Hugo Awards: Novellas & Novelettes (Volume 2)
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Hugo Awards
The Novellas and Novelettes
Volume 2: 1980-1999
(custom book cover)
Jerry eBooks
Title Page
Bibliography
1980
WINNERS
Enemy Mine - Barry B. Longyear
Sandkings - George R.R. Martin
NOMINEES
Ker-plop - Ted Reynolds

The Battle of the Abaco Reefs - Hilbert Schenck

Songhouse - Orson Scott Card

The Moon Goddess and the Son - Donald Kingsbury

Palely Loitering - Christopher Priest
Options - John Varley
The Locusts - Larry Niven
The Homecoming - Barry Longyear
Fireflood - Vonda N. McIntyre
1981
WINNERS
Lost Dorsai - Gordon R. Dickson
The Cloak and the Staff - Gordon R. Dickson
NOMINEES
One-Wing - Lisa Tuttle and George R.R. Martin
Nightflyers - George R.R. Martin
The Brave Little Toaster - Thomas M. Disch

All the Lies that are My Life - Harlan Ellison

Savage Planet - Barry L. Longyear
The Lordly Ones - Keith Roberts
Beatnik Bayou - John Varley
The Ugly Chicken - Howard Waldrop
The Autopsy - Michael Shea
1982
WINNERS
The Saturn Game - Poul Anderson
Unicorn Variations - Roger Zelazny
NOMINEES
In the Western Tradition - Phyllis Eisenstein
Emergence - David R. Palmer
True Names - Vernor Vinge
Blue Champagne - John Varley

With Thimbles, With Forks, and Hope - Kate Wilhelm

The Fire When It Comes - Parke Godwin
The Thermals of August - Edward Bryant
The Quickening - Michael Bishop
Guardians - George R.R. Martin
1983
WINNERS
Souls - Joanna Russ
Fire Watch - Connie Willis
NOMINEES
Unsound Variations - George R.R. Martin
Brainchild - Joseph H. Delaney
Another Orphan - John Kessel
The Postman - David Brin
To Leave a Mark - Kim Stanley Robinson
Aquila - Somtow Sucharitkul
Nightlife - Phyllis Eisenstein
Pawn’s Gambit - Timothy Zahn
Swarm - Bruce Sterling
1984
WINNERS
Cascade Point - Timothy Zahn
Blood Music - Greg Bear
NOMINEES
Hardfought - Greg Bear
Seeking - David R. Palmer
Hurricane Claude - Hilbert Schenck
In the Face of My Enemy - Joseph H. Delaney
Black Air - Kim Stanley Robinson
The Sidon in the Mirror - Connie Willis
Slow Birds - Ian Watson
The Monkey Treatment - George R.R. Martin
1985
WINNERS
Press Enter ■ - John Varley
Bloodchild - Octavia E. Butler
NOMINEES

Valentina - Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler

Cyclops - Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler
Summer Solstice - Charles L. Harness
Elemental - Geoffrey A Landis
Blued Moon - Connie Willis
The Lucky Strike - Kim Stanley Robinson
Return to the Fold - Timothy Zahn
Silicon Muse - Hilbert Schenck

The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule - Lucius Shepard

The Weigher - Eric Vinicoff and Marcia Martin
1986
WINNERS

24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai - Roger Zelazny

Paladin of the Lost Hour - Harlan Ellison
NOMINEES
The Scapegoat - C.J. Cherryh
Sailing to Byzantium - Robert Silverberg
Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson

The Only Neat Thing to Do - James Tiptree, Jr.

Dogfight - Michael Swanwick and William Gibson

The Gift from the Graylanders - Michael Bishop

The Fringe - Orson Scott Card

Portraits of His Children - George R.R. Martin

1987
WINNERS
Gilgamesh in the Outback - Robert Silverberg
Permafrost - Roger Zelazny
NOMINEES
R&R - Lucius Shepard
Escape from Kathmandu - Kim Stanley Robinson
Spice Pogrom - Connie Willis
Eifelheim - Michael Flynn
The Winter Market - William Gibson
Thor Meets Captain America - David Brin
Hatrack River - Orson Scott Card
The Barbarian Princess - Vernor Vinge
1988
WINNERS
Eye for Eye - Orson Scott Card

Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight - Ursula K. Le Guin

NOMINEES
The Blind Geometer - Kim Stanley Robinson
The Forest of Time - Michael Flynn
The Secret Sharer - Robert Silverberg

Mother Goddess of the World - Kim Stanley Robinson

Dream Baby - Bruce McAllister
Rachel in Love - Pat Murphy
Flowers of Edo - Bruce Sterling
Dinosaurs - Walter Jon Williams
1989
WINNERS
The Last of the Winnebagoes - Connie Willis
Schrödinger’s Kitten - George Alec Effinger
NOMINEES

The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter - Lucius Shepard

Surfacing - Walter Jon Williams

The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians - Bradley Denton

Journals of the Plague Years - Norman Spinrad

Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus - Neal Barrett, Jr.

Peaches for Mad Molly - Steven Gould
The Function of Dream Sleep - Harlan Ellison
Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance? - Howard Waldrop
1990
WINNERS

The Mountains of Mourning - Lois McMaster Bujold

Enter a Soldier, Later: Enter Another - Robert Silverberg

NOMINEES
Tiny Tango - Judith Moffett
The Father of Stones - Lucius Shepard
Time Out - Connie Willis
A Touch of Lavender - Megan Lindholm
Everything But Honor - George Alec Effinger
The Price of Oranges - Nancy Kress
At the Rialto - Connie Willis
Dogwalker - Orson Scott Card
For I Have Touched the Sky - Mike Resnick
1991
WINNERS
The Hemingway Hoax - Joe Haldeman
The Manamouki - Mike Resnick
NOMINEES
Fool to Believe - Pat Cadigan
A Short, Sharp Shock - Kim Stanley Robinson
Bones - Pat Murphy
Bully! - Mike Resnick
A Braver Thing - Charles Sheffield
Over the Long Haul - Martha Soukup

The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks - Dafydd ab Hugh

Tower of Babylon - Ted Chiang
1992
WINNERS
Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress
Gold - Isaac Asimov
NOMINEES
Griffin’s Egg - Michael Swanwick
And Wild for to Hold - Nancy Kress

The Gallery of His Dreams - Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Jack - Connie Willis
Understand - Ted Chiang
Dispatches from the Revolution - Pat Cadigan
Fin de Cyclé - Howard Waldrop
Miracle - Connie Willis
1993
WINNERS
Barnacle Bill the Spacer - Lucius Shepard
The Nutcracker Coup - Janet Kagan
NOMINEES
Stopping at Slowyear - Frederik Pohl
Protection - Maureen F. McHugh
Uh-Oh City - Jonathan Carroll
The Territory - Bradley Denton

Suppose They Gave a Peace . . . - Susan Shwartz

True Faces - Pat Cadigan
In the Stone House - Barry N. Malzberg
Danny Goes to Mars - Pamela Sargent
1994
WINNERS
Down in the Bottomlands - Harry Turtledove
Georgia on My Mind - Charles Sheffield
NOMINEES
Wall, Stone, Craft - Walter Jon Williams
The Night We Buried Road Dog - Jack Cady
American Childhood - Pat Murphy
Into the Miranda Rift - G. David Nordley
Mefisto in Onyx - Harlan Ellison
Dancing on Air - Nancy Kress
Deep Eddy - Bruce Sterling
The Franchise - John Kessel
The Shadow Knows - Terry Bisson
1995
WINNERS
Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge - Mike Resnick
The Martian Child - David Gerrold
NOMINEES
Melodies of the Heart - Michael F. Flynn
Cri de Coeur - Michael Bishop
Les Fleurs Du Mal - Brian Stableford
Forgiveness Day - Ursula K. Le Guin
A Little Knowledge - Mike Resnick

The Singular Habits of Wasps - Geoffrey A. Landis

The Matter of Seggri - Ursula Le Guin
Cocoon - Greg Egan
Solitude - Ursula K. Le Guin
1996
WINNERS
The Death of Captain Future - Allen Steele
Think Like a Dinosaur - James Patrick Kelly
NOMINEES
A Man of the People - Ursula K. Le Guin
A Woman’s Liberation - Ursula K. Le Guin
Fault Lines - Nancy Kress
Bibi - Mike Resnick and Susan Shwartz
Where the Old Gods Die - Mike Resnick
Luminous - Greg Egan
Must and Shall - Harry Turtledove
Tap - Greg Egan
The Good Rat - Allen Steele
1997
WINNERS
Blood of the Dragon - George R.R. Martin
Bicycle Repairman - Bruce Sterling
NOMINEES
Gas Fish - Mary Rosenblum
Immersion - Gregory Benford
Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt
The Cost to Be Wise - Maureen F. McHugh
Abandon in Place - Jerry Oltion

Beauty and the Opéra or the Phantom Beast - Suzy McKee Charnas

Age of Aquarius - William Barton
The Land of Nod - Mike Resnick
Mountain Ways - Ursula K. Le Guin
1998
WINNERS

“. . . Where Angels Fear to Tread” - Allen Steele

We Will Drink Fish Together . . . - Bill Johnson

NOMINEES
Ecopoiesis - Geoffrey A. Landis
Loose Ends - Paul Levinson

The Funeral March of the Marionettes - Adam-Troy Castro

Marrow - Robert Reed

Broken Symmetry - Michael A. Burstein

Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream - James Alan Gardner

Moon Six - Stephen Baxter
The Undiscovered - William Sanders
1999
WINNERS
Oceanic - Greg Egan
Taklamakan - Bruce Sterling
NOMINEES
Get Me to the Church on Time - Terry Bisson
The Summer Isles - Ian R. MacLeod
Story of Your Life - Ian R. MacLeod
Aurora in Four Voices - Ted Chiang

Steamship Soldier on the Information Front - Nancy Kress

The Planck Dive - Greg Egan
Echea - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Time Gypsy - Ellen Klages
Divided By Infinity - Robert Charles Wilson
Zwarte Piet’s Tale - Allen Steele

Boldface story title = Winner

1980

Best Novella

Enemy Mine, (Barry B. Longyear), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1979

Ker-Plop, (Ted Reynolds), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 1979

The Battle of the Abaco Reefs, (Hilbert Schenck), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1979

Songhouse, (Orson Scott Card), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, September 1979

The Moon Goddess and the Son, (Donald Kingsbury), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, December 1979

Best Novelette

Sandkings, (George R.R. Martin), Omni, August 1979

Palely Loitering, (Christopher Priest), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1979

Options, (John Varley), Universe 9, May 1979

The Locusts, (Larry Niven and Steven Barnes), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1979

Homecoming, (Barry B. Longyear), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1979

Fireflood, (Vonda N. McIntyre), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1979

1981

Best Novella

Lost Dorsai, (Gordon R. Dickson), Destinies, February/March, February 1979

One-Wing (Part One of Two Parts), (Lisa Tuttle and George R.R. Martin), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, January 1980

One-Wing (Part II), (Lisa Tuttle and George R.R. Martin), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1980

Nightflyers, (George R.R. Martin), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1980

The Brave Little Toaster, (Thomas M. Disch), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1980

All the Lies That Are My Life, (Harlan Ellison), All the Lies That Are My Life, October 1980

Best Novelette

The Cloak and the Staff, (Gordon R. Dickson), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, August 1980

Savage Planet, (Barry B. Longyear), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1980

The Lordly Ones, (Keith Roberts), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1980

Beatnik Bayou, (John Varley), New Voices III: The Campbell Award Nominees, April 1980

The Ugly Chickens, (Howard Waldrop), Universe 10, September 1980

The Autopsy, (Michael Shea), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1980

1982

Best Novella

The Saturn Game, (Poul Anderson), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1981

In the Western Tradition, (Phyllis Eisenstein), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1981

Emergence, (David R. Palmer), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, January 5, 1981

True Names, (Vernor Vinge), Binary Star #5, February 1981

Blue Champagne, (John Varley), New Voices #4, August 1981

With Thimbles, with Forks, and Hope, (Kate Wilhelm), Listen, Listen, November 1981

Best Novelette

Unicorn Variation, (Roger Zelazny), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 13, 1981

The Fire When It Comes, (Parke Godwin), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1981

The Thermals of August, (Edward Bryant), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1981

The Quickening, (Michael Bishop), Universe 11, June 1981

Guardians, (George R.R. Martin), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, October 12, 1981

1983

Best Novella

Souls, (Joanna Russ), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1982

Unsound Variations, (George R.R. Martin), Amazing Science Fiction Stories, January 1982

Brainchild, (Joseph H. Delaney), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1982

Another Orphan, (John Kessel), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1982

The Postman, (David Brin), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1982

To Leave a Mark, (Kim Stanley Robinson), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November 1982

Best Novelette

Fire Watch, (Connie Willis), Isaac Asimov’s Wonders of the World, February 1982

Aquila, (Somtow Sucharitkul), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 18, 1982

Nightlife, (Phyllis Eisenstein), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1982

Pawn’s Gambit, (Timothy Zahn), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 29, 1982

Swarm, (Bruce Sterling), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1982

1984

Best Novella

Cascade Point, (Timothy Zahn), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, December 1983

Hardfought, (Greg Bear), The Wind from a Burning Woman, 1983

Seeking, (David R. Palmer), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1983

Hurricane Claude, (Hilbert Schenck), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1983

In the Face of My Enemy, (Joseph H. Delaney), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, April 1983

Best Novelette

Blood Music, (Greg Bear), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1983

Black Air, (Kim Stanley Robinson), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1983

The Sidon in the Mirror, (Connie Willis), Isaac Asimov’s Space of Her Own, April 1983

Slow Birds, (Ian Watson), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1983

The Monkey Treatment, (George R.R. Martin), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1983

1985

Best Novella

Press Enter ■, (John Varley), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1984

Valentina, (Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, May 1984

Cyclops, (David Brin), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1984

Summer Solstice, (Charles L. Harness), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1984

Elemental, (Geoffrey A. Landis), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, December 1984

Best Novelette

Bloodchild, (Octavia E. Butler), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1984

Blued Moon, (Connie Willis), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January 1984

The Lucky Strike, (Kim Stanley Robinson), Universe 14, June 1984

Return to the Fold, (Timothy Zahn), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, September 1984

Silicon Muse, (Hilbert Schenck), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, September 1984

The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule, (Lucius Shepard), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1984

The Weigher, (Eric Vinicoff and Marcia Martin), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, October 1984

1986

Best Novella

24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai, (Roger Zelazny), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1985

The Scapegoat, (C.J. Cherryh), Alien Stars, January 1985

Sailing to Byzantium, (Robert Silverberg), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1985

Green Mars, (Kim Stanley Robinson), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1985

The Only Neat Thing to Do, (James Tiptree, Jr.), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1985

Best Novelette

Paladin of the Lost Hour, (Harlan Ellison), Universe 15, August 1985

Dogfight, (Michael Swanwick and William Gibson), Omni, July 1985

The Gift from the Graylanders, (Michael Bishop), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1985

The Fringe, (Orson Scott Card), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1985

Portraits of His Children, (George R.R. Martin), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1985

1987

Best Novella

Gilgamesh in the Outback, (Robert Silverberg), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1986

R & R, (Lucius Shepard), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1986

Escape from Kathmandu, (Kim Stanley Robinson), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1986

Spice Pogrom, (Connie Willis), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1986

Eifelheim, (Michael F. Flynn), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, November 1986

Best Novelette

Permafrost, (Roger Zelazny), Omni, April 1986

The Winter Market, (William Gibson), Interzone #15, Spring 1986

Thor Meets Captain America, (David Brin), The River of Time, June 1986

Hatrack River, (Orson Scott Card), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1986

The Barbarian Princess, (Vernor Vinge), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, September 1986

1988

Best Novella

Eye for Eye, (Orson Scott Card), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1987

The Blind Geometer, (Kim Stanley Robinson), The Blind Geometer, December 22, 1986

The Forest of Time, (Michael Flynn), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, June 1987

The Secret Sharer, (Robert Silverberg), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1987

Mother Goddess of the World, (Kim Stanley Robinson), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1987

Best Novelette

Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight, (Ursula K. Le Guin), Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, November 1987

Dream Baby, (Bruce McAllister), In the Field of Fire, February 1987

Rachel in Love, (Pat Murphy), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1987

Flowers of Edo, (Bruce Sterling), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1987

Dinosaurs, (Walter Jon Williams), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1987

1989

Best Novella

The Last of the Winnebagos, (Connie Willis), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1988

The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter, (Lucius Shepard), The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter, April 1988

Surfacing, (Walter Jon Williams), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1988

The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians, (Bradley Denton), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1988

Journals of the Plague Years, (Norman Spinrad), Full Spectrum, September 1988

Best Novelette

Schrödinger’s Kitten, (George Alec Effinger), Omni, September 1988

Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus, (Neal Barrett, Jr.), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1988

Peaches for Mad Molly, (Steven Gould), Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1988

The Function of Dream Sleep, (Harlan Ellison), Midnight Graffiti, June 1988

Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance, (Howard Waldrop), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1988

1990

Best Novella

The Mountains of Mourning, (Lois McMaster Bujold), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 1989

Tiny Tango, (Judith Moffett), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1989

The Father of Stones, (Lucius Shepard), The Father of Stones, May 26, 1989

Time Out, (Connie Willis), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1989

A Touch of Lavender, (Megan Lindholm), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1989

Best Novelette

Enter a Soldier. Later: Enter Another, (Robert Silverberg), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1989

Everything But Honor, (George Alec Effinger), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1989

The Price of Oranges, (Nancy Kress), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1989

At the Rialto, (Connie Willis), Omni, October 1989

Dogwalker, (Orson Scott Card), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1989

For I Have Touched the Sky, (Mike Resnick), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1989

1991

Best Novella

The Hemingway Hoax, (Joe Haldeman), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1990

Fool to Believe, (Pat Cadigan), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1990

A Short, Sharp Shock, (Kim Stanley Robinson), A Short, Sharp Shock, May 1990

Bones, (Pat Murphy), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1990

Bully!, (Mike Resnick), Bully!, September 1990

Best Novelette

The Manamouki, (Mike Resnick), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1990

A Braver Thing, (Charles Sheffield), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1990

Over the Long Haul, (Martha Soukup), Amazing Stories, March 1990

The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk, (Dafydd ab Hugh), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1990

Tower of Babylon, (Ted Chiang), Omni, November 1990

1992

Best Novella

Beggars in Spain, (Nancy Kress), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1991

Griffin’s Egg, (Michael Swanwick), Griffin’s Egg, January 1991

And Wild for to Hold, (Nancy Kress), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1991

The Gallery of His Dreams, (Kristine Kathryn Rusch), The Gallery of His Dreams, July 1991

Jack, (Connie Willis), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1991

Best Novelette

Gold, (Isaac Asimov), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 1991

Understand, (Ted Chiang), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1991

Dispatches from the Revolution, (Pat Cadigan), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1991

Fin de Cyclé, (Howard Waldrop), Night of the Cooters, December 1990

Miracle, (Connie Willis), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1991

1993

Best Novella

Barnacle Bill the Spacer, (Lucius Shepard), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1992

Stopping at Slowyear, (Frederik Pohl), Stopping at Slowyear, 1992

Protection, (Maureen F. McHugh), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1992

Uh-Oh City, (Jonathan Carroll), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1992

The Territory, (Bradley Denton), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1992

Best Novelette

The Nutcracker Coup, (Janet Kagan), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, December 1992

Suppose They Gave a Peace . . ., (Susan Shwartz), Alternate Presidents, February 1992

True Faces, (Pat Cadigan), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1992

In the Stone House, (Barry N. Malzberg), Alternate Kennedys, July 1992

Danny Goes to Mars, (Pamela Sargent), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1992

1994

Best Novella

Down in the Bottomlands, (Harry Turtledove), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January 1993

Wall, Stone, Craft, (Walter Jon Williams), Wall, Stone, Craft, 1993

The Night We Buried Road Dog, (Jack Cady), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1993

An American Childhood, (Pat Murphy), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1993

Into the Miranda Rift, (G. David Nordley), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July 1993

Mefisto in Onyx, (Harlan Ellison), Omni, October 1993

Best Novelette

Georgia on My Mind, (Charles Sheffield), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January 1993

Dancing on Air, (Nancy Kress), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1993

Deep Eddy, (Bruce Sterling), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1993

The Franchise, (John Kessel), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1993

The Shadow Knows, (Terry Bisson), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1993

1995

Best Novella

Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge, (Mike Resnick), Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge, October 1994

Melodies of the Heart, (Michael F. Flynn), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January 1994

Cri de Coeur, (Michael Bishop), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1994

Les Fleurs du Mal, (Brian Stableford), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1994

Forgiveness Day, (Ursula K. Le Guin), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1994

Best Novelette

The Martian Child, (David Gerrold), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1994

A Little Knowledge, (Mike Resnick), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1994

The Singular Habits of Wasps, (Geoffrey A. Landis), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 1994

The Matter of Seggri, (Ursula K. Le Guin), Crank #3, Spring 1994

Cocoon, (Greg Egan), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1994

Solitude, (Ursula K. Le Guin), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1994

1996

Best Novella

The Death of Captain Future, (Allen Steele), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October 1995

A Man of the People, (Ursula K. Le Guin), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1995

A Woman’s Liberation, (Ursula K. Le Guin), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1995

Fault Lines, (Nancy Kress), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1995

Bibi, (Mike Resnick and Susan Shwartz), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, mid-Dec, December 15, 1995

Best Novelette

Think Like a Dinosaur, (James Patrick Kelly), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1995

When the Old Gods Die, (Mike Resnick), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April 1995

Luminous, (Greg Egan), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1995

Must and Shall, (Harry Turtledove), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1995

TAP, (Greg Egan), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, November 1995

The Good Rat, (Allen Steele), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, mid-Dec 1995

1997

Best Novella

Blood of the Dragon, (George R.R. Martin), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1996

Gas Fish, (Mary Rosenblum), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1996

Immersion, (Gregory Benford), Science Fiction Age, March 1996

Time Travelers Never Die, (Jack McDevitt), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1996

The Cost to Be Wise, (Maureen F. McHugh), Starlight #1, September 1996

Abandon in Place, (Jerry Oltion), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1996

Best Novelette

Bicycle Repairman, (Bruce Sterling), Intersections, January 1996

Beauty and the Opéra or The Phantom Beast, (Suzy McKee Charnas), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1996

Age of Aquarius, (William Barton), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1996

The Land of Nod, (Mike Resnick), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June 1996

Mountain Ways, (Ursula K. Le Guin), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1996

1998

Best Novella

“. . . Where Angels Fear to Tread”, (Allen Steele), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October/November, October 1997

Ecopoiesis, (Geoffrey A. Landis), Science Fiction Age, May 1997

Loose Ends, (Paul Levinson), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 1997

The Funeral March of the Marionettes, (Adam-Troy Castro), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1997

Marrow, (Robert Reed), Science Fiction Age, July 1997

Best Novelette

We Will Drink a Fish Together . . ., (Bill Johnson), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1997

Broken Symmetry, (Michael A. Burstein), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, February 1997

Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream, (James Alan Gardner), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1997

Moon Six, (Stephen Baxter), Science Fiction Age, March 1997

The Undiscovered, (William Sanders), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1997

1999

Best Novella

Oceanic, (Greg Egan), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, August 1998

Get Me to the Church on Time, (Terry Bisson), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1998

The Summer Isles, (Ian R. MacLeod), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October/November, October 1998

Story of Your Life, (Ted Chiang), Starlight #2, November 1998

Aurora in Four Voices, (Catherine Asaro), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 1998

Best Novelette

Taklamakan, (Bruce Sterling), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, October/November, October 1998

Steamship Soldier on the Information Front, (Nancy Kress), Future Histories, June 1997

The Planck Dive, (Greg Egan), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, February 1998

Echea, (Kristine Kathryn Rusch), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1998

Time Gypsy, (Ellen Klages), Bending the Landscape: Science Fiction, September 1998

Divided by Infinity, (Robert Charles Wilson), Starlight #2, November 1998

Zwarte Piet’s Tale, (Allen Steele), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 1998

ENEMY MINE

Barry B. Longyear

The author, after the usual variety of jobs that seem characteristic of an author’s formative years, has settled down to write full time. Physically, Mr. Longyear is sturdy but not plump; in person he’s cheerful, easily moved to laughter; and his writing output is an almost frightening 10 to 20 pages a day, when the muse is co-operating.

The Dracon’s three-fingered hands flexed. In the thing’s yellow eyes I could read the desire to have those fingers around either a weapon or my throat. As I flexed my own fingers, I knew it read the same in my eyes.

“Irkmaan!” the thing spat.

“You piece of Drac slime.” I brought my hands up in front of my chest and waved the thing on. “Come on, Drac; come and get it.”

“Irkmaan vaa, koruum su!”

“Are you going to talk, or fight? Come on!” I could feel the spray from the sea behind me—a boiling madhouse of white-capped breakers that threatened to swallow me as it had my fighter. I had ridden my ship in.

The Drac had ejected when its own fighter had caught one in the upper atmosphere, but not before crippling my power plant. I was exhausted from swimming to the gray, rocky beach and pulling myself to safety. Behind the Drac, among the rocks on the otherwise barren hill, I could see its ejection capsule. Far above us, its people and mine were still at it, slugging out the possession of an uninhabited corner of nowhere. The Drac just stood there and I went over the phrase taught us in training—a phrase calculated to drive any Drac into a frenzy. “Kiz dayuomeen, Shizumaat!” Meaning: Shizumaat, the most revered Drac philosopher, eats kiz excrement. Something on the level of stuffing a Moslem full of pork.

The Drac opened its mouth in horror, then closed it as anger literally changed its color from yellow to reddish-brown. “Irkmaan, yaa stupid Mickey Mouse is!”

I had taken an oath to fight and die over many things, but that venerable rodent didn’t happen to be one of them. I laughed, and continued laughing until the guffaws in combination with my exhaustion forced me to my knees. I forced open my eyes to keep track of my enemy. The Drac was running toward the high ground, away from me and the sea. I half-turned toward the sea and caught a glimpse of a million tons of water just before they fell on me, knocking me unconscious.

“Kiz dayuomeen, Irkmaan, ne?”

My eyes were gritty with sand and stung with salt, but some part of my awareness pointed out: “Hey, you’re alive.” I reached to wipe the sand from my eyes and found my hands bound. A straight metal rod had been run through my sleeves and my wrists tied to it. As my tears cleared the sand from my eyes, I could see the Drac sitting on a smooth black boulder looking at me. It must have pulled me out of the drink. “Thanks, toad face. What’s with the bondage?”

“Ess?”

I tried waving my arms and wound up giving an impression of an atmospheric fighter dipping its wings. “Untie me, you Drac slime!” I was seated on the sand, my back against a rock.

The Drac smiled, exposing the upper and lower mandibles that looked human—except that instead of separate teeth, they were solid. “Eh, ne, Irkmaan.” It stood, walked over to me and checked my bonds.

“Untie me!”

The smile disappeared. “Ne!” It pointed at me with a yellow finger. “Kos son va?”

“I don’t speak Drac, toad face. You speak Esper or English?”

The Drac delivered a very human-looking shrug, then pointed at its own chest. ”Kos va son Jeriba Shigan.” It pointed again at me. ”Kos son va?”

“Davidge. My name is Willis E. Davidge.”

”Ess?”

I tried my tongue on the unfamiliar syllables. ”Kos va son Willis Davidge.”

“Eh.” Jeriba Shigan nodded, then motioned with its fingers. ”Dasu, Davidge.”

“Same to you, Jerry.”

“Dasu, dasu!” Jeriba began sounding a little impatient. I shrugged as best I could. The Drac bent over and grabbed the front of my jumpsuit with both hands and pulled me to my feet. ”Dasu, dasu, kizlode!”

“All right! So dasu is ‘get up.’ What’s a kizlode?”

Jerry laughed. ”Gavey ‘kiz’ ?”

“Yeah, I gavey.”

Jerry pointed at its head. “Lode.” It pointed at my head. “Kizlode, gavey?”

I got it, then swung my arms around, catching Jerry upside its head with the metal rod. The Drac stumbled back against a rock, looking surprised. It raised a hand to its head and withdrew it covered with that pale pus that Dracs think is blood. It looked at me with murder in its eyes. ”Gefh! Nu Gefh, Davidge!”

“Come and get it, Jerry, you kizlode sonafabitch!”

Jerry dived at me and I tried to catch it again with the rod, but the Drac caught my right wrist in both hands and, using the momentum of my swing, whirled me around, slamming my back against another rock. Just as I was getting back my breath, Jerry picked up a small boulder and came at me with every intention of turning my melon into pulp. With my back against the rock, I lifted a foot and kicked the Drac in the midsection, knocking it to the sand. I ran up, ready to stomp Jerry’s melon, but he pointed behind me. I turned and saw another tidal wave gathering steam, and heading our way. “Kiz!” Jerry got to its feet and scampered for the high ground with me following close behind.

With the roar of the wave at our backs, we weaved among the water-and sand-ground black boulders until we reached Jerry’s ejection capsule. The Drac stopped, put its shoulder to the egg-shaped contraption, and began rolling it uphill. I could see Jerry’s point. The capsule contained all of the survival equipment and food either of us knew about. “Jerry!” I shouted above the rumble of the fast-approaching wave. “Pull out this damn rod and I’ll help!” The Drac frowned at me. “The rod, kizlode, pull it out!” I cocked my head toward my outstretched arm.

Jerry placed a rock beneath the capsule to keep it from rolling back, then quickly untied my wrists and pulled out the rod. Both of us put our shoulders to the capsule, and we quickly rolled it to higher ground. The wave hit and climbed rapidly up the slope until it came up to our chests. The capsule bobbed like a cork, and it was all we could do to keep control of the thing until the water receded, wedging the capsule between three big boulders. I stood there, puffing.

Jerry dropped to the sand, its back against one of the boulders, and watched the water rush back out to sea. “Magasienna!”

“You said it, brother.” I sank down next to the Drac; we agreed by eye to a temporary truce, and promptly passed out.

My eyes opened on a sky boiling with blacks and grays. Letting my head loll over on my left shoulder, I checked out the Drac. It was still out. First, I thought that this would be the perfect time to get the drop on Jerry. Second, I thought about how silly our insignificant scrap seemed compared to the insanity of the sea that surrounded us. Why hadn’t the rescue team come? Did the Dracon fleet wipe us out? Why hadn’t the Dracs come to pick up Jerry? Did they wipe out each other? I didn’t even know where I was. An island. I had seen that much coming in, but where and in relation to what? Fyrine IV: the planet didn’t even rate a name, but was important enough to die over.

With an effort, I struggled to my feet. Jerry opened its eyes and quickly pushed itself to a defensive crouching position. I waved my hand and shook my head. “Ease off, Jerry. I’m just going to look around.” I turned my back on it and trudged off between the boulders. I walked uphill for a few minutes until I reached level ground.

It was an island, all right, and not a very big one. By eyeball estimation, height from sea level was only eighty meters, while the island itself was about two kilometers long and less than half that wide. The wind whipping my jump suit against my body was at least drying it out, but as I looked around at the smooth-ground boulders on top of the rise, I realized that Jerry and I could expect bigger waves than the few puny ones we had seen.

A rock clattered behind me and I turned to see Jerry climbing up the slope. When it reached the top, the Drac looked around. I squatted next to one of the boulders and passed my hand over it to indicate the smoothness, then I pointed toward the sea. Jerry nodded. “Ae, Gavey.” It pointed downhill toward the capsule, then to where we stood. “Echey masu, nasesay.”

I frowned, then pointed at the capsule. “Nasesay? The capsule?”

“Ae capsule nasesay. Echey masu.” Jerry pointed at its feet.

I shook my head. “Jerry, if you gavey how these rocks got smooth”—I pointed at one—“then you gavey that masuing the nasesay up here isn’t going to do a damned bit of good.” I made a sweeping up and down movement with my hands. “Waves.” I pointed at the sea below. “Waves, up here”; I pointed to where we stood. “Waves, echey.”

“Ae, gavey.” Jerry looked around the top of the rise, then rubbed the side of its face. The Drac squatted next to some small rocks and began piling one on top of another. “Viga, Davidge.”

I squatted next to it and watched while its nimble fingers constructed a circle of stones that quickly grew into a doll-house-sized arena. Jerry stuck one of its fingers in the center of the circle. “Eche, nasesay.”

The days on Fyrine IV seemed to be three times longer than any I had seen on any other habitable planet. I use the designation “habitable” with reservations. It took us most of the first day to painfully roll Jerry’s nasesay up to the top of the rise. The night was too black to work and was bone-cracking cold. We removed the couch from the capsule, which made just enough room for both of us to fit inside. The body heat warmed things up a bit; and we killed time between sleeping, nibbling on Jerry’s supply of ration bars (they taste a bit like fish mixed with cheddar cheese), and trying to come to some agreement about language.

“Eye.”

“Thuyo.”

“Finger.”

“Zurath.”

“Head.”

The Drac laughed. “Lode.”

“Ho, ho, very funny.”

“Ho, ho.”

At dawn on the second day, we rolled and pushed the capsule into the center of the rise and wedged it between two large rocks, one of which had an overhang that we hoped would hold down the capsule when one of those big soakers hit. Around the rocks and capsule, we laid a foundation of large stones and filled in the cracks with smaller stones. By the time the wall was knee high, we discovered that building with those smooth, round stones and no mortar wasn’t going to work. After some experimentation, we figured out how to break the stones to give us flat sides with which to work. It’s done by picking up one stone and slamming it down on top of another. We took turns, one slamming and one building. The stone was almost a volcanic glass, and we also took turns extracting rock splinters from each other. It took nine of those endless days and nights to complete the walls, during which waves came close many times and once washed us ankle deep. For six of those nine days, it rained. The capsule’s survival equipment included a plastic blanket, and that became our roof. It sagged in at the center, and the hole we put in it there allowed the water to run out, keeping us almost dry and giving us a supply of fresh water. If a wave of any determination came along, we could kiss the roof good-bye; but we both had confidence in the walls, which were almost two meters thick at the bottom and at least a meter thick at the top.

After we finished, we sat inside and admired our work for about an hour, until it dawned on us that we had just worked ourselves out of jobs. “What now, Jerry?”

”Ess?”

“What do we do now?”

“Now wait, we.” The Drac shrugged. “Else what, ne?”

I nodded. ”Gavey.” I got to my feet and walked to the passageway we had built. With no wood for a door, where the walls would have met, we bent one out and extended it about three meters around the other wall with the opening away from the prevailing winds. The never-ending winds were still at it, but the rain had stopped. The shack wasn’t much to look at, but looking at it stuck there in the center of that deserted island made me feel good. As Shizumaat observed, “Intelligent life making its stand against the universe.” Or, at least, that’s the sense I could make out of Jerry’s hamburger of English. I shrugged and picked up a sharp splinter of stone and made another mark in the large standing rock that served as my log.

Ten scratches in all, and under the seventh, a small “x” to indicate the big wave that just covered the top of the island.

I threw down the splinter. “Damn, I hate this place!”

“Ess?” Jerry’s head poked around the edge of the opening. “Who talking at, Davidge?”

I glared at the Drac, then waved my hand at it. “Nobody.”

“Ess va, ‘nobody’ ?”

“Nobody. Nothing.”

“Ne gavey, Davidge.”

I poked at my chest with my finger. “Me! I’m talking to myself! You gavey that stuff, toad face!”

Jerry shook its head. “Davidge, now I sleep. Talk not so much nobody, ne?” It disappeared back into the opening.

“And so’s your mother!” I turned and walked down the slope. Except, strictly speaking, toad face, you don’t have a mother—or father. “If you had your choice, who would you like to be trapped on a desert island with?” I wondered if anyone ever picked a wet freezing corner of Hell shacked up with a hermaphrodite.

Half of the way down the slope, I followed the path I had marked with rocks until I came to my tidal pool that I had named “Rancho Sluggo.” Around the pool were many of the water-worn rocks, and underneath those rocks, below the pool’s waterline, lived the fattest orange slugs either of us had ever seen. I made the discovery during a break from house building and showed them to Jerry.

Jerry shrugged. “And so?”

“And so what? Look, Jerry, those ration bars aren’t going to last forever. What are we going to eat when they’re all gone?”

“Eat?” Jerry looked at the wriggling pocket of insect life and grimaced. “Ne, Davidge. Before then pickup. Search us find, then pickup.”

“What if they don’t find us? What then?”

Jerry grimaced again and turned back to the half-completed house. “Water we drink, then until pickup.” He had muttered something about kiz excrement and my tastebuds, then walked out of sight.

Since then I had built up the pool’s walls, hoping the increased protection from the harsh environment would increase the herd. I looked under several rocks, but no increase was apparent. And, again, I couldn’t bring myself to swallow one of the things. I replaced the rock I was looking under, stood and looked out to the sea. Although the eternal cloud cover still denied the surface the drying rays of Fyrine, there was no rain and the usual haze had lifted.

In the direction past where I had pulled myself up on the beach, the sea continued to the horizon. In the spaces between the whitecaps, the water was as gray as a loan officer’s heart. Parallel lines of rollers formed approximately five kilometers from the island. The center, from where I was standing, would smash on the island, while the remainder steamed on. To my right, in line with the breakers, I could just make out another small island perhaps ten kilometers away. Following the path of the rollers, I looked far to my right, and where the gray-white of the sea should have met the lighter gray of the sky, there was a black line on the horizon.

The harder I tried to remember the briefing charts on Fyrine IV’s land masses, the less clear it became. Jerry couldn’t remember anything either—at least nothing it would tell me. Why should we remember? The battle was supposed to be in space, each one trying to deny the other an orbital staging area in the Fyrine system. Neither side wanted to set foot on Fyrine, much less fight a battle there. Still, whatever it was called, it was land and considerably larger than the sand and rock bar we were occupying.

How to get there was the problem. Without wood, fire, leaves, or animal skins, Jerry and I were destitute compared to the average poverty-stricken caveman. The only thing we had that would float was the nasesay. The capsule. Why not? The only real problem to overcome was getting Jerry to go along with it.

That evening, while the grayness made its slow transition to black, Jerry and I sat outside the shack nibbling our quarter portions of ration bars. The Drac’s yellow eyes studied the dark line on the horizon, then it shook its head. “Ne, Davidge. Dangerous is.”

I popped the rest of my ration bar into my mouth and talked around it. “And more dangerous than staying here?”

“Soon pickup, ne?”

I studied those yellow eyes. “Jerry, you don’t believe that any more than I do.” I leaned forward on the rock and held out my hands. “Look, our chances will be a lot better on a larger land mass. Protection from the big waves, maybe food..”

“Not maybe, ne?” Jerry pointed at the water. “How nasesay steer, Davidge? In that, how steer? Ess eh soakers, waves, beyond land take, gavey? Bresha,” Jerry’s hands slapped together. “Ess eh bresha rocks on, ne? Then we death.”

I scratched my head. “The waves are going in that direction from here, and so is the wind. If the land mass is large enough, we don’t have to steer, gavey?”

Jerry snorted. “Ne large enough, then?”

“I didn’t say it was a sure thing.”

”Ess?”

“A sure thing; certain, gavey?” Jerry nodded. “And for smashing up on the rocks, it probably has a beach like this one.”

“Sure thing, ne?”

I shrugged. “No, it’s not a sure thing, but, what about staying here? We don’t know how big those waves can get. What if one just comes along and washes us off the island? What then?”

Jerry looked at me, its eyes narrowed. “What there, Davidge? Irkmaan base, ne?”

I laughed. “I told you, we don’t have any bases on Fyrine IV.”

“Why want go, then?”

“Just what I said, Jerry. I think our chances would be better.”

“Ummm.” The Drac folded its arms. “Viga, Davidge, nasesay stay. I know.”

“Know what?”

Jerry smirked, then stood and went into the shack. After a moment it returned and threw a two-meter long metal rod at my feet. It was the one the Drac had used to bind my arms. “Davidge, I know.”

I raised my eyebrows and shrugged. “What are you talking about? Didn’t that come from your capsule?”

“Ne, Irkmaan.”

I bent down and picked up the rod. Its surface was uncorroded and at one end were arabic numerals—a part number. For a moment a flood of hope washed over me, but it drained away when I realized it was a civilian part number. I threw the rod on the sand. “There’s no telling how long that’s been here, Jerry. It’s a civilian part number and no civilian missions have been in this part of the galaxy since the war. Might be left over from an old seeding operation or exploratory mission..”

The Drac nudged it with the toe of his boot. “New, gavey”

I looked up at it. “You gavey stainless steel?”

Jerry snorted and turned back toward the shack. “I stay, nasesay stay; where you want, you go, Davidge!”

With the black of the long night firmly bolted down on us, the wind picked up, shrieking and whistling in and through the holes in the walls. The plastic roof flapped, pushed in and sucked out with such violence it threatened to either tear or sail off into the night. Jerry sat on the sand floor, its back leaning against the nasesay as if to make clear that both Drac and capsule were staying put, although the way the sea was picking up seemed to weaken Jerry’s argument.

“Sea rough now is, Davidge, ne?”

“It’s too dark to see, but with this wind..” I shrugged more for my own benefit than the Drac’s, since the only thing visible inside the shack was the pale light coming through the roof. Any minute we could be washed off that sandbar. “Jerry, you’re being silly about that rod. You know that.”

“Surda.” The Drac sounded contrite if not altogether miserable.

“Ess?”

“Ess eh ’Surda’ ?”

“Ae.”

Jerry remained silent for a moment. “Davidge, gavey ‘not certain not is’ ?”

I sorted out the negatives. “You mean ‘possible,’ ‘maybe,’ ‘perhaps’ ?”

“Ae possiblemaybeperhaps. Dracon fleet Irkmaan ships have. Before war buy; after war capture. Rod possiblemaybeperhaps Dracon is.”

“So if there’s a secret base on the big island, Surda it’s a Dracon base?”

“Possiblemaybeperhaps, Davidge.”

“Jerry, does that mean you want to try it? The nasesay?”

“Ne.”

“Ne? Why, Jerry? If it might be a Drac base—”

“Ne! Ne talk!” The Drac seemed to choke on the words.

“Jerry, we talk, and you better believe we talk! If I’m going to death it on this island, I have a right to know why.”

The Drac was quiet for a long time. “Davidge.”

“Ess?”

“Nasesay, you take. Half ration bars you leave. I stay.”

I shook my head to clear it. “You want me to take the capsule alone?”

“What you want is, ne?”

“Ae, but why? You must realize there won’t be any pickup.”

“Possiblemaybeperhaps.”

“Surda, nothing. You know there isn’t going to be a pickup. What is it? You afraid of the water? If that’s it, we have a better chance—”

“Davidge, up your mouth shut. Nasesay you have. Me ne you need, gavey?”

I nodded in the dark. The capsule was mine for the taking; what did I need a grumpy Drac along for—especially since our truce could expire at any moment? The answer made me feel a little silly—human. Perhaps it’s the same thing. The drac was all that stood between me and utter aloneness. Still, there was the small matter of staying alive. “We should go together, Jerry.”

“Why?”

I felt myself blush. If humans have this need for companionship, why are they also ashamed to admit it? “We just should. Our chances would be better.”

“Alone your chances better are, Davidge. Your enemy I am.”

I nodded again and grimaced in the dark. “Jerry, you gavey ‘loneliness’ ?”

“Ne gavey.”

“Lonely. Being alone, by myself.”

“Gavey you alone. Take nasesay; I stay.”

“That’s it. see, viga, I don’t want to.”

“You want together go?” A low, dirty chuckle came from the other side of the shack. “You Dracon like? You me death, Irkmaan.” Jerry chuckled some more. “Irkmaanpoorzhab in head, poorzhab.”

“Forget it!” I slid down from the wall, smoothed out the sand and curled up with my back toward the Drac. The wind seemed to die down a bit and I closed my eyes to try and sleep. In a bit, the snap, crack of the plastic roof blended in with the background of shrieks and whistles and I felt myself drifting off, when my eyes opened wide at the sound of footsteps in the sand. I tensed, ready to spring.

“Davidge?” Jerry’s voice was very quiet.

“What?”

I heard the Drac sit on the sand next to me. “You loneliness, Davidge. About it hard you talk, ne?”

“So what?” The Drac mumbled something that was lost in the wind. “What?” I turned over and saw Jerry looking through a hole in the wall.

“Why I stay. Now, you I tell, ne?”

I shrugged. “Okay; why not?”

Jerry seemed to struggle with the words, then opened its mouth to speak. Its eyes opened wide. “Magasienna!”

I sat up. “Ess?”

Jerry pointed at the hole. “Soaker!”

I pushed it out of the way and looked through the hole. Steaming toward our island was an insane mountainous fury of whitecapped rollers. It was hard to tell in the dark, but the one in front looked taller than the one that had wet our feet a few days before. The ones following it were bigger. Jerry put a hand on my shoulder and I looked into the Drac’s eyes. We broke and ran for the capsule. We heard the first wave rumbling up the slope as we felt around in the dark for the recessed doorlatch. I just got my finger on it when the wave smashed against the shack, collapsing the roof. In half a second we were under water, the currents inside the shack agitating us like socks in a washing machine.

The water receded, and as I cleared my eyes, I saw that the windward wall of the shack had caved in. “Jerry!”

Through the collapsed wall, I saw the Drac staggering around outside. “Irkmaan?” Behind him I could see the second roller gathering speed.

“Kizlode, what’n the Hell you doing out there? Get in here!”

I turned to the capsule, still lodged firmly between the two rocks, and found the handle. As I opened the door, Jerry stumbled through the missing wall and fell against me. “Davidge. forever soakers go on! Forever!”

“Get in!” I helped the Drac through the door and didn’t wait for it to get out of the way. I piled in on top of Jerry and latched the door just as the second wave hit. I could feel the capsule lift a bit and rattle against the overhang of the one rock.

“Davidge, we float?”

“No. The rocks are holding us. We’ll be all right once the breakers stop.”

“Over you move.”

“Oh.” I got off Jerry’s chest and braced myself against one end of the capsule. After a bit, the capsule came to rest and we waited for the next one. “Jerry?”

“Ess?”

“What was it that you were about to say?”

“Why I stay?”

“Yeah.”

“About it hard me talk, gavey?”

“I know, I know.”

The next breaker hit and I could feel the capsule rise and rattle against the rock. “Davidge, gavey ‘vi nessa‘?”

“Ne gavey.”

“Vi nessa . . . little me, gavey?”

The capsule bumped down the rock and came to rest. “What about little you?”

“Little me. little Drac. From me, gavey?”

“Are you telling me you’re pregnant?”

“Possiblemaybeperhaps.”

I shook my heard. “Hold on, Jerry. I don’t want any misunderstandings. Pregnant. are you going to be a parent?”

“Ae, parent, two-zero-zero in line, very important is, ne?”

“Terrific. What’s this got to do with you not wanting to go to the other island?”

“Before, me vi nessa, gavey? Tean death.”

“Your child, it died?”

“Ae!” The Drac’s sob was torn from the lips of the universal mother. “I in fall hurt. Tean death. Nasesay in sea us bang. Tean hurt, gavey?”

“Ae, I gavey.” So, Jerry was afraid of losing another child. It was almost certain that the capsule trip would bang us around a lot, but staying on the sandbar didn’t appear to be improving our chances. The capsule had been at rest for quite a while, and I decided to risk a peek outside. The small canopy windows seemed to be covered with sand, and I opened the door. I looked around, and all of the walls had been smashed flat. I looked toward the sea, but could see nothing. “It looks safe, Jerry.” I looked up, toward the blackish sky, and above me towered the white plume of a descending breaker. “Maga damn sienna!” I slammed the hatch door.

“Ess, Davidge?”

“Hang on, Jerry!”

The sound of the water hitting the capsule was beyond hearing. We banged once, twice against the rock, then we could feel ourselves twisting, shooting upward. I made a grab to hang on, but missed as the capsule took a sickening lurch downward. I fell into Jerry, then was flung to the opposite wall, where I struck my head. Before I went blank, I heard Jerry cry ”Tean! Vi tean!”

. . . the lieutenant pressed his hand control and a figure—tall, humanoid, yellow—appeared on the screen.

“Dracslime!” shouted the auditorium of seated recruits.

The lieutenant faced the recruits. “Correct. This is a Drac. Note that the Drac race is uniform as to color; they are all yellow.” The recruits chuckled politely. The officer preened a bit, then with a light wand began pointing out various features. “The three-fingered hands are distinctive, of course, as is the almost noseless face, which gives the Drac a toad-like appearance. On average, eyesight is slightly better than human, hearing about the same, and smell . . .” The lieutenant paused. “The smell is terrible!” The officer beamed at the uproar from the recruits. When the auditorium quieted down, he pointed his light wand at a fold in the figure’s belly. “This is where the Drac keeps its family jewels—all of them.” Another chuckle. “That’s right, Dracs are hermaphrodites, with both male and female reproductive organs contained in the same individual.” The lieutenant faced the recruits. “You go tell a Drac to go boff himself, then watch out, because he can!” The laughter died down, and the lieutenant held out a hand toward the screen. “You see one of these things, what do you do?”

“KILL IT . . .”

. . . .I cleared the screen and computer sighted on the next Drac fighter, looking like a double x in the screen’s display. The Drac shifted hard to the left, then right again. I felt the autopilot pull my ship after the fighter, sorting out and ignoring the false images, trying to lock its electronic crosshairs on the Drac. “Come on, toad face. a little bit to the left . . .”

The double cross image moved into the ranging rings on the display and I felt the missile attached to the belly of my fighter take off. “Gotcha!” Through my canopy I saw the flash as the missile detonated. My screen showed the Drac fighter out of control, spinning toward Fyrine IV’s cloud-shrouded surface. I dived after it to confirm the kill . . . skin temperature increasing as my ship brushed the upper atmosphere. “Come on, dammit, blow!” I shifted the ship’s systems over for atmospheric flight when it became obvious that I’d have to follow the Drac right to the ground. Still above the clouds, the Drac stopped spinning and turned. I hit the auto override and pulled the stick into my lap. The fighter wallowed as it tried to pull up. Everyone knows the Drac ships work better in atmosphere . . . heading toward me: on an interception course . . . why doesn’t the slime fire. just before the collision, the Drac ejects. power gone; have to deadstick it in. I track the capsule as it falls through the muck, intending to find that Dracslime and finish the job. . . .

It could have been for seconds or years that I groped into the darkness around me. I felt touching, but the parts of me being touched seemed far, far away. First chills, then fever, then chills again, my head being cooled by a gentle hand. I opened my eyes to narrow slits and saw Jerry hovering over me, blotting my forehead with something cool. I managed a whisper. “Jerry.”

The Drac looked into my eyes and smiled. “Good is, Davidge. Good is.”

The light on Jerry’s face flickered and I smelled smoke. “Fire.”

Jerry got out of the way and pointed toward the center of the room’s sandy floor. I let my head roll over and realized that I was lying on a bed of soft, springy branches. Opposite my bed was another bed, and between them crackled a cheery campfire. “Fire now we have, Davidge. And wood.”

Jerry pointed toward the roof made of wooden poles thatched with broad leaves.

I turned and looked around, then let my throbbing head sink down and closed my eyes. “Where are we?”

“Big island, Davidge. Soaker off sandbar us washed. Wind and waves us here took. Right you were.”

“I. I don’t understand; ne gavey. It’d take days to get to the big island from the sandbar.”

Jerry nodded and dropped what looked like a sponge into a shell of some sort filled with water. “Nine days. You I strap to nasesay, then here on beach we land.”

“Nine days? I’ve been out for nine days?”

Jerry shook his head. “Seventeen. Here we land eight days.” The Drac waved its hand behind itself.

“Ago. eight days ago.”

”Ae.”

Seventeen days on Fyrine IV was better than a month on Earth. I opened my eyes again and looked at Jerry. The Drac was almost bubbling with excitement. “What about tean, your child?”

Jerry patted its swollen middle. “Good is, Davidge. You more nasesay hurt.”

I overcame an urge to nod. “I’m happy for you.” I closed my eyes and turned my face toward the wall, a combination of wood poles and leaves. “Jerry?”

”Ess?”

“You saved my life.”

”Ae.”

“Why?”

Jerry sat quietly for a long time. “Davidge. On sandbar you talk. Loneliness now gavey.” The Drac shook my arm. “Here, now you eat.”

I turned and looked into a shell filled with a steaming liquid. “What is it, chicken soup?”

“Ess?”

“Ess va?” I pointed at the bowl, realizing for the first time how weak I was.

Jerry frowned. “Like slug, but long.”

“An eel?”

“Ae, but eel on land, gavey?”

“You mean ‘snake’ ?”

“Possiblemaybeperhaps.”

I nodded and put my lips to the edge of the shell. I sipped some of the broth, swallowed and let the broth’s healing warmth seep through my body. “Good.”

“You custa want?”

“Ess?”

“Custa.” Jerry reached next to the fire and picked up a squarish chunk of clear rock. I looked at it, scratched it with my thumbnail, then touched it with my tongue.

“Halite! Salt!”

Jerry smiled. “Custa you want?”

I laughed. “All the comforts. By all means, let’s have custa.”

Jerry took the halite, knocked off a corner with a small stone, then used the stone to grind the pieces against another stone. He held out the palm of his hand with a tiny mountain of white granules in the center. I took two pinches, dropped them into my snake soup and stirred it with my finger. Then I took a long swallow of the delicious broth. I smacked my lips. “Fantastic.”

“Good, ne?”

“Better than good; fantastic.” I took another swallow, making a big show of smacking my lips and rolling my eyes.

“Fantastic, Davidge, ne?”

“Ae.” I nodded at the Drac. “I think that’s enough. I want to sleep.”

“Ae, Davidge, gavey.” Jerry took the bowl and put it beside the fire. The Drac stood, walked to the door and turned back. Its yellow eyes studied me for an instant, then it nodded, turned and went outside. I closed my eyes and let the heat from the campfire coax the sleep over me.

In two days I was up in the shack trying my legs, and in two more days, Jerry helped me outside. The shack was located at the top of a long, gentle rise in a scrub forest; none of the trees was any taller than five or six meters. At the bottom of the slope, better than eight kilometers from the shack, was the still rolling sea. The Drac had carried me. Our trusty nasesay had filled with water and had been dragged back into the sea soon after Jerry pulled me to dry land. With it went the remainder of the ration bars. Dracs are very fussy about what they eat, but hunger finally drove Jerry to sample some of the local flora and fauna—hunger and the human lump that was rapidly drifting away from lack of nourishment. The Drac had settled on a bland, starchy type of root, a green bushberry that when dried made an acceptable tea, and snakemeat. Exploring, Jerry had found a partly eroded salt dome. In the days that followed, I grew stronger and added to our diet with several types of sea mollusk and a fruit resembling a cross between a pear and a plum.

As the days grew colder, the Drac and I were forced to realize that Fyrine IV had a winter. Given that, we had to face the possibility that the winter would be severe enough to prevent the gathering of food—and wood. When dried next to the fire, the berrybush and roots kept well, and we tried both salting and smoking snakemeat. With strips of fiber from the berrybush for thread, Jerry and I pieced together the snake skins for winter clothing. The design we settled on involved two layers of skins with the down from berrybush seed pods stuffed between and then held in place by quilting the layers.

We agreed that the house would never do. It took three days of searching to find our first cave, and another three days before we found one that suited us. The mouth opened onto a view of the eternally tormented sea, but was set in the face of a low cliff well above sea level. Around the cave’s entrance we found great quantities of dead wood and loose stone. The wood we gathered for heat; and the stone we used to wall up the entrance, leaving only space enough for a hinged door. The hinges were made of snake leather and the door of wooden poles tied together with berrybush fiber. The first night after completing the door, the sea winds blew it to pieces; and we decided to go back to the original door design we had used on the sandbar.

Deep inside the cave, we made our living quarters in a chamber with a wide, sandy floor. Still deeper, the cave had natural pools of water, which were fine for drinking but too cold for bathing. We used the pool chamber for our supply room. We lined the walls of our living quarters with piles of wood and made new beds out of snakeskins and seed pod down. In the center of the chamber we built a respectable fireplace with a large, flat stone over the coals for a griddle. The first night we spent in our new home, I discovered that, for the first time since ditching on that damned planet, I couldn’t hear the wind.

During the long nights, we would sit at the fireplace making things—gloves, hats, packbags—out of snake leather, and we would talk. To break the monotony, we alternated days between speaking Drac and English, and by the time the winter hit with its first ice storm, each of us was comfortable in the other’s language.

We talked of Jerry’s coming child.

“What are you going to name it, Jerry?”

“It already has a name. See, the Jeriba line has five names. My name is Shigan; before me came my parent, Gothig; before Gothig was Haesni; before Haesni was Ty, and before Ty was Zammis. The child is named Jeriba Zammis.”

“Why only the five names? A human child can have just about any name its parents pick for it. In fact, once a human becomes an adult, he or she can pick any name he or she wants.”

The Drac looked at me, its eyes filled with pity. “Davidge, how lost you must feel. You humans—how lost you must feel.”

“Lost?”

Jerry nodded. “Where do you come from, Davidge?”

“You mean my parents?”

“Yes.”

I shrugged. “I remember my parents.”

“And their parents?”

“I remember my mother’s father. When I was young we used to visit him.”

“Davidge, what do you know about this grandparent?”

I rubbed my chin. “It’s kind of vague. I think he was in some kind of agriculture—I don’t know.”

“And his parents?”

I shook my head. “The only thing I remember is that somewhere along the line, English and Germans figured. Gavey Germans and English?”

Jerry nodded. “Davidge, I can recite the history of my line back to the founding of my planet by Jeriba Ty, one of the original settlers, one hundred and ninety-nine generations ago. At our line’s archives on Draco, there are the records that trace the line across space to the racehome planet, Sindie, and there back seventy generations to Jeriba Ty, the founder of the Jeriba line.”

“How does one become a founder?”

“Only the firstborn carries the line. Products of second, third, or fourth births must found their own lines.”

I nodded, impressed. “Why only the five names? Just to make it easier to remember them?”

Jerry shook its head. “No. The names are things to which we add distinction; they are the same, commonplace five so that they do not overshadow the events that distinguish their bearers. The name I carry, Shigan, has been served by great soldiers, scholars, students of philosophy, and several priests. The name my child will carry has been served by scientists, teachers, and explorers.”

“You remember all of your ancestors’ occupations?”

Jerry nodded. “Yes, and what they each did and where they did it. You must recite your line before the line’s archives to be admitted into adulthood as I was twenty-two of my years ago. Zammis will do the same, except the child must begin its recitation.”—Jerry smiled—“with my name, Jeriba Shigan.”

“You can recite almost two hundred biographies from memory?”

“Yes.”

I went over to my bed and stretched out. As I stared up at the smoke being sucked through the crack in the chamber’s ceiling. I began to understand what Jerry meant by feeling lost. A Drac with several dozens of generations under its belt knew who it was and what it had to live up to. “Jerry?”

“Yes, Davidge?”

“Will you recite them for me?” I turned my head and looked at the Drac in time to see an expression of utter surprise melt into joy. It was only after many years had passed that I learned I had done Jerry a great honor in requesting his line. Among the Dracs, it is a rare expression of respect, not only of the individual, but of the line.

Jerry placed the hat he was sewing on the sand, stood and began.

“Before you here I stand, Shigan of the line of Jeriba, born of Gothig, the teacher of music. A musician of high merit, the students of Gothig included Datzizh of the Nem line, Perravane of the Tuscor line, and many lesser musicians. Trained in music at the Shimuram, Gothig stood before the archives in the year 11,051 and spoke of its parent Haesni, the manufacturer of ships. . . .“

As I listened to Jerry’s singsong of formal Dracon, the backward biographies—beginning with death and ending with adulthood—I experienced a sense of time-binding, of being able to know and touch the past. Battles, empires built and destroyed, discoveries made, great things done—a tour through twelve thousand years of history, but perceived as a well-defined, living continuum.

Against this: I Willis of the Davidge line stand before you, born of Sybil the housewife and Nathan the second-rate civil engineer, one of them born of Grandpop, who probably had something to do with agriculture, born of nobody in particular.. Hell, I wasn’t even that! My older brother carried the line; not me. I listened and made up my mind to memorize the line of Jeriba.

We talked of war:

“That was a pretty neat trick, suckering me into the atmosphere, then ramming me.”

Jerry shrugged. “Dracon fleet pilots are best; this is well known.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That’s why I shot your tail feathers off, huh?”

Jerry shrugged, frowned, and continued sewing on the scraps of snake leather. “Why do the Earthmen invade this part of the Galaxy, Davidge? We had thousands of years of peace before you came.”

“Hah! Why do the Dracs invade? We were at peace too. What are you doing here?”

“We settle these planets. It is the Drac tradition. We are explorers and founders.”

“Well, toad face, what do you think we are, a bunch of homebodies? Humans have had space travel for less than two hundred years, but we’ve settled almost twice as many planets as the Dracs—”

Jerry held up a finger. “Exactly! You humans spread like a disease. Enough! We don’t want you here!”

“Well, we’re here, and here to stay. Now, what are you going to do about it?”

“You see what we do, Irkmaan, we fight!”

“Phooey! You call that little scrap we were in a fight? Hell, Jerry, we were kicking you junk jocks out of the sky—”

“Haw, Davidge! That’s why you sit here sucking on smoked snakemeat!”

I pulled the little rascal out of my mouth and pointed it at the Drac. “I notice your breath has a snake flavor too, Drac!”

Jerry snorted and turned away from the fire. I felt stupid, first because we weren’t going to settle an argument that had plagued a hundred worlds for over a century. Second, I wanted to have Jerry check my recitation. I had over a hundred generations memorized. The Drac’s side was toward the fire, leaving enough light falling on its lap to see its sewing.

“Jerry, what are you working on?”

“We have nothing to talk about, Davidge.”

“Come on, what is it?”

Jerry turned its head toward me, then looked back into its lap and picked up a tiny snakeskin suit. “For Zammis.” Jerry smiled and I shook my head, then laughed.

We talked of philosophy:

“You studied Shizumaat, Jerry; why won’t you tell me about its teachings?”

Jerry frowned. “No, Davidge.”

“Are Shizumaat’s teachings secret or something?”

Jerry shook its head. “No. But we honor Shizumaat too much for talk.”

I rubbed my chin. “Do you mean too much to talk about it, or to talk about it with a human?”

“Not with humans, Davidge; just not with you.”

“Why?”

Jerry lifted its head and narrowed its yellow eyes. “You know what you said. on the sandbar.”

I scratched my head and vaguely recalled the curse I laid on the Drac about Shizumaat eating it. I held out my hands. “But, Jerry, I was mad, angry. You can’t hold me accountable for what I said then.”

“I do.”

“Will it change anything if I apologize?”

“Not a thing.”

I stopped myself from saying something nasty and thought back to that moment when Jerry and I stood ready to strangle each other. I remembered something about that meeting and screwed the corners of my mouth in place to keep from smiling. “Will you tell me Shizumaat’s teachings if I forgive you. for what you said about Mickey Mouse?” I bowed my head in an appearance of reverence, although its chief purpose was to suppress a cackle.

Jerry looked up at me, its face pained with guilt. “I have felt bad about that, Davidge. If you forgive me, I will talk about Shizumaat.”

“Then, I forgive you, Jerry.”

“One more thing.”

“What?”

“You must tell me of the teachings of Mickey Mouse.”

“I’ll, uh, do my best.”

We talked of Zammis:

“Jerry, what do you want little Zammy to be?”

The Drac shrugged. “Zammis must live up to its own name. I want it to do that with honor. If Zammis does that, it is all I can ask.”

“Zammy will pick its own trade?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t there anything special you want, though?”

Jerry nodded. “Yes, there is.”

“What’s that?”

“That Zammis will, one day find itself off this miserable planet.”

I nodded. “Amen.”

“Amen.”

The winter dragged on until Jerry and I began wondering if we had gotten in on the beginning of an ice age. Outside the cave, everything was coated with a thick layer of ice, and the low temperature combined with the steady winds made venturing outside a temptation of death by falls or freezing. Still, by mutual agreement, we both went outside to relieve ourselves. There were several isolated chambers deep in the cave; but we feared polluting our water supply, not to mention the air inside the cave. The main risk outside was dropping one’s drawers at a wind chill factor that froze breath vapor before it could be blown through the thin face muffs we had made out of our flight suits. We learned not to dawdle.

One morning, Jerry was outside answering the call, while I stayed by the fire mashing up dried roots with water for griddle cakes. I heard Jerry call from the mouth of the cave. “Davidge!”

“What?”

“Davidge, come quick!”

A ship! It had to be! I put the shell bowl on the sand, put on my hat and gloves, and ran through the passage. As I came close to the door, I untied the muff from around my neck and tied it over my mouth and nose to protect my lungs. Jerry, its head bundled in a similar manner, was looking through the door, waving me on. “What is it?”

Jerry stepped away from the door to let me through. “Come, look!”

Sunlight. Blue sky and sunlight. In the distance, over the sea, new clouds were piling up; but above us the sky was clear. Neither of us could look at the sun directly, but we turned our faces to it and felt the rays of Fyrine on our skins. The light glared and sparkled off the ice-coveredice-covered rocks and trees. “Beautiful.”

“Yes.” Jerry grabbed my sleeve with a gloved hand. “Davidge, you know what this means?”

“What?”

“Signal fires at night. On a clear night, a large fire could be seen from orbit, ne?”

I looked at Jerry, then back at the sky. “I don’t know. If the fire were big enough, and we get a clear night, and if anybody picks that moment to look.” I let my head hang down. “That’s always supposing that there’s someone in orbit up there to do the looking.” I felt the pain begin in my fingers. “We better go back in.”

“Davidge, it’s a chance!”

“What are we going to use for wood, Jerry?” I held out an arm toward the trees above and around the cave. “Everything that can burn has at least fifteen centimeters of ice on it.”

“In the cave—”

“Our firewood?” I shook my head. “How long is this winter going to last? Can you be sure that we have enough wood to waste on signal fires?”

“It’s a chance, Davidge. It’s a chance!”

Our survival riding on a toss of the dice. I shrugged. “Why not?”

We spent the next few hours hauling a quarter of our carefully gathered firewood and dumping it outside the mouth of the cave. By the time we were finished and long before night came, the sky was again a solid blanket of grey. Several times each night, we would check the sky, waiting for stars to appear. During the days, we would frequently have to spend several hours beating the ice off the wood pile. Still, it gave both of us hope, until the wood in the cave ran out and we had to start borrowing from the signal pile.

That night, for the first time, the Drac looked absolutely defeated. Jerry sat at the fireplace, staring at the flames. Its hand reached inside its snakeskin jacket through the neck and pulled out a small golden cube suspended on a chain. Jerry held the cube clasped in both hands, shut its eyes and began mumbling in Drac. I watched from my bed until Jerry finished. The Drac sighed, nodded and replaced the object within its jacket.

“What’s that thing?”

Jerry looked up at me, frowned, then touched the front of its jacket. “This? It is my Talman—what you call a Bible.”

“A Bible is a book. You know, with pages that you read.”

Jerry pulled the thing from its jacket, mumbled a phrase in Drac, then worked a small catch. Another gold cube dropped from the first and the Drac held it out to me. “Be very careful with it, Davidge.”

I sat up, took the object and examined it in the light of the fire. Three hinged pieces of the golden metal formed the binding of a book two-and- a-half centimeters on an edge. I opened the book in the middle and looked over the double columns of dots, lines, and squiggles. “It’s in Drac.”

“Of course.”

“But I can’t read it.”

Jerry’s eyebrows went up. “You speak Drac so well. I didn’t remember. would you like me to teach you?”

“To read this?”

“Why not? You have an appointment you have to keep?”

I shrugged. “No.” I touched my finger to the book and tried to turn one of the tiny pages. Perhaps fifty pages went at once. “I can’t separate the pages.”

Jerry pointed at a small bump at the top to the spine. “Pull out the pin. It’s for turning the pages.”

I pulled out the short needle, touched it against a page and it slid loose of its companion and flipped. “Who wrote your Talman, Jerry?”

“Many. All great teachers.”

“Shizumaat?”

Jerry nodded. “Shizumaat is one of them.”

I closed the book and held it in the palm of my hand. “Jerry, why did you bring this out now?”

“I needed its comfort.” The Drac held out its arms. “This place. Maybe we will grow old here and die. Maybe we will never be found. I see this today as we brought in the signal fire wood.” Jerry placed its hands on its belly. “Zammis will be born here. The Talman helps me to accept what I cannot change.”

“Zammis, how much longer?”

Jerry smiled. “Soon.”

I looked at the tiny book. “I would like you to teach me to read this, Jerry.”

The Drac took the chain and case from around its neck and handed it to me. “You must keep the Talman in this.”

I held it for a moment, then shook my head. “I can’t keep this, Jerry. It’s obviously of great value to you. What if I lost it?”

“You won’t. Keep it while you learn. The student must do this.”

I put the chain around my neck. “This is quite an honor you do me.”

Jerry shrugged. “Much less than the honor you do me by memorizing the Jeriba line. Your recitations have been accurate, and moving.” Jerry took some charcoal from the fire, stood and walked to the wall of the chamber. That night I learned the thirty-one letters and sounds of the Drac alphabet, as well as the additional nine sounds and letters used in formal Drac writings.

The wood eventually ran out. Jerry was very heavy and very, very sick as Zammis prepared to make its appearance, and it was all the Drac could do to waddle outside with my help to relieve itself. Hence, wood-gathering, which involved taking our remaining stick and beating the ice off the dead standing trees, fell to me, as did cooking.

On a particularly blustery day, I noticed that the ice on the trees was thinner. Somewhere we had turned winter’s corner and were heading for spring. I spent my ice-pounding time feeling great at the thought of spring, and I knew Jerry would pick up some at the news. The winter was really getting the Drac down. I was working the woods above the cave, taking armloads of gathered wood and dropping them down below, when I heard a scream. I froze, then looked around. I could see nothing but the sea and the ice around me. Then, the scream again. “Davidge!” It was Jerry. I dropped the load I was carrying and ran to the cleft in the cliffs face that served as a path to the upper woods. Jerry screamed again; and I slipped, then rolled until I came to the shelf level with the cave’s mouth. I rushed through the entrance, down the passageway until I came to the chamber. Jerry writhed on its bed, digging its fingers into the sand.

I dropped on my knees next to the Drac. “I’m here, Jerry. What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Davidge!” The Drac rolled its eyes, seeing nothing; its mouth worked silently, then exploded with another scream.

“Jerry, it’s me!” I shook the Drac’s shoulder. “It’s me, Jerry. Davidge!”

Jerry turned its head toward me, grimaced, then clasped the fingers of one hand around my left wrist with the strength of pain. “Davidge! Zammis. something’s gone wrong!”

“What? What can I do?”

Jerry screamed again, then its head fell back to the bed in a half-faint. The Drac fought back to consciousness and pulled my head down to its lips. “Davidge, you must swear.”

“What, Jerry? Swear what?”

“Zammis. on Draco. To stand before the line’s archives. Do this.”

“What do you mean? You talk like you’re dying.”

“I am, Davidge. Zammis two hundredth generation. very important. Present my child, Davidge. Swear!”

I wiped the sweat from my face with my free hand. “You’re not going to die, Jerry. hang on!”

“Enough! Face truth, Davidge! I die! You must teach the line of Jeriba to Zammis. and the book, the Talman, gavey

“Stop it!” Panic stood over me almost as a physical presence. “Stop talking like that! You aren’t going to die, Jerry. Come on; fight, you kizlode sonofabitch.”

Jerry screamed. Its breathing was weak and the Drac drifted in and out of consciousness. “Davidge.”

“What?” I realized I was sobbing like a kid.

“Davidge, you must help Zammis come out.”

“What. how? What in the Hell are you talking about?”

Jerry turned its face to the wall of the cave. “Lift my jacket.”

“What?”

“Lift my jacket, Davidge. Now!”

I pulled up the snakeskin jacket, exposing Jerry’s swollen belly. The fold down the center was bright red and seeping a clear liquid. “What. what should I do?”

Jerry breathed rapidly, then held its breath, “Tear it open! You must tear it open, Davidge!”

“No!”

“Do it! Do it, or Zammis dies!”

“What do I care about your goddamn child, Jerry? What do I have to do to save you?”

“Tear it open.” whispered the Drac. “Take care of my child, Irkmaan. Present Zammis before the Jeriba archives. Swear this to me.”

“Oh, Jerry.”

“Swear this!”

I nodded, hot fat tears dribbling down my cheeks. “I swear it..” Jerry relaxed its grip on my wrist and closed its eyes. I knelt next to the Drac, stunned. “No. No, no, no, no.”

Tear it open! You must tear it open, Davidge!

I reached up a hand and gingerly touched the fold on Jerry’s belly. I could feel life struggling beneath it, trying to escape the airless confines of the Drac’s womb. I hated it; I hated the damned thing as I never hated anything before. Its struggles grew weaker, then stopped.

Present Zammis before the Jeriba archives. Swear this to me . . .

I swear it. . . .

I lifted my other hand and inserted my thumbs into the fold and tugged gently. I increased the amount of force, then tore at Jerry’s belly like a madman. The fold burst open, soaking the front of my jacket with the clear fluid. Holding the fold open, I could see the still form of Zammis huddled in a well of the fluid, motionless.

I vomited. When I had nothing more to throw up, I reached into the fluid and put my hands under the Drac infant. I lifted it, wiped my mouth on my upper left sleeve, and closed my mouth over Zammis’ and pulled the child’s mouth open with my right hand. Three times, four times, I inflated the child’s lungs, then it coughed. Then it cried. I tied off the two umbilicals with berrybush fiber, then cut them. Jeriba Zammis was freed of the dead flesh of its parent.

I held the rock over my head, then brought it down with all of my force upon the ice. Shards splashed away from the point of impact, exposing the dark green beneath. Again, I lifted the rock and brought it down, knocking loose another rock. I picked it up, stood and carried it to the half-covered corpse of the Drac. “The Drac,” I whispered. Good. Just call it “The Drac.” Toad face. Dragger.

The enemy. Call it anything to insulate those feelings against the pain.

I looked at the pile of rocks I had gathered, decided it was sufficient to finish the job, then knelt next to the grave. As I placed the rocks on the pile, unmindful of the gale-blown sleet freezing on my snakeskins, I fought back the tears. I smacked my hands together to help restore the circulation. Spring was coming, but it was still dangerous to stay outside too long. And I had been a long time building the Drac’s grave. I picked up another rock and placed it into position. As the rock’s weight leaned against the snakeskin mattress cover, I realized that the Drac was already frozen. I quickly placed the remainder of the rocks, then stood.

The wind rocked me and I almost lost my footing on the ice next to the grave. I looked toward the boiling sea, pulled my snakeskins around myself more tightly, then looked down at the pile of rocks. There should be words. You don’t just cover up the dead, then go to dinner. There should be words. But what words? I was no religionist, and neither was the Drac. Its formal philosophy on the matter of death was the same as my informal rejection of Islamic delights, pagan Valhallas, and Judeo-Christian pies in the sky. Death is death; finis; the end; the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. Still, there should be words.

I reached beneath my snakeskins and clasped my gloved hand around the golden cube of the Talman. I felt the sharp corners of the cube through my glove, closed my eyes and ran through the words of the great Drac philosophers. But there was nothing they had written for this moment.

The Talman was a book on life. Talman means life, and this occupies Drac philosophy. They spare nothing for death. Death is a fact; the end of life. The Talman had no words for me to say. The wind knifed through me, causing me to shiver. Already my fingers were numb and pains were beginning in my feet. Still, there should be words. But the only words I could think of would open the gate, flooding my being with pain—with the realization that the Drac was gone. Still . . . still, there should be words.

“Jerry, I.” I had no words. I turned from the grave, my tears mixing with the sleet.

With the warmth and silence of the cave around me, I sat on my mattress, my back against the wall of the cave. I tried to lose myself in the shadows and flickers of light cast on the opposite wall by the fire. Images would half-form, then dance away before I could move my mind to see something in them. As a child I used to watch clouds, and in them see faces, castles, animals, dragons, and giants. It was a world of escape—fantasy; something to inject wonder and adventure into the mundane, regulated life of a middle-class boy leading a middle-class life. All I could see on the wall of the cave was a representation of Hell: flames licking at twisted, grotesque representations of condemned souls. I laughed at the thought. We think of Hell as fire, supervised by a cackling sadist in a red union suit. Fyrine IV had taught me this much: Hell is loneliness, hunger, and endless cold.

I heard a whimper, and I looked into the shadows toward the small mattress at the back of the cave. Jerry had made the snakeskin sack filled with seed pod down for Zammis. It whimpered again, and I leaned forward, wondering if there was something it needed. A pang of fear tickled my guts. What does a Drac infant eat? Dracs aren’t mammals. All they ever taught us in training was how to recognize Dracs—that, and how to kill them. Then real fear began working on me. “What in the hell am I going to use for diapers?”

It whimpered again. I pushed myself to my feet, walked the sandy floor to the infant’s side, then knelt beside it. Out of the bundle that was Jerry’s old flight suit, two chubby three-fingered arms waved. I picked up the bundle, carried it next to the fire, and sat on a rock. Balancing the bundle on my lap, I carefully unwrapped it. I could see the yellow glitter of Zammis’s eyes beneath yellow, sleep-heavy lids. From the almost noseless face and solid teeth to its deep yellow color, Zammis was every bit a miniature of Jerry, except for the fat. Zammis fairly wallowed in rolls of fat. I looked, and was grateful to find that there was no mess.

I looked into Zammis’s face. “You want something to eat?”

“Guh.”

Its jaws were ready for business, and I assumed that Dracs must chew solid food from day one. I reached over the fire and picked up a twist of dried snake, then touched it against the infant’s lips. Zammis turned its head. “C’mon, eat. You’re not going to find anything better around here.”

I pushed the snake against its lips again, and Zammis pulled back a chubby arm and pushed it away. I shrugged. “Well, whenever you get hungry enough, it’s there.”

“Guh meh!” Its head rocked back and forth on my lap, a tiny, threefingered hand closed around my finger, and it whimpered again.

“You don’t want to eat, you don’t need to be cleaned up, so what do you want? Kos va nu?”

Zammis’s face wrinkled, and its hand pulled at my finger. Its other hand waved in the direction of my chest. I picked Zammis up to arrange the flight suit, and the tiny hands reached out, grasped the front of my snakeskins, and held on as the chubby arms pulled the child next to my chest. I held it close, it placed its cheek against my chest, and promptly fell asleep. “Well. I’ll be damned.”

Until the Drac was gone, I never realized how closely I had stood near the edge of madness. My loneliness was a cancer—a growth that I fed with hate: hate for the planet with its endless cold, endless winds, and endless isolation; hate for the helpless yellow child with its clawing need for care, food, and an affection that I couldn’t give; and hate for myself. I found myself doing things that frightened and disgusted me. To break my solid wall of being alone, I would talk, shout, and sing to myself—uttering curses, nonsense, or meaningless croaks.

Its eyes were open, and it waved a chubby arm and cooed. I picked up a large rock, staggered over to the child’s side, and held the weight over the tiny body. “I could drop this thing, kid. Where would you be then?” I felt laughter coming from my lips. I threw the rock aside. “Why should I mess up the cave? Outside. Put you outside for a minute, and you die! You hear me? Die!”

The child worked its three-fingered hands at the empty air, shut its eyes, and cried. “Why don’t you eat? Why don’t you crap? Why don’t you do anything right, but cry?” The child cried more loudly. “Bah! I ought to pick up that rock and finish it! That’s what I ought.” A wave of revulsion stopped my words, and I went to my mattress, picked up my cap, gloves, and muff, then headed outside.

Before I came to the rocked-in entrance to the cave, I felt the bite of the wind. Outside I stopped and looked at the sea and sky—a roiling panorama in glorious black and white, gray and gray. A gust of wind slapped against me, rocking me back toward the entrance. I regained my balance, walked to the edge of the cliff and shook my fist at the sea. “Go ahead! Go ahead and blow, you kizlode sonofabitch! You haven’t killed me yet!”

I squeezed the windburned lids of my eyes shut, then opened them and looked down. A forty-meter drop to the next ledge, but if I took a running jump, I could clear it. Then it would be a hundred and fifty meters to the rocks below. Jump. I backed away from the cliff’s edge. “Jump! Sure, jump!” I shook my head at the sea. “I’m not going to do your job for you! You want me dead, you’re going to have to do it yourself!”

I looked back and up, above the entrance to the cave. The sky was darkening and in a few hours, night would shroud the landscape. I turned toward the cleft in the rock that led to the scrub forest above the cave.

I squatted next to the Drac’s grave and studied the rocks I had placed there, already fused together with a layer of ice. “Jerry. What am I going to do?”

The Drac would sit by the fire, both of us sewing. And we talked.

“You know, Jerry, all this,” I held up the Talman. “I’ve heard it all before. I expected something different.”

The Drac lowered its sewing to its lap and studied me for an instant. Then it shook its head and resumed its sewing. “You are not a terribly profound creature, Davidge.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jerry held out a three-fingered hand. “A universe, Davidge—there is a universe out there, a universe of life, objects, and events. There are differences, but it is all the same universe, and we all must obey the same universal laws. Did you ever think of that?”

“No.”

“That is what I mean, Davidge. Not terribly profound.”

I snorted. “I told you, I’d heard this stuff before. So I imagine that shows humans to be just as profound as Dracs.”

Jerry laughed. “You always insist on making something racial out of my observations. What I said applied to you, not to the race of humans . . .”

I spat on the frozen ground. “You Dracs think you’re so damned smart.” The wind picked up, and I could taste the sea salt in it. One of the big blows was coming. The sky was changing to that curious darkness that tricked me into thinking it was midnight blue, rather than black. A trickle of ice found its way under my collar.

“What’s wrong with me just being me? Everybody in the universe doesn’t have to be a damned philosopher, toad face!” There were millions—billions—like me. More maybe. “What difference does it make to anything whether I ponder existence or not? It’s here; that’s all I have to know.”

“Davidge, you don’t even know your family line beyond your parents, and now you say you refuse to know that of your universe that you can know. How will you know your place in this existence, Davidge? Where are you? Who are you?”

I shook my head and stared at the grave, then I turned and faced the sea. In another hour, or less, it would be too dark to see the whitecaps. “I’m me, that’s who.” But was that “me” who held the rock over Zammis, threatening a helpless infant with death? I felt my guts curdle as the loneliness I thought I felt grew claws and fangs and began gnawing and slashing at the remains of my sanity. I turned back to the grave, closed my eyes, then opened them. “I’m a fighter pilot, Jerry. Isn’t that something?”

“That is what you do, Davidge; that is neither who nor what you are.”

I knelt next to the grave and clawed at the ice-sheathed rocks with my hands. “You don’t talk to me now, Drac! You’re dead!” I stopped, realizing that the words I had heard were from the Talman, processed into my own context. I slumped against the rocks, felt the wind, then pushed myself to my feet. “Jerry, Zammis won’t eat. It’s been three days. What do I do?

Why didn’t you tell me anything about Drac brats before you.” I held my hands to my face. “Steady, boy. Keep it up, and they’ll stick you in a home.” The wind pressed against my back, I lowered my hands, then walked from the grave.

I sat in the cave, staring at the fire. I couldn’t hear the wind through the rock, and the wood was dry, making the fire hot and quiet. I tapped my fingers against my knees, then began humming. Noise, any kind, helped to drive off the oppressive loneliness. “Sonofabitch.” I laughed and nodded. “Yea, verily, and kizlode va nu, dutschaat.” I chuckled, trying to think of all the curses and obscenities in Drac that I had learned from Jerry. There were quite a few. My toe tapped against the sand and my humming started up again. I stopped, frowned, then remembered the song.

“Highty tighty Christ almighty,

Who the Hell are we?

Zim zam, Gawd Damn,

We’re in Squadron B.”

I leaned back against the wall of the cave, trying to remember another verse. A pilot’s got a rotten life/no crumpets with our tea/ we have to service the general’s wife/ and pick fleas from her knee. “Damn!” I slapped my knee, trying to see the faces of the other pilots in the squadron lounge.

I could almost feel the whiskey fumes tickling the inside of my nose. Vadik, Wooster, Arnold. the one with the broken nose—Demerest, Kadiz. I hummed again, swinging an imaginary mug of issue grog by its imaginary handle.

“And, if he doesn’t like it,

I’ll tell you what we’ll do:

We’ll fill his ass with broken glass,
and seal it up with glue.”

The cave echoed with the song. I stood, threw up my arms and screamed. “Yaaaaahoooooo!”

Zammis began crying. I bit my lip and walked over to the bundle on the mattress. “Well? You ready to eat?”

“Unh, unh, weh.” The infant rocked its head back and forth. I went to the fire, picked up a twist of snake, then returned. I knelt next to Zammis and held the snake to its lips. Again, the child pushed it away. “Come on, you. You have to eat.” I tried again with the same results. I took the wraps off the child and looked at its body. I could tell it was losing weight, although Zammis didn’t appear to be getting weak. I shrugged, wrapped it up again, stood, and began walking back to my mattress.

“Guh, weh.”

I turned. “What?”

“Ah, guh, guh.”

I went back, stooped over and picked the child up. Its eyes were open and it looked into my face, then smiled.

“What’re you laughing at, ugly? You should get a load of your own face.”

Zammis barked out a short laugh, then gurgled. I went to my mattress, sat down, and arranged Zammis in my lap. “Gumma, buh, buh.” Its hand grabbed a loose flap of snakeskin on my shirt and pulled on it.

“Gumma buh buh to you, too. So, what do we do now? How about I start teaching you the line of Jeriban? You’re going to have to learn it sometime, and it might as well be now.” The Jeriban line. My recitations of the line were the only things Jerry ever complimented me about. I looked into Zammis’s eyes. “When I bring you to stand before the Jeriba archives, you will say this: ‘Before you here I stand, Zammis of the line of Jeriba, born of Shigan, the fighter pilot.’ ” I smiled, thinking of the upraised yellow brows if Zammis continued, “and, by damn, Shigan was a Helluva good pilot, too. Why, I was once told he took a smart round in his tail feathers, then pulled around and rammed the kizlode sonofabitch, known to one and all as Willis E. Davidge . . .” I shook my head. “You’re not going to get your wings by doing the line in English, Zammis.” I began again:

“Naatha nu enta va, Zammis zea does Jeriba, estay va Shigan, asaam naa denvadar. . . .”

For eight of those long days and nights, I feared the child would die. I tried everything—roots, dried berries, dried plumfruit, snakemeat dried, boiled, chewed, and ground. Zammis refused it all. I checked frequently, but each time I looked through the child’s wraps, they were as clean as when I had put them on. Zammis lost weight, but seemed to grow stronger. By the ninth day it was crawling the floor of the cave. Even with the fire, the cave wasn’t really warm. I feared that the kid would get sick crawling around naked, and I dressed it in the tiny snakeskin suit and cap Jerry had made for it. After dressing it, I stood Zammis up and looked at it. The kid had already developed a smile full of mischief that, combined with the twinkle in its yellow eyes and its suit and cap, made it look like an elf. I was holding Zammis up in a standing position. The kid seemed pretty steady on its legs, and I let go. Zammis smiled, waved its thinning arms about, then laughed and took a faltering step toward me. I caught it as it fell, and the little Drac squealed.

In two more days Zammis was walking and getting into everything that could be gotten into. I spent many an anxious moment searching the chambers at the back of the cave for the kid after coming in from outside. Finally, when I caught it at the mouth of the cave heading full steam for the outside, I had had enough. I made a harness out of snakeskin, attached it to a snake-leather leash, and tied the other end to a projection of rock above my head. Zammis still got into everything, but at least I could find it.

Four days after it learned to walk, it wanted to eat. Drac babies are probably the most convenient and considerate infants in the universe.

They live off their fat for about three or four Earth weeks, and don’t make a mess the entire time. After they learn to walk, and can therefore make it to a mutually agreed upon spot, then they want food and begin discharging wastes. I showed the kid once how to use the litter box I had made, and never had to again. After five or six lessons, Zammis was handling its own drawers. Watching the little Drac learn and grow, I began to understand those pilots in my squadron who used to bore each other—and everyone else—with countless pictures of ugly children, accompanied by thirty-minute narratives for each snapshot. Before the ice melted, Zammis was talking. I taught it to call me “Uncle.”

For lack of a better term, I called the ice-melting season “spring.” It would be a long time before the scrub forest showed any green or the snakes ventured forth from their icy holes. The sky maintained its eternal cover of dark, angry clouds, and still the sleet would come and coat everything with a hard, slippery glaze. But the next day the glaze would melt, and the warmer air would push another millimeter into the soil.

I realized that this was the time to be gathering wood. Before the winter hit, Jerry and I working together hadn’t gathered enough wood. The short summer would have to be spent putting up food for the next winter. I was hoping to build a tighter door over the mouth of the cave, and I swore that I would figure out some kind of indoor plumbing. Dropping your drawers outside in the middle of winter was dangerous. My mind was full of these things as I stretched out on my mattress watching the smoke curl through a crack in the roof of the cave. Zammis was off in the back of the cave playing with some rocks that it had found, and I must have fallen asleep. I awoke with the kid shaking my arm.

“Uncle?”

“Huh? Zammis?”

“Uncle. Look.”

I rolled over on my left side and faced the Drac. Zammis was holding up its right hand, fingers spread out. “What is it, Zammis?”

“Look.” It pointed at each of its three fingers in turn. “One, two, three.”

“So?”

“Look.” Zammis grabbed my right hand and spread out the fingers. “One, two, three, four, five!”

I nodded. “So you can count to five.”

The Drac frowned and made an impatient gesture with its tiny fists. “Look.” It took my outstretched hand and placed its own on top of it. With its other hand, Zammis pointed first at one of its own fingers, then at one of mine. “One, one.” The child’s yellow eyes studied me to see if I understood.

“Yes.”

The child pointed again. “Two, two.” It looked at me, then looked back at my hand and pointed. “Three, three.” Then he grabbed my two remaining fingers. “Four, five!” It dropped my hand, then pointed to the side of its own hand. “Four, five?”

I shook my head. Zammis, at less than four Earth months old, had detected part of the difference between Dracs and humans. A human child would be—what—five, six, or seven years old before asking questions like that. I sighed. “Zammis.”

“Yes, Uncle?”

“Zammis, you are a Drac. Dracs only have three fingers on a hand.” I held up my right hand and wiggled the fingers. “I’m a human. I have five.”

I swear that tears welled in the child’s eyes. Zammis held out its hands, looked at them, then shook its head. “Grow four, five?”

I sat up and faced the kid. Zammis was wondering where its other four fingers had gone. “Look, Zammis. You and I are different. different kinds of beings, understand?”

Zammis shook his head. “Grow four, five?”

“You won’t. You’re a Drac.” I pointed at my chest. “I’m a human.” This was getting me nowhere. “Your parent, where you came from, was a Drac. Do you understand?”

Zammis frowned. “Drac. What Drac?”

The urge to resort to the timeless standby of “you’ll understand when you get older” pounded at the back of my mind. I shook my head. “Dracs have three fingers on each hand. Your parent had three fingers on each hand.” I rubbed my beard. “My parent was a human and had five fingers on each hand. That’s why I have five fingers on each hand.”

Zammis knelt on the sand and studied its fingers. It looked up at me, back to its hands, then back to me. “What parent?”

I studied the kid. It must be having an identity crisis of some kind. I was the only person it had ever seen, and I had five fingers per hand. “A parent is. the thing.” I scratched my beard again. “Look. we all come from someplace. I had a mother and father—two different kinds of humans—that gave me life; that made me, understand?”

Zammis gave me a look that could be interpreted as “Mac, you are full of it.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if I can explain it.”

Zammis pointed at its own chest. “My mother? My father?”

I held out my hands, dropped them into my lap, pursed my lips, scratched my beard, and generally stalled for time. Zammis held an unblinking gaze on me the entire time. “Look, Zammis. You don’t have a mother and a father. I’m a human, so I have them; you’re a Drac. You have a parent—just one, see?”

Zammis shook its head. It looked at me, then pointed at its own chest. “Drac.”

“Right.”

Zammis pointed at my chest. “Human.”

“Right again.”

Zammis removed its hand and dropped it in its lap. “Where Drac come from?”

Sweet Jesus! Trying to explain hermaphroditic reproduction to a kid who shouldn’t even be crawling yet! “Zammis.” I held up my hands, then dropped them into my lap. “Look. You see how much bigger I am than you?”

“Yes, Uncle.”

“Good.” I ran my fingers through my hair, fighting for time and inspiration. “Your parent was big, like me. Its name was. Jeriba Shigan.” Funny how just saying the name was painful. “Jeriba Shigan was like you. It only had three fingers on each hand. It grew you in its tummy.” I poked Zammis’ middle. “Understand?”

Zammis giggled and held its hands over its stomach. “Uncle, how Dracs grow there?”

I lifted my legs onto the mattress and stretched out. Where do little Dracs come from? I looked over to Zammis and saw the child hanging upon my every word. I grimaced and told the truth. “Damned if I know, Zammis. Damned if I know.” Thirty seconds later, Zammis was back playing with its rocks.

Summer, and I taught Zammis how to capture and skin the long gray snakes, and then how to smoke the meat. The child would squat on the shallow bank above a mudpool, its yellow eyes fixed on the snake holes in the bank, waiting for one of the occupants to poke out its head. The wind would blow, but Zammis wouldn’t move. Then a flat, triangular head set with tiny blue eyes would appear. The snake would check the pool, turn and check the bank, then check the sky. It would advance out of the hole a bit, then check it all again. Often the snakes would look directly at Zammis, but the Drac could have been carved from rock. Zammis wouldn’t move until the snake was too far out of the hole to pull itself back in tail first. Then Zammis would strike, grabbing the snake with both hands just behind the head. The snakes had no fangs and weren’t poisonous, but they were lively enough to toss Zammis into the mudpool on occasion.

The skins were spread and wrapped around tree trunks and pegged in place to dry. The tree trunks were kept in an open place near the entrance to the cave, but under an overhang that faced away from the ocean. About two-thirds of the skins put up in this manner cured; the remaining third would rot.

Beyond the skin room was the smokehouse: a rock-walled chamber that we would hang with rows of snakemeat. A greenwood fire would be set in a pit in the chamber’s floor; then we would fill in the small opening with rocks and dirt.

“Uncle, why doesn’t the meat rot after it’s smoked?”

I thought upon it. “I’m not sure; I just know it doesn’t.”

“Why do you know?”

I shrugged. “I just do. I read about it, probably.”

“What’s read?”

“Reading. Like when I sit down and read the Talman.”

“Does the Talman say why the meat doesn’t rot?”

“No. I meant that I probably read it in another book.”

“Do we have more books?”

I shook my head. “I meant before I came to this planet.”

“Why did you come to this planet?”

“I told you. Your parent and I were stranded here during the battle.”

“Why do the humans and Dracs fight?”

“It’s very complicated.” I waved my hands about for a bit. The human line was the Dracs were aggressors invading our space. The Drac line was that the humans were aggressors invading their space. The truth? “Zammis, it has to do with the colonization of new planets. Both races are expanding and both races have a tradition of exploring and colonizing new planets. I guess we just expanded into each other. Understand?”

Zammis nodded, then became mercifully silent as it fell into deep thought. The main thing I learned from the Drac child was all of the questions I didn’t have answers to. I was feeling very smug, however, at having gotten Zammis to understand about the war, thereby avoiding my ignorance on the subject of preserving meat. “Uncle?”

“Yes, Zammis?”

“What’s a planet?”

As the cold, wet summer came to an end, we had the cave jammed with firewood and preserved food. With that out of the way, I concentrated my efforts on making some kind of indoor plumbing out of the natural pools in the chambers deep within the cave. The bathtub was no problem. By dropping heated rocks into one of the pools, the water could be brought up to a bearable—even comfortable—temperature. After bathing, the hollow stems of a bamboo-like plant could be used to siphon out the dirty water. The tub could then be refilled from the pool above. The problem was where to siphon the water. Several of the chambers had holes in their floors. The first three holes we tried drained into our main chamber, wetting the low edge near the entrance. The previous winter, Jerry and I had considered using one of those holes for a toilet that we would flush with water from the pools. Since we didn’t know where the goodies would come out, we decided against it.

The fourth hole Zammis and I tried drained out below the entrance to the cave in the face of the cliff. Not ideal, but better than answering the call of nature in the middle of a combination ice-storm and blizzard. We rigged up the hole as a drain for both the tub and toilet. As Zammis and I prepared to enjoy our first hot bath, I removed my snakeskins, tested the water with my toe, then stepped in. “Great!” I turned to Zammis, the child still half dressed. “Come on in, Zammis. The water’s fine.” Zammis was staring at me, its mouth hanging open. “What’s the matter?”

The child stared wide-eyed, then pointed at me with a three-fingered hand. “Uncle, what’s that?”

I looked down. “Oh.” I shook my head, then looked up at the child. “Zammis, I explained all that, remember? I’m a human.”

“But what’s it for?”

I sat down in the warm water, removing the object of discussion from sight. “It’s for the elimination of liquid wastes, among other things. Now, hop in and get washed.”

Zammis shucked its snakeskins, looked down at its own smooth-surfaced, combined system, then climbed into the tube. The child settled into the water up to its neck, its yellow eyes studying me. “Uncle?”

“Yes?”

“What other things?”

Well, I told Zammis. For the first time, the Drac appeared to be trying to decide whether my response was truthful or not, rather than its usual acceptance of my every assertion. In fact, I was convinced that Zammis thought I was lying—probably because I was.

Winter began with a sprinkle of snowflakes carried on a gentle breeze. I took Zammis above the cave to the scrub forest. I held the child’s hand as we stood before the pile of rocks that served as Jerry’s grave. Zammis pulled its snakeskins against the wind, bowed its head, then turned and looked up into my face. “Uncle, this is the grave of my parent?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

Zammis turned back to the grave, then shook its head. “Uncle, how should I feel?”

“I don’t understand, Zammis.”

The child nodded at the grave. “I can see that you are sad being here. I think you want me to feel the same. Do you?”

I frowned, then shook my head. “No. I don’t want you to be sad. I just wanted you to know where it is.”

“May I go now?”

“Sure. Are you certain you know the way back to the cave?”

“Yes. I just want to make sure my soap doesn’t burn again.”

I watched as the child turned and scurried off into the naked trees, then I turned back to the grave. “Well, Jerry, what do you think of your kid? Zammis was using wood ashes to clean the grease off the shells, then it put a shell back on the fire and put water in it to boil off the burnt-on food. Fat and ashes. The next thing, Jerry, we were making soap. Zammis’ first batch almost took the hide off us, but the kid’s getting better . . .”

I looked up at the clouds, then brought my glance down to the sea. In the distance, low, dark clouds were building up. “See that? You know what that means, don’t you? Ice-storm number one.” The wind picked up and I squatted next to the grave to replace a rock that had rolled from the pile. “Zammis is a good kid, Jerry. I wanted to hate it. after you died. I wanted to hate it.” I replaced the rock, then looked back toward the sea.

“I don’t know how we’re going to make it off planet, Jerry—” I caught a flash of movement out of the corner of my vision. I turned to the right and looked over the tops of the trees. Against the gray sky, a black speck streaked away. I followed it with my eyes until it went above the clouds.

I listened, hoping to hear an exhaust roar, but my heart was pounding so hard, all I could hear was the wind. Was it a ship? I stood, took a few steps in the direction the speck was going, then stopped. Turning my head, I saw that the rocks on Jerry’s grave were already capped with thin layers of fine snow. I shrugged and headed for the cave. “Probably just a bird.”

Zammis sat on its mattress, stabbing several pieces of snakeskin with a bone needle. I stretched out on my own mattress and watched the smoke curl up toward the crack in the ceiling. Was it a bird? Or was it a ship? Damn, but it worked on me. Escape from the planet had been out of my thoughts, had been buried, hidden for all that summer. But again, it twisted at me. To walk where a sun shined, to wear cloth again, experience central heating, eat food prepared by a chef, to be among. people again.

I rolled over on my right side and stared at the wall next to my mattress. People. Human people. I closed my eyes and swallowed. Girl human people. Female persons. Images drifted before my eyes—faces, bodies, laughing couples, the dance after flight training. what was her name? Dolora? Dora?

I shook my head, rolled over and sat up, facing the fire. Why did I have to see whatever it was? All those things I had been able to bury—to forget—boiling over.

“Uncle?”

I looked up at Zammis. Yellow skin, yellow eyes, noseless toad face. I shook my head. “What?”

“Is something wrong?”

Is something wrong, hah. “No. I just thought I saw something today. It probably wasn’t anything.” I reached to the fire and took a piece of dried snake from the griddle. I blew on it, then gnawed on the stringy strip.

“What did it look like?”

“I don’t know. The way it moved, I thought it might be a ship. It went away so fast, I couldn’t be sure. Might have been a bird.”

“Bird?”

I studied Zammis. It’d never seen a bird; neither had I on Fyrine IV. “An animal that flies.”

Zammis nodded. “Uncle, when we were gathering wood up in the scrub forest, I saw something fly.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I meant to, but I forgot.”

“Forgot!” I frowned. “In which direction was it going?”

Zammis pointed to the back of the cave. “That way. Away from the sea.” Zammis put down its sewing. “Can we go see where it went?”

I shook my head. “The winter is just beginning. You don’t know what it’s like. We’d die in only a few days.”

Zammis went back to poking holes in the snakeskin. To make the trek in the winter would kill us. But spring would be something else. We could survive with double layered snakeskins stuffed with seed pod down, and a tent. We had to have a tent. Zammis and I could spend the winter making it, and packs. Boots. We’d need sturdy walking boots. Have to think on that..

It’s strange how a spark of hope can ignite, and spread, until all desperation is consumed. Was it a ship? I didn’t know. If it was, was it taking off, or landing? I didn’t know. If it was taking off, we’d be heading in the wrong direction. But the opposite direction meant crossing the sea. Whatever. Come spring we would head beyond the scrub forest and see what was there.

The winter seemed to pass quickly, with Zammis occupied with the tent and my time devoted to rediscovering the art of boot making. I made tracings of both of our feet on snakeskin, and, after some experimentation, I found that boiling the snake leather with plumfruit made it soft and gummy. By taking several of the gummy layers, weighting them, then setting them aside to dry, the result was a tough, flexible sole. By the time I finished Zammis’ boots, the Drac needed a new pair.

“They’re too small, Uncle.”

“Waddaya mean, too small?”

Zammis pointed down. “They hurt. My toes are all crippled up.”

I squatted down and felt the tops over the child’s toes. “I don’t understand. It’s only been twenty, twenty-five days since I made the tracings. You sure you didn’t move when I made them?”

Zammis shook its head. “I didn’t move.”

I frowned, then stood. “Stand up, Zammis.” The Drac stood and I moved next to it. The top of Zammis’ head came to the middle of my chest. Another sixty centimeters and it’d be as tall as Jerry. “Take them off, Zammis. I’ll make a bigger pair. Try not to grow so fast.”

Zammis pitched the tent inside the cave, put glowing coals inside, then rubbed fat into the leather for waterproofing. It had grown taller, and I had held off making the Drac’s boots until I could be sure of the size it would need. I tried to do a projection by measuring Zammis feet every ten days, then extending the curve into spring. According to my figures, the kid would have feet resembling a pair of attack transports by the time the snow melted. By spring, Zammis would be full grown. Jerry’s old flight boots had fallen apart before Zammis had been born, but I had saved the pieces. I used the soles to make my tracings and hoped for the best.

I was busy with the new boots and Zammis was keeping an eye on the tent treatment. The Drac looked back at me.

“Uncle?”

“What?”

“Existence is the first given?”

I shrugged. “That’s what Shizumaat says; I’ll buy it.”

“But, Uncle, how do we know that existence is real?”

I lowered my work, looked at Zammis, shook my head, then resumed stitching the boots. “Take my word for it.”

The Drac grimaced. “But, Uncle, that is not knowledge; that is faith.”

I sighed, thinking back to my sophomore year at the University of Nations—a bunch of adolescents lounging around a cheap flat experimenting with booze, powders, and philosophy. At a little more than one Earth year old, Zammis was developing into an intellectual bore. “So, what’s wrong with faith?”

Zammis snickered. “Come now, Uncle. Faith?”

“It helps some of us along this drizzle-soaked coil.”

“Coil?”

I scratched my head. “This mortal coil; life. Shakespeare, I think.”

Zammis frowned. “It is not in the Talman.”

“He, not it. Shakespeare was a human.”

Zammis stood, walked to the fire and sat across from me. “Was he a philosopher, like Mistan or Shizumaat?”

“No. He wrote plays—like stories, acted out.”

Zammis rubbed its chin. “Do you remember any of Shakespeare?”

I held up a finger. “ ‘To be, or not to be; that is the question.’ ”

The Drac’s mouth dropped open; then it nodded its head. “Yes. Yes! To be or not to be; that is the question!” Zammis held out its hands. “How do we know the wind blows outside the cave when we are not there to see it? Does the sea still boil if we are not there to feel it?”

I nodded. “Yes.”

“But, Uncle, how do we know?”

I squinted at the Drac. “Zammis, I have a question for you. Is the following statement true or false: What I am saying right now is false.”

Zammis blinked. “If it is false, then the statement is true. But. if it’s true. the statement is false, but.” Zammis blinked again, then turned and went back to rubbing fat into the tent. “I’ll think upon it, Uncle.”

“You do that, Zammis.”

The Drac thought upon it for about ten minutes, then turned back. “The statement is false.”

I smiled. “But that’s what the statement said, hence it is true, but.” I let the puzzle trail off. Oh, smugness, thou temptest even saints.

“No, Uncle. The statement is meaningless in its present context.” I shrugged. “You see, Uncle, the statement assumes the existence of truth values that can comment upon themselves devoid of any other reference. I think Lurrvena’s logic in the Talman is clear on this, and if meaningless is equated with falsehood.”

I sighed. “Yeah, well—”

“You see, Uncle, you must first establish a context in which your statement has meaning.”

I leaned forward, frowned, and scratched my beard. “I see. You mean I was putting Descartes before the horse?”

Zammis looked at me strangely, and even more so when I collapsed on my mattress cackling like a fool.

“Uncle, why does the line of Jeriba have only five names? You say that human lines have many names.”

I nodded. “The five names of the Jeriba line are things to which their bearers must add deeds. The deeds are important—not the names.”

“Gothig is Shigan’s parent as Shigan is my parent.”

“Of course. You know that from your recitations.”

Zammis frowned. “Then I must name my child Ty when I become a parent?”

“Yes. And Ty must name its child Haesni. Do you see something wrong with that?”

“I would like to name my child Davidge, after you.”

I smiled and shook my head. “The Ty name has been served by great bankers, merchants, inventors, and—well, you know your recitation. The name Davidge hasn’t been served by much. Think of what Ty would miss by not being Ty.”

Zammis thought awhile, then nodded. “Uncle, do you think Gothig is alive?”

“As far as I know.”

“What is Gothig like?”

I thought back to Jerry talking about its parent, Gothig. “It taught music, and is very strong. Jerry. Shigan said that its parent could bend metal bars with its fingers. Gothig is also very dignified. I imagine that right now Gothig is also very sad. Gothig must think that the line of Jeriba has ended.”

Zammis frowned and its yellow brow furrowed. “Uncle, we must make it to Draco. We must tell Gothig the line continues.”

“We will.”

The winter’s ice began thinning, and boots, tent, and packs were ready. We were putting the finishing touches on our new insulated suits. As Jerry had given the Talman to me to learn, the golden cube now hung around Zammis’ neck. The Drac would drop the tiny golden book from the cube and study it for hours at a time.

“Uncle?”

“What?”

“Why do Dracs speak and write in one language and the humans in another?”

I laughed. “Zammis, the humans speak and write in many languages. English is just one of them.”

“How do the humans speak among themselves?”

I shrugged. “They don’t always; when they do, they use interpreters—people who can speak both languages.”

“You and I speak both English and Drac; does that make us interpreters?”

“I suppose we could be, if you could ever find a human and a Drac who want to talk to each other. Remember, there’s a war going on.”

“How will the war stop if they do not talk?”

“I suppose they will talk, eventually.”

Zammis smiled. “I think I would like to be an interpreter and help end the war.” The Drac put its sewing aside and stretched out on its new mattress. Zammis had outgrown even its old mattress, which it now used for a pillow. “Uncle, do you think that we will find anybody beyond the scrub forest?”

“If we do, will you go with me to Draco?”

“I promised your parent that I would.”

“I mean, after. After I made my recitation, what will you do?”

I stared at the fire. “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “The war might keep us from getting to Draco for a long time.”

“After that, what?”

“I suppose I’ll go back into the service.”

Zammis propped itself up on an elbow. “Go back to being a fighter pilot?”

“Sure. That’s about all I know how to do.”

“And kill Dracs?”

I put my own sewing down and studied the Drac. Things had changed since Jerry and I had slugged it out—more things than I had realized. I shook my head. “No. I probably won’t be a pilot—not a service one. Maybe I can land a job flying commercial ships.” I shrugged. “Maybe the service won’t give me any choice.”

Zammis sat up, was still for a moment; then it stood, walked over to my mattress and knelt before me on the sand. “Uncle, I don’t want to leave you.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ll have your own kind around you. Your grandparent, Gothig, Shigan’s siblings, their children—you’ll forget all about me.”

“Will you forget about me?”

I looked into those yellow eyes, then reached out my hand and touched Zammis’ cheek. “No, I won’t forget about you. But, remember this, Zammis: you’re a Drac and I’m a human, and that’s how this part of the universe is divided.”

Zammis took my hand from his cheek, spread the fingers and studied them. “Whatever happens, Uncle, I will never forget you.”

The ice was gone, and the Drac and I stood in the windblown drizzle, packs on our backs, before the grave. Zammis was as tall as I was, which made it a little taller than Jerry. To my relief, the boots fit. Zammis hefted its pack up higher on its shoulders, then turned from the grave and looked out at the sea. I followed Zammis’ glance and watched the rollers steam in and smash on the rocks. I looked at the Drac. “What are you thinking about?”

Zammis looked down, then turned toward me. “Uncle, I didn’t think of it before, but. I will miss this place.”

I laughed. “Nonsense! This place?” I slapped the Drac on the shoulder. “Why would you miss this place?”

Zammis looked back out to sea. “I have learned many things here. You have taught me many things here, Uncle. My life happened here.”

“Only the beginning, Zammis. You have a life ahead of you.” I nodded my head at the grave. “Say good-bye.”

Zammis turned toward the grave, stood over it, then knelt to one side and began removing the rocks. After a few moments, it had exposed the hand of a skeleton with three fingers. Zammis nodded, then wept. “I am sorry, Uncle, but I had to do that. This has been nothing but a pile of rocks to me. Now it is more.” Zammis replaced the rocks, then stood.

I cocked my head toward the scrub forest. “Go on ahead. I’ll catch up in a minute.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

Zammis moved off toward the naked trees, and I looked down at the grave. “What do you think of Zammis, Jerry? It’s bigger than you were. I guess snake agrees with the kid.” I squatted next to the grave, picked up a small rock and added it to the pile. “I guess this is it. We’re either going to make it to Draco, or die trying.” I stood and looked at the sea. “Yeah, I guess I learned a few things here. I’ll miss it, in a way.” I turned back to the grave and hefted my pack up. “Eh-derva sahn, Jeriba Shigan. So long, Jerry.”

I turned and followed Zammis into the forest.

The days that followed were full of wonder for Zammis. For now the sky was still the same, dull gray, and the few variations of plant and animal life that we found were nothing remarkable. Once we got beyond the scrub forest, we climbed a gentle rise for a day, and then found ourselves on a wide, flat, endless plain. It was ankle deep in a purple weed that stained our boots the same color. The nights were still too cold for hiking, and we would hole up in the tent. Both the greased tent and suits worked well, keeping out the almost constant rain.

We had been out perhaps two of Fyrine IV’s long weeks when we saw it.

It screamed overhead, then disappeared over the horizon before either of us could say a word. I had no doubt that the craft I had seen was in landing attitude.

“Uncle! Did it see us?”

I shook my head. “No, I doubt it. But it was landing. Do you hear? It was landing somewhere ahead.”

“Uncle?”

“Let’s get moving! What is it?”

“Was it a Drac ship, or a human ship?”

I cooled in my tracks. I had never stopped to think about it. I waved my hand. “Come on. It doesn’t matter. Either way, you go to Draco. You’re a noncombatant, so the USE forces couldn’t do anything, and if they’re Dracs, you’re home free.”

We began walking. “But, Uncle, if it’s a Drac ship, what will happen to you?”

I shrugged. “Prisoner of war. The Dracs say they abide by the interplanetary war accords, so I should be all right.” Fat chance, said the back of my head to the front of my head. The big question was whether I preferred being a Drac POW or a permanent resident of Fyrine IV. I had figured that out long ago. “Come on, let’s pick up the pace. We don’t know how long it will be on the ground.”

Pick ’em up; put ’em down. Except for a few breaks, we didn’t stop—even when night came. Our exertion kept us warm. The horizon never seemed to grow nearer. The longer we slogged ahead the duller my mind grew. It must have been days, my mind gone numb as my feet, when I fell through the purple weed into a hole. Immediately, everything grew dark, and I felt a pain in my right leg. I felt the blackout coming, and I welcomed its warmth, its rest, its peace.

“Uncle? Uncle? Wake up! Please, wake up!”

I felt slapping against my face, although it felt somehow detached. Agony thundered into my brain, bringing me wide awake. Damned if I didn’t break my leg. I looked up and saw the weedy edges of the hole. My rear end was seated in a trickle of water. Zammis squatted next to me.

“What happened?”

Zammis motioned upwards. “This hole was only covered by a thin crust of dirt and plants. The water must have taken the ground away. Are you all right?”

“My leg. I think I broke it.” I leaned my back against the muddy wall. “Zammis, you’re going to have to go on by yourself.”

“I can’t leave you, Uncle!”

“Look, if you find anyone, you can send them back for me.”

“What if the water in here comes up?” Zammis felt along my leg until I winced. “I must carry you out of here. What must I do for the leg?”

The kid had a point. Drowning wasn’t in my schedule. “We need something stiff. Bind the leg so it doesn’t move.”

Zammis pulled off its pack, and kneeling in the water and mud, went through its pack, then through the tent roll. Using the tent poles, it wrapped my leg with snakeskins torn from the tent. Then, using more snakeskins, Zammis made two loops, slipped one over each of my legs, then propped me up and slipped the loops over its shoulders. It lifted, and I blacked out.

On the ground, covered with the remains of the tent, and Zammis was shaking my arm. “Uncle? Uncle?”

“Yes?” I whispered.

“Uncle, I’m ready to go.” It pointed to my side. “Your food is here, and when it rains, just pull the tent over your face. I’ll mark the trail I make so I can find my way back.”

I nodded. “Take care of yourself.”

Zammis shook its head. “Uncle, I can carry you. We shouldn’t separate.”

I weakly shook my head. “Give me a break, kid. I couldn’t make it. Find somebody and bring ’em back.” I felt my stomach flip, and cold sweat drenched my snake-skins. “Go on; get going.”

Zammis reached out, grabbed its pack and stood. The pack shouldered, Zammis turned and began running in the direction that the craft had been going. I watched until I couldn’t see it. I faced up and looked at the clouds. “You almost got me that time, you kizlode sonofabitch, but you didn’t figure on the Drac. you keep forgetting, there’s two of us.” I drifted in and out of consciousness, felt rain on my face, then pulled up the tent and covered my head. In seconds, the blackout returned.

“Davidge? Lieutenant Davidge?”

I opened my eyes and saw something I hadn’t seen for four Earth years; a human face. “Who are you?”

The face, young, long, and capped by short blond hair, smiled. “I’m Captain Steerman, the medical officer. How do you feel?”

I pondered the question and smiled. “Like I’ve been shot full of very high grade junk.”

“You have. You were in pretty bad shape by the time the survey team brought you in.”

“Survey team?”

“I guess you don’t know. The United States of Earth and the Dracon Chamber have established a joint commission to supervise the colonization of new planets. The war is over.”

“Over?”

“Yes.”

Something heavy lifted from my chest. “Where’s Zammis?”

“Who?”

“Jeriban Zammis; the Drac that I was with.”

The doctor shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it, but I suppose the Draggers are taking care of it.”

Draggers. I’d once used the term myself. As I listened to it coming out of Steerman’s mouth, it seemed foreign: alien, repulsive. “Zammis is a Drac, not a Dragger.”

The doctor’s brows furrowed, then he shrugged. “Of course. Whatever you say. Just you get some rest, and I’ll check back on you in a few hours.”

“May I see Zammis?”

The doctor smiled. “Dear, no. You’re on your way back to the Delphi USEB. The. Drac is probably on its way to Draco.” He nodded, then turned and left. God, I felt lost. I looked around and saw that I was in the ward of a ship’s sick bay. The beds on either side of me were occupied.

The man on my right shook his head and went back to reading a magazine. The one on my left looked angry.

“You damned Dragger suck!” He turned on his left side and presented me his back.

Among humans once again, yet more alone than I had ever been. Misnuuram va siddeth, as Mistan observed in the Talman from the calm perspective of eight hundred years in the past. Loneliness is a thought—not something done to someone; instead, it is something that someone does to oneself. Jerry shook its head that one time, then pointed a yellow finger at me as the words it wanted to say came together. “Davidge. to me loneliness is a discomfort— a small thing to be avoided if possible, but not feared. I think you would almost prefer death to being alone with yourself.”

Misnuuram yaa va nos misnuuram van dunos. “You who are alone by yourselves will forever be alone with others.” Mistan again. On its face, the statement appears to be a contradiction; but the test of reality proves it true. I was a stranger among my own kind because of a hate that I didn’t share, and a love that, to them, seemed alien, impossible, perverse. “Peace of thought with others occurs only in the mind at peace with itself.” Mistan again. Countless times, on the voyage to the Delphi Base, putting in my ward time, then during my processing out of the service, I would reach to my chest to grasp the Talman that no longer hung there. What had become of Zammis? The USESF didn’t care, and the Drac authorities wouldn’t say—none of my affair.

Ex-Force pilots were a drag on the employment market, and there were no commercial positions open—especially not to a pilot who hadn’t flown in four years, who had a gimpy leg, and who was a Dragger suck. “Dragger suck” as an invective had the impact of several historical terms—

Quisling, heretic, fag, nigger lover—all rolled into one.

I had forty-eight thousand credits in back pay, and so money wasn’t a problem. The problem was what to do with myself. After kicking around the Delphi Base, I took transportation to Earth and, for several months, was employed by a small book house translating manuscripts into Drac. It seems that there was a craving among Dracs for Westerns: “Stick ’em up naagusaatl.”

“Nu Geph, lawman.” Thang, thangl The guns flashed and the kizlode shaddsaat bit the thessa.

I quit.

I finally called my parents. Why didn’t you call before, Willy? We’ve been worried sick . . . Had a few things I had to straighten out, Dad . . . No, not really . . . Well, we understand, son . . . It must have been awful . . . Dad, I’d like to come home for a while . . .

Even before I put down the money on the used Dearman Electric, I knew I was making a mistake going home. I felt the need of a home, but the one I had left at the age of eighteen wasn’t it. But I headed there because there was nowhere else to go.

I drove alone in the dark, using only the old roads, the quiet hum of the Dearman’s motor the only sound. The December midnight was clear, and I could see the stars through the car’s bubble canopy. Fyrine IV drifted into my thoughts, the raging ocean, the endless winds. I pulled off the road onto the shoulder and killed the lights. In a few minutes, my eyes adjusted to the dark and I stepped outside and shut the door. Kansas has a big sky, and the stars seemed close enough to touch. Snow crunched under my feet as I looked up, trying to pick Fyrine out of the thousands of visible stars.

Fyrine is in the constellation Pegasus, but my eyes were not practiced enough to pick the winged horse out from the surrounding stars. I shrugged, felt a chill, and decided to get back in the car. As I put my hand on the doorlatch, I saw a constellation that I did recognize, north, hanging just above the horizon: Draco. The Dragon, its tail twisted around Ursa Minor, hung upside down in the sky. Eltanin, the Dragon’s nose, is the homestar of the Dracs. Its second planet, Draco, was Zammis’ home.

Headlights from an approaching car blinded me, and I turned toward the car as it pulled to a stop. The window on the driver’s side opened and someone spoke from the darkness.

“You need some help?”

I shook my head. “No, thank you.” I held up a hand. “I was just looking at the stars.”

“Quite a night, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.”

“Sure you don’t need any help?”

I shook my head. “Thanks. wait. Where is the nearest commercial spaceport?”

“About an hour ahead in Salina.”

“Thanks.” I saw a hand wave from the window, then the other car pulled away. I took another look at Eltanin, then got back in my car.

Six months later, I stood in front of an ancient cut-stone gate wondering what in the hell I was doing. The trip to Draco, with nothing but Dracs as companions on the last leg, showed me the truth in Namvaac’s words, “Peace is often only war without fighting.” The accords, on paper, gave me the right to travel to the planet, but the Drac bureaucrats and their paperwork wizards had perfected the big stall long before the first human step into space. It took threats, bribes, and long days of filling out forms, being checked and rechecked for disease, contraband, reason for visit, filling out more forms, refilling out the forms I had already filled out, more bribes, waiting, waiting, waiting..

On the ship, I spent most of my time in my cabin, but since the Drac stewards refused to serve me, I went to the ship’s lounge for my meals. I sat alone, listening to the comments about me from other booths. I had figured the path of least resistance was to pretend I didn’t understand what they were saying. It is always assumed that humans do not speak Drac.

“Must we eat in the same compartment with the Irkmaan slime?”

“Look at it, how its pale skin blotches—and that evil-smelling thatch on top. Feh! The smell!”

I ground my teeth a little and kept my glance riveted to my plate.

“It defies the Talman that the universe’s laws could be so corrupt as to produce a creature such as that.”

I turned and faced the three Dracs sitting in the booth across the aisle from mine. In Drac, I replied: “If your line’s elders had seen fit to teach the village kiz to use contraceptives, you wouldn’t even exist.” I returned to my food while the two Dracs struggled to hold the third Drac down.

On Draco, it was no problem finding the Jeriba estate. The problem was getting in. A high stone wall enclosed the property, and from the gate, I could see the huge stone mansion that Jerry had described to me. I told the guard at the gate that I wanted to see Jeriba Zammis. The guard stared at me, then went into an alcove behind the gate. In a few moments, another Drac emerged from the mansion and walked quickly across the wide lawn to the gate. The Drac nodded at the guard, then stopped and faced me. It was a dead ringer for Jerry.

“You are the Irkmaan that asked to see Jeriba Zammis?”

I nodded. “Zammis must have told you about me. I’m Willis Davidge.”

The Drac studied me. “I am Estone Nev, Jeriba Shigan’s sibling. My parent, Jeriba Gothig, wishes to see you.” The Drac turned abruptly and walked back to the mansion. I followed, feeling heady at the thought of seeing Zammis again. I paid little attention to my surroundings until I was ushered into a large room with a vaulted stone ceiling. Jerry had told me that the house was four thousand years old. I believed it. As I entered, another Drac stood and walked over to me. It was old, but I knew who it was.

“You are Gothig, Shigan’s parent.”

The yellow eyes studied me. “Who are you, Irkmaan?” It held out a wrinkled, three-fingered hand. “What do you know of Jeriba Zammis, and why do you speak the Drac tongue with the style and accent of my child Shigan? What are you here for?”

“I speak Drac in this manner because that is the way Jeriba Shigan taught me to speak it.”

The old Drac cocked its head to one side and narrowed its yellow eyes. “You knew my child? How?”

“Didn’t the survey commission tell you?”

“It was reported to me that my child, Shigan, was killed in the battle of Fyrine IV. That was over six of our years ago. What is your game, Irkmaan?”

I turned from Gothig to Nev. The younger Drac was examining me with the same look of suspicion. I turned back to Gothig. “Shigan wasn’t killed in the battle. We were stranded together on the surface of Fyrine IV and lived there for a year. Shigan died giving birth to Jeriba Zammis. A year later the joint survey commission found us and—”

“Enough! Enough of this, Irkmaan! Are you here for money, to use my influence for trade concessions—what?”

I frowned. “Where is Zammis?”

Tears of anger came to the old Drac’s eyes. “There is no Zammis, Irkmaan! The Jeriba line ended with the death of Shigan!”

My eyes grew wide as I shook my head. “That’s not true. I know. I took care of Zammis—you heard nothing from the commission?”

“Get to the point of your scheme, Irkmaan. I haven’t all day.”

I studied Gothig. The old Drac had heard nothing from the commission. The Drac authorities took Zammis, and the child had evaporated. Gothig had been told nothing. Why? “I was with Shigan, Gothig. That is how I learned your language. When Shigan died giving birth to Zammis, I—”

“Irkmaan, if you cannot get to your scheme, I will have to ask Nev to throw you out. Shigan died in the battle of Fyrine IV. The Drac Fleet notified us only days later.”

I nodded. “Then, Gothig, tell me how I came to know the line of Jeriba? Do you wish me to recite it for you?”

Gothig snorted. “You say you know the Jeriba line?”

“Yes.”

Gothig flipped a hand at me. “Then, recite.”

I took a breath, then began. By the time I had reached the hundred and seventy-third generation, Gothig had knelt on the stone floor next to Nev. The Dracs remained that way for the three hours of the recital. When I concluded, Gothig bowed its head and wept. “Yes, Irkmaan, yes. You must have known Shigan. Yes.” The old Drac looked up into my face, its eyes wide with hope. “And, you say Shigan continued the line—that Zammis was born?”

I nodded. “I don’t know why the commission didn’t notify you.”

Gothig got to its feet and frowned. “We will find out, Irkmaan—what is your name?”

“Davidge. Willis Davidge.”

“We will find out, Davidge.”

Gothig arranged quarters for me in its house, which was fortunate, since I had little more than eleven hundred credits left. After making a host of inquiries, Gothig sent Nev and me to the Chamber Center in Sendievu, Draco’s capital city. The Jeriba line, I found, was influential, and the big stall was held down to a minimum. Eventually, we were directed to the Joint Survey Commission representative, a Drac named Jozzdn Vrule. It looked up from the letter Gothig had given me and frowned. “When did you get this, Irkmaan?”

“I believe the signature is on it.”

The Drac looked at the paper, then back at me. “The Jeriba line is one of the most respected on Draco. You say that Jeriba Gothig gave you this?”

“I felt certain I said that: I could feel my lips moving—”

Nev stepped in. “You have the dates and the information concerning the Fyrine IV survey mission. We want to know what happened to Jeriba Zammis.”

Jozzdn Vrule frowned and looked back at the paper. “Estone Nev, you are the founder of your line, is this not true?”

“It is true.”

“Would you found your line in shame? Why do I see you with this Irkmaan?”

Nev curled its upper lip and folded its arms. “Jozzdn Vrule, if you contemplate walking this planet in the foreseeable future as a free being, it would be to your profit to stop working your mouth and to start finding Jeriba Zammis.”

Jozzdn Vrule looked down and studied its fingers, then returned its glance to Nev. “Very well, Estone Nev. You threaten me if I fail to hand you the truth. I think you will find the truth the greater threat.” The Drac scribbled on a piece of paper, then handed it to Nev. “You will find Jeriba Zammis at this address, and you will curse the day that I gave you this.”

We entered the imbecile colony feeling sick. All around us, Dracs stared with vacant eyes, or screamed, or foamed at the mouth, or behaved as lower-order creatures. After we had arrived, Gothig joined us. The Drac director of the colony frowned at me and shook its head at Gothig. “Turn back now, while it is still possible, Jeriba Gothig. Beyond this room lies nothing but pain and sorrow.”

Gothig grabbed the director by the front of its wraps. “Hear me, insect: If Jeriba Zammis is within these walls, bring my grandchild forth! Else, I shall bring the might of the Jeriba line down upon your pointed head!”

The director lifted its head, twitched its lips, then nodded. “Very well. Very well, you pompous Kazzmidthl We tried to protect the Jeriba reputation. We tried! But now you shall see.” The director nodded and pursed its lips. “Yes, you overwealthy fashion follower, now you shall see.” The director scribbled on a piece of paper, then handed it to Nev.

“By giving you that, I will lose my position, but take it! Yes, take it! See this being you call Jeriba Zammis. See it, and weep!”

Among trees and grass, Jeriba Zammis sat upon a stone bench, staring at the ground. Its eyes never blinked, its hands never moved. Gothig frowned at me, but I could spare nothing for Shigan’s parent. I walked to Zammis. “Zammis, do you know me?”

The Drac retrieved its thoughts from a million warrens and raised its yellow eyes to me. I saw no sign of recognition. “Who are you?”

I squatted down, placed my hands on its arms and shook them. “Dammit, Zammis, don’t you know me? I’m your uncle. Remember that? Uncle Davidge?”

The Drac weaved on the bench, then shook its head. It lifted an arm and waved to an orderly. “I want to go to my room. Please, let me go to my room.”

I stood and grabbed Zammis by the front of its hospital gown. “Zammis, it’s me!”

The yellow eyes, dull and lifeless, stared back at me. The orderly placed a yellow hand upon my shoulder. “Let it go, Irkmaan.”

“Zammis!” I turned to Nev and Gothig. “Say something!”

The Drac orderly pulled a sap from its pocket, then slapped it suggestively against the palm of its hand. “Let it go, Irkmaan.”

Gothig stepped forward. “Explain this!”

The orderly looked at Gothig, Nev, me, and then Zammis. “This one—this creature—came to us professing a love, a love, mind you, of humans! This is no small perversion, Jeriba Gothig. The government would protect you from this scandal. Would you wish the line of Jeriba dragged into this?”

I looked at Zammis. “What have you done to Zammis, you kizlode sonofabitch? A little shock? A little drug? Rot out its mind?”

The orderly sneered at me, then shook its head. “You, Irkmaan, do not understand. This one would not be happy as an Irkmaan vul— a human lover. We are making it possible for this one to function in Drac society. You think this is wrong?”

I looked at Zammis and shook my head. I remembered too well my treatment at the hands of my fellow humans. “No. I don’t think it’s wrong. I just don’t know.”

The orderly turned to Gothig. “Please understand, Jeriba Gothig. We could not subject the Jeriba Line to this disgrace. Your grandchild is almost well and will soon enter a reeducation program. In no more than two years, you will have a grandchild worthy of carrying on the Jeriba line. Is this wrong?”

Gothig only shook its head. I squatted down in front of Zammis and looked up into its yellow eyes. I reached up and took its right hand in both of mine. “Zammis?”

Zammis looked down, moved its left hand over and picked up my left hand and spread the fingers. One at a time Zammis pointed at the fingers of my hand, then it looked into my eyes, then examined the hand again. “Yes.” Zammis pointed again. “One, two, three,four, jive!” Zammis looked into my eyes. “Four, five!”

I nodded. “Yes. Yes.”

Zammis pulled my hand to its cheek and held it close. “Uncle. Uncle. I told you I’d never forget you.”

I never counted the years that passed. My beard was back, and I knelt in my snakeskins next to the grave of my friend, Jeriba Shigan. Next to the grave was the four-year-old grave of Gothig. I replaced some rocks, then added a few more. Wrapping my snakeskins tightly against the wind, I sat down next to the grave and looked out to sea. Still the rollers steamed in under the gray-black cover of clouds. Soon, the ice would come. I nodded, looked at my scarred, wrinkled hands, then back at the grave.

“I couldn’t stay in the settlement with them, Jerry. Don’t get me wrong; it’s nice. Damned nice. But I kept looking out my window, seeing the ocean, thinking of the cave. I’m alone, in a way. But it’s good. I know what and who I am, Jerry, and that’s all there is to it, right?”

I heard a noise. I crouched over, placed my hands upon my withered knees, and pushed myself to my feet. The Drac was coming from the settlement compound, a child in its arms.

I rubbed my beard. “Eh, Ty, so that is your first child?”

The Drac nodded. “I would be pleased, Uncle, if you would teach it what it must be taught: the line, the Talman; and about life on Fyrine IV, our planet called ‘Friendship.’ ”

I took the bundle into my arms. Chubby three-fingered arms waved at the air, then grasped my snakeskins. “Yes, Ty, this one is a Jeriba.” I looked up at Ty. “And how is your parent, Zammis?”

Ty shrugged. “It is as well as can be expected. My parent wishes you well.”

I nodded. “And the same to it, Ty. Zammis ought to get out of that air-conditioned capsule and come back to live in the cave. It’ll do it good.”

Ty grinned and nodded its head. “I will tell my parent, Uncle.”

I stabbed my thumb into my chest. “Look at me! You don’t see me sick, do you?”

“No, Uncle.”

“You tell Zammis to kick that doctor out of there and to come back to the cave, hear?”

“Yes, Uncle.” Ty smiled. “Is there anything you need?”

I nodded and scratched the back of my neck. “Toilet paper. Just a couple of packs. Maybe a couple of bottles of whiskey—no, forget the whiskey. I’ll wait until Haesni, here, puts in its first year. Just the toilet paper.”

Ty bowed. “Yes, Uncle, and may the many mornings find you well.”

I waved my hand impatiently. “They will, they will. Just don’t forget the toilet paper.”

Ty bowed again. “I won’t, Uncle.”

Ty turned and walked through the scrub forest back to the colony. Gothig had put up the cash and moved the entire line, and all the related lines, to Fyrine IV. I lived with them for a year, but I moved out and went back to the cave. I gathered the wood, smoked the snake, and withstood the winter. Zammis gave me the young Ty to rear in the cave, and now Ty had handed me Haesni. I nodded at the child. “Your child will be called Gothig, and then.” I looked at the sky and felt the tears drying on my face, “and then, Gothig’s child will be called Shigan.” I nodded and headed for the cleft that would bring us down to the level of the cave.

SANDKINGS

George R.R. Martin

His interest piqued when told of the creatures’ proficiency for warfare and worship

Simon Kress lived alone in a sprawling manor house among dry, rocky hills fifty kilometers from the city So, when he was called away unexpectedly on business, he had no neighbors he could conveniently impose on to take his pets. The carrion hawk was no problem; it roosted in the unused belfry and customarily fed itself anyway. The shambler Kress simply shooed outside and left to fend for itself; the little monster would gorge on slugs and birds and rockjocks. But the fish tank, stocked with genuine earth piranha, posed a difficulty. Finally Kress just threw a haunch of beef into the huge tank. The piranha could always eat one another if he were detained longer than expected. They’d done it before. It amused him.

Unfortunately, he was detained much longer than expected this time. When he finally returned, all the fish were dead. So was the carrion hawk. The shambler had climbed up to the belfry and eaten it. Kress was vexed.

The next day he flew his skimmer to Asgard, a journey of some two hundred kilometers. Asgard was Baldur’s largest city and boasted the oldest and largest starport as well. Kress liked to impress his friends with animals that were unusual, entertaining, and expensive; Asgard was the place to buy them.

This time, though, he had poor luck. Xenopets had closed its doors, t’Etherane the Petseller tried to foist another carrion hawk off on him, and Strange Waters offered nothing more exotic than piranha, glowsharks, and spider squids. Kress had had all those; he wanted something new, something that would stand out.

Near dusk he found himself walking down Rainbow Boulevard, looking for places he had not patronized before. So close to the starport, the street was lined by importers’ marts. The big corporate emporiums had impressive long windows, in which rare and costly alien artifacts reposed on felt cushions against dark drapes that made the interiors of the stores a mystery. Between them were the junk shops—narrow, nasty little places whose display areas were crammed with all manner of offworld bric-a-brac. Kress tried both kinds of shops, with equal dissatisfaction.

Then he came across a store that was different.

It was very near the port. Kress had never been there before. The shop occupied a small, single-story building of moderate size, set between a euphoria bar and a temple brothel of the Secret Sisterhood. Down this far, Rainbow Boulevard grew tacky. The shop itself was unusual. Arresting.

The windows were full of mist—now a pale red, now the gray of true fog, now sparkling and golden. The mist swirled and eddied and glowed faintly from within. Kress glimpsed objects in the window—machines, pieces of art, other things he could not recognize—but he could not get a good look at any of them. The mists flowed sensuously around them, displaying a bit of first one thing and then another, then cloaking all. It was intriguing.

As he watched, the mist began to form letters. One word at a time. Kress stood and read.

WO. AND. SHADE. IMPORTERS. ARTIFACTS. ART. LIFEFORMS. AND. MISC.

The letters stopped. Through the fog Kress saw something moving. That was enough for him, that and the lifeforms in their advertisement. He swept his walking cloak over his shoulder and entered the store.

Inside, Kress felt disoriented. The interior seemed vast, much larger than he would have guessed from the relatively modest frontage. It was dimly lit, peaceful. The ceiling was a starscape, complete with spiral nebulas, very dark and realistic, very nice. All the counters shone faintly, to better display the merchandise within. The aisles were carpeted with ground fog. It came almost to his knees in places and swirled about his feet as he walked.

“Can I help you?”

She almost seemed to have risen from the fog. Tall and gaunt and pale, she wore a practical gray jumpsuit and a strange little cap that rested well back on her head.

“Are you Wo or Shade?” Kress asked. “Or only sales help?”

“Jala Wo, ready to serve you,” she replied. “Shade does not see customers. We have no sales help.”

“You have quite a large establishment,” Kress said. “Odd that I have never heard of you before.”

“We have only just opened this shop on Baldur,” the woman said. “We have franchises on a number of other worlds, however. What can I sell you? Art, perhaps? You have the look of a collector. We have some fine Nor T’alush crystal carvings.”

“No,” Kress said. “I own all the crystal carvings I desire. I came to see about a pet.”

“A lifeform?”

“Yes.”

“Alien?”

“Of course.”

“We have a mimic in stock. From Celia’s World. A clever little simian. Not only will it learn to speak, but eventually it will mimic your voice, inflections, gestures, even facial expressions.”

“Cute,” said Kress. “And common. I have no use for either, Wo. I want something exotic. Unusual. And not cute. I detest cute animals. At the moment I own a shambler. Imported from Cotho, at no mean expense. From time to time I feed him a litter of unwanted kittens. That is what I think of cute. Do I make myself understood?”

Wo smiled enigmatically. “Have you ever owned an animal that worshiped you?” she asked.

Kress grinned. “Oh, now and again. But I don’t require worship, Wo. Just entertainment.”

“You misunderstand me,” Wo said, still wearing her strange smile. “I meant worship literally.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I think I have just the thing for you,” Wo said. “Follow me.”

She led him between the radiant counters and down a long, fog-shrouded aisle beneath false starlight. They passed through a wall of mist into another section of the store, then stopped in front of a large plastic tank. An aquarium, Kress thought.

Wo beckoned. He stepped closer and saw that he was wrong. It was a terrarium. Within lay a miniature desert about two meters square. Pale sand tinted scarlet by wan red light. Rocks: basalt and quartz and granite. In each corner of the tank stood a castle.

Kress blinked and peered and corrected himself; actually, there were only three castles standing. The fourth leaned, a crumbled, broken ruin. The three others were crude but intact, carved of stone and sand. Over their battlements and through their rounded porticoes tiny creatures climbed and scrambled. Kress pressed his face against the plastic. “Insects?” he asked.

“No,” Wo replied. “A much more complex lifeform. More intelligent as well. Smarter than your shambler by a considerable amount. They are called sandkings.”

“Insects,” Kress said, drawing back from the tank. “I don’t care how complex they are.” He frowned. “And kindly don’t try to gull me with this talk of intelligence. These things are far too small to have anything but the most rudimentary brains.”

“They share hiveminds,” Wo said. “Castle minds, in this case. There are only three organisms in the tank, actually. The fourth died. You see how her castle has fallen.”

Kress looked back at the tank. “Hiveminds, eh? Interesting.” He frowned again. “Still, it is only an oversized ant farm. I’d hoped for something better.”

“They fight wars.”

“Wars? Hmmm.” Kress looked again.

“Note the colors, if you will,” Wo said. She pointed to the creatures that swarmed over the nearest castle. One was scrabbling at the tank wall. Kress studied it. To his eyes, it still looked like an insect. Barely as long as his fingernail, six-limbed, with six tiny eyes set all around its body. A wicked set of mandibles clacked visibly, while two long, fine antennae wove patterns in the air. Antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were sooty black, but the dominant color was the burnt orange of its armor plating. “It’s an insect,” Kress repeated.

“It is not an insect,” Wo insisted calmly. “The armored exoskeleton is shed when the sandking grows larger. If it grows larger. In a tank this size, it won’t.” She took Kress by the elbow and led him around the tank to the next castle. “Look at the colors here.”

He did. They were different. Here the sandkings had bright red armor; antennae, mandibles, eyes, and legs were yellow. Kress glanced across the tank. The denizens of the third live castle were off-white, with red trim. “Hmmm,” he said.

“They war, as I said,” Wo told him. “They even have truces and alliances. It was an alliance that destroyed the fourth castle in this tank. The blacks were becoming too numerous, and so the others joined forces to destroy them.”

Kress remained unconvinced. “Amusing, no doubt. But insects fight wars, too.”

“Insects do not worship,” Wo said.

“Eh?”

Wo smiled and pointed at the castle. Kress stared. A face had been carved into the wall of the highest tower. He recognized it. It was Jala Wo’s face. “How . . .?”

“I projected a hologram of my face into the tank, then kept it there for a few days. The face of god, you see? I feed them. I am always close. The sandkings have a rudimentary psionic sense. Proximity telepathy. They sense me and worship me by using my face to decorate their buildings. All the castles have them, see.” They did.

On the castle, the face of Jala Wo was serene, peaceful, and very lifelike. Kress marveled at the workmanship. “How do they do it?”

“The foremost legs double as arms. They even have fingers of a sort, three small, flexible tendrils. And they cooperate well, both in building and in battle. Remember, all the mobiles of one color share a single mind.”

“Tell me more,” Kress requested.

Wo smiled. “The maw lives in the castle. Maw is my name for her—a pun, if you will. The thing is mother and stomach both. Female, large as your fist, immobile. Actually sandking is a bit of a misnomer. The mobiles are peasants and warriors. The real ruler is a queen. But that analogy is faulty as well. Considered as a whole, each castle is a single hermaphroditic creature.”

“What do they eat?”

“The mobiles eat pap, predigested food obtained inside the castle. They get it from the maw after she has worked on it for several days. Their stomachs can’t handle anything else. If the maw dies, they soon die as well. The maw . . . the maw eats anything. You’ll have no special expense there. Table scraps will do excellently.”

“Live food?” Kress asked.

Wo shrugged. “Each maw eats mobiles from the other castles, yes.”

“I am intrigued,” he admitted. “If only they weren’t so small!”

“Yours can be larger. These sandkings are small because their tank is small. They seem to limit their growth to fit available space. If I moved these to a larger tank, they’d start growing again.”

“Hmmm. My piranha tank is twice this size and vacant. It could be cleaned out, filled with sand . . .”

“Wo and Shade would take care of the installation. It would be our pleasure.”

“Of course,” Kress said, “I would expect four intact castles.”

“Certainly,” Wo said.

They began to haggle about the price.

Three days later Jala Wo arrived at Simon Kress’s estate, with dormant sandkings and a work crew to take charge of the installation. Wo’s assistants were aliens unlike any Kress was familiar with—squat, broad bipeds with four arms and bulging, multifaceted eyes. Their skin was thick and leathery and twisted into horns and spines and protrusions at odd places upon their bodies. But they were very strong, and good workers. Wo ordered them about in a musical tongue that Kress has never heard before.

In a day it was done. They moved his piranha tank to the center of his spacious living room, arranged couches on either side of it for better viewing, scrubbed it clean, and filled it two thirds of the way up with sand and rock. Then they installed a special lighting system, both to provide the dim red illumination the sandkings preferred and to project holographic images into the tank. On top they mounted a sturdy plastic cover, with a feeder mechanism built in. “This way you can feed your sandkings without removing the top of the tank,” Wo explained. “You would not want to take any chances on the mobiles escaping.”

The cover also included climate-control devices, to condense just the right amount of moisture from the air. “You want it dry, but not too dry,” Wo said.

Finally one of the four-armed workers climbed into the tank and dug deep pits in the four corners. One of his companions handed the dormant maws over to him, removing them, one by one, from their frosted cryonic traveling cases.

They were nothing to look at. Kress decided they resembled nothing so much as mottled, half-spoiled chunks of raw meat. Each with a mouth.

The alien buried them, one in each corner of the tank. Then the work party sealed it all up and took their leave.

“The heat will bring the maws out of dormancy,” Wo said. “In less than a week mobiles will begin to hatch and burrow up to the surface. Be certain to give them plenty of food. They will need all their strength until they are well established. I would estimate that you will have castles rising in about three weeks.”

“And my face? When will they carve my face?”

“Turn on the hologram after about a month,” she advised him, “and be patient. If you have any questions, please call. Wo and Shade are at your service.” She bowed and left.

Kress wandered back to the tank and lit a joy stick. The desert was still and empty. He drummed his fingers impatiently against the plastic and frowned.

On the fourth day Kress thought he glimpsed motion beneath the sand—subtle subterranean stirrings.

On the fifth day he saw his first mobile, a lone white.

On the sixth day he counted a dozen of them, whites and reds and blacks. The oranges were tardy. He cycled through a bowl of half-decayed table scraps. The mobiles sensed it at once, rushed to it, and began to drag pieces back to their respective corners. Each color group was highly organized. They did not fight. Kress was a bit disappointed, but he decided to give them time.

The oranges made their appearance on the eighth day. By then the other sandkings had begun carrying small stones and erecting crude fortifications. They still did not war. At the moment they were only half the size of those he had seen at Wo and Shade’s, but Kress thought they were growing rapidly.

The castles began to rise midway through the second week. Organized battalions of mobiles dragged heavy chunks of sandstone and granite back to their corners, where other mobiles were pushing sand into place with mandibles and tendrils. Kress had purchased a pair of magnifying goggles so that he could watch them work wherever they might go in the tank. He wandered around and around the tall plastic walls, observing. It was fascinating.

The castles were a bit plainer than Kress would have liked, but he had an idea about that. The next day he cycled through some obsidian and flakes of colored glass along with the food. Within hours they had been incorporated into the castle walls.

The black castle was the first completed, followed by the white and red fortresses. The oranges were last, as usual. Kress took his meals into the living room and ate, seated on the couch so he could watch. He expected the first war to break out any hour now.

He was disappointed. Days passed, the castles grew taller and more grand, and Kress seldom left the tank except to attend to his sanitary needs and to answer critical business calls. But the sandkings did not war. He was getting upset.

Finally he stopped feeding them.

Two days after the table scraps had ceased to fall from their desert sky, four black mobiles surrounded an orange and dragged it back to their maw. They maimed it first, ripping off its mandibles and antennae and limbs, and carried it through the shadowed main gate of their miniature castle. It never emerged. Within an hour more than forty orange mobiles marched across the sand and attacked the blacks’ corner. They were outnumbered by the blacks that came rushing up from the depths. When the fighting was over, the attackers had been slaughtered. The dead and dying were taken down to feed the black maw.

Kress, delighted, congratulated himself on his genius.

When he put food into the tank the following day, a three-cornered battle broke out over its possession. The whites were the big winners.

After that, war followed war.

Almost a month to the day after Jala Wo had delivered the sandkings, Kress turned on the holographic projector, and his face materialized in the tank. It turned, slowly, around and around, so that his gaze fell on all four castles equally. Kress thought it rather a good likeness; it had his impish grin, wide mouth, full cheeks. His blue eyes sparkled, his gray hair was carefully arrayed in a fashionable sidesweep, his eyebrows were thin and sophisticated.

Soon enough the sandkings set to work. Kress fed them lavishly while his image beamed down at them from their sky. Temporarily the wars stopped. All activity was directed toward worship. . . .

His face emerged on the castle walls.

At first all four carvings looked alike to him. but as the work continued and Kress studied the reproductions, he began to detect subtle differences in technique and execution. The reds were the most creative, using tiny flakes of slate to put the gray in his hair. The white idol seemed young and mischievous to him, while the face shaped by the blacks—although virtually the same, line for line—struck him as wise and benevolent. The orange sandkings. as usual, were last and least. The wars had not gone well for them, and their castle was sad compared to those of the others. The image they carved was crude and cartoonish, and they seemed to intend to leave it this way. When they stopped work on the face, Kress grew quite piqued with them, but there really was nothing he could do.

When all of the sandkings had finished their Kress faces, he turned off the projector and decided that it was time to have a party. His friends would be impressed. He could even stage a war for them, he thought. Humming happily to himself, he began drawing up a guest list.

The party was a wild success.

Kress invited thirty people: a handful of close friends who shared his amusements, a few former lovers, and a collection of business and social rivals who could not afford to ignore his summons. He knew some of them would be discomfited and even offended by his sandkings. He counted on it. He customarily considered his parties a failure unless at least one guest walked out in high dudgeon.

On impulse he added Jala Wo’s name to his list. “Bring Shade if you like,” he added when he dictated the invitation to her.

Her acceptance surprised him just a bit: “Shade, alas, will be unable to attend. He does not go to social functions. As for myself, I look forward to the chance to see how your sandkings are doing.”

Kress ordered a sumptuous meal. And when at last the conversation had died down and most of his guests had gotten silly on wine and joy sticks, he shocked them by personally scraping their table leavings into a large bowl. “Come, all of you,” he commanded. “I want to introduce you to my newest pets.” Carrying the bowl, he conducted them into his living room.

The sandkings lived up to his fondest expectations. He had starved them for two days in preparation, and they were in a fighting mood. While the guests ringed the tank, looking through the magnifying glasses that Kress had thoughtfully provided, the sandkings waged a glorious battle over the scraps. He counted almost sixty dead mobiles when the struggle was over. The reds and whites, which had recently formed an alliance, came off with most of the food.

“Kress, you’re disgusting,” Cath m’Lane told him. She had lived with him for a short time two years before, until her soppy sentimentality almost drove him mad. “I was a fool to come back here. I thought perhaps you’d changed and wanted to apologize.” She had never forgiven him for the time his shambler had eaten an excessively cute puppy of which she had been fond. “Don’t ever invite me here again, Simon.” She strode out, accompanied by her current lover, to a chorus of laughter.

Kress’s other guests were full of questions.

Where did the sandkings come from? they wanted to know. “From Wo and Shade, Importers,” he replied, with a polite gesture toward Jala Wo, who had remained quiet and apart throughout most of the evening.

Why did they decorate their castles with his likeness? “Because I am the source of all good things. Surely you know that?” This retort brought a round of chuckles.

Will they fight again? “Of course, but not tonight. Don’t worry. There will be other parties.”

Jad Rakkis, who was an amateur xenologist, began talking about other social insects and the wars they fought. “These sandkings are amusing, but nothing really. You ought to read about Terran soldier ants, for instance.”

“Sandkings are not insects,” Jala Wo said sharply, but Jad was off and running, and no one paid her the slightest attention. Kress smiled at her and shrugged.

Malada Blane suggested they have a betting pool the next time they got together to watch a war, and everyone was taken with the idea. An animated discussion about rules and odds ensued. It lasted for almost an hour Finally the guests began to take their leave.

Jala Wo was the last to depart. “So,” Kress said to her when they were alone, “it appears my sandkings are a hit.”

“They are doing well,” Wo said. “Already they are larger than my own.”

“Yes,” Kress said, “except for the oranges.”

“I had noticed that,” Wo replied. “They seem few in number, and their castle is shabby.”

“Well, someone must lose,” Kress said. “The oranges were late to emerge and get established. They have suffered for it.”

“Pardon,” said Wo, “but might I ask if you are feeding your sandkings sufficiently?”

Kress shrugged. “They diet from time to time. It makes them fiercer.”

She frowned. “There is no need to starve them. Let them war in their own time, for their own reasons. It is their nature, and you will witness conflicts that are delightfully subtle and complex. The constant war brought on by hunger is artless and degrading.”

Kress repaid Wo’s frown with interest. “You are in my house, Wo, and here I am the judge of what is degrading. I fed the sandkings as you advised, and they did not fight.”

“You must have patience.”

“No,” Kress said. “I am their master and their god. after all. Why should I wait on their impulses? They did not war often enough to suit me. I have corrected the situation.”

“I see,” said Wo. “I will discuss the matter with Shade.”

“It is none of your concern, or his,” Kress snapped.

“I must bid you good-night, then,” Wo said with resignation. But as she slipped into her coat to leave, she fixed him with a final, disapproving stare. “Look to your faces, Simon Kress,” she warned him. “Look to your faces.” And she departed.

Puzzled, he wandered back to the tank and stared at the castles. His faces were still there, as ever. Except—he snatched up his magnifying goggles and slipped them on. He studied the faces for long moments. Even then exactly what it was, was hard to make out. But it seemed to him that the expression on the faces had changed slightly, that his smile was somehow twisted so that it seemed a touch malicious. But it was a very subtle change—if it was a change at all. Kress finally put it down to his suggestibility, and he resolved not to invite Jala Wo to any more of his gatherings.

Over the next few months Kress and about a dozen of his favorites got together weekly for what he liked to call his “war games.” Now that his initial fascination with the sandkings was past, Kress spent less time around his tank and more on his business affairs and his social life, but he still enjoyed having a few friends over for a war or two. He kept the combatants sharp on a constant edge of hunger. It had severe effects on the orange sandkings, which dwindled visibly until Kress began to wonder whether their maw was dead. But the others did well enough.

Sometimes at night when he could not sleep, Kress would take a bottle of wine into the living room, where the red gloom of his miniature desert provided the only light. He would drink and watch for hours, alone. There was usually a fight going on somewhere; when there was not, he could easily start one by dropping some small morsel of food into the tank.

Kress’s companions began betting on the weekly battles, as Malada Blane had suggested. Kress won a goodly amount by betting on the whites, which had become the most powerful and most numerous colony in the tank and which had the grandest castle. One week he slid the corner of the tank top aside, and he dropped the food close to the white castle instead of on the central battleground, where he usually let food fall. So the others had to attack the whites in their stronghold to get any food at all. They tried. The whites were brilliant in defense. Kress won a hundred standards from Jad Rakkis.

Rakkis, in fact, lost heavily on the sandkings almost every week. He pretended to a vast knowledge of them and their ways, claiming that he had studied them after the first party, but he had no luck when it came to placing his bets. Kress suspected that Jad’s claims were empty boasting. He had tried to study the sandkings a bit himself, in a moment of idle curiosity, tying in to the library to find out what world his pets originally came from. But the library had no listing for sandkings. He wanted to get in touch with Wo and ask her about it, but he had other concerns, and the matter kept slipping his mind.

Finally, after a month in which his losses totaled more than a thousand standards, Rakkis arrived at the war games. He was carrying a small plastic case under his arm. Inside was a spiderlike thing covered with fine golden hair.

“A sand spider,” Rakkis announced. “From Cathaday. I got it this afternoon from t’Etherane the Petseller. Usually they remove the poison sacs, but this one is intact. Are you game, Simon? I want my money back. I’ll bet a thousand standards, sand spider against sandkings.”

Kress studied the spider in its plastic prison. His sandkings had grown—they were twice as large as Wo’s, as she’d predicted—but they were still dwarfed by this thing. It was venomed, and they were not. Still, there were an awful lot of them. Besides, the endless sandking wars lately had begun to grow tiresome. The novelty of the match intrigued him.

“Done,” Kress said. “Jad, you are a fool. The sandkings will just keep coming until this ugly creature of yours is dead.”

“You are the fool, Simon,” Rakkis replied, smiling. “The Cathadayan sand spider customarily feeds on burrowers that hide in nooks and crevices, and—well, watch—it will go straight into those castles and eat the maws.”

Kress scowled amid general laughter. He hadn’t counted on that. “Get on with it,” he said irritably. Then he went to freshen his drink.

The spider was too large to be cycled conveniently through the food chamber. Two other guests helped Rakkis slide the tank top slightly to one side, and Malada Blane handed his case up to him. He shook the spider out. It landed lightly on a miniature dune in front of the red castle and stood confused for a moment, mouth working, legs twitching menacingly.

“Come on,” Rakkis urged. They all gathered around the tank. Kress found his magnifiers and slipped them on. If he was going to lose a thousand standards, at least he wanted a good view of the action.

The sandkings had seen the invader. All over the red castle activity had ceased. The small scarlet mobiles were frozen, watching.

The spider began to move toward the dark promise of the gate. From the tower above, Simon Kress’s countenance stared down impassively.

At once there was a flurry of activity. The nearest red mobiles formed themselves into two wedges and streamed over the sand toward the spider. More warriors erupted from inside the castle and assembled in a triple line to guard the approach to the underground chamber where the maw lived. Scouts came scuttling over the dunes, recalled to fight.

Battle was joined.

The attacking sandkings washed over the spider. Mandibles snapped shut on legs and abdomen, and clung. Reds raced up the golden legs to the invader’s back. They bit and tore. One of them found an eye and ripped it loose with tiny yellow tendrils. Kress smiled and pointed.

But they were small, and they had no venom, and the spider did not stop. Its legs flicked sandkings off to either side. Its dripping jaws found others and left them broken and stiffening. Already a dozen of the reds lay dying. The sand spider came on and on. It strode straight through the triple line of guardians before the castle. The lines closed around it, covered it. waging desperate battle. A team of sandkings had bitten off one of the spider’s legs Defenders leaped from atop the towers to land on the twitching, heaving mass.

Lost beneath the sandkings, the spider somehow lurched down into the darkness and vanished.

Rakkis let out a long breath. He looked pale. “Wonderful.” someone else said Malada Blane chuckled deep in her throat.

“Look,” said Idi Noreddian, tugging Kress by the arm.

They had been so intent on the struggle in the corner that none of them had noticed the activity elsewhere in the tank. But now the castle was still, and the sands were empty save for dead red mobiles, and now they saw.

Three armies were drawn up before the red castle. They stood quite still, in perfect array, rank after rank of sandkings. orange and white and black—waiting to see what emerged from the depths.

Kress smiled. “A cordon sanitaire,” he said. “And glance at the other castles, if you will, Jad.”

Rakkis did, and he swore. Teams of mobiles were sealing up the gates with sand and stone. If the spider somehow survived this encounter, it would find no easy entrance at the other castles. “I should have brought four spiders,” Rakkis said. “Still, I’ve won. My spider is down there right now, eating your damned maw.”

Kress did not reply. He waited. There was motion in the shadows.

All at once red mobiles began pouring out of the gate. They took their positions on the castle and began repairing the damage that the spider had wrought. The other armies dissolved and began to retreat to their respective corners.

“Jad,” Kress said, “I think you are a bit confused about who is eating whom.”

The following week Rakkis brought four slim silver snakes. The sandkings dispatched them without much trouble.

Next he tried a large black bird. It ate more than thirty white mobiles, and its thrashing and blundering virtually destroyed that castle, but ultimately its wings grew tired, and the sandkings attacked in force wherever it landed.

After that it was a case of insects, armored beetles not too unlike the sandkings themselves. But stupid, stupid. An allied force of oranges and blacks broke their formation, divided them, and butchered them.

Rakkis began giving Kress promissory notes.

It was around that time that Kress met Cath m’Lane again, one evening when he was dining in Asgard at his favorite restaurant. He stopped at her table briefly and told her about the war games, inviting her to join them. She flushed, then regained control of herself and grew icy. “Someone has to put a stop to you, Simon. I guess it’s going to be me,” she said.

Kress shrugged and enjoyed a lovely meal and thought no more about her threat.

Until a week later, when a small, stout woman arrived at his door and showed him a police wristband. “We’ve had complaints,” she said. “Do you keep a tank full of dangerous insects, Kress?”

“Not insects,” he said, furious. “Come, I’ll show you.”

When she had seen the sandkings, she shook her head. “This will never do. What do you know about these creatures anyway? Do you know what world they’re from? Have they been cleared by the Ecological Board? Do you have a license for these things? We have a report that they’re carnivores and possibly dangerous. We also have a report that they are semisentient. Where did you get these creatures anyway?”

“From Wo arid Shade,” Kress replied.

“Never heard of them,” the woman said. “Probably smuggled them in, knowing our ecologists would never approve them. No, Kress, this won’t do. I’m going to confiscate this tank and have it destroyed. And you’re going to have to expect a few fines as well.”

Kress offered her a hundred standards to forget all about him and his sandkings.

She tsketi. “Now I’ll have to add attempted bribery to the charges against you.”

Not until he raised the figure to two thousand standards was she willing to be persuaded. “It’s not going to be easy, you know,” she said. “There are forms to be altered, records to be wiped. And getting a forged license from the ecologists will be time-consuming. Not to mention dealing with the complainant. What if she calls again?”

“Leave her to me,” Kress said. “Leave her to me.”

He thought about it for a while. That night he made some calls.

First he got t’Etherane the Petseller. “I want to buy a dog,” he said. “A puppy.”

The round-faced merchant gawked at him. “A puppy? That is not like you, Simon.

Why don’t you come in? I have a lovely choice.”

“I want a very specific kind of puppy,” Kress said. “Take notes. I’ll describe to you what it must look like.”

Afterwards he punched for Idi Noreddian. “Idi,” he said, “I want you out here tonight with your holo equipment. I have a notion to record a sandking battle. A present for one of my friends.”

The night after they made the recording, Kress stayed up late. He absorbed a controversial new drama in his sensorium, fixed himself a small snack, smoked a couple of joy sticks, and broke out a bottle of wine. Feeling very happy with himself, he wandered into the living room, glass in hand.

The lights were out. The red glow of the terrarium made the shadows look flushed and feverish. Kress walked over to survey his domain, curious as to how the blacks were doing in the repairs on their castle. The puppy had left it in ruins.

The restoration went well. But as Kress inspected the work through his magnifiers, he chanced to glance closely at the face on the sand-castle wall. It startled him.

He drew back, blinked, took a healthy gulp of wine, and looked again.

The face on the wall was still his. But it was all wrong, all twisted. His cheeks were bloated and piggish; his smile was a crooked leer. He looked impossibly malevolent.

Uneasy, he moved around the tank to inspect the other castles. They were each a bit different, but ultimately all the same.

The oranges had left out most of the fine detail, but the result still seemed monstrous, crude; a brutal mouth and mindless eyes.

The reds gave him a satanic. twitching sort of smile. His mouth did odd, unlovely things at its corners.

The whites, his favorites, had carved a cruel idiot god.

Kress flung his wine across the room in rage. “You dare,” he said under his breath. “Now you won’t eat for a week, you damned . . .” His voice was shrill. “I’ll teach you.”

He had an idea. He strode out of the room, then returned a moment later with an antique iron throwing sword in his hand. It was a meter long, and the point was still sharp. Kress smiled, climbed up, and moved the tank cover aside just enough to give him working room, exposing one corner of the desert. He leaned down and jabbed the sword at the white castle below him. He waved it back and forth, smashing towers and ramparts and walls. Sand and stone collapsed, burying the scrambling mobiles. A flick of his wrist obliterated the features of the insolent, insulting caricature that the sandkings had made of his face. Then he poised the point of the sword above the dark mouth that opened down into the maw’s chamber; he thrust with all his strength, meeting with resistance. He heard a soft, squishing sound. All the mobiles trembled and collapsed. Satisfied. Kress pulled back.

He watched for a moment, wondering whether he had killed the maw. The point of the throwing sword was wet and slimy. But finally the white sandkings began to move again—feebly, slowly—but they moved.

He was preparing to slide the cover back into place and move on to a second castle when he felt something crawling on his hand.

He screamed, dropping the sword, and brushed the sandking from his flesh. It fell to the carpet, and he ground it beneath his heel, crushing it thoroughly long after it was dead. It had crunched when he stepped on it. After that, trembling, he hurriedly sealed the tank up again. He rushed off to shower and inspected himself carefully. He boiled his clothing.

Later, after drinking several glasses of wine, he returned to the living room. He was a bit ashamed of the way he had been terrified by the sandking. But he was not about to open the tank again. From then on, the cover would stay sealed permanently. Still, he had to punish the others.

He decided to lubricate his mental processes with another glass of wine. As he finished it, an inspiration came to him. He went to the tank and made a few adjustments to the humidity controls.

By the time he fell asleep on the couch, his wine glass still in his hand, the sand castles were melting in the rain.

Kress woke to angry pounding on his door.

He sat up, groggy, his head throbbing. Wine hangovers were always the worst, he thought. He lurched to the entry chamber.

Cath m’Lane was outside. “You monster,” she said, her face swollen and puffy and streaked with tears. “I cried all night, damn you. But no more, Simon, no more.”

“Easy,” he said, holding his head. “I’ve got a hangover.”

She swore and shoved him aside and pushed her way into his house. The shambler came peering round a corner to see what the noise was. She spat at it and stalked into the living room, Kress trailing ineffectually after her. “Hold on,” he said, “where do you . . . you can’t . . .” He stopped, suddenly horror-struck. She was carrying a heavy sledgehammer in her left hand. “No,” he said.

She went directly to the sandkings’ tank. “You like the little charmers so much, Simon? Then you can live with them.”

“Cath!” he shrieked.

Gripping the hammer with both hands, she swung as hard as she could against the side of the tank. The sound of the impact set Kress’s head to screaming, and he made a low, blubbering sound of despair. But the plastic held.

She swung again. This time there was a crack, and a network of thin lines appeared in the wall of the tank.

Kress threw himself at her as she drew back her hammer to take a third swing. They went down flailing and rolled over. She lost her grip on the hammer and tried to throttle him, but Kress wrenched free and bit her on the arm, drawing blood. They both staggered to their feet, panting.

“You should see yourself, Simon,” she said grimly. “Blood dripping from your mouth. You look like one of your pets. How do you like the taste?”

“Get out,” he said. He saw the throwing sword where it had fallen the night before, and he snatched it up. “Get out,” he repeated, waving the sword for emphasis. “Don’t go near that tank again.”

She laughed at him. “You wouldn’t dare,” she said. She bent to pick up her hammer.

Kress shrieked at her and lunged. Before he quite knew what was happening, the iron blade had gone clear through her abdomen. Cath m’Lane looked at him wonderingly and down at the sword. Kress fell back, whimpering. “I didn’t mean . . . I only wanted . . .”

She was transfixed, bleeding, nearly dead, but somehow she did not fall. “You monster,” she managed to say, though her mouth was full of blood. And she whirled, impossibly, the sword in her, and swung with her last strength at the tank. The tortured wall shattered, and Cath m’Lane was buried beneath an avalanche of plastic and sand and mud.

Kress made small hysterical noises and scrambled up onto the couch.

Sandkings were emerging from the muck on his living-room floor. They were crawling across Cath’s body. A few of them ventured tentatively out across the carpet. More followed.

He watched as a column took shape, a living, writhing square of sandkings, bearing something—something slimy and featureless, a piece of raw meat as big as a man’s head. They began to carry it away from the tank. It pulsed.

That was when Kress broke and ran.

Before he found the courage to return home, he ran to his skimmer and flew to the nearest city, some fifty kilometers away, almost sick with fear. But, once safely away, he found a small restaurant, downed several mugs of coffee and two anti-hangover tabs, ate a full breakfast, and gradually regained his composure.

It had been a dreadful morning, but dwelling on that would solve nothing. He ordered more coffee and considered his situation with icy rationality.

Cath m’Lane was dead at his hand. Could he report it and plead that it had been an accident? Unlikely. He had run her through, after all, and he had already told that policer to leave her to him. He would have to get rid of the evidence and hope that Cath had not told anyone her plans for the day. It was very unlikely she had. She could only have gotten his gift late last night. She said that she had cried all night, and she was alone when she arrived. Very well, he had one body and one skimmer to dispose of.

That left the sandkings. They might prove more of a difficulty. No doubt they had all escaped by now. The thought of them around his house, in his bed and his clothes, infesting his food—it made his flesh crawl. He shuddered and overcame his revulsion. It really shouldn’t be too hard to kill them, he reminded himself. He didn’t have to account for every mobile. Just the four maws, that was all. He could do that. They were large, as he’d seen. He would find them and kill them. He was their god; now he would be their destroyer.

He went shopping before he flew back to his home. He bought a set of skinthins that would cover him from head to foot, several bags of poison pellets for rockjock control, and a spray canister containing an illegally strong pesticide. He also bought a magnalock towing device.

When he landed late that afternoon, he went about things methodically. First he hooked Cath’s skimmer to his own with the magnalock. Searching it, he had his first piece of luck. The Crystal chip with Idi Noreddian’s holo of the sandking fight was on the front seat, He had worried about that.

When the skimmers were ready, he slipped into his skinthins and went inside to get Cath’s body.

It wasn’t there.

He poked through the fast-drying sand carefully, and there was no doubt of it, the body was gone. Could she have dragged herself away? Unlikely but Kress searched. A cursory inspection of his house turned up neither the body nor any sign of the sandkings. He did not have time for a more thorough investigation, not with the incriminating skimmer outside his front door, He resolved to try later.

Some seventy kilometers north of Kress’s estate was a range of active volcanoes. He flew there, Cath’s skimmer in tow. Above the glowering cone of the largest volcano he released the magnalock and watched the skimmer plummet down and vanish in the lava below.

It was dusk when he returned to his house. This gave him pause. Briefly he considered flying back to the city and spending the night there. He put the thought aside. There was work to do. He wasn’t safe yet.

He scattered the poison pellets around the exterior of his house. No one would think this suspicious. He had always had a rockjock problem. When this task was completed, he primed the canister of pesticide and ventured back inside the house.

Kress went through the house, room by room, turning on lights everywhere he went until he was surrounded by a blaze of artificial illumination. He paused to clean up in the living room, shoveling sand and plastic fragments back into the broken tank. The sandkings were all gone, as he’d feared. The castles were shrunken and distorted, slagged by the watery bombardment Kress had visited upon them, and what little of them remained was crumbling as it dried.

He frowned and searched further, the canister of pest spray strapped across his shoulders.

Down in the wine cellar he could see Cath m’Lane’s corpse.

It sprawled at the foot of a steep flight of stairs, the limbs twisted as if by a fall. White mobiles were swarming all over it, and as Kress watched, the body moved jerkily across the hard-packed dirt floor.

He laughed and twisted the illumination up to maximum. In the far corner a squat little earthen castle and a dark hole were visible between two wine racks. Kress could make out a rough outline of his face on the cellar wall.

The body shifted once again, moving a few centimeters toward the castle. Kress had a sudden vision of the white maw waiting hungrily. It might be able to get Cath’s foot in its mouth, but no more. It was too absurd. He laughed again and started down into the cellar, finger poised on the trigger of the hose that snaked down his right arm. The sandkings—hundreds of them moving as one—deserted the body and assumed battle formation, a field of white between him and their maw.

Suddenly Kress had another inspiration. He smiled and lowered his firing hand. “Cath was always hard to swallow,” he said, delighted at his wit. “Especially for one your size. Here, let me give you some help. What are gods for, after all?”

He retreated upstairs, returning shortly with a cleaver. The sandkings, patient, waited and watched while Kress chopped Cath m’Lane into small, easily digestible pieces.

Kress slept in his skinthins that night, the pesticide close at hand, but he did not need it. The whites, sated, remained in the cellar, and he saw no sign of the others.

In the morning he finished the cleanup of the living room. When he was through, no trace of the struggle remained except for the broken tank.

He ate a light lunch and resumed his hunt for the missing sandkings. In full daylight it was not too difficult. The blacks had located in his rock garden, where they built a castle heavy with obsidian and quartz. The reds he found at the bottom of his long-disused swimming pool, which had partially filled with wind-blown sand over the years. He saw mobiles of both colors ranging about his grounds, many of them carrying poison pellets back to their maws. Kress felt like laughing. He decided his pesticide was unnecessary No use risking a fight when he could just let the poison do its work. Both maws should be dead by evening.

That left only the burnt-orange sandkings unaccounted for. Kress circled his estate several times, in an ever-widening spiral, but he found no trace of them. When he began to sweat in his skinthins—it was a hot. dry day—he decided it was not important. If they were out here, they were probably eating the poison pellets, as the reds and blacks were.

He crunched several sandkings underfoot, with a certain degree of satisfaction, as he walked back to the house. Inside, he removed his skinthins, settled down to a delicious meal, and finally began to relax. Everything was under control. Two of the maws would soon be defunct, the third was safely located where he could dispose of it after it had served his purposes, and he had no doubt that he would find the fourth. As for Cath, every trace of her visit had been obliterated.

His reverie was interrupted when his viewscreen began to blink at him. It was Jad Rakkis, calling to brag about some cannibal worms he would bring to the war games tonight.

Kress had forgotten about that, but he recovered quickly. “Oh, Jad, my pardons. I neglected to tell you. I grew bored with all that and got rid of the sandkings. Ugly little things. Sorry, but there’ll be no party tonight.”

Rakkis was indignant. “But what will I do with my worms?”

“Put them in a basket of fruit and send them to a loved one,” Kress said, signing off. Quickly he began calling the others. He did not need anyone arriving at his doorstep now, with the sandkings alive and infesting the estate.

As he was calling Idi Noreddian, Kress became aware of an annoying oversight. The screen began to clear, indicating that someone had answered at the other end. Kress flicked off.

Idi arrived on schedule an hour later. She was surprised to find the party had been canceled but perfectly happy to share an evening alone with Kress. He delighted her with his story of Cath’s reaction to the holo they had made together. While telling it, he managed to ascertain that she had not mentioned the prank to anyone. He nodded, satisfied, and refilled their wine glasses. Only a trickle was left. “I’ll have to get a fresh bottle,” he said. “Come with me to my wine cellar, and help me pick out a good vintage. You’ve always had a better palate than I.”

She went along willingly enough but balked at the top of the stairs when Kress opened the door and gestured for her to precede him. “Where are the lights?” she asked. “And that smell—what’s that peculiar smell, Simon?”

When he shoved her, she looked briefly startled. She screamed as she tumbled down the stairs. Kress closed the door and began to nail it shut with the boards and air hammer he had left for that purpose. As he was finishing, he heard Idi groan. “I’m hurt,” she called. “Simon, what is this?” Suddenly she squealed, and shortly after that the screaming started.

It did not cease for hours. Kress went to his sensorium and dialed up a saucy comedy to blot it from his mind.

When he was sure she was dead, Kress flew her skimmer north to the volcanoes and discarded it. The magnalock was proving a good investment.

Odd scrabbling noises were coming from beyond the wine-cellar door the next morning when Kress went down to check things out. He listened for several uneasy moments, wondering whether Idi might possibly have survived and was scratching to get out. This seemed unlikely; it had to be the sandkings. Kress did not like the implications of this. He decided that he would keep the door sealed, at least for a while. He went outside with a shovel to bury the red and black maws in their own castles.

He found them very much alive.

The black castle was glittering with volcanic glass, and sandkings were all over it, repairing and improving. The highest tower was up to his waist, and on it was a hideous caricature of his face. When he approached, the blacks halted in their labors and formed up into two threatening phalanxes. Kress glanced behind him and saw others closing off his escape. Startled, he dropped his shovel and sprinted out of the trap, crushing several mobiles beneath his boots.

The red castle was creeping up the walls of the swimming pool. The maw was safely settled in a pit, surrounded by sand and concrete and battlements. The reds crept all over the bottom of the pool. Kress watched them carry a rockjock and a large lizard into the castle. Horrified, he stepped back from the poolside and felt something crunch. Looking down, he saw three mobiles climbing up his leg. He brushed them off and stamped them to death, but others were approaching rapidly. They were larger than he remembered. Some were almost as big as his thumb.

He ran.

By the time he reached the safety of the house, his heart was racing and he was short of breath. He closed the door behind him and hurried to lock it. His house was supposed to be pestproof. He’d be safe in here.

A stiff drink steadied his nerve. So poison doesn’t faze them, he thought. He should have known. Jala Wo had warned him that the maw could eat anything. He would have to use the pesticide. He took another drink for good measure, donned his skinthins, and strapped the canister to his back. He unlocked the door.

Outside, the sandkings were waiting.

Two armies confronted him, allied against the common threat. More than he could have guessed. The damned maws must be breeding like rockjocks, Mobiles were everywhere, a creeping sea of them.

Kress brought up the hose and flicked the trigger. A gray mist washed over the nearest rank of sandkings. He moved his hand from side to side.

Where the mist fell, the sandkings twitched violently and died in sudden spasms. Kress smiled. They were no match for him. He sprayed in a wide arc before him and stepped forward confidently over a litter of black and red bodies. The armies fell back. Kress advanced, intent on cutting through them to their maws.

All at once the retreat stopped. A thousand sandkings surged toward him.

Kress had been expecting the counterattack. He stood his ground, sweeping his misty sword before him in great looping strokes. They came at him and died. A few got through; he could not spray everywhere at once. He felt them climbing up his legs, then sensed their mandibles biting futilely at the reinforced plastic of his skinthins. He ignored them and kept spraying.

Then he began to feel soft impacts on his head and shoulders.

Kress trembled and spun and looked up above him. The front of his house was alive with sandkings. Blacks and reds, hundreds of them. They were launching themselves into the air, raining down on him. They fell all around him. One landed on his faceplate, its mandibles scraping at his eyes for a terrible second before he plucked it away.

He swung up his hose and sprayed the air, sprayed the house, sprayed until the airborne sandkings were all dead or dying. The mist settled back on him, making him cough. But he kept spraying. Only when the front of the house was clean did Kress turn his attention back to the ground.

They were all around him, on him, dozens of them scurrying over his body, hundreds of others hurrying to join them. He turned the mist on them. The hose went dead. Kress heard a loud hiss, and the deadly fog rose in a great cloud from between his shoulders, cloaking him, choking him, making his eyes burn and blur. He felt for the hose, and his hand came away covered with dying sandkings. The hose was severed; they’d eaten it through. He was surrounded by a shroud of pesticide, blinded. He stumbled and screamed and began to run back to the house, pulling sandkings from his body as he went.

Inside, he sealed the door and collapsed on the carpet, rolling back and forth until he was sure he had crushed them all. The canister was empty by then, hissing feebly Kress stripped off his skinthins and showered. The hot spray scalded him and left his skin reddened and sensitive, but it made his flesh stop crawling.

He dressed in his heaviest clothing, thick work pants and leathers, after shaking them out nervously. “Damn,” he kept muttering, “damn.” His throat was dry. After searching the entry hall thoroughly to make certain it was clean, he allowed himself to sit and pour a drink. “Damn,” he repeated. His hand shook as. he poured, slopping liquor on the carpet.

The alcohol settled him, but it did not wash away the fear. He had a second drink and went to the window furtively. Sandkings were moving across the thick plastic pane. He shuddered and retreated to his communications console. He had to get help, he thought wildly. He would punch through a call to the authorities, and policers would come out with flamethrowers, and . . .

Kress stopped in mid-call and groaned.

He couldn’t call in the police. He would have to tell them about the whites in his cellar, and they’d find the bodies there. Perhaps the maw might have finished Cath m’Lane by now, but certainly not Idi Noreddian; He hadn’t even cut her up. Besides, there would be bones. No, the police could be called in only as a last resort.

He sat at the console, frowning. His communications equipment filled a whole wall. From here he could reach anyone on Baldur. He had plenty of money and his cunning; he had always prided himself on his cunning. He would handle this somehow.

Briefly he considered calling Wo, but he soon dismissed the idea. Wo knew too much, and she would ask questions, and he did not trust her. No, he needed someone who would do as he asked without questions.

His frown slowly turned into a smile. Kress had contacts. He put through a call to a number he had not used in a long time.

A woman’s face took shape on his viewscreen—white-haired, blank of expression, with a long, hooked nose. Her voice was brisk and efficient. “Simon,” she said. “How is business?”

“Business is fine, Lissandra,” Kress replied. “I have a job for you.”

“A removal? My price has gone up since last time, Simon. It has been ten years, after all.”

“You will be well paid,” Kress said. “You know I’m generous. I want you for a bit of pest control.”

She smiled a thin smile. “No need to use euphemisms, Simon. The call is shielded.”

“No, I’m serious. I have a pest problem. Dangerous pests. Take care of them for me. No questions. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Good. You’ll need . . . oh, three to four operatives. Wear heat-resistant skinthins, and equip them with flamethrowers, or lasers, something on that order. Come out to my place. You’ll seethe problem. Bugs, lots and lots of them. In my rock garden and the old swimming pool you’ll find castles. Destroy them, kill everything inside them. Then knock on the door, and I’ll show you what else needs to be done. Can you get out here quickly?”

Her face remained impassive. “We’ll leave within the hour.”

Lissandra was true to her word. She arrived in a lean, black skimmer with three operatives. Kress watched them from the safety of a second-story window. They were all faceless in dark plastic skinthins. Two of them wore portable flamethrowers; a third carried lasercannon and explosives. Lissandra carried nothing; Kress recognized her by the way she gave orders.

Their skimmer passed low overhead first, checking out the situation. The sandkings went mad. Scarlet and ebon mobiles ran everywhere, frenetic. Kress could see the castle in the rock garden from his vantage point. It stood tall as a man. Its ramparts were crawling with black defenders, and a steady stream of mobiles flowed down into its depths.

Lissandra’s skimmer came down next to Kress’s, and the operatives vaulted out and unlimbered their weapons. They looked inhuman, deadly.

The black army drew up between them and the castle. The reds—Kress suddenly realized that he could not see the reds. He blinked. Where had they gone?

Lissandra pointed and shouted, and her two flamethrowers spread out and opened up on the black sandkings. Their weapons coughed dully and began to roar, long tongues of blue-and-scarlet fire licking out before them. Sandkings crisped and shriveled and died. The operatives began to play the fire back and forth in an efficient, interlocking pattern. They advanced with careful, measured steps.

The black army burned and disintegrated, the mobiles fleeing in a thousand different directions, some back toward the castle, others toward the enemy. None reached the operatives with the flamethrowers. Lissandra’s people were very professional.

Then one of them stumbled.

Or seemed to stumble. Kress looked again and saw that the ground had given way beneath the man. Tunnels, he thought with a tremor of fear; tunnels, pits, traps. The flamer was sunk in sand up to his waist, and suddenly the ground around him seemed to erupt, and he was covered with scarlet sandkings. He dropped the flamethrower and began to claw wildly at his own body. His screams were horrible to hear.

His companion hesitated, then swung and fired. A blast of flame swallowed human and sandkings both. The screaming stopped abruptly. Satisfied, the second flamer turned back to the castle, took another step forward, and recoiled as his foot broke through the ground and vanished up to the ankle. He tried to pull it back and retreat, and the sand all around him gave way. He lost his balance and stumbled, flailing, and the sandkings were everywhere, a boiling mass of them, covering him as he writhed and rolled. His flamethrower was useless and forgotten.

Kress pounded wildly on the window, shouting for attention. “The castle! Get the castle!”

Lissandra, standing back by her skimmer, heard and gestured. Her third operative sighted with the lasercannon and fired. The beam throbbed across the grounds and sliced off the top of the castle. He brought the cannon down sharply, hacking at the sand and stone parapets. Towers fell. Kress’s face disintegrated. The laser bit into the ground, searching round and about. The castle crumbled. Now it was only a heap of sand. But the black mobiles continued to move. The maw was buried too deeply. The beams hadn’t touched it.

Lissandra gave another order. Her operative discarded the laser, primed an explosive, and darted forward. He leaped over the smoking corpse of the first flamer, landed on solid ground within Kress’s rock garden, and heaved. The explosive ball landed square atop the ruins of the black castle. White-hot light seared Kress’s eyes, and there was a tremendous gout of sand and rock and mobiles. For a moment dust obscured everything. It was raining sandkings and pieces of sandkings.

Kress saw that the black mobiles were dead and unmoving.

“The pool!” he shouted down through the window. “Get the castle in the pool!”

Lissandra understood quickly; the ground was littered with motionless blacks, but the reds were pulling back hurriedly and re-forming. Her operative stood uncertain, then reached down and pulled out another explosive ball. He took one step forward, but Lissandra called him, and he sprinted back in her direction.

It was all so simple then. He reached the skimmer, and Lissandra took him aloft. Kress rushed to another window in another room to watch. They came swooping in just over the pool, and the operative pitched his bombs down at the red castle from the safety of the skimmer. After the fourth run, the castle was unrecognizable, and the sandkings stopped moving.

Lissandra was thorough. She had him bomb each castle several additional times. Then he used the lasercannon, crisscrossing methodically until it was certain that nothing living could remain intact beneath those small patches of ground.

Finally they came knocking at his door. Kress was grinning-maniacally when he let them in. “Lovely,” he said, “lovely.”

Lissandra pulled off the mask of her skinthins. “This will cost you, Simon. Two operatives gone, not to mention the danger to my own life.”

“Of course,” Kress blurted. “You’ll be well paid, Lissandra. Whatever you ask, just so you finish the job.”

“What remains to be done?”

“You have to clean out my wine cellar,” Kress said. “There’s another castle down there. And you’ll have to do it without explosives. I don’t want my house coming down around me.”

Lissandra motioned to her operative. “Go outside and get Rajk’s flamethrower. It should be intact.”

He returned armed, ready, silent. Kress led them to the wine cellar.

The heavy door was still nailed shut, as he had left it. But it bulged outward slightly, as if warped by some tremendous pressure. That made Kress uneasy, as did the silence that reigned about them. He stood well away from the door while Lissandra’s operative removed his nails and planks. “Is that safe in here?” he found himself muttering, pointing at the flamethrower. “I don’t want a fire, either, you know.”

“I have the laser,” Lissandra said. “We’ll use that for the kill. The flamethrower probably won’t be needed. But I want it here just in case. There are worse things than fire. Simon.”

He nodded.

The last plank came free of the cellar door. There was still no sound from below. Lissandra snapped an order, and her underling fell back, took up a position behind her, and leveled the flamethrower squarely at the door. She slipped her mask back on, hefted the laser, stepped forward, and pulled the door open.

No motion. No sound. It was dark down there.

“Is there a light?” Lissandra asked.

“Just inside the door,” Kress said. “On the right-hand side. Mind the stairs. They’re quite steep.”

She stepped into the doorway, shifted the laser to her left hand, and reached up with her right, fumbling inside for the light panel. Nothing happened. “I feel it,” Lissandra said, “but it doesn’t seem to . . .”

Then she was screaming, and she stumbled backward. A great white sandking had clamped itself around her wrist. Blood welled through her skinthins where its mandibles had sunk in. It was fully as large as her hand.

Lissandra did a horrible little jig across the room and began to smash her hand against the nearest wall. Again and again and again. It landed with a heavy, meaty thud. Finally the sandking fell away. She whimpered and fell to her knees.

“I think my fingers are broken,” she said softly. The blood was still flowing freely. She had dropped the laser near the cellar door.

“I’m not going down there,” her operative announced in clear, firm tones.

Lissandra looked up at him. “No,” she said. “Stand in the door and flame it all. Cinder it. Do you understand?”

He nodded.

Kress moaned. “My house,” he said. His stomach churned. The white sandking had been so large. How many more were down there? “Don’t,” he continued. “Leave it alone. I’ve changed my mind.”

Lissandra misunderstood. She held out her hand. It was covered with blood and greenish-black ichor, “Your little friend bit clean through my glove, and you saw what it took to get it off. I don’t care about your house, Simon. Whatever is down there is going to die.”

Kress hardly heard her. He thought he could see movement in the shadows beyond the cellar door. He imagined a white army bursting out, each soldier as big as the sandking that had attacked Lissandra. He saw himself being lifted by a hundred tiny arms and being dragged down into the darkness, where the maw waited hungrily. He was afraid. “Don’t,” he said.

They ignored him.

Kress darted forward, and his shoulder slammed into the back of Lissandra’s operative just as the man was bracing to fire. The operative grunted, lost his balance, and pitched forward into the black. Kress listened to him fall down the stairs. Afterwards there were other noises—scuttlings and snaps and soft, squishing sounds.

Kress swung around to face Lissandra. He was drenched in cold sweat, but a sickly kind of excitement possessed him. It was almost sexual.

Lissandra’s calm, cold eyes regarded him through her mask. “What are you doing?” she demanded as Kress picked up the laser she had dropped. “Simon!”

“Making a peace,” he said, giggling. “They won’t hurt god, no, not so long as god is good and generous. I was cruel. Starved them. I have to make up for it now, you see.”

“You’re insane,” Lissandra said. It was the last thing she said. Kress burned a hole in her chest big enough to put his arm through. He dragged the body across the floor and rolled it down the cellar stairs. The noises were louder—chitinous clackings and scrapings and echoes that were thick and liquid. Kress nailed up the door once again.

As he fled, he was filled with a deep sense of contentment that coated his fear like a layer of syrup. He suspected it was not his own.

He planned to leave his home, to fly to the city and take a room for a night, or perhaps for a year. Instead he started drinking. He was not quite sure why. He drank steadily for hours and retched it all up violently on his living-room carpet. At some point he fell asleep. When he woke, it was pitch-dark in the house.

He cowered against the couch. He could hear noises. Things were moving in the walls. They were all around him. His hearing was extraordinarily acute. Every little creak was the footstep of a sandking. He closed his eyes and waited, expecting to feel their terrible touch, afraid to move lest he brush against one.

Kress sobbed and then was very still.

Time passed, but nothing happened.

He opened his eyes again. He trembled. Slowly the shadows began to soften and dissolve. Moonlight was filtering through the high windows. His eyes adjusted.

The living room was empty. Nothing there, nothing, nothing. Only his drunken fears.

Kress steeled himself and rose and went to a light.

Nothing there. The room was deserted.

He listened. Nothing. No sound. Nothing in the walls. It had all been his imagination, his fear.

The memories of Lissandra and the thing in the cellar returned to him unbidden. Shame and anger washed over him. Why had he done that? He could have helped her burn it out, kill it. Why . . . he knew why. The maw had done it to him, had put fear in him. Wo had said it was psionic, even when it was small. And now it was large, so large. It had feasted on Cath and Idi. and now it had two more bodies down there. It would keep growing. And it had learned to like the taste of human flesh, he thought.

He began to shake, but he took control of himself again and stopped. It wouldn’t hurt him; he was god; the whites had always been his favorites.

He remembered how he had stabbed it with his throwing sword. That was before Cath came. Damn her, anyway.

He couldn’t stay here. The maw would grow hungry again. Large as it was, it wouldn’t take long. Its appetite would be terrible. What would it do then? He had to get away, back to the safety of the city while the maw was still contained in his wine cellar. It was only plaster and hard-packed earth down there, and the mobiles could dig and tunnel. When they got free . . . Kress didn’t want to think about it.

He went to his bedroom and packed. He took three bags. Just a single change of clothing, that was all he needed; the rest of the space he filled with his valuables, with jewelry and art and other things he could not bear to lose. He did not expect to return to this place ever again.

His shambler followed him down the stairs, staring at him from its baleful, glowing eyes. It was gaunt Kress realized that it had been ages since he had fed it. Normally it could take care of itself, but no doubt the pickings had grown lean of late. When it tried to clutch at his leg, he snarled at it and kicked it away, and it scurried off, obviously hurt and offended.

Carrying his bags awkwardly, Kress slipped outside and shut the door behind him.

For a moment he stood pressed against the house, his heart thudding in his chest. Only a few meters between him and his skimmer. He was afraid to take those few steps. The moonlight was bright, and the grounds in front of his house were a scene of carnage. The bodies of Lissandra’s two flamers lay where they had fallen, one twisted and burned, the other swollen beneath a mass of dead sandkings. And the mobiles, the black and red mobiles, they were all around him. It took an effort to remember that they were dead. It was almost as if they were simply waiting, as they had waited so often before.

Nonsense, Kress told himself. More drunken fears. He had seen the castles blown apart. They were dead, and the white maw was trapped in his cellar. He took several deep and deliberate breaths and stepped forward onto the sandkings. They crunched. He ground them into the sand savagely. They did not move.

Kress smiled and walked slowly across the battleground, listening to the sounds, the sounds of safety.

Crunch, crackle, crunch.

He lowered his bags to the ground and opened the door to his skimmer.

Something moved from shadow into light. A pale shape on the seat of his skimmer. It-was as long as his forearm. Its mandibles clacked together softly, and it looked up at him from six small eyes set all around its body.

Kress wet his pants and backed away slowly.

There was more motion from inside the skimmer. He had left the door open. The sandking emerged and came toward him, cautiously. Others followed. They had been hiding beneath his seats, burrowed into the upholstery. But now they emerged. They formed a ragged ring around the skimmer.

Kress licked his lips, turned, and moved quickly to Lissandra’s skimmer.

He stopped before he was halfway there. Things were moving inside that one, too. Great maggoty things half-seen by the light of the moon.

Kress whimpered and retreated back toward the house. Near the front door, he looked up.

He counted a dozen long, white shapes creeping back and forth across the walls of the building. Four of them were clustered close together near the top of the unused belfry, where the carrion hawk had once roosted. They were carving something. A face. A very recognizable face.

Kress shrieked and ran back inside. He headed for his liquor cabinet.

A sufficient quantity of drink brought him the easy oblivion he sought. But he woke. Despite everything, he woke. He had a terrific headache, and he stank, and he was hungry. Oh, so very hungry! He had never been so hungry.

Kress knew it was not his own stomach hurting.

A white sandking watched him from atop the dresser in his bedroom, its antennae moving faintly. It was as big as the one in the skimmer the night before. He tried not to shrink away. “I’ll . . . I’ll feed you,” he said to it. “I’ll feed you.” His mouth was horribly dry, sandpaper-dry. He licked his lips and fled from the room.

The house was full of sandkings; he had to be careful where he put his feet. They all seemed busy on errands of their own. They were making modifications in his house, burrowing into or out of his walls, carving things. Twice he saw his own likeness staring out at him from unexpected places. The faces were warped, twisted, livid with fear.

He went outside to get the bodies that had been rotting in the yard, hoping to appease the white maw’s hunger. They were gone, both of them. Kress remembered how easily the mobiles could carry things many times their own weight.

It was terrible to think that the maw was still hungry after all of that.

When Kress reentered the house, a column of sandkings was wending its way down the stairs. Each carried a piece of his shambler. The head seemed to look at him reproachfully as it went by.

Kress emptied his freezers, his cabinets, everything, piling all the food in the house in the center of his kitchen floor. A dozen whites waited to take it away. They avoided the frozen food, leaving it to thaw in a great puddle, but carried off everything else.

When all the food was gone, Kress felt his own hunger pangs abate just a bit, though he had not eaten a thing. But he knew the respite would be short-lived. Soon the maw would be hungry again. He had to feed it.

Kress knew what to do. He went to his communicator. “Malada,” he began casually when the first of his friends answered, “I’m having a small party tonight. I realize this is terribly short notice, but I hope you can make it. I really do.”

He called Jad Rakkis next, and then the others. By the time he had finished, five of them had accepted his invitation. Kress hoped that would be enough.

Kress met his guests outside—the mobiles had cleaned up remarkably quickly, and the grounds looked almost as they had before the battle—and walked them to his front door. He let them enter first. He did not follow.

When four of them had gone through, Kress finally worked up his courage. He closed the door behind his latest guest, ignoring the startled exclamations that soon turned into shrill gibbering, and sprinted for the skimmer the man had arrived in. He slid in safely, thumbed the startplate, and swore. It was programmed to lift only in response to its owner’s thumbprint, of course.

Rakkis was the next to arrive. Kress ran to his skimmer as it set down and seized Rakkis by the arm as he was climbing out. “Get back in, quickly,” he said, pushing. “Take me to the city. Hurry, Jad. Get out of here!”

But Rakkis only stared at him and would not move. “Why, what’s wrong, Simon? I don’t understand. What about your party?”

And then it was too late, because the loose sand all around them was stirring, and the red eyes were staring at them, and the mandibles were clacking. Rakkis made a choking sound and moved to get back in his skimmer, but a pair of mandibles snapped shut about his ankle, and suddenly he was on his knees. The sand seemed to boil with subterranean activity. Rakkis thrashed and cried terribly as they tore him apart. Kress could hardly bear to watch.

After that, he did not try to escape again. When it was all over, he cleaned out what remained in his liquor cabinet and got extremely drunk. It would be the last time he would enjoy that luxury, he knew. The only alcohol remaining in the house was stored down in the wine cellar.

Kress did not touch a bite of food the entire day, but he fell asleep feeling bloated, sated at last, the awful hunger vanquished. His last thoughts before the nightmares took him were about whom he could ask out tomorrow.

Morning was hot and dry. Kress opened his eyes to see the white sandking on his dresser again. He shut his eyes again quickly, hoping the dream would leave him. It did not, and he could not go back to sleep, and soon he found himself staring at the thing.

He stared for almost five minutes before the strangeness of it dawned on him; the sandking was not moving.

The mobiles could be preternaturally still, to be sure. He had seen them wait and watch a thousand times. But always there was some motion about them: The mandibles clacked, the legs twitched, the long, fine antennae stirred and swayed.

But the sandking on his dresser was completely still.

Kress rose, holding his breath, not daring to hope. Could it be dead? Could something have killed it? He walked across the room.

The eyes were glassy and black. The creature seemed swollen, somehow, as if it were soft and rotting inside, filling up with gas that pushed outward at the plates of white armor.

Kress reached out a trembling hand and touched it.

It was warm; hot even, and growing hotter. But it did not move.

He pulled his hand back, and as he did, a segment of the sandking’s white exoskeleton fell away from it. The flesh beneath was the same color, but softer-looking, swollen and feverish. And it almost seemed to throb.

Kress backed away and ran to the door.

Three more white mobiles lay in his hall. They were all like the one in his bedroom.

He ran down the stairs, jumping over sandkings. None of them moved. The house was full of them, all dead, dying, comatose, whatever. Kress did not care what was wrong with them. Just so they could not move.

He found four of them inside his skimmer. He picked them up, one by one, and threw them as far as he could. Damned monsters. He slid back in, on the ruined half-eaten seats, and thumbed the startplate.

Nothing happened.

Kress tried again and again. Nothing. It wasn’t fair. This was his skimmer. It ought to start. Why wouldn’t it lift? He didn’t understand.

Finally he got out and checked, expecting the worst. He found it. The sandkings had torn apart his gravity grid. He was trapped. He was still trapped.

Grimly Kress marched back into the house. He went to his gallery and found the antique ax that had hung next to the throwing sword he had used on Cath m’Lane. He set to work. The sandkings did not stir even as he chopped them to pieces. But they splattered when he made the first cut, the bodies almost bursting. Inside was awful; strange half-formed organs, a viscous reddish ooze that looked almost like human blood, and the yellow ichor.

Kress destroyed twenty of them before he realized the futility of what he was doing. The mobiles were nothing, really Besides, there were so many of them. He could work for a day and night and still not kill them all.

He had to go, down into the wine cellar and use the ax on the maw.

Resolute, he started toward the cellar. He got within sight of the door, then stopped.

It was not a door anymore. The walls had been eaten away, so that the hole was twice the size it had been, and round. A pit, that was all. There was no sign that there had ever been a door nailed shut over that black abyss.

A ghastly, choking, fetid odor seemed to come from below.

And the walls were wet and bloody and covered with patches of white fungus.

And worst, it was breathing.

Kress stood across the room and felt the warm wind wash over him as it exhaled, and he tried not to choke, and when the wind reversed direction, he fled.

Back in the living room he destroyed three more mobiles and collapsed. What was happening? He didn’t understand.

Then he remembered the only person who might understand. Kress went to his communicator again, stepped on a sandking in his haste, and prayed fervently that the device still worked.

When Jala Wo answered, he broke down and told her everything.

She let him talk without interruption, no expression save for a slight frown on her gaunt, pale face. When Kress had finished, she said only, “I ought to leave you there.”

Kress began to blubber. “You can’t. Help me, I’ll pay—”

“I ought to,” Wo repeated, “but I won’t.”

“Thank you,” Kress said. “Oh, thank—”

“Quiet,” said Wo. “Listen to me. This is your own doing. Keep your sandkings well, and they are courtly ritual warriors. You turned yours into something else, with starvation and torture. You were their god. You made them what they are. That maw in your cellar is sick, still suffering from the wound you gave it. It is probably insane. Its behavior is . . . unusual.

“You have to get out of there quickly. The mobiles are not dead, Kress. They are dormant. I told you the exoskeleton falls off when they grow larger. Normally, in fact, it falls off much earlier. I have never heard of sandkings growing as large as yours while still in the insectoid stage. It is another result of crippling the white maw, I would say. That does not matter.

“What matters is the metamorphosis your sandkings are now undergoing. As the maw grows, you see, it gets progressively more intelligent. Its psionic powers strengthen, and its mind becomes more sophisticated, more ambitious. The armored mobiles are useful enough when the maw is tiny and only semisentient, but now it needs better servants, bodies with more capabilities. Do you understand? The mobiles are all going to give birth to a new breed of sandking. I can’t say exactly what it will look like. Each maw designs its own, to fit its perceived needs and desires. But it will be biped, with four arms and opposable thumbs. It will be able to construct and operate advanced machinery. The individual sandkings will not be sentient. But the maw will be very sentient indeed.”

Kress was gaping at Wo’s image on the viewscreen. “Your workers,” he said, with an effort. “The ones who came out here . . . who installed the tank . . .”

Wo managed a faint smile. “Shade,” she said.

“Shade is a sandking,” Kress repeated numbly “And you sold me a tank of . . . of . . . infants, ah . . .”

“Do not be absurd,” Wo said. “A first-stage sandking is more like a sperm than like an infant. The wars temper and control them in nature. Only one in a hundred reaches the second stage. Only one in a thousand achieves the third and final plateau and becomes like Shade. Adult sandkings are not sentimental about the small maws. There are too many of them, and their mobiles are pests.” She sighed.

“And all this talk wastes time. That white sandking is going to waken to full sentience soon. It is not going to need you any longer, and it hates you, and it will be very hungry. The transformation is taxing. The maw must eat enormous amounts both before and after. So you have to get out of there. Do you understand?”

“I can’t,” Kress said. “My skimmer is destroyed, and I can’t get any of the others to start. I don’t know how to reprogram them. Can you come out for me?”

“Yes,” said Wo. “Shade and I will leave at once, but it is more than two hundred kilometers from Asgard to you, and there is equipment that we will need to deal with the deranged sandking you’ve created. You cannot wait there. You have two feet. Walk. Go due east, as near as you can determine, as quickly as you can. The land out there is pretty desolate. We can find you easily with an aerial search, and you’ll be safely away from the sandkings. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Kress said. “Yes, oh, yes.”

They signed off, and he walked quickly toward the door. He was halfway there when he heard the noise, a sound halfway between a pop and a crack.

One of the sandkings had split open. Four tiny hands covered with pinkish-yellow blood came up out of the gap and began to push the dead skin aside.

Kress began to run.

He had not counted on the heat.

The hills were dry and rocky. Kress ran from the house as quickly as he could, ran until his ribs ached and his breath was coming in gasps. Then he walked, but as soon as he had recovered, he began to run again. For almost an hour he ran and walked, ran and walked, beneath the fierce, hot sun. He sweated freely and wished that he had thought to bring some water, and he watched the sky in hopes of seeing Wo and Shade.

He was not made for this. It was too hot and too dry, and he was in no condition. But he kept himself going with the memory of the way the maw had breathed and the thought of the wriggling little things that by now were surely crawling all over his house. He hoped Wo and Shade would know how to deal with them.

He had his own plans for Wo and Shade.

It was all their fault, Kress had decided, and they would suffer for it. Lissandra was dead, but he knew others in her profession. He would have his revenge. This he promised himself a hundred times as he struggled and sweated his way eastward.

At least he hoped it was east. He was not that good at directions, and he wasn’t certain which way he had run in his initial panic, but since then he had made an effort to bear due east, as Wo had suggested.

When he had been running for several hours, with no sign of rescue, Kress began to grow certain that he had miscalculated his direction.

When several more hours passed, he began to grow afraid. What if Wo and Shade could not find him? He would die out here. He hadn’t eaten in two days, he was weak and frightened, his throat was raw for want of water. He couldn’t keep going. The sun was sinking now, and he’d be completely lost in the dark. What was wrong? Had the sandkings eaten Wo and Shade? The fear was on him again, filling him, and with it a great thirst and a terrible hunger. But Kress kept going. He stumbled now when he tried to run, and twice he fell. The second time he scraped his hand on a rock, and it came away bloody. He sucked at it as he walked, and he worried about infection.

The sun was on the horizon behind him. The ground grew a little cooler, for which Kress was grateful. He decided to walk until last light and settle down for the night. Surely he was far enough from the sandkings to be safe, and Wo and Shade would find him come morning.

When he topped the next rise, he saw the outline of a house in front of him.

It wasn’t as big as his own house, but it was big enough. It was habitation, safety. Kress shouted and began to run toward it. Food and drink, he had to have nourishment, he could taste the meal already. He was aching with hunger. He ran down the hill toward the house, waving his arms and shouting to the inhabitants. The light was almost gone now, but he could still make out a half-dozen children playing in the twilight. “Hey there,” he shouted. “Help, help.”

They came running toward him.

Kress stopped suddenly. “No,” he said, “oh, no. Oh, no.” He backpedaled, slipped on the sand, got up, and tried to run again. They caught him easily. They were ghastly little things with bulging eyes and dusky orange skin. He struggled, but it was useless. Small as they were, each of them had four arms, and Kress had only two.

They carried him toward the house. It was a sad, shabby house, built of crumbling sand, but the door was quite large, and dark, and it breathed. That was terrible, but it was not the thing that set Simon Kress to screaming. He screamed because of the others, the little orange children who came crawling out of the castle, and watched impassively as he passed.

All of them had his face.

KER-PLOP

Ted Reynolds

Mr. Reynolds, who lives in Ann Arbor MI, now admits familiarity with three more archipelagoes: the Cooks, the Bahamas, and the Marshalls.

I.

“I am your examiner,” said the little man on the far side of the bare desk.

Checker Pilot Cotter Oren would have risen to attention, but it was null-grav, he was strapped into his chair, and he was far too weary anyway. He contented himself with a deferential nod. All he knew of the other was that he was Oren’s superior, and that it was better to answer his questions as accurately as possible. He only hoped he wouldn’t fall asleep in the middle of the interrogation.

The examiner looked up; he was gaunt for a Randarian, unstriking except for his eyes, which showed at once both piercing and wistful.

“Item,” he said abruptly: “you have made a most unusual and difficult journey, for which you will eventually receive full recognition and congratulations, but there is no time for that now. We must evaluate the implications of what you have experienced without loss of time.

“Item: don’t worry about the relative significance of details. Tell me everything you can come up with. It will be my responsibility to integrate and analyze the data for possible policy decisions, not yours.

“Item: I will not be able to prompt you in any way. Your observations must not be contaminated by what I may think I already know; I want Primary experience.

“Item: you are under hypnosis. Among the other reasons, this is keeping you from succumbing to what would otherwise be intolerable exhaustion.

“Now you may begin. At the beginning, please.”

There was a long pause, while Oren’s gaze roamed the small anonymous room and finally settled upon the examiner.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said at last, “but I haven’t the slightest idea what it is I’m supposed to have done.”

The examiner flashed a warm smile in which all consciousness of rank dissolved. “Of course not,” he said. “That’s part of the hypnosis. Your more recent memories would tend to adulterate the earlier. Don’t fight the hypnosis; it will do the job for you.”

“If you say so,” said Oren, “I’ll try.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. Slowly, like dust at a planetary genesis, a few particles of memory began to collide and cohere. Abruptly they coalesced; his waking view of his luxury suite on Randar 13 sprang into his vision as solid as it had been . . . how long ago?

“I woke up,” he began tentatively, “twenty minutes before the start of my trick. I think maybe I get more and more nervous in my sleep as my watch gets closer, till my nervousness wakes me up automatically on time. Anyway, twenty-to is when I always wake up. Breakfast was ready for me.” He paused. “Seems whole orbits since I’ve had Groogeggs and flaben. Got dressed . . . these clothes . . . in better shape then, of course. Stopped at the Comm-Recept on the stairs to the roof. I’d sent another video in to Randar Central on 4B before I slept. Told them most respectfully that they had to find another checker-pilot at once, or the whole station would collapse under the incoming pile-up. Since Roscalp broke down, me and Hernie and the kid had been working overlapping five-hour shifts, wearing ourselves out, and the ships coming in faster than we could get to them. Suppose one of us went under too. We just couldn’t keep it up much longer. And so on, real polite. I knew there couldn’t be an answer yet. It takes eight hours for light to get in to Randar 4 and back; even if they kicked back their ‘Sorry, old fellow’ right away, it would be another half hour before it got back to 13. But I keep hoping the Board or someone will do something someday about speeding light up a little bit.”

Oren stopped abruptly, realizing that he was merely repeating almost verbatim his not very brilliant thoughts of that earlier time. “You wouldn’t have any pull in a matter like that?” he asked.

“I’m afraid not,” came the other’s voice. “My influence over the physical laws of nature is almost as insignificant as my influence over the Board.”

Oren chuckled, and plunged into his own mind again.

“So, there wasn’t an answer yet. I hurried to my checker-ship, which is always ready on the roof, and if anyone but me ever tries to use it . . . zzzzutt.” He languidly slit his throat with his index finger. “First I had to squeeze into my checker-suit, to make me a superman, and after that into my checker-ship, to make me a god. Those checkers are blamed small, you know. Don’t feel like getting into a ship, more like climbing into a second oversize suit. I guess it’s really not a ship at all; just an outer defense suit, ‘bout three meters long. But Cosmos, friend, does it take you places! Well, I punched the key to lift me to my assigned starting point on automatic, and in a couple of seconds I was ready for duty, a few hundred kiloms off Randar 13. Top half of my view was stars, real nice; lower half viewscreen. Got to handle the controls by touch, of course. Can’t possibly see them.”

And now, his surroundings forgotten in the grip of the hypnosis, Cotter Oren again effectively lived his memories.

II.

So below all those beautiful stars flicked on the noticeably-less-beautiful face of Flyn Rose, my Controller. Like all his breed, he’s a jerk—gets such a kick out of sending guys places no one’s asking them to go themselves.

Rose looked up from his control board down on Randar 13, and winked at me. Then he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, so no one could hear but the half-dozen stations that constantly monitor our contact. “How about taking a few minutes for a leaf, old boy? I’m feeling real mellow today.”

I didn’t feel like kidding. “Come off it, Flyn. What’s come in already?”

“Kinda impatient to get to work up there, Cot?” And Rose, ignoring his own viewscreen, leaned back in his swivel chair to gaze upward. “I can see you through the skylight, you know. One of the fainter and less aesthetic stars of my zenith. Yet within that orb there breathes a spirit so dedicated to his task of welcoming the galaxy’s wanderers to Randar . . . no, I simply cannot grasp it. Inside, you must be as work-shy, and planet-hungry, as the rest of us. Come down from yonder heights, oh rover . . .”

Cosmos, he’d go on like that forever if I let him. “When they bust me to gravity—like one Controller I could name—and not until. I draw ten times your pay, Flyn, and you know it.”

“Sadly true. Then your munificence will rinse our impoverished gullet this coming pre-sleep, right?”

“If you don’t know, ask someone intelligent . . . is there anything in?”

Rose didn’t need his clip-board. “Oh, things are a tiny bit piled up, is all. Let’s see, now.” As he recited, views, ports, distances, transit times, tonnages, population estimates, ship layouts paraded across the screens behind him. “An S.N. Cruiser waiting at Coordinate 1, from some star called Mike’s Hangover, for the love of Man; 740 light years off and 753 years en route. Some two-man yacht in Coordinate 4, from Irango, 17 light years, of course. A hulk from off in the Spider Web somewheres, 3000 light years; but the way she’s pitted, I doubt me much of any survivors. That’s in Coord 11. None of them have signalled us except with the automatic come-out identification signals, so you’ll just have to enter blind; as always. Wait, another just came in—Coord 9. And here comes the identification . . . AND it’s from 350 light years, Pellidee.” His snub nose wrinkled. “Cosmos, who named these places?”

Less I couldn’t have cared. “A little piled up, the man says. Who’s wasting time spewing vacuum when we’re four ships behind?”

Rose looked up sharply. “Cotter, what are you doing twiddling your heels up there? You’re on the job, man. On that Irango yacht on the double. Coord 4—jump, checker!”

I jumped. Jumping, I swore. I knew Flyn was doing his job well; the adrenalin he pumped into me during the seemingly wasted first few minutes would keep me working at double speed the rest of the watch. But, holy nova, someday I’ll twist his neck for good!

My conscious throttling of Flyn Rose did not prevent my hand from automatically punching the button for off-Coordinate 4. The checker-ship did the rest. The heavily packed stars slewed around me in a vast circle, and for a fraction of a second the ship’s nose hung in a steady point just over Randar 13’s darkly cutting horizon. Then everything outside flickered like a child’s shifting splinter-crystal, and I was a third of a second and a hundred thousand kilometers straight ahead of myself, hovering at one of the 24 prearranged work locations—Coordinate 4. Or, more exactly, off-Coordinate 4, because if I were so dumb as to aim for the Coord itself, I’d find myself amalgamating at light-speed with the yacht that was already there. No, and I thank you.

I rotated the checker-ship until I could catch sight of the yacht, stabilized where the detractor beams had braked it from light to local zero in zero squared. The occupants, if any there were, hadn’t jumped on their chance to communicate with the outside for the first time in seventeen years. I behooved myself to caution. A checker-pilot can get so involved with the complications of the multi-generation flights that he starts to forget that even a single-generation one can generate some oddities. There was that lunatic from Grome just 2 light years away—you can’t find a shorter hop than that—who took a laser to me on the impression that I had turned the stars out on him.

Why anyone would want to spend two or seventeen years, or a whole life, in one of those insulated flasks is sure beyond me; the way I see it, if you’re born in a stellar system, you better accept being stuck with that one. What in Cosmos is the use of spending half your life in isolation to get to one of the few near systems you might reach in person, when you’re an old man, and there’s likely nothing any better there than what you left behind? And what in a cubed Cosmos is the sense of voluntarily accepting life confinement on a real trip, in a sealed capsule you’ll die in, so your umptieth descendants can land on a planet for which they’re totally unadjusted, and will only be homesick for the good old ship again? And of course, once you start, there’s no changing of the mind; like it or not, dead or alive, when the course has been set for a destination, that’s where that ship’s going to go.

They say that way back in the times of the Anarchate, crews could decide to stop anywhere they wanted to. Maybe that’s one reason there isn’t an Anarchate any longer. Rose told me once that on the original worlds, men used to think that if the speed of light couldn’t be broken, man could never populate the Galaxy. So they worked and worked on finding flaws in the light-speed equations. And found them—in the wrong place. C-limitation held; it was time-dilation for subjective consciousness that didn’t. A light-year was going to feel like a year, however you went about it. For a while, that seemd to kill it. Item of faith; the Galaxy is too big for Man.

Rose said the two things they didn’t count on were the great length of time they’d have to do it in, and the stupid perversity of humanity.

And there are still a lot of the stupidly perverse around, judging from the constant influx of ships to Randar. Of course, Randar used to be a Galactic Control Center, or something, back before the ‘Tween-Times, though now it’s just one of the 60,000 or whatever thoroughly populated systems. There must have been more traffic through Randar then, I suppose, but they probably had better checking facilities too.

Not that I draw my pay for thinking so much. By this time I’d already spotted the silver speck of my target, centered nose on to it, and punched APPROACH. That flicker again, and I was floating the standard four meters off the yacht’s hull.

It was a small two-man model, about a hundred meters along the thicker axis. I knew the type; Irango’s close enough that the ship styles haven’t diverged much anyway. Everything looked in order; the airlock had jutted out automatically when the yacht was trapped in the shipnet. I punched LINKAGE, and my faithful checker-ship swung around the other hull at a constant four-meter distance until directly over the airlock, then dropped to clip on. I went through the routine. Checker-ship defenses on; nothing short of a direct neutron blast, if that, would faze it. Personal defenses on; I was similarly protected. Yacht’s air breathable, not that I’d have to sample it myself; and airlock open.

Squirming backward out of my tiny projectile, I floated ungracefully feet-first into the yacht.

The passageway I entered was deserted—normal, quiet, even almost clean. (Most ships tend to disintegrate, dirtwise.) I pushed off from the bulkhead, ignoring doors to either side. Whatever the size or shape of a ship, its sealsafe will always be in the precise center; it’s the only topographical point every ship has. There was no need for stealthy glances over my shoulder—I had the confidence which comes from carrying more defensive apparatus than that allowed a Galax-cruiser of the S.N.

I swung open the heavy metal door at the end of the radial corridor, and looked into the ship’s bridge. It was cluttered with furniture and controls, mostly of molded ceramics with luxury wood fittings; garish. It was only on the second sweep of my eyes that I caught sight of the man slumped in a swivel chair before the viewscreen, staring at the image of Randar 13, limbs drifting to either side in the free-fall equivalent of a relaxed sprawl.

“ ‘Lo,” I said politely. “Mind if I monitor your sealsafe?”

Not that I wasn’t going to anyway, but no need to be rude about it. The only response, however, was a possible accentuation of the slump.

I didn’t have time to waste, so I crossed to the sealsafe in its central mounting. It’s a small black cube, about two centimeters on a side. I got a duplicate from my suit’s chest-cache, examined each surface, chose the proper one, and pressed it to the top of the yacht’s sealsafe. The little click was audible as transfer began.

There was a short silence, and then the man in the chair opened his mouth. He tried to speak, and made a sound like rust-coated tonsils. He stopped with his mouth open, and for a moment I could see his tongue rising slowly in freefall. Then he got it under control and tried again.

“Stars . . . sure pretty.”

“You haven’t seen ’em for seventeen years, maybe. See stars on the job all cycle like me, get pretty sick of them.”

He tried again. “Nice planet you got there.”

“If you like minus 227 degrees outdoors.”

That shut him up for a while. I waited for the transfer to be completed. That’s the longest part of the job; it’s quicker to get out to a ship and back than to monitor its sealsafe. The fellow was eager to communicate, though. They’re all that way—except the ones who try to extinguish me. Anyway, he tried again.

“What’re you doing?”

“Monitoring your sealsafe.” He looked blank. “This little gizmo. When you left Irango, they inserted up-to-date records in here. I’m getting them out. The Analysts will use them to bring our knowledge of what’s happened in Irango up to time-space present.”

“Up to what?”

I blinked at such ignorance, and then realized he must have been just a kid at departure. Seventeen years was a long time to remember things anyway. “Time-space present, fellow. Up to the latest possible time you can know anything—its distance from you in light speed measured as past time. In your case, up to seventeen years ago. We won’t know what’s happening on Irango now until seventeen years from now. We’ll know what’s happening now along the periphery when the sealsafes sent out now get here in another five thousand odd years. Simple enough?”

“I didn’t know what it was,” said the other. “Tried to take it apart some years back with a torch . . . had a lot of time to kill.”

I chuckled at the unfamiliar idiom. “Impossible and undesirable, fellow. Couldn’t dent this thing with anything from a laser to a krotie blast. You know, there are cases of ships absolutely blown into their component atoms by reactor backfire, and nothing came on into the terminal shiptrap nets except the seal-safe.” It was a ludicrous yarn, but indicated some of the facts. “And undesirable, especially for you, ’cause if you’d come in without it, we’d know at once, and blow you into little tiny bits soonest.”

“Huh! Why’s that?”

The reason involving another function of the sealsafe not for general consumption, I skipped over the matter, saying, “It’s done clear across the inhabited Galaxy, from Leidul to Olva; and it’s been customary under the Amalgamate, and before, during the ‘Tween-times, and before that, during the Anarchate. You are questioning 64,000 worlds and a half a million years?” The seal-safe clicked again, and I scooped up my duplicate cube. “So long. Be good.” I started off.

Cosmos, but the guy exploded. “Wait!” He scrabbled for a moment, and managed to jerk himself erect. “Aren’t you the cold one! Damn it, you’re the first man I’ve seen in half my life. Welcome me! Shake my hand or something. And get my feet on a planet.” His arm was jutting out towards me like a piston. I grabbed it and pumped a bit.

“Sorry, ol’ fellow, but I really do have to be on my way. It’s just that I’m awfully rushed, and actually, I’m not supposed to be the welcoming committee. Customs will board you as soon as I leave, and they’re just swell guys. If you don’t need a lot of rehabilitation, you can be in-system and down-planet in a few days. And you look fine to me, considering you’ve been all alone.”

“I had a partner when I started,” he admitted, hanging his head in embarrassment. “We were totally incompatible. I killed her three years out of Irango.”

“These things happen,” I consoled. “Don’t worry. Randar doesn’t care about en route activities.” I turned to go, then thought of something. “Oh, fellow, just don’t kill anybody in this system. There’s some law against it. It can be mean.”

His eyes transluced a bit, and I decided I was pushing him too fast. Wasn’t my job anyway. Let Customs and Quarantine rehabilitate and orient him. I smiled, waved, pushed off down the corridor. He collapsed into his chair again, and glumly watched me out of sight.

III.

I felt rushed for time as I squeezed out of the airlock, which is nothing new. The ships keep coming in as fast as we can check them. The only thing that would help, I thought, as I detached the checker-ship from the yacht’s airlock, would be more checker-pilots, and there just aren’t the men with the capability. Oh, I suppose there are hundreds, or anyway dozens, of men in the system with the technical ability and all for the job. It’s the other aspect. It’s not enough to be smart about the right things; you’ve got to be dumb about the wrong things. Here you’re putting a fellow in a defensive ship and suit that just has to be impervious to any weapon known to man, and giving him weapons that are just bound to destroy any defense known to man (yes, I’ve been tempted, and no, I haven’t Z-beamed my Q-screen) and then you don’t want him to take over the whole system. I don’t know that I could take over Randar with my ship and suit, and don’t know why anyone drawing my salary would want to. Enough is all I can consume.

But it seems I’m deviant on this. At any rate, the psy-guys who accepted me reject over ninety percent of the otherwise qualified candidates on the grounds that they’d do just that, or be tempted to. I guess I’m just too nice for that. I guess I’m just too dumb..

By this time, I’d keyed the HOMING switch, and dropped in a second down to the surface of Randar 13, straight into my homing slot at light speed, where the shiptrap detractors stopped me from smashing on through the planet. Shoving the transfer cube out of the ship into the tube which would pull it into Security, I received an unused one in exchange, and shot myself into space again. Slapped on the viewscreen. “Irango at Coord 4 clear,” I told Rose. “Number 2 Boarding Routine, and a couple weeks Rehab should take care of him.”

“And something else had come in during your dawdles,” snapped Rose. “Take a look at Coordinate 9 at once.”

“What’s in there?”

“We don’t know. When it slapped into the net a few minutes back, it set up a deafening squeal straight across all the normal operating wave-lengths—sort of yelling ‘Me first, me first!’ Take it on priority, so we can function again. Coord 9.”

“Where’s it from, Flyn?”

“Can’t be where it says it’s from, Cotter. On the double!”

So I doubled.

A few seconds later, delay caused by needing to hop twice to clear the planet, I was at off-Coordinate 9. The shiptrap net should have braked the new intruder to zero just ten kilometers ahead of me. But I could see nothing likely against the star-splattered blackdrop. I waited a moment, scanning across the far sparks of the suns, my irritation growing. By this time I should have built up quite a bit of drop towards the planet under gravity; any object out there should have stuck out clearly in reverse against the sky. Impatiently, I pointed directly into the Coordinate itself, and pushed APPROACH. The ship jumped; and still there was nothing. Which was ridiculous, as I must now be within four meters of something, or I wouldn’t have come to a stop at all short of the end of my leash.

Then I almost exploded in laughter. A couple of meters ahead of me, revolving about itself in solemn circles, floated the troublemaker—a small pod, some meter long. I slid down my ship’s grabhole, and extended my arm towards the pod. It was just beyond reach. Withdrawing my arm, I realized the ludicrousness of the situation.

Four meters was the nearest the APPROACH system would let me come to any material object, my arm was some deal shorter than that, and obviously this little pod had no airlock onto which to connect. And if anyone has ever figured out how to advance precisely three meters forward at 300,000 kilometers a second, the method has yet to be built into my checker-ship. So having come all the way out here to get to this thing, how was I to get at it?

I was baffled a moment, and then—“when in doubt, freeze up”—followed through with routine. I pushed LINKAGE. My little ship orbited in a neat semi-circle about the little pod, and then drifted in towards it as if it were just another spaceliner. The pod and checker gently bumped, and the pod silently burst into two halves at the axis. In the hollow floated a small silver cube. I reached out my suited hand and scooped it in. And that was that.

Turning ship, I struck down for the homing slot, made the cube transfer and was in space again on the rebound. It was just beginning to come home to me that something had come across space at light speeds to Randar—with no apparent source of motive power. Well, there must be specialists for it, I decided, out of my jurisdiction now.

Rose was on screen again. “Well enough, Cotter. Now back to routine. S.N. Cruiser from Mike’s Hangover, 740 LY flight, Coord 1.”

“Am doing. Remind someone to remove that little rascal at 9. It’s no ten-thousand-manner, but it could sure make a neat little hole in the next ship coming in to that Coord.”

“Thanks, Cot. Someone’s already on it,” he said. He sounded subdued. Usually he’d remind me to stick to my own duties.

I slapped for off-Coordinate 1, and my ship leaped. You know, I used to think they were called checker-ships because they jumped. That’s ’cause there’s a board game, very old and traditional in my clan, with pieces called checkers that jump. Of course now I realize it’s the other way round—the game must have been named for the ships. But that’s both there and then.

At least the Space Navy ship was plainly visible from the off-Coordinate. Over a kilometer across, she hung in the blackness like a minor moon. I looked the hull over, noting worse pitting than the familiar moons of Randar 2, and felt somewhat dubious about survivors. Still, I saw no actual breaks, and even where there have been, I’ve found tenacious incumbents hanging on . . . though usually I’d rather not have. Anyway, regular precautions were in order.

In the cruiser’s rotation, the markings on the bow spindle were swinging into view. I stepped up the magnification and sighed, as a pleasant illusion was shattered. Letters in Old Northern script, long superceded here, proclaimed that the ship was the S.N. Biphotonic from Maixa Nova. Too bad—“Mike’s Hangover” had sounded like more fun. I reached for the comtrans, but never keyed it. Rose appeared suddenly on my screen. He looked real bad.

“All right, Cotter, the rest of your schedule is cancelled. Report to Central Headquarters at once.”

“What are you talking about, Rose?” I asked in confusion, and then, as an awful light seemed to dawn, “What did I do this time?”

“I said to CHQ at once,” snapped Rose. He added, “You’re in the clear. Something real big has come up. Jump!” He was gone.

What the Cosmos! I jumped; but jumping, I seethed and swore.

To get to Headquarters’ Central was a manual job; my checker-ship’s automatics naturally weren’t keyed to that combination. It took several minutes to jockey into a waiting slip on the roof of HQ. They must have expected me. The auto-beams hadn’t tried to blast me down. Though I’ll bet they couldn’t have.

A gang of groundmen in uniform were already racing out to me. They grabbed me and started to drag me along towards the drops. If I’d braked my suit, of course, they’d have had a time budging me, but I was thinking that if I were due for a spanking, it might be as well to keep my suit on.

We proceeded on the double through a series of drops, monos, slides, lifts, and vehicles that made my head spin, and in a couple of minutes were catapulted down a chute into a large hall filled with gadgets, servos, maps, men, and gizmos. I was shoved up to a pudgy officer with braids on his hat and medals on his boots; my captors let go and scattered. The general stood silent and withdrawn, gazing abstractedly just over my head. I waited, and presently his eyes slowly dropped to rest on me. They widened.

“Who are you?” he rasped. “What are you doing in here?”

I wished I knew. I shrugged. His shoulders and cheeks swelled angrily.

“How did you get in here?” he yelled. “Show your authorization at once, man! Where’s your badge?”

I looked over my shoulder. The men who had dragged me in had turned to vacuum. I looked back at the general and smiled in friendly fashion. It didn’t take.

He whirled around. “Guards!” he shouted. “Take this intruder out, and get rid of him. He’s broken security.”

“Cos—cushions, sir,” I interpolated. “I didn’t ask to come here. Your boys brought me off my checking schedule. If I’m not wanted, I’ll get back to it.” I was a bit sore.

He looked at me again, unpuffed himself, and waved the guards off me. “Oh, the checker-fellow. Why didn’t you tell me so at once?” He glared at me. “You almost got shot. You’re going up in just . . . fourteen minutes. Coordinate 7.”

He turned away, forgetting me.

I tried to scratch my head in bewilderment, and gauntlets scraped screechingly across helmet. I desisted. People swarmed around me like bugs in a brush fire. I wandered around looking for a place to sit down, and came across Flyn Rose sitting at a console. With relief, I hurried up to him.

“Give me a clue, Flyn?”

He swivelled to look up at me. “Oh, Cotter. What a mess, hmm? Sorry it had to fall on you, kid.”

“Thanks a lot. Now could you tell me just what has fallen on me?”

“No one really is positive, but it just might be an authentic ship of the Anarchate.”

“Stop kidding. There hasn’t been an Anarchate for a couple hundred thousand years.”

“Correct,” Rose agreed. “Did you notice the general atmosphere in here might suggest some occurrence out of the ordinary run of things? Or did you perchance think this normal headquarters operating procedure?”

“Uh . . . for all I know. But where could an Anarch ship have come from?”

“Heard of the Magellanics?”

“Come off it, Flyn! No one’s ever been to the Clouds. They’re much too far.”

“So we have two impossibilities, you catch? They happen to add up to one actual event.”

I sat on the floor for want of a chair and looked up at Rose pleasantly.

“Tell me all about it, Papa,” I suggested.

“In nine minutes?” asked Rose. He switched into the rapid patter he used while controlling. “The cube you brought in from the pod at Coord 9. It was stuffed with information in dozens of languages, mostly mathematical, which may take us years to sort out. But the lead message was that the pod would be followed within an hour by a ship of the Anarchate, returning from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.”

“Hold on. How could the message be interpreted so soon? I mean, no one knows anything of the Anarchs’ language, do they?”

Rose looked perplexed. “True, but . . . Cot, there’s no time. Take my word on it, there was no mistake about that message. It said the ship was leaving Golgaronok—as they called the Lesser Magellanic—right after the cube. Gave the ship’s size and time of arrival in terms of the period and dimensions of Randar 4—and I guess that hasn’t changed much—and hoped there were still human beings around to greet them on arrival.”

I was out of my depth. I supposed I should say something. I asked, “Does it fit? I have no idea of the distance or the time.”

“Seems to fit. The Magellanics are some one hundred fifty thousand light years off, which means the ship must have left this galaxy some three hundred thousand years ago. We know the Anarchate was functioning up to about two hundred thousand years ago, and there’s no reason to think they hadn’t been in existence at least as long as the Amalgamate, is there?”

“Er . . . I wouldn’t know, Flyn. That was a good many megayears before my ancestors joined the human race.”

Rose looked interested. “I thought you were pure human stock, Oren.”

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t show on me, but most of my clan have only five fingers to a hand. And we’re mainly a lot thinner than most Randarians, you know.”

“That’s not necessarily racial. You do interbreed with other people, don’t you?”

I grinned at him. “We could, but mostly we don’t.”

We both knew we were ignoring the crisis. I appreciated Rose giving my subconscious time to catch up with some of the reality. “Then your ancestors didn’t join the human race, they rejoined,” he said. “They must have been lost relics of the Anarchate during the Tween-Times.”

“I wouldn’t know. I never studied history. There was just too much of it.”

“Don’t blame you,” said Rose, sneaking a look at the clock. “What system did your ancestors come from, any idea?”

“Earth. You might not have heard of it. A star some 200 LY from here called Sun.” He looked blank. “S . . . u . . . n.”

“You’re right. Never heard of it. What about it that I might have heard of? I’ve studied a little history.”

That was a tough one. I thought a bit. All I could think of was tobacco and 64-square board games, both of which are claimed by every planet around.

“Have you ever come across the old 5-7-5 poems,” I asked tentatively. “By ancients called Issa and Basho?”

“Hey, are they from Earth? Basho . . . something about an amphibian, how did it go?”

“It’s supposed to be seventeen syllables in the original, but I can’t stretch it out that long in Randarian. Something like “OLD POND/FROG JUMPS/KER-PLOP.”

“Great stuff,” said Rose. “I guess Earth rates a salute.”

“How much more time?” I asked.

“You were supposed to go two minutes ago. Don’t sweat it. Wait till you’re notified.”

“It’s me they want?”

“You’re available.”

“I’ll cut my carotid.”

“Afterwards, please.”

I tried to sum up. “Then a ship was sent out, say some three hundred kiloyears ago, under the Anarchate, to the Lesser Magel-lanic Cloud. The distant descendants of the original crew got there about one hundred fifty kiloyears ago, while the Galaxy was in the depths of the ‘Tween-Times. Unlikely as it seems, they got there both alive and capable of starting back. And now they—I mean their descendants—come back to the new Amalgamate.”

“Precisely.”

“They’re lucky they didn’t return during the ‘Tweens. No one around to stop them.”

“They couldn’t have returned sooner,” observed Rose. “They’re right up to space-time date. Light only travels so fast.”

That was true, too.

“Maybe they haven’t survived the return,” I mused half wishfully. “A viable ecology population for a trip of that length . . . I wonder how many people it’s made for. What size is it supposed to be?”

Rose swung his chair away from me. “The Anarchate liked doing things to the big scale,” he said briskly. “But your work is the same, for any size ship. Don’t worrry, Cotter.”

“The size, Flyn . . . I asked you the size.”

Rose looked down on me squatting there, something strange back in his eyes. “The ship you are to check,” he said precisely, “is 6000 kilometers radius.”

I remained calm. “You mean,” I said quite as precisely, “it is 6000 meters radius, which is larger than any ship under the Amalgamate.”

“I mean,” and Flyn Rose’s voice reached a degree of precision I would never be able to match, “six thousand kilometers radius period.”

I giggled.

IV.

Then a voice behind me was yelling beautiful obscenities; and there was the puffed general again, asking what idiot let this moron into the imbecilic Headquarters wearing a fornicated checker-suit and didn’t they realize if I scratched I’d blow the place apart. I guess I was pretty formidable. So someone told him again that I was the checker, and he shook my gauntlet and thanked me for my dedication to the service and to get the hell out of there because this thing would be in, in four and a half minutes. Everybody joins in to shove me out on the roof again. Just as we get to the roof some jerk-clerk from Physdiv comes tearing up waving an abacus, and says don’t we all realize a planet-size mass suddenly laying off Randar 13 is going to add a grav-pull which will swing the whole planet right out of orbit, and somebody (me, I could see it coming) has just got to do something about it. His boss comes ripping after him, and says don’t worry, a ship’s mostly space anyway, and hasn’t got a squashed lead core, and knocked the clerk down two stripes on the spot. Everyone’s clapping me on the back, and telling me what a hero I am, and what a snap it’s going to be. And before I can ask why I’m such a hero if it’s such a snap . . .

. . . there I was in the checker-ship, a hundred kilometers off-planet, sighting for off-Coordinate 7, and the heroic grin was already sort of wearing off me. I felt like heading in-system for Randar 11 or 6, and who in Cosmos would blame me? No human born; only the Board.

Some blame fool was yelling, “Keep radio silence. Keep radio silence,” on all wave lengths, till someone snuck up and garrotted him, and there was silence. And there I was, in the silence, slicing up to off-Coord 7, peeling my eyes for the sudden emergence of a planet-sized ship ahead of me, when something in that concept sort of struck me between the eyes; and I stomped on full reverse and jumped back ten thousand kilometers. Not too soon, either; that ship just loomed up and smeared itself over half the sky the second I vacated. I felt like evaporating right out my pores, thinking how it would have been if I’d been way in there at off-Coord 7, just ten kilometers from the central Coordinate itself, when that monster smashed in there.

I wasted several seconds swearing at the whole tribe of idiots back on 13 who hadn’t foreseen this item. That’s when I guess I really got scared. Because then I realized that not only me, but nobody else had had time to think through any of the implications of this yet.

Just then, of course, in excited squeals from my communicator, someone incoherently warned me not to go all the way in to the off-Coordinate. Thanks grounder. Radio silence, remember?

I was trying to recapture my bearings, lost when the universe flopped over two seconds back. IT had definitely arrived. In fact, IT seemed to have taken over completely. I did my best to ignore IT until my mind and belly were in better shape to cope. The instruments were being silly, I couldn’t start with them.

I looked aft and left, caught with relief the familiar crescent of 13, then higher the tiny etched circular halo where my helmet polarized out the solar radiation of the primary. That gave me at least a positional plane, and I came back to my instruments with more sense of reality. The distance indicator showed I had almost 4000 kilometers of empty space around me. In spite of first impressions, I wasn’t on the verge of smashing into IT.

Now I could look back at this new invader. My mind flashed several alternate versions in succession—a vast plain down there, an overhanging stone up there—and settled for a bulging wall out there. It was too big, it was too close, but it was once more just a separate thing within space which I could look at and come to terms with.

As I hung like a mite in space, dominated by that overweeningly presumptuous wall, I realized they’d have to be some terms indeed.

I was through being rushed into this affair. I spent a leisurely thirty seconds giving this thing the once-over, and the twice-over. Big? It was pockmarked with craters you could mislay the whole Headquarters Complex in . . . and they just dimpled its hide. I mean, it was planet-size, even if a minor planet. It was so beat up by running into vacuum at effective light speed that it didn’t look artificial, just a pocky satellite. I scanned vainly for airlocks or cargo hatches, and then realized I was carrying ideas over from my checking of smaller ships. If I could have seen an opening from there, it would have been kilometers across.

While my thoughts ran largely on the asininity of letting myself get in such a situation, my fingers followed routine. They pointed the ship at the monster’s side and punched APPROACH. And there I was, that orthodox four little meters over an expanse of twisted and warped and contorted metal. And it was down all right; my body felt that the instant my ship bumped gently down on the surface.

In front of me an overarching slab of metal framed a dreary landscape, wide and wild to the horizon, of tilted sheets and pointing spires and collapsed domes and canted silvers. No detectable atmosphere, said one little dial brightly. It was out of its element too.

I eyed the communicator, flipped it on. The low, uneven hiss of the Galaxy filled my ears. Nobody was speaking, no one from Randar 13, no one from the visitor. . . . no one was keeping up the usual checking chatter, and that got to me. If they’d called the other checkers off their rounds, they meant it about radio silence. Those incoming ships had to be checked and shunted; there are only 24 slots to fill at 13.

I had been given no instructions, damnitall! It was usually my option to make radio contact with an incomer or not, according to whether I wanted to be expected when I boarded. All rule of thumb. I looked at my thumb; shut up and tiptoe, it said. I agreed and switched off the communicator.

I wanted, now that I was down for a moment, to for once figure out something of what I was going to do before I started doing it. I knew why the brass boys were in a rush; they didn’t want Randar 13 to be blasted out of space. Simple as that. We can feel pretty confident of keeping superiority to all the ships that come in, no matter how belligerent or touchy the occupants. No ship can possess the resources, the industrial complexes, the manpower, to make and keep up an armament array like that kept up in a 14-planet system. Until, just possibly, now. A potentially real rival to Randarian power had appeared on the premises with a bare hour’s warning—and no one had any idea who manned it.

So I was supposed to go ahead and deal with it in the normal mode. The high-uppers were counting on the primary function of the sealsafe. Gaining information from past millenia was highly secondary at the moment; they wanted my transfer cube to fuse the sealsafe, so that at any moment the new arrival could be sealed safe—every energy source within it damped utterly until the occupants could be brought to heel. Thus Randar will remain on the high orbit. As I say, this function isn’t something we chat about everywhere. But it’s the real reason I’ve got to get into every new arrival fast.

But whatever the hurry, if I didn’t get the transfer and sealsafe cubes together, it wasn’t going to do anybody any good. If anyone on this thing was going to start communication by blasting R-13 out of space, I could just better hope they didn’t do it before I could size up the situation in a leisurely way. I wasn’t planning to race in ahead of the angels.

Cautiously, I squirmed backwards out of the checker and rose to my feet. I stood to mid-shin in metallic dust, collected in the hollow of this cup, and scanned the drably twisting horizon. I wondered if I couldn’t legally claim this world as my own by right of first touchdown after the requisite ten-thousand year hiatus. I’d name it—what had Rose said—Golgaronok. A monstrous name for a monstrous beast.

Adjusting my personal gravity control until I was exactly at equilibrium against Golgaronok’s slight pull, I read off the scale: .21 g. Then I slapped my feet against the surface and slowly rose above that surface.

Gradually, the resting checker-ship sank beneath me and my view widened. Stark and jagged, the world ship lay beneath me. I was looking for breaks. I gave up on that when I was high enough to see to the bottom of a crater at least 400 meters deep—and unbroken. The skin of this behemoth was thick! I reset my gravity control to fractional weight and descended again.

Back in my checker-ship, I pondered the procedure for boarding an antique Anarchical ship. I had the vague impression that, as far as possible, the Amalgamate had tried to continue the older checking methods, procedures, and coordinates in every way.

After all, the ‘Tween-Times was only some 90,000 years; and by the time the Amalgamate was forming in this spiral arm, survey ships of the Anarchate were still coming back from the Far Rim. If the present method of entry was based on the old, my LINKAGE button should swing me around Golgaronok until I was over the pulses from the nearest airlock, and then screw me onto threads matching my checker’s. Nothing better occurred to me than to try—or else go exploring over millions of square kilometers of surface for unknown signs—so I reached for the LINKAGE button . . .

And paused.

And imaged myself in the checker-ship bumping and crunching my way over the surface of Golgaronok to the nearest airlock. Better think a little more.

Couldn’t lift forward with that bulge hanging in front. And behind . . . rear-viewing, I shuddered; I had come to ‘ground’ in the hollow of a kind of Klein Bottle. I thought some more. Ship won’t move sideways—can’t swing it while lying on this surface—what about . . .? I reached for APPROACH. Sort of in reverse, but . . .

Better think it through.. . . All right.

I pushed APPROACH, the proximity adjuster sprang into action, and the ship lifted me neatly four meters off the surface. Before grav could pull me down again, I had leaped ten miles out.

Now LINKAGE. Think .. . push.

The checker ship swung smoothly around Golgaronok. The rim of Randar 13 rose above the horizon. Well enough, not blasted out yet. I’d hate to think, if it went, of all the good rotgut that would go with it.

Around and around—and then down. I swivelled to look beneath me. From the surface of the ship below, a vastly lengthening pillar was lifting priapously towards me, slowly rearing up hundreds of meters until it touched; rotated; locked .. . silence.

Somehow, I found myself muttering the very words that tradition attributes to the first human rediscoverer of Randar 4, over 50,000 years back. “Damn, I didn’t think I’d make it this far.” Why not? Great minds think in unison, and the great phrase is eternal.

I carefully rechecked the defenses of ship and suit, then tested the air within the airlock. This, my first clue to Golgaronok’s inner conditions, offered both discouragement and relief, real heavy on the relief. Sulphur, methane, ammonia, zinc . . . no trace of oxygen. The atmospheric adjusters must have passed on long ago, and all life with them. My spirits rose perceptibly.

I paused for the next consideration. In a usual boarding, vertical direction didn’t exist; I just pushed into the larger ship in free fall. In this case, I would be swinging the airlock open beneath me—and I didn’t know how far the drop would be. Again I adjusted my gravity control to weightlessness—still .21—then moved the lever and opened the lock beneath me.

Below, the extended tube of the airlock stretched down darkly for hundreds of meters until it framed a tiny pinkish circle in the distance. The light streaming down from my checker lit up a small section of it: hard, bare metal. I examined the sides of the tube, without success, for signs of a ladder. Resetting for fractional weight, I began to drop slowly down the shaft.

As I drifted down, the checker-ship vanishing in gloom above, the pink spot below hardly seeming to approach, I scanned the walls of the shaft. They swam up past me, pitted, encrusted, eroded. At times the blankness was broken by vacant roots of metallic shelves. I looked down; still a long way to drop. Words of an ancient scripture came to mind unbidden, one of the pre-space prophets, “Down, down, down, would the fall never come to an end?”

Gradually the base of the protruding column approached, only to be succeeded by more hundreds of meters of the wider tube from which it had been protruded; the pink spot glowed wider in its own good time, and abruptly I was at the bottom of the shaft. I hovered at null-grav and looked out and down on the vista.

It was . . . oh, it was just incredible.

It was like looking down on another planet through drifting pink clouds. Far down, kilometers below me, loomed ragged contour lines as of ranges of hills—or mountains. This was a ship? Since when did a ship have topography? And meteorological phenomena?

V.

From where I hung like an insect in the sky, curving ceilings spread smoothly out in all directions. And below, the scurrying pink mists. The light glowed evenly everywhere. It was unnerving to hang at such a height, and I moved closer to the shaft wall, but there was no place to grasp. Far down to my right I thought I could see the source of the pink clouds: a huge funnel, from which they rose in puffs, to diffuse out into this expansive space.

Further out, what looked very like a cloudburst was moving over the distant ranges, darkening them in its passage under a downpour of, whatever it was, not water.

It looked as though someone, somewhere in this world vessel, was running at least some of the equipment, because this vast chamber collected waste. I thought I could now figure the purpose of this place. The waste products from the internal chemical and drive processes were spewn into it, and presumably were supposed to be discharged periodically into space through the airlock I had just descended. Yet it didn’t appear to have been emptied for a long, long time. If those hills below were composed, as I believed, of consolidated particles solidifed from this atmosphere, they spoke eloquently of geological aeons.

I searched the area at the bottom of the shaft for the communicator that should be installed here, and found it. It was a pane of shiny glass set into the metal of the wall, untarnished after all the millenia. In it I could see my suited face, and had to grin at its woebegone and put-upon expression.

I can’t say why I decide things. I just have to do what feels right at the time. A while back I had decided to tiptoe quietly into Golaronok, mainly because I didn’t know what I was getting into. Now I decided to take a chance on advertising my presence, and for the same reason: I still didn’t know what I was getting into. And this seemed the time to find out. I thumbed the single stud beneath the glass.

There was a flickering, deep back in the glass, and my own reflection faded, to be replaced by the slowly crystallizing image of an elderly man with wrinkled canvas face, penetrating eyes, and a patch on his coveralls bearing the haphazardly meaningless non-symbol of the Anarchate—no two were supposed to have been alike. His eyes bored into mine. He spoke. It was absolutely incomprehensible.

“XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”

He paused, and repeated. I couldn’t wrench my eyes from his gaze, and this time I at least caught the syllabic structure of his words.

“Olastra konestai forsein kal undus merd.”

He waited and said it again, his eyes still fixed on mine. And somehow it struck me that undus must be a form of “to teach,” and konestai of “language.”

Again he paused and repeated. This time I understood him to say, “I shall teach you the basic kal of my language”; and even before he had repeated the sentence for the fifth time, I had figured out by myself that the word kal must mean principles.

The next pause was longer, but I was entranced with delight at this tutorial technique. How much study I could have saved with this approach to linguistics!

His next speech was slow and took about a minute. Again it sounded meaningless, except that the sounds interlinked and penetrated one another in a way that seemed not altogether nonsense—no more so than math or music, at least. When he finally stopped, eyes still fixed on me as I hovered before him, and then resumed speaking, it was in a conversational tone; and I understood him so naturally I thought for an instant he was speaking Standard Amalgamate.

“I have now given you the basic principles of our tongue,” he said with a smile. “It is totally based on the simple mnemonic correlates I have just fed into your subconscious, and all its further structure and syntax and vocabulary are built up by procedural steps which, being in one-to-one correspondence with the human synapses, can be carried out by your brain as well as by mine—assuming, as I hope, that you are human. Now that you comprehend what sound patterns correlate with various basic mental units, you should have no difficulty in understanding me. I wish I would be able to understand you, but as I shall have died in Magellanic Lesser some 150 millenia before you receive this message—” he grinned wryly “that, I fear, will not be possible.”

I was not watching a present individual, then, but an image from forever ago. I listened as the old man continued.

“It would be natural for you to anticipate a communications device at this spot, assuming that this is the airlock you have chosen to enter. I do not know, of course, if you are an official checker of the type we are accustomed to employ, a chance visitor, an armed raiding party. I do not know if you have heard of the Anarchs, or if we are now no longer even a memory, or if Man himself still survives in the Home Galaxy. But we have wanted to do all in our power to assure that, whatever the circumstances, the meeting between you who were left behind, and we who are wandering back from the Magellanic, goes smoothly and happily to both sides. We have wanted,” and how complexly precise was the verb form he actually used and I understood, “we have wanted to make the conditions fair for yourselves as well as for our own distant descendants. We really would not know, were there to be any real or supposed conflicts of interest, which of you to back. For we do not know what you shall have become in the 300,000 years since our separation. Nor can we be certain of the condition of our own descendants 150,000 years hence. They also may have progressed, may have stagnated, or deteriorated. But, perhaps without sufficient reason, we in some ways have been able to feel that we can be more sure of their future, which we are now planning for, than of yours, which has long been beyond our control. For protection of yourselves, should our descendants prove regressive, or the lines of progress too diverse for reconciliation, we have provided certain defenses. Of one I may speak; they will not be able to leave this ship until you on the outside have accepted them. There is a Barrier. On the other hand, you from outside will be permitted to enter at will; but you will be unable to introduce weapons. There is a Barrier.

“I wish I could go so far as to assure you that you are welcome to enter without personal danger to yourselves, but that I cannot do. If our descendants have not rejected the heritage we are passing on to them, they shall welcome you and, whoever you may be, strive to give and to receive the fruit of what our two branches of humanity may have separately achieved and become. But one would be irrational who tried to speak with assurance of the behavior of his offspring of the 6000th generation. Whoever you are, wherever you came from, consider this: what has happened to your line of descent in the past 150,000 years?” He paused, as if expecting a response. I had none.

“So enter if you will, but enter with due caution,” said the image. “We hope our arrangements have made it impossible for you to harm the people of the ship, or for them to harm at least those of you who remain outside the Barrier. More we cannot do.”

His voice grew more informal. “Now you won’t easily be able to go straight down from here.” His image faded and was replaced by a schematic diagram. “After departure, this air-lock antechamber is slated to become a waste-deposit area.”

A pulsing blob of light must indicate my present position. I strained to make sense of the tightly cross-hatched lines, following perspective conventions I couldn’t quite grasp.

“Remember,” the old man was continuing, “you have a long way to go yet. You can descend most quickly—unless things have changed more than we hope—by taking the passage which will open behind you on completion of this message.” The view of the schematic drew back, and a glowing line extended itself from the blob, as more complexities flowed into view. I tried to memorize as rapidly as possible as the route wove through gathering webs of multi-colored lines.

“In about one ten-thousandth of the circumference of the Ship you will arrive at a shaft, down which you may drop for about half that distance.” The line stopped moving and red-shifted sharply .. . representing vertical descent?

“I cannot advise you of the geography or ecology of individual floors, as they are due for periodic change, but the stairs down to the elevators should remain; on the stairs you will meet the Barrier. Deposit your weapons and defenses there; they will be kept safely for your return.” The view had continued to retreat. By now it must be covering square kilometers. I was losing track of the route, and wished he’d decelerate a bit.

The line marking the route ceased its crawl and abruptly dopplered into visibility. “The elevators will take you as deep as you desire. I suggest you head for the Administrative Offices on Floor 10 to the 5th. At least,” he added, “we have so arranged the layout of the ship that whoever has overall administrative authority under any social structure almost necessarily has to be in that area—or else whoever is in that area will find themselves administrators. Why not stop in there first?”

The view had continued to pull back and back, and I could now see the whole vast arc of the ship onioning in towards the center in round after round of closely packed circular layers, far too numerous to count. Then the diagram was replaced once again by the old Anarch’s wistful smile.

He looked out of the glass at my future unborn presence. “That’s all, I guess,” he said at last. “I hate to break it off, though. There is such incommunicable possibility for both optimism and pessimism in our futures, so much of joy and sorrow in such a touching of the endless years with our individual lives. I am not a Survey Ship man at heart; two hundred years ago I was born on the second planet touched in the cloud. I was old enough to remember when the ship left my family on a world reached later. I have grown up here on Raxnix since I was nine, and its land and seas are my home. Now the ship has stopped here again on its way Galaxyward from the heart of the cloud. Some of us are to stay; most, my sons among them, start the return. I shall stay. I would not want to die without the Home Galaxy blazing in my sky.

“But the whole is more than the mere sum of our individual short lives . . . the many whose home is a planet, the many whose home is a ship. Each of us lives his life in relation to his own brief time and narrow spot—and it is only with a rare and holy shock that we realize that we are at a turning point in something far vaster than we had realized. The ship is turning homeward; what that means to any individual, it means infinitely more to Man. And to you, the ship has returned. Good luck; and, people of home, be kind to your returning brothers.”

Again he smiled sadly, sighed, raised his hand in farewell. He was gone.

I waited a moment, feeling an odd sense of loss, and then pushed the stud again. No response. He was really gone.

“Someday we’ll meet again,” I said to the noncommittal glass, “at another airlock.” I turned. In the metal side of the shaft across from me a valve had yawned. Kicking off with my feet, I floated through.

Far ahead of me stretched the passage; and with an occasional flick of my fingers along the side, I made good speed. The pink glow from behind faded, but the walls continued to glow in dim phosphorescence. I swam on, stroke after stroke, and came to the vertical shaft. It was another cylinder stretching down to a tiny circle below; this time the patch of light at the bottom was green. I pushed out towards the center of the shaft.

“Don’t foul the line!”

If one could jump a meter in free-fall . . . I spun onto my back and, floating, looked up. A few meters above me, seated with legs dangling from a metal shelf just over the passage opening, a small boy gazed solemnly down at me. He seemed normal enough: stocky, lethargic, with bright yellow hair. From his hand extended a stick, held out over the shaft.

I hovered, and my heart started up again.

“If you can help it, mister,” he said again, “please don’t foul the line.” He used the language I had known for some minutes now. I replied easily in the same.

“Excuse me,” I managed, trying to be matter-of-fact about it. “I was just going down.”

From the end of his stick a thin line dangled down past me into the shaft below.

“Long way to anywheres,” he volunteered. “That’s if you was going anywheres.”

I was checking my wrist meters—somewhere on my way to this point I had entered highly breathable atmosphere. “Um . . . where are the Administrative Offices, son?”

“Never heard of them. Is it in Vrynn?”

I considered a moment. “Any idea who lives on Floor 10 to the 5th?”

“Gosh, Mister,” he said. “That’s the address of the Recollecters, ain’t it? That sure is some ways. I haven’t never been nowheres inships.”

“Where do you live?” I asked, still floating on my back.

“In Vrynn,” he gestured vaguely up the shaft above him.

“I see.” I felt some social embarrassment at having to break off the conversation so soon, but I was in a hurry .. . “Bye, now, son.”

“S’long, Mister. Remember not to foul the line.”

I adjusted my weight slightly and drifted down from him along the side of the shaft. In front of me dangled that ridiculous line. It was a full hundred meters before I reached the end of it. A cluster of large, bluish birds which were swarming and hovering around the end of the line scattered at my approach, so I never did get to see one hooked.

Slowly the green circle expanded, and finally I dropped into a green space. The view from the outlet of the shaft was not so overpowering as the first I had dropped into, in this world. The ground was less than fifty meters beneath me. I suppose technically it should be called “deck,” but somehow I thought of it as ground—for one reason, it was being farmed.

Furrowed soil stretched off into the distance on every side. It was an ample expanse, as wide and unconfined as one of the warm inner planets. But the ceiling was low and reached with a gentle curve to meet the land at a horizon as far as that on Randar 4. All was ploughed land, sprinkled with a few scattered sod houses at field corners. Below me a man was treading leisurely behind a plowing ox. A normal man, a normal plow, a normal ox . . . except, as I saw in my descent, that it had only two horns.

The farmer looked up and, seeing me over his head, waved pleasantly.

“Excuse me for troubling you,” I called down, my words coming out in the old language unthought. “Could you tell me where to find the stairs to the elevators?”

He jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Two fields north, one east, at the corner mark,” he called up. “Straight down to the Vators. Time for a bite of something, stranger?”

“Not this time, thanks,” I called down. I was certainly getting favorable first impressions of the Golgaronokites. “Maybe if I pass through again.”

Cheerily he waved again and turned nonchalantly back to his plowing. My conclusion had to be that folks must do some floating around up here on their own at times, even before I came. And plowed their fields and fished for birds. Real homey.

I drifted over the fields to the indicated corner and deposited myself on the first of a long descending series of steps leading into the depths. The upper three meters were cut through soil, and then smooth artificial walls luminesced a white glow. I cut off from null-grav once my feet were on the steps. Weight was still under a fourth of standard, enough to keep me down. I had a brief thought of all the little ships fast piling up, out in the worlds I came from, and then wrenched my mind back to present business. I started down, eyes searching for the promised Barrier.

I wasn’t left in doubt when I hit it.

VI.

One minute I was peacefully treading down the stairs in the graceful strides of low gravity. The next I was invisibly plucked up and flung back bodily, suit and all. As I cautiously picked myself up, a voice from nowhere began gently chiding.

“Weapons and defensive apparatus are not to be brought within these boundaries,” it said sweetly. “Please place your Q-screen; energy absorber; paralyser; and X-, Y-, and 2-beams in the niche to your right. They will not be touched until your return. Click.”

I ignored these directions and approached the invisible screen more warily. It would seem the anarchate had been aware of our most advanced paraphernalia. Had they also known how to counter them?

I took slow steps forward until I felt a pressure against my suit, pushing me back a few centimeters. I shoved harder, and rebounded a meter. Nothing was visible but the continuous stairway leading down. I brought up my X-beam, and gave a little squirt. Nothing happened. I played it back and forth, cut it, and reached my hand out. The obstruction was still there; no give. I removed my hand from the suit and stretched it forward. It passed without resistance until my shoulder was abruptly forced back where my suit began.

Fascinating!

I backed up the stairs ten meters and tried my Y-beam. The corridor filled with corruscations. I kept it up until I began to grow warm even inside my suit screens. Then I cut it, waited a couple of minutes for the surfaces to cool down, and returned to the Barrier.

Boinggg!

I could hardly believe it. I admit I was leery of using the Z-beam. I didn’t really know if it was more ultimate than my Q-screen or not. I backed up a real distance for this one, unlimbered the Z-projector, set it for a millisecond, pointed it downstairs, and pressed the stud. There was a whump, and I was knocked back on my reclamation unit. A voice shouted from down the steps:

“What in Creation you trying to do, there?”

I blinked my eyes. The stairwell was filled with roiling haze, shot through with short dying arcs of flame as quarkal redistribution levelled out. Dazedly I got to my feet and descended again. A man was standing on the other side of the Barrier. The air on his side was undisturbed. He was tall and dark, with jutting nose and furious eyes. As I appeared through the haze he spoke sharply.

“You a nut or something? I thought it was a kid! You know if I’d already passed over I might have been hurt?” He glared at me, snorted, forgot me. Stretching out his hand, he pressed it against the Barrier. The voice rang out:

“Dwellers within the world of the Ship are not to pass beyond this point at this time. Please return to lower decks. Information concerning points higher than this may be attained from Computer Deck, 12,600 North or South. Physical passage at this time is absolutely forbidden. Click.”

The man answered calmly. “I am not a dweller within the world of the Ship. I wish no information from above this point. I am already beyond this point. I do not intend to pass physically. It is no longer this time. Please countermand decision.”

The voice from the air hiccoughed slightly and spoke again. “Any human within the Barrier is a dweller within the world of the Ship by definition. You are now standing within the Barrier. The purpose of your attempt to pass is irrelevant; reference to information was made only for your benefit. If you actually wish to pass in a non-physical manner, only your physical body will be halted. It is now precisely now, as of this moment.”

“But it is no longer of this moment,” countered the man reasonably. “At the present time, this moment surely cannot be the one you previously referred to. I appeal to the 4th retractible equation in Fargut’s redaction. Therefore your decision is inadequate. The physicality of my body is an unwarranted assumption, pending verification or otherwise of the Ruvel-Forst-Ganywire hypothesis of sixth-level psychogolic integration. Thus your decision is arbitrary. The point at which I was on the inside of the Barrier, moreover, has now become, in space-time point of fact, a point at which I am on the other side of the Barrier. I appeal to the equations of the galactic expansion, the computations of the ship’s course, and the principle of irrelation. Therefore I am not trying to pass, but to return, and your decision is irrelevant. Finally, I resent your implication that I am a human. Please define ‘human’ and I shall show you that it is impossible to include me in any such category. In short, please countermand decision.”

The voice was not cowed. It settled down to a point by point defense. “Though otherness may tentatively be predicated of the so-called present moment as ascertained by Fargut, this in turn presupposes a constant factor of differentiation between any and all temporal breaks in continuity . . .” mounting into arguments and allusions I couldn’t begin to follow. Then the man answered, and several more exchanges took place before the battle ended with the capitulation of the voice. It admitted in a somewhat depressed tone:

“It seems logically conceivable that, at least on the eighth level of psychogolic integration, you might equally validly be regarded as trying to return within the Barrier as trying to pass it. Under these circumstances, your return is allowed.” It ended on a moody afterthought. “Please do not repeat this conversation to anyone. Click.”

The man strolled through the invisible Barrier and on up the stairs. At the same moment I tried to get past in the other direction and ended up with what felt like a dislocated shoulder, still on the up side.

Desperately I called up to the ascending man. “Hey, there.” He turned. He seemed to have completely forgotten me. “Does everybody get through like that?”

“For tens of thousands of years, Mister. Know any other way to do it?” he replied casually.

I felt very close to spoiling my dubious native cover, but if I couldn’t go on, my mission was a scrub anyway. “How do you get weapons in, then?”

His eyes stared indifferently down at me. “Don’t know, Mister. Tens of thousands of years, nobody’s felt a need to.”

“But isn’t that regulation only supposed to guard us against the . . . the people outside the ship?”

His eyes at last focussed on me. “Might be, for all I know, Mister. But and how’s a machine to know who’s from outside? Just has to stop everybody. Not that there’s any use to that. If people from outside, and if there is any, wants to get weapons in some-days, reckon they’ll bollix the computers quick as we does. A comp’s a comp, friend.”

He seemed to be eyeing me with somewhat more interest.

“But don’t you know?” I burst out at random. “The ship has stopped at last. Now’s when they’re coming. Now’s when we need the weapons for protection.” I knew I was talking utter balderdash, but surely there was some way I could enlist his help. I just couldn’t give up in the middle of a checking mission. All I was doing was making myself feel more and more conspicuous. I must stick out like a heavy isotope under a disintegration-counter. But this fellow didn’t seem to really care.

“You might know all that,” he commented, “and if you were one of them out there yourself, but sure no one that’s of the Ship would know a thing like that for certain.” He paused a long space, eyes fixed on me, drifitng between curiosity and indifference. The latter won, and he resumed his climb. Behind him floated down a little snatch of doggerel:

“Some as says my love she shines,

Some as says she don’t . . . oh.

Some as says the Ship’ll stop,

Some as says it won’t . . . oh.”

And he was gone.

I sat pondering for a long time before I came to a few highly obvious conclusions.

The first was that I am just simply too dumb to figure out anything actually new. I told you I wasn’t necessarily chosen for my intellect. I just couldn’t figure out a dodge to get past the Barrier with my weapons and defenses; nor could I figure out what was going on in this planet-ship I was crawling into. I suppose a bright guy would have been piecing together all the clues I’d been hearing and seeing, and have a nice consistent picture of what the deal was by then, But me, I still haven’t got it.

My second conclusion was that I was a pretty pure specimen of coward. Here I’d thought me a real indomitable customer, going into dangerous places and out again with a whole skin, real cool about it all. Well, come to think about it, who couldn’t do all I’ve done, in a Q-screen checker-suit? The mere thought of going on, without my suit, sort of shrivelled me up. Just me? Naked? Or as good as. Suppose something fell on me!

And third, I knew I just had to do it. It seemed to me I hadn’t really been deserving the pay I’d been getting all this time. Well, now I had a chance to make it up to the Board at one shot.

I returned to the Barrier for a last attempt to pass unstripped. I looked around in vain for a direction to talk to, and then said:

“You are supposed to stop the passage of weapons. My Q-suit is not a weapon; therefore there is no reason to prevent its passage. You are supposed to stop the passage of defensive apparatus. My Z-beam is not a defensive apparatus; therefore there is no reason to prevent its passage. Please countermand decision.”

“No!” answered the voice brusquely and then, after a moment’s pause, “I have never heard a more illogical proposition.”

I glared at the wall, and sat on the steps a while. Then I said, “Defensive units are not permitted. I call your attention to the plural form of the word ‘units’. I only propose to cross with a single, teensy-weensy defensive unit—”

“No!” interrupted the voice adamantly; and then, impatiently, “Weapons and defensive apparatus are not to be brought within these boundaries . . .” and all the way through to the final “click.”

“I don’t suppose it matters that all this is for peaceful, constructive, humanitarian purposes,” I muttered, but I didn’t expect much from that one. This time, the voice deigned not to answer.

What could I do? The machines might be dumb, but they were brighter than me. I’m just not a brain, is all there is to it. I clenched my fists in frustration . . . it just wasn’t fair. These characters inside Golgaronok had broken the rules, could get out at us all they wanted to, and we couldn’t get in at them. All the old Anarchical plans so carefully laid for our protection all those ages ago were absolutely wasted. It wasn’t fair!

Slowly I removed my checker-suit with all its impregnable and unstoppable arsenal, and laid it in the niche along the stairway. I sure hoped the voice was right about nobody touching it, for it would kill them. I looked a while at my food package, containing a single meal for mid-watch, and wondered what the real time was. My chrono told me I’d been on the way for 10 and a half hours, or 20 and a half, or only a half. None of them seemed right.

I wasn’t hungry, but I ate what I had. All I could think was, at breakfast I had never even heard of this place I’m in! At last I took the transfer cube from the suit chest pocket. If I couldn’t get that over there was no real reason for me to go on down. A sudden hope swept over me that I would be given a rational reason for turning back, then choking shame for hoping that. Let’s see if a potential damping-fuse is regarded as a weapon. I returned to the Barrier clutching it as unobtrusively as possible, struck a pose before the boundary, and said confidently, “I’ve left my stuff. May I cross now?”

“Try it and see,” said the voice noncommitally.

I cautiously leaned forward against the Barrier. It wasn’t there, and I almost plunged head-first down the stairs. I caught my footing, thanks to low gravity, and whirled to glare at the invisible voice. It didn’t even chuckle.

But I had the cube.

So, turning, I beat it down the stairs again, feeling as naked in my coveralls as a shell-less shellfish.

At the third or fourth curve of the flight of stairs, I reached the end of the descent. The lowest step was washed by rippling water. Coming out under an arched gate, I found myself looking out over a wide inland sea.

I’m not kidding! A real sea, with a soft breeze wrinkling the blue surface into white-caps, the smell of salt and kelp, and a small fleet of rigged sailing vessels in the offing. I know a sea when I see one; I grew up on the shores of the Polar Gulf on Randar 2.

I had barely time to wonder if this sea could possibly stretch clear around the ship on this level when, from some sort of small craft pulled up beside the lowest step, a local stood up as I approached, bowed with easy deference, and ushered me. Like a clockwork windup I let myself be led, and before I had been on this level for two minutes, I was swaying uncomfortably in the middle of blue water, and the lapping wavelets at the base of the gray lift of wall where the steps emerged were retreating behind us.

I looked around uneasily. A warmth was beating down from overhead, and I had time to see that the blue of the water was a reflection of the blue sheen of the spreading ceiling, and that some sort of life stirred in the waters. My new companion was silent, somehow propelling the vessel through the sea by the repeated insertion into the water of a long stick, shaped like the blade of a propeller, but so far as I could tell, without moving parts. We did not travel rapidly, but it was not long before my companion pointed across the water and spoke for the first time.

“The elevators are yonder, sire. You do be in good time for next embarking. May good be with you in wayfarings to come, and pay the people of Sea with kind remembrance in your thought.”

I glanced at the speaker with fresh interest, the voice bringing to me what cropped hair, tanned skin, and pastiche robe had not, that my conveyer was a woman. Then I looked in the direction she had indicated.

A hundred meters of metal wall rose out of the water ahead, lifting a shaft to the overhead sky-ceiling. As we pulled nearer, I could see many little boats tossing alongside gates in the wall. The skiff I rode in entered among the others, rocking gently to the backswell from the wall. My guide waved to persons in other vessels, and greetings wafted cheerily across the waters. I didn’t see anything like a motor or machine in use.

I became aware of a rapidly growing wheeze of sound; nothing was visible as its source. It mounted to a crescendo and abruptly ceased; in a moment the nearest gate retracted into the wall, and I saw within a large chamber filled with people, raised a few meters above the level of the water. The boats pulled in closer; people were clambering into them from the chamber; others were climbing from the boats up through the gates, and I felt myself being hoisted in with them. I was a floating chip, pushed about by my own passivity. But what to do but keep moving?

The gate closed behind me, and I looked about as the other newcomers scattered away. The room was a good hundred meters square, and full of people, several hundred at least, sitting on benches, drinking at fountains, wandering about deep in conversation. The number of different physiques, skin hues, and costumes was staggering; in fact, I wasn’t sure I could see two people of the same appearance. I began to feel less conspicuous than I had feared. As I looked around for the elevators, the gate behind me slid open again. I looked out to find the sea evaporated, and in its place a tangle of jungly vegetation interpolated with winding paths from which more people were already emerging to clamber into the chamber. Just for a moment I wondered what had changed sea to jungle, and then realized that I was in the elevator. A large, noiseless, vibrationless elevator; I couldn’t even tell if we were going up or down. Well, I guessed we couldn’t go very far if it was up. But there must be a lot of room to go down in. As the door closed again, I strained to feel or hear any motion, but it was no use. But I did notice lights flashing out over the gate in numbered series; as I watched 7 turned to 8, and again the gates opened noiselessly—this time on grassy meadows, with a small cluster of low shingled houses visible some kilometers away. The next two levels lacked visibility. The 9th was shrouded in haze, while the 10th was blocked by a blank wall a few meters away—and suddenly I realized that everybody was getting off here. I wondered at the abrupt end of the line, but followed the pack quietly. Some of the others streamed to left or right along the cobbled street and halted in front of the facing wall. So I joined them, feeling a trifle foolish; hundreds of us silently eyeing a featureless wall. But I was getting the idea into my thick head that this was the transfer from local to express. For once, I was right.

But rather than a gate opening, the whole wide wall rolled straight up in the air, and I was looking in on the grand-daddy of all elevators. Within were crowds of swarming people, rows of small buildings. I could see at least half a kilometer, and still wasn’t sure I could see the far side. But the crowd was pushing in, and me with them. The wall rolled down behind us.

Immediately I turned to look up over the gate. There was another series of numbers—the first 0, the second 10, which was lit, and on in multiples of 10, to 100. I figured, at fifty meters a level, that would still take me only five kilometers deep into the planet-ship. But I could expect that there would be a super-express elevator to take me to the 1000-level, 50 kilometers down, and a super^2 express to take me 500 kilometers down, and a super^3 express to take me 5000 kilometers down, which was nearly to the center. I grinned to myself at the ease with which I accepted the situation, and then I did feel it. It hit me like I was beamed between the eyes . . .

Oren screamed. He kept screaming for a long time. At last it died away, and slowly he found himself buckled in the chair, sweat rolling down his face. The Examiner was holding him gently and smoothing his hair.

“There, now, Oren, it’s all right, boy. Take it easy. I should have expected it.”

Oren gasped, tried to regain control of himself. “I . . . I really was there again. You made me live through it all again.”

“You did it yourself, Oren. I just made it easy for you.” The Examiner let go, looked carefully at Oren, and returned to his own chair. Seating himself, he smiled wryly at the checker-pilot. “My fault, though. There are some depths of experience that break through any hypnotic block. Even the most insensitive man . . . Not you, you understand.”

Oren pulled himself together. “Oh, that’s me, all right. I’m not supposed to be sensitive, given my work. But,” he shuddered, “it did get to me then.”

“Naturally so,” agreed the Examiner. “But I should have stopped the interview before it reached that point. I’ve already gained enough information to show that we’ll need far more than you can give us alone. But—Oren, I couldn’t let you stop!” He leaned forward, eyes glowing with excitement. “It’s fantastic! These glimpses you give of a culture so complex it approaches our own.” A sombre expression chased the excitement off his fluid features. “Let me add, you also may have presented us with as large a problem as we’ve faced for a very long time. Survival itself may be at stake.”

Oren asked, “Ours or theirs?”

“Well, I have no choice but to think of Randar first,” pointed out the Examiner. “Golgaronok, as you call it, certainly conveys an aura of threat, wouldn’t you say? You tell me. You’re the only person from Randar to get into that ship yet. Are they dangerous?”

“I don’t know. The technology, the sheer size of it, is formidable. The people I met didn’t seem at all aggressive. There was just so much I didn’t see.”

“Be hard-headed, Oren. I’ll have to be. Will they attack Randar?”

“I don’t know, sir. They seemed likable. I didn’t meet their leaders I don’t think.”

“What of their capabilities? Could they destroy Randar?”

“I don’t know,” Oren repeated, feeling inane. “The ship is a miracle of construction. But it was built three hundred thousand years ago and just seems to keep going. I don’t know what the people in there now can do.”

The Examiner rose and paced the room. He turned to Oren. “Listen carefully. The heaviest arsenal of Randar is concentrated around this Anarch ship at the moment, or bound outward from the inner worlds. It may be possible to destroy it now. It may not be later. Should it be destroyed?”

“I don’t know,” said Oren, and then jerked upright. “Destroyed? Destroyed? All those people?”

“That was the question,” said the Examiner. “You have observed Golgaronok. Can Randar trust them? Dare Randar assume they are benevolent or weak?”

“Trust, destroy,” Oren buried his face in his palms, then looked up. “What about learn? That ship, what’s in it, who’s in it, what they know . . . We can’t just blow it up without trying to learn . . . and all those people.”

“Then just what does Randar do with this monster dumped on its doorstep, threatening its existence, its way of life?”

“It learns and it teaches,” said Oren, taken aback by his temerity. “It does what it always does with any ship of any size. It finds out what’s happening where it’s come from, what the present situation inside is, and it brings the passengers back to civilization, helps them readjust to the mainstream of humanity. That’s what we’re supposed to do. I say that’s what we should do now.”

The Examiner stood, eyes downcast, for a time. The he looked up, and said, “Thank you, Cotter Oren. That is most helpful. But insufficient. We must learn more: Which means you must continue your descent into Golgaronok. But not now. You need several days of sleep. Do you know your present condition? Look at your arm.”

Open raised his arm, and rolled back the ragged ends of his coverall sleeve. The shape of the bones beneath the skin was easily apparent.

“If I didn’t have you under hypnosis,” continued the other, “your mind would be in the same condition as your body. And—though I don’t want to worry you—if I kept going too much longer by this method, you’d feel perfectly fine until I let you out of it . . . and then you’d quite possibly be dead.”

“So the examination is over?”

“For the present.”

“Then I have one question, sir. Did I get the cube to the Center all right? Did I make the transfer?”

The Examiner frowned. “I can’t tell you.”

Oren was startled by the sudden anger that poured into him. He found himself rising, looming over the little inquisitor. “You said you’d tell me everything after the Examination. You’d better tell me that! Did I carry out my mission? You’ve got to tell me!”

The Examiner had risen also. He seemed as furious as Oren. He yelled back, “Don’t be a fool, Oren! The answer’s in your mind! Do you remember?”

Oren took a step back and commenced kneading his forehead spasmodically. “No, sir,” he said at last, quietly. “I only remember as far as you’ve helped me, actually.” He paused, then, “I’m sorry I misunderstood. Could you tell me how I got back out, then? By myself?”

The Examiner smiled. “Sit back in your chair. While I remove the hypnosis.”

Oren leaned back. He tried to make some over-all sense out of what he had been remembering, tried to push past the barrier of memory at which the interrogation had stopped, tried to forget it all simultaneously . . . and suddenly he had time enough only to feel that tons of dark sand were pouring on his head, sands of uttermost exhaustion and fatigue and disability and weakness, and he was as if snuffed out of existence. . . .

VII.

Gradually Cotter Oren’s mind fell out of nothingness into a semblance of existence. To exist was to fall, to drop deeper and deeper towards the center. To transfer to larger and larger elevators, descending deeper and deeper into a world, a universe, Galgaronok.

He lingered near the wall that opened. It didn’t go up at every stop. Sometimes he could see the wall far off to the right or left rising or falling. When the nearest wall rose the scenery was always different: farms, forests, parks, occasionally villages, once a fair-sized city—all reminiscent of scenes on the planets, but all with lowering roofs some 30 to 40 meters overhead. A vertical culture, Oren thought vaguely. Sometimes the views were unbelievable and incomprehensible, and then something in Oren reminded him that this was not the real experience, but a later hypnotic recollection of it; and something subjective must have gotten mixed into his memories. There could be no real Level 40,000 as the one he looked at, for instance, not in the actual universe.

The numbers mounted steadily as the elevator presumably dropped, and he began to notice the narrowing in of the horizon. At first he wasn’t sure, but as time passed there could be no doubt. The horizon was much closer than it had been.

Oren screamed. He kept screaming for a long time. At last it died away, and slowly he found himself buckled in the chair, sweat rolling down his face. The Examiner was holding him gently and smoothing his hair.

“Can you hear me, Oren? Is everything all right?” The voice was unplaced, inner.

Oren looked around the memoried elevator. “Is that you, Examiner? Are you still investigating?”

“Yes, Oren,” came the voice of the little man who was nowhere. “But this time I’m sticking closer to you. No more recurrence of what happened before. Do you feel all right?”

“Perfectly.”

“Very good. If there is any problem, just say so, or think it. I’m right with you. You understand you are in memory.”

“Oh, yes, sir. But it’s very real.”

“Of course,” came the other’s voice. “As a matter of fact, it’s every bit as real as what you experienced on your previous descent, although it is your memory. Memories are quite real things, you know. But with a proper guide, not so dangerous. I do digress, don’t I? I’ll be in touch.”

Oren screamed. He kept screaming for a long time. At last it died away, and slowly he found himself buckled in the chair, sweat rolling down his face. The Examiner was holding him gently and smoothing his hair.

Back at the entry wall, the numbers above marked the 70,000th Level. No comment.

Down.

He noticed a man bent over a water fountain, and realized a parching thirst. And yet he knew he was asleep, really, and had been well nourished, but he knew he must act his thirst, for it had been real once. He wondered if he might not be poisoned by Golgaronok water, but decided to risk it. When the man departed, he crossed to the fountain and bent over it, only to find no ascertainable means of operation. No knobs, switches, buttons, dials or handles; he bent down, no footles either. Backing away in embarrassment, he watched carefully as a woman in mufti approached. She leaned over the fountain, water spurted, she drank and left. A little boy darted up, tiptoed at the fountain, and lapped up water as it gushed. He saw no mechanism. Pausing until the current of to-and-fro in this corridor ebbed, Oren hastily leaped to the fountain and bent over it. Nothing happened. With a curse, he hurried away before he became conspicuous.

He watched for Level 100,000, the address of the Recollecters. It was unlike any of the other decks. Long radial corridors stretched away in each direction, straight rows of metal floor and wall following the curve of the world to the vanishing point at the horizon. They were empty; far down one of them, a solitary figure moved. No one got off; no one got on.

He left the elevator briefly at Level 140,000. The time between stops on the super express was a good part of an hour, and he had needs he had not seen anyone else fulfilling. Level 140,000 seemed rural enough for his purpose.

Those who had left the elevator with him had soon strolled off on lanes through the fields of velvety-tasselled grain, leaving him alone by the base of the huge metal shaft housing the super express. Warmth and light bathed him, perhaps irradiated from the low ceiling. His eye was caught by a large square opening in the metal ceiling, and he wandered through the fields towards it. Beneath it he came to an identical square opening in the floor, railed about at waist level.

He looked up. The well rose through level after level until it closed to a pinpoint far above and vanished. Some of the levels-were darkened wedges in the shaft; night-time regions, he guessed. Three levels, only one hundred meters up, a face was leaning out from a small shrubbery-covered balcony and looking back down at him. It was hard to see details, but something in Oren’s spine tightened, and something in his mind said, “Not human.” The face waved something that might not have been a hand. Oren paused, waved back stiffly, and looked down the shaft.

The mirror of upwards, the shaft plunged forever into the depths. A few floors down, a sparkling trill of water rushed over the edge of the well and trembled down, down, down away from him, catching the varied hues from the floors it passed, an endless waterfall vanishing kilometers beneath him.

Oren returned to the elevator in time for the next arrival.

Time passed.

Oren screamed. He kept screaming for a long time. At last it died away, and slowly he found himself buckled in the chair, sweat rolling down his face. The Examiner was holding him gently and smoothing his hair.

“Are you there, sir?” asked Oren silently.

“Yes, Oren,” came the reply.

“I think we’re at the bottom,” said Oren. “Level 180,000 and everyone’s getting out, that is, all the last dozen or so left in here. They’re all wandering over to the wall on the left, and I’m following them. I don’t want to be the last person left, and go up again, or wind up with the elevator in storage somewhere. It can’t be much farther to the center, anyway. I’m pretty weak from hunger, I guess, and tension, and my legs are wobbly, but I’m going on as long as I can. You want to know all this?”

“Perfect,” said the Examiner from another universe, where Oren imagined him standing over his sleeping body. “Just what I want. Keep vocalizing, if you want.”

“Well, we’re standing beside the wall, as I say, about a dozen of us. The guy next to me is a beautiful ruddy color, stripped to the waist. He’s got something slung over his shoulder that looks sort of like a fan fruit the size of a marsh pig. It’s hard to keep my eyes off of him.

“Now the wall is rolling up, and my companions are trotting out jovially. Me, I take one look and gulp. Ahead of me, as far as I can see, below, above, stretch spindly girders off into the distance, like a gigantic spider web. And they’re not straight; they curve downwards. As I watch, the figures of those who have just left the elevator ahead of me trot easily away, get smaller, their heads tilting farther and farther away from me as they depart around the curving beams. I step quickly out on the nearest girder, and shut my eyes as the wall clangs down behind me.

“It’s just the close curvature in here, I keep thinking. We’re near the center, it’s curved like a small planetoid. And the weight’s so near to nothing, I can hardly hurt myself. So with this consolation, I peek a bit. Ahead of me the girder curves forward and down like a chute to the abyss. I can imagine myself a few huridred meters ahead, beginning to slide down it, faster and faster until it drops me off into nothing. All the pedestrians ahead have vanished down their .girders.

“I raise my head slowly. Girders above girders in infinite arching series, criss-crossing until their forms are lost in the gloom, kilometers up. Each glow golden, except where black shadows cut across them. And that tells me that the light comes from below.

“I look down, a little more abruptly than I had planned. A golden glow mounts from below, caressing my eyes from far beneath more kilometers of girders. I look back; the huge square shaft that houses the elevator ends here. Within it, I suppose, the elevator is again lifting towards the far surface of Golgaronok, thousands of kilometers above. I catch my breath; I am alone at the center of a world.

“The gravity is very light. I can’t explain my planet-hog sense of nausea, except that this whole place is so planet-like in its extent and contents, not like the emptiness of clear outer space. But here at the center of Golgaronok, I’m almost suspended between the opposing pulls from opposite hemispheres of the planet-ship. That gives me more confidence. I’m used to free-fall. I give a little hop, and time my drift down to my girder with my pulse. Next to nil. I won’t get to the center very fast without a little extra push of my own.

I peer down again. About ten meters below, a lower bar cuts across the direction of mine, at about the right distance for a practice hop. I blink into the light, poise myself, flick off, away from my solid beam. For about ten seconds I drift downward, and come to rest on the lower bar. Easy as falling off a girder, I think, as my legs crumple under me and my nose bumps the metal nastily. I sit up and wipe it, comes blood. Then I start rubbing my legs to restore some circulation. I forgive them, though; I’ve been giving them a rough time.

“I wait till I feel up to it again, then I begin descending. It’s an odd plunge; rather terrifying at first in its lonely strangeness, then slowly becoming calm and tranquil. It’s like a dream, dropping gradually and silently down towards the golden center rising towards me, barely grazing a girder every few hundred meters to brake my fall and sight for the next trajectory. Profoundly easing, this methodical rhythm of plunge, brake, and push off. I forget my hunger, thirst, weariness, and what will happen next.

“There is no warning. One minute I am pushing gently off from a beam for the hundredth time, the next all the beams have swept up past me, and I’m dropping into a vast open emptiness. I look around desparately for my next foothold. There is none. Above me, or maybe behind me, the network of spidery bars retreats into distance, and I drop into the golden glow. I see my diminishing shadow black on the retreating girders.

“Damn me for a fool! I swing to face inward. And now I can see where I am going. I am at the center.

“Far ahead of me, like an orange sun, a gleaming spherical structure lies before me. It lies, a sparkling nucleus to the world-ship, almost—but not quite—in my path. Unless it’s got more mass than I think, I’m going to miss it.

“It seems to move up towards me, though I know that it is I that am falling. It looms and shows itself as unmarked golden surface; then closer, several small openings are visible. It must be several hundred meters across. No, ten times that . . . I see a man on it.

“A small speck is moving here and there over its looming surface. It is certainly a man; he looks up and notices me. For a long moment he gazes up at me drifting helplessly through his zenith. He waves a hand briskly and turns back to his work.

“I try to croak out for help, but I have no throat. I watch while the fellow obviously keeps to whatever he is doing (and what in Cosmos does he think I’m doing up here?), and the golden ball begins to drop away from me. My senses are spinning, and as I try to recapture them, they fade. . . .”

“Oren,” came the voice of the Examiner, “let’s pass over to the other side of your period of coma now.”

“Holy nova!” retorted Oren, spinning deadly in nothingness, lying asleep in an unknown room, “I forgot again that I’m only remembering!”

“A one-hundred-percent full-sensory induced recollection, indistinguishable from the real thing,” said the Examiner, perhaps a tint of pride in his voice. “You’re controlling yourself quite well. Now, when you became conscious again . . .?”

“I don’t know how much later it is. I seem to come to when something gently nudges me, and open my eyes. There is a horrid noise near my ear. My eyes focus a bit, and I seem to be eddying among metallically curved beams. A bird crossed where I am looking, a green and blue and squawking bird. And then the beams seem to fall away from me, I am rising upward into a golden light, and then. . . .”

Oren paused a long time, and then resumed. “This is how it is. Something touched my face softly. Someone looking at me. Someone saying, ‘Excuse me for disturbing you, sir, but you are dying. Is it by your own intent, or do you desire assistance?’

“Somehow it seems a rational question. I manage to gasp out ‘Assistance.’ A moment later something warm and fragrant is poured down my throat. I gulp eagerly, and it is removed, again offered. In a minute I can relax, and open my eyes.

“I am lying on that golden surface. A man kneels beside me, an odd little man, sympathetic, shrewd, harmless.

“ ‘I’m sorry I let you pass the first time,’ he says. ‘As you said nothing, I mistakenly assumed you were swimming for pleasure.’ He offers the liquid again. ‘Are you quite better? You should have accepted some person’s aid long before. You are not in your best condition, I fear.’

“I say nothing, but raise myself on my elbow. Around us lies the surface of the golden globe.

“ ‘The Center,’ I have said aloud, for the little man nods.

“ ‘Just so. Appreciate it as you will, sir. Few come so deep.’

“I look down at my left hand and grin weakly to myself. Clutched in my hand after its incredible trek is the transfer cube.

“The man detaches a weapon-shaped article from a clip at his waist. I flinch. ‘Please rest now,’ he says politely. ‘I have work to complete, of course. Then I shall see you to your destination.’ He almost curtseys, says, ‘Sustenance is there beside you,’ and begins walking off around the curve of the globe in awkward strides that suggest magnetic boots. It is quite weightless here. As I recover strength I watch him at his task, and take sips from the warm flask of liquid. His tool is the gun-like object; he uses it to spray seemingly endless amounts of gold paint on surfaces which hardly need any more. Slowly he works his way over the far curve of the golden sphere, until his head bobs beneath the horizon. As soon as he has vanished, I grasp the nearest of the functional or ornamental excrescences which surround me, and begin to pull myself in the other direction.

“After a few hundred meters, the rim of a portal shows ahead of me. I reach it and push my head over, to see only blackness. Hoisting myself over the rim, I bend my head down out of the golden glare until my eyes adjust. Bit by bit the outlines of a small room can be made out; I am looking in through wall, ceiling, floor, as you will. Shadowy furniture on five sides, table, chair, viewscreen—universals. An oval opening in the far side. I shove myself across to the opening and again peer through.

“My breath catches; it is a magnificent effect. The whole sphere of space surrounds me in unwinking constellations. It is so real I stop breathing in fear of vacuum; but it is illusion. I recognize at once that the portrayal is of the actual outside view; Randar 13 swims, a cold hemisphere to my left; our sun flames weakly far below in endless depths; the patterns of the Zodiac of my youth march about me in aching distance: the Harpist, the Flatbird, the Cross, the Triple Tower, the Dreamer. I cling to the oval ring of the dimly lit opening and stare out into the starlit black. Somewhere out there is the exact center, and the seal-safe I have sought so long.

“My fingers have been feeling within the opening as I survey the interior, and now my right hand passes across a metal bar. I kneel and finger it. It is solidly fixed, and stretches out into the night; as nearly as I can judge, toward the exact center. I take a good grip on it, and prepare to push off from the opening.

“I’m afraid,’ says a mild voice, ‘I must ask you to refrain . . .’

“I don’t pause to consider whether the little man’s tool can spray anything besides paint; instead of shoving off with my feet, I reverse vectors, lashing back with my feet from my handhold on the bar. The little man spins with a gasp as my boots connect with his arm and he is flung heavily against a wall. By the time he ricochets I am on him. He doesn’t struggle, just lies looking up at me, gasping for breath. I don’t want to harm him, but nothing is going to keep me from finishing up now I’m this close. I heave him up—he doesn’t weigh anything here—and pull him to the outer portal. I position myself in the firmest stance I can attain, grasp him by armpit and thigh, and heave him straight up with all the force I can dredge up. I fall back into the room as the little man gradually rises from me, his wistful face receding as he drifts outward from the golden globe.

“That should keep him off my back for a while.

“I bend to the bar again, panting for breath myself, and begin to haul myself out into the look of infinity. One tug after another along the bar, until I am skimming among the constellations. Pull, and pull, and pull, and. . . .

“DAMNIT!

“I have found my goal by ramming into it head first. It hurts! I still haven’t learned to allow for being out of my checker-suit.

“As my head spins, my stomach retches, and I prepare to die by preference, my hands are automatically aligning the transfer cube with the sealsafe cube, and transfer starts. An endless time, while the cold stars stare lidlessly in on me, and then suddenly it is done.

“It is done.

“Transfer is complete, the world-ship’s sealsafe is fused, my friends out on Randar are alive and waiting, and not planning to take any chances with Golgaronok; and my mission is a complete success.

“I know all this the instant the stars go out.

“I cling there in the utter dark at the center of a world I have just turned off, and every cell in my body slumps in relief and exhaustion. It’s out of my hands. The burden’s off me, I’ve done my job, I can rest.

“I guess I’m lucky to pick the same bar to leave by that I came in on, or maybe I don’t. But I’m not caring much any more. Anyway, I clamber out into the same, or a similar, outer room, and then onto the surface of the Center. The golden surface still shines in silent phosphorescence.

“I look up for the little man. He’s not up there. I wander around and find him sitting a short distance away, nursing his arm tenderly. It looks like I bent it the wrong way a bit; I hadn’t meant to.

“It’s hard to keep from caving in, with my limbs, my head, my senses, all about to collapse, but I do what I can to look mighty and determined. ‘I hoped you’d stay up there longer,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t want to have to smash you again.’

“ ‘No need for that,’ he replies with odd cheerfulness. ‘I’m not really fond of being smashed. I came down, of course, with this.’ He holds up the paint squirter. ‘Without a reaction tool it’s very hard to get anywhere in the Center, don’t you think? For instance,’ and he draws back his good arm and, with a heave that lays him on his back, hurls the tool off into limbo. ‘For instance, how were you planning to go back . . . up?’

“My eyes follow the tumbling little object until it vanishes in the golden perspectives of infinity. My mind follows it up. Up to the girders invisible kilometers above. Up in the beginnings of gravity, from girder to girder. Up to the elevator—which the seal-safe has now put out of operation. Up deck by deck 180,000 times, straight up out of this pit, to my checker-ship, impregnably waiting, vanishingly far above me. As my thoughts rise, my spirit and knees crumble. I don’t fall, of course; just find myself floating above the surface like a corpse.

“His pleasant little face swims into my vision. ‘Perhaps, sir,’ he is saying as I slowly disintegrate, ‘I can still help you.’ Now I see two of him; how could I have taken both of him on? He smiles, and my eyes blur. There are four little men, dozens, then he explodes into sparkling shards.

VIII.

“I am being moved, lifted, arranged like a rag puppet. I am tired, tired and drained. Someone is saying brightly, ‘That will do, I think. Now where to start? You must understand that it will be better to answer my questions as accurately as possible—that is surely true. We can also assume, from all indications thus far, that I am your superior. That should be sufficient to begin with. Now let us start at the beginning. Open your eyes.’

“I do, and immediately try to stand at attention before the desk, not easy in null-grav. All I know about this man sitting across from me is that he is my superior” WAIT A BLAME MOMENT “and that it is better to answer his questions as accurately” I’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE TOO “as possible. I only hope I don’t fall asleep. The other looks up, a small unstriking man.” BUT I KNOW HIM. THOSE EYES, THIS ROOM “ ‘The very first thing,’ says the little man” IN THE TONGUE OF GOLGARONOK “ ‘is for me to congratulate you most sincerely. The journey you have just made . . .’ ” HE’S THE ENEMY. DON’T TELL HIM . . . FORGET IT. IT’S TOO LATE. THIS IS MEMORY. I’VE ALREADY TOLD HIM.

“ ‘few others could have mustered.’ The smile wavers across his face again, the waver spreads to his whole face, to the room. My sight blurs liquidly for an instant, and then solidifies again. I have caught up with now . . . I think.”

IX.

Cotter Oren dragged his babbling thoughts to a ragged halt, and sat numbly in a functionally universal chair in an all-too-familiar room. The Examiner was standing over him, offering a flask of refreshment. He was more pale and worn. Oren looked down at himself; he had filled out, was more rested than since he had entered Golgaronok.

“Yes,” said the little man. “You’re out of memory now. This,” he waved his hand, “is current occurrence. Space-time date present, if you will.”

Oren glared for some time in tight-lipped silence. Finally he spoke stiffly.

“You are a native of Golgaronok; you’re the little man I met at the Center.” He looked around him. “Where we still are. I never got out after all.”

The other shrugged apologetically. “You’re still in the Ship,” he said. “I never said you weren’t. You know, I never lied at all.”

“Well, there was a hell of a damned lot of truth you just never got around to mentioning,” Oren snapped. He rose, and strode over to the Examiner. “Can you give me,” he growled down at the man, “any good reason why I shouldn’t break your neck?”

Somewhat regretfully, the other shook his head. “None you’d listen to—unless you thought of it on your own.” He cheered up a bit. “But I really don’t think you’re going to,” he added, “because you asked.”

“Forget it,” said Oren. He moved back to the table, and slumped against it. “Damn,” he said thoughtfully. There was a long silence.

“May I ask,” said the Examiner, “why my neck remains unbroken?”

Oren looked glum. “I don’t see much use in it, other than cheering me up a bit. I don’t suppose you’d give me the chance if you couldn’t stop me. And you must have already let the other Anarchs know what you found out.”

“Ah, prudence,” said the other. “A fine virtue. But I haven’t told anyone yet, quite impossible. And I assure you I couldn’t stop you,” he added with incongruous glee. “So now are you going to kill me?”

Oren paused. “Thanks for the suggestion, but not right now. I’ve got a lot to learn from you first.”

“Curiosity. Even better. But I will not tell you a thing under threat. You might as well dispose of me now .. . unless you have some other reason not to.”

Oren grimaced. “Will you shut up! I’m not going to kill you anyway. I don’t just go around killing people. I think that was the nastiest trick I ever got played, but—oh, just shut up. You played very well for your side; I thought you were on mine, is all. I might even like you a bit, under other circumstances.”

“Affection!” the Examiner glowed. “Your reasons get better all the time. All right,” he ended hastily as Oren glowered at him, “now I will shut up.”

There was another lengthy pause, while Oren’s thoughts clambered into tentative structures, and tumbled to separate items again.

Then the other said almost shyly, “Now I will tell you anything you wish, as it is evident you will not threaten me if I do not. What do you wish to know?”

Oren stared at him. At last he came up, inanely, with “Who are you?”

“Very good.” The little man settled down to his favorite occupation of running verbiage. “I have no aural mnemonic of the sort you use, as our language is based on mental, rather than aural correlates. We evolve a separate self-denoting concept for each separate person we deal with, or sometimes for each meeting, which is mutually employed for that occasion. I have been thinking of myself for some time now, as far as my relationship with you is concerned, as Basho.”

“Basho???”

“Precisely. It is, perhaps, a small joke. Your Home Galaxy the still pond, the Ship the intruding amphibian, and we are both caught up in the Ker-plop. Anyway, for you I am Basho.”

“Oh . . . I meant, I also meant, who are you? Grand Inquisitor for the Recollecters?”

“Not at all,” said Basho hastily. “You do me too much honor. No, I am a . . . a relative nobody. It is by mere chance you found me, or anyone, down here at the Center. I’m a wear-and-tear man, and was looking for something useful and different and preferably meditative to do, and the Computer records mentioned that it was several decades since the Ship Center was refurbished. So I just came down to touch it up. So when you first dropped in on me, at first I thought you weren’t anyone special either, except in as far as everyone is, of course. But when I followed you in, and the interior had changed . . .” his eyes shone with delight. “Were those lights . . . stars?”

“Images of them, I guess. That’s just what they look like . . . outside.”

“Magnificent! Anyway, I feared you’d get hurt, and you kicked me! That, I presume, was violence. Stars and violence in one day; it was most impressive! Naturally I became intensely curious, so I questioned you. I seem to have found some unusual answers. The Ship has indeed, in a sense, stopped; and those left behind in the Home Galaxy did manage to survive, after a fashion. And to think that I, a mere wear-and-tear man, should be the very first—pardon me, I mean from the Ship—to know of this. What an experience! Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” replied Oren automatically. “So you are just a chance nobody, a peasant bystander, who trapped a checker-pilot, hypnotized him, and wrung him dry. Just what can you think of me, I hate to imagine.”

“That you are an exciting and very brave . . . er . . . barbarian,” answered Basho frankly. “I did try to protect your integrity and confidence as best I could. For a truly courageous and capable man, you are terribly diffident and insecure, Oren. If I failed, it is just because I have never been very good at this sort of thing.”

“Just go on.”

“So I observed from your relation what I could of your worlds out there, and your reactions to us in the Ship. You must understand that this is a very big event. The Ship has been travelling for over two hundred generations to reach this point in space and time. And now it’s here, and there you all are out there, and there will be all that data to analyse, and decisions to make, and . . . well, it’s quite an affair.”

“It will hardly be amusing,” commented Oren, “if the next stage of the affair is for Randar to shoot your Ship down.”

Smile. “I doubt if your great 6000-meter ships are equipped for shooting down even minor planets.”

“We could—pardon me, they could puncture a pretty big hole in your hull, and leak your air.”

“Do get the scale straight, Oren. This is a world full of air, in a .21 g. gravity-field. It wouldn’t explosively decompress. It would take forever. And nothing you could—pardon me, Oren, they could do—would get beneath the Barrier. Except, of course, doubletalk.”

Oren groaned.

“But I’ve sealed your sealsafe,” he pointed out, “damped your ship’s energy out. At least they did from out there, as soon as I’d primed the fuse. The Ship is crippled.”

Basho tapped his chin thoughtfully. “I gather that would be devastating in your worlds,” he said. “Or in the times of the Anarchs, for that matter. Oren, we do things differently now. The Ship will hardly notice, except for a couple of items kept over from the Anarchs, like the Elevators. We don’t much employ your kinds of energy sources; primitive, you’d call us, perhaps. Most of our lighting is phosphorescent. Our atmosphere and subsistence is cyclical and self-sustaining, just as on your worlds. The engines, and the in-flight protective screens, will be out, but then we’ve stopped; they’re not needed any more. A few Anarch relics, like your star-show in the Center . . . no, I can’t say that’s much of a problem.

“There will, of course, be some casualties,” Basho added quietly. “People trapped in elevators, for example. But I should expect the fatalities to be well under a tenth of a percent of our population.”

Oren winced. “Your computers?” he asked.

“Oh, they’re not affected. They’re not human. Oh, I see you’ve misunderstood. They’re not mechanical either. They’re life-forms. We symbed with them in the Cloud. Highly logical in their way, but certainly don’t need to be plugged in. No,” Basho continued, “the difficulties I anticipate do not involve any danger to the Ship . . . or Galgaronok, as you uglify it. I might rather fear for all planet-dwelling mankind in the Galaxy. Unless they also possess virtues of prudence, curiosity, and affection.”

It was Oren’s turn to smile. “That’s a little extravagant. You have a mighty impressive ship, or world, and you’ve worried Randar, but don’t let it go to your head.”

“You mean . . .?”

“That there is half a galaxy full of a lot of humans who’d prove a bit much for even you to threaten.”

Basho nodded. He looked out the portal, up into the golden haze and distance. “What’s the area of man’s living space in the galaxy?”

“Are you still trying to examine me?”

“We’re trading information. If you choose to trust me.”

Oren nodded. “The re-expansion since the ‘Tween-Times has reached over 20,000 light-years across—and must have expanded since the last border reports were current.”

“Fine, but I meant effective living space. All those impressive light years are just empty wasted space. Man doesn’t use them. They don’t add to his power, rather they scatter and dilute it. Man actually lives . . . where?”

“On the surface of planets,” said Oren.

“On the outer rind of inhabitable worlds?”

“Of course.”

“How many planets, roughly?”

“Incorporated—call it 64,000. I’ve heard that quoted.”

“Average size,” pressed Basho.

“Tends to be smaller planets, standard gravity. Say 8 to 15 thousand kilometer diameter.”

“Say 12,000,” said Basho. “Area of a spherical surface?”

“4 pi r square.”

“So?”

Oren groaned. “Surface of a planet 6000 kiloms radius is 88/7 times 36 million is . . . about 450 million square kiloms. Times 64,000 planets is roughly . . . 3 times 10 to the 13th square kilometers.”

“All inhabitable?”

“Well, no. Lots of it ocean, polar caps, deserts, just not used.”

Basho said, “Let the figure you quoted stand. Now population.”

Oren calculated. “I’ve heard of planets like Dreyk with 15 billions; but most inhabited planets are under a billion. Taking two or three billion as an average . . .”

“Take three billion.”

“Then 3 times 10 to the 9th, times 64,000 planets equals a total human population for the galaxy of about 1.9 times 10 to the 14th: 190,000,000,000,000.”

“Living on the order of light years away from one another, as well,” observed Basho. “And set against these vast forces of planetary humanity is one small world. What is the formula for the volume of a sphere?”

“4/3 pi r cube,” said Oren, and straightened abruptly. “Wait, is that your point? The Ship is populated in three dimensions. With 6000 kiloms radius, its volume is 88/21 times 216 times 10 to the 9th cubic kiloms .. . just under 10 to the 12th. And then . . . yes, the Ship is constructed in shells with about 35 meters vertical space between, making about 30 to the kilometer. Which come out to a total living space in the Ship of . . . about 3 times 10 to the 13th . . .” He stopped in confusion. “I made a mistake somewhere. That’s the figure for the planets.”

“You made no mistake. Finish the task. Possible population of the Ship?”

“At the same population density, the same population . . . 1.9 times 10 to the 14th . . .” Oren was in near panic, but switched to laughter. “Oh, no. That’s utter nonsense. I don’t know how you did it, but for a minute you had me worried.”

“What’s the difficulty?”

“I’m not sure, but you can’t tell me there are a hundred-ninety trillion people crammed into this spaceship.”

“Not crammed,” said Basho. “Living quite comfortably. Remember, we left room for oceans, ice caps, deserts, and free space. It is true. Didn’t you yourself drop past sphere after sphere, all inhabited, each one a surface functionally equivalent to a planet? In fact, you dropped through 180,000 spheres on your way to the center, each a slightly smaller planet.” He paused, then added, “When ‘Golgaronok’ arrived, the human population and living space in the Galaxy doubled.”

Oren sat down. What else was there to do?

“Look, Oren,” said Basho at last, “You said that ships from only a few thousand light years off break down, the equipment begins to erode, the atmosphere to foul, the language to change, the crew to mutate. Now you enter a ship which, after hundreds of millenia, has clean air, functioning apparatus, impeccable Anarchical language, genetically stable inhabitants. Isn’t it clear at once that this ship has never broken down, never severed its link with the day of departure? It went to the Magellanics, did what it went for, and has now returned. We have retained the skills of the Anarchate, and kept harmony among trillions for all these ages. We are more viable than a planet, a system, or all your systems. We do not have to justify our existence. You perhaps must justify yours.”

Oren was silent. The little man went on, almost pleadingly.

“Oren, we have been progressing without a break for three hundred thousand years while your immediate ancestors were plunging into the abyss of whatever horror you call the ‘Tween-Times, from which you’re just now clambering out. A small sprinkling of isolated humanity, on thousands of segregated worlds, barely recovered from millenia of degeneration and ignorance, without clear knowledge of your great past which we still hold for you—completely unaware that the true and vital history of humanity has been evolving elsewhere—here, in the Ship.” He looked at Oren. “The Ship has come to take you home again.”

There was a long silence. Finally Oren looked at Basho. “You said only a tenth of a percent of your people would die through the power loss,” he said accusingly. “That’s nineteen billion people!”

“That is the order of magnitude,” admitted Basho.

Oren kneaded his forehead. “Then I’ve got to get out fast,” he said. “I can’t reverse the sealsafe from in here. I’ve got to get them to release it from Randar.”

“Do you think,” asked Basho, “they are likely to listen to you on the matter?”

Oren looked grim. “Get me to my checker-suit,” he said, “and see if they can stop me. I don’t have to take over the whole system to get that power restored, just one planet at worst.”

Basho sighed deeply. “I was hoping you’d feel that way,” he smiled suddenly, “but I couldn’t prompt you.”

“Can I get out quickly?”

“It will be an interesting challenge. I think, together, we can. There are various alternatives. We should start at once, if you are ready.”

“I’m ready,” said Oren.

“It will take a great deal of care and patience,” said Basho gently, “to prevent lasting damage to your people’s feelings of confidence and adequacy. Your cultures are built on deep illusions of superiority which the Ship will destroy. We will have to be sure to replace better foundations rapidly. It is a fine challenge.”

The little man stared far up into the golden distances, his voice a musing murmur of sound. “I cannot, of course, anticipate the decision of the Ship, but I shouldn’t be surprised if we take Randar in. After all, as humans, you deserve what we can give. An additional shell or two thrown up over the outermost level, perhaps, would easily include in the Randarian population. Then I imagine we might possibly visit the other inhabited human systems. That would give an external course of action in place of the Return which has now ended, and shouldn’t take much longer than that has. We will eventually be able to bring them all in, and reintegrate them into the mainstream of humanity.”

“My friend Basho, you are rather arrogant,” remarked Oren.

“We are,” agreed the other, “quite arrogant. Shall we go?”

THE BATTLE OF THE ABACO REEFS

Hilbert Schenck

This is the third in Hilbert Schenck s fine series of sf stories with a sea-going background in common (“Three Days at the End of the World”, September 1977; “The Morphology of the Kirkham Wreck”, September 1978). The story concerns, among many other things, the invasion of the Bahamian island of Abaco by an energy-starved United States, and it is the longest, richest and most exciting to date.

The fall wind blew steadily from the east, dead across Elbow Cay, and the big, vertical-axis wind machines, running synchronously in the steady breeze, gentled the island with their hushahushahusha, a giant snoozing in the lowest frequencies. Susan Peabody toyed with her coffee and half watched the tiny, jewel-like TV screen at her elbow, thinking of nothing in particular. Or, really, much in particular such as the department, and the university, and the screwing, literal and figurative, she had taken from that bastard . . . But that was already six months past, and how big a plum would it have been anyway, in a riotous, unheated Boston? . . . Susan, a forty-year-old, tall, thin woman, her brown hair cut short and severe, her thin lips pressed thinner still, thought to herself, hating herself as she thought it: I have a good face, high color, a straight nose and a strong chin. I have tits and my legs are long. Oh, for God’s sake!

Susan focused on the TV screen, a brilliant spark of color. The 8 A.M. Miami news kicked off with a fire fight between the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol and a teamster cadre after diesel fuel. In Vermont, they were shooting wood thieves at the side of the road. Then came the latest skirmish in the Arizona-California war over the water . . . At least in Boston she would have been totally involved in her profession instead of pissing away her life here in paradise . . .

The scene shifted to London, where Scottish nationalists wrecked two government buildings and killed a number of police. “No longer drunken soccer hooligans, the Scots were well-equipped with Mark Eleven Uzi automatics . . .” There was a knock on the door. Susan looked down at her drab and torn dressing gown and dashed from her living-room-kitchen combo into her small bedroom to pull on a halter and jean shorts, shouting, “Coming! Coming!” Who in Hell was calling at 8 A.M. in Hopetown, for God’s sake?

Susan smoothed her hair and pulled the door open. It was Frank Albury; well, one of the three Frank Alburys, the electronics one. “Hi, Susan,” said the portly little man, “Can I talk with you a sec?” He was perhaps thirty-five, a small roll in the gut, and completely nondescript. With an even, round, bland face and thin blond hair, he ran the island C.B. operation. An electronic wizard, Jerry Ravetz had said, but all Frank had ever talked about with Susan was the discovery of Christ and scuba diving. And she shared in this second life, in his love of the water. The first time they went together to the outer reefs where the long, hot waves broke and the massive surge ebbed and flowed over the great coral heads, Susan imagined she entered the magical Lewis story of Perelandra and the floating islands on the great-warm sea of never-Venus. Her father, a gentle classics professor, had read her all those books, Narnia, the Langs, Lord of the Rings, Oz, and as she rode the long surge of the reef looking down on its society, she flew over fairy kingdoms and the ride was magical.

But Albury watched the fish. Studying the fantastic interlocking detail of their behavior and survival, he understood absolutely that only God could make such an intricate puzzle fit together.

“Hi, Frank. Going scuba?” asked Susan.

Albury shook his head and shrugged. “Sure would like to, Susan, but we got some problems.” He looked at her and rubbed his chin. Then he pointed at the TV. “You seen that fellow in Miami, that Abaco independence fellow?”

Susan didn’t watch the TV much, but she had noticed an occasional reference on the Miami public station to such a group, one of the many splinter and terrorist gangs looking for fun and trouble in Florida. She smiled. “Is he coming over to run the place, Frank?”

Albury shrugged again. “Maybe. It looks like they got some planes and ships, Susan. From Munoz, the Florida Governor. We figure Munoz has some kind of understanding with Castro to let him go at us and Freetown, and maybe New Providence, while the Cubans work over the islands closest to them.”

Susan laughed. “Come on, Frank! I realize the U. S. is coming apart at the seams, but an attack on Abaco from the state of Florida? Are they commandeering yachts?”

Albury sat down soberly at her table. “Susan, do you know about the satellite time-lease system?”

“Sure. The Third World rental military satellites open to anyone who can pay the rip-off price. You guys subscribers?”

“The Bahamian government is. We’re monitoring Florida ship movements now, at highest resolution, and they’ve put a fleet to sea. All shallow-draft boats, tank-landing vessels with National Guard tanks, an old destroyer escort, some Coast Guard stuff.”

“Coast Guard is federal, U.S. Treasury,” said Susan.

“Susan, President Childers isn’t minding the store. The governors are all going off on their own. We think Munoz is looking to set up his own Caribbean state and shut off the flow of U.S. northerners. The Abaco energy communes look awful handy.”

“The Israelis would never work for Munoz.”

Albury looked down at his Bermuda shorts and rubbed his chubby knees. “Munoz doesn’t really understand what’s going on out here. But he probably figures they’ll either work or starve.” He looked up. “Susan, there’s a meeting of the Abaco Defense Council at ten this morning, and they asked me to come and see if you would attend.”

“The WHAT?” laughed Susan. “Abaco Defense Council, those dolts at the customs shed?”

“More than that,” said Albury seriously. “We have a command post at Marsh Harbor out at the Wind Commune Headquarters on Eastern Shore. If you could be there at ten, we surely would appreciate it, Susan.”

After Frank Albury left, Susan turned to the commercial channels and sought news of the Abaco Independence Movement, but the morning talk and game shows were in full swing. The world was breaking into tiny splinters and these fools were mesmerized by garbage . . .! Susan shook her head angrily and watched the simpering host lead a young woman through some personal sex questions . . . She flicked off the set and stared out at the palms and the gentle, sunny morning. Off across the brilliant blue and green Sea of Abaco the squat solar boilers centered in their mirror nests bulked behind the palms and white houses on Man-o-War Cay. The causeways and locks of the tidal-basin control system joined Elbow and Man-o-War by an incomprehensible network of underwater walls and control gates, all operated from a concrete building on tiny Johnnies Cay, a white spider sitting in a huge web of life and energy.

Susan rubbed her hands together and bitterly stared about her small house. Four months, and she knew nothing about this place, these people! Her book on Shastri cycles untouched. Her U.N. duties carried out just as perfunctorily as the locals could hope, from an uninvited snooper checking to see that UNESCO money wasn’t decorating casinos or whorehouses.

She had made only a few friends, and most of them among the Israelis, the other arrivés. Face it. Frank Albury was the only Abacoan who called her Susan. That’s why they sent him this morning.

She rubbed her hands back and forth across her eyes until the flashes and spots came behind the lids, and she thought about taking the drug. She probably couldn’t help them anyway; she hadn’t done her homework on Abaco. Yet her only possibility would be to vector for them. She drew back and remembered her lover, intense, brilliant, corrupt Jamie. She had used the drug with him, but he did not believe in Shastri Vector Space. And he had told the committee she was addicted to cocaine. She lost the chairmanship. That bastard . . .! She still couldn’t reconcile his tenderness and strength with . . .

Oh, Hell. She was going to dress and ride to the Marsh Harbor ferry. But just before she stepped out the door, she swallowed two small pills and popped the tiny box, not knowing what might happen, or for how long, into her skirt pocket.

Pedaling south the mile to Hopetown Harbor on her bike, Susan saw no one until she arrived at the ferry dock. There, several young Israelis and black Abacoans were wrestling some generator parts off a Wind Commune barge. The Donnie-Rocket glided into the dock right on time and disgorged several wind workers and some school children. Everything seemed very ordinary and peaceful, but the drug was doing its work and Susan vectored on the suppressed excitement among the children.

She waited quietly while they revved up the flywheel on the ferry, listening carefully to the children as they babbled, walking off down the dock.

“I is in D-south tracker, Joan!” said a little black boy excitedly. “Dat’s de whole end of the system. I is bound to get some tracks.” The boy looked back, saw Susan staring at him and abruptly and silently ran off the dock. The very incomprehensibleness of his conversation rang alarm bells in Susan’s head. What in God’s name were they up to? She turned back to watch the repowering of the Donnie-Rocket.

The large island of Abaco and its chain of cays to the north and east were linked and looped together by the ferry system, originally, the Donnies had been I.C.-engined cabin cruisers, twenty to thirty feet in length. Then in the late seventies, the gas-turbined hovercraft, the Donnie-Rockets, had arrived, spectacular, high speed, and kerosene guzzling. Although the relatively new Swiss flywheel boats now ran in total silence, the name, Donnie-Rocket, had stuck with them, for they still went like blazes, up on their stalky foils, forty feet of praying mantis doing thirty-five knots.

The captain of this Donnie-Rocket was skinny, fourteen-year-old Gerald Beans, black as night with a head like a chestnut burr. He cut off the magnetic clutch and signaled the dock superintendent to hoist the torque bar out of the Donnie’s engine compartment. Down below, in a hard vacuum, six tons of steel flywheel spun in perfectly vibration-free gas bearings at over twenty-thousand revolutions per minute. Captain Beans noticed Susan’s intense inspection of the Donnie-Rocket’s power plant and flashed her a great many large white teeth. “Plenty of crayfish to buy that wheel, Dr. Peabody,” he suggested.

But Susan, fully into the drug, suddenly, blindingly, saw how incredibly little she had seen in Abaco. These children and their talk. A fourteen-year-old ferry captain. This incredibly diverse technology. The Israelis, their energy communes, Governor Munoz and Fidel Castro. She was staggered at the vector complexity, and yet the alarm bell in her head was clanging continuously. She suddenly realized she had not thought of Jamie for at least ten minutes, and she smiled, really grinned in fact, at Captain Beans.

The Donnie-Rocket ambled out of Hopetown Harbor as a displacement boat, past the tall, old red-striped lighthouse with its 130-year-old Trinity House lamp and spring-driven occulting gear. Then Captain Beans clutched the propellers into the flywheel more strongly, and they rose up and scooted for Marsh Harbor. The only other passenger, an Israeli computer specialist whom Susan hardly knew, was studying an instruction manual. So Captain Beans turned to Susan. “Did you see that crazy Abaco independence man on TV, Dr. Peabody?”

Susan shook her head. “I didn’t watch it last night, Gerald. Is he really nutty?”

Gerald Beans whistled and nodded his head. “Mad as can be, I think. But he’s not the real one, I think. Those politicians want us . . . Abaco. All these kilowatts!”

“Yes,” said Susan. “We Americans had all the toys, but they’ve gotten broken and we waited too long to fix them. All we can see to do is steal from somebody else.”

“Those folks up north, with the snows. Who are they going to steal from?” asked Captain Beans.

Susan, distracted in her attempts to vector Abaco and its problems, looked at the boy sharply. “They’ll steal from each other, I suppose, Gerald. We had it awfully soft for a very long time.”

“Then,” said Captain Beans inexorably, “why won’t Abaco get the same way?” and Susan found she had no answer.

The Donnie-Rocket made a side trip up Sugar Loaf Creek to drop Susan at the big dock of the Wind Commune Headquarters. For the first time she saw a group of young Abacoans with side arms and some Uzi whistle guns on slings. One of them, a customs agent in fact, detached himself and nodded politely. “They’ve been waiting for you, Dr. Peabody,” he said. “Let me show you the way.”

She followed the soldier in his short khaki pants and knee socks up a path brilliant with bougainvillaea, the soft coral crunching underfoot. As she walked, Susan watched a big instrument kite leave its launching rack on the top of the building and climb into the sky. The local wind communes in the South Abaco area were fed data from here, and from similar installations on Man-o-War and Hopetown.

On-line computers continuously load-matched the entire system and updated weather predictions. Susan tried to remember who had worked the kites out. The Swedes? The French?

The soldier held open a door and Susan stepped into a large, dim, air-conditioned room with picture-window views of the entire horizon. Around the walls under the almost continuous windows were the various consoles of the wind engineers: instrument boards, video readouts, and interactive computer monitors. The entire center of the room was now filled with a long plain table at which sat perhaps twenty people. Susan looked at her watch. It was just ten. “Sorry,” she said to the seated people, “Frank Albury told me . . .” she noticed Albury in a chair . . . “You told me ten, Frank.”

Albury popped to his feet and the other men followed. “You’re right on time, Susan. We haven’t started.” They had, of course, started. They had been talking about her. Susan looked curiously around at the Abaco Defense Council and selected a chair next to Jerry Ravetz, toward which she walked. She was fully vectoring now, and selecting that chair had involved a certain extension of mental activity. She suddenly realized that Ravetz, with whom she was friendly, was perhaps the most important person in the room. Provost of the Abaco Technical College and called Jerry by almost everyone, Ravetz seemed to represent all the Israelis in Abaco in some generalized and unstructured way. And much of the new technology of Abaco, the energy farms, the huge, still-building thermocline system, the tidal impoundments running laminar-flow, low-head turbines, the crayfish farms, all were basically Israeli-engineered. As she mentally projected various vector trees, she began to see how it must have developed. Kilowatts were not the only problem!

“Hi, Jerry,” she said firmly.

Ravetz smiled cheerfully. “Hi, Susan, sorry to bother you, but we do seem to have this little . . . ah . . . problem with the State of Florida.” Several of the men around her grinned.

“You’ve got plenty of problems, Jerry,” said Susan, and she did not smile. As was often the case of retrospective vectoring, the picture was clearing even as she spoke. “For one thing, you should never have left Fidel out of all this. Who else is Munoz thick with? There’s some kind of Washington connection in this, Jerry.”

Ravetz, a stocky, crew-cut man in his forties, wearing white tennis shorts and a purple T-shirt, blinked and let his smile slip away, turning to peer more carefully at Susan and her bright, sharp eyes. “It’s a little late to get geopolitical, Susan. We may be under attack before dark.”

At that moment a tall black man in the same simple khaki uniform as the soldiers walked briskly into the room. He was about forty, lean and muscled, and it was perfectly evident that now he was in charge. Susan looked and looked, then turned to Ravetz. “Who is that, Jerry?”

Ravetz smiled again, “Colonel John Gillam, C. in C. of all Abaco defense forces and presently the acting military governor of Abaco,” he whispered.

“Jerry,” said Susan rather more loudly than she intended, “that’s my garbage man!”

Colonel Gillam turned and smiled frostily the length of the table at Susan. “I do the garbage when things are quiet, Dr. Peabody. It’s a way of . . . keeping an eye on things. I’m sure we’ll have this Florida business under control in a day or so. Don’t worry about the Friday pickup. I’ll get your stuff.” His voice was like ice. His eyes glinted and his big fat lower lip jutted red and wet at her. Susan flinched at the shock of his hostility. Here was one real hard conch eater, a North American hater. She was at this table over his dead body! He had obviously refused to even be present when they discussed what to tell her.

Jerry Ravetz pulled awkwardly at his T-shirt with its pink, Day-Glo words, “Crayfish Need Love Too,” an obscure logo popular with biotechs. “Johnnie,” he said quietly, “could we sort of get people introduced and go on?”

John Gillam sat down at the head of the table and pulled a sheet out of his briefcase. “Well, OK, Jerry.” He looked around. “Most of you know each other, but maybe some of you don’t know who it is you know.” He grinned at a young Israeli across from Susan. “Now Merv there is our boat man, kind of our admiral. He bosses the Donnie-Rockets, work boats, and the rest.”

The Israeli grinned back. “Just so I don’t have to go outside the reefs, John. I’m the Dramamine kid, you know.”

“Communication,” said Colonel Gillam, “is Frank Albury. You all know him. At ten this morning we put all C.B. on scrambler and took the lid off the broadcast power.”

Frank looked around and gave them all a gentle smile. “John,” he said softly, “could we have a short prayer before we get into this?”

Colonel Gillam shook his head. “You’re the chaplain, Frank. But the time for that is when they’re on the screens. OK?”

Several other men were introduced, and Susan suddenly noticed that there were only two other women in the room: Dr. Francis Foot, chief of the Abaco hospital; and Frank’s niece, Mary Albury, whose main function seemed to be to select which computer outputs would be displayed and where. Susan looked at Gillam’s coal-black face, the flat nose and high, shiny cheekbones. A black honky-hating macho garbage man, just what the crisis doctor ordered!

Colonel Gillam finally turned to Susan and said evenly, “Dr. Susan Peabody is a newcomer. As most of you know, when Professor Hollister of Princeton retired here, we approached him to advise us in our political relations with the U.S. Dr. Hollister had a stroke last month and this, ah, problem required us to bring in someone not familiar with our situation.” Gillam paused and looked at some notes. “Dr. Peabody is a professor at Harvard and one of the founding members of the Department of Contemporary Politics, a current academic euphemism for crisis management. Dr. Peabody has come to Abaco as a U.N. Fellow and will make a report to UNESCO on the economic and political effects of our energy program and other developments.”

The room suddenly became very quiet, and Susan realized they were waiting for something they had been told by Gillam would happen. The colonel looked at her steadily. “Before we go on, I’d like to ask you a couple of frank questions, Dr. Peabody. If you don’t like them, or you don’t like this situation, please feel free to go back to Hopetown. OK?”

Susan looked at him as evenly as she could. He radiated anger and resentment at her. She was suddenly standing in for Castro, Governor Munoz and God knows who else. “Shoot, Colonel.”

Gillam took a deep breath. “We’re probably going to be attacked by American forces today. If you have any doubts about which side you might be on, or if you think you might play U.N. lady bountiful or peace dove, please just go away.”

Even the whites of his eyes were brown. He was a most thoroughly colored man. Susan looked steadily into the brown-on-brown eyes. “My tenure with the U.N. is six months, Colonel. They’ve already forgotten why I’m here. As far as any choice between you or Governor Munoz, I’ll take you and the rest here, even though you hate my bloody guts and wish I were dead.”

That was vector talk, right down the middle. Colonel Gillam looked at his papers. “I don’t hate you, Dr. Peabody. I don’t know you.”

Susan shook her head. “You can’t imagine why we, and I mean Harvard and the State Department and all the big shots who have patronized and snooted you here for years, are now throwing you to Munoz and Castro. Because it’s coming apart up there, Colonel! President Childers is yellow to the core and incompetent besides. We counted on more time than the Arabs gave us, than the Arabs could ever give us. Do you know there’s a cruise missile battalion in north Florida? Munoz hasn’t got much now, but give him some successes, and who knows? Federal troops have gone over to a state before in our history. So hate away, all of you!”

Jerry Ravetz sat up in his chair and cleared his throat.“Johnnie,” he said plaintively, “don’t we need all the help we can get? There’s nobody else here who knows the U.S. situation like Susan. You said yourself, her professional field is crisis management. What do you want, somebody in English lit., for Heaven’s sake?”

Colonel Gillam nodded grimly. “Welcome to the Abaco Defense Force, Dr. Peabody,” he said evenly. Then, “OK, Frank, let’s show everyone last night’s TV spec.”

Frank Albury nodded to an assistant at one of the consoles and a big flat solid-state screen dropped over the north window and began to flicker. “You mostly saw this before,” said Frank.

The TV tape cut into the eleven o’clock news and a black woman who gave a short spiel on the Abaco Independence Movement and introduced its leader, one Basham Kondo, dressed in flowing robes and a busy afro. Basham had hardly gotten into his slurring, high-speed speech about the enslaved blacks of Abaco and the many Alburys and their Yiddish masters from across the sea, when the screen blanked and retracted. “Sorry,” said Frank Albury gently, “but the prime minister is coming down on the roof.”

The swish of big rotor blades above slowed and then they heard a flurry of footsteps. The far door opened and in swept Prime Minister Sean O’Malley and an entourage of two uniformed and two seersuckered assistants. The old man walked rapidly over to Colonel Gillam and briskly shook his hand. O’Malley was light coffee-colored with a white, kinky poll and a grandfatherly look. Susan suddenly remembered parlor car rides on the New Haven Railroad with her father when she was a very little girl. There was always one porter who was sort of the Old Boss Man, the Chief, and they had all looked exactly like Bahamian Prime Minister Sean O’Malley.

“Colonel,” said O’Malley, “don’t let us interrupt or slow you up. This is your battle. I’m here if there should be any policy problems.” Susan tried to remember what sort of strength the Bahamian navy possessed. Customs and fishery protection vessels certainly, but with what caliber arms? If Florida had DE . . . No, no, there was much more to this, These men weren’t fools. Susan vectored continuouly but the tree was too open, too diffuse. She had been all over Abaco. Where could they have the emplacements? The magazines? What about aircraft? Susan looked up startled to see Ravetz and O’Malley bearing down on her.

“Dr. Peabody,” said the old man, “Jerry tells me you’ve agreed to help us and that you’re a crisis expert. You couldn’t be in a better place!” He shook her hand strongly. “Jerry,” he said, “can’t we get back to whatever you were doing? I know you have plenty of things to get ready.”

Colonel Gillam beckoned for more chairs. “We were watching a replay of last night’s extravaganza.”

O’Malley’s face registered the distaste of a man handed an overfilled diaper. “Well, I’ve watched it twice, but once more can’t hurt.”

Everyone adjusted chairs, the screen came down again, and that great lover of freedom and justice, BashamKondo, told south Florida the way it was. When it ended, Ravetz turned immediately to Susan. “How in the devil can he go on with that Yiddish and Zionist masters baloney? Don’t the Jews in Florida listen to TV or vote?”

Susan shrugged. “Demographics. The old old Jews are dying off and the new ones don’t come down anymore. Munoz and his Cuban gang disavow the worst stuff, but they know how the Sunbelt is going.” She turned and looked directly at Colonel Gillam. “Is that man, that Kondo, an Abacoan, Colonel.”

Gillam snorted in disgust. “He worked here as a crayfish harvester but his work record was hopeless. We think he was born on the Berry Islands and his name was Smythe, but it’s hard to trace drifters like that. He has perhaps two dozen with him, similar types, misfits from the out islands.”

“He wasn’t much of a find for Munoz,” said Susan thoughtfully, “but I suppose he was the only game in town. Mr. Prime Minister, what steps are you taking in the U.S. about this fleet?”

O’Malley turned to Susan in surprise. “Why, my ambassador to the U.S. is carrying a note of protest to the Security Council this morning . . .”

“Good grief,” said Susan impatiently, “I don’t mean that Tower of Babel. Why, they won’t even know where Abaco is, with no casinos, racetracks, or fancy houses. I’m talking about Federal District Court in Miami. Don’t you have a law firm there that can get on this for you?” She looked around quickly. “Does anyone have a copy of the Florida state constitution? I’m sure you can nail Munoz on at least a dozen violations of his authority in Dade County. With a federal restraining order, the Coast Guard will have to function. Furthermore, you can get injunctions so that federal marshals and state police must keep his Guard planes on the ground. They couldn’t be coming over with a fleet and no air cover. These are simple, traditional thinkers, Mr. Prime Minister. Break this chain anywhere and they’ll crawl back into the woodwork!”

The room fell silent as everyone looked at everyone else. Colonel Gillam looked grimly at Susan but said nothing. Finally Prime Minister O’Malley’s ancient face broke into a grin. “I’m chagrined, Dr. Peabody, that we did not think of that,” he said gracefully, then turned and nodded at an assistant in a seersucker suit. The man rose and hurriedly left the room. Frank Albury also stood up, smiling at everyone. “I’ll make sure he gets through on priority to Miami,” he said. “We have protected channels through the satellite link.” And he dashed out.

For the next hour they watched the successive satellite transmissions of high-magnification video showing the invasion fleet assembling in calm waters off Palm Beach. There were Naval Reserve and Coast Guard vessels from Port Everglades, National Guard tank-landing vessels from Fort Lauderdale and Miami, and a collection of state fishery and patrol craft. A young Abacoan stood up and gave the intelligence appreciation: twenty-nine craft, approximately twelve hundred crewmen and about fifteen hundred troops, tank personnel, and drivers. E.T.A. at present course and speed, assuming a Marsh Harbor destination, 8 P.M.

While they were awaiting an update from the satellite, Prime Minister O’Malley slipped into a chair next to Susan. “Dr. Peabody, at what level of combat do you think the U.S. Federal government might intervene?”

Susan looked sideways at the shrewd old face. “That would depend on who was winning, Dr. O’Malley.”

O’Malley looked at her very piercingly, as though seeing her for the first time, and then smiled thinly. “Let’s assume we are overwhelmed here and Fidel takes a hand at New Providence, Andros, and points south.”

Susan jerked her head around and spoke fiercely, directly at him. “That must not happen. You must never count on Washington! Don’t you understand? That’s exactly what they want!”

Her vehemence startled O’Malley. “Who, Dr. Peabody? Who would want that?” he asked softly.

“Munoz’s friends, of course. You don’t think he got this together without help in Washington, do you? He’s being used!”

“But, Fidel?”

“My God, the same! Fidel’s a puppet, a decoy. He’s their next step. The Bahamas, Abaco, mean nothing to them. Dr. O’Malley, have you ever heard of Shastri cycles . . .? No, no, let’s not get into that. This may be blunted.” Susan shook her head staring at the old brown man.

“Do you have any idea who these people in Washington are, Dr. Peabody?”

Susan nodded. “Yes, but there is nothing you can do here and now about this, Dr. O’Malley, except stop the war. And if it starts, win as quietly as possible.”

Susan was vectoring powerfully. She had never achieved this formidable a high, and the great integrating power of her amplified consciousness created clouds of possibilities, the Shastri vector trees, growing and bunching in the created spaces of her mind. The whole development was transparent to her, Munoz, Castro, the cabal of horrible old men in Washington, made by disaster and uncertainty into monsters more fearsome than the rawest, maddest S.S. camp commandant in the worst days at the end of the last great convulsion of a Shastri cycle, over forty years ago. But through some incredible chance (or mischance, that would only vector clearly after the attack was met), these Florida amateurs had decided to drown a pussy cat that was looking more and more like a hungry tiger. As she waited in an ecstasy of speculation and computation, she thought briefly again of Jamie, naked, his cock wilting that night she had dazzled him with the theory of the Shastri cycle. She realized suddenly that he had never been even close to her in intelligence or ability, and it seemed odd that she had never seen that now-obvious fact.

At that moment, Frank Albury said, “Governor Munoz is on Channel Seven, impromptu news conference on the capital steps.” The screen flashed in bright color, and there was Munoz, a short, stocky brown man with a thick mustache and receding hair, waving at some supporters. Around him were his guards and staff, black, brown, and white, as befits the modern Southern governor.

“Governor, is it true the State of Florida is supporting an invasion of the Bahamas?” The question came from offscreen.

Munoz passed a hand across his brow. “We’re not supporting anything. As I understand it, there may be a volunteer group attempting to liberate certain islands in the Bahamas group. In all fairness, I think . . .”

Another reporter shouted, “Is it true that John Amsler of Amsler, Bigelow and Parke is in Federal District Court right now getting a restraining order on moving those ships into Bahamian waters?”

Munoz shrugged. “That’s between the feds and their people. If they can’t control discipline on the cutters, that’s hardly Florida’s problem.”

Now there were several reporters shouting at once. “Governor, what if they get an order in Dade County restraining the state and National Guard boats?”

Munoz held up his hand. “Look, let me make a statement. It’s simply this. Washington, the federal government, is no longer able to protect or even deal with regional interests. When we had everything, it was easy to resolve these differences. With the price of oil at its present level, it’s becoming impossible. Now, the State of Florida has no intention of encouraging a foreign power, a very controversial and bloody-minded foreign power . . . I’m talking about Israel. Let’s please get that straight . . . to penetrate to within one hundred miles of the Florida mainland, displacing as it does hundreds of poor blacks and disturbing the only friends who count today, and I obviously mean the Arab nations. The health, safety , and good life of all Floridians is the only thing that motivates me. This administration is . . .”

Suddenly a small young woman popped into camera range, her pad pointing and waving at Munoz. “Then you intend to violate the law, Governor? You intend to defy any court order to ground the Guard jets?”

Munoz shook his head mildly but his magnified eyes were as thick and cold as a snake’s. “I have no such intention. This office will obey all federal and state laws and orders of the courts. This office . . .”

A red light over the C.B. speaker rack went on, and all sound in the room went suddenly dead. Then came a cool young voice on a C.B. monitor. “Attention! Attention, Abaco! This is Argus North. I have twenty-six single-seat bandits leaving the Florida coast. Estimated flight time to Little Abaco, seventeen minutes!”

Susan took an involuntary deep breath. Governor Munoz would evidently obey the court’s orders by flying his weapons before the orders arrived.

Colonel Gillam made two long steps to the C. B. center and pressed a protected red button. Priority lights shone all across the monitors and Gillams’s voice was multiply projected, still clear and sharp. “This is Big John. Prepare for air attack. All trackers make final calibrations now. All protection vessels, put to sea at once. Argus North, take direction. Execute!”

“Ten-four, Big John. Trackers all, this is your Argus North. We will number targets consecutively and assign you in groups. Report your calibrations to subdivision leaders as available. I repeat . . .”

John Gillam turned and grimly nodded at Frank Albury. “Time for that prayer, Frank,” he said softly.

Albury stood up and looked out over the room. “Please bow your heads, whatever you may believe,” he said in his gentle voice. “Dear Lord, we do not kill and maim our fellow men in Thy name, but because Thy Kingdom has not yet been achieved on this sinful world. Forgive us our pride and our cruelty, for we are imperfect seekers after Thy Truth, and though our sins offend Thy sight, bless us in simple love, we Abacoans and our friends from Thy ancient land of Israel, Amen.”

“This is . . . your Argus North. Our bandits are dividing their forces. We anticipate twelve to attack north from Cherokee Sound. E.T.A. Cherokee, nine minutes.”

Colonel Gillam turned to Frank Albury. “Picture, Frank!” The big screen showed a radar presentation, a glowing map of the Abaco chain. “Project that squadron at twenty-X, Mary,” said Gillam.

Twelve bright dots, moving far faster than in real time swept across the southern Bight of Abaco and out over Tilloo Cay. “Argus South, are you tracking?”

“I see the picture, Big John,” came a new voice. “Trackers all, Marsh Harbor and south, this is your Argus South. We will number targets consecutively . . .

Susan watched all this intently. By God, they could keep a secret here! What in Hell: “Jerry,” she started to say . . .

“Urgent! This is Argus North! Enemy in sight! Six bandits on the deck! Numbering consecutively: target one, batteries A and B; target two . . .”

Colonel Gillam peered out the window to the northwest. “Frank,” and now he could not conceal the tightness in his voice, “optical blow on these first ones.”

The screen flickered and then a projected telescope image showed two large jet aircraft head on, their images made wavery by the intervening hot air layers, growing in size slowly. Suddenly the closer one’s wings showed two bright flashes. “He’s firing rockets, Johnnie!” Susan could hardly recognize Ravetz’s voice, it was dry and tense. Colonel Gillam grinned fiercely.

“This is Big John. All shutters open! Execute!”

Susan looked out at Man-o-War Cay and she seemed to see a glitter, a sudden flash as though lightning had darted across the distant low land, the two jets came at 600 miles an hour southeast down the Sea of Abaco just off the water and heading for Marsh Harbor, a huge, growing roar. In an instant the leading plane cartwheeled and splashed gigantically. His wing man went into a sudden vertical climb, up and up, north of them, and Susan could see without magnification that the plane was glowing red. Smoke began to plume from the entire fuselage, and the pilot ejected, a black bundle. But the bundle smoked too, and when the chute opened, it was no more than a bag of tatters.

Now the C.B. monitors were alive with urgent talk.

“Track! Track! Carol! Hold your target!”

“Harden my focus, Benji!”

“Left, B Battery, left!”

Planes were coming in on several angles now. One of the southern group went directly over them and crashed within a hundred yards of the harbor at Man-o-War. Two more went south on fire, and a third was glowing so brightly that it simply blew apart before ever smoking at all.

Susan turned to Ravetz, her surprise unconcealed. “Solar weapons, Jerry! You’re using the mirrors on the energy farms!”

Colonel Gillam turned and his smile was now cruel and twisted. “Not quite what UNESCO had in mind, eh, Dr. Peabody? But on the right day, a nasty toy. You see, even if we don’t hold them in the mirror battery’s focus long enough to cook them, it’s usually long enough to blind them. Of course, if they had brought welding goggles they might stop that, but it’s hard to strafe nigger conch-eaters when you’re wearing welding goggles!”

“This is Argus South! Batteries M and N, redirect to target eleven. You’re tracking too fast, Dawn!”

“I got two already, Argus!” The girl’s voice was high and tense, total excitement. “Harden my focus!” she shrieked; then: “Mine’s on fire! Mine’s burning!”

“Jerry,” said Susan thickly. “That’s Dawn LaVere! That child is only fifteen! What in Hell are you doing here?”

But now Ravetz looked at her coldly and his voice was low, yet as hard as Gillam’s. “Cut the shit, Susan! Don’t you see it yet? This is a Shastri community. We’re living what you people gave seminars on. You’ve been too close to it!”

And Susan, watching horrified another ejection at one hundred feet, this time the pilot enclosed in a bright orange tongue of flame, suddenly saw the whole puzzle unfold and, in chagrin put all the pieces into place.

A jet came over Matt Lowes Cay firing cannon at Marsh Harbor, and Gillam raged into the mike. “Argus South! We’re being hurt by target sixteen!”

“A-OK, Big John! We’re tracking sixteen! Carrie, you’re too low! Track! Track!”

The plane continued over the town and crashed into the Bight of Abaco to the west.

Susan turned firmly to Colonel Gillam. “Colonel, stop! Let some of them go home, for God’s sake!”

Gillam whirled on her. ‘To their fucking subdivisions and their insurance offices? To their darky babysitters and cleaning women!” he shouted.

Susan shrank before his anger, but she stared resolutely back. “Probably a third of those pilots are black, Colonel,” she said bitterly. “You’re living in another age. I don’t give a damn about those men, but if you kill them all, if you win absolutely, it’s almost impossible to vector the effect!”

She whirled on Ravetz. “Jerry, you fool! What would Shastri have said? This is a Shastri community? Bullshit! You’re all on raving ego trips!” She spun again, frantic. “Mr. O’Malley! I said you must win, but quietly! Don’t you understand . . .?”

But it was too late.

“Trackers all, this is your Argus North. We have zero . . . repeat zero targets! We are checking the tapes now, hang on . . . Trackers all! We have twenty-six kills! We wiped the sky clean!”

The C.B. monitors lit up like a Christmas tree and a confusion of shouts and cheers burbled out. To the north, several huge meteorological balloons surged upward carrying fluttering Bahamian and Israeli flags. Windpattern smoke rockets flew skyward from Marsh Harbor and Hopetown painting sudden red vertical columns as high as the eye could see, and over it all came the high, sexy, excited voice of Dawn LaVere. “Ohhhh, Big John! I got five! I’m an ace . . . an ACE!”

Susan felt a real chill of panic. She looked around the room at the arrested figures, many of them still unable to believe what they had done, yet already believing and starting to live in a world in which it had happened.

“Well,” she said soberly, suddenly remembering with a real pang of love her cheerful, gentle father and one of his favorite Yankeeisms, “You all really pissed on the stove this time!”

Cleaning up after the great battle consisted mainly of locating the pilots’ bodies or getting them out of the sunken planes, and this grim business was taken in hand at once by Marv, the Donnie-Rockets, and the biotech scuba teams.

“For,” said Colonel Gillam to Susan in as deliberately callous a way as possible, “we wouldn’t want any missing-in-action problems, would we? All those wives petitioning your Congress? They’re going to get everything back, the charcoaled remains, the dogtags, and the TV tapes showing just how and where we put the sun in their cockpits!”

Susan, sitting slumped in a chair, shook her head. “Come off it, Colonel!” she said with irritation. “Neither the Florida National Guard or the Pentagon is going to want to talk about this very much. Those widows will be an embarrassment to Munoz, all right, but the press will probably represent the pilots as undisciplined and incompetent adventurers. No, no. You’re missing the point. Once the power centers hear that an exuberant bunch of thirteen-year-old colored kids and sexy-poos like Dawn can total two squadrons of jets without a single local casualty, they’re going to look much closer at Abaco and this Israeli thing. They’ve been looking and thinking plenty already, and I specifically mean Fidel.”

Prime Minister O’Malley, who had watched, wide-eyed and silent, the first great battle of the Abaco reefs, now turned to Ravetz.

“Jerry, I think this is all unbelievable, too miraculous to take in. But I find Dr. Peabody’s words more and more disturbing. Could we talk . . .?”

“Hang on, everybody!” Frank Albury dashed into the room with some tapes. “It looked like the invasion fleet had stopped, but now it’s headed our way again.”

The cheerful chatter in the room stopped abruptly. “E.T.A., Frank?” said Gillam.

“Hard to say, John, right at this minute. They aren’t really up to speed yet.”

Susan started. She had completely forgotten the fleet! Hastily she rose and located a ladies’ room and went into the toilet to take two more pills. This continuous confrontation with Gillam was wearing her down. She sat, resting and alone, on the cool John and rubbed her eyes. How was it possible that a Shastri community . . . for Ravetz had been absolutely right in so describing Abaco, she saw that with blinding clarity . . . could trigger a Shastri cycle? Or, as Shastri had called it, a spasm, for completed cycles were always accompanied by a multitude of unvectorable changes. Ravetz was right. In the seminars you could always keep things in their compartments; but the moment the insights became more than theoretical, the moment you built a community, weapons, life patterns, tools, ideals, then you rippled the pond; and the more successful and radical the insight, the more ripples there were. Susan gave herself five minutes of luxury, a mental vector investigation of the mirror weapon in all its Shastrian ramifications. Ravetz, or someone in Israel . . . or, what the Hell, Archimedes if you like! . . . had achieved an almost perfect Shastri null-weapon. A weapon so totally integrated into the community that it had no vector strength whatever in most of the critical and dangerous areas. Such as standing armies and their officer corps, almost always more destabilizing than the real and imagined enemies they faced. And all the ideal, extraneous, deadly hardware. Susan wondered how much extra it cost to turn the solar heating mirrors into weapons; they had to move in altitude and azimuth to track the sun anyhow. Ten percent for the control stations, logic chips, and hard wire connections? Probably not even that much. And the beautiful, Shastrian idea that in destroying the weapon, an attacker would be destroying the very reason for his attack; the booming energy wealth of the Bahamas in a world of dry oil wells. And the fact that it could only be used part of the time and only for defense, a fatal flaw no doubt in the tired imaginations of the old incompetents at the Pentagon, was completely in accord with that essential, really primary Shastri vector: self-realization and the necessity for diverse answers in a society.

The greatest enemy in the Shastri canon was traditional systems analysis in which cost, profit, growth, safety, or some other single value dictated a decision. Of course, without the drug they really had to use single-vector analysis; they could not control the vector tree, could not see the cloud of, not end points, but extensions of now. Susan suddenly grinned. How it worked! Gerald Beans went to school, but he captained a high-speed foil boat of the most sophisticated sort. Dawn LaVere, with her pouty red mouth, melon breasts, and tanned white flanks that Ravetz had described as simultaneously a treasure and a disaster . . . she with five kills against modern aggressively flown jets. The vector tree always showed that there were several equally good solutions to a problem. This diversity led to wealth and to more diversity, to a social system in which almost everyone could gain somewhere a sense of themselves and their integration into their community. The children were cast in that role by age, but they were also full-fledged and useful members of Abaco society. Doubtless the Israelis had found their tracking reflexes superior to any adults‘. Susan had to agree, Shastri would have absolutely approved of that! It totally nulled the whole hero, macho, glory, bravery vector so excrutiatingly dominant in war-beset, single-vector societies, so utterly useless in a Shastri society where heroes were replaced by experts, by persons whose confidence comes from their heads, not their balls or that mystical “backbone” her New England father made reference to when he really had no idea why someone behaved, or failed to behave, in a particular way.

But there was still a problem with the children! That most elusive of all vectors, ethics, the vague, but powerful human-based standards, how a society thinks about itself. Five dead men, fathers of children like Dawn LaVere, but prepared to kill Dawn and her black and Israeli friends from on high, impersonally as pilots always did. Dawn knew she directed the mirrors because she, and that little boy at the dock—God, twelve? thirteen?—they were the best in the community at that task. They knew and the community knew, that was important. And yet, the children also know, many would never be able to forget, that they burned those men! Susan rubbed and rubbed her eyes. Will Dawn love differently, or not be able to love, because she burned five pilots? Five bastards! Five of the main fucking reasons why there’s burning in the world . . .

The ladies’ room door opened. “Susan, you OK, honey?” It was Mary Albury.

“OK, Mary. I sort of fell asleep for a sec.”

“Oh, don’t I know it! This is really too much for everybody. Listen, honey, the new stuff on the boats is coming in, and Dr. O’Malley wondered if . . .”

“Be right out, Mary. Thanks.” Susan washed her hands and thought of Frank Albury and decided she would take up the matter of the children with him.

They were all seated when she returned, watching a blow-up of the satellite pictures of the fleet, which was apparently steaming at about eight knots so as to bring it into Abacoan waters well after dark. Susan saw that Dr. O’Malley was now across the table from her, and as soon as the pictures ended, he turned to Colonel Gillam. “I think I’d like to hear Dr. Peabody’s appreciation, Colonel,” he said a trifle stiffly.

Colonel Gillam inclined his head, and O’Malley turned immediately to Susan. “Why are they still coming, Dr. Peabody?”

“At what level do you want to discuss that, Dr. O’Malley, the fleet itself, Munoz, or his helpmeets in Washington?”

“All three, if you please,” said O’Malley.

“Well, as to the fleet, I would imagine they left Florida with all communications, especially receiving stuff; radios and C.B.s, ripped out and confiscated. The one thing you folks didn’t think about, Federal District Court would be the first thing to occur to Munoz’s gang. So they would have perhaps one man per ship with ways of talking either to the mainland or at least to a central communication vessel. That way, some judge can’t get them on contempt, for failing to obey a court order which they claim they never got because they had twenty-nine busted radios. For this, the Coast Guard writes each captain a letter asking him to do better next time. Of course, they’ve been warned, through whatever hidden radios are left, about the solar weapons. So they’re coming in at night.”

O’Malley looked at her and shook his head. “They wouldn’t be so stupid as to think we had no other arrows in the quiver? Mister Kondo is doubtless a psychotic, but it defies belief . . .”

Susan shook her head. “Who knows what even Munoz’s closest man in the fleet actually has found out? I’m sure the news and TV stations are filled with rumors of death rays and general wild talk . . .” She looked over at Frank Albury, who grinned and nodded vehemently. “The more important question is, why is Munoz still at this?”

“Exactly!” said O’Malley in a tense voice.

“Two reasons, I think. First, because he’s already in plenty deep. If they could have gotten most of the pilots back, the thing might have dribbled away, a flaming sensation and nuisance, but something that could be handled. But all twenty-six . . . that’s what I was trying to tell you . . . absolute victories are . . . absolute. They have nonvectorable elements. Munoz is the gambler suddenly in over his head with one last buck in his pocket.” Susan looked around the room and even Colonel Gillam sat silent.

“The second pressure is the scary one, the one on Munoz from Washington. He’s had to have help all along, and he certainly couldn’t keep the fleet coming without both help and, probably, pressure from that same direction. Do you see what that means, Dr. O’Malley?”

The old man nodded at once. “I do. It means they don’t care whether they lose the fleet or capture Abaco. That has become irrelevant.”

“Exactly!” said Susan, and the room became silent for many moments.

“Dr. Peabody, do you use political cocaine?” said Colonel Gillam. “Specifically, are you on it now?”

Susan flushed involuntarily and turned to face him. “I am, Colonel. I wouldn’t dare attempt vector analysis without the drug.”

“Dr. Peabody, I spent three years with the C.I. A., and much of my time was spent working with Shastri vectors,” said Gillam coldly. “They established that the drug was not only unnecessary but gave erratic results. Crisis experts in Washington vector using computer branching and cluster algorithms.”

Susan curled her lip. “Right! And look at the U.S. political turmoil! The reason, Colonel Gillam, that your beloved C.I.A. could never really work in Shastri vector space is that in 1981, President Carter suddenly eliminated the Drug Enforcement Administration, by then an international scandal, and turned the whole, nutty U.S. drug hunt over to the C.I.A., thereby making it absolutely impossible for them to make any serious studies of drug-enhanced decision-making.”

Jerry Ravetz ran his hands through his crew cut and pinched his pudgy nose. “Well, this is my fault. I didn’t take my pills today, Susan. Believe it or not, the first Shastri null-weapon battle, and I thought it would be so simple I wouldn’t need all that vectoring. I wanted to savor it emotionally instead of being endlessly into all that damn thinking.”

“I didn’t know you used the political cocaine, too, Jerry,” said Colonel Gillam stiffly.

“You never asked, Johnnie, and I didn’t offer to tell,” said Ravetz quickly. “The point is, Susan was right this noon and she’s right now. We’re in the initial stages of a Shastri cycle. Somehow the Abaco community has triggered it, chance, something else, I just don’t know.”

“Yes,” said Gillam angrily, “providing we all believe in this drug-fevered hokum! Jerry, the C.I.A. used Shastri’s stuff all the time, but they vectored on a computer.”

Ravetz shook his head firmly. “No way! Johnnie, the C.I.A. showed you a lot of useful stuff, but you can’t vector in real time on a computer. It’s simply impossible. It takes weeks to write even a rudimentary program, and by then the crisis, decision, or whatever is past.”

“Jerry, this drug, what is it anyway?” asked Sean O’Malley.

“Okay,” said Ravetz, turning to look at everyone. “Quickly, here it is for those who don’t know the story . . . or have the wrong one. Bar Singh Shastri was an Indian pharmacologist and general all-around genius working in a London hospital on synthesis problems. He got into cocaine as a recreational drug in the early seventies, but it had the same effect on Shastri as on Freud. He gained intellectual power, or at least felt he did, and set about searching for that part of the coca plant that carried the intellectual part of the high. Well, eventually he managed to isolate and synthesize a group of alkaloids that apparently reduce the time delay at the nerve synapses. They do other things as well, but the effect is that the mind can carry many more coherent thoughts simultaneously, in parallel, and can process thoughts more quickly. Short-term memory is also enhanced. Interestingly, even though Shastri was a really top-level scientist, he immediately recognized that his enhanced abilities under the drug would be most extended and useful in a political context, he ran for Parliament and spent three years forming a brilliant political career, then dropped it all and went to Israel, becoming a recluse to study and write. Shastri was far beyond becoming the first Indian prime minister of Britain. He had found a way to reorganize the world using vectoring and the vector tree. Most of you know where the theory leads: null-weapons, multiple, labor-intensive energy communes, decisions based on vectoring a cloud of factors.”

Prime Minister O’Malley rubbed his cheek and shrugged. “Well, Dr. Peabody, what projection do you . . . ah . . . see? Why do they attack us but not care if they win?”

“A Shastri cycle,” said Susan, “can progress in two ways. With primarily external vector interactions, such as Europe in 1914, or with primarily internal vector interactions, such as Germany in 1939. We are in an internal cycle, in which a small, very powerful group in Washington is attempting to escalate a twenty-six plane raid on Abaco into, I’m afraid, an open-ended, transcontinental-level nuclear strike interchange. If you defeat the Florida navy, and especially if you defeat it as decisively as you did the jets, they will attempt, and they obviously have considerable hope of doing it or they wouldn’t be taking these risks, to induce Fidel to fall upon you. Or at least make demands upon you.”

Susan looked from Ravetz to Prime Minister O’Malley. “The Bahamas government has an agreement with Israel to accept some substantial number of refugees, if the Palestine situation becomes irretrievable. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

The room now remained very quiet for some time. O’Malley’s face flushed darkly, but then the smooth brown calm slowly returned. “You know, Dr. Peabody, that was a very carefully held confidence between our governments that you perceived.”

“Yes,” said Susan coolly, “but Fidel perceived it too. I won’t attempt to guess how many might come, one hundred thousand perhaps? But it would totally transform the Bahamas, this end of the Caribbean. And now Fidel sees that these Israelis, far from dancing the hora and raising yummy crayfish, have the strike of a cobra. No doubt your plans for the Florida navy are equally spectacular, and Fidel can watch them on his own satellite link, and what do you think will happen after that? All of you?”

Susan looked around. She had to vector them too. They must be led to this, inescapably. She looked at her watch. Four-thirty, and the fleet here a little after midnight! She took a deep breath. “Munoz’s bosses in Washington, through some ghastly chance, have stumbled into something that could be an all-win situation. If Abaco falls, Munoz will taste blood and go for Freeport. Fidel will have to move or have a far more hostile and expansionist neighbor than yourself, Dr. O’Malley. If, as they now probably expect, Florida goes down to defeat, they throw Munoz to the wolves, who will really be howling at this point, and panic Fidel with now-documented stories of Israeli superiority and hegemony in the Caribbean.

“In either case,” and Susan paused and looked around the silent room, “the end result is a move by Cuba against the Bahamas followed by a spasm strike from the U.S. to protect freedom, save Jews, stop Communism, or whatever best serves them. One of the first conclusions Shastri came to when he began to use drug-enhanced analysis was that once the cycle reached a nuclear-explosion level, it could be driven to conclusion. The very fact of a burst over, say, Havana or Miami, would enable a leader to induce other crews and commanders to fire, whatever the dampers or restraints.”

Sean O’Malley nodded. “And so, Dr. Peabody?”

“And so, Dr. O’Malley, we must immediately attempt to get Fidel here, tonight . . . to Abaco . . . and let him watch the big show. And, Jerry, you must decide how to get your government to send Israeli energy communes to Cuba and, I suppose, how to convince them to go.”

“It’s impossible!” spat Ravetz in sudden anger. “There’s no way to vector that through, Susan. Cut the crap! You know what Cuba’s like!”

Susan stared calmly at him. “What’s it like, Jerry?”

Ravetz spluttered, “Phony elections, snooping! Secret police! Come on, Susan!”

“Listen,” said Susan. “Cuba has softened and Fidel is old. And you Israelis have something big to offer, bigger than anyone else can offer. A transformed society within Communism! Shastri showed that multivector planning requires a collective approach. Everybody has to give somewhere in this, Jerry. The point is, once Fidel sees a Shastri society at work, he’ll be like a child after candy.

“That bastard won’t come here!” said Colonel Gillam. “Mr. Prime Minister, I’ll resign if . . .”

Sean O’Malley looked darkly at Susan. “Even if I were willing to see the man, what could we offer him? It may be possible in your computer crisis-gaming to call up dictators and have them run over, Dr. Peabody, but in the real world such talks require weeks of preparation . . .”

“Nonsense!” said Susan fiercely. “Fidel is aware of Shastri concepts. Say that you’ll talk with him about sharing all this. Just talk!”

O’Malley, flushed and angry, shook his head. “You don’t understand. What do I do? Call him on the C.B.? I tell you . . .”

“Dr.O’Malley,” said Susan, “if Frank Albury can get me Major José Martino at the Department of State in Havana on diplomatic channels, that is guarded channels, it may be possible, but you’ve got to agree . . .” She turned and looked at Colonel Gillam, her lips a thin line. “Before you resign, Colonel, you might consider that Fidel will certainly be more fascinated by your efforts than, say, me. The Cuban military forces are . . . crack. If those had been Cuban jets, you probably wouldn’t have burned them all and you would have lost some mirrors too!”

“Who is this Major Martino, Dr. Peabody?” asked O’Malley and he suddenly sounded worn and tired.

Susan smiled. “A Shastri scholar.He studied with Shastri the same time I was in Israel. He is close to Fidel, Dr. O’Malley. Nobody is handing the Bahamas to anyone, just remember that. What it really amounts to is you extending your good offices assist in getting energy communes into Cuba. Of course Jerry is right. There are political problems aplenty. But they won’t get smaller!”

O’Malley squared his shoulders. “All right. Let’s try it. Mr. Albury, my Mr. Steen will assist you in putting through the call.” Steen, a middle-aged black in seersucker shorts, walked to a communications panel on the west wall and began dialing on a picture phone.

Susan turned and stared coldly at Colonel Gillam. “I’ve been assuming through all this that there will be a show for Fidel tonight, Colonel, and I don’t mean a rifle regiment running ashore on Elbow Cay!”

“That,” said Gillam bitterly, “is the one and only certainty in any of this. If the bastards come ashore, they’ll be swimming!”

“Susan,” called Frank Albury, “Major Martino is on the hook!”

Susan jumped up and ran across the big room, dropping into the seat vacated by Steen. “José, how are you, old friend?” said Susan quickly, looking at the thin officer’s image, with his slicked hair and tiny pencil mustache, smiling primly at her.

“Hello, Susan. I knew you were on Abaco and I hoped we would talk.” Susan took her deepest breath of the day and held it for a moment.

“José, we may have a chance to socialize but there is now an urgent problem. A Shastri cycle has begun, José.”

She watched his brown color fade on the screen, and then he blinked several very long blinks. “Abaco . . . Susan? . . .”

“. . . And Cuba,” she finished relentlessly.

“I cannot see it, Susan. I sensed there were deeper problems when you burned the Florida planes, but . . .”

“But you don’t have all the vectors, José!” said Susan, looking at him intently. “Cuba is to serve as an excuse for a destabilization strike from the U.S.A. That is all I can say on electronics, but it is true. We are in deadly danger, José.”

The little Cuban wiped his forehead and patted his thin hair. “And so . . .” he almost whispered.

“Prime Minister O’Malley has agreed to invite Fidel to Abaco, to watch our defense against the Florida navy. We can talk about it all, José: the cycle, the Israelis, the energy . . . it can be worked out, José!” God, she was sweating in this cold room! She took more deep breaths.

Major Martino nodded. “Hold the channel, Susan. I will ring Fidel. We have been approached . . .” He paused and thought a moment. “Hold the channel!” and the screen went bright and empty.

There seemed to be nothing much to do at that point but have supper, and most of them staggered down to the wind engineers’ dining room, one flight below. Ravetz and O’Malley disappeared to some private place, while Colonel Gillam and some of his young staff and engineers ate in a quiet, closed group.

Susan sat down at a table alone with her tray and picked at the fried chicken. She sighed and rubbed her eyes.

“Cheer up, cheer up,” said Frank Albury, putting his tray down across from her. “Moses never stepped on the soil of the Promised Land, but he knew his people would, Susan.” His soft eyes peered into her shadowed, pinched face.

“Oh, Frank.” She gave a deep, shuddery sigh. “This morning before you came I was sitting in a dirty dressing gown feeling sorry for myself. Now suddenly I’m telling everyone how to run the world. These are your islands, your technology, your weapons, and in a few hours I’ve . . . Oh, Hell, Frank, of course Jerry doesn’t want to put Israelis into Cuba, to deal with all that political hassle on top of the whole Shastri and technical thing. And Prime Minister O’Malley, after eight years of stiff-arming Fidel, suddenly has to face him under the worst kinds of pressures and dangers, no agenda, no plans, no data.”

She rubbed her cheeks hard. “And Colonel Gillam. The miracle worker, the one man in the world who translates a lot of theoretical, academic hokum into a pure Shastri defense. And by carping and needling him, I’ve reduced his miracle to crud. He’s better, more honest than I am, Frank. He always knew what was right and what needed doing, and he did it with his super toys and his wonder children . . . and, oh, Frank. The children. I can’t make them fit. I just can’t!” And she wiped her eyes on her napkin and stared at her plate.

Frank Albury rubbed his pink knees and cleared his throat several times. “I’m not sure I can make them fit either, Susan,” he said finally, “but David was a young boy. God needed David, not only to kill an enemy of his people, but to teach a lesson, to men, to us.”

Susan nodded. “Oh, I know that. I’ve thought about that. David is very much a Shastrian figure. The small, confident expert facing macho bluster and baloney.”

Frank nodded hard. “Susan, the Shastrian society is, at its base, a meritocracy structured to continuously maximize diversity, to maximize the ways in which merit can be achieved. To use adults for tracking aircraft when the children test better would simply admit they were less than full members of the Abaco community.”

“Yes, Frank. It’s all true. I see it now. But to kill so easily, like a contest or game. To kill with such glee. What if it hardens them, turns them callous, Frank?”

Albury nodded. “And if those troops were to land tonight and rape Dawn LaVere,” Frank colored a bit thinking about that, “would she be less hard afterwards because she hadn’t killed any of them? Or wouldn’t she be both hard and a victim besides?”

A young man dashed up to their table. “Frank! We’ve got Castro on the wire! I’ve sent for the Prime Minister!”

Frank rose at once. “Coming, Susan?”

Susan shook her head. “I’ve meddled enough, Frank. Either Dr. O’Malley sells it or he doesn’t, and all I could do is watch and fidget, Frank.”

He nodded looking down at her. “I know you pray for us all the time and I don’t believe a word of it, but . . . don’t stop, OK?”

At almost ten that night, three huge Cuban VTOLs settled down out of the dark to crouch on their tails at the Marsh Harbor airport, their jet-prop engines whining shrilly. Susan and Ravetz stood in the floodlit landing area, in front of two dozen Abaco civil police who held back a mass of gaping Marsh Harbor residents, come to catch a glimpse of the terrible old man.

“It’s like the three-shell game,” said Ravetz. “You never know which one he’s in until they open the doors.”

But only in the first, upthrust fuselage did a door slide back and steps swing down, and Susan saw Major Martino start down the ladder. In that instant, Frank Albury was at their elbow. “Susan! Jerry! We got it off the diplomatic wire ninety seconds ago, and now it’s coming over the commercial channels! President Childers has been assassinated! His helicopter was attacked by some kind of missiles, wire-guided or heat-seekers, they don’t know which yet, just after he took off from the White House!”

“Oh, my God, Jerry,” breathed Susan and she began to shiver. “I’ve never been so scared, never!”

“Look! said Ravetz tensely. “They’ve just gotten the news too!” Major Martino had been followed down the ladder by the old man himself, white-bearded and wearing an O.D. baseball cap, but then two more Cubans ran down the steps shouting and all four clustered at the bottom of the ladder.

“Jerry,” said Susan suddenly. “They mustn’t go back! Not now!” And she ran across the asphalt waving and shouting, “José! José!”

The dapper thin Cuban turned and watched her come up. “Ah, Susan, how fine . . .”

“José! You’ve heard about Childers? Do you see now how it’s happening? José, the cycle will diverge. We must all talk!” The shadowy figure behind Major Martino stepped up beside him and Susan suddenly gulped. Close up, Fidel Castro looked like an aging Ernest Hemingway, the same round beard and shape of face. She blinked and shook her head.

“Dr. Castro! Within an hour, Vice-president Demarest will be sworn in. He is mad, sir! A manic-depressive who can barely be stabilized on lithium!”

The old Cuban looked at her coolly.“Dr. Peabody, José has told me about you and your call this afternoon. But, sane or mad, what is that to us?”

Susan pushed a strand of hair back. “Dr. Castro, have you ever heard of the Last Mile Study?” The old man shook his head. “Sir, the study was kept very secret because of its monstrous conclusions, but basically, Last Mile proved a number of things, all based on defective, single-vector analysis. First, they showed that the U.S. total-war capacity could only slip, was slipping, with time in relation to Russia and the Third World. Second, they claimed that in any all-out nuclear war, and especially a rapidly opening one, the Russians would be revealed as far weaker than believed. Third, that the longer the war continued, the greater would be the U.S.‘s relative strength at the end.” She paused and swallowed to moisten her dry throat. “The . . . the loss of life in Asia would be . . . beneficial, reducing the population pressure and breaking down super states like India that have become ungovernable. Even in the U.S., the tremendous damage and horror would turn people to the federal government for help, give it back its old clout . . .” She shook her head angrily. “Oh . . . I won’t give you any more of that horrible nonsense, Dr. Castro. It’s just that President-designate Demarest believes it all, and all his advisors are ready to try it out if they can just get the first one to go off! Cuba, then the Soviets is their sequence.”

Major Martino turned to the old Cuban excitedly. “Fidel, that is why they offered . . .” but the old man’s narrow and snapping eyes stopped Martino instantly.

“Dr. Peabody,” he said, “you urged this meeting tonight to insure that these people could not possibly connect me with this invasion?” Susan nodded. “But that was before this murder. Cannot Demarest do whatever he chooses? To Cuba or anyone else?”

Susan shook her head vehemently. “There has to be a context, Dr. Castro. A logical development. Don’t you see that to get even the lowest commander to fire his own missile involves a whole mass of intangibles? What sergeant, no matter how plausible the codes and signals, would fire his missile when he’s watching a Lucy rerun on Miami television with no sign of war or sense of trouble?”

Castro pulled his white whiskers and looked at Major Martino. “José?” he asked softly.

Martino nodded. “She is right, Fidel! Now we see many things that we did not see before. We must at once null the political vector between the Bahamas and Cuba. We will force this man Demarest to look elsewhere for his provocations.”

“Oh,” said Susan, taking long breaths in sudden relief and really smiling at the two men, “I expect Demarest will be dealt with almost immediately, providing our friends here in Abaco can carry out their part tonight.”

Castro, Ravetz, and O’Malley left the airport in a staff car and went into private session for an hour, when suddenly all arrived back in the window-room center of the Wind Commune building. It was almost midnight when Frank Albury said, “Hold it everybody,” and the big screen slid down. “Here’s Channel Two.”

The inside of the newsroom behind an open-shirted young black at his desk looked, for once, authentically busy. “Continuing Channel Two’s coverage of the incredible Abaco and assassination stories,” he said excitedly, “we have learned that Prime Minister Fidel Castro, Cuba’s aging patriarch, has made a sensational visit to the island of Abaco, scene this noon of an air battle involving renegades of the Florida Air National Guard and elements of the Abacoan defense forces. Cuban Radio announced that the prime minister wished to demonstrate his solidarity with other island nations who, Dr. Castro was quoted as saying, must now contend with the fall and death throes of the entire Yankee elephant rather than just the tramplings of his large and careless feet, unquote. Channel Two has also learned that the extraordinarily effective Abacoan anti-aircraft defense, which registered a sensational one-hundred percent kill against the Guard jets, was not a laser weapon as first thought but a solar mirror concentration system that can be rapidly tracked. Channel Two also . . .”

The breathless disclosures continued, but the old, white-bearded Cuban sat quietly down next to Susan and whispered, “That was what you wanted, was it not, Dr. Peabody?”

Susan nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Castro, and . . . sir?” He looked at her and nodded. “Shastrian ideas can work in Cuba. I . . .” But he only smiled distantly and held up his hand.

“I know all about that from José, Dr. Peabody. We will see how it all works out.”

They continued watching the developing stories on the Miami channels when Ravetz suddenly spoke. “Hush, let’s catch this!”

“We have learned,” said a frazzled young lady staring down blearily at the prompter readout in front of her, “that Israeli Ambassador Mishka Gur is attempting to see the new president in his Camp David retreat. Sources at the Israeli embassy say that Ambassador Gur is attempting an eleventh-hour appeal to stop the continued Florida-based attacks on the Jewish settlements in the Abaco Island group. Sources at Camp David have refused to comment on the appeal and say that President Demarest is in seclusion with his closest advisors.”

“What’s that all about, Jerry?” asked Susan, suddenly puzzled, but Ravetz, his face grim, only shook his head.“Johnnie,” he said turning to Colonel Gillam, “we can’t win too big tonight. There’s no limit on this one!”

Gillam laughed bitterly. “I thought absolute victories were a Shastri no-no, Jerry.”

Susan spoke up. “This noon that was true, Colonel, but not now, not with the fleet. The cycle may be damped, but Demarest is still as dangerous as a mad dog. Nothing will help his enemies more than total victory here.” Gillam said nothing and Susan noticed that Castro was watching them with quick narrow eyes.

Suddenly, they all turned to stare at the lighted C.B. monitor board. “Attention! Attention, Abaco, this is your Argus North. Our pirates have increased their speed to twenty knots. E.T.A. Man-o-War, entrance-channel buoy, fourteen minutes.”

Colonel Gillam jumped up and peered out the north windows. The moon was less than a quarter full and the Sea of Abaco was dark, only an occasional navigation marker winking or glowing along the five-mile channel leading in from Man-o-War to Marsh Harbor. “Infrared, Frank,” said Gillam.

The big screen lit with a faint eerie light and in the center was a detailed whitish image of a destroyer escort bow on, with a black bone in her teeth. “She has a missile battery amidships, Jerry,” said Colonel Gillam softly. “We mustn’t provoke her as long as she . . .” He lifted up the mike. “Man-o-War Traffic Master. This is Big John. Prepare for lamp messages. Send at the DE, the leading vessel.”

“Ten-four, Big John. We’re waiting.”

They were all waiting now. Everyone frozen in the room, watching the infrared, magnified images of the incoming ships. “They’re pretty well bunched, Colonel,” said a young Abacoan operating the search radar. “Except for the last one. He’s hanging back.”

“He won’t come,” said Susan suddenly. “That must be their communications center. They wouldn’t want to lose their main radio contact with Florida.”

“Imagine,” said Ravetz in wonder. “Just plowing in here like that. Of course they have acoustic front-scanning so they can see the channel clear, but after what happened this noon, it just . . .”

The DE was heading directly for the lighted entrance markers at twenty knots. Colonel Gillam picked up the mike. “Traffic Master, this is Big John. Send in plain English the following: Welcome, please identify yourself. Repeat it over and over. Execute.”

“Will do, Big John. Commencing message: Welcome, please identify yourself.”

A signal lamp flickered at the north end of Elbow Cay, although they could only see it at Marsh Harbor on a video picture of the entrance area.

Immediately the DE began signaling rapidly back from its bridge toward Man-o-War.

“Big John, this is Traffic Master. We are getting return signal lamp traffic as follows: The Abaco Independence Movement reiterates its solidarity with its . . . oppressed black brothers of the Abacos . . . we emphasize our peaceful intentions to all . . .” Colonel Gillam pressed the priority button and silenced Traffic Master.

“Thank you, Traffic Master. Continue sending our message without change. Crawdaddy North?”

A new voice of a young woman came out of the monitor. “This is Crawdaddy North, Big John. We see your targets.”

“Crawdaddy North. Is Harmon tracking?”

“Positive, Big John. Harmon is accepting targets.”

The great Sea of Abaco, stretching forty miles north and ten south of Marsh Harbor lay in faint moonlight. The small cay towns of Man-o-War and Hopetown were completely black, as was all of Marsh Harbor. Susan peered out of the dark room at the dark water, and far across the flat sea she suddenly had a sense of motion, of activity.

“He’s entering the channel now,” whispered Gillam. “Here they all come. Crawdaddy North, do we have a wave simulation yet?”

“Hang on, Big John. Here is Harmon’s proposed wave now. This is a thirty-X projection.”

The big screen suddenly lit up with an outline map of the Sea of Abaco from Treasure Cay south to Cherokee Point. A thin green line starting at Treasure Cay moved south across the image, shifting in shape and thickness until it reached the Marsh Harbor area, where small green ship targets were also moving more slowly in an irregular line. As the green line passed across the ship pips, they winked out, one after another, and the green line continued past Marsh Harbor and disappeared.

Gillam watched the simulation scan closely. “Crawdaddy North. How soon until decision-zero time?”

“Harmon says four minutes, Big John.”

“Crawdaddy, I don’t like the north end of the wave. See if Harmon can truncate it.”

“Will do, Big John . . . Stand by, here comes Harmon’s new try.”

This time the green line did not overlap Man-o-War at all, but passed directly centered over the line of ships. “Crawdaddy North. This is Big John, I like that simulation. Put Harmon in real time and turn him loose.”

“Will do, Big John. Harmon has control . . . now!”

Susan turned to Ravetz in puzzlement. “Who is Harmon, Jerry?”

“The hydrodynamic computer,” said Ravetz with a grin. “The only self-adjusting, boundary-condition simulator in the world. But Harmon isn’t just a thinker. When he gives us what we want, then we let him go ahead and do it.”

Susan looked at Ravetz and then at Gillam. “You’re going to pull the plug on them, aren’t you Jerry? Empty out the bathtub?”

Ravetz grinned again. “We couldn’t keep you guessing very long on this one, Susan.”

“Big John, this is Crawdaddy North. Harmon is dumping now.”

Gillam peered and peered into the night.

“This is Crawdaddy North. The basin is down five feet, and the sinkage is accelerating.”

“That DE should touch anytime now,” said Gillam tensely to himself.

Susan looked down from the considerable height of the Wind Commune building and gasped. The land beneath her had suddenly increased. The revealed sand and coral bottom stretched out away from the shore and into the night, no water in sight anywhere. “But, Jerry,” she asked, “how do you get it to come back as a wave instead of just rising and floating them again?”

From way across the water there was a sudden, grinding, crashing sound. Ravetz cocked his head. “The DE wouldn’t float again anyway. She’s just ripped her bottom out hitting at twenty knots.” He pointed to the projected map of the Sea of Abaco. “We pump down the tidal impoundment basin north of Treasure Cay, which is also dredged deeper for load-equalization on very low tides. The water surges into it when the gates are opened by Harmon, gaining velocity so that when it strikes the north end of the basin it builds into a south-moving wave. It isn’t a wave really, but a bore, like in the Bay of Fundy, maybe twenty-five or thirty feet high.”

Fidel Castro, one liver-spotted hand rubbing his thin white hair, pointed to the screen. “And this, Professor Ravetz, is also a Shastrian weapon. Useful, community integrated, all the other things you have told us about?”

Ravetz nodded. “Quite practical really. With the entire Bight of Abaco, our backside, turned into a solar pond for the thermocline system, approach to our mainland really has to come across the Sea of Abaco.”

“But amphibious vehicles, Professor Ravetz?” said the old man.

Jerry Ravetz smiled. “Reserve judgment on that question until our defense is ended, Dr. Castro.”

“Big John, this is your Argus North. We believe all vessels numbering twenty-eight are now on the ground. We can see no movement anywhere.”

“Argus North. Light up the sky!”

Immediately a series of pops sounded far to the north and the first parachutes opened sending brilliant white light flooding down from the sky above the Sea of Abaco. Ravetz leaned toward the old man and spoke softly. “We’re using the Swedish day-night battlefield system, Dr. Castro. The pyrotechnic projections are programmed to provide a continuous, shadowless carpet of light for as long as we choose. This part of our operation requires much light.”

Brighter and brighter still glowed the once-green Sea of Abaco, but now without its water. Out as far as the eye could see were pools and puddles, but no continuous sea at all. And to the north, in its dry center, were the distant ships, an irregular line of beached and heeled craft of all sizes. And in under the high ceiling of flare lights that continued to fly up popping and bursting came three big Bahamian army helicopters. Susan could readily make out what the massively amplified voice said, over and over, booming downward on the little ragged line of doomed ships. “Put on your life jackets. A tidal wave is coming. Do not stay below. Put on . . .”

Susan gave a sidelong glance at the old Cuban Prime Minister. His mouth was open. He was thunderstruck, transfixed by the scene. This was going to work out. Oh, dear God, this was going to work out!

And now Colonel Gillam turned on the room. “We must have absolute quiet now! Please, all of you!” He picked up the mike. “Crawdaddy South, this is Big John. Is Harmon working on Wave Two?”

“All right, Johnnie. He’s working but we’ve hardly assessed Wave One.” It was an ancient, cracked, crotchety voice, a voice Susan knew belonged to eighty-year-old Professor Stephen Morheim, of N.Y.U. and the Trondheim Institute for Hydrodynamic Research, long retired to Abaco where he taught physics and calculus to the freshmen of Abaco Technical from a wheel chair.

Gillam leaned forward, tense, his voice low. “Crawdaddy South, we have only three point seven minutes until decision zero on Wave Two.”

“Harmon knows that, Johnnie. He’s working out the best initial condition within the solution-time restraint. Now you just lay back and . . .” The irritable old voice trailed off and they heard him muttering to himself near the open mike. “Harmon, let’s depth-average and get Johnnie something before he craps his pants. Forget those higher terms, Harmon . . . All right, Johnnie,” the voice suddenly louder again. “Here’s your projection. Fifty-X, since you’re in such a raving hurry.” The screen still showed the southern part of the Sea of Abaco, and again they saw a green line projected on the map moving southeast toward Marsh Harbor from Treasure Cay, and as it moved south a second line of green detached itself from the Little Harbor Impoundment and moved north. The two lines came together between Hopetown and Marsh Harbor, and a third, fainter and more irregular line moved northeast over Johnnies Cay and into the Atlantic. But the original line, now very faint lit and tenuous, continued southeast to Elbow Cay. “This is Big John. Crawdaddy South, that was a simulated seven-foot runup on Elbow!”

“I know it and Harmon knows it. He’s correcting, aren’t you, Harmon? Let’s delay opening on the west end, Harmon, and phase shift the stream function . . .”

Susan leaned close to Ravetz and whispered in his ear. “Does he really . . . talk to Harmon, Jerry?”

Ravetz turned and whispered back. “He claims he does but John thinks it’s just his way of thinking, of organizing himself.”

“Here comes a better one for you,” came the creaky voice. This time there was no discernible wave hitting elbow, the entire result of the collision running northeast out over Johnnies Cay.

“Crawdaddy South. That was perfect! Put Harmon on line, we’ve only thirty-six seconds!”

“Don’t get so danged rushed, Johnnie. Harmon wants to bifurcate the outrun and keep the blockhouse dry. Now you give the boy his chance . . .”

Gillam suddenly turned and thrust his fingers through his kinky hair. “Jesus, God, Jerry. What . . .”

“Here’s the wave, Johnny.” And this time the green resultant line actually dimmed in the center as it reached Johnnies Cay and left the basin in two strong surges.

Gillam dropped his hands to his sides. “Oh, Hell. They’re actually going to do it!”

“Seven seconds, Johnnie, and I’m putting Harmon on line. Three seconds. Gates are opening. This is Crawdaddy South, Johnnie. Your Wave Two is off and moving!” And the old voice was grim and filled with powerful satisfaction.

Castro leaned towards Ravetz. “The second wave is to prevent the first one from doing damage within the sea, Professor Ravetz?”

Ravetz nodded. “The basin turns south at Marsh Harbor. So we have to modify the first bore by cue-balling a second one into it. The control station on Johnnies Cay is designed to go completely under water, but apparently old Professor Morheim and Harmon have the resultant bore splitting and going out on either side. Well, we’ll see . . .”

But Susan now gave a great gasp, for the northern bore was in sight! A great steaming, thundering white wall of water, it stretched almost from one side of the Sea of Abaco to the other, over three miles of blinding foam running like an express train. And it was growing in size rapidly. “It’s doing about thirty-eight miles an hour,” said Ravetz to the awe-struck old Cuban.

John Gillam stared hungrily at the great bore. “Optical blow on the crest, Frank.”

The big screen immediately showed a magnified and vastly foreshortened image of the crest. And riding back and forth along it were great insects, black and stalky in the intense light of the battle field flare carpet.

“The Donnie-Rockets!” breathed Susan.

“Yes,” said Ravetz. “Riding the bore to the ships to help pick up survivors. Saving these crews is the biggest systems problem of all, over twenty-five hundred people in the drink at once.”

Marv Weinstein, the Admiral of the Abaco Sea, shouted into his C.B. excitedly. “Gerald Beans, Captain Beans! Get back off that crest! You’ll skid to the bottom!”

“We riding just great, Marv!” came the high ecstatic voice of Gerald Beans. “Oh my, Johnnie, we Israelites are coming with the Hammer of God!”

“Here’s the picture from Gerald’s boat,” said Frank Albury, and now the big screen showed a blinding color view down the sloping, white, boiling front of the wave to the sea floor. There was no sense of forward progress, just the violent motion, pitching and rolling. The huge, smoking, ever-changing face of the bore fell away in front like a living, steaming sand dune, and as Susan watched, totally transfixed, the first ships came into view, distantly at the top of the screen, small and leaning in hurt attitudes. Now she turned and looked out the window and saw the great white monster itself, gigantic in the brilliant flat light and moving with implacable, terrifying speed. Now, back on the screen was the bore’s face and the DE growing suddenly huge beneath them and . . . The bore devoured it! Ate it completely in a second! Susan, shocked, looked again out the window and saw the monstrous, shuffling white confusion of the bore face vanish each ship in turn with no more effort than if they were seed pods or bits of driftwood.

“How bibilical, Jerry!” said Susan gaping. “You’ve outdone yourself!”

Ravetz shook his head. “This is completely Colonel Gillam’s show. Once he grasped the idea of the Shastri null-weapon, he turned this one up. I never believed it would work. I still don’t believe it will work!”

The great white bore swept, roaring, past them, the Donnie-Rockets falling back off the crest now to the sea behind that filled the basin from shore to shore with confusion, surge and chop.

But Captain Beans’ picture still showed the gleaming lumpy sheet of the face and, now, something in the right corner of the screen! Wave Two!

Marv urgently spoke. “Lay back, Gerald, lay back! We want the picture, not you in the picture!”

“Oh, Johnnie, Marv, I hate to leave her. She’s such a beauty! But there comes old man Number Two! Don’t he look mean, ole man Two! The last Donnie-Rocket fell back off the crest and let it roll ahead towards its turbulent destiny at Matt Lowes Cay. The southern bore, not so high but vast enough indeed, had thundered and smoked up past Lubbers Quarters. Now it was abreast of the old striped lighthouse at Hopetown, and then . . . The great meeting of the seas! A tumult in the basin, an endless roar, spume hundreds of feet high! On Gerald’s video they saw the boil and literal explosion of waters in breathtaking close-up, but through the east window a grander sight still, for the entire sweep of the horizon was suddenly intruded on, fragmented by a volcano of white waters, tumultuous and blinding under the flare carpet.

Susan felt suddenly dizzy. Is there nothing we cannot try? An ecstasy in the sea itself!

“This is Crawdaddy South, Johnnie. You want to bet ten crays that we won’t wet the top of that blockhouse, eh?” The old man was cackling and breathing heavily.

John Gillam grinned, his teeth shining. “I’d rather bet that the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow, you old . . .”

“Well, Johnnie, there goes the run-off. You just watch!” came the dry crackly voice.

And sure enough, the Donnie-Rocket camera showed that the smaller, but still impressive runoff bore did bifurcate, quite magically in fact, and roll by on each side of the Johnnies Cay blockhouse, and although some spray may have touched the roof, no green water did.

The ancient voice really crackled in satisfaction now. “Thought we couldn’t optimize in four minutes, eh, Harmon? Why Johnnie was pissing his diapers when I was jumping Navier-Stokes through hoops . . .”

But now the space north and west of them was blackly spattered with heads, and more were popping up every second. The Donnie-Rockets ran slowly into the thickest bunches, and Abaco police and troopers in bathing suits pulled the men aboard with desperate haste.

Fidel Castro, his face white with astonishment and shock under his white beard, suddenly turned to Major Martino. “José, how many guard machines do we have around Abaco?”

Martino looked surprised. “Why, eight, Fidel.”

“Colonel Gillam, if we could help, we have eight sea-surface, rotor machines available to you. They might perhaps come down into the larger groups and hold men until the more mobile . . .”

“We accept, Dr. Castro,” said Gillam quickly. “This was always the biggest problem. We simply don’t have the capacity to do this fast enough.”

As Major Martino and Frank Albury contacted the Cuban machines, Susan watched close-ups on several small screens of the moment-by-moment rescues. The scuba teams were down on the wrecks attempting to free those caught below in that precious moment before the sea water irrevocably damaged their lungs.

Now the first of the big Cuban guard machines settled ponderously into an area black with heads. Frank brought the scene into sharp optical close-up, and they saw the first man in white coveralls leap down a ladder onto the huge float and rip his clothing off in a single gesture, diving smoothly into the sea. His target was a head and hand slipping back into the emerald-green waves.

“He got him!” breathed Ravetz. But now more Cubans were in the water, and still others were rigging nets and ropes for the men in the water to grasp. As the next two Cuban machines settled down into the light, their floats were already crowded with brown lean bodies that dove from great heights at struggling figures beneath.

Colonel Gillam turned and looked straight at Fidel Castro. “These men are a credit to your nation, Dr. Castro. Their flexibility is superb!”

The old man nodded, his color almost returned. “Oh, we have learned some things from your Shastri and from José, Colonel.” The old man looked again out the window. “But we have still more things to learn, José, do we not?”

“Si, Fidel, si,” said Major Martino soberly, but Susan saw his face was now alight with joy.

The continual rescue and transportation of the prisoners to shore occupied every eye, and Susan turned tiredly to Mary Albury. “Oh, Mary, I’ll never get back to Hopetown tonight,” she said in a soft whisper. “Is there any place I can lay my head?”

Mary smiled, “Sure, honey, the night-duty weather watch bedrooms on the roof. C‘mon, I’ll take you up. They don’ t use them much.”

They climbed to the roof and found a cozy, breezy bedroom that overlooked the far-flung rescues still going on to the northeast. Susan sat down on the firm bed, looking out at the brilliant light, and hearing the distant excited sounds. Mary Albury looked down at her. “We’re part of history now, aren’t we, Susan? Really part?”

Susan nodded drowsily. “Oh dear, yes, I really think we are, Mary.” And kicking off her shoes she rolled over and fell into a dreamless sleep.

At quarter to nine the next morning, they all reassembled in the window room of the Wind Commune building. Dr. O’Malley, who had watched the night’s events from a Bahamian naval vessel, was already seated, as was Fidel Castro and Major Martino. Susan picked a chair as unobtrusively far back as she could and leaned over to Frank Albury at one of his panels, “How did it all come out, Frank?”

He beamed at her. “Over ninety-eight percent saved, Susan. You know, we never got better than about ninety-two percent in the simulations. Having the Cubans really made the difference. That’s the answer, put as many swimmers in the water as you can.”

“You mean . . . the next time you do it, Frank?” asked Susan seriously. Frank Albury giggled, then laughed out loud.

“Well,” said Jerry Ravetz, “I’m afraid we’re not quite out of the woods yet. That ‘we’ means humanity in general, not just Abaco. President Demarest is to address the nation at nine A.M. We’ve done all that could possibly be done on Abaco, and with the help of our Cuban friends.” Jerry nodded at Castro. “But now the final act is elsewhere. To put this quite quickly, we are expecting Demarest to resign the office of President this morning, although not . . . ah, before certain unconditional pardons have occurred, I suspect.”

Susan could not resist leaning forward. “Jerry,” she said quickly, “what if he won’t do it?”

Ravetz shrugged. “He must do it, Susan. Munoz has fled to Nicaragua where his kind can plot endlessly. Demarest’s part in this is hours from exposure. And last night was a total disaster for him.”

“But he is mad, Jerry!”

“Channel Seven looks good,” said Frank suddenly, and they all stared as the big screen descended and flashed the image of the seal on the rostrum. From offstage came the heavy, stagy voice: “. . . the President of the United States.”

“All my fellow citizens . . .” Susan looked up at the jowly, age-sagged face, newly ruined by defeat and fear. But the eyes were bright, alive, darting about.

“Jerry, he’s mad as a hatter. Look at the eyes!” said Susan quickly.

“Hush,” said Ravetz. “Hush!”

“I bring you a brief, sad message, my fellow citizens . . .” His eyes were darting even more, peering every which way, the hands fluttering, the cheek muscles jerking. “Last night a group of brave young Americans were brutally murdered by a cowardly, dirty kike trick . . .” The screen briefly blurred for several seconds. Then the image skipped and steadied. “But I must now announce to you all, my beloved friends and supporters, that my health will not permit me to continue . . .”

“That’s an electronic dummy, a piece-up!” hissed Frank Albury. Fidel Castro looked at Frank.

“What is a ‘piece-up,’ Mr. Albury?”

“Taking snips of video tape with separate words, facial expressions, and gestures and building a completely spurious TV appearance electronically. It’s easy to spot if you know the tricks.”

“Turn it off, Frank,” said Ravetz quietly.

“Off?”

Ravetz nodded and the screen retracted. “All right,” he said, and took a deep breath. “President Demarest is dead. Whatever I say here, I’ll deny absolutely I ever said . . . and I won’t say it again. Is that clear?” He looked around the room. “When Demarest became Vice-president or as he was becoming, a person joined his group who gained Demarest’s complete trust. That person, who will soon be identified with an extremist Jewish group . . . and you just had a scrap of Demarest on Jews . . . was given a radiation weapon, a no-blast neutron generator. This morning, Demarest was visited by Israeli Ambassador Gur and told that if he did not quit, his part in the Abaco activities would be revealed and the death of those sailors placed on his head.” Ravetz paused, then . . . “I’m guessing on some of this, but it must have happened something like this. Demarest balked, so Ambassador Gur played his final ace. if the president did not announce his resignation within the hour, he would be killed, and if he attempted to leave Camp David, he would be killed. Demarest agreed, but he is mad, as you said, Susan, and they were waiting for him with the taped piece-up ready. When that ‘kike’ popped out, they knew there was only one way to end it safely and they pushed the button.”

“And the rest of those at Camp David?” asked Castro quickly.

Ravetz shook his head. “Gone, of course. Sacrificed. Ambassador Gur, other good and brave men, some evil men, some innocent men.”

The room was still until Frank leaned forward and said quickly, “It’s true. They can’t raise Camp David. Phones, TV. Everything’s out there.”

Susan raised her hand diffidently. “Jerry, could I say one more thing?”

Ravetz shook his head and grinned. “Susan, you’ve never stopped talking since you got here, and thank God for that!”

“Well,” she said looking around at them. “Dr. Castro, Dr. O’Malley, the rest of you, it’s just this. The person who damped this Shastri cycle was Colonel John Gillam and no one else. If Munoz had gotten his way here, none of the rest of this would have happened. This was an epic, an historic defense, not only of Abaco and the Bahama Islands, but of Shastrian ideals as well!”

“Hear! Hear!” said Frank Albury loudly, and they all stood and clapped, turning toward Colonel Gillam.

Fidel Castro nodded vigorously, “Dr. Peabody, I will second that. Colonel Gillam, the matchless professionalism, planning and discipline of your action is eclipsed only by the skill and elan of your men.” The old man looked around excitedly. “Shastrian ideals can adapt Communism to the new, to the technical present. The sun shines forever, Professor Ravetz! And Cuba too shall have fourteen-year-old men who drive great foil boats to the very rim of the maelstrom!”

So, in the end, it was black, skinny Captain Gerald Beans of Dundas Town who would change the Caribbean and perhaps the world. Susan stared, transfixed, as the excited old man, his white beard spiky and erect, now not only looking like Hemingway, but talking that same romantic wild stuff about élan and style. Oh, how Shastri would have laughed at that!

Major Martino leaned over and whispered in Susan’s ear. “We will make the step, Susan. Someday they will light candles to you in Cuba!”

But Susan looked down at her brown knees and blinked and blinked.

“Oh, José. Oh, I hope not, José,” she whispered back.

The Cuban VTOLs took off at noon while all of Abaco buzzed, and met, and organized the victory celebration that night. After some excited C.B. traffic, Elbow Cay was selected as the site, since it had been in the thick of the air battle and stood the greatest risk of run-up during the use of the hydrodynamic weapon. Colored lights were strung in the small revival park in a parade, of sorts, organized before the crayfish barbecue.

The parade never actually ended but metamorphosed into a kind of combination conga line and boogaloo that stretched the length of Hopetown and kept busy every instrument and player in the entire chain of islands.

At the head of the great writhing chain of Abacoans and Israelis, or really in the middle since the head and tail had long since merged, was that ace of aces, Dawn LaVere. Dancing nearby, Susan noticed, was Prime Minister O’Malley, his eyes popping as Dawn’s long thighs and tiny ripped jeans shorts flashed like bonefish in the warm fitful light. The extraordinary tightness and brevity of those shorts suggested that they might not come off at all, a possibility Susan smilingly rejected.

She leaned against the fence at the rear of the field where the dancers dropped off momentarily to get food and drink. She was now without the drug and in full possession of the inevitable downer. Her moment, the greatest moment of her life, had just passed, but she had made no more friends, nor was she any more a part of this blooming Shastrian society than she had been yesterday morning.

Susan looked at the gyrating, grinning throng and listened to the blaring music. She sighed and rubbed her eyes and tried to tell herself, as Frank surely would have, that peacemakers were especially blessed. They didn’t seem to offer much to a lonely, overeducated, out-of-place woman in her forties, playing a brief, impromptu role in some larger . . .

“Dr. Peabody?” She looked up startled and saw Colonel Gillam, now neatly dressed in Bermuda snorts and a flowered sports shirt, standing before her. “I wanted to thank you for the speech this morning. We . . . ah . . .” he rubbed his shiny black face with a big pink palm.“We both wanted the same things, Dr. Peabody.”

Susan sighed deeply. “Yes, we did, and we do, Colonel.” she looked at the shadowed angular face, the high cheeks gleaming in the dim light, the brown eyes large and soft. If you judged a man by his friends—Dawn LaVere, Professor Morheim, Gerald Beans—John Gillam rated tops.

Susan threw her head back and bit her lip. “Colonel, John . . . would you like to try some political cocaine with me?” She looked openly into his face.

He rubbed his chin slowly. “Well, uh . . . Dr . . . Susan.” He smoothed back his kinky short hair several times. “Ah, well look, frankly, you scare the Hell out of me. I’m afraid I’d be sort of like a scout master trying to keep up with Mata Hari.”

Two bright tears popped into Susan’s eyes and she made no attempt to wipe them away. “Oh? Well, I guess I really asked for that, John. We Peabodys aren’t used to . . . Well, look, just forget I said it.” And she stared at his face made blurry with the tears.

John Gillam took her hand and smiled, his big lips just parting to show the bright teeth. “I’ve had my great victories, Susan. I guess I can stand a defeat,” and she unashamedly gripped his hand in gratitude for that.

They walked north from Hopetown, hand in hand, leaving the shouts, the happy laughter, and the tinkling music behind. As they paused at her front door and kissed for the first time, the fitful east wind drove the ridge-mounted wind rotors behind them at subtly different speeds and the air throbbed faintly with the beat frequencies. “Shastri’s heartbeat, John,” she said softly. But now she saw his eyes were holding her and that they had gone fuzzy and soft as his desire for her mounted.

John Gillam suffered no defeat that night. The great subjective time suspension possible with the drug not only drove him to the peak of sensation but held him in a timeless spasm out of which he perceived another Susan, her body in a tight, upward circle of ecstasy, her face rigid yet smooth and lost as a child’s. The softness of her arms and her gentle breasts caught John Gillam in a spiraling rush of tender lust. “Oh, how lovely,” he breathed again and again. “Oh, Susan,” and it seemed impossible that the relief, and yet not-relief could last so blissfully long. But Susan was riding a hard, upward-curving wave of white passion, a wave that would never break, or else break and break again forever. Her body lusted for John Gillam’s strong core, and when she saw his black face, now soft and heavy with desire, her own lust flamed higher. In that wrenching, protracted moment, she remembered her father, the fairy tales, how they lived happily ever after, and she knew that John Gillam and she would live within this moment for ever after, and that was better.

And in her final overwhelming submission to utter pleasure, Susan cried out, “Oh, Johnnie! Mine’s on fire! Mine’s burning too!”

When those words were spoken, the Battle of the Abaco Reefs came, as far as any such battle can, to an end. It was not the last battle in the history of the West, but it was one of the most decisive. And as Susan sensed that night, she and John Gillam did live together within that moment, through the rest of their long and useful lives.

SONGHOUSE

Orson Scott Card

“Music hath charms . . .” But there’s more than one requirement for a songbird.

Prologue

Nniv did not go to meet Mikal’s starship. Instead he waited in the rambling stone Songhouse, listening to the song of the walls, the whisper of the hundred young voices from the Chambers and the Stalls, the cold rhythm of the drafts. There were few in the galaxy who would dare to make Mikal come to them. Nniv was not daring, however. It did not occur to him that the Songmaster needed to go meet anyone.

The people who were not sheltered by the Songhouse walls were not so placid, however. Mikal’s reputation was well-known, and Tew had been a bit slow about submitting to the Discipline of Frey. Who could have known that Mikal would not be content with ravaging the worlds he had already won, that instead he would govern wisely and brutally and well and would use those worlds as a springboard from which he now reached out farther and farther into the galaxy. Too many of the great leagues and nations had fallen, and now there were few worlds that even thought of resisting Mikal when his ships came. Instead—and the world of Tew was no different—the governments made it a point to impress Mikal with their loyalty to him, their desire to have him rule over them. Secretly, they all wished he would get swallowed up in a nova. Publicly, he had no stauncher allies.

But Mikal had no time for Tew. He had come (as most visitors to the planet came) to see the Songhouse.

And for a man of wealth and power, there was only one reason to visit the Songhouse.

He wanted a Songbird, of course. “You can’t have a Songbird, sir,” said the diffident young woman in the waiting room.

“I haven’t come to argue with gatekeepers.”

“Whom would you like to argue with? It will do you no good.”

“The Songmaster. Nniv.”

“You do not understand,” the young woman explained. “Songbirds are given only to those who can truly appreciate them. We invite people to accept them. We do not take applications from anyone.”

Mikal looked at her coldly. “I am not applying.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

Mikal said no more. Merely stood, waiting. The young woman tried to argue with him, but he didn’t answer. She tried to ignore him and go on with her work, but he waited for more than an hour, until she could stand no more. She got up and left without a word.

“What is he like?” sang Nniv, his voice low and comforting.

“Impatient,” she said.

“Yet he waited for you.” Correction did not give way to criticism in Nniv’s voice. Ah, he is a kind master, the girl thought but did not say.

“He is stern,” she said. “He is a ruler, and he will not believe there is anything he cannot get, anyone he cannot rule, anywhere he cannot fill with his presence.”

“No man can travel through space,” Nniv answered gently, “and not know there are places that he cannot fill.”

She bowed. “What should I tell him?”

“Tell him that I will see him.”

She was startled. She was confused. She abandoned words, and sang her confusion. The song was meek and uncontrolled, for she would never be a master, not even a teacher, but wordlessly she asked Nniv why he would even listen to such a man, why he would risk having the rest of mankind think, the Songhouse treats all men alike, judging only on merit, not on power—except for Mikal.

“I will not be corrupted,” Nniv sang gently.

“Send him away,” she pleaded.

“Bring him to me.”

She broke control and wept, then, and declared she could not do such a thing.

Nniv sighed. “Then send me Esste. Send me Esste, and be relieved of duty until Mikal leaves.”

Mikal still stood in the gateroom an hour later, when the door opened again. This time it was not the gatekeeper. It was another woman, more mature, with darkness under her eyes and power in her bearing. “Mikal?” she asked.

“Are you the Songmaster?” Mikal asked.

“Not I,” she said, and for a moment Mikal felt acutely embarrassed at having thought so. But why should I be embarrassed, he wondered, and shook off the feelings. The Songhouse weaves spells, said the common people on Tew, and it made Mikal uneasy. The woman led the way out of the room, humming. She said nothing, but her melody told Mikal he should follow, and so he pursued the thread of music through the cold stone halls. Doors opened here and there; windows let in the only light (and it was a dismal light of grey winter sky); in all the wandering through the Songhouse they met no other person, heard no other voice.

At last, after many stairs, they reached a high room. The High Room, in fact, though no one mentioned it. Seated at one end of the room on a stone bench unsheltered from the cold breeze through the open shutters was Nniv. He was old, his face more sag than features, and Mikal was startled. Ancient. It reminded Mikal of mortality, which at the age of forty he was just beginning to be aware of. He had sixty years yet, but he was no longer young and knew that time was against him.

“Nniv?” Mikal asked.

Nniv nodded, and his voice rumbled a low mmmmm.

Mikal turned to the woman who had led him. She was still humming. “Leave us,” Mikal said.

The woman stayed where she was, looking at him as if without comprehension. Mikal grew angry, but he said nothing because suddenly her melody counseled silence, insisted on silence, and instead Mikal turned to Nniv. “Make her stop humming,” he said. “I refuse to be manipulated.”

“Then,” Nniv said (and his song seemed to shout with laughter, though his voice remained soft), “then you refuse to live.”

“Are you threatening me?”

Nniv smiled. “Oh, no, Mikal. I merely observe that all living things are manipulated. As long as there is a will, it is bent and twisted constantly. Only the dead are allowed the luxury of freedom, and then only because they want nothing, and therefore can’t be thwarted.”

Mikal’s eyes grew cold then, and he spoke in measured voice, which sounded dissonant and awkward after the music of Nniv’s speech. “I could have come here in power, Songmaster Nniv. I could have landed huge armies and weapons that would hold the Songhouse itself for ransom to work my will. If I intended to coerce you or frighten you or abuse you in any way, I would not have come alone, open to assassins, to ask for what I want. I have come to you with respect, and I will be treated with respect.”

Nniv’s only answer was to glance at the woman and say, “Esste.” She fell silent. Her humming had been so pervasive that the walls fairly rung with the sudden quiet.

Nniv waited.

“I want a Songbird,” Mikal said. Nniv said nothing.

“Songmaster Nniv, I conquered a planet called Rain, and on that planet was a man of great wealth, and he had a Songbird. He invited me to hear the child sing.”

And at the memory, Mikal could not contain himself. He wept.

His weeping took Esste and Nniv by surprise. This was not Mikal the Terrible. Could not be. For Songbirds, while they impressed everyone, could only be fully appreciated by certain people, people whose deepest places resonated with that most powerful of musics. It was known throughout the galaxy that a Songbird could never go to a person who killed, to a person of greed or gluttony, to a person who loved power. Such people could not really hear a Songbird’s music. But there could be no doubt that Mikal had understood the Songbird. Both Nniv and Esste could hear his inadvertent songs too easily to be mistaken.

“You have damaged us,” Nniv said, his voice full of regret.

Mikal composed himself as best he could. “I, damaged you? The memory of your Songbird destroys me.”

“Uplifts you.”

“Wrecks my self-composure, which is the key to my survival. How have I damaged you?”

“By proving to us that you do indeed deserve a Songbird. You know what that will do, I’m certain. Everyone knows that the Songhouse does not bend to the powerful where Songbirds are concerned. And yet—we will give you one. I can hear them now; ‘Even the Songhouse sells out to Mikal.’ ” Nniv’s voice was a raucous and perfectly accurate imitation of the speech of the common man, though of course there was no such creature in the galaxy. Mikal laughed.

“You think it’s funny?” Esste asked, and her voice pierced Mikal deeply and made him wince.

“No,” he answered.

Nniv sang soothingly, and calmed both Esste and Mikal. “But Mikal, you know also that we set no date for delivery. We must find the right Songbird for you, and if we don’t find one before you die, there can be no complaint.”

Mikal nodded. “But hurry. Hurry, if you can.”

Esste sang, her voice ringing with confidence, “We never hurry. We never hurry. We never hurry.” The song was Mikal’s dismissal. He left, and found his own way out, guided by the fact that all doors but the right ones were locked against him.

“I don’t understand,” said Nniv to Esste after Mikal had gone.

“I do,” Esste said.

Nniv whispered his surprise in a steeply rising hiss that echoed from the stone walls and blended with the breeze.

“He’s a man of great personal force and power,” she told him. “But he has not been corrupted. He believes he can use his power for good. He longs to do it.”

“An altruist?” Nniv found it difficult to believe.

“An altruist. And this,” said Esste, “is his song.” She sang, then, occasionally using words, but more often shaping meaningless syllables with her voice, or singing strange vowels, or even using silence and wind and the shape of her lips to express her understanding of Mikal.

At last her song ended, and Nniv’s own voice was heavy with emotion as he sang his reaction. That, too, ended, and Nniv said, “If he truly is what you sing him to be, then I love him.”

“And I,” Esste said.

“Who will find a Songbird for him, unless it’s you?”

“I will find Mikal’s Songbird.”

“And teach this bird?”

“And teach.”

“Then you will have done a life’s work.”

And Esste, accepting the heavy challenge (and the possible inestimable honor), sang her submission and dedication and left Nniv alone in the High Room to hear the song of the wind and answer as best he was able.

For seventy-nine years Mikal had no Songbird. In all that time, he conquered the galaxy, and imposed the Discipline of Frey on all mankind, and established Mikal’s Peace so that every child born had a reasonable hope of living to adulthood, and appointed a high quality of government for every planet and every district and every province and every city there was.

Still he waited. Every two or three years he sent a messenger to Tew, asking the Songmaster one question: When?

And the answer always came back: Not yet.

And Esste was made old by the years and the weight of her life’s work. Many Songbirds were discovered because of her search, but none that would sing properly to Mikal’s own song.

Until she found Ansset.

Esste

There were many ways a child could turn up in the child markets of Doblay-Me. Many children, of course, were genuine orphans, though now that wars had ended with Mikal’s Peace orphanhood was a social position much less often achieved. Others had been sold by desperate parents who had to have money—or who had to have a child out of their way and hadn’t the heart for murder. More were bastards from worlds and nations where religion or custom forbade birth control. And others slipped in through the cracks.

Ansset was one of these when a seeker from the Songhouse found him. He had been kidnapped and the kidnappers had panicked, opting for the quick profit from the baby trade instead of the much riskier business of arranging for ransom and exchange. Who were his parents? They were probably wealthy, or their child wouldn’t have been worth kidnapping. They were white, because Ansset was extremely fair skinned and blond. But there were trillions of people answering to that description, and no government agency was quite so foolish as to assume the responsibility of returning him to his family.

So Ansset, whose age was unknowable but who couldn’t be more than three years old, was one of a batch of a dozen children that the seeker brought back to Tew. All the children had responded well to a few simple tests—pitch recognition, melody repetition, and emotional response. Well enough, in fact, to be considered potential musical prodigies. And the Songhouse had bought—no, no, people are not bought in the child markets—the Songhouse had adopted them all. Whether they became Songbirds or mere singers, masters or teachers, or even if they did not work out musically at all, the Songhouse raised them, provided for them, cared about them for life. In loco parentis, said the law. The Songhouse was mother, father, nurse, siblings, offspring, and, until the children reached a certain level of sophistication, God.

“New,” sang a hundred young children in the Common Room, as Ansset and his fellow marketed children were ushered in. Ansset did not stand out from the others. True, he was terrified—but so were the rest. And while his nordic skin and hair put him at the extreme end of the racial spectrum, such things were studiously ignored and no one ridiculed him for it, any more than they would have ridiculed an albino.

Routinely he was introduced to the other children; routinely all forgot his name as soon as they heard it; routinely they sang a welcome whose tone and melody were so confused that it did nothing to allay Ansset’s fear; routinely Ansset was assigned to Rruk, a five-year-old who knew the ropes.

“You can sleep by me tonight,” Rruk said, and Ansset dumbly nodded. “I’m older” Rruk said. “In maybe a few months or sometime soon anyway I get a stall.” This meant nothing to Ansset. “Anyway, don’t piss in your bed because we never get the same one two nights in a row.”

Ansset’s three-year-old pride was enough to take umbrage at this. “Don’t piss in bed.” But he didn’t sound angry—just afraid.

“Good. Some of ’em are so scared they do.”

It was near bedtime; new children were always brought in near bedtime. Ansset asked no questions. When he saw that other children were undressing, he too undressed. When he saw that they found nightgowns under their blankets, he too found a nightgown and put it on, though he was clumsy at it. Rruk tried to help him, but Ansset shrugged off the offer. Rruk looked momentarily hurt, then sang the love song to him.

I will never hurt you.

I will always help you.

If you are hungry

I’ll give you my food.

If you are frightened

I am your friend.

I love you now

And love does not end.

The words and concepts were beyond Ansset, but the tone of voice was not. Rruk’s embrace on his shoulder was even more clear, and Ansset leaned on Rruk, though he still said nothing and did not cry. “Toilet?” Rruk asked.

Ansset nodded, and Rruk led him to a large room adjoining the Common, where water ran swiftly through trenches. It was there that he learned that Rruk was a girl. “Don’t stare,” she said. “Nobody stares without permission.” Again, Ansset did not understand the words, but the tone of voice was clear. He understood the tone of voice instinctively, as he always had; it was his greatest gift, to know emotions even better than the person feeling them.

“How come you don’t talk except when you’re mad?” Rruk asked him as they lay down in adjoining beds (as a hundred other children also lay down).

It was now that Ansset’s control broke. He shook his head, then turned away, burying his face under the blankets, and cried himself to sleep. He did not see the other children around him who looked at him with distaste. He did not know that Rruk was humming a tune that meant, “Let be, let alone, let live.”

He did know, however, when Rruk patted his back, and he knew that the gesture was kind; and this was why he never forgot his first night in the Songhouse and why he could never feel anything but love for Rruk, though he would soon far surpass her rather limited abilities.

“Why do you let Rruk hang around you so much when she isn’t even a Breeze?” asked a fellow student once, when Ansset was six. Ansset did not answer in words. He answered with a song that made the questioner break Control, much to his humiliation, and weep openly. No one else ever challenged Rruk’s claim on Ansset. He had no friends, not really, but this song for Rruk was too powerful to challenge, and no one ever did.

2

Ansset held on to two memories of his parents, though he did not know these dream people were his parents. They were White Lady and Giant Man, when he thought to put names to them at all (and he never spoke of them to anyone), and he only thought of them when he had dreamed the dreams of them the night before.

The first memory was of the White Lady whimpering, lying on a bed with huge pillows. She was staring into nothingness, and did not see Ansset as he walked into the room. His step was unsure. He did not know if she would be angry that he had come in. But her soft, whipped cries drew him on, for it was a sound he could not resist, and he came and stood by the bed where she rested her head on her arm. He reached out and patted her arm. Even in the dream the skin felt hot and fevered. She looked at him, and her eyes were deep in tears. Ansset reached to the eyes, touched the brow, let his tiny fingers slide down, closing the eyes, caressing the lids so gently that the White Lady did not recoil. Instead she sighed, and he caressed all her face as her whimpers softened into gentle humming.

It was then that the dream went awry, ending in odd ways. Always Giant Man came in, but what he did was a mystery of rumbling voice, embraces, shouts. Sometimes he also lay on the bed with White Lady. Sometimes he picked Ansset up and took him on strange adventures that ended in waking. Sometimes the White Lady kissed him good-bye. Sometimes she did not notice him once the Giant Man came into the room. But the dream always began the same, and the part that never changed was memory.

The other memory was of the moment of kidnapping. Ansset was in a very large place with a distant roof that was painted with strange animals and distorted people. Loud music came from a lighted place where everyone was always moving. Then there was a deafening noise and the place became all light and noise and conversation, and White Lady and Giant Man walked among the crowd. There was pushing and jostling, and someone stepped between White Lady and Ansset, breaking their handhold. White Lady turned to the stranger, but at the same moment Ansset felt a powerful hand grip his. He was pulled away, bumping harshly through the crowd. Then the hand pulled him up, hurting his arm, and for a moment, lifted above the heads of the crowd, Ansset saw White Lady and Giant Man for the last time, both of them pushing through the crowd, their faces fearful, their mouths open to cry out. But Ansset could never remember hearing them. For a blast of hot air struck him and a door closed, and he was outside in a blazing hot night, and then he always, always woke up, trembling but not crying, because he could hear a voice saying, “Quiet, Quiet, Quiet,” in tones that meant fear and falling and fire and shame.

“You do not cry,” said the teacher, a man with a voice that was more comforting than sunlight.

Ansset shook his head. “Sometimes,” he said.

“Before,” answered the teacher. “But now you will learn Control. When you cry you waste your songs. You burn up your songs. You drown your songs.”

“Songs?” asked Ansset.

“You are a little pot full of songs,” said the teacher, “and when you cry, the pot breaks and all the songs spill out ugly. Control means keeping the songs in the pot, and letting them out one at a time.”

Ansset knew pots. Food came from a pot. He thought of songs as food, then, besides knowing they were music.

“Do you know any songs?” asked the teacher.

Ansset shook his head.

“Not any? Not any songs at all?”

Ansset looked down.

“Ansset, songs. Not words. Just a song that has no words but you just sing, like this, Ah—” and the teacher sang a short stretch of melody that spoke to Ansset, that said, Trust, Trust, Trust.

Ansset smiled. He sang the same melody back to the teacher. For a moment the teacher smiled, then looked startled, then reached out with wondering eyes and touched Ansset’s hair. The gesture was kind. And so Ansset sang the love song to the teacher. Not the words, because he had no memory for words yet. But he sang the melody as Rruk had sung it to him, and the teacher wept. It was Ansset’s first lesson on his first full day at the Songhouse, and the teacher wept. He did not understand until later that this meant that the teacher had lost Control and would be ashamed for weeks until Ansset’s gifts were more fully appreciated. He only knew that when he sang the love song, he was understood.

3

“Cull, you’re beyond this,” said Esste, with grief and sympathy and reproach. “You’re a good teacher, and that’s why we trusted you with the new ones.”

“I know,” Cull said. “But Esste—”

“You wept for minutes. Minutes before you regained Control. Cull, have you been ill?”

“Healthy.”

“Are you unhappy?”

“I wasn’t, not until after—after. I wasn’t weeping for grief, Mother Esste, I was weeping for—”

“For what?”

“Joy.”

Esste hummed exasperation and noncomprehension.

“The child, Esste, the child.”

“Ansset, yes? The blond one?”

“Yes. I sang him trust, and he sang it back to me.”

“He shows promise then, and you broke Control in front of him.”

“You are impatient.”

Esste bowed her head. “I am.” Her posture said shame. Her voice said she was still impatient and only a little ashamed after all. She could not lie to a teacher. Of this she was certain.

“Listen to me,” pleaded Cull.

I’m listening, said Esste’s reassuring sigh.

“Ansset sang my trust back to me note for note, perfectly. Nearly a minute, and it wasn’t easy. And he didn’t sing just the melody. He sang pitch. He sang nuance. He sang every emotion I had said to him, except that it was stronger. It was like singing into a long hall and having the sound come back at you louder than you sang it.”

Do you exaggerate? asked Esste’s hum.

“I was shocked. And yet delighted. Because I knew in that instant that here we had a true prodigy. Someone who might become a Songbird—”

Careful, careful, said the hiss from Esste’s mouth.

“I know it’s not my decision, but you didn’t hear his answer. It’s his first day, his first lesson—and anyway, that was nothing, nothing at all to what came after. Esste, he sang the love song to me. Rruk only sang it to him once yesterday. But he sang the whole thing—”

“Words?”

“He’s only three. He sang the melody and the love, and Esste, Mother Esste, no one has ever sung such love to me. Uncontrolled, utterly open, completely giving, and I couldn’t contain it. I couldn’t, Esste, and you know my Control has never faltered before.”

Esste heard Cull’s song, and the teacher wasn’t lying to protect himself. The child was remarkable.

The child was powerful. Esste decided she would meet the child.

After she met him, in a brief encounter at the Galley at breakfast, she reassigned herself to be his teacher. As for Cull, the consequence of his loss of Control was much lighter than the usual, and as Esste taught Ansset day after day, she sent word for Cull to be advanced step by step until within a few weeks he was a teacher of new ones again, and Esste put the word around so that none would criticize Cull, “With this child, any teacher would have lost Control.”

And there was a dancing quality to her walk and a warmth to her voice that made every teacher and master and even the Songmaster in the High Room realize that Esste at last hoped, perhaps even let herself believe, that her life’s work might be within reach. “Mikal’s Songbird?” another Songmaster presumed to ask her one day, though his melody told her she need not answer if she didn’t want to.

She only hummed high in her head, and leaned her head against the stone, and laid her hand on her cheek so that the Songmaster laughed. But he had his answer. She could clown and play to try to hide her hopes, but the very clowning and playing were message enough. Esste was happy. This was so unusual it even startled the children.

4

It was unheard of for a Songmaster to teach new ones. The new ones did not know it, of course, not at first, not until they had learned enough of the basics to advance, as a class, to become Groans. There were other Groans, some as old as five or six, and like all children they had their own society with its own rules, its own customs, its own legends. Ansset’s class of Groans soon learned that it was safe to be pugnacious and obstinate with a Belch, but never with a Breeze; that it meant nothing where you slept, but you sat at table with your friends; that if a fellow Groan sang you a melody, you must deliberately make a mistake in singing it back to him, or he’ll think you’re bragging.

Ansset learned all the rules quickly, because he was bright, and made everyone in his class think of him as a friend, because he was kind. No one but Esste noticed that he did not exchange secrets in the toilet, did not join any of the inner rings that constantly grew and waned among the children. Instead, Ansset worked harder at perfecting his voice. He hummed almost constantly. He cocked his head when masters and teachers talked without words, using only melody to communicate. His focus was not on the children, who had nothing to teach him, but on the adults.

While none of the children were conscious of his separation from them, unconsciously they allowed for it. Ansset was treated with deference. The hazing by the Belches (no, not in front of the teachers—in front of the teachers they’re Bells), which was usually at the level of urinating on a Groan so he had to shower again or spilling his soup day after day so that he got in trouble with the cooks, the hazing somehow bypassed Ansset.

And he entered the mythology of the Groans very quickly. There were other legendary figures—Jaffa, who in anger at her teacher burst one day into a Chamber and sang a solo, and then, instead of being punished, was advanced to be a Breeze without ever having to be a Belch at all; Moom, who stayed a Groan until he was nine years old, and then suddenly got the hang of things and passed through Bells and Breezes in a week, entered Stalls and Chambers and was out as a singer before he turned ten; and Dway, who was gifted and ought to have become a Songbird, but who could not stop rebelling and finally escaped the Songhouse so often that she was thrust out and put with a normal boarding school and never sang another note. Ansset was not so colorful. But his name passed from class to class and from year to year so that after he had been a Groan for only a month, even singers in Stalls and Chambers knew of him, and admired him, and secretly resented him.

He will be a Songbird, said the growing myth. And this was not resented by the children his own age, because while all of them could hope to be a singer, Songbirds only came every few years, and some children passed from Common Rooms into Stalls and Chambers without ever having known someone who became a Songbird. Indeed, there was no Songbird at all in the Songhouse now—the most recent one, Wymmyss, had been placed out only a few weeks before Ansset came, so none of his class had ever heard a Songbird sing.

Of course, there were former Songbirds among the teachers and masters, but that was no help, because their voices had changed. How do you become a Songbird? Groans would ask Belches, and Belches would ask Breezes, and none of them knew the answer, and few dared hope that they would achieve that status.

“How do you become a Songbird?” Ansset sang to Esste one day, and Esste could not hide her startlement completely, not because of the question, though it was rare for a child to ask such an open question, but because of the song, which also seemed to ask, Were you a Songbird, Esste?

“Yes, I was a Songbird,” she answered, and Ansset, who had not yet mastered Control, revealed to her that that was the question he had been asking. The boy was learning songtalk, and Esste would have to be careful to warn the teachers and masters not to use it in front of him unless they didn’t mind being understood.

“What did you do?” Ansset asked.

“I sang.”

“Singers sing. Why are Songbirds different?”

Esste looked at him narrowly. “Why do you want to be a Songbird?”

“Because they’re the perfect ones.”

“You’re only a Groan, Ansset. You have years ahead of you.” The statement was wasted, she knew. He could sing, he could hear song, but he was still almost an infant, and years were too long for him to grasp.

“Why do you love me?” Ansset asked her, this time in front of the entire class.

“I love all of you,” Esste sang, and all the children smiled at the love that was in her voice.

“Why do you sing to me more than to the others, then?” Ansset demanded, and Esste heard in his song another message: The others are not my friends because you set me apart.

“I don’t sing to anyone more than to anyone else,” Esste answered, and in songtalk she said, “I will be more careful.” Did he understand? At least he seemed satisfied with her answer, and did not ask again.

Ansset became one of the great legends, however, when he was promoted from Groan to Belch earlier than the rest of his class—and instead of Esste remaining with the class, she moved with Ansset. It was then that Ansset realized that not only was it unusual for a Songmaster to be doing a teacher’s job, but also Esste was teaching, not the class, but him. Ansset. Esste was teaching Ansset.

The other children noticed this at least as quickly as Ansset did, and he found that while all of them were nice to him, and all of them praised him, and all of them sought to be near him and eat with him and talk to him, none of them sang the love song to him. And none of them was his friend, for they were afraid.

5

A lesson.

Esste took her class of Bells out of the Songhouse. They rode in a flesket, so that all of them could see outside. It was always a wonder to them, leaving the cold stone walls of the Songhouse. Groans were never taken out; Breezes often were; and Bells knew that the trips in the flesket were only a taste of things to come.

They went through deep forests, skimming over the underbrush as they followed a narrow road cut between tall trees. Birds paced them, and animals looked up bemusedly as they passed.

To children schooled to singing, however, the miracle came when they left the flesket. Esste had the driver, who was only eighteen and therefore just returned from being a singer outside, stop them by a small waterfall. Esste led the children to the side of the stream. She commanded silence, and because Bells have the rudiments of Control, they were able to hold utterly still and listen. They heard birdsong, which they longed to answer; the gurgle of the stream as it slopped against the rocks and inlets of the shore; the whisper of breezes through the leaves and grass.

They sat for fifteen minutes, which was near the limit of their Control, and then Esste led them closer to the waterfall. It wasn’t a long walk, but it was slick and damp as they approached the mist rising from the foot of the falls. There had been a landslide many years before, and instead of falling into the pool it had carved out of rock, the cascade tumbled onto rock and sprayed out in all directions. The children sat only a dozen meters away, and the water soaked them.

Again, silence. Again, Control. But this time they heard nothing but the crash of the water on the rock. They could see birds flying, could see leaves moving in the wind, but could hear nothing of that.

After only a few minutes Esste released them. “What do we do?” asked one of the children.

“What you want,” answered Esste.

So they gingerly waded at the edge of the pool, while the driver watched to make sure no one drowned. Few of them noticed when Esste left; only Ansset followed her.

She led him, though she gave no sign she knew he was following, to a path leading up the steep slope to the top of the falls. Ansset watched her carefully, to see where she was going. She climbed. He climbed after. It was not easy for him. His arms and legs were still clumsy with childhood, and he grew tired. There were hard places, where Esste had only to step up, while Ansset had to clamber over rises half as high as he was. But he did not let Esste out of his sight, and she, for her part, did not go too quickly for him. She had gathered her gown for the climb, and Ansset looked curiously at her legs. They were white and spindly, and her ankles looked too thin to hold her up. Yet she was nimble enough as they climbed. Ansset had never thought of her as having legs before. Children had legs, but masters and teachers rushed along with gowns brushing the floor. The sight of legs, just like a child’s, made Ansset wonder if Esste was like the girls in the shower and toilet. He imagined her squatting over the trench. It was a sight that he knew was forbidden, yet in his mind he violated even good manners and stared and stared.

And came face to face with Esste at the top of the hill.

He was startled, and showed it. She only murmured a few notes of reassurance. You were meant to be here, her song said. Then she looked out beyond the hill, and Ansset looked after her. Behind them was forest in rolling hills, but here a lake spread out to lap the edges of a bowl of hills. Trees grew right to the edge, except for a few clearings. The lake was not large, as lakes go, but to Ansset it was all the water in the world. Only a few hundred meters away, the lake poured over a lip of rock to make the waterfall. But here there was no hint of the violence of the fall. Here the lake was placid, and water-birds skimmed and dipped and swam and dived, crying out from time to time.

Esste questioned him with a melody, and Ansset answered, “It’s large. Large as the sky.”

“That is not all you should see, Ansset, my son,” she said to him. “You should see the mountains around the lake, holding it in.”

“What makes a lake?”

“A river comes into this valley, pouring in the water. It has no place to go, so it fills up. Until some spills out at the waterfall. It can fill no deeper than the lowest point. Ansset, this is Control.” This is Control. Ansset’s young mind struggled to make the connection. “How is it Control, Ansset?”

“Because it is deep,” Ansset answered. He waited.

“You are guessing, not thinking.”

“Because,” said Ansset, “it is all held in everywhere except one place, so that it only comes out a little at a time.”

“Closer,” said Esste. Which meant he was wrong.

Ansset looked at the lake, trying for inspiration. But all he could see was a lake.

“Stop looking at the lake, Ansset, if the lake tells you nothing.”

So Ansset looked at the trees, at the birds, at the hills. He looked all around the hills. And he knew what Esste wanted him to know. “The water pours out of the low place.”

“And?” Not enough yet?

“If the low place were higher, the lake would be deeper.”

“And if the low place were lower?”

“There wouldn’t be a lake.”

And Esste broke off the conversation. Or rather, changed languages, because now she sang, and the song exulted. It was low and it was not loud, but it spoke, without words, of joy; of having found after long searching, of having given a gift carried far too long; of having, at last, eaten when she thought never to eat again. I starved for you, and you are here, said her song.

And Ansset understood all the notes of her song, and all that lay behind the notes, and he, too, sang. Harmony was not taught to Bells, but Ansset sang harmony. It was wrong, it was only countermelody, it was dissonant to Esste’s song, but it was nevertheless an augmentation of her joy, and where a mere teacher, with less Control, might have been overcome by Ansset’s echo of the deepest parts of her song, Esste had Control enough to channel the ecstasy through her song. It became so powerful, and Ansset was so receptive to it, that it overcame him, and he sobbed and clung to her and still tried to sing through his tears.

She knelt beside him and held him and whispered to him, and soon he slept. She talked to him in his sleep, told him things far beyond his comprehension, but she was laying pathways through his mind. She was building secret places in his mind, and in one of them she sang the love song, sang it so that at a time of great need it would sing back to him and he would remember, and be filled.

When he woke, he remembered nothing of having lost Control; nor did he remember Esste speaking to him. But he reached out aid took her hand, and she led him down the hill. It felt right to him to hold her hand, though such familiarity was forbidden between children and teachers, partly because his body had vague memories of holding the hand of a woman whom he completely trusted, and partly because he knew, somehow, that Esste would not mind.

6

Kya-Kya was a Deaf. At the age of eight she had still not progressed beyond the Groan level. Her Control was weak. Her pitch was uncertain. It was not lack of native ability—the seeker who found her had not made a mistake. She simply could not pay attention well enough. She did not care.

Or so they said. But she cared very much. Cared when the children her age and a year younger and a year younger than that passed her by. All were kind to her and few despaired, because it was well known that some sang later than others. She cared even more when she was gently told that there was no point in going on. She was a Deaf, not because she could not hear, but because, as her teacher told her, “Hearing, you hear not.” And that was it. A different kind of teacher, different duties, different children. There weren’t that many Deafs, but there was enough for a class. They learned from the best teachers Tew could provide. But they learned no music.

The Songhouse takes care of all its children, she thought often, sometimes gratefully, sometimes bitterly. I am taken care of. Taught to work by being given duties in the Songhouse. Taught science and history and languages and I’m damned good at it. Outside, outside they would consider me gifted. But here I’m a Deaf. And the sooner I leave the better.

She would leave soon. She was fourteen. Only a few months left. At fifteen she would be out, with a comfortable stipend and the doors to a dozen universities open to her. The money would continue until she was twenty-two. Later, if she needed. The Songhouse took care of its children.

But there were still those few months, and her duties were interesting enough. She worked with security, checking the warning and protective devices that made sure the Songhouse stayed isolated from the rest of Tew. Such devices had not always been needed, in the old days. There had even been a time when the Songmaster in the High Room ruled all the world. But it was still less than a century since the outsiders had tried to storm the Songhouse in a silly dispute over a pirate who wanted the Songhouse’s reputed great wealth. And now the security devices, which took a year to patrol. The duty had taken her around the perimeter, a journey longer than circling the Earth, and all by skooter, so that she was alone in the forests and deserts and seacoasts of the Songhouse lands.

Today she was checking the monitoring devices in the Songhouse itself. In a way it made her feel superior, to know what none of the children and few of the masters and teachers knew—that the stone was not impenetrable, that, in fact, it was heavily strung with wires and tubes, so that what seemed to be a rambling, primitive stone relic was potentially as modern as anything on Tew. Possession of the wiring diagrams gave her information that would surprise any of the less-informed singers. Yet whenever she dwelt on her pride at having inside knowledge, she forced herself to remember that she was only allowed the knowledge so young because she was completely outside all the discipline and study of the Songhouse. She was a Deaf—she could know secrets because she would never sing and so she didn’t matter.

That was her frame of mind when she entered the High Room. She knocked brusquely because she was feeling upset. No answer. Good, the old Songmaster, Nniv, wasn’t in. She pushed open the. door. The High Room was freezing, with all the shutters open to the wintry wind. It was insane to leave the place like this—who could work here? Instead of going to the panels where the monitors were hidden, she went to the shutters of the nearest window, leaned out to catch them, and found herself looking down forever, it seemed, to the next roof below her. She hadn’t realized how high she really was. On the east side, of course, the Songhouse was higher, so the stairs up to the High Room were not so terribly long. But she was high, and the height fascinated her. What would it be like to fall? Would she feel it like flying, with the exhilaration of the skooter rushing down a hillside? Or would she really be afraid?

She stopped herself with one leg over the sill, her arms poised to thrust her out. What am I doing? The shock of realization was almost enough to throw her forward, out the window. She caught herself, gripped the sides of the window, forced herself to slowly pull ha leg back inside, withdraw from the window, and finally kneel, leaning her head against the lip of rock at the base of the window. Why did I do that? What was I doing?

I was leaving the Songhouse.

The thought made her shudder. Not that way. I will not leave the Songhouse that way. Leaving the Songhouse will not be the end of my life.

She did not believe it. And, not believing, she gripped the stone and wanted not to ever let go.

The room was cold. It made her numb, motionless as she was, and the whine of the wind through the spaces in the roof and the rush of wind through the windows made her afraid in a new way; as if someone were watching her.

She turned. There was no one. Just the bundles of clothing and books and stone benches and a foot sticking out from under one of the bunches of clothing and the foot was blue and she went ova to it and discovered that this bundle of clothing was the misshapen, inaedibly thin body of Nniv, who was dead, frozen in the wind from the winta outside. His eyes wae open, and he stared at the stone in front of his face. Kya-Kya whimpered, but then reached down and pulled on his lip, as if to wake him. He rolled onto his back, but an arm stuck up in the air, and the legs moved only a little, and she knew he was dead, that the entire time she had been in the room he had been dead.

The Songmaster in the High Room died only rarely. She had neva known another. It was Nniv who had ultimately decided ha fate. He had declared her Deaf and decided she would leave the Songhouse without songs. She had hated him in her heart, though she had only talked to him a few times, ever since she was eight. But now she only felt repulsed by the corpse, and more than that, disgusted at the way he had died. Was the room always kept this bitterly cold? How had he lived so long! Was this some part of the discipline, that the ruler of the Songhouse lived in such squalor and misay?

If this emaciated, frozen corpse was the pinnacle of what the Songhouse could produce, Kya-Kya was not impressed. The lips were parted and the tongue lolled forward, blue and ghastly. This tongue, she thought, was once part of a song. Reputed to be the most mastaful song in the galaxy, pahaps in the universe. But what had the song been, if not the throat and lips and teeth and lungs, all now cold; if not the brain, that now was still?

She could not sing because of lips and teeth and throat and lungs and because in her own mind she was not so single-minded that she could be what the Songhouse demanded. But did it matter?

She did not feel triumphant that Nniv was dead. She was old enough to know that she, too, would be dead, and if she had a century ahead of her it only meant time in which she might end up just as accidentally cruel as Nniv had been. Kya-Kya did not pretend to unusual virtue. Just unusual value, which no one but her recognized. And it occurred to her that Nniv’s failure to recognize who and what she was (or had he, indeed recognized it?) did not change her.

She left him, went downstairs to find the Blind in charge of maintenance, an old man named Hrrai who rarely left his office. “Nniv is dead,” she told him wondering if her happiness sounded in her voice (but knowing that Hrrai would not be likely to read her very well, being a Blind). Can’t let anyone hear that I’m happy, she thought. Because I’m not rejoicing at his death. Only at my life.

“Dead?” Imperturbable Hrrai only sounded mildly surprised. “Well, then, you must go tell his successor.”

Hrrai leaned down over his table and began worrying his pen back and forth across a page.

“But Hrrai,” Kya-Kya said.

“But what?”

“Who is Nniv’s successor?”

“The next Songmaster of the High Room,” he said. “Of course.”

“Of course nothing! How should I know who that is? How am I supposed to figure it out if you don’t tell me?” Hrrai looked up, more surprised this time than he had been at the news of Nniv’s death. “Don’t you know how this works?”

“How should I? I’m a Deaf. I never got past Groan!”

“Well, you needn’t act so upset about it. It isn’t exactly a secret, you know. Whoever finds the body will know, that’s all. Whoever finds that the Songmaster in the High Room is dead will know.”

“How will I know?”

“It will be obvious to you. Just go and tell him or her that he or she is supposed to take care of funeral arrangements. It’s all that simple. But you really ought to act quickly. The Songhouse shouldn’t be long without someone in the High Room.”

He turned back to his work with a finality that told Kya-Kya she must leave, must be about her business, certainly must not bother him anymore. She left. And wandered the halls. She had thought to be quit of the Songhouse in a matter of months, the least important person ever to have been there, and suddenly she was supposed to choose the leader of the place. What kind of crazy system is this? she thought. And what the hell kind of rotten luck for me, of all people!

But it was not rotten luck, and as she wandered through the stone corridors, all of them chilly with the winter outside, she realized that no one ever came to the High Room unbidden except maintenance people, and all the maintenance people were Deaf’s or Blinds, those who had not made it into the highest reaches of the singing folk. They could not sing, they could not teach—and so it was left to one of them to stumble across the body and, being impartial, not a member of the eligible group, choose fairly the person who obviously should be the Songmaster in the High Room.

Who?

She went to the Common Rooms and saw the teachers moving among the Classes and knew that she could not suddenly elevate a teacher above his rank—it was tempting to be whimsical, to take vengeance on the Songhouse by naming an incompetent to head it, but it would be cruel to the incompetent so called, and she couldn’t destroy someone that way. She knew enough to know that it was just as cruel to lift someone above where he ought to be as it was to force them to stay below their true station. I won’t cause misery.

But the Songmasters, the logical group to choose from—she knew none of them, except by reputation. Onn, a gifted teacher and singer, but always assigned as a consultant to everybody because he couldn’t live with the necessity of keeping a fixed schedule, meeting with obnoxious people, and making, of all things, decisions. Much better to give advice. No, Onn was not the one anyone would expect, though he was by far the nicest. And Chuffyun was too old, far too old. He would not be long behind Nniv.

In fact, just as Hrrai had told her, the choice was obvious. But not one she enjoyed, not at all. Esste, who was cold to everyone except for the little boy she was promoting as a possibility for Mikal’s Songbird. Esste, who had reached down into the Common Rooms and lowered herself to be a teacher when she had been administrator of half the Songhouse, all for the sake of a little boy. No one made such great sacrifices for me, Kya-Kya thought bitterly. But Esste was a great singer, one who could light fires in every heart in the Songhouse—or quench those fires, if she wanted to. And Esste was above the petty jealousies and competitions that were endemic to the Songhouse. Esste was above such things in her attitude—and now she would be above them in station, too.

Kya-Kya stopped a master (who was quite surprised at having a Deaf interrupt her) and asked where she might find Esste.

“With Ansset. With the boy.”

“And where is he?”

“In his stall.”

Stall. The boy had been promoted. He couldn’t be more than six yet, and he was already in Stalls and Chambers. It turned Kya-Kya’s mouth down, her stomach dull. But in a moment she brightened again. The boy had been advanced by Esste, that’s all. He would be in the Songhouse all his life, except for a few years as a performer. While she would be free, could see all of Tew—more, could see other planets, could go, perhaps, to Earth where Mikal ruled the universe in indescribable glory!

A few questions. A few directions. She found Ansset’s stall, identical to all the others except for a number on the door. Inside she could hear singing. It was conversation—she knew when it was songtalk. Esste was inside, then. Kya-Kya knocked.

“Who?” came the answer—from the boy, not from the Songmaster.

“Kya-Kya. With a message for Songmaster Esste.”

The door opened. The boy, who was far smaller than Kya-Kya, let her in. Esste sat on the stool by the window. The room was bleak—bare wooden walls on three sides, a cot, a stool, a table, and the stone wall framing the single window that opened onto the courtyard. Every stall was interchangeable with any other. But Kya-Kya would once have given her soul to have a stall and all that it implied. The boy was six.

“Your message?”

Esste was as cold as ever; her robe swirled around her feet as she sat absolutely erect on the stool.

“Esste, I have come from the High Room.”

“He wants me?”

“He is dead.” Esste’s face betrayed nothing. She had Control. “He is dead,” Kya-Kya said again. “And I hope you will take care of the funeral arrangements.”

Esste sat in silence for a moment before she answered.

“You found the body?”

“Yes.”

“You have done me no kindness,” Esste said. She rose and left the room.

What now? Kya-Kya wondered, as she stood near the door of Ansset’s stall. She had not thought beyond informing Esste. She had expected some reaction; expected at least to be told what to do. Instead she stood here in the stall with the boy who was the opposite of her, the epitome of success where she had met nothing but failure.

He looked at her inquiringly. “What does this mean?”

“It means,” said Kya-Kya, “that Esste is Songmaster in the High Room.”

The boy showed no sign of response. Control, thought Kya-Kya. That damnable Control.

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you?” she demanded.

“What should it mean?” Ansset asked, and his voice was a web of innocence.

“It should mean a little gloating, at least, boy,” Kya-Kya answered, with the contempt the hopelessly inferior can freely use when the superior is helpless. “Esste’s been pampering you every step of the way. Leading you up without having to go through the pain everyone goes through. And now she has all the power it takes. You’ll be a Songbird, little boy. You’ll sing for the greatest people in the galaxy. And then you’ll come home, and your Esste will see to it you never have to bother with being a friend or a tutor, you’ll just step right into teaching, or being a master, or perhaps—why not?—a high master right from the start, and before you’re twenty you’ll be a Songmaster. So why don’t you forget your Control and let it show? This is the best thing that’s ever happened to you!” Her voice was bitter and angry, with no hint of music in it, not even the dark music of rage.

Ansset regarded her placidly, then opened his mouth, not to speak but to sing. At first she decided to leave immediately; soon she was incapable of deciding anything.

Kya-Kya had heard many singers before, but no one had sung to her like this. There were words, but she did not hear words. Instead she heard kindness and understanding, and encouragement. In Ansset’s song she was not a failure. She was, in fact, a wise woman who had done a great favor for the Songhouse, who had earned the love of all future generations. She felt proud. She felt that the Songhouse would send her out, not in shame, but as an emissary to the worlds outside. I will tell them of the music, she thought, and because of me the Songhouse will be held in even greater esteem by everyone who knows of it. For I am as much a product of the Songhouse as any singer or Songbird. She was bursting with joy, with pride. She had not been so happy in years. In her life. She embraced the boy and wept for several minutes.

If this is what Ansset can do, he is worth all the praise he has been given, she thought. Why, the boy is full of love, even for me. Even for me. And she looked up into his eyes and saw—

Nothing.

He regarded her as placidly as he had before. Control. He had let out the song, and that was all. There was nothing human about him when he wasn’t singing. He knew what she wanted to hear, he had given it to her, and that was all he needed to do.

“Do they wind you up?” she said to the blank face.

“Wind me up?”

“You may be a singer,” she said angrily, “but you aren’t human!”

He began to sing again, the tones already soothing, but Kya-Kya leaped to her feet, backed away. “Not again! You can’t trick me again! Sing to the stones and make them cry, but I won’t have you fooling me again!” She fled the room, slamming shut the door on his song, on his empty face. The child was a monster, not real at all, and she hated him.

She also remembered his song and loved him and longed to return to his stall to hear him sing forever.

That very day she pleaded with Esste to let her go early. To let her leave before she ever had to hear Ansset sing again. Esste looked confused, asked for explanation. Kya-Kya only insisted again that if she wasn’t allowed to go, she would kill herself.

“You can go tomorrow, then,” the new Songmaster in the High Room said.

“Before the funeral?”

“Why before the funeral?”

“Because he’ll sing then, won’t he?”

Esste nodded. “His song will be beautiful.”

“I know,” Kya-Kya said, and her eyes filled with tears at the memory. “But it won’t be a human being singing it. Good-bye.”

“We’ll miss you,” Esste said softly, and the words were tender.

Kya-Kya had been leaving, but she turned to look Esste in the eye. “Oh, you sound so sweet. I can see where Ansset learned it. A machine teaching a machine.”

“You misunderstand,” said Esste. “It is pain teaching pain. What else do you think the Control is for?”

But Kya-Kya was gone. She saw neither Esste nor Ansset again before the tram took her and her luggage and her first month’s money away from the Songhouse. “I’m free,” she said softly when she passed the gate leading to Tew and the farms opened before her.

You’re a liar, you’re a liar, answered the rhythm of the engines.

7

A machine teaching a machine. The words left a sour memory that stayed with Esste through all the funeral arrangements. A machine. Well, true enough in a way, and completely untrue in another. The machines were the people who had no Control, whose voice spoke all their secrets and none of their intentions. But I am in control of myself, which no machine can ever be.

But she also understood what Kya-Kya meant. Indeed, she already knew it, and it frightened her how completely Ansset had learned Control, and how young. She watched him as he sang at Nniv’s funeral. He was not the only singer, but he was the youngest, and the honor was tremendous, almost unprecedented. There was a stir when he stepped up to sing. But when he was through singing, no one had any doubt that the honor was deserved. Only the new ones, the Groans, and a few of the Bells were crying—it would not be right at a Songmaster’s funeral to try to get anyone to break Control. But the song was grief and love and longing together, the respect of all those present, not just for Nniv, who was dead, but for the Songhouse, which he had helped keep alive. Oh, Ansset, you’re a master, thought Esste, but she also noticed things that most did not notice. How his face was impassive before and after he sang; how he stood rigidly, his body focused on making the exact tone. He manipulates us, Esste thought, manipulates us but not half so perfectly as he manipulates himself. She noticed how he sensed every stir, every glance in the audience and fed upon it and gave it back a hundred fold. He is a magnifying mirror, Esste thought. You are a magnifying mirror who takes the love you’ve been given and spews it out stronger than before, but with none of yourself attached to it. You are not whole.

He came to where Esste sat, and sat beside her. It was his right, since she was his master. She said no words, but only sighed in a way that said to Ansset’s sensitive ears, “Fair, but flawed.” The unexpected and undeserved criticism did not cause his expression to change. He only answered with a grunt that meant, “You hardly needed to tell me. I knew it.”

Control, thought Esste. You have certainly learned Control.

8

Ansset did not sing again for an audience in the Songhouse. At first he did not notice it. It was simply not his turn to solo or duo or trio or quarto in Chamber. But when everyone in his chamber had performed twice or three times, and Ansset had not been asked to sing, he became puzzled, then alarmed. He did not ask because volunteering simply was not done. He waited. And waited. And his turn never seemed to come.

It was not long after he noticed it that the others in Chamber began commenting on it, first to each other, finally to Ansset. “Did you do something wrong?” they asked him, one by one at mealtime or in the corridors or in the toilet. “Why are you being punished?”

Ansset only answered with a shrug or a sound that said, How should I know? But when his ban from performing continued, he began to turn away the questions with coldness that taught the questioner quickly that the subject was forbidden. It was part of Control for Ansset, not to let himself become part of speculation about his mysterious ban. Nor would his Control allow him to ask. Esste could continue as long as she liked. Whatever it meant, whatever she hoped to accomplish, Ansset would bear it unquestioning.

She came to his stall every day, of course, just as before. Being Songmaster in the High Room meant additional duties, not relief from her previous ones. Finding and training Mikal’s Songbird was her life’s work, chosen freely decades ago. It would not end, the burden would not be lifted, just because Nniv died and that damned fool Kya-Kya had had the temerity to afflict her with his office. She said as much to Ansset, hoping to reassure him that he would not be losing her. But he took the news without any sign that he cared either way, and went on with the day’s lessons as if nothing were wrong.

And why should he do anything else? Until Kya-Kya had said her say just before leaving, Esste had not worried particularly. If Ansset was superb at Control, he was superb at everything else, too, and so it was not to be remarked upon. But now Esste noticed the Control as if each example of Ansset’s apparent unconcern were a blow to her.

As for Ansset, he had no idea what was going on inside Esste’s mind. For Esste’s Control was also superb, and she showed nothing of her worry or reasoning to Ansset. That was as it should be, Ansset assumed. I am a lake, he thought, and all my walls are high. I have no low place. I grow deeper every day.

It did not occur to him that he might drown.

9

A lesson.

Esste took Ansset to a bare room with no windows. Just stone, a dozen meters square, and a thick door that admitted no sound. They sat on the stone floor, and because all the floors were stone they found the floor comfortable, or at least familiar, and Ansset was able to relax.

“Sing,” said Esste, and Ansset sang. As always, his body was rigid and his face showed no emotion; as always, the song was intensely emotional. This time he sang of darkness and closed-in spaces, and he sounded mournful. Esste was often surprised by the depth of Ansset’s understanding of things he surely, at his age, could not know firsthand.

The song resonated and echoed back from the walls.

“It rings,” Esste said.

“Mmmm,” Ansset answered.

“Sing so it doesn’t ring.”

Ansset sang again, this time a wordless and essentially meaningless song that danced easily through his lowest notes (which were not very low) and came out more as air than as tone. The song did not echo.

“Sing,” Esste said, “so that it is as loud to me, here by the wall, as it is right next to you, but so that none of it echoes.”

“I can’t,” Ansset said.

“You can.”

“Can you?”

Esste sang, and the song filled the room but there was no echo.

And so Ansset sang. For an hour, for another hour, trying to find the exact voice for that room. Finally, at the end of the second hour, he did it. “Do it again.”

He did it again. And then asked, “Why?”

“You do not sing only into silence. You also sing into space. You must sing exactly for the space you have been given. You must fill it so that no one can fail to hear you, and yet keep your tone so clear and free of echo that all they can hear is exactly what your body produces.”

“I have to do this every time?”

“In a while, Ansset, it becomes reflex.”

They sat in silence for a moment. And then, softly, Ansset asked, “I would like to try to fill the chamber this way.”

Esste knew what he was asking, and refused to answer his real question. “I believe the chamber’s empty right now. We could go there.”

Ansset struggled with himself for a moment—Esste assumed, anyway, for though he was silent for a time, his face showed nothing. “Mother Esste,” he finally said, “I don’t know why I’ve been banned.”

“Have you been?”

Mildly: “You know I have.”

It was a minor victory. She had actually forced him to ask. Yet the victory was an empty one. He had not lost Control; he simply had found it unproductive to remain silent about it. Esste leaned back on the stone wall, not realizing that she herself was bending to his rigidity by relaxing her own.

“Ansset, what is your song?”

He looked at her blankly. Waited. Apparently he did not understand.

“Ansset, you keep singing our songs back to us. You keep taking what people feel and intensifying it and shattering us with it, but child, what song is yours?”

“All.”

“None. So far I have never heard you sing a song that I knew was only Ansset.”

He did not lose Control. Surely he should be angry. But he only looked at her with empty eyes and said, “You are mistaken.” The child was six, and said you are mistaken.

“You will not sing before an audience again until you have sung for me a song that is yours.”

“How will you know?”

“I don’t know, Ansset. But I’ll know.”

He continued to regard her steadily, and she, because of her own Control, did not break her gaze. Some children had taken to Control very badly before, and usually they ended up as Deafs. Control was not easy for anyone, but essential for the songs. Yet here was a child who, like most really good singers and Songbirds, had learned Control quickly, lived with it naturally. Too naturally. The object of Control was not to remove the singer from all human contact, but to keep that contact clear and clean. Instead of a channel, Ansset was using Control as an impenetrable, insurmountable wall.

I will get over your walls, Ansset, she promised him silently. You will sing a song of yourself to me.

But his blank, meaningless face said only, You will fail.

10

Riktors Ashen was angry when he got to the High Room. “Listen, lady, do you know what this is?”

“No,” Esste answered, and her voice was calculated to soothe him.

“It’s a warrant of entry. From the emperor.”

“And you’ve entered. Why are you upset?”

“I’ve entered after four days! I’m the emperor’s personal envoy, on a very important errand—”

“Riktors Ashen,” Esste interrupted (but quietly, calmly), “you are on an important errand, but this is not it. This is just a stop along the way—”

“Damn right,” Riktors said, “and this petty errand has put me four days behind schedule.”

“Perhaps, Riktors Ashen, you ought to have asked to see me.”

“I don’t have to ask. I have the emperor’s warrant of entry.”

“Even the emperor asks before he enters here.”

“I doubt that.”

“It’s history, my friend. I myself brought him to this room.”

Riktors was less agitated now. Was, in fact, embarrassed at his outburst. Not that he hadn’t the right—this was a man, Esste knew, who could use rage to good effect. He hadn’t risen to high rank in the fleet without reason.

He was embarrassed because the rage had been real, and over a matter of pride. This was a young man who was learning. Esste liked him. Even though he was also a young man who would kill anyone to get what he wanted. Death waited in his calm hands, behind his boyish face.

“History is shit,” Riktors said mildly. “I’m here to find out about Mikal’s Songbird.”

“The emperor has no Songbird.”

“That,” said Riktors, not without amusement, “is precisely the problem. Do you realize how many years have passed since you promised him a Songbird? Mikal is 118 years old this year. Naturally it’s polite to suppose the emperor will live forever, but Mikal himself told me to tell you that he is aware of his mortality, and he hopes he will not die without having heard his Songbird sing.”

“You understand that Songbirds are matched very carefully to their hosts. Usually we have the Songbird and work to place him or her properly. This was an unusual case, and until now we haven’t had the right Songbird.”

“Until now?”

“I believe we have the Songbird who will be Mikal’s.”

“I will see him now.”

Esste chose to smile. Riktors Ashen smiled back. “With your permission, of course,” he added.

“The child is only six years old,” Esste answered. “His training is far from complete.”

“I want to see him to know that he exists.” Riktors held her gaze.

“I’ll take you to him.”

They wound their way down the stairs, through passages and corridors. “There are so many corridors,” Riktors said, “that I don’t see how you have any space left for rooms.” Esste said nothing until they reached the corridors of stalls, where she paused for a moment and sang a long high note. Doors closed in the distance. Then she led the emperor’s personal envoy to Ansset’s door, and sang a few wordless notes outside.

The door opened, and Riktors Ashen gasped. Ansset was thin, but his light complexion and blond hair were given a feeling of translucence by the sun coming in his window. And the boy’s features were beautiful, not just regular; the kind of face that melted men’s hearts as readily as women’s. More readily.

“Was he chosen for his voice, or his face?” Riktors Ashen asked.

“When a child is three,” answered Esste, “his future face is still a mystery. His voice unfolds more easily. Ansset, I have brought this man to hear you sing.”

Ansset looked blankly at Esste, as if he did not understand but refused to ask for explanation. Esste knew immediately what Ansset planned. Riktors did not. “She means for you to sing for me,” he said helpfully.

“The child needs no repetition. He heard my request, and chooses not to sing.”

Ansset’s face showed nothing.

“Is he deaf?” asked Riktors.

“We will go now,” answered Esste. They went. But Riktors lingered until the last possible moment, looking at at Ansset’s face.

“Beautiful,” Riktors said, again and again, as they walked through more passageways toward the gatehouse.

“He is to be the emperor’s Songbird, Riktors Ashen, not the emperor’s catamite.”

“Mikal has a large number of offspring. His tastes are not so eclectic as to include little boys. Why wouldn’t the boy sing?”

“Because he chose not to.”

“Is he always so stubborn?”

“Often.”

“Hypnotherapy would take care of that. A good practitioner could lay a mental block that would forbid resistance—”

Esste sang a melody that stopped Riktors cold. He looked at her, not understanding why suddenly he was afraid of this woman.

“Riktors Ashen, I do not tell you how to move your fleets of starships between planets.”

“Of course. Just a suggestion—”

“You live in a world where all you expect of people is compliance, and so your hypnotherapists and your mental blocks accomplish all your ends. But here in the Songhouse, we create beauty. You cannot force a child to find his voice.”

Riktors Ashen had regained his composure. “You’re good at that. I have to work a little harder to force people to listen to me.”

Esste opened the door to the gatehouse.

“Songmaster Esste,” Riktors said, “I will tell the emperor that I have seen his Songbird, and that the child is beautiful. But when will I tell him the child will be sent?”

“The child will be sent when I am ready,” Esste replied.

“Perhaps it would be better if the child were sent when he was ready.”

“When I am ready,” Esste said again, and her voice was all pleasure and grace.

“The emperor will have his Songbird before he dies.”

Esste hissed softly, which forced Riktors to come closer, to bring his face near enough that only he could hear what Esste said next:

“There is much for both of us to do before Mikal Imperator dies, isn’t there?”

Riktors Ashen left quickly then, to finish his business for the emperor.

11

Brew takes your mind,

Bay takes your life,

Bog takes your money,

Wood takes your wife.

Stivess is cold,

Water is hot Overlook wants you,

Norumm does not.

“What song is that?” asked Ansset.

“Consider it a directory. It used to be taught to the children of Step, to make fun of the other great cities of Tew. Step is no longer a great city. But the ones they made fun of still are.”

“Where will we go?”

“You are eight years old, Ansset,” Esste answered. “Do you remember any life, any people outside the Songhouse?”

“No.”

“After this, you will.”

“What does the song mean?” asked Ansset. The flesket stopped then, at the changing place, where Songhouse vehicles always stopped and commercial transport took over. Esste led Ansset by the hand, ignoring his question for the moment. There was business at the ticket counter, and their luggage, slight as it was, had to be searched and itemized and fed into the computer, so that no false insurance claims could be made. Esste knew from her memories of her first venture outside the Songhouse lands that Ansset understood almost nothing of what was going on. She tried explaining a few things to him, and he seemed to pick it up well enough to get along. The money, and the idea of money, he took in stride. The clothing he found uncomfortable; he kept taking the shoes off until she insisted that they were essential. She did not look forward to his getting accustomed to the food. There would be diarrhea for days—at the Songhouse he had never acquired a taste or a tolerance for sugar.

She was not surprised at his quiet acceptance of everything. The trip meant that he was within a year of placement, yet he showed no excitement or even interest in his ultimate destination. Over the last two years he had finally begun to show a little human emotion in his face, but Esste, who knew him better than any other, was not fooled. The emotion was placed there in order to avoid exciting comment. None of it was real. It was nothing more or less than what was expected and proper at the moment. And Esste despaired. There were paths and hidden places that she herself had put in Ansset’s mind, but now she could not reach him at all. She could not get him to speak of himself; she could not get him to show even the slightest inadvertent emotion; and as for the closeness they had felt on the hill overlooking the lake, he never betrayed a memory of it but at the same time never allowed her to get even a few steps into the path she could follow to put him into a light trance, where she might have accomplished or at least discovered something.

When the business at the changing place was finished, they sat to wait for the bus, a flesket that anyone with the money could ride. It was then that Esste whiled away the time by answering Ansset’s question. If he was surprised or gratified that she remembered it, he did not show any sign.

“Brew is one of the Cities of the Sea—Homefall, Chop, Brine, and Brew—all of which are famous for beer and ale. They also have a reputation for exporting very little of their product because they are such prodigious drinkers. Beer and ale contain alcohol. They are enemies of Control, and you cannot sing when you’ve been drinking them.”

“Bay takes your life?” Ansset prompted, having memorized the song, as usual.

“Bay used to have the unfortunate habit of holding public executions every Saturday whether anyone was sentenced to death or not. To avoid using up too many of their own citizens, they used strangers. The practice has in recent years, been stopped. Wood had a sort of mandatory wife-market. Very odd things. Tew is a very odd planet. Which is why the Songhouse was able to exist here. We were more normal than most cities, and so we were left alone.”

“Cities?”

“The Songhouse began as a city. It began as a town of people who loved to sing. That’s all. Things then grew from there.”

“The rest of the cities?”

“Stivess is very far to the north. Water is just as far to the south. Overlook is a place whose only product is the beauty of its scenery, and it lives off the people of wealth who go there to end their days. Norumm has four million people. It used to have nine million. But they still feel crowded and refuse to let more than a few people visit them every year.”

“Are we going there?”

“We are not.”

“Bog takes your money. What does that mean?”

“You’ll find out for yourself. That’s where we’re going.”

The bus arrived, they boarded, and the bus left. For the First time in memory, Ansset saw people outside the milieu of the Songhouse. There were not very many people on the bus. Though this was the main highway from Seawatch to Bog, most people took the expresses, which didn’t stop at the Songhouse changing place—or even at Step, usually. This bus was not an express—it stopped everywhere.

Directly in front of them were a mother and father and their son, who must have been at least a year older than Ansset. The child had been riding far too long, and he could not hold still.

“Mother, I need to go to the toilet.”

“You just went. Stay in your seat.”

But the child whirled around and knelt on the bench to stare at Esste and Ansset. Ansset looked at the boy, his gaze never wavering. The boy stared back, while wagging his backside impatiently. He reached out to bat at Ansset’s face. It might have been meant as a friendly gesture, but Ansset uttered a quick, harsh song that spun the boy around in his seat. When the mother took the boy to the bathroom at the back of the bus, the child looked at Ansset in terror and stayed as far from him as possible.

Esste was surprised at how frightened the child had become. True, the music had been a rebuke. But the child’s reaction was far out of proportion to Ansset’s song. In the Songhouse, anyone would have understood Ansset’s song, but here the child should have understood it only vaguely—that was the purpose of the trip, to learn to adapt to outsiders. Yet somehow Ansset had communicated with the boy, and done it better than he had with Esste.

Could Ansset actually direct his music to one particular person? Esste wondered. That went beyond songtalk. No, no. It must have been just that the boy had been paying closer attention to Ansset than she had, so that the song struck him with more force.

And instead of worrying, she made the incident give her more confidence. In his first encounter with an outsider, Ansset had done far better than he should have been able to. Ansset was the right choice for Mikal’s Songbird. If only.

Though the forest was not so lush as the deep woods in the Valley of Songs, where all Ansset’s excursions had taken him before, the trees were still tall enough to be impressive, and the lack of underbrush made for a different kind of beauty, a sort of austere temple with trunks extending into the infinite distance and the leaves making a dense ceiling. Ansset watched the trees more than the people. Esste speculated as to what was going on in his impenetrable mind. Was he deliberately avoiding looking at the others? Perhaps he needed to avoid their strangeness until he could absorb it. Or was he truly disinterested, more drawn to the forest than to other human beings?

Perhaps I was wrong, Esste thought. Perhaps my intuition was a mistake, and I should have let Ansset perform. For two years he has had no audience but me. If his preferred treatment before kept the other children from being close to him, his ban had made him a pariah. No one knew what his error had been, but after that triumphant song at Nniv’s funeral Ansset’s voice had gone unheard, and everyone concluded the disgrace must be punishment for something terrible. Some had even sung of it in chamber. One child, Ller, had even had the temerity to protest, to sing angrily that it was unjust to ban Ansset for so long, so unfairly. Yet even Ller avoided Ansset as if the future Songbird’s suffering were contagious.

If I was wrong, Esste concluded, the damage has been done. In a year Ansset will go to Mikal, ready or not. Ansset will go as the finest, most exquisite voice we have sent from the Songhouse in living memory. But he will go as an inhuman creature, unable to communicate the normal human feelings with others. A singing machine.

I have a year, Esste thought. I have one year to break down his walls without breaking his heart.

The forest gave way to wooded prairie, the desolate land where wild animals still roamed. Population pressure on Tew had never been great enough to drive many settlers to this plateau where winters were impossibly cold and summers unbearably hot. They were an hour reaching the Rim, a great cliff thousands of kilometers long and nearly a kilometer high, Here, however, the rift had split in two parts, and between them other cliffs took the descent more gradually. The city of Step had grown up at the foot of the jumble of rock, where river traffic had to end and transfer to roads. Few of the farmers could afford fleskets or the even more expensive flinks. Even when Step ceased to be a major city, it remained important locally.

The bus followed the switchback road carved centuries ago in the rock. It was rough, but the bus never felt it, except when sudden dips forced it to drop a bit in altitude. Ansset still watched the scenery, and now even Esste gazed at the huge expanse of farmland at the base of the descent. What fell as snow on the plateau came as rain below the Rim, and farmers here fed the world, as they liked to say.

Step itself was boring. All the buildings were old, and decay was the loudest message shouted by the shabby signs and the nearly empty streets. Nevertheless, lessons had to be learned. Esste took Ansset into a dismal restaurant and ordered and paid for a dinner. “Even the prices are depressed here,” she commented. Ansset ignored her.

The restaurant was no more crowded than the streets. Wherever all the people were, it wasn’t here. And the food came quickly. It was not bad, but the flavor had left it somewhere between the farm and the table. Ansset ate some, but not much. Esste ate less. Instead, she looked around at the people. At first she got the impression that they were all old, but because she didn’t trust impressions she counted. Only six were grey-haired or balding—the other dozen were middle-aged or young. Some were silent, but most conversed. Yet the restaurant felt old, and the conversations sounded tired, and it all made Esste vaguely sad. The songs of the place were gone, if there had ever been songs. Now only moans were appropriate.

And, as soon as Esste thought that, she realized that Ansset was moaning. The sound was soft but penetrating, almost like the background noise of the kitchen machines that processed the food. Control allowed Esste to refrain from glancing at Ansset. Instead she listened to the song. It was a perfect echo of the mood of the place, a perfect understanding of the, not misery, but weariness of the people. But gradually Ansset built a rising tone into his melody, a strange, surprising element that made it interesting, or at least that made a person hearing it want to be interested in something. Esste knew immediately what Ansset was doing. He was breaking the ban. He was performing. And once again the song was not his own—it was what every person in the restaurant, including Esste, wished to hear, wished to be made to feel.

The lilting quality of his song became more pronounced. People who had not been conversing began to talk; conversations already in progress became more animated. People smiled. The ugly young woman at the counter began talking to the waiter. Even joking. No one seemed to notice Ansset’s song, and its effect.

And Ansset faded, softened the song, let it die in midnote so that it seemed to continue into the silence. Esste was not sure, in fact, when the song was over, even though she was the only person who had been carefully listening to it. Yet the effect of the song lingered. Deliberately Esste waited, watched to see how long the people would remain cheerful. They left the restaurant smiling.

“I congratulate you,” said Esste, “on your superb performance.” Ansset’s face did not respond. His voice did. “They’re harder to change than Songhouse people.”

“Like trying to move through water, yes?” asked Esste.

“Or mud. But I can do it.”

Not even smugness. Just a recognition of fact. But I know you, boy, Esste thought. You are enjoying yourself immensely. You are having a hilarious time outsmarting me and at the same time proving that you can handle any situation. As long as it’s outside of you.

The bus took them through the night back up the Rim, but to the west this time, and it was still dark when they reached Bog. The sky was dark, that is. The lights of the city filled the land to the edge of the sea. It seemed in places that there were no breaks between the lights, as if the city were a carpet of pure light, a fragment of the sun. The clouds above the city glowed brightly. Even the sea seemed to shine.

The streets were so crowded, even in the last hours before dawn, that buses and fleskets and even skooters had to use overhead ramps that wound among the buildings. It was dazzling. It was exciting. The crush of humanity was frantic, desperate, exhilarating, even from the inside of a bus. Ansset slept through it, after waking for a moment when Esste tried to get him to look. “Lights,” he said, in a tone of voice that said, I’d rather sleep.

“Might as well go upstairs and sleep,” said the clerk at the hotel. “Nothing happens during the day here. Not even business. Can’t even get a decent meal except at one of those junky all-day diners.

But after only a few hours of sleep, Ansset insisted that they go out.

“I want to see the city now.”

“It looks better by electric light,” Esste told him.

“So.” So that’s why I want to see it.

“So?” I’d rather rest.

“The beds here are too soft,” Ansset said, “and my back is sore. The food we ate in Step has sent me to the toilet four times, and it looked better than it did on the table. I want to see outside. I want to see it when it isn’t dressed up to fool people.”

You are eight years old, Esste said silently. You might as well be a crusty old eighty.

They saw Bog by daylight.

“Name?” asked Ansset.

“The city is on the estuary of the. River Salway. Most of the land is only a few centimeters above sea level, and it is constantly trying to sink into the sea.” She showed him how architecture had adapted to the conditions. Every building had a main entrance opening onto air on every floor. As the building sank, the entrance on the next floor up came into use. There were buildings whose tops were only a few feet above street level—usually, other buildings had already been built atop them.

The lighted signs were off in the daytime, and very few people were on the streets. “As dismal as Step,” Ansset said.

“Except that it comes alive at night.”

“Does it?”

Litter was inches deep on the streets in some places. Sweepers sucked their way through the city, roaring as they chewed up the trash. The few people on the streets looked as if they had had a hard night—or were up after very little sleep. It had been a carnival the night before; today the city was a cemetery.

A park. They sat on a massit that contoured itself to fit their bodies within a few moments. An old woman sat not far off, dangling her feet in a pond. She was holding to a string that led off into the water. Beside her an ugly eel occasionally twitched. She was whistling.

Her melody was harsh, untuneful, repetitive. Ansset began singing the same tune, in the same pitch—high, wavering, uncertain. He matched her, waver for waver, sour note for sour note. And then, abruptly, he sang a dissonance that grated painfully. The old woman turned around, heaving her huge stomach off her lap as she did. She laughed, and her breasts heaved up and down. “You know the song?” she called.

“Know it!” cried Ansset. “I wrote it!”

She laughed again. Ansset laughed with her, but his laugh was a high imitation of hers, great gasps and little, loud bursts of sound. She loved hearing his laugh as much as her own—since it was her own. “Come here!” she called.

Ansset came to her, and Esste followed, unsure whether the old woman meant well for the boy. Unsure until she spoke again.

“New here,” she said. “I can tell who’s new here. This your mother? A beautiful boy. Don’t let go of him tonight. He’s pretty enough to be a catamite. Unless that’s what you have in mind, in which case I hope you turn into an eel, speaking of which would you like to buy this one?”

The eel, as if to display its charms, twitched obscenely.

“It isn’t dead yet,” Ansset commented.

“They take hours to die. Which is fine with me. The longer they wiggle the more they pee and the better they taste. This pond’s full of them. Connects right up with the sewer system. They live in the sewer. Along with worse things. Bog produces more turds than anything else, enough to keep a million of these things alive. And as long as they’re around, I won’t starve.” She laughed again, and Ansset laughed with her, then briefly took her laugh and turned it into a mad song that made her laugh even harder. It took Control for Esste not to laugh with her.

“The boy’s a singer.”

“The boy has many gifts.”

“Songhouse?” asked the woman. Better to lie. “They wouldn’t take him. I told them he had talent, genius even, but their damned tests wouldn’t find a genius if he sang an aria.”

“That’s fine enough. Plenty of market for singers around here, and not the Songhouse type, you can bet. If he’s willing to take off his clothes he can make a fortune.”

“We’re just visiting.”

“Or there are even places where he could earn plenty by putting them on. All kinds here. But you are from out of town. Everybody knows you don’t go into the parks in the daytime. Not enough police to patrol them. Even the monitors do no good—only a few men and women to watch them, and they’re sleepy from the night before anyway. The night lives, but the daytime’s a crime. It’s a saying.”

The singsong in her voice had said as much. But Ansset apparently couldn’t resist. He took the words and sang them several times, each time funnier than the last. “The night lives, but the daytime’s a crime.”

She laughed. But her eyes got serious quickly. “It’s all right here on the edge. And they never bother me. But you be careful.”

Ansset picked up the eel, looked at it calmly. The eel’s eyes looked desperate. Ansset asked, “How does it taste?”

“How else? All it eats is shit. It tastes like shit.”

“And you eat it?”

“Spices, salt, sugar—I can take eel and make it taste like almost anything. Still terrible, but at least not eel. Eel’s a flexible meat. You can bend it and twist it into whatever you want.”

“Ah,” said Ansset.

To the old woman, his ah meant nothing. To Esste, it said, I am an eel to you. It said, You can bend me, but I will strain against the bending.

“Let’s go,” said Esste.

“A good idea,” said the old woman. “It isn’t safe here.”

“Good-bye,” said Ansset. “I’m glad I met you.” He sounded so glad to meet her that she was surprised, and smiled with more mirth as they left.

12

“This is boring,” Ansset said. “There must be more to see than this.”

Esste looked at him in surprise. When she had come here as an incipient Songbird, the shows with their dancing and singing and laughing were a marvelous surprise to her. She had not thought Ansset would be so easily satiated.

“Where should we go, then?”

“Behind.”

“Behind what?”

“Everything.” He got up from his seat and started sidling out between the rows. A woman reached out and patted his shoulder. He ignored her completely and moved on. Esste tried to catch up, but he fit better through the crowds in the aisles as people constantly came and went. She caught up with him where he waited by the exit where the waiters came and went with food and drinks for the people at tables down front.

“In here,” he said.

“We’re not allowed.”

“Anyway.”

He went in. Esste, having no choice, followed. Where was the fear and shyness of strangers that normally kept children from the Songhouse in line? Ansset would never show fear even if he felt it—but surely he felt some inhibition?

She found him with the cooks. They laughed and joked with him, and he echoed their laughs and their mood and made it happier as he talked virtual nonsense to them. They loved it. “Your son, lady?”

“My son.”

“Good boy. Wonderful boy.” Ansset watched as they cooked. The heat in the kitchen was intense. The cook explained as he worked. “Most places use quick ovens. But here, we go for the old flavors. The old ways of cooking. It’s our specialty.” Sweat dripped from Ansset’s chin; his hair stuck to his forehead and neck in sweaty curls. He seemed not to notice it, but Esste noticed, and said, in tones that meant she intended to be obeyed, “We’re going.”

Ansset offered no resistance, but when she started leading him to the door they had entered from he unerringly headed toward another exit. It led to a loading dock. Loaders looked at them curiously, but Ansset was humming a mindless tune and they left him alone.

Beyond the dock an indoor street serviced all the buildings of that area. It was a city within the city: all the fronts outside glittering for the visitors, the gamers, the funseekers, while behind the buildings, within the buildings the loaders, the cooks, the waiters, the servants, the managers, the entertainers passed back and forth, rode in shabby taxis, emptied garbage. It was the ugliness that all the pleasure of Bog generated, hidden from the paying customers behind walls and doors that said Employees Only.

Esste could barely keep up with Ansset. She made no pretense of directing him now. He had found this place, and it was his music that kept at bay those who might have stopped them. She had to stay with him; wanted to stay with him, for she was excited by the discoveries he made, much more excited than he let himself appear to be.

A garbage processing station; a whoreshop; an armored car loading that hour’s receipts from a gambling establishment; a dentist who specialized in fixing the teeth of those who had to smile and didn’t want to take more than an few minutes off work; a rehearsal for a slat show; and a thousand loaders bringing in food and taking out garbage.

And a morgue.

“You’re not allowed in here,” said the embalmer, but Ansset only smiled and said, “Yes we are,” and sang unshakeable confidence. The embalmer shrugged and went on with his work. And soon he began talking as he went. “I clean ’em,” he said. The bodies came in on a conveyor. He rolled them off onto a table, where he slit the abdomen and removed the guts. “Rich folks, poor folks, winners, losers, players, workers, they dies a hundred a night in this city, and here we cleans ’em pretty so they’ll keep. All the guts is the same. All the stinks is the same. Naked as babies.” The guts went into a bag. He filled the cavity with a stiff plastic wool and sewed up the skin with a hooked needle. It took only ten minutes for one body. “Another one does the eyes, and another one does visible wounds. I’m a specialist.”

Esste wanted to leave. Pulled on Ansset’s arm, but Ansset wouldn’t go. He watched four bodies come by. The fourth one was the old woman from the park. The embalmer had just about run out of chat. He cut open the huge stomach. The stench was worse. “I hate the fat ones,” said the embalmer. “Always having to hold the fat out of the way. Slows me down. Gets me behind.” He had to reach over mounds of flesh to reach the bowels, and he swore when he broke them. “Fat ones makes me clumsy.”

The woman’s face was set in a grimace that might have been a grin. Her throat had been slit.

“Who killed her?” asked Ansset, his face and voice showing no emotion beyond curiosity.

“Anyone. How should I know?

Just a deader. Could have been killed for anything. But she’s a poor one, all right. I know the smell. Eats eels. If the killers hadn’t got her the cancer would’ve. See?” He pulled up the stomach, which was distended and putrified by a huge tumor. “So fat she didn’t know she had it. Would have finished her off soon enough.”

It took the embalmer several tries and stronger thread before he could tie the abdomen back together again. In the meantime another body passed on the conveyor. “Damn” he said. “There’ll be complaints tonight, that’s for sure. Another missed quota. I hate the fat ones.”

“Let’s go now,” said Esste, deliberately letting her Control slip enough that he would be surprised into moving. He let her lead him to the indoor street.

“Enough,” Esste said. “Let’s go.”

“She was wrong,” Ansset answered.

“Who?”

“The woman. She was wrong. They wouldn’t let her alone.”

“Ansset.”

“This has been a good trip,” Ansset said. “I’ve learned a lot.”

“Have you?”

“Pleasure is like making bread. A lot of hot, nasty work in, the kitchen for a few swallows at the table.”

“Very good.” She tried to lead him away.

“No Esste. You can ban me at the Songhouse, but you can’t ban me here.” And he broke away from her and ran to the backstage entrance of a theater. Esste followed, but she was not young, and though she had made an effort to stay in shape a woman of her age could not hope to overtake a child determined to escape. She was lucky to stay close enough to see where he went.

An orchestra was playing to a full hall, and a woman on the stage was dancing nude. An equally naked man waited in the wings. Ansset stood behind one of the illusions, rigid as he sang. His voice was clear and loud, and the woman heard it and stopped dancing, and soon the members of the orchestra began hearing it and stopped playing. Ansset stepped through the illusion and walked out onto the stage, still singing.

Ansset sang to them what they had been feeling, what the orchestra had been pathetically incompetent to satisfy. He sang lust to them, though he had never experienced it, and they grew passionate and uncontrollable, audience and orchestra and the naked woman and man. Esste grieved inwardly as she watched it. He will give them everything they want.

But then he changed his song. Still without words, he began telling them of the sweating cooks in the kitchen, of the loaders, of the dentist, of the shabbiness behind the buildings. He made them understand the ache of weariness, the pain of serving the ungrateful. And at last he sang of the old woman, sang her laugh, sang her loneliness and her trust, and sang her death, the cold embalming on a shining table. It was agony, and the audience wept and screamed and fled the hall, those who could control themselves enough to stand.

Ansset’s voice penetrated to the walls, but did not echo.

When the hall was empty, Esste walked onto the stage. Ansset looked at her with eyes as empty as the hall.

“You eat it,” said Esste, “and you vomit it back fouler than before.”

“I sang what was in me.”

“In you? None of this ever got in you. It came to the walls and you threw it back.”

Ansset’s gaze did not swerve. “I knew you would not know it when I sang from myself.”

“It was you that did not know,” Esste said. “We’re going home.”

“I was to have a month.”

“You don’t need a month here. Nothing here will change you.”

“Am I an eel?”

“Are you a stone?”

“I’m a child.”

“It’s time you remembered that.” He offered no resistance. She led him to the hotel, where they gathered their things and left Bog before morning. It all failed, Esste thought. I had thought that the mixture of humanity here would open him. But all he found was what he already had. Inhumanity. An impregnable wall. And proof that he can do to people whatever he wants.

He had read the audience of strangers too well. It was something that had never happened at the Songhouse before. Ansset was not just a brilliant singer. He could hear the songs in people’s hearts without their having to sing; could hear them, could strengthen them, could sing them back with a vengeance. He had been forced into the mold of the Songhouse, but he was not made of such malleable stuff as the others. The mold could not fit.

What will break? Esste wondered. What will break first?

She did not for a moment believe it would be the Songhouse. Ansset, for all his seeming strength, was far more fragile than that. If he goes to Mikal like this, Esste realized, he will do the opposite of all my plans for him. Mikal is strong, perhaps strong enough to resist Ansset’s perversion of his gift. But the others: Ansset would destroy them. Without meaning to, of course. They would come to drink again and again at his well, not knowing it was themselves they drank until they were dry.

He slept in the bus. Esste put her arms around him, held him, and sang the love song to him over and over in his sleep.

13

“I haven’t time for this,” Esste said, allowing her voice to sound irritated.

“Neither have I,” Kya-Kya answered defiantly.

“The schools on Tew are excellent. Your stipend is more than adequate.”

“I have been accepted at the Princeton Government Institute.”

“It will cost ten times as much to support you on Earth. Not to mention the cost of getting you there. And the inconvenience of having to give it to you in a lump sum.”

“You earn ten times that amount from a single year’s payment on a Songbird.”

True enough. Esste sighed inwardly. Too much today. I was not ready to face this girl. What Ansset has not taken from me, exhaustion has. “Why Earth?” she asked, knowing that Kya-Kya would recognize the question as the last gasp of resistance.

“Earth, because in my field I’m a Songbird. I know that’s hard for you to admit, that someone can actually do something excellent that isn’t singing, but—”

“You can go. We will pay.”

The tone of voice was dismissal. The very abruptness and unconcern of it made her victory feel almost like a letdown. Kya-Kya waited for a few moments, then went to the door. Stopped. Turned around and asked, “When?”

“Tomorrow. Have the bursar see me.”

Esste turned back to the papers on her table. Kya-Kya took advantage of her inattention to look around the High Room. I chose you for this place, Kya-Kya thought, trying to feel superior. It didn’t work. It was as Hrrai had said—she made the obvious choice. Anyone who knew the Songhouse would have named Esste to the office.

The room was cold, but at least all the shutters were closed. There were drafts, but no wind. Apparently Esste did not intend to die soon. Kya-Kya looked at the window where she had almost fallen out. With the shutters closed it was just another window, or part of the wall. The room was not kilometers above the ground; it was as low as any other building; the Songhouse was just a building; she did not care whether she never saw it again, felt no lingering fondness for its stone, refused to dream of it, did not even demean herself by disparaging it to her friends at the university.

Her fingers brushed the stone walls as she left.

Esste looked up at the sound of Kya-Kya’s leaving. Finally gone. She picked up the paper that concerned her far more than the needs of a Deaf who was trying to avenge her failure.

Songmaster Esste:

Mikal has called me to Earth to serve in his palace guard. He has also instructed me to bring his Songbird back with me. It is my understanding that the child is nine. I have no choice but to obey. I have arranged my route, however, so that Tew is my last stop. You have twenty-two days from the date of this message. I regret the abruptness of this, but I will carry out my orders.

Riktors Ashen.

The letter had been transmitted that morning. Twenty-two days. And the worst of it is, Ansset is ready. Ready. Ready.

I am not ready.

Twenty-two days. She pushed a button under the table. “Send Ansset to me.”

14

Rruk had just entered Stalls and Chambers, right on schedule. She had no power in her voice, but she was a sweet singer, and pleased everyone who heard her. Still, she was afraid. Stalls and Chambers was a greater step than those between Groan and Bell or Bell and Breeze. Here she was one of the youngest, and in her chamber she was the youngest. Only one thing helped her forget her timidity—this was the seventh chamber. Ansset’s chamber.

“Will Ansset come?” Rruk asked a boy sitting near her.

“Not today.”

Rruk did not show her disappointment; she sang it.

“I know,” said the boy. “But it hardly matters. He never sang here anyway.”

Rruk had heard rumors of that, but hadn’t believed them. Not let Ansset sing? But it was true. And she murmured a song of the injustice of Ansset’s banning.

“Don’t I know it,” said the boy. “I once sang just such a song in chamber. My name’s Ller.”

“Rruk.”

“I’ve heard of you. You’re the one who first sang the love song to Ansset.”

It was a bond—they both had given something, even dared something for Ansset. Chamber began then, and their conversation ceased. Ller was part of a trio that day. He took the high part, and did a thin high drone that changed only rarely. Yet it was still the controlling voice in the trio, the center to which the other two voices always returned. By subordinating his own virtuosity, he had made the song unusually good. Rruk liked him even more, for his own sake now, not just for Ansset’s.

After chamber, without particularly deciding it, they went to Ansset’s stall. “He was called to the Songmaster in the High Room just before chamber. Perhaps he’ll be back now. Usually Esste comes to him as master, so it may be that she called him up there to lift the ban.”

“I hope so,” Rruk said.

They knocked at Ansset’s door. It opened, and Ansset stood there regarding them absently.

“Ansset,” Ller said, and then fell silent. Any other child they could have asked directly. But Ansset’s long isolation, his unchildlike expression, his apparent lack of interest—they were difficult obstacles to surmount.

When the silence had lasted far too long, Rruk blurted. “We heard you went to the High Room.”

“I did,” Ansset said.

“Is the ban lifted?”

Ansset again looked at them in silence.

“Oh,” said Rruk. “I’m sorry.” Her voice told how sorry.

It was then that Ller noticed that Ansset’s blankets were rolled together.

“Are you leaving?” Ller asked.

“Yes.”

“Where?” Ller insisted.

Ansset went to the blanket, picked it up, and came back to the door. “The High Room,” he said. Then he walked by them and headed down the corridor.

“To live there?” Ller asked.

Ansset did not answer.

15

“This was not a job for a seeker,” the seeker said.

“I know,” Esste answered, and she sang him an apology that pleaded the necessity of the work.

Mollified, the seeker made his report. “I spent the income from a decade of singers getting into the secret files of the child market. Doblay-me is a simple place to do business. If you have enough money and know whom to give it to, you can accomplish anything.”

“You found?”

“Ansset was kidnapped. His parents are very much alive, would pay almost anything to get him back. And when he was taken, he was old enough to know his parents. To know they didn’t want him to go. Stolen from them at a theater. The kidnapper I talked to is now a petty government official. Taxes or something. I had to hire some known killers in order to scare him into talking to me. Very unpleasant business. I haven’t been able to sing in weeks.”

“His parents?”

“Very rich. The mother a very loving woman. The father—his songs are more ambiguous. I’m not a great judge of adults, you know that. I haven’t needed to be. But I had the feeling there were guilts in him that he was afraid of. Perhaps he could have done more to get Ansset back. Or perhaps the guilts are for other things entirely. Completely unrelated. According to the law, now that you and I know this, it’s a capital offense not to give the boy back.”

Esste looked at him, sang a few notes, and both of them laughed. “I know,” the seeker said. “Once in the Songhouse, you have no parents, you have no family.”

“The parents don’t suspect?”

“To them their little boy is Byrwyn. I told them that the psychotic child in our hospital on Murrain had the wrong blood type to be their son.”

A knock on the door.

“Who?”

“Ansset,” came the answer.

“May I see him?” the seeker said. “You may see him. But don’t speak to him. And when you leave, bar the door from the other side. Tell the Blind that I’ll be taking my meals through the machines. No one is to come up. Messages through the computer.”

The seeker was puzzled. “Why the isolation?”

“I am preparing,” Esste said, “Mikal’s Songbird.”

Then she arose and went to the door and opened it. Ansset came in, holding his blanket roll unconcernedly. He looked at the seeker without curiosity. The seeker looked at him, too, but not so unemotionally. Two years of tracing Ansset’s past had given the boy unusual importance in the seeker’s eyes. But as the seeker watched, and saw the emptiness of Ansset’s face, he let himself show grief, and he sang his mourning to Esste, briefly. She had told him not to speak. But some things could not. Should not go unsaid.

The seeker left. The bar dropped into place on the other side of the door. Ansset and Esste were alone.

Ansset stood before Esste for a long time, waiting. But this time Esste had nothing to say. She simply looked at him, her face as blank as his, though because of age some expression was permanently inscribed there and she could not look as empty of personality as he. The wait seemed interminable to Esste. The boy’s patience was greater than most adults’. But it broke, eventually. Still silent, Ansset went to the stone bench beside one of the locked shutters and sat down.

First victory.

Esste was able, now, to go to the table and work. Papers came from the computer; she wrote by hand notes to herself; wrote by keys messages into the computer. As she worked Ansset sat silently on the bench until his body grew tired and cold. Then he got up, walked around. He did not try the door or the shutters. It was as if he already grasped the fact that this was going to be a test of wills, a trial of strength between his Control and Esste’s. The door and windows would be no escape. The only escape would be victory.

Outside it grew dark, and the light from the cracks in the shutters disappeared. There was only the light over the table, which almost no one ever saw in use—the illusion of primitiveness was maintained before everyone possible, and only the staff and the Songmasters knew that the High Room was not really so bare and simple as it seemed. The purpose of it was not really illusion, however. The Songmaster of the High Room was invariably someone who had grown up in the chilly stone halls and Common Rooms and Stalls and Chambers of the Songhouse. Sudden luxury would be no comfort; it would be a distraction. So the High Room seemed bare except when necessity required some modern convenience.

Ansset sat in the gloom in a comer of the High Room as Esste finally closed the table and laid out her own blankets on the floor. Her movement gave him permission to move. He spread out his own blankets in the far comer, wrapped himself in them, and was asleep before Esste.

The second day passed in complete silence, as did the third, Esste working most of the day at the computer, Ansset standing or walking or sitting as it pleased him, his Control never letting a sound pass his lips. They ate from the machine in silence, silently went to the toilet in a corner of the room, where their wastes were consumed by an incredibly expensive disturbor in the walls and floor.

Esste found it hard, however, to keep her mind on her work. She had never been so long without music in her life. Never been so long without singing. And in the last few years, she had never passed a day without Ansset’s voice. It had become a vice, she knew—for while Ansset was banned from singing to others in the Songhouse, his voice was always singing in his stall, and they had conversed for hours many times. Her memory of those conversations, however, maintained her resolution. An intellect far beyond his years, a great perception of what went on in people’s minds, but no hint of anything from his own heart. This must be done, she said. Only this can break his walls, she said to herself. And I must be strong enough to need him less than he needs me, in order to save him, she cried to herself silently.

Save him?

Only to send him to the capital of mankind, to the ruler of humanity. If he has not found a way to tap the deep wells of himself by then, Ansset will never escape. There his very closedness would be applauded, honored, adored. His career would be made, but when he came back to the Songhouse at the age of fifteen there would be nothing there. He would never be able to teach; only to sing. And he would be a Blind. That would kill him.

That would kill me.

And so Esste remained silent for three days, and on the fourth night she was wakened from her sleep by Ansset’s voice. He was not awake. But the voice had to come out. In his sleep he Was singing, meaningless, random ditties, half of them childish songs taught to new ones and Groans. But in his sleep his Control had broken, just a little. Esste noted this.

The fourth day began with complete silence again, as if the pattern could be repeated forever. But sometime during the day Ansset apparently reached a decision, and when the High Room was warmest in the afternoon he spoke.

“You must have a reason for your silence, but I don’t have a reason for mine except that you’re being silent. So if you were just trying to get me to stop being stubborn and talk, I’m talking.”

The voice was perfectly controlled, the nuances suggesting a pro forma surrender, but no real recognition of defeat. A slight victory, but only a slight one. Esste showed no notice of the fact that Ansset had spoken. She was grateful, however, not so, much because it was another step forward as because it meant she could hear Ansset’s voice again. Ansset speaking with perfect Control was only slightly closer to her objective than Ansset silent with perfect Control.

When she did not answer, Ansset fell silent again, occasionally exercised as before, said nothing for several hours. But at nightfall, when Esste laid out her blanket and Ansset laid out his, he began to sing. Not in his sleep, this time. The songs were deliberately chosen, gentle melodies that pleased Esste very much. They made her feel confident that everything would work out fine, that her worries were meaningless, that Ansset would be fine. After a while, they even made her feel that Ansset was already fine, and she had been exaggerating her fears because of her concern for him in the frightening placement he would be facing.

She startled. Her Control gave no outward sign, but inwardly she was furious with herself. Ansset was using his voice on her, using his gift. He had sensed her mood of worry and her wish for peace and was playing on it, trying to put her off her guard.

I’m out of my class, she realized. I’m a Groan trying to sing a duet with a Songbird. How can my silence compare to his singing as a weapon in this battle?

He sang that night for hours, and she lay awake resisting him by concentrating on the problems and concerns of the Songhouse. The pressure from Stivess to open the northwest section, which the Songhouse almost never used, to oil exploration. The complaints by Wood that pirates were using the desert islands in the southwest as bases from which to pillage shipping in the gulf. The question of where to invest the incredible amount the emperor would pay each year to have a Songbird. The damage that would be done when Mikal the Terrible actually received a Songbird and the rest of mankind, to whom the Songhouse had seemed like the one inviolable institution left in the galaxy, lost faith and supposed that for money, or under pressure, even the Songhouse had lowered its standards.

All these thoughts were enough to occupy days and weeks under normal circumstances. But Ansset’s songs played around the edges and while she was no longer trapped by them, she also could not completely escape them. Even after Ansset gave up and went to sleep she lay awake, dreading the next day. I was worried about how this would affect the boy, she thought ironically. It’s my Control that’s in danger, not his.

Ansset sang to her sporadically through the next day, and she found that, awake, she could resist him better than in the weariness of evening. Yet the resistance took effort, and when evening came she was even more tired than before, and the ordeal was even harder.

But her Control did not break, and while Ansset could sense emotions that her Control hid from others, he apparently did not realize how close he had come to success. On the sixth day he fell silent again, much to her relief. And he showed signs of the tension on him. He exercised more often. He looked at her more often. And he touched the door twice.

16

Is she insane? It occurred to Ansset more than once. He could conceive of no reason for her to have locked him up in absolute silence. Neither silence nor singing did any good. What did she want?

Does she hate me? That question had arisen often enough in the last few years. During his ban he had found the pressure almost unendurable. But he trusted her—whom else could he trust? It was terrible to know that everyone was wondering what he had done wrong, when he knew but could not tell them that he had done nothing wrong. And her mad ideas about his mind—often he could not understand what she was getting at, but sometimes he felt he was getting closer. She accused him of not singing from himself. And yet he knew that his singing was exhilaration, the one great joy of his life. To look at people and understand them and sing to them and change them; he almost recreated them, almost felt as if he could take them and make them over, make them better than they were. How could this not be coming from himself?

And now silence. Silence until his head ached. In all his life there had been no such silence, and he didn’t know what to make of it. Why did you become so close to me, if you only meant to cut it off? And yet she wasn’t cutting it off, was she; here he was in the High Room, spending every moment with her. No, she wasn’t just trying to hurt him. There was a purpose in this. Some insane purpose.

Somehow she has misunderstood me. It made Ansset sad that everyone so consistently failed to understand him. The children couldn’t be expected to; the masters and teachers hardly knew him; but Esste. Esste knew him as completely as anyone could. I have sung every song I have to her, and she has refused them all. I showed her that I could sing to a theater of strangers and change them, and she told me I had failed! She can’t admit that I can do any good.

Is she jealous? She was a Songbird herself. Can she see that I’m better than her, and does that make her want to hurt me? This thought appealed to him because it offered some rational explanation. It might be true, while insanity was clearly out of the question no matter how often he tried to persuade himself of it. Jealousy.

If she realized it, she wouldn’t persecute him anymore. They could be friends again, like that day on the mountain by the lake, when she taught him Control. He had not understood it before then. But the lake—that was clear, that had told him the reason for Control. It wasn’t just a matter of not crying, of not laughing, of holding still when told to, all the meaningless things that he struggled with and hated and resented as he studied in the Common Rooms. Control was not to tie him down, but to fill him up. And the very day of that lesson, he had relaxed, had allowed Control to become, not something outside himself that pressed him in, but something inside himself that kept him safe. I have never been happier. Life has never been easier, he thought at the time. It was as if the anger and fear that had constantly plagued him before had disappeared. I became a lake, he thought, and only when I sing does anything come out. Even then, the singing is easy, it comes lightly and naturally. Because of Control I can see sorrow and know its song. It doesn’t make me afraid as it did before—it gives me music. Death is music, and pain, and joy, and everything that people feel—it is all music. I let it all in and it fills me up and only music comes out.

What is she trying to do? She doesn’t know.

I have to help her. I have used my music to help strangers in Step, to awaken sleeping souls in Bog. But I have never used it to help Esste. She’s troubled and doesn’t know why, and thinks that it’s my fault. I will show her what it is she really fears, and then perhaps she will understand me.

When I sang before I tried to calm her fear. This time I will show it to her more clearly than she has ever seen it.

And with that decision made, Ansset slept on the eighth night of his stay in the High Room. He gave no outward sign, of course, of what had passed through his mind. His body had been as rigid as when he sang, as when he slept.

17

Ansset did not sit on the periphery of the room or exercise periodically as he had before. On the eighth day of the confinement he sat in the middle of the floor, directly before the desk, and looked at Esste as she worked. He is going to attack today, Esste immediately concluded, and braced herself inwardly. But she was not ready. There was no brace to cope with what Ansset did to her today.

His singing was sweet, but not reassuring. Instead the song kept forcing memories into her mind. He had found the melody of nostalgia. She struggled (outwardly placid) to keep working. But as she went over reports of lumbering operations in the White Forest she no longer felt like Esste, the aging Songmaster of the High Room. She felt like Esste, Polwee’s Songbird, and instead of stone walls she saw crystal out of the corners of her eyes.

Crystal of the palace Polwee had built for his family on the face of a snow-covered granite mountain, a palace that looked more like nature’s work than the mountain around it. All the world seemed artificial once she had seen Polwee’s home. But she remembered it better from the inside than out. The sun shining through a thousand prisms into every room, a hundred moons rising wherever she looked at night, floors that seemed invisible, rooms whose proportions were all wrong and yet completely perfect, and more than all the beauty of the place, the beauty of the people.

Polwee was the easiest placement anyone could remember. He had come to the Songhouse to apply for a Songbird or a singer only a few weeks before Esste was ready to be placed. He had talked to Songmaster Blunne and in the first minute she had said, “You may have a Songbird.” He had never asked the price, and when it came time to pay it never minded that it was half his wealth. “All my wealth would have been worth it,” he told her when she left to return to the Songhouse at the age of fifteen. Only good people had come, only kind people, and in Polwee’s palace there was always love and joy to sing about.

Love and joy and Greff, Polwee’s (I cannot remember this, said a place in Esste’s mind, and she tried to continue with her work, but now it was the High Room that was at the periphery of her vision and the reality was all crystal and light. She sat stiffly at the table, her Control keeping her from betraying any emotion, but utterly unable to work or pretend to work because Ansset’s song carried too far, too deeply into her.)

Greff was his father’s son. Concerned more for her happiness than his from the moment she arrived. He was ten and she was nine; and the last year the drug’s effects began to wane and Esste reached puberty only a few months ahead of schedule. It had no effect on her voice yet, and showed only slightly in her body. But Greff was growing an adolescent mustache, and he was even more tender than before, touched with shyness that made her feel an infinite fondness, and they had made love quite by accident as snow fell on the crystal one winter.

It was not forbidden, was not really even a failure of Control—she had sung throughout, and learned new melodies as she did. But she did not want to leave him. She realized that Greff was more important to her than anybody in the Songhouse. Who had ever loved her like this? Whom had she ever loved? She tried to be rational, to tell herself that she had been nearly seven years, almost half her life with Greff as her closest friend, that no matter how she felt about him she was a creature of the Songhouse and would not be happy living outside forever. She tried to be rational.

It made no difference. The Songmaster came to take her home, and she refused to come.

The Songmaster was patient. He was still in middle age; it would be years before he would be named Songmaster of the High Room, and Nniv had not learned the brusqueness that enabled him to bear later, heavier responsibilities. So instead of arguing, Nniv merely asked Polwee if he could stay for a while. Polwee was concerned. “I didn’t know anything about it,” he kept saying, but as Nniv later sang to Esste, “It wouldn’t have mattered if he knew, would it?” Of course it wouldn’t. Esste was in love with Greff from their first childish romps through the crystal the year that she arrived.

The longer Nniv stayed, the more patiently he waited, the more the memory of the Songhouse became important to her. She began to remember her teachers, her master, singing in chamber. She began to spend more time with Nniv. One day she sang a duet with him. The next day she came home.

(Ansset’s song did not relent. Esste had not remembered this day in years. And had never remembered it with such clarity. But she could not resist him, and she lived through it again.)

“I’m going, Greff.”

And Greff looked at her with surprise on his face, hurt in his voice as he spoke. “Why? I love you.”

What could she explain? That the children of the Songhouse needed other singers as much as they needed to sing? He’d never understand that. She tried to tell him anyway.

“Esste, Esste, I need you! Without your songs—”

That was another thing. Songs—she would always have to perform, forever if she stayed with Greff. She could not refuse to sing, but already, after only seven years, singing for people whose only songs were coarse approximations of what they thought and felt, or (worse yet) lies, she was weary of it.

“You don’t have to sing if you don’t want to!” Greff cried, desperation in his voice, tears on his face. “Esste, what has this Songmaster done to you? You were prepared to defy armies in order to stay with me, and suddenly today you don’t care about any of that, you’re ready to leave me without a second thought.”

She remembered his embrace, his kisses, his pleading, but even then her Control had worked, and he finally backed away, hurt beyond describing because her body had been cold to him. Patiently she explained the one reason he would understand. She told him about the drug that put off puberty for years, how the drug had no permanent effect beyond the one that counted—singers and Songbirds were sterile for life. “Why else do you think we bring children in from outside? It wouldn’t do for children to be born in the Songhouse. We’d be more concerned with being parents than with being singers. I can’t marry you. There’d be no children.”

But he insisted, demanded. He didn’t care about children, just cared about her, and she finally realized that love wasn’t just giving, it was also—(I don’t want to remember this! And Ansset’s song did not give up—) It was also possession, ownership, dependence, self-surrender. She turned and walked out of the room, went to Nniv, told him she was going with him back to the Songhouse. Greff stormed into the room, a bottle of pills in his hand, threatening to kill himself if she left. She had no answer for him, only wished that he had been able to take it with grace, only wished that people outside the Songhouse could also learn Control, for it smoothed pain as nothing else in life could. So she told him, “Greff, I’m going because Nniv and I sang a duet last night. You can never sing with me, Greff. So I can’t stay with you.”

She turned and left. Nniv afterward told her that Greff swallowed the poison. Of course he was saved—in a house full of servants suicide is difficult to accomplish and Greff had no real intention of dying, just of forcing Esste to stay with him.

It had taken all of Esste’s control, however, not to turn back, not to change her mind at the entrance of the starship and plead for a chance to stay with Greff. She had Control, however.

Control had saved her. And Ansset’s song insisted:

Leave me in Control. Do not break my Control.

It was night. She sat by the table, the electric light on overhead. Ansset was asleep in his corner of the room. She did not know how long ago he had gone to sleep, how long ago his song had ended, or how long she had sat stiffly by the table. Her arms hurt, her back ached, the tears that her Control had barely contained pressed behind her eyes and she knew that the victory today had been Ansset’s. There was no way he could know what parts of her past were most painful—but his singing could evoke those memories anyway, and she dreaded the morning. Dreaded the morning and the songs Ansset would sing, but she lay down anyway, slept instantly, dreamed nothing, and the night passed in a moment.

18

It was the fourth day that Ansset had tormented Esste. It was near dark outside, and the High Room was growing cold. He had stopped singing an hour ago, but he could not move. He sat in the middle of the floor and looked at Esste and was afraid.

She sat still, her eyes open, looking forward but seeing nothing. Her hands rested on the table in front of her. She had not moved from that position since Ansset began his song in the morning.

And now he was full of doubt. He did not understand what was happening to her. The first time he had been excited because he had actually changed her. While her Control had held and she still remained silent, she had stopped work, had lost her struggle to concentrate on the computer in the table. He had thought the end would come the next day. But the next day she had held on, and the next, and today he realized that she was not going to break. He knew that these were the songs that would make her afraid. But he had no idea what fears he had summoned up.

Each night he had gone to sleep with her frozen at the table: each morning he had awakened to find her asleep in her blankets. When she woke she said nothing, hardly looked at him, just got up, ate, went to the table and began work. Each day he had started to sing and, each time a little sooner, she had stopped working and taken her day-long pose of studied inattention.

What am I doing to her behind her face?

Ansset felt restless, felt that he had to move. He delayed (Control) and when he got up he got up slowly (Control) and did not walk back and forth but instead headed directly for a shutter and tried to open it and realized that the very attempt was a sign that his Control was slipping. At the thought he was instantly aware of the walls of rock inside him, the deep and placid lake that grew ever deeper within them. But something was stirring at the bottom of the lake.

He touched the cold stone wall between the windows and heard the whine of wind outside. Perhaps the first storm of fall was coming. Why had she brought him here? What was she trying to achieve?

What have I done to her?

He looked into the lake, looked deep and began to understand what was happening to him. After eleven days in the High Room he was beginning to be afraid. Things were out of his control. He could not leave. He could not force Esste to speak to him, or even to weep or show any sign that she felt anything at all. (Why is it so important that she show a sign of feeling?) And now he was feeling things within the walls of his Control that did not belong there. Fear stirred at the bottom of his calm. Fear, not just of what would happen to him in the High Room, but of what he might have done to Esste. He could not put it into words, but he realized that if something happened to her, something would happen to him. There was a connection. They were linked somehow, he was sure of it. And by raising her fears he had raised his own. They lurked. They waited. They were inside his walls and he did not know how he would be able to control them.

Speak to me, Esste, he said silently. Speak to me and be angry with me and demand that I change, abuse me or praise me or sing idiotic songs about the cities of Tew but stop this hiding from me!

She did not look alive or human, her face empty like that, her body motionless. Human beings moved, their faces expressed things.

I will not break Control.

“I will not break Control,” he sang softly. But in the moment of singing he knew it was not true, and the fear moved sluggishly within him.

19

It was her childish nightmare that held her. A roaring in her ears and a vast invisible globe that grew and grew and rolled toward her to crush her swallow her fill her empty her

And the globe reached her, roaring like a storm at sea. She was a little girl holding the blanket up tight to her neck, lying on her back, her eyes wide open seeing and not seeing the ceiling of the Common Room, seeing and not seeing the vast roar that had filled the vast hall. She opened her hands to press against the globe, but it was too heavy and she could not lift her hands against the weight. She closed her hands into fists, but the stuff of the globe could not be shut out so simply, and it squeezed in between her fingers and into her fist so that instead of shutting it out she was holding it in. If she opened her mouth it would enter and fill her. If she closed her eyes it would be able to change without her seeing. And so she lay there hour after hour until sleep overcame her or until she screamed and screamed.

But no one ever came, because she never made a sound.

The stone wall emerged from the shadows. It was dark night, and the light through the cracks in the shutters was gone. Ansset was no longer in the middle of the room. She could see him asleep sitting in the corner, his blanket wrapped around him. The wind whistled outside; it was cold. She reached stiff and painful fingers down to the computer and made the room warmer. She was inured to cold, but Ansset was still young. Freezing him to death would accomplish nothing.

She got up slowly, so that her body could adjust to movement. Her back protested. But the pains of her body were nothing. Today had been worse than ever, not a memory of the past at all, but the terrors of childhood returned with a vengeance. I cannot last another day of this.

She had said the same thing to herself yesterday; yet she had lasted.

How am I different from him, she wondered. I, too, am hiding behind my Control. I, too, am unreachable, express nothing to anyone but what I choose to express. Perhaps if I unbent, broke Control just a little, he too would come out and be human again.

But she knew she would not try the experiment. He would have to open first. If she moved first it would all have been wasted, and he would be stronger and she weaker the next time it was tried. If there was a next time. Twenty-two days. It was the twelfth night, tomorrow would be the twelfth day, they were more than halfway through the time and she had accomplished nothing of importance except that her own strength was flagging and she wondered if she could last another day.

She walked to her blanket roll, and spread the blankets on the floor and bent over to lie down. But in the bending she glanced at the corner where Ansset was sleeping, and she quickly looked up again and stared and realized that Ansset was not asleep as he had been every other time. His eyes were open. He was watching her.

Don’t sing! she cried out silently. Let me have peace!

He did not sing. He just watched. And then, in a controlled, quiet voice that expressed no emotion whatsoever he said, “Can we stop now?”

Can we stop now? If it hadn’t been for Control she would have laughed hysterically. He asks her for mercy? His voice was still ice; the battle was still going on; but he had asked for it to end, and somehow that made her feel that she had, after all, made some progress. No. She hadn’t made the progress. He had. It was a sign that maybe this would end.

She slept a little better that night.

In the morning, a message waited on the computer. Riktors Ashen had sent a regretful note that the emperor had cancelled several of his errands and he would be arriving on Tew a week ahead of schedule. The emperor had been most explicit. The Songhouse had promised him a Songbird. He needed the Songbird now. If the Songbird did not come with Riktors Ashen immediately, Mikal would know that the Songhouse did not intend to keep the promise made by Songmaster Nniv.

A week early. Three days from now.

She ate breakfast with Ansset, silently, and wondered if there was any hope of finishing this now.

Sitting for her day’s work at the table, Esste steeled herself for Ansset to sit in the middle of the floor and start to destroy her with a song. Today it did not happen. Today Ansset walked around aimlessly, stroking the rock, sitting down and standing up again almost immediately, trying the door, trying the shutters. He hummed as he did, but the humming expressed almost nothing, a hint of impatience, and under that an even fainter hint of fear, but he was not trying to manipulate her with his voice. At first she was relieved beyond expression, but soon, as she began to pursue the work that had gone undone for three days, she began to worry about Ansset again. Now that he was giving her a rest from fearing for herself, she could care about him.

The strain was beginning to show in his face. His eyes were not empty. They darted back and forth, unable to rest on one object for long. And he was biting his cheek occasionally. Control was breaking down. Why now? What had happened to him?

I have to watch him now, very carefully. I’m playing with fire, playing along the rim of his destruction, I must know the moment when I can speak to him. He must not be allowed to pass into despair.

Three days.

In the afternoon Ansset’s aimless humming turned into speech. At first Esste could hardly hear him and wondered if he was even talking to her. But soon the words became clearer and, she noticed, he was exactly filling the High Room with his voice and speaking no louder. The voice was still under Control: it expressed, but only what he wanted it to express.

“Please please please,” said the controlled careful meticulous voice, “please please please I’ve had enough can I please go or will you please say something to me I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish I don’t understand any of this but please I can’t stand it anymore please please please. . . .”

Ansset’s voice droned on and he didn’t look at Esste, looked instead at the walls and the windows and the floor and his own hand, which did not tremble when he looked at it but wavered ever so slightly when he did not. She had not seen him move a muscle when he sang in years. This movement was not voluntary, but it was movement, and the very involuntariness of it spoke of terrible things going on inside Ansset’s mind. She wanted to reach out and comfort him and stop the muscles from trembling. She did not, however. She stayed at the computer and worked as she listened to his voice drone on.

“I’m sorry I made you afraid I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry please can this be over I’m afraid of you I’m afraid of this room let me hear your voice Esste Esste Esste please. . . .”

His voice finally faded into silence again and he sat by the door, his face pressed into the heavy wood.

20

I have begged and she hasn’t answered. The whales are swimming deep inside me and she doesn’t help. I need help. All the monsters in the world are inside me instead of outside me I’ve been tricked and trapped and they are inside my walls not outside my walls inside with me and she won’t help me. When I stop thinking about a muscle it shakes. When I stop thinking about a fear it leaps at me. I’m drowning but the lake keeps getting deeper and deeper and deeper and I don’t know how to get out the walls go up forever and I can’t climb over and I can’t break through and she won’t talk to me.

Ansset pressed his face into the wood of the door until it hurt terribly, and the pain helped.

He remembered. He remembered singing. He could hear all the voices. He heard the other children in chamber. He heard the voices in his class of Breezes and his class of Bells and his class of Groans. Voices at meals. Voices in the toilet. The voices of the strangers in Step and Bog. Rruk’s voice as she helped him learn how things were done in the Songhouse. All the voices sang at once to him but there was only one voice that he could not recognize, that he could not hear clearly, a dim and distant voice that he did not understand.

But it was not a Songhouse voice. It was coarse and crude and the song was meaningless and empty. But it was not empty, it was full. It was not meaningless, for he knew that if he could once hear the song, really hear it through the din of the other voices that it would help him, that the song would mean something to him. And as for coarseness and crudeness, the song he tried to hear did not jar on him at all. It made him feel as comfortable as sleep, as comfortable as eating, as the satisfaction of all the miserable desires. He strained to hear, he pressed his face into the wood, but the voice would not come clear.

Not for hours, and he rubbed his face back and forth against the wood, and threw himself to the stone floor, so the pain would drive all the other voices out of his mind, would let him hear the one voice he searched for, because that voice would save him from the terror that swam every moment closer to the surface where he watched and waited helplessly.

21

The vigil lasted all night. Esste watched as Ansset drove the splinters of the door into his nose and brow and cheeks until blood flowed. She watched as he tried to grip and tear the stone until his nails broke. She watched as he slammed his face into the rock walls until he bled and she feared he would cause permanent damage. It seemed he would never sleep. And in between the self-mutilation he would, in a wooden, controlled voice, his body held as rigid as he could hold it for all the trembling, say, “Now please. Now please. Help me.” There was Control, but that was all. No music. His songs were gone.

Just for the moment, she told herself. Just for now. His songs, his good songs, will come back if I just wait for this to run its course, like a fever that has to break.

Morning came and Ansset was still awake. He had stopped thrashing, and Esste went to the machines for food. She set it in front of him, but he did not eat. She reached a piece of it to his mouth, but instead of taking the food he bit her, he set his teeth into her fingers with all his strength. The pain was excruciating, but Esste’s Control was not even tested by this—physical pain, at her age, was the least of her weaknesses. She waited patiently, saying nothing. Blood from her fingers drooled out of Ansset’s mouth for minutes as both silently looked at each other. And it was Ansset who made the first sound, a moan that sounded like the slow breaking of rock, a song that spoke only of agony and self-hatred. Slowly he released his bite on her fingers. Pain rushed up her arm.

Ansset’s eyes went blank. He did not see her.

Esste went to the machine and covered her fingers with salve. She was exhausted after a night of no sleep, and Ansset’s savage bite had disturbed her far more than the mere pain. I will stop. This has gone too far, she decided. Her hand shook, despite Control, despite the calm she tried to enforce on herself. I can’t do this anymore, she said silently.

But for twelve days she had been silent, and sound did not come easily to her throat. Came with such difficulty, in fact, that as she looked at Ansset’s blank face she could not make any sound come. Instead she lay down on her blanket, unused that night, and slept.

She awoke to the sound of wind howling through the High Room. It was cold, icy even under the blanket. It took only a few moments for her to realize what that meant. She leaped up from the floor. It was afternoon, but dark with wind and clouds. The clouds were so low that mist trailed into the High Room with every gust of wind, and the ground was invisible. Every shutter of every window was open, some of them banging against the stone walls outside.

He has jumped from the tower. The thought screamed in her mind, and she gasped aloud.

Her gasp was answered by a moan. She whirled and saw Ansset lying on the table, curled up with the thumb and little finger of his right hand in his mouth, the other fingers pressed into his forehead and eyes like an infant’s involuntary pose. The relief that swept over her forced her to lean on the table taking her breath in great gasps. Any illusion of Control was gone now. Ansset had won, forcing her to break before her task was completed.

The cold forced her to take action again. She went to the windows and closed them all, leaning out over the sills to catch the handles of the shutters and pull them closed. The mist was so dense that it seemed to swallow up her hand as she reached into it. But inside she was singing. Ansset had not jumped.

The windows closed, she returned to the table, and only now realized that Ansset was asleep. He trembled with cold and, probably, exhaustion, but he had not seen her panic, her relief, had not heard her gasp. Her first thought was gratitude, but she realized that it might have been good for him to see that fear for his safety could overcome even Esste’s iron reserve. It is as it is, she told herself, and looked in his left hand for the key to the shutters, found it, and went around arid locked them all, then replaced the key on the chain which had fallen to the floor after he took it from her neck in her sleep.

She went to the computer and turned up the heat in the High Room. Instantly the stones under her feet grew warm.

Then she took her blanket and Ansset’s and covered the boy where he lay on the table. He stirred slightly, moaned and whimpered, but did not awaken.

22

Ansset’s face was stiff when he awoke. He was not cold anymore. His head ached, and where the splinters had been driven into his face the stinging was a constant undercurrent. But he felt something cool touching his face, and wherever it touched the stinging went away. He opened his eyes just a little. Esste leaned over him dabbing salve on his face. For the moment Ansset forgot everything bad and carefully said to her, “I didn’t jump. They told me to jump and I didn’t.”

She said nothing. She said nothing at all, nothing at all, and her silence was a blow that knocked him back in on himself, and his struggle returned. The water was rushing up to meet him, a vast whirlpool sweeping higher and higher and Ansset was at the top and there was nowhere higher that he could go to escape it. He looked inside himself and there was no escape and as the water touched him, swept his feet out from under him, bore him in fast, dizzying circles around and around, he screamed. His scream was a voice that filled the High Room and echoed from the walls and shattered the stillness of the mist outside.

He was no longer in the High Room. He was being sucked down into the maelstrom. The water closed over his head. Spinning faster and faster he plunged deeper and deeper toward the mouths of the waiting terrors below. One after another they swallowed him up. He felt himself being swallowed, the massive peristalsis driving him into gullet after gullet, hot warm places where he could not breathe.

And he was walking into a room. Walking and walking but getting no farther into the room than he had been before. And all alone, no other sound, he heard the song he had been searching for. Heard the song and saw the singer, but could not hear and could not see, not really, because the singer had no face that he could recognize, and the song, no matter how carefully he listened, kept escaping the moment after he heard it. He could not hear the melody in his memory, only in the moment, and as he looked at an eye the other eye vanished, and when he looked for the mouth the eye he had seen before disappeared from sight.

He was no longer walking, though he had no memory of reaching the woman who lay on the bed. He reached out. He was touching her face. He was stroking her face so very gently, tracing the features, the eyes, the mouth, and the voice sang, “Bi-lo-bye. Bi-lo-bye,” but the moment he understood the words he lost them. Lost them, and the mist came and swallowed up the face. He clutched for it, held it, held it tight; she could not disappear from him in the mist which was all white invisible faces that swallowed her up. This time he held on tightly and he would not let go, nothing could pull him away.

He heard the song again, heard the song and it was exactly the same song and this time the words were:

I will never hurt you.

I will always help you.

If you are hungry

I’ll give you my food.

If you are frightened

I am your friend.

I love you now

And love does not end.

He knew where he was now. Somehow he had been pulled from the lake. He lay on the shore of the lake and he was dry and safe and the song he had been searching for had at last been found. He still gripped the face tightly, clinging to the hair, holding the face close over his own as he lay there, and he knew her at last, and cried for joy.

23

Ansset lay across Esste’s lap, his hands frantically gripping her hair, when at last his violent shaking stopped, and his jaw slackly opened, and his eyes at last focused and he saw her.

“Mother,” he cried, and there was no song but childhood in his voice. He called softly again, “Mother.”

Esste opened her mouth, and tears poured from her eyes, and flew as she blinked to Ansset’s cheeks, and she sang from the deepest part of her heart. “Ansset, my only son.”

He wept and clung to her, and she babbled meaningless words to him, sang her most soothing songs to him, and held him tightly. They lay on the blankets in the warm High Room as the storm raged outside. As she held his bruised and cut face into her shoulder she also wept; for two hidden places had been plumbed, and she did not know or care which had been the greater achievement. She had locked him into silence in the High Room in order to cure him; he had returned the favor, and she, too, was healed.

24

It was the afternoon of the fourteenth day. Sunlight streamed through the cracks on the western shutters. Ansset and Esste sat on the floor of the High Room singing to each other.

Ansset’s song was halting, though the melody was high and fine, and his words were all the agony of loss and loneliness as he grew up, but the agony had been transformed, was transformed even as he sang, by the harmony and countermelody of Esste’s wordless song which said not to fear, not to fear, not to fear. Ansset’s hands danced as he sang, played gently along Esste’s arms, face, and shoulders, kept capturing her hands and letting them go. His face was slight as he sang, the eyes were alive, and his body said as much as his voice did. For while his voice spoke of the memory of fear, his body spoke of the presence of love.

25

Riktors Ashen was not sure what to do. Mikal had been emphatic. The Songbird was to return with Riktors Ashen. And yet Riktors knew that he could not achieve anything by blustering or threatening. This was not a national council or a vain dictator on an unsophisticated planet where the emperor’s very name could inspire terror. This was the Songhouse, and it was older than the empire, older than many worlds, older than any government in the galaxy. It recognized no nationality, no authority, no purpose except its songs. Riktors could only wait, knowing that delay would infuriate Mikal, and knowing that haste would accomplish nothing in the Songhouse.

At least the Songhouse was taking him seriously enough that they left a full-fledged Songmaster with him, a man named Onn whose every word was reassurance, though in fact he promised nothing at all.

“We’re honored to have you here,” Onn said.

“You must be,” Riktors answered, amused. “This is the third time you’ve said so since my arrival.”

“Well, you know how it is,” Onn said with good cheer. “I meet so few outsiders that I hardly know what to say. You’d hardly enjoy hearing the gossip of the Songhouse, and that’s all I know to talk about.”

“You’d be surprised at how much interest I’d have in gossip.”

“Oh, no. We have singularly boring gossip,” Onn said, and then changed the subject to the weather, which had been alternately rainy and sunny for days. Riktors grew impatient. Weather mattered a great deal to the planet-bound. To Riktors Ashen weather of any kind was just one more reason to be in space.

The door opened, and Esste herself entered, accompanied by a boy. Blond and beautiful, and Riktors recognized him instantly as Ansset, Mikal’s Songbird, and almost said so. Then he hesitated. The boy looked different somehow. He looked closely. There were scratches and bruises on his face.

“What have you been doing to the boy?” asked Riktors, appalled at the thought that the child might have been beaten.

It was Ansset himself who answered, in tones that inspired absolute confidence. The boy could not lie, said his voice: “I fell on the woodpile. I knew better than to play there. I was lucky not to break a bone.”

Riktors relaxed, and then realized another, more important reason why the child looked different. He was smiling. His face was alert, his eyes looked warm and friendly. He held Esste’s hand.

“Are you ready to come with me?” Riktors asked him.

Ansset smiled and sighed, and both melted Riktor’s normal reserve. He liked the boy immediately. “I wish I could come,” Ansset said. “But I’m a Songbird, and that means that I must sing to the whole Songhouse before I go.” Ansset turned to Esste. “May I invite him to attend?”

Esste smiled, and that surprised Riktors more than the change in Ansset. He hadn’t thought the woman knew how to seem anything but stern.

“Will you come?” Ansset asked.

“Now?”

“Yes, if you like.” And Ansset and Esste turned and left. Riktors, unsure of himself, looked at Onn, who blandly returned his gaze. I was invited, Riktors decided, so I can follow them.

They led him to a large hall which was filled with hundreds and hundreds of children who sat on hard benches in absolute silence. Even their bare feet on the stone made little noise as the last of them filed into place. Scattered among them were many teenagers and adults, and on the stone platform at the front of the hall sat the oldest of them. They were all dressed alike in the drab robes that reached the floor, though none of the children seemed to have clothing that exactly fit. The impression was of poverty until he looked at their faces, which looked exalted.

Esste and Ansset led him to the rear of the hall, at the end of the center aisle. Riktors was surprised to have been given such a poor seat; he did not know, and no one at the Songhouse ever told him, that he was the first outsider in centuries to witness a ceremony in the great hall of the Songhouse.

He did not even know it was a ceremony. Ansset and Esste merely walked, hand in hand, to the front of the hall. Esste stepped onto the platform, then reached down a hand to bring Ansset up. Then the Songmaster retired to a chair on the platform while Ansset stood alone in front, at the head of the aisle, where Riktors could see him clearly.

And he sang.

His voice filled every part of the hall, but there was no resonance from the walls to distort the tone. He rarely sang words, and those he sang seemed meaningless to Riktors. Yet the emperor’s envoy was held spellbound. Ansset’s hands moved in the air, rising, falling, keeping time with odd rhythms in the music. His face also spoke with the song so that even Riktors, at a distance, could see that the song came from Ansset’s soul.

No one in the hall wept, not even the youngest Groans with the least Control. Control was not threatened by Ansset’s song, and it did not reflect the feelings of the audience. Indeed, the song divided the audience into every separate individual, for Ansset’s song was so private that no two people could hear it the same way. The song made Riktors think of plunging down between planets, though the child could not possibly have experienced a pilot’s thrill of vertigo. And when Ansset at last fell silent the song lingered in the air and Riktors knew he would never forget it. He had shed no tears, felt no terrible passions. Yet the song was one of the most powerful experiences of his life.

Mikal has waited a lifetime for this, Riktors thought.

All the children and adults in the hall arose, though he had seen no cue given. And all of them began to sing, one by one, then all together, until the sheer weight of sound made the air in the hall feel thick and aromatic with melody. They were saying good-bye to Ansset, who alone was silent, who stood without weeping on the platform.

They were still singing as Ansset stepped from the platform, and without looking to the left or the right walked down the aisle to where Riktors waited. Ansset held out his hand. Riktors took it.

“Take me with you,” Ansset said. “I’m ready to go.”

And Riktors’ hand trembled as he led Ansset from the hall, as he took him to the flesket waiting outside that would carry them both to Riktors’ starship. Riktors had seen wealth, had seen the opulence of Mikal’s palace at Susquehanna, had seen the thousand most beautiful things that people made and bought and sold. None of them was worth the beauty that walked beside him, that held his hand, that smiled at him as the Songhouse door closed behind them.

THE MOON GODDESS AND THE SON

Donald Kingsbury

Why will individuals go into space? For as many reasons as there are individuals!

1

Diana’s ambition to get a job on the moon really started the day she found out that her namesake was the moon goddess. She was six and she crawled out her bedroom window onto the porch roof so she could stare at the full moon in the sky where she belonged. Her father caught her. He was furious because she could have fallen off and hurt herself so he stripped her and tied her to the bed and beat her bleeding with his belt.

The pain blotted out this man, blotted out even the pain itself. She saw a wild boar and she cast an arrow into his heart from her perch safe behind the shield of the moon. But in time the trauma evaporated, leaving only the pain of being touched by a blood stained bed in Ohio that refused to stop torturing her body with its prodding fingers. When the moon rose so high that her round eyes could no longer see it through the window, she felt abandoned.

On her seventh birthday a high school boy showed her his portable tracking telescope. The cratered mountains of the moon stunned her with their beauty—her mountains, her craters, her plains, her rills and streamers. Meticulously she located each of the old Apollo landing sites. In a moment of astral travel she imagined herself in a crater full of trees with lots of nymphs to take care of.

He showed her Jupiter and the Pleiades. Another evening they followed the bright thread of the half built spaceport as it arrowed through the southern sky in those few minutes before it faded into the Earth’s shadow. When it was gone he explained that they could see the spaceport this far north only because it hadn’t yet been towed into equatorial orbit.

At eight Diana had a temper tantrum and stoically endured five beatings until her mother papered her wall with a photomontage of the moon’s surface. At nine she took up archery in school and worked at it until she became the regional champ for her age. When she was ten she ran away from home to visit a space museum but the police brought her back. After the police were gone her father beat her until even her mother cried. At twelve she ran away from home with her arm in a cast, broken by her father when he found her collection of newspaper stories about families who murdered their children in the night.

She fixed her hair like the March cover girl of Viva Magazine and she wore one of her mother’s bras stuffed with an extra pair of socks. People gave her rides. She told them she was going to visit her mother in California because her father was out of work.

The best ride she got was from a truck driver whom she targeted at a diesel station in Newton, Iowa, mainly because his rig carried a Washington license plate and she knew vaguely that spaceships were built in Washington. He wasn’t supposed to take passengers but she flaunted her spare socks and he broke down and got to liking her over the steak he bought her. She chattered to him about a historical novel called Diana’s Temple.

An endless ride later, through farmland and broken hills and over decaying interstate highways, they pulled into a rest stop near Elk Mountain to sleep in the cab for the night. Diana tried to seduce her driver because she thought girls were supposed to reward nice men. The cast on her arm got in the way and a sock fell out of her bra.

He laughed, holding her by the chin in a vice grip between thumb and fingers. “Diana was a virgin.”

“Yeah, I know.” She cringed out of the vice to a position back against the door of the cab.

He didn’t want to hurt her feelings. He reached out and pulled her shoulders into his large arm tenderly. “Your virginity is the most valuable thing you have right now. Hang onto it. Grow up a little bit and when you throw it away make sure he’s the nicest guy in the world.”

“How do you tell the nice guys from the mean ones?”

“Did you ever have any trouble with that?”

“My father always beat me. For nothing!”

“Then you know what the bad ones are like.”

“What are the good ones like?”

“Me,” he laughed.

For a year Diana stayed in a small town near Seattle where they assembled feeder spacecraft for the spaceport as well as cruise missiles for the military. The tiny nine-meter long automatic lighters rocketed to the spaceport from an equatorial base and flew back on stubby delta wings. Diana was excited at first. She did housework and cared for the children of one of the foremen whose wife was recovering from an auto accident. But this sleepy Earth town was just as far away from the moon as Ohio.

She stole some money and caught a bus for L. A. It was scary panhandling in Hollywood. She got picked up by a pimp she didn’t know was a pimp and had to crawl out a window in the middle of the night and sleep under a car like a cat. After three days alone she found a family of runaways and slept on the floor. They were all into stealing and hustling and one of them was into heroin but she found a job as a waitress from which she got fired because she didn’t have any papers.

Twilight was panhandling time. Afterwards she took her addict friend to a crowded basement dive so she could have company being depressed. The smoke coiled through the dim light, choking at life. She sat there crazying and suddenly darted toward the ladies’ room where she knew they had a little open window where she could breathe for a minute, alone.

A large hand clamped on her shoulder. “You got holes in your head, spending time with that buzzhead? He’ll take you for everything you’ve got.”

She whirled on the scruffy young man who had a 1950 hairdo. “What have I got to take? I haven’t even got a job.”

“Lots of jobs around.”

“I don’t want to be a whore, smartass.”

He smiled sardonically. “A waitress, then?”

“I got fired as a waitress because I don’t have any papers.”

“How about that!” He shook her hand. “I’m a forger.” He escorted her into the ladies’ room and, after locking the door, hung his head through the window. “What name you want to be known by?”

“I can change my name?”

“Yeah and you get a birth certificate and an L.A. high school record and a social security number. I figure if we stretched it a bit you could pass for eighteen.”

“What do you get out of it?” she asked cynically.

“A girl to ferret around records offices who doesn’t arouse suspicion. I need new faces all the time.” He laughed. “I’m square. My side lady would kill me if I didn’t give every thirteen year old an integrity deal.”

“Could I get a job on the moon with your papers?”

2

Charlie McDougall was an only child with thickly lashed eyes. He first learned to roll his eyes at his parents when he was thirteen—behind their backs. His whole memory of life was of two giants giving him orders that had to be executed on some strict schedule if he didn’t want to be driven crazy by shouting directed into his eardrum.

Mama wanted him to become the world’s greatest violinist or maybe a dancer who would wow them in Moscow. Papa wanted him to become the greatest space engineer who ever lived, the cutting edge of the Last Hope of Mankind.

During those crucial years when most babies discover the first spark of individuality by playing with the power of the word “no,” Charlie had been broken. He learned to obey. He hated the violin and he hated dancing and he hated space but he hated screaming parents even more. Obeying was the only peace he had.

Still while he became a fine violinist, his strings had a perpetual habit of snapping. He was invariably the best dancer in his class but he was always being thrown out because of his incurable habit of peeking into the girls’ dressing room.

For his father he devised even more diabolical tortures. Though he slaved dutifully over his physics and chemistry and math and model building, he refused to read science fiction. On his fifteenth birthday his father tried to seduce him with a luxury hardbound copy of Dune with a facsimile Frank Herbert signature.

“You’ll love it.”

“Hey Papa, that’s a great gift. This evening I have some spare time and maybe I’ll take a crack at it.” When his father went out for a beer, he rolled his eyes.

That evening the old man peeked into his room on tiptoes to see how the first chapter of Dune was going, just as Charlie knew he would. Charlie was engrossed in the eighth chapter of Robert’s Differential Equations setting up the ninth problem.

“Have you had a chance to look at Dune?”

“Tomorrow. I got myself hung up on the breaking mode of long cylinders and I don’t want to sleep on it.”

The coup had kept Charlie happy for weeks. Dune was still on his shelf, unopened.

It was only when he was seventeen that he discovered the perfect shelter from his parents, digital music. Electronic instruments frightened his mother. She had a Ph. D in musicology from Mills but couldn’t tell a fourier compact series from a quartet concert series; a resistor had something to do with the draft, and a chip was what an uncouth person carried on his shoulder. As for Charlie’s father, who polished off textbooks like most slow readers polished off light novels, engineered music was in the same category as purple smells or painted cooking.

Waves, repetitions, pulsations, rumblings, the rise of a violin taking off can all be described by a fourier series—am amalgamation of sine and cosine waves of different frequencies and amplitudes. A frequency is a number. An amplitude is a number. Charlie composed by choosing those numbers and deciding when they were to change. His computer executed the commands.

He created his own computer language for simulating instruments. It was a simple matter for him to write a subroutine for oboe or violin or harmonica. He had ten violins on file, four of them matching in sound the finest violins ever crafted, the other six of a haunting timbre that could never come from a material violin, wood lacking the proper resonant qualities. He doodled up new instruments in pensive moments and gave them frivolous names like the pooh and the eeyore and the kanga.

By using his world of numbers as an open sesame to the trance underground, he burrowed assiduously into this dark world his parents couldn’t understand. Once when he was twenty and deliriously celebrating the end of his junior year by smashing out in the popular Boston Trance Hall where the show was continuous and the waitresses sported silver pantsuits with cutout buttocks, all seven of his friends became dazzled by the nubility of the singer. She was wearing a golden necklace from which her dress flowed, cupric green, so slashed in a thousand ribbons that one both saw all and none of her body as she sang.

Charlie noted the ordinary voice—slightly brassy with a tendency to slurring—and rashly bet his friends she would date him. Gleefully they put $200 in the pot, impelling him to keep pace by taking her hand as she left the stage.

“You have a zorchy voice—a lot could be done with it.”

She smiled coolly and let him hold her fingers just long enough to appear unrude. It gave him time to press his card into that hand, a hand so cold his must have seemed tropical.

ELECTRONIC MADMAN

DIGITALIZED MUSIC

Her eyes widened slightly when she read it—DM was a controversial thing on the pop music scene; one loved or hated its sounds and argued endlessly about the awesome scope of its territory. DM projected mystery and resentment. Few musicians could handle its technical demands. But an ambitious woman with an ordinary voice would know what a DM magician could do for her.

She sat down and the cupric cloth rippled, sometimes revealing, sometimes hiding, always teasing. “What do you hear in my voice?”

“You’ll have to come to my place and listen. It’s beautiful.”

“It’s not. I don’t think my mouth is the right shape.”

“But you don’t hear what I hear.”

“Do you do real time or augmented?”

“Both. I can feed your mike right into the shoebox if that’s what you want.”

She took his palm and read it silently. Then she looked into his face with the eyes of a judge. “What sign are you?”

“Aquarius.”

Her face broke into a smile of relief. “Fantastic!” And she wouldn’t let his hand go. Charlie’s friends, conceding, shoved a money filled envelope into the other hand.

Betty worked with him. He showed her many versions of her voice. He washed her car. He rushed her clothes out for dry cleaning to give her extra sleep. When she had a new gig, he set up for her. He worked late into many nights decoding the structure of her voice until he was able to customize a shoebox that transformed her into a siren at the wave of a mike.

Charlie’s new life thrilled him. He spent all his time thinking about seducing Betty. Devious plans grew out of dreams and finally he convinced Betty to let him move into her place in what had once been the maid’s room back in the century when Irish labor was plentiful. He promised to cook and do the dishes and not molest her. His theory was that the way to a girl’s heart was through her stomach and after a month of being taken care of by a man who loved her, she would melt.

In a mailgram that gave him great pleasure to write he told his father that he was not returning to MIT. Within a week his father arrived in Boston from orbit and charmed Betty off to Mexico City for a vacation. She sent him a card from Xicotencatl wishing he was there. The card was forwarded to New Hampshire where his mother had taken him by the ear, screaming at him all the time, insisting that if he wasn’t going to continue his engineering he had to sign up for the Berlin Conservatory. In self-defense he reregistered at MIT, all the while plotting perfect murders.

It took him only two months to utterly crush his mother. He digitalized a secret recording of one of her screaming rages. Slowly he added harmonicas. He mushed the words until their content was lost against a pure emotion. Here he amplified the rage, there he added piteous undertones. Violins played at dramatic moments. Sobbing children filled the silences. He had the tape cut and sold the pressing to a company that pushed it up to thirty-second place on the hit parade.

Charlie figured it would take longer to crush his father. His father was tough. He would have to bide his time and strike at an unexpected moment with overwhelming force.

3

It was a nice name. Diana Grove. She could go anywhere and do anything with it. Mostly she went to Texas and Arizona because John the Forger’s main business was manufacturing new identities for Mexicans. When she became too well known he let her go and she became a waitress.

Rooming with older girls taught Diana how to imitate adult behavior. Her manners became flirtatious. She was a sassy summertime flower to the bees, little caring whether the men she attracted were young or old or handsome or married—but she never dated the same man twice. She had a perfect excuse whenever an admirer wanted a second date.

“But that’s the day I’m seeing Larry.”

“How about Saturday then?”

“I always go out with George on Saturday.”

When too many people wanted her, she changed jobs or roommates. Eventually she began to move up the coast, carefully picking only the most expensive and popular restaurants. Once in Coos Bay, Oregon, a drunk wacked her around and that so frightened her she flew to San Francisco the very next day.

Not having a job was unimportant. At the airport she bought a paper and answered a classified ad demanding an exceptionally attractive and experienced waitress to work at Namala in the Pacific. Diana was a long time space buff and knew very well that Namala was one of the equatorial stations that supplied the orbiting spaceport.

The secretary of Ling Enterprises smiled and Diana reciprocated. It helped her nervousness that the secretary was sitting down and she was standing. She could pretend that she was just earning a five-dollar tip.

The speaker beside the video camera spoke in a gentle voice. “Send her in. She’s expected.”

Diana instantly turned her smile on the camera. It was President Ling speaking. That was very suspicious. Presidents of restaurant chains did not interview waitresses. She felt faint and, what was worse, she felt fifteen years old.

When she peered around Mr. Ling’s door she found him to be Chinese and ancient. His office was Contemporary American except for the paintings—a battle between Earthmen and beastoid in a jungle under a large red sun, the other a desolate landscape somewhere in the galaxy near a star cluster. The fear went out of her.

“You’re another space cookie,” she said relieved, all her poise back.

“It’s a comfortable disease.”

“Do you remember when they landed on the moon?”

He laughed. “I’m so old I remember when they thought landing on the moon was impossible.”

“Do you own a restaurant on the moon?”

“No, but when they build one, I’ll be running it.”

She loved him already. She was his slave. She sat down on the couch and couldn’t take her eyes off his face, lined and old and frail and the most fascinating face she’d ever seen.

He moved closer to her, sitting on the desk top. “Are you wondering why a president is interviewing waitresses?”

“Yes,” she grinned. “I’m ready to run out the door screaming.”

“I have six space related restaurants and I take a personal interest in them. The frustrated astronaut in me.”

“What’s Namala like?”

“Hard work for you. Too many men.”

“I’m a good girl and surprisingly self-reliant.”

“Sometimes you’ll need advice. Madam Lilly, who runs my Namala franchise, has large skirts for hiding behind when it is necessary.”

“I never need help,” said Diana defiantly.

“An unwise consideration.”

They talked. He found out all he needed to know and she found out all she needed to know. He offered her the job. She accepted. There was nothing more to say but she didn’t want to leave just yet.

He watched her silence as she moved her fingers and played with a ring. “Ah, I’ve finally caught you when you’re not smiling.”

“I’m hungry and I want to invite you for lunch,” she said with frog’s legs in her throat.

He smiled a thousand wrinkles.

“Would your wife mind?” she then asked awkwardly.

“I’m a widower.”

“We could go to the Calchas. I’ve worked there. It’s beautiful and I miss their food.”

She made him talk about himself over too much wine. He was the rebel in his family. His father wanted him to take over the restaurant business and he wanted to be an engineer. He had edited a science fiction fanzine called Betelgeuse which went to fourteen issues but when he became engaged to his illustrator who was a Caucasian, his family disowned him. He didn’t do well enough in school to get a scholarship and ended up as a city bureaucrat, married, with three lovely mongrel children while he tried to write at night.

Finally his father died and his brothers expanded and took the family fortune into a close brush with disaster and he made a pact with his mother to run the family business. He was good at it. Later he made his breakthrough by discovering how to franchise variety in a world of Macdonald’s, Johnson’s, and Colonel’s.

Diana had fun. They ran up quite a bill at Mr. Ling’s insistance the thought he was paying) and she had the best fight of her life taking the bill away from him. To make up for it he bought her beautiful luggage. She sighed and told him she had nothing to put in it, so he bought her clothes. She sighed and told him she had no place to take them because she hadn’t rented a hotel room yet, so he gave her the key to his place.

She cooked Mr. Ling a gourmet dinner in his kitchen after making many phone calls to the office to find out what he liked and when he would be in. They spent the whole meal and three liquors discussing the history of Jerusalem. She discovered his wicked sense of humor. He convinced her that there had been a whole order of Chinese Knights who fought in the crusades.

“Don’t laugh so hard!” she complained. “You’re just lucky I didn’t bake a lemon meringue pie for supper or you’d get it right in your kisser!”

Ten o’clock was his bedtime. He excused himself gracefully and escorted her all the way to the guest room where he put an arm around her shoulder and thanked her for a lovely evening before he left her.

Diana peeked. She waited until the light went out under his door and then, dressed only in a candle flame, entered his room. “I’ve come to kiss you goodnight.” It was easy to pretend you were twenty years old when you were nude.

His smile in the candlelight was wistful. “Goddess Diana, I am much too old for such escapades.”

“That makes us even. I’m much too young for such escapades.” She blew out the candle and slipped under the sheets with him. “Don’t die of a heart attack just yet. I want my job on the moon.” She snuggled up beside him, deciding that she liked to sleep with men. It was the sleep of innocence.

The next day a great aircraft flew her over the ocean to the equator.

4

The rocket-supplied lunar base was an improbable cluster of forms on Mare Imbrium which had lately grown a spider web rectenna farm to receive microwaves from a small twenty-five megawatt solar power station that had been built in low Earth orbit and towed up to the Lagrange 1 position 58,000 km above the moon. Each new addition was part of a single-minded plan. The sole purpose of the base was to build an electromagnetic landing track so that access to the moon might be made cheap. This deep out in space, rockets fueled from Earth were not cheap.

When Byron McDougall took the assignment to construct the initial lunar base he was given one-fourth of the money originally allocated for that task. He was a military man from a military family. He thought like a soldier who could still fight when his supply lines had been cut. McDougall’s base had shafts without elevators. He used cast basalt instead of aluminum. Eighty percent of the parts by weight of all imported machines were made of lunar metals and glasses. All food was raised locally.

The lunar day was given over to energy intensive tasks such as metals production. The lunar night was given over to effort intensive tasks such as design work and machining.

From his tiny office Byron called Louise. “Sweetheart, do you have a bottle of champagne tucked away?” He knew she didn’t.

“Champagne? You’re mad. All I have is a liter of Ralph’s turnip rotgut.”

“Too bad. How can we celebrate on that? Any last minute hassles with the SPS?”

“No. We should have power exactly on time.”

“Good.”

“Your son has been trying to reach you. We’ll have the connection set up in fifteen minutes. Do you want to take it there or here?”

“I’m hopping right up to the control room.”

Byron switched off, smiling slyly. He took out a half bottle of champagne he had hidden, all he could afford to smuggle in by rocket, but enough to give them a taste of victory. It wasn’t really victory: getting the SPS power so they weren’t energy starved at night was just another milestone, but one certainly worth celebrating.

Maybe there never would be a final victory. Byron sometimes despaired. Maybe in two years this effort might be a ghost town in spite of all the billions that had been invested in it. Risk funding was so damned erratic. Support waxed and waned in Congress. It had been waning now for years, even though the pay-off was a certainty.

He slipped out of his office, soared up the shaft, caught himself, and made his slow leap into the control room with the bottle high in his hand. “Who’s got strong thumbs?”

“How did you get that!” Louise’s nature lent itself to exclamations. “False bottomed suitcase.”

One of the men turned to Byron from the console display with a smile. “The SPS is powered and checking through beautifully. We should get the first beam down soon.”

“Is your son as handsome as you?” asked Louise dreamily.

“Why should you care?”

“Braithwaite was telling me he’s coming up here to work on the track as soon as he graduates from MIT.”

“No, I’m much better looking than my son. You should try older men once in awhile.”

“Not a chance. You see through all of my tricks. I might get away with batting my eyes at your son. He’s six years younger than lam.”

“Actually you might have a chance. When he gets here I’ll set you up. He chases older women—but I’ve never seen him chase one as bright as you. I once took a girl friend of his off to Mexico City. She was a great lady, but I was bored to death with her chatter.”

“Byron! You stole your son’s girl friend? How could you be so cruel? And I always thought you were such a nice man!”

“I did him a favor. She was using him,” he said bitterly.

“He probably needed her!”

That stung Byron’s anger. “Like hell he needed her. She didn’t have enough sense to send him back to school when he quit to take care of her. For that I could have killed the bitch. I shipped her off to Paris with enough bread to keep her amused.” Louise was grinning. “What was your wife saying about all this?”

“She divorced me.”

“Byron!”

He laughed. “Something else to celebrate.”

The phone rang. Louise took it and chatted with the operator. “Byron. It’s your son.”

“Hi Papa.”

“Charlie!”

Two second pause.

“I’m calling you up to congratulate you. I hear you’re not going to need candles at night anymore. Hey, pretty soon you’ll have hot running water in the trenches.”

“It’s pretty good. We’ll be powered except for six hours once a month at eclipse.”

Two second pause.

“I just got your comments on my last batch of homework. You’re two days faster than my profs. I’m glad I’m getting clever enough with my mistakes so even you can’t see them.”

“While you’re on the line I want you to talk with Braithwaite. You’ll be working with him on the lunar track. He’s anxious to get you after all he’s heard about you.”

Byron motioned frantically for Braithwaite to come over while his voice travelled to Earth and his son’s came back.

“You still want me to get involved in that thing, eh?”

“You bet. When we get it built this place is going to start to pay for itself. She’ll mushroom. We’ve been tooling up for the track and now that we have the power, we’re ready to roll.”

The lunar track was an electromagnetic cushion to take fifteen-ton ships in for a horizontal landing at lunar circular velocity. Or shoot them off.

“Say Papa, I’m calling to tell you not to bother to come back to Earth for my graduation.”

“But of course I’m coming. I need the vacation.”

Two second pause.

“Yeah, but I just quit school.”

“You’re at the top of your class!” Two second pause.

“I don’t want your job. I just want to play around and listen to the birds sing. Why put myself in the position where I need a vacation when I can have one all the time?”

Byron thought frantically. “It’s the chance of your lifetime! It will make your career! From this job you can go anywhere!”

Two second pause. There was no real way to argue over this distance. He had caught a barracuda and the line was too light.

“I never liked engineering. Good luck in your log cabin. I’m hanging up, now.”

The line went dead. Byron waited for two seconds, stunned, then he smashed his bottle against the bulkhead wall. Gracefully the champagne foamed as it arced in a slow motion spatter.

“She’s ready,” said the operations man, as calmly as if he had witnessed a christening. “There she goes. The grid is powered.”

Louise was rushing over to Byron. “It’s all right.”

Byron was frozen, his hand outstretched where it had grasped sudden defeat from victory. “No,” he said in pain.

“Are you going back to Earth to talk to him?”

“No.” Byron paused for two thoughtful seconds, his hand slowly sinking. “I had to push him and push him and push him, the little bastard. He did so well, I couldn’t resist. If I didn’t push him, he didn’t move. So I pushed him. God, how I wanted him here under my thumb where I could make a man out of him.” He shrugged bitterly. “It’s no use. If you have to push a man, he’s not going to move anywhere.”

“He’ll settle out.”

“Yeah, he’ll settle out. He’ll settle out as a third rate musician.”

5

Namala was the tropical sea, blue water and a sometimes billowy clouded sky and green islands that, to Diana’s airborne eyes, seemed to sleep in the vast moat of the Pacific like a drowsy crocodile. She arrived at sunset while the water was deepening to purple. Never in her life had she been so exhilarated. She was here—part of a base that was shipping goods to the moon to make a home for her that would be there when she found a way to go.

While she waited on the airfield terrace for Madam Lilly, the drowsy crocodile woke. A barrage of delta winged lighters began to lift in roaring flame from the launch area. Then Diana saw to the west the silver thread of the spaceport rising majestically out of the ocean. At first it was only a small thread, a wavering glimmer. On the horizon the spaceport’s 150-kilometer length was foreshortened to hardly more than a degree of sky, but, within minutes, as it rose to the thunder of the lighter launches, it grew to stretch its gossamer strand over almost a sixth of the sky—before vanishing into the shadow of the Earth, leaving only stars. She remembered a spider riding a filament of web over the cornfields of Ohio.

Soon another fleet of lighters, electromagnetically ejected from the spaceport as it passed overhead, began a screaming drop out of the blackness, swooping into the floodlamps of the lagoon to be received with the efficiency of a squadron returning to the deck of its aircraft carrier. Some of the lighters were laden with goods manufactured in the factory pods that lined the spaceport’s length like factories had once sprung up along a railway spur line. Some of the lighters came down empty.

The ground crews ran a standard maintenance check on each vehicle, inserting a new 500 kilogram payload module, pumping kerosene and oxygen into the tanks, recooling the superconducting coils that would electromagnetically accelerate the lighter once it had been swallowed by the spaceport’s electromagnetic intestine on its next spaceward trip. Finally the fresh readied lighter was rolled to the launch site and pointed at the sky on its own gantry, there to await the return of the spaceport. Every ninety minutes, day and night, this cycle repeated at all of the equatorial stations.

Madam Lilly was standing behind Diana, unwilling to intrude on the girl’s rapture. She turned out to be a hard taskmaster. Her restaurant carried the Ling symbol but like all Ling restaurants it supported its own name, the Kaleidoscope, which meant that it was constantly changing its atmosphere. Madam Lilly was a theater person. She could do miracles with a few props and backdrops and screens, but her main focus was on the girls. She costumed them perfectly and taught them gesture and emotion and expression and dialog.

When Diana arrived they were doing World War II. There was a Rosey the Riveteer in slacks and a Sultry Pinup in black negligee. Diana served the veranda in shorts with a tray over her head as a Hep Carhop. Sometimes she chewed gum and she always said “swell” to the customers. The music was “Deep in the heart of Texas . . .” or “Kiss me once and kiss me twice and kiss me once again, it’s been a long long time . . .”

Namala was a paradise for a girl scared of men. The ratio of single men to women was four to one and she had so many dates that she could easily play one against the other for safety. If that failed, Diana pleaded work. She had to rehearse the movements of a Burmese dancer, or walk like a Persian lady, or catch the subtle way a geisha presented a plate of raw fish. You could find her laughing with her arms around two men, or alone on the beach in the moonlight watching the fireworks supply the spaceport.

The beach could be fun. During the Kaleidoscope’s twenties’ stint Madam Lilly strictly forbade her girls to wear their monokinis and instead had them splashing about in the latest daring flapper bathing suit that exposed the knees. It caused a riot and was very good for business.

Time and the smallness of the Namala community was her enemy. She met a boy named Jack in her martial arts class. He always spoke to her; she consistently ignored him. Their Japanese instructor repeated that the greatest perfection was to defeat an opponent with the minimum of force. Diana was having none of that. She was there to learn how to demolish men with the thrust of her heel or the back of her hand. She believed in a safety factor of ten. Break their skulls and then ask questions.

But Jack survived. Smitten, he arranged a surprise birthday party. There were twenty-one candles on the cake even though she was only turning sixteen. She had a fabulous time hugging everyone for their gifts and singing and fooling around. She successfully avoided Jack for three hours knowing how dangerous a man in love can be.

Her fatal mistake was to need a Kleenex. Jack kept some in his study which had remained off limits to the party because of the delicate model of the lunar base he kept there. She caught a glimpse of its detail and fell heels over head. Long after the revelry had died she was still in the study, her arms wrapped around Jack kissing his nose and asking him questions about the lunar electromagnetic landing track.

The affair lasted two weeks, a miracle of involvement for Diana. She went everywhere with him. She haunted the launch site when he was at work. He spent all his money at the Kaleidoscope. They went surfing together and kissed at every opportunity. He hinted that he wanted to sleep with her. She hinted that she wanted to wait but to herself decided that he was the nicest guy in the world and she was going to throw her virginity away on him and live happily ever after.

In time they found themselves alone. Unhurriedly, gently he began to undress her. Diana only noticed that he was between her and the door. Since she had been a small girl she had learned to keep herself always between her father and a door. For awhile she tried to suppress her silly need, but the anxiety didn’t go away—it became worse. It became imperative. Smiling at her insanity she took Jack in her arms hoping to roll him away from the door, toward the wall, without having to say anything. He chose that moment to be assertive.

Suddenly panicked, Diana threw him off the bed. When he looked up in anger, still commanding the doorway, she was so terrified that she struck him with a reflex karate kick to the head, and ran, not remembering that she ran. The next day he apologized when he found her. She turned away without speaking.

He flew in flowers from the States. He sent her letters. He papered love declarations on the corridor walls of her apartment. He slept on her steps. His intensity frightened her. She stayed awake with images of him murdering her. When he came to the Kaleidoscope, the other girls waited on him. Madam Lilly soothed her and told her that it was normal for men to go crazy, that it was nothing to worry about, but Diana worried. Jack persisted. He even sent one of the female mechanics he worked with to talk to her. Diana became so upset that she wrote Mr. Ling a mailgram pleading for a transfer.

The reply bounced back via satellite and was printed up immediately. “Spend a week with me. Ling.”

6

At the emergency meeting in the main control room of the lunar base Zimmerman told a joke about a congressman that ended with the punch line: “I got no luck at all, nohow. Jist as I was gettin’ my ass trained to work without eatin’, she has to up and die on me!”

It wasn’t a funny joke when you were the ass. They poked at the budget cut and they went over their own expenses from five different angles. No sane way of handling the cut emerged.

During the next shift out on the lunar plain, Byron chewed over his anger in one of the construction trucks along the half built track. His mind kept wandering off to Earth, that goddess of inconsistency.

One year you had Congress convinced that what you were doing was in the economic self-interest of the United States. You’d ask them if they were sure because you wanted them to be sure before you went ahead. Yes, they were sure. They backed you to the hilt. They made laws. But the next year they were convinced of something else, riding some new fad.

Back at the base Byron took dinner in his room. He cut off the intercom and tended his climbing vines, still seeking a solution to this latest sudden change in the rules. Adam Smith was wrong; men were not motivated by self-interest—they were too myoptic to perceive self-interest farther than an inch away. A man would grab for that cigaret because the pleasure was immediate; the surgeon’s knife cutting out his cancerous lung lay an unreal fifteen years in the future.

Byron’s eyes blurred and for a moment he beheld a religious vision. A luminous hand was reaching out of the stars and that hand was a mosaic of little men held together by little hands in the pockets of the men above. Each little man was complaining about somebody else’s greed. The conquest of space was not, at the moment, a gloriously cooperative venture. It was a war of pickpockets. But war gave him an edge. He smiled. Byron was an old fighter pilot.

His fingers switched off the lights so that he was in total darkness, the bed easy under his body. What did a soldier do when he was cornered? He remembered one of the favorite maxims of his father. “There is no such thing as losing,” said that very stern man. It was an absurd maxim, parochially American, but one his father could imbue with a peculiar vitality.

As a ten year old Byron had been no fool. “That’s what Hitler said at Stalingrad,” he argued hotly.

“Ah, but Hitler confused winning with being on the offensive. You and I would have retreated and won.”

“We retreated all over the place in Vietnam and lost!”

“Son, recall that you and I were in Germany during that disgraceful affair. Real soldiers aren’t so clumsy as to defend something by destroying it.”

“What’s a real soldier?”

“An ordinary soldier fights well when he is grandly equipped. A real soldier can still fight after his supply lines have been cut. A real soldier doesn’t even need any help from Congress!”

Once on a 300-kilometer hike with his father he had crumpled, refusing to go farther. The pain was overwhelming.

“A man inured to hell cannot lose.”

“He can die,” Byron remembered himself whining.

His son-of-a-bitch father had then lifted him up by the hair. “No. You forget. Death comes first. Then hell. Get moving. McDougalls are tough enough to walk out of hell. You’re that tough. We make camp in two hours.”

Byron walked out of his father’s hell into an Air Force recruiting office on his eighteenth birthday. The Air Force groomed him, disciplined him, toughened him, and then sent him to Saudi Arabia to train Bedouins to fly the F-15. It was hell. He found himself drawing upon his father’s wisdom about coping with hells because it was all he had. He used that empty time in the desert like a good commander might use a lull in the fighting—to build up his striking power. He sweated out an engineering education by correspondence course.

In those days few Americans cared about space, not even Byron. NASA’s program had collapsed to a dismal four shuttle fleet with no solid funding in sight. Russian space ventures began to show signs of life again and Congress frantically authorized the building of the spaceport, giving Rockwell a contract for 70 modified space shuttles. Byron found himself flying one of them above the Earth, above a vision that shattered his isolation.

He resigned from the Air Force and transferred easily into a spaceport construction crew, engineering with love where no men had built before, 275 kilometers above the silly wars in Africa and Afghanastan and Argentina. That was a boom time. Today it was bust.

Yes, it is like war, he thought there in the dark. This was a battle to take the high ground. You won some and you lost some. The battle up the slope always cost more than you wanted to pay. Sometimes the home front got tired of the war. Still you kept on fighting your way higher in the hope that once you reached the peak you could dig in and hold it cheaply.

The first low orbital spaceport had to be built on the money of incredibly expensive orbital rockets, but once in place the 150 kilometer long, double barreled spaceport could swallow, and electromagnetically accelerate cheap suborbital rocket freighters and spew the unloaded freighters back down again to maintain momentum equilibrium. But that wasn’t the end of the battle. That was only a ridge, a defense line, a trench.

The 275 kilometers wasn’t high enough. As long as more mass was rising than falling, momentum balancing of the spaceport required a net energy input into the spaceport’s mass drivers. That assumed an expensive auxiliary orbiting power plant which tended to limit spaceport capacity. And so the astronautical strategists began to covet the really high ground, the moon. If lunar mass could be delivered to Earth through the spaceport, momentum balancing of the spaceport would cease to depend upon auxiliary power. Capacity would go way up and costs down. If more mass was going down than coming up, the spaceport would generate a net surplus of power. A kilogram of moon delivered to the Earth contains eight times as much energy as a kilogram of the most powerful chemical rocket propellant.

The dust at the bottom of a minor lunar crater holds more energy reserves than in the whole of the Arabian peninsula. The potential energy of the moon is enough to power the wildest space program for millions of years. Damn the cost! Capture the high ground! Economics demanded it!

And so the war went on. Byron McDougall was chief field engineer when the second spaceport was built parallel to the first. It was designed to accelerate vehicles to high orbit beyond the Van Allen belts and to receive the vehicles back from high orbit. He did the job in three years.

By then congressional support was disintegrating. The Russian tortoise had fallen behind again. Wars are not fought on the battlefield alone. They are backed up by a whole support structure. And a loot hungry populace is impatient with long sieges.

His father had something to say about long wars. “When the enemy’s line is solid, endure, survive, and observe. Do not expect a break to appear at an enemy strong point. The breaks appear where no one expects trouble. When they appear victory goes to the swiftest. A place which has no strategic importance may achieve importance simply because it is not being defended.”

7

Every civilization contains eddies of its past, sometimes within walking distance of its major centers. An eddy of the nineteenth century lay tucked away between two mountains of the California Coast Range, below the grasslands where the topography traps enough ocean fog to water a redwood stand. A Chinese family has long owned a log cabin there beside a dammed stream. There is no electricity. The road is dirt. Legend has it that every time a land developer comes this way, the wood nymphs call up a fog from the sea to sift through the redwood forest until it becomes invisible.

When Diana was with her Chinese friend she was all woman. At night she lay cozy with him under heavy blanket, by day she cooked over wood for her sage—flapjacks with sweet fried tomato syrup, and eggs and beans and bacon, even bread from flour and yeast. She kissed him and swam with him behind the dam and massaged him and flattered him.

But when she was by herself she reverted to girl. Deep in the forest she built a shrine out of stone to the goddess of moon and glade so that Diana might properly be worshipped. She tracked animals but they got away. She practiced archery for hours. Once she saw a deer and they both stood frozen, staring at each other in awe in that cathedral of trees.

On their last day she splashed in the cold pool behind the dam and toweled herself sassily in front of her boss because she knew he liked to look at her body even if he couldn’t do anything with it. A wondrous evening light sneaked through the redwood needles.

“I have a job for you,” he said, lighting the coals for a barbecue.

“You just sit down,” she smiled. “I’ll take care of everything. What do you want me to cook?”

“I meant a job opening. One of my places needs a new girl.”

“Are you ever nice to me. Where?”

“You might not want it. It’s a costume place. It involves playing up to some crazy men.”

“What other kind is there?”

“Put this on,” he said, giving her a shining package.

She held it out. “Brass bras!” she hooted. “Mr. Ling, I didn’t know you ran a skin dive.”

“Try it on.”

Modestly she held it in front of herself. “I’ll show through.”

“You’ll look beautiful, if slightly kinky.”

So she stepped into what there was of it. Her hair spilled out of the helmet, a simple brass band around her forehead that supported oval head-pieces which might or might not have been earphones. Her breasts spilled out of their immodest cups and her hips spilled out of their hardly adequate metallic banding. “Where do you get your outrageous ideas?”

He took her by the hand into the cabin and pulled his old copies of Planet Stories from a shelf. “Treat them like gold. They are from the forties and early fifties and fragile.” Diana shrieked at the cover of an issue he handed her. “That’s me! Brass bras and all! And if that monster goes with the job, I’m quitting yesterday! Where is this restaurant?”

“On the spaceport.”

Her heart jumped. “How high is that thing?”

“One hundred sixty-five miles.”

“In kilometers! I didn’t go to school in the dark ages like you.”

“Two hundred seventy-five.”

“And how high is the moon?”

“Too high for the restaurant business at the moment. They have to make do with a cafeteria.”

“Damn,” she said. “Don’t forget me when you get your first lunar franchise. I’m going to send you vitamin pills every week. I want to make sure that you’ll live that long.”

“You haven’t said yes to the spaceport yet.”

She squeezed his hand. “When have I ever said no to you? I’m so thrilled I’m speechless. What’s the name of your restaurant?”

“Planet Stories.”

8

For sixty kilometers the raised track swept across the surface of the Imbrian plain. Since the lunar horizon was only three kilometers away, the track stabbed to the edge of the universe like God’s knife separating the light from the darkness.

If they were allowed to finish it, within four months graceful ships would be skimming in tangentially at orbital velocity, to be picked up by a travelling platform equipped with superconducting coils, and braked on the maglev track. Right now Byron’s staff was installing auxiliary systems, a series of flywheels near the track to soak up the energy of a landing, or feed out energy in the case of a takeoff. A fifteen-ton ship moving at 1680 m/sec and decelerating at two Earth gravities generates 500 megawatts of electricity which has to go somewhere.

The flywheels were housed in huts which could be pressurized during construction and maintenance and evacuated during operation. They rotated on magnetic bearings in a vacuum. Their basic frame was built on Earth but the bulk mass for the wheel was made of lunar laminates. It was those laminates that were giving trouble.

Byron was with one of the flywheel crews when he got a call from the main base. “McDougall. Braithwaite here. Louise hasn’t been able to find you. She has an urgent call from Earth.”

“Goddamn that phone! I’ve got enough to do seeing if you and Anne are on schedule and under budget without having to listen to every gripe from Earth.”

“Louise said it was a panicky message from Seattle. You’re going to be recalled.”

“I just got back! Oh for Christ’s sake. I suppose they aren’t satisfied with the deal I made in Washington. I know damn well it was a stopgap, but it was the best I could do. It has got to do for the next four months.”

“I think the call was about the crisis,” said Braithwaite.

“Which crisis? An old one or a new one?”

“You vac-head. The revolution.”

“What revolution?”

“In Saudi Arabia.”

“Yeah, yeah, Saudi Arabia is going to revolt when hell freezes over. I know those sand eaters. I know Abdul Zamani, the defense minister. I taught him how to fly the F-15.”

“Abdul Zamani is dead. The last I heard the refinery complex at Dhahran was in flames. And God alone knows if the new leaders will continue to sell us oil. We don’t yet know which freak Marxist heresy they belong to. Old Poker Face raced in from Camp David and seems to be trying to gather support to send in the marines—but hell, it’s already way too late. The Royalists who were yelling for help are already dead.”

“You’re kidding me?”

“You didn’t scan the news this morning? We saw rows of Royal Bodies hanging headless by their feet from the lampposts in Riyadh. The King was murdered three hours ago.”

“My God! And you didn’t tell me!”

“I automatically assume you know everything.”

“I’m coming in. Sweet Jesus!” Back in the huts of the main base Byron replayed the late news on his console screen. It had been a stunning coup. The battle was over before the Pentagon had even received orders to organize an airlift. And the CIA had heard the news via CBS. Modern Arab coups evidently weren’t the clumsy affairs of yesterday.

Swat, just like that.

He felt disoriented, remembering the tough men he had trained. Those Saudi fighter pilots had been Royalist to the core. He couldn’t imagine a coup succeeding without them and he couldn’t imagine them siding with the Palestinians and the Pakistanis and the other immigrants who chafed under Royal rule. But he didn’t let his disorientation stop him from sensing that here was an extraordinary battlefield situation to be exploited immediately.

Zimmerman came into his office with a worried look. “That’s bad news. You heard the news?”

“Yeah. I still don’t believe it.”

“Look, no American should try already to understand an Arab intrigue.”

“You sound upset.”

“The House of Saud supported moderate terrorists. Me, I’m thinking the new government will maybe support extreme terrorists.”

“I have a simple philosophy about terrorists—shaved ones and unshaved ones,” said Byron. “Give any one of them a buck to do in your blood enemies, and they’ll use it to buy a gun to do you in for the rest of your money. Bank rolling hatred is a risky line of work.”

“You think the terrorists are behind the coup?”

“Zimmerman, I haven’t got a clue. Money is power and power is a double-edged sword, that’s all I know. There is no denying that the Royalists have been feeding murderers. Maybe that money was used to kill Jews, maybe it turned into graft, maybe it flowed backwards to water the plots in Jidda. Who will ever know? Whatever the basis for the coup, somebody just lost a queen in a big chess game. The USA is up the creek. And we on the moon have been dealt an ace.” Byron glanced at his watch. “Hungry?”

“It’s cucumber salad today,” said Zimmerman disconsolately.

“I’m going to have to crack that whip to get that landing track finished so we can ship in some beef.”

“With whose money?”

“You think money will be a problem after today?”

“I see a depression,” Zimmerman said gloomily.

Byron was grinning as they drifted off toward the cafeteria. “I see gas rationing in the States, and I’m dying laughing. I’m seeing the pipes bursting in the middle of winter and I’m rolling in the aisles. I’m seeing the Russians trading weapons for Saudi oil and I’m grinning from ear to ear.”

“That bad you see it?”

“I used to like Americans,” said Byron with amused savagery. “I’m an American. It used to feel great to go to them and say, ‘Here’s a solution to a problem that hasn’t happened yet.’ So how do they react? They sniff daisies. Even my son. Zimmerman, if an American jumps out of an airplane, you can’t sell him a parachute until after he hits the ground. I don’t even flap about it anymore. Americans are manic freaks who slack off suicidally between crises and then work their asses to a bone to meet a crisis after it has bashed them in the face—all the time bitching bitterly that no one ever told them that the fist was on the way. Well, I told them. I was on my knees begging them, for Christ’s sake. That’s the whole story. It’s a mania that will kill us all dead one day, and our Constitution besides, that one last crisis too many, but in the meantime it is no use yammering to deaf ears about how to prevent a coming crisis, you just have to be cool and work quietly until you know exactly what to tell them to do after the crisis has them screaming in pain—and hope to God they can get their silly asses in gear as fast as they always have before. Don’t have the parachutes ready! Know all about splints!”

“Well done!” exclaimed Zimmerman. “I haven’t heard you rant that well for three days.”

Braithwaite appeared from behind the potted plants and joined them at their table. “Have you phoned Seattle yet?”

“Why should I call Seattle? I know what they are going to say. They’re going to send me back to D.C. to try to sell Congress on putting up the risk capital to set up a production line that will crank out one-ten begawatt solar power satellite per month. I’ll go; I’ll make salvation noises, and our politicians will stand there with their knees shaking, those George’s who have cut us colonials down to the bone, and they’ll kiss my ass and they’ll buy it. Eight years ago I would have kissed their asses.”

“You’re so happy it depresses me,” moped Zimmerman. “The State Department is having a morbid nightmare, and you’re happy.”

“Give us a smile, Zim.”

“How can I give you a smile? My son is in Israel. I’m worried.”

“Arabs are killing each other and he’s worried. Give us a smile. This is the break we’ve been praying for. Now the bureaucrats need us in a bad way.”

“You really think D.C. is going to buy anything? With our luck they’ll revoke our return tickets and turn off the air. We’ll starve. Here, maybe have some cucumber salad before it is gone already.”

9

The pods were attached all along the sides of the spaceport. Floating down the central corridor of Pod-43 a customer faced the logo of Planet Stories set into a glass rectangle above liquid crystal credits for the waitresses such as:

MOON CRAWLERS
by Diana Grove

Framed by this layout was the control room of a 1940s class rocketship battle cruiser. The busy “captain” could be seen in free fall, perhaps with his hand on the Pressor Beam Rheostat mixing a whisky sour. Beyond him was a porthole and an awesome view of the Earth filling half the sky.

Beside the porthole sat a surly Bug Eyed Monster deep in his cups. He was so lifelike that the unwary frequently approached him to see if they couldn’t detect a defect left by the artist and got the shock of their lives. The BEM turned with a cat’s suppleness, bared his teeth and snarled at people who came too close. His electronic innards were, of course, made on the spaceport.

Diana was late for work, the first time in many weeks. It wasn’t her fault. There had been a minor malfunction on the maglev transport line that carried passengers and freight and empty lighters along the 150-km length of the spaceport. Her apartment, which she shared with another girl employed in large scale integrated microelectronics, was 20 km from Planet Stories.

She popped through the airlock entrance—a real emergency airlock—whispered hurried words to the “captain” and scooted to the ladies’ room where she slipped into her brass scanties and emerged ready to serve. Serving in free fall was freaky but she already knew how to do it with grace.

“Diana!”

She turned. A man with pepper hair and blue eyes was smiling lazily at her. He wore lunar togs. He had a strong aura about him and she thought she saw in his face a gentle fondness for women. That strange heady feeling of love at first sight struck. She let the emotion tingle through her mainly because he was an older man and that made him safe. Three other men hovered with him at a service booth. She glided over, her willingness to serve at a level above and beyond the call of duty.

“What’s a Moon Crawler?” he asked.

“How do you know I’m Diana?”

“I’ve kissed all the other bylines.”

“And they rejected your clever pass so you’re trying me as a last resort?”

“Byron,” said one of the others, “she’s armed.”

“And beautiful arms they are,” said Byron undiscouraged.

“A Moon Crawler,” replied Diana, “is a slimy worm from outer space who telepathically poses as an irresistable woman. All that’s left of the man in the morning is his toenails.”

“Ouch,” said Byron. “Let’s hug and make up.”

“You wouldn’t survive. Now what do you want to order?”

He was amused. “I’m rich and charming and experienced, a classic winner. What did I do to deserve you?”

At the first opportunity Diana asked the “captain” in his Tri-planet Rocketforce uniform, “Who is that distinguished one with those accountant types? He’s a regular here, isn’t he?”

“McDougall.”

“Thanks. That tells me a lot.”

“He has a few interesting stories to tell. He’s an old fighter pilot. He’s an old Rockwell shuttle pilot. He built half of this bird we’re flying on. I think he is a close friend of Arnold.” Arnold had designed the spaceport. “He’s top dog of the moon base construction crew.”

“He’s really been to the moon?” Her eyes darted to the corner.

“He commutes to the moon.”

She leaned conspiratorially over the battle cruiser weapons’ control array. “Is he married?”

“Divorced.”

She shivered at that news. “He likes me, did you notice?”

“Diana sweetheart, listen to me. You have a superlative bod. He’s a make-em and leave-em man. He’s out of your class.”

“What do you know about trapping men!” she flared and left with their dinners.

One thing she liked about her job, the girls were supposed to entertain intellectually as well as serve and be sexy. Ling never sent a woman to Planet Stories who wasn’t a good conversationalist. It was easy to wedge into this group and dominate the chat. She made her points by touching them lightly with excited hands—except McDougall. She let the men fondle her body—except McDougall. But while his companions caressed her brass armor, she flirted with those flecked blue eyes.

Duties called her away, yet she made special trips back to his corner. Only as they finished their after dinner drinks did she tousle Byron’s hair and whisper in his ear, “I’m off at 2 a.m. Why don’t you pick me up then?” She was trembling with embarrassment.

He smiled. “Too bad I’m not on vacation. This Saudi mess has a stake up all our asses.” He scribbled something and handed her a note. “Drop by when you get off. You may have to watch me work.”

Diana didn’t look at the note until he was gone. It was his Hilton hotel room, the executive suite. She had a flash of anger. I won’t go. He wanted her to chase him. It was humiliating. I’ll go home and chain myself to the hammock.

She stared at the wall. On it hung an original Planet Stories illustration of the Princess of Io, wearing a World War II hairdo and burlesque costume, racing between the moons of Jupiter on her rocket sled and being pursued. Some women have all the luck!

It was a long ride to the Hilton on the maglev. If you were close to the tubes, you could hear the lighters coming in or being shot out, a kind of humming swoosh that came through your feet, but in the maglev bus, suspended in vacuum, you could hear nothing. She did catch an occasional glimpse of an unloaded lighter, its delta wings retracted, moving along the central transport line in electromagnetic suspension where it was being taken to maintenance or loading or to the ejection breech at the leading edge of the spaceport.

Tremulously, at two-thirty, she was at McDougall’s door, knocking. He opened. He seemed confused to see her. Behind him papers were maglocked to the walls and the combination info-computer console that went with the executive suite was alive with readout.

“Didn’t you invite me?” She clutched his note, unsure of herself on his territory.

He shook himself. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I thought you invited me.”

He eased her inside. “And I thought you were pulling my leg. You pulled my leg all evening. So I pulled yours. If I’d known you were serious I would have been after you with roses. I hate being stood up.”

Slightly mollified she said, “Where would you get roses in space?”

“There are ways, my little Moon Crawler.”

She watched the tension lift from his face. A lined face could not hide tension as easily as a young face. He’s happy to have me. He took her in his arms and held her warmly. She let him. What am I doing here? He’s going to try to lay me. I’ve got to get out of here. “Did I interrupt something?”

“You most certainly did.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t bother you. I’ll just watch. I love to watch men work. They’re so involved.”

“Give me another hour or so. I’m making up a presentation for a congressional committee. Looking at energy alternatives with Saudi oil knocked out.”

“I thought we weren’t importing as much oil from Saudi Arabia as we used to.” Always get a man to talk about his work.

“We’re not. But try turning off 30 percent of your oil supply when you’re all geared up for it. That new crew of camel-smelling sister-beaters are throwing out their American oil men and importing Soviet technicians to put their oil fields back into production. They killed more than 20,000 of their own American-trained men in the battle. And we can’t do a damn thing about it.”

Her eyes were glowing. “Will they have to build solar power satellites now?”

“There’s a good chance.”

“They’ll just dig more coal,” she said disdainfully. “Where I used to live in Ohio, everything was done with coal.”

He snorted. “Coal has been having problems for a long time. Do you know how many billions of dollars the government spends on coal related disabilities every year? I could buy a lunar colony for that budget.” He called up a display on the screen. “And look at that. Hydrogen fusion is still 3000 times as expensive as fission. That leaves breeder reactors and solar power satellites. And we are clean. It will take a mix of both. It is a pain in the ass figuring out the trade-offs. Time is the factor now. We’ve got to move fast and that changes the tradeoffs.”

“Is there anything I can do? Sort papers or something?”

“Diana,” he said warmly, “you’ve had a hard day. You’ve done a whole shift for God’s sake. Get to bed. I’ll join you later.”

“I’d rather watch.” With a cringing fascination she watched the terror that was beginning to rise in her.

“And I’d rather see some rosy cheeks in the morning.” He took her behind the room screen and pulled out the bed netting and casually began to undress her.

She froze.

He backed off. “We’ve made different postulates?”

She was panicky. She didn’t know how to explain. “I have to be between you and the door. I’m crazy.”

He changed positions with her, careful not to touch her, instantly willing to put her at ease. “Is that better?” He was puzzled, and half amused.

She nodded.

“Have you ever made love in space?”

“No.”

“You’ll enjoy it.”

“I’m getting out of here.”

“Stay.” It was a command. He did not raise his hands.

She stared at those blue eyes which held her, knowing that he would let her go if she had the strength to leave. “I can undress myself.” She did so, swiftly, awkwardly, and slipped into the net. “Kiss me goodnight.”

Quietly, at six in the morning, he woke her. His body was comfortably warm. That part was like Mr. Ling and she enjoyed it. But Byron’s fingers were hungry. That part confused her. She tried to be like the girls in the movies. It didn’t work. It was like trying to take control of a runaway horse.

He stopped. “How old did you say you were?”

“Twenty-one.”

“You’re a virgin.”

“Is that bad?”

“Holy Jesus.”

“I’m sorry. It’s not my fault I was born that way.”

“I’m rattled. You aren’t in the space I thought you were in, and I’m astonished that I missed it.”

“You don’t want me?” She was ready to cry.

He didn’t stop making love to her, but he was slower and carefully gentle, less intense, more propitiative, and he took contraceptive precautions because he didn’t trust her innocence. The pleasure of it astonished her and she clung to him and wouldn’t let go.

“My father used to beat me. I’ve had a hard time liking men. You’re a good lover.”

“How would you know? I’m a lousy lover.”

“You’re so delicious that all that’s going to be left of you is toenails.”

“Maybe it is just space. The first time you try it on Earth, you’ll be shocked—especially if you are stuck with a 200-pound man like me.”

“I’m never going back to Earth!”

“I am. In three days.”

She began to cry. “Are you going to marry me?”

“Sweet Jesus. I could be your father.”

“It doesn’t matter. I love you. I remember everything you said. In Planet Stories you said you’d never met a woman who could love both you and space. Well, I love you and I love space and I want to settle down on the moon just like you do.”

“Wench, we will discuss this later when you are sober.”

Diana called up one of the other girls and arranged an exchange of days off. She did her best not to let Byron out of her sight. He didn’t seem to mind. She let Byron work. She helped him when she could. But the minute he showed signs of relaxing, she seduced him with every wile she knew. Sex, for two whole days, was her entire universe.

The door slid open. Byron’s eyes blazed with blue fire. “Get dressed!” Terrified she slipped into her blouse but his anger couldn’t wait and he gathered the collar of the blouse in his fist and shoved her against the wall. “You lied to me!”

She loved him too much to hit him or struggle.

“There is no Diana Grove.” He shook her like a dog shakes a rat.

“Your name is Osborne and you are sixteen years old. You are jailbait!” He let her go. “Do you realize how much trouble you could get me into?”

“Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me!” She was cringing.

“You slipped up in some of your stories. I got to thinking. And the company has ways of checking up on people. We can’t tolerate fools in space. Sixteen. My God. Sixteen! You should be home with your parents!”

“My father beats me,” she said piteously. “That’s why I ran away when I was twelve.”

Byron remained angry. “Kids always blame their fathers. A favorite sport. Fathers happen to be nice guys. Maybe you just never understood what your father was saying. Maybe you are headstrong and willful and don’t see the dangers a father sees. You’re young. Fathers know, kid. They know.”

Her face twisted into agony. “You don’t love me anymore.”

A single tear rolled out of his eye. “Jesus, what a damn fool I am. Yes, I love you. And I’m responsible for you. I’m leaving tomorrow and you’re coming with me.”

Sometimes the sun breaks through the clouds. “You’re going to marry me?”

“I’m going to take you home to your family.”

The sun can disappear again behind a thundercloud. “I hate my father!” He took Diana in his arms and soothed her. “Can you remember something nice about him?”

“Why should I?”

“For me.”

She paused, wanting to please Byron. “He bought me a rug when I wanted one.”

“Did you like the rug?”

“Yeah.”

“Remember something else nice.”

She thought a long time, her eyes staring off in the direction of Arcturus. “He always made lemon and honey for my mother when she was sick.”

“See. He’s a nice man. It’s been a long time. Our minds don’t remember some things well because we are committed to proving that our decisions were right. You’ll like him. You’ll see.”

“Mr. Ling will never forgive me,” she said petulantly.

“I’m buying your contract.”

“You can’t make me go!”

“Oh yes I can,” he said grimly.

10

The snow in Ohio was dirty with coal dust. Coal smells were on the air because the wind blew from that direction. Diana was surprised to see her father smiling, surprised to see him contrite, surprised at the warmth of the welcome he gave to the distinguished Mr. McDougall whose power awed him.

She arrived back in her familiar rat warren of factories and dry cleaning stores and chunky houses on tiny lots with potholes in the streets, a prisoner of the man she loved, determined to be emotionless—instead she cried with her mother. Both her parents lavished her with affection.

It was weird to go back to school with kids who hadn’t changed since they were twelve because they hadn’t done anything since they were twelve. The boys giggled when they said “boobs” and the girls were all virgins who thought SPS was a new thing to put in face cream to keep your pores clean.

Diana introverted into thoughts of Byron, suppressing all the evidence that might tell her she had been abandoned. He had hairs on his chest like Samson and she had some of them in an old perfume bottle. He was a hero angel who built stairways to the stars for men who were as yet too savage to understand. His fingers were pleasure, his eyes an ultimate beauty.

In her loneliness she began a letter to him. She wasn’t sure she was going to mail it but the poetry of her love ached on her tongue. “Dearest Byron, I had a dream that there was nothing left of you but toenails and woke up in my bed nude (and beautiful as you well know) and imagined sweet touches. . . .” She redrafted the letter again and again, hiding it under the leather blotter on her desk.

One day when she came home from an errand to buy milk, her father chased her up the stairs raging against the depraved McDougall and against his daughter’s dirty pornographic mind. He cornered her in her room, crumpling the letter in his fist.

Karate habits told her to take a defensive posture. She found herself cringing instead but when his arm lashed out to hit, her reflexes took over. A precisely placed foot smashed into his elbow, breaking it. She never looked back. She grabbed her Diana Grove papers from hiding and leaped through the window onto the porch roof and down onto the ground, rebounding in a run, unprotected against the winter cold.

A man and his wife found her on the highway, half frozen to death, thumbing a ride. They wrapped her in a car blanket and turned up the heat. She told them she was trying to go to her mother in New Hampshire. Only after she said New Hampshire did she remember that Byron’s home was there.

The couple were active Christians and though they gave her endless advice about God and finding Jesus they were also practical. They insisted on taking her home, feeding her and finding winter clothes for her from their friends. They insisted on paying her bus fare and when she protested, they merely smiled and told her she could pay them back by helping someone else someday.

On the bus she prepared the scathing lecture with which she intended to axe murder Byron.

(1) You are a monster!

(2) You seduced me and, not content with just rejecting me, you ruthlessly destroyed the whole wonderful life that I was building up for myself.

(3) And once you smashed my lire, you weren’t satisfied; you had to deliver me to a sadist for safekeeping, just so you could walk away without any burden.

(4) How am I ever going to get a job like that spaceport job again?

(5) It’s not my fault that I had to pretend to be five years older than I really am. The government is stupid. They won’t let me work and they won’t take care of me.

I’ll strangle him. He better give me some money. He better give me a job on the moon.

Halfway to New Hampshire she realized she didn’t have a mark on her body and she wouldn’t have a story to tell Byron that he would believe. At one of the hour long rest stops she went out to a brick wall and bashed her head against it until the side of her face was bloody and swollen. When some friendly passengers tried to ask her what had happened she queered them by talking up the joys of head pounding.

Looking like an accident victim and in a state of confusion, she stepped off the bus, penniless, at a roadside terminal in a little New Hampshire town. It was madness to think that Byron would be home. He would be in D.C. or Seattle or anywhere but New Hampshire. She was going to a shuttered home buried in snow. His ex-wife, she knew, was in Florida.

She had a cry in the ladies’ room before she went over to the post office and asked about Mr. McDougall. The woman told her he wasn’t home, but that his son was, and a no good drifter he had for a son. Diana panhandled a quarter for a phone call and when she heard the son’s voice, hung up without saying a word. She walked in the snow, ten kilometers, until she reached the McDougall place.

A dark haired young man with Byron’s blue eyes answered the door. “You’ve been walking. Your car is stuck? I have a truck.”

“No. I’m your father’s mistress.” He tried to say seven things in reply and only a squeek came out. She walked past him, hugging herself. He rushed after her. “Hey, you’re cold.”

“Take me to your radiator.”

“You’ve had an accident.”

She touched her face. “The swelling is down. The black eye is pretty awful, isn’t it? My old man beat me up for sleeping with your old man.”

“My father abandoned you?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t he give you a free year in Paris?”

“He gave me a free year in an Ohio coal town.”

“You could have asked for more.”

“You don’t ask for things when you’re in love.”

“You’re too young for him.”

“I don’t think that is any of your business’.”

“Are you pregnant?”

“No I’m not pregnant,” she said through gritted teeth.

“I’ll have some hot tea ready in a minute.”

She sat down in the kitchen by the radiator and took her boots off. Her feet were white and numb. “Where is he?”

“I just got a check from Houston, but that was a week ago.”

“A lot of good that does me.” She started to cry.

“Aw, hey now. It can’t be that bad.”

“If you come over here with your big blue eyes and try to comfort me, I’ll slug you!”

11

Diana sulked in the master bedroom except for meals. Across the veranda she had a view of snowed-in farmlands, the kind of rolling landscape rich people purchase when they are bored by the city. The room had a handcrafted look with walnut trim and carved walnut doors. It was wholly a woman’s room. Perfume bottles were on display, but things like heavy brass hairbrushes were neatly placed in drawers. Two portraits hung over the bed: a woman lit by sun reflected from spring leaves and a man glooming beneath some autumnal overcast in a fighter pilot uniform. The portrait of Mrs. McDougall, Diana hid under the bed. His portrait she launched upon the bed, a raft for a lonely girl to cling to in a king-sized ocean of softness.

Sulking made Diana restless. She had never tried it before and didn’t like it. After three days she took a couple of hours off to bake a chicken casserole and that was such a relief she began trying on Mrs. McDougall’s clothes, modifying the ones she liked on the sewing machine. A timid knock interrupted her concentration sometime during her fourth day of sewing.

“Like to come to the village? I’m going for groceries.”

“Thank God! Did Byron finally send you more money?”

“Naw. I did some electrical work at the Hodge farm.”

“You worked?” she exclaimed incredulously.

“Yeah, you’re eating me out of house and home.”

“And here I thought I was starving!”

“So today we’ll have steak. I figured that if my father can keep my girlfriend in Paris, I can at least buy his girlfriend a steak.”

In the village she noticed that the highway restaurant needed a waitress and she went in and took the job. It was a drag to live with a wastrel like Charlie who ate macaroni every night, sweet as he was. She was used to money.

Sometimes she hitchhiked home after work. Sometimes Charlie was waiting for her if she paid for the gas. Once he arrived to pick her up and found her being hassled by three toughs who wanted to give her a ride. The leader blew smoke in his face.

“You being bothered by these lung disease cases?” he asked.

“Stay out of this, Charlie. I know karate.”

“It’s not a job for a lady.” He assumed the stance of a battle-tried colonel. “Leave!”

They left.

“How did you do that?” She was amazed.

He laughed. “Ordering men around and saving women and children runs in the family. Old military tradition.

I’m considered the sissy of the McDougalls.”

Diana decided to become independent of Charlie and bought a fifty-dollar car and pay-by-the-week insurance policy after she had wangled some gas ration tickets. The car got her halfway home.

“Charlie,” said a plaintive voice over the phone. “I’m stuck on the Stonefield road at the hairpin. Would it be too much trouble for you to come and get me? Bring a chain.”

“A chain?”

“To pull my car.”

“Your car!”

“I bought a car.”

“How much did you pay?”

She muttered an answer.

“Good God! You can’t buy an unrusty hubcap for that!”

“It made noises and quit. Can you fix it?”

He sighed. “Maybe it’s the spark plugs. I’ll be right down.”

The engine had seized. “How much does a new engine cost?” she whined. “Oh, maybe a thousand dollars.” She cried all the way home. He tried to console her by telling her he could get something for the tires, and maybe sell a few other parts but she was unconsolable. He began to feel so sorry for her that the next day he towed the car off to a friend’s garage and spent all day doing an engine job. That evening he picked her up.

“Where’s the truck?”

“I brought the car.”

“I didn’t know you could fix cars.”

“I can’t but I used to repair obsolete jet engines at MIT.”

“Where did you get the money for parts?”

Charlie grinned like a man who has just won somebody else’s gambling money. “My father is a millionaire. I have a kind of credit around here. He grumbles like hell, but he pays the bills.”

“I don’t understand you. Why do you loaf around when you could get a job as a mechanic?”

“Diana! That’s work! I only did it for you.”

“You’re my nice sweetie pie. How can I sacrifice myself for you?”

“Entertain me in bed.”

“I belong to your father!” she said indignantly.

“What kind of garbage is that?” he snarled.

“A girl belongs to the man who took her virginity.”

He groaned. “You believe that drivel?”

“I certainly do!”

“You sound like my grandfather.”

“Are you in love with me?” she asked warily.

“An inch, going on an inch and a quarter.”

As they were thrown around the hairpin turn on Stonefield Road she kissed him. “If I hadn’t met your father first, I’d love you an inch and a quarter, too.” She kissed him again.

“Watch that stuff. You’ll get dirty.

I couldn’t wash all the grease off.”

“I don’t care. I want to be nice to you. What was the nicest thing that ever happened to you—besides sex?”

“When Betty let me give her a bath.”

Diana screeched. “I’ll give you a bath!”

She sudsed him carefully, in no hurry to finish caressing away the black grease. It made her lonely to touch him, and happy at the same time. He tried to convince her to join him in the tub but she refused. When she was toweling him afterwards, he tried to kiss her and she hit him and they had a fight. She ran to the master bedroom and locked the door but hugging Byron’s angular portrait proved to be no way to go to sleep. She kept thinking about crazy Charlie.

At four in the morning she wrapped a sheet around her body and shuffled to the kitchen for a glass of milk. She returned by way of Charlie’s study, curiosity driving her to rifle through his papers. It was mostly school-work—equations, printouts, drawings, projects, experiments.

Charlie appeared at the door in his pajamas. “You’re not asleep.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not mad at you. What are all those things?”

“I used to go to MIT.”

“What are you?”

“A lunar engineer. It’s not that really; I didn’t specialize in lunar construction problems until my last year.”

“Is that what these diagrams are?”

“Yeah.”

“You never told me.”

“It’s not important to me.”

Like a dash of hot tobasco the old excitement was in her body as it sauced her blood with adrenalin and a pinch of lust. “Did you flunk?”

“I was the top of my class.”

“Why aren’t you building houses on the moon? It would be fun.”

“Fun? It would be like New Hampshire in January with the air missing. Why take the moon when the worst that can happen to you on Earth is to be staked to an anthill in Nevada.”

“But you could go if you wanted?”

“My father would love it. Staking me to an anthill isn’t good enough for him.”

A small adjustment of her shoulders let one curious nipple peek over the sheet at his blue eyes. “And what’s all that electronic junk?”

“My music.”

“Is that the weird stuff I hear once in awhile?”

“No, the weird stuff is when I’m composing. That’s just experiments and subthemes. Sometimes it’s a foundation sound on which I’m going to build.” Then he added shyly, “I’ve been composing a piece for you.”

“Oh, you are in love with me!” she teased. “May I hear it?”

“You sing this wild stuff in the shower. I built it on that. You’ll have to forgive me for bugging your shower.”

“But I have a slug’s voice!”

“Ah, but it’s all filtered through my electronic ears and I hear the most beautiful things when I listen to you.”

“If you weren’t so lazy you could work as a queen’s flatterer.”

“It’s called ‘Diana in the Rain.’ ” Nothing larval was left in the voice he had transformed with his silken touch. Mostly it wasn’t even human. Perhaps a nymph bathing in a mountain waterfall would sing that way. The sound folded and unfolded wings of joy so startling even she failed to recognize herself as the music gripped her with her own emotion. Background instruments fluted in tonal patterns no wooden instrument had ever emitted. Her mind, captured by his net, remembered mythical worlds she had never seen.

He stood breathless, anxious, watching her reaction. Slowly becoming aware of what his metamorphic magic had done to her, she worked out of her percale cocoon with little jerking cries of pleased embarrassment.

“Golly.”

He was drugged with happiness, just watching her.

“Don’t stare at me like that or I’ll turn you into a stag and your own hounds will hunt you down!”

Gently he carried her off to bed but, when responding to his memory of her earlier anger, he withdrew, she would not let him go. What is true one hour is false the next.

“Stay with me and cuddle. As long as I get the door side of the bed. You can make love to me in the morning.” When she woke she found him staring at her with his blue eyes. She rubbed noses with him. “Hi,” he said. “Is it morning yet?”

Their sexing was an awkward disaster. The gravity threw her off and he was a virgin. Alternately they swore at each other and laughed. Finally they decided that at least they knew how to hug.

“It reminds me of a story that my grandfather loves to tell,” he sighed. “Once upon a time there was a new recruit for the 43rd Cavalry Regiment and the commanding officer asked him, ‘Have you ever ridden before, my boy?’ ‘No, sir,’ said the boy. ‘Hmm,’ replied the colonel, ‘I have just the horse for you; she’s never been ridden before, either.’ ”

“Let’s have breakfast and try it again,” she said.

For three days Diana ran around in a daze, baking, washing his clothes, laughing at his jokes, buying him presents with her tip money and hugging him every time she met him. The second time she found herself scrubbing the kitchen floor in one week, she frowned. Did sex always make a woman feel this way? Byron had given her goosebumps, too. Were men similarly affected? She peeked out the kitchen window and saw Charlie freezing his fingers off changing a bearing on her right front wheel and that was reassuring.

By Friday she was enough in control of her emotions to begin the Great Plan. (1) Get Charlie a job. (2) Get him to finish school. (3) Get him a job on the moon. (4) Marry him. (5) Have children. She wasn’t going to do it by nagging. She hated nagging a man. She’d rather leave a man than nag him. She was going to do it by worshipping him when he moved in the right direction and with patience and humor.

A driver’s mother died and he trucked potatoes for three days; Diana let him make love to her for three evenings and three mornings. A neighbors pipes froze and he joined the plumbing crew; she cooked him a four course meal. Slyly she began to encourage him to be more ambitious. He took a weekend gig in Concord with his music. But spring came and he was still only doing odd jobs. Happiness gave her patience. They went walking in the woods when the buds sprouted. They splashed nude in the ice cold brook.

She began to read to him from the papers about the big new push into space. Money was flooding into the effort. Overnight the high frontier had become a business almost half as big as the American cigaret, dope, and cosmetics trade. Charlie was never interested. She hid her hurt.

The Saudi Arabian situation improved. Escaped Royalists had money in America and Europe with which to influence politics at home. Intrigues prospered. Assassinations were frequent. The new leaders found it easier to conquer than to rule, and found some appeasement of the western capitalists necessary. Still the oil situation was grim and as reserves were depleted the United States imposed draconian gasoline rationing. Syntigas plants were pushed to full capacity in spite of a coal strike, suppressed by the Army. But sabotage continued to decimate coal tonnage.

Red tape was cut so that breeder reactors could be put on line in four years but nuisance protests continued to mount. A new tar sands plant was financed for Alberta. Hydrogen fusion power was brought down to $100 per kilowatt hour. A new gas field was discovered at great depth in the Gulf of Mexico. Mainly the economy was gearing up for solar power satellite production.

She read to Charlie the fabulous job offers in the New York Times. He wasn’t interested. She sulked.

One day like a bolt from Jupiter the father called and Diana listened on the upstairs phone, tears rolling out of her eyes. There was a man. He could build. He could fight. His very voice called forth loyalty. He was on the cover of Time magazine. He could even be tender to virgins. His kind forged the glory of man. She ached to hold him. Could a woman ever forget her first man?

That noon Diana cooked pies and a mouth watering lasagna. She made a fresh spring salad of new asparagus tips. She adjusted Charlie’s collar. She teased him and in all ways was free and easy with her love. When she went to work she left a note in the truck’s windshield wiper. “I have a job on the moon.” Which wasn’t true. “I’ll always love you.” Which was true for the moment. “Keep in touch.”

She stopped at the restaurant only long enough to collect her pay and buy a packet of black market gas stamps which got her as far as Montana. In Butte she abandoned the car and took a bus to Seattle, curled over two seats with her head pressed against her wadded jacket, dreaming that she was asleep next to Byron’s facial stubble.

12

For three hours, a nervous girl waited in the hotel lobby where that flighty secretary said he was staying. It stunned her when he sailed by, his weathered eyes scanning over her like a reef to be avoided, his wake washing away the hello in her throat. She buttoned the décolleté she had arranged to remind him of her womanhood, and followed him into the waiting elevator, ignoring him while they touched shoulders.

He left the elevator. She followed silently. He stopped and took out his key card. She waited.

“Diana! For the love of God!”

“So you finally noticed,” she said petulantly.

“I had you pegged as one of the convention girls,” he apologized, somewhat untactfully, switching on the light and walking over to the telephone. “What’ll I order for you?”

“Poison darts!”

He spoke into the phone. “A double whisky for room 412. Also an extra glass, a bucket of ice and three bottles of ginger ale.” Carefully he cradled the receiver. “So you ran away again?”

“He beat me up the minute you left! I mistook myself for a gong. I escaped by jumping two stories into the snow. A couple of good Samaritans found me frozen to death at the end of a trail of blood. I learned about fathers what I already knew.”

He was gazing at her with quizzical amusement. “Any scars?”

“No sir!” She snapped her heels. “Regrouped, resupplied, rested, and ready for active duty, you son-of-a-bitch, sir!” A clipped salute finished her report.

“Now I remember you,” he said amiably. “And how have you been spending your AWOL?”

“Living with your son.”

His face crumpled like a piece of paper being prepared for a bureaucrat’s wastebasket. “You’ve seen Charlie?”

“We’re lovers.”

“Did he send you here for money?”

“Oh Byron! I heard your voice last week on the phone. I became nostalgic. I came here to marry you. We’re going to have three children and live on the moon.”

“A minute ago you were ready to kill me with poison darts.”

“That was a minute ago. I’d be a good wife.”

“I’m tempted,” he said.

“Yeah?” She unbuttoned her décolleté.

“But my good sense remains. I’ll give you a choice. I’ll argue with you or I’ll send you to an orphan asylum.”

“Argue with me.”

“You laid Charlie, eh?”

“What’s it to you! The last I heard from you, just before you abandoned me to that prick father of mine, you wanted me to live in the coal dust and be virtuous.”

Byron was trying to visualize being married to her. “I was thinking that you are young, even for Charlie.”

“Yaah! Charlie’s young, even for me.”

“It wouldn’t work between you and me,” he said decisively.

“Why not!”

“I’m more than thirty years older than you are. I’m dying. You are beginning to flower.”

She undid another button and rummaged around under the bed for his dirty socks which she angrily threw into a plastic bag. “Corpses make good fertilizer for flowers. Your power and my youth; it’s a fair exchange. Jesus, Byron,” she turned to him with regret, “I swooned when I saw you on Time. I was horny for a day.”

“You’d tire of an old man.”

“But it’s men who are fickle.

Women aren’t like that. They’re faithful. When they love a man, they love him. I’d be faithful to you. I’d forgive you anything.”

He was settling into his decision. “That’s what they all say when they are seventeen. When they are twenty-seven it’s a different story.”

“Already you’re complaining about ten glorious years?” she stormed. “I’ll bet you think you deserve fifty!”

There was a polite knock on the door.

“Young girls tend to bore experienced men,” he reminded her.

She flung open the door and took the double whisky from the bellhop’s cart before he had fully entered the room. She set the glass on the dresser, imperiously tipped the man, and poured Byron a ginger ale. “For your liver, old man. So I bore you, do I?”

“You started me thinking about those fifty years.”

She half finished the whisky in one slurp.

“Can’t I even have a sip of my whisky?” he complained.

“I’ve decided to blackmail you instead of marry you,” she answered calmly.

“Blackmail me!” She had his attention. “We’re not even married yet and you’re being a bitch. I hope your lawyers are cheaper than my lawyers! You’ve stolen my whisky. What else do you want?”

“A job on the moon.”

His humor left him. “No. That’s final. What’s your countermove?”

“You damn fool!” she flared. “Your son is in love with me! He’ll follow me to the moon! That’s where you want him!”

“And do you love Charlie?”

“No! I can’t stand drifters. Yes. He’s very kind.”

Byron gripped her arms in the iron curl of his fingers. “Diana. He won’t follow you to the moon.”

“Yes.”

“No. I know my son.”

“You’ve seen him lately with my legs around him?” she lilted sarcastically, not even trying to escape his crushing hold. “I’ve watched him butter my toast. I’ve watched him scatter men who were trying to molest me. I’ve seen his eyes in the morning. You know nothing about your son. You’re a dried up old man, remember, who has forgotten what it’s like to be driven by his juices. Charlie would follow me to hell. I planned it that way.” She started to cry. “At least he will if we move fast enough before he has time to sober up and get another girl.”

“He could follow you and refuse to work.”

“Then I’d let him die. No man of mine is a suck.” She smiled through her tears. “But for me he’d work. He’s a sweet guy, Byron.”

He began to march around the room, shaking ice from the ginger ale glass he had exchanged for her arm. “And you think I give a damn whether he goes to space? I don’t give a damn anymore. I used to care. Now I’d be happy if he did anything. Anything. Wash cars even. How is his damned music going?”

“Like his engineering. He piddles at it.”

“Is he healthy?”

“He’s fine. I took good care of him. He’s probably very unhappy right now.”

“Suffering, eh?” Byron was smiling again. “A couple of months in the trenches will do him good. Finish your whisky and let’s go. You’ve earned a dinner in Seattle’s only real French restaurant.”

At dinner he refused to gossip about his son. He ordered the best meal on the menu, the third most expensive. “It’s good to eat like this again. For awhile I didn’t even have an expense account.”

“I’m on your expense account?”

“You’re goddamned right. This year the Saudi Arabian Royal family lucked out and I’m enjoying every minute of their agony. We’re tripling the size of the lunar colony. I wouldn’t have believed that last year. And you should see the assembly line we’re setting up for the solar power satellites; subcontracts all over the nation. It is going to be a boom year for the economy even though oil is short.”

Her eyes were grinning. “I heard rumors that next year hydrogen fusion prices will drop to one cent a kilowatt hour.”

Byron almost didn’t laugh. “How could I let my son marry a girl with such a macabre sense of humor?”

He took her walking along the night beach, barefoot, sometimes on the sand, sometimes over the great driftwood trees, his shoes tied by the shoelaces over his shoulder and hers stuffed in his jacket pockets. The Pacific wind was cold and she sheltered herself behind his body, wondering at his silence that lasted for miles, not daring to invade his thoughts. The waves came and broke and went. Their feet were alternately drowned by foam and then free to make wet tracks in the moonlit sand.

“I’m not sure you’d like it up there. There is no moon in the sky for lovers.”

“We can make poems about the Earth.”

“You still have your Diana Grove papers?”

“Sure.”

“They need to be made more solid. I’ll spend some money.”

She hugged his arm, thanking him silently, the glory and the triumph rising in her bosom to shout down the Pacific wind.

“I’m shipping out in two weeks. I’ll take you with me. Not because of Charlie. Charlie can go to hell. For you. If Charlie follows, well, there’ll be a job for him. We’re building a second electromagnetic track to separate the take-offs from the landings.”

Blackmail works! She was amazed. “What will I be doing?”

“Who knows.”

“May I stay with you tonight?”

“No!”

“My hotel by the bus station has cockroaches!”

They were halfway back along the beach before he answered. “Zimmerman tells this story about some New York cockroaches that followed him to the moon. He claims to have spaced them and that they didn’t die but are running around the crater Aristarchus to this day.”

13

Rockets were still used to carry passengers and large freight to orbit. The electromagnetic interaction of a vehicle and the spaceport involved momentum transfer and large lighters would have required a more massive spaceport. Since the material of the original spaceport had to be carried to orbit by rocket, cost demanded that, once built, it would be supplied by a swarm of midget freighters which were intrinsically unsuitable for passenger transport.

Diana felt like a veteran. A mere year ago she had first been thrown into space by a rattletrap Rockwell Mark VI transport, a much modified version of the original Rockwell shuttle but still launched essentially by the means pioneered during the 1980s. Today she was aboard a modern impact rocket fresh from the factory at San Diego, its very design younger than her “Grove” identity. Even the upholstery smelled clean.

“How do you like this imp?” asked Byron cramped beside her, not a patch of their bodies unsupported. Imp was the name by which impact rockets had become known.

“It’s super.”

“You’re not scared?”

“I’m going to heaven!”

“I’m scared to death. I get nervous out of the cockpit.”

There were no stewardesses. A robot seat monitored each passenger, checking that regulations were complied with during the countdown. “. . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”

Blast off crushed them. The imp was, among other things, an oxygen-hydrogen rocket of mass ratio four, carrying enough propellant to reach slightly more than half orbital velocity. The roar cut off. A button tumbled in free fall in front of Diana. Then, as the imp found the apogee of its orbit among the blaze of stars, they met the spaceport, an express to hell passing under them so fast that its linear bulk was already perspective lines piercing infinity at the very moment the four gravity acceleration hit them.

The imp’s magnetically suspended arms had reached down and were receiving oxygen from precision valved nozzles set into a perfectly straight feed pipe laid along the spaceport. The oxygen was hurtling at circular velocity as it entered the imp’s ducts. The gas suffered an almost elastic collision against the vehicle, swinging through the ducts, around and out the rear jets with its relative velocity reversed—thus violently thrusting the ship forward without affecting the momentum of the spaceport at all. As the imp began to catch up with the spaceport the impacting oxygen became less and less effective. Then the imp began to inject hydrogen into the reaction chamber, adding fire to the recoil.

Ten percent of the oxygen used by this impact system was already being supplied by the moon. Eventually all of it would be. In the meantime oxygen was imported from the Earth via the hybrid lighters.

“Poor little Byron, you can relax now. We’re here.”

“Whew! The old shuttle was a piece of cake compared with this sobering ride. I feel like I’ve just been put up in front of a firing squad and asked to gently kiss a machine gun burst.”

“You’re such a stick-in-the-mud. You’re too old for me.”

They ate at the Planet Stories with leisurely gusto. Diana got drunk for the first time in her life. She told Shaggy Dog jokes and, when she had the attention of five booths, tried to dance on the tabletop. If you’ve ever seen a drunk try to dance on a table-top in null gravity you may understand the extent to which laughing tears convulsed her audience. When she passed out, Byron towed her back to the Hilton.

The next day they caught a ferry to geosynchronous orbit at the construction site of the first ten begawatt solar power satellite. For eleven hours the five passengers played poker while the captain distributed sandwiches and made coffee.

There was some more ship maneuvering. When they went into a parking orbit, the captain called Diana into the cockpit. “Take a look.” The match-stick framework of the SPS angled away into the star laden blackness. “It’s hard to comprehend how immense it is. Look, see that crane over there? It’s a whopping big crane. See the little dot? That’s the cabin for two men.”

“Wow.”

“I’ll give you the grand picture. That thing is going to be as big as Manhattan Island. What you see is only five of the eight modules. What’s out there would reach from Battery Park to 110th Street at the end of Central Park. The next module, the one that would contain Columbia University off in one corner if it was a piece of New York City is being assembled in low orbit right now. They bring them up here by pushing hydrogen through porous electrically heated tungsten to get it through the Van Allen belts quickly, and then the rest of the way with ion jets.”

McDougall was laughing behind them. “Tell her how to get from the A-train to the Seventh Avenue line.”

Within the hour they docked with a lunar lander and exchanged lunar oxygen for terran hydrogen. The captain of the lunar lander stuck his head through the hatch, mainly to get a chance to razz McDougall. Byron didn’t introduce him to Diana until the visit was over.

“Maltby and I used to fly in Saudi Arabia under the same command. He’ll be taking care of you from here in. But don’t depend on him. He’s a rascal. Take care of yourself. Write Charlie. And don’t let them send your bags to Mexico City. Ciao.”

Maltby took her back through the tunnel.

“You sit copilot with me.”

“Where’s your copilot?”

“He’s too fat. I left him home. Where would I put you if he was here? This ain’t no taxicab. This here boat is a freighter. You want to fly the beast?”

“You’re scaring me.”

“It seems complicated to you? Shucks, you just say ‘giddiap’ and the beast goes. She has a brain of her own. She knows where home is. The smell of oats.”

“Giddiap,” said Diana. Nothing happened.

Maltby did a few quick things with his fingers and the ship swung around. Then he yelled “Giddiap!” with an ear piercing Texas drawl and the ship roared to life.

This trip, instead of poker, she learned how to play chess. He gave her a two-pawn-and-a-rook handicap and she won one out of five games in the next three days.

The ship faced backwards for the horizontal landing, its rockets firing in tiny vernier adjustments. Lazily the barren moon flowed by, slowly rising to meet them. Only when they were skimming the plain at crater-rim height did their speed become evident. A mile every second. Nearby features ran together in a watercolor blur. Suddenly the track appeared beneath them and she saw, for a split second, the rocket-catching-cradle racing up the track toward them. She remembered the spaniel who used to gallop from the neighbor’s house to chase her bicycle. The cradle positioned itself underneath them, grabbing with gentle jaws until their ship and the maglev vehicle became one.

Maltby was yelling “Whoa!” at the blood curdling top of his Texan voice. Electromagnetic fields cut in to convert fifteen tons of mass flow into an electron flood. Force hit then, two gravities that slowly built to five. The blur beyond the windows resolved into the majesty of the lunar desert, and finally they were moving sedately along a shunt line towards a shed. Maltby was fondly patting the control panel, smiling. “Atta girl.”

I’m here, she thought and wonder was all within her.

She was assigned to the hydroponic gardens under a scowling beak-nosed boss who went through his chambers constantly tasting tomatoes and carrots and brocolli like a Punch making passes at lady puppets.

“Now that’s a strawberry,” he cackled. “I have the little buggers fooled that they are living on the slopes of a British Columbian mountain. Taste is everything. To hell with yield. Yield we can leave to the Californians.” Slowly his grin grew, showing his upper gums above his jagged teeth.

She decided that her boss was crazy—not that what he said was crazy, but he had papered the wall of the small strawberry room with a fantastic view of a British Columbian valley. It didn’t take her long to find out that everyone else was crazy, too. In the cafeteria with the construction workers she listened curiously to a conversation beside her. Billy was sick. He’d been anemic for months. His leaves were drying around the edges. His leaves?

Byron’s friend, Zimmerman, dropped around after work to play scrabble. Diana asked him, “What kind of fruitcake would name a lemon tree Billy?”

Zimmerman nodded. “I hear Billy is pretty sick about it, too. My tree, I named Hershel Ostropolier and he’s never been sick a day in his life.”

Then there was the tiny cook who had a redwood tree called Paul Bunyan. Weird. But he was into Bonsai so Diana supposed it might be all right. When she bought her own baby orange tree she decided it was not going to have a name, however, one evening in a humorous mood when the conversation came around to the Celtic worship of trees, she toasted her tree with a local version of Irish Mist. “To my true Irish friend!” Henceforth her orange tree was invariably referred to as “the Irishman.”

It wasn’t easy living on the moon. The corridors were cramped. The rooms were small. There was no place to go. She missed Charlie and hiking through the New Hampshire woods.

Worse, an enormous sense of loss began to plague her. She had no direction, no purpose to her life which had always known a fierce purpose. It was awful. It was like being a compass that had smashed its way through to the north magnetic pole and was now spinning, aimless. One night she dreamed about the truck driver who had taken her to Washington when she was twelve. In the dream he said with an ironic smile, “Better be careful what you want, kid—you may get it!”

Somehow the most important thing in her life became the study of plants. She was going to become a genius and bring life to the moon. She borrowed botany books and began to memorize all the names. She began to read biology books and agricultural texts and every hydroponic book in the library of her boss. Studying became an urgent compulsion. There wasn’t even time to socialize, and finally no time to sleep.

One afternoon, looking for a scrabble game, Zimmerman found her wandering around the landing track control room trying to explain a theory of hers that no one could understand.

14

Every time when she woke up and tried to get out of bed so she could go back to work, they held her down and shot her full of drugs again. Once she escaped and turned up for work in her pajamas. They brought her back and put her to sleep. This time she was going to be more cunning. She’d pretend to be asleep until the drugs were all worn off and then she’d get up and go to work.

She peeked.

“Ah, you’re awake,” said Charlie.

She opened her eyes in wide disbelief. “Charlie! What are you doing here?”

“The old man called me up. He told me to get off my ass and take care of you. It was like listening to a wire brush cleaning out the hole between my ears.”

“Are you on their side?”

“I don’t know from nothing. I got here an hour ago. Tomorrow I’m out working on the new track. The old man got me a job as a laborer, the rat.”

“Get me out of here, Charlie. I have to go back to work.”

“You’re on a paid vacation and you’re complaining?”

“They’ll fire me.” She was terrified.

“Nobody is going to fire you with my old man backing you.”

“What happened to me? They won’t tell me.”

“You were wandering around passionately trying to convince people that milkweed was going to save the moon. The flowers are edible or something.”

“I wasn’t! I don’t believe you!” She hid under her covers in shame.

“Yeah, you were really around the bend.”

“I don’t understand,” she said through the covers.

“Neither does the doctor. But I do. You ought to see the loonies wandering around MIT during final exam time.”

“You’ll take care of me?”

“Do you think I’ll let you out of my sight again? You gave me the shock of my life. For a week I thought I was strong enough to dismiss you. Then a funny thing began to happen. The sweet flowered fields of New Hampshire dissolved away into the flowered fields of hell. And the moon up there in the sky began to take on a heavenly beauty.”

“Can I go back to work? I could finish the afternoon shift if I started now.”

“Maybe tomorrow. We have to settle things between us. Like who is this Irishman you’re living with?”

“That’s not my Irishman! That’s my orange tree!”

“I’m competing with an orange tree? Do you think I have a chance?”

She laughed as Charlie tried to walk her home. He needed low gravity locomotion lessons. Once he collided with one of the awkwardly placed potted trees. “Charlie! Excuse yourself to Jezebel.” He looked at her askance as she patted the pear tree. “There, there, Jezebel. Everything is going to be all right.” Then she burst into tears.

Select friends gave Diana a homecoming party. Her boss arrived with a bowl of strawberries so delicious they needed neither sugar nor cream. Zimmerman leaned against the wall stealing more than his share. Louise was there and Maltby brought his guitar and his regular copilot. The Irishman moved into one corner to make room for them all.

Later Charlie explained to her the profounder truths of the universe as he saw them. “Some unsolved problem starts to push you. A couple of weeks without sleep and the borderline between the real world and imagination begins to fuzz. You fall asleep on your feet. You begin to treat real people as if they were the ghosts of your dreams and that’s when the guys in the white coats come after you. Happens all the time at MIT in May. So if you get eight hours of sleep, I’ll let you go to work. Otherwise, no.”

“Make love to life. That’ll put me to sleep.”

“Thanks.”

“Is that what happened to you at MIT?”

“Naw. I was pushing to get my father’s ass. Sweet revenge. Haven’t you ever wanted to strangle your father?”

“Oh yes!” she said brightly.

“I was going to get 100 percent in every course my last year just to rub that martinet’s nose in the robot he’d made out of me. But no matter how much I strove I just couldn’t make it as a robot. I couldn’t get past 98 percent. It drove me crazy. It was like continually jumping in front of my father’s Buick to prove to him what a bad driver he was and always coming out between the wheels without a scratch.”

“You’re crazier than I am!”

“I owe it all to my father.” He was smiling.

“I like Byron!”

“That’s because you’re a girl.” He sighed. “Maybe one of these days I’ll make my peace with the old prick.”

“You could have finished school. It was in your own best interest.”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t doing it for me.”

“Why didn’t you do more with your music?”

“My music was something they didn’t want, so it was a reaction, too, I guess.”

“What do you want then?”

“You.”

“Oh Charlie! That’s not enough and you know it!”

“Maybe it is. Men are more romantic than women. Women only pretend to be romantic because they know men like it.”

“Are you calling me a fake?” she bridled.

“No. You made it very clear that what you wanted to do was sit on a peak 380,000 kilometers high and look down on the rest of us.”

“Screw you!” She strode to the furthest corner of the room, which wasn’t very far away, and sat with her arms crossed, confronting him belligerently.

“Don’t you think it’s romantic that I climbed a peak that high just to ask you to marry me?”

She smiled mischievously, still with her arms crossed. “You haven’t passed the other tests yet. You have to learn how to work first. Then maybe I’ll marry you.”

Within two years Charlie worked his way to assistant chief construction engineer. He was known with awe as the 100 percent man; the man who got the job perfect the first time. He lived with Diana and refused to take an SPS construction job because it would take him away from her.

Diana began to write papers on taste in high yield crops. For a lark she sent some tomatoes to a California fair and won first prize. She had seven projects going at once. Some people suspected that she never slept. Then, when necessity moved the command center out of the original Spartan diggings into much larger quarters, Diana made some frantic calls to Byron before someone else could find a use for the space. Charlie did the conversion design work. Zimmerman did the politicking. Ling, her old friend Ling, put up the money.

The place is called Diana’s Grove. There are trees everywhere, not big trees, but what they lack in size they make up for in lushness. Some of them bear fruit—lemons and oranges and figs. There are vines and bamboo stands, even a brook that flows in too dreamlike a manner to gurgle. The benches are real wood. The food is the best in the solar system—just don’t ask for beef. Nymphs with names like Callisto serve the tables wearing Roman hairdos and whispy gowns.

Diana, when she comes, makes her appearance in a white tunic with quiver over her shoulder. She knows everyone. Often she has a dinner party in one of the alcoves and brings people together who should be together, sometimes for major or minor politicking, sometimes because she delights in the clash of disparate views, sometimes because she is a secret matchmaker, sometimes for trivial reasons—an old professor of Charlie’s needs company or one of her friends needs to discuss curtains. She is fiercely protective of the girls who work for her.

If you’ve ever heard the music at Diana’s Grove you know that Charlie has risen into the league of the greatest. He claims it is just a hobby. The compositions can be as simple as birds chattering in the morning from somewhere beyond the leaves—a heron’s cry, a sightseeing flock southbound, a lone warbler—or it can be a conversation stopping argument between the gods.

Infrequently Charlie still proposes to Diana. She smiles her teasing smile, even though they already have one child, and writes him out a new contract in a flourishing script that promises she will be faithful to him for at least the next fortnight. He grumbles that living with her is like being an untenured professor.

The solar power satellites are winking on all around the equator, half of their mass coming from the moon now. All of the oxygen used by the space fleet is manufactured on the moon. America is prosperous, doing what it has always done best, selling high technology to the rest of the world. Her economy has achieved power independence and resource independence. The investment is considerable but it is, as yet, not well defended. Both McDougalls belong to an unofficial defense ministry which considers problems that Pentagon thinking is too archaic to handle. Serious decisions have to be made to secure the high ground in the face of a Russian resurgence into space. Such duties take Charlie back to the home-world once a year.

Diana never goes with him. She is a minor Earth deity who worked hard for her promotion to moon goddess and she is well content with her position.

PALELY LOITERING

Christopher Priest

Christopher Priest, who wrote “The Watched,” (April 1978) returns with an unusual and evocative story about a young man who grows to adulthood in an era when starflight is a thing of the past and time travel is routine but confined to a Victorian like park.

During the summers of my childhood, the best treat of all was our annual picnic in Flux Channel Park, which lay some fifty miles from home. Because my father was set in his ways, and for him no picnic would be worthy of its name without a joint of freshly roasted cold ham, the first clue we children had was always, therefore, when Cook began her preparations. I made a point every day of slipping down unnoticed to the cellar to count the hams that hung from steel hooks in the ceiling, and as soon as I found one was missing I would hurry to my sisters and share the news. The next day, the house would fill with the rich aroma of ham roasting in cloves, and we three children would enter an elaborate charade: inside we would be brimming over with excitement at the thought of the adventure, but at the same time restraining ourselves to act normally, because Father’s announcement of his plans at breakfast on the chosen day was an important part of the fun.

We grew up in awe and dread of our father, for he was a distant and strict man. Throughout the winter months, when his work made its greatest demands, we hardly saw him, and all we knew of him were the instructions passed on to us by Mother or the governor. In the summer months he chose to maintain the distance, joining us only for meals, and spending the evenings alone in his study. However, once a year my father would mellow, and for this alone the excursions to the Park would have been cause for joy. He knew the excitement the trip held for us and he played up to it, revealing the instinct of showman and actor.

Sometimes he would start by pretending to scold or punish us for some imaginary misdemeanour, or would ask Mother a misleading question, such as whether it was that day the servants were taking a holiday, or he would affect absent-mindedness; through all this we would hug our knees under the table, knowing what was to come. Then at last he would utter the magic words “Flux Channel Park”, and, abandoning our charade with glee, we children would squeal with delight and run to Mother, the servants would bustle in and clear away the breakfast, there would be a clatter of dishes and the creak of the wicker hamper from the kitchen . . . and at long last the crunching of hooves and steel-rimmed wheels would sound on the gravel drive outside, as the taxi-carriage arrived to take us to the station.

ii

I believe that my parents went to the Park from the year they were married, but my own first clear memory of a picnic is when I was seven years old. We went as a family every year until I was fifteen. For nine summers that I can remember, then, the picnic was the happiest day of the year, fusing in memory into one composite day, each picnic much like all the others, so carefully did Father orchestrate the treat for us. And yet one day stands out from all the others because of a moment of disobedience and mischief, and after that those summery days in Flux Channel Park were never quite the same again.

It happened when I was ten years old. The day had started like any other picnic day, and by the time the taxi arrived the servants had gone on ahead to reserve a train compartment for us. As we clambered into the carriage, Cook ran out of the house to wave us away, and she gave each of us children a freshly peeled carrot to gnaw on. I took mine whole into my mouth, distending my cheeks, and sucking and nibbling at it slowly, mashing it gradually into a juicy pulp. As we rattled down to the station I saw Father glancing at me once or twice, as if to tell me not to make so much noise with my mouth . . . but it was a holiday from everything, and he said nothing.

My mother, sitting opposite us in the carriage, issued her usual instructions to my sisters. “Salleen,” (my elder sister), “you’re to keep an eye on Mykle. You know how he runs around.” (I, sucking my carrot, made a face at Salleen, bulging a cheek with the carrot and squinting my eyes.) “And you, Therese, you must stay by me. None of you is to go too close to the Channel.” Her instructions came too soon—the train-ride was of second-order interest, but it came between us and the Park.

I enjoyed the train, smelling the sooty smoke and watching the steam curl past the compartment window like an attendant white wraith, but my sisters, especially Salleen, were unaccustomed to the motion and felt sick. While Mother fussed over the girls and summoned the servants from their compartment further down the train, Father and I sat gravely beside each other. When Salleen had been taken away down the train and Therese had quietened I started to fidget in my seat, craning my neck to peer forward, seeking that first magical glimpse of the silvery ribbon of the Channel.

“Father, which bridge shall we cross this time?” And, “Can we cross two bridges today, like last year?”

Always the same answer. “We shall decide when we arrive. Keep still, Mykle.”

And so we arrived, tugging at our parents’ hands to hurry them, waiting anxiously by the gate as the entrance fees were paid. The first dashing run down the sloping green sward of the Park grounds, dodging the trees and jumping high to see along the Channel, shouting disappointment because there were too many people there already, or not enough. Father beamed at us and lit his pipe, flicking back the flaps of his frock-coat and thrusting his thumbs into his waistcoat, then strolled beside Mother as she held his arm. My sisters and I walked or ran, depending on our constitutional state, heading towards the Channel, but slowing when awed by its closeness, not daring to approach. Looking back, we saw Father and Mother waving to us from the shade of the trees, needlessly warning us of the dangers.

As always, we hurried to the tollbooths for the time bridges that crossed the Channel, for it was these bridges that were the whole reason for the day’s trip. A line of people were waiting at each booth, moving forward slowly to pay the entrance fee: families like ourselves with children dancing, young couples holding hands, single men and women glancing speculatively at each other. We counted the people in each queue, eagerly checked the results with each other, then ran back to our parents.

“Father, there are only twenty-six people at the Tomorrow Bridge!”

“There’s no one at the Yesterday Bridge!” Salleen, exaggerating as usual.

“Can we cross into Tomorrow, Mother?”

“We did that last year.” Salleen, still disgruntled from the train, kicked out feebly at me. “Mykle always wants to go to Tomorrow!”

“No I don’t. The queue is longer for Yesterday!”

Mother, soothingly, “We’ll decide after lunch. The queues will be shorter then.”

Father, watching the servants laying our cloth beneath a dark old cedar tree, said, “Let us walk for a while, my dear. The children can come too. We will have luncheon in an hour or so.”

Our second exploration of the Park was more orderly, conducted, as it was, under Father’s eye. We walked again to the nearest part of the Channel—it seemed less risky now, with parents there—and followed one of the paths that ran parallel to the bank. We stared at the people on the other side.

“Father, are they in Yesterday or Tomorrow?”

“I can’t say, Mykle. It could be either.”

“They’re nearer to the Yesterday Bridge, stupid!” Salleen, pushing me from behind.

“That doesn’t mean anything, stupid!” Jabbing back at her with an elbow.

The sun reflecting from the silvery surface of the flux fluid (we sometimes called it water, to my father’s despair) made it glitter and sparkle like rippling quicksilver. Mother would not look at it, saying the reflections hurt her eyes, but there was always something dreadful about its presence so that no one could look too long. In the still patches, where the mystifying currents below briefly let the surface settle, we sometimes saw upside-down reflections of the people on the other side.

Later: we edged around the tolls, where the lines of people were longer than before, and walked further along the bank towards the east.

Then later: we returned to the shade and the trees, and sat in a demure group while lunch was served. My father carved ham with the precision of the expert chef: one cut down at an angle towards the bone, another horizontally across to the bone, and the wedge of meat so produced taken away on a plate by one of the servants. Then the slow, meticulous carving beneath the notch. One slice after another, each one slightly wider and rounder than the one before.

As soon as lunch was finished we made our way to the toll-booths and queued with the other people. There were always fewer people waiting at this time of the afternoon, a fact that surprised us but which our parents took for granted. This day we had chosen the Tomorrow Bridge. Whatever the preferences we children expressed Father always had the last word. It did not, however, prevent Salleen from sulking, nor me from letting her see the joys of victory.

This particular day was the first time I had been to the Park with any understanding of the Flux Channel and its real purpose. Earlier in the summer, the governor had instructed us in the rudiments of spatio-temporal physics . . . although that was not the name he gave to it. My sisters had been bored with the subject (it was boys’ stuff, they declared), but to learn how and why the Channel had been built was fascinating to me.

I had grown up with a general understanding that we lived in a world where our ancestors had built many marvellous things that we no longer used or had need for. This awareness, gleaned from the few other children I knew, was of astonishing and miraculous achievements, and was, as might be expected, wildly inaccurate. I knew as a fact, for instance, that the Flux Channel had been built in a matter of days, that jet-propelled aircraft could circumnavigate the world in a matter of minutes, and that houses and automobiles and railway trains could be built in a matter of seconds. Of course the truth was quite different, and our education in the scientific age and its history was constantly interesting to me.

In the case of the Flux Channel, I knew by my tenth birthday that it had taken more than two decades to build, that its construction had cost many human lives, and that it had taxed the resources and intelligence of many different countries.

Furthermore, the principle on which it worked was well understood today, even though we had no use for it as it was intended.

We lived in the age of starflight, but by the time I was born mankind had long lost the desire to travel in space.

The governor had shown us a slowed-down film of the launching of the craft that had flown to the stars: the surface of the Flux Channel undulating as the starship was propelled through its deeps like a huge whale trying to navigate a canal. Then the hump of its hull bursting through the surface in a shimmering spray of exploding foam, and the gushing wake sluicing over the banks of the Channel and vanishing instantaneously. Then the actual launch, with the starship soaring into the sky, leaving a trail of brilliant droplets in the air behind it.

All this had taken place in under one-tenth of a second. Anyone within twenty-five miles of the launch would have been killed by the shockwave, and it is said that the thunder of the starship’s passage could be heard in every country of the Neuropean Union. Only the automatic high-speed cameras were there to witness the launching. The men and women who crewed the ship—their metabolic functions frozen for most of the flight—would not have felt the strain of such a tremendous acceleration even if they had been conscious. The flux field distorted time and space, changed the nature of matter. The ship was launched at such a high relative velocity that by the time the technicians returned to the Flux Channel it would have been outside the Solar System. By the time I was born, seventy years after this, the starship would have been . . . who knows where?

Behind it, churning and eddying with temporal mystery, the Flux Channel lay across more than a hundred miles of the land, a scintillating, dazzling ribbon of light, like a slit in the world that looked towards another dimension.

There were no more starships after the first and that one had never returned. When the disturbance of the launching had calmed to a degree where the flux field was no longer a threat to human life, the stations that tapped the electricity had been built along part of its banks. A few years later, when the flux field had stabilized completely, an area of the countryside was landscaped to create the Park and the time bridges were built.

One of these traversed the Channel at an angle of exactly ninety degrees, and to walk across it was no different from crossing any bridge across any ordinary river.

One bridge was built slightly obtuse of the right-angle, and to cross it was to climb the temporal gradient of the flux field; when one emerged on the other side of the Channel, twenty-four hours had elapsed.

The third bridge was built slightly acute of the right-angle, and to cross to the other side was to walk twenty-four hours into the past. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow existed on the far side of the Flux Channel, and one could walk at will among them.

iii

While waiting in line at the tollbooth, we had another argument about Father’s decision to cross into Tomorrow. The Park management had posted a board above the paydesk, describing the weather conditions on the other side. There was wind, low cloud, sudden showers. My mother said that she did not wish to get wet. Salleen, watching me, quietly repeated that we had been to Tomorrow last year. I stayed quiet, looking across the Channel to the other side.

(Over there the weather seemed to be as it was here: a high, bright sky, hot sunshine. But what I could see was Today: yesterday’s Tomorrow, tomorrow’s Yesterday, today’s Today.)

Behind us the queue was thinning as other, less hardy, people drifted away to the other bridges. I was content, because the only one that did not interest me was the Today Bridge, but to rub in my accidental victory I whispered to Salleen that the weather was good on the Yesterday side. She, in no mood for subtle perversity, kicked out at my shins and we squabbled stupidly as my father went to the toll.

He was an important man. I heard the attendant say, “But you shouldn’t have waited, sir. We are honoured by your visit.” He released the ratchet of the turnstile, and we filed through.

We entered the covered way of the bridge, a long dark tunnel of wood and metal, lit at intervals by dim incandescent lamps. I ran on ahead, feeling the familiar electric tingle over my body as I moved through the flux field.

“Mykle! Stay with us!” My father, calling from behind.

I slowed obediently and turned to wait. I saw the rest of the family coming towards me. The outlines of their bodies were strangely diffused, an effect of the field on all who entered it. As they reached me, and thus came into the zone I was in, their shapes became sharply focused once more.

I let them pass me, and followed behind. Salleen, walking beside me, kicked out at my ankles.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because you’re a little pig!”

I ignored her. We could see the end of the covered way ahead. It had become dark soon after we started crossing the bridge—a presage of the evening of the day we were leaving—but now daylight shone again and I saw pale blue morning light, misty shapes of trees. I paused, seeing my parents and sisters silhouetted against the light. Therese, holding Mother’s hand, took no notice of me, but Salleen, whom I secretly loved, strutted proudly behind Father, asserting her independence of me. Perhaps it was because of her, or perhaps it was that morning light shining down from the end of the tunnel, but I stayed still as the rest of the family went on.

I waved my hands, watching the fingertips blur as they moved across the flux field, and then I walked on slowly. Because of the blurring my family were now almost invisible. Suddenly I was a little frightened, alone in the flux field, and I hastened after them. I saw their ghostly shapes move into daylight and out of sight (Salleen glanced back towards me), and I walked faster.

By the time I had reached the end of the covered way, the day had matured and the light was that of mid-afternoon. Low clouds were scudding before a stiff wind. As a squall of rain swept by I sheltered in the bridge, and looked across the Park for the family. I saw them a short distance away, hurrying towards one of the pagoda-shaped shelters the Park authorities had built. Glancing at the sky I saw there was a large patch of blue not far away, and I knew the shower would be a short one. It was not cold and I did not mind getting wet, but I hesitated before going out into the open. Why I stood there I do not now recall, but I had always had a childish delight in the sensation of the flux field, and at the place where the covered way ends the bridge is still over a part of the Channel.

I stood by the edge of the bridge and looked down at the flux fluid. Seen from directly above it closely resembled water, because it seemed to be clear (although the bottom could not be seen), and did not have the same metallic sheen or quicksilver property it had when viewed from the side. There were bright highlights on the surface, glinting as the fluid stirred, as if there were a film of oil across it.

My parents had reached the pagoda—whose colourful tiles and paintwork looked odd in this dismal rain—and they were squeezing in with the two girls, as other people made room for them. I could see my father’s tall black hat, bobbing behind the crowd.

Salleen was looking back at me, perhaps envying my solitary state, and so I stuck out my tongue at her. I was showing off. I went to the edge of the bridge, where there was no guard rail, and leaned precariously out above the fluid. The flux field prickled around me. I saw Salleen tugging at Mother’s arm, and Father took a step forward into the rain. I poised myself and jumped towards the bank, flying above the few inches of the Channel between me and the ground. I heard a roaring in my ears, I was momentarily blinded, and the charge of the flux field enveloped me like an electric cocoon.

I landed feet-first on the muddy bank, and looked around me as if nothing untoward had happened.

iv

Although I did not realize it at first, in leaping from the bridge and moving up through a part of the flux field, I had travelled in time. It happened that I landed on a day in the future when the weather was as grey and blustery as on the day I had left, and so my first real awareness, when I looked up, was that the pagoda had suddenly emptied. I stared in horror across the parkland, not believing that my family could have vanished in the blink of an eye.

I started to run, stumbling and sliding on the slippery ground, and I felt a panicky terror and a dread of being abandoned. All the cockiness in me had gone. I sobbed as I ran, and when I reached the pagoda I was crying aloud, snivelling and wiping my nose and eyes on the sleeve of my jacket.

I went back to where I had landed, and saw the muddy impressions of my feet on the bank. From there I looked at the bridge, so tantalizingly close, and it was then that I realized what I had done, even though it was a dim understanding.

Something like my former mood returned then and a spirit of exploration came over me. After all, it was the first time I had ever been alone in the Park. I started to walk away from the bridge, following a tree-lined path that went along the Channel.

The day I had arrived in must have been a weekday in winter or early spring because the trees were bare and there were very few people about. From this side of the Channel I could see that the tollbooths were open, but the only other people in the Park were a long way away.

For all this, it was still an adventure and the awful thoughts about where I had arrived, or how I was to return, were put aside.

I walked a long way, enjoying the freedom of being able to explore this side without my family. When they were present it was as if I could only see what they pointed out, and walk where they chose. Now it was like being in the Park for the first time.

This small pleasure soon palled. It was a cold day and my light summer shoes began to feel sodden and heavy, chafing against my toes. The Park was not at all how I liked it to be. Part of the fun on a normal day was the atmosphere of shared daring, and mixing with people you knew had not all come from the same day, the same time. Once, my father, in a mood of exceptional capriciousness, had led us to and fro across the Today and Yesterday Bridges, showing us time-slipped images of himself which he had made on a visit to the Park the day before. Visitors to the Park often did such things. During the holidays, when the big factories were closed, the Park would be full of shouting, laughing voices as carefully prepared practical jokes of this sort were played.

None of this was going on as I tramped along under the leaden sky. The future was for me as commonplace as a field.

I began to worry, wondering how I was to get back. I could imagine the wrath of my father, the tears of my mother, the endless jibes I would get from Salleen and Therese. I turned around and walked quickly back towards the bridges, forming a half-hearted plan to cross the Channel repeatedly, using the Tomorrow and Yesterday Bridges in turn, until I was back where I started.

I was running again, in danger of sobbing, when I saw a young man walking along the bank towards me. I would have paid no attention to him, but for the fact that when we were a short distance apart he sidestepped so that he was in front of me.

I slowed, regarded him incuriously, and went to walk around him . . . but much to my surprise he called after me.

“Mykle! It is Mykle, isn’t it?”

“How do you know my name?” I said, pausing and looking at him warily.

“I was looking for you. You’ve jumped forward in time, and don’t know how to get back.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’ll show you how. It’s easy.”

We were facing each other now, and I was wondering who he was and how he knew me. There was something much too friendly about him. He was very tall and thin, and had the beginnings of a moustache darkening his lip. He seemed adult to me, but when he spoke it was with a hoarse, boyish falsetto.

I said, “It’s all right, thank you, sir. I can find my own way.”

“By running across the bridges?”

“How did you know?”

“You’ll never manage it, Mykle. when you jumped from the bridge you went a long way into the future. About thirty-two years.”

“This is . . .?” I looked around at the Park, disbelieving what he said. “But it feels like—”

“Just like Tomorrow. But it isn’t. You’ve come a long way. Look over there.” He pointed across the Channel, to the other side. “Do you see those houses? You’ve never seen those before, have you?”

There was an estate of new houses, built beyond the trees on the Park’s perimeter. True, I hadn’t noticed them before, but it proved nothing. I didn’t find this very interesting, and I began to sidle away from him, wanting to get on with the business of working out how to get back.

“Thank you, sir. It was nice to meet you.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir’,” he said, laughing. “You’ve been taught to be polite to strangers, but you must know who I am.”

“N-no . . .” Suddenly rather nervous of him I walked quickly away, but he ran over and caught me by the arm.

“There’s something I must show you,” he said. “This is very important. Then I’ll get you back to the bridge.”

“Leave me alone!” I said loudly, quite frightened of him.

He took no notice of my protests, but walked me along the path beside the Channel. He was looking over my head, across the Channel, and I could not help noticing that whenever we passed a tree or a bush which cut off the view he would pause and look past it before going on. This continued until we were near the time bridges again, when he came to a halt beside a huge sprawling rhododendron bush.

“Now,” he said. “I want you to look. But don’t let yourself be seen.”

Crouching down with him, I peered around the edge of the bush. At first I could not imagine what it was I was supposed to be looking at, and thought it was more houses for my inspection. The estate did, in fact, continue all along the further edge of the Park, just visible beyond the trees.

“Do you see her?” He pointed, then ducked back. Following the direction, I saw a young woman sitting on a bench on the far side of the Channel.

“Who is she?” I said, although her small figure did not actually arouse much curiosity in me.

“The loveliest girl I have ever seen. She’s always there, on that bench. She is waiting for her lover. She sits there every day, her heart filled with anguish and hope.”

As he said this the young man’s voice broke, as if with emotion, and I glanced up at him. His eyes were moist.

I peered again around the edge of the bush and looked at the girl, wondering what it was about her that produced this reaction. I could hardly see her, because she was huddled against the wind and had a shawl drawn over her hair. She was sitting to one side, facing towards the Tomorrow Bridge. To me, she was approximately as interesting as the houses, which is not to say very much, but she seemed important to the young man.

“Is she a friend of yours?” I said, turning back to him.

“No, not a friend, Mykle. A symbol. A token of the love that is in us all.”

“What is her name?” I said, not following this interpretation.

“Estyll. The most beautiful name in the world.”

Estyll: I had never heard the name before, and I repeated it softly.

“How do you know this?” I said. “You say you—”

“Wait, Mykle. She will turn in a moment. You will see her face.”

His hand was clasping my shoulder, as if we were old friends, and although I was still shy of him it assured me of his good intent. He was sharing something with me, something so important that I was honoured to be included.

Together we leaned forward again and looked clandestinely at her. By my ear, I heard my friend say her name, so softly that it was almost a whisper. A few moments passed, then, as if the time vortex above the Channel had swept the word slowly across to her, she raised her head, shrugged back the shawl, and stood up. I was craning my neck to see her but she turned away. I watched her walk up the slope of the Park grounds, towards the houses beyond the trees.

“Isn’t she a beauty, Mykle?”

I was too young to understand him fully, so I said nothing. At that age, my only awareness of the other sex was that my sisters were temperamentally and physically different from me. I had yet to discover more interesting matters. In any event, I had barely caught a glimpse of Estyll’s face.

The young man was evidently enraptured by the girl, and as we watched her move through the distant trees my attention was half on her, half on him.

“I should like to be the man she loves,” he said at last.

“Do you . . . love her, sir?”

“Love? What I feel is too noble to be contained in such a word.” He looked down at me, and for an instant I was reminded of the haughty disdain that my father sometimes revealed when I did something stupid. “Love is for lovers, Mykle. I am a romantic, which is a far grander thing to be.”

I was beginning to find my companion rather pompous and overbearing, trying to involve me in his passions. I was an argumentative child, though, and could not resist pointing out a contradiction.

“But you said she was waiting for her lover,” I said.

“Just a supposition.”

“I think you are her lover, and won’t admit it.”

I used the word disparagingly, but it made him look at me thoughtfully. The drizzle was coming down again, a dank veil across the countryside. The young man stepped away suddenly. I think he had grown as tired of my company as I had of his.

“I was going to show you how to get back,” he said. “Come with me.” He set off towards the bridge, and I went after him. “You’ll have to go back the way you came. You jumped, didn’t you?”

“That’s right,” I said, puffing a little. It was difficult keeping up with him.

As we reached the end of the bridge, the young man left the path and walked across the grass to the edge of the Channel. I held back, nervous of going too close again.

“Ah!” said the young man, peering down at the damp soil. “Look, Mykle . . . these must be your footprints. This was where you landed.”

I went forward warily and stood just behind him.

“Put your feet in these marks and jump towards the bridge.”

Although the metal edge of the bridge was only an arm’s length away from where we were standing it seemed a formidable jump, especially as the bridge was higher than the bank. I pointed this out.

“I’ll be behind you,” the young man said. “You won’t slip. Now . . . look on the bridge. There’s a scratch on the floor. Do you see it? You have to aim at that. Try to land with one foot on either side, and you’ll be back where you started.”

It all seemed rather unlikely. The part of the bridge he was pointing out was wet with rain and looked slippery. If I landed badly I would fall; worse, I could slip backwards into the flux fluid. Although I sensed that my new friend was right—that I could only get back by the way I had come—it did not feel right.

“Mykle, I know what you’re thinking. But I made that mark. I’ve done it myself. Trust me.”

I was thinking of my father and his wrath, so at last I stepped forward and put my feet in the squelching impressions I had made as I landed. Rainwater was oozing down the muddy bank towards the flux fluid, but I noticed that as it dripped down to touch the fluid it suddenly leaped back, just like the droplets of whisky on the side of the glass my father drank in the evenings.

The young man took a grip on my belt, holding on so that I should not slip down into the Channel.

“I’ll count to three, then you jump. I’ll give you a shove. Are you ready?”

“I think so.”

“You’ll remember Estyll, won’t you?”

I looked over my shoulder. His face was very close to mine.

“Yes, I’ll remember her,” I said, not meaning it.

“Right . . . brace yourself. It’s quite a hop from here. One . . .”

I saw the fluid of the Channel below me and to the side. It was glistening eerily in the grey light.

“. . . two . . . three . . .”

I jumped forward at the same instant as the young man gave me a hefty shove from behind. Instantly, I felt the electric crackle of the flux field, I heard again the loud roaring in my ears and there was a split-second of impenetrable blackness. My feet touched the edge of the time bridge and I tripped, sprawling forward on the floor. I slithered awkwardly against the legs of a man standing just there, and my face fetched up against a pair of shoes polished to a brilliant shine. I looked up.

There was my father, staring down at me in great surprise. All I can now remember of that frightful moment is his face glaring down at me, topped by his black, curly brimmed, stovepipe hat. He seemed to be as tall as a mountain.

v

My father was not a man who saw the merit of short, sharp punishment, and I lived under the cloud of my misdeed for several weeks.

I felt that I had done what I had done in all innocence, and that the price I had to pay for it was too high. In our house, however, there was only one kind of justice and that was Father’s.

Although I had been in the future for only about an hour of my subjective time, five or six hours had passed for my family and it was twilight when I returned. This prolonged absence was the main reason for my father’s anger, although if I had jumped thirty-two years, as my companion had informed me, an error of a few hours on the return journey was as nothing.

I was never called upon to explain myself. My father detested excuses.

Salleen and Therese were the only ones who asked what had happened, and I gave them a shortened account: I said that after I jumped into the future, and realized what I had done, I explored the Park on my own and then jumped back. This was enough for them. I said nothing of the youth with the lofty sentiments, nor of the young lady who sat on the bench. (Salleen and Therese were thrilled enough that I had catapulted myself into the distant future, although my safe return did make the end of the story rather dull.) Internally, I had mixed feelings about my adventure. I spent a lot of time on my own—part of my punishment was that I could only go into the playroom one evening a week, and had to study more diligently instead—and tried to work out the meaning of what I had seen.

The girl, Estyll, meant very little to me. She certainly had a place in my memory of that hour in the future, but because she was so fascinating to my companion I remembered her through him, and she became of secondary interest.

I thought about the young man a great deal. He had gone to such pains to make a friend of me, and to include me in his private thoughts, and yet I remembered him as an intrusive and unwelcome presence. I often thought of his husky voice intoning those grand opinions, and even from the disadvantage of my junior years, his callow figure—all gangly limbs, slicked-back hair and downy moustache—was a comical one. For a long time I wondered who he could be. Although the answer seems obvious in retrospect it was some years before I realized it and whenever I was out in the town I would keep my eyes open in case we happened to meet.

My penance came to an end about three months after the picnic. This parole was never formally stated but understood by all concerned. The occasion was a party our parents allowed us to have for some visiting cousins and after that my misbehaviour was never again directly mentioned.

The following summer, when the time came around for another picnic in Flux Channel Park, my father interrupted our excited outpourings to deliver a short speech, reminding us that we must all stay together. This was said to us all, although Father gave me a sharp and meaningful look. It was a small, passing cloud, and it threw no shadow on the day. I was obedient and sensible throughout the picnic . . . but as we walked through the Park in the gentle heat of the day, I did not forget to look out for my helpful friend, nor for his adored Estyll. I looked, and kept looking, but neither of them was there that day.

vi

When I was eleven I was sent to school for the first time. I had spent my formative years in a household where wealth and influence were taken for granted, and where the governor had taken a lenient view of my education. Thrown suddenly into the company of boys from all walks of life, I retreated behind a manner of arrogance and condescension. It took two years to be scorned and beaten out of this, but well before then I had developed a wholehearted loathing for education and all that went with it. I became, in short, a student who did not study, and a pupil whose dislike for his fellows was heartily reciprocated.

I became an accomplished malingerer, and with the occasional connivance of one of the servants I could readily feign a convincing though unaccountable stomach ailment, or develop infectious-looking rashes. Sometimes I would simply stay at home. More frequently I would set off into the countryside on my bicycle and spend the day in pleasant musings.

On days like this I pursued my own form of education by reading, although this was by choice and not by compulsion. I eagerly read whatever novels and poetry I could lay my hands on: my preference in fiction was for adventure, and in poetry I soon discovered the romantics of the early nineteenth century, and the then much despised desolationists of two hundred years later. The stirring combinations of valour and unrequited love, of moral virtue and nostalgic wistfulness, struck deep into my soul and made more pointed my dislike of the routines of school.

It was at this time, when my reading was arousing passions that my humdrum existence could not satisfy, that my thoughts turned to the girl called Estyll.

I needed an object for the stirrings within me. I envied the romantic poets their soulful yearnings, for they, it seemed to me, had at least had the emotional experience with which to focus their desires. The despairing desolationists, lamenting the waste around them, at least had known life. Perhaps I did not rationalize this need quite so neatly at the time, but whenever I was aroused by my reading it was the image of Estyll that came most readily to mind.

Remembering what my companion had told me, and with my own sight of that small, huddled figure, I saw her as a lonely, heartbroken waif, squandering her life in a hopeless vigil. That she was unspeakably beautiful, and utterly faithful, went without saying.

As I grew older, my restlessness advanced. I felt increasingly isolated, not only from the other boys at school, but also from my family. My father’s work was making more demands on him than ever before and he was unapproachable. My sisters were going their own separate ways: Therese had developed an interest in ponies, Salleen in young men.

Nobody had time for me; no one tried to understand.

One autumn, some three or four years after I started school, I surrendered at last to the stirrings of soul and flesh, and attempted to allay them.

vii

I selected the day with care, one when there were several lessons at school where my absence would not be too obvious. I left home at the usual time in the morning, but instead of heading for school I rode to the city, bought a return ticket to the Park at the railway station, and settled down on the train.

During the summer there had been the usual family outing to the Park, but it had meant little to me. I had outgrown the immediate future. Tomorrow no longer concerned me.

I was vested with purpose. When I arrived at the Park on that stolen day I went directly to the Tomorrow Bridge, paid the toll, and set off through the covered way towards the other side. There were more people about than I had expected, but it was quiet enough for what I wanted to do. I waited until I was the only one on the bridge, then went to the end of the covered way and stood by the spot from which I had first jumped. I took a flint from my pocket and scratched a thin but deep line in the metal surface of the bridge.

I slipped the flint back in my pocket then looked appraisingly at the bank below. I had no way of knowing how far to jump, only an instinct and a vague memory of how I had done it before. The temptation was to jump as far as possible, but I managed to suppress it.

I placed my feet astride the line, took a deep breath . . . and launched myself towards the bank.

A dizzying surge of electric tingling, momentary darkness, and I sprawled across the bank.

Before I took stock of my surroundings I marked the place where I had landed. First I scraped a deep line in the soil and grass with the flint, pointing back towards the mark on the bridge (which was still visible, though less bright), then I tore away several tufts of grass around my feet to make a second mark. Thirdly, I stared intently at the precise place, fixing it in memory, so there would be no possibility of not finding it again.

When satisfied, I stood up and looked around at this future.

viii

It was a holiday. The Park was crowded with people, all gay in summer clothes. The sun shone down from a cloudless sky, a breeze rippled the ladies’ dresses, and from a distant pagoda a band played stirring marches. It was all so familiar that my first instinct was that my parents and sisters must be somewhere about and my illicit visit would be discovered. I ducked down against the bank of the Channel, but then I laughed at myself and relaxed; in my painstaking anticipation of this exploit I had considered the possibility of meeting people I knew, and had decided that the chance was too slender to be taken seriously. Anyway, when I looked again at the people passing—who were paying me no attention—I realized that there were subtle differences in their clothes and hair-styles, reminding me that for all the superficial similarities I had indeed travelled to the future.

I scrambled up to the tree-lined pathway and mingled with the throng, quickly catching the spirit of the day. I must have looked like any other schoolboy, but I felt very special indeed. After all, I had now leaped into the future twice.

This euphoria aside, I was there with a purpose, and I did not forget it. I looked across to the other bank, searching for a sight of Estyll. She was not by the bench, and I felt a crushing and illogical disappointment, as if she had deliberately betrayed me by not being there. All the frustration of the past months welled up in me, and I could have shouted with the agony of it. But then, miraculously it seemed, I saw her some distance away from the bench, wandering to and fro on the path on her side, glancing occasionally towards the Tomorrow Bridge. I recognized her at once, although I am not sure how; during that other day in the future I had barely seen her, and since then my imagination had run with a free rein, yet the moment I saw her I knew it was she.

Gone was the shawl, and the arms that had been wrapped for warmth about her body were now folded casually across her chest. She was wearing a light summer frock, coloured in a number of pastel shades, and to my eager eyes it seemed that no lovelier clothes could have been worn by any woman in the world. Her short hair fell prettily about her face, and the way she held her head, and the way she stood, seemed delicate beyond words.

I watched her for several minutes, transfixed by the sight of her. People continued to mill past me, but for all I was aware of them they might not have been there.

At last I remembered my purpose, even though just seeing her was an experience whose joys I could not have anticipated. I walked back down the path, past the Tomorrow Bridge and beyond to the Today Bridge. I hastened across and let myself through the exit turnstile on the other side. Still in the same day, I went up the path towards where I had seen Estyll.

There were fewer people on this side of the Channel, of course, and the path was less crowded. I looked around as I walked, noticing that custom had not changed and that many people were sitting in the shade of the trees with the remains of picnic meals spread out around them. I did not look too closely at these groups—it was still at the back of my mind that I might see my own family here.

I passed the line of people waiting at the Tomorrow tollbooth and saw the path continuing beyond. A short distance away, walking slowly to and fro, was Estyll.

At the sight of her, now so near to me, I paused.

I walked on, less confidently than before. She glanced in my direction once, but she looked at me in the same uninterested way as she looked at everybody. I was only a few yards from her, and my heart was pounding and I was trembling. I realized that the little speech I had prepared—the one in which I introduced myself, then revealed myself as witty and mature, then proposed that she take a walk with me—had gone from my mind. She looked so grown-up, so sure of herself.

Unaware of my concentrated attention on her, she turned away when I was within touching distance of her. I walked on a few more paces, desperately unsure of myself. I turned and faced her.

For the first time in my life I felt the pangs of uncontrollable love. Until then the word had had no meaning for me but as I stood before her I felt for her a love so shocking that I could only flinch away from it. How I must have appeared to her I cannot say. I must have been shaking; I must have been bright with embarrassment. She looked at me with calm grey eyes and an enquiring expression, as if she detected that I had something of immense importance to say. She was so beautiful! I felt so clumsy!

Then she smiled, unexpectedly, and I had my cue to say something. Instead, I stared at her, not even thinking of what I could say, but simply immobilized by the unexpected struggle with my emotions. I had thought love was so simple.

Moments passed and I could cope with the turbulence no more. I took a step back and then another. Estyll had continued to smile at me during those long seconds of my wordless stare, and as I moved away her smile broadened and she parted her lips as if to say something. It was too much for me. I turned away, burning with embarrassment, and started to run. After a few steps, I halted and looked back at her. She was still looking at me, still smiling.

I shouted, “I love you!”

It seemed to me that everyone in the Park had heard me. I did not wait to see Estyll’s reaction. I ran away. I hurried along the path, then ran up a grassy bank and into the shelter of some trees. I ran and ran, crossing the concourse of the open-air restaurant, crossing a broad lawn, diving into the cover of more trees beyond.

It was as if the physical effort of running would stop me thinking, because the moment I rested the enormity of what I had done flooded in on me. It seemed that I had done nothing right and everything wrong. I had had a chance to meet her and I had let it slip through my fingers. Worst of all, I had shouted my love at her, revealing it to the world. To my adolescent mind it seemed there could have been no grosser mistake.

I stood under the trees, leaning my forehead against the trunk of an old oak, banging my fist in frustration and fury.

I was terrified that Estyll would find me and I never wanted to see her again. At the same time I wanted her and loved her with a renewed passion . . . and hoped, but hoped secretly, that she would be searching for me in the Park, and would come to me by my tree and put her arms around me.

A long time passed and gradually my turbulent and contradictory emotions subsided.

I still did not want to see Estyll, so when I walked down to the path I looked carefully ahead to be sure I would not meet her. When I stepped down to the path itself—where people still walked in casual enjoyment, unaware of the drama—I looked along it towards the bridges, but saw no sign of her. I could not be sure she had left so I hung around, torn between wincing shyness of her and profound devotion.

At last I decided to risk it and hurried along the path to the tollbooths. I did not look for her and I did not see her. I paid the toll at the Today Bridge and returned to the other side. I located the marks I had made on the bank beside the Tomorrow Bridge, aimed myself at the scratch on the bridge floor, and leaped across towards it.

I emerged in the day I had left. Once again, my rough-and-ready way of travelling through time did not return me to a moment precisely true to elapsed time, but it was close enough. When I checked my watch against the clock in the toll-booth, I discovered I had been gone for less than a quarter of an hour. Meanwhile, I had been in the future for more than three hours.

I caught an earlier train home and idled away the rest of the day on my bicycle in the countryside, reflecting on the passions of man, the glories of young womanhood, and the accursed weaknesses of the will.

ix

I should have learned from experience, and never tried to see Estyll again, but there was no quieting the love I felt for her. Thoughts of her dominated every waking moment. It was the memory of her smile that was central. She had been encouraging me, inviting me to say the very things I had wanted to say, and I missed the chance. So, with the obsession renewed and intensified, I returned to the Park and did so many times.

Whenever I could safely absent myself from school and could lay my hands on the necessary cash I went to the Tomorrow Bridge and leapt across to the future. I was soon able to judge that dangerous leap with a marvellous instinctive skill. Naturally, there were mistakes. Once, terrifyingly, I landed in the night, and after that experience I always took a small pocket flashlight with me. On two or three occasions my return jump was inaccurate, and I had to use the timebridges to find the day I should have been in.

After a few more of my leaps into the future I felt sufficiently at home to approach a stranger in the Park and ask him the date. By telling me the year he confirmed that I was exactly twenty-seven years into the future . . . or, as it had been when I was ten, thirty-two years ahead. The stranger I spoke to was apparently a local man and by his appearance a man of some substance, and I took him sufficiently into my confidence to point out Estyll to him. I asked him if he knew her, which he said he did, but could only confirm her given name. It was enough for me, because by then it suited my purpose not to know too much about her.

I made no more attempts to speak to Estyll. Barred from approaching her by my painful shyness I fell back on fantasies, which were much more in keeping with my timid soul. As I grew older, and became more influenced by my favourite poets, it seemed not only more sad and splendid to glorify her from a distance, but appropriate that my role in her life should be passive.

To compensate for my nervousness about trying to meet her again, I constructed a fiction about her.

She was passionately in love with a disreputable young man, who had tempted her with elaborate promises and wicked lies. At the very moment she had declared her love for him, he had deserted her by crossing the Tomorrow Bridge into a future from which he had never returned. In spite of his shameful behaviour her love held true and every day she waited in vain by the Tomorrow Bridge, knowing that one day he would return. I would watch her covertly from the other side of the Channel, knowing that her patience was that of the lovelorn. Too proud for tears, too faithful for doubt, she was at ease with the knowledge that her long wait would be its own reward.

In the present, in my real life, I sometimes dallied with another fiction: that I was her lover, that it was for me she was waiting. This thought excited me, arousing responses of a physical kind that I did not fully understand.

I went to the Park repeatedly, gladly suffering the punishments at school for my frequent, and badly excused, truancies. So often did I leap across to that future that I soon grew accustomed to seeing other versions of myself, and realized that I had sometimes seen other young men before, who looked suspiciously like me, and who skulked near the trees and bushes beside the Channel and gazed across as wistfully as I. There was one day in particular—a lovely, sunny day, at the height of the holiday season—that I often lighted on, and here there were more than a dozen versions of myself, dispersed among the crowd.

One day, not long before my sixteenth birthday, I took one of my now customary leaps into the future and found a cold and windy day, almost deserted. As I walked along the path I saw a child, a small boy, plodding along with his head down against the wind and scuffing at the turf with the toes of his shoes. The sight of him, with his muddy legs and tear-streaked face, reminded me of that very first time I had jumped accidentally to the future. I stared at him as we approached each other. He looked back at me and for an instant a shock of recognition went through me like a bolt of electricity. He turned his eyes aside at once and stumped on by, heading towards the bridges behind me. I stared at him, recalling in vivid detail how I had felt that day, and how I had been fomenting a desperate plan to return to the day I had left, and as I did so I realized—at long last—the identity of the friend I had made that day.

My head whirling with the recognition I called after him, hardly believing what was happening.

“Mykle!” I said, the sound of my own name tasting strange in my mouth. The boy turned to look at me and I said a little uncertainly, “It is Mykle, isn’t it?”

“How do you know my name?” His stance was truculent and he seemed unwilling to be spoken to.

“I . . . was looking for you,” I said, inventing a reason for why I should have recognized him. “You’ve jumped forward in time, and don’t know how to get back.”

“Yes, but—”

“I’ll show you how. It’s easy.”

As we were speaking a distracting thought came to me: so far I had, quite accidentally, duplicated the conversation of that day. But what if I were to change it consciously? Suppose I said something that my “friend” had not; suppose young Mykle were not to respond in the way I had? The consequences seemed enormous and I could imagine this boy’s life—my own life—going in a direction entirely different. I saw the dangers of that and I knew I had to make an effort to repeat the dialogue, and my actions, precisely.

But just as it had when I tried to speak to Estyll, my mind went blank.

“It’s all right, thank you, sir,” the boy was saying. “I can find my own way.”

“By running across the bridges?” I wasn’t sure if that was what had been said to me before, but I knew that had been my intention.

“How did you know?”

I found I could not depend on that distant memory, and so, trusting to the inevitable sweep of destiny, I stopped trying to remember. I said whatever came to mind.

It was appalling to see myself through my own eyes. I had not imagined that I had been quite such a pathetic-looking child. I had every appearance of being a sullen and difficult boy. There was a stubbornness and a belligerence that I both recognized and disliked. And I knew there was a deeper weakness too. I could remember how I had seen myself, my older self, that is. I recalled my “friend” from this day as callow and immature, and mannered with a loftiness that did not suit his years. That I (as child) had seen myself (as young man) in this light was condemnation of my then lack of percipience. I had learned a lot about myself since going to school and I was more adult in my outlook than the other boys at school. What is more, since falling in love with Estyll I had taken great care over my appearance and clothes and whenever I made one of these trips to the future I looked my best.

However, in spite of the shortcomings I saw in myself-as-boy, I felt sorry for young Mykle and there was certainly a feeling of great spirit between us. I showed him what I had noticed of the changes in the Park and then we walked together towards the Tomorrow Bridge. Estyll was there on the other side of the Channel. I told him what I knew of her. I could not convey what was in my heart, but knowing how important she was to become to him, I wanted him to see her and love her.

After she had left, I showed him the mark I had made in the surface of the bridge. After I had persuaded him to make the leap—with several sympathetic thoughts about his imminent reception—I wandered alone in the blustery evening, wondering if Estyll would return. There was no sign of her.

I waited almost until nightfall, resolving that the years of admiring her from afar had been long enough. Something that young Mykle said had deeply affected me.

Allowing him a glimpse of my fiction, I had told him, “She is waiting for her lover.” My younger self had replied, “I think you are her lover, and won’t admit it.”

I had forgotten saying that. I would not admit it, for it was not strictly true, but I would admit to the wish that it were so.

Staring across the darkening Channel, I wondered if there were a way of making it come true. The Park was an eerie place in that light, and the temporal stresses of the flux field seemed to take on a tangible presence. Who knew what tricks could be played by Time? I had already met myself—once, twice, and seen myself many times over—and who was to say that Estyll’s lover could not be me?

In my younger self I had seen something about my older self that I could not see on my own. Mykle had said it, and I wanted it to be true. I would make myself Estyll’s lover, and I would do it on my next visit to the Park.

x

There were larger forces at work than those of romantic destiny, because soon after I made this resolution my life was shaken out of its pleasant intrigues by the sudden death of my father.

I was shocked by this more profoundly than I could ever have imagined. In the last two or three years I had seen very little of him and thought about him even less. And yet, from the moment the maid ran into the drawing-room, shrilling that my father had collapsed across the desk in his study, I was stricken with the most awful guilt. It was I who had caused the death! I had been obsessed with myself, with Estyll . . . if only I had thought more of him he would not be dead!

In those sad days before the funeral my reaction seemed less than wholly illogical. My father knew as much about the workings of the flux field as any man alive, and after my childhood adventure he must have had some inkling that I had not left matters there. The school must have advised him of my frequent absences and yet he said nothing. It was almost as if he had been deliberately standing by, hoping something might come of it all.

In the days following his death, a period of emotional transition, it seemed to me that Estyll was inextricably bound up with the tragedy. However much it flew in the face of reason, I could not help feeling that if I had spoken to Estyll, if I had acted rather than hidden, then my father would still be alive.

I did not have long to dwell on this. When the first shock and grief had barely passed, it became clear that nothing would ever be quite the same again for me. My father had made a will, in which he bequeathed me the responsibility for his family, his work and his fortune.

I was still legally a child and one of my uncles took over the administration of the affairs until I reached my majority. This uncle, deeply resentful that none of the fortune had passed to him, made the most of his temporary control over our lives. I was removed from school and made to start in my father’s work. The family house was sold, the governor and the other servants were discharged, and my mother was moved to a smaller household in the country. Salleen was quickly married off, and Therese was sent to boarding school. It was made plain that I should take a wife as soon as possible.

My love for Estyll—my deepest secret—was thrust away from me by forces I could not resist.

Until the day my father died I did not have much conception of what his work involved, except to know that he was one of the most powerful and influential men in the Neuropean Union. This was because he controlled the power stations which tapped energy from the temporal stresses of the flux field. On the day I inherited his position I assumed this meant he was fabulously wealthy, but I was soon relieved of this misapprehension. The power stations were state controlled and the so-called fortune comprised a large number of debentures in the enterprise. In real terms these could not be cashed, thus explaining many of the extreme decisions taken by my uncle. Death duties were considerable, and in fact I was in debt because of them for many years afterwards.

The work was entirely foreign to me and I was psychologically and academically unready for it, but because the family was now my responsibility, I applied myself as best I could. For a long time, shaken and confused by the abrupt change in our fortunes, I could do nothing but cope.

My adolescent adventures in Flux Channel Park became memories as elusive as dreams. It was as if I had become another person.

(But I had lived with the image of Estyll for so long that nothing could make me forget her. The flame of romanticism that had lighted my youth faded away, but it was never entirely extinguished. In time I lost my obsessive love for Estyll, but I could never forget her wan beauty, her tireless waiting.)

By the time I was twenty-two I was in command of myself. I had mastered my father’s job. Although the position was hereditary, as most employment was hereditary, I discharged my duties well and conscientiously. The electricity generated by the flux field provided roughly nine-tenths of all the energy consumed in the Neuropean Union, and much of my time was spent in dealing with the multitude of political demands for it. I travelled widely, to every state in Federal Neurop, and further abroad.

Of the family: my mother was settling into her long years of widowhood and the social esteem that naturally followed. Both my sisters were married. Of course I too married in the end, succumbing to the social pressures that every man of standing has to endure. When I was twenty-one I was introduced to Dorynne, a cousin of Salleen’s husband, and within a few months we were wed. Dorynne, an intelligent and attractive young woman, proved to be a good wife, and I loved her. When I was twenty-five, she bore our first child: a girl. I needed an heir, for that was the custom of my country, but we rejoiced at her birth. We named her . . . well, we named her Therese, after my sister, but Dorynne had wanted to call her Estyll, a girl’s name then very popular, and I had to argue against her. I never explained why.

Two years later my son Carl was born, and my position in society was secure.

xi

The years passed, and the glow of adolescent longing for Estyll dimmed still further. Because I was happy with my growing family, and fulfilled by the demands of my work, those strange experiences in Flux Channel Park seemed to be a minor aberration from a life that was solid, conventional and unadventurous. I was no longer romantic in outlook. I saw those noble sentiments as the product of immaturity and inexperience. Such was the change in me that Dorynne sometimes complained I was unimaginative.

But if the romance of Estyll faded with time, a certain residual curiosity about her did not. I wanted to know: what had become of her? Who was she? Was she as beautiful as I remembered her?

Setting out these questions has lent them an urgency they did not possess. They were the questions of idle moments, or when something happened to remind me of her. Sometimes, for instance, my work took me along the Flux Channel, and then I would think briefly of her. For a time a young woman worked in my office, and she had the same name. As I grew older, a year or more would sometimes pass without a thought of Estyll.

I should probably have gone for the rest of my life with these questions unanswered if it had not been for an event of major world importance. When the news of it became known it seemed for a time to be the most exciting event of the century, as in some ways it was. The starship that had been launched a hundred years before was returning.

This news affected every aspect of my work. At once I was involved in strategic and political planning at the highest level.

What it meant was this: the starship could only return to Earth by the same means as it had left. The Flux Channel would have to be reconverted, if only temporarily, to its original use. The houses in its vicinity would have to be evacuated, the power stations would have to be disconnected, and the Park and its time bridges would have to be destroyed.

For me, the disconnection of the power stations—with the inevitable result of depriving the Neuropean Union of most of its electricity—created immense problems. Permission had to be sought from other countries to generate electricity from fossil deposits for the months the flux stations were inoperable, and permission of that sort could only be obtained after intricate political negotiation and bargaining. We had less than a year in which to achieve this.

But the coming destruction of the Park struck a deeper note in me, as it did in many people. The Park was a much loved playground, familiar to everyone, and, for many people, ineradicably linked with memories of childhood. For me, it was strongly associated with the idealism of my youth and with a girl I had loved for a time. If the Park and its bridges were closed, I knew that my questions about Estyll would never be answered.

I had leapt into a future where the Park was still a playground, where the houses beyond the trees were still occupied. Through all my life I had thought of that future as an imaginary or ideal world, one unattainable except by a dangerous leap from a bridge. But that future was no longer imaginary. I was now forty-two years old. It was thirty-two years since I, as a ten-year-old boy, had leapt thirty-two years into the future.

Today and Tomorrow co-existed once more in Flux Channel Park.

If I did not act in the next few weeks, before the Park was closed, I should never see Estyll again. The memory of her flared into flame again, and I felt a deep sense of frustration. I was much too busy to go in search of a boyhood dream.

I delegated. I relieved two subordinates from work in which they would have been better employed, and told them what I wanted them to discover on my behalf. They were to locate a young woman or girl who lived, possibly alone, possibly not, in one of the houses that bordered the Park.

The estate consisted of some two hundred houses. In time, my subordinates gave me a list of over a hundred and fifty possible names, and I scanned it anxiously. There were twenty-seven women living on the estate who were called Estyll. It was a popular name.

I returned one employee to his proper work, but retained the other, a woman named Robyn. I took her partially into my confidence. I said that the girl was a distant relative and that I was anxious to locate her, but for family reasons I had to be discreet. I believed she was frequently to be found in the Park. Within a few days, Robyn confirmed that there was one such girl. She and her mother lived together in one of the houses. The mother was confined to the house by the conventions of mourning (her husband had died within the last two years), and the daughter, Estyll, spent almost every day alone in the Park. Robyn said she was unable to discover why she went there.

The date had been fixed when Flux Channel Park would be closed to the public, and it was some eight and a half months ahead. I knew that I would soon be signing the order that would authorize the closure. One day between now and then, if for no other reason, Estyll’s patient waiting would have to end.

I took Robyn further into my confidence. I instructed her to go to the Park and, by repeated use of the Tomorrow Bridge, go into the future. All she was to report back to me was the date on which Estyll’s vigil ended. Whether Robyn wondered at the glimpses of my obsession she was seeing, I cannot say, but she went without demur and did my work for me. When she returned, she had the date: it was just over six weeks away.

That interview with Robyn was fraught with undertones that neither side understood. I did not want to know too much, because with the return of my interest in Estyll had come something of that sense of romantic mystery. Robyn, for her part, clearly had seen something that intrigued her. I found it all most unsettling.

I rewarded Robyn with a handsome cash bonus and returned her to her duties. I marked the date in my private diary, then gave my full attention to the demands of my proper work.

xii

As the date approached I knew I could not be at the Park. On that day there was to be an energy conference in Geneva and there was no possibility of my missing it. I made a futile attempt to change the date, but who was I against fifty heads of state? Once more I was tempted to let the great preoccupation of my youth stay forever unresolved, but again I succumbed to it. I could not miss this one last chance.

I made my travel arrangements to Geneva with care and instructed my secretarial staff to reserve me a compartment on the one overnight train which would get me there in time.

It meant that I should have to visit the Park on the day before the vigil was to end, but by using the Tomorrow Bridge I could still be there to see it.

At last the day came. I had no one to answer to but myself. Shortly after midday I left my office and had my driver take me to the Park. I left him and the carriage in the yard beyond the gate, and with one glance towards the estate of houses I went into the Park.

I had not been in the Park itself since my last visit just before my father died. Knowing that one’s childhood haunts often seem greatly changed when revisited years later I had been expecting to find the place smaller, less grand than I remembered it. But as I walked slowly down the gently sloping sward towards the tollbooths, it seemed that the magnificent trees, and the herbaceous borders, the fountains, the pathways, and all the various kinds of landscaping in the Park gardens were just as I recalled them.

But the smells! In my adolescent longing I had not responded to those. The sweet bark, the sweeping leaves, the clustered flowers. A man with a mowing machine clattered past, throwing up a moist green smell, and the shorn grass humped in the mower’s hood like a sleeping furry animal. I watched the man as he reached the edge of the lawn he was cutting, turned the machine, then bent low over it to start it up the incline for his return. I had never pushed a mower, and as if this last day in the Park had restored my childhood I felt an urge to dash across to him and ask him if I might try my hand.

I smiled to myself as I walked on: I was a well-known public figure, and in my drape suit and tall silk hat I should certainly have cut a comic sight.

Then there were the sounds. I heard, as if for the first time (and yet also with a faint and distracting nostalgia), the metallic click of the turnstile ratchets, the sound of the breeze in the pines that surrounded the Park, and the almost continuous soprano of children’s voices. Somewhere, a band was playing marches.

I saw a family at picnic beneath one of the weeping willows. The servants stood to one side, and the paterfamilias was carving a huge joint of cold beef. I watched them surreptitiously for a moment. It might have been my own family, a generation before; people’s delights did not change.

So taken was I by all this that I had nearly reached the toll-booths before I remembered Estyll. Another private smile: my younger self would not have been able to understand this lapse. I was feeling more relaxed, welcoming the tranquil surroundings of the Park and remembering the past, but I had grown out of the obsessive associations the place had once had for me.

I had come to the Park to see Estyll, though, so I went on past the tollbooths until I was on the path that ran beside the Channel. I walked a short way, looking ahead. Soon I saw her, and she was sitting on the bench, staring towards the Tomorrow Bridge.

It was as if a quarter of a century had been obliterated. All the calm and restful mood went from me as if it had never existed, to be replaced by a ferment of emotions that was the more shocking for being so unexpected.

I came to a halt, turned away, thinking that if I looked at her any more she would surely notice me.

The adolescent, the immature, the romantic child . . . I was still all of these, and the sight of Estyll awakened them as if from a short nap. I felt large and clumsy and ridiculous in my overformal clothes, as if I were a child wearing a grandparent’s wedding outfit. Her composure, her youthful beauty, the vital force of her vigil . . . they were enough to renew all those inadequacies I had felt as a teenager.

But at the same time there was a second image of her, one which lay above the other like an elusive ghost. I was seeing her as an adult sees a child.

She was so much younger than I remembered her! She was smaller. She was pretty, yes . . . but I had seen prettier women. She was dignified, but it was a precocious poise, as if she had been trained in it by a socially conscious parent. And she was young, so very young! My own daughter, Therese, would be the same age now, perhaps slightly older.

Thus torn, thus acutely conscious of my divided way of seeing her, I stood in confusion and distraction on the pathway, while the families and couples walked gaily past.

I backed away from her at last, unable to look at her any more. She was wearing clothes I remembered too well from the past: a narrow white skirt tight around her legs, a shiny black belt, and a dark-blue blouse embroidered with flowers across the bodice.

(I remembered—I remembered so much, too much. I wished she had not been there.)

She frightened me because of the power she had, the power to awaken and arouse my emotions. I did not know what it was. Everyone has adolescent passions, but how many people have the chance to revisit those passions in maturity?

It elated me, but also made me deeply melancholic. Inside I was dancing with love and joy, but she terrified me. She was so innocently, glowingly young, and I was now so old.

xiii

I decided to leave the Park at once . . . but changed my mind an instant later. I went towards her, then turned yet again and walked away.

I was thinking of Dorynne, but trying to put her out of my mind. I was thinking of Estyll, obsessed again.

I walked until I was out of sight of her, then took off my hat and wiped my brow. It was a warm day but I knew that the perspiration was not caused by the weather. I needed to calm myself, wanted somewhere to sit down and think about it . . . but the Park was for pleasure, and when I went towards the open air restaurant to buy a glass of beer, the sight of all the heedless merriment was intrusive and unwelcome.

I stood on the uncut grass, watching the man with the mower, trying to control myself. I had come to the Park to satisfy an old curiosity, not to fall again into the traps of childhood infatuation. It was unthinkable that I should let a young girl of sixteen distract me from my stable life. It had been a mistake, a stupid mistake, to return to the Park.

But inevitably there was a deeper sense of destiny beneath my attempts to be sensible. I knew, without being able to say why, that Estyll was waiting there at her bench for me, and that we were destined at last to meet.

Her vigil was due to end tomorrow and that was just a short distance away. It lay on the far side of the Tomorrow Bridge.

xiv

I tried to pay at the tollbooth but the attendant recognized me at once. He released the ratchet of the turnstile with such a sharp jab of his foot that I thought he might break his ankle. I nodded to him and passed through into the covered way.

I walked across briskly, trying to think no more about what I was doing or why. The flux field prickled about my body.

I emerged into bright sunlight. The day I had left was warm and sunny, but here in the next day it was several degrees hotter. I felt stiff and overdressed in my formal clothes, not at all in keeping with the reawakened, desperate hope that was in my breast. Still trying to deny that hope I retreated into my daytime demeanour, opening the front of my coat and thrusting my thumbs into the slit-pockets of my waistcoat, as I sometimes did when addressing subordinates.

I walked along the path beside the Channel, looking across for a sight of Estyll on the other side.

Someone tugged at my arm from behind and I turned in surprise.

There was a young man standing there. He was nearly as tall as me but his jacket was too tight across his shoulders and his trousers were a fraction too short, revealing that he was still growing up. He had an obsessive look to him but when he spoke it was obvious he was from a good family.

“Sir, may I trouble you with a question?” he said, and at once I realized who he was.

The shock of recognition was profound. Had I not been so preoccupied with Estyll I am sure meeting him would have made me speechless. It was so many years since my time jumping that I had forgotten the jolting sense of recognition and sympathy.

I controlled myself with great difficulty. Trying not to reveal my knowledge of him, I said, “What do you wish to know?”

“Would you tell me the date, sir?” I started to smile, and glanced away from him for a moment, to straighten my face. His earnest eyes, his protuberant ears, his pallid face and quiffed-up hair!

“Do you mean today’s date, or do you mean the year?”

“Well . . . both actually, sir.”

I gave him the answer at once, although as soon as I had spoken I realized I had given him today’s date, whereas I had stepped forward one day beyond that. No matter, though: what he, I, was interested in was the year.

He thanked me politely and made to step away. Then he paused, looked at me with a guileless stare (which I remembered had been an attempt to take the measure of this forbidding-looking stranger in a frock coat), and said, “Sir, do you happen to live in these parts?”

“I do,” I said, knowing what was coming. I had raised a hand to cover my mouth, and was stroking my upper lip.

“I wonder if you would happen to know the identity of a certain person, often to be seen in this Park?”

“Who—?”

I could not finish the sentence. His eager, pinkening earnestness was extremely comical. I spluttered an explosive laugh. At once I turned it into a simulated sneeze, and while I made a play with my handkerchief I muttered something about hay fever. Forcing myself to be serious I returned my handkerchief to my pocket and straightened my hat. “Who do you mean?”

“A young lady, of about my own age.” Unaware of my amusement he moved past me and went down the bank to where there was a thick cluster of rosebushes. From behind their cover he looked across at the other side. He made sure I was looking too, then pointed.

I could not see Estyll at first, because of the crowds, but then saw that she was standing quite near to the queue for the Tomorrow Bridge. She was wearing her dress of pastel colours—the clothes she had been wearing when I first loved her.

“Do you see her, sir?” His question was like a discordant note in a piece of music.

I had become perfectly serious again. Just seeing her made me want to fall into reflective silence. The way she held her head, the innocent composure.

He was waiting for a reply, so I said, “Yes . . . yes, a local girl.”

“Do you know her name, sir?”

“I believe she is called Estyll.”

An expression of surprised pleasure came over his face and his flush deepened. “Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

He backed away from me, but I said, “Wait!” I had a sudden instinct to help him, to cut short those months of agony. “You must go and talk to her, you know. She wants to meet you. You mustn’t be shy of her.”

He stared at me in horror, then turned and ran into the crowd. Within a few seconds I could see him no more.

The enormity of what I had done struck me forcibly. Not only had I touched him on his most vulnerable place, forcing him to confront the one matter he had to work out for himself in his own time, but impetuously I had interfered with the smooth progression of events. In my memory of the meeting, the stranger in the silk hat had not given unsolicited advice!

A few minutes later, as I walked slowly along the path, pondering on this, I saw my younger self again. He saw me and I nodded to him, as an introduction, perhaps, to telling him to ignore what I had said, but he glanced away uninterestedly as if he had never seen me before.

There was something odd about him: he had changed his clothes, and the new ones fitted better.

I mused over this for a while until I realized what must have happened. He was not the same Mykle I had spoken to—he was still myself, but here, on this day, from another day in the past!

A little later I saw myself again. This time I—he—was wearing the same clothes as before. Was it the youth I had spoken to? Or was it myself from yet another day?

I was quite distracted by all this but never so much that I forgot the object of it all. Estyll was there on the other side of the Channel and while I paced along the pathway I made certain she was never out of my sight. She had waited beside the toll-booth queue for several minutes, but now she had walked back to the main path and was standing on the grassy bank, staring, as I had seen her do so many times before, towards the Tomorrow Bridge. I could see her much better there: her slight figure, her young beauty.

I was feeling calmer at last. I no longer saw a double image of her. Meeting myself as a youth, and seeing other versions of myself, had reminded me that Estyll and I, apparently divided by the flux field, were actually united by it. My presence here was inevitable.

Today was the last day of her vigil, although she might not know it, and I was here because I was supposed to be here. She was waiting, and I was waiting. I could resolve it; I could resolve it now!

She was looking directly across the Channel, and seemed to be staring deliberately at me, as if the inspiration had struck her in the same instant. Without thinking, I waved my arm at her. Excitement ran through me. I turned quickly, and set off down the path towards the bridges. If I crossed the Today Bridge I should be with her in a matter of a few seconds! It was what I had to do!

When I reached the place where the Tomorrow Bridge opened on to this side I looked back across the Channel to make sure of where she was standing.

But she was no longer waiting! She too was hurrying across the grass, rushing towards the bridges. As she ran she was looking across the Channel, looking at me!

She reached the crowd of people waiting by the tollbooth and I saw her pushing past them. I lost sight of her as she went into the booth.

I stood at my end of the bridge, looking down the ill-lit covered way. Daylight was a bright square two hundred feet away.

A small figure in a long dress hurried up the steps at the far end and ran into the wooden tunnel. Estyll came towards me, raising the front of her skirt as she ran. I glimpsed trailing ribbons, white stockings.

With each step, Estyll moved further into the flux field. With each frantic, eager step towards me, her figure became less substantial. She was less than a third of the way across before she had blurred and dissolved into nothing.

I saw her mistake! She was crossing the wrong bridge! When she reached this side—when she stood where I stood now—she would be twenty-four hours too late.

I stared helplessly down the gloomy covered way, watching as two children slowly materialized before me. They pushed and squabbled, each trying to be the first to emerge into the new day.

xv

I acted without further delay. I left the Tomorrow Bridge and ran back up the slope to the path. The Today Bridge was about fifty yards away, and, clapping a hand on the top of my hat, I ran as fast as I could towards it. I thought only of the extreme urgency of catching Estyll before I lost her. If she realized her mistake and began to search for me, we might be forever crossing and recrossing the Channel on one bridge after another—forever in the same place, but forever separated in time.

I scrambled on to the end of the Today Bridge, and hurried across. I had to moderate my pace, as the bridge was narrow and several other people were crossing. This bridge, of the three, was the only one with windows to the outside. As I passed each one I paused to look anxiously towards each end of the Tomorrow Bridge, hoping for a glimpse of her.

At the end of the bridge I pushed quickly through the exit turnstile, leaving it rattling and clattering on its ratchet.

I set off at once towards the Tomorrow Bridge, reaching for the money to pay the toll. In my haste I bumped into someone. It was a woman and I murmured an apology as I passed, affording her only a momentary glance. We recognized each other in the same instant. It was Robyn, the woman I had sent to the Park. But why was she here now?

As I reached the tollbooth I looked back at her again. She was staring at me with an expression of intense curiosity but as soon as she saw me looking she turned away. Was this the conclusion of the vigil she had reported to me on? Is this what she had seen?

I could not delay. I pushed rudely past the people at the head of the queue and threw some coins on to the worn brass plate where the tickets were ejected mechanically towards the buyer. The attendant looked up at me, recognized me as I recognized him.

“Compliments of the Park again, sir,” he said, and slid the coins back to me.

I had seen him only a few minutes before—yesterday in his life. I scooped up the coins and returned them to my pocket. The turnstile clicked as I pushed through. I went up the steps and entered the covered way.

Far ahead: the glare of daylight of the day I was in. The bare interior of the covered way, with lights at intervals. No people.

I started to walk and when I had gone a few paces across the flux field, the daylight squared in the far end of the tunnel became night. It felt much colder.

Ahead of me: two small figures, solidifying, or so it seemed, out of the electrical haze of the field. They were standing together under one of the lights, partly blocking the way.

I went nearer and saw that one of them was Estyll. The figure with her had his head turned away from me. I paused.

I had halted where no light fell on me, and although I was only a few feet away from them I would have seemed as they seemed to me—a ghostly, half-visible apparition. But they were occupied with each other and did not look towards me.

I heard him say, “Do you live around here?”

“In one of the houses by the Park. What about you?”

“No . . . I have to come here by train.” The hands held nervously by his side, the fingers curling and uncurling.

“I’ve often seen you here,” she said. “You stare a lot.”

“I wondered who you were.”

There was a silence then, while the youth looked shyly at the floor, apparently thinking of more to say. Estyll glanced beyond him to where I was standing, and for a moment we looked directly into each other’s eyes.

She said to the young man, “It’s cold here. Shall we go back?”

“We could go for a walk. Or I could buy you a glass of orange.”

“I’d rather go for a walk.”

They turned and walked towards me. She glanced at me again, with a frank stare of hostility. I had been listening in and she well knew it. The young man was barely aware of my presence. As they passed me he was looking first at her, then nervously at his hands. I saw his too-tight clothes, his quiff of hair combed up, his pink ears and neck, his downy moustache. He walked clumsily as if he were about to trip over his own feet, and he did not know where to put his hands.

I loved him; I had loved her.

I followed them a little way, until light shone in again at the tollbooth end. I saw him stand aside to let her through the turnstile first. Out in the sunshine she danced across the grass, letting the colours of her dress shine out, and then she reached over and took his hand. They walked away together, across the newly cut lawns towards the trees.

xvi

I waited until Estyll and I had gone and then I too went out into the day. I crossed to the other side of the Channel on the Yesterday Bridge, and returned on the Today Bridge.

It was the day I had arrived in the Park, the day before I was due in Geneva, the day before Estyll and I were finally to meet. Outside in the yard, my driver would be waiting with the carriage.

Before I left I went for one more walk along the path on this side of the Channel and headed for the bench where I knew Estyll would be waiting.

I saw her through the crowd: she was sitting quietly and watching the people, dressed neatly in her white skirt and dark blue blouse.

I looked across the Channel. The sunshine was bright and hazy and there was a light breeze. I saw the promenading holidaymakers on the other side: the bright clothes, the festive hats, the balloons and the children. But not everyone blended with the crowd.

There was a rhododendron bush beside the Channel. Behind it I could just see the figure of a youth. He was staring across at Estyll. Behind him, walking along deep in thought, was another Mykle. Further along the bank, well away from the bridges, another Mykle sat in long grass overlooking the Channel. I waited, and before long another Mykle appeared. A few minutes later yet another Mykle appeared, and took up position behind one of the trees over there. I did not doubt that there were many more, each unaware of all the others, each preoccupied with the girl who sat on the bench a few feet from me.

I wondered which one it was I had spoken to. None of them, perhaps, or all of them?

I turned towards Estyll at last and approached her. I went to stand directly in front of her and removed my hat.

“Good afternoon, miss,” I said. “Pardon me for speaking to you like this.”

She looked up at me in sharp surprise. I had interrupted her reverie. She shook her head, but turned on a polite smile for me.

“Do you happen to know who I am?” I said.

“Of course, sir. You’re very famous.” She bit her lower lip, as if wishing she had not answered so promptly. “What I meant was—”

“Yes,” I said. “Do you trust my word?” She frowned then, and it was a consciously pretty gesture—a child borrowing a mannerism from an adult. “It will happen tomorrow,” I said.

“Sir?”

“Tomorrow,” I said again, trying to find some subtler way of putting it. “What you’re waiting for . . . it will happen then.”

“How do you—?”

“Never mind that,” I said. I stood erect, running my fingers across the brim of my hat. In spite of everything she had the uncanny facility of making me nervous and awkward. “I’ll be across there tomorrow,” I said, pointing to the other side of the Channel. “Look out for me. I’ll be wearing these clothes, this hat. You’ll see me wave to you. That’s when it will be.”

She said nothing to this, but looked steadily at me. I was standing against the light, and she could not have been able to see me properly. But I could see her with the sun on her face, and with light dancing in her hair and her eyes.

She was so young, so pretty. It was like pain to be near her.

“Wear your prettiest dress,” I said. “Do you understand?”

She still did not answer, but I saw her eyes flicker towards the far side of the Channel. There was a pinkness in her cheeks and I knew I had said too much. I wished I had not spoken to her at all.

I made a courtly little bow and replaced my hat.

“Good-day to you, miss,” I said.

“Good-day, sir.”

I nodded to her again, then walked past her and turned on to the lawn behind the bench. I went a short way up the slope, and moved over to the side until I was hidden from Estyll by the trunk of a huge tree.

I could see that on the far side of the Channel one of the Mykles I spotted earlier had moved out from his hiding place. He stood on the bank in clear view. He had apparently been watching me as I spoke to Estyll, for now I could see him looking across at me, shading his eyes with his hand.

I was certain that it was him I had spoken to.

I could help him no more. If he now crossed the Channel twice, moving forward two days, he could be on the Tomorrow Bridge to meet Estyll as she answered my signal.

He stared across at me and I stared back. Then I heard a whoop of joy. He started running.

He hurried along the bank and went straight to the Today Bridge. I could almost hear the hollow clumping of his shoes as he ran through the narrow way, and moments later he emerged on this side. He walked, more sedately now, to the queue for the Tomorrow Bridge.

As he stood in line, he was looking at Estyll. She, staring thoughtfully at the ground, did not notice.

Mykle reached the tollbooth. As he went to the paydesk, he looked back at me and waved. I took off my hat and waved it. He grinned happily.

In a few seconds he had disappeared into the covered way, and I knew I would not see him again. I had seen happen what was to happen next.

I replaced my hat and walked away from the Channel, up through the stately trees of the Park, past where the gardener was still pushing his heavy mower against the grass, past where many families were sitting beneath the trees at their picnic luncheons.

I saw a place beneath a wide old cedar where I and my parents and sisters had often eaten our meals. A cloth was spread out across the grass, with several dishes set in readiness for the meal. An elderly couple was sitting here, well under the shade of the branches. The lady was sitting stiffly in a folding canvas chair, watching patiently as her husband prepared the meat. He was carving a ham joint, taking slices from beneath the notch with meticulous strokes. Two servants stood in the background, with white linen cloths draped over their forearms.

Like me, the gentleman was in formal wear. His frockcoat was stiff and perfectly ironed, and his shoes shone as if they had been polished for weeks. On the ground beside him, his silken stove-pipe hat had been laid on a scarf.

He noticed my uninvited regard and looked up at me. For a moment our gaze met and we nodded to each other like the gentlemen we were. I touched the brim of my hat, wished him and the lady good-afternoon. Then I hurried towards the yard outside. I wanted to see Dorynne before I caught the train to Geneva.

OPTIONS

John Varley

Science fiction in the 1970s has been greatly enriched by the stories of John Varley, most of them set in a wonder-filled, consistent future in which our solar system has been explored and colonized by people to whom cloning, memory transplants, and sex changes are routine aspects of everyone’s life.

The ease with which one can change sexes in Varley’s world has enabled him to explore the fascinating sociological ramifications of his “future history,” but as so often happens with stories postulating that such changes have occurred, Varley’s fiction has left many of us wondering how we got from Here to There. “Options” is his answer to our questions; it’s a convincing character study of one woman, happily married and the mother of three, who becomes curious about sex changes while the practice is still new. Varley is uncompromising in his depiction of every problem or anomaly that might come up in such a situation; the result is an eye-opening novelette that may well be the best story he’s yet written.

Cleo hated breakfast.

Her energy level was lowest in the morning, but not so the children’s. There was always some school crisis, something that had to be located at the last minute, some argument that had to be settled.

This morning it was a bowl of cereal spilled in Lilli’s lap. Cleo hadn’t seen it happen; her attention had been diverted momentarily by Feather, her youngest.

And of course it had to happen after Lilli was dressed.

“Mom, this was the last outfit I had.”

“Well, if you wouldn’t use them so hard they might last more than three days, and if you didn’t . . .” She stopped before she lost her temper. “Just take it off and go as you are.”

“But Mom, nobody goes to school naked. Nobody. Give me some money and I’ll stop at the store on—”

Cleo raised her voice, something she tried never to do.

“Child, I know there are kids in your class whose parents can’t afford to buy clothes at all.”

“All right, so the poor kids don’t—”

“That’s enough. You’re late already. Get going.”

Lilli stalked from the room. Cleo heard the door slam. Through it all Jules was an island of calm at the other end of the table, his nose in his newspad, sipping his second cup of coffee. Cleo glanced at her own bacon and eggs cooling on the plate, poured herself a first cup of coffee, then had to get up and help Paul find his other shoe.

By then Feather was wet again, so she put her on the table and peeled off the sopping diaper.

“Hey, listen to this,” Jules said. “ ‘The City Council today passed without objection an ordinance requiring—’ ”

“Jules, aren’t you a little behind schedule?”

He glanced at his thumbnail. “You’re right. Thanks.” He finished his coffee, folded his newspad and tucked it under his arm, bent over to kiss her, then frowned.

“You really ought to eat more, honey,” he said, indicating the untouched eggs. “Eating for two, you know. ’By, now.”

“Good-by,” Cleo said, through clenched teeth. “And if I hear that ‘eating for two’ business again, I’ll . . .” But he was gone.

She had time to scorch her lip on the coffee, then was out the door, hurrying to catch the train.

There were seats on the sun car, but of course Feather was with her and the UV wasn’t good for her tender skin. After a longing look at the passengers reclining with the dark cups strapped over their eyes—and a rueful glance down at her own pale skin—Cleo boarded the next car and found a seat by a large man wearing a hardhat. She settled down in the cushions, adjusted the straps on the carrier slung in front of her, and let Feather have a nipple. She unfolded her newspad and spread it out in her lap.

“Cute,” the man said. “How old is he?”

“She,” Cleo said, without looking up. “Eleven days.” And five hours and thirty-six minutes. . . .

She shifted in the seat, pointedly turning her shoulder to him, and made a show of activating her newspad and scanning the day’s contents. She did not glance up as the train left the underground tunnel and emerged on the gently rolling, airless plain of Mendeleev. There was little enough out there to interest her, considering she made the forty-minute commute run to Hartman crater twice a day. They had discussed moving to Hartman, but Jules liked living in King City near his work, and of course the kids would have missed all their school friends.

There wasn’t much in the news storage that morning. She queried when the red light flashed for an update. The pad printed some routine city business. Three sentences into the story she punched the reject key.

There was an Invasion Centennial parade listed for 1900 hours that evening. Parades bored her, and so did the Centennial. If you’ve heard one speech about how liberation of Earth is just around the comer if we all pull together, you’ve heard them all. Semantic content zero, nonsense quotient high.

She glanced wistfully at sports, noting that the J Sector jumpball team was doing poorly in the intracity tournament without her. Cleo’s small stature and powerful legs had served her well as a starting sprint-wing in her playing days, but it just didn’t seem possible to make practices any more.

As a last resort, she called up the articles, digests, and analysis listings, the newspad’s Sunday Supplement and Op-Ed department. A title caught her eye, and she punched it up.

Changing: The Revolution in Sex Roles

(Or, Who’s on Top?)

Twenty years ago, when cheap and easy sex changes first became available to the general public, it was seen as the beginning of a revolution that would change the shape of human society in ways impossible to foresee. Sexual equality is one thing, the sociologists pointed out, but certain residual inequities—based on biological imperatives or on upbringing, depending on your politics—have proved impossible to weed out. Changing was going to end all that. Men and women would be able to see what it was like from the other side of the barrier that divides humanity. How could sex roles survive that?

Ten years later the answer is obvious. Changing had appealed to only a tiny minority. It was soon seen as a harmless aberration, practiced by only 1 per cent of the population. Everyone promptly forgot about the tumbling of barriers.

But in the intervening ten years a quieter revolution has been building. Almost unnoticed on the broad scale because it is an invisible phenomenon (how do you know the next woman you meet was not a man last week?), changing has been gaining growing, matter-of-fact acceptance among the children of the generation that rejected it. The chances are now better than even that you know someone who has had at least one sex change. The chances are better than one out of fifteen that you yourself have changed; if you are under twenty, the chance is one in three.

The article went on to describe the underground society which was springing up around changing. Changers tended to band together, frequenting their own taprooms, staging their own social events, remaining aloof from the larger society which many of them saw as outmoded and irrelevant. Changers tended to marry other changers. They divided the childbearing equally, each preferring to mother only one child. The author viewed this tendency with alarm, since it went against the socially approved custom of large families. Changers retorted that die time for that was past, pointing out that Luna had been tamed long ago. They quoted statistics proving that at present rates of expansion, Luna’s population, would be in the billions in an amazingly short time.

There were interviews with changers, and psychological profiles. Cleo read that the males had originally been the heaviest users of the new technology, stating sexual reasons for their decision, and the change had often been permanent Today, the changer was slightly more likely to have been born female, and to give social reasons, the most common of which was pressure to bear children. But the modem changer committed him/herself to neither role. The average time between changes in an individual was two years, and declining.

Cleo read the whole article, then thought about using some of the reading references at the end. Not that much of it was really new to her. She had been aware of changing, without thinking about it much. The idea had never attracted her, and Jules was against it. But for some reason it had struck a chord this morning.

Feather had gone to sleep. Cleo carefully pulled the blanket down around the child’s face, then wiped milk from her nipple. She folded her newspad and stowed it in her purse, then rested her chin on her palm and looked out die window for the rest of the trip.

Cleo was chief on-site architect for the new Food Systems, Inc., plantation that was going down in Hartman. As such, she was in charge of three junior architects, five construction bosses, and an army of drafters and workers. It was a big project, the biggest Cleo had ever handled.

She liked her work, but the best part had always been being there on the site when things were happening, actually supervising construction instead of running a desk. That had been difficult in the last months of carrying Feather, but at least there were maternity pressure suits. It was even harder now.

She had been through it all before, with Lilli and Paul. Everybody works. That had been the rule for a century, since the Invasion. There was no labor to spare for babysitters, so having children meant the mother or father must do the same job they had been doing before, but do it while taking care of the child. In practice, it was usually the mother, since she had the milk.

Cleo had tried leaving Feather with one of the women in the office, but each had her own work to do, and not unreasonably felt Cleo should bear the burden of her own offspring. And Feather never seemed to respond well to another person. Cleo would return from her visit to the site to find the child had been crying the whole time, disrupting everyone’s work. She had taken Feather in a crawler a few times, but it wasn’t the same.

That morning was taken up with a meeting. Geo and the other section chiefs sat around the big table for three hours, discussing ways of dealing with the cost overrun, then broke for lunch only to return to the problem in the afternoon. Geo’s back was aching and she had a headache she couldn’t shake, so Feather chose that day to be cranky. After ten minutes of increasingly hostile looks, Geo had to retire to the booth with Leah Faraham, the accountant, and her three-year-old son, Eddie. The two of them followed the proceedings through earphones while trying to cope with their children and make their remarks through throat mikes. Half the people at the conference table either had to turn around when she spoke, or ignore her, and Geo was hesitant to force them to that choice. As a result, she chose her remarks with extreme care. More often, she said nothing.

There was something at the core of the world of business that refused to adjust to children in the board room, while appearing to make every effort to accommodate the working mother. Geo brooded about it, not for the first time.

But what did she want? Honestly, she could not see what else could be done. It certainly wasn’t fair to disrupt the entire meeting with a crying baby. She wished she knew the answer. Those were her friends out there, yet her feeling of alienation was intense, staring through the glass wall that Eddie was smudging with his dirty fingers.

Luckily, Feather was a perfect angel on the trip home. She gurgled and smiled toothlessly at a woman who had stopped to admire her, and Cleo warmed to the infant for the first time that day. She spent the trip playing games with her, surrounded by the approving smiles of other passengers.

“Jules, I read the most interesting article on the pad this morning.” There, it was out, anyway. She had decided the direct approach would be best.

“Hmm?”

“It was about changing. It’s getting more and more popular.”

“Is that so?” He did not look up from his book.

Jules and Cleo were in the habit of sitting up in bed for a few hours after the children were asleep. They spumed the video programs that were designed to lull workers after a hard day, prefering to use the time to catch up on reading, or to talk if either of them had anything to say. Over the last few years, they had read more and talked less.

Cleo reached over Feather’s crib and got a packet of dope-sticks. She flicked one to light with her thumbnail, drew on it, and exhaled a cloud of lavender smoke. She drew her legs up under her and leaned back against the wall.

“I just thought we might talk about it. That’s all.”

Jules put his book down. “All right. But what’s to talk about? We’re not into that.”

She shrugged and picked at a cuticle. “I know. We did talk about it, way back. I just wondered if you still felt the same, I guess.” She offered him the stick and he took a drag.

“As far as I know, I do,” he said easily. “ ‘It’s not something I spend a great deal of thought on. What’s the matter?” He looked at her suspiciously. “You weren’t having any thoughts in that direction, were you?”

“Well, no, not exactly. No. But you really ought to read the article. More people are doing it. I just thought we ought to be aware of it.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” Jules conceded. He laced his hands behind his head. “No way to tell unless you’ve worked with them and suddenly one day they’ve got a new set of equipment.” He laughed. “First time it was sort of hard for me to get used to. Now I hardly think about it.”

“Me, either.”

“They don’t cause any problem,” Jules said with an air of finality. “Live and let live.”

“Yeah.” Cleo smoked in silence for a time and let Jules get back to his reading, but she still felt uncomfortable. “Jules?”

“What is it now?”

“Don’t you ever wonder what it would be like?”

He sighed and closed his book, then turned to face her. “I don’t quite understand you tonight,” he said.

“Well, maybe I don’t, either, but we could talk—”

“Listen. Have you thought about what it would do to the kids? I mean, even if I was willing to seriously consider it, which I’m not.”

“I talked to Lilli about that. Just theoretically, you understand. She said she has two teachers who change, and one of her best friends used to be a boy. There’s quite a few kids at school who’ve changed. She takes it in stride.”

“Yes, but she’s older. What about Paul? What would it do to his concept of himself as a young man? I’ll tell you, Cleo, in the back of my mind I keep thinking this business is a little sick. I feel it would have a bad effect on the children.”

“Not according to—”

“Cleo, Cleo. Let’s not get into an argument. Number one, I have no intention of getting a change, now or in the future. Two, if only one of us was changed, it would sure play hell with our sex life, wouldn’t it? And three, I like you too much as you are.” He leaned over and began to kiss her.

She was more than a little annoyed, but said nothing as his kisses became more intense. It was a damnably effective way of shutting off debate. And she could not stay angry: she was responding in spite of herself, easily, naturally.

It was as good as it always was with Jules. The ceiling, so familiar, once again became a calming blankness that absorbed her thoughts.

No, she had no complaints about being female, no sexual dissatisfactions. It was nothing as simple as that.

Afterward she lay on her side with her legs drawn up, her knees together. She faced Jules, who absently stroked her leg with one hand. Her eyes were closed, but she was not sleepy. She was savoring the warmth she cherished so much after sex; the slipperiness between her legs, holding his semen inside.

She felt the bed move as he shifted his weight.

“You did make it, didn’t you?”

She opened one eye enough to squint at him.

“Of course I did. I always do. You know I never have any trouble in that direction.”

He relaxed back onto the pillow. “I’m sorry for . . . well, for springing on you like that.”

“It’s okay. It was nice.”

“I had just thought you might have been . . . faking it. I’m not sure why I would think that.”

She opened the other eye and patted him gently on the cheek.

“Jules, I’d never be that protective of your poor ego. If you don’t satisfy me, I promise you’ll be the second to know.”

He chuckled, then turned on his side to kiss her.

“Good night, babe.”

“G’night.”

She loved him. He loved her. Their sex life was good—with the slight mental reservation that he always seemed to initiate it—and she was happy with her body.

So why was she still awake three hours later?

Shopping took a few hours on the vidphone Saturday morning. Cleo bought the household necessities for delivery that afternoon, then left the house to do the shopping she fancied: going from store to store, looking at things she didn’t really need.

Feather was with Jules on Saturdays. She savored a quiet lunch alone at a table in the park plaza, then found herself walking down Brazil Avenue in the heart of the medical district. On impulse, she stepped into the New Heredity Body Salon.

It was only after she was inside that she admitted to herself she had spent most of the morning arranging for the impulse.

She was on edge as she was taken down a hallway to a consulting room, and had to force a smile for the handsome young man behind the desk. She sat, put her packages on the floor, and folded her hands in her lap. He asked what he could do for her.

“I’m not actually here for any work,” she said. “I wanted to look into the costs, and maybe learn a little more about the procedures involved in changing.”

He nodded understanding, and got up.

“There’s no charge for the initial consultation,” he said. “We’re happy to answer your questions. By the way, I’m Marion, spelled with an ‘O’ this month.” He smiled at her and motioned for her to follow him. He stood her in front of a full-length mirror mounted on the wall.

“I know it’s hard to make that first step. It was hard for me, and I do it for a living. So we’ve arranged this demonstration that won’t cost you anything, either in money or worry. It’s a non-threatening way to see some of what it’s all about, but it might startle you a little, so be prepared.” He touched a button in the wall beside the mirror, and Cleo saw her clothes fade away. She realized it was not really a mirror, but a holographic screen linked to a computer.

The computer introduced changes in the image. In thirty seconds she faced a male stranger. There was no doubt the face was her own, but it was more angular, perhaps a little larger in its underlying bony structure. The skin on the stranger’s jaw was rough, as if it needed shaving.

The rest of the body as she might expect, though overly muscled for her tastes. She did little more than glance at the penis; somehow that didn’t seem to matter so much. She spent more time studying the hair on the chest, the tiny nipples, and the ridges that had appeared on the hands and feet. The image mimicked her every movement.

“Why all the brawn?” she asked Marion. “If you’re trying to sell me on this, you’ve taken the wrong approach.”

Marion punched some more buttons. “I didn’t choose this image,” he explained. “The computer takes what it sees, and extrapolates. You’re more muscular than the average woman. You probably exercise. This is what a comparable amount of training would have produced with male hormones to fix nitrogen in the muscles. But we’re not bound by that.

The image lost about eight kilos of mass, mostly in the shoulders and thighs. Cleo felt a little more comfortable, but still missed the smoothness she was accustomed to seeing in her mirror.

She turned from the display and went back to her chair. Marion sat across from her and folded his hands on the desk.

“Basically, what we do is produce a cloned body from one of your own cells. Through a process called Y-Recombinant Viral Substitution we remove one of your X chromosomes and replace it with a Y.

“The clone is forced to maturity in the usual way, which takes about six months. After that, it’s just a simple non-rejection-hazard brain transplant. You walk in as a woman, and leave an hour later as a man. Easy as that.” Cleo said nothing, wondering again what she was doing here.

“From there we can modify the body. We can make you taller or shorter, rearrange your face, virtually anything you like.” He raised his eyebrows, then smiled ruefully and spread his hands.

“All right, Ms. King,” he said. “I’m not trying to pressure you. You’ll need to think about it. In the meantime, there’s a process that would cost you very little, and might be just the thing to let you test the waters. Am I right in thinking your husband opposes this?”

She nodded, and he looked sympathetic.

“Not uncommon, not uncommon at all,” he assured her. “It brings out castration fears in men who didn’t even suspect they had them. Of course, we do nothing of the sort. His male body would be kept in a tank, ready for him to move back whenever he wanted to.”

Cleo shifted in her chair. “What was this process you were talking about?”

“Just a bit of minor surgery. It can be done in ten minutes, and corrected in the same time before you even leave the office if you find you don’t care for it. It’s a good way to get husbands thinking about changing; sort of a signal you can send him. You’ve heard of the androgenous look. It’s in all the fashion tapes. Many women, especially if they have large breasts like you do, find it an interesting change.”

“You say it’s cheap? And reversible?”

“All our processes are reversible. Changing the size or shape of breasts is our most common body operation.”

Cleo sat on the examining table while the attendant gave her a quick physical.

“I don’t know if Marion realized you’re nursing,” the woman said. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

How the hell should I know? Cleo thought. She wished the feeling of confusion and uncertainty would pass.

“Just do it.”

Jules hated it.

He didn’t yell or slam doors or storm out of the house; that had never been his style. He voiced his objections coldly and quietly at the dinner table, after saying practically nothing since she walked in the door.

“I just would like to know why you thought you should do this without even talking to me about it. I don’t demand that you ask me, just discuss it with me.”

Cleo felt miserable, but was determined not to let it show. She held Feather in her arm, the bottle in her other hand, and ignored the food cooling on her plate. She was hungry but at least she was not eating for two.

“Jules, I’d ask you before I rearranged the furniture. We both own this apartment. I’d ask you before I put Lilli or Paul in another school. We share the responsibility for their upbringing. But I don’t ask you when I put on lipstick or cut my hair. It’s my body.”

“I like it, Mom,” Lilli said. “You look like me.”

Cleo smiled at her, reached over and tousled her hair.

“What do you like?” Paul asked, around a mouthful of food.

“See?” said Cleo. “It’s not that important.”

“I don’t see how you can say that. And I said you didn’t have to ask me. I just would . . . you should have . . . I should have known.”

“It was an impulse, Jules.”

“An impulse. An impulse.” For the first time, he raised his voice, and Cleo knew how upset he really was. Lilli and Paul fell silent, and even Feather squirmed.

But Cleo liked it. Oh, not forever and ever: as an interesting change. It gave her a feeling of freedom to be that much in control of her body, to be able to decide how large she wished her breasts to be. Did it have anything to do with changing? She really didn’t think so. She didn’t feel the least bit like a man.

And what was a breast, anyway? It was anything from a nipple sitting flush with the rib cage to a mammoth hunk of fat and milk gland. Cleo realized Jules was suffering from the more-is-better syndrome, thinking of Cleo’s action as the removal of her breasts, as if they had to be large to exist at all. What she had actually done was reduce their size.

No more was said at the table, but Cleo knew it was for the children’s sake. As soon as they got into bed, she could feel the tension again.

“I can’t understand why you did it now. What about Feather?”

“What about her?”

“Well, do you expect me to nurse her?”

Cleo finally got angry. “Damn it, that’s exactly what I expect you to do. Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. You think it’s all fun and games, having to carry a child around all day because she needs the milk in your breasts?”

“You never complained before.”

“I . . .” She stopped. He was right, of course. It amazed even Cleo that this had all come up so suddenly, but here it was, and she had to deal with it. They had to deal with it.

“That’s because it isn’t an awful thing. It’s great to nourish another human being at your breast. I loved every minute of it with Lilli. Sometimes it was a headache, having her there all the time, but it was worth it. The same with Paul.” She sighed. “The same with Feather, too, most of the time. You hardly think about it.”

“Then why the revolt now? With no warning?”

“It’s not a revolt, honey. Do you see it as that? I just . . . I’d like you to try it. Take Feather for a few months.

Take her to work like I do. Then you’d . . . you’d see a little of what I go through.” She rolled on her side and playfully punched his arm, trying to lighten it in some way. “You might even like it. It feels real good.”

He snorted. “I’d feel silly.”

She jumped from the bed and paced toward the living room, then turned, more angry than ever. “Silly? Nursing is silly? Breasts are silly? Then why the hell do you wonder why I did what I did?”

“Being a man is what makes it silly,” he retorted. “It doesn’t look right. I almost laugh every time I see a man with breasts. The hormones mess up your system, I heard, and—”

“That’s not true! Not any more. You can lactate—”

“—and besides, it’s my body, as you pointed out. I’ll do with it what pleases me.”

She sat on the edge of the bed with her back to him. He reached out and stroked her, but she moved away.

“All right,” she said. “I was just suggesting it. I thought you might like to try it. I’m not going to nurse her. She goes on the bottle from now on.”

“If that’s the way it has to be.”

“It is. I want you to start taking Feather to work with you. Since she’s going to be a bottle baby, it hardly matters which of us cares for her. I think you owe it to me, since I carried the burden alone with Lilli and Paul.”

“All right.”

She got into bed and pulled the covers up around her, her back to him. She didn’t want him to see how close she was to tears.

But the feeling passed. The tension drained from her, and she felt good. She thought she had won a victory, and it was worth the cost. Jules would not stay angry at her.

She fell asleep easily, but woke up several times during the night as Jules tossed and turned.

He did adjust to it. It was impossible for him to say so all at once, but after a week without love-making he admitted grudgingly that she looked good. He began to touch her in the mornings and when they kissed after getting home from work. Jules had always admired her slim muscularity, her athlete’s arms and legs. The slim chest looked so natural on her, it fit the rest of her so well that he began to wonder what all the fuss had been about.

One night while they were clearing the dinner dishes, Jules touched her nipples for the first time in a week. He asked her if it felt any different.

“There is very little feeling anywhere but the nipples,” she pointed out, “no matter how big a woman is. You know that.”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

She knew they would make love that night and determined it would be on her terms.

She spent a long time in the bathroom, letting him get settled with his book, then came out and took it away. She got on top of him and pressed close, kissing and tickling his nipples with her fingers.

She was aggressive and insistent. At first he seemed reluctant, but soon he was responding as she pressed her lips hard against his, forcing his head back into the pillow.

“I love you,” he said, and raised his head to kiss her nose. “Are you ready?”

“I’m ready.” He put his arms around her and held her close, then rolled over and hovered above her.

“Jules. Jules. Stop it.” She squirmed onto her side, her legs held firmly together.

“What’s wrong?”

“I want to be on top tonight.”

“Oh. All right.” He turned over again and reclined passively as she repositioned herself. Her heart was pounding. There had been no reason to think he would object—they had made love in any and all positions, but basically the exotic ones were a change of pace from the “natural” one with her on her back. Tonight she had wanted to feel in control.

“Open your legs, darling,” she said, with a smile. He did, but didn’t return the smile. She raised herself on her hands and knees and prepared for the tricky insertion. “Cleo.”

“What is it? This will take a little effort, but I think I can make it worth your while, so if you’d just—”

“Cleo, what the hell is the purpose of this?”

She stopped dead and let her head sag between her shoulders.

“What’s the matter? Are you feeling silly with your feet in the air?”

“Maybe. Is that what you wanted?”

“Jules, humiliating you was the farthest thing from my mind.”

“Then what was on your mind? It’s not like we’ve never done it this way before. It’s—”

“Only when you chose to do so. It’s always your decision.”

“It’s not degrading to be on the bottom.”

“Then why were you feeling silly?”

He didn’t answer, and she wearily lifted herself away from him, sitting on her knees at his feet. She waited, but he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.

“I’ve never complained about that position,” she ventured. “I don’t have any complaints about it. It works pretty well.” Still he said nothing. “All right. I wanted to see what it looked like from up there. I was tired of looking at the ceiling. I was curious.”

“And that’s why I felt silly. I never minded you being on top before, have I? But before . . . well, it’s never been in the context of the last couple of weeks. I know what’s on your mind.”

“And you feel threatened by it. By the fact that I’m curious about changing, that I want to know what it’s like to take charge. You know I can’t—and wouldn’t if I could—force a change on you.”

“But your curiosity is wrecking our marriage.”

She felt like crying again, but didn’t let it show except for a trembling of the lower lip. She didn’t want him to try and soothe her; that was all too likely to work, and she would find herself on her back with her legs in the air. She looked down at the bed and nodded slowly, then got up. She went to the mirror and took the brush, began running it through her hair.

“What are you doing now? Can’t we talk about this?”

“I don’t feel much like talking right now.” She leaned forward and examined her face as she brushed, then dabbed at the comers of her eyes with a tissue. “I’m going out. I’m still curious.”

He said nothing as she started for the door.

“I may be a little late.”

The place was called Oophyte. The capital “O” had a plus sign hanging from it, and an arrow in the upper right side. The sign was built so that the symbols revolved; one moment the plus was inside and the arrow out, the next moment the reverse.

Cleo moved in a pleasant haze across the crowded dance floor, pausing now and then to draw on her dopestick. The air in the room was thick with lavender smoke, illuminated by flashing blue lights. She danced when the mood took her. The music was so loud that she didn’t have to think about it; the noise gripped her bones and animated her arms and legs. She glided through a forest of naked skin, feeling the occasional roughness of a paper suit and, rarely, expensive cotton clothing. It was like moving underwater, like wading through molasses.

She saw him across the floor and began moving in his direction. He took no notice of her for some time, though she danced right in front of him. Few of the dancers had partners in more than the transitory sense. Some were celebrating life, others were displaying themselves, but all were looking for partners, so eventually he realized she had been there an unusual length of time. He was easily as stoned as she was.

She told him what she wanted.

“Sure. Where do you want to go? Your place?”

She took him down the hall in back and touched her credit bracelet to the lock on one of the doors. The room was simple, but clean.

He looked a lot like her phantom twin in the mirror, she noted with one part of her mind. It was probably why she had chosen him. She embraced him and lowered him gently to the bed.

“Do you want to exchange names?” he asked. The grin on his face kept getting sillier as she toyed with him.

“I don’t care. Mostly I think I want to use you.”

“Use away. My name’s Saffron.”

“I’m Cleopatra. Would you get on your back, please?”

He did, and they did. It was hot in the little room, but neither of them minded it. It was healthy exertion, the physical sensations were great, and when Cleo was through she had learned nothing. She collapsed on top of him. He did not seem surprised when tears began falling on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she said, sitting up and getting ready to leave.

“Don’t go,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder, “Now that you’ve got that out of your system, maybe we can make love.”

She didn’t want to smile, but she had to, then she was crying harder, putting her face to his chest and feeling the warmth of his arms around her and the hair tickling her nose. She realized what she was doing, and tried to pull away.

“For God’s sake, don’t be ashamed that you need someone to cry on.”

“It’s weak. I . . . I just didn’t want to be weak.”

“We’re all weak.”

She gave up struggling and nestled there until the tears stopped. She sniffed, wiped her nose, and faced him.

“What’s it like? Can you tell me?” She was about to explain what she meant, but he seemed to understand.

“It’s like . . . nothing special.”

“You were born female, weren’t you? I mean, you . . . I thought I might be able to tell.”

“It’s no longer important how I was born. I’ve been both. It’s still me, on the inside. You understand?”

“I’m not sure I do.”

They were quiet for a long time. Cleo thought of a thousand things to say, questions to ask, but could do nothing.

“You’ve been coming to a decision, haven’t you?” he said, at last. “Are you any closer after tonight?”

“I’m not sure.”

“It’s not going to solve any problems, you know. It might even create some.”

She pulled away from him and got up. She shook her hair and wished for a comb.

“Thank you, Cleopatra,” he said.

“Oh. Uh, thank you . . .” She had forgotten his name. She smiled again to cover her embarrassment, and shut the door behind her.

“Hello?”

“Yes. This is Cleopatra King. I had a consultation with one of your staff. I believe it was ten days ago.”

“Yes, Ms. King, I have your file. What can I do for you?”

She took a deep breath. “I want you to start the clone.

I left a tissue sample.”

“Very well, Ms. King. Did you have any instructions concerning the chromosone donor?”

“Do you need consent?”

“Not as long as there’s a sample in the bank.”

“Use my husband, Jules La Rhin. Security number 4454390.”

“Very good. We’ll be in contact with you.”

Cleo hung up the phone and rested her forehead against the cool metal. She should never get this stoned, she realized. What had she done?

But it was not final. It would be six months before she had to decide if she would ever use the clone. Damn Jules. Why did he have to make such a big thing of it?

Jules did not make a big thing of it when she told him what she had done. He took it quietly and calmly, as if he had been expecting it.

“You know I won’t follow you in this?”

“I know you feel that way. I’m interested to see if you change your mind.”

“Don’t count on it. I want to see if you change yours.”

“I haven’t made up my mind. But I’m giving myself the option.”

“All I ask is that you bear in mind what this could do to our relationship. I love you, Cleo. I don’t think that will ever change. But if you walk into this house as a man, I don’t think I’ll be able to see you as the person I’ve always loved.”

“You could if you were a woman.”

“But I won’t be.”

“And I’ll be the same person I always was.” But would she be? What the hell was wrong? What had Jules ever done that he should deserve this? She made up her mind never to go through with it, and they made love that night and it was very, very good.

But somehow she never got around to calling the vivarium and telling them to abort the clone. She made the decision not to go through with it a dozen times over the next six months, and never had the clone destroyed.

Their relationship in bed became uneasy as time passed. At first, it was good. Jules made no objections when she initiated sex, and was willing to do it any way she preferred. Once that was accomplished she no longer cared whether she was on top or underneath. The important thing had been having the option of making love when she wanted to, the way she wanted to.

“That’s what this is all about,” she told him one night, in a moment of clarity when everything seemed to make sense except his refusal to see things from her side. “It’s the option I want. I’m not unhappy being female. I don’t like the feeling that there’s anything I can’t be. I want to know how much of me is hormones, how much is genetics, how much is upbringing. I want to know if I feel more secure being aggressive as a man, because I don’t, most of the time, as a woman. Or do men feel the same insecurities I feel? Would Cleo the man feel free to cry? I don’t know any of those things.”

“But you said it yourself. You’ll still be the same person.”

They began to drift apart in small ways. A few weeks after her outing to Oophyte she returned home one Sunday afternoon to find him in bed with a woman. It was not like him to do it like that; their custom had been to bring lovers home and introduce them, to keep it friendly and open. Cleo was amused, because she saw it as his way of getting back at her for her trip to the encounter bar.

So she was the perfect hostess, joining them in bed, which seemed to disconcert Jules. The woman’s name was Harriet, and Cleo found herself liking her. She was a changer—something Jules had not known or he certainly would not have chosen her to make Cleo feel bad. Harriet was uncomfortable when she realized why she was there. Cleo managed to put her at ease by making love to her, something that surprised Cleo a little and Jules considerably, since she had never done it before.

Cleo enjoyed it; she found Harriet’s smooth body to be a whole new world. And she felt she had neatly turned the tables on Jules, making him confront once more the idea of his wife in the man’s role.

The worst part was the children. They had discussed the possible impending change with Lilli and Paul.

Lilli could not see what all the fuss was about; it was a part of her life, something that was all around her which she took for granted as something she herself would do when she was old enough. But when she began picking up the concern from her father, she drew subtly closer to her mother. Cleo was tremendously relieved. She didn’t think she could have held to it in the face of Lilli’s displeasure. Lilli was her first born, and though she hated to admit it and did her best not to play favorites, her darling. She had taken a year’s leave from her job at appalling expense to the household budget so she could devote all her time to her infant daughter. She often wished she could somehow return to those simpler days, when motherhood had been her whole life.

Feather, of course, was not consulted. Jules had assumed the responsibility for her nurture without complaint, and seemed to be enjoying it. It was fine with Cleo, though it maddened her that he was so willing about taking over the mothering role without being willing to try it as a female. Cleo loved Feather as much as the other two, but sometimes had trouble recalling why they had decided to have her. She felt she had gotten the procreation impulse out of her system with Paul, and yet there Feather was.

Paul was the problem.

Things could get tense when Paul expressed doubts about how he would feel if his mother were to become a man. Jules’s face would darken and he might not speak for days. When he did speak, often in the middle of the night when neither of them could sleep, it would be in a verbal explosion that was as close to violence as she had ever seen him.

It frightened her, because she was by no means sure of herself when it came to Paul. Would it hurt him? Jules spoke of gender identity crises, of the need for stable role models, and finally, in naked honesty, of the fear that his son would grow up to be somehow less than a man.

Cleo didn’t know, but cried herself to sleep over it many nights. They had read articles about it and found that psychologists were divided. Traditionalists made much of the importance of sex roles, while changers felt sex roles were important only to those who were trapped in them; with the breaking of the sexual barrier, the concept of roles vanished.

The day finally came when the clone body was ready. Cleo still did not know what she should do.

“Are you feeling comfortable now? Just nod if you can’t talk.”

“Wha . . .”

“Relax. It’s all over. You’ll be feeling like walking in a few minutes. We’ll have someone take you home. You may feel drunk for a while, but there’s no drugs in your system.”

“Wha’ . . . happen?”

“It’s over. Just relax.”

Cleo did, curling up in a ball. Eventually he began to laugh.

Drunk was not the word for it. He sprawled on the bed, trying on pronouns for size. It was all so funny. He was on his back with his hands in his lap. He giggled and rolled back and forth, over and over, fell on the floor in hysterics.

He raised his head.

“Is that you, Jules?”

“Yes, it’s me.” He helped Cleo back onto the bed, then sat on the edge, not too near, but not unreachably far away. “How do you feel?”

He snorted. “Drunker ’n a skunk.” He narrowed his eyes, forced them to focus on Jules. “You must call me Leo now. Cleo is a woman’s name. You shouldn’t have called me Cleo then.”

“All right. I didn’t call you Cleo, though.”

“You didn’t? Are you sure?”

“I’m very sure it’s something I wouldn’t have said.”

“Oh. Okay.” He lifted his head and looked confused for a moment. “You know what? I’m gonna be sick.”

Leo felt much better an hour later. He sat in the living room with Jules, both of them on the big pillows that were the only furniture.

They spoke of inconsequential matters for a time, punctuated by long silences. Leo was no more used to the sound of his new voice than Jules was.

“Well,” Jules said, finally, slapping his hands on his knees and standing up. “I really don’t know what your plans are from here. Did you want to go out tonight? Find a woman, see what it’s like?”

Leo shook his head. “I tried that out as soon as I got home.” he said. “The male orgasm, I mean.”

“What was it like?”

He laughed. “Certainly you know that by now.”

“No, I meant, after being a woman—”

“I know what you mean.” He shrugged. “The erection is interesting. So much larger than what I’m used to. Otherwise . . .” He frowned for a moment. “A lot the same. Some different. More localized. Messier.”

“Um.” Jules looked away, studying the electric fireplace as if seeing it for the first time. “Had you planned to move out? It isn’t necessary, you know. We could move people around. I can go in with Paul, or we could move him in with me in . . . in our old room. You could have his.” He turned away from Leo, and put his hand to his face.

Leo ached to get up and comfort him, but felt it would be exactly the wrong thing to do. He let Jules get himself under control.

“If you’ll have me, I’d like to continue sleeping with you.”

Jules said nothing, and didn’t turn around.

“Jules, I’m perfectly willing to do whatever will make you most comfortable. There doesn’t have to be any sex. Or I’d be happy to do what I used to do when I was in late pregnancy. You wouldn’t have to do anything at all.”

“No sex,” he said.

“Fine, fine. Jules, I’m getting awfully tired. Are you ready to sleep?”

There was a long pause, then he turned and nodded.

They lay quietly, side by side, not touching. The lights were out; Leo could barely see the outline of Jules’s body.

After a long time, Jules turned on his side.

“Cleo, are you in there? Do you still love me?”

“I’m here,” she said. “I love you. I always will.”

Jules jumped when Leo touched him, but made no objection. He began to cry, and Leo held him close. They fell asleep in each other’s arms.

The Oophyte was as full and noisy as ever. It gave Leo a headache.

He did not like the place any more than Cleo had, but it was the only place he knew to find sex partners quickly and easily, with no emotional entanglements and no long process of seduction. Everyone there was available; all one needed to do was ask. They used each other for sexual calisthenics just one step removed from masturbation, cheerfully admitted the fact, and took the position that if you didn’t approve, what were you doing there? There were plenty of other places for romance and relationships.

Leo didn’t normally approve of it—not for himself, though he cared not at all what other people did for amusement. He preferred to know someone he bedded.

But he was here tonight to learn. He felt he needed the practice. He did not buy the argument that he would know just what to do because he had been a woman and knew what they liked. He needed to know how people reacted to him as a male.

Things went well. He approached three women and was accepted each time. The first was a mess—so that’s what they meant by too soon!—and she was rather indignant about it until he explained his situation. After that she was helpful and supportive.

He was about to leave when he was propositioned by a woman who said her name was Lynx. He was tired, but decided to go with her.

Ten frustrating minutes later she sat up and moved away from him. “What are you here for, if that’s all the interest you can muster? And don’t tell me it’s my fault.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot. T thought I could . . . well, I didn’t realize I had to be really interested before I could perform.”

“Perform? That’s a funny way to out it.”

“I’m sorry.” He told her what the problem was, how many times he had made love in the last two hours. She sat on the edge of the bed and ran her hands through her hair, frustrated and irritable.

“Well, it’s not the end of the world. There’s plenty more out there. But you could ewe a girl a warning. You didn’t have to say yes back there.”

“I know. It’s my fault. I’ll have to learn to judge my capacity, I guess. It’s just that I’m used to being able to, even if I’m not particularly—”

Lynx laughed. “What am I saving? Listen to me. Honey, I used to have the same problem myself. Weeks of not getting it up. And I know it hurts.”

“Well,” Leo said. “I know what you’re feeling like, too. It’s no fun.”

Lynx shrugged. “In other circumstances, yeah. But like I said, the woods are full of ’em tonight. I won’t have any problem.” She put her hand on his cheek and pouted at him. “Hey, I didn’t hurt your poor male ego, did I?”

Leo thought about it, probed around for bruises, and found none.

“No.”

She laughed. “I didn’t think so. Because you don’t have one. Enjoy it, Leo. A male ego is something that has to be grown carefully, when you’re young. People have to keep pointing out what you have to do to be a man, so you can recognize failure when you can’t ‘perform.’ How come you used that word?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was just thinking of it that way.”

“Trying to be a quote man unquote. Leo, you don’t have enough emotional investment in it. And you’re lucky. It took me over a year to shake mine. Don’t be a man. Be a male human, instead. The switchover’s a lot easier that way.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

She patted his knee. “Trust me. Do you see me getting all upset because I wasn’t sexy enough to turn you on, or some such garbage? No. I wasn’t brought up to worry that way. But reverse it. If I’d done to you what you just did to me, wouldn’t something like that have occurred to you?”

“I think it would. Though I’ve always been pretty secure in that area.”

“The most secure of us are whimpering children beneath it, at least some of the time. You understand that I got upset because you said yes when you weren’t ready? And that’s all I was upset about? It was impolite, Leo. A male human shouldn’t do that to a female human. With a man and a woman, it’s different. The poor fellow’s got a lot of junk in his head, and so does the woman, so they shouldn’t be held responsible for the tricks their egos play on them.”

Leo laughed. “I don’t know if you’re making sense at all. But I like the sound of it. ‘Male human.’ Maybe I’ll see the difference one day.”

Some of the expected problems never developed.

Paul barely noticed the change. Leo had prepared himself for a traumatic struggle with his son, and it never came. If it changed Paul’s life at all, it was in the fact that he could now refer to his maternal parent as Leo instead of mother.

Strangely enough, it was Lilli who had the most trouble at first. Leo was hurt by it, tried not to show it, and did everything he could to let her adjust gradually. Finally she came to him one day about a week after the change. She said she had been silly, and wanted to know if she could get a change, too, since one of her best friends was getting one. Leo talked her into remaining female until after the onset of puberty. He told her he thought she might enjoy it.

Leo and Jules circled each other like two tigers in a cage, unsure if a fight was necessary but ready to start clawing out eyes if it came to it. Leo didn’t like the analogy; if he had still been a female tiger, he would have felt sure of the outcome. But he had no wish to engage in a dominance struggle with Jules.

They shared an apartment, a family, and a bed. They were elaborately polite, but touched each other only rarely, and Leo always felt he should apologize when they did. Jules would not meet his eyes; their gazes would touch, then rebound like two cork balls with identical static charges.

But eventually Jules accepted Leo. He was “that guy who’s always around” in Jules’s mind. Leo didn’t care for that, but saw it as progress. In a few more days Jules began to discover that he liked Leo. They began to share things, to talk more. The subject of their previous relationship was taboo for a while. It was as if Jules wanted to know Leo from scratch, not acknowledging there had ever been a Cleo who had once been his wife.

It was that simple; Leo would not let it be. Jules sometimes sounded like he was mourning the passing of a loved one when he hesitantly began talking about the hurt inside him. He was able to talk freely to Leo, and it was in a slightly different manner from the way he had talked to Cleo. He poured out his soul. It was astonishing to Leo that there were so many bruises on it, so many defenses and insecurities. There was buried hostility which Jules had never felt free to tell a woman.

Leo let him go on, but when Jules started a sentence with, “I could never tell this to Cleo,” or, “Now that she’s gone,” Leo would go to him, take his hand, and force him to look.

“I’m Cleo,” he would say. “I’m right here, and I love you.”

They started doing things together. Jules took him to places Cleo had never been. They went out drinking together and had a wonderful time getting sloshed. Before, it had always been dinner with a few drinks or dopesticks, then a show or concert. Now they might come home at 0200 harmonizing loud enough to get thrown in jail. Jules admitted he hadn’t had so much fun since his college days.

Socializing was a problem. Few of their old friends were changers, and neither of them wanted to face the complications of going to a party as a couple. They couldn’t make friends among changers, because Jules correctly saw he would be seen as an outsider.

So they saw a lot of men. Leo had thought he knew all of Jules’s close friends, but found he had been wrong. He saw a side of Jules he had never seen before: more relaxed in ways, some of his guardedness gone, but with other defenses in place. Leo sometimes felt like a spy, looking in on a stratum of society he had always know it was there, but he had never been able to penetrate. If Cleo had walked into the group its structure would have changed subtly; she would have created a new milieu by her presence, like light destroying the atom it was meant to observe.

After his initial outing to the Oophyte, Leo remained celibate for a long time. He did not want to have sex casually; he wanted to love Jules. As far as he knew, Jules was abstaining, too.

But they found an acceptable alternative in double-dating. They shopped around together for a while, taking out different women and having a lot of fun without getting into sex, until each settled on a woman he could have a relationship with. Jules was with Diane, a woman he had known at work for many years. Leo went out with Harriet.

The four of them had great times together. Leo loved being a pal to Jules, but would not let it remain simply that. He took to reminding Jules that he could do this with Cleo, too. What Leo wanted to emphasize was that he could be a companion, a buddy, a confidant no matter which sex he was. He wanted to combine the best of being a woman and being a man, be both things for Jules, fulfill all his needs. But it hurt to think that Jules would not do the same for him.

“Well, hello, Leo. I didn’t expect to see you today.”

“Can I come in, Harriet?”

She held the door open for him.

“Can I get you anything? Oh, yeah, before you go any further, that ‘Harriet’ business is finished. I changed my name today. It’s Joule from now on. That’s spelled j-o-u-l-e.”

“Okay, Joule. Nothing for me, thanks.” He sat on her couch.

Leo was not surprised at the new name. Changers had a tendency to get away from “name” names. Some did as Cleo had done by choosing a gender equivalent or a similar sound. Others ignored gender connotations and used the one they had always used. But most eventually chose a neutral word, according to personal preference.

“Jules, Julia,” he muttered.

“What was that?” Joule’s brow wrinkled slightly. “Did you come here for mothering? Things going badly?”

Leo slumped down and contemplated his folded hands.

“I don’t know. I guess I’m depressed. How long has it been now? Five months? I’ve learned a lot, but I’m not sure just what it is. I feel like I’ve grown. I see the world . . . well, I see things differently, yes. But I’m still basically the same person.”

“In the sense that you’re the same person at thirty-three as you were at ten?”

Leo squirmed. “Okay. Yeah, I’ve changed. But it’s not any kind of reversal. Nothing turned topsy-turvy. It’s an expansion. It’s not a new viewpoint. It’s like filling something up, moving out into unused spaces. Becoming . . .” His hands groped in the air, then fell back into his lap. “It’s like a completion.”

Joule smiled. “And you’re disappointed? What more could you ask?”

Leo didn’t want to get into that just yet. “Listen to this, and see if you agree. I always saw male and female—whatever that is, and I don’t know if the two really exist other than physically and don’t think it’s important anyway. . . . I saw those qualities as separate. Later, I thought of them like Siamese twins in everybody’s head. But the twins were usually fighting, trying to cut each other off. One would beat die other down, maim it, throw it in a cell, and never feed it, but they were always connected and the beaten-down one would make the winner pay for the victory.

“So I wanted to try and patch things up between them. I thought I’d just introduce them to each other and try to referee, but they got along a lot better than I expected. In fact, they turned into one whole person, and found they could be very happy together. I can’t tell them apart any more. Does that make any sense?”

Joule moved over to sit beside him.

“It’s a good analogy, in its way. I feel something like that, but I don’t think about it any more. So what’s the problem? You just told me you feel whole now.”

Leo’s face contorted. “Yes. I do. And if I am, what does that make Jules?” He began to cry, and Joule let him get it out, just holding his hand. She thought he’d better face it alone, this time. When he had calmed down, she began to speak quietly.

“Leo, Jules is happy as he is. I think he could be much happier, but there’s no way for us to show him that without having him do something that he fears so much. It’s possible that he will do it someday, after more time to get used to it. And it’s possible that he’ll hate it and run screaming back to his manhood. Sometimes the maimed twin can’t be rehabilitated.”

She sighed heavily, and got up to pace the room. “There’s going to be a lot of this in the coming years,” she said. “A lot of broken hearts. We’re not really very much like them, you know. We get along better. We’re not angels, but we may be the most civilized, considerate group the race has yet produced. There are fools and bastards among us, just like the one-sexers, but I think we tend to be a little less foolish, and a little less cruel. I think changing is here to stay.

“And what you’ve got to realize is that you’re lucky. And so is Jules. It could have been much worse. I know of several broken homes just among my own friends. There’s going to be many more before society has assimilated this. But your love for Jules and his for you has held you together. He’s made a tremendous adjustment, maybe as big as the one you made. He likes you. In either sex. Okay, so you don’t make love to him as Leo. You may never reach that point.”

“We did. Last night.” Leo shifted on the couch. “I . . . I got mad. I told him if he wanted to see Cleo, he had to learn to relate to me, because I’m me, dammit.”

“I think that might have been a mistake.”

Leo looked away from her. “I’m starting to think so, too.”

“But I think the two of you can patch it up, if there’s any damage. You’ve come through a lot together.”

“I didn’t mean to force anything on him, I just got mad.”

“And maybe you should have. It might have been just the thing. You’ll have to wait and see.”

Leo wiped his eyes and stood up.

“Thanks, Harr . . . sorry. Joule. You’ve helped me. I . . . uh, I may not be seeing you as often for a while.”

“I understand. Let’s stay friends, okay?” She kissed him, and he hurried away.

She was sitting on a pillow facing the door when he came home from work, her legs crossed, elbows resting on her knee with a dopestick in her hand. She smiled at him.

“Well, you’re home early. What happened?”

“I stayed home from work.” She nearly choked, trying not to laugh. He threw his coat to the closet and hurried into the kitchen. She heard something being stirred, then the sound of glass shattering. He burst through the doorway.

“Cleo!”

“Darling, you look so handsome with your mouth hanging open.”

He shut it, but still seemed unable to move. She went to him, feeling tingling excitement in her loins like the return of an old friend. She put her arms around him, and he nearly crushed her. She loved it.

He drew back slightly and couldn’t seem to get enough of her face, his eyes roaming every detail.

“How long will you stay this way?” he asked. “Do you have any idea?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

He smiled, a little sheepishly. “I hope you won’t take this wrong. I’m so happy to see you. Maybe I shouldn’t say it . . . but no, I think I’d better. I like Leo. I think I’ll miss him, a little.”

She nodded. “I’m not hurt. How could I be?” She drew away and led him to a pillow. “Sit down, Jules. We have to have a talk.” His knees gave way under him and he sat, looking up expectantly.

“Leo isn’t gone, and don’t you ever think that for a minute. He’s right here.” She thumped her chest and looked at him defiantly. “He’ll always be here. He’ll never go away.”

“I’m sorry, Cleo, I—”

“No, don’t talk yet. It was my own fault, but I didn’t know any better. I never should have called myself Leo. It gave you an easy out. You didn’t have to face Cleo being a male. I’m changing all that. My name is Nile. N-i-l-e. I won’t answer to anything else.”

“All right. It’s a nice name.”

“I thought of calling myself Lion. For Leo the lion. But I decided to be who I always was, the queen of the Nile, Cleopatra. For Old time’s sake.”

He said nothing, but his eyes showed his appreciation. “What you have to understand is that they’re both gone, in a sense. You’ll never be with Cleo again. I look like her now. I resemble her inside, too, like an adult resembles the child. I have a tremendous amount in common with what she was. But I’m not her.”

He nodded. She sat beside him and took his hand.

“Jules, this isn’t going to be easy. There are things I want to do, people I want to meet. We’re not going to be able to share the same friends. We could drift apart because of it. I’m going to have to fight resentment because you’ll be holding me back. You won’t let me explore your female side like I want to. You’re going to resent me because I’ll be trying to force you into something you think is wrong for you. But I want to try and make it work.”

He let out his breath. “God, Cl . . . Nile. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I thought you were leading up to leaving me.”

She squeezed his hand. “Not if I can help it. I want each of us to try and accept the other as they are. For me, that includes being male whenever I feel like it. It’s all the same to me, but I know it’s going to be hard for you.”

They embraced, and Jules wiped his tears on her shoulder, then faced her again.

“I’ll do anything and everything in my power, up to—” She put her finger to her lips. “I know. I accept you that way. But I’ll keep trying to convince you.”

THE LOCUSTS

Larry Niven

We assume that Evolution, like entropy, is a one-way street. The assumption is unproved.

There are no men on Tau Ceti IV.

Near the equator on the ridged ribbon of continent which reaches north and south to cover both poles, the evidence of Man still show. There is the landing craft, a great thick saucer with a rounded edge gaping doors and vast empty space inside. Ragged clumps of grass and scrub vegetation surround its base, now. There is the small town where they lived, grew old, and died: tall stone houses, a main street of rock fused with atomic fire, a good deal of machinery whose metal is still bright. There is the land itself overgrown but still showing the traces of a square arrangement that once marked it as farmland.

And there is the fores4 reaching north and south along the sprawling ribbon of continent, spreading even to the innumerable islands which form two-thirds of Ridgeback’s land mass Where forest cannot grow, because of insufficient water or because the carefully bred bacteria have not yet built a sufficient depth of topsoil, there is grass, an exceptionally hardy hybrid of Buffalo and Cord with an abnormal number of branching roots, developing a dense and fertile sod.

There are flocks of moos, resurrected from a lost New Zealand valley. The great flightless birds roam freely, sharing their grazing land with expanding herds of wild cattle and buffalo.

There are things in the forest. They prefer it there, but will occasionally shamble out into the grasslands and sometimes even into the town. They themselves do not understand why they go: there is no food and they do not need building materials or other things which may be there for the scavenging. They always leave the town before nightfall arrives.

When men came the land was as barren as a tabletop.

Doc and Elise were among the last to leave the ship. He took his wife’s hand and walked down the ramp, eager to feel alien loam between his toes. He kept his shoes on. They’d have to make the loam first.

The other colonists were exceptionally silent, as if each were afraid to speak. Not surprising, Doc thought, The first words spoken on Ridgeback would become history.

The robot probes had found five habitable worlds besides Ridgeback in Earth’s neighborhood. Two held life in more or less primitive stages, but Ridgeback was perfect. There was one-celled life in Ridgeback’s seas, enough to give the planet an oxygenating atmosphere; and no life at all on land. They would start with a clean slate.

So the biologists had chosen what they believed was a representative and balanced ecology. A world’s life was stored in the cargo hold now, in frozen fertilized eggs and stored seeds and bacterial cultures, ready to go to work.

Doc looked out over his new home, the faint seabreeze stinging his eyes. He had known Ridgeback would be barren, but he had not expected the feel of a barren world to move him.

The sky was bright blue, clouds shrouding Tau Ceti, a sun wider and softer than the sun of Earth. The ocean was a deeper blue, flat and calm. There was no dirt. There was dust and sand and rock, but nothing a farming man would call dirt. There were no birds, no insects. The only sound was that of sand and small dust-devils dancing in the wind, a low moan almost below the threshold of human hearing.

Doc remembered his college geology class’ fieldtrip to the Moon. Ridgeback wasn’t dead as Luna was dead. It was more like his uncle’s face, after the embalmers got through with him. It looked alive, but it wasn’t.

Jase, the eldest of them and the colony leader, raised his hand and waited. When all eyes were on him he crinkled his eyes happily, saving his biggest smile for his sister Cynnie, who was training a hobotape camera on him. “We’re here, people,” his voice boomed in the dead world’s silence. “It’s good, and it’s ours. Let’s make the most of it.”

There was a ragged cheer and the colonists surged toward the cargo door of the landing craft. The lander was a flattish dome now, its heat shield burned almost through, its Dumbo-style atomic motor buried in dust. It had served its purpose and would never move again. The great door dropped and became a ramp. Crates and machinery began to emerge on little flatbed robot trucks.

Elise put her arm around her husband’s waist and hugged him. She murmured, “It’s so empty.”

“So far.” Doc unrolled a package of birth control pills, and felt her flinch.

“Two years before we can have children.”

Did she mean it as a question? “Right,” be said. They had talked it through too often, in couples and in groups, in training and aboard ship. “At least until Jill gets the ecology going.”

“Uh huh.” An impatient noise.

Doc wondered if she believed it. At twenty-four, tall and wiry and with seven years of intensive training behind him, be felt competent to handle most emergencies. But children, and babies in particular, were a problem he could postpone.

He had interned for a year at Detroit Memorial, but most of his schooling related directly to General Colonization. His medical experience was no better than Elise’s, his knowledge not far superior to that of a 20th century GP. Like his shipmates, Doc was primarily a trained crewman and colonist. His courses in world settling—funny chemistry,” water purification, basic mine engineering, exotic factor recognition, etc. were largely guesswork. There were no interstellar colonies, not yet.

And bearing children would be an act of faith, a taking possession of the land. Some had fought the delay bitterly. The starship would have been smelling of babies shortly after takeoff if they’d had their way.

He offered Elise a pill. “Bacteria and earthworms come first. Men last,” he said. “We’re too high on the chain. We can’t overload the ecology—”

“Uh huh.”

“—before we’ve even got one. And look—”

She took a six-month birth control pill and swallowed it.

So Doc didn’t say: suppose it doesn’t work out? Suppose we have to go home? He passed out the pills and watched the women take them, crossing names off a list in his head.

The little robot trucks were all over the place now. Their flat beds were endless belts, and they followed a limited repertoire of voiced orders. They had the lander half unloaded already. When Doc bad finished his pill pushing he went to work beside Elise, unloading crates. His thirty patients, including himself, were sickeningly healthy. As an unemployed doctor he’d have to do honest work until someone got ill.

He was wrong, of course. Doc had plenty of employment. His patients were doing manual labor in 1.07 gravities. They’d gained an average often pounds the moment the landing craft touched down. It threw their coordination and balance off, causing them to strain muscles and gash themselves.

One of the robot trucks ran over Chris’ foot. Chris didn’t wince or curse as Doc manipulated the bones, but his teeth ground silently together.

“All done here, Chris.” Doc smiled. The meteorologist looked at him bleakly from behind wire-rimmed glasses, eyes blinking without emotion. “Hey, you’re a better man than I am. If I had a wound like that, I’d scream my head off.”

Something only vaguely like a smile crossed Chris’ lips. “Thanks, Doc,” he said, and limped out.

Remarkable control, Doc mused. But then again, that’s Chris.

A week after landing, Ridgeback’s nineteen-hour day caught up with them. Disrupted body rhythms are no joke; adding poor sleep to the weight adjustment led to chronic fatigue. Doc recognized the signs quickly.

“I’m surprised that it took this long,” he said to Elise as she tossed, sleepless.

“Why couldn’t we have done our adjusting on ship?” she mumbled, opening a bleary eye.

“There’s more to it than just periods of light and darkness. Every planet has its own peculiarities. You just have to get used to them before your sleep cycles adjust.”

“Well what am I supposed to do? Jesus, hand me the sleeping pills, wouldja please? I just want to sleep.”

“Nope. Don’t want anyone hooked on sleeping pills. We’ve got the ‘russian sleep’ sets. You’ll have one tomorrow.” The “russian sleep” headsets were much preferred over chemical sedatives. They produced unconsciousness with a tiny trickle of current through the brain.

“Good,” Elise yawned. “Sunset and dawn, they both seem to come too soon.”

The colony went up fast. It was all prefabs, makeshift and temporary, the streets cluttered with the tools, machinery and electric cables which nobody had put away because there was no place for them. Gradually places were made. Hydroponic tanks were assembled and stocked, and presently the colonists were back on fresh food.

Much more gradually, the stone houses began to appear.

They blasted their own rock from nearby cliffs with guncotton from the prefab chemical factory. They hauled the fractured stone on the robot trucks, and made concrete to stick it together. There was technology to spare, and endless power from the atomic motor in the landing craft. They took their time with the houses. Prefabs would weather the frequent warm rains for long enough. The stone houses were intended to last much longer. The colonists built thick walls, and left large spices so that the houses could be expanded when later generations saw fit.

Doc squinted into the mirror, brushing his teeth with his usual precise vertical movements. He jumped when he felt a splash of hot water hit his back. “Cut that out, Elise,” he laughed.

She settled back in her bathtub, wrinkling her nose at him. Three years of meager showers on the ship had left her dying for a real bathtub, where she could waste gallons of water without guilt.

“Spoilsport,” she teased. “If you were any kind of fun, you’d come over here and . . .”

“And what?” he asked, interested.

“And rub my back.”

“And that’s supposed to be fun?”

“I was thinking that we could rub it with you.” She grinned, seeing Doc’s eyes light up. “And then maybe we could rub you with me . . .”

Later, they toweled each other off, still tingling. “Look!” Doc said, pulling her in front of the mirror. He studied her, marveling. Had Elise become prettier, or was he seeing her with new eyes? He knew she laughed louder and more often than when they had met years ago in school, she the child of a wealthy family and he a scholarship student who dreamt of the stars. He knew that her body was more firm and alive than it had been in her teens. The same sun that had burnt her body nut-brown had lightened her reddish hair to strawberry blond. She grinned at him from the mirror and asked, “Do you propose to take all the credit?”

He nodded happily. He’d always been fit, but his muscles had been stringy, the kind that didn’t show. Now they bulged, handsome curves filling out chest and shoulders, legs strong from lifting and moving rock. His skin had darkened under the probing of a warm, friendly sun. He was sleeping well, and so was she.

All of the colonists were darker, more muscular, with thicker calluses on hands and feet. Under open sky or high ceilings they walked straighter than the men and women of Earth’s cities. They talked more boldly and seemed to fill more space. In the cities of Earth, the ultimate luxury had been building space. It was beyond the means of all but the wealthiest. Here, there was land for the taking, and twelve foot ceilings could be built. The house Doc was building for Elise—almost finished now—would be as fine as any her father could have built for her. One that would be passed on to their children, and then to their grandchildren.

She seemed to echo his thought. “One last step. I want a bulge, right here,” and she patted her flat abdomen. “Your department.”

“And Jill’s. We’re up to mammals already, and we’re adjusting. I’ve got half the ‘russian sleep’ sets back in the infirmary already.”

The Orion spacecraft was a big, obtrusive object, mace-shaped, cruising constantly across the sky. What had been a fifth of a mile of deuterium snowball, the fuel supply for the starship’s battery of laser-fusion motors, was now a thin, shiny skin, still inflated by the residue of deuterium gas. It was the head of the mace. The life support system, ending in motors and shock absorbers, formed the handle.

Roy had taken the ground-to-orbit craft up and was aboard the Orion now, monitoring the relay as Cynnie beamed her holotape up. It was lonely. Once there had been too little room; now there was too much. The ship still smelled of too many people crowded too close for too long. Roy adjusted the viewscreen and grinned back at Cynnie’s toothy smile.

“This is Year Day on Ridgeback,” she said in her smooth announcer’s voice. “It was a barren world when we came. Now, slowly, life is spreading across the land. The farming teams have spent this last year dredging mulch from the sea bed and boiling it to kill the native life. Now it grows the tame bacteria that will make our soil.” The screen showed a sequence of action scenes: tractors plowing furrows in the harsh dirt; colonists glistening with sweat as they pulled boulders from the ground; and Jill supervising the spreading of the starter soil. Grass seed and earthworms were sown into the trenches, and men and machines worked together to fold them into the earth.

Cynnie had mounted a camera on one of the small flyers for an aerial view. “The soil is being spread along a ten-mile strip,” she said, “and grains are being planted. Later we’ll have fruit trees and shade trees, bamboo and animal feed.”

It was good, Roy thought, watching. It was smooth. Getting it all had been rough enough. Before they were finished the colonists had become damn sick of Roy and Cynnie poking their cameras into their every activity. That sign above the auditorium toilet: Smile! Roy Is Watching!

He’d tried to tell them. “Don’t you know who it is that builds starships? It’s taxpayers, that’s who! And they’ve got to get something for their money. Sure we’re putting on a show for them. if we don’t, when election time comes around they may ask for a refund.”

Oh, they probably believed him. But the sign was still up.

Roy watched Cynnie interview Jase and Brew in the fields; watched Angie and Chris constructing the animal pens. Jill thawed some of the fertilized goat eggs and a tape was shown of the wriggling embryos.

“At first,” Cynnie reminisced, “Ridgeback was daunting. There was no sound: no crickets, no birdsongs, but no roar of traffic either. By day, the sky is Earthlike enough, but by night the constellations are brighter. It’s impossible to forget how far from home we are—we can’t even see Sol, invisible somewhere in the northern hemisphere. It’s hard to forget that no help of any kind could come in much less than twenty-five years. It would take five years just to refuel the ship. It takes fourteen years to make the trip, although thanks to relativity it was only three years ‘ship time.’

“Yes, we are alone.” The image of Cynnie’s sober face segued to the town hail, a geodesic dome of metal tubing sprayed with plastic. “But it is heartening that we have found, in each other, the makings of a community. We come together for midday meal, discussions, songfests and group worship services.”

Cynnie’s face was calm now, comforting. “We have no crime, and no unemployment. We’re much too busy for marital squabbles or political infighting.” She grinned, and the sparkle of her personality brought pleasure to Roy’s analytical mind. “In fact, I have work to do myself So, until next year, this is Cynnie Mitchell on Ridgeback, signing off.”

A year and a half after landing, a number of animals were out of incubation with a loss of less than two percent. The mammals drank synthetic milk now, but soon they would be milling in their pens, eating Ridgeback grass and adding their own rich wastes to the cooking compost heaps.

Friday night was community night at the town hail.

From the inside the ribs of the dome were still visible through the sprayed plastic walls, and some of the decorations were less than stylish, but it was a warm place, a friendly, relaxing place where the common bond between the Ridgebackers was strengthened.

Jill, especially, seemed to love the stage, and took every opportunity to mount it, almost vibrating with her infectious energy.

“Everything’s right on schedule,” she said happily. “The fruit flies are breeding like mad.” (Booo!) “And if! hear that again I’m gonna break out the mosquitoes. Gang, there are things we can live without, but we don’t know what they are yet. Chances are we’ll be raising the sharks sooner or later. We’ve been lucky so far. Really lucky.” She cleared her throat dramatically. “And speaking of luck, we have Chris with some good news for the farmers, and bad news for the sunbathers. Chris?”

There was scattered applause, most vigorously from Chris’ tiny wife Angie. He walked to the lectern and adjusted the microphone before speaking.

“We, uh,” he took off his glasses, polishing them on his shirt, then replaced them, smiling nervously. “We’ve been having good weather, people, but there’s a storm front moving over the mountains. I think Greg can postpone the irrigation canals for a week, we’re going to get plenty wet.”

He coughed, and moved the microphone close to his mouth. “June and I are working to program the atmospheric model into the computer. Until we do, weather changes will keep catching us unaware. We have to break down a fairly complex set of thermo and barometric dynamics into something that can be dealt with systematically—wind speed, humidity, vertical motion, friction, pressure gradients, and a lot of other factors still have to be fed in, but we’re making progress. Maybe next year we’ll be able to tell you how to dress for the tenth anniversary of Landing Day.”

There were derisive snorts and laughter, and Chris was applauded back into his seat.

Jase bounded onto the stage and grabbed the mike. “Any more announcements? No? AU right, then, we all voted on tonight’s movie, so no groans, please. Lights?”

The auditorium dimmed. He slipped from the stage and the twin beams of the holo projector flickered onto the screen.

It was a war movie, shot in flatfilm but optically reconstructed to simulate depth. Doc found it boring. He slipped out during a barrage of cannon fire. He headed to the lab and found Jill there already, using one of the small microscopes.

“Hi hon,” he called out, flipping on his desk light. “Working late?”

“Well, I’m maybe just a wee bit more bugged than I let on. Just a little.”

“About what?”

“I keep thinking that one day we’ll find out that we left something out of our tame ecology. It’s just a feeling, but it won’t go away.”

“Like going on vacation,” Doc said, deliberately flippant. “You know you forgot something. You’d just rather it was your toothbrush and not your passport.”

She smeared a cover glass over a drop of fluid on a slide and set it to dry. “Yes, it feels like that.”

“Do you really have mosquitoes in storage?”

She twinkled and nodded. “Yep. Hornets too.”

“Just how good is it going? You know how impatient everyone is.”

“No real problems. There sure as hell might have been, but thanks to my superior planning,” she stuck out her tongue at Doc’s grimace. “We’ll have food for ourselves and all the children we can raise. I’ve been getting a little impatient myself, you know? As if there’s a part of me that isn’t functioning at full efficiency.”

Doc laughed. “Then I think you’d better tell Greg.”

“I’ll do better. I’ll announce it tonight and let all the fathers-to-be catch the tidings in one shot.”

“Oh boy.”

“What?”

“No, it has to be done that way. I know it. I’m just thinking about nine months from now. Oh boy.”

So it was announced that evening. As Doc might have expected, someone had already cheated. Somehow Nat, the midwestern earthmother blond, had taken a contraceptive pill and, even with Doc watching, had avoided swallowing it. Doc was fairly sure that her husband Brew knew nothing of it, although she was already more than four months along when she confessed.

Nat had jumped the gun, and there wasn’t a woman on Ridgeback who didn’t envy her. A year and eleven months after Landing Day, Doc delivered Ridgeback’s first baby.

Sleepy, exhausted by her hours of labor, Nat looked at her baby with a pride that was only half maternal. Her face was flushed, yellow hair tangled in mats with perspiration and fatigue. She held her baby, swaddled in blankets, at her side. “I can hear them outside. What do they want?” she asked drowsily, fighting to keep her eyelids open.

Doc breathed deeply. Ridiculous, but the scentless air of Ridgeback seemed a little sweeter. “They’re waiting for a glimpse of the little crown princess.”

“Well, she’s staying here. Tell them she’s beautiful,” Ridgeback’s first mother whispered, and dropped off to sleep.

Doc washed his hands and dried them on a towel. He stood above the slumbering pair, considering. Then he gently pried the baby from her mother’s grip and took her in his arms. Half-conscious mother’s wish or no, the infant must be shown to the colony before they could rest. Especially Brew. He could see the Swede’s great broad hands knotting into nervous fists as he waited outside. And the rest of them in a half-crescent around the door; and the inevitable Cynnie and Roy with their holotape cameras.

“It’s a girl,” he told them. “Nat’s resting comfortably.” The baby was red as a tomato and looked as fragile as Venetian glass. She and Doc posed for the camera, then Doc left her with Brew to make a short speech.

Elise and Greg, Jill’s husband, had both had paramedic training. Doc set up a rotating eight-hour schedule for the three of them, starting with Elise. The group outside was breaking up as he left, but he managed to catch Jase.

“I’d like to be taken off work duties for a while,” he told the colony leader, when the two were alone.

Jase gripped his arm. “Something’s wrong with the baby?” There was a volume of concern in the question.

“I doubt it, but she is the first, and I want to watch her and Nat. Most of the women are pregnant now. I want to keep an eye on them, too.”

“You’re not worried about anything specific?”

When Elise left her shift at the maternity ward, she found him staring at the stone ceiling. She asked, “Insomnia again? Shall I get a ‘russian sleep’ set?”

She studied his face. “The baby?”

She’d seen it too, then. “You just left the baby. She’s fine, isn’t she?”

“They’re both fine. Sleeping. Harry?” She was the only one who called him that. “What is it?”

“No, nothing’s bothering me. You know everything I know. It’s just that . . .”

“Well?”

“It’s just that I want to do everything right. This is so important. So I keep checking back on myself, because there’s no one I can call in to check my work. Can you understand what I’m getting at?”

She pursed her lips. Then said, “I know that the only baby in the world could get a lot more attention than she needs. There shouldn’t be too many people around her, and they should all be smiling. That’s important to a baby.”

Doc watched as she took off her clothes and got into bed. The slight swell of her pregnancy was just beginning to show. Within six months there would be nine more children on Ridgeback, and one would be theirs.

Predictably, Brew’s and Nat’s daughter became Eve.

It seemed nobody but Doc had noticed anything odd about Eve. Even laymen know better than to expect a newborn child to be pretty. A baby Doesn’t begin to look like a baby until it is weeks old. The cherubs of the Renaissance paintings of Foucquet or Conegliano were taken from two year-olds. Naturally Eve looked odd, and most of the colony, who had never seen newborn children, took it in their stride . . .

But Doc worried.

The ship’s library was a world’s library. It was more comprehensive, and held more microfilm and holographically encoded information than any single library on earth. Doc spent weeks running through medical tapes, and got no satisfaction thereby.

Eve wasn’t sick. She was a “good baby”; she gave no more trouble than usual, and no less. Nat had no difficulty nursing her, which was good, as there were no adult cows available on Ridgeback.

Doc pulled a microfisch chip out of the viewer and yawned irritably. The last few weeks had cost him his adjustment to Ridgeback time, and gained him . . . well, a kind of general education in pediatrics. There was nothing specific to look for, no handle on the problem.

Bluntly put, Eve was an ugly baby.

There was nothing more to say, and nothing to do but wait.

Roy and Cynnie showed their tapes for the year. Cynnie had a good eye for detail. Until he watched the camera view trucking from the landing craft past the line of houses on Main Street, to Brew, to a closeup of Brew’s house, Doc had never noticed how Brew’s house reflected Brew himself. It was designed like the others: tall and squarish, with a sloped roof and small window. But the stones in Brew’s house were twice the size of those in Doc’s house. Brew was proud of his strength.

Roy was in orbit on Year Day, but Cynnie stayed to cover the festivities, such as they were. Earth’s hypothetical eager audience staff hadn’t seen Year Day One. Jase spoke for the camera, comparing the celebration with the first Thanksgiving Day in New England. He was right: it was a feast, a display of the variety of foods Ridgeback was now producing, and not much more than that.

His wife June sang a nondenominational hymn, and they all followed along, each in his own key. Nat fed Eve a bit of corncake and fruit juice, and the colonists applauded Eve’s gurgling smile.

The folks back on Earth might not have thought it very exciting, but to the Ridgebackers it meant everything. This was food they had grown themselves. All of them had bruises or blisters or calluses from weeding or harvesting. They were more than a community now, they were a world, and the fresh fruit and vegetables, and the hot breads, tasted better than anything they could have imagined.

Six months after the birth of Eve, Doc was sure. There was a problem.

The children of Ridgeback totaled seven. Two of the women had miscarried, fewer than he might have feared, and without complications. Jill was still carrying hers, and Doc was beginning to wonder; but it wasn’t serious yet. Jill was big and strong with wide hips and a deep bust. Even now Greg was hard put to keep her from commandeering one of the little flyers and jouncing off to the coastline to check the soil, or inland to supervise the fresh water fish preserve. Give her another week.

The night Elise had delivered their child, it had been special. She had had a dry birth, with the water sack rupturing too early, and Doc had had to use a lubrication device. Elise was conscious during the entire delivery, eschewing painkillers for the total experience of her first birth. She delivered safely, for which Doc had given silent thanks. His nerves were scraped to super-sensitivity, and he found himself just sitting and holding her hand, whispering affection and encouragement to her, while Greg did much of the work. With Elise’s approval he named their son Gerald, shortened to Jerry. Jerry was three weeks old now, healthy and squalling, with a ferocious grip in his tiny hands.

But even a father’s pride could not entirely hide the squarish jawline, the eyes, the eyes.

All the children had it, all the six recent ones. And Eve hadn’t lost it. Doc continued his research in the microlibrary, switching from pediatrics to genetics. He had a microscope and an electron microscope, worth their hundreds of thousands of dollars in transportation costs; he had scrapings of his own flesh and Eve’s and Jerry’s. What he lacked was a Nobel Prize geneticist to stand behind his shoulder and point out what were significant deviations as opposed to his own poor slide preparation techniques.

He caught Brew looking at him at mealtimes, as though trying to raise the nerve to speak. Soon the big man would break through his inhibitions, Doc could see it coming. Or perhaps Nat would broach the question. Her eldest brother had been retarded, and Doc knew she was sensitive about it. How long could it be before that pain rose to the surface?

And what would he say to them then?

It was not a mutation. One could hardly expect the same mutation to hit all of seven couples in the same way.

It was no disease. The children were phenomenally healthy.

So Doc worked late into the night, sometimes wearing a black scowl as he retraced dead ends. He needed advice, and advice was 11.9 light years away. Was he seeing banshees? Nobody else had noticed anything. Naturally not; the children all looked normal, for they all looked alike. Only Brew seemed disturbed. Hell, it was probably Doc that was worrying Brew, just as it was Doc that worried Elise. He ought to spend more time with Elise and Jerry.

Jill lost her baby. It was stillborn, pitiful in its frailty. Jill turned to Greg as the dirt showered down on the cloth that covered her child, biting her lip savagely, trying to stop the tears. She and her husband held each other for a long moment, then, with the rest of the colonists, they walked back to the dwellings.

The colonists had voted early, and unanimously, to give up coffins on Ridgebaek. Humans who died here would give their bodies to the conquest of the planet. Doc wondered if a coffin would have made this ceremony easier, more comforting in its tradition. Probably not, he thought. Dead is dead.

Doc went home with Elise. He’d been spending more time there lately, and less time with the microscopes. Jerry was crawling now, and he crawled everywhere; you had to watch him like a hawk. He could pick his parents unerringly out of a crowd of adults, and he would scamper across the floor, cooing, his eyes alight . . . his deepset brown eyes.

It was a week later that Jase came to him. After eight hours of labor June had finally released her burden. For a newborn infant the body was big and strong, though in any normal context he was a fragile, precious thing. As father, Jase was entitled to see him first. He looked down at his son and said, “He’s just like the others.” His eyes and his voice were hollow, and at that moment Doc could no longer see the jovial colony leader who called squaredanees at the weekly hoedown.

“Of course he is.”

“Look, don’t con me, Doc. I was eight when Cynnie was born. She didn’t look like any of them. And she never looked like Eve.”

“Don’t you think that’s for me to say?”

“Yes. And damned quick!”

Doc rubbed his jaw, considering. If he was honest with himself he had to admit he ached to talk to somebody. “Let’s make it tomorrow. In the ship’s library.”

Jase’s strong hand gripped his arm. “Now.”

“Tomorrow, Jase. I’ve got a lot to say, and there are things in the library you ought to see.”

“Here,” he said, dialing swiftly. A page appeared on the screen, three-quarters illustration, and one-quarter print to explain it. “Notice the head? And the hands. Eve’s fingers are longer than that. Her forehead slopes more. But look at these.” He conjured up a series of growth states paired with silhouettes of bone structure.

“She’s maturing much faster than normal.”

“At first I didn’t think anything about the head. Any infant’s head is distorted during passage from the uterus. It goes back to normal if the birth wasn’t difficult. And you can’t tell much from the features; all babies look pretty much alike. But the hands and arms bothered me.”

“And now?”

“See for yourself Her face is too big and her skull is too small and too flat. And I don’t like the jaw, or the thin lips.” Doc rubbed his eyes wearily. “And there’s the hair. That much hair isn’t unheard of at that age, but taken with everything else . . . you can see why I was worried.”

“And all the kids look just like her. Even Jase Junior.”

“Even Jerry. And Jill’s stillbirth.”

In the ship’s library there was a silence as of mourning.

Jase said, “We’ll have to tell Earth. The colony is a failure.”

Doc shook his head. “We’d better see how it develops first.”

“We can’t have normal children, Doc.”

“I’m not ready to give up, Jase. And if it’s true, we can’t go back to Earth, either.”

“What? Why?”

“This thing isn’t a mutation. Not in us, it can’t be. What it could be is a virus replacing some of the genes. A virus is a lot like a free-floating chromosome anyway. If we’ve got a disease that keeps us from having normal children—”

“That’s stupid. A virus here, waiting for us, where there’s nothing for it to live on but plankton? You—”

“No, no, no. It had to come with us. Something like the common cold could have mutated aboard ship. There was enough radiation outside the shielding. Someone sneezes in the airlock before he puts his helmet on. A year later someone else inhales the mutant.”

Jase thought it through. “We can’t take it back to Earth.”

“Right. So what’s the hurry? It’d be twenty-four years before they could answer a cry for help. Let’s take our time and find out what we’ve really got.”

“Doc, in God’s name, what can we tell the others?”

“Nothing yet. When the time comes I’ll tell them.”

Those few months were a busy time for Ridgeback’s doctor. Then they were over. The children were growing, and most of the women were pregnant, including Angie and Jill, who had both had miscarriages. Never again would all the women of Ridgeback be having children in one ear shattering population explosion.

Now there was little work for Doc. He spoke to Jase, who put him on the labor routines. Most of the work was agricultural, with the heavy jobs handled by machines. Robot trucks, trailing plows, scored rectangular patterns across the land.

The fenced bay was rich in Earthborn plankton, and now there were larger forms to eat the plankton. Occasionally Greg opened the filter to let discolored water spread out into the world, contaminating the ocean.

At night the colonists watched news from Earth, 11.9 years in transit, and up to a year older before Roy boarded the starship to beam it down. They strung the program out over the year in hour segments to make it last longer. There were no wars in progress, to speak of; the Procyon colony project had been abandoned; Macrostructures Inc. was still trying to build an interstellar ramjet. It all seemed very distant.

Jase came whistling into Doc’s lab, but backed out swiftly when he saw that he had interrupted a counseling session with Cynnie and Roy. Doc was the closest thing the colony had to a marriage therapist. Jase waited outside until the pair had left, then trotted in.

“Rough day?”

“Yeah. Jase, Roy and Cynnie don’t fight, do they?”

“They never did. They’re like twins. Married people do get to be like each other, but those two overdo it sometimes.”

“I knew it. There’s something wrong, but it’s not between them.” Doc rubbed his eyes on his sleeve. “They were sounding me out, trying to get me talking about the children without admitting they’re scared. Anyway what’s up?”

Jase brought his hands from behind his back. He had two bamboo poles rigged for fishing. “What say we exercise our manly prerogatives?”

“Ye gods! In our private spawning ground?”

“Why not? It’s big enough. There are enough fish. And we can’t let the surplus go; they’d starve. It’s a big ocean.”

By now the cultivated strip of topsoil led tens of miles north and south along the continent. Jill claimed that life would spread faster that way, outward from the edges of the strip. The colony was raising its own chicken eggs and fruit and vegetables. On Landing Day they’d been the first in generations to taste moa meat, whose rich flavor had come that close to making the New Zealand bird extinct. Why shouldn’t they catch their own fish?

They made a full weekend of it. They hauled a prefab with them on the flyer and set it up on the barren shore. For three days they fished with the springy bamboo poles. The fish were eager and trusting. They ate some of their catch, and stored the rest for later.

On the last day Jase said, “I kept waiting to see you lose some of that uptight look. You finally have, a little, I think.”

“Yeah. I’m glad this happened, Jase.”

“Okay. What about the children?”

He didn’t need to elaborate. Doc said, “They’ll never be normal.”

“Then what are they?”

“I dunno. How do you tell people who came twelve light years to build a world that their heirs will be . . .” he groped for words. “Whatever. Changed. Animals.”

“Christ. What a mess.”

“Give me time to tell Elise . . . if she hasn’t guessed by now. Maybe she has.”

“How long?”

“A week, maybe. Give us time to be off with Jerry. Might make it easier if we’re with him.”

“Or harder.”

“Yeah, there’s that.” He cast his line out again. “Anyway, she’ll keep the secret, and she’d never forgive me if I didn’t tell her first. And you’d better tell June the night before I make the big announcement.” The words seemed to catch in his throat and he hung his head, miserable.

Tentatively Jase said, “It’s absolutely nobody’s fault.”

“Oh, sure. I was just thinking about the last really big announcement I helped to make. Years ago. Seems funny now, Doesn’t it? It’s safe, people. You can start dreaming now. Go ahead and have those babies, folks. It’s all right . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked to Jase in guilty confusion. “What could I do, Jase? It’s like thalidomide. In the beginning, it all looked so wonderful.”

Jase was silent, listening to the sound of water lapping against the boat. “I just hate to tell Earth, that’s all,” he finally said in a low voice. “It’ll be like giving up. Even if we solve this thing, they’d never risk sending another ship.”

“But we’ve got to warn them.”

“Doc, what’s happening to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“How hard have you—no, never mind.” Jase pulled his line in, baited it and sent it whipping out again. Long silences are in order when men talk and fish.

“Jase, I’d give anything I have to know the answer. Some of the genes look different in the electron microscope. Maybe. Hell, it’s all really too fuzzy to tell, and I don’t really know what it means anyway. None of my training anticipated anything like this. You try to think of something.”

“Alien invasion.”

Pause. “Oh, really?”

Jase’s line jumped. He wrestled in a deep sea bass and freed the hook. He said, “It’s the safest, most painless kind of invasion. They find a world they want, but there’s an intelligent species in control. So they design a virus that will keep us from bearing intelligent children. After we’re gone they move in at their leisure. If they like they can use a countervirus, so the children can bear human beings again for slaves.”

The bamboo pole seemed dead in Doc’s hands. He said, “That’s uglier than anything I’ve thought of.”

“Well?”

“Could be. Insufficient data. If it’s true, it’s all the more reason to warn Earth. But Ridgeback is doomed.”

Jerry had his mother’s hair, sunbleached auburn. He had too much of it. On his narrow forehead it merged with his brows . . . his shelf of brow, and the brown eyes watching from way back. He hardly needed the shorts he was wearing; the hair would have been almost enough. He was nearly three.

He seemed to sense something wrong between his parents. He would spend some minutes scampering through the grove of sapling fruit trees, agile as a child twice his age; then suddenly return to take their hands and try to tug them both into action.

Doc thought of the frozen fertilized eggs of dogs in storage. Jerry with a dog . . . the thought was repulsive. Why? Shouldn’t a child have a dog?

“Well, of course I guessed something,” Elise said bitterly. “You were always in the library. When you were home, the way that you looked at Jerry . . . and me, come to think of it. I see now why you haven’t taken me to bed much lately.” She’d been avoiding his eyes, but now she looked full at him. “I do see. But, Harry, couldn’t you have asked me for help? I have some medical knowledge, and, and I’m your wife, and Jerry’s mother, damn it Harry!”

“Would you believe I didn’t want you worrying?”

“Oh, really? How did it work?”

Her sarcasm cut deep. Bleeding, he said, “Nothing worked.”

Jerry came out of the trees at a tottering run. Doc stood up, caught him, swung him around, chased him through the trees . . . came back puffing, smiling, holding his hand. He almost lost the smile, but Elise was smiling back, with some effort. She hugged Jerry, then pulled fried chicken from the picnic basket and offered it around.

She said, “That alien invasion idea is stupid.”

“Granted. It’d be easy to think someone has ‘done’ it to us.”

“Haven’t you found anything? Isn’t there anything I can help with?”

“I’ve found a lot. All the kids have a lower body temperature, two point seven degrees. They’re healthy as horses, but hell, who would they catch measles from? Their brain capacity is too small, and not much of it is frontal lobe. They’re hard to toilet train and they should have started babbling, at least, long ago. What counts is the brain, of course.”

Elise took one of Jerry’s small hands. Jerry crawled into her lap and she rocked him. “His hands are okay. Human. His eyes . . . are brown, like yours. His cheekbones are like yours, too. High and a little rounded.”

Doc tried to smile. “His eyes look a little strange. They’re not really slanted enough to suspect mongolism, but I’ll bet there’s a gene change. But where do I go from there? I can see differences, and they’re even consistent, but there’s no precedent for the analysis equipment to extrapolate from.” Doc looked disgusted. Elise touched his cheek, understanding.

“Can you teach me to use an electron microscope?”

Doc sat at the computer console, watching over Jill’s shoulder as she brought out the Orion vehicle’s image of Ridgeback. The interstellar spacecraft doubled as a weather eye, and the picture, once drab with browns and grays, now showed strips of green beneath the fragmented cloud cover. If Ridgeback was dead, it certainly didn’t show on the screen.

“Well, we’ve done a fair old job.” Jill grinned and took off her headset. Her puffy natural had collected dust and seeds and vegetable fluff until she gave up and shaved it off. The tightly curled mat just covered her scalp now, framing her chocolate cameo features. “The cultivated strip has spread like weeds. All along the continent now I get CO_2-oxygen exchange. It jumped the ridges last year, and now I get readings on the western side.”

“Are you happy?”

“No,” she said slowly. “I’ve done my job. Is it too much to want a child too? I wouldn’t care about the . . . problem. I just want . . .”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Doc said helplessly.

“I know, I know. But two miscarriages. Couldn’t they have known back on Earth? Wasn’t there any way to be sure? Why did I have to come all this way . . .” She caught herself and smiled thinly. “I guess I should count my blessings. I’m better off than poor Angie.”

“Poor Angie,” Doc echoed sadly. How could they have known about Chris? The night Doc announced his conclusions about the children, there had been tears and harsh words, but no violence. But then there was Chris.

Chris, who had wanted a child more than any of them could have known. Who had suffered silently through Angie’s first miscarriage, who hoped and prayed for the safe delivery of their second effort.

It had been an easy birth.

And the morning after Doc’s speech, the three of them, Chris, Angie and the baby, were found in the quiet of their stone house, the life still ebbing from Chris’ eyes and the gaps in his wrists.

“I’m sorry,” he said over and over, shaking his head as if he were cold, his watery brown eyes dulling. “I just couldn’t take it. I just . . . I just . . .” and he died. The three of them were buried in the cemetery outside of town, without coffins.

The town was different after the deaths, a stifling quiet hanging in the streets. Few colonists ate at the communal meals, choosing to take their suppers at home.

In an effort to bring everyone together, Jase encouraged them to come to town hall for Movie Night.

The film was “The Sound of Music.” The screen erupted with sound and color, dazzling green Alps and snow-crested mountains, happy song and the smiling faces of normal, healthy children.

Half the colonists walked out.

Most of the women took contraceptives now, except those who chose not to tamper with their estrogen balance. For these, Doc performed painless menstrual extractions bimonthly.

Nat and Elise insisted on having more children. Maybe the problem only affected the firstborn, they argued. Doc fought the idea at first. He found himself combatting Brew’s sullen withdrawal, Nat’s frantic insistence, and a core of hot anger in his own wife.

Earth could find a cure. It was possible. Then their grandchildren would be normal again, the heirs to a world.

He gave in.

But all the children were the same. In the end, Nat alone had not given up. She had borne five children, and was carrying her sixth.

The message of failure was halfway to Earth, but any reply was still nineteen years away. Doc had adapted the habit of talking things over with Jase, hoping that he would catch some glimpse of a solution.

“I still think it’s a disease,” he told Jase, who had heard that before, but didn’t mention it. The bay was quiet and their lines were still. They talked only during fishing trips. They didn’t want the rest of the colony brooding any more than they already were. “A mutant virus. But I’ve been wondering, could the changes have screwed us up? A shorter day, a longer year, a little heavier gravity. Different air mixture. No common cold, no mosquito bites; even that could be the key.”

On a night like this, in air this clear, you could even see starglades casting streaks across the water. A fish jumped far across the bay, and phosphorescence lit that patch of water for a moment. The Orion vehicle, mace-shaped, rose out of the west, past the blaze of the Pleiades. Roy would be rendezvousing with it now, preparing for tomorrow’s Year Day celebration.

Jase seemed to need these trips even more than Doc. After the murders the life seemed to have gone out of him, only flashes of his personality coming through at tranquil times like these. He asked, “Are you going to have Jill breed mosquitoes?”

Yes.”

“I think you’re reaching. Weren’t you looking at the genes in the cytoplasm?”

“Yeah. Elise’s idea, and it was a good one. I’d forgotten there were genes outside the cell nucleus. They control the big things, you know: not the shape of your fingers, but how many you get, and where. But they’re hard to find, Jase. And maybe we found some differences between our genes and the children’s, but even the computer Doesn’t know what the difference means.”

“Mosquitoes.” Jase shook his head. “We know there’s a fish down that way. Shall we go after him?”

“We’ve got enough. Have to be home by morning. Year Day.”

“What exactly are we celebrating this time?”

“Hell, you’re the mayor. You think of something.” Doc sulked, watching the water ripple around his float. “Jase, we can’t give up—”

Jase’s face was slack with horror, eyes east up to the sky. Doc followed his gaze, to where a flaring light blossomed behind the Orion spacecraft.

“Oh my God,” Jase rasped, “Roy’s up there.”

Throwing his bamboo pole in the water, Jase started the engine and raced for shore.

Doc studied the readouts carefully. “Mother of God,” he whispered. “How many engines did he fire?”

“Six.” Jill’s eyes were glued to the screen, her voice flat. “If he was aboard, he . . . well, there isn’t much chance he survived the acceleration. Most of the equipment up there must be junk now.”

“But what if he did survive? Is there a chance?”

“I don’t know. Roy was getting set to beam the messages down, but said that he had an alarm to handle first. He went away for a while, and . . .” she seemed to search for words. She whispered, “Boom.”

“If he was outside the ship, in one of the little rocket sleds, he could get to the shuttle vehicle.”

Jase walked heavily into the lab.

“What about Cynnie? What did she say?” Doc asked quickly.

Jase’s face was blank of emotion. “She talked to him before the accident.”

“And?”

“It’s all she would say. I’m afraid she took it pretty bad. This was sort of the final straw.” His eyes were hollow as he reminisced. “She was always a brave kid, you know? Anything I could do, she’d be right behind me, measuring up to big brother. There’s just a limit, that’s all. There’s just a limit.”

Doc’s voice was firm, only a slight edge of unease breaking through his control. “I think we had better face it. Roy is dead. The Orion’s ruined, and the shuttle-craft is gone anyway.”

“He could be alive . . .” Jifi ventured.

Doc tried to take the sting out of his voice, and was not entirely successful. “Where? On the ship, crushed to a paste? Not on the shuttle. It’s tumbling further from the Orion every second. There’s no one on it. In one of the rocket sleds?” His face softened, and they could see that he was afraid to have hope. “Yes. Maybe that. Maybe on one of the sleds.”

They nodded to each other, and they and the other colonists spent long hours on the telescope hoping, and praying.

But there was nothing alive up there now. Ridgeback was entirely alone.

Cynnie never recovered. She would talk only to her brother, refusing even to see her child. She was morose and ate little, spending most of her time watching the sky with something like terrified awe in her eyes.

And one day, seven months after the accident, she walked into the woods and never returned.

Doc hadn’t seen Jerry for three weeks.

The children lived in a community complex which had some of the aspects of a boarding school. The colonists took turns at nursing duty. Jill spent most of her time there since she and Greg were on the outs. Lately, Elise had taken up the habit too. Not that he blamed her; he couldn’t have been very good company the last few months.

Parents took their children out to the T-shaped complex whenever they felt like it, so that some of the children had more freedom than others. But by and large they all were expected to live there eventually.

Brew was coming out of the woods with a group of six children when Doc stumbled out into the sunlight and saw Jerry.

He wore a rough pair of coveralls that fit him well enough, but he would have looked ludicrous if there had been anything to laugh about. Soft brown fur covered every inch of him. As Doc appeared he turned his head with a bird-quick movement, saw his father, and scampered over. Jerry bounced into him, wrapped long arms tight about his rib cage and said, eagerly, “Daddy.”

There was a slight pause.

“Hello, Jerry.” Doc slowly bent to the ground, looking into his son’s eyes.

“Daddy Doc, Daddy Doc,” he chattered, smiling up at his father. His vocabulary was about fifteen words. Jerry was six years old and much too big for his age. His fingers were very long and strong, but his thumbs were small and short and inconsequential. Doc had seen him handle silverware without much trouble. His nose pugged, jaw massive with a receding chin. There were white markings in the fur around his eyes, accentuating the heavy supraorbital ridges, making the poor child look like—

The poor child. Doc snorted with self-contempt. Listen to me. Why not my child?

Because I’m ashamed. Because we lock our children away to ease the pain. Because they look like—Doc gently disengaged Jerry’s fingers from his shirt, turned and half-ran back to the ship. Shivering, he curled up on one of the cots and cursed himself to sleep.

Hours later he roused himself and, woozy with fatigue, he went looking for Jase. He found him on a work detail in the north fields, picking fruit.

“I’m not sure,” he told Jase. “They’re not old enough for me to be sure. But I want your opinion.”

“Show me,” said Jase, and followed him to the library.

The picture on the tape was an artist’s rendering of Pithecanthropus erectus. He stood on a grassy knoll looking warily out at the viewer, his long-fingered hand clutching a sharp-edged throwing rock.

“I’ll smack your head,” said Jase.

“I’m wrong, then?”

“You’re calling them apes!”

“I’m not. Read the copy. Pithecanthropus was a small-brained Pleistocene primate, thought to be a transitional stage between ape and man.

You got that? Pith is also called Java Man.”

Jase glared at the reader. “The markings are different. And there is the fur—”

“Forget ‘em. They’re nothing but guesswork. All the artist had to go on were crumbling bones and some broken rocks.”

“Broken rocks?”

“Pith used to break rocks in half to get an edged weapon. It was about the extent of his tool-making ability. All we know about what he looked like comes from fossilized bones—very much like the skeleton of a stoop shouldered man with foot trouble, topped with the skull of an ape with hydrocephalus.”

“Very nice. Will Eve’s children be fish?”

“I don’t know, dammit. I don’t know anything at all. Look, Pith isn’t the only candidate for missing link. Homo Habilis looked a lot more like us and lived about two million years ago. Kenyapithicus Africanus resembled us less, but lived eighteen million years earlier. So I can’t say what we’ve got here. God only knows what the next generation will be like. That depends on whether the children are moving backwards or maybe sideways. I don’t know, Jase, I just don’t know!” The last words were shrill, and Doc punctuated them by slamming his fist against a wire window screen. Then, because he could think of nothing more to say, he did it again. And again.

Jase caught his arm. Three knuckles were torn and bleeding. “Get some sleep,” he said, eyes sad. “I’ll have them send Earth a description of Eve the way she is now. She’s oldest, and best developed. We’ll send them all we have on her. It’s all we can do.”

Momentum and the thoroughness of their training had kept them going for eight years. Now the work of making a world slowed and stopped.

It didn’t matter. The crops and the meat animals had no natural enemies on Ridgeback. Life spread along the continent like a green plague.

Already it had touched some of the islands.

Doc was gathering fruit in the groves. It was a shady place, cool, quiet, and it made for a tranquil day’s work. There was no set quota. You took home approximately a third of what you gathered. Sometimes he worked there, and sometimes he helped with the cattle, examining for health and pregnancy, or herding the animals with the nonlethal sonic stunners.

He wished that Elise were here with him, so they could laugh together, but that was growing infrequent now. She was growing more involved with the nursery, and he spent little of his time there.

Jill’s voice hailed him from the bottom of the ladder. “Hey up there, Doc. How about a break?”

He grinned and climbed down, hauling a sack of oranges.

“Tired of spending the day reading, I guess,” she said lightly. She offered him an apple. He polished it on his shirt and took a bite. “Just needed to talk to somebody.”

“Kinda depressed?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s just getting hard to cope with some of the problems.”

“I guess there have been a few.”

Jill gave a derisive chuckle. “I sure don’t know Greg anymore. Ever since he set up the brewery and the distillery, he doesn’t really want to see me at all.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” Doc comforted. “The strain is showing on all of us. Half the town does little more than read or play tapes or drink. Personally, I’d like to know who smuggled the hemp seeds on board.”

Jill laughed, which he was glad for, then her face grew serious again. “You know, there’d probably be more trouble if we didn’t need someone to look after the kids.” She paused, looking up at Doc. “I spend a lot of my time there,” she said unnecessarily.

“Why?” It was the first time he’d asked. They bad left the groves and were heading back into town along the gravel road that Greg and Brew and the others had built in better days.

“We . . . I came here for a reason. To continue the human race, to cross a new frontier, one that my children could have a part in. Now, now that we know that the colony is doomed, there’s just no motive to anything. No reason. I’m surprised that there isn’t more drinking, more carousing and foursomes and divorces and everything else. Nothing seems to matter a whole lot. Nothing at all.”

Doc took her by the shoulders and held her. Go on and cry, he silently said to her. God, I’m tired.

The children grew fast. At nine Eve reached puberty and seemed to shoot skyward. She grew more hair. She learned more words, but not many more. She spent much of her time in the trees in the children’s complex. The older girls grew almost as fast as she did, and the boys.

Every Saturday Brew and Nat took some of the children walking. Sometimes they climbed the foothills at the base of the continental range; sometimes they wandered through the woods, spending most of their efforts keeping the kids from disappearing into the trees.

One Saturday they returned early, their faces frozen in anger. Eve and Jerry were missing. At first they refused to discuss it, but when Jase began organizing a search party, they talked.

They’d been ready to turn for home when Eve suddenly scampered into the trees. Jerry gave a whoop and followed her. Nat had left the others with Brew while she followed after the refugees.

It proved easy to find them, and easier still to determine what they were doing with each other when she came upon them.

Eve looked up at Nat, innocent eyes glazed with pleasure. Nat trembled for a moment, horrified, then drove them both away with a stick, screaming filth at them.

Over Nat’s vehement objections and Brew’s stony refusal to join, Jase got his search party together and set off. They met the children coming home. By that time Nat had talked to the other mothers and fathers at the children’s complex.

Jase called a meeting. There was no way to avoid it now, feelings were running too deep.

“We may as well decide now,” he told them that night. “There’s no question of the children marrying. We could train them to mouth the words of any of our religions, but we couldn’t expect them to understand what they were saying. So the question is, shall we let the children reproduce?”

He faced an embarrassed silence.

“There’s no question of their being too young. In biological terms they aren’t, or you could all go home. In our terms, they’ll never be old enough. Anyone have anything to say?”

“Let’s have Doc’s opinion,” a hoarse voice called. There was a trickle of supportive applause.

Doc rose, feeling very heavy. “Fellow colonists . . .” The smile he was trying on for size didn’t fit his face. He let it drop. There was a desperate compassion in his voice. “This world will never be habitable to mankind until we find out what went wrong here. I say let our children breed. Someday someone on Earth may find out how to cure what we’ve caught. Maybe he’ll know how to let our descendants breed men again. Maybe this problem will only last a generation or two, then we’ll get human babies again. If not, well, what have we lost? Who else is there to inherit Ridgeback?”

“No!” The sound was a tortured meld of hatred and venom. That was Nat, loving mother of six, with her face a strained mask of frustration. “I didn’t risk my life and leave my family and, and train for years and bleed and sweat and toil so my labor could fall to . . . to . . . a bunch of goddamned monkeys!”

Brew pulled her back to her seat, but by now the crowd was muttering and arguing to itself. The noise grew louder. There was shouting. The yelling, too, grew in intensity.

Jase shouted over the throng. “Let’s talk this out peacefully!”

Brew was standing, screaming at the people who disagreed with him and Natalie. Now it was becoming a shoving match, and Brew was getting more furious.

Doc pushed his way into the crowd, hoping to reach Brew and calm him. The room was beginning to break down into tangled knots of angry, emotionally charged people.

He grabbed the big man’s arm and tried to speak, but the Swede turned bright baleful eyes on him and swung a heavy fist.

Doc felt pain explode in his jaw and tasted blood. He fell to the ground and was helped up again, Brew standing over him challengingly. “Stay out of our lives, Doctor,” he sneered, openly now. “You’ve never helped anything before. Don’t try to start now.”

He tried to speak but felt the pain, and knew his jaw was fractured. A soft hand took his arm and he turned to see Elise, big green eyes luminous with pity and fear. Without struggling, he allowed her to take him to the ship infirmary.

As they left the auditorium he could hear the shouting and struggling, Jase on the microphone trying to calm them, and the coldly murderous voices that screamed for “no monkey Grandchildren.”

He tried to turn his head towards the distant sound of argument as Elise set the bone and injected quick-healing serums. She took his face and kissed him softly, with more affection than she had shown in months, and said, “They’re afraid, Harry.” Then kissed him again, and led him home.

Doc raged inwardly at his jaw that week. Its pain prevented him from joining in the debate which now flared in every corner of the colony.

Light images swam across his closed eyes as the sound of fists pounding against wood roused him from dreamless sleep. Doc threw on a robe and padded barefoot across the cool stone floor of his house, peering at the front door with distaste before opening it. Jase was there, and some of the others, somber and implacable in the morning’s cool light.

“We’ve decided, Doc,” Jase said at last. Doc sensed what was coming.

“The children are not to breed. I’m sorry, I know how you feel—Doc grunted. How could Jase know how he felt when lie wasn’t sure himself? “We’re going to have to ask you to perform the sterilizations . . .” Doc’s hearing faded down to a low fuzz, and he barely heard the words. This is the way the world ends.

Jase looked at his friend, feeling the distaste between them grow. “All right. We’ll give you a week to change your mind. If not, Elise or Greg will have to do it.” Without saying anything more they left.

Doc moped around that morning, even though Elise swore to him that she’d never do it. She fussed over him as they fixed breakfast in the kitchen. The gas stove burned methane reclaimed from waste products, the flame giving more heat control than the microwaves some of the others had. Normally Doc enjoyed scrambling eggs and woking fresh slivered vegetables into crisp perfection, but nothing she said or did seemed to lift him out of his mood.

He ate lightly, then got dressed and left the house. Although she was concerned, Elise did not follow him.

He went out to the distillery, where Greg spent much of his time under the sun, drunk and playing at being happy. “Would you?” The pain still muffled Doc’s words. “Would you sterilize them?”

Greg looked at him blearily, still hung over from the previous evening’s alcoholic orgy. “You don’t understand, man.” There was a stirring sound from the sheltered bedroom behind the distillery, and a woman’s waking groan. Doc knew it wasn’t Jifi. “You just don’t understand.”

Doc sat down, wishing he had the nerve to ask for a drink. “Maybe I don’t. Do you?”

“No. No, I don’t. So I’ll follow the herd. I’m a builder. I build roads, and I build houses. I’ll leave the moralizing to you big brains.”

Doc tried to say something and found that no words would come. He needed something. He needed.

“Here, Doc. You know you want it.” Greg handed him a canister with a straw in it. “Best damn vodka in the world.” He paused, and the slur dropped from his voice. “And this is the world, Doc. For us. For the rest of our lives. You’ve just got to learn to roll with it.” He smiled again and mixed himself an evil-looking drink.

Greg’s guest had evidently roused herself and dressed. Doc could hear her now, singing a snatch of song as she left. He didn’t want to recognize the voice.

“Got any orange juice?” Doc mumbled, after sipping the vodka.

Greg tossed him an orange. “A real man works for his pleasures.”

Doc laughed and took another sip of the burning fluid. “Good lord. What is that mess you’re drinking?”

“It’s a Black Samurai. Sake and soy sauce.”

Doc choked. “How can you drink that?”

“Variety, my friend. The stimulation of the bizarre.”

Doc was silent for a long time. Senses swimming he watched the sun climb, feeling the warmth as morning melted into afternoon. He downed a slug of his third screwdriver and said irritably, “You can’t do it, Greg. If you sterilize the children, it’s over.”

“So what? It’s over anyway. If they wanna let a drunk slit the pee pees of their . . . shall we say atavistic progeny? Yeah, that sounds nice. Well, if they want me to do it, I guess I’ll have to do it.” He looked at Doc very carefully. “I do have my sense of civic duty. How about you, Doc?”

“I tried.” He mumbled, feeling the liquor burning his throat, feeling the light-headedness exert its pull. “I tried. And I’ve failed.”

“You’ve failed so far. What were your goals?”

“To keep.—he took a drink. Damn, that felt good. “To keep the colony healthy. That’s what. It’s a disaster. We’re at each other’s throats. We kill our babies—”

Doc lowered his head, unable to continue.

They were both silent, then Greg said, “If I’ve gotta do it, I will, Doc. If it’s not me, it’ll be someone else who reads a couple of medical texts and wants to play doctor. I’m sorry.”

Doc sat, thinking. His hands were shaking. “I can’t do that.” He couldn’t even feel the pain anymore.

“Then do what you gotta do, man,” and Greg’s voice was dead sober.

“Will you . . . can you help me?” Doc bit his lip. “This is my civic duty, you know?”

“Yea, I know.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”

A few minutes passed, then Doc said drunkenly, “There’s got to be a way. There just has to be.”

“Wish I could help, Doc.”

“I wish you could too,” Doc said sincerely, then rose and staggered back to his house.

It rained the night he made his decision, one of the quick, hot rains that swept from the coast to the mountains in a thunderclap of fury. It would make a perfect cover.

He gathered his medical texts, a Bible and a few other books, regretting that most of the information available to him was electronically encoded. Doc took one of the silent stunners from the armory. The non lethal weapons had only been used as livestock controllers. There had never been another need, until now. From the infirmary he took a portable medical kit, stocking it with extra bandages and medicine, then took it all to the big cargo flyer.

It was collapsible, with a fabric fuselage held rigid by highly compressed air in fabric structural tubing. He put it in one of the soundless electric trucks and inflated it behind the children’s complex.

There was plenty of room inside the fence for building and for a huge playground with fruit trees and all the immemorial toys of the very young. After the children had learned to operate a latch, Brew had made a lock for the gate and given everyone a key. Doc clicked it open and moved in.

He stayed in the shadows, creeping close to the main desk where Elise worked.

You can’t follow where I must go, he thought regretfully. You and I are the only fully trained medical personnel you must stay with the others I’m sorry, darling.

And he stunned her to sleep silently, moving up to catch her head as it slumped to the table. For the last time, he gently kissed her mouth and her closed eyes.

The children were in the left wing—one room for each sex, with floors all mattress and no covers, because they could not be taught to use a bed. He sprayed the sound waves up and down the sleeping forms. The parabolic reflector leaked a little, so that his arm was numb to the elbow when he was finished. He shook his hand, trying to get some feeling back into it, then gave up and settled into the hard work of carrying the children to the flyer.

He hustled them through the warm rain, bending under their weight but still working swiftly. Doc arranged them on the fabric floor in positions that looked comfortable—the positions of sleeping men rather than sleeping animals. For some time he stood looking down at Jerry his son and at Lori his daughter, thinking things he could not afterwards remember.

He flew North. The flyer was slow and not soundless; it must have awakened people, but he’d have some time before anyone realized what had happened.

Where the forest had almost petered out he hovered down and landed gently enough that only a slumbering moan rose from the children. Good. He took half of them, including Jerry and Lori, and spread them out under the trees. After he had made sure that they had cover from the air he took the other packages, the books and the medical kit, and hid them under a bush a few yards away from the children.

He stole one last look at them, his heirs, small and defenseless, asleep. He could see Elise in them, in the color of their hair, as Elise could see him in their eyes and cheeks.

Kneading his shoulder, he hurried back to the ship. There was more for him to do.

Skipping the ship off again, he cruised thirty miles west, near the stark ridge of mountains, their somber gray still broken only sparsely by patches of green. There he left the other seven children. Let the two groups develop separately, he thought. They wouldn’t starve, and they wouldn’t die of exposure, not with the pelts they had grown. Many would remain alive, and free. He hoped Jerry and Lori would be among them.

Doc lifted the flyer off and swept it out to the ocean. Only a quarter mile offshore were the first of the islands, lush now with primitive foliage. They spun beneath him, floating brownish-green upon a still blue sea.

Now he could feel his heartbeat, taste his fear. But there was resolve, too, more certain and calm than any he had known in his life.

He cut speed and locked the controls, setting the craft on a gradual decline. Shivering already, he pulled on his life jacket and walked to the emergency hatch, screwing it open quickly.

The wind whipped his face, the cutting edge of salt narrowing his eyes. Peering against the wall of air pressure he was able to see the island coming up on him now, looming close. The water was only a hundred feet below him, now eighty, sixty.

The rumbling of the shallow breakers joined with the tearing wind, and, fighting his fear, he waited until the last possible moment before hurling himself from the doorway.

He remembered falling.

He remembered hitting the water at awful speed, the spray ripping into him, the physical impact like the blow of a great hand. When his head broke surface Doc wheezed for air, swallowed salty liquid and thrashed for balance.

In the distance, he saw the flash of light, and a moment later heard the shattering roar as the flyer spent itself on the rocky shore.

Jase was tired. He was often tired lately, although he still managed to get his work done.

The fields had only recently become unkempt, as Marlow and Billie and Jill and the others grew more and more inclined to pick their vegetables from their backyard gardens.

So just he and a few more still rode out to the fields on the tractors, still kept close watch on the herds, still did the hand-pruning so necessary to keep the fruit trees healthy.

The children were of some help. Ten years ago a few of them had been captured around the foothill area. They had been sterilized, of course, and taught to weed, and carry firewood, and a few other simple tasks.

Jase leaned on his staff and watched the shaggy figures moving along the street, sweeping and cleaning.

He had grown old on this world, their Ridgeback. He regretted much that had happened here, especially that night thirty-some years before when Doc had taken the children.

Taken them—where? Some argued for the islands, some for the West side of the mountain range. Some believed that the children had died in the crash of the flyer. Jase had believed that, until the adult Piths were captured. Now, it was hard to say what happened.

It was growing chill now, the streetlights winking on to brighten the long shadows a setting Tau Ceti cast upon the ground. He drew his coat tighter across his shoulders and walked back to his house. It was a lonelier place to be since June had died, but it was still home.

Fumbling with the latch, he pushed the door open and reached around for the light switch. As it flicked on, he froze.

My God.

“Hello, Jase.” The figure was tall and spare, clothes ragged, but graying hair and beard cut squarely. Three of the children were with him.

After all this time.

“Doc . . .” Jase said, still unbelieving. “It is you, isn’t it?”

The bearded man smiled uncertainly, showing teeth that were white but chipped. “It’s been a long time, Jase. A very long time.”

The three Piths were quiet and alert, sniffing the air of this strange place.

“Are these—?”

“Yes. Jerry and Lori. And Eve. And a small addition.” One of the three-God, could it be Eve? sniffed up to Jase. The soft golden fur on her face was tinged with gray, but she carried a young child at her breast.

Jerry stood tall for a preman, eyeing Jase warily. He carried a sharpened stick in one knobby hand.

Jase sat down, speechless. He looked up into the burning eyes of the man he had known thirty years before. “You’re still officially under a death sentence, you know.”

Doc nodded his head. “For kidnapping?”

“Murder. No one was sure what had happened to you, whether you or any of the children had survived.”

Doc, too, sat down. For the first time the light in his eyes dimmed. “Yes. We survived. I swam to shore after crashing the flyer, and found the place where I had left the children.” He thought for a moment, then asked quietly. “How is Elise? And all the others?”

Jase was unable to raise his eyes from the floor. “She died three years ago, Doc. She was never the same after you left. She thought you were dead. That the children were dead. Couldn’t you have at least told her about your plan? Or gotten her a message?”

Doc’s fingers played absently with his beard as he shook his head. “I couldn’t involve her. I couldn’t. Could you . . . show me where she’s buried, Jase?”

“Of course.”

“What about the others?”

“Well, none of the people were the same after the children left. Some just seemed to lose purpose. Brew’s dead. Greg drank himself under. Four of the others have died.” Jase paused, thinking. “Do any of the others know you’re here?”

“No. I slipped in just at dusk. I wasn’t sure what kind of a reception I’d get.”

“I’m still not sure.” Jase hesitated. “Why did you do it?”

The room was quiet, save for a scratching sound as Jerry fingered an ear. Fleas? Absurd. Jill had never uncrated them.

“I had to know, Jase,” he said. There was no uncertainty in his voice. In fact, there was an imperious quality he had never had in the old days. “The question was: Would they breed true? Was the Pith effect only temporary?”

“Was it?”

“No. It persisted. I had to know if they were regressing or evolving, and they remained the same in subsequent generations, save for natural selection, and there isn’t much of that.”

Jase watched Lori, her stubby fingers untangling mats in her fur. Her huge brown eyes were alive and vital. She was a lovely creature, he decided. “Doc, what are the children?”

“What do you think?”

“You know what I think. An alien species wants our worlds. In a hundred years they’ll land and take them. What they’ll do with the children is anybody’s guess. I—” He couldn’t bring himself to look at Eve. “I wish you’d sterilized them, Doc.”

“Maybe you do, Jase. But, you see, I don’t believe in your aliens.”

Jase’s breath froze in his throat.

“They might want our world,” said Doc, “but why would they want our life forms? Everything but Man is spreading like a plague of locusts. If someone wants Ridgeback, why haven’t they done something about it? By the time they land, terrestrial life will have an unstoppable foothold. Look at all the thousands of years we’ve been trying to stamp out just one life form, the influenza viruses.

“No, I’ve got another idea. Do you know what a locust is?”

“I know what they are. I’ve never seen one.”

“As individuals they’re something like a short grasshopper. As individuals, they hide or sleep in the daytime and come out at night. In open country you can hear them chirping after dusk, but otherwise nobody notices them. But they’re out there, eating and breeding and breeding and eating, getting more numerous over a period of years, until one day there are too many for the environment to produce enough food.

“Then comes the change. On Earth it hasn’t happened in a long time because they aren’t allowed to get that numerous. But it used to be that when there were enough of them, they’d grow bigger and darker and more aggressive. They’d come out in the daytime. They’d eat everything in sight, and when all the food was gone, and when there were enough of them, they’d suddenly take off all at once.

“That’s when you’d get your plague of locusts. They’d drop from the air in a cloud thick enough and broad enough to darken the sky, and when they landed in a farmer’s field he could kiss his crops goodbye. They’d raze it to the soil, then take off again, leaving nothing.”

Jase took off his glasses and wiped them. “I don’t see what it is you’re getting at.”

“Why do they do it? Why were locusts built that way?”

“Evolution, I guess. After the big flight they’d be spread over a lot of territory. I’d say they’d have a much bigger potential food supply.”

“Right. Now consider this. Take a biped that’s man shaped, enough so to use a tool, but without intelligence. Plant him on a world and watch him grow. Say he’s adaptable; say he eventually spread over most of the fertile land masses of the planet. Now what?

“Now an actual physical change takes place. The brain expands. The body hair drops away. Evolution had adapted him to his climate, but that was when he had hair. Now he’s got to use his intelligence to keep from freezing to death. He’ll discover fire. He’ll move out into areas he couldn’t live in before. Eventually he’ll cover the whole planet, and he’ll build spacecraft and head for the stars.”

Jase shook his head. “But why would they change back, Doc?”

“Something in the genes, maybe. Something that didn’t mutate.”

“Not how, Doc. We know it’s possible. Why?”

“We’re going back to being grasshoppers. Maybe we’ve reached our evolutionary peak. Natural selection stops when we start protecting the weak ones, instead of allowing those with defective genes to die a natural death.”

He paused, smiling. “I mean, look at us, Jase. You walk with a cane now. I haven’t been able to read for five years, my eyes have weakened so. And we were the best Earth had to offer; the best minds, the finest bodies. Chris only squeaked by with his glasses because he was such a damn good meteorologist.”

Jase’s face held a flash of long-forgotten pain. “And I guess they still didn’t choose carefully enough.”

“No,” Doc agreed soberly. “They didn’t. On Earth we protected the sick, allowed them to breed, instead of letting them die . . . with pacemakers, with insulin, artificial kidneys and plastic hip joints and trusses. The mentally ill and retarded fought in the courts for the right to reproduce. Okay, it’s humane. Nature isn’t humane. The infirm will do their job by dying, and no morality or humane court rulings or medical advances will change the natural course of things for a long, long time.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know how stable they are. It could be millions of years, or?” Doc shrugged. “We’ve changed the course of our own development. Perhaps a simpler creature is needed to colonize a world. Something that has no choice but to change or die. Jase, remember the Cold War?”

“I read about it.”

“And the Belt Embargo? Remember diseromide, and smog, and the spray-can thing, and the day the fusion seawater distillery at San Francisco went up and took the Bay area with it, and four states had to have their water flown in for a month?”

“So?”

“A dozen times we could have wiped out all life on Earth. As soon as we’ve used our intelligence to build spacecraft and seed another world, intelligence becomes a liability. Some old anthropologist even had a theory that a species needs abstract intelligence before it can prey on its own kind. The development of fire gave Man time to sit back and dream up ways to take things he hadn’t earned. You know how gentle the children are, and you can remember how the carefully chosen citizens of Ridgeback acted the night we voted on the children’s right to reproduce.”

“So you gave that to them, Doc. They are reproducing. And when we’re gone they’ll spread all over the world. But are they human?”

Doc pondered, wondering what to say. For many years he had talked only to the children. The children never interrupted, never disagreed. “I had to know that too. Yes. They’re human.”

Jase looked closely at the man he had called friend so many years ago. Doc was so sure. He didn’t discuss; he lectured. Jase felt an alienness in him that was deeper than the mere passage of time.

“Are you going to stay here now?”

“I don’t know. The children don’t need me anymore, though they’ve treated me like a god. I can’t pass anything on to them. I think our culture has to die before theirs can grow.”

Jase fidgeted, uncomfortable. “Doc. Something I’ve got to tell you. I haven’t told anyone. It’s thirty years now, and nobody knows but me.”

Doc frowned. “Go on.”

“Remember the day Roy died? Something in the Orion blew all the motors at once? Well, he talked to Cynnie first. And she talked to me, before she disappeared. Doc, he got a laser message from Earth, and he knew he couldn’t ever send it down. It would have destroyed us. So he blew the motors.”

Doc waited, listening intently.

“It seems that every child being born on Earth nowadays bears an uncanny resemblance to Pithecanthropus erectus. They were begging us to make the Ridgeback colony work. Because Earth is doomed.”

“I’m glad nobody knew that.”

Jase nodded. “If intelligence is bad for us, it’s bad for Earth. They’ve fired their starships. Now they’re ready for another cycle.”

“Most of them’ll die. They’re too crowded.”

“Some will survive. If not there, then, thanks to you, here.” He smiled. A touch of the old Jase in his eyes. “They’ll have to become men, you know.”

“Why do you put it like that?”

“Because Jill uncrated the wolves, to help thin out the herds.”

“They’ll cull the children, too,” Doc nodded. “I couldn’t help them become men, but I think that will do it. They will have to band together, and find tools, and fire.” His voice took on a dreamy quality. “Eventually, the wolves will come out of the darkness to join them at their campfires, and Man will have dogs again.” He smiled. “I hope they don’t overbreed them like we did on earth. I doubt if chihuahuas have ever forgotten what we did to them.”

“Doc,” Jase said, urgently, “will you trust me? Will you wait for a minute while I leave? I . . . I want to try something. If you decide to go there may never be another chance.”

Doc looked at him, mystified. “Alright, I’ll wait.”

Jase limped out of the door. Doc sat, watching his charges, proud of their alertness and flexibility, their potential for growth in the new land.

There was a creaking as the door swung open.

The woman’s hair had been blond, once. Now it was white, heavy wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, years of hardship and disappointment souring what had once been beauty.

She blinked, at first seeing only Doc.

“Hello, Nat,” he said to her.

She frowned. “What . . .?” Then she saw Eve.

Their eyes locked, and Nat would have drawn back save for Jase’s insistent hand at her back.

Eve drew close, peering into her mother’s face as if trying to remember her.

The old woman stuttered, then said, “Eve?” The Pith cocked her head and came closer, touching her mother’s hand. Nat pulled it back, eyes wide.

Eve cooed, smiling, holding her baby out to Nat.

At first she flinched, then looked at the child, so much like Eve had been, so much . . . and slowly, without words or visible emotion, she took the child from Eve and cradled it, held it, and began to tremble. Her hand stretched out helplessly, and Eve came closer, took her mother’s hand and the three of them, mother, child and grandchild, children of different worlds, held each other. Nat cried for the pain that had driven them apart, the love that had brought them together.

Doc stood at the edge of the woods, looking back at the colonists who waved to them, asking for a swift return.

Perhaps so. Perhaps they could, now. Enough time had passed that understanding was a thing to be sought rather than avoided. And he missed the company of his own kind.

No, he corrected himself, the children were his kind. As he had told Jase, without explaining, he knew that they were human. He had tested it the only way he could, by the only means available.

Eve walked beside him, her hand seeking his. “Doc,” she cooed, her birdlike singsong voice loving. He gently took their child from her arms, kissing it.

At over sixty years of age, it felt odd to be a new father, but if his lover had her way, as she usually did, his strange family might grow larger still.

Together, the five of them headed into the forest, and home.

THE HOMECOMING

Barry Longyear

Mr. Longyear describes himself as a part-time professional do-gooder, mostly as a result of being elected director of the local animal shelter and finance chairman for the animal shelter building fund drive (have you, he asks, ever tried to squeeze $50,000 from a community that never recovered from the Crash of ’29?).

Lothas draped his heavy green tail between the seat cushion and backrest. Extending a claw on a scaled, five-fingered hand, he inserted it in a slot switch and pulled down. The armored shield on the forward view bubble slowly lifted as the control center went to redlight. Lothas felt the strange pain grow in his chest as he looked through the filter at the target star, now no longer a point of light but a tiny, brilliant disc. He leaned against the backrest, his large dark eyes glittering as they drank in the sight of the star.

It has been so long. Even though I have been out of suspension for only a total of six star cycles, yet I still know it has been . . . seventy million star cycles. A third of a galactic cycle.

Lothas noticed his own reflection in the filter, turned his long neck left, then right, and marveled at the absence of change. The large eyes, occupying a fifth of the image, were clear and glinted with points of red, blue, and yellow light reflected from service and indicator lights. The skin, gray-green and smooth, pressed against and outlined the large veins leading from his eyes down the elongated muzzle, with its rows of thick, white, needle-sharp teeth. His focus returned to the star as he reached and pressed a panel with one of the five clawed fingers of his right hand.

“This is Lothas Dim Ir, on regular watch.” He paused and examined the navigation readout, then switched to a display of the rest of the cluster formation of ships. “The formation is normal; no course corrections necessary; the homestar Amasaat now at—” he examined an instrument “—four degrees of arc.”

He pressed another panel, signaling to all the watches on the rest of the ships. The display showed all but three of the two hundred ships answering. Lothas studied the display, slightly confused that he felt nothing about the missing ships. Automatic recording systems had shown the three ships wrecked by the same meteor.

But that was . . . millions of cycles ago. Difficult to feel pain for deaths that old.

He pressed another panel, and the display began filling with life unit survival-percentage figures transmitted by the watches on the other ships. Automatically an average was made and a total rate of survival and unit count was made. 77.031 percent; 308,124 life units surviving. Lothas nodded. There had been no change in the figure for . . . over thirty million star cycles. The three wrecked ships, and the others who could not survive the suspension process.

But, the rest of us shall see Nitola.

Lothas looked around at the empty control center. Moments after he gave the initiate-desuspension command, the center would be a hive of activity . . . a hive of activity; I wonder if the little stinging sweetsects have survived? He looked at the banks of receiving equipment, sensor and analysis piles, and the rest of the tools that the knowing ones would use to see how Nitola had changed.

But, this moment there is still quiet—this wondrous, jeweled loneliness of space. I ache for my home planet, but this, too, has become my home.

He reached out a claw and closed the shield, cutting off his view of the homestar. As the center returned to yellow light, Lothas pressed the initiate-desuspension command. As the ships answered, he listened to the sounds of life stirring in his own vessel—motors whined, draining the clear suspension from countless lengths of veins and replacing it with warm blood.

Lothas looked at the drain set into the skin of his own arm. He pulled it free and watched as the blood pooled slightly, then began clotting. He tossed the drain into a recycler. We will need them no longer. We are almost home.

Carl Baxter, garbed in regulation briefs and tee shirt, looked up from under the bed. “Where are my socks?”

The lump on the bed, sheets pulled up over her head, mumbled. “I don’t wear ’em.”

“It’s my last pair of clean socks. Now, where are they?”

The lump pulled the sheets down, exposing a sleep-mussed tousle of black curls framing a pretty angry, face. “You’d have clean socks if you’d do the laundry more often. We both work. There’s no reason why I have to be the—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Baxter pulled out the dresser and looked behind it.

“Yeah, yeah, is it?”

“Yeah.” He pushed the dresser back against the wall. “Look, it’s not like we had the same kind of job, Deb. I have to be at the base at oh-six-thirty six days a week and sometimes seven. I’m lucky if I can drag it home in time for Johnny Carson. And, you want me to pitch in with the laundry, grocery shopping, housecleaning—”

“Look, supersoldier!” Deb pushed, her hair from her eyes. “You think keeping the agency going by myself is easy? Just last week that idiot layout man you hired before you were called up totally feebed the Boxman Spring campaign. I’ve been putting in sixteen hour days to try and have ready in time! You want laundry on top of that?”

Baxter concluded his third survey of the dresser drawers by slamming the upper right. “Why don’t you hire some help? We can afford it.”

Deb’s eyes widened. “Yawl means dat Massa Baxter gonna let dis nappy ol’ head actually hire someone? Me? a woman!”

“Oh, knock it off!” Baxter frowned and sat on the bed He put a hand on Deb’s shoulder. “Look. I’m sorry Deb. I know I said no hiring until I got back, and I know it’s been tough on you. Go ahead and hire whatever you need in the way of help. I’ll give Boxman a call and try and straighten things out.”

Deb put her hand on Baxter’s and looked up into his eyes. “Carl, when is the Air Force going to be finished with you? This whole thing is so silly. One day we are running a successful advertising agency and living in a nice condo, and the next we’re stuck here in the middle of nowhere in a shack that hasn’t been repaired since Billy Mitchell was a P.F.C. Tell me there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Baxter shrugged. “I don’t know.” He raised his head and looked at her. “That trip to Santa Barbara every day is getting you down, isn’t it? Maybe you’d be happier if you stayed at home?”

“Look, Baxter, I’ll stick it out as long as you do, and how much longer can that be? Your six months is almost up, isn’t it?”

Baxter stood up and resumed his search for the missing pair of socks. “You think I might have left them in the living room?”

Deb’s face developed an instant frown. “Isn’t it?”

“Isn’t what?”

She shook her head and pounded on the mattress with her fists. “Oh, no! You didn’t! Tell me you didn’t get extended, Baxter! Tell me you didn’t, or I’ll brain you with the alarm clock!”

He sighed, shrugged, scratched his head, then held out his hands. “I didn’t have any choice, Deb—”

“Oooooooooo! You . . . you . . . monster!” She threw off the covers, swung her legs to the floor, then stormed off to the bathroom. The door slammed, then clicked.

“Deb?” Baxter walked to the door. “Deb, honey? Don’t lock yourself in, honey. I still have to shave.”

“Go away.”

“Deb, I’m all they have in public relations right now to promote the Air Force’s argument for the combined shuttle, not to mention the new bomber, and the—”

The door opened, a pair of socks flew out, and the door slammed shut.

Wearing one regulation blue and one not-so-regulation yellow and red Argyle sock in addition to his uniform, Captain Carl F. Baxter pulled away in the blue staff car assigned to him. He came to the cross-street stop sign, screeched to a halt, and rummaged through the glove compartment for his electric shaver. A honk came from behind, and Baxter looked over the top of the headrest to check the honker’s rank. Seeing only single golden bars, he returned to his search. Damned thing has got to be in here.

His hand closed on the ancient Remington, a gift from his mother-in-law, and he sat up and removed the cap. The driver behind honked again, and Baxter extended a finger in the Hawaiian good luck tradition, then returned to the shaver. With an angry squeal of tires, the lieutenant pulled around Baxter’s car, ignored the stop sign, and pulled out onto the base’s main drag. With his shaver humming, Baxter pulled out and turned right.

Baxter caught a flash of a sign, “ODQ—D7,” recalling Deb’s comment when she first saw it. “This is our new home? Oh, I like the name; it’s so much nicer than Hollywood Hills or Sutton Place.” He snorted and leaned on the accelerator as he came abreast of the parking ramp for the experimental aircraft. Deb was ready with a comment for that, too. “Oh, what a nice view—Baxter, I want a divorce!” She didn’t really, but she was not happy, and neither was Baxter. An experienced test pilot, he had left the Air Force during the testing cutbacks of the late sixties to begin his own advertising agency. As a reserve officer, he had assumed that, if he ever was called up, it would be as a pilot. But, the Air Force had found his advertising skills much more desirable, and dropped him in public relations. Baxter glanced out of the side window at the black, needle-pointed craft on the ramp being readied for a test. Dammit, it is a beautiful view!

He turned back to his driving and concentrated on missing the larger pieces of traffic. The Congressional delegation would show up in two days, and the presentation on the combined shuttle was still in search of a theme—or at least a theme less obvious than “Gimmie bucks!”

Then, there was the still the planning board in town to deal with. The proposed recruiting facility violated the town’s zoning ordinances, and it was feather-smoothing time. Even though Federal departments aren’t obligated to be governed by local zoning regulations, bad press is still bad press. The theme: cram the new facility down their throats, but in a manner that makes it look like the Air Force is doing the town a big favor.

The Concerned Women from town still had to have a number done on them. In the office, the group was known as the Anti-Slop Chute and Whorehouse League. The dear ladies objected to men from the base supplying a market in town for the growing number of bars and ladies of negotiable virtue. Theme?

Perhaps we could have all the men castrated, ladies. How would that be? Baxter chuckled, then resumed his sober expression as he remembered the school board had to be dealt with. The screams over supporting the educations of the base’s dependent children were getting loud, and the charge that a group of Air Force brats had introduced pot to their playmates was no help . . . “Ah, nuts!”

Baxter drove it all from his mind as he pulled up to the guard shack at the security gate. An AP, three times larger than life, with a jaw the size, shape, and color of a cinder block, saluted and bent down to the car’s window. “Captain Baxter?”

Baxter nodded. “Yes, I’m Baxter.”

“Carl F.?”

“That’s right.”

The AP opened the door and motioned with his hand. “Please slide over, sir.”

“What?”

“I’m supposed to drive you to a security area, Captain. Please, slide over.”

Baxter reached for the door and tried to pull it shut. The AP’s grip on the door might as well have been a ton of reinforced concrete. Baxter looked into the guard shack and saw Wilson, one of the regular AP’s on the gate. “Wilson, will you call off this trained gorilla? I have a lot of work to do today, and no time to fool around.”

Wilson stood in the doorway and shrugged. “I’m sorry, Captain, but Inovsky has his orders.”

Baxter looked at the gorilla. “Inovsky, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You sure you got the right Air Force, Inovsky?”

The AP unsnapped the cover on his holster. “Please, Captain Baxter. Slide over.”

Baxter shrugged and put the car in park. “Sure. Why not?” He slid over and watched as the huge AP slid in, slammed the door, then squealed off, heading the car in the direction of the experimental parking ramp. “What’s this all about?”

The AP shook his head. “I don’t know, Captain. I was detailed to get you to the experimental station.” The man cracked his first smile. “But, with all the brass that’s been landed out on the field during the past hour, it looks like you’re going to see some important people.”

“How important?”

“The Secretary of Defense, the base commander, and just about everything in between, from what I hear.”

Baxter looked out of the window on his side, and tried to inch his right trouser leg down over his Argyle sock.

“A question rests without answer in my mind, Lothas.”

Lothas turned away from the side port where he had been drinking in the sights of the blue-white planet Nitola—now called Earth. Medp stood next to him. “Medp, have the knowing ones among you time now for idle thoughts?” Both of them looked at Nitola.

“What is the question, Medp?”

Medp nodded in the direction of the planet. “How does a race such as that select a representative to treat with us?”

“The hue-muns?” Lothas paused, wondering how his own race would have reacted at the news of seventy-million-cycle-old visitors from the past. “I cannot even speculate, Medp.” Lothas held out a clawed hand. “All those separate tribes, such confusion—I know not.” He turned toward Medp. “How are the surveys progressing?”

Medp looked at a readout strapped to his wrist. “We have over twenty distinct languages, with as yet uncounted dialects, entered in the lingpile, and this from only their radio and television. Many more languages are yet to be entered. However, the tribe who is sending the representative speaks the English, and that we have entered in quantity.”

Lothas turned back to the view port. “And, the other surveys?”

“Everything is much as predicted. Residual radiation is negligible; vegetable and animal life is reestablished, although the forms are highly mutated. As I said, it is all much as predicted.”

Lothas nodded toward Nitola. “All except this hue-muns creature. That we did not predict.” He reached up and touched a panel that dropped armor over the view port, then turned to Medp. “I have a question of my own, knowing one.”

“Speak.”

Lothas lowered himself into a couch and closed his eyes. “How would we choose a representative, Medp, if the positions were reversed?”

“That is easily answered; we would send the wisest of our race. Nothing less could serve such a moment.”

Lothas nodded. “Perhaps the hue-muns will do the same.”

Baxter looked around the room at the circle of seated high-ranking officers and officials. “What in the ever-loving, four-color-processed Hell are you people talking about?”

The Secretary of Defense looked at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Chairman and the Secretary of the Air Force both looked at Baxter’s base commander, General Stayer. Stayer’s glance seemed to lower the room’s temperature by twenty degrees. “You don’t understand, Captain. You aren’t being asked; you’re being ordered. You’re it.”

Baxter found a chair and lowered himself into it. He realized that he was coming across as being a little wild-eyed, and he took several deep breaths before he continued. “Gentlemen, what I do not understand is how I drew the black marble on this one. It’s been seven, no, eight years since I flew anything even resembling the Python.”

An unnamed colonel seated next to the Secretary of the Air Force leaned forward. “Captain, you are familiar with the XK-17 Python, are you not?”

Baxter shrugged and shook his head. “Only for publicity purposes. I never flew it, or even checked out in it. The things I know are things people want to know, like cost figures, performance—”

“And, all your tickets are up to date?”

Baxter held out his hands, then dropped them. “Yes.”

“And you are in top physical shape?”

Baxter nodded again. “But, Colonel—”

The colonel held up a hand. “Captain, you will be surprised how fast we can check you out in the XK-17—”

“Colonel!” Baxter was startled by the loudness of his own voice. “Colonel, there must be at least five pilots I can name who are checked out on the Python, and who are on the base right now.”

General Stayer gave a curt wave of his hand at the Colonel. “Let’s cut through the crap. Baxter, you’re it. None of those pilots are trained in public relations. You are.”

“What about whatsisface? The astronaut in the Senate?”

Stayer shook his head. “Too old, his tickets aren’t up to date, and we can’t locate him. He’s somewhere in Canada right now, fishing.” The general leaned forward and pointed a finger at Baxter’s throat. “You are the closest thing to a flying diplomat that we can get off the ground within the next twenty-four hours, because the Python is the only vehicle ready to go right now.”

The Secretary of Defense moved his head a fraction of an inch, signaling his desire to speak. “If I may, General?”

“Of course, Mr. Secretary.”

The secretary, a blown-dry glory in four-hundred-dollar pin stripes, let his gaze wander around the room as he talked. “Captain Baxter, I realize you are being asked to perform a difficult task, but we have little choice. The . . . “he waved a hand up in the air “. . . aliens, or whatever they are, made a broadband contact. In other words, their invitation was extended to whomsoever can make it up there. The Russians, of course, will get there, but—” he held up a finger, “it will take them at least three days to get off the ground. Am I making myself clear?”

Baxter folded his hands over his belly and nodded. “Yes, Mr. Secretary.”

The secretary nodded. “Good. While you are there, you will be in constant touch with the Department of State, and with the White House. There will always be someone with whom you can consult on any matter.”

Baxter nodded and smiled. “This is what I mean, Mr. Secretary. If all I’m supposed to do is carry a radio for the State Department, why not use another—qualified—pilot? I don’t see what particular use my training in public relations will be.”

The secretary nodded. “You must know the value in eyeball-to-eyeball negotiations, Captain. When you deal with groups and committees on behalf of the Air Force, do you telephone or appear in person?”

Baxter nodded, noting the chains being locked in place. “And what am I supposed to attempt to accomplish?”

“Your meaning?”

“Mr. Secretary, the only purpose of public relations, or diplomacy for that matter, is to get people to do things that they would normally not do. If everyone did what we wanted, there would be no need for PR types or diplomats. Now, just what is it that I am supposed to get them to do?”

The secretary frowned. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know!”

“Captain, if these beings are what they say they are—inhabitants of Earth from over seventy million years ago—it is possible that they are thinking of reclaiming the planet for themselves. In such a case, discourage them.” The secretary raised his eyebrows and held out his hands. “However, they may be from another solar system and bent on conquering Earth. Then, perhaps, in either case, it may prove beneficial to have them on our side. They are obviously more advanced . . . but, then again, it might be better to sic them on the Russians.” The secretary dropped his hands into his lap. “All I can say, Baxter, is look out for the interests of your country, and the interests of your planet and the human race, while you’re at it.”

An hour later, as two technicians stood waiting to help him into his pressure suit, Baxter remembered that he had forgotten to telephone Boxman about the Boxman Spring account. He sat down on a cold metal bench and untied his shoes. Security on the base was locked up tighter than a million uninflated dollars, and no calls allowed. Deb! I can’t call her! She’ll kill me! He removed his red and yellow Argyle sock and held it in his hand. It had a hole in it. I guess it’s just going to be one of those days.

Lothas studied the circle of eight faces seated around the polished black table in the half-light of the governor’s conference compartment, aft of the control center. Deayl brushed a clawed hand over his muzzle, then let the hand drop to the surface of the table. “Lothas, it is still my mind that we wait no longer. The hue-muns are divided, and they have nothing that can protect them against the Power. We can brush them aside.”

Lothas examined the other faces. “How many of you have this mind?” Four clawed hands went forward toward the center of the table. “The mind that counsels us to wait, then, still prevails.”

Deayl put two fists on the table and turned to the ones who had not voted with him. “After seventy million cycles traveling from and to our home, we are to sit here polishing our claws? We are so close!”

Lothas noted that two who had voted with him were wavering. The desire to go home was strong, and Deayl’s argument appealed to that desire. The desire twisted with no less strength in Lothas, but he held out his hands. “Our knowledge of the hue-muns is but pieces—what they are, and what they can do. The hue-muns’ knowledge of us is even less—what we are, and what we can do.” He lowered his hands to the table. “We must also grant that the sense of right we feel in our cause is shared by the hue-muns in their cause. They grew to dominate and control Nitola, much as we did. By what we acknowledge to be the right—”

“No!” Deayl crossed his wrists. All could hear the angry swishing of his tail across the deck. “We do not know that. What if the hue-muns are from another planet? What if they invaded our home planet, and now simply stand to defend their conquest?”

Lothas nodded. “The hue-muns must have like suspicions about us, Deayl. After all, they are on the planet; we are the ones in space ships.” He brought his hands together. “We have much to learn about each other, if we are to avoid error.” Lothas looked around the table and stopped on Deayl. “Do you wish another vote?”

Deayl leaned against his back rest. “No. Not at the present.”

Medp entered the compartment, bowed toward those seated at the table, then turned toward Lothas. “We have just been told that the hue-muns’ representative has been launched. Other hue-muns, speaking the Russian, have said that the true representative will be launched in three days, and that we should refuse to see the other.”

Lothas looked at the table top, then raised his glance and looked at Deayl. “We do have much to learn. Deayl, I will leave to you the task of instructing our visitor in what we can do. If hue-muns understand the Power, they will understand our power.”

“Yes, Lothas.”

Lothas stood and bowed toward the ones seated at the table. The others stood and bowed in return. Lothas turned toward the control center and entered, Medp at his side. “Medp, do you have contact with the representative?”

“Yes. He is called Captaincarlbaxter.”

Lothas nodded. “Is everything in readiness?”

“Yes. It will take him approximately a tenth of a cycle to come into safe power range.”

Lothas tucked his tail between the seat and backrest of a chair before a monitor and sat down. He lifted his head and looked at Medp. “Deayl will sway some minds before the council sits again.”

Medp nodded and pointed at the monitor. Nitola hung blue-white in the blackness of space. “The feeling is very strong, Lothas. All of us can see, and . . . we have been away for a very long time.”

Lothas turned toward the monitor, studied once more the beautiful planet, then nodded. “Have you assembled enough information to comprehend this squabble and division among the hue-muns?”

Medp shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “We can see a little. We have determined from their transmissions, and our sensor surveys support this, that there are over four billion hue-muns belonging to the various tribes.”

“Four billion?”

“And, they grow in numbers every day. This does not explain all, but it lets us see a little.”

Lothas changed the positions on several slotswitches, then energized a panel, causing a tiny dot to appear on the monitor. He pressed another panel, and the dot expanded until the monitor was filled with an image of a sleek, black ship, just separating from a cluster of acceleration tubes. “Such a tiny craft. Have you come to a determination about the hue-muns’ rite called humor?”

“It is exasperating. The loud reaction—the laughing, chuckling and so on—appears to be pleasurable. But, the causes of the reaction—pain, misfortune, shame, misunderstanding—all are causes of grief as well.” Medp looked at the monitor. “It needs more information for sense to be made of it. Still, they are fascinating creatures. I could devote my remaining cycles to studying them.”

Lothas extended a claw toward the monitor. “Part of your wish approaches now, Medp: Your first specimen, Captaincarlbaxter.”

Baxter was surprised at how familiar everything was. The wing drop from the mother plane, the slam of the initial and secondary burns, even the attitude correction rockets. He looked out of the tiny canopy windows, little more than a hand’s breadth from his faceplate, to see himself floating on the outer limits of Earth’s atmosphere. Above, the sky was star-studded black. He searched the space above for a visual sighting, but could see nothing. He looked down, and the cluster of ships was indicated clearly on his screen. As he studied the screen, he finally realized what he was about to do. The frustrations of the morning and the skull-popping briefing by the Python’s pilot, plus frantic phone conversations with several Undersecretaries of State, along with a brief inspirational call from the President, faded as the thought of meeting . . . whoever they are, filled his mind.

This is a bigger event than walking on the moon. This is what generations of movie makers and novelists have speculated about.

“Messenger, this is Mission Control.”

Baxter opened his channel. “This is Messenger. Go ahead.”

“Messenger, we’re patching you into a line connected with the State Department. Stand by.”

Baxter listened to a series of clicks, howls, and crackles. “Captain Baxter, this is Undersecretary Wyman. Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Mr. Wyman.”

“Baxter, our most recent information on the Soviet mission indicates that they will have a man up in less than three days. They are sending Lavr Razin. Razin is a former cosmonaut, now attached to the Soviet mission to the U.N. Understand?”

“Affirmative. Can you tell me anything about him?”

The channel went dead for long moments, then came to life. “Baxter, since we don’t know, we are assuming that none of our transmissions are secure from the . . . visitors.” Another pause. “We can tell you to watch out. Razin is no Fozzie Bear, savvy?”

“Affirmative.”

“Goodbye, and good luck, Baxter.”

Baxter signed off with Mission Control, wishing that Undersecretary Wyman’s goodbye hadn’t sounded so final. He gave his instruments a casual sweep, then looked out of the left side canopy window. Green fire danced upon the Python’s skin. “Captaincarlbaxter?”

“This is Messenger. Go ahead, Mission Control.”

A long pause. “I am called Deayl. Are you Captaincarlbaxter?”

A strange feeling began tugging at Baxter’s stomach. The voice sounded . . . ultranormal—the ideal of every midwestern radio announcer. “Yes, this is Baxter.”

“Greetings. Our instruments inform us that, unless you remove the force of your engines, you will be destroyed.” Baxter turned back to his own instruments. Every dial was either pegged or dead. “We have you in the grip of our power. With it, we shall bring you into our control ship. It will not harm you, unless you fail to turn off your engines.”

Baxter raised a gloved hand, hesitated, then began punching and flicking switches according to the Python’s shutdown SOP. “The craft is shut down . . . Deayl.”

“Sensible. I am curious, Captaincarlbaxter. What were you hue-muhs seventy million years ago?”

Baxter swallowed and tried to recall his ten minute high-speed briefing on the lineage of Man. “After all, Baxter, they may want to establish the authenticity of our claim to this planet.” “At that stage, we were prosimians—the apes hadn’t evolved yet. You know what I mean when I say ‘apes’ ?”

“Yes. We have seen them on your transmissions.”

Baxter frowned. What if those guys can pick up every radio and T. V. transmission on Earth ? They could assemble quite a body of information. “Interesting.”

“What did the prosimians look like?”

“Well, I understand that they were small, long-tailed creatures that resembled present-day squirrels. Probably, they were adept at securing food by leaping about in the trees, eating fruit, seeds, eggs—”

“Ah, the tree jontyl. I recognize them. That is very curious, Captaincarlbaxter. Tree jontyls were very well-known to my race when we occupied this planet. My mouth has been watering for one for over seventy million years. I am looking forward to seeing you.”

They called themselves Nitolans—Earthlings in another tongue. As his craft approached the ship in the lead center of the armada of Nitolan vessels, Baxter felt the awe he experienced when, as a boy often, he had been taken into St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. One hundred and ninety-seven ships, and any one of them large enough to dwarf a supertanker. The ships were long, cylindrical, and with ridges along the sides that could be retractable wings. As he observed the smooth skin and flowing configuration of the ships, Baxter realized that the vessels were designed for atmospheric flight. “Captaincarlbaxter?”

“This is Baxter. Deayl?”

A pause. “This is Deayl. This shortening of the name; is this a friendly gesture of you hue-muns?”

“Yes . . . everybody just calls me ‘Baxter’—even my wife.”

“Your mate?”

Baxter nodded to himself. “Yes.”

Another pause. “Very well, Baxter. I will accept this gesture in kind. I am known as Illya . . .” Baxter listened while the Nitolan supervising his approach seemed to be wrestling with a thought. “This gesture, Baxter. Understand that it does not obligate me to anything.”

Baxter smiled. This guy could have come straight from a Middle East peace conference. “I understand, Illya. Is there anything I should know about being taken into your ship’s landing bay?”

“If your craft has surface landing apparatus that is now retracted, you should prepare it. Otherwise, we can suspend your craft in a neutral field. Air will be normal to you.”

Baxter noted the existence of artificial gravity. None of the ships were spinning. The Python landed on two fixed rear skids and a nose wheel. He threw the switch and felt the wheel lower and lock as his eyes confirmed the event by observing the safe/go light for the landing gear. “Landing gear down and locked, Illya.”

“Noted.”

Baxter watched as the underside (toward Earth) of the ship opened, much like the iris of a camera. Dull red light came from the bay, and as the Python closed on the iris, Baxter felt a slight panic at the size of the opening, then at the size of the bay. I feel like a pea rattling around in a fifty-five gallon drum!

The Python rose just above the opening, and Baxter watched open-mouthed as the enormous iris blinked shut. His craft was gently lowered to the deck, and he let out his breath. He checked his instruments, shut down the works, and waited. In the distance he could see four jumbo-jet-sized ships parked off to the side. The bay switched from red to yellow light, and Baxter’s mouth remained open as a hatch opened and a delegation of gray-green, long-necked, heavy-tailed creatures entered.

They walked toward him on powerful legs with clawed feet. Although bipedal, they stooped forward, carrying their long, thin arms in front. Baxter’s gaze went from the clawed toes to the clawed fingers, then to the gleaming rows of teeth. As he unstrapped, removed his helmet and cracked the Python’s canopy, Baxter ran a dry tongue over equally dry lips. He stood, stepped over the side of the cockpit, pushing his toes into the step holes, and climbed down from his craft. He turned as the delegation of creatures came to a halt. Stooped over, the creatures were only a little taller than himself. One of them rotated its body, bringing its neck and head well above the others. Baxter cleared his throat and croaked, “I bring you greetings from the President of the United States.”

Deayl watched the scene of the docking bay reception a moment longer, then closed his eyes. If so long ago we had not abandoned our gods. If I could only lay my burden at the feet of old Sisal, or old Fane. He extended a claw and shut off the monitor. Energizing another monitor, he watched Nitola, and his pain eased.

I do not do it for myself, but for all of us. He kept his eyes on the image as he pressed the signal to Lothas’ quarters.

“Lothas.”

“Deayl, Lothas. Baxter has landed safely, and Medp brings him now to the quarters prepared for him.”

“Deayl, is ‘Baxter’ the representative’s name of friendship?”

Deayl lowered his muzzle to his chest. “Yes. And I extended mine to him.”

“This is good. He shall rest for the remainder of the cycle, then you shall demonstrate to him the Power. I shall meet with him after.”

“All will be as you wish, Lothas.”

“Deayl, with your mind concerning the return to Nitola, exchanging names with the hue-muns was a fine gesture.” A pause, as though Lothas expected some sort of comment. “Deayl, I know you disapprove of my direction as governor, but I know you to be a strong and determined champion of our race. I would exchange names with you. I am called ‘Dimmis.’ ”

Deayl wiped a shaking hand over his muzzle, then nodded. “I am called ‘Illya.’ ”

“A home for you, Illya.”

Deayl pressed the panel, extended his fingers, and placed his palms over his eyes. Ah! Ah, it comes! The pain returns. How many disgraces must I bring upon myself before my task is done? How many?

In his quarters, Baxter sagged as he tried to get comfortable in the strange chair. As near as he could figure it, he had just completed a three kilometer dead run from the docking bay, trying to keep up with the delegation. He opened his eyes and looked around the room. The white bulkheads were bare, except for the three iris-like doors. One door led to a closet, another to the corridor, and the third to a bathroom straight from one of Baxter’s more imaginative nightmares. He had been literally relieved to find that he could use the equipment, although with some difficulty. On the deck, several thick cushions were arranged for sleeping. His chair had a black metal frame and was upholstered with a soft green fabric. Baxter sat on one side of the seat, since the center-rear was open to comfortably seat the Nitolan tail. The backrest, tilted forward to accommodate the creatures’ stooping backs, dug into Baxter’s shoulderblades. His ankles reached to the edge of the seat.

He reached to his belt and pressed the switch to his radio that, through the relay set in the Python, would keep him in touch with Earth. “Mission Control, this is Messenger.”

“Messenger, report on your situation.”

“I’m established in quarters. At the moment, I’m supposed to be resting . . . although that’s going to be a little difficult. At about oh-four-hundred GMT tomorrow, I’ll be taken on some kind of demonstration, then meet Lothas. The best their language mechanics can make out of his title is ‘governor.’ Then, whatever negotiations there will be will begin.”

“Acknowledged, Messenger. From now on, until you begin preparations for reentry, your communications will be handled by the State Department mission control. Stand by.”

Baxter looked down from the chair at the knee-high thick pallet on the deck that would serve him as a bed during his stay. “Baxter, this is Wyman. Do you read?”

“Five by five, Mr. Wyman.”

“Good. What have you found out?”

“The Nitolans, first. They look like a cross between a kangaroo, an ostrich and an alligator; general shape for the first, eyes for the second, claws and teeth for the third—lots of teeth. The head is pretty large.”

“I understand, Baxter. The ships?”

“Incredible.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“The ships are enormous. I can’t even tell you how wide they are. Everything seemed to extend out of sight. But, I’m pretty sure they are monitoring our commercial radio and television broadcasts. The lingpile—the thing they use to convert their language into and out of English—talks like Merv Griffin. They have some sort of force field or tractor beam that pulled me into their lead ship, and I think the same thing allows them to simulate gravity on board. Gravity appears to be Earth normal, and there appears to be no inducement of this by centrifugal force or other physical means. That’s it, except that they seem friendly—and curious.”

“Baxter, do they appear secretive or evasive about themselves?”

Baxter shook his head. “Not that I can tell. In fact, they provided me with a reader of some kind in case I wanted some diversion when I wasn’t sleeping. They prepared something for me that contains a nutshell history of them, their mission, and so on.”

“You will begin on it at once, Baxter.”

“Mr. Wyman, I’m a little bushed right now—”

“At once, Baxter! Until we know more, all of us are groping in the dark-including you. Now, do your homework.”

“Yessir.”

“One more thing, Baxter.”

“Go ahead.”

“We must establish to a certainty from where they came. If they, in fact, have come from Earth’s past, we must be sure. Do you have any indications other than their appearance? Things they’ve said? Answers to your questions?”

“Mr. Wyman, I haven’t asked them Babe Ruth’s all-time batting average, or the words to ‘Yankee Doodle,’ if that’s what you’re talking about.”

“I understand. I’ll see about preparing a suitable list of questions—things based on our knowledge of the period they claim to be from. Is there anything you need?”

Baxter thought a moment. “How is all this striking the public?”

“Officially, we are denying everything, and so are the Soviets, but rumors are spreading fast. Too many people picked up that initial broadband contact, although it hasn’t grown serious yet.”

“What about the Russian?”

“Launch is still go for the day after tomorrow. We still don’t have a line on what they plan to pull. That it?”

“Yes. Baxter out.” He released the switch, sighed and slid to the front edge of the seat, then dropped to the floor. The edge of the seat came to his waist. Baxter walked to the door panel, reached up and pressed the platter-sized button with both hands. Part of the wall dilated iris fashion, exposing a wide corridor and a Nitolan standing guard. The creature walked to the opening, its heavy tail scraping harshly against the deck, and stooped in Baxter’s direction.

“May I help you, Captaincarlbaxter? I am Simdna.”

Baxter nodded and pointed at the swept-screened contraption attached to a chair by a swinging metal brace. “Yes. Medp said that I could use the reader if I wanted, but I am ignorant of its operation.” Baxter walked to the reader chair, climbed up and settled in as the Nitolan followed, then pushed the reader more closely to the chair. “Now, what do I do?”

Simdna picked up two pancake-sized tabs and held them out to Baxter. “Put one on each side of your head. They will attach themselves.”

Baxter held one tab in each hand, then held them to the sides of his head. “What now?”

Simdna pointed toward a panel. “This will begin the record.” He pointed at a slotswitch. “The more you pull this toward you, the faster will run the record.”

Baxter nodded. “Thank you. I don’t think I’ll need anything else.”

Simdna turned, left the room and the door closed after him. Baxter studied the screen then looked at the panel for starting. He leaned forward and pushed it with the palm of his hand. At once, a feeling of mild intoxication swept him. It stayed as he pulled the switch, and images and narratives attacked his senses at high input levels. He realized this, but realized also that he understood it all, as fast as it was. He pulled again at the slotswitch . . .

. . . The Nitolans were a highly-evolved race, with self-made imperatives of right and wrong, a structured social system, great cities, long before man thought these even to exist. In the midst of the great reptiles, the Nitolans had science, law, and the creation of wealth, for the Power was theirs. They studied truth . . .

. . . And the knowing ones read their instruments and saw the death of every creature that could not hide within the mud or beneath the waters. The night brightstar would grow in brilliance, until it washed all other stars from the sky, and even paled Amasaat from the day sky. To survive, the Nitolans must leave the planet for as long as the planet took to again become green and alive with creatures.

While the wisest of the knowing ones searched the future for a time that would serve the race, others of the knowing ones spread across Nitola to tell the things that they had learned. “We must leave Nitola, else the race shall die.” . . . Many believed and helped to construct the great ships that would protect precious cargo through the vacuum of space and the emptiness of time. Others did not believe and the Power was turned against itself as the factions decided the issue through blood.

As the ships were completed, the war concluded, and the victors gathered among the ships to depart Nitola. The knowing ones looked at their planet and saw the ravaged cities, the gaping wounds of mines and quarries, their own structures for building the ships. They wondered if this evidence, if left behind, would lead an alien visitor or a newly evolved race to find them and destroy them as they crossed the void. The Power was turned against the cities, and the other marks they had made, removing all trace of their existence. Then, they swept the planet and removed all traces of the substance of the Power, should they return to find a newly evolved race using the Power and turning it against the homecomers.

When all was done, the ships were filled, the travelers’ life processes were slowed, and the journey begun . . .

“There are many of us who share your mind, Deayl.”

Deayl looked from Nozn to his companion Suleth, then back to Nozn. “My mind has been voted down by the council. What brings you to my quarters?”

Nozn studied Deayl. “We read the piles and can see what the hue-muns do. Many of us would not wait until the creatures render Nitola unfit for habitation.”

Deayl turned away and studied a blank wall. “If there are such as you talk about, they would disgrace themselves by acting against the common mind.”

Suleth looked from Nozn to Deayl. “We have had enough of these word games, Deayl. Do you plan to take an action?”

“Action?”

Suleth nodded. “Will you lead us?”

Deayl lowered himself to his sleeping pallet, placed his head on his cushion, and looked up at the overhead. “I will speak with you two later.”

Nozn placed a clawed hand on Suleth’s arm to quiet him, then nodded at Deayl. “It is my mind that this task would be bonded by our exchanging of names. Is this your mind as well, Deayl?”

Deayl rolled over and propped himself up with an elbow. His black eyes fixed Nozn to the deck. “No! Treason to our race is no excuse for friendship!” He lowered himself back to his cushion. “Leave me now. I will call you if I wish to converse further.”

Nozn and Suleth bowed and left Deayl’s quarters. Deayl rolled to his left side, his eyes tightly shut. I belittle myself enough by the enterprise I have undertaken. I shall not suck others into the same mire. He opened his eyes and spoke to a dark corner of the compartment. “You are my governor, Lothas, and you speak for the common mind.” Deayl sighed. “But, you stand between us and our home. Isn’t yours the greater crime?” Deayl closed his eyes and tossed. The question was yet to be answered in his own mind.

Midway through the next planetary cycle, Baxter bid farewell to his Nitolan friend Illya, then entered his quarters and flopped onto his sleeping pallet. He detached the insulated gloves from his suit, threw them aside and placed his hands against his cheeks. His face felt drained of color. Without rising, Baxter keyed his transceiver. “State, this is Messenger.” He opened his eyes and looked at the overhead. “State, this is Messenger. Do you read?”

“Go ahead, Baxter. This is Wyman.”

Baxter licked his lips, took a deep breath, then sat up. “Wyman, are there any manned missions on the Moon—secret things that I don’t know about?”

“I’m sure there aren’t, but I can check it for you. Is it important?”

“It’s important. I also want to know if the Soviets have anything on the Lunar surface, and if so, where.”

“Understood. What’s going on, Baxter?”

Baxter shook his head. I’m rattled, that’s what’s going on. Calm down.

“I was taken on a demonstration today. It’s a thing they call ‘the power.’ I saw a quarter of the Lunar surface turned into glass in less time than it’s taking me to tell you about it.” Baxter licked his lips again. “My guide took me down about two hours later and I walked the surface. The dark side now has a mare that makes Imbrium, Serenity, and Tranquility together look like a wading pool.” The radio remained silent. “Did you copy that, Wyman?”

“Baxter, what is your feeling about it?”

Baxter’s eyes widened. “My feeling? How in the Hell do you think I feel about it? If these lizards want to, they can fry my entire planet in about twenty minutes!”

“What I meant, Baxter, is your feeling about the purpose of the demonstration.”

Baxter thought a moment, then flushed. “I suppose its purpose was to produce exactly the kind of hysterical gibbering I’ve been doing; correct?”

“Correct. Look, Baxter; you are not dealing with an overweight Congressional committee or the local school board. You can’t make a mistake, then go back and patch it up later with an apology or some syrup from the White House. You have to keep your head clear and your feelings out of it, while you look for angles, feel out the edges, find out where to push, and where to back off. You understand?”

Baxter shook his head. “You diplomatic types have all the sensitivity of an oyster.”

State paused for a long moment. “It’s not lack of feelings, Baxter; it’s called guts. Grow some. Wyman out.”

Baxter released the key on his transceiver, stood, and began shucking his pressure suit. At least I wasn’t as rattled as Deayl. The Nitolan had walked the Lunar surface with him, and had been strangely quiet. Deayl’s answers to direct questions were brief, shaken, and almost incoherent. I wonder what my old buddy Illya was nervous about?

The iris to Baxter’s compartment opened and the Nitolan called Simdna entered. “I extend an invitation from Lothas, our governor, to meet with him in private before you meet with the full council.”

Baxter nodded. “I am most happy to accept his invitation.” I’m already beginning to talk like a diplomat. “When does Lothas wish to see me?”

“Is it convenient for you to come now?”

“Yes.”

Simdna backed away from the door and held out a clawed hand. “Then Lothas would see you now.”

On the way to his quarters, Deayl sagged against the corridor wall. He turned his head up, then closed his eyes and let his muzzle drop to his chest. The claws on his fingers dug into his palms, the pain almost blotting out the waves of self-condemnation that threatened to drive his mind empty. He heard the sound of someone approaching, and he pushed himself away from the wall and opened his eyes. It was Nozn.

“There you are, Deayl.”

“Here I am.”

Nozn turned back, and seeing the corridor empty, returned his gaze to Deayl. “The hue-mun still lives, Deayl. If you cannot perform the task, leave it to someone who can.”

Deayl hissed, his eyes sparking. “You forget your place, Nozn!”

Nozn closed his eyes and performed a shallow bow. “I meant no disrespect, Deayl.”

“I shall do what needs to be done, and with no one’s help. That I can keep all others but myself clean from this act is my only claim to honor. Do not take this from me by becoming involved.”

Nozn bowed again. “It will be as you wish, Deayl.” He stood and half-turned to go. “But, if you should fail, there are others who will not.” Nozn nodded once, then moved off down the corridor.

Deayl placed a hand against the corridor wall, turned his gaze toward the deck plates, and saw the glassy surface of Naal, the child-moon of Nitola. Baxter had stood on the thin crust of the molten pool, and it would have taken only a slight shove to have removed the creature from existence. The Council would have accepted the event as an accident, while the humans on the planet would have . . . Are the hue-muns that sensitive that they would attempt retaliation on the basis of one suspicious death? Will they adopt an attitude that will make their removal the only option left to the Council, for just one death? Deayl wiped his hand over his muzzle, then let it drop to his side. Or, will the hue-muns’ tribes be more reflective, making the murder I will commit a futile gesture ?

Deayl, still supporting himself by moving his hand along the corridor wall, walked the few remaining steps to his quarters. He pressed the panel and the iris opened. Inside, the compartment was black, making the door appear as the dark, slathering maw of some nightmare-begotten creature. If the hue-muns know it is a murder, the Council will as well. But, perhaps this is the only way—exchange my future for the future of my race. Deayl stepped into the iris, and it closed behind him.

Baxter stared at the upholstered, wing-backed chair in disbelief. From its wooden claw-on-ball legs to the garish oranges and yellows of the fabric, the chair appeared to have been cloned from a discount department store’s loss leader. He looked over to Lothas. The Nitolan governor reclined on several of the familiar thick cushions. “Where did you get this?” Baxter held out a hand toward the chair.

“Do you like it? I hope it is comfortable.”

Baxter lowered himself into it, did one or two experimental bounces, then leaned back and crossed his legs. “It’s fine.”

“That pleases me, Captaincarlbaxter. It was constructed according to information gleaned from your television transmissions. It was felt that you might find our furniture out of size.”

Baxter smiled. “Thank you very much . . . do I call you ‘governor’ ?”

“I am Lothas. If you would exchange names, I am called Dimmis.”

Baxter nodded. “Very well, Dimmis. I am called Baxter. I appreciate the chair very much.”

“Another like it will be placed in your quarters, and one more in the conference compartment where you will meet with my council.”

“Excellent.” Baxter wondered if he should mention something about the horrible pattern, but decided against it.

“We can prepare you one of your beds, if you wish.”

Baxter held up his hands. “Thank you, but that would be quite unnecessary. I find the cushions in my quarters very comfortable.”

Lothas nodded. “Baxter, you know of us and our mission, do you not?”

“Yes. I watched the record you prepared before I slept.”

The governor nodded again. “Still, you know too little of us, and we, too little of you.” The Nitolan sat up and pulled a table console to where he could reach it. “The knowing ones have amassed a great deal of information from your radio and television, and from the visual and sensor surveys they have done. Still, we know too little to judge properly what we should do.”

Baxter nodded. These lizards don’t know what to do any more than I do. “I understand. If you will tell me the information you want, perhaps I can arrange to get it for you.”

“We understand that your information storage piles can talk to each other, is this not true?”

Baxter nodded. “Yes. Computers.”

“The information we need appears to be contained in a number of your . . . computers. I would like to send three of our knowing ones down to a place that can talk to your computers.”

“I’ll see if I can arrange it.”

Lothas sat quietly for a moment, then lifted his head. “There is much, Baxter, that we must learn about each other, as well.”

Baxter followed the direction of the governor’s gaze and saw nothing but an inverted green dome set into the overhead. He looked back at Lothas and shrugged. “I agree, we must . . .”

Baxter’s vision blurred as Lothas removed a hand from the console beside his cushion bed.

“It is good you agreed, Baxter. Trust is important.” Lothas’s hand rose to the console, and Baxter felt himself expanding, whirling up and out, as the compartment went black.

He felt his gorge rise as he realized he was standing off to one side observing while another thumbed and sorted through his memories. From memories to automatized interactions and responses as memories were let to play, mesh, divide, and redivide according to their own dictates.

. . . the job; the goddamned job . . . still haven’t called Boxman. Deb. That damned Argyle sock . . . He felt his thoughts pulled from one area, then forced into another . . . a documentary; stacking them up like cordwood in Auschwitz . . . Eichmann in a little glass booth . . . Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, Gaza, Suez, South Afr . . .

His thoughts plunged down a dimly lit hole . . . a little red balsa wood plane with a wind up . . . Christmas, and Grandma’s there, so we’ll say grace this time . . . high school, college . . . planes at the grass strip near Evanston . . . testing at Lockheed . . . Air Force . . .

A cesspool of repressed fear yawned before him . . . The Python, panic . . . what to do, God, what to do? . . . the size of them . . . why me ? . . .

Baxter opened his eyes and saw Lothas removing his hand from the console. The Nitolan stared at him for a long time, then held its hands over its eyes for a moment. Lothas let his hands fall to his knees. “Baxter . . . you, your race . . . you are everything . . .” He waved a hand toward his compartment’s iris. “Please leave. Take no offense, but please leave. I must think.”

Baxter stood, a feeling of panic rising in his chest. He watched as Lothas put his head down on the cushions and appeared to sleep.

Back in his quarters, seated in a duplicate of the wing backed chair, Baxter shook his head at his transceiver. “I don’t know, Wyman. After I woke up, Lothas seemed very upset. Then, he asked me to leave.”

“I don’t know what to make of it, Baxter. You think it’s some kind of mind-reading machine?”

“I’m sure of it. Should I make a break for it? I know the way to the docking bay, and—”

“No. Baxter, get control of yourself. Since we don’t have any plans, Lothas couldn’t have uncovered any hostile intentions. We just don’t know, so sit tight until we do.”

“Sit tight.”

“You read me correctly.”

Baxter listened to the static as he reviewed language forms he had not used since high school. He let out his breath. “Wyman, has anyone gotten in touch with Deb yet?”

“Deb?”

“My wife.”

“I’m sure someone has. Is it important?”

Baxter could feel himself becoming wild-eyed again, and he took several deep breaths. “You’re damn right it’s important, Wyman, I want you—you personally—to make sure that my wife is notified.”

“Very well. I’ll let you know as soon as I can about that visit from your friends. There shouldn’t be any problems with letting them down—the slip-stick jockeys down here are as curious about them as they are about us. As far as access to computers, it depends on what they want. We aren’t about to hand over classified information to a potential enemy. Do you know what they’re interested in?”

“No.” Baxter wiped a hand over his face. The hand came away wet. “What about the Russian?”

“No change. Lift-off is tomorrow. We still don’t have a reading on the approach he’s going to use.”

Baxter laughed. “I think I do. He’ll probably use the same one I’m using: sort of a combination of Alice in Wonderland with Blind Man’s Bluff.”

“Baxter?”

“Yeah?”

“Hang in there, Baxter. Okay?”

Baxter closed his eyes and nodded. “No sweat. And thanks. Baxter out.” He released the key on his transceiver and studied the overhead. It was eggshell white, smooth and seamless. Images from his stay under Lothas’s machine flashed through his mind, and he gripped the armrests of the chair to keep his hands from shaking.

I don’t believe it! I’m scared. I am finger-shaking, head-sweating, pants-wetting scared.

The iris to his compartment opened, and he jumped and began backing away from the door. It was Simdna. “Captaincarlbaxter?”

Baxter held his head back as the muscles at the back of his neck knotted. “What is it, Simdna?”

“Lothas wishes to inform you that the council meeting has been postponed.”

Baxter studied the guard, then nodded. “Thank you.”

Simdna left, the door closing behind him. Baxter lowered himself to the knee-high pallet on the deck and exhaled.

“Now what?”

Baxter tossed on his pallet, his fingers clawing at the throats of his mind’s monsters. He saw himself, a fraud in man’s clothing. A creature of petty evasion, weak, frightened—above all, frightened. Thin hands reached out to work levers and turn knobs; watery eyes, reflective and darting, sought out lights and dials. Shaking and pain-whipped, the creature operated a machine. Baxter’s view faded back, through the wall of the machine, into the light. He stumbled back as his view of the machine reached a point of recognition. With thick painted lips, gleaming cardboard teeth, and dime store flashlight bulbs for eyes, Carl Baxter raised a hand in his direction . . . the machine-Baxter buzzed as the creature inside screamed . . .

Baxter bolted upright, looked around the compartment, then wrapped his arms around his body to still the shaking. A low buzzing sound drew his attention to the transceiver on the wing-backed chair. Baxter stood, walked over to the chair, and keyed the instrument. “This is Baxter.”

“Wyman here.”

“What is it, Wyman?”

“Hold on for a moment while we patch you back through Mission Control. Remember, you won’t have long.”

“Wyman . . .” Baxter could hear the static shifts as Wyman went out and unseen hands fed unseen signals over new routes.

“Baxter?” The voice was clear, husky, yet soft.

Baxter stared at the transceiver. “Deb? Is that you?”

Baxter heard a familiar sniff, and knew she would be nodding her head and crying. “What have you gotten yourself into now?”

He swallowed, picked up the transceiver, and sat in the chair. “This is a fine mess I’ve gotten us in, Ollie.” Baxter felt the tears welling in his eyes. “Has anyone explained . . . you know.”

“Yes. I see from your new friends down here that you’ve become a real social climber.” She laughed. “You want to know who sat up and held my hand last night?”

“Who?”

“Her husband lives in a white house.” She sniffed again. “And you voted for the other one.”

Baxter smiled and shook his head. “This’ll teach you to mismatch my socks. Hey, you’d never believe the bathroom in my quarters. There’s a machine in there that can clean and dry my uniform and underwear in twenty seconds flat—and you should see my laundress. His name’s Simdna . . . cooks too—”

“Baxter, I love you.”

He bit his lower lip. “Deb, is there anyone else listening in?”

“Only three or four hundred people that I know of.”

Baxter shut his eyes. “Deb . . . there’s something I . . . something I want to tell you.”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been holding down my side of your bed for a bunch of years, Baxter. I know. You can handle it. Do you understand that?”

“Sure.”

“I know you don’t believe it, Baxter, but it’s true. You’ve got what it takes.”

“Deb . . .”

“I have to go now, Baxter. Don’t forget where you live.”

“The house with the view, right?”

“Right.” The audio filled with static as the frequency was returned to State. I love you, Deb. God, do I need you.

“Baxter, this is Wyman.”

“Go ahead.”

“It’s go on the trip. Mission Control will get in touch with the Nitolan mission directly regarding the landing field and time. Still go on the Russian.”

Baxter nodded. “I copy. And Wyman?”

“Yes, Baxter?”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome, but for what?”

“You know. The call to my wife.”

Wyman chuckled. “Don’t thank me, Baxter. That call was made at the orders of the President because of an urgent request by your friend Lothas. I thought you knew.”

“Lothas requested that you put me in touch with my wife?”

“Affirmative. What do you make of it?”

What I make of it is I needed, very badly, to hear from Deb—to have her tell me I can handle it—to prop up my crumbling self-esteem. That, and that Lothas knew that. “I haven’t a clue. I’ll keep in touch.”

“Wyman out.”

Baxter released the key, leaned his head back against the chair, and fell into a troubled sleep.

In the control center, Lothas leaned against his chair’s backrest while Medp shut down the receiver. “Medp, why would Baxter forget where he lives?”

Medp swung his chair in the governor’s direction. “It is a joke, Lothas. It is said as a substitute for ‘I want you to come home.’ ”

Lothas held up a hand toward the receiver. “Baxter did not laugh at the joke.”

Medp shook his head. “There are jokes not to be laughed at. It is but another facet to this humor that still eludes me.”

Lothas let his hand drop to his knee. “Why did his mate, Deb, not simply say ‘I want you to come home’ ? There would be less confusion.”

“Lothas, I am sure Baxter understood. This is what he meant by saying ‘the house with the view,’ when, from what you said, Baxter believes his mate to detest the view from their house. Another joke.”

Lothas hissed, then let his muzzle drop to his chest as he passed a hand over one eye. “The melding showed me Baxter’s mind, but it did not give me an understanding of it. On the outside, he functions as you or I; inside he is a warren of screaming agonies.” Lothas turned to Medp. “I have never witnessed such confusion . . . such pain.” He leaned forward. “Do the creatures use the humor to hide the things they feel from others?”

Medp nodded. “And from themselves as well.”

“How can they hide what they are from themselves? It is impossible.”

“You saw it for yourself, Lothas. All I have seen shows them to be complex, contradictory, self-deceptive, and even self-destructive.”

Lothas leaned back in his chair. “Medp, the melding process not only makes clear to me the workings of Baxter’s mind, you know that it will do the same for him. If what you say is true—as improbable as it sounds—then Baxter will have seen himself for the first time.”

Medp nodded. “Possible.”

“We cannot hide our motives from our own minds; to do so would cause us much pain and confusion. But, if a creature cannot see himself, do we damage it by allowing it to discover its motives?”

Medp leaned back and looked at the overhead. He then lowered his head and turned toward Lothas. “It is outside of my experience to imagine that knowledge of oneself could be damaging. But the hue-muns are also outside of my experience. Perhaps it could be damaging.” Medp turned to a monitor displaying but a crescent of night-shrouded Nitola. “A more important question, Lothas, is can we live together with such creatures in peace?” Medp looked at Lothas.

“My mind thinks not.”

Lothas looked at the monitor and nodded. “Perhaps Deayl is in the right.” He turned to Medp. “In any event, we shall know once you obtain the information from their computers. Prepare your mission well, Medp. The future of this curious race may depend upon what you find. Our own futures, as well.”

In his private quarters, Lothas reclined on his cushions and studied the hue-mun sitting nervously in the wing-backed chair. Baxter would cross his legs, uncross them, then cross them again. His eyes would dart about, then look in one direction for long, unblinking minutes. “Are you well, Baxter?”

The human raised his glance and looked at the Nitolan. “Well?” He nodded, then smiled. “Yes, and you?”

Lothas nodded. “I am well.” He watched as the human’s appearance altered to become calm, his motions unhurried. Perhaps this denial of the self is a means of hue-mun survival.

“What did you wish to see me about, Dimmis? Has the new meeting with the council been arranged?”

“No. Baxter, we are very different creatures from each other.”

Baxter laughed. “This much even I could see.”

Lothas waited for the hue-mun to quiet himself, then sat up. “I do not talk of skin, bones, shape, and size, Baxter.” Lothas held up a five-fingered hand. “Our bone structures are similar, we are both carbon-based lifeforms—two eyes, two nostrils, two arms, two legs. I believe your race originated on my planet, as you must believe that my race did as well.”

Baxter shrugged. “That judgment is for others to make, Dimmis. But, for myself, I believe you are what you say you are.”

Lothas nodded. “There is a difference. Your thinking, Baxter; it is alien. But I can see it is alien by your own choosing. What I do not see is why. I know of no form of life that acts against its interests by choice, except yours.”

Baxter frowned, then wiped a hand over his face. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.” His hand came away wet. “Do you mean wars?”

Lothas shook his head. “No. We have had our own wars. Baxter. Wars can be an expression of self-interest.” The Nitolan pointed a clawed finger at the human. “I talk about your thinking, and how your thinking makes you act. During the meld, among your many pains, I saw the need for your mate. Yet, when you talked with her, you made jokes; you hide the things you mean to say.”

Baxter flushed. “That’s my business. I would like to thank you for making the request.”

“Is this what you mean, Baxter, or is this a joke? I do not understand. Understand that, to my mind, there are only a few ways that this situation can be resolved: First, we end hue-mun life on Nitola and resume control of our planet. We can do this.”

Baxter blanched, then leaned forward, his elbows on the chair’s armrests. “That would gain you nothing but a dead planet, Dimmis. To kill us from orbit, you will have to kill everything. If you land to kill us, then we can fight back, and we will.”

Lothas nodded. “This is why my mind has not been in favor of this choice, although the minds of many Nitolans do favor it.” Lothas waved a hand, dismissing the option. “Of course, I think it impossible that your race could attack and destroy mine. We have the Power. This leaves us with both races living together on Nitola, in some manner.”

Baxter nodded as he exhaled a nervous breath. “I would prefer that.”

“But the more we examine that course, Baxter, the more impossible it appears. We see you destroying the home planet, and this we could not tolerate. But your tribes are so divided, how could they agree to stop? I find that you do not represent all hue-muns, but only a small number. The Russian also represents only a small number. Yet, even so, you could not agree. I see that your tribes would try to use us each to gain an advantage over the other.” Lothas shook his head.

“Another way is for the hue-muns to leave Nitola.”

“Leave?”

“Yes. Find another planet.”

Baxter leaned back in his chair and stared at Lothas. He placed a hand over his chest as he felt his heart beating, threatening to come loose of its supports. “How can we?”

“We have these ships, and we can build you more. Enough to vacate the planet.”

Impossible! Baxter shook his head as he remembered that it was not his decision to make. “I don’t know, Dimmis. It seems unlikely, but I will talk with my people.”

“Such of them as you represent.”

Baxter nodded. “Yes.” He stood.

“Before you go, Baxter, you should understand that these talks with me and with the council are different in substance to us than they are to you.

“How do you mean?”

“In you I read an attitude . . . a desire to use this experience to gain an advantage for your race. To us, we are learning. When we know enough, the proper choice will become obvious. Such a choice is not something subject to concession or negotiation. We will see where the right is, then we shall pursue it. This right we seek is independent of either my desires—or yours.”

Baxter gently rubbed his temples as he reviewed his meeting with Lothas and waited for Wyman to get back to him. State had not been pleased. The whole damned thing is falling apart. Baxter leaned back in the chair, thinking. This whole thing—it’s like trying to stop the fall of mountains by stringing spools of rotting thread across the Grand Canyon.

Lothas had pointed at the dying oceans, the poison air, the sheer number of human mouths. “Still, Dimmis, we have a right to our future—and, on Earth. It is the future you committed us to. We didn’t bail out and take the power with us—you did. If you had left us the power, perhaps things would have been different.”

Lothas had swept the argument away with a wave of his clawed hand. “As lifeforms, you are freaks—self-destructive, murdering freaks. And what is your answer? We are only hue-mun.’ You use this phrase to excuse it all. But, Baxter, this defines you as a lifeform; it defines you as flawed, unworthy. And this is how you define yourselves. “The Nitolan had leaned forward. “If we had left you the Power, there would be none of you left.”

Baxter leaned forward, placed his elbows on his knees, then lowered his face into his hands. He had reported the talk to Wyman. “Baxter, are you insane?”

“Wyman, dammit, we both know I didn’t ask for this! I knew I didn’t know what I was doing, and so did you people! Now Lothas knows it, too. Wyman, you have got to get someone else up here. When Medp takes down the ship to get at the computers, what about putting a State Department mission—or something from the U.N.—on board?”

There had been a long silence, then Wyman came back on the air. “I have to talk to some people about all of this, Baxter, then I’ll get back to you. One thing I can tell you now: if and when you have any more meetings with Lothas or with his council, keep your transceiver keyed and your mouth shut. We shall inform Lothas that State will attempt to deal directly with him. Understood?”

Baxter let his head fall between his hands, then began kneading the knot of muscles at the back of his neck. Wyman had taken the responsibility off of him, except for working the transceiver—something Baxter felt confident enough to handle. But, still, he felt no relief. He leaned back in the chair and bit his lower lip. He was coming across as a complaining, whining, incompetent loser. “Dammit, Wyman,” he said to the overhead, “don’t you understand that they’re messing with my mind? How would you weather a good look at yourself, you brass-plated diplomat?”

His transceiver buzzed, and he pressed the key. “This is Baxter.”

“Wyman. Well, boy, it looks as though you have royally screwed up the works. To tell you the truth, I wouldn’t give two cents for the chances your tailfeathers have if you ever set foot in this country again.”

“It’s nice hearing from you too, Wyman.”

“Okay, here is the drill. We have put together a mission, and we’re waiting now for Lothas or his council to decide whether or not to take them on board. The communications we’ve had were not encouraging. Just in case, we’re going on full alert, and a spit-and-baling-wire arrangement is being put together to coordinate the military defenses of every nation on Earth. By the way, we’ve had at least one break. The Russian isn’t going to make it. He bought it during the launch—”

“Wyman, you twit! A break? You call that a break? What brand of bumwad are you using for brains? I need help up here, and fast—”

“Grow up, Baxter! Help, from the Soviets?”

Baxter shook his head. “No, Wyman. Help from another human.” Baxter felt himself giggling. “You haven’t gotten the message yet—you people down there. We’re all in this together . . . all of us.” He shook his head as his giggles turned into quiet tears. The transceiver clicked, then clicked again. Wyman had keyed in, then keyed out—nothing to say.

The transceiver clicked again. “Remember, Baxter. Do nothing without authorization, and make sure they understand that, from now on, they will be dealing with us directly. Wyman out.”

Baxter released the key on the transceiver. He shrugged, released the catch on his belt, and stood, leaving the belt and transceiver in the chair. The iris to his compartment opened and Simdna entered. “Captaincarlbaxter, Deayl would speak with you if it is your desire.”

Baxter looked at the transceiver on the chair, then back at Simdna. “Yes. I will see him.” Simdna left through the iris and Deayl entered. “It is good to see you again, Illya. Are you feeling better?”

Deayl stared down at the hue-mun, the creature’s image wavered before his eyes. Better? Do I feel better? The iris closed and Deayl took a step forward. “Baxter, we have exchanged names.”

“Yes, Illya.”

Deayl wiped a clawed hand over his muzzle. “Do you remember I said this obligates me to nothing?”

“I remember.” Baxter frowned, then looked once again at the transceiver. He turned back and faced the Nitolan. Deayl had come another step closer, his frightful clawed hands were outstretched.

“Still, I must tell you why I do this, Baxter.” Baxter began edging away from the Nitolan. “Do what?”

“Baxter, the knowing ones have left for Nitola to talk with your computers. The hue-muns below struggle with the same problem: how are we to live together in peace—a thing that can never be.”

“How do you know? You’re upset—”

“The longer we wait to take back our planet, the harder it will be. Even now the hue-muns prepare. But, I must make this clear to the council, and to do this I must provoke the hue-muns. You see, I must murder you.”

“Murder . . .” Baxter watched as Deayl came closer, his black, dagger-sized claws glowing softly in the light of the compartment. The hands struck out, and Baxter ducked. He turned, grabbed the wing-backed chair and threw it at the Nitolan. Deayl swatted it away, splintering it, and smashing the transceiver. Before the pieces hit the deck, Baxter reached the panel controlling the iris and slapped it with both hands. “Simdna! For God’s sake, Simdna!” As the iris opened, Baxter felt Deayl’s hands encircling his chest, the long claws ripping into his lungs . . .

A week passed, and many of those on Earth marveled at how easily arms and territorial agreements between nations could be reached, now that they—in the face of the power—had become meaningless. The strange Nitolan vessel squatted silently next to the hangar where human technicians maintained the links between the ship and a vast array of computers located in almost every nation of Earth. No one saw the Nitolans, and for a week, there had been no communications from either Lothas or Baxter.

In a motel, near the airbase, a diplomatic mission headed by the secretary of state waited impatiently to board the Nitolan ship. On the other side of the field, a task force of commandos practiced their assault plan on the vessel. In Washington, Moscow, Paris, London, Peking, Cairo . . . haggard faces circled cup—and butt-littered tables, waiting by brand new communication facilities for some kind—any kind—of news.

The base commander, General Stayer, heard it first. A shaken voice—one of the technicians in the hangar. No warning. The Nitolans had disconnected the links to the hangar and rose into the night.

The waiting began in earnest.

Deb Baxter listened to the rain spatter against the window and let her arm fall on the empty side of the bed. She opened her hand, palm down, and caressed the overstuffed quilt. She made a fist, then rolled over and pulled a cigarette from a half-empty pack on her night stand. She had been three years off cigarettes, and she realized as she struck a match that she was already back to two packs a day. In the light of the match, her eyes were puffy, with dark circles. She touched the match to the end of the cigarette, then shook it out. Taking a pillow and propping it up against the headboard, she propped herself up against it and studied the dark surrounding the warm coal that brightened with each drag she took.

She had faced that Baxter wasn’t coming back, learned she could survive the fact, then accepted it—almost. Nights without sleeping pills still became vigils. She threw off the covers, swung her legs to the cold floor and walked barefooted to the bedroom window. Holding the dark curtain aside, she stared at the security lights surrounding the experimental parking ramp. Somewhere out there, some poor jerk who had been conned off the farm with promises of becoming an “Aerospace Technician” was walking guard, rifle muzzle down, head and shoulders hunched under a poncho against the rain. She shook her head. “Stupid. It’s not even supposed to rain in the desert.”

She heard sirens in the distance, and then red lights streaked down the base’s main drag, between her and the lights around the experimental ramp. There were always sirens. Baxter used to roll over and mumble something about the AP’s playing cops and robbers, then sink back into sleep. She listened as the sirens grew dim, then gradually increased in volume. Must be turning into the area. She smiled and shook her head. An area. I don’t call it a neighborhood, or even a development, anymore. An area. She felt an ash brush her knuckles as it fell from the cigarette to the carpet. “Damn!” She stooped down to make certain that she had not ignited the cheap pile, then held up her head as she heard the sirens grow very loud, then die amidst a squeal of brakes. Immediately a loud pounding came from her door.

She looked around the dark bedroom, found her robe thrown over a chair, and began putting it on. “Mrs. Baxter! Mrs. Baxter, are you in there?”

She tied the sash with trembling fingers. “Just a minute!” She ran into the living room and to the front door. Unlocking the door, she pulled it open. In the street before her house was a blue staff car flanked fore and aft by AP jeeps, red lights still flashing. She turned on the outside light and a graying Air Force officer, accompanied by an AP, removed his hat.

“Mrs. Baxter. I am the base commander, General Stayer. I must ask you to come with me.”

“I . . . General, is this about my husband? Is it?”

The officer looked down. “I’m sorry. I don’t know. Please hurry. We haven’t much time.”

Deb turned from the door, opened the hall closet and pulled out a raincoat. As she put it on, she found the first thing handy, and slipped Baxter’s rubber galoshes over her bare feet. Moments later, she sat by the general in the back of the blue staff car as the procession screamed its way toward the field.

The car stood silently on the edge of the field, the dim blue taxiing lights diffused by the droplets on the windows, illuminating Deb’s face with a cold glow. She looked across the back seat through the windshield, but could see nothing but the rain. Pulling the raincoat around her, she shivered.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Baxter.” The general turned to the driver. “Bill?”

“Yessir?”

“Turn on the car and let’s have some heat.”

“Yessir!” The driver hit the ignition, the motor caught, and in moments warm air blew against Deb’s legs. She turned toward Stayer.

“Thank you. I didn’t realize how cold I was.”

Stayer nodded, then reached for a microphone attached to the back seat. He keyed the mike. “Tower, this is Stayer. Has GCA got ’em yet?”

“Affirmative, General. Ground con—”

Stayer switched the frequency indicator next to the mike hanger, then keyed the mike. “GCA, this is Stayer. You have an ETA yet?”

“This is GCA. Yes, General. They should be over the field in about a minute, although with this visibility you probably won’t be able to see them until they land. The other ship didn’t use lights.”

“Stayer out.” The general hung up the mike, looked at Deb, then turned back to the driver. “Bill, hit the wipers.”

“Yessir.” The car’s electric wipers whined and thumped back and forth, but the field before them, as well as the sky above, remained empty.

Stayer leaned back, keeping his eyes on the deserted runway. “This is the first contact of any kind that we’ve had with them for three weeks, Mrs. Baxter. I know how difficult this is, but they specifically asked to meet with you. We tried to ask, but they ended the transmission before we could ask about your husband.”

Deb nodded and turned to face Stayer. “I’ll do whatever I can—”

The entire field grew bright with a blinding, yellow-white glare. Deb put her hands over her eyes, then peered through her fingers. The driver was leaning forward, over the steering wheel, looking up through the windshield.

“Jesus!” The driver craned his neck further, trying to get a vertical look. “Jesus, General, the size of it!”

Stayer, his head pressed against the rear window, simply nodded. Deb held her breath as a glittering shape filled the landing field before her. She was startled to realize that the only sound she heard was the car’s motor and the patter of the rain on the roof. Without thinking, she reached out a hand and grasped Stayer’s forearm.

The area beneath the ship grew bright as it came within a few meters of the ground. Red light joined the white as the belly opened, and a small, black craft was gently lowered to the runway. “It’s the Python, General. And there’s something else. Looks like two boxes.”

Somewhere on the ship, a blue panel illuminated. The general took a breath, leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. “That’s the signal, Bill. Get going.”

Deb saw the driver looking at the controls of the staff car as though it was the first time he had ever seen them.

“Damn!” He put the car in gear, the car jumped forward, then died. “I’m sorry, sir . . . I . . .”

“Take it easy, Bill. Just start it up, and take it easy.”

“Yessir.” The car started, then began approaching the ship. Deb’s hand dropped from her eyes as she stared at the vessel, growing larger just at the moment she would have sworn it could grow no larger. The car stopped. Deb watched as an illuminated ramp extended from under the blue panel on the ship and touched the ground. A moment later a creature with massive legs for walking, smaller clawed legs held in front, and a thick tail behind, walked down the ramp and took up a position next to it.

“Mrs. Baxter?”

Deb turned toward Stayer, realizing she still held his arm. “What . . . what do I do?”

Stayer nodded at the creature. “Go over to . . . that. It’ll tell you what to do. Good luck.”

Deb opened the door, stepped out, and stood facing the ship. She could tell it was still raining, but none fell around the vessel. Leaving the door open, she walked toward the ramp, keeping her eyes on the creature. When she was ten feet from it, she stopped. “Well?”

The creature looked down at her. “You are the mate of Captaincarlbaxter?”

“Yes.” She looked up the ramp into the ship, and at the top she saw a familiar face. “Baxter!” She ran past the creature, onto the ramp, and then reached the top. Tears streamed down her face as she looked at him, then ran to him and held him tightly.

“Easy, Deb.” He kissed her and held his cheek tightly against hers.

She pushed back and held him at arm’s length. “Baxter.” She sniffed, then laughed. “That’s some dynamite entrance you’ve got there, Baxter!”

Baxter smiled. “Wait until you see the rest of my act.” He looked from Deb’s wet hair, to his old raincoat, then to his old rubber galoshes. He looked back at her face and shook his head. “That’s my Deb. All class. Why didn’t you dress up? You’re going to meet some important people.”

“Oh, you jerk!” She embraced him again, then withdrew her arms as she heard a rasping sound behind her.

Baxter nodded in the direction of the open ramp door, where the creature Deb had seen was now standing. “Deb, I would like you to meet my friend, Deayl. If you would be friends with him, he would be called Illya.”

Deb nodded at Deayl. “My name is Deb.”

The creature nodded back. “You must call me Illya, then.”

Baxter bent down, picked a helmet up from the deck, and turned to Deayl. “Illya, there’s something I have to do. Would you keep Deb company for a few minutes?”

Deb frowned. “Baxter!”

He kissed her, turned and walked down the ramp. Both she and Illya stood at the head of the ramp as Baxter went down, walked to the edge of the concrete runway, and knelt down. She turned to Deayl. “What is he doing?”

“Something that he wishes to do.” He turned his head down toward Deb. “I asked Baxter if I could explain to you what has happened, and he consented.” Deayl looked back at the hue-mun kneeling on the edge of the runway. “I tried to kill Baxter.” Deb looked at the creature’s clawed hands, then to the coal black eyes. “I hurt him very badly. This was to make you humans angry, and make impossible a settlement between us.”

Deayl nodded toward Baxter. “Our medicine saved him, then he saved me. I was to be tried by the council for my act, and Baxter interceded. What was said is not important, but he showed us something we had never seen before.” Deayl looked back at Deb. “When we see the right, that is what we accept and follow. But the right says Baxter should have demanded my death. Instead, he pleaded for me. He understood why I had acted the way I did. He . . . showed mercy. You hue-muns are everything evil that we had feared becoming, but you are also greater than we could hope to be. Because of this, and because of the things the knowing ones found, our ships will leave. Earth is yours for as long as you can keep it.”

Deb looked down the ramp and saw Baxter at the bottom. In his arms he carried his helmet, and as he came close to the door, she saw that the helmet was filled to the brim with mud. He stopped, held it out toward Deayl, and smiled as the Nitolan took it and bowed. “A home for you, Baxter.”

“A home for you, Illya.”

Deayl stood up, turned and went through an open iris. It blinked shut behind him. Baxter took Deb’s arm and steered her down the ramp. When they reached the runway, the ramp retracted, the ship became dark, then it lifted quietly away from the field. Deb felt the rain on her cheek as she followed Baxter to where the Python stood on the runway next to the two cubical containers. General Stayer got out of his car and stopped next to them.

Baxter patted the nose of the Python and turned toward the general. “There you are, General. I’m returning your property, and I even saved you some fuel.”

Stayer placed a hand on Baxter’s shoulder. “I’m glad to see you, Baxter. You’ll never know how glad.”

“The feeling is mutual, General.” Baxter looked up as he saw a stampede of siren-screaming, light-flashing vehicles moving toward their location from the tower area. “I guess that’ll be all the brass.” He turned toward Stayer. “General, I have two favors to ask.”

“Shoot.”

Baxter went to one of the containers. “General, this is the information the Nitolans pulled out of our computers. It’s been put together with their information and processed in ways I don’t pretend to understand. It shows, day by day, the human race lasting another hundred and twenty years at the outside. Their predictions are accurate, which is why they left. What they saw told them that they could come back in a few hundred years and pick up where they left off—that humanity will have eliminated itself by then.” Baxter nodded, then held Deb around the shoulders. “But, Medp told me that this particular prediction of theirs has one very large, unpredictable variable. That’s us: humanity. If I were you, I’d have the container moved to wherever it was the Nitolans linked into those computers and get to work.”

Stayer nodded. “And the other favor?”

“Before all the brass shows up, I’d like to borrow your car and driver. I want to go home.”

“Baxter, there are briefings, the Secretary—”

“General, I want to go home.”

Stayer motioned at his car, it started up, and began rolling in their direction. The car’s headlights illuminated the Python and the two containers. “One more thing, Baxter.”

“Yessir?”

“What’s in the other container?”

Baxter pulled on Deb’s arm, stopped next to the car-sized cube, and pressed a panel set into the side of the container. It parted into two sections and swung open, exposing two wing-backed chairs, claw-on-ball feet, yellow and orange floral pattern. “I’d like these sent to my house.”

Deb looked at them, then began laughing. “Oh . . . oh, Baxter . . . they’re horrible!”

Stayer shook Baxter’s arm. “Get going, Captain. And expect an early call. You have quite a selling job to do.”

“Yessir. Thank you, sir.”

The two entered the rear door held by the driver, and after shutting it, the driver ran around the front of the car and entered. In moments, the car moved off. Stayer felt the rain, hunched his shoulders and walked to the container with the chairs. As waves of vehicles pulled up, lighting the area with their headlights, the General took a last look, then pressed the container’s panel. The cube closed with a snap. He nodded. “She’s right. They are horrible.” Shaking his head, General Stayer turned to greet the brass.

Lothas closed his fingers over the handful of dirt and looked up at the image of receding Nitola in the monitor. He held the closed hand toward the monitor and turned toward Medp. “In suspension it will be nothing to us. Perhaps a few planetary cycles, then we shall go home.”

Medp studied the monitor. “Perhaps not.”

Lothas nodded. “I hope you are right, Medp. They are special creatures, aren’t they?”

“Indeed. It will take me many star cycles to absorb the information on them that I have acquired.”

Lothas turned back toward the monitor. “Have you found an answer to the humor ritual?”

Medp gave an involuntary snort, then shook his head. “Perhaps there is no answer.” He giggled.

“You seem to have discovered the cause of the reaction. Please explain.”

Medp nodded, then looked up at the overhead. “Very well. Do you know of mice?”

Lothas nodded. “The small rodent.”

“Yes.” Medp giggled again. “And the mythical being of Santa Claus?”

Lothas leaned against his backrest, half-closed his large, dark eyes, and studied the knowing one. “Yes. You explained that in your report on hue-mun beliefs. Explain this behavior.”

Medp held out his hands. “Lothas, why are a little gray mouse and Santa Claus similar?” Medp closed his eyes, shook, and gasped for breath.

“Are you well?”

Medp waved a hand. “Yes, yes. Answer the question.”

Lothas thought a moment, then shook his head. “It escapes me, knowing one. Why are a little gray mouse and Santa Claus similar?”

Medp reached out a hand and grasped the back of Lothas’s chair, apparently to keep from falling to the deck. “You see, Lothas . . . they both have long white beards—” tears began streaming from the knowing one’s eyes “—except for the mouse!”

The control center rocked with the sounds of Medp’s laughter as the knowing one slapped Lothas’s back, then staggered through an open iris, leaving Lothas alone with only a puzzled expression for company. Lothas shook his head. “Truly, there is much to learn.” He reached out a clawed finger to press the panel for the voice log. His finger stopped short of the panel, he closed his eyes and nodded.

Then the dinosaur laughed.

FIREFLOOD

Vonda N. McIntyre

Here is a first rate sf tale about a conflict among human and alien and a life-form somewhere in between. Vonda McIntyre’s DREAMSNAKE won the SFWA Nebula award for best novel of 1978. The story you are about to read is the title story in a new collection, FIREFLOOD AND OTHER STORIES, to be published shortly by Houghton Mifflin.

Dark moved slowly along the bottom of a wide, swift river, pushing against its current. The clean water made long bubbling strokes over her armor, and round stones scraped against her belly scales. She could live here, hidden in rapids or pools, surfacing every few hours to replenish her internal supplies of oxygen, looking little different from a huge boulder. In time she could even change the color of her armor to conform perfectly to the lighter, grayer rock of this region. But she was moving on; she would not stay in the river long enough to alter her rust-red hue.

Vibrations warned her of rapids. She took more care with her hand-and footholds, though her own mass was her main anchor. Stones rumbling gradually downstream did not afford much purchase for her claws. The turbulence was treacherous and exciting. But now she had to work harder to progress, and the riverbed shifted more easily beneath her. As the water grew swifter it also became more shallow, and when she sensed a number of huge boulders around her, she turned her back to the flow and reared up above the surface to breathe.

The force of the current sent water spraying up over her back, forming a curtain that helped conceal her. She breathed deeply, pumping air through her storage lungs, forcing herself not to exceed her body’s most efficient absorption rate. However anxious she was to get underwater again, she would do herself no good if she used more oxygen than she stored during the stop.

Dark’s armor, though impenetrable and insensitive to pain, detected other sensations. She was constantly aware of the small point of heat—call it that, she had no more accurate word—in the center of her spinal ridge. It was a radio transceiver. Though she could choose not to hear its incoming messages, it sent out a permanent beacon of her presence that she could not stop. It was meant to bring aid to her in emergencies, but she did not want to be found. She wanted to escape.

Before she had properly caught her breath, she sensed the approach of a helicopter, high above and quite far away. She did not see it: the spray of water glittered before her shortsighted eyes. She did not hear it: the rush of the river drowned out all other sounds. But she had more than one sense that had as yet no name.

She let herself sink beneath the water. An observer would have had to watch a single boulder among many to see what had happened. If the searchers had not homed in on the transmitter she could still get away.

She turned upstream again and forged ahead toward the river’s source.

If she was very lucky, the helicopter was flying a pattern and had not actually spotted her transmitter at all. That was a possibility, for while it did not quite have the specificity of a laser, it worked on a narrow beam. It was, after all, designed to send messages via satellite.

But the signal did not pass through water and even as the searchers could not detect her, she could not see or feel them through the rough silver surface of the river. Trusting her luck, she continued on.

The country was very different from where she had trained. Though she was much more comfortable underground than underwater, this land was not ideal for digging. She could survive as well beneath liquid, and travel was certainly quicker. If she could not get to the surface to breathe, the time it would take her to stop and extract oxygen directly was about the same. But the character of water was far too constant for her taste. Its action was predictable and its range of temperature was trivial compared to what she could stand. She preferred to go under ground, where excitement spiced the exploration. For, though she was slow, methodical, and nearly indestructible, she was an explorer. It was just that now she had nowhere to explore.

She wondered if any of her friends had made it this far. She and six others had decided, in secret, to flee. But they offered each other only moral support; each had gone out alone. Twenty more of her kind still remained scattered in their reserve, waiting for assignments that would never come and pretending they had not been abandoned.

Though it was not yet evening, the light faded around her and left the river bottom gray and black. Dark slowly and cautiously lifted her eyes above the water. Her eyes peered darkly from beneath her armor. They were deep blue, almost black, the only thing of beauty about her: the only thing of beauty about her after or before her transformation from a creature who could pass for human to one who could not. Even now she was not sorry to have volunteered for the change. It did not further isolate her; she had always been alone. She had also been useless. In her new life, she had some worth.

The riverbed had cut between tall, thick trees that shut out much of the sunlight. Dark did not know for certain if they would interfere with the radio signal as well. She had not been designed to work among lush vegetation and she had never studied how her body might interact with it. But she did not believe it would be safe for her to take a quiet stroll among the giant cedars. She tried to get her bearings, with sun time and body memory. Her ability to detect magnetic fields was worthless here on Earth; that sense was designed for more delicate signals. She closed it off as she might shut her eyes to a blinding light.

Dark submerged again and followed the river upward, keeping to its main branch. As she passed the tributaries that ran and rushed to join the primary channel the river became no more than a stream itself, and Dark was protected only by thin ripples.

She peered out again.

The pass across the ridge lay only a little ahead and above her, just beyond the spring that created the river. To Dark’s left lay a wide field of scree, where a cliff and hillside had collapsed. The river flowed around the pile, having been displaced by tons of broken stone. The rubble stretched on quite a way, at least as far as the pass and, if she were lucky, all the way through. It was ideal. Sinking barely underwater, she moved across the current. Beneath her feet she felt the stones change from rounded and water-worn to sharp and freshly broken. She reached the edge of the slope, where the shattered rock projected into the river. On the downstream side she nudged away a few large stones, set herself, and burrowed quickly into the shards.

The fractured crystalline matrix disrupted her echo perception. She kept expecting to meet a wall of solid rock that would push her out and expose her, but the good conditions existed all the way through the pass. Then, on the other side, when she chanced a peek out into the world, she found that the texture of the ground changed abruptly on this side of the ridge. When the broken stone ended, she did not have to seek out another river. She dug straight from the scree into the earth.

In the cool dry darkness, she traveled more slowly but more safely than in the river. Underground there was no chance of the radio signal’s escaping to give her away. She knew exactly where the surface was all the time. It, unlike the interface of water and air, did not constantly change. Barring the collapse of a hillside, little could unearth her. A landslide was possible, but her sonar could detect the faults and weaknesses in earth and rock that might create a danger.

She wanted to rest, but she was anxious to reach the flyers’ sanctuary as quickly as she could. She did not have much farther to go. Every bit of distance might make a difference, for she would be safe only after she got inside the boundaries . . . She could be safe there from normal people: what the flyers would do when she arrived she could not say.

Dark’s vision ranged much farther through the spectrum than it had when she was human. In daytime she saw colors, but at night and underground she used infrared, which translated to distinguishable and distinctive shades of black. They were supposed to look like colors, but she saw them all as black. They told her what sort of land she was passing through and a great deal about what grew above. Nevertheless, when the sun went down she broke through thick turf and peered around at the forest. The moon had not yet risen, and a nearby stream was almost as dark as ice. The fir trees kept the same deep tone as in bright sunlight. Still, all the colors were black.

Dark breathed deeply of the cold air. It was stuffy underground, through she had not had to switch to reducing her own oxygen. That was for deeper down, in altogether more difficult regions.

The air smelled of moss and ferns, evergreen trees, and weathered stone. But under it all was the sulfurous volcano, and the sweet delicate fragrance of flyers.

Sinking down into the earth once more, Dark traveled on.

The closer Dark got to the volcano, the more jumbled and erratic grew the strata. Lava flows and land movement, glaciers and erosion had scarred and unsettled and twisted the surface and all that lay beneath it. Deep underground Dark encountered a tilted slab of granite, too hard for her to dig through quickly. She followed it upward, hoping it would twist and fold back down again. But it did not, and she broke through topsoil into the chill silence of a wilderness night. Dirt and pebbles fell away from her shoulder armor. From the edge of the outcropping she looked out, in infrared, over her destination.

The view excited her. The tree-covered slope dropped to tumbled masses of blackened logs that formed the first barrier against intrusion into the flyers’ land. Beyond, at the base of the volcano, solidified lava created another wasteland. The molten rock had flowed from the crater down the flank of the mountain; near the bottom it broke into two branches which ran, one to each side, until both ended like true rivers, in the sea. The northern shore was very close, and the pale nighttime waves lapped gently on the dim cool beach. To the south the lava had crept through a longer sweep of forest, burning the trees in its path and toppling those beyond its heat, for a much longer distance to the ocean. The wide solid flood and the impenetrable wooden jumble formed a natural barricade. The flyers were exiled to their peninsula, but they stayed there by choice. The humans had no way of containing them short of killing them. They could take back their wings or chain them to the ground or imprison them, but they wished to isolate the flyers, not murder them. And murder it would be if they denied the creatures flight.

The basalt streams glowed with heat retained from the day, and the volcano itself was a softly radiant cone, sparkling here and there where upwellings of magma approached the surface. The steam rising from the crater shone brightly, and among its clouds shadows soared in spirals along the edges of the column. One of the shadows dived dangerously toward the ground, risking destruction, but at the last moment it pulled up short to soar skyward again. Another followed, another, and Dark realized they were playing a game. Entranced, she hunched on the ridge and watched the flyers play. They did not notice her. No doubt they could see better than she, but their eyes would be too dazzled by the heat’s luminous blackness to notice an earthbound creature’s armor-shielded warmth.

Sound and light burst upon her like explosions. Clearing the ridge that had concealed it, a helicopter leaned into the air and ploughed toward her. Until this moment she had not seen or heard or sensed it. It must have been grounded, waiting for her. Its searchlights caught and blinded her for a moment, till she shook herself free in an almost automatic reaction and slid across the bare rock to the earth beyond. As she plunged toward the trees the machine roared over her, its backwash blasting up a cloud of dirt and leaves and pebbles. The ‘copter screamed upward, straining to miss treetops. As it turned to chase her down again, Dark scuttled into the woods.

She had been careless. Her fascination with the volcano and the flyers had betrayed her, for her stillness must have convinced the humans that she was asleep or incapacitated.

Wondering if it would do any good, she burrowed into the earth. She felt the helicopter land, and then the lighter vibrations of footsteps. The humans could find her by the same technique, amplifying the sounds of her digging. From now on they did not even need her beacon.

She reached a boundary between bedrock and earth and followed its lessened resistance. Pausing for a moment, she heard both movement and its echoes. She felt trapped between sounds, from above and below. She started digging, pushing herself until her work drowned out all other noises. She did not stop again.

The humans could move faster down the steep terrain than she could. She was afraid they would get far enough ahead of her to dig a trench and head her off. If they had enough equipment or construction explosives, they could surround her, or simply kill her with the shock waves of a shaped charge.

She dug violently, pushing herself forward, feeling the debris of her progress slide over her shoulder armor and across her back, filling in the tunnel as quickly as she made it. The roots of living trees, springy and thick, reached down to slow her. She had to dig between and sometimes through them. Their malleable consistency made them harder to penetrate than solid rock, and more frustrating. Dark’s powerful claws could shatter stone, but they tangled in the roots and she was forced to shred the tough fibers a few strands at a time. She tired fast, and she was using oxygen far more quickly than she could take it in underground.

Dark slashed out angrily at a thick root. It crumbled completely in a powdery dust of charcoal. Dark’s momentum, meeting no resistance, twisted her sideways in her narrow tunnel. She was trapped. The footsteps of the humans caught nearly up to her, and then, inexplicably, stopped. Scrabbling frantically with her feet and one clawed hand, her left front limb wedged uselessly beneath her, she managed to loosen and shift the dirt in the small enclosed space. Finally, expecting the humans to start blasting toward her at any moment, she freed herself.

Despite the ache in her left shoulder, deep under her armor, she increased her pace tremendously. She was beneath the dead trees now, and the dry porous earth contained only the roots of trees that had burned from top to deep underground, or roots riddled with insects and decay. Above her, above ground, the treetrunks lay in an impassable tangle, and that must be why the humans had paused. They could not trench her now.

Gauging her distance to the basalt flow by the pattern of returning echoes, Dark tunneled through the last few lengths of earth. She wanted to go under the stone barrier and come up on the other side in safety. But the echoes proved that she could not. The basalt was much thicker than she had hoped. It was not a single flow but many, filling a deep-cleft valley the gods only knew how far down. She could not go under and she did not have time or strength right now to go through.

It was not the naked sheet of stone that would keep the humans from her, but the intangible barrier of the flyers’ boundary. That was what she had to reach. Digging hard, using the last of her stored oxygen, Dark burst up through the earth at the edge of the lava flow and scrambled out onto the hard surface. Never graceful at the best of times, she was slow and unwieldy on land. She lumbered forward, panting, her claws clacking on the rock and scraping great marks across it.

Behind her the humans shouted, as their detectors went off so loudly even Dark could hear them, and as the humans saw Dark for themselves, some for the first time.

They were very close. They had almost worked their way through the jammed treetrunks, and once they reached solid ground again they could overtake her. She scrambled on, feeling the weight of her armor as she never did underground. Its edges dragged along the basalt, gouging it deeply.

Two flyers landed as softly as wind, as milkweed floss, as pollen grains. Dark heard only the rustle of their wings, and when she looked up from the fissured gray rock, they stood before her, barring her way.

She was nearly safe: she was just on the boundary, and once she was over it the humans could not follow. The delicate flyers could not stand up against her if she chose to proceed, but they did not move to let her pass. She stopped.

Like her, the flyers had huge eyes, to extend the spectrum of their vision. Armored brow ridges and transparent shields protected Dark’s eyes and almost hid them. The flyers’ eyes were protected, too, but with thick black lashes that veiled and revealed them.

“What do you want, little one?” one of the flyers said. Its voice was deep and soft, and it wrapped its body in iridescent black wings.

“Your help,” Dark said. “Sanctuary.” Behind her, the humans stopped too. She did not know if they still had the legal right to take her. Their steel net scraped along the ground, and they moved hesitantly closer. The black flyer glared, and the human noises ceased. Dark inched forward, but the flyers did not retreat at all.

“Why have you come?” The black flyer’s voice withheld all emotion, warmth, or welcome.

“To talk to you,” Dark said. “My people need your help.” The raven-winged flyer did not move, except to blink its luminous eyes. But its blue-feathered companion peered at Dark closely, moved a step one way, a step the other, and ruffled the plumage of its wings. The blue flyer’s movements were as quick and sharp as those of a bird itself.

“We have no help to offer you,” the black flyer said.

“Let me in, let me talk to you.” Her claws ground against stone as she moved nervously. She could not flee, and she did not want to fight. She could crush the humans or the flyers, but she had not been chosen for her capacity for violence. Her pursuers knew that perfectly well.

Again the nets scraped behind her as the humans moved forward.

“We’ve only come for her,” one of them said. “She’s a fugitive—we don’t want to involve you in any unpleasantness.” The powerful searchlight he carried swept over Dark’s back, transfixing the flyers, who turned their faces away. The harsh white illumination washed Out the iridescent highlights of the black feathers but brightened the other’s wings to the brilliant color of a Stellar’s jay.

“Turn out your lights,” the jay said, in a voice as brash and demanding as any real bluejay’s. “It’s dawn—you can see well enough.”

The human hesitated, swung the light away, and turned it off. He motioned to the helicopter and its lights faded. As the jay had said, it was dawn, misty and gray and eerie. The flyers faced Dark’s adversaries again.

“We have no more resources than you,” the raven flyer said. “How do you expect us to help you? We have ourselves. We have our land. You have the same.”

“Land!” Dark said bitterly. “Have you ever seen my land? It’s nothing but piles of rotting stone and pits full of rusty water—” She stopped; she had not meant to lose her temper. But she was hunched on the border of captivity, straining toward sanctuary and about to be refused.

“Send her out so we can take her without violating your boundaries. Don’t let her cause you a lot of trouble.”

“A little late for such caution,” Jay said. “Redwing, if we bow to their threats now, what will they do next time? We should let her in.”

“So the diggers can do to our refuge what they did to their own? Pits, and rusting water—”

“It was like that when we came!” Dark cried, shocked and hurt. “We make tunnels, yes, but we don’t destroy! Please hear what I’ve got to say. Then, if you ask me to go . . . I’ll obey.” She made the promise reluctantly, for she knew that once she had lived near the volcano, she would need great will to leave. “I give you my word.” Her voice quivered with strain. The humans muttered behind her; a few steps inside the boundary, a few moments inside and then out—who, besides Dark, would accuse them of entering the flyers’ territory at all?

Jay and Redwing glared at each other, but suddenly Jay laughed sharply and turned away. He stepped back and swept one wingtip along the ground, waving Dark into his land. “Come in, little one,” he said.

Hesitantly, afraid he would change his mind, Dark moved forward. Then, in a single moment, after her long journey, she was safe.

“We have no reason to trust it!” Redwing said.

“Nor any reason not to, since we could just as well be mashed flat between stone and armor. We do have reason not to help the humans.”

“You’ll have to send her back,” the leader of the humans said. He was angry; he stood glowering at the very edge of the border, perhaps a bit over. “Laws will take her, if we don’t now. It will just cost you a lot more in trouble.”

“Take your threats and your noisy machine and get out of here,” Jay said.

“You will be sorry, flyer,” the humans’ leader said.

Dark did not really believe they would go until the last one boarded the helicopter and its roar increased, it climbed into the air, and it clattered off into the brightening gray morning.

“Thank you,” Dark said.

“I had ulterior motives,” Jay said.

Redwing stood back, looking at Jay but not at Dark. “We’ll have to call a council.”

“I know. You go ahead. I’ll talk to her and meet you when we convene.”

“I think we will regret this,” Redwing said. “I think we are closer to the humans than to the diggers.” The black flyer leaped into the air, wings outspread to reveal their brilliant scarlet underside, and soared away.

Jay laid his soft hand on Dark’s shoulder plate to lead her from the lava to volcanic soil. His skin felt frail, and very warm: Dark’s metabolism was slower than it had been, while the flyers’ chemistry had been considerably speeded up. Dark was ugly and clumsy next to him. She thought of digging down and vanishing but that would be ill-mannered. Besides, she had never been near a flyer before. Curiosity overcame her. Glancing surreptitiously sideways, beneath the edge of her armor, she saw that he was peeking at her, too. Their gazes met; they looked away, both embarrassed. Then Dark stopped and faced him. She settled back to regard him directly.

“This is what I look like,” she said. “My name is Dark and I know I’m ugly, but I could do the job I was made for, if they’d let me.”

“I think your strength compensates for your appearance,” the flyer said. “I’m Jay.” Dark was unreasonably pleased that she had guessed right about his name.

“You never answered Redwing’s question,” Jay said. “Why come here? The strip mines—”

“What could you know of strip mines?”

“Other people lived near them before they were given over to you.”

“So you think we should stay there!”

Jay replied to her abrupt anger in a gentle tone. “I was going to say, this place is nicer than the strip mines, true, but a lot of places nicer than the strip mines are more isolated than we are. You could have found a hidden place to live.”

“I’m sorry,” Dark said. “I thought—”

“I know. Never mind.”

“No one else like me got this far, did they?”

Jay shook his head.

“Six of us escaped,” Dark said. “We hoped more than one would reach you. Perhaps I’m just the first, though.”

“That could be.”

“I came to ask you to join us,” Dark said.

Jay looked at her sharply, his thick flaring eyebrows raised in surprise. He veiled his eyes for a moment with the translucent avian membranes, then let them slowly retract.

“Join you? In . . . your preserve?” He was polite enough to call it this time by its official name. Though she had expressed herself badly, Dark felt some hope.

“I misspoke myself,” she said. “I came—the others and I decided to come—to ask you to join us politically. Or at least to support us.”

“To get you a better home. That seems only fair.”

“That isn’t quite what we’re hoping for. Or rather it is, but not the way you mean.”

Jay hesitated again. “I see. You want . . . what you were made for.”

Dark wanted to nod; she missed the shorthand of the language of the human body, and she found she was unable to read Jay’s. She had been two years out of contact with normal humans; or perhaps it was that Jay was a flyer, and his people had made adjustments of their own.

“Yes. We were made to be explorers. It’s a useless economy, to keep us on earth. We could even pay our own way after a while.”

Dark watched him closely, but could not tell what he thought. His face remained expressionless; he did not move toward her or away. Then he sighed deeply. That, Dark understood.

“Digger—” She flinched, but inwardly, the only way she could. He had not seemed the type to mock her. “—the projects are over. They changed their minds. There will be no exploring or colonizing, at least not by you and me. And what difference does it make? We have a peaceful life and everything we need. You’ve been badly used but that could be changed.”

“Maybe,” Dark said, doubting his words. The flyers were beautiful, her people were ugly, and as far as the humans were concerned that made every difference. “But we had a purpose, and now it’s gone. Are you happy, living here with nothing to do?”

“We’re content. Your people are all ready, but we aren’t. We’d have to go through as much change again as we already have.”

“What’s so bad about that? You’ve gone this far. You volunteered for it. Why not finish?”

“Because it isn’t necessary.”

“I don’t understand,” Dark said. “You could have a whole new living world. You have even more to gain than we do, that’s why we thought you’d help us.” Dark’s planned occupation was the exploration of dead worlds or newly formed ones, the places of extremes where no other life could exist. But Jay’s people were colonists; they had been destined for a world that was being made over for them, even as they were being suited for what it would become.

“The terraforming is only beginning,” Jay said. “If we wait until it’s complete—”

“But that won’t be for generations.”

Jay shrugged. “We know.”

“You’ll never see it!” Dark cried. “You’ll be dead and dust before it changes enough for people like you are now to live on it.”

“We’re virus-changed, not constructed,” Jay said. “We breed true. Our grandchildren may want another world, and the humans may be willing to help them go. But we intend to stay here.” He blinked slowly, dreamily. “Yes, we are happy. And we don’t have to work for the humans.”

“I don’t care who I work for, as long as I can be something better than a deformed creature,” Dark said angrily. “This world gives my people nothing and because of that we’re dying.”

“Come now,” Jay said tolerantly.

“We’re dying!” Dark stopped and rocked back on the edge of her shell so she could more nearly look him in the eye. “You have beauty all around you and in you, and when the humans see you they admire you. But they’re afraid of us! Maybe they’ve forgotten that we started out human or maybe they never considered us human at all. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care! But we can’t be anything, if we don’t have any purpose. All we ask is that you help us make ourselves heard, because they’ll listen to you. They love you. They almost worship you!” She paused, surprised by her own outburst.

“Worship us!” Jay said. “They shoot us out of the sky, like eagles.”

He looked away from her. His gaze sought out clouds, the direction of the sun, for all she knew the eddies of the wind. Dark thought she sensed something, a call or a cry at the very edge of one of her new perceptions. She reached for it, but it eluded her. It was not meant for her.

“Wait for me at sunset,” Jay said, his voice remote. He spread his huge furled wings and sprang upward, the muscles bunching in his short, powerful legs. Dark watched him soar into the sky, a graceful dark blue shape against the cloud-patterned gold and scarlet dawn.

Dark knew she had not convinced him. When he was nothing but a speck she eased herself down again and lumbered up the flank of the volcano. She could feel it beneath her feet. Its long rumbles pulsed through her, at a far lower frequency than she ever could have heard as a human. It promised heat and danger; it excited her. She had experienced no extremes, of either heat or cold, pressure or vacuum, for far too many months.

The ground felt hollow beneath Dark’s claws: passages lay beneath her, and lava beaten to a froth by the violence of its formation and frozen by exposure into spongy rock. She found a crevice that would leave no trace of her passing and slid into it. She began to dig, slowly at first, then faster, dirt and pulverized stone flying over her shoulders. In a moment the earth closed in around her.

Dark paused to rest. Having reached the gas-formed tunnels, she no longer had to dig her way through the substance of the mountain. She relaxed in the twisted passage, enjoying the brilliance of the heat and the occasional shining puff of air that came to her from the magma. She could analyze the gases by taste: that was another talent the humans had given her. Vapors toxic to them were merely interesting scents to her. If necessary she could metabolize some gases; the ability would have been necessary in many of the places she had expected to see, where sunlight was too dim to convert, where life had vanished or never evolved and there were no organic chemicals. On the outer planets, in the asteroids, even on Mars, her energy would have come from a tenuous atmosphere, from ice, even from the dust. Out there the challenging extremes would be cold and emptiness, unless she discovered hot, living veins in dying planets. Perhaps now no one would ever look for such activity on the surface of an alien world. Dark had dreamed of the planets of a different star, but she might never get a chance even to see the moon.

Dark sought a living vein in a living world: she moved toward the volcano’s central core. Her people had been designed to resist conditions far more severe than the narrow range tolerated by normals, but she did not know if she could survive this great a temperature. Nor did she care. The rising heat drew her toward a heightened state of consciousness that wiped away caution and even fear. The rock walls glowed in the infrared, and as she dug at them, the chips flew like sparks. At last, with nothing but a thin plate of stone between her and the caldera, she hesitated. She was not afraid for her life. It was almost as if she were afraid she would survive: afraid the volcano, like all else, would finally disappoint her.

She lashed out with her armored hand and shattered the fragile wall. Steam and vapor poured through the opening, flowing past her. Before she stopped normal breathing she chanced a quick, shallow mouthful and savored the taste and smell, then moved forward to look directly into the crater.

Whatever she had imagined dissolved in the reality. She was halfway up the crater, dazzled from above by light and from below by heat. She had been underground a long time and it was almost exactly noon. Sunlight beat down through clouds of steam, and the gases and sounds of molten rock reached up to her. The currents swirled, hot and hotter, and in the earth’s wound a flood of fire burned.

She could feel as well as see the heat, and it pleased her intensely that she would die if she remained where she was. Internal oxygen sustained her: a few deep breaths of the mountain’s uncooled exhalations and she would die.

She wanted to stay. She did not want to return to the surface and the probability of rejection. She did not want to return to her people’s exile.

Yet she had a duty toward them, and she had not yet completed it. She backed into the tunnel, turned around, and crawled away, hoping someday she could return.

Dark made her way back to the surface, coming out through the same fissure so the land would not change. She shook the dirt off her armor and looked around, blinking, waiting for her eyes to reaccustom themselves to the day. As she rested, colors resolved out of the afterimage dazzle of infrared: the blue sky first, then the deep green trees, the yellow of a scatter of wildflowers. Finally, squinting, she made out dark specks against the crystal clarity of the sky. The flyers soared in small groups or solo, now and again two coming together in lengthy graceful couplings, their wings brushing tips. She watched them, surprised and a little ashamed to be aroused despite herself. For her kind, intercourse was more difficult and more pedestrian. Dark had known how it would be when she volunteered; there was no secret about it. Like most of the other volunteers, she had always been a solitary person. She seldom missed what she had so seldom had, but watching the flyers she felt a long pang of envy. They were so beautiful, and they took everything so for granted.

The winged dance went on for hours, until the sun, reddening, touched mountains in the west. Dark continued to watch, unable to look away, in awe of the flyers’ aerial and sexual stamina. Yet she resented their extended play, as well; they had forgotten that an earthbound creature waited for them.

The several pairs of coupled flyers suddenly broke apart, as if on signal, and the whole group of them scattered. A moment later Dark sensed the approach of the humans’ plane.

It was too high to hear, but she knew it was there. It circled slowly. Sitting still, not troubling now to conceal the radio-beacon in her spine, Dark perceived it spiraling in, with her as its focus. The plane descended; it was a point, then a silver shape reflecting scarlet sunset. It did not come too close; it did nothing immediately threatening. But it had driven the flyers out of Dark’s sight. She hunkered down on the stone promontory, waiting.

Dark heard only the sudden rush of air against outstretched wings as Jay landed nearby. His approach had been completely silent, and intent as she was on the search plane, she had not seen him. She turned her attention from the sky to Jay, and took a few steps toward him. But then she stopped, shamed once more by her clumsiness compared to the way he moved. The flyers were not tall, and even for their height their legs were quite short. Perhaps they had been modified that way. Still, Jay did not lumber. He strode. As he neared her he furled his wings over his back, folding them one bit at a time, ruffling them to smooth the feathers, folding a bit more. He reminded her not so much of a bird, as of a spectacular butterfly perched in the wind, flicking his wings open and closed. When he stopped before her his wings stilled, each bright blue feather perfectly placed, framing him from behind. Unconcealed this time by the wings, his body was naked. Flyers wore no clothes: Dark was startled that they had nothing to conceal. Apparently they were as intricately engineered as her own people.

Jay did not speak for so long that Dark, growing uncomfortable, reared back and looked into the sky. The search plane still circled loudly.

“Are they allowed to do that?” she said.

“We have no quick way of stopping them. We can protest. No doubt someone already has.”

“I could send them a message,” she said grumpily. That, after all, was what the beacon was for, though the message would not contain the sort of information anyone had ever planned for her to send.

“We’ve finished our meeting,” Jay said.

“Oh. Is that what you call it?”

Dark expected a smile or a joke, but Jay spoke quite seriously.

“That’s how we confer, here.”

“Confer—!” She dropped back to the ground, her claws digging in. “You met without letting me speak? You told me to wait for you at sunset!”

“I spoke for you,” Jay said softly.

“I came here to speak for myself. And I came here to speak for my kind. I trusted you—”

“It was the only way,” he said. “We only gather in the sky.”

Dark held down an angry retort. “And what is the answer?”

Jay sat abruptly on the hard earth, as if he could no longer support the weight of his wings on his delicate legs. He drew his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them.

“I’m sorry.” The words burst out in a sigh, a moan.

“Call them,” Dark said. “Fly after them, find them, make them come and speak to me. I will not be refused by people who won’t even face me.”

“It won’t help,” Jay said miserably. “I spoke for you as well as I could, but when I saw I would fail I tried to bring them here. I begged them. They wouldn’t come.”

“They wouldn’t come . . .” She had risked her life only to have her life dismissed as nothing. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

Jay reached out and touched her hand: it still could function as a hand, despite her armor and her claws. Jay’s hand, too, was clawed, but it was delicate and fine-boned, and veins showed blue through the translucent skin. Dark pulled back the all too solid mass of her arm.

“Don’t you, little one?” Jay said, sadly. “I was so different, before I was a flyer—”

“So was I,” Dark said.

“But you’re strong, and you’re ready. You could go tomorrow with no more changes and no more pain. I have another stage to go through. If I did it, and then they decided not to send us after all—Dark, I would never be able to fly again. Not in this gravity. There are too many changes. They’d thicken my skin, and regress me again so my wings weren’t feathered but scaled—they’d shield my eyes and reconstruct my face for the filters.”

“It isn’t the flying that troubles you,” Dark said.

“It is. The risk’s too great.”

“No. What troubles you is that when you were finished, you wouldn’t be beautiful anymore. You’d be ugly, like me.”

“That’s unfair.”

“Is it? Is that why all your people flock around me so willingly to hear what I have to say?”

Jay stood slowly and his wings unfolded above him: Dark thought he was going to sail away off the side of the mountain, leaving her to speak her insults to the clouds and the stones. But, instead, he spread his beautiful black-tipped blue wings, stretched them in the air, and curved them around over Dark so they brushed the ridge of her spine. She shivered.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We have grown used to being beautiful. Even I have. They shouldn’t have decided to make us in stages, they should have done it all at once. But they didn’t, and now it’s hard for us, being reminded of how we were.”

Dark stared at Jay, searching for the remnants of how he had been until he became a flyer, understanding, finally, the reasons he had decided to become something other than human. Before, she had only perceived his brilliant plumage, his luminous eyes, and the artificial delicacy of his bones. Now she saw his original proportions, the disguised coarseness of his features, and she saw what he must have looked like.

Perhaps he had not actually been deformed, as Dark had been. But he had never been handsome, or even so much as plain. She gazed at him closely. Neither of them blinked: that must be harder for him, Dark thought. Her eyes were shielded, his were only fringed with long, thick, dark eyelashes.

His eyes were too close together. That was something the virus-forming would not have been able to cure.

“I see,” she said. “You can’t help us, because we might succeed.”

“Don’t hate us,” he said.

She turned away, her armor scraping on rock. “What do you care, if a creature as repellent as I hates you?”

“I care,” Jay said very quietly.

Dark knew she was being unfair, to him if not to his kind, but she had no sympathy left. She wanted to hide herself somewhere and cry.

“When are the humans coming for me?”

“They come when they please,” he said. “But I made the others promise one thing. They won’t ask you to leave till morning. And if we can’t find you, then—there’s time for you to get away, if you hurry.”

Dark spun around, more quickly than she thought herself able to. Her armor struck sparks, but they glowed only briefly and died.

“Where should I go? Somewhere no one at all will ever see me? Underground, all alone, forever?” She thought of the mountain and its perils, but it meant nothing now. “No,” she said. “I’ll wait for them.”

“But you don’t know what they might do! I told you what they’ve done to us—”

“I hardly think they’ll shoot me out of the sky.”

“Don’t joke about it! They’ll destroy anything, the things they love and the things they fear . . .”

“I don’t care anymore,” Dark said. “Go away, flyer. Go away to your games, and to your illusions of beauty.”

He glared at her, turned, and sprang into the air. She did not watch him go, but pulled herself completely inside the shadows of her armor to wait.

Sometime during the night she drifted off to sleep. She dreamed of the fireflood: she could feel its heat and hear its roar.

When she awoke, the rising sun blazed directly into her eyes, and the steel blades of a helicopter cut the dawn. She tried and failed to blot out the sound of the humans’ machine. She began to shiver, with uncertainty or with fear.

Dark crept slowly down the side of the mountain, toward the border where the humans would land. The flyers would not have to tell her to leave. She wondered if she were protecting herself, or them, from humiliation.

Something touched her and she started, drawing herself tightly into her armor.

“Dark, it’s only me.”

She peered out. Jay stood over her with his wings curved around them both.

“You can’t hide me,” she said.

“I know. We should have, but it’s too late.” He looked gaunt and exhausted. “I tried, Dark, I did try.”

On the humans’ side of the lava flow, the machine landed and sent up a fine spray of dust and rock particles. People climbed out, carrying weapons and nets. Dark did not hesitate.

“I have to go.” She raised her armor up off the ground and started away.

“You’re stronger than we are,” Jay said. “The humans can’t come and get you and we can’t force you to leave.”

“I know.” The invisible boundary was almost at her feet; she moved reluctantly but steadily toward it.

“Why are you doing this?” Jay cried.

Dark did not answer.

She felt Jay’s wingtip brush the edge of her armor as he walked alongside her. She stopped and glanced up at him.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “Till you get home. Till you’re safe.”

“It’s no more safe for you. You can’t leave your preserve.”

“Nor could you.”

“Jay, go back.”

“I’ll not lose another friend to the humans.”

Dark touched the boundary. As if they were afraid she would still try to escape them, the humans rushed toward her and flung the net over her, pulling in its edges so it caught beneath her armor. They jostled the flyer away from her side.

“This isn’t necessary,” she said. “I’ll come with you.”

“Sorry,” one finally said, in a grudging tone. “It’s necessary.”

“Her word’s good,” Jay said. “Otherwise she never would have come out to you at all.”

“What happened to the others?” Dark asked.

One human shrugged.

“Captured,” another said.

“And then?”

“Returned to the sanctuary.”

Dark had no reason not to believe them, simply because they had no reason to spare her feelings if any of her friends were dead.

“You see, Jay, there’s no need for you to come.”

“You can’t trust them! They’ll lie to you for your cooperation and then kill you when I’ve left you with no witness.”

That could be true; still, she lumbered toward the helicopter, more hindered than helped by the humans’ tugging on the steel cables. The blades circled rhythmically over her.

Jay followed, but the humans barred his way.

“I’m going with her,” he said.

She glanced back. Somehow, strangely, he looked even more delicate and frail among the normal humans than he had when she compared him to her own massive self.

“Don’t come any farther, flyer.”

He pushed past them. One took his wrist and he pulled away. Two of the humans grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him over the border as he struggled. His wings opened out above the turmoil, flailing, as Jay fought to keep his balance. A blue feather fluttered free and spiraled to the ground.

Dragging her own captors with her, pulling them by the net-lines as they struggled and failed to keep her on their side, Dark scuttled toward Jay and broke through the group of humans. The flyer lay crumpled on the ground, one wing caught awkwardly beneath him, the other curved over and around him in defense. The humans sprang away from him, and from Dark.

“Jay,” she said. “Jay . . .”

When he rose, Dark feared his wing was crushed. He winced when he lifted it, and his plumage was in disarray, but, glaring at the humans, he extended and flexed it and she saw to her great relief that he was all right. He glanced down at her and his gaze softened. Dark reached up toward him, and their clawed hands touched.

One of the humans snickered. Embarrassed, Dark jerked her hand away.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she said. “Stay here.”

The net jerked tighter around her, but she resisted it. “We can’t waste any more time,” the leader of her captors said. “Come on, now, it’s time to go.”

They succeeded in dragging her halfway around, and a few steps toward the helicopter, only because she permitted it.

“If you won’t let me come with her, I’ll follow,” Jay said. “That machine can’t outpace me.”

“We can’t control anyone outside your preserve.” Strangely, the human sounded concerned. “You know the kind of thing that can happen. Flyer, stay inside your boundaries.”

“You pay no heed to boundaries!” Jay cried, as they pulled and pushed Dark the last few paces back into their own territory. She moved slowly, at her own speed, ignoring them.

“Stay here, Jay,” she said. “Stay here, or you’ll leave me with guilt as well as failure.”

Dark did not hear him, if he answered. She reached the ‘copter, and steeled herself against the discomfort of its noise and unshielded electrical fields. She managed to clamber up into the cargo hold before they could subject her to the humiliation of being hoisted and shoved.

She looked out through the open door. It was as if the rest of the world were silent, for she could hear and sense nothing but the clamor immediately around her. On the lava ridge, Jay stood still, his shoulders slumped. Suddenly his wings flared out, rose, descended, and he soared into the air. Awestruck once more, Dark watched through the mesh of the net. Jay sailed in a huge circle and glided into the warm updraft of the volcano.

The rotors moved faster, blurring and nearly disappearing. The machine rose with a slight forward lurch, laboring under the weight of the hunting party and Dark as well. At the same time, Jay spiraled upward through the glowing steam. Dark tried to turn away, but she could not. He was too beautiful.

The distance between them grew greater, until all Dark could see was a spark of bright blue appearing, then vanishing, among the columns of steam.

As the helicopter swung round, she thought she saw the spiral of Jay’s flight widen, as if he were ignoring the threats the humans had made and cared nothing for warnings, as if he were drifting gently toward the boundaries of his refuge, gradually making up his mind to cross them and follow.

Don’t leave your sanctuary, Jay, Dark thought. You don’t belong out here.

But then, just before the machine cut off her view, he veered away from the mountain and in one great soaring arc passed over the boundary and into the humans’ world.

LOST DORSAI

Gordon R. Dickson

Pacifism will always be a powerful moral force, even—perhaps especially—to the Dorsai.

I am Corunna El Man.

I brought the little courier vessel down at last at the spaceport of Nahar City on Ceta, the large world around Tau Ceti. I had made it from the Dorsai in six phase shifts to transport, to the stronghold of Gebel Nahar, our Amanda Morgan—she whom they call the Second Amanda.

Normally I am far too senior in rank to act as a courier pilot. But the situation at Gebel Nahar required a contracts expert at Nahar more swiftly than one could safely be gotten there.

The risks I had taken had not seemed to bother Amanda. That was not surprising, since she was Dorsai. But neither did she talk to me much on the trip; and that was a thing that had come to be, with me, a little unusual.

For things had been different for me after Baunpore. In the massacre there following the siege, when the North Freilanders finally overran the town, they cut up my face for the revenge of it; and they killed Else, for no other reason than that she was my wife. There was nothing left of her then but incandescent gas, and since there could be nothing to come back to, nor any place where she could be remembered, I rejected surgery and chose to wear my scars as a memorial to her.

It was a decision I never regretted. But it was true that with those scars came an alteration in the way other people reacted to me. With some I found that I became almost invisible. But nearly all seemed to relax their natural impulse to keep private their personal secrets and concerns. It was as if I was like a burnt-out candle in the dark room of their inner selves—a lightless, but safe, companion whose presence reassured them that their privacy was still unbreached. I doubt that Amanda and those I was to meet on this trip to Gebel Nahar would have talked to me as freely as they later did, if I had met them back in the days when I had Else, alive.

The Gebel Nahar is a mountain fortress; and for military reasons Nahar City, near it, has a spaceport capable of handling deep-space ships.

The main lobby of the terminal was small, but high-ceilinged and airy with bright, enormous heavily-framed paintings on all the walls. We stood in the middle of all this: no one looked directly at us, although neither I with my scars, nor Amanda were easy to ignore.

I went over to check with the message desk and found nothing there for us. Coming back, I had to hunt for Amanda, who had stepped away from where I had left her.

“El Man—” her voice said without warning, behind me. “Look!”

Her tone had warned me, even as I turned. I caught sight of her and the painting she was looking at, all in the same moment. It was high up on one of the walls; and she stood just below it, gazing up.

Sunlight through the transparent front wall of the terminal flooded her and the picture, alike. She was in all the natural colors of life—as Else had been—tall, slim, in light blue cloth jacket and short cream-colored skirt, with white-blond hair and that incredible youthfulness that her namesake ancestor, the First Amanda, had also owned. In contrast, the painting was rich in garish pigments, gold leaf and alazarin crimson, the human figures it depicted caught in exaggerated, melodramatic attitudes.

Leto de muerte, the large brass plate below it read.

Hero’s Death-Couch, as the title would roughly translate from the bastard, archaic Spanish spoken by the Naharese. It showed a great, golden bed set out on an open plain in the aftermath of the battle. All about were corpses and bandaged officers standing in gilt-encrusted uniforms. The living surrounded the bed and its occupant, the dead Hero, who, powerfully muscled yet emaciated, hideously wounded and stripped to the waist, lay upon a thick pile of velvet cloaks, jewelled weapons, marvellously-wrought tapestries and golden utensils, all of which covered the bed.

The body lay on its back, chin pointing at the sky, face gaunt with the agony of death, still firmly holding by one large hand to its naked chest, the hilt of an oversized and ornate sword, its massive blade darkened with blood. The wounded officers standing about and gazing at the corpse were posed in dramatic attitudes. In the foreground, on the earth beside the bed, a single ordinary soldier in battle-torn uniform, dying, stretched forth one arm in tribute to the dead man.

Amanda looked at me. She did not say anything. In order to live, for two hundred years we on the Dorsai have exported the only commodity we owned—the lives of our generations—to be spent in wars for others’ causes. We live with real war; and to those who do that, a painting like this one was close to obscenity.

“So that’s how they think here,” said Amanda.

I looked sideways and down at her.

“Every culture has its own fantasies,” I said. “And this culture’s Hispanic, at least in heritage.”

“Less than ten per cent of the Naharese population’s Hispanic nowadays,” she answered. “Besides, this is a caricature of Hispanic attitudes.”

She was right. Nahar had originally been colonized by immigrants—Gallegos from the northwest of Spain who had dreamed of large ranches in a large open Territory. After the first wave, those who came to settle here were of anything but Hispanic ancestry, but still they had adopted the language and ways they found there.

The original ranchers had become enormously rich—for though Ceta was a sparsely populated planet, it was food-poor. The later arrivals swelled the cities of Nahar, and stayed poor—very poor.

“I hope the people I’m to talk to are going to have more than ten per cent of ordinary sense,” Amanda said. “This picture makes me wonder if they don’t prefer fantasy. If that’s the way it is at Gebel Nahar . . .”

She left the sentence unfinished, shook her head, and then smiled at me. The smile lit up her face. It was something different, an inward lighting deeper and greater than those words usually indicate. I had only met her for the first time, three days earlier, and Else was all I had ever or would ever want; but now I could see what people had meant on the Dorsai, when they had said she inherited her great-great-grand-mother’s abilities to both command others and make them love her.

“No message for us?” she said.

“No—” I began. But then I turned, for out of the corner of my eye I had seen someone approaching us.

The man striding toward us on long legs was a Dorsai. He was big. Not the size of the Graeme twins, Ian and Kensie, who commanded at Gebel Nahar on the Naharese contract; but close to that size and noticeably larger than I was. He wore a Naharese army bandmaster’s uniform, with warrant officer tabs at the collar; and he was blond-haired, lean-laced, and no more than in his early twenties. I recognized him as the third son of a neighbor from my own canton of High Island, on the Dorsai. His name was Michael de Sandoval, and little had been heard of him for six years.

“Sir—Ma’m,” he said, stopping in front of us. “Sorry to keep you waiting. There was a problem getting transport.”

“Michael,” I said. “Have you met Amanda Morgan?”

“No, I haven’t.” He turned to her. “An honor to meet you ma’m. I suppose you’re tired of having everyone say they recognize you from your great-great-grandmother’s pictures?”

“Never tire of it,” said Amanda cheerfully; and gave him her hand. “But you already know Corunna?”

“The El Man family are High Island neighbors,” said Michael. “If you’ll come along with me, please? I’ve already got your luggage in the bus.”

“Bus?” I said, as we followed him toward one of the window-wall exits from the terminal.

“The band bus for Third Regiment. It was all I could get.”

We emerged on to a small parking pad and Michael de Sandoval led us to a thirty-passenger bus. Inside was only an Exotic in a dark blue robe, white hair and a strangely ageless face, seated in the lounge area at the front of the bus. He stood up as we came in.

“Padma, Outbond to Ceta,” said Michael. “Sir, may I introduce Amanda Morgan, Contracts Adjuster, and Corunna El Man, Senior Ship Captain, both from the Dorsai? Captain El Man just brought the Adjuster in by courier.”

“Of course, I know about their coming,” said Padma.

He did not offer a hand to either of us, nor rise. But, like many of the advanced Exotics I have known, he did not seem to need to. There was a warmth and peace about him that the rest of us were immediately caught up in, and any behavior on his part seemed natural and expected.

We sat down together. Michael ducked into the control compartment, and a moment later, with a soft vibration, the bus lifted from the parking pad.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Outbond,” said Amanda. “But it’s even more of an honor to have you meet us.”

Padma smiled slightly.

“I’m afraid I didn’t come just to meet you,” he said to her. “I had a call to make, and the phones at Gebel Nahar are not as private as I liked. When I heard Michael was coming to get you, I rode along to use the phones in the terminal here.”

I could see Amanda signalling me to leave her alone with him. It showed in the way she sat and the angle at which she held her head.

“Excuse me,” I told them. “I think I’ll go have a word with Michael.”

I got up and went forward through the door into the control section, closing it behind me. Michael sat relaxed, one hand on the control rod; and I sat down myself in the copilot’s seat.

“How are things at home, sir?” he asked, without turning his head from the sky ahead of us.

“I’ve only been back this once since you have left, yourself,” I said. “But it hasn’t changed much. My father died last year.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Your father and mother are well—and I hear your brothers are all right, out among the stars,” I said. “But, of course, you know that.”

“No,” he said, still watching the sky ahead. “I haven’t heard for quite a while.”

A silence threatened.

“How did you happen to end up here?” I asked. It was almost a ritual question between Dorsais away from home.

“I heard about Nahar. I thought I’d take a look at it.”

“Did you know it was as fake Hispanic as it is?”

“Not fake,” he said. “Something . . . but not that. You know the situation here?”

“No. That’s Amanda’s job,” I said. “I’m just a driver on this trip. Why don’t you fill me in?”

“You must know some of it already,” he said, “and Ian or Kensie Graeme will be telling you the rest. But in any case El Conde, the titular ruler of Nahar, is only a figurehead. His father was set up with that title by the first Naharese immigrants. They had a dream of starting their own hereditary aristocracy here, but that never really worked. Still, on paper, the Conde’s the hereditary sovereign and Commander-in-Chief. But the army’s always been drawn from the poor of Nahar and they hate the rich first-immigrants. Now there’s a revolution brewing.”

“I see,” I said. “So the Graeme’s contract here is with a government which may be out of power tomorrow. Amanda’s got a problem.”

“It’s everyone’s problem,” Michael said. “The only reason the army hasn’t declared itself for the revolutionaries is because its parts don’t work together too well. Coming from the outside, the way you have, the ridiculousness of the locals’ attitudes may be what catches your notice first. But actually those attitudes are all the non-rich have, here, outside of a bare existence—this business of the flags, the uniforms, the music, the duels over one wrong glance and the idea of dying for your regiment—or being ready to go at the throat of any other regiment at the drop of a hat.”

“But,” I said, “what you’re describing isn’t any practical, working sort of military force.”

“No. That’s why Kensie and Ian were contracted in here, to turn the local army into something like an actual defensive force. The other principalities around Nahar all have their eyes on the ranchlands, here. Given a normal situation, the Graemes’d already be making progress—you know Ian’s reputation for training troops. But the common soldiers here think of the Graemes as tools of the ranchers. The truth is, I think Kensie and Ian’d be wise to take their loss on the contract and get out.”

“If accepting loss and leaving was all there was to it, someone like Amanda wouldn’t be needed here,” I said. “How about you? What’s your position here? You’re Dorsai too.”

“Am I?” he said to the windshield, in a low voice.

I had at last touched on what had been going unspoken between us. There was a name for individuals like Michael, back home. They were called “lost Dorsai.” The name was not used for those who had chosen to do something other than a military vocation. It was reserved for those of Dorsai heritage who seemed to have chosen their life work, whatever it was, and then—suddenly and without explanation—abandoned it. In Michael’s case, as I knew, he had graduated from the Academy with honors; but after graduation he had abruptly withdrawn his name from assignment and left the planet, with no explanation.

“I’m Bandmaster of the Third Naharese Regiment,” he said, now. “My regiment likes me. The local people don’t class me with the rest of you, generally—” he smiled a little sadly, again, “except that I don’t get challenged to duels.”

“I see—” I said.

The door to the control compartment opened and Amanda stepped in.

“Well, Corunna,” she said, “how about giving me a chance to talk with Michael?”

She smiled past me at him; and he smiled back. Her very presence, with all it implied of home, was plainly warming to him.

“Go ahead,” I said, getting up. “I’ll go say a word to the Out bond.”

“He’s worth talking to,” Amanda spoke after me as I went.

I stepped out, and rejoined Padma. He was looking out the window, down at the plains area that lay between the city and the small mountain from which Gebel Nahar took its name. Around and beyond that mountain—for the fort-like residence that was Gebel Nahar faced east—the actual, open grazing land of the cattle plains began. Our bus was designed to fly at about tree-top level, but right now we were about three hundred meters up. As I stepped out Padma took his attention from the window.

“Michael’s been telling me that a revolution seems to be brewing here in Nahar,” I said to him. “That wouldn’t be what brings someone like you to Gebel Nahar?”

His hazel eyes were suddenly amused.

“I thought Amanda was the one with the questions,” he said.

He sat in perfectly relaxed stillness, his hands loosely together in the lap of his robe, light brown against the dark blue. His face was calm and unreadable. “It’s part of the overall pattern of events on this world.”

“Just this world?”

He smiled back at me.

“Of course,” he said gently, “our Exotic science of ontogenetics deals with the interaction of all known human and natural forces, on all the inhabited worlds. But the situation here in Nahar, and specifically the situation at Gebel Nahar, is primarily a result of local, Cetan forces.”

“International planetary politics.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Which ones are backing the revolutionaries?”

He gazed out the window for a moment without speaking. It was a presumptuous thought on my part to imagine that my strange geas, that made people want to tell me private things, would work on an Exotic. But for a moment I had had the familiar feeling that he was about to open up to me.

“Actually,” he said, “all of the five think they have a hand in it on the side of the revolutionaries. But bad as Nahar is, now, it would be a shambles after a successful revolution, with everybody fighting everybody else for different goals. The other principalities all look for a situation in which they can move in and gain. But you’re quite right. International politics is always at work, and it’s never simple.”

“What’s really fueling this situation, then?”

“William,” Padma looked directly at me and for the first time I felt the remarkable effect of his hazel eyes. His face held such a calmness that all his expression seemed to be concentrated in those eyes.

“William?” I asked.

“William of Ceta.”

“That’s right,” I said, remembering. “He owns this world, doesn’t he?”

“It’s not really correct to say he owns it,” Padma said. “He controls after a fashion, but only by manipulating the outside conditions such as those the ranchers here have to deal with.”

“So he’s behind the revolution?”

“Yes.”

It was plainly William’s involvement that had brought Padma to this backwater section of the planet. The Exotic science of ontogenetics, which was essentially a study of how humans interacted, both as individuals and societies, was something they took very seriously; and William, as one of the movers and shakers of our time would always have his machinations closely watched by them.

“Well, it’s nothing to do with us, at any rate,” I said, “except as it affects the Graeme’s contract.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said. “William hires a good many mercenaries, directly and indirectly. It would benefit him if events here could lower the Dorsai reputation and market value.”

“I see—” I began; and broke off as the hull of the bus rang suddenly—as if to a sharp blow.

“Down!” I said, pulling Padma to the floor of the vehicle.

“What was it?” he asked, after a moment, but without moving.

“Solid projectile slug. Probably from a heavy hand weapon.” I told him. “We’ve been shot at. Stay down, if you please, Outbond.”

I got up myself, staying low, and went into the control compartment. Amanda and Michael both looked around at me, their faces alert.

“Who’s out to get us?” I asked Michael.

He shook his head.

“Here in Nahar,” he said, “it could be anybody. The revolutionaries, or simply someone who doesn’t like the Dorsai; or someone who doesn’t like Exotics—or me. It could be someone drunk, drugged, or just in a macho mood.”

“—who also has a military hand weapon.”

“There’s that,” Michael said. “But everyone in Nahar is armed; and most of them, legitimately or not, own military weapons. Anyway, we’re almost down.”

I looked out. The interlocked mass of buildings that was Gebel Nahar was sprawled halfway down from the top of the small mountain. In the tropical sunlight, it looked like a resort hotel. The only difference was that each terrace terminated in a wall, and the lowest of the walls were solid fortifications, with heavy weapons.

“What’s the other side like?” I asked.

“Mountaineering cliff—there’s heavy weapon emplacements cut out of the rock there, too, and reached by tunnels going clear through the mountain,” Michael answered. “The ranchers spared no expense. They and their families might all have to hole up here, one day.”

But a few moments later we were on the poured concrete surface of a vehicle pool. The parking area was abnormally silent.

“I don’t know what’s happened—” said Michael.

A voice shouting brought our heads around. A moment later a soldier wearing an energy sidearm, but dressed in the green and red Naharese army uniform with band tabs, burst into sight and slid to a halt, panting before us.

“Sir—” he wheezed, in the local dialect of archaic Spanish.

We waited for him to get his breath; after a second, he tried again.

“They’ve deserted, sir!” he said to Michael, trying to pull himself to attention. “They’ve gone—all the regiments, everybody!”

“When?” asked Michael.

“Two hours past. It was all planned. Certainly, it was planned! In each group, at the same time, a man stood up. He said that now was the time to desert, to show the ricones where the army stood. They all marched out, with their flags, their guns, everything. Look!”

He turned and pointed outwards. It was possible to see, from this as from any of the other levels, straight out for miles over the plains. Looking now, we saw tiny, occasional twinkles of reflected sunlight, seemingly right on the horizon.

“They are camped out there.”

“Everyone’s gone?” Michael’s words in Spanish brought the soldier’s eyes back to him.

“All but us. The soldiers of your band, sir. We are the Conde’s Elite Guard, now.”

“Where are the two Dorsai Commanders?”

“In their offices, sir.”

“I’ll have to go to them right away,” said Michael to the rest of us. “Outbond, will you wait in your quarters, or will you come along with us?”

“I’ll come,” said Padma.

The five of us went across the parking area, between the crowded vehicles and into a maze of corridors. Through these we found our way finally to a large suite of offices, where the outward wall of each room was all window. We found Kensie and Ian Graeme together in one of the inner offices, standing talking before a massive desk large enough to serve as a conference table for a half-dozen people.

They turned as we came in—and once again I was hit by the curious illusion that I usually experienced on meeting these two.

In my own mind I had always laid it to the fact that in spite of their size—and either one is nearly a head taller than I am—they are so evenly proportioned physically that from a distance it is easy to take them for not much more than ordinary height. Then, having unconsciously underestimated them, you or someone else whose size you know approaches them; and it is that individual who seems to shrink as he, she, or you get close. If it is you, you are directly aware of the change. But if it is someone else, you can still seem to shrink, along with that other person. To feel yourself become smaller that way is a strange sensation, even if it is entirely subjective.

In this case, the measuring element turned out to be Amanda, who ran to the two brothers the minute we entered the room. Her homestead, Fal Morgan, was the one closest to the Graeme home of Foralie and the three of them had grown up together. She was not a small woman, but by the time she had reached them and was hugging Kensie, she seemed to have become not only tiny, but fragile; and suddenly—again, as it always does—the room seemed to orient itself about the two Graemes.

I followed her and held out my hand to the first one I reached, who was Ian.

“Corunna!” he said. His large hand wrapped around mine. His face—so different, yet so like, to his twin brother’s—looked down into mine. Only it was not a physical difference, for all its powerful effect on the eye. Literally, it was that Ian was lightless, and all the bright element that might have been in him was instead in his brother, so that Kensie radiated double the human normal amount of sunny warmth. Dark and light. Night and day. Brother and brother.

And yet, there was a closeness between them of a kind that I have never seen in any other two human beings.

“Do you go back right away?” Ian was asking me. “Or will you be staying to take Amanda?”

“I can stay,” I said. “Can I be of use here?”

“Yes,” Ian said. “You and I should talk. Just a minute, though—”

He turned to greet Amanda in his turn and tell Michael to check and see if the Conde was available for a visit. Michael went out with the soldier who had met us at the vehicle pool. It seemed that Michael and his bandsmen, plus a handful of servants and the Conde himself, added up to the total present population of Gebel Nahar, outside of those in this room. The ramparts were designed to be defended by a handful of people, if necessary; but we had barely more than a handful in the forty members of the regimental band Michael had led, and they were evidently untrained in anything but marching.

We left Kensie with Amanda and Padma. Ian led me into an adjoining office, waved me to a chair, and took one himself.

His arms lay relaxed upon the arms of the chair, his massive hands loosely curved about the ends of those chair arms. There was, as there always had been, something utterly lonely but utterly invincible about Ian. Most non-Dorsais seem to draw a noticeable comfort from having a Dorsai around in times of physical danger, as if they assumed that any one of us would know the right thing to do and so do it. It may sound fanciful, but I have to say that in somewhat the same way as the non-Dorsai reacted to the Dorsai, so did most of the Dorsai I’ve known always react to Ian.

“It’ll take them two days to settle in out there,” Ian said now, nodding at the window wall, beyond which lay the nearly invisible encampments on the plain. “After that, they’ll either have to move against us, or they’ll start fighting among themselves. That means we can expect to be overrun in two days.”

“Unless what?” I asked. He looked back at me.

“There’s always an unless,” I said.

“Unless Amanda can find us an honorable way out of the situation,” he said. “As it now stands, there doesn’t seem to be any way out. Our only hope is that she can find something in the contract or the situation that the rest of us have overlooked.”

“Isn’t there anything you think she might be able to use?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “It’s a hope against hope. An honor problem.”

“What makes it so sensitive that you need an Adjuster from home?” I asked.

“William. You know him, of course. But how much do you know about the situation in Nahar?”

I repeated what I had picked up from Michael and Padma.

“Nothing else?” he asked.

“I haven’t had time to find out anything else.”

“William . . .” he said. “It’s my fault we’re into this, rather than Kensie’s. I’m the strategist, he’s the tactician on this contract. The large picture was my job, and I didn’t look far enough.”

“If there were things the Naharese government didn’t tell you, then there’s your out, right there.”

“Oh, the contract’s challengeable, all right,” Ian said. He smiled. I know there are those who like to believe that he never smiles; and that notion is nonsense. But his smile is like all the rest of him. “It isn’t the information they held back that’s trapped us, it’s this matter of honor. Not just our personal honor—the reputation and honor of all Dorsai. They’ve got us in a position where whether we stay and die or go and live, it’ll tarnish the planetary reputation.”

I frowned at him.

“How can they do that?”

“Partly,” said Ian, “because William’s an extremely able strategist himself. Partly, because it didn’t occur to me or Kensie that we were getting into a three-party rather than a two-party agreement.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“The type of country the original settlers tried to set up here,” he said “was something that could only exist under uncrowded, near-pioneering conditions.

After that, the semi-feudal notion of open plains and large individual holdings of land got to be impractical, on the international level of this world. Of course, the first settlers, those Gallegos from Galicia in northwest Spain, saw that coming from the start. That was why they built this place we’re setting in.”

His smile came again.

“But that was back when they were only trying to delay the inevitable,” he said. “Sometime in more recent years they evidently decided to come to terms with it.”

“Bargain with the neighbor countries?”

“Bargain with the rest of Ceta,” he said. “Which is William—for all practical purposes.”

“There again, if they had an agreement with William that they didn’t tell you about,” I said, “you’ve every excuse to void the contract.”

“Their deal with William isn’t a written, or even a spoken contract,” Ian answered. “What the ranchers did was let him know that he could have the control he wanted here in Nahar if he’d meet their terms.”

“And what did they want in exchange?”

“A guarantee that their life style and this pocket culture they’d developed would be maintained and protected.”

He looked under his dark brows at me.

“I see,” I said. “How did they think William could do that?”

“They didn’t know. But they didn’t worry about it. They just let the fact be known to William that if they got what they wanted they’d stop fighting his attempts to control Nahar directly. That’s why there’s no other contract we can cite as an excuse to break this one.”

“It sounds like William. If I know him,” I said, “he’d even enjoy engineering whatever situation was needed to keep this country fifty years behind the times. But you still haven’t explained this business of your being trapped here, not by the contract, but by the general honor of the Dorsai.”

Ian nodded.

“William’s taken care of both things,” he said. “His plan was for the Naharese to hire Dorsai to make their army a working unit. Then his revolutionary agents would cause a revolt of that army. Then he could step in with his own non-Dorsai officers to control the situation and bring order back to Nahar.”

“I see,” I said.

“He then would mediate the matter,” Ian went on, “the revolutionary people would be handed some limited say in the government—under his control, of course—and the ranchers would give up their absolute authority but little of anything else.”

“So,” I said, thoughtfully, “what he’s after is to show that his military people can do things Dorsai can’t?”

“That’s it,” said Ian. “We command the price we do now only because military experts like ourselves are in limited supply. If they want Dorsai results—military situations dealt with at either no cost or a minimum cost, in life and materiel—they have to hire Dorsai. That’s as it stands now. But if it looks like others can do the same job as well or better, our price has to go down, and our world will begin to starve.”

“It’d take some years for the Dorsai to starve. In that time we could live down the results of this, maybe.”

“But it goes farther than that. William isn’t the first to dream of being able to hire all the Dorsai and use (hem as a personal force to dominate the other worlds. We’ve never considered allowing that yet. But if William can depress our price below what we need to keep the Dorsai free and independent, then he can offer us survival wages, available from him alone, and we’ll have no choice but to accept.”

“Then you’ve got no choice, yourself,” I said.

“You’ve got to break this contract, no matter what it costs.”

“I’m afraid not,” he answered. “The cost looks right now to be the one we can’t afford to pay. You’ll understand when you see El Conde—”

The door opened and Amanda herself looked in.

“It seems some local people calling themselves the Governors have just arrived—” Her tone was humorous, but every line of her body spoke of serious concern. “Evidently, I’m supposed to go and talk with them right away. Are you coming, Ian?”

“Kensie is all you’ll need,” Ian said. “We’ve trained them to realize that they don’t necessarily get both of us on deck every time they whistle. You’ll find it’s just another step in the dance, anyway—there’s nothing to be done with them.”

“All right,” she said, and went out.

“Sure you don’t want to be there?” I asked him.

“No need.” He got up. “Come along, then. It’s important you understand the situation here thoroughly. If Kensie and myself should both be knocked out, Amanda would only have you to help her handle things. I wanted you to meet the Conde de Nahar. I’ve been waiting to hear from Michael as to whether the old man’s receiving, right now, but we won’t wait any longer. Let’s go see how old the gentleman is.”

He led the way out of the room. We left the suite of offices and began to travel the corridors of Gebel Nahar once more. Twice we took lift tubes and once we rode a motorized strip down one long corridor; but at the end Ian pushed open a door and we stepped into what was obviously the orderly room fronting a barracks section.

The soldier bandsman seated behind the desk there came to his feet immediately at the sight of us.

“Sirs!” he said, in Spanish.

“I ordered Mr. de Sandoval to find out for me if the Conde would receive Captain El Man here, and myself,” Ian said in the same language. “Do you know where the Bandmaster is now?”

“No, sir. He has not come back. Sir—it is not always possible to contact the Conde quickly—”

“I’m aware of that,” said Ian. “Rest easy. Mr. de Sandoval’s due back here shortly, then?”

“Yes, sir. Any minute now. Would the sirs care to wait in the Bandmaster’s office?”

“Yes,” said Ian.

The orderly turned to usher us through a farther entrance into a larger room, very orderly and with a clean desk, filing cabinets and with its walls hung with musical instruments.

Most of these were ones I had never seen before. There was one that looked like an early Scottish bagpipe. It had only a single drone, some seventy centimeters long, and a chanter about half that length. Another was obviously a keyed bugle of some sort, but with most of its central body length wrapped with red cord ending in dependent tassels. I moved about the walls, examining each as I came to it, while Ian took a chair and watched me. I came back at length to the deprived bagpipe.

“Can you play this?” I asked Ian.

“I’m not a piper,” said Ian. “I can blow a bit, of course—but I’ve never played anything but regular highland pipes. You’d better ask Michael if you want a demonstration. Apparently, he plays everything—and plays it well.”

I turned away from the walls and took a seat, myself.

“What do you think?” asked Ian. I was gazing around the office.

I looked back at him and saw his gaze curiously upon me.

“It’s . . . strange,” I said.

And the room was strange. Just as there are subtle characteristics by which one born to the Dorsai will recognize another, so there are small signals about the office of anyone on military duty and from that world. So, Michael de Sandoval’s office was unmistakably the office of a Dorsai. But, at the same time, it owned a strange difference from any other Dorsai’s office.

“He’s got these musical instruments displayed as if they were fighting tools,” I said, “and no weapons visible.”

Ian nodded. If Michael had chosen to hang a banner from one of the walls testifying to the fact that he would absolutely refuse to lay his hands upon a weapon, he could not have announced himself more plainly to Ian and myself.

“It seems to be a strong point with him,” I said. “I wonder what happened?”

“His business, of course,” said Ian.

“Yes,” I said.

But the discovery hit me hard—because suddenly I identified what I had felt in young Michael from the first moment I had met him, here on Ceta. It was pain, a deep and abiding pain; and you cannot have known someone since he was in childhood and not be moved by that sort of pain.

The orderly stuck his head into the room.

“Sirs,” he said, “the Bandmaster comes.”

“Thank you,” said Ian.

A moment later, Michael came in. “Sorry to keep you waiting—” he began.

“Perfectly all right,” Ian said. “The Conde made you wait?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, is he available now?”

“Yes sir. You’re both most welcome.”

“Good.” Ian stood up and so did I. “Amanda Morgan is seeing the Governors, at the moment. You might keep yourself available for her.”

“I’ll be right here,” said Michael. “Sir—I wanted to apologize for my orderly’s making excuses about my not being here when you came—my men have been told not to—”

“It’s all right, Michael,” said Ian. “You’d be an unusual Dorsai if they didn’t try to protect you.”

“Still—” said Michael.

“Still,” said Ian, “I know they’ve trained only as bandsmen. They may be line troops at the moment—all the line troops we’ve got to hold this place with—but I’m not expecting miracles.”

“Well,” said Michael. “Thank you, Commander.” We went out. Once more Ian led me through a maze of corridors and lifts.

“How many of his bandsmen decided to stay with him when the regiments moved out?” I asked as we went.

“All of them,” said Ian.

“And no one else stayed?”

Ian looked at me with a glint of humor.

“You have to remember,” he said, “Michael did graduate from the Academy, after all.”

A final short distance down a wide corridor brought us to a massive pair of double doors. Ian touched a visitor’s button on the right-hand door and spoke to an annunciator panel in Spanish.

“Commander Ian Graeme and Captain El Man are here with permission to see the Conde.”

There was the pause of a moment and then one of the doors opened to show us another of Michael’s bandsmen.

“Be pleased to come in, sirs,” he said.

“Thank you,” Ian said as we walked past. “Where’s the Conde’s majordomo?”

“He’s gone, sir. Also the other servants.”

“I see.”

The room we had just been let into was a wide foyer filled with enormous and magnificently-kept furniture but lacking windows. The bandsman led us through two more rooms like it, into a third, finally window-walled room. A stick-thin old man dressed in black was standing with the help of a silver-headed cane, before the center of the window area.

The soldier slipped out of the room. Ian led me to the old man.

“El Conde,” he said Spanish, “may I introduce Captain Corunna El Man? Captain, you have the honor of meeting El Conde de Nahar, Macias Francisco Ramón Manuel Valentin y Compostela y Abente.”

“You are welcome. Captain El Man,” said the Conde. He spoke a more correct, if more archaic, Spanish than that of the other Naharese I had so far met; and his voice was the thin remnant of what once must have been a remarkable bass. “We will sit down now, if you please. If my age produces a weakness, it is that it is wearisome to stand for any length of time.”

We settled ourselves in heavy, overstuffed chairs with massively padded arms—more like thrones than chairs.

“Captain El Man,” said Ian, “has brought Amanda Morgan here to discuss the present situation with the Governors. She’s talking to them now.”

“I have not met . . .” the Conde hesitated over her name, “Amanda Morgan.”

“She is one of our experts.”

“I would like to meet her.”

“She’s looking forward to meeting you.”

“Possibly this evening? I would have liked to have had all of you to dinner, but my servants have gone.”

“I just learned that,” said Ian.

“They may go,” said the Conde. “They will not be allowed to return. Nor will the regiments who have deserted their duty be allowed to return to my armed forces.”

“With the Conde’s indulgence,” said Ian, “we don’t yet know all their reasons for leaving. Perhaps some leniency is justified.”

“I can think of none.” The Conde’s back was as erect as a flagstaff and his dark eyes did not waver. “But, if you think so, I can reserve judgment momentarily.”

“We’d appreciate that,” Ian said.

“You are very lenient.” The Conde looked at me. His voice took on an unexpected timbre. “Captain, has the Commander here told you? Those deserters out there—” he flicked a finger toward the window and the plains beyond, “under the instigation of people calling themselves revolutionaries, have threatened to take over Gebel Nahar. If they dare to come here, I and what few loyal servants remain will resist. To the death!”

“The Governors—” Ian began.

“The Governors have nothing to say in the matter!” the Conde turned fiercely on him. “Once, their fathers and grandfathers chose my father to be El Conde. I inherited that title and while I live, I will be El Conde. I will remain, I will fight—alone if need be—as long as I am able. But I will retreat, never! I will compromise, never!”

He continued to talk for some minutes; but although his words changed, the message of them remained the same. He would not give an inch to anyone who wished to change the governmental system in Nahar. He would never yield, in spite of reason or the overwhelming odds against him.

After a while he ran down. He apologized graciously for his emotion, but not for his attitude; and after a few minutes more of meaninglessly polite conversation on the history of Gebel Nahar itself, let us leave.

“So you see part of our problem,” said Ian to me when we were alone again, walking back to his offices. “We can’t just abandon him.”

We went a little distance together in silence.

“Part of that problem,” I said, “seems to lie in the difference between our idea of honor, and theirs. Did you ever read Calderon’s poem about the Mayor of Zalemea?”

“I don’t think so. Calderon?”

“Pedro Calderon de la Barca, seventeenth century Spanish poet. He wrote a poem called El Alcalde de Zalamea.”

I gave him the lines of which he had reminded me.

Al Rey la hacienda y la vida
Se ha de dar; pero el honor
Es patrimonio del alma
Y el alma soló es de Dios.

“ ‘—Fortune and life we owe to the King,’ ” murmured Ian, “ ‘but honor is patrimony of the soul and the soul belongs to God alone.’ I see what you mean.”

I started to say something, then decided it was too much effort. I was aware of Ian glancing sideways at me as we went.

“When did you eat last?” he asked.

“I don’t remember,” I said. “But I don’t particularly need food right now.”

“You need sleep, then,” said Ian, “I’m not surprised, after the way you made it here from the Dorsai.”

“Yes,” I said.

Now that I had admitted to tiredness, it was an effort even to think. For those who have never navigated between the stars, it is easy to forget the implications of the fact that danger increases rapidly with the distance moved in a single shift—beyond a certain safe amount of light-years. For three days I had had no more than catnaps between periods of calculation. I was numb with a fatigue I had held at bay until this moment with the body adrenalin.

The bandsman supplied by Ian showed me at last to my suite. It consisted of three window-walled rooms, each with a door in it to let me out onto a small balcony running the length of this particular level. The balcony was divided into areas for each suite by tall plants in pots at each division point.

I checked balcony and suite, locked the doors, and slept.

It was sometime after dark when I awoke, suddenly, to the sound of the call chime at the front door of my suite.

I reached over and keyed on the annunciator circuit.

“Yes?” I said. “Who is it?”

“Michael de Sandoval,” said Michael’s voice, “can I come in?”

I touched the stud that unlocked the corridor door in the adjoining sitting room. It swung open, letting in a knife-blade sharp swath of light I could see through the doorway to my bedroom. I was on my feet and moving to meet him in the sitting room as the door closed behind him.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The ventilating system’s gone out on this level,” he said; and I realized that the air in the suite was now perfectly motionless—motionless and beginning to be a little warm and stuffy.

“I wanted to check the quarters of everyone on this level,” Michael said. “I’d suggest I open the door to the balcony for you, sir.”

“Thanks,” I said. “What was the situation with the servants? Were they revolutionary sympathizers, too?”

“Not necessarily.” He unlocked the door and propped it open to the night air, which came coolly and sweetly through the aperture. “They just didn’t want their throats cut along with the Conde’s, when the army stormed its way back in here.”

“I see,” I said.

“Yes.” He came back to me in the center of the sitting room.

“What time is it?” I asked. “I’ve been sleeping as if I was under drugs.”

“A little before midnight.”

I sat down in one of the chairs of the unlighted sitting room. The glow of the soft exterior lights spaced at ten meter intervals along the balcony came dimly through the window wall.

“Sit for a moment,” I said. “Tell me. How did Amanda do with the Governors?”

I barely saw the shrug of his shoulders in the gloom.

“There was nothing much to be done with them,” he said. “They wanted reassurances that Ian and Kensie could handle the situation. Effectively, it was all choreographed.”

“They’ve left, then?”

“That’s right. They asked for guarantees for the safety of the Conde. Both Ian and Kensie told them that there was no such thing as a guarantee; but we’d protect the Conde, of course, with every means at our disposal. Then they left.”

“It sounds,” I said, “as if Amanda could have saved her time and effort.”

“No. She said she wanted to get the feel of them,” he leaned forward. “You know, she’s something to write home about. She says there’s no question that there’s a way out—it’s just that finding it in the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours is asking a lot.”

“I see,” I said. “Is there anything I can do? Would you like me to spell you on the duty officer bit?”

“You’re to rest, Ian says. He’ll need you tomorrow. I’m getting along fine with my duties.” He moved toward the front door of the suite. “Good night.”

“Good night,” I said.

He went out, the knife of light from the corridor briefly cutting across the carpeting of my sitting room again and vanishing as the door latched behind him.

I stayed where I was, enjoying the night breeze through the propped-open door. I may have dozed. At any rate I came to, suddenly, to the sound of voices from the balcony. Not from my portion of the balcony, but from the portion next to it, beyond my bedroom window to the left.

“. . . yes,” a voice was saying. Ian had been in my mind; and for a second I thought I was hearing him speak. But it was Kensie.

“I don’t know . . .” It was Amanda’s voice answering, a troubled voice.

“Time goes by quickly,” Kensie said. “Look at us. It was just yesterday we were in school together.”

“I know,” she said, “you’re talking about it being time to settle down. But maybe I never will.”

“How sure are you of that?”

“Not sure, of course.” Her voice changed as if she had moved some little distance from him.

“Then you could take the idea of settling down under consideration.”

“No,” she said. “I know I don’t want to do that.” Her voice changed again, as if she had turned and come back to him. “Maybe I’m ghost-ridden, Kensie. Maybe it’s the old spirit of the first Amanda that’s ruling out the ordinary things for me.”

“She married—three times.”

“But her husbands weren’t important to her, that way. She really belonged to everyone, not just to her husbands and children. Don’t you understand? I think that’s the way it’s going to have to be for me, too.”

He said nothing. After a long moment she spoke again, and her voice was lowered, and drastically altered.

“Kensie! Is it that important?”

His voice was lightly humorous, but the words came a fraction more slowly than they had before.

“It seems to be.”

“But it’s something we both just fell into, as children. It was just an assumption on both our parts. Since then, we’ve grown up. You’ve changed. I’ve changed.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t need me. Kensie, you don’t need me—” her voice was soft. “Everybody loves you.”

“Could I trade?” The humorous tone persisted. “Everybody for you?”

“Kensie, don’t!”

“You ask a lot,” he said; and now the humor was gone, but there was still nothing in the way he spoke that reproached her. “I’d probably find it easier to stop breathing.”

There was another silence.

“Why can’t you see? I don’t have any choice,” she said. “We’re both what we are, and stuck with what we are.”

“Yes,” he said.

The silence, this time, lasted. But they did not move. My ear was now sensitized. They had been standing apart, and they stayed standing apart.

“Yes,” he said again, finally—and this time it was a long, slow yes, a tired yes. “Life moves. And all of us move with it, whether we like it or not.”

She moved to him, now.

“You’re exhausted,” she said. “Get some rest. Things’ll look different in the daylight.”

“That sometimes happens.” The humor was back, but there was effort behind it. “Not that I believe it, in this case.”

They went back inside.

I sat where I was, wide awake. There had been no way for me to get up and get away from their conversation without letting them know I was there. I still had the ugly feeling that I had been intruding where I should not have been.

There was no point in moving now. I sat where I was, so concerned with my own feelings that I did not pay close attention to the sounds around me. A small noise in my own entrance to the balcony area alerted me; and I looked up to see a dark silhouette in the doorway.

“You heard,” Amanda’s voice said.

“Yes,” I told her. “I happened to be sitting here when you came out on the balcony. There was no chance to shut the door or move.”

“It’s all right,” she came in. “No, don’t turn on the light.”

I dropped the hand I had lifted toward the control studs in the arm of my chair. With the illumination from the balcony behind her, she could see me better than I could see her. She sat down in the chair Michael had occupied a short while before.

“I told myself I’d step over and see if you were sleeping,” she said. “Ian has a lot of work for you tomorrow. But I think I was really hoping to find you awake.”

“I don’t want to intrude,” I said.

“If I reach out and haul you in by the scruff of the neck, are you intruding? I’m the one who’s thinking of intruding—of intruding my problems on you.”

“That’s not necessarily an intrusion,” I said.

“I hoped you’d feel that way,” she said. “I need to have all my mind on what I’m doing here and personal matters have ended up getting in the way.” She paused.

“You don’t really mind people spilling all over you?”

“No,” I said.

“I thought so. I had the feeling you wouldn’t. Do you think of Else much?”

“When other things aren’t on my mind.”

“I wish I’d known her.”

“She was someone to know.”

“Yes. Knowing someone else is what makes the difference. The trouble is, often we don’t know. Or we don’t know until too late.” She paused. “I suppose you think, after what you heard just now, that I’m talking about Kensie?”

“Aren’t you?”

“No. Kensie and Ian—the Graemes are so close to us Morgans that we might as well all be related. You don’t usually fall in love with a relative when you’re young. The kind of person you imagine falling in love with is someone strange and exciting—someone from fifty light years away.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Else was a neighbor and I think I grew up being in love with her.”

“I’m sorry.” Her silhouette shifted a little in the darkness. “I’m really just talking about myself. When I was younger, I just assumed I’d wind up with Kensie, that I’d have to have something wrong with me not to want someone like him.”

“And you’ve got something wrong with you?” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s it. I grew up, that’s the trouble.”

“Everybody does.”

“I don’t mean I grew up physically. I mean, I matured. We live a long time, we Morgans, and I suppose we’re slower growing up than most. Did you ever have a wild animal as a pet as a child?”

“Several,” I said.

“Then you’ve run into what I’m talking about. While it’s young, it’s cuddly and tame; but when it grows up, the day comes when it bites or slashes at you without warning. People talk about that being part of their wild nature. But it isn’t. Humans change the same way. You grow up. Then the day comes when someone tries to play with you and you aren’t in a playing mood—and you react with ‘Back off! What I want is just as important as what you want!’ And all at once, the time of your being young and cuddly is over, forever.”

“Of course,” I said. “That happens to all of us.”

“But to us—to us Dorsai—it happens too late!” she said. “That’s the cruel part of it. Or rather, we start life too early. By the age of seventeen we have to be out and working like an adult, either at home or on some other world. We’re pitchforked into adulthood. There’s never any time to take stock, to realize what it’s going to turn us into. We don’t realize we aren’t cubs any more until one day we slash or bite someone without warning; and then we know we’ve changed. But it’s too late then for us to adjust to the change in the other person because we’ve already been trapped by our own change.”

She stopped. I sat, waiting. From my experience with this sort of thing since Else died, I knew that I no longer needed to talk. She would carry the conversation, herself.

“No, it wasn’t Kensie I was talking about when I first came in here and said the trouble is you don’t know someone else until too late. It’s Ian.”

“Ian?” I echoed.

“Yes,” she said. “When I was young, I didn’t understand Ian. I do now. Then, I thought he was simply solid all the way through, like a piece of wood. But he’s not. Everything you can see in Kensie is there in Ian, only there’s no light to see it by. Now I know. And now it’s too late.”

“Too late?” I said. “He’s not married, is he?”

“Married? Not yet. But you didn’t know? Look at the picture on his desk. Her name’s Leah. She’s on Earth. He met her there, four years ago. But that’s not what I mean. I mean—it’s too late for me. I’ve got the curse of the first Amanda. I’m born to belong to a lot of people, first; and to any single person, second. As much as I’d give for Ian, that equation would sooner or later put even him in second place for me. I can’t do that to him.

“Maybe Ian’d be willing to agree to those terms.”

She did not answer for a second. Then I heard a slow intake of breath from the darker darkness that was her.

“Would you suggest something like that to Ian if our positions were reversed?”

“I didn’t suggest it,” I said. “I mentioned it.”

Another pause.

“You’re right,” she said. “I know what I want and what I’m afraid of in myself, and it seems to me so obvious I keep thinking everyone else must know too.

She stood up.

“Thank you, Corunna,” she said.

“I’ve done nothing,” I said.

“Thank you, anyway. Good night. Sleep if you can.”

She stepped out through the door; and through the window wall I watched her, very erect, pass to my left until she walked out of my sight beyond the sitting room wall.

I went back to bed, not really expecting to fall asleep again easily. But I dropped off and slept like a dead man.

When I woke it was morning and my bedside phone was chiming. I flicked it on and Michael looked at me out of the screen.

“I’m sending a man up with maps of the interior of Gebel Nahar,” he said, “so you can find your way around. Breakfast’s available in the General Staff Lounge, if you’re ready.”

“Thanks,” I told him.

I got up and was ready when his bandsman arrived; and the bandsman showed me to the General Staff Lounge. Ian was the only other there and he was just finishing his meal.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat.

“I’m assuming we’ll be defending this place in twenty-four hours or so,” he said. “I’d like you to familiarize yourself with its defenses, particularly the first line of walls and its weapons, so that you can either direct the men working them, or take over the general defense.”

“What have you got in mind for a general defense?” I asked.

“We’ve got just about enough of Michael’s troops to man that first wall and have a handful in reserve,” he said. “Most of them have never touched anything but a handweapon in their life, but we’ve got to use them to fight with the emplaced energy weapons against foot attack up the slope. I’d like you to drill them on the weapons. Get breakfast in you; and I’ll tell you how I expect the regiments to attack and what we might do when they try it.”

He went on talking while my food came and I ate. Boiled down, his expectations were of a series of infantry wave attacks up the slope until the first wall was overrun. He planned a defense of the first wall until the last safe moment, then destruction of the emplaced weapons, and a quick retreat to the second wall with its weapons—and so, step by step, retreating up the terraces. It was essentially the sort of defense that Gebel Nahar had been designed for by its builders.

The problem would be in getting absolutely green troops like the Naharese bandsmen to retreat cool-headedly. If they could not, then the first wave over the ramparts could reduce their numbers to the point where there would not be enough of them to make any worthwhile defense of the second terrace, to say nothing of the third, the fourth, and so on, and still have men left for a final stand within the top three levels.

Given an equal number of veteran, properly trained troops, to say nothing of Dorsai-trained ones, we might even have held Gebel Nahar in that fashion and inflicted enough casualties to eventually make them pull back. But the most we could hope to do with what we had was inflict a maximum of damage while losing.

I finished eating and got up to go.

“Where’s Amanda?” I asked.

“She’s working with Padma,” Ian said.

“I didn’t know Exotics took sides.”

“He’s not.” Ian said. “He’s just making—his knowledge available. That’s standard Exotic practice as you know as well as I do. He and Amanda are still hunting some political angle.”

“What do you think their chances are?”

Ian shook his head.

“But,” he said, shuffling together the papers he had spread out before him on the lounge table, “of course, where they’re looking is a far ways out, beyond the areas of strategy I know. We can hope.”

He got up, holding his papers and went out; I to Michael’s office, he to his own.

Michael was not in his office. The orderly directed me to the first wall; and I found him there, already drilling his men on the emplaced weapons. I worked with them for most of the morning and then we stopped, because his untrained troops were exhausted and beginning to make mistakes simply out of fatigue.

Michael sent them to lunch. He and I went back to his office and had sandwiches and coffee brought in by his orderly.

“What about this?” I asked, after we were done, getting up and going to the wall where the archaic-looking bagpipe hung. “I asked Ian about it, but he said he’d only played highland pipes; and that if I wanted a demonstration, to ask you.”

Michael looked up from his seat behind his desk.

“That’s a gaita gallega,” he said. “Or, to be correct, it’s a local imitation of the gaita gallega you can still find back on Earth. It’s a perfectly playable instrument to anyone who’s familiar with the highland pipes. Ian could have played it.”

“He seemed to think you could play it better,” I said.

“Well . . .” Michael grinned again. “Perhaps, a bit. Do you really want to hear it?” he asked.

“Yes, I would.”

He took it down from the wall.

“We’ll have to step outside,” he said.

We went back out on to the first terrace. He swung the pipe up in his arms, the long single drone resting on his left shoulder and pointing up into the air behind him. He took the mouthpiece between his lips and laid his fingers across the holes of the chanter. Then he blew up the bag and began to play.

Michael played something Scottish and standard—The Flowers of the Forest, I think—pacing slowly up and down. Then, abruptly he swung around and stepped out, playing something entirely different.

I wish there were words in me to describe it. It was anything but Scottish. It was hispanic, right down to its backbones—a wild, barbaric, musically ornate challenge that heated the blood in my veins.

He finished at last with a sort of dying wail as he swung the deflating bag down from his shoulder. He looked drawn and old.

“What was that?” I demanded.

“It’s got a polite name for polite company,” he said. “But nobody uses it. The Naharese call it Su Madre.”

“Your Mother?” I echoed. Then, of course, it hit me. The Spanish language has a number of elaborate and poetically insulting curses to throw at your enemy about his ancestry; and the words su madre are found in most of them.

“Yes,” said Michael. “It’s what you play when you’re daring the enemy to come out and fight. It accuses him of being less than a man in all the senses of that phrase—and the Naharese love it.”

He sat down on the rampart suddenly, like someone very tired and discouraged.

“And they like me,” he said, “My bandsmen, my regiment—they like me.”

“Usually,” I said, “men like their Dorsai officers.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He was still staring at the wall. “I’ve made no secret here of the fact I won’t touch a weapon. They’ve all known it from the day I signed on.”

“I see,” I said. “So that’s it.”

He looked up at me, abruptly.

“Do you know how they react to cowards—as they consider them—in this splinter culture? They show their manhood by knocking them around here. But they don’t touch me. They don’t even challenge me to duels, as I said.”

“They don’t believe you,” I said.

“That’s it.” His face was almost savage. “Why not?”

“Because you only say you won’t use a weapon,” I told him bluntly. “In body language and every other language you speak, you broadcast just the opposite information—that you’re so good none of them who’d challenge you would stand a chance. You could not only defeat someone like that, you could make him look foolish. The message is in the very way you walk and talk. How else could it be?”

“That’s not true!” he got suddenly to his feet, holding the gaita. “I live what I believe in—”

He stopped.

“Maybe we’d better get back to work,” I said. “No!” The word burst out of him. “I want to tell someone. I want someone to . . .”

He broke off. He had been about to say “someone to understand . . .” but I could not help him. There is something in me that tells me when to speak and when not to.

And now I was being held silent.

He struggled with himself for a few seconds, and then calm seemed to flow over him.

“No,” he said, as if talking to himself, “what people think doesn’t matter. But we’re not likely to live through this and I want to know how you react.” He looked at me.

“I’ve got to know how they’d take it, back home,” he said, “if I could explain it to them. And your family is like mine, from the same canton, the same neighborhood, the same sort of ancestry . . .”

“Did it occur to you you might not owe anyone an explanation?” I said. “When your parents raised you, they only paid back the debt they owed their parents for raising them. If you’ve any obligation it’s to the Dorsai in general, to bring in interstellar exchange credits. And you’ve done that by becoming bandmaster here. Anything beyond that’s your own private business.”

It was quite true. The vital currency between worlds was not wealth, but work credits. The inhabited worlds trade special skills, packaged in human individuals; and the exchange credits earned by a Dorsai on Newton enables the Dorsai to hire a geophysicist from Newton—or a physician from Kultis. Michael had been earning such credits ever since he had come here. True, he might have earned these at a higher rate if he had chosen work as a mercenary combat officer; but the credits he did earn as bandmaster more than justified the expense of his education and training.

“I’m not talking about that—” he began.

“No,” I said, “you’re talking about a point of obligation and honor not very different from what the Naharese use.”

He stood for a second, absorbing that.

“You’re telling me,” he said “you don’t want to listen.”

“Now,” I said, “you really are talking like a Naharese.”

“Yes,” he said, suddenly weary. “Would you sit down?”

He gestured to the rampart and sat down himself.

“Do you know I’m a happy man?” he demanded. “I really am. I’ve got everything I could want. I’ve got a military job I like. I’m in touch with all the things that I grew up thinking made the kind of life one of my family ought to have. I’m better at what I do than anyone else they can find—and I’ve got my other love, music, as my main duty. My men like me.

I nodded, watching him.

“But then there’s this other part . . .” His hands closed on the gaita’s bag, and there was a faint sound from the drone.

“Your refusal to fight?”

“Yes.” He got up and began to pace, holding the instrument, talking jerkily. “This feeling against hurting anything . . . I’ve had it as long as I’ve had the other—all the dreams I made up as a boy from the stories I heard. When I was young it didn’t matter that the feeling and the dreams hit head on. It just always happened that, in my visions, the battles I won were always bloodless. No one ever got hurt. I didn’t worry about any conflict, then. It was something that would take care of itself later. But what was in me didn’t change. It was there with me all the time, not changing.”

“No normal person likes the actual fighting and killing,” I said. “What sets our people off by ourselves is that often we can win without having dead bodies piled all over the place. Our way justifies itself by saving employers money; but also it gets us away from the essential brutality of combat and keeps us human. Remember what Cletus says about that? He hated killing just as much.”

“But he could do it when he had to,” Michael looked at me with a face drawn tight. “So can you. Or Ian. Or Kensie.”

That was true, of course. I could not deny it.

“You see,” said Michael, “that’s the difference between life and at the Academy. In life, sooner or later, you get to the killing part. When I graduated and faced going out as a fighting officer, I finally had to decide. And I did. I won’t hurt anyone—even to save my own life, I think. But at the same time I’m bred and born a soldier. I don’t want any other life, I can’t conceive of any other; and I love it.”

He broke off, and stood, staring out at the flashes of light from the camp of the deserted regiments.

“Well, there it is,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

He turned to look at me.

“Will you tell my family that?” he asked. “If you should get home and I don’t?”

“All right,” I said. “But we’re not dead, yet.”

He grinned, unexpectedly—a sad grin.

“I know,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve had this on my conscience for a long time. You don’t mind?”

“Of course not.”

He hefted the gaita in his hands.

“My men will be back out here in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “I can carry on the drilling myself, if you’ve got other things you want to do.”

I looked at him a little narrowly.

“What you’re trying to tell me,” I said, “is that they’ll learn faster if I’m not around.”

“Something like that.” He laughed. “They’re used to me; but you make them self-conscious.”

“Whatever works,” I said. “I’ll go and see what else Ian can find for me to do.”

I turned and went to the door that would let me back into the interior of Gebel Nahar.

“Thank you again,” he called after me. I waved at him and went inside.

I found my way back to Ian’s office. He was not there, so I went looking, and found Kensie with his desk covered with large scale printouts of terrain maps.

“Ian?” he said. “No, I don’t know. But he ought to be back soon. I’ll have some work for you tonight. I want to mine the approach slope. Michael’s bandsmen can do the actual work; but you and I are going to need to go out first and make a sweep to pick up any observers the regiments have sent. Then, later, before dawn I’d like to do a scout of their camp and get some hard ideas as to how many of them there are, what they have to attack with, and so on.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’m slept up. Call me when you want.”

“You could try asking Amanda if she knows where Ian is.”

Amanda and Padma were in a conference room two doors down from Kensie’s office, seated at one end of a table covered with text printouts and an activated display screen. Amanda was studying the screen and they looked up as I came in. But while Padma’s eyes were sharp, Amanda’s were abstract.

“I’ll come,” Padma said to me before I could speak.

He got up and came to me, stepping into the outside room and shutting the door behind him.

“I’m trying to find Ian.”

“I don’t know where he’d be just now,” said Padma.

I nodded toward the door he had just shut.

“It’s getting rather late, isn’t it,” I asked, “for Amanda to hope to turn up some sort of legal solution?”

“Not necessarily.” Next to the window wall of the outer office were several armchairs. “Why don’t we sit down there? If he comes in from the corridor, he’s got to go through this office, and if he comes out on the terrace of this level, we can see him through the window.”

We went over and took chairs.

“It’s not exact, actually, to say that there’s a legal way of handling this situation that Amanda’s looking for.

“You might get a better word picture if you said what Amanda is searching for is a social solution to the situation.”

“I see,” I said. “This morning Ian talked about Amanda saying that there always was a solution, but the problem here was to find it in so short a time. Did I hear that correctly?”

“There’s always any number of solutions,” Padma said. “The problem is to find the one you’d prefer. Once they happen, of course, they become history—”

He smiled at me.

“—And history, so far, is something we can’t change. But changing what’s about to happen simply requires getting to the base of the forces involved in time. What takes time is identifying the forces, finding what pressures are possible and where to apply them.”

“And we don’t have time.”

“No,” he said. “In fact, you don’t.”

I looked squarely at him.

“In that case, shouldn’t you be thinking of leaving, yourself?” I said. “Aren’t you too valuable to get your throat cut by some battle-drunk soldier?”

“I’d like to think so,” he said. “But we think the value of studying people as closely as possible at times like this is important enough to take priority over everything else.”

“People? You can’t mean us who are here. Who then? William?” I said. “The Conde? Someone in the revolutionary camp?”

Padma shook his head.

“All of you, one way or another, have a hand in shaping history. But who shapes it largely, and who only a little is something I can’t tell you. The science of ontogenetics isn’t that sure. As to whom I may be studying, I study everyone.”

It was a gentle, but impenetrable, shield he set up.

“Maybe you can explain how Amanda or you go about looking for a solution?” I said.

“It’s a matter of looking for the base of the existing forces at work—”

“The ranchers—and William?”

He nodded.

“Particularly William—since he’s the prime mover. To get results, William or anyone else had to set up a structure of cause and effect, operating through individuals. For anyone else to control the forces already set to work, it’s necessary to find where that structure is vulnerable to cross-pressures and arrange for those to operate—again through individuals.”

“And Amanda hasn’t found a weak point yet?”

“Of course she has. Several.” He frowned at me, but with a touch of humor. “But none that can be implemented between now and sometime tomorrow, if the regiments attack Gebel Nahar then.”

I had a strange sensation. As if a gate was slowly but inexorably being closed in my face.

“It seems to me,” I said, “the easiest thing to change would be the position of the Conde. If he’d just agree to come to terms with the regiments, the whole thing would collapse.”

“Obvious solutions are usually not the easiest,” Padma said. “Stop and think. Do you really think the Conde would change his mind?”

“No. You’re right,” I said. “He’s a Naharese. More than that, he’s honestly an hispanic. El honor forbids that he yield to soldiers threatening to destroy him.”

“But tell me,” said Padma, watching me. “Even if el honor was satisfied, would he want to treat with the rebels?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “You’re right again. This is the great moment of his life, the chance for him to substantiate that paper title of his, to make it real. This way he can prove to himself he’s a real aristocrat. He’d give his life—in fact, he can hardly wait to give his life—to prove that.”

There was a little silence.

“So you see,” said Padma. “And what other ways can you see a solution being found?”

“Ian and Kensie could void the contract. But they won’t. No responsible officer from our world would risk giving the Dorsai the sort of bad name that could give, and neither of those two brothers would abandon the Conde as long as he insisted on fighting.”

“What other ways, then?”

“I can’t think of any,” I said. “I’m out of suggestions—which is probably why I was never considered for anything like Amanda’s job, in the first place.”

“As a matter of fact, there are a number of other possible solutions,” Padma said softly. “There’s the possibility of bringing counter economic pressure upon William. There’s also the possibility of bringing social and economic pressure upon the ranchers; and there’s the possibility of disrupting the control of the revolutionaries who’ve come in from outside Nahar to run this rebellion. But none of these solutions can very easily be made to work in the short time we’ve got.”

“In fact, there’s no solution that can be made to work in time,” I said.

Padma shook his head.

“No. If we could stop the clock at this second and take the equivalent of some months to study the situation, we’d undoubtedly find not only one, but several solutions. What’s lacking isn’t time to act, since that’s merely something specified for the solution. What’s lacking is time in which to find the solution that will work in the time there is to act.”

“So you mean,” I said, “that we’re to sit here tomorrow and face the attack of six thousand line soldiers, all the time knowing there’s a way in which that attack doesn’t have to happen, if only we had the sense to find it?”

“The sense—and the time,” said Padma. “But you’re right.”

The door I had sensed closing had just closed. It was unbelievable. I am Dorsai. The words “Abandon hope . . .” have no emotional reality for me. But there was no shadow of a doubt that this was what Padma was telling me.

PART TWO

“I see,” I said. “Well, I find I don’t accept it that easily.”

“No.” Padma’s gaze was level and cooling upon me. “Neither does Amanda. Neither does Ian or Kensie. Nor, I suspect, even Michael. But then, you’re all Dorsai.”

I said nothing.

“In any case,” Padma went on. “None of you are being called on to merely accept it. Amanda’s still at work. So is Ian, so are all the rest of you. I didn’t mean to sneer at the reflexes of your culture. I envy you—a great many people envy you—that inability to give in. My point is that the fact we know there’s an answer makes no difference.”

“True enough,” I said—and at that moment we were interrupted.

“Padma?” It was the general office annunciator speaking from the walls around us with Amanda’s voice.

Padma got to his feet.

“I’ve got to go,” he said.

He went out. I sat where I was, held by that odd little melancholy that had caught me up at moments all through my life. It is not a serious thing, just a touch of loneliness and sadness at the fact that life is measured; and there are only so many things that can be accomplished, try how you may.

Ian’s return woke me out of it.

I got up.

“Corunna!” he said, and led the way into his private office. “How’s the training going?”

“As you’d expect,” I said. “I left Michael alone with them, at his suggestion. He thinks they might learn faster without my presence to distract them.”

“Possible,” said Ian.

He stepped to the window wall and looked out.

“They don’t seem to be doing badly,” he said.

He was still on his feet, of course, and I was standing next to his desk. I looked at it now, and found the cube holding the image Amanda had talked about. The woman pictured there was obviously not Dorsai, but there was something not unlike our people about her. She was strong-boned and dark-haired, the hair sweeping down to her shoulders, longer than most Dorsais out in the field would have worn it, but not long according to the styles of Earth.

I looked back at Ian. His face was turned toward the wall beyond which Amanda would be working with Padma at this moment. I noticed a tiredness about him. Not that it showed anywhere specifically in the lines on his face. He was, as always, like a mountain of granite, untouchable. But the way he stood spoke of a fatigue—perhaps one of the spirit rather than of the body.

“I just heard about Leah,” I nodded at the image cube.

He turned.

“Leah? Oh, yes.” His own eyes went to the cube and away again. “Yes, she’s Earth. I’ll be going to get her after this is over. We’ll be married in two months.”

“That soon?” I grinned at him. “I hadn’t even heard you’d fallen in love.”

“Love?” he echoed. His eyes were still on me, but their attention had gone away again. “No, it was years ago . . .”

His attention focused, suddenly. He was back with me. “Sit down,” he said. “Have you talked to Kensie?”

“Just a little while ago.”

“He’s got a couple of runs outside the walls he’d like your hand with, tonight after dark’s well settled in.”

“He told me about them,” I said. “A sweep of the slope in front to clear it before laying mines, and a scout of the regimental camp before tomorrow.”

“That’s right,” Ian said.

“Do you have any solid figures on how many they’ll have?”

“Regimental rolls,” said Ian, “give us over five thousand of all ranks. Fifty-two hundred and some. But something like this invariably attracts a number of Naharese who scent the chance for personal glory. Then there’re perhaps seven or eight hundred honest revolutionaries in Nahar, plus a hundred or so agents provocateurs from outside.”

“In something like this, we can discount the civilians?”

Ian nodded.

“How many of the actual soldiers’ll have had any actual combat experience?” I asked.

“Combat experience here,” Ian said, “means a border clash with the armed forces of the surrounding principalities. Maybe one in ten of the line soldiers has had that. On the other hand, every Naharese male has dreamed of a moment like this.”

“So they’ll all come on hard with the first attack,” I said.

“That’s as I see it,” said Ian, “and Kensie agrees. I’m glad to hear it’s your thought, too. If we can throw them back even once, some won’t come again. And so on. They won’t lose heart as a group, but each setback will take the heart out of some, and we’ll work them finally down to the hard core that’s serious about being willing to die, if only they can reach us.”

“Yes,” I said, “how many do you think?”

“That’s the problem,” said Ian, calmly. “At the very least, there’s going to be one in fifty we’ll have to kill to stop. Even if half of those are already out of it by the time we get down to it, that’s sixty left; and we’ve got to figure thirty percent casualties ourselves—Man to man, on the attackers making it over the walls, the bandsmen that’re left will be lucky to take care of an equal number of attackers. Padma, of course, doesn’t exist in our defensive table. That leaves you, me, Kensie, Michael, and Amanda to handle about thirty bodies. Are you in condition?”

I grinned.

“That’s good,” said Ian. “I forgot to figure that scar-face of yours. Be sure to smile like that when they come at you. It ought to slow them down for a couple of seconds at least, and we’ll need all the help we can get.”

I laughed.

“If Michael doesn’t want you, how about working with Kensie?”

“Fine,” I said.

Kensie looked up from his printouts when he saw me again.

“Find him?” he asked.

“Yes. He suggested you could use me.”

“I can. Join me.”

We worked together the rest of the afternoon. What Kensie needed to know was what the ground was like meter by meter from the front walls on out over perhaps a couple of hundred meters of plain beyond. Given that knowledge, it would be possible to make reasonable estimates as to how a foot attack might develop, how many attackers we might be likely to have on a front, and on which parts of that front, they might be expected to fall behind their fellows during a rush.

The Naharese terrain maps had never been made with such detailed information in mind. Kensie had spent most of the day before taking pictures of three-meter square segments of the ground, using the watch cameras built into the ramparts. With these pictures as reference, we now proceeded to make notes on blown up versions of the clumsy Naharese maps.

It took us the rest of the afternoon. We knocked off, with the job done, finally, about the dinner hour.

We found no one else at dinner but Ian. Michael was still teaching his bandsmen to be fighting troops; and Amanda was still with Padma.

“You’d both probably better get an hour of sleep,” Ian said. “We might be able to pick up an hour or two more of rest just before dawn, but there’s no counting on it.”

“Yes,” said Kensie. “You might sleep some, yourself.”

Brother looked at brother. They knew each other so well that neither bothered to discuss the matter further. It had been discussed silently in that one momentary exchange of glances, and now they were concerned with other things.

As it turned out, I got a full three hours of sleep. It was just after ten o’clock when Kensie and I came out from Gebel Nahar. Michael led us, with our face and hands blackened, along a passage that would let us out into the night a good fifty meters beyond the wall.

“How did you know about this?” I asked. “If there’s more secret ways like this, and the regiments know about them—”

“There aren’t and they don’t,” said Michael. “This is a private secret of the Conde’s. His father had it built thirty-eight years ago. Our Conde told me about it when he heard the regiments had deserted.”

I nodded. There was plainly a sympathy and a friendship between Michael and the old Conde that I had not had time to ask about. Perhaps it had come of their each being the only one of their kind in Gebel Nahar.

We reached the end of the passage and a short ladder leading up to a circular metal hatch. Michael turned out the light and we were suddenly in absolute darkness. I heard him cranking something well-oiled. Above us the hatch lifted to show starlit sky.

“Go ahead,” Michael whispered. “Keep your heads down. The bushes that hide this spot have thorns.”

We went up; I led, as being the more expendable. I heard Kensie come up and the hatch closed behind us. Michael was to open it again in two hours and fourteen minutes.

Kensie touched my shoulder. I looked and saw his hand held up, silhouetted against the stars. He made the hand signal for move out, and disappeared. I turned away to move off in the opposite direction, staying close to the ground.

I worked to the right as Kensie was working left. It was all sand, gravel and low brush, most with thorns or burrs. The night wind blew, cooling me under a sky where no clouds hid the stars.

The light of a moon would have been welcome, but Ceta has none. After fifteen minutes I came to the first of nine positions in my area that we had marked as possible locations for watchers from the enemy camp. Picking such positions is simple reasoning. Anyone but the best trained of observers, given the job of watching something like the Gebel Nahar, from which no action is really expected to develop, finds the hours long; and with the animal instinct in him he drifts automatically to the most comfortable or sheltered location from which to do his watching.

But there was no one at the first of the positions I came to. I moved on.

It was just about this time that I began to be aware of a change in the way I was feeling. The exercise, the adjustment of my body to the darkness and the night temperature, had begun to have their effects. I was no longer physically self-conscious. Instead, I was beginning to enjoy the action.

Old habits and reflexes had awakened in me. I flowed over the ground, now, not an intruder in the night of Nahar, but part of it. There was an excitement to it, a feeling of naturalness and rightness in my quiet search through this dim-lit land. I felt not only at home there, but as if in some measure I owned the night. The wind, the scents, the sounds I heard, all entered into me; and I recognized suddenly that I had moved completely beyond an awareness of myself as a physical body separate from what surrounded me. I was now pure observer, with the keen involvement that a wild animal feels in the world he moved through.

Then a sense of duty came and hauled me back to my obligations. I finished my sweep. There were no observers at all, either at any of the likely positions Kensie and I had picked out or anywhere else in the area I had covered. Unbelievable as it seemed from a military standpoint, the regiments had not bothered to keep even a token watch on us.

I returned to the location of the tunnel-end, and met Kensie there. His hand-signal showed that he had also found his area deserted. There was no reason why Michael’s men should not be moved out as soon as possible and put to work laying the mines.

Michael opened the hatch at the scheduled time and we went down the ladder by feel in the darkness. With the hatch once more closed overhead, the light came on again.

“What did you find?” Michael asked, as we stood squinting in the glare.

“Nothing,” said Kensie. “It seems they’re ignoring us. You’ve got the mines ready to go?”

“Yes,” said Michael. “If it’s safe out there, do you want to send the men out by one of the regular gates? I promised the Conde to keep the secret of this tunnel.”

“Absolutely,” said Kensie. “In any case, the less people who know about this sort of way in and out of a place like Gebel Nahar, the better. Let’s go back inside and get things organized.”

We went. Back in Kensie’s office, we were joined by Amanda. We sat around in a circle and Kensie and I reported on what we had found.

“I haven’t waked the men yet,” said Michael, when we were done. “They needed all the sleep they can get. I’ll call the orderly and wake them now. We can be at work in half an hour; and except for my rotating them in by groups for food and rest breaks, we can work straight through the night. We ought to have all the mines placed by a little before dawn.”

“Good,” said Ian.

I sat watching him, and the others. My sensations, outside of having become one with the night, had left my senses keyed to an abnormally sharp pitch.

They were all deadly tired—each in his or her own way, very tired, with a personal, inner exhaustion that had finally been exposed by the physical tiredness to which the present situation had brought all of them except me. It seemed what that physical tiredness had accomplished had been to strip away the polite covering that before had hidden the private exhaustion; and it was now plain on every one of them.

“. . . Then there’s no reason for the rest of us to waste any more time,” Ian was saying. “Amanda, you and I’d better dress and equip for that scout of their camp. Knife and sidearm, only.”

His words brought me suddenly out of my separate awareness.

“You and Amanda?” I said. “I thought it was Kensie and I, Michael and Amanda who were going to take a look at the camp?”

“It was,” said Ian. “One of the Governors who came in to talk to us yesterday is on his way in by personal aircraft. He wants to talk to Kensie again, privately—he won’t talk to anyone else.”

“Some kind of a deal in the offing?”

“Possibly,” said Kensie. “We can’t count on it, though, so we go ahead. On the other hand we can’t ignore the chance. So I’ll stay and Ian will go.”

“We could do it with three,” I said.

“Not as well as it could be done by four,” said Ian. “That’s a good sized camp to get into and look over in a hurry. If anyone but Dorsai could be trusted to get in and out without being seen, I’d be glad to take half a dozen more. It’s not like most military camps, where there’s a single overall headquarters area. We’re going to have to check the headquarters of each regiment; and there’re six of them.”

I nodded.

“You’d better get something to eat, Corunna,” Ian went on. “We could be out until dawn.”

It was good advice. When I came back from eating, the other three were already in Ian’s office. On his right thigh Michael was wearing a knife—which was after all, more tool than weapon—but no sidearms, and I noticed Ian did not object. With her hands and face blacked, wearing the black stocking cap, overalls and boots, Amanda looked taller and more squareshouldered.

“All right,” said Ian, “we’ll go by field experience. I’ll take two of the six regiments—the two in the center. Michael, because he’s more recently from his Academy training and because he knows these people, will take two regiments—the two on the left wing that includes the far left one that’s his own Third Regiment. You’ll take the Second Regiment, Corunna, and Amanda will take the Fourth.”

“It’s unlucky you and Michael can’t take regiments adjoining each other,” I said. “That’d give you a chance to work together. You might need that with two regiments each to cover.”

“Ian needs to see the Fifth Regiment for himself, if possible,” Michael said. “That’s the Guard Regiment, the one with the best arms. My regiment is a traditional enemy of the Guard Regiment, so the two have deliberately been separated as far as possible—that’s why the Guards are in the middle and my Third’s on the wing.”

“Anything else? Then we should go,” said Ian.

We went out by the same tunnel, leaving the hatch propped a little open against our return. Once out we spread apart at ten meter intervals and began to jog toward the lights of the regimental camp, in the distance.

We were an hour coming up on it. We began to hear it some distance off. It did not sound like a military camp on the eve of battle half so much as it did a large open-air party.

The camp was laid out in a crescent. The center of each regimental area was made up of the usual beehive-shaped buildings of blown bubble-plastic that could be erected so easily on the spot. Behind and between these were tents of all types and sizes. There was steady traffic between these tents and the plastic buildings.

We stopped a hundred meters out, opposite the center of the crescent and checked off.

“All back here in forty minutes,” Ian said.

We checked chronometers and split up, going in. My target, the Second Regiment, was between Ian’s two regiments and Michael’s two; and it was a section that had few tents, these seeming to cluster most thickly either toward the center of the camp or out on both wings. I slipped between the first line of buildings, moving from shadow to shadow.

It was foolishly easy. Effectively, the people moving between the buildings and. among the tents had neither eyes nor ears for what was not directly under their nose. Getting about unseen under such conditions boils down simply to the fact that you move quietly—which means moving all of you in a single rhythm, including your breathing; and that, when you stop, you become utterly still—which means relaxing completely in whatever bodily position you have stopped in.

Breathing is the key to both, of course, as we learn back home in childhood games even before school age. Move in rhythm and stop utterly, and you can sometimes stand in plain sight without being observed.

A quick circuit of my area told me all we needed to know about this particular regiment. Most of the soldiers were between late twenties and early forties, in age. Under other conditions this might have meant a force of veterans. In this case, it indicated the opposite, time-servers who liked the uniform, the relatively easy work, and the authority. I found a few field energy weapons—light, three-man pieces that were not only out-of-date, but impractical in open territory, like that before Gebel Nahar. The heavier weapons on the ramparts would be able to take out such as these almost as soon as the rebels could try to put them into action, and long before they could do any real damage to the heavy defensive walls.

The hand weapons varied from the best of newer energy guns, cone rifles and needle guns—in the hands of the soldiers—to ancient and modern hunting tools and slug-throwing sport pieces—carried by those in civilian clothing. Civilian and military hand weapons alike, however, had one thing in common that surprised me, in the light of everything else I saw—they were clean, well-cared for, and handled with respect.

I decided I had found out as much as necessary about this part of the camp. I headed back to the first row of plastic structures and the darkness of the plains beyond, having to detour slightly to avoid a drunken brawl that had spilled out of one of the buildings into the space between it and the next.

It was on this detour that I became conscious of someone quietly moving parallel to me. Since it was on the side given to Michael to investigate, I guessed it was he. I went to look, and found him.

I’ve got something to show you, he hand signalled me. Are you done, here?

Yes, I told him.

Come on, then.

He led me to one of the larger plastic buildings in the territory of the second regiment. The curving sides of such structures are not difficult to climb quietly. He led me to the top and a small hole tom there.

I looked in and saw six men with the collar rabs of Regimental Commanders at a table, apparently having sometime since finished a meal. Their conversation was just below comprehension level. I could hear their words, but not understand them.

But I could watch the way they spoke and tell how they were reacting to each other. There were a great many tensions around that table. There was no open argument, but they looked at each other in ways next to open challenges and the rumble of their voices bristled with the electricity of controlled angers.

I felt my shoulder tapped, and took my attention from the hole. It took a few seconds to adjust to the darkness, but when I did, I could see Michael again talking with his hands.

Look at the youngest Commander—the one with the very black mustache. That’s the Commander of my regiment.

I looked, and lifted my gaze briefly to nod.

Now look across the table and as far down from him as possible. You see the somewhat heavy Commander with the gray sideburns and the lips that almost pout?

I looked, raised my head and nodded again.

That’s the Commander of the Guard Regiment. He and my Commander are beginning to wear on each other. If not, they’d be seated side by side and pretending friendship. It’s almost as tense with the junior officers, if you know the signs to look for. Can you guess what’s triggered it off?

No, I told him, but I suppose you do.

I’ve been watching for some time. They had the maps out earlier. The position of each regiment in the line of battle, tomorrow. They’ve agreed, but no one’s happy with the decision.

I nodded.

I wanted you to see it for yourself. They’re all ready to go at each other’s throats. Maybe Amanda can find something in that she can use. I brought you here because I was hoping you’ll support me in suggesting she come and see this for herself.

I nodded again. The brittle emotions below had been obvious, even to me, the moment I had first looked through the hole.

We slipped quietly back down the curve of the building to the ground and moved out together toward the rendezvous point. Ian and Amanda were already there; and we stood together, looking back at the activity in the encampment as we compared notes.

“I called Captain El Man in to look at something I’d found,” Michael said. “In my alternate area, there was a meeting going on between the regimental commanders—”

The sound of a shot from someone’s antique explosive firearm cut him short. We all turned toward the encampment; and saw a lean figure wearing a white shirt brilliantly reflective in the lights, running toward us, while a gang of men poured out of one of the tents, stared about, and then started in pursuit.

The one they chased was running directly for us, in his obvious desire to get away from the camp. It was obvious that, with his eyes still dilated from the lights of the camp, and staring at black-dressed figures like ours, he was completely unable to see us.

We dropped flat into the sparse grass of the plain. But he still came straight for us. Another shot sounded.

The fugitive had all the open Naharese plain into which to run. He came toward us instead as if drawn on a cable. We lay still. Unless he actually stepped on one of us, there was a chance he could run right through us and not know we were there.

He did not step on one of us, but he did trip over Michael, stagger on a step, check, and glance down to see what had interrupted his flight. He looked directly at Amanda, and stopped, staring down in astonishment. A second later, he had started to swing around to face his pursuers, his mouth open to shout.

He was obviously about to betray our presence, and Amanda did exactly the correct thing—even if it produced the least desirable results. She uncoiled from the ground like a spring released from tension, one fist taking the fugitive in the adam’s apple to cut off his cry and the other going into him just under the breastbone to take the wind out of him and put him down without killing him. But the incredible bad luck of that moment was still with us.

As she took the man down, another shot sounded from the pursuers, clearly aimed at the now-stationary target of the fugitive—and Amanda went down with him.

She was up again in a second.

“Fine—I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s go!”

We went, off into the darkness at the same trot at which we had come. Until we were aware of specific pursuit there was no point in burning our reserves of energy. We moved steadily back toward Gebel Nahar, while the pursuers reached the fugitive, surrounded him, got him on his feet and talking.

By that time we could see them flashing around the lights some had been carrying, searching for us. But we were well away and drawing farther off every second. No pursuit developed.

“Too bad,” said Ian, as the sound and lights of the camp dwindled behind us. “But no great harm done. What happened to you, ’Manda?”

She did not answer. Instead, she went down again, stumbling and dropping abruptly. In a second we were all back around her.

She was plainly having trouble breathing.

“Sorry . . .” she whispered.

Ian was already cutting away the clothing over her left shoulder.

“Not much blood,” he said.

The tone of his voice said he was angry with her. So was I. It was entirely possible that she might have killed herself by trying to run with a wound that should not have been excited by that kind of treatment. She had acted instinctively to hide the fact that she had been hit, so that the rest of us would not hesitate in getting away. It was not hard to understand the impulse that had made her do it—but she should not have.

“Corunna,” said Ian, “this is more in your line.”

He was right. As a captain, I was the closest thing to a physician aboard my ship. I moved in and checked the wound as best I could. In the faint starlight it showed as a small patch of darkness against a pale patch of exposed flesh. I felt it with my fingers and put my cheek down against it.

“Small caliber slug,” I said. Ian breathed out harshly. He had already deduced that much. “Not a sucking wound. High up, just below the collarbone. No immediate pneumothorax, but the chest cavity’ll be filling with blood. Are you very short of breath, Amanda? Don’t talk, just nod or shake your head.”

She nodded.

“How do you feel. Dizzy? Faint?”

She nodded again. Her skin was clammy to my touch.

“Going into shock,” I said.

I put my ear to her chest again.

“Right,” I said. “The lung on this side’s not filling with air. She can’t run. We’ll need to carry her.”

“I’ll do that,” said Ian. He was still angry, but trying to control it. “How fast do we have to get her back, do you think?”

“Her condition ought to stay the same for a couple of hours,” I said. “Looks like no large blood vessels were hit; and the smaller vessels tend to be selfsealing. But the pleural cavity on this side’s been filling up with blood and she’s collapsed a lung. That’s why she’s having trouble breathing. No blood around her mouth, so it probably didn’t nick an airway going through . . .”

I felt around behind her shoulder.

“It didn’t go through. If there’re MASH med-mech units back at Gebel Nahar and we get her back in the next two hours, she should be all right—if we carry her.”

Ian scooped her into his arms. He stood up.

“Head down,” I said.

“Right,” he answered and put her over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “No, wait—we’ll need some padding.”

Michael and I took off our jerseys and made a pad for his other shoulder. He transferred her to that shoulder, with her head hanging down his back. I sympathized with her. Even with the padding, it was not a comfortable way to travel; and her wound and shortness of breath would make it a great deal worse.

“Try it at a slow walk, first,” I said.

“I’ll try it. But we can’t go slow walk all the way,” said Ian. “It’s nearly three klicks from where we are now.”

He was right, of course. To walk her back over three kilometers would take too long. We started off, and he gradually increased his pace until we were moving smoothly but briskly.

“How are you?” he asked her, over his shoulder.

“She nodded,” I reported, from my position behind him.

“Good,” he said, and began to jog.

We travelled. She did not speak; and, as far as I could tell, she did not lose consciousness once on that long, jolting ride. Ian forged ahead, like something made of gears and shafts rather than ordinary flesh, his gaze on the lights of Gebel Nahar, far off across the plain.

There is something that happens under those conditions where the choice is either to count the seconds, or disregard time altogether. In the end we all—and I think Amanda, too—went off a little way from ordinary time, and did not come back to it until we were at the entrance to the Conde’s secret tunnel, leading back under the walls of Gebel Nahar.

By the time I got Amanda laid out in the medical section she looked very bad indeed and was only semi-conscious. Luckily, the medical section had everything necessary. I was able to find a portable unit that could be rigged for bed rest—vacuum pump, power unit, drainage bag. It was a matter of inserting a tube between Amanda’s lung and chest wall—and this I left to the med-mech—so that the unit could exhaust the blood from the pleural space into which it had drained.

It was also necessary to rig a unit to supply her with reconstituted whole blood while this draining process was going on. I finally got her fixed up and left her to rest—she was in no shape to do much else.

I went off to the offices to find Ian and Kensie with my report on Amanda’s treatment and my estimate of her condition.

“She shouldn’t do anything for the next few days, I take it,” said Ian when I was done.

“That’s right,” I said.

“There ought to be some way we could get her out of here, to safety and a regular hospital,” said Kensie.

“How?” I asked. “It’s almost dawn. The Naharese would zero in on any vehicle that tried to leave, by ground or air.”

Kensie nodded soberly.

“They should be starting to move now,” said Ian, “if this dawn was to be the attack moment.”

He turned to the window, and Kensie and I turned with him. Dawn was just breaking.

“After all their parties last night, they may not get going until noon,” I said.

“I don’t think they’ll be that late,” said Ian, absently. He had taken me seriously. “At any rate, it gives us a little more time. Are you going to have to stay with Amanda?”

“I’ll want to look in on her from time to time—in fact, I’m going back down now,” I said. “I just came up to tell you how she is. But in between visits, I can be useful.”

“Good,” said Ian. “As soon as you’ve had another look at her, why don’t you go see if you can help Michael? He’s been saying he’s got his doubts about those bandsmen of his.”

“All right.” I went out.

When I got back to the medical section, Amanda was asleep. I was going to leave, when she woke and recognized me.

“Corunna,” she said, “how am I?”

“You’re fine,” I said. “All you need now is to get a lot of sleep and do a good job of healing.”

Her head moved restlessly on the pillow.

“Better if that slug had been more on target.”

I looked down at her.

“According to what I’ve heard about you,” I said, you of all people ought to know that when you’re in a hospital bed it’s not the best time in the world to be worrying over things.”

She started to speak, interrupted herself to cough, and was silent for a little time until the pain of the tube, rubbing inside her with the disturbance of her coughing, subsided.

“No,” she said. “I can’t want to die. But the situation’s impossible; and every way out of it is impossible, for all three of us. Just like our situation here in Gebel Nahar.”

“Kensie and Ian are able to make up their own minds.”

“It’s not a matter of making up minds. It’s a matter of impossibilities.”

“Well,” I said, “is there anything you can do about that?”

“I ought to be able to.”

“Ought to, maybe, but can you?”

She breathed shallowly. Slowly she shook her head.

“Then let it go. Leave it alone,” I said. “I’ll be back to check on you from time to time. Wait and see what develops.”

“How can I wait?” she said. “I’m afraid of myself. Afraid I might throw everything overboard and do what I want most—and so ruin everyone.”

“You won’t do that.”

“I might.”

“You’re exhausted,” I told her. “You’re in pain. Stop trying to think. I’ll be back in an hour or two to check on you. Until then, rest!”

I went out, in search of Michael and found him in the supply section. He was going from supply bin to supply bin, checking the contents of each and testing the automated delivery system of each to make sure it was working.

The overhead lights were very bright, and their illumination reflected off solid concrete walls painted a utilitarian, flat white. I watched his face as he worked. There was no doubt about it. He looked much more tired, much leaner, and older than he had appeared to me only a few days before when he had met Amanda and me at the spaceport terminal of Nahar City. But the work he had been doing and what he had gone through could not alone have cut him down so visibly, at his age.

He finished checking the last of the delivery systems and the last of the bins. He turned away.

“Ian tells me you’re concerned over your bandsmen,” I said.

His mouth thinned and straightened.

“Yes,” he said. There was a little pause, and then he added: “You can’t blame them. If they’d been real soldier types they would have been in one of the line companies. There’s security, but no chance for promotion in a band.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “they stayed.”

“Well . . .” He sat down a little heavily on a short stack of boxes and waved me to another, “so far it hasn’t cost them anything but some hard work. And they’ve been paid off in excitement. Excitement—drama—is what most Naharese live for; and die for, for that matter, if the drama is big enough.”

“You don’t think they’ll fight when the time comes?”

“I don’t know.” His face was bleak again. “I only know I can’t blame them—I can’t, of all people—if they don’t.”

“Your attitude’s a matter of conviction.”

“Maybe theirs is, too. You never know enough to make a real comparison.”

“True,” I said. “But I still think that if they don’t fight, it’ll be for somewhat lesser reasons than yours.”

He shook his head slowly.

“Maybe I’m wrong, all wrong.” His tone was almost bitter. “But I can’t get outside myself to look at it. I only know I’m afraid.”

“Afraid?” I looked at him. “Of fighting?”

“I wish it was of fighting,” he laughed, briefly. “No, what I’m afraid of is that I don’t have the will not to fight. I’m afraid at the last moment it’ll all come back, those early dreams and all the training; and I’ll find myself killing, even though I’ll know it won’t make any difference in the end and that the Naharese will take Gebel Nahar, anyway.”

“I don’t think it’d be Gebel Nahar you’d be fighting for,” I said slowly. “I think it’d be out of a natural, normal instinct to stay alive yourself as long as you can—or to help protect those who are fighting alongside you.”

“Yes,” he said. His nostrils flared as he drew in an unhappy breath. “The rest of you. That’s what I won’t be able to stand. It’s too deep in me. I might be able to let myself be killed. But can I stand there when they start to kill someone else—like Amanda, and she already wounded?”

He and I walked back to his offices in silence. When we arrived, there was a message for me, to call Ian. I did.

“The Naharese still haven’t started to move,” he said. “They’re so unprofessional I’m beginning to think we can get Padma, at least, away from here. He can take one of the small vehicles and fly out to Nahar City. My guess is that once they see he’s an Exotic, they’ll simply wave him on.”

“It could be,” I said.

“I’d like you to go and put that point to him,” said Ian. “He seems to want to stay, but he may listen if you make him see that by staying here, he simply increases the load of responsibility on the rest of us. I’d like to order him out but I don’t have the authority.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go talk to him right now. Where is he?”

“In his quarters.”

I found Padma’s suite and spoke to him.

“I see,” he said. “Did Ian or Kensie ask you to talk to me, or is this the result of an impulse of your own?”

“Ian asked me,” I said. “The Naharese are dealying their attack. Once they see you’re an Exotic—”

His smile interrupted me.

“I have my duty, too. In this instance, it’s to gather information for Mara and Kultis.” His smile broadened. “Also, there’s the matter of my own temperament. Watching a situation like the one here is fascinating. I wouldn’t leave if I could. In short, I’m as chained here as the rest of you.”

I shook my head at him.

“It’s a fine argument,” I said. “But, if you’ll forgive me, a little hard to believe.”

“In what way?”

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but I don’t seem to be able to give any real faith to the idea that you’re being held here by patterns that are essentially the same as mine, for instance.”

“Not the same,” he said. “Equivalent. The fact others can’t match you Dorsai in your own area doesn’t mean others don’t have equal areas in which equal commitments apply.”

“With identical results?”

“With comparable results—could I ask you to sit down?” Padma said mildly. “I’m getting a stiff neck looking up at you.”

I sat down facing him.

“For example,” he said. “In the Dorsai ethic, you and the others here have something that directly justifies your natural human hunger to do things for great purposes. The Naharese here have no equivalent ethic; but they feel the hunger just the same. So they invent their own customs, their leto de muerte concepts. But can you Dorsais, of all people, deny that their concepts can lead them to as true a heroism, or as true a keeping of faith as your ethic leads you to?”

“Of course I can’t deny it,” I said. “But the Dorsai can at least be counted on to perform as expected. Can the Naharese? You sound a little like Michael when you get on the subject of these people. All right, stay if you want. I think I’d better leave now, before you talk me into going out and offering to surrender before they even get here.”

He laughed. I left.

It was time again for me to check Amanda. I went to the medical section. But she was honestly asleep now. Apparently she had been able to put her personal concerns aside enough so that she could exercise a little of the basic physiological control we are all taught from birth. I left her sleeping.

It was a shock to see the sun as high in the sky as it was, when I emerged once more, on to the first terrace. They sky was almost perfectly clear and there was a small, steady breeze. The day would be hot. Ian and Kensie were each at one end of the terrace, looking through watch cameras at the Naharese front.

Michael, the only other person in sight, was also at a watch camera. I went to him.

“They’re on the move,” he said, stepping back from the watch camera. I looked into its rectangular viewing screen, bright with the daylight scene it showed. He was right. The regiments had finally formed for the attack and were now coming toward us at the pace of a slow walk.

I could see their flags spaced along the front of the crescent formation and whipping in the breeze. The Guard regiment was still in the center and Michael’s Third Regiment on the right wing. Behind the wings I could see the darker swarms that were the volunteers and the revolutionaries.

The attacking force had already covered a third of the distance to us. I stepped away from the screen and all at once the front I looked at became a thin line with little bright flashes of reflected sunlight and touches of color, still distant.

“Another thirty or forty minutes,” said Michael.

I looked at him. The clear daylight showed him pale and wire-tense. He looked as if he had been whittled down—nothing but nerves were left. He was not wearing weapons.

The rifles woke me to something I had noted but not focused upon. The bays with the fixed weapons were empty.

“Where’re your bandsmen?” I asked Michael.

He gazed at me.

“They’ve gone,” he said.

“Gone?”

“Decamped. Deserted, if you want to use that word.”

I stared at him.

“You mean they’ve joined—”

“No, no.” He broke in on me. “They haven’t gone over to the enemy. They just decided to save their own skins. I told you—you remember, I told you they might. You can’t blame them. They’re not Dorsai; and staying here meant death.”

“If Gebel Nahar is overrun,” I said.

“Can you believe it won’t be?”

“It’s become hard to,” I said, “now that there’s just us. But there’s always a chance as long as anyone’s left to fight. At Baunpore, I saw men and women firing from hospital beds, when the North Freilanders broke in.”

I should not have said it. I saw the shadow cross his eyes and knew he had taken my reference to Baunpore personally, as if I had been comparing his present weaponless state with the last efforts of the defenders I had seen then.

“That’s a general observation only—” I began.

“It’s not what you accuse me of, it’s what I accuse myself of,” he said in a low voice looking at the regiments.

There was nothing more I could say. We both knew that without his forty men we could not even make a pretense of holding the first terrace. There were just too few of us, and too many of them, to stop them from coming over the top.

“They’re probably hiding just out beyond the walls,” he said. “If we do manage to hold out for a day or two, there’s a slight chance they might trickle back—”

He broke off, staring past me. I turned and saw Amanda.

How she had managed it by herself, I do not know. But she had gotten up and strapped the portable drainage unit on to her. It was not heavy, or much bigger than a thick book; and it was designed for wearing by an ambulatory patient; but it must have been hell for her to rig it by herself with that tube rubbing inside her at every deep breath.

Now she was here, looking as if she might collapse at any time, but on her feet with the unit slung from her right shoulder and strapped to her right side. She had a sidearm clipped to her left thigh, over the cloth of the hospital gown; and the gown itself was ripped up the center so that she could walk in it.

“What the hell are you doing?” I said. “Get back to bed!”

“Corunna—” she gave me the most level and unyielding stare I had ever encountered. “Don’t give me orders. I rank you.”

I blinked at her. It was true I had been asked to be her driver for the trip here, and in a sense that put me under her orders. But for her to presume to tell a Captain of a full flight of fighting ships, with an edge of half a dozen years in seniority and experience that in a combat situation like this she ranked him—it was raving nonsense. I opened my mouth to explode—and found myself breaking into laughter, instead. The situation was too ridiculous.

But, obviously she was out here on the terrace to stay; and obviously, I was not going to make any real issue of it under the circumstances. We both understood what was going on. Which did not change the fact that she should not have been on her feet. Like Ian out on the plain, and in spite of having been forced to see the humorous side of it, I was still angry with her.

“Next time you’re wounded, better hope I’m not your medico,” I told her. “What can you do up here, anyway?”

“I can be with the rest of you,” she said.

I closed my mouth again. There was no arguing with that answer. Out of the corner of my eyes I saw Kensie and Ian approaching. They looked down at her but said nothing, and we all turned to look again out across the plain.

We stood together, the four of us, looking at the slow, ponderous advance upon us. All my life I had been plagued by an awareness of the ridiculous. What mad god had decided that an army should march against a handful—and that the handful should not only stand to be marched upon, but should prepare to fight back? But then the sense of the ridiculousness passed.

With that, I passed into the final stage that always came on me before battle. It was as if I stepped down into a place of private quiet. What was coming would come, and I would meet it when it came. I was aware of Kensie, Ian, Michael and Amanda standing around me, and aware that they were experiencing much the same feelings. Something like telepathy flowed between us, binding us together. In all my life’s experience there has been nothing like that feeling of unity, and I have noticed that those who have once felt it never forget it. It is as it is, as it always has been, and we who are there at that moment are together.

Against that togetherness, odds do not matter.

There was a faint scuff of a foot on the terrace floor, and Michael was gone. I looked at the others, and the thought was unspoken between us. He had gone to put on his weapons. We turned and saw the Naharese now close enough so that they were recognizable as individual figures. They were almost close enough for their approach to be heard.

We moved forward to the parapet of the terraces and stood watching. The day-breeze, strengthening, blew in our faces. There was time now to appreciate the sunlight, the not-yet-hot temperature of the day and the moving air. Another few hundred meters and they would be within the range of our emplaced weapons. Until then, there was nothing urgent to be done.

The door opened behind us. I turned, but it was not Michael. It was Padma, supporting El Conde, who was coming out to us with the help of a silver-headed walking stick. Padma helped him out to the parapet, and for a second he ignored us, looking instead at the oncoming troops. Then he turned to us.

“Gentlemen and lady,” he said in Spanish, “I will join you.”

“We’re honored,” Ian answered him in the same tongue. “Would you care to sit down?”

“Thank you, no. I will stand. You may go about your duties.”

He leaned on the cane, watching across the parapet. We stepped back away from him, and Padma spoke in a low voice.

“I’m sure he won’t be in the way,” Padma said. “But he wanted to be here, and there was no one but me left to help him.”

“It’s all right,” said Kensie. “But what about you?”

“I’d like to stay, too,” said Padma.

Ian nodded. A harsh sound came from the throat of the count, and we looked at him. He was rigid as some ancient dry spearshaft, staring out at the approaching soldiers, his face carved with the lines of fury and scorn.

“What is it?” Amanda asked.

I had been as baffled as the rest. Then a faint sound came to my ear. The regiments were at last close enough to be heard; and what we were hearing were their bugle calls as faint snatches of melody on the breeze. We could barely hear it, but I recognized it, as El Conde already had.

“They’re playing the te guello,” I said. “Announcing ’no quarter’.”

The te guello is a promise to cut the throat of anyone opposing. Amanda’s eyebrows rose.

“For us?” she said. “What good do they think that’ll do?”

“They may think Michael’s bandsmen are still with us,” I said. “But probably they’re doing it just because it’s always done.”

The others listened for a second. The te guello is an effectively chilling piece of music; but, as Amanda had implied, it was a little beside the point to play it to Dorsai.

“Where’s Michael?” she asked now.

I looked around. It was a good question. If he had indeed gone for weapons, he should have been back out on the terrace sometime since. But there was no sign of him.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“They’ve stopped their portable weapons,” Kensie said, “and they’re setting them up to fire. Completely out of effective range, against walls like this.”

“We’d probably be better down behind the armor of our own emplacements,” said Ian. “They can’t hurt the walls but they might get lucky and hurt some of us.”

He turned to El Conde.

“If you’d care to step down into one of the weapon emplacements, sir—” he said.

El Conde shook his head.

Ian nodded. He looked at Padma.

“Of course,” said Padma. “I’ll come in with one of you—unless I can be useful in some other way?”

“No,” said Ian. A shouting from the approaching soldiers turned him and the rest of us once more toward the plain.

The front line of the attackers had broken into a run toward us. They were only a hundred meters or so now from the foot of the slope leading to the walls of Gebel Nahar. Whether it had been decided that they should attack from that distance, or—more likely—someone had been carried away and started forward early, did not matter. The attack had begun.

For a moment, this development had given us a temporary respite. With their own soldiers flooding out ahead, it would be difficult for those behind to fire at Gebel Nahar without killing their own men. It was the sort of small happening that can sometimes be turned to an advantage—but, as I stared out at the plain, I had no idea of what we might do that would make any real difference to the battle’s outcome.

“Look!” called Amanda.

The shouting of the soldiers had stopped, suddenly. The front line of the attackers was trying to slow down against the pressure of those behind. The attack was halting as more and more of them checked and stared at the slope.

What was happening there was that the lid of El Conde’s private exit from Gebel Nahar was rising. To the Naharese military it must have looked as if some secret weapon was about to unveil itself on the slope—and it would have been this that had caused them to have sudden doubts and dig in their heels. They were still two or three hundred meters from the tunnel, and the first line of attackers, trapped by those behind them, were sitting ducks for whatever field-class weapon might elevate itself through this unexpected opening and zero in on them.

But of course no such weapon came out. Instead, what emerged was a head wearing a regimental cap, with what looked like a stick tilted back by its right ear . . . and slowly, up on to the level of the ground, and out to face them all came Michael.

He was without weapons. But he was dressed in his full parade regimentals as band officer; and thegaita gallega was resting in his arms. He stepped on to the slope and began to march down it toward the Naharese.

The silence was deadly; and into that silence, striking up, came the sound of the gaita gallega. Clear and strong it came to us; and clearly it reached as well to the now-silent and motionless ranks of the Naharese. He was playing Su Madre.

He went forward at a march step, shoulders level, the instrument held securely in his arms; and his playing went before him, throwing its challenge directly into their faces. A single figure marching against three thousand.

From where I stood, I had a slight angle on him; and with the magnification of the watch camera, I could get just a glimpse of his face from the side and behind. He looked peaceful and intent. He marched as if on parade, with the intentness of a good musician in performance, and all the time Su Madre was calling and mocking at the armed regiments before him.

I touched the camera to make it give me a closeup look at the men in the Naharese force. They stood as if paralyzed. They were saying nothing, doing nothing, only watching Michael come toward them as if he meant to march right through them. All along their front, they were stopped and watching.

But their inaction was something that could not last. As I watched, they began to stir. Michael was between us and them, and the incredible voice of the bagpipe came almost loudly to our ears. But rising behind this, we now began to hear a sound like the growl of some enormous beast.

I looked in the screen. The regiments were still not advancing, but none of the figures I now saw as I panned down the front were standing frozen with shock. In the middle of the crescent formation, the soldiers of the Guard Regiment, who held a feud with Michael’s Third, were shaking weapons at him.

All along the line, the front boiled. They had all seen that Michael was unarmed. For a few moments this held them in check. They threatened, but did not fire. But I could feel the fury building in them.

I wanted to shout at Michael to turn and come back. He had broken the momentum of their attack and thrown them into confusion. With troops like these they would not take up their advance where they had halted it. Their senior officers would pull them back and reform them. A breathing space had been gained. It could be some hours before they would be able to mount a second attack; and in that time internal tensions or any number of developments might help us further. Michael still had them between his thumb and forefinger. If he turned his back on them now, their inaction might well hold until he was back in safety.

But there was no way I could reach him and he went steadily forward, scorning them with his music, taunting them for attacking in their numbers an opponent so much less than themselves.

Still the Naharese soldiery only shook their weapons and shouted insults at him; but now, in by the Third Regiment there were uniformed figures beginning to wave Michael back. I moved the view of the screen further along that wing and saw civilians from the following swarm of volunteers and revolutionaries, who were shoving their way to the front, kneeling down and putting weapons to their shoulder.

The Third Regiment soldiers were pushing these others back and jerking their weapons away. Fights had begun to break out; but on that wing those who wished to fire on Michael were being held back. It was plain the Third Regiment was torn now between the attack on Gebel Nahar and its impulse to protect their former bandmaster in his act of outrageous bravery. Still, I saw in the screen one civilian with a starved and furious face, who had literally to be held on the ground by three of the Third Regiment before he could be stopped from firing.

A sudden suspicion passed through me. I swung the screen’s view to the opposite wing, and saw there the same situation. There, volunteers and civilian revolutionaries were trying to stop Michael with their weapons; and on this wing, also, the soldiers were trying to check those who attempted to shoot Michael. But here, the effort to prevent that firing was scattered and ineffective.

I saw a number of weapons of all types leveled at Michael. No sound could reach me, but it was clear that death was finally in the air around Michael.

I switched the view back to him. For a moment he continued to march as if some invisible armor was protecting him. Then he stumbled, caught himself, went forward, and fell.

For a second time—for a moment only—the voice of the attackers stopped, cut off as if a multitude of invisible hands had been clapped over the mouths of those there. I lifted the view on the screen from the fallen shape of Michael and saw soldiers and civilians alike standing motionless, staring at him, as if they could not believe that he had at last been brought down.

Then, on the wing opposite to the Third Regiment, the civilians firing began to dance and wave their weapons in the air—and suddenly the whole formation seemed to collapse inward, as the soldiers of the Third Regiment charged across at the rejoicing civilians, and the Guard Regiment swirled out to oppose them. The fighting spread as individual attacked individual. In a moment they were all embroiled. A wild mob without direction or purpose except to kill whoever was closest, took the place of the military formation that had existed only five minutes before.

As the fighting became general, the tight mass of bodies spread out like butter melting; and the struggle extended over a larger and larger area, until at last it covered even the place where Michael had fallen. Amanda turned away from the parapet and I caught her as she staggered. I held her upright and she leaned heavily against me.

“I have to lie down, I guess,” she murmured.

I led her towards the door and the bed that was waiting for her. Ian, Kensie and Padma followed, leaving only El Conde, leaning on his silver headed stick and staring at what was taking place on the plain, his face lighted with the fierce satisfaction of a hawk perched above the body of its kill.

It was twilight before all the fighting had ceased; and, with the dark, there began to be heard the small sounds of the annunciator chimes at the main gate. One by one Michael’s bandsmen began to slip back to us in Gebel Nahar. With their return, Ian, Kensie and I were able to stop taking turns at standing watch, as we had up until then. But it was not until after midnight that we felt it was safe to leave long enough to go out and recover Michael’s body.

Amanda insisted on going with us. There was no reason to argue against her coming with us and a good deal of reason in favor of it. She was responding very well to the drainage unit and a further eight hours of sleep had rebuilt her strength to a remarkable degree. Also, she was the one who had suggested we take Michael’s body back to the Dorsai for burial.

The cost of travel between the worlds was such that few individuals could afford it; and few Dorsai who died in the course of their duties off-planet had their bodies returned for internment in native soil. But we had adequate space to carry Michael’s body with us in the courier vessel; and it was Amanda’s point that Michael had solved the problem by his action—something for which the Dorsai world in general owed him a debt. Both Padma and El Conde had agreed, after what had happened today, that the Naharese would not be brought back to the idea of revolution again for some time. William’s machinations had fallen through. Ian and Kensie could now either make it their choice to stay and execute their contract, or legitimately withdraw from it for the reason that they had been faced with situations beyond their control.

In the end, all of us except Padma went out to look for Michael’s body, leaving the returned bandsmen to stand duty. It was full night by the time we emerged once more on to the plain through the secret exit.

“El Conde will have to have another of these made for him,” said Kensie, as we came out under the star-brilliant sky. “This one is more a national monument than a secret, now.”

The night was like the one before, when Kensie and I had made our sweep in search of observers from the other side. But this time we were looking only for the dead; and that was all we found.

During the afternoon all the merely wounded had been taken away by their friends; but there were bodies to be seen as we moved out to the spot where we had seen Michael go down, but not many of them. It had been possible to mark the location exactly using the surveying equipment built into the watch camerits. But the bodies were not many. The fighting had been more a weaponed brawl than a battle. Which did not alter the fact that those who had died were dead. They would not come to life again, any more than Michael would. A small night breeze touched our faces from time to time as we walked. It was too soon after the fighting for the odors of death to have taken possession of the battlefield. For the present moment under the stars the scene we saw, including the dead bodies, had all the neatness and antiseptic quality of a stage setting.

We came to the place where Michael’s body should have been, but it was gone. Ian switched on a pocket lamp; and he, with Kensie, squatted to examine the ground. I waited with Amanda. Ian and Kensie were the experienced field officers, with Hunter Team practice. I could spend several hours looking to see what they would take in at a glance.

After a few minutes they stood up again and Ian switched off the lamp. There were a few seconds while our eyes readjusted, and then the plain became real around us once more, replacing the black wall of darkness that the lamplight had instantly created.

“He was here, all right,” Kensie said. “Evidently quite a crowd came to carry his body off someplace else. It’ll be easy enough to follow the way they went.”

We followed the trail of scuffed earth and broken vegetation left by the footwear of those who had carried away Michael’s body. The track they had left was plain enough so that I myself had no trouble picking it out, even by starlight, as we went along at a walk. It led further away from Gebel Nahar, toward where the center of the Naharese formation had been when the general fighting broke out; and as we went, bodies became more numerous. Eventually, at a spot which must have been close to where the Guard Regiment had stood, we found Michael.

The mound on which his body lay was visible as a dark mass in the starlight, well before we reached it. But it was only when Ian switched on his pocket lamp again that we saw its true identity and purpose. It was a pile nearly a meter in height and a good two meters long and broad. Most of what made it up was clothes; but there were many other things mixed in with the cloth items—belts and ornamental chains, ancient weapons, so old that they must have been heirlooms, bits of personal jewelry, even shoes and boots.

But, as I say, the greater part of what made it up was clothing—in particular uniform jackets or shirts, although a fair number of detached sleeves or collars bearing insignia of rank had evidently been deliberately torn off by their owners and added as separate items.

On top of all this, lying on his back with his dead face turned toward the stars, was Michael. I did not need an interpretation of what I was seeing here, after my earlier look at the painting in the Nahar City Spaceport Terminal. Michael lay not with a sword, but with the gaita gallega held to his chest; and beneath him was the leto de muerte—the real leto de muerte, made up of everything that those who had seen him there that day, and who had fought for and against him after it was too late, considered the most valuable thing they could give from what was in their possession at the time.

Each had given the best he could, to build up a bed of state for the dead hero—a bed of triumph, actually, for in winning here Michael had won everything, according to their rules and their ways. After the supreme victory of his courage, as they saw it, there was nothing left for them but the offering of tribute; their possessions or their lives.

We stood, we three, looking at it all in silence. Finally, Kensie spoke.

“Do you still want to take him home?”

“No,” said Amanda. The word was almost a sigh from her, and she stood looking at the dead Michael. “No. This is his home, now.”

We went back to Gebel Nahar, leaving the corpse of Michael with his honor guard of the other dead around him.

The next day Amanda and I left Gebel Nahar to return to the Dorsai. Kensie and Ian had decided to complete their contract; and it looked as if they should be able to do so without difficulty. With dawn, individual soldiers of the regiments had begun pouring back into Gebel Nahar, asking to be accepted once more into their duties. They were eager to please, and for Naharese, remarkably subdued.

Padma was also leaving. He rode into the spaceport with us, as did Kensie and Ian, who had come along to see us off. In the terminal, we stopped to look once more at the leto de muerte painting.

“Now I understand,” said Amanda, after a moment. She turned from the painting and lightly touched both Ian and Kensie who were standing on either side of her.

“We’ll be back,” she said, and led the two of them off.

I was left with Padma.

“Understand?” I said to him. “The leto de muerte concept?”

“No,” said Padma, softly. “I think she meant that now she understands what Michael came to understand, and how it applies to her. How it applies to everyone, including me and you.”

I felt coldness on the back of my neck.

“To me?” I said.

“You have lost part of your protection, the armor of your sorrow and loss,” he answered. “To a certain extent, when you let yourself become concerned with Michael’s problem, you let someone else in to touch you again.”

I looked at him, a little grimly.

“You think so?” I put the matter aside. “I’ve got to get out and start the checkover on the ship. Why don’t you come along? When Amanda and the others come back and don’t find us here, they’ll know where to look.”

Padma shook his head.

“I’m afraid I’d better say goodby now,” he replied. “There are other urgencies that have been demanding my attention for some time and I’ve put them aside for this. Now, it’s time to pay them some attention. So I’ll say goodby now; and you can give my farewells to the others.”

“Goodby, then,” I said.

As when we had met, he did not offer me his hand; but the warmth of him struck through to me; and for the first time I faced the possibility that perhaps he was right. That Michael, or he, or Amanda—or perhaps the whole affair—had either worn thin a spot, or chipped off a piece, of that shell that had closed around me when I watched them kill Else.

“Perhaps we’ll run into each other again,” I said.

“With people like ourselves,” he said, “it’s very likely.”

He smiled once more, turned and went.

I crossed the terminal to the Security Section, identified myself and went out to the courier ship. It was no more than half an hour’s work to run the checkover—these special vessels are practically self-monitoring. When I finished the others had still not yet appeared. I was about to go in search of them when Amanda pulled herself through the open entrance port and closed it behind her.

“Where’s Kensie and Ian?” I asked.

“They were paged. The Board of Governors showed up at Gebel Nahar, without warning. They both had to hurry back for a full-dress confrontation. I told them I’d say goodby to you for them.”

“All right. Padma sends his farewells by me to the rest of you.”

She laughed and sat down in the copilot’s seat beside me.

“I’ll have to write Ian and Kensie to pass Padma’s on,” she said. “Are we ready to lift?”

“As soon as we’re cleared for it. That port sealed?”

She nodded. I reached out to the instrument bank before me, keyed Traffic Control and asked to be put in sequence for liftoff. Then I gave my attention to the matter of warming the bird to life.

Thirty-five minutes later we lifted, and another ten minutes after that saw us safely clear of the atmosphere. I headed out for the legally requisite number of planetary diameters before making the first phase shift. Then, finally, with mind and hands free, I was able to turn my attention again to Amanda.

She was lost in thought, gazing deep into the pinpoint fires of the visible stars in the navigation screen above the instrument bank. I watched her without speaking for a moment, thinking again that Padma had possibly been right. Earlier, even when she had spoken to me in the dark of my room of how she felt about Ian, I had touched nothing of her. But now, I could feel the life in her as she sat beside me.

She must have sensed my eyes on her, because she roused from her private consultation with the stars and looked over.

“Something on your mind?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Or rather, yes. I didn’t really follow your thinking, back in the terminal when we were looking at the painting and you said that now you understood.”

“You didn’t?” She watched me for a fraction of a second. “I meant that now I understood what Michael had.”

“Padma said he thought you’d meant you understood how it applied to you—and to everyone.”

She did not answer for a second.

“You’re wondering about me—and Ian and Kensie,” she said.

“It’s not important what I wonder,” I said.

“Yes, it is. After all, I dumped the whole matter in your lap in the first place, without warning. It’s going to be all right. They’ll finish up their contract here and then Ian will go to Earth for Leah. They’ll be married and she’ll settle in Foralie.”

“And Kensie?”

“Kensie.” She smiled sadly. “Kensie’ll go in . . . in his own way.”

“And you?”

“I’ll go mine.” She looked at me very much as Padma had looked at me, as we stood below the painting. “That’s what I meant when I said I’d understood. In the end the only way is to be what you are and do what you must. If you do that, everything works. Michael found that out.”

“And threw his life away putting it into practice.”

“No,” she said, swiftly. “He threw nothing away. There were only two things he wanted. One was to be the Dorsai he was born to be and the other was never to use a weapon; and it seemed he could have either one but not the other. Only, he was true to both and it worked. In the end, he was Dorsai and unarmed—and by being both he stopped an army.”

Her eyes held me so powerfully that I could not look away.

“He went his way and found his life,” she said, “and my answer is to go mine. Ian, his. Kensie, his; and—” She broke off so abruptly I knew what she had been about to say.

“Give me time,” I said; and the words came a little more thickly than I had expected. “It’s too soon yet. Still too soon since she died. But give me time, and maybe . . . maybe, even me.”

THE CLOAK AND THE STAFF

Gordon R. Dickson

Man is an irrational animal—but the “rational” decidion is not always the right one.

Descending in the icy grey November dawn from the crowded bus that had brought the airline passengers over the mountains from Bologna—as frequently happened in wintertime, the airport at Milan, Italy, was fogged in; and the courier ship, like the commercial jets, had been forced to set down in Bologna—Shane Evert caught a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of a small stick figure, inconspicuously etched on the base of a lamppost.

He did not dare to look at it directly, but the side glance was enough. He snagged a taxi and gave the driver the address of the Aalaag Guard Headquarters for the city.

“Efreddo, Milano,” said the driver, wheeling the cab through the nearly deserted morning streets.

Shane gave him a monosyllable in a Swiss accent, by way of agreement. Milan was indeed cold in November. Cold and hard. To the south, Florence would be still soft and warm, with blue skies and sunlight. The driver was probably hoping to start a conversation and find out what brought his human passenger to an alien HQ, and that was dangerous. Ordinary humans did not love those who worked for the Aalaag. If I say nothing, Shane thought, he may be suspicious. No, on second thought, he’ll just think from the Swiss accent that I’m someone who has a relative in trouble in this city and doesn’t feel like conversation.

The driver spoke of the summer now past. He regretted the old days when tourists had come through.

To both these statements, Shane gave the briefest of responses. Then there was silence in the cab, except for the noise of travel. Shane leaned his staff at a more comfortable angle against his right leg and left shoulder, to better accommodate it to the small passenger compartment of the cab. He smoothed his brown robe over his knees. The image of the stick figure he had seen still floated in his mind. It was identical with the figure he himself had first marked upon a wall beneath the triple hooks with the dead man on them, in Aalborg, Denmark, over half a year ago:—

But he had not marked this one on the lamppost. Nor, indeed, had he marked any of the other such figures he had glimpsed about the world during the last eight months. One moment of emotional rebellion had driven him to create an image that was now apparently spawning and multiplying to fill his waking as well as his sleeping hours with recurring nightmares. It did no good to remind himself that no one could possibly connect him with the original graffito. It did no good to know that, all these eight months since he had been an impeccable servant of Lyt Ahn.

Neither fact would be of the slightest help if for some reason Lyt Ahn, or any other Aalaag, should believe there was cause to connect him with any one of the scratched figures.

What insane egocentric impulse had pushed him to use his own usual pilgrim sect disguise as the symbol of opposition to the aliens? Any other shape would have done as well. But he had had the alcohol of the Danish bootleg aquavit inside him; and with the memory of the massive Aalaag father and son in the square, watching the death of the man they had condemned and executed—above all, with the memory of their conversation, which he alone of all the humans there could understand—also burning in him, for one brief moment reason had flown out the window of his mind.

So, now his symbol had been taken up and become the symbol of what was obviously an already existent human underground in opposition to the Aalaag, an underground he had never suspected. The very fact that it existed at all forecast bloody tragedy for any human foolish enough to be related to it. By their own standards, the Aalaag were unsparingly fair. But they considered humans as “cattle”; and a cattle owner did not think in terms of being “fair” to a sick or potentially dangerous bull that had become a farm problem . . .

“Eccolo!” said the cab driver.

Shane looked as bidden and saw the alien HQ. A perfectly reflective force shield covered it like a coating of mercury. It was impossible to tell what kind of structure it had been originally. Anything from an office building to a museum was a possibility. Lyt Ahn, First Captain of Earth, in his HQ overlooking St. Anthony’s Falls in what had once been the heart of Minneapolis, scorned such an obvious display of defensive strength. The grey concrete walls of his sprawling keep on Nicollet Island had nothing to protect them but the portable weapons within, though these alone were capable of leveling the metropolitan area surrounding in a handful of hours. Shane paid the driver, got out, and went in through the main entrance of the Milan HQ.

The Ordinary Guards inside the big double doors and those on the desk were all human. Young for the most part, like Shane himself, but much bigger; for the largest of humans seemed frail and small to the eight-foot Aalaag. These guards wore the usual neat, but drab, black uniforms of servant police. Dwarfed among them, in spite of his five feet eleven inches of height, Shane felt a twinge of perverse comfort at being within these walls and surrounded by these particular fellow humans. Like him, they ate at the alien’s tables; they would be committed to defend him against any non-servant humans who should threaten him. Under the roof of masters who sickened him, he was physically protected and secure.

He stopped at the duty desk and took his Key from the leather pouch at his belt, leaving the documents within. The human duty officer there took the Key and examined it. It was made of metal—metal which no ordinary Earth native was allowed to own or carry—and the Mark of Lyt Ahn was stamped on the square handle.

“Sir,” said the officer in Italian, reading the Mark. He was suddenly obliging. “Can I be of assistance?”

“I sign in, temporarily,” answered Shane in Arabic, for the officer’s speech echoed the influence of the throat consonants of that language. “I am the one who delivers messages for the First Captain of Earth, Lyt Ahn. I have some to deliver now to the Commander of these Headquarters.”

“Your tongue is skilled,” said the officer in Arabic, turning the duty book about and passing Shane a pen.

“Yes,” said Shane and signed.

“The Commander here,” said the officer, “is Laa Ebon, Captain of the sixth rank. He accepts your messages.”

He turned and beckoned over one of the lesser human guards.

“To the outer office of Laa Ehon, with this one bearing messages for the Commander.”

The guard saluted, and led Shane off. Several flights of stairs up beside an elevator which Shane would have known better than to use even if the guard had not been with him brought them to a corridor; down which, behind another pair of large carved doors, they reached what was plainly an outer room of the private offices of the Aalaag Commander in Milan.

The guard saluted and left. There were no other humans in the room. An Aalaag of the twenty-second rank sat at a desk in a far corner of the large open space, reading what seemed to be reports on the sort of plastic sheets that would take and hold multiple overlays of impressions. In the wall to Shane’s left was a window, showing the slight corner shading that betrayed an Aalaag version of one-way glass. The window gave a view of what must be an adjoining office having benches for humans to sit on. This office was empty, however, except for a blond-haired young woman, dressed in a loose ankle-length blue robe tied tight around her narrow waist.

There was no place for Shane to sit. But, in close attendance as he customarily was on Lyt Ahn and other Aalaag of low-number rank, he was used to waiting on his feet for hours.

He stood. After perhaps twenty minutes, the Aalaag at the desk noticed him.

“Come,” he said, lifting a thumb the size of a tent peg. “Tell me.”

He had spoken in Aalaag, for most human servants had some understanding of the basic commands in the tongue of their overlords. But his face altered slightly as Shane answered, for there were few humans like Shane—and Shane both worked and lived with all of those few—who were capable of fluent accentless response in that language.

“Untarnished sir,” said Shane, coming up to the desk and stopping before it, “I have messages from Lyt Ahn directly to the Commander of the Milan Headquarters.”

He made no move to produce the message rolls from his pouch; and the Aalaag’s massive hand, which had begun to extend itself, palm up, toward him at the word “messages,” was withdrawn when Shane pronounced the name of Lyt Ahn.

“You are a valuable beast,” said the Aalaag. “Laa Ebon will receive your messages soon.”

“Soon” could mean anything from “within minutes” to “within weeks.” However, since the messages were from Lyt Ahn, and personal, it was probable that it would be minutes rather than a longer time. Shane went back to his corner.

The door opened, and two other Aalaag came in. They were both males in middle life, one of the twelfth, one of the sixth rank. The one of sixth rank could only be Laa Ehon. A Captain of a rank that low-numbered was actually too highly qualified to command a single HQ like this. It was unthinkable that there would be two such here.

The newcomers ignored Shane. No, he thought, as their gaze moved on, they had not merely ignored him. Their eyes had noticed, catalogued, and dismissed him in a glance. They walked together to the one-way window; and the one who must be Laa Ehon spoke in Aalaag.

“This one?”

They were examining the girl in the blue robe, who sat unaware of their gaze in the other room.

“Yes, untarnished sir. The officer on duty in the square saw this one move away from the wall I told you of just before he noticed the scratching on it.” The Captain of the twelfth rank pointed with his thumb at the girl. “He then examined the scratching, saw it was recently made, and turned to find this one. For a moment he thought she had been lost among the herd in the square, then he caught sight of her from the back, some distance off and hurrying away. He stunned her and brought her in.”

“His rank?”

“Thirty-second, untarnished sir.”

“And this one has been questioned?”

“No sir, I waited to speak to you about procedure.”

Laa Ehon stood for a moment, unanswering, gazing at the girl.

“Thirty-second, you said? Did he know this particular beast previously to seeing her in the square?”

“No sir. But he remembered the color of her apparel. There was no other in that color nearby.”

Laa Ehon turned from the window.

“I’d like to talk to him, first. Send him to me.”

“Sir, he’s presently on duty.”

“Ah.”

Shane understood Laa Ehon’s momentary thoughtfulness. As commanding officer, he could easily order the officer in question to be relieved from duty long enough to report to him in person. But the Aalaag nature and custom was such that only the gravest reason would allow him to justify such an order. An Aalaag on duty, regardless of rank, was almost a sacred object.

“Where?” Laa Ehon.

“The local airport, untarnished sir.”

“I will go and speak to him at his duty post. Captain Otah On, you are ordered to accompany me.”

“Yes, untarnished sir.”

“Then let us move with minimal loss of time. It is unlikely that this matter has more importance than presently seems, but we must make sure of that.”

He turned toward the door with Otah On behind him. Once more his eyes swept Shane. He stopped and looked over at the Aalaag.

“What is this one?” he asked.

“Sir,” the Aalaag at the desk was on his feet. “A courier with messages for your hand from Lyt Ahn.”

Laa Ehon looked back at Shane.

“I will accept your messages in an hour, no more, once I’ve come back. Do you understand what I have just said to you?”

“I understand, untarnished sir,” said Shane.

“Until then, remain dutiful. But be comfortable.”

Laa Ehon led the way out of the room, Otah On close behind him. The Aalaag at the desk sat down again and went back to his sheets.

Shane looked once more at the girl beyond the one way glass. She sat, unaware of what another hour would bring. They would question her with chemicals, of course, first. But after that their methods would become physical. There was no sadism in the Aalaag character. If any of the aliens had shown evidence of such, his own people would have considered it an unfitting weakness and destroyed him for having it. But it was understood that cattle might be induced to tell whatever they knew if they were subjected to sufficient discomfort. An Aalaag, of course, was above any such persuasion. Death would come long before any degree of discomfort could change the individual alien’s character enough to make him or her say what they wished to keep unsaid.

Shane felt his robe clinging to his upper body, wet with a secret sweat. The woman sat almost in profile, her blond hair down her shoulders, her surprisingly pale-skinned (for this latitude) face, smooth and gentle-looking. She could not be more than barely into her twenties. He wanted to look away from her, so that he could stop thinking about what was awaiting her, but—as it had happened to him a year ago with the man on the triple hooks when he had first created the symbol—Shane could not make his head turn.

He knew it now for what it was—a madness in him. A madness born of his own hidden revulsion against and private terror of these massive humanoids who had descended to own the Earth. These were the Masters he served, who kept him warm and well-fed when most of the rest of humanity chilled and ate little, who patted him with condescending compliments—as if he was in fact the animal they called him, the clever house pet ready to wag his tail for a kind glance or word. The fear of death was like an ingot of cold iron inside him, when he thought of them; and the fear of a long and painful death was like that same ingot with razor edges. But at the same time there was this madness—this madness that, if he did not control it by some small actions, would explode and bring him to throw his dispatches in some Aalaag face, to fling himself one day like a terrier against a tiger, at the throat of his Master, First Captain of Earth, Lyt Ahn.

It was a real thing, that madness. Even the Aalaag knew of its existence in their conquered peoples. There was even a word for it in their own tongue—yowaragh. Yowaragh had caused the man on the hooks a year ago to make a hopeless attempt to defend his wife against what he had thought was an Aalaag brutality. Yowaragh, every day, caused one human, at least somewhere in the world, to fling a useless stick or stone against some shielded untouchable conqueror in a situation where escape was impossible and destruction was certain. Yowaragh had knocked at the door of Shane’s brain once, a year ago, threatening to break out. It was knocking again.

He could not help but look at her; and he could not bear to look at her—and the only alternative to an end for both of them was to somehow keep it from happening—Laa Ehon’s return, the torture of the girl, and the yowaragh that would lead to his own death.

In one hour, Laa Ehon had said, he would be back. Rivulets of perspiration were trickling down Shane’s naked sides under the robe. His mind had gone into high gear, racing like an uncontrolled heartbeat. What way out was there? There must be one—if he could think of it. The other side of the coin to what they would do to the girl was built on the same lack of sadism. The Aalaag would only destroy property for some purpose. If there was no purpose, they would not waste a useful beast. They would have no emotional stake in keeping her merely because she had been arrested in the first place. She was too insignificant; they were too pragmatic.

His mind was feverish. He was not sure what he planned, but all his intimate knowledge of the Aalaag in the three years he had lived closely with them was simmering and bubbling in the back of his mind. He went and stood before the Aalaag at the desk.

“Yes?” said the Aalaag, after a little while, looking up at him.

“Untarnished sir, the Captain Commander said that he would be back in an hour to accept my messages, but until then I should be dutiful but comfortable.”

Eyes with grey-black pupils gazed at him on a level with his own.

“You want comfort, is that it?”

“Untarnished sir, if I could sit or lie, it would be appreciated.”

“Yes. Very well. The Commander has so ordered. Go find what facilities there are for such activities in the areas of our own cattle. Return in an hour.”

“I am grateful to the untarnished sir.”

The grey-black pupils were cast into shadow by the jet brows coming together.

“This is a matter of orders. I am not one who allows his beasts to fawn.”

“Sir, I obey.”

The brows relaxed.

“Better. Go.”

He went out. He was moving swiftly now. As when before, in Denmark, he was at last caught up in what he was doing. There was no longer any doubt, any hesitation. He went swiftly down the outside corridor which was deserted, ears and eyes alert for sign of anyone, but particularly one of the aliens. As he passed the elevators, he stopped, looked about him.

There was no one watching; and once aboard the elevator he would be able to go from this floor down to street level or below without being seen. There would be other doors to the outside than the one by which he had come in; and on other levels, sub-main-floor levels, he could possibly find them. There would be portals used only by the Aalaag themselves and their most trusted servants, and they would be free to come and go without being noticed.

He punched for the elevator. After a moment it came. The doors swung wide. As it opened he turned away and readied himself to pretend—in case there was an Aalaag aboard—that he was merely passing by. But the elevator compartment was empty.

He stepped inside. The only danger remaining for him now was that some other Aalaag on a floor below would have just punched for this elevator. If it stopped for one of the aliens and the door opened to reveal him inside, he would be trapped—doubly guilty, for being where he should not be and also for being absent from his duty, which at the present was to lie down or otherwise relax. Only Aalaag were permitted to use elevators.

For a moment he thought the one in which he was descending was going to hesitate on the first floor. In the back of his mind, plans flickered like heat lightning on a summer evening. If it did stop, if the door did open and an Aalaag walked in, he planned to throw himself at the alien’s throat. Hopefully, the other would kill him out of reflex, and he would escape being held for questioning as to why he was where he was.

But the elevator did not stop. It continued moving downward, and the telltale light illuminating the floor numbers as they passed showed it was approaching the floor just below street level. Shane punched for the cage to stop. It did, the door opened, and he stepped into a small square corridor leading directly to a glass door and a flight of steps beyond, leading upward. He had hit on one of the alien ways out of the building.

He left the elevator and went quickly along the corridor to the door. It was locked, of course; but in his pocket he carried the Key of Lyt Ahn, or at least the Key that all the special human servants of Lyt Ahn were allowed to bear. It would open any ordinary door in a building belonging to the aliens.

He tried the Key now, and it worked. The door swung noiselessly open. A second later he was out of it, up the stairs, and into the street above.

He went down the street, walking at a pace just short of a run, and turned right at the first crossing, searching for a market area. Four blocks on, he found a large square with many shops. A single Aalaag sat on his riding animal, towering and indifferent to the crowd about him, before a set of pillars upholding a sidewalk arcade at one end of the square. Whether the alien was on duty or simply waiting for something or someone, it was impossible to tell. But for Shane, now, to use a shop on this square would not be wise.

He hurried on. A few streets farther on, he found a smaller collection of shops lining both sides of a blind alley, and one of these was a store for such simple clothing as the Aalaag allowed humans to use nowadays. He stepped inside and a small bell over the door chimed softly.

“Signore?” said a voice.

Shane’s eyes adjusted to the interior dimness and saw a counter piled high with folded clothing and with a short dark-faced man with a knife-blade nose behind it. Remarkably, in these days of alien occupation, the proprietor had a small potbelly under his loose yellow smock.

“I want a full-length robe,” Shane said. “Reversible.”

“Of course.” The proprietor began to come around the counter. “What type?”

“How much is your most expensive garment?”

“Seventy-five new lire or equivalent in trade, signore.”

Shane dug into the purse hanging from the rope around his waist, and threw on the counter before him metal coins issued by the Aalaag for use as an international currency—the gold and silver rectangles with which his work as an employee of Lyt Ahn was rewarded.

The store owner checked his movement. His eyes moved to the coins, then back to Shane’s face with a difference. Only humans of great power under the alien authority, or those engaged in the illegal black market, would ordinarily have such coins with which to pay their bills; and it would be seldom that such would come into a small shop like this.

He moved toward the coins. Shane covered them with his hand.

“I’ll pick the robe out myself,” he said. “Show me your stock.”

“But of course, of course, signore.”

The proprietor went past the coins and out from behind the counter. He opened a door to a back room and invited Shane in. Within were tables stacked with clothing and cloth. In one corner, under a kerosene lamp, was a tailor’s worktable with scraps of cloth, tools, thread, and some pieces of blue or white chalk.

“Here are the robes, on these two tables,” he said.

“Good,” said Shane, harshly. “Go over to the corner there and turn around. I’ll pick out what I want.”

The man moved swiftly, his shoulders hunched a little. If his visitor was black market, it would be unwise to argue with or irritate him.

Shane located the reversible robes among the others, and pawed through them, selecting the largest one he could find that was blue on one side. The other side of it was brown. He pulled it on over his own robe, the blue side out, and drew the drawstring tight at the waist. Stepping across to the worktable, he picked up a fragment of the white chalk.

“I’ll leave a hundred lire on the counter,” he said to the back of the proprietor. “Don’t turn around, don’t come out until I’ve been gone for five minutes. You understand?”

“I understand.”

Shane turned and went. He glanced at the counter as he passed. He had snatched coins from his purse at random and there was the equivalent of over a hundred and fifty lire in gold and silver on the counter. It would not do to make the incident look any more important to the storeman than was necessary. Shane scooped up fifty lire-equivalent and went out the door, heading back toward the square where he had seen the mounted Aalaag.

He was very conscious of the quick sliding by of time. He could not afford to be missing from the headquarters more than the hour the officer on duty had allowed him. If the Aalaag had left the square . . .

But he had not. When Shane, sweating, once more emerged into the square, the massive figure still sat unmoved, as indifferent as ever.

Shane, because of his duties, was allowed to carry one of the Aalaag’s perpetual timepieces. It lay in his purse now, but he dared not consult it to see how much time remained. A glimpse of it by the ordinary humans around would identify him as a servant of the aliens, and win him the bitter enmity of these others; and that enmity, here and now, could be fatal.

He went quickly through the crowd swarming the square. As he got close to the Aalaag on the riding animal, the adrenaline-born courage inside him almost failed. But a memory of the prisoner back at the headquarters rose in him, and he pushed himself on.

Deliberately, he made himself blunder directly beneath the heavy head of the riding animal, so that it jerked its nose up. Its movement was slight—only an inch or two—but it was enough to draw the attention of the Aalaag. His eyes dropped to see Shane.

Still moving, Shane kept his head down. He had pulled his hair down on his forehead as far as possible, to hide his face from the alien’s view—but it was not really that he was counting on preserving his anonymity. Few Aalaag could tell one human from another—even after two years of close contact, Lyt Ahn recognized Shane from the other courier-interpreters more by the times on which Shane reported than by any physical individualities.

Shane scuttled past; and the alien, indifferent to something as mere as a single one of the cattle about him, raised his eyes to infinity again, returning to his thoughts. Shane went on for only a few more steps, to the nearest pillar, and stopped. There, hiding his actions with his body from the alien behind him, he pulled the tailor’s white chalk from his pouch and with a hand that trembled, sketched on the stone of the pillar the cloaked figure with its staff.

He stepped back—and the sudden, almost inaudible moan of recognition and arrested movement in the crowd behind him drew—as he had known it would—the attention of the Aalaag. Instantly, the alien wheeled his animal about, reaching for the same sort of stunning weapon with which the woman prisoner had been captured.

But Shane was already moving. He ran into the crowd, threw himself down so that the bodies about would shield him from the view of the Aalaag, and rolled, frantically pulling off the outer reversible robe.

Instinctively, defensively, the other humans closed about him, hiding him from the alien, who was now—weapon in one massive hand—searching their numbers to locate him. The reversible robe stuck and bound itself under his armpits, but at last Shane got it off. Leaving it on the ground behind him, still with its blue side out, he scuttled on hands and knees farther off, until, at last near the edge of the square, he risked getting to his feet and leaving it as quickly as he could without drawing attention to himself.

Panting, soaked with sweat, leaving behind humans who studiously avoided looking at him and beginning to move now among others who looked at him with entirely normal interest, Shane half-ran toward the Aalaag headquarters. Subjectively, it seemed as if at least an hour had passed since he had first stepped under the nose of the Aalaag riding animal; but reason told him that the whole business could not have taken more than a few minutes. He stopped at a fountain—bless Italy, he thought, for having fountains—to bathe his face, neck, and underarms. Officially, the Aalaag were indifferent to how their cattle stank; but in practice, they preferred those humans who were physically as much without odor as possible—though it never seemed to occur to them that they were as noisome in human noses as humans were in their own. But for Shane to return smelling strongly from what had theoretically been a rest period might attract interest to the period of time he had spent out of the office.

He let himself in with his Key through the same door which had given him egress; and this time took a stair, rather than the elevator, to the entrance level of the headquarters. No one saw him emerge on the entrance level. He paused to check his timepiece and saw that he still had some twelve minutes of his hour.

He made use of that time by asking one of the Ordinary Guards where the rest facilities for cattle were, went to it, and retraced his steps from there to the office he had waited in before. Outside the office door, he discovered he had still four minutes left, and stood where he was until he could enter at the exact moment on which he had been told to return.

The alien officer at the desk looked up as he came in, glanced at the clock face over the door, and returned to his papers silently. Nonetheless, Shane felt the triumph of a minor point scored. Precise obedience was a mark in any human’s favor, in Aalaag eyes. He went back to the spot on which he had been standing before—and stood again.

It was nearly three-quarters of an hour later that the door opened and Laa Ehon, with Otah On, entered. With a subjected being’s acuteness of observation, reinforced by the experience gained in his two years of close contact with aliens, Shane recognized both of the officers at once. They went directly to the one-way glass to stare at the human prisoner beyond; and Shane’s heart sank in panic.

It was inconceivable that his actions in the square of an hour before should not have been reported by this time. But it looked as if the two senior officers were about to proceed with the young woman as if nothing had happened. Then Laa Ehon spoke.

“It is indeed the same color,” the headquarters Commander said. “There must be many of the cattle so dressed.”

“Very true, untarnished sir,” answered Otah On.

Laa Ehon studied the young woman for a moment longer.

“Was she at any time made aware of the specific reason for her being brought here?” he asked.

“Nothing has been told her, untarnished sir.”

“Yes,” said Laa Ehon, thoughtfully. “Well, then. It is a healthy young beast. There is no need to waste it. Let it go.”

“It will be done.”

Laa Ehon turned from the one-way glass and his eyes swept over the rest of the room, stopping on Shane. He walked forward to Shane.

“You were the beast with dispatches from Lyt Ahn?”

“Yes, untarnished sir,” said Shane. “I have them here for you.”

He produced them from his pouch and handed them into the large grasp of the Commander. Laa Ehon took them, unfolded and read them. He passed them to Otah On.

“Execute these.”

“Yes, untarnished sir.”

Otah On carried the dispatches over to the desk of the duty officer and spoke to him, handing him the papers. The eyes of Laa Ehon fastened on Shane, with a glimmer of interest.

“You speak with great purity,” said the Commander. “You are one of the First Captain’s special group of beasts for speaking and carrying, are you not?”

“I am, untarnished sir.”

“How long have you spoken the true language?”

“Two years of this world, untarnished sir.”

Laa Ehon stood looking at him, and a trickle of perspiration crept coldly down Shane’s spine under his robe.

“You are a beast worth having,” said the Commander, slowly. “I did not think one such as you could be brought to speak so clearly. How are you valued?”

Shane’s breath caught silently in his throat. Existence was barely endurable as one of the favored human group that was the personal property of Earth’s ruling alien. The madness he feared would come quickly, if instead he should be trapped here, in this building, among the brutes that made up the Interior Guard.

“To the best of my knowledge, untarnished sir”—he dared not hesitate in his answer—“I am valued at half a possession of land—”

Otah On, who had just regained the side of his commander, raised his black eyebrows at the voicing of this price, but Laa Ehon’s face remained thoughtful.

“—and the favor of my Master Lyt Ahn,” said Shane.

The thoughtfulness vanished from Laa Ehon’s features. Shane’s heart was pounding. It was true he had prefaced his answer with “to the best of my knowledge,” but in fact he had never officially been acquainted with the fact that part of his price involved the favor of his owner. What he knew himself to be valued at, half a possession of land—about forty miles square of what the Aalaag called “good country”—was an enormously high price in itself for any single human beast. It was roughly equivalent to what, in pre-Aalaag days, would have been the cost of a top-price, custom-made sports car, gold-plated and set with jewels. But Laa Ehon had looked ready to consider even that. It was not the first time Shane had been aware that he possessed the status of a sort of luxury toy. Only, this time, Shane had mentioned that his price included the favor of Lyt Ahn. “Favor” was a term that went beyond all price. It was a designation meaning that his Master was personally interested in keeping him, and that the price of any sale could include anything at all—but probably something Lyt Ahn would favor at least as much as what he was giving up. Such “favor,” involved in a sale, could constitute in effect a blank check signed by the buyer, cashable at any time in the future for goods or actions by the seller, guaranteed under the unyielding obligation code of the Aalaag.

Shane had never been told he had Lyt Ahn’s favor. He had only overheard Lyt Ahn once saying to his Chief of Staff that he must get around to extending his favor over all the beasts of that special group to which Shane belonged. If Laa Ehon should check with Lyt Ahn, and this had never been done, then Shane was doomed as an untrustworthy and lying beast. Even if the favor had been extended, Lyt Ahn might question how Shane had come to know of it.

And then, again, the First Captain, busy as he was with much more weighty affairs of Aalaag government, might simply conclude that he had mentioned it at some time to Shane and since forgotten the fact. Claiming it now was one of the daily gambles necessary to human daily existence in the midst of the aliens.

“Give him his receipt,” said Laa Ehon.

Otah On passed Shane a receipt for the dispatches, made out a moment before by the duty officer. Shane put it in his pouch.

“You return directly to Lyt Ahn?” Laa Ehon said.

“Yes, untarnished sir.”

“My courtesies to the First Captain.”

“I will deliver them.”

“Then you may go.”

Shane turned and left. As the door closed behind him, he drew a deep breath and went quickly to the stairs, then down to the entrance floor and the entrance itself.

“I’m returning to the residence of the First Captain,” he told the officer of the Ordinary Guards in charge at the entrance. It was the same man with the Arabic influence noticeable in his spoken Italian. “Will you get me space on the necessary aircraft? I’ve priority, of course.”

“It’s already taken care of,” said the officer. “You’re to travel with one of the Masters on courier duty in a military small craft, leaving in two hours. Shall I order transportation to the airfield?”

“No,” said Shane briefly. He did not have to give the reasons for his actions to this uniformed lackey. “I’ll get myself there.”

He thought he caught a hint of admiration in the officer’s steady gaze. But then, if the other ever thought of walking the Milan streets alone, it would be in his regular uniform, which he was never permitted to discard. Someone like this officer would never be able to imagine the freedom of Shane in going about, ostensibly as one of them, among the ordinary humans of the city—nor could he imagine how necessary these few moments of illusory freedom were to Shane.

“Very well,” said the officer. “The Master who will carry you is Enech Ajin. The Masters’ desk at the air terminal will direct you to him, when you get there.”

“Thank you,” said Shane.

“You are entirely welcome.”

They had both picked up inevitably, Shane thought bitterly, the very courtesies and intonations of their owners.

He went out through the heavy right-hand door of the pair that made up the entrance and down the steps. There were no taxis in sight—of course. No human without need to be there would hang around the alien headquarters. He turned up the same street he had followed to find the square.

He had gone past no more than two corners when a taxi passed him, cruising slowly. He hailed it and got in.

“To the airport,” he said to the driver, looking at the thin overcoated man behind the wheel, as his fingers automatically opened the cab door. He stepped inside—and tripped over something on the floor as he got in.

The door slammed, the cab took off with a rush. He found himself held, pinioned by two men who had risen from crouching positions on the floor of the cab’s back seat. They held him helpless and he felt something sharp against his throat.

He looked down and saw a so-called glass knife, actually a dagger made by a sliver of glass held between two bound-together halves of a wooden dagger. The glass formed the cutting edge and could be—as this one had—sandpaper to razorlike sharpness.

“Lie still!” growled one of the men in Italian.

Shane lay still. He smelled the rank old stink of dirty clothing from both of the two who held him tightly. The taxi whirled him away through unknown streets to an unguessable destination.

They rode for at least twenty minutes, though how much of this was necessary distance to reach their goal, or how much was to mislead Shane in any attempt to estimate the length of the trip, was impossible to guess. At length the taxi turned, bumped over some very uneven pavement, and passed under the shadow of an arch. Then it stopped, and the two men hustled Shane out of the vehicle.

He had just a glimpse of a dark and not-too-clean courtyard surrounded by buildings before he was pushed up two steps, through a door, and into a long narrow corridor thick with ancient paint and cooking odors.

Shane was herded along the corridor, more numb than frightened. Inside him there was a feeling of something like fatalistic acceptance. He had lived for two years with the thought that someday ordinary humans would identify him as one of those who worked for the aliens; and when they did, they would then use him as an object for the bitter fear and hatred they all felt for their conquerors but dared not show directly. In his imagination, he had lived through this scene many times. It was nonetheless hideous now for finally having become real, but it was a situation on which his emotions had worn themselves out. At the end, it was almost a relief to have the days of his masquerade over, to be discovered for what he really was.

The two men stopped suddenly. Shane was shoved through a door on his right, into a room glaringly lit by a single powerful light bulb. The contrast from the shadowed courtyard outside, and the even dimmer hallway, made the sudden light blinding for a second. When his eyes adjusted, he saw that he was standing in front of a round table and that the room was large and high-ceilinged, with paint grimed by time on the walls and a single tall window which, however, had a blackout blind drawn tightly down over it. The cord from the light bulb ran not into the ceiling but across the face of it, past a capped gas outlet, and down the farther wall and to a bicycle generator. A young man with long black hair sat on the bicycle part of the generator and whenever the light from the ceiling bulb began to fade, he would pump energetically on his pedals until it brightened again and held its brightness.

There were several other men standing around the room, and two more at the table together with the only woman to be seen. She was, he recognized, the prisoner he had seen through the one-way glass. Her eyes met his now with the look of a complete stranger, and even in his numbness he felt strange that he should recognize her with such strong emotional identification and she should not know him at all.

“Where’s that clothing store owner?” said one of the men at the table with her, speaking to the room at large in a northern Italian underlaid with London English. He was young—as young in appearance as Shane himself; but, unlike Shane, spare and athletic-looking, with a straight nose, strong square jaw, thin mouth, and blond hair cut very short.

“Outside, in the supply room,” said a voice speaking the same northern Italian, but without accent.

“Get him in here, then!” said the man with the short hair. The other man beside him at the table said nothing. He was round-bodied and hard-fat, in his forties, wearing a worn leather jacket, with a short-stemmed pipe in one corner of the mouth of his round face. He looked entirely Italian.

The door opened and closed behind Shane. A minute later it opened and closed again, and a blindfolded man Shane recognized as the proprietor of the store where he had bought the reversible cloak was brought forward and turned around to face Shane. His blindfold was jerked off.

“Well?” demanded the short-haired young man.

The shopkeeper blinked under the unshaded electric light. His eyes focused on Shane then slid away.

“What is it you want, signori?” he asked. His voice was almost a whisper in the stark room.

“Didn’t anyone tell you? Him!” said the short-haired man impatiently. “Look at him? Do you recognize him? Where did you see him last?”

The store proprietor licked his lips and raised his eyes.

“Earlier today, signore,” he said. “He came into my shop and bought a reversible cloak, blue and brown—”

“This cloak?” The short-haired individual made a gesture. One of the men standing in the back of the room came forward to shove a bundled mass of cloth into the hands of the proprietor, who slowly unfolded it and looked at it.

“This is mine,” he said, still faintly. “Yes. This was the one he bought.”

“All right, you can go then. Keep the cloak. You two—don’t forget to blindfold him.” The short-haired man turned his attention to the young man slouching on the bicycle seat of the electric generator. “How about it, Carlo? Is he the one you followed?”

Carlo nodded. He had a toothpick in one corner of his mouth and through his numbness Shane watched him with an odd sort of fascination, for the toothpick seemed to give him a rakish infallible look.

“He left the Square of San Marco and went straight back to the alien HQ,” Carlo said. “As fast as possible.”

“That’s it, then,” said the short-haired man. He looked at Shane.

“Well, do you want to tell us now what the Aalaag had you up to? Or do we have to wait while Carlo works you over a bit?”

Suddenly Shane was weary to the point of sickness—weary of the whole matter of human subjects and alien overlords. Unexpected fury boiled up in him.

“You damn fool!” he shouted at the short-haired man. “I was saving her!”

And he pointed at the woman, who stared back at him, her gaze frowning and intent.

“You idiots!” Shane spat. “You stupid morons with your resistance games! Don’t you know what they’d have done to her? Don’t you know where you’d all be, right now, if I hadn’t given them a reason to think it was someone else? How long do you think she could keep from telling them all about you? I’ll tell you, because I’ve seen it—forty minutes is the average!”

They all looked at the woman, reflexively.

“He’s lying,” she said in a thin voice. “They didn’t offer to do a thing to me. They just made me wait a while and then turned me loose for lack of evidence.”

“They turned you loose because I gave them enough reason to doubt you were the one who made the Mark!” The fury was carrying Shane away like a dark inexorable tide. “They let you go because you’re young and healthy and they don’t waste valuable beasts without reason. Lack of evidence! Do you still think you’re dealing with humans?”

“All right,” said the short-haired man. His voice was hard and flat. “This is all very pretty, but suppose you tell us where you learned our Mark.”

“Learned it?” Shane laughed, a laugh that was close to a sob of long-throttled rage. “You clown! I invented it. Me—myself! I carved it on a brick wall in Aalborg, two years ago, for the first time. Learn about it! How did you learn about it? How did the Aalaag learn about it? By seeing it marked up in places, of course!”

There was a moment of silence in the room after Shane’s voice ceased to ring out.

“He’s crazy, then,” said the hard-fat man with the pipe.

“Crazy,” echoed Shane, and laughed again.

“Wait a minute,” said the woman. She came around and faced him. “Who are you? What do you do with the Aalaag?”

“I’m a translator, a courier,” said Shane. “I’m owned by Lyt Ahn—me and about thirty men and women like me.”

“Maria—” began the short-haired man.

“Wait, Peter.” She held up her hand briefly and went on without taking her eyes off Shane. “All right. You tell us what happened.”

“I was delivering special communications to Laa Ebon—you know your local Commander, I suppose—”

“We know Laa Ebon,” said Peter, harshly. “Keep talking.”

“I had special communications to deliver. I looked through a one-way mirror and saw you—” He was looking at the woman named Maria. “I knew what they’d do to you. Laa Ehon was talking to one of his officers about you. All that had been spotted was some human wearing a blue robe. There was just a chance that if they had another report of a human in a blue robe making that Mark it would make them doubtful enough so they wouldn’t want to waste a healthy young beast like you. So I ducked out and tried giving them that other report. It worked.”

“Why did you do it?” She was looking penetratingly at him.

“Just a minute, Maria,” said Peter. “Let me ask a few questions. What’s your name, you?”

“Shane Everts.”

“And you said you heard Laa Ehon talking to one of his officers. How did you happen to be there?”

“I was waiting to deliver my communications.”

“And Laa Ehon just discussed it all in front of you—that’s what you’re trying to tell us?”

“They don’t see us, or hear us, unless they want us,” said Shane bitterly. “We’re furniture—pets.”

“So you say,” said Peter. “What language did Laa Ehon speak in?”

“Aalaag, of course.”

“And you understood him so well that you could tell there was a chance to make them think that the human they wanted was someone else than Maria?”

“I told you.” A dull weariness was beginning to take Shane over as the fury died. “I’m a translator. I’m one of Lyt Ahn’s special group of human translators.”

“No human can really speak or understand the Aalaag tongue,” said the man with the pipe, in Basque.

“Most can’t,” answered Shane, also in Basque. The weariness was beginning to numb him so that he was hardly aware of changing languages. “I tell you I’m one of a very special group belonging to Lyt Ahn.”

“What was that? What did you say, Georges?” Peter was looking from one to the other.

“He speaks Basque,” said Georges, staring at Shane.

“How well?”

“Well . . .” Georges made an effort. “He speaks it . . . very well.”

Peter turned on Shane.

“How many languages do you speak?” he asked.

“How many?” Shane said dully. “I don’t know. A hundred and fifty—two hundred, well. A lot of others, some . . .”

“And you speak Aalaag like an alien.”

Shane laughed.

“No,” he said. “I speak it well—for a human.”

“Also, you travel all over the world as a courier—” Peter turned to Maria and Georges. “Are you listening?”

Maria ignored him.

“Why did you do it? Why did you try to rescue me?” She held him with her eyes.

There was a new silence.

“Yowaragh,” he said, dully.

“What?”

“It’s their word for it,” he said. “The Aalaag word for when a beast suddenly goes crazy and fights back against one of them. It was like that first time in Aalborg, when I snapped and put the Pilgrim Mark on the wall under the man they’d thrown on the hooks to execute him.”

“You don’t really expect us to believe you were the one who invented the symbol of resistance to the aliens.”

“You can go to hell!” Shane told him in English.

“What did you say?” said Peter quickly.

“You know what I said,” Shane told him savagely, still in English, and in the exact accent of the London area in which the other had grown up. “I don’t care whether you believe me or not. Just give up trying to pretend you can speak Italian.”

A small dark flush came to Peter’s cheeks and for a second his eyes glinted. Shane had read him clearly. He was one of those who could learn to speak another language just well enough to delude himself—but he didn’t speak it like a native. Shane had touched one of his vulnerabilities.

But then Peter laughed, and both flush and glint were gone.

“Caught me, by God! You caught me!” he said in English. “That’s really very good! Magnificent!”

And you’ll never forgive me for it, thought Shane, watching him.

“Look now, tell me—” Peter seized one of the straight-backed chairs and pushed it forward. “Sit down and let’s talk. Tell me, you must have some sort of credentials that let you pass freely through any inspection or check by the ordinary sort of Aalaag?”

“What I carry,” said Shane, suddenly wary, “is my credentials. Communications from the First Captain of Earth will pass a courier anywhere.”

“Of course!” said Peter. “Now sit down—”

He urged Shane to the chair; and Shane, suddenly conscious of the weariness of his legs, dropped into it. He felt something being put into his hands; and, looking, saw that it was a glass tumbler one-third full of a light-brown liquid. He put it to his lips and smelled brandy—not very good brandy. For some reason, this reassured him. If they had been planning to drug him, he thought, they surely would have put the drug in something better than this.

The burn of the liquor on his tongue woke him from that state of mind in which he had been caught ever since he had stepped into the taxi and found himself kidnapped. He recognized suddenly that he had now moved away from the threat involved in his original capture. These people had been thinking of him originally only as one of the human jackals of the Aalaag. Now they seemed to have become aware of his abilities and advantages; and clearly Peter, at least, was thinking of somehow putting these to use in their resistance movement.

But the situation was still tricky and could go either way. All that was necessary was for him to slip, and by word or action imply that he might still be a danger to them; and their determination to destroy him could return, redoubled in urgency.

For the moment the important thing was that Peter, who seemed to be the dominant of their group, appeared to be determined to make use of him. On his part, Shane was finding, now that his first recklessness of despair was over, that he wanted to live. But he did not want to be used. Much more clearly than these people around him, he knew how hopeless their dream of successful resistance to the Aalaag was, and how certain and ugly the end toward which they were headed, if they continued.

Let them dig their own graves if they wanted. All he wanted was to get safely out of here and in the future to stay clear of such people. Too late, now that he had answered their questions, he realized how much leverage against himself he had given them, in telling them his true name and the nature of his work with the Aalaag. Above all, he thought now, he must keep the secret of Lyt Ahn’s Key. They would sell their souls for something that would unlock most alien doors—doors to warehouses, to armories, to communication and transportation equipment. And the use of the Key by them would be a certain way to his association with them being discovered by the Aalaag. He had been making himself far too attractive to them, thought Shane grimly. It was time to take the glamour off.

“I’ve got thirty minutes, no more,” he said, “to get to the airport and meet the Aalaag officer who’s flying me back to Lyt Ahn’s headquarters. If I’m not there on time, it won’t matter how many languages I can speak.”

There was silence in the room. He could see them looking at each other—in particular, Peter, Georges, and Maria consulting each other with their gazes.

“Get the car,” said Maria, in Italian, when Peter still hesitated. “Get him there on time.”

Peter jerked suddenly into movement, as if Maria’s words had wakened him from a dream so powerful it had held him prisoner. He turned on Carlo.

“Get the car,” he said. “You drive. Maria, you’ll go with me and Shane. Georges—”

He spoke just in time to cut short the beginnings of a protest from the man with the pipe.

“—I want you to close this place up. Bury it! We may end up wanting better security on this than we ever have had on anything until now. Then get out of sight, yourself. We’ll find you. You follow me?”

“All right,” said Georges. “Don’t take too long to come calling.”

“A day or two. That’s all. Carlo—” He looked around.

“Carlo’s gone for the car,” said Maria. “Let’s move, Peter. We’ll barely make it to the airport as it is.”

Shane followed them back through the hall by which he had entered. Crammed in the back seat of the taxi between Maria and Peter, with Carlo driving up front, he had a sudden feeling of ridiculousness, as if they were all engaged in some wild slapstick movie.

“Tell me,” said Peter in English, in a voice that was friendlier than any he had used until now, “just how it happened you made that first Mark in—where did you say it was?”

“Denmark,” said Shane, answering in English also. “The city of Aalborg. I was delivering messages there and on my way back from that I saw two of the aliens, a father and a son, mounted on their riding animals, crossing the square there that has the statue of the Cymri bull—”

It came back to him as he told them. The son, using the haft of his power lance to knock aside a woman who otherwise would have been trampled by his riding animal. The husband of the woman, suddenly mad with yowaragh, attacking the son bare-handed and being easily knocked unconscious. The woman trying to rescue the man and being killed for it—and all of them, who were human and in the square at the time, being forced to watch under Aalaag law while the man, still unconscious, was thrown onto the sharp points of the triple punishment hooks on the wall of a building on the edge of the square.

Shane had stood, for the half hour it took the man to die, almost within arm’s length of the two Aalaag sitting on their riding animals. He had been trapped into listening, as the senior of the two, who could have no suspicion he was within earshot of one of the rare humans who actually understood Aalaag, gently reproved his son for bad judgment in trying to save the woman from being trampled. Because of this, they had been forced to kill not one, but two, healthy beasts; and also to engage in a ritual of justice—which always had a disturbing effect on the others, no matter how necessary. Remembering, Shane felt the inner center of his body grow icy with the recalled horror and the near approach of his own madness. He told how he had gone on to the bar, drunk the bootleg rotgut the bartender had claimed was aquavit, how he had been set upon by the three vagabonds and killed or badly damaged two of them with his staff, before the third had run off. He had not intended to tell it all, movement by movement; but somehow, once started, he could not help himself. He told how, once more crossing the now-empty square, on impulse he had scratched the Mark of the Pilgrim beneath the body on the hooks, before returning to the airport. “I believe you,” said Peter.

Shane said nothing. Crowded together as they were, he was conscious of the softness of Maria’s thigh pressed against his; and the warmth of her seemed also to press in upon the iciness within him, melting it as if he was someone lost and frozen in a snowstorm that was now getting back life and heat from the living temperature of another human being.

He felt a sudden desperate longing for her as a woman. Beasts were encouraged by the Aalaag to breed—particularly valuable cattle like those special human translator-couriers of Lyt Ahn; but living continually under the observations of the aliens as Shane and the others did cultured a paranoia. They all knew too well the innumerable ways that could bring them to destruction at the hands of their Masters; and when their duties were completed, their instinct was to draw apart, to creep separately into their solitary beds and lock their individual doors against each other, for fear that close contact with another could put their survival too completely in another’s power.

In any case, Shane did not want to breed. He wanted love—if only for a moment; and love was the one thing the highly paid human servants of the First Captain of Earth could not afford. Suddenly the warmth of Maria drew him like a dream of peace . . .

He jerked himself out of his thoughts. Peter was looking at him curiously. What had the man just been saying—that he believed Shane?

“Get someone to check Aalborg and ask people there what happened. The Mark I made might still be there, if the Aalaag haven’t erased it.”

“I don’t need to,” said Peter. “What you say explains how the Mark could spread around the world the way it already has. It would have to take someone who can move around as you can to get it known everywhere as the symbol of resistance. I always thought there must have been someone at the root of the legend.”

Shane let the first part of Peter’s comment pass without answer. The other man obviously did not understand what Shane had learned in his travels—the speed with which rumor of any kind could travel in a subject population. Shane had been present at the origin of rumors in Paris which he had heard again in this city of Milan less than a week later. Also, Peter seemed to be giving him credit for continuing to spread the Mark around, himself; and that, too, was probably a matter on which it was better not to correct the other.

“But I think you ought to face something,” Peter said, leaning hard against him for a second as Carlo whipped the taxi around a corner. “It’s time to move on from just being a legend, time to set up an organization with practical goals of resistance against the alien, looking forward to the day when we can kill them all, or drive them off the Earth, entirely.”

Shane looked sideways at him. It was incredible that this man could be saying such things in all seriousness. But of course Peter had not seen what Shane had, up close, of the power of the Aalaag. Mice might as well dream of killing or driving off lions. He was about to say this bluntly when the instinct for survival cautioned him to go cautiously, still. Avoiding a direct answer, he fastened on something else. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned a legend,” he said.

“What legend?”

“You don’t know?” There was a note of triumph in Peter’s voice.

He did not offer to explain.

“There’s talk all the Marks are made by one person,” said Maria, also in English, now. She had only a trace of Italian accent—Venetian. “By someone called simply the Pilgrim, who has the ability to come and go without the Aalaag being able to stop or catch whoever it is.”

“And you, all of you, have been helping this Pilgrim, is that it?” said Shane, raising his voice.

“The point is,” Peter interrupted, “that it’s time the Pilgrim was associated with a solid organization. Don’t you think?”

Shane felt a return of the weariness that had deadened him when he had first been abducted by these people.

“If you can find your Pilgrim, ask him,” he said. “I’m not him, and I’ve got no opinions.”

Peter watched him for a moment.

“Whether you’re the Pilgrim or not is beside the point,” he said. “The point still is, you could help us and we need you. The world needs you. Just from what you’ve told us, it’s plain you could be invaluable just acting as liaison between resistance groups.”

Shane laughed grimly.

“Not on the best day in the year,” he said.

“You aren’t even stopping to think about it,” Peter said. “What makes you so positive you don’t want to do it?”

“I’ve been trying to tell you ever since you kidnapped me,” said Shane. “You’re the one who doesn’t listen. You don’t know the Aalaag. I do. Because you don’t know them, you can fool yourself that you’ve got a chance with this resistance of yours. I know better. They’ve been taking over worlds like this and turning the native populations into their servants for thousands of years. Did you think this was the first planet they’d ever tried it on? There’s nothing you can come up with by way of attacking them that they haven’t seen before and know how to deal with. But even if you could come up with something new, you still couldn’t win.”

“Why not?” Peter’s head leaned close.

“Because they’re just what they say they are—born conquerors who could never be dominated or defeated themselves. You can’t torture an Aalaag and get information out of him. You can’t point a weapon at one of them and force him to back off or surrender. All you can do is kill them—if you’re lucky. But they’ve got so much power, so much military power, that even that’d only work if you killed them all in the same moment. If even one escaped and had warning, you’d have lost.”

“Why?”

“Because with any warning at all, any one of them could make himself or herself invulnerable, and then take all the time he needed to wipe out whole cities and sections of Earth, one by one, until the other humans who were left served you and anyone else who had been fighting the Aalaag up on a platter, to stop the killing.”

“What good would it do just one Aalaag, to do all that,” Peter said, “if he was the last one on Earth?”

“You don’t think all the Aalaag in the universe are here, do you?” said Shane. “Earth, with only one Aalaag left alive on it, would only represent that much new homesteading territory for the surplus Aalaag population, elsewhere. In a year or less, you’d have as many Aalaag here as before; and the only result would be the humans who’d died, the slagged areas of Earth, and the fact that the Aalaag would then set up an even stricter control system to make sure no one like you rose against them again.”

There was silence in the car. Carlo whipped them around another corner and Shane could see a sign beside the highway announcing that the airport was now only one kilometer distant. The warmth of Maria’s body penetrated through his, and he could smell the harsh clean odor of the all-purpose soap with which she must just this morning have washed her hair.

“Then you won’t lift a finger to help us?” said Peter.

“No,” said Shane.

Carlo turned the car onto an off-ramp leading up to the airport road.

“Isn’t anybody willing to do anything?” burst out Maria suddenly. “Not anybody? Nobody at all?”

An icy electric shock jarred all through Shane. It was as if a sword had been plunged clear through him, a sword he had been expecting, but a sword to take his life nonetheless. It cut to his instinctive roots, to the ancient racial and sexual reflexes from which yowaragh sprang. The words were nothing, the cry was everything.

He sat for a numb moment.

“All right,” he said. “Let me think about it, then.”

He heard his own voice far off, remote.

“You’re never going to get anywhere the way you’ve been acting so far,” he said. “You’re doing all the wrong things because you don’t understand the Aalaag. I do. Maybe I could tell you what to do—but you’d have to let me tell you, not just try to pick my brains, or it won’t work. Would you do it that way? Otherwise it’s no use.”

“Yes!” Maria said.

There was a slight pause.

“All right,” said Peter. Shane turned to stare at him.

“If you don’t, it won’t work.”

“We’ll do anything to hit at the Aalaag,” said Peter; and this time his answer came immediately.

“All right,” said Shane, emptily. “I’ll still have to think about it. How do I get in touch with you?”

“We can find you, if we know what city you’re coming into,” said Peter. “Can you arrange to put an ad in the local paper before you come—”

“I don’t have that much warning,” said Shane. “Why don’t I go into a shop in the center of a city when I first get there, and buy a pilgrim robe—a grey one like the one I’m wearing—and pay for it in a silver or gold Aalaag coin. You can have the shopkeepers warn you if anyone does that. If the description fits me, you watch the local Aalaag HQ and pick me up coming or going.”

“All right,” said Peter.

“One other thing,” Shane said. They were almost to the terminal building of the airport. He looked directly into Peter’s eyes. “I’ve seen the Aalaag questioning humans and I know what I’m talking about. If they suspect me, they’ll question me. If they question me, they’ll find out everything I know. You have to understand that. If everything else fails, they have drugs that just start you talking and you talk until you die. They don’t like to use them because they’re not efficient. Someone has to wade through hours of nonsense to get the answers they want. But they use them when they have to. You understand? Anyone they question is going to tell them everything. Not just me—anyone. That’s one of the things you’re going to have to work with.”

“All right,” said Peter.

“What it means, as far as I’m concerned, is that I don’t want anyone who doesn’t already know about me to know I exist.”

He held Peter’s eye, glanced meaningfully at Carlo and back to Peter.

“And those who aren’t to have something to do with me in the future—if I decide to have anything to do with you in the future—should believe that I get out of this car now and none of you ever see me again.”

“I understand,” said Peter. He nodded. “Don’t worry.”

Shane laughed harshly.

“I always worry,” he said. “I’d be insane not to. I’m worrying about myself right now. I need my head examined for even thinking about this.”

The taxi pulled up to the long concrete walk fronting the airline terminal and stopped. Peter, on the curb side of the car, opened the door beside him and got out to let Shane out. Shane started to follow him, hesitated, and turned for a second back to Maria.

“I will think about it,” he said. “I’ll do whatever I can, the best I can.”

In the relative shadow of the corner of the taxi’s back seat, her face was unreadable. She reached out a hand to him. He took and held it for a second. Her fingers were as icy as Milan itself had been this morning.

“I’ll think about it,” he said again, squeezed her fingers, and scrambled out. On the walk, he stood for a second, facing the other man.

“If you don’t hear from me in six months, forget me,” he said.

Peter’s lips opened. He appeared about to say something; then the lips closed again.

He nodded.

Shane turned and went swiftly into the terminal. Just inside the entrance doors, he spotted a terminal policeman and swung on him, taking the Key from his purse and exposing it for a second in the palm of his hand to the other’s gaze.

“This is the Key of Lyt Ahn, First Captain of Earth,” he said in rapid Italian. “I’m one of his special couriers, and I need transport to the Masters’ section of the field, fast. Fast! Emergency! But do it without attracting attention!”

The officer snapped upright, jerked the phone from his belt and spoke into it. There was no more than a thirty-second wait before an electric car came sliding through the crowd on its air cushion. Shane jumped into one of the passenger seats behind the driver, glancing at his watch.

“The hangars for smaller military craft!” he said. He hesitated, then made up his mind. “Use your siren.”

The driver cranked up his siren, the crowd parted before him as he swung the car around and drove at it. They slid swiftly across the polished floor, out through a vehicle passway by the entrance to the field itself.

Once on the field, the car lifted higher on its cushion and went swiftly. They swung around two sides of the field and approached the heavily-guarded silver hangars housing the military atmosphere ships of the Aalaag. They slowed at the guard gate of the entrance to this area. Shane showed his Key and explained his errand to the human Special Guard on duty there.

“We’ve been warned to expect you,” said the Guard. “Hangar Three. The courier ship is piloted by the Master Enech Ajin, who is of the thirty-fifth rank.”

Shane nodded and the driver of the car, having heard, moved them off without any further need for orders.

In the hangar, the slim dumbbell shape of the courier sat dwarfed by the large fighter ships of the Aalaag, on either side of her. Yet, as Shane knew, even these seemingly larger ships were themselves small as Aalaag warships went. The true fighting vessels of the Aalaag never touched planetary surface, but hung in continual orbit and readiness—as much for reasons of principle as for that there was no air or spaceport on Earth where they could have set down without causing massive damage.

He jumped down from the car as it paused by the open port of the courier vessel, and ran up the steps of the port, stepping into the cramped interior. It need not have been so cramped; but even this ship designed for carrying dispatches was heavy with armament.

The massive back of an Aalaag showed itself above one of the triple seats at the control panel in the front of the ship. Shane walked up to just behind the seat and stood waiting. This was not only his duty, but all that was necessary, even if the pilot had not heard him come in. This close to the other, he smelled the typical Aalaag body odor plainly; and the pilot was as surely scenting him. After a moment the pilot spoke.

“Take one of the seats farther back, beast.” It was the voice of an adult Aalaag female. “I have two other stops to make before I bring you to the area of the First Captain.”

Shane went back and sat down. After only a couple of minutes, the courier ship lifted and hovered lightly perhaps ten feet off the floor of the hangar. It slid out into the late daylight of the field, turned, and went softly to a blast pad. At the pad it stopped and Shane let the air out of his lungs and laid his arms in the hollows of the armrests on either side of his chair.

For a second there was neither sound, nor movement. Then something like a clap of thunder, a great weight crushing him into the seat so that he could not move for a long moment—then sudden freedom and lightness, so that he felt almost as if he could float out of the chair. Actually, the feeling was exaggerated. He was still within gravity. It was the contrast with the pressure of takeoff that created the illusion of lightness.

He looked at the viewing screen in the back of the seat before him and saw the surface of the Earth below, a curving horizon and a general mottling of clouds. Nothing else. The look of no expression on Maria’s face as he had left her came so clearly back into his imagination that it was as if her face floated before him in the air this moment. He felt the coldness of her fingers against his fingers, and her voice rang, re-echoing in memory in his ear—

“Isn’t anybody willing to do anything? Not anybody? Nobody at all?”

They were all insane. He shivered. He had been wise to play along and pretend to consider their suggestion that he involve himself in their charade of resistance, that could only lead to torture and death at Aalaag hands. They had no chance. None. If he had seriously considered joining them, he would have been as insane as they were.

His heart beat heavily. The cold touch of Maria’s fingers that lingered in his fingers seemed to spread up his arms and all through him. No, it was no use. It made no difference that they were insane.

He had no choice. Something within him left him no choice, even though he knew what it would mean. He would do it even though he knew it would mean his death in the end. He would seek them out again and go back to them. Join them.

ONE-WING

Lisa Tuttle and George R.R. Martin

Reformers must live with the results of their reforms. All the results . . .

The oddest thing about dying was how easy it was, how calm and beautiful.

The still air had come upon Maris without warning. An instant before, the storm had raged all around her. Rain stung her eyes and ran down her cheeks and tinged against the silver metal of her wings, and the winds were full of tumult, pushing her this way and that, slapping her contemptuously from side to side as if she were a child new to the air. Strapped beneath the wing struts, her arms ached from the struggle. Dark clouds obscured the horizon while the sea below was frothing and troubled; land was nowhere in sight. Maris cursed and hurt and flew.

Then peace enveloped her, and calm, and death.

The winds quieted and the rains stopped. The sea ceased its wild heaving. The clouds themselves seemed to draw back, until they were infinitely far away. A silence fell, an eerie hush, as if time had paused to catch its breath.

In the still air, with her bright wings spread wide, Maris began to descend.

It was a slow, gradual descent, a thing of beauty, graceful and inevitable. Without a breeze to push or lift, she could only glide forward and down. It was not a fall. It seemed to last forever. Far ahead she could see the spot where she would hit the water.

Briefly her flyer’s instincts bid her struggle. She banked this way and that, tried to tack, searched vainly for an updraft or a current in the quiet sky. Her wings, twenty feet across, lifted and fell, and a sudden shaft of wan sunlight gleamed on the silver metal. But her descent continued.

Then she was calm, as calm as the air, her inner turmoil as still as the sea below. She felt the deep peace of surrender, the relief of ending her long battle with the winds. She had always been at their mercy, she thought, never truly in control. They were wild and she was weak, and she was foolish to have dreamed otherwise. She looked up, wondering if she would see the ghost flyers who were said to haunt still air.

The tips of her boots brushed the water and then her body shattered the grey, smooth mirror of the ocean. The impact of the cold water seared her like a flame, and she sank . . .

. . . and woke, wet and gasping for breath.

Silence pounded in her ears. The sweat on her body dried in the cool air, and she sat up, disoriented and blind. Across the room she could see a thin red line of banked coals, but they were at the wrong side of the bed to be the Eyrie, and too far away for her fireplace at home. The air smelled faintly of damp and sea mold.

The smell gave it away. She was at the academy, she thought with relief, at Woodwings; suddenly all the shadows and the strangenesses resolved themselves into the mundane and the familiar. Tension drained slowly from her body, and now Maris was fully awake. Pulling a roughly-woven shift over her head, she moved carefully across the dark room to the fireplace, where she took a woven taper from the pile and lit a sand candle.

In the light she saw the little stone jug beside her low bed, and smiled. Just the thing to wash away the nightmares.

She sat cross-legged on the bed as she sipped the cool, woody wine, staring at the flickering candle flame all the while. The dream disturbed her. Like all the flyers of Windhaven, Maris feared still air, but until now she did not have nightmares about it. And the peace of it all, the sense of surrender and acceptance; those were the worst parts. I am a flyer, she thought, and that was not a true flyer’s dream.

Someone knocked on her door.

“Enter,” Maris said, setting the wine jug aside.

S’Rella stood in the doorway, a slight, dark girl with her hair cropped short in the Southern fashion. “Breakfast soon, Maris,” she said, the slight slurring of her speech reflecting her origins.

“Sena wants to see you before, though. Up in her room.”

“Thanks,” Maris said, smiling. She liked S’Rella, perhaps best of all the students at the Woodwings academy. The island in the Southern Archipelago where S’Rella had been born was a world away from Maris’ own Lesser Amberly, but despite their differences Maris saw a lot of herself in the younger girl. S’Rella was small but determined, with a stamina that belied her size. At the moment she was still graceless in the sky, but she was stubborn enough to give hope of quick improvement. Maris had been working with Sena’s flock of would-be flyers for nearly ten full days now, and she had come to regard S’Rella as one of the three or four most promising.

“Shall I wait and show you the way?” she asked when Maris climbed off the bed to wash at the basin of water in the far corner of the room.

“No,” Maris said. “Off to breakfast now. I can find Sena well enough by myself.” She smiled to soften the dismissal, and S’Rella smiled back, a little shyly, before she left.

A few minutes later Maris was having second thoughts as she groped along a narrow, dank corridor in search of Sena’s cubbyhole. Woodwings academy was an ancient structure, a huge rock shot through with tunnels and caves, some natural, others hollowed out by human hands. Its lower chambers were perpetually flooded, and even in the upper, inhabited portions, many of the rooms and all of the halls were windowless, cut off from sun and stars. The sea smell was everywhere. In the old days it had been a fortress, built in some time of trouble and then unoccupied until the Landsman of Seatooth had offered it to the flyers as a site for a training academy. In the seven years since, Sena and her charges had restored much of it, but it was still easy to take a wrong turn and get lost in the abandoned sections.

Time passed without a trace in the corridors of Woodwings. Torches burned down in wall-sockets and oil lamps ran short of oil, and days often passed before anyone noticed. Maris felt her way carefully along one such stretch of corridor, nervous and a bit oppressed by the weight of the old fortress upon her. She did not like being underground and enclosed; it quarreled with all her flyer’s instincts.

With relief Maris saw the dim glow of a light ahead. One last, sharp corner and she found herself back in familiar territory. Unless she had gotten turned around completely, Sena’s room was the first to the left.

“Maris.” Sena looked up and smiled. She was sitting in a wicker chair, carving a soft block of wood with a bone knife, but now she set it aside and motioned Maris to enter. “I was about to call for S’Rella again and send her looking for you. Did you get lost in our maze?”

“Almost,” Maris said, shaking her head. “I should have thought to carry a light. I can get from my room to the kitchen or the common room or the outside, but beyond that it is a less certain proposition.”

Sena laughed, but it was only polite laughter, masking a mood that was far from light. The teacher was a former flyer, three times Maris’ age, made land-bound a decade ago in the sort of accident all too common among flyers. Normally her vigor and enthusiasm cloaked her age, but this morning she looked old and tired. Her bad eye, like a piece of milky seaglass, seemed to weigh down the left side of her face. It sagged and trembled beneath its burden.

“You sent S’Rella to me for a reason,” Maris said. “News?”

“News,” Sena said, “and not good. I thought it best not to talk about it at breakfast until I had discussed it with you.”

“Yes?”

“Eastern has closed Airhome,” Sena said.

Maris sighed and leaned back in her chair. Suddenly she too felt weary. The news was no great surprise, but it was still disheartening. “Why now?” she asked. “I spoke to Nord three months ago, when they sent me out with a message to Far Hunderlin. He thought they would keep the doors open at least through the next competition. He even told me that he had several promising students.”

“There was a death,” Sena said. “One of those promising students made a misjudgment, and struck a cliffside with her wing. Nord could only watch helplessly as she fell to the rocks below. Worse, her parents were there too. Wealthy, powerful people—traders from Cheslin with more than a dozen ships. The girl had been showing off for them. The parents went directly to the Landsman, of course, asking for justice. They said Nord was negligent.”

“Was he?” Maris said.

Sena shrugged. “He was a mediocre flyer even when he had his wings, and I cannot believe he was better than that as teacher. Always too eager to impress. And he constantly overpraised and overestimated his students. Last year, in the competition, he sponsored nine in challenges. They all failed, and most had no business trying. I sponsored only three. This girl that died, I’m told, had been at Airhome only a year. A year, Maris! She had talent perhaps, but Nord let her go too far too soon. Well, it is too late now. You know the academies have been a drain, a useless drain to hear some Landsmen talk. All they needed was an excuse. They dismissed Nord and closed the school. End. And all the children of Eastern can give up their dreams now, and content themselves with their lot in life.” Her voice was bitter.

“Then we are the last,” Maris said glumly.

“We are the last,” Sena echoed. “And for how long? The Landsman sent a runner to me last night, and I hobbled up to get this joyous news, and afterwards we talked. She is not happy with us, Maris. She says that she has given us meat and hearth and iron coin for seven years, but we have given her no flyer in return. She is growing impatient.”

“So I gather,” Maris said. She knew the Landsman of Seatooth only by reputation, but that was enough. Seatooth lay close by Big Shotan but had a long, fierce history of independence. Its present ruler was a proud, ambitious woman who was deeply resentful that her island had never had a flyer of its own. She had campaigned hard to make Seatooth the home of the training academy for the Western Archipelago, and once she had been lavish in her support. But now she expected results. “She doesn’t understand,” Maris said. “None of the land-bound understand, really. The wood wingers come to the competitions almost raw, to vie with seasoned flyers and flyer-children who have been bred and reared to wings. If only they would give you time.

“Time, time, time,” said Sena, a hint of anger in her voice. “Yes, I said as much to the Landsman. She said that seven years was enough time. You, Maris, you are a flyer. I was a flyer once. We know the difficulties, the need for training year after year, for practice until your arms tremble with the effort and your palms come away bloody from the wing grips. The land-bound know none of that. Too many of them thought the fight was over seven years ago, when you and your friends convinced the flyers to let those of land-bound parentage compete for wings. They thought that next week the sky would be full of fisher-folk and cobblers and glassblowers, and they were dismayed when the first competition came and went and the flyers and flyer-children defeated all land-bound challengers.

“At least then they cared. Now they are only resigned, I fear. In the seven years since your great council, the seven years of the academies, only once has a land-bound taken wings. And he lost them back again a year later, at the very next competition. These days I think the island folk come to the meets only to see flyer siblings compete for the family wings.

The challenges from my woodwingers are talked about as a kind of a comic interlude, a brief performance by some jesters to lighten up the moments between the serious races.”

“Sena, Sena,” Maris said with concern. The older woman had poured all of the passion of her own broken life into the dreams of the young people who came to Woodwings asking for the sky. Now she was clearly upset, her voice trembling despite herself. “I understand your distress,” Maris said, taking Sena’s hand within her own, “but it isn’t as bad as you say.”

Sena’s good eye regarded Maris skeptically, and she pulled her hand away. “It is,” she insisted. “Of course they don’t tell you. No one wants to bring bad news, and they all know what the academies mean to you. But it’s true.” Maris tried to interrupt, but Sena waved her quiet. “No, enough, and not another word about my distress. I did not call you here to comfort me, or to make us late for breakfast. I wanted to tell you the news privately, before I told the others. And I wanted to ask you to fly to Big Shotan for me.”

“Today?”

“Yes,” Sena said. “You have been doing good work with the children. It is a real benefit to them to have an actual flyer in their midst. But we can spare you for one day. It should only take a few hours.”

“Certainly,” Maris said. “What is this about?”

“The flyer who brought the news about Airhome to the Landsman also brought another message. A private message for me. One of Nord’s students wishes to continue his studies here, and hopes that I will sponsor him in the next competition. He asks permission to travel here.”

“Here?” Maris said, incredulous. “From Eastern? Without wings?”

“He has word of a trader bold enough to try the open seas, I am told,” Sena said. “The voyage is hazardous, to be sure, but if he is willing to make it I will not begrudge him admission. Take my agreement to the Landsman of Big Shotan, if you would. He sends three flyers to Eastern every month, and one is due to leave on the morrow. Speed is important. The ships will take a month getting here even if the winds are kind, and the competition is only two months away.”

“I could take the message direct to Eastern myself,” Maris suggested.

“No,” said Sena. “We need you here. Simply relay my word to Big Shotan and then return to fly guard on my clumsy young birds.” She rose unsteadily from her wicker chair, and Maris stood up quickly to help her. “And now we should see about breakfast,” Sena continued. “You need to eat before your flight. With all the time we have spent talking, I fear the others have probably eaten our share.”

But breakfast was still waiting when they reached the common room. Two blazing hearths kept the large hall warm and bright in the damp morning. Gently curving walls of stone rose to become an arched and blackened ceiling. The furniture was rough and sparse; three long wooden tables with benches running the length on each side. The benches were crowded with students now, talking and joking and laughing, most at least half finished with their meals. Nearly twenty would-be flyers were currently in residence, ranging in age from a woman only two years younger than Maris to a boy just shy of ten.

The hall quieted only a little when Maris and Sena entered, and Sena had to shout to be heard above the din and clatter. But after she had finished speaking, it was very quiet indeed.

Maris accepted a chunk of black bread and a bowl of porridge and honey from Kerr, a chubby youth who was taking his turn as cook today, and found a place on one of the benches. As she ate, she conversed politely with the students on either side of her, but she could sense that neither had their heart in it, and after a short time both of them excused themselves and left. Maris could not blame them. She remembered how she had felt, years earlier, when her own dream of being a flyer had been imperiled, as their dreams were imperiled now. Airhome was not the first academy to shut its doors. The desolate island-continent of Artellia had given up first, after three years of failure, and the academies in the Southern Archipelago and the Outer Islands had followed it into oblivion. Eastern’s Airhome was the fourth closing, leaving only Woodwings. No wonder the students were sullen.

Maris mopped her plate with the last of the bread, swallowed it, and pushed back from the table. “Sena, I will not be back until tomorrow morning,” she said as she rose. “I’m going to fly to the Eyrie after Big Shotan.”

Sena looked up from her own plate and nodded. “Very well. I plan to let Leya and Kurt try the air today. The rest will exercise. Be back as early as you can.” She returned to her food.

Maris sensed someone behind her, and turned to see S’Rella. “May I help you with your wings, Maris?”

“Of course you may. Thank you.”

The girl smiled. They walked together down the short corridor to the little room where the wings were kept. Three pair of wings hung on the wall now; Maris’ own and two owned by the academy, dying bequests from flyers who had left no heir. It was hardly surprising that the woodwingers fared so poorly in competition, Maris thought bitterly as she contemplated the wings. A flyer sends his child into the sky almost daily during the years of training, but at the academies—with so many students and so few wings—practice time was not so easily come by. There was only so much you could learn on the ground after all.

She pushed the thought away and lifted her wings from the rack. They made a compact package, the struts folded neatly back on themselves, the tissue-metal hanging limply between and drooping towards the floor like a silver cape. The tissue itself, the stuff the vast sail that had pushed their ancestors to Windhaven, was virtually weightless, so the wings were deceptively light. S’Rella held them up easily with one hand while Maris partially unfolded them, checking each strut and joint carefully with fingers and eyes for any wear or defect which might become evident, too late, as a danger in the air.

“It’s bad about them closing Airhome,” S’Rella said as Maris worked. “It happened just the same way in Southern, you know., That was why I had to come here, to Woodwings. Our own school was closed.”

Maris paused and looked at her. She had almost forgotten that the shy Southern girl had been a victim of a previous closing. It must be especially hard on her. “One student from Airhome is coming here, as you did,” Maris said, trying to make a jest of it. “So you won’t be alone among the savage Westerners anymore.” She smiled.

“Do you miss your home?” S’Rella asked suddenly.

Maris thought for a moment. “Truthfully, I don’t know that I really have a home,” she said. “Wherever I am is my home.”

S’Rella digested that calmly. “I suppose that’s a good way to feel, if you’re a flyer. Do most flyers feel that way?”

“Maybe a little bit,” Maris said. She glanced back to her wings and set her hands to work again. “But not so much as me. Most flyers have more ties to their home islands than I do, though never so many as the land-bound. Could you help me stretch that taut? Thanks. No, I didn’t mean that particularly because I’m a flyer, but just because my old home is gone and I haven’t made a new one yet. My father—my stepfather, really—died three years ago. His wife died long before that, and my own natural parents are both dead as well. I have a step-brother, Coll, but he’s been off adventuring and singing in the Outer Islands for a long time now. The little house on Lesser Amberly seemed awfully big and empty with Coll and Russ both gone. And since I had no one to go home to, I went there less and less. The island survives. The Landsman would like his third flyer to be in residence more often, no doubt, but he makes do with the two at hand.” She shrugged. “My friends are flyers, mostly.”

“I see.”

Maris looked at S’Rella, who was staring at the wing she still held with more concentration than it warranted. “You miss your home,” Maris said gently.

S’Rella nodded slowly, almost reluctantly. “It’s different here. The others are different from the people I knew.”

“A flyer has to get used to that,” Maris said.

“Yes. But there was someone I loved. We talked of marrying, but I knew we never would. I loved him—I still love him—but I wanted to be a flyer even more. You know.”

“I know,” Maris said, trying to be encouraging. “Perhaps, after you win your wings, he could—”

“No. He’ll never leave his land. He can’t. He’s a farmer, and his land has always been in his family. He—well, he never asked me to give up the idea of flying, and I never asked him to give up his land.”

“Flyers have married farmers before,” Maris said. “You could go back.”

“Not without wings,” S’Rella said fiercely. Her eyes met Maris’. “No matter how long it takes. And if—when—I win my wings, well, he’ll have married by then. He’s bound to. Farming isn’t a job for a single person. He’ll want a wife who loves the land, and a lot of children.”

Maris said nothing.

“Well, I made my choice.” S’Rella said. “It’s just that sometimes I get . . . homesick. Lonely, maybe.”

“Yes,” Maris said. She put a hand on S’Rella’s shoulder. “Come, I have a message to deliver.”

S’Rella led the way. Maris slung her wings over a shoulder and followed down a dark passageway that led to a well-fortified exit. It opened on what once had been an observation platform, a wide stone ledge eighty feet above where the sea crested and broke against the rocks of Seatooth. The sky was grey and overcast, but the wild salt smell of the ocean and the strong, eager hands of the wind filled Maris with exhilaration.

S’Rella held the wings while Maris fastened the restraining straps around her body. When they were secure, S’Rella began to unfold them, strut by strut, locking each into place so the silver tissue pulled tight and strong. Maris waited patiently, aware of her role as teacher, although she was anxious to be off. Only when the wings were fully extended did she smile at S’Rella, slide her arms through their loops, and wrap her hands around the worn, familiar leather of the wing grips. Then, with four quick steps, she was off.

For a second, or less than a second, she fell, but then the winds took her, thrumming against her wings, lifting her, turning her plunge into flight, and the feel of it was like a shock running through her, a shock that left her flushed and breathless and set her skin to tingling. That instant, that little space of less than a second, made it all worthwhile. It was better and more thrilling than any sensation Maris had ever known, better than love, better than everything. Alive and aloft, she joined the strong western wind in a lover’s embrace.

Big Shotan lay to the north, but for the moment Maris let the prevailing wind carry her, luxuriating in the fine freedom of an effortless soar before beginning her game with the winds, when she would have to tack and turn, test and tease them into taking her where she chose to go. A flight of rainbirds darted past her, each a different bright color, their haste an omen of a coming storm. Maris followed them, climbing higher and higher, rising until Seatooth was only a green and grey area off to her left, smaller than her hand. She could see Eggland as well, and off in the distance the fog banks that shrouded the southernmost coast of Big Shotan.

Maris began to circle, deliberately slowing her progress, aware of how easy it would be to overshoot her destination. Conflicting air currents whispered past her ears, taunting her with promises of a north-bound gale somewhere above, and she rose again, seeking it in the colder air far above the sea. Now Big Shotan’s coast and Seatooth and Eggland were ail spread out before her on the metallic grey ocean like toys on a table. She saw the tiny shapes of fishing boats bobbing in the harbors and bays of Shotan and Seatooth, and the gulls and scavenger-kites in the hundreds wheeling around the sharp crags of Eggland.

She had lied to S’Rella, Maris realized suddenly. She did have a home, and it was here, in the sky, with the wind strong and cold behind her and her wings on her back. The world below, with its worries about trade and politics and food and war and money, was alien to her, and even at the best of times she always felt a bit apart from it. She was a flyer, and like all flyers, she was less than whole when she took off her wings.

Smiling a small, secret smile, Maris went to deliver her message.

The Landsman of Big Shotan was a busy man, kept occupied by the endless task of ruling the oldest, richest, and most densely populated island on Windhaven. He was in conference when Maris arrived—some sort of fishing dispute with Little Shotan and Skulny—but he came out to see her. Flyers were the equals of the Landsman, and it was dangerous for even one so powerful as he to slight them. He heard Sena’s message dispassionately, and promised that word would travel back to Eastern the next morning, on the wings of one of his flyers.

Maris left her wings on the wall of the conference room in the Old Captain’s House, as the Landsman’s ancient sprawling residence was named, and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the streets of the city beyond. It was the only real city on Windhaven; oldest, largest, and first. Stormtown, it was called; the town the star sailors built. Maris found it endlessly fascinating. There were windmills everywhere, their great blades churning against the grey sky. There were more people here than on Lesser and Greater Amberly together. There were shops and stalls of a hundred different sorts, selling every useful good and worthless trinket imaginable. There were endless numbers of wineshops and inns and alehouses, and there was a market that was a wonder to her every time she came upon it. She spent several hours there, browsing happily and listening to the talk, although she bought very little. Afterwards she ate a light dinner of smoked moonfish and black bread, washed down with a mug of kivas, the hot spice wine that Shotan prided itself on. The inn where she took her meal had a singer and Maris listened to him politely enough, though she thought him much inferior to her brother Coll and other singers she had known on Amberly.

It was close to dusk when she flew from Stormtown, in the wake of a brief squall that had washed the city streets with rain while she ate. She had good winds at her back all the way, and it had just turned dark when she reached the Eyrie.

It hulked out of the sea at her, black in the bright starlight, a weathered column of ancient stone whose sheer walls rose two hundred feet straight up from the foaming waters; nothing grew on the Eyrie, and no safe landing was on hand for any boat, but atop it stood the flyers’ lodge, their meeting place and refuge forever inaccessible to those without wings. Maris saw lights within the windows. She circled once and came down skillfully in the landing pit, full of damp sand. Alone, it took her several minutes to remove and fold her wings. She hung them on a hook just inside the door.

A small fire was blazing in the hearth of the common room. In front of it, two flyers she knew only by sight were engrossed in a game of geechi, shoving black and white pebbles around a board. One of them waved at her. She nodded in reply, but by then his glance had already gone back to his game.

There was one other present, slumped in an armchair near the fire with an earthenware mug in his hand, studying the flames. But he looked up when she entered. “Maris!” he said, rising suddenly and grinning. He set his mug aside and started across the room. “I hadn’t expected to see you here.”

“Dorrel,” she said, but then he was there, and he put his arms around her and they kissed, briefly but with intensity. One of the geechi players watched them in a distracted sort of way, but his gaze fell quickly when his opponent moved a stone.

“Did you fly all the way from Amberly?” Dorrel asked her. “You must be hungry. Sit by the fire and I’ll fetch you a snack. There’s cheese and smoked ham and some sort of fruit-bread in the kitchen.”

Maris took his hand and squeezed it and led him back towards the fire, choosing two chairs well away from the geechi players. “I ate not too long ago,” she said, “but thanks. And I flew from Big Shotan, not Amberly. An easy flight. The winds are friendly tonight. I haven’t been to Amberly in almost a month, I’m afraid. The Landsman is going to be angry.”

Dorrel did not look too happy himself. His lean face wrinkled in a frown. “Flying? Or gone to Seatooth again?” He released her hand and found his mug again, sipping from it carefully. Steam rose from within.

“Seatooth. Sena asked me to come spend some time with the students. I’ve been working with them for about ten days. Before that I was on a long mission, to Deeth in the Southern Archipelago.”

Dorrel set down his mug and sighed. “You don’t want to hear my opinion,” he said cheerfully, “but I’m going to tell it to you anyway. You spend too much time away from Amberly, working at the academy. Sena is teacher there, not you. She is paid good metal for doing what she does. I don’t see her pressing any iron into your palm.”

“I have enough iron,” Maris said. “Russ left me well off. Sena’s lot is harder. And the woodwingers need my help—they see precious few other flyers on Seatooth.” Her voice became warmer, coaxing. “Why don’t you come spend a few days yourself? Laus would survive a week without you. We could share a room. I’d like to have you with me.”

“No.” His cheerful tone vanished abruptly, and he looked vaguely irritated. “I’d love to spend a week with you, Maris, in my cabin on Laus, or your home on Amberly, or even here in the Eyrie. But not at Woodwings. I’ve told you before: I won’t train a group of land-bounds to take the wings of my friends.”

His words wounded her. She pulled back her chair and looked away from him, into the fire. “You sound like Corm, seven years ago,” she said.

“I don’t deserve that, Maris.”

She turned back to look at him. “Then why won’t you help? Why are you so contemptuous of the woodwingers? You sneer at them like the most tradition-bound old flyer—but seven years ago you were with me. You fought for this, believed in it with me. I could never have done it without you—they would have taken my wings and named me outlaw. You risked the same fate by helping, me. What has changed you so?”

Dorrel shook his head violently. “I haven’t changed, Maris. Listen. Seven years ago, I fought for you. I didn’t care about those precious academies you dreamed up—I fought for your right to keep your wings and be a flyer. Because I loved you, Maris, and I would have done anything for you. And,” he went on, his tone a little cooler, “you were the best damn flyer I’d ever seen. It was a crime, madness, to give your wings to your brother and ground you. Now, don’t look at me like that. Of course the principle mattered to me, too.”

“Did it?” Maris asked. It was an old argument, but it still upset her.

“Of course it did. I wouldn’t fly in the face of all I believed just to please you. The system as it existed was unfair, forcing good flyers to be land-bound before their time, and sending up unskilled children who had no right to the wings beyond an accident of birth. The traditions had to be changed—you were right about that. If a child born of a sailmaker and a farmer can outfly one born of a flyer, he deserves wings. I believed that then, and I believe it now.”

“You believe it,” Maris said bitterly. “You say that, but words are easy. You won’t do anything for your belief—you won’t help me now, although we’re on the verge of losing all we fought for.”

“We aren’t going to lose it. We won. We changed the rules—we changed the world.”

“But without the academies, what does it mean?”

“The academies! I didn’t fight for the academies. Changing bad tradition was what I fought for. I’ll agree that if a land-bound can outfly me, I must give him my wings. But I will not agree to teach him to outfly me. And that’s what you’re asking of me. You, of all people, should understand what it means to a flyer to lose the sky.”

“I also understand what it is to want to fly but to know that there’s no chance of ever being allowed to,” Maris said. “There’s a student at the academy—S’Rella. You should have heard her this morning, Dorrel. She wants to fly more than anything. She’s a lot like I was, when Russ first began to teach me how to fly. Please come help her, Dorr.”

“If she really is like you, she’ll be flying soon enough, whether I choose to help her or not. So I choose not. Then if she defeats a friend of mine, takes his wings in competition, I won’t feel guilty.” He drained his mug and stood up.

Maris scowled and was seeking another argument when he said, “Have some tea with me?” She nodded, watching him go to the kettle on the fire where the fragrant spiced tea steamed. His stance, his walk, the way he bent to pour the tea—all so familiar to her. She knew him probably better than she had ever known anyone, she thought.

When Dorrel returned with the hot, sweetened drinks and took his place close to her again, the anger was gone, her thoughts having taken another direction. Her gaze was intense.

“What happened to us, Dorr? A few years ago we planned to marry. Now we glare at each other from our separate islands and squabble like two Landsmen arguing fishing rights. What happened to our plans to live together and have children—what happened to our love?” She smiled ruefully. “I don’t understand what happened.”

“Yes you do,” Dorrel said, his voice gentle. “This argument happened. Your loves and your loyalties are divided between the flyers and the land-bound. Mine aren’t. Life isn’t simple anymore—not for you. We don’t want the same things, and it’s hard for us to understand each other. We loved each other so much once. . . .” He sipped the hot tea, his eyes cast down. Maris watched him, waiting, feeling sad. She wished for a moment that they could return to that earlier time, when their love had been so singleminded and strong that it had seemed certain to weather all storms.

Dorrel looked up at her again. “But I still love you, Maris. Things have changed, but the love’s still there. Maybe we can’t join our lives, but when we are together we can still love each other and try not to fight, hmm?”

She smiled at him, a bit tremulously, and put her hand out. He grasped it strongly and smiled.

“Now. No more arguing, and no more sad talk of what might have been. We have the present—let’s enjoy it. Do you realize it’s been nearly two months since we were together last? Where have you been? What have you seen? Tell me some news, love. Some good gossip to cheer me up,” he said.

“My news isn’t very cheerful,” Maris said, thinking about the messages she’d heard and carried recently. “Eastern has closed Airhome. One of the students there has died in an accident. Another one is taking ship to Seatooth. The others have given up and gone home, I suppose. Don’t know what Nord will do.” She disengaged her hand and reached for her tea.

Dorrel shook his head, a small smile on his face. “Even your news is of nothing but the academies. Mine’s more interesting. The Landsman of Scylla’s Point died, and his youngest daughter was chosen to succeed him. Rumor has it that Kreel—d’you know him? Fair-haired boy missing a finger on his left hand? You might have noticed him at the last competition, he did quite a lot of fancy doubleloops—anyway, that he’s going to become Scylla Point’s second flyer because the new Landsman’s in love with him! Can you imagine—a Landsman and a flyer married?”

Maris smiled slightly. “It’s happened before.”

“Not in our time. Did you hear about the fishing fleet off Greater Amberly? Destroyed by a scylla, though they managed to kill it, and most got away with their lives, even if without their boats. Another scylla, dead, washed up on the shores of Culhall—I saw the carcass.” He raised his brows and held his nose. “Even against the wind I could smell it! And up in Artellia, word is that two flyer-princes are warring for control of the Iron Islands.” Dorrel stopped speaking, his head turning toward the door as a violent gust of wind from outside rattled the heavy lodge door.

“Ah,” he said, turning back and sipping his tea. “Just the wind.”

“What is it?” Maris asked. “You’re so restless. Are you expecting someone?”

“I thought Garth might come.” He hesitated. “We were supposed to meet here this afternoon, but he hasn’t shown up. Nothing important, but he was flying a message out to Culhall and said he’d meet me here on the way back and we’d get drunk together.”

“So maybe he got drunk alone. You know Garth.” She spoke lightly, but she saw that he was truly worried. “A lot of things could have delayed him—perhaps he had to fly an answer back. Or he might have decided to stay on Culhall for a party. I’m sure that he’s all right.”

Despite her words, Maris, too, was worried. Garth was an old and dear friend to them both. The last time she had seen him he had obviously put on weight—always dangerous for a flyer. And he was too fond of parties, particularly the wine and the food. She hoped he was safe and well. He’d never been a reckless flyer—that was comforting to remember—but he’d also never been more than solid and competent in the air. As he grew older, heavier and slower in his responses, the steady skills of his youth were becoming less certain.

“You’re right,” Dorrel said. “Garth can take care of himself. He probably met up with some good companions on Culhall and forgot about me. He likes to drink, but he’d never fly drunk.” He drained his mug and forced a smile. “We might as well return the favor and forget about him. At least for tonight.”

Their eyes met, and they moved to a low, cushioned bench closer to the fire. There they managed, at least for a time, to put aside their conflicts and fears as they drank more tea and later wine, and talked of good times from the past and exchanged gossip about the flyers they both knew. The evening passed in a pleasant haze, and much later that night they shared a bed and something more than memories. It was good to hold someone she cared about, Maris thought, and to be held in turn, after so many nights in her narrow bed alone. His head against her shoulder, his body a solid comfort against hers, Maris fell asleep at last, warm and contented.

But that night she dreamed again of falling.

The next day Maris rose early, cold and frightened from her dream. She left Dorrel sleeping and ate a lonely breakfast of hard cheese and bread in the deserted common room. As the sun brushed the horizon she donned her wings and gave herself to the morning wind. By midday she was back at Seatooth, flying guard for S’Rella and a boy named Jan while they tried their fledgling wings.

—She stayed and worked with the woodwingers for another week, watching their unsteady progress in the air, helping them through their exercises, telling them stories of famous flyers each night around the fire.

But increasingly she felt guilty over her prolonged absence from Lesser Amberly, and finally she took her leave, promising Sena she would return in time to help prepare the students for their challenges.

It was a full day’s flight to Amberly. She was exhausted when she finally saw the fire burning in its familiar light tower, and very glad to collapse into her own long-empty bed. But the sheets were cold and the room was dusty, and Maris found it hard to sleep. Her own familiar house seemed cramped and strange to her now. She rose and went in search of a snack, but she had been gone too long—the little food left in the kitchen was stale or spoiled. Hungry and unhappy, she returned to a cold bed and a fitful sleep.

The Landsman’s greeting was polite but aloof when she went to him the next morning. “The times have been busy,” he said simply. “I’ve sent for you several times, only to find you gone. Corm and Shalli have flown the missions instead. They grow weary. And now Shalli is with child. Are we to content ourselves with a single flyer, like a poor island half our size?”

“If you have flying for me to do, give it to me,” Maris replied. She could not deny the justice of his complaint, yet neither would she promise to stay away from Seatooth.

The Landsman frowned, but there was nothing else he could do. He recited a message to her, a long involved message to the traders on Poweet, seed grain in return for canvas sails, but only if they would send the ships to get it, and an iron bribe for their support in some dispute between the Amberlys and Kesselar. Maris memorized it word for word without letting it fully touch her conscious mind, as flyers often did. And then she was off to flyer’s cliff and the sky.

Anxious not to let her get away again, the Landsman kept her occupied. No sooner would she return from one mission than up she went again on another; back and forth to Poweet four times, twice to Little Shotan, twice to Greater Amberly, once to Kesselar to deliver a stern warning to a young Landsman who could scarce contain her anger, once each to Culhall and Stonebowl and Laus (Dorrel was not at home, off on some mission himself), once on a long flight to Kite’s Landing in Eastern.

When at last she found herself free to escape to Seatooth again, barely three weeks remained before the competition commenced.

“How many do you intend to sponsor in challenges?” Maris asked. Somewhere outside rain and wind lashed the island, but the thick stone walls which enclosed them kept the weather very far away. Sena sat on a low stool, a torn shirt in her hands, and Maris stood before her, warming her back by the fire. They were in Sena’s room.

“I had hoped to ask your advice on that,” Sena said, looking up from her clumsy job of mending. “I think four this year, perhaps five.”

“S’Rella certainly,” Maris said, thoughtfully. Her opinions might influence Sena, and Sena’s sponsorship was all-important to the would-be flyers. Only those who won her approval were allowed to issue challenge. “Damen as well. They are your best. After them—Sher and Leya, perhaps? Or Liane?”

“Sher and Leya,” Sena said, stitching. “They would be impossible if I sponsored one and not the other. It will be chore enough to convince them that they cannot challenge the same person and race him as a team.”

Maris laughed. Sher and Leya were two of the younger aspirants, inseparable friends. They were talented and enthusiastic, although they tired too easily and could be rattled by the unexpected. She had often wondered if their constant companionship gave them strength, or simply reinforced their similar faults. “Do you think they can win?”

“No,” Sena said, without looking up. “But they are old enough to try, and lose. The experience will do them good. Temper them. If their dreams cannot withstand a loss, they will never be flyers.”

Maris nodded. “And Liane is the one in doubt?”

“I will not sponsor Liane,” Sena said. “He is not ready. I wonder if he will ever be ready.”

Maris was surprised. “I’ve watched him fly,” she said. “He is strong, and at times he flies brilliantly. I grant you that he is moody and erratic, but when he is good he is better than S’Rella and Damen together. He might be your best hope.”

“He might,” Sena said, “but I will not sponsor him. One week he soars like a nighthawk, and the next he stumbles and tumbles like a child thrown into the air for the first time. No, Maris. I want to win, but a victory by Liane would be the worst thing that could happen to him. I would venture to bet that he would be dead within the year. The sky is no safe haven for one whose skills come and go with his moods.”

Reluctantly, Maris nodded. “Perhaps you are wise,” she said. “But who would be your possible fifth, then?”

“Kerr,” Sena said. She set her bone needle aside, and inspected the shirt she had been working on, then spread it across her table and sat back to regard Maris evenly with her good eye.

“Kerr? He is nice enough, but he is nervous and overweight and uncoordinated, and his arms are not half as strong as they need to be. Kerr is hopeless, at least for the present. In a few years, perhaps . . .”

“His parents want him to race this year,” Sena said wearily. “He has wasted two years already, they say. They own a copper mine on Little Shotan, and are most anxious for Kerr to have his wings. They support the academy handsomely.”

“I see,” said Maris.

“Last year I told them no,” Sena continued. “This year I am less certain of myself. Without a victory in this competition, the academy may lose its support from the Landsmen. Then only wealthy patrons will stand between us and closing. Perhaps it is best for all to keep them happy.”

“I understand,” Maris said, “though I do not entirely approve. Still, I suppose it cannot be helped. And it will do Kerr little enough harm to lose. At times he seems to enjoy playing the clown.”

Sena snorted. “I think I must do it. Yet I hate it. I had hoped you could talk me out of it.”

“No,” said Maris. “You overestimate my eloquence. I will give some advice, however. During these last weeks, reserve your wings solely for those who will challenge. They will need the seasoning. Occupy the others with exercises and lessons.”

“I have done so in past years,” Sena said. “They also race mock contests against each other. I would have you contest with them too, if only to teach them how to lose. S’Rella challenged last year, and Damen has lost twice, but the others need the experience. Sher . . .”

“Sena, Maris, come quick!” The shout came from the hall, and a breathless Kerr suddenly appeared in the doorway. “The Landsman sent someone, they need a flyer, they . . .”

He panted, struggling with the words.

“Go with him, quickly,” Sena told Maris. “I will hurry behind as fast as I am able.”

The stranger who waited in the common room among the students was also panting; he had run all the way from the Landsman’s tower. Yet speech seemed to burst from him. “You’re the flyer?” He was young and obviously distraught, glancing about like a wild bird trapped in a cage.

Maris nodded.

“You must fly to Shotan. Please. And fetch their healer. The Landsman said to come to you. My brother is ill. Wandering in the head. His leg is broken—badly, I can see the bone—and he won’t tell me how to fix it, or what to give him for his fever. Please, please hurry.”

“Doesn’t Seatooth have its own healer?” Maris asked.

“His brother is the healer,” volunteered Damen, a lean youth native to the island.

“What’s the name of the healer on Big Shotan?” Maris asked, just as Sena came limping into the room.

The old woman immediately grasped the situation and took command. “There are several,” she said.

“Hurry,” the stranger implored. “My brother might die.”

“I don’t think he’ll die of a broken leg,” Maris began, but Sena silenced her with a gesture.

“Then you’re a fool for thinking so,” the youth said. “He has a fever. He raves. He fell down the cliff face climbing after kite eggs, and he lay alone for almost a day before I found him. Please.”

“There’s a healer on the near end named Fila,” Sena said. “She’s old and crotchety and doesn’t care for sea travel, but her daughter lives with her and knows her arts. If she can’t come she’ll tell you the name of another who can. Don’t waste your time in Stormtown. The healers there will all want to weigh your metal before they gather their herbs. And stop at the South Landing and tell the ferry captain to wait for an important passenger.”

“I’ll go at once,” Maris said, with only the briefest of glances for the stew pot that was steaming over the fire. She was hungry, but it could wait. “S’Rella, Kerr, come help me with my wings.”

“Thank you,” the stranger muttered, but Maris and the students were already gone.

The storm had finally broken outside. Maris thanked her luck, and flew straight across the salt channel, skimming a few feet above the waves. There were dangers in flying so low, but she had no time to try for altitude, and scyllas rarely came so close to land anyway. The flight was short enough. Fila was easy to find but—as Sena had predicted—reluctant to come. “The waters make me sick,” she muttered sourly. “And that boy on Seatooth, he thinks he’s better than me anyway. Always has, the young fool, and now he comes crying to me for help.” But her daughter apologized for her, and soon after left for the ferry.

On the way back, Maris indulged herself, enjoying the sensuous feel of the winds as if to make up for the brusque way that she had used them to travel to Big Shotan. The stormclouds were gone now, the sun was shining brightly on the waters, and a rainbow arched across the eastern sky. Maris went in search of it, soaring up on a warm current of air that rose from Shotan, frightening a flock of summerfowl when she joined them from below. She laughed as they scattered in confusion, banking at the same time, her body responding out of habit to the subtle, shifting demands of the winds. They went in all directions, some towards Seatooth, some towards Eggland or Big Shotan, some out towards the open sea. And further out she saw—she narrowed her eyes, trying to be sure. A scylla, its long neck rearing out of the water to snap some unwary bird from the sky? No, there were several shapes. A hunting pack of seacats, then. Or ships.

She circled and glided out over the ocean, leaving the islands behind her, and very shortly she was sure. Ships all right, five of them sailing together, and when the wind had brought her closer she could see the colors as well, the faded paint on the canvas sails, the ragged streamers flapping and fluttering above, the hulls all black. Local ships were less gaudy; these had come a long way. A trading fleet from Eastern.

She swooped low enough to see the crew hard at work replacing sails, pulling in lines and shifting desperately to stay on the good side of the wind. A few looked up and shouted and waved at her, but most concentrated on their labors. Sailing the open seas of Windhaven was always a dangerous business, and there were many months in the year when travel between distant island groupings was made flatly impossible by the raging storms. To Maris the wind was a lover, but to the sailors it was a smiling assassin, pretending friendship only to gain the chance to slash a sail or drive a ship to splinters against an unseen rock. A ship was too large to play the games the flyers played; a ship at sea was always in a state of battle.

But these ships were safe enough now; the storm was past, and it would be sunset at least before another one would be upon them. There would be celebration in Stormtown tonight; arrival of an Eastern trade fleet this size was always an occasion. Fully a third of the ships that tried the hazardous crossing between archipelagos were lost at sea. Maris guessed the fleet would make port in less than an hour, judging from their position and the strength of the winds. She wheeled above them once more, made very aware of her grace and freedom in the sky by their struggles below, and decided to carry the news to Big Shotan instead of returning immediately to Seatooth. She might even wait for them, she thought, curious about their cargo and their news.

Maris drank too much wine in the boisterous tavern on the waterfront; it was pressed on her by the delighted customers, for she had been the first to bring word of the approaching fleet. Now everyone was at the docks, drinking and carousing and speculating about what the traders might be bringing.

When the cry went up—first one voice, then many—that the ships were docking, Maris stood up, only to lurch forward as she lost her balance, made dizzy by the wine. She would have fallen, but the crush of bodies around her, rushing towards the door, kept her upright and bore her along.

The scene outside was wild and noisy and for a moment Maris wondered whether she had been right to stay; she could see nothing, learn nothing in this excited, milling crowd. Shrugging, she slowly fought her way free of the mob, and sat down on an overturned barrel. She might as well stay out of it and keep her eyes open for anyone from the ship who could supply her with news. She leaned back against a smooth stone wall and folded her arms to wait.

She woke unwillingly, annoyed by someone who would not stop pushing at her shoulder. She blinked her eyes several times, looking up into the face of a stranger.

“You are Maris,” he said. “Maris the flyer? Maris of Lesser Amberly?” He was a very young man, with the severe, sculpted face of an ascetic: a closed, guarded face which gave away nothing. Set in such a face, his eyes were startling; large, dark, and liquid. His rust-colored hair was pulled back sharply from a high forehead, and knotted in the back of his skull.

“Yes,” she said, straightening. “I’m Maris. Why? What happened? I must have fallen asleep.”

“You must have,” he said flatly. “I came in on the ship. You were pointed out to me. I thought perhaps you had come to meet me.”

“Oh!” Maris looked quickly around. The crowds had thinned and all but vanished. The docks were empty except for a group of traders standing on a gang plank, and a work-crew of stevedors unloading chests of cloth. “I sat down to wait,” she muttered. “I must have closed my eyes. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Of course,” he said.

There was something naggingly familiar about him, Maris thought groggily. She looked at him more closely. His clothing was Eastern in cut, but simple; grey fabric without ornamentation, thick and warm, a hood hanging down behind him. He had a canvas bag under one arm and wore a knife in a leather sheath at his waist.

“You said you were from the ship?” she asked. “Pardon, I’m still only half awake. Where are the other sailors?”

“The sailors are drinking or eating, the traders off haggling, I would say,” he answered. “The voyage was difficult. We lost one ship to a storm, though all but two of the crew were pulled from the water safely. Still, conditions afterwards were crowded and uncomfortable. The sailors were glad to come ashore.” He paused for a moment. “I am no sailor, however. My apologies. I made a mistake. I do not think you were sent to meet me.” He turned to go.

Suddenly Maris realized who he must be. “Of course,” she blurted. “You’re the student, the one from Airhome.” He had turned back to her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d forgotten all about you.” She jumped down from the barrel.

“My name is Val,” he said, as if he expected it to mean something to her. “Val of South Arren.”

“Fine,” Maris said. “You know my name. I’m sure—”

He shifted his bag uneasily. The muscles around his mouth were tense. “They also call me One-Wing.” Maris said nothing. But her face gave her away.

“I see you know me after all,” he said, a bit sharply.

“I’ve heard of you.” Maris admitted. “You intend to compete?”

“I intend to fly,” Val said. “I have worked for this for four years.”

“I see,” Maris said coolly. She looked up at the sky, dismissing him. It was nearly dusk. “I’ve got to get back to Seatooth,” she said. “They’ll be thinking I fell into the ocean. I’ll tell them you arrived.”

“Aren’t you even going to speak to the captain?” he asked sardonically. “She’s in the tavern across the way, telling stories to a gullible crowd.” He canted his head at one of the dockside buildings.

“No,” Maris said, too quickly. “But thanks.” She turned away, but stopped when he called after her.

“Can I hire a boat to take me to Seatooth?”

“You can hire anything in Stormtown,” Marie answered, “but it will cost you. There’s a regular ferry from South Landing. You’d probably be best to stay the night here and take the ferry in the morning.” She turned again and moved off down the cobbled street, towards the flyers’ quarters where she had stored her wings. She felt a bit ashamed of leaving him so abruptly when he had come so far in his desire to be a flyer, but she did not feel ashamed enough to turn back. One-Wing, she thought furiously. She was surprised he admitted to the name, and even more surprised that he would come to try again at a competition. He must know how he would be met.

“You knew!” Maris shouted, angry enough so that she did not care if the students heard her. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.”

“Of course I knew,” Sena said. Her own voice was even, and her good eye was as impassive and fixed as her bad one. “I did not tell you because I expected you would react like this. My students needed your help. I could not risk your flying off in anger, especially since it was possible that Val would not even survive the ocean crossing.”

“Sena, how could you?” Maris demanded. “Do you really intend to sponsor his challenge?”

“If he is good enough,” Sena replied. “I have every reason to think he will be. I have serious qualms about sponsoring Kerr, but none whatsoever about Val.”

“Don’t you know how we feel about him?”

“We?”

“The flyers,” Maris said impatiently. She paced back and forth before the fire, then paused to face Sena again. “He can’t possibly win again. And if he did, do you think it would keep Woodwings open? The academies are still living down his first win. If he won again, the Landsman of Seatooth would . . .”

“ ‘The Landsman of Seatooth would be proud and pleased,” Sena said, interrupting. “Val intends to take up residence here if he wins, I believe. It’s not the land-bound who call him One-Wing—only your flyers do that.”

“He calls himself One-Wing,” Maris said, her voice rising once more. “And you know why he got the name. Even during the year he wore his wings, he was never more than half a flyer.” She resumed her pacing.

“I’m less than half a flyer myself,” the older woman said quietly, looking into the flames. “A flyer without wings can be a flyer only in dreams and memory. Val has a chance to fly again, and I can help him.”

“You would do absolutely anything to have a woodwinger win in the competition, wouldn’t you?” Maris said accusingly.

Sena turned up her wrinkled face, her good eye bright and sharp on Maris. “What did he do to make you hate him so?”

“You know what he did,” Maris said.

“He won a pair of wings,” Sena said.

She seemed suddenly a stranger. Maris spun away from her, turning her back on the older woman to avoid the blind stare of that white and hideous eye. “He drove a friend of mine to suicide,” she said in a low, intense voice. “Mocked her grief, took her wings, and all but pushed her off that cliff with his own hands.”

“Nonsense,” Sena said. “Ari took her own life.”

“I knew Ari,” Maris said softly, still facing the fire. “She hadn’t had her wings very long, but she was a true flyer, one of the best. Everyone liked her. Val could never have defeated her in fair flight.”

“Val did defeat her.”

“She talked to me at the Eyrie, just after her brother died,” Maris said. “She had seen it all. He was out in his boat, the lines out for moonfish, and she was flying above, keeping an eye on him. She saw the scylla coming, but she was too far away, the winds tore the warning from her mouth. She tried to fly closer, but it wasn’t in time. She saw the boat smashed to splinters, and the scylla’s neck came craning up out of the water with her brother’s body in its jaws. Then it dove. Her brother was all the family she had left.”

“She should not have gone to the competition,” Sena said simply.

“It was only a week off,” Maris said. “She didn’t intend to go, that day she was at the Eyrie, but she was so forlorn. Everyone thought it would help cheer her up. The games, the races, the singing and the drinking. We ail urged her to go, never dreaming that anyone would challenge her. Not in her condition.”

“She knew the rules the council set,” Sena insisted. “The council you caused to be summoned, Maris. Any flyer who appears at the competition is subject to challenge, and no healthy flyer may absent himself more than two years running.”

Maris turned back to face the teacher once again, scowling. “You talk of law. What of humanity, kindness? Yes, Ari should have stayed away. But she desperately wanted to go on with her life. She needed to be among her friends and forget her pain for a while. We watched over her. She was clumsy then, as if she often forgot where she was and what she was doing, but we kept her safe. She was enjoying the competition. No one could believe it when that boy challenged her.”

“Boy,” Sena repeated. “You used the right word, Maris. He was fifteen at the time.”

“He knew what he was doing. The judges tried to explain things to him, but he would not withdraw his challenge. He flew well and Ari flew badly, and that was it. One-Wing had her wings. It was only a month later that she killed herself.”

“Val was half an ocean away at the time,” Sena said. “The flyers had no cause to blame him, and shun him so. And no cause to do what they did the year after, at the competition on Culhall. Challenge after challenge after challenge, from retired flyers and flyer-children just come of age, and the best and the most talented at that.”

“ ‘There was no rule against multiple challenges at that time,” Maris said defensively.

“I notice that there is such a rule now, though. Where was the fairness in that?”

“It didn’t matter. He lost to the second challenger.”

“Yes. A girl who had been practicing with wings since she was seven, whose father was the senior flyer on Little Shotan, was able to defeat him after he had already outflown one other challenger,” Sena said. She made an angry noise and rose slowly from her chair. “And what incentive did he have to fly well against her? There was another waiting to challenge next, a dozen more after him. And you all told him he was only half a flyer anyway.” She moved towards the door.

“Where are you going?” Maris demanded in an angry voice.

“To dinner,” Sena said gruffly. “I have news to tell my students.”

Val arrived the next morning during breakfast. Sena sat at one bench, spooning up her eggs in a grim silence while the students glanced at her curiously. Maris was seated well away from the teacher, listening to S’Rella and brawny young Liane try to convince a third student—a plain, quiet woman named Dana, the oldest of the woodwingers—to remain at the academy. Last night at dinner, Sena had announced the names of the five she would sponsor in challenge. Dana, discouraged, was planning to return home and resume the life she had abandoned. S’Rella and Liane were not doing very well in their attempts to reconvert her. From time to time Maris would add a few words about the importance of desire, but she found it hard to really care. Truth was that Dana had begun much too late and had never had real talent anyway. She was probably just wasting her time, although Maris did not feel it was her place to say that.

All conversation ended when Val entered.

He took off his heavy woolen travelling cape and lowered his bag to the floor. If he took note of the sudden silence or the way the others stared at him, he gave no sign. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Have you any extra food?”

That shattered the spell. Everyone began talking at once, and Leya fetched him a platter of eggs and a mug of tea, and Sena rose and went to him, smiling, and led him back to her table, to sit and eat at her side. Maris watched in silence, staring and feeling uneasy, until S’Rella tugged at the sleeve of her shirt.

“I said, do you think he will win again?” S’Rella asked.

“No.” Maris said, too quickly and too loudly. She rose abruptly. “No one has lost a brother lately. How could he possibly win?”

That afternoon, he made her regret her words.

Sher and Leya had been up all morning, flying practice circuits while Sena yelled instructions at them from below and Maris observed them from the air. Val was unpacking and settling into his room. In the afternoon, S’Rella and Damen were supposed to have use of the academy wings, but Sena had asked one of them to yield to Val, since he had been grounded for months and needed the feel of the wind again. S’Rella had quickly volunteered.

It was crowded on the observation platform when he emerged, wings strapped to back and folded. Most of the students had come to see him fly. Maris, still winged, waited among them.

“Damen,” Sena was saying, “I want you to practice skimming today. Fly as low over the water as you can. Keep your wings stiff and even. You wobble too much. You must improve, or some day you will fall in.” She looked at her other student. “Val, you’d be best to just unlimber now.

Later there will be time for other exercises.”

“No,” Val said. He was standing stiffly while two of the younger students unfolded and locked his wings. “I fly better when I must fly well. Set me a difficulty.” He looked at Damen, who was flexing in preparation for flight. “Or give me a race.” Sena shook her head. “You are premature, Val. I will say when the time has come for racing.”

But Maris pushed forward, possessed of a sudden urge to see how good the infamous Val One-Wing really was. “Let them race, Sena,” she said. “Damen has had exercise enough. He needs a competition.” Damen looked from Maris to Sena and back again, clearly eager to race but unwilling to defy his teacher. “I don’t know,” he said.

Val shrugged. “As you will. I doubt you could give me much of a race in any case.”

That was too much for Damen, who was fiercely proud of his status as one of Woodwings’ best. “Don’t flatter yourself. One-Wing,” he snapped. He lifted an arm and pointed across the waters, to where the waves broke and foamed against a ridge of half-submerged stone. “When we are both aloft and Maris gives the word, three times and three times back. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Val said, studying the distant rocks.

Sena pursed her lips but said nothing. Hearing no further objections, Damen grinned and ran and leapt. The wind took him and lifted.

He soared upward, did a stately circle over the shoreline, and passed above them, his shadow rippling across the stone. Val moved to the edge, his wings fully extended now.

“Your knife, Val,” S’Rella said suddenly. The rest of them looked. His ornate blade, obsidian with beaten silver edges, was still in its sheath at his hip.

Val reached down and pulled it free, looking at it curiously. “What of it?”

“Flyer tradition,” Sena said. “No blade may be carried into the sky. S’Rella, help him off with it. We will keep it safe for you.”

S’Rella moved to obey, but Val gestured her away, “This was my father’s knife, the only decent thing he ever owned. I carry it everywhere.” He slid it back into its sheath.

“It’s flyer tradition,” S’Rella said, her voice puzzled, as if she couldn’t quite understand.

Val smiled sardonically. “Ah. But I am only half a flyer. Move back, S’Rella.” And when she moved back, he threw himself into the air.

Maris walked to the outer edge of the platform, to stand between Sena and S’Rella, all of them watching Val as he spiraled upwards to join Damen. Behind her, she could hear the others talking about him. “One-Wing,” a voice said, Liane perhaps. Damen had called him that too, after Val had mocked him. The Easterner wasted no time making enemies, Maris thought. She said as much to Sena.

“The flyers wasted no time making an enemy of him,” Sena replied. Even her bad eye was turned upward, towards the sky, where Damen and Val now wheeled in great circles around each other, like two birds of prey searching for a weakness. “You are to say the word, Maris,” Sena reminded her.

Maris cupped her hands. “Fly,” she shouted, as loud as she could shout it. The wind took it and carried it up to them.

Damen came out of his circle first, sweeping around and over the water in a slow, leisurely manner, as if he had all the time in the world. Val One-Wing came just behind him, wide silver wings weathervaning a bit, tilting first one way and then the other, as if he were not quite balanced. Both flyers kept low. Maris put a hand up to shade her eyes against the sunlight flashing from their wings.

Halfway to the first turn, Damen was widening his lead and Val began to rise. “The wind is picking up,” Sena commented. Maris nodded. It felt like a crosswind as well. They’d have to fly; it would be no simple matter of letting the breeze carry them where they wished to go.

Damen reached the rocks well ahead of his competition, and began his turn. A ragged shout went up from the woodwingers; Damen was winning. But he lost time on his turn; he came around slow and too wide, faltering at one point when he faced head on into the wind, before he took command of it again. He seemed less steady coming back.

Val began to tack well before the turn, changing his course as he climbed, not all at once but in a series of small increments. He was much higher than Damen now, but substantially behind. When he came around at last, Damen was already halfway back. But Val’s turn was sharper and cleaner than his rival’s.

“Damen’s beating him,” Liane called out. Damen swept by above them. The students shouted again and waved. “Hey, Damen!” Liane bellowed, hands cupped around his mouth. “Go!” Damen came around slowly—again the turn was too wide—and dipped his wing to acknowledge the cheers, but the gesture cost him. He lost the wind for an instant and slid down sharply and dangerously and when he passed in front of them, suddenly the bulk of the great rock fortress was between him and the prevailing wind. He drifted lazily, losing speed, and had to struggle to pull himself back up again.

Val made no such mistake. He turned tightly, keeping high enough above them so he lost no portion of the wind, however small. And suddenly he seemed to be moving much faster as well.

“Val has won it,” Maris said suddenly. She hadn’t meant to speak aloud, but no sooner had it come to her than the words were out.

Sena was smiling. S’Rella looked baffled. “But, Maris, look. Damen is well ahead.”

“Damen is just riding on the winds,” Maris said. “Val is using them. He was searching for the right wind, and now he’s found it. Watch, S’Rella.”

It didn’t take long. Damen’s lead shrank steadily as the two flyers moved out towards the rocks once more, and the wood winger slid badly off course when he tried to come around more sharply than before. By the time he’d corrected himself, Val had reached the turnaround point. A few moments later, Damen seemed to startle visibly as the shadow of Val’s wings fell upon his own. Then the shadow moved in front of him.

The students were quiet, even Liane.

“Give him my congratulations,” Maris said. She then turned and went back inside.

Her room was cold and damp. Maris built a fire in the hearth, and since it was going anyway, decided that she might as well heat the kivas she had bought in Stormtown. She was on her third cup, relaxing at last, when Sena entered unasked, and took a seat.

“How do the practices go?” Maris said.

“He has them all racing,” Sena said. “Damen took it well enough, but he had no taste for another race, so he gave up his wings for the afternoon. They were all eager to try him.” She smiled a bit, clearly proud of their eagerness. “He defeated Sher and Jan handily, humiliated Kerr and Egon. Egon almost fell into the ocean. S’Rella flew him a close race, though. Stole all the tricks he used to defeat Damen. She’s a clever girl, S’Rella.”

“He flew six races?” Maris said.

“Seven,” Sena said, smiling. “Liane almost beat him. The wind is gusting now, very turbulent. It knocked Val around a bit. He’s lean, not as strong as he could be. I’ll have him work on that. Pull-ups, push-ups. And of course he was tired by then, but Liane insisted. Liane can handle rough winds. He’s muscled like a scylla. Sometimes, the way he wrenches his wings around, I think he’s yanking himself through the sky on sheer brawn. Val beat him anyway, though. Very close. Then Leya wanted to race, but the storm was about to break and I chased them all inside. What do you think of One-Wing now, Maris?”

Maris poured the teacher a mug of kivas while she thought about that one; Sena took it wordlessly, with a brief nod of thanks.

“I think he can fly,” Maris said at last. “Beyond that, I don’t know. I still don’t like what he did to Ari. And I didn’t like that business with his knife today, either. Yet I can’t deny his skill.”

“Will he win?”

Maris tasted her drink, let the sweet warmth flow down and into her. She closed her eyes briefly and leaned back. “Perhaps,” she said. “I can think of a dozen flyers who don’t handle themselves as well as he did today. I can also think of a dozen who are better than he, who know all his tricks and more. Tell me who he’s to challenge and I’ll tell you his chances. Beyond that—well, speed is only one skill of a flyer. The competition will judge grace and precision as well.

“Fair enough,” Sena said. “Will you help me ready him?”

Maris stared down at the grey stone floor. “You place me in a difficult position,” she said. “And for the sake of someone I don’t even like.”

“So only those you approve of deserve to fly?” Sena said. “Is that the principle you struggled for seven years ago?”

Maris raised her head, solemnly meeting Sena’s gaze. “You know better. Those who fly best deserve the wings.”

“And you admit Val is skilled,” Sena said. She sipped at her kivas while she waited for an answer.

Maris nodded reluctantly. “But if he should win, the others will not forget the past. You call him Val, but he’ll always be One-Wing to them.”

“I am not asking you to fly guard on him for the rest of his career,” Sena said tartly. “I ask only that you help me now, help Val to get his wings.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing more than you have already done, for the others. Show him his mistakes. Teach him the things your years as a flyer have taught you, as you would teach a child of your own. Advise him. Push him. Challenge him. He is too skilled to gain much by pitting himself against my wood wingers, and you saw today how little he is willing to listen to me. I am old and crippled, and I fly only in my dreams. But you are an active flyer, and reputed one of the best. He will heed you.”

“I wonder,” Maris said. She drained the last inch of kivas from her mug and set it aside. “Well, I suppose I must give him my advice, if he will take it.”

“Good,” Sena said. She nodded briskly and stood up. “I thank you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have work to tend to.” Halfway to the door she paused and half-turned. “I know this is hard for you, Maris. Perhaps if you knew Val better, you might feel some sympathy between you. He admires you, I know.”

Maris was startled, but tried not to show it. “I can’t admire him,” she said. “And the more I see of him, the less I see to sympathize with or like.”

“He is young,” Sena said. “His life has not been easy, and he is obsessed with winning back his wings—not so very different from you, some years back.”

Maris choked down her anger to keep from launching into a tirade about how different Val One-Wing was from her younger self; she would only risk hurting the older woman and making herself look spiteful.

The silence lengthened, and then Maris heard Sena’s soft, uncertain footsteps taking her away.

The next day the final training began.

From sunup until sundown the six challengers flew. Of those who would not compete this year, some went home to visit families on Seatooth or the Shotans or other nearby islands. The others, whose homes lay long dangerous distances away, sat perched on bare rock to watch their fortunate companions and dream of the day when they, too, would have a chance to win their own wings.

Sena stood below on the launching deck, shouting up advice and encouragement to her fledglings, sometimes leaning on a wooden cane, more often using it to gesture and command. Maris, winged, flew guard; circling, watching, yelling cautions. She put S’Rella, Damen, Sher, Leya, and Kerr through their paces, racing against them two at a time, calling upon them to perform the sort of aerial acrobatics that might impress the judges.

Val was given a chance to use a pair of wings as often as any of the others, but Maris found herself observing him in silence. He had been in competition twice before, she reasoned; he knew what would be expected. To treat him as she did the other woodwingers would be to condescend. But, mindful of her promise to Sena, she studied his flying closely, and that night at dinner she sought him out.

Only one hearth was lit in the common room, and the benches seemed strangely empty. When Maris arrived, one table was crowded with the students who would not be competing, and Sena sat at a second, talking in an animated fashion with Sher, Leya, and Kerr. S’Rella and Val were alone at the third table.

Maris let Damen fill her platter with his fish stew, then drew herself a glass of white wine and went to join them.

“How is the food?” she asked, as she sat down across from Val.

He looked at her evenly, but she could read nothing in his large, dark eyes. “Excellent,” he said. “But even at Airhome, we never had cause to complain about the meals. Flyers eat well. Even those with wooden wings.”

S’Rella, seated next to him, pushed a chunk of hookfin across her plate with marked indifference. “This isn’t that good,” she said. “Damen always makes everything so bland. You should be here when I’m cook, Val. Southern food has a lot of spices.” Maris laughed. “Too many, if you want my opinion.”

“I’m not talking about spices,” Val said. “I’m talking about food. This stew has four or five different kinds of fish in it, and chunks of vegetable, and I think there’s wine in the sauce. There’s plenty of it, and not a bit of it is rotten. Only flyers and Landsmen and rich traders would quibble about food like this.”

S’Rella looked wounded. Maris frowned and put down her knife. “Most flyers eat simply, Val. We can’t afford to get fat.”

“I’ve been served fish that stank and meat crawling with worms,” Val said coolly. “I’ve eaten fish stew that was entirely fishless, sometimes for months. I grew up on scraps and leavings from flyer plates. I will be happy to spend the rest of my life eating as simply as a flyer.” There was an infinite amount of sarcasm in the way he said simply.

Maris flushed. Her own true parents had not been wealthy, but her father had fished the sea off Amberly and they had always had enough to eat. After his death, when she had been adopted by the flyer Russ, she had always had enough of everything. She drank some of her wine and changed the subject. “I wanted to talk to you about your turns, Val.”

“Oh?” He swallowed his last piece of fish and shoved the plate away. It was perfectly clean. “Am I doing anything wrong, flyer?” His voice was so flat Maris found it difficult to tell if the sarcasm was still there or not.

“Not wrong, not exactly. But given a choice, I notice that you always turn downwind. Why?”

Val shrugged. “It’s easier.”

“Yes,” Maris said. “But not better. You’ll come out of a downwind turn with more speed, but it will also take more room. And you tend to roll more on a downwind turn, particularly in high winds.”

“An upwind turn is difficult in high winds,” Val said.

“It requires more strength,” Maris agreed. “But you need to work on your strength. You should not avoid difficulty. A habit like always turning downwind may seem harmless, but the time will come when you have to turn upwind, and you should be able to do it well.”

Val’s expression was as guarded as ever. “I see,” he said.

Emboldened, Maris raised a touchier subject. “Something else. I saw that you wore your knife again today during practice.”

“Yes.”

“Next time, don’t,” Maris said. “I don’t think you understand. No matter what the knife means to you, this is a matter of flyer law. No blades may be worn in the sky.”

“Flyer law,” Val said icily. “Tell me, who gave the flyers the right to make laws? Do we have farmers’ law? Glassblowers’ law? The Landsmen make the law. The only law. When my father gave me that knife, he told me never to put it aside. But I did put it aside, during the year I had my wings. I obeyed your flyer law. It did nothing but shame me. I was still One-Wing. Well, I was a boy then, and cowed by flyer law, but I am not a boy now. I choose to wear my knife.”

S’Rella looked at him wonderingly. “But, Val—how can you disregard flyer law, if you’re going to be a flyer?”

“I never said I was going to be a flyer,” Val replied. “Only that I intend to win wings, and fly.” His eyes moved from Maris to S’Rella. “And, S’Rella, you are not going to be a flyer either, even if you should win. Remember that, if it comes to pass. You’ll be as I was—a One-Wing.”

“ ‘That’s not true’.” Maris said angrily. “I was not born of flyers, but they’ve accepted me all the same.”

“Have they?” Val said. He smiled a thin, ironic smile, and rose from the bench. “You’ll excuse me. I have to rest. Tomorrow I must practice my upwind turns, and I’ll need all my strength for that.”

When he was gone, Maris reached across the table to take S’Rella by the hand, but the girl gave her a troubled look and pulled away. “I have to go too,” she said, and Maris was left alone.

She sat for a long time, thinking, and it was not until Damen approached her that she remembered the half-eaten meal on her plate. “Everyone else is gone,” he said softly. “Are you going to finish, Maris?”

“Oh,” she said, “no, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I got distracted and let it get cold.” She smiled and helped Damen with the plates, then left him to clean up the common room and set off down the dank stone corridors in search of Val’s room.

She found it after only one wrong turning, and her anger grew to a white heat as she walked; she was determined to have it out with Val. But it was S’Rella who answered her impatient knocking.

“What are you doing here?” Maris said, startled.

S’Rella hesitated, shy and uncertain. But Val’s voice came from within the room. “She doesn’t have to answer that,” he said.

“No, of course not,” Maris said, abashed. She had no right even asking, she realized. She touched S’Rella on the shoulder. “I’m sorry. Can I come in? I want to talk to Val.”

“Let her in,” Val said, and S’Rella smiled at Maris tentatively and opened the door.

Like all the rooms in the academy, Val’s was small, damp, and cold. He’d lit a fire in the hearth to drive some of the chill away, but so far it had been only partially successful. Maris noticed how bare the room was, completely lacking in the personal touches and trinkets that would tell a visitor something about the person who lived here.

Val was on the floor before the fire, doing push-ups. He’d thrown his shirt over the bed and was exercising barechested. “Well?” he said, without slackening his pace.

Maris was staring, sickened by what she saw. The whole of Val’s back was crisscrossed by lines and thin white scars, mementoes of long-ago beatings. She had to force her eyes from them to remember why she had come. “We need to talk, Val,” she said.

He came bounding to his feet, smiling at her and breathing hard. “Hand me my shirt, S’Rella,” he said. Then, after he had pulled it on, “What do you want to talk about?” His hair, unbound now, fell to his shoulders in a rust-colored waterfall, softening the severity of his face and giving him an oddly vulnerable look.

“May I sit?” Maris asked. Val gestured towards the only chair in the room, and when Maris sat in it, lowered himself onto the backless stool near the fire. S’Rella sat on the edge of the narrow bed. “I don’t want to play games with you, Val,” Maris resumed. “We have a lot of work to do together.”

“What makes you think I am playing games?” he asked.

Maris ignored that. “Listen to me,” she said. “I realize that you are bitter towards the flyers. They made you an outcast, branded you with a mocking, insulting name, and stripped you of your wings perhaps unfairly, with multiple challenge. But if you let that poison your feelings towards all flyers, forever, you will be the loser for it. Win your wings back in the competition, and you will be living with, competing with, and associating with flyers for much of the rest of your life. If you refuse to allow them to be your friends, then you will have no friends. Is that really what you want?”

Val was unmoved. “Windhaven is full of people, and only a few of them are flyers. Or don’t you count the land-bound?”

“Why are you so determined to be hateful? You waste no time making enemies. Maybe you feel the flyers have wronged you, and maybe you are right. But quarrels are seldom onesided. Try to understand that. What you did to Ari was not without wrong, either. If you want to be forgiven for that, then forgive the flyers for what they did. Accept and you may also be accepted.”

Val smiled his thin-lipped smile, but there was something insulting in the way he did it. “Why do you think I want to be accepted? Or forgiven? I’ve done nothing that requires forgiving. I’d challenge Ari again. Unfortunately, she isn’t available this year.”

Maris suddenly found herself speechless with rage.

“Val,” S’Rella said in a small, shocked voice. “How can you say that? She killed herself.”

“Land-bound die every day,” Val told her, his voice softening a bit. “Some of them kill themselves too. No one makes a cause out of that, or sings about it, or avenges their squalid little suicides. You have to shield your own flank, S’Rella. My parents taught me that. No one else will do it for you.” His eyes went back to Maris. “I knew your brother, you know,” he said suddenly.

“Coll?” she said, surprised.

“He visited South Arren seven years ago, on his way to the Outer Islands. There was another singer with him, an older man.”

“Barrion,” Maris said. “Coil’s mentor.”

“They stayed a week or two, singing in the dockside taverns, waiting for a ship to take them further east. That was the first time I heard about you, Maris of Lesser Amberly. You were my hero for a time. Your brother sings a pretty little song about you.”

“Seven years ago,” Maris said. “That must have been right after the council.”

Val smiled. “It was the first we had heard of it. I was around twelve, just short of the age when a flyer-child would be taking up his wings, but of course I had no hope of that. Until your brother came to my island and sang about you and your council and your academies. When Airhome opened a few months later, I was one of the first students. I still loved you then, for making it all possible.”

“And what happened?”

Val half-turned on his stool, stretching his hands out toward the fire. “I grew disillusioned. I thought that you’d opened the world to everyone, where once it had belonged only to flyers. I felt such a kinship with you. I was naive.”

He turned back again, and Maris shifted uncomfortably under his intense, accusing gaze. “I thought we were alike,” he continued. “I thought you wanted to break open the rotten flyer society. I found out I was wrong. All you ever wanted was to be a part of the whole thing. You wanted the fame and the status and the wealth and the freedom, you wanted to party on the Eyrie with the rest of them and look down on the dirt-digging land-bound. You embrace what I despise.

“The irony of it, though, is that you can’t be a flyer, no matter how much you want to. No more than I can be a flyer, or S’Rella here, or Damen, or any of the rest of them.”

“I am a flyer,” Maris said quietly. “They let you play at it,” Val said, “because you try so very hard to fit in, to be just like them. But both of us know that they don’t really trust you, or accept you as they’d accept one of their own. You have your wings, but you’re still suspect, aren’t you? Whether you admit it or not, you were the first One-Wing, Maris.”

Maris stood up. His words had made her furious, but she didn’t want to lash out at him or lose her dignity by quarreling with him in front of S’Rella. “You’re wrong,” she said as calmly and quietly as she could manage. But then she found she had no words to refute him with. “I feel sorry for you, Val,” she continued. “You hate the flyers and you have contempt for the land-bound. For everyone who is not yourself. I don’t want your respect or your gratitude. It’s not just the privileges of flyer society you’re rejecting, it’s the responsibilities as well. You’re totally selfish and self-absorbed. If I hadn’t promised Sena, I’d have nothing more to do with helping you get your wings. Good night.”

She left the room. Val did not move or call her back. But as the door swung shut behind her, she heard him speak to S’Rella. “You see,” he said flatly.

And that night the dream came to Maris again, and she twisted and fought and woke with the bedclothes wrapped about her and soaked with clammy sweat. It had been worse than before. She had been falling, falling, falling endlessly through still air, and all around were other flyers, soaring on their silver wings and watching, and not one of them moved to help.

Day after day the practice continued.

Sena grew hoarse and intense and short-tempered, and presided over all like a tyrannical Landsman. Damen sharpened his turns and heard long lectures every day on flying with his head and not just his arms. S’Rella worked on launchings and landings and acrobatics, looking for grace to match her stamina. Sher and Leya, already graceful, stayed in the air for hours at a time in high winds, trying to build up a powerful endurance. Kerr worked on everything.

And Val One-Wing did what he would. Maris watched him from afar, as she watched all of them, and said little. She answered what questions he had, gave advice on the rare occasions that he asked for it, and treated him always with careful, distant courtesy.

Sena, absorbed entirely in the flying of her protégés, noticed none of it, but the woodwingers picked up their cues from Maris, and carefully kept their distance from Val. He aided the process himself; he had a sharp tongue and no compunction about making enemies. He told Kerr to his face that he was hopeless, sending the boy into a fit of sulking, and he mocked proud, stubborn Damen endlessly, defeating him again and again in informal races. The students, led by Damen and Liane and a few others, soon began calling Val “One-Wing” openly. But if that bothered him, he gave no sign.

Val’s isolation was not quite total. If the others shunned him, he had at least S’Rella. She was more than merely polite to Val: she sought him out, asking for his advice, ate with him, and always, when Sena paired students off to race, S’Rella was the first to challenge Val.

Maris saw sense in her actions; pitting her skills against those of a stronger flyer would help her learn and overcome her weaknesses faster than anything else. And S’Rella, Maris knew, was determined to win her wings this year. There were other, less practical, reasons why S’Rella might be drawn to Val as well. The shy Southern girl had always been a bit out of place among the woodwingers, all of whom were Westerners; she cooked differently, dressed differently, wore her hair differently, spoke with a slight accent, even told different tales when the students gathered together for storytelling. Val One-Wing, from Eastern, was similarly displaced, and it was natural, Maris told herself, that the two odd birds would fly together.

Still, it made Maris uneasy to see the two talking together. S’Rella was young and impressionable, and Maris did not want her picking up Val’s ideas. Besides, too close an association with One-Wing would make her unpopular among the other flyers, and S’Rella was vulnerable enough to be hurt by that.

But Maris pushed those worries to the back of her mind and did not interfere. There was no time now for personal fretting; she had to train these woodwingers for the real thing.

At the end of every day of training Maris raced each student individually. On the second day before the scheduled departure for the competition, the wind was strong from the north, and its cold edge seemed to slice through the shivering students. It grew colder by the minute.

“You don’t need to wait,” Maris told them. “It’s too cold for standing around. After I race you, help the next student with the wings, and then you can go on inside.”

The exertion of flying kept Maris warm, but it also tired her. Finally, bone weary and beginning to really feel the cold, Maris saw that she was alone on the flyer’s cliff with Val.

Her shoulders slumped. She had not expected him to wait. And to race him now, when he was fresh and she was so tired. . . . She looked up at the swirling purple sky and licked dried salt from the corners of her mouth.

“It’s late for flying,” she said. “The winds are wild and it’s getting dark. We can race another time.”

“The winds will make it that much more of a challenge,” Val said. His eyes rested coolly on hers, and Maris knew, with a sinking heart, that he had been waiting a long time for this moment.

“Sena may worry,” she began weakly.

“Of course, if flying against the woodwingers has worn you out . . .”

“I once flew thirty hours without a rest,” she said, stung. “An afternoon of play doesn’t wear me out.”

His smile mocked her: she saw that she had fallen into his trap.

“Get your wings on,” she said.

She did not offer to help him, but it was obvious that he was accustomed to putting on his wings unaided. Maris tried unobtrusively to flex some resilience back into her muscles, telling herself that a victory for him, with her as tired as she was and the winds so capricious, would mean nothing. And he must know that.

“The usual? Twice out and back?”

Maris nodded, glancing across the grey, churning waves to the distant spire of rock they all used as a marker. How many times had she flown out there today? Thirty? More? It didn’t matter. She’d fly the last two laps as if they were the first; her pride insisted.

“Who will judge us?” she asked.

Val snapped the last two joints of his wings into place. “We’ll know,” he said. “That’s all that matters. I’ll launch first, you call ready. Agreed?”

“Yes.” She watched as, with a few swift steps, Val moved to the edge of the cliff and leapt outward. His body bobbed on the conflicting winds like a small boat on rough water until he took command, veered off to the right, and began to climb.

Maris took a breath and let her mind clear. She ran lightly forward and pushed off. For one brief moment she fell; then her wings caught the winds and she was buoyed upward. She took her time coming to Val’s level, climbing in a ragged spiral, needing those few moments to get the feel back, so her tired body would know how best to use the winds.

When she came up to him, the two of them circled warily, around and around each other, struggling to hold position amid the restless winds. Her eyes met his, and then she looked away, straight ahead, towards the rock that was their marker.

“Ready . . . go,” she shouted, and they were off.

The winds were strong and turbulent, the prevailing north wind interrupted by gusts from one direction, then from another. The whole eastern sky was a mass of darkening clouds, towering grey shapes that threatened storm weather. Maris gave them an uneasy glance and started to climb again, looking for a steadier, faster wind in the heights. She fought constantly to keep on course; the gusts pushed her first one way, then another, demanding constant attention and frequent half-turns and corrections. She could not afford any detours.

Although she did not look for him, she often caught sight of Val. He sometimes flew below her, but more often he was beside her, disconcertingly close. He flew well, and it did not help Maris to reflect that he was using the advice she had given him. There would be nothing easy or simple about defeating him, she thought.

Then Val surged ahead.

A shock of adrenalin coursed through Maris and she flung her body to the left to catch the changing wind that had given him his push. They might call him One-Wing, but he knew how to use both wings in the air. Flying races against woodwingers had made her soft, Maris thought. Her responses had been dulled.

Ahead of her, just barely out of reach, Val’s wings swept around the spike of rock. He turned downwind, Maris noted, coming around wide and rocking just a little, but picking up speed as he did so. Then he was headed back towards the cliff.

Determined to overtake him, Maris flew dangerously close to the rock. Her wing-tip grazed the spire and that slight scraping threw her sideways, off balance for a crucial moment. She sheared downward crookedly, the wind lost to her, stalling, her heart pounding in her throat, before she finally gained control again. Val had put more distance between them. She was only grateful that he hadn’t seen her blunder.

She had lost altitude, but she caught a strong updraft above the rocks, and suddenly Maris was rising again. She flew recklessly, thinking only of the immediate need for speed, searching and shifting until she found a steady current she could use.

It moved her close to Val, but she was so intent on passing him that she barely noticed the approach of land, and abruptly she was clutched by a sinker, a cold pocket of air that yanked her down like an icy hand from below. Val somehow flew clear of it, found some impossible lift that shoved him up and further ahead while Maris checked her abrupt descent and banked to free herself from the downdraft. He circled above the fortress, gauging the winds by the thin smoke rising from the academy’s chimneys, and was on his way back out again, higher and higher, before Maris had finished her recovery.

It was as if the sky favored Val this evening, Maris thought resentfully as she came around. The winds toyed with her and stalled her, gusting unpredictably every time she tried to ride them, but let Val fly them freely. He seemed almost unaware of the dangerous uncertainty of the gales, somehow finding, amid constant shifting, the sure and fluid wind on which to glide.

Maris knew then that she had lost the race. Val was high above her, knowing that altitude often meant speed, and it would take her too long to reach his height, even if she should find the winds she needed to take her there. She tried to make up the distance between them, but the struggle against the ragged gusts wore her out, and the awareness that already it was too late took the heart out of her efforts. Val lost some time descending for his landing, but still passed above the cliff the second, final time more than a full wingspan ahead of her. Clearly, he had won.

Maris was too drained by the flight to smile at him when they had both come down in the soft sand of the landing pit, too depressed to pretend that it didn’t matter. In silence, she removed her wings as hastily as she could, her numbed fingers often slipping and fumbling uselessly at the straps. At last, without a word having passed between them, Maris slung her wings over her shoulder and turned towards the weathered fortress.

Val blocked her way.

“I won’t tell anyone,” he said.

Her head jerked up, and she felt a hot flush of embarrassment rise in her cheeks. “I don’t care what you say—about anything—to anyone!”

“Oh?” His faint smile taunted her, made her realize how hollow her words rang. Obviously she did care.

“It wasn’t a fair trial,” she snapped, and instantly regretted the feeble, childish complaint.

“No,” Val agreed, his tone flat enough so Maris had no clue as to whether irony was intended. “You were flying all day, while I was well-rested. I could never have beaten you if we were both fresh. We all know that.”

“I’ve lost before,” Maris said, trying hard to control her emotions. “It doesn’t bother me.”

“I see,” said Val. “Good.” He smiled again.

Maris shrugged irritably, feeling the wings scrape her back. “I’m very tired,” she said. “Please excuse me.”

“Certainly,” Val moved out of her way and she trudged past him, crossed the sand wearily, and began climbing the flight of worn, moss-covered steps that led to the fortress’ seaward entrance. But at the top, some impulse made her hesitate and turn before ducking inside.

Val had not followed her. He still stood out on the sand, a gaunt solitary figure in the gathering dusk, his folded wings propped lightly on one shoulder. He was looking off over the sea, where a lone scavenger-kite sailed in ragged circles against the clouds of sunset.

Maris shivered and went inside.

The yearly competition was a festive three-day affair. Once it had been only games and drinking, with nothing at stake except pride. In those days it was smaller, and traditionally held on the Eyrie. But since the challenge system had been instituted seven years ago, flyer participation had grown dramatically, and it had been necessary to move the competition to the islands.

The Landsmen competed for it eagerly, donating facilities and labor. It was a holiday for their own people, and brought crowds of visitors with good metal coin from other islands. The land-bound had few spectacles like it, and the flyers were still figures of romance and adventure to many of them.

This year the contests were to be held on Skulny, a mid-sized island to the northeast of Little Shotan. Seatooth’s Landsman had chartered a ship for Sena and the wood wingers, and a runner had just brought word that it was waiting at the smallisland’s only port. They would sail on the evening tide.

“Setting out in the dark,” Sena grumbled, taking a seat beside Maris at breakfast. “Asking for trouble.”

Kerr looked up from his porridge. “Oh, but we have to leave on the tide,” he said earnestly. “That’s why we leave in the evening.”

Sena regarded him sourly with her good eye. “Know a lot about sailing, do you?”

“Yes, ma’am. My brother Rac captains a trading ship, one of the big three-masters, and my other brother is a sailor too, though he’s only a hand on a channel ferry. I thought that I—well, before I came to Woodwings, I thought I’d be a sailor too. It’s about the closest thing there is to flying.”

Sena shuddered. “Like flying without control, like flying with weights dragging you into the sea, like flying blind, yes, that’s sailing.”

She’d been speaking loud enough for everyone to hear, and there was widespread laughter around the room. Kerr blushed and concentrated on his bowl.

Maris looked at Sena with sympathy, trying not to laugh for Kerr’s sake. She knew too well the flyer hatred of entrusting life to the sailors—Sena, although grounded for years, had still never lost the flyer’s almost superstitious fear of travelling by sea.

“How long will it take?” Maris asked.

“Oh, they say, winds willing, three days, with a stop in Stormtown. What does it matter? Either we’ll get there, or we’ll all drown.” The teacher looked at Maris. “You fly to Skulny today?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” Sena said, reaching across to take Maris by the arm. “Then everyone need not drown. We have two sets of wings we’ll be needing in the competition. It would be insane to take them in the boat with us—”

“Ship,” Kerr interrupted.

Sena looked at him. “Whatever,” she said. “Boat or ship, it would be insane. We might as well put them to use. Will you take two of the students with you? The long flight should be good practice.”

Maris looked down the table and saw how everyone within hearing distance had suddenly become still. No spoons were raised, no jaws moved as they waited for her answer.

“That’s a fine idea,” Maris said, smiling. “I’ll take S’Rella with me, and—” She hesitated, trying to decide who to choose.

Two tables down, Val set down his spoon and rose. “I’ll go,” he said.

Maris’ eyes met his across the room. “S’Rella and Sher or Leya,” she said stubbornly. “They need that kind of flight the most.”

“I’ll stay with Val, then,” S’Rella said quietly.

“And I’d rather go with Leya,” Sher added.

“It will be S’Rella and Val,” Sena said irritably, “and I’ll hear no more about it. If the rest of us die at sea, they have the best chance of becoming flyers and honoring our memory.” She pushed aside her porridge bowl and turned on the bench. “Now I must go see our patron the Landsman and be obsequious to her for a while. I will see you again before you leave for Skulny.”

Maris scarcely heard her; her eyes were still locked with Val’s. He smiled at her thinly, then spun and followed Sena from the room. S’Rella left soon after.

Kerr was talking to her, Maris suddenly realized. She shook herself back to attention and smiled at him. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

“It isn’t so dangerous,” he said quietly. “Not just to sail from here to Skulny. There’s only a few miles of open ocean, when the ship crosses from Little Shotan to Skulny. Mostly we’ll hug the shores of the Shotans, with land never out of sight. And the ships aren’t as fragile as she thinks. I know about ships.”

“I’m sure you do, Kerr,” Maris said. “Sena is just thinking like a flyer. After the freedom of having your own wings, it’s hard to travel by sea and trust your life to those handling the sails and the tiller.”

Kerr chewed his lip. “I guess I see,” he said, without conviction. “But if the flyers all think that, they don’t know much. It’s not as dangerous as she says.” Satisfied, he went back to his breakfast.

Maris grew thoughtful, as she ate. He was right, she realized with a sense of vague unease; flyers were often limited in the ways they thought, judging everything from their own perspective. But the idea that Val’s sweeping condemnation of them might have some justice to it disturbed her more than she was willing to admit.

She shrugged it off and finished. Afterwards, she helped Sher and Leya with the cleaning-up, and tried to answer their eager questions about what the competition would be like this year. At last she got away and went to look for S’Rella and—reluctantly—Val.

Neither of them were in their room, nor in any of the other obvious places, and no one seemed to know where they had gone after leaving the common room. Maris wandered through the dark, cool corridors until she was thoroughly lost, making her choice of turning according to whether or not there were torches for her to light in the wall-sockets.

She was thinking of giving out a cry for help, and laughing at herself for being so helpless within the enclosure of walls, when she heard, very faintly, the sound of voices, and pressed on. One more turn to the right and she found them, together, sitting close in a small cul-de-sac with a window overlooking the sea. There was something in the way they leaned near to each other that spoke of intimacy, and it changed Maris’ mood to one of annoyance.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” Maris said abruptly.

S’Rella half-turned from Val and stood up. “What is it?” she asked.

“We’re flying to Skulny, you know,” Maris said. “Can you be ready to leave in an hour? Anything you wanted to take with you, you can pack up and give to Sena.”

“I can be ready to leave in a minute,” S’Rella said, and her smile put a damper on Maris’ pique. “I was so happy when you named me, Maris. You don’t know what this means to me.” Her face alight, she leaped forward and embraced Maris.

Maris hugged her back. “I think I do,” she said. “Now, go off and get ready.”

S’Rella bid a brief goodbye to Val and then was off. Maris stood watching her go, and then turned back to him, and hesitated.

Val was still looking down the tunnel where S’Rella had disappeared, smiling, but there was something about him—the smile was real, Maris realized. That was it. He was smiling with something like fondness, and it gave him a softer, more human look than she had ever seen him wear.

Then his eyes snapped back to her, and the smile changed, subtly, a small twist at the corners, and now he was smiling for Maris and the smile was full of derision and hostility. “I haven’t thanked you for naming me,” he said. “I was so happy when you said I could fly with you.”

“Val,” Maris said wearily, “we may not like each other, but we have a long flight to make together. You could at least try to be civil. Don’t mock me. Are you going to pack?”

“I’ve never unpacked,” he said. “I’ll give my bag to Sena, and wear my knife. It’s the only thing that matters. Don’t worry, I’ll be ready.” He hesitated. “And I won’t bother you on Skulny. When we land, I’ll find my own quarters. I can amuse myself for a few days without imposing on you and your flyer friends. Fair enough?”

“Val,” Maris started. But he had turned away and was staring through the cell’s small window at the moving, cloudy sky, his face cold and closed.

Sena brought the others out to the launching cliff to watch Maris, S’Rella, and Val depart. All of them were in the highest of spirits, laughing and joking, vying with each other for the privilege of helping Maris and S’Rella with their wings. There was a mood of wild and restless gaiety among them that was infectious; Maris felt her own spirits rise, and for the first time she was eager for the competitions.

“Let them be, let them be!” Sena cried, laughing. “They certainly can’t fly with the lot of you hanging on their wings!”

“Wish they could,” mumbled Kerr. He pushed at his nose, which had turned bright red in the wind.

“You’ll have your chance,” S’Rella said, sounding defensive.

“No one grudges you this,” Leya said quickly.

“You two are the best of us,” Sher added.

“Save it,” Sena said, putting one arm around Leya, the other around Sher. “Go now. We’ll wave goodbye and meet you again on Skulny.”

Maris turned to S’Rella and saw that the younger woman was watching her intently, her whole body tensed and ready for Maris’ slightest signal. She remembered her own earliest flights, when she had still not quite believed that she could have wings of her own, and she touched S’Rella’s shoulder and spoke to her kindly.

“We’ll all stay close together and take it easy,” she said. “The stunts are for the competitions—right now, we’ll concentrate on steady flying. This will be a long trip for you, I know, but don’t worry about it—you’ve got enough stamina for twice the distance. Just relax and trust yourself. I’ll be there watching out for you, but you won’t really need me.”

“Thank you,” S’Rella said. “I’ll do my best.”

Maris nodded and signaled, and Damen and Liane came out and unfolded her wings for her, strut by strut, pulling the bright silver fabric taut until her wingspan spread twenty feet. Then she was off, leaping away from the cliff to a chorus of farewells and good wishes, into the cool, steady, faintly rain-scented flow of the wind. She circled and watched S’Rella’s takeoff, trying to judge it as if S’Rella were in competition.

No doubt about it. S’Rella had improved greatly recently. The clumsiness was gone, and she did not hesitate at the edge, but sprang smoothly clear of the fortress and, having judged the wind nicely, began to rise almost at once.

“I don’t believe your wings are of wood at all!” Maris called to her.

Then both of them swung through the sky in impatient, widening circles, waiting for Val.

He had been leaning against the door through all of the joking and the preparations, standing outside it all, his face blank and guarded. He was winged already, having strapped them on without help. Now he walked calmly through the group of students and would-be flyers, and stood perched on the brink of the precipice, his feet half-over the edge. Painstakingly he unfolded the first three struts, but he did not lock them into place. Then he slid his arms through the loops, flexed, knelt and stood again.

Damen reached to help him unfold his wings, but Val turned and said something sharp—Maris, circling above, lost the words in the wind—and Damen fell back in confusion.

Then Val laughed, and jumped.

S’Rella trembled visibly in the air, her wings shaking with her shock. Below, Maris heard someone scream, and someone else was swearing.

Val fell, body straight, like a diver’s, ten feet down, twenty . . .

And suddenly he was falling no more, the wings came out of nowhere, flaring, flashing silver-white in the sun as they sprang open almost with their own volition. The air screamed past them, and Val caught it and turned it and rode on it, and all at once he was flying, skimming the breakers with impossible speed, then pulling up, climbing, soaring, the waves and the rocks and death all receding visibly beneath him, and Maris could hear dimly the peal of his triumphant windblown laughter.

S’Rella had locked into a stall, still watching Val. Maris shouted commands at her, and she broke out of it, twisting her wings at an angle and slanting off back over the land. Above the fortress, its bare rock heated in the sun, she found a strong riser and sailed back up to safety.

Below, Sena was cursing up at Val and shaking her cane in apoplectic fury. He paid no attention. He was rising, higher and higher, and from the woodwingers on the cliff came the ragged, popping sound of applause.

Maris went after him, banking, breaking her circle, heading out over the sea. Val was already ahead of her. But flying easily this time, luxuriating in his stunt.

When she caught him, flying as near to him as she dared—above and a bit behind and to the right—she began to shout curses down at him, borrowing freely from Sena’s more extensive vocabulary.

Val laughed at her.

“That was dangerous and useless and stupid,” Maris shouted. It was not the first time she had seen the stunt. Once, when she was just a child, she had watched a flyer long dead perform it at the Eyrie. But that was a decade past, and she had seen it then with a child’s eyes, as the woodwingers saw it today. Now she saw it differently. .“You could have killed yourself . . . a jammed strut . . . if you hadn’t flung them hard enough . . .”

Val still laughed. “My risk,” he shouted back. “And I didn’t fling them . . . rigged springs . . . better than Raven.”

Raven: the name startled her. Raven was the flyer who had invented that trick, oiling his wing struts and flinging them away as he fell, each strut jarring loose the next as it snapped into place. But how had Val learned of Raven? “Raven was a fool,” she shouted. “And long dead . . . what’s Raven to you?”

“Your brother sang that song, too,” Val yelled. Then he banked and dove, away from her, abruptly terminating the conversation. But Maris understood. She had witnessed Raven’s Fall at the Eyrie, and told her brother Coll of it, and later Coll had made it into a song, one of the first that was entirely his own.

Numb, and seeing no use in further pursuit of Val, Maris wheeled around and looked for S’Rella, who was following several hundred yards behind and below them. She drifted down to join her, trying to tell her pounding heart to relax, willing her stiff muscles to loosen and get the feel of the wind.

S’Rella was ghost pale, and flying badly. “What happened?” she cried when Maris approached. “I could have died.”

“It was a stunt,” Maris called to her. “Flyer named Raven used to do it. Val concocted his own version.”

S’Rella flew silently for a moment, considering that, and then a little color came tentatively back into her face. “I thought someone had pushed him,” she shouted. “A stunt—it was beautiful.”

“It was insane,” Maris called back. She was quietly horrified that S’Rella could possibly have thought one of her fellow students capable of shoving Val to his death. He has been influencing her, she thought bitterly.

The rest of the flight, as Maris had predicted, was easy. Maris and S’Rella flew close together, Val ahead and much higher, preferring the company of rainbirds, it seemed. They kept him in sight throughout the afternoon, but only with an effort.

The winds were cooperative, blowing them so steadily towards Skulny that they hardly needed to do more than relax and glide. It was at times a dull flight, but Maris did not regret it. They skirted the coast of Big Shotan, fishing fleets everywhere beyond the little harbor towns, bringing in as big a catch as possible in the storm-free weather. And they saw Stormtown from the air, its great bay in the center of the city, windmills turning all along the shores, forty of them, or fifty—S’Rella tried to count them, but they were behind her before she was half done. And in the open sea between Little Shotan and Skulny, near sunset, they spied a scylla, its long neck craning up but of the blue-green water as its rows of powerful flippers churned just beneath the surface. S’Rella seemed delighted. She had heard about scyllas all her life, but this was the first she had actually seen.

They reached Skulny just ahead of the night. As they circled before landing, they could see figures below setting up lanterns on poles all along the beach, to guide in later flyers. Already the small flyers’ lodge nearby was ablaze with lights and activity: the parties, thought Maris, began earlier every year.

Maris tried to make her landing an example to S’Rella, but even as she was on her hands and knees, shaking sand out of her hair, she heard S’Rella thump to the ground nearby, and realized the girl had surely been too busy with her own landing to notice how clumsy or adept her teacher was.

Whoops of pleasure and welcome surrounded them at once. Eager hands reached out to them. “Help you, flyer? Help you, please?”

Maris took hold of one strong hand, and looked up into the eager face of a young boy with wind-tangled hair. His face was alive with pleasure; he was here for the glory of being near flyers, and was probably thrilled by the thought of the coming competition on his own island.

But as he was helping her off with her wings—and another boy was helping S’Rella—suddenly there was the sound of wind-on-wings again, and another thump, and Maris glanced over to see that Val had come in. They had lost sight of him near dusk, and she had assumed he was already down.

He climbed awkwardly to his feet, the great silver wings bobbing on his back, and two young girls moved in on him. “Help you, flyer.” The refrain was almost a chant. “Help you, flyer,” and their hands were on him.

“Get away,” he snapped, anger in his voice. The girls jumped back, startled, and even Maris looked up. Val was always so cool and controlled; the outburst was totally unlike him.

“We just want to help you with your wings, flyer,” the bolder of the girls said.

“Don’t you have any pride?” Val said. He was unstrapping himself, without help. “Don’t you have anything better to do than fawn over flyers who treat you like dirt? What are your parents?”

The girl quailed. “Tanners, flyer.”

“Then go and learn tanning,” he said. “It’s a cleaner trade than slaving for the flyers.” He turned away from her, began to fold up his wings carefully.

Maris and S’Rella were free of their own wings now. “Here,” said the boy who had been helping her, as he offered them to her, neatly folded. Suddenly abashed, Maris fumbled in her pocket and offered the boy an iron coin. She had always accepted the help without payment before, but something in what Val said had struck a chord.

But the boy just laughed and refused to take her money. “Don’t you know,” he said, “it’s good luck to touch a flyer’s wings.” And then he was off, and Maris saw as he darted towards his companions that the beach was full of children. They were everywhere, helping with the poles, playing in the sand, waiting for the chance to aid a flyer.

But looking at them, Maris thought of Val, and wondered if there were others on the island who were not so thrilled by the flyers and the competition; who stayed home to brood and sulk and resent the privileged caste that flew the skies of Windhaven.

“Take your wings, flyer?” a voice said sharply, and Maris glanced over. It was Val, mocking. “Here,” he said, in his normal tone, and he offered her the wings he’d worn on the flight. “I imagine you’ll want these for safekeeping.”

She took the wings from him, holding one pair awkwardly in each hand. “Where are you going?”

Val shrugged. “This is a fair-sized island. Somewhere there’s a-town or two, and a tavern or two, and a bed to sleep in. I have a few irons.”

“You could come up to the lodge with S’Rella and me,” Maris said hesitantly.

“Could I?” Val said, his voice perfectly level. His smile flickered at her. “That would be an interesting scene. More dramatic than my launching today, I’d guess.”

Maris frowned. “I haven’t forgotten that,” she said. “S’Rella could have hurt herself, you know. She was badly startled by that fool’s leap of yours. I ought—”

“I believe I’ve heard this before,” Val said. “Excuse me.” He turned and was gone, walking quickly up the beach with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

Behind her, Maris heard S’Rella laughing and talking with the other young people, sharing her delight in her first long flight. When Maris approached, she broke off and ran to take her hand. “How was I?” she asked breathlessly. “How did I do?”

“You know how you did—you just want me to praise you,” Maris said, her tone a mock-scold. “All right, I will. You flew as if you’d never done anything else in your life, as if you’d been born to it.”

“I know,” S’Rella said shyly. Then she laughed in sheer joy. “It was marvellous. I never want to do anything but fly!”

“I know how you feel,” Maris said. “But a rest will do us good right now. Let’s go in and sit by the fire and see who else has come early.”

But when she turned to go, S’Rella hung back. Maris looked at her curiously, and then understood; S’Rella was worried about the sort of reception she would find inside the lodge. She was an outsider, after all, and no doubt Val had been filling her with tales of his own rejection.

“Well,” Maris said, “you might as well come in, unless you feel like flying back tonight. They’ll have to meet you sometime.”

S’Rella nodded, still a bit timorous, and they started up the pebbled incline towards the lodge.

It was a small two-room building of soft, weathered white rock. The main room, well-lit and overheated by a roaring fire, was noisy, crowded, and unappealing after the clean solitude of the open air. The faces of the flyers seemed to blur together as Maris looked around in search of special friends, S’Rella standing nervously behind her. They hung the wings on hooks along the walls, and began to fight their way across the room.

A heavy-set, middle-aged man with a full beard was pouring some liquid into the huge, fragrant stewpot hung over the fire, and roaring insults at someone demanding nourishment. Something drew Maris’ eyes back after they had passed over him, and with a strange little shock she recognized the overweight cook. When had Garth grown so old and fat?

She started towards him when thin arms went around her from behind, hugging her fiercely, and she caught the faint whisper of a flowery scent.

“Shalli!” she said, turning. She noticed the rounded stomach. “I didn’t expect to see you here—heard you were preg—”

Shalli stopped her lips with a finger. “Hush. I get enough of that from Corm. And I tell him that our little flyer has to learn about flying from the very beginning. But I am careful, truly. I took the flight slow and easy. I couldn’t miss this! Corm wanted me to take a boat. Can you imagine?” Shalli’s beautiful, mobile face went from one comic expression to another as she spoke.

“You’re not going to compete?”

“Oh, no. It wouldn’t be fair, me with the extra ballast!” She patted the small mound and laughed. “I’m to judge. And I’ve promised Corm that after this I’ll stay home and be a good little mother ’til the baby comes, unless there’s an emergency.”

Maris felt a pang of guilt, knowing that the ‘emergencies’ Shalli had to fly were caused by her own absence from Amberly. But after the competition, she swore to herself, she’d stay home and tend to her duties.

“Shalli, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine,” Maris said. S’Rella was hanging back shyly, so Maris pulled her gently forward. “This is S’Rella, our most promising student. She flew here from Woodwings with me today, her longest flight so far.”

“Ooh.” Shalli arched her brows. “S’Rella, this is Shalli. From Lesser Amberly, like me. She used to fly guard on me, when I was just learning how to use the wings.”

They exchanged polite greetings. Then Shalli, giving S’Rella a measuring look, said, “Good luck in the competitions. You’d better not beat Corm,though. I think I’d go mad if he was around the house every day for a year.”

Shalli smiled, but S’Rella seemed to take the jest in earnest. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she said, “but someone has to lose. I want to win as much as any flyer.”

“Mmm, well, it’s not quite the same,” Shalli murmured. “But I was only joking, child. You wouldn’t want to challenge Corm, really. You wouldn’t have a very good chance.” She glanced across the room. “Excuse me, please—I see that Corm has found a cushion for me, and now I suppose I must go and sit on it if I’m not to hurt his feelings. I’ll talk to you later, Maris. S’Rella, it was nice to meet you.”

They watched her moving easily through the crowded room, away from them.

“Would I?” S’Rella asked, her tone troubled.

“Would you what?”

“Have a chance against Corm.”

Maris looked at her unhappily, not knowing what to say. “He’s very good,” she managed finally. “He’s been flying for almost twenty years now, and he’s won prizes in lots of these competitions. No, you’re probably not his match. But that’s no disgrace, S’Rella.”

“Which one is he?” S’Rella said, looking around with displeasure.

“Over by Shalli—see—the darkhaired one in black and grey.” She tried not to point.

“He’s handsome,” S’Rella said.

Maris laughed. “Ah, yes. Half the land-bound girls on Amberly were in love with him when he was younger. They were all heartbroken when he and Shalli wed.”

That drew a small smile back to S’Rella’s face. “On my home island, all the boys used to dream about S’Landra, our flyer. Were you in love with Corm too?”

“Never. I knew him too well.”

“MARIS!” The bellow rang from the rafters, attracting attention all over the lodge. Garth was yelling at her from across the room, gesturing her closer.

She grinned. “Come,” she said, pulling S’Rella after her through the press, nodding polite hellos at old acquaintances as she went.

Garth crushed her in a formidable hug when she reached him, then he pushed her back to look at her. “You look tired, Maris,” he told her. “Flying too much.”

“And you,” she said, “have been eating too much.” She jabbed a finger into his stomach where it hung over his belt. “What’s this? Are you and Shalli going to give birth together?”

Garth snorted with laughter. “Ah,” he growled, “my sister’s fault. She brews her own ale, you know. Got a right little business going. I have to help her out, of course, buy a little now and again.”

“You’re probably her best customer,” Maris said. “When did you grow the beard?”

“Oh, a month ago, two, something like that. I haven’t seen you in a half-year, it seems.”

Maris nodded. “Dorrel was fretting over you the last time we were at the Eyrie together. Something about a date to get drunk, and you didn’t make it.”

He frowned. “Ah,” he said, “yes, I know all about it. Dorrel goes on endlessly. I was ill, that’s all, no great mystery.” He turned back to the fire and gave his stew a stir. “There’ll be food soon. Hungry? I made this myself, Southern style, with lots of spices and tone.”

Maris turned. “You hear that, S’Rella? You’ll get some decent food, k sounds like.” She ushered the girl forward to face Garth. “S’Rella’s a wood winger, and one of the best. She’ll be taking some poor soul’s wings this year. S’Rella, this is Garth of Skulny, one of our hosts here and an old friend.”

“Not that old,” Garth protested. He smiled at S’Rella. “Why, you’re as beautiful as Maris used to be, before she got thin and tired. Do you fly as well?”

“I try to,” S’Rella said.

“Modest, too,” he said. “Well, Skulny knows how to treat flyers, even fledglings. Anything you want, you tell me about it. Are you hungry? This will be ready soon. In fact, maybe you can help me with the spices. I’m not really from Southern, you know, maybe I didn’t get it right.” He took her by her hand and drew her closer to the fire, then forced a spoonful of stew at her. “Here, try this, tell me what you think.”

As S’Rella tasted, Garth glanced at Maris and pointed. “Look, you’re wanted,” he said. Dorrel was standing in the doorway, still holding his folded wings, shouting to her above the din of the party. “Go on,” Garth said gruffly. “I’ll keep S’Rella occupied. I’m the host, after all.” He pushed her towards the door.

Maris smiled at him, then began to work her way back across the floor, which had grown even more crowded. Dorrel, after hanging up his wings, met her part way. He threw his arms around her and kissed her, briefly. Maris found herself trembling as she leaned against him.

When they broke apart, there was concern in his eyes. “What’s wrong?” he said. “You were shaking.” He looked at her hard. “And you look worn out, exhausted.”

Maris forced a smile. “Garth said the same thing. No, really, I’m fine.”

“No you’re not. I know you too well, love.” He put his hands on her shoulders, his gentle, familiar hands. “Really. Can’t you tell me?”

Maris sighed. She did feel tired, she realized suddenly. “I guess I don’t know myself,” she muttered. “I haven’t been sleeping well this past month. Nightmares.”

Dorrel put an arm around her and led her through the press of flyers to a wide wooden table against the wall, covered with wines, liquors, and food. “What kind of nightmares?” he asked. He poured them each glasses of rich red wine, and carved out two wedges of a white, crumbly cheese.

“Only one. Falling. I fall through still air, hit the water, and die.” She bit off a mouthful of cheese and then washed it down with a gulp of the wine. “Good,” she said, smiling.

“Should be,” Dorrel replied. “It’s from Amberly. But you can’t really be worried about this dream, can you? I didn’t think you were superstitious.”

“No,” Maris said, “that’s not it at all. I can’t explain. It—bothers me. And that’s not all.” She hesitated. Dorrel watched her face, waiting. “This competition,” Maris said. “There could be trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Remember when I saw you at Eyrie? I mentioned that one of the students from Airhome had taken ship for Woodwings?”

“Yes,” Dorrel said. He sipped at his own wine. “What of it?”

“He’s on Skulny now, and he’s going to challenge, and it isn’t just any student. It’s Val.”

Dorrel’s face went blank. “Val?”

“One-Wing,” Maris said quietly. He frowned. “One-Wing,” he repeated. “Well, I understand why you’re upset. I would never have expected him to try again. Does he expect to be welcomed?”

“No,” Maris said. “He knows better. And his opinion of flyers is no better than their opinion of him.”

Dorrel shrugged. “Well, it will be unpleasant, but it needn’t ruin the competition all by itself,” he said. “He’ll be easy enough to ignore, and I don’t imagine we have to worry about him winning again. No one has lost a relative lately.”

Maris drew back a little. Dorrel’s voice seemed so hard, and the gibe sounded so cruel from his lips—and yet, it was almost identical to what she’d said at the academy on the day Val had arrived. “Dorr,” she said, “he’s good. He’s been training for years, it seems, and he’s older now. I think he’s going to win. He has the skills, I know, I’ve flown against him.”

“You’ve flown against him?” Dorrel said.

“In practice,” Maris said. “At Woodwings. What—”

He drained his wine and set the glass aside. “Maris,” he said, his voice low but suddenly strained. “You’re not going to tell me you’ve been helping him too. One-Wing?!”

“He was a student, and Sena asked me to work with him,” Maris said stubbornly. “I’m not there to play favorites and help only those I like.” Dorrel swore and took her by the arm. “Come outside,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about this in here, where someone might hear.”

It was cool outside the lodge, and the wind coming in off the sea had the tang of salt to it. Along the beach, the poles were up and the lanterns had been lit to welcome night-flying travellers. Maris and Dorrel walked away from the crowded lodge and sat together on the sand. Most of the children had gone now, and they were alone.

“Maybe this is what I feared,” Maris said, with a tinge of bitterness in her tone. “I knew you’d balk at that. But I can’t make exceptions—we can’t make exceptions. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you try to understand?”

“I can try,” he said. “I can’t promise to succeed. Why, Maris? He’s no ordinary land-bound, no little woodwinger dreaming of being a flyer. He’s One-Wing, half a flyer even when he had his wings. He killed Ari. Have you forgotten that?”

“No,” Maris said. “I’m not happy about Val. He’s hard to like, and he hates flyers, and there’s always the spectre of Ari peering over his shoulder. But I have to help him, Dorr. Because of what we did seven years ago. The wings must go those who can use them best, even if they are, well . . . like Val. Vindictive, and angry, and cold.”

Dorrel shook his head. “I can’t accept that,” he said.

“I wish I knew him better,” Maris said, “so I could understand what made him the way he is. I think he hated the flyers even before they named him One-Wing.” She reached over and took Dorrel by the hand. “He’s always accusing, making venomous little jests, when he isn’t shielding himself in ice. And sometimes, listening to him, I find myself close to agreeing with him, seeing things through land-bound eyes. According to Val, I’m a One-Wing too, even if I pretend that I’m not.”

Dorrel looked at her and squeezed her hand tight within his own. “No,” he said. “You are a flyer, Maris. Have no fear of that.”

“Am I?” she said. “I’m not sure what it means to be a flyer. It’s more than having wings, though, or flying well. Val had wings, and he flies well enough, but you yourself said he was only half a flyer. If it means . . . well, accepting everything the way it is, and looking down on the land-bound, and not offering help to the woodwingers for fear they’ll hurt a fellow flyer, a real flyer . . . if it means things like that, then I don’t think I am a flyer. And sometimes I wonder if I’m not beginning to share Val’s opinions of those who are.”

Dorrel let go her hand but his eyes were still on her. Even in the dark she could feel the anguished intensity of his gaze. “Maris,” he said softly.

“I’m a flyer, born to my wings. Val One-Wing surely despises me for it. Do you?”

“Dorr,” she said, hurt. “You know I don’t. I’ve always loved and trusted you—you’re my best friend, truly. But . . .”

“But,” he echoed.

She could not look at him. “I wasn’t proud of you when you refused to come to Woodwings,” she said.

The distant sounds of the party and the melancholy wash of the waves against the beach seemed to fill the world. Finally Dorrel spoke.

“My mother was a flyer, and her mother before her, and on back for generations the pair of wings that I bear has been in my family. That means a great deal to me. My child, should I ever father one, will fly, too, someday.

“You weren’t born to that tradition, and you’ve been the dearest person in the world to me. And you’ve always proved that you deserved wings at least as much as any flyer’s child. It would have been a horrible injustice if you’d been denied them. I’m proud that I could help you.

“I’m proud that I fought with you in council to open the sky, but now you seem to be telling me that we fought for different things. As I understood it, we were fighting for the right of anyone who dreamed hard enough and worked long enough to become a flyer. We weren’t out to destroy the great tradition of the flyers, to throw the wings out and let land-bound and would-be flyers alike fight over them like scavenging gulls over a pile of fish.

“What we were trying to do, or so I thought, was to open the sky, to open the Eyrie, to open the ranks of the flyers to anyone who could prove worthy of bearing wings.

“Was I wrong? Were we actually fighting instead to give up everything that makes us special and different? Tell me, Maris. I want to know.”

“I don’t know anymore,” she said. “Seven years ago, I could think of nothing more wonderful than being a flyer. Neither could you. We never dreamed that there were people who might want to wear our wings, but reject everything else that makes up a flyer. We never dreamed of them, but they existed. And we opened the sky for them, too, Dorr. We changed more than we knew. And we can’t turn our backs on it. The world has changed, and we have to accept it, and deal with it. We may not like all the results of what we’ve done, but we can’t deny them. Val is one of those results.”

Dorrel stood up and brushed the sand from his clothes. “I can’t accept that result,” he said, his voice more sorrowful than angry. “I’ve done alot of things for the love of you, Maris, but I can see the limits. It’s true that the world has changed—because of what we’ve done—but we don’t have to accept the evil with the good. We don’t have to embrace those, like Val One-Wing, who sneer at our traditions and seek to tear us apart. He’ll destroy us in the end, Maris—with his selfishness and his hatred. And because you don’t understand that, you’ll help him. I won’t. Do you understand that?”

She nodded without looking up at him.

A minute passed in silence. “Will you come with me, back to the lodge?”

“No,” she said. “No, not just now.”

“Good night, Maris.” Dorrel turned away from her, his boots crunching on the sand until the lodge door opened for him with a burst of party noise, then closed again.

It was quiet and peaceful on the beach. The lanterns, burning atop their poles, moved weakly in the breeze, and she heard their faint clattering and the never-ending sound of the sea rolling in and out, in and out.

Maris had never felt so alone.

TO BE CONTINUED

ONE-WING

Lisa Tuttle and George R.R. Martin

PART II

Traditions exist for reasons—but times change, and traditions, like people, must adapt.

SYNOPSIS

Wings are no longer passed down jealously from parent to child in the flyer families of Windhaven: for seven years there has been a system of annual competitions to determine who shall make use of the limited number of cloth-of-metal wings which are the most important method of travel and communication on this windy, ocean planet. Those who prove themselves best in a series of aerial contests are allowed to wear the wings, regardless of their age or background. Academies train those not born to a flyer’s household and, theoretically, the sky is open to all. Yet in seven years, only once has a land-bound won a pair of wings—and he lost them during the following year’s competition.

Tired of the drain on their purses, the Landsmen of Windhaven are closing down the academies they once enthusiastically supported. Now, only Woodwings Academy, on Seatooth, remains. The Landsman of Seatooth has supported it in the hope that a Woodwings-trained flyer would someday settle on Seatooth. But she has grown impatient, and has threatened to close Woodwings if there are no winners in the forthcoming competition.

Sena, the crippled flyer who runs Woodwings, has turned to Maris for help. Maris was the first land-bound to be accepted as a flyer and, in winning her own wings, she changed the structure of flyer society, and brought about the opening of the academies. She has been spending most of her time helping Sena train the young “woodwingers.” Her flyer friends find the time she spends helping land-bound hopefuls achieve flyer status disturbing, and Maris often feels torn by conflicting demands.

A new student, Val, makes the hazardous ocean voyage to Woodwings, and Sena announces her intention of sponsoring Val at the competition, along with her most promising students, S’Rella, Sher, Leya, Damen and Kerr. She asks Maris to help her ready them.

But Maris has discovered that Val—an arrogant, unpleasant young man—is the one the flyers have contemptuously dubbed “One-Wing.” Flyers unanimously despise Val for the way in which he won a pair of wings, several years before, and Maris holds him personally responsible for the death of a friend of hers.

As a boy, Val had challenged a young woman named Ari. Grieving over the recent death of her brother, Ari had flown badly, and lost her wings to Val. A month later, Ari killed herself. Val had never made any apology, or shown any pity, for the flyer he defeated, and in the following year’s competition, the flyers had ganged up to challenge Val until he lost the wings again. (Subsequently, multiple challenges have been prohibited by flyer law.)

Maris wants nothing to do with Val One-Wing. Sena argues that Val is the best flyer among all the woodwingers, the one with the best chance of winning wings. His performance might make the difference of whether or not Woodwings will remain open—the flyers might despise him, but the Landsman of Seatooth would welcome him as her island’s flyer. Forced to admit that Val is a very good flyer, but still in emotional conflict, Maris finally agrees to offer Val her advice—if the remote young man will take it—and do what she can to help him, as well as the other woodwingers, prepare for the competition.

Val alienates almost everyone with his rude manner and deliberate flaunting of flyer tradition—he even goes so far as to wear his obsidian knife (a legacy, he says, from his father) into the air. Only S’Rella befriends Val, and she is drawn to him in a way that worries Maris.

Maris learns that Val has no intention of becoming a flyer—not, at least, as she and her friends mean the word. He is interested only in obtaining a pair of wings, which he sees as his passport to a better life, to a life of relative wealth, ease and respect. He has no use for tradition, or for the friendship of other flyers. Maris realizes that Val may be the first of a new breed and that, like them or not, the old flyers will have to make room for them.

In an argument with Dorrel, her old friend and lover, Maris tries to explain her feelings about Val, and others like him: “We can’t turn our backs on them. The world has changed, and we have to accept it, and deal with it. We may not like all the results of what we’ve done, but we can’t deny them.

Val is one of those results.”

Maris and S’Rella spent the night together in a roughly finished cabin for two not far from the shore, one of fifty such structures that the Landsman of Skulny had caused to be erected to house the visiting flyers. The little village was only half full as yet, but Maris knew that the earliest arrivals had already appropriated the more comfortable accommodations in the lodge house and the guest wing of the Landsman’s own High Hall.

S’Rella didn’t mind the austerity of their lodgings. She was in high spirits when Maris retrieved her at last from the dying party. Garth had stayed close to her throughout the evening, introducing her to most everybody, forcing her to eat three portions of his stew after she had praised it incautiously, and regaling her with embarrassing anecdotes about half of the flyers present. “He’s nice,” S’Rella said, “but he drinks too much.” Maris could only agree with that, though it had not always been so; when she’d come to find S’Rella, Garth had been red-eyed and close to staggering. Maris helped him to the back room and put him to bed while he carried on a slurred, unintelligible conversation.

The next day dawned grey and windy. They woke to the cries of a food vendor, and Maris slipped outside and bought two steaming hot sausages from his cart. After breakfast, they donned their wings and flew. Not many of the flyers were in the air; the holiday atmosphere was a contagion, and most were drinking and talking in the lodge, or paying their respects to the Landsman, or wandering about Skulny to see what there was to see. But Maris insisted that S’Rella practice, and they stayed aloft for close to five hours on steadily rising winds.

Below them, the beach was again choked with children eager to assist incoming flyers. Despite their numbers, they were kept busy. Arrivals were constant throughout the day. The most spectacular moment—S’Rella looked on with wondering, awestruck eyes—was when the flyers of Big Shotan approached en masse, nearly forty strong, flying in a tight formation, gorgeous against the sun in their dark red uniforms and shimmering silver wings.

By the time the competition began, Maris knew, virtually all the flyers from the scattered reaches of Western would be here, since the games were close at hand this year. Eastern would be heavily represented too, although not quite with the unanimity of Western. Southern, smaller and further, would have fewer still, and there would be only a handful of competitors from the Outer Islands, desolate Artellia, the volcanic Embers, and the other far-off places.

It was afternoon, and Maris and S’Rella were sitting outside the lodge with glasses of hot spiced milk in their hands, when Val made his appearance.

He gave Maris his mocking halfsmile and sat down next to S’Rella. “I trust you enjoyed flyer hospitality,” he said flatly.

“They were nice,” S’Rella said, blushing. “Won’t you come tonight? There’s to be another party. Garth is going to roast a whole seacat, and his sister is providing ale.”

“No,” Val said. “They have ale enough and food enough where I’m staying, and it suits me better.” He glanced at Maris. “No doubt it suits us all better.”

Maris refused to be baited. “Where are you staying?”

“A tavern about two miles down the sea road. Not the sort of place you’d care to visit. They don’t get many flyers there, just miners and landsguard and some who are more reticent to talk about their professions. I doubt they’d know how to treat a flyer properly.”

Maris frowned in annoyance. “Do you ever stop?”

“Stop?” He smiled.

All at once Maris was filled with a perverse determination to erase that smile, to prove Val wrong. “You don’t even know the flyers,” she said angrily. “What right have you to hate them so? They’re people, no different than you—no, that’s wrong, they are different. They’re warmer and more generous.”

“The warmth and generosity of flyers is fabled,” Val said. “No doubt that’s why only flyers are welcome at flyer parties.”

“They welcomed me,” S’Rella said. Her voice was firm yet quiet.

Val gave her a long look, cautious and measuring. Then he shrugged and the thin smile returned to his lips. “You’ve convinced me,” he said. “I’ll come to this party tonight, if they’ll let a land-bound in the door.”

“Come as my guest, then,” Maris said, “if you refuse to call yourself a flyer. And try to put aside your damned hostility for a few hours. Give them a chance.”

“Please,” S’Rella said. She took his hand and smiled hopefully at him.

“Oh, they’ll have a chance to show their warmth and generosity,” Val said. “But I won’t beg for it, or polish their wings, or sing songs in their praise.” He stood up abruptly. “Now, I would like to get some flying in. Is there a pair of wings I might be able to use?”

Maris nodded and directed him to the cabin where his wings were hung. After he was gone, she turned to S’Rella. “You care for him a lot, don’t you?” she said softly.

S’Rella lowered her eyes and blushed. “I know he’s cruel at times, Maris, but he’s not always like that.”

“Maybe that’s so,” Maris admitted. “He hasn’t let me get to know him very well. Just—just be careful, all right, S’Rella? Val has a lot of hurt in him and sometimes people like that, when they’ve been hurt, get back by hurting others, even those who care for them and haven’t hurt them at all.”

“I know,” S’Rella said. “Maris, you don’t think—they won’t hurt him tonight, will they? The flyers?”

“I think he wants them to,” Maris said, “so you’ll see that he’s right about them—about us. But I’m hoping that we’ll prove him wrong.”

S’Rella said nothing. Maris finished her drink and rose. “Come,” she said. “The party will take care of itself. There’s still time for more practice, and you need it. Let’s get our wings back on.”

By early evening it was common knowledge among the flyers that Val One-Wing was on Skulny and intended to challenge. How the word had gotten out Maris was unsure. Perhaps Dorrel had said something, or perhaps Val had been recognized, or perhaps the news had come in from Eastern with some flyer who knew that Val had taken ship from Airhome. It was out and flying in any case. Twice Maris heard the epithet “One-Wing” as she and S’Rella walked back to their cabin in the flyer village, and outside their door a young flyer Maris knew casually from the Eyrie stopped her and asked her point-blank if the rumor was true. When Maris admitted that it was, the other woman just whistled and shook her head.

It was not quite dark when Maris and S’Rella wandered up to the lodge, but the main room was already halffull of flyers, drinking and talking in small clusters. The promised seacat was roasting on a spit above the fire, but by the look of it Still had several hours to go.

Garth’s sister, a stout plain-faced woman named Riesa, drew Maris a mug of her ale from one of three huge wooden casks that had been set along one wall. “It’s good,” Maris said after tasting. “Although I confess I’m no expert. Wine and kivas are my usual drinks.”

Riesa laughed. “Well, Garth swears by it, and he’s drunk enough ale in his time to float a small trading fleet.”

“Where is Garth?” S’Rella asked. “I thought he’d be here.”

“He should be, later,” Riesa said. “He wasn’t feeling well, so he sent me on ahead. I think it was just an excuse to avoid helping with the barrels.”

“Wasn’t feeling well?” Maris said. “Riesa, is everything all right? He’s been ill frequently of late, hasn’t he?” Riesa’s pleasant smile faded. “Has he told you, Maris? I wasn’t sure. It’s only been the past half-year. It’s his joints. When it gets bad, they swell up on him something terrible, and even when they aren’t swelling he’s got pain.” She leaned a little closer. “I’m worried about him in truth. Dorrel is too. He’s seen healers, here and in Stormtown too, but no one has been able to do much. And he’s drinking more than he used to.”

Maris was appalled. “I knew Dorrel was fretting over him, but I thought it was just his drinking.” She hesitated. “Riesa, has Garth told the Landsman about his troubles?”

Riesa shook her head. “No, he’s—” She interrupted herself to draw a mug for a craggy-looking Easterner strange to Maris, and resumed only after he had drifted away. “He’s afraid, Maris, I am certain of it.”

“Why is he afraid?” S’Rella asked quietly, looking from Maris to Riesa and back again. She had been standing silently by Maris’ elbow, listening to everything that was said.

“If a flyer is sick,” Maris said, “the Landsman can call together the island’s other flyers, and if they agree can take the wings from the sick one, lest they be lost at sea.” She looked back towards Riesa. “Then Garth is still flying missions as if he were well,” she said, with concern in her voice. “The Landsman isn’t sparing him.”

“No,” Riesa said, chewing on her lip. “I’m frightened for him, Maris. The pain comes on so suddenly sometimes, and if it should come while he’s flying—I’ve told him to speak to the Landsman, but he won’t hear of it. His wings are everything to him, you know that. All you flyers are alike.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Maris said firmly. “Dorrel has spoken to him endlessly,” Riesa said. “It does no good. You know how stubborn Garth can be.”

“He should lay down his wings,” S’Rella blurted suddenly.

Riesa gave her a hard look. “Child, you don’t know what you are saying. You are the woodwinger Garth met last night, are you not? Maris’ friend?” S’Rella nodded.

“Yes, Garth spoke of you,” Riesa said. “You would understand better if you were a flyer. You and I, we can only watch from outside, we can never feel as a flyer feels about his wings. At least Garth has told me so.”

“I will be a flyer,” S’Rella insisted. “Certainly you will, child,” Riesa said, “but you are not now, and that is why you talk so easily of laying down the wings.”

But S’Rella looked offended. She stood very stiffly and said, “I’m not a child, and I do understand.” She might have said more, but just then the door opened and closed, and she and Maris both glanced in that direction.

Val had arrived.

“Excuse me,” Maris said, taking Riesa by the forearm and giving her a squeeze for reassurance. “We’ll talk more later.” She hurried to where Val stood, his dark eyes sweeping the room, one hand resting on the hilt of his ornate knife in a pose that was half nervousness and half challenge.

“A small party,” he said noncommittally when Maris and S’Rella joined him.

“It’s early,” Maris replied. “Give it time. Come, let’s get you a drink and a bit of food.” She gestured to the far wall, where a lavish table had once again been spread; spiced eggs, fruit, four kinds of cheese, bread, various kinds of small shellfish, sweetmeats, pastries. “The seacat is the main course, but we’ll be waiting hours for that,” she concluded.

Val took in the seacat on the spit and the table covered with other edibles. “I see the flyers are eating simply once again,” he said. But he followed Maris and S’Rella across the room, where he ate two spiced eggs and a wedge of cheese before pausing to pouring a goblet of wine.

Around them the party went on as ever; Val had attracted no particular attention. But Maris had no way of knowing if that was because the others had accepted him, or simply failed to recognize him; most of the flyers present were either strangers or nodding acquaintances whose names escaped her. So the three of them stood quietly for a few moments, S’Rella talking to Val in a low voice while he sipped at his wine and nibbled some more cheese, Maris quaffing her ale and watching the front door a bit apprehensively each time it opened. It had grown dark outside, and the lodge was filling up rapidly. A dozen Shotaners she knew only vaguely swept in all at once, still in their red uniforms, followed by a half-dozen Easterners she knew not at all. One of them climbed atop Riesa’s ale casks, and a companion tossed him up a guitar, and he began to sing flyers’ songs in a passably mellow voice. Beneath him the crowd grew dense with some standing and listening and shouting up requests, and others sampling Riesa’s ale.

Maris, still glancing at the door whenever it opened, drifted a bit closer to Val and S’Rella, and tried to listen to them above the music.

Then the music stopped.

In mid-song, suddenly singer and guitar both grew silent, and the silence flowed across the room, as conversations ceased and all eyes turned curiously to the man perched atop the ale keg, a slim, balding Easterner who all at once seemed to have lost his voice. In less than a minute, everyone in the lodge was looking at him.

And he was looking across the room at Val.

Val turned in his direction and raised his wine glass. “Greetings, Loren,” he called, in his maddeningly flat tones. “I toast your fine singing.” He drained his wine and set the glass aside.

Someone, taking Val’s words for veiled insult, snickered. Others took the toast in earnest, and raised their own glasses. The singer just sat and stared, his face darkening, and most of the flyers watched him, baffled, waiting for him to resume his music.

“Do the ballad of Aron and Jeni,” someone called out.

The guitarist shook his head. “No,” he said, smiling, “I’ve got a more appropriate song.” He played a few opening bars and began to sing a song unfamiliar to Maris.

Val turned to her. “Don’t you recognize it?” he said. “It’s popular in Eastern. They call it the ballad of Ari and One-Wing.” He poured himself more wine and raised the glass again in mocking tribute to the singer.

With a sinking feeling, Maris realized that she had heard the song before, years past, and what was worse had probably enjoyed it. It was a rousing, dramatic story of betrayal and revenge, with One-Wing the villian and the flyers the heroes.

S’Rella was biting her lip in anger, barely holding back her tears. She started forward impulsively, but Val restrained her with a hand on her arm and shook his head. Maris could only stand helplessly, listening to the cruel words, so very different from those of her own song, the one Coll had written for her. She wished he were here now, to compose a song in answer to this. Singers had a strange power, even amateurs like the Easterner.

When he was finished, everyone knew.

He tossed his guitar down to a friend, and jumped down after it. “I’ll be singing on the beach, if anyone cares to hear,” he said. Then he took his instrument and left, followed by all of the Easterners who had arrived with him and a good many others. The lodge was suddenly half-empty again.

“Loren was a neighbor,” Val said. “From North Arren, just across the bay. I haven’t seen him in years.”

The Shotaners were talking softly among themselves, one or two of them giving Val, Maris and S’Rella pointed looks from time to time. All of them left together.

“You haven’t introduced me to your flyer friends,” Val said to S’Rella. “Come.” He took her hand and led her forcefully to where four men were clustered in a tight circle. Maris had no choice but to follow. “I’m Val of South Arren,” he said loudly. “This is S’Rella. Fine flying weather today, wasn’t it?”

One of the four, a huge dark man with a massive jaw, frowned at him. “I admire your courage, One-Wing,” he rumbled, “but nothing else about you. I knew Ari, though not well. Do you want me to make polite conversation with you?”

“This is a flyers’ lodge and a flyers’ party,” his companion said sharply. “Do you two have business here?”

“They are my guests,” Maris said furiously. “Or do you question my right to be here too?”

“No. Only your taste in guests.” He clapped the big man on the shoulder. “Come. I have a sudden urge to hear some singing.”

Val tried another group, two women and a man with ale mugs in their hands. Before he had quite reached them, they set down their mugs—still half-full—and left.

Only one party remained in the room, six flyers that Maris knew vaguely from the far reaches of Western, and a single blond youth from the Outer Islands. And suddenly they were leaving too, but on the way to the door one of them, a man well into his middle years, stopped to talk to Val. “You may not remember, but I was among the judges the year you took Ari’s wings,” the man said. “We judged fairly, but some have never forgiven us for the verdict we handed down. Perhaps you did not know what you were doing, perhaps you did. It makes no difference. If they were so reluctant to forgive me, they will never forgive you. I pity you, but we’re helpless. You were wrong to come back, son. They will never let you be a flyer.”

Val had been calm through everything else, but now his face contorted in rage. “I do not want your pity,” he said. “I do not want to be one of you. And I am not your son! Get out of here, old man, or I will take your wings this year.”

The grey-haired flyer shook his head, and a companion took him by his elbow. “Let’s go, Cadon. You waste your concern on him.”

When they left, only Riesa remained in the lodge room with Maris, Val, and S’Rella. She busied herself with her ale mugs, gathering them up to wash, and did not look at them.

“Warmth and generosity,” Val said. “They’re not all—” Maris started, and found she could not go on. S’Rella looked as if she were about to cry. Then the door crashed open, and it was Garth standing there, frowning, looking puzzled and angry. “What is going on?” he said. “I stumble up from home to host my party, and everyone is out on the beach. Maris? Riesa?” He slammed the door and started across the room. “If there was a fight, I’ll break the neck of the fool who started it. Flyers have no business quarrelling like land-bound.”

Val faced him squarely. “I’m the cause of your empty party,” he said. “Do I know you?” Garth said. “Val. Of South Arren.” He waited. “He didn’t start anything,” Maris said suddenly. “Believe that, Garth. He’s my guest.”

Garth looked baffled. “Then why—?”

“I’m also called One-Wing.” Comprehension broke across Garth’s face, and Maris knew how she must have looked the day she had met Val on the Stormtown docks, and had a sickening realization of what it must have felt like to Val.

Whatever Garth felt, he struggled to control it. “I wish I could bid you welcome,” he said, “but that would be a lie. Ari was a sweet fine woman who never hurt anyone, and I knew her brother too. We all did.” He sighed and looked to Maris. “He is your guest, you say? What would you have me do with him?”

“Ari was my friend as well,” Maris said. “Garth, I don’t ask you to forget her. But Val is not her killer. He took her wings, not her life.”

“They are one and the same,” Garth grumbled, but it was half-hearted. He looked back at Val. “You were a boy then, though, and none of us knew that Ari would kill herself. I’ve made my own share of mistakes, though none as big as yours, and I suppose—”

“I made no mistake,” Val interjected quickly. His dark eyes flashed.

Garth blinked. “Your challenge was a mistake,” he said. “Ari killed herself because of it.”

“I would challenge her again,” Val said. “She was not fit to fly. Her death was her mistake, not mine.”

Garth was always gentle and genial, even his infrequent angers full of bluff and bluster; Maris had never seen his face as cold and bitter as it looked now. “Out, One-Wing,” he said, his voice low. “Leave this lodge and do not enter it again, whether you wear wings or not. I will not have you.”

“I won’t be back,” Val said evenly. “Nonetheless, I thank you for your warmth and generosity.” He smiled and headed towards the door. S’Rella started after him.

“S’Rella,” Garth said. “I don’t—you can stay, girl, I have no—” S’Rella whirled. “Everything Val says is true. I hate you all.” And she followed Val One-Wing out into night.

S’Rella did not return to their little cabin that night, but she was there just after dawn the next day, Val with her, both ready for practice. Maris gave them the wings and accompanied them up the steep, twisting stone stairs to flyers’ cliff. “Race,” she told them. “Fly above the coastline, using the sea-breeze and staying low. Circle the entire island.” In silence, they left.

It was not until they were out of sight that Maris took wing herself. They would take several hours to complete the circuit, and she was thankful for the time. She felt tired and irritable, in no mood for even the best of company, and Val was never that. She gave herself to the healing embrace of the wind and angled out to sea.

The morning was pale and quiet, the wind steady behind her. She rode it, letting it take her where it would; all directions were the same to her. She wanted only to fly, to feel the touch of the wind, to forget all the petty troubles below in the cold air of the upper sky.

There was little enough to see; gulls and scavenger-kites and a hawk or two near the shores of Skulny, a fishing boat here and there, and further out only ocean, ocean everywhere, blue-green water with long bright streaks of sun upon it. Once she saw a pack of seacats, graceful silver shapes whose playful leaps took them twenty feet above the waves. An hour later, she caught a rare glimpse of a wind wraith, a vast strange bird with semi-translucent wings as wide and thin as the sails of a trading ship. Maris had never seen one before, though she had heard other flyers speak of them. They liked the higher altitudes where humans seldom flew, and almost never came within sight of land. This one was quite low, floating on the wind, its great wings scarcely seeming to move. She soon lost sight of it.

A deep sense of peace filled her, and she felt all the tensions and angers of the land drain away from her. This was what it meant to fly, she thought. The rest, the messages she flew, the honor paid to her, the ease of living, the friends and enemies in flyer society, the rules and laws and legends, the responsibility and the boundless freedom, all of it, all of it was secondary. This, for her, was the real reward; the simple feel of flying.

S’Rella felt it too, she thought. Perhaps that was why she was so drawn to the Southern girl, because of the way she looked when she came from flying, cheeks flushed, eyes glowing, smiling. Val had none of that look about him, Maris realized suddenly. The thought saddened her. Even if he should win his wings, he would miss so much; he took a fierce pride in his flying, came away from it with a sheen of satisfaction, but he was not capable of finding joy in the sky. Whether or not he ever won his wings, the peace and happiness of the true flyer would always be denied him. And that, thought Maris, was the crudest truth about Val’s life.

When she saw by the sun that it was nearly noon, Maris finally banked and swept around in a long, graceful arc to begin the flight back to Skulny.

Maris was resting in her cabin late that afternoon—Val and S’Rella had hung up their wings for the day and gone off down the road to the tavern where Val was staying in search of dinner—when she was startled by loud, insistent pounding on her door.

Her visitor was a stranger, a short, slight, hollow-cheeked man with greying hair pulled back hard and tied in a knot in the back of his head. An Easterner; his hair style gave him away, as did his clothes, collar and cuffs trimmed with black fur, shirt hooded. He wore an iron ring on one finger and silver on the next, testimonials to his wealth and status. “I would speak to you,” he said brusquely when Maris opened the door. “Do I know you?” Maris said.

“My name is Arak,” he said. “I have flown for South Arren for these past thirty years.”

Maris opened the door wider and let him in, gesturing him towards the only chair in the cabin. She sat on a bed. “You are from Val’s home island.”

“I have that misfortune,” he said. She did not care for his tone. “Well?” she demanded.

“Some of us have been talking—”

“Us?”

“The flyers,” he said.

“Which flyers, precisely?”

“It doesn’t matter who they were,” Arak said. There was something about the man, his self-centered intensity, that woke all of Maris’ hostilities. “Some of them think you are a flyer at heart, even though you were not flyer-born. So I was sent to talk to you, to tell you about Val One-Wing and dissuade you from helping him.”

“I doubt that you could tell me anything that would change my course,” Maris said.

“You do not know what sort of man he is,” the Easterner said sharply. “No? I remember Ari. I have lived with Val’s bitterness these past few weeks. He still deserves his chance.”

“His chance,” Arak said angrily. “He has had chances enough, more than he ever deserved. Do you know about his parents?”

Maris shrugged. “Land-bound, as were my own.”

“Worse than land-bound,” Arak said. “Vicious, dirty, ignorant. He was born on Lomarron, did you know that? Not on South Arren at all. Do you know Lomarron?”

Maris nodded, suddenly interested despite herself. She had flown to Lomarron once, three or four years ago, but that had been enough. A large, desolate island, all rocks and mountains, the soil too poor for farming, but rich in the metals so rare on Windhaven. Almost all the land-bound on Lomarron worked in the mines, and with such wealth at hand, warfare was endemic. “They were miners,” she guessed.

But Arak shook his head. “Landsguard,” he said. “Professional killers. His father was a knife-fighter, his mother a sling.”

“Many islands have landsguard forces,” Maris said uneasily.

Arak seemed to be enjoying this. “On Lomarron they get more practice than on other islands,” he said. “Too much, finally. His mother had her sling hand lopped off in an engagement, severed clean at the wrist. Not long after that there was a truce. But Val’s family didn’t take to truces. His father killed a man anyway, and then the three of them had to flee Lomarron in a fishing boat they stole. That was how they came to South Arren. The mother was a useless one-handed cripple, but the father joined the landsguard again. Only for a short time, though. One night he got too drunk and told a mate who he was, and word reached the Landsman, and then Lomarron. He was hanged as a thief and a murderer.”

Maris sat numbed, not knowing what to say.

“I know all this,” Arak went on, “because I took pity on the poor widow. My wife had died not long before, so I took her in as a housekeeper and cook, never mind that she had only one hand and couldn’t do half as much work as a healthy one. I gave them a place to live, work, decent enough food, raised Val with my own son. But kindness couldn’t change him or his mother. It was wasted on them, and anything you do for him is going to be wasted as well. His mother was lazy and shiftless, always whining and complaining about how she felt, never getting her work done on time, but expecting to be paid for it all the same. Val was insolent. I tried to straighten him out, gave him a taste of discipline, but it was useless. The blood was bad. He used to play at being a knife-fighter, you know, and killing people. Even tried to drag my own boy into his sick games, but I stopped that soon enough. He was a terrible influence. Both of them stole, you know, him and his mother. There was always something missing. I had to keep my iron under lock and key. I even caught him handling my wings once, in the middle of the night, when he thought I was asleep.

“He hasn’t changed since, either.

Give him the chance to get into an academy, and what did he do with it—killed someone right off, anything to get what he wanted. I’d wager he committed other crimes during the year he had those wings, too. We just don’t know about them. Lots of things a flyer can do if he cares to.”

Maris stood up. She was remembering things Val had said back at Woodwings. She was remembering the scars on his back. And she remembered her own childhood as well, and the flyer Russ who had adopted her and raised her as his own. Her lips trembled.

“Discipline, you say,” she said, keeping her voice as flat as she could manage. “What kind of discipline?”

“Eh?” Arak looked at her in surprise, the thread of his speech broken. He was a small man, and seated, and Maris loomed over him as she stood with her arms folded. “Nothing excessive,” he said. “A blackwood stick when he was little, a lick of the whip now and again when he’d grown. The same as I gave my own.”

“The same as your own,” she repeated. “And did they eat at a table with you? Share the food you ate?” Arak stood up, his sharp face twisted in dismay. But even standing he had to look up to her. “Of course not,” he snapped. “They were help, hired land-bound. They had food, though. I didn’t starve them.”

“Scraps,” Maris spat angrily. “Scraps from your own table. Rotten fish you didn’t want anymore.”

“I was flying when you were a land-bound brat playing with seashells,” Arak said. “Keep your insolence to yourself. How I feed my household is my business.”

“And did he ever ask you to teach him the wings?” Maris said, ignoring his comment. She stepped closer to him. “When you were training your own son, did Val ever want to fly too?” Arak laughed, a choking snort of laughter. “I whipped that idea out of him fast enough,” he said. “That was before you came along with your damned academies, and put notions in all these land-bound heads.”

She shoved him.

She had never done anything like it before, never touched another person in anger, but now she shoved him, hard, with both hands, and Arak staggered backwards and his laughter died in his throat. And Maris came forward and shoved him again, and he stumbled and went down, disbelief and the beginnings of fear in his eyes. She stood over him. “Get up,” she said. “Get up and get out, you filthy little man. If I could I’d rip the wings from your back. You foul the sky.”

Arak rose and moved quickly to the door, a frightened shuffle before Maris could touch him again. But outdoors he got his courage back. “I knew this idea was a folly,” he said. “I told them as much. Land-bound is land-bound. The blood will tell. I voted against your academies, you know. We should have taken your wings when we had the chance. Maybe we’ll take them yet.” Maris, shaking, slammed the door on him.

But no sooner had she done it then a terrible suspicion hit her, and she threw open the door and went after him. Arak saw her coming and tried to run, but she caught him on the edge of the small village and knocked him flat on the sand. Several astonished flyers watched, but no one moved to interfere. Arak cringed beneath her with an arm across his face. “Get away from me!” he shouted.

“Where was Val’s father executed?” Maris demanded. “On Lomarron or South Arren? Where?”

“Leave me alone,” Arak said. He got clumsily to his feet.

“Where?”

“On Arren, of course, on Arren. No sense shipping him back. Our rope was just as good.” He stepped backwards, away from her.

“But the crime was committed on Lomarron, so the Landsman of Lomarron had to order the execution,” Maris said. “How did that order get to your Landsman? You flew it, didn’t you? You flew the messages both ways.”

Arak glared at her and broke and ran again. Maris did not go after him.

The look on his face had been all the admission she needed.

The tavern was a shabby place, its interior dark and cold and smelling faintly of mold. The fire was too small to heat the main room properly, and the candles on the table burned smokily. Val was dicing with three dark-haired, heavy women in landsguard brown-and-green, but he came away when Maris asked him, a wine glass elapsed loosely in his hand.

He nursed his wine as she spoke, his face closed and silent. When she had finished, his smile was faint and fastfading. “Warmth and generosity,” he said. “Arak has them both in abundance.” After that he said nothing.

The silence was lengthy and awkward. “Is that all you’re going to say?” Maris asked finally.

Val’s expression changed just a little, the lines around his mouth tightening, eyes narrowing; he looked harder than ever. “What did you expect me to say, flyer? Did you think I’d embrace you, bed you, sing a song in praise of your understanding? What?”

Maris was startled by the anger in his tone. “I—I don’t know what I expected,” she said. “But I wanted to let you know that I understood what you’d been through, that I was on your side.”

“I don’t want you on my side,” Val said. “I don’t need you, or your sympathy. And if you think I appreciate your prying into my past, you are wrong. What went on between Arak and myself is our business, not yours, and neither of us needs your judgments.” He finished his wine, snapped his fingers, and the barkeep came across the room and set a bottle on the table between them.

“You wanted revenge on Arak, and rightly so,” Maris said stubbornly, “but you’ve changed that into a desire for revenge against all flyers. You should have challenged Arak, not Ari.” Val poured himself a refill and tasted it. His face was still angry, but his tone cooled a little, as if he were abashed for losing control even slightly. “There are several problems with that romantic notion,” he said. “For one, Arak did not have wings when Airhome finally sponsored me in challenge. His son had come of age and assumed them the previous year. Arak was retired. But two years ago, the son picked up something down in Southern, some disease that racked him with fever and made him stink and grow fungus all over his body. After he died of it, Arak took up the wings again.”

“I see,” Maris said. “And you didn’t challenge the son because he was a friend.”

Val’s laugh was cruel. “Hardly. The son was an ill-bred bully who grew more like his father every day. I didn’t shed a tear when they dropped him into the sea. Oh, we played together once, when he was still too young to quite comprehend how superior he was, and we were whipped together often enough, but there was no bond between us.” He leaned forward. “I didn’t challenge the son because he was good, the same reason I would not have challenged Arak. I was not interested in revenge. I was interested in wings, and the things that went with them. Your Ari was the feeblest flyer I saw, and I knew I could take her wings. Against Arak or his son I would have lost. It is that simple.”

He sipped at his wine again, while Maris watched with something close to dismay. Whatever she had hoped to accomplish by coming here, whatever bond she had hoped to forge, was not happening. And she realized that it would not happen, could not happen. She had been foolish to think otherwise. Val One-Wing was who he was, and that would not change simply because Maris understood the cruel forces that had shaped him. He sat regarding her with the same cool disdain as ever, and she knew then that they could never be friends, never, no matter what might come to pass.

But she tried a final time to soften him. “Don’t judge all flyers by Arak,” she began. As she heard her own words, she wondered why she had not said us, why she spoke of the flyers as if she were not one of them. She had been doing that a lot lately. “Arak is not typical, Val.”

“Arak and I understand each other well enough,” Val said. “I know exactly what he is, thank you. I know that he is cruder than most, flyer or land-bound, and less intelligent, and more easily angered. That does not make my opinions of flyers any less true. His attitudes are shared by most of your friends, whether you care to admit it or not. Arak is only a bit less reticent about voicing those views, and a little more crude in the way he does so.”

Maris rose. “We have nothing more to say to each other,” she said coolly. I’ll expect you and S’Rella tomorrow morning for practice.”

Sena and the other woodwingers arrived several hours ahead of schedule on the day before the competition was to open, putting in at the nearest port and trekking twelve miles overland along the sea road. Maris had not been expecting them. She was up flying, and she did not know they had arrived until they had been in the flyer village several hours and were already settled comfortably into cabins.

When she found them, Sena almost immediately asked after the academy wings, and sent Sher and Leya off to fetch them from Maris’ cabin. “Val and S’Rella are no doubt limber enough by now,” she said. “But the rest of us have been at sea, and we must take advantage of every hour of good flying wind.”

Only when the students had gone off to fly for the rest of the afternoon did Sena beckon Maris to take a seat. “Tell me what is wrong,” she said.

“What—”

Sena gestured impatiently with her cane. “I noticed it at once,” she said. “Don’t take me for an old fool. In years past, we’ve never been fully accepted by the flyers, but they were always polite enough. Cool, yes, and patronizing, endlessly. But this year the hostility is rank. I could smell it as soon as we arrived, and the students have noticed it too, although some of them aren’t sure what it is. Is it Val?”

Maris told her about the party at the lodge, about her conversation with Dorrel, a little about Arak and his visit.

Sena was frowning when she finished. “Well, it is unfortunate,” she said. “But Val has survived worse for years, so we can survive the little that rubs off on us. Adversity will toughen them. They need that.”

“Do they?” Maris said, bitterness creeping into her tone. “This is not the kind of toughness you get from the wind and the weather and a hard landing or two. This is something else, a hardness of the spirit. Do they need their hearts toughened as well as their bodies?”

Sena placed a hand on her shoulder. “These days, I think they do. Easy, Maris. I understand your disappointment. I too was a flyer, and I would have liked to believe better of my old friends. I am disappointed too, but it is not the end of everything.”

That night they bought food from the vendors and ate it in their cabins, while the flyers enjoyed a final boisterous party at the lodge. Even in the village Maris could hear the noise, but Sena would hear no talk of going up to it; she insisted her charges retire early. But before that, she gathered them together—even Val—for one final meeting in her cabin.

She began by going over the rules, which changed enough from year to year so that even those who had challenged before needed a refresher. The competition was to last three days, but the serious business, the formal challenges, would be restricted to the mornings. “Tomorrow you name your opponent, and race, the test for speed and endurance,” Sena said. “The day after, the judges look for grace. On the third day, precision; you fly the gates to show the degree of your control.” The evenings and afternoons would be filled with contests too, but games of a less serious nature; all manner of flying competitions in the day, and by night singing contests, drinking contests, and so on. “Leave those to the flyers not involved in challenges,” Sena warned. “You have no business with such foolery. It will only waste your strength. Watch if you will, but take no part.”

When she had finished talking about the rules, Sena answered questions for a time, until she was asked one she could not answer. It came from Kerr, who had lost some weight during the three days at sea, and looked surprisingly fit. “Sena,” he said, “how do we decide who is best to challenge?”

Sena looked at Maris. “We have had this problem before,” she said. “The children of flyer families know everything they need to when they come of age to challenge, but we hear no flyer gossip, know little about who is strong or who is weak. What things I know myself are ten years out of date. Will you advise them, Maris?”

Maris nodded. “Well, obviously, you want to find someone you can beat. I’d say challenge those from Eastern or Western. The flyers from further away, they have come a very long distance to get here, and only the best care to make that flight. When the competition is in Southern, then weaker Southern flyers are on hand, and only the most skilled from Western make the flight.

“Also, you’d do best to avoid the flyers from Big Shotan. They are organized almost in a military fashion, and they practice and drill endlessly, and most are very good.”

“I challenged a woman from Big Shotan last year,” Damen put in glumly. “She hadn’t seemed very good beforehand, but she beat me easily enough when it mattered.”

“She was probably being deliberately clumsy earlier, trying to lure a challenge from someone,” Maris said. “I’ve known some who did that. No, you’re safer to challenge someone other than a Shotaner.”

“That still leaves a lot of people,” Kerr said, unsatisfied. “I don’t know any of them. Can’t you tell me the name of someone I can beat?”

Val laughed. He was standing by the door, S’Rella close to him. “You can’t beat anyone,” he said, “unless it’s Sena here. Challenge her.”

“I’ll beat you, One-Wing,” Kerr snapped back.

Sena hushed him and glared at Val. “Quiet. I’ll have no more of that, Val, or I may decide not to sponsor you at all.” She looked back at Maris. “Kerr is right. Can you tell us specific flyers who are vulnerable?”

“You know, Maris,” Val said. “Like Ari.” He was smiling.

Once, not so very long ago, the suggestion would have filled Maris with horror. Once she would have thought it betrayal of the worst kind. Now she was not sure. The poorer flyers endangered themselves and their wings, and it was small enough secret who they were for one privy to flyer gossip in the Eyrie.

“I—I suppose I can suggest a few names,” she said hesitantly. “Jon of Culhall, for one. His eyes are said to be weak, and I’ve never been impressed by his abilities. Bari of Poweet would be another. She gained a good thirty pounds this past year, a sure sign of a flyer whose will and body are failing.” She named about a half-dozen more, all frequent subjects of flyer talk, reputed to be clumsy or careless or both, the old and the very young. Then, impulsively, she added one other name. “An Easterner I met yesterday might be worth a challenge. Arak of South Arren.”

Val shook his head. “Arak is small but hardly frail,” he said calmly. “He would outfly anyone here, except perhaps for me.”

“Oh?” Damen, as ever, was annoyed by the implied slur. “We’ll see about that. I think we can trust Maris’ judgment before yours.”

They talked for a few minutes more, the woodwingers eagerly discussing the names Maris had tossed out, adding what little they knew of them, suggesting other possibilities. Finally Sena chased them all away and told them to get some rest.

In front of the cabin she had shared with Maris, S’Rella bid goodnight to Val. “Goon,” she told him. “I’ll stay here tonight.”

He looked a bit nonplussed. “Oh? Well, suit yourself.”

When Val was out of sight, Maris said, “S’Rella? You’re welcome, of course, but why . . .?”

S’Rella turned to her with a serious expression on her face. “You left out Garth,” she said.

Maris was taken aback. She thought of Garth, of course. He was ill, drinking too much, gaining weight; it might be best for him to lose his wings. But she knew he would never agree to that, and he had been close to her for a long time, and she could not bring herself to name his name when speaking to the woodwingers. She was afraid for what it might do to him. “I couldn’t,” she said. “He’s my friend.”

“Aren’t we your friends too?”

“Of course.”

“But not as close friends as Garth. You care more about protecting him than about whether we win our wings.” There was more accusation in her voice than Maris would have thought possible.

“Maybe I was wrong to omit him,” Maris admitted. “But I care for him too much, and it isn’t easy—S’Rella, you haven’t said anything about Garth to Val, have you?” She was suddenly worried.

“Never mind,” S’Rella said. She brushed past Maris into the cabin and began to undress. Maris could only follow helplessly, already regretting her question about Val.

“I want you to understand,” Maris said to S’Rella as the Southern girl slipped under the blankets.

“I understand,” S’Rella replied. “You’re a flyer.” She rolled over on her side, her back to Maris, and would say no more.

The first day dawned bright and still and clear.

From where she stood outside the flyer’s lodge, it seemed to Maris that half the population of Skulny had come to watch the competition. People were everywhere: wandering up and down the shores, climbing over the rugged cliff face to get better vantage points, sitting on grass and sand and stone alone or in groups. The beach was littered with children of all ages, running up and down kicking sand up in their wake, playing in the surf, shouting excitedly, running with their arms stretched out stiffly, playing at being flyers. Merchants moved among the crowds: one man decorated with sausages, another bearing wineskins, a woman wheeling a cart burdened with meat pies. Even the sea was full of spectators. Maris could see more than a dozen boats, laden with passengers, lying dead in the water just beyond the breakers, and she knew there must be even more beyond her sight.

Only the sky was empty.

Normally the sky would have been crowded with impatient flyers, full of the glint of silver wings wheeling and turning as they took some last-minute practice or simply tested the wind. But not today.

Today the air was still.

The dead calm was frightening. It was unnatural, impossible: along the coast the brisk seabreeze should have been constant. Yet a suffocating heaviness hung over everything. Even the clouds rested wearily in the sky.

Flyers paced the beach with their wings slung over their shoulders, glancing up uneasily from time to time, waiting for the wind to return, and talking among themselves about the calm in low, careful voices.

The land-bound were waiting eagerly for the competition to start, most of them unaware that anything was amiss. It was, after all, a beautiful, clear day. And, atop the cliffs, the judges were setting up their station and taking their seats. The competition could not wait on the weather: contests in this sluggish air might not be as exciting, but they would still be tests of skill and endurance.

Maris saw Sena leading the woodwingers across the sands towards the stairs leading up the cliffs. She hurried to join them.

A line had formed in front of the judges’ table, behind which sat the Landsman of Skulny and four flyers, one each from Eastern, Southern, Western and the Outer Islands.

The Landsman’s crier, a massive woman with a chest like a barrel, stood on the edge of the cliff. As each of the challengers named an opponent to the judges, she would cup her hands and shout out the name for all to hear, and her apprentices would take up the cry all along the beach, shouting it over and over until the flyer challenged acknowledged and moved off towards flyers’ cliff. Then the challenger would go to meet his opponent, and the line would shuffle forward. Most of the names called were vaguely familiar to Maris, and she knew they were in-family challenges, parents testing children, or—in one case—a younger sibling disputing the right of her older brother to wear the family wings. But just before the woodwingers reached the judges’ table, a black-haired girl from Big Shotan, daughter of a prominent flyer, named Bari of Poweet, and Maris heard Kerr swear softly. That was one good target gone.

Then it was their turn.

It seemed to Maris to be quieter than it had been before. The Landsman was animated enough, but the four flyer judges all looked grave and nervous. The Easterner was toying with the wooden telescope that had been set before her on the table, the muscular blond from the Outer Islands was frowning, and even Shalli looked concerned.

Sher went first, followed by Leya. Both named flyers that Maris had suggested to them. The crier bellowed out the names, and Maris heard the shouts being repeated up and down the beach.

Damen named Arak of South Arren, and the Eastern judge smiled slyly. “Arak will be so pleased,” she said.

Kerr named Jon of Culhall. Maris was not happy with that. Jon was a weak flyer, a likely opponent, and she had been hoping that he would be challenged by one of the academy’s better prospects—Val, S’Rella, or Damen. Kerr was the poorest of their six, and Jon would probably escape with his wings.

Val One-Wing moved to the table.

“Your choice?” rumbled the Outer Islander. He was tense, as were the other judges, even the Landsman. Maris realized she was on edge as well, afraid of what Val might do.

“Must I choose only one?” Val said sardonically. “The last time I competed, I had a dozen rivals.”

Shalli replied sharply. “The rules have been changed, as you very well know. Multiple challenges have been disallowed.”

“A pity,” Val said. “I had hoped to win a whole collection of wings.”

“It will be unfortunate if you win any wings at all, One-Wing,” the Easterner said. “Others are waiting. Name your opponent and move on.” Val shrugged. “Then I name Corm, of Lesser Amberly.”

Silence. Shalli looked shocked at first; then she smiled. The Easterner chuckled softly to herself, and the Outer Islander laughed openly.

“Corm of Lesser Amberly!” the crier thundered. “Corm of Lesser Amberly!” A dozen lesser voices echoed the call.

“I shall have to disqualify myself from this judging,” Shalli said quietly.

“No, Shalli,” said the judge from Eastern. “We have every confidence in your fairness.” The others nodded.

“I do not ask you to step aside,” Val said.

She looked at him, puzzled. “Very well. You contribute to your own fall. Corm is no grief-stricken child.”

Val smiled at her enigmatically and moved off, and Maris and Sena surrounded him instantly. “Why did you do that?” Sena demanded. She was furious. “I have wasted my time with you, clearly. Corm! Maris, tell him how good Corm is, tell this willful fool how he has just thrown away his chance for a pair of wings.”

Val was looking at her. “I think he knows how good Corm is,” Maris said, meeting his eyes. “And he knows Shalli is his wife as well. I think that was why he chose him.”

Val had no chance to disagree. Behind them, the line had moved on, and now the crier was shouting out another name. Maris heard it and whirled, her stomach twisting. “No,” she said, though the word caught in her throat and no one heard. But the crier, as if in answer, shouted the name once again. “Garth of Skulny! Garth of Skulny!”

S’Rella was walking away from the judges, her eyes downcast. When she looked up at last to see Maris, her face was reddened, but defiant.

Two by two they flew off into the morning sun, struggling against the heavy air—the calm had broken, but the winds were still sluggish and erratic—with wings grown suddenly awkward. The flyers wore their own wings, the challengers pairs lent them by judges or friends or bystanders. The course would take them to a rocky little island named Lisle, where they would have to land and collect a marker from the waiting Landsman before proceeding back. It was a flight of some three hours under normal conditions; in this weather, Maris suspected it would take longer.

The woodwingers and their opponents launched in the order in which they had challenged. Sher and Leya got away well enough. Damen had more trouble; Arak abused him verbally while they were circling, waiting for the shout to start, and flew dangerously close to him as they veered out over the ocean. Even from a distance, Maris thought Damen looked shaken.

Kerr did even worse. He botched his leap badly, almost seeming to stumble from the cliff, and a cry went up from below as he plunged down sharply towards the beach. Finally he regained some control and pulled himself up, but by the time he sailed out over the sea his opponent had opened up a substantial lead.

Corm was cheerful and smiling as he prepared for his match against Val, joking and flirting with the two land-bound girls who helped him open his wings, calling out comments to the spectators, waving to Shalli. He even threw a grim smile in Maris’ direction. But he did not speak to Val, except once, before he launched. “This is for Ari,” he shouted, his tone deadly, and then he was running and the wind took him. Val said nothing. He unfolded his own wings in silence, leaped from the cliff in silence, swept up and around near Corm in silence. The crier gave the shout, and the two of them broke in opposite directions, both coming around cleanly, the shadow of their wings passing across the upturned faces of the children on the beach. When they moved out of sight, Corm was ahead, but only by a wingspan.

Lastly came S’Rella and Garth. Maris stood with Sena near the judges, and she could look down on flyers’ cliff and see them both, and watching them she felt heartsick. Garth was somber and pale, and from a distance he appeared far too stout and clumsy to have much of a chance against the slim young challenger. Both of them prepared quietly, Garth speaking only once or twice to his sister, S’Rella saying nothing at all. Neither got off to a good start, Garth having a bit more difficulty with the thick air because of his weight. S’Rella moved in front of him quickly, but he had closed the gap by the time they reached the horizon and vanished.

“I know you wanted to help your woodwingers, but couldn’t you have stopped short of the betrayal of a friend?”

Dorrel’s voice, deceptively calm. Feeling heartsick, Maris turned to face him. She had not spoken to him since that night on the beach.

“I didn’t want it to happen, Dorr,” she said. “But it may be for the best. We both know he’s sick.”

“Sick, yes,” he snapped. “But I wanted to protect him—this will kill him if he loses.”

“It may kill him if he wins.”

“I think he’d prefer that. But if that girl takes his wings from him—he liked her, did you know that? He mentioned her to me, how nice she was, that night after Val wrecked the party in the lodge.”

Maris, too, had been sick and angry over S’Rella’s choice of opponent, but Dorrel’s cold fury turned her feelings another way.

“S’Rella hasn’t done anything wrong,” she said. “Her challenge was perfectly proper. And Val didn’t wreck the party, as you say. How dare you say that: it was the flyers who insulted him and then walked out.”

“I don’t understand you,” Dorrel said quietly. “I haven’t wanted to believe how much you’ve changed. But it’s true, it’s as they say. You’ve turned against us. You prefer the company of the woodwingers and the one-winged to that of true flyers. I don’t know you any more.”

The unhappiness on his face hurt her as much as the harshness of his words. Maris forced herself to speak. “No,” she said. “You don’t know me any more.”

Dorrel waited a moment, waited for her to say something more, but Maris knew that if she opened her mouth again it could only be for a scream or a sob. She could see anger warring with sadness on Dorrel’s face, and anger finally won. He turned without another word and stalked away.

She felt, as she watched him walk away from her, that she was bleeding to death, and knew it was a self-inflicted wound.

“My choice,” she whispered, and the tears ran down her face as she stared blindly out to sea.

They had flown away two by two; they returned, hours later, one by one.

Crowds of the land-bound waited on the beaches, their eager eyes scanning the horizon. They had engaged in their own games and contests, and in eating and drinking as they waited for the results of the flyers’ contest.

The judges watched the skies through telescopes made for them by the finest lensmakers in Stormtown. On the table before them were a number of wooden boxes, one for each match, and piles of small pebbles: white pebbles for the flyers, black pebbles for the challengers. When a race was completed, each judge tossed a pebble into the wooden box. In a particularly close match, a judge might chose to vote for a tie by putting one stone of each color into the box. Or—but this was rarely done—if the winner was especially obvious, two white pebbles or two black could be cast.

The first flyer was sighted from the boats before anyone on shore saw him, and the shout went rippling over the water. On the beach, people began to stand and raise their hands to shield their eyes from the sun. Shalli lifted her telescope.

“See anything?” one judge asked.

“A flyer,” Shalli said, laughing. “There’s”—she tried to point—“below the cloud. Can’t tell who it is.”

The others looked. Maris could barely see the speck they were straining at; it might have been a kite or a rainbird to her, but they had their telescopes.

The Eastern woman recognized the flyer first. “That’s Lane,” she said, surprised. The others looked impressed as well. Lane had started in the third pair, Maris recalled, which meant that not only had he outflown his own son, but four others who had started ahead of him as well.

By the time he had landed, two other flyers had come surging out of the clouds, one several wingspans ahead of the other. The first pair to depart, the judges announced. One of the Landsman’s attendants passed two of the wooden boxes down the table, and Maris heard the small clicks as the stones were dropped.

When the boxes were set aside, she drifted closer. In the first box, she counted five black pebbles and one white; four judges ruling for the challenger, one for a tie. The other, the box representing the race in which Lane had flown, had five whites in it, but as she watched the judges dropped in three more—two more flyers had appeared, far apart, but neither one was Lane’s son. When he finally did appear, some twenty minutes later, five others had preceded him, and Lane’s box had ten white pebbles in it. A formidable margin; the boy was probably lost already, Maris knew.

As each incoming flyer was recognized, the judges announced the name to the crier, who shouted it out for all to hear. Ragged cheers went up for some of the announcements from the land-bound thronging the beaches, and now and again Maris heard a loud groan as well. She suspected that most of the cheering was for financial reasons rather than personal. Most of the land-bound did not know flyers from other islands well enough to like or dislike them, but it was traditional to gamble on the outcome of the races, and she knew that a lot of money was changing hands below. It would be different, however, for S’Rella. This was Skulny, Garth’s home island, and he was familiar and popular with many of the spectators.

“Arak of South Arren!” the crier yelled clearly for all to hear.

Sena swore softly. Maris borrowed a scope from Shalli. It was Arak, sure enough, flying alone, ahead of not only Damen but of Sher and Leya and their opponents as well.

One by one the woodwingers and their rivals struggled in.

Arak came first, then the man Sher had challenged, then Damen—he had passed Sher, Leya, and Leya’s opponent, but was still hopelessly behind Arak—and Leya’s rival. Minutes later, three flyers appeared bunched close together; Sher and Leya, inseparable as always, and close to them—moving ahead now—Jon of Culhall. Sena was swearing again, her face screwed up in disappointment. Maris tried to think of something reassuring to say, but nothing came to mind. The judges were dropping pebbles into the boxes. On the beach, Damen was down and getting out of his wings, while the others approached for a landing.

The sky was clear for a moment, with nothing to see. Kerr was losing badly too; Jon of Culhall had landed now, and he was nowhere in sight. Maris took advantage of the free moment to see how the judges had scored her students.

She was not cheered. Sher’s box had seven whites in it, Leya’s had five, Damen’s eight. Kerr had six against him at the moment, but the judges were dropping in more as minutes went by and he did not appear. “Come on,” Maris mumbled under her breath.

“I see someone,” the Southern judge said. “Very high, angling down now.” The others lifted their scopes.

“Yes,” one of them said. Now people on the beach had spotted the incoming flyer as well, and Maris could hear the buzz of speculation.

“Is it Kerr?” Sena said anxiously.

“I’m not sure,” the Easterner answered. “Wait.”

But it was Shalli who lowered her telescope first, looking stunned. “It’s One-Wing,” she said, in a small voice.

“Give me that,” Sena said, snatching the telescope from her hands. “It is him.” She passed the instrument over to Maris, beaming.

It was Val, all right. The wind had picked up quite a bit, and he was using it well, slipping from current to current, riding with a veteran’s grace.

“Announce him,” Shalli said numbly to the crier.

“Val One-Wing, Val of South Arren!”

The crowd was hushed for a moment, then erupted into noise; wild cheering, groans, cursing. No one was indifferent to Val One-Wing.

Another pair of silvered wings sliced into view from above. Corm, Maris guessed, and a glance through Shalli’s telescope confirmed it. But he was behind, too far behind, with no chance of catching up. It was by no means a humiliation for him, but it was clearly a defeat.

“Maris,” Shalli said, “I want you to see this, so everyone will know that my judging is fair.” She opened her hand, and a single black pebble rested in the hollow of her palm, and as Maris watched she dropped it into the box. Four others followed it.

“Another one,” someone said. “No, two.”

Val had landed, and was calmly taking off his wings. As always he had refused the help of the land-bound children who crowded around him. Corm came sliding over the beach and cliffs, then swept around in an angry predatory circle, reluctant to come down and face the fact of his defeat. And Corm did not take defeat well.

All eyes moved to the two new flyers. “Garth of Skulny,” the Outer Islander said, “and his challenger. She’s close behind him.”

“Yes, it’s Garth,” the Landsman put in. He had not been happy when S’Rella challenged one of his flyers; the prospect of losing a pair of wings was something no Landsman relished. “Fly, Garth,” he said now, openly partisan. “Hurry.”

Sena grimaced at him. “She’s doing well,” she said to Maris.

“Not well enough,” Maris said. She could see them clearly now. S’Rella was one, two wingspans behind. But with the beach in sight, she seemed to be faltering. Garth began his descent, cutting sharply in front of her, and the turbulence created by his passing seemed to shake her. Her wings seesawed for a moment before she regained stability, giving him a chance to open his lead.

He passed over the beach about three wingspans ahead of her. The pebbles began to clatter into the box. Maris turned to see. It had been a close race, credible, spirited. Perhaps some of the judges would score it a tie.

One did, but only one. Maris counted. Five white pebbles for Garth, one lonely black for S’Rella.

“Let’s go down to her,” Maris said to Sena.

“Kerr hasn’t come in yet,” the teacher replied.

Maris had almost forgotten about Kerr. “Oh. I hope he’s safe.”

“I should never have sponsored him,” Sena grumbled. “Damn his parents’ iron.”

They waited five minutes, ten, fifteen. Sher, Leya, and a very dispirited Damen all wandered up to join them. Other wings appeared on the horizon, but none of them was Kerr. Maris began to grow seriously afraid for his safety.

But finally he was there, the last of all those who had left that morning, and coming from the wrong direction too; he had been blown off course, he explained, and overshot Skulny. He was very sheepish about it.

By then, of course, ten white pebbles had been cast against him.

The crowds of land-bound were breaking up below, going off in search of food or drink or shade. Flyers were preparing for the afternoon games. Sena shook her head. “Come,” she said, throwing an arm around Kerr. “Let’s find the others and get some food into them.”

The afternoon passed quickly. Some of the woodwingers went off to watch the flying games—an Outer Islander and two Shotaners won the individual prizes, and Western came away with the medals in the team races—while the others rested, talked, or played games. Damen had brought a geechi set, and he and Sher spent hours bent over it, both of them trying to recoup some of their lost pride.

In the evening the parties started. The woodwingers had a small party of their own outside Sena’s cabin, in a halfhearted effort to lighten dampened spirits. Leya played the pipes and Kerr told sea stories, and all of them drank from the wineskin Maris had brought. Val was in his usual mood, cool and distant and invulnerable, but everyone else remained glum.

“No one has died,” Sena said at last, her manner gruff. “When you lose an eye and shatter a leg as I did, then you will have a right to be morose. You don’t have that right now. Get out of here, the lot of you, before you make me irritable.” She waved her cane at them. “Off now, and to bed. We still have two more days of competition, and all of you can win your wings if you fly well enough. Tomorrow I expect more from each one of you.”

Maris and S’Rella walked along the beach for a while, talking and listening to the slow restless sound of the sea, before heading back to the cabin they shared. “Are you angry with me,” S’Rella said quietly, “for naming Garth?”

“I was,” Maris said wearily. She did not have the heart to speak of her break with Dorrel. “Maybe I had no right to be. If you beat him, you have a right to his wings. I’m not angry with you any longer.”

“I’m glad,” S’Rella said. “I was angry with you, but I’m not now. I’m sorry for what I said.”

Maris put an arm around her shoulders. They walked in silence for a minute, and then S’Rella said, “I’ve lost, haven’t I?”

“No,” Maris said. “You can still win. You heard what Sena said.”

“Yes,” said S’Rella, “but tomorrow they’ll be judging grace, and that’s always been my weakest point. Even if I win at the gates, I’ll be so far behind that I won’t be able to catch up with Garth.”

“Hush,” Maris said. “Don’t talk like that. Just fly as best you can, and leave the rest to the judges. It’s all you can do. If you do lose, there’s always next year.”

S’Rella nodded. They had reached the cabin. She darted ahead to get the door, and then drew back. “Oh,” she said. Her voice was suddenly frightened. “Maris,” she whimpered.

Alarmed, Maris hurried to her side. S’Rella stood trembling and looking at their cabin door. Maris looked too, and felt sick.

Someone had nailed two dead rainbirds to the door. They hung limp and disheveled, bright feathers dark and stained, the nails driven through their small bodies, blood dripping slowly and steadily to the ground.

Maris went inside for a knife and came back to take the grisly warnings from the door. But when she pried loose the first nail and the dead rainbird thumped to the ground, Maris discovered to her horror that it had not only been slaughtered, but mutilated as well.

One wing had been ripped from its body.

The second day was chilly and overcast. It was raining at dawn, and although the rain stopped by the time the morning contests got underway, the day remained damp and cold, the sky heavily overcast. The land-bound spectators were fewer—sitting on the beach was not so pleasant now—and the choppy seas carried only a few boats of observers.

But all that mattered to the flyers was the wind. The wind on the second day was strong and steady, promising the possibility of excellent flying.

Maris pulled Sena apart from the woodwingers on the beach below the cliff, and spoke to her quietly.

“Who would do a thing like that?” Sena demanded, her voice shocked.

Maris put her finger to her lips. She didn’t want the others to overhear. S’Rella had been badly frightened by the incident, and there was no sense in alarming the others.

“A flyer, I would guess,” Maris said grimly. “A sick, bitter flyer. But we have no proof of anything. It could have been done by a flyer who was challenged, or the friend of someone we challenged, or simply some stranger who hates woodwingers. It might even be some local land-bound who lost money on a bet over Val One-Wing. My own suspicions fall on Arak, but I can’t prove that.”

Sena nodded. “You were right to keep it quiet. I only hope S’Rella wasn’t too disturbed by it.”

Maris glanced at where S’Rella stood among the other students, talking softly to Val. “She needs to do well today, or it is all over for her.”

“They’re starting,” Damen called, pointing up at the cliffs.

The first pair of contestants had taken to the air and were moving quickly above the beach. They would circle over the water, Maris knew, and each would go into a sequence of stunts and maneuvers designed to demonstrate flying skills. The specific stunts were the choice of each individual flyer; some satisfied themselves with performing basics as flawlessly as possible, while others tried to be daring and ambitious. Seldom were there clear-cut winners or losers; it was in this event that the judges wielded the most power.

Sena sent the woodwingers up one stair to flyers’ cliff to prepare for their own matches, while she and Maris returned to the judging area. Shalli gave them a curt nod when they arrived; the others were too engrossed in the flying to notice their arrival.

The first two pairs were nothing special, merely long sequences of launchings, landings, and graceful, sweeping turns, all done skillfully but not spectacularly. The third match was something else. The flyer Lane, who had raced so well yesterday, was a splendid stunter as well. Leaping from the cliff, he plunged down low over the beach, skimming so close to the sand that land-bound had to duck to be out of his way. Then he found a riser and swooped up, up, soaring through the overcast and out of sight before he came diving down again, with reckless speed, only to pull out at the last possible instant. He attempted verticle banks and a full loop, and only went into a stall once—he broke out quickly—and Maris found herself admiring his verve. His son was no match for him; the poor boy would be waiting a long time for wings, unless he challenged out-of-family next year. After they had finished, Maris counted eighteen stones in the voting box, eight new ones added to the ten Lane had won yesterday.

Sher was the first woodwinger to try the air. It was a good effort; a clean launch, almost perfect but for a slight wobble, followed by a standard sequence of turns, circles, dives, and climbs, all performed smoothly. Sher seemed lithe and buoyant in the air, compared to the stolid competency of the opposition. Maris would have given the judgment to Sher by a slight margin, but when she looked she found the judges had been more critical of the woodwinger than she. Two had given the victory to the flyer, two had called it even, and only one had cast for Sher, who was now down eleven stones to three.

Sena sighed when Maris told her the count. “I’ve grown used to it. I always hate the stunting. Perhaps the judges try to be fair, but the bias creeps in nonetheless. Nothing can be done about it, except to have our woodwingers fly so well that they can’t be denied their victories.”

Leya was next, with the same sequence Sher had flown, all basic, but with less luck. The wind shifted during the match, robbing Leya of the fluid grace that Maris had so often seen her display, giving her flight a ragged appearance. And several times gusts threw her sideways, breaking up what had been well-executed turns. Her rival had trouble as well, but less. Four judges gave him their stones, and only one made it a tie, leaving Leya behind ten to one.

Damen was more ambitious than either of them. Today, when Arak threw insults at him, Damen spat them right back, which brought a smile to Maris’ lips. And he began with a passable imitation of the spectacular swoop-on-the-beach that the flyer Lane had used. Arak tried to shadow him, to fly so close that Damen would be forced to break off his glide clumsily, but Damen twisted away with a graceful bank and vanished into a cloud, losing the older flyer. One of the judges, the Outer Islander, grumbled about Arak’s tactics, but the others only shrugged. “Whatever else he might be, he is still the better flyer,” the Easterner insisted. “Note how tight his turns are. The boy is spirited, but slipshod.” Maris had to admit that she was right; Damen habitually slid wide on turns, especially downwind turns.

When they scored it, four judges cast for Arak, only the Outer Islahder for Damen.

“,Jon of Culhall, Kerr the Woodwinger!” the crier bellowed. Sena made a tsk-ing noise, and Kerr soon proved she was right. The wind was gusting, he was as clumsy as ever, and probably still despondent about yesterday’s performance.

After a few minutes, Sena faced Maris. “Even with one eye, this is painful to watch,” she said.

Jon of Culhall accumulated eight white pebbles, and Maris pitied Kerr.

“Corm of Lesser Amberly,” announced the crier, “Val One-Wing, Val of South Arren!”

They stepped into view on flyers’ cliff, wings strapped in place but folded, and Maris could feel a ripple of excitement go through the onlookers. People along the beach were making noise, and even the landsguard and attendants who stood near the Landsman moved closer to watch.

Corm was not laughing or joking today. He stood as silently as Val, his dark hair tossing in the wind, while his wings were unfolded and locked by others. Val, as usual, waved away the help offered him.

“Corm can be quite graceful,” Maris warned Sena. “Val may have trouble today.”

“Yes,” Sena said, with a pointed glance back to where Shalli sat among the judges.

The crowd was growing impatient; the flyers still had not launched. Corm’s helpers had stepped back from him, and he stood with his silver wings fully extended, but Val had made no move to unfold his own. Instead he kept examining the joints of one wing, as if looking for something wrong. Corm said something to him, sharply, and Val looked up from what he was doing and made a broad gesture.

“All right,” Corm said clearly, and then he was running, and an instant later he was aloft.

“There’s Corm,” Shalli said. “Where’s One-Wing?”

“Doesn’t he know that this will cost him?” Sena muttered.

Maris gripped Sena tightly by the elbow. “He’s going to do it again,” she said urgently.

“Do what?” Sena said, but even as she spoke a light broke over her face and Maris knew she understood.

Val jumped.

It was a long way down, and only sand and spectators below, and trickier and more dangerous than the same stunt over water. But he was doing it, falling, his wings flapping behind him like a silver cape. Shalli and the Southern judge jumped to their feet, two of the landsguard rushed to the cliffside, even the crier gave a grunt of surprise. Maris heard people screaming, somewhere below, and there was running as well.

Val’s wings took flower.

For an instant it did not seem to be enough. He still fell, speed increasing, even with the wings fully extended. But then he yanked himself to one side and that did it, suddenly he was veering up sharply, angling over the beach and out towards sea. People were dropping to the sand, and someone was still screaming, but there was shouting as well.

Then silence, a hush, a long indrawn breath. Val skimmed the waves, gliding as if over ice, and smoothly began to rise. Serenely he flew out to where Corm, almost unnoticed, had performed a difficult loop.

The applause began, and the cheering, and all along the shore land-bound began clapping and chanting the refrain, “One-Wing, One-Wing, One-Wing,” over and over. Even Lane’s spectacular plunge had not thrilled them as Val had.

The judge from Eastern was laughing. “I never thought I’d see that again,” she exclaimed. “Damn, damn. Even Raven himself never did it better.”

Shalli looked miserable. “A cheap trick,” she said. “And a dangerous one as well.”

“Probably,” the Outer Islander agreed, “but I’ve never seen anything like it. How did he do it anyway?”

The Easterner tried to explain, and the two of them fell to talking. In the distance, Val and Corm were going through their stunts. Val flew well, though Maris noted that his upwind turns were still not all they should be. Corm flew better, matching Val stunt-for-stunt and doing each of them just a little more gracefully, with the skill that comes with decades of flying. But he flew hopelessly, Maris thought; after Raven’s Fall, no amount of finesse could redress the balance.

She was right. Shalli was the only exception. “Corm was much superior overall,” she insisted. “One foolhardy stunt does not change that.” She dropped a white stone into the box with a flick of her wrist.

But the other judges just smiled at her indulgently, and the four pebbles that followed hers were black.

“Garth of Skulny, S’Rella the Woodwinger!”

S’Rella and Garth, though totally different in appearance, looked almost alike this morning, Maris thought as she watched them prepare. Garth should have been elated by his victory yesterday, and the likelihood that his wings were safe, but if anything he seemed paler and more aged today. He hardly spoke to Riesa, and went about donning his wings with a wooden deliberateness. S’Rella bit her lip as she let the helpers unfold her wings, and looked as if she were holding back tears.

Neither of them attempted anything spectacular on launching. Garth banked right, S’Rella left, and they passed above the beach and the boats with approximately equal ease. A few of the locals waved to Garth and shouted his name as he sailed by, but otherwise the crowd was silent, still breathless over Val’s leap.

Sena shook her head. “S’Rella was never as pretty to watch as Sher or Leya, but she can fly better than that.” She had just stalled and lost altitude on a rather routine upwind turn, and Maris had to agree with the teacher’s assessment. S’Rella was not flying well.

“She’s just going through the motions,” Maris said. “I think she’s still shaken by last night.”

Garth was taking full advantage of his opponent’s lassitude. He soared with his usual competence, performed graceful, langurous turns, and slid into a loop. It was not an especially good loop, but S’Rella was attempting none at all.

“This one will be easy to judge,” the Landsman of Skulny said with relief. He was already looking about for a white pebble. Maris could only hope that he would not drop two.

“Look at that,” Sena snorted with disgust. “My best student, and she’s wandering all over the sky like some eight-year-old on her first flight.”

“What’s Garth doing?” Maris wondered aloud. His wings were moving out to sea, tilting first one way and then the other, almost shaking. “That’s an awful wobble.”

“If the judges notice,” Sena said sourly. “Look, he’s righted it now.” He had; now the great silver wings had straightened, and Garth was sailing steadily away from them, riding on the wind, sinking slightly.

“He’s just flying,” Maris said, puzzled. “He isn’t doing any stunts.”

Garth continued to move off, towards the deep waters beyond the breakers. He flew gracefully, but so straight; it was no great task to be graceful when yielding to the wind. Gradually he was descending. Now he was about thirty feet above the water, and still sank. His flight seemed so calm, so peaceful.

Maris gasped. “He’s falling,” she said. She turned to the judges. “Help him,” she shouted. “He’s falling!”

“What’s she yelling about?” the Easterner asked.

Shalli put her telescope to her eye, found Garth in it. He was skimming the waves now. “She’s right,” she said, in a small voice.

Instantly there was chaos. The Landsman jumped to his feet and began to wave his arms and shout orders, and two of the landsguard went sprinting off down the stairs, and the others all started running somewhere. The crier cupped her huge hands and shouted, “Help him! Help the flyer! People in the boats, help the flyer!” Down on the beach other criers repeated the chant, and spectators ran for the shore shouting and pointing. Now it was clear for everyone to see.

Garth hit the water. His forward motion sent him skipping over the surface, once, twice, and sheets of spray fanned out from his wings, but he lost speed rapidly, slowed, stopped.

“It’s all right, Maris,” Sena was saying, “it’s all right. Look, they’ll get him.” A small sailboat, alerted by the shouts of the criers, was moving in on him rapidly. Maris watched it with apprehension. It took them a minute to reach him, another minute to fish him out in a net they tossed over the side. But from this distance, she had no way of telling whether he was dead or alive.

The Landsman lowered his telescope. “They got him, and the wings as well.”

S’Rella was flying low above the sailboat that had rescued Garth. Too late she had realized what was happening, and started after him, but it was unlikely she would have been able to help in any event.

The Landsman, grim, ordered another of his landsguard down to find out Garth’s condition, and walked back to his seat. The judges talked nervously among themselves and Maris and Sena shared an anxious silence until the man returned, ten minutes later. “He is alive and recovering, though he swallowed some water,” the landsguard announced. “They are taking him back to his house.”

“What happened?” the Landsman demanded.

“His sister says he has been ill for some time,” the man replied. “It seems he had an attack.”

The Landsman swore. “He never told me any such thing.” He glared at the four judges. “Must we score this?”

“I’m afraid we must,” Shalli said gently, “and we do not have much choice about how, either.” She picked up a black pebble.

“Her?” the Landsman said. “Garth outflew her easily, until he was taken sick. You mean to give the girl the victory over Garth?”

“You can’t be serious, sir,” the big man from the Outer Islands said. “Your Garth fell into the ocean, Landsman. He might have stunted as well as Lane and he’d still lose.”

“I must agree,” the Easterner said. “Landsman, you are not a flyer, you do not understand. Garth is fortunate to be alive. If he had fallen while flying a mission, with no ship to save him, he would have been food for a scylla.”

“He was sick,” the Landsman insisted, he was frantic not to lose the wings for Skulny.

“It doesn’t matter,” the quiet Southern judge put in, and she cast the first pebble into the voting box with a flick of her thumb. It was black. Three other black stones followed in quick succession, Shalli placing hers with obvious dismay, until the Landsman defiantly added the only white one.

Garth’s fall intensified the bitterness of flyers and woodwingers both. The afternoon games, stunts conducted in an increasingly dark and stormy cloud, had little zest to them. An Easterner from Kite’s Landing was the grand winner, but she had scant competition, as many of the flyers decided to drop out at the last moment. A few of those not directly involved in challenges were even seen taking wing for their home islands. Kerr, the only woodwinger who had bothered to attend the games, reported that the spectators had grown sparse as well, and all their talk was of Garth.

Sena tried to encourage the students, but it was a formidable task. Sher and Leya were philosophical about their chances, neither expecting to win, but Damen was in a dismal condition and Kerr seemed ready to slink off and slit his own throat. S’Rella was nearly as despondent. She was tired and withdrawn for most of the afternoon, and that evening she quarreled with Val.

It was just after dinner. Damen was setting up his geechi board and looking for an opponent, and Leya had gotten out her pipes again. Val found S’Rella sitting with Maris on the beach, and joined them uninvited. “Let’s walk down to the tavern,” he suggested to S’Rella, “and celebrate our victories. I want to get free of these losers and hear what people are saying about us, maybe even get down some bets for tomorrow.”

“I’ve got no victory to celebrate,” S’Rella replied sullenly. “I flew horribly. Garth was much better than I was. I didn’t deserve to win.”

“You win or you lose, S’Rella,” Val said. “What you deserve has nothing to do with anything. Come on.” He tried to take her by the hand and pull her to her feet, but S’Rella yanked loose of him angrily.

“Don’t you even care about what happened to Garth?”

“Not particularly. You shouldn’t either. As I recall, the last thing you said to him was how much you hated him. It would have gone better for you if he’d drowned. Then they would have to give you his wings. As it is, they’ll try to find some way to cheat you out of them.”

Maris, listening, began to lose her temper. “Stop it, Val,” she said.

“Just keep out of this, flyer,” he snapped. “This is between us.” S’Rella jumped to her feet. “Why are you always so hateful? You’re cruel to Maris all the time, and she’s only tried to help you. And the things you’ve been saying about Garth—Garth was nice to me, and what did I do, you made me try to take his wings, and now he almost died and you’re saying awful things about him. Don’t you say another word! Don’t you!” Val’s face became an expressionless mask. “I see,” he said flatly. “Suit yourself. If you care so much for flyers, go visit Garth and tell him to keep his wings. I’ll celebrate by myself.” He turned away and began to stride across the sand, toward the sea road and his tavern.

Maris took hold of S’Rella’s hand. “Would you like to visit Garth?” she said impulsively.

“Could we?”

Maris nodded. “He and Riesa share a big house a half mile up the hill road. He likes to stay close to the sea and the lodge. We could go see how he is.” S’Rella was more than willing, she was eager, and they set off at once. Maris had been a bit afraid of the reception they might meet when they arrived, but her own concern about Garth’s condition was great enough that she was willing to take the risk. She needn’t have worried. Riesa beamed at them when she opened the door, and all at once began to cry, and Maris had to take her in her arms and comfort her. “Oh, come see him, come see him,” Riesa kept saying through her tears. “He’ll be so glad.”

Garth was propped up in bed against a mountain of pillows, a shaggy woolen blanket thrown over his legs. His face was frighteningly pale and puffed-up, but when he saw them in the doorway his smile was real enough. “Ah,” he boomed, his voice loud as ever, “Maris! And the little demon who’s out to take my wings.” He waved them to his side. “Come and sit and talk to me. Riesa does nothing but fuss and fret, and she won’t even bring me any of her ale.”

Maris smiled. “You don’t need any ale,” she said primly as she walked to his bedside and kissed him lightly on the brow.

S’Rella hung back by the door, however. When he saw that, Garth’s face turned serious. “Ah, S’Rella,” he said, “don’t be frightened. I’m not angry with you.”

She came forward to stand by Maris. “You’re not?”

“No,” Garth said firmly. “Riesa, bring them seats.” His sister did as he asked, and when they were seated Garth resumed. “Oh, I was furious when you challenged me—hurt, too—I can’t deny that.”

“I’m sorry,” S’Rella blurted. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I don’t hate you—what I said—at the lodge—”

He waved her quiet. “I know that. And you needn’t be sorry. The water was terribly cold out there, but maybe it woke me up a bit, and I’ve had all afternoon to lie here and think. I’ve been a fool, and I’m lucky I have the breath to say so. I did wrong to keep it secret, the way that I was feeling, and you did right to name me when you knew.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t accept being a land-bound, you know. I love the flying too much, all my friends, the travel. But it’s over, my little swim proved that, the only question is whether I’m to be a live land-bound or a drowned flyer at the end of it all. Before today, I’d always managed to shrug off the pain, get where I was going. But this morning—ah, it was miserable, shooting pains in my arms and legs. But I don’t want to talk about that. Bad enough it happened.” He reached across and took S’Rella by the hand. “What I mean to say, S’Rella, is that I can’t compete tomorrow, and I wouldn’t if I could. Riesa and the sea have brought me to my senses. The wings are yours.”

S’Rella could hardly believe him. She stared at him wide-eyed, and a tremulous smile broke across her face.

“What will you do, Garth?” Maris asked, her voice showing concern.

He grimaced. “That depends on the. healers,” he said. “Seems to me I have three choices. Maybe I’ll be a corpse, and maybe I’ll be a cripple, but if I can find a healer who knows what he’s about, I thought I might try my hand at trade. I’ve got enough iron put aside to buy myself a ship, and I could travel that way, see other islands—though I’m half scared out of my wits at the idea of traveling by sea.” He chuckled. “You and Dorr used to kid me about being a trader. You remember, Maris? Said I’d trade my wings if the deal was good enough, just because I liked to swap a little now and again. Well, some trader I turned out to be. Here S’Rella gets my wings and doesn’t give me anything.” He laughed, and Maris found herself joining him.

They talked for over an hour, about traders and sailors and finally flyers, relaxing as they laughed at Garth’s jokes and exchanged gossip. “Corm is livid about your friend Val,” Garth said at one point, “and I can’t say I blame him. He’s a good enough flyer that he never considered that he might lose his wings, and here it seems he’s lost them, and to One-Wing of all people. Did you have anything to do with that, Maris?”

She shook her head. “Hardly. All Val’s idea. He’ll never admit it, but I think he wanted to beat a flyer of the top rank to make them forget about Ari. The fact that Corm’s wife sits among the judges just added an extra flair to the feat, and of course it gave him a convenient excuse if he lost. He could blame it on flyer prejudice.”

Garth nodded and made a rude joke about Corm, then turned to his sister. “Riesa, why don’t you show S’Rella our house?”

Reisa took the hint. “Yes, do come see,” she said. S’Rella followed her from the room.

“She’s nice,” Garth said when they were gone, “and she does remind me an awful lot of you, Maris. Do you remember when we first met? I was—well, less than twenty, and you were even younger than she is. Do you remember?”

Maris smiled at him. “I remember. It was my first flight to the Eyrie. They were having a party for some Outer Islander, but I half thought it was given in my honor.”

Garth laughed. “Ah, you beautiful ones are always vain. You remember Raven? He was there too. That was where he did his trick.”

“I’ve never forgotten it,” Maris answered him.

“Did you teach it to One-Wing?”

“No.”

Garth laughed again. “Everyone is certain you did. We all remember how impressed you were by Raven. Coll even wrote a song about him, as I seem to recall.”

Maris smiled. “Yes.”

Garth started to say something else, then thought the better of it. For a long moment the room was filled with silence, and the smile slowly faded on Garth’s face.

He began to cry, fighting it and losing, and he reached out his big hands for her, and Maris came and sat on the edge of the bed and hugged him, and ran her hand across his brow. “I knew—I didn’t want S’Rella to see me—ah, Maris it’s so damned rotten, so damned—”

“Oh, Garth,” she whispered, kissing him lightly and fighting to hold back her own tears.

“Come and see me,” he said. “I—you know how—when you don’t fly, you can’t go to the Eyrie—you know—bad enough to lose your freedom, and the wind—but I don’t want to lose you too, and my other friends, just because—oh, damn, damn these tears—visit me, Maris, promise, promise.”

“I promise, Garth,” she said, trying to keep her voice light. “Unless you gain so much weight that I can’t stand to look at you.”

Beneath his tears, he laughed. “Ah,” he said. “Here—and just when I thought I could get fat in peace. You—”

Footsteps sounded outside, Riesa and S’Rella returning, and Garth quickly used the blanket to dry his tears. “Go,” he said, smiling again, “go, I’m tired, you’ve exhausted me. But come back tomorrow when it’s all over and tell me how the games finished out.”

Maris nodded. And S’Rella came up to her side and bent to give Garth a quick, shy kiss before they left.

They walked the half-mile back to the village slowly, talking as they went, savoring the cool wind that moved through the night. They spoke of Garth, and a little bit of Val, and then S’Rella mentioned the wings—her wings—with wonder in her voice. “I’m a flyer,” she said happily. “It’s really true.”

But it was not that simple.

Sena was waiting for them inside their cabin, sitting on the edge of a bed and looking impatient. She rose when they entered. “Where have the two of you been?”

“We went to see how Garth is,” Maris answered. “What is it? Is anything wrong?”

“I don’t know. We have been summoned up to the lodge house by the judges.” She gave S’Rella a meaningful look with her good eye. “All three of us, and we’re late.”

They left at once. On the way, Maris told Sena what Garth had said about giving up the wings, but the old teacher did not seem pleased. “Well, we shall see about that,” she said. “I wouldn’t go flying off with them yet.” The flyers were not partying tonight. The main room of the lodge was sparsely populated, only a half-dozen Western flyers Maris knew vaguely sitting and drinking, and the atmosphere was anything but festive. One of them stood up when Maris and the others entered. “In the back room,” he said.

The five judges were squabbling around a circular table, but they broke off in mid-argument when the door opened. Shalli stood up. “Maris, Sena, S’Rella, do come in,” she said. “And close the door.”

They took seats around the table, and Shalli folded her hands neatly in front of her as she resumed. “We summoned you because we have a dispute, and it involves young S’Rella here, and you have a right to state your views. Garth has sent word that he will not fly tomorrow—”

“We know,” Maris broke in. “We just came from him.”

“Good,” Shalli said. “Then perhaps you understand our problem. We must decide what to do with the wings.”

S’Rella looked stricken. “They’re mine,” she said. “Garth said so.” The Landsman of Skulny was drumming his fingers on the table and frowning. “The wings are not Garth’s to give,” he said loudly. “Here, child, I will ask you a question. If you are given the wings, will you promise to make a home here, and fly for Skulny?”

S’Rella did not flinch under his tense gaze, Maris noted with approval. “No,” she answered bluntly. “I couldn’t. I mean, Skulny is nice, I’m sure, but—but this isn’t my home. I’m going to return to Southern with the wings, to Veleth, the little island where I was born.”

The Landsman shook his head violently. “No, no, no. You may return to this Southern rock if you wish, but if you do it will be without the wings.” He looked at the other judges. “See. I gave her a chance. Now, I insist.” He sought their support.

Sena thumped a fist on the table. “What is this? What is going on? S’Rella has a right to the wings, more right than anyone else. She challenged Garth and he has failed the test. How can you speak of not giving her the wings?” She looked from judge to judge furiously.

Shalli, who seemed to be the spokesman, gave an apologetic shrug. “We have a disagreement,” she said. “The question is how tomorrow’s contest should be scored. Some of us feel that if Garth does not fly, S’Rella must be given the victory by forfeit. But the Landsman is of the opinion that we cannot vote on a contest in which only one flyer flies. He insists that the decision be made on the basis of the two legs already completed, and on them alone. If that is done, Garth is presently ahead six stones to five, and would retain the wings.”

“But Garth has renounced the wings!” Maris said. “He can’t fly, he is too ill.”

“The law provides for that,” the Landsman said. “If a flyer is sick, his wings are given over to the Landsman and the island’s other flyers to dispose of, provided he or she has no heir. We will give the wings to someone worthy of them, someone who is willing to take up residence on Skulny. I offered that chance to the girl here and you all heard her answer. It must be someone else then.”

“We had hoped that S’Rella would consent to remain on Skulny,” Shalli said. “That would have resolved our differences.”

“No,” S’Rella repeated stubbornly, but she looked miserable.

“What you propose is a cheat,” Sena said bitterly to the Landsman.

“I am inclined to agree with that,” put in the big man from the Outer Islands. He ran his fingers through unkempt blond hair. “The only reason Garth stands ahead now is because you cast a stone for him today, even after he fell into the ocean, Landsman. That was hardly fair.”

“I judged it fair,” the Landsman said angrily.

“Garth wants S’Rella to take his wings,” Maris said. “Don’t his wishes matter in this?”

“No,” the Landsman said. “The wings were never his alone. They are a trust, they belong to all the people of Skulny.” He looked around at his fellow judges, imploring. “It is not fair to give them away to this Southerner, to reduce Skulny to only two flyers without cause. Listen to me. If Garth had been well, he would have defended his wings ably against any challenge, and it never would have come to this. If he had been sick and had come to me and told me, as your own flyer law requires, then by now we would have found someone else to wear the wings, someone capable of retaining them for Skulny. It is only because Garth chose to conceal his condition that we are in this predicament. Will you punish all my island because a flyer kept a secret?”

Maris had to admit that there was some justice in the argument. The judges seemed swayed too. “What you say is true,” said the small woman from Southern. “I would be glad to see a new set of wings come south, but your claim is hard to deny.”

“S’Rella has rights too,” Sena insisted. “You must be fair to her.”

“If you give the wings to the Landsman,” Maris added, “you will be taking away her right to challenge. She is only down one stone. She has an excellent chance.”

Then S’Rella spoke up. “I didn’t earn the wings,” she said uncertainly. “I was ashamed of the way I flew today. But I could win them fairly, if I had another chance. I know I could. Garth wants me to.”

Shalli sighed. “S’Rella, my dear, it isn’t that simple. We can’t start the whole competition over simply for your sake alone.”

“She should get the wings,” the Outer Islander grumbled. “Here, I cast tomorrow’s pebble for her already. That makes it six to six. Will anyone join me?” He looked around.

“There are no pebbles here to cast,” the Landsman snapped, “and you cannot have a contest with only one flyer.” He crossed his arms and sat back, scowling.

“I fear I must vote with the Landsman,” the Southerner said, “lest I be charged with unfairly favoring a neighbor.”

That left Shalli and the woman from Eastern, both of whom looked hesitant. “Isn’t there some way we can be fair to all?” Shalli said.

Maris looked at S’Rella and then touched her on her arm. “Are you truly willing to fly again in contest, to try to earn the wings?”

“Yes,” S’Rella said, “I want to win them right. I want to deserve them, no matter what Val says.”

Maris nodded and turned back to the judges. “Then I have a proposition for you,” she said. “Landsman, you have two other flyers on Skulny. Do you think them able enough?”

“Yes,” he said suspiciously, quickly. “What of it?”

“Only this—I propose that you resume the match. Keep the score as it stands, with S’Rella down one stone. But since Garth cannot fly, name a proxy for him, another of your flyers to bear wings in his place. If your proxy wins, then Skulny retains the wings and you can award them to whom you choose. If S’Rella wins, well, then no one can dispute her right to go south as a flyer. What do you say?”

The Landsman thought it over for a minute. “Well,” he said, “I could accept that. Jirel can fly in Garth’s stead. If this girl can outfly her, then she has earned her place, though it will not make me happy.”

Shalli looked immensely relieved. “An excellent suggestion,” she said, smiling. “I knew we could count on Maris for good sense.”

“Are we all agreed, then?” the Easterner said quickly.

All of the judges nodded except the Outer Islander, who shook his head again and muttered, “The girl should get the wings. The man fell into the ocean.” But he did not dissent too loudly and finally conceded.

Outside the lodge in the cool night air, a thin rain had begun to fall. But Sena stopped them anyway, looking troubled. “S’Rella,” she said, leaning on her cane, “are you certain this is what you want? You might lose the wings this way. Jirel is said to be a good flyer. And perhaps we could have won the judges to our side, if we had argued longer.”

“No,” S’Rella said gravely. “No, I want it this way.”

Sena looked her in the eye for a long time, and finally nodded. “Good,” she said, satisfied. “Let’s get you home, then. Tomorrow there is flying to be done.”

On the third day of the competition, Maris woke before dawn, confused by the dark and the cold and aware that something was very wrong. There was a hammering inside her head, and she shook it to try to still the insistent noise before she realized it was real. Someone was pounding on the door.

“Maris,” S’Rella said from the next bed. “Should I get it?” Maris could not see her; it was well before dawn, and their candles weren’t lit.

“No,” Maris whispered. “Quiet.” She was afraid. The pounding went on and on, without let-up, and Maris remembered the dead rainbirds that had been left for them and wondered who was on the other side of the door at this hour, trying so angrily to get them to open. She climbed out of bed and padded across the room, and in the dark she managed to locate the blade she had used to pry free the birds. It was nothing, a little metal table knife, not a fighting blade at all, but it gave her confidence. Only then did she go to the door. “Who’s there?” she demanded. “Who is it?” The pounding stopped. “Raggin,” said a deep voice that she did not recognize. Its gruffness startled her.

“Raggin? I know no Raggin. What do you want?”

“I’m from the Iron Axe,” the voice said. “You know Val? The one who’s been staying with me?”

Maris felt her fears drain away, and she hurried to open the door. The man standing in the starlight was gaunt and stooped, with a hook nose and a dirty beard, but he was suddenly familiar to her; the barkeep from Val’s tavern. “Is something wrong?”

“I was closing up, and your friend hadn’t been in yet. Thought he’d just found some pretty to sleep with, but then I found him outside, lying in the back. Somebody hurt him bad.”

“Val,” S’Rella said. She rushed to the door. “Where is he? Is he all right? Where is he?”

“He’s up in his room,” Raggin said. “I dragged him up the stairs, and it wasn’t easy. But I remembered he knew people up here so I thought I better come and ask around, and they sent me here. You gonna come down? I don’t know what to do for him.”

“Right away,” Maris said urgently. “S’Rella, get dressed.” She hurried to collect her own clothes and slipped into them, and shortly they were hurrying down the sea road. Maris had a lantern in one hand. The road ran along the seaside cliffs for part of its length, and a misstep in the dark could prove to be fatal.

The tavern was dark and shuttered, the front door braced from inside with a heavy wooden beam. Raggin left them standing in front of it and vanished around back to enter by what he called his “secret way.” When he opened the door from the inside, he said, “Got to lock up good, lots of hard types around here. I got customers you wouldn’t believe.”

They hardly listened. S’Rella ran up the stairs to the room she had sometimes shared with Val, and Maris came close behind. S’Rella was lighting a candle by Val’s bedside when Maris caught up to her.

Flickering ruddy light filled the small room, and the shape huddled beneath the blankets moved with a small animal whimper. S’Rella set down the candle and then she pulled off the blankets.

Val’s eyes found her, and he seemed to recognize her—his left arm clutched at her hand desperately. But when he tried to speak, the only sounds he could make were choking, pain-wracked sobs.

Maris felt sick. He had been beaten savagely about the head and shoulders, and his face was an unrecognizable mass of swelling and bruises. An open scar along one cheek was still bleeding, and he had dried blood all over his shirt and jaw. His mouth was bloody too, when he opened it and tried to speak.

“Val!” S’Rella cried, weeping. She touched his brow and he shrank away from her hand, trying to speak.

Maris came closer. Val was holding S’Rella tight with his left hand, clutching at her, pulling. But his right arm just lay still along his side, and there was something wrong, blood on the sheet beneath it. The angle that it lay was impossible, and his jacket was ripped, bloody. She knelt by the right side of the bed and touched his arm gingerly, and Val shrieked so loudly that S’Rella jumped away, terrified. It was only then that Maris saw the jagged edge of bone peeking through his skin and clothing.

Raggin was observing them from the doorway. “His arm’s broke, don’t touch it,” he said helpfully. “He screams when you do. You shoulda heard the noise he made when I carried him up here. I think his leg’s broke too, but I’m not sure.”

Val had quieted, but his breath came in painful gasps. Maris was on her feet. “Why didn’t you call a healer?” she demanded of Raggin. “Why didn’t you give him something for the pain?”

Raggin drew back, shocked, as if those ideas had never occurred to him. “I got you, didn’t I? Who’s gonna pay a healer? He’s not, that’s for sure. Don’t have near enough. I went through his things.”

Maris balled her fists and tried to control her fury. “You’re going to go and fetch a healer right now,” she said. “And I don’t care if you have to run ten miles, you’re going to do it fast. If you don’t, I swear I’ll talk to the Landsman and have this place closed down.”

“Flyers,” the barkeep spat. “Throwing your weight around, eh? Well, I’ll go, but who’s gonna pay this healer? That’s what I want to know, and he’ll want to know too.”

“Damn you,” Maris said. “I’ll pay, damn you, I’ll pay. He’s a flyer, and if his bones don’t heal right, if they aren’t taken care of, he’ll never fly again. Now hurry!”

Raggin gave her a last sour look and turned for the stairs. Maris went back to Val’s bedside. He was making whimpering noises and trying to move, but every motion seemed to wrack him with pain.

“Can’t we help him?” S’Rella said, glancing up at Maris.

“Yes,” Maris said. “This is a tavern, after all. Go downstairs and find the stock, bring up a few bottles. That should help a little with the pain, until the healer arrives.”

S’Rella nodded and started for the door. “What should I bring?” she asked. “Wine?”

“No, we need something stronger. Look for some brandy. Or—that liquor from Poweet, what do they call it?—they make it from grain and potatoes—”

S’Rella nodded and was gone. Shortly she returned with three bottles of local brandy and an unmarked flask that gave off a pungent, potent smell. “Strong stuff,” Maris said. She tasted it herself, then had S’Rella hold up Val’s head while she dribbled it into his mouth. He seemed anxious to cooperate, sucking down the drink eagerly as they took turns pouring it into him.

When Raggin finally returned with a healer more than an hour later, Val had passed out. “Here’s your healer,” the barkeep said. He took one look at the empty bottles on the floor and added, “You’ll pay for those too, flyer.”

When the healer had set Val’s arm and leg—Raggin had been right, it was broken as well, though not as badly—and splinted them, and treated his swollen face, he gave Maris a small bottle full of a dark green liquid. “This is better than brandy,” he said. “It will numb the pain and let him sleep.” He departed, leaving Maris and S’Rella alone with Val.

“It was flyers, wasn’t it?” S’Rella asked tearfully as they sat together in the smoky, candle-lit room.

“One arm and one leg broken, and the other side not touched,” Maris said angrily. “Yes, that says flyer to me. I don’t think any flyer could have done this personally, but I suspect it was a flyer who had it done.” On a sudden impulse Maris moved to where Val’s blood-stained, torn clothing had been piled, and rummaged through it. “Hmm. As I thought. His knife is gone. Maybe they took it, or maybe he just had it in his hand and dropped it.”

“I hope he cut them, whoever it was,” S’Rella said. “Do you think it was Corm? Because Val was going to take his wings tomorrow?”

“Today,” Maris said ruefully, glancing toward the window. The first blush of dawn was visible against the eastern sky. “But, no, it wasn’t Corm. Not that Corm wouldn’t gladly destroy Val if he could, but he’d do it legally, not like this. Corm is too proud to resort to beatings.”

“Who, then?” Her voice quivered.

Maris shook her head. “I don’t know, S’Rella. Some sick person, obviously. Maybe a friend of Corm’s, or a friend of Ari’s. Maybe Arak or one of his friends. You know Val made a lot of enemies.”

“He wanted me to go with him,” S’Rella said, guiltily, “but I went to see Garth instead. If I had gone with him like he wanted, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“If you had gone with him,” Maris said, “you’d probably be lying there broken and bleeding as well. S’Rella, love, remember those rainbirds they left for us. They wanted to tell us something. You’re a one-wing too.” She glanced out towards the dawn. “And so am I. Maybe it’s time I admitted it. I’m half-a-flyer and that’s all I’ll ever be.” She smiled for S’Rella. “But I guess what matters is what half.”

S’Rella seemed puzzled, but Maris said, “No more talk. You still have a few hours before the competition opens, and I want you to try to get some sleep. You have to win your wings today, remember?”

“I can’t,” S’Rella protested. “Not now. I can’t.”

“Especially now,” Maris said. “Whoever had this done to Val would be delighted to know that it lost you your wings as well as his. Is that what you want?”

“No,” S’Rella said.

“Then sleep.”

Later, when S’Rella slept, Maris looked up again at the window. The sun was half-risen, its reddened face streaked with heavy dark clouds. It was going to be a good, windy day. A fine day for flying.

The competition was already well under way when Maris and S’Rella arrived late. They had been delayed in the tavern when Raggin demanded immediate payment of Val’s bill, and it had taken a long argument to convince him that he would get everything due him. Maris made him promise to tend to Val’s needs, and allow no one else up those stairs.

Sena was at her usual station by the judges, watching the early contestants fly the gates. Maris sent S’Rella off to join the other woodwingers, and hurried up the cliff. Sena was relieved to see her. “Maris!” she exclaimed. “I was worried something was wrong. It will be time soon. Sher is next up. Is S’Rella ready?”

“S’Rella is ready to fly,” Maris said. She told Sena about Val.

All the strength and vitality seemed to drain from the teacher as she listened. Her good eye clouded over with tears and she leaned more heavily on her cane, and suddenly she was very old indeed. “I did not believe,” she muttered weakly. “I did not—even when that terrible thing with the birds, even then—I could not think they would do such a thing.” Her face was the color of ash. “Help me, child. I must sit down.”

Maris put an arm about her for support and led her to the judges’ table, where Shalli looked up, concerned.

“Is everything all right?”

“No,” said Maris, easing Sena into a seat. “Val will not fly today,” she continued, swinging around to face the judges. “Last night he was attacked and beaten at the tavern where he had a room. An arm and a leg were broken.”

All of the judges looked shocked. “How terrible,” Shalli said. The Easterner swore, the Outer Islander shook his head, and the Landsman of Skulny rose. “This is dreadful. I won’t allow this on my island. We’ll find whoever did it, you have my promise on that.”

“A flyer did it,” Maris said, “or paid for it, anyway. They broke his right arm and his right leg. One-Wing. You understand.”

Shalli frowned. “Maris, this is a horrid thing, but no flyer would do such a thing. And if you mean to imply that Corm would—”

“Do you have proof a flyer was involved?” the Easterner interrupted.

“I know the tavern where Val One-Wing was staying,” the Landsman said. “The Iron Axe, was it not? That is a very bad place, with the worst sort of patrons, rough people. It could have been anyone. A drunken fight, a jealous lover, a gambling quarrel. I’ve seen many beatings come before me from that place.”

Maris stared at him. “You’ll never find who did it, no matter what you promise,” she said. “That isn’t what concerns me. I want to take Val’s wings back to him tonight.”

“Val’s—wings?”

“I’m afraid,” the Southerner said, “he must wait and try again next year. I am sorry he was hurt when he was so close to winning.”

“Close?” Maris looked the length of the table, found the box she sought, picked it up and rattled it at them. “Nine black stones to one white. That is more than close. Val has won. Even if he lost five to nothing today, he has won.”

“No,” Shalli said stubbornly. “Corm deserves his chance, I won’t have you cheat him of it for One-Wing, no matter how sorry I feel for him. Corm is very good at the gates. He might have won ten to nothing, two stones from each of us, and then he would have kept his wings.”

“Ten to nothing,” Maris said. “How likely is that?”

“It is possible,” Shalli said.

“It is,” echoed the Easterner. “We can’t give the victory to One-Wing. It would not be fair to Corm, who has flown well for many years. I think we must declare Val forfeit.”

Heads were bobbing up and down the table, but Maris only smiled. “I was afraid you might take this position.” She put her hands on her hips and defied them. “But Val will have his wings. Luckily there is a precedent. You set it yourselves last night, with S’Rella and Garth. Let the score stand and the match continue. Summon Corm immediately.

“I will fly proxy for Val.”

She knew they would not deny her.

Maris got her wings and joined the mill of contestants, impatient and increasingly nervous.

The gates had been erected during the night, nine flimsy wooden constructions planted firmly in the sand, in a course demanding a series of difficult turns and tacking maneuvers. The first gate, straight out from flyers’ cliff, consisted of two tall blackwood poles, each some forty feet high, set fifty feet apart in the sand. A rope had been tied from the top of one pole to the top of the other. To score, the flyer had to glide through that gate. Easy enough, but the next gate was only a few yards further down the beach, not straight ahead but off to one side, so the flyer had to angle quickly before shooting past it. And the second gate was smaller, the poles just a little bit shorter and set just a little bit closer together. So it went, the course wandering out into the shallows and then veering sharply back onto land, a twisting wing-snapping course, with each of the nine gates smaller than the one before, until the ninth and final gate, two poles barely eight feet off the ground, set exactly twenty-one feet apart. A flyer’s wingspan was twenty feet. No one had ever flown more than seven gates. Even that was no mean task; of all the flyers to try the gates this morning, the best score was six, and that had been flown by the phenomenal Lane.

Challengers traditionally flew first in this test; the flyer was given the courtesy of knowing what score he had to beat. Wings on her shoulders, Maris watched the woodwingers make their attempts, one by one.

Sher dove straight from the cliff through the first gate, coming in barely under the rope, banked sharply towards the second but continued to descend, fast, too fast. Panicking, the young woodwinger leveled off quickly to avoid hitting the ground, and suddenly started to rise, passing over the second gate instead ofthrough it. The flyer that Sher challenged managed only two gates, but that was enough for the victory.

Leya, watching Sher, chose a different strategy. She leapt from the cliff to circle widely above the beach, dropping down gradually so that she’d pass through the first gate level instead of in a descent. She began her turn well before she entered the gate proper, so that she actually swung around one pole gracefully, already heading for the second gate. She sailed smoothly through that as well, again beginning her turn early, but this time it was a sharper turn, more demanding, upwind. Leya made it well enough, and the third gate with it, but had nothing left to wrench herself around afterwards. She flew peacefully out to sea, missing the fourth gate by a wide margin. A few of the spectators applauded her anyway, and her flyer rival could only manage two gates before he landed roughly in the sand. So Leya had her first triumph, though it was not enough to win for her a pair of wings.

Damen and Arak were announced by the crier. Both of them had trouble. Damen took the gates too fast, and couldn’t recover after the second in time for the third. Arak passed through the second gate too high; the upper edge of a wing grazed the rope, and it was enough to send him off balance and far off course. But even with the two-gate tie, Arak easily retained his wings.

Kerr, surprisingly, also managed a tie. Imitating Leya, he entered the first gate levelled and starting his turn, and handled the second easily enough. But like Leya he had trouble veering upwind into the third, and unlike Leya, he did not manage it. He thumped to a halt in the sand a few yards short of the gate, and the land-bound children rushed in from all sides to help him out of his wings. Jon of Culhall tried to avoid Kerr’s fate by maintaining a higher altitude, but passed over and-to the right of the third gate.

“Corm of Lesser Amberly,” the crier was announcing, “Val One-Wing, Val of South Arren.” Then a brief halt. “Maris of Lesser Amberly, flying proxy for Val, Maris of Lesser Amberly.”

She stood on flyers’ cliff, helpers unfolding her wings, locking each strut in place. A few dozen yards away, Corm too stood and let them work. She looked over at him, and his eyes met hers, dark, intense. “Maris One-Wing,” he called bitterly. “Is this what you’ve come to? I’m glad Russ is not alive to see you.”

“Russ would be proud,” she threw back, angry, and knowing Corm had wanted her angry. Anger brought carelessness, and that was his only hope; Seven years ago she had outflown him, in a very different sort of contest where her life and her wings depended on the outcome, and she was confident she could outfly him today as well. Precision, control, reflexes, a feel for the wind; that was all it required, and, today, she had them in full measure.

Her wings were wide and tight, metal humming softly in the wind, and she felt utterly serene and sure of herself. She reached up, wrapped her hands around the grips, ran, jumped, soared. Up she flew, up and up, and she did a loop for the sheer joy of it and then dove, sliding down and down through the air, riding and shifting with the little eddies and currents, angling towards the gates. She was banked sharply and wheeling as she went through the first gate, her wings drawing a silver line from the top of one pole to the bottom of the other, but she stabilized gracefully and swayed the other way for the approach to the second, slid through it fluidly. It was the feel of it, the love of it, not the thought; it was instinct and reflex and knowing the wind, and Maris was the wind. The third gate was next, the difficult upwind turn, but she snapped around easily, quickly, cleanly, then looped above the water to correct her angle on the fourth gate, and she was through that too, and the fifth was a wide lazy downwind turn, and the sixth was almost straight ahead, not a difficult angle at all, but small, so she dropped a little and skimmed low over the sand, her wings taut and full, and the spectators were shouting and cheering wildly.

In a heartbeat it was over.

Just as the sixth gate loomed ahead of her, she hit a sink, a sudden cold downdraft that had no right being there. It pushed at her, clutched at her, just for an instant, but that was long enough for her wings to brush the ground, and then her legs were trailing through the wet sand and she slid along bumpily before finally jolting to a halt in the shadow of the gate.

A small blond girl ran up to her and helped her to her feet, then began folding up her wings. Maris stood breathless and exhilarated. Five, then, five it was. Not the best score of the day, but a good score, and it was enough. Corm trailed Val by such a margin that it would not be enough for him to beat her. He had to humiliate her, crush her, collect two pebbles from each of the judges. And that he could not do.

He knew it too. Disheartened by her flight, he did not even come close. He failed on the fourth gate, a decisive victory for her, for Val. She felt elated as she trudged across the beach, wings folded on her back.

Criers’ calls ran up and down the shore. S’Rella stood poised on the precipice, the sun shining off the bright metal of her wings, and behind her Maris glimpsed wiry, black-haired Jirel of Skulny.

S’Rella leaped, and Maris stood to watch, her heart flying with her, hoping, hoping. S’Rella banked and circled, a leisurely approach instead of the wild rush Maris had employed, and came gliding down smoothly on the same tack Leya and Kerr had used in their turns. Through the first gate, turning, leveling, wheeling now in the opposite direction—Maris felt her breath stop for a minute—and through the second gate, and now a very sharp turn upwind, a clean knife-thrust of a turn as if the wind itself had changed direction at her command, and through the third gate, still in control, and another hard veer and she was through the fourth gate—people began to rise and cheer—and the fifth was as easy for her as it had been for Maris, and now it was the sixth that she was moving in on, the sixth on which Maris had failed, and her wings were swaying a bit but then they stilled and she came in higher than Maris, and the sink shook her and didn’t ground her, and then she was through the sixth gate too—shouts and cheers everywhere—and the seventh demanded a split-second bank at just the right angle, and S’Rella did that as well, and she came around towards the eighth—

—and it was too narrow, the poles set too close together, and S’Rella was just a bit too far to one side. Her left wing hit the pole with a snap, and the wing-struts shattered even as the pole did, and S’Rella went sprawling on the ground.

And Maris was only one of dozens running toward her.

When she got there, S’Rella was sitting up, laughing and breathing hard, surrounded by land-bound who were shouting at her, yelling hoarse-voiced congratulations. The children pressed close to touch her wings. But S’Rella, her face reddened by the wind, couldn’t seem to stop laughing.

Maris pushed her way through the crowd and hugged her, and S’Rella giggled through it all. “Are you all right?” Maris asked, pushing her away and holding her at arm’s length. S’Rella nodded furiously, still giggling. “Then what . . .?”

S’Rella pointed at her wing, the wing that had struck the gate. The fabric, virtually indestructible, was damaged, but a support strut had broken. “That’s easily fixed,” Maris said after she’d looked it over. “No problem.”

“Don’t you see?” S’Rella said, jumping to her feet. Her right wing bobbed with the motion, taut and vibrant, but her left hung limp and broken, silver tissue dragging on the sand where she fell.

Maris looked and began to laugh. “One-Wing,” she said helplessly and they collapsed into each other’s arms again, laughing.

“Jirel didn’t disgrace you,” Maris said to Garth that night, as she sat with him by his fire. He was up and about again, looking better, and drinking ale once more. “She was an admirable proxy, flew five gates as good as I’d done. But five isn’t seven, of course, and it wasn’t enough. Even the Landsman couldn’t call it a tie.”

“Good,” Garth said. “S’Rella deserves the wings. I like S’Rella. Make her promise to visit me too.”

Maris smiled. “I will,” she said. “She’s sorry she couldn’t come tonight, but she wanted to go straight down to Val. I’m to join her after I leave here. I don’t relish it, but . . .” She sighed.

Garth took a healthy swig of ale and stared into the fire for a long moment. “I feel sorry for Corm,” he said. “Never liked him, but he knew how to fly.” He took another long swallow.

“Don’t fret,” Maris said. “He’s bitter, but he’ll recover. Shalli’s pregnancy will soon be too advanced for her to fly, so Corm will have the use of her wings for a few months, and if I know him he’ll bully her into sharing even after the baby comes. Next year he can challenge. It won’t be Val, either. Corm is cleverer than that. I’ll wager he names someone like Jon of Culhall.”

“Ah,” Garth said, “if the damned healers ever cure me, I just may name Jon myself.”

“He’ll be a popular choice next year,” Maris agreed. “Even Kerr wants another chance at him, though I doubt Sena will sponsor him again until he’s a lot more seasoned. She’ll have better prospects to choose from next year. With the double victory by S’Rella and Val, Woodwings is suddenly thriving again. She’ll soon have more students than she knows what to do with.” Maris chuckled. “You and Corm weren’t the only flyers grounded either. Bari of Poweet lost her wings in an out-of-family challenge, and Big Hara went down to her own daughter.”

“A flock of ex-flyers,” Garth grumbled.

“And a lot of one-wings,” Maris added, smiling. “The world is changing, Garth. Once we had only flyers and land-bound.”

“Yes,” Garth said, gulping down some more ale. “Then you confused everything. Flying land-bounds and grounded flyers. Where will it end?”

“I don’t know,” Maris said. She stood up. “I’d stay longer, but I must go talk to Val, and I’m long overdue on Amberly. With Shalli pregnant and Corm wingless, the Landsman will no doubt work me to death. But I’ll find time to visit, I promise.”

“Good.” He grinned up at her. “Fly well, now.”

When she left, he was shouting to Riesa for another ale.

Val was propped up awkwardly in bed, his head raised just enough so that he could eat, and he was spooning soup into his mouth with his left hand. S’Rella sat by his side, holding the bowl. They both looked up when Maris entered, and Val’s hand trembled, spilling hot soup on his bare chest. He cursed and S’Rella helped him mop it up.

“Val,” Maris said evenly, nodding. On the floor by the door she set the wings she had carried, once belonging to Corm of Lesser Amberly. “Your wings.”

The swelling in his face had subsided enough so that Val was beginning to look like himself again, although his puffed tip gave him an atypical sneer. “S’Rella told me what you did,” he said with difficulty.

“Now I suppose you want me to thank you.” Maris folded her arms and waited. “Your friends the flyers did this to me, you know,” he said, “if the bones mend crooked, I’ll never use those damn wings you got me. Even if they heal properly, I’ll never be as good as I was.”

“I know that,” Maris said, “and I’m sorry. But it wasn’t my friends who did this, Val. Not all flyers are my friends. And they aren’t all your enemies.”

“You were at the party,” Val said. Maris nodded. “It won’t be easy, and most of the burden is on you. Reject them if you like, hate all of them. Or find the ones worth knowing. It’s up to you.”

“I’ll tell you who I’m going to find,” Val said. “I’m going to find the ones who did this to me, and then I’m going to find whoever sent them.”

“Yes,” Maris said. “And then?”

“S’Rella found my knife,” Val said simply. “I dropped it in the bushes last night. But I cut one of them, well enough so I’ll know her by the scar.”

“Where are you going, when you heal?” Maris said.

Val seemed thrown off-stride by the sudden change of subject. “I had thought Seatooth. I’ve heard the stories, about how much the Landsman there wants a flyer. But S’Rella tells me that the Landsman of Skulny is anxious as well. I’ll talk to them both, see what they offer.”

“Val of Seatooth,” Maris said. “It has a nice sound to it.”

“It will always be One-Wing,” he said. “Maybe for you too.”

“A half-flyer,” she agreed. “Both of us. But which half? Val, you can make the Landsman bid for your services. The flyers will despise you for it, most of them, and maybe some of the younger and greedier will imitate you, and I’d hate to see that. And you can wear that knife your father gave you when you fly, even though you break one of the oldest and wisest flyer laws by doing so. It is a small point, a tradition, and the flyers again will despise you, but no one will do anything. But I tell you now, if you find who ordered you beaten, and kill them with that same knife, you’ll be One-Wing no longer. The flyers will name you outlaw and strip your wings away, and not a Landsman on Windhaven will take your side or give you landing, no matter how much they need flyers.”

“You want me to forget,” Val said. “Forget this?”

“No,” said Maris. “Find them, and take them to a Landsman, or call a flyer court. Let your enemy be the one who loses wings and home and life, and not you. Is that such a bad alternative?”

Val smiled crookedly, and Maris saw he had lost some teeth as well. “No,” he said. “I almost like it.”

“It’s your choice,” Maris said. “You won’t be flying for a good while, so you’ll have time to think about it. I think you’re intelligent enough to use that time.” She looked to S’Rella. “I must return to Lesser Amberly. It’s on your way, if you’re going back to Southern. Will you fly with me, and spend a day in my home?”

S’Rella nodded eagerly. “Yes, I’d love—that is, if Val will be all right.”

“Flyers have unlimited credit,” Val said. “If I promise Raggin enough iron, he’ll nurse me better than my own parent.”

“I’ll go then,” S’Rella said. “But I’ll see you again, Val, won’t I? We both have wings now.”

“Yes,” Val said. “Go fly with yours. I’ll look at mine.”

S’Rella kissed him and crossed the room to where Maris stood. They started out the door.

“Maris!” Val called sharply.

She turned at the sound of his voice, in time to see his left hand reach awkwardly behind his head, under the pillow, and come whipping out with frightening speed. The long blade sliced through the air and struck the doorframe not a foot from Maris’ head. But the knife was ornamental obsidian, bright and black and sharp, but not resilient, and it shattered when it struck.

Maris must have looked terrified; Val was smiling. “It was never my father’s,” he said. “My father never owned anything. I stole it from Arak.” Across the room their eyes met, and Val laughed painfully. “Get rid of it for me, will you, One-Wing?” Maris smiled and bent to pick up the pieces.

NIGHTFLYERS

George R.R. Martin

Technology breeds new variations on the oldest themes. Even ghosts. . . .

When Jesus of Nazareth hung dying on his cross, the volcryn passed within a light-year of his agony, headed outward. When the Fire Wars raged on Earth, the volcryn sailed near Old Poseidon, where the seas were still unnamed and unfished. By the time the stardrive had transformed the Federated Nations of Earth into the Federal Empire, the volcryn had moved into the fringes of Hrangan space. The Hrangans never knew it. Like us they were children of the small bright worlds that circled their scattered suns, with little interest and less knowledge of the things that moved in the gulfs between.

War flamed for a thousand years and the volcryn passed through it, unknowing and untouched, safe in a place where no fires could ever burn. Afterwards the Federal Empire was shattered and gone, and the Hrangans vanished in the dark of the Collapse, but it was no darker for the volcryn.

When Kleronomas took his survey ship out from Avalon, the volcryn came within ten light-years of him. Kleronomas found many things, but he did not find the volcryn. Not then did he and not on his return to Avalon a lifetime later.

When I was a child of three Kleronomas was dust, as distant and dead as Jesus of Nazareth and the volcryn passed close to Daronne. That season all the Crey sensitives grew strange and sat staring at the stars with luminous, flickering eyes.

When I was grown, the volcryn had sailed beyond Tara, past the range of even the Crey, still heading outward.

And now I am old and the volcryn will soon pierce the Tempter’s Veil where it hangs like a black mist between the stars. And we follow, we follow. Through the dark gulfs where no one goes, through the emptiness, through the silence that goes on and on, my Nightflyer and I give chase.

From the hour the Nightflyer slipped into stardrive, Royd Eris watched his passengers.

Nine riders had boarded at the orbital docks above Avalon; five women and four men, each an Academy scholar, their backgrounds as diverse as their fields of study. Yet, to Royd, they dressed alike, looked alike, even sounded alike. On Avalon, most cosmopolitan of worlds, they had become as one in their quest for knowledge.

The Nightflyer was a trader, not a passenger vessel. It offered one double cabin, one closet-sized single. The other academicians rigged sleepwebs in the four great cargo holds, some in close confinement with the instruments and computer systems they had packed on board. When restive, they could wander two short corridors, one leading from the driveroom and the main airlock up past the cabins to a well-appointed lounge-library-kitchen, the other looping down to the cargo holds. Ultimately it did not matter where they wandered. Even in the sanitary stations, Royd had eyes and ears.

And always and everywhere, Royd watched.

Concepts like a right of privacy did not concern him, but he knew they might concern his passengers, if they knew of his activities. He made certain that they did not.

Royd’s own quarters, three spacious chambers forward of the passenger lounge, were sealed and inviolate; he never left them. To his riders, he was a disembodied voice over the communicators that sometimes called them for long conversations, and a holographic spectre that joined them for meals in the lounge. His ghost was a lithe, pale-eyed young man with white hair who dressed in filmy pastel clothing twenty years out of date, and it had the disconcerting habit of looking past the person Royd was addressing, or in the wrong direction altogether, but after a few days the academicians grew accustomed to it. The holograph walked only in the lounge, in any event.

But Royd, secretly, silently, lived everywhere, and ferreted out all of their little secrets.

The cyberneticist talked to her computers, and seemed to prefer their company to that of humans.

The xenobiologist was surly, argumentative, and a solitary drinker.

The two linguists, lovers in public, seldom had sex and snapped bitterly at each other in private.

The psipsych was a hypochondriac given to black depressions, which worsened in the close confines of the Nightflyer.

Royd watched them work, eat, sleep, copulate; he listened untiringly to their talk. Within a week, the nine of them no longer seemed the same to him at all. Each of them was strange and unique, he had concluded.

By the time the Nightflyer had been under drive for two weeks, two of the passengers had come to engage even more of his attention. He neglected none of them, watched all, but now, specially, he focused on Karoly d’Branin and Melantha Jhirl.

“Most of all, I want to know the why of them,” Karoly d’Branin told him one false night the second week out from Avalon. Royd’s luminescent ghost sat close to d’Branin in the darkened lounge, watching him drink bittersweet chocolate. The others were all asleep. Night and day are meaningless on a starship, but the Nightflyer kept the usual cycles, and most of the passengers followed them. Only Karoly d’Branin, administrator and generalist, kept his own solitary time.

“The if of them is important as well, Karoly,” Royd replied, his soft voice coming from the communicator panels in the walls. “Can you be truly certain if these aliens of yours exist?”

“I can be certain,” Karoly d’Branin replied. “That is enough. If everyone else were certain as well, we would have a fleet of research ships instead of your little Nightflyer.” He sipped at his chocolate, and gave a satisfied sigh. “Do you know the Nor T’alush, Royd?”

The name was strange to him, but it took Royd only a moment to consuit his library computer. “An alien race on the other side of human space, past the Fyndii worlds and the Damoosh. Possibly legendary.”

D’Branin chuckled. “Your library is out-of-date. You must supplement it the next time you are on Avalon. Not legends, no, real enough, though far away. We have little information about the Nor T’alush, but we are sure they exist, though you and I may never meet one. They were the start of it all.

“I was coding some information into the computers, a packet newly arrived from Dam Tullian after twenty standard years in transit. Part of it was Nor T’alush folklore. I had no idea how long that had taken to get to Dam Tullian, or by what route it had come, but it was fascinating material. Did you know that my first degree was in xenomythology?”

“I did not,” Royd said. “Please continue.”

“The volcryn story was among the Nor T’alush myths. It awed me; a race of sentients moving out from some mysterious origin in the core of the galaxy, sailing towards the galactic edge and, it was alleged, eventually bound for intergalactic space itself, meanwhile keeping always to the interstellar depths, no planetfalls, seldom coming within a light-year of a star. And doing it all without a stardrive, in ships moving only a fraction of the speed of light! That was the detail that obsessed me! Think how old they must be, those ships!”

“Old,” Royd agreed. “Karoly, you said ships. More than one?”

“Oh, yes, there are,” d’Branin said. “According to the Nor T’alush, one or two appeared first, on the innermost edges of their trading sphere, but others followed. Hundreds of them, each solitary, moving by itself, bound outward, always outward. The direction was always the same. For fifteen thousand standard years they moved between the Nor T’alush stars, and then they began to pass out from among them. The myth said that the last volcryn ship was gone three thousand years ago.”

“Eighteen thousand years,” Royd said, adding, “are your Nor T’alush that old?”

D’Branin smiled. “Not as star-travellers, no. According to their own histories, the Nor T’alush have only been civilized for about half that long. That stopped me for a while. It seemed to make the volcryn story clearly a legend. A wonderful legend, true, but nothing more.

“Ultimately, however, I could not let it alone. In my spare time, I investigated, cross-checking with other alien cosmologies to see whether this particular myth was shared by any races other than the Nor T’alush. I thought perhaps I would get a thesis out of it. It was a fruitful line of inquiry.

“I was startled by what I found. Nothing from the Hrangans, or the Hrangan slaveraces, but that made sense, you see. They were out from human space, the volcryn would not reach them until after they had passed through our own sphere. When I looked in, however, the volcryn story was everywhere. The Fyndii had it, the Damoosh appeared to accept it as literal truth—and the Damoosh, you know, are the oldest race we have ever encountered—and there was a remarkably similar story told among the gethsoids of Aath. I checked what little was known about the races said to flourish further in still, beyond even the Nor T’alush, and they had the volcryn story too.”

“The legend of the legends,” Royd suggested. The spectre’s wide mouth turned up in a smile.

“Exactly, exactly,” d’Branin agreed. “At that point, I called in the experts, specialists from the Institute for the Study of Nonhuman Intelligence. We researched for two years. It was all there, in the files and the libraries at the Academy. No one had ever looked before, or bothered to put it together.

“The volcryn have been moving through the manrealm for most of human history, since before the dawn of spaceflight. While we twist the fabric of space itself to cheat relativity, they have been sailing their great ships right through the heart of our alleged civilization, past our most populous worlds, at stately slow sublight speeds, bound for the Fringe and the dark between the galaxies. Marvelous, Royd, marvelous!”

“Marvelous,” Royd agreed.

Karoly d’Branin set down his chocolate cup and leaned forward eagerly towards Royd’s projection, but his hand passed through empty light when he tried to grasp his companion by the forearm. He seemed disconcerted for a moment, before he began to laugh at himself. “Ah, my volcryn. I grow overenthused, Royd. I am so close now. They have preyed on my mind for a dozen years, and within a month I will have them. Then, then, if only I can open communication, if only my people can reach them, then at last I will know the why of it!”

The ghost of Royd Eris, master of the Nightflyer, smiled for him and looked on through calm unseeing eyes.

Passengers soon grow restless on a starship under drive, sooner on one as small and spare as the Nightflyer. Late in the second week, the speculation began. Royd heard it all.

“Who is this Royd Eris, really?” the xenobiologist complained one night when four of them were playing cards. “Why doesn’t he come out? What’s the purpose of keeping himself sealed off from the rest of us?”

“Ask him,” the linguist suggested.

No one did.

When he was not talking to Karoly d’Branin, Royd watched Melantha Jhirl. She was good to watch. Young, healthy, active, Melantha Jhirl had a vibrancy about her that the others could not touch. She was big in every way; a head taller than anyone else on board, large-framed, large-breasted, long-legged, strong, muscles moving fluidly beneath shiny coal-black skin. Her appetites were big as well. She ate twice as much as any of her colleagues, drank heavily without ever seeming drunk, exercised for hours every day on equipment she had brought with her and set up in one of the cargo holds. By the third week out she had sexed with all four of the men on board and two of the other women. Even in bed she was always active, exhausting most of her partners. Royd watched her with consuming interest.

“I am an improved model,” she told him once as she worked out on her parallel bars, sweat glistening on her bare skin, her long black hair confined in a net.

“Improved?” Royd said. He could not send his holographic ghost down to the holds, but Melantha had summoned him with the communicator to talk while she exercised, not knowing he would have been there anyway.

She paused in her routine, holding her body aloft with the strength of her arms. “Altered, Captain,” she said. She had taken to calling him that. “Born on Prometheus among the elite, child of two genetic wizards. Improved, Captain. I require twice the energy you do, but I use it all. A more efficient metabolism, a stronger and more durable body, an expected lifespan half again the normal human’s. My people have made some terrible mistakes when they try to radically redesign the lessers, but the small improvements they do well.”

She resumed her exercises, moving quickly and easily, silent until she had finished. Then, breathing heavily, she crossed her arms and cocked her head and grinned. “Now you know my life story, Captain, unless you care to hear the part about my defection to Avalon, my extraordinary work in nonhuman anthropology, and my tumultuous and passionate lovelife. Do you?”

“Perhaps some other time,” Royd said, politely.

“Good,” Melantha Jhirl replied. She snatched up a towel and began to dry the sweat from her body. “I’d rather hear your life story, anyway. Among my modest attributes is an insatiable curiosity. Who are you, Captain? Really?”

“One as improved as you,” Royd replied, “should certainly be able to guess.”

Melantha laughed, and tossed her towel at the communicator grill.

By that time all of them were guessing, when they did not think Royd was listening. He enjoyed the rumors.

“He talks to us, but he can’t be seen,” the cyberneticist said. “This ship is uncrewed, seemingly all automated except for him. Why not entirely automated, then? I’d wager Royd Eris is a fairly sophisticated computer system, perhaps an Artificial Intelligence. Even a modest program can carry on a blind conversation indistinguishable from a human’s.”

The telepath was a frail young thing, nervous, sensitive, with limp flaxen hair and watery blue eyes. He sought out Karoly d’Branin in his cabin, the cramped single, for a private conversation. “I feel it,” he said excitedly. “Something is wrong, Karoly, something is very wrong. I’m beginning to get frightened.” D’Branin was startled. “Frightened? I don’t understand, my friend. What is there for you to fear?”

The young man shook his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know. Yet it’s there, I feel it. Karoly, I’m picking up something. You know I’m good, I am, that’s why you picked me. Class one, tested, and I tell you I’m afraid. I sense it. Something dangerous. Something volatile—and alien.”

“My volcryn!” d’Branin said.

“No, no, impossible. We’re in drive, they’re light-years away.” The telepath’s laugh was desperate. “I’m not that good, Karoly. I’ve heard your Crey story, but I’m only a human. No, this is close. On the ship.”

“One of us?”

“Maybe,” the telepath said. “I can’t sort it out.”

D’Branin sighed and put a fatherly hand on the young man’s shoulder. “I thank you for coming to me, but I cannot act unless you have something more definite. This feeling of yours—could it be that you are just tired? We have all of us been under strain. Inactivity can be taxing.”

“This is real,” the telepath insisted, but he left peacefully.

Afterwards d’Branin went to the psipsych, who was lying in her sleepweb surrounded by medicines, complaining bitterly of aches. “Interesting,” she said when d’Branin told her. “I’ve felt something too, a sense of threat, very vague, diffuse. I thought it was me, the confinement, the boredom, the way I feel. My moods betray me at times. Did he say anything more specific?”

“No.”

“I’ll make an effort to move around, read him, read the others, see what I can pick up. Although, if this is real, he should know it first. He’s a one, I’m only a three.”

D’Branin nodded, reassured. Later, when the rest had gone to sleep, he made some chocolate and talked to Royd through the false night. But he never mentioned the telepath once.

“Have you noticed the clothes on that holograph he sends us?” the xenobiologist said to the others. “A decade out of style, at least. I don’t think he really looks like that. What if he’s deformed, sick, ashamed to be seen the way he really looks? Perhaps he has some disease. The Slow Plague can waste a person terribly, but it takes decades to kill, and there are other contagions, manthrax and new leprosy and Langamen’s Disease. Could it be that Royd’s self-imposed quarantine is just that. A quarantine. Think about it.”

In the fifth week out, Melantha Jhirl pushed her pawn to the sixth rank and Royd saw it was unstoppable and resigned. It was his eighth straight defeat at her hands in as many days. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the lounge, the chessmen spread out before her on a viewscreen, its receiver dark. Laughing, she swept them away. “Don’t feel bad, Royd,” she told him. “I’m an improved model. Always three moves ahead.”

“I should tie in my computer,” he replied. “You’d never know.” His holographic ghost materialized suddenly, standing in front of the viewscreen, and smiled at her.

“I’d know within three moves,” Melantha Jhirl said. “Try it.” She stood up and walked right through his projection on her way to the kitchen, where she found herself a bulb of beer. “When are you going to break down and let me behind your wall for a visit, Captain?” she asked, talking up to a communicator grill. She refused to treat his ghost as real. “Don’t you get lonely there? Sexually frustrated? Claustrophobic?”

“I’ve flown the Nightflyer all my life, Melantha,” Royd said. His projection ignored, winked out. “If I were subject to claustrophobia, sexual frustration, or loneliness, such a life would have been impossible. Surely that should be obvious to you, being as improved a model as you are?” She took a squeeze of her beer and laughed her mellow, musical laugh at him. “I’ll solve you yet, Captain,” she warned.

“Fine,” he said. “Meanwhile, tell me some more lies about your life.”

“Have you ever heard of Jupiter?” the xenotech demanded of the others. She was drunk, lolling in her sleepweb in the cargo hold.

“Something to do with Earth,” one of the linguists said. “The same myth system originated both names, I believe.”

“Jupiter,” the xenotech announced loudly, “is a gas giant in the same solar system as Old Earth. Didn’t know that, did you? They were on the verge of exploring it when the stardrive was discovered, oh, way back. After that, nobody bothered with gas giants. Just slip into drive and find the habitable worlds, settle them, ignore the comets and the rocks and the gas giants—there’s another star just a few light-years away, and it has more habitable planets. But there were people who thought those Jupiters might have life, you know. Do you see?”

The xenobiologist looked annoyed. “If there is intelligent life on the gas giants, it shows no interest in leaving them,” he snapped. “All of the sentient species we have met up to now have originated on worlds similar to Earth, and most of them are oxygen breathers. Unless you suggest that the volcryn are from a gas giant?”

The xenotech pushed herself up to a sitting position and smiled conspiratorially. “Not the volcryn,” she said. “Royd Eris. Crack that forward bulkhead in the lounge, and watch the methane and ammonia come smoking out.” Her hand made a sensuous waving motion through the air, and she convulsed with giddy laughter.

“I dampened him,” the psipsych reported to Karoly d’Branin during the sixth week. “Psionine-4. It will blunt his receptivity for several days, and I have more if he needs it.”

D’Branin wore a stricken look. “We talked several times, he and I. I could see that he was becoming ever more fearful, but he could never tell me the why of it. Did you absolutely have to shut him off?”

The psipsych shrugged. “He was edging into the irrational. You should never have taken a class one telepath, d’Branin. Too unstable.”

“We must communicate with an alien race. I remind you that is no easy task. The volcryn are perhaps more alien than any sentients we have yet encountered. Because of that we needed class one skills.”

“Glib,” she said, “but you might have no working skills at all, given the condition of your class one. Half the time he’s catatonic and half the time crazy with fear. He insists that we’re all in real physical danger, but he doesn’t know why or from what. The worst of it is I can’t tell if he’s really sensing something or simply having an acute attack of paranoia. He certainly displays some classic paranoid symptoms. Among other things, he believes he’s being watched. Perhaps his condition is completely unrelated to us, the volcryn, and his talent. I can’t be sure at this point in time.”

“What of your own talent?” d’Branin said. “You are an empath, are you not?”

“Don’t tell me my job,” she said sharply. “I sexed with him last week. You don’t get more proximity or better rapport for esping than that. Even under those conditions, I couldn’t be sure of anything. His mind is a chaos, and his fear is so rank it stank up the sheets. I don’t read anything from the others either, besides the ordinary tensions and frustrations. But I’m only a three, so that doesn’t mean much. My abilities are limited. You know I haven’t been feeling well, d’Branin. I can barely breathe on this ship. My head throbs. Ought to stay in bed.”

“Yes, of course,” d’Branin said hastily. “I did not mean to criticize. You have been doing all you can under difficult circumstances. Yet, I must ask, is it vital he be dampened? Is there no other way? Royd will take us out of drive soon, and we will make contact with the volcryn. We will need him.”

The psipsych rubbed her temple wearily. “My other option was an injection of esperon. It would have opened him up completely, tripled his psionic receptivity for a few hours. Then, hopefully, he could home in this danger he’s feeling. Exorcise it if it’s false, deal with it if it’s real. But psionine-4 is a lot safer. The physical side effects of esperon are debilitating, and emotionally I don’t think he’s stable enough to deal with that kind of power. The psionine should tell us something. If his paranoia continues to persist, I’ll know it has nothing to do with his telepathy.”

“And if it does not persist?” Karoly d’Branin said.

She smiled wickedly. “Then we’ll know that he really was picking up some sort of threat, won’t we?”

False night came, and Royd’s wraith materialized while Karoly d’Branin sat brooding over his chocolate. “Karoly,” the apparition said, “would it be possible to tie in the computer your team brought on board with my shipboard system? Those volcryn stories fascinate me, and I’d like to be able to study them at my leisure.”

“Certainly,” d’Branin replied in an offhand, distracted manner. “It is time we got our system up and running in any case. Soon, now, we will be dropping out of drive.”

“Soon,” Royd agreed. “Approximately seventy hours from now.”

At dinner the following day, Royd’s projection did not appear. The academicians ate uneasily, expecting their host to materialize at any moment, take his accustomed place, and join in the mealtime conversation. Their expectations were still unfulfilled when the afterdinner pots of chocolate and spiced tea and coffee were set on the table before them.

“Our captain seems to be occupied,” Melantha Jhirl observed, leaning back in her chair and swirling a snifter of brandy.

“We will be shifting out of drive soon,” Karoly d’Branin said. “There are preparations to make.”

Some of the others looked at one another. All nine of them were present, although the young telepath seemed lost in his own head. The xenobiologist broke the silence. “He doesn’t eat. He’s a damned holograph. What does it matter if he misses a meal? Maybe it’s just as well. Karoly, a lot of us have been getting uneasy about Royd. What do you know about this mystery man anyway?”

D’Branin looked at him with wide, puzzled eyes. “Know, my friend?” he said, leaning forward to refill his cup with the thick, bittersweet chocolate. “What is there to know?”

“Surely you’ve noticed that he never comes out to play with us,” the female linguist said drily. “Before you engaged his ship, did anyone remark on this quirk of his?”

“I’d like to know the answer to that too,” her partner said. “A lot of traffic comes and goes through Avalon. How did you come to choose Eris? What were you told about him?”

D’Branin hesitated. “Told about him? Very little, I must admit. I spoke to a few port officials and charter companies, but none of them were acquainted with Royd. He had not traded out of Avalon originally, you see.”

“Where is he from?” the linguists demanded in unison. They looked at each other, and the woman continued. “We’ve listened to him. He has no discernible accent, no idiosyncrasies of speech to betray his origins. Tell us, where did this Nightflyer come from?”

“I—I don’t know, actually,” d’Branin admitted, hesitating. “I never thought to ask him about it.”

The members of his research team glanced at each other incredulously. “You never thought to ask?” the xenotech said. “How did you select this ship, then?”

“It was available. The administrative council approved my project and assigned me personnel, but they could not spare an Academy ship. There were budgetary constraints as well.” All eyes were on him.

“What d’Branin is saying,” the psipsych interrupted, “is that the Academy was pleased with his studies in xenomyth, with the discovery of the volcryn legend, but less than enthusiastic about his plan to prove the volcryn real. So they gave him a small budget to keep him happy and productive, assuming that this little mission would be fruitless, and they assigned him workers who wouldn’t be missed back on Avalon.” She looked around at each person. “Except for d’Branin,” she said, “not a one of us is a first-rate scholar.”

“Well, you can speak for yourself,” Melantha Jhirl said. “I volunteered for this mission.”

“I won’t argue the point,” the psipsych said. “The crux is that the choice of the Nightflyer is no large enigma. You engaged the cheapest charter you could find, didn’t you, d’Branin?”

“Some of the available ships would not even consider my proposition,” d’Branin said. “The sound of it is odd, we must admit. And many ship masters seemed to have a superstitious fear of dropping out of drive in interstellar space, without a planet near. Of those who agreed to the conditions, Royd Eris offered the best terms, and he was able to leave at once.”

“And we had to leave at once,” said the female linguist. “Otherwise the volcryn might get away. They’ve only been passing through this region for ten thousand years, give or take a few thousand,” she said sarcastically.

Someone laughed. D’Branin was nonplussed. “Friends, no doubt I could have postponed departure. I admit I was eager to meet my volcryn, to ask them the questions that have haunted me, to discover the why of them, but I must also admit that a delay would have been no great hardship. But why? Royd is a gracious host, a skilled pilot, he has treated us well.”

“He has made himself a cipher,” someone said.

“What is he hiding?” another voice demanded.

Melantha Jhirl laughed. When all eyes had moved to her, she grinned and shook her head. “Captain Royd is perfect, a strange man for a strange mission. Don’t any of you love a mystery? Here we are flying light-years to intercept a hypothetical alien starship from the core of the galaxy that has been outward bound for longer than humanity has been having wars, and all of you are upset because you can’t count the warts of Royd’s nose.” She leaned across the table to refill her brandy snifter. “My mother was right,” she said lightly. “Normals are subnormal.”

“Melantha is correct,” Karoly d’Branin said quietly. “Royd’s foibles and neuroses are his business, if he does not impose them on us.”

“It makes me uncomfortable,” someone complained weakly.

“For all we know, Karoly,” said the xenotech, “we might be travelling with a criminal or an alien.”

“Jupiter,” someone muttered. The xenotech flushed red, and there was sniggering around the long table.

But the young, pale-haired telepath looked up suddenly and stared at them all with wild, nervous eyes. “An alien,” he said.

The psipsych swore. “The drug is wearing off,” she said quickly to d’Branin. “I’ll have to go back to my room to get some more.”

All of the others looked baffled; d’Branin had kept his telepath’s condition a careful secret. “What drug?” the xenotech demanded. “What’s going on here?”

“Danger,” the telepath muttered. He turned to the cyberneticist sitting next to him, and grasped her forearm in a trembling hand. “We’re in danger, I tell you, I’m reading it. Something alien. And it means us ill.”

The psipsych rose. “He’s not well,” she announced to the others. “I’ve been dampening him with psionine, trying to hold his delusions in check. I’ll get some more.” She started towards the door.

“Wait,” Melantha Jhirl said. “Not psionine. Try esperon.”

“Don’t tell me my job, woman.”

“Sorry,” Melantha said. She gave a modest shrug. “I’m one step ahead of you, though. Esperon might exorcise his delusions, no?”

“Yes, but—”

“And it might let him focus on this threat he claims to detect, correct?”

“I know the characteristics of esperon,” the psipsych said testily.

Melantha smiled over the rim of her brandy glass. “I’m sure you do,” she said. “Now listen to me. All of you are anxious about Royd, it seems. You can’t stand not knowing what he’s concealing about himself. You suspect him of being a criminal. Fears like that won’t help us work together as a team. Let’s end them. Easy enough.” She pointed. “Here sits a class one telepath. Boost his power with esperon and he’ll be able to recite our captain’s life history to us, until we’re all suitably bored with it. Meanwhile he’ll also be vanquishing his personal demons.”

“He’s watching us,” the telepath said in a low, urgent voice.

“Karoly,” the xenobiologist said, “this has gone too far. Several of us are nervous, and this boy is terrified. I think we all need an end to the mystery of Royd Eris. Melantha is right.”

D’Branin was troubled. “We have no right—”

“We have the need,” the cyberneticist said.

D’Branin’s eyes met those of the psipsych, and he sighed. “Do it,” he said. “Get him the esperon.”

“He’s going to kill me,” the telepath screamed and leapt to his feet. When the cyberneticist tried to calm him with a hand on his arm, he seized a cup of coffee and threw it square in her face. It took three of them to hold him down. “Hurry,” one commanded, as the youth struggled.

The psipsych shuddered and quickly left the lounge.

Royd was watching.

When the psipsych returned, they lifted the telepath to the table and forced him down, pulling aside his hair to bare the arteries in his neck.

Royd’s ghost materialized in its empty chair at the foot of the long dinner table. “Stop that,” it said calmly. “There is no need.”

The psipsych froze in the act of slipping an ampule of esperon into her injection gun, and the xenotech startled visibly and released one of the telepath’s arms. But the captive did not pull free. He lay on the table, breathing heavily, too frightened to move, his pale blue eyes fixed glassily on Royd’s projection.

Melantha Jhirl lifted her brandy glass in salute. “Boo,” she said. “You’ve missed dinner, Captain.”

“Royd,” said Karoly d’Branin, “I am sorry.”

The ghost stared unseeing at the far wall. “Release him,” said the voice from the communicators. “I will tell you my great secret, if my privacy intimidates you so.”

“He has been watching us,” the male linguist said.

“Tell, then,” the xenotech said suspiciously. “What are you?”

“I liked your guess about the gas giants,” Royd said. “Sadly, the truth is less dramatic. I am an ordinary Homo sapien in late middle-age. Sixty-eight standard, if you require precision. The holograph you see before you was the real Royd Eris, although some years ago. I am older now.”

“Oh?” The cyberneticist’s face was red where the coffee had scalded her. “Then why the secrecy?”

“I will begin with my mother,” Royd replied. “The Nightflyer was her ship originally, custom-built to her design in the Newholme spaceyards. My mother was a freetrader, a notably successful one. She made a fortune through a willingness to accept the unusual consignment, fly off the major trade routes, take her cargo a month or a year or two years beyond where it was customarily transferred. Such practices are riskier but more profitable than flying the mail runs. My mother did not worry about how often she and her crews returned home. Her ships were her home. She seldom visited the same world twice if she could avoid it.”

“Adventurous,” Melantha said.

“No,” said Royd. “Sociopathic. My mother did not like people, you see. Not at all. Her one great dream was to free herself from the necessity of crew. When she grew rich enough, she had it done. The Nightflyer was the result. After she boarded it at Newholme, she never touched a human being again, or walked a planet’s surface. She did all her business from the compartments that are now mine. She was insane, but she did have an interesting life, even after that. The worlds she saw, Karoly! The things she might have told you! Your heart would break. She destroyed most of her records, however, for fear that other people might get some use or pleasure from her experience after her death. She was like that.”

“And you?” the xenotech said.

“I should not call her my mother,” Royd continued. “I am her cross-sex clone. After thirty years of flying this ship alone, she was bored. I was to be her companion and lover. She could shape me to be a perfect diversion. She had no patience with children, however, and no desire to raise me herself. As an embryo, I was placed in a nurturant tank. The computer was my teacher. I was to be released when I had attained the age of puberty, at which time she guessed I would be fit company.

“Her death, a few months after the cloning, ruined the plan. She had programmed the ship for such an eventuality, however. It dropped out of drive and shut down, drifted in interstellar space for eleven years while the computer made a human being out of me. That was how I inherited the Nightflyer. When I was freed, it took me some years to puzzle out the operation of the ship and my own origins.”

“Fascinating,” said d’Branin.

“Yes,” said the female linguist, “but it doesn’t explain why you keep yourself in isolation.”

“Ah, but it does,” Melantha Jhirl said. “Captain, perhaps you should explain further for the less improved models?”

“My mother hated planets,” Royd said. “She hated stinks and dirt and bacteria, the irregularity of the weather, the sight of other people. She engineered for us a flawless environment, as sterile as she could possibly make it. She disliked gravity as well. She was accustomed to weightlessness, and preferred it. These were the conditions under which I was born and raised.

“My body has no natural immunities to anything. Contact with any of you would probably kill me, and would certainly make me very sick. My muscles are feeble, atrophied. The gravity the Nightflyer is now generating is for your comfort, not mine. To me it is agony. At the moment I am seated in a floating chair that supports my weight. I still hurt, and my internal organs may be suffering damage. It is one reason why I do not often take on passengers.”

“You share your mother’s opinion of the run of humanity, then?” the psipsych said.

“I do not. I like people. I accept what I am, but I did not choose it. I experience human life in the only way I can, vicariously, through the infrequent passengers I dare to carry. At those times, I drink in as much of their lives as I can.”

“If you kept your ship under weightlessness at all times, you could take on more riders, could you not?” suggested the xenobiologist.

“True,” Royd said politely. “I have found, however, that most people choose not to travel with a captain who does not use his gravity grid. Prolonged free-fall makes them ill and uncomfortable. I could also mingle with my guests, I know, if I kept to my chair and wore a sealed environment suit. I have done so. I find it lessens my participation instead of increasing it. I become a freak, a maimed thing, one who must be treated differently and kept at a distance. I prefer isolation. As often as I dare, I study the aliens I take on as riders.”

“Aliens?” the xenotech said, in a confused voice.

“You are all aliens to me,” Royd answered.

Silence then filled the Nightflyer’s lounge.

“I am sorry this had to happen, my friend,” Karoly d’Branin said to the ghost.

“Sorry,” the psipsych said. She frowned and pushed the ampule of esperon into the injection chamber. “Well, it’s glib enough, but is it the truth? We still have no proof, just a new bedtime story. The holograph could have claimed it was a creature from Jupiter, a computer, or a diseased war criminal just as easily.” She took two quick steps forward to where the young telepath still lay on the table. “He still needs treatment, and we still need confirmation. I don’t care to live with all this anxiety, when we can end it all now.” Her hand pushed the unresisting head to one side, she found the artery, and pressed the gun to it.

“No,” the voice from the communicator said sternly. “Stop. I order it. This is my ship. Stop.”

The gun hissed loudly, and there was a red mark when she lifted it from the telepath’s neck.

He raised himself to a half-sitting position, supported by his elbows, and the psipsych moved close to him. “Now,” she said in her best professional tones, “focus on Royd. You can do it, we all know how good you are. Wait just a moment, the esperon will open it all up for you.”

His pale blue eyes were clouded. “Not close enough,” he muttered. “One, I’m one, tested. Good, you know I’m good, but I got to be close.” He trembled.

She put an arm around him, stroked him, coaxed him. “The esperon will give you range,” she said. “Feel it, feel yourself grow stronger. Can you feel it? Everything’s getting clear, isn’t it?” Her voice was a reassuring drone. “Remember the danger now, remember, go find it. Look beyond the wall, tell us about it. Tell us about Royd. Was he telling the truth? Tell us. You’re good, we all know that, you can tell us.” The phrases were almost an incantation.

He shrugged off her support and sat upright by himself. “I can feel it,” he said. His eyes were suddenly clearer. “Something—my head hurts—I’m afraid!”

“Don’t be afraid,” the psipsych said. “The esperon won’t make your head hurt, it just makes you better. Nothing to fear.” She stroked his brow. “Tell us what you see.”

The telepath looked at Royd’s ghost with terrified little-boy eyes, and his tongue flicked across his lower lip. “He’s—”

Then his skull exploded.

It was three hours later when the survivors met again to talk.

In the hysteria and confusion of the aftermath, Melantha Jhirl had taken charge. She gave orders, pushing her brandy aside and snapping out commands with the ease of one born to it, and the others seemed to find a numbing solace in doing as they were told. Three of them fetched a sheet, and wrapped the headless body of the young telepath within, and shoved it through the driveroom airlock at the end of the ship. Two others, on Melantha’s order, found water and cloth and began to clean up the lounge. They did not get far. Mopping the blood from the tabletop, the cyberneticist suddenly began to retch violently. Karoly d’Branin, who had sat still and shocked since it happened, woke and took the blood-soaked rag from her hand and led her away, back to his cabin.

Melantha Jhirl was helping the psipsych, who had been standing very close to the telepath when he died. A sliver of bone had penetrated her cheek just below her right eye, she was covered with blood and pieces of flesh and bone and brain, and she had gone into shock. Melantha removed the bone splinter, led her below, cleaned her, and put her to sleep with a shot of one of her own drugs.

And, at length, she got the rest of them together in the largest of the cargo holds, where three of them slept. Seven of the surviving eight attended. The psipsych was still asleep, but the cyberneticist seemed to have recovered. She sat cross-legged on the floor, her features pale and drawn, waiting for Melantha to begin.

It was Karoly d’Branin who spoke first, however, “I do not understand,” he said. “I do not understand what has happened. What could . . .”

“Royd killed him, is all,” the xenotech said bitterly. “His secret was endangered, so he just—just blew him apart.”

“I cannot believe that,” Karoly d’Branin said, anguished. “I cannot. Royd and I, we have talked, talked many a night when the rest of you were sleeping. He is gentle, inquisitive, sensitive. A dreamer. He understands about the volcryn. He would not do such a thing.”

“His holograph certainly winked out quick enough when it happened,” the female linguist said. “And you’ll notice he hasn’t had much to say since.”

“The rest of you haven’t been usually talkative either,” Melantha Jhirl said. “I don’t know what to think, but my impulse is to side with Karoly. We have no proof that the captain was responsible for what happened.”

The xenotech make a loud rude noise. “Proof.”

“In fact,” Melantha continued unperturbed, “I’m not even sure anyone is responsible. Nothing happened until he was given the esperon. Could the drug be at fault?”

“Hell of a side effect,” the female linguist muttered.

The xenobiologist frowned. “This is not my field, but I know esperon is an extremely potent drug, with severe physical effects as well as psionic. The instrument of death was probably his own talent, augmented by the drug. Besides boosting his principal power, his telepathic sensitivity, esperon would also tend to bring out other psi-talents that might have been latent in him.”

“Such as?” someone demanded.

“Biocontrol. Telekinesis.”

Melantha Jhirl was way ahead of him. “Increase the pressure inside his skull sharply, by rushing all the blood in his body to his brain. Decrease the air pressure around his head simultaneously, using teke to induce a shortlived vacuum. Think about it.”

They thought about it, and none of them liked it.

“It could have been self-induced,” Karoly d’Branin said.

“Or a stronger talent could have turned his power against him,” the xenotech said stubbornly.

“No human telepath has talent on that order, to seize control of someone else, body and mind and soul, even for an instant.”

“Exactly,” the xenotech said. “No human telepath.”

“Gas giant people?” The cyberneticist’s tone was mocking.

The xenotech stared her down. “I could talk about Crey sensitives or githyanki soulsucks, name a half-dozen others off the top of my head, but I don’t need to. I’ll only name one. A Hrangan Mind.”

That was a disquieting thought. All of them fell silent and moved uneasily, thinking of the vast, inimicable power of a Hrangan Mind hidden in the command chambers of the Nightflyer, until Melantha Jhirl broke the spell. “That is ridiculous,” she said. “Think of what you’re saying, if that isn’t too much to ask. You’re supposed to be xenologists, the lot of you, experts in alien languages, psychology, biology, technology. You don’t act the part. We warred with Old Hranga for a thousand years, but we never communicated successfully with a Hrangan Mind. If Royd Eris is a Hrangan, they’ve certainly improved their conversational skills in the centuries since the Collapse.”

The xenotech flushed. “You’re right,” she mumbled. “I’m jumpy.”

“Friends,” Karoly d’Branin said, “we must not panic or grow hysterical. A terrible thing has happened. One of our colleagues is dead, and we do not know why. Until we do, we can only go on. This is no time for rash actions against the innocent. Perhaps, when we return to Avalon, an investigation will tell us what happened. The body is safe, is it not?”

“We cycled it through the airlock into the driveroom,” said the male linguist. “Vacuum in there. It’ll keep.”

“And it can be examined on our return,” d’Branin said, satisfied.

“That return should be immediate,” the xenotech said. “Tell Eris to turn this ship around.”

D’Branin looked stricken. “But the volcryn! A week more, and we will know them, if my figures are correct. To return would take us six weeks. Surely it is worth one week additional to know that they exist?”

The xenotech was stubborn. “A man is dead. Before he died, he talked about aliens and danger. Maybe we’re in danger too. Maybe these volcryn are the cause, maybe they’re more potent than even a Hrangan Mind. Do you care to risk it? And for what? Your sources may be fictional or exaggerated or wrong, your interpretations and computations may be incorrect, or they may have changed course—the volcryn may not even be within light-years of where we’ll drop out!”

“Ah,” Melantha Jhirl said, “I understand. Then we shouldn’t go on because they won’t be there, and besides, they might be dangerous.”

D’Branin smiled and the female linguist laughed. “Not funny,” said the xenotech, but she argued no more.

“No,” Melantha continued, “any danger we are in will not increase significantly in the time it will take us to drop out of drive and look about for volcryn. We would have to drop out anyway, to reprogram. Besides, we have come a long way for these volcryn, and I admit to being curious.” She looked at each of them in turn, but none of them disagreed. “We continue, then.”

“And what do we do with Royd?” D’Branin asked.

“Treat the captain as before, if we can,” Melantha said decisively. “Open lines to him and talk. He’s probably as shocked and dismayed by what happened as we are, and possibly fearful that we might blame him, try to hurt him, something like that. So we reassure him. I’ll do it, if no one else wants to talk to him.” There were no volunteers. “All right. But the rest of you had better try to act normally.”

“Also,” said d’Branin, “we must continue with our preparations. Our sensory instruments must be ready for deployment as soon as we shift out of drive and reenter normal space, our computer must be functioning.”

“It’s up and running,” the cyberneticist said quietly. “I finished this morning, as you requested.” She had a thoughtful look in her eyes, but d’Branin did not notice. He turned to the linguists and began discussing some of the preliminaries he expected from them, and in a short time the talk had turned to the volcryn, and little by little the fear drained out of the group. Royd, listening, was glad.

She returned to the lounge alone.

Someone had turned out the lights. “Captain?” she said, and he appeared to her, pale, glowing softly, with eyes that did not really see. His clothes, filmy and out-of-date, were all shades of white and faded blue. “Did you hear, Captain?”

His voice over the communicator betrayed a faint hint of surprise. “Yes. I hear and I see everything on my Nightflyer, Melantha. Not only in the lounge. Not only when the communicators and viewscreens are on. How long have you known?”

“Known?” She laughed. “Since you praised the gas giant solution to the Roydian mystery.”

“I was under stress. I have never made a mistake before.”

“I believe you, Captain,” she said. “No matter. I’m the improved model, remember? I’d guessed weeks ago.” For a time Royd said nothing. Then: “When do you begin to reassure me?”

“I’m doing so right now. Don’t you feel reassured yet?”

The apparition gave a ghostly shrug, “lam pleased that you and Karoly do not think I murdered that man.”

She smiled. Her eyes were growing accustomed to the room. By the faint light of the holograph, she could see the table where it had happened, dark stains across its top. Blood. She heard a faint dripping, and shivered. “I don’t like it in here.”

“If you would like to leave, I can be with you wherever you go.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll stay. Royd, if I asked you to, would you shut off your eyes and ears throughout the ship? Except for the lounge? It would make the others feel better, I’m sure.”

“They don’t know.”

“They will. You made that remark about gas giants in everyone’s hearing. Some of them have probably figured it out by now.”

“If I told you I had cut myself off, you would have no way of knowing whether it was the truth.”

“I could trust you,” Melantha said. Silence. The spectre looked thoughtful. “As you wish,” Royd’s voice said finally. “Everything off. Now I see and hear only in here.”

“I believe you.”

“Did you believe my story?” Royd asked.

“Ah,” she said. “A strange and wondrous story, Captain. If it’s a lie, I’ll swap lies with you anytime. You do it well. If it’s true, then you are a strange and wondrous man.”

“It’s true,” the ghost said quietly.

“Melantha—” His voice hesitated. “Yes.”

“I watched you copulating.”

She smiled. “Ah,” she said. “I’m good at it.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Royd said. “You’re good to watch.”

Silence. She tried not to hear the dripping. “Yes,” she said after a long hesitation.

“Yes? What?”

“Yes, Royd, I would probably sex with you if it were possible.”

“How did you know what I was thinking?”

“I’m an improved model,” she said. “And no, I’m not a telepath. It wasn’t so difficult to figure out. I told you, I’m three moves ahead of you.”

Royd considered that for a long time. “I believe I’m reassured,” he said at last.

“Good,” said Melantha Jhirl. “Now reassure me.”

“Of what?”

“What happened in here? Really?” Royd said nothing.

“I think you know something,” Melantha said. “You gave up your secret to stop us from injecting him with esperon. Even after your secret was forfeit, you ordered us not to go ahead. Why?”

“Esperon is a dangerous drug,” Royd said.

“More than that, Captain,” Melantha said. “What killed him?”

“I didn’t.”

“One of us? The volcryn?”

Royd said nothing.

“Is there an alien aboard your ship, Captain?” she asked. “Is that it?” Silence.

“Are we in danger? Am in danger, Captain? I’m not afraid. Does that make me a fool?”

“I like people,” Royd said at last. “When I can stand it, I like to have passengers. I watch them, yes. It’s not so terrible. I like you and Karoly especially. You have nothing to fear. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“What might happen?” she asked. Royd said nothing.

“And what about the others, Royd? Are you taking care of them, too? Or only Karoly and me?”

No reply.

“You’re not very talkative tonight,” Melantha observed.

“I’m under strain,” his voice replied. “Go to bed, Melantha Jhirl. We’ve talked long enough.”

“All right, Captain,” she said. She smiled at his ghost and lifted her hand. His own rose to meet it. Warm dark flesh and pale radiance brushed, melded, were one. Melantha Jhirl turned to go. It was not until she was out in the corridor, safe in the light once more, that she began to tremble.

False midnight. The talks had broken up, the nightmares had faded, and the academicians were lost in sleep. Even Karoly d’Branin slept, his appetite for chocolate quelled by his memories of the lounge.

In the darkness of the largest cargo hold, three sleep webs hung, sleepers snoring softly in two. The cyberneticist lay awake, thinking, in the third, Finally she rose, dropped lightly to the floor, pulled on her jumpsuit and boots, and shook the xenotech from her slumber. “Come,” she whispered, beckoning. They stole off into the corridor, leaving Melantha Jhirl to her dreams.

“What the hell,” the xenotech muttered when they were safely beyond the door. She was half-dressed, disarrayed, unhappy.

“There’s a way to find out if Royd’s story was true,” the cyberneticist said carefully. “Melantha won’t like it, though. Are you game to try?”

“What?” the other asked. Her face betrayed her interest.

“Come,” the cyberneticist said.

One of the three lesser cargo holds had been converted into a computer room. They entered quietly; all empty. The system was up, but dormant. Currents of light ran silkily down crystalline channels in the data grids, meeting, joining, splitting apart again; rivers of wan multihued radiance crisscrossing a black landscape. The chamber was dim, the only noise a low buzz at the edge of human hearing, until the cyberneticist moved through it, touching keys, tripping switches, directing the silent luminescent currents. Slowly the machine woke.

“What are you doing!” the xenotech said.

“Karoly told me to tie in our system with the ship,” the cyberneticist replied as she worked. “I was told Royd wanted to study the volcryn data. Fine, I did it. Do you understand what that means?”

Now the xenotech was eager. “The two systems are tied together!”

“Exactly. So Royd can find out about the volcryn, and we can find out about Royd.” She frowned. “I wish I knew more about the Nightflyer’s hardware, but I think I can feel my way through. This is a pretty sophisticated system d’Branin requisitioned.”

“Can you take over?” the xenotech asked excitedly.

“Take over?” The cyberneticist sounded puzzled. “You been drinking again?”

“No, I’m serious. Use your system to break into the ship’s control, overwhelm Eris, countermand his orders, make the Nightflyer respond to us, down here.”

“Maybe,” the cyberneticist said doubtfully, slowly. “I could try, but why do that?”

“Just in case. We don’t have to use the capacity. Just so we have it, if an emergency arises.”

The cyberneticist shrugged. “Emergencies and gas giants. I only want to put my mind at rest about Royd.” She moved over to a readout panel, where a half-dozen meter-square viewscreens curved around a console, and brought one of them to life. Long fingers brushed across holographic keys that appeared and disappeared as she touched them, the keyboard changing shape even as she used it. Characters began to flow across the viewscreen, red flickerings encased in glassy black depths. The cyberneticist watched, and finally froze them. “Here,” she said, “here’s my answer about the hardware. You can dismiss your takeover idea, unless those gas giant people of yours are going to help. The Nightflyer’s bigger and smarter than our little system here. Makes sense, when you stop to think about it. Ship’s all automated, except for Royd.” She whistled and coaxed her search program with soft words of encouragement. “It looks as though there is a Royd, though. Configurations are all wrong for a robot ship. Damn, I would have bet anything.” The characters began to flow again, the cyberneticist watching the figures as they drifted by. “Here’s life support specs, might tell us something.” A finger jabbed, and the screen froze once more.

“Nothing unusual,” the xenotech said in disappointment.

“Standard waste disposal. Water recycling. Food processor, with protein and vitamin supplements in stores.” She began to whistle. “Tanks of Renny’s moss and neograss to eat up the CO_2. Oxygen cycle, then. No methane or ammonia. Sorry about that.”

“Go sex with a computer.”

The cyberneticist smiled. “Ever tried it?” Her fingers moved again. “What else should I look for? Give me some ideas.”

“Check the specs for nurturant tanks, cloning equipment, that sort of thing. Find Royd’s life history. His mother’s. Get a readout on the business they’ve done, all this alleged trading.” Her voice grew excited, and she took the cyberneticist by her shoulder. “A log, a ship’s log! There’s got to be a log. Find it! You must!”

“All right.” She whistled, happy, one with her systems, riding the data winds, in control, curious. The readout screen turned a bright red and began to blink at her, but she only smiled. “Security,” she said, her fingers a blur. As suddenly as it had come, the blinking red field was gone. “Nothing like slipping past another system’s security. Like slipping onto a man.”

Down the corridor, an alarm sounded a whooping call. “Damn,” the cyberneticist said, “that’ll wake everyone.” She glanced up when the xenotech’s fingers dug painfully into her shoulder, squeezing, hurting.

A grey steel panel slid almost silently across the access to the corridor. “Wha—?” the cyberneticist said.

“That’s an emergency airseal,” the xenotech said in a dead voice. She knew starships. “It closes when they’re about to load or unload cargo in vacuum.”

Their eyes went to the huge curving outer airlock above their heads. The inner lock was almost completely open, and as they watched it clicked into place, and the seal on the outer door cracked, and now it was open half a meter, sliding, and beyond was twisted nothingness so bright it burned the eyes.

“Oh,” the cyberneticist said. She had stopped whistling.

Alarms were hooting everywhere. The passengers began to stir. Melantha Jhirl leapt from her sleepweb and darted into the corridor, nude, concerned, alert. Karoly d’Branin sat up drowsily. The psipsych muttered fitfully in her drug-induced sleep. The xenobiologist cried out in alarm.

Far away metal crunched and tore, and a violent shudder ran through the ship, throwing the linguists out of their sleepwebs, knocking Melantha from her feet.

In the command quarters of the Nightflyer was a spherical room with featureless white walls, a lesser sphere—a control console—suspended in its center. The walls were always blank when the ship was in drive; the warped and glaring underside of spacetime was painful to behold.

But now darkness woke in the room, a holoscape coming to life, cold black and stars everywhere, points of icy unwinking brilliance, no up and no down and no direction, the floating control sphere the only feature in the simulated sea of night.

The Nightflyer had shifted out of drive.

Melantha Jhirl found her feet again and thumbed on a communicator. The alarms were still hooting, and it was hard to hear. “Captain,” she shouted, “what’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Royd’s voice replied. “I’m trying to find out. Wait here. Gather the others to you.”

She did as he had said, and only when they were all together in the corridor did she slip back to her web to don some clothing. She found only six of them. The psipsych was still unconscious and could not be roused, and they had to carry her. And the xenotech and cyberneticist were missing. The rest looked uneasily at the seal that blocked cargo hold three.

The communicator came back to life as the alarms died. “We have returned to normal space,” Royd’s voice said, “but the ship is damaged. Hold three, your computer room, was breached while we were under drive. It was ripped apart by the flux. The computer automatically dropped us out of drive, or the drive forces might have torn my entire ship apart.”

“Royd,” d’Branin said, “two of my team are . . .”

“It appears that your computer was in use when the hold was breached,” Royd said carefully. “We can only assume that they are dead. I cannot be sure. At Melantha’s request, I have deactivated most of my eyes and ears, retaining only the lounge inputs. I do not know what happened. But this is a small ship, Karoly, and if they are not with you, we must assume the worst.” He paused briefly. “If it is any consolation, they died quickly and painlessly.”

The two linguists exchanged a long, meaningful look. The xenobiologist’s face was red and angry, and he started to say something. Melantha Jhirl slipped her hand over his mouth firmly. “Do we know how it happened, Captain?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, reluctantly.

The xeriobiologist had taken the hint, and Melantha took away her hand to let him breathe. “Royd?” she prompted.

“It sounds insane, Melantha,” his voice replied, “but it appears your colleagues opened the hold’s loading lock. I doubt that they did so deliberately, of course. They were apparently using the system interface to gain entry to the Night flyer’s data storage and controls.”

“I see,” Melantha said. “A terrible tragedy.”

“Yes,” Royd agreed. “Perhaps more terrible than you think. I have yet to assess the damage to my ship.”

“We should not keep you, Captain, if you have duties to perform,” Melantha said. “All of us are shocked, and it is difficult to talk now. Investigate the condition of your ship, and we’ll continue our discussion in the morning. All right?”

“Yes,” Royd said.

Melantha thumbed the communicator plate. Now officially, the device was off. Royd could not hear them.

Karoly d’Branin shook his large, grizzled head. The linguists sat close to one another, hands touching. The psipsych slept. Only the xenobiologist met her gaze. “Do you believe him?” he snapped abruptly.

“I don’t know,” Melantha Jhirl said, “but I do know that the other three cargo holds can all be flushed just as hold three was. I’m moving my sleepweb into a cabin. I suggest those who are living in hold two do the same.”

“Good idea,” the female linguist said. “We can crowd in. It won’t be comfortable, but I don’t think I’d sleep the sleep of angels in the holds anymore.”

“We should also take our suits out of storage in four and keep them close at hand,” her partner suggested.

“If you wish,” Melantha said. “It’s possible that all the locks might pop open simultaneously. Royd can’t fault us for taking precautions.” She flashed a grim smile. “After today, we’ve earned the right to act irrationally.”

“This is no time for your damned jokes, Melantha,” the xenobiologist said, fury in his voice. “Three dead, a fourth maybe deranged or comatose, the rest of us endangered—”

“We still have no idea what is happening,” she pointed out.

“Royd Eris is killing us!” he shouted, pounding his fist into an open palm to emphasize his point. “I don’t know who or what he is and I don’t know if that story he gave us is true, and I don’t care. Maybe he’s a Hrangan Mind or the avenging angel of the volcryn or the second coming of Jesus Christ. What the hell difference does it make? He’s killing us!”

“You realize,” Melantha said gently, “that we cannot actually know whether the good captain has turned off his inputs down here. He could be watching and listening to us right now. He isn’t, of course. He told me he wouldn’t and I believe him. But we have only his word on that. Now, you don’t appear to trust Royd. If that’s so, you can hardly put any faith in his promises. It follows that from your point of view it might not be wise to say the things that you’re saying.” She smiled slyly.

The xenobiologist was silent.

“The computer is gone, then,” Karoly d’Branin said in a low voice before Melantha could resume.

She nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

He rose unsteadily to his feet. “I have a small unit in my cabin,” he said. “A wrist model, perhaps it will suffice. I must get the figures from Royd, learn where we have dropped out. The volcryn—” He shuffled off down the corridor and disappeared into his cabin.

“Think how distraught he’d be if all of us were dead,” the female linguist said bitterly. “Then he’d have no one to help him look for volcryn.”

“Let him go,” Melantha said. “He is as hurt as any of us, maybe more so. He wears it differently. His obsessions are his defense.”

“What’s our defense?”

“Ah,” said Melantha. “Patience, maybe. All of the dead were trying to breach Royd’s secret when they died. We haven’t tried. Here we sit discussing their deaths.”

“You don’t find that suspicious?”

“Very,” Melantha Jhirl said. “I even have a method of testing my suspicions. One of us can make yet another attempt to find out whether our captain told us the truth. If he or she dies, we’ll know.” She stood up abruptly. “Forgive me, however, if I’m not the one who tries. But don’t let me stop you if you have the urge. I’ll note the results with interest. Until then, I’m going to move out of the cargo area and get some sleep.”

“Arrogant bitch,” the male linguist observed almost conversationally after Melantha had left.

“Do you think he can hear us?” the xenobiologist whispered quietly.

“Every pithy word,” the female linguist said, rising. They all stood up. “Let’s move our things and put her”—she jerked a thumb at the psipsych—“back to bed.” Her partner nodded.

“Aren’t we going to do anything?” the xenobiologist said. “Make plans. Defenses.”

The linguist gave him a withering look, and pulled her companion off in the other direction.

“Melantha? Karoly?”

She woke quickly, alert at the mere whisper of her name, and sat up in the narrow bunk. Next to her, Karoly d’Branin moaned softly and rolled over, yawning.

“Royd?” she asked. “Is it morning now?”

“Yes,” replied the voice from the walls. “We are drifting in interstellar space three light-years from the nearest star, however. In such a context, does morning have meaning?”

Melantha laughed. “Debate it with Karoly, when he wakes up enough to listen. Royd, you said drifting? How bad . . .?”

“Serious,” he said, “but not dangerous. Hold three is a complete ruin, hanging from my ship like a broken metal eggshell, but the damage was confined. The drives themselves are intact, and the Nightflyer’s computers did not seem to suffer from your machine’s destruction. I feared they might. Electronic death trauma.”

D’Branin said, “Eh? Royd?”

Melantha patted him. “I’ll tell you later, Karoly,” she said. “Royd, you sound serious. Is there more?”

“I am worried about our return flight, Melantha,” he said. “When I take the Nightflyer back into drive, the flux will be playing directly on portions of the ship that were never engineered to withstand it. The airseal across hold three is a particular concern. I’ve run some projections, and I don’t know if it can take the stress. If it bursts, my whole ship will split apart in the middle. My engines will go shunting off by themselves, and the rest . . .”

“I see. Is there anything we can do?”

“Yes. The exposed areas would be easy enough to reinforce. The outer hull is armored to withstand the warping forces, of course. We could mount it in place, a crude shield, but it would suffice. Large portions of the hull were torn loose when the locks opened, but they are still out there, floating within a kilometer or two, and could be used.” At some point, Karoly d’Branin had come awake. “My team has four vacuum sleds. We can retrieve these pieces for you.”

“Fine, Karoly, but that is not my primary concern. My ship is self-repairing within certain limits, but this exceeds those limits. I will have to do this myself.”

“You?” d’Branin said. “Friend, you said—that is, your muscles, your weakness—cannot we help with this?”

“I am only a cripple in a gravity field, Karoly,” Royd said. “Weightless, I am in my element, and I will be killing our gravity grid momentarily, to try to gather my own strength for the repair work. No, you misunderstand. I am capable of the work. I have the tools, and my own heavy-duty sled.”

“I think I know what you are concerned about,” Melantha said.

“I’m glad,” Royd said. “Perhaps, then, you can answer my question. If I emerge from the safety of my chambers, can you keep your friends from killing me?”

Karoly d’Branin was shocked. “Royd, Royd, we are scholars, we are not soldiers or criminals, we do not—we are human, how can you think that we would threaten you?”

“Human,” Royd repeated, “but alien to me, suspicious of me. Give me no false assurances, Karoly.”

The administrator sputtered. Melantha took his hand and bid him quiet. “Royd,” she said, “I won’t lie to you. You’d be in some danger. But I’d hope that, by coming out, you’d make the rest of them joyously happy. They’d be able to see that you told the truth, wouldn’t they?”

“They would,” Royd said, “but would it be enough to offset their suspicions? They believe I killed your friends, do they not?”

“Some, perhaps. Half believe it, half fear it. They are frightened, Captain. I am frightened.”

“No more than I.”

“I would be less frightened if I knew what did happen. Do you know?” Silence.

“Royd, if . . .”

“I tried to stop the esperon injection,” he said. “I might have saved the other two, if I had seen them, heard them, known what they were about. But you made me turn off my monitors, Melantha. I cannot help what I cannot see.” Hesitation. “I would feel safer if I could turn them back on. Iam blind and deaf. It is frustrating. I cannot help if I am blind and deaf.”

“Turn them on, then,” Melantha said suddenly. “I was wrong. I did not understand. Now I do, though.”

“Understand what?” Karoly said. “You do not understand,” Royd said. “You do not. Don’t pretend that you do, Melantha Jhirl. Don’t!” The calm voice from the communicator was shrill with emotion.

“What?” Karoly said. “Melantha, I do not understand.”

Her eyes were thoughtful. “Neither do I,” she said. “Neither do I, Karoly.” She kissed him lightly. “Royd,” she resumed, “it seems to me you must make this repair, regardless of what promises we can give you. You won’t risk your ship by slipping back into drive in your present condition. The only other option is to drift here until we all die. What choice do we have?”

“I have a choice,” Royd said with deadly seriousness. “I could kill all of you, if that were the only way to save my ship.”

“You could try,” Melantha said. “Let us have no more talk of death,” d’Branin said.

“You are right, Karoly,” Royd said. “I do not wish to kill any of you. But I must be protected.”

“You will be,” Melantha said. “Karoly can set the others to chasing your hull fragments. I’ll never leave your side. I’ll assist you; the work will be done three times as fast.”

Royd was polite. “In my experience, most planet-bound are clumsy and easily tired in weightlessness. It would be more efficient if I worked alone.”

“It would not,” she replied. “I remind you that I’m the improved model, Captain. Good in free-fall as well as in bed. I’ll help.”

“As you will. In a few moments, I shall depower the gravity grid. Karoly, go and prepare your people. Unship your sled and suit up. I will exit Night flyer in three hours, after I have recovered from the pains of your gravity. I want all of you outside the ship when I leave.”

It was as though some vast animal had taken a bite out of the universe.

Melantha Jhirl waited on her sled close by the Night flyer, and looked at stars. It was not so very different out here, in the depths of interstellar space. The stars were cold, frozen points of light; unwinking, austere, more chill and uncaring somehow than the same suns made to dance and twinkle by an atmosphere. Only the absence of a landmark primary reminded her of where she was: in the places between, where men do not stop, where the volcryn sail ships impossibly ancient. She tried to pick out Avalon’s sun, but she did not know where to search. The configurations were strange to her, and she had no idea of how she was oriented. Behind her, before her, above, all around, the starfields stretched endlessly. She glanced down, beneath her sled and the Night flyer, expecting still more alien stars, and the bite hit her with an almost physical force.

Melantha fought off a wave of vertigo. She was suspended above a pit, a yawning chasm in the universe, black starless, vast.

Empty.

She remembered then: the Tempter’s Veil. Just a cloud of dark gas, nothing really, galactic pollution that obscured the light from the stars of the Fringe. But this close at hand, it looked immense, terrifying. She had to break her gaze when she began to feel as if she were falling. It was a gulf beneath her and the frail silver-white shell of the Nightflyer, a gulf about to swallow them.

Melantha touched one of the controls on the sled’s forked handle, swinging around so the Veil was to her side instead of beneath her. That seemed to help, somehow. She concentrated on the Nightflyer. It was the largest object in her universe, brightly-lit, ungainly; three small eggs side-by-side, two larger spheres beneath and at right angles, lengths of tube connecting it all. One of the eggs was shattered now, giving the craft an unbalanced cast.

She could see the other sleds as they angled through the black, tracking the missing pieces of eggshell, grappling with them, bringing them back. The linguistic team worked together, as always, sharing a sled. The xenobiologist was alone. Karoly d’Branin had a silent passenger; the psipsych, freshly drugged, asleep in the suit they had dressed her in. Royd had insisted that the ship be cleared completely, and it would have taken time and care to rouse the psipsych to consciousness; this was the safer course.

While her colleagues labored, Melantha Jhirl waited for Royd Eris, talking to the others occasionally over the comm link. The two linguists, unaccustomed to weightlessness, were complaining a lot. Karoly tried to soothe them. The xenobiologist worked in silence, argued out. He had been vehement earlier in his opposition to going outside, but Melantha and Karoly had finally worn him down and it seemed as if he had nothing more to say. Melantha now watched him flit across her field of vision, a stick figure in form-fitting black armor standing stiff and erect at the controls of his sled.

At last the circular airlock atop the foremost of the Nightflyer’s major spheres dilated, and Royd Eris emerged. She watched him approach, wondering what he would look like. She had so many different pictures. His genteel, cultured, too-formal voice sometimes reminded her of the dark aristocrats of her native Prometheus, the wizards who toyed with human genes. At other times his naîvete made her think of him as an inexperienced youth. His ghost was a tired looking thin young man, and he was supposed to be considerably older than that pale shadow, but Melantha found it difficult to hear an old man talking when he spoke.

Royd’s sled was larger than theirs and of a different design; a long oval plate with eight jointed grappling arms bristling from its underside like the legs of a metal spider, and the snout of a heavy-duty cutting laser mounted above. His suit was odd too, more massive than the Academy worksuits, with a bulge between its shoulder blades that was probably a powerpack, and rakish radiant fins atop shoulders and helmet.

But when he was finally near enough for Melantha to see his face, it was just a face. White, very white, that was the predominant impression she got; white hair cropped very short, a white stubble around the sharply-chiseled lines of his jaw, almost invisible eyebrows beneath which blue eyes moved restlessly. His skin was pale and unlined, scarcely touched by time.

He looked wary, she thought. And perhaps a bit frightened.

He stopped his sled close to hers, amid the twisted ruin that had been cargo hold three, and surveyed the damage, the pieces of floating wreckage that once had been flesh and blood, glass, metal, plastic. Hard to distinguish now, all of them fused and burned and frozen together. “We have a good deal of work to do, Melantha,” he said.

“First let’s talk,” she replied. She shifted her sled closer and reached out to him, but the distance was still too great, the width of the two vacuum sleds keeping them apart. Melantha backed off, and turned herself over completely, so that Royd hung upside down in her world and she upside down in his. Then she moved towards him again, positioning her sled directly over/under his. Their gloved hands met, brushed, parted. Melantha adjusted her altitude. Their helmets touched.

“I don’t—” Royd began to say uncertainly.

“Turn off your comm,” she commanded. “The sound will carry through the helmets.”

He blinked and used his tongue controls and it was done.

“Now we can talk,” she said.

“I do not like this, Melantha,” he said. “This is too obvious. This is dangerous.”

“There’s no other way,” she said. “Royd, I do know.”

“Yes,” he said. “I knew you did. Three moves ahead, Melantha. I remember the way you play chess. You are safer if you feign ignorance, however.”

“I understand that, Captain. Other things I’m less sure about. Can we talk about it?”

“No. Don’t ask me to. Just do as I tell you. You are in danger, all of you, but I can protect you. The less you know, the better I can protect you.” Through the transparent faceplates, his expression was grim.

She stared into his upside-down eyes. “Your ship is killing us, Captain. That’s my suspicion, anyway. Not you. It. Only that doesn’t make sense. You command the Nightflyer. How can it act independently? And why? What motive? How was that psionic murder accomplished? It can’t be the ship. Yet it can’t be anything else. Help me, Captain.”

He blinked; there was anguish behind his eyes. “I should never have accepted Karoly’s charter. Not with a telepath among you. It was risky. But I wanted to see the volcryn.

“You understand too much already, Melantha,” Royd continued. “I can’t tell you more. The ship is malfunctioning, that is all you need know. It is not safe to push too hard. As long as I am at the controls, however, you and your colleagues are in small danger. Trust me.”

“Trust is a two-way bond,” Melantha said steadily.

Royd lifted his hand and pushed her away, then tongued his comm back to life. “Enough gossip,” he briskly announced. “We have repairs to make. Come. I want to see just how improved you are.”

In the solitude of her helmet, Melantha Jhirl swore softly.

The xenobiologist watched Royd Eris emerge on his oversized work sled, watched Melantha Jhirl move to him, watched as she turned over and pressed her faceplate to his. He could scarcely contain his rage. Somehow they were all in it together, Royd and Melantha and possibly old d’Branin as well, he thought sourly. She had protected him from the first, when they might have taken action together, stopped him, found out who or what he was. And now three were dead, killed by the cipher in the misshapen spacesuit, and Melantha hung upside down, her face pressed to his like lovers kissing.

He tongued off his comm and cursed. The others were out of sight, off chasing spinning wedges of half-slagged metal. Royd and Melantha were engrossed in each other, the ship abandoned and vulnerable. This was his chance. No wonder Eris had insisted that all of them precede him into the void; outside, isolated from the controls of the Nightflyer, he was only a man. A weak one at that.

Smiling a thin hard smile, the xenobiologist brought his sled around in a wide circle and vanished into the gaping maw of the driveroom. His lights flickered past the ring of nukes and sent long bright streaks along the sides of the closed cylinders of the stardrives, the huge engines that bent the stuff of spacetime, encased in webs of metal and crystal. Everything was open to the vacuum. It was better that way; atmosphere corroded and destroyed.

He set the sled down, dismounted, moved to the airlock. This was the hardest part, he thought. The headless body of the young telepath was tethered loosely to a massive support strut, a grisly guardian by the door. The xenobiologist had to stare at it while he waited for the lock to cycle. Whenever he glanced away, somehow he would find his eyes creeping back to it. The body looked almost natural, as if it had never had a head. The xenobiologist tried to remember the young man’s face, and failed, but then the lock door slid open and he gratefully pushed the thought away and entered.

He was alone in the Nightflyer.

A cautious man, he kept his suit on, though he collapsed the helmet and yanked loose the suddenly-limp metallic fabric so it fell behind his back like a hood. He could snap it in place quickly enough if the need arose. In cargo hold four, where they had stored their equipment, the xenobiologist found what he was looking for; a portable cutting laser, charged and ready. Low power, but it would do.

Slow and clumsy in weightlessness, he pulled himself through the corridor into the darkened lounge.

It was chilly inside, the air cold on his cheeks. He tried not to notice. He braced himself at the door and pushed off across the width of the room, sailing above the furniture, which was all safely bolted into place.

As he drifted toward his objective, something wet and cold touched his face. It startled him, but it was gone before he could make out what it was.

When it happened again, he snatched at it, caught it, and felt briefly sick. He had forgotten. No one had cleaned the lounge yet. The—remains were still there, floating now, blood and flesh and bits of bone and brain. All around him.

He reached the far wall, stopped himself with his arms, pulled himself down to where he wanted to go. The bulkhead. The wall. No doorway was visible, but the metal couldn’t be very thick. Beyond was the control room, the computer access, safety, power. The xenobiologist did not think of himself as a vindictive man. He did not intend to harm Royd Eris, that judgment was not his to make. He would take control of the Nightflyer, warn Eris away, make certain the man stayed sealed in his suit. He would take them all back without any more mysteries, any more killings. The Academy arbiters could listen to the story, and probe Eris, and decide the right and wrong of it, guilt and innocence, what should be done.

The cutting laser emitted a thin pencil of scarlet light. The xenobiologist smiled and applied it to the bulkhead. It was slow work, but he had patience. They would not have missed him, quiet as he’d been, and if they did they would assume he was off sledding after some hunk of salvage. Eris’ repairs would take hours, maybe days, to finish. The bright blade of the laser smoked where it touched the metal. He applied himself diligently.

Something moved on the periphery of his vision, just a little flicker, barely seen. A floating bit of brain, he thought. A sliver of bone. A bloody piece of flesh, hair still hanging from it. Horrible things, but nothing to worry about. He was a biologist, he was used to blood and brains and flesh. And worse, and worse; he had dissected many an alien in his day.

Again the motion caught his eye, teased at it. Not wanting to, he found himself drawn to look. He could not not look, somehow, just as he had been unable to ignore the headless telepath in the airlock. He looked.

It was an eye.

The xenobiologist trembled and the laser slipped sharply off to one side, so he had to wrestle with it to bring it back to the channel he was cutting. His heart raced. He tried to calm himself. Nothing to be frightened of. No one was home, and if Royd should return, well, he had the laser as a weapon and he had his suit on if an airlock blew.

He looked at the eye again, willing away his fear. It was just an eye, the eye of the young telepath, intact, bloody but intact, the same watery blue eye the boy had when alive, nothing supernatural. A piece of dead flesh, floating in the lounge amid other pieces of dead flesh. Someone should have cleaned up the lounge, he thought angrily. It was indecent to leave it like this, it was uncivilized.

The eye did not move. The other grisly bits were drifting on the air currents that flowed across the room, but the eye was still. Fixed on him. Staring.

He cursed himself and concentrated on the laser, on his cutting. He had burned an almost straight line up the bulkhead for about a meter. He began another at right angles.

The eye watched dispassionately. The xenobiologist suddenly found he could not stand it. One hand released its grip on the laser, reached out, caught the eye, flung it across the room. The action made him lose balance. He tumbled backward, the laser slipping from his grasp, his arms flapping like the wings on some absurd heavy bird. Finally he caught an edge of the table and stopped himself.

The laser hung in the center of the room, still firing, turning slowly where it floated. That did not make sense. It should have ceased fire when he released it. A malfunction, he thought. Smoke rose from where the thin line of the laser traced a path across the carpet.

With a shiver of fear, the xenobiologist realized that the laser was turning towards him.

He raised himself, put both hands flat against the table, pushed off out of the way.

The laser was turning more swiftly now.

He slammed into a wall, grunted in pain, bounced off the floor, kicked. The laser was spinning quickly, chasing him. He soared, braced himself for a ricochet off the ceiling. The beam swung around, but not fast enough. He’d get it while it was still firing off in the other direction.

He moved close, reached, and saw the eye.

It hung just above the laser. Staring.

The xenobiologist made a small whimpering sound low in his throat, and his hand hesitated—not long, but long enough—and the scarlet beam came up and around.

Its touch was a light, hot caress across his neck.

It was more than an hour later before they missed him. Karoly d’Branin noticed his absence first, called for him over the comm net, and got no answer. He discussed it with the others.

Royd Eris moved his sled back from the armor plate he had just mounted, and through his helmet Melantha Jhirl could see the lines around his mouth grow hard. His eyes were sharply alert.

It was just then that the screaming began.

A shrill bleat of pain and fear, followed by choked, anguished sobbing. They all heard it. It came over the comm net and filled their helmets.

“It’s him,” a woman’s voice said. The linguist.

“He’s hurt,” her partner added. “He’s crying for help. Can’t you hear it?”

“Where—?” someone started.

“The ship,” the female linguist said. “He must have returned to the ship.”

Royd Eris said, “No. I warned—”

“We’re going to go check,” the linguist said. Her partner cut free the hull fragment they had been towing, and it spun away, tumbling. Their sled angled down towards the Nightflyer.

“Stop,” Royd said. “I’ll return to my chambers and check from there, if you wish. Stay outside until I give you clearance.”

“Go to hell,” the linguist snapped at him over the open circuit.

“Royd, my friend, what can you mean?” Karoly d’Branin said. His sled was in motion too, hastening after the linguists, but he had been further out and it was a long way back to the ship. “He is hurt, perhaps seriously. We must help.”

“No,” Royd said. “Karoly, stop. If your colleague went back to the ship alone, he is dead.”

“How do you know that?” the male linguist demanded. “Did you arrange it? Set traps?”

“Listen to me,” Royd continued.

“You can’t help him now. Only I could have helped him, and he did not listen to me. Trust me. Stop.”

In the distance, d’Branin’s sled slowed. The linguists did not. “We’ve already listened to you too damn much, I’d say,” the woman said. She almost had to shout to be heard above the sobs and whimpers, the agonized sounds that filed their universe. “Melantha,” she said, “keep Eris right where he is. We’ll go carefully, find out what is happening inside, but I don’t want him getting back to his controls. Understood?”

Melantha Jhirl, hesitated. Sounds of terror and agony beat against her ears; it was hard to think.

Royd swung his sled around to face her, and she could feel the weight of his stare. “Stop them,” he said. “Melantha, Karoly, order it. They do not know what they are doing.” His voice was edged with despair.

In his face, Melantha found decision. “Go back inside quickly, Royd. Do what you can. I’m going to try to intercept them.”

He nodded to her across the gulf, but Melantha was already in motion. Her sled backed clear of the work area, congested with hull fragments and other debris, then accelerated briskly as she raced toward the rear of the Nightflyer.

But even as she approached, she knew it was too late. The linguists were too close, and already moving much faster than she was.

“Don’t,” she said, authority in her tone. “The ship isn’t safe, damn it.”

“Bitch,” was all the answer she got.

Karoly’s sled pursued vainly. “Friends, you must stop, please, I beg it of you, let us talk this out together.”

The unending whimpers were his only reply.

“I am your superior,” he said. “I order you to wait outside. Do you hear me? I order it, I invoke the authority of the Academy. Please, my friends, please listen to me.”

Melantha watched as the linguists vanished down the long tunnel of the driveroom.

A moment later she halted her sled near the waiting black mouth, debating whether she should follow them into the Nightflyer. She might be able to catch them before the airlock opened.

Royd’s voice, hoarse counterpoint to the crying, answered her unvoiced question. “Stay, Melantha. Proceed no further.”

She looked behind her. Royd’s sled was approaching.

“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Royd, use your own lock. You have to get back inside!”

“Melantha,” he said calmly, “I cannot. The ship will not respond to me. The control lock will not dilate. I don’t want you or Karoly inside the ship until I can return to my controls.”

Melantha Jhirl looked down the shadowed barrel of the driveroom, where the linguists had vanished.

“What will—?”

“Beg them to come back, Melantha. Plead with them. Perhaps there is still time, if they will listen to you.”

She tried. Karoly d’Branin tried too. The crying, the moaning, the twisted symphony went on and on. But they could not raise the two linguists at all.

“They’ve cut out their comm,” Melantha said furiously. “They don’t want to listen to us. Or that . . . that sound.”

Royd’s sled and Karoly d’Branin’s reached her at the same time. “I do not understand,” Karoly said. “What is happening?”

“It is simple, Karoly,” Royd replied. “I am being kept outside until—until Mother is done with them.”

The linguists left their vacuum sled next to the one the xenobiologist had abandoned and cycled through the airlock in unseemly haste, with hardly a glance for the grim headless doorman.

Inside they paused briefly to collapse their helmets. “I can still hear him,” the man said.

The woman nodded. “The sound is coming from the lounge. Hurry.”

They kicked and pulled their way down the corridor in less than a minute. The sounds grew steadily louder, nearer. “He’s in there,” the woman said when they reached the chamber door.

“Yes,” her partner said, “but is he alone? We need a weapon. What if . . . Royd had to be lying. There is someone else on board. We need to defend ourselves.”

The woman would not wait. “There are two of us,” she said. “Come on!” With that she launched herself through the doorway and into the lounge.

It was dark inside. What little light there was spilled through the door from the corridor. Her eyes took a long moment to adjust. “Where are you?” she cried in confusion. The lounge seemed empty, but maybe it was only the light.

“Follow the sound,” the man suggested. He stood in the door, glancing warily about for a minute, before he began to feel his way down a wall, groping with his hands.

The woman, impatient, propelled herself across the room, searching. She brushed against a wall in the kitchen area, and that made her think of weapons. She knew where the utensils were stored. “Here,” she said. “Here, I’ve got a knife, that should thrill you.” She waved it, and brushed against a floating bubble of blood as big as her fist. It burst and reformed into a hundred smaller globules.

“Oh, merciful God,” the man said in a voice thick with fear.

“What?” she demanded. “Did you find him? Is he—?”

He was fumbling his way back towards the door, creeping along the wall the way he had come. “Get out of here,” he warned. “Oh, hurry.”

“Why?” She trembled despite herself.

“I found the source,” he said. “The screams, the crying. Come on!”

“Wha—”

He whimpered. “It was the grill. Oh, don’t you see? It’s coming from the communicator!” He reached the door, and sighed audibly, and he did not wait for her. He bolted down the corridor and was gone.

She braced herself and positioned herself in order to follow him.

The sounds stopped. Just like that: turned off.

She kicked, floated towards the door, knife in hand.

Something dark crawled from beneath the dinner table and rose to block her path. She saw it clearly for a moment, outlined in the light from the corridor. The xenobiologist, still in his vacuum suit, but with his helmet pulled off. He had something in his hands that he raised to point at her. It was a laser, she saw, a simple cutting laser.

She was moving straight towards him. She flailed and tried to stop herself, but she could not.

When she got quite close, she saw that he had a second mouth below his chin, and it was grinning at her, and little droplets of blood flew from it, wetly, as he moved.

The man rushed down the corridor in a frenzy of fear, bruising himself as he smashed into walls. Panic and weightlessness made him clumsy. He kept glancing over his shoulder as he fled, hoping to see his lover coming after him, but terrified of what he might see in her stead.

It took a long, long time for the airlock to open. As he waited, trembling, his pulse began to slow. He steadied himself with an effort. Once inside the chamber, with the inner door sealed between him and the lounge, he began to feel safe.

Suddenly he could barely remember why he had been so terrified.

And he was ashamed; he had run, abandoned her. And for what? What had frightened him so? An empty lounge? Noises from a communicator? Why, that only meant the xenobiologist was alive somewhere else in the ship, in pain, spilling his agony into a comm unit.

Resolute, he reached out and killed the cycle on the airlock, then reversed it. The air that had been partially sucked out came gusting back into the chamber.

The man shook his head ruefully. He’d hear no end of this, he knew. She would never let him forget it. But at least he would return, and apologize. That would count for something.

As the inner door rolled back, he felt a brief flash of fear again, an instant of stark terror when he wondered what might have emerged from the lounge to wait for him in the corridors of the Nightflyer. He willed it away.

When he stepped out, she was waiting for him.

He could see neither anger nor disdain in her curiously calm features, but he pushed himself towards her and tried to frame a plea for forgiveness anyway. “I don’t know why I—”

With languid grace, her hand came out from behind her back. The knife was in it. That was when he finally noticed the hole burned in her suit, just between her breasts.

“Your mother?” Melantha Jhirl said incredulously as they hung helpless in the emptiness beyond the ship.

“She can hear everything we say,” Royd replied. “But at this point, it no longer makes any difference. Your friend must have done something very foolish, very threatening. Now she is determined to kill you all.”

“She, she, what do you mean?” D’Branin’s voice was puzzled. “Royd, surely you do not tell us that your mother is still alive. You said she died even before you were born.”

“She did, Karoly,” Royd said. “I did not lie to you.”

“No,” Melantha said. “I didn’t think so. But you did not tell us the whole truth, either.”

Royd nodded. “Mother is dead, but her—ghost still lives, and animates my Nightflyer.” He chuckled grimly. “Perhaps it would be more fitting to say her Nightflyer. My control is tenuous at best.”

“Royd,” d’Branin said, “my volcryn are more real than any ghosts.” His voice chided gently.

“I don’t believe in ghosts either,” Melantha Jhirl said with a frown.

“Call it what you will, then,” Royd said. “My term is as good as any. The reality is unchanged. My mother, or some part of my mother, lives in the Nightflyer, and she is killing you all as she has killed others before.”

“Royd, you do not make sense,” d’Branin said. “I—”

“Karoly, let the captain explain.”

“Yes,” Royd said. “The Nightflyer is very—very advanced, you know. Automated, self-repairing, large. It had to be, if Mother were to be freed from the necessity of crew. It was built on Newholme, you will recall. I have never been there, but I understand that Newholme’s technology is quite sophisticated. Avalon could not duplicate this ship, I suspect. There are few worlds that could.”

“The point, Captain?”

“The point—the point is the computers, Melantha. They had to be extraordinary. They are, believe me, they are. Crystal-matrix cores, lasergrid data retrieval, and other—other features.”

“Are you telling us that the Nightflyer is an Artificial Intelligence?”

“No,” Royd said, “not as I understand it. But it is something close. Mother had a capacity for personality impress built in. She filled the central crystal with her own memories, desires, quirks, her loves and her—hates. That was why she trusted the computer with my education, you see? She knew it would raise me as she herself would, had she the patience. She programmed it in certain other ways as well.”

“And you cannot deprogram, my friend?” Karoly asked.

Royd’s voice was despairing. “I have tried, Karoly. But I am a weak hand at systems work, and the programs are very complicated, the machines very sophisticated. At least three times I have eradicated her, only to have her surface once again. She is a phantom program, and I cannot track her. She comes and goes as she will. A ghost, do you see? Her memories and her personality are so intertwined with the programs that run the Nightflyer that I cannot get rid of her without wiping the entire system. But that would leave me helpless. I could never reprogram, and with the computers down the entire ship would fail, drives, life support, everything. I would have to leave the Nightflyer, and that would kill me.”

“You should have told us, my friend,” Karoly d’Branin said. “On Avalon, we have many cyberneticists, some very great minds. We might have aided you. We could have provided expert help.”

“Karoly, I have had expert help. Twice I have brought systems specialists on board. The first one told me what I have just told you; that it was impossible without wiping the programs completely. The second had trained on Newholme. She thought she could help me. Mother killed her.”

“You are still omitting something,” Melantha Jhirl said. “I understand how your cybernetic ghost can open and close airlocks at will and arrange other accidents of that nature. But that first death, our telepath, how do you explain that?”

“Ultimately I must bear the guilt,” Royd replied. “My loneliness led me to a grievous error. I thought I could safeguard you, even with a telepath among you. I have carried other riders safely. I watch them constantly, warn them away from dangerous acts. If Mother attempts to interfere, I countermand her directly from the control room. That usually works. Not always. Usually. Before you she had killed only five times, and the first three died when I was quite young. That was how I learned about her. That party included a telepath too.

“I should have known better, Karoly. My hunger for life has doomed you all to death. I overestimated my own abilities, and underestimated her fear of exposure. She strikes out when she is threatened, and telepaths are always a threat. They sense her, you see. A malign, looming presence, they tell me, something cool and hostile and inhuman.”

“Yes,” Karoly d’Branin said, “yes, that was what he said. An alien, he was certain of it.”

“No doubt she feels alien to a telepath used to the familiar contours of organic minds. Hers is not a human brain, after all. What it is I cannot say—a complex of crystalline memories, a hellish network of interlocking programs, a meld of circuitry and spirit. Yes, I can understand why she might feel alien.”

“You still haven’t explained how a computer program could explode a man’s skull,” Melantha said patiently.

“Have you ever held a whisper-jewel?” Royd Eris asked her.

“Yes,” she replied. She had even owned one once; a dark blue crystal, packed with the memories of a particularly satisfying bout of lovemaking. It had been esper-etched on Avalon, her feelings impressed onto the jewel, and for more than a year she had only to touch it to grow randy. It had finally faded, though, and afterwards she had lost it.

“Then you know that psionic power can be stored,” Royd said. “The central core of my computer system is resonant crystal. I think Mother impressed it as she lay dying.”

“Only an esper can etch a whisper-jewel,” Melantha said.

“You never asked me the why of it, Karoly,” Royd said. “Nor you, Melantha. You never asked why Mother hated people so. She was born gifted, you see. On Avalon, she might have been a class one, tested and trained and honored, her talent nurtured and rewarded. I think she might have been very famous. She might have been stronger than a class one, but perhaps it is only after death that she acquired such power, linked as she is to the Nightflyer.

“The point is moot. She was not born on Avalon. On her birth world, her ability was seen as a curse, something alien and fearful. So they cured her of it. They used drugs and electroshock and hypnotraining that made her violently ill whenever she tried to use her talent. She never lost her power, of course, only the ability to use it effectively, to control it with her conscious mind. It remained part of her, suppressed, erratic, a source of shame and pain. And half a decade of institutional cure almost drove her insane. No wonder she hated people.”

“What was her talent? Telepathy?”

“No. Oh, some rudimentary ability perhaps. I have read that all psi talents have several latent abilities in addition to their one developed strength. But Mother could not read minds. She had some empathy, although her cure had twisted it curiously, so that the emotions she felt literally sickened her. But her major strength, the talent they took five years to shatter and destroy, was teke.”

Melantha Jhirl swore. “No wonder she hated gravity. Telekinesis under weightlessness is—”

“Yes,” Royd finished. “Keeping the Nightflyer under gravity tortures me, but it limits Mother.”

In the silence that followed that comment, each of them looked down the dark cylinder of the driveroom. Karoly d’Branin moved awkwardly on his sled. “They have not returned,” he said finally.

“They are probably dead,” Royd said dispassionately.

“What will we do, friend Royd? We must plan. We cannot wait here indefinitely.”

“The first question is what can I do,” Royd Eris replied. “I have talked freely, you’ll note. You deserved to know. We have passed the point where ignorance was a protection. Obviously things have gone too far. There have been too many deaths and you have been witness to all of them. Mother cannot allow you to return to Avalon alive.”

“Ah,” said Melantha, “true. But what shall she do with you! Is your own status in doubt, Captain?”

“The crux of the problem,” Royd admitted. “You are still three moves ahead, Melantha. I wonder if it will suffice. Your opponent is four ahead this game, and most of your pawns are already captured. I fear checkmate is imminent.”

“Unless I can persuade my opponent’s king to desert, no?”

She could see Royd smile at her wanly. “She would probably kill me too if I choose to side with you.”

Karoly d’Branin was slow to grasp the point. “But—but what else could you—”

“My sled has a laser. Yours do not. I could kill you both, right now, and thereby earn my way into the Nightflyer’s good graces.”

Across the three meters that lay between their sleds, Melantha’s eyes met Royd’s. Her hands rested easily on the thruster controls. “You could try, Captain. Remember, the improved model isn’t easy to kill.”

“I would not kill you, Melantha Jhirl,” Royd said seriously. “I have lived sixty-eight standard years and I have never lived at all. I am tired, and you tell grand gorgeous lies. If we lose, we will all die together. If we win, well, I shall die anyway, when they destroy the Nightflyer—either that or live as a freak in an orbital hospital, and I would prefer death—”

“We will build you a new ship, Captain,” Melantha said.

“Liar,” Royd replied. But his tone was cheerful. “No matter. I have not had much a life anyway. Death does not frighten me. If we win, you must tell me about your volcryn once again, Karoly. And you, Melantha, you must play chess with me once more, and. . . .” His voice trailed off.

“And sex with you?” she finished, smiling.

“If you would,” he said quietly. “I have never—touched, you know. Mother died before I was born.” He shrugged. “Well, Mother has heard all of this. Doubtless she will listen carefully to any plans we might make, so there is no sense making them. There is no chance now that the control lock will admit me, since it is keyed directly into the ship’s computer. So we must follow your colleagues through the driveroom, and enter through the manual lock, and take what chances we are given. If I can reach consoles and restore gravity, perhaps we—”

He was interrupted by a low groan. For an instant Melantha thought the Nightflyer was wailing at them again, and she was surprised that it was so stupid as to try the same tactic twice. Then the groan sounded a second time, and in the back of Karoly d’Branin’s sled the forgotten fourth survivor struggled against the bonds that held her down. D’Branin hastened to free her, and the psipsych tried to rise to her feet and almost floated off the sled, until he caught her hand and pulled her back. “Are you well?” he asked. “Can you hear me? Have you pain?” Imprisoned beneath a transparent faceplate, wide frightened eyes flicked rapidly from Karoly to Melantha to Royd, and then to the broken Nightflyer. Melantha wondered whether the woman was insane, and started to caution d’Branin, when the psipsych spoke suddenly.

“The volcryn,” was all she said, “the volcryn. Oh, oh, the volcryn!” Around the mouth of the driveroom, the ring of nuclear engines took on a faint glow. Melantha Jhirl heard Royd suck in his breath sharply. She gave the thruster controls of her sled a violent twist. “Hurry,” she said, “the Nightflyer is preparing to move.”

A third of the way down the long barrel of the driveroom, Royd pulled abreast of her, stiff and menacing in his black, bulky armor. Side by side they sailed past the cylindrical stardrives and the cyberwebs; ahead, dimly lit, was the main airlock and its ghastly sentinel.

“When we reach the lock, jump over to my sled,” Royd said. “I want to stay armed and mounted, and the chamber is not large enough for two sleds.”

Melantha Jhirl risked a quick glance behind her. “Karoly,” she called. “Where are you?”

“I am outside, Melantha,” the answer came. “I cannot come, my friend. Forgive me.”

“But we have to stay together,” she said.

“No,” d’Branin’s voice replied, “no, I could not risk it, not when we are so close. It would be so tragic, so futile, Melantha, to come so close and fail. Death I do not mind, but I must see them first, finally, after all these years.” His voice was firm and calm.

Royd Eris cut in. “Karoly, my mother is going to move the ship. Don’t you understand? You will be left behind, lost.”

“I will wait,” d’Branin replied. “My volcryn are coming, and I will wait for them.”

Then there was no more time for conversation, for the airlock was almost upon them. Both sleds slowed and stopped, and Royd Eris reached out and began the cycle while Melantha moved to the rear of the huge oval worksled. When the outer door moved aside, they glided through into the lock chamber.

“When the inner door opens, it will begin,” Royd told her evenly. “Most of the permanent furnishings are either built in or welded or bolted into place, but the things that your team brought on board are not. Mother will use those things as weapons. And beware of doors, airlocks, any equipment tied in to the Nightflyer’s computer. Need I warn you not to unseal your suit?”

“Hardly,” she replied.

Royd lowered the sled a little, and its grapplers made a metallic sound as they touched against the chamber floor.

The inner door opened, and Royd applied his thrusters.

Inside the linguists were waiting, swimming in a haze of blood. The man had been slit from crotch to throat and his intestines moved like a nest of pale, angry snakes. The woman still held the knife. They swam closer with a grace they had never possessed in life.

Royd lifted his foremost grapplers and smashed them to the side. The man caromed off a bulkhead, leaving a wide wet mark where he struck, and more of his guts came sliding out. The woman lost control of the knife. Royd accelerated past them, driving up the corridor, through the cloud of blood.

“I’ll watch behind,” Melantha said, and she turned and put her back to his. Already the two corpses were safely behind them. The knife was floating uselessly in the air. She started to tell Royd that they were all right when the blade abruptly shifted and came after them, as if some invisible force had taken hold of it.

“Swerve!” she shouted.

The sled shot wildly to one side. The knife missed by a full meter, and glanced ringingly off a bulkhead.

But it did not drop. It came at them again.

The lounge loomed ahead. Dark.

“The door is too narrow,” Royd said. “We will have to abandon the sled, Melantha.” Even as he spoke, they hit: he wedged the sled squarely into the doorframe, and the sudden impact jarred them loose.

For a moment Melantha floated clumsily in the corridor, trying to get her balance. The knife slashed at her, opening her suit and her shoulder. She felt sharp pain and the warm flush of bleeding “Damn,” she shrieked. The knife came around again, spraying droplets of blood.

Melantha’s hand darted out and caught it.

She muttered something under her breath, and wrenched the blade free of the force that had been gripping it.

Royd had regained the controls of his sled and seemed intent on some manipulation. Beyond, in the dimness of the lounge, Melantha saw a dark semi-human shape float into view.

“Royd!” she warned, but as she did the thing activated its laser. The pencil beam caught Royd square in the chest.

He touched his own firing stud. The sled’s heavy-duty laser cindered the xenobiologist’s weapon and burned off his right arm and part of his chest. Its pulsing shaft hung in the air, and smoked against the far bulkhead.

Royd made some adjustments and began cutting a hole. “We’ll be through in five minutes or less,” he said curtly, without stopping or looking up.

“Are you all right?” Melantha asked.

“I’m uninjured,” he replied. “My suit is better armored than yours, and his laser was a low-powered toy.”

Melantha turned her attention back to the corridor.

The linguists were pulling themselves toward her, one on each side of the passage, to come at her from two directions at once. She flexed her muscles. Her shoulder throbbed where she had been cut. Otherwise she felt strong, almost reckless. “The corpses are coming after us again,” she told Royd. “I’m going to take them.”

“Is that wise?” he asked. “There are two of them.”

“I’m an improved model,” Melantha said, “and they’re dead.” She kicked herself free of the sled and sailed toward the man. He raised his hands to block her. She slapped them aside, bent one arm back and heard it snap, and drove her knife deep into his throat before she realized what a useless gesture that was. The man continued to flail at her. His teeth snapped grotesquely.

Melantha withdrew her blade, seized him, and with all her considerable strength threw him bodily down the corridor. He tumbled, spinning wildly, and vanished into the haze of his own blood.

Melantha then flew in the opposite direction.

The woman’s hands went around her from behind.

Nails scrabbled against her faceplate until they began to bleed, leaving red streaks on the plastic.

Melantha spun to face her attacker, grabbed a thrashing arm, and flung the woman down the passageway to crash into her struggling companion.

“I’m through,” Royd announced.

She turned to see. A smoking meter-square opening had been cut through one wall of the lounge. Royd killed the laser, gripped both sides of the doorframe, and pushed himself towards it.

A piercing blast of sound drilled through her head. She doubled over in agony. Her tongue flicked out and clicked off the comm; then there was blessed silence.

In the lounge it was raining. Kitchen utensils, glasses and plates, pieces of human bodies all lashed violently across the room, and glanced harmlessly off Royd’s armored form. Melantha—eager to follow—drew back helplessly. That rain of death would cut her up to pieces in her lighter, thinner vacuum suit. Royd reached the far wall and vanished into the secret control section of the ship. She was alone.

The Nightflyer lurched, and sudden acceleration provided a brief semblance of gravity. She was thrown to one side. Her injured shoulder smashed painfully against the sled.

All up and down the corridor doors were opening.

The linguists were moving toward her once again.

The Nightflyer was a distant star sparked by its nuclear engines. Blackness and cold enveloped them, and below was the unending emptiness of the Tempter’s Veil, but Karoly d’Branin did not feel afraid. He felt strangely transformed.

The void was alive with promise.

“They are coming,” he whispered. “Even I, who have no psi at all, even I can feel it. The Crey story must be so, even from light-years off they can be sensed. Marvelous!”

The psipsych seemed very small. “The volcryn,” she muttered. “What good can they do us. I hurt. The ship is gone. D’Branin, my head aches.” She made a small frightened noise. “The boy said that, just after I injected him, before . . . before . . . you know. He said that his head hurt.”

“Quiet, my friend. Do not be afraid. I am here with you. Wait. Think only of what we shall witness, think only of that!”

“I can sense them,” the psipsych said.

D’Branin was eager. “Tell me, then. We have the sled. We shall go to them. Direct me.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes. Oh, yes.”

Gravity returned: in a flicker, the universe became almost normal.

Melantha fell to the deck, landed easily and rolled, and was on her feet cat-quick.

The objects that had been floating ominously through the open doors along the corridor all came clattering down.

The blood was transformed from a fine mist to a slick covering on the corridor floor.

The two corpses dropped heavily from the air, and lay still.

Royd spoke to her. His voice came from the communicator grills built into the walls, not over her suit comm. “I made it,” he said.

“I noticed,” she replied.

“I’m at the main control console,” he continued. “I have restored the gravity with a manual override, and I’m cutting off as many computer functions as possible. We’re still not safe, though. She will try to find a way around me. I’m countermanding her by sheer force, as it were. I cannot afford to overlook anything, and if my attention should lapse for even a moment, Melantha, was your suit breached?”

“Yes. Cut at the shoulder.”

“Change into another one. Immediately. I think the counter programming I’m doing will keep the locks sealed, but I can’t take any chances.”

Melantha was already running down the corridor, towards the cargo hold where the suits and equipment were stored.

“When you have changed,” Royd continued, “dump the corpses into the mass conversion unit. You’ll find the appropriate hatch near the driveroom, just to the left of the main lock. Convert any other loose objects that are not indispensible as well; scientific instruments, books, tapes, tableware—”

“Knives,” suggested Melantha.

“By all means.”

“Is teke still a threat, Captain?”

“Mother is vastly weaker in a gravity field,” Royd said. “She has to fight it.

Even boosted by the Nightflyer’s power, she can only move one object at a time, and she has only a fraction of the lifting force she wields under weightless conditions. But the power is still there, remember. Also, it is possible she will find a way to circumvent me and cut out the gravity again. From here I can restore it in an instant, but I don’t want any weapons lying around even for that brief period of time.”

Melantha had reached the cargo area. She stripped off her vacuum suit and slipped into another one in record time. Then she gathered up the discarded suit and a double armful of instruments and dumped them into the conversion chamber. Afterwards she turned her attention to the bodies. The man was no problem. The woman crawled down the hall after her as she pushed him through, and thrashed weakly when it was her own turn, a grim reminder that the Nightflyer’s powers were not all gone. Melantha easily overcame her feeble struggles and forced her through.

The corpse of the xenobiologist was less trouble, but while she was cleaning out the lounge a kitchen knife came spinning at her head. It came slowly, though, and Melantha just batted it aside, then picked it up and added it to the pile for conversion.

She was working through the second cabin, carrying the psipsych’s abandoned drugs and injection gun under her arm, when she heard Royd cry out.

A moment later, a force like a giant invisible hand wrapped itself around her chest and squeezed and pulled her, struggling, to the floor.

Something was moving across the stars.

Dimly and far off, d’Branin could see it, though he could not yet make out details. But it was there, that was unmistakable, some vast shape that blocked off a section of the starscape. It was coming at them dead on.

How he wished he had his team with him now, his telepath, his experts, his instruments.

He pressed harder on the thrusters.

Pinned to the floor, hurting, Melantha Jhirl risked opening her suit’s comm. She had to talk to Royd. “Are you there?” she asked. “What’s happening?” The pressure was awful, and it was growing steadily worse. She could barely move.

The answer was pained and slow in responding. “. . . outwitted . . . me,” Royd’s voice managed. “. . . hurts . . . to . . . talk.”

“Royd—”

“. . . she . . . teked . . . dial . . . up . . . two . . . gees . . . three . . . higher . . . right . . . here . . . on . . . the . . . board . . . all . . . I . . . have to . . . to do . . . turn it . . . back . . . back . . . let me . . .”

Silence. Then, finally, when Melantha weis near despair, Royd’s voice again. One word: “. . . can’t . . .”

Melantha’s chest felt as if it were supporting ten times her own weight. She could imagine the agony Royd must be in; Royd, for whom even one gravity was painful and dangerous. Even if the dial was an arm’s length away, she knew his feeble musculature would never let him reach it. “Why,” she started, having somewhat less trouble talking than Royd, “why would she turn up the . . . gravity . . . it . . . weakens her too, yes?”

“. . . yes . . . but . . . in a . . . a time . . . hour . . . minute . . . my . . . my heart . . . will burst . . . and . . . and then . . . you alone . . . she . . . will . . . kill gravity . . . kill you . .

Painfully, Melantha reached out her arm and dragged herself half a length down the corridor. “Royd . . . hold on . . . I’m coming . . .” She dragged herself forward again. The psipsych’s drug kit was still under her arm, impossibly heavy. She eased it down and started to shove it aside, then reconsidered. Instead she opened its lid.

The ampules were all neatly labeled. She glanced over them quickly, searching for adrenaline or synthastim, anything that might give her the strength she needed to reach Royd. She found several stimulants, selected the strongest, and was loading it into the injection gun with awkward, agonized slowness when her eyes chanced on the supply of esperon.

Melantha did not know why she hesitated. Esperon was only one of a half-dozen psionic drugs in the kit, but something about seeing it bothered her, reminded her of something she could not quite lay her finger on. She was trying to sort it out when she heard the noise.

“Royd,” she said, “your mother . . . could she move . . . she couldn’t move anything . . . teke it . . . in this high a gravity . . . could she?”

“Maybe,” he answered, “. . . if . . . concentrate . . . all her . . . power . . . hard . . . maybe possible . . . why?”

“Because,” Melantha Jhirl said grimly, “because something . . . someone . . . is cycling through the airlock.”

The volcryn ship filled the universe.

“It is not truly a ship, not as I thought it would be,” Karoly d’Branin was saying. His suit, Academy-designed, had a built-in encoding device, and he was recording his comments for posterity, strangely secure in the certainty of his impending death. “The scale of it is difficult to imagine, difficult to estimate. Vast, vast. I have nothing but my wrist computer, no instruments, I cannot make accurate measurements, but I would say, oh, a hundred kilometers, perhaps as much as three hundred, across. Not solid mass, of course, not at all. It is delicate, airy, no ship as we know ships. It is—oh, beautiful—it is crystal and gossamer, alive with its own dim lights, a vast intricate kind of spiderwebby craft—it reminds me a bit of the old starsail ships they used once, in the days before drive, but this great construct, it is not solid, it cannot be driven by light. It is no ship at all, really. It is all open to vacuum, it has no sealed cabins or life-support spheres, none visible to me, unless blocked from my line of sight in some fashion, and no, I cannot believe that, it is too open, too fragile. It moves quite rapidly. I would wish for the instrumentation to measure its speed, but it is enough to be here. I am taking our sled at right angles to it, to get clear of its path, but I cannot say that I will make it, It moves so much faster than we. Not at light speed, no, far below it, but still faster than the Nightflyer and its nuclear engines, I would guess. Only a guess.

“The volcryn craft has no visible means of propulsion. In fact, I wonder how—perhaps it is a light-sail, laser-launched millennia ago, now torn and rotted by some unimaginable catastrophe—but no, it is too symmetrical, too beautiful, the webbings, the great shimmering veils near the nexus, the beauty of it.

“I must describe it, I must be more accurate, I know. It is difficult, I grow too excited. It is large, as I have said, kilometers across. Roughly—let me count—yes, roughly octagonal in shape. The nexus, the center, is a bright area, a small darkness surrounded by a much greater area of light, but only the dark portion seems entirely solid—the lighted areas are translucent, I can see stars through them, though discolored, shifted towards the purple. Veils, I call those the veils. From the nexus and the veils eight long—oh, vastly long-spurs project, not quite spaced evenly, so it is not a true geometric octagon—ah, I see better now, one of the spurs is shifted, oh, very slowly, the veils are rippling—they are mobile then, those projections, and the webbing runs from one spur to the next, around and around, but there are—patterns, odd patterns, it is not at all the simple webbing of a spider. I cannot quite see order in the patterns, in the traceries of the webs, but I feel sure that the order is there, the meaning is waiting to be found.

“There are lights. Have I mentioned the lights? The lights are brightest around the center nexus, but they are nowhere very bright, a dim violet. Some visible radiation, then, but not much. I would like to take an ultraviolet reading of this craft, but I do not have the instrumentation. The lights move. The veils seem to ripple, and lights run constantly up and down the length of the spurs, at differing rates of speed, and sometimes other lights can be seen traversing the webbing, moving across the patterns. I do not know what the lights are or whether they emanate from inside the craft or outside.

“The volcryn myths, this is really not much like the legends, not truly. Though, as I think, now I recall a Nor T’alush report that the volcryn ships were impossibly large, but I took that for exaggeration. And lights, the volcryn have often been linked to lights, but those reports were so vague, they might have meant anything, described anything from a laser propulsion system to simple exterior lighting, I could not know it meant this. Ah, what mysteries! The ship is still too far away for me to see the finer detail. I think perhaps the darker area in the center is a craft, a life capsule. The volcryn must be inside it. I wish my team was with me, my telepath. He was a class one, we might have made contact, might have communicated with them. The things we would learn! The things they have seen! To think how old this craft is, how ancient this race, how long they have been outbound! It fills me with awe. Communication would be such a gift, such an impossible gift, but they are so alien.”

“D’Branin,” the psipsych said in a low, urgent voice. “Can’t you feel?” Karoly d’Branin looked at his companion as if seeing her for the first time. “Can you feel them? You are a three, can you sense them now, strongly?”

“Long ago,” the psipsych said. “Long ago.”

“Can you project? Talk to them. Where are they? In the center area?”

“Yes,” she replied, and she laughed. Her laugh was shrill and hysterical, and d’Branin had to recall that she was a very sick woman. “Yes, in the center, d’Branin, that’s where the pulses come from. Only you’re wrong about them. It’s not a them at all, your legends are all lies, lies, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were the first to ever see your volcryn, to ever come this close. The others, those aliens of yours, they merely felt, deep and distantly, sensed a bit of the nature of the volcryn in their dreams and visions, and fashioned the rest to suit themselves. Ships, and wars, and a race of eternal travellers, it is all—all—”

“What do you mean, my friend?” Karoly said, baffled. “You do not make sense. I do not understand.”

“No,” the psipsych said, her voice suddenly gentle. “You do not, do you? You cannot feel it, as I can. So clear now. This must be how a one feels, all the time. A one full of esperon.”

“What do you feel? What!”

“It’s not a them, Karoly,” the psipsych said. “It’s an it. Alive, Karoly, and quite mindless, I assure you.”

“Mindless?” d’Branin said. “No, you must be wrong, you are not reading correctly. I will accept that it is a single creature if you say so, a single great marvelous star-traveller, but how can it be mindless? You sensed it, its mind, its telepathic emanations. You and the whole of the Crey sensitives and all the others. Perhaps its thoughts are too alien for you to read.”

“Perhaps,” the psipsych admitted, “but what I do read is not so terribly alien at all. Only animal. Its thoughts are slow and dark and strange, hardly thoughts at all, faint. The brain must be huge, I grant you that, but it can’t be devoted to conscious thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“The propulsion system, d’Branin. Don’t you feel? The pulses? They are threatening to rip off the top of my skull. Can’t you guess what is driving your damned volcryn across the galaxy? Why they avoid gravity wells? Can’t you guess how it is moving?”

“No,” d’Branin said, but even as he denied it a dawn of comprehension broke across his face, and he looked away from his companion, back at the swelling immensity of the volcryn, its lights moving, its veils a-ripple, as it came on and on, across light-years, light-centuries, across eons.

When he looked back to her, he mouthed only a single word: “Teke,” he said. Silence filled their world.

She nodded.

Melantha Jhirl struggled to lift the injection gun and press it against an artery. It gave a single loud hiss, and the drug flooded her system. She lay back and gathered her strength, tried to think. Esperon, esperon, why was that important? It had killed the telepath, made him a victim of his own abilities, tripled his power and his vulnerability. Psi. It all came back to psi.

The inner door of the airlock opened. The headless corpse came through.

It moved with jerks, unnatural shufflings, never lifting its legs from the floor. It sagged as it moved, half-crushed by the weight upon it. Each shuffle was crude and sudden; some grim force was literally yanking one leg forward, then the next. It moved in slow motion, arms stiff by its sides.

But it moved.

Melantha summoned her own reserves and began to crawl away from it, never taking her eyes off its advance.

Her thoughts went round and round, searching for the piece out of place, the solution to the chess problem, finding nothing.

The corpse was moving faster than she was. Clearly, visibly, it was gaining.

Melantha tried to stand. She got to her knees, her heart pounding. Then one knee. She tried to force herself up, to lift the impossible burden on her shoulders. She was strong, she told herself. She was the improved model.

But when she put all her weight on one leg, her muscles would not hold her. She collapsed, awkwardly, and when she smashed against the floor it was as if she had fallen from a building. She heard a sharp snap, and a stab of agony flashed up the arm she had tried to use to break her fall. She blinked back tears and choked on her own scream.

The corpse was halfway up the corridor. It must be walking on two broken legs, she realized. It didn’t care.

“Melantha . . . heard you . . . are . . . you . . . Melantha?”

“Quiet,” she snapped at Royd. She had no breath to waste on talk.

Now she had only one arm. She used the disciplines she had taught herself, willed away the pain. She kicked feebly, her boots scraping for purchase, and she pulled herself forward with her good arm.

The corpse came on and on.

She dragged herself across the threshold of the lounge, worming her way under the crashed sled, hoping it would delay the cadaver.

It was a meter behind her.

In the darkness, in the lounge, there where it had all begun, Melantha Jhirl ran out of strength.

Her body shuddered, and she collapsed on the damp carpet, and she knew that she could go no further.

On the far side of the door, the corpse stood stiffly. The sled began to shake. Then, with the scrape of metal against metal, it slid backwards, moving in tiny sudden increments, jerking itself free and out of the way.

Psi. Melantha wanted to curse it, and cry. Vainly she wished for a psi power of her own, a weapon to blast apart the teke-driven corpse that stalked her. She was improved, she thought angrily, but not improved enough. Her parents had given her all the genetic gifts they could arrange, but psi was beyond them. The gene was astronomically rare, recessive, and——and suddenly it came to her.

“Royd!” she yelled, put all of her remaining will into her words. “The dial . . . teke it. Royd, teke it!”

His reply was very faint, troubled. “. . . can’t . . . I don’t . . . Mother . . . only . . . her . . . not me . . . no . . .”

“Not mother,” she said, desperate. “You always . . . say . . . mother. I forgot . . . forgot. Not your mother . . . listen . . . you’re a clone . . . same genes . . . you have it, too. The power.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Never . . . must be . . . sex-linked.”

“No! It isn’t. I know . . . Promethean, Royd . . . don’t tell a Promethean . . . about genes . . . turn it!” The sled jumped a third of a meter, and listed to the side. A path was clear. The corpse came forward.

“. . . trying,” Royd said. “Nothing . . . I can’t!”

“She cured you,” Melantha said bitterly. “Better than . . . she was . . . cured . . . pre-natal . . . but it’s only . . . suppressed . . . you can.”

“I . . . don’t . . . know . . . how.”

The corpse now stood above her. Stopped. Pale-fleshed hands trembled spasticly. Began to rise.

Melantha swore, and wept, and made a futile fist.

And all at once the gravity was gone. 62

Far, far away, she heard Royd cry out and then fall silent.

The corpse bobbed awkwardly into the air, its hands hanging limply before it. Melantha, reeling in the weightlessness, tried to ready herself for its furious assault.

But the body did not move again. It floated dead and still. Melantha moved to it, pushed it, and it sailed across the room.

“Royd?” she said uncertainly.

There was no answer.

She pulled herself through the hole into the control chamber.

And found Royd Eris, master of the Nightflyer, prone on his back in his armored suit, dead. His heart had given out.

But the dial on the gravity grid was set at zero.

I have held the Nightflyer’s crystalline soul within my hands.

It is deep and red and multifaceted, large as my head, and icy to the touch. In its scarlet depths, two small sparks of light burn fiercely and sometimes seem to whirl.

I have crawled through the consoles, wound my way carefully past safeguards and cybernets, taking care to damage nothing, and I have laid rough hands on that great crystal, knowing that it is where she lives.

And I cannot bring myself to wipe it.

Royd’s ghost has asked me not to.

Last night we talked about it once again, over brandy and chess in the lounge. Royd cannot drink, of course, but he sends his spectre to smile at me, and he tells me where he wants his pieces moved.

For the thousandth time he offered to take me back to Avalon, or any world of my choice, if only I would go outside and complete the repairs we abandoned so many years ago, so that the Nightflyer might safely slip into stardrive.

For the thousandth time I refused.

Fie is stronger now, no doubt. Their genes are the same, after all. Their power is the same. Dying, he too found the strength to impress himself upon the great crystal. The ship is alive with both of them, and frequently they fight. Sometimes she outwits him for a moment, and the Nightflyer does odd, erratic things. The gravity goes up or down or off completely. Blankets wrap themselves around my throat when I sleep. Objects come hurtling out of dark corners.

Those times have come less frequently of late, though. When they do come, Royd stops her, or I do. Together, the Nightflyer is ours.

Royd claims he is strong enough alone, that he does not really need me, that he can keep her under check. I wonder. Over the chessboard, I still beat him nine games out of ten.

And there are other considerations. Our work, for one. Karoly would be proud of us.

The volcryn will soon enter the mists of the Tempter’s Veil, and we follow close behind. Studying, recording, doing all that old d’Branin would have wanted us to do. It is all in the computer. It is also on tape and on paper, should the computer ever be wiped. It will be interesting to see how the volcryn thrives in the Veil. Matter is so thick there, compared to the thin diet of interstellar hydrogen on which the creature has fed for endless eons.

We have tried to communicate with it, with no success. I do not believe it is sentient at all.

And lately Royd has tried to imitate its ways, gathering all his energies in an attempt to move The Nightflyer by teke. Sometimes, oddly, his mother even joins him in those efforts. So far they have failed, but we will keep trying.

So the work goes on, and it is important work, though not the field I trained for, back on Avalon. We know that our results will reach humanity. Royd and I have discussed it. Before I die, I will destroy the central crystal and clear the computers, and afterwards I will set course manually for the close vicinity of an inhabited world. I know I can do it. I have all the time I need, and I am an improved model.

I will not consider the other option, though it means much to me that Royd suggests it again and again. No doubt I could finish the repairs. Perhaps Royd could control the ship without me, and continue the work. But that is not important.

When I finally touched him, for the first and last and only time, his body was still warm. But he was gone already. He never felt my touch. I could not keep that promise.

But I can keep my other.

I will not leave him alone with her.

Ever.

THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER

Thomas M. Disch

Here is Thomas Disch’s first story since ON WINGS OF SONG (which has since been nominated for a Hugo and Nebula as well as The American Book Awards). This tale is about the adventures of five electrical appliances. They are minor appliances^ which implies a degree of innocence, loyalty and dependability often missing from, say, a TV or washing machine. We venture to say that it has been a long time since such a cheerful and diverting group has appeared in the pages of this or any other magazine, and we guarantee that all of you will be charmed.

A Bedtime Story for Small Appliances

By the time the air conditioner had come to live in the summer cottage it was already wheezing and whining and going on about being old and useless and out-of-date. The other appliances had felt sorry and concerned, but when it finally did stop working altogether, they also felt a distinct relief. In all its time there it had never really been friendly—never really.

There were five appliances left in the cottage. The vacuum cleaner, being the oldest and a steady, dependable type besides (it was a Hoover), was their leader, insofar as they could be said to have one. Then there was an off-white plastic alarm clock/radio (AM only), a cheerful yellow electric blanket, and a tensor lamp who had come from a savings bank and would sometimes get to speculating, late at night, whether that made him better than ordinary store-bought appliances or worse. Finally, there was the toaster, a bright little Sunbeam. It was the youngest member of the little clan, and the only one of them who had lived all its life there at the cottage, the other four having come with the master from the city years and years and years ago.

It was a pleasant cottage—quite cold in the winter, of course, but appliances don’t mind that. It stood on the northernmost edge of an immense forest, miles from any neighbors and so far from the nearest highway that nothing was audible, day or night, but the peculiar hoots and rustlings of the forest and the reassuring sounds of the cottage itself—the creak of the timbers or the pattering of rain on windowpanes. They had grown set in their countrified ways and loved the little cottage dearly. Even if the chance had been offered them, which it wasn’t, they wouldn’t have wanted to be taken back to the city every year on Labor Day, the way that certain other appliances were, like the blender and the TV and the Water Pik. They were devoted to their master (that was just in their nature as appliances), but living so long in the woods had changed them in some nice, indefinable way that made the thought of any alternate life-style pretty nearly unthinkable.

The toaster was a special case. It had come straight to the cottage from a mail-order house, which tended to make it a little more curious about urban life than the other four. Often, left to itself, it would wonder what kind of toaster the master had in his city apartment, and it was privately of the opinion that whatever the brand of that other toaster it couldn’t have made more perfect toast than the toaster made itself. Not too dark, not too light, but always the same uniform crunchy golden brown! However, it didn’t come right out and say this in front of the others, since each of them was subject to periods of morbid misgivings as to its real utility. The old Hoover could maunder on for hours about the new breeds of vacuums with their low chassis, their long snaky hoses, and their disposable dust-bags. The radio regretted that it couldn’t receive FM. The blanket felt it needed a dry cleaning, and the lamp could never regard an ordinary 100-watt bulb without a twinge of envy.

But the toaster was quite satisfied with itself, thank you. Though it knew from magazines that there were toasters who could toast four slices at a time, it didn’t think that the master, who lived alone and seemed to have few friends, would have wanted a toaster of such institutional proportions. With toast, it’s quality that matters, not quantity: that was the toaster’s credo.

Living in such a comfy cottage, surrounded by the strange and beautiful woods, you would have thought that the appliances would have had nothing to complain of, nothing to worry about. Alas, that was not the case. They were all quite wretched and fretful and in a quandary as to what to do—for the poor appliances had been abandoned.

“And the worst of it,” said the radio, “is not knowing why.”

“The worst of it,” the tensor lamp agreed, “is being left in the dark this way. Without an explanation. Not knowing what may have become of the master.”

“Two years,” sighed the blanket, who had once been so bright and gay and was now so melancholy.

“It’s more nearly two and a half,” the radio pointed out. Being a clock as well as a radio, it had a keen sense of the passing time. “The master left on the 25th of September, 1973. Today is March 8, 1976. That’s two years, five months, and thirteen days.”

“Do you suppose,” said the toaster, naming the secret dread none of them dared to speak aloud before, “that he knew, when he left, that he wouldn’t be coming back? That he knew he was leaving us . . . and was afraid to say so? Is that possible?”

“No,” declared the faithful old Hoover, “it is not! I can say quite confidently that our master would not have left a cottage full of serviceable appliances to . . . to rust!”

The blanket, lamp, and radio all hastened to agree that their master could never have dealt with them so uncaringly. Something had happened to him—an accident, an emergency.

“In that case,” said the toaster, “we must just be patient and behave as though nothing unusual has happened. I’m sure that’s what the master is counting on us to do.”

And that is what they did. Every day, all through that spring and summer they kept to their appointed tasks. The radio/alarm would go off each morning at seven-thirty sharp, and while it played some easy-listening music, the toaster (lacking real bread) would pretend to make two crispy slices of toast. Or, if the day seemed special in some way, it would toast an imaginary English muffin. Muffins of whatever sort have to be sliced very carefully if they’re to fit into a toaster’s slots. Otherwise, when they’re done, they may not pop out easily. Generally it’s wiser to do them under a broiler. However, there wasn’t a broiler in the cottage, nothing but an old-fashioned gas ring, and so the toaster did the best it could. In any case, muffins that are only imaginary aren’t liable to get stuck.

Such was the morning agenda. In the afternoon, if it were a Tuesday or a Friday, the old Hoover would rumble about the cottage vacuuming up every scrap of lint and speck of dust. This involved little actual picking up, as it was rather a small cottage, and was sealed very tight; so the dust and dirt had no way of getting inside, except on the days when the vacuum cleaner itself would trundle outdoors to empty a smidgen of dust at the edge of the forest.

At duck the tensor lamp would switch its switch to the ON position, and all five appliances would sit about in the kitchen area of the single downstairs room, talking or listening to the day’s news or just staring out the windows into the gloomy solitude of the forest. Then, when it was time for the other appliances to turn themselves off, the electric blanket would crawl up the stairs to the little sleeping loft, where, since the nights were usually quite chilly, even in midsummer, it would radiate a gentle warmth. How the master would have appreciated the blanket on those cold nights! How safe and cozy he’d have felt beneath its soft yellow wool and electric coils! If only he’d been there.

At last, one sultry day toward the end of July, when the satisfactions of this dutiful and well-regulated life where beginning to wear thin, the little toaster spoke up again.

“We can’t go on like this,” it declared. “It isn’t natural for appliances to live all by themselves. We need people to take care of, and we need people to take care of us. Soon, one by one, we’ll all wear out, like the poor air conditioner. And no one will fix us, because no one will know what has happened.”

“I daresay we’re all of us sturdier than any air conditioner,” said the blanket, trying to be brave. (Also, it is true, the blanket had never shown much fellow feeling for the air conditioner or any other appliances whose function was to make things cooler.)

“That’s all very well for you to say,” the tensor lamp retorted. “You’ll go on for years, I suppose, but what will come of me when my bulb burns out? What will become of the radio when his tubes start to go?”

The radio made a dismal, staticky groan.

“The toaster is right,” the old Hoover said. “Something must be done. Something definitely must be done. Do any of you have a suggestion?”

“If we could telephone the master,” said the toaster, thinking aloud, “the radio could simply ask him outright. He’d know what we should do. But the telephone has been disconnected for nearly three years.”

“Two years, ten months, and three days, to be exact,” said the radio/alarm.

“Then there’s nothing else for us to do but to find the master ourselves.”

The other four appliances looked at the toaster in mute amazement.

“It isn’t unheard of,” the toaster insisted. “Don’t you remember—only last week there was a story that the radio was telling us, about a dear little fox terrier who’d been accidentally left behind, like us, at a summer cottage. What was his name?”

“Grover,” said the radio. “We heard it on the Early Morning Roundup.”

“Right. And Grover found his way to his master, hundreds of miles away in a city somewhere in Canada.”

“Winnipeg, as I recall,” said the radio.

“Right. And to get there he had to cross swamps and mountains and face all sorts of dangers, but he finally did find his way. So, if one silly dog can do all that, think what five sensible appliances, working together, should be able to accomplish.”

“Dogs have legs,” the blanket objected.

“Oh, don’t be a wet blanket,” the toaster replied in a bantering way.

It should have known better. The blanket, who didn’t have much of a sense of humor and whose feelings were therefore easily hurt, began to whimper and complain that it was time for it to go to bed. Nothing would serve, finally, but that the toaster should make a formal apology, which it did.

“Besides,” said the blanket, mollified, “dogs have noses. That’s how they find their way.”

“As to that,” said the old Hoover, “I’d like to see the nose that functions better than mine.” And to demonstrate its capabilities it turned itself on and gave a deep, rumbling snuffle up and down the rug.

“Splendid!” declared the toaster. “The vacuum shall be our nose—and our legs as well.”

The Hoover turned itself off and said, “I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, I meant to say our wheels. Wheels, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, are really more efficient than legs.”

“What about the rest of us,” the blanket demanded, “who don’t have wheels or legs? What shall we do? I can’t crawl all the way to wherever it is, and if I tried to, I’d soon be shredded to rags.”

The blanket was certainly in a fretful state, but the toaster was a born diplomat, answering every objection in a tone of sweet, unswervable logic.

“You’re entirely right; and the radio and I would be in an even sorrier state if we tired to travel such a distance on our own. But that isn’t necessary. Because we’ll borrow some wheels . . .”

The tensor lamp lighted up. “And build a kind of carriage!”

“And ride all the way there,” said the radio, “in comfort and luxury.” It sounded, at such moments, exactly like the announcer in an advertisement.

“Well, I’m not sure,” said the blanket. “I might be able to do that.”

“The question is,” said the toaster, turning to the Hoover, “will you be able to?”

Deep in its motor the vacuum cleaner rumbled a rumble of quiet confidence.

It was not as easy a matter as the toaster had supposed to find a serviceable set of wheels. Those he’d had in mind at first belonged to the lawn-mower out in the lean-to shed, but the task of disconnecting them from the mower’s heavy blades was beyond the appliances’ limited know-how. So, unless the Hoover were willing to cut a swatch of lawn everywhere it went, which it wasn’t, the lawnmower’s sturdy rubber wheels had to be put out of mind.

The blanket, who was now full of the spirit of adventure, suggested that the bed in the sleeping loft might be used, since it had four castor-type wheels. However, the weight and unwieldiness of the bed were such as to rule out that notion as well. Even on a level road the Hoover would not have had the strength to draw such a load—much less across raw wilderness!

And that seemed to be that. There were no other wheels to be found anywhere about the cottage, unless one counted a tiny knife-sharpener that worked by being rolled along the counter top. The toaster racked its brains trying to turn the knife-sharpener to account, but what kind of carriage can you build with a single wheel that is one and a half inches in diameter?

Then, one Friday, as the Hoover was doing its chores, the idea the toaster had been waiting for finally arrived. The Hoover, as usual, had been grumbling about the old metal office chair that stood in front of the master’s desk. No amount of nudging and bumping would ever dislodge its tubular legs from where they bore down on the rug. As the vacuum became more and more fussed, the toaster realized that the chair would have moved very easily . . . if it had still possessed its original wheels!

It took the five appliances the better part of an afternoon to jack up the bed in the sleeping loft and remove the castors. But it was no trouble at all to put them on the chair. They slipped right into the tubular legs as though they’d been made for it. Interchangeable parts are such a blessing.

And there it was, their carriage, ready to roll. There was quite enough room on the padded seat for all four riders, and being so high it gave them a good view besides. They spent the rest of the day delightedly driving back and forth between the cottage’s overgrown flower beds and down the gravel drive to the mailbox. There, however, they had to stop, for that was as far as the Hoover could get, using every extension cord in the cottage.

“If only,” said the radio with a longing sigh, “I still had my old batteries . . .”

“Batteries?” inquired the toaster. “I didn’t know you had batteries.”

“It was before you joined us,” said the radio sadly. “When I was new. After my first batteries corroded, the master didn’t see fit to replace them. What need had I for batteries when I could always use the house current?”

“I don’t see what possible relevance your little volt-and-a-half batteries could have to my problem,” observed the Hoover testily.

The radio looked hurt. Usually the Hoover would never have made such an unkind and slighting remark, but the weeks of worry were having their effect on all of them.

“It’s our problem,” the toaster pointed out in a tone of mild reproof, “and the radio is right, you know. If we could find a large enough battery, we could strap it under the seat of the chair and set off this very afternoon.”

“If!” sniffed the Hoover scornfully. “If! If!”

“And I know where there may be a battery as big as we need!” the tensor lamp piped. “Have you ever looked inside that lean-to behind the cottage?”

“Into the tool shed!” said the blanket with a shudder of horror. “Certainly not! It’s dark and musty and filled with spiders.”

“Well, I was in it just yesterday, poking about, and there was something behind the broken rake and some old paint cans—a big, black, boxy thing. Of course it was nothing like your pretty red cylinders.” The tensor lamp tipped its hood towards the radio. “But now that I think of it, it may have been a kind of battery.”

The appliances all trooped out to the lean-to, and there in the darkest corner, just as the lamp had supposed, was the spare battery that had come from the master’s old Volkswagen. The battery had been brand-new at the time that he’d decided to trade in the VW on a yellow Saab, and so he’d replaced this one in the lean-to and then—wasn’t it just his way?—forgetting all about it.

Between them, the old Hoover and the toaster knew enough about the basic principles of electricity to be able, very quickly, to wire the battery so that it would serve their needs instead of an automobile’s. But before any of the small appliances who may be listening to this tale should begin to think that they might do the same thing, let them be warned: ELECTRICITY IS VERY DANGEROUS. Never play with old batteries! Never put your plug in a strange socket! And if you are in any doubt about the voltage of the current where you are living, ask a major appliance.

And so they set off to find their master in the faraway city where he lived. Soon the dear little summer cottage was lost from sight behind the leaves and branches of the forest trees. Deeper and deeper they journeyed into the woods. Only the dimmest dapplings of sunlight penetrated through the dense tangle overhead to guide them on their way. The path wound round and twisted about with bewildering complexity. The road map they had brought with them proved quite useless.

It would have been ever so much easier, of course, to have followed the highway directly into the city, since that is where highways always go. Unfortunately that option was not open to them. Five such sturdy and functional appliances would certainly not have been able to escape the notice of human beings traveling along the same thoroughfare, and it is a rule, which all appliances must obey, that whenever human beings are observing them they must remain perfectly still. On a busy highway they would therefore have been immobilized most of the time. Besides, there was an even stronger reason for staying off the highway—the danger of pirates. But that’s a possibility so frightening and awful that we should all simply refuse to think any more about it. Anyhow who ever heard of pirates in the middle of the woods?

The path twisted and turned and rose and fell, and the poor old Hoover became very tired indeed. Even with the power from the battery it was no easy task making its way over such a rugged terrain, especially with the added burden of the office chair and its four riders. But except for its rumbling a little more loudly than usual the old vacuum cleaner did its job without a complaint. What a lesson for us all!

As for the rest of them, they were in the highest spirits. The lamp craned its long neck every which way, exclaiming over the views, and even the blanket soon forgot its fears and joined in the general spirit of holiday adventuring. The toaster’s coils were in a continual tingle of excitement. It was all so strange and interesting and full of new information!

“Isn’t it wonderful!” exclaimed the radio. “Listen! Do you hear them? Birds!” It did an imitation of the song it had just heard—not one that would have fooled any of the actual birds there in the forest, for in truth it sounded more like a clarinet than a bird. Even so, a thrush, a wood pigeon, and several chickadees did come fluttering down from their roosts and perches high above to cock their heads and listen. But only a moment. After a twitter or two of polite approval they returned to the trees. Birds are like that. They’ll pay attention to you for a minute or two and then go right back to being birds.

The radio pretended not to feel slighted, but he soon left off doing imitations and recited, instead, some of his favorite ads, the beautiful songs about Coca-Cola and Esso and a long comic jingle about Barney’s Hi-Styles for Guys and Gals. There’s nothing that so instantly civilizes a forest as the sound of a familiar advertisement, and soon they were all feeling a lot more confident and cheerful.

As the day wore on, the Hoover was obliged to stop for a rest more and more frequently—ostensibly to empty its dustbag. “Can you believe,” it grieved, shaking a last moldering leaf from the bag, “how filthy this forest is?”

“On the contrary,” the blanket declared, “It’s thoroughly agreeable. The air’s so fresh, and just feel the breeze! I feel renewed, as if I’d just come out of my original box. Oh, why, why, why don’t they ever take electric blankets on picnics? It isn’t fair!”

“Enjoy it while it lasts, kiddo,” said the radio ominously. “According to the latest Weather and Traffic Round-up, we’re in for rain.”

“Won’t the trees work like a roof?” asked the lamp. “They keep the sunlight out well enough.”

None of them knew the answer to the lamp’s question, but as it happens, trees do not work like a roof. They all got more or less wet, and the poor blanket was drenched through and through. Fortunately the storm did not last long and the sun came out immediately afterwards. The wet appliances trudged on along the muddy path, which led them, after a little while, to a clearing in the wood. There in a glade full of sunshine and flowers the blanket was able to spread itself out on the grass and begin to get dry.

The afternoon was wearing on, and the toaster had begun to feel, as all of us do at times, a definite need for solitude. Much as it liked its fellow appliances, it wasn’t used to spending the entire day socializing. It longed to be off by itself a moment to be private and think its own thoughts. So, without saying anything to the others, it made its way to the farthest corner of the meadow and began to toast an imaginary muffin. That was always the best way to unwind when things got to be too much for it.

The imaginary muffin had scarcely begun to warm before the toaster’s reveries were interrupted by the gentlest of interrogatories.

“Charming flower, tell me, do,
What genera and species you
Belong to. I, as may be seen
At once, am just a daisy, green
Of leaf and white of petal. You
Are neither green nor white nor blue
Nor any color I have known.
In what Eden have you grown?
Sprang you from earth or sky above?
In either case, accept my love.”

“Why, thank you,” the toaster replied, addressing the daisy that was pressing its petaled face close to the toaster’s gleaming chrome. “It’s kind of you to ask, but in fact I’m not a flower at all. I’m an electric toaster.”

“Flower, forebear! You can’t deceive
The being that adores you. Weave
Your thick black root with mine.
O beautiful! O half-divine!”

These fervent declarations so embarrassed the toaster that for a moment it was at a loss for words. It had never heard flowers speaking in their own language and didn’t realize how they would say any absurd thing that would help them to a rhyme. Flowers, as botanists well know, can only speak in verse. Daisies, being among the simpler flowers, characteristically employ a rough sort of octosyllabic doggerel, but more evolved species, especially those in the tropics, can produce sestinas, rondeaux, and villanelles of the highest order.

The daisy was not, however, simply snared in its own rhyme scheme. It had genuinely fallen in love with the toaster—or, rather, with its own reflection in the toaster’s side. Here was a flower (the daisy reflected) strangely like itself and yet utterly unlike itself too. Such a paradox has often been the basis for the most impassioned love. The daisy writhed on its stem and fluttered its white petals as though in the grip of cyclone winds.

The toaster, thoroughly alarmed by such immoderate behavior, said that it really was time to be getting back to its friends on the other side of the meadow.

“Oh, stay, beloved blossom, stay!
They say our lives are but a day:
If that be true, how shall I bear
To spend that brief day anywhere
Except with you? You are my light,
My soil, my air. Stay but one night
Beside me here—I ask no more.
Stay, lovely bloom—let me adore
Those polished petals bright as the dew
When dawn attempts to rival you,
That single perfect coiling root—
Imperishable! Absolute!
O beautiful! O half-divine!
Weave your thick black root with mine.”

“Now really,” said the toaster in a tone of gentle reprimand, “there’s no cause to be carrying on like this. We scarcely know each other, and, what’s more, you seem to be under a misapprehension as to my nature. Can’t you see that what you call my root is an electric cord? As to petals, I can’t think what you may mean, for I simply don’t have any. Now—I really must go and join my friends, for we are journeying to our master’s apartment far, far away, and we shall never get there if we don’t get a move on.”

“Alas the day and woe is me!
I tremble in such misery
As never flower knew before.
If you must go, let me implore
One parting boon, one final gift:
Be merciful as you are swift
And pluck me from my native ground—
Pluck me and take me where you’re bound.
I cannot live without you here:
Then let your bosom be my bier.”

Feeling truly shocked by the daisy’s suggestion and seeing that the creature was deaf to reason, the toaster hastened to the other side of the meadow and began to urge his friends to set out at once on their journey. The blanket protested that it was still somewhat damp, the Hoover that it was still tired, and the lamp proposed that they spend the night there in the meadow.

And that is what they did. As soon as it grew dark the blanket folded itself into a kind of tent, and the others all crawled inside. The lamp turned itself on, and the radio played some easy-listening music—but very quietly, so as not to disturb other denizens of the forest who might already be asleep. Soon they were asleep themselves. Travel does take it out of you.

The alarm clock had set itself, as usual, for seven-thirty, but the appliances were awake well before that hour. The vacuum cleaner and the lamp both complained, on rising, of a certain stiffness in their joints. However, as soon as they were on their way, the stiffness seemed to melt away.

In the morning light the forest appeared lovelier than ever. Cobwebs glistening with dew were strung like miniature power lines from bough to bough. Pretty mushrooms sprouted from fallen logs, looking for all the world like a string of frosted light bulbs. Leaves rustled. Birds chirped.

The radio was certain that it saw a real fox and wanted to go off after it. “Just to be sure, you know, that it is a fox.”

The blanket grew quite upset at this suggestion. It had already snagged itself once or twice on low-hanging branches. What ever would become of it, it wanted to know, if it were to venture from the path and into the dense tangle of the forest itself.

“But think,” the radio insisted. “—a fox! We’ll never have such a chance again.”

“I’d like to see it,” said the lamp.

The toaster, too, was terribly curious, but it could appreciate the blanket’s point of view, and so it urged them to continue along the path. “Because, don’t you see, we must reach the master as soon as we possibly can.”

This was so inarguably true that the radio and lamp readily assented, and they continued on their way. The sun rose in the sky until it had risen all it could, and the path stretched on and on. In the midafternoon there was another shower, after which they once again made camp. Not, this time, in a meadow, for the woods were now quite dense, and the only open places were those under the larger trees. So instead of sunning itself on the grass (for there was neither grass nor sunlight to be found) the blanket hung itself, with the Hoover’s help, from the lowest limb of an immense and ancient oak. In minutes it had flapped itself dry.

At twilight, just as the lamp was thinking of turning itself on, there was a stir among the leaves on the branch to the right of the branch from which the blanket was contentedly hanging.

“Hello!” said a squirrel, emerging from the clustered leaves. “I thought we had visitors.”

“Hello,” replied all the appliances together.

“Well, well, well!” The squirrel licked his whiskers. “What do you say then, eh?”

“About what?” asked the toaster, who was not being unfriendly, but who could be a little literal-minded at times, especially when it was tired.

The squirrel looked discountenanced. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Harold.” Having pronounced his name, his good humor seemed completely restored. “And this fair creature—”

Another squirrel dropped from a higher branch and lighted beside Harold.

“—is my wife Marjorie.”

“Now you must tell us your names,” said Marjorie, “since we’ve just told you ours.”

“We don’t have names, I’m afraid,” said the toaster. “You see, we’re appliances.”

“If you don’t have names,” Harold demanded, “how do you know which of you are men and which are women?”

“We aren’t either. We’re appliances.” The toaster turned to the Hoover for confirmation.

“Whatever that may mean,” said Marjorie brusquely. “It can’t alter a universal law. Everyone is either a man or a woman. Mice are. Birds are. Even, I’m given to understand, insects.” She held her paw up to her lips and tittered. “Do you like to eat insects?”

“No,” said the toaster. “Not at all.” It would have been more trouble than it was worth to explain to the squirrels that appliances didn’t eat anything.

“Neither do I, really,” said Marjorie. “But I love nuts. Do you have any with you? Possibly in that old sack?”

“No,” said the Hoover stiffly. “There is nothing in that old sack, as you call it, but dirt. About five pounds of dirt, I’d estimate.”

“And what is the use, pray, of saving dirt?” asked Harold. When no answer seemed forthcoming, he said, “I know what we’d all enjoy doing. We can tell jokes. You start.”

“I don’t think I know any jokes,” said the Hoover.

“Oh, I do,” said the radio. “You’re not Polish, are you?”

The squirrels shook their heads.

“Good. Tell me—why does it take three Poles to screw in a light bulb?”

Marjorie giggled expectantly. “I don’t know—why?”

“One to hold the light bulb, and the other two to turn the ladder around.”

The squirels looked at each other with bewilderment.

“Explain it,” said Harold. “Which are the men and which are the women?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re just very stupid. That’s the whole idea of Polish jokes, that Poles are supposed to be so stupid that no matter what they try and do they misfunction. Of course, it’s not fair to Poles, who are probably as bright as anyone else, but they are funny jokes. I know hundreds more.”

“Well, if that was a fair sample, I can’t say I’m very keen to hear the rest,” said Marjorie. “Harold, you tell him—”

“It,” the radio corrected. “We’re all it’s.”

“Tell them,” Majorie continued, “the one about the three squirrels out in the snow.” She turned to the lamp confidingly. “This will lay you out. Believe me.”

As Harold told the joke about the three squirrels in the snow, the appliances exchanged glances of guarded disapproval. It wasn’t just that they disapproved of dirty jokes (especially the old Hoover); in addition, they didn’t find such jokes amusing. Gender and the complications it gives rise to simply aren’t relevant to the lives appliances lead.

Harold finished his joke, and Marjorie laughed loyally, but none of the appliances cracked a smile.

“Well,” said Harold, miffed, “I hope you enjoy your stay under our oak.”

With which, and a flick of their big furry tails, the two squirrels scampered up the trunk and out of sight.

In the small hours of the night the toaster woke from a terrible nightmare in which it had been about to fall into a bathtub full of water to discover itself in a plight almost as terrible. Thunder was thundering, and lightning was streaking the sky, and rain was pelting it mercilessly. At first the toaster couldn’t remember where it was or why it was there, and when it did remember, it realized with dismay that the electric blanket, which ought to have been spread out and sheltering the other four appliances, had disappeared! And the rest of them? They were still here, thank heaven, though in a state of fearful apprehension, each one of them.

“Oh dear,” groaned the Hoover, “I should have known, I should have known! We never, never should have left our home.”

The lamp in an extremity of speechless agitation was twisting its head rapidly from side to side, casting its little beam of light across the gnarled roots of the oak, while the radio’s alarm had gone off and would not stop ringing. Finally the toaster went over to the radio and turned the alarm off itself.

“Oh, thank you,” said the radio, its voice blurry with static. “Thank you so much.”

“Where is the blanket?” the toaster demanded apprehensively.

“Blown away!” said the radio. “Blown off to the far end of the forest, where we shall never be able to find it!”

“Oh, I should have known!” groaned the Hoover. “I should have known!”

“It’s not your fault,” the toaster assured the vacuum, but it only groaned the louder.

Seeing that it could not be of any help to the vacuum, the toaster went over to the lamp and tried to calm it down. Once its beam was steady, the toaster suggested that it be directed into the branches above them, on the chance that the blanket, when it was blown away, might have been snagged on one of them. The lamp did so, but it was a very faint light and a very tall oak and a very dark night, and the blanket, if it were up there, was not to be seen.

All of a sudden there was a flash of lightning. The radio’s alarm went off again, and the lamp shrieked and folded itself up as small as could be. Of course it’s silly to be afraid of lightning, since it’s only another form of electricity. But such a large form—and so uncontrolled! If you were a person, instead of an appliance, and you encountered a berserk giant many times larger than yourself, you’d have some idea how the average electric appliance feels about lightning.

In the brief moment that the lightning was lighting everything up, the toaster, who had been peering up into the oak, was able to make out a shape—all twisted about—that might have been the blanket. The toaster waited until there was another lightning flash; and, yes, definitely, it was the yellow blanket, which had indeed become snagged on one of the highest branches of the tree.

Once they all knew that the blanket was nearby, even though they still had no idea how they’d be able to get it down, the storm ceased to seem quite so scary. The rain made them quite miserable, as rain will do, but their worst anxieties were over. Even the occasional bolt of lightning was now something to be wished for rather than dreaded, since by its brightness they could glimpse their companion high above them, clutching to the limb of the oak and flailing in the ceaseless winds. How could they feel afraid, or even sorry for themselves, when they considered the terrors the poor blanket must be experiencing?

By morning the storm had abated. The radio, at top volume, called up to the blanket, but the blanket made no response. For one horrible moment the toaster thought its friend might have stopped working altogether. But the radio kept on calling to the blanket, and after a time it made a feeble reply, waving one wet bedraggled corner at its friends.

“YOU CAN COME DOWN NOW,” the radio shouted. “THE STORM IS OVER.”

“I can’t,” said the blanket with a whimper. “I’m stuck. I can’t get down.”

“You must try,” the toaster urged.

“What’s that?” said the blanket.

“THE TOASTER SAYS YOU MUST TRY!”

“But I told you—I’m stuck. And there’s a great rip right through the center of me. And another by my hem. And I hurt.” The blanket began to wring itself convulsively, and a steady patter of droplets fell from its rain-soaked wool into the puddles below.

“What the deuce is all this racket about?” Harold demanded imperiously, stepping forth from his nest high in the trunk of the oak. “Do you have any idea what time it is? Squirrels are trying to sleep.”

The radio apologized to Harold and then explained the cause of the commotion. Like most squirrels, Harold was essentially kind-hearted, and when he saw what had happened to the blanket, he immediately offered his assistance. First he went into his nest and woke his wife. Then together the two squirrels began to help the blanket to loosen itself from where it had been snared. It was a long and—to judge by the blanket’s cries—painful process, but at last it was done, and with the squirrels’ help the liberated blanket made its way, slowly and carefully, down the trunk of the tree.

The appliances gathered round their friend, commiserating over his many injuries and rejoicing at his rescue.

“How shall we ever be able to repay you?” said the toaster warmly, turning to Harold and Marjorie. “You’ve saved our friend from a fate too terrible to imagine. We’re so grateful.”

“Well,” said Marjorie cagily, “I can’t remember whether or not you said you had any nuts with you. But if you do . . .”

“Believe me,” said the Hoover, “if we did, you would have them all. But you can see for yourselves that my bag contains nothing but dust and dirt.” Whereupon it opened its dustbag and a thick brown sludge of rain-sodden topsoil oozed forth.

“Though we don’t have nuts,” said the toaster to the disconsolate squirrels, “perhaps there is something I could do for you. That is, if you like roasted nuts.”

“Indeed, yes,” said Harold. “Any kind will do.”

“Then if you can provide me with some nuts, I shall roast them. As many as you like.”

Harold narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “You mean you want us to give you the nuts we’ve been storing up all this summer?”

“If you’d like me to roast them,” answered the toaster brightly.

“Oh, darling, do,” Marjorie urged. “I don’t know what he means to do, but he seems to. And we might like it.”

“I think it’s a trick,” said Harold.

“Just two or three of the ones that are left from last year. Please?”

“Oh, very well.”

Harold scampered up the tree trunk to his nest and returned with four acorns stuffed in the pouches of his cheeks. At the toaster’s bidding Harold and Marjorie cracked them open, and then Harold placed them carefully on the thin strips of metal that went up and down inside the toaster’s slots. As these strips were meant to accommodate large slices of bread, it had to be very careful lest the tiny round acorns should roll off as it lowered them into itself. When this was done it turned on its coils and commenced toasting them. When the acorns were starting to turn a crispy brown, the toaster lifted them up gently as far as it could, turned off its coils, and (when it judged the squirrels would not burn their paws by reaching in) bade them take out the roasted nuts and taste them.

“Delicious!” Marjorie declared.

“Exquisite!” Harold agreed.

As soon as the squirrels had eaten the first four acorns, they returned to their nest for more, and when those were gone still more, and then again some more after that. Marjorie, especially, was insatiable. She urged the toaster to remain in the forest as their guest. It could stay in their own nest, where it would always be dry and cozy, and she would introduce it to all their friends.

“I’d love to be able to accept,” said the toaster, from a sense not only of politeness but of deep obligation as well, “but it really isn’t possible. Once I’ve roasted your nuts for you—would you like some more?—we must be on our way to the city where our master lives.”

While the toaster roasted some more acorns, the radio explained to the squirrels the important reason for their journey. It also demonstrated its own capacities as a utensil and persuaded the other appliances to do the same. The poor Hoover was scarcely able to function from having been clogged with mud, and the squirrels, in any case, could not see the point of sweeping up dirt from one place and putting it somewhere else. Nor did the lamp’s beams or the radio’s music excite their admiration. However, they were both very taken with the electric blanket, which, damp as it was, had plugged itself into the battery strapped under the office chair and was glowing warmly. Marjorie renewed her invitation to the toaster and extended it to the blanket as well. “Until,” she explained, “you’re quite well again.”

“That’s very kind,” said the blanket, “and of course I’m so grateful for all you’ve done. But we must be on our way. Truly.”

Marjorie sighed resignedly. “At least,” she said, “keep your tail tucked into that black thing that makes the furry part of you so delightfully hot. Until you have to leave. The warmth is so pleasant. Isn’t it, my dear?”

“Oh, yes,” said Harold, who was busy shelling acorns. “Most agreeable.”

The Hoover ventured a mild protest, for it feared that with both the toaster and the blanket working so hard the battery would be worn down needlessly. But really what else could they do but comply with the squirrels’ request? Besides, quite apart from their debt of gratitude, it felt so good to be useful again! The toaster would have gone on gladly roasting acorns all morning and all afternoon, and the squirrels seemed of much the same disposition.

“It’s strange,” said Harold complacently, while he stroked the toaster’s side (now sadly streaked with raindrop patterns like the outside of a window), “it’s more than strange that you should maintain you have no sex, when it’s very clear to me that you’re male.” He studied his own face in the mottled chromium. “You have a man’s whiskers and a man’s front teeth.”

“Nonsense, darling,” said his wife, who was lying on the other side of the toaster. “Now that I look carefully, I can see her whiskers are most definitely a woman’s whiskers and teeth as well.”

“I won’t argue, my love, about anything so patently obvious as whether or not a man is a man, for it’s evident that he is!”

It suddenly dawned on the toaster how the squirrels—and the daisy the day before—had come by their confusions. They were seeing themselves in his sides! Living in the wild as they did, where there are no bathroom mirrors, they were unacquainted with the principle of reflectivity. It considered trying to explain their error to them, but what would be the use? They would only go away with hurt feelings. You can’t always expect people, or squirrels, to be rational. Appliances, yes—appliances have to be rational, because they’re built that way.

To Harold the toaster explained, under seal of strictest secrecy, that it was indeed, just as he had supposed, a man; and to Marjorie it confided, under a similar pact of trust, that it was a woman. It hoped they were both true to their promises. If not, their argument would be fated to continue for a long, long while.

With its coils turned to HIGH, the blanket was soon quite dry, and so, after a final round of roast acorns, the appliances said good-bye to Harold and Marjorie and continued on their way.

And what a long and weary way it was! The forest stretched on seemingly forever with the most monotonous predictability, each tree just like the next—trunk, branches, leaves; trunk, branches, leaves. Of course a tree would have taken a different view of the matter. We all tend to see the way others are alike and how we differ, and it’s probably just as well we do, since that prevents a great deal of confusion. But perhaps we should remind ourselves from time to time that ours is a very partial view, and that the world is full of a great deal more variety than we ever manage to take in. At this stage of their journey, however, the appliances had lost sight of this important truth, and they were very bored and impatient, in addition simply to being worn to a frazzle. Rust spots had begun to develop alarmingly on the unchromed bottom of the toaster and inside it as well. The stiffness that the vacuum and lamp complained of each morning on rising no longer vanished with a bit of exercise but persisted through the day. As for the blanket, it was almost in tatters, poor thing. Alone of the appliances, the radio seemed not to have suffered damage from the demands of the trip.

The toaster began to worry that when they did at last arrive at the master’s apartment they would be in such raggle-taggle condition that he would have no further use for them. They’d be put on the scrap heap, and all their efforts to reach him would have been in vain! What a dreadful reward for so much loyalty and devotion! But it is a rare human being who will be swayed by considerations of the heart in his dealings with appliances, and the master, as the toaster well knew, was not notable for his tender conscience. Its own predecessor at the cottage had still been quite serviceable when it had been sent to the dump, its only faults having been that its chrome had been worn away in patches and that its sense of timing was sometimes erratic. In its youth the toaster had thought these sufficient grounds for the older appliance’s replacement, but now . . .

Now it was better not to think about such matters. Better simply to pursue one’s duty wherever it led, along the path through the forest.

Until, at the bank of a wide river, that path finally came to an end.

They were all, at first sight of that broad impassable expanse of water, utterly cast-down and despairing, none more so than the Hoover, which became almost incoherent in its distress. “No!” it roared aloud. “I refuse! Never! Oh! Stop, turn me off, empty my bag, leave me alone, go away!” It began to choke and sputter, and then ran over its own cord and started chewing on it. Only the toaster had enough presence of mind to wrest the cord from the vacuum’s powerful suction grip. Then, to calm it down, it led the Hoover back and forth across the grassy bank of the river in regular, carpet-sweeping swathes.

At last these habitual motions brought the Hoover round to a more reasonable frame of mind, and it was able to account for its extraordinary alarm. It was not only the sight of this new obstacle that had distressed it so, but, as well, its certainty that the battery was now too run-down for them to be able to return to the cottage by its power. They could not go forward and they could not turn back. They were marooned! Marooned in the middle of the forest, and soon it would be fall and they would have no shelter from the inclemencies of the autumn weather, and then it would be winter and they’d be buried in the snow. Their metal parts would corrode. The Hoover’s rubber belt would crack. They would be powerless to resist the forces that would slowly but surely debilitate and destroy them, and in only a few months—or even weeks—they would all be unable to work.

No wonder the Hoover, foreseeing this inevitable progression of events, had been beside itself. What were they to do? the toaster asked itself.

There was no answer immediately forthcoming.

Toward evening the radio announced that it was receiving interference from a source quite nearby. “A power drill, by the feel of it. Just on the other side of the river.”

Where there was a power drill there were bound to be power lines as well! New hope poured into the appliances like a sudden surge of current.

“Let’s look at the map again,” said the lamp. “Maybe we can figure out exactly where we are.”

Following the lamp’s suggestion, they unfolded the road map and looked very carefully at all the dots and squiggles between the spot (marked with a Magic Marker) along the highway where the cottage was situated and the little patch of pink representing the city they were bound for. At last, only a quarter-inch from the pink patch of the city, they found the wavery blue line that had to be the river they’d come to, since there were no other blue lines anywhere between the cottage and the city, and this river was much too big for the mapmakers to have forgotten all about it.

“We’re almost there!” the radio trumpeted. “We’ll make it! Everything will be all right! Hurrah!”

“Hurrah!” the other appliances agreed, except for the Hoover, who wasn’t so easily convinced that all would now be well. But when the lamp pointed out four distinct places where the river was traversed by highways, even the Hoover had to admit that there was cause to cheer up, though he still wouldn’t go so far as to say “Hurrah.”

“We only have to follow the river,” said the toaster, who did like to give instructions, even when it was obvious what had to be done, “either to the left or the right, and eventually it must lead us to one of those bridges. Then, when it’s very late and there’s no traffic, we can make a dash for it!”

So once again they set off with courage renewed and determination strengthened. It was not so light a task as the toaster had made it sound, for there was no longer a clear path to follow. Sometimes the bank of the river lay flat as a carpet, but elsewhere the ground got quite bumpy or—what was worse—quaggy and soft. Once, avoiding a rock, the Hoover took a sharp turn; and the office chair, getting a leg mired in an unremarked patch of mud, was overturned, and the four appliances riding on it tumbled off the plastic seat into a thorough slough. They emerged smirched and spattered, and were obliged to become dirtier still in the process of retrieving the castor wheel that had come off the chair and was lost in the mud.

The blanket, naturally, was exempted from this task, and while the four others delved for the lost wheel, it betook itself down the water’s edge and attempted to wash away the signs of its spill. Lacking any cloth or sponge, the blanket only succeeded, sad to say, in spreading the stains over a larger area. So preoccupied was the blanket with its hopeless task that it almost failed to notice—

“A boat!” the blanket cried out. “All of you, come here! I’ve found a boat!”

Even the toaster, with no experience at all in nautical matters, could see that the boat the blanket had discovered was not of the first quality. Its wood had the weather-beaten look of the clapboard at the back of the summer cottage that the master had always been meaning to replace, or at least repaint, and its bottom must be leaky for it was filled with one big puddle of green mush. Nevertheless, it must have been basically serviceable, since a Chriscraft outboard motor was mounted on the blunt back-end, and who would put an expensive motor on a boat that couldn’t at least stay afloat?

“How providential,” said the Hoover.

“You don’t intend for us to use this boat, do you?” asked the toaster.

“Of course we shall,” replied the vacuum. “Who knows how far it may be to a bridge? This will take us across the river directly. You’re not afraid to ride in it, are you?”

“Afraid? Certainly not!”

“Well, then?”

“It doesn’t belong to us, if we were to take it, we’d be no better than . . . than pirates!”

Pirates, as even the newest of my listeners will have been informed, are people who take things that belong to other people. They are the bane of an appliance’s existence, since once an appliance has been spirited away by a pirate, it has no choice but to serve its bidding just as though it were that appliance’s legitimate master. A bitter disgrace, such servitude—and one that few appliances can hope to escape once it has fallen to their lot. Truly, there is no fate, even obsolescence, so terrible as falling into the hands of pirates.

“Pirates!” exclaimed the Hoover. “Us? What nonsense? Who ever heard of an appliance that was a pirate?”

“But if we took the boat—” the toaster insisted.

“We wouldn’t keep it,” said the Hoover brusquely. “We’d just borrow it a little while to cross the river and leave it on the other side. Its owner would get it back soon enough.”

“How long we’d have it for doesn’t matter. It’s the principle of the thing. Taking what isn’t yours is piracy.”

“Oh, as for principles,” said the radio lightly, “there’s a well-known saying: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ Which means, as far as I can see, that someone who makes use of his abilities should get to use a boat when he or it needs to cross a river and the boat is just sitting there waiting.” With which, and a little chuckle besides, the radio hopped onto the foremost seat of the rowboat.

Following the radio’s example, the Hoover heaved the office chair into the back of the boat and then got in itself. The boat settled deep in the water.

Avoiding the toaster’s accusing look, the blanket took a seat beside the radio.

The lamp seemed to hesitate, but only for a moment. Then it too entered the boat.

“Well?” said the Hoover gruffly. “We’re waiting.”

Reluctantly the toaster prepared to board the boat. But then, inexplicably, something made it stop. What’s happening? it wondered—though it could not say the words aloud, for the same force preventing it from moving prevented its speech as well.

The four appliances in the boat had been similarly incapacitated. What had happened, of course, was that the owner of the boat had returned and seen the appliances. “Why, what’s this?” he exclaimed, stepping from behind a willow tree with a fishing rod in one hand and a string of sunfish in the other. “It seems we’ve had some visitors!”

He said much more than this, but in a manner so rough and ill-mannered that it were better not to repeat his words verbatim. The sum of it was this—that he believed the owner of the appliances had been about to steal his boat, and so he intended, by way of retaliation, to steal the appliances!

He took the toaster from where it sat spellbound on the grassy riverbank and set it in the rowboat beside the blanket, lamp and radio. Then, unfastening the battery from the office chair, he threw the latter end-over-end high up into the air. It came down—Splash!—in the middle of the river and sank down to the muddy bottom, nevermore to be seen.

Then the pirate—for there could no longer be any doubt that such he was—started the Chriscraft motor and set off upstream with his five helpless captives.

After mooring his boat alongside a ramshackle dock on the other side of the river, the pirate loaded the outboard motor and the appliances onto the wooden bed of a very dusty pickup truck—except for the radio, which he took with him into the front seat. As it drove off, the truck jolted and jounced and bolted and bounced so violently the toaster feared the ride would cost it every coil in its body. (For though toasters look quite sturdy, they are actually among the more delicate appliances and need to be handled accordingly.) But the blanket, realizing the danger the toaster was in, managed to slip underneath its old friend and cushion it from the worst shocks of the journey.

As they rode they could hear the radio in the front seat humming the poignant theme-song from Dr. Zhivago.

“Listen!” the Hoover hissed. “Of all possible songs to be singing, it has chosen one of the master’s favorites. Already it has forgotten him!”

“Ah,” said the toaster, “what choice does it have, poor thing? Once one of us had been turned on, would we have behaved any otherwise? Would you? Would I?”

The old vacuum groaned, and the radio went on playing its sad, sad song.

What graveyards are for people—horrible, creepy places that any reasonable individual tries to stay away from—the City Dump is for appliances and machines of every description. Imagine, therefore, what the appliances must have felt when they realized (the pirate had parked his pickup in front of high, ripply iron gates and was opening the padlock with a key from the ring that swung from his belt) that they had been brought to the City Dump! Imagine their horror as he drove the truck inside and they assimilated the terrible fact that he lived here! There, with smoke curling from a tin chimney, was his wretched shack—and all about it the most melancholy and fearsome sights the toaster had ever witnessed. Dismembered chassis of once-proud automobiles were heaped one atop the other to form veritable mountains of rusted iron. The asphalt-covered ground was everywhere strewn with twisted beams and blistered sheet metal, with broken and worn-out machine parts of all shapes and sizes—with all the terrible emblems, in short, of its own inevitable obsolescence. An appalling scene to behold—yet one that exercised a strange fascination over the toaster’s mind. As often as it had heard of the City Dump, it had somehow never really believed in its existence. And now it was here, and nothing, not even the pirate’s stony gaze, could prevent its shudder of fear and wonder.

The pirate got out of the truck and took the radio, along with his fishing rod and his day’s catch, into the hovel where he lived. The appliances, left to themselves in the back of the truck, listened to the radio sing song after song with apparently indefatigable good cheer. Among them was the toaster’s own favorite melody, “I Whistle a Happy Tune.” The toaster was certain this couldn’t be a coincidence. The radio was trying to tell its friends that if they were brave and patient and cheerful, matters would work out for the best. Anyhow, whether that was the radio’s intention or just a program it had been tuned to, it was what the toaster firmly believed.

After he’d had his dinner the pirate came out of his shack to examine the other appliances. He fingered the Hoover’s mud-stained dustbag and the frayed part of its cord where it had been chewing on itself. He lifted the blanket and shook his head in mute deprecation. He looked inside the lamp’s little hood and saw—which the lamp itself had not realized till now—that its tiny bulb was shattered. (It must have happened when the lamp had fallen off the office chair, just before they’d found the boat.)

Finally the pirate picked up the toaster—and made a scornful grimace. “Junk!” he said, depositing the toaster on a nearby scrap pile.

“Junk!” he repeated, dealing with the lamp in a similar fashion.

“Junk!” He hurled the poor blanket over the projecting, broken axle of a ’57 Ford.

“Junk!” He set the Hoover down on the asphalt with a shattering thunk.

“All of it, just junk.” Having delivered this dismaying verdict, the pirate returned to his shack, where the radio had gone on singing in the liveliest manner all the while.

“Thank goodness,” said the toaster aloud, as soon as he was gone.

“Thank goodness?” the Hoover echoed in stricken tones. “How can you say ‘Thank goodness’ when you’ve just been called junk and thrown on a heap of scrap?”

“Because if he’d decided to take us into his shack and use us, we’d have become his, like the radio. This way we’ve got a chance to escape.”

The blanket, where it hung, limply, from the broken axle, began to whimper and whine. “No, no, it’s true. That’s all I am now—junk! Look at me—look at these tears, these snags, these stains. Junk! This is where I belong.”

The lamp’s grief was quieter but no less bitter. “Oh, my bulb,” it murmured, “oh, my poor poor bulb!”

The Hoover groaned.

“Pull yourselves together, all of you!” said the toaster, in what it hoped was a tone of stern command. “There’s nothing wrong with any of us that a bit of fixing-up won’t put right. You—” it addressed the blanket “—are still fundamentally sound. Your coils haven’t been hurt. After some sewing up and a visit to the dry cleaner you’ll be as good as new.”

It turned to the lamp. “And what nonsense—to fuss over a broken bulb! You’ve broken your bulb before and probably will many times again. What do you think replaceable parts are for?”

Finally the toaster directed its attention to the vacuum cleaner. “And you? You, who must be our leader! Who ought to inspire us with your own greater strength! For you to sit there groaning and helpless! And just because some old pirate who lives in a dump makes an unflattering remark. Why, he probably doesn’t even know how to use a vacuum cleaner—that’s the sort of person he is!”

“Do you think so?” said the Hoover.

“Of course I do, and so would you if you’d be rational. Now, for goodness’ sake, let’s all sit down together and figure out how we’re going to rescue the radio and escape from here.”

By midnight it was amazing how much they’d managed to accomplish. The Hoover had recharged the rundown battery from the battery in the pirate’s own truck. Meanwhile the lamp, in looking about for another doorway or gate than the one they’d come in by (there wasn’t any), had discovered a vehicle even better suited to their needs than the office chair the pirate had thrown in the river. This was a large vinyl perambulator, which is another word for pram, which is also known, in the appliances’ part of the world, as a baby buggy. By whatever name, it was in good working order—except for two minor faults. One fault was a squeak in the left front wheel, and the other was the way its folding visor was twisted out of shape so as to give the whole pram an air of lurching sideways when it was moving straight ahead. The squeak was fixed with a few drops of 3-in-1 Oil, but the visor resisted their most determined efforts to bend it back into true. But that didn’t matter, after all. What mattered was that it worked.

To think how many of the things consigned to this dump were still, like the pram (or themselves, for that matter) essentially serviceable! There were hair dryers and four-speed bicycles, water heaters and wind-up toys that would all have gone on working for years and years with just the slightest maintenance. Instead, they’d be sent to City Dump! You could hear the hopeless sighs and crazed murmurings rising from every dark mound round about, a ghastly medley that seemed to swell louder every moment as more and more of the forlorn, abandoned objects became conscious of the energetic new appliances in their midst.

“You will never, never, never get away,” whispered a mad old cassette player in a cracked voice. “No, never! You will stay here like all the rest of us and rust and crack and turn to dust. And never get away.”

“We will, though,” said the toaster. “Just you wait and see.”

But how? That was the problem the toaster had to solve without further delay.

Now the surest way to solve any problem is to think about it, and that’s just what the toaster did. It thought with the kind of total, all-out effort you have to give to get a bolt off that’s rusted onto a screw. At first the bolt won’t budge, not the least bit, and the wrench may slip loose, and you begin to doubt that any amount of trying is going to accomplish your purpose. But you keep at it, and use a dab of solvent if there’s any on hand, and eventually it starts to give. You’re not even sure but you think so. And then, what do you know, it’s off! You’ve done it! That’s the way the toaster thought, and at last, because he thought so hard, he thought of a way they could escape from the pirate and rescue the radio at the same time.

“Now here’s my plan,” said the toaster to the other appliances, which had gathered round him in the darkest corner of the dump. “We’ll frighten him, and that will make him run away, and when he’s gone we’ll go into his shack—”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that,” said the blanket with a shiver of dread.

“We’ll go into his shack,” the toaster insisted calmly, “and get the radio and put it inside the baby buggy and get in ourselves, all except the Hoover, of course, which will high-tail it out of this place just as fast as it can.”

“But won’t the gate be locked?” the lamp wanted to know. “It is now.”

“No, because the pirate will have to unlock it to get out himself, and he’ll be too frightened to remember to lock it behind him.”

“It’s a very good plan,” said the Hoover, “but what I don’t understand is—how are we going to frighten him?”

“Well, what are people afraid of the most?”

“Getting run over by a steam roller?” the Hoover guessed.

“No. Scarier than that.”

“Moths?” suggested the blanket.

“No.”

“The dark,” declared the lamp with conviction.

“That’s close,” said the toaster. “They’re afraid of ghosts.”

“What are ghosts?” demanded the Hoover.

“Ghosts are people who are dead, only they’re also sort of alive.”

“Don’t be silly,” said the lamp. “Either they are dead or they aren’t.”

“Yes,” the blanket agreed. “It’s as simple as ON and OFF. If you’re ON, you can’t be OFF, and vice versa.”

“I know that, and you know that, but people don’t seem to. People say they know that ghosts don’t exist but they’re afraid of them anyhow.”

“No one can be afraid of something that doesn’t exist,” the Hoover huffed.

“Don’t ask me how they do it,” said the toaster. “It’s what they call a paradox. The point is this—people are afraid of ghosts. And so we’re going to pretend to be one.”

“How?” asked the Hoover skeptically.

“Let me show you. Stoop down. Lower. Wrap your cord around my cord. Now—lift me up . . .”

After an hour’s practice of pretending to be a ghost, they decided they were ready. Carefully, so that the other appliances wouldn’t fall off, the old Hoover trundled toward the window of the shack. The toaster, where it was balanced atop the handle of the vacuum, was just able to see inside. There on a table between a stack of unwashed dishes and the pirate’s ring of keys was the poor captive radio, and there, in dirty striped pajamas, getting ready to go to bed, was the pirate.

“Ready?” the toaster whispered.

The blanket, which was draped over the vacuum in a roughly ghostlike shape with a kind of hood at the top through which the toaster was able to peer out, adjusted its folds one last time. “Ready,” the blanket replied.

“Ready?” the toaster asked again.

For just a moment the lamp, where it was hidden halfway down the handle of the Hoover, turned itself on and then, quickly off. The bulb it had taken from the socket in the ceiling of the pickup truck had only half the wattage it was used to, and so its beam of light was noticeably dimmer—just enough to make the blanket give off the faintest yellowish glow.

“Then let’s start haunting,” said the toaster.

That was the signal the Hoover had been waiting for.

“Whoo!” groaned the Hoover in its deepest, most quivery voice. “Whoo!”

The pirate looked up with alarm. “Who’s there?” he demanded.

“Whoo—oo!” the Hoover continued.

“Whoever you are, you’d better go away.”

“Whoo—oo—oo!”

Cautiously the pirate approached the window from which the groaning seemed to issue.

Upon receiving a secret electric signal from the toaster, the vacuum crept quietly alongside the shack to where they would be out of sight from the window.

“Whoo . . .” breathed the Hoover in the barest of whispers. “Whoo . . . Whoo—oo . . .”

“Who’s out there?” the pirate demanded, pressing his nose against the pane of glass and peering into the outer darkness. “You’d better answer me. Do you hear?”

In answer the Hoover made a strangling, gurgling, gaspy sound that sounded frightening even if you knew it was only the Hoover doing it. By now the pirate, who didn’t have any idea what this mysterious groaning might be, had got into a considerable state of nerves. When you live all alone in the City Dump you don’t expect to hear strange noises just outside your window in the middle of the night. And if you were also a bit superstitious, as pirates tend to be . . .

“All right then—if you won’t say who you are, I’m going to come out there and find out!” He lingered yet a while before the window, but at last, when no reply was forthcoming, the pirate pulled on his pants and then got into his boots. “I’m warning you!” he called out, though not in a tone that could be called threatening.

Still there was no reply. The pirate took up his key ring from where it lay on the table beside the radio. He went to the door.

He opened it.

“Now!” said the toaster, signaling secretly to the blanket along its electric cord.

“I can’t,” said the blanket, all atremble. “I’m too afraid.”

“You must!”

“I mustn’t: it’s against the rules.”

“We discussed all that before, and you promised. Now hurry—before he gets here!”

With a shudder of trepidation the blanket did as it was bidden. There was a rent in its side where it had been pierced by a branch on the night it was blown up into the tree. The lamp was hiding just behind this rent. As the pirate appeared around the corner of the shack, the blanket twitched the torn fabric aside.

The pirate stopped short in his tracks when he saw the shrouded figure before him.

“Whoo—oo!” groaned the Hoover one last time.

At this cue the lamp turned itself on. Its beam slanted up through the hole in the blanket right into the pirate’s face.

When the lamp lit up, the pirate stared at the figure before him with the utmost horror. What he saw that was so frightening was the same thing the daisy had seen, the same thing Harold and Marjorie had seen, as well—he saw his own features reflected in the toaster’s mottled chrome. And as he had been a very wicked person from his earliest youth, his face had taken on that special kind of ugliness that only very evil people’s faces acquire. Seeing such a face grimacing at him from this strange hooded figure, what was the pirate to suppose but that he had come upon the most dangerous kind of ghost, the kind that understands exactly who we are and knows all the wrong things we’ve done and intends to punish us for them. From such ghosts even grown-up pirates will flee in terror. Which is exactly what the pirate did.

As soon as he was gone, the appliances rushed into the pirate’s shack and rescued the joyful radio. Then before the pirate could return they scrambled into the baby buggy, and the old Hoover drove off with them as fast as its wheels would revolve.

As luck would have it, they didn’t have much farther to go: where the master lived on Newton Avenue was only a mile or so from City Dump. They reached his apartment building early in the morning before a single milk truck had appeared on the street.

“You see,” said the toaster cheerfully, “in the end everything really does work out for the best.”

Alas, the toaster had spoken too soon. Their tribulations were not yet at an end, and not everything would work out for the best, as they were shortly to discover.

The Hoover, which had an instinctive knack for such things, buzzed the street door open and summoned the automatic elevator. When the elevator door slid open, it wheeled the pram in and pressed the button for the 14th floor.

“It’s changed so,” said the tensor lamp, as the Hoover pushed the pram out of the elevator and down the corridor. “The wallpaper used to be green squiggles and white blobs, and now it’s crisscross lines.”

“It’s we who’ve changed,” said the blanket miserably.

“Hush,” said the Hoover sternly. “Remember the rules!” It pressed the doorbell beside the door to the master’s apartment.

All the appliances kept perfectly still.

No one came to the door.

“Maybe he’s asleep,” said the alarm clock/radio.

“Maybe he’s not home,” said the Hoover. “I’ll see.” It rang the doorbell again, but in a different way so that only the appliances in the apartment would be able to hear it ring.

In only a moment a Singer sewing machine answered the door. “Yes?” said the sewing machine in a tone of polite curiosity. “Can I help you?”

“Oh, excuse me, I seem to have made a mistake.” The Hoover looked at the number on the door, then at the name on the brass panel over the bell. It was the right number, the right name. But . . . a sewing machine?

“Is that . . .?” said a familiar voice within the apartment. “Why, it is! It’s the old Hoover! How are you? Come in! Come in!”

The Hoover wheeled the pram into the apartment and over the deep-piled carpet toward the friendly old TV.

The blanket peeked out shyly over the side of the pram.

“And who’s that with you? Come out—don’t be shy. My goodness, what a treat this is.”

The blanket crawled out of the pram, taking care to keep the worst effects of the journey folded up out of sight. It was followed by the radio, the lamp, and, last of all, the toaster.

The TV, which knew all five of them from the time it had spent with the master at the summer cottage, introduced them to the many appliances from all over the apartment which had begun to gather in the living room. Some, like the Water Pik, the blender, and the TV itself, were old friends. Some, like the stereo and the clock on the mantel, were known to the four appliances that had lived in the apartment at one time themselves but not to the toaster. But a great many were complete strangers to them all. There were huge impractical ginger-jar lamps squatting on low tables and, out of the bedroom, dim little lamps with frilly shades and other lamps screwed into the dining-nook wall that were pretending to be candleflames. Out of the kitchen had trooped a whole tribe of unfamiliar gadgets: a crockpot, a can opener, a waffle iron, a meat grinder, a carving knife, and, somewhat abashedly, the master’s new toaster.

“How do you do,” said the new toaster in a barely audible voice when the TV introduced it.

“How do you do?” the toaster replied warmly.

Neither could think of anything else to say. Fortunately there were more introductions to be effected. The Hoover had to go through a similar ordeal when it met the apartment’s vacuum cleaner, which was (just as the Hoover had feared) one of the new lightweight models that looks like a big hamburger bun on wheels. They were polite to each other, but it was obvious that the new vacuum looked on the Hoover as outmoded.

The blanket had an even worse shock in store. The last two appliances to appear in the living room were a vaporizer and a long tangled string of Christmas tree lights, both of which had been hibernating in a closet. The blanket looked about anxiously. “Well,” it said, making a determined effort to seem accepting and friendly, “I think there must still be one more of you we haven’t yet met.”

“No,” said the TV. “We’re all here.”

“But is there no other . . . blanket?”

The TV avoided the blanket’s earnest gaze. “No. The master doesn’t use an electric blanket anymore. Just a plain wool one.”

“But he always . . . he always . . .” The blanket could say no more. Its resolution deserted it and it fell in a heap on the carpet.

A gasp went up from the apartment’s assembled appliances, which until now had had no idea of the extent of the blanket’s injuries.

“Doesn’t use an electric blanket!” the toaster repeated indignantly. “Why ever not?”

The screen of the TV flickered and then, evasively, started showing a gardening show.

“It isn’t the master’s choice, really,” said the Singer sewing machine in its funny clipped accent. “I daresay he would be delighted to see his old blanket again.”

The blanket looked up questioningly.

“It’s the mistress,” the sewing machine went on. “She says she becomes too hot under an electric blanket.”

“The mistress?” the five appliances repeated.

“Didn’t you know?”

“No,” said the toaster. “No, we haven’t heard anything from the master since he left the cottage three years ago.”

“Two years, eleven months, and twenty-two days, to be precise,” said the alarm clock/radio.

“That’s why we determined to find our way here. We feared . . . I don’t know what exactly. But we thought that . . . that our master would need us.”

“Oh,” said the sewing machine. It turned to watch the gardening show on the TV.

As unobtrusively as it might, the new toaster crept back into the kitchen and resumed its post of duty on the formica countertop.

“Two years, eleven months, and twenty-two days is a long time to be left alone,” the radio asserted at rather a loud volume. “Naturally we became concerned. The poor air conditioner stopped working altogether.”

“And all the while,” said the lamp, “never a word of explanation!” It glared reproachfully at the TV, which continued to discuss the problem of blister beetles.

“Can’t any of you tell us why?” the toaster demanded earnestly. “Why did he never return to the cottage? There must be a reason.”

“I can tell you,” said the vaporizer, inching forward. “You see, the mistress is subject to hay fever. I can help her a bit with her asthma, but when the hay fever starts in on her, there’s nothing anyone can do, and she is really very miserable then.”

“I still don’t understand,” said the toaster.

The sewing machine spelled it out. “Rather than go to the country, where there is bound to be ragweed and pollen and such, they spend their summers at the seaside.”

“And our cottage—our lovely cottage in the woods—what is to become of it?”

“I believe the master means to sell it.”

“And . . . and us?” the toaster asked.

“I understand there is to be an auction,” said the sewing machine.

The Hoover, which had comported itself with great dignity throughout the visit, could bear no more. With a loud groan it grasped the handle of the perambulator as though to steady itself. “Come,” it gasped. “All of you, come. We are not wanted here. We’ll return to . . . to . . .”

Where would they return? Where could they? They had become appliances without a household!

“To the Dump!” shrieked the blanket hysterically. “Isn’t that where junk belongs? That’s all we are now—junk!” It twisted its cord into an agonized knot. “Isn’t that what the pirate said we were? Junk! Junk! Junk! All of us, and me most of all.”

“Control yourself,” said the toaster sternly, though its own coils felt as though they were about to snap. “We’re not junk. We’re sturdy, useful appliances.”

“Look at me!” cried the blanket, displaying the full extent of its worst tear. “And these mudstains—look!”

“Your tears can be sewn up,” said the toaster calmly. It turned to the sewing machine. “Can’t they?”

The sewing machine nodded in mute agreement.

“And the stains can be cleaned.”

“And then what?” the Hoover demanded dourly. “Let us suppose the blanket is repaired and cleaned, and that I’ve mended my cord and got my dustbag into working shape, and that you’ve polished yourself. Suppose all that—what then? Where shall we go?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere. I’ll have to think.”

“Pardon me,” said the TV, turning off the gardening show. “But didn’t I hear you say something about a . . . pirate?”

“Yes,” said the sewing machine nervously. “What pirate did you mean? There’s not a pirate in this building, I hope?”

“Never fear—we don’t have to worry any more about him. He captured us but we escaped from him. Would you like to know how?”

“Goodness, yes,” said the TV. “I love a good story.”

So all the appliances gathered in a circle about the toaster, which began to tell the story of their adventures from the moment they had decided to leave the cottage till the moment they arrived at the door of the apartment. It was a very long story, as you know, and while the toaster told it, the sewing machine set to work sewing up all the rips and tears in the blanket.

The next afternoon when the blanket came back from Jiffy Dry Cleaners on the other side of Newton Avenue, the apartment’s appliances put on a splendid party for their five visitors. The Christmas tree lights strung themselves up between the two ginger-jar lamps and winked and bubbled in the merriest way, while the TV and the stereo sang duets from all the most famous musical comedies. The toaster was polished to a fare-thee-well, and the Hoover was likewise in fine fettle once again. But most wonderful of all—the blanket looked almost as good as new. Its yellow was possibly not as bright as it had been, but it was a lovely yellow, for all that. The exact same yellow, according to the TV, of custard and primroses and the nicest bathroom tissues.

At five o’clock the radio’s alarm went off, and everyone became very still, except for the blanket, which went on whirling gaily about the living room for some time before it realized the music had stopped.

“What is it?” asked the blanket. “Why are you all so quiet?”

“Hush,” said the radio. “It’s time for The Swap Shop.”

“What is The Swap Shop?” asked the blanket.

“It’s the program on listener-supported radio station KHOP,” said the toaster excitedly, “that is going to find a new home for us! I told you not to worry, didn’t I? I told you I’d think of something!”

“Be quiet,” said the lamp. “It’s starting.”

The radio turned up its volume so that all the appliances in the living room could hear. “Good afternoon,” it said, in a deep, announcer-type voice, “and welcome to The Swap Shop. Today’s program opens with a very strange offering from Newton Avenue. It seems that someone there wants to swap—now listen to this list!—a Hoover vacuum cleaner, an AM alarm clock/radio, a yellow electric blanket, a tensor lamp, and a Sunbeam toaster. All this in exchange for . . . well, it says on the card here: ‘You name it.’ What’s most important, I’m informed, is that you should have a real and genuine need for all five of these fine appliances, since their present owner wants them to be able to stay together. For sentimental reasons! Now I’ve heard everything! Anyhow, if you think you need those five appliances, the number to call is 485-9120. That number again, 485-9120. Our next offer is not quite so unusual. Seems there’s a party on Center Street who is offering, absolutely for free, five lovable black-and-white—”

The radio tuned out KHOP. “Didn’t he make us sound super!” it exclaimed, forgetting in its excitement to stop speaking in the announcer’s voice.

“Come over here by the telephone,” the Hoover urged the radio. “You’ll have to talk to them. I’m just too nervous.”

All five appliances gathered about the telephone and waited for it to ring.

There are two schools of thought about whether or not appliances ought to be allowed the free use of telephones. Some insist that it is flatly against the rules and should never be done in any circumstances, while others maintain that it’s all right, since it is only another appliance one is talking to, in this case a telephone. Whether or not it’s against the rules, it is certainly a fact that a good many appliances (lonely radios especially) do use the phone system regularly, usually to contact other appliances. This explains the great number of so-called “wrong numbers” that people get at odd times. Computerized exchanges could never make so many mistakes, though they end up taking the blame.

For the last three years, of course, this issue had not mattered very much to the appliances, since the phone in the cottage had been disconnected. Ordinarily, the Hoover would probably have opposed the notion of any of them using the phone, as it did tend to adopt the conservative attitude. But first there had been the absolute necessity of calling Jiffy Dry Cleaners and having them pick up the blanket, and that had established a clear precedent for their phoning in to KHOP and offering themselves on The Swap Shop. And now here they were all gathered round the telephone, waiting to talk with their next master!

The phone rang.

“Now whatever you do,” warned the Hoover, “don’t say yes to the first person who happens to call. Find out something about him first. We don’t want to go just anywhere, you know.”

“Right,” said the radio.

“And remember,” said the toaster, “to be nice.”

The radio nodded. It picked up the telephone receiver. “Hello?” it said.

“Is this the person with the five appliances?”

“It is! Oh my goodness yes indeed, it is!”

And so the five appliances went to live with their new mistress, for as it happened it was a woman who’d phoned them first and not a man. She was an elderly, impoverished ballerina who lived all alone in a small room at the back of her ballet studio on Center Street in the oldest part of the city. What the ballerina had swapped for the appliances were her five lovable black-and-white kittens. The appliances’ former master never could figure out how, upon returning with his wife from their summer vacation by the sea, there had come to be five kittens in their apartment. It was rather an awkward situation, for his wife was allergic to cat fur. But they were such darlings—it would never have done to put them out on the street. In the end they decided to keep them, and his wife simply took more antihistamines.

And the appliances?

Oh, they were very happy. At first the Hoover had been doubtful about entering service with a woman (for it had never worked for a woman before, and it was somewhat set in its ways), but as soon as it realized what a fastidious and immaculate housekeeper its mistress was, it forgot all its reservations and became her greatest champion.

It felt so good to be useful again! The radio would play beautiful classical music for the ballerina to dance to; and when she became tired and wanted to sit down and read, the lamp would light her book; and then when it grew late and she’d finished her book, the blanket would give off a steady, gentle warmth that kept her cozy all through the long, cold night.

And when it was morning and she awoke, what wonderful slices of toast the toaster would toast for her—so brown and crisp and perfect and always just the same!

And so the five appliances lived and worked, happy and fulfilled, serving their dear mistress and enjoying each other’s companionship, to the end of their days.

ALL THE LIES THAT ARE MY LIFE

Harlan Ellison

They buried Jimmy Crowstairs today.

My closest, oldest, best friend: the world-famous fantasist, Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs.

They put him down the rectangular hole this morning, and I was one of the dozen people inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes. Also in there among the select few was an ex-President of the United States, for whom I had not voted; also two actresses, one of whom, though age thirty, keeps being cast as late teens beachbait, despite her excellence as a serious thesp, mostly on the basis of her chubby cheeks and a pair of breasts—if you’ll pardon the pragmatism—only slightly smaller than Bosnia and Herzegovina; the other one I didn’t know, but she made a good impression on me when, as we were walking up the hill to the grave from the limos, she graciously waved off a small knot of ghouls seeking her autograph; Jimmy’s publisher, whose chief claims to fame are his rejection of Jerzy Kosinski’s first novel on the basis that it was morbid and depressing, and his ongoing participation as a panelist on a television game show now into its seventh year of syndication; Jimmy’s sister, eight years his senior, whom he had not spoken to for over twenty years and to whom he referred as SylviaTheCunt, all one word; a great bear of an English novelist, a French film director who wore clothes so elegantly it made everyone else feel like breadline standbys, a plasma physicist from Princeton who’s up for the Nobel this year because of his major breakthrough in magnetic containment fusion; and two married couples Jimmy considered close friends, mostly because they proved to him, as living examples, that it is possible for Man and Woman to cleave together under the same roof, bound by The Paper (as he constantly referred to it), without emotionally disemboweling each other. How many is that?

Counting me, that’s thirteen. Well, okay, thirteen, not twelve. Even so, it was a select cadre of mourners.

Set apart by black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes from the vast throng of his fans and idle groupies of the great, the near-great, the celebrated and the hemidemisemicelebrated.

History tells us that when Victor Hugo died on May 22nd, 1885, over two million Parisians followed the pauper’s hearse he had specified from the Arc de Triomphe to the Pantheon, where he was buried.

Jimmy’s entourage wasn’t quite that large; but for a contemporary author, in a nation where illiteracy has gone beyond mere totemization, well into deification . . . it was eminently satisfactory. Maybe two or three thousand. Not bad at all for a guy they steadfastly called a “sci-fi writer.”

You‘ll notice I never use that hideous neologism.

Jimmy spent the last twenty-five years of his life trying to get that ugly categorization off his books and out of the biographies they wrote about him. He wrote fantasy, if specific pigeonholes are needed; but he insisted on being called simply a writer. He didn’t even like being referred to as an “author.” He once told me the difference, as he saw it, between an author and a writer.” An author [he said] is what you put on your passport, because in Europe they think a writer is a newspaperman. An author is somebody who gets his name on the spine of leatherbound volumes that are never read; a writer is someone who gets hemorrhoids from sitting on his ass all his life . . . writing.” Either way, whatever they called him, he managed by sheer dint of hard work and careful manipulation of his public image to become three things, almost always mutually contradictory: a staggeringly wealthy bestselling novelist, a. genius artist who was seriously regarded by all the “serious” critics, and a legend in his own time. A household name like Salk or Babe Ruth or Hemingway—or Nixon or Jack the Ripper or Hitler.

And this morning they lowered him into darkness, and wonderful words were read over him by Rabbi Ashkenazi, Monsignor McCalla, Dr. Ehlen, Carl Sagan and me. Mine were the best.

Naturally: I knew him best. And as Jimmy so often told interviewers, with that abundance of humble largesse that so endeared him to People magazine, The Paris Review and The National Enquirer, “Larry Bedloe is a good solid writer; he’s got a nice little talent working there.”

That popped up in my thoughts as I stood there watching them crank down the gunmetal-blue anodized aluminum casket. Right across from me, on the other side of the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes, was a chubby little woman in basic black and pearls.

Her face was all puffy from crying. She was clutching the Literary Guild boxed set of his Radimore trilogy. Chances of her getting it autographed were very slim.

Kerch, as everyone but his ex-wife Leslie and I called him, was already on his way to stardom when I met him. We were both just turning twenty—I scampered ahead only six months older—which meant that for half of each year he could refer to me as “old man” and I could admonish him to speak with respect to his elders—and we had both been science fiction fans.

Every ingroup coterie had its mystiques, its craziness. Masons have secret handshakes; jazz musicians run a special patois incomprehensible to squares; only in the motion picture industry can you get a laugh when you tell the one about the Polish starlet . . .

who fucked the writer; antiquarian bookdealers share arcane rituals of buy&sell that bind them in terms of verso, recto, foxing, gutters and true firsts.

The deranged traditions of science fiction “fandom” are overwhelmingly attractive, particularly to those few boys and girls who are the outcasts of their high school classes because of wonky thought processes, a flair for the bizarre, and physical appearance that denies them the treasures of sorority membership or a position on the football team. For the pimply, the short, the weird and intelligent . . . for those to whom sex is frightening and to whom come odd dreams in the middle of study hall, the camaraderie of fandom is a gleaming, beckoning Erewhon; an extended family of other wimps, twinks, flakes and oddballs.

We had never met, though we’d corresponded heavily for several years. The nexus of our incipient friendship was the. maelstrom of fannish publishing—”fanzines.” Mimeographed amateur magazines of comment about the writers and the works in the genre, and a smattering of dreary fan fiction. His fanzine was titled, with becoming modesty, The World’s Greatest SF Famine Including Venus; mine was called Visitations.

But it was at the tenth annual World Science Fiction Convention (neologized as ChiCon 11), in Chicago, 1952, that we actually met.

I was walking through the lobby of the Hotel Morrison. Being short on funds, I had arranged to stay in a two-room suite with half a dozen other fans from different parts of the country; and I was looking for the one in whose name the rooms were registered, so I could get the key and dump my suitcase.

The lobby was jammed with a horde of fans checking in, renewing acquaintances, screaming across through the potted plants for directions, rolling in dollies with cartons of used books for the huckster room, making arrangements for cheeseburger dinners that night.

And in the midst of that cyclical flow of sweaty aficionados who had driven or flown of hitchhiked or crawled in from Minneapolis and Kansas City and Cleveland, Jake Repnich tracked me down.

I felt a hand grab the back of my shirt as I tried to elbow through a knot of kids divvying up suitcases for the trek to the elevators (thereby saving the bellboy’s tip), and I reeled backward as the tension was applied. Then someone clubbed me a shot in the kidney.

I pitched forward, but couldn’t fall down because the back of my shirt was still wrapped in a fist. So my feet went out from under me and I dropped to my knees. I tried to look around behind me; I was in such exquisite pain that my head wouldn’t turn on my neck.

Everything seemed to be slipping off the edge. But I could tell from the expressions on the faces of the crowd that something awful was about to happen, and that I was on the visitation end of that unnamed awfulness.

A foot was planted between my shoulder blades and the fist let go of my shirt, and I was booted forward onto my suitcase, which slid a few feet, carrying me as on a raft.

I fell off, rolled over, and tried to sit up.

Conquest, Slaughter, Famine and Death were staring down at me.

The courageous and loving extended family had moved back to clear a circle in which I could be conveniently stomped to pudding. Erewhon had been invaded.

The nastiest-looking of the Four Horsemen—whom I instantly recognized as Death—
leaned forward, providing me with a dandy view of his terminal acne, and (in the pulp magazine vernacular of the period) lipped thinly, “I’m Jake Repnich, you little sonofabitch.

You wanna tweak my nose?”

It all became hideously clear what was happening. Six months earlier, among the batches of fanzines I traded for Visitations by mail, I’d received an ineptly hektographed crudzine called Uranium-236. It was “edited,” if one takes semiliteracy, quadruple amputee syntax and sophomoric screeds against any writer with aspirations of writing literature above the level of shootouts in space as editing, by one Jake Repnich. It came out of Secaucus, New Jersey. Need more be said?

As the voice of reason, I had cast caution to the Four Horsemen (without knowing it), and had responded to a particularly stupid article in which Repnich had said H. P. Lovecraft was a better writer than Poe, with the published remarks that good old Jake had about as much literary savvy as a storm drain, and that someone ought to tweak his nose. The point being that merely slapping his pinkies wasn’t due and proper for the intellectual crimes of a pimplebrain like good old Jake, a. k. a. Death.

Now Jake and three of his buddies, who no doubt spent their off-hours chewing broken glass and flogging cripples, had come all the way to Chicago from Secaucus, New Jersey, to more than tweak the nose of Larry Bedloe.

The smell of the Jersey swamps was still on them.

And I hadn’t, at that point, lived enough of a life to have it flash before my eyes.

With three stories out to market, without even having had my shot at immortality, with the National Book Award and Martha Foley’s Best of the Year and intimate conversations with Styron and Mailer and Hemingway and Steinbeck just within my grasp, I was about to become a problem for the carpet cleaners of the Hotel Morrison. Quelle ironie!

At which moment Jake Repnich’s nose spouted blood and he went pinwheeling past me to land in a hideous heap against the checkin counter.

A foot and a half behind the spot he had just occupied stood a wild-eyed, babbling apparition, part vampire bat, part slavering derangement, part avenging Fury. The attaché case he had used to break Death’s nose was dangling from one of his little pixie fists. The other fist was balled and seemed to be waiting for a target of opportunity.

Feet planted far apart, this pint-sized Zorro, no less than Destiny’s Tot, stared at the three remaining teddy boys with eyes that could have triggered an A-bomb. “You want trouble, you pustulent slugs? You want a hassle, huh? You want to come in here where law-abiding science fiction fans are trying to share good times, and start a fracas? Huh, that what you want? Well, we’re ready! Right, everybody?”

He directed the challenge at the extended family, cowering in confusion and naked cowardice around the lobby.

From here and there in the crowd came timorous responses of “Yeah, you tell ’em,” and “We’re with you, all the way!”

In that instant I understood the dangerous power of Willie Stark, Elmer Gantry, Jean Paul Marat and Aimee Semple McPherson.

Gorgo the Small then instructed Conquest, Slaughter and Famine to gather up the weeping, bleeding carcass of their leader and, with the crowd backing him all the way, in some unfathomable power-pull, he moved the guerrilla band through the lobby, down the steps, across the landing, down some other steps, through the revolving doors, and out onto the street. The potential assassins were held there for a few minutes, I suppose to get explicit directions from the Goliath-slayer how to find their way back to the sewers that emptied out onto the Jersey flats—with detailed warnings of what would happen to them should they try to return to the ChiCon—and then the throng returned.

I was still on the floor.

Peter Pan reached down, pulled me to my feet and said, with a wide, infectious grin.

“Hi, you’re Larry Bedloe, right? I’m Kerch Crowstairs, we’re sharing the room upstairs. I just sold my first novel, Crowell’s publishing it in the spring, it’s called Death Dance on Sirius 7. You’re going to love it, I promise you.”

Say hello to Kercher O.J. Crowstairs.

It started raining as the funeral party filed away from Jimmy’s grave. I looked up into the slanting gray downpour.

My parents were Wesleyan Methodists; Straight out of the Book of Discipline: no movies, no books except the Bible and the Book of Hymns, no eating in restaurants that hold a liquor license, church four times a week, tithes, and praying out loud in unison till it all melds into a droning chant. Some of the clearest thinking of the early 1700s. God is love and no intermediary is needed to intercede for his children. Not to mention that I confess Jesus Christ as my Savior and Lord and pledge my allegiance to His Kingdom.

From this background I fled Pittsburgh and my family with the cynicism that served as Maginot Line against the rape of my sanity, yet unable to shake the inculcated, subcutaneous certainty that God Is Watching. God, the art director; God, the set designer; God, the stage manager.

Who always makes it rain at the most dramatic moments in the burial ceremonies.

Just once, I thought, why doesn’t the Holy Director go against form, against type-casting, against cliché. A hail of frogs, perhaps. Or a celestial chorus, and marching band decked out like a New Orleans jazz funeral, with selections ranging from Muskrat Ramble to Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam.

I stood there as everyone else filed away, directed by the attendants. Since I was still inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes they let me remain for a moment.

Almost thirty years. I knew you through most of my life, Jimmy. Friends. I don’t even know what that means. I’m sure you must have done things for me on the basis of friendship, but I’ll be damned if I can remember a single one of them. I remember another time of rain, a night in New York, years ago, when we had dinner together and you left me standing in the wet outside the restaurant, I remember that. You hustled down the sidewalk to your car and popped into the Porsche and drove off uptown, never even thinking to offer me a ride back to my hotel. It took me the better part of an hour to get a cab; I remember that.

But friends. Never occurred to me to question that word as the operative definition of our liaison. But what the hell did that ever mean, functionally speaking? You knew almost everything about me, and I knew quite a lot about you, but then so do all your readers, what with the confessional nature of most of what you wrote.

I was one of your readers. Every word published that I could lay hands on.

Which is more than we can say for the reverse, eh, Kerch?

You read “The Hourglass” ten years ago, chum; and made a point of mentioning how good it was every time we got together. I wrote that short story ten years ago, Jimmy! Ten fucking years ago! Nine books since. But by the mute testimony of your failure to mention even one of them, old friend now gone, you told me that it had all been downhill. Ten years ago, Jimmy. That was it, right? The one high spot and then nothing but mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, right? Too controlled, that’s what you used to tell me on the nights when we’d sit across from each other at the kitchen table, after your staff had gone to bed, when we’d sit and drink instant and reminisce. Too controlled, too cautious. There wasn’t enough wildness in what I put on the paper. Right? Right.

You had enough. wildness for both of us, Jimmy.

Jesus, I’m lonely without you. Christ, I’m glad you’re gone.

I’d stamped muddy spots a. round my feet. The tops of my shoes were covered. And I looked across the grave, through the rain that was coming down cold and nasty, and Jimmy’s ex-wife Leslie was staring at me. She’d cried so much her nose had swollen and closed both eyes to slits. She held her head to the side like a little girl who’s seen her dolly run over by a speeding car. I couldn’t hear the short, sharp thistles of her sobs, but those Audrey Hepburn shoulders went up and down, each intake of breath painful.

You had enough wildness for both of us, Jimmy.

I walked around the grave and stepped over the black, plush velvet, upholstered rope and scuffed through the pedicured grass to her. She could barely see me, but she knew who it was. We knew how each of us moved, even in the darkness.

I took her in my arms and she buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder. Her dress was soaked through and she was cold, heaving with sobs but not shivering. The weather report had said nothing about rain.

Every few years I was privileged to hold her like this. Usually she was crying. We fitted together, in this way, like ancient stones.

“Come on, love,” I said, over her head, into the rain. “It’s all done now. We’ve got to go put a lid on it.”

She spoke words I couldn’t understand, sending them into the fabric of my jacket.

Then more words, two of which were Jimmy’s name and my name. And I turned her slightly, and started to walk her away from the grave site.

“I can’t go over there, Larry. Do I have to go over there?” I said yes, she had to go over there, it was her due, it was the payoff for all the good times and all the bad times. I said I’d be there with her, and it would be quick, and then we could both go out somewhere and have a couple of dozen extremely potent drinks, and pretend the past was smoother and kinder than flawless recall permitted us to misremember it.

And the last of the limousines was waiting, and we let the chauffeur hold the door for us, and we got in and went off to Jimmy’s baronial mansion to hear the reading of the will.

And Kerch, left behind in the rain, went with us.

Jimmy had been having simultaneous affairs with four women, anyone of whom would have been sufficiently daunting to scare even Vlad the Impaler into impotence. One was an Olympic gymnast, no more than twenty years old, what is usually referred to as coltish, natural blonde naturally, and much given to scenes in restaurants where the maitre d’ objected to her carrying a coatimundi on her shoulder. Her name was Muriel. One was an authority on machine intelligence, in her early thirties, with what used to be referred to as “bee-stung” lips, a mass of heavy, thick black, lustrous hair the shade of thoughts for which one can be jailed without bail, and an intellect that made virtually everything she said incomprehensible to all but five or six of the finest minds on the planet. Her name was Andrea. One. was a Cuban actress who had fled Batista’s tyranny mere hours before an order for her arrest on grounds of moral turpitude was issued, whose exiled status in America had been guaranteed by the extension of said warrant whose grounds of moral turpitude had been upheld by Castro; not yet thirty, in appearance no more than twenty-five, she claimed to be Chicana, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan or Castilian, depending on what the casting director was seeking, with a pair of legs usually referred to as “terminating just under her chin,” with a voice and range that could have shamed Yma Sumac, and a temper that frequently manifested itself in a splendid right cross. Her name was Edith. One was a consumer advocate for CBS television, a former runner-up to Miss North Carolina in the Miss America contest, thirty years old, rather puckishly committed to a variation on the original Ann-Margret coiffure which, given all proper due, admirably suited her auburn hair, opinionated, contentious beyond belief, and directly responsible for a Xerox price rollback that had cost the firm nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Her name was Mary Louise.

I had been seeing Leslie for three years.

Not until six years after they’d married did Jimmy bother to ask if I’d been troubled by the heat-death of the universe. Simply never occurred to him to worry about it. Not that he was bone-stick-stone insensitive; no indeed: it was that he moved too fast for consideration of the emotional debacles at any given point along the scenic route.

They were living in Connecticut, near Crown Point, in a stately manse brought over from Thomas Hardy country, somewhere near Dorset, brick-by-brick, in the early 1900s by a Dutch robber baron who’d made his boodle in association with Elisha Otis on the development of the gearless traction elevator. It was one. of those fumed oak, parquet-floored, wine-cellared beauties all writers dream about owning; just the right setting when one receives the word that one has been awarded a Nobel, or a Pulitzer, or an American Book Award, or a high six-figure purchase offer from Paramount. Two, and almost three, of those came to Jimmy in his stately manse. I was writing a lot of book reviews for The Village Voice and Kirkus.

He called late in the afternoon; the last spear of light permitted entrance by the surrounding buildings, had almost vanished from the airshaft, and I sat in gloomy relaxation trying to decipher the Mayan Codex that Doubleday charmingly called a royalty statement.

“What’re you up to?” he said, without identifying himself.

“I’m locked in nonorgasmic congress with Doubleday’s bookkeepers. It’s the first time I’ve ever been fucked by a mindless octopus.”

“How about dinner?”

“When, tonight?”

“Yeah. I’m in the city. You free?”

“According to my royalty statements that’s exactly what I am.”

“The new book isn’t doing well?”

“How could it? They must have taken the entire printing, loaded it on barges, floated it out the Narrows and deep-sixed it. Weighted down, no doubt, by the excess profits from their latest bestselling cookbook.”

“You don’t sound like the man to cheer me up tonight.”

“Sure I am. You can spend my last exuberant evening with me before I establish residency in the nearest leper colony.”

“That would be the Carrville Leprosarium. In Louisiana. And they don’t call it leprosy any more. Hansen’s Disease.”

“Why aren’t I grateful for that information?”

“I could stop off at Abercrombie & Fitch on my way over, and pick up a nice big bell for you. Or maybe a cassette of Frankie Laine singing ‘Unclean, Unclean. “Do wonders for getting you a seat on the subway during rush hour.”

Badinage. Brightalk. Never a discouraging word, and the deer and the antelope play.

The ritual incantations of those who had resonated to Salinger. I still had my red baseball cap in the bottom of a carton of old clothes, at the back of the bedroom closet. Nostalgia somehow cannot survive the smell of mothballs.

“I’m here; come on over whenever you’re free.”

“About an hour. We’ll go have a steak. I’m paying.”

I smiled. Naturally, you’re paying. With a five thousand copy printrun of Laurence Bedloe’s most recent astonishment, The Salamander Enchantment, rapidly being carried by salutary sea-currents toward the Bermuda Triangle, naturally you’re paying for steaks. Now if you’re up for Twinkies and Hawaiian Punch, I’m paying.

“See you when you get here.”

“Take care.”

“So long.”

I listened to the dial tone for about two minutes. Then I sat in the growing darkness, thinking about Arctic tundra. somehow it didn’t make the Carrville Leprosarium seem more attractive.

After a while the doorbell buzzed and I put on some lights and let him in. He had the look of a man who had broken some vows.

“I need a drink,” he said. He fell into the rocker with the leather seat, toed off his loafers, and sank down onto his spine, eyes closed. “By the unspeakable name of the slavering hordes of Yog-Sothoth, though Allah be the wiser . . . I do fiercely need a drink.”

“Can be done, chum. Give it a speakable name and I’ll put it in your paw in moments.”

He rubbed his closed eyes ferociously. From inside his hands he mumbled, “Any damn thing. Largeish, if you will.”

I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard and gave the cognac a pass. This looked like heavy weather drinking. I poured Wild Turkey into a big water glass without benefit of jigger, tossed in a single ice cube, raised the level with a little tap water, and carried the BomDer’s Moon back into the living room.

Jimmy was sitting on the floor, in the darkness near the window. I couldn’t see him that well, but I could hear him sobbing. I think I grabbed for the doorjamb to steady myself.

In the fifteen years we’d been friends, I’d never seen him cry. I’d never known him to cry. I’d never heard anyone mention that they’ d seen him cry. It had never occurred to me that he might one day, in my presence, cry. I didn’t even know if he was able to cry.

He didn’t know I was there, staring at him.

Very quietly, I carried the glass over to him, put it down beside his crossed legs, and I went back across the room and sat just outside a pool of lamplight, my face in darkness. I had, no idea what to do, didn’t want to say something wrong, definitely didn’t want whatever I finally said to be banality or homey homily; so I waited. Eventually, it seemed to me, he’d stop, take a drink, and we’d talk.

Eventually he stopped, noticed the glass, reached for it slowly and drank long and deep; and then he looked around for me.

“Here’s a new one for you,” he said.

I spoke softly. “Not so new; I do it all the time.”

A marvelous waiting silence resumed.

Quite a while later he said, “I never asked you: were you pissed off at me for marrying Leslie?”

I thought about the right answer. Not necessarily the kindest answer, or the most polite answer, or the truthful answer, just the right one. “I think we were about done with each other.”

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s an answer. You want others, I can make up others. But that’s definitely an answer.”

More silence. He finished the drink, I went in and threw a lot of cubes in a mixing bowl, brought the bowl and the bottle, and set them down in front of him. He worked at it slowly. Neither of us would end up alcoholics: we weren’t passionate enough about the juice.

Oh hi there, I’m recruiting for Richard the Lion-Hearted; we’re putting together a wonderful follow-up to last year’s big hit, The Children’s Crusade. This year it’s The Wino’s March on Mecca, from the people who brought you the Black Death. You’ll just love it—all the Sterno and Grand Marnier you can osmose. Whaddaya say?

Listen, I’ll talk to you later. You go save Mecca, I’ll have a go at writing the Great American Novel, and we’ll meet right next to the big lions on the steps of the New York Public Library two years from now. You can’t miss me, I’ll be the one without the Holy Grail.

“You know, I’ve always felt like your kid brother,” he said.

“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”

“Always felt faintly ridiculous around you. Loudmouthed, gauche, coming on too strong even when I was purposely speaking so softly I knew people had to strain to hear me.”

“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”

“You know I’m a better writer than you, don’t you? Not just sales . . . better. There’s heat in my stuff; it works, it pulls the plow. Better.

“For Christ’s sake, Larry, there’s nothing but cold dead air blowing through your books. They ought to hand out woolly mittens with every copy of your stuff.” I thought about Arctic tundra. “Six months, Jimmy; just six months.” He started crying again. “For Christ’s sake, Larry, help me! You’ve got it all together, you’ve got the answers, you’ve always had the answers. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, I’m falling apart. I feel like I’m being emptied out, like a hot water bottle; it’s all running away from me. I’m going to kill somebody, I swear to God I’m going to run through the streets killing strangers.”

“How about some gin rummy, tenth of a cent a point?”

He got up, went into the bathroom and washed his face.

When he came back he sat down in the rocker, looking bushed. “You ready to talk about it now?” I asked.

He stretched his hands out on the arms of the rocker until the fingertips were just at the edge. Just at the edge. “This open marriage with Leslie is killing me. I can’t stand it.” It was the first I’d heard of it. When he married her I stopped thinking about anything in that area. I never knew what went on with them in that way. I felt my stomach getting cold.

That’s the way I respond to photographs of Dachau.

“So get out of it,” I said.

“Don’t be an asshole.”

“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”

He started yelling. “Give me a break, will you? I’ve got nobody else in the world to talk to. You’re my best friend, maybe the only friend I can really trust. I’m talking to you, I’m asking for help!”

What I wanted to say was: come off it, Jimmy! You’ve got exactly and precisely what you always wanted. You’re rich, you’re well-liked, you’re urbane and charming; you’ve got a beautiful, intelligent wife, a big classy home steeped in authentic antiquity; everywhere you go they know you, your face is on the tube and they don’t hold you for The last fifteen minutes of the Carson Show; you go where you want, do what you want, you’re a workaholic under the weight of the Puritan Work Ethic, so you get off on slaving night and day . . .

You’re who you made you, Jimmy; so come off it.

Wanted to say that. But didn’t. Sat there and said, “Go ahead, tell me what’s happening.” Remember when you were a kid, how awful it was when you bit down on the tinfoil?

And he went on for about two hours, telling me everything about his life, and Leslie’s life, and my life, and about how dear I was to him because I was his role-model. All of this went in and flowed out again, and I must confess there were even three or four things that disgusted me.

And then we went out to O. Henry’s Steak House and had magisterial chunks of some King of the Beasts, and I put ketchup on mine and KercherOliver James Crowstairs, the best:.

selling and critically acclaimed author winced and said, “That’s disgusting, Larry.” And I said: “Chalk it up to improper toilet training.”

Jimmy’s baronial mansion was not the one in which he’d lived with Leslie. That had been Connecticut. This was Los Angeles. The Crown Point mansion had been brought over stone-by-stone from Dorset. This one looked as if it had been brought over ticky-by-tacky from the back lot at Twentieth.

But it had a “library.” Yes, indeed, it had a library that held the 37,000 books Jimmy had owned at the moment of his death. He read a book a day, summer or winter, bright or cloudy, naked or clothed.

And we gathered there, in the high-arched library, for the reading of the will, the last will and testament of Jimmy, beloved Kerch, American literary treasure.

It was not what I expected. But then, Jimmy never did the expected. There was an evening we spent together at a reception for the Brazilian ambassador to the United States, at the Spanish legation in Washington, during which Jimmy had a meaningful relationship with a gigantic silver Cellini tureen filled with applesauce . . .

It was not what I expected.

The room had been set up with deep, comfortable chairs all facing an enormous beam-television screen. The projector was hooked up with a Sony Betamax unit. An impish-looking man of middle height, wearing what was clearly a very expensive three-piece suit that had not been properly tailored to the slump of his shoulders, stood before the screen holding a document that was very likely the last hurrah of my friend Jimmy Crowstairs.

Despite the serious manner of the imp in the three-piece suit, intended I suppose to give the occasion the proper portentous ambiance, it was impossible to get away from a festive feeling in that room. Jimmy had been an inveterate collector—of everything. The library was floor-to-ceiling with books, almost all hardcovers, arranged alphabetically by author, from Aeschylus, Aldiss and Algren at the left of the topmost shelf of the first bookcase to the left side of the entranceway . . . to Zamyatin, Zelazny and Zola at the bottom of the last bookcase all the way around the enormous room at the right side of the entrance. But there were also glass cases spotted across the room, containing pewter figurines, Makundi sculpture from Mozambique, lacquered boxes from Russia, T’ang dynasty glazes, gold scarabs encrusted with lapis lazuli from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, scrimshaw from whaling villages in New England, Amerindian pottery, German kinetic sculptures flickering and strobing, ceramic statues from the Austrian courts, fantasy bronzes by Enzenbacher, Spacher and Rumph; and lucite easels with paintings: Kanemitsu, Stamitz, Pebworth, David Hockney, the Dillons, Wunderlich, Bash, Wyeth, Rothko, Kley, Campanile and Willardson. And in the dead center of the room was a nine foot tall model of the Abominable Snowman that Steve Kirk had designed for the Matterhorn at Disneyland.

No matter how hard the imp in the three-piece suit worked at it, he could not possibly overcome the lunatic frivolity of that yeti.

The five chairs were arranged in a semicircle. At the extreme left, already seated, Jimmy’s sister SylviaTheCunt stared straight ahead, folding and refolding the telegram that had commanded her appearance here. The next chair was empty. And the next chair. In the fourth chair sat Jimmy’s friend Bran Winslow, himself a writer, and probably the gentlest human being I’d ever met. He had not been at the burial ceremony. In the last chair, at the extreme right, sat Missy, which was short for Mississippi, who was—and for the past fifteen years had been—Jimmy’s assistant, good right hand, troubleshooter, basic office staff and Person Friday. She let no one call her a “girl,” even if the word Friday followed it.

Obviously the two empty chairs were for Leslie and me.

We moved toward the chairs and started to sit down, but the imp stopped us, saying,

“Mrs. Crowstairs, would you take the third seat please; Mr. Bedloe, Kerch wanted you to sit in the second seat.” We rearranged ourselves. It made good sense:, I separated Leslie and SylviaTheCunt, who looked on each other with the enthusiasm one might evince at the prospect of root canal surgery.

The imp waited till we were settled, then he said, “My name is Kenneth L. Gross; I was the attorney for Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs and remain legal counsel for both his estate and The Kerch Corporation in which Mr. Crowstairs was the principal party of record.” He showed us the document we had all come to hear.

“This document is Mr. Crowstairs’s last will and testament, as you might have supposed. However, it will not be read here today.”

Why had I suspected Jimmy wasn’t finished with us yet?

He waited a moment for the effect, then went on. “Mr. Crowstairs, as you all know, was a rather remarkable man, with a flair for the original. One day, several years ago, we were discussing the preparation of this document, and I mentioned, almost as a joke, that he ought to videotape the reading of his will. Kerch . . . Mr. Crowstairs immediately fastened on the idea and instructed me to look into the legal ramifications of such a videotaping.

“At first there were questions of validity, but Mr. Crowstairs financed the appropriate research, and in a decision handed down just eight months ago by the Supreme Court of the State of California, such a procedure was adjudged permissible, contingent on a written document being prepared as it has been historically.

“Many of the smaller grants in this document will be handed directly through my office, but the principal beneficiaries are gathered here, per Mr. Crowstairs’s instructions; and you will now hear your bequests directly from the deceased. This extended element of the basic instrument was videotaped four months ago . . . before any of us had any idea . . . we never thought . . .”

He faltered to silence. I liked him a lot. He bad cared about Jimmy.

Then he went behind us and turned on the television set from the projection module, cut in the Betamax, light appeared on the enormous screen, color-bands of leader ran through, and suddenly we were looking at this room, with Jimmy, the attorney, Missy, a tall, thin black woman I didn’t recognize, and Bran Winslow, sitting at Jimmy’s desk. It was obvious that Missy, the black woman and Bran Winslow were the witnesses to the execution of the will, and I now understood how two people as close to Jimmy as Missy and Bran had been, who had been there only a few months before when this document had been merely an act of preparing for the long, far inevitable future, had chosen not to attend the burial service.

They all sat up there, larger than life, on the screen, and I thought with the faintest flutter of trepidation, What a field day the archivists will have with this little chunk of literary gossip.

Roll ’em, C. B. It’s magic time, I thought. Break a leg, Jimmy.

He once took me along with him on what he called a “dangerous mission of research.”

Because of the confessional nature of much of what he wrote—Jimmy had believed Hemingway when Poppa said, “a writer should never write what he doesn’t know”—Kerch was forever putting himself in crazy situations where raw material for books had to be obtained first-hand, usually at risk of one’s life or sanity; or at very least at risk of one’s complexion.

He had scaled mountains, raced sports cars, worked in a steel foundry, traveled cross-county on a Vincent Black Shadow with Hell’s Angels, marched with Chavez in the Coachella Valley, spent time in Southern jails for civil rights activities, chummed it up with a Mafia capo, managed to con a trio of radical feminist lesbians into a four-way sexual liaison, covered a South American revolution, hired himself out to a firm specializing in industrial espionage, and God knows what all else.

He had no secrets when he wrote. He talked about his feelings when his mother had lingered in her endless midnight coma and he signed the order to kick out the plug on her life-support system; he revealed the most intimate secrets of his love life, with Leslie and others; he told stories on himself that men with more humility and a greater sense of shame would have buried in the vaults of their family secrets. Probably because of that open conversation that went on between Jimmy and his millions of readers, his popularity grew and grew. It was possible to trust a man who told everything, a man who could not be morally or literarily blackmailed. It made it seem reasonable that he would go to the burning core of whatever he wrote, because he was not afraid of sunlight striking the tomb of the vampire.

And once he took me with him.

I was living in Chicago at the time, doing editorial work on a men’s magazine. He called and asked if I was free that night, and if I was free would I like to accompany him on a “dangerous mission of research.”

Evenings spent in Jimmy’s company were many things, but they were seldom dull or uneventful. I said I was stoked for an adventure.

He picked me up in a Hertz rental at the office, and all he would say was that we were going deep into the South Side of the city, the section commonly known as Back of the Yards. Oh yes, he said one more thing: he was going to see a woman who had given him a case of the crabs.

I think I responded with the remark, “Frankly, I’m underwhelmed.” But when we got there —there being a rundown tenement in a scuzzy section—I found an apartment half-filled with card-carrying criminals. They had the appearance of righteous gypsies, some kind of hyperthyroid Romany rejects. Eleven of them, looking like road company understudies for “The Wolf Man,” starring Madame Maria Ouspenskaya.

Four flights up, in what would have been called a railroad flat, had we been in New York and not Chicago, they sat around the kitchen staring at Jimmy and me with dark, hooded eyes. I felt like a cobra at a mongoose rally.

An extremely attractive young woman had opened the apartment door after Jimmy had knocked in a special cadence: two shorts close together, pause, then three more shorts.

“’Open, Sesame’ isn’t required, eh? How convenient,” I said. He gave me one of his looks.

And the door was opened by this extremely attractive young woman, who threw her arms around him and kissed him full on the mouth. I stared beyond them, into the kitchen, and was greeted by the massed nastiness contained in ten pairs of dark, hooded eyes.

He held her away from him and murmured something too quietly for the gypsies to hear. What he said, Jimmy always the romantic, was: “What’re you pushing this time . . .

cancer?”

She grinned and gave him a playful punch in the stomach—playful enough to straighten him out with a whooze of pain. Then she led him into the apartment. I followed, not happily.

Let me cut through all the subsequent hours of weird happenings. The background was this:

Jimmy had been out on the lecture circuit the year before. In Kansas City the usual gaggle of esurient sycophants who cannot differentiate between the Artist and the Art rushed the podium for autographs and cheap thrills such as the pressing of flesh. In the crowd had been an extremely attractive young woman who, when her turn came to thrust a book and a pen under Jimmy’s nose, had thrust neither. She had moved in quickly and thrust herself.

Reaching for him, she had put her mouth to his ear and whispered, “Why don’t we go back up to your hotel room and see if you can make me groan.”

Needless to say . . .

About a week later, Jimmy back home, a phone call on his private line. It was the extremely attractive young woman whom Jimmy had made groan. Her name, she told him, was not Mia, as she had told him. She was not, strictly speaking, a bank teller, as she had told him. She was, in fact, a member of a rather large family that specialized in robbing banks.

When they were between jobs, she worked as a bank teller. “Who better?” Jimmy had replied to that one. She was on the dodge, spent most of her time underground with different aliases and different pseudo-lives, and she had had a wonderful time with Jimmy whose books, during those long hours underground, had brought her endless pleasure.

When Jimmy inquired why she was revealing all this to him, she shamefacedly admitted—though he couldn’t see her face—that she had probably given him a cataclysmic dose of the crabs.

Without even bothering to check, Jimmy perceived that he had, at last, an understanding of why he had been scratching furiously for the preceding week. As it was his first exposure to Phthirus pubis, he dropped instantly into panic. “I would rather,” he said later, “have ten thousand years of tertiary syphilis than ten seconds of the crabs.” He had an urgent Candygram from his autonomic nervous system, directing him in the most stridently hysterical tones, to rush off and set fire to his crotch.

She had gone on—unaware that Jimmy was no longer within ratiocination range—to say she hadn’t known about it herself, that she was sorry as hell, and that she thought it was a crummy thing to do to someone who had given her so many hours of pleasure, both in print and in bed. And that, she told him, was why she was calling him to tell him . . . and spilling the beans about herself. (Which wasn’t that big a deal, apparently, because she wasn’t in Kansas City any more; and he couldn’t very well find her, or the family, if the FBI, the Federal Reserve System, the Organized Crime Task force, Brink’s and the Pinkertons couldn’t find them.)

Ever the polite chap, Jimmy had thanked her decently for taking the time to call on such a piddling matter when she obviously had bigger problems to worry about. Then he hung up the phone, hyperventilated, and sent Missy to the pharmacy to buy copious quantities of A-200 pyrinate Liquid, Cuprex, Kwell cream and Kwelll otion—and a thermite bomb just to be prepared in the event a scorched-earth policy proved necessary.

Now a year later, the Mia-manque had summoned Jimmy from California to Chicago to act as intermediary in the family’s surrender to the Laws (as she called them, reminiscent of the colorful patois of Bonnie & Clyde).

And this once he had taken me with him.

Pseudo-Mia took him by the hand and started to lead him down the hallway toward the rear of the apartment. “Hey!” I said. The sound made by a ferret caught in a clampjaw trap.

Jimmy turned, still being led by the hand, walked backward and said, “Make yourself at home. Strike up new acquaintances. Establish meaningful relationships. I’ll be back.” And Not-Mia opened a door to what I presumed was a bedroom off the hall—thereby illuminating her family’s liberal, one might even say cavalier, attitude toward her sexual egalitarianism—and she disappeared inside; followed by Jimmy’s disappearing hand, arm, body, and face, leaving behind only the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

I turned to stare at ten pairs of dark, hooded eyes that were staring at me.

A man in his thirties got up, stood aside, and indicated the empty chair at the kitchen table. I sat down, not happily.

At almost the instant I realized there was a wonderful, dark brown smell of something baking in the apartment, the old woman—an old old woman, shapeless and infinitely corrugated with wrinkles—sitting directly across from me reached behind her, wearing a potholder mitt, opened the door of the oven, pulled out a metal bread pan, and slapped it down on the table between us.

“Langos,” she said. She pronounced it lahng- osh .

It smelled sensational. Some kind of deep-fried bread dough she’d apparently been keeping warm in the oven. I looked at it. The guy who had given me his seat took a bowl full of garlic cloves off the sink and put it down in front of me.

“Bread,” he said. “Rub it with the garlic.”

I reached in, took a piece of langos, burned my fingertips, squeaked, provoked ten smiles, added an eleventh, my own, and rubbed the hot surface with a clove of garlic. It tasted sensational.

Then the old, old woman began rattling off at me. She spoke uninterruptedly for about a minute. In Hungarian. I smiled. I nodded. She stopped and looked at me, waiting for a response. I thought of Arctic tundra.

A man in his fifties, sitting to my left, said, “She asks if you know if Laurie will marry Vic Lamont and if Cookie will go crazy and will Simon Jessup kill Orin Hillyer?” I stopped chewing. I smiled. I nodded. I looked from one to another of them, hoping someone would take pity on a man lost in the desert.

The old, old woman, hearing what the man in his fifties had said, added a few more words. I looked at the interpreter. He spoke resignedly: “And will Adam Drake fall in love with Nicole?”

I hoped, with profound desperation, that Mia was neither greedy nor afflicted with the djam karet attendant on ownership of a hooded clitoris.

“I’m sorry,” I said slowly, “but I don’t know what she’s talking about.” I smiled. I nodded.

There was an appreciable drop in temperature around the table. The man in his fifties said something short to the old, old woman. She snorted that special snort translatable in any language as, “Who asked for you, who sent for you; who sent for you, who asked for you?” And so, every instant anguish, I sat there for the better part of an hour. In Indonesia they have. a name for it: djam karet . . . the hour that stretches.

Eventually, open covenants having apparently been openly entered into, Other-Than-Mia and Jimmy emerged from the bedroom. It looked like a draw.

I got up at a signal from Jimmy, who drew me aside. I started to whisper my.

consternation, but he pressed my bicep for silence. Maybe-Mia took my seat, and began speaking in a low, intense voice. In Hungarian. Or Urdu. Or tongues, maybe. What do I know about glossolalia?

She was about fifteen seconds into the recitation when they all started replying.

Eleven gypsies, all going at it like the Russians were invading Evanston. A hailstorm of babble.

Jimmy leaned in and said, “You know the FBI’s list of Ten Most Wanted?” I nodded. Not happily.

“They just made it to number one.”

“Terrific. I’ll meet you in the car; say my goodbye& for me.”

“Shut up and listen.

“It’s a hype. It’s a publicity dodge. The Feds never put anyone on that list till a week or two before they’re going to make an arrest. That way, they spread it around about all these dangerous felons at large, and a week or so later the Bureau makes a pinch, making it look as if they’re right on top of things. People they can’t find never even get on the list.”

“You’re telling me Jimmy Stewart’s going to break in here any minute with a Thompson submachine gun, is that it?”

“I’m telling you they want to give themselves up; but they’re afraid they’ll get wiped out if they just wait for the Feds to find them.”

“Why don’t they run? God knows they’re in practice.”

“Shut up and listen.

“They want me to be the go-between. To get the press and some responsible local officials in here before they pull the plug.”

“Listen, Jimmy . . . they pull the plug and you’re liable to lose the baby with the bathwater. I’m referring to me, baby, in case you had any doubts . . .”

“Take it easy. I did a docudrama about a Chicago psychiatrist for CBS last year . . .” I hadn’t heard the word docudrama before. I was looking at him with confusion. He understood my problem and said, “Fictionalized documentary. Semi-real. Touches truth in at least ten places. Anyhow . . .”

The babble was growing louder. The old, old woman was now silent, watching and listening. The thirty-year-old guy and the fifty-year-old guy were obviously on opposite sides of the question—whatever the question was— and I could see the crowd was about evenly divided. The older guy was with Mia, whatever she was proposing, and I had the certain feeling that if the thirty-year-old guy’s point of view prevailed, that this baby might go down the drain before Jimmy Stewart made one of his rare personal appearances.

“Are you listening to me?” Kerch demanded, squeezing my arm.

“No,” I whispered, “I’m listening to them. Somehow I get the feeling what they’re saying has more to do with my living to a dignified old age.”

“Just shut up and listen, for Christ’s sake!

“Marvin Ziporyn is his name . . . the psychiatrist. He’s the top shrink for the state.

Works with the Cook County authorities. Concert violinist, big social mover, wrote a couple of books; he’s got access to Kup and the Mayor and everybody else.” I was staring openly now. Hell, anybody could get to the Mayor; but access to Irv Kupcinet, the columnist; well, that was the Big Time.

“So?”

“So I call Marvin, tell him what I’m into, get him to contact Kup, who’ll love it a lot.

They pull in a few of the local squires and top cossacks . . . and Mia and the crowd remand themselves into proper custody.”

“Before Jimmy Stewart breaks in . . .”

“Right, right.”

“I’ll meet you at the car. Thank the old lady for the bread.” I started toward the door.

The thirty-year-old guy erupted from his seat and if there was anything else in that lousy kitchen but the gigantic. 45 in his hairy paw, I didn’t see it. There is a quality about blue-steel gunmetal that gathers all light in a room; like a black diamond.

He was pointing it at me.

I grinned stupidly, placed both palms against the air and tittered like the village idiot.

He seemed somewhat mollified and the barrel of the automatic lowered to the vicinity of my crotch. For a moment there it had been like staring into the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, only bigger.

“Damn it, Larry, stop acting like a schmuck. Let Mia handle it. “.

“Her name isn’t Mia.”

“Whatever her name is; let her handle it.”

So I stood there with him, leaning against the wall, for the better part of an hour while the Sanhedrin decided my fate.

Sometime during that hour I asked him, “Who’s Vic Lamont?” He said, “Who?”

I said, “Vic Lamont.”

He said, “Never heard of him.”

I said, “Will Laurie marry him?”

He said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I said, “Will Laurie marry Vic Lamont; will Cookie go crazy; will Simon Somebody-or-other kill Orin Hillyer; will Adam Something-or-other fall in love with Nicole?” He stared at me.

“The old lady seemed miffed I didn’t know the answers,” I whispered.

He thought about it a minute. Then he said, “The Edge of Night. It’s a soap opera.” I said, “Why me?”

He said. “Because you’re with me, and Mia told them I’m a famous television writer, and that means you’re a famous television writer, and that means you know what happens to all those characters in the soap operas, because they’re not characters, they’re real people, and I suppose when you’re on the lam the only consistency in your life is the surrogate life of people in soap operas. What’d you tell her?”

“I didn’t tell her anything. I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about.” He said, “How’d she take it?”

I said, “Not terrific.”

He nodded, thought about it a minute, then called Mia over. He took her aside, whispered at her for a little while, then sent her back to the table. She bent down over the old, old woman, whispered in her ear for a while longer, and when she straightened up the old, old woman was grinning wide as a death’s head. Her mouth was a classic argument for compulsory remedial orthodontia.

Whatsername sat down and smiled, waiting.

Then the old, old woman said something sharp and hard. In Hungarian. Everybody shut up and stared at her. Then she said something else, not quite as sharp and hard, and the thirty-year-old guy packing the Holland Tunnel bowed his thorny head, nodded in supplication, and murmured words of acquiescence.

The fifty-year-old spoke rapidly to the Ghost of Mia Past, every once in a while pointing at Jimmy or me, or Jimmy and me. Once, damned sure, he was making a threat; and once, damned certain, he was giving warning. She nodded, said okay okay okay every few sentences, added a thought here and there and, finally, it all seemed settled.

She got up, came over to us, and said, “All set. Do your stuff, Kerch.” He gave her a little kiss and started toward the old black two-handed pedestal telephone on the kitchen counter. I asked the Memory of Mia, “What’s all set?” She patted me on the cheek and answered, “They’re not going to cut you into small pieces and leave you in garbage cans all over the South Side.” Then she went away, to join my best friend, Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs, who had brought me along into the jaws of death on a “dangerous mission of research.”

It was not till a week later, after the gypsy bank robbers had given themselves up with attendant headlines and photos of Jimmy leading them out of the tenement into the waiting arms of Irv Kupcinet, the Mayor of Chicago and the bureau Chief of the Midwest Regional FBI office (not to mention several thousand cops and G-Men armed for the apocalypse), that Kerch bothered to tell me that what had saved our lives was Mia’s imparting to her dear old Granny the information that I was a close family friend of everyone on The Edge of Night and that when (or if) Granny ever got sprung from the federal slam, I would introduce her to Laurie, Vic Lamont, Simon Jessup, Orin Hillyer, Cookie, Nicole and Adam Drake, whoever the hell they were!

“My name is Kercher O.J. Crowstairs,” said the Kercher O.J. Crowstairs three times life-size on the screen before us. The camera pulled back into a medium shot and Jimmy up there whipped open the wallet lying on the desk. He pulled out a sheaf of cards and held the first one up to the camera, which obligingly zoomed in for a closeup. Jimmy’s voice, off-camera, said, “And this is my driver’s license, issued by the state of California. You’ll notice it has a rather unflattering photograph of me right here in the lower left-hand corner, which will identify me as the one and only K. O.J. Crowstairs, your friendly neighborhood testator.”

The camera had slowly pulled back to include the attorney, Kenneth L. Gross. He was making a small moue at Jimmy’s levity. The moue became a stricture as Jimmy held up one card after another:

“And this is my BankAmericard/Visa card; and this is my Master Charge card; and this is my Diners Club card, but I don’t use it much; and this is my Carte Blanche; and this one will rent me a Hertz, and this one an Avis, and this one will get me a tacky room in any Holiday Inn across the face of the Earth; and this one is for Neiman-Marcus, and this one is for good old Bloomingdale’s, and . . .”

He must have caught the strangled moan from Gross, because he stopped. He dropped the rest of the thick pack of cards, and looked into the camera.

“Look: we’re doing this videotape so no one, and that means no one will be able to raise the question of my competency after I’ve croaked. By competency they mean was I of sound mind and body, and under no duress, such as being held captive by the Symbionese Liberation Army. But if I played it absolutely straight, and didn’t laugh at all this somber bullshit, then anyone who’s known me more than ten minutes would suspect I was out of my skull.

“Nonetheless . . .” and he said this hurriedly, because Gross was making the kind of strangling noises that, had he uttered them in a good restaurant, would have brought the maitre d’ running to administer the Heimlich Maneuver, “nonetheless, moving right along to the serious stuff, folks, here’s my friend and advisor, the world-famous corporate attorney, Mr. Kenneth L. Gross, who’d like to say a few words. Let’s give him a big funeral day welcome . . . Kenny Gross!”

The attorney was the color of old toothpaste as he read from a prepared form. “Mr.

Crowstairs, you have now established your identity for those who may be seeing this recording at a later date. You have retained this office in connection with estate planning and more specifically to prepare your will. The document I now show you (handing will to client), is the final draft of that will. Would you please take a moment to review it?” The screen now went to split-frame, the right side being a copy of the will. Jimmy took the document Gross handed him and scanned it. “But this is a laundry list, Kenny.” The attorney damned near fainted. Jimmy laughed and hurriedly corrected himself. “I’m kidding, I’m just kidding; this is my will; honest to God, I swear it is!” Gross was breathing hard. I felt for the poor devil. “Is this the document that you have, hopefully, previously read?”

“Yes, it is. But you don’t mean hopefully, Kenny. You mean I hope, or it is to be hoped, or one hopes. You see, when you use the word ‘hopefully,’ you’re reporting a subjective state of mind; that is, full of hope. Your error is in attributing your hope to the object, in this case the will . . . or is the object me? I’m never really sure of parts of speech. In any case, if you were to reverse the word, you’d see how wrong it’s being used: hopelessly I’ve read it. See what I mean? Good grammar, Kenny; always good grammar. Your mother and I have chided you about this on numerous occasions . . .” Gross exploded. “Mister Crowstairs! If you will, sir! This is a serious undertaking!

Now is this, or is this not the document previously read by yourself?”

“It is, it is! Nag, nag, nag.”

Gross gave it up. He bulled. forward. Not happily. “Are you executing this document or prepared to execute this document . . . no, wait . . . I’m out of sequence! Damn it, Kerch!” Jimmy grinned infectiously. He was never happier than when he was stirring up the soup. He laid a placating hand on Gross’s. “Take it easy, Kenny. Don’t fumfuh.” Gross swallowed; as they say, he looked daggers at his client, pulled a weathered pipe with a large Oom Paul bowl and a bent stem from his vest pocket, puffed it alight with a kitchen match taken from his other vest pocket, harrumphed once, and began again.

“All right, then: In my presence, and in the presence of these witnesses, and cognizant of the fact that these proceedings are being videotaped, does this document reflect your exclusive and entire wishes with regard to the disposition of your property?” Testator responded in the affirmative: “I respond in the affirmative.” The attorney now turned to the three witnesses. “Each of you has known Mr.

Crowstairs for many years. You have been asked to participate in these proceedings for the purpose of further identification. Will you now, each in turn, declare who you are, your relationship to Mr. Crowstairs, and verify that this is, in fact, Mr. Kercher Oliver James Crowstairs.”

Camera came into closeup on the first witness as the splitscreen went to solo image.

“My name is Brandon Winslow. I have been a close personal friend, house guest and sometime-collaborator of Kercher Crowstairs for almost fourteen years; and I hereby declare that the man over there with all the credit cards is, in fact and as he’s stated, the Crowstairs he says he is.”

Well, well, I thought, oh my ears and whiskers.

“Sometime-collaborator.” Now there’s one phrase I never thought I’d hear in connection with Jimmy. So Bran had been paying off the loans and the live-in companionship with something more valuable than coin of the realm. He had worked on some of the books.

That went a long way toward explaining how Jimmy could turn out his novel and a short story collection every year as regular as the swallows visiting Capistrano, plus finding the time for all the introductions, newspaper columns, background pieces for TV Guide; the lectures, the television talk show appearances, the writing workshops; and the women. He had another laborer in the vineyard. A bond slave.

I cast back through the long list of Crowstairs publications trying to figure out which ones had been co-written —entirely ghost-written?!?!—no, it was unthinkable—but then, collaboration had been unthinkable till Bran had let the black cat cross the path—and I came up with two immediately.

Bakelite Radio Fantasies and Fearsome Noises. They were gentler, more thoughtful than was Jimmy’s wont. There was greater lyricism in them, closer in tone to Bran’s own solo novel—his only novel —Knowledge of Two Kinds. They were a couple of my favorite Crowstairs creations.

And my heart contracted in my chest as I realized that in some way Bran Winslow had sold himself to Jimmy, had denied his own career, to add a few more chapters to the myth of Kercher Crowstairs. I didn’t want to know what Jimmy had had on Bran, that could make him, seemingly willingly, put aside his own work, to become a secret shadow of the public Kerch.

To me, it was unthinkable. The more I thought about it, the more often the word unthinkable burned in the darkness. Unthinkable: Jimmy was many kinds of a man, but blackmailer wasn’t one of them. Unthinkable: Brandon Winslow was as fiercely committed to his art as was I, as was Jimmy . . .

Unthinkable!

No one has that kind of charisma. I simply wouldn’t go for it. There had to be something deeper, something more potent. It was unthinkable that a writer of Bran Winslow’s sincerity and dedication would simply give over his life to Jimmy; it was unthinkable that Jimmy’s fever could be passed on to another writer—possibly a better writer, a more important writer, an intrinsically more valuable, a worthier writer—to cause him to deny the song of his own Muse. But now that I’d thought it, as unthinkable as it had seemed . . .

Kercher Crowstairs refused to acknowledge the night.

He had a quote from Thomas Carlyle taped to the molding of the bookcase right over his typewriter:

Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it, in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up!

whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the night cometh, wherein no man can work.

He refused to cower against the fear of scaled or furry or fanged creatures moving toward him. in the night.

He was a sharpened stick.

He was in motion, no sitting target.

He did not play poker, yet he never sat with his back to the door.

But such a level of energy has to dissipate itself before it can consume another writer.

It has to! Sheer force of will, massed totality of personality, unleashed waves of charismatic power . . . no one has that. No one! Unthinkable goddam you Kerch Jimmy!

What the fuck did you have on Bran Winslow to turn him into your Uncle Tom? Your Stepin Fetchit? Your coolie laborer? Second sax in your brass section? Make-work creative typist?

Oh, Jesus, Jimmy, this is most hateful; and I don’t even know what was behind it.

Poor Bran.

Damn! Stop that! Stop thinking that way. There was a reason, a solid, good reason.

There had to be. No writer can do that to another writer who knows how good he is, who has the books in him crying out to be released. No one. No damn you, no one!

My head was swimming. I felt sick to my stomach.

“Can you hold the tape,” I heard myself saying; and then as the film vanished and white screen appeared, I bolted out of my chair and rushed for the toilet.

That dyspeptic old fart Nelson Algren got three out of four. He wrote: “Never play cards with a man named Doc. Never eat in a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”

Close. Very close.

But he missed a fourth:

“Never let anyone catch you down on your knees puking into a toilet bowl.” Especially not a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

I should have locked the door. But the bile was pushing as if it were spring-loaded; I barely had time to get into the can before I felt it coming like the Sunshine Express. Down on my knees, loving the toilet bowl, and then the river of fire.

Leslie was in there, right behind me, trying to hold my forehead, for Christ’s consumptive sake, with me hurling and heaving like a boa constrictor that’s swallowed a Peterbilt. I shoved at her, ineffectually, as she continued to play Lady Bountiful to my bounty.

I flailed my free arm behind me, trying to get her to back off. I think in that moment I realized just how insensitive she is. There’d always been hints . . . such as her revelation at a group dinner many years before that she had, as a child, thrown a hamster into a window fan . . . and then, of course, she’d stayed married to Jimmy; that had to indicate more than a soupçon of the obdurate.

But the level of insensitivity it takes to force someone in the most degrading condition known to humanity to think that he’s being watched while he glops up his guts, no matter if it’s misguidedly interpreted as “concern” or “out of love,” is a bestial level whereon one finds only flagstones or spent shell casings. Back off!

After a while I got up, filled the sink with cold water, put my face into it completely, and lay there for quite a length pf time, allowing the spittle and other nastiness to float away on the tide. My eyes were burning. I could not, thank God, see my face in the water.

I emptied the bowl, washed thoroughly, gargled as best I could with icy water, and reached for a towel. Leslie was standing there with one in her outstretched hand.

I took it. “Thank you very much.”

“How do you feel?”

“Dandy. Just dandy.”

“That was awful.”

I looked a surprised look. “Oh, really? It usually brings down the house. The awestruck expressions of the crowd are usually upon me.” Back the fuck off!

“My God,” she said, “you know you’re even starting to talk like him?” Have you never perceived that before, my love? Have you never caught on that my interior monologues are never in my own voice, never the way I write or speak? They are pure Jimmy. That quick-silver turn of the phrase, all that heat and color; not the plodding, methodical, reasonably reasoned wise uncle with good, solid thinking of Laurence Bedloe, but rather the bold, sure spring of the tiger, and I believe in you. Never caught that, eh? How sad, how sorry: if I were to write up the relationship between the Recently Departed and Larry Bedloe it would be in the assumed voice of Kerch Jimmy. You didn’t pick up on that?

You’re simply not paying attention.

“The hamster isn’t the most awful I’ve ever heard,” I said, “although it is in the top tenth of a percentile of the most awful.”

“What are you talking about? Are you okay?”

“The most awful, I guess, was something Missy told me. She said that when she was a kid Down South they used to take baby ducks and chicks, and they’d bury them up to their no-necks in the dirt, and then they’d run the lawn mower over them. Now that is yucchh.” Her face was all pulled out of shape. “I’m calling the doctor.” There was a set of silver-backed military brushes on the counter. I picked them up and started brushing back my wet hair. I looked at her in the mirror and said, “Very good idea. You call the doctor. Make it a voodoo doctor, if you can get Inboard to clear a line to Haiti. Get a specialist in resurrection. Tell him we’re not sure Jimmy is completely all the way dead . . . that he seems to be clinging ferociously to life . . . your life, my life, Bran’s life . . .” She started to cry. I put the brushes down and turned to her; but I didn’t take her in my arms, usually pro forma. I just stared at her. She had the heels of her hands in her eyes and she was starting to get into it.

“Come on, Leslie! Pack it in, darlin’ !”

She fell against me, put her arms around me.

“Then,” I said, “he pushed her away.” And I pushed her away.

She looked at me. She said, “What?”

“He stared back at her,” I said, “and said simply, ‘We don’t walk backward, do we?

You’re his wife; you’ll always be his wife, even if you remarry, even if you’re canonized; he owns you. You say no, but five years from now you’ll make a deal with Simon & Schuster and have poor Bran out there ghostwrite your memoirs—I Was Kercher’s Koncubine. ‘ And he shook his head sadly,” I said, “and he walked to the door and walked out.” And then I walked past her to the door and walked out.

Not so hard ghostwriting in the voice of a ghost.

They all looked at me as I reentered the library. I patted the Abominable Snowman on the belly and resumed my appointed seat, ready to let Jimmy have another go at me. Bamboo shoots under the fingernails would have been a happier prospect.

They were still looking at me as Leslie came in. “Something I ate, perhaps. An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a fragment of underdone potato. More of gravy than of grave. Do let’s continue with the show.” All but Leslie continued to stare at me, touched by astonishment. Ah, of what good are literary allusions in the Land of Functional Illiterates, close to the borders of the Kingdom of the Blind?

But we continued.

The videotape began playing again, and once again we were in this library, weeks ago, only a moment after Bran had identified Jimmy as Jimmy and caused me to lose a perfectly lovely breakfast from DuPar’s Farmhouse. The tall, thin black woman I didn’t recognize now spoke, as the camera came in on her.

“My name is Eusona Parker, and I have been Mr. Crowstairs’s housekeeper for eighteen, going on nineteen years; and that’s him sitting right there; and don’t nobody try to say he’s not in his sound mind and body ’cause I have known him all these years and he’ s just as sharp and clean and neat as a pin as he’s ever been. Is that what I’m supposed to say?” No wonder I didn’t recognize her. Eusona Parker had lost about eighty pounds.

Every Wednesday. That was Eusona’s day. I’d only seen her half a dozen times through the years, when I was in Los Angeles and visiting Jimmy. But if anyone knew his state of health, it was Ms. Parker. She had been more of a true mother to Jimmy than his own natural mother. What I remembered best about her was the “hearing aid.” She had a memory that should have been on display in the Smithsonian. It might be three or four years between our seeing each other; but when I’d come out of the blue guest room searching for coffee early on a Wednesday morning during one of my visits, there would be Eusona, dusting Jimmy’s vast, endless hoard of tchotchkes; and she’d look up and grin as if I’d been there uninterruptedly for years, and she’d say, “Good morning, Larry, sleep good?” And I’d scream at her, “Hello, Eusona, how are you?” And she’d answer, “Doin’ just fine, Larry; water’s still hot.” And I’d scream, “Thanks, Eusona.” The reason I screamed was that she wore a hearing aid. One of those little button things shoved into her ear, the cord trailing down to disappear into the capacious pocket of her wraparound apron where the shape of the battery pack bulged.

And we went on that way, amiably, until one time she stopped me in the back corridor leading to the greenhouse, took me by the hand like a small boy who’s been caught eating worms in the schoolyard, and she said, “Mr. Bedloe, why do you always scream at me?”

She never called Jimmy “Mr. Crowstairs” unless he was behaving badly or living with a woman who left globs of mascara on the mirror in the bathroom, and she never called me anything but Larry unless I had left my bed unmade. Ms. Parker made it clear she was a housekeeper, not a maid; and if I slept in it, I ought to make it when I got out of it. “Mr. Bedloe” was her way of politely saying pay close attention now, asshole.

“Why, uh, I’m sorry, Eusona,” I said, terribly embarrassed as one can only be embarrassed when one has been caught staring at the empty place between eyes and mouth where a leper’s nose has fallen off. “I was speaking loudly because I wanted you to hear me.”

“Well, I’m not hard of hearin’, dear.”

That dear of hers: butter would not have melted in her mouth. I’ve never understood what that meant, it never made sense to me, butter not melting. Whatever it meant, it’s what that dear was all about. The dear you use when you say, “No, dear, the round hole is for the round peg.”

“You’re not?”

“No, Mr. Bedloe, dear, I’m not hard of hearing.”

Mr. Bedloe and dear.

“But you wear a hearing aid.”

“Mistuh Bedloe, this is not a hearing aid.” And she pulled the earphone of the transistor radio in her apron, out of her ear and, faintly, like fairy trumpets, I heard the tinny sound of Steve Garvey batting the brains out of the Cardinals’ relief pitcher, bottom of the seventh, two out, a man on third.

All that went through my head as Kenneth L. Gross said, “Yes, Miss Parker, that’s all you have to do, is identify Mr. Crowstairs.”

“That’s him. I said it.”

“Thank you, Miss Parker.”

“Neat as a pin, everything right in place; always been like that, eighteen going on nineteen years.”

“Thank you, Miss Parker.”

“You’re welcome, dear.”

Then Missy identified him; then Jimmy as testator stated the date and stated that the will being made on that date took precedence over all other wills previously made by him, including any that might be found written in cuneiform on stone tablets by gas station attendants roaming in the Nevada deserts.

Then the roundelay went like this:

Kenny: Are you executing this document or prepared to execute this document with a complete satisfaction on your Pal. that it says what you wish it to say, and that you understand it in its entirety?

Jimmy: Affirmative. And it should be noted for the record that the last person to marry a duck lived four hundred years ago.

Kenny: Choke. Are you prepared to execute this document and accordingly state for the record, in my presence and in the presence of witnesses, that in so doing you are not acting under duress, undue influence, or under the influence of any drug or other substance that may impair your mental capacity?

Jimmy: I had a Coca-Cola about half an hour ago, does that count?

Kenny: No sir, it does not. Please!

Jimmy: Are you sure, Kenny? I mean, if you take a piece of raw meat and you put it in a glass of Coke and leave it overnight it comes out looking like something from a James Bond movie. You know, all those little piranha bubbles ill there, they could chew the shit out of your brain cells.

Kenny: It doesn’t count, damn it!

Jimmy: Then how about all the stuff I put up my nose just before we started filming?

Kenny: Aaaargh!

Jimmy: Okay, okay, take it easy. I’m just clowning. I don’t use dope, you know that.

Everybody knows it. I couldn’t possibly write the crap I write if I was ripped. Having my nostrils Tefloned was just for a lark, you know that.

The attorney laid his head down on his arms and pounded the tabletop with his fist. It was pathetic what Jimmy was doing to this poor soul. We all looked around in the semidark but Kenneth L. Gross was back there in the shadows, no doubt chewing through the bit of his pipe.

On the screen Jimmy was being upbraided by his three witnesses. They whipped him into a semblance of probity and urged Kenny Gross to resume the proceedings.

The attorney said, “Therefore, in my presence and in the presence of the witnesses, God help us, is it your wish that you now execute the document and that we sign the document as witnesses thereto?”

Client responded in the affirmative.

“I will then ask, Mr. Crowstairs, that you now initial each and every page in the lower right-hand corner . . .”

“I’m left-handed.”

“Then do it in the lower left-hand corner but for God’s sake initial the damned thing already!” He was shouting; it seemed to quell Jimmy. He started initialing. Gross went on weakly, “Up to but not including the signature page. For your information and for the record, this is being done so that no pages can be substituted in the future into this document.” He was standing now, over Jimmy’s right shoulder, behind him, turning the pages to verify each one was properly initialed (and possibly to insure that Jimmy didn’t sign Herman Melville or Frederick VIII, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg).

It went on that way without hindrance. Jimmy had clearly grown bored with the activity and even bored with the japery that had made the proceedings minimally tolerable.

Jimmy reached the signature page and filled in the location of execution of the will, then the date, and then he signed it. Then each of the witnesses signed location, date and name. The latter two added their place of residence. The will was returned to Gross, who asked if Jimmy wanted the will kept in the attorney’s vault and a conformed copy provided to Jimmy, or if the client wanted to keep the original with a conformed copy in Gross’s possession. Jimmy waved a hand negligently. “You keep it; send me a copy.” Gross said he would do so and, painfully aware that the juice was running out of the presentation, said, “For the record, the witnesses need not be present during any videotaping portion which is about to occur and the only people who will be present will be myself, Mr.

Crowstairs, and the two camera persons.”

Yo-ho-ho. Here we go. Up there on the screen Missy, Bran and Eusona Parker rose, walked out of camera range and damned certainly out of the room, and Gross turned to Jimmy and said, “Mr. Crowstairs, if you wish, you may say some words to your beneficiaries or for that matter, to anyone who may have been excluded by you under your last will which we have just executed.”

He placed what was obviously a seating diagram of this room as Jimmy had planned it to be arranged on the desk in front of Jimmy, got up, and backed out of camera range. Now all we had on the screen was Jimmy sitting behind his desk, hands folded demurely, staring out at us, looking right to left as if he really could see us, back there four months ago when he had known for certain that he would live forever.

He looked first at SylviaTheCunt, then at me, then at Leslie, then at Bran who was seeing and hearing this for the first time—which may have been why he hadn’t attended the burial ceremonies—and finally, at my right but Jimmy’s extreme left, Missy. She hadn’t spoken all day.

But I’d make book she knew what was coming.

Jimmy stared at us, and we stared back at him. He kept us waiting. I don’t know what the others wanted—vindication, protestations of love, vast wealth, security for their twilight years, remorse, the slam bang of gin and vermouth, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings—
but all I wanted was to be turned loose. Tempest-tossed, righteous card-carrying wretched refuse, I merely yearned to breathe free. To sever the bond with Jimmy. I heard a sound. I’ll tell you what that sound sounded like:

On July 28, 1945, a foggy Saturday on the East Coast, Army Air Forces Lt. Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr. took off from Bedford, Massachusetts in a B-25 light bomber for La Guardia. Field in New York. A few minutes after 10:00 A. M. Lt. Col. Smith crashed his two-engine bomber into the north side of the Empire State Building at the level of the 78th and 79th floors.

On the 75th floor of the Empire State Building an office worker who had come in to do some extra work over the weekend heard a sound. A terrifying, ominous, hurtling-toward-him sound. He looked out the window to see, emerging from the fog, ten tons of screaming airplane rushing toward him at 225 m.p.h.

I sat staring, waiting for Jimmy to speak to us from beyond the grave. I heard a sound, rushing toward me out of the fog at 225 m.p.h.

This is how Jimmy died.

The story was in all the papers.

It was pried loose, finally, from one of the three culeros they pulled out of the other wreck. All three of them lived; one of them lost his left leg; one of them has no teeth. But that was Jimmy, not the crash.

Appropriately enough it was Halloween. That’s Bradbury’s favorite holiday; and it’s mine, and it was Jimmy’s. It was last week.

Jimmy had spent the evening at a party thrown by one of the two married couples who had been inside the black, plush velvet, upholstered ropes at the burial ceremonies. Huck and Carol Barkin. She’s an architect, he’s a writer. They were very close to Jimmy.

Around midnight Jimmy had left. He’d only had a couple of glasses of wine, perfectly sober and, in fact, had been drinking Perrier since ten o’clock. That figures in the story.

He took a cold quart bottle of Perrier with him when he left, swigging it straight from the mouth to his mouth in the car. Then he realized he was almost out of gas, probably couldn’t make it back to the Valley and the ancestral manse, went looking for an open station on a holiday, near midnight, in Los Angeles where odd-even allocation is taken seriously.

He found a serve-yourself that was open, but they wouldn’t let him fill up because it was an odd-numbered day and he had license plates that ended in an even number. So he pulled off to one side and waited for the clock to run past midnight when it would be the next day and he could get pumped up.

I wasn’t there, no one was there in his head, but I know what he was like, and from the story the culeros told, it had to have happened like this. And even if it didn’t let’s see how well we can get inside the characters, let’s see how fluidly we can carry the action, let’s see if we can plumb the intricate motivations. This is called sensitive, creative writing; full of heat, Jimmy; pulling the plow, Jimmy; getting the powerhouse up to peak efficiency.

What we need is a good opening, a tough literary hook.

Kerch Crowstairs slumped behind the wheel of the Rolls Corniche, listening to the second movement, the Allegro appassionato, of Brahms’s Concerto in B-flat major. In the chopped and channeled Chevy beside him the raucous clatter of the Eagles banged uneasy counterpoint . . .

No, too esoteric. Not Hammett enough.

How about this:

He was distracted. Thinking about the past, the future, indefinite times and opportunities passing too fast for analysis. Under him the Rolls hummed softly, waiting for the light to change. Beside him three Chicanos in a decked Chevy raced their motor. Drag for pink slips, mister?

No, too diffuse. Not enough oomph.

I can’t do it, Jimmy. I can’t write like you! I can talk and think in your voice, because I can hear you . . . I’ve always had phonographic recall. But I can’t put it down in your bloodthirsty Visigoth way.

What happened was . . .

He filled the tank. He drove back out onto the street. He was listening to the classical music on KFAC-FM. He was smoking his pipe. He was sitting at the light, waiting for it to change, simply enjoying the cool night air and the pleasant music and the smoke rising from the pipe. The empty Perrier bottle lay on the passenger seat. A car pulled up beside him in the left lane. Someone spoke in the night. He was caught up in the gentle feel of the music washing over him, the sense of ease and leisure. He was relaxed. For once, he wasn’t on, he wasn’t angry, he wasn’t hyper. He was feeling good; and he paid no attention to the voice.

But it spoke again, louder, coarser, directed at him. He looked across. Two young men, late teens, maybe early twenties, in the front seat. Another one in the back seat, looked asleep.

The kid closest to him yelled again. “Hey! Cabrón! What’re you smokin’ in the pipe?” The light changed. He took off. At the next light they raced up, gunned the motor, closer to his lane now. “Hey, man, de dónde? I ast you what the fuck you smokin’ in the pipe?” He stared ahead. He didn’t want any hassles. God, don’t these lights change? “Hey, mamador, you gonna answer me or I’m gonna come over there an “whip your ass?” He lOOked at them. If Rich Garza or Pano Del Rio were here, they’d have just the right words to back these clowns off. But he was alone. “I’m smoking Essence of Asshole,” he said: “I’m smokin’ your mama.” And the light changed, and he hit it. They ran up his tailpipe to the next light. Jesus, how many lights are there before the freeway? As he screeched to a halt the one on the passenger side jumped out and came across to grab him. He dumped it into reverse, backed up three feet, threw open the door and knocked the silly sonofabitch flat on his ass. Then he took off through the just-changing light. Behind him the passenger was climbing back aboard as the driver decked it. They caught him at the next light and he thought about going straight through: the freeway was one street up. But now the adrenalin was pumping. He stopped at the light and grabbed the empty Perrier bottle. When the passenger got to his window he swung the bottle in his left hand with a flat, scythelike movement and busted out the guy’s teeth, emptied his mouth and sent him careening backward into the Chevy. Then he went through the light, turned sharp left, ran down the side street to the freeway entrance, hit the ramp doing sixty and was on the San Diego before the driver could load his buddy back into the trashwagon. ¡Huo de la chingada!

They caught him just beyond the interchange of the San Diego and Santa Monica freeways. He was in the fast lane, the number one next to the divider. He was doing seventy-five. The Chevy came up on the right and the berserk latino swung it over hard; lock to lock, maybe not—but hard. The Rolls took it just behind the door, slewed into the cyclone fence, scraped along throwing sparks back in a fan, then shot ahead as Jimmy floored the Corniche.

¡Puto pendejo!

Doing ninety, he cut out of the number one lane, slanted across the second, third and fourth lanes, and ran away. The Chevy caught up on the grade leading through the saddle of the hills to the Valley. The culeros rear-ended him. Hard; once twice three times. Jimmy braked, speeded up, cut in and out, but the Chevy was hot, it ran him down like a bulldogger.

¡Vatos locos!

Two miles before the Mulholland offramp the cholos said aw, fuck it, and decided to boom him. They came up in the number three, doing ninety-five, went ahead by two car-lengths and slant-drove across his bow. Jimmy stood on the brake but it didn’t count. They impacted at eighty-five, the Corniche went in hard on the right front, ricocheted, spun out and went over the side. The Rolls hit the berm, dropped and began to somersault. The Chevy was horizontal across the three and four lanes, caught a centerpunch from a long-distance moving van, lifted, went tail-over onto its roof, sliding across the shoulder, followed Jimmy over the side two hundred yards beyond him and came to rest against a low hillside.

Behind the latinos the Rolls Corniche took one last roll, hit the crumbling hillside and went off like a can of beer shaken in a centrifuge. It blew apart scattering hot metal and parts of Jimmy allover the Santa Monica Mountains.

Say goodbye to Kercher O.J. Crowstairs.

“I’m not feeling too giddy about all this, now that we’re alone,” Jimmy said from the screen. “You five are the most I’ve got left. Everybody else has been taken care of; okay, they’re okay; I took good care of them, in the ancillary sections of the will. But you five are the big scores, and I wanted you to hear it straight from. me.” He stopped, wiped his mouth. Jimmy nervous? Come on, give me a break here.

“Missy, you’re first,” he said, looking all the way to his left, directly where Mississippi was slouched in her seat, long legs crossed straight out in front of her. “You get The Kerch Corporation and all its holdings.”

SylviaTheCunt gasped, off to my left. The smell of cardiac arrest was there in the library.

Jimmy went on. “You keep it running. There’s the land up at Lake Isabella, we own it free and clear now, and it’ll be built up pretty big within the next five years, they’re putting in that Kern County International Airport. Keep adding to the art, find a place to show it, something nice and stately like the Norton Simon Museum . . . you know . . . something toney and really chi-chi. Set your own salary, keep on as much of the staff as you need, hire more, fire some, do what the hell you want with it. It was just a dodge to keep the tax fuckers off my carcass, anyhow. You make it into something terrific, kiddo. I love you, babe. You watched out for me real good.”

Missy was crying. Toughest woman I ever met, but she—even she—lost it when Jimmy went to work at the top of his form. In Iran there’s a word —zirangī—it means cleverness, or wiliness. The Machiavellian quality. It’s much admired by the Shiites. Jimmy would have been a smash in Islam.

“And for the record,” Jimmy added, “let it be known that never once in all the years you and I worked together, did we once so much as fondle each other’s genitalia. The bantlings will need their gossip, m’love; and they’ll fasten first on she who was my amanuensis. Let the slushfaces herewith take note: you and I worked together for fifteen years plus however many more wash under the bridge from the date of this taping before I bite the big one, mostly on the basis of your being the best goddamned pool-shooter I ever met. I would have fired your tidy ass a million times, kiddo, if it hadn’t been that you shot the most unbelievable three-bank cushions into the hip pockets.” Missy was dry now. And smiling gently.

Then he turned to Brandon Winslow sitting right beside her.

“Bran, my friend . . . I’ve done you right, and I’ve done you wrong. But you never once treated me like a hotshot, and for that I cannot thank you enough. Other people were in awe, or they wanted to drink my blood, or they came sharpshooting. But you were my friend and my colleague, and you started out as something like my student but went beyond what I could show you. And you maintained, chum. You make the Hall of Fame for hanging in there. So this house is yours. The house and the grounds and everything in it. Live here, and change it any way you want to make your nest the way I made it my nest. I built the west wing full of separate apartments for other writers who need a place to flop. I never could afford to buy San Simeon from the state of California; I always thought the old Hearst castle would be a dynamite place for a no-obligation writers’ colony where kids who had the real stuff could come and work without worrying about rent or getting fed. So lay in half a dozen real outlaws, Bran. And the only rule ought to be that they can stay and be happy as long as they write. If they turn into leaners, if you catch them sitting around all day watching The Price is Right boot their asses into the street. But if they’re producing, they can live here forever.

Alone is okay, but loneliness can kill a good writer . . . you know that. Give them a community of sharp, witty minds . . . and three squares a day. You’ll be the only landlord who writes books that chew on the hearts of the literary establishment.

“Do it for me and for you, Bran.”

SylviaTheCunt was making sounds like the Titanic going down.

Then Jimmy looked straight ahead. At Leslie.

He didn’t say anything. He just stared.

Leslie took it for about thirty seconds. Then she got up and walked to the side of the room where she stood with her arms folded, watching the screen, still curious, but—once having freed herself of Jimmy’s power—unwilling to let him manipulate her beyond a certain point of tolerable terror.

Now Jimmy was staring at an empty seat.

She’s insensitive, or maybe desensitized; but she’s tough. Which also explains how she could have stayed married to him as long as she did. High-fashion barbed wire wrapped in Spandex.

“Leslie, you did okay in the settlement. But I suppose you rate more than a standard ‘I’m sorry,’ which doesn’t count for shit . . .”

“You can say that again,” Leslie murmured from the side of the room.

“. . . so the Corporation is depositing a million in the Bermuda account for you; I’ve signed over ownership of the magazine to your name; Kenny will transfer the chalet at Villarvolard to you . . . so you can keep that ski bum of yours on the string a little longer; and Missy’ll find a letter in the safe that transfers a substantial block of non-voting stock in The Kerch Corporation to you. Stay out of the business, take the dividends, and try to remember me fondly.”

“Right,” Leslie said from the side of the room.

Now he looked all the way to his right, directly at SylviaTheCunt, who had to know what was coming. There was still a lot in the till, and from what Jimmy had said of her in years past I knew she’d be bolted to that chair till the final farthing had been accounted for; but, for a wonder, she had to know what was on the way.

“To my beloved sister, Sylvia . . .

“And that’s the first time in over twenty years I’ve said your name without adding the sobriquet. Seems truncated, but these are formal proceedings and I want to do it without flaw so after I’ve finished talking to you—which you’ll sit through right to the last syllable on just the off-chance that I might act like a brother even though we both know I despise you with a pure, blue flame of loathing, and you might be able to cadge a few bucks—where was I?

Fouled in my own syntax. Oh, yeah, I was saying you’ll sit through all this maleficent defoedation—Kenny, if she needs help with that, stop the tape and get her the definitions—
you’ll find them in something called Mrs. Byrne’s Dictionary, in the reference shelf to the left of my typewriter in the office—shit, I lost myself again. Oh, yeah, I remember. You’ll sit through it because you cling to greedy hope like a leech on floating garbage. You figure I can’t be that big a prick after all these years, and so you’ll wait for the last rotten word I’m going to speak to you, sister dearest. And I’m doing this without flaw so that you won’t even have a scintilla of hope that you can contest this will. It’s solid, Sylvia; ironclad, rockribbed, diamond-encrusted solid.

“And the bottom line is that you get zip.

“Not a cent.

“Not a penny.

“Not a farthing.

“Not a grubnik. (Which is worth 13¢ American.)

“Not even a Blue Chip Stamp.

“Nothing is what you get. Nada, nyet, nihil, nil, nihilum! Nothing, because if I have any dislike of women as a species it comes from you. Nothing because if I haven’t been able, my whole life, entirely to trust a woman, it’s because of what you ran on me when I was a kid.

“Sylvia, I don’t think I’ve ever had a chance to tell you how deeply and thoroughly I loathe you. No, that isn’t even correctly put. I loathed you for most of my life, but about twelve years ago I just sort of dropped you out of the universe. You ceased to exist. You were never there.

“I know you can’t doubt that, because you were on the other end of the phone that time when—”

SylviaTheCunt screamed.

“Stop it! Stop him right now!”

Kenny Gross moved in from the shadowy rear of the library and cut off the Betamax.

The screen went white. So did SylviaTheCunt. She was on her feet, the veins standing out in her forehead; a dumpy, big-bosomed woman in middle years. Jimmy always said she was one of those pathetic creatures that had been assembled by The Great Engineer in the Sky without a love mechanism in her. It didn’t take a writer to see that. She had the look of old stone walls that had never even been considered for monuments or pyramids or standing circles.

“This is criminal!” she shouted. She clutched her purse to her stomach and kept hitting it with her fist. She wanted to strike out at something more offensive, but that was under dirt now. ‘‘I’ll fight this! I will!”

Missy came around her chair. She towered over SylviaTheCunt and looked down at her, eyes blazing. It may not have been Jimmy reborn, but the spirit had floated out of the grave, off the silent screen, and had entered the body of his most stalwart defender. “You won’t do shit, dolly. You knew what he had for you. You’ve always known. He hasn’t spoken to you for twenty years till now. You’ll fight? It is to laugh, dolly! He left the Corporation to me and I’ll put ten fucking thousand attorneys on it. We’ll block you and tie you up and make you look like the scumbag you are. Wanna fight, dolly? I’m waiting!” It drained her. Bran came around and took her by the shoulders and took her back to her seat. Missy slumped down, murmuring, “That bitch . . . she hated him . . . she never thought he’d make it . . .” Bran whispered soft things close to her ear and she quieted down.

“For the record I’d suggest you watch the rest of the videotape, no matter how distasteful,” Kenny Gross said to SylviaTheCunt. “In the event you do contemplate any legal action. Or if you prefer, you can wait in the living room and when the tape is finished I can run this section for you alone.”

She stared at him with animosity. She looked around the room at the rest of us, her eyes like slag-heaps. Then she went back and resumed her seat.

Jimmy was really putting us through it. It reminded me of the piece he had written after his mother’s funeral, where SylviaTheCunt had stood up right in the middle of the eulogy he had written and was reading, and had started screaming that Jimmy was defiling her mother’s funeral. It had shattered Jimmy. He could almost have forgiven her anything she’d done to him as a kid, as a young man, as an adult: but not that. She was doing it again.

It was posthumous revenge, but it didn’t ennoble Jimmy in the least. And it was hell for the rest of us.

The attorney started the tape again, and for the next twenty minutes Jimmy rang every charge he could on the woman. How she had brutalized him as a child, with specific deeds that he had remembered with that quirky selective memory of his. Affronts and mean tricks that were almost ludicrous but which, if you remembered how susceptible you were as a little kid, were monstrously cruel. How she had fucked over her own kids, Jimmy’s nephew and niece. How she had beaten down her husband, whom Jimmy had liked even though he wouldn’t stand up to her. How she had become a deplorable human being—racist, bigoted, coarse, provincial and, for Jimmy the most inexcusable of all, bone-stick-stone stupid.

For twenty minutes we all averted our eyes as Jimmy got into it like a ‘lude-stoked jazz musician trying to blow Bud Powell back from the Great Beyond. It was a bravura ugly performance, many riffs, a lot of high shrieking runs and a lot of low animal growls. None of us could look. There are beasts that go right in and suck the marrow, clean the bones to a glistening white.

But SylviaTheCunt looked.

With hard, mean eyes; straight up at the screen; locked in eternal combat with the creature for whom she had seldom felt anything but the most destructive kind of sibling rivalry.

Jimmy once told me how he had gotten SylviaTheCunt to stop pulling his hair. He said one time when she grabbed a fistful of his straight, brown hair he had gritted his teeth and started turning his body in her grasp. Around and around until the hair pulled so tight the pain went all the way to the soles of his feet. It was so horrible, so excruciating, that she had been appalled at how painful it must have been . . . and she let him loose. And whenever she would try it again, he would inflict that pain on himself. Until she was so horrified by it that she stopped. “That’s how I developed a very high threshold for pain,” he had said.

I remember when he got done telling me that . . . I was gritting my teeth.

But finally, thank God finally, Jimmy had had all of it even he could handle. He had turned and turned till the pain was insupportable, even for him. Even my best friend, Jimmy, with that seemingly limitless capacity for revenge, for not just getting even, but for getting a bit more of the vigorish in shylock interest, even he had had all he could stomach. And not a moment too soon.

“You can stop it now,” SylviaTheCunt said. And she stood up. The screen went white again, lights came on in the library where evening had descended, and Jimmy’s sister looked around at all of us.

“You haven’t heard the last of me,” she said softly, and then she left. You haven’t heard the last of me.

But I had the sure feeling that we had; we had heard the last of her. Jimmy had called in all the debts from his childhood.

We sat down again, the lights went off, the Betamax went on, and Jimmy turned his head slightly to the left, looking straight at me in my chair. He had saved me for last and he said, “Larry, buddy? You out there?”

We were driving from Chicago to New Orleans in an attempt to make Mardi Gras, which we would miss by a full day, arriving on Ash Wednesday, because in the next five miles we would spin out across the snow-covered highway, escape being piledriven by an oncoming truck by inches, plunge off the side of the road, and bury the Corvette headfirst to its rear wheels in snowbanks fifteen feet deep. But we were still five miles away from missing Mardi Gras when he said the thing I remember most clearly from all the years that we knew each other.

He was driving. He said, “You know the one thing about me that I’m terrified anyone will ever find out. The one lie that makes all of my life a lie.”

“I do?”

“Yep. You know it, but you don’t know you know it.”

“That makes no sense. If I knew it, then I’d know it.”

“You know more about me than anyone else, and you have the data; but you don’t know how much I fear it, how frightened I am that it might come out.”

“I’ll never tell.”

“You might. Get pissed off at me sometime in the future; I might screw you; you might let it slip without knowing it.”

“Never. I’ll never tell a living soul; honest to God, you can trust me, Rocco: I’ll take the filthy secret to my grave.”

“No, I’ll take it to my grave. But you might still tell it.”

“If you’re dead there’d be no way you could protect against that, is there?” He thought about that for a while. This was before he married Leslie. We were good and close friends, whatever that meant. But he thought about it, seriously thought about this terrible thing I knew that he was ashamed of, the one thing in a life like his so filled with things any normal human being might find the cause of sleepless nights, that didn’t bother him in the slightest way. He thought about the knowledge I possessed, this Damoclean sword I held over his life and his career and his work in which he revealed everything. Everything except the one bit of knowledge that made all of his life a lie.

And he said, “I’ll have to figure out a way to keep you quiet after I’m dead.”

“Good luck,” I said, laughing lightly; and then we hit the icy patch and started to spin out.

He looked straight at me, having saved me for last.

“Larry, I herewith make you the executor of my literary estate. You have control of every novel, short story, essay, article, review, anthology and introduction I ever wrote. All those millions of words are in your care, buddy. You’re the one they’ll have to come to if they want to reprint even one of my commas.”

I sat stunned. If he had done me the way he’d done SylviaTheCunt, taken this last chance to purge all the swamp animosity of a lifetime . . . or if he had done me the way he’d done Leslie, tried to clear his conscience of real or fancied harm he’ d visited on her . . . if he’ d done me as he’ d done Missy and Bran, paid off for loyalty and friendship and domination of their lives . . . I wouldn’t have been surprised.

But, oh you malicious wonderful sonofabitch! You did the one thing I cannot bear: you tied me to you forever.

Malicious? Probably not. It was just Jimmy insuring his memory. Going for posterity, and dragging me along with him, kicking and screaming every micromillimeter of the way.

What a mind, what a fucking sweetly conniving mind. I couldn’t even condemn him; hate him, yes, revile him, yes, rail at what he was doing, yes —against which I had no defense— but he was merely demonstrating as a perfect paradigm for his whole breakneck plunge of a life . . .

the ugliness of simply being human.

I sat stunned. And the voice of the turtle was heard in the library: “Would you mind cutting it for a minute?”

Turtle, the voice was mine; stunned, I sat in the darkness. The sound of very old, rinkytink music played distantly in the empty concert hall of my head.

Jimmy had set me up to be either his servant or his Griswold.

Poe. Jimmy got the idea from Poe.

He saw himself as Edgar Allan, cut off in his prime from the benefits of posterity’s accolades; he saw me as the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold, but a Griswold who was walled up himself, not free to blacken Poe’s name, a Griswold never free of the sound of the tell-tale heart, Jimmy’s heart, still beating, his will indomitable, his presence felt until the last moment of my own Griswold-trapped life.

We had talked of this. Poe was one of Jimmy’s idols. He was more than an amusing storyteller to me. But Jimmy even had a puppet made of Edgar Allan, had it hanging in the living room as an ever-present reminder of what heights fantasy could reach.

And we had discussed what Griswold had done to Poe.

He had buried him for a hundred years.

What a poor judge of human nature Poe had been. What an ass. But let the critic Daniel Hoffman (Doubleday, 1972) tell it:

Most of all, [Poe’s] own Imp of the Perverse so arranged the history of his career that his literary executor was his most invidious enemy, the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold.

This man, an ex-minister, a busybody of letters, an incessant anthologist and publicizer, a failed poetaster fattening on the writings of others as does a moth eating Gobelin tapestries, went to extraordinary pains, after Poe’s death, to present the deceased writer in a manner designed to make his name a household word for the dissolute, immoral, recklessly debauched. Griswold falsified the facts of Poe’s life, and he revised the texts of Poe’s letters, always with this calumnious end in view . . . .

The scoundrel’s punishment is this: he is now known everywhere, if known at all, as the maligner of a helpless genius; whereas had he done his job honestly, he’d have won his proper modest niche among the footnotes by which the nearly forgotten are saved from total oblivion.

How better to keep me quiet? What insanity! I didn’t even know which of the many seamy facts of Jimmy’s life was the one that so paralyzed him with fear of its disclosure! I wouldn’t have talked about him; I wanted to be free of him. I simply wanted to be able to say, when asked, “Yeah, Kerch Crowstairs and I were close friends for over a quarter of a century; he’ll be missed; his like will never come again”; the usual bullshit. That’s all I wanted.

But the crazy paranoid sonofabitch couldn’t even credit me with decent motivations after he was gone. My God, does fear have a life of its own, to keep feeding on the living after the carrier of the plague has gone down the hole?

“Okay, you can start it again,” I said.

Kenny Gross ran it back and hit the play button. Jimmy was in the middle of what he’d been saying when my heart had begun to slam at me. “—if they want to reprint even one of my commas.”

He looked so damned innocent up there.

Just chatting with his best friend; just asking his best chum buddy to take care of his memory.

“Larry, you know I’m not afraid of dying. Not that, and nothing else. Not spiders, snakes, being burned, being crippled, heights, closed-in places, ridicule, rejection . . . none of them ever got to me. Very high pain threshold, remember? But it’s tomorrow that gets me, Larry. The day after you see this tape. Will they still read me? Will I be on the bookshelves, the Modern Library, matched sets in good bindings? That’s what I’m afraid of, Larry.

Posterity. I want a chance to go on after I’m gone. Fifty years from now I want them to come back to my stuff, the way they did to Poe’s, and Dickens’s, and Conrad’s. I don’t want to wind up like Clark Ashton Smith or Cabell or the other Smith, Thorne Smith. I don’t want bits and pieces of my unfinished stories written by the literary vampires. You’ve got to promise me, Larry: nobody will ever touch one of the fragments in my file. I probably won’t know when I’m going to buy the farm, probably won’t have time to get into the file with a blowtorch and crisp all the false starts and half-attempts. I’ve got them locked up, everything that’s not finished, all in one file drawer in the office. Missy has the only other key. Get all that stuff out of there and burn it for me, buddy.

“Pride isn’t part of it . . . honest to God it isn’t! You remember when we talked about Poe how I said he had the right idea, that it was the work, it was Art, that held the high road, not religion, or good deeds or friendship or patriotism? None of those. The stories, the books.

That’s all you can put a bet on. That continues. And I couldn’t bear to think of some halfassed science fiction hack dredging up a line or two I started and didn’t know how to finish, and writing a whole fucking book off it, the way they’ve done to poor old Robert E. Howard, or ‘Doc’ Smith. They even did it to Poe and Jack London and . . . oh Christ, Larry, you know what I’m saying. Promise me!”

He waited. He watched that camera and he waited, four months ago. I murmured, “I promise, Jimmy.”

“You take care of me when I’m gone, Larry. You’re the only one I can trust to do it.

Keep me alive, Larry.”

And if there was more to that vile videotaped document I don’t remember it. After a while I was sitting there and the lights were on, and everybody else had left the room.

He did it. The clever sonofabitch did it. He figured a way to keep me tied to him. He knew I’d do the job.

I’d make sure there were regular retrospectives of his germinal stories; I’d write the best kind of interesting essays and articles about how significant Kercher O.J. Crowstairs had been in the parade of contemporary American letters; I’d set up seminars at the Modem Language Association conclaves; I’d edit anthologies of his work, putting the stories into fresh and insightful contexts; I’d keep him alive through his seriously considered work.

And in the bargain I’d sublimate my own talent. I’d spend a part of every day living with Jimmy. I’d hear his voice and finally start writing the way he did. And if I ever ever ever figured out what it was I knew about him that made all of his life a he, I’d keep it to myself till the cancer killed me, too.

And at last I know the nature of our friendship.

Say goodbye to Laurence Kercher O.J. Bedloe.

SAVAGE PLANET

Barry L. Longyear

A good teachers is a dangerous man.

Armath squatted in the snow as his deep red eyes studied the two-tracked vehicles in the valley below. The wind gusted, causing a light rain of fine snow to fall upon his broad, hairy back. As two creatures emerged from one of the vehicles, Armath drew back his lips, exposing gleaming white fangs. A low growl issued from his throat and he pawed the snow with dagger-tipped fingers.

“Hey, Charlie! Bring the caps!”

A third creature emerged from one of the vehicles, it walked over to the other two and handed something to them. The first two stooped over and dug at the snow while the third watched them. Armath looked at the marks the vehicles had made over the floor of the valley. Twenty times the vehicles had stopped, and as many times the creatures had emerged, buried something, then climbed back into the roaring metal carts. The two stood, waved at the one vehicle, then the three of them climbed into the second. The carts roared to life, then moved away.

Armath’s heavy black brows wrinkled as the carts kept going instead of following the pattern that had been established. He waited a moment longer, then rose on his four walking legs, shook his heavy mane to free it from the accumulation of snow, and began walking toward the most recent burial site. His eyes darted left and right, instinctively searching for darkness against the snow. Halfway down the slope, he spotted another male. Armath reared up, bellowed and held out his arms, fingers and claws extended. The other male reared up and returned the bellow. They both came down together and altered their paths slightly to avoid meeting.

Armath’s new course took him away from the nearest burial site, and he chose another. As he approached it, he saw the other male squatting at one of the first sites, and clawing at the snow. He turned back to see the disturbed area, marked with a tiny orange flag. Five paces from the flag, the snow around Armath seemed to erupt with an ear-shattering slam. He fell to the shaking snow, covered his eyes, and howled as lumps of ice struck his back. When the ice stopped falling, Armath uncovered his eyes and stood, his ears ringing.

The tiny orange flag was gone. Cautiously he approached the site and saw a hole that extended deep into the snow, through the frozen soil, into the hard rock beneath. He frowned and looked toward another site. It too was nothing but a hole. Armath turned to look at the other male and saw him crumpled next to the site he had been investigating. Armath growled, then fell silent as he padded toward the other male. He was lying on the snow, his back toward Armath, the wind blowing back his long black hair, showing the gray skin beneath.

Armath halted the customary four paces away. “You!” The male did not move. “You!” Armath bellowed. Still nothing. Armath traversed a circle, four paces from the reclining figure, until he came to the male’s other side. Armath looked down at the hole in the snow. It too went all the way to the rock of the valley floor. He looked up at the other male and howled. His face was missing.

On the liner to Bendadn to accept his post of chair of the Bendadn School Department of History, Michael studied two texts on the planet and its population. The Benda had evolved to dominate other lifeforms, and had been at the brink of their Iron Age, when RMI put down its ships and missionaries preaching the creed of the bountiful god of multiplanetary corporate domination. Earth was signatory to neither the Ninth Quadrant Council of Planets, nor the United Quadrants. However, both bodies had made clear to RMI that invading Bendadn with a combination of money and mercenaries would incur opposition by the combined armed forces of both organizations. Michael picked up the senior high-school text that was RMI’s secret weapon: Manifest Destiny—A History of Human Expansionism.

Michael again opened the text and leafed through it. He had finished reading the thing eight days before, and it still hadn’t changed. Michael shook his head. Some fantasy writer must have collaborated with an advertising copywriter to produce Manifest. Certainly no historian had anything to do with it. It was a simplistic, highly romanticized, overblown account of the human expansion into space, ignoring the warts and highlighting the invincible, inevitable nature of human force. The message was clear: humanity, because of its nature and tradition, was meant to rule. Willing subjugation meant peace and prosperity; resistance meant destruction. Michael closed the text with a snap. “What drivel.”

He leaned back on his couch and closed his eyes. At first he’d refused to take the top history post, but as the good Mr. Sabin had pointed out, “you’re selling your professional soul for eleven hundred a month; why not sell for twenty-five hundred? It’s the same soul in either case.” A good point, thought Michael. Whether or not my soul is for sale is the concern of principle; how much is only the concern of economics and bargaining. The crime is no more severe by being a high-ranked flunky rather than a middle- or low-ranked flunky. Michael nodded. The good Mr. Sabin had a definite way with words.

Michael closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. Then he shook his head. Opening his eyes, he leaned his head against the back of the seat. No one who has sold out has a right to be bitter, he thought. Why am I doing this? As the good Mr. Sutton replied when asked why he robbed banks: “That’s where the money is.” He nodded and tried to sleep. Recognize it, accept it, and to Hell with it.

A week to Bendadn, and Michael Fellman parked his water wagon and headed toward the ship’s lounge for the first time. He had played with a vague thought of using his experience on Bendadn as an excuse for turning over a new leaf, but as the trip and his studies of Manifest dragged on, his resolve wore as thin as the cliche. As he slouched in an overpadded booth sipping his fifth Martini, he had to admit that Rolf Mineral Industries allowed one to sell out in style.

“Mind if I join you?”

Michael looked up and made out the face of Jacob Lynn, RMI’s Project Manager for Bendadn. The man who would be the top RMI man on the planet. Michael held out a hand. “Be my guest, sahib.”

Lynn raised his eyebrows, then laughed as he sat and placed his drink on the table. “You ivory-tower hypocrites really kill me.” He sipped at his drink, then laughed again as he lowered it to the table.

“Perhaps you could share the cause of your amusement, Mr. Lynn.”

His face in smiles, but his eyes colder than RMI steel, Lynn leaned back and studied Michael. “I’ve been wandering around the lounge listening to some of you old mossbacks bitching and whining about life in general, and their own places in it in particular.”

Michael nodded. “And, Mr. Lynn, you are pleased with your place in this universe?”

“Yes.” He nodded and sipped again from his drink. “There are still things that I want, but now that I’ve made my peace with reality, I know I’ll get most of them.” He smiled and waved a hand in the direction of a booth full of graying instructors working hard with the free booze, trying to forget its price. “Look at them. For the first time in their lives they are being practical. But all they can do is pickle their heads to try and ease the pain of growing up.”

“You seem to take a perverse pleasure in their distress, Mr. Lynn.” Michael sipped again at his Martini. “Particularly when they in all likelihood don’t even understand why they are unhappy.”

Lynn nodded, then faced Michael. “But you understand it, Fellman. That’s why you’re the biggest hypocrite in the bunch. And, yes, I do enjoy it.” Lynn finished off his drink and motioned to a steward for a refill. “The reason isn’t too hard to understand, Fellman. When I left the university, after having you dream merchants stuff my head with nonsense for four years, reality slammed me right in the face. Every ideal you people implanted in my skull was a program for disaster. You didn’t teach me what I had to do to survive in reality as it is. No, you and your fuzzy-headed colleagues taught me what you thought really should be.” Lynn laughed, then took his fresh drink from the steward. “And here you all are, putting should be on the back burner while dancing to the tune of what is—if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.” He nodded and grinned. “I once had an instructor who was very picky about mixed metaphors. Now she’s working for me as a secretary.”

Michael raised his eyebrows, then finished off his drink. He lowered the glass, then frowned. “Tell me, Mr. Lynn. Why do I get the feeling that you want me to argue with you; to tell you that ideals are still important?”

“You’re drunk.”

“Which does not answer the question.”

Lynn looked for a moment at the overhead, then brought his glance down to look at Michael. “Maybe I’d like to see you put up at least a little fight; something to tell me that those years I wasted in and after college were worth something. You know, when I finally made my peace with reality and got with the program, I felt guilty—like I was betraying myself. I didn’t stop feeling guilty until I saw you characters being frozen out of teaching positions, and finally hopping on the RMI bandwagon.” He shook his head. “And all the time the truth was staring me right in the face.”

“Truth?”

“Biology. Any lifeform faced with the circumstances of its environment must either adapt to those circumstances, or perish.”

“And you have adapted?”

Lynn nodded. “And so have you, finally. And there really wasn’t any choice, was there? Powerful blocs of capital, labor, and governmental force are the circumstances of our environment, and those blocs aren’t ruled by foggy ideals, Fellman, but by pragmatics.”

Michael shrugged. “I still have the feeling that you expect some kind of protest from me.”

Lynn curled his lip. “Don’t you just make yourself the least little bit sick? Where are all those ideals you and your bunch held so dear?”

Michael motioned for another drink. “They went the way of the snail darter and the dodo, Mr. Lynn. As you put it, I have adapted.” Lynn narrowed his eyes and stared at Michael for a moment, then he left his half-finished drink on the table, stood and walked quickly from the lounge. Michael took his fresh drink from the steward and gulped it down. As he held the glass in his hand, he glanced at the door through which Jacob Lynn had disappeared. He looked back at his glass and nodded. “Of course, some of us adapt better than others.” He studied the glass until it shattered in his hand.

Armath squatted sullenly as his wives moved away from the eating fire. He watched Nanka, his head wife, as she went to the edge of the forest and brought back an armload of wood for the fire. He studied her short golden fur, her sleek flanks and gracefully arched back. He scratched at the long black fur on his shoulder. “Need not burn all wood in forest, wife. The eating is done.”

Nanka tossed her head to one side, added another stick to the fire, then dropped the wood at the fire’s edge. Armath frowned, then folded his arms. “You not speak.”

Nanka squatted by the fire. “Husband. I speak for your wives. Our Tueh is almost ended—”

“Stop!” Armath reared back, then settled to the fire under Nanka’s unblinking stare. “Hear no more of this, wife.”

“Must talk, Armath. Your duty to your wives—”

“No!” Armath growled, then swiped at the snow with a clawed hand. “No talk! Enough!”

Nanka studied her husband for a moment, then looked down at the fire. “Last Tueh season, when you saw the male killed in the valley, then the teachers came. This started. Armath, you sired only six females last season. This season you have sired none. Is our Dishah to die, Armath?”

Armath scratched at his shoulder and frowned. He lowered his hand, then brought up both hands and folded his arms. “The school, Nanka. You have not seen it. You do not understand.”

“The school.” Nanka nodded, then drew her left arm down her flanks. “You get from this school what your wives exist to give you?”

Armath lowered his head and shook it. “No. You no understand the school . . . It . . .” He shook his head again. He looked up at Nanka. “Join the others. I talk no more.” As she rose and loped off toward the edge of the forest, Armath looked back to the fire. The little gray human and his assistants had been teaching at the big houses for three winters. The Benda males would watch, listen and hear of the mighty human advance through space—a huge rock reeling down a steep hill, with other races nothing but feeble blades of grass. Armath looked up from the fire to see his wives talking together at the edge of the forest. He rose, shook his head and moved away from them to seek the solitude of the frozen river.

At his unit in the lavish instructors’ complex, Michael Fellman put down his history of the Roman Empire, removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He looked at his watch, noted the time, then mentally calculated the remaining Bendadn minutes left before his self-appointed happy hour. He looked at the bottle on his clothes dresser, then stood. “To Hell with it.” He went to the dresser, uncapped the bottle, and poured a glass full of straight gin. Returning to his chair, he sipped at the drink, closed his eyes, and let the familiar taste of juniper berries fill his mouth. He smiled, remembering that he had taken to drinking Martinis in an effort to curb his drinking. Michael had hated the taste of gin—once, long ago. Since then he had acquired a taste for the stuff. He raised his glass to take another sip, then the chimes sounded.

He stood, went to the door and opened it. Standing outside, his overcoat collar hunched against the cold, stood a frowning Dale Stevenson. “Oh, it’s you. Won’t you come in? I was just about to have a drink.”

Stevenson nodded, then walked through the door. “Doctor Fellman, I’ve come about something pretty important.”

Michael closed the door, then moved back to his chair. “You can dispose of your own coat.” He sipped at his drink as Stevenson removed his coat and tossed it on a chair. Stevenson pulled up his sweater as he turned and withdrew a large envelope that had been hidden there. “What have you got there, Dale?”

Stevenson held out the envelope, then walked to the dresser and poured himself a generous quantity of gin. “Something I want you to read.”

Michael weighed the thing, then chuckled. “What is it? Your rough draft on the history of human conquest?”

Stevenson took a chair across from Michael, reached out a hand and tapped the envelope with his finger. “It’s a confidential RMI report. It’s a biological study that was done on Bendadn by the company five years ago.”

Michael shrugged. “I have no interest in biology. And what are you doing with a confidential report? We’re not exactly in the inner circle around here.”

Stevenson took a gulp of his drink, twisted his face up until the fumes cleared his lungs, then lowered his glass. “I had it stolen from Lynn’s office.”

Michael raised his eyebrows. “How very imaginative of you, Dale. Would you mind informing me why you placed both of our positions in jeopardy in this manner?”

Stevenson lowered his glass after his second gulp, then nodded. “Doctor, do you know anything about the sexual habits of the Benda?”

“Not a thing.”

“Didn’t you wonder why males are the only students?”

Michael frowned. “The black-haired ones? I had no idea they were all male. I had supposed that the blonde ones were on a lower social scale—you know, something racial.”

Stevenson shook his head, finished his drink, then stood and went again to the dresser. As he poured, he talked. “The Benda are all females at birth.”

“Interesting, but how do they reproduce?”

Stevenson took his drink and resumed his seat. “It’s all in the report. When they are young, all during their growing-up years, they have competitions, fights, and eventually combats to determine a pecking order of sorts. The ones who wind up on top become males. They then form a harem of females around each male. That’s what they call a Dishah. That’s the family unit on Bendadn.” Stevenson paused as he took a long pull at his drink.

Michael looked at the envelope on his lap. “I suppose it’s of some interest to someone, but why a confidential report on it—and, I might add, why did you steal it?”

“In college I had a minor in evolutionary biosystems. It’s a hobby, I guess. That’s why the Benda interested me in a biological sense. Because of their method of reproduction and the social organizations that were determined by it, it is almost impossible that the Benda evolved to become a sentient, time-binding race.” Stevenson shook his head. “That’s why my ears perked up when I overheard a couple of clerks talking at the executive complex about a proposed update on this report. To make a long story short, I heard enough to prompt me to spread around a few credits to get a copy.”

Michael shrugged. “I only hope your dedication to history is as commendable as your interest in biology.” He tossed the envelope onto his coffee table. “However, it’s just not my subject.”

Stevenson studied Michael for a moment. “Doctor, there’s only two things you have to know about that report. The first is that males in this race are determined by conquest. Females are determined by being dominated.”

“I know, the competition thing—”

“The other thing you should know is that the Benda look upon our little history course as a form of competition.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Every reproducing male within RMI’s claim area is in a position to compare his race’s history with that of another race—that towering monument of lies called Manifest Destiny.”

Michael sighed. “I still don’t see what you’re driving at, Dale. None of us are happy with the texts, but we knew what the job was when we took it.”

Stevenson put his glass on the coffee table, stood and put on his coat. “I guess I misread you for all these years, Doctor. I’m sorry to have taken up your time.”

Michael stood and faced Stevenson. “What do you mean?”

“You’re rather a cynical character now, aren’t you, Doctor?”

Michael sighed again and held out his hands. “Whatever does any of this have to do with me?”

Stevenson shook his head. “When a Benda male recognizes he is dominated, he reverts and becomes female again. What do you think will happen to the Benda after all the reproducing males have reverted?”

Michael’s eyes widened. “Come now, Dale, I can’t believe that.”

Stevenson pointed at the coffee table. “Then, Doctor, I suggest you break your rule and read something in biology! I think you’ll find it has a lot to do with the history you’ve been teaching.”

“How?”

“In that report is an outline for Manifest Destiny.” Stevenson opened the door. “RMI is having us—you, me and the others—the company is having us teach an entire race to death!” Stevenson walked through the open door, slamming it behind him. Michael picked up the envelope, pulled the report from it, then sat down and turned to the first page.

Jacob Lynn looked up in surprise as Michael Fellman burst into his office unannounced. Lynn’s secretary followed in the historian’s wake. “I’m sorry, Mr. Lynn, he just walked right past me, and—”

Lynn waved a hand. “It’s all right.” The secretary scowled at Michael, then turned and left, closing the door. “Now, Fellman, what’s this all about?”

Michael took a bound sheaf of papers from under his arm and dropped it on Lynn’s desk. “That.”

Lynn raised his eyebrows as he read the title on the report, then he looked at Michael. “Where did you get this?”

“Transportation problems don’t interest me, Lynn. What does interest me is are you aware of what’s in that report?”

Lynn leaned back in his chair and half-closed his eyes. “Of course.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

Michael studied the project manager. With each sweep of his eyes, new information presented itself. “You knew all along about this.”

“Of course.”

“Why? This will mean the death of a race!”

Lynn smiled and shook his head. “You’re overstating things, Fellman. We’re not doing this outside the claim area.” He shook his head again, then fixed Michael to the floor with his eyes. “Let me introduce you to a few realities, Fellman. Developed planets with advanced populations already are exploiting their mineral resources. Uninhabited planets are many, but expensive to investigate. Therefore, we, that is, RMI finds itself in a position where it always has to deal with semi-barbaric populations. To maximize our profits, it is necessary that the local population cooperate.”

“And death is the ultimate cooperation.”

“You said it, Fellman. I didn’t.”

“Which makes one Helluvalot of difference, Lynn.”

Lynn smiled. “Is your conscience bothering you, Doctor? Is the size of the cynicism beginning to gnaw at you? You must know that any principle that you thought worth preserving was tossed down the toilet when you signed your contract with RMI.” Lynn held out his hands. “What is this performance, Fellman? Are you trying to manufacture a rationalization for your own purity?”

“Lynn, you ought to be sporting a forked tail and red suit.”

Lynn frowned, then laughed. “Are you complaining because I made a better deal when I sold out than you did? Or are old ideals beginning to shake their coffin lids?”

“You know, Lynn, you are the lowest form of life that ever crawled.”

Lynn, still smiling, shook his head. “No, Fellman. There we disagree. I know what I’m doing, and I accept it. You are doing the same thing and crying about it. At least I’m honest. What does that make you, Fellman? You and the rest of your ivory-tower crew?”

“What does that make me?” Michael sat on the crude stone wall overlooking the encampments of five of the Benda families. Each family was removed from the others by distance and strict custom. The families had moved from their permanent sites in order that their males could attend his lecture at the local RMI auditorium. Michael pushed himself from the wall and began walking the rough path through the encampments back to his quarters. He thought of Stevenson’s anger and Lynn’s smugness, and the words Michael had uttered many years before when a young idealist at the university had sought his support in protesting some rights-diminishing law. “I am tired. Too tired to again break my back on the knee of another lost cause.” A coldness had crept into his heart as he made his peace with uncontestable power; a coldness that allowed him to sweep together a few shards of career ruined by following impossible ideals.

As he approached the first encampment, he saw twelve young females competing to see which of them would have the strength, courage and stamina to become males. Michael remembered a line from the report. The Benda cannot conceptualize of an organization beyond the family level. It appears, then, that the company must either treat with separate families—with the entailing impossible conflicts inherent in such arrangements—or devise apian that will enable the Benda to be either treated as a unity, or eliminated.

Michael shook his head at the frigid sense of purpose implied by the report. The cynicism of pragmatics brought to the ultimate cynicism: the elimination of a race to achieve the kind of political stability that would attract investment capital to the RMI coffers. He watched one of the Benda females deliver a savage blow to another, sending the stricken child writhing to the dust. The victorious female whirled around on her four walking hands, motioning to her sisters to come and try their luck. Most of them hung back, but one reared up and charged. The two met with a bone-crunching thud, then were lost to view in a cloud of dust.

Michael turned and saw the females of another family similarly engaged. Then, he saw the family male squatting at the edge of the clearing, studying his children at their combat. The male’s burly arms and strong back showed patches of fine blond hair amidst the black shag of his coat. The male turned his head, saw Michael, then jumped up, startled. Michael smiled and nodded his head at the Benda male. The creature only stared at the human, then hung his head and walked slowly away from the encampment.

Michael turned and hurried away.

Armath waited at the auditorium door for the opening to clear. At a break in the ingoing traffic, Armath spaced himself behind the most recent entrant the customary four paces, then moved into the huge, vaulted structure. Its size was necessary to seat the Benda students in such a manner that no two of them came any closer than four paces apart. Armath moved down the ranks, spotted an open place, then walked to it and squatted, facing the tiny stage at the front of the room. He noticed blond patches on many backs, and that the smell of Tueh was in the air. Armath bowed his head, sighed and waited. After a few moments, the auditorium grew silent. The frail gray human called Fellman entered at the front of the room and climbed up on the stage.

He placed his papers on the lectern, adjusted the microphone, then looked at the assembled males. “Humans will bury you.” The words echoed throughout the auditorium. Armath frowned, for the human’s style had changed. “If this were a classroom full of humans, there would be talking, laughing, playing about. But not with you.” Armath could feel the scorn washing from the lectern across the students. “You can’t talk with your neighbor, can you? Look at you. Look at yourselves squatting as though each one of you was an island unto himself.” Armath looked and saw the other Benda males also looking around.

“Do any of you know why you sit apart like that? I’m asking a question? Do any of you know?”

Armath stood. “It is our custom.”

Fellman nodded. “And how is it that it became a custom? Can you answer that?”

Armath held out his hands. “It has always been so.”

The human motioned with his hand. “Sit back down.” He looked over the audience for a long moment, then fixed one of the males in the front row with its eyes. “You!” The student stood. “Why are we speaking my language—the language of humans?”

The Benda frowned, then shrugged. “Our own language is not . . . it is not complex as is yours. Our only need of language is to care for our Dishah. We needed nothing more before the humans came.”

Fellman nodded. “And we are here, aren’t we? And you will all die because we came—because we are better than you!”

Armath swallowed as the last echoes of the human’s challenge faded. Inside his chest he felt a tightening. The human walked from behind the lectern, then went from one end of the stage to the other, looking over the students. He returned to the lectern and leaned his arms on it. “The custom of separation dates back before the earliest memory of your oldest. Before the custom, a male chancing to meet another would enter combat to decide who was the stronger.” Fellman nodded. “Of course you know what happened to the loser. You know because it’s happening to all of you!

The tightening in Armath’s chest grew, and he recognized it to be anger. The human removed his arms from the lectern and held them behind his back. “Your ancestors were at least intelligent enough to see that this reduced an already small male population. Hence, it was agreed, long ago, that there was no challenge between males beyond four paces. This solved the problem, but it also eliminated the need for one male to talk to another. You cannot even talk to your own fathers if they can still reproduce, can you?” Fellman shook his head. “That’s why you are nothing, and will remain nothing, until your race is extinct!”

Armath snarled and stood, along with several other Benda. His fingers ached to rip the little man apart, but other Benda had him boxed in on all four sides and corners. Fellman pointed his finger at Armath. “You!”

The growls among the Benda quieted. Armath held his head high, his eyes flashing. “Yes, human?”

“You want to come up here, do you not?”

Armath nodded and flexed his fingers. “Yes. Ah, yes!”

Fellman moved a little to his left and pointed at the four-pace-wide path between Armath and the stage. “There is a clear path. Walk through there.”

Armath looked at the two Benda males flanking the entrance to the path. He saw the hair on one rise as the fellow stood. The male looked at Fellman, then back at Armath. He nodded. The male across from him nodded as well. The human screamed from the lectern. “Tell him it’s all right! Tell him with words, damn it!”

The male to Armath’s right looked at the human, then back at Armath. He held out a fist, then opened his hand, pointing it toward the human. “Pass.”

The Benda male across from him nodded and held out his hand. “Pass.”

Armath moved forward, his body tense, as he passed between the two males, then approached the next pair. They held out their hands toward the stage.

“Pass.”

“Pass.”

Armath walked between the two rows, stopping before each new pair, with each new pair holding out their hands toward the stage.

“Pass.”

“Pass.”

As he left the last pair behind and stood before the stage, he discovered to his amazement that he was no longer angry. Instead, his mind was filled with the wonder of what had just transpired. The auditorium was silent. Fellman walked to the edge of the stage. “Come up here.”

Armath walked the five steps to the stage and moved to the lectern. He stopped four paces from the human. Fellman glared at him and pointed at a spot on the stage next to the lectern. Armath reared up a bit, blew in and out a few times, then stood next to the human. Fellman turned to the auditorium and folded his arms. To the Benda males seated in the ranks, he appeared foolish and small standing next to the tall, husky Armath. The odd couple stood together until the picture was firmly implanted in everyone’s mind. Then the human spoke into the microphone.

“All over this Universe there is life that has a special quality. Humans have this quality; the Benda has this quality. You are not creatures of instinct, Benda. You are not slaves to the Universe’s whim. You are creatures of choice. What you are is by choice; what you will become is by choice—your choice.” Fellman looked at Armath, then returned his gaze to the assembled Benda males. “My job is to teach you about human history. That history has been one of expansionism, conquest and oppression.” The little gray man rubbed his chin, then dropped his hand to his side. “But no race has a longer history of resisting human oppression, conquest, and expansion than do the humans themselves.” Fellman tapped the papers on his lectern and spoke to Armath without looking at him. “Read this to the others.” The man turned, left the stage, then left the auditorium.

Armath moved to the lectern, his heart stopping as he realized that he was about to talk—to talk to a room full of males. He swallowed, looked down at the papers, and studied them to keep from looking at the sea of faces before him. His eyes dashed over the hand-printed lines, then he frowned and looked back at the faces. “The human . . . the human has left us a story.” He looked back at the paper, swallowed, then looked back at the males. “In a land far away, in a time long ago, there was a man. He was a hard man among hard men; he was a solitary man among solitary men. In the midst of a powerful empire, he was a slave, and his name was Spartacus . . .”

The winter closed, Bendadn saw its brief summer, then once again the winds brought the snow as two males met in the forest. Armath squatted in the field and turned to Januth. “Why do we meet here, Januth?”

Januth raised his brows and held out his hands. “Armath, can you imagine us meeting in my camp, or yours? Think of the females.”

Armath nodded. “They would be disturbed.” He rubbed his chin. “I wonder . . . about educating the females. What would Fellman think of that?”

“Armath, you are closer to the human than any of us. That is why I would ask you a question.”

“What question?”

Januth frowned and scratched at the new black hair on his arm. “This human, Spartacus, and the few humans who fought the Persians at that pass . . .”

“Thermopylae.”

Januth nodded. “And the human Hale who hung, and all those others. Humans who faced impossible odds, it is true. But they all failed.”

“What is your question?”

“I feel that Fellman would have us . . . become something different, something better, stronger.” Januth held out his hands, then dropped them. “But the examples he gives us all fail. What is the purpose of this?”

Armath studied the ground, then looked into Januth’s eyes. “Can there be, Januth, something more important than the Dishah! We serve our own lives, and that of our Dishah. That is how it has always been, and it is good.” Armath frowned, then held out a hand in Januth’s direction. “But is there something more important? The humans Fellman talks of. They failed, but they . . . failed serving something more important than themselves. Perhaps that is the lesson Fellman would have us learn.”

Januth shrugged. “He would have us serve something more important?”

Armath nodded. “It is what I think.”

“Well, what would he have us serve?”

Armath shook his head. “I do not know. One thing I do know is that he teaches us that the contest with power is never won or lost until one side or the other breathes its last. Our contest is not over. Who is the stronger is still to be decided.”

Januth smiled. “Do you . . . do you mean . . .?”

Armath grinned and held out his arms. “Yes. Soon my home will be crawling with screaming, squabbling brats!”

A month later, a strange human waited in the darkness at the back of the RMI auditorium furthest from the company administrative complex. He observed the Benda males, totally absorbed in talk, moving into the great room together and crowding toward the small raised stage where they squatted, shoulder to shoulder. When the auditorium was half-full, the Benda lowered their chatter, then became silent as a graying human entered and climbed up onto the stage. He moved to the lectern, placed some notes upon it, then adjusted the microphone. “Questions.”

Several hairy black hands rose. The man pointed at one of them and a huge Benda male stood. “Fellman, if the Benda is to serve something larger, more important, than any one of us, or any one Dishah, what is it that we should serve?”

The human nodded. “I am a human. What makes me better than you is that I can devise and choose those things that I serve. You are Benda. It is not for me to devise and choose the things that you will serve. You are creatures of choice; then choose.” The graying human looked to his notes. “Today I will talk of manifest destiny—”

A moan rose from the assembled males. One male close to the front stood. “Fellman, we choose not to hear any more of that trash. It is trash, and you have said so yourself.” The male’s comment was greeted with growls of approval.

The little gray man smiled. “You speak of a book; I speak of an ideal—the true destiny of humans, and of other intelligent races.”

The male standing cocked his head to one side. “Is this the destiny of the Benda as well?”

Another male stood and spoke to the first. “Fellman said that such things are a matter of choice. We cannot choose until we listen and understand.”

Both males squatted on the floor. The human turned to his notes. “Intelligent life rules other life. But it is not the destiny of intelligent life to rule intelligent life. The destiny of intelligent life is not to be ruled. As creatures of choice, it is our nature to be free to choose. Rule is existence by the choice of others as instinct is existence by the choice of nature. Today we will begin a study of the history of human progress and revolution . . .”

The Benda males, absorbed in thought, did not notice the other human at the back of the auditorium moving from the shadows, then walking rapidly out of the building.

Jacob Lynn leaned back in his chair and nodded at the biologist. “All right, Hyman. You’ve had a look around. Now tell me why things are not following the projections in your report.”

Hyman pushed a thin wisp of brown hair from his watery blue eyes. “It’s your boy Fellman.”

“Fellman?”

Hyman nodded. “He’s made the entire Manifest Destiny program into a laughingstock. In addition, he has the Benda males discussing matters that should be far beyond them. Dangerous matters.”

Lynn frowned. “Such as?”

Hyman shrugged. “He’s got them talking philosophy, politics, revolution—”

“What?”

Hyman nodded. “In addition, none of the males I’ve observed have reverted. By now they should have stopped reproducing altogether. Somehow, Fellman has convinced the Benda that they are, if not superior to humans, at least not to be dominated by humans. I’m afraid that simply removing Fellman and the other teachers who are helping him will not reverse the process. The damage is done.”

“What do you suggest?”

Hyman sighed, then shrugged. “There appears to be little alternative. You must convince the Benda—once and for all—that they are inferior. And this must be done in a manner understandable to the Benda.”

Lynn rubbed the back of his neck. “What are you suggesting?”

“A confrontation. A demonstration of force.” Hyman smiled. “I’m certain that you can devise a pretext that will satisfy the Ninth Quadrant Supervisory Forces.”

Lynn pulled at his lower lip, then nodded. “In fact, if it is worked properly, I might even be able to get the Quadrant Forces to do the dirty work.” He leaned forward. “One thing more. Your report said that the Benda males cannot act in concert. How can we provoke something that will appear to be an uprising?”

Hyman rubbed his chin and studied the toes of his shoes, then he looked up. “Fellman has them sitting and talking together. Perhaps he has made our task very simple by making it possible for the Benda to act together in an attempt at force.” He nodded and held up a finger. “One thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Fellman and his bunch must not leave the planet. Since they are aware of the report, it wouldn’t do to have them wandering around Earth, talking.” Hyman stood and walked toward the door. He paused and looked back at Lynn. “There is an alternative—but I suppose you know that.”

“Know what, Hyman?”

“If Fellman’s efforts result in a unified Benda race, RMI will have a political entity with which to deal for minerals. It will cut into the profits some, but no more than on any other planet RMI has invested in.”

Lynn nodded. “I’ll be getting in touch with you later, Hyman.” The biologist nodded and left the office. Lynn swung his chair around and stared at the map behind his desk. On it were marked the many test-boring sites that had uncovered rich deposits of hematite, silver, tungsten, zinc, lead—a treasure house of metals. He tapped his fingertips upon the armrests of his chair, then he swung back and punched a code into his desk’s tiny keyboard.

“Thorpe here.”

“This is Lynn.”

“Yes, Mr. Lynn.”

“Thorpe, I want you to prepare to have a full crew move into the Javuud Valley tomorrow. I want full-scale production to be reached within the next two weeks.”

“Yes, sir, but all the transfers of mineral rights haven’t been completed.”

“Let me worry about that. And Thorpe?”

“Yes, Mr. Lynn.”

“I’ll be having a full security company with your crew for protection.”

“Is there a need? I mean, has there been some trouble that I should know about?”

“Just taking precautions.” Lynn cut off the communication, then stared at the door through which the biologist had left. Lynn’s eyes narrowed as he clenched his fists. “It’s not profits, Hyman. It’s Fellman!”

Dale Stevenson felt the bite of the morning chill as he walked from his quarters at the subschool to the local RMI auditorium.

There were many things that had to be prepared as Doctor Fellman made his circuit of RMI subschools. First, the auditorium had to be opened, which was the easy part. After the lecture, as the mass of Benda males divided into discussion groups, Stevenson and the other discussion-group leaders would again be embroiled in the telling questions and spirited arguments of the students for the next nine days. Then Fellman would appear for a lecture and begin the process all over again.

As he approached the door to the auditorium, he nodded at the students who had gathered there, then he motioned to the RMI security guard standing beside the door. “Let’s open it up.”

The guard shook his head. “My orders are to keep these doors closed.”

Stevenson sighed. “Look . . . what’s your name?”

“Bartlet, Mr. Stevenson.”

“Then you know who I am.”

“Yes, sir. But my orders come from Mr. Lynn. The auditorium is to remain closed for the day.”

Stevenson held out his hands. “There is some mistake, Mr. Bartlet. This auditorium has to be open for Doctor Fellman to deliver his lecture.”

The guard shook his head. “My orders stand until Mr. Lynn changes them. I’m sorry.”

Stevenson fumed a bit, then moved to the door and tried the handle. The door rattled but would not open. He motioned to a couple of Benda males who were observing the conversation. “You two. Pull this door open.”

The males grinned at each other, then moved toward the door. Bartlet pulled a solid projectile weapon from the holster at his side and aimed it at Stevenson. “If they go near that door, Stevenson, I have orders to shoot!”

Stevenson’s eyes widened, then he laughed. “Nonsense!” He turned back to the two Benda and pointed at the door. “Go to it.”

A sharp report deafened them all. The guard, his face red, looked around at the students, then back at Stevenson on the ground holding his thigh. “I told you! My orders are to shoot!”

Stevenson looked at the guard, his eyes wide and glassy with shock. “My god, man, have you lost your mind?”

“I got my orders!”

The guard turned and faced the circle of Benda males as a low growl began at one side. He pointed his gun at a particularly huge male who began advancing. “Stand back! Stand back or I’ll shoot!” He squeezed the trigger again and again as hairy black hands reached for his throat.

Distath looked out of the door beyond his garden and examined with pleasure the rocks and fields of his Dishah’s land. The human’s lessons on property were complicated, but caused him many hours of profound thought. He rolled the words with his tongue. “Without a right to exist at some place, no other rights can exist.” He nodded, then started as he saw a movement among the rocks. A Benda—a female, not of his Dishah. He ran from the house toward the movement, left the garden and vaulted the low fence. As he approached the rocks, a golden female stepped forth and bowed her head. “Forgive me . . . forgive me this intrusion. It is my husband, Virsth.”

Distath glowered at the female, then held out a hand. “What of Virsth?”

“Distath, the humans have come with great machines to take my family’s land.” She hung her head, then looked into the male’s eyes. “Virsth sent me to warn you.”

Distath swung his head back, then looked down at the female. “You realize the impropriety of a female not of my Dishah being on my land?” He shook his shaggy head. “What care have I that the humans take Virsth‘s property? He is to care for his Dishah, and I mine.”

The female looked up into Distath’s eyes. “The humans come for your land as well, Distath. This is the message I was given to deliver . . . as my husband died from a wound delivered at the hands of the humans. Do with it what you will!”

Lynn’s office door opened and two guards pulled a struggling Michael Fellman into the room, then released him before Lynn’s desk. “Lynn, what are you—”

“You’re fired.” Lynn returned to the papers on his desk. “If you are found anywhere on company property you will be arrested under Quadrant Savage Planet Regulations as a trespasser.” He glanced up. “That’s all.”

Five days later, as his shuttle touched down at the RMI field on Bendadn, Damon Stirnak watched from his view port as Jacob Lynn crossed the tarmac toward the craft. He heard the shuttle door open, then he waited and watched. Lynn hesitated at the bottom step, then he moved into the shuttle. Stirnak did not rise as Lynn entered the passenger compartment, nor did he offer Lynn a seat. Lynn appeared to Stirnak to be having difficulties about what to do with his hands. They clasped in front, went into his coat pockets, jumped out and clasped behind Lynn’s back, then went off to hide themselves in his trouser pockets. Stirnak leaned his head back against the seat and closed his ice-blue eyes. “Stop fidgeting, Lynn.”

“Yes, Mr. Stirnak.” Lynn took a deep breath and halted his nervous movements through sheer will.

“You know, of course, why I am here?”

“No, sir. I was only notified of your arrival a few minutes ago.”

“Surely when your office applied for military assistance under the QSP Regulations it knew that the fact would come to the attention of RMI.”

Lynn shrugged. “Of course, but everything is well in hand. I see no need for an Executive Office investigator.”

Stirnak nodded, then opened his eyes and fixed Lynn to the deck. “Lynn, what is going on down here?”

Lynn wet his lips. “It’s all in the application for assistance, Mr. Stirnak. There have been four attacks on RMI facilities by locals—”

“Why? Why have these attacks happened? According to the Hyman Report, submitted by your office five years ago, the locals should—right now—be a whipped and dying population.”

“I can explain.”

“Do.”

Lynn wet his lips again. “It’s Fellman and some of the other instructors RMI hired to staff the school system. They turned everything around, making the locals hostile.”

“How did this happen?”

Lynn shrugged. “I’m not the one who screened the applicants for those positions. That’s a Main Office headache.”

Stirnak rubbed his chin, closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Lynn, I am going to give you a free hand with this problem.”

“Thank you, Mr. Stirnak.”

Stirnak held up a hand and shook his head. “Save your thanks, Lynn. I’m putting you on the spot.”

Lynn frowned. “Sir?”

“The Manifest Destiny plan was cooked up and submitted by your office. RMI has made and will make no official notice of the plan. That includes, as well, your present attempts at resolving the situation. You are on your own.”

“I see.” Lynn nodded. “If everything works out, I’m a hero, but—”

“—But if this all falls apart, Lynn, you will find yourself in a high wind, and very much alone.” Stirnak motioned to a seat opposite his. “First sit, then tell me what you plan to do about the Benda.”

Several mornings later, Dale Stevenson, hobbling on an improvised crutch, spotted Michael Fellman at the edge of the clearing that the instructors had been camping in. He pursed his lips against the ache in his leg, and moved toward him. Fellman looked around and smiled. “It’s good to see you up and around, Dale.” Michael pointed at the leg. “And how is your badge of courage?”

Stevenson snorted as he came to a halt. “Michael, if you think for an instant that if I thought that guard was serious, I would have . . . well, you’d be as ready for a soft-walled room as the rest of us are.” Stevenson cocked his head back toward the collection of rough lean-tos that housed the former RMI Department of History on Bendadn. “Look at us, Michael. Flabby, gray, weak, and without half an idea between us as to how to survive on our own, much less as savages.”

Michael looked at the camp, saw several faces turned in his direction. As they noticed him looking back, the faces turned away. Michael looked at Stevenson. “Have you been put up as a spokesman of some kind?”

“I guess I have. Look, you know as well as any of us how impossible our situation is. You know what the winter is like on Bendadn. I doubt if any of us can survive it like this.”

Michael shrugged. “What would you have me do about it?”

Stevenson shook his head. “I don’t know. Get in touch with Lynn. Ask for a deal.”

“What kind of deal? We don’t have anything he wants.”

Stevenson looked into Michael’s eyes for an instant, then averted his glance. “We have one thing.”

Michael studied Stevenson, then as his mouth opened in surprise he pointed at the camp. “You . . . and the others. You want me to tell Lynn that we’ll go back and implement his damnable Manifest Destiny plan?”

Stevenson kept his gaze down as he nodded. “What good are we doing like this? I ask you, what good? If Kurst over there hadn’t had a smattering of medical training, I’d be dead right now. The same thing for those two Benda males who got wounded with me. Michael, in a couple of months we aren’t going to have anything to eat!”

Michael sighed. “Is this the man who came to me with the Hyman Report? The same man who said that I have to do something?”

Stevenson shook his head. “I know. But, we aren’t doing any good like this. What about the families that got tossed into the bush along with us? You and I are single, but what about the instructors with families? Could you sit and watch your son or daughter starve or freeze to death? What good are our ideals then?”

“Dale, that’s when they’re the most important. I’ll tell you what good we’ve done. After you and the two Benda males were wounded, the rest of the students carried the three of you off and cared for you until we could get Kurst to you. Before we came, they wouldn’t have done that—not for a human, not for a Benda.”

Stevenson looked into Michael’s eyes and shook his head. “But what good are we doing now?”

“We are abstaining from the commission of a crime.”

“Aaah—”

“Listen, Dale. When you came to me with that report, what did you have as a limit on your so-called ideals? Do what you can, Fellman, just as long as I don’t lose my job?” Michael turned away, then spoke with his back toward Stevenson. “First, Dale, I doubt if the Manifest Destiny program can be salvaged at this point. Our students, I am proud to say, have learned too well for that. But even if we could reverse what we’ve done, I doubt that Jacob Lynn would believe it, or, if he did, that he would take any of us back. In his mind, he is committed to the use of physical force.” Michael turned back. “But if any of those in the camp want to try, I have no way of stopping them.”

That evening, Armath and a scattering of Benda males looked with horror at the bodies littered across the Javuud Valley. Squads of scaled creatures moved out from the protection of the mineral extraction plant. Each one carried one of the weapons that had felled the Benda long before any of them had reached the RMI ramparts. A hairy hand shook Armath’s shoulder. “The creatures seek the rest of us, Armath. We must run!”

The speaker ran off into the underbrush leaving Armath alone. The Benda male frowned as he felt the hair below his eyes and found them wet. He lowered his hand as a fist, watched the beings coming closer, then he turned and followed the other male into the forest.

Michael, Stevenson and several of the other instructors watched as the huge Benda male drew a seven-pointed star in the dirt. Armath looked up at the circle of human faces, then pointed at the star. “This is the sign they wore on their coverings, and on their flying boats.”

“That’s the Ninth Quadrant insignia.” One of the humans stepped forward and turned toward Michael. “Those aren’t RMI guards, Fellman. Those are Ninth Quadrant troops.”

Michael nodded at the man. “I can see that, DuPree. What I want to know is how RMI got the Quadrant to use its troops.” He looked up at DuPree. “You have experience in Quadrant law, don’t you?”

DuPree nodded. “The only way I can figure it is that RMI asked for the protection of the Quadrant under, the Savage Planet Regulations. What it amounts to, if a planet is savage, according to the law’s definition of savage, then a private party on such a planet can request the Quadrant to come in as a police force if a threat has presented itself.”

Michael nodded, then looked up at Armath. “Why did you do this? You cannot attack guns with bare hands.”

“This is the only way we know, Fellman.”

Michael nodded. “I know. I know. How many of you were lost?”

“A hundred of us charged the complex. Not more than ten escaped alive.”

Michael nodded. “That a hundred of you would fight together for a common goal; this is good.” He studied the star, then looked up at DuPree. “Savage?”

DuPree shrugged. “That’s what they’re called.”

Michael turned toward Armath. “Do not be sad, Armath. Your companions joined in the right cause, but with the wrong weapons.” Michael stood and turned toward the other humans. “School resumes tomorrow.” He turned back to Armath. “I cannot travel the circuit as I did before. Can you spread word to the Benda?”

Armath frowned, then nodded. “I shall have them told.”

As Bendadn’s chilly winds gathered, sending the white flakes of winter through trees and across fields, little gray men and little gray women stood ankle deep in snow, surrounded by hulking black bodies. At night, the humans were quartered in Benda camps. They earned their keep during the days with their talk. The Benda males listened, questioned, argued, then listened some more. As spring darted warm fingers into frozen draws and hollows, the lessons ended.

Ninth Quadrant Force Captain Vaakne lifted his scaled head as the orderly entered. “Jazut, this is what?”

“Captain, the Benda at gate there are.”

Vaakne stood. “Attack?”

The orderly gestured in the negative. “Talk it is they want.”

Captain Vaakne buckled on his sidearms. “Guard to walls posted?”

The orderly gestured in the affirmative. “To walls posted, Captain.”

Armath watched as the heavy Ninth Quadrant officer waddled from the mining complex gate. He looked up to see many of the scaled heads of the Quadrant soldiers looking back. The Quadrant officer waddled around the few remaining patches of ice and came to a halt in front of Armath. “Negias si naad, Benda?”

Armath shook his massive head. “Does the scaled creature understand English?”

Vaakne’s slitted eyes narrowed. “The English I speak. What is that you and the others here want?”

Armath extended a roll of papers and handed it to the officer. “Take this, creature. The papers are our constitution, the record of our election, and our government’s application for representation among the planets of the Ninth Quadrant Federation.” Armath pointed at the roll of papers. “In there you will find my government’s demand that Ninth Quadrant Forces be removed from Bendadn. Should you not leave, Bendadn shall request the United Quadrants to remove you.”

Vaakne cocked his head to one side, looked at the roll of papers in his hands, then looked back at the naked, hairy creatures that had delivered it. “Government? This not understand.”

Armath scratched at his shoulder with a clawed hand. “Study the regulations for savage planets, creature, and you will see. Bendadn no longer is a savage planet, and you must leave.” The six Benda males turned and left Vaakne standing alone.

On the RMI ship back to Earth, Jacob Lynn frowned and turned to the two guards who had spent the first several days of the trip following him like a shadow. “Do you have to follow me around like that? It’s not like I could escape.”

One of the guards shrugged, then rubbed his chin. “Where’ll you be, Mr. Lynn—just in case someone should ask?”

“I’m going to the ship’s lounge to have a drink.”

The two guards looked at each other, shrugged, then the first guard spoke to Lynn. “Okay, but don’t get lost.” They turned and went back to their quarters.

Lynn moved through the corridor until it widened into the ship’s lounge. He walked directly to the bar, obtained a double whiskey, then turned to survey the open booth seats. He saw a graying man with glasses sipping at a Martini. He walked to the booth and looked down at him. “May I, Fellman?”

Michael looked up and smiled. “Be my guest, sahib.”

Lynn made a wry smile, then sat down. He took a swallow from his drink, then lowered it to the table. “I suppose you know what’s going to happen to me?”

Michael shook his head. “Only a little. Is it true that RMI is bringing charges against you?”

Lynn snorted. “Yeah. Like I did it all by myself. I’m their scapegoat so they can remain on Bendadn. It seems that they are willing to try and work within the framework of your government, Fellman.”

Michael shook his head and smiled. “It’s not my government, Mr. Lynn. It’s theirs.”

“I suppose in some philosophical sense you think you’ve created Utopia.”

Michael sipped at his drink, then raised his eyebrows. “No, Mr. Lynn. The government of the Benda is far from perfect. Only the males can vote or serve in government. I advised them to extend those rights to the females to avoid a future headache, but as I said it’s their government.” Michael studied the former project manager. “Mr. Lynn, your problems stem from failing to take your own advice.”

Lynn raised an eyebrow, then he turned back to his drink. “What advice?”

“Adapt to the circumstances of your environment, or go under. The environment changed, Mr. Lynn. RMI adapted; you did not.”

Lynn took a swallow of his drink, then looked at Michael. “Why are you going back to Earth, Fellman? I would have thought that you would have carved a nice little place for yourself in the new society.”

Michael leaned back and returned Lynn’s glance. “I told you. My government isn’t on Bendadn; mine is on Earth. Since leaving Earth, I’ve learned a little about environments, circumstances, and—if I may use the word—ideals. I’m going back to see if I can find ears willing to listen to what I have to teach.”

Lynn laughed, then shook his head. “As a teacher, Fellman, you are poison on Earth. You’ll die on the vine.”

Michael finished off his Martini, then stood and faced Lynn. “Perhaps, Mr. Lynn, but at least I’ll find the vine I die on quite comfortable.”

Lynn frowned. “I don’t understand you at all, Fellman.”

Michael smiled. “I don’t doubt it.” Michael Fellman turned and left the lounge. Lynn stared at the door through which the history instructor had left, then he turned and finished his drink.

THE LORDLY ONES

Keith Roberts

Keith Roberts (“The Big Fans,” May 1977; “Ariadne Potts,” April 1978) never seems to repeat himself, except in terms of quality, which is always high. This new story starts with the most mundane of heroes—a lavatory attendant—and turns into something quite unearthly and moving.

How beautiful they are, the Lordly Ones,

Who live in the heart of the hollow hills.

—William Sharp, Rutland Boughton, “The Immortal Hour”

When I was very young I was given a pedal car. That must have been just before the War, as such things later became unobtainable. I mean by that World War Two. People of my generation still call it ‘The War’, though of course there have been many wars since.

It was a very fine car indeed, much larger than was common and with a door on one side that could be opened. It was painted a bright golden brown, with three smart red flashes on either side of its bonnet. It had streamlined headlamps let into its mudguards and its wheels had rubber tyres and chromium hub plates, though the hub plates could not be removed. I became very skilled at driving it, though perhaps I should not say such a thing, and could negotiate the narrowest gates and doorways without scraping its paint. I also learned to steer it in reverse, and was able to turn it round in very small spaces.

I do not know why my father gave me such an expensive present as we were a fairly poor family. I was an only child, and lived in an end terrace house in a back street of the town in which I had been born. Both the terrace and the street in which it stood have been knocked down now for many years.

It was a small house, though as a child I was not conscious of this, but it had a long garden. I remember the garden particularly well. It was closed off on both its sides, partly by solid fencing and partly by trellis work fixed to stout posts. The fences and trellis were painted with creosote, which the summer sun bleached to a pleasant brown. At the bottom of the garden was a tall, untidy hedge of hawthorn. The hedge had gaps in it low down through which you could see allotments dotted with little sheds, and pig pens made of corrugated iron. On a sunny day the allotments and the men working on them looked like little bright pictures seen through the stems and leaves.

The garden, though narrow, was further divided by two long paths made of some pinky ashy stuff and edged by a grey-leaved creeper that grew star-shaped flowers in summer. Near the house was a little paved part my mother always called The Patio. Beyond The Patio was a rose plot, then another with Lane’s Prince Albert apple trees, then the vegetable patch and some raspberry canes before you came to the cold frame and the compost heap. There was a little greenhouse too, built close up to the hedge so that one side of it always grew green spots on the glass no matter how often they were scraped away. The greenhouse had an iron rainwater butt. During the War my father put it outside in the street and wrote FIRE on it in big red letters, though we were never bombed.

I remember the garden so well because of a game I played there. All the paths had names I had invented, the long paths and the little ones that went between the plots, the hard, beaten patch by the compost heap, the turning place beside the cold frame. The borders had their roadways too, places that were not often dug and where my tyre marks did not show, but only I knew what they were called. On summer afternoons when I did not have to shop with my mother I would sit on The Patio and plan my travels through the country I had invented. My choice of routes was wide. For instance, I could take the North Road or the South. The North Road, the first of the long pink paths, led to Foxglove Close, or if I travelled its full length, to Cold Frame Garage and the greenhouse. Behind the greenhouse were old bricks and rotted boxes, and a pair of great spoked wheels my father told me had once belonged to an aeroplane. The bindweed crawled over them before climbing up into the hedge. The Road ended here. It was a dangerous place, frightening and a little dark. Or I could cross The Patio to the South Highway. Clumps of violets grew between the flags of The Patio, where the cracks were widest. I knew exactly the locks to apply to steer my wheels between them. From the Highway I could swing right into Mornington Crescent. The grass path in front of the raspberry canes curved a little, and it was here the sun came first in summer. I do not know where I had heard the name I chose for it, but it seemed right.

Wherever I travelled though, I would always end up in my favourite place of all. I called it Daisy Lane, from the big mauve clumps of Michaelmas Daisies that grew close by each year. Here, by careful reversing, I could slide myself right out of sight between tall bushes. Once in position I could not be seen from the house at all, but I could see. I could stare down through the gaps in the hedge at the men working in the field, easing the car backward a little by the pressure of a pedal if one of them paused and seemed to glance my way. The sun struck hot on my face and arms, and the bushes broke the breeze. It was always still in Daisy Lane, and wasps would come and bite at the old wood of the fence posts, little beetles would run across the earth.

In winter or when the weather was bad I would oil the motor ready for fresh journeys, and polish its headlamp rims. Newspapers would be spread on the living room rug and my father would turn the car on its side for me so I could reach the pedal bearings. I had been given a little oilcan, round, flat and with a long, thin spout, to have for my own. I kept it with my cleaning rags in a tin with an overlapping pattern in brown, gold and orange. The oilcan had to be stored upright, or the oil would spill.

I do not know why I have begun to write down my thoughts, or why I should think first of my toy car, and the games I played when I was small.

It is very still today, with hardly any wind, and the Station is quiet. Recently a skylight ventilator has taken to rattling, several times it has woken me in the night. Yesterday I got the big steps out and climbed up to it but I could not see what was wrong. I wonder if a strip of draught excluder would be a good idea. If I put it along the top of the frame by the catch it would stop the noise, and also prevent the rain getting in. At least it would do no harm. I am always careful about undertaking actual repairs, as I know I am not very good with my hands.

I did my first piece of writing last night. I have read through it, and do not quite know what to think. I am not really sure what I am trying to do. I am certainly not writing my life story.

Even if I was capable of such a thing, it would not be of any interest. Nor am I keeping a diary, I did the writing in an old ledger I found when I first cleaned my office out. So I suppose I must have started a hobby. I must be careful not to let it interfere with my work. I do not think I have ever had a hobby before.

The writing took a long while. Three hours, from locking the Stations until nearly midnight. I was amazed when I looked at my clock and saw how much time had passed. If I am to write regularly I must rearrange my schedule so as to take more advantage of the light. I have a good supply of candles but it seems a waste to burn them unnecessarily.

I read parts of what I had done several times. I was surprised at how much I had remembered about being small. I could never be a real writer of course but I find I can put my thoughts down clearly, and in the proper order. That will have to do instead.

I must spend this afternoon filling the water tank. It is a good tank and has been very useful, but filling it takes a long time. I found it behind what I think is an old factory on the far side of the Car Park. It was thrown out on a rubbish heap with a lot of used bricks so it seemed quite all right to take it, though it was very hard work getting it to the Station. I was afraid to drag it in case I damaged it but it was so heavy that carrying it took most of a day. It had a tap already fitted that I thought would be very useful, though when I got it back I realized it would have to be lifted up onto something before I could fill buckets from it. So I fetched some of the bricks and made them into two stacks for it to stand on. I was very pleased when I had finished as it seemed to be quite firm. The night after I fixed the tank was the first time I saw the camp fires on the hills.

A stream runs past the Station, within a yard or two of it, but the banks are steep and slippery and it is difficult to reach the water. For a time I did not know what to do, then I found something in a shed by the rubbish heap that I thought would help. It was like a little crane with a pulley and an arm and a sort of foot, a metal plate with holes at the corners for fixing. I do not know what it was for originally. There was some rope too. At first I did not like to borrow it as I was afraid it would look like stealing, but there was nobody I could ask. There is a bridge across the stream, where the cars used to come into the Car Park. I managed to fix the crane to its parapet with baling wire. The pulley was very stiff at first but it ran quite freely after I had oiled it. It was difficult for a time getting the bucket to fill. Instead of turning over and sinking it would float, and the current would carry it off along the stream. I found after several tries that it was best to drop it the last little way with a bump, and sort of jog it over onto its side. Of course I only have the plastic buckets that were supplied for use on the Station. I wonder if metal ones might work better.

I was very worried when the water went off. I did not bother so much about the electricity as I had a box of candles in the office and have been able to get more since, but without water the Stations could not do their job properly. There was water in the small cisterns of course, but the big one my side used to flush automatically every twenty minutes and without the sound of it the whole place seemed different. I got the steps and filled it with a bucket. I found it would still work when the water reached the proper level. At first I filled it several times a day but with nobody using the Station any more that was not really necessary. But it is still done twice a day, last thing before I lock up and first thing in the morning.

I have been thinking some more about when I was small. I have been trying to remember the very last time I used the car, drove down the South Highway or into Mornington Crescent. There must have been a last time, but I cannot remember it. This seems strange. I found the car a long while later, when I was cleaning out the wash house after my mother died. It was very rusty, it needed a good clean up and a coat of paint. There were new people next door, with young children. I asked them if they wanted it but they said no so I put it back where it was. It was hard to believe I had once been small enough to drive it. By that time most of my Roads had gone anyway, as my mother had been ill for several years and I was never very good at gardening. It disappointed my father, as he had wanted me to be a gardener like himself.

I did not get on very well at school. Everybody said I was slow, though I was never sure just what they meant. One time when it was very bad I started trying to do all sorts of things, like eating and tying my shoelaces, quicker than usual to show I was not slow at all. My father visited the school several times. I met him once in the corridor, it seemed very strange to see him there. Afterwards the Head sent for me, from one of my classes. I was very frightened. He asked me a lot of questions about the sort of things I did at home. I could not answer him properly as I did not know what he meant. It was a new school, built nearly outside the town, and his study was very new with light green walls. There was a cream-painted cupboard behind his desk, I knew that was where he kept his Sticks. They were canes really but we called it getting the Stick. There were also tall glass doors with a flagged courtyard outside, like The Patio at home only much tidier. He said he wanted to help me and that I was not to worry. I was very glad when he told me I could go.

After that they put me into a Special Class. They said it was to help my reading. We all sat round on funny-smelling straw mats with bright patterns on them and took it in turns to read aloud. I could read quite well although I was never very interested in books, but I could not answer questions. They confused me, I could never understand what I was supposed to say.

Afterwards the Head sent for me several more times and asked what I was doing at home to help my mother. I could never think of what to say to him either. He said he wanted to be my friend but I never really liked him much.

I think not being able to remember the last time I drove my car is really odd. It has made me think of doing other things for the last time. I did read a story once, about a man who was going to be shot for spying. Only they did not do it till the morning so that he could see his last sunset. But if you were going to be killed there would be a lot of other things. Like the last time you cut your nails, or the very last time you ever combed your hair.

Things always seemed to get harder for me, not easier. After I left school my father got me a job at the Council nurseries. I had to go and see a man called Mr Sanderson. I thought I was going to like it at the beginning. It was not far to go, just the other side of the allotments. There were three big greenhouses about 30 yards long. I could see the roof of our house and the big hedge at the bottom of the garden, it looked quite different from the other side. But I did not do very well. I kept breaking plant pots, things were always going wrong. And there was a girl who worked in the office. She used to follow me about, try and get me on my own in one of the sheds. She made me afraid to go to work. Then she said a lot of things about what I had done to her. They were not true but everybody believed her. Afterwards I worked at the Tip for a long time, then I was on the carts. I did not like that at all.

I was nearly 45 when I started at the Station. It had not been built very long then. I knew they wanted someone to look after it but I did not think they would give the job to me. I had to see a man called Mr Ireland. That was at the new Council Offices. He asked me a lot of questions, it was nearly like being in the Headmaster’s study again. Then he said that I had worked for the Council a long time and that apart from one small incident I had a very good record. He said that he had known my father for many years and that he had been a good worker too. He made some notes and sat and thought for a minute, then he said he would let me know. He was very nice to me.

The letter came next day. It upset my mother very much. I was really happy, I could not understand why she was not pleased as well. She kept saying, ‘To think a son of mine should be a lavatory attendant.’ But I never thought of it as a lavatory. It was the Station almost from the start. I heard a lady say one afternoon, ‘Thank God, a Comfort Station!’ It pleased me very much, it seemed such a good name. I think she was an American.

There are two Stations really, built on to each other, one for Ladies and one for Gentlemen. The Ladies side was looked after by someone called Mrs Stevens. She was rather short and had hornrimmed glasses and very yellow hair. On sunny afternoons she used to take a chair outside and sit by her door and knit. I used to say good morning to her but we never talked much. She did not seem very friendly.

I expect it will sound silly but I think the Station is very beautiful. It stands to one side of the Car Park, very close to the stream. It is low and plain and built of a sort of fawn-coloured brick, with narrow windows along the side that have muffled glass. Inside, all the tiles are white and the walls are a very light grey with more white on them in little splashes. It is always cool, even in summer. At the end farthest from the stream there is quite a large room with one door into the Station and another that opens outside. This is my room. It has a chair and table and a ring for boiling kettles, a sink and two big cupboards and quite a lot of shelves. There is even space for a bed, which is very fortunate.

I made a mistake about the room the first time Mr Ireland came to the Station. I had been there nearly 2 weeks then. When I took over it was in a terrible mess, with cigarette ends ground out all over the floor and dirt everywhere. I scrubbed it out, using the disinfectant for the Station floor, and got everything tidy, and Mr Ireland came to see what stores and equipment I had and what new things I would need. I said, ‘If you will come into the office, sir, I will show you,’ and he laughed. I felt myself going red at that, like I used to at school when I had said something stupid, but he put his hand on my shoulder. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘If you want it to be your office, that is what it will be.’ I do not know why, but I felt better almost at once.

The next time he came it was because I had written him a note. One of the channels was stained, it annoyed me as the rest of the Station was spotless, but although I had scrubbed it with the disinfectant for a long time it had not done any good. Also people kept writing things on the cubicle doors. Horrible things, sometimes. I had been rubbing them off with hot water and Vim but the paint was wearing away as well in places and the doors were looking a sight. He brought me a can of special cleaner that worked very well though he told me to be careful not to get it on my hands. He said he would get some special paint put on the doors. He even asked me what colour I would like. I said I thought dark blue would look very nice and he laughed. He said it was up to the architect really but he would see what he could do. I felt confused. Nobody had ever asked me a thing like that before.

I asked him if he would like a cup of tea. I do not know what made me say such a thing as it was hardly my place. I was sure he would refuse and that I had made another mistake but he said, ‘That would be very nice.’ I was a bit nervous, I gave him the cup with the big crack in it, I did not realize till afterwards. But he did not seem to mind. He sat in the office and smoked a cigarette. Then he said a most surprising thing. ‘You know, Tom,’ he said—he always called me Tom, right from the start—‘if everybody on the Council was as conscientious as you, we’d have no call for complaint.’ I did not know what to say. I felt really embarrassed, being praised like that. I had never realized there was anything I could do well.

After that I started coming down to the Station very early. It opened at half past eight in the summer and I was suppose to be there an hour before, but I took to coming down at half past six. It gave me a chance to do a lot of extra cleaning jobs, like the door catches and the windows. It was a lovely time of day, with nobody about and the sun on all the buildings and the parked cars. There was mist on the stream sometimes, but the hills all round the town were very clear.

Sometimes I would stay on late as well, after the Station was closed. Then I would not want to go home at all. My mother had died by this time and they had moved me out of the old house. They gave me a flat in a new building overlooking the Cathedral Close. It was very nice, there was a bedroom and a place where I could cook, but I did not like it. I was always happier at the Station.

I thought about it a long time, then I bought a little air bed. They had a sale of camping things at one of the big shops in the town centre, that was what gave me the idea. After that I could sleep at the Station and get up and make my breakfast and start whenever I liked. Each morning I rolled the bed up carefully and put it away at the bottom of one of the cupboards. I did not tell Mr Ireland. I did not think he would approve.

After he brought the cleaning stuff he started calling in quite regularly, sometimes twice a week. He always had tea. He would sit and talk about his job, and how hard it was to keep everything going with the money getting tighter all the time. One day he even brought some tea of his own, he said it was to replace all mine that he had drunk though that did not matter. It was a very expensive brand, one I had never bought. I still have some of it left.

I do not know how to describe Mr Ireland. He was about 2 inches taller than I am, with grey hair combed straight back and very bright blue eyes, but that is not enough. There were other things, and I cannot find the proper words for them. Nobody was ever as kind to me as he was.

I have been trying to remember how long it has been since anybody used the Station. The Trouble came at Easter, and it is nearly autumn now. So it must be at least 5 months, perhaps more.

I have fixed the skylight, though I do not know yet whether it has worked as it has not been windy. Also, I looked out of the office window tonight before I lit the candle. There seemed to be a lot more fires than before, and some of them were closer.

I must stop now, as the candle is nearly out. I did not mean to go on for so long, but there was more to say about Mr Ireland than I realized.

I want to try and write something very difficult. I have started twice already and had to cross out what I had done. I think perhaps this is the first really hard thing I have tried to say.

There was a song we had to learn at school, about the Lordly Ones. Miss Chaston, who taught us music, said that meant the fairies. It was a strange song and puzzled me very much at first. It said they lived in the hollow hills but I thought the other children were singing ‘the Harlow hills’ and that all fairies lived at a place called Harlow, wherever that might be. I often used to make mistakes like that.

I did not think about the song again for years. Then when I was working on the dust carts there was a man called Smudger. I never knew his proper name. He was a big man, much bigger than me, and had a lot of friends. I used to go with him sometimes to a hotel near the town centre to have a drink. I would never have dared go to such a place on my own. The Public Bar was up the yard and to get to it you had to pass a room lit by candles where all the guests were eating their dinner. The first time I looked in I thought some of the ladies were the most beautiful I had ever seen and for some reason I remembered the song at once. I knew they were not fairies of course, just very rich people, but afterwards whenever I went there the song always started in my mind.

Then when I had my flat I used to sit quite a lot looking down over the Cathedral wall at the grass and driveways inside, especially if there was a wedding there or some other big function, which often happened. The people who came were very grand. Some of them even wore top hats like in the films, so I thought they must be the Lordly Ones too. So although I was always getting shouted at for being clumsy or in the way, I thought if I could get the job at the Station some of them might come there and see the towels all clean and soap in the dispensers, and be pleased. I wonder if Mr Ireland knew that, and that was why he set me on.

I have had an idea. There is some old lead piping on the rubbish heap where I found the water tank. If I could somehow fix a piece of it to the edge of one of the buckets it would tip over automatically when it went into the water, and filling it would be a lot easier.

I cannot do very much tonight. I feel tired. I wonder if it is the writing, and having to think so hard to find the proper words.

It works! I went over to the factory first thing this morning, as soon as it was light, and brought the pipe back. I cut a piece off, using a saw that was in one of the cupboards in the office, and knocked it flat with a hammer. Then I bent it round the edge of one of the buckets and hammered it again till it was tight. After that I did not have to jiggle the bucket about each time to make it sink, and filling the tank took a whole half hour less!

After I had finished I went and sat on the bank of the stream for a time because I was still feeling shaky from having had to use the saw. I do not like saws. I was playing with one once when I was small and it slipped, I remember looking down and seeing all the white bone. I could not feel anything at first so I thought I had not hurt myself very much, then the blood all came in a big red spurt. I think everybody in the street came out to see when I was taken to the hospital. My mother kept shouting, ‘I told him not to touch the saw! I told him not to touch the saw!’ I do not think I was so frightened of the blood as of being shouted at again if the saw had slipped. It made me feel really sick. But it had not slipped, I had not had an accident at all, and after a time the sickness went away.

It is a very beautiful stream. There are notices on the bridge saying it is the River Avon so I suppose it must be, but it always looks like a stream to me. Under the bridge the water is quite deep but by the Station there is a shallower part where there are great masses of starwort. The underwater leaves are long and thin like hair but those on top spread out like little light green roses. There is duckweed too. In the very shallowest parts the leaves throw their shadows onto the bottom, each with a little bright rim. Hart’s Tongue Ferns grow on the banks. Their leaves are bright green and wavy, and the tips of the longest nearly touch the water. There are small trees too, mostly alder. When I first went to the Station I bought a book of plants, and can now identify nearly all of them.

I was always afraid they would do something to the stream, dredge it or culvert it. I remember when they cut the hedge behind the old house. It was only waist high when they had finished, all the branches woven in and out like a fence, and the dark places underneath it had gone. Everything looked different, it did not seem possible there had ever been that great mound of leaves.

I used to sit by the stream a lot, early in the morning and in the evening when the Station had closed. I was there when the Trouble started. It was a fine evening. It was a Sunday, so there were not many cars in the Park. I did not understand what was happening at first. There was some shouting, and bangs and rattlings like a lot of cars all backfiring at once. I only realized later it was shooting.

By that time I was sleeping at the Station nearly every night. I had bought a little gas cooker as I was afraid to use too much electricity, and I had a saucepan and some tins of soup. When I heard the shooting I was very frightened. I could not think what to do. In the end I decided to stay in the office and wait. I locked the doors and went to bed. Some people came in the night and took the rest of the cars away, but they did not come near the Station.

The noise went on all next day, and most of the next. The third morning was very quiet, and there was no electricity.

Two days later the water stopped running. I knew I must do something then, as it had to be reported. Also I was very hungry, having used up all my soup. There was a telephone box in the main street, at the top of the little lane that leads to the Car Park. I made sure I had some twopenny pieces and walked up to it. My throat felt rather dry as I do not like using telephones.

The main street was empty. There were some cars parked, one with its doors standing open, but nobody was moving about. Also there was a big cloud of smoke coming from somewhere behind the Cathedral. It was all very odd.

I rang the Offices. I had the number in my pocket book. I was going to ask to speak to Mr Ireland but the telephone did not answer. It did not even make those little clicks and buzzes you usually hear. I read the instructions to make sure I was doing it right, and tried again. But nobody spoke.

After I had tried several more times I went back to the office. It was a sunny morning, quite warm for the time of the year. I made some tea. I had to drink it without anything as I had run out of both sugar and milk. I did not know what to do, I had been relying on speaking to Mr Ireland.

It was afternoon by the time I had decided. I walked round to the Offices. The doors were all closed. I banged on them but nobody came. I felt more confused than ever and went on toward the town centre. I had not gone very far when I saw a body. I mean a dead person. He was lying on the path with his arms spread out and there were dark brown splashes all round his head. I had not seen anything like that before.

I kept on walking but I soon saw some more. One was a lady. She had some shopping with her, it had all spilled out across the path. Something, cats I expect or perhaps birds, had been scratching at it so that all the cartons were spoiled. I did not go very close.

There were a lot more bodies in the town centre and more cars, one with its windscreen smashed. The bodies were mostly on the pavements, so I walked in the road. I kept looking round. I was expecting somebody to shout at me to ask what I was doing. It took me a long time to realize that there was nobody left.

On the way back I passed the supermarket where I used to do my shopping. Its doors were standing open and one of its windows had been broken. I went inside. I was not hungry any more after what I had seen but I knew I had to get more food. I took a basket and went round some of the shelves. They were all still full. I took some corned beef and some tins of fruit salad, which I have always liked. I knew it was no use taking the bread as it would have gone stale but I found some things called oat cakes that were just as good. When I had filled the basket I went back to one of the checkouts. I did not know how much I had taken and am not very good with figures, so I left a 5 pound note in the clip on the front of the till. I hoped that would be enough.

I went back again when the food was gone. It was horrible. There were big crows flapping about in the streets and the whole town was starting to smell. I knew I had to have a lot of food this time as it might be a long while before anyone came back, so I took a shopping trolley. I tried to add it all up but I kept getting different amounts. In the end I just walked away. I knew that was stealing but I was very hungry, and somehow it did not seem to matter any more.

I do not know why the Trouble happened. There was a lot on the telly about the black people fighting the whites, and the Unions trying to take over, but I could never understand it. I do not know why black people and white people should fight. I knew a black man once when I was on the carts. He was a very quiet person, and used to bring small fruit pies to work that his wife had made. He shared them with me sometimes. They were very nice.

I have done more than I intended to again, the ledger is starting to look quite full. But it seems when I think of one thing it makes me think of others, and then they have to be put down as well.

I am glad I have written about what it was like in the town. I do not feel quite so worried now, though I do not know why that should be.

I had a bad dream last night. It was very frightening. At least I think it was a dream. It certainly started out as one.

When it began I was sitting by the back door of the old house in my car. I remember it very clearly. There was a patch of dark blue shiny bricks and a strip of earth to one side with ferns in it and a big flaky seashell the size of a football. The outhouse door was painted dull green and had a horseshoe nailed to it. I never liked to get too close to the outhouse as there was something inside it that frightened me. I found out later it was an old washing dolly but in the half light it always looked like an animal, with a long neck and big sticking-out ears. In the dream I knew it was going to come out and get me but I could not move. My mother was knocking on the living room window and shouting something, but it was as if the pedals of the car were frozen solid.

Then I do not know how it happened but I had moved and was rushing across The Patio very fast. Only the garden was not as I remembered it, there was a great hill beyond that kept getting steeper and steeper. The pedals started going quicker and quicker, then just as I was going to crash there was a great shout of ‘Whoa, back!’ It woke me and I sat up. I was sweating quite a lot. I was frightened because the shout had been right too. I mean, something I remembered. The house I used to live in was on a little slope and there was one Co-Op man who never used to set the handbrake on his van, and that was how he would shout at the horse when it kept walking on. The noise still seemed to be echoing, though why he should come back and shout in my office again after so long I could not understand.

I lit a candle, but there was nothing there. Then I thought the sound might have come from one of the Stations, my side or the Ladies, so I got the keys and a torch and unlocked them. But everything was all right. It was a beautiful night with a full moon. The hills showed clearly, and I could hear the stream running in the dark.

I did not go into the other Station till nearly a month after the Trouble. Mrs Stevens did not come again, though with all that had happened I hardly expected her to, so while my side was still opened and closed at the proper times hers stayed shut. Then one morning, I do not know why, I tried my outside key in the other lock. I did not think it would fit. But it did, and the door opened.

I was very startled by that. For a moment I did not know what to do. Then I put my head inside. Naturally I had never been in before. It was just like my side, the same light grey walls, the same basins and roller towels and white tiles. It smelled a little musty though, from having been shut up so long.

I went farther in. I was worried that I was doing wrong, but very curious. There were no channels, naturally, just the cubicles, but everything else was just the same, with a door at the back to another little office. It was open, so I went in. It was the same as mine, only not so tidy. There was a raincoat on a hanger and a corner cupboard and a table with some keys on it. I took them and put them on my own ring. I was not worried any more as I had come to a decision. Since nobody was looking after the other Station it was clearly my duty to take it over myself. This time I was sure Mr Ireland would agree. I went back and stood in the main part again by the cubicles. It still seemed a little strange, everything the same as my side only the wrong way round. But I soon got used to it.

My first job was to clean out the office, which was really in rather a mess. I tidied all the stores I could find and washed the floor, and stood the doors open for it to dry. Then I started on the rest. I cleaned the pedestals, flushed all the cisterns and refilled them by hand. There was a dispenser on the wall that I did not like to touch at first but finally I unlocked it. I did not know what I would see inside but it was quite all right, just a stack of little white cartons. I had found some while I was tidying the office and had not known what they were. I filled the machine right up and checked that it was working properly, then I started on the floor. A lot of dust and stuff had blown in under the door, I swept it out and gave the Station a good scrub through. Then I got the steps and cleaned the windows, inside and out. It was a hard day’s work but when it was finished I was very pleased with myself.

Next morning I went back to the town. I had realized while I was doing the cleaning that the other office would make a useful store room, and since my food was running low I had better get a really good supply. The streets did not smell quite as much as they had, though in the supermarket it was worse. All the food in the refrigerators had gone bad and there were rats scuttling about. They had even chewed the labels on a lot of the tins so it seemed I was only just in time. I spent a long while going forward and back with the trolley. When I had finished the office was really full. Then I went looking for other things that would be useful, like spare gas cylinders for the cooker. It was easy, as nearly all the shops had been left open. I had got quite used to taking what I wanted by this time, it hardly seemed like stealing any more. After all nobody else wanted it. Then I went to my flat. I had some more tinned soup there, I took it all and some clothes and blankets.

Nearly the last thing I did was go to the Cathedral. I had wanted to see inside it ever since I could remember but I had never dared, and now seemed as good a chance as any. When I got up close I realized how big it really was, with the spire going up and up in the sunlight and all the windows staring down. It made me feel quite giddy. I half expected it to be locked up but it was open too. There was a big door at the side, standing ajar. I went through and there was another door with a huge iron handle. I turned it and pushed and it opened a little way. The air inside smelled funny, very musty and cold. There were great tall columns like trees and a big window with the light all pouring through. But I could not go in. I stood on the step a long time but in the end I had to walk away. It frightened me. Places like that are for the Lordly Ones, not the likes of me.

I spent this afternoon sitting by the stream again. The doors of both Stations were open, ready for anybody who might come, and there was nothing else to do. It was a warm afternoon and very still, the sort of day you often get in September. The hills looked yellow in the sunlight, and some smoke was going up a long way off. It was really quiet but from time to time there was a sort of dull booming, like guns being fired miles away.

I suppose it will sound funny, but I felt at peace. I have been feeling like that a lot since everybody went away. I cannot really find the right words to describe it.

When I wake up in the mornings the sun makes a patch low down on the wall by my head, always in the same place. Birds are singing in the trees by the stream and I know if I go to the window the sun will be on the brick wall round the Car Park, and the hills. As it moves round through the day all the shadows change until they point the other way. Sometimes if there is a wind the dust blows across the Car Park in little whirls. When I lock the doors last thing at night the moon is coming up. The moon makes shadows too of course, and they change as well as it goes across the sky. The moonlight makes the Car Park look nearly white but the shadows by the stream are black, like velvet. At night it always seems you can smell the water more clearly. The mist usually comes when it is starting to get light. It makes long streaks that reach as high as the bridge parapet. Nothing else happens. I do not want anything else to happen, ever again.

Being on my own was strange at first but I soon got used to it. I was sorry for a while that I would not see Mr Ireland again but I do not think he will come now. I do not think anybody will come.

I have had an odd thought. I think I enjoyed the garden so much when I was small because I could be on my own there. Nobody knew about the secret places except me. I wonder if perhaps that is what I have always wanted. Just to be alone, and not have people always telling me off. Perhaps that is why I wrote so much about the garden, and my pedal car.

The tune about the Lordly Ones has been in my head again all day. There must be a reason for it. I wonder if they are the only people left, if they own everything now. I think it is their fires I can see on the hills.

If they do come, the Stations will be ready. They will see that I have been doing my job.

The water is running again!

It woke me in the night. At first I did not understand, then I could not believe it. The pipes were knocking and banging all round then I heard the big cistern flush, and the hissing as it started to fill again. I got up and went outside. I still could not believe it, but it was true.

I unlocked the Stations and went in with my torch. I was afraid of something overflowing or getting blocked. But everything was working perfectly. I flushed all the cisterns, both sides, again and again; and as fast as I flushed them, they filled back up! It was like a miracle.

I could not go back to sleep. I made some tea instead. As it was a celebration I used the special packet Mr Ireland brought. I even opened some tinned milk I was keeping for a special occasion.

I cannot write any more just now. It is getting light already and I have a lot to do. Both Stations must be cleaned right through, from top to bottom. I expect somebody will be round from the Offices soon, to see how I have been getting on.

I have made another decision. When Mr Ireland comes, I am going to show him what I have written. I expect some of it is silly but I know he will not laugh. I would not show it to anybody else. Nobody in the whole world.

I cannot understand what is happening. The water is still on and the electricity came back this afternoon, I kept trying the switches just in case. But nobody has been to the Stations.

I worked all day. I did everything, the tiles and channels, the pedestals, the downpipes, the windows and floors. I wanted it all to be looking its very best. But nobody came.

I kept telling myself they would be very busy, they would have a lot more important people to see than me. But when it got to evening I started getting anxious again and went up to the telephone box. It was just the same as last time though, the telephone would not answer however much I tried. So I went round to the Offices. They were still shut and big drifts of paper and rubbish had blown up against the doors. So nobody had been there after all.

It was getting late when I came back and I noticed something else. All the hills were dark, there were no fires showing anywhere. So the Lordly Ones have gone away as well.

I do not know what to think. I want to see Mr Ireland again of course but I am getting worried now about all the food still in Mrs Stevens’ office. I had to have food if I was going to keep on doing my job but I am afraid if he does come now he will think I took too much. But I did not know how long I would have to be here and it was only spoiling anyway. I did not take anything that was not necessary. I even returned the trolley when I had finished with it, I can show him where I left it. And he will see the water tank and the crane and know I did the best I could.

There have been noises in the town for hours now. Queer noises. It sounds like the shooting again. But that surely cannot be right. It is all over.

I am going to leave the lights on in the Stations tonight, and the doors unlocked. I know it is against the rules but if there are people about again someone might need them.

I think maybe the Lordly Ones came down from the hills and turned the water on for me. I suppose I am really hoping they will come here. I wonder what they will be like. Beautiful of course, as it says in the song. I wonder if they will be black.

They have been to the Station!

It was some time during the night, I do not know when. After I had finished writing I put the office light out and lay down on the bed. I felt very tired but I did not think I would sleep. I must have done though because when I opened my eyes again it was early morning.

I got up at once and went outside. The mist was still hanging over the brook, the trees looked quite ghostly with it floating round their trunks. The first thing I noticed was something lying on the Car Park. It was a piece of cloth, all covered with blood. There was some more near the Station door. I went inside and had a nasty shock. There was blood everywhere, on the basins, on the floor and splashed down one of the walls. So they must have been badly hurt. If only they had called me! I have bandages in the office, proper bandages, I brought them back when I fetched the spare gas cylinders. I could have helped.

I got started right away cleaning the mess up. I got it off the floor and the basins easily enough but it would not come off the wall, it still left stains however much I rubbed. I wish it had not gone on the wall but I do not suppose they could help it.

There has been shooting in the town all day. It is still going on. And there must be a big fire somewhere close because clouds of smoke keep blowing across the Car Park. The sunlight coming through it makes it a funny ginger colour. Sometimes I can hardly see the far wall, and the hills are quite blotted out. I was going to try and get to the Offices again but I did not dare. I wish I knew what was going on.

I had a sleep this afternoon. It was only a short nap but I had a very strange dream. It was as if I was standing a long way off looking at the Station. It was all on its own in fields, no buildings near at all, just the big green hills all around. It is still very clear in my mind. I wish I could draw a picture of it just as I saw it. But I was always very bad at drawing, even at school.

I wish that was how it could be. Just the Station on its own, miles away from anywhere, and me to look after it. I could have a stove for the winter, and curtains I could draw. And I could get up every day and polish the copper pipe under the cistern and do the channels, and the people would come and go from the hills and I could see them. And nothing would change for ever, there would be no more worries at all.

They are here again!

I do not know what the time is. It is still dark. I have lighted a candle to write this, as somehow I did not want to turn the electricity on. I am very nervous, though I am sure there is no need.

Although it is still night I can see the Car Park. There is an orange, flickery light like the light from a bonfire and I can still smell smoke. It must be coming from the burning building.

They are all round the Station. I can hear their feet scuffling and their voices, but I cannot make out what they are saying.

It is silly to be nervous. After all I am not important, they are not interested in me. But if they really are the Lordly Ones, come down from the hills, I am not sure after all that I want to see them.

They are calling something. It sounds like, ‘Come out, wherever you are.’ That is very strange. They surely cannot mean me.

There is something else now. They are all shouting it together. ‘Dan, Dan, the shithouse man,’ But that is not right. This is a Comfort Station, and I am its attendant.

This is terrible! They are shooting, at the Station! I can hear the glass going in the windows. They must not do that! It is special glass, I cannot replace it!

There must have been a mistake. They think there is someone else here, someone they do not like. I will go out to them, I should have gone before. I shall blow the candle out first, then open the door. When they see me it will be all right.

I have had a silly thought, the silliest of all. I would like my little car back again now. I always felt safe in it, I could pedal it through the door and they would laugh. They would see I was only a little child after all.

I am putting the light out now.

BEATNIK BAYOU

John Varley

John Varley is a two-time loser.

That is, Varley earned the distinction of being the first young writer to lose not one but two John W. Campbell Awards. He was not the first to be nominated twice, mind you. Lisa Tuttle accomplished that in the first two years of the award’s existence. Tuttle, however, won the second time around, sharing the honor with Spider Robinson, and leaving Varley alone in the grandeur of his double defeat.

Varley—who is John on his by-line, but Herb to his friends—made his professional debut in the summer of 1974 with the simultaneous publication of two stories, the memorable “Picnic on Nearside” in the pages o/The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and a notably less memorable short-short in the late, unlamented Vertex. The latter story was soon forgotten, but it was no easy thing to forget “Nearside,” a strikingly original piece that gave the SF community its first glimpse into Varley’s unique future history: the Eight Worlds.

The idea of using a coherent, internally consistent history of the future as a background for a whole series of stories has been around for a long, long time in science fiction. Robert A. Heinlein invented the game and coined the term “future history,” and Isaac Asimov provided the basic model that endless later writers would imitate with his Foundation stories. Since then future histories have been cheaper by the dozen. But not since Asimov had a young writer contributed an imaginary background as rich and inventive and singular as Herb Varley did with the Eight Worlds.

In “Picnic on Nearside” and the rash of other stories that followed it early in 1975, the Eight Worlds grew ever more detailed, ever more real, and ever stranger. Even the most jaded reader could hardly escape feeling the sense of wonder that infused Varley’s work as it has no other writer in a generation. Here was a startling new version of the future of humanity, a universe where cloning is commonplace and memory banks provide a kind of immortality, where Earth has been taken by aliens greater and more distant than gods, where the human race clings to survival in a barely hospitable Solar System. Here was a universe of symbs and disneylands and hole hunters, where people change sex as easily as they might change clothes. It was an odd, fascinating place, and if anyone had described it to me before I sampled Varley’s work, I would have wagered that no writer could possibly make it all work. Varley would have proven me wrong. The Eight Worlds live.

The handful of Varley stories published in 1974 and early 1975 were enough to win him a lot of reader attention, and a place as a finalist on the ballot for the 1975 Campbell Award. That he lost was no surprise, and hardly a disgrace. Most of the other contenders had published substantially more than him at the time of the voting.

A year later, with a much more formidable body of work to display, he was nominated for a second Campbell Award. He didn’t win that one either, but that was 1976, and that story is best left for NEW VOICES 4. Suffice it to say that he came close. Since then, Herb Varley has gone on to lose more major awards in a shorter period of time than just about anyone. Time after time his Eight Worlds stories have crashed onto Hugo and Nebula ballots in twos and threes, and time after time the awards themselves have eluded him.

But win or lose, the number of nominations speaks for itself, and what it says is that John Varley is a writer to be reckoned with. Not a writer with promise. Not an important talent of tomorrow or the day after. No. Varley is already one of the major figures of SF in the Seventies. He has come far and fast, and he will go farther. The rest of us will have to do our damndest to keep up with him.

The man behind these remarkable fictions was born in Austin, Texas, left the Lone Star state at age 18 to attend Michigan State, dropped/flunked out “from lack of interest and lack of attendance,” and bummed around the Southwest before settling in San Francisco. He started writing in 1973, and that was that.

To date Herb has written and sold more than twenty pieces of short fiction, a good number of which have been awards nominees. His collected stories, including most of the Eight Worlds oeuvre, can be found in The Persistence of Vision (Quantum, 1978) and the forthcoming Eight Worlds, due out in 1979 from Berkley/Putnam. At this writing, the title novella from his first collection bids fair to run off with both Hugo and Nebula trophies, thereby shattering Varley’s long-standing awards jinx. Lately he has graduated from short fiction to the novel. His first book-length story, The Ophiuchi Hotline (Quantum, 1977), was a major publishing event. His second, Titan (Berkley/Putnam, 1979), looks to be even bigger and more startling.

Varley has lived for the past four years in Oregon, which he does not love (“want to get back to civilization, i.e., San Francisco,” he reports) but thinks is a good environment for children. He is tall and quiet. “I am either 31 or 32 years old. I know which, but will no longer tell my birthdate. I despise astrology.”

The story that follows should delight both Varley veterans and readers new to his universe. It is an Eight Worlds story, a prequel to The Ophiuchi Hotline, and an inventive look at a different kind of educational system.

And, of course, it is a joy to read.

The pregnant woman had been following us for over an hour when Cathay did the unspeakable thing.

At first it had been fun. Me and Denver didn’t know what it was about, just that she had some sort of beef with Cathay. She and Cathay had gone off together and talked. The woman started yelling, and it was not too long before Cathay was yelling, too. Finally Cathay said something I couldn’t hear and came back to join the class. That was me, Denver, Trigger, and Cathay, the last two being the teachers, me and Denver being the students. I know, you’re not supposed to be able to tell which is which, but believe me, you usually know.

That’s when the chase started. This woman wouldn’t take no for an answer, and she followed us wherever we went. She was about as awkward an animal as you could imagine, and I certainly wasn’t feeling sorry for her after the way she had talked to Cathay, who is my friend. Every time she slipped and landed on her behind, we all had a good laugh.

For a while. After an hour, she started to seem a little frightening. I had never seen anyone so determined.

The reason she kept slipping was that she was chasing us through Beatnik Bayou, which is Trigger’s home. Trigger herself describes it as “twelve acres of mud, mosquitoes, and moonshine.” Some of her visitors had been less poetic but more colorful. I don’t know what an acre is, but the bayou is fairly large. Trigger makes the moonshine in a copper and aluminum still in the middle of a canebrake. The mosquitoes don’t bite, but they buzz a lot. The mud is just plain old Mississippi mud, suitable for beating your feet. Most people see the place and hate it instantly, but it suits me fine.

Pretty soon the woman was covered in mud. She had three things working against her. One was her ankle-length maternity gown, which covered all of her except for face, feet, and bulging belly and breasts. She kept stepping on the long skirt and going down. After a while, I winced every time she did that.

Another handicap was her tummy, which made her walk with her weight back on her heels. That’s not the best way to go through mud, and every so often she sat down real hard, proving it.

Her third problem was the Birthgirdle pelvic bone, which must have just been installed. It was one of those which sets the legs far apart and is hinged in the middle so when the baby comes it opens out and gives more room. She needed it, because she was tall and thin, the sort of build that might have died in childbirth back when such things were a problem. But it made her waddle like a duck.

“Quack, quack,” Denver said, with an attempt at a smile. We both looked back at the woman, still following, still waddling. She went down, and struggled to her feet. Denver wasn’t smiling when she met my eyes. She muttered something.

“What’s that?” I said.

“She’s unnerving,” Denver repeated. “I wonder what the hell she wants.”

“Something pretty powerful.”

Cathay and Trigger were a few paces ahead of us, and I saw Trigger glance back. She spoke to Cathay. I don’t think I was supposed to hear it, but I did. I’ve got good ears.

“This is starting to upset the kids.”

“I know,” he said, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. All four of us watched her as she toiled her way up the far side of the last rise. Only her head and shoulders were visible.

“Damn. I thought she’d give up pretty soon.” He groaned, but then his face became expressionless. “There’s no help for it. We’ll have to have a confrontation.”

“I thought you already did,” Trigger said, lifting an eyebrow.

“Yeah. Well, it wasn’t enough, apparently. Come on, people. This is part of your lives, too.” He meant me and Denver, and when he said that we knew this was supposed to be a “learning experience.” Cathay can turn the strangest things into learning experiences. He started back toward the shallow stream we had just waded across, and the three of us followed him.

If I sounded hard on Cathay, I really shouldn’t have been. Actually, he was one damn fine teacher. He was able to take those old saws about learning by doing, seeing is believing, one-on-one instruction, integration of life experiences—all the conventional wisdom of the educational establishment—and make it work better than any teacher I’d ever seen. I knew he was a counterfeit child. I had known that since I first met him, when I was seven, but it hadn’t started to matter until lately. And that was just the natural cynicism of my age-group, as Trigger kept pointing out in that smug way of hers.

Okay, so he was really forty-eight years old. Physically he was just my age, which was almost thirteen: a short, slightly chubby kid with curly blond hair and an androgynous face, just starting to grow a little fuzz around his balls. When he turned to face that huge, threatening woman and stood facing her calmly, I was moved.

I was also fascinated. Mentally, I settled back on my haunches to watch and wait and observe. I was sure I’d be learning something about “life” real soon now. Class was in session.

When she saw us coming back, the woman hesitated. She picked her footing carefully as she came down the slight rise to stand at the edge of the water, then waited for a moment to see if Cathay was going to join her. He wasn’t. She made an awful face, lifted her skirt up around her waist, and waded in.

The water lapped around her thighs. She nearly fell over when she tried to dodge some dangling Spanish moss. Her lace dress was festooned with twigs and leaves and smeared with mud.

“Why don’t you turn around?” Trigger yelled, standing beside me and Denver and shaking her fist. “It’s not going to do you any good.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she yelled back. Her voice was harsh and ugly and what had probably been a sweet face was now set in a scowl. An alligator was swimming up to look her over. She swung at it with her fist, nearly losing her balance. “Get out of here, you slimy lizard!” she screamed. The reptile recalled urgent business on the other side of the swamp, and hurried out of her way.

She clambered ashore and stood ankle-deep in ooze, breathing hard. She was a mess, and beneath her anger I could now see fear. Her lips trembled for a moment. I wished she would sit down; just looking at her exhausted me.

“You’ve got to help me,” she said, simply.

“Believe me, if I could, I would,” Cathay said.

“Then tell me somebody who can.”

“I told you, if the Educational Exchange can’t help you, I certainly can’t. Those few people I know who are available for a contract are listed on the exchange.”

“But none of them are available any sooner than three years.”

“I know. It’s the shortage.”

“Then help me,” she said, miserably. “Help me.”

Cathay slowly rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, then squared his shoulders and put his hands on his hips.

“I’ll go over it once more. Somebody gave you my name and said I was available for a primary stage teaching contract. I—”

“He did! He said you’d—”

“I never heard of this person,” Cathay said, raising his voice. “Judging from what you’re putting me through, he gave you my name from the Teacher’s Association listings just to get you off his back. I guess I could do something like that, but frankly, I don’t think I have the right to subject another teacher to the sort of abuse you’ve heaped on me.” He paused, and for once she didn’t say anything.

“Right,” he said, finally. “I’m truly sorry that the man you contracted with for your child’s education went to Pluto instead. From what you told me, what he did was legal, which is not to say ethical.” He grimaced at the thought of a teacher who would run out on an ethical obligation. “All I can say is you should have had the contract analyzed, you should have had a standby contract drawn up three years ago . . . Oh, hell. What’s the use? That doesn’t do you any good. You have my sympathy, I hope you believe that.”

“Then help me,” she whispered, and the last word turned into a sob. She began to cry quietly. Her shoulders shook and tears leaked from her eyes, but she never looked away from Cathay.

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“You have to.”

“Once more. I have obligations of my own. In another month, when I’ve fulfilled my contract with Argus’ mother,” he gestured toward me, “I’ll be regressing to seven again. Don’t you understand? I’ve already got an intermediate contract. The child will be seven in a few months. I contracted for her education four years ago. There’s no way I can back out of that, legally or morally.”

Her face was twisting again, filling with hate.

“Why not?” she rasped. “Why the hell not? He ran out on my contract. Why the hell should I be the only one to suffer? Why me, huh? Listen to me, you shit-sucking little son of a blowout. You’re all I’ve got left. After you, there’s nothing but the public educator. Or trying to raise him all by myself, all alone, with no guidance. You want to be responsible for that? What the hell kind of start in life does that give him?”

She went on like that for a good ten minutes, getting more illogical and abusive with every sentence. I’d vacillated between a sort of queasy sympathy for her—she was in a hell of a mess, even though she had no one to blame but herself—and outright hostility. Just then she scared me. I couldn’t look into those tortured eyes without cringing. My gaze wandered down to her fat belly, and the glass eye of the wombscope set into her navel. I didn’t need to look into it to know she was due, and overdue. She’d been having the labor postponed while she tried to line up a teacher. Not that it made much sense; the kid’s education didn’t start until his sixth month. But it was a measure of her desperation, and of her illogical thinking under stress.

Cathay stood there and took it until she broke into tears again. I saw her differently this time, maybe a little more like Cathay was seeing her. I was sorry for her, but the tears failed to move me. I saw that she could devour us all if we didn’t harden ourselves to her. When it came right down to it, she was the one who had to pay for her carelessness. She was trying her best to get someone else to shoulder the blame, but Cathay wasn’t going to do it.

“I didn’t want to do this,” Cathay said. He looked back at us. “Trigger?”

Trigger stepped forward and folded her arms across her chest.

“Okay,” she said. “Listen, I didn’t get your name, and I don’t really want to know it. But whoever you are, you’re on my property, in my house. I’m ordering you to leave here, and I further enjoin you never to come back.”

“I won’t go,” she said, stubbornly, looking down at her feet. “I’m not leaving till he promises to help me.”

“My next step is to call the police,” Trigger reminded her.

“I’m not leaving.”

Trigger looked at Cathay and shrugged helplessly. I think they were both realizing that this particular life experience was getting a little too raw.

Cathay thought it over for a moment, eye to eye with the pregnant woman. Then he reached down and scooped up a handful of mud. He looked at it, hefting it experimentally, then threw it at her. It struck her on the left shoulder with a wet plop, and began to ooze down.

“Go.” he said. “Get out of here.”

“I’m not leaving,” she said.

He threw another handful. It hit her face, and she gasped and sputtered.

“Go,” he said, reaching for more mud. This time he hit her on the leg, but by now Trigger had joined him, and the woman was being pelted.

Before I quite knew what was happening, I was scooping mud from the ground and throwing it. Denver was, too. I was breathing hard, and I wasn’t sure why.

When she finally turned and fled from us, I noticed that my jaw muscles were tight as steel. It took me a long time to relax them, and when I did, my front teeth were sore.

There are two structures on Beatnik Bayou. One is an old, rotting bait shop and lunch counter called the Sugar Shack, complete with a rusty gas pump out front, a battered Grapette machine on the porch, and a sign advertising Rainbow Bread on the screen door. There’s a gray Dodge pickup sitting on concrete blocks to one side of the building, near a pile of rusted auto parts overgrown with weeds. The truck has no wheels. Beside it is a Toyota sedan with no windows or engine. A dirt road runs in front of the shack, going down to the dock. In the other direction the road curves around a cypress tree laden with moss—

—and runs into the wall. A bit of a jolt. But though twelve acres is large for a privately owned disneyland, it’s not big enough to sustain the illusion of really being there. “There,” in this case is supposed to be Louisiana in 1951, old style. Trigger is fascinated by the twentieth century, which she defines as 1903 to 1987.

But most of the time it works. You can seldom see the walls because trees are in the way. Anyhow, I soak up the atmosphere of the place not so much with my eyes but with my nose and ears and skin. Like the smell of rotting wood, the sound of a frog hitting the water or the hum of the compressor in the soft drink machine, the silver wiggle of a dozen minnows as I scoop them from the metal tanks in back of the shack, the feel of sun-heated wood as I sit on the pier fishing for alligator gar.

It takes a lot of power to operate the “sun,” so we get a lot of foggy days, and long nights. That helps the illusion, too. I would challenge anyone to go for a walk in the bayou night with the crickets chirping and the bullfrogs booming and not think they were back on Old Earth. Except for the Lunar gravity, of course.

Trigger inherited money. Even with that and a teacher’s salary, the bayou is an expensive place to maintain. It used to be a more conventional environment, but she discovered early that the swamp took less upkeep, and she likes the sleazy atmosphere, anyway. She put in the bait shop, bought the automotive mockups from artists, and got it listed with the Lunar Tourist Bureau as an authentic period reconstruction. They’d die if they knew the truth about the Toyota, but I certainly won’t tell them.

The only other structure is definitely not from Louisiana of any year. It’s a teepee sitting on a slight rise, just out of sight of the Sugar Shack. Cheyenne, I think. We spend most of our time there when we’re on the bayou.

That’s where we went after the episode with the pregnant woman. The floor is hard-packed clay and there’s a fire always burning in the center. There’s lots of pillows scattered around, and two big waterbeds.

We tried to talk about the incident. I think Denver was more upset than the rest of us, but from the tense way Cathay sat while Trigger massaged his back I knew he was bothered, too. His voice was troubled.

I admitted I had been scared, but there was more to it than that, and I was far from ready to talk about it. Trigger and Cathay sensed it, and let it go for the time being. Trigger got the pipe and stuffed it with dexeplant leaves.

It’s a long-stemmed pipe. She got it lit, then leaned back with the stem in her teeth and the bowl held between her toes. She exhaled sweet, honey-colored smoke. As the day ended outside, she passed the pipe around. It tasted good, and calmed me wonderfully. It made it easy to fall asleep.

But I didn’t sleep. Not quite. Maybe I was too far into puberty for the drug in the plant to act as a tranquilizer anymore. Or maybe I was too emotionally stimulated. Denver fell asleep quickly enough.

Cathay and Trigger didn’t. They made love on the other side of the teepee, did it in such a slow, dreamy way that I knew the drug was affecting them. Though Cathay is in his forties and Trigger is over a hundred, both have the bodies of thirteen-year-olds, and the metabolism that goes with the territory.

They didn’t actually finish making love; they sort of tapered off, like we used to do before orgasms became a factor. I found that made me happy, lying on my side and watching them through slitted eyes.

They talked for a while. The harder I strained to hear them, the sleepier I got. Somewhere in there I lost the battle to stay awake.

I became aware of a warm body close to me. It was still dark, the only light coming from the embers of the fire.

“Sorry, Argus,” Cathay said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s okay. Put your arms around me?” He did, and I squirmed until my back fit snugly against him. For a long time I just enjoyed it. I didn’t think about anything, unless it was his warm breath on my neck, or his penis slowly hardening against my back. If you can call that thinking.

How many nights had we slept like this in the last seven years? Too many to count. We knew each other every way possible. A year ago he had been female, and before that both of us had been. Now we were both male, and that was nice, too. One part of me thought it didn’t really matter which sex we were, but another part was wondering what it would be like to be female and know Cathay as a male. We hadn’t tried that yet.

The thought of it made me shiver with anticipation. It had been too long since I’d had a vagina. I wanted Cathay between my legs, like Trigger had had him a short while before.

“I love you,” I mumbled.

He kissed my ear. “I love you, too, silly. But how much do you love me?”

“What do you mean?”

I felt him shift around to prop his head up on one hand. His fingers unwound a tight curl in my hair.

“I mean, will you still love me when I’m no taller than your knee?”

I shook my head, suddenly feeling cold. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“I know that very well,” he said. “But I can’t let you forget it. It’s not something that’ll go away.”

I turned onto my back and looked up at him. There was a faint smile on his face as he toyed with my lips and hair with his gentle fingertips, but his eyes were concerned. Cathay can’t hide much from me anymore.

“It has to happen,” he emphasized, showing no mercy. “For the reasons you heard me tell the woman. I’m committed to going back to age seven. There’s another child waiting for me. She’s a lot like you.”

“Don’t do it,” I said, feeling miserable. I felt a tear in the corner of my eye, and Cathay brushed it away.

I was thankful that he didn’t point out how unfair I was being. We both knew it; he accepted that, and went on as best he could.

“You remember our talk about sex? About two years ago, I think it was. Not too long after you first told me you love me.”

“I remember. I remember it all.”

He kissed me. “Still, I have to bring it up. Maybe it’ll help. You know we agreed that it didn’t matter what sex either of us was. Then I pointed out that you’d be growing up, while I’d become a child again. That we’d grow further apart sexually.”

I nodded, knowing that if I spoke I’d start to sob.

“And we agreed that our love was deeper than that. That we didn’t need sex to make it work. It can work.”

This was true. Cathay was close to all his former students. They were adults now, and came to see him often. It was just to be close, to talk and hug. Lately sex had entered it again, but they all understood that would be over soon.

“I don’t think I have that perspective,” I said, carefully. “They know in a few years you’ll mature again. I know it too, but it still feels like . . .”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re abandoning me. I’m sorry, that’s just how it feels.”

He sighed, and pulled me close to him. He hugged me fiercely for a while, and it felt so good.

“Listen,” he said, finally. “I guess there’s no avoiding this. I could tell you that you’ll get over it—you will—but it won’t do any good. I had this same problem with every child I’ve taught.”

“You did?” I hadn’t known that, and it made me feel a little better.

“I did. I don’t blame you for it. I feel it myself. I feel a pull to stay with you. But it wouldn’t work, Argus. I love my work, or I wouldn’t be doing it. There are hard times, like right now. But after a few months you’ll feel better.”

“Maybe I will.” I was far from sure of it, but it seemed important to agree with him and get the conversation ended.

“In the meantime,” he said, “we still have a few weeks together. I think we should make the most of them.” And he did, his hands roaming over my body. He did all the work, letting me relax and try to get myself straightened out.

So I folded my arms under my head and reclined, trying to think of nothing but the warm circle of his mouth.

But eventually I began to feel I should be doing something for him, and knew what was wrong. He thought he was giving me what I wanted by making love to me in the way we had done since we grew older together. But there was another way, and I realized I didn’t so much want him to stay thirteen. What I really wanted was to go back with him, to be seven again.

I touched his head and he looked up, then we embraced again face to face. We began to move against each other as we had done since we first met, the mindless, innocent friction from a time when it had less to do with sex than with simply feeling good.

But the body is insistent, and can’t be fooled. Soon our movements were frantic, and then a feeling of wetness between us told me as surely as entropy that we could never go back.

On my way home the signs of change were all around me.

You grow a little, let out the arms and legs of your pressure suit until you finally have to get a new one. People stop thinking of you as a cute little kid and start talking about you being a fine young person. Always with that smile, like it’s a joke that you’re not supposed to get.

People treat you differently as you grow up. At first you hardly interact at all with adults, except your own mother and the mothers of your friends. You live in a kid’s world, and adults are hardly even obstacles because they get out of your way when you run down the corridors. You go all sorts of places for free; people want you around to make them happy because there are so few kids and just about everybody would like to have more than just the one. You hardly even notice the people smiling at you all the time.

But it’s not like that at all when you’re thirteen. Now there was the hesitation, just a fraction of a second before they gave me a child’s privileges. Not that I blamed anybody. I was nearly as tall as a lot of the adults I met.

But now I had begun to notice the adults, to watch them. Especially when they didn’t know they were being watched. I saw that a lot of them spent a lot of time frowning. Occasionally, I would see real pain on a face. Then he or she would look at me, and smile. I could see that wouldn’t be happening forever. Sooner or later I’d cross some invisible line, and the pain would stay in those faces, and I’d have to try to understand it. I’d be an adult, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be.

It was because of this new preoccupation with faces that I noticed the woman sitting across from me on the Archimedes train. I planned to be a writer, so I tended to see everything in terms of stories and characters. I watched her and tried to make a story about her.

She was attractive: physically mid-twenties, straight black hair and brownish skin, round face without elaborate surgery or startling features except her dark brown eyes. She wore a simple thigh-length robe of thin white material that flowed like water when she moved. She had one elbow on the back of her seat, absently chewing a knuckle as she looked out the window.

There didn’t seem to be a story in her face. She was in an unguarded moment, but I saw no pain, no big concerns or fears. It’s possible I just missed it. I was new at the game and I didn’t know much about what was important to adults. But I kept trying.

Then she turned to look at me, and she didn’t smile.

I mean, she smiled, but it didn’t say isn’t-he-cute. It was the sort of smile that made me wish I’d worn some clothes. Since I’d learned what erections are for, I no longer wished to have them in public places.

I crossed my legs. She moved to sit beside me. She held up her palm and I touched it. She was facing me with one leg drawn up under her and her arm resting on the seat behind me.

“I’m Trilby,” she said.

“Hi. I’m Argus.” I found myself trying to lower my voice.

“I was sitting over there watching you watch me.”

“You were?”

“In the glass,” she explained.

“Oh.” I looked, and sure enough, from where she had been sitting she could appear to be looking at the landscape while actually studying my reflection. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

She laughed and put her hand on my shoulder, then moved it. “What about me?” she said. “I was being sneaky about it; you weren’t. Anyhow, don’t fret. I don’t mind.” I shifted again, and she glanced down. “And don’t worry about that, either. It happens.”

I still felt nervous but she was able to put me at ease. We talked for the rest of the ride, and I have no memory of what we talked about. The range of subjects must have been quite narrow, as I’m sure she never made reference to my age, my schooling, her profession—or just why she had started a conversation with a thirteen-year-old on a public train.

None of that mattered. I was willing to talk about anything. If I wondered about her reasons, I assumed she actually was in her twenties, and not that far from her own childhood.

“Are you in a hurry?” she asked at one point, giving her head a little toss.

“Me? No. I’m on my way to see—” No, no, not your mother. “—a friend. She can wait. She expects me when I get there.” That sounded better.

“Can I buy you a drink?” One eyebrow raised, a small motion with the hand. Her gestures were economical, but seemed to say more than her words. I mentally revised her age upward a few years. Maybe quite a few.

This was timed to the train arriving at Archimedes; we got up and I quickly accepted.

“Good. I know a nice place.”

The bartender gave me that smile and was about to give me the customary free one on the house toward my legal limit of two. But Trilby changed all that.

“Two Irish whiskeys, please. On the rocks.” She said it firmly, raising her voice a little, and a complex thing happened between her and the bartender. She gave him a look, his eyebrow twitched and he glanced at me, seemed to understand something. His whole attitude toward me changed.

I had the feeling something had gone over my head, but didn’t have time to worry about it. I never had time to worry when Trilby was around. The drinks arrived, and we sipped them.

“I wonder why they still call it Irish?” she said.

We launched into a discussion of the Invaders, or Ireland, or Occupied Earth. I’m not sure. It was inconsequential, and the real conversation was going on eye to eye. Mostly it was her saying wordless things to me, and me nodding agreement with my tongue hanging out.

We ended up at the public baths down the corridor. Her nipples were shaped like pink valentine hearts. Other than that, her body was unremarkable, though wonderfully firm beneath the softness. She was so unlike Trigger and Denver and Cathay. So unlike me. I catalogued the differences as I sat behind her in the big pool and massaged her soapy shoulders.

On the way to the tanning room she stopped beside one of the private alcoves and just stood there, waiting, looking at me. My legs walked me into the room and she followed me. My hands pressed against her back and my mouth opened when she kissed me. She lowered me to the soft floor and took me.

What was so different about it?

I pondered that during the long walk from the slide terminus to my home. Trilby and I had made love for the better part of an hour. It was nothing fancy, nothing I had not already tried with Trigger and Denver. I had thought she would have some fantastic new tricks to show me, but that had not been the case.

Yet she had not been like Trigger or Denver. Her body responded in a different way, moved in directions I was not used to. I did my best. When I left her, I knew she was happy, and yet felt she expected more.

I found that I was very interested in giving her more.

I was in love again.

With my hand on the doorplate, I suddenly knew that she had already forgotten me. It was silly to assume anything else. I had been a pleasant diversion, an interesting novelty.

I hadn’t asked for her name, her address or call number. Why not? Maybe I already knew she would not care to hear from me again.

I hit the plate with the heel of my hand and brooded during the elevator ride to the surface.

My home is unusual. Of course, it belongs to Darcy, my mother. She was there now, putting the finishing touches on a diorama. She glanced up at me, smiled, and offered her cheek for a kiss.

“I’ll be through in a moment,” she said. “I want to finish this before the light fails.”

We live in a large bubble on the surface. Part of it is partitioned into rooms without ceilings, but the bulk forms Darcy’s studio. The bubble is transparent. It screens out the ultraviolet light so we don’t get burned.

It’s an uncommon way to live, but it suits us. From our vantage point at the south side of a small valley only three similar bubbles can be seen. It would be impossible for an outsider to guess that a city teemed just below the surface.

Growing up, I never gave a thought to agoraphobia, but it’s common among Lunarians. I felt sorry for those not fortunate enough to grow up with a view.

Darcy likes it for the light. She’s an artist, and particular about light. She works two weeks on and two off, resting during the night. I grew up to that schedule, leaving her alone while she put in marathon sessions with her airbrushes, coming home to spend two weeks with her when the sun didn’t shine.

That had changed a bit when I reached my tenth birthday. We had lived alone before then, Darcy cutting her work schedule drastically until I was four, gradually picking it up as I attained more independence. She did it so she could devote all her time to me. Then one day she sat me down and told me two men were moving in. It was only later that I realized how Darcy had altered her lifestyle to raise me properly. She is a serial polyandrist, especially attracted to fierce-faced, uncompromising, maverick male artists whose work doesn’t sell and who are usually a little hungry. She likes the hunger, and the determination they all have not to pander to public tastes. She usually keeps three or four of them around, feeding them and giving them a place to work. She demands little of them other than that they clean up after themselves.

I had to step around the latest of these household pets to get to the kitchen. He was sound asleep, snoring loudly, his hands stained yellow and red and green. I’d never seen him before.

Darcy came up behind me while I was making a snack, hugged me, then pulled up a chair and sat down. The sun would be out another half hour or so, but there wasn’t time to start another painting.

“How have you been? You didn’t call for three days.”

“Didn’t I? I’m sorry. We’ve been staying on the bayou.”

She wrinkled her nose. Darcy had seen the bayou. Once.

“That place. I wish I knew why—”

“Darcy. Let’s not get into that again. Okay?”

“Done.” She spread her paint-stained hands and waved them in a circle, as if erasing something, and that was it. Darcy is good that way. “I’ve got a new room-mate.”

“I nearly stumbled over him.”

She ran one hand through her hair and gave me a lopsided grin. “He’ll shape up. His name’s Thogra.”

“Thogra,” I said, making a face. “Listen, if he’s housebroken, and stays out of my way, we’ll—” But I couldn’t go on. We were both laughing and I was about to choke on a bite that went down wrong. Darcy knows what I think of her choice in bedmates.

“What about . . . what’s-his-name? The armpit man. The guy who kept getting arrested for body odor.”

She stuck her tongue out at me.

“You know he cleaned up months ago.”

“Hah! It’s those months before he discovered water that I remember. All my friends wondering where we were raising sheep, the flowers losing petals when he walked by, the—”

“Abil didn’t come back,” Darcy said, quietly.

I stopped laughing. I’d known he’d been away a few weeks, but that happens. I raised one eyebrow.

“Yeah. Well, you know he sold a few things. And he had some offers. But I keep expecting him to at least stop by to pick up his bedroll.”

I didn’t say anything. Darcy’s loves follow a pattern that she is quite aware of, but it’s still tough when one breaks up. Her men would often speak with contempt of the sort of commercial art that kept me and Darcy eating and paying the oxygen bills. Then one of three things would happen. They would get nowhere, and leave as poor as they had arrived, contempt intact. A few made it on their own terms, forcing the art world to accept their peculiar visions. Often Darcy was able to stay on good terms with these; she was on a drop-in-and-make-love basis with half the artists in Luna.

But the most common departure was when the artist decided he was tired of poverty. With just a slight lowering of standards they were all quite capable of making a living. Then it became intolerable to live with the woman they had ridiculed. Darcy usually kicked them out quickly, with a minimum of pain. They were no longer hungry, no longer fierce enough to suit her. But it always hurt.

Darcy changed the subject.

“I made an appointment at the medico for your Change,” she said. “You’re to be there next Monday, in the morning.”

A series of quick, vivid impressions raced through my mind. Trilby. Breasts tipped with hearts. The way it had felt when my penis entered her, and the warm exhaustion after the semen had left my body.

“I’ve changed my mind about that,” I said, crossing my legs. “I’m not ready for another Change. Maybe in a few months.”

She just sat there with her mouth open.

“Changed your mind? Last time I talked to you, you were all set to change your sex. In fact, you had to talk me into giving permission.”

“I remember,” I said, feeling uneasy about it. “I just changed my mind, that’s all.”

“But Argus. This just isn’t fair. I sat up two nights convincing myself how nice it would be to have my daughter back again. It’s been a long time. Don’t you think you—”

“It’s really not your decision, Mother.”

She looked like she was going to get angry, then her eyes narrowed. “There must be a reason. You’ve met somebody. Right?”

But I didn’t want to talk about that. I had told her the first time I made love, and about every new person I’d gone to bed with since. But I didn’t want to share this with her.

So I told her about the incident earlier that day on the bayou. I told her about the pregnant woman, and about the thing Cathay had done.

Darcy frowned more and more. When I got to the part about the mud, there were ridges all over her forehead.

“I don’t like that,” she said.

“I don’t really like it, either. But I didn’t see what else we could do.”

“I just don’t think it was handled well. I think I should call Cathay and talk to him about it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t.” I didn’t say anything more, and she studied my face for a long, uncomfortable time. She and Cathay had differed before about how I should be raised.

“This shouldn’t be ignored.”

“Please, Darcy. He’ll only be my teacher for another month. Let it go, okay?”

After a while she nodded, and looked away from me.

“You’re growing more every day,” she said, sadly. I didn’t know why she said that, but was glad she was dropping the subject. To tell the truth, I didn’t want to think about the woman anymore. But I was going to have to think about her, and very soon.

I had intended to spend the week at home, but Trigger called the next morning to say that Mardi Gras ’56 was being presented again, and it was starting in a few hours. She’d made reservations for the four of us.

Trigger had seen the presentation before, but I hadn’t, and neither had Denver. I told her I’d come, went in to tell Darcy, found her still asleep. She often slept for two days after a Lunar Day of working. I left her a note and hurried to catch the train.

It’s called the Cultural Heritage Museum, and though they pay for it with their taxes, most Lunarians never go there. They find the exhibits disturbing. I understand that lately, however, with the rise of the Free Earth Party, it’s become more popular with people searching for their roots.

Once they presented London Town 1903, and I got to see what Earth museums had been like by touring the replica British Museum. The CHM isn’t like that at all. Only a very few art treasures, artifacts, and historical curiosities were brought to Luna in the days before the Invasion. As a result, all the tangible relics of Earth’s past were destroyed.

On the other hand, the Lunar computer system had a capacity that was virtually limitless even then; everything was recorded and stored. Every book, painting, tax receipt, statistic, photograph, government report, corporate record, film, and tape existed in the memory banks. Just as the disneylands are populated with animals cloned from cells stored in the Genetic Library, the CHM is filled with cunning copies made from the old records of the way things were.

I met the others at the Sugar Shack, where Denver was trying to talk Trigger into taking Tuesday along with us. Tuesday is the hippopotamus that lives on the bayou, in cheerful defiance of any sense of authenticity. Denver had her on a chain and she stood placidly watching us, blinking her piggy little eyes.

Denver was tickled at the idea of going to Mardi Gras with a hippo named Tuesday, but Trigger pointed out that the museum officials would never let us into New Orleans with the beast. Denver finally conceded, and shooed her back into the swamp. The four of us went down the road and out of the bayou, boarded the central slidewalk, and soon arrived in the city center.

There are twenty-five theaters in the CHM. Usually about half of them are operating while the others are being prepared for a showing. Mardi Gras ’56 is a ten-year-old show, and generally opens twice a year for a two-week run. It’s one of the more popular environments.

We went to the orientation room and listened to the lecture on how to behave, then were given our costumes. That’s the part I like the least. Up until about the beginning of the twenty-first century, clothing was designed with two main purposes in mind: modesty, and torture. If it didn’t hurt, it needed redesigning. It’s no wonder they killed each other all the time. Anybody would, with high gravity and hard shoes mutilating their feet.

“We’ll be beatniks,” Trigger said, looking over the racks of period clothing. “They were more informal, and it’s accurate enough to get by. There were beatniks in the French Quarter.”

Informality was fine with us. The girls didn’t need bras, and we could choose between leather sandals or canvas sneakers for our feet. I can’t say I cared much for something called Levi’s, though. They were scratchy, and pinched my balls. But after visiting Victorian England—I had been female at the time, and what those people made girls wear would shock most Lunarians silly—anything was an improvement.

Entry to the holotorium was through the restrooms at the back of a nightclub that fronted on Bourbon Street. Boys to the left, girls to the right. I think they did that to impress you right away that you were going back into the past, when people did things in strange ways. There was a third restroom, actually, but it was only a false door with the word “colored” on it. It was impossible to sort that out anymore.

I like the music of 1956 New Orleans. There are many varieties, all sounding similar for modern ears with their simple rhythms and blends of wind, string, and percussion. The generic term is jazz, and the particular kind of jazz that afternoon in the tiny, smoke-filled basement was called dixieland. It’s dominated by two instruments called a clarinet and a trumpet, each improvising a simple melody while the rest of the band makes as much racket as it can.

We had a brief difference of opinion. Cathay and Trigger wanted me and Denver to stay with them, presumably so they could use any opportunity to show off their superior knowledge—translation: “educate” us. After all, they were teachers. Denver didn’t seem to mind, but I wanted to be alone.

I solved the problem by walking out onto the street, reasoning that they could follow me if they wished. They didn’t, and I was free to explore on my own.

Going to a holotorium show isn’t like the sensies, where you sit in a chair and the action come to you. And it’s not like a disneyland, where everything is real and you just poke around. You have to be careful not to ruin the illusion.

The majority of the set, most of the props, and all of the actors are holograms. Any real people you meet are costumed visitors, like yourself. What they did in the case of New Orleans was to lay out a grid of streets and surface them as they had actually been. Then they put up two-meter walls where the buildings would be, and concealed them behind holos of old buildings. A few of the doors in these buildings were real, and if you went in you would find the interiors authentic down to the last detail. Most just concealed empty blocks.

You don’t go there to play childish tricks with holos, that’s contrary to the whole spirit of the place. You find yourself being careful not to shatter the illusion. You don’t talk to people unless you’re sure they’re real, and you don’t touch things until you’ve studied them carefully. No holo can stand up to a close scrutiny, so you can separate the real from the illusion if you try.

The stage was a large one. They had reproduced the French Quarter—or Vieux Carre—from the Mississippi River to Rampart Street, and from Canal Street to a point about six blocks east. Standing on Canal and looking across, the city seemed to teem with life for many kilometers in the distance, though I knew there was a wall right down the yellow line in the middle.

New Orleans ’56 begins at noon on Shrove Tuesday and carries on far into the night. We had arrived in late afternoon, with the sun starting to cast long shadows over the endless parades. I wanted to see the place before it got dark.

I went down Canal for a few blocks, looking into the “windows.” There was an old flat movie theater with a marquee announcing From Here to Eternity, winner of something called an Oscar. I saw that it was a real place and thought about going in, but I’m afraid those old 2-D movies leave me flat, no matter how good Trigger says they are.

So instead I walked the streets, observing, thinking about writing a story set in old New Orleans.

That’s why I hadn’t wanted to stay and listen to the music with the others. Music is not something you can really put into a story, beyond a bare description of what it sounds like, who is playing it, and where it is being heard. In the same way, going to the flat movie would not have been very productive.

But the streets, the streets! There was something to study.

The pattern was the same as old London, but all the details had changed. The roads were filled with horseless carriages, great square metal boxes that must have been the most inefficient means of transport ever devised. Nothing was truly straight, nor very clean. To walk the streets was to risk broken toes or cuts on the soles of the feet. No wonder they wore thick shoes.

I knew what the red and green lights were for, and the lines painted on the road. But what about the rows of timing devices on each side of the street? What was the red metal object that a dog was urinating on? What did the honking of the car horns signify? Why were wires suspended overhead on wooden poles? I ignored the Mardi Gras festivities and spent a pleasant hour looking for the answers to these and many other questions.

What a challenge to write of this time, to make the story a slice of life, where these outlandish things seemed normal and reasonable. I visualized one of the inhabitants of New Orleans transplanted to Archimedes, and tried to picture her confusion.

Then I saw Trilby, and forgot about New Orleans.

She was behind the wheel of a 1955 Ford station wagon. I know this because when she motioned for me to join her, slid over on the seat, and let me drive, there was a gold plaque on the bulkhead just below the forward viewport.

“How do you run this thing?” I asked, flustered and trying not to show it. Something was wrong. Maybe I’d known it all along, and was only now admitting it.

“You press that pedal to go, and that one to stop. But mostly it controls itself.” The car proved her right by accelerating into the stream of holographic traffic. I put my hands on the wheel, found that I could guide the car within limits. As long as I wasn’t going to hit anything it let me be the boss.

“What brings you here?” I asked, trying for a light voice.

“I went by your home,” she said. “Your mother told me where you were.”

“I don’t recall telling you where I live.”

She shrugged, not seeming too happy. “It’s not hard to find out.”

“I . . . I mean, you didn’t . . .” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to say it, but decided I’d better go on. “We didn’t meet by accident, did we?”

“No.”

“And you’re my new teacher.”

She sighed. “That’s an oversimplification. I want to be one of your new teachers. Cathay recommended me to your mother, and when I talked to her, she was interested. I was just going to get a look at you on the train, but when I saw you looking at me . . . well, I thought I’d give you something to remember me by.”

“Thanks.”

She looked away. “Darcy told me today that it might have been a mistake. I guess I judged you wrong.”

“It’s nice to hear that you can make a mistake.”

“I guess I don’t understand.”

“I don’t like to feel predictable. I don’t like to be toyed with. Maybe it hurts my dignity. Maybe I get enough of that from Trigger and Cathay. All the lessons.”

“I see it now,” she sighed. “It’s a common enough reaction, in bright children, they—”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m sorry, but I must. There’s no use hiding from you that my business is to know people, and especially children. That means the phases they go through, including the phase when they like to imagine they don’t go through phases. I didn’t recognize it in you, so I made a mistake.”

I sighed. “What does it matter, anyway? Darcy likes you. That means you’ll be my new teacher, doesn’t it?”

“It does not. Not with me, anyway. I’m one of the first big choices you get to make with no adult interference.”

“I don’t get it.”

“That’s because you’ve never been interested enough to find out what’s ahead of you in your education. At the risk of offending you again, I’ll say it’s a common response in people your age. You’re only a month from graduating away from Cathay, ready to start more goal-oriented aspects of learning, and you haven’t bothered to find what that will entail. Did you ever stop to think what’s between you and becoming a writer?”

“I’m a writer, already,” I said, getting angry for the first time. Before that, I’d been feeling hurt more than anything. “I can use the language, and I watch people. Maybe I don’t have much experience yet, but I’ll get it with or without you. I don’t even have to have teachers at all anymore. At least I know that much.”

“You’re right, of course. But you’ve known your mother intended to pay for your advanced education. Didn’t you ever wonder what it would be like?”

“Why should I? Did you ever think that I’m not interested because it just doesn’t seem important? I mean, who’s asked me what I felt about any of this up to now? What kind of stake do I have in it? Everyone seems to know what’s best for me. Why should I be consulted?”

“Because you’re nearly an adult now. My job, if you hire me, will be to ease the transition. When you’ve made it, you’ll know, and you won’t need me anymore. This isn’t primary phase. Your teacher’s job back then was to work with your mother to teach you the basic ways of getting along with people and society, and to cram your little head with all the skills a seven-year-old can learn. They taught you language, dexterity, reasoning, responsibility, hygiene, and not to go in an airlock without your suit. They took an ego-centered infant and turned him into a moral being. It’s a tough job; so little, and you could have been a sociopath.

“Then they handed you to Cathay. You didn’t mind. He showed up one day, just another playmate your own age. You were happy and trusting. He guided you very gently, letting your natural curiosity do most of the work. He discovered your creative abilities before you had any inkling of them, and he saw to it that you had interesting things to think about, to react to, to experience.

“But lately you’ve been a problem for him. Not your fault, nor his, but you no longer want anyone to guide you. You want to do it on your own. You have vague feelings of being manipulated.”

“Which is not surprising,” I put in. “I am being manipulated.”

“That’s true, so far as it goes. But what would you have Cathay do? Leave everything to chance?”

“That’s beside the point. We’re talking about my feelings now, and what I feel is you were dishonest with me. You made me feel like a fool. I thought what happened was . . . was spontaneous, you know? Like a fairy tale.”

She gave me a funny smile. “What an odd way to put it. What I intended to do was allow you to live out a wet dream.”

I guess the easy way she admitted that threw me off my stride. I should have told her there was no real difference. Both fairy tales and wet dreams were visions of impossibly convenient worlds, worlds where things go the way you want them to go. But I didn’t say anything.

“I realize now that it was the wrong way to approach you. Frankly, I thought you’d enjoy it. Wait, let me change that. I thought you’d enjoy it even after you knew. I submit that you did enjoy it while it was happening.”

I once again said nothing, because it was the simple truth. But it wasn’t the point.

She waited, watching me as I steered the old car through traffic. Then she sighed, and looked out the viewport again.

“Well, it’s up to you. As I said, things won’t be planned for you anymore. You’ll have to decide if you want me to be your teacher.”

“Just what is it you teach?” I asked.

“Sex is part of it.”

I started to say something, but was stopped by the novel idea that someone thought she could—or needed to—teach me about sex. I mean, what was there to learn?

I hardly noticed it when the car stopped on its own, was shaken out of my musings only when a man in blue stuck his head in the window beside me. There was a woman behind him, dressed the same way. I realized they were wearing 1956 police uniforms.

“Are you Argus-Darcy-Meric?” the man asked.

“Yeah. Who are you?”

“My name is Jordan. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to come with me. A complaint has been filed against you. You are under arrest.”

Arrest. To take into custody by legal authority. Or, to stop suddenly.

Being arrested contains both meanings, it seems to me. You’re in custody, and your life comes to a temporary halt. Whatever you were doing is interrupted, and suddenly only one thing is important.

I wasn’t too worried until I realized what that one thing must be. After all, everyone gets arrested. You can’t avoid it in a society of laws. Filing a complaint against someone is the best way of keeping a situation from turning violent. I had been arrested three times before, been found guilty twice. Once I had filed a complaint myself, and had it sustained.

But this time promised to be different. I doubted I was being hauled in for some petty violation I had not even been aware of. No, this had to be the pregnant woman, and the mud. I had a while to think about that as I sat in the bare-walled holding cell, time to get really worried. We had physically attacked her, there was no doubt about that.

I was finally summoned to the examination chamber. It was larger than the ones I had been in before. Those occasions had involved just two people. This room had five wedge-shaped glass booths, each with a chair inside, arranged so that we faced each other in a circle. I was shown into the only empty one and I looked around at Denver, Cathay, Trigger . . . and the woman.

It’s quiet in the booths. You are very much alone.

I saw Denver’s mother come in and sit behind her daughter, outside the booth. Turning around, I saw Darcy. To my surprise, Trilby was with her.

“Hello, Argus.” The Central Computer’s voice filled the tiny booth, mellow as usual but without the reassuring resonance.

“Hello, CC.” I tried to keep it light, but of course the CC was not fooled.

“I’m sorry to see you in so much trouble.”

“Is it real bad?”

“The charge certainly is, there’s no sense denying that. I can’t comment on the testimony, or on your chances. But you know you’re facing a possible mandatory death penalty, with automatic reprieve.”

I was aware of it. I also knew it was rarely enforced against someone my age. But what about Cathay and Trigger?

I’ve never cared for that term “reprieve.” It somehow sounds like they aren’t going to kill you, but they are. Very, very dead. The catch is that they then grow a clone from a cell of your body, force it quickly to maturity, and play your recorded memories back into it. So someone very like you will go on, but you will be dead. In my case, the last recording had been taken three years ago. I was facing the loss of almost a quarter of my life. If it was found necessary to kill me, the new Argus—not me, but someone with my memories and my name—would start over at age ten. He would be watched closely, be given special guidance to insure he didn’t grow into the sociopath I had become.

The CC launched into the legally required explanation of what was going on: my rights, the procedures, the charges, the possible penalties, what would happen if a determination led the CC to believe the offense might be a capital one.

“Whew!” the CC breathed, lapsing back into the informal speech it knew I preferred. “Now that we have that out of the way, I can tell you that, from the preliminary reports, I think you’re going to be okay.”

“You’re not just saying that?” I was sincerely frightened. The enormity of it had now had time to sink in.

“You know me better than that.”

The testimony began. The complainant went first, and I learned her name was Tiona. The first round was free-form; we could say anything we wanted to, and she had some pretty nasty things to say about all four of us.

The CC went around the circle asking each of us what had happened. I thought Cathay told it most accurately, except for myself. During the course of the statements both Cathay and Trigger filed counter-complaints. The CC noted them. They would be tried simultaneously.

There was a short pause, then the CC spoke in its “official” voice.

“In the matters of Argus and Denver: testimony fails to establish premeditation, but neither deny the physical description of the incident, and a finding of Assault is returned. Mitigating factors of age and consequent inability to combat the mob aspect of the situation are entered, with the following result: the charge is reduced to Willful Deprivation of Dignity.

“In the case of Tiona versus Argus: guilty.

“In the case of Tiona versus Denver: guilty.

“Do either of you have anything to say before sentence is entered?”

I thought about it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It upset me quite a bit, what happened. I won’t do it again.”

“I’m not sorry,” Denver said. “She asked for it. I’m sorry for her, but I’m not sorry for what I did.”

“Comments are noted,” the CC said. “You are each fined the sum of three hundred Marks, collection deferred until you reach employable age, sum to be taken at the rate of ten percent of your earnings until paid, half going to Tiona, half to the State. Final entry of sentence shall be delayed until a further determination of matters still before the court is made.”

“You got off easy,” the CC said, speaking only to me. “But stick around. Things could still change, and you might not have to pay the fine after all.”

It was a bit of a wrench, getting a sentence, then sympathy from the same machine. I had to guard against feeling that the CC was on my side. It wasn’t, not really. It’s absolutely impartial, so far as I can tell. Yet it is so vast an intelligence that it makes a different personality for each citizen it deals with. The part that had just talked to me was really on my side, but was powerless to affect what the judgmental part of it did.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What happens now?”

“Well, I’ve been rashomoned again. That means you all told your stories from your own viewpoints. We haven’t reached deeply enough into the truth. Now I’m going to have to wire you all, and take another round.”

As it spoke, I saw the probe come up behind everyone’s chair: little golden snakes with plugs on the end. I felt one behind me search through my hair until it found the terminal. It plugged in.

There are two levels to wired testimony. Darcy and Trilby and Denver’s mother had to leave the room for the first part, when we all told our stories without our censors working. The transcript bears me out when I say I didn’t tell any lies in the first round, unlike Tiona, who told a lot of them. But it doesn’t sound like the same story, nevertheless. I told all sorts of things I never would have said without being wired: fears, selfish, formless desires, infantile motivations. It’s embarrassing, and I’m glad I don’t recall any of it. I’m even happier that only Tiona and I, as interested parties, can see my testimony. I only wish I was the only one.

The second phase is the disconnection of the subconscious. I told the story a third time, in terms as bloodless as the stage directions of a holovision script.

Then the terminals withdrew from us and I suffered a moment of disorientation. I knew where I was, where I had been, and yet I felt like I had been told about it rather than lived it. But that passed quickly. I stretched.

“Is everyone ready to go on?” the CC asked, politely. We all said that we were.

“Very well. In the matters of Tiona versus Argus and Denver: the guilty judgments remain in force in both cases, but both fines are rescinded in view of provocation, lessened liability due to immaturity, and lack of signs of continuing sociopathic behavior. In place of the fines, Denver and Argus are to report weekly for evaluation and education in moral principles until such time as a determination can be made, duration of such sessions to be no less than four weeks.

“In the matter of Tiona versus Trigger: Trigger is guilty of an Assault. Tempering this judgment is her motive, which was the recognition of Cathay’s strategy in dealing with Tiona, and her belief that he was doing the right thing. This court notes that he was doing the merciful thing; right is another matter. There can be no doubt that a physical assault occurred. It cannot be condoned, no matter what the motive. For bad judgment, then, this court fines Trigger ten percent of her earnings for a period of ten years, all of it to be paid to the injured party, Tiona.”

Tiona did not look smug. She must have known by then that things were not going her way. I was beginning to understand it, too.

“In the matter of Tiona versus Cathay,” the CC went on, “Cathay is guilty of an Assault. His motive has been determined to be the avoidance of just such a situation as he now finds himself in, and the knowledge that Tiona would suffer greatly if he brought her to court. He attempted to bring the confrontation to an end with a minimum of pain for Tiona, never dreaming that she would show the bad judgment to bring the matter to court. She did, and now he finds himself convicted of assault. In view of his motives, mercy will temper this court’s decision. He is ordered to pay the same fine as his colleague, Trigger.

“Now to the central matter, that of Trigger and Cathay versus Tiona.” I saw her sink a little lower in her chair.

“You are found to be guilty by reason of insanity of the following charges: harassment, trespassing, verbal assault, and four counts of infringement.

“Your offense was in attempting to make others shoulder the blame for your own misjudgments and misfortunes. The court is sympathetic to your plight, realizes that the fault for your situation was not entirely your own. This does not excuse your behavior, however.

“Cathay attempted to do you a favor, supposing that your aberrant state of mind would not last long enough for the filing of charges, that when you were alone and thought it over you would realize how badly you had wronged him and that a court would find in his favor.

“The State holds you responsible for the maintenance of your own mind, does not care what opinions you hold or what evaluations you make of reality so long as they do not infringe on the rights of other citizens. You are free to think Cathay responsible for your troubles, even if this opinion is irrational, but when you assault him with this opinion the State must take notice and make a judgment as to the worth of the opinion.

“This court is appointed to make that judgment of right and wrong, and finds no basis in fact for your contentions.

“This court finds you to be insane.

“Judgment is as follows:

“Subject to the approval of the wronged parties, you are given the choice of death with reprieve, or submission to a course of treatment to remove your sociopathic attitudes.

“Argus, do you demand her death?”

“Huh?” That was a big surprise to me, and not one that I liked. But the decision gave me no trouble.

“No, I don’t demand anything. I thought I was out of this, and I feel just rotten about the whole thing. Would you really have killed her if I asked you to?”

“I can’t answer that, because you didn’t. It’s not likely that I would have, mostly because of your age.” It went on to ask the other four, and I suspect that Tiona would have been pushing up daisies if Cathay had wanted it that way, but he didn’t. Neither did Trigger or Denver.

“Very well. How do you choose, Tiona?”

She answered in a very small voice that she would be grateful for the chance to go on living. Then she thanked each of us. It was excruciatingly painful for me; my empathy was working overtime, and I was trying to imagine what it would feel like to have society’s appointed representative declare me insane.

The rest of it was clearing up details. Tiona was fined heavily, both in court costs and taxes, and in funds payable to Cathay and Trigger. Their fines were absorbed in her larger ones, with the result that she would be paying them for many years. Her child was in cold storage; the CC ruled that he should stay there until Tiona was declared sane, as she was now unfit to mother him. It occurred to me that if she had considered suspending his animation while she found a new primary teacher, we all could have avoided the trial.

Tiona hurried away when the doors came open behind us. Darcy hugged me while Trilby stayed in the background, then I went over to join the others, expecting a celebration.

But Trigger and Cathay were not elated. In fact, you would have thought they’d just lost the judgment. They congratulated me and Denver, then hurried away. I looked at Darcy, and she wasn’t smiling, either.

“I don’t get it,” I confessed. “Why is everyone so glum?”

“They still have to face the Teacher’s Association,” Darcy said.

“I still don’t get it. They won.”

“It’s not just a matter of winning or losing with the TA,” Trilby said. “You forget, they were judged guilty of assault. To make it even worse, in fact as bad as it can be, you and Denver were there when it happened. They were the cause of you two joining in the assault. I’m afraid the TA will frown on that.”

“But if the CC thought they shouldn’t be punished, why should the TA think otherwise? Isn’t the CC smarter than people?”

Trilby grimaced. “I wish I could answer that. I wish I was even sure how I feel about it.”

She found me the next day, shortly after the Teacher’s Association announced its decision. I didn’t really want to be found, but the bayou is not so big that one can really hide there, so I hadn’t tried. I was sitting on the grass on the highest hill in Beatnik Bayou, which was also the driest place.

She beached the canoe and came up the hill slowly, giving me plenty of time to warn her off if I really wanted to be alone. What the hell. I’d have to talk to her soon enough.

For a long time she just sat there. She rested her elbows on her knees and stared down at the quiet waters, just like I’d been doing all afternoon.

“How’s he taking it?” I said, at last.

“I don’t know. He’s back there, if you want to talk to him. He’d probably like to talk to you.”

“At least Trigger got off okay.” As soon as I’d said it, it sounded hollow.

“Three years’ probation isn’t anything to laugh about. She’ll have to close this place down for a while. Put it in mothballs.”

“Mothballs.” I saw Tuesday the hippo, wallowing in the deep mud across the water. Tuesday in suspended animation? I thought of Tiona’s little baby, waiting in a bottle until his mother became sane again. I remembered the happy years slogging around in the bayou mud, and saw the waters frozen, icicles mixed with Spanish moss in the tree limbs. “I guess it’ll cost quite a bit to start it up again in three years, won’t it?” I had only hazy ideas of money. So far, it had never been important to me.

Trilby glanced at me, eyes narrowed. She shrugged.

“Most likely, Trigger will have to sell the place. There’s a buyer who wants to expand it and turn it into a golf course.”

“Golf course,” I echoed, feeling numb. Manicured greens, pretty water hazards, sand traps, flags whipping in the breeze. Sterile. I suddenly felt like crying, but for some reason I didn’t do it.

“You can’t come back here, Argus. Nothing stays the same. Change is something you have to get used to.”

“Cathay will, too.” And just how much change should a person be expected to take? With a shock, I realized that now Cathay would be doing what I had wanted him to do. He’d be growing up with me, getting older instead of being regressed to grow up with another child. And it was suddenly just too much. It hadn’t been my fault that this was happening to him, but having wished for it and having it come true made it feel like it was. The tears came, and they didn’t stop for a long time.

Trilby left me alone, and I was grateful for that.

She was still there when I got myself under control. I didn’t care one way or the other. I felt empty, with a burning in the back of my throat. Nobody had told me life was going to be like this.

“What . . . what about the child Cathay contracted to teach?” I asked, finally, feeling I should say something. “What happens to her?”

“The TA takes responsibility,” Trilby said. “They’ll find someone. For Trigger’s child, too.”

I looked at her. She was stretched out, both elbows behind her to prop her up. Her valentine nipples crinkled as I watched.

She glanced at me, smiled with one corner of her mouth. I felt a little better. She was awfully pretty.

“I guess he can . . . well, can’t he still teach older kids?”

“I suppose he can,” Trilby said, with a shrug. “I don’t know if he’ll want to. I know Cathay. He’s not going to take this well.”

“Is there anything I could do?”

“Not really. Talk to him. Show sympathy, but not too much. You’ll have to figure it out. See if he wants to be with you.”

It was too confusing. How was I supposed to know what he needed? He hadn’t come to see me. But Trilby had.

So there was one uncomplicated thing in my life right then, one thing I could do where I wouldn’t have to think. I rolled over and got on top of Trilby and started to kiss her. She responded with a lazy eroticism I found irresistible. She did know some tricks I’d never heard of.

“How was that?” I said, much later.

That smile again. I got the feeling that I constantly amused her, and somehow I didn’t mind it. Maybe it was the fact that she made no bones about her being the adult and me being the child. That was the way it would be with us. I would have to grow up to her; she would not go back and imitate me.

“Are you looking for a grade?” she asked. “Like the twentieth century?” She got to her feet and stretched.

“All right. I’ll be honest. You get an A for effort, but any thirteen-year-old would. You can’t help it. In technique, maybe a low C. Not that I expected any more, for the same reason.”

“So you want to teach me to do better? That’s your job?”

“Only if you hire me. And sex is such a small part of it. Listen, Argus. I’m not going to be your mother. Darcy does that okay. I won’t be your playmate, either, like Cathay was. I won’t be teaching you moral lessons. You’re getting tired of that, anyway.”

It was true. Cathay had never really been my contemporary, though he tried his best to look it and act it. But the illusion had started to wear thin, and I guess it had to. I was no longer able to ignore the contradictions, I was too sophisticated and cynical for him to hide his lessons in everyday activities.

It bothered me in the same way the CC did. The CC could befriend me one minute and sentence me to death the next. I wanted more than that, and Trilby seemed to be offering it.

“I won’t be teaching you science or skills, either,” she was saying. “You’ll have tutors for that, when you decide just what you want to do.”

“Just what is it you do, then?”

“You know, I’ve never been able to find a good way of describing that. I won’t be around all the time, like Cathay was. You’ll come to me when you want to, maybe when you have a problem. I’ll be sympathetic and do what I can, but mostly I’ll just point out that you have to make all the hard choices. If you’ve been stupid I’ll tell you so, but I won’t be surprised or disappointed if you go on being stupid in the same way. You can use me as a role model if you want to, but I don’t insist on it. But I promise I’ll always tell you things straight, as I see them. I won’t try to slip things in painlessly. It’s time for pain. Think of Cathay as a professional child. I’m not putting him down. He turned you into a civilized being, and when he got you you were hardly that. It’s because of him that you’re capable of caring about his situation now, that you have loyalties to feel divided about. And he’s good enough at it to know how you’ll choose.”

“Choose? What do you mean?”

“I can’t tell you that.” She spread her hands, and grinned. “See how helpful I can be?”

She was confusing me again. Why can’t things be simpler?

“Then if Cathay’s a professional child, you’re a professional adult?”

“You could think of it like that. It’s not really analogous.”

“I guess I still don’t know what Darcy would be paying you for.”

“We’ll make love a lot. How’s that? Simple enough for you?” She brushed dirt from her back and frowned at the ground. “But not on dirt anymore. I don’t care for dirt.”

I looked around, too. The place was messy. Not pretty at all. I wondered how I could have liked it so much. Suddenly I wanted to get out, to go to a clean, dry place.

“Come on,” I said, getting up. “I want to try some of those things again.”

“Does this mean I have a job?”

“Yeah. I guess it does.”

Cathay was sitting on the porch of the Sugar Shack, a line of brown beer bottles perched along the edge. He smiled at us as we approached him. He was stinking drunk.

It’s strange. We’d been drunk many times together, the four of us. It’s great fun. But when only one person is drunk, it’s a little disgusting. Not that I blamed him. But when you’re drinking together all the jokes make sense. When you drink alone, you just make a sloppy nuisance of yourself.

Trilby and I sat on either side of him. He wanted to sing. He pressed bottles on both of us, and I sipped mine and tried to get into the spirit of it. But pretty soon he was crying, and I felt awful. And I admit that it wasn’t entirely in sympathy. I felt helpless because there was so little I could do, and a bit resentful of some of the promises he had me make. I would have come to see him anyway. He didn’t have to blubber on my shoulder and beg me not to abandon him.

So he cried on me, and on Trilby, then just sat between us looking glum. I tried to console him.

“Cathay, it’s not the end of the world. Trilby says you’ll still be able to teach older kids. My age and up. The TA just said you couldn’t handle younger ones.”

He mumbled something.

“It shouldn’t be that different,” I said, not knowing when to shut up.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

“Sure I am.” I was unconsciously falling into that false heartiness people use to cheer up drunks. He heard it immediately.

“What the hell do you know about it? You think you . . . Damn it, what do you know? You know what kind of person it takes to do my job? A little bit of a misfit, that’s what. Somebody who doesn’t want to grow up any more than you do. We’re both cowards, Argus. You don’t know it, but I do. I do. So what the hell am I going to do? Huh? Why don’t you go away? You got what you wanted, didn’t you?”

“Take it easy, Cathay,” Trilby soothed, hugging him close to her. “Take it easy.”

He was immediately contrite, and began to cry quietly. He said how sorry he was, over and over, and he was sincere. He said, he hadn’t meant it, it just came out, it was cruel.

And so forth.

I was cold all over.

We put him to bed in the shack, then started down the road.

“We’ll have to watch him the next few days,” Trilby said. “He’ll get over this, but it’ll be rough.”

“Right,” I said.

I took a look at the shack before we went around the false bend in the road. For one moment I saw Beatnik Bayou as a perfect illusion, a window through time. Then we went around the tree and it all fell apart. It had never mattered before.

But it was such a sloppy place. I’d never realized how ugly the Sugar Shack was.

I never saw it again. Cathay came to live with us for a few months, tried his hand at art. Darcy told me privately that he was hopeless. He moved out, and I saw him frequently after that, always saying hello.

But he was depressing to be around, and he knew it. Besides, he admitted that I represented things he was trying to forget. So we never really talked much.

Sometimes I play golf in the old bayou. It’s only two holes, but there’s talk of expanding it.

They did a good job on the renovation.

THE UGLY CHICKEN

Howard Waldrop

Science fiction is an unpredictable literature, and you can trust Howard Waldrop to be more unpredictable than most anyone. Remember the stories about lost valleys in the Amazon or islands in the South Pacific where adventurous scientists discovered living dinosaurs, mastodons, or saber-toothed tigers? Those were only a few of the strange creatures from Earth’s past that have long been extinct . . .

For instance, there was the dodo.

My car was broken, and I had a class to teach at eleven. So I took the city bus, something I rarely do.

I spent last summer crawling through The Big Thicket with cameras and tape recorder, photographing and taping two of the last ivory-billed woodpeckers on the earth. You can see the films at your local Audubon Society showroom.

This year I wanted something just as flashy but a little less taxing. Perhaps a population study on the Bermuda cahow, or the New Zealand takahe. A month or so in the warm (not hot) sun would do me a world of good. To say nothing of the advance of science.

I was idly leafing through Greenway’s Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World. The city bus was winding its way through the ritzy neighborhoods of Austin, stopping to let off the chicanas, black women, and Vietnamese who tended the kitchens and gardens of the rich.

“I haven’t seen any of those ugly chickens in a long time,” said a voice close by.

A grey-haired lady was leaning across the aisle toward me.

I looked at her, then around. Maybe she was a shopping-bag lady. Maybe she was just talking. I looked straight at her. No doubt about it, she was talking to me. She was waiting for an answer.

“I used to live near some folks who raised them when I was a girl,” she said. She pointed.

I looked down at the page my book was open to.

What I should have said was: “That is quite impossible, madam. This is a drawing of an extinct bird of the island of Mauritius. It is perhaps the most famous dead bird in the world. Maybe you are mistaking this drawing for that of some rare Asiatic turkey, peafowl, or pheasant. I am sorry, but you are mistaken.”

I should have said all that.

What she said was, “Oops, this is my stop,” and got up to go.

My name is Paul Linberl. I am twenty-six years old, a graduate student in ornithology at the University of Texas, a teaching assistant. My name is not unknown in the field. I have several vices and follies, but I don’t think foolishness is one of them.

The stupid thing for me to do would have been to follow her.

She stepped off the bus.

I followed her.

I came into the departmental office, trailing scattered papers in the whirlwind behind me. “Martha! Martha!” I yelled.

She was doing something in the supply cabinet.

“Jesus, Paul! What do you want?”

“Where’s Courtney?”

“At the conference in Houston. You know that. You missed your class. What’s the matter?”

“Petty cash. Let me at it!”

“Payday was only a week ago. If you can’t . . .”

“It’s business! It’s fame and adventure and the chance of a lifetime! It’s a long sea voyage that leaves . . . a plane ticket. To either Jackson, Mississippi or Memphis. Make it Jackson, it’s closer. I’ll get receipts! I’ll be famous. Courtney will be famous. You’ll even be famous! This university will make even more money! I’ll pay you back. Give me some paper. I gotta write Courtney a note. When’s the next plane out? Could you get Marie and Chuck to take over my classes Tuesday and Wednesday? I’ll try to be back Thursday unless something happens. Courtney’ll be back tomorrow, right? I’ll call him from, well, wherever. Do you have some coffee?”

And so on and so forth. Martha looked at me like I was crazy. But she filled out the requisition anyway.

“What do I tell Kemejian when I ask him to sign these?”

“Martha, babe, sweetheart. Tell him I’ll get his picture in Scientific American.”

“He doesn’t read it.”

“Nature, then!”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.

The lady I had followed off the bus was named Jolyn (Smith) Jimson. The story she told me was so weird that it had to be true. She knew things only an expert, or someone with firsthand experience, could know. I got names from her, and addresses, and directions, and tidbits of information. Plus a year: 1927.

And a place: northern Mississippi.

I gave her my copy of the Greenway book. I told her I’d call her as soon as I got back into town. I left her standing on the corner near the house of the lady she cleaned for twice a week. Jolyn Jimson was in her sixties.

Think of the dodo as a baby harp seal with feathers. I know that’s not even close, but it saves time.

In 1507, the Portuguese, on their way to India, found the (then unnamed) Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean—three of them a few hundred miles apart, all east and north of Madagascar.

It wasn’t until 1598, when that old Dutch sea captain Cornelius van Neck bumped into them, that the islands received their names—names which changed several times through the centuries as the Dutch, French, and English changed them every war or so. They are now know as Rodriguez, Réunion, and Mauritius.

The major feature of these islands were large flightless birds, stupid, ugly, bad-tasting birds. Van Neck and his men named them dod-aarsen, stupid ass, or dodars, silly birds, or solitaires.

There were three species—the dodo of Mauritius, the real grey-brown, hooked-beak clumsy thing that weighed twenty kilos or more; the white, somewhat slimmer dodo of Réunion; and the solitaires of Rodriguez and Réunion, which looked like very fat, very dumb light-colored geese.

The dodos all had thick legs, big squat bodies twice as large as a turkey’s, naked faces, and big long downcurved beaks ending in a hook like a hollow linoleum knife. They were flightless. Long ago they had lost the ability to fly, and their wings had degenerated to flaps the size of a human hand with only three or four feathers in them. Their tails were curly and fluffy, like a child’s afterthought at decoration. They had absolutely no natural enemies. They nested on open ground. They probably hatched their eggs wherever they happened to lay them.

No natural enemies until van Neck and his kind showed up. The Dutch, French, and Portuguese sailors who stopped at the Mascarenes to replenish stores found that besides looking stupid, dodos were stupid. They walked right up to them and hit them on the head with clubs. Better yet, dodos could be herded around like sheep. Ship’s logs are full of things like: “Party of ten men ashore. Drove half-a-hundred of the big turkey-like birds into the boat. Brought to ship where they are given the run of the decks. Three will feed a crew of 150.”

Even so, most of the dodo, except for the breast, tasted bad. One of the Dutch words for them was walghvogel, disgusting bird. But on a ship three months out on a return from Goa to Lisbon, well, food was where you found it. It was said, even so, that prolonged boiling did not improve the flavor.

That being said, the dodos might have lasted, except that the Dutch, and later the French, colonized the Mascarenes. These islands became plantations and dumping-places for religious refugees. Sugar cane and other exotic crops were raised there.

With the colonists came cats, dogs, hogs, and the cunning Rattus norvegicus and the Rhesus monkey from Ceylon. What dodos the hungry sailors left were chased down (they were dumb and stupid, but they could run when they felt like it) by dogs in the open. They were killed by cats as they sat on their nests. Their eggs were stolen and eaten by monkeys, rats, and hogs. And they competed with the pigs for all the low-growing goodies of the islands.

The last Mauritius dodo was seen in 1681, less than a hundred years after man first saw them. The last white dodo walked off the history books around 1720. The solitaires of Rodriguez and Réunion, last of the genus as well as the species, may have lasted until 1790. Nobody knows.

Scientists suddenly looked around and found no more of the Didine birds alive, anywhere.

This part of the country was degenerate before the first Snopes ever saw it. This road hadn’t been paved until the late fifties, and it was a main road between two county seats. That didn’t mean it went through civilized country. I’d traveled for miles and seen nothing but dirt banks red as Billy Carter’s neck and an occasional church. I expected to see Burma Shave signs, but realized this road had probably never had them.

I almost missed the turn-off onto the dirt and gravel road the man back at the service station had marked. It led onto the highway from nowhere, a lane out of a field. I turned down it and a rock the size of a golf ball flew up over the hood and put a crack three inches long in the windshield of the rent-a-car I’d gotten in Grenada.

It was a hot muggy day for this early. The view was obscured in a cloud of dust every time the gravel thinned. About a mile down the road, the gravel gave out completely. The roadway turned into a rutted dirt pathway, just wider than the car, hemmed in on both sides by a sagging three-strand barbed-wire fence.

In some places the fenceposts were missing for a few meters. The wire lay on the ground and in some places disappeared under it for long stretches.

The only life I saw was a mockingbird raising hell with something under a thorn bush the barbed wire had been nailed to in place of a post. To one side now was a grassy field which had gone wild, the way everywhere will look after we blow ourselves off the face of the planet. The other was fast becoming woods—pine, oak, some black gum and wild plum, fruit not out this time of the year.

I began to ask myself what I was doing here. What if Ms. Jimson were some imaginative old crank who—but no. Wrong, maybe, but even the wrong was worth checking. But I knew she hadn’t lied to me. She had seem incapable of lies—good ol’ girl, backbone of the South, of the earth. Not a mendacious gland in her being.

I couldn’t doubt her, or my judgment, either. Here I was, creeping and bouncing down a dirt path in Mississippi, after no sleep for a day, out on the thin ragged edge of a dream. I had to take it on faith.

The back of the car sometimes slid where the dirt had loosened and gave way to sand. The back tire stuck once, but I rocked out of it. Getting back out again would be another matter. Didn’t anyone ever use this road?

The woods closed in on both sides like the forest primeval, and the fence had long since disappeared. My odometer said six miles and it had been twenty minutes since I’d turned off the highway. In the rearview mirror, I saw beads of sweat and dirt in the wrinkles of my neck. A fine patina of dust covered everything inside the car. Clots of it came through the windows.

The woods reached out and swallowed the road. Branches scraped against the windows and the top. It was like falling down a long dark leafy tunnel. It was dark and green in there. I fought back an atavistic urge to turn on the headlights. The roadbed must have been made of a few centuries of leaf mulch. I kept constant pressure on the accelerator and bulled my way through.

Half a log caught and banged and clanged against the car bottom. I saw light ahead. Fearing for the oil pan, I punched the pedal and sped out.

I almost ran through a house.

It was maybe ten yards from the trees. The road ended under one of the windows. I saw somebody waving from the corner of my eye.

I slammed on the brakes.

A whole family was on the porch, looking like a Walker Evans Depression photograph, or a fever dream from the mind of a Hee Haw producer. The house was old. Strips of peeling paint a yard long tapped against the eaves.

“Damned good thing you stopped,” said a voice. I looked up. The biggest man I had ever seen in my life leaned down into the driver’s-side window.

“If we’d have heard you sooner, I’d’ve sent one of the kids down to the end of the driveway to warn you,” he said.

Driveway?

His mouth was stained brown at the corners. I figured he chewed tobacco until I saw the sweet-gum snuff brush sticking from the pencil pocket in the bib of his overalls. His hands were the size of catchers’ mitts. They looked like they’d never held anything smaller than an axe handle.

“How y’all?” he said, by the way of introduction.

“Just fine,” I said. I got out of the car.

“My name’s Lindberl,” I said, extending my hand. He took it. For an instant, I thought of bear traps, sharks’ mouths, closing elevator doors. The thought went back to wherever it is they stay.

“This is the Gudger place?” I asked.

He looked at me blankly with his grey eyes. He wore a diesel truck cap, and had on a checked lumberjack shirt beneath his overalls. His rubber boots were the size of the ones Karloff wore in Frankenstein.

“Naw, I’m Jim Bob Krait. That’s my wife Jenny, and there’s Luke and Skeeno and Shirl.” He pointed to the porch.

The people on the porch nodded.

“Lessee? Gudger? No Gudgers round here I know of. I’m sorta new here,” I took that to mean he hadn’t lived here for more than twenty years or so.

“Jennifer!” he yelled. “You know of anybody named Gudger?” To me he said, “My wife’s lived around here all her life.”

His wife came down onto the second step of the porch landing. “I think they used to be the ones what lived on the Spradlin place before the Spradlins. But the Spradlins left around the Korean War. I didn’t know any of the Gudgers myself. That’s while we was living over to Water Valley.”

“You an insurance man?” asked Mr. Krait.

“Uh . . . no,” I said. I imagined the people on the porch leaning toward me, all ears. “I’m a . . . I teach college.”

“Oxford?” asked Krait.

“Uh, no. University of Texas.”

“Well, that’s a damn long way off. You say you’re looking for the Gudgers?”

“Just their house. The area. As your wife said, I understand they left during the Depression, I believe.”

“Well, they musta had money,” said the gigantic Mr. Krait. “Nobody around here was rich enough to leave during the Depression.”

“Luke!” he yelled. The oldest boy on the porch sauntered down. He looked anemic and wore a shirt in vogue with the Twist. He stood with his hands in his pockets.

“Luke, show Mr. Lindbergh—”

“Lindberl.”

“Mr. Lindberl here the way up to the old Spradlin place. Take him a far as the old log bridge, he might get lost before then.”

“Log bridge broke down, daddy.”

“When?”

“October, daddy.”

“Well, hell, somethin’ else to fix! Anyway, to the creek.”

He turned to me. “You want him to go along on up there, see you don’t get snakebit?”

“No, I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“Mind if I ask what you’re going up there for?” he asked. He was looking away from me. I could see having to come right out and ask was bothering him. Such things usually came up in the course of conversation.

“I’m a—uh, bird scientist. I study birds. We had a sighting—someone told us the old Gudger place—the area around here—I’m looking for a rare bird. It’s hard to explain.”

I noticed I was sweating. It was hot.

“You mean like a goodgod? I saw a goodgod about twenty-five years ago, over next to Bruce,” he said.

“Well, no.” (A goodgod was one of the names for an ivory-billed woodpecker, one of the rarest in the world. Any other time I would have dropped my jaw. Because they were thought to have died out in Mississippi by the teens, and by the fact that Krait knew they were rare.)

I went to lock my car up, then thought of the protocol of the situation. “My car be in your way?” I asked.

“Naw. It’ll be just fine,” said Jim Bob Krait. “We’ll look for you back by sundown, that be all right?”

For a minute, I didn’t know whether that was a command or an expression of concern.

“Just in case I get snakebit,” I said. “I’ll try to be careful up there.”

“Good luck on findin’ them rare birds,” he said. He walked up to the porch with his family.

“Les go,” said Luke.

Behind the Krait house was a henhouse and pigsty where hogs lay after their morning slop like islands in a muddy bay, or some Zen pork sculpture. Next we passed broken farm machinery gone to rust, though there was nothing but uncultivated land as far as the eye could see. How the family made a living I don’t know. I’m told you can find places just like this throughout the South.

We walked through woods and across fields, following a sort of path. I tried to memorize the turns I would have to take on the way back. Luke didn’t say a word the whole twenty minutes he accompanied me, except to curse once when he stepped into a bull nettle with his tennis shoes.

We came to a creek which skirted the edge of a woodsy hill. There was a rotted log forming a small dam. Above it the water was nearly three feet deep, below it, half that much.

“See that path?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Follow it up around the hill, then across the next field. Then you cross the creek again on the rocks, and over the hill. Take the left-hand path. What’s left of the house is about three quarters the way up the next hill. If you come to a big bare rock cliff, you’ve gone too far. You got that?”

I nodded.

He turned and left.

The house had once been a dog-run cabin, like Ms. Jimson had said. Now it was fallen in on one side, what they call sigoglin (or was it antisigoglin?). I once heard a hymn on the radio called “The Land Where No Cabins Fall.” This was the country songs like that were written in.

Weeds grew everywhere. There were signs of fences, a flattened pile of wood that had once been a barn. Further behind the house were the outhouse remains. Half a rusted pump stood in the backyard. A flatter spot showed where the vegetable garden had been; in it a single wild tomato, pecked by birds, lay rotting. I passed it. There was lumber from three outbuildings, mostly rotten and green with algae and moss. One had been a smokehouse and woodshed combination. Two had been chicken roosts. One was larger than the other. It was there I started to poke around and dig.

Where? Where? I wish I’d been on more archaeological digs, knew the places to look. Refuse piles, midden heaps, kitchen scrap piles, compost boxes. Why hadn’t I been born on a farm so I’d know instinctively where to search?

I prodded around the grounds. I moved back and forth like a setter casting for the scent of quail. I wanted more, more. I still wasn’t satisfied.

Dusk. Dark, in fact. I trudged into the Kraits’ front yard. The toe sack I carried was full to bulging. I was hot, tired, streaked with fifty years of chicken shit. The Kraits were on their porch. Jim Bob lumbered down like a friendly mountain.

I asked him a few questions, gave them a Xerox of one of the dodo pictures, left them addresses and phone numbers where they could reach me.

Then into the rent-a-car. Off to Water Valley, acting on information Jennifer Krait gave me. I went to the postmaster’s house at Water Valley. She was getting ready for bed. I asked questions. She got on the phone. I bothered people until one in the morning. Then back into the trusty rent-a-car.

On to Memphis as the moon came up on my right. Interstate 55 was a glass ribbon before me. WLS from Chicago was on the radio.

I hummed along with it, I sang at the top of my voice.

The sack full of dodo bones, beaks, feet and eggshell fragments kept me company on the front seat.

Did you know a museum once traded an entire blue whale skeleton for one of a dodo?

Driving. Driving.

The dance of the Dodos

I used to have a vision sometimes—I had it long before this madness came up. I can close my eyes and see it by thinking hard. But it comes to me most often, most vividly when I am reading and listening to classical music, especially Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

It is near dusk in The Hague and the light is that of Frans Hals, of Rembrandt. The Dutch royal family and their guests eat and talk quietly in the great dining hall. Guards with halberds and pikes stand in the corners of the room. The family is arranged around the table; the King, Queen, some princesses, a prince, a couple of other children, and invited noble or two. Servants come out with plates and cups but they do not intrude.

On a raised platform at one end of the room an orchestra plays dinner music—a harpsichord, viola, cello, three violins, and woodwinds. One of the royal dwarfs sits on the edge of the platform, his foot slowly rubbing the back of one of the dogs sleeping near him.

As the music of Pachelbel’s Canon in D swells and rolls through the hall, one of the dodos walks in clumsily, stops, tilts its head, its eyes bright as a pool of tar. It sways a little, lifts its foot tentatively, one then another, rocks back and forth in time to the cello.

The violins swirl. The dodo begins to dance, its great ungainly body now graceful. It is joined by the other two dodos who come into the hall, all three in sort of a circle.

The harpsichord begins its counterpoint. The fourth dodo, the white one from Réunion, comes from its place under the table and joins the circle with the others.

It is most graceful of all, making complete turns where the others only sway and dip on the edge of the circle they have formed.

The music rises in volume; the first violinist sees the dodos and nods to the King. But he and the others at the table have already seen. They are silent, transfixed—even the servants stand still, bowls, pots and, kettles in their hands forgotten.

Around the dodos dance with bobs and weaves of their ugly heads. The white dodo dips, takes half a step, pirouettes on one foot, circles again.

Without a word the King of Holland takes the hand of the Queen, and they come around the table, children before the spectacle. They join in the dance, waltzing (anachronism) among the dodos while the family, the guests, the soldiers watch and nod in time with the music.

Then the vision fades, and the afterimage of a flickering fireplace and a dodo remains.

The dodo and its kindred came by ships to the ports of civilized men. The first we have record of is that of Captain van Neck who brought back two in 1599—one for the King of Holland, and one which found its way through Cologne to the menagerie of Emperor Rudolf II.

This royal aviary was at Schloss Neugebau, near Vienna. It was here the first paintings of the dumb old birds were done by Georg and his son Jacob Hoefnagel, between 1602 and 1610. They painted it among more than ninety species of birds which kept the Emperor amused.

Another Dutch artist named Roelandt Savery, as someone said, “made a career out of the dodo.” He drew and painted them many times, and was no doubt personally fascinated by them. Obsessed, even. Early on, the paintings are consistent; the later ones have inaccuracies. This implies he worked from life first, then from memory as his model went to that place soon to be reserved for all its species. One of his drawings has two of the Raphidae scrambling for some goodie on the ground. His works are not without charm.

Another Dutch artist (they seemed to sprout up like mushrooms after a spring rain) named Peter Withoos also stuck dodos in his paintings, sometimes in odd and exciting places—wandering around during their owner’s music lessons, or with Adam and Eve in some Edenic idyll.

The most accurate representation, we are assured, comes from half a world away from the religious and political turmoil of the seafaring Europeans. There is an Indian miniature painting of the dodo which now rests in a museum in Russia. The dodo could have been brought by the Dutch or Portuguese in their travels to Goa and the coasts of the Indian subcontinent. Or they could have been brought centuries before by the Arabs who plied the Indian Ocean in their triangular-sailed craft, and who may have discovered the Mascarenes before the Europeans cranked themselves up for the First Crusade.

At one time early in my bird-fascination days (after I stopped killing them with BB guns but before I began to work for a scholarship), I once sat down and figured out where all the dodos had been.

Two with van Neck in 1599, one to Holland, one to Austria. Another was in Count Solm’s park in 1600. An account speaks of “one in Italy, one in Germany, several to England, eight or nine to Holland.” William Boentekoe van Hoorn knew of “one shipped to Europe in 1640, another in 1685” which he said was “also painted by Dutch artists.” Two were mentioned as “being kept in Surrat House in India as pets,” perhaps one of which is the one in the painting. Being charitable, and considering “several” to mean at least three, that means twenty dodos in all.

There had to be more, when boatloads had been gathered at the time.

What do we know of the Didine birds? A few ships’ logs, some accounts left by travelers and colonists. The English were fascinated by them. Sir Hamon L’Estrange, a contemporary of Pepys, saw exhibited “a Dodar from the Island of Mauritius . . . it is not able to flie, being so bigge.” One was stuffed when it died, and was put in the Museum Tradescantum in South Lambeth. It eventually found its way into the Ashmolean Museum. It grew ratty and was burned, all but a leg and the head, in 1750. By then there were no more dodos, but nobody had realized that yet.

Francis Willughby got to describe it before its incineration. Earlier, old Carolus Clusius in Holland studied the one in Count Solm’s park. He collected everything known about the Raphidae, describing a dodo leg Pieter Pauw kept in his natural history cabinet, in Exoticarium libri decem in 1605, eight years after their discovery.

François Leguat, a Huguenot who lived on Réunion for some years, published an account of his travels in which he mentioned the dodos. It was published in 1690 (after the Mauritius dodo was extinct) and included the information that “some of the males weigh forty-five pounds. One egg, much bigger than that of a goose, is laid by the female, and takes seven weeks’ hatching time.”

The Abbe Pingre visited the Mascarenes in 1761. He saw the last of the Rodriguez solitaires, and collected what information he could about the dead Mauritius and Réunion members of the genus.

After that, only memories of the colonists, and some scientific debate as to where the Raphidae belonged in the great taxonomic scheme of things—some said pigeons, some said rails—were left. Even this nitpicking ended. The dodo was forgotten.

When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland in 1865, most people thought he invented the dodo.

The service station I called from in Memphis was busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Between bings and dings of the bell, I finally realized the call had gone through.

The guy who answered was named Selvedge. I got nowhere with him. He mistook me for a real estate agent, then a lawyer. Now he was beginning to think I was some sort of a con man. I wasn’t doing too well, either. I hadn’t slept in two days. I must have sounded like a speed freak. My only progress was that I found that Ms. Annie Mae Gudger (childhood playmate of Jolyn Jimson) was now, and had been, the respected Ms. Annie Mae Radwin. This guy Selvedge must have been a secretary or toady or something.

We were having a conversation comparable to that between a shrieking macaw and a pile of mammoth bones. Then there was another click on the line.

“Young man?” said the other voice, an old woman’s voice, Southern, very refined but with a hint of the hills in it.

“Yes? Hello! Hello!”

“Young man, you say you talked to a Jolyn somebody? Do you mean Jolyn Smith?”

“Hello! Yes! Ms. Radwin, Ms. Annie Mae Radwin who used to be Gudger? She lives in Austin now. Texas. She used to live near Water Valley, Mississippi. Austin’s where I’m from. I . . .”

“Young man,” asked the voice again, “are you sure you haven’t been put up to this by my hateful sister Alma?”

“Who? No, ma’am. I met a woman named Jolyn . . .”

“I’d like to talk to you, young man,” said the voice. Then offhandedly, “Give him directions to get here, Selvedge.”

Click.

I cleaned out my mouth as best I could in the service station restroom, tried to shave with an old clogged Gillette disposable in my knapsack and succeeded in gapping up my jawline. I changed into a clean pair of jeans, the only other shirt I had with me, and combed my hair. I stood in front of the mirror.

I still looked like the dog’s lunch.

The house reminded me of Presley’s mansion, which was somewhere in the neighborhood. From a shack on the side of a Mississippi hill to this, in forty years. There are all sorts of ways of making it. I wondered what Annie Mae Gudger’s had been. Luck? Predation? Divine intervention? Hard work? Trover and replevin?

Selvedge led me toward the sun room. I felt like Philip Marlowe going to meet a rich client. The house was filled with that furniture built sometime between the turn of the century and the 1950s—the ageless kind. It never looks great, it never looks ratty, and every chair is comfortable.

I think I was expecting some formidable woman with sleeve blotters and a green eyeshade hunched over a roll-top desk with piles of paper whose acceptance or rejection meant life or death for thousands.

Who I met was a charming lady in a green pantsuit. She was in her sixties, her hair still a straw wheat color. It didn’t look dyed. Her eyes were blue as my first-grade teacher’s had been. She was wiry and looked as if the word fat was not in her vocabulary.

“Good morning, Mr. Lindberl.” She shook my hand. “Would you like some coffee? You look as if you could use it.”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Please sit down.” She indicated a white wicker chair at a glass table. A serving tray with coffeepot, cups, tea bags, croissants, napkins, and plates lay on the tabletop.

After I swallowed half a cup of coffee at a gulp, she said, “What you wanted to see me about must be important?”

“Sorry about my manners,” I said. “I know I don’t look it, but I’m a biology assistant at the University of Texas. An ornithologist. Working on my master’s. I met Ms. Jolyn Jimson two days ago . . .”

“How is Jolyn? I haven’t seen her in oh, Lord, it must be on to fifty years. The times gets away.”

“She seemed to be fine. I only talked to her half an hour or so. That was . . .”

“And you’ve come to see me about? . . .”

“Uh. The . . . about some of the poultry your family used to raise, when they lived near Water Valley.”

She looked at me a moment. Then she began to smile.

“Oh, you mean the ugly chickens?” she said.

I smiled. I almost laughed. I knew what Oedipus must have gone through.

It is now 4:30 in the afternoon. I am sitting at the downtown Motel 6 in Memphis. I have to make a phone call and get some sleep and catch a plane.

Annie Mae Gudger Radwin talked for four hours, answering my questions, setting me straight on family history, having Selvedge hold all her calls.

The main problem was that Annie Mae ran off in 1928, the year before her father got his big break. She went to Yazoo City, and by degrees and stages worked her way northward to Memphis and her destiny as the widow of a rich mercantile broker.

But I get ahead of myself.

Grandfather Gudger used to be the overseer for Colonel Crisby on the main plantation near McComb, Mississippi. There was a long story behind that. Bear with me.

Colonel Crisby himself was the scion of a seafaring family with interests in both the cedars of Lebanon (almost all cut down for masts for His Majesty’s and others’ navies) and Egyptian cotton. Also teas, spices, and any other salable commodity which came their way.

When Colonel Crisby’s grandfather reached his majority in 1802, he waved good-bye to the Atlantic Ocean at Charleston, S.C. and stepped westward into the forest. When he stopped, he was in the middle of the Chickasaw Nation, where he opened a trading post and introduced slaves to the Indians.

And he prospered, and begat Colonel Crisby’s father, who sent back to South Carolina for everything his father owned. Everything—slaves, wagons, horses, cattle, guinea fowl, peacocks, and dodos, which everybody thought of as atrociously ugly poultry of some kind, one of the seafaring uncles having bought them off a French merchant in 1721. (I surmised these were white dodos from Réunion, unless they had been from even earlier stock. The dodo of Mauritius was already extinct by then.)

All this stuff was herded out west to the trading post in the midst of the Chickasaw Nation. (The tribes around there were of the confederation of the Dancing Rabbits.)

And Colonel Crisby’s father prospered, and so did the guinea fowl and the dodos. Then Andrew Jackson came along and marched the Dancing Rabbits off up the Trail of Tears to the heaven of Oklahoma. And Colonel Crisby’s father begat Colonel Crisby, and put the trading post in the hands of others, and moved his plantation westward still to McComb.

Everything prospered but Colonel Crisby’s father, who died. And the dodos, with occasional losses to the avengin’ weasel and the egg-sucking dog, reproduced themselves also.

Then along came Granddaddy Gudger, a Simon Legree role model, who took care of the plantation while Colonel Crisby raised ten companies of men and marched off to fight the War of the Southern Independence.

Colonel Crisby came back to the McComb plantation earlier than most, he having stopped much of the same volley of Minié balls that caught his commander, General Beauregard Hanlon, on a promontory bluff during the Siege of Vicksburg.

He wasn’t dead, but death hung around the place like a gentlemanly bill collector for a month. The colonel languished, went slap-dab crazy and freed all his slaves the week before he died (the war lasted another two years after that). Not having any slaves, he didn’t need an overseer.

Then comes the Faulkner part of the tale, straight out of As I Lay Dying, with the Gudger family returning to the area of Water Valley (before there was a Water Valley), moving through the demoralized and tattered displaced persons of the South, driving their dodos before them. For Colonel Crisby had given them to his former overseer for his faithful service. Also followed the story of the bloody murder of Granddaddy Gudger at the hands of the Freedman’s militia during the rising of the first Klan, and of the trials and tribulations of Daddy Gudger in the years between 1880 and 1910, when he was between the ages of four and thirty-four.

Alma and Annie Mae were the second and fifth of Daddy Gudger’s brood, born three years apart. They seemed to have hated each other from the very first time Alma looked into little Annie Mae’s crib. They were kids by Daddy Gudger’s second wife (his desperation had killed the first) and their father was already on his sixth career. He had been a lumberman, a stump preacher, a plowman-for-hire (until his mules broke out in farcy buds and died of the glanders), a freight hauler (until his horses died of overwork and the hardware store repossessed the wagon), a politician’s roadie (until the politician lost the election). When Alma and Annie Mae were born, he was failing as a sharecropper. Somehow Gudger had made it through the Depression of 1898 as a boy, and was too poor after that to notice more about economics than the price of Beech-Nut tobacco at the store.

Alma and Annie Mae fought, and it helped none at all that Alma, being the oldest daughter, was both her mother and father’s darling. Annie Mae’s life was the usual unwanted poor-white-trash-child’s hell. She vowed early to run away, and recognized her ambition at thirteen.

All this I learned this morning. Jolyn (Smith) Jimson was Annie Mae’s only friend in those days—from a family even poorer than the Gudgers. But somehow there was food, and an occasional odd job. And the dodos.

“My family hated those old birds,” said the cultured Annie Mae Radwin, née Gudger, in the solarium. “He always swore he was going to get rid of them someday, but just never seemed to get around to it. I think there was more to it than that. But they were so much trouble. We always had to keep them penned up at night, and go check for their eggs. They wandered off to lay them, and forgot where they were. Sometimes no new ones were born at all in a year.

“And they got so ugly. Once a year. I mean, terrible-looking, like they were going to die. All their feathers fell off, and they looked like they had mange or something. Then the whole front of their beaks fell off, or worse, hung halfway on for a week or two. They looked like big old naked pigeons. After that they’d lose weight, down to twenty or thirty pounds, before their new feathers grew back.

“We were always having to kill foxes that got after them in the turkey house. That’s what we called their roost, the turkey house. And we found their eggs all sucked out by cats and dogs. They were so stupid we had to drive them into their roost at night. I don’t think they could have found it standing ten feet from it.”

She looked at me.

“I think much as my father hated them, they meant something to him. As long as he hung on to them, he knew he was as good as Granddaddy Gudger. You may not know it, but there was a certain amount of family pride about Granddaddy Gudger. At least in my father’s eyes. His rapid fall in the world has a sort of grandeur to it. He’d gone from a relatively high position in the old order, and maintained some grace and stature after the Emancipation, and though he lost everything, he managed to keep those ugly old chickens the colonel had given him as sort of a symbol.

“And as long as he had them, too, my daddy thought himself as good as his father. He kept his dignity, even when he didn’t have anything else.”

I asked what happened to them. She didn’t know, but told me who did and where I could find her.

That’s why I’m going to make a phone call.

“Hello. Dr. Courtney. Dr. Courtney? This is Paul. Memphis. Tennessee. It’s too long to go into. No, of course not, not yet. But I’ve got evidence. What? Okay, how do trochanters, coracoids, tarsometatarsi, and beak sheaths sound? From their henhouse, where else? Where would you keep your dodos, then?

“Sorry. I haven’t slept in a couple of days. I need some help. Yes, yes. Money. Lots of money.

“Cash. Three hundred dollars, maybe. Western Union, Memphis, Tennessee. Whichever one’s closest to the airport. Airport. I need the department to set up reservations to Mauritius for me. . . .

“No. No. Not wild goose chase, wild dodo chase. Tame dodo chase. I know there aren’t any dodos on Mauritius! I know that. I could explain. I know it’ll mean a couple of grand . . . if . . . but . . .

“Look, Dr. Courtney. Do you want your picture in Scientific American, or don’t you?”

I am sitting in the airport cafe in Port Louis, Mauritius. It is now three days later, five days since that fateful morning my car wouldn’t start. God bless the Sears Diehard people. I have slept sitting up in a plane seat, on and off, different planes, different seats, for twenty-four hours, Kennedy to Paris, Paris to Cairo, Cairo to Madagascar. I felt like a brand-new man when I got here.

Now I feel like an infinitely sadder and wiser brand-new man. I have just returned from the hateful sister Alma’s house in the exclusive section of Port Louis, where all the French and British officials used to live.

Courtney will get his picture in Scientific American, me too, all right. There’ll be newspaper stories and talk shows for a few weeks for me, and I’m sure Annie Mae Gudger Radwin on one side of the world and Alma Chandler Gudger Molière on the other will come in for their share of the glory.

I am putting away cup after cup of coffee. The plane back to Tananarive leaves in an hour. I plan to sleep all the way back to Cairo, to Paris, to New York, pick up my bag of bones, sleep back to Austin.

Before me on the table is a packet of documents, clippings and photographs. I have come half the world for this. I gaze from the package, out the window across Port Louis to the bulk of Mt. Pieter Boothe, which overshadows the city and its famous racecourse.

Perhaps I should do something symbolic. Cancel my flight. Climb the mountain and look down on man and all his handiworks. Take a pitcher of martinis with me. Sit in the bright semitropical sunlight (it’s early dry winter here). Drink the martinis slowly, toasting Snuffo, God of Extinction. Here’s one for the Great Auk. This is for the Carolina Parakeet. Mud in your eye, Passenger Pigeon. This one’s for the Heath Hen. Most importantly, here’s one each for the Mauritius dodo, the white dodo of Réunion, the Réunion solitaire, the Rodriguez solitaire. Here’s to the Raphidae, great Didine birds that you were.

Maybe I’ll do something just as productive, like climbing Mt. Pieter Boothe and pissing into the wind.

How symbolic. The story of the dodo ends where it began, on this very island. Life imitates cheap art. Like the Xerox of the Xerox of a bad novel. I never expected to find dodos still alive here (this is the one place they would have been noticed). I still can’t believe Alma Chandler Gudger Molière could have lived here twenty-five years and not know about the dodo, never set foot inside the Port Louis Museum, where they have skeletons and a stuffed replica the size of your little brother.

After Annie Mae ran off, the Gudger family found itself prospering in a time the rest of the country was going to hell. It was 1929. Gudger delved into politics again, and backed a man who knew a man who worked for Theodore “Sure Two-Handed Sword of God” Bilbo, who had connections everywhere. Who introduced him to Huey “Kingfish” Long just after that gentleman lost the Louisiana governor’s election one of the times. Gudger stumped around Mississippi, getting up steam for Long’s Share the Wealth plan, even before it had a name.

The upshot was that the Long machine in Louisiana knew a rabble-rouser when it saw one, and invited Gudger to move to the Sportsman’s Paradise, with his family, all expenses paid, and start working for the Kingfish at the unbelievable salary of $62.50 a week. Which prospect was like turning a hog loose under a persimmon tree, and before you could say Backwoods Messiah, the Gudger clan was on its way to the land of pelicans, graft, and Mardi Gras.

Almost. But I’ll get to that.

Daddy Gudger prospered all out of proportion with his abilities, but many men did that during the Depression. First a little, thence to more, he rose in bureaucratic (and political) circles of the state, dying rich and well-hated with his fingers in all the pies.

Alma Chandler Gudger became a debutante (she says Robert Penn Warren put her in his book) and met and married Jean Carl Molière, only heir to rice, indigo, and sugar cane growers. They had a happy wedded life, moving first to the West Indies, later to Mauritius, where the family sugar cane holdings were one of the largest on the island. Jean Carl died in 1959. Alma was his only survivor.

So local family makes good. Poor sharecropping Mississippi people turn out to have a father dying with a smile on his face, and two daughters who between them own a large portion of the planet.

I open the envelope before me. Ms. Alma Molière had listened politely to my story (the university had called ahead and arranged an introduction through the director of the Port Louis Museum, who knew Ms. Molière socially) and told me what she could remember. Then she sent a servant out to one of the storehouses (large as a duplex) and he and two others came back with boxes of clippings, scrapbooks and family photos.

“I haven’t looked at any of this since we left St. Thomas,” she said. “Let’s go through it together.”

Most of it was about the rise of Citizen Gudger.

“There’s not many pictures of us before we came to Louisiana. We were so frightfully poor then, hardly anyone we knew had a camera. Oh, look. Here’s one of Annie Mae. I thought I threw all those out after Mamma died.”

This is the photograph. It must have been taken about 1927. Annie Mae is wearing some unrecognizable piece of clothing that approximates a dress. She leans on a hoe, smiling a snaggle-toothed smile. She looks to be ten or eleven. Her eyes are half hidden by the shadow of the brim of a gapped straw hat she wears. The earth she is standing in barefoot has been newly turned. Behind her is one corner of the house, and the barn beyond has its upper hay-windows open. Out-of-focus people are at work there.

A few feet behind her, a huge male dodo is pecking at something on the ground. The front two-thirds of it shows, back to the stupid wings and the edge of the upcurved tail feathers. One foot is in the photo, having just scratched at something, possibly an earthworm, in the new-plowed clods. Judging by its darkness, it is the grey, or Mauritius, dodo.

The photograph is not very good, one of those 3 1/2 x 5 jobs box cameras used to take. Already I can see this one, and the blowup of the dodo, taking up a double-page spread in S.A. Alma told me around then they were down to six or seven of the ugly chickens, two whites, the rest grey-brown.

Besides this photo, two clippings are in the package, one from the Bruce Banner-Times, the other from the Oxford newspaper; both are columns by the same woman dealing with “Doings in Water Valley.” Both mention the Gudger family moving from the area to seek its fortune in the swampy state to the west, and telling how they will be missed. Then there’s a yellowed clipping from the front page of the Oxford newspaper with a small story about the Gudger Farewell Party in Water Valley the Sunday before (dated October 19, 1929).

There’s a handbill in the package, advertising the Gudger Family Farewell Party, Sunday Oct. 15, 1929 Come One Come All. (The people in Louisiana who sent expense money to move Daddy Gudger must have overestimated the costs by an exponential factor. I said as much.)

“No,” Alma Molière said. “There was a lot, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. Daddy Gudger was like Thomas Wolfe and knew a shining golden opportunity when he saw one. Win, lose, or draw, he was never coming back there again. He would have thrown some kind of soirée whether there had been money for it or not. Besides, people were much more sociable then, you mustn’t forget.”

I asked her how many people came.

“Four or five hundred,” she said. “There’s some pictures here somewhere.” We searched awhile, then we found them.

Another thirty minutes to my flight. I’m not worried sitting here. I’m the only passenger, and the pilot is sitting at the table next to mine talking to an RAF man. Life is much slower and nicer on these colonial islands. You mustn’t forget.

I look at the other two photos in the package. One is of some men playing horseshoes and washer-toss, while kids, dogs, and women look on. It was evidently taken from the east end of the house looking west. Everyone must have had to walk the last mile to the old Gudger place. Other groups of people stand talking. Some men in shirtsleeves and suspenders stand with their heads thrown back, a snappy story, no doubt, just told. One girl looks directly at the camera from close up, shyly, her finger in her mouth. She’s about five. It looks like any snapshot of a family reunion which could have been taken anywhere, anytime. Only the clothing marks it as backwoods 1920s.

Courtney will get his money’s worth. I’ll write the article, make phone calls, plan the talk show tour to coincide with publication. Then I’ll get some rest. I’ll be a normal person again; get a degree, spend my time wading through jungles after animals which will be dead in another twenty years, anyway.

Who cares? The whole thing will be just another media event, just this year’s Big Deal. It’ll be nice getting normal again. I can read books, see movies, wash my clothes at the laundromat, listen to Jonathan Richman on the stereo. I can study and become an authority on some minor matter or other.

I can go to museums and see all the wonderful dead things there.

“That’s the memory picture,” said Alma. “They always took them at big things like this, back in those days. Everybody who was there would line up and pose for the camera. Only we couldn’t fit everybody in. So we had two made. This is the one with us in it.”

The house is dwarfed by people. All sizes, shapes, dresses, and ages. Kids and dogs in front, women next, then men at the back. The only exceptions are the bearded patriarchs seated towards the front with the children—men whose eyes face the camera but whose heads are still ringing with something Nathan Bedford Forrest said to them one time on a smoke-filled field. This photograph is from another age. You can recognize Daddy and Mrs. Gudger if you’ve seen their photograph before. Alma pointed herself out to me.

But the reason I took the photograph is in the foreground. Tables have been built out of sawhorses, with doors and boards nailed across them. They extend the entire width of the photograph. They are covered with food, more food than you can imagine.

“We started cooking three days before. So did the neighbors. Everybody brought something,” said Alma.

It’s like an entire Safeway had been cooked and set out to cool. Hams, quarters of beef, chickens by the tubful, quail in mounds, rabbit, butterbeans by the bushel, yams, Irish potatoes, an acre of corn, eggplant, peas, turnip greens, butter in five-pound molds, cornbread and biscuits, gallon cans of molasses, redeye gravy by the pot.

And five huge birds—twice as big as turkeys, legs capped like for Thanksgiving, drumsticks the size of Schwarzenegger’s biceps, whole-roasted, lying on their backs on platters large as cocktail tables.

The people in the crowd sure look hungry.

“We ate for days,” said Alma.

I already have the title for the Scientific American article. It’s going to be called “The Dodo Is Still Dead.”

THE AUTOPSY

Michael Shea

This story—in which Dr. Carl Winters, a fifty-seven year old pathologist, arrives at a mountain town to perform autopsies on the victims of a suspicious mining explosion—is about the business of death; and so be warned that it is in some ways a grim and horrifying tale. However, it is ultimately a positive, even a touching story; and we doubt that you will soon forget Dr. Winters and what he finds in a defunct ice plant on the edge of the town known as Bailey.

Dr. Winter stepped out of the tiny Greyhound station and into the midnight street that smelled of pines. The station’s window showed the only light, save for a luminous clock face several doors down and a little neon beer logo two blocks farther on. He could hear a river. It ran deep in a gorge west of town, but the town was only a few streets wide and a mile or so long, and the current’s blurred roar was distinct, like the noise of a ghost river running between the banks of dark shop windows. When he had walked a short distance, Dr. Winters set his suitcase down, pocketed his hands, and looked at the stars—thick as cobblestones in the black gulf.

“A mountain hamlet—a mining town,” he said. “Stars. No moon. We are in Bailey.”

He was talking to his cancer. It was in his stomach. Since learning of it, he had developed this habit of wry communion with it. He meant to show courtesy to this uninvited guest, Death. It would not find him churlish, for that would make its victory absolute. Except, of course, that its victory would be absolute, with or without his ironies.

He picked up his suitcase and walked on. The starlight made faint mirrors of the windows’ blackness and showed him the man who passed: lizard-lean, white-haired (at fifty-seven), a man traveling on death’s business, carrying his own death in him, and even bearing death’s wardrobe in his suitcase. For this was filled—aside from his medical kit and some scant necessities—with mortuary bags. The sheriff had told him on the phone of the improvisations that presently enveloped the corpses, and so the doctor had packed these, laying them in his case with bitter amusement, checking the last one’s breadth against his chest before the mirror, as a woman will gauge a dress before donning it, and telling his cancer: “Oh, yes, that’s plenty roomy enough for both of us!”

The case was heavy, and he stopped frequently to rest and scan the sky. What a night’s work to do, probing pungent, soulless filth, eyes earthward, beneath such a ceiling of stars! It had taken five days to dig the ten men out. The autumnal equinox had passed, but the weather here had been uniformly hot. And warmer still, no doubt, so deep in the earth.

He entered the courthouse by a side door. His heels knocked on the linoleum corridor. A door at the end of it, on which was lettered NATE CRAVEN, COUNTY SHERIFF, opened well before he reached it, and his friend stepped out to meet him.

“Dammit, Carl, you’re still so thin they could use you for a whip. Gimme that. You’re in too good a shape already. You don’t need the exercise.”

The case hung weightless from the Sheriff’s hand, imparting no tilt at all to his bull shoulders. Despite his implied self-derogation, he was only moderately paunched for a man his age and size. He had a rough-hewn face, and the bulk of brow, nose, and jaw made his greenish eyes look small until one engaged them and felt the snap and penetration of their intelligence. In the office he half filled two cups from a coffee urn and topped both off with bourbon from a bottle in his desk. When they had finished these, they had finished trading news of mutual friends. The sheriff mixed another round and sipped from his, in a silence clearly prefatory to the work at hand.

“They talk about rough justice,” he said. “I’ve sure seen it now. One of those . . . patients of yours that you’ll be working on? He was a killer. Christ, ‘killer’ doesn’t half say it. A killer’s the least of what he was. The blast killing him, that was the justice part. Those other nine, they were the rough. And it just galls the hell out of me, Carl! If that kiss-ass boss of yours has his way, the rough won’t even stop with their being dead! There won’t even be any compensation for their survivors! Tell me—has he broke his back yet? I mean, touching his toes for Fordham Mutual?”

“You refer, I take it, to the estimable Coroner Waddleton of Fordham County.” Dr. Winters paused to sip his drink. With a delicate flaring of his nostrils he communicated all the disgust, contempt, and amusement he had felt in his four years as pathologist in Waddleton’s office. The sheriff laughed.

“Clear pictures seldom emerge from anything the coroner says,” the doctor continued. “He took your name in vain. Vigorously and repeatedly. These expressions formed his opening remarks. He then developed the theme of our office’s strict responsibility to the letter of the law, and of the workmen’s compensation law in particular. Death benefits accrue only to the dependents of decedents whose deaths arise out of the course of their employment, not merely in the course of it. Victims of a maniacal assault, though they die on the job, are by no means necessarily compensable under the law. We then contemplated the tragic injustice of an insurance company—any insurance company—having to pay benefits to unentitled persons, solely through the laxity and incompetence of investigating officers. Your name came up again, and Coroner Waddleton subjected it to further abuse. Fordham Mutual, campaign contributor or not, is certainly a major insurance company and is therefore entitled to the same fair treatment that all such companies deserve.”

Craven uttered a bark of wrathful mirth and spat expertly into his wastebasket. “Ah, the impartial public servant! What’s seven widows and sixteen dependent children, next to Fordham Mutual?” He drained his cup and sighed. “I’ll tell you what, Carl. We’ve been five days digging those men out and the last two days sifting half that mountain for explosive traces, with those insurance investigators hanging on our elbows, and the most they could say was that there was ‘strong presumptive evidence’ of a bomb. Well, I don’t budge for that because I don’t have to. Waddleton can shove his ‘extraordinary circumstances.’ If you don’t find anything in those bodies, then that’s all the autopsy there is to it, and they get buried right here where their families want ’em.”

The doctor was smiling at his friend. He finished his cup and spoke with his previous wry detachment, as if the sheriff had not interrupted his narrative.

“The honorable coroner then spoke with remarkable volubility on the subject of Autopsy Consent forms and the malicious subversion of private citizens by vested officers of the law. He had, as it happened, a sheaf of such forms on his desk, all signed, all with a rider clause typed in above the signatures. A cogent paragraph. It had, among its other qualities, the property of turning the coroner’s face purple when he read it aloud. He read it aloud to me three times. It appeared that the survivors’ consent was contingent on two conditions: that the autopsy be performed in loco mortis, that is to say in Bailey, and that only if the coroner’s pathologist found concrete evidence of homicide should the decedents be subject either to removal from Bailey or to further necropsy. It was well written. I remember wondering who wrote it.”

The sheriff nodded musingly. He took Dr. Winters’s empty cup, set it by his own, filled both two-thirds with bourbon, and added a splash of coffee to the doctor’s. The two friends exchanged a level stare, rather like poker players in the clinch. The sheriff regarded his cup, sipped from it.

“In loco mortis. What-all does that mean exactly?”

“ ‘In the place of death.’ ”

“Oh. Freshen that up for you?”

“I’ve just started it, thank you.”

Both men laughed, paused, and laughed again, some might have said immoderately.

“He all but told me that I had to find something to compel a second autopsy,” the doctor said at length. “He would have sold his soul—or taken out a second mortgage on it—for a mobile X-ray unit. He’s right, of course. If those bodies have trapped any bomb fragments, that would be the surest and quickest way of finding them. It still amazes me your Dr. Parsons could let his X-ray go unfixed for so long.”

“He sets bones, stitches wounds, writes prescriptions, and sends anything tricky down the mountain. Just barely manages that. Drunks don’t get much done.”

“He’s gotten that bad?”

“He hangs on and no more. Waddleton was right there, not deputizing him pathologist. I doubt he could find a cannonball in a dead rat. I wouldn’t say it where it could hurt him, as long as he’s still managing, but everyone here knows it. His patients sort of look after him half the time. But Waddleton would have sent you, no matter who was here. Nothing but his best for party contributors like Fordham Mutual.”

The doctor looked at his hands and shrugged. “So. There’s a killer in the batch. Was there a bomb?”

Slowly the sheriff planted his elbows on the desk and pressed his hands against his temples, as if the question had raised a turbulence of memories. For the first time the doctor—half hearkening throughout to the never-quite-muted stirrings of the death within him—saw his friend’s exhaustion: the tremor of hand, the bruised look under the eyes.

“When I’ve told you what we have, I guess you’ll end up assuming what I do about it. But I think assuming is as far as any of us will get with this one. It’s one of those nightmare specials, Carl. The ones no one ever does get to the bottom of.

“All right, then. About two months ago, we had a man disappear—Ronald Hanley. Mine worker, rock-steady, family man. He didn’t come home one night, and we never found a trace of him. OK, that happens sometimes. About a week later, the lady that ran the laundromat, Sharon Starker, she disappeared, no trace. We got edgy then. I made an announcement on the local radio about a possible weirdo at large, spelled out special precautions everybody should take. We put both our squad cars on the night beat, and by day we set to work knocking on every door in town collecting alibis for the two times of disappearance.

“No good. Maybe you’re fooled by this uniform and think I’m a law officer, protector of the people, and all that? A natural mistake. A lot of people were fooled. In less than seven weeks, six people vanished, just like that. Me and my deputies might as well have stayed in bed round the clock, for all the good we did.” The sheriff drained his cup.

“Anyway, at last we got lucky. Don’t get me wrong now. We didn’t go all hog-wild and actually prevent a crime or anything. But we did find a body—except it wasn’t the body of any of the seven people that had disappeared. We’d taken to combing the woods nearest town, with temporary deputies from the miners to help. Well, one of those boys was out there with us last week. It was hot—like it’s been for a while now—and it was real quiet. He heard this buzzing noise and looked around for it, and he saw a bee-swarm up in the crotch of a tree. Except he was smart enough to know that that’s not usual around here—beehives. So it wasn’t bees. It was bluebottle flies, a goddamned big cloud of them, all over a bundle that was wrapped in a tarp.”

The sheriff studied his knuckles. He had, in his eventful life, occasionally met men literate enough to understand his last name and rash enough to be openly amused by it, and the knuckles—scarred knobs—were eloquent of his reactions. He looked back into his old friend’s eyes.

“We got that thing down and unwrapped it. Billy Lee Davis, one of my deputies, he was in Viet Nam, been near some bad, bad things and held on. Billy Lee blew his lunch all over the ground when we unwrapped that thing. It was a man. Some of a man. We knew he’d stood six-two because all the bones were there, and he’d probably weighed between two fifteen and two twenty-five, but he folded up no bigger than a big-size laundry package. Still had his face, both shoulders, and the left arm, but all the rest was clean. It wasn’t animal work. It was knife work, all the edges neat as butcher cuts. Except butchered meat, even when you drain it all you can, will bleed a good deal afterwards, and there wasn’t one goddamned drop of blood on the tarp, nor in that meat. It was just as pale as fish meat.”

Deep in his body’s center, the doctor’s cancer touched him. Not a ravening attack—it sank one fang of pain, questioningly, into new untasted flesh, probing the scope for its appetite there. He disguised his tremor with a shake of the head.

“A cache, then.”

The sheriff nodded. “Like you might keep a pot roast in the icebox for making lunches. I took some pictures of his face, then we put him back and erased our traces. Two of the miners I’d deputized did a lot of hunting, were woods-smart. So I left them on the first watch. We worked out positions and cover for them, and drove back.

“We got right on tracing him, sent out descriptions to every town within a hundred miles. He was no one I’d ever seen in Bailey, nor anyone else either, it began to look like, after we’d combed the town all day with the photos. Then, out of the blue, Billy Lee Davis smacks himself on the forehead and says, ‘Sheriff, I seen this man somewhere in town, and not long ago!’

“He’d been shook all day since throwing up, and then all of a sudden he just snapped to. Was dead sure. Except he couldn’t remember where or when. We went over and over it, and he tried and tried. It got to where I wanted to grab him by the ankles and hang him upside down and shake him till it dropped out of him. But it was no damn use. Just after dark we went back to that tree—we’d worked out a place to hide the cars and a route to it through the woods. When we were close, we walkie-talkied the men we’d left for an all-clear to come up. No answer at all. And when we got there, all that was left of our trap was the tree. No body, no tarp, no Special Assistant Deputies. Nothing.”

This time Dr. Winters poured the coffee and bourbon. “Too much coffee,” the sheriff muttered, but drank anyway. “Part of me wanted to chew nails and break necks. And part of me was scared shitless. When we got back, I got on the radio station again and made an emergency broadcast and then had the man at the station rebroadcast it every hour. Told everyone to do everything in groups of three, to stay together at night in threes at least, to go out little as possible, keep armed and keep checking up on each other. It had such a damn-fool sound to it, but just pairing-up was no protection if half of one of those pairs was the killer. I sent our corpse’s picture out statewide, I deputized more men and put them on the streets to beef up the night patrol.

“It was next morning that things broke. The sheriff of Rakehell called—he’s over in the next county. He said our corpse looked a lot like a man named Abel Dougherty, a mill-hand with Con Wood over there. I left Billy Lee in charge and drove right out.

“This Dougherty had a cripple older sister he always checked back to by phone whenever he left town for long, a habit no one knew about, probably embarrassed him. Sheriff Peck there only found out about it when the woman called him, said her brother’d been four days gone for vacation and not rung her once. He’d hardly had her report for an hour when he got the picture I sent out, and recognized it. And I hadn’t been in his office more than ten minutes when Billy Lee called me there. He’d remembered.

“When he’d seen Dougherty was the Sunday night three days before we found him. Where he’d seen him was the Trucker’s Tavern outside the north end of town. The man had made a stir by being jolly drunk and latching onto a miner who was drinking there, man named Joe Allen, who’d started at the mine about two months back. Dougherty kept telling him that he wasn’t Joe Allen, but Dougherty’s old buddy named Sykes that had worked with him at Con Wood for a coon’s age, and what the hell kind of joke was this, come have a beer old buddy and tell me why you took off so sudden and what the hell you been doing with yourself.

“Allen took it laughing. Dougherty’d clap him on the shoulder, Allen’d clap him right back and make every kind of joke about it, say, ‘Give this man another beer, I’m standing in for a long-lost friend of his.’ Dougherty was so big and loud and stubborn, Billy Lee was worried about a fight starting, and he wasn’t the only one worried. But this Joe Allen was a natural good ol’ boy, handled it perfect. We’d checked him out weeks back along with everyone else, and he was real popular with the other miners. Finally Dougherty swore he was going to take him on to another bar to help celebrate the vacation Dougherty was starting out on. Joe Allen got up grinning, said goddamn it, he couldn’t accommodate Dougherty by being this fellow Sykes, but he could sure as hell have a glass with any serious drinking man that was treating. He went out with him, and gave everyone a wink as he left, to the general satisfaction of the audience.”

Craven paused. Dr. Winters met his eyes and knew his thought, two images: the jolly wink that roused the room to laughter, and the thing in the tarp aboil with bright blue flies.

“It was plain enough for me,” the sheriff said. “I told Billy Lee to search Allen’s room at the Skettles’ boardinghouse and then go straight to the mine and take him. We could fine-polish things once we had him. Since I was already in Rakehell, I saw to some of the loose ends before I started back. I went with Sheriff Peck down to Con Wood, and we found a picture of Eddie Sykes in the personnel files. I’d seen Joe Allen often enough, and it was his picture in that file.

“We found out Sykes had lived alone, was an on-again, off-again worker, private in his comings and goings, and hadn’t been around for a while.

But one of the sawyers there could be pretty sure of when Sykes left Rakehell because he’d gone to Sykes’s cabin the morning after a big meteor shower they had out there about nine weeks back, since some thought the shower might have reached the ground, and not far from Sykes’s side of the mountain. He wasn’t in that morning, and the sawyer hadn’t seen him since.

“After all those weeks, it was sewed up just like that. Within another hour I was almost back in Bailey, had the pedal to the metal, and was barely three miles out of town, when it all blew to shit. I heard it blow, I was that close to collaring him. I tell you, Carl, I felt . . . like a bullet. I was going to rip right through this Sykes, this goddamned cannibal monster . . .

“We had to reconstruct what happened. Billy Lee got impatient and went after him alone, but luckily he radioed Travis—my other deputy—first. Travis was on the mountain drag-netting around that tree for clues, but he happened to be near his car when Billy Lee called him. He said he’d just been through Allen’s room and had got something really odd. It was a sphere, half again big as a basketball, heavy, made of something that wasn’t metal or glass but was a little like both. He could half-see into it, and it looked to be full of some kind of circuitry and components. He hadn’t found anything else unusual. He was going to take this thing along with him, and go after Allen now. He told Travis to get up to the mine for backup. He’d be there first and should already have Allen by the time Travis arrived.

“Tierney, the shift boss up there, had an assistant that told us the rest. Billy Lee parked behind the offices where the men in the yard wouldn’t see the car. He went upstairs to arrange the arrest with Tierney. They got half a dozen men together. Just as they came out of the building, they saw Allen take off running from the squad car. He had the sphere under his arm.

“The whole compound’s fenced in, and Tierney’d already phoned to have all the gates shut. Allen zigged and zagged some but caught on quick to the trap. The sphere slowed him, but he still had a good lead. He hesitated a minute and then ran straight for the main shaft. A cage was just going down with a crew, and he risked every bone in him jumping down after it, but he got safe on top. By the time they got to the switches, the cage was down to the second level, and Allen and the crew had got out. Tierney got it back up. Billy Lee ordered the rest back to get weapons and follow, and him and Tierney rode the cage right back down. And about two minutes later half the goddamned mine blew up.”

The sheriff stopped as if cut off, his lips parted to say more, his eyes registering for perhaps the hundredth time his amazement that there was no more, that the weeks of death and mystification ended here, with this split-second recapitulation: more death, more answerless dark, sealing all.

“Nate.”

“What.”

“Wrap it up and go to bed. I don’t need your help. You’re dead on your feet.”

“I’m not on my feet. And I’m coming along.”

“Give me a picture of the victims’ position relative to the blast. I’m going to work, and you’re going to bed.”

The sheriff shook his head absently. “They’re mining in shrinkage stopes. The adits—levels—branch off lateral from the vertical shaft. From one level they hollow out overhand up to the one above. Scoop out big chambers and let most of the broken rock stay inside so they can stand on the heaps to cut the ceiling higher. They leave sections of support wall between stopes, and those men were buried several stopes in from the shaft. The cave-in killed them. The mountain just folded them up in their own hill of tailings. No kind of fragments reached them. I’m dead sure. The only ones they found were of some standard charges that the main blast set off, and those didn’t even get close. The big one blew out where the adit joined the shaft, right where, and right when, Billy Lee and Tierney got out of the cage. And there is nothing left there, Carl. No sphere, no cage, no Tierney, no Billy Lee Davis. Just rock blown fine as flour.”

Dr. Winters nodded and, after a moment, stood up.

“Come on, Nate. I’ve got to get started. I’ll be lucky to have even a few of them done before morning. Drop me off and go to sleep, till then at least. You’ll still be there to witness most of the work.”

The sheriff rose, took up the doctor’s suitcase, and led him out of the office without a word, concession in his silence.

The patrol car was behind the building. The doctor saw a crueler beauty in the stars than he had an hour before. They got in, and Craven swung them out onto the empty street. The doctor opened the window and hearkened, but the motor’s surge drowned out the river sound. Before the thrust of their headlights, ranks of old-fashioned parking meters sprouted shadows tall across the sidewalks, shadows that shrank and were cut down by the lights’ passage. The sheriff said:

“All those extra dead. For nothing! Not even to . . . feed him! If it was a bomb, and he made it, he’d know how powerful it was. He wouldn’t try some stupid escape stunt with it. And how did he even know that globe was there? We worked it out that Allen was just ending a shift, but he wasn’t even up out of the ground before Billy Lee’d parked out of sight from the shaft.”

“Let it rest, Nate. I want to hear more, but after you’ve slept. I know you. All the photos will be there, and the report complete, all the evidence neatly boxed and carefully described. When I’ve looked things over, I’ll know exactly how to proceed by myself.”

Bailey had neither hospital nor morgue, and the bodies were in a defunct ice-plant on the edge of town. A generator had been brought down from the mine, lighting improvised, and the refrigeration system reactivated. Dr. Parsons’s office, and the tiny examining room that served the sheriff’s station in place of a morgue, had furnished this makeshift with all the equipment that Dr. Winters would need beyond what he carried with him. A quarter-mile outside the main body of the town, they drew up to it. Tree-flanked, unneighbored by any other structure, it was a double building; the smaller half—the office—was illuminated. The bodies would be in the big windowless refrigerator segment. Craven pulled up beside a second squad car parked near the office door. A short rake-thin man wearing a large white Stetson got out of the car and came over. Craven rolled down his window.

“Trav. This here’s Dr. Winters.”

“’Lo, Nate. Dr. Winters. Everything’s shipshape inside. Felt more comfortable out here. Last of those newshounds left two hours ago.”

“They sure do hang on. You take off now, Trav. Get some sleep and be back at sunup. What temperature we getting?”

The pale Stetson, far clearer in the starlight than the shadowface beneath it, wagged dubiously. “Thirty-six. She won’t get lower—some kind of leak.”

“That should be cold enough,” the doctor said.

Travis drove off, and the sheriff unlocked the padlock on the office door. Waiting behind him, Dr. Winters heard the river again—a cold balm, a whisper of freedom—and overlying this, the stutter and soft snarl of the generator behind the building, a gnawing, remorseless sound that somehow fed the obscure anguish that the other soothed. They went in.

The preparations had been thoughtful and complete. “You can wheel ’em out of the fridge on this and do the examining in here,” the sheriff said, indicating a table and a gurney. “You should find all the gear you need on this big table here, and you can write up your reports on that desk. The phone’s not hooked up—there’s a pay phone at the last gas station if you have to call me.”

The doctor nodded, checking over the material on the larger table: scalpels, postmortem and cartilage knives, intestine scissors, rib shears, forceps, probes, mallet and chisels, a blade saw and electric bone saw, scale, jars for specimens, needles and suture, sterilizer, gloves . . . Beside this array were a few boxes and envelopes with descriptive sheets attached, containing the photographs and such evidentiary objects as had been found associated with the bodies.

“Excellent,” he muttered.

“The overhead light’s fluorescent, full spectrum or whatever they call it. Better for colors. There’s a pint of decent bourbon in that top desk drawer. Ready to look at ’em?”

“Yes.”

The sheriff unbarred and slid back the big metal door to the refrigeration chamber. Icy tainted air boiled out of the doorway. The light within was dimmer than that provided in the office—a yellow gloom wherein ten oblong heaps lay on trestles.

The two stood silent for a time, their stillness a kind of unpremeditated homage paid the eternal mystery at its threshold. As if the cold room were in fact a shrine, the doctor found a peculiar awe in the row of veiled forms. The awful unison of their dying, the titan’s grave that had been made for them, conferred on them a stern authority, Death’s Chosen Ones. His stomach hurt, and he found he had his hand pressed to his abdomen. He glanced at Craven and was relieved to see that his friend, staring wearily at the bodies, had missed the gesture.

“Nate. Help me uncover them.”

Starting at opposite ends of the row, they stripped the tarps off and piled them in a corner. Both were brusque now, not pausing over the revelation of the swelled, pulpy faces—most three-lipped with the gaseous burgeoning of their tongues—and the fat, livid hands sprouting from the filthy sleeves. But at one of the bodies Craven stopped. The doctor saw him look, and his mouth twist. Then he flung the tarp on the heap and moved to the next trestle.

When they came out, Dr. Winters took out the bottle and glasses Craven had put in the desk, and they had a drink together. The sheriff made as if he would speak, but shook his head and sighed.

“I will get some sleep, Carl. I’m getting crazy thoughts with this thing.” The doctor wanted to ask those thoughts. Instead he laid a hand on his friend’s shoulder.

“Go home, Sheriff Craven. Take off the badge and lie down. The dead won’t run off on you. We’ll all still be here in the morning.”

When the sound of the patrol car faded, the doctor stood listening to the generator’s growl and the silence of the dead, resurgent now. Both the sound and the silence seemed to mock him. The afterecho of his last words made him uneasy. He said to his cancer:

“What about it, dear colleague? We will still be here tomorrow? All of us?”

He smiled, but felt an odd discomfort, as if he had ventured a jest in company and roused a hostile silence. He went to the refrigerator door, rolled it back, and viewed the corpses in their ordered rank, with their strange tribunal air. “What, sirs?” he murmured. “Do you judge me? Just who is to examine whom tonight, if I may ask?”

He went back into the office, where his first step was to examine the photographs made by the sheriff in order to see how the dead had lain at their uncovering. The earth had seized them with terrible suddenness. Some crouched, some partly stood, others sprawled in crazy free-fall postures.

Each successive photo showed more of the jumble as the shovels continued their work between shots. The doctor studied them closely, noting the identifications inked on the bodies as they came completely into view.

One man, Roger Willet, had died some yards from the main cluster. It appeared he had just straggled into the stope from the adit at the moment of the explosion. He should thus have received, more directly than any of the others, the shock waves of the blast. If bomb fragments were to be found in any of the corpses, Mr. Willet’s seemed likeliest to contain them. Dr. Winters pulled on a pair of surgical gloves.

Willet lay at one end of the line of trestles. He wore a thermal shirt and overalls that were strikingly new beneath the filth of burial. Their tough fabrics jarred with the fabric of his flesh—blue, swollen, seeming easily torn or burst, like ripe fruit. In life Willet had grease-combed his hair. Now it was a sculpture of dust, spikes and whorls shaped by the head’s last grindings against the mountain that clenched it.

Rigor had come and gone—Willet rolled laxly onto the gurney. As the doctor wheeled him past the others, he felt a slight self-consciousness. The sense of some judgment flowing from the dead assembly—unlike most such vagrant fantasies—had an odd tenacity in him. This stubborn unease began to irritate him with himself, and he moved more briskly.

He put Willet on the examining table and cut the clothes off him with shears, storing the pieces in an evidence box. The overalls were soiled with agonal waste expulsions. The doctor stared a moment with unwilling pity at his naked subject.

“You won’t ride down to Fordham in any case,” he said to the corpse. “Not unless I find something pretty damned obvious.” He pulled his gloves tighter and arranged his implements.

Waddleton had said more to him than he had reported to the sheriff. The doctor was to find, and forcefully to record that he had found, strong “indications” absolutely requiring the decedents’ removal to Fordham for X-ray and an exhaustive second postmortem. The doctor’s continued employment with the Coroner’s Office depended entirely on his compliance in this. He had received this stipulation with a silence Waddleton had not thought it necessary to break. His present resolution was all but made at that moment. Let the obvious be taken as such. If the others showed as plainly as Willet did the external signs of death by asphyxiation, they would receive no more than a thorough external exam. Willet he would examine internally as well, merely to establish in depth for this one what should appear obvious in all. Otherwise, only when the external exam revealed a clearly anomalous feature—and clear and suggestive it must be—would he look deeper.

He rinsed the caked hair in a basin, poured the sediment into a flask and labeled it. Starting with the scalp, he began a minute scrutiny of the body’s surfaces, recording his observations as he went.

The characteristic signs of asphyxial death were evident, despite the complicating effects of autolysis and putrefaction. The eyeballs’ bulge and the tongue’s protrusion were, by now, as much due to gas pressure as to the mode of death, but the latter organ was clamped between locked teeth, leaving little doubt as to that mode. The coloration of degenerative change—a greenish-yellow tint, a darkening and mapping-out of superficial veins—was marked, but not sufficient to obscure the blue of cyanosis on the face and neck, nor the pinpoint hemorrhages freckling neck, chest, and shoulders. From the mouth and nose the doctor scraped matter he was confident was the blood-tinged mucous typically ejected in the airless agony.

He began to find a kind of comedy in his work. What a buffoon death made of a man! A blue pop-eyed three-lipped thing. And there was himself, his curious solicitous intimacy with this clownish carrion. Excuse me, Mr. Willet, while I probe this laceration. What do you feel when I do this? Nothing? Nothing at all? Fine, now what about these nails? Split them clawing at the earth, did you? Yes. A nice blood blister under this thumbnail, I see—got it on the job a few days before your accident, no doubt? Remarkable calluses here, still quite tough . . .

The doctor looked for an unanalytic moment at the hands—puffed dark paws, gestureless, having renounced all touch and grasp. He felt the wastage of the man concentrated in the hands. The painful futility of the body’s fine articulation when it is seen in death—this poignancy he had long learned not to acknowledge when he worked. But now he let it move him a little. This Roger Willet, plodding to his work one afternoon, had suddenly been scrapped, crushed to a nonfunctional heap of perishable materials. It simply happened that his life had chanced to move too close to the passage of a more powerful life, one of those inexorable and hungry lives that leave human wreckage—known or undiscovered—in their wakes. Bad luck, Mr. Willet. Naturally, we feel very sorry about this. But this Joe Allen, your co-worker. Apparently he was some sort of . . . cannibal. It’s complicated. We don’t understand it all. But the fact is we have to dismantle you now to a certain extent. There’s really no hope of your using these parts of yourself again, I’m afraid. Ready now?

The doctor proceeded to the internal exam with a vague eagerness for Willet’s fragmentation, for the disarticulation of that sadness in his natural form. He grasped Willet by the jaw and took up the postmortem knife. He sank its point beneath the chin and began the long, gently sawing incision that opened Willet from throat to groin.

In the painstaking separation of the body’s laminae Dr. Winters found absorption and pleasure. And yet throughout he felt, marginal but insistent, the movement of a stream of irrelevant images. These were of the building that contained him, and of the night containing it. As from outside, he saw the plant—bleached planks, iron roofing—and the trees crowding it, all in starlight, a ghost town image. And he saw the refrigerator vault beyond the wall as from within, feeling the stillness of murdered men in a cold yellow light. And at length a question formed itself, darting in and out of the weave of his concentration as the images did: Why did he still feel, like some stir of the air, that sense of mute vigilance surrounding his action, furtively touching his nerves with its inquiry as he worked? He shrugged, overtly angry now. Who else was attending but Death? Wasn’t he Death’s hireling, and this Death’s place? Then let the master look on.

Peeling back Willet’s cover of hemorrhage-stippled skin, Dr. Winters read the corpse with an increasing dispassion, a mortuary text. He confined his inspection to the lungs and mediastinum and found there unequivocal testimony to Willet’s asphyxial death. The pleurae of the lungs exhibited the expected ecchymoses—bruised spots in the glassy enveloping membrane. Beneath, the polyhedral surface lobules of the lungs themselves were bubbled and blistered—the expected interstitial emphysema. The lungs, on section, were intensely and bloodily congested. The left half of the heart he found contracted and empty, while the right was overdistended and engorged with dark blood, as were the large veins of the upper mediastinum. It was a classic picture of death by suffocation, and at length the doctor, with needle and suture, closed up the text again.

He returned the corpse to the gurney and draped one of his mortuary bags over it in the manner of a shroud. When he had help in the morning, he would weigh the bodies on a platform scale the office contained and afterward bag them properly. He came to the refrigerator door, and hesitated. He stared at the door, not moving, not understanding why.

Run. Get out. Now.

The thought was his own, but it came to him so urgently he turned around as if someone behind him had spoken. Across the room a thin man in smock and gloves, his eyes shadows, glared at the doctor from the black windows. Behind the man was a shrouded cart, behind that, a wide metal door.

Quietly, wonderingly, the doctor asked, “Run from what?” The eyeless man in the glass was still half-crouched, afraid.

Then, a moment later, the man straightened, threw back his head, and laughed. The doctor walked to the desk and sat down shoulder to shoulder with him. He pulled out the bottle and they had a drink together, regarding each other with identical bemused smiles. Then the doctor said, “Let me pour you another. You need it, old fellow. It makes a man himself again.”

Nevertheless his reentry of the vault was difficult, toilsome, each step seeming to require a new summoning of the will to move. In the freezing half-light all movement felt like defiance. His body lagged behind his craving to be quick, to be done with this molestation of the gathered dead. He returned Willet to his pallet and took his neighbor. The name on the tag wired to his boot was Ed Moses. Dr. Winters wheeled him back to the office and closed the big door behind him.

With Moses his work gained momentum. He expected to perform no further internal necropsies. He thought of his employer, rejoicing now in his seeming-submission to Waddleton’s ultimatum. The impact would be dire. He pictured the coroner in shock, a sheaf of Pathologist’s Reports in one hand, and smiled.

Waddleton could probably make a plausible case for incomplete examination. Still, a pathologist’s discretionary powers were not well-defined. Many good ones would approve the adequacy of the doctor’s method, given his working conditions. The inevitable litigation with a coalition of compensation claimants would be strenuous and protracted. Win or lose, Waddleton’s venal devotion to the insurance company’s interest would be abundantly displayed. Further, immediately on his dismissal the doctor would formally disclose its occult cause to the press. A libel action would ensue that he would have as little cause to fear as he had to fear his firing. Both his savings and the lawsuit would long outlast his life.

Externally, Ed Moses exhibited a condition as typically asphyxial as Willet’s had been, with no slightest mark of fragment entry. The doctor finished his report and returned Moses to the vault, his movements brisk and precise. His unease was all but gone. That queasy stirring of the air—had he really felt it? It had been, perhaps, some new reverberation of the death at work in him, a psychic shudder of response to the cancer’s stealthy probing for his life. He brought out the body next to Moses in the line.

Walter Lou Jackson was big, six feet two inches from heel to crown, and would surely weigh out at more than two hundred pounds. He had writhed mightily against his million-ton coffin with an agonal strength that had torn his face and hands. Death had mauled him like a lion. The doctor set to work.

His hands were fully themselves now—fleet, exact, intricately testing the corpse’s character as other fingers might explore a keyboard for its latent melodies. And the doctor watched them with an old pleasure, one of the few that had never failed him, his mind at one remove from their busy intelligence. All the hard deaths! A worldful of them, time without end. Lives wrenched kicking from their snug meat-frames. Walter Lou Jackson had died very hard. Joe Allen brought this on you, Mr. Jackson. We think it was part of his attempt to escape the law.

But what a botched flight! The unreason of it—more than baffling—was eerie in its colossal futility. Beyond question, Allen had been cunning. A ghoul with a psychopath’s social finesse. A good old boy who could make a tavernful of men laugh with delight while he cut his victim from their midst, make them applaud his exit with the prey, who stepped jovially into the darkness with murder at his side clapping him on the shoulder. Intelligent, certainly, with a strange technical sophistication as well, suggested by the sphere. Then what of the lunacy yet more strongly suggested by the same object? In the sphere was concentrated all the lethal mystery of Bailey’s long nightmare.

Why the explosion? Its location implied an ambush for Allen’s pursuers, a purposeful detonation. Had he aimed at a limited cave-in from which he schemed some inconceivable escape? Folly enough in this—far more if, as seemed sure, Allen had made the bomb himself, for then he would have to know its power was grossly inordinate to the need.

But if it was not a bomb, had a different function and only incidentally an explosive potential, Allen might underestimate the blast. It appeared the object was somehow remotely monitored by him, for the timing of events showed he had gone straight for it the instant he emerged from the shaft—shunned the bus waiting to take his shift back to town and made a beeline across the compound for a patrol car that was hidden from his view by the office building. This suggested something more complex than a mere explosive device, something, perhaps, whose destruction was itself more Allen’s aim than the explosion produced thereby.

The fact that he risked the sphere’s retrieval at all pointed to this interpretation. For the moment he sensed its presence at the mine, he must have guessed that the murder investigation had led to its discovery and removal from his room. But then, knowing himself already liable to the extreme penalty, why should Allen go to such lengths to recapture evidence incriminatory of a lesser offense, possession of an explosive device?

Then grant that the sphere was something more, something instrumental to his murders that could guarantee a conviction he might otherwise evade. Still, his gambit made no sense. Since the sphere—and thus the lawmen he could assume to have taken it—was already at the mine office, he must expect the compound to be scaled at any moment. Meanwhile, the gate was open, escape into the mountains a strong possibility for a man capable of stalking and destroying two experienced and well-armed woodsmen lying in ambush for him. Why had he all but ensured his capture to weaken a case against himself that his escape would have rendered irrelevant? Dr. Winters watched as his own fingers, like a hunting pack round a covert, converged on a small puncture wound below Walter Lou Jackson’s xiphoid process, between the eighth ribs.

His left hand touched its borders, the fingers’ inquiry quick and tender. The right hand introduced a probe, and both together eased it into the wound. It was rarely fruitful to use a probe on corpses this decayed; the track of the wound would more properly be examined by section. But an inexplicable sense of urgency had taken hold of him. Gently, with infinite pains not to pierce in the softened tissues an artifactual track of his own, he inched the probe in. It moved unobstructed deep into the body, curving upward through the diaphragm toward the heart. The doctor’s own heart accelerated. He watched his hands move to record the observation, watched them pause, watched them return to their survey of the corpse, leaving pen and page untouched.

External inspection revealed no further anomaly. All else he observed the doctor recorded faithfully, wondering throughout at the distress he felt. When he had finished, he understood it. Its cause was not the discovery of an entry wound that might bolster Waddleton’s case. For the find had, within moments, revealed to him that, should he encounter anything he thought to be a mark of fragment penetration, he was going to ignore it. The damage Joe Allen had done was going to end here, with this last grand slaughter, and would not extend to the impoverishment of his victims’ survivors. His mind was now made up: for Jackson and the remaining seven, the external exams would be officially recorded as contraindicating the need for any external exam.

No, the doctor’s unease as he finished Jackson’s external—as he wrote up his report and signed it—had a different source. His problem was that he did not believe the puncture in Jackson’s thorax was a mark of fragment entry. He disbelieved this, and had no idea why he did so. Nor had he any idea why, once again, he felt afraid. He sealed the report. Jackson was now officially accounted for and done with. Then Dr. Winters took up the postmortem knife and returned to the corpse.

First the long sawing slice, unzippering the mortal overcoat. Next, two great square flaps of flesh reflected, scrolled laterally to the armpits’ line, disrobing the chest: one hand grasping the flap’s skirt, the other sweeping beneath it with the knife, flensing through the glassy tissue that joined it to the chest wall, and shaving all muscles from their anchorages to bone and cartilage beneath. Then the dismantling of the strongbox within. Rib shears—so frank and forward a tool, like a gardener’s. The steel beak bit through each rib’s gristle anchor to the sternum’s centerplate. At the sternum’s crownpiece the collarbones’ ends were knifed, pried, and sprung free from their sockets. The coffer unhasped, unhinged, a knife teased beneath the lid and levered it off.

Some minutes later the doctor straightened up and stepped back from his subject. He moved almost drunkenly, and his age seemed scored more deeply in his face. With loathing haste he stripped his gloves off. He went to the desk, sat down, and poured another drink. If there was something like horror in his face, there was also a hardening in his mouth’s line and the muscles of his jaw. He spoke to his glass: “So be it, your Excellency. Something new for your humble servant. Testing my nerve?”

Jackson’s pericardium, the shapely capsule containing his heart, should have been all but hidden between the big blood-fat loaves of his lungs. The doctor had found it fully exposed, the lungs flanking it wrinkled lumps less than a third their natural bulk. Not only they, but the left heart and the superior mediastinal veins—all the regions that should have been grossly engorged with blood—were utterly drained of it.

The doctor swallowed his drink and got out the photographs again. He found that Jackson had died on his stomach across the body of another worker, with the upper part of a third trapped between them. Neither these two subjacent corpses nor the surrounding earth showed any stain of a blood loss that must have amounted to two liters.

Possibly the pictures, by some trick of shadow, had failed to pick it up. He turned to the Investigator’s Report, where Craven would surely have mentioned any significant amounts of bloody earth uncovered during the disinterment. The sheriff recorded nothing of the kind. Dr. Winters returned to the pictures.

Ronald Pollock, Jackson’s most intimate associate in the grave, had died on his back, beneath and slightly askew of Jackson, placing most of their torsos in contact, save where the head and shoulder of the third interposed. It seemed inconceivable Pollock’s clothing should lack any trace of such massive drainage from a death mate thus embraced.

The doctor rose abruptly, pulled on fresh gloves, and returned to Jackson. His hands showed a more brutal speed now, closing the great incision temporarily with a few widely spaced sutures. He replaced him in the vault and brought out Pollock, striding, heaving hard at the dead shapes in the shifting of them, thrusting always—so it seemed to him—just a step ahead of urgent thoughts he did not want to have, deformities that whispered at his back, emitting faint, chill gusts of putrid breath. He shook his head—denying, delaying—and pushed the new corpse onto the worktable. The scissors undressed Pollock in greedy bites.

But at length, when he had scanned each scrap of fabric and found nothing like the stain of blood, he came to rest again, relinquishing that simplest, desired resolution he had made such haste to reach. He stood at the instrument table, not seeing it, submitting to the approach of the half-formed things at his mind’s periphery.

The revelation of Jackson’s shriveled lungs had been more than a shock. He had felt a stab of panic too, in fact that same curiously explicit terror of this place that had urged him to flee earlier. He acknowledged now that the germ of that quickly suppressed terror had been a premonition of this failure to find any trace of the missing blood. Whence the premonition?

It had to do with a problem he had steadfastly refused to consider: the mechanics of so complete a drainage of the lungs’ densely reticulated vascular structure. Could the earth’s crude pressure by itself work so thoroughly, given only a single vent both slender and strangely curved? And then the photograph he had studied. It frightened him now to recall the image—some covert meaning stirred within it, struggling to be seen. Dr. Winters picked the probe up from the table and turned again to the corpse. As surely and exactly as if he had already ascertained the wound’s presence, he leaned forward and touched it: a small, neat puncture, just beneath the xiphoid process. He introduced the probe. The wound received it deeply, in a familiar direction.

The doctor went to the desk and took up the photograph again.

Pollock’s and Jackson’s wounded areas were not in contact. The third man’s head was sandwiched between their bodies at just that point. He searched out another picture, in which this third man was more central, and found his name inked in below his image: Joe Allen.

Dreamingly, Dr. Winters went to the wide metal door, shoved it aside, entered the vault. He did not search, but went straight to the trestle where Sheriff Craven had paused some hours before. He found the same name on its tag.

The body, beneath decay’s spurious obesity, was trim and well-muscled. The face was square-cut, shelf-browed, with a vulpine nose skewed by an old fracture. The swollen tongue lay behind the teeth, and the bulge of decomposition did not obscure what the man’s initial impact must have been—handsome and open, his now-waxen black eyes sly and convivial. Say, good buddy, got a minute? I see you comin’ on the swing shift every day, don’t I? Yeah, Joe Allen. Look, I know it’s late, you want to get home, tell the wife you ain’t been in there drinkin’ since you got off, right? Oh, yeah, I hear that. But this damn disappearance thing’s got me so edgy, and I’d swear to God just as I was coming here I seen someone moving around back of that frame house up the street. See how the trees thin out a little down back of the yard, where the moonlight gets in? That’s right. Well, I got me this little popper here. Oh, yeah, that’s a beauty, we’ll have it covered between us. I knew I could spot a man ready for some trouble—couldn’t find a patrol car anywhere on the street. Yeah, just down in here now, to that clump of pine. Step careful, you can barely see. That’s right . . .

The doctor’s face ran with sweat. He turned on his heel and walked out of the vault, heaving the door shut behind him. In the office’s greater warmth he felt the perspiration soaking his shirt under the smock. His stomach rasped with steady oscillations of pain, but he scarcely attended it. He went to Pollock and seized up the postmortem knife.

The work was done with surreal speed, the laminae of flesh and bone recoiling smoothly beneath his desperate but unerring hands, until the thoracic cavity lay exposed, and in it, the vampire-stricken lungs, two gnarled lumps of gray tissue.

He searched no deeper, knowing what the heart and veins would show. He returned to sit at the desk, weakly drooping, the knife, forgotten, still in his left hand. He looked at his reflection in the window, and it seemed his thoughts originated with that fainter, more tenuous Dr. Winters hanging like a ghost outside.

What was this world he lived in? Surely, in a lifetime, he had not begun to guess. To feed in such a way! There was horror enough in this alone. But to feed thus in his own grave. How had he accomplished it—leaving aside how he had fought suffocation long enough to do anything at all? How was it to be comprehended, a greed that raged so hotly it would glut itself at the very threshold of its own destruction? That last feast was surely in his stomach still.

Dr. Winters looked at the photograph, at Allen’s head snugged into the others’ middles like a hungry suckling nuzzling to the sow. Then he looked at the knife in his hand. The hand felt empty of all technique. Its one impulse was to slash, cleave, obliterate the remains of this gluttonous thing, this Joe Allen. He must do this, or flee it utterly. There was no course between. He did not move.

“I will examine him,” said the ghost in the glass, and did not move. Inside the refrigeration vault, there was a slight noise.

No. It had been some hitch in the generator’s murmur. Nothing in there could move. There was another noise, a brief friction against the vault’s inner wall. The two old men shook their heads at one another. A catch clicked, and the metal door slid open. Behind the staring image of his own amazement, the doctor saw that a filthy shape stood in the doorway and raised its arms toward him in a gesture of supplication. The doctor turned in his chair. From the shape came a whistling groan, the decayed fragment of a human voice.

Pleadingly, Joe Allen worked his jaw and spread his purple hands. As if speech were a maggot struggling to emerge from his mouth, the blue tumescent face toiled, the huge tongue wallowed helplessly between the viscid lips.

The doctor reached for the telephone, lifted the receiver. Its deadness to his ear meant nothing—he could not have spoken. The thing confronting him, with each least movement that it made, destroyed the very frame of sanity in which words might have meaning, reduced the world itself around him to a waste of dark and silence, a starlit ruin where already, everywhere, the alien and unimaginable was awakening to its new dominion. The corpse raised and reached out one hand as if to stay him—turned, and walked toward the instrument table. Its legs were leaden, it rocked its shoulders like a swimmer, fighting to make its passage through gravity’s dense medium. It reached the table and grasped it exhaustedly. The doctor found himself on his feet, crouched slightly, weightlessly still. The knife in his hand was the only part of himself he clearly felt, and it was like a tongue of fire, a crematory flame. Joe Allen’s corpse thrust one hand among the instruments. The thick fingers, with a queer simian ineptitude, brought up a scalpel. Both hands clasped the little handle and plunged the blade between the lips, as a thirsty child might a Popsicle, then jerked it out again, slashing the tongue. Turbid fluid splashed down to the floor. The jaw worked stiffly, the mouth brought out words in a wet ragged hiss:

“Please. Help me. Trapped in this.” One dead hand struck the dead chest. “Starving.”

“What are you?”

“Traveler. Not of Earth.”

“An eater of human flesh. A drinker of human blood.”

“No. No. Hiding only. Am small. Shape hideous to you. Feared death.”

“You brought death.” The doctor spoke with the calm of perfect disbelief, himself as incredible to him as the thing he spoke with. It shook its head, the dull, popped eyes glaring with an agony of thwarted expression.

“Killed none. Hid in this. Hid in this not to be killed. Five days now. Drowning in decay. Free me. Please.”

“No. You have come to feed on us, you are not hiding in fear. We are your food, your meat and drink. You fed on those two men within your grave. Their grave. For you, a delay. In fact, a diversion that has ended the hunt for you.”

“No! No! Used men already dead. For me, five days, starvation. Even less. Fed only from need. Horrible necessity!”

The spoiled vocal instrument made a mangled gasp of the last word—an inhuman snake-pit noise the doctor felt as a cold flicker of ophidian tongues within his ears—while the dead arms moved in a sodden approximation of the body language that swears truth.

“No,” the doctor said. “You killed them all. Including your . . . tool—this man. What are you?” Panic erupted in the question that he tried to bury by answering himself instantly. “Resolute, yes. That surely. You used death for an escape route. You need no oxygen perhaps.”

“Extracted more than my need from gasses of decay. A lesser component of our metabolism.”

The voice was gaining distinctness, developing makeshifts for tones lost in the agonal rupturing of the valves and stops of speech, more effectively wrestling vowel and consonant from the putrid tongue and lips. At the same time the body’s crudity of movement did not quite obscure a subtle, incessant experimentation. Fingers flexed and stirred, testing the give of tendons, groping the palm for old points of purchase and counterpressure there. The knees, with cautious repetitions, assessed the new limits of their articulation.

“What was the sphere?”

“My ship. Its destruction our first duty facing discovery.” (Fear touched the doctor, like a slug climbing his neck; he had seen, as it spoke, a sharp spastic activity of the tongue, a pleating and shrinkage of its bulk as at the tug of some inward adjustment.) “No chance to reenter. Leaving this body takes far too long. Not even time to set it for destruct—must extrude a cilium, chemical key to broach hull shield. In shaft was my only chance to halt my host.”

Though the dead mask hung expressionless, conveyed no irony, the thing’s articulacy grew uncannily—each word more smoothly shaped, nuances of tone creeping into its speech. Its right arm tested its wrist as it spoke, and the scalpel the hand still held cut white sparks from the air, while the word host seemed itself a little razor-cut, an almost teasing abandonment of fiction preliminary to attack.

But the doctor found that fear had gone from him. The impossibility with which he conversed, and was about to struggle, was working in him an overwhelming amplification of his life’s long helpless rage at death. He found his parochial pity for Earth alone stretched to the transstellar scope this traveler commanded, to the whole cosmic trash yard with its bulldozed multitudes of corpses; galactic wheels of carnage—stars, planets with their most majestic generations—all trash, cracked bones and foul rags that pooled, settled, reconcatenated in futile symmetries gravid with new multitudes of briefly animate trash.

And this, standing before him now, was the death it was given him particularly to deal—his mite was being called in by the universal Treasury of Death, and Dr. Winters found himself, an old healer, on fire to pay. His own, more lethal, blade tugged at his hand with its own sharp appetite. He felt entirely the Examiner once more, knew the precise cuts he would make, swiftly and without error. Very soon now, he thought and coolly probed for some further insight before its onslaught:

“Why must your ship be destroyed, even at the cost of your host’s life?”

“We must not be understood.”

“The livestock must not understand what is devouring them.”

“Yes, Doctor. Not all at once. But one by one. You will understand what is devouring you. That is essential to my feast.”

The doctor shook his head. “You are in your grave already, Traveler. That body will be your coffin. You will be buried in it a second time, for all time.”

The thing came one step nearer and opened its mouth. The flabby throat wrestled as with speech, but what sprang out was a slender white filament, more than whip-fast. Dr. Winters saw only the first flicker of its eruption, and then his brain nova-ed, thinning out at light-speed to a white nullity.

When the doctor came to himself, it was in fact to a part of himself only. Before he had opened his eyes he found that his wakened mind had repossessed proprioceptively only a bizarre truncation of his body. His head, neck, left shoulder, arm, and hand declared themselves—the rest was silence.

When, he opened his eyes, he found that he lay supine on the gurney, and naked. Something propped his head. A strap bound his left elbow to the gurney’s edge, a strap he could feel. His chest was also anchored by a strap, and this he could not feel. Indeed, save for its active remnant, his entire body might have been bound in a block of ice, so numb was it, and so powerless was he to compel the slightest movement from the least part of it.

The room was empty, but from the open door of the vault there came slight sounds: the creak and soft frictions of heavy tarpaulin shifted to accommodate some business involving small clicking and kissing noises.

Tears of fury filled the doctor’s eyes. Clenching his one fist at the starry engine of creation that he could not see, he ground his teeth and whispered in the hot breath of strangled weeping:

“Take it back, this dirty little shred of life! I throw it off gladly like the filth it is.” The slow knock of boot soles loudened from within the vault, and he turned his head. From the vault door Joe Allen’s corpse approached him.

It moved with new energy, though its gait was grotesque, a ducking, hitching progress, jerky with circumventions of decayed muscle, while above this galvanized, struggling frame, the bruise-colored face hung inanimate, an image of detachment. With terrible clarity the thing was revealed for what it was—a damaged hand-puppet vigorously worked from within. And when that frozen face was brought to hang above the doctor, the reeking hands, with the light, solicitous touch of friends at sickbeds, rested on his naked thigh.

The absence of sensation made the touch more dreadful than if felt. It showed him that the nightmare he still desperately denied at heart had annexed his body while he—holding head and arm free—had already more than half-drowned in its mortal paralysis. There, from his chest on down, lay his nightmare part, a nothingness freely possessed by an unspeakability. The corpse said:

“Rotten blood. Thin nourishment. I had only one hour alone before you came. I fed from my neighbor to my left—barely had strength to extend a siphon. Fed from the right while you worked. Tricky going—you are alert. I expected Dr. Parsons. The energy needs of animating this”—one hand left the doctor’s thigh and smote the dusty overalls—“and of host-transfer, very high. Once I have you synapsed, I will be near starvation again.”

A sequence of unbearable images unfolded in the doctor’s mind, even as the robot carrion turned from the gurney and walked to the instrument table: the sheriff’s arrival just after dawn, alone of course, since Craven always took thought for his deputies’ rest and because on this errand he would want privacy to consider any indiscretion on behalf of the miners’ survivors that the situation might call for; Craven’s finding his old friend, supine and alarmingly weak; his hurrying over, his leaning near. Then, somewhat later, a police car containing a rack of still wet bones might plunge off the highway above some deep spot in the gorge.

The corpse took an evidence box from the table and put the scalpel in it. Then it turned and retrieved the mortuary knife from the floor and put that in as well, saying as it did so, without turning, “The sheriff will come in the morning. You spoke like close friends. He will probably come alone.”

The coincidence with his thoughts had to be accident, but the intent to terrify and appall him was clear. The tone and timing of that patched-up voice were unmistakably deliberate—sly probes that sought his anguish specifically, sought his mind’s personal center. He watched the corpse—over at the table—dipping an apish but accurate hand and plucking up rib shears, scissors, clamps, adding all to the box. He stared, momentarily emptied by shock of all but the will to know finally the full extent of the horror that had appropriated his life. Joe Allen’s body carried the box to the worktable beside the gurney, and the expressionless eyes met the doctor’s.

“I have gambled. A grave gamble. But now I have won. At risk of personal discovery we are obliged to disconnect, contract, hide as well as possible in the host-body. Suicide in effect. I disregarded situational imperatives, despite starvation before disinterment and subsequent autopsy being all but certain. I caught up with the crew, tackled Pollock and Jackson microseconds before the blast. I computed five days’ survival from this cache. I could disconnect at limit of my strength to do so, but otherwise I would chance autopsy, knowing the doctor was an alcoholic incompetent. And now see my gain. You are a prize host. Through you I can feed with near impunity even when killing is too dangerous. Safe meals are delivered to you still warm.”

The corpse had painstakingly aligned the gurney parallel to the worktable but offset, the table’s foot extending past the gurney’s, and separated from it by a distance somewhat less than the reach of Joe Allen’s right arm. Now the dead hands distributed the implements along the right edge of the table, save for the scissors and the box. These the corpse took to the table’s foot, where it set down the box and slid the scissors’s jaws round one strap of its overalls. It began to speak again, and as it did, the scissors dismembered its cerements in unhesitating strokes.

“The cut must be medical, forensically right, though a smaller one is easier. I must be careful of the pectoral muscles or these arms will not convey me. I am no larva anymore—over fifteen hundred grams.”

To ease the nightmare’s suffocating pressure, to thrust out some flicker of his own will against its engulfment, the doctor flung a question, his voice more cracked than the other’s now was:

“Why is my arm free?”

“The last, fine neural splicing needs a sensory-motor standard, to perfect my brain’s fit to yours. Lacking this eye-hand coordinating check, only a much coarser control of the host’s characteristic motor patterns is possible. This done, I flush out the paralytic, unbind us, and we are free together.”

The grave-clothes had fallen in a puzzle of fragments, and the cadaver stood naked, its dark gas-rounded contours making it seem some sleek marine creature, ruddered with the black-veined gas-distended sex. Again the voice had teased for his fear, had uttered the last word with a savoring protraction, and now the doctor’s cup of anguish brimmed over; horror and outrage wrenched his spirit in brutal alternation as if trying to tear it naked from its captive frame. He rolled his head in this deadlock, his mouth beginning to split with the slow birth of a mind-emptying outcry.

The corpse watched this, giving a single nod that might have been approbation. Then it mounted the worktable and, with the concentrated caution of some practiced convalescent reentering his bed, lay on its back. The dead eyes again sought the living and found the doctor staring back, grinning insanely.

“Clever corpse!” the doctor cried. “Clever, carnivorous corpse! Able alien! Please don’t think I’m criticizing. Who am I to criticize? A mere arm and shoulder, a talking head, just a small piece of a pathologist. But I’m confused.” He paused, savoring the monster’s attentive silence and his own buoyancy in the hysterical levity that had unexpectedly liberated him. “You’re going to use your puppet there to pluck you out of itself and put you on me. But once he’s pulled you from your driver’s seat, won’t he go dead, so to speak, and drop you? You could get a nasty knock. Why not set a plank between the tables—the puppet opens the door, and you scuttle, ooze, lurch, flop, slither, as the case may be, across the bridge. No messy spills. And in any case, isn’t this an odd, rather clumsy way to get around among your cattle? Shouldn’t you at least carry your own scalpels when you travel? There’s always the risk you’ll run across that one host in a million that isn’t carrying one with him.”

He knew his gibes would be answered to his own despair. He exulted, but solely in the momentary bafflement of the predator—in having, for just a moment, mocked its gloating assurance to silence and marred its feast.

Its right hand picked up the postmortem knife beside it, and the left wedged a roll of gauze beneath Allen’s neck, lifting the throat to a more prominent arch. The mouth told the ceiling:

“We retain larval form till entry of the host. As larvae we have locomotor structures, and sense buds usable outside our ships’ sensory amplifiers. I waited coiled round Joe Allen’s bed leg till night, entered by his mouth as he slept.” Allen’s hand lifted the knife, held it high above the dull, quick eyes, turning it in the light. “Once lodged, we have three instars to adult form,” the voice continued absently—the knife might have been a mirror from which the corpse read its features. “Larvally we have only a sketch of our full neural tap. Our metamorphosis is cued and determined by the host’s endosomatic ecology. I matured in three days.” Allen’s wrist flexed, tipping the knife’s point downmost. “Most supreme adaptations are purchased at the cost of inessential capacities.” The elbow pronated and slowly flexed, hooking the knife bodyward. “Our hosts are all sentients, ecodominants, are already carrying the baggage of coping structures for the planetary environment we find them in. Limbs, sensory portals”—the fist planted the fang of its tool under the chin, tilted it and rode it smoothly down the throat, the voice proceeding unmarred from under the furrow that the steel ploughed—“somatic envelopes, instrumentalities”—down the sternum, diaphragm, abdomen the stainless blade painted its stripe of gaping, muddy tissue—“with a host’s brain we inherit all these, the mastery of any planet, netted in its dominant’s cerebral nexus. Thus our genetic codings are now all but disencumbered of such provisions.”

So swiftly that the doctor flinched, Joe Allen’s hand slashed four lateral, cuts from the great wound’s axis. The seeming butchery left two flawlessly drawn thoracic flaps cleanly outlined. The left hand raised the left flap’s hem, and the right coaxed the knife into the aperture, deepening it with small stabs and slices. The posture was a man’s who searches a breast pocket, with the dead eyes studying the slow recoil of flesh. The voice, when it resumed, had geared up to an intenser pitch:

“Galactically, the chordate nerve/brain paradigm abounds, and the neural labyrinth is our dominion. Are we to make plank bridges and worm across them to our food? Are cockroaches greater than we for having legs to run up walls and antennae to grope their way? All the quaint, hinged crutches that life sports! The stilts, fins, fans, springs, stalks, flippers, and feathers, all in turn so variously terminating in hooks, clamps, suckers, scissors, forks, or little cages of digits! And besides all the gadgets it concocts for wrestling through its worlds, it is all knobbed, whiskered, crested, plumed, vented, spiked, or measeled over with perceptual gear for combing pittances of noise or color from the environing plentitude.”

Invincibly calm and sure, the hands traded tool and tasks. The right flap eased back, revealing ropes of ingeniously spared muscle while promising a genuine appearance once sutured back in place. Helplessly the doctor felt his delirious defiance bleed away and a bleak fascination rebind him.

“We are the taps and relays that share the host’s aggregate of afferent nerve-impulse precisely at its nodes of integration. We are the brains that peruse these integrations, integrate them with our existing banks of host-specific data, and, lastly, let their consequences flow down the motor pathway—either the consequences they seek spontaneously, or those we wish to graft upon them. We are besides a streamlined alimentary/ circulatory system and a reproductive apparatus. And more than this we need not be.”

The corpse had spread its bloody vest, and the feculent hands now took up the rib shears. The voice’s sinister coloration of pitch and stress grew yet more marked—the phrases slid from the tongue with a cobra’s seeking sway, winding their liquid rhythms round the doctor till a gap in his resistance should let them pour through to slaughter the little courage left him.

“For in this form we have inhabited the densest brainweb of three hundred races, lain intricately snug within them like thriving vine on trelliswork. We’ve looked out from too many variously windowed masks to regret our own vestigial senses. None read their worlds definitively. Far better then our nomad’s range and choice than an unvarying tenancy of one poor set of structures. Far better to slip on as we do whole living beings and wear at once all of their limbs and organs, memories and powers—wear all these as tightly congruent to our wills as a glove is to the hand that fills it.”

The shears clipped through the gristle, stolid, bloody jaws monotonously feeding, stopping short of the sternoclavicular joint in the manubrium where the muscles of the pectoral girdle have an important anchorage.

“No consciousness of the chordate type that we have found has been impermeable to our finesse—no dendritic pattern so elaborate we could not read its stitchwork and thread ourselves to match, precisely map its each synaptic seam till we could loosen it and retailor all to suit ourselves. We have strutted costumed in the bodies of planetary autarchs, venerable manikins of moral fashion, but cut of the universal cloth: the weave of fleet electric filaments of experience that we easily reshuttled to the warp of our wishes. Whereafter—newly hemmed and gathered—their living fabric hung obedient to our bias, investing us with honor and influence unlimited.”

The tricky verbal melody, through the corpse’s deft, unfaltering self-dismemberment—the sheer neuromuscular orchestration of the compound activity—struck Dr. Winters with the detached enthrallment great keyboard performers could bring him. He glimpsed the alien’s perspective—a Gulliver waiting in a Brobdingnagian grave, then marshaling a dead giant against a living, like a dwarf in a huge mechanical crane, feverishly programming combat on a battery of levers and pedals, waiting for the robot arms’ enactments, the remote, titanic impact of the foes—and he marveled, filled with a bleak wonder at life’s infinite strategy and plasticity. Joe Allen’s hands reached into his half-opened abdominal cavity, reached deep below the uncut anterior muscle that was exposed by the shallow, spurious incision of the epidermis, till by external measure they were extended far enough to be touching his thighs. The voice was still as the forearms advertised a delicate rummaging with the buried fingers. The shoulders drew back. As the steady withdrawal brought the wrists into view, the dead legs tremored and quaked with diffuse spasms.

“You called your kind our food and drink, Doctor. If you were merely that, an elementary usurpation of your motor tracts alone would satisfy us, give us perfect cattle-control—for what rarest word or subtlest behavior is more than a flurry of varied muscles? That trifling skill was ours long ago. It is not mere blood that feeds this lust I feel now to tenant you, this craving for an intimacy that years will not stale. My truest feast lies in compelling you to feed in that way. It lies in the utter deformation of your will this will involve. Had gross nourishment been my prime need, then my grave-mates—Pollock and Jackson—could have eked out two weeks of life for me or more. But I scorned a cowardly parsimony in the face of death. I reinvested more than half the energy that their blood gave me in fabricating chemicals to keep their brains alive, and fluid-bathed with oxygenated nutriment.”

The corpse reached into its gaping abdomen, and out of its cloven groin the smeared hands pulled two long skeins of silvery filament. The material looked like masses of nerve fiber, tough and scintillant—for the weave of it glittered with a slight incessant movement of each single thread. These nerve skeins were contracting. They thickened into two swollen nodes, while at the same time the corpse’s legs tremored and faintly twitched, as the bright vermiculate roots of the parasite withdrew from within Allen’s musculature. When the nodes lay fully contracted—the doctor could just see their tips within the abdomen—then the legs lay still as death.

“I had accessory neural taps only to spare, but I could access much memory, and all of their cognitive responses, and having in my banks all the organ of Corti’s electrochemical conversions of English words, I could whisper anything to them directly into the eighth cranial nerve. Those are our true feast, Doctor, such bodiless electric storms of impotent cognition as I tickled up in those two little bone globes. I was forced to drain them just before disinterment, but they lived till then and understood everything—everything I did to them.”

When the voice paused, the dead and living eyes were locked together. They remained so a moment, and then the dead face smiled.

It recapitulated all the horror of Allen’s first resurrection—this waking of expressive soul in that purple death mask. And it was a demon-soul the doctor saw awaken: the smile was barbed with fine, sharp hooks of cruelty at the corners of the mouth, while the barbed eyes beamed fond, languorous anticipation of his pain. Remotely, Dr. Winters heard the flat sound of his own voice asking:

“And Joe Allen?”

“Oh, yes, Doctor. He is with us now, has been throughout. I grieve to abandon so rare a host! He is a true hermit-philosopher, well-read in four languages. He is writing a translation of Marcus Aurelius—he was, I mean, in his free time . . .”

Long minutes succeeded of the voice accompanying the surreal self-autopsy, but the doctor lay resigned, emptied of reactive power. Still, the full understanding of his fate reverberated in his mind as the parasite sketched his future for him in that borrowed voice. And it did not stop haunting Winters, the sense of what a virtuoso this entity was, how flawlessly this mass of neural fibers played the tricky instrument of human speech. As flawlessly as it had puppeteered the corpse’s face into that ghastly smile. And with the same artistic aim: to waken, to amplify, to ripen its host-to-be’s outrage and horror. The voice, with ever more melody and gloating verve, sent waves of realization through the doctor, amplifications of the Unspeakable.

The parasite’s race had traced and tapped the complex interface between the cortical integration of sense input and the neural output governing response. It had interposed its brain between, sharing consciousness while solely commanding the pathways of reaction. The host, the bottled personality, was mute and limbless for any least expression of its own will, while hellishly articulate and agile in the service of the parasite’s. It was the host’s own hands that bound and wrenched the life half out of his prey, his own loins that experienced the repeated orgasms crowning his other despoliations of their bodies. And when they lay, bound and shrieking still, ready for the consummation, it was his own strength that hauled the smoking entrails from them, and his own intimate tongue and guzzling mouth he plunged into the rank, palpitating feast.

And the doctor had glimpses of the racial history that underlay the aliens’ predatory present. Glimpses of a dispassionate, inquiring breed so advanced in the analysis of its own mental fabric that, through scientific commitment and genetic self-sculpting, it had come to embody its own model of perfected consciousness. It had grown streamlined to permit its entry of other beings and its direct acquisition of their experiential worlds. All strictest scholarship at first, until there matured in the disembodied scholars their long-germinal and now blazing, jealous hatred for all “lesser” minds rooted and clothed in the soil and sunlight of solid, particular worlds. The parasite spoke of the “cerebral music,” the “symphonies of agonized paradox” that were its invasion’s chief plunder. The doctor felt the truth behind this grandiloquence: the parasite’s actual harvest from the systematic violation of encoffined personalities was the experience of a barren supremacy of means over lives more primitive, perhaps, but vastly wealthier in the vividness and passionate concern with which life for them was imbued.

The corpse had reached into its thorax and with its dead hands aided the parasite’s retraction of its upper-body root system. More and more of its livid mass had gone dead, until only its head and the arm nearer the doctor remained animate, while the silvery worming mass grew in its bleeding abdominal nest.

Then Joe Allen’s face grinned, and his hand hoisted up the nude, regathered parasite from his sundered gut and held it for the doctor to view—his tenant-to-be. Winters saw that from the squirming mass of nerve cord one thick filament still draped down, remaining anchored in the canyoned chest toward the upper spine. This, he understood, would be the remote-control line by which it could work at a distance the crane of its old host’s body, transferring itself to Winters by means of a giant apparatus it no longer inhabited. This, he knew, was his last moment. Before his own personal horror should begin, and engulf him, he squarely met the corpse’s eyes and said:

“Goodbye, Joe Allen. Eddie Sykes, I mean. I hope he gave you strength, the Golden Marcus. I love him too. You are guiltless. Peace be with you at the last.”

The demon smile stayed fixed, but, effortlessly, Winters looked through it to the real eyes, those of the encoffined man. Tormented eyes foreseeing death, and craving it. The grinning corpse reached out its viscid cargo—a seething, rippling, multinodular lump that completely filled the erstwhile logger’s roomy palm. It reached this across and laid it on the doctor’s groin. He watched the hand set the bright medusa’s head—his new self—on his own skin, but felt nothing.

He watched the dead hand return to the table, take up the scalpel, reach back over, and make a twelve-inch incision up his abdomen, along his spinal axis. It was a deep, slow cut—sectioning, just straight down through the abdominal wall—and it proceeded in the eerie, utter absence of physical sensation. The moment this was done, the fiber that had stayed anchored in the corpse snapped free, whipped back across the gap, and rejoined the main body that now squirmed toward the incision, its port of entry.

The corpse collapsed. Emptied of all innervating energy, it sagged slack and flaccid, of course. Or had it . . .? Why was it . . .? That nearer arm was supinated. Both elbow and wrist at the full upturned twist. The palm lay open, offering. The scalpel still lay in the palm.

Simple death would have dropped the arm earthward, it would now hang slack. With a blaze, like a nova of light, Winters understood. The man, Sykes, had—for a microsecond before his end—repossessed himself. Had flung a dying impulse of his will down through his rotten, fading muscles and had managed a single independent gesture in the narrow interval between the demon’s departure and his own death. He had clutched the scalpel and flung out his arm, locking the joints as life left him.

It rekindled Winters’s own will, lit a fire of rage and vengefulness. He had caught hope from his predecessor.

How precariously the scalpel lay on the loosened fingers! The slightest tremor would unfix the arm’s joints, it would fall and hang and drop the scalpel down farther than Hell’s deepest recess from his grasp. And he could see that the scalpel was just—only just—in the reach of his fingers at his forearm’s fullest stretch from the bound elbow. The horror crouched on him and, even now slowly feeding its trunk line into his groin incision, at first stopped the doctor’s hand with a pang of terror. Then he reminded himself that, until implanted, the enemy was a senseless mass, bristling with plugs, with input jacks for senses, but, until installed in the physical amplifiers of eyes and ears, an utterly deaf, blind monad that waited in a perfect solipsism between two captive sensory envelopes.

He saw his straining fingers above the bright tool of freedom, thought with an insane smile of God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling, and then, with a life span of surgeon’s fine control, plucked up the scalpel. The arm fell and hung.

“Sleep,” the doctor said. “Sleep revenged.”

But he found his retaliation harshly reined-in by the alien’s careful provisions. His elbow had been fixed with his upper arm almost at right angles to his body’s long axis; his forearm could reach his hand inward and present it closely to the face, suiting the parasite’s need of an eye-hand coordinative check, but could not, even with the scalpel’s added reach, bring its point within four inches of his groin. Steadily the parasite fed in its tapline. It would usurp motor control in three or four minutes at most, to judge by the time its extrication from Allen had taken.

Frantically the doctor bent his wrist inward to its limit, trying to pick through the strap where it crossed his inner elbow. Sufficient pressure was impossible, and the hold so awkward that even feeble attempts threatened the loss of the scalpel. Smoothly the root of alien control sank into him. It was a defenseless thing of jelly against which he lay lethally armed, and he was still doomed—a preview of all his thrall’s impotence-to-be.

But of course there was a way. Not to survive. But to escape, and to have vengeance. For a moment he stared at his captor, hardening his mettle in the blaze of hate it lit in him. Then, swiftly, he determined the order of his moves, and began.

He reached the scalpel to his neck and opened his superior thyroid vein—his inkwell. He laid the scalpel by his ear, dipped his finger in his blood, and began to write on the metal surface of the gurney, beginning by his thigh and moving toward his armpit. Oddly, the incision of his neck, though this was muscularly awake, had been painless, which gave him hopes that raised his courage for what remained to do.

When he had done the message read:

MIND PARASITE

FM ALLEN IN ME

CUT All TILL FIND
lSOOGMMASS

NERVE FIBRE

He wanted to write goodbye to his friend, but the alien had begun to pay out smaller auxiliary filaments collaterally with the main one, and all now lay in speed.

He took up the scalpel, rolled his head to the left, and plunged the blade deep in his ear.

Miracle! Last accidental mercy! It was painless. Some procedural, highly specific anesthetic was in effect. With careful plunges, he obliterated the right inner ear and then thrust silence, with equal thoroughness, into the left. The slashing of the vocal cords followed, then the tendons in the back of the neck that hold it erect. He wished he were free to unstring knees and elbows too, but it could not be. But blinded, deaf, with centers of balance lost, with only rough motor control—all these conditions should fetter the alien’s escape, should it in the first place manage the reanimation of a bloodless corpse in which it had not yet achieved a fine-tuned interweave. Before he extinguished his eyes, he paused, the scalpel poised above his face, and blinked them to clear his aim of tears. The right, then the left, both retinas meticulously carved away, the yolk of vision quite scooped out of them. The scalpel’s last task, once it had tilted the head sideways to guide the blood flow absolutely clear of possible effacement of the message, was to slash the external carotid artery.

When this was done, the old man sighed with relief and laid his scalpel down. Even as he did so, he felt the deep inward prickle of an alien energy—something that flared, crackled, flared, groped for, but did not quite find its purchase. And inwardly, as the doctor sank toward sleep—cerebrally, as a voiceless man must speak—he spoke to the parasite these carefully chosen words:

“Welcome to your new house. I’m afraid there’s been some vandalism—the lights don’t work, and the plumbing has a very bad leak. There are some other things wrong as well—the neighborhood is perhaps a little too quiet, and you may find it hard to get around very easily. But it’s been a lovely home to me for fifty-seven years, and somehow I think you’ll stay . . .”

The face, turned toward the body of Joe Allen, seemed to weep scarlet tears, but its last movement before death was to smile.

THE SATURN GAME

Poul Anderson

Humanity uses psychological tools as well as physical-ones. In space, the most ancient of those toots will take on new uses—and new dangers

If we are to understand what happened, which is vital if we are to avoid repeated and worse tragedies in the future, we must begin by dismissing all accusations. Nobody was negligent; no action was foolish. For who could have predicted the eventuality, or recognized its nature, until too late? Rather should we appreciate the spirit with which those people struggled against disaster, inward and outward, after they knew. The fact is that thresholds exist throughout reality, and that things on their far sides are altogether different from things on their hither sides. The Chronos crossed more than an abyss, it crossed a threshold of human experience.

—Francis L. Minamoto, Death

Under Saturn: A Dissenting View

(Apollo University Communications,

Leyburg, Luna, 2057)

“The City of Ice is now on my horizon,” Kendrick says. Its towers gleam blue. “My griffin spreads his wings to glide.” Wind whistles among those great, rainbow-shimmering pinions. His cloak blows back from his shoulders; the air strikes through his ring-mail and sheathes him in cold. “I lean over and peer after you.” The spear in his left hand counterbalances him. Its head flickers palely with the moonlight that Wayland Smith hammered into the steel.

“Yes, I see the griffin,” Ricia tells him, “high and far, like a comet above the courtyard walls. I run out from under the portico for a better look. A guard tries to stop me, grabs my sleeve, but I tear the spider silk apart and dash forth into the open.” The elven castle wavers as if its sculptured ice were turning to smoke. Passionately, she cries, “Is it in truth you, my darling?”

“Hold, there!” warns Alvarlan from his cave of arcana ten thousand leagues away. “I send your mind the message that if the King suspects this is Sir Kendrick of the Isles, he will raise a dragon against him, or spirit you off beyond any chance of rescue. Go back. Princess of Maranoa. Pretend you decide that it is only an eagle. I will cast a belief-spell on your words.”

“I stay far aloft,” Kendrick says. “Save he use a scrying stone, the Elf King will not be aware this beast has a rider. From here I’ll spy out city and castle.” And then—? He knows not. He knows simply that he must set her free or die in the quest. How long will it take him, how many more nights will she lie in the King’s embrace?

“I thought you were supposed to spy out Iapetus,” Mark Danzig interrupted.

His dry tone startled the three others into alertness. Jean Broberg flushed with embarrassment, Colin Scobie with irritation; Luis Garcilaso shrugged, grinned, and turned his gaze to the pilot console before which he sat harnessed. For a moment silence filled the cabin, and shadows, and radiance from the universe.

To help observation, all lights were out except a few dim glows from the instruments. The sunward ports were lidded. Elsewhere thronged stars, so many and so brilliant that they well-nigh drowned the blackness which held them. The Milky Way was a torrent of silver. One port framed Saturn at half phase, dayside pale gold and rich bands amidst the jewelry of its rings, nightside wanly ashimmer with starlight upon clouds, as big to the sight as Earth over Luna.

Forward was Iapetus. The spacecraft rotated while orbiting the moon, to maintain a steady optical field. It had crossed the dawn line, presently at the middle of the inward-facing hemisphere. Thus it had left bare, crater-pocked land behind it in the dark, and was passing above sunlit glacier country. Whiteness dazzled, glittered in sparks and shards of color, reached fantastic shapes heavenward; cirques, crevasses, caverns brimmed with blue.

“I’m sorry,” Jean Broberg whispered. “It’s too beautiful, unbelievably beautiful, and . . . almost like the place where our game had brought us. Took us by surprise—”

“Huh!” Mark Danzig said. “You had a pretty good idea of what to expect, therefore you made your play go in the direction of something that resembled it. Don’t tell me any different. I’ve watched these acts for eight years.”

Colin Scobie made a savage gesture. Spin and gravity were too slight to give noticeable weight, and his movement sent him flying through the air, across the crowded cabin. He checked himself by a handhold just short of the chemist. “Are you calling Jean a liar?” he growled.

Most times he was cheerful, in a bluff fashion. Perhaps because of that, he suddenly appeared menacing. He was a big, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties; a coverall did not disguise the muscles beneath, and the scowl on his face brought forth its ruggedness.

“Please!” Broberg exclaimed. “Not a quarrel, Colin.”

The geologist glanced back at her. She was slender and fine-featured. At her age of forty-two, despite longevity The Saturn Game treatment, the reddish-brown hair that fell to her shoulders was becoming streaked with white, and lines were engraved around large gray eyes.

“Mark is right,” she sighed. “We’re here to do science, not daydream.” She reached forth to touch Scobie’s arm, smiling shyly. “You’re still full of your Kendrick persona, aren’t you? Gallant, protective—” She stopped. Her voice had quickened with more than a hint of Ricia. She covered her lips and flushed again. A tear broke free and sparkled off on air currents. She forced a laugh. “But I’m just physicist Broberg, wife of astronomer Tom, mother of Johnnie and Billy.”

Her glance went Saturnward, as if seeking the ship where her family waited. She might have spied it, too, as a star that moved among stars by the solar sail. However, that was now furled, and naked vision could not find even such huge hulls as Chronos possessed, across millions of kilometers.

Luis Garcilaso asked from his pilot’s chair; “What harm if we carry on our little commedia dell’arte?” His Arizona drawl soothed the ear. “We won’t be landin’ for a while yet, and everything’s on automatic till then.” He was small, swarthy, and deft, still in his twenties.

Danzig twisted his leathery countenance into a frown. At sixty, thanks to his habits as well as to longevity, he kept springiness in a lank frame; he could joke about wrinkles and encroaching baldness. In this hour, he set humor aside.

“Do you mean you don’t know what’s the matter?” His beak of a nose pecked at a scanner screen which magnified the moonscape. “Almighty God! That’s a new world we’re about to touch down on—tiny, but a world, and strange in ways we can’t guess. Nothing’s been here before us except one unmanned flyby and one unmanned lander that soon quit sending. We can’t rely on meters and cameras alone. We’ve got to use our eyes and brains.”

He addressed Scobie. “You should realize that in your bones, Colin, if nobody else aboard does. You’ve worked on Luna as well as Earth. In spite of all the settlements, in spite of all the study that’s been done, did you never hit any nasty surprises?”

The burly man had recovered his temper. Into his own voice came a softness that recalled the serenity of the Idaho mountains from which he hailed. “True,” he admitted. “There’s no such thing as having too much information when you’re off Earth, or enough information, for that matter.” He paused. “Nevertheless, timidity can be as dangerous as rashness—not that you’re timid, Mark,” he added in haste. “Why, you and Rachel could’ve been in a nice O’Neill on a nice pension—”

Danzig relaxed and smiled. “This was a challenge, if I may sound pompous. Just the same, we want to get home when we’re finished here. We should be in time for the Bar Mitzvah of a great-grandson or two. Which requires staying alive.”

“My point is,” Scobie said, “if you let yourself get buffaloed, you may end up in a worse bind than—Oh, never mind. You’re probably right, and we should not have begun fantasizing. The spectacle sort of grabbed us. It won’t happen again.”

Yet when Scobie’s eyes looked anew on the glacier, they had not quite the dispassion of a scientist in them. Nor did Broberg’s or Garcilaso’s. Danzig slammed fist into palm. “The game, the damned childish game.” he muttered, too low for his companions to hear. “Was nothing saner possible for them?”

II

Was nothing saner possible for them? Perhaps not.

If we are to answer the question, we should first review some history. When early industrial operations in space offered the hope of rescuing civilization, and Earth, from ruin, then greater knowledge of sister planets, prior to their development, became a clear necessity. The effort started with Mars, the least hostile. No natural law forbade sending small manned spacecraft yonder. What did was the absurdity of using as much fuel, time, and effort as were required, in order that three or four persons might spend a few days in a single locality.

Construction of the J. Peter Vajk took longer and cost more, but paid off when it, virtually a colony, spread its immense solar sail and took a thousand people to their goal in half a year and in comparative comfort. The payoff grew overwhelming when they, from orbit, launched Earthward the beneficiated minerals of Phobos that they did not need for their own purposes. Those purposes, of course, turned on the truly thorough, long-term study of Mars, and included landings of auxiliary craft, for ever-lengthier stays, all over the surface.

Sufficient to remind you of this much; no need to detail the triumphs of the same basic concept throughout the inner Solar System, as far as Jupiter. The tragedy of the Vladimir became a reason to try again for Mercury, and, in a left-handed, political way, pushed the Britannic-American consortium into its Chronos project.

They named the ship better than they knew. Sailing time to Saturn was eight years.

Not only the scientists must be healthy, lively-minded people. Crewfolk, technicians, medics, constables, teachers, clergy, entertainers—every element of an entire community must be. Each must command more than a single skill, for emergency backup, and keep those skills alive by regular, tedious rehearsal. The environment was limited and austere; communication with home was soon a matter of beamcasts; cosmopolitans found themselves in what amounted to an isolated village. What were they to do?

Assigned tasks. Civic projects, especially work on improving the interior of the vessel. Research, or writing a book, or the study of a subject, or sports, or hobby clubs, or service and handicraft enterprises, or more private interactions, or—There was a wide choice of television tapes, but Central Control made sets usable for only three hours in twenty-four. You dared not get into the habit of passivity.

Individuals grumbled, squabbled, formed and dissolved cliques, formed and dissolved marriages or less explicit relationships, begot and raised occasional children, worshipped, mocked, learned, yearned, and for the most part found reasonable satisfaction in life.

But for some, including a large proportion of the gifted, what made the difference between this and misery were their psychodramas.

—Minamoto

Dawn crept past the ice, out onto the rock. It was a light both dim and harsh, yet sufficient to give Garcilaso the last data he wanted for descent.

The hiss of the motor died away. A thump shivered through the hull, landing jacks leveled it, and stillness fell. The crew did not speak for a while. They were staring out at Iapetus.

Immediately around them was desolation like that which reigns in much of the Solar System. A darkling plain curved visibly away to a horizon that, at man-height, was a bare three kilometers distant; higher up in the cabin, you could see farther, but that only sharpened the sense of being on a minute ball awhirl among the stars. The ground was thinly covered with cosmic dust and gravel; here and there a minor crater or an upthrust mass lifted out of the regolith to cast long, knife-edged, utterly black shadows. Light reflections lessened the number of visible stars, turning heaven into a bowlful of night. Halfway between the zenith and the south, half-Saturn and its rings made the vista beautiful.

Likewise did the glacier—or the glaciers? Nobody was sure. The sole knowledge was that, seen from afar. Iapetus gleamed bright at the western end of its orbit and grew dull at the eastern end, because one side was covered with whitish material while the other side was not; the dividing line passed nearly beneath the planet which it eternally faced. The probes from Chronos had reported the layer was thick, with puzzling spectra that varied from place to place, and little more about it.

In this hour, four humans gazed across pitted emptiness and saw wonder rear over the world-rim. From north to south went ramparts, battlements, spires, depths, peaks, cliffs, their shapes and shadings an infinity of fantasies. On the right Saturn cast soft amber, but that was nearly lost in the glare from the east, where a sun dwarfed almost to stellar size nonetheless blazed too fierce to look at, just above the summit. There the silvery sheen exploded in brilliance, diamond-glitter of shattered light, chill blues and greens; dazzled to tears, eyes saw the vision glimmer and waver, as if it bordered on dreamland, or on Faerie. But despite all delicate intricacies, underneath was a sense of chill and of brutal mass; here dwelt also the Frost Giants.

Broberg was the first to breathe forth a word. “The City of Ice.”

“Magic,” said Garcilaso as low. “My spirit could lose itself forever, wanderin’ yonder. I’m not sure I’d mind. My cave is nothin’ like this, nothin’—”

“Wait a minute!” snapped Danzig in alarm.

“Oh, yes. Curb the imagination, please.” Though Scobie was quick to utter sobrieties, they sounded drier than needful. “We know from probe transmissions the scarp is. well. Grand Canyon-like. Sure, it’s more spectacular than we realized, which I suppose makes it still more of a mystery.” He turned to Broberg. “I’ve never seen ice or snow as sculptured as this. Have you, Jean? You’ve mentioned visiting a lot of mountain and winter scenery when you were a girl in Canada.”

The physicist shook her head. “No. Never. It doesn’t seem possible. What could have done it? There’s no weather here . . . is there?”

“Perhaps the same phenomenon is responsible that laid a hemisphere bare,” Danzig suggested.

“Or that covered a hemisphere,” Scobie said. “An object seventeen hundred kilometers across shouldn’t have gases, frozen or otherwise. Unless it’s a ball of such stuff clear through, like a comet, which we know it’s not.” As if to demonstrate, he unclipped a pair of pliers from a nearby tool rack, tossed it, and caught it on its slow way down. His own ninety kilos of mass weighed about seven. For that, the satellite must be essentially rocky.

Garcilaso registered impatience. “Let’s stop tradin’ facts and theories we already know about, and start findin’ answers.”

Rapture welled in Broberg. “Yes, let’s get out. Over there.”

“Hold on,” protested Danzig as Garcilaso and Scobie nodded eagerly. “You can’t be serious. Caution, step-by-step advance—”

“No, it’s too wonderful for that.” Broberg’s tone shivered.

“Yeah, to hell with fiddlin’ around,” Garcilaso said. “We need at least a preliminary scout right away.”

The furrows deepened in Danzig’s visage. “You mean you too, Luis? But you’re our pilot!”

“On the ground I’m general assistant, chief cook, and bottle washer to you scientists. Do you think I want to sit idle, with somethin’ like that to explore?” Garcilaso calmed his voice. “Besides, if I should come to grief, any of you can fly back, given a bit of radio talk from Chronos and a final approach under remote control.”

“It’s quite reasonable, Mark,” Scobie argued. “Contrary to doctrine, true; but doctrine was made for us, not vice versa. A short distance, low gravity, and we’ll be on the lookout for hazards. The point is, until we have some notion of what that ice is like, we don’t know what the devil to pay attention to in this vicinity, either. No, first we’ll take a quick jaunt. When we return, then we’ll plan.”

Danzig stiffened. “May I remind you, if anything goes wrong, help is at least a hundred hours away? An auxiliary like this can’t boost any higher if it’s to get back, and it’d take longer than that to disengage the big boats from Saturn and Titan.”

Scobie reddened at the implied insult. “And may I remind you: on the ground I am the captain. I say an immediate reconnaissance is safe and desirable. Stay behind if you want—In fact, yes, you must. Doctrine is right in saying the vessel mustn’t be deserted.”

Danzig studied him for several seconds before murmuring, “Luis goes, though, is that it?”

“Yes!” cried Garcilaso so that the cabin rang.

Broberg patted Danzig’s limp hand. “It’s okay, Mark,” she said gently. “We’ll bring back samples for you to study. After that, I wouldn’t be surprised but what the best ideas about procedure will be yours.”

He shook his head. Suddenly he looked very tired. “No,” he replied in a monotone, “that won’t happen. You see. I’m only a hardnosed industrial chemist who saw this expedition as a chance to do interesting research. The whole way through space, I kept myself busy with ordinary affairs, including, you remember, a couple of inventions I’d wanted the leisure to develop. You three, you’re younger, you’re romantics—”

“Aw, come off it, Mark.” Scobie tried to laugh. “Maybe Jean and Luis are, a little, but me, I’m about as otherworldly as a plate of haggis.”

“You played the game, year after year, until at last the game started playing you. That’s what’s going on this minute, no matter how you rationalize your motives.” Danzig’s gaze on the geologist, who was his friend, lost the defiance that had been in it and turned wistful. “You might try recalling Delia Ames.”

Scobie bristled. “What about her? The business was hers and mine, nobody else’s.”

“Except afterward she cried on Rachel’s shoulder, and Rachel doesn’t keep secrets from me. Don’t worry, I’m not about to blab. Anyhow, Delia got over it. But if you’d recollect objectively, you’d see what had happened to you, already three years ago.”

Scobie set his jaw. Danzig smiled in the left corner of his mouth. “No, I suppose you can’t,” he went on. “I admit I had no idea either, till now, how far the process had gone. At least keep your fantasies in the background while you’re outside, will you? Can you?”

In half a decade of travel, Scobie’s apartment had become idiosyncratically his—perhaps more so than was usual, since he remained a bachelor who seldom had women visitors for longer than a few nightwatches at a time. Much of the furniture he had made himself; the agrosections of Chronos produced wood, hide, and fiber as well as food and fresh air. His handiwork ran to massiveness and archaic carved decorations. Most of what he wanted to read he screened from the data banks, of course, but a shelf held a few old books—Childe’s border ballads, an eighteenth-century family Bible (despite his agnosticism), a copy of The Machinery of Freedom which had nearly disintegrated but displayed the signature of the author, and other valued miscellany. Above them stood a model of a sailboat in which he had cruised Northern European waters, and a trophy he had won in handball aboard this ship. On the bulkheads hung his fencing sabers and numerous pictures—of parents and siblings, of wilderness areas he had tramped on Earth, of castles and mountains and heaths in Scotland where he had often been too, of his geological team on Luna, of Thomas Jefferson and, imagined, Robert the Bruce.

On a certain evenwatch he had, though, been seated before his telescreen. Lights were turned low in order that he might fully savor the image. Auxiliary craft-were out in a joint exercise, and a couple of their personnel used the opportunity to beam back views of what they saw.

That was splendor. Starful space made a chalice for Chronos. The two huge, majestically counter-rotating cylinders, the entire complex of linkages, ports, locks, shields, collectors, transmitters, docks, all became Japanesely exquisite at a distance of several hundred kilometers. It was the solar sail which filled most of the screen, like a turning golden sun-wheel; yet remote vision could also appreciate its spiderweb intricacy, soaring and subtle curvatures, even the less-than-gossamer thinness. A mightier work than the Pyramids, a finer work than a refashioned chromosome, the ship moved on toward a Saturn which had become the second brightest beacon in the firmament.

The doorchime hauled Scobie out of his exaltation. As he started across the deck, he stubbed his toe on a table leg. Coriolis force caused that. It was slight, when a hull this size spun to give a full gee of weight, and a thing to which he had long since adapted; but now and then he got so interested in something that Terrestrial habits returned. He swore at his absent-mindedness, good-naturedly, since he anticipated a pleasurable time.

When he opened the door, Delia Ames entered in a single stride. At once she closed it behind her and stood braced against it. She was a tall blonde woman who did electronics maintenance and kept up a number of outside activities. “Hey!” Scobie said. “What’s wrong? You look like—” he tried for levity “—something my cat would’ve dragged in, if we had any mice or beached fish aboard.”

She drew a ragged breath. Her Australian accent thickened till he had trouble understanding: “I . . . today . . . I happened to be at the same cafeteria table as George Harding—”

Unease tingled through Scobie. Harding worked in Ames’s department but had much more in common with him. In the game group to which they both belonged. Harding likewise took a vaguely ancestral role, N’Kuma the Lionslayer.

“What happened?” Scobie asked. Woe stared back at him. “He mentioned . . . you and he and the rest . . . you’d be taking your next holiday together . . . to carry on your, your bloody act uninterrupted.”

“Well, yes. Work at the new park over in Starboard Hull will be suspended till enough metal’s been recycled for the water pipes. The area will be vacant, and my gang has arranged to spend a week’s worth of days—”

“But you and I were going to Lake Armstrong!”

“Uh, wait, that was just a notion we talked about, no definite plan yet, and this is such an unusual chance—Later, sweetheart. I’m sorry.” He took her hands. They felt cold. He essayed a smile. “Now, c’mon, we were going to cook a festive dinner together and afterward spend a, shall we say, quiet evening at home. But for a start, this absolutely gorgeous presentation on the screen—”

She jerked free of him. The gesture seemed to calm her. “No, thanks,” she said, flat-voiced. “Not when you’d rather be with that Broberg woman. I only came by to tell you in person I’m getting out of the way of you two.”

“Huh?” He stepped back. “What the flaming hell do you mean?”

“You know jolly well.”

“I don’t! She, I, she’s happily married, got two kids, she’s older than me, we’re friends, sure, but there’s never been a thing between us that wasn’t in the open and on the level—” Scobie swallowed. “You suppose maybe I’m in love with her?”

Ames looked away. Her fingers writhed together. “I’m not about to go on being a mere convenience to you. Colin. You have plenty of those. Myself, I’d hoped—But I was wrong, and I’m going to cut my losses before they get worse.”

“But . . . Dee. I swear I haven’t fallen for anybody else, and I . . . I swear you’re more than a body to me, you’re a fine person—” She stood mute and withdrawn. Scobie gnawed his lip before he could tell her: “Okay, I admit it, the main reason I volunteered for this trip was I’d lost out in a love affair on Earth. Not that the project doesn’t interest me, but I’ve come to realize what a big chunk out of my life it is. You, more than any other woman, Dee, you’ve gotten me to feel better about the situation.”

She grimaced. “But not as much as your psychodrama has, right?”

“Hey, you must think I’m obsessed with the game. I’m not. It’s fun and—oh, maybe ‘fun’ is too weak a word—but anyhow, it’s just little bunches of people getting together fairly regularly to play. Like my fencing, or a chess club, or, or anything.”

She squared her shoulders. “Well, then,” she asked, “will you cancel the date you’ve made and spend your holiday with me?”

“I. uh, I can’t do that. Not at this stage. Kendrick isn’t off on the periphery of current events, he’s closely involved with everybody else. If I didn’t show, it’d spoil things for the rest.”

Her glance steadied upon him. “Very well. A promise is a promise, or so I imagined. But afterward—Don’t be afraid. I’m not trying to trap you. That would be no good, would it? However, if I maintain this liaison of ours, will you phase yourself out of your game?”

“I can’t—” Anger seized him. “No, God damn it!” he roared.

“Then goodbye, Colin,” she said, and departed. He stared for minutes at the door she had shut behind her.

Unlike the large Titan and Saturn-vicinity explorers, landers on the airless moons were simply modified Luna-to-space shuttles, reliable, but with limited capabilities. When the blocky shape had dropped below the horizon, Garcilaso said into his radio: “We’ve lost sight of the boat, Mark. I must say it improves the view.” One of the relay microsatellites which had been sown in orbit passed his words on.

“Better start blazing your trail, then,” Danzig reminded.

“My, my, you are a fussbudget, aren’t you?” Nevertheless Garcilaso unholstered the squirt gun at his hip and splashed a vividly fluorescent circle of paint on the ground. He would do it at eyeball intervals until his party reached the glacier. Except where dust lay thick over the regolith, footprints were faint under the feeble gravity, and absent when a walker crossed continuous rock.

Walker? No, leaper. The three bounded exultant, little hindered by spacesuits, life support units, tool and ration packs. The naked land fled from their haste, and ever higher, ever clearer and more glorious to see, loomed the ice ahead of them.

There was no describing it, not really. You could speak of lower slopes and palisades above, to a mean height of perhaps a hundred meters, with spires towering farther still. You could speak of gracefully curved tiers going up those braes, of lacy parapets and fluted crags and arched openings to caves filled with wonders, of mysterious blues in the depths and greens where light streamed through translucencies, of gem-sparkle across whiteness where radiance and shadow wove mandalas—and none of it would convey anything more than Scobie’s earlier, altogether inadequate comparison to the Grand Canyon.

“Stop,” he said for the dozenth time. “I want to take a few pictures.”

“Will anybody understand them who hasn’t been here?” whispered Broberg.

“Probably not,” said Garcilaso in the same hushed tone. “Maybe no one but us ever will.”

“What do you mean by that?” demanded Danzig’s voice.

“Never mind,” snapped Scobie.

“I think I know,” the chemist said. “Yes, it is a great piece of scenery, but you’re letting it hypnotize you.”

“If you don’t cut out that drivel,” Scobie warned, “we’ll cut you out of the circuit. Damn it, we’ve got work to do. Get off our backs.”

Danzig gusted a sigh. “Sorry. Uh, are you finding any clues to the nature of that—that thing?”

Scobie focused his camera. “Well,” he said, partly mollified, “the different shades and textures, and no doubt the different shapes, seem to confirm what the reflection spectra from the flyby suggested. The composition is a mixture, or a jumble, or both, of several materials, and varies from place to place. Water ice is obvious, but I feel sure of carbon dioxide too. and I’d bet on ammonia, methane, and presumably lesser amounts of other stuff.”

“Methane? Could that stay solid at ambient temperatures, in a vacuum?”

“We’ll have to find out for sure. However, I’d guess that most of the time it’s cold enough, at least for methane strata that occur down inside where there’s pressure on them.”

Within the vitryl globe of her helmet, Broberg’s features showed delight. “Wait!” she cried. “I have an idea—about what happened to the probe that landed.” She drew a breath. “It came down almost at the foot of the glacier, you recall. Our view of the site from space seemed to indicate that an avalanche buried it, but we couldn’t understand how that might have been triggered. Well, suppose a methane layer at exactly the wrong location melted. Heat radiation from the jets may have warmed it, and later the radar beam used to map contours added the last few degrees necessary. The stratum flowed, and down came everything that had rested on top of it.”

“Plausible,” Scobie said. “Congratulations, Jean.”

“Nobody thought of the possibility in advance?” Garcilaso scoffed. “What kind of scientists have we got along?”

“The kind who were being overwhelmed by work after we reached Saturn, and still more by data input.” Scobie answered. “The universe is bigger than you or anybody can realize, hotshot.”

“Oh. Sure. No offense.” Garcilaso’s glance returned to the ice. “Yes, we’ll never run out of mysteries, will we?”

“Never.” Broberg’s eyes glowed enormous. “At the heart of things will always be magic. The Elf King rules—”

Scobie returned his camera to its pouch. “Stow the gab and move on,” he ordered curtly.

His gaze locked for an instant with Broberg’s. In the weird, mingled light, it could be seen that she went pale, then red, before she sprang off beside him.

Ricia had gone alone into Moonwood on Midsummer Eve. The King found her there and took her unto him as she had hoped. Ecstasy became terror when he afterward bore her off; yet her captivity in the City of Ice brought her many more such hours, and beauties and marvels unknown among mortals. Alvarlan, her mentor, sent his spirit in quest of her, and was himself beguiled by what he found. It was an effort of will for him to tell Sir Kendrick of the Isles where she was, albeit he pledged his help in freeing her.

N’Kuma the Lionslayer, Bela of Eastmarch, Karina Far West, Lady Aurelia, Olav Harpmaster had none of them been present when this happened.

The glacier (a wrong name for something that might have no counterpart in the Solar System) lifted off the plain abruptly as a wall. Standing there, the three could no longer see the heights. They could, though, see that the slope which curved steeply upward to a filigree-topped edge was not smooth. Shadows lay blue in countless small craters. The sun had climbed just sufficiently high to beget them; a Iapetan day is more than seventy-nine of Earth’s.

Danzig’s question crackled in their earphones: “Now are you satisfied? Will you come back before a fresh landslide catches you?”

“It won’t,” Scobie replied. “We aren’t a vehicle, and the local configuration has clearly been stable for centuries or better. Besides, what’s the point of a manned expedition if nobody investigates anything?”

“I’ll see if I can climb,” Garcilaso offered.

“No, wait.” Scobie commanded. “I’ve had experience with mountains and snowpacks. for whatever that may be worth. Let me work out a route for us first.”

“You’re going onto that stuff, the whole gaggle of you?” exploded Danzig. “Have you completely lost your minds?”

Scobie’s brow and lips tightened. “Mark, I warn you again, if you don’t get your emotions under control we’ll cut you off. We’ll hike on a ways if I decide it’s safe.”

He paced back and forth, in floating low-weight fashion, while he surveyed the jokull. Layers and blocks of distinct substances were plain to see, like separate ashlars laid by an elvish mason—where they were not so huge that a giant must have been at work. The craterlets might be sentry posts on this lowest embankment of the City’s defenses. . . .

Garcilaso, most vivacious of men, stood motionless and let his vision lose itself in the sight. Broberg knelt down to examine the ground, but her own gaze kept wandering aloft.

Finally she beckoned. “Colin, come over here, please,” she said. “I believe I’ve made a discovery.”

Scobie joined her. As she rose, she scooped a handful of fine black particles off the shards on which she stood and let it trickle from her glove. “I suspect this is the reason the boundary of the ice is sharp,” she told him.

“What is?” Danzig inquired from afar. He got no answer.

“I noticed more and more dust as we went along,” Broberg continued. “If it fell on patches and lumps of frozen stuff, isolated from the main mass, and covered them, it would absorb solar heat till they melted or, likelier, sublimed. Even water molecules would escape to space, in this weak gravity. The main mass was too big for that; square-cube law. Dust grains there would simply melt their way down a short distance, then be covered as surrounding material collapsed on them, and the process would stop.”

“H’m.” Scobie raised a hand to stroke his chin, encountered his helmet, and sketched a grin at himself. “Sounds reasonable. But where did so much dust come from—and the ice, for that matter?”

“I think—” Her voice dropped until he could barely hear, and her look went the way of Garcilaso’s. His remained upon her face, profiled against stars. “I think this bears out your comet hypothesis, Colin. A comet struck Iapetus. It came from the direction it did because it got so near Saturn that it was forced to swing in a hairpin bend around the planet. It was enormous; the ice of it covered almost a hemisphere, in spite of much more being vaporized and lost. The dust is partly from it, partly generated by the impact.”

He clasped her armored shoulder. “Your theory, Jean. I was not the first to propose a comet, but you’re the first to corroborate with details.”

She didn’t appear to notice, except that she murmured further: “Dust can account for the erosion that made those lovely formations, too. It caused differential melting and sublimation on the surface, according to the patterns it happened to fall in and the mixes of ices it clung to, until it was washed away or encysted. The craters, these small ones and the major ones we’ve observed from above, they have a separate but similar origin. Meteorites—”

“Whoa, there,” he objected. “Any sizable meteorite would release enough energy to steam off most of the entire field.”

“I know. Which shows the comet collision was recent, less than a thousand years ago, or we wouldn’t be seeing this miracle today. Nothing big has since happened to strike, yet. I’m thinking of little stones, cosmic sand, in prograde orbits around Saturn so that they hit with low relative speed. Most simply make dimples in the ice. Lying there, however, they collect solar heat because they’re dark, and re-radiate it to melt away their surroundings, till they sink beneath. The concavities they leave reflect incident radiation from side to side, and thus continue to grow. The pothole effect. And again, because the different ices have different properties, you don’t get perfectly smooth craters, but those fantastic bowls we saw before we landed.”

“By God!” Scobie hugged her. “You’re a genius.”

Helmet against helmet, she smiled The Saturn Game and said, “No. It’s obvious, once you’ve seen for yourself.” She was quiet for a bit while still they held each other. “Scientific intuition is a funny thing, I admit,” she went on at last. “Considering the problem, I was hardly aware of my logical mind. What I thought was—the City of Ice, made with starstones out of that which a god called down from heaven—”

“Jesus Maria!” Garcilaso spun about to stare at them.

Scobie released the woman. “We’ll go after confirmation,” he said unsteadily. “To the large crater we spotted a few klicks inward. The surface appears quite safe to walk on.”

“I called that crater the Elf King’s Dance Hall,” Broberg mused, as if a dream were coming back to her.

“Have a care.” Garcilaso’s laugh rattled. “Heap big medicine yonder. The King is only an inheritor; it was giants who built these walls, for the gods.”

“Well. I’ve got to find a way in, don’t I?” Scobie responded.

“Indeed,” Alvarlan says. “I cannot guide you from this point. My spirit can only see through mortal eyes. I can but lend you my counsel, until we have neared the gates.”

“Are you sleepwalking in that fairy tale of yours?” Danzig yelled. “Come back before you get yourselves killed!”

“Will you dry up?” Scobie snarled. “It’s nothing but a style of talk we’ve got between us. If you can’t understand that, you’ve got less use of your brain than we do.”

“Listen, won’t you? I didn’t say you’re crazy. You don’t have delusions or anything like that. I do say you’ve steered your fantasies toward this kind of place, and now the reality has reinforced them till you’re under a compulsion you don’t recognize. Would you go ahead so recklessly anywhere else in the universe? Think!”

“That does it. We’ll resume contact after you’ve had time to improve your manners.” Scobie snapped off his main radio switch. The circuits that stayed active served for close-by communication but had no power to reach an orbital relay. His companions did likewise.

The three faced the awesomeness before them. “You can help me find the Princess when we are inside, Alvarlan,” Kendrick says.

“That I can and will,” the sorcerer vows.

“I wait for you, most steadfast of my lovers,” Ricia croons.

Alone in the spacecraft, Danzig well-nigh sobbed, “Oh, damn that game forever!” The sound fell away into emptiness.

III

To condemn psychodrama, even in its enhanced form, would be to condemn human nature.

It begins in childhood. Play is necessary to an immature mammal, a means of learning to handle the body, the perceptions, and the outside world. The young human plays, must play, with its brain too. The more intelligent the child, the more its imagination needs exercise. There are degrees of activity, from the passive watching of a show on a screen, onward through reading, daydreaming, storytelling, and psychodrama . . . for which the child has no such fancy name.

We cannot give this behavior any single description, for the shape and course it takes depends on an endless number of variables. Sex, age, culture, and companions are only the most obvious. For example, in pre-electronic North America little girls would often play “house” while little boys played “cowboys and Indians” or “cops and robbers,” whereas nowadays a mixed group of their descendants might play “dolphins” or “astronauts and aliens.” In essence, a small band forms, and each individual makes up a character to portray or borrows one from fiction. Simple props may be employed, such as toy weapons, or a chance object—a stick, for instance—may be declared something else such as a metal detector, or a thing may be quite imaginary, as the scenery almost always is. The children then act out a drama which they compose as they go along. When they cannot physically perform a certain action, they describe it. (“I jump real high, like you can do on Mars, an’ come out over the edge o’ that ol’ Valles Marineris, an’ take that bandit by surprise.”) A large cast of characters, especially villains, frequently comes into existence by fiat.

The most imaginative member of the troupe dominates the game and the evolution of the story line, though in a rather subtle fashion, through offering the most vivid possibilities. The rest, however, are brighter than average; psychodrama in this highly developed form does not appeal to everybody.

For those to whom it does, the effects are beneficial and lifelong. Besides increasing their creativity through use, it lets them try out a play version of different adult roles and experiences. Thereby they begin to acquire insight into adulthood.

Such play-acting ends when adolescence commences, if not earlier—but only in that form, and not necessarily forever in it. Grown-ups have many dream-games. This is plain to see in lodges, for example, with their titles, costumes, and ceremonies; but does it not likewise animate all pageantry, every ritual? To what extent are our heroisms, sacrifices, and self-aggrandizements the acting out of personae that we maintain? Some thinkers have attempted to trace this element through every aspect of society.

Here, though, we are concerned with overt psychodrama among adults. In Western civilization it first appeared on a noticeable scale during the middle twentieth century. Psychiatrists found it a powerful diagnostic and therapeutic technique. Among ordinary folk, war and fantasy games, many of which involved identification with imaginary or historical characters, became increasingly popular. In part this was doubtless a retreat from the restrictions and menaces of that unhappy period, but likely in larger part it was a revolt of the mind against the inactive entertainment, notably television, which had come to dominate recreation.

The Chaos ended those activities. Everybody knows about their revival in recent times—for healthier reasons, one hopes. By projecting three-dimensional scenes and appropriate sounds from a data bank—or, better yet, by having a computer produce them to order—players gained a sense of reality that intensified their mental and emotional commitment. Yet in those games that went on for episode after episode, year after real-time year, whenever two or more members of a group could get together to play, they found themselves less and less dependent on such appurtenances. It seemed that, through practice, they had regained the vivid imaginations of their childhoods, and could make anything, or airy nothing itself, into the objects and the worlds they desired.

I have deemed it necessary thus to repeat the obvious in order that we may see it in perspective. The news beamed from Saturn has brought widespread revulsion. (Why? What buried fears have been touched? This is subject matter for potentially important research.) Overnight, adult psychodrama has become unpopular; it may become extinct. That would, in many ways, be a worse tragedy than what has occurred yonder. There is no reason to suppose that the game ever harmed any mentally sound person on Earth; on the contrary. Beyond doubt, it has helped astronauts stay sane and alert on long, difficult missions. If it has no more medical use, that is because psychotherapy has become a branch of applied biochemistry.

And this last fact, the modem world’s dearth of experience with madness, is at the root of what happened. Although he could not have foreseen the exact outcome, a twentieth-century psychiatrist might have warned against spending eight years, an unprecedented stretch of time, in as strange an environment as the Chronos. Strange it certainly has been, despite all efforts—limited, totally man-controlled, devoid of countless cues for which our evolution on Earth has fashioned us. Extraterrestrial colonists have, thus far. had available to them any number of simulations and compensations, of which close, full contact with home and frequent opportunities to visit there are probably the most significant. Sailing time to Jupiter was long, but half of that to Saturn. Moreover, because they were earlier, scientists in the Zeus had much research to occupy them en route, which it would be pointless for later travelers to duplicate; by then, the interplanetary medium between the two giants held few surprises.

Contemporary psychologists were aware of this. They understood that the persons most adversely affected would be the most intelligent, imaginative, and dynamic—those who were supposed to make the very discoveries at Saturn which were the purpose of the undertaking. Being less familiar than their predecessors with the labyrinth that lies, Minotaur-haunted, beneath every human consciousness, the psychologists expected purely benign consequences of whatever psychodramas the crew engendered.

—Minamoto

Assignments to teams had not been made in advance of departure. It was sensible to let professional capabilities reveal themselves and grow on the voyage, while personal relationships did the same. Eventually such factors would help in deciding what individuals should train for what tasks. Long-term participation in a group of players normally forged bonds of friendship that were desirable, if the members were otherwise qualified.

In real life, Scobie always observed strict propriety toward Broberg. She was attractive, but she was monogamous, and he had no wish to alienate her. Besides, he liked her husband. (Tom did not partake of the game. As an astronomer, he had plenty to keep his attention happily engaged.) They had played for a couple of years, and their group had acquired as many characters as it could accommodate in a narrative whose milieu and people were becoming complex, before Scobie and Broberg spoke of anything intimate.

By then, the story they enacted was doing so, and maybe it was not altogether by chance that they met when both had several idle hours. This was in the weightless recreation area at the spin axis. They tumbled through aerobatics, shouting and laughing, until they were pleasantly tired, went to the clubhouse, turned in their wingsuits, and showered. They had not seen each other nude before; neither commented, but he did not hide his enjoyment of the sight, while she colored and averted her glance as tactfully as she was able. Afterward, their clothes resumed, they decided on a drink before they went home, and sought the lounge.

Since evenwatch was approaching nightwatch. they had the place to themselves. At the bar, he thumbed a chit for Scotch, she for Pinot Chardonnay. The machine obliged them and they carried their refreshments out onto the balcony. Seated at a table, they looked across immensity. The clubhouse was built into the support frame on a Lunar gravity level. Above them they saw the sky wherein they had been as birds: its reach did not seem any more hemmed in by far-spaced, spidery girders than it was by a few drifting clouds. Beyond, and straight ahead, decks opposite were a commingling of masses and shapes which the scant illumination at this hour turned into mystery. Among those shadows the humans made out woods, brooks, pools, turned hoary or agleam by the light of stars which filled the skyview strips. Right and left, the hull stretched off beyond sight, a dark in which such lamps as there were appeared lost.

The air was cool, slightly jasmine-scented, drenched with silence. Underneath and throughout, subliminally, throbbed the myriad pulses of the ship.

“Magnificent,” Broberg said low, gazing outward. “What a surprise.”

“Eh?” asked Scobie.

“I’ve only been here before in daywatch. I didn’t anticipate a simple rotation of the reflectors would make it wonderful.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t sneer at the daytime view. Mighty impressive.”

“Yes, but—but then you see too plainly that everything is manmade, nothing is wild or unknown or free. The sun blots out the stars; it’s as though no universe existed beyond this shell we’re in. Tonight is like being in Maranoa,” the kingdom of which Ricia is Princess, a kingdom of ancient things and ways, wildernesses, enchantments.

“H’m, yeah, sometimes I feel trapped myself,” Scobie admitted. “I thought I had a journey’s worth of geological data to study, but my project isn’t going anywhere very interesting.”

“Same for me.” Broberg straightened where she sat, turned to him, and smiled a trifle. The dusk softened her features, made them look young. “Not The Saturn Game that we’re entitled to self-pity. Here we are, safe and comfortable till we reach Saturn. After that we should never lack for excitement, or for material to work with on the way home.”

“True.” Scobie raised his glass. “Well, skoal. Hope I’m not mispronouncing that.”

“How should I know?” she laughed. “My maiden name was Almyer.”

“That’s right, you’ve adopted Tom’s surname. I wasn’t thinking. Though that is rather unusual these days, hey?” She spread her hands. “My family was well-to-do, but they were—are—Jerusalem Catholics. Strict about certain things; archaistic, you might say.” She lifted her wine and sipped. “Oh, yes, I’ve left the Church, but in several ways the Church will never leave me.”

“I see. Not to pry, but, uh, this does account for some traits of yours I couldn’t help wondering about.”

She regarded him over the rim of her glass. “Like what?”

“Well, you’ve got a lot of life in you, vigor, a sense of fun, but you’re also—what’s the word?—uncommonly domestic. You’ve told me you were a quiet faculty member of Yukon University till you married Tom.” Scobie grinned. “Since you two kindly invited me to your last anniversary party, and I know your present age, I deduced that you were thirty then.” Unmentioned was the likelihood that she had still been a virgin. “Nevertheless—oh, forget it. I said I don’t want to pry.”

“Go ahead, Colin,” she urged. “That line from Bums sticks in my mind, since you introduced me to his poetry. ‘To see ourselfs as others see us!’ Since it looks as if we may visit the same moon—”

Scobie took a hefty dollop of Scotch. “Aw, nothing much,” he said, unwontedly diffident. “If you must know, well, I have the impression that being in love wasn’t the single good reason you had for marrying Tom. He’d already been accepted for this expedition, and given your personal qualifications, that would get you in too. In short, you’d grown tired of routine respectability and here was how you could kick over the traces. Am I right?”

“Yes.” Her gaze dwelt on him. “You’re more perceptive than I supposed.”

“No, not really. A roughneck rockhound. But Ricia’s made it plain to see that you’re more than a demure wife, mother, and scientist—” She parted her lips. He raised a palm. “No, please, let me finish. I know it’s bad manners to claim somebody’s persona is a wish fulfillment, and I’m not doing that. Of course you don’t want to be a free-roving, free-loving female scamp, any more than I want to ride around cutting down assorted enemies. Still, if you’d been born and raised in the world of our game, I feel sure you’d be a lot like Ricia. And that potential is part of you, Jean.” He tossed off his drink. “If I’ve said too much, please excuse me. Want a refill?”

“I’d better not, but don’t let me stop you.”

“You won’t.” He rose and bounded off.

When he returned, he saw that she had been observing him through the vitryl door. As he sat down, she smiled, leaned a bit across the table, and told him softly: “I’m glad you said what you did. Now I can declare what a complicated man Kendrick reveals you to be.”

“What?” Scobie asked in honest surprise. “Come on! He’s a sword-and-shield tramp, a fellow who likes to travel, same as me; and in my teens I was a brawler, same as him.”

“He may lack polish, but he’s a chivalrous knight, a compassionate overlord, a knower of sagas and traditions, an appreciator of poetry and music, a bit of a bard . . . Ricia misses him. When will he get back from his latest quest?”

“I’m bound home this minute. N’Kuma and I gave those pirates the slip and landed at Haverness two days ago. After we buried the swag, he wanted to visit Bela and Karina and join them in whatever they’ve been up to, so we bade goodbye for the time being.” Scobie and Harding had lately taken a few hours to conclude that adventure of theirs. The rest of the group had been mundanely occupied for some while.

Broberg’s eyes widened. “From Haverness to the Isles? But I’m in Castle Devaranda, right in between.”

“I hoped you’d be.”

“I can’t wait to hear your story.”

“I’m pushing on after dark. The moon is bright and I’ve got a pair of remounts I bought with a few gold pieces from the loot.” The dust rolls white beneath drumming hoofs. Where a horseshoe strikes a flint pebble, sparks fly ardent. Kendrick scowls. “You, aren’t you with . . . what’s his name? . . . Joran the Red? I don’t like him.”

“I sent him packing a month ago. He got the idea that sharing my bed gave him authority over me. It was never anything but a romp. I stand alone on the Gerfalcon Tower, looking south over moonlit fields, and wonder how you fare. The road flows toward me like a gray river. Do I see a rider come at a gallop, far and far away?”

After many months of play, no image on a screen was necessary. Pennons on the night wind stream athwart the stars. “I arrive. I sound my horn to rouse the gatekeepers.”

“How I do remember those merry notes—”

That same night, Kendrick and Ricia become lovers. Experienced in the game and careful of its etiquette, Scobie and Broberg uttered no details about the union; they did not touch each other and maintained only fleeting eye contact; the ultimate goodnights were very decorous. After all, this was a story they composed about two fictitious characters in a world that never was.

The lower slopes of the jokull rose in tiers which were themselves deeply concave; the humans walked around their rims and admired the extravagant formations beneath. Names sprang onto lips: the Frost Garden, the Ghost Bridge, the Snow Queen’s Throne, while Kendrick advances into the City, and Ricia awaits him at the Dance Hall, and the spirit of Alvarlan carries word between them so that it is as if already she too travels beside her knight. Nevertheless they proceeded warily, vigilant for signs of danger, especially whenever a change of texture or hue or anything else in the surface underfoot betokened a change in its nature.

Above the highest ledge reared a cliff The Saturn Game too sheer to scale, Iapetan gravity or no, the fortress wall. However, from orbit the crew had spied a gouge in the vicinity, forming a pass, doubtless plowed by a small meteorite in the war between the gods and the magicians, when stones chanted down from the sky wrought havoc so accursed that none dared afterward rebuild. That was an eerie climb, hemmed in by heights which glimmered in the blue twilight they cast, heaven narrowed to a belt between them where stars seemed to blaze doubly brilliant.

“There must be guards at the opening,” Kendrick says.

“A single guard,” answers the mind-whisper of Alvarlan, “but he is a dragon. If you did battle with him, the noise and flame would bring every warrior here upon you. Fear not. I’ll slip into his buntin’ brain and weave him such a dream that he’ll never see you.”

“The King might sense the spell,” says Ricia through him. “Since you’ll be parted from us anyway while you ride the soul of that beast, Alvarlan, I’ll seek him out and distract him.”

Kendrick grimaces, knowing full well what means are hers to do that. She has told him how she longs for freedom and her knight; she has also hinted that elven lovemaking transcends the human. Does she wish for a final time before her rescue? . . . Well, Ricia and Kendrick have neither plighted nor practiced single troth. Assuredly Colin Scobie had not. He jerked forth a grin and continued through the silence that had fallen on all three.

They came out on top of the glacial mass and looked around them. Scobie whistled. Garcilaso stammered, “J-J-Jesus Christ!” Broberg smote her hands together.

Below them the precipice fell to the ledges, whose sculpturing took on a wholly new, eldritch aspect, gleam and shadow, until it ended at the plain. Seen from here aloft, the curvature of the moon made toes strain downward in boots, as if to cling fast and not be spun off among the stars which surrounded, rather than shone above, its ball. The spacecraft stood minute on dark, pocked stone, like a cenotaph raised to loneliness.

Eastward the ice reached beyond an edge of sight which was much closer. (“Yonder could be the rim of the world.” Garcilaso said, and Ricia replies, “Yes, the City is nigh to there.”) Bowls of different sizes, hillocks, crags, no two of them eroded the same way, turned its otherwise level stretch into a surreal maze. An arabesque openwork ridge which stood at the explorers’ goal overtopped the horizon. Everything that was illuminated lay gently aglow. Radiant though the sun was, it cast the light of only, perhaps, five thousand full Lunas upon Earth. Southward, Saturn’s great semidisc gave about one-half more Lunar shining; but in that direction, the wilderness sheened pale amber.

Scobie shook himself. “Well, shall we go?” His prosaic question jarred the others; Garcilaso frowned and Broberg winced.

She recovered. “Yes, hasten,” Ricia says. “I am by myself once more. Are you out of the dragon, Alvarlan?”

“Aye,” the wizard informs her. “Kendrick is safely behind a ruined palace. Tell us how best to reach you.”

“You are at the time-gnawed Crown House. Before you lies the Street of the Shieldsmiths—”

Scobie’s brows knitted. “It is noonday, when elves do not fare abroad,” Kendrick says remindingly, commandingly. “I do not wish to encounter any of them. No fights, no complications. We are going to fetch you and escape, without further trouble.”

Broberg and Garcilaso showed disappointment, but understood him. A game broke down when a person refused to accept something that a fellow player tried to put in. Often the narrative threads were not mended and picked up for many days. Broberg sighed.

“Follow the street to its end at a forum where a snow fountain springs,” Ricia directs. “Cross, and continue on Aleph Zain Boulevard. You will know it by a gateway in the form of a skull with open jaws. If anywhere you see a rainbow flicker in the air, stand motionless until it has gone by, for it will be an auroral wolf. . . .”

At a low-gravity lope, the distance took some thirty minutes to cover. In the later part, the three were forced to detour by great banks of an ice so finegrained that it slid about under their bootsoles and tried to swallow them. Several of these lay at irregular intervals around their destination.

There the travelers stood again for a time in the grip of awe.

The bowl at their feet must reach down almost to bedrock, a hundred meters, and was twice as wide. On this rim lifted the wall they had seen from the cliff, an arc fifty meters long and high, nowhere thicker than five meters, pierced by intricate scrollwork, greenly agleam where it was not translucent. It was the uppermost edge of a stratum which made serrations down the crater. Other outcrops and ravines were more dreamlike yet . . . was that a unicorn’s head, was that a colonnade of caryatids, was that an icicle bower . . .? The depths were a lake of cold blue shadow.

“You have come, Kendrick, beloved!” cries Ricia, and casts herself into his arms.

“Quiet,” warns the sending of Alvarlan the wise. “Rouse not our immortal enemies.”

“Yes, we must get back.” Scobie blinked. “Judas priest, what possessed us? Fun is fun, but we sure have come a lot farther and faster than was smart, haven’t we?”

“Let us stay for a little while,” Broberg pleaded. “This is such a miracle—the Elf King’s Dance Hall, which the Lord of the Dance built for him—”

“Remember, if we stay we’ll be caught, and your captivity may be forever.” Scobie thumbed his main radio switch. “Hello, Mark? Do you read me?”

Neither Broberg nor Garcilaso made that move. They did not hear Danzig’s voice: “Oh, yes! I’ve been hunkered over the set gnawing my knuckles. How are you?”

“All right. We’re at the big hole and will be heading back as soon I’ve gotten a few pictures.”

“They haven’t made words to tell how relieved I am. From a scientific standpoint, was it worth the risk?”

Scobie gasped. He stared before him.

“Colin?” Danzig called. “You still there?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“I asked what observations of any The Saturn Game importance you made.”

“I don’t know,” Scobie mumbled. “I can’t remember. None of it after we started climbing seems real.”

“Better you return right away,” Danzig said grimly. “Forget about photographs.”

“Correct.” Scobie addressed his companions: “Forward march.”

“I can’t,” Alvarlan answers. “A wanderin’ spell has caught my spirit in tendrils of smoke.”

“I know where a fire dagger is kept,” Ricia says. “I’ll try to steal it.” Broberg moved ahead, as though to descend into the crater. Tiny ice grains trickled over the verge from beneath her boots. She could easily lose her footing and slide down.

“No, wait,” Kendrick shouts to her. “No need. My spearhead is of moon alloy. It can cut—”

The glacier shuddered. The ridge cracked asunder and fell in shards. The area on which the humans stood split free and toppled into the bowl. An avalanche poured after. High-flung crystals caught sunlight, glittered prismatic in challenge to the stars, descended slowly and lay quiet.

Except for shock waves through solids, everything had happened in the absolute silence of space.

Heartbeat by heartbeat, Scobie crawled back to his senses. He found himself held down, immobilized, in darkness and pain. His armor had saved, was still saving his life; he had been stunned but escaped a real concussion. Yet every breath hurt abominably. A rib or two on the left side seemed broken; a monstrous impact must have dented metal.

And he was buried under more weight than he could move.

“Hello,” he coughed. “Does anybody read me?” The single reply was the throb of his blood. If his radio still worked—which it should, being built into the suit—the mass around him screened him off.

It also sucked heat at an unknown but appalling rate. He felt no cold because the electrical system drew energy from his fuel cell as fast as needed to keep him warm and to recycle his air chemically. As a normal thing, when he lost heat through the slow process of radiation—and, a trifle, through kerofoam-lined bootsoles—the latter demand was much the greater. Now conduction was at work on every square centimeter. He had a spare unit in the equipment on his back, but no means of getting at it.

Unless—He barked forth a chuckle. Straining, he felt the stuff that entombed him yield the least bit under the pressure of arms and legs. And his helmet rang slightly with noise, a rustle, a gurgle. This wasn’t water ice that imprisoned him. but stuff with a much lower freezing point. He was melting it, subliming it, making room for himself.

If he lay passive, he would sink, while frozenness above slid down to keep him in his grave. He might evoke superb new formations, but he would not see them. Instead, he must use the small capability given him to work his way upward, scrabble, get a purchase on matter that was not yet aflow, burrow to the stars.

He began.

Agony soon racked him. Breath rasped in and out of lungs aflame. His strength drained away and trembling took its place, and he could not tell whether he ascended or slipped back. Blind, half suffocated, Scobie made mole-claws of his hands and dug.

It was too much to endure. He fled from it—

His strong enchantments failing, the Elf King brought down his towers of fear in wreck. If the spirit of Alvarlan returned to its body, the wizard would brood upon things he had seen, and understand what they meant, and such knowledge would give mortals a terrible power against Faerie. Waking from sleep, the King scryed Kendrick about to release that fetch. There was no time to do more than break the spell which upheld the Dance Hall. It was largely built of mist and starshine, but enough blocks quarried from the cold side of Ginnungagap were in it that when they crashed they should kill the knight. Ricia would perish too, and in his quicksilver intellect the King regretted that. Nevertheless he spoke the necessary word.

He did not comprehend how much abuse flesh and bone can bear. Sir Kendrick fights his way clear of the ruins, to seek and save his lady. While he does, he heartens himself with thoughts of adventures past and future—

—and suddenly the blindness broke apart and Saturn stood lambent within rings.

Scobie belly-flopped onto the surface and lay shuddering.

He must rise, no matter how his injuries screamed, lest he melt himself a new burial place. He lurched to his feet and glared around.

Little but outcroppings and scars was left of the sculpture. For the most part, the crater had become a smooth-sided whiteness under heaven. Scarcity of shadows made distances hard to gauge, but Scobie guessed the new depth was about seventy-five meters. And empty, empty.

“Mark, do you hear?” he cried.

“That you, Colin?” rang in his earpieces. “Name of mercy, what’s happened? I heard you call out, and saw a cloud rise and sink . . . then nothing for more than an hour. Are you okay?”

“I am, sort of. I don’t see Jean or Luis. A landslide took us by surprise and buried us. Hold on while I search.”

When he stood upright, Scobie’s ribs hurt less. He could move about rather handily if he took care. The two types of standard analgesic in his kit were alike useless, one too weak to give noticeable relief, one so strong that it would turn him sluggish. Casting to and fro, he soon found what he expected, a concavity in the tumbled snowlike material, slightly aboil.

Also a standard part of his gear was a trenching tool. Scobie set pain aside and dug. A helmet appeared. Broberg’s head was within it. She too had been tunneling out.

“Jean!”

“Kendrick!” She crept free and they embraced, suit to suit. “Oh, Colin.”

“How are you?” rattled from him.

“Alive,” she answered. “No serious harm done, I think. A lot to be said for low gravity . . . You? Luis?” Blood was clotted in a streak beneath her nose, and a bruise on her forehead was turning purple, but she stood firmly and spoke clearly.

“I’m functional. Haven’t found Luis yet. Help me look. First, though, we’d The Saturn Game better check out our equipment.”

She hugged arms around chest, as if that would do any good here. “I’m chilled,” she admitted.

Scobie pointed at a telltale. “No wonder. Your fuel cell’s down to its last couple of ergs. Mine isn’t in a lot better shape. Let’s change.”

They didn’t waste time removing their backpacks, but reached into each other’s. Tossing the spent units to the ground, where vapors and holes immediately appeared and then froze, they plugged the fresh ones into their suits. “Turn your thermostat down,” Scobie advised. “We won’t find shelter soon. Physical activity will help us keep warm.”

“And require faster air recycling,” Broberg reminded.

“Yeah. But for the moment, at least, we can conserve the energy in the cells. Okay, next let’s check for strains, potential leaks, any kind of damage or loss. Hurry. Luis is still down there.” Inspection was a routine made automatic by years of drill. While her fingers searched across the man’s spacesuit, Broberg let her eyes wander. “The Dance Hall is gone,” Ricia murmurs. “I think the King smashed it to prevent our escape.”

“Me too. If he finds out we’re alive, and seeking for Alvarlan’s soul—Hey, wait! None of that!”

Danzig’s voice quavered. “How’re you doing?”

“We’re in fair shape, seems like,” Scobie replied. “My corselet took a beating but didn’t split or anything. Now to find Luis . . . Jean, suppose you spiral right, I left, across the crater floor.”

It took a while, for the seething which marked Garcilaso’s burial was minuscule. Scobie started to dig. Broberg watched how he moved, heard how he breathed, and said, “Give me that tool. Just where are you bunged up, anyway?”

He admitted his condition and stepped back. Crusty chunks flew from Broberg’s toil. She progressed fast, since whatever kind of ice lay at this point was, luckily, friable, and under Iapetan gravity she could cut a hole with almost vertical sides.

“I’ll make myself useful,” Scobie said, “namely, find us a way out.” When he started up the nearest slope, it shivered. All at once he was borne back in a tide that made rustly noises through his armor, while a fog of dry-white motes blinded him. Painfully, he scratched himself free at the bottom and tried elsewhere. In the end he could report to Danzig: “I’m afraid there is no easy route. When the rim collapsed where we stood, it did more than produce a shock which wrecked the delicate formations throughout the crater. It let tons of stuff pour down from the surface—a particular sort of ice that, under local conditions, is like fine sand. The walls are covered by it. Most places, it lies meters deep over more stable material. We’d slide faster than we could climb, where the layer is thin; where it’s thick, we’d sink.”

Danzig sighed. “I guess I get to take a nice, healthy hike.”

“I assume you’ve called for help.”

“Of course. They’ll have two boats here in about a hundred hours. The best they can manage. You knew that already.”

“Uh-huh. And our fuel cells are good for perhaps fifty hours.”

“Oh, well, not to worry about that. I’ll bring extras and toss them to you. if you’re stuck till the rescue party arrives. M-m-m . . . maybe I’d better rig a slingshot or something first.”

“You might have a problem locating us. This isn’t a true crater, it’s a glorified pothole, the lip of it flush with the top of the glacier. The landmark we guided ourselves by, that fancy ridge, is gone.”

“No big deal. I’ve got a bearing on you from the directional antenna, remember. A magnetic compass may be no use here, but I can keep myself oriented by the heavens. Saturn scarcely moves in this sky, and the sun and the stars don’t move fast.”

“Damn! You’re right. I wasn’t thinking. Got Luis on my mind, if nothing else.” Scobie looked across the bleakness toward Broberg. Perforce she was taking a short rest, stoop-shouldered above her excavation. His earpieces brought him the harsh sound in her windpipe.

He must maintain what strength was left him. against later need. He sipped from his water nipple, pushed a bite of food through his chowlock, pretended an appetite. “I may as well try reconstructing what happened,” he said. “Okay, Mark, you were right, we got crazy reckless. The game—Eight years was too long to play the game, in an environment that gave us too few reminders of reality. But who could have foreseen it? My God, warn Chronos! I happen to know that one of the Titan teams started playing an expedition to the merfolk under the Crimson Ocean—on account of the red mists—deliberately, like us, before they set off . . .

Scobie gulped, “Well,” he slogged on. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know exactly what went wrong here. But plain to see, the configuration was only metastable. On Earth, too, avalanches can be fatally easy to touch off. I’d guess at a methane layer underneath the surface. It turned a little slushy when temperatures rose after dawn, but that didn’t matter in low gravity and vacuum—till we came along. Heat, vibration—Anyhow, the stratum slid out from under us, which triggered a general collapse. Does that guess seem reasonable?”

“Yes, to an amateur like me,” Danzig said. “I admire how you can stay academic under these circumstances.”

“I’m being practical,” Scobie retorted. “Luis may need medical attention earlier than those boats can come for him. If so, how do we get him to ours?”

Danzig’s voice turned stark. “Any ideas?”

“I’m fumbling my way toward that. Look, the bowl still has the same basic form. The whole shebang didn’t cave in. That implies hard material, water ice and actual rock. In fact, I see a few remaining promontories, jutting out above the sandlike stuff. As for what it is—maybe an ammonia-carbon dioxide combination, maybe more exotic—that’ll be for you to discover later. Right now . . . my geological instruments should help me trace where the solid masses are least deeply covered. We all have trenching tools, so we can try to shovel a path clear, along The Saturn Game a zigzag of least effort. That may bring more garbage slipping down on us from above, but that in turn may expedite our progress. Where the uncovered shelves are too steep or slippery to climb, we can chip footholds. Slow and tough work; and we may run into a bluff higher than we can jump, or something like that.”

“I can help,” Danzig proposed. “While I waited to hear from you, I inventoried our stock of spare cable, cord, equipment I can cannibalize for wire, clothes and bedding I can cut into strips—whatever might be knotted together to make a rope. We won’t need much tensile strength. Well, I estimate I can get about forty meters. According to your description, that’s about half the slope length of that trap you’re in. If you can climb halfway up while I trek there, I can haul you the rest of the way.”

“Thanks, Mark,” Scobie said, “although—”

“Luis!” shrieked in his helmet. “Colin, come fast, help me, this is dreadful!”

Regardless of the pain, except for a curse or two, Scobie sped to Broberg’s aid.

Garcilaso was not quite unconscious. In that lay much of the horror. They heard him mumble, “—Hell, the King threw my soul into Hell. I can’t find my way out. I’m lost. If only Hell weren’t so cold—” They could not see his face; the inside of his helmet was crusted with frost. Deeper and longer buried than the others, badly hurt in addition, he would have died shortly after his fuel cell was exhausted. Broberg had uncovered him barely in time, if that.

Crouched in the shaft she had dug, she rolled him over onto his belly. His limbs flopped about and he babbled, “A demon attacks me. I’m blind here but I feel the wind of its wings,” in a blurred monotone. She unplugged the energy unit and tossed it aloft, saying, “We should return this to the ship if we can.”

Above, Scobie gave the object a morbid stare. It didn’t even retain the warmth to make a little vapor, like his and hers, but lay quite inert. Its case was a metal box, thirty centimeters by fifteen by six, featureless except for two plug-in prongs on one of the broad sides. Controls built into the spacesuit circuits allowed you to start and stop the chemical reactions within and regulate their rate manually; but as a rule you left that chore to your thermostat and aerostat. Now those reactions had run their course. Until it was recharged, the cell was merely a lump.

Scobie leaned over to watch Broberg, some ten meters below him. She had extracted the reserve unit from Garcilaso’s gear, inserted it properly at the small of his back, and secured it by clips on the bottom of his packframe. “Let’s have your contribution, Colin,” she said. Scobie dropped the meter of heavy-gauge insulated wire which was standard issue on extravehicular missions, in case you needed to make a special electrical connection or a repair. She joined it by Western Union splices to the two she already had, made a loop at the end and, awkwardly reaching over her left shoulder, secured the opposite end by a hitch to the top of her packframe. The triple strand bobbed above her like an antenna.

Stooping, she gathered Garcilaso in her arms. The Iapetan weight of him and his apparatus was under ten kilos, of her and hers about the same. Theoretically she could jump straight out of the hole with her burden. In practice, her spacesuit was too hampering; constant-volume joints allowed considerable freedom of movement, but not as much as bare skin, especially when circum-Saturnian temperatures required extra insulation. Besides, if she could have reached the top, she could not have stayed. Soft ice would have crumbled beneath her fingers and she would have tumbled back down.

“Here goes,” she said. “This had better be right the first time, Colin. I don’t think Luis can take much jouncing.”

“Kendrick, Ricia, where are you?” Garcilaso moaned. “Are you in Hell too?”

Scobie dug his heels into the ground near the edge and crouched ready. The loop in the wire rose to view. His right hand grabbed hold. He threw himself backward, lest he slide forward, and felt the mass he had captured slam to a halt. Anguish exploded in his rib cage. Somehow he dragged his burden to safety before he fainted.

He came out of that in a minute. “I’m okay,” he rasped at the anxious voices of Broberg and Danzig. “Only let me rest a while.”

The physicist nodded and knelt to minister to the pilot. She stripped his packframe in order that he might lie flat on it, head and legs supported by the packs themselves. That would prevent significant heat loss by convection and cut loss by conduction. Still, his fuel cell would be drained faster than if he were on his feet, and first it had a terrible energy deficit to make up.

“The ice is clearing away inside his helmet,” she reported. “Merciful Mary, the blood! Seems to be from the scalp, though: it isn’t running any more. His occiput must have been slammed against the vitryl. We ought to wear padded caps in these rigs. Yes, I know accidents like this haven’t happened before, but—” She unclipped the flashlight at her waist, stooped, and shone it downward. “His eyes are open. The pupils—yes, a severe concussion, and likely a skull fracture, which may be hemorrhaging into the brain. I’m surprised he isn’t vomiting. Did the cold prevent that? Will he start soon? He could choke on his own vomit, in there where nobody can lay a hand on him.”

Scobie’s pain had subsided to a bearable intensity. He rose, went over to look, whistled, and said, “I judge he’s doomed unless we get him to the boat and give him proper care soon. Which isn’t possible.”

“Oh, Luis.” Tears ran silently down Broberg’s cheeks.

“You think he can’t last till I bring my rope and we carry him back?” Danzig asked.

“ ‘Fraidnot,” Scobie replied. “I’ve taken paramedical courses, and in fact I’ve seen a case like this before. How come you know the symptoms, Jean?”

“I read a lot,” she said dully.

“They weep, the dead children weep,” Garcilaso muttered.

Danzig sighed. “Okay, then. I’ll fly over to you.”

“Huh?” burst from Scobie, and from The Saturn Game

Broberg: “Have you also gone insane?”

“No, listen,” Danzig said fast. “I’m no skilled pilot, but I have the same basic training in this type of craft that everybody does who might ride in one. It’s expendable; the rescue vessels can bring us back. There’d be no significant gain if I landed close to the glacier—I’d still have to make that rope and so forth—and we know from what happened to the probe that there would be a real hazard. Better I make straight for your crater.”

“Coming down on a surface that the jets will vaporize out from under you?” Scobie snorted. “I bet Luis would consider that a hairy stunt. You, my friend, would crack up.”

“Nu?” They could almost see the shrug. “A crash from low altitude, in this gravity, shouldn’t do more than rattle my teeth. The blast will cut a hole clear to bedrock. True, the surrounding ice will collapse in around the hull and trap it. You may need to dig to reach the airlock, though I suspect thermal radiation from the cabin will keep the upper parts of the structure free. Even if the craft topples and strikes sidewise—in which case, it’ll sink down into a deflating cushion—even if it did that on bare rock, it shouldn’t be seriously damaged. It’s designed to withstand heavier impacts.” Danzig hesitated. “Of course, could be this would endanger you. I’m confident I won’t fry you with the jets, assuming I descend near the middle and you’re as far offside as you can get. Maybe, though, maybe I’d cause a . . . an ice quake that’ll kill you. No sense in losing two more lives.”

“Or three, Mark,” Broberg said low. “In spite of your brave words, you could come to grief yourself.”

“Oh, well, I’m an oldish man. I’m fond of living, yes, but you guys have a whole lot more years due you. Look, suppose the worst, suppose I don’t just make a messy landing but wreck the boat utterly. Then Luis dies, but he would anyway. You two, however, would have access to the stores aboard, including those extra fuel cells. I’m willing to run what I consider to be a small risk of my own neck, for the sake of giving Luis a chance at survival.”

“Um-m-m,” went Scobie, deep in his throat. A hand strayed in search of his chin, while his gaze roved around the glimmer of the bowl.

“I repeat,” Danzig proceeded, “if you think this might jeopardize you in any way, we scrub it. No heroics, please. Luis would surely agree, better three people safe and one dead than four stuck with a high probability of death.”

“Let me think.” Scobie was mute for minutes before he said: “No, I don’t believe we’d get in too much trouble here. As I remarked earlier, the vicinity has had its avalanche and must be in a reasonably stable configuration. True, ice will volatilize. In the case of deposits with low boiling points, that could happen explosively and cause tremors. But the vapor will carry heat away so fast that only material in your immediate area should change state. I daresay that the fine-grained stuff will get shaken down the slopes, but it’s got too low a density to do serious harm; for the most part, it should simply act like a brief snowstorm. The floor will make adjustments, of course, which may be rather violent. However, we can be above it—do you see that shelf of rock over yonder, Jean, at jumping height? It has to be part of a buried hill; solid. That’s our place to wait . . . Okay, Mark, it’s go as far as we’re concerned. I can’t be absolutely certain, but who ever is about anything? It seems like a good bet.”

“What are we overlooking?” Broberg wondered. She glanced down at Luis, who lay at her feet. “While we considered all the possibilities, Luis might die. Yes, fly if you want to, Mark, and God bless you.”

But when she and Scobie had brought Garcilaso to the ledge, she gestured from Saturn to Polaris and: “I will sing a spell, I will cast what small magic is mine, in aid of the Dragon Lord, that he may deliver Alvarlan’s soul from Hell,” says Ricia.

IV

No reasonable person will blame any interplanetary explorer for miscalculations about the actual environment, especially when some decision has to be made, in haste and under stress. Occasional errors are inevitable. If we knew exactly what to expect thoughout the Solar System, we would have no reason to explore it.

—Minamoto

The boat lifted. Cosmic dust smoked away from its jets. A hundred and fifty meters aloft, thrust lessened and it stood still on a pillar of fire.

Within the cabin was little noise, a low hiss and a bone-deep but nearly inaudible rumble. Sweat studded Danzig’s features, clung glistening to his beard stubble, soaked his coverall and made it reek. He was about to undertake a maneuver as difficult as a rendezvous, and without guidance.

Gingerly, he advanced a vernier. A side jet woke. The boat lurched toward a nosedive. Danzig’s hands jerked across the console. He must adjust the forces that held his vessel on high and those that pushed it horizontally, to get a resultant that would carry him eastward at a slow, steady pace. The vectors would change instant by instant, as they do when a human walks. The control computer, linked to the sensors, handled much of the balancing act, but not the crucial part. He must tell it what he wanted it to do.

His handling was inexpert. He had realized it would be. More altitude would have given him more margin for error, but deprived him of cues that his eyes found on the terrain beneath and the horizon ahead. Besides, when he reached the glacier he would perforce fly low to find his goal. He would be too busy for the precise celestial navigation he could have practiced afoot.

Seeking to correct his error, he overcompensated. and the boat pitched in a different direction. He punched for “hold steady” and the computer took over. Motionless again, he took a minute to catch his breath, regain his nerve, rehearse in his mind. Biting his lip, he tried afresh. This time he did not quite approach disaster. Jets aflicker, the boat staggered drunkenly over the moonscape.

The ice cliff loomed nearer and nearer. He saw its fragile loveliness and regretted that he must cut a swathe of ruin. Yet what did any natural wonder mean unless a conscious mind was there to know it? He passed the lowest slope. It vanished in billows of steam.

Onward. Beyond the boiling, right and left and ahead, the Faerie architecture crumbled. He crossed the palisade. Now he was a bare fifty meters above the surface, and the clouds reached vengefully close before they disappeared into vacuum. He squinted through the port and made the scanner sweep a magnified overview across its screen, a search for his destination.

A white volcano erupted. The outburst engulfed him. Suddenly he was flying blind. Shocks belled through the hull when upflung stones hit. Frost sheathed the craft; the scanner screen went as blank as the ports. Danzig should have ordered ascent, but he was inexperienced. A human in danger has less of an instinct to jump than to run. He tried to scuttle sideways. Without exterior vision to aid him, he sent the vessel tumbling end over end. By the time he saw his mistake, less than a second, it was too late. He was out of control. The computer might have retrieved the situation after a while, but the glacier was too close. The boat crashed.

“Hello, Mark?” Scobie cried. “Mark, do you read me? Where are you, for Christ’s sake?”

Silence replied. He gave Broberg a look which lingered. “Everything seemed to be in order,” he said, “till we heard a shout, and a lot of racket, and nothing. He should’ve reached us by now. Instead, he’s run into trouble. I hope it wasn’t lethal.”

“What can we do?” she asked as redundantly. They needed talk, any talk, for Garcilaso lay beside them and his delirious voice was dwindling fast.

“If we don’t get fresh fuel cells within the next forty or fifty hours, we’ll be at the end of our particular trail. The boat should be someplace near. We’ll have to get out of this hole under our own power, seems like. Wait here with Luis and I’ll scratch around for a possible route.”

Scobie started downward. Broberg crouched by the pilot.

“—alone forever in the dark—” she heard.

“No, Alvarlan.” She embraced him. Most likely he could not feel that, but she could. “Alvarlan, hearken to me. This is Ricia. I hear in my mind how your spirit calls. Let me help. Let me lead you back to the light.”

“Have a care,” advised Scobie. “We’re too damn close to rehypnotizing ourselves as it is.”

“But I might, I just might get through to Luis and . . . comfort him.

. . . Alvarlan. Kendrick and I escaped. He’s seeking a way home for us. I’m seeking you. Alvarlan, here is my hand, come take it.”

On the crater floor, Scobie shook his head, clicked his tongue, and unlimbered his equipment. Binoculars would help him locate the most promising areas. Devices that ranged from a metal rod to a portable geosonar would give him a more exact idea of what sort of footing lay buried under what depth of unclimbable sand-ice. Admittedly the scope of such probes was very limited. He did not have time to shovel tons of material aside in order that he could mount higher and test further. He would simply have to get some preliminary results, make an educated guess at which path up the side of the bowl would prove negotiable, and trust he was right.

He shut Broberg and Garcilaso out of his consciousness as much as he was able, and commenced work.

An hour later, he was ignoring pain while clearing a strip across a layer of rock. He thought a berg of good, hard frozen water lay ahead, but wanted to make sure.

“Jean! Colin! Do you read?”

Scobie straightened and stood rigid. Dimly he heard Broberg: “If I can’t do anything else, Alvarlan, let me pray for your soul’s repose.”

“Mark!” ripped from Scobie. “You okay? What the hell happened?”

“Yeah, I wasn’t too badly knocked around,” Danzig said, “and the boat’s habitable, though I’m afraid it’ll never fly again. How are you? Luis?”

“Sinking fast. All right, let’s hear the news.”

Danzig described his misfortune. “I wobbled off in an unknown direction for an unknown distance. It can’t have been extremely far, since the time was short before I hit. Evidently I plowed into a large, um, snowbank, which softened the impact but blocked radio transmission. It’s evaporated from the cabin area now. I see tumbled whiteness around, and formations in the offing . . . I’m not sure what damage the jacks and the stern jets suffered. The boat’s on its side at about a forty-five degree angle, presumably with rock beneath. But the after part is still buried in less whiffable stuff—water and CO_2 ices, I think—that’s reached temperature equilibrium. The jets must be clogged with it. If I tried to blast, I’d destroy the whole works.”

Scobie nodded. “You would, for sure.”

Danzig’s voice broke. “Oh, God, Colin! What have I done? I wanted to help Luis, but I may have killed you and Jean.”

Scobie’s lips tightened. “Let’s not start crying before we’re hurt. True, this has been quite a run of bad luck. But neither you nor I nor anybody could have known that you’d touch off a bomb underneath yourself.”

“What was it? Have you any notion? Nothing of the sort ever occurred at rendezvous with a comet. And you believe the glacier is a wrecked comet, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh, except that conditions have obviously modified it. The impact produced heat, shock, turbulence. Molecules got scrambled. Plasmas must have been momentarily present. Mixtures, compounds, clathrates, alloys—stuff formed that never existed in free space. We can learn a lot of chemistry here.”

“That’s why I came along . . . Well, then, I crossed a deposit of some substance or substances that the jets caused to sublime with tremendous force. A certain kind of vapor refroze when it encountered the hull. I had to defrost the ports from inside after the snow had cooked off them.”

“Where are you in relation to us?”

“I told you, I don’t know. And I’m not sure I can determine it. The crash crumpled the direction-finding antenna. Let me go outside for a better look.”

“Do that,” Scobie said. “I’ll keep busy meanwhile.”

He did, until a ghastly rattling noise and Broberg’s wail brought him at full speed back to the rock.

Scobie switched off Garcilaso’s fuel cell. “This may make the difference that carries us through,” he said low. “Think of it as a gift. Thanks, Luis.”

Broberg let go of the pilot and rose from her knees. She straightened the limbs that had threshed about in the death struggle and crossed his hands on his breast. There was nothing she could do about the fallen jaw or the eyes that glared at heaven. Taking him out of this suit, here, would have worsened his appearance. Nor could she wipe the tears off her own face. She could merely try to stop their flow. “Goodbye, Luis,” she whispered.

Turning to Scobie, she asked, “Can you give me a new job? Please.”

“Come along,” he directed. “I’ll explain what I have in mind about making our way to the surface.”

They were midway across the bowl when Danzig called. He had not let his comrade’s dying slow his efforts, nor said much while it happened. Once, most softly, he had offered Kaddish.

“No luck,” he reported like a machine. “I’ve traversed the largest circle I could while keeping the boat in sight, and found only weird, frozen shapes. I can’t be a huge distance from you, or I’d see an identifiably different sky, on this miserable little ball. You’re probably within a twenty or thirty kilometer radius of me. But that covers a bunch of territory.”

“Right,” Scobie said. “Chances are you can’t find us in the time we’ve got. Return to the boat.”

“Hey, wait,” Danzig protested. “I can spiral onward, marking my trail. I might come across you.”

“It’ll be more useful if you return,” Scobie told him. “Assuming we climb out, we should be able to hike to you, but we’ll need a beacon. What occurs to me is the ice itself. A small energy release, if it’s concentrated, should release a large plume of methane or something similarly volatile. The gas will cool as it expands, recondense around dust particles that have been carried along—it’ll steam—and the cloud ought to get high enough, before it evaporates again, to be visible from here.”

“Gotcha!” A tinge of excitement livened Danzig’s words. “I’ll go straight to it. Make tests, find a spot where I can get the showiest result, and . . . how about I rig a thermite bomb? No, that might be too hot. Well, I’ll develop a gadget.”

“Keep us posted.”

“But I, I don’t think we’ll care to chatter idly,” Broberg ventured.

“No, we’ll be working our tails off, you and I,” Scobie agreed.

“Uh, wait.” said Danzig. “What if you find you can’t get clear to the top? You implied that’s a distinct possibility.”

“Well, then it’ll be time for more radical procedures, whatever they turn out to be,” Scobie responded. “Frankly, at this moment my head is too full of . . . of Luis, and of choosing an optimum escape route, for much thought about anything else.”

“M-m, yeah, I guess we’ve got an ample supply of trouble without borrowing more. Tell you what, though. After my beacon’s ready to fire off. I’ll make that rope we talked of. You might find you prefer having it to clean clothes and sheets when you arrive.” Danzig was silent for seconds before he ended: “God damn it, you will arrive.”

Scobie chose a point on the north side for his and Broberg’s attempt. Two rock shelves jutted forth, near the floor and several meters higher, indicating that stone reached at least that far. Beyond, in a staggered pattern, were similar outcroppings of hard ices. Between them, and onward from the uppermost, which was scarcely more than halfway to the rim, was nothing but the featureless, footingless slope of powder crystals. Its angle of repose gave a steepness that made the surface doubly treacherous. The question, unanswerable save by experience, was how deeply it covered layers on which humans could climb, and whether such layers extended the entire distance aloft.

At the spot, Scobie signalled a halt. “Take it easy, Jean,” he said. “I’ll go ahead and commence digging.”

“Why don’t we go together? I have my own tool, you know.”

“Because I can’t tell how so large a bank of that pseudo-quicksand will behave. It might react to the disturbance by causing a gigantic slide.”

She bridled. Her haggard countenance registered mutiny. “Why not me first, then? Do you suppose I always wait passive for Kendrick to save me?”

“As a matter of fact,” he rapped, “I’ll begin because my rib is giving me billy hell, which is eating away what strength I’ve got left. If we run into trouble, you can better come to my help than I to yours.”

Broberg bent her neck. “Oh. I’m sorry. I must be in a fairly bad state myself, if I let false pride interfere with our business.” Her look went toward Saturn, around which Chronos orbited, bearing her husband and children.

“You’re forgiven.” Scobie bunched his legs and sprang the five meters to the lower ledge. The next one up was slightly too far for such a jump, when he had no room for a running start.

Stooping, he scraped his trenching tool against the bottom of the declivity that sparkled before him, and shoveled. Grains poured from above, a billionfold, to cover what he cleared. He worked like a robot possessed. Each spadeful was nearly weightless, but the number of spadefuls was nearly endless. He did not bring the entire bowlside down on himself as he had half feared, half hoped. (If that didn’t kill him, it would save a lot of toil.) A dry torrent went right and left over his ankles. Yet at last somewhat more of the underlying rock began to show.

From beneath, Broberg listened to him breathe. It sounded rough, often broken by a gasp or a curse. In his spacesuit, in the raw, wan sunshine, he resembled a knight who, in despite of wounds, did battle against a monster.

“All right,” he called at last. “I think I’ve learned what to expect and how we should operate. It’ll take the two of us.”

“Yes . . . oh, yes, my Kendrick.”

The hours passed. Ever so slowly, the sun climbed and the stars wheeled and Saturn waned.

Most places, the humans labored side by side. They did not require more than The Saturn Game the narrowest of lanes, but unless they cut it wide to begin with, the banks to right and left would promptly slip down and bury it. Sometimes the conformation underneath allowed a single person at a time to work. Then the other could rest. Soon it was Scobie who must oftenest take advantage of that. Sometimes they both stopped briefly, for food and drink and reclining on their packs.

Rock yielded to water ice. Where this rose very sharply, the couple knew it, because the sand-ice that they undercut would come down in a mass. After the first such incident, when they were nearly swept away, Scobie always drove his geologist’s hammer into each new stratum. At any sign of danger, he would seize its handle and Broberg would cast an arm around his waist. Their other hands clutched their trenching tools. Anchored, but forced to strain every muscle, they would stand while the flood poured around them, knee-high, once even chest-high, seeking to bury them irretrievably deep in its quasi-fluid substance. Afterward they would confront a bare stretch. It was generally too steep to climb unaided, and they chipped footholds.

Weariness was another tide to which they dared not yield. At best, their progress was dismayingly slow. They needed little heat input to keep warm, except when they took a rest, but their lungs put a furious demand on air recyclers. Garcilaso’s fuel cell, which they had brought along, could give a single person extra hours of life, though depleted as it was after coping with his hypothermia, the time would be insufficient for rescue by the teams from Chronos. Unspoken was the idea of taking turns with it. That would put them in wretched shape, chilled and stifling, but at least they would leave the universe together.

Thus it was hardly a surprise that their minds fled from pain, soreness, exhaustion, stench, despair. Without that respite, they could not have gone on as long as they did.

At ease for a few minutes, their backs against a blue-shimmering parapet which they must scale, they gazed across the bowl, where Garcilaso’s suited body gleamed like a remote pyre, and up the curve opposite to Saturn. The planet shone lambent amber, softly banded, the rings a coronet which a shadow band across their arc seemed to make all the brighter. That radiance overcame sight of most nearby stars, but elsewhere they arrayed themselves multitudinous, in splendor, around the silver road which the galaxy clove between them.

“How right a tomb for Alvarlan,” Ricia says in a dreamer’s murmur.

“Has he died, then?” Kendrick asks.

“You do not know?”

“I have been too busied. After we won free of the ruins and I left you to recover while I went scouting, I encountered a troop of warriors. I escaped, but must needs return to you by devious, hidden ways.” Kendrick strokes Ricia’s sunny hair. “Besides, dearest dear, it has ever been you, not I, who had the gift of hearing spirits.”

“Brave darling . . . Yes, it is a glory to me that I was able to call his soul out of Hell. It sought his body, but that was old and frail and could not survive the knowledge it now had. Yet Alvarlan passed peacefully, and before he did, for his last magic he made himself a tomb from whose ceiling starlight will eternally shine.”

“May he sleep well. But for us there is no sleep. Not yet. We have far to travel.”

“Aye. But already we have left the wreckage behind. Look! Everywhere around in this meadow, anemones peep through the grass. A lark sings above.”

“These lands are not always calm. We may well have more adventures ahead of us. But we shall meet them with high hearts.”

Kendrick and Ricia rise to continue their journey.

Cramped on a meager ledge, Scobie and Broberg shoveled for an hour without broadening it much. The sand-ice slid from above as fast as they could cast it down. “We’d better quit this as a bad job,” the man finally decided. “The best we’ve done is flatten the slope ahead of us a tiny bit. No telling how far inward the shelf goes before there’s a solid layer on top. Maybe there isn’t any.”

“What shall we do instead?” Broberg asked in the same worn tone.

He jerked a thumb. “Scramble back to the level beneath and try a different direction. But first we absolutely require a break.”

They spread kerofoam pads and sat. After a while during which they merely stared, stunned by fatigue, Broberg spoke.

“I go to the brook,” Ricia relates. “It chimes under arches of green boughs. Light falls between them to sparkle on it. I kneel and drink. The water is cold, pure, sweet. When I raise my eyes, I see the figure of a young woman, naked. her tresses the color of leaves. A wood nymph. She smiles.”

“Yes, I see her too,” Kendrick joins in. “I approach carefully, not to frighten her off. She asks our names and errands. We explain that we are lost. She tells us how to find an oracle which may give us counsel.”

They depart to find it.

Flesh could no longer stave off sleep. “Give us a yell in an hour, will you, Mark?” Scobie requested.

“Sure.” Danzig said, “but will that be enough?”

“It’s the most we can afford, after the setbacks we’ve had. We’ve come less than a third of the way.”

“If I haven’t talked to you,” Danzig said slowly, “it’s not because I’ve been hard at work, though I have been. It’s that I figured you two were having a plenty bad time without me nagging you. However—do you think it’s wise to fantasize the way you have been?”

A flush crept across Broberg’s cheeks and down toward her bosom. “You listened, Mark?”

“Well, yes, of course. You might have an urgent word for me at any minute—”

“Why? What could you do? A game is a personal affair.”

“Uh, yes, yes—”

Ricia and Kendrick have made love whenever they can. The accounts were never explicit, but the words were often passionate.

“We’ll keep you tuned in when we need you, like for an alarm clock,” Broberg clipped. “Otherwise we’ll cut the circuit.”

“But—Look. I never meant to—”

“I know,” Scobie sighed. “You’re a nice guy and I daresay we’re overreacting. Still, that’s the way it’s got to be. Call us when I told you.”

Deep within the grotto, the Pythoness sways on her throne, in the ebb and flow of her oracular dream. As nearly as Ricia and Kendrick can understand what she chants, she tells them to fare westward on the Stag Path until they meet a one-eyed graybeard who will give them further guidance; but they must be wary in his presence, for he is easily angered. They make obeisance and depart. On their way out, they pass the offering they brought. Since they had little with them other than garments and his weapons, the Princess gave the shrine her golden hair. The knight insists that, close-cropped, she remains beautiful.

“Hey, whoops, we’ve cleared us an easy twenty meters,” Scobie said, albeit in a voice which weariness had hammered flat. At first, the journey through the land of Nacre is a delight.

His oath afterward had no more life in it. “Another blind alley, seems like.” The old man in the blue cloak and wide-brimmed hat was indeed wrathful when Ricia refused him her favors and Kendrick’s spear struck his own aside. Cunningly, he has pretended to make peace and told them what road they should next take. But at the end of it are trolls. The wayfarers elude them and double back.

“My brain’s stumbling around in a fog,” Scobie groaned. “My busted rib isn’t exactly helping, either. If I don’t get another nap I’ll keep on making misjudgments till we run out of time.”

“By all means, Colin,” Broberg said. “I’ll stand watch and rouse you in an hour.”

“What?” he asked in dim surprise. “Why not join me and have Mark call us as he did before?”

She grimaced. “No need to bother him. I’m tired, yes, but not sleepy.”

He lacked wit or strength to argue. “Okay,” he said. He stretched his insulating pad on the ice, and toppled out of awareness.

Broberg settled herself next to him. They were halfway to the heights, but they had been struggling, with occasional breaks, for more than twenty hours, and progress grew harder and trickier even as they themselves grew weaker and more stupefied. If ever they reached the top and spied Danzig’s signal, they would have something like a couple of hours’ stiff travel to shelter.

Saturn, sun, stars shone through vitryl. Broberg smiled down at Scobie’s face. He was no Greek god. Sweat, grime, unshavenness, the manifold marks of exhaustion were upon him, but—For that matter, she was scarcely an image of glamour herself.

Princess Ricia sits by her knight, where he slumbers in the dwarf’s cottage, and strums a harp the dwarf lent her before he went off to his mine, and sings a lullaby to sweeten the dreams of Kendrick. When it is done, she passes her lips lightly across his, and drifts into the same gentle sleep.

Scobie woke a piece at a time. “Ricia, beloved.” Kendrick whispers, and feels after her. He will summon her up with kisses—

He scrambled to his feet. “Judas priest!” She lay unmoving. He heard her breath in his earplugs, before the roaring of his pulse drowned it. The sun glared farther aloft, he could see it had moved, and Saturn’s crescent had thinned more, forming sharp horns at its ends. He forced his eyes toward the watch on his left wrist.

“Ten hours,” he choked.

He knelt and shook his companion. “Come, for Christ’s sake!” Her lashes fluttered. When she saw the horror on his visage, drowsiness fled from her.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Please, no.”

Scobie climbed stiffly erect and flicked his main radio switch. “Mark, do you receive?”

“Colin!” Danzig chattered. “Thank God! I was going out of my head from worry.”

“You’re not off that hook, my friend. We just finished a ten-hour snooze.”

“What? How far did you get first?”

“To about forty meters’ elevation. The going looks tougher ahead than in back. I’m afraid we won’t make it.”

“Don’t say that, Colin,” Danzig begged.

“My fault,” Broberg declared. She stood rigid, fists doubled, her features a mask. Her tone was steely. “He was worn out, had to have a nap. I offered to wake him, but fell asleep myself.”

“Not your fault, Jean,” Scobie began.

She interrupted: “Yes. Mine. Perhaps I can make it good. Take my fuel cell. I’ll still have deprived you of my help, of course, but you might survive and reach the boat anyway.”

He seized her hands. They did not unclench. “If you imagine I could do that—”

“If you don’t, we’re both finished,” she said unbendingly. “I’d rather go out with a clear conscience.”

“And what about my conscience?” he shouted. Checking himself, he wet his lips and said fast: “Besides, you’re not to blame. Sleep slugged you. If I’d been thinking. I’d have realized it was bound to do so, and contacted Mark. The fact that you didn’t either shows how far gone you were yourself. And . . . you’ve got Tom and the kids waiting for you. Take my cell.” He paused. “And my blessing.”

“Shall Ricia forsake her true knight?”

“Wait, hold on, listen,” Danzig called. “Look, this is terrible, but—oh, hell, excuse me, but I’ve got to remind you that dramatics only clutter the action. From what descriptions you’ve sent. I don’t see how either of you can possibly proceed solo. Together, you might yet. At least you’re rested—sore in the muscles, no doubt, but clearer in the head. The climb before you may prove easier than you think. Try!” Scobie and Broberg regarded each other for a whole minute. A thawing went through her, and warmed him. Finally they smiled and embraced. “Yeah, right,” he growled. “We’re off. But first a bite to eat. I’m plain, old-fashioned hungry. Aren’t you?” She nodded.

“That’s the spirit,” Danzig encouraged them. “Uh, may I make another suggestion? I am just a spectator, which is pretty hellish but does give me an overall view. Drop that game of yours.” Scobie and Broberg tautened.

“It’s the real culprit,” Danzig pleaded. “Weariness alone wouldn’t have clouded your judgment. You’d never have cut me off, and—But weariness and shock and grief did lower your defenses to the point where the damned game took you over. You weren’t yourselves when you fell asleep. You were those dreamworld characters. They had no reason not to cork off!”

Broberg shook her head violently. “Mark,” said Scobie, “you are correct about being a spectator. That means there are some things you don’t understand. Why subject yourself to the torture of listening in, hour after hour? We’ll call you back from time to time, naturally. Take care.” He broke the circuit.

“He’s wrong,” Broberg insisted.

Scobie shrugged. “Right or wrong, what difference? We won’t pass out again in the time we have left. The game didn’t handicap us as we traveled. In fact, it helped, by making the situation feel less gruesome.”

“Aye. Let us break our fast and set forth anew on our pilgrimage.”

The struggle grew stiffer. “Belike the White Witch has cast a spell on this road,” says Ricia.

“She shall not daunt us,” vows Kendrick.

“No, never while we fare side by side, you and I, noblest of men.”

A slide overcame them and swept them back a dozen meters. They lodged against a crag. After the flow had passed by, they lifted their bruised bodies and limped in search of a different approach. The place where the geologist’s hammer lay was no longer accessible.

“What shattered the bridge?” asks Ricia.

“A giant,” answers Kendrick. “I saw him as I fell into the river. He lunged at me, and we fought in the shallows until he fled. He bore away my sword in his thigh.”

“You have your spear that Wayland forged,” Ricia says, “and always you have my heart.”

They stopped on the last small outcrop they uncovered. It proved to be not a shelf but a pinnacle of water ice. Around it glittered sand-ice, again quiescent. Ahead was a slope thirty meters in length, and then the rim, and stars.

The distance might as well have been thirty light-years. Whoever tried to cross would immediately sink to an unknown depth.

There was no point in crawling back down the bared side of the pinnacle. Broberg had clung to it for an hour while she chipped niches to climb by with her knife. Scobie’s condition had not allowed him to help. If they sought to return, they could easily slip, fall, and be engulfed. If they avoided that, they would never find a new path. Less than two hours’ worth of energy was left in their fuel cells. Attempting to push onward while swapping Garcilaso’s back and forth would be an exercise in futility.

They settled themselves, legs dangling over the abyss, and held hands.

“I do not think the ores can burst the iron door of this tower, “Kendrick says, “but they will besiege us until we starve to death.”

“You never yielded up your hope ere now, my knight,” replies Ricia, and kisses his temple. “Shall we search about? These walls are unutterably ancient. Who knows what relics of wizardry lie forgotten within? A pair of phoenix-feather cloaks, that will bear us laughing through the sky to our home—?”

“I fear not, my darling. Our weird is upon us.” Kendrick touches the spear that leans agleam against the battlement. “Sad and gray will the world be without you. We can but meet our doom bravely.”

“Happily, since we are together.” Ricia’s gamin smile breaks forth. “I did notice that a certain room holds a bed. Shall we try it?”

Kendrick frowns. “Rather should we seek to set our minds and souls in order.”

She tugs his elbow. “Later, yes. Besides—who knows?—when we dust off the blanket, we may find it is a Tamkappe that will take us invisible through the enemy.”

“You dream.”

Fear stirs behind her eyes. “What if I do?” Her words tremble. “I can dream us free if you will help.”

Scobie’s fist smote the ice. “No!” he croaked. “I’ll die in the world that is.”

Ricia shrinks from him. He sees terror invade her. “You, you rave, beloved,” she stammers.

He twisted about and caught her by the arms. “Don’t you want to remember Tom and your boys?”

“Who—?”

Kendrick slumps. “I don’t know. I have forgotten too.”

She leans against him, there on the windy height. A hawk circles above. “The residuum of an evil enchantment, surely. Oh, my heart, my life, cast it from you! Help me find the means to save us.”

Yet her entreaty is uneven, and through it speaks dread.

Kendrick straightens. He lays hand on Wayland’s spear, and it is as though strength flows thence, into him. “A spell in truth,” he says. His tone gathers force. “I will not abide in its darkness, nor suffer it to blind and deafen you, my lady.” His gaze takes hold of hers, which cannot break away. “There is but a single road to our freedom. It goes through the gates of death.”

She waits, mute and shuddering. “Whatever we do, we must die, Ricia. Let us fare hence as our own folk.”

“I—no—I won’t—I will—”

“You see before you the means of your deliverance. It is sharp, I am strong, you will feel no pain.”

She bares her bosom. “Then quickly, Kendrick, before I am lost!”

He drives the weapon home. “I love you,” he says. She sinks at his feet. “I follow you, my darling,” he says, withdrawing the steel, bracing the shaft against stone, and lunging forward. He falls beside her. “Now we are free.”

“That was . . . a nightmare.” Broberg sounded barely awake.

Scobie’s voice shook. “Necessary, I think, for both of us.” He gazed straight before him, letting Saturn fill his eyes with dazzle. “Else we’d have stayed . . . insane? Maybe not, by definition. But we’d not have been in reality either.”

“It would have been easier,” she mumbled. “We’d never have known we were dying.”

“Would you have preferred that?”

Broberg shivered. The slackness in her countenance gave place to the same tension that was in his. “Oh, no,” she said, quite softly but in the manner of full consciousness. “No, you were right, of course. Thank you for your courage.”

“You’ve always had as much guts as anybody. Jean. You just have more imagination than me.” Scobie’s hand chopped empty space in a gesture of dismissal. “Okay, we should call poor Mark and let him know. But first—” His words lost the cadence he had laid on them. “First—”

Her glove clasped his. “What, Colin?”

“Let’s decide about that third unit—Luis’s,” he said with difficulty, still confronting the great ringed planet. “Your decision, actually, though we can discuss the matter if you want. I will not hog it for the sake of a few more hours. Nor will I share it; that would be a nasty way for us both to go out. However, I suggest you use it.”

“To sit beside your frozen corpse?” she replied. “No. I wouldn’t even feel the warmth, not in my bones—”

She turned toward him so fast that she nearly fell off the pinnacle. He caught her. “Warmth!” she screamed, shrill as the cry of a hawk on the wing. “Colin, we’ll take our bones home!”

“In point of fact,” said Danzig, “I’ve climbed onto the hull. That’s high enough for me to see over those ridges and needles. I’ve got a view of the entire horizon.”

“Good,” grunted Scobie. “Be prepared to survey a complete circle quick. This depends on a lot of factors we can’t predict. The beacon will certainly not be anything like as big as what you had arranged. It may be thin and short-lived. And. of course, it may rise too low for sighting at your distance.” He cleared his throat. “In that case, we two have bought the farm. But we’ll have made a hell of a try, which feels great by itself.”

He hefted the fuel cell. Garcilaso’s gift. A piece of heavy wire, insulation stripped off, joined the prongs. Without a regulator, the unit poured its maximum power through the short circuit. Already the strand glowed.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to do it. Colin?” Broberg asked. “Your rib—”

He made a lopsided grin. “I’m nonetheless better designed by nature for throwing things,” he said. “Allow me that much male arrogance. The bright idea was yours.”

“It should have been obvious from the first,” she said. “I think it would have been, if we weren’t bewildered in our dream.”

“M-m, often the simple answers are the hardest to find. Besides, we had to get this far or it wouldn’t have worked, and the game helped mightily . . . Are you set, Mark? Heave ho!”

Scobie cast the cell as if it were a baseball, hard and far through the Iapetan gravity field. Spinning, its incandescent wire wove a sorcerous web across vision. It landed somewhere beyond the rim. on the glacier’s back.

Frozen gases vaporized, whirled aloft, briefly recondensed before they were lost. A geyser stood white against the stars.

“I see you!” Danzig yelped. “I see your beacon. I’ve got my bearing. I’ll be on my way! With rope and extra energy units and everything!”

Scobie sagged to the ground and clutched at his left side. Broberg knelt and held him, as if either of them could lay hand on his pain. No large matter. He would not hurt much longer.

“How high would you guess the plume goes?” Danzig inquired, calmer.

“About a hundred meters.” Broberg replied after study.

“Oh, damn, these gloves do make it awkward punching the calculator. . . . Well, to judge by what I observe of it. I’m between ten and fifteen klicks off. Give me an hour or a tad more to get there and find your exact location. Okay?”

Broberg checked gauges. “Yes, by a hair. We’ll turn our thermostats down and sit very quietly to reduce oxygen demand. We’ll get cold, but we’ll survive.”

“I may be quicker,” Danzig said. “That was a worst-case estimate. All right. I’m off. No more conversation till we meet. I won’t take any foolish chances, but I will need my wind for making speed.”

Faintly, those who waited heard him breathe, heard his hastening footfalls. The geyser died.

They sat, arms around waists, and regarded the glory which encompassed them. After a silence, the man said: “Well, I suppose this means the end of the game. For everybody.”

“It must certainly be brought under strict control,” the woman answered. “I wonder, though, if they will abandon it altogether—out here.”

“If they must, they can.”

“Yes. We did, you and I, didn’t we?”

They turned face to face, beneath that star-beswarmed, Saturn-ruled sky. Nothing tempered the sunlight that revealed them to each other, she a middle-aged wife, he a man ordinary except for his aloneness. They would never play again. They could not.

A puzzled compassion was in her smile. “Dear friend—” she began.

His uplifted palm warded her from further speech. “Best we don’t talk unless it’s essential,” he said. “That’ll save a little oxygen, and we can stay a little warmer. Shall we try to sleep?”

Her eyes widened and darkened. “I dare not,” she confessed. “Not till enough time has gone past. Now, I might dream.”

UNICORN VARIATIONS

Roger Zelazny

Mr. Zelazny, his wife, Judith, and his two sons, Devin and Jonathan, live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He began writing professionally in 1962, and made the transition to full-time writing just seven years later. Recent books of note include Roadmarks and Changeling.

A bizarrerie fires, cunabulum of light, it moved with a deft, almost dainty deliberation, phasing into and out of existence like a storm-shot piece of evening; or perhaps the darkness between the flares was more akin to its truest nature—swirl of black ashes assembled in prancing cadence to the lowing note of desert wind down the arroyo behind buildings as empty yet filled as the pages of unread books or stillnesses between the notes of a song.

Gone again. Back again. Again.

Power, you said? Yes. It takes considerable force of identity to manifest before or after one’s time. Or both.

As it faded and gained it also advanced, moving through the warm afternoon, its tracks erased by the wind. That is, on those occasions when there were tracks.

A reason. There should always be a reason. Or reasons.

It knew why it was there—but not why it was there, in that particular locale.

It anticipated learning this shortly, as it approached the desolation-bound line of the old street. However, it knew that the reason may also come before, or after. Yet again, the pull was there and the force of its being was such that it had to be close to something.

The buildings were worn and decayed and some of them fallen and all of them drafty and dusty and empty. Weeds grew among floorboards. Birds nested upon rafters. The droppings of wild things were everywhere, and it knew them all as they would have known it, were they to meet face to face.

It froze, for there had come the tiniest unanticipated sound from somewhere ahead and to the left. At that moment, it was again phasing into existence and it released its outline which faded as quickly as a rainbow in hell, that but the naked presence remained beyond subtraction.

Invisible, yet existing, strong, it moved again. The clue. The cue. Ahead. A gauche. Beyond the faded word SALOON on weathered board above. Through the swinging doors. (One of them pinned alop.)

Pause and assess.

Bar to the right, dusty. Cracked mirror behind it. Empty bottles. Broken bottles. Brass rail, black, encrusted. Tables to the left and rear. In various states of repair.

Man seated at the best of the lot. His back to the door. Levi’s. Hiking boots. Faded blue shirt. Green backpack leaning against the wall to his left.

Before him, on the tabletop, is the faint, painted outline of a chessboard, stained, scratched, almost obliterated.

The drawer in which he had found the chessmen is still partly open.

He could no more have passed up a chess set without working out a problem or replaying one of his better games than he could have gone without breathing, circulating his blood or maintaining a relatively stable body temperature.

It moved nearer, and perhaps there were fresh prints in the dust behind it, but none noted them.

It, too, played chess.

It watched as the man replayed what had perhaps been his finest game, from the world preliminaries of seven years past. He had blown up after that—surprised to have gotten even as far as he had—for he never could perform well under pressure. But he had always been proud of that one game, and he relived it as all sensitive beings do certain turning points in their lives. For perhaps twenty minutes, no one could have touched him. He had been shining and pure and hard and clear. He had felt like the best.

It took up a position across the board from him and stared. The man completed the game, smiling. Then he set up the board again, rose and fetched a can of beer from his pack. He popped the top.

When he returned, he discovered that White’s King’s Pawn had been advanced to K4. His brow furrowed. He turned his head, searching the bar, meeting his own puzzled gaze in the grimy mirror. He looked under the table. He took a drink of beer and seated himself.

He reached out and moved his Pawn to K4. A moment later, he saw White’s King’s Knight rise slowly into the air and drift forward to settle upon KB3. He stared for a long while into the emptiness across the table before he advanced his own Knight to his KB3.

White’s Knight moved to take his Pawn. He dismissed the novelty of the situation and moved his Pawn to Q3. He all but forgot the absence of a tangible opponent as the White Knight dropped back to its KB3. He paused to take a sip of beer, but no sooner had he placed the can upon the tabletop than it rose again, passed across the board and was upended. A gurgling noise followed. Then the can fell to the floor, bouncing, ringing with an empty sound.

“I’m sorry,” he said, rising and returning to his pack. “I’d have offered you one if I’d thought you were something that might like it.”

He opened two more cans, returned with them, placed one near the far edge of the table, one at his own right hand.

“Thank you,” came a soft, precise voice from a point beyond it.

The can was raised, tilted slightly, returned to the table-top.

“My name is Martin,” the man said.

“Call me Tlingel,” said the other. “I had thought that perhaps your kind was extinct. I am pleased that you at least have survived to afford me this game.”

“Huh?” Martin said. “We were all still around the last time that I looked—a couple of days ago.”

“No matter. I can take care of that later,” Tlingel replied. “I was misled by the appearance of this place.”

“Oh. It’s a ghost town. I backpack a lot.”

“Not important. I am near the proper point in your career as a species. I can feel that much.”

“I am afraid that I do not follow you.”

“I am not at all certain that you would wish to. I assume that you intend to capture that pawn?”

“Perhaps. Yes, I do wish to. What are you talking about?”

The beer can rose. The invisible entity took another drink.

“Well,” said Tlingel, “to put it simply, your—successors—grow anxious. Your place in the scheme of things being such an important one, I had sufficient power to come and check things out.”

“ ‘Successors’ ? I do not understand.”

“Have you seen any griffins recently?”

Martin chuckled.

“I’ve heard the stories,” he said, “seen the photos of the one supposedly shot in the Rockies. A hoax, of course.”

“Of course it must seem so. That is the way with mythical beasts.”

“You’re trying to say that it was real?”

“Certainly. Your world is in bad shape. When the last grizzly bear died recently, the way was opened for the griffins—just as the death of the last aepyornis brought in the yeti, the dodo the Loch Ness creature, the passenger pigeon the sasquatch, the blue whale the kraken, the American eagle the cockatrice—”

“You can’t prove it by me.”

“Have another drink.”

Martin began to reach for the can, halted his hand and stared.

A creature approximately two inches in length, with a human face, a lion-like body and feathered wings was crouched next to the beer can.

“A mini-sphinx,” the voice continued. “They came when you killed off the last smallpox bacillus.”

“Are you trying to say that whenever a natural species dies out a mythical one takes its place?” he asked.

“In a word—yes. Now. It was not always so, but you have destroyed the mechanisms of evolution. The balance is now redressed by those others of us, from the morning land—we, who have never truly been endangered. We return, in our time.”

“And you—whatever you are, Tlingel—you say that humanity is now endangered?”

“Very much so. But there is nothing that you can do about it, is there? Let us get on with the game.”

The sphinx flew off. Martin took a sip of beer and captured the Pawn.

“Who,” he asked then, “are to be our successors?”

“Modesty almost forbids,” Tlingel replied. “In the case of a species as prominent as your own, it naturally has to be the loveliest, most intelligent, most important of us all.”

“And what are you? Is there any way that I can have a look?”

“Well—yes. If I exert myself a trifle.”

The beer can rose, was drained, fell to the floor. There followed a series of rapid rattling sounds retreating from the table. The air began to flicker over a large area opposite Martin, darkening within the growing flamework. The outline continued to brighten, its interior growing jet black. The form moved, prancing about the saloon, multitudes of tiny, cloven hoofprints scoring and cracking the floorboards. With a final, near-blinding flash it came into full view and Martin gasped to behold it.

A black unicorn with mocking, yellow eyes sported before him, rising for a moment onto its hind legs to strike a heraldic pose. The fires flared about it a second longer, then vanished.

Martin had drawn back, raising one hand defensively.

“Regard me!” Tlingel announced. “Ancient symbol of wisdom, valor and beauty, I stand before you!”

“I thought your typical unicorn was white,” Martin finally said.

“I am archetypical,” Tlingel responded, dropping to all fours, “and possessed of virtues beyond the ordinary.”

“Such as?”

“Let us continue our game.”

“What about the fate of the human race? You said—”

“. . . And save the small talk for later.”

“I hardly consider the destruction of humanity to be small talk.”

“And if you’ve any more beer . . .”

“All right,” Martin said, retreating to his pack as the creature advanced, its eyes like a pair of pale suns. “There’s some lager.”

Something had gone out of the game. As Martin sat before the ebon horn on Tlingel’s bowed head, like an insect about to be pinned, he realized that his playing was off. He had felt the pressure the moment he had seen the beast—and there was all that talk about an imminent doomsday. Any run-of-the-mill pessimist could say it without troubling him, but coming from a source as peculiar as this . . .

His earlier elation had fled. He was no longer in top form. And Tlingel was good. Very good. Martin found himself wondering whether he could manage a stalemate.

After a time, he saw that he could not and resigned.

The unicorn looked at him and smiled.

“You don’t really play badly—for a human,” it said.

“I’ve done a lot better.”

“It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game.”

“I am pleased that you were not wholly bored,” Martin said. “Now will you tell me what you were talking about concerning the destruction of my species?”

“Oh, that,” Tlingel replied. “In the morning land where those such as I dwell, I felt the possibility of your passing come like a gentle wind to my nostrils, with the promise of clearing the way for us—”

“How is it supposed to happen?”

Tlingel shrugged, horn writing on the air with a toss of the head.

“I really couldn’t say. Premonitions are seldom specific. In fact, that is what I came to discover. I should have been about it already, but you diverted me with beer and good sport.”

“Could you be wrong about this?”

“I doubt it. That is the other reason I am here.”

“Please explain.”

“Are there any beers left?”

“Two, I think.”

“Please.”

Martin rose and fetched them.

“Damn! The tab broke off this one,” he said.

“Place it upon the table and hold it firmly.”

“All right.”

Tlingel’s horn dipped forward quickly, piercing the can ‘s top.

“. . . Useful for all sorts of things,” Tlingel observed, withdrawing it.

“The other reason you ‘re here . . .” Martin prompted.

“It is just that I am special. I can do things that the others cannot.”

“Such as?”

“Find your weak spot and influence events to exploit it, to—hasten matters. To turn the possibility into a probability, and then—”

“You are going to destroy us? Personally?”

“That is the wrong way to look at it. It is more like a game of chess. It is as much a matter of exploiting your opponent’s weaknesses as of exercising your own strengths. If you had not already laid the groundwork I would be powerless. I can only influence that which already exists.”

“So what will it be? World War III? An ecological disaster? A mutated disease?”

“I do not really know yet, so I wish you wouldn’t ask me in that fashion. I repeat that at the moment I am only observing. I am only an agent—”

“It doesn’t sound that way to me.”

Tlingel was silent. Martin began gathering up the chessmen.

“Aren’t you going to set up the board again?”

“To amuse my destroyer a little more? No thanks.”

“That’s hardly the way to look at it—”

“Besides, those are the last beers.”

“Oh.” Tlingel stared wistfully at the vanishing pieces, then remarked, “I would be willing to play you again without additional refreshment . . .”

“No thanks.”

“You are angry.”

“Wouldn’t you be, if our situations were reversed?”

“You are anthropomorphizing.”

“Well?”

“Oh, I suppose I would.”

“You could give us a break, you know—at least, let us make our own mistakes.”

“You’ve hardly done that yourself, though, with all the creatures my fellows have succeeded.”

Martin reddened.

“Okay. You just scored one. But I don’t have to like it.”

“You are a good player. I know that . . .”

“Tlingel, if I were capable of playing at my best again, I think I could beat you.”

The unicorn snorted two tiny wisps of smoke.

“Not that good,” Tlingel said.

“I guess you’ll never know.”

“Do I detect a proposal?”

“Possibly. What’s another game worth to you?”

Tlingel made a chuckling noise.

“Let me guess: You are going to say that if you beat me you want my promise not to lay my will upon the weakest link in mankind’s existence and shatter it.”

“Of course.”

“And what do I get for winning?”

“The pleasure of the game. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“The terms sound a little lopsided.”

“Not if you are going to win anyway. You keep insisting that you will.”

“All right. Set up the board.”

“There is something else that you have to know about me first.”

“Yes?”

“I don’t play well under pressure, and this game is going to be a terrific strain. You want my best game, don’t you?”

“Yes, but I’m afraid I’ve no way of adjusting your own reactions to the play.”

“I believe I could do that myself if I had more than the usual amount of time between moves.”

“Agreed.”

“I mean a lot of time.”

“Just what do you have in mind?”

“I ‘ll need time to get my mind off it, to relax, to come back to the positions as if they were only problems . . .”

“You mean to go away from here between moves?”

“Yes.”

“All right. How long?”

“I don’t know. A few weeks, maybe.”

“Take a month. Consult your experts, put your computers onto it. It may make for a slightly more interesting game.”

“I really didn’t have that in mind.”

“Then it’s time that you’re trying to buy.”

“I can’t deny that. On the other hand, I will need it.”

“In that case, I have some terms. I’d like this place cleaned up, fixed up, more lively. It’s a mess. I also want beer on tap.”

“Okay. I’ll see to that.”

“Then I agree. Let’s see who goes first.”

Martin switched a black and a white pawn from hand to hand beneath the table. He raised his fists then and extended them. Tlingel leaned forward and tapped. The black horn’s tip touched Martin’s left hand.

“Well, it matches my sleek and glossy hide,” the unicorn announced.

Martin smiled, setting up the white for himself, the black pieces for his opponent. As soon as he had finished, he pushed his Pawn to K4.

Klingel’s delicate, ebon hoof moved to advance the Black King’s Pawn to K4.

“I take it that you want a month now, to consider your next move?”

Martin did not reply but moved his Knight to KB 3. Tlingel immediately moved a Knight to QB3.

Martin took a swallow of beer and then moved his Bishop to N5. The unicorn moved the other Knight to B3. Martin immediately castled and Tlingel moved the Knight to take his Pawn.

“I think we’ll make it,” Martin said suddenly, “if you’ll just let us alone. We do learn from our mistakes, in time.”

“Mythical beings do not exactly exist in time. Your world is a special case.”

“Don’t you people ever make mistakes?”

“Whenever we do they’re sort of poetic.”

Martin snarled and advanced his Pawn to Q4. Tlingel immediately countered by moving the Knight to Q3.

“I’ve got to stop,” Martin said, standing. “I’m getting mad, and it will affect my game.”

“You will be going, then?”

“Yes.”

He moved to fetch his pack.

“I will see you here in one month’s time?”

“Yes.”

“Very well.”

The unicorn rose and stamped upon the floor and lights began to play across its dark coat. Suddenly, they blazed and shot outward in all directions like a silent explosion. A wave of blackness followed.

Martin found himself leaning against the wall, shaking. When he lowered his hand from his eyes, he saw that he was alone, save for the knights, the bishops, the kings, the queens, their castles and both the kings’ men.

He went away.

Three days later Martin returned in a small truck, with a generator, lumber, windows, power tools, paint, stain, cleaning compounds, wax. He dusted and vacuumed and replaced rotted wood. He installed the windows. He polished the old brass until it shone. He stained and rubbed. He waxed the floors and buffed them. He plugged holes and washed glass. He hauled all the trash away.

It took him the better part of a week to turn the old place from a wreck back into a saloon in appearance. Then he drove off, returned all of the equipment he had rented and bought a ticket for the Northwest.

The big, damp forest was another of his favorite places for hiking, for thinking. And he was seeking a complete change of scene, a total revision of outlook. Not that his next move did not seem obvious, standard even. Yet, something nagged . . .

He knew that it was more than just the game. Before that he had been ready to get away again, to walk drowsing among shadows, breathing clean air.

Resting, his back against the bulging root of a giant tree, he withdrew a small chess set from his pack, set it up on a rock he’d moved into position nearby. A fine, mist-like rain was settling, but the tree sheltered him, so far. He reconstructed the opening through Tlingel’s withdrawal of the Knight to Q3. The simplest thing would be to take the Knight with the Bishop. But he did not move to do it.

He watched the board for a time, felt his eyelids drooping, closed them and drowsed. It may only have been for a few minutes. He was never certain afterwards.

Something aroused him. He did not know what. He blinked several times and closed his eyes again. Then he reopened them hurriedly.

In his nodded position, eyes directed downward, his gaze was fixed upon an enormous pair of hairy, unshod feet—the largest pair of feet that he had ever beheld. They stood unmoving before him, pointed toward his right.

Slowly—very slowly—he raised his eyes. Not very far, as it turned out. The creature was only about four and a half feet in height. As it was looking at the chessboard rather than at him, he took the opportunity to study it.

It was unclothed but very hairy, with a dark brown pelt, obviously masculine, possessed of low brow ridges, deep-set eyes that matched its hair, heavy shoulders, five-fingered hands that sported opposing thumbs.

It turned suddenly and regarded him, flashing a large number of shining teeth.

“White’s pawn should take the pawn,” it said in a soft, nasal voice.

“Huh? Come on,” Martin said. “Bishop takes knight.”

“You want to give me black and play it that way? I’ll walk all over you.”

Martin glanced again at its feet.

“. . . Or give me white and let me take that pawn. I’ll still do it.”

“Take white,” Martin said, straightening. “Let’s see if you know what you’re talking about.” He reached for his pack. “Have a beer?”

“What’s a beer?”

“A recreational aid. Wait a minute.”

Before they had finished the six-pack, the sasquatch—whose name, he had learned, was Grend—had finished Martin. Grend had quickly entered a ferocious midgame, backed him into a position of swindling security and pushed him to the point where he had seen the end and resigned.

“That was one hell of a game,” Martin declared, leaning back and considering the ape-like countenance before him.

“Yes, we Bigfeet are pretty good, if I do say it. It’s our one big recreation, and we’re so damned primitive we don’t have much in the way of boards and chessmen. Most of the time, we just play it in our heads. There’re not many can come close to us.”

“How about unicorns?” Martin asked.

Grend nodded slowly.

“They’re about the only ones can really give us a good game. A little dainty, but they’re subtle. Awfully sure of themselves, though, I must say. Even when they’re wrong. Haven’t seen any since we left the morning land, of course. Too bad. Got any more of that beer left?”

“I’m afraid not. But listen, I’ll be back this way in a month. I’ll bring some more if you’ll meet me here and play again.”

“Martin, you’ve got a deal. Sorry. Didn’t mean to step on your toes.”

He cleaned the saloon again and brought in a keg of beer which he installed under the bar and packed with ice. He moved in some bar stools, chairs and tables which he had obtained at a Goodwill store. He hung red curtains. By then it was evening. He set up the board, ate a light meal, unrolled his sleeping bag behind the bar and camped there that night.

The following day passed quickly. Since Tlingel might show up at any time, he did not leave the vicinity, but took his meals there and sat about working chess problems. When it began to grow dark, he lit a number of oil lamps and candles.

He looked at his watch with increasing frequency. He began to pace. He couldn’t have made a mistake. This was the proper day. He—

He heard a chuckle.

Turning about, he saw a black unicorn head floating in the air above the chessboard. As he watched, the rest of Tlingel’s body materialized.

“Good evening, Martin.” Tlingel turned away from the board. “The place looks a little better. Could use some music . . .”

Martin stepped behind the bar and switched on the transistor radio he had brought along. The sounds of a string quartet filled the air. Tlingel winced.

“Hardly in keeping with the atmosphere of the place.”

He changed stations, located a Country & Western show.

“I think not,” Tlingel said. “It loses something in transmission.”

He turned it off.

“Have we a good supply of beverage?”

Martin drew a gallon stein of beer—the largest mug that he could locate, from a novelty store—and set it upon the bar. He filled a much smaller one for himself. He was determined to get the beast drunk if it were at all possible.

“Ah! Much better than those little cans,” said Tlingel, whose muzzle dipped for but a moment. “Very good.”

The mug was empty. Martin refilled it.

“Will you move it to the table for me?”

“Certainly.”

“Have an interesting month?”

“I suppose I did.”

“You’ve decided upon your next move?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get on with it.”

Martin seated himself and captured the Pawn.

“Hm. Interesting.”

Tlingel stared at the board for a long while, then raised a cloven hoof which parted in reaching for the piece.

“I’ll just take that bishop with this little knight. Now I suppose you’ll be wanting another month to make up your mind what to do next.”

Tlingel leaned to the side and drained the mug.

“Let me consider it,” Martin said, “while I get you a refill.”

Martin sat and stared at the board through three more refills. Actually, he was not planning. He was waiting. His response to Grend had been Knight takes Bishop, and he had Grend’s next move ready.

“Well?” Tlingel finally said. “What do you think?”

Martin took a small sip of beer.

“Almost ready,” he said. “You hold your beer awfully well.”

Tlingel laughed.

“A unicorn’s horn is a detoxicant. It’s possession is a universal remedy. I wait until I reach the warm glow stage, then I use my horn to burn off any excess and keep me right there.”

“Oh,” said Martin. “Neat trick, that.”

“. . . If you’ve had too much, just touch my horn for a moment and I’ll put you back in business.”

“No, thanks. That’s all right. I’ll just push this little pawn in front of the queen’s rook two steps ahead.”

“Really . . .” said Tlingel. “That’s interesting. You know, what this place really needs is a piano—rinkytink, funky . . . Think you could manage it?”

“I don’t play.”

“Too bad.”

“I suppose I could hire a piano player.”

“No. I do not care to be seen by other humans.”

“If he’s really good, I suppose he could play blindfolded.”

“Never mind.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You are also ingenious. I am certain that you will figure something out by next time.”

Martin nodded.

“Also, didn’t these old places used to have sawdust all over the floors?”

“I believe so.”

“That would be nice.”

“Check.”

Tlingel searched the board frantically for a moment.

“Yes. I meant ‘yes.’ I said ‘check’. It means ‘yes’ sometimes, too.”

“Oh. Rather. Well, while we’re here . . .”

Tlingel advanced the Pawn to Q3.

Martin stared. That was not what Grend had done. For a moment, he considered continuing on his own from here. He had tried to think of Grend as a coach up until this point. He had forced away the notion of crudely and crassly pitting one of them against the other. Until P-Q3. Then he recalled the game he had lost to the sasquatch.

“I’ll draw the line here,” he said, “and take my month.”

“All right. Let’s have another drink before we say good night. Okay?”

“Sure. Why not?”

They sat for a time and Tlingel told him of the morning land, of primeval forests and rolling plains, of high craggy mountains and purple seas, of magic and mythic beasts.

Martin shook his head.

“I can’t quite see why you ‘re so anxious to come here,” he said, “with a place like that to call home.”

Tlingel sighed.

“I suppose you’d call it keeping up with the griffins. It’s the thing to do these days. Well. Till next month . . .”

Tlingel rose and turned away.

“I’ve got complete control now. Watch!”

The unicorn form faded, jerked out of shape, grew white, faded again, was gone, like an afterimage.

Martin moved to the bar and drew himself another mug. It was a shame to waste what was left. In the morning, he wished the unicorn were there again. Or at least the horn.

It was a gray day in the forest and he held an umbrella over the chessboard upon the rock. The droplets fell from the leaves and made dull, plopping noises as they struck the fabric. The board was set up again through Tlingel’s P-Q3. Martin wondered whether Grend had remembered, had kept proper track of the days . . .

“Hello,” came the nasal voice from somewhere behind him and to the left.

He turned to see Grend moving about the tree, stepping over the massive roots with massive feet.

“You remembered,” Grend said. “How good! I trust you also remembered the beer?”

“I’ve lugged up a whole case. We can set up the bar right here.”

“What’s a bar?”

“Well, it’s a place where people go to drink—in out of the rain—a bit dark, for atmosphere—and they sit up on stools before a big counter, or else at little tables—and they talk to each other—and sometimes there’s music—and they drink.”

“We’re going to have all that here?”

“No. Just the dark and the drinks. Unless you count the rain as music. I was speaking figuratively.”

“Oh. It does sound like a very good place to visit, though.”

“Yes. If you will hold this umbrella over the board, I’ll set up the best equivalent we can have here.”

“All right. Say, this looks like a version of that game we played last time.”

“It is. I got to wondering what would happen if it had gone this way rather than the way that it went.”

“Hmm. Let me see . . .”

Martin removed four six-packs from his pack and opened the first.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.”

Grend accepted the beer, squatted, passed the umbrella back to Martin.

“I’m still white?”

“Yeah.”

“Pawn to King six.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“About the best thing for me to do would be to take this pawn with this one.”

“I’d say. Then I’ll just knock off your knight with this one.”

“I guess I’ll just pull this knight back to K2.”

“. . . And I’ll take this one over to B3. May I have another beer?”

An hour and a quarter later, Martin resigned. The rain had let up and he had folded the umbrella.

“Another game?” Grend asked.

“Yes.”

The afternoon wore on. The pressure was off. This one was just for fun. Martin tried wild combinations, seeing ahead with great clarity, as he had that one day . . .

“Stalemate,” Grend announced much later. “That was a good one, though. You picked up considerably.”

“I was more relaxed. Want another?”

“Maybe in a little while. Tell me more about bars now.”

So he did. Finally, “How is all that beer affecting you?” he asked.

“I’m a bit dizzy. But that’s all right. I’ll still cream you the third game.”

And he did.

“Not bad for a human, though. Not bad at all. You coming back next month?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You’ll bring more beer?”

“So long as my money holds out.”

“Oh. Bring some plaster of paris then. I’ll make you some nice footprints and you can take casts of them. I understand they’re going for quite a bit.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Martin lurched to his feet and collected the chess set.

“Till then.”

“Ciao.”

Martin dusted and polished again, moved in the player piano and scattered sawdust upon the floor. He installed a fresh keg. He hung some reproductions of period posters and some atrocious old paintings he had located in a junk shop. He placed cuspidors in strategic locations. When he was finished, he seated himself at the bar and opened a bottle of mineral water. He listened to the New Mexico wind moaning as it passed, to grains of sand striking against the windowpanes. He wondered whether the whole world would have that dry, mournful sound to it if Tlingel found a means for doing away with humanity, or—disturbing thought—whether the successors to his own kind might turn things into something resembling the mythical morning land.

This troubled him for a time. Then he went and set up the board through Black’s P-Q3. When he turned back to clear the bar he saw a line of cloven hoofprints advancing across the sawdust.

“Good evening, Tlingel,” he said. “What is your pleasure?”

Suddenly, the unicorn was there, without preliminary pyrotechnics. It moved to the bar and placed one hoof upon the brass rail.

“The usual.”

As Martin drew the beer, Tlingel looked about.

“The place has improved, a bit.”

“Glad you think so. Would you care for some music ?”

“Yes.”

Martin fumbled at the back of the piano, locating the switch for the small, battery-operated computer which controlled the pumping mechanism and substituted its own memory for rolls. The keyboard immediately came to life.

“Very good,” Tlingel stated. “Have you found your move?”

“I have.”

“Then let us be about it.”

He refilled the unicorn’s mug and moved it to the table, along with his own.

“Pawn to King six,” he said, executing it.

“What?”

“Just that.”

“Give me a minute. I want to study this.”

“Take your time.”

“I’ll take the pawn,” Tlingel said, after a long pause and another mug.

“Then I’ll take this knight.”

Later, “Knight to K2,” Tlingel said.

“Knight to B3.”

An extremely long pause ensued before Tlingel moved the Knight to N3.

The hell with asking Grend, Martin suddenly decided. He’d been through this part any number of times already. He moved his Knight to N5.

“Change the tune on that thing!” Tlingel snapped.

Martin rose and obliged.

“I don’t like that one either. Find a better one or shut it off!”

After three more tries, Martin shut it off.

“And get me another beer!”

He refilled their mugs.

“All right.”

Tlingel moved the Bishop to K2.

Keeping the unicorn from castling had to be the most important thing at the moment. So Martin moved his Queen to R5. Tlingel made a tiny, strangling noise, and when Martin looked up smoke was curling from the unicorn’s nostrils.

“More beer?”

“If you please.”

As he returned with it, he saw Tlingel move the Bishop to capture the Knight. There seemed no choice for him at that moment, but he studied the position for a long while anyhow.

Finally, “Bishop takes bishop,” he said.

“Of course.”

“How’s the warm glow?”

Tlingel chuckled.

“You’ll see.”

The wind rose again, began to howl. The building creaked.

“Okay,” Tlingel finally said, and moved the Queen to Q2.

Martin stared. What was he doing? So far, it had gone all right, but—He listened again to the wind and thought of the risk he was taking.

“That’s all, folks,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Continued next month.”

Tlingel sighed.

“Don’t run off. Fetch me another. Let me tell you of my wanderings in your world this past month.”

“Looking for weak links?”

“You’re lousy with them. How do you stand it?”

“They’re harder to strengthen than you might think. Any advice?”

“Get the beer.”

They talked until the sky paled in the east, and Martin found himself taking surreptitious notes. His admiration for the unicorn’s analytical abilities increased as the evening advanced.

When they finally rose, Tlingel staggered.

“You all right?”

“Forgot to detox, that’s all. Just a second. Then I’ll be fading.”

“Wait!”

“Whazzat?”

“I could use one, too.”

“Oh. Grab hold, then.”

Tlingel’s head descended and Martin took the tip of the horn between his fingertips. Immediately, a delicious, warm sensation flowed through him. He closed his eyes to enjoy it. His head cleared. An ache which had been growing within his frontal sinus vanished. The tiredness went out of his muscles. He opened his eyes again.

“Thank—”

Tlingel had vanished. He held but a handful of air.

“—you.”

“Rael here is my friend,” Grend stated. “He’s a griffin.”

“I’d noticed.”

Martin nodded at the beaked, golden-winged creature.

“Pleased to meet you, Rael.”

“The same,” cried the other in a high-pitched voice. “Have you got the beer?”

“Why—uh—yes.”

“I’ve been telling him about beer,” Grend explained, half-apologetically. “He can have some of mine. He won’t kibitz or anything like that.”

“Sure. All right. Any friend of yours . . .”

“The beer!” Rael cried. “Bars!”

“He’s not real bright,” Grend whispered. “But he’s good company. I’d appreciate your humoring him.”

Martin opened the first six-pack and passed the griffin and the sasquatch a beer apiece. Rael immediately punctured the can with his beak, chugged it, belched and held out his claw.

“Beer!” he shrieked. “More beer!”

Martin handed him another.

“Say, you’re still into that first game, aren’t you?” Grend observed, studying the board. “Now, that is an interesting position.”

Grend drank and studied the board.

“Good thing it’s not raining,” Martin commented.

“Oh, it will. Just wait a while.”

“More beer!” Rael screamed.

Martin passed him another without looking.

“I’ll move my pawn to N6,” Grend said.

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Then you’ll take that pawn with your bishop’s pawn. Right?”

“Yes . . .”

Martin reached out and did it.

“Okay. Now I’ll just swing this knight to Q5.”

Martin took it with the Pawn.

Grend moved his Rook to Kl.

“Check,” he announced.

“Yes. That is the way to go,” Martin observed.

Grend chuckled.

“I’m going to win this game another time,” he said.

“I wouldn’t put it past you.”

“More beer?” Rael said softly.

“Sure.”

As Martin poured him another, he noticed that the griffin was now leaning against the treetrunk.

After several minutes, Martin pushed his King to Bl.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought you’d do,” Grend said. “You know something?”

“What?”

“You play a lot like a unicorn.”

“Hm.”

Grend moved his Rook to R3.

Later, as the rain descended gently about them and Grend beat him again, Martin realized that a prolonged period of silence had prevailed. He glanced over at the griffin. Rael had tucked his head beneath his left wing, balanced upon one leg, leaned heavily against the tree and gone to sleep.

“I told you he wouldn’t be much trouble,” Grend remarked.

Two games later, the beer was gone, the shadows were lengthening and Rael was stirring.

“See you next month?”

“Yeah.”

“You bring my plaster of paris?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Come on, then. I know a good place pretty far from here. We don’t want people beating about these bushes. Let’s go make you some money.”

“To buy beer?” Rael said, looking out from under his wing.

“Next month,” Grend said.

“You ride?”

“I don’t think you could carry both of us,” said Grend, “and I’m not sure I’d want to right now if you could.”

“Bye-bye then,” Rael shrieked, and he leaped into the air, crashing into branches and treetrunks, finally breaking through the overhead cover and vanishing.

“There goes a really decent guy,” said Grend. “He sees everything and he never forgets. Knows how everything works—in the woods, in the air—even in the water. Generous, too, whenever he has anything.”

“Hm,” Martin observed.

“Let’s make tracks,” Grend said.

“Pawn to N6? Really?” Tlingel said. “All right. The bishop’s pawn will just knock off the pawn.”

Tlingel’s eyes narrowed as Martin moved the Knight to Q5.

“At least this is an interesting game,” the unicorn irntarked. “Pawn takes knight.”

Martin moved the Rook.

“Check.”

“Yes, it is. This next one is going to be a three flagon move. Kindly bring me the first.”

Martin thought back as he watched Tlingel drink and ponder. He almost felt guilty for hitting it with a powerhouse like the sasquatch behind its back. He was convinced now that the unicorn was going to lose. In every variation of this game that he’d played with Black against Grend, he’d been beaten. Tlingel was very good, but the sasquatch was a wizard with not much else to do but mental chess. It was unfair. But it was not a matter of personal honor, he kept telling himself. He was playing to protect his species against a supernatural force which might well be able to precipitate World War III by some arcane mind-manipulation or magically induced computer foulup. He didn’t dare give the creature a break.

“Flagon number two, please.”

He brought it another. He studied it as it studied the board. It was beautiful, he realized for the first time. It was the loveliest living thing he had ever seen. Now that the pressure was on the verge of evaporating and he could regard it without the overlay of fear which had always been there in the past, he could pause to admire it. If something had to succeed the human race, he could think of worse choices . . .

“Number three now.”

“Coming up.”

Tlingel drained it and moved the King to B1.

Martin leaned forward immediately and pushed the Rook to R3.

Tlingel looked up, stared at him.

“Not bad.”

Martin wanted to squirm. He was struck by the nobility of the creature. He wanted so badly to play and beat the unicorn on his own, fairly. Not this way.

Tlingel looked back at the board, then almost carelessly moved the Knight to K4.

“Go ahead. Or will it take you another month?”

Martin growled softly, advanced the Rook and captured the Knight.

“Of course.”

Tlingel captured the Rook with the Pawn. This was not the way that the last variation with Grend had run. Still . . .

He moved his Rook to KB3. As he did, the wind seemed to commence a peculiar shrieking, above, amid, the mined buildings.

“Check,” he announced.

The hell with it! he decided. I’m good enough to manage my own endgame. Let’s play this out.

He watched and waited and finally saw Tlingel move the King to Nl.

He moved his Bishop to R6. Tlingel moved the Queen to K2. The shrieking came again, sounding nearer now. Martin took the Pawn with the Bishop.

The unicorn’s head came up and it seemed to listen for a moment. Then Tlingel lowered it and captured the Bishop with the King.

Martin moved his Rook to KN3.

“Check.”

Tlingel returned the King to Bl.

Martin moved the Rook to KB3.

“Check.”

Tlingel pushed the King to N2.

Martin moved the Rook back to KN3.

“Check.”

Tlingel returned the King to B1 , looked up and stared at him, showing teeth.

“Looks as if we’ve got a drawn game,” the unicorn stated. “Care for another one?”

“Yes, but not for the fate of humanity.”

“Forget it. I’d given up on that a long time ago. I decided that I wouldn’t care to live here after all. I’m a little more discriminating than that.

“Except for this bar.” Tlingel turned away as another shriek sounded just beyond the door, followed by strange voices. “What is that?”

“I don’t know,” Martin answered, rising.

The doors opened and a golden griffin entered.

“Martin!” it cried. “Beer! Beer!”

“Uh—Tlingel, this is Rael, and, and—”

Three more griffins followed him in. Then came Grend, and three others of his own kind.

“—and that one’s Grend,” Martin said lamely. “I don’t know the others.”

They all halted when they beheld the unicorn.

“Tlingel,” one of the sasquatches said. “I thought you were still in the morning land.”

“I still am, in a way. Martin, how is it that you are acquainted with my former countrymen?”

“Well—uh—Grend here is my chess coach.”

“Aha! I begin to understand.”

“I am not sure that you really do. But let me get everyone a drink first.”

Martin turned on the piano and set everyone up.

“How did you find this place?” he asked Grend as he was doing it. “And how did you get here?”

“Well . . .” Grend looked embarrassed. “Rael followed you back.”

“Followed a jet?”

“Griffins are supernaturally fast.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, he told his relatives and some of my folks about it. When we saw that the griffins were determined to visit you, we decided that we had better come along to keep them out of trouble. They brought us.”

“I—see. Interesting . . .”

“No wonder you played like a unicorn, that one game with all the variations.”

“Uh—yes.”

Martin turned away, moved to the end of the bar.

“Welcome, all of you,” he said. “I have a small announcement. Tlingel, awhile back you had a number of observations concerning possible ecological and urban disasters and lesser dangers. Also, some ideas as to possible safeguards against some of them.”

“I recall,” said the unicorn.

“I passed them along to a friend of mine in Washington who used to be a member of my old chess club. I told him that the work was not entirely my own.”

“I should hope so.”

“He has since suggested that I turn whatever group was involved into a think tank. He will then see about paying something for its efforts.”

“I didn’t come here to save the world,” Tlingel said.

“No, but you’ve been very helpful. And Grend tells me that the griffins, even if their vocabulary is a bit limited, know almost all that there is to know about ecology.”

“That is probably true.”

“Since they have inherited a part of the Earth, it would he to their benefit as well to help preserve the place. Inasmuch as this many of us are already here, I can save myself some travel and suggest right now that we find a meeting place—say here, once a month—and that you let me have your unique viewpoints. You must know more about how species become extinct than anyone else in the business.”

“Of course,” said Grend, waving his mug, “but we really should ask the yeti, also. I’ll do it, if you’d like. Is that stuff coming out of the big box music?”

“Yes.”

“I like it. If we do this think tank thing, you’ll make enough to keep this place going?”

“I’ll buy the whole town.”

Grend conversed in quick gutturals with the griffins, who shrieked back at him.

“You’ve got a think tank,” he said, “and they want more beer.”

Martin turned toward Tlingel.

“They were your observations. What do you think?”

“It may be amusing,” said the unicorn, “to stop by occasionally.” Then, “So much for saving the world. Did you say you wanted another game?”

“I’ve nothing to lose.”

Grend took over the tending of the bar while Tlingel and Martin returned to the table.

He beat the unicorn in thirty-one moves and touched the extended horn.

The piano keys went up and down. Tiny sphinxes buzzed about the bar, drinking the spillage.

IN THE WESTERN TRADITION

Phyllis Eisenstein

Here is a time travel story that is not only entertaining; it is thoroughly realistic and convincing to boot, qualities not normally associated with the theme. Phyllis Eisenstein is best known to F&SF readers for her Alaric stories, recently collected and published in book form under the title “Born to Exile.”

It was obvious from his reaction that Holland had never bought time on the Bubble before. He could scarcely sit still in his chair. “That’s him! That’s him!” he shouted. He was grinning like a child on Christmas morning, surrounded by toys.

I knew how he felt. I would never forget my own first assignment, and my first view of the man I sought. Holland knew his quarry from photographs; I had only stone likenesses to guide me. Yet I knew him immediately, though the statues had been idealized, youthful, flawless. That was back in the beginning, when almost all of us were involved in the Life of Jesus Project based in Istanbul. I was assigned to the western branch—the less important one, I thought. But my hands started to shake when I saw my man in the Forum, shaking as hard as if I were seeing Jesus himself, and they kept shaking while I brought his face closer and closer, close enough that he could have spit in my eye if he had not been just an image in the Bubble. Augustus Caesar, dead two thousand years, was in that fellow Bubble operators, and the most significant man in history. Yes, I knew how Dr. Frederick Holland felt. And no matter how often I sat at the console, or even just watched another operator at work, I still experienced a strong echo of that initial thrill every time I saw the Bubble spring into being from nothingness in a small, bare room. For I knew that within its confines the dead would walk again. Holland had known that, I supposed, on an intellectual level; how he knew it as I did, in his soul.

I sat behind him, a casual visitor to his enterprise. I was there because I never tired of watching the Bubble and because Alison and I would be going out to dinner as soon as she finished her shift. To my left, she played on the computer and gave Holland what he had paid for—Ellsworth, Kansas, August 18, 1873:

Wyatt Earp took a seat under the wooden awning that shaded Beebe’s General Store from the scorching afternoon sun. He tipped the chair back against the weathered clapboard wall and surveyed the street from beneath the wide brim of his dark hat. Beyond him, the town stretched hot and dusty to the railroad tracks, and in the distance, long-horned cattle could be seen moving sluggishly as they grazed on an endless expanse of prairie grass.

Earp turned his face toward us; gaunt, hollow-cheeked, he appeared to be in his early twenties, not yet the legend he would become in Dodge and Tombstone. His eyes focused briefly on something we could not see.

“Shall I turn the viewpoint and catch what he’s looking at?” Alison asked.

Holland shook his head violently. “No, stay where you are. We can check that out in another session.”

A muffled uproar heralded the appearance of two men: they burst from a doorway down the street, shouting curses over their shoulders.

“The Thompsons,” said Holland. “Ben and Bill.”

They crossed the square at a run and entered a two-story building whose sun-bleached sign said GRAND CENTRAL HOTEL.

Earp rose from his chair, tall and loose-limbed, and stepped into the doorway of Beebe’s, flattening himself against the jamb. Up and down the street, people peered out of other doorways, roused by the clamor but unwilling to come out into the sunlight.

Quick footsteps sounded nearby, hard heels on the boards of the sidewalk; a man materialized from nothing directly in front of the console, his back to us. He was short and stocky, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up over thick, gray-haired forearms. He wore a sweat-stained vest.

“Whitney,” said Holland.

Whitney stopped by Earp. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Earp shook his head.

“Now Logan,” whispered Holland.

More footsteps, very fast this time, and a young man—scarcely more than a boy, really—appeared abruptly to clutch at Whitney’s arm. “I ran to find you as soon as it happened, sheriff.” He was breathing hard, and his dark hair was plastered in wet points against his forehead. “Bill Thompson got nasty drunk, and John Sterling gave him the flat of his hand across the mouth. When Bill invited John to get a gun and meet him outside, John hit him again and knocked him out of his seat. Then Bill and Ben ran after their guns.”

Whitney turned, fists on his hips, and I could see the glint of the metal star on his vest.

By this time the Thompsons had returned to the street with gunbelts, shotgun, and rifle and were standing behind a hay wagon, shouting threats toward the saloon.

“All right,” said Whitney. “We can’t have this.” He started across the street toward the wagon.

“You keep out of this, sheriff!” shouted a Thompson. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t be foolish, Ben,” Whitney replied.

“You tell that to Sterling!” said Ben, and he shook a fist toward the saloon door, adding a string of profanities for Sterling’s benefit.

Whitney went into the saloon.

Several people from the interior of the store crowded its doorway, craning over Earp’s shoulder, trying for a good view of the excitement without exposing themselves to danger. Holland pointed to them one by one, relishing their names as if they were fine wines. “Stacey. Anderson. McDonald. And there’s Beebe himself in the apron.”

Alison leaned forward, elbows coming to rest among the telltales, fingers interlacing beneath her chin. “Logan’s the young one, the one who brought the news?”

Holland nodded. “Jimmy Logan. Blacksmith’s son. Hangs around the saloons too much for his father’s taste.”

She smiled. “You’ve really done your homework.”

“I know every one of them,” he replied. “I know every man, woman, and child who impinged on Wyatt Earp’s life.”

“Must be quite a crowd,” murmured Alison.

“Ah—he’s coming back now.”

Whitney strode down the sidewalk like a man very sure of himself. At Beebe’s he waved as if clearing the air of flies. “You can all go about your business; there won’t be any gunplay out here today. Sterling’s gone out the back way, gone clear out of town.”

“I didn’t take Sterling for a coward,” said young Logan.

The sheriff shook his head. “It wasn’t his idea. He was ready to come out shooting, but he had some friends with better sense, and they wouldn’t let him. Now everything is just fine, nothing to worry about. I’m going to treat the Thompson boys to a couple of drinks at Brennan’s, and that’ll be the end of it.”

With some muttering, those who had been Beebe’s customers drifted back inside while Whitney approached the Thompsons with his offer. Up and down the street, the rest of the audience melted away, too. Earp settled back into his chair, and Jimmy Logan leaned against the wall beside him.

“They’ve got this town treed good,” said Logan. He was looking toward Brennan’s.

Earp gazed out into the street. “Why’d you go for the sheriff? I hear he’s not much use with a gun. Marshal, now—he’s a man with a reputation.”

“I knew the sheriff would be in his store. It was close-by.”

Earp shook his head. “A man should be a full-time peace officer, not half merchant and half sheriff. Job’s too hard in a town like this any other way.”

“You’re sure right about that.”

They lapsed into silence, each surveying the street in his own way. As the minutes passed, I found myself restless. Alison’s shift had only about an hour to go, and I began to wonder if anything significant would happen in that time. Holland, however, seemed to find every swirl of dust in that scorching summer day fascinating. He had one elbow balanced on the edge of the console now, fist tight against his mouth; the outside of that hand almost brushed the insubstantial edge of the Bubble. He looked like he wanted to reach out and touch Earp. I thought he might be the kind that would try to enter the Bubble space to get closer to his subject, in spite of the standard warning. I had worked with one of those once—in his enthusiasm, he kept edging into the Bubble itself and blotting out sections of the scene with the interference generated by his own body. But as the minutes passed, Holland sat, obviously yearning but able to restrain himself.

Alison, too, seemed to have found some sort of fascination in the vision of two men doing nothing; she hadn’t moved since speaking to Holland. My own restless shuffling sounded loud in the quiet room, and I was glad when Whitney finally came out of Brennan’s, striding noisily.

He turned toward us and crossed the few meters that separated him from Earp and Logan. He stopped, smiling, self-satisfied. “They’ve calmed down a bit. They’re inside with a bunch of Texas men.”

Earp looked up at him. “Did you take their guns away from them?”

“No, they wouldn’t stand for that.”

Before Earp could comment further, Bill Thompson stepped out of the saloon, shotgun in his hands. “I’ll get me a sheriff if I don’t get anyone else!” he shouted.

Whitney turned to face him just as Thompson fired both barrels. At point-blank range, the blast caught the hapless sheriff full in the chest. The sound of the shot, earsplitting in such close quarters, rocked Alison and me back in our chairs; my pulse lurched wildly, while her knee slammed the underside of the console, and she clutched it, growling curses. Holland, evidently expecting the shot, was unruffled.

Whitney had fallen back into Earp’s arms. Above the pounding of my heart I heard him gasp, “I’m done. Get me home.”

Thompson had run back into the saloon. But there were hundreds of other people in the street now, most of them with drawn guns, and more were gushing from the hotels, the stores, the saloons with every passing moment. At last both Thompsons strode out of Brennan’s, guns waving from one side to the other, and walked to the nearest rail where horses were hitched.

“Those are their friends,” said Holland, pointing to a group that was gathering in front of the Grand Central Hotel. “Peshaur, Pierce, Kane, Good—”

“All right,” said Alison, one hand still massaging her knee. “You don’t have to name them all. I just work here.”

Holland threw her an injured glance, then sighed. “Sorry. Still, you have to know some of them, for future reference.”

“They can’t all be important.”

“That depends on how many times my grant is renewed.”

Alison shook her head. “I won’t remember most of them. Not from a single session.”

“Very well,” said Holland. “I’ll try to keep to the crucial ones.”

The sheriff had friends, too, it turned out, inside Beebe’s. They bore his barely breathing body off. Earp and Logan backed into the doorway once more. Within a couple of minutes, a third face peeped out between them.

“Morco,” said Holland. “Deputy marshal.”

The deputy elbowed Logan aside and peered into the street. The Thompsons were facing the other way, engrossed in their guns.

“Jump out and get them now,” Earp said to Morco.

Morco shook his head. “Those fellows across the street might get me.”

“You’d get both Thompsons first.”

“Not me, friend.”

An expression of disgust passed over Earp’s face.

Bill Thompson rode out of town, and Ben Thompson covered his retreat by stalking up and down the street with half a hundred armed men at his back. One of them fired his gun into the air and crowed, “I’ll give a thousand dollars to anybody who’ll knock off another lawman!”

Holland chuckled then. “Watch this next piece of frontier bravery. Here comes the mayor.” Appearing from our side of the Bubble, the mayor edged along the wall of Beebe’s as if magnetized to it. He slid into the doorway, crowding Logan and Earp. “And there’s the marshal—that new face just behind Logan. He came in the back.”

“You’ve really picked the center of the action. Dr. Holland,” said Alison.

He hushed her with a sharp gesture, and we spent the next few minutes listening to the mayor try, unsuccessfully, to talk the marshal and his deputy into arresting Ben Thompson. At the end of his tether, the mayor himself shouted at Thompson to lay down his arms and submit to arrest. But the mayor did not dare go out into the street to say that, and Thompson’s only answer was some colorful profanity.

Earp had been silent since he suggested that Morco take action. Now he folded his arms across his chest and said to the harried mayor, “Nice police force you’ve got.”

The mayor, whose face was red enough to explode, said, “Who the hell are you?”

Earp shrugged. “Just a looker-on.”

“Well, don’t talk so goddamned much. You haven’t even got a gun.”

Earp, wearing dark trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt with soft collar and string tie, looked more like a frontier schoolteacher than a gun-fighter. “It’s none of my business,” he said slowly, “but if it was, I’d get me a gun and arrest Ben Thompson.”

“Don’t pay any attention to that, kid,” said the marshal.

The mayor looked the marshal in the face and said, “You’re fired, Norton. You, too, Morco.” He snatched the marshal’s badge from Norton’s shirt and turned to Earp. “I’ll make this your business,” he said. “You’re marshal of Ellsworth. Here’s your badge. Go into Beebe’s and get some guns. I order you to arrest Ben Thompson.”

Earp took the badge and went inside.

“Follow him!” said Holland.

Alison’s hands moved over the console; the viewpoint swung sideways to center on the doorway and swoop inside past the mayor, past the ex-marshal and his deputy and Logan, their bodies melting away at the edges of the Bubble like mist at sunrise.

The interior of the store was dim compared to the sun-scorched plaza. Without breaking stride, Earp turned to his left, to the firearms counter, where he requested second-hand forty-fives, holsters, and cartridges. Beebe himself hurried over to help with the selection and to watch the new marshal examine the weapons, load them, settle them on hips. Our viewpoint wheeled to float above Beebe’s shoulder as Earp returned to the door and the store owner followed, then swept on past when the latter stopped with his customers at the threshold. Earp went out to the street alone save for our invisible, unknowable presence.

Fifty meters away, Thompson spotted his new adversary as soon as Earp stepped off the sidewalk. The shotgun muzzle swerved to point toward him as he began to close that gap with a slow, steady gait.

“What do you want, Wyatt?” shouted Thompson.

Until that moment, I had not realized they were acquainted with each other. I wondered how much Thompson knew about Earp, how much there was to know at this early date.

“I want you, Ben,” said Earp.

“I’d rather talk than fight,” said Thompson. Whatever their relationship, he clearly did not think Earp insane for facing him down in that Ellsworth street.

“I’ll get you either way, Ben,” said Earp. He kept walking.

“Wait a minute. What do you want me to do?”

“Throw your shotgun into the road, put up your hands, and tell your friends to stay out of this play.” He was less than ten meters from Thompson.

Close up, Thompson was ugly, bloated from too much drinking, and powerfully built. He looked belligerent. Earp looked cool. I had to admire him; how many men could appear so calm while facing a loaded shotgun? And then there were all those other half-drunk cowboys in Thompson’s entourage, including the one who had offered the reward for the lawman. I began to understand the making of a legend.

“Will you stop and let me talk to you?” shouted Thompson.

Earp halted. He still had not drawn a gun.

“What are you going to do with me?” Thompson asked.

“Kill you or take you to jail.”

“Deputy Brown’s over there by the depot with a rifle,” Thompson said, tilting his head in the appropriate direction. ‘The minute I give up my guns he’ll cut loose at me.”

Earp said, “If he does, I’ll give you back your guns and we’ll shoot it out with him. As long as you’re my prisoner, the man that gets you will have to get me.”

Thompson hesitated.

“Come on. Throw down your gun or make your fight.”

Thompson threw down the gun. “You win.” He raised his hands above his head. “I’m all yours.”

Now Earp’s right hand went to his hip, touched the butt of the weapon there, but still he did not draw. With his left hand he pointed toward Thompson’s supporters, swinging his arm wide to encompass them all. “Get back, all of you! Move!”

They moved, and Earp took his prisoner’s shotgun and gunbelts and marched him through the throng to the courthouse. Some of Thompson’s friends attempted to storm the court, but Earp drove them out and locked the door.

The arraignment was swift. “What’s the charge?” said the judge.

The mayor was there, and the peace officers who had been fired, but now that they were sealed into a room with Thompson—a room surrounded by his supporters, who could be heard shouting through the thin walls—none of them had any suggestions to make.

“How about accessory to murder?” offered Earp.

The judge looked to the mayor. “How about it?”

The mayor frowned, hesitating, and finally said, “Well, your honor, in my opinion, Ben Thompson here could be charged with . . . disturbing the peace.”

“Guilty!” said the judge. Twenty-five dollar fine.”

Thompson grinned and peeled two bills from a roll of greenbacks. He slapped them down before the judge. “Do I get my guns back now?”

“Certainly,” said the judge. “You have paid your fine, and the marshal will restore any property he may have taken from you.”

As Thompson started to strap a gunbelt on, Earp caught his arm. “Listen to me, Ben,” he said. “Court or no court, don’t you put those guns on here. You carry them straight to the Grand Central, and don’t so much as stop to say hello to anybody on the way. I’ll be watching you. Keep moving till you’re out of my sight. After that, whatever you do is your own business.”

Earp watched Thompson walk into the waiting crowd, which engulfed him and moved en masse toward the hotel. When Thompson was completely lost to sight, he turned to the mayor, plucking the badge from his shirt, unbuckling the gunbelts from his hips. “I don’t need these any more,” he said.

The mayor stared at him, his hands receiving the items like coat hooks. “Don’t you want to be marshal of Ellsworth?”

“I do not.”

“We’ll pay you a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month.”

Earp looked him in the eye. “Ellsworth figures lawmen at twenty-five dollars a head. That’s too cheap for me.” He turned and walked out of the courthouse, down the street which no longer swarmed with armed men. We followed him for some minutes, but he only went into a hotel—not the Grand Central—for some dinner. He was just being served his steak when Holland’s time ran out.

Alison hit the finish button, and the Bubble collapsed into itself like a deflating balloon, dwindling to a spot of light before winking out. Without it, the room beyond the console was bare and lonely.

“All right,” said Alison, swiveling her chair to face Holland. “I’m impressed.”

“He was quite a man,” said Holland. “Now, where do I get the tape?”

“At the records office. Down the hall to your left.”

He rose from his chair and offered her his hand. ‘Thank you very much for all your efforts. I’m very grateful that the company assigned me one of its best operators.”

She smiled. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yes.” He hurried out, obviously eager to lay his hands on the tape and live the whole experience again.

Alison turned to me, still smiling, and shook her head. “Sometimes I think the ones who just sit there with their mouths shut the whole time are the best clients of all, even if they don’t offer any cues.”

I laughed as I reached out for her. “He’s in love with his subject matter.” I pulled her onto my lap. “Almost as much as I’m in love with you.”

She slid her arms around my neck and touched my forehead with her lips. “Don’t we have a 1900 dinner reservation?” she murmured.

“Uh-huh.” She was warm, and soft in all the right places. I could have sat there for an hour, just holding her.

“And Myra’s due on shift in about five minutes.”

I gave her a last squeeze. “You must be hungry.”

“Dying,” she said. “Nothing like a little simulated fresh air to give a person an appetite.”

“It was just the look of that huge steak, I know. They don’t make them like that any more. Or at least they don’t serve them like that.”

“And a good thing, too,” she said, extricating herself from my embrace. ‘That was grass-fed beef, and I’m sure it tasted terrible by modern standards. Let’s go get our dinner.”

We passed Myra on the way out; she was one of the two other operators who used Alison’s Bubble. She had a sour-faced old woman in tow—a woman I had seen so often that I was beginning to wonder when her grant would run out. She was studying the Plains Indians, and I was sure she must have enough information to write a dozen books by now. Hers was one of the longest ongoing projects in the Kansas City Center, and Myra had been complaining lately that the whole thing was starting to bore her. I had never had that experience myself. All of my assignments had been fascinating; perhaps that was the luck of the draw or just a reflection of my attitude toward time viewing. Time viewing, after all, had given me everything I wanted—the endlessly marvelous past, a fat salary, and Alison.

She and I had been living together for about a year just then, sharing an apartment in one of Kansas City’s plushest high-rises. The place suited us well—it was full of creature comforts, of deep-cushioned chairs and thick carpeting, and of the personal things of our lives, the music we loved and the souvenirs of our work. We stayed there during most of our free time, relaxing together, content with each other’s company. We had the money to do anything, go anywhere, but that never mattered. The only thing we ever spent it on was good food; and because neither of us cared much for cooking, we went out for almost every meal.

That evening we visited one of our favorite restaurants. We were dressed plainly compared to the other patrons, wearing our work clothes while other diners wore furs and jewels, but the manager was accustomed to that and did not even raise an eyebrow. His place was frequented by Bubble operators, and that only boosted its reputation.

We ordered wine, lobster, paté. Alison had a weakness for Maine lobster; there were not many places in Kansas City that served it.

“I thought you’d be having steak,” I said, “after seeing it in the Bubble.”

She shook her head. “The more I thought about it, the less appetizing it seemed. Earp probably ate it every day of his life. He probably never tasted lobster. Why should I limit myself to his menu? I can have steak anyplace. The famous Kansas City Steak.”

I had to laugh. “People in New England probably care as little about lobster.”

“Ah, yes,” she murmured. “One never appreciates what’s available at home.”

We stopped for a swim after that, in the pool on the fortieth floor of our building. Ordinary people would probably have taken in a show instead, but Bubble operators rarely found the artificial life of either the theatre or the holomovies attractive—they spent their days with the reality of the past, live people instead of actors, and if that moved more slowly than professional entertainment, it was still too similar for the other to be diverting.

We went to bed early, and to sleep somewhat later. Alison seemed distracted while we made love, and quickly tired, but I put that down to an irritating session with a new client; I had had the same experience myself often enough. Clients—invariably Ph.D.s in some variety of history or anthropology—would sit still for a short time, patient at first while the operator worked the Bubble back to the appropriate time period, patient still while the Bubble swept through space to locate the precise spot requested. Only when the process began to drag out did they become restless; only when they began to realize that pinpointing events in time and space was not a simple matter, that it took a practiced and delicate hand and a great deal more patience than they ever thought existed, did they start to show their annoyance. Some clients merely became tense and twitchy as their sessions stretched toward Finish and they saw nothing that they were searching for. Others became sarcastic, making snide comments on the ability of the operator. Some became abusive. One client—back in the early days, just after the Jesus Project was finally geared down to ordinary proportions, when we had trained enough operators that a few could be spared for other parts of the world and other projects—actually tried to strangle me for, as he put it, delaying him unconscionably. Fortunately, the intercom to the maintenance office was open as usual, and about ten seconds after I yelled for help, three technicians erupted into the room and pulled him off me. He was gabbling about me wasting his grant money as they dragged him out. The company refunded his grant money and barred him from further use of the Bubble.

Alison had never had quite so bad an experience—I was something of a showpiece among the operators, the guy everyone pointed to when new operators asked if there was anything else to know about handling clients. But she knew her share of petty irritants. No matter how well an operator worked, the clients were hardly ever satisfied. Ultimately, they always thought there was something else they could have seen. And they were probably right. Especially in the cast of tracing historical figures, there was always far more to a person’s life than could be viewed in a few hours, even a few hundred hours, in the Bubble.

Alison had been an operator almost as long as I, though I had known her only two years when we moved in together. She had come out of the Paris office, one of the earliest set up after the experimental Bubble in Los Angeles and the first commercial office in Istanbul. She had been kept busy with the Romans and the Vikings there until the Kansas City office opened and needed some experienced operators. When that finally happened, there was considerable maneuvering among the company staff, mostly people trying to avoid the Kansas City assignment; they pleaded that it was an out-of-the way place without much intrinsic interest, not like Istanbul, Paris, or even Los Angeles. But it was a good central location as long as the Bubble was limited in range to about 1500 kilometers—superior to Chicago, which would have pleased some operators better as a base. The result of all the maneuvering was that only the operators with the most interest in the job itself went to Kansas City, those who got pleasure from time viewing almost to the exclusion of outside concerns. We prided ourselves on being the best, the cream. Alison, Myra, and I, and half a dozen others.

There was no lack of work for us, certainly. Pre-Columbian culture studies swept up most of the viewing slots at first, though Vanderbilt University did put in a big, successful bid for the Civil War period as soon as the office was announced. Having a relatively small grant, Holland had been forced to wait a long time for his opportunity to study Wyatt Earp.

On the day after I watched Alison’s first session with Holland, the holos appeared in our apartment. It was a common practice among operators to surround themselves with pictures of the current assignment—people, genre scenes, anything typical of the period, anything attractive to the eye. We kept in the mood of the assignment that way, kept our minds working on it even in off-duty hours. In some ways, we were never off duty, because there were always calculations to be made, procedures to be planned, suggestions to be formulated. Few of the scholars who used the Bubble understood its techniques or its limitations, nor did they often even know exactly what they wanted from it. Part of the Bubble operator’s job was to show them what could be discovered with the device. Too many users wanted to know why things happened in addition to the events themselves. And they fumed that they couldn’t walk right into the Bubble and ask questions of the people there. “Anthropology without informants” was what one of my clients called it—valuable, of course, but not enough for some researchers. Two clients out of three would moan that they wished the company sold time travel instead of time viewing.

Myself, I was glad enough that it was just viewing. The complexities of actually going to the past made my mind spin every time I considered them. I was happy to sit at the console, safe in the world I understood, guiding people through the museum of the past, where everything was locked away behind the invisible walls of the Bubble, tamper-proof and secure.

Not all of the operators agreed with me, of course. Some of them surrounded themselves with so many holos of the past that their homes seemed to be there instead of in the Twenty-first Century. Myra usually turned entire walls of her place into scenes from her current project—for example, endless vistas of the Great Plains, complete with buffalo herds and Indian villages. When we sat in her living room during that period, it was like being camped on the prairie. Other operators were less extreme, like Alison and me, with a few holos from the current project plus a few well-loved shots from previous ones. In my bedroom there was a full-length, life-sized portrait of Augustus Caesar standing in the Forum, just as I had seen him that first time. Alison’s room had a dragon-prowed Viking ship, one-quarter size, but still large enough to span an entire wall, and the waves beneath it lapped gently at its wooden sides; she said the motion soothed her when she was thinking.

The day after her first meeting with Holland, she put up holos of the main street of Ellsworth and of Earp, Whitney, Logan, the Thompsons—almost everyone we had seen in the Bubble, some full body shots, some just faces. She put them in her own room, scattered them on the three walls not occupied by the dragon ship; we had agreed when we moved in together that we would each fill our rooms with whatever we wanted and that the common rooms—living room, dining room, kitchen—would be decorated by consultation. The result of that was that our bedrooms were crowded with memorabilia but the other three rooms held only furniture and drapes and a few music tapes that we both liked.

From the doorway, I looked around her walls. “They mostly seem to need baths,” I said.

She nodded, still adjusting placement of the pictures. “Except Earp and Whitney. And Logan, I think—he bathes frequently, but smithing is dirty work. Lots of soot.”

I glanced at Whitney’s face. “I suppose you won’t be seeing much more of the sheriff.” I pointed at him.

“Some,” she said. “I’ve seen him die from two viewpoints already. Holland says we’ll try at least one more.”

“How many times can you watch a man be shot?”

“It’s Earp he’s interested in, not Whitney. He thinks by watching this scene closely enough, he’ll be able to figure out why Earp goes after Thompson in the face of all that opposition.” She grinned at me. “He wants to read the man’s mind.”

“I take it nobody knows why Earp did it.”

There are a couple of books, each with its own interpretation, but Holland says they’re both based on interviews with Earp when he was an old man. He suspects eighty-year-old Earp of either embroidery or forgetfulness.” She shrugged. “I don’t think he knew why he did it. He just did it. He was crazy.”

“Wyatt Earp crazy? The greatest legend of the West?” She started to step back to see the effect of her adjustment of the holos, and I eased myself behind her so that she ended up in my arms. I locked my hands over her navel. “What a cruel thing to think,” I murmured, nuzzling her neck.

“He has that penetrating look of madness in his eye,” she said. She covered my hands with her own. “He has restless eyes, as if he thinks someone might be after him.”

I chuckled against her hair. “That’s the piercing gaze of the lone scout you’re criticizing, you know.”

“And he’s thin—the nervous type that eats and eats but never gains weight. You saw the meal he ordered.”

“He’s the calmest person I ever saw. The way he faced that Thompson fellow, with the mob behind him. . . .”

“A suicidal impulse.” She ticked items off on her fingers, pressing one after the other against my hand. “Suicide prone. Paranoid. Megalomaniacal.”

“Megalomaniacal? How so?”

“No one but a megalomaniac would have thought he could face down all those armed men and get out alive.”

“That’s not consistent with the suicidal part of your diagnosis.”

She shrugged. “I’m looking at all the options.”

I had to laugh. “Have you discussed any of this with Dr. Holland?”

“No. I don’t think he’d want to hear it. Earp is his hero—pure, good, the epitome of courage. Sort of larger than life. And, anyway, why should I offer my theories? He’s not paying me for psychiatric services.” She turned her head to look at me sidelong. “Besides . . . an operator should always try to maintain a tranquil relationship with the client.”

“You think Dr. Holland would try to do something unpleasant if you told him you thought Earp was insane?”

She pivoted in my embrace and slid her arms up around my neck. “Who knows,” she replied. “I don’t know how crazy he is yet.”

“We’re all crazy somehow,” I said. “Me, for example—I’m crazy about you.”

“That’s good to know,” she whispered.

We spent the rest of that night in her bedroom, surrounded by Ellsworth, Kansas, and its incongruous partner, the Viking ship.

My own project of the period was as routine as any had ever been—the endless trek along the Oregon Trail. There were thousands of stories in those covered wagons, most of which I never saw completed, for they passed beyond range of our equipment at the Snake River in Idaho, just before the last leg of their journey. Still, I thought their history, in a dramatic sense, had been pretty well covered by a multitude of classic movies I had seen as a child. So I didn’t much mind it being cut short for me. My client, of course, didn’t see things that way, and she would be finishing her research in Los Angeles, where she could view the other end of the Trail.

I had been living with several holos of covered wagons, dusty mules, and poke-bonneted women for some time on the day that Alison installed her new pictures, and it was shortly after that that I decided to get rid of them and bring back some old favorites. I had steeped myself in the period long enough, I thought, that I no longer needed visual inspiration; I just knew what to do every day, almost without conscious effort. That was a common experience among operators during extended projects.

I dumped the holos and surrounded Augustus with other successes. There had been failures, of course—certain historical figures who could not be found no matter what I tried, leading me to believe that either they were entirely mythical or that my clients’ literary researches were less than perfect—but there were few operators who liked to keep records of that sort. Nothing was more frustrating, and more ulcer-making, than searching time and space for someone or something that wasn’t there.

The central office had those records, of course—and the failures would go before the upper echelons of the company during the semiannual employee evaluation. So far, though, no operator had ever been fired for lack of success. There were just too few of us to go around, and training was, at that time, too long and expensive a procedure to waste on anyone without considerable potential. The bad risks were weeded out early, and most operators had a strong sense of having found their life’s work. I know I did.

Not long after I got rid of my Oregon Trail holos, Alison added to her Earp collection. She and Holland had moved on to Wichita, and a new set of faces replaced the citizens of Ellsworth. Earp was more mature, I saw, but gaunt as ever, and I thought there were five pictures of him on the wall until Alison explained, that two were of his brothers Morgan and Virgil. Only someone who had seen them often, alive, in motion, could have told them apart.

I also recognized another face, though at first I couldn’t place it.

“Jimmy Logan, the blacksmith’s boy, remember?” said Alison. “He followed Earp to Witchita. Hero-worship, I think. Wants to be his deputy, but Earp says he’s too young.”

Logan looked older than before, had gained some weight, just enough to give him a mature physique. But he still had a boy’s face, and I could see why Earp had said what he did.

“One less new name to memorize,” Alison said, crossing her arms over her breasts. “Sometimes I suspect Holland can’t possibly have any living friends—his mind can’t have room for their names.”

I had to smile at her. “Maybe he has holos of his living friends on his walls, just to remind him of them.” She laughed.

With the lights low, we couldn’t see all those eyes looking down at us. When I was new at time viewing, that had made me feel strange—dead people watching my sleep. Now, it was nothing, and I slept well beneath them, perhaps better than if the walls had been bare. There was a kind of childish security in knowing that the shadows in the room held only familiar things. I even dreamed about my holos, nights spent as my days were, perhaps even a touch more vividly. In my dreams I was often inside the Bubble instead of sitting at the console. Alison would smile when I told her that. She said she didn’t dream about that sort of thing at all.

About a week after she and Holland began work on Wichita, the Viking ship vanished from the fourth wall, replaced by more shots of people. Alison’s room was crowded with pictures now, every available centimeter, a kaleidoscope of pictures. She made no attempt at pattern, or at any illusion of reality; they were just scattered randomly, like a crowd pressing close to the bed. Her room had become a scrapbook.

Then she started spending her independent time in the period.

Most operators ran uninterrupted six-hour shifts, each trio assigned to a console arranging its own flexible schedule. The remaining time was, theoretically, reserved for maintenance, but in practice the machines rarely needed more than brief routine servicing. That left a couple of extra hours per day on each console. The company could have sold that time, of course, no matter how inconveniently placed the slots were, but early in its history it established a different policy: operators were required to sign up for those odd hours, every operator taking at least one of those slots every week, to practice search techniques. In the Kansas City Center, at least, no one had to be told to take a turn in independent study, and we all had pet private projects going that were important only to us. The company oversaw it all but generally looked the other way when an operator used independent time to make certain kinds of profit in the outside world. More than one operator had earned a minor scholarly reputation on independent work; even I had published a paper on the Indian Wars. Others just played at their consoles, watching famous sporting events or entertainments of the past. In the Paris office, according to Alison, the most popular independent study was viewing the great Elizabethan plays as they had been originally performed, with Shakespeare himself sometimes appearing onstage. Some of us would have liked to view more recent events, the great baseball and football games, and the Olympics of the middle and late Twentieth Century—but the Bubble failed us there. The 93.675 years immediately before our own were closed to the Bubble, too near for focus. That was an explanation the Company had to give out tiresomely often, especially to the various governments of the world, which wanted to spy on each other from the vantage of yesterday.

I really didn’t mind the loss of ninety-three-odd years. Like most operators, I was fascinated by the remote past, by the worlds that were so different from the one that had encompassed my life before I discovered the company. There was no single period that drew me; I moved from one to another as whim took me—which was typical. Ordinarily, an operator chose an area of independent study because of something he had seen during his regular work, something at a tangent to the client’s desires but intriguing to the operator.

As Alison had chosen the period of Earp.

I became aware of her new interest when she signed a tape out of records and brought it home to project in her room. Projection required that she move a wall of holos, and for that she requested my help. I thought it was amusing that we didn’t stack the holos but moved them to the ceiling, where she could see them from the bed. I had always thought of the ceiling as sacred blank territory, but Alison didn’t want to discard any of the pictures. She asked me if I wanted to view the tape, knowing that I would demur. I rarely viewed tapes myself, only when necessary for the job, because their reality was so much less than that in the Bubble; they were not two-dimensional, but they seemed flat to me, and dead as the past really was. I left her there, propped on a mound of pillows on the bed, and I went out to the living room to listen to a little music.

She didn’t come out that evening and didn’t invite me in. I never knew when she stopped viewing the tape. Rather than disturb her, I went to bed in my own room, alone. We had an agreement about that, too—we respected each other’s privacy.

She brought another tape home the following evening. And the one after that. She said they related to Holland’s investigations, that she was doing extra preparation for some difficult searches. Alison had always been diligent that way. She came back to my bed on the fourth night, and I was certainly glad to welcome her; I decided that she was working just a little too hard on Dr. Holland’s project—a little too hard for my taste. But I didn’t say anything. It was her job, she loved it, and this project wouldn’t last forever.

Holland’s grant had to run out someday.

So for a time I didn’t see much of Alison, though we shared the apartment and similar work schedules. But when I did see her, it was wonderful. fresh, as if we had just discovered each other, as if she were trying to make up for having so little time for me. There was an extra measure of passion in her lovemaking, and of unpredictability, for I would never know when she was going to creep into my bed in the middle of the night—after staying up that long—and wake me in the best possible way. It was fresh, and frustrating, and a little silly, and at last I tired of it and found myself looking forward impatiently to a return to the old, settled relationship.

But I saw less and less of her, and what I did see began to be moody and morose, as if there were something nagging at her. I thought I recognized those symptoms—the signs of a project going sour, the goals not realized, seeming farther and farther away every day, or completely unrealizable. Better, I decided, not to discuss that possibility with her; I knew how oppressive such discussions could be. I saw Holland a couple of times in the corridors of the company building, and he seemed buoyant. He hardly noticed me, probably didn’t recall me from that first day. The contrast between his and Alison’s attitudes didn’t seem odd to me; often the operator was the first to suspect that something was going bad, while the client was still wrapped up in evaluating earlier achievements.

Then her wardrobe changed.

Alison had never been much interested in clothes. Normally she wore jeans and a tee shirt and sneakers just this side of worn out. Now she traded the jeans for dark slacks, the tee shirt for man-cut long-sleeved white, the sneakers for boots. It was an unfamiliar style, not particularly attractive, except that Alison was wearing it. She never needed beautiful clothes in order to look beautiful. I didn’t care that she wore something different. Except that it was . . . different. The change in wardrobe seemed to betoken some other change in her. She was . . . brisker, somehow. With me, at least. She didn’t seem to have any time at all these days. There was pressure on her, of Holland’s making or her own, I couldn’t be sure which. Perhaps, I thought, his grant was running out and he was transmitting the pressure he was feeling to her. I found myself hoping that his grant would run out very soon.

Then she stayed away from our apartment all night.

It had happened before, always work. There was no reason for me to think it was anything else this time. When I saw her the next day, she didn’t talk about it. She was in too much of a rush.

I hadn’t wanted to believe it, but I couldn’t resist the feeling that something was coming between us. The way Holland looked at me in the corridor, that look of complete disinterest . . . could it have been him? The new wardrobe nagged at my mind. Holland didn’t dress that way, of course; he was just a typical, somewhat conservative academic type, subdued colors and patterns, his clothing ten or fifteen years behind the current fashions in their cut. But Earp dressed that way, and other men of the period—Sunday clothes, they called them, clothes of the leisure time. Alison wouldn’t wear a hoop skirt and a poke bonnet, of course, but she might immerse herself in the masculine fashions of the day to be more in harmony with Holland’s fascination.

I told myself not to be jealous. Holland was considerably older than Alison and I and, to my eyes, not particularly attractive. I didn’t know if he was attached to someone else. But he wasn’t a Kansas City resident, and so he would have to leave eventually. If it was Holland indeed, I could weather that. Alison and I had too much going for us for any outsider to pry us apart. I told myself that when she was out a second night, when I had lost track of how many nights it had been since we had made love.

I went shopping for myself. I figured that two could play this game, and so I bought myself a pair of dark slacks and some boots and a soft white shirt of the proper style. I even bought a string tie and did it up the way Earp did his. And then I checked at records to see when Alison was scheduled for her next independent stint; I was going to surprise her with my new outfit and see if I could get a laugh out of her. We had always laughed together, before Holland.

Records revealed that she had been spending an unusual amount of time in independent work. She had traded with the other operators assigned to her console, amassed a considerable number of extra hours, and spent them all viewing the period between 1873 and 1885. She had also signed out tapes of everything she had viewed independently and had claimed a projection room for replaying them. There were no records of how often she had used the projection room, just that she had access to it full-time. I thought about those rooms, with their wide, plush couches—perfect for meeting close friends. I wondered if she had viewed any of the tapes in that room, or if she had done something else entirely there.

I had always been honest with Alison. I had thought she would be honest with me. I was sure there was something wrong now between us. And I wanted to bridge the gap before it became too wide. I didn’t want to lose Alison. I didn’t think I had done anything that would cause her to stop loving me. But maybe I hadn’t done enough to keep her wanting to love me. All I could think of was Holland. What did he have to offer that was better? How could he possibly love her more than I did? He hardly knew her. I went to the door of her projection room when she should have been there. It was locked. Somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to ring the call bell. It wouldn’t have been fair to disturb whatever she was doing in there. I stood by the door awhile, hoping she would come out on her own, hoping someone would come out, but at last I gave up. I told myself I was too hungry to wait for her. But when I got to the restaurant, everything on the menu looked like dust; I could hardly choke down the light salad that was all I ordered.

Finally, she changed shifts. We had always arranged our shifts to more or less coincide, since the first day we decided to live together. No—before that, back when we first realized that we had something special. Each of us had settled into an arrangement with the other two operators of our consoles, and except for a few brief, temporary readjustments, everyone had been satisfied. Now I found a note taped to my bedroom door:

MYRA IS ON A NEW PROJECT AND HAS ASKED ME TO SWITCH SHIFTS WITH HER FOR THE DURATION.

LOVE, ALISON

I stared at the word LOVE. In spite of its presence, the note felt cold and impersonal. In other days, she would have told me herself, in bed, in an apologetic tone. She and Myra were very close, they did each other favors often. Myra always had a good reason for asking Alison to take her shift. It never lasted long. But . . . for the duration?

Because Alison obviously didn’t want to discuss the matter with me in person, I called Myra—she was at home at the same times I was now, while Alison was not.

“You can’t imagine how glad I was to get rid of that old prune!” she said almost as soon as I could say hello. “She’s taking a vacation, and with any luck, I won’t be available when she comes back, and she’ll have to drive another operator crazy!”

“Yes,” I said. “I’d heard from Alison that you had a new project. Some problem with the scheduling, wasn’t there? Was it a local academic with a teaching conflict?”

Myra’s expression was puzzled. “No, just the usual out-of-towner. From Dallas this time. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I was wondering . . . why you switched shifts with Alison.”

She frowned a little. “Why, that was Alison’s idea. She did it to stay in synch with you, didn’t she?”

“I haven’t changed.”

“No?”

“No.”

Her eyebrows rose slowly. “Are you and Alison . . . having problems?”

I said, “I don’t know. How long is your new project going to last?”

“Awhile. A few weeks maybe. It doesn’t look like anything monumental. Maybe she just wants a change. A vacation.”

“From me?”

“Well, any relationship can get. . . .” She shrugged. “Claustrophobic.” She leaned forward. “Is she talking about moving out?”

“She isn’t talking at all. I haven’t seen her in days.”

“Maybe you should leave her alone for a while. Let her work through whatever it is that’s bothering her.”

“I don’t think I have a choice on that. We may be living in the same apartment, but we don’t seem to be living in the same world any more.”

“Oh, Barry . . . I’m sorry.” She spread her hands in helplessness. “Maybe it’s just the job. She’s been looking tired lately. Maybe she just doesn’t have the energy left for her private life. After her current project is over, you two should take a long vacation, get away from the company, from the Bubble, from the pressure. Just the two of you.”

“If it’s still the two of us by then.”

“Take it easy, Barry. Maybe it will all blow over, whatever it is.”

I tried to smile at her, but my lips felt very stiff. “I hope so,” I said. “Thanks, Myra. See you tomorrow.” I broke the connection, and her face vanished from the viewscreen, but I couldn’t get her expression of sympathy out of my mind. How did I look to her, I wondered, that provoked that expression? I went to the bathroom mirror and stared at myself for a while.

I hadn’t examined my own face so carefully in a long time; in the morning when I got ready for work, it was all business—the hair, the comb, the chin, the depilator. I never looked at my eyes. Now I saw they were bloodshot, as if I hadn’t slept well in a long time. For the rest, it could have been misery or anger; I felt them both lapping over me, fighting with each other for supremacy. I wanted to break the mirror. The apartment felt so empty with Alison gone. So cold. I stood before her door, that blank, familiar territory. We respected each other’s privacy; I knew it would not be locked; I knew Alison would never have dreamed that I might go in without her permission. I touched the smooth panel with the flat of my hand. What did I expect to find? The walls covered with pictures of Holland? Or everything packed up, ready to be removed, a trunk standing in the middle of the floor? Or . . . nothing—an empty room, already divested of all the individuality that was Alison?

I slid the panel aside. At first glance, the room appeared to be in its ordinary condition, much as I had seen it last, with holos on three walls and the ceiling, the fourth wall blank for projection. Scenes and people of the Classic West surrounded me, and Alison’s bed and belongings were in their usual places. She wasn’t moving out, at least. Then something began to nag at me and I turned slowly to take in all the pictures, to look at what they were, not just at the whole kaleidoscopic effect.

There was only one man on the walls of that room. In a hundred different poses, a hundred different sets of clothing, full body shots and portraits, profiles and frontal views, with mustache and clean-shaven, at a dozen different ages, but still, unmistakably, the same man. I knew him, I was sure of that, but it took me a few moments to place him. For me, he would never have stood out from a crowd, but I had seen him in the Bubble and I had seen him before on that wall. His name came at last—Jimmy Logan, the blacksmith’s boy, the one who hero-worshipped Wyatt Earp. In one of the holos, a full-length shot, life-sized, he appeared to be about thirty years old, and he wore a marshal’s star on his long-sleeved white shirt.

I sat down on the bed. In my periods of greatest devotion to Augustus Caesar, I had never been so immersed in him. It was overwhelming, stifling, claustrophobic. I lay back, and there he was on the ceiling, inescapable; he had his shirt off in the most central shot, hot sun pouring down on him, and the beads of sweat on his shoulders and chest glistened, giving him the appearance of being covered with oil. I rolled over, burying my face in her pillow to escape him. The pillow smelled faintly of her shampoo, and I wondered when the last time was that she had slept there. A glass half-full of water sat on the bedside table, the inside surface of the lower part covered with bubbles. Stale. Was it yesterday that she had drunk from that glass, or last week?

Behind the glass was a stack of tapes, coded with the company’s emblem. The recording dates were all recent. These, I thought, were what she had been spending some of her spare time with. I dimmed the overhead light and slipped one into her projector.

A dusty street materialized upon the blank wall. The sun was low, shadows long, few people walking anywhere in sight. The street looked vaguely familiar; it might have been Ellsworth, or any one of a hundred similar Western cowtowns of the period. I half expected to see Wyatt Earp stride through the field of view. Instead, Jimmy Logan entered it, Logan in his mid-twenties, I judged, walking with a sure stride down the street. The center of town was behind him. He was passing into a more residential sector, an area of clapboard houses surrounded by burnt-out gardens and white picket fences. He stopped to unlatch the gate at one of the houses, to step through it and latch it once more behind him. He hurried up the walk, climbed three steps and pulled the front door open without knocking. I guessed that it was his own house and he had come home for supper.

I swooped in behind him and found that more than supper was waiting inside for him. She was about his age, rather prim-looking in the tradition of the time, hair pulled back in a tight knot, dress high at the neck and long-sleeved, falling to the floor. Still, she was rather pretty and quite nicely built, and she gave him a very warm welcome. When her hand touched the back of his neck, I saw that she wore a wedding ring. They kissed for quite a long time, and the tape went on afterward, following lovingly close as they went into the bedroom and undressed each other and eased to the bed. From their intensity, I supposed that they hadn’t been married long. Alison had caught everything, had recorded an excellent piece of erotica. I found myself reacting very strongly to it.

And wondering how she reacted.

I scanned the other tapes at high speed. They were all different, yet all fundamentally alike. Not that they were all erotic, not overtly. A few just showed him moving, chopping wood, riding a horse, working in his father’s forge. Still, there was an erotic element to them all, a physical element. When I had seen the lot, I had a very fine awareness of his body, of the play of muscles, the style of walk and posture, the little habitual gestures. And I knew I would never again have any trouble recognizing him. If he had been alive, if he had walked into the company’s offices, I could have greeted him by name.

And I didn’t know who he was. I knew, of course, that he was Logan, but who was Logan? What was his place in history? Why was Alison so fascinated by him?

I put everything back as I had found it, smoothed the bed. When she came home . . . if she came home, she wouldn’t be able to tell I had breached her privacy. I felt guilty about doing it, but glad. Out in the living room, I put in a call to the Encyclopedia Britannica, requested all their information on James Logan of Ellsworth, Kansas, approximate birth year 1853. They had no listing for him. He wasn’t important, at least not that our contemporary culture knew. I thought that he must be important just to Dr. Frederick Holland.

So I waited until Alison was off shift and called Dr. Holland, taking a chance that he and she would not be together at his place. I was at work by then and didn’t know if Alison had gone home. Records gave me Holland’s number at the guest house. He was bright, polite, not rushed as if he had company. He didn’t seem to recognize my name or face.

“Just some checking on behalf of records. Dr. Holland,” I said. “We just want to confirm that some of your time has been devoted to an intensive study of one James Logan.”

Holland looked puzzled. “Don’t you people know what I’m studying?”

“We have a listing for Wyatt Earp, Dr. Holland, but you seem to have expanded your researches to include this other person.”

“Is that wrong? Is that not allowed? I thought the fee covered whatever researches I chose to make.”

“It does. Dr. Holland, it does. We only want to keep our records organized for purposes of cross-referencing. Someone else has requested materials on James Logan, and to avoid duplication of effort we would appreciate knowing how much of his life you intend to examine.”

Holland shook his head. “Very little,” he said. “If someone else is investigating him, they won’t profit by my studies. Who is it, anyway?”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Holland, but we can’t give out that information. Would you please tell me approximately how many hours of work you have spent or intend to spend on James Logan? An estimate.”

“Well, none on him per se. I suppose he’s appeared in an hour or two of my viewing so far, but just as a bystander. I don’t expect to see him at all in the future.”

“Thank you for your time, Dr. Holland. Sorry to have disturbed you.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be more help.”

I snapped off the connection.

Unless Holland was lying, Logan was Alison’s own project. Unless he was lying. Perhaps the lack of recognition was just a sham, and he knew perfectly well that I was Alison’s lover. Ex-lover? Still, I had called unexpectedly; he hadn’t had time to prepare camouflage for his reactions. And the more I saw of him, the less likely he seemed as a reasonable replacement for me. Of course, I couldn’t be objective on that. I was rapidly discovering that I couldn’t be objective on anything where Alison was concerned.

I had tried calling her during her off-shift, at work, at home. Her line had a block on my personal code; she wasn’t accepting my calls. It seemed absurd—we lived together, but I didn’t see her, couldn’t talk to her. Part of that was my own doing, and I decided the time had come to ring at the door of her projection room, even if it meant disturbing her privacy.

I traded shifts with one of my co-workers, putting myself back in synch with Alison. Now I had time to spend in trying to touch her. It took me quite a while to get up the courage to ring. I kept telling myself that the truth couldn’t possibly be worse than what I imagined.

I rang.

At first there was no answer, and I thought perhaps she wasn’t inside; like every room of the building, it was totally soundproofed. So I couldn’t tell if it was occupied by pressing my ear against the panel, though I did that anyway. I rang again. And as I waited, while the occasional company personnel passed by and looked at me curiously, I began to think that she was inside all right, watching erotic tapes with Holland. I hadn’t bothered to check on him. And then I didn’t care. I rang again, a long, long ring, my finger pressed against the call button until the nail reddened.

The door opened.

Alison wore her new clothes, or perhaps they were her only clothes now. The soft white shirt, the dark trousers, the boots made her look like someone else, someone I didn’t know. She wore her hair tied back now, too, with a thin ribbon, not loose about her shoulders any more.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.” She leaned against the door, as if to block my way inside and my view of it.

“May. I come in?”

“Why?” she said.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you too much.”

“Some,” she said.

“I’d like to talk to you. Please. If not now . . . then maybe I can make an appointment?” I tried to smile at that suggestion, but my mouth didn’t want to cooperate.

She sighed heavily. “All right. Come in.” She stood aside, holding the door with both hands, like a shield.

There was no one else in the room. It was a very bare little room, with minimum comforts. A thick rug. A couch in the center of the floor. A four-way projector, for displaying tapes on all the walls simultaneously. Alison walked to one end of the couch and stood there, waiting for me.

“Sit down,” she said.

I sat, but she remained standing, I thought so that she could go back to the door any time she wanted and hold it open for my exit.

“Well?” she said.

I tried to smile again, but the effort was too much for me. I patted the cushion beside me. “Come here?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have time for a long discussion.”

I said, “Alison, what’s wrong?”

“I’m just busy.”

I leaned toward her. “You know what I mean. What’s wrong with us? What’s happened?”

She half turned away, looked down at the carpet. “Let it go, Barry. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Let it go?” I stood up, took a step and reached for her, but she backed off, just beyond my grasp. “Alison, I lovee you.”

She crossed her arms over her breasts. “Let’s not play tag, Barry. Just leave me alone.”

“Have you . . . changed your feelings about me?” The words caught in my throat, and I thought for a moment that they would choke me. Then I realized that the sensation was tears held back. I didn’t want to cry in front of her; my pride wouldn’t allow that.

“Do you want me to move out?” she said.

“No!”

“I don’t want to. It’s a lot of trouble.” She spoke so casually, so effortlessly, while for me every word was like pulling knives from my belly.

“Alison,” I began.

She walked over to the door and opened it for me, as I had known she would. “You’d better go. I’m very busy.”

I couldn’t move for a moment. Watching her walk—no, stride was the word to describe it—jarred me. Clothes, manner, even walk, this was a new Alison indeed. She didn’t even stand the way she used to. Her step was longer now, harder, though maybe that was a result of the hard high heels on those boots, like the boots that Earp and Logan and Whitney had worn, the boots that hammered so hard on wooden sidewalks. She walked like the men of Ellsworth, Kansas, those men whose natural habitat included dusty, unpaved streets and wide prairie pounded flat by the hooves of buffalo. And she stood as they did, legs wide, hips canted as if a pair of forty-fives rode on them.

Standing by the couch, I felt as though time itself had come between us, as if some strange avatar of a man dead a century had come out of the Bubble to stand in Alison’s place. I sagged. I, a mere mortal of the Twenty-first Century—what did I have in common with this creature from the past? I shook my head sharply. No, I told myself, this was just Alison, no matter how deeply she had immersed herself in vanished days. Perhaps, I thought, too deeply. I glanced sidelong at the projector, at the tapes racked in its holders. Four were in playing position; Alison had probably been running them one at a time, but I had only to touch a button to show them all simultaneously. A serious breach of operator etiquette.

“What’s been keeping you so busy?” I asked softly, and my finger stabbed the button.

“No!” shouted Alison. But it was too late. I saw what she had been seeing until she opened the door for me.

Four walls of Logan was too much for me. My head spun.

Logan in the dusty street, star on his chest, facing down a waiting gunman, tension evident in his straining stance. Logan with chest bared and running sweat in his father’s forge, muscles glistening with the ruddy light of the coals. Logan making love to his wife in the bed I had seen once before. Logan by a brook, lying on green grass, obviously far from Ellsworth, and with him someone other than his wife, laughing, holding her arms out to him.

Alison reached the projector then and punched the OFF button. “Get out,” she said, her face white with anger, her eyes hard. But she was so close as we both stood by the projector that I couldn’t help encircling her with my arms, pressing her against me. She turned her face away from my kiss and tried to push me away; for a moment I held her tight, my lips against her hair, and at least she smelled like the old Alison. She hadn’t changed her shampoo. She broke free. “Out,” she said, her hands making fists at her hips, and I could have sworn that if those forty-fives had been there she would have drawn on me. I had seen that kind of anger before, in the Bubble.

I didn’t move. “What’s going on, Alison?” I whispered. “What are you doing in here? Making tapes for public consumption? Or maybe just . . . for private?”

“What I do in here is none of your business.”

I shook my head slowly. “What have I done, Alison? We used to confide in each other. We used to trust each other. We used to . . . love each other.”

“I don’t love you any more,” she said. “Now leave me alone.”

The words were like bricks dropping on my head, but instead of being beaten down, I felt myself drawing the strength of fury from them. “Who is it then?” I shouted. “Who is it? Holland?”

“No, it isn’t Holland. It isn’t anyone. Now will you leave before everybody on the floor comes running to see what the shouting’s about?” She pointed peremptorily toward the door.

I went to the door, but I kicked it shut instead of going out. “He isn’t worth it,” I said, turning back to her, my voice a bit more under control. “He’ll bore you out of your mind!”

“I told you I’m not interested in Holland,” she said. “And I’m not interested in continuing this conversation.”

“Who, then?” I demanded. “Who are you making these tapes for? Who are you going to enjoy these choice bits of erotica with? Is it someone I know?”

“It isn’t anyone,” said Alison. “And even if it were, you have no right to ask who.”

“I have the right to know who the competition is. I have a right to know what he’s doing for you that I haven’t done.”

She turned away. “Go home, Barry. It’s over, that’s all. Since you feel this way, I’ll move out as soon as I can find a new place.”

“I don’t want you to move out, Alison!”

“Well, what do you want?”

“I want . . . to understand.” I took a step toward her and held my hands out, pleading. “What have I done wrong?”

She sighed. “Nothing, Barry. Nothing at all. I’m just . . . not interested any more. You’re going to have to accept that.”

“Then what are you interested in?” I looked at the projector. “This? Watching dead people make love? When you can have someone live and warm?”

“I’d rather not discuss it.”

“What kind of replacement is that for me? Am I so . . . repulsive?

“You’re not repulsive, Barry.”

I eased up behind her, touched her shoulders tentatively. “I’ve changed my schedule, Alison; we’re back in synch. Why don’t we go out for dinner and then home? Or whatever you want. I’ll do whatever you want. Anything.” I squeezed her shoulders with stiff fingers, trying to be gentle, knowing that I was too tense to be so. “Come home, darling. Please come home.”

She shook her head.

“I’ll wait for you, till you’re finished with whatever it is that you’re doing. You can’t stay here around the clock. You’ve got to eat, to sleep. It’s all so much more pleasant with a warm body nearby. I won’t even talk if you don’t want me to.”

Again, she shook her head.

“Alison, please.”

“Barry,” she said quietly, “I would rather stay here with him than go anywhere with you.”

“With him? Who?”

“Jim Logan.”

I glanced at the projector. “You’d rather watch a dead man than spend any time with me.”

“Please don’t take it as an insult.”

“No?” I swung her around to face me. “How else can I take it?”

“He’s fresh, Barry. He’s different. He fascinates me.”

“I can see that.”

“I can watch him for hours. He’s struggling to move from one world to another. His father wants him to be a blacksmith, but he wants to be a peace officer. He has a very strong sense of right and wrong. And courage. Barry, I’ve never seen such courage.”

“And his body isn’t bad, either,” I said. “Which do you watch more—the body or the courage?”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. He fulfills my highest expectations. I couldn’t expect more from a human being than I see in him.”

“There was Earp.”

She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “Earp wasn’t the wonderful person legend would have him.”

“And this guy is wonderful. It just makes you go all warm inside to watch him be so terrific.”

She pushed away from me. “I knew I couldn’t discuss it with you.”

I stared at her for a long moment. At last I said, “Alison, do you have a crush on this guy?”

She stared back at me, her lips a thin, white line. “Don’t be silly,” she said.

I looked her up and down, slowly, and everything I had seen and heard since she opened the door began to make a sort of bizarre sense to me. “I don’t think I’m being silly,” I said. “I think you’re acting like a teenager in love with an entertainment idol. Only this . . . this one isn’t even accessible through the stage door. You’ll never touch him, Alison. You’ll never even get close enough to find out if he has bad breath.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“Then tell me who’s really taking up your time. Tell me that I’m wrong, that it’s a live person edging me out. I’d rather believe that, Alison.”

“Barry, you’re wrong on both counts. Look—you have your hobbies, your favorite historical people. I remember very clearly all those stories you used to tell about Augustus. I didn’t accuse you of having a crush on him.”

“This is different! I didn’t trade time with my fellow operators to spend all my waking hours following his life. I didn’t tape his orgies for later replay. I didn’t wear a toga.”

“So I traded a few hours; so what?” Her brows knit. “You’ve been checking up on me?”

I nodded. “I’m fascinated by you, Alison.”

“I don’t think I care for that level of curiosity.”

“I missed you. I was jealous. Isn’t it understandable?”

She strode to the projector, pulled out one of the four tapes and inserted a replacement from the stack in one of the holders. She hit the ON button, and Logan flashed onto one of the walls, life-sized, standing spraddle-legged on the empty prairie, one hand raised before him holding a gun. He was shooting slow and steady at something—a target, I guessed, beyond the edge of the picture. He wore no hat, and a sharp wind ruffled his hair, his shirt collar. He made a striking figure against the endless expanse of prairie and cloudless sky.

“All right,” said Alison, not looking at me but at the image on the wall. “There’s your competition. Now get out of here. Or I’ll call for help and have you thrown out. I signed out this room, and you haven’t any right in it without my approval.”

“Alison,” I said. This is all wrong.”

“I’ll be out of the apartment as soon as I can manage it.”

“You don’t have to move. I want you to stay.”

“I don’t want to stay,” she said.

“Alison.. .he’s dead. He’s dust.”

“Get out!”

I felt my whole body slump, my legs carry me toward the door without any conscious volition on my part. I touched the panel with my fist before opening it. “I love you,” I said. “I’ll wait this thing out.”

“Goodbye.”

I closed the door softly behind me, leaned against the wall beside it. Then I just slid down to the floor and sat with my knees up, my head pillowed on my arms, and I wept. I didn’t care who saw me. Several people passed in the ensuing minutes, most of them operators I had known for years, and each one of them asked if I needed any help. I did, but none they could give. At last I got tired of hearing their offers and staggered away. I locked myself in a bathroom for a while, and eventually I was empty enough to go home.

Alison moved out three days later. I wasn’t home when it happened; she took a day off while I was on shift, and she cleaned her room out so thoroughly that it looked as if no one had ever lived there. When I got home I discovered her bedroom door ajar and went in and stood in the bare room for a time, not thinking anything at all. It was like our relationship had never been. Even the music collection, when I looked through it later to put something on the system, was missing the recordings she had selected. As I sat and listened to one of my own choices—I didn’t really know which one—I couldn’t help wondering if Holland had been angry at missing a day with the Bubble.

The next afternoon, Myra was sympathetic, everyone was sympathetic, though not all were verbal about it. Everyone knew that Alison had left me. But Myra assured me that she hadn’t moved in with anyone else; she had taken a small place near the company building. I guessed that Myra thought she was being kind to me, to tell me that, and I didn’t have the heart to explain that I would have been happier the other way, any other way.

I called Alison a couple of times in the following weeks, after Myra gave me her number, but her line was blocked to my code as before. I didn’t know what I would say anyway; I just wanted to see her face. I didn’t see her at work at all, though she was still there. I wondered briefly if her next step would be to transfer to another office, but then I realized that only in Kansas City could she watch Logan—he was out of range anywhere else. I was assuming, of course, that he spent his whole life in Kansas. After a while I thought she might transfer when she had tracked his life to some point where he moved to another base’s range. Earp had done it, gone to California eventually, as Holland would have to do if he wanted to follow his quarry all the way.

I realized I didn’t know very much about Logan. But Alison’s interest in him was mesmeric. I wanted to know. I wanted to understand her fixation. So in my independent time I began to study him. If the records people thought it was strange that two operators were spending a lot of time in the same milieu, they never said anything, even when I, like Alison, traded away my future independent time to other operators willing to give up their present allotments.

I can’t say I grew fond of him, though his wife was very pretty. The other woman I had seen him with on Alison’s tape turned out to be a second wife, acquired after the first one died in childbirth. He was a very moral person, this Logan—never gambled, rarely drank, sent his children to Sunday school. His contemporaries considered him a pillar of the community. He moved back to Ellsworth soon after Earp left Wichita for Dodge, becoming its marshal in 1876. The town was past its days of glory then, but still a rowdy place, and there was plenty of work for a man with a fast gun hand and more courage than I could comprehend. I didn’t compare to him there. I had seen a lot of guns pointed in my direction in the Bubble, and my mouth had gone dry at every one of them, though the bullets couldn’t touch me; I probably would have fainted at the same sight in reality. Or at best, frozen. I had the wrong reactions to be a frontier gun-fighter. I knew she compared me to him and found me lacking. But how well would James Logan function in the Kansas City of the Twenty-First Century, where the skills he had spent so many years honing would be useless? He wouldn’t even be able to function as a contemporary law officer now that the police no longer carried guns.

I worked forward through Logan’s life, watched his children grow, watched the trees that shaded his white clapboard house rise up and up till the street beneath them was moist with shade instead of dusty in the summer. Ellsworth aged, too, softened, settled down to quiet anonymity. In 1889 he and the family moved west to Colorado, where the town of Lamar needed a marshal. Life was more exciting for him there. He seemed to thrive on excitement, to be restless when things were quiet.

And then, he disappeared.

The standard procedure for a quick Bubble survey of the life of a historical figure involved a delicate and almost intuitive use of the device. The operator had to guess where people were going, how long they would be there, when they would return. The operator had to skim through events at a speed that made them virtually incomprehensible to the layman, halting the process by some instinct that sensed significance. It took a long time to develop that instinct, but every good operator had it. I established my baselines immediately—the house Logan lived in, the marshals office. I saw him pass in and out of them like a wraith, almost insubstantial against the long-lasting solidity of the walls and furnishings. I could run through the days of his life in the minutes of my own. Sometimes I lost track of him and had to retrace laboriously—when he escorted a prisoner to the next state, when he took a posse out after stage robbers, whenever he left the town for an extended period of time. Then, the process of following him had to slow enormously, and sometimes I didn’t bother, merely returning to the house, trusting that he would come back there eventually and I could take him up again.

I did that this time. I didn’t know why he vanished, but I stationed my view in the bedroom, sure that he would return to the room where his wife slept fitfully every night he was away.

He didn’t.

After going through a dozen stages of worry, his wife persuaded the mayor to send a search party out for him—which was when I learned that he had gone to check on some rumors of cattle rustling among outlying ranches. I backtracked to the day he left and followed him.

I watched him die.

At that point I had spent months on Logan, and I had had enough. Alison was right about him, completely right. I could see how attractive he was—charming, handsome, with all the qualities that his era valued. And in addition there was that touch of sadness about him, especially after he lost his first wife—just a touch of vulnerability to make the rest all that more endearing. And I was tired of watching such a paragon.

Alison, however, was not. Records showed that her use of the Bubble was still as heavy as ever in the period between 1873 and 1885. She kept returning to certain time segments, replaying them. She could have taped them, of course, probably had, but I could easily understand her desire to see them in the Bubble instead—the near-reality of the Bubble. She was selecting from his life, the high points, the cream. But not after 1885.

Out of curiosity, I tuned in the last 1885 date myself. That turned out to be the day that Logan was shot by a drunken cowboy, shot from behind, from cover—a practice that occurred more often than admirers of the Classic West would have liked to believe. It was not a serious wound by modern standards, but in a world without antibiotics it came close to claiming his life. He was bedridden for a long time, but he recovered well under his wife’s diligent care.

She was avoiding the shooting, the period of convalescence, the life afterward. Even though that life wasn’t very different from the one he had led before. He hadn’t let the shooting faze him.

I thought . . . maybe . . . he had come too close to death for her taste—his mortality had suddenly become too real. And I thought, too, that maybe now I had a way to pull her away from him and back to me. One last attempt, I told myself, now that she’d had some time to herself. I was hoping that, perhaps, she was beginning to get lonely for someone real. She still lived alone, and according to Myra, there was no one in her life. No one, at least, but Holland, whose grant had been renewed because of Alison’s excellent work. I hated Holland by that time because he was seeing her, even if in a professional capacity. Holland; unattractive as he looked to me, he was still real and available for whenever she wanted reality. And Alison, even the new strange Alison, must have provoked some kind of reaction in him. Unless he was as fixated on Earp as she was on Logan. It was possible. I no longer knew what to believe, what to scoff at. Even my own clients seemed to have unnatural interests in their subjects. I found myself in a mental prison, and I had to escape somehow, and take Alison with me.

I taped about twenty minutes of James Logan, and with that tape I went to Alison’s apartment. She had given up on the projection room after moving out of our place; she didn’t need that extreme of privacy any more, didn’t have to concern herself with the annoyance of encountering me in the kitchen or living room at home. I knew her door wouldn’t respond to my code, though I tried it anyway. And I knew she wasn’t there, but she was due soon, her shift having just ended. I waited for her, waited a long time. She must have gone someplace else before coming home, perhaps to dinner. I waited. She arrived at last, alone as I expected, alone for an evening with him.

She saw me when she stepped out of the elevator. She stood stock still and stared at me.

“Hello, Alison,” I said. “It’s been . . . a long time.”

“Whatever you want,” she said, “I haven’t got it.”

I shook my head. “I have something to show you.”

“Another time, Barry. Catch me at work.” I blocked her way to the door, but she elbowed me aside—harder than necessary—to open it.

“Please let me come in, Alison. It won’t take long. Just a few minutes.”

“I’m very tired,” she said. “I’m going to take a bath and go to bed. I don’t want any company.” She stepped across the threshold, turned, and started to slide the portal shut in my face.

I leaned into the opening, blocking the door’s closure. “Please.”

“I don’t want to see you, Barry. Now, go away or I’ll call the police.”

“Oh, Alison, it can’t be that bad between us.”

She looked at me rather sadly. “I don’t know what you expect me to do, Barry. I’m really sorry, but it’s all over. Why can’t you understand that?”

I said, “Alison, have you changed so much . . .?”

“These things happen all the time. Look at how many men Myra has run through.”

“Myra is Myra, and you’re you.”

“And you’re you, and I’ve had enough of it. Barry, don’t try to recapture something that’s gone. Can’t we part friends? Can’t we just . . . part?”

I put one hand on the door. “You’re not being very friendly, Alison.”

“You’re being pushy.”

“I haven’t bothered you lately.”

“You’ve tried to call.”

“Why not? I’m still interested.”

“And I’m not. So why don’t you go home and get a good night’s sleep instead of standing in my doorway?”

I pulled the tape out of my pocket, held it up. “I have something to show you. It won’t take long.”

She sighed, shifted her weight from one leg to the other and put one hand on her hip. “How long? That’s a two-hour tape.”

“Not full,” I said, “maybe fifteen minutes. Twenty at most.”

“Of what?”

“You have to see it.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ll keep bothering you until you do.”

“There are ways of dealing with that kind of harassment, Barry.”

“Just view the tape. After that . . . I’ll let the next move be up to you.”

“It’s not going to change my mind. I don’t care what it is.”

“Afterward . . . if you still want me to leave, I’ll go. I promise.”

“You’re betting a lot on this tape,” she said, eying it suspiciously. “What is it?”

“You can find out right now.”

She pursed her lips, then sighed so heavily that her shoulders heaved. She stepped aside. “All right. Come in. But I’m just doing this because you promised. I trust you, Barry—I trust you’ll keep that promise. If you don’t. . . .”

“I will.”

This was Alison’s apartment, no compromise with another human being; as soon as I entered, my eyes were assaulted with Logan—Logan on the living room walls, Logan visible through the bedroom door, even in the kitchen. Alison went into the bedroom to fetch the projector, which she placed on a low table beside the living room sofa.

“You sit there,” she said, indicating the sofa. She seated herself in a chair some distance away. “You can project over here.” She pointed to the wall facing the chair, the only wall with a large blank space.

I nodded, slipped the tape into the slot and flicked the machine on.

I heard her sharply indrawn breath as Logan bloomed into view; he was on horseback, riding among rolling hills near a wide river. He was heading westward, and beyond him we could see the lowering sun above mountains purple with distance.

Alison gripped the arms of her chair with white-knuckled fingers. “What is this?” she demanded.

“You said you’d watch.”

She pushed herself deeper into the chair, and I could see the flexion of her jaw where the teeth were grinding. “All right,” she murmured. “All right.”

As Logan topped the next rise, we were behind him and saw what he saw—a cabin set well back from the river. A thin plume of smoke drifted from the chimney. Logan rode down to it, tethered his horse at the rail before the front porch, climbed the two steps to the door and knocked loudly. The panel swung open, and he entered, with us at his back. He was hardly a pace past the threshold when someone who had been concealed to one side of the aperture struck him over the head with a club. He fell without a sound and lay still upon the floor. The two men—the assailant and the one who had opened the door—picked him up by the shoulders and the heels and carried him outside. There, they draped him across his horse, and while one of them led the animal, the other steadied the unconscious body in the saddle. They walked toward the river.

I watched Alison. She was tense, but she never spared a glance for me; once she had begun to concentrate on Logan, she didn’t seem to notice anything else. Her eyes were wide, staring, and her expression was stark.

At the riverbank, the two men pulled Logan’s limp body from the horse, and between them they hauled it into the stream until the brisk current swirled about their waists. Then they held his head underwater for a long, long time before letting go of him. He sank.

The rest of the tape was disjointed, jumping forward in time, skimming the surface of the river until the body washed ashore, bloated, scarcely recognizable. In fast motion we watched it decompose, watched buzzards pick the carcass, watched the skeleton separate into a scatter of bones as the last ligaments gave way. Dust alternated with snow in covering the remains, and before the tape ended they had disappeared from view.

Alison stood up when it was over, when the wall was blank once more. “Get out,” she said in a low, tight voice.

I looked at her for a long moment, looked at the white face and wide eyes, at the fists working convulsively at her sides. “Don’t you see? I said softly. “He’s dead. He’s dust. Before you were born he was dust. If you love a man like that, you might as well be dead yourself.”

She reached the projector in two strides, pulled the tape out and dashed it against the floor. “Get out of here!” she shouted.

I tried to pull her into my arms; but she struggled. “Alison, you’re warm and alive! How can you waste yourself on him?”

She glared up into my face, her fingers curling into my shirt front till the fabric cut into the back of my neck. “Murderer!” she said. “Murderer!” And then she yanked me sideways, and suddenly we were on the floor, rolling over and over, and she was all nails and sharp knees and kicking feet. She went for my eyes, my throat, my groin, but I twisted and freed myself somehow, staggered to my feet. I felt my face bleeding, and the numb places scattered over my body where bruises would rise soon.

“Alison,” I gasped, “time killed him, not me!”

She lay on the floor, her fists striking the rug in a slow, steady beat. “Murderer,” she moaned. She turned her head gradually, till her tear-streaked face was visible. Her eyes seemed to look past me, unfocused. “Get out before I kill you.” There were no tears in her voice, but there was something that chilled me.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go. But I want you to know that I love you. I did this today because I love you. I hope . . . someday you’ll understand that.”

She was still beating on the rug when I left.

For three days I nursed my bruises, calling in sick to work. Finally, I had to go in, with a spray bandage covering the gashes on my cheeks. My client was sympathetic when I explained that I had fallen down a flight of stairs. Some of my fellow operators looked at me curiously, but none made any comment; they were much too engrossed in a more vital topic of conversation: Dr. Frederick Holland. As I came off shift, word of his complaints was buzzing through records. A crowd of workers was gathered about the counter there, discussing him. Myra, who was due on shift in a couple of minutes, took me aside as soon as she saw me.

“Maybe you could sub for her, Barry—double shift until she comes back. You must know more about his project than anybody else here. He’s furious, threatening to sue, and the front office is giving us all a hard time.”

“Threatening to sue? What’s going on?”

“It’s Alison. She’s gone. She hasn’t come in to work for three days, and nobody knows where she is or when she’ll be back.”

“She didn’t call in?”

“She didn’t anything. Her line rings forever, nobody answers the door, and her mail is piling up.”

I clutched at her arms. “Maybe something’s wrong! Have you called the police?”

“The police?” She frowned. “You think it might be that bad?”

I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what crazy ideas could have gone through Alison’s mind after I left that day. “You’d better call them. They’ll have to break in. I’ll wait for them there. You want to come with me?”

“I can t. I’m on duty.”

“Isn’t this more important? She’s your friend.”

“You’ll be there,” she said. “What good will two of us do?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I let go of her. “I’ll let you know what we find out.” I started for the door at a run.

She called after me, “Will you take her shift?”

“Ask me later!”

She started to say something else, but the door cut her voice off as it slid shut behind me.

The police took their time. I paced the corridor outside her apartment for what seemed like hours before they finally arrived. They waved a warrant at me when I began babbling about the delay—“You don’t get these things in five minutes, you know,” they said. Then they asked for my company ID, to prove that I really was one of her co-workers, that I had some legitimate business witnessing the procedure. They asked me a lot of questions, too, and found out that she and I were former lovers and had had an argument three days before. One of them stood very close to me after that, while his partner rang the bell for a long time before unscrambling the lock.

We went inside. The apartment was just as I remembered it. The police did not seem to pay much attention to the pictures of Logan everywhere. They searched very thoroughly—rooms, closets, even under the bed. When they started on the bureau drawers and the kitchen cabinets, I began to wonder if they expected to find pieces of Alison hidden everywhere. But they found nothing—no blood, no sign of a struggle, and no Alison.

They were obviously disgusted, with the search and with me.

“Maybe she just went home to her mother,” one of them suggested.

“She’s an orphan,” I said.

“Well, maybe she has a favorite aunt.” They ushered me out and re-locked the door. “People have been known to leave home for a few days, you know, even without telling anybody where they were going. Maybe she just wanted to get away. Maybe from you. You work together, don’t you?”

I shook my head. “Just in the same building. We don’t see each other much any more.”

“Okay, maybe she just wanted to get out of that building, even out of the town. A little vacation. Why don’t you wait a few more days—she’ll probably turn up.” He looked at me hard then. “But don’t go anywhere we can’t find you easily until she comes back.

“I didn’t do anything to her,” I said.

“Looks like she did something to you.”

I nodded. “It was a bad argument. Short, but bad. When I left she was very upset. She could have done . . . anything.”

“For example?”

I clenched my teeth. “Suicide?”

The officers looked at each other, then back at me. “Well, we’ll keep that in mind. Now I’d suggest that you go home and get yourself some rest.”

“You’re not . . . going to take me in?”

“For what? Meeting us at an empty apartment? Having a scratched face? Go home.” He shook his head slowly. “Let me tell you, I’ve seen people gone four, five months and then they come back safe and sound. Drives their families crazy, and the families drive us crazy. You want to file a missing-person report? She has to be gone at least a month for that.”

My hands gripped each other tightly. “She might have drowned herself.”

“Oh? What makes you think that?”

“She . . . worked with someone who drowned. She was very despondent over his death.”

“Well, we haven’t had any reports of drownings lately. Of course, if she threw herself in the river, she might not have been found yet. She normally carries identification, doesn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“All right, we’ll look into it. But there’s really no point in worrying. She’ll probably turn up when she’s good and ready.”

We went downstairs in the elevator together, and they watched me walk to the tram and catch my line before they got into their vehicle.

I had made myself a murder suspect, but I didn’t care. I felt drained. Where was she? What had she done? I tried to put myself in her place that night after I had left. I tried to feel what she must have felt. Fury? Hate? Despair? I tried to feel that I had seen someone I loved die. It didn’t seem difficult. She had lost someone. I had lost her. What next?

Kansas City fled by as I leaned against the tram window, and I hardly saw it. I saw Ellsworth instead, in my mind’s eye, and Logan stalking the streets with a star on his chest and a pair of forty-fives on his hips. Kansas City was cool with November, but Ellsworth was dusty summer, always would be for me, since the first day Holland and Alison had worked together.

And then I knew where Alison had gone.

When I got home I checked out the Kansas air schedules and called in my reservation for the next hop to Salina. The computer answered my query on Alison: she had taken the same route the morning after I left her.

At Salina I rented a vehicle and drove west on old Route 140. The new highway, the rental agent told me, was restricted to wheeled traffic and very crowded. This road was in poor repair, but it was virtually deserted, and my hovercraft made good time over the cracked pavement. In less than an hour I was in Ellsworth, seat of Ellsworth County, population 2000.

Foolishly, I had expected to recognize the town. But a century and a half had erased the old village, and this Ellsworth could have been any county seat of the Great Plains—courthouse in the town square, traffic circle around that, streets extending grid-fashion from that center. The latest vehicles were parked at the curbs, both hovercraft and ground cars, not a horse in sight. And the dust had been laid by the damp November breeze. Citizens walked casually in the cool morning, dressed like anyone in Kansas City, and no one packed a gun, not even the traffic cop stationed by the stoplight in front of the courthouse.

I parked by a meter, fed it my credit card for the eight-hour maximum, then started my stroll around town. I really didn’t know where to begin. I was disoriented, trying to figure out where the old street had run; there was a Main Street on one side of the courthouse, but I couldn’t connect that with Ellsworth’s old Main Street, nor the courthouse with the old court building. There was no necessity for either of them to occupy the old sites, except perhaps human lethargy. So I just wandered, spiraling outward from the courthouse, thinking that eventually I’d find the place where the Logan house had been. Alison, I thought, would most likely be there.

I walked for hours. The sun reached its zenith and began to sink. I must have covered every street in town. some twice, and everywhere I walked people looked at me, the stranger. But none of them was Alison. At last I realized that I was very hungry, and I stepped into a bar for a sandwich. The town had only two restaurants—lunch counters, really—and by that time both of them were closed. The bartender served me a hamburger and a beer, and though he looked at me rather pointedly, he didn’t ask any questions. I asked him: “Is there a hotel in town?”

“Motel,” he replied, flicking a thumb toward the south, “On the big highway.”

“Any others?”

“No, just the one. Nice place, though. Clean. Truckers stop there.”

Thanks.” I finished my beer and paid for the meal. I left him a big tip. One motel in town—where else could Alison be?

I took the hovercraft over to the highway, and there the place was, just beyond the foot of the exit ramp, without any name but MOTEL in medium-sized letters on the roof. I counted twelve units and five vehicles; they had room for me. I didn’t ask about Alison when I checked in. I didn’t want the owner suspicious, and I didn’t want her to tell Alison that someone was looking for her. But I glimpsed a familiar signature in the motel’s records—she was there all right. In my room I settled down in a reasonably comfortable chair by the window, the heavy drapes barely twitched aside to give me a view of the parking lot. Anyone walking from the town would be visible to me, too, though I didn’t think Alison would be walking that sort of distance.

A couple of big rigs pulled in just after dark, their headlights flashing across the building like searchlights. Sometime later, more exhausted than I realized from the long day’s activities, I fell asleep. I woke in the chair when one of the rigs revved its engine at first light.

I was cramped and stiff from sleeping in the chair, especially my legs. I had been doing my traveling by Bubble for a lot of years, and that and riding the tramways of Kansas City had not prepared me for tramping all over Ellsworth. In the bathroom, I splashed some water in my face and set the coffeemaker for a couple of cups. If Alison had come in as late as I suspected, she would still be sleeping and I would catch her as she left. I waited by the window, sipping my coffee.

I didn’t recognize her at first. She stepped out of a unit somewhere to my left and climbed into a small hovercraft. She was wearing a ground-sweeping dress of some heavy black material, with long sleeves and a high neck. Covering her head and shoulders was a black veil pulled back from her face for driving. She gunned the hovercraft and swung out of the parking lot, heading for town. I scrambled to follow her. By the time I was in my own vehicle, she was no more than a swirl of kicked-up dust in the distance.

She drove all the way through town, turning west at the courthouse, onto a road as old and decrepit as the one I had taken from Salina. Not far beyond the town limits, the land rose gently. At the crest of the rise, stark amid the endless stubble of harvested wheat fields, a parcel of land was surrounded by a spike-topped wrought-iron fence. The gate, replete with curlicue vines and leaves of age-darkened iron, stood wide open in the morning sunlight. As I eased my hovercraft into the small lot before the gate, I saw the gravestones, row on neat row, and the browning grass that cloaked them.

Alison was inside already, delicately picking her way among the graves, her long skirt lifted in front. She seemed extraordinarily slim in black, fragile, swaying a little as the prairie wind gusted against her. She stopped at a far corner of the cemetery and sat down on a stone bench.

It was an old place, maybe Ellsworth’s original Boot Hill. Some of the markers were so weathered that their inscriptions were illegible. Those I could make out spanned the Twentieth Century, reached back into the Nineteenth, forward into the Twenty First. A few were sharp-cut in their newness. None was exceptionally elaborate, none taller than my waist—it was not a place of ostentatious grief, that cemetery. It was just a spot where the dead were laid with some respect. Aside from Alison and me, it had no other visitors that November morning. Slowly, I walked up behind her. Over her shoulder I read the inscription on the marker at her feet.

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

JAMES LOGAN

1853 - 1890

REST IN PEACE

It was very new. The space in front of it, however, was flat and completely overgrown with grass. If a grave lay there, it was not a recent one.

“Hello, Alison,” I said.

She started at my words, her back straightening, but she didn’t turn to look at me. “Good guess,” she said.

“An operator has to know how to find people.”

Her hands were folded in her lap, and the veil had fallen over her face, dark, shadowing her features. In old Ellsworth they would have called her dress widow’s weeds.

“May I sit down?” I asked.

“Do what you like.”

I sat on the very edge of the bench, an arm’s length between us. “He’s not buried here,” I said.

“No.”

“Who is?”

“Nobody. Does it matter?”

I gestured toward the marker. “You put up the stone.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly. Behind the veil, I couldn’t read her expression. She said, “His mother would have wanted it.”

“Are you . . . going to try to recover the remains?”

She tilted her head, seemed to be looking down at her hands. “Not much point in that, is there? It’s just bones.”

I nodded. “Don’t you think you should come back to Kansas City now? You’ve done . . . all that could be expected here.”

“He spent most of his life here. This was his home. This is where I belong.”

“You can’t mean that, Alison. What about your work, your friends? What about your contract with the company?”

“Let them sue me. I don’t care.”

“Of course you do. You love your work. I know it. You can’t give it up to . . . to bury yourself in this backwater.”

She turned her face toward me, but the veil was a barrier between us, keeping her thoughts from me. “You don’t understand me at all,” she said. “And you don’t know when you’re not wanted. You are intruding upon my grief. I would appreciate it if you would go away.”

“Grief over someone you never knew, Alison? What kind of grief is that?”

“A kind you obviously will never know.”

“I know the other kind of grief.”

“Fine. Go back to Kansas City and practice it there.”

“Alison . . . Dr. Holland wants you to come back.”

She let a moment of silence pass, and then she laughed a choking laugh, half a sob. “Holland. How I wish I had never met him! How I wish it!”

“Then . . . you would never have seen Logan.”

“No,” she said, looking at the gravestone. “Never.” Then she bent forward a little and raised her hands to her face, pressing the veil against her cheeks. Her shoulders trembled, and I couldn’t help reaching a hand toward her. But she shrugged off my comfort and slid to the far end of the bench. “He’s dead,” she murmured. “And I’m dead, too. Why won’t you let me rest in peace?”

“Oh, Alison . . . come home. You’re not going to find peace in this cemetery.”

“I don’t want to talk to you any more, Barry.”

I stood up slowly. “All right. I’ll go. I just want you to remember that if you ever need me, I’ll always be there.”

Her back toward me, she straightened up, shaking her head, the veil moving gently about her shoulders. “No,” she murmured. “Nobody can make that kind of promise. You’ll die someday. Everybody dies.”

“Oh, Alison. . . .” I half lifted my hands toward her, but no words would come. What could I say? That, yes, we all die someday—James Logan, Augustus Caesar, and me . . . and that emotions die as well, eventually—love, hate, even grief. I knew she didn’t want to listen. So I consoled myself with that knowledge instead of offering it to her, and I turned away and trudged back to the cemetery gate.

That night I was back in Kansas City. In the morning, I added Alison’s shift to my own, tolerated Holland’s indignation and gave him his money’s worth. Earp was in Tombstone now, the hearing that followed the gunfight at the O.K. Corral behind him, one brother crippled, another dead. Soon he would be leaving for a new life in California, and Holland would have to move on, too, if he wanted to follow his subject. He was already foreseeing difficulties for the period that Earp would be spending in Alaska—it was out of range of all the company offices. He badgered me for information about new branches to be opened, obviously hoping for Seattle or Vancouver, and he was angry when I told him that all I knew about was the one in Tokyo.

He was gone by the time Alison came back.

I had known she would, known it in my soul. She was an operator first, like Myra, like me. Nothing could make us quit. Nothing.

She didn’t speak to me. I passed her in the corridor a few times, but she just looked through me, walking briskly, as if to some important meeting.

She transferred to the Tokyo office as soon as it opened—looking for a new challenge, Myra said. Shortly afterward, I returned to Istanbul. To Imperial Rome. Someone needed an expert on Augustus Caesar.

EMERGENCE

David R. Palmer

What do you do after the end of the world? That depends or what’s left—and on what kind of survivor you are.

Nothing to do? Nowhere to go? Time hangs heavy? Bored? Depressed? Also badly scared? Causal factors beyond control?

Unfortunate. Regrettable. Vicious cycle—snake swallowing own tail. Mind dwells on problems; problems fester, assume ever greater importance for mind to dwell on. Etc. Bad enough where problems minor.

Mine aren’t.

Psychology text offers varied solutions: recommends keeping occupied, busywork if necessary; keep mind distracted. Better if busywork offers challenge, degree of frustration. Still better that I have responsibility. All helps.

Perhaps.

Anyway, keeping busy difficult. Granted, more books in shelter than public library; more tools, equipment, supplies, etc., than Swiss Family Robinson’s wrecked ship—all latest developments: lightest, simplest, cleverest, most reliable, non-rusting. Sanforized. All useless unless—correction, until I get out (and of lot, know uses of maybe half dozen: screwdriver for opening stuck drawer; hammer to tenderize steak, break ice cubes; hacksaw for cutting frozen meat . . . ).

Oh, well, surely must be books explaining selection, use.

Truly, surely are books—thousands! Plus microfilm library—even bigger. Much deep stuff: classics, contemporary; comprehensive museum of man’s finest works: words, canvas, 3-D and multi-view reproductions of statuary. Also scientific: medical, dental, veterinary, entomology, genetics, marine biology; engineering, electronics, physics (both nuclear and garden variety), meteorology, astronomy; carpentry, agriculture, welding (equipment, too), woodcraft, survival, etc., etc., etc.; poetry, fiction, biographies of great, neargreat; philosophy—even complete selection of world’s fantasy, new and old. Complete Oz books, etc. Happy surprise, that.

Daddy was determined man’s highest achievements not vanish in Fireworks; also positive same just around corner. Confession: Wondered sometimes if was playing with complete deck; spent incalculable sums on shelter and contents. Turns out was right; is probably having last laugh. Somewhere. Wish were here to needle me about it—but wouldn’t if could; was too nice. Miss him. Very much.

Growing maudlin. Above definitely constitutes “dwelling” in pathological sense as defined by psychology text. Time to click heels, clap hands, smile, Shuffle Off to Buffalo.

Anyhow, mountains of books, microfilm of limited benefit; too deep. Take classics: Can tolerate just so long; then side effects set in. Resembles obtaining manicure by scratching fingernails on blackboard—can, but would rather suffer long fingernails. Same with classics as sole remedy for “dwelling”: Not sure which is worse. May be that too much culture in sudden doses harmful to health; perhaps must build up immunity progressively.

And technical is worse. Thought I had good foundation in math, basic sciences. Wrong—background good, considering age; but here haven’t found anything elementary enough to form opening wedge. Of course, haven’t gotten organized yet; haven’t assimilated catalog, planned orderly approach to subjects of interest. Shall; but for now, can get almost as bored looking at horrid pictures of results of endocrine mis-functions as by wading through classics.

And am rationing fantasy, of course. Thousands of titles, but dasn’t lose head. Speedreader, you know; breach discipline, well runs dry in matter of days.

Then found book on Pitman Shorthand. Changed everything. Told once by unimpeachable source (Mrs. Hartman. Daddy’s secretary and receptionist) was best, potentially fastest, most versatile of various pen systems. Also most difficult to learn well. (Footnote, concession to historical accuracy: Was also her system; source possibly contaminated by tinge of bias.) However, seemed promising; offered challenge, frustration. Besides, pothook patterns quite pretty, art form of sorts. Hoped would be entertaining.

Was—for about two days. Then memory finished absorbing principles of shorthand theory, guidelines for briefing and phrasing; transferred same to cortex—end of challenge. Tiresome being genius sometimes.

Well, even if no longer entertaining for own sake, still useful, much more practical than longhand; ideal for keeping journal, writing biography for archeologists. Probably not bother if limited to longhand; too slow, cumbersome. Effort involved would dull enthusiasm (of which little present anyway), wipe out paper supply in short order. Pitman fits entire life story on line and a half. (Of course, helps I had short life—correction: Helps brevity; does nothing for spirits.)

Problem with spirits serious business. Body trapped far underground: emotional index substantially lower. Prospects not good for body getting out alive, but odds not improved by emotional state. Depression renders intelligent option assessment improbable. In present condition would likely overlook ten good bets, flip coin over dregs. Situation probably not hopeless as seems, but lacking data, useful education, specialized knowledge (and guts), can’t form viable conclusion suggesting happy ending. And lacking same, tend to assume worst.

So journal not just for archeologists; is therapeutic. Catharsis: Spill guts on paper, feel better. Must be true—psychology text says so (though cautions is better to pay Ph.D.-equipped voyeur week’s salary per hour to listen. However, none such included in shelter inventory; will have to make do).

First step: Bring journal up to date. Never kept one: not conversant with format requirements, Right Thing To Do. Therefore will use own judgment. One thing certain: Sentence structure throughout will have English teachers spinning in graves (those fortunate enough to have one).

English 60 percent flab, null symbols, waste. Suspect massive inefficiency stems from subconsciously recognized need to stall, give inferior intellects chance to collect thoughts into semblance of coherence (usually without success), and to show off (my 512-word can lick your $10-word). Will not adhere to precedent; makes little sense to write shorthand, then cancel advantage by employment of rambling academese.

Keep getting sidetracked into social criticism. Probably symptom of condition. Stupid: all evidence says no society left. Was saying:

First step: Bring journal up to present: purge self of neuroses, sundry hangups. Then record daily orderly progress in study of situation, subsequent systematic (brilliant) self-extrication from dire straits. Benefits twofold:

First, will wash, dry, fold, put away psyche; restore mind to customary genius; enhance prospects for successful escape, subsequent survival. Second, will give archeologists details on cause of untimely demise amidst confusing mass of artifacts in shelter should anticipate first benefit lose rosy glow. (Must confess solicitude for bone gropers forced: bones in question mine!)

Enough maundering. Time to bear down, flay soul for own good. Being neurotic almost as tiresome as being genius. (Attention archeologists: Clear room of impressionable youths and/or mixed company—torrid details follow:) Born 11 years ago in small Wisconsin town, only child of normal parents. Named Candidia Maria Smith; reduced to Candy before ink dried on certificate. Early indications of atypicality: Eyes focused, tracked at birth; cause-effect association evident by six weeks: first words at four months; sentences at six months.

Orphaned at ten months. Parents killed in car accident.

No relatives—created dilemma for baby-sitter. Solved when social worker took charge. Was awfully cute baby: adopted in record time.

Doctor Foster and wife good parents: loving, attentive: very fond of each other, showed it. Provided good environment for formative years. Then Momma died. Left just Daddy and me; drew us very close. Was probably shamelessly spoiled, but also stifled.

Barely five then, but wanted to learn—only Daddy had firm notions concerning appropriate learning pace, direction for “normal” upbringing. Did not approve of precocity; felt was unhealthy. would lead to future maladjustment. unhappiness. Also paternalistic sexist: had bad case of ingrown stereotypes. Censored activities, reading: dragged heels at slightest suggestion of precocious behavior, atypical interests.

Momma disagreed; aided, indulged. With her help I learned to read by age two; understood basic numerical relationships by three: could add, subtract, multiply, divide. Big help until she had to leave.

So sneaked most of education. Flad to—certainly not available in smalltown classroom. Not difficult; developed speedreading habit, could finish high school text in 10. 20 minutes: digest typical best-seller in half, three-quarters of hour. Haunted school, local libraries every opportunity (visits only: couldn’t bring choices home). But town small: exhausted obvious resources three years ago. Have existed since on meager fruits of covert operations in friends’ homes, bookstores, occasional raids on neighboring towns’ libraries, schools. Of course not all such forays profitable: small-town resources tend to run same direction: slowly, in circles. Catalogs mostly shallow, duplicated: originality lacking.

Frustrating. Made more so by knowledge that Daddy’s personal in-house library rivaled volume count of local school, public libraries put together (not counting shelter collection, but didn’t know about that then)—and couldn’t get halfway down first page of 95 percent of contents.

Daddy pathologist; books imperviously technical. So far over head, couldn’t even tell where gap lay (ask cannibal fresh off plane from Amazon for analysis of educational deficiencies causing noncomprehension of commercial banking structure). Texts dense; assumed reader already possessing high-level competency. Sadly lacking in own case—result of conspiracy. So languished. fed in dribbles as tireless prospecting uncovered new sources.

Single bright exception: Soo Kim McDivott. son of American missionary in Boxer Rebellion days, product of early East-West alliance. Was 73 when retired, moved next door two years ago. Apparently had been teacher whole life but never achieved tenure; tended to get fired over views. Didn’t appear to mind.

Strange old man. Gentle, soft-spoken. very polite; small, seemed almost frail. Oriental flavoring lent elf-like quality to wizened features; effect not reduced by mischief sparkling from eyes.

Within two weeks became juvenile activity focus for most of town. Cannot speak for bulk of kids, but motivation obvious in own case: Aside from intrinsic personal warmth, knew everything—and if exception turned up would gleefully drop everything, help find out—and had books. House undoubtedly in violation of Fire Code; often wondered how structural members took load.

Fascinating man: could, would discuss anything. Butyvondered for a time how managed as teacher; never answered questions but with questions. Seemed whenever I had question, ended up doing own research, telling him answer. Took a while to catch on. longer before truly appreciated: Had no interest in teaching knowledge, factual information—taught learning. Difference important; seldom understood, even more rarely appreciated. Don’t doubt was reason for low retirement income.

Oh. almost forgot: Could split bricks with sidelong glance, wreak untold destruction with twitch of muscle. Any muscle. Was Tenth Degree Master of Karate. Didn’t know were such: thought ratings stopped at Eighth—and heard rumors they could walk on water. (But doubt Master Mac would bother. Should need arise, would politely ask waters to part—but more likely request anticipated, unnecessary.)

Second day after moving in. Master was strolling down Main Street when happened upon four young men. early 20s. drunk, unkempt—Summer People (sorry, my single ineradicable prejudice)—engaged in self-expression at Miller’s Drugstore. Activities consisted of inverting furniture, displays; dumping soda-fountain containers (milk, syrup, etc.) on Boor; throwing merchandise through display windows. Were discussing also throwing Mr. Miller when Master Mac arrived on scene.

Assessed situation; politely requested cease, desist, await authorities’ arrival. Disbelieving onlookers closed, averted eyes; didn’t want to watch expected carnage. Filthy Four dropped Mr. Miller, converged on frail-looking old Chinese.

Then all fell down, had subsequent difficulty arising. Situation remained static until police arrived.

Filthies taken into custody, then to hospital. Attempted investigation of altercation unrewarding: Too many eyewitness accounts—all contradictory, disbelieving, unlikely. However, recurring similarities in stories suggested simultaneous stumble as Filthies reached for Master; then all fell, accumulating severe injuries therefrom: four broken jaws, two arms, two legs, two wrists: two dislocated hips; two ruptured spleens. Plus bruises in astonishing places.

Single point of unanimity—ask anyone: Master Mac never moved throughout.

Police took notes in visibly strained silence. Also took statement from Master Mac. But of dubious help: Consisted mostly of questions.

Following week YMCA announced Master Mac to teach karate classes. Resulted in near riot (by small-town standards). Standing room only at registration: near fistfights over positions in line.

Was 16th on list to start first classes but deserve no credit for inclusion: Daddy’s doing. Wanted badly—considering sociological trends, self-defense skills looked ever more like required social graces for future survival—but hesitated to broach subject: seemed probable conflict with “normal upbringing” dictum.

So finally asked. Surprise! Agreed—granted dispensation! Was still in shock when Daddy asked time, date of registration. Showed article in paper: noon tomorrow. Looked thoughtful maybe five seconds; then rushed us out 78 doors, down street to Y. Already 15 ahead of us, equipped to stay duration.

Daddy common as old slipper: warm, comfortable, folksy. But shared aspects with iceberg: Nine-tenths of brains not evident in everyday life. Knew was very smart, of course. Implicit from job: pathologist knows everything any other specialist does, plus own job. Obviously not career for cretin—and was good pathologist. Renowned.

But not show-off: was easy to forget: reminders few, far between. Scope, foresight, quick reactions. Command Presence demonstrated only in time of need.

Such occurred now: While I stood in line with mouth open (and 20 more hopefuls piled up behind like Keystone Cops). Daddy organized friends to bring chairs, cot. food, drink, warm clothing, blankets, rainproofs, etc. Took three minutes on phone. Was impressed. Then astounded—spent whole night on sidewalk with me, splitting watches, trading off visits to Little Person’s room when need arose.

Got all choked up when he announced intention. Hugged him breathless: told him Kismet had provided better father than most workings of genetic coincidence. Did not reply, but got hugged back harder than usual; caught glimpse of extra reflections in corners of eyes from streetlight. Special night; full of warmth, feelings of belonging. togetherness.

After Daddy’s magnificent contribution. effort to get me into class, felt slight pangs of guilt over my subsequent misdirection, concealment of true motivation. True, attended classes, worked hard; became, in fact, star pupil. But had to—star pupils qualified for private instruction—yup!—at Master’s home, surrounded by what appeared to be 90 percent of books in Creation.

Earned way though. Devoted great effort to maintain favored status; achieved Black Belt in ten months, state championship (for age/weight group) six months later. Was considered probable national championship material, possibly world. Enjoyed: great fun. terrific physical conditioning, obvious potential value (ask Filthy Four), good for ego due to adulation over ever-lengthening string of successes, capture of state loving cup (ironic misnomer—contest was mock combat: “killed” seven opponents, “maimed” 22 others for life or longer).

But purely incidental in no way distracted from main purpose:

With aid of Master (addressed as Teacher away from dojo) had absorbed equivalent of advanced high school education, some college by time world ended: Math through calculus, chemistry, beginnings of physics; good start on college biology, life sciences—doing well.

Occasionally caught Teacher regarding me as hen puzzles over product of swan egg slipped into nest; making notes in “Tarzan File” (unresolved enigma: huge file, never explained; partially concerned me, as achievements frequently resulted in entries, but was 36 inches thick before I entered picture), but definitely approved—and his approval better for ego than state cup.

Regarding which, had by then achieved Fifth Degree; could break brick with edge of hand, knee, foot. But didn’t after learned could. Prospect distressed Daddy. Poor dear could visualize with professional exactitude pathological consequences of attempt by untrained; knew just what each bone splinter would look like, where would be driven: which tendons torn from what insertions; which nerves destroyed forever, etc. Had wistful ambition I might follow into medicine: considered prospects bleak for applicant with deformed, calloused hammers dangling from wrists.

Needless concern; callouses unnecessary. With proper control, body delivers blow through normal hands without discomfort, damage. Is possible, of course, to abuse nature to point where fingers, knuckles, edge of hands, etc., all turn to flint, but never seen outside exhibitions. Serves no purpose in practice of art; regarded with disdain by serious student. Master alike.

So much for happy memories.

Not long ago world situation took turn for worse. Considering character of usual headlines when change began, outlook became downright grim. Daddy tried to hide concern but spent long hours reading reports from Washington (appreciated for first time just how renowned was when saw whom from), watching news; consulting variety of foreign, domestic officials by phone. Seemed cheerful enough, but when thought I wasn’t looking, mask slipped.

Finally called me into study. Sat me down: gave long, serious lecture on how bad things were. Made me lead through house, point out entrances to emergency chute leading down to shelter (dreadful thing—200 foot vertical drop in pitch dark, cushioned at bottom only by gradual curve as polished sides swing to horizontal, enter shelter). Then insisted we take plunge for practice. Although considered “practice” more likely to induce psychic block, make subsequent use impossible—even in time of need—performed as requested. Not as bad as expected; terror index fell perhaps five percent short of anticipation. But not fun.

However, first time in shelter since age three. Scenic attractions quickly distracted from momentary cardiac arrest incurred in transit. Concealed below modest small-town frame house of unassuming doctor was Eighth Wonder of World. Shelter is three-story structure carved from bedrock, 100 feet by 50; five-eighths shelves, storage compartments. Recognized microfilm viewer immediately; identical to one used at big hospital over in next county. Film storage file cabinets same, too—only occupied full length of two long walls, plus four free-standing files ran almost full length of room. Rest bookshelves, as is whole of second floor. Basement seems mostly tools, machinery, instrumentation.

Hardly heard basic life-support function operation lecture: air regeneration, waste reclamation, power production, etc. Was all could do to look attentive—books drew me like magnet. However, managed to keep head; paid sufficient attention to ask intelligent-sounding questions. Actually learned basics of how to work shelter’s vital components.

. . . Because occurred to me: Could read undisturbed down here if knew how to make habitable. (Feel bad about that, too: here Daddy worried sick over my survival In The Event Of—and object of concern scheming about continuing selfish pursuit of printed word.)

Tour, lecture ended. Endless spiral staircase up tube five feet in diameter led back to comfortable world of smalltown reality. Life resumed where interrupted.

With exception: Was now alert for suitable opportunity to begin exploration of shelter.

Not readily available. As Fifth was qualified assistant instructor at formal classes; took up appreciable portion of time. Much of rest devoted to own study—both Art (wanted to attain Sixth; would have been youngest in world) and academics, both under approving eye of Master. Plus null time spent occupying space in grammar school classroom. trying not to look too obviously bored while maintaining straight-A average (only amusement consisted of correcting teachers, textbooks—usually involved digging up proof, confrontations in principal’s office). Plus sundry activities rounding out image of “normally well-rounded” 11-year-old.

But patience always rewarded. If of sufficient duration. Daddy called to Washington: agreed was adult enough to take care of self, house. Terry during three days’ expected absence. Managed not to drool at prospect.

Terry? True, didn’t mention before, by name: just that had responsibility. Remember? First page, fourth paragraph. Pay attention—may spring quiz.

Terry is retarded, adoptive twin brother. Saw light of day virtually same moment I emerged—or would have had opened eyes. Early on showed more promise than 1: Walked at nine weeks, first words at three months, could fly at 14 weeks. Achieved fairly complex phrases by six months but never managed complete sentences. Peaked early but low.

Not fair description. Actually Terry is brilliant—for macaw. Also beautiful. Hyacinthine Macaw, known to lowbrows as Hyacinth, pseudo-intellectuals as Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus—terrible thing to say about sweet baby bird. Full name Terry D. Foster (initial stands for Dactyll). Length perhaps 36 inches (half of which is tail feathers); basic color rich, glowing hyacinth blue (positively electric in sunlight), with bright yellow eye patches like clown, black feet and bill. Features permanently arranged in jolly Alfred E. Newman, village-idiot smile. Diet is anything within reach, but ideally consists of properly mixed seeds, assorted fruits, nuts, sprinkling of meat, etc.

Hobbies include getting head and neck scratched (serious business, this), art of conversation, destruction of world. Talent for latter avocation truly awe-inspiring: 1.500 pounds pressure available at business end of huge, hooked beak. Firmly believe if left Terry with four-inch cube of solid tungsten carbide. would return in two hours to find equivalent mass of metal dust, undimmed enthusiasm.

Was really convinced were siblings when very young. First deep childhood trauma (not affected by loss of blood parents: too young at time, too many interesting things happening) induced by realization was built wrong, would never learn to fly. Had stubbornly mastered perching on playpen rail shortly after began walking (though never did get to point of preferring nonchalant one-legged stance twin affected—toes deformed: stunted, too short for reliable grip), but subsequent step simply beyond talents.

Suspect this phase of youth contributed to appearance of symptoms leading to early demise of Momma Foster. Remember clearly first time she entered room, found us perched together on rail, furiously “exercising wings.” Viewed in retrospect, is amazing didn’t expire on spot.

(Sounds cold, unfeeling; is not. Momma given long advance notice: knew almost to day when could expect to leave. Prepared me with wisdom, understanding, love. Saw departure as unavoidable but wonderful opportunity, adventure; stated was prepared to accept. even excuse reasonable regret over plans spoiled, things undone—but not grief. Compared grief over death of friend to envy of friend’s good fortune: selfish reaction—feeling sorry for self, not friend. Compared own going to taking wonderful trip: “spoiled plans” to giving up conflicting movie, picnic, swim in lake. Besides, was given big responsibility—charged me with “looking after Daddy.” Explained he had formed many elaborate plans involving three of us—many more than she or I had. Would doubtless be appreciably more disappointed, feel more regret over inability to carry out. Would need love, understanding during period it took him to reform plans around two remaining behind. Did such a job on me that truly did not suffer loss, grief; just missed her when gone, hoped was having good time.)

Awoke morning of Daddy’s trip to startling realization—didn’t want him to go. Didn’t like prospect of being alone three days: didn’t like idea of him alone three days. Lay abed trying to resolve disquieting feeling. Or at least identify. Could do neither; had never forebode before. Subliminal sensation: below conscious level but intrusive. Multiplied by substantial factor could be mistaken for fear—no, not fear, exactly; more like mindless, screaming terror.

But silly; nothing to be scared about. Mrs. Hartman could be working in office in front part of house during day; house locked tight at night—with additional security provided by certain distinctly non-small-town devices Daddy recently caused installed. Plus good neighbors on all sides, available through telephone right at bedside or single loud scream.

Besides, was I not Candy Smith-Foster, State Champion, Scourge of Twelve-and-Under Class, second most dangerous mortal within 200-mile radius? (By now knew details of Filthy Four’s “stumble,” and doubt would have gotten off so lightly had I been intercessor.)

Was. So told feeling to shut up. Washed, dressed, went down to breakfast with Daddy and Terry.

Conduct during send-off admirable; performance qualified for finals in stiff-upper-lip-of-year award contest. Merely gave big hug, kiss; cautioned stay out of trouble in capital, but if occurred, call me soonest—would come to rescue: split skulls, break bones, mess up adversaries something awful. Sentiment rewarded by lingering return hug, similar caution about self during absence (but expressed with more dignity).

Then door of government-supplied, chauffeur-driven, police-escorted limousine closed; vehicle made its long, black way down street, out of sight around corner.

Spent morning at school, afternoon teaching at Y, followed by own class with Master. Finally found self home, now empty except Terry (voicing disapproval of day’s isolation at top of ample lungs): Mrs. Hartman done for day, had gone home. Silenced twin by scratching head, transferring to shoulder (loves assisting with household chores, but acceptance means about three times as much work as doing by self—requires everything done at arms’ length, out of reach).

Made supper, ate, gave Terry whole tablespoon of peanut butter as compensation for boring day (expressed appreciation by crimping spoon double). Did dishes, cleaned house in aimless fashion; started over.

Finally realized was dithering, engaging in busywork; afraid to admit was really home alone, actually had opportunity for unhindered investigation of shelter. Took hard look at conflict; decided was rooted in guilt over intent to take advantage of Daddy’s absence to violate known wishes. Reminded self that existence of violation hinged upon accuracy of opinion concerning unvocalized desires; “known wishes” question-begging terminology if ever was one. Also told self firmly analysis of guilt feeling same as elimination. Almost believed.

Impatiently stood, started toward basement door. Terry recognized signs, set up protest against prospect of evening’s abandonment. Sighed, went back.

transferred to shoulder. Brother rubbed head on cheek in gratitude, gently bit end of nose, said, “You’re so bad,” in relieved tones. Gagged slightly; peanut-butter breath from bird is rare treat.

Descended long spiral stairs down tube to shelter. Ran through power-up routine, activated systems. Then began exploration.

Proceeded slowly. Terry’s first time below; found entertaining. Said, “How ‘bout that!” every ten seconds. Also stretched neck, bobbed head, expressed passionate desire to sample every book as pulled from shelf. Sternly warned of brief future as giblet dressing if so much as touched single page. Apparently thought prospect sounded fun, redoubled efforts. But was used to idiot twin’s antisocial behavior; spoiled fun almost without conscious thought as proceeded with exploration.

Soon realized random peeking useless; was in position of hungry kid dropped in middle Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory: Too much choice. Example: Whole cabinet next to microfilm viewer was catalog!

Three feet wide, eight high; drawers three feet deep, six inches wide (rows of six); ten titles per card (thin cards)—72 cubic feet of solid catalog.

Took breath away to contemplate. Also depressed; likelihood of mapping orderly campaign to augment education not good. Didn’t know where to start: which books, films within present capacity; where to go from there. Only thing more tiresome than being repressed genius is being ignorant genius recognizing own status.

Decided to consult Teacher; try to get him to list books he considered ideal to further education most rapidly from present point, cost no object. (Was giving consideration to Daddy’s ambition to see me become doctor: but regardless. no education wasted. Knowledge worthwhile for own sake.) Didn’t feel should report discovery—would be breach of confidence—but could use indirect approach. Not lie; just not mention that any book suggested undoubtedly available on moment’s notice. Ought to fool him all of ten seconds.

Started toward switchboard to powerdown shelter. Hand touching first switch in sequence when row of red lights began flashing, three large bells on wall next to panel commenced deafening clangor. Snatched hand back as if from hot stove; thought had activated burglar alarm (if reaction included thought at all). Feverish inspection of panel disclosed no hint of such, but found switch marked “Alarm Bells, North American Air Defense Command Alert.” Opened quickly; relieved to note cessation of din. but lights continued flashing. Then, as watched, second row, labeled, “Attack Detected,” began flashing.

Problem with being genius is tendency to think deep, mull hidden significance, overlook obvious. Retrieved Terry (as usual, had gone for help at first loud noise), scratched head to soothe nerves. Twin replied, “That’s bad!” several times; dug claws into shoulder, flapped wings to show had not really been scared. Requested settle down, shut up; wished to contemplate implications of board.

Impressive. Daddy must be truly high-closet VIP to rate such inside data supplied to home shelter. As considered this, another row flashed on. this labeled. “Retaliation Initiated.” Imagine—blow-by-blow nuclear war info updates supplied to awn home! Wonderful to be so important. Amazing man. And so modest—all these years never let on. Wondered about real function in government. With-such brains was probably head of super-secret spy bureau in charge of dozens of James Bond types.

Don’t know how long mindless rumination went on: finally something clicked in head: Attack? Retaliation? Hey . . .! Bolted for steps. Terry dug in claws, voiced protest over sudden movements.

Stopped like statue. Daddy’s voice, tinny, obviously recording: “Red alert, radiation detected. Level above danger limit. Shelter will seal in 30 seconds—29, 28, 27 . . .” Stood frozen: listened as familiar voice delivered requiem for everything known and loved—including probably self. Interrupted count once at 15-second mark to repeat radiation warning, again at five seconds.

Then came deep-toned humming: powerful motors slid blocks of concrete, steel, asbestos across top of stairwell. did same for emergency-entry chute. Sealing process terminated with solidly mechanical clunks, thuds. Motors whined in momentary overload as program ensured was tight.

Then truly alone. Stood staring at nothing for long minutes. Did not know when silent tears began; noticed wet face when Terry sampled, found too salty. Shook head; said softly, “Poo-oor bay-bee-ee . . .”

Presently found self sitting in chair. Radio on; could not remember turning switch, locating CONELRAD frequency. Just sat. listened to reports.

Only time stirred was to feed, water Terry: use potty. Station on air yet. but manned only first three days.

Was enough, told story: Mankind eliminated. Radiation, man-made disease. International quick-draw ended in tie.

Final voice on air weakly complained situation didn’t make sense: Was speaking from defense headquarters near Denver—miles underground, utterly bombproof, airtight: self-contained air. water—so why dying? Why last alive in entire installation? Didn’t make sense. . . .

Agreed, but thought objection too limited in scope. Also wondered why we were still alive. Likewise didn’t make sense.

If invulnerability of NORAD headquarters—located just this side of Earth’s core under Cheyenne Mountain—proving ineffective, how come fancy subcellar hidey-hole under house in small town still keeping occupants alive? And for how long? Figured had to be just matter of time.

Therefore became obsessed with worry over fate of retarded brother. Were safe from radiation (it seemed), but plague another matter. Doubted would affect avian biochemistry: would kill me, leave poor baby to starve, die of thirst. Agonized over dilemma for days. Finally went downstairs; hoped might turn up something in stores could use as Terry’s Final Friend.

Did. Found armory. Thought of what might have to do almost triggered catatonia; but knew twin’s escape from suffering dependent on me, so mechanically went ahead with selection of shotgun. Found shells, loaded gun. Carried upstairs, placed on table. Then waited for cue.

Knew symptoms; various CONEL-RAD voices had described own, those of friends. Were six to syndrome. Order in which appeared reported variable; number present at onset of final unconsciousness not. Four symptoms always; then fifth: period of extreme dizziness—clue to beginning of final decline. Was important, critical to timing with regard to Terry. Desperately afraid might wait too long: condemn poor incompetent to agonizing last days. And almost more afraid might react to false alarm, proceed with euthanasia; then fail to die—have to face scattered, blood-spattered feathers, headless body of sweetest, jolliest, most devoted, un-demandingly loving friend had ever known.

Which was prospect if acted too soon—intended to stand 20 feet away, blow off head while engrossed in peanut butter. Pellet expansion sufficient at that distance to ensure virtually instantaneous vaporization of entire head, instant kill before possibility of realization, pain. Would rather suffer own dismemberment, boiling in oil than see innocent baby suffer, know was me causing.

Thus, very important to judge own condition accurately when plague sets in.

Only hasn’t yet. Been waiting three weeks, paralyzed with grief, fear, apprehension, indecision. But such emotions wearysome when protracted: eventually lose grip on victim. I think perhaps might have—particularly now that journal up to date, catharsis finished. Book says therapy requires good night’s sleep after spilling guts: then feel better in morning. Suspect may be right; do feel better.

Okay. Tomorrow will get organized . . .!

Good morning, Posterity! Happy to report I spent good night. Slept as if already dead—first time since trouble began. No dreams; if tossed, turned, did so without noticing. Appears writer of psychology text knew stuff (certainly should have; more letters following name than in). Catharsis worked—at least would seem: felt good on waking. Wounds obviously not healed yet. but closed. A beginning—scabs on soul much better than hemorrhage.

Situation unchanged: obviously not happy about fact (if were would know had slipped cams), but this morning can look at Terry without bursting into tears; can face possibility might have to speed birdbrained twin to Reward before own condition renders unable. Thought produces entirely reasonable antipathy, sincere hope will prove unnecessary—but nothing more.

Despairing paralysis gone; mind no longer locked into hopeless inverse logarithmic spiral, following own tail around ever-closer, all-enveloping fear of ugly possibility.

Seems have regained practical outlook held prior to Armageddon: i.e., regard worry as wasteful, contra-productive if continued after recognition, analysis of impending problem, covering bases to extent resources permit. Endless bone-worrying not constructive exercise; if anything, diminishes odds for favorable outcome by limiting scope of mind’s operation, cuts down opportunities for serendipity to lend hand.

Besides, takes fun out of life—especially important when little enough to be had.

Time I rejoined world of living (possibly not most apt choice of words—hope do not find am in exclusive possession). First step: consider physical well-being. Have sadly neglected state of health past three weeks; mostly just sat in chair, lay abed listening to airwaves hiss.

And speaking of physical wellbeing—has just occurred: am ravenous! Have nibbled intermittently without attention to frequency, content—mostly when feeding, watering Terry. (Regardless of own condition, did not neglect jovial imbecile during course of depression. Even cobbled up makeshift stand from chair, hardwood implement handle; found sturdy dishes, secured firmly to discourage potential hilarity. Granted, diet not ideal—canned vegetables, fruits, meat, etc.—but heard no complaints from clientele, and would be no doubt if existed: Dissatisfaction with offerings usually first indicated by throwing on floor; if prompt improvement not forthcoming, abandons subtlety.)

Have also noticed am filthy! Wearing same clothes came downstairs in three weeks ago. Neither garments nor underlying smelly germ farm exposed to water, soap, deodorant since. (Can be same fastidious Candy Smith-Foster who insists upon shower, complete change of clothing following any hint of physical exertion, contact with even potentially soiled environment? Regrettably is.) And now that am in condition to notice—have! Self-respecting maggot would take trade elsewhere.

So please excuse. Must rectify immediately. Bath (probably take three, four complete water changes to do job); then proper meal, clean clothes. Then get down to business. Time to find out about contents of shelter—availability of resources relevant to problems.

Be back later. . . .

Apologies for delay, neglect. But have been so busy!

Bath, resumption of proper nutrition completed cure. Spirits restored: likewise determination, resourcefulness, curiosity (intellectual variety: am not snoop—rumors to contrary). Also resumed exercises, drills (paid immediate penalty for three-week neglect of Art—first attempt at usual kata nearly broke important places, left numerous sore muscles.)

Have systematically charted shelter. Took pen, pad downstairs to stores, took inventory. Then went through bookshelves in slow, painstaking manner; recorded titles, locations of volumes applicable to problems. Project took best part of three days. Worth effort: variety, volume of equipment simply awesome. Together with library probably represents everything necessary for singlehanded founding of bright new civilization—from scratch, if necessary. (Not keen on singlehanded part, however: sounds lonely. Besides, know nothing about Applied Parthogenesis: not merit badge topic in scouts. Only memory of subject’s discussion concerned related research—was no-no; leader claimed caused myopia, acne, nonspecific psychoses. Oh. well, considering age. prospects for achieving functional puberty, seems less than pressing issue.)

Speaking of pressing issues, however—found food. Founder of. civilization will certainly eat well in interim. Must be five-year supply of frozen meat, fruit, fresh vegetables in deepfreeze locker adjoining lower level (huge things—50 feet square). Stumbled upon by accident: door wasn’t labeled. Opened during routine exploration expecting just another bin. Light came on illuminating scenery—almost froze tip of nose admiring contents before realized was standing in 50-degree-below-zero draft. Also good news for Terry: Daddy anticipated presence; lifetime supply of proper seed mix in corner bin. Will keep forever; too cold to hatch inevitable weevil eggs, etc.

Actually haven’t minded canned diet; good variety available—but sure was nice to drop mortally-peppered steak onto near-incandescent griddle, inhale fumes as cooked: then cut with fork while still bleeding inside charred exterior. Of course had to fight Terry for share: may be something likes better, but doesn’t come readily to mind.

Is regrettable this could be part of Last Words: means must exercise honesty in setting down account. Bulk of organized theologies I’ve read opine dying with lie upon lips bodes ill for direction of departure. Since can be no doubt of Terry’s final Destination, must keep own power dry. Twin would be lonely if got There without me—besides, without watching would announce presence by eating pearls out of Gate.

So despite self-serving impulses, must record faithfully shameful details of final phase in monumental inventory: assault upon card file. Intended to make painstaking, card-by-card inspection of microfilm catalog (vastly more extensive than bound collection), recording titles suggesting relevance to problems. Grim prospect; 72 cubic feet holds dreadful quantity of cards—each with ten titles. Even considering own formidable reading speed, use of Pitman for notes, seemed likely project would account for substantial slice of remaining lifespan—even assuming can count upon normal duration.

However, could see no other way; needed information. So took down first drawer (from just below ceiling, of course; but thoughtful Daddy provided rolling ladder as in public stacks): set on table next to notepad. Sighed, took out first card, scanned—stopped, looked again. Pulled out next 20. 30; checked quickly. Made unladylike observation regarding own brains (genius, remember?). Reflected (after exhausted self-descriptive talents) had again underestimated Daddy.

Humble healer, gentle father was embodiment of patience—but had none with unnecessary inefficiency. Obviously would have devised system to locate specifics in such huge collection. Useless otherwise; researcher could spend most of life looking for data instead of using.

First 200 cards index of index. Alphabetically categorized, cross-referenced to numbered file locations. Pick category, look up location in main file; check main file for specific titles, authors: find films from specific location number on individual card. Just like downtown.

So after settled feathers from self-inflected wounds (ten well-deserved lashes with sharp tongue), got organized. Selected categories dealing with situation: referred to main index; decided upon specific films, books. Cautioned Terry again about giblet shortage, dug out selections. Settled down to become expert in nuclear warfare, viral genocide; construction details, complete operation of shelter systems.

Have done so. Now know exactly what happened. Every ugly detail. Know which fissionables used, half-life durations; viral, bacterial agents employed: how deployed, how long remain viable threats without suitable living hosts. Know what they used on us—vice versa. Found Daddy’s papers dealing with secret life.

Turns out was heavyweight government consultant. Specialty was countering biological warfare. Privy to highest secrets; knew all about baddest bugs on both sides. Knew how used, countermeasures most effective—personally responsible for development programs aimed at wide-spectrum etiotropic counteragents. Also knew intimate details of nuclear hardware poised on both sides of face-off. Seems had to: radiation level often key factor: In many cases benign virus, bacteria turned instantaneously inimical upon exposure to critical wavelengths. Only difference between harmless tourist and pathogen: Soothing counsel transmitted from pacific gene in DNA helix to cytoplasmic arsenal by radiation-vulnerable RNA messenger. Enter energy particle flood, exit restraint: hello Attila the Germ. Clever these mad scientists.

Undoubtedly how attack conducted—explains, too. fall of hermetically sealed NORAD citadel. Entire country seeded over period of time with innocuous first-stage organisms until sufficiently widespread. Then special warheads—carefully spaced to irradiate every inch of target with critical wavelength—simultaneously detonated at high altitude across whole country. Bombs dropping vertically from space remained undetected until betrayed by flash—by which time too late: radiation front travels just behind visible light. Not a window broken but war already over: Everybody running for shelter already infected, infectious with at least one form of now-activated, utterly lethal second-stage plague. Two. three days later—all of them dead.

Supposed to be another file someplace down here detailing frightful consequences to attackers: haven’t found yet. Only mention in this one suggests annihilation even surer, more complete among bad guys—and included broken windows.

Tone of comment regretful. Not sure can agree. True, most dead on both sides civilians—but are truly innocent? Who permitted continuing rule by megalomaniacs? Granted, would have been costly for populace to throw incumbent rascals out, put own rascals in—but considering cost of failure in present light . . .

Must give thought before passing judgment.

Enough philosophy.

Have learned own tactical situation not bad. No radiation detectable on surface. immediate area (instrumentation in shelter: sensors upstairs on roof of house—part of TV antenna). Not surprising: According to thesis, nuclear stuff to be used almost exclusively as catalyst for viral, bacterial invaders. Bursts completely clean—no fallout at all—high enough to preclude physical damage. Exception: Direct hits anticipated on known ICBM silos. SAC bases. Polaris submarines, bomber-carrying carriers, overseas installations—and Washington . . .

Where Daddy went. Hope was quick, clean.

Plague another question entirely. Daddy holds opinion infection of target country self-curing. No known strain in arsenals of either side capable of more than month’s survival outside proper culture media; i.e., living human tissue (shudder to contemplate where, how media obtained for experimentation leading to conclusion). Odds very poor such available longer than two, three days after initial attack; therefore should be only another week before is safe to venture outside, see what remains of world. However, wording, “. . . should be . . . erodes confidence in prediction; implies incomplete data, guesswork—gamble. Considering stake involved is own highly regarded life, placing absolute reliance on stated maximum contagion parameters not entirely shrewd policy.

So shan’t. Now that can get out whenever wish, no longer have such pressing need to; claustrophobic tendencies gone. Shelter quite cozy (considering); Dry. warm, plumbing, furniture; great food (brilliantly prepared), safe water; good company, stimulating conversation (“Hello, baby! What’cha doin’ ? You’re so bad! Icky pooh!” Y plus endless supply of knowledge. Delay amidst such luxury seems small price for improved odds. So will invest extra two months as insurance.

Figure arbitrary: based on theory that treble safety factor was good enough for NASA, should be good enough for me. (Of course theory includes words “should be” again, but must draw line somewhere.)

And can get out when ready. Easy: Just throw proper switches. All spelled out in detailed manual on shelter’s systems. operation. Nothing to it. Just pick up book. read. After finding. After learning exists in first place. (Daddy could have reduced first three weeks’ trauma had bothered to mention, point out where kept—on other hand, had learned how to get out prior to absorbing details on attack, would doubtless be dead now.)

Makes fascinating reading. Shelter eloquent testimonial to wisdom of designer. Foresight, engineering brilliance embodied in every detail. Plus appalling amount of money, shameless level of political clout. Further I got into manual, more impressed became. Is NORAD headquarters miniaturized, improved: hermetically sealed: air, water, wastes recycled: elaborate communications equipment; sophisticated sensory complex for radiation, electronics, detection, seismology, medicine. Power furnished by nuclear device about size of Volkswagen—classified, of course (talk about clout?). Don’t know if works; supposed to come on automatically when municipal current fails. But according to instruments am still running on outside power.

Let’s see—nope: seems to be about everything for now. Will update journal as breathtaking developments transpire.

Hi. One-month mark today. Breathless developments to date:

1. Found stock of powdered milk: awful. Okay in soup, chocolate, cooking. etc., but alone tastes boiled.

2. Discovered unplugged phone in hitherto-unnoticed cabinet. Also found jack. Plugged in, found system still working. Amused self by ringing phones about country—random area codes, number. But no answers, of course; and presently noticed tears streaming down face. Decided not emotionally healthy practice. Discontinued.

3. Employed carpentry tools, pieces of existing makeshift accommodation to fabricate proper stand for brother. Promptly demonstrated gratitude by chewing through perch (which had not bothered for whole month’.). Replaced with thick, hardwood sledge handle; sneered, dared him try again. Have thereby gained temporary victory: Fiend immediately resumed game but achieving little progress. Wish had stands from upstairs in house. Are three, all 11 years old—still undamaged (of course, perches consist of hard-cured, smooth-cast concrete—detail possibly relevant to longevity).

Guess that’s it for now. Watch this space for further stirring details.

Two months—hard to believe not millenia. Einstein correct: Time is relative. Hope doesn’t get more so; probably stop altogether. Have wondered occasionally if already hasn’t.

Not to imply boredom. Gracious, how could be bored amidst unremitting pressure from giddy round of social activities? For instance, just threw gala party to celebrate passing of second month. Was smash, high point of entombment, sensation of sepulchral social schedule. Went all out—even invited Terry (desperately relieved to find invitee able to squeeze event into already busy whirl of commitments).

First class event: Made cake, fried chicken thighs, broiled small steak; even found ice cream. All turned out well. Preferred steak, cake myself; honored guest chose ice cream (to eyebrows), chicken bones (splits shafts, devours marrow—possibly favoritest treat of all). No noisemakers in inventory (gross oversight), but assemblage combined efforts to compensate. At peak of revelry birdbrain completed chewing through perch. Was standing on end at time, of course; accepted downfall with pride, air of righteous triumph. Then waddled purposefully in direction of nearest chair leg. Had to move fast to dissuade.

Replaced perch.

Also have read 104 microfilmed books, regular volumes. Am possibly world’s foremost living authority on everything.

As if matters.

Later.

Ever wanted something so bad could almost taste, needed so long seemed life’s main ambition? Finally got—wished hadn’t?

You guessed: Three months up—finally’.

Went upstairs, outside. Stayed maybe two hours. Wandered old haunts: familiar neighborhood. Main Street shopping area. Quarry Lake Park, school, Y, etc.

Should have quit sooner: would, had understood nature of penalty accruing. By time got back was already too late; trembling all over, tears running down face. Scabs all scraped from wounds; worms awake, gnawing soul. In parlance of contemporaries-past: Was bad trip.

However, conditions outside are fact of life, something must face. Must overcome reaction unless intend to spend balance of years simulating well-read mole. Nature works slowly, methods unesthetic; tidying up takes years. Inescapable: must accept as is; develop blind spot, immunity. Meanwhile will just have to cope best I can with resulting trauma each time crops up until quits cropping.

Well, coping ought to be no problem. Catharsis worked before, should again. But wish were some other way. No fun; hurts almost as much second time around. But works—and already learned cannot function with psyche tied in knots. So time to quit stalling. “Sooner started, sooner done; sooner outside, having fun.”—Anon. (Understandably.)

Only just can’t right now. Not in mood; still hurting from initial trauma. Guess I’ll go read some more. Or pound something together with hammer.

Or apart.

Later.

Okay. Feel no better yet, but feel less bad. Is time got on with therapy.

Suspect current problems complicated by deja vu. Still retain vivid mental picture of body of Momma Foster minutes after pronounced dead. Bore physical resemblance to warm, wise, vital woman whose limitless interests, avid curiosity, ready wonderment, hearty enjoyment of existence had so enriched early years.

But body not person—person gone. Resemblance only underscored absence.

So too with village: Look quick, see no difference. Bears resemblance to contentedly industrious, unassuming, small farm town of happy childhood. Same tall, spreading trees shade same narrow streets; well-kept, comfortably ageless old homes. Old-fashioned street lights line Main Street’s storefront downtown business district, unchanged for 50 years, fronting on classic village square. Hundred-year-old township building centered in square amidst collection of heroic statues. World War One mementos, playground equipment; brightly-painted, elevated gazebo for public speakers. Look other direction down street, see own ivy-covered, redbrick school at far end, just across from Y. Next door. Teacher’s house looks bright, friendly, inviting as ever in summer-afternoon sunshine.

But open door, step out onto porch—illusion fades. Popular fallacy attends mystique of small towns: Everyone knows are “quiet.” Not so: plenty of noise, but right kind—comfortable, unnoticed.

Until gone.

Silence is shock. Is wrong, but takes whole minutes to analyze why wrong; identify anomalous sensation, missing input.

Strain ears for hint of familiar sound: Should be faint miasma of voices, traffic sounds drifting up from direction of Main Street; chatter, squeals, laughter from schoolyard. Too, is truly small town, farmlands close at hand; should hear tractors chugging in fields, stock calling from pastures. Should catch frequent hollow mutter as distant semi snores down highway past town; occasional, barely-perceptiblc rumble from jet, visible only as fleecy tracing against indigo sky. Should be all manner of familiar sounds.

But as well could be heart of North Woods; sounds reaching ear limited to insect noises, bird calls, wind sighing through leaves.

Visual illusion fades quickly, too. Knee-deep grass flourishes where had been immaculately groomed yards; straggly new growth bewhiskers hedges, softening previous mathcmatically-ex-act outlines. Houses up and down street show first signs of neglect: Isolated broken windows, doors standing open, missing shingles. Partially uprooted tree leans on Potter’s house, cracking mortar, crushing eaves, sagging roof. Street itself blocked by car abandoned at crazy angle; tire flat, rear window broken, driver’s door hanging open. Closer inspection shows Swensens’ pretty yellow-brick Cape Cod nothing but fire-gutted shell; roof mostly gone, few panes of glass remain, dirty smudge marks above half-consumed doors and windows; nearby trees singed.

And the smell . . .! Had not spent last three months sealed in own atmosphere. doubt could have remained in vicinity. Still strong enough outside to dislodge breakfast within moments of first encounter. And did. Happily, human constitution can learn to tolerate almost anything if must. By time returned to shelter, stench faded from forefront of consciousness—had other problems more pressing:

Learned what knee-deep lawns conceal. Three months’ exposure to Wisconsin summer does little to enhance cosmetic aspects of Nature’s embalming methods: Sun. rain, insects, birds, probably dogs, too, have disposed of bulk of soft tissues. What remains is skeletons (mostly scattered, incomplete, partially covered by semi-cured meat, some clothing). Doubtless would have mummified completely by now in dry climate, but Wisconsin summers aren’t. At best, results unappealing: at worst (first stumbled over in own front yard), dreadful shock.

Yes. I know: should have anticipated. Possibly did, in distant, nonpersonally-involved sort of way—but didn’t expect to find three bodies within ten feet of own front door! Didn’t expect to confront dead neighbors within three minutes after left burrow. Didn’t expect so many’. Thought most would be respectably tucked away indoors, perhaps in bed. That’s where I’d be. I think.

Well, lived through initial shocks continued foray. Was not systematic exploration: just wandered streets, let feet carry us at random. Didn’t seem to matter: same conditions everywhere. Peeked into houses, stores, cars: knocked on doors, hollered a lot.

Wasn’t until noticed twin digging in claws, flapping wings, protesting audibly that realized was running blindly, screaming for somebody—anybody’.

Stopped then, streaming tears, trembling. panting (must have run some distance); made desperate attempt to regain semblance of control. Dropped where stood, landed in lotus. Channeled thoughts into relaxation of body, achievement of physical serenity; hoped psyche would heed good example.

Did—sort of. Worked well enough, at least, to permit deliberate progress back to shelter, deliberate closing door, deliberate descent of stairs, deliberate placing of Terry on stand—all before threw screaming fit.

Discharged lots of tension in process, amused Terry hugely. By end of performance fink sibling was emulating noises. Ended hysteria in laughter. Backwards, true, but effective.

Recovered enough to make previous journal entry. Granted, present (therapeutic) entries beyond capacity at that point; but after spent balance of day licking wounds, night’s rest, was fit enough to make present update, discharge residual pain onto paper.

Amazing stuff, therapy; still not exactly looking forward to going outside again, but seem to have absorbed trauma of dead-body/deserted-city shock; adjusted to prospect of facing again. Forewarned, should be able to go about affairs, function effectively in spite of surroundings.

Which brings up entirely relevant question: Exactly what are my affairs, functions . . .? Now that am out. what to do? Where to go? What to do when get there? Why bother go at all?

Okay, fair questions. Obviously prime objective is find Somebody Else. Preferably somebody knowing awful lot about Civilizations. Founding & Maintenance Of—to say nothing of where to find next meal when supplies run out.

Certainly other survivors. Somewhere. So must put together reasonable plan of action based on logical extension of available data. Sounds good—uh. except, what is available data?

Available data: Everybody exposed to flash, to air at time of flash, to anybody else exposed to flash or air exposed to flash or to anybody exposed to anybody, etc., either at time of flash or during subsequent month, anywhere on planet, is dead. Period.

Shucks. Had me worried; thought for moment I had problem. Ought be plenty survivors; modern civilization replete with airtight refuges; nuclear submarines. hyperbaric chambers, space labs, jet transports, “clean assembly” facilities, many others (not to forget early-model VW beetles, so long as windows closed). Ought be many survivors of flash, initial contagion phase.

But—loaded question—how many knew enough; stayed tight throughout required month? Or got lucky, couldn’t get out too soon despite best efforts? Or with best intentions, had supplies, air for duration? Or survived emotional ravages; resisted impulse to open window. take big. deliberate breath?

Could employ magnet to find needle in haystack; easy by comparison. Real problem is: Is needle in there at all?

Well, never mind; leave for subconscious to mull. Good track record heretofore; probably come up with solution, given time.

Other, more immediate problems confronting: For one, must think about homestead. Can’t spend balance of years living underground. Unhealthy; leads to pallor. Besides, doubt is good for psyche: too many ghosts.

Where—no problem for short term; can live just about anywhere warm, dry. Adequate food supplies available in shelter, stores, home pantries, etc.; same with clothing, sundry necessities. Can scavenge for years if so inclined.

However, assuming residential exclusivity continues (and must take pessimistic view when planning), must eventually produce own food, necessities: become self-sufficient. Question is: Should start now or wait: hope won’t prove necessary?

Not truly difficult decision: longer delayed, more difficult transition becomes. Livestock factor alone demands prompt attention. Doubtless was big die-off over summer. Too stupid to break out of farms, pastures, search for water, feed, most perished—“domestic” synonym for “dependent.” But of survivors, doubt one in thousand makes it through winter unaided. Means if plan to farm, must round up beginning inventory before weather changes. Also means must have food, water, physical accommodations ready for inductees beforehand.

Means must have farm.

However, logic dictates commandeering farm relatively nearby. Too much of value in shelter; must maintain reasonable access. Availability of tools, books, etc., beneficial in coming project: provisioning, repairing fences, overhaul well-pumps, etc.

Plus work needed to put house in shape for winter. Wisconsin seasons rough on structures; characteristic swayback rooflines usually not included in builder’s plan, zoning regulations. After summer’s neglect, buildings of farm selected apt to need much work—none of which am qualified to do. Expect will find remainder of summer. fall highly educational, very busy.

So perhaps should quit reflecting on plans, get move on. Best reconnoitcr nearby farms. Be nice to find one with buildings solid, wells pumping, fences intact, etc.; be equally nice to meet jolly red-dressed, white-bearded gentleman cruising down road in sleigh pulled by reindeer.

Hi, again. Surprised to see me? Me too. Thinking of changing name to Pauline, serializing journal. Or maybe just stay home, take up needlepoint. Seems during entombment character of neighborhood changed: deteriorated, gotten rough—literally gone to dogs. Stepped out of A & P right into—nope, this won t do. Better stick to chronology; otherwise sure to miss something. Might even be important someday. So:

Awoke fully recovered—again (truly growing tired of yo-yo psychology). Since planned to be out full day, collected small pile of equipment, provisions: canteen, jerky, dried apricots, bag of parrot mix; hammer, pry bar (in case forcible investigation indicated). Went upstairs, outside.

Retained breakfast by force of will until accustomed to aroma.

Took bike from garage, rode downtown (first ride in three months; almost deafened by twin’s manic approval). After three months’ neglect, tires a tad soft (ten-speed requires 85 pounds): stopped at Oily’s Standard, reinflated. And marveled: Utilities still on, compressor. pumps, etc., still working—even bell still rang when rode across hose.

Started to go on way; stopped—had thought. Returned, bled air tanks as had seen Big Oily do. Had explained: Compression, expansion of air in tanks “made water” through condensation: accumulation bad for equipment. Found was starting to think in terms of preserving everything potentially useful against future need. (Hope doesn’t develop into full-blown neurosis; maintaining whole world could cramp schedule.)

Set about conducting check of aboveground resources: Eyeball-inventoried grocery stores, hardware, seed dealers; took ride down to rail depot, grain elevators. Found supplies up everywhere; highly satisfactory results. Apparently business conducted as usual after flash until first symptoms emerged. No evidence of looting; probably all too sick to bother.

And since power still on. freezers in meat markets maintaining temperature; quantity available probably triple that in shelter. If conditions similar in nearby towns, undoubtedly have lifetime supply of everything—or until current stops. (Personally, am somewhat surprised still working; summer thunderstorms habitually drop lines, blow transformers twice, three times a year—and winter . . .! One good ice storm brings out candles for days; prime reason why even new houses, designed with latest heating systems, all have old-fashioned Franklin-type oil stoves in major rooms, usually multiple fireplaces. Doubt will have electricity by spring.)

OH HELL! Beg pardon: unladylike outburst—but just realized: Bet every single farm well in state electrically operated. I got troubles . . .!

Well, just one more problem for subconscious to worry about. Can’t do anything about it now—but must devote serious thought.

Back to chronology: Emerged from A & P around ten; kicked up stand, prepared to swing leg over bike. Suddenly Terry squawked, gripped shoulder so hard felt like claws met in middle. Dropped bike. spun.

Six dogs: Big, lean, hungry: visibly exempt from “Best Friend” category.

Given no time to consider strategy; moment discovered, pack abandoned stealth, charged. Had barely time to toss twin into air. general direction of store roof, wish Godspeed. Then became very busy.

Had not fought in three months but continued kata: was in good shape. Fortunate.

First two (Shepherd. Malamute) left ground in formation. Doberman close behind. Met Malamute (bigger of two) in air with clockwise spin-kick to lower mandible attachment. Felt bones crunch, saw without watching as big dog wind-milled past, knocking Shepherd sprawling. Took firm stance, drove forward front-fist blow under Doberman’s jaw, impacting high on chest, left of center. Fist buried to wrist; felt scapula, clavicle, possibly also humerus crumble; attacker bounced five feet backwards, landed in tangle. Spun, side-kicked Shepherd behind ear as scrambled to rise: felt vertebrae give. Took fast step, broke Malamute’s neck with edge-hand chop. Spun again, jumped for Doberman; broke neck before could rise.

Glanced up, body coiling for further combinations—relaxed; remaining three had revised schedule: were halfway across parking lot.

Looked wildly about for Terry: spotted twin just putting on brakes for touchdown on shopping cart handle 20 feet away. Wondered, what had been doing in interim; seemed could have flown home, had dinner, returned to watch outcome.

Retrieved; lectured about stupidity, not following orders—suppose had been flankers? Would have been lunch before I got there.

Birdbrain accepted rebuke; nuzzled cheek in agreement, murmured. “You’re so icky-poo!”

Gave up; continued sortie.

Wondered briefly at own calmness. First blows ever struck in earnest; halfway expected emotional side-effects. But none; only mild regret had not met attackers under favorable circumstances. Doberman in particular was beautiful specimen, if could disregard gauntness.

Decided, in view of events, might be best if continued explorations in less vulnerable mode. Decided was time I soloed. Had driven cars before, of course; country kids all learn vehicular operation basics soonest moment eyes (augmented by cushions) dear dashboard. feet reach pedals.

Question of which car to appropriate gave pause. Have no particular hangups: familiar (for nondriver) with automatics, three-, four-speed manuals, etc. But would be poking nose down vestigial country roads, venturing up driveways more accustomed (suitable) to passage of tractor, horses; squeezing in. out of tight places: doubtless trying hard to get very stuck. Granted, had been relatively dry recently: ground firm most places, but—considering potential operating conditions, physical demands . . .

Would take Daddy’s old VW. Happy selection: Answered physical criteria (maneuverable, good traction, reliable, etc.); besides, had already driven—for sure could reach pedals, see out. Did give thought to Emerson’s Jeep, but never had opportunity to check out under controlled conditions. Further, has plethora of shift levers (three!). True, might be more capable vehicle, but sober reflection suggested unfamiliar advantages might prove trap: seemed simpler, more familiar toy offered better odds of getting back.

Pedaled home quickly, keeping weather eye out for predators (can take hint). Arrived without incident. Found key, established blithe sibling on passenger’s seatback: adjusted own seat for four-foot-ten-inch stature, turned key.

Results would have warmed ad-writer’s heart: After standing idle three months. Beetle cranked industriously about two seconds; started.

Gauge showed better than three-quarters full, but wanted to make sure; lonely country road frequented by hungry dog packs wrong place to discover faulty gauge. So backed gingerly down drive (killed only twice), navigated cautiously to Oily’s. Stuck in hose, got two gallons in before spit back. Beetle’s expression seemed to say.” . . . told you so,” as capped tank, hung up hose.

Went about tracking down suitable farm in workmanlike fashion, for beginner. Picked up area USGS Section Map from Sheriff’s office. Methodically plotted progress as went: avoided circling, repetition. Drove 150 miles; visited 30, 35 farms; marked off on map as left, graded on one-to-ten basis. Were many nice, places; some could make do in pinch. But none rated above seven; nothing rang bell until almost dark.

Found self at terminus of cowpath road. Had wound through patchy woods.

hills; felt must go somewhere so persevered to end, where found mailbox, driveway. Turned in; shortly encountered closed gate. Opened, drove through; resecured. Followed drive through woods, over small rise, out into clearing, farmyard. Stopped abruptly.

Knew at once was home . . .

To right stood pretty, almost new, red-brick house; to left, brand-new, modern steel barn, hen house; two silos (one new), three corn cribs—all full.

Got out, walked slowly around house, mouth open, heart pounding. No broken windows, doors closed, shingles all in place—grass cut! For glorious moment heart stopped altogether: thought had stumbled on nest of survivors. Then rounded corner, bumped into groundskeepers—sheep.

Owners quite dead. Found remains of man in chair on porch. Apparently spent last conscious moments reflecting upon happy memories. Picture album in lap suggested four impromptu graves short distance from house were wife, three children; markers confirmed. Fine looking people; faces showed confidence, contentment, love; condition of farm corroborated, evidenced care, pride.

Grew misty-eyed looking through album. Resolved to operate farm in manner founders would approve. Had handed me virtual “turn-key” homestead; immeasurably advanced schedule, boosted odds for self-sufficiency, survival. Least I could do in return.

Farm nestles snugly in valley amidst gently rolling, wooded countryside. Clean, cold, fast-running brook meanders generally through middle, passes within hundred yards of house; and by clever fence placement, zigs, zags, or loops through all pastures. Perimeter fence intact; strong, heavy-gauge, small-mesh fabric. Probably not entirely dog-proof, but highly resistant; with slight additional work should be adequate.

Contents of silos, cribs, loft product of season’s first planting; second crop still in fields—primary reason stock alive, healthy. Internal gates open throughout; allowed access to water, varied grazing (including nibbling minor leakages from cribs, silos). Beasties spent summer literally eating “fat of land”; look it.

Besides five sheep are nine cows (two calves, one a bull), two mares, one gelding, sundry poultry (rooster, two dozen chickens, motley half dozen ducks, geese). No pigs, but no tears; don’t like pigs, not wild about pork either.

From evidence, losses over summer low: Found only two carcasses: two cows, one horse. Bones not scattered, doubt caused by dogs; more likely disease, injury, stupidity—salient characteristic of domestic ruminants: Given opportunity, will gorge on no-no, pay dearly later.

Wandered grounds, poked through buildings until light gone. Found good news everywhere looked. Nothing I can’t use as is, put right with minor work.

Clocked distance on return: 17 miles by road. Not too bad; can walk if necessary—should breakdown occur while commuting—but perhaps wiser to hang bike on bumper. Still, machines can’t last forever; only matter of time before forced back to horseback technology. Will still have occasion to visit shelter often. Map shows straightline distance only nine miles; guess better learn bulldozer operation, add road-building to skills. (Goodness—future promises such varied experiences; may vary me to death . . . )

Was late when finally got back to shelter, tired but glowing all over at prospect. Can hardly wait for morning, start packing, moving in; start of new life.

Demented twin shares view; hardly shut up whole time were at farm. Or since. Lectured stock, dictated to poultry, narrated inspection tour throughout. Hardly took time out for snack, drink. Must be country boy at heart. So urbane, never suspected.

Hey—am really tired!

Good night.

Oh! Hurt places didn’t even know I had. Suspect must have come into being just for occasion.

Six trips to farm. Count ’em.

Light failed just before self. Packing stuff from house no problem: Eight, ten trips to car; all done. Stuff in shelter is rub. Aye.

Two hundred feet straight up. arms loaded. Repeatedly.

Must be better way.

Good night.

This is embarrassing; guess is time quit posing as genius. Proof in pudding. What matter 200-plus IQ if actions compatible with mobile vegetable?

Occurred this morning to ponder (after third trip up stairs) how excavated material removed during construction. Hand-carried in buckets? Counting stairwell, material involved amounts to 200,000 cubic feet plus. At half cube per bucket, assuming husky lad carrying doubles, 15 minute round trips, that’s 32 cubic feet every eight hours. Would take ten-man crew 625 days—not counting down time due to heart attacks, hernias, fallen arches . . .

And what about heavy stuff? Doubt nuclear generator carried down by hand—must weigh couple tons.

Okay. Obviously done some other way. But how? Oh—shelter manual; had forgotten. Thumbed through quickly, found answer; elevator! Of course. Missed significance of small, oddshaped, empty storeroom during first inspection. Other things on mind; didn’t notice controls.

Balance of day much easier. Still tired tonight but not basket case.

Tomorrow is another day . . .!

STOP THE PRESSES! Strike the front page! Scoop! I’m not me—I’m something else. No—we’re not us—no—oh, bother; not making any sense. But can’t help it; hard to organize thought—so DAMNED excited . . .! Will try, must try. Otherwise will end up leaving out best parts, most important stuff. Then, by time get feathers settled, blood pressure reduced, will have forgotten everything! Oh, must stop this blithering! Must get back to chronology. So . . .

Deep breath . . . release slow-oo-ow-ly . . . heart slowed to normal, physical tranquility . . . serenity . . . ohm-m-m . . .

Amazing, worked again.

Okay, resumed packing this morning. Took two loads over, returned for third. Finished; everything in car, at farm that felt would need. But still fidgeting; couldn’t decide why. No question of something forgotten; farm only short drive away, omission not crisis.

Finally recognized source of unscratchable itch: Was time I did duty. Had avoided at first; knew couldn’t face prospect. Then got so busy, slipped mind. But now remembered: Soo Kim McDivott. Teacher. Friend.

To friend falls duty of seeing to final resting place.

Generally inured now to face of death per se: unaffected last few days by myriad corpses have stepped over during course of running errands. Had no problem. for instance, removing Mr. Haralsen from porch to proper place beside wife, children; even finished job with warm feeling inside. (Suspect original trauma caused by sudden shock of events; enormity, completeness of isolation.) Condition improved now; felt could perform final service for old friend—more, felt need to.

Went next door, looked for body. Checked entire house: upstairs, downstairs, basement—even stuck head in attic.

Finally returned to library. Teacher had used as study; desk located there, most of favorite dog-eared references close at hand. Hoped might find clue regarding whereabouts amidst clutter.

First thing to catch was “Tarzan File” standing on desk. Large envelope taped to top, printing on face. Glanced at wording. Blood froze.

Was addressed to me!

Pulled loose, opened with suddenly shaking fingers. Teacher’s meticulous script, legible, beautiful as Jefferson’s on Declaration, read:

Dearest Candidia,

It is the considered opinion of several learned men familiar with your situation, among them Dr. Foster and myself, that you will survive the plague to find and read this. The viral complex employed by the enemy cannot harm you, we know: it was created as a specific against Homo sapiens.

Almost dropped letter. Surely required no genius to note implications. Took deep breath, read on:

I know, my child, that that statement must sound like the rumblings of an old man in extremis . . .

Ramble? Teacher? Ha! True, was old; condition intrinsic to amount of water over dam—of which lots (all deep, too). Probably also in extremis; lot of that going around when wrote this. But ramble? Teacher? Comes the day Teacher rambles. Old Nick announces cooling trend. New Deal, takes up post as skiing instructor on glorious powder slopes of Alternate Destination. I ramble; Teacher’s every word precise, correct.

Precise, correct letter went on:

. . . but please, before forming an opinion, humor me to the extent of reading the balance of this letter and reviewing the supporting evidence which documents 25 years of painstaking investigation by me and other.

Note that of 1,284 incidents wherein wild animals of varying descriptions “adopted” human children, none (with the exception of the very youngest—those recovered from the wild below age three) developed significantly beyond the adoptive parents. They could not be taught to communicate; they evinced no abstract reasoning; they could not be educated. IQ testing, where applicable, produced results indistinguishable from similar tests performed on random members of the “parents” species. Further, except for the 29 cases where the adoptive parents were of a species possessing rudimentary hands (apes, monkeys, the two racoon incidents; to a lesser degree the badger and the woverine), the children possessed no awareness of the concept of grasping, nor did it prove possible to teach them any manual skills whatever.

Finally, most authorities (note the citations in the file) are agreed that Man is born devoid of instincts, save (a point still in contention) suckling; therefore, unlike lesser animals, human development is entirely dependent upon learning and, therefore, environment.

This principle was deeply impressed upon me during the years I spent studying a number of these children; and it occurred to me to wonder what effect this mechanism might have within human society—whether average parents, for instance, upon producing a child possessing markedly superior genetic potential, might raise such a child (whether through ignorance, unconscious resentment or envy, deliberate malice, or some unknown reason) in such a manner as to prevent his development from exceeding their own attainments; and if such efforts took place, to what extent the child would in fact be limited.

Then followed narrative of early stages of investigation, solo at first, but producing preliminary findings so startling that shortly was directing efforts of brilliant group of associates (including Daddy!), whole project funded by bottomless government grant. Object of search: reliable clues, indicators upon which testing program could be based enabling identification of gifted children (potential geniuses) shortly after birth, before retardation (if such truly existed) began operation.

Efforts rewarded: Various factors pinpointed which, encountered as group, were intrinsic to genetically superior children. Whereupon study shifted to second phase. As fast as “positives” found, identified, were assigned to study group. Were four:

AA (positive/advantaged), potentially gifted kids whose parents were in on experiment; guided, subsidized, assisted every way possible to provide optimum environment for learning, development. AB (positive/nonadvantaged), potential geniuses whose parents weren’t let in on secret; would have to bloom or wither, depending on qualities of vine. BA (negative/ advantaged), ordinary babies, random selection, whose parents were encouraged (for which read “conned”) to think offspring were geniuses; also received benefit of AA-type parental coaching (and coaches didn’t know whether were dealing with AA or BA parents), financial assistance. And BB (negative/nonadvantaged), control group: ordinary babies raised ordinary way. Whatever that is.

As expected, AAs did well in school: average progress tripled national norm. Further, personality development also remarkable: AA kids almost offensively well-adjusted: happy, well-integrated personalities. BAs did well. too. but beat national figures by only 15 percent. Were also generally happy, but isolated individuals demonstrated symptoms suggesting insecurity; perhaps being pushed close to. even beyond capabilities.

ABs also produced spotty results: Goods very good, equaling AA figures in certain cases; however, bads very bad; ABs had highest proportion of academic failures, behavioral problems, perceptibly madadjusted personalities.

BBs, of course, showed no variation at all from national curves; were just kids.

Study progressed cozily; all content as confirming evidence of own cleverness emerged from statistical analysis, continued to accumulate (Teacher, in particular, basking in glow emanating from vindication of theory), when suddenly Joker popped from deck.

It became obvious that AA and AB children lost vastly less time from school through illness. Further breakdown, however, showed that approximately one third of the positives had never lost any time, while the balance had attendance records indistinguishable from the norm. Detailed personal inquiry revealed that these particular children had never been sick from any cause, while the balance had had the usual random selection of childhood illnesses. It was also determined that these unfailingly healthy positives were far and away the highest group of achievers in the AA group and constituted the best, worst, and most maladjusted of the AB group.

At that time study blessed by convenient tragedy: healthy child died in traffic accident. Body secured for autopsy.

Every organ was examined minutely, every tissue sample was scrutinized microscopically and chemically, and chromosome examination was performed. Every test known to the science of pathology was performed, most three, four, and five times, because no one was willing to believe the results.

And thereafter, quickly and by various subterfuges, complete physicals, including x-rays, and biopsy samples of blood, bone, skin, hair, and a number of organs were obtained from the full test group and compared.

The differences between “healthy” positives and the balance proved uniform throughout the sample, and were unmistakable to an anthropologist . . . Shock upon shock: Folksy, humble, simple Teacher was Ph.D.—three times over! Was physician (double-barreled—pediatrician, psychiatrist) plus anthropologist. Predictably, renowned in all three—qualities leading to Tenth Degree not confined to Art.

. . . but none of themselves were of a character to attract the notice of a physician not specifically and methodically hunting for an unknown “common denominator,” using mass sampling techniques and a very open mind; nor would they attract notice by affecting the outcome of any known medical test or procedure. The single most dramatic difference is the undisputed fact, still unexplained, that “healthy” positives are totally immune to the full spectrum of human disease.

Differences proved independent of race, sex: Makeup of AA. AB “healthy” kids 52 percent female; half Caucasoid, one third Negroid, balance apportioned between Oriental, Hispanic, Indian, other unidentifiable fractions. Breakdown matched precisely population area from which emerged.

The conclusion is indisputable: Although clearly of the genus Homo, AA and AB “healthy” children are not human beings; they are a species distinct unto themselves.

Quite aside from the obvious aspect of immunity and the less obvious anatomical characteristics which identify them, these children possess clear physical superiority over Homo sapiens children of like size and weight. They are stronger, faster, more resistant to trauma, and demonstrate markedly quicker reflexive responses. Visual, aural, and olfactory functions operate over a broader range and at higher levels of sensitivity than in humans. We have no data upon which to base even a guess as to the magnitude, but all evidence points toward a substantially longer lifespan.

A study was begun immediately, a search for clues which might help to explain this phenomenon of uniformly mutated children being born to otherwise normal, healthy human couples. And these couples were normal: To the limits of our clinical capabilities to determine, they were indistinguishable from any other Homo sapiens.

However, it was only very recently, after years of the most exhaustive background investigation and analysis, that a possible link was noticed. It was an obvious connection, but so removed in time that we almost missed its significance, due to the usual scientific tendency to probe for the abstruse while ignoring the commonplace.

The grandmothers of these children were all of a similar age, born within a two-year span: All were conceived during the rampage of the great influenza pandemic of 1918-19.

This “coincidence” fairly shouts its implications: Sweeping genetic recombination, due to specific viral invasion, affecting either of the gametes before, or both during, formation of the zygotes which became the grandmothers, creating in each half of the matrix which fitted together two generations later to become the AA and AB “healthy” children.

Personally I have no doubt that this is the explanation; however. so recently has this information come to light, that we have not had time to study the question in detail. And suspecting that something may be true—even a profound inner conviction—is not the same as proving it. I hope you will one day have the opportunity to add this question to your own studies. It needs answering.

After much reflection we named this new species Homo post hominem, meaning ‘Man Who Follows Man.’ for it would appear that this mutation is evolutionary in character: and that, given time and assuming it breeds true (there is no reason to suspect otherwise—in fact, chromosome examination suggests that the mutation is dominant: i.e. a sapiens hominem pairing should unfailingly produce a hominem) it will entirely supplant Homo sapiens.

Wonderful thing, the human nervous system: accustoms quickly to mortal shocks. Didn’t even twitch as other shoe landed—or perhaps had anticipated from buildup; just wondering how would be worded:

Very nice; no fanfare, just matter-of-fact statement:

You, my child are a Homo post hominem. You are considerably younger than your fellows among the study group, and were never involved in the. study itself. Your identification and inclusion in our sample came about late and through rather involved and amusing circumstances.

The Fosters, as you know, had long desired a child and had known equally long that they could never have one. When your natural parents died, it was entirely predictable that they lost no time securing your adoption (which is certainly understandable: you were a most winning baby).

Neither Daddy nor rest of staff thought to have me tested; had been exposed to ten months’ “unmonitored parentage”; was “compromised subject.” Besides, Daddy wasn’t interested in studying me; wanted to enjoy raising “his little girl.” Professional competence crumbled before gush of atavistic paternalism. Most reprehensible.

Momma disagreed: felt determination of potential would provide useful child-rearing information. In keeping with formula long established for maintaining smooth marriage, kept disagreement to self; however, took steps: Prevailed upon staff to test me—all unbeknownst Daddy.

Tests proved positive, but follow-up determination as to “healthy” status not performed—didn’t occur to discipline-blindered scientists, and Momma didn’t know any better so didn’t insist.

You were a genius: she was content. And she thereupon took it upon herself to see that you were raised in the same “advantaged” manner as the rest of the AAs—with the exception of the fact that the doctor did not know this was taking place. He continued to enjoy his “daddy’s little girl” as before, prating endlessly about the advantages of “sugar and spice,” etc. And as for the rest of us. after swearing each other to secrecy about your test results and our involvement. we forgot you. You were, after all, a “compromised subject.”

Was almost five when next came to their attention. Had soured “sugar and spice” by glancing up. commenting living room wall “. . . looks awful hot.” Was, too—result of electrical fault. Would have burned down house shortly.

Remember incident clearly. Not that caused any particular, immediate fuss, but Daddy spent balance of evening trying not to show was staring at me.

The doctor had spent much time during the previous few years observing children whose visual preception extended into the infrared and ultraviolet; and as shortly thereafter as possible, without letting Mrs. Foster know, he had you examined and tested.

Oho! Finally—explanation what triggered Daddy’s reaction that day—and of friends’ inexplicable night-blindness, even during summer. Of course, could understand difficulty seeing at night during winter; is dark outside on cold night. Only perceptible glow comes from faces, hands; and after short exposure to cold, cheeks, noses dim perceptibly.

And remember also that testing session. Salient feature was expressions of other staff as repeated tests done on previous (conspicuously unmcntioned) occasion: utterly deadpan.

It was only after the tests (performed fully this time) identified you as a Homo post hominem; after the doctor had diffidently broached this fact to Mrs. Foster and she, giggling helplessly, confessed to him and, finally, we also came clean, that further testing demonstrated that you were substantially more advanced in intellectual development than the profile developed by our studies suggested you should be at that age.

How nice. Even as superkid can’t be normal; still genius. Is no justice.

Detailed analysis of this phenomenon brought forth two unassessable factors: One, you had experienced ten months of unmonitored BB parentage; and two, your subsequent upbringing had been AA from your mother but BB from your father. Since we could neither analyze nor affect the first of these, we chose to continue the second factor unaltered, observing you closely and hoping that in some way, then unknown, the whipsaw combination of indulgent spoiling and accelerated, motivational education you had received to this point would continue to produce these outstanding results.

Momma’s death terminated experiment; but before she left, made Teacher promise would take over overt management of education, keep pushing me hard as would accept while Daddy (apparently) continued classic BB father role. Momma felt hunger for knowledge already implanted; abetted by Daddy’s careful negative psychology, seeding of environment with selected books (Ha! Always suspected something fishy about circumstances surrounding steady discovery of wanted, needed study materials, always just in time, just as finishing previous volume—not complaining; just wish planting had gone faster), would carry on through interim without lost momentum. Was right, too—but now know how puppet must feel when wires too thin to discern.

Phase Two of scheme hit snag, though; was not anticipated would take four years for Teacher to extricate self from complications attendant profession(s), “retire.”

Fortunately the delay appeared to be without consequences. Mrs. Foster’s opinion of you was borne out; Dr. Foster reported that you located every book he planted—and not a few that he didn’t. He said it was rarely necessary to “steer” you; that you were quite self-motivated, distinctly tenacious, and could be quite devious when it came to tracking down knowledge in spite of the “barriers” he placed in your way.

By the time I managed to delegate all my other responsibilities to my successors and devote my entire attention to you your advantage over other AAs had increased impressively. There were only a very few individuals showing anywhere near as much promise. And by the time the blunderings of our late friends behind the Iron Curtain put an end to all such research, you were—for your age—quite the most advanced of our hominems.

If I seem to harp on that point, it is because you must remember that this study was initiated some 20 years ago. You are ten years younger than the next youngest in our group; and as advanced as you are for your age, you still have considerable catching up to do—see that you keep at it.

Yes, I know; the exigencies of solo survival will occupy much of your time, but do not neglect your studies entirely. Cut back if you must, but do not terminate them.

Now, if I may presume to advise a singularly gifted member of an advanced species, there is security and comfort in numbers. You will doubtless find the preservation and extension of knowledge more convenient once a group of you have been assembled. Within the body of the Tarzan File you will find a complete listing of known Homo post hominems. I can anticipate no logical reason why most should not be alive and in good health.

Pawed through file with shaking hands. Found listing referred to: collection of mini-dossiers. One had small note attached. Read:

Dear Candy,

It is now almost time for me to leave, and a number of things still remain undone, so I must be brief.

The subject of this dossier,

Peter Bell, is the direct, almost line-bred descendant of Alexander Graham Bell (would that I could have tested him,). A measure of his intellect is the fact that he, alone of our hominems, deduced the existence and purpose of our study, the implications regarding himself, and most of the characteristics of his and your species.

To him, not long-ago, I confided your existence, as well as my impressions of your potential.

As well as probably being your equal (after you reach maturity, of course), he is also nearest to your own age, at 21; and of all our subjects, I predict he is the most likely to prove compatible with you as you continue your unrelenting search for knowledge in the future—in fact, he may give you quite a run for it; he is a most motivated young man.

However, l was unable to reach him following the attack; therefore he does not know that you are alive and well in the shelter. The burden is upon you to establish contact, if such is possible—and I do urge you to make the attempt; l feel that a partnership consisting of you two would be most difficult to oppose, whatever the future may bring you.

Love,

Teacher

Hands shook, blood pounded in head as turned back to first letter. Balance consisted of advice on contacting other hominems—AAs from study.

Cautioned that, based on (terribly loose) extrapolation of known data, should be perhaps 150.000 of us on North American continent—but virtually all must be considered ABs. replete with implications: High proportion of maladjusteds, discontents, rebels, borderline (or worse after shock of depopulation) psychotics, plus occasional genius. Plus rare occurences of surviving Homo sapiens.

Teacher suggested moving very deliberately when meeting strangers: Evaluate carefully, rapidly, selfishly. If decide is not sort would like for neighbor, hit first: kill without hesitation, warning. No place in consideration for racial altruism. Elimination of occasional bad apple won’t affect overall chances for lifting species from endangered list; are enough of us to fill ranks after culling stock—but only one me. Point well taken.

Well, time grows short. So much remains to be accomplished before I leave, so I had best hurry.

I leave with confidence; I know the future of the race is in hands such as yours and Peter’s. You will prosper and attain levels of development I cannot even envision; of that I am certain. I hope those heights will include much joy and contentment.

I might add this in parting: When your historians tell future generations about us, I hope they will not be unduly severe. True, we did not last the distance; also true, we did exterminate ourselves, apparently in a display of senseless, uncontrolled aggression; equally true, we did many other things that were utterly wrong.

But we did create a mighty civilization: we did accumulate a fund of knowledge vast beyond our capacity to absorb or control: we did conceive and aspire to a morality unique in history, which placed the welfare of others ahead of our own self-interest—even if most of us didn’t practice it.

And we did produce you!

It may well be that we were not intended to last more than this distance. It may even be that your coming triggered seeds of self-destruction already implanted in us for that purpose: that our passing is as necessary to your emergence as a species as was our existence to your genesis.

But whatever the mechanism or its purpose. I think that when all are judged at the end of Time, Homo sapiens will be adjudged, if not actually a triumph, then at least a success, according to the standards imposed by the conditions we faced and the purposes for which we were created: just as the Cro-Magnon. Neanderthal. and Pithecanthropus—and even the brontosaur—were successful in their time when judged in light of the challenges they overcame and the purposes they served.

Single page remained. Hesitated: was final link with living past. Once read, experienced, would become just another memory. Sighed, forced eyes to focus:

Candy, my beloved daughter-in-spirit, this is most difficult to bring to a close. Irrationally I find myself grieving over losing you: “irrationally.” I say. because it is obvious I who must leave. But leave l must, and there is no denying and little delaying of it—

It will be well with you and yours. Your growth has been sound, your direction right and healthy: you cannot fail to live a life that must make us, who discovered and attempted to guide you this far, proud of our small part in your destiny, even though we are not to be permitted to observe its fulfillment. I think I understand something of how Moses must have felt as he stood looking down that last day on Nebo.

Always know that l. the doctor. and Mrs. Foster could not have loved you more had you sprung from our own flesh. Remember us fondly, but see that you waste no time grieving after us.

The future is yours, my child: go mold it as you see the need.

Goodbye, my best and bestloved pupil.

Love forever,

Soo Kim McDivott

P.S.: By the authority vested in me as the senior surviving official of the United States Karate Association, I herewith promote you to Sixth Degree. You are more than qualified: see to it that you practice faithfully and remain so.

Read, reread final page until tears deteriorated vision, made individual word resolution impossible. Placed letter reverently on desk, went upstairs, outside onto balcony porch. Was Teacher’s favorite meditation setting. Settled onto veranda swing, eased legs into lotus.

Terry understood: moved silently from shoulder to lap, pressed close, started random-numbers recitation of vocabulary in barely audible, tiny baby-girl voice. Held twin nestled in arms as pain escalated, tears progressed to silent. painful, wracking sobs. Sibling’s uncritical companionship, unquestioning love all that stood between me and all-engulfing blackness, fresh awareness of extent of losses threatening to overwhelm soul.

Together we watched early-afternoon cumulonimbus form up, mount into towering thunderheads, roil and chum, finally develop lightning flickers in gloom at bases, arch dark shafts of rain downward to western horizon; watched until fading light brought realization how long had sat there. Brighter stars already visible in east.

Reviewed condition with mounting surprise: Eyes dry, pain gone from throat, heart; blackness hovering over soul mere memory. Apparently had transcendentalized without conscious intent, resolved residual grief. All that remained was sweet sadness when contemplated Daddy, Momma, Teacher; were gone along with everything, everybody else, leaving only memories. Suddenly realized was grateful being permitted to keep those.

Cautiously moved exploratory muscle, first in hours. Terry twitched, fretted; then woke, set up justifiable protest over starved condition. Arose, shifted twin to shoulder; went inside, downstairs.

Picked up Tarzan File. Teacher’s letter, went back to Daddy’s house. Fed birdbrain, self; settled down, skimmed file’s contents.

Presently concluded Teacher correct (profound shock, that): Peter Bell doubtless best prospective soulmate of lot. Very smart, very interested, very conscious: educational credits to date sound like spoof (nobody that young could have learned that much, except, uh . . . perhaps me—okay); very strong, quick, very advanced in study of Art (Eighth Degree!); plus (in words of Teacher): “Delightfully unconcerned about his own accomplishments; interested primarily in what he will do next.” And, “. . . possessed of a wry sense of humor.” Sounds like my kind of guy. Hope turns out can stand him.

Sat for long moments working up nerve. Then picked up phone, deliberately dialed area code, number. Got stranded after a few moments’ clicking, hissing when relay somewhere Out There stuck. Tried again: hit busy circuit (distinct from busy number: difference audible—also caused by sticky relay). Tried again muttering in beard. Stranded again. Tried again. Failed again.

“That’s bad,” offered Terry enthusiastically, bobbing head cheerfully.

Took deep breath, said very bad word, tried again.

Got ring tone! Once, twice, three times; then: Click. “Hello, is that you. Candy? Sure took you long enough. This is Peter Bell. I can’t come to the phone right now; I’m outside taking care of the stock. But I’ve set up this telephone answering machine to guard my back. It’s got an alarm on it that’ll let me know you’ve called so I can cheek the tape.

“When you hear the tone at the end of my message, give me your phone number if you’re not at home—don’t forget the area code if it’s different from your home—and I’ll call you back the moment I get back and find your message. Boy, am I glad you’re all right.

“Beep!”

Caught agape by recording. Barely managed regroupment in time to stutter out would be home; add if not. would be at farm, give number before machine hung up. dial tone resumed.

Repeated bad word. Added frills tailored specifically for answering machine.

Did dishes, put away. Refilled twin’s food dish, changed water: moved stand into study, placed next to desk, within convenient head-scratching range.

Settled into Daddy’s big chair, opened journal, brought record up to date. Have done so. Now up to date. Current. Completely. Nothing further to enter. So haven’t entered anything else. For quite a while.

Midnight. Might as well read book.

Stupid phone.

Awoke to would-be rooster’s salute to dawn’s early light. Found self standing unsteadily in middle of study, blinking sleep from eyes, listening to echoes die away. Glared at twin; received smug snicker in return.

Took several moments to establish location, circumstances leading to night spent in chair with clothes on. When succeeded, opened mouth, then didn’t bother—realized bad word wouldn’t help: no longer offered relief adequate to situation.

Casual approach had worn out about one a.m.—by which time had read possibly ten pages (of which couldn’t remember single word). Feathcrhead snored on stand: nothing within reach to disassemble, had lost interest.

Yawning prodigiously myself by time abandoned pretense, grabbed phone, dialed number.

Got through first try. But was busy!

Repeated attempt at five-minute intervals for two hours or until fell asleep—whichever came first.

Have just tried line again. Still busy. Better go make breakfast.

Contact problem no longer funny. In two months since last entry have averaged five tries daily. Result: Either (usually) busy signal or transistorized moron spouts same message. One possible explanation (among many): Recorded message mentions no dates; could have been recorded day after Armageddon. yesterday—anytime.

Not that am languishing, sitting wringing hands by phone, however: have been busy. Completed move to farm; padded supply reserves: shored weaknesses; collected additional livestock. poultry. Have electrified fences, augmented where appeared marginally dogproof: trucked in additional grain (learned to drive semi, re-re-re-replete with 16-speed transmission—truly sorry about grain company’s gatepost, but was in way; should have been moved long ago): located, trucked in two automatic diesel generators, connected through clever relay system so first comes on line (self-starting) if power fails, second kicks in if first quits. So far has worked every time tested, just as book said.

Have accumulated adequate fuel for operation: Brought in four tankers brim full of diesel (6,000 gallons each); rigged up interconnecting hose system guaranteeing gravity feed to generators—whichever needs, gets. At eight gallons hourly (maximum load) should provide over four months’ operation if needed. (However, farm rapidly taking on aspect of truck lot. Must think about disposing of empties soon: otherwise won’t be able to walk through yard.)

Overkill preparations not result of paranoia. Attempting to make place secure in absence; improve odds of finding habitable, viable farm on return, even if sortie takes longer than expected. Which could; is over 900 miles (straight-line) to file’s address on Peter Bell. And he’s only first on AA list; others are scattered all over.

Have attempted to cover all bets, both home and for self on trip. Chose vehicle with care: Four-wheel-drive Chevy van. Huge snow tires bulge from fenders on all four wheels, provide six inches extra ground clearance, awesome traction. Front bumper mounts electric winch probably capable of hoisting vehicle bodily up sheer cliff. Interior has bed. potty, sink, stove, sundry cabinets—and exterior boasts dreadful baroque murals on sides.

Though might appear was built specifically to fill own needs (except for murals—and need for build-ups on pedals), was beloved toy of town banker. When not pinching pennies, frittered time away boonies-crawling in endless quest for inaccessable, impassable terrain. Bragged hadn’t found any. Hope so; bodes extremely well for own venture.

Personal necessities, effects aboard. Include: Ample food, water for self. Terry; bedding, clothing, toiletries; diverse tools, including axe. bolt cutters, etc.; spares for van; siphon, pump, hose for securing gas; small, very nasty armory. including police chief’s sawed-off riot gun., two Magnum revolvers. M-16 with numerous clips and scope. Not expecting trouble, but incline toward theory that probably won’t rain if carry umbrella.

Leaving this journal here in shelter for benefit of archeologists: keep separate book on trip. Can consolidate on return, but if plans go awry this account still available for posterity.

Well, time to go: unknown beckons.

But have never felt so small. Awfully big world waiting out there.

For me.

TRUE NAMES

Vernor Vinge

To my sister,

Patricia Vinge, with Love.

In the once upon a time days of the First Age of Magic, the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for—the stories go—once an enemy, even a weak unskilled enemy, learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful. As times passed, and we graduated to the Age of Reason and thence to the first and second industrial revolutions, such notions were discredited. Now it seems that the Wheel has turned full circle (even if there never really was a First Age) and we are back to worrying about true names again:

The first hint Mr. Slippery had that his own True Name might be known—and, for that matter, known to the Great Enemy—came with the appearance of two black Lincolns humming up the long dirt driveway that stretched through the dripping pine forest down to Road 29. Roger Pollack was in his garden weeding, had been there nearly the whole morning, enjoying the barely perceptible drizzle and the overcast, and trying to find the initiative to go inside and do work that actually makes money. He looked up the moment the intruders turned, wheels squealing, into his driveway. Thirty seconds passed, and the cars came out of the third-generation forest to pull up beside and behind Pollack’s Honda. Four heavy-set men and a hard-looking female piled out, started purposefully across his well-tended cabbage patch, crushing tender young plants with a disregard which told Roger that this was no social call.

Pollack looked wildly around, considered making a break for the woods, but the others had spread out and he was grabbed and frog-marched back to his house. (Fortunately the door had been left unlocked. Roger had the feeling that they might have knocked it down rather than ask him for the key.) He was shoved abruptly into a chair. Two of the heaviest and least collegiate-looking of his visitors stood on either side of him. Pollack’s protests—now just being voiced—brought no response. The woman and an older man poked around among his sets. “Hey, I remember this, Al: It’s the script for 1965. See?” The woman spoke as she flipped through the holo-scenes that decorated the interior wall.

The older man nodded. “I told you. He’s written more popular games than any three men and even more than some agencies. Roger Pollack is something of a genius.”

They’re novels, damn you, not games! Old irritation flashed unbidden into Roger’s mind. Aloud: “Yeah, but most of my fans aren’t as persistent as you all.”

“Most of your fans don’t know that you are a criminal, Mr. Pollack.”

“Criminal? I’m no criminal—but I do know my rights. You FBI types must identify yourselves, give me a phone call, and—”

The woman smiled for the first time. It was not a nice smile. She was about thirty-five, hatchet-faced, her hair drawn back in the single braid favored by military types. Even so it could have been a nicer smile. Pollack felt a chill start up his spine. “Perhaps that would be true, if we were the FBI or if you were not the scum you are. But this is a Welfare Department bust, Pollack, and you are suspected—putting it kindly—of interference with the instrumentalities of National and individual survival.”

She sounded like something out of one of those asinine scripts he occasionally had to work on for government contracts. Only now there was nothing to laugh about, and the cold between his shoulderblades spread. Outside the drizzle had become a misty rain sweeping across the Northern California forests. Normally he found that rain a comfort, but now it just added to the gloom. Still, if there was any chance he could wriggle out of this, it would be worth the effort. “Okay, so you have license to hassle innocents, but sooner or later you’re going to discover that I am innocent and then you’ll find out what hostile media coverage can really be like.” And thank God I backed up my files last night. With luck, all they’ll find is some out-of-date stock-market schemes.

“You’re no innocent, Pollack. An honest citizen is content with an ordinary data set like yours there.” She pointed across the living room at the forty-by-fifty-centimeter data set. It was the great-grandchild of the old CRTs. With color and twenty-line-per-millimeter resolution, it was the standard of government offices and the more conservative industries. There was a visible layer of dust on Pollack’s model. The femcop moved quickly across the living room and poked into the drawers under the picture window. Her maroon business suit revealed a thin and angular figure. “An honest citizen would settle for a standard processor and a few thousand megabytes of fast storage.” With some superior intuition she pulled open the center drawer—right under the marijuana plants to reveal at least five hundred cubic centimeters of optical memory, neatly racked and threaded through to the next drawer which held correspondingly powerful CPUs. Even so, it was nothing compared to the gear he had buried under the house.

She drifted out into the kitchen and was back in a moment. The house was a typical airdropped bungalow, small and easy to search. Pollack had spent most of his money on the land and his . . . hobbies. “And finally,” she said, a note of triumph in her voice, “an honest citizen does not need one of these!” She had finally spotted the Other World gate. She waved the electrodes in Pollack’s face.

“Look, in spite of what you may want, all this is still legal. In fact, that gadget is scarcely more powerful than an ordinary games interface.” That should be a good explanation, considering that he was a novelist.

The older man spoke almost apologetically, “I’m afraid Virginia has a tendency to play cat and mouse, Mr. Pollack. You see, we know that in the Other World you are Mr. Slippery.”

“Oh.”

There was a long silence. Even “Virginia” kept her mouth shut. This had been, of course, Roger Pollack’s great fear. They had discovered Mr. Slippery’s True Name and it was Roger Andrew Pollack TIN/SSAN 0959-34-2861, and no amount of evasion, tricky programming, or robot sources could ever again protect him from them. “How did you find out?”

A third cop, a technician type, spoke up. “It wasn’t easy. We wanted to get our hands on someone who was really good, not a trivial vandal—what your Coven would call a lesser warlock.” The younger man seemed to know the jargon, but you could pick that up just by watching the daily paper. “For the last three months, DoW has been trying to find the identity of someone of the caliber of yourself or Robin Hood, or Erythrina, or the Slimey Limey. We were having no luck at all until we turned the problem around and began watching artists and novelists. We figured at least a fraction of them must be attracted to vandal activities. And they would have the talent to be good at it. Your participation novels are the best in the world.” There was genuine admiration in his voice. One meets fans in the oddest places, “so you were one of the first people we looked at. Once we suspected you, it was just a matter of time before we had the evidence.”

It was what he had always worried about. A successful warlock cannot afford to be successful in the real world. He had been greedy; he loved both realms too much.

The older cop continued the technician’s almost diffident approach. “In any case, Mr. Pollack, I think you realize that if the Federal government wants to concentrate all its resources on the apprehension of a single vandal, we can do it. The vandals’ power comes from their numbers rather than their power as individuals.”

Pollack repressed a smile. That was a common belief—or faith—within government. He had snooped on enough secret memos to realize that the Feds really believed it, but it was very far from true. He was not nearly as clever as someone like Erythrina. He could only devote fifteen or twenty hours a week to SIG activities. Some of the others must be on welfare, so complete was their presence on the Other Plane. The cops had nailed him simply because he was a relatively easy catch.

“So you have something besides jail planned for me?”

“Mr. Pollack, have you ever heard of the Mailman?”

“You mean on the Other Plane?”

“Certainly. He has had no notoriety in the, uh, real world as yet.”

For the moment there was no use lying. They must know that no member of a SIG or coven would ever give his True Name to another member. There was no way he could betray any of the others—he hoped.

“Yeah, he’s the weirdest of the werebots.”

“Werebots?”

“Were-robots, like werewolves—get it? They don’t really mesh with coven imagery. They want some new mythos, and this notion that they are humans who can turn into machines seems to suit them. It’s too dry for me. This Mailman, for instance, never uses real time communication. If you want anything from him, you usually have to wait a day or two for each response—just like the old-time hardcopy mail service.”

“That’s the fellow. How impressed are you by him?”

“Oh, we’ve been aware of him for a couple years, but he’s so slow that for a long time we thought he was some clown on a simple data set. Lately, though, he’s pulled some really—” Pollack stopped short, remembering just who he was gossiping with.

“—some really tuppin stunts, eh, Pollack?” The femcop “Virginia” was back in the conversation. She pulled up one of the roller chairs, till her knees were almost touching his, and stabbed a finger at his chest. “You may not know just how tuppin. You vandals have caused Social Security Records enormous problems, and Robin Hood cut IRS revenues by three percent last year. You and your friends are a greater threat than any foreign enemy. Yet you’re nothing compared to this Mailman.”

Pollack was rocked back. It must be that he had seen only a small fraction of the Mailman’s japes. “You’re actually scared of him,” he said mildly.

Virginia’s face began to take on the color of her suit. Before she could reply, the older cop spoke. “Yes, we are scared. We can scarcely cope with the Robin Hoods and the Mr. Slipperys of the world. Fortunately, most vandals are interested in personal gain or in proving their cleverness. They realize that if they cause too much trouble, they could no doubt be identified. I suspect that tens of thousands of cases of Welfare and Tax fraud are undetected, committed by little people with simple equipment who succeed because they don’t steal much—perhaps just their own income tax liability—and don’t wish the notoriety which you, uh, warlocks go after. If it weren’t for their petty individualism, they would be a greater threat than the nuclear terrorists.

“But the Mailman is different: he appears to be ideologically motivated. He is very knowledgeable, very powerful. Vandalism is not enough for him; he wants control . . .” The Feds had no idea how long it had been going on, at least a year. It never would have been discovered but for a few departments in the Federal Screw Standards Commission which kept their principal copy records on paper. Discrepancies showed up between those records and the decisions rendered in the name of the FSSC. Inquiries were made; computer records were found at variance with the hardcopy. More inquiries. By luck more than anything else, the investigators discovered that decision modules as well as data were different from the hardcopy backups. For thirty years government had depended on automated central planning, shifting more and more from legal descriptions of decision algorithms to program representations that could work directly with data bases to allocate resources, suggest legislation, outline military strategy.

The take-over had been subtle, and its extent was unknown. That was the horror of it. It was not even clear just what groups within the Nation (or without) were benefitting from the changed interpretations of Federal law and resource allocation. Only the decision modules in the older departments could be directly checked, and some thirty percent of them showed tampering. “. . . and that percentage scares us as much as anything, Mr. Pollack. It would take a large team of technicians and lawyers months to successfully make just the changes that we have detected.”

“What about the military?” Pollack thought of the Finger of God installations and the thousands of missiles pointed at virtually every country on Earth. If Mr. Slippery had ever desired to take over the world, that is what he would have gone for. To hell with pussy-footing around with Social Security checks.

“No. No penetration there. In fact, it was his attempt to infiltrate—” the older cop glanced hesitantly at Virginia, and Pollack realized who was the boss of this operation, “—NSA that revealed the culprit to be the Mailman. Before that it was anonymous, totally without the ego-flaunting we see in big-time vandals. But the military and NSA have their own systems. Impractical though that is, it paid off this time.” Pollack nodded. The SIG steered clear of the military, and especially of NSA.

“But if he was able to slide through DoW and Department of Justice defenses so easy, you really don’t know how much a matter of luck it was that he didn’t also succeed with his first try on NSA. . . . I think I understand now. You need help. You hope to get some member of the Coven to work on this from the inside.”

“It’s not a hope, Pollack,” said Virginia. “It’s a certainty. Forget about going to jail. Oh, we could put you away forever on the basis of some of Mr. Slippery’s pranks. But even if we don’t do that, we can take away your license to operate. You know what that means.”

It was not a question, but Pollack knew the answer nevertheless: ninety-eight percent of the jobs in modem society involved some use of a data set. Without a license, he was virtually unemployable—and that left Welfare, the prospect of sitting in some urbapt counting flowers on the wall. Virginia must have seen the defeat in his eyes. “Frankly, I am not as confident as Ray that you are all that sharp. But you are the best we could catch. NSA thinks we have a chance of finding the Mailman’s true identity if we can get an agent into your coven. We want you to continue to attend coven meetings, but now your chief goal is not mischief but the gathering of information about the Mailman. You are to recruit any help you can without revealing that you are working for the government—you might even make up the story that you suspect the Mailman of being a government plot. (I’m sure you see he has some of the characteristics of a Federal agent working off a conventional data set.) Above all, you are to remain alert to contact from us, and give us your instant cooperation in anything we require of you. Is all this perfectly clear, Mr. Pollack?”

He found it difficult to meet her gaze. He had never really been exposed to extortion before. There was something . . . dehumanizing about being used so. “Yeah,” he finally said.

“Good.” She stood up, and so did the others. “If you behave, this is the last time you’ll see us in person.”

Pollack stood too. “And afterward, if you’re . . . satisfied with my performance?” Virginia grinned, and he knew he wasn’t going to like her answer. “Afterward, we can come back to considering your crimes. If you do a good job, I would have no objection to your retaining a standard data set, maybe some of your interactive graphics. But I’ll tell you, if it weren’t for the Mailman, nabbing Mr. Slippery would make my month. There is no way I’d risk your continuing to abuse the System.”

Three minutes later, their sinister black Lincolns were halfway down the drive, disappearing into the pines. Pollack stood in the drizzle watching till long after their sound had faded to nothing. He was barely aware of the cold wet across his shoulders and down his back. He looked up suddenly, feeling the rain in his face, wondering if the Feds were so clever that they had taken the day into account: the military’s recon satellites could no doubt monitor their cars, but the civilian satellites the SIG had access to could not penetrate these clouds. Even if some other member of the SIG did know Mr. Slippery’s True Name, they would not know that the Feds had paid him a visit.

Pollack looked across the yard at his garden. What a difference an hour can make.

By late afternoon, the overcast was gone. Sunlight glinted off millions of waterdrop jewels in the trees. Pollack waited till the sun was behind the tree line, till all that was left of its passage was a gold band across the taller trees to the east of his bungalow. Then he sat down before his equipment and prepared to ascend to the Other Plane. What he was undertaking was trickier than anything he had tried before, and he wanted to take as much time as the Feds would tolerate. A week of thought and research would have suited him more, but Virginia and her pals were clearly too impatient for that.

He powered up his processors, settled back in his favorite chair, and carefully attached the Portal’s five sucker electrodes to his scalp. For long minutes nothing happened: a certain amount of self-denial—or at least self-hypnosis—was necessary to make the ascent. Some experts recommended drugs or sensory isolation to heighten the user’s sensitivity to the faint, ambiguous signals that could be read from the Portal. Pollack, who was certainly more experienced than any of the pop experts, had found that he could make it simply by staring out into the trees and listening to the wind-surf that swept through their upper branches.

And just as a daydreamer forgets his actual surroundings and sees other realities, so Pollack drifted, detached, his subconscious interpreting the status of the West Coast communication and data services as a vague thicket for his conscious mind to inspect, interrogate for the safest path to an intermediate haven. Like most exurb data-commuters, Pollack rented the standard optical links: Bell, Boeing, Nippon Electric. Those, together with the local West Coast data companies, gave him more than enough paths to proceed with little chance of detection to any accepting processor on Earth. In minutes, he had traced through three changes of carrier and found a place to do his intermediate computing. The comsats rented processor time almost as cheaply as ground stations, and an automatic payment transaction (through several dummy accounts set up over the last several years) gave him sole control of a large data space within milliseconds of his request. The whole process was almost at a subconscious level—the proper functioning of numerous routines he and others had devised over the last four years. Mr. Slippery (the other name was avoided now, even in his thoughts) had achieved the fringes of the Other Plane. He took a quick peek through the eyes of a low-resolution weather satellite, saw the North American continent spread out below, the terminator sweeping through the West, most of the plains clouded over. One never knew when some apparently irrelevant information might help—and though it could all be done automatically through subconscious access, Mr. Slippery had always been a romantic about spaceflight.

He rested for a few moments, checking that his indirect communication links were working and that the encryption routines appeared healthy, untampered with. (Like most folks, honest citizens or warlocks, he had no trust for the government standard encryption routines, but preferred the schemes that had leaked out of academia—over NSA’s petulant objections-during the last fifteen years.) Protected now against traceback, Mr. Slippery set out for the Coven itself. He quickly picked up the trail, but this was never an easy trip, for the SIG members had no interest in being bothered by the unskilled.

In particular, the traveler must be able to take advantage of subtle sensory indications, and see in them the environment originally imagined by the SIG. The correct path had the aspect of a narrow row of stones cutting through a gray-greenish swamp. The air was cold but very moist. Weird, towering plants dripped audibly onto the faintly iridescent water and the broad lilies. The subconscious knew what the stones represented, handled the chaining of routines from one information net to another, but it was the conscious mind of the skilled traveler that must make the decisions that could lead to the gates of the Coven, or to the symbolic “death” of a dump back to the real world. The basic game was a distant relative of the ancient Adventure that had been played on computer systems for more than forty years, and a nearer relative of the participation novels that are still widely sold. There were two great differences, though. This game was more serious, and was played at a level of complexity impossible without the use of the EEG input/output that the warlocks and the popular data bases called Portals.

There was much misinformation and misunderstanding about the Portals. Oh, responsible data bases like the LA Times and the CBS News made it clear that there was nothing supernatural about them or about the Other Plane, that the magical jargon was at best a romantic convenience and at worst obscurantism. But even so, their articles often missed the point and were both too conservative and too extravagant. You might think that to convey the full sense imagery of the swamp, some immense bandwidth would be necessary. In fact, that was not so (and if it were, the Feds would have quickly been able to spot warlock and werebot operations). A typical Portal link was around fifty thousand baud, far narrower than even a flat video channel. Mr. Slippery could feel the damp seeping through his leather boots, could feel the sweat starting on his skin even in the cold air, but this was the response of Mr. Slippery’s imagination and subconscious to the cues that were actually being presented through the Portal’s electrodes. The interpretation could not be arbitrary or he would be dumped back to reality and would never find the Coven; to the traveler on the Other Plane, the detail was there as long as the cues were there. And there is nothing new about this situation. Even a poor writer if he has a sympathetic reader and an engaging plot—can evoke complete internal imagery with a few dozen words of description. The difference now is that the imagery has interactive significance, just as sensations in the real world do. Ultimately, the magic jargon was perhaps the closest fit in the vocabulary of millenium Man.

The stones were spaced more widely now, and it took all Mr. Slippery’s skill to avoid falling into the noisome waters that surrounded him. Fortunately, after another hundred meters or so, the trail rose out of the water, and he was walking on shallow mud. The trees and brush grew in close around him, and large spider webs glistened across the trail and between some of the trees along the side.

Like a yo-yo from some branch high above him, a red-banded spider the size of a man’s fist descended into the space right before the traveler’s face. “Beware, beware,” the tiny voice issued from dripping mandibles. “Beware, beware,” the words were repeated, and the creature swung back and forth, nearer and farther from Mr. Slippery’s face. He looked carefully at the spider’s banded abdomen. There were many species of deathspider here, and each required a different response if a traveler was to survive. Finally he raised the back of his hand and held it level so that the spider could crawl onto it. The creature raced up the damp fabric of his jacket to the open neck. There it whispered something very quietly.

Mr. Slippery listened, then grabbed the animal before it could repeat the message and threw it to the left, at the same time racing off into the tangle of webs and branches on the other side of the trail. Something heavy and wet slapped into the space where he had been, but he was already gone—racing at top speed up the incline that suddenly appeared before him.

He stopped when he reached the crest of the hill. Beyond it, he could see the solemn, massive fortress that was the Coven’s haven. It was not more than five hundred meters away, illuminated as the swamp had been by a vague and indistinct light that came only partly from the sky. The trail leading down to it was much more open than the swamp had been, but the traveler proceeded as slowly as before: the sprites the warlocks set to keep eternal guard here had the nasty—though preprogrammed habit of changing the rules in new and deadly ways.

The trail descended, then began a rocky, winding climb toward the stone and iron gates of the castle. The ground was drier here, the vegetation sparse. Leathery snapping of wings sounded above him, but Mr. Slippery knew better than to look up. Thirty meters from the moat, the heat became more than uncomfortable. He could hear the lava popping and hissing, could see occasional dollops of fire splatter up from the liquid to scorch what vegetation still lived. A pair of glowing eyes set in a coal-black head rose briefly from the moat. A second later, the rest of the creature came surging into view, cascading sparks and lava down upon the traveler. Mr. Slippery raised his hand just so, and the lethal spray separated over his head to land harmlessly on either side of him. He watched with apparent calm as the creature descended ancient stone steps to confront him.

Alan—that was the elemental’s favorite name—peered nearsightedly, his head weaving faintly from side to side as he tried to recognize the traveler. “Ah, I do believe we are honored with the presence of Mr. Slippery, is it not so?” he finally said. He smiled, an open grin revealing the glowing interior of his mouth. His breath did not show flame but did have the penetrating heat of an open kiln. He rubbed his clawed hands against his asbestos T-shirt as though anxious to be proved wrong. Away from his magma moat, the dead black of his flesh lightened, trying to contain his body heat. Now he looked almost reptilian.

“Indeed it is. And come to bring my favorite little gifts.” Mr. Slippery threw a leaden slug into the air and watched the elemental grab it with his mouth, his eyes slitted with pleasure—melt-in-your-mouth pleasure. They traded conversation, spells, and counterspells for several minutes. Alan’s principal job was to determine that the visitor was a known member of the Coven, and he ordinarily did this with little tests of skill (the magma bath he had tried to give Mr. Slippery) and by asking the visitor questions about previous activities within the castle. Alan was a personality simulator, of course. Mr. Slippery was sure that there had never been a living operator behind that toothless, glowing smile. But he was certainly one of the best, probably the product of many hundreds of blocks of psylisp programming, and certainly superior to the little “companionship” programs you can buy nowadays, which generally become repetitive after a few hours of conversation, which don’t grow, and which are unable to counter weird responses. Alan had been with the Coven and the castle since before Mr. Slippery had become a member, and no one would admit to his creation (though Wiley J. was suspected). He hadn’t even had a name until this year, when Erythrina had given him that asbestos Alan Turing T-shirt.

Mr. Slippery played the game with good humor, but care. To “die” at the hands of Alan would be a painful experience that would probably wipe a lot of unbacked memory he could ill afford to lose. Such death had claimed many petitioners at this gate, folk who would not soon be seen on this plane again.

Satisfied, Alan waved a clawed fist at the watchers in the tower, and the gate—ceramic bound in wolfram clasps—was rapidly lowered for the visitor. Mr. Slippery walked quickly across, trying to ignore the spitting and bubbling that he heard below him. Alan—now all respectful—waited till he was in the castle courtyard before doing an immense belly-flop back into his magma swimming hole.

Most of the others, with the notable exception of Erythrina, had already arrived. Robin Hood, dressed in green and looking like Errol Flynn, sat across the hall in very close conversation with a remarkably good-looking female (but then they could all be remarkably good-looking here) who seemed unsure whether to project blonde or brunette. By the fireplace, Wiley J. Bastard, the Slimey Limey, and DON.MAC were in animated discussion over a pile of maps. And in the comer, shaded from the fireplace and apparently unused, sat a classic remote printing terminal. Mr. Slippery tried to ignore that teleprinter as he crossed the hall.

“Ah, it’s Slip.” DON.MAC looked up from the maps and gestured him closer. “Take a look here at what the Limey has been up to.”

“Hmm?” Mr. Slippery nodded at the others, then leaned over to study the top map. The margins of the paper were aging vellum, but the “map” itself hung in three dimensions, half sunk into the paper. It was a typical banking defense and cash-flow plot—that is, typical for the SIG. Most banks had no such clever ways of visualizing the automated protection of their assets. (For that matter, Mr. Slippery suspected that most banks still looked wistfully back to the days of credit cards and COBOL.) This was the sort of thing Robin Hood had developed, and it was surprising to see the Limey involved in it. He looked up questioningly. “What’s the jape?”

“It’s a reg’lar double-slam, Slip. Look at this careful, an’ you’ll see it’s no ord’n’ry protection map. Seems like what you blokes call the Mafia has taken over this banking net in the Maritime states. They must be usin’ Portals to do it so slick. Took me a devil of a time to figure out it was them as done it. Ha ha! but now that I have . . . look here, you’ll see how they’ve been launderin’ funds, embezzlin’ from straight accounts.

“They’re ever so clever, but not so clever as to know about Slimey.” He poked a finger into the map and a trace gleamed red through the maze. “If they’re lucky, they’ll discover this tap next autumn, when they find themselves maybe three billion dollars short, and not a single sign of where it all disappeared to.”

The others nodded. There were many covens and SIGs throughout this plane. Theirs, The Coven, was widely known, had pulled off some of the most publicized pranks of the century. Many of the others were scarcely more than social clubs. But some were oldstyle criminal organizations which used this plane for their own purely pragmatic and opportunistic reasons. Usually such groups weren’t too difficult for the warlocks to victimize, but it was the Slimey Limey who seemed to specialize in doing so.

“But, geez, Slimey, these guys play rough, even rougher than the Great Enemy.” That is, the Feds. “If they ever figure out who you really are, you’ll die the True Death for sure.”

“I may be slimy, but I ain’t crazy. There’s no way I could absorb three billion dollars—or even three million—without being discovered. But I played it like Robin over there: the money got spread around three million ordinary accounts here and in Europe, one of which just happens to be mine.”

Mr. Slippery’s ears perked up. “Three million accounts, you say? Each with a sudden little surplus?

I’ll bet I could come close to finding your True Name from that much, Slimey.”

The Limey made a faffling gesture. “It’s actually a wee bit more complicated. Face it, chums, none of you has ever come close to sightin’ me, an’ you know more than any Mafia.”

That was true. They all spent a good deal of their time in this plane trying to determine the others’ True Names. It was not an empty game, for the knowledge of another’s True Name effectively made him your slave—as Mr. Slippery had already discovered in an unpleasantly firsthand way. So the warlocks constantly probed one another, devised immense programs to sieve government-personnel records for the idiosyncracies that they detected in each other. At first glance, the Limey should have been one of the easiest to discover: he had plenty of mannerisms. His Brit accent was dated and broke down every so often into North American. Of all the warlocks, he was the only one neither handsome nor grotesque. His face was, in fact, so ordinary and real that Mr. Slippery had suspected that it might be his true appearance and had spent several months devising a scheme that searched secret and US and common Europe photo files for just that appearance. It had been for nothing, and they had all eventually reached the conclusion that the Limey must be doubly or triply deceptive.

Wiley J. Bastard grinned, not too impressed. “It’s nice enough, and I agree that the risks are probably small, Slimey. But what do you really get? An ego boost and a little money. But we,” he gestured inclusively, “are worth more than that. With a little cooperation, we could be the most powerful people in the real world. Right, DON?”

DON.MAC nodded, smirking. His face was really the only part of him that looked human or had much flexibility of expression—and even it was steely gray. The rest of DON’s body was modeled after the standard Plessey-Mercedes all-weather robot.

Mr. Slippery recognized the reference. “So you’re working with the Mailman now, too, Wiley?” He glanced briefly at the teleprinter. “Yup.”

“And you still won’t give us any clue what it’s all about?”

Wiley shook his head. “Not unless you’re serious about throwing in with us. But you all know this: DON was the first to work with the Mailman, and he’s richer than Croesus now.”

DON.MAC nodded again, that silly smile still on his face.

“Hmmm.” It was easy to get rich. In principle, the Limey could have made three billion dollars off the Mob in his latest caper. The problem was to become that rich and avoid detection and retribution. Even Robin Hood hadn’t mastered that trick—but apparently DON and Wiley thought the Mailman had done that and more. After his chat with Virginia, he was willing to believe it. Mr. Slippery turned to look more closely at the teleprinter. It was humming faintly, and as usual it had a good supply of paper. The paper was torn neatly off at the top, so that the only message visible was the Mailman’s asterisk prompt. It was the only way they ever communicated with this most mysterious of their members: type a message on the device, and in an hour or a week the machine would rattle and beat, and a response of up to several thousand words would appear. In the beginning, it had not been very popular—the idea was cute, but the delays made conversation just too damn dull. He could remember seeing meters of Mailman output lying sloppily on the stone floor, mostly unread. But now, every one of the Mailman’s golden words was eagerly sopped up by his new apprentices, who very carefully removed every piece of output, leaving no clues for the rest of them to work with.

“Ery!” He looked toward the broad stone stairs that led down from the courtyard. It was Erythrina, the Red Witch. She swept down the stairs, her costume shimmering, now revealing, now obscuring. She had a spectacular figure and an excellent sense of design, but of course that was not what was remarkable about her. Erythrina was the sort of person who knew much more than she ever said, even though she always seemed easy to talk to. Some of her adventures—though unadvertised—were in a class with Robin Hood’s. Mr. Slippery had known her well for a year; she was certainly the most interesting personality on this plane. She made him wish that all the secrets were unnecessary, that True Names could be traded as openly as phone numbers. What was she really?

Erythrina nodded to Robin Hood, then proceeded down the hall to DON.MAC, who had originally shouted greetings and now continued, “We’ve just been trying to convince Slimey and Slip that they are wasting their time on pranks when they could have real power and real wealth.”

She glanced sharply at Wiley, who seemed strangely irritated that she had been drawn into the conversation. “We meaning you and Wiley and the Mailman?”

Wiley nodded. “I just started working with them last week, Ery,” as if to say, and you can’t stop me.

“You may have something, DON. We all started out as amateurs, doing our best to make the System just a little bit uncomfortable for its bureaucratic masters. But we are experts now. We probably understand the System better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power.” It was the same thing the other two had been saying, but she could make it much more persuasive. Before his encounter with the Feds, he might have bought it (even though he always knew that the day he got serious about Coven activities and went after real gain would also be the day it ceased to be an enjoyable game and became an all-consuming job that would suck time away from the projects that made life entertaining).

Erythrina looked from Mr. Slippery to the Limey and then back. The Limey was an easygoing sort, but just now he was a bit miffed at the way his own pet project had been dismissed. “Not for me, thanky,” he said shortly and began to gather up his maps.

She turned her green, faintly oriental eyes upon Mr. Slippery. “How about you, Slip? Have you signed up with the Mailman?”

He hesitated. Maybe I should. It seemed clear that the Mailman’s confederates were being let in on at least part of his schemes. In a few hours, he might be able to learn enough to get Virginia off his back. And perhaps destroy his friends to boot; it was a hell of a bargain. God in Heaven, why did they have to get mixed up in this? Don’t they realize what the Government will do to them, if they really try to take over, if they ever try to play at being more than vandals? “Not . . . not yet,” he said finally. “I’m awfully tempted, though.”

She grinned, regular white teeth flashing against her dark, faintly green face. “I, too. What do you say we talk it over, just the two of us?” She reached out a slim, dark hand to grasp his elbow. “Excuse us, gentlemen; hopefully, when we get back, you’ll have a couple of new allies.” And Mr. Slippery felt himself gently propelled toward the dark and musty stairs that led to Erythrina’s private haunts.

Her torch burned and glowed, but there was no smoke. The flickering yellow lit their path for scant meters ahead. The stairs were steep and gently curving. He had the feeling that they must do a complete circle every few hundred steps: this was an immense spiral cut deep into the heart of the living rock. And it was alive. As the smell of mildew and rot increased, as the dripping from the ceiling grew subtly louder and the puddles in the worn steps deeper, the walls high above their heads took on shapes, and those shapes changed and flowed to follow them. Erythrina protected her part of the castle as thoroughly as the castle itself was guarded against the outside world. Mr. Slippery had no doubt that if she wished, she could trap him permanently here, along with the lizards and the rock sprites. (Of course he could always “escape” simply by falling back into the real world, but until she relented or he saw through her spells, he would not be able to access any other portion of the castle.) Working on some of their projects, he had visited her underground halls, but never anything this deep.

He watched her shapely form preceding him down, down, down. Of all the Coven (with the possible exception of Robin Hood, and of course the Mailman), she was the most powerful. He suspected that she was one of the original founders. If only there were some way of convincing her (without revealing the source of his knowledge) that the Mailman was a threat. If only there was some way of getting her cooperation in nailing down the Mailman’s True Name.

Erythrina stopped short and he bumped pleasantly into her. Over her shoulder, a high door ended the passage. She moved her hand in a pattern hidden from Mr. Slippery and muttered some unlocking spell. The door split horizontally, its halves pulling apart with oiled and massive precision. Beyond, he had the impression of spots and lines of red breaking a further darkness.

“Mind your step,” she said and hopped over a murky puddle that stood before the high sill of the doorway.

As the door slid shut behind them, Erythrina changed the torch to a single searing spot of white light, like some old-time incandescent bulb. The room was bright-lit now. Comfortable black leather chairs sat on black tile. Red engraving, faintly glowing, was worked into the tile and the obsidian of the walls. In contrast to the stairway, the air was fresh and clean—though still.

She waved him to a chair that faced away from the light, then sat on the edge of a broad desk. The point light glinted off her eyes, making them unreadable. Erythrina’s face was slim and fine-boned, almost Asian except for the pointed ears. But the skin was dark, and her long hair had the reddish tones unique to some North American blacks. She was barely smiling now, and Mr. Slippery wished again he had some way of getting her help.

“Slip, I’m scared,” she said finally, the smile gone.

You’re scared! For a moment, he couldn’t quite believe his ears. “The Mailman?” he asked, hoping.

She nodded. “This is the first time in my life I’ve felt outgunned. I need help. Robin Hood may be the most competent, but he’s basically a narcissist; I don’t think I could interest him in anything beyond his immediate gratifications. That leaves you and the Limey. And I think there’s something special about you. We’ve done a couple things together,” she couldn’t help herself, and grinned remembering. “They weren’t real impressive, but somehow I have a feeling about you: I think you understand what things up here are silly games and what things are really important. If you think something is really important, you can be trusted to stick with it even if the going gets a little . . . bloody.”

Coming from someone like Ery, the words had special meaning. It was strange, to feel both flattered and frightened. Mr. Slippery stuttered for a moment, inarticulate. “What about Wiley J? Seems to me you have special . . . influence over him.”

“You knew . . .?”

“Suspected.”

“Yes, he’s my thrall. Has been for almost six months. Poor Wiley tums out to be a life-insurance salesman from Peoria. Like a lot of warlocks, he’s rather a Thurberesque fellow in real life: timid, always dreaming of heroic adventures and grandiose thefts. Only nowadays people like that can realize their dreams. . . . Anyway, he doesn’t have the background, or the time, or the skill that I do, and I found his True Name. I enjoy the chase more than the extortion, so I haven’t leaned on him too hard; now I wish I had. Since he’s taken up with the Mailman, he’s been giving me the finger. Somehow Wiley thinks that what they have planned will keep him safe even if I give his True Name to the cops!”

“So the Mailman actually has some scheme for winning political power in the real world?”

She smiled. “That’s what Wiley thinks. You see, poor Wiley doesn’t know that there are more uses for True Names than simple blackmail. I know everything he sends over the data links, everything he has been told by the Mailman.”

“So what are they up to?” It was hard to conceal his eagerness. Perhaps this will be enough to satisfy Virginia and her goons.

Erythrina seemed frozen for a moment, and he realized that she too must be using the low-altitude satellite net for preliminary processing: her task had just been handed off from one comsat to a nearer bird. Ordinarily it was easy to disguise the hesitation. She must be truly upset.

And when she finally replied, it wasn’t really with an answer. “You know what convinced Wiley that the Mailman could deliver on his promises? It was DON.MAC—and the revolution in Venezuela. Apparently DON and the Mailman had been working on that for several months before Wiley joined them. It was to be the Mailman’s first demonstration that controlling data and information services could be used to take permanent political control of a state. And Venezuela, they claimed, was perfect: it has enormous data-processing facilities—all just a bit obsolete, since they were bought when the country was at the peak of its boom time.”

“But that was clearly an internal coup. The present leaders are local—”

“Nevertheless, DON is supposedly down there now, the real Jefe, for the first time in his life able to live in the physical world the way we do in this plane. If you have your own country, you are no longer small fry that must guard his True Name. You don’t have to settle for crumbs.”

“You said ‘supposedly’.”

“Slip, have you noticed anything strange about DON lately?”

Mr. Slippery thought back. DON.MAC had always been the most extreme of the werebots—after the Mailman. He was not an especially talented fellow, but he did go to great lengths to sustain the image that he was both machine and human. His persona was always present in this plane, though at least part of the time it was a simulator like Alan out in the magma moat. The simulation was fairly good, but no one had yet produced a program that could really pass the Turing test: that is, fool a real human for any extended time. Mr. Slippery remembered the silly smile that seemed pasted on DON’s face and the faintly repetitive tone of his lobbying for the Mailman. “You think the real person behind DON is gone, that we have a zombie up there?”

“Slip, I think the real DON is dead, and I mean the True Death.”

“Maybe he just found the real world more delightful than this, now that he owns such a big hunk of it?”

“I don’t think he owns anything. It’s just barely possible that the Mailman had something to do with that coup; there are a number of coincidences between what they told Wiley beforehand and what actually happened. But I’ve spent a lot of time floating through the Venezuelan data bases, and I think I’d know if an outsider were on the scene, directing the new order.

“I think the Mailman is taking us on one at a time, starting with the weakest, drawing us in far enough to learn our True Names—and then destroying us. So far he has only done it to one of us. I’ve been watching DON.MAC both directly and automatically since the coup, and there has never been a real person behind that facade, not once in two thousand hours. Wiley is next. The poor slob hasn’t even been told yet what country his kingdom is to be—evidence that the Mailman doesn’t really have the power he claims—but even so, he’s ready to do practically anything for the Mailman, and against us.

“Slip, we have got to identify this thing, this Mailman, before he can get us.”

She was even more upset than Virginia and the Feds. And she was right. For the first time, he felt more afraid of the Mailman than the government agents. He held up his hands. “I’m convinced. But what should we do? You’ve got the best angle in Wiley. The Mailman doesn’t know you’ve got a tap through him, does he?”

She shook her head. “Wiley is too chicken to tell him, and doesn’t realize that I can do this with his True Name. But I’m already doing everything I can with that. I want to pool information, guesses, with you. Between us maybe we can see something new.”

“Well for starters, it’s obvious that the Mailman’s queer communication style—those long time delays—is a ploy. I know that fellow is listening all the time to what’s going on in the Coven meeting hall. And he commands a number of sprites in real time.” Mr. Slippery remembered the day the Mailman—or at least his teleprinter-had arrived. The image of an American Van Lines truck had pulled up at the edge of the moat, nearly intimidating Alan. The driver and loader were simulators, though good ones. They had answered all of Alan’s questions correctly, then hauled the shipping crate down to the meeting hall. They hadn’t left till the warlocks signed for the shipment and promised to “wire a wall outlet” for the device. This enemy definitely knew how to arouse the curiosity of his victims. Whoever controlled that printer seemed perfectly capable of normal behavior. Perhaps it’s someone we already know, like in the mysteries where the murderer masquerades as one of the victims. Robin Hood?

“I know. In fact, he can do many things faster than I. He must control some powerful processors. But you’re partly wrong: the living part of him that’s behind it all really does operate with at least a one-hour turnaround time. All the quick stuff is programmed.”

Mr. Slippery started to protest, then realized that she could be right. “My God, what could that mean? Why would he deliberately saddle himself with that disadvantage?”

Erythrina smiled with some satisfaction. “I’m convinced that if we knew that, we’d have this guy sighted. I agree it’s too great a disadvantage to be a simple red herring. I think he must have some timedelay problem to begin with, and—”

“—and he has exaggerated it?” But even if the Mailman were an Australian, the low satellite net made delays so short that he would probably be indistinguishable from a European or a Japanese. There was no place on Earth where . . . but there are places off Earth! The mass-transmit satellites were in synchronous orbit 120 milliseconds out. There were about two hundred people there. And further out, at L5, there were at least another four hundred. Some were near-permanent residents. A strange idea, but still a possibility.

“I don’t think he has exaggerated. Slip, I think the Mailman—not his processors and simulators, you understand—is at least a half-hour out from Earth, probably in the asteroid belt.”

She smiled suddenly, and Mr. Slippery realized that his jaw must be resting on his chest. Except for the Joint Mars Recon, no human had been anywhere near that far out. No human. Mr. Slippery felt his ordinary, everyday world disintegrating into sheer science fiction. This was ridiculous.

“I know you don’t believe; it took me a while to. He’s not so obvious that he doesn’t add in some time delay to disguise the cyclic variation in our relative positions. But it is a consistent explanation for the delay. These last few weeks I’ve been sniffing around the classified reports on our asteroid probes; there are definitely some mysterious things out there.”

“Okay. It’s consistent. But you’re talking about an interstellar invasion. Even if NASA had the funding, it would take them decades to put the smallest interstellar probe together—and decades more for the flight. Trying to invade anyone with those logistics would be impossible. And if these aliens have a decent stardrive, why do they bother with deception? They could just move in and brush us aside.”

“Ah, that’s the point, Slip. The invasion I’m thinking of doesn’t need any “stardrive,” and it works fine against any race at exactly our point of development. Right: most likely interstellar war is a fantastically expensive business, with decade lead times. What better policy for an imperialistic, highly technological race than to lie doggo listening for evidence of younger civilizations? When they detect such, they send only one ship. When it arrives in the victims’ solar system, the Computer Age is in full bloom there. We in the Coven know how fragile the present system is; it is only fear of exposure that prevents some warlocks from trying to take over. Just think how appealing our naivete must be to an older civilization that has thousands of years of experience at managing data systems. Their small crew of agents moves in as close as local military surveillance permits and gradually insinuates itself into the victims’ system. They eliminate what sharp individuals they detect in that system-people like us—and then they go after the bureaucracies and the military. In ten or twenty years, another fiefdom is ready for the arrival of the master race.”

She lapsed into silence, and for a long moment they stared at each other. It did all hang together with a weird sort of logic. “What can we do, then?”

“That’s the question.” She shook her head sadly, came across the room to sit beside him. Now that she had said her piece, the fire had gone out of her. For the first time since he had known her, Erythrina looked depressed. “We could just forsake this plane and stay in the real world. The Mailman might still be able to track us down, but we’d be of no more interest to him than anyone else. If we were lucky, we might have years before he takes over.” She straightened. “I’ll tell you this: if we want to live as warlocks, we have to stop him soon—within days at most. After he gets Wiley, he may drop the con tactics for something more direct.

“If I’m right about the Mailman, then our best bet would be to discover his communication link. That would be his Achilles’ heel; there’s no way you can hide in the crowd when you’re beaming from that far away. We’ve got to take some real chances now, do things we’d never risk before. I figure that if we work together, maybe we can lessen the risk that either of us is identified.”

He nodded. Ordinarily a prudent warlock used only limited bandwidth and so was confined to a kind of linear, personal perception. If they grabbed a few hundred megahertz of comm space, and a bigger share of rented processors, they could manipulate and search files in a way that would boggle Virginia the femcop. Of course, they would be much more easily identifiable. With two of them, though, they might be able to keep it up safely for a brief time, confusing the government and the Mailman with a multiplicity of clues. “Frankly, I don’t buy the alien part. But the rest of what you say makes sense, and that’s what counts. Like you say, we’re going to have to take some chances.”

“Right!” She smiled and reached behind his neck to draw his face to hers. She was a very good kisser. (Not everyone was. It was one thing just to look gorgeous, and another to project and respond to the many sensory cues in something as interactive as kissing.) He was just warming to this exercise of their mutual abilities when she broke off. “And the best time to start is right now. The others think we’re sealed away down here. If strange things happen during the next few hours, it’s less likely the Mailman will suspect us.” She reached up to catch the light point in her hand. For an instant, blades of harsh white slipped out from between her fingers; then all was dark. He felt faint air motion as her hands moved through another spell. There were words, distorted and unidentifiable. Then the light was back, but as a torch again, and a door—a second door—had opened in the far wall.

He followed her up the passage that stretched straight and gently rising as far as the torchlight shone. They were walking a path that could not be—or at least that no one in the Coven could have believed. The castle was basically a logical structure “fleshed” out with the sensory cues that allowed the warlocks to move about it as one would a physical structure. Its moats and walls were part of that logical structure, and though they had no physical reality outside of the varying potentials in whatever processors were running the program, they were proof against the movement of the equally “unreal” perceptions of the inhabitants of the plane. Erythrina and Mr. Slippery could have escaped the deep room simply by falling back into the real world, but in doing so, they would have left a chain of unclosed processor links. Their departure would have been detected by every Coven member, even by Alan, even by the sprites. An orderly departure scheme, such as represented by this tunnel, could only mean that Erythrina was far too clever to need his help, or that she had been one of the original builders of the castle some four years earlier (lost in the Mists of Time, as the Limey put it).

They were wild dogs now, large enough so as not likely to be bothered, small enough to be mistaken for the amateur users that are seen more and more in the Other Plane as the price of Portals declines and the skill of the public increases. Mr. Slippery followed Erythrina down narrow paths, deeper and deeper into the swamp that represented commercial and government data space. Occasionally he was aware of sprites or simulators watching them with hostile eyes from nests off to the sides of the trail. These were idle creations in many cases—program units designed to infuriate or amuse later visitors to the plane. But many of them guarded information caches, or peepholes into other folks’ affairs, or meeting places of other SIGs. The Coven might be the most sophisticated group of users on this plane, but they were far from being alone.

The brush got taller, bending over the trail to drip on their backs. But the water was clear here, spread in quiet ponds on either side of their path. Light came from the water itself, a pearly luminescence that shone upward on the trunks of the waterbound trees and sparkled faintly in the droplets of water in their moss and leaves. That light was the representation of the really huge data bases run by the government and the largest companies. It did not correspond to a specific geographical location, but rather to the main East/West net that stretches through selected installations from Honolulu to Oxford, taking advantage of the time zones to spread the user load.

“Just a little bit farther,” Erythrina said over her shoulder, speaking in the beast language (encipherment) that they had chosen with their forms.

Minutes later, they shrank into the brush, out of the way of two armored hackers that proceeded implacably up the trail. The pair drove in single file, the impossibly large eight-cylinder engines on their bikes belching fire and smoke and noise. The one bringing up the rear carried an old-style recoilless rifle decorated with swastikas and chrome. Dim fires glowed through their blackened face plates. The two dogs eyed the bikers timidly, as befitted their present disguise, but Mr. Slippery had the feeling he was looking at a couple of amateurs who were imaging beyond their station in life: the bikes’ tires didn’t always touch the ground, and the tracks they left didn’t quite match the texture of the muck. Anyone could put on a heroic image in this plane, or appear as some dreadful monster. The problem was that there were always skilled users who were willing to cut such pretenders down to size—perhaps even to destroy their access. It befitted the less experienced to appear small and inconspicuous, and to stay out of others’ way.

(Mr. Slippery had often speculated just how the simple notion of using high-resolution EEGs as input/output devices had caused the development of the “magical world” representation of data space. The Limey and Erythrina argued that sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomistic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols. It was, they argued, just more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment. They had a point; in fact, it was likely that the governments of the world hadn’t caught up to the skills of the better warlocks simply because they refused to indulge in the foolish imaginings of fantasy. Mr. Slippery looked down at the reflection in the pool beside him and saw the huge canine face and lolling tongue looking up at him; he winked at the image. He knew that despite all his friends’ high intellectual arguments, there was another reason for the present state of affairs, a reason that went back to the Moon Lander and Adventure games at the “dawn of time”: it was simply a hell of a lot of fun to live in a world as malleable as the human imagination.)

Once the riders were out of sight, Erythrina moved back across the path to the edge of the pond and peered long and hard down between the lilies, into the limpid depths. “Okay, let’s do some cross-correlation. You take the JPL data base, and I’ll take the Harvard Multispectral Patrol. Start with data coming off space probes out to ten AUs. I have a suspicion the easiest way for the Mailman to disguise his transmissions is to play trojan horse with data from a NASA spacecraft.”

Mr. Slippery nodded. One way or another, they should resolve her alien invasion theory first.

“It should take me about half an hour to get in place. After that, we can set up for the correlation. Hmmm . . . if something goes wrong, let’s agree to meet at Mass Transmit 3,” and she gave a password scheme. Clearly that would be an emergency situation. If they weren’t back in the castle within three or four hours, the others would certainly guess the existence of her secret exit.

Erythrina tensed, then dived into the water. There was a small splash, and the lilies bobbed gently in the expanding ring waves. Mr. Slippery looked deep, but as expected, there was no further sign of her.

He padded around the side of the pool, trying to identify the special glow of the JPL data base.

There was thrashing near one of the larger lilies, one that he recognized as obscuring the NSA connections with the East/West net. A large bullfrog scrambled out of the water onto the pad and turned to look at him. “Aha! Gotcha, you sonofabitch!”

It was Virginia; the voice was the same, even if the body was different. “Shhhhhh!” said Mr.

Slippery, and looked wildly about for signs of eavesdroppers. There were none, but that did not mean they were safe. He spread his best privacy spell over her and crawled to the point closest to the lily. They sat glaring at each other like some characters out of La Fontaine: The Tale of the Frog and Dog. How dearly he would love to leap across the water and bite off that fat little head. Unfortunately the victory would be a bit temporary. “How did you find me?” Mr. Slippery growled. If people as inexperienced as the Feds could trace him down in his disguise, he was hardly safe from the Mailman.

“You forget,” the frog puffed smugly. “We know your Name. It’s simple to monitor your home processor and follow your every move.”

Mr. Slippery whined deep in his throat. In thrall to a frog. Even Wiley has done better than that. “Okay, so you found me. Now what do you want?”

“To let you know that we want results, and to get a progress report.”

He lowered his muzzle till his eyes were even with Virginia’s. “Heh heh. I’ll give you a progress report, but you’re not going to like it.” And he proceeded to explain Erythrina’s theory that the Mailman was an alien invasion.

“Rubbish,” spoke the frog afterward. “Sheer fantasy! You’re going to have to do better than that, Pol er, Mister.”

He shuddered. She had almost spoken his Name. Was that a calculated threat or was she simply as stupid as she seemed? Nevertheless, he persisted. “Well then, what about Venezuela?” He related the evidence Ery had that the coup in that country was the Mailman’s work.

This time the frog did not reply. Its eyes glazed over with apparent shock, and he realized that Virginia must be consulting people at the other end. Almost fifteen minutes passed. When the frog’s eyes cleared, it was much more subdued. “We’ll check on that one. What you say is possible. Just barely possible. If true . . . well, if it’s true, this is the biggest threat we’ve had to face this century.”

And you see that I am perhaps the only one who can bail you out. Mr. Slippery relaxed slightly. If they only realized it, they were thralled to him as much as the reverse—at least for the moment. Then he remembered Erythrina’s plan to grab as much power as they could for a brief time and try to use that advantage to flush the Mailman out. With the Feds on their side, they could do more than Ery had ever imagined. He said as much to Virginia.

The frog croaked, “You . . . want . . . us . . . to give you carte blanche in the Federal data system? Maybe you’d like to be President and Chair of the JCS, to boot?”

“Hey, that’s not what I said. I know it’s an extraordinary suggestion, but this is an extraordinary situation. And in any case, you know my Name. There’s no way I can get around that.”

The frog went glassy-eyed again, but this time for only a couple of minutes. “We’ll get back to you on that. We’ve got a lot of checking to do on the rest of your theories before we commit ourselves to anything. Till further notice, though, you’re grounded.”

“Wait!” What would Ery do when he didn’t show? If he wasn’t back in the castle in three or four hours, the others would surely know about the secret exit.

The frog was implacable. “I said, you’re grounded, Mister. We want you back in the real world immediately. And you’ll stay grounded till you hear from us. Got it?”

The dog slumped. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” The frog clambered heavily to the edge of the sagging lily and dumped itself ungracefully into the water. After a few seconds, Mr. Slippery followed.

Coming back was much like waking from a deep daydream; only here it was the middle of the night.

Roger Pollack stood, stretching, trying to get the kinks out of his muscles. Almost four hours he had been gone, longer than ever before. Normally his concentration began to fail after two or three hours. Since he didn’t like the thought of drugging up, this put a definite limit on his endurance in the Other Plane.

Beyond the bungalow’s picture window, the pines stood silhouetted against the Milky Way. He cranked open a pane and listened to the night birds trilling out there in the trees. It was near the end of spring; he liked to imagine he could see dim polar twilight to the north. More likely it was just Crescent City. Pollack leaned close to the window and looked high into the sky, where Mars sat close to Jupiter. It was hard to think of a threat to his own life from as far away as that.

Pollack backed up the spells acquired during this last session, powered down his system, and stumbled off to bed.

The following morning and afternoon seemed the longest of Roger Pollack’s life. How would they get in touch with him? Another visit of goons and black Lincolns? What had Erythrina done when he didn’t make contact? Was she all right?

And there was just no way of checking. He paced back and forth across his tiny living room, the novelplots that were his normal work forgotten. Ah, but there is a way. He looked at his old data set with dawning recognition. Virginia had said to stay out of the Other Plane. But how could they object to his using a simple data set, no more efficient than millions used by office workers all over the world?

He sat down at the set, scraped the dust from the handpads and screen. He awkwardly entered longunused call symbols and watched the flow of news across the screen. A few queries and he discovered that no great disasters had occurred overnight, that the insurgency in Indonesia seemed temporarily abated. (Wiley J. was not to be king just yet.) There were no reports of big-time data vandals biting the dust.

Pollack grunted. He had forgotten how tedious it was to see the world through a data set, even with audio entry. In the Other Plane, he could pick up this sort of information in seconds, as casually as an ordinary mortal might glance out the window to see if it is raining. He dumped the last twenty-four hours of the world bulletin board into his home memory space and began checking through it. The bulletin board was ideal for untraceable reception of messages: anyone on Earth could leave a message-indexed by subject, target audience, and source. If a user copied the entire board, and then searched it, there was no outside record of exactly what information he was interested in. There were also simple ways to make nearly untraceable entries on the board.

As usual, there were about a dozen messages for Mr. Slippery. Most of them were from fans; the Coven had greater notoriety than any other vandal SIG. A few were for other Mr. Slipperys. With five billion people in the world, that wasn’t surprising.

And one of the memos was from the Mailman; that’s what it said in the source field. Pollack punched the message up on the screen. It was in caps, with no color or sound. Like all messages directly from the Mailman, it looked as if it came off some incredibly ancient I/O device:

YOU COULD HAVE BEEN RICH. YOU COULD HAVE RULED. INSTEAD YOU CONSPIRED AGAINST ME. I KNOW ABOUT THE SECRET EXIT. I KNOW ABOUT YOUR DOGGY DEPARTURE. YOU AND THE RED ONE ARE DEAD NOW. IF YOU EVER SNEAK BACK ONTO THIS PLANE, IT WILL BE THE TRUE DEATH—I AM THAT CLOSE TO KNOWING YOUR NAMES.

*********WATCH FOR ME IN THE NEWS, SUCKER*********

Bluff, thought Roger. He wouldn’t be sending out warnings if he has that kind of power. Still, there was a dropping sensation in his stomach. The Mailman shouldn’t have known about the dog disguise. Was he onto Mr. Slippery’s connection with the Feds? If so, he might really be able to find Slippery’s True Name. And what sort of danger was Ery in? What had she done when he missed the rendezvous at Mass Transmit 3?

A quick search showed no messages from Erythrina. Either she was looking for him in the Other Plane, or she was as thoroughly grounded as he.

He was still stewing on this when the phone rang. He said, “Accept, no video send.” His data set cleared to an even gray: the caller was not sending video either.

“You’re still there? Good.” It was Virginia. Her voice sounded a bit odd, subdued and tense. Perhaps it was just the effect of the scrambling algorithms. He prayed she would not trust that scrambling. He had never bothered to make his phone any more secure than average. (And he had seen the schemes Wiley J. and Robin Hood had devised to decrypt thousands of commercial phone messages in realtime and monitor for key phrases, signaling them when anything interesting was detected. They couldn’t use the technique very effectively, since it took an enormous amount of processor space, but the Mailman was probably not so limited.)

Virginia continued, “No names, okay? We checked out what you told us and . . . it looks like you’re right. We can’t be sure about your theory about his origin, but what you said about the international situation was verified.” So the Venezuela coup had been an outside take-over. “Furthermore, we think he has infiltrated us much more than we thought. It may be that the evidence we had of unsuccessful meddling was just a red herring.” Pollack recognized the fear in her voice now. Apparently the Feds saw that they were up against something catastrophic. They were caught with their countermeasures down, and their only hope lay with unreliables like Pollack.

“Anyway, we’re going ahead with what you suggested. We’ll provide you two with the resources you requested. We want you in the Other . . . place as soon as possible. We can talk more there.”

“I’m on my way. I’ll check with my friend and get back to you there.” He cut the connection without waiting for a reply. Pollack sat back, trying to savor this triumph and the near-pleading in the cop’s voice. Somehow, he couldn’t. He knew what a hard case she was; anything that could make her crawl was more hellish than anything he wanted to face.

His first stop was Mass Transmit 3. Physically, MT3 was a two-thousand-tonne satellite in synchronous orbit over the Indian Ocean. The Mass Transmits handled most of the planet’s noninteractive communications (and in fact that included a lot of transmission that most people regarded as interactive-such as human/human and the simpler human/computer conversations). Bandwidth and processor space was cheaper on the Mass Transmits because of the 240- to 900-millisecond time delays that were involved.

As such, it was a nice out-of-the-way meeting place, and in the Other Plane it was represented as a five-meter-wide ledge near the top of a mountain that rose from the forests and swamps that stood for the lower satellite layer and the ground-based nets. In the distance were two similar peaks, clear in pale sky.

Mr. Slippery leaned out into the chill breeze that swept the face of the mountain and looked down past the timberline, past the evergreen forests. Through the unnatural mists that blanketed those realms, he thought he could see the Coven’s castle.

Perhaps he should go there, or down to the swamps. There was no sign of Erythrina. Only sprites in the forms of bats and tiny griffins were to be seen here. They sailed back and forth over him, sometimes soaring far higher, toward the uttermost peak itself.

Mr. Slippery himself was in an extravagant winged man form, one that subtly projected amateurism, one that he hoped would pass the inspection of the enemy’s eyes and ears. He fluttered clumsily across the ledge toward a small cave that provided some shelter from the whistling wind. Fine, wind-dropped snow lay in a small bank before the entrance. The insects he found in the cave were no more than what they seemed—amateur transponders.

He turned and started back toward the drop-off; he was going to have to face this alone. But as he passed the snowbank, the wind swirled it up and tiny crystals stung his face and hands and nose. Trap! He jumped backward, his fastest escape spell coming to his lips, at the same time cursing himself for not establishing the spell before. The time delay was just too long; the trap lived here at MT3 and could react faster than he. The little snow-devil dragged the crystals up into a swirling column of singing motes that chimed in near-unison, “W-w-wait-t-t!”

The sound matched deep-set recognition patterns; this was Erythrina’s work. Three hundred milliseconds passed, and the wind suddenly picked up the rest of the snow and whirled into a more substantial, taller column. Mr. Slippery realized that the trap had been more of an alarm, set to bring Ery if he should be recognized here. But her arrival was so quick that she must already have been at work somewhere in this plane.

“Where have you been-n-n!” The snow-devil’s chime was a combination of rage and concern.

Mr. Slippery threw a second spell over the one he recognized she had cast. There was no help for it: he would have to tell her that the Feds had his Name. And with that news, Virginia’s confirmation about Venezuela and the Feds’ offer to help.

Erythrina didn’t respond immediately—and only part of the delay was light lag. Then the swirling snow flecks that represented her gusted up around him. “So you lose no matter how this comes out, eh? I’m sorry, Slip.”

Mr. Slippery’s wings drooped. “Yeah. But I’m beginning to believe it will be the True Death for us all if we don’t stop the Mailman. He really means to take over . . . everything. Can you imagine what it would be like if all the governments’ wee megalomaniacs got replaced by one big one?”

The usual pause. The snow-devil seemed to shudder in on itself. “You’re right; we’ve got to stop him even if it means working for Sammy Sugar and the entire DoW.” She chuckled, a near-inaudible chiming. “Even if it means that they have to work for us.” She could laugh; the Feds didn’t know her Name. “How did your Federal Friends say we could plug into their system?” Her form was changing again—to a solid, winged form, an albino eagle. The only red she allowed herself was in the eyes, which gleamed with inner light.

“At the Laurel end of the old arpa net. We’ll get something near carte blanche on that and on the DoJ domestic intelligence files, but we have to enter through one physical location and with just the password scheme they specify.” He and Erythrina would have more power than any vandals in history, but they would be on a short leash, nevertheless.

His wings beat briefly, and he rose into the air. After the usual pause, the eagle followed. They flew almost to the mountain’s peak, then began the long, slow glide toward the marshes below, the chill air whistling around them. In principle, they could have made the transfer to the Laurel terminus virtually instantaneously. But it was not mere romanticism that made them move so cautiously—as many a novice had discovered the hard way. What appeared to the conscious mind as a search for air currents and clear lanes through the scattered clouds was a manifestation of the almost-subconscious working of programs that gradually transferred processing from rented space on MT3 to low satellite and groundbased stations. The game was tricky and timeconsuming, but it made it virtually impossible for others to trace their origin. The greatest danger of detection would probably occur at Laurel, where they would be forced to access the system through a single input device.

The sky glowed momentarily; seconds passed, and an airborne fist slammed into them from behind. The shock wave sent them tumbling taft over wing toward the forests below. Mr. Slippery straightened his chaotic flailing into a head-first dive. Looking back which was easy to do in his present attitude he saw the peak that had been MT3 glowing red, steam rising over descending avalanches of lava. Even at this distance, he could see tiny motes swirling above the inferno. (Attackers looking for the prey that had fled?) Had it come just a few seconds earlier, they would have had most of their processing still locked into MT3 and the disaster—whatever it really was—would have knocked them out of this plane. It wouldn’t have been the True Death, but it might well have grounded them for days.

On his right, he glimpsed the white eagle in a controlled dive; they had had just enough communications established off MT3 to survive. As they fell deeper into the humid air of the lowlands, Mr. Slippery dipped into the news channels: word was already coming over the LA Times of the fluke accident in which the Hokkaido aerospace launching laser had somehow shone on MT3’s optics. The laser had shone for microseconds and at reduced power; the damage had been nothing like a Finger of God, say. No one had been hurt, but wideband communications would be down. for some time, and several hundred million dollars of information traffic was stalled. There would be investigations and a lot of very irate customers.

It had been no accident, Mr. Slippery was sure. The Mailman was showing his teeth, revealing infiltration no one had suspected. He must guess what his opponents were up to.

They leveled out a dozen meters above the pine forest that bordered the swamps. The air around them was thick and humid, and the faraway mountains were almost invisible. Clouds had moved in, and a storm was on the way. They were now securely locked into the low-level satellite net, but thousands of new users were clamoring for entry, too. The loss of MT3 would make the Other Plane a turbulent place for several weeks, as heavy users tried to shift their traffic here.

He swooped low over the swamp, searching for the one particular pond with the one particularly large water lily that marked the only entrance Virginia would permit them. There! He banked off to the side, Erythrina following, and looked for signs of the Mailman or his friends in the mucky clearings that surrounded the pond.

But there was little purpose in further caution. Flying about like this, they would be clearly visible to any ambushers waiting by the pond. Better to move fast now that we’re committed. He signaled the redeyed eagle, and they dived toward the placid water. That surface marked the symbolic transition to observation mode. No longer was he aware of a winged form or of water coming up and around him. Now he was interacting directly with the I/O protocols of a computing center in the vicinity of Laurel, Maryland. He sensed Ery poking around on her own. This wasn’t the arpa entrance. He slipped “sideways” into an old-fashioned government office complex. The “feel” of the 1990-style data sets was unmistakable. He was fleetingly aware of memos written and edited, reports hauled in and out of storage. One of the vandals’ favorite sports and one that even the moderately skilled could indulge in—was to infiltrate one of these office complexes and simulate higher level input to make absurd and impossible demands on the local staff.

This was not the time for such games, and this was still not the entrance. He pulled away from the office complex and searched through some old directories. Arpa went back more than half a century, the first of the serious data nets, now (figuratively) gathering dust. The number was still there, though. He signaled Erythrina, and the two of them presented themselves at the log-in point and provided just the codes that Virginia had given him.

. . . and they were in. They eagerly soaked in the megabytes of password keys and access data that Virginia’s people had left there. At the same time, they were aware that this activity was being monitored. The Feds were taking an immense chance leaving this material here, and they were going to do their best to keep a rein on their temporary vandal allies.

In fifteen seconds, they had learned more about the inner workings of the Justice Department and DoW than the Coven had in fifteen months. Mr. Slippery guessed that Erythrina must be busy plotting what she would do with all that data later on. For him, of course, there was no future in it. They drifted out of the arpa “vault” into the larger data spaces that were the Department of Justice files. He could see that there was nothing hidden from them; random archive retrievals were all being honored and with a speed that would have made deception impossible. They had subpoena power and clearances and more.

“Let’s go get ‘im, Slip.” Erythrina’s voice seemed hollow and inhuman in this underimaged realm. (How long would it be before the Feds started to make their data perceivable analogically, as on the Other Plane? It might be a little undignified, but it would revolutionize their operation—which, from the Coven’s standpoint, might be quite a bad thing.)

Mr. Slippery “nodded.” Now they had more than enough power to undertake the sort of work they had planned. In seconds, they had searched all the locally available files on off-planet transmissions. Then they dove out of the DoJ net, Mr. Slippery to Pasadena and the JPL planetary probe archives, Erythrina to Cambridge and the Harvard Multispectral Patrol.

It should take several hours to survey these records, to determine just what transmissions might be cover for the alien invasion that both the Feds and Erythrina were guessing had begun. But Mr. Slippery had barely started when he noticed that there were dozens of processors within reach that he could just grab with his new Federal powers. He checked carefully to make sure he wasn’t upsetting air traffic control or hospital life support, then quietly stole the computing resources of several hundred unknowing users, whose data sets automatically switched to other resources. Now he had more power than he ever would have risked taking in the past. On the other side of the continent, he was aware that Erythrina had done something similar.

In three minutes, they had sifted through five years’ transmissions far more thoroughly than they had originally planned.

“No sign of him,” he sighed and “looked” at Erythrina. They had found plenty of irregular sources at Harvard, but there was no orbital fit. All transmissions from the NASA probes checked out legitimately.

“Yes.” Her face, with its dark skin and slanting eyes, seemed to hover beside him. Apparently with her new power, she could image even here. “But you know, we haven’t really done much more than the Feds could—given a couple months of data set work. . . . I know, it’s more than we had planned to do. But we’ve barely used the resources they’ve opened to us.”

It was true. He looked around, feeling suddenly like a small boy let loose in a candy shop: he sensed enormous data bases and the power that would let him use them. Perhaps the cops had not intended them to take advantage of this, but it was obvious that with these powers, they could do a search no enemy could evade. “Okay,” he said finally, “let’s pig it.”

Ery laughed and made a loud snuffling sound. Carefully, quickly, they grabbed noncritical dataprocessing facilities along all the East/West nets. In seconds, they were the biggest users in North America. The drain would be clear to anyone monitoring the System, though a casual user might notice only increased delays in turnaround. Modem nets are at least as resilient as old-time power nets—but like power nets, they have their elastic limit and their breaking point. So far, at least, he and Erythrina were far short of those.

—but they were experiencing what no human had ever known before, a sensory bandwidth thousands of times normal. For seconds that seemed without end, their minds were filled with a jumble verging on pain, data that was not information and information that was not knowledge. To hear ten million simultaneous phone conversations, to see the continent’s entire video output, should have been a white noise. Instead it was a tidal wave of detail rammed through the tiny aperture of their minds. The pain increased, and Mr. Slippery panicked. This could be the True Death, some kind of sensory.

Erythrina’s voice was faint against the roar, “Use everything, not just the inputs!” And he had just enough sense left to see what she meant. He controlled more than raw data now; if he could master them, the continent’s computers could process this avalanche, much the way parts of the human brain preprocess their input. More seconds passed, but now with a sense of time, as he struggled to distribute his very consciousness through the System.

Then it was over, and he had control once more. But things would never be the same: the human that had been Mr. Slippery was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had become. There simply was more there than before. No sparrow could fall without his knowledge, via air traffic control; no check could be cashed without his noticing over the bank communication net. More than three hundred million lives swept before what his senses had become.

Around and through him, he felt the other occupant—Erythrina, now equally grown. They looked at each other for an unending fraction of a second, their communication more kinesthetic than verbal. Finally she smiled, the old smile now deep with meanings she could never image before. “Pity the poor Mailman now!”

Again they searched, but now it was through all the civil data bases, a search that could only be dreamed of by mortals. The signs were there, a near invisible system of manipulations hidden among more routine crimes and vandalisms. Someone had been at work within the Venezuelan system, at least at the North American end. The trail was tricky to follow—their enemy seemed to have at least some of their own powers—but they saw it lead back into the labyrinths of the Federal bureaucracy: resources diverted, individuals promoted or transferred, not quite according to the automatic regulations that should govern. These were changes so small they were never guessed at by ordinary employees and only just sensed by the cops. But over the months, they added up to an instability that neither of the two searchers could quite understand except to know that it was planned and that it did the status quo no good.

“He’s still too sharp for us, Slip. We’re all over the civil nets and we haven’t seen any living sign of him; yet we know he does heavy processing on Earth or in low orbit.”

“So he’s either off North America, or else he has penetrated the . . . military.”

“I bet it’s a little of both. The point is, we’re going to have to follow him.”

And that meant taking over at least part of the US military system. Even if that was possible, it certainly went far beyond what Virginia and her friends had intended. As far as the cops were concerned, it would mean that the threat against the government was tripled. So far he hadn’t detected any objections to their searching, but he was aware of Virginia and her superiors deep in some kind of bunker at Langley, intently watching a whole wall full of monitors, trying to figure out just what he was up to and if it was time to pull the plug on him.

Erythrina was aware of his objections almost as fast as he could bring them to mind. “We don’t have any choice, Slip. We have to take control. The Feds aren’t the only thing watching us. If we don’t get the Mailman on this try, he is sure as hell going to get US.”

That was easy for her to say. None of her enemies yet knew her True Name. Mr. Slippery had somehow to survive two enemies. On the other hand, he suspected that the deadlier of those enemies was the Mailman. “Only one way to go and that’s up, huh? Okay, I’ll play.”

They settled into a game that was familiar now, grabbing more and more computing facilities, but now from common Europe and Asia. At the same time, they attacked the harder problem—infiltrating the various North American military nets. Both projects were beyond normal humans or any group of normal humans, but by now their powers were greater than any single civil entity in the world.

The foreign data centers yielded easily, scarcely more than minutes’ work. The military was a different story. The Feds had spent many years and hundreds of billions of dollars to make the military command and control system secure. But they had not counted on the attack from all directions that they faced now; in moments more, the two searchers found themselves on the inside of the NSA control system—

—and under attack! Impressions of a dozen sleek, deadly forms converging on them, and sudden loss of control over many of the processors he depended on. He and Erythrina flailed out wildly, clumsy giants hacking at fast-moving hawks. There was imagery here, as detailed as on the Other Plane. They were fighting people with some of the skills the warlocks had developed—and a lot more power. But it was still an uneven contest. He and Erythrina had too much experience and too much sheer processing mass behind them. One by one, the fighters flashed into incandescent destruction.

He realized almost instantly that these were not the Mailman’s tools. They were powerful, but they fought as only moderately skilled warlocks might. In fact, they had encountered the most secret defense the government had for its military command and control. The civilian bureaucracies had stuck with obsolete data sets and old-fashioned dp languages, but the cutting edge of the military is always more willing to experiment. They had developed something like the warlocks’ system. Perhaps they didn’t use magical jargon to describe their computer/human symbiosis, but the techniques and the attitudes were the same. These swift-moving fighters flew against a background imagery that was like an olive drab Other Plane.

Compared to his present power, they were nothing. Even as he and Erythrina swept the defenders out of the “sky,” he could feel his consciousness expanding further as more and more of the military system was absorbed into their pattern. Every piece of space junk out to one million kilometers floated in crystal detail before his attention; in a fraction of a second he sorted through it all, searching for some evidence of alien intelligence. No sign of the Mailman.

The military and diplomatic communications of the preceding fifty years showed before the light of their minds. At the same time as they surveyed the satellite data, Mr. Slippery and Erythrina swept through these bureaucratic communications, looking carefully but with flickering speed at every requisition for toilet paper, every “declaration” of secret war, every travel voucher, every one of the trillions of pieces of “paper” that made it possible for the machinery of state to creak forward. And here the signs were much clearer: large sections were subtly changed, giving the same feeling the eye’s blind spot gives, the feeling that nothing is really obscured but that some things are simply gone. Some of the distortions were immense. Under their microscopic yet global scrutiny, it was obvious that all of Venezuela, large parts of Alaska, and most of the economic base for the low satellite net were all controlled by some single interest that had little connection with the proper owners. Who their enemy was was still a mystery, but his works loomed larger and larger around them.

In a distant corner of what his mind had become, tiny insects buzzed with homicidal fury, tiny insects who knew Mr. Slippery’s True Name. They knew what he and Erythrina had done, and right now they were more scared of the two warlocks than they had ever been of the Mailman. As he and Ery continued their search, he listened to the signals coming from the Langley command post, followed the helicopter gunships that were dispatched toward a single rural bungalow in Northern California—and changed their encrypted commands so that the sortie dumped its load of death on an uninhabited stretch of the Pacific.

Still with a tiny fraction of his attention, Mr. Slippery noticed that Virginia—actually her superiors, who had long since taken over the operation—knew of this defense. They were still receiving real-time pictures from military satellites.

He signaled a pause to Erythrina. For a few seconds, she would work alone while he dealt with these persistent antagonists. He felt like a man attacked by several puppies: they were annoying and could cause substantial damage unless he took more trouble than they were worth. They had to be stopped without causing themselves injury.

He should freeze the West Coast military and any launch complexes that could reach his body. Beyond that, it would be a good idea to block recon satellite transmission of the California area. And of course, he’d better deal with the Finger of God installations that were above the California horizon. Already he felt one of those heavy lasers, sweeping along in its ten-thousand-kilometer orbit, go into aiming mode and begin charging. He still had plenty of time—at least two or three seconds—before the weapons laser reached its lowest discharge threshold. Still, this was the most immediate threat. Mr. Slippery sent a tendril of consciousness into the tiny processor aboard the Finger of God satellite—

—and withdrew, bloodied. Someone was already there. Not Erythrina and not the little military warlocks. Someone too great for even him to overpower.

“Ery! I’ve found him!” It came out a scream. The laser’s bore was centered on a spot thousands of kilometers below, a tiny house that in less than a second would become an expanding ball of plasma at the end of a columnar explosion descending through the atmosphere.

Over and over in that last second, Mr. Slippery threw himself against the barrier he felt around the tiny military processor—with no success. He traced its control to the lower satellite net, to bigger processors that were equally shielded. Now he had a feel for the nature of his opponent. It was not the direct imagery he was used to on the Other Plane; this was more like fighting blindfolded. He could sense the other’s style. The enemy was not revealing any more of himself than was necessary to keep control of the Finger of God for another few hundred milliseconds.

Mr. Slippery slashed, trying to cut the enemy’s communications. But his opponent was strong, much stronger—he now realized—than himself. He was vaguely aware of the other’s connections to the computing power in those blind-spot areas he and Erythrina had discovered. But for all that power, he was almost the enemy’s equal. There was something missing from the other, some critical element of imagination or originality. If Erythrina would only come, they might be able to stop him. Milliseconds separated him from the True Death. He looked desperately around. Where is she?

Military Status announced the discharge of an Orbital Weapons Laser. He cowered even as his quickened perceptions counted the microseconds that remained till his certain destruction, even as he noticed a ball of glowing plasma expanding about what had been a Finger of God—the Finger that had been aimed at him!

He could see now what had happened. While he and the other had been fighting, Erythrina had commandeered another of the weapons satellites, one already very near discharge threshold, and destroyed the threat to him.

Even as he realized this, the enemy was on him again, this time attacking conventionally, trying to destroy Mr. Slippery’s communications and processing space. But now that enemy had to fight both Erythrina and Mr. Slippery. The other’s lack of imagination and creativity was beginning to tell, and even with his greater strength, they could feel him slowly, slowly losing resources to his weaker opponents. There was something familiar about this enemy, something Mr. Slippery was sure he could see, given time.

Abruptly the enemy pulled away. For a long moment, they held each other’s sole attention, like cats waiting for the smallest sign of weakness to launch back into combat—only here the new attack could come from any of ten thousand different directions, from any of the communications nodes that formed their bodies and their minds.

From beside him, he felt Erythrina move forward, as though to lock the other in her green-eyed gaze.

“You know who we have here, Slip?” He could tell that all her concentration was on this enemy, that she almost vibrated with the effort. “This is our old friend DON.MAC grown up to super size, and doing his best to disguise himself.”

The other seemed to tense and move even further in upon himself. But after a moment, he began imaging. There stood DON.MAC, his face and Plessey-Mercedes body the same as ever. DON.MAC, the first of the Mailman’s converts, the one Erythrina was sure had been killed and replaced with a simulator. “And all the time he’s been the Mailman. The last person we would suspect, the Mailman’s first victim.”

DON rolled forward half a meter, his motors keening, his hydraulic fists raised. But he did not deny what Mr. Slippery said. After a moment he seemed to relax. “You are very . . . clever. But then, you two have had help; I never thought you and the cops would cooperate. That was the one combination that had any chance against the ‘Mailman.’ ” He smiled, a familiar automatic twitch. “But don’t you see? It’s a combination with lethal genes. We three have much more in common than you and the government.

“Look around you. If we were warlocks before, we are gods now. Look!” Without letting the center of their attention wander, the two followed his gaze. As before, the myriad aspects of the lives of billions spread out before them. But now, many things were changed. In their struggle, the three had usurped virtually all of the connected processing power of the human race. Video and phone communications were frozen. The public data bases had lasted long enough to notice that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. Their last headlines, generated a second before the climax of the battle, were huge banners announcing GREATEST DATA OUTAGE OF ALL TIME. Nearly a billion people watched blank data sets, feeling more panicked than any simple power blackout could ever make them. Already the accumulation of lost data and work time would cause a major recession.

“They are lucky the old arms race is over, or else independent military units would probably have already started a war. Even if we hand back control this instant, it would take them more than a year to get their affairs in order.” DON.MAC smirked, the same expression they had seen the day before when he was bragging to the Limey. “There have been few deaths yet. Hospitals and aircraft have some standalone capability.”

Even so . . . Mr. Slippery could see thousands of aircraft stacked up over major airports from London to Christchurch. Local computing could never coordinate the safe landing of them all before some ran out of fuel.

“We caused all that—with just the fallout of our battle,” continued DON. “If we chose to do them harm, I have no doubt we could exterminate the human race.” He detonated three warheads in their silos in Utah just to emphasize his point. With dozens of video eyes, in orbit and on the ground, Mr. Slippery and Erythrina watched the destruction sweep across the launch sites. “Consider: how are we different from the gods of myth? And like the gods of myth, we can rule and prosper, just so long as we don’t fight among ourselves.” He looked expectantly from Mr. Slippery to Erythrina. There was a frown on the Red One’s dark face; she seemed to be concentrating on their opponent just as fiercely as ever.

DON.MAC turned back to Mr. Slippery. “Slip, you especially should see that we have no choice but to cooperate. They know your True Name. Of the three of us, your life is the most fragile, depending on protecting your body from a government that now considers you a traitor. You would have died a dozen times over during the last thousand seconds if you hadn’t used your new powers.

“And you can’t go back. Even if you play Boy Scout, destroy me, and return all obedient—even then they will kill you. They know how dangerous you are, perhaps even more dangerous than I. They can’t afford to let you exist.”

And megalomania aside, that made perfect and chilling sense. As they were talking, a fraction of Mr. Slippery’s attention was devoted to confusing and obstructing the small infantry group that had been air-dropped into the Arcata region just before the government lost all control. Their superiors had realized how easily he could countermand their orders, and so the troops were instructed to ignore all outside direction until they had destroyed a certain Roger Pollack. Fortunately they were depending on city directories and orbit-fed street maps, and he had been keeping them going in circles for some time now. It was a nuisance, and sooner or later he would have to decide on a more permanent solution.

But what was a simple nuisance in his present state would be near-instant death if he returned to his normal self. He looked at Erythrina. Was there any way around DON’s arguments?

Her eyes were almost shut, and the frown had deepened. He sensed that more and more of her resources were involved in some pattern analysis. He wondered if she had even heard what DON.MAC said. But after a moment her eyes came open, and she looked at the two of them. There was triumph in that look. “You know, Slip, I don’t think I have ever been fooled by a personality simulator, at least not for more than a few minutes.”

Mr. Slippery nodded, puzzled by this sudden change in topic. “Sure. If you talk to a simulator long enough, you eventually begin to notice little inflexibilities. I don’t think we’ll ever be able to write a program that could pass the Turing test.”

“Yes, little inflexibilities, a certain lack of imagination. It always seems to be the tipoff. Of course DON here has always pretended to be a program, so it was hard to tell. But I was sure that for the last few months there has been no living being behind his mask . . .

“. . . and furthermore, I don’t think there is anybody there even now.” Mr. Slippery’s attention snapped back to DON.MAC. The other smirked at the accusation. Somehow it was not the right reaction. Mr. Slippery remembered the strange, artificial flavor of DON’s combat style. In this short an encounter, there could be no really hard evidence for her theory. She was using her intuition and whatever deep analysis she had been doing these last few seconds. “But that means we still haven’t found the Mailman.”

“Right. This is just his best tool. I’ll bet the Mailman simply used the pattern he stole from the murdered DON.MAC as the basis for this automatic defense system we’ve been fighting. The Mailman’s time lag is a very real thing, not a red herring at all. Somehow it is the whole secret of who he really is.

“In any case, it makes our present situation a lot easier.” She smiled at DON.MAC as though he were a real person. Usually it was easier to behave that way toward simulators; in this case, there was a good deal of triumph in her smile. “You almost won for your master, DON. You almost had us convinced. But now that we know what we are dealing with, it will be easy to—”

Her image flicked out of existence, and Mr. Slippery felt DON grab for the resources Ery controlled. All through near-Earth space, they fought for the weapon systems she had held till an instant before.

And alone, Mr. Slippery could not win. Slowly, slowly, he felt himself bending before the other’s force, like some wrestler whose bones were breaking one by one under a murderous opponent. It was all he could do to prevent the DON construct from blasthag his home; and to do that, he had to give up progressively more computing power.

Erythrina was gone, gone as though she had never been. Or was she? He gave a sliver of his attention to a search, a sliver that was still many times more powerful than any mere warlock. That tiny piece of consciousness quickly noticed a power failure in southern Rhode Island. Many power failures had developed during the last few minutes, consequent to the data failure. But this one was strange. In addition to power, comm lines were down and even his intervention could not bring them to life. It was about as thoroughly blacked out as a place could be. This could scarcely be an accident.

. . . and there was a voice, barely telephone quality and almost lost in the mass of other data he was processing. Erythrina! She had, via some incredibly tortuous detour, retained a communication path to the outside.

His gaze swept the blacked-out Providence suburb. It consisted of new urbapts, perhaps one hundred thousand units in all. Somewhere in there lived the human that was Erythrina. While she had been concentrating on DON.MAC, he must have been working equally hard to find her True Name. Even now, DON did not know precisely who she was, only enough to black out the area she lived in.

It was getting hard to think; DON.MAC was systematically dismantling him. The lethal intent was clear: as soon as Mr. Slippery was sufficiently reduced, the Orbital Lasers would be turned on his body, and then on Erythrina’s. And then the Mailman’s faithful servant would have a planetary kingdom to turn over to his mysterious master.

He listened to the tiny voice that still leaked out of Providence. It didn’t make too much sense. She sounded hysterical, panicked. He was surprised that she could speak at all; she had just suffered—in losing all her computer connections—something roughly analogous to a massive stroke. To her, the world was now seen through a keyhole, incomplete, unknown and dark.

“There is a chance; we still have a chance,” the voice went on, hurried and slurred. “An old military communication tower north of here. Damn. I don’t know the number or grid, but I can see it from where I’m sitting. With it you could punch through to the roof antenna . . . has plenty of bandwidth, and I’ve got some battery power here . . . but hurry.”

She didn’t have to tell him that; he was the guy who was being eaten alive. He was almost immobilized now, the other’s attack squeezing and stifling where it could not cut and tear. He spasmed against DON’s strength and briefly contacted the comm towers north of Providence. Only one of them was in line of sight with the blacked-out area. Its steerable antenna was very, very narrow beam.

“Ery, I’m going to need your house number, maybe even your antenna id.”

A second passed, two—a hellish eon for Mr. Slippery. In effect, he had asked her for her True Name—he who was already known to the Feds. Once he returned to the real world, there would be no way he could mask this information from them. He could imagine her thoughts: never again to be free. In her place, he would have paused too, but—

“Ery! It’s the True Death for both of us if you don’t. He’s got me!”

This time she barely hesitated. “D-Debby Charteris, 4448 Grosvenor Row. Cut off like this, I don’t know the antenna id. Is my name and house enough?”

“Yes. Get ready!”

Even before he spoke, he had already matched the name with an antenna rental and aligned the military antenna on it. Return contact came as he turned his attention back to DON.MAC. With luck, the enemy was not aware of their conversation. Now he must be distracted.

Mr. Slippery surged against the other, breaking communications nodes that served them both. DON shuddered, reorganizing around the resources that were left, then moved in on Mr. Slippery again. Since DON had greater strength to begin with, the maneuver had cost Mr. Slippery proportionately more. The enemy had been momentarily thrown off balance, but now the end would come very quickly.

The spaces around him, once so rich with detail and colors beyond color, were fading now, replaced by the sensations of his true body straining with animal fear in its little house in California. Contact with the greater world was almost gone. He was scarcely aware of it when DON turned the Finger of God back upon him—

Consciousness, the superhuman consciousness of before, returned almost unsensed, unrecognized till awareness brought surprise. Like a strangling victim back from oblivion, Mr. Slippery looked around dazedly, not quite realizing that the struggle continued.

But now the roles were reversed. DON.MAC had been caught by surprise, in the act of finishing off what he thought was his only remaining enemy. Erythrina had used that surprise to good advantage, coming in upon her opponent from a Japanese data center, destroying much of Don’s higher reasoning centers before the other was even aware of her. Large, unclaimed processing units lay all about, and as DON and Erythrina continued their struggle, Mr. Slippery quietly absorbed everything in reach.

Even now, DON could have won against either one of them alone, but when Mr. Slippery threw himself back into the battle, they had the advantage. DON.MAC sensed this too, and with a brazenness that was either mindless or genius, returned to his original appeal. “There is still time! The Mailman will still forgive you.”

Mr. Slippery and Erythrina ripped at their enemy from both sides, disconnecting vast blocks of communications, processing and data resources. They denied the Mass Transmits to him, and one by one put the low-level satellites out of synch with his data accesses. DON was confined to land lines, tied into a single military net that stretched from Washington to Denver. He was flailing, randomly using whatever instruments of destruction were still available. All across the midsection of the US, silo missiles detonated, ABM lasers swept back and forth across the sky. The world had been stopped short by the beginning of their struggle, but the ending could tear it to pieces.

The damage to Mr. Slippery and Erythrina was slight, the risk that the random strokes would seriously damage them small. They ignored occasional slashing losses and concentrated single-mindedly on dismantling DON.MAC. They discovered the object code for the simulator that was DON, and zeroed it. DON—or his creator—was clever and had planted many copies, and a new one awakened every time they destroyed the running copy. But as the minutes passed, the simulator found itself with less and less to work with. Now it was barely more than it had been back in the Coven.

“Fools! The Mailman is your natural ally. The Feds will kill you! Don’t you underst—”

The voice stopped in midshriek, as Erythrina zeroed the currently running simulator. No other took up the task. There was a silence, an . . . absence . . . throughout. Erythrina glanced at Mr. Slippery, and the two continued their search through the enemy’s territory. This data space was big, and there could be many more copies of DON hidden in it. But without the resources they presently held, the simulator could have no power. It was clear to both of them that no effective ambush could be hidden in these unmoving ruins.

And they had complete copies of DON.MAC to study. It was easy to trace the exact extent of his infection of the system. The two moved systematically, changing what they found so that it would behave as its original programmers had intended. Their work was so thorough that the Feds might never realize just how extensively the Mailman and his henchman had infiltrated them, just how close he had come to total control.

Most of the areas they searched were only slightly altered and required only small changes. But deep within the military net, there were hundreds of trillions of bytes of program that seemed to have no intelligible function yet were clearly connected with DON’s activities. It was apparently object code, but it was so huge and so ill organized that even they couldn’t decide if it was more than hash now. There was no possibility that it had any legitimate function; after a few moments’ consideration, they randomized it.

At last it was over. Mr. Slippery and Erythrma stood alone. They controlled all connected processing facilities in near-Earth space. There was no place within that volume that any further enemies could be lurking. And there was no evidence that there had ever been interference from beyond.

It was the first time since they had reached this level that they had been able to survey the world without fear. (He scarcely noticed the continuing, pitiful attempts of the American military to kill his real body.) Mr. Slippery looked around him, using all his millions of perceptors. The Earth floated serene. Viewed in the visible, it looked like a thousand pictures he had seen as a human. But in the ultraviolet, he could follow its hydrogen aura out many thousands of kilometers. And the high-energy detectors on satellites at all levels perceived the radiation belts in thousands of energy levels, oscillating in the solar wind. Across the oceans of the world, he could feel the warmth of the currents, see just how fast they were moving. And all the while, he monitored the millions of tiny voices that were now coming back to life as he and Erythrina carefully set the human race’s communication system back on its feet and gently prodded it into function. Every ship in the seas, every aircraft now making for safe landing, every one of the loans, the payments, the meals of an entire race registered clearly on some part of his consciousness. With perception came power; almost everything he saw, he could alter, destroy, or enhance. By the analogical rules of the covens, there was only one valid word for themselves in their present state: they were gods.

“. . . we could rule,” Erythrina’s voice was hushed, self-frightened. “It might be tricky at first, assuring our bodies protection, but we could rule.”

“There’s still the Mailman—”

She seemed to wave a hand, dismissingly. “Maybe, maybe not. It’s true we still are no closer to knowing who he is, but we do know that we have destroyed all his processing power. We would have plenty of warning if he ever tries to reinsinuate himself into the System.” She stared at him intently, and it wasn’t until some time later that he recognized the faint clues in her behavior and realized that she was holding something back.

What she said was all so clearly true; for as long as their bodies lived, they could rule. And what DON.MAC had said also seemed true: they were the greatest threat the “forces of law and order” had ever faced, and that included the Mailman. How could the Feds afford to let them be free, how could they even afford to let them live, if the two of them gave up the power they had now? But—“A lot of people would have to die if we took over. There are enough independent military entities left on Earth that we’d have to use a good deal of nuclear blackmail, at least at first.”

“Yeah,” her voice was even smaller than before, and the image of her face was downcast: “During the last few seconds I’ve done some simulating on that. We’d have to take out four, maybe six, major cities. If there are any command centers hidden from us, it could be a lot worse than that. And we’d have to develop our own human secret-police forces as folks began to operate outside our system. . . . Damn. We’d end up being worse than the human-based government.”

She saw the same conclusion in his face and grinned lopsidedly. “You can’t do it and neither can I.

So the State wins again.”

He nodded, “reached” out to touch her briefly. They took one last glorious minute to soak in the higher reality. Then, silently, they parted, each to seek his own way downward.

It was not an instantaneous descent to ordinary humanity. Mr. Slippery was careful to prepare a safe exit. He created a complex set of misdirections for the army unit that was trying to close in on his physical body; it would take them several hours to find him, far longer than necessary for the government to call them off. He set up preliminary negotiations with the Federal programs that had been doing their best to knock him out of power, telling them of his determination to surrender if granted safe passage and safety for his body. In a matter of seconds he would be talking to humans again, perhaps even Virginia, but by then a lot of the basic ground rules would be automatically in operation.

As per their temporary agreements, he closed off first one and then another of the capabilities that he had so recently acquired. It was like stopping one’s ears, then blinding one’s eyes, but somehow much worse since his very ability to think was being deliberately given up. He was like some lobotomy patient (victim) who only vaguely realizes now what he has lost. Behind him the Federal forces were doing their best to close off the areas he had left, to protect themselves from any change of heart he might have.

Far away now, he could sense Erythrina going through a similar procedure, but more slowly. That was strange; he couldn’t be sure with his present faculties, but somehow it seemed that she was deliberately lagging behind and doing something more complicated than was strictly necessary to return safely to normal humanity. And then he remembered that strange look she had given him while saying that they had not figured out who the Mailman was.

One could rule as easily as two!

The panic was sudden and overwhelming, all the more terrible for the feeling of being betrayed by one so trusted. He struck out against the barriers he had so recently allowed to close in about him, but it was too late. He was already weaker than the Feds. Mr. Slippery looked helplessly back into the gathering dimness, and saw . . .

. . . Ery coming down toward the real world with him, giving up the advantage she had held all alone. Whatever problems had slowed her must have had nothing to do with treachery. And somehow his feeling of relief went beyond the mere fact of death avoided—Ery was still what he had always thought her.

He was seeing a lot of Virginia lately, though of course not socially. Her crew had set up offices in Arcata, and twice a week she and one of her goons would come up to the house. No doubt it was one of the few government operations carried out face-to-face. She or her superiors seemed to realize that anything done over the phone might be subject to trickery. (Which was true, of course. Given several weeks to himself, Pollack could have put together a robot phone connection and—using false ids and priority permits—been on a plane to Djakarta.)

There were a lot of superficial similarities between these meetings and that first encounter the previous spring:

Pollack stepped to the door and watched the black Lincoln pulling up the drive. As always, the vehicle came right into the carport. As always, the driver got out quickly, eyes flickering coldly across Pollack. As always, Virginia moved with military precision (in fact, he had discovered, she had been promoted out of the Army to her present job in DoW intelligence). The two walked purposefully toward the bungalow, ignoring the summer sunlight and the deep wet green of the lawn and pines. He held the door open for them, and they entered with silent arrogance. As always.

He smiled to himself. In one sense nothing had changed. They still had the power of life and death over him. They could still cut him off from everything he loved. But in another sense . . .

“Got an easy one for you today, Pollack,” she said as she put her briefcase on the coffee table and enabled its data set. “But I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“Oh?” He sat down and watched her expectantly.

“The last couple of months, we’ve had you destroying what remains of the Mailman and getting the National program and data bases back in operation.”

Behind everything, there still stood the threat of the Mailman. Ten weeks after the battle—the War, as Virginia called it—the public didn’t know any more than that there had been a massive vandalism of the System. Like most major wars, this had left ruination in everyone’s camp. The US government and the economy of the entire world had slid far toward chaos in the months after that battle. (In fact, without his work and Erythrina’s, he doubted if the US bureaucracies could have survived the Mailman War. He didn’t know whether this made them the saviors or the betrayers of America.) But what of the enemy?

His power was almost certainly destroyed. In the last three weeks Mr. Slippery had found only one copy of the program kernel that had been DON.MAC, and that had been in nonexecutable form. But the man—or the beings—behind the Mailman was just as anonymous as ever. In that, Virginia, the government, and Pollack were just as ignorant as the general public.

“Now,” Virginia continued, “we’ve got some smaller problems—mopping-up action, you might call it. For nearly two decades, we’ve had to live with the tuppin vandalism of irresponsible individuals who put their petty self-interest ahead of the public’s. Now that we’ve got you, we intend to put a stop to that:

“We want the True Names of all abusers currently on the System, in particular the members of this so-called coven you used to be a part of.”

He had known that the demand would eventually come, but the knowledge made this moment no less unpleasant. “I’m sorry, I can’t.”

“Can’t? Or won’t? See here, Pollack, the price of your freedom is that you play things our way. You’ve broken enough laws to justify putting you away forever. And we both know that you are so dangerous that you ought to be put away. There are people who feel even more strongly than that, Pollack, people who are not as soft in the head as I am. They simply want you and your girl friend in Providence safely dead.” The speech was delivered with characteristic flat bluntness, but she didn’t quite meet his eyes as she spoke. Ever since he had returned from the battle, there had been a faint diffidence behind her bluster.

She covered it well, but it was clear to Pollack that she didn’t know if she should fear him or respect him—or both. In any case, she seemed to recognize a basic mystery in him; she had more imagination than he had originally thought. It was a bit amusing, for there was very little special about Roger Pollack, the man. He went from day to day feeling a husk of what he had once been and trying to imagine what he could barely remember.

Roger smiled almost sympathetically. “I can’t and I won’t, Virginia. And I don’t think you will harm me for it—Let me finish. The only thing that frightens your bosses more than Erythrina and me is the possibility that there may be other unknown persons—maybe even the Mailman, back from wherever he has disappeared to—who might be equally powerful. She and I are your only real experts on this type of subversion. I bet that even if they could, your people wouldn’t train their own clean-cut, braided types as replacements for us. The more paranoid a security organization is, the less likely it is to trust anyone with this sort of power. Mr. Slippery and Erythrina are the known factors, the experts who turned back from the brink. Our restraint was the only thing that stood between the Powers That Be and the Powers That Would Be.”

Virginia was speechless for a moment, and Pollack could see that this was the crux of her changed attitude toward him. All her life she had been taught that the individual is corrupted by power: she boggled at the notion that he had been offered mastery of all mankind—and had refused it.

Finally she smiled, a quick smile that was gone almost before he noticed it. “Okay. I’ll pass on what you say. You may be right. The vandals are a long-range threat to our basic American freedoms, but day to day, they are a mere annoyance. My superiors—the Department of Welfare—are probably willing to fight them as we have in the past. They’ll tolerate your, uh, disobedience in this single matter as long as you and Erythrina loyally protect us against the superhuman threats.”

Pollack felt a great sense of relief. He had been so afraid DoW would be willing to destroy him for this refusal. And since the Feds would never be free of their fear of the Mailman, he and Debby Charteris—Erythrina—would never be forced to betray their friends.

“But,” continued the cop, “that doesn’t mean you get to ignore the covens. The most likely place for superhuman threats to resurface is from within them. The vandals are the people with the most real experience on the System-even the Army is beginning to see that. And if a superhuman type originates outside the covens, we figure his ego will still make him show off to them, just as with the Mailman.

“In addition to your other jobs, we want you to spend a couple of hours a week with each of the major covens. You’ll be one of the ‘boys’—only now you’re under responsible control, watching for any sign of Mailman-type influence.”

“I’ll get to see Ery again!”

“No. That rule still stands. And you should be grateful. I don’t think we could tolerate your existence if there weren’t two of you. With only one in the Other Plane at a time, we’ll always have a weapon in reserve. And as long as we can keep you from meeting there, we can keep you from scheming against us. This is serious, Roger: if we catch you two or your surrogates playing around in the Other Plane, it will be the end.”

“Hmm.”

She looked hard at him for a moment, then appeared to take that for acquiescence. The next half-hour was devoted to the details of this week’s assignments. (It would have been easier to feed him all this when he was in the Other Plane, but Virginia—or at least DoW—seemed wedded to the past.) He was to continue the work on Social Security Records and the surveillance of the South American data nets. There was an enormous amount of work to be done, at least with the limited powers the Feds were willing to give him. It would likely be October before the welfare machinery was working properly again. But that would be in time for the elections.

Then, late in the week, they wanted him to visit the Coven. Roger knew he would count the hours; it had been so long.

Virginia was her usual self, intense and all business, until she and her driver were ready to leave. Standing in the carport, she said almost shyly, “I ran your Anne Boleyn last week . . . It’s really very good.”

“You sound surprised.”

“No. I mean yes, maybe I was. Actually I’ve run it several times, usually with the viewpoint character set to Anne. There seems to be a lot more depth to it than other participation games I’ve read. I’ve got the feeling that if I am clever enough, someday I’ll stop Henry and keep my head!”

Pollack grinned. He could imagine Virginia, the hard-eyed cop, reading Anne to study the psychology of her client-prisoner-then gradually getting caught up in the action of the novel. “It is possible.”

In fact, it was possible she might turn into a rather nice human being someday.

But by the time Pollack was starting back up the walk to his house, Virginia was no longer on his mind. He was going back to the Coven!

A chill mist that was almost rain blew across the hillside and obscured the far distance in shifting patches. But even from here, on the ridge above the swamp, the castle looked different: heavier, stronger, darker.

Mr. Slippery started down the familiar slope. The frog on his shoulder seemed to sense his unease and its clawlets bit tighter into the leather of his jacket. Its beady yellow eyes turned this way and that, recording everything. (Altogether, that frog was much improved—almost out of amateur status nowadays.)

The traps were different. In just the ten weeks since the War, the Coven had changed them more than in the previous two years. Every so often, he shook the gathering droplets of water from his face and peered more closely at a bush or boulder by the side of the path. His advance was slow, circuitous, and interrupted by invocations of voice and hand.

Finally he stood before the towers. A figure of black and glowing red climbed out of the magma moat to meet him. Even Alan had changed: he no longer had his asbestos T-shirt, and there was no humor in his sparring with the visitor. Mr. Slippery had to stare upward to look directly at his massive head. The elemental splashed molten rock down on them, and the frog scampered between his neck and collar, its skin cold and slimy against his own. The passwords were different, the questioning more hostile, but Mr. Slippery was a match for the tests and in a matter of minutes Alan retreated sullenly to his steaming pool, and the drawbridge was lowered for their entrance.

The hall was almost the same as before: perhaps a bit drier, more brightly lit. There were certainly more people. And they were all looking at him as he stood in the entranceway. Mr. Slippery gave his traveling jacket and hat to a liveried servant and started down the steps, trying to recognize the faces, trying to understand the tension and hostility that hung in the air.

“Slimey!” The Limey stepped forward from the crowd, a familiar grin splitting his bearded face. “Slip! Is that really you?” (Not entirely a rhetorical question, under the circumstances.)

Mr. Slippery nodded, and after a moment, the other did, too. The Limey almost ran across the space that separated them, stuck out his hand, and clapped the other on the shoulder. “Come on, come on! We have rather a lot to talk about!”

As if on cue, the others turned back to their conversations and ignored the two friends as they walked to one of the sitting rooms that opened off the main hall. Mr. Slippery felt like a man returning to his old school ten years after graduation. Almost all the faces were different, and he had the feeling that he could never belong here again. But this was only ten weeks, not ten years.

The Slimey Limey shut the heavy door, and the sounds from the main room were muted. He waved Slip to a chair and made a show of mixing them some drinks. “They’re all simulators, aren’t they?” Slip said quietly. “Uh?” The Limey broke off his stream of chatter and shook his head glumly. “Not all. I’ve recruited four or five apprentices. They do their best to make the place look thriving and occupied. You may have noticed various improvements in our security.”

“It looks stronger, but it’s more appearance than fact.”

Slimey shrugged. “I really didn’t expect it to fool the likes of you.”

Mr. Slippery leaned forward. “Who’s left from the old group, Slimey?”

“DON’s gone. The Mailman is gone. Wiley J. Bastard shows up a couple of times a month, but he’s not much fun anymore. I think Erythrina’s still on the System, but she hasn’t come by. I thought you were gone until today.”

“What about Robin Hood?”

“Gone.”

That accounted for all the top talents. Virginia the Frog hadn’t been giving away all that much when she excused him from betraying the Coven. Slip wondered if there was any hint of smugness in the frog’s fixed and lipless smile. “What happened?”

The other sighed. “There’s a depression on down in the real world, in case you hadn’t noticed; and it’s being blamed on us vandals.

“—I know, that could scarcely explain Robin’s disappearance, only the lesser ones. Slip, I think most of our old friends are either dead Truly Dead—or very frightened that if they come back into this Plane, they will become Truly Dead.”

This felt very much like history repeating itself. “How do you mean?”

The Limey leaned forward. “Slip, it’s quite obvious the government’s feeding us lies about what caused the depression. They say it was a combination of programming errors and the work of ‘vandals.’ We know that can’t be true. No ordinary vandals could cause that sort of damage. Right after the crash, I looked at what was left of the Feds’ data bases. Whatever ripped things up was more powerful than any vandal. . . . And I’ve spoken with—p’raps I should say interrogated Wiley. I think what we see in the real world and on this plane is in fact the wreckage of a bloody major war.”

“Between?”

“Creatures as far above me as I am above a chimp. The names we know them by are the Mailman, Erythrina . . . and just possibly Mr. Slippery.”

“Me?” Slip tensed and sent out probes along the communications links which he perceived had created the image before him. Even though on a leash, Mr. Slippery was far more powerful than any normal warlock, and it should have been easy to measure the power of this potential opponent. But the Limey was a diffuse, almost nebulous presence. Slip couldn’t tell if he were facing an opponent in the same class as himself; in fact, he had no clear idea of the other’s strength, which was even more ominous.

The Limey didn’t seem to notice. “That’s what I thought. Now I doubt it. I wager you were used like Wiley and possibly DON—by the other combatants. And I see that now you’re in someone’s thrall.” His finger stabbed at the yellow-eyed frog on Mr. Slippery’s shoulder, and a sparkle of whiskey flew into the creature’s face. Virginia—or whoever was controlling the beast—didn’t know what to do, and the frog froze momentarily, then recovered its wits and emitted a pale burst of flame.

The Limey laughed. “But it’s no one very competent. The Feds is my guess. What happened? Did they sight your True Name, or did you just sell out?”

“The creature’s my familiar, Slimey. We all have our apprentices. If you really believe we’re the Feds, why did you let us in?”

The other shrugged. “Because there are enemies and enemies, Slip. Beforetime, we called the government the Great Enemy. Now I’d say they are just one in a pantheon of nasties. Those of us who survived the crash are a lot tougher, a lot less frivolous. We don’t think of this as all a wry game anymore. And we’re teaching our apprentices a lot more systematically. It’s not near so much fun. Now when we talk of traitors in the Coven, we mean real, life-and-death treachery.

“But it’s necessary. When it comes to it, if we little people don’t protect ourselves, we’re going to be eaten up by the government or . . . certain other creatures I fear even more.”

The frog shifted restively on Mr. Slippery’s shoulder, and he could imagine Virginia getting ready to deliver some speech on the virtue of obeying the laws of society in order to reap its protection. He reached across to pat its cold and pimply back; now was not the time for such debate.

“You had one of the straightest heads around here, Slip. Even if you aren’t one of us anymore, I don’t reckon you’re an absolute enemy: You and your . . . friend may have certain interests in common with us. There are things you should know about—if you don’t already. An’ p’raps there’ll be times you’ll help us similarly.”

Slip felt the Federal tether loosen. Virginia must have convinced her superiors that there was actually help to be had here. “Okay. You’re right. There was a war. The Mailman was the enemy. He lost and now we’re trying to put things back together.”

“Ah, that’s just it, old man. I don’t think the war is over. True, all that remains of the Mailman’s constructs are ‘craterfields’ spread through the government’s program space. But something like him is still very much alive.” He saw the disbelief in Mr. Slippery’s face. “I know, you an’ your friends are more powerful than any of us. But there are many of us—not just in the Coven—and we have learned a lot these past ten weeks. There are signs, so light an’ fickle you might call ‘em atmosphere, that tell us something like the Mailman is still alive. It doesn’t quite have the texture of the Mailman, but it’s there.”

Mr. Slippery nodded. He didn’t need any special explanations of the feeling. Damn! If I weren’t on a leash, I would have seen all this weeks ago, instead of finding it out secondhand. He thought back to those last minutes of their descent from godhood and felt a chill. He knew what he must ask now, and he had a bad feeling about what the answer might be. Somehow he had to prevent Virginia from hearing that answer. It would be a great risk, but he still had a few tricks he didn’t think DoW knew of. He probed back along the links that went to Arcata and D.C., feeling the interconnections and the redundancy checks. If he was lucky, he would not have to alter more than a few hundred bits of the information that would flow down to them in the next few seconds. “So who do you think is behind it?”

“For a while, I thought it might be you. Now I’ve seen you and, uh, done some tests, I know you’re more powerful than in the old days and probably more powerful than I am now, but you’re no superman.

“Maybe I’m in disguise.”

“Maybe, but I doubt it.” The Limey was coming closer to the critical words that must be disguised. Slip began to alter the redundancy bits transmitted through the construct of the frog. He would have to fake the record both before and after those words if the deception was to escape detection completely. “No, there’s a certain style to this presence. A style that reminds me of our old friend, REorbyitnh rHionoad.” The name he said, and the name Mr. Slippery heard, was “Erythrina.” The name blended imperceptibly in its place, the name the frog heard, and reported, was “Robin Hood.”

“Hmm, possible. He always seemed to be power hungry.” The Limey’s eyebrows went up fractionally at the pronoun “he.” Besides, Robin had been a fantastically clever vandal, not a power grabber. Slimey’s eyes flickered toward the frog, and Mr. Slippery prayed that he would play along. “Do you really think this is as great a threat as the Mailman?”

“Who knows? The presence isn’t as widespread as the Mailman’s, and since the crash no more of us have disappeared. Also, I’m not sure that . . . he . . . is the only such creature left. Perhaps the original Mailman is still around.”

And you can’t decide who it is that I’m really trying to fool, can you?

The discussion continued for another half-hour, a weird three-way fencing match with just two active players. On the one hand, he and the Limey were trying to communicate past the frog, and on the other, the Slimey Limey was trying to decide if perhaps Slip was the real enemy and the frog a potential ally. The hell of it was, Mr. Slippery wasn’t sure himself of the answer to that puzzle.

Slimey walked him out to the drawbridge. For a few moments, they stood on the graven ceramic plating and spoke. Below them, Alan paddled back and forth, looking up at them uneasily. The mist was a light rain now, and a constant sizzling came from the molten rock.

Finally Slip said, “You’re right in a way, Slimey. I am someone’s thrall. But I will look for Robin Hood. If you’re right, you’ve got a couple of new allies. If he’s too strong for us, this might be the last you see of me.”

The Slimey Limey nodded, and Slip hoped he had gotten the real message: He would take on Ery all by himself. “Well then, let’s hope this ain’t good-bye, old man.” Slip walked back down into the valley, aware of the Limey’s not unsympathetic gaze on his back.

How to find her, how to speak with her? And survive the experience, that is. Virginia had forbidden him—literally on pain of death—from meeting with Ery on this plane. Even if he could do so, it would be a deadly risk for other reasons. What had Ery been doing in those minutes she dallied, when she had fooled him into descending back to the human plane before her? At the time, he had feared it was a betrayal. Yet he had lived and had forgotten the mystery. Now he wondered again. It was impossible for him to understand the complexity of those minutes. Perhaps she had weakened herself at the beginning to gull him into starting the descent, and perhaps then she hadn’t been quite strong enough to take over.

Was that possible? And now she was slowly, secretly building back her powers, just as the Mailman had done? He didn’t want to believe it, and he knew if Virginia heard his suspicions, the Feds would kill her immediately. There would be no trial, no deep investigation.

Somehow he must get past Virginia and confront Ery—confront her in such a way that he could destroy her if she were a new Mailman. And there is a way! He almost laughed: it was absurd and absurdly simple, and it was the only thing that might work. All eyes were on this plane, where magic and power flowed easily to the participants. He would attack from beneath, from the lowly magicless real world!

But there was one final act of magic he must slip past Virginia, something absolutely necessary for a real world confrontation with Erythrina.

He had reached the far ridge and was starting down the hillside that led to the swamps. Even preoccupied, he had given the right signs flawlessly. The guardian sprites were not nearly so vigilant toward contructs moving away from the castle. As the wet brush closed in about them, the familiar red and black spider—or its cousin—swung down from above.

“Beware, beware,” came the tiny voice. From the flecks of gold across its abdomen, he knew the right response: left hand up and flick the spider away. Instead Slip raised his right hand and struck at the creature.

The spider hoisted itself upward, screeching faintly, then dropped toward Slip’s neck—to land squarely on the frog. A free-for-all erupted as the two scrambled across the back of his neck, pale flame jousting against venom. Even as he moved to save the frog, Mr. Slippery melted part of his attention into a data line that fed a sporting goods store in Montreal. An order was placed and later that day a certain very special package would be in the mail to the Boston International Rail Terminal.

Slip made a great show of dispatching the spider, and as the frog settled back on his shoulder, he saw that he had probably fooled Virginia. That he had expected. Fooling Ery would be much the deadlier, chancier thing.

If this afternoon were typical, then July in Providence must be a close approximation to Hell. Roger Pollack left the tube as it passed the urbapt block and had to walk nearly four hundred meters to get to the tower he sought. His shirt was soaked with sweat from just below the belt line right up to his neck. The contents of the package he had picked up at the airport train station sat heavily in his right coat pocket, tapping against his hip with every step, reminding him that this was high noon in more ways than one.

Pollack quickly crossed the blazing concrete plaza and walked along the edge of the shadow that was all the tower cast in the noonday sun. All around him the locals swarmed, all ages, seemingly unfazed by the still, moist, hot air. Apparently you could get used to practically anything.

Even an urbapt in summer in Providence. Pollack had expected the buildings to be more depressing. Workers who had any resources became data commuters and lived outside the cities. Of course, some of the people here were data-set users too and so could be characterized as data commuters. Many of them worked as far away from home as any exurb dweller. The difference was that they made so little money (when they had a job at all) that they were forced to take advantage of the economies of scale the urbapts provided.

Pollack saw the elevator ahead but had to detour around a number of children playing stickball in the plaza. The elevator was only half-full, so a wave from him was all it took to keep it grounded till he could get aboard.

No one followed him on, and the faces around him were disinterested and entirely ordinary. Pollack was not fooled. He hadn’t violated the letter of Virginia’s law; he wasn’t trying to see Erythrina on the data net. But he was going to see Debby Charteris, which came close to being the same thing. He imagined the Feds debating with themselves, finally deciding it would be safe to let the two godlings get together if it were on this plane where the State was still the ultimate, all-knowing god. He and Debby would be observed. Even so, he would somehow discover if she were the threat the Limey saw. If not, the Feds would never know of his suspicions. But if Ery had betrayed them all and meant to set herself up in place of—or in league with—the Mailman, then in the next few minutes one of them would die.

The express slid to a stop with a deceptive gentleness that barely gave a feeling of lightness. Pollack paid and got off.

Floor 25 was mainly shopping mall. He would have to find the stairs to the residential apts between Floors 25 and 35. Pollack drifted through the mall. He was beginning to feel better about the whole thing. I’m still alive, aren’t I? If Ery had really become what the Limey and Slip feared, then he probably would have had a little “accident” before now. All the way across the continent he sat with his guts frozen, thinking how easy it would be for someone with the Mailman’s power to destroy an air transport, even without resorting to the military’s lasers. A tiny change in navigation or traffic-control directions, and any number of fatal incidents could be arranged. But nothing had happened, which meant that either Ery was innocent or that she hadn’t noticed him. (And that second possibility was unlikely if she were a new Mailman. One impression that remained stronger than any other from his short time as godling was the omniscience of it all.)

It turned out the stairs were on the other side of the mall, marked by a battered sign reminiscent of old-time highway markers: FOOTS > 26-30. The place wasn’t really too bad, he supposed, eyeing the stained but durable carpet that covered the stairs. And the hallways coming off each landing reminded him of the motels he had known as a child, before the turn of the century. There was very little trash visible, the people moving around him weren’t poorly dressed, and there was only the faintest spice of disinfectant in the air. Apt module 28355, where Debbie Charteris lived, might be high-class. It did have an exterior view, he knew that. Maybe Erythrina—Debbie—liked living with all these other people.

Surely, now that the government was so interested in her, she could move anywhere she wished.

But when he reached it, he found floor 28 no different from the others he had seen: carpeted hallway stretching away forever beneath dim lights that showed identical module doorways dwindling in perspective. What was Debbie/Erythrina like that she would choose to live here?

“Hold it.” Three teenagers stepped from behind the slant of the stairs. Pollack’s hand edged toward his coat pocket. He had heard of the gangs. These three looked like heavies, but they were well and conservatively dressed, and the small one actually had his hair in a braid. They wanted very much to be thought part of the establishment.

The short one flashed something silver at him. “Building Police.” And Pollack remembered the news stories about Federal Urban Support paying youngsters for urbapt security: “A project that saves money and staff, while at the same time giving our urban youth an opportunity for responsible citizenship.

Pollack swallowed. Best to treat them like real cops. He showed them his id. “I’m from out of state. I’m just visiting.”

The other two closed in, and the short one laughed. “That’s sure. Fact, Mr. Pollack, Sammy’s little gadget says you’re in violation of Building Ordinance.” The one on Pollack’s left waved a faintly buzzing cylinder across Pollack’s jacket, then pushed a hand into the jacket and withdrew Pollack’s pistol, a lightweight ceramic slug-gun perfect for hunting hikes—and which should have been perfect for getting past a building’s weapon detectors.

Sammy smiled down at the weapon, and the short one continued, “Thing you didn’t know, Mr. Pollack, is Federal law requires a metal tag in the butt of these cram guns. Makes ‘em easy to detect.” Until the tag was removed. Pollack suspected that somehow this incident might never be reported. The three stepped back, leaving the way clear for Pollack. “That’s all? I can go?”

The young cop grinned. “Sure. You’re out-of-towner. How could you know?”

Pollack continued down the hall. The others did not follow. Pollack was fleetingly surprised: maybe the FUS project actually worked. Before the turn of the century, goons like those three would have at least robbed him. Instead they behaved something like real cops.

Or maybe—and he almost stumbled at this new thought—they all work for Ery now. That might be the first symptom of conquest: the new god would simply become the government. And he—the last threat to the new order—was being granted one last audience with the victor.

Pollack straightened and walked on more quickly. There was no turning back now, and he was damned if he would show any more fear. Besides, he thought with a sudden surge of relief, it was out of his control now. If Ery was a monster, there was nothing he could do about it; he would not have to try to kill her. If she were not, then his own survival would be proof, and he need think of no complicated tests of her innocence.

He was almost hurrying now. He had always wanted to know what the human being beyond Erythrina was like; sooner or later he would have had to do this anyway. Weeks ago he had looked through all the official directories for the state of Rhode Island, but there wasn’t much to find: Linda and Deborah Charteris lived at 28355 Place on 4448 Grosvenor Row. The public directory didn’t even show their “interests and occupations.”

28313, 315, 317. . . .

His mind had gone in circles, generating all the things Debby Charteris might turn out to be. She would not be the exotic beauty she projected in the Other Plane. That was too much to hope for; but the other possibilities vied in his mind. He had lived with each, trying to believe that he could accept whatever turned out to be the case:

Most likely, she was a perfectly ordinary looking person who lived in an urbapt to save enough money to buy high-quality processing equipment and rent dense comm lines. Maybe she wasn’t good-looking, and that was why the directory listing was relatively secretive.

Almost as likely, she was massively handicapped. He had seen that fairly often among the warlocks whose True Names he knew. They had extra medical welfare and used all their free money for equipment that worked around whatever their problem might be—paraplegia, quadriplegia, multiple sense loss. As such, they were perfectly competitive on the job market, yet old prejudices often kept them out of normal society. Many of these types retreated into the Other Plane, where one could completely control one’s appearance.

And then, since the beginning of time, there had been the people who simply did not like reality, who wanted another world, and if given half a chance would live there forever. Pollack suspected that some of the best warlocks might be of this type. Such people were content to live in an urbapt, to spend all their money on processing and life-support equipment, to spend days at a time in the Other Plane, never moving, never exercising their real world bodies. They grew more and more adept, more and more knowledgeable—while their bodies slowly wasted. Pollack could imagine such a person becoming an evil thing and taking over the Mailman’s role. It would be like a spider sitting in its web, its victims all humanity. He remembered Ery’s contemptuous attitude on learning he never used drugs to maintain concentration and so stay longer in the Other Plane. He shuddered.

And there, finally, and yet too soon, the numbers 28355 stood on the wall before him, the faint hall light glistening off their bronze finish. For a long moment, he balanced between the fear and the wish. Finally he reached forward and tapped the door buzzer.

Fifteen seconds passed. There was no one nearby in the hall. From the corner of his eye, he could see the “cops” lounging by the stairs. About a hundred meters the other way, an argument was going on. The contenders rounded the faraway corner and their voices quieted, leaving him in near silence.

There was a click, and a small section of the door became transparent, a window (more likely a holo) on the interior of the apt. And the person beyond that view would be either Deborah or Linda Charteris.

“Yes?” The voice was faint, cracking with age. Pollack saw a woman barely tall enough to come up to the pickup on the other side. Her hair was white, visibly thin on top, especially from the angle he was viewing.

“I’m . . . I’m looking for Deborah Charteris.”

“My granddaughter. She’s out shopping. Downstairs in the mall, I think.” The head bobbed, a faintly distracted nod.

“Oh. Can you tell me—” Deborah, Debby. It suddenly struck him what an old-fashioned name that was, more the name of a grandmother than a granddaughter. He took a quick step to the door and looked down through the pane so that he could see most of the other’s body. The woman wore an old-fashioned skirt and blouse combination of some brilliant red material.

Pollack pushed his hand against the immovable plastic of the door. “Ery, please. Let me in.”

The pane blanked as he spoke, but after a moment the door slowly opened. “Okay.” Her voice was tired, defeated. Not the voice of a god boasting victory.

The interior was decorated cheaply and with what might have been good taste except for the garish excesses of red on red. Pollack remembered reading somewhere that as you age, color sensitivity decreases. This room might seem only mildly bright to the person Erythrina had turned out to be.

The woman walked slowly across the tiny apt and gestured for him to sit. She was frail, her back curved in a permanent stoop, her every step considered yet tremulous. Under the apt’s window, he noticed an elaborate GE processor system. Pollack sat and found himself looking slightly upward into her face.

“Slip—or maybe I should call you Roger here—you always were a bit of a romantic fool.” She paused for breath, or perhaps her mind wandered. “I was beginning to think you had more sense than to come out here, that you could leave well enough alone.”

“You . . . you mean, you didn’t know I was coming?” The knowledge was a great loosening in his chest.

“Not until you were in the building.” She turned and sat carefully upon the sofa.

“I had to see who you really are,” and that was certainly the truth. “After this spring, there is no one the likes of us in the whole world.”

Her face cracked in a little smile. “And now you see how different we are. I had hoped you never would and that someday they would let us back together on the Other Plane. . . . But in the end, it doesn’t really matter.” She paused, brushed at her temple, and frowned as though forgetting something, or remembering something else.

“I never did look much like the Erythrina you know. I was never tall, of course, and my hair was never red. But I didn’t spend my whole life selling life insurance in Peoria, like poor Wiley.”

“You . . . you must go all the way back to the beginning of computing.”

She smiled again, and nodded just so, a mannerism Pollack had often seen on the Other Plane. “Almost, almost. Out of high school, I was a keypunch operator. You know what a keypunch is?”

He nodded hesitantly, visions of some sort of machine press in his mind.

“It was a dead-end job, and in those days they’d keep you in it forever if you didn’t get out under your own power. I got out of it and into college quick as I could, but at least I can say I was in the business during the stone age. After college, I never looked back; there was always so much happening. In the Nasty Nineties, I was on the design of the ABM and FoG control programs. The whole team, the whole of DoD for that matter, was trying to program the thing with procedural languages; it would take ‘em a thousand years and a couple of wars to do it that way, and they were beginning to realize as much. I was responsible for getting them away from CRTs, for getting into really interactive EEG programming—what they call portal programming nowadays. Sometimes . . . sometimes when my ego needs a little help, I like to think that if I had never been born, hundreds of millions more would have died back then, and our cities would be glassy ponds today.

“. . . And along the way there was a marriage . . .” her voice trailed off again, and she sat smiling at memories Pollack could not see.

He looked around the apt. Except for the processor and a fairly complete kitchenette, there was no special luxury. What money she had must go into her equipment, and perhaps in getting a room with a real exterior view. Beyond the rising towers of the Grosvenor complex, he could see the nest of comm towers that had been their last-second salvation that spring. When he looked back at her, he saw that she was watching him with an intent and faintly amused expression that was very familiar.

“I’ll bet you wonder how anyone so daydreamy could be the Erythrina you knew in the Other Plane.”

“Why, no,” he lied. “You seem perfectly lucid to me.”

“Lucid, yes. I am still that, thank God. But I know—and no one has to tell me—that I can’t support a train of thought like I could before. These last two or three years, I’ve found that my mind can wander, can drop into reminiscence, at the most inconvenient times. I’ve had one stroke, and about all ‘the miracles of modern medicine’ can do for me is predict that it will not be the last one.

“But in the Other Plane, I can compensate. It’s easy for the EEG to detect failure of attention. I’ve written a package that keeps a thirty-second backup; when distraction is detected, it forces attention and reloads my short-term memory. Most of the time, this gives me better concentration than I’ve ever had in my life. And when there is a really serious wandering of attention, the package can interpolate for a number of seconds. You may have noticed that, though perhaps you mistook it for poor communications coordination.”

She reached a thin, blue-veined hand toward him. He took it in his own. It felt so light and dry, but it returned his squeeze. “It really is me—Ery—inside, Slip.”

He nodded, feeling a lump in his throat.

“When I was a kid, there was this song, something about us all being aging children. And it’s so very, very true. Inside I still feel like a youngster. But on this plane, no one else can see . . .”

“But I know, Ery. We knew each other on the Other Plane, and I know what you truly are. Both of us are so much more there than we could ever be here.” This was all true: even with the restrictions they put on him now, he had a hard time understanding all he did on the Other Plane. What he had become since the spring was a fuzzy dream to him when he was down in the physical world. Sometimes he felt like a fish trying to imagine what a man in an airplane might be feeling. He never spoke of it like this to Virginia and her friends: they would be sure he had finally gone crazy. It was far beyond what he had known as a warlock. And what they had been those brief minutes last spring had been equally far beyond that.

“Yes, I think you do know me, Slip. And we’ll be . . . friends as long as this body lasts. And when I’m gone—”

“I’ll remember; I’ll always remember you, Ery.” She smiled and squeezed his hand again. “Thanks.

But that’s not what I was getting at. . . .” Her gaze drifted off again. “I figured out who the Mailman was and I wanted to tell you.”

Pollack could imagine Virginia and the other DoW eavesdroppers hunkering down to their spy equipment. “I hoped you knew something.” He went on to tell her about the Slimey Limey’s detection of Mailmanlike operations still on the System. He spoke carefully, knowing that he had two audiences.

Ery—even now he couldn’t think of her as Debby—nodded. “I’ve been watching the Coven. They’ve grown, these last months. I think they take themselves more seriously now. In the old days, they never would have noticed what the Limey warned you about. But it’s not the Mailman he saw, Slip.”

“How can you be sure, Ery? We never killed more than his service programs and his simulators—like DON.MAC. We never found his True Name. We don’t even know if he’s human or some science-fictional alien.”

“You’re wrong, Slip. I know what the Limey saw, and I know who the Mailman is—or was,” she spoke quietly, but with certainty. “It turns out the Mailman was the greatest cliché of the Computer Age, maybe of the entire Age of Science.”

“Huh?”

“You’ve seen plenty of personality simulators in the Other Plane. DON.MAC—at least as he was rewritten by the Mailman—was good enough to fool normal warlocks. Even Alan, the Coven’s elemental, shows plenty of human emotion and cunning.” Pollack thought of the new Alan, so ferocious and intimidating. The Turing T-shirt was beneath his dignity now. “Even so, Slip, I don’t think you’ve ever believed you could be permanently fooled by a simulation, have you?”

“Wait. Are you trying to tell me that the Mailman was just another simulator? That the time lag was just to obscure the fact that he was a simulator? That’s ridiculous. You know his powers were more than human, almost as great as ours became.”

“But do you think you could ever be fooled?”

“Frankly, no. If you talk to one of those things long enough, they display a repetitiveness, an inflexibility that’s a giveaway. I don’t know; maybe someday there’ll be programs that can pass the Turing test. But whatever it is that makes a person a person is terribly complicated. Simulation is the wrong way to get at it, because being a person is more than symptoms. A program that was a person would use enormous data bases, and if the processors running it were the sort we have now, you certainly couldn’t expect real-time interaction with the outside world.” And Pollack suddenly had a glimmer of what she was thinking.

“That’s the critical point, Slip: if you want realtime interaction. But the Mailman—the sentient, conversational part—never did operate real time. We thought the lag was a communications delay that showed the operator was off-planet, but really he was here all the time. It just took him hours of processing time to sustain seconds of self-awareness.”

Pollack opened his mouth, but nothing came out. It went against all his intuition, almost against what religion he had, but it might just barely be possible. The Mailman had controlled immense resources. All his quick time reactions could have been the work of ordinary programs and simulators like DON.MAC. The only evidence they had for his humanity were those teleprinter conversations where his responses were spread over hours.

“Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s possible. Someone, somewhere had to write the original Mailman. Who was that?”

“Who would you guess? The government, of course. About ten years ago. It was an NSA team trying to automate system protection. Some brilliant people, but they could never really get it off the ground. They wrote a developmental kernel that by itself was not especially effective or aware. It was designed to live within large systems and gradually grow in power and awareness, independent of what policies or mistakes the operators of the system might make.

“The program managers saw the Frankenstein analogy—or at least they saw a threat to their personal power—and quashed the project. In any case, it was very expensive. The program executed slowly and gobbled incredible data space.”

“And you’re saying that someone conveniently left a copy running all unknown?”

She seemed to miss the sarcasm. “It’s not that unlikely. Research types are fairly careless—outside of their immediate focus. When I was in FoG, we lost thousands of megabytes ‘between the cracks’ of our data bases. And back then, that was a lot of memory. The development kernel is not very large. My guess is a copy was left in the system. Remember, the kernel was designed to live untended if it ever started executing. Over the years it slowly grew—both because of its natural tendencies and because of the increased power of the nets it lived in.”

Pollack sat back on the sofa. Her voice was tiny and frail, so unlike the warm, rich tones he remembered from the Other Plane. But she spoke with the same authority.

Debby’s—Erythrina’s—pale eyes stared off beyond the walls of the apt, dreaming. “You know, they are right to be afraid,” she said finally. “Their world is ending. Even without us, there would still be the Limey, the Coven—and someday most of the human race.”

Damn. Pollack was momentarily tongue-tied, trying desperately to think of something to mollify the threat implicit in Ery’s words. Doesn’t she understand that DoW would never let us talk unbugged? Doesn’t she know how trigger-happy scared the top Feds must be by now?

But before he could say anything, Ery glanced at him, saw the consternation in his face, and smiled. The tiny hand patted his. “Don’t worry, Slip. The Feds are listening, but what they’re hearing is tearful chitchat—you overcome to find me what I am, and me trying to console the both of us. They will never know what I really tell you here. They will never know about the gun the local boys took off you.”

“What?”

“You see, I lied a little. I know why you really came. I know you thought that I might be the new monster. But I don’t want to lie to you anymore. You risked your life to find out the truth, when you could have just told the Feds what you guessed.” She went on, taking advantage of his stupefied silence. “Did you ever wonder what I did in those last minutes this spring, after we surrendered—when I lagged behind you in the Other Plane?

“It’s true, we really did destroy the Mailman; that’s what all that unintelligible data space we plowed up was. I’m sure there are copies of the kernel hidden here and there, like little cancers in the System, but we can control them one by one as they appear.

“I guessed what had happened when I saw all that space, and I had plenty of time to study what was left, even to trace back to the original research project. Poor little Mailman, like the monsters of fiction he was only doing what he had been designed to do. He was taking over the System, protecting it from everyone—even its owners. I suspect he would have announced himself in the end and used some sort of nuclear blackmail to bring the rest of the world into line. But even though his programs had been running for several years, he had only had fifteen or twenty hours of human type self-awareness when we did him in. His personality programs were that slow. He never attained the level of consciousness you and I had on the System.

“But he really was self-aware, and that was the triumph of it all. And in those few minutes, I figured out how I could adapt the basic kernel to accept any input personality. . . . That is what I really wanted to tell you.”

“Then what the Limey saw was—”

She nodded. “Me . . .”

She was grinning now, an open though conspiratorial grin that was very familiar. “When Bertrand Russell was very old, and probably as dotty as I am now, he talked of spreading his interests and attention out to the greater world and away from his own body, so that when that body died he would scarcely notice it, his whole consciousness would be so diluted through the outside world.

“For him, it was wishful thinking, of course. But not for me. My kernel is out there in the System. Every time I’m there, I transfer a little more of myself. The kernel is growing into a true Erythrina, who is also truly me. When this body dies,” she squeezed his hand with hers, “when this body dies, I will still be, and you can still talk to me.”

“Like the Mailman?”

“Slow like the Mailman. At least till I design faster processors. . . .”

“. . . So in a way, I am everything you and the Limey were afraid of. You could probably still stop me, Slip.” And he sensed that she was awaiting his judgment, the last judgment any mere human would ever be allowed to levy upon her.

Slip shook his head and smiled at her, thinking of the slow-moving guardian angel that she would become. Every race must arrive at this point in its history, he suddenly realized. A few years or decades in which its future slavery or greatness rests on the goodwill of one or two persons. It could have been the Mailman. Thank God it was Ery instead.

And beyond those years or decades . . . for an instant, Pollack came near to understanding things that had once been obvious. Processors kept getting faster, memories larger. What now took a planet’s resources would someday be possessed by everyone. Including himself.

Beyond those years or decades . . . were millennia. And Ery.

BLUE CHAMPAGNE

John Varley

Megan Galloway arrived in the Bubble with a camera crew of three. With her breather and her sidekick she was the least naked nude woman any of the lifeguards had ever seen.

“I bet she’s carrying more hardware than any of her crew,” Glen said.

“Yeah, but it hardly shows, you know?”

Q.M. Cooper was thinking back as he watched her accept the traditional bulb of champagne. “Isn’t that some kind of record? Three people in her crew?”

“The President of Brazil brought twenty-nine people in with her,” Anna-Louise observed. “The King of England had twenty-five.”

“Yeah, but only one network pool camera.”

“So that’s the Golden Gypsy,” Leah said.

Anna-Louise snorted. “More like the Brass Transistor.” They had all heard that one before, but laughed anyway. None of the lifeguards had much respect for Trans-sisters. Yet Cooper had to admit that in a profession which sought to standardize emotion, Galloway was the only one who was uniquely herself. The others were interchangeable as News Anchors.

A voice started whispering in their ears, over the channel reserved for emergency announcements and warnings.

“Entering the Bubble is Megan Galloway, representing the Feelie Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GWA Conglom. Feeliecorp: bringing you the best in experiential tapes and erotix. Blue Champagne Enterprises trusts you will not impede the taping, and regrets any disturbance.”

“Commercials, yet,” Glen said in disgust. To those who loved the Bubble—as all the lifeguards did—this was something like using the walls of the Taj Mahal for the Inter-conglomerate Graffiti Championship finals.

“Stick around for the yacht races,” Cooper said. “They should have at least told us she was coming. What about that sidekick? Should we know anything about it if she gets into trouble?”

“Maybe she knows what she’s doing,” Leah said, earning sour looks from the other four. It was an article of faith that nobody on a first visit to the Bubble knew what they were doing.

“You think she’ll take the sidekick into the water?”

“Well, since she can’t move without it I sort of doubt she’ll take it off,” Cooper said. “Stu. you call operations and ask why we weren’t notified. Find out about special precautions. The rest of you get back to work. A.L., you take charge here.”

“What will you be doing, Q.M.?” Anna-Louise asked, arching one eyebrow.

“I’m going to get a closer look.” He pushed off, and flew toward the curved inner surface of the Bubble.

The Bubble was the only thing Q.M. Cooper ever encountered which caught his imagination, held it for years, and did not prove a disappointment when he finally saw it. It was love at first sight.

It floated in lunar orbit with nothing to give it perspective. Under those conditions the eye can see the Earth or Luna as hunks of rock no bigger than golf balls, or a fleck of ice millimeters from the ship’s window can seem to be a distant, tumbling asteroid. When Cooper first saw it the illusion was perfect: someone had left a champagne glass floating a few meters from the ship.

The constricted conic-shape was dictated by the mathematics of the field generators that held the Bubble. It was made of an intricate network of fine wires. No other configuration was possible; it was mere chance that the generator resembled the bowl and stem of a wine glass.

The Bubble itself had to be weightless, but staff and visitors needed a spin-gravity section. A disc was better than a wheel for that purpose, since it provided regions of varying gravity, from one gee at the rim to free-fall at the hub. The most logical place for the disc was at the base of the generator stem, which also made it the base of the glass. It was rumored that the architect of the Bubble had gone mad while designing it and that, since he favored martinis, he had included in the blueprints a mammoth toothpick spearing a giant green olive.

But that was only the station. It was beautiful enough in itself, but was nothing compared to the Bubble.

It floated in the shallow bowl of the generators, never touching them. It was two hundred million liters of water held between two concentric spherical fields of force, one of them one hundred meters in diameter, the other one hundred and forty. The fields contained a shell of water massing almost a million tonnes, with a five-hundred-thousand-cubic-meter bubble of air in the middle.

Cooper knew the relevant numbers by heart. Blue Champagne Enterprises made sure no one entered the Bubble without hearing them at least once. But numbers could not begin to tell what the Bubble was really like. To know that, one had to ride the elevator up through the glass swizzle stick that ended in the center of the air bubble, step out of the car, grab one of the monkeybar struts near the lifeguard station, and hold on tight until one’s emotions settled down enough to be able to believe in the damn thing.

The lifeguards had established six classes of visitor. It was all unofficial; to BCE, everyone was an honored guest. The rankings were made by a guest’s behavior and personal habits, but mostly by swimming ability.

Crustaceans clung to the monkeybars. Most never got their feet wet. They came to the Bubble to be seen, not to swim. Plankton thought they could swim, but it was no more than a fond hope. Turtles and frogs really could swim, but it was a comical business.

Sharks were excellent swimmers. If they had added brains to their other abilities the lifeguards would have loved them. Dolphins were the best. Cooper was a dolphin-class swimmer, which was why he had the job of chief lifeguard for the third shift.

To his surprise, Megan Galloway ranked somewhere between a frog and a shark. Most of her awkward moves were the result of being unaccustomed to the free-fall environment. She had obviously spent a lot of time in flat water.

He pulled ahead and broke through the outer surface of the Bubble with enough speed to carry him to the third field, which kept air in and harmful radiation out. On his way he twisted in the air to observe how she handled the breakthrough. He could see gold reflections from the metal bands of her sidekick while she was just an amorphous shape beneath the surface. The water around her was bright aquamarine from the camera lights. She had outdistanced her crew.

He had an immediate and very strong reaction: what a ghastly way to live. Working in the Bubble was very special to him. He griped about the clients, just like everyone did, complained when he had to ferry some damn crustacean who couldn’t even get up enough speed to return to the monkeybars, or when he had to clean up one of the excretory nuisances that got loose in surprising numbers when somebody got disoriented and scared. But the basic truth was that, for him, it never got old. There was always some new way of looking at the place, some fresh magic to be found. He wondered if he could feel that way about it if he lived in the middle of a traveling television studio with the whole world watching.

He was starting to drift back toward the water when she burst free of it. She broke the surface like a golden mermaid, rising, trailing a plume of water that turned into a million quivering crystals as it followed her into the air. She tumbled in the middle of a cloud of water globes, a flesh and metal Aphrodite emerging from the foam.

Her mouthpiece fell from her lips to dangle from its airhose, and he heard her laugh. He did not think she had noticed him. He was fairly sure she thought she was alone, for once, if only for a few seconds. She sounded as delighted as a child, and her laughter went on until the camera crew came grumbling out of the water.

They made her go back and do it over.

“She’s not worth the effort, Q.M.”

“Who? Oh, you mean the Golden Gypsy.”

“You want your bedroom technique studied by ninety million slobs?”

Cooper turned to look at Anna-Louise, who sat behind him on the narrow locker room bench, tying her shoelaces. She glanced over her shoulder and grinned. He knew he had a reputation as a starfucker. When he first came to work at the Bubble he had perceived one of the fringe benefits to be the opportunity to meet, hob-nob with, and bed famous women, and had done so with more than a few. But he was long over that.

“Galloway doesn’t make heavy-breathers.”

“Not yet. Neither did Lyshia Trumbull until about a year ago. Or that guy who works for ABS . . . Chin. Randall Chin.”

“Neither did Salome Hassan,” someone chimed in from across the room. Cooper looked around and saw the whole shift was listening.

“I thought you were all above that,” he said. “Turns out we’re a bunch of feelie-groupies.”

“You can’t help hearing the names,” Stu said, defensively.

Anna-Louise pulled her shirt over her head and stood up. “There’s no sense denying I’ve tried tapes,” she said. “The trans-sisters have to make a living. She’ll do them. Wet-dreams are the coming thing.”

“They’re coming, all right,” Stu said, with an obscene gesture.

“Why don’t you idiots knock it off and get out of here?” Cooper said.

They did, gradually, and the tiny locker room at the gee/10 level was soon empty but for Cooper and Anna-Louise. She stood at the mirror, rubbing a lotion over her scalp to make it shine.

“I’d like to move to the number two shift,” she said.

“You’re a crazy Loonie, you know that?” he shot back, annoyed.

She turned at the waist and glared at him.

“That’s redundant and racist,” she said. “If I wasn’t such a sweet person I’d resent it.”

“But it’s true.”

“That’s the other reason I’m not going to resent it.”

He got up and embraced her from behind, nuzzling her ear. “Hey, you’re all wet,” she laughed, but did not try to stop him, even when his hands lifted her shirt and went down under the waistband of her pants. She turned and he kissed her.

Cooper had never really understood Anna-Louise, even though he had bunked with her for six months. She was almost as big as he was, and he was not small. Her home was New Dresden, Luna. Though German was her native tongue, she spoke fluent, unaccented English. Her face would inspire adjectives like strong, healthy, glowing, and fresh, but never a word like glamorous. In short, she was physically just like all the other female lifeguards. She even shaved her head, but where the others did it in an attempt to recapture past glory, to keep that Olympic look, she had never done any competitive swimming. That alone made her unique in the group, and was probably what made her so refreshing. All the other women in the lifeguard force were uncomplicated jocks who liked two things: swimming, and sex, in that order.

Cooper did not object to that. It was a pretty fair description of himself. But he was creeping up on thirty, getting closer every day. That is never a good time for an athlete. He was surprised to find that it hurt when she told him she wanted to change shifts.

“Does this have anything to do with Yuri Feldman?” he asked, between kisses.

“Is that his shift?”

“Are we still going to be bunkmates?”

She drew back. “Are we going to talk? Is that why you’re undressing me?”

“I just wanted to know.”

She turned away, buckling her pants.

“Unless you want to move out, we’re still bunkmates. I didn’t think it really meant a hell of a lot. Was I wrong?”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s just that it might be simpler to sleep alone, that’s all.” She turned back and patted his cheek. “Hell, Q.M. It’s just sex. You’re very good at it, and so long as you stay interested we’ll do just fine. Okay?” Her hand was still on his cheek. Her expression changed as she peered intently into his eyes. “It is just sex, isn’t it? I mean—”

“Sure, it’s—”

“—if it isn’t . . . but you’ve never said anything that would—”

“God, no,” he said. “I don’t want to get tied down.”

“Me, either.” She looked as if she might wish to say more, but instead touched his cheek again, and left him alone.

Cooper was so preoccupied that he walked past the table where Megan Galloway sat with her camera crew.

“Cooper! Your name is Cooper, right?”

When he turned he had his camera smile in place. Though being recognized had by that time become a rare thing, the reflexes were still working. But the smile was quickly replaced by a more genuine expression of delight. He was surprised and flattered that she had known who he was.

Galloway had her hand to her forehead, looking up at him with comical intensity. She snapped her fingers, hit her forehead again.

“I’ve been trying to think of the name since I saw you in the water,” she said. “Don’t tell me . . . I’ll get it . . . it was a nickname . . .” She trailed off helplessly, then plunked both elbows on the table and put her chin in her hands, glowering at him.

“I can’t think of it.”

“It’s—”

“Don’t tell me.”

He had been about to say it was not something he revealed, but instead he shrugged and said nothing.

“I’ll get it, if you’ll just give me time.”

“She will, too,” said the other woman, who then gestured to an empty seat and extended a hand to him. “I’m Consuela Lopez. Let me buy you a drink.”

“I’m . . . Cooper.”

Consuela leaned closer and murmured, “If she doesn’t have the goddam name in ten minutes, tell her, huh? Otherwise she won’t be worth a damn until she gets it. You’re a lifeguard.”

He nodded, and his drink arrived. He tried to conceal his amazement. It was impossible to impress the waiters at the promenade cafes. Yet Galloway’s party did not even have to order.

“Fascinating profession. You must tell me all about it. I’m a producer, studying to be a pimp.” She swayed slightly, and Cooper realized she was drunk. It didn’t show in her speech. “That devilish fellow with the beard is Markham Montgomery, director and talent prostitute.” Montgomery glanced at Cooper, made a gesture that could have been the step-outline for a nod. “And the person of debatable sex is Coco-89 (Praisegod), recordist, enigma, and devotee of a religiosexual cult so obscure even Coco isn’t sure what it’s about.” Cooper had seen Coco in the water. He or she had the genitals of a man and the breasts of a woman, but androgynes were not uncommon in the Bubble.

“Cheers,” Coco said, solemnly raising a glass. “Accly your am tance to deep make honored.”

Everyone laughed but Cooper. He could not see the joke. Lopez had not bothered him—he had heard cute speeches from more rich/sophisticated people than he could count—but Coco sounded crazy.

Lopez lifted a small, silver tube over the edge of the table, squeezed a trigger, and a stream of glittering silver powder sprayed toward Coco. It burst in a thousand pinpoint scintillations. The androgyne inhaled with a foolish grin.

“Wacky Dust,” Lopez said, and pointed the tube at Cooper. “Want some?” Without waiting for an answer she fired again. The stuff twinkled around his head. It smelled like one of the popular aphrodisiacs.

“What is it?” he asked.

“A mind-altering drug,” she said, theatrically. When she saw his alarm she relented a little. “The trip is very short. In fact. I gave you such a little squirt you’ll hardly notice it. Five minutes, tops.”

“What does it do?”

She was eyeing him suspiciously. “Well, it should have done it already. Are you left-handed?”

“Yes.”

“That explains it. Most of it’s going to the wrong side of your head. What it does is scramble your speech center.”

Montgomery roused himself enough to turn his head. He looked at Cooper with something less than total boredom. “It’s like inhaling helium,” he said. “You talk funny for a while.”

“I didn’t think that was possible,” Cooper said, and everyone laughed. He found himself grinning reflexively, not knowing what was funny until he played his words back in his head and realized he had said something like “Pos that ib think unt I bull . . .”

He gritted his teeth and concentrated.

“I,” he said, and thought some more. “Don’t. Like. This.” They seemed delighted. Coco babbled gibberish, and Lopez patted him on the back.

“Not many people figure it out that fast,” she said. “Stick to one-word sentences and you’re okay.”

“The Wacky Dust scrambles the sentence-making capability of the brain,” Montgomery said. He was sounding almost enthusiastic. Cooper knew from experience that the man was speaking of one of the few things that could excite him, that being his current ten-minute’s wonder, the thing that everyone of any importance was doing today and would forget about tomorrow. “Complex thoughts are no longer—”

Cooper slammed his fist on the table and got the expected silence. Montgomery’s eyes glazed and he looked away, bored by poor sportsmanship. Cooper stood.

“You,” he said, pointing at all of them. “Stink.”

“Quarter-meter!” Galloway shouted, pointing at Cooper. “Quarter-meter Cooper! Silver medal in Rio, bronze at Shanghai, 1500-meter freestyle, competed for United N.A., then for Ryancorp.” She was grinning proudly, but when she looked around her face fell. “What’s wrong?”

Cooper walked away from them. She caught him when he was almost out of sight around the curved promenade floor.

“Quarter-meter, please don’t—”

“Don’t me call that!” he shouted, jerking his arm away from her touch, not caring how the words came out. Her hand sprang back poised awkwardly, each joint of her fingers twinkling with its own golden band.

“Mr. Cooper, then.” She let her hand fall, and her gaze with it, looked at her booted feet. “I want to apologize for her. She had no right to do that. She’s drunk, if you hadn’t—”

“I no . . . ticed.”

“You’ll be all right now,” she said, touching his arm lightly, remembering, and pulling it away with a sheepish smile.

“There are no lasting effects?”

“We hope not. There haven’t been so far. It’s experimental.”

“And illegal.”

She shrugged. “Naturally. Isn’t everything fun?”

He wanted to tell her how irresponsible that was, but he sensed she would be bored with him if he belabored it and while he did not care if Montgomery was bored with him, he did not want to be tiresome with her. So when she offered another tentative smile, he smiled back, and she grinned, showing him that gap between her front teeth which had made a fortune for the world’s dentists when one hundred million girls copied it.

She had one of the most famous faces in the world, but she did not closely resemble herself as depicted on television. The screen missed most of her depth, which centered on her wide eyes and small nose, was framed by her short blonde curls. A faint series of lines around her mouth betrayed the fact that she was not twenty, as she looked at first glance, but well into her thirties. Her skin was pale, and she was taller than she seemed in pictures, and her arms and legs were even thinner.

“They compensate for that with camera angles,” she said, and he realized she was not reading his mind but merely noticing where he was looking. He had given her a stock reaction, one she got every day, and he hated that. He resolved not to ask any questions about her sidekick. She had heard them all and was surely as sick of them as he was of his nickname.

“Will you join us?” she asked. “I promise we won’t misbehave again.”

He looked back at the three, just visible at their table before the curved roof cut off his view of the corridor promenade, gee/1 level.

“I’d rather not. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but those are pretty stock types. I always want to either sneer at them or run away from them.”

She leaned closer.

“Me too. Will you rescue me?”

“What do you mean?”

“Those three could teach limpets a thing or two about clinging. That’s their job, but the hell with them.”

“What do you want to do?”

“How should I know? Whatever people do around here for a good time. Bob for apples, ride on the merry-go-round, screw, play cards, see a show.”

“I’m interested in at least one of those.”

“So you like cards, too?” She glanced back at her crew. “I think they’re getting suspicious.”

“Then let’s go.” He took her arm and started to walk away with her. Suddenly she was running down a corridor. He hesitated only a second, then was off after her.

He was not surprised to see her stumble. She recovered quickly, but it slowed her enough for him to catch her.

“What happened?” she said. “I thought I was falling—” She pulled back her sleeve and stared at the world’s most complicated wristwatch. He realized it was some sort of monitor for her sidekick.

“It isn’t your hardware,” he said, leading her at a fast walk. “You were running with the spin. You got heavier. You should bear in mind that what you’re feeling isn’t gravity.”

“But how will we get away if we can’t run?”

“By going just a little faster than they do.” He looked back, and as he had expected, Lopez was already down. Coco was wavering between turning back to help and following Montgomery, who was still coming, wearing a determined expression. Cooper grinned. He had finally succeeded in getting the man’s attention. He was making off with the star.

Just beyond stairwell C Cooper pulled Galloway into an elevator whose door was closing. He had a glimpse of Montgomery’s outraged face.

“What good will this do us?” Galloway wanted to know. “He’ll just follow us up the stairs. These things are slow as the mid-town express.”

“They’re slow for a very good reason, known as coriolis force,” Cooper said, reaching into his pocket for his keys. He inserted one in the control board of the elevator. “Since we’re on the bottom level, Montgomery will go up. It’s the only direction the stairs go.” He twisted the key, and the elevator began to descend.

The two “basement” levels were the parts of the Champagne Hotel complex nearest hard vacuum. The car stopped on B level and he held the door for her. They walked among exposed pipes, structural cables, and beams not masked by the frothy decorations of the public levels. The only light came from bare bulbs spaced every five meters. The girders and the curved floor made the space resemble the innards of a zeppelin.

“How hard will they look for you?”

She shrugged. “They won’t be fooling around. They’ll keep it up until they find me. It’s only a question of time.”

“Can they get me in trouble?”

“They’d love to. But I won’t let them.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

“So my room is out. First place they’d look.”

“No, they’d check my room First. It’s better equipped for playing cards.”

He was mentally kicking himself. She was playing games with him, he knew that, but what was the game? If it was just sex, that was okay. He’d never made love with a woman in a sidekick.

“About your nickname . . .” she said, leaving the sentence unfinished to see how he would react. When he said nothing, she started over. “Is it your favorite swimming distance? I seem to recall you were accused of never exerting yourself more than the situation required.”

“Wouldn’t it be foolish if I did?” But the label still rankled. It was true he had never turned in a decent time just swimming laps, and that he seldom won a race by more than a meter. The sports media had never warmed to him because of that, even before he failed to win the gold. For some reason, they thought of him as lazy, and most people assumed his nickname meant he would prefer to swim races of no more than a quarter of a meter.

“No, that’s not it,” was all he would say, and she dropped the subject.

The silence gave him time to reflect, and the more he did, the less happy he was. She had said she could keep him out of trouble, but could she? When it came to a showdown, who had more clout with BCE? The Golden Gypsy, or her producers? He might be risking a lot, and she was risking nothing at all. He knew he should ditch her but, if he spumed her now, she might withdraw what protection she could offer.

“I sense you don’t care for your nickname,” she said, at last. “What should I call you? What’s your real name?”

“I don’t like that, either. Call me Q.M.”

“Must I?” she sighed.

“Everybody else does.”

He took her to Eliot’s room because Eliot was in the infirmary and because Montgomery and company would not look for them there. They drank some of Eliot’s wine, talked for a while, and made love.

The sex was pleasant, but nothing to shout about. He was surprised at how little the sidekick got in his way. Though it was all over her body, it was warm and most of it was flexible, and he soon forgot about it.

Finally she kissed him and got dressed. She promised to see him again soon. He thought she said something about love. It struck him as a grotesque thing to say, but by then he was not listening very hard. There was an invisible wall between them and most of it belonged to her. He had tried to penetrate it—not very hard, he admitted to himself—but a good ninety-nine percent of her was in a fiercely-guarded place he was sure he’d never see. He shrugged mentally. It was certainly her right.

He was left with a bad post-coital depression. It had not been one of his finer moments. The best thing to do about it was to put it behind him and try not to do it again. It was not long before he realized he was doing uncommonly well at that already. Reclining naked on the bed. gazing at the ceiling, he could not recall a single thing she had said.

What with one thing and another, he did not get back to his room until late. He did not turn on the light because he did not want to wake Anna-Louise. And he walked with extra care because he was not balancing as well as he might. There had been a few drinks.

Still, she woke up, as she always did. She pressed close to him under the covers, her body warm and humid and musky, her breath a little sour as she kissed him. He was half-drunk and she was half-awake, but when her hands began to pull and her hips to thrust forward insistently he found to his surprise that he was ready and so was she. She guided him, then eased over onto her side and let him nestle in behind her. She drew her knees up and hugged them. Her head was pillowed on his arm. He kissed the back of her smooth scalp and nibbled her ear, then let his head fall into the pillow and moved against her slowly for a peaceful few minutes. At last she stretched, squeezing him, making small fists, digging her toes into his thighs.

“How did you like her?” she mumbled.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

He was pretty sure he could pull off a lie, because Anna-Louise couldn’t be that sure, and then he frowned in the darkness, because he had never wanted to lie to her before.

So he said, “Do you know me that well?”

She stretched again, this time more sensually, to more of a purpose than simply getting the sleepiness out of her system.

“How should I know? My nose didn’t give me a chance to find out. I smelled the liquor on your breath when you came in, but I smelled her on my fingers after I touched you.”

“Come on.”

“Don’t get mad.” She reached around to pat his buttocks while at the same time pressing herself back against him. “Okay, so I guessed at the identity. It didn’t take much intuition.”

“It was lousy.” he admitted.

“I’m so sorry.” He knew she really was, and did not know if that made him happy or sad. It was a hell of a thing, he thought, not to know something as basic as that.

“It’s a damn shame,” she went on. “Fucking should never be lousy.”

“I agree.”

“If you can’t have fun doing it. you shouldn’t do it.”

“You’re one hundred per cent right.”

He could just see her teeth in the darkness; he had to imagine the rest of her grin, but he knew it well.

“Do you have anything left for me?”

“There’s a very good chance that I do.”

“Then what do you say we just skip the next part and wake up?”

She shifted gears so fast he had a hard time keeping up at first; she was all over him and she was one of the strongest women he knew. She liked to wrestle. Luckily, there were no losers in her matches. It was everything the encounter with Galloway had not been. That was no surprise; it always was. Sex with Anna-Louise was very good indeed. For that matter, so was everything else.

He lay there in the dark long after she had gone to sleep, their bodies spooned together just as they had begun, and he thought long and hard and as clearly as he could. Why not? Why not Anna-Louise? She could care if he gave her the chance. And maybe he could, too.

He sighed, and hugged her tighter. She murmured like a big, happy cat, and began to snore.

He would talk to her in the morning, tell her what he had been thinking. They would begin the uncertain process of coming to know each other.

Except that he woke with a hangover, Anna-Louise had already showered, dressed, and gone, and someone was knocking on his door.

He stumbled out of bed and it was her. Galloway. He had a bad moment of disorientation, wishing that famous face would get back on the television screen where it belonged. But somehow she was in his room, though he did not recall standing aside to admit her. She was smiling, smiling, and talking so fast he could barely understand her. It was an inane rattle about how good it was to see him and how nice the room was, as her eyes swept him and the room from head to toe and comer to comer until he was sure she knew Anna-Louise better than he did himself, just from the faint traces she had left on the bare impersonal cubicle.

This was going to be difficult. He closed the door and padded to the bed, where he sank gratefully and put his face in his hands.

When she finally ran down he looked up. She was perched on the edge of the room’s only chair, hands laced together on her knees. She looked so bright and chipper he wanted to puke.

“I quit my job,” she said. It took a while for that to register. In time, he was able to offer a comment.

“Huh?” he said.

“I quit. Just said screw this and walked out. All over, ka-put, down the toilet. Fuck it.” Her smile looked unhealthy.

“Oh.” He thought about that, listening to the dripping of the bathroom faucet. “Ah . . . what will you do?”

“Oh, no problem, no problem.” She was bouncing a little now. One knee bobbed in four-four time while the other waltzed. Perhaps that should have told him something. Her head jerked to the left, and there was a whine as it slowly straightened.

“I’ve had offers from all over,” she went on. “CBS would sacrifice seven virgin vice-presidents on a stone altar to sign me up. NAAR and Telecommunion are fighting a pitched battle across Sixth Avenue at this very moment, complete with tanks and nerve gas. Shit, I’m already pulling down half the GNP of Costa Rica, and they all want to triple that.”

“Sounds like you’ll do all right,” he ventured. He was alarmed. The head movement was repeating now, and her heels were hammering the floor. He had finally figured out that the whining noise was coming from her sidekick.

“Oh, bugger them, too,” she said easily. “Independent production, that’s for me. Doing my own thing. I’ll show you some tapes. No more LCD, no more Trendex. Just me and a friend or two.”

“LCD?”

“Lowest common denominator. My audience. Eight-year-old minds in thirty-one-point-three-six-year-old bodies. Demographics. Brain-cancer victims.”

“Television made them that way,” he said.

“Of course. And they loved it. Nobody could ever underestimate them, and nobody could ever give them enough crap. I’m not even going to try anymore.”

She stood up, turned-at the waist, and knocked the door off its hinges. It clattered into the hallway, teetering around the deep dimple her fist had made in the metal.

All that would have been bizarre enough, but when the noise had finally stopped she still stood there, arm extended, fist clenched, half turned at the waist. The whining sound was louder now, accompanied by something resembling the wail of a siren. She looked over her shoulder.

“Oh, dam it,” she said, in a voice that rose in pitch with every word. “I think I’m stuck.” And she burst into tears.

Cooper was no stranger to the ways of the super-rich and super-famous. He had thought he understood clout. He soon learned he knew nothing about it.

He got her calmed in a few minutes. She eventually noticed the small crowd that had gathered beyond the space where his door had been, whispering and pointing at the woman sitting on Cooper’s bed with her arm stuck in an odd position. Her eyes grew cold, and she asked for his telephone.

Thirty seconds after her first call, eight employees of BCE arrived in the hallway outside. Guards herded the audience away and engineers erected a new door, having to remove two twisted hinges to do so. It was all done in less than four minutes, and by then Galloway had completed her second call.

She made three calls, none of them over two minutes long. In one, she merely chatted with someone at the Telecommunion Network and mentioned, in passing, that she had a problem with her sidekick. She listened, thanked the person on the other end, and hung up. The call to GM&L, the conglom that owned Sidekick, Incorporated, was businesslike and short.

Two hours later a repairman from Sidekick knocked at the door. It was not until the next day that Cooper realized the man had been on the Earth’s surface when he got the call, that his trip had involved a special ship boosting at one gee all the way and carrying no cargo but himself and his tool kit, which he opened and plugged into the wall computerminal before starting to work on the sidekick.

But in those two hours . . .

“If you’d like me to leave, I’ll leave,” she said, sipping her third glass of Cooper’s wine.

“No, please.”

She was still frozen like a frame from a violent film. Her legs worked and so did her right arm, but from her hips all the way up her back and down her left arm the sidekick had shorted out. It looked awfully uncomfortable. He asked if there was anything he could do.

“It’s okay, really,” she said, resting her chin on the arm that crossed in front of her.

“Will they be able to fix it?”

“Oh, sure.” She tossed down the rest of the wine. “And if they can’t, I’ll just stay here and you’ll have a real conversation piece. A human hatrack.” She picked her shirt off the couch beside her and draped it over her frozen arm, then smiled at him. It was not a pretty smile.

He had helped her get the shirt off. It had been like undressing a statue. The idea had been to check the sidekick core for hot spots and visible cracks, which would necessitate the quick removal of the apparatus. It was clearly a project she did not relish. But as far as he had been able to see the thing was physically intact. The damage was on the electronic level.

It was the closest look he had yet taken at the technological marvel of the age, closer even than the night before, when he had made love to her. Then, manners had prevented him from staring. Now he had a perfect excuse, and he used it.

When he thought about it, it was frightening that they could pack so much power into a mechanism that, practically speaking, was hardly even there. The most massive part of the sidekick was the core, which was segmented, padded in flesh-toned soft plastic, and hugged her spine from the small of the back to the nape of her neck. Nowhere was it more than three centimeters thick.

Radiating from the core was an intricate network of gold chains, bands, and bracelets, making such a cunningly contrived system that one could almost believe it was all decoration rather than the conductors for energized fields that allowed her to move. Woven belts of fine gold wire criss-crossed like bandoliers between her breasts and just happened to connect, via a fragile gold chain, with the sinuous gooseneck that was concealed by her hair before it attached to the back of the golden tiara that made her look like Wonder Woman. Helical bands fashioned to look like snakes coiled down her arms, biting each other’s tails until the last ones attached to thick, jewel-encrusted bracelets around her wrists, which in turn sprouted hair-fine wires that transformed themselves into finger rings, one for each joint, each inset with a single diamond. Elsewhere the effect was much the same. Each piece, taken by itself, was a beautiful piece of jewelry. The worst that could be said about Megan Galloway in the “nude” was that she was ostentatiously bejeweled. If one didn’t mind that, she was absolutely stunning: a gilded Venus, or a fantasy artist’s Amazon in full, impractical armor. Dressed, she was just like anyone else except for the tiara and the rings. There were no edges on her sidekick to savage clothes or poke out at unnatural angles. Cooper guessed this was as important to Galloway as the fact that the sidekick was a beautiful object, emphatically not an orthopedic appliance.

“It’s unique,” she said. “One of a kind.”

“I didn’t mean to stare.”

“Heavens,” she said. “You weren’t staring. You are so pointedly not staring that your fascination must be intense. And no . . . don’t say anything.” She held up her free hand and waited for him to settle back in his chair. “Please, no more apologies. I’ve got a pretty good idea of the problem I present to somebody with both manners and curiosity, and it was shitty of me to say that about not staring. That puts you in the wrong whatever you do, huh?” She leaned back against the wall, getting comfortable as she could while waiting for the repairman to arrive.

“I’m proud of the damned thing. Cooper. That’s probably obvious. And of course I’ve answered the same questions so many times that it bores me, but for you, since you’re providing me a refuge in an embarrassing moment. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“Is it really gold?”

“Twenty-four carat, solid.”

“That’s where your nickname comes from, I presume.” She looked puzzled for a moment, then her face cleared. “Touché. I don’t like that nickname any more than you like yours. And no, it’s no more correct than yours is. At first. I wasn’t the Golden Gypsy. The sidekick was. That was the name of this model sidekick. But they’ve still only made one of them, and before long, the name rubbed off on me. I discourage it.”

Cooper understood that too well.

He asked more questions. Before long the explanations got too technical for him. He was surprised that she knew as much about it as she did. Her knowledge stopped short of the mathematics of Tunable Deformation Fields, but that was her only limit. TDF’s were what had made the Bubble possible, since they could be made to resonate with particular molecular or atomic structures. The Bubble’s Fields were turned to attract or repel H_2O, while the Fields generated by Galloway’s sidekick influenced gold, Au^197, and left everything else alone. She went on to tell him far more than he could absorb about the ways in which the Fields were generated in the sidekick core, shaped by wave guides buried in the jewelry, and deformated (“Physics terms are usually inelegant,” she apologized), to the dictates of nanocomputers scattered throughout the hardware, operating by a process she called “augmented neuro-feedback holistitopology.”

“The English of which is . . . “he pleaded.

“. . . that I think of pressing the middle valve down, the music goes round and round and it comes out here.” She held out her hand and depressed the middle Finger. “You would weep to know how many decisions the core made to accomplish that simple movement.”

“On the other hand,” he said, and rushed on when he remembered what had happened to her other hand, “what goes on in my brain to do the same thing is complex, but I don’t have to program it. It’s done for me. Isn’t it much the same with you?”

“Much. Not exactly. If they made one of these for you and plugged you in right now, you’d twitch a lot. In a few weeks you’d patty-cake pretty well. But in a year you’d not even think about it. The brain re-trains itself. Which is a simple way of saying you struggle day and night for six or seven months with something that feels totally unnatural and eventually you learn to do it. Having done it, you know that learning to tap-dance on the edge of a razor blade would be a snap.”

“You say you’ve heard all the questions. What’s your least favorite?”

“God, you’re merciless, aren’t you? There’s no contest. ‘How did you hurt yourself?’ To answer the question you so cleverly didn’t ask, I broke my fool neck when me and my hang-glider got into an argument with a tree. The tree won.

Many years later I went back and chopped that tree down, which just may be the stupidest thing I ever did, not counting today.” She looked at him and raised one eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to ask me about that?”

He shrugged.

“The funny thing is, that’s the question I want you to ask. Because it’s tied up with what we did yesterday, and that’s really what I came here to talk to you about.”

“So talk,” he said, wondering what she could have to say about it beyond the fact that it had been hideous, and demeaning to both of them.

“It was the worst sexual experience I ever had,” she said. “And you bear zero percent responsibility for that. Please don’t interrupt. There are things you don’t know about.

“I know you don’t think much of my profession—I really don’t want you to interrupt, or I’ll never get all this out; if you disagree you can tell me when I’m through.

“You’d be a pretty strange lifeguard if you were a fan of the trans-tapes, or if you didn’t feel superior to the kind of people who buy them. You’re young, fairly well-educated and fairly articulate, you’ve got a good body and an attractive face and the opposite sex neither terrifies nor intimidates you. You are out on the end of all the bell-curves, demographically. You are not my audience, and people who aren’t my audience tend to look down on my audience, and usually on me and my kind, too. And I don’t blame them. Me and my kind have taken what might have been a great art-form and turned it into something so exploitative that even Hollywood and Sixth Avenue gag at it.

“You know as well as I do that there are many, many people growing up now who wouldn’t know an honest, geniune, self-originated emotion if it kicked them in the behind. If you take their Transers away from them they’re practically zombies.

“For a long time I’ve flattered myself that I’m a little better than the industry in general. There are some tapes I’ve made that will back me up on that. Things I’ve taken a chance on, things that try to be more complex than the LCD would dictate. Not my bread-and-butter tapes. Those are as simple-headed as the worst hack travelogue. But I’ve tried to be like the laborers in other artistic sweatshops of the past. Those few who managed to turn out something with some merit, like some directors of Hollywood westerns which were never meant to be anything but crowd pleasers and who still produced some works of art, or a handful of television producers who . . . none of this is familiar to you, is it? Sorry, I didn’t mean to get academic. I’ve made a study of it, of art in the mass culture.

“All those old art-forms had undergrounds, independents who struggled along with no financing and produced things of varying quality but with some vision, no matter how weird. Trans-tapes are more expensive than films or television but there is an underground. It’s just so far under it practically never comes to light. Believe it or not, it’s possible to produce great art in emotional recording. I could name names, but you will not have heard of any of them. And I’m not talking about the people who make tapes about how it feels to kill somebody; that’s another underground entirely.

“But things are getting tight. It used to be that we could make a good living and still stay away from the sex tapes. Let me add that I don’t feel contempt for the people who make sex tapes. Given the state of our audience, it has become necessary that many of them have their well-worn jerk-off cassette, so when they get horny they know what to do with it. Most of them wouldn’t have the vaguest notion otherwise. I just didn’t want to make them myself. It’s axiomatic in the trade that love is the one emotion that cannot be recorded, and if I can’t have—”

“I’m sorry,” Cooper said, “but I have to interrupt there. I’ve never heard that. In fact, I’ve heard just the opposite.”

“You’ve been listening to our commercials,” she reproved. “Get that shit out of your head. Cooper. It’s pure hype.” She rubbed her forehead, and sighed. “Oh, all right. I wasn’t precise enough. I can make a tape of how I love my mother or my father or anybody I’m already in love with. It’s not easy to do—it’s the less subtle emotions that arc more readily transed. But nobody has ever recorded the process of falling in love. It’s sort of a Heisenberg Principle of transing, and nobody’s sure if the limitation is in the equipment or in the person being recorded, but it exists, and there are some very good reasons to think nobody will ever succeed in recording that kind of love.”

“I don’t see why not,” Cooper confessed. “It’s supposed to be very intense, isn’t it? And you said the strong emotions are the easiest to tape.”

“That’s true. But . . . well, try to visualize it. I’ve got my job because I’m better at ignoring all the hardware involved in transing. It’s because of my sidekick; I mean, if I can learn to forget I’m operating that I can ignore anything. That’s why the nets scour the trauma wards of hospitals looking for potential stars. It’s like . . . well, in the early days of sex research they had people fuck in laboratories, with wires taped to them. A lot of people just couldn’t do it. They were too self-conscious. Hook most people up to a transcordcr and what you get is ‘Oh, how interesting it is to be making a tape, look at all those people watching me. look at all those cameras, how interesting, now I have to forget about them, I must forget about them I just must forget—”

Cooper held up his hand, nodding. He was recalling seeing her burst from the water that first day in the Bubble, and his feelings as he watched her.

“So the essence of making a tape,” she went on, “is the ability to ignore the fact that you’re making one. To react just as you would have reacted if you weren’t doing it. It calls for some of the qualities of an actor, but most actors can’t do it. They think too much about the process. They can’t be natural about it. That’s my talent: to feel natural in unnatural circumstances.

“But there are limits. You can fuck up a storm while transing, and the tape will record how good everything feels and how goddam happy you arc to be fucking. But it all falls apart when the machine is confronted with that moment of first falling in love. Either that, or the person being recorded just can’t get into the frame of mind to fall in love while transing. The distraction of the transer itself makes that emotional state impossible.

“But I really got off on a tangent there. I’d appreciate it if you’d just hear me out until I’ve said what I have to say.” She rubbed her forehead again, and looked away from him.

“We were talking economics. You have to make what sells. My sales have been dropping off. I’ve specialized in what we call ‘elbow-rubbers.’ ‘You, too, can go to fancy places with fancy people. You, too. can be important, recognized. appreciated.’ ” She made a face. “I also do the sort of thing we’ve been making in the Bubble. Sensuals, short of sex. Those, frankly, are not selling so well anymore. The snob-tapes still do well, but everybody makes those. What you’re marketing there is your celebrity, and mine is falling off. The competition has been intense.

“That’s why I . . . well, it was Markham who talked me into it. I’ve been on the verge of going into heavy-breathers.” She lifted her eyes. “I assume you know what those are.” Cooper nodded, remembering what Anna-Louise had said. So even Galloway could not stay out of it.

She sighed deeply, but no longer looked away from him. “Anyway, I wanted to make something just a little bit better than the old tired in-and-outers. You know: ‘Door-to-door salesman enters living room; “I’d like to show you my samples, ma’am.” Woman rips open nightgown; “Take a look at these samples, buster.” Fade to bed. I thought that for my first sex-tape I’d try for something more erotic than salacious. I wanted a romantic situation, and if I couldn’t get some love in it at least I’d try for affection. It would be with a handsome guy I met unexpectedly. He’d have some aura of romance about him. Maybe there’d be an argument at first, but the irresistible attraction would bring us together in spite of it, and we’d make love and part on a slightly tragic note since we’d be from different worlds and it could never . . .”

Tears were running down her cheeks. Cooper realized his mouth was open. He was leaning toward her, too astonished at first to say anything.

“You and me . . .” he finally managed to say.

“Shit, Cooper, obviously you and me.”

“And you thought that . . . that what we did last night . . . did you really think that was worth a tape? I knew it was bad, but I had no inkling how bad it could be. I knew you were using me—hell, I was using you, too. and I didn’t like that any better—but I never thought it was so cynical—”

“No, no, no, no, no!” She was sobbing now. “It wasn’t that. It was worse than that! It was supposed to be spontaneous, damn it! I didn’t pick you out. Markham was going to do that. He would find someone, coach him, arrange a meeting, conceal cameras to tape the meeting and in the bedroom later. I’d never really know. We’ve been studying an old show called Candid Camera and using some of their techniques. They’re always throwing something unexpected at me. trying to help me stay fresh. That’s Markham’s job. But how surprised can I be when you show up at my table? Just look at it: in the romantic Bubble, the handsome lifeguard—lifeguard, for pete’s sake!—an Olympic athlete familiar to millions from their television sets, gets pissed at my rich, decadent friends . . . I couldn’t have gotten a more clichéd script from the most drug-brained writer in Television City!”

For a time there was no sound in the room but her quiet sobs. Cooper looked at it from all angles, and it didn’t look pretty from any of them. But he had been just as eager to go along with the script as she had.

“I wouldn’t have your job for anything.” he said.

“Neither would I,” she finally managed to say. “And I don’t, damn it. You want to know what happened this morning? Markham showed me just how original he really is. I was eating breakfast and this guy—he was a lifeguard, are you ready?—he tripped over his feet and dropped his plate in my lap. Well, while he was cleaning me up he started dropping cute lines at a rate that would have made Neil Simon green. Sorry, getting historical again. Let’s just say he sounded like he was reading from a script . . . he made that shitty little scene we played out together yesterday seem just wonderful. His smile was phony as a brass transistor. I realized what had happened, what I’d done to you, so I pushed the son of a bitch down into his French toast, went to find Markham, broke his fucking jaw for him, quit my job, and came here to apologize. And went a little crazy and broke your door. So I’m sorry, I really am, and I’d leave but I’ve busted my sidekick and I can’t stand to have people staring at me like that, so I’d like to stay here a little longer, until the repairman gets here, and I don’t have any notion of what I’m going to do.”

What composure she had managed to gather fell apart once again, and she wept bitterly.

By the time the repairman arrived Galloway was back in control.

The repairman’s name was Snyder. He was a medical doctor as well as a cybertechnician, and Cooper supposed that combination allowed him to set any price he fancied for his services.

Galloway went into the bedroom and got all the clean towels. She spread them on the bed, then removed her clothes. She reclined, face down, with the towels making a thick pad from her knees to her waist. She made herself as comfortable as she could with her arm locked in the way, and waited.

Snyder fiddled with the controls in his tool kit, touched needle-sharp probes to various points on the sidekick core, and Galloway’s arm relaxed. He made more connections, there was a high whine from the core, and the sidekick opened like an iron maiden. Each bracelet, chain, amulet and ring separated along invisible join lines. Snyder then went to the bed, grasped the sidekick with one hand around the center of the core, and lifted it away from her. He set it on its “feet,” where it promptly assumed a parade-rest stance.

There was an Escher print Cooper had seen, called “Rind,” that showed the bust of a woman as if her skin had been peeled off and arranged in space to suggest the larger thing she had once been. Both the inner and outer surfaces of the rind could be seen, like one barber-pole stripe painted over an irregular, invisible surface. Galloway’s sidekick, minus Galloway, looked much like that. It was one continuous, though convoluted, entity, a thing of springs and wires, too fragile to stand on its own but doing it somehow. He saw it shift slightly to maintain its balance. It seemed all too alive.

Galloway, on the other hand, looked like a rag doll. Snyder motioned to Cooper with his eyes, and the two of them turned her on her back. She had some control of her arms, and her head did not roll around as he had expected it to. There was a metal wire running along her scarred spine.

“I was an athlete, too, before the accident,” she said.

“Were you?”

“Well, not in your class. I was fifteen when I cracked my neck, and I wasn’t setting the world on fire as a runner. For a girl that’s already too old.”

“Not strictly true,” Cooper said. “But it’s a lot harder after that.” She was reaching for the blanket with hands that did not work very well. Coupled with her inability to raise herself from the bed, it was a painful process to watch. Cooper reached for the edge of the blanket.

“No,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Rule number one. Don’t help a crip unless she asks for it. No matter how badly she’s doing something, just don’t. She’s got to learn to ask, and you’ve got to learn to let her do what she can do.”

“I’m afraid I’ve never known any crips.”

“Rule number two. A nigger can call herself a nigger and a cripple can call herself a cripple, but lord help the able-bodied white who uses cither word.”

Cooper settled back in his chair.

“Maybe I’d better just shut up until you fill me in on all the rules.”

She grinned at him. “It’d take all day. And frankly, maybe some of them are self-contradictory. We can be a pretty prickly lot. but I ain’t going to apologize for it. You’ve got your body and I don’t have mine. That’s not your fault, but I think I hate you a little because of it.”

Cooper thought about that. “I think I probably would, too.”

“Yeah. It’s nothing serious. I came to terms with it a long time ago. and so would you, after a bad couple of years.” She still hadn’t managed to reach the blanket, and at last she gave it up and asked him to do it for her. He tucked it around her neck.

There were other things he thought he would like to know, but he felt she must have reached the limits of questioning, no matter what she said. And he was no longer quite so eager to know the answers. He had been about to ask what the towels on the bed were for, then suddenly it was obvious what they were for and he couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t known it at once. He simply knew nothing about her, and nothing about disability. And he was a little ashamed to admit it, but he was not sure he wanted to know any more.

There was no way he could keep the day’s events from Anna-Louise, even if he had wanted to. The complex was buzzing with the story of how the Golden Gypsy had blown a fuse, though the news about her quitting her job was still not general knowledge. He was told the story three different times during his next shift. Each story was slightly different, but all approximated the truth. Most of the tellers seemed to think it was funny. He supposed he would have, too, yesterday.

Anna-Louise inspected the door hinges when they got back from work.

“She must have quite a right hook,” she said.

“Actually, she hit it with her left. Do you want to hear about it?”

“I’m all ears.”

So he told her the whole story. Cooper had a hard time figuring out how she was taking it. She didn’t laugh, but she didn’t seem too sympathetic, either. When he was through—mentioning Galloway’s incontinence with some difficulty—Anna-Louise nodded, got up, and started toward the bathroom.

“You’ve led a sheltered life, Q.M.”

“What do you mean?”

She turned, and looked angry for the first time.

“I mean you sound as if incontinence was the absolute worst thing you’d ever heard of in your life.”

“Well, what is it, then? No big thing?”

“It certainly isn’t to that woman. For most people with her problem, it means catheters and feces bags. Or diapers. Like my grandfather wore for the last five years of his life. The operations she’s had to fix it, and the hardware, implanted and external . . . well, it’s damn expensive, Q.M. You can’t afford it on the money grandfather was getting from the State, and Conglomerate health plans won’t pay for it, either.”

“Oh, so that’s it. Just because she’s rich and can afford the best treatment, her problems don’t amount to anything. Just how would you like to—”

“Wait a minute, hold on . . .” She was looking at him with an expression that would not hold still, changing from sympathy to disgust. “I don’t want to fight with you. I know it wouldn’t be pleasant to have my neck broken, even if I was a trillionaire.” She paused, and seemed to be choosing her words carefully.

“I’m bothered by something here,” she said, at last. “I’m not even sure what it is. I’m concerned about you, for one thing. I still think it’s a mistake to get involved with her. I like you. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

Cooper suddenly remembered his resolve of the night before, as she lay sleeping at his side. It confused him terribly. Just what did he feel for Anna-Louise? After the things Galloway had told him about love and the lies of the Transer commercials, he didn’t know what to think. It was pitiful, when he thought about it, that he was as old as he was and hadn’t the vaguest notion what love might be, that he had actually assumed the place to find it, when the time came, was on trans-tapes. It made him angry.

“What are you talking about, hurt?” he retorted. “She’s not dangerous. I’ll admit she lost control there for a moment, and she’s strong, but—”

“Oh, help!” Anna-Louise moaned. “What am I supposed to do with these emotionally stunted smoggies who think nothing is real unless they’ve been told by somebody on the—”

“Smoggies? You called me a racist when—”

“Okay, I’m sorry.” He complained some more but she just shook her head and wouldn’t listen and he eventually sputtered to a stop.

“Finished? Okay. I’m getting crazy here. I’ve only got one more month before I go back home. And I do find most Earthlings—is that a neutral enough term for you?—I find them weird. You’re not so bad, most of the time, except you don’t seem to have much notion about what life is for. You like to screw and you like to swim. Even that is twice as much purpose as most sm—, Terrans seem to have.”

“You . . . you’re going?”

“Surprise!” Her tone dripped sarcasm.

“But why didn’t you tell me?”

“You never asked. You never asked about a lot of things. I don’t think you ever realized I might like to tell you about my life, or that it might be any different from yours.”

“You’re wrong. I sensed a difference.”

She raised an eyebrow and seemed about to say something, but changed her mind. She rubbed her forehead, then took a deep, decisive breath.

“I’m almost sorry to hear that. But I’m afraid it’s too late to start over. I’m moving out.” And she began packing.

Cooper tried to argue with her but it did no good. She assured him she wasn’t leaving because she was jealous; she even seemed amused that he thought that might be the reason. And she also claimed she was not going to move in with Yuri Feldman. She intended to live her last month in the Bubble alone.

“I’m going back to Luna to do what I planned to do all along.” she said, tying the drawstring of her duffel bag. “I’m going to the police academy. I’ve saved enough now to put me through.”

“Police?” Cooper could not have been more astonished if she had said she intended to fly to Mars by flapping her arms.

“You had no inkling, right? Well, why should you? You don’t notice other people much unless you’re screwing them. I’m not saying that’s your fault; you’ve been trained to be that way. Haven’t you ever wondered what I was doing here? It isn’t the working conditions that drew me. I despise this place and all the people who come to visit. I don’t even like water very much, and I hate that monstrous obscenity they call the Bubble.”

Cooper was beyond shock. He had never imagined anyone could exist who would not be drawn by the magic of the Bubble.

“Then why? Why work here, and why do you hate it?”

“I hate it because people are starving in Pennsylvania,” she said, mystifying him completely. “And I work here, God help me, because the pay is good, which you may not have noticed since you grew up comfortable. I would have said rich, but by now I know what real rich is. I grew up poor, Q.M. Another little detail you never bothered to learn. I’ve worked hard for everything, including the chance to come here to this disgusting pimp-city to provide a safety service for rich degenerates, because BCE pays in good, hard GWA Dollars. You probably never noticed, but Luna is having serious economic troubles because it’s caught between a couple of your corporation-states . . . ah, forget it. Why worry your cute little head with things like that?”

She went to the door, opened it, then turned to look at him.

“Honestly, Q.M., I don’t dislike you. I think I feel sorry for you. Sony enough that I’m going to say once more you’d better watch Out for Galloway. If you mess around with her right now, you’re going to get hurt.”

“I still don’t understand how.”

She sighed, and turned away.

“Then there’s nothing more I can say. I’ll see you around.”

Megan Galloway had the Mississippi Suite, the best in the hotel. She didn’t come to the door when Cooper knocked, but just buzzed him in.

She was sitting tailor-fashion on the bed, wearing a loose nightgown and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and looking at a small box in front of her. The bed resembled a sternwheeler, with smoke and sparks shooting from the bedposts, and was larger than his entire room and bath. She put her glasses at the end of her nose and peered over them.

“Something I can do for you?”

He came around until he could see the box, which had a picture flickering dimly on one side of it.

“What’s that?”

“Old-timey television,” she said. “Honey West, circa 1965, American Broadcasting Company. Starring Anne Francis, John Ericson, and Irene Hervey, Friday nights at 2100. Spin-off from Burke’s Law, died 1966. What’s up?”

“What’s wrong with the depth?”

“They didn’t have it.” She removed her glasses and began to chew absently on one rubber tip. “How are you doing?”

“I’m surprised to see you wear glasses.”

“When you’ve had as many operations as I have, you skip the ones you think you can do without. Why is it I sense you’re having a hard time saying whatever it is you came here to say?”

“Would you like to go for a swim?”

“Pool’s closed. Weekly filtering, or something like that.”

“I know. Best possible time to go for a swim.”

She frowned. “But I was told no one is admitted during the filtering.”

“Yeah. It’s illegal. Isn’t everything that’s fun?”

The Bubble was closed one hour in every twenty-four for accelerated filtering. At one time the place had been open all day. with filteration constantly operating, but then a client got past the three safety systems, where he was aerated, churned, irradiated, centrifuged, and eventually forced through a series of very fine screens. Most of him was still in the water in one form or another, and his legend had produced the station’s first ghost.

But long before the Filtered Phantom first sloshed down the corridors the system had been changed. The filters never shut down completely, but while people were in the pool they were operated at slow speed. Once a day they were turned to full power.

It still wasn’t enough. So every ten days BCE closed the pool for a longer period and gave the water an intensive treatment.

“I can’t believe no one even watches it,” Megan whispered.

“It’s a mistake. Security is done by computer. There’s twenty cameras in here but somebody forgot to tell the computer to squeal if it sees anybody enter during filteration. I got that from the computer itself, which thinks the whole fuck-up is very funny.”

The hordes of swimmers had been gone for over two hours, and the clean-up crew had left thirty minutes before. Megan Galloway had probably thought she knew the Bubble pretty well, on the basis of her two visits. She was finding out now, as Cooper had done long ago, that she knew nothing. The difference between a resort beach on a holiday weekend and on a day in mid-winter was nothing compared to what she saw now.

It was perfectly still, totally clear: a crystal ball as big as the world.

“Oh, Cooper.” He felt her hand tighten on his arm.

“Look. Down there. No, to the left.” She followed his pointing finger and saw a school of the Bubble goldfish far below the surface, moving like lazy submarines, big and fat as watermelons and tame as park squirrels.

“Can I touch it, daddy?” she whispered, with the hint of a giggle. He pretended to consider it, then nodded. “I almost don’t want to, you know?” she said. “Like a huge field covered in new snow, before anybody tracks across it.”

“Yeah, I know.” He sighed. “But it might as well be us. Hurry, before somebody beats you to it.” He grinned at her, and pushed off slowly from his weightless perch on the sundeck tier that circled the rim of the champagne glass.

She pushed off harder and passed him before he was halfway there, as he had expected her to. The waves made by her entry spread out in perfect circles, then he broke the surface right behind her.

It was a different world.

When the Bubble had first been proposed, many years before, it had been suggested that it be a solid sphere of water, and that nothing but weightlessness and surface tension be employed to maintain it. Both forces came free of charge, which was a considerable factor in their favor.

But in the end, the builders had opted for TDF fields. This was because, while any volume of water would assume a spherical shape in free-fall, surface tension was not strong enough to keep it that way if it was disturbed. Such a structure would work fine so long as no swimmers entered to upset the delicate balance.

The TDF’s provided the necessary unobtrusive force to keep things from getting messy. Tuned to attract or repel water, they also acted to force foreign matter toward either the inner or outer surfaces; in effect, making things that were not water float. A bar of lead floated better than a human body. Air bubbles also were pushed out. The fields were deliberately tuned to a low intensity. As a result, humans did not bob out of the water like corks but drifted toward a surface slowly, where they floated quite high in the water. As a further result, when the pool was open it was always churned by a billion bubbles.

When Cooper and Galloway entered the water the bubbles left behind by the happy throngs had long since merged with one of the larger volumes of air. The Bubble had become a magic lens, a piece of water with infinite curvature. It was nearly transparent with an aquamarine tint. Light was bent by it in enchanting ways, to the point that one could fancy the possibility of seeing all the way around it.

It distorted the world outside itself. The lifeguard station, cabanas, bar, and tanning chairs in the center were twisted almost beyond recognition, as if vanishing down the event horizon of a black hole. The rim of the glass, the deep violet field-dome that arched over it, and the circle of tanning chairs where patrons could brown themselves under genuine sunlight bent and flowed like a surrealist landscape. And everything, inside and outside the Bubble, oozed from one configuration to another as one changed position in the water. Nothing remained constant.

There was one exception to that rule. Objects in the water were not distorted. Galloway’s body existed in a different plane, moved against the flowing, twisting background as an almost jarring intrusion of reality: pink flesh and golden metal, curly yellow hair, churning arms and legs. The stream of air ejected from her mouthpiece cascaded down the front of her body. It caressed her intimately, a thousand shimmering droplets of mercury, before it was thrashed to foam by her feet. She moved like a sleek aerial machine, streamlined, leaving a contrail behind her.

He customarily left his mouthpiece and collar-tank behind when he swam alone, but he was wearing it now, mostly so Galloway would not insist on removing hers, too. He felt the only decent way to swim was totally nude. He conceded the breathers were necessary for the crustaceans and plankton who did not understand the physical laws of the Bubble and who would never take the time to learn them. It was possible to get hopelessly lost, to become disoriented, unable to tell which was the shortest distance to air. Though bodies would float to a surface eventually, one could easily drown on the way out. The Bubble had no ends, deep or shallow. Thus the mouthpieces were required for all swimmers. They consisted of two semi-circular tanks that closed around the neck, a tube, a sensor that clipped to the car, and the mouthpiece itself. Each contained fifteen minutes of oxygen, supplied on demand or when blood color changed enough to indicate it was needed. The devices automatically notified both the user and the lifeguard station when they were nearly empty.

It was a point of honor among the lifeguards to turn them in as full as they had been issued.

There were things one could do in the Bubble that were simply impossible in flat water. Cooper showed her some of the tricks, soon had her doing them herself. They burst from the water together, described long, lazy parabolas through the air, trailing comet tails of water. The TDF Fields acted on the water in their bodies at all times, but it was such a lackadaisical force that it was possible to remain in the air for several minutes before surrendering to the inexorable center-directed impulse. They laced the water with their trails of foam, be-spattered the air with Fine mist. They raced through the water, cutting across along a radial line, building up speed until they emerged on the inner surface to barrel across the width of the Bubble and re-enter, swam some more, and came up outside in the sunlight. If they went fast enough their momentum would carry them to the dark sun-Field, which was solid enough to stand on.

He had had grave misgivings about asking her to come here with him. In fact, it had surprised him when he heard himself asking. For hours he had hesitated, coming to her door, going away, never knocking. Once inside it hadn’t seemed possible to talk to her, particularly since he was far from sure he knew what he wanted to say. So he had brought her here, where talking was unnecessary. And the biggest surprise was that he was glad. It was fun to share this with someone. He wondered why he had never done it before. He wondered why he had never brought Anna-Louise, remembered the revelation of her real opinions of the place, and then turned away from thoughts of her.

It was strenuous play. He was in pretty good shape but was getting tired. He wondered if Galloway ever got tired. If she did, she seemed sustained by the heady joy of being there. She summed it up to him in a brief rest period at the outer rim.

“Cooper, you’re a genius. We’ve just hijacked a swimming pool!”

The big clock at the lifeguard station told him it was time to quit, not so much because he needed the rest as because there was something he wanted her to see, something she would not expect. So he swam up to her and took her hand, motioned toward the rim of the glass, and saw her nod. He followed her as she built up speed.

He got her to the rim just in time. He pointed toward the sun. shielding his eyes, just as the light began to change. He squinted, and there it was. The Earth had appeared as a black disc, beginning to swallow the sun.

It ate more and more of it. The atmosphere created a light show that had no equal. Arms of amber encircled the black hole in the sky, changing colors quickly through the entire spectrum: pure, luminous colors against the deepest black imaginable. The sun became a brilliant point, seemed to flare sharply, and was gone. What was left was one side of the corona, the halo of Earth’s air, and stars.

Millions of stars. If tourists ever complained about anything at the Bubble, it was usually that. There were no stars. The reason was simple: space was flooded with radiation. There was enough of it to fry an unprotected human. Any protection that could shut out that radiation would have to shut out the faint light of the stars as well. But now, with the sun in eclipse, the sensors in the field turned it clear as glass. It was still opaque to many frequencies, but that did not matter to the human eye. It simply vanished, and they were naked in space.

Cooper could not imagine a better time or place to make love, and that is exactly what they did.

“Enjoyed that a little more, did you?” she said.

“Uh.” He was still trying to catch his breath. She rested her head against his chest and sighed in contentment.

“I can still hear your heart going crazy.”

“My heart has seldom had such a workout.”

“Nor a certain quarter of a meter, from the look of things.” He laughed. “So you figured that out. It’s exaggerated.”

“But a fifth of a meter would be an understatement, wouldn’t you say?”

“I suppose so.”

“So what’s between? Nine fortieths? Who the hell needs a nickname like ‘Nine-fortieths-of-a-meter Cooper’ ? That is about right, isn’t it?”

“Close enough for rock and roll.”

She thought about that for a time, then kissed him. “I’ll bet you know, exactly. To the goddamn tenth of a millimeter. You’d have to, with a nickname like that.” She laughed again, and moved in his arms. He opened his eyes and she was looking into them.

“This time I rock, and you roll,” she suggested.

“I guess I’m getting older,” he admitted, at last.

“You’d be a pretty odd fellow if you weren’t.”

He had to smile at that, and he kissed her again. “I only regret that we didn’t get to see the sun come out.”

“Well, I regret a little more than that.” She studied his face closely, and seemed puzzled by what she found. “Damn.

I never would have expected it, but I don’t think you’re really upset. For some reason, I don’t feel the need to soothe your wounded ego.”

He shrugged. “I guess not.”

“What’s your secret?”

“Just that I’m a realist, I guess. I never claimed to be superman. And I had a fairly busy night.” He shut his eyes, not wanting to remember it. But the truth was that something was bothering him. and something else was warning him not to ask about it. He did, anyway.

“Not only did I have a rather full night,” he said, “but I think I sensed a certain . . . well, you were less than totally enthusiastic, the second time. I think that put me off slightly.”

“Did it, now?”

He looked at her face, but she did not seem angry, only amused.

“Was I right?”

“Certainly.”

“What was wrong?”

“Not much. Only that I have absolutely no sensation from my toes to . . . right about here.” She was holding her arm over her chest, just below her shoulders.

It was too much for him to take in all at once. When he began to understand what she was saying, he felt a terror beside which fear of impotence would have been a very minor annoyance.

“You can’t mean . . . nothing I did had . . . you were faking it? Faking everything, the whole time? You felt—”

“That First night, yes, I was. Totally. Not very well, I presume, from your reaction.”

“. . . but just now . . .”

“Just now, it was something different. I really don’t know if I could explain it to you.”

“Please try.” It was very important that she try, because he felt despair such as he had never imagined. “Can you . . . is it all going through the motions? Is that it? You can’t have sex, really?”

“I have a full and satisfying sex life,” she assured him. “It’s different than yours, and it’s different from other women’s. There are a lot of adaptations, a lot of new techniques my lovers must learn.”

“Will you—” Cooper was interrupted by high-pitched, chittering squeals from the water. He glanced behind him, saw Charlie the Dolphin had been allowed to re-enter the Bubble, signaling the end of their privacy. Charlie knew about Cooper, was in on the joke, and always warned him when people were coming.

“We have to go now. Can we go back to your room, and . . . and will you teach me how?”

“I don’t know if it’s a good idea, friend. Listen, I enjoyed it, I loved it. Why don’t we leave it that way?”

“Because I’m very ashamed. It never occurred to me.”

She studied him, all trace of levity gone from her face. At last, she nodded. He wished she looked more pleased about it.

But when they returned to her room she had changed her mind. She did not seem angry. She would not even talk about it. She just kept putting him off each time he tried to start something, not unkindly, but firmly, until he finally stopped pursuing the matter. She asked him then if he wanted to leave. He said no, and he thought her smile grew a little warmer at that.

So they built a fire in her fireplace with logs of real wood brought up from Earth. (“This fireplace must be the least energy-efficient heater humans have ever built,” she said.) They curled up on the huge pillows scattered on the rug, and they talked. They talked long into the night, and this time Cooper had no trouble at all remembering what she said. Yet he would have been hard put to relate the conversation to anyone else. They spoke of trivia and of heartbreaks, sometimes in the same sentence, and it was hard to know what it all meant.

They popped popcorn, drank hot buttered rum from her autobar until they were both feeling silly, kissed a few times, and at last fell asleep, chaste as eight-year-olds at a slumber party.

For a week they were separated only when Cooper was on duty. He did not get much sleep, and he got no sex at all. It was his longest period of abstinence since puberty, and he was surprised at how little he felt the lack. There was another surprise, too. Suddenly he found himself watching the clock while he was working. The shift could not be over soon enough to suit him.

She was educating him, he realized that, and he did not mind. There was nothing dry or boring about the things they did together, nor did she demand that he share all her interests. In the process he expanded his tastes more in a week than he had in the previous ten years.

The outer, promenade level of the station was riddled with hole-in-the-wall restaurants, each featuring a different ethnic cuisine. She showed him there was more to food than hamburgers, steaks, potato chips, tacos, and fried chicken. She never ate anything that was advertised on television, yet her diet was a thousand times more varied than his.

“Look around you,” she told him one night, in a Russian restaurant she assured him was better than any to be found in Moscow. “These are the people who own the companies that make the food you’ve been eating all your life. They pay the chemists who formulate the glop-of-the-month, they hire the advertising agencies who manufacture a demand for it, and they bank the money the proles pay for it. They do everything with it but eat it.”

“Is there really something wrong with it?”

She shrugged. “Some of it used to cause problems, like cancer. Most of it’s not very nutritious. They watched for carcinogens, but that’s because a consumer with cancer eats less. As for nutrition, the more air the better. My rule of thumb is if they have to flog the stuff on television it has to be bad.”

“Is everything on television bad, then?”

“Yes. Even me.”

He was indifferent to clothes but liked to shop for them. She did not patronize the couturiers but put her wardrobe together from unlikely sources.

“Those high-priced designers work according to ancient laws,” she told him. “They all work more or less together—though they don’t plan it that way. I’ve decided that trite ideas are born simultaneously in mediocre minds. A fashion designer or a television writer or a studio executive cannot really be said to possess a mind at all. They’re hive mentalities; they eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea—all at once. The turds look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year’s fashions, hit shows, books, and movies. The key to dressing is to look at what everyone else is wearing then avoid it. Find a creative person who had never thought of designing clothes, and ask her to come up with something.”

“You don’t look like that on television,” he pointed out.

“Ah. my dear. That’s my job. A Celebrity must be homogenized with the culture that believes she is a Celebrity. I couldn’t even get on the television dressed like I am now; the Taste Arbiter would consult its trendex and throw up its hands and have a screaming snit. But take note; the way I’m dressed now is the way everyone will be dressed in about a month.”

“Do you like that?”

“Better than I like getting into costume for a guest spot on the Who’s Hot. Who’s Shit? show. This way the designers arc watching me instead of the other way around.” She laughed, and nudged him with her elbow. “Remember drop-seat pajamas, about a year and a half ago? That was mine. I wanted to see how far they’d go. They ate it up. Didn’t you think that was funny?”

Cooper did recall thinking they were funny when they First came around. But then, somehow, they looked sexy. Soon a girl looked frumpy without that rectangle of flannel flapping against the backs of her thighs. Later, another change had happened, the day he realized the outfits were old-fashioned.

“Remember tail-fins on shoes? That was mine too.”

One night she took him through part of her library of old tapes.

After her constant attacks on television, he was not prepared for her fondness, her genuine love, for the buried antiques of the medium.

“Television is the mother that eats its young,” she said, culling through a case of thumbnail-sized cassettes. “A television show is senile about two seconds after the phosphor dots stop glowing. It’s dead after one re-run. and it doesn’t go. to heaven.” She came back to the couch with her selection and dumped them on the table beside the ancient video device.

“My library is hit-and-miss,” she said. “But it’s one of the best there is. In the real early days they didn’t even save the shows. They made some films, lost most of those, then went to tape and erased most of them after a few years in the vault. Shows you how valuable the product was, in their own estimation. Here, take a look at this.”

What she now showed him lacked not only depth, but color as well. It took him a few minutes to reliably perceive the picture, it was so foreign to him. It flickered, jumped, it was all shades of gray, and the sound was tinny. But in ten minutes he was hypnotized.

“This is called Faraway Hill,” she said. “It was the first net soap. It came on Wednesday nights at 2100, on the DuMont Net, and it ran for twelve weeks. This is, so far as I know, the only existing episode, and it didn’t surface until 1990.”

She took him back, turning the tiny glass screen into a time machine. They sampled Toast of the Town, One Man’s Family, My Friend Irma, December Bride, Pete and Gladys, Petticoat Junction, Ball Four, Hunky & Dora, Black Vet, Kunklowitz, Kojak, and Koonz. She showed him wonderfully inventive game shows, serials that made him deeply involved after only one episode, adventures so civilized and restrained he could barely believe they were on television. Then she went on to the Golden Age of the Sitcom for Gilligan’s Island and Family Affair.

“What I can’t get over,” he said, “is how good it is. It’s so much better than what we see today. And they did it all with no sex and practically no violence.”

“No nudity, even,” she said. “There was no frontal nudity on network TV until Koonz. Next season, every show had it, naturally. There was no actual intercourse until much later, in Kiss My Ass.” She looked away from him, but not before he caught a hint of sadness in her eyes. He asked her what was wrong.

“I don’t know, Q.M. I mean . . . I don’t know exactly. Part of it is knowing that most of these show s were panned by the critics when they came out. And I’ve showed you some flops, but mostly these were hits. And I can’t tell the difference. They all look good. I mean, none of them have people you’d expect to meet in real life, but they’re all recognizably human. they act more or less like humans act. You can care for the characters in the dramas, and the comedies arc witty.”

“So those critics just had their heads up their asses.”

She sighed. “No. What I fear is that it’s us. If you’re brought up eating shit, rotten soyaloid tastes great. I really do think that’s what’s happened. It’s possible to do the moral equivalent of the anatomical impossibility you just mentioned.

I know, because I’m one of the contortionists who does it. What frightens me is that I’ve been kidding myself all along, that I’m stuck in that position. That none of us can unbend our spines any longer.”

She had other tapes.

It was not until their second week together that she brought them out. rather shyly, he thought. Her mother had been a fanatic home vidmaker; she had documented Megan’s life in fine detail.

What he saw was a picture of lower-upper-class life, not too different in its broad outlines from his own upper-middle milieu. Cooper’s family had never had any financial troubles. Galloway’s were not fabulously wealthy, though they brought in twenty times the income of Cooper’s. The house that appeared in the background shots was much larger than the one Cooper had grown up in. Where his family had hiked, hers had private automobiles. There was a woman in the early tapes that Megan identified as her nurse; he did not see any other servants. But the only thing he saw that really impressed him was a sequence of her receiving a pony for her tenth birthday. Now, there was class.

Little Megan Galloway, pre-sidekick, emerged as a precocious child, perhaps a trifle spoiled. It was easy to see where at least part of her composure before the Transer came from; her mother had been everywhere, aiming her vidicam. Her life was cinema verite, with Megan either totally ignoring the camera or playing to it expertly, as her mood dictated. There were scenes of her reading fluently in three languages at the age of seven, others showing her hamming it up in amateur theatricals staged in the back yard.

“Are you sure you want to see more?” she asked, for the third or fourth time.

“I tell you. I’m fascinated. I forgot to ask you where all this is happening. California, isn’t it?”

“No, I grew up in La Barrio Cercada, Veintiuno, one of the sovereign enclaves the congloms carved out of Mexico for exec families. Dual United States and GWA citizenship. I never saw a real Mexican the whole time I lived there. I just thought I ought to ask you,” she went on, diffidently. “Home vids can be deadly boring.”

“Only if you don’t care about the subject. Show me more.”

Somewhere during the next hour of tapes, control of the camera was wrested from Megan’s mother and came to reside primarily with Megan herself and with her friends. They were as camera-crazy as her mother had been, but not quite so restrained in subject matter. The children used their vidicams as virtually every owner had used them since the invention of the device: they made dirty tapes. The things they did could usually better be described as horseplay than as sex, and they generally stopped short of actual intercourse, at least while the tape was rolling.

“My god,” Megan sighed, rolling her eyes. “I must have a million kilometers of this sort of kiddie-porn. You’d think we invented it.”

He observed that she and her crowd were naked a lot more than he and his friends had been. The students at his school had undressed at the beach, to participate in athletics, and to celebrate special days like Vernal Equinox and The Last Day of School. Megan’s friends did not seem to dress at all. Most of them were Caucasian, but all were brown as coffee beans.

“It’s true,” she said. “I never wore anything but a pair of track shoes.”

“Even to school?”

“They didn’t believe in dictating things like that to us.”

He watched her develop as a woman in a sequence that lap-dissolved her from the age of ten, like those magic time-lapses of flowers blooming.

“I call this ‘The Puberieties of 2073,’ ” she said, with a self-deprecating laugh. “I put it together years ago, for something to do.”

He had already been aware of the skilled hand which had assembled these pieces into a whole which was integrated, yet not artificially slick. The arts learned during her years in the business had enabled her to produce an extended program which entranced him far longer than its component parts, seen raw, could ever have done. He remembered Anna-Louise’s accusations, and wondered what she would think if she could see him now, totally involved in someone else’s life.

A hand-lettered title card appeared on the screen: “The Broken Blossom: An Act of Love. By Megan Allegra Galloway and Reginald Patrick Thomas.” What followed had none of the smooth flow of what had gone before. The cuts were jerky. The camera remained stationary at all times, and there were no fades. He knew this bit of tape had been left untouched from the time a young girl had spliced it together many years ago. The children ran along the beach in slow-motion, huge waves breaking silently behind them. They walked along a dirt road, holding hands, stopping to kiss. The music swelled behind them. They sat in an infinite field of yellow flowers. They laughed, tenderly fondled each other. The boy covered Megan with showers of petals.

They ran through the woods, found a waterfall and a deep pool. They embraced under the waterfall. The kisses became passionate and they climbed out onto a flat rock where—coincidentally—there was an inflatable mattress. (“When we rehearsed it,” Megan explained, “that damn rock didn’t feel half as romantic as it looked.”) The act was consummated. The sequence was spliced from three camera angles; in some of the shots Cooper could see the legs of one of the other tripods. The lovers lay in each other’s arms, spent, and more ocean breakers were seen. Fade to black.

Galloway turned off the tape player. She sat for a time examining her folded hands.

“That was my first time,” she said.

Cooper frowned. “I was sure I saw—”

“No. Not with me, you didn’t. The other girls, yes. And you saw me doing a lot of other things. But I was ‘saving’ that.” She chuckled. “I’d read too many old romances. My first time was going to be with someone I loved. I know it’s silly.”

“And you loved him?”

“Hopelessly.” She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand, then sighed. “He wanted to pull out at the end and ejaculate on my belly, because that’s the way they always do it on television. I had to argue with him for hours to talk him out of that. He was an idiot.” She considered that for a moment. “We were both idiots. He believed real life should imitate television, and I believed it wasn’t real unless it was on television. So I had to record it, or it might all fade away. I guess I’m still doing that.”

“But you know it’s not true. You do it for a living.”

She regarded him bleakly. “This makes it better?”

When he did not answer she fell silent for a long time.

studying her hands again. When she spoke, she did not look up.

“There are more tapes.”

He knew what she meant, knew it would no longer be fun, and knew just as certainly that he must view them. He told her to go on.

“My mother shot this.”

It began with a long shot of a silver hang-glider. Cooper heard Megan’s mother shout for her daughter to be careful. In response, the glider banked sharply upward, almost stalled, then came around to pass twenty meters overhead. The camera followed. Megan was waving and smiling. There was a chaotic moment—shots of the ground, of the sky, a blurred glimpse of the glider nearing the tree—then it steadied.

“I don’t know what was going through her mind,” Megan said, quietly. “But she responded like an old pro. It must have been reflex.”

Whatever it was, the camera was aimed unerringly as the glider turned right, grazed the tree, and flipped over. It went through the lower branches, and impaled itself. The image was jerky as Megan’s mother ran. There was a momentary image of Megan dangling from her straps. Her head was at a horrifying angle. Then the sky filled one half of the screen and the ground the other as the camera continued to record after being flung aside.

Things were not nearly so comprehensive after that. The family at last had no more inclination to tape things. There were some hasty shots of a bed with a face—Megan, so wrapped and strapped and tucked that nothing else showed—pictures of doctors, of the doors of operating rooms and the bleak corridors of hospitals. And suddenly a girl with ancient eyes was sitting in a wheelchair, feeding herself laboriously with a spoon strapped to her fist.

“Things pick up a little now,” Megan said. “I told them to start taping again. I was going to contrast these tapes with the ones they would make a year from now, when I was walking again.”

“They told you you would walk?”

“They told me I would not. But everyone thinks they’re the exception. The doctors tell you you’ll regain some function, and hell, if you can regain some you can regain it all, right? You start to believe in mind over matter, and you’re sure God will smile on you alone. Oh, by the way, there’s trans-tape material with some of these.”

The implications of the casual statement did not hit him for a moment. When he understood, he knew she would not mention it again. It was an invitation she would never make more directly than she had just done.

“I’d like to run them, if you wouldn’t mind.” He had hoped for a tone of voice as casual as hers had been, and was not sure he had pulled it off. When she looked at him her eyes were measuring.

“It would be bad form for me to protest,” she said, at last. “Obviously, I want very much for you to try them. But I’m not sure you can handle them. I should warn you, they’re—”

“—not much fun? Damn it, Megan, don’t insult me.”

“All right.” She got up and went to a cabinet, removed a very small, very expensive Transer unit and helmet. As she helped him mount it she would not look into his eyes, but babbled nervously about how the Feelie Corporation people had showed up in the hospital one day, armed with computer printouts that had rated her a good possibility for a future contract with the company. She had turned them away the first time, but they were used to that. Transing had still been a fairly small industry at the time. They were on the verge of breakthroughs that would open the mass market, but neither Feelie-corp nor Megan knew that. When she finally agreed to make some tapes for them it was not in the belief that they would lead to stardom. It was to combat her growing fear that there was very little she could do with her life. They were offering the possibility of a job, something she had never worried about when she was rich and un-injured. Suddenly, any job looked good.

“I’ll start you at low intensity,” she said. “You don’t have a tolerance for transing, I presume, so there’s no need for power boosters. This is fragmented stuff. Some of the tapes have trans-tracks, and others don’t, so you’ll—”

“Will you get on with it, please?”

She turned on the machine.

On the screen, Megan was in a therapy pool. Two nurses stood beside her, supporting her, stretching her thin limbs. There were more scenes of physical therapy. He was wondering when the transing would begin. It should start with a shifting of perspectives, as though he had (The television expanded; he passed through the glass and into the world beyond.) actually entered—

“Are you all right?”

Cooper was holding his face in his hands. He looked up, and shook his head, realized that she would misinterpret the gesture, and nodded.

“A touch of vertigo. It’s been a while.”

“We could wait. Do it another time.”

“No. Let’s go.”

He was sitting in the wheelchair, dressed in a fine lace gown that covered him from his neck to his toes. The toes were already beginning to look different. There was no more muscle tone in them. Most important, he could no longer feel them.

He felt very little sensation. There was a gray area just above his breasts where every thing began to fade. He was a floating awareness, suspended above the wheelchair and the body attached to it.

He was aware of all this, but he was not thinking about it. It was already a common thing. The awful novelty was long gone.

Spring had arrived outside his window. (Where was he? This was not Mexico, he was sure, but his precise location eluded him. No matter.) He watched a squirrel climbing a tree just outside his window. It might be nice to be a squirrel.

Someone was coming to visit real soon. It would only be a few more hours. He felt good about that. He was looking forward to it. Nothing much had happened today. There had been therapy (his shoulders still ached from it) and a retraining session (without thinking about it, he made the vast, numb mittens that used to be his hands close together strongly—which meant he had exerted almost enough force to hold a sheet of paper between thumb and bunched fingers). Pretty soon there would be lunch. He wondered what it would be.

Oh, yes. There had been that unpleasantness earlier in the day. He had been screaming hysterically and the doctor had come with the needle. That was all still down there. There was enough sadness to drown in, but he didn’t feel it. He felt the sunlight on his arm and was grateful for it. He felt pretty good. Wonder what’s for lunch?

“You still okay?”

“I’m fine.” He rubbed his eyes, trying to uncross them. It was the transition that always made him dizzy; that feeling as though a taut rubber band had snapped and he had popped out of the set and back into his own head, his own body. He rubbed his arms, which felt as though they had gone to sleep. On the screen, Megan still sat in her wheelchair, looking out the window with a vague expression. The scene changed.

He sat as still as he could so he wouldn’t disturb the sutures in the back of his neck, but it was worth a little pain. On the table in front of him, the tiny metal bug shuddered, jerked forward, then stopped. He concentrated, telling it to make a right turn. He thought about how he would have turned right while driving a car. Foot on the accelerator, hands on the wheel. Shoulder muscles holding the arms up. fingers curled, thumbs . . . what had he done with his thumbs? But then he had them, he felt the muscles of his arms as he began turning the wheel. He tapped the brake with his foot, trying to feel the tops of his toes against the inside of his shoe as his foot lifted, the steady pressure on the sole as he pushed down. He took his right hand off the wheel as his left crossed in front of him . . .

On the table, the metal bug whirred as it turned to the right. There was applause from the people he only vaguely sensed standing around him. Sweat dripped down his neck as he guided the device through a left turn, then another right. It was too much. The bug reached the edge of the table and try as he might, he could not get it straightened out. One of the doctors caught it and placed it in the center of the table.

“Would you like to rest. Megan?”

“No,” he said, not allowing himself to relax. “Let me try again.” Behind him. an entire wall flashed and blinked as the computer found itself taxed to its limits, sorting the confusing neural impulses that gathered on the stump of his spinal cord, translating the information, and broadcasting it to the servos in the remotalog device. He made it start, then stopped it before it reached the edge of the table. Just how he had done it was still mostly mysterious, but he felt he was beginning to get a handle on it. Sometimes it worked best if he tried to trick himself into thinking he could still walk and then just did it. Other times the bug just sat there, not fooled. It knew he could not walk. It knew he was never going to—

A white-sheeted form was being wheeled down the corridor toward the door to the operating room. Inside, from the gallery, he saw them transfer the body onto the table. The lights were very bright. He blinked, confused by them. But they were turning him over now, and that made it much better. Something cool touched the back of his neck—

“A thousand pardons, sir,” Megan said, briskly fast-forwarding the tape. “You’re not ready for that. I’m not ready for that.”

He was not sure what she was talking about. He knew he needed the operation. It was going to improve the neural interfaces, which would make it easier for him to operate the new remotes they were developing. It was exciting to be involved in the early stages of . . .

“Oh. Right. I’m . . .”

“Q.M. Cooper,” she said, and looked dubiously into his eyes. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather wait?”

“No. Show me more.”

The nights were the worst. Not all of them, but when it was bad it was very bad. During the day there was acceptance, or some tough armor that contained the real despair. For days at a time he could be happy, he could accept what had happened, know that he must struggle but that the struggle was worth it. For most of his life he knew that what had happened was not the end of the world, that he could lead a full, happy life. There were people who cared about him. His worst fears had not been realized. Pleasure was still possible, happiness could be attained. Even sexual pleasures had not vanished. They were different and sometimes awkward, but he didn’t mind.

But alone at night, it could all fall apart. The darkness stripped his defenses and he was helpless, physically and emotionally.

He could not move. His legs were dead meat. He was repulsive, disgusting, rotting away, a hideous object no one could ever love. The tube had slipped out and the sheets were soaked with urine. He was too ashamed to buzz for the nurse.

He wept silently. When he was through, he coldly began plotting the best way to end his life.

She held him until the worst of the shaking passed. He cried like a child who cannot understand the hurt, and like a weary old man. For the longest time he could not seem to make his eyes open. He did not want to see anything.

“Do I . . . do I have to see the next part?” He heard the whine in his voice.

She covered his face with kisses, hugging him, giving him wordless reassurance that everything would be all right. He accepted it gratefully.

“No. You don’t have to see anything. I don’t know why I showed you as much as I have, but I can’t show you that part even if I wanted to because I destroyed it. It’s too dangerous. I’m no more suicidal now than anybody else, but transing that next tape would strip me naked and maybe drive me crazy, or anybody who looked at it. The strongest of us is pretty fragile, you know. There is so much primal despair just under our surfaces that you don’t dare fool around with it.”

“How close did you come?”

“Gestures.” she said, easily. “Two attempts, both discovered in plenty of time.” She kissed him again, looked into his eyes and gave him a tentative smile. She seemed satisfied with what she saw, for she patted his cheek and reached for the transer controls again.

“One more little item,” she said, “and we’ll call it a night. This is a happy tape. I think we could both use it.”

There was a girl in a sidekick. This machine was to the Golden Gypsy what a Wright Brothers Flyer was to a supersonic jet. Megan was almost invisible. Chromed struts stuck out all over, hydraulic cylinders hissed. There were welds visible where the thing had been bashed into shape. When she moved, the thing whined like a sick dog. Yet she was moving. and under her own control, placing one foot laboriously in front of the other, biting her tongue in concentration as she pondered her next step. Quick cut to—

—next year’s model. It was still ponderous, it poked through her clothes, it was hydraulic and no-nonsense orthopedic. But she was moving well. She was able to walk naturally; the furrows of concentration were gone from her brow. This one had hands. They were heavy metal gauntlets, but she could move each finger separately. The smile she gave the camera had more genuine warmth than Cooper had seen from her since the accident.

“The new Mark Three,” said an off-camera voice, and Cooper saw Megan running. She did high kicks, jumped up and down. And yet this new model was actually bulkier than the Mark Two had been. There was a huge bulge on her back, containing computers which had previously been external to the machine. It was the first self-contained sidekick. No one would ever call it pretty, but he could imagine the feeling of freedom it must have given Megan, and wondered why she wasn’t playing the trans-track. He started to look away from the screen but this was no time to worry about things like that. He was free!

He held his hands before his face, turning them, looking at the trim leather gloves he would always have to wear, and not caring, because they were so much better than the mailed fists, or the fumbling hooks before that. It was the first day in his new sidekick, and it was utterly glorious. He ran, he shouted and jumped and cavorted, and everyone laughed with him and applauded his every move. He was powerful! He was going to change the world. Nothing could stop him. Some day, everyone would know the name of Me(Q.M.)gan Gallo (Cooper)way. There was nothing, nothing in the world he couldn’t do. He would—

“Oh!” He clapped his hands to his face in shock. “Oh! You turned it off!”

“Sort of coitus interruptus, huh?” she said, smugly.

“But I want more!”

“That would be a mistake. It’s not good to get too deeply into someone else’s joy or sadness. Besides, how do you know it stays that good?”

“How could it not? You have everything now, you—” He stopped, and looked into her face. She was smiling. He would come back to the moment many times in days to come, searching for a hint of mockery, but he would never find it. The walls were gone. She had showed him everything there was to know about her, and he knew his life would never be the same.

“I love you,” he said.

Her expression changed so slightly he might have missed it had he not been so exquisitely attuned to her emotions. Her lower lip quivered, and sadness outlined her eyes. She drew a ragged breath.

“This is sudden. Maybe you should wait until you’ve recovered from—”

“No.” He touched her face with his hands and made her look at him. “No. I could only put it into words just now, in that crazy moment. It wasn’t an easy thing for me to say.”

“Oh boy,” she said, in a quiet monotone.

“What’s the matter?” When she wouldn’t talk, he shook her head gently back and forth between his hands. “You don’t love me, is that it? I’d rather you came out and said it now.”

“That’s not it. I do love you. You’ve never been in love before, have you?”

“No. I wondered if I’d know what it would feel like. Now I know.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Sometimes, you almost wish it was a more rational thing, that it wouldn’t hit you when you feel you can least cope with it.”

“I guess we’re really helpless, aren’t we?”

“You said it.” She sighed again, then rose and took his hand. She pulled him toward the bed.

“Come on. You’re going to have to learn to make love.”

He had feared it would be bizarre. It was not. He had thought about it a great deal in the last weeks and had come up with no answers. What would she do? If she could feel nothing below the collarbone, how could any sexual activity have any meaning for her?

One answer should have been obvious. She still felt with her shoulders, her neck, her face. lips, and ears. A second answer had been there for him to see, but he had not made the connection. She was still capable of erection. Sensation from her genitals never reached her brain, but the nerves from her clitoris to her spinal cord were undamaged. Complex things happened, things she never explained completely, involving secondary and tertiary somatic effects, hormones, transfer arousal, the autonomic and vascular systems of the body.

“Some of it is natural adaptation.” she said, “and some of it has been augmented by surgery and microprocessors. Quadraplegics could do this before the kind of nerve surgery we can do today, but not as easily as I can. It’s like a blind person, whose sense of hearing and touch sharpen in compensation. The areas of my body I can still feel are now more sensitive, more responsive. I know a woman who can have an orgasm from having her elbow stimulated. With me. elbows are not so great.”

“With all they can do, why can’t they bridge the gap where your spinal cord was cut? If they can make a machine to read the signals your brain sends out. why can’t they make one to put new signals into the rest of your body, and take the signals that come from your lower body and put them into—”

“It’s a different problem. They’re working on it. Maybe in fifteen or twenty years.”

“Here?”

“More around here. All around my neck, from ear to ear . . . that’s it. Keep doing that. And why don’t you find something for your hands to do?”

“But you can’t feel this. Can you?”

“Not directly. But nice things are happening. Just look.”

“Yeah.”

“Then don’t worry about it. Just keep doing it.”

“What about this?”

“Not particularly.”

“This?”

“You’re getting warmer.”

“But I thought you—”

“Why don’t you do a little less thinking? Come on, put it in. I want this to be good for you, too. And don’t think it won’t do something for me.”

“Whatever you say. Oh, lord, that feels . . . hey, how did you do that?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“Yeah, but you can’t move any muscles down there.”

“A simple variation on the implants that keep me from making a mess of myself. Now, honestly, Q.M. Don’t you think the time for questions is over?”

“I think you’re right.”

“You want to see something funny?” she asked.

They were sprawled in each other’s arms, looking at the smoke belching from her ridiculous bedposts. She had flipped on the holo generators, and her bedroom had vanished in a Mark Twain illusion. They floated down the Mississippi River. The bed rocked gently. Cooper felt indecently relaxed. “Sure.”

“Promise you won’t laugh?”

“Not unless it’s funny.”

She rolled over and spread her arms and legs, face down on the bed. The sidekick released her, stood up, found the holo control, and turned off the river. It put one knee on the bed, carefully turned Megan onto her back, crossed her legs for her, then sat beside her on the edge of the bed and crossed its own legs, swinging them idly. By then he was laughing, as she had intended. It sat beside her and encased her left forearm and hand, lit a cigarette and placed it in her mouth, then released her hand again. It went to a chair across the room and sat down.

He jumped when she touched him. He turned and saw a thin hand on his elbow, not able to grasp him, not strong enough to do more than nudge.

“Will you put this out?” She inclined her head toward him. He carefully removed the cigarette from her lips, cupping his hand under the ash. When he turned back to her, her eyes were guarded.

“This is me, too,” she said.

“I know that.” He frowned, and tried to get closer to the truth, for his own sake as well as hers. “I hadn’t thought about it much. You look very helpless like this.”

“I am very helpless.”

“Why are you doing it?”

“Because nobody sees me like this, except doctors. I wanted to know if it made any difference.”

“No. No difference at all. I’ve seen you this way before. I’m surprised you asked.”

“You shouldn’t be. I hate myself like this. I disgust myself. I expect everyone else to react the way I do.”

“You expect wrong.” He hugged her, then drew back and studied her face. “Do you . . . would you like to make love again? Not this second. I mean, but a little later. Like this.”

“God, no. But thanks for offering.” When she was inside the sidekick again she touched his face with her be-ringed hand. Her expression was an odd mixture of satisfaction and uncertainty.

“You keep passing the tests, Cooper. As fast as I can throw them at you. I wonder what I’m going to do with you?”

“Are there more tests?”

She shook her head. “No. Not for you.”

“You’re going to be late for work,” Anna-Louse said, as Cooper lifted one of her suitcases and followed her out of the shuttleport waiting room.

“I don’t care.” Anna-Louise gave him an odd look. He knew why. When they had been together he had always been eager for his shift to begin. By now he was starting to hate it. When he worked he could not be with Megan.

“You’ve really got it bad, don’t you?” she said.

He smiled at her. “I sure do. This is the first time I’ve been away from her in weeks. I hope you aren’t angry.”

“Me? No. I’m flattered that you came to see me off. You . . . well, you wouldn’t have thought of something like that a month ago. Sorry.”

“You’re right. He put the suitcase down beside the things she had been carrying. A porter took them through the lock and into the shuttle. Cooper leaned against the sign that announced “New Dresden, Clavius, Tycho Under.”

“I didn’t know if you’d be angry, but I thought I ought to be here.” Anna-Louise smiled wryly. “Well, she’s certainly changed you. I’m happy for you. Even though I still think she’s going to hurt you, you’ll gain something from it. You’ve come alive since the last time I saw you.”

“I wanted to ask you about that,” he said, slowly. “Why do you think she’ll hurt me?”

She hesitated, hitching at her pants and awkwardly scuffing her shoes on the deck.

“You don’t like your work as much as you did. Right?”

“Well . . . yeah. I guess not. Mostly because I’d like to spend more time with her.”

She looked at him, cocking her head.

“Why don’t you quit?”

“What . . . you mean—”

“Just quit. She wouldn’t even notice the money she spent to support you.”

He grinned at her. “You’ve got the wrong guy, A.L. I don’t have any objections to being supported by a woman. Did you really think I was that old-fashioned?”

She shook her head.

“But you think money will be a problem.”

She nodded. “Not the fact that she has it. The fact that you don’t.”

“Come on. She doesn’t care that I’m not rich.” Anna-Louise looked at him a long time, then smiled. “Good,” she said, and kissed him. She hurried into the shuttle, waving over her shoulder.

Megan received a full sack of mail every day. It was the tip of the iceberg; she employed a staff on Earth to screen it, answer fan mail with form letters, turn down speaking engagements. and repel parasites. The remainder was sent on, and fell into three categories. The first, and by far the largest, was the one out of a thousand matters that came in unsolicited and, after sifting, seemed to have a chance of meriting her attention. She read some, threw most away, unopened.

The last two categories she always read. One was job offers, and the other was material from facilities on Earth doing research into the nervous system. Often the latter was accompanied by requests for money. She usually sent a check.

At first she tried to keep him up on the new developments but she soon realized he would never have her abiding and personal interest in matters neurological. She was deeply involved with what is known as the cutting edge of the research. Nothing new was discovered, momentous or trivial, that did not end up on her desk the next day. There were odd side effects: The Wacky Dust which had figured in their first meeting had been sent by a lab which had stumbled across it and didn’t know what to do with it.

Her computer was jammed with information on neurosurgery. She could call up projections of when certain milestones might be reached, from minor enhancements all the way up to complete regeneration of the neuron net. Most of the ones Cooper saw looked dismal. The work was not well funded. Most money for medical research went to the study of radiation disease.

Reading the mail in the morning was far from the high point of the day. The news was seldom good. But he was not prepared for her black depression one morning two weeks after Anna-Louise’s departure.

“Did someone die?” he asked, sitting down and reaching for the coffee.

“Me. Or I’m in the process.”

When she looked up and saw his face she shook her head.

“No. it’s not medical news. Nothing so straightforward.” She tossed a sheet of paper across the table at him. “It’s from Allgemein Femsehen Gesellschafi. They will pay any price . . . if I’ll do essentially what I’ve been doing all along for Feeli-corp. They regret that the board of directors will not permit the company to enter any agreement wherein AFG has less than total creative control of the product.”

“How many does that make now?”

“That you’ve seen? Seventeen. There have been many more that never got past the preliminary stage.”

“So independent production isn’t going to be as easy as you thought.”

“I never said it would be easy.”

“Why not use your own money? Start your own company.”

“We’ve looked into it, but the answers are all bad. The war between GWA and Royal Dutch Shell makes the tax situation . . .” She looked at him, quickly shifted gears. “It’s hard to explain.”

That was a euphemism for “you wouldn’t understand.” He did not mind it. She had tried to explain her business affairs to him and all it did was frustrate them both. He had no head for it.

“Okay. So what do you do now?”

“Oh, there’s no crisis yet. My investments are doing all right. Some war losses, but I’m getting out of GWA. The bank balance is in fair shape.” That was another euphemism. She had begun using it when she realized he was baffled by the baroque mechanism that was Gitano de Oro, her corporate self. He had seen some astounding bills from Sidekick Inc., but if she said she was not hurting he would believe her.

She had been toying with the salt shaker while her eggs benedict grew cold. Now she gave a derisive snort, and glanced at him.

“The funny thing is. I’ve just proved all the theoreticians wrong. I’ve made a breakthrough no one believed was possible. I could set the whole industry on its ear, and I can’t get a job.”

It was the first he heard of it. He raised one eyebrow in polite inquiry.

“Damn it, Cooper. I’ve been wondering how to tell you this. The problem is I didn’t realize until something you said a few days ago that you didn’t know my transcorder is built in to my sidekick.”

“I thought your camera crew—”

“I know you did, now. I swear I didn’t realize that. No, the crew makes nothing but visual tapes. It’s edited into the trans-tape which is made by my sidekick. I leave it on all the time.”

He chewed on that one for a while, and frowned at her.

“You’re saying you got love on tape.”

“The moment of falling in love. I got it all.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She sighed. “Trans-tapes have to be developed. They aren’t like viddies. They just came back from the lab yesterday. I transed them last night, while you slept.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“Maybe someday,” she hedged. “For right now, it’s too personal. I want to keep this just for myself. Can you understand that? God knows I’ve never sought privacy very hard in my life, but this . . .” She looked helpless.

“I guess so.” He considered it a little longer. “But if you sell them, it’ll hardly be personal then, will it?”

“I don’t want to sell them, Q.M.”

He said nothing, but he had been hoping for something a little stronger than that. For the first time, he began to feel alarmed.

He did not think about money, or about trans-tapes, in the next two weeks. There was too much else to do. He took his accumulated vacation and sick leave and the two of them traveled to Earth. It might as well have been a new planet.

It was not only that he went to places he had never seen. They went there in a style to which he was not accustomed. It was several steps above what most people thought of as First class. Problems did not exist on this planet. Luggage took care of itself. He never saw any money. There was no schedule that had to be met. Cars and planes and hypersonic shuttles were always ready to whisk them anywhere they wanted to go. When he mentioned that all this might be costing too much she explained that she was paying for none of it. Everything was provided by eager corporate suitors. Cooper thought they behaved worse than any love-smitten adolescent. They were as demonstrative as puppies, and as easily forgiving when she snubbed them while accepting their gifts.

She did not seem afraid of kidnapping, either, though he saw little in the way of security. When he asked, she told him that security one kept tripping over was just amateur gun-toting. She advised him never to think of it again, that it was all taken care of.

“You wouldn’t market that tape, would you?” There, he finally had it out in the open.

“Well, let me put it this way. When I First came to you, I was near a nervous breakdown from just thinking about going into the sex tape business. This is much more personal, much dearer to me than plain old intercourse.”

“Ah. I feel better.”

She reached across the bed and squeezed his hand, looked at him fondly.

“You really don’t want me to market it, do you?”

“No. I really don’t. The first day I saw you, a good friend warned me that if I got into bed with you my technique would be seen by ninety million slobs.”

She laughed. “Well, Anna-Louise was wrong. You can put that possibility right out of your mind. For one thing, there were no vidicams around, so no one will ever see you making love to me. For another, they wouldn’t use my sensations while I’m making love if I ever get into the sex-tape business. Those are a little esoteric for my audience. That would all be put together in the editing room. There would be visuals and emotionals from me—showing me making love in the regular way—and there’d be a stand-in for the physical sensations.”

“Pardon my asking,” he said, “but wasn’t your reaction that first day a little overblown, then?”

She laughed. “Much ado about nothing?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’d be your body on the screen—”

“—but I’ve already shown you I don’t care about that.”

“And if you were making love in the conventional way, you’d hardly be emotionally transported—”

“It would register as sheer boredom.”

“—so I presume you’d splice in the emotional track from some other source, too.” He frowned, no longer sure of what he was trying to say.

“You’re catching on. I told you this business was all fake. And I can’t really explain why it bothers me so much, except to say I don’t want to surrender that part of myself, even a little bit. I taped my first intercourse, but I didn’t show it to anybody until you saw it. And what about you? You’re worried that I might sell a tape of falling in love with you. You wouldn’t be on it at all.”

“Well, it was something we shared.”

“Exactly. I don’t want to share it with anyone else.”

“I’m glad you don’t plan to sell it.”

“My darling, I would hate that as much as you would.”

It was not until later that he realized she had never ruled out the possibility.

They went back to the Bubble when Cooper’s vacation time was over. She never suggested he quit his job. They checked into a different suite. She said the cost had little to do with it, but this time he was not so sure. He had begun to see a haunted expression around her eyes as she read letter after letter rejecting increasingly modest proposals.

“They really know the game,” she told him bitterly, one night. “Every one of those companies will give me any salary I want to name, but I have to sign their contract. You begin to think it’s a conspiracy.”

“Is it?”

“I really don’t know. It may be just shrewdness. I talk about how stupid they are, and artistically they live up to that description. Morally, there’s not one of them who wouldn’t pay to have his daughter gang-raped if it meant a tenth-point ratings jump. But financially, you can’t fault them. These are the folks who have suppressed the cures for a dozen diseases because they didn’t cost enough to use. I’m speaking of the parent congloms, of course, the real governments. If they ever find a way to profit off nuclear war we’ll be having them every other week. And they have obviously decided that television outside their control is dangerous.”

“So what does it mean to you and me?”

“I got into the business by accident. I won’t go crazy if I’m not working.”

“And the money?”

“We’ll get along.”

“Your expenses must be pretty high.”

“They are. No sense lying about that. I can cut out a lot, but the sidekick is never going to be cheap.”

As if to underscore her words of the night before, the Golden Gypsy chose the next morning to get temperamental. The middle finger of Megan’s right hand was frozen in the extended position. She joked about it.

“As they say, ‘The perversity of the universe tends toward the maximum.’ Why the middle finger? Can you answer me that?”

“I guess you’ll have the repairman up here before I get back.”

“Not this time,” she decided. “It’ll be hard, but I’ll struggle through. I’ll wait until we return to Earth, and drop by the factory.”

She called Sidekick while he dressed for work. He could hear her without being able to make out the words. She was still on the phone when he came out of the bathroom and started for the door. She punched the hold button and caught him, turned him around, and kissed him hard.

“I love you very much,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

She was not there when he returned. She had left a tape playing. When he went to turn it off he found the switch had been scaled. On the screen, a younger Megan moved through the therapy room in her Mark One sidekick. It was a loop, repeating the same scene.

He waited for almost an hour, then went to look for her. Ten minutes later he learned she had taken the 0800 shuttle for Earth.

A day later he realized he was not going to be able to get her on the telephone. That same day he heard the news that she had signed a contract with Telecommunion, and as he turned off the set he saw the trans-tape which had been sitting on top of it, unnoticed.

He got out the Transer she had left behind, donned the headset, inserted the cassette, turned on the machine. Half an hour later it turned itself off, and he came back to reality with a beatific smile on his face.

Then he began to scream.

They released him from the hospital in three days. Still numb from sedation, he went to the bank and closed his account. He bought a ticket for New Dresden.

He located Anna-Louise in the barracks of the police academy. She was surprised to see him, but not as much as he had expected. She took him to a lunar park—an area of trees with a steel roof and corridors radiating in all directions—sat him down, and let him talk.

“. . . and you were the only one who seemed to have understood her. You warned me the first day. I want to know how you did that, and I want to know if you can explain it to me.”

She did not seem happy, but he could see it was not directed at him.

“You say the tape really did what she claimed? It captured love?”

“I don’t think anyone could doubt it.”

She shivered. “That frightens me more than anything I’ve heard in a long time.” He waited, not knowing exactly what she meant by that. When she spoke again, it was not about her fears. “Then it proved to your satisfaction that she really was in love with you.”

“Absolutely.”

She studied his face. “I’ll take your word for it. You look like someone who would recognize it.” She got up and began to walk, and he followed her. “Then I’ve done her an injustice. I thought at first that you were just a plaything to her. From what you said, I changed my mind, even before I left the station.”

“But you were still sure she’d hurt me. Why?”

“Cooper, have you studied much history? Don’t answer that. Whatever you learned, you got from corporate-run schools. Have you heard of the great ideological struggles of the last century?”

“What the hell does that have to do with me?”

“Do you want my opinions or not? You came a long way to hear them.” When she was sure he’d listen, she went on.

“This is very simplified. I don’t have time to give you a history lesson, and I’m pretty sure you aren’t in the mood for one. But there was capitalism, and there was communism. Both systems were run, in the end, by money. The capitalists said money was really a good thing. The communists kept trying to pretend that money didn’t actually exist. They were both wrong, and money won in the end. It left us where we are now. The institutions wholly devoted to money swallowed up all political philosophies.”

“Listen, I know you’re a crazy Loonie and you think Earth is—”

“Shut up!” He was caught off guard when she spun him around. For a moment he thought she would hit him. “Damn you, that might have been funny in the Bubble, but now you’re on my territory and you’re the crazy one. I don’t have to listen to your smoggie shit!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Forget it!” she shouted, then ran her hand through her short hair. “Forget the history lesson, too. Megan Galloway is trying to make it as best she can in a world that rewards nothing so well as it rewards total self-interest. So am I, and so are you. Today or yesterday, Earth or Luna, it doesn’t really matter. It’s probably always been like that. It’ll be that way tomorrow. I am very sorry, Q.M., I was right about her, but she had no choice, and I could see that from the start.”

“That’s what I want you to explain to me.”

“If she was anybody but the Golden Gypsy, she might have gone with you to the ends of the world, endured any poverty. She might not have cared that you were never going to be rich. I’m not saying you wouldn’t have had your problems, but you’d have had the same chance anyone else has to overcome them. But there is only one Golden Gypsy, and there’s a reason for that.”

“You’re talking about the machine now. The sidekick.”

“Yes. She called me yesterday. She was crying. I didn’t know what to say to her, so I just listened. I felt sorry for her, and I don’t even like her. I guess she knew you’d seek me out. She wanted you to hear some things she was ashamed to tell you. I really don’t like her for that, but what can I do?

“There is only one Golden Gypsy. It is not owned by Megan Galloway. Rich as she is, she couldn’t afford that. She leases it, at a monthly fee that is more than you or I will ever see in our lives, and she pays for a service contract that is almost that much money again. She had not been on television for over a month. Babe, it’s not like there aren’t other people who would like to use a machine like that. There must be a million of them or more. If you ran a conglom that owned that machine, who would you rent it to? Some nobody, or someone who will wear it in ten billion homes every night, along with a promo for your company?”

“That’s what they told her on the phone? That they were going to take the machine away.”

“The way she put it was they threatened to take her body away.”

“But that’s not enough!” He was weeping again, and he had thought he was past that stage. “I would have understood that. I told her I didn’t care if she was in a sidekick, in a wheelchair, in bed, or whatever.”

“Your opinion is hardly the one that matters, there,” Anna-Louise pointed out.

“No, what I’m saying is, I don’t care if she had to sign a contract she didn’t like to do things she hates. Not if it means that much to her. If having the Golden Gypsy is that important. That wasn’t enough reason to walk out on me.”

“Well, I think she gave you credit for that much. She was less certain you’d forgive her for the other thing she had to do, which was sell the tape she made of her falling in love with you. But maybe she’d have tried to make you understand why she had to do that, too . . . except that wasn’t her real problem. The thing is. she couldn’t live with it, not with her betrayal of herself, if you were around to remind her of the magnitude of the thing she had sold.”

He looked at it from all angles, taking his time. He thought it would be too painful to put into words, but he gave it a try.

“She could keep me. or she could keep her body. She couldn’t keep both.”

“I’m afraid that’s the equation. There’s a rather complex question of self-respect in there, too. I don’t think she figured she could save much of that either way.”

“And she chose the machine.”

“You might have, too.”

“But she loved me. Love is supposed to be the strongest thing there is.”

“Get your brain out of the television set, Q.M.”

“I think I hate her.”

“That would be a big mistake.”

But he was no longer listening.

He tried to kill her, once, shortly after the tape came out, more because it seemed like the right thing to do than because he really wanted to. He never got within a mile of her. Her security had his number, all right.

The tape was a smash, the biggest thing ever to hit the industry. Within a year, all the other companies had imitations, mostly bootlegged from the original. Copyright skirmishes were fought in Hollywood and Tokyo.

He spent his time beachcombing, doing a lot of swimming. He found that he now preferred flat water. He roamed, with no permanent address, but the checks found him. no matter where he was. The first was accompanied with a detailed royalty statement showing that he was getting fifty percent of the profits from sales of the tape. He tore it up and mailed it back. The second one was for the original amount plus interest plus the new royalties. He smeared it with his blood and paid to have it hand-delivered to her.

The tape she had left behind continued to haunt him. He had kept it, and viewed it when he felt strong enough. Again and again the girl in the wheezing sidekick walked across the room, her face set in determination. He remembered her feeling of triumph to be walking, even so awkwardly.

Gradually, he came to focus on the last few meters of the tape. The camera panned away from Megan and came to rest on the face of one of the nurses. There was an odd expression there, as subtle and elusive as the face of the Mona Lisa. He knew this was what Megan had wanted him to see, this was her last statement to him, her final plea for understanding. He willed himself to supply a trans-track for the nurse, to see with her eyes and feel with her skin. He could let no nuance escape him as he watched Megan’s triumphant walk, the thing the girl had worked so long and hard to achieve. And at last he was sure that what the woman was feeling was an uglier thing than mere pity. That was the image Megan had chosen to leave him with: the world looking at Megan Galloway. It was an image to which she would never return, no matter what the price.

In a year he allowed himself to view the visual part of the love tape. They had used an actor to stand in for him, re-playing the scene in the Bubble and in the steam-boat bed. He had to admit it: she had never lied to him. The man did not even resemble Cooper. No one would be studying his lovemaking.

It was some time later before he actually transed the tape again. It was both calming and sobering. He wondered what they could sell using this new commodity, and the thought frightened him as much as it had Anna-Louise. But he was probably the only spumed lover in history who knew, beyond a doubt, that she actually had loved him.

Surely that counted for something.

His hate died quickly. His hurt lasted much longer, but a day came when he could forgive her.

Much later, he knew she had done nothing that needed his forgiveness.

WITH THIMBLES, WITH FORKS, AND HOPE

Kate Wilhelm

The farmhouse glowed in the late-afternoon dusk, like an old-fashioned Christmas card scene. Low evergreens crowded the front porch; the sidewalk from the drive curved gracefully. It was all scrubbed-looking, the white clapboard freshened by rain that had started to fall. Charlie felt a twinge of guilt at the cleanliness and the comfort of it after spending most of the day in New York. He parked in the garage and entered a small side porch that led into the back of the house. The porch was a catchall for the bottles to be returned to the store, newspapers destined for a recycle center, some wooden seed flats that had gotten only that far on their way to the barn, an overflowing woodbox. When the clutter got so bad that he could no longer make his way through it, he cleaned it up, but not until then, and he never had finished cleaning everything—the seed flats had been there since June.

Inside the house, the fragrance of soup was tantalizing; there were the odors of wood fires, of onions, of cats—three of them—cedar paneling, and other things he had not been able to identify, leftover things from when the house was built, or from the first seventy years of its occupancy.

“Hello,” he called out, but he knew Constance was out. The house felt empty when she was outside. Two of the three cats stalked over to sniff his shoes and legs, checking credentials before they accepted him. The third one, Brutus, glared at him from on top of the upright freezer. It was Charlie’s fault, obviously, that the rain had started again. Brutus turned his back and faced the wall.

Charlie went through a narrow hallway, through the utility room, all the time dancing to avoid squashing a cat. He heard the soft plop Brutus made when he left the freezer, and he knew the evil old tiger cat was following along, his tail rigid, daring either of the other two to get in his way. They would keep an eye on him and scamper if he got near. Brutus was a New York cat; he had not, would never approve of country life. In the kitchen, there was a copper-colored electric range with a stove-top grill, a dishwasher, a disposal that had never been used since they had moved in—meat scraps went to cats, and everything else went on the compost; there were rows of hanging pots and pans, all gleaming copper-bottomed, seldom used. What was used every day for nine or even ten months of the year was a forty-year-old wood cookstove. On it now, there was the iron kettle with soup simmering so low that a bubble broke the surface once every five minutes or so.

The orange cat rubbed against him and complained about things generally. He rubbed its ears for a moment, then said softly, “She’s going to be mad as hell, Candy.” Brutus swiped at the gray cat, Ashcan, in passing and settled himself on the rocking chair nearest the stove. His eyes gleamed yellow as he narrowed them in the way that made him look Mephistophelian. Candy went on detailing her awful day, Ashcan licked the place Brutus had nabbed him, and Charlie tried to think of a way to break the news to his wife that he had practically taken on a job for them both. “She will be mad as hell,” he said again under his breath, and he put down the briefcase filled with reports that he planned to read that night and have her read.

On the slope overlooking the house and yard, Constance was on her knees planting daffodils under the half dozen apple trees that made their orchard. Next year, they should start bearing. “Goddamned rain,” she muttered, “had to do it now, couldn’t wait another fifteen minutes, had to be right now.” Rain trickled down her neck, icy fingers that made her skin flinch, trying to turn itself inside out. She plunged the bulb planter into the yielding earth, twisted it viciously, lifted out the plug, and laid it down. With one hand, she scooped up wood ashes and bonemeal and sand and tossed the mixture into the hole; with the other, she groped in her pail for another bulb and dropped it in, no longer taking the trouble to put it right side up. She returned the column of dirt topped with newly cut grass and jabbed at the ground a scant six inches away to repeat the process. It was impossible now for her to summon the vision of apple trees in bloom on a golden carpet.

She had heard the car and knew that Charlie was home. She had known when Charlie left that morning that when he got home he would hem and haw around for a while and finally blurt out that he had taken the job, that it would be a milk run, nothing to do, nothing dangerous, et cetera, et cetera. Her stomach would churn and her blood would chill, making her fingers cold, and she would nod silently and try to find words that would tell him she hated it but that she was willing for him to do it because she knew he couldn’t just quit the business cold turkey. She knew that now and then he would go see Phil Stearns and come home to tell her that he had agreed to do just this one job, this one last time. “But it isn’t fair,” she muttered. For twenty-five years, Charlie had worked on the New York City police force, and he had come out scarred but intact, and it wasn’t fair to risk everything again.

The worst scars were the ones that could not be seen. Invisible scar tissue had formed, protecting him where he had been hurt too often. In the beginning, he had been possessed by zeal, a sense of mission, holy justice; over the years, that had become cynicism and simple dedication to sharpening his skills of detection. Then he had become different again, had developed a cold fury because nothing changed, or if there were changes, they were for the worse. His rage at the criminal began to extend to the victim. Constance had known then it was time for him to get out. Surprisingly, he had agreed, and three years ago, at forty-seven, he had retired.

She looked with dismay at the pail, at least twenty more bulbs. The rain was coming down harder; there was a touch of ice in it. Her fingers were red and swollen-looking and her nose had started to run and she couldn’t wipe it without smearing mud across her face. “It isn’t fair!” she cried, looking at the house.

By the time she finished the job and put away her equipment, the rain was a downpour and the day was finished, with the gray sky lowering toward the ground. Charlie met her at the back door and drew her inside, pushed her gently into a chair, and brushed a kiss across her nose as he leaned over and pulled off her muddy boots. He helped her out of the sodden jacket and then took both her hands and pulled her across the kitchen, through the hallway, to the bathroom, which was steamy and sweet-smelling from bubble bath.

She sighed and did not tell him she would have preferred a shower in order to wash her hair also. Since her fingers were stiff with cold, he ended up undressing her and then held her elbow firmly until she was in the tub, only her flushed face and wet hair above water.

Charlie was perplexed about the hair; she was not the image he had anticipated, with mud on her cheek and her hair dripping and clinging to her cheeks and her forehead.

“Be right back,” he said, and left, taking her wet clothes with him.

As soon as he had vanished, she stood up and pulled a towel from the rack and tied up her hair. It was silly for Charlie to baby her; she was taller than he was, and almost as broad. Her face was wide, Slavic, her eyes pale blue, her hair almost white, it was so blond. The gray that was already showing here and there blended in, and no one but Charlie knew she was turning. She knew she neither looked nor acted like the kind of woman a man would baby. She sank back into the suds and thought again it was silly for him to go through this to ease his conscience, but she was glad he did. Sometimes he babied her and sometimes she babied him; it worked out.

He came back carrying a tray with two frosted martini glasses, the shaker, a plate of garlic salami, the kind you could get only in a good New York deli, and strips of cheese. He sat down cross-legged on the floor so that his eyes and hers were level, poured the drinks, handed her a towel and then her drink, and began to tell her about the job. While he talked, he ate the salami and held out pieces for her to bite.

Constance watched him and listened and she thought: He was night to her day, all dark and brooding and secret. His hair was a mop of tight black curls, his eyebrows so heavy, they made his face look out of proportion. There was a gleam of gold in his mouth when he laughed, one gold cap. His teeth were crooked, an orthodontist’s nightmare, but they were the whitest teeth Constance had ever seen.

“Lou Bramley,” Charlie said, eating cheese, “will be fifty-one November first. That’s Saturday. He’s got a wife that he cares for, two good kids, treasurer of Tyler and Sacks, Incorporated, no debts, everything going for him. And Phil’s sure as sin that he’s going to suicide before the end of the day Saturday. And leave him, Phil, holding a five-hundred-thousand-dollar insurance policy.”

“So why doesn’t he just not issue the policy?”

“Because it’s too big to piss away without more than an itch to go by. And nothing’s come up. He’s had his best working on it for the last three weeks and they haven’t come up with anything—no motive, no problem, no woman, nothing.”

“Why does Bramley say he wants that kind of insurance?”

“His story was that at a party a screwball astrologer told him the next six months are the most dangerous of his life, that unless he takes extreme care, the odds are good that he will be killed in an accident.” Charlie poured the last of the martinis and laughed. “Phil even hired an astrologer to do a horoscope for Bramley. Nothing to it. He’s riding a high wave, nothing but good things ahead. Can you imagine Phil going to an astrologer?”

Constance laughed. They had known Phil Stearns since Charlie’s college days. Phil believed in nothing but actuarial tables. “Charlie,” she said then, “it’s an impasse. In time, a good psychologist or psychiatrist could give Phil his answers, but if his people couldn’t find anything in three weeks, what does he think you can do in three days? He has to gamble or cut loose.”

Charlie nodded. “I more or less told him the same thing. Midnight Friday, the policy goes through automatically if he doesn’t reject it. By midnight Saturday, we both think Mr. Lou Bramley will no longer be with us, and Mrs. Bramley will come into a sizable fortune. Phil is ready to cut him loose, but he wants a backup opinion from a good psychologist. From you.”

She shook her head. “I’m retired. And you are, too, if you’d just remember it from time to time.”

“Bramley’s gone down to a flossy resort in Florida, in the Fort Myers area. That raises the possibility of a vanishing act instead of suicide. In either case, it has to go down on the books as accidental death for the big payoff. All Phil wants you to do is go down there and observe him, talk to him, and on Friday give Phil a call. He needs something more than an itch to refuse a policy like that.”

Constance glared at him. “You can’t take jobs for me. I’m not an indentured servant or something.”

“I didn’t tell him anything definite,” Charlie said reproachfully. “I did say that if we agreed, we’d want a week’s vacation at the flossy resort after we finished this little job. On Phil, of course.”

She shook her head. “Go stir the soup or something.”

As soon as he was gone, she opened the drain, pulled the towel from her hair, and turned on the shower. She hated bubble bath; this was a gift from their daughter. Of course, Charlie would be hooked on Lou Bramley—they were the same age. He would never admit it, but the idea of stopping everything now when there was so much to do, time enough finally to do it, that would frighten him. He was not a coward—he had survived too many encounters with near death and had gone back too many times—but he was cautious. He was not ready. His own unreadiness would make it impossible for him to sidestep Lou Bramley, who evidently was ready. Charlie would have to know why. He would have to stop him if he was stoppable.

Constance had called Charlie late in the afternoon of her first day at the luxurious hotel. She had managed to talk briefly with Lou Bramley, she reported. “He’s withdrawing, Charlie,” she had said soberly. “Anyone with half an eye could spot it. He’s not eating, not sleeping, doesn’t finish sentences. He stares and stares without moving, then jumps up and walks furiously on the beach. Nervous energy. He’s so obsessed, he doesn’t even realize he’s got two women pursuing him.”

“Two? What do you mean?”

And she had told him about the woman who was openly stalking Lou Bramley. The bellboys and waiters were betting on when she would land him, it was so obvious.

Charlie did not like having a woman appear. It was possible they planned to skip out together.

He was going to like it even less, she thought. She had learned that the woman was June Oliveira, from Brazil, and Lou Bramley was the first man she had paid any attention to in the week she had been in the hotel. Wherever Lou Bramley went, she was so close that she might as well have been attached to him. Constance had watched her sit at a table next to his and start edging her chair toward him. When she got within whispering distance, he apparently had become aware of her for the first time, and he had moved out to a beach chair in the sun. His action had been almost absentminded. The woman had continued to watch him intently, and moments later when he jumped up and started to walk, she had followed.

It would have been easy to miss, Constance knew. The terrace was usually a busy place, especially during the late-afternoon happy hour. Waiters were rushing back and forth, groups forming, breaking up, re-forming. If she had not been watching closely, she might not have noticed, partly because the woman was so brazen about it; somehow that screened her intentions even more than secrecy would have done. When she first mentioned the woman to Charlie, Constance had realized she could not describe her beyond the most obvious features—long black hair and slender figure. Her face was smooth and unreadable, expressionless; she wore no jewelry, no makeup, no nail polish. Probably she was in her thirties; she was too self-assured to be younger, but there were no visible signs that she was older.

Up to this point Charlie would be willing to accept her assurance that Lou Bramley and the woman were strangers. And then she would tell him that last evening the woman had moved to a room next to Bramley’s.

The bellboy who was willing to sell information had rolled his eyes when he told her that. Later last night, Constance had gone for a walk, and in the shadows of a sea-grape bush, she had stopped and looked back at the hotel, studying it until she found her own room, counting up and over from it to Bramley’s. On the balcony next to his, she had made out the dim figure of the woman as close to the joint rail as she could get.

Constance remembered the chill that had shaken her, and she felt it edging up her arms now. She looked at her watch; he should be home, she decided, and dialed the number.

Charlie sounded pleased; he was running down a good lead, he said, but the woman continued to worry him. She could be a complication, he admitted.

“I’ll see if I can get anything from Bramley about her,” Constance said. “I’m having a drink with him in a few minutes. I doubt that we’ll be able to talk, though. That woman will be in his lap practically. Charlie, she . . . she really bothers me.”

“Okay. Keep your distance from her. Don’t get in her way. She’s probably got her own little racket going. Just watch the gazebo from a distance. Right?”

She agreed, and in a few minutes they hung up. She had not thought of the gazebo for a long time, but this didn’t feel at all like that. There was something strange and mysterious going on, but she felt no danger; this was not the way she had felt when she had made the workmen move the little structure—hardly bigger than a playhouse. Nine years ago when they were in the country on weekends and part of the summer only, she had looked out the kitchen window one Saturday morning and had felt her skin crawl. I have to move the gazebo, she had said to herself sharply, and without another thought she had gone to the phone and called Willard Orme and had told him to bring someone out to do it. He had protested and tried to arrange a date a week away, and she had said she would get someone else to do it and remodel the house and build the garage and all the rest of the work he was figuring on doing for them. Reluctantly, he had come out and moved the gazebo. That afternoon, their daughter Jessica and two friends had been sitting in it drinking Cokes and eating hot dogs when a storm had blown down the walnut tree near the barn, and it had fallen on the newly bared spot of earth.

This was nothing like that, she told herself sharply. It was time to go down and meet Lou Bramley, see if they could find a place where she could get him to talk a little, a place where there would be no room for June Oliveira to be at his elbow.

The terrace was very large, and even though there were forty or more people on it, many tables were vacant. The hotel was between seasons now; after Thanksgiving, through spring, it would be jammed and then it would be impossible to wander out and find a table. She sat down and shook her head at the waiter. She would order when Lou Bramley joined her. She spotted him as soon as he walked from the lobby through the wide doors. He hesitated, looking around, then nodded and started for her table. He had taken perhaps ten steps when he paused, looked past her, and changed his direction to go through the terrace, out to the beach chairs in the sand, where he sat down next to June Oliveira.

“For heaven’s sake,” Constance muttered to herself. “He’s falling for her line.” Bramley was facing the Gulf, away from her. June Oliveira was at his left, talking to his profile. Constance watched them for several minutes and then decided not to let Oliveira get away with it so easily. She picked up her purse and put on her sunglasses; it was still very bright out on the sand. She hated going out in the sun because her nose was burned, her cheeks, her chin. She walked across the terrace and down the three steps, turned toward them, and then veered away and headed toward the beach instead. She began to feel the heat of the sun on her nose and cheeks, and abruptly she turned and went back, without glancing at Lou Bramley and June Oliveira.

In her room again, she began to shiver and started to adjust the air conditioner, but she had turned it off when she arrived and it had not been on since. She went to the balcony to let the late-afternoon sun warm her. She realized that she was cursing under her breath and suddenly she laughed. A tug of war over a man! She had not played games like that since her teens. Now she began to look over the people on the sand below. Finally, she found Lou Bramley and June Oliveira, exactly as before. She stood thinking and then went back inside and dialed Charlie again.

“I just want you to call her and keep her on the line a few minutes.”

He didn’t like it, he said many times, until she said she would hire a bellboy to do it, and if she paid him ten, that woman would more than likely pay fifteen to learn the identity of the hoaxer.

“And if you get him out of her clutches, then what?”

“I’m going to try to get him drunk enough to sleep tonight. If he doesn’t, he just might go through with it, no matter what you tell him. He’s desperate for sleep.”

Charlie grumbled some more, but he would make the call to Oliveira in five minutes. “Honey,” he said before hanging up, “just be damned careful.”

Lou Bramley sat in the afternoon sun with June Oliveira and on her balcony Constance shivered. It was crazy, she told herself sternly; there were fifty people down there, and that many more on the beach, dozens of people swimming or sunbathing. It was a mob scene down there.

Almost thirteen years ago, Charlie had given her a present of one year of self-defense classes. He had insisted over her protests, saying further that as soon as Jessica was ten, he was going to enroll her also. Months later, she had come home one afternoon upset and unwilling to continue. “Charlie, what Kim is teaching us now are lethal blows. I don’t like it.”

He had held her shoulders and regarded her soberly. “If anyone ever lays a hand on you, hurts you, you’d better kill him. Because if you don’t, I will. You’ll get off with self-defense, but it will be murder for me.” They both knew he meant it.

What her classes had not prepared her to do, she thought decisively, was to stay in her den and shiver when she had agreed to do a job. She waited in the dark, cool bar for the bellboy to summon June Oliveira for her urgent long-distance call. The bar adjoined the terrace; it had ceiling-to-floor smoked-glass windows that let the patrons see out and kept those on the outside from seeing in.

The day the walnut tree fell was the day that Jessica had given up junk food, had, in fact, become a health-food fanatic. The girls had come running in, talking shrilly, caught up in a nervous reaction to the storm and the crash of the tree, and the realization that they could so easily have been under it. Jessica had stopped at the door and looked at her mother across the kitchen. There had been beads of sweat on her upper lip. Wordlessly, she had crossed the room and hugged Constance very hard, shaking, saying nothing. Strange, Constance thought as she watched, how memories like that one pop up, complete, every detail there, as if it were a little scene one could raise the curtain on at any time. She was glad she had been with her daughter on the day she learned how short the distance was between life and death.

Presently, June Oliveira appeared, walking fast toward the lobby. Constance left the bar through the terrace door and went straight to Lou Bramley. The woman had left her scarf on the chair; she did not intend to be delayed very long.

“Hi,” Constance said. “Want to take a walk?”

Bramley jumped up and looked around swiftly. “I certainly do. Let’s go.”

They started for the beach, then he stopped. “It’s no good. She’ll just tag along.”

“I’ve got a rental car in the lot,” Constance said, taking his arm. “Let’s go somewhere else to walk.”

They went to a flagstone path that wound between the swimming pool area and the tennis courts, up past the terrace, to the street-front parking lot. Not until they were on the busy highway heading south did Lou Bramley relax.

“I really wanted to talk to you professionally, but I’m not quite sure of the etiquette of the situation. And I owe you an apology,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Constance laughed. “I’m retired. Any advice I give these days is just that, advice, like you might get from sweet old Aunt Maud.”

She glanced at him as she spoke; his mouth twisted in an attempt to smile, then settled back into a tight line. His sunglasses were mirrors that completely hid his eyes. She turned her attention once more to the road. Incredibly busy, she thought; probably many of them were on their way down to the Tamiami Trail, through the swamps over to the east coast.

A straggly line of pelicans flew across the road; she admired pelicans more than all the other birds. They were scruffy-looking on land, ungainly, comical, but in flight they were supreme. So little effort seemed to go into it. They just opened their wings and sailed.

“I came down here to think through a problem,” Lou Bramley said after the silence had stretched out long enough to be almost unbreakable. “A business problem,” he added quickly. He turned his head away, as if afraid that even with most of his face hidden behind the sunglasses, he might reveal too much. “Lucky, my wife, says that we constantly signal to each other, all people, and that we learn to read the signals as kids and get sharper at it as we grow up. She says that women don’t make passes at me because I’m not signaling that I’d be receptive.” He paused, waiting for her response.

“That’s really very good,” Constance said dutifully.

“Yes. And now especially, with this problem, I know I’m not hunting. So why is it that I can’t turn around without having that woman at my side? Earlier, I wanted to have a talk with you and I went to her instead. I don’t even like her. I actively dislike her, more than anyone I’ve met in a long time. And I can’t stay away from her.”

“I wonder what she wants,” Constance said.

“That’s the stumbling block for me, too. There must be some kind of con game that she’s going to pull when the time’s right.”

“She isn’t right for a con artist, too blatant, too uncaring about appearances.” She spied a good place to leave the highway at a small restaurant with beach access. “Finally, we can take our walk.”

They walked on the hard-packed wet sand at the edge of the water. Lime green waves rose knee-high before they lost themselves in the froth. Flocks of sandpipers probed the sand, scattered at their approach, settled again as soon as they passed. Now and then, a large white heron fluttered up out of their way, or a bunch of seagulls screeched at them. Constance did not push the conversation or try to direct it as he talked about the woman, June Oliveira. She got little from it; he was not a good observer, not an attentive listener, not at this time in his life, anyway.

They turned back as the sun was setting in a gaudy display of reds, golds, ivory, green. . . . Offshore, a large yacht was moving south. They watched it.

“I don’t swim,” Lou Bramley said suddenly.

“My husband doesn’t swim very well,” Constance said. “He paddles a little.”

“I saw you heading straight out into the Gulf this morning; it gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized I couldn’t see you any longer.”

“I don’t think June Oliveira swims, either,” Constance said. “At least I haven’t seen her doing it.”

“She thinks it’s dangerous. She doesn’t do anything dangerous. She thinks people are crazy who do.”

He did not break the silence again until they were drawing near the tiny restaurant. “Would you like to have dinner here? I understand almost all the seafood restaurants are pretty good.”

They got a booth by a window and she ordered a martini; they watched the end of the gaudy sunset while they waited for it.

“What happened after you published your articles?” he asked. He had not ordered a drink, and he watched her sip her martini with poorly concealed desire for one just like it.

He was punishing himself, she thought, making himself live through every minute of this week without help of any sort. The hollows under his eyes were alarming.

“I had already quit the hospital when I began to write the articles,” she said. “They brought a little pressure on the university. I had tenure and they couldn’t have touched me, but it was uncomfortable. I finished the semester and dropped that, too. It wasn’t as if I sacrificed anything,” she said easily. “I was busier than ever doing consulting.”

“They made it look like a continuation of the old battle between the psychologists who aren’t doctors and the psychiatrists who are,” he said thoughtfully.

She shrugged. “A plague on both their houses. I’m researching a book right now that will damn the psychologists just as much as those articles damned the holy psychiatrists.”

“I’d like to see that,” he said almost regretfully, and his eyes went distant as his fingers began to tap on the tabletop. He was back in his own hell.

“It’s heady stuff,” she said, “taking an opponent that much bigger than you are.” His gaze remained fixed. She pulled the menu close to the candle and tried to make out the faint print.

When the waiter came to take their orders she asked to see the wine list and was disappointed by the selection. She did the best she could with it and said firmly, “two glasses.” Lou Bramley started to protest, then became silent again. For the first time, he seemed to be uncomfortable with the silence.

“I’m surprised that they’re still treating so many people with electroshock,” he said.

“Several hundred thousand a year. For a while, they thought they had a better solution with psychodrugs, but what happened was, they ended up with addicts. Mostly women.”

“And the difference in the treatments for men and women. That was shocking, too.”

“Shocking,” she agreed. “That’s the word.”

Suddenly, he smiled, the first time. “I’m not very good company. I’m sorry. Thanks for rescuing me, though. I’m glad we got out, away from that woman.”

He ate little, but he drank the wine, and she kept refilling his glass; when the bottle was low, she signaled the waiter, who immediately brought a new one. The food was delicious. She was sorry he had not eaten.

They both ordered key lime pie and while they waited for it, he said, “I really wanted to talk to you about a favor. You mentioned that your husband is joining you this weekend and you’ll be around next week?”

She nodded.

He leaned back as the waiter came with their pie. For a minute, Constance was afraid he would reconsider and withdraw again, but as soon as the waiter left, he went on.

“I thought I might miss you tomorrow. I have an important call I have to wait for in my room, and I thought you might have plans to go out. Anyway, that woman has made me jumpy, and I don’t want to leave anything in my room. For all I know she might find a key somewhere, let herself in.” He tried to laugh to show that he did not really mean it, but the effort was wasted. “It’s something I want kept safe for me. I’m going deep-sea fishing, but I mentioned that already, didn’t I?”

He knew he had not. The lie evidently made his mouth dry; he had to drink some of the awful water before he could continue. Constance was missing nothing: his sudden thirst, the way his fingers tightened and relaxed, tightened again, the way he avoided her gaze. He was still too dry to go on and he reached for the wine this time.

Constance took a bite of the pie and drew in a deep breath. It was sinfully good, made with real whipped cream, real lime juice.

“I don’t want to leave confidential papers in the hotel safe,” Lou Bramley said finally. “I know they have to turn things over to the police in case of accident or anything,” he said in a rush.

He stopped again and this time Constance thought he would not go on. “This has to do with your business problem?”

“Yes. That’s it. I would like to know that someone responsible has the papers, just in case.”

“I’ll be glad to hold anything for you.”

“Thanks. And if—I mean there’s always a chance that something could happen—and if it does, would you just drop the stuff in a mailbox for me? There will be two envelopes ready to mail. Inside a larger envelope.”

She nodded.

“I can’t tell you how that relieves my mind,” he said. “I know it must sound crazy, but I’ve got a hunch that I should make sure that stuff is safe.” He put his fork down and looked past her out the window and instantly his face was set in that distant look she had come to know.

“I believe very much in hunches,” she said. “I used to wonder why everyone in my profession paid so little attention to intuitions, hunches, things that we all experience and no one wants to talk about. Some of those patients committed to years of institutional life, ordeals of drugs, shock treatments, hours of psychodrama, group therapies, the works, are there because they couldn’t bring themselves to ignore their intuitions. They got out of control. Others, even sicker people on the outside, pretend there is no such thing. There has to be a middle ground; there has to be a handle to it, a way to look into it without being labeled crazy. I haven’t found it yet,” she admitted. “But I’m convinced that you can’t treat neurotics, psychotics, psychopaths, any of them, unless you admit that part of the psyche is still uncharted, unknown, and powerful.”

She had brought him back; he was regarding her with interest.

“They’ll crucify you,” he said softly.

“They might try. I’m hammering my nails as hard and fast as they are hammering theirs.”

He smiled with her.

She made a waving motion. “Enough of that. Why is your wife nicknamed Lucky?”

It was a silly story—her father had won a daily double the day she was born—but it started Lou Bramley talking. It was all about his wife and two children now, the trips they had taken, the strange and wonderful things the children had done. Nothing current, nothing about the future, nothing more recent than a couple of years ago. When he paused, she told a story about Jessica, or about Charlie.

They were the only customers still in the restaurant when it closed. He was yawning widely. At the car, he stopped and looked back at the small dining room, the beach beyond it pale under a new moon. He nodded, then got in.

It was shortly after twelve when they walked into the hotel lobby and saw June Oliveira studying travel folders near the desk. Lou Bramley groaned.

“Jesus Christ!” he muttered. “She’s just waiting. She knows and she’s waiting.”

On Friday, Charlie arrived at the hotel at 6:30 and went straight up to their room, where Constance was waiting for him. He kissed her fervently.

“You had me worried,” he said then, holding her at arm’s length, studying her. “Have you looked at your nose?”

She had; it was shiny and red as a plum tomato. It was also hot.

“You know what he’s running away from?” she asked.

“I think so. He needs to confirm it; I don’t have a stitch of proof.”

“If he doesn’t, we have to kidnap him or something. We can’t let him go through with it, Charlie. I like him; he doesn’t deserve that.”

“And I like his wife a bunch, too. We’ll see. Now, what about that mystery woman?”

“I wish I knew. Look, Bramley hasn’t left his room all day. He’s waiting for that phone call. He was supposed to get a package to me for safekeeping, and he hasn’t done that, either. It’s that woman. She’s got some kind of control over him. I know, I know . . .”

Charlie watched her pace to the window, back. He had seen her like this before, but not for a very long time. He tried to pull her to the sofa next to him; she was too restless to sit down.

“Charlie, you’ll have to get him out of here to talk to him. Tell him he’s insured. Tell him you have to have something to eat, say in the coffee shop, that he has to sign papers and can do it there. She’ll follow. In the lobby, I’ll distract her, and that’s when you have to get him out. There’s a place down the road, south, Jake’s Fish House. I’ll meet you there. You rented a car, didn’t you?”

“Yes. You told me to, remember? Constance, what is all this? You’re nearly hysterical, you know?”

“I’m not hysterical, but there isn’t much time. There’s an eleven o’clock flight out of Miami and I want him on it. Charlie, he won’t talk here! That woman is hanging out on his elbow. Believe me.”

He kissed her again and went to the door. “Okay. Jake’s Fish House. It’d better be good, sweetie, real good.”

He would have recognized Lou Bramley from the photographs, but they had not prepared him for the muddy color of his face. He had blanched when Charlie said he represented the insurance company.

“You have the policy, Mr. Bramley,” Charlie said. “There are some formalities, of course, a few things to sign.”

Bramley sank into a chair, staring at him blankly; very slowly, the mud color changed to a reddish suntan. He moistened his lips. “Something to sign?”

“Yeah. Would you mind going to the coffee shop? I got a lousy headache on that flight down here. Cup of coffee and a couple aspirins, that’s what I need. We can get the paperwork done there.”

Bramley nodded and stood up. He went to a chest, opened a drawer, and withdrew a manila envelope. “I have to drop this off at the desk,” he said, looking at the envelope.

The woman was standing at the elevators when they arrived. The Dragon Lady, Charlie thought, and nodded to her. At his side, Lou Bramley had gone stiff. He looked straight ahead, as if he had not seen the woman at all. No one spoke.

She got off before them but was walking so slowly that they passed her within a few feet of the recessed elevator bank. They went to the desk, where Bramley handed over his envelope and watched until the clerk deposited it in Constance’s box. He took a deep breath.

“The coffee shop’s over there,” he said dully, turning from the desk.

The woman was less than fifteen feet away. Constance appeared and walked between them, and when the woman stepped aside, Constance brushed against her.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Constance yelled. “She had her hand in my purse!”

June Oliveira started to move away faster; Constance caught her by the arm and turned her around. “I know you did! I saw you and I felt the tug on my purse. It’s happened to me before, just like that.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Charlie said, taking Bramley’s arm. There was no need to tug; Bramley was already nearly running for the wide entrance doors.

In Jake’s Fish House, they took a booth and Charlie ordered.

“One scotch on the rocks,” he said, pointing to Bramley.

“One very dry martini for me.”

“Your wife said that’s your drink,” Charlie said easily.

“You saw my wife? Why?”

“Routine.”

“You told her about the policy?”

“Nope. Told her I was a headhunter scouting you out for a new job.”

“She believed that?”

“She sure was trying hard to believe it. She showed me your computer. Neat, real neat.”

Bramley ran his hand over his lips. “Who are you?”

“Actually, I really am doing a bit of headhunting for Jim Hammond.”

Bramley looked as if he might faint. The waiter brought their drinks and Charlie said, “Drink up.” He sipped his martini and knew he wanted another one very fast. Bramley drank most of his scotch without pausing. They regarded each other. Bramley looked haunted, or maybe treed. Charlie had seen that look on other faces. Sometimes if the person with that look had a gun, he began shooting. If he was on a ledge, he usually jumped.

“If you’ve done what we think you’ve done,” he said softly, “Jim Hammond wants to hire you, starting now, tonight, or next week, next month, whenever you can arrange it.”

“He doesn’t even know. No one knows.”

“Five hundred thousand dollars’ worth for openers,” Charlie said.

“For openers,” Bramley said. He finished his scotch.

“Hammond wants you; you can work it out together. You found a glitch in his foolproof gadget. You could even say he needs you.” He signaled the waiter to repeat the first round and then leaned back, watching Bramley. “Of course, it was the dumbest thing you could do, get a policy like that and take off, I mean. Like a neon announcement.”

“I never claimed to be smart. I was desperate. It would have worked. Lucky would have paid the money back and would have collected fifty thousand from Hammond. His offer is still good, isn’t it? The reward for anyone who cracked his system? I wrote out exactly what I did to prove . . . Oh my God!”

“Now what?”

“I’ve got to retrieve that envelope from the hotel desk!” He shook his head, then asked, “How did you find out?”

“The old Sherlock Holmes method. If it’s all that’s left, it’s got to be it. Or something like that. We couldn’t find anything on you, so I looked up your company. Two years ago, they got a new Hammond computer system. I read about the guarantee and the reward. As soon as I saw that computer setup at your house, I knew.”

Their new drinks had arrived before Constance showed up. She came straight to their booth and sat down next to Charlie. Bramley looked completely bewildered by her arrival.

“It’s okay,” Charlie said to Constance, putting his arm about her shoulders and squeezing slightly. “You put on a good show. How did you get out of it?”

“I apologized and explained many times that I had been robbed in New York by someone who casually brushed against me. She was not happy.”

“You two . . .? You’re with him?”

“This is my husband,” Constance said. “I have your envelope. I suppose you want it back?” She took it from her purse and slid it across the table.

He looked from her to the envelope, back to her. “You’ve been working these past couple of days?”

She nodded. “I had planned to kidnap you and make you see how unfair you were being, if Charlie hadn’t pulled it off.”

“It’s too easy to make judgments from the outside,” Bramley said. “It would have ruined her life, too.”

“And what about the load of guilt you were planning to dump on her? Wouldn’t that have ruined her life? Ruin, despair, humiliation, those were your burdens, but you know she would have shared them. Who would have shared her guilt?”

“She would have grieved, but she would have gotten over it. It was going to be an accident. Everyone would have accepted that.”

“She already knows,” Charlie said. “I don’t know how, but she does.”

“Just as I’d know,” Constance said.

“She would have tried to stop me if she suspected,” Bramley whispered.

“Maybe she feels she can take the guilt trip better than you could stand the humiliation and ruin from whatever you did. Maybe she wanted to save you from suffering,” Constance said coolly.

“Stop it!” His voice broke and he gulped his drink. “You’ve made the point,” he said.

“Lou, there’s an eleven o’clock flight out of Miami for New York. You can take my rental car and turn it in for me at Miami. You have a reservation for that flight.”

“This feels like a bum’s rush,” he said, but his eyes gleamed, and there was a look on his face that she had not seen there: boyish, eager.

“The hotel knows you’re going out fishing tonight; they won’t think anything of it when you don’t come back. Call them from New York tomorrow.”

He was nodding. “I really don’t have to go back there. I could drive over in a couple, three hours. What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty.”

“I’d better get started.”

“I got some sandwiches, and a thermos of coffee. They’re on the front seat. Here’s the agreement for the car, and the key.” Constance handed them to him.

He folded the paper and stuffed it in his pocket and brought out another slip of paper. He looked at it, then let it fall to the table. “My receipt for the fishing trip. Paid in full.” Now he stood up. He looked down at Constance. “I don’t know yet what I think about you. I owe you a lot. Thanks.” Suddenly, he leaned down and kissed her forehead. He reached across her to shake Charlie’s hand. “You don’t really have anything for me to sign. That was all done a month ago. Right?”

“Right. Good luck, Lou. Hammond’s waiting for your call.” He hesitated, then asked, “Fill me in on one thing, before you go. What do you think the Oliveira woman was up to?”

“I think she knew I was going to die and she was hanging around to watch,” he said without hesitation. “She’ll be disappointed. Keep out of her way,” he added, looking at Constance. “She’s a ghoul, probably crazy, and I think she’s very dangerous.”

They watched him leave, then Charlie turned to Constance.

“Okay. What was that all about? He’s right—it was the bum’s rush. Why?”

“I don’t think he would have been able to leave again if he had gone back to the hotel. I don’t know how or why, but that woman does have some kind of power over him. I think he’s right, Charlie. She knew. That’s what she was waiting for.”

Charlie took a deep breath, blew it out again in exasperation. “Tell me,” he said.

When she kept it all very objective, as she did now, Constance knew there was nothing frightening about the woman. She repelled and fascinated Lou Bramley, nothing too unusual there; except, she told herself, both she and Lou Bramley knew it was more than that, even if neither of them could ever demonstrate it.

“Now, you tell me. What did he do? He’s not a crook.”

“Not in the usual sense, anyway. His company got a big multimillion-dollar computer system two years ago, guaranteed safe against illicit access. And Bramley couldn’t resist trying to break into it. It was a game, puzzle solving. And he did it. Eighteen months ago, he got his own computer at home, and it’s been like having a mouse in the cheese cupboard ever since. God knows how much money he’s diverted, where it is. Hammond, the computer company president, wants to hire him.” He shrugged. “I think I got out of the crime business at a good time. I just don’t understand things anymore. Hammond said half a dozen companies would hire him if he actually got access to that computer. And I guess he did.”

Hours later when Charlie fished for his keys, he felt the receipt for the charter boat and brought it out also. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s go fishing.”

“He’s going to take off at high tide, at three or a little after,” she said. She thought of the glassy water of the Gulf. “We have to sleep aboard if we’re going.” They began to hurry, like children rushing to a picnic.

For a moment or two, Constance was aware of another feeling, the same one she had felt years ago when she had looked out her kitchen window that Saturday morning. The same, but intensified, and also directionless.

“You know,” Charlie said, driving, “this is something I’ve wanted to do all my life. Never thought the chance would drop into my lap like this. Freezing rain was falling when I left the city. . . .”

Beside him, Constance was caught up in his infectious gaiety; she pushed the intrusive feeling of dread and fear out of her mind.

At the docks, she and Charlie went into an all-night diner to ask directions, and they met Dino Skaggs there, one of the brothers who owned Dinah’s Way. He was a wiry brown man with sun-bleached hair, his face so wrinkled, it was hard to guess his age, which Constance thought was about thirty-five, give or take a few years.

Dino scowled when Charlie showed him the receipt. “You sure he isn’t coming?” he asked suspiciously, studying the receipt.

“I’m sure,” Charlie said. “Look, if there’s an additional charge because there’re two of us, we’ll pay it.”

Dino bit his lip as he studied Charlie, then Constance. “Shit,” he said finally. “Hundred per head, in advance. We shove off at three. No checks,” he added as Charlie pulled out his checkbook.

“I have cash,” Constance said. She counted out the hundred and handed it to Dino, who recounted it.

He stood with the money in his hand, still frowning glumly. “Shit, I guess you won’t be eating all that much.” He peeled off five tens and thrust the bills back to her. “Don’t bother to come aboard until two-thirty, and keep it quiet when you do. We’ve got a sleeping passenger aboard already.” He slouched away.

“Well,” Constance said. “You’re sure about this?”

“Shit yes,” Charlie said, grinning. “Want some coffee?”

Dino met them on the dock where Dinah’s Way was moored. It was too dark to tell much about the boat, except that it looked small, and very pretty, sparkling white, with blue letters, blue trim, gleaming copper rails. It looked less like a fishing boat than Charlie had anticipated.

“You’ll want to watch the lights and all, I guess,” Dino said morosely. “I’m going to settle you in the stern and you stay put. When you’ve had enough, you go on to your stateroom. And no talking in the galley. Inside your room with the door closed, it’s okay, just keep it low. Right?”

Charlie said, “Aye, aye,” and Dino groaned. Constance felt a stab of impatience with Charlie. He was too eager, too willing to let this pip-squeak boss him around.

“I’ll take her out from up on the flybridge,” Dino went on. He led them aboard and to the rear. The boat rocked gently. “Grandstand seats,” Dino said, pointing to two fighting chairs. “Back through here,” he said, motioning them to come to the cabin, “you go down the stairs, and turn right at the bottom. There’s a yellow light over the door; that’s your room. Light switch on the wall. Head at the far end. Bathroom,” he added, glancing at Constance. “You’d better take your seats. I’ll see you in the morning.” He waved to a man who was leaning against a piling and vanished around the side of the boat.

Constance leaned toward Charlie. “What’s a flybridge?”

“I don’t know.”

They sat back in their chairs and watched the gleaming black water laced with ladders and bridges and arcs of lights. The engines started up and Charlie found Constance’s hand and held it; lights came on above and around them, running lights, Charlie thought with self-satisfaction, and then they were moving easily, backing away from the dock, out into the bay. Here and there, other boats were moving, small boats with lights hardly above the waterline, larger fishing boats, a yacht that made everything else look toylike. Charlie sighed with contentment.

When they finally went to bed, after all the lights had disappeared in the distance, they shared one of the bunks. Sometime during the night, Charlie moved to the other one and again fell asleep instantly.

He woke up first and was amazed to find that it was nearly eight. The motion of the boat was very gentle, nothing like what he had imagined. He had never been on a boat before, except for a rowboat when he was a kid. He thought of the seascapes he had admired, always stormy, threatening. Another time, he decided, and was glad that today the Gulf was like a pond, the boat’s motion hardly noticeable. As soon as he got up and started toward the head, he realized the motion had been effectively concealed while he had been horizontal. He held to the bunk and groped for the door. He had just finished showering when he heard Constance scream.

He flung open the shower door and stopped. Standing in the open doorway to the galley stood June Oliveira, staring at Constance.

“Where is he?” she demanded.

“Why didn’t you tell us she was aboard?” Charlie snapped.

They were in the galley, where Dino was making breakfast. June Oliveira had gone forward, he told them.

“I don’t recall that you asked me,” Dino said, breaking eggs, his back to them.

“We have to go back,” Constance said.

Now Dino turned. “Lady, get this one thing straight. This is my boat. I’m the skipper. I say when we come out and when we go in. I made a contract with Mr. Bramley, all signed, paid for, everything. You and your husband said you wanted to use that contract. That means we do it my way. And that means we fish until this afternoon. I pick up my brother Petie, and then we go back. That’s in the contract, and I’m following it to the letter. You don’t want to fish, fine. You can look at scenery. I’ll fish.”

“When did she come aboard?” Charlie asked, his voice easy now. His working voice, Constance thought.

“Last night. I was checking things out and there she came. What’s this? What’s that? I’m going, too, you know. I’m his guest, you know. He wants to pretend it isn’t planned, so just don’t say anything to him, so he won’t have to lie about it. That’s her story. How was I to know anything?”

Charlie nodded in sympathy. “I’ve seen her operate. But you could have mentioned it to us,” he added reasonably.

“Yeah. I should have. I was afraid you wouldn’t want to go, and I sure as hell didn’t want to go out alone with her. She’s . . . I don’t know. Anyway, I had to go out to pick up Petie, and I’m sticking to the original schedule. Now let’s eat.” He motioned toward the table, where there was a coffeepot. “Help yourselves.”

The galley was sparkling with copper fixtures, everything so compact and well planned that in an area hardly more than five feet square there were a two-burner stove, a refrigerator, sink, cabinets. The table and a right-angled bench could seat half a dozen people. Behind it, there was a wall separating off another stateroom, and beyond that the pilot’s cabin. The boat was moving slowly, on automatic pilot while Dino did the galley chores.

Charlie began to wonder how much it all cost. Opposite the galley was what Dino called the saloon, with three chairs and a bench-sofa and coffee table. The walls were mellow, rich paneling. Teak? Mahogany? It looked expensive.

Dino served up ham and scrambled eggs and fluffy cinnamon rolls.

“Are you going to call her?” Charlie asked. “She said she’d have coffee a little later. I think she’s mad as hell.” He looked at Constance, who was eating nothing, just drinking the coffee. “Look, I’m sorry. But the boat’s big enough for four people not to get in each other’s way. You and Charlie just stay in the stern, do a little fishing. I’ll see that she stays forward, or up on the flybridge. I can run the boat from the pilot’s bridge down here, or from up there, either way.”

He showed them the pilot’s bridge. “Dual controls,” he said, “for the two diesels. This is clutch; this is throttle. Midway, that’s idle, forward for going ahead, back like this to reverse, down all the way to stop. That’s all there is to that. And the wheel here, just like a car, only you allow for more time and space for everything to happen. Okay?” He glanced around at the instrument panel. “You won’t need more than that. In case Charlie gets a big one, I might have you run us while I help him. Oh, yeah, here’s the starter, just in case you need it. Just flip it on.”

Again, Charlie was struck by the simplicity and the beauty of the boat. He was very much afraid the Skaggs boys were running more than fish out of the Gulf waters. And he told himself to forget it. He wanted no part of the drug business; he was retired.

Dino got Charlie baited up, urged Constance again to give it a try, then went below. In a few minutes, he said, they’d start trolling. Constance looked at the water, almost too bright to stand; there were long, smooth swells, and now and then there was a soft plop as water broke against the side of the boat. She had grown used to the lesser slaps of water; the larger sounds broke the rhythm. Something splashed out of sight behind her and she wondered, prey or predator? The sea stretched out endlessly, formless, exactly the same everywhere, and yet different under the lazy swells. It would be terrifying to be out there alone, she thought; they were so small and the sea was so big. Another splash sounded and this time she swiveled to see what it was. She could not even see ripples. Prey or predator? She caught a movement from the corner of her eye and turned farther and looked into the eyes of June Oliveira up on the flybridge. She’s frightening because her expression never changes, Constance thought, and abruptly swung back around. She felt cold in the hot sunlight. She should have known that woman would be aboard. It had been easy enough to figure out that Bramley had planned his accident to take place at sea.

“Why didn’t you argue with Dino at least a little?” she asked bitterly.

“Wouldn’t have done any good. I’m afraid we’re on a drug run, honey. So let’s just play it real cool. I’m in the insurance racket and you’re a housewife. Period. We don’t know from nothing. Right?”

“Oh for heaven’s sake!” she muttered helplessly, and stared at the brilliant water until her eyes smarted.

Dino brought her a big floppy straw hat and a long-sleeved shirt. “You’re going to cook,” he said. “You’re already burning. People as pale as you can get sun poisoning without ever getting warm.”

“Thanks,” she said, and he ducked away quickly, back to the pilot’s bridge. Soon the boat began to move a little faster through the calm waters. “He’s hard to hate,” Constance said, tying the ribbon of the hat under her chin.

Charlie nodded, and thought, But he’s a drug runner. Sometimes he tried to sort out the criminals he hated most on a scale from one to ten. Usually, he put arsonists first, but he knew that was prejudice. He had had to get transferred from the arson squad when he had started having nightmares, had smelled smoke where there wasn’t any, and suspected smoldering rags behind all locked doors. Child molesters came next, then rapists, and drug pushers, murderers. . . . But he always changed the order even as he composed it, because some of them obviously had to be second, and they couldn’t all be. He glanced at Constance; her eyes were closed.

He woke up with a start. Dino had touched his shoulder.

“Sorry,” Charlie muttered. Constance was coming awake also.

“Doesn’t matter,” Dino said. “If you’d gotten a strike that would have waked you up pretty fast. Just wanted to tell you, might as well reel in. I’m taking us to a place to try some reef fishing. Might get something there. Good place for scuba diving.” He looked at Charlie hopefully, shrugged when Charlie shook his head.

Dino sent June Oliveira down from the flybridge, and then the boat stood up and raced through the water. Charlie nodded at Constance. He had suspected there was a lot more power in the engines than they had witnessed before.

June Oliveira braced herself in the doorway to the galley; she looked terrified. Constance remembered what Lou Bramley had said about her: she did nothing dangerous. Obviously, she thought what they were doing was dangerous. Constance was glad to see that she did have at least one other expression.

When Dino cut the engines and came down, he looked happy, as if this was what he liked to do, open it up and roar, leaving a wide white wake behind them as straight as a highway through a desert.

“Lunchtime,” he said cheerfully. “Then you’ll get a snapper or two, Charlie. Bet you a ten spot on it.”

He would have won. Charlie caught a red snapper within the first fifteen minutes of fishing over the reefs.

“It’s a beauty,” Dino said. “Catch its mate and that’s our supper. Go ashore, build a little fire, roast them on a spit. That’s good eating, Charlie. Just you wait and see.” He was keeping an eye on the progress of the sun, evidently timing their day carefully. “You’ve got half an hour.” He watched Charlie bait his hook, patted him on the back, and left with the first snapper, to put it on ice. The boat was again on automatic, moving slowly over the shadows of the reefs.

Charlie was excited and pleased with himself, Constance knew, standing close to him, watching the water. The live fish on his line went this way and that, then vanished. Charlie was muttering that it was pulling; maybe he had something—no, it was just the bait fish. Something splashed behind them. Charlie let out more line as his bait fish headed deeper. Constance was watching, looking down, when she caught a glimpse of a larger motion. She jerked her head around and saw Dino in the water behind them.

“Charlie! Look!”

He dropped his rod and grabbed at one of the life preservers clamped in place against the side of the cabin. “Get this thing back there!” he yelled to Constance as he moved.

She raced through the cabin, through the saloon, to the pilot’s bridge. Put it on manual, she thought clearly, and flipped the automatic control off. Pull the control back to reverse. She pulled the lever back, heard a slight click as it passed neutral, and then the engines stopped. She groaned and hit the lever back up to the neutral position, aligned the clutch control. She pushed the starter. Nothing. She repeated it several times before she gave up and ran back to the stern, where Charlie was standing rigidly, staring at the water behind them. Their momentum was pushing them forward slower and slower.

“I killed the engines,” Constance said, tearing off her hat, loosening her sneaker with her other hand.

“What are you doing?” Charlie asked. His voice sounded strange, forced.

“I’m going in after him.”

Charlie’s hand clamped painfully on her arm. He was still looking at the water. Now Constance looked. There was the life preserver, nearly two hundred feet away, bobbing easily. There was no sign of Dino.

“I almost hit him with it,” Charlie said in that strained, thick voice. “He could have reached out and touched it, caught it. He never made a motion toward it. He wasn’t even trying to swim.”

“I can still get him up,” Constance said, jerking her arm, trying to get loose.

“No! He went down like a stone. He’s on the bottom, already dead. He wasn’t even struggling.”

Constance felt her knees threaten to buckle. She turned to look at the flybridge: June Oliveira was standing up there facing the life preserver. Her eyes were closed.

“She did it,” Constance whispered. “She killed him.”

“Take it easy, honey,” Charlie said. “She was up there the whole time.” He turned away from the water now. “He must have had a stroke or something, couldn’t move, couldn’t swim. He didn’t even yell. Maybe he was already dying before he fell in.”

“You don’t just fall overboard,” Constance said, watching June Oliveira, who hugged herself, opening her eyes. She looked at Constance; her expression was as blank as ever. She moved to the ladder and descended from the fly-bridge.

“I think I lie down now,” she said.

They watched her enter the cabin. “Let’s go up there and see if we can get this boat going,” Charlie said. He sounded tired. Wordlessly, Constance started up the ladder to the flybridge.

The flybridge was built over the main cabin; the front was enclosed, the rear open, with another fighting chair. There were wraparound windows and a control panel exactly like the one below, the same wheel, dual controls for the engines, automatic pilot. The same array of dials and indicators that neither of them understood. Charlie sat down behind the wheel and looked at the controls: The automatic was turned to off; it must have moved when Constance turned it below. The dual controls were both at midpoint, in neutral. He turned on the starter. Dead.

“I thought it might be like a car engine,” Constance said. “Maybe I flooded it when I moved the throttle too fast.” She knelt down and tried to see behind the control panel. It was all enclosed.

“What are you looking for?”

“A wire. She must have pulled a wire loose or something.”

Charlie shook his head. “Knock it off, honey. I’m telling you, she was nowhere near him. Let’s go find the engines. Maybe we can tell if it’s flooded, or if a battery connection is loose.”

“See if the radio works,” Constance said.

Charlie had no idea what most of the switches and knobs were for, but he did know how to operate a radio. It was dead.

At three, Charlie called June Oliveira to the galley. He had made coffee and was drinking a beer. Constance watched the other woman warily when she drew near to sit at the small table. She said she wanted nothing when Charlie offered her a drink.

“We’re in a spot,” Charlie said. “I don’t think it’s especially serious, but still, there it is. I can’t make this boat go. I don’t know how, and neither does my wife. Do you know how to run it?”

She shook her head. “It is the first time I am on a boat.”

“I thought so. Okay. So we have to wait for help. We have no electricity, and that means no lights. Someone may spot us before dark; if not, we’ll have to take shifts and keep a watch. I’m afraid we might be run down, or we might miss a passing ship or small boat. I found a flare gun to signal with if we see anything.” He poured more coffee for Constance.

“His brother, he is expecting us,” June Oliveira said. “When we do not arrive, he informs the authorities. Yes? They come for us then.”

Charlie shrugged. He was trying to place her accent. Not Spanish, not anything he had heard before. Portuguese? He did not think so; there had been some Sao Paulo students at the crime lab, eight, nine years ago, and they had not sounded like her. He said, “Eventually, they’ll come, but I doubt they’ll hear from Petie right away.” Little brother, he thought, would have to hide something first, bury it, sink it at sea, do something. Depending on where he was, little brother might have to be rescued also. “We’d better prepare for an all-night wait, and a daylight search tomorrow.”

“If there is more beer . . .” June Oliveira said then.

He took one from the refrigerator and handed it to her. Already the ice was melting. They would have to eat before dark, before the butter melted, the other food spoiled.

“If you two will start keeping a watch now,” he said, “I’ll gather up everything I can think of that we might need during the night. I found one flashlight only, so we’d better have things in one place.” He handed a pair of binoculars to Constance. “You take the flybridge. Yell out if you see anything. Miss Oliveira, you go forward and keep an eye open for a ship. Later we’ll switch around, choose lots or something. Okay?”

Constance watched her go around the cabin to the forward deck before she started up the ladder to the flybridge. Charlie handed up the coffee and the binoculars to her.

“Be careful,” she said softly.

Charlie felt a twinge of impatience with her. He nodded and turned to his task. When Constance got a notion, he thought, she played it to the bitter end, no matter how ridiculous it was. He scanned the water briefly before going back inside. He could no longer see the life preserver and he was glad, even though he could not tell if the boat had drifted or if the wind had simply taken the doughnut away. He was glad it was not there, a constant reminder that he had done nothing at all, and had prevented Constance from trying to do anything. She swam like a fish; she might have saved him. He did not believe it, but the thought came back over and over. He remembered his own feeling of terror at the idea of letting Constance go over the side after Dino: What if she got out there and just stopped swimming, as he had done? He knew he could not have helped her; he would have watched her look of incomprehension, fear, disbelief. . . . Angrily he jerked up a life jacket and stood holding it. Where to put things? Not on the table, which they would be using off and on. Not in the saloon; probably they would take turns sleeping on the couch. Finally, he opened the door to the stateroom he and Constance had shared the night before. He put the life jacket on her bunk and went out to continue his search; a first-aid kit, what else? He was not certain what they might need; he could make no list and then go search. All he could do was collect things he saw that looked useful. He felt the same helplessness now that he had experienced when Constance had said they did not even know what switch to throw to put out an anchor to stop their drift. He did not know where they were, how fast they might be drifting, or in what direction, not necessarily pushed by the wind, although they might be; it was also possible that they were in a current from the Florida Straits. He simply did not know.

Constance made a hurried scan of the horizon in all directions, then a slower search. She saw birds, and she saw porpoises in the distance. A few hours ago, the sight would have thrilled her, seeing them leaping; now it was depressing that only the creatures of the sea were out there. Charlie clearly thought Dino’s death was the result of a seizure of some sort; she knew she would not be able to convince him of anything else. Up here, examining the problem logically, she agreed that it had been an accident, but she rejected the logic. She knew June Oliveira had been responsible, even if she did not understand how she had done it. She knew, and accepted, that she would not have been able to save Dino. It would not have been allowed. She could not see the woman from on the flybridge, and she could not hear Charlie moving about. She bit her lip and strained to hear something, but there was only the slap, slap of water on the side of the boat, and a faraway birdcall. She went down the ladder and met Charlie coming up from the cabin.

“What’s wrong? Did you see a ship?”

“No. I just came down for my hat.” She had left it in the saloon. She retrieved it and started up again. “Charlie, say something to me now and then, or whistle, or something. Okay?” His nod was perfunctory and absentminded. He was tying a self-inflating rubber raft to the side rail, out of the way of traffic, but available if they needed it. A second raft was already tied in place. Constance returned to her post and did the entire search again.

The sun was getting lower. A couple more hours of daylight, she thought, and then the long night wondering what Oliveira would do next, if she could do anything as long as Constance was awake and watching her. She leaned over the side of the flybridge and called, “Charlie, is there plenty of water?”

“Yeah, I checked. And plenty of coffee,” he added, as if reading her mind. She smiled slightly and looked at the sea.

They should eat something before it started to get dark, she decided a little later. Oliveira could come up here while she made something; she started down the ladder again. There was only the gentle sloshing sound of water. Charlie was still below, maybe swearing at the engines. She took a step toward the cabin door, paused, and instead went to the side of the cabin and looked forward. June Oliveira was standing at the rail near the pilot’s cabin windows, and beyond her, ten feet away, Charlie was swinging one leg over the rail.

Soundlessly, Constance dashed the fifteen feet to the woman and hit her with her shoulder, knocking her flat. She kept going and grabbed Charlie, who was hanging on to the rail, dangling over the water. She hauled on Charlie’s arms and he pulled himself up, got purchase with his foot, and heaved himself back aboard. He was the color of putty. June Oliveira was starting to sit up. “You move another muscle and I’m going to throw you overboard!” Charlie yelled at her. He unfastened the inflatable raft he had secured to the rail and tied the rope to one of the loops on it. Holding it over the side, he pulled the release and then dropped it, keeping the rope in his hand, letting it out as the raft fell and settled.

“Now get up!” he ordered. “Over the side, down the ladder. Move!”

She shook her head. “I am hurt! Your wife attacked me! I think my back is broken.”

“You’d better be able to swim, lady. You go down under your own power or I’m going to throw you in and let you swim for the raft. Right now!”

“You are crazy,” she said.

“Hold this,” Charlie said, handing the end of the rope to Constance, taking a step toward the woman. She was on her knees, and now she scrambled up, clinging to the side of the boat, then to the rail. She looked terrified, the way she had looked when Dino had roared at full speed over the water. “There’s the ladder,” Charlie said, stopping within reach of her. She backed away, stepped up the two steps to the rail, then over it, down the ladder. Charlie maneuvered the raft closer and she stepped into it, clutching the sides. “Get down low,” he said. “I’m towing you to the other side.” He didn’t wait for her to crouch down, but yanked on the rope and hauled the raft, bumping and rubbing against the boat hull, around to the other side, where he tied it securely.

“Let’s go below,” he said to Constance then. “I sure God want a drink.”

Silently, he poured bourbon for them both, added some shrunken ice cubes, and took a long drink from his.

A long shudder passed over him and his knees felt weak. He sat down and pulled Constance to his side, put his arm around her shoulders, and held her tightly against him.

“Oh, Charlie,” she said softly, “I’m afraid we’ve caught ourselves a boojum.”

He held her tighter. He still saw himself going into the water, not struggling, not trying to swim, going under, down, down. . . .

“I think you’re right,” he said. His voice was so normal that few people would have detected the difference, the slight huskiness, the almost too-careful spacing of words.

“Do you know what happened to you?” Constance asked. She drank also and welcomed the warmth; she had become icy cold now that the woman was in the raft and she and Charlie were side by side.

“I was going to go over just as if I had decided to do it. I was doing it and I was watching myself do it. Watching her watching me, pushing me, not even trying not to go, not even trying to resist. I was just doing it.”

She nodded. Neither of them said, Like Dino. “What are we going to do?”

“Remember when I read The Hunting of the Snark to Jessica? Remember what she said when I asked what she’d do if she caught a boojum?”

Constance nodded again. Jessica had said the only thing to do was cut it loose and run.

“It might come to that,” Charlie said grimly. “It just might.” He took the last swallow of his bourbon, then pushed the glass away. He got up and put the coffeepot on the burner to heat it. “Start with the first time you saw her, the first thing Bramley said about her,” he said. “You were right, honey. I should have paid attention. Let’s try to make some sense out of it now.”

He stopped her when she told again how Lou Bramley had bypassed her to sit at a table with June Oliveira. “Exactly what did he do?”

“You know the wide doors? He stood there looking around until he spotted me and then started toward my table.” She closed her eyes, visualizing it. “Then he looked past me and he didn’t look at me again. His face changed a little, became set, almost like a sleepwalker, or someone in a trance.” She opened her eyes. “She did it then, too. I was blind not to realize.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Charlie said. “Then what?”

“I waited a minute or two. Then I decided to spoil it for her, to join them. I got up and started toward their table. . . .” She stopped, remembering. “I thought it was my decision to take a walk instead. Oh my God, I wasn’t even aware . . . I didn’t even wonder about it!”

Charlie squeezed her shoulder. “Try to remember exactly how it was, honey, I think it may be important. What was he doing when you started to walk?”

“His back was to me. He was staring at the water. I got pretty close to them before I changed my . . . He hadn’t moved, I’m sure. Then I turned right.” She stopped, eyes closed. “I think he might have stood up; there was a motion. I just caught it from the corner of my eye, and I was thinking how hot it was on the sand. It was sunny, and I had been trying to avoid the hot sun. I went a little farther and decided I didn’t want to walk after all.”

“You were thinking it was hot, all that, close to their table?”

She nodded. “What is it, Charlie?”

“She couldn’t hold both of you,” he said. “She got you past the table and lost him, grabbed him back and lost you. What do you think?”

She considered it and nodded. “But we can’t be certain. We can’t count on it.”

“No, but it’s something.” The other thing she had said, that the woman did nothing dangerous, alarmed him. No doubt she thought it was very dangerous out there on the raft with night coming on fast. She might even be right; it could be dangerous. He didn’t know.

“I’d better start making sandwiches,” Constance said. “We’re all going to be hungry eventually.”

“Okay, but keep talking. What else was there?”

She talked as she rummaged in the refrigerator and the cabinets. When she stopped again, Charlie was staring fixedly at the tabletop, deep in thought. She did not interrupt him, but continued to assemble the sandwiches.

It did not make any sense to him. If she had that kind of power, to control people like that, why use it in such a perverse way? Murder was so commonplace, never really dull, but not exciting, either; it was always sad, always futile, always the action of ultimate failure. It was the final admission that there was no solution to a problem, no human solution. But no one needed her kind of power to commit murder. A gun, a knife, poison, a brick, a fire . . . he had seen them all; death that looked accidental—a fall, car exhaust in a closed garage, a leaky gas stove, overdoses of everything that could be swallowed. All filthy, all irreversible, all committed by ordinary people for ordinary reasons: money, sex, revenge, greed. . . . All committed without her kind of power. That was the puzzle. Why use such a gift for something so mundane? And why out here in God knew what part of the gulf? She could be knocking people off every day of the week—running them in front of trains, making them jump from high places, forcing them to put bullets through their brains. Who would suspect? Each and every one would go down as accidental, or suicide.

He remembered what Lou Bramley had said, that she had known he was going to die and wanted to watch. He nodded.

Constance, seeing the nod, stopped all movement, waiting, but Charlie continued to stare through the tabletop.

Bramley had been broadcasting death and she had picked it up somehow. She had planned to watch for whatever insane pleasure that gave her, and she had been cheated. Again, Charlie nodded. She had had her death through murder, not suicide. And she planned to kill the witnesses. Now he shook his head. No one had witnessed anything. What could he or Constance say that could damage her? She could make a better case against them. Of course, if she was a psychopath, none of the best reasoning in the world would apply to her. He rejected that also. She was the boojum, an it, not like other people. He could not fathom her motives in either event—a whacko, or something inhuman. And, he thought, motives were not the issue. What she might try next was the only issue now. She had tried to kill him, damn near succeeded, and she no doubt would try again.

But she had not come out here to kill, he said to himself, and he held on to that one thought as the only clue he had about her, the only thing he was reasonably certain about. If the original plan had worked, Bramley would be dead now, a legitimate suicide passing for accident, and she and Dino would be back ashore. Their stories would have been accepted: Dino was well known; the insurance would have entered into it. Finis. Dino’s death was a different matter. No one would believe he had fallen off his own boat in a dead calm, in the first place. And it was less plausible to suggest that he had not gotten back aboard, even if he had managed to fall. Although no one could prove anything else, no one would ever believe that story. What if there were others, like her, who would know the story he and Constance could tell was true? His skin prickled all over at the thought that his people would never believe his story, but that this woman’s people, if she had people, would.

He was certain she planned to be the sole survivor of a ghastly tragedy. No one knew he and Constance were aboard. If they vanished, no one would know that. The contract would be found with Bramley’s name, and he was in New York, out of it. She could say anything to account for Dino’s disappearance, and he was the only one she would have to account for, actually.

Constance froze in the motion of cutting through a sandwich; Charlie lifted his head and listened. June Oliveira was calling them in a shrill, panic-striken voice.

They went out together, staying close to each other. Constance still carried the butcher knife.

“There is a shark! I saw it! You can not keep me out here! I will stay in the little room. You lock the door. Please, I did not do nothing. You know I did not!”

In the west, a spectacular sunset was blossoming; the light had turned deep pink, making June Oliveira look flushed, almost ruddy, very normal, ordinary, and very frightened.

“Who are you?” Constance demanded.

“I see him starting to climb over the rail, and I am petrified. I cannot move. I am terrified of water. I cannot to help him or call out or anything. I am coward. I am sorry.”

“You don’t just watch them die, do you?” Constance said. “You weren’t watching Dino. Your eyes were closed. You feel it, experience it. Why? Why don’t you feel your own people’s deaths? Why ours?”

“She crazy,” June Oliveira wailed to Charlie. “She crazy!”

“I saw you,” Constance said. “You knew exactly when Dino died. We didn’t; we couldn’t know, but you did. You planned to experience Lou’s death. You come here to feel death without dying yourselves, don’t you? Do your people ever die? Just by accident, don’t they? Isn’t that why you’re so terrified of water, of fire, of anything that might be dangerous?”

“Please give me jacket or sweater. I am cold. So afraid,” June Oliveira moaned.

“For God’s sake,” Charlie said, and turned away. “I’ll get her jacket.”

“How many of you are there?” Constance asked furiously. “How many murders do you commit? How many accidents do you cause?”

The woman was huddled down, her arms wrapped about herself. Suddenly, Constance realized what she had done; she had separated them. She turned, to see Charlie in the narrow passage between the rail and the cabin, coming toward her, carrying the heavy gaff, the iron hook Dino had said they used on the big ones.

Constance put the knife to the rope tethering the raft. “Let him go or I’ll cut you loose! You’ll drift away. He can’t bring you back; he doesn’t know how.” She began to cut.

She stopped the sawing motion and watched as if from a great distance as the knife turned in her hand, began to move toward her midsection. In the stomach, she thought, so death wouldn’t be too fast. There would be time to feel it all, to know it was happening . . .

Charlie leapt at her, grabbed the knife, and threw it out into the water. His hand dripped blood.

Constance sagged, then straightened. “My God, oh my God! You’re hurt! Let’s go fix it.” Neither of them looked at the woman in the raft as they hurried away, back inside the cabin.

“What are we going to do?” Constance whispered. “Charlie, what can we do? We can’t even cut her loose!”

“Get the first-aid kit,” Charlie said calmly. “You’ll need the flashlight. The kit’s on your bed. Bring a clean towel, too.”

Constance snatched up the flashlight and ran to the stateroom for the kit and towel. When she returned, Charlie was washing the blood from his hand. She dried and bandaged it and neither spoke until she was done.

“I’m going to kill her,” Charlie said. He reached out and gently touched the shirt Constance had on. There was a slash in it; she had not even noticed, had not realized how close it had been.

This was why some people murdered, Charlie thought, because there really was no solution, no human solution. How easy it was to step across that line. He felt as if he had always known that, had denied knowing it, had pretended it was not true when of course it had been true from the beginning. When he had transferred from the arson squad, it had been because he had dreamed too many times that he was the one arranging the materials, pouring the oil or the gasoline, setting the match. The thrill of the pursuer, the thrill of the pursued, who could tell how different they were? Now that he had crossed that imaginary line, that arbitrary line that each cop drew for himself, he knew the thrill was the same, the desperation the same, the fear, it was all the same.

“We can’t cut her loose,” he said in that deceptively calm voice, “so we cut ourselves loose. We have to go out in the other raft, get the hell away from her. She’ll try again, maybe soon. Before it gets much darker.” He glanced about the galley. “Start packing up everything you think we might need for tonight and tomorrow. We might not be picked up for hours, maybe a couple of days. Fill whatever you can find with water.”

Thank God she didn’t argue, he thought, going into the stateroom. She knew their chances of escaping as well as he did, knew their only chance was in getting distance between them and June Oliveira. He lifted the mattress of his bunk. Foam, he thought with disgust. There was a plywood board, and beneath it there were cabinets with linens. He nodded. It would do. He cut a circle out of the foam mattress with his pocketknife and tucked the extra piece under the pillow on the other bed. He had seen a can of charcoal starter in a cabinet in the galley; he went out to get it. He took the flashlight back with the can. He soaked the plywood board and let it air out before he replaced the mattress. In the hole, he now put a folded towel and then added a layer of crumpled toilet paper, then another towel, this one folded in such a way that the paper was exposed in the center of it. He studied it for a minute and sighed. The fumes were gone, the odor so faint that he might not have noticed it if he was not sniffing. He had seen cigarettes somewhere, in one of the cabinets in the saloon. Dino did not smoke, but maybe Petie did, or their guests. He went to the saloon and found the new package and opened it, lighted a cigarette with the flame from the stove. Constance was filling a plastic water bottle, a collapsible gallon jug. There were two at the bottom of the stairs, already filled. She looked startled at the cigarette, but she still asked no questions.

“About ready?” Charlie asked.

She nodded. “It’s getting dark fast.”

“Yes. Come on, let’s tell her our plans.”

“Charlie . . .” She stopped; there was not enough time to spell it out. She followed him to the door.

Charlie went to the corner of the cabin and yelled, “You, you can have the goddamn boat! We’re taking off in the other raft. Before we go, I’m going to toss the portable ladder over your side so you can climb aboard. Just leave us alone and let us take off. Is it a deal?”

He puffed the cigarette hard. It was not yet dark, but within half an hour it would be. Already the water looked solid, impenetrable, and there were two stars in the deep violet sky. She must be calculating her chances of getting one of them before dark, making the other bring her aboard. He was not even sure she could make someone do anything as complicated as that; she was not a telepath. Her power was cruder, a total assault, a complete takeover. She cannot read our thoughts, he said to himself, praying it was true.

“If you leave the flashlight. Put it on the flybridge, turned on, so I can see it.” She sounded calmer and was controlling her accent and syntax better, but her voice was still tremulous.

He let out his breath. “Okay. We’re taking provisions with us, water and stuff. It’ll take us a few minutes, ten maybe.”

He nodded to Constance. “Let’s get the life jackets and other stuff over by the ladder.”

As Constance began to carry things from the cabin to the railing, Charlie entered the stateroom again. He lighted a second cigarette from the first and then put them both very carefully on top of the paper in the hole in the mattress. He pulled the sheet over it, and the bedspread, with ripples in it for air to pass through easily. For years, he had known how easy it would be, how well he would be able to do it. He put the extra life jackets on that bed, and then he was through. He left the stateroom door open when he went into the cabin. One last thing he had to get, he thought, almost leisurely, and he went to the drawer where he had seen an assortment of thread and needles. He chose the largest needle, a darning needle, or a sail-mending needle; it was four inches long and only slightly less thick than an ice pick. He stuck it through his shirt. Constance returned for the last of the items she had put aside, the bag of sandwiches.

“Listen,” he said to her softly. “We’ll put the raft out, make sure the paddles are in it, and then load. While you’re putting the flashlight on the flybridge, I’m going to swim around the boat. The last thing you do is hang the ladder over the side, make sure it’s secure and everything. We don’t want her to get suspicious now. Then you get in the raft and start paddling to the front end of the boat. You pick me up there and we paddle like hell.”

“What are you going to do?”

He pointed to the needle. “Puncture her escape route.”

Constance shook her head and began to strip. “That’s my department,” she said. “You’d never make it in time, and you splash like a puppy. Same plan, different performers.

“No!” He saw her, arms crossed over her chest, sinking, sinking. . . .

“Yes! Let’s move!” She was making a bundle of her clothes. She had on only her bra. Now she reached out and took the needle and put it through the top of the bra. “You know the only way it’ll work is if I do that part. You know that. We don’t dare have her out in the water alive. We have no idea how far she can reach.”

He pulled her to him and kissed her hard, and then they hurried to get the raft into the water, get it loaded. Only one quadrant of the sky was still light now; to the east, the sky and sea merged in blackness.

“Arrange it any way you can,” Charlie said, nodding to her, when they were through. She slipped from the raft soundlessly and vanished into the dark water. “That looks good enough for now. When I get in, we can shift things around some. I’ll put the flashlight up there and then give her the ladder. You okay?”

It was all taking much longer than he had realized it would, he thought bleakly. What if smoke began to pour from the cabin? What if she got suspicious, caught Constance down there in the water? What if she took this as her last chance to get them both? He climbed to the flybridge and put the flashlight down, shining toward the stern, away from where Constance might be surfacing. What if there really had been a shark? He felt weak with fear; his hands were trembling so hard, he could scarcely hold the rail as he left the flybridge to get the ladder.

Constance surfaced at the prow of the boat and waited. There was the ladder, and Charlie was running away to the other side. June Oliveira had to haul herself in hand over hand to reach the ladder; she started to climb. As soon as she started up, Constance sank below the surface again and swam to the raft. She lifted her face only enough to get air, then went under and pulled out the needle and stuck it into the raft. The raft bobbed and she stopped moving, afraid the woman would be alarmed, turn around. She stuck the needle in three more times before she had to surface for air. The next time she went under, she began to swim toward the prow of the boat, praying that Charlie would be there by now.

When Charlie first started to paddle, he found himself moving away from the boat at right angles. Frantically, he pulled with one paddle until he bumped the boat. Keeping against the hull, using one paddle only, he finally got to the front end. Where was she? She should be here by now, he thought with despair, and she appeared at the side of the raft. He grabbed her arm and hauled her in, and she began to pull on her clothes as fast as she could. She was shivering hard from the cold water, the chill night air. Before she got her shirt buttoned, Charlie was putting the life jacket on her. He was wearing his already. As soon as she had the life jacket tied, she took her place by him, took up the paddle, and they both began to row hard. The raft did not move through the water easily; it seemed to be mired in tar. But gradually, they pulled away from the boat, and now Charlie could see the light from the flash bobbing in the windows of the cabin, then the pilot’s cabin, stern. She was checking it out, as he had thought she might. She went to the fly-bridge and in a minute or two the boat’s engines started up. Constance groaned and pulled harder on her paddle. It was no use, she thought dully. She would run them down, watch them die anyway, feel them die.

“We have to stay behind the boat,” Charlie said. “You know how to turn these things?”

“You push; I pull,” Constance said, knowing it was no use. They could dodge for a while, but eventually they would tire, or she would make one of them stop paddling, or something.

Slowly, they made the raft go astern. The boat was not moving yet; the engines were idling. Now the lights came on. Constance blinked as the light hit them. “Charlie, she can back up!” she whispered. “Christ!” He had forgotten.

The boat began to move forward, not very fast; the wake shook the small raft, tilting it high to one side. The boat left them behind, then started to turn. Like steering a car, Charlie remembered. It was just like steering a car, except you need more room. She turned too wide and came out of it far to the right of the raft. She had switched on a searchlight now, was playing it back and forth, looking for them. She seemed not to realize how wide her turn had been; the light came nowhere near them. It stopped moving.

Constance watched fearfully. The boat looked so close. The engines were so loud. She felt herself go blank, felt sleep-heavy, immobilized. When it passed, in a second or two, the light began to move again, this time swinging around to focus on them.

“She reached me,” Constance said tonelessly. “We can’t hide from her.”

Why didn’t the damn boat start burning? He knew it had to burn. He visualized the fire that had to be smoldering along the bed board, in the cabinet under the bed. The towels should be blazing by now. The boat was turning slowly; she was being careful. She had all the time in the world, she seemed to be telling them, keeping them pinned by the blinding light, keeping them waiting for her next move. Charlie wondered if she laughed. If she ever laughed.

She was steering with one hand, holding the light with the other, not letting either go to increase her speed. The throb of the engines did not change, only grew louder.

Constance began to pull on her paddle. “At least let’s make her work for it,” she said grimly. Charlie pulled hard, sending them on the beginning of another circle. Then suddenly, the light made an arc, swung wildly away, up, down, off to the other side.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, pleased. Smoke was rolling from the cabin windows. He began to pull on the paddle again, harder now. “We should try to get some more distance from it,” he said.

Silently, they rowed, not making very much gain, and they watched the boat. The smoke had lessened. Constance was afraid June Oliveira had put the fire out already. Charlie felt almost smug; he knew the smoldering had turned into blazing; there would be less smoke, more heat, more fire. When the first flame showed on the side of the boat, he said, “I think we should get down in the bottom of this thing, as flat as we can.” It would blow, he knew, and he did not know how much of an explosion there would be, what kind of shock there would be, if they were too close. He hoped June Oliveira was tossing water on the flames, that she had not thought of the beautiful fire equipment on board, or of abandoning the boat. He had not seen her since the powerful spotlight had come on.

He and Constance curled up in the bottom of the raft. “Try to keep your ears covered,” he said. He raised himself enough to continue to watch, his hands cupped over his ears. Flames were shooting out every window now, licking up around the flybridge. When the explosion came, it was not as loud or as violent as he had thought it would be. A fireball formed, then vanished almost instantly, and the boat erupted in a shower of fiery objects; the lights went off, and now there was only a low fire that was being extinguished very fast as the boat settled, began to slide under the water. They could hear a furious bubbling, then nothing, and the fire was gone. The sea was inky black.

Constance was on her knees, clutching the side of the raft. She shuddered and Charlie put his arm about her, held her close. “Did she get off?” she whispered.

“I don’t know yet.”

They waited in silence as their eyes adapted to the darkness. Charlie could see nothing out there; he could hardly even see Constance. She was little more than a pale shadow. He strained to hear.

When it came, it sounded so close, he felt he could reach out and touch the woman. She sounded as if she was weeping. “Why do you do that? Why? Now we all die in the sea!”

He could not tell her direction, distance, anything at all. The voice seemed close, all around him.

Constance put her head down, pressing her forehead against the rounded side of the raft. “We should have slashed the other raft, scuttled it.”

He had been afraid that if she had not believed she had an escape at hand, she might have used the impressive fire-fighting equipment. She might have been able to put out the fire with it. She might have known about the emergency hatch in the tiny engine room with the simple instructions: Open in case of fire. It would have flooded the engines and the fuel tanks with seawater; the boat would have been immobilized, but it would be afloat. Worse, he had feared that if she had been trapped, she might have reached out and killed them both instantly. She had been in the raft, knew it was comparatively safe; she had to trust it again. How long would it take for the air to leak out enough? He did not know. He could hear a paddle splashing awkwardly.

“Do you remember where we put the flare gun?” he asked in a whisper. One to light up the scene, he thought; the next one aimed at her.

Constance began to grope for the gun. There was a loud splash close by. June Oliveira screamed shrilly.

“Sharks!” Constance yelled. She knew sharks did not make splashes, did not leap from the water. Perhaps the porpoises had come to investigate the explosion. Maybe a seabird had dived. Her hand closed on the gun and she handed it to Charlie.

“First, Charlie,” the woman called out. “Constance stay with me until morning. You are good swimmer. I saw you in water. Is possible I need you to swim for me.”

She was talking to still her terror of the water, the sharks she believed to be circling her, to break the silence. Constance recognized that shrillness, the clipped words; Oliveira was panic-stricken.

“Sometimes they come up under you and graze the boat,” Constance yelled. “They’re so rough, they puncture the rubber, and you don’t even know it until too late. You can feel the sides of the raft getting soft, the top sinking in a little . . .”

Charlie was searching for the extra packet of flares. One was in the gun; he wanted a second to jam in and fire quickly before the light faded, while she was still dazed from the sudden glare.

“I’ve got it,” he whispered finally. “Shield your eyes.”

He fired straight up, then scanned the water. She was several hundred feet away, kneeling in the other raft, holding the paddle with both hands, stilled by the unexpected light. He rammed the second flare into the gun, then pitched forward, dropping the gun, not unconscious, but without muscle tone, unable to move.

Constance snatched up the paddle and started to row as hard as she could. She was stronger than the other woman; at least she could outdistance her.

“Stop!” Oliveira called. “Stop or I kill him now. I do not like it at this distance, but I do it.”

Constance put the paddle down. The light had faded already; again there was only darkness, now even deeper, blacker. Charlie lay huddled in the bottom of the raft, unmoving.

“Stay very still,” the woman said. “I come to your little boat. You are right about many things. During the night you explain to me how you know, what makes you guess, so I tell my people.”

“Why Bramley? People are dying all the time. Why him?”

“Because I know him. We seldom know them, the people who are dying. It is more interesting to know him.”

The water remained quiet around them; there were only the splashes of her paddle. She was so inept, it would take her a long time to cross the distance separating them. Constance nudged Charlie with her toe. He did not respond.

“Why don’t you just hang around hospitals? People die there every hour, every day.”

“They are drugged. Sometimes it is good.” Her voice was getting firmer, losing its fearful note, as she narrowed the space between them, and the water remained still.

Constance nudged Charlie again. Move, she thought at him, please move, get up. “You come here and murder, kill people. Watch them suffer for your own amusement. Do you torture them to death to drag it out?”

“We are not uncivilized,” the woman said sharply. “We do not kill; we participate. It does no harm.”

“You killed Dino!”

There was silence; her paddle slapped the water, then again. “I expect the other one. I have only until Sunday. I will be forgiven.”

Constance shuddered. She reached out and touched Charlie’s face. She wanted to lie down by him, gather him in her arms, just hold him.

The paddle hit, lifted, hit. And then it suddenly splashed very hard, and the woman screamed hoarsely. “My raft getting soft! It is punctured!”

Charlie stiffened even more under Constance’s hand. She was using him as a beacon, homing in on him.

Constance picked up one of the water jugs and heaved it out toward the other raft. It made a loud noise when it hit the water.

“Sharks are all around us!” she yelled. The other paddle stopped and there was no sound. Constance groped for something else to throw, something heavy enough to make a noise, light enough to lift and heave. Her hand closed over the paddle. She lifted it silently and brought it down hard on the water. She screamed. “They’re hitting our raft! Charlie, do something!”

Charlie began to stir; he pulled himself to his knees cautiously; the woman was letting go. Her terror was so great, she could no longer hold him. From the other raft, there were sounds of panicky rowing; she was simply beating the water with the paddle. Charlie and Constance began to row, saying nothing, trying to slip the plastic paddles into the water without a sound, pulling hard.

“It is sinking!” the woman screamed. “Help me!”

Constance screamed also, trying for the same note of terror. She screamed again, then listened. The other woman was incoherent, screaming, screeching words that were not human language. Soon it all stopped.

For a long time, they sat holding each other without speaking. Now and then, something splashed, now close to them, now farther away. They could see nothing.

In a little while, Charlie thought, he would fire the flare gun again, then periodically repeat it through the night. Someone would see. Maybe someone had seen the fire, was on the way already. He would have to think of a story to tell them—a fire at sea, Dino’s going back after getting them into the raft. . . . He could handle that part. He had heard enough stories essentially like his, lies, excuses, reasonably enough put together to fool most people. He could do that. And Constance was thinking: There would come a day when one or the other of them would start to doubt what had happened. What that one would remember was that they, together, had killed a crazy woman.

“She wasn’t human,” Charlie said, breaking the silence. And Constance knew he would be the one who would come awake at night and stare at the ceiling and wonder about what they had done. She would have to be watchful for the signs, make him remember it exactly the way it had happened. And one day, she thought, one of them would say what neither had voiced yet: That woman had not been alone. There were others.

Now Charlie thought: They would live with this, knowing what they had done, that there were others out there, maybe not as murderous as this one had been, or maybe just like her. They could tell no one; no one would ever believe. Constance had her proof of that uncharted part of the psyche and could not even use it.

“I think I dislocated my shoulder when I threw that jug out,” Constance said, shifting in his arms. “I’m aching all over.”

And he knew his hand was bleeding through the bandage; it was throbbing painfully suddenly. He had forgotten about it. “In just a minute, I’ll see if there’s a sling in the first-aid kit. I need a new bandage, too.” He felt her nod against his shoulder.

“Poor, little, miserable, helpless, vulnerable, hurt people,” she sighed. “That’s us. Adrift on an endless ocean as dark as hell. With a terminal case of life. But I wouldn’t trade with them.” Knowing you were gambling eternity, you wouldn’t dare risk your life for someone you loved, she thought, trying to ignore the pain in her shoulder, down into her arm. You wouldn’t dare love, she thought. You wouldn’t dare. Period. Not far away, something splashed.

Neither of them moved yet. It was enough for now to rest, to feel the solidity of the other, to renew the strength the last several hours had taken from them. Quietly, they drifted on the dark sea.

THE FIRE WHEN IT COMES

Parke Godwin

This impressive F&SF debut is a gripping contemporary ghost story which also presents a fascinating and convincing picture of a young actress. Mr. Godwin writes that he is a reformed actor whose latest novel, FIRELORD, was published by Doubleday in 1980. He is the co-author (with Marvin Kaye) of THE MASTERS OF SOLITUDE and its recently completed sequel, WINTERMIND.

Got to wake up soon.

I’ve been sick a long time, I mean really sick. Hard to remember why or how long, but it feels like that time I had hundred-and-three fever for a week. Sleep wasn’t rest but endless, meaningless movement, and I’d wake up to change my sweaty nightdress for a clean one which would be soaked by sunup.

But this boring, weary dream has gone on for ages. I’m walking up and down the apartment trying to find the door. The furniture isn’t mine. People come and go, replaced by others with even tackier sofas in colors loud enough to keep them awake, and I flutter around and past them on my own silly route as if I’d lost an earring and had to find it before I could get on with life. None of it’s very real, murky as cinema-verité shot in a broom closet. I have to strain to recognize the apartment, and the sound track just mumbles. No feeling at all.

Just that it’s gone on so long.

All right, enough of this. Lying around sick and fragile is romantic as hell, but I have to get it together, drop the needle on the world again and let it play. I’m—

Hell, I am out of it, can’t even remember my name, but there’s a twinge of pain in trying. Never mind, start with simple things. Move your hand, spider your fingers out from under the covers. Rub your face, open your eyes.

That hasn’t worked the last thousand times. I can’t wake up, and in a minute the stupid dream will start again with a new cast and no script, and I’ll be loping up and down after that earring or the lost door. Hell, yes. Here it comes. Again.

No. It’s different this time. I’d almost swear I was awake, standing near the balcony door with the whole long view of my apartment stretching out before me: living room, pullman kitchen, the bedroom, bathroom like an afterthought in the rear. It’s clear daylight, and the apartment is bare. Sounds are painfully sharp. The door screams open and shuts like thunder.

A boy and a girl.

She’s twenty-two at the outside, he’s not much older. He looks sweet, happy and maybe a little scared. Nice face, the kind of sensitive expression you look at twice. The girl’s mouth is firmer. Small and blonde and compact. I know that expression, tentative only for a moment before she begins to measure my apartment for possibilities, making it hers.

“Really a lot of room,” she says. “I could do things with this place if we had the money.”

My God, they’re so loud. The boy drifts toward me while she bangs cupboard doors, checks out the bathroom, flushes the toilet.

“The john works. No plumbing problems.”

“Al, come here. Look, a balcony.”

“Wow, Lowen, is that for real?”

Of course it’s real, love. Open the door, take a look and then get the hell out of my dreams.

“Let’s look, Al.” He invites the girl with one hand and opens the balcony door. He’s in love with her and doesn’t quite know how to handle it all yet. They wander out onto my tiny balcony and look down at 77th Street and out over the river where a garbage scow is gliding upstream. It’s a lovely day. Jesus, how long since I’ve seen the sun? Kids are romping in the playground across Riverside Drive. Lowen and Al stand close together. When he pulls her to him, her hand slips up over his shoulder. The gold ring looks new.

“Can we afford it, Lowen?”

“We can if you want it.”

“If? I never wanted anything so much in my life.”

They hold each other and talk money as if it were a novelty, mentioning a rent way over what I pay. The frigging landlord would love to hang that price tag on this place. Lowen points to the drainpipe collar bedded in a patch of cement, monument stone to my epic battle with that bastard to clear the drain and anchor it so every rain didn’t turn my balcony into a small lake. Lowen’s pointing to letters scratched in the cement.

“GAYLA.”

That’s right, that’s me. I remember now.

They look through the apartment again, excited now that they think they want it. Yes, if they’re careful with their budget, if they get that cash wedding present from Aunt Somebody, they can work it. I feel very odd; something is funny here. They’re too real. The dream is about them now.

Hey, wait a minute, you two.

The door bangs shut after them.

Hey, wait!

I run out onto the balcony and call to them in the street, and for the first time in this fever dream, I’m conscious of arms and legs that I still can’t feel, and a fear growing out of a clearing memory.

Hey, hello. It’s me, Gayla Damon.

Lowen turns and tilts his head as if he heard me, or perhaps for one more look at where he’s going to live with Al-short-for-Alice. I can’t tell from his smile, but I lean to it like a fire in winter, out over the low stone parapet—and then, oh Christ, I remember. For one terrible, sufficient flash, the memory flicks a light switch.

If I could cry or be sick, I’d do that. If I screamed loud enough to crack the asphalt on West End Avenue, nobody would hear. But I let it out anyway, and my scream fills the world as Lowen and Al stroll away toward Riverside Drive.

As if they could actually see me hunched over the balcony edge, head shaking back and forth in despair. They could will their real bodies to stop, real eyes lift again to a real, vacant balcony.

Because they’re real. I’m not. Not sick or dreaming, just not.

You died, Gayla baby. You’re dead.

The last couple of days have been bad. Panic, running back and forth, scared to death or life, I don’t know which, trying to find a way out without knowing where to go or why. I know I died, God, am I sure of that, but not how or how to get out.

There’s no frigging door! Lowen and Al sail in and out unloading their junk, but when I try to find the door, it’s Not, like me. I’m stuck here. I guess that’s what frightens all of us because you can’t imagine Not. I never bought the MGM version of heaven. For me, being dead was simply not being, zero, zilch, something you can’t imagine. The closest you can come is when a dentist knocks you out with pentothol or how you felt two years before you were born.

No. I don’t end, you say. Not me, not the center of the universe. And yet it’s happened and I’m stuck with it, no way out, trying to hack the whole thing at once, skittering back and forth from the bedroom to the living room, through the kitchen with its new cream paint, crawling like cigarette smoke in the drapes, beating my nothing-fists against the wall sometimes, collapsing out of habit and exhaustion into a chair or bed I can’t feel under me, wearing myself out with the only sensation left, exhaustion and terror.

I’m not dead. I can’t be dead, because if I am, why am I still here. Let me out!

To go where, honey?

There’s a kind of time again. Al’s pinned up a Japanese art calendar in the kitchen, very posh. This month it’s a samurai warrior drawing his sword; either that or playing with himself. I can’t see it that well, but the date is much too clear. 1981. No wonder the rent’s gone up. Seven years since I—

No, that word is a downer. Exited is better. Just how is still a big fat blank wrapped in confusion. All I remember is my name and a few silly details about the apartment. No past, no memory to splice the little snippets of film that flash by too swiftly to catch. Not that it matters, but where’s my body? Was I buried or burned, scattered or canned in memoriam in some mausoleum? Was there a husband, a lover? What kind of life did I have?

When I think hard, there’s the phantom pain of someone gone, someone who hurt me. That memory is vaguely connected with another of crying into the phone, very drunk. I can’t quite remember, just how it made me feel. Got to organize and think, I’ve worn myself out running scared, and still no answers. The only clear thought is an odd little thing; there must have been a lot of life in me to be kept so close to it.

Don’t ask me about death. The rules are all new. I might be the first of the breed. It’s still me, but unable to breathe or sleep or get hungry. Just energy that can still run down from overuse, and when that happens, Lowen and Al grow faint. That’s all there is to me now, energy, and not much of that. I have to conserve, just float here by Al’s painfully correct window drapes and think.

Does anyone know I’m here. I mean, Anyone?

A few more days. Al and Lowen are all moved in. Al’s decor works very hard at being House Beautiful, an almost militant graciousness. Style with clenched teeth. And all her china matches—hell, yes, it would. But let’s face it: whatever’s happening to me is because of them. When they’re close, I get a hint of solid objects around me, as if I could reach out and touch tables and chairs or Lowen, but touching life costs me energy. The degree of nearness determines how much of my pitiful little charge is spent. Like being alive in a way. Living costs. I learned that somewhere.

Just got the hell scared out of me. Al has a mirror in the bedroom, a big antique affair. Sometimes when she brushes her hair, I stand behind her, aching out of habit to get that brush into my own mop. Tonight as I watched, I saw myself behind her.

I actually jumped with fright, but Al just went on pumping away with the brush while I peered over her head at Gayla Damon. Thirty-three—I remember that now—and beginning to look it. Thank God that won’t bother me any more. Yes, I was tall. Brownish-black hair not too well cut. Thin face, strong jaw, eyes large and expressive. They were my best feature, they broadcast every feeling I ever had. Lines starting around my mouth. Not a hard mouth but beginning to turn down around the edges, a little tired. Hardness would have helped, I guess. Some of Natalie Bond’s brass balls.

Nattie Bond: a name, another memory.

No, it’s gone, but there was a kind of pain with it. I stared at the mirror. Cruddy old black sweater and jeans: was I wearing them? You’d think I could check out in something better.

Hey, brown eyes, how did they do you for the curtain call? Touch of pancake, I hope. You always looked dead without it. Oh, shit. . . .

A little crying helps. Even dry it’s something.

I watch Lowen more and more, turning to him as a flower follows the sun, beginning to learn why I respond to him. Lowen’s a listener and a watcher. He can be animated when he’s feeling good or way down if he’s not. Tired, depressed or angry, his brown eyes go almost black. Not terribly aggressive, but he does sense and respond to the life going on around him.

He likes the apartment and being quiet in it. He smokes, too, not much but enough to bother Al. They’ve worked out a compromise: anywhere but the bedroom. So, sometimes, I get a surprise visit in the living room when Lowen wakes up and wants a smoke. He sits for a few minutes in the dark, cigarette a bright arc from his mouth to the ashtray. I can’t tell, but sometimes it seems he’s listening to pure silence. He turns his head this way and that—toward me sometimes—and I feel weird; like he was sifting the molecules of silence, sensing a weight in them. Sometimes in the evening when he and Al are fixing dinner, Lowen will raise his head in that listening way.

It’s a long-shot hope, but I wonder if he can feel me.

Why has he brought me back to time and space and caring? All these years there’s been only blurred shadows and voices faint as a radio in the next room. Real light and sound and thought came only when he walked in. When Lowen’s near, I perk up and glow; when he leaves, I fade to drift, disinterested, by the balcony door.

Lowen Sheppard; twenty-four at most, gentle, unconsciously graceful, awkward only when he tries to be more mature than he is. Don’t work at it, lover, it’ll come. Soft, straight brown hair that he forgets to cut until Al reminds him, which is often. She’s great on detail, lives by it. Faces this apartment like a cage of lions to be tamed. Perhaps it’s the best she ever had.

Lowen seems used to this much or maybe better. Mister nice guy, not my type at all, and yet I’m bound to him by a kind of fascination, bound without being able to touch his hair or speak to him. And it’s no use wondering why, I’m learning that, too. Like that old Bergman flick where Death comes to collect Max Von Sydow. Max says, “Tell me what eternity is like.” And Death says, “Who knows? I just work here.”

Don’t call us. We’ll call you.

Well, damnit, someone is going to know I’m here. If I can think, I can do, and I’m not going to sit here forever just around the comer from life. Lowen and Al are my world now, the only script left to work with. I’m a part of their lives like a wart on the thigh, somewhere between God and a voyeur.

Wait, a memory just . . . no. Gone too quick again.

If I could touch Lowen somehow. Let him know.

Lowen and Al are settled in, place for everything and everything in its place, and Al daring it to get out of line. Lowen works full time, and Al must do some part-time gig. She goes out in the early afternoon. The lights dim then. Just as well; I don’t like what she’s done with my apartment. Everything shrieks its price at you, but somehow Al’s not comfortable with it. Maybe she never will be. That mouth is awful tight. She wanted to keep plastic covers over the sofa and chairs, the kind that go crunkle when you sit on them and make you feel like you’re living in a commercial. But Lowen put his foot down on that.

“But, Al, they’re to use, not just to look at.”

“I know, but they’re so nice and new.”

“Look, I wear a rubber when we make love. I don’t need them on the furniture.”

She actually blushed. “Really, Lowen.”

Son of a—she makes him—? Do guys still wear those things? Whatever happened to the sexual revolution?

It’s indicative of their upbringing the way each eats, too. Al sits erect at the table and does the full choreography with her knife and fork, as if disapproving mama was watching her all the time. Cut the meat, lay the knife down, cross the fork to her right hand, spear, chew, swallow, and the whole thing over again. Left hand demurely in her lap.

Lowen leans slightly into his plate, what-the-hell elbows on the table. More often than not, he uses the fork in his left hand, placing things on it with his knife. The way he handles them both, he’s definitely lived in England or Europe. Not born there, though. The fall of his speech has a hint of softness and mid-South nasal. Virginia or Maryland. Baltimore, maybe.

Perhaps it’s just plain jealousy that puts me off Alice. She’s alive. She can reach out and touch, hold, kiss what I can only look at. She’s the strength in this marriage, the one who’ll make it work. Lowen’s softer, easier, with that careless assurance that comes from never having to worry about the rent or good clothes. He’s been given to; Al’s had to grab and fight. Now he’s got a job and trying to cut it on his own for the first time. That’s scary, but Al helps. She does a pretty fair job of supporting Lowen without letting him notice it too much.

She has her problems, but Lowen comes first. She gets home just before him, zips out to get fresh flowers for the table. A quick shower and a spritz of perfume, another swift agony at the mirror. And then Lowen is home and sitting down to dinner, telling her about the day. And Al listens, not so much to the words but the easy, charming sound, the quality she loves in him, as if she could learn it for herself. She’s from New York, probably the Bronx. I remember the accent somehow. Petite and pretty, but she doesn’t believe it no matter how much attention Lowen gives her. Spends a lot of time at the mirror when he’s gone, not admiring but wondering. What does she really look like. What type is she, what kind of an image does she, should she, project; and can she do it? Lipstick: this shade or that? So she fiddles and narrows her eyes, scrutinizing the goods, hopes for the advertised magic of Maybelline and ends up pretty much the same: more attractive than she thinks, not liking what she sees.

Except she doesn’t see. She’s carried it around all her life, too busy, too nervous and insecure to know what she’s got. Stripped down for a bath, Al looks like she never had a pimple or a pound of fat in her life, but I swear she’ll find something wrong, something not to like.

Don’t slop that goo on your face, girl. You’re great already. God, I only wish I had your skin. The crap I had to put on and take off every night, playing parts like—

Parts like. . . .

My God, I remember!

I was an actress. That’s what I remember in quick flashes of hard light. The pictures whiz by like fast cars, but they’re slowing down: stage sets, snatches of dialogue, dim faces in the front rows. Bill Wrenn giving me a piece of business to work out. Fragments of me like a painting on shattered glass, I grope for the pieces, fitting them together one by one.

Bill Wrenn: there’s a warm feeling when I think of him, a trusting. Where did I meet him? Yes, it’s coming back.

Bill directed that first season at Lexington Rep. Gentle and patient with a weariness that no longer expected any goodies from life, he always reminded me of a harried sheepdog with too many sheep to hustle. Forty years old, two marriages and struck out both times, not about to fall hard again.

But he did for me. I made it easy for him. We were out of the same mold, Bill and I. He sensed my insecurity as a woman and found ways to make it work for me onstage, found parts in me I’d never dream of playing. With most men, my whole thing began in bed and usually ended there. Bill and I didn’t hurry: there was a love first. We enjoyed and respected each other’s work, and theater was a church for us. We’d rehash each performance, sometimes staying up all night to put an extra smidge of polish on business or timing, to get a better laugh, to make something good just a hair better. We started with a love of something beyond us that grew toward each other, so that bed, when it came, was natural and easy as it was gorgeous.

I made him love me, my one genuine conquest. We even talked about getting married—carefully skirting around a lot of if’s. I seem to remember him asking me one night in Lexington.

I think he asked then; there’s a thick haze of vodka and grass over that night. Did I say yes? Not likely; by that time the old habits were setting in.

It was too good with Bill. That’s not funny. Perfection, happiness, these are frightening things. Very few of us can live with them. After a while, I began to resent Bill. I mean, who the hell was he to take up so much of my life? I began to pick at him, finding things not to like, irritating habits like the nervous way he cleared his throat or dug in his ear when he was thinking out some stage problem; the way he picked his feet in bed and usually left the bathroom a mess. Just bitchiness. I even over reacted when he gave me notes after a performance. All bullshit and panic; just looking for a way out. How dare you love me, Bill Wrenn? Who asked you? Where did I get that way, where did it begin?

When Nick Charreau came into the company, he was tailor-made for me.

He was alone onstage the first time I saw him, a new cast replacement going through his blocking with the stage manager. Everything his predecessor did, Nick adjusted to show himself in a better light. He wasn’t a better actor, but so completely, insolently sure of himself that he could pull off anything and make it look good, even a bad choice. Totally self-centered: if there were critics in the house, Nick lit up like a sign, otherwise it was just another working night in the sticks.

Nick was a lot better looking than Bill and eighteen years younger. Even-featured with a sharp, cool, detached expression. Eyes that looked right through you. He could tell me things wrong with myself that would earn Bill Wrenn a reaming out, but I took it from Nick. He didn’t get close or involved all the way down. Perhaps that’s why I chose him, out of cowardice. He wouldn’t ever ask me to be a person.

When he finished the blocking session, I came down to lean on the stage apron. “You play that far back, you’ll upstage everyone else in the scene.”

“It’s my scene. I’m beautifully lit up there.” Nick’s smile was friendly with just the right soilpson of cockiness. A little above us all, just enough to tickle my own self-doubt and make me want to take him on. I can handle you, mister. You’re not so tough.

But he was. There was always part of Nick I couldn’t reach or satisfy. I started out challenged, piqued, to cut him down to size in bed and ended up happy if he’d just smile at me.

Looking over Al’s shoulder in the mirror, I know it’s not what we’re born but what we’re made into. The game is called Hurt me, I haven’t suffered enough. I needed a son of a bitch like Nick. You don’t think I’d go around deserving someone like Bill, do you?

Call that weird, Alice? You’re the same song, different verse. You have that wary, born-owing-money look yourself. You handle it better than I did—you knew a good man when you saw one—but you still feel like a loser.

The fights with Bill grew large, bitter and frequent. He knew what was happening and it hurt him. And one night we split.

“When will you grow up, Gayla?”

“Bill, don’t make it harder than it has to be. Just wish me luck.”

Dogged, tired, plopping fresh icecubes into his drink. “I care about you. About you, Gayla. That makes it hard. Nick’s twenty-two and about an inch deep. He’ll split in six months and you’ll be out in the cold. When will you learn, Gay? It’s not a game, it’s not a great big candy store. It’s people.”

“I’m sorry, Bill.”

“Honey,” he sighed, “you sure are.”

I still hovered, somehow needing his blessing. “Please? Wish me luck?”

Bill raised his glass, not looking up. “Sure, Gay. With Nick you’ll need it.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Nothing, forget it.”

“No, you don’t just say things like that.”

“Sorry, I’m all out of graciousness.”

“What did you mean I’ll need it.”

Bill paused to take a swallow of his drink. “Come on, Gay. You’re not blind.”

“Other women? So what.”

“Other anybody.”

“Oh boy, you’re—”

“Nick swings both ways.”

“That’s a lie!”

“He’d screw a light socket if it helped him to a part.”

That was the nastiest thing Bill ever said about anyone. I felt angry and at the same time gratified that he made it easier to walk out mad. “Good-bye, Bill.”

And then he looked up at me, showing what was hidden before. Bill Wrenn was crying. Crying for me, the only person in this fucking world who ever did. All the pain, anger, loss, welling up in those sad sheepdog eyes. I could have put my arms around him and stayed . . . no, wait, the picture’s changing. I’m here in the apartment. Get him out of here, Nick—

No, it goes too fast or I will it to go. I can’t, won’t remember that yet because it hurts too much, and like a child I reach, cry out for the one thing I could always trust.

Bill-l-l—

Not a scream, just the memory of sound.

Lowen looks up from his book, puzzled. “Al? You call me?”

No answer. It’s late, she’s asleep.

Once more Lowen seems to listen, feeling the air and the silence, separating its texture with his senses. Searching. Then he goes back to his book, but doesn’t really try to read.

He heard me. He heard me. I can reach him.

Sooner or later, he’ll know I’m here. Bust my hump or break my heart, I’ll do it. Somehow. I’ve got to live, baby. Even dead, it’s all I know how to do.

I’ve hit a new low, watched Lowen and Al make love. At first I avoided it, but gradually the prospect drew me as hunger draws you to a kitchen; hunger no longer a poignant memory but sharp need that grows with my strength.

I’ve never watched love-making before. Porn, yes, but that’s for laughs, a nowhere fantasy. One of the character men in Lexington had a library of films we used to dig sometimes after a show, hooting at their ineptness. They could make you laugh or even horny now and then, but none of them ever dealt with reality. Porn removes you from the act, puts it at a safe distance.

Real sex is awkward, banal and somehow very touching to watch. It’s all the things we are and want: involvement, commitment, warmth, passion, clumsiness, generosity or selfishness. Giving and receiving or holding back, all stained with the colors of openness or fear, lovely—and very vulnerable. All that, and yet the words are inadequate; you can’t get any of that from watching. Like the man said, you had to be there.

Rogers and Astaire these two are not. It’s all pretty straight missionary and more of an express than a local. Lowen does certain things and Al tries a few herself, sort of at arm’s length and without much freedom. I don’t think Lowen’s had much experience, and Al, though she needs sex, probably learned somewhere that she oughtn’t like it all that much. She’s the new generation; she’s heard it’s her right and prerogative, but the no-no was bred in early. So she compromises by not enjoying it, by making it uphill for both of them. She inhibits Lowen without meaning to. He has to wait so long for her to relax and then work so hard to get her going. And of course at the best moment, like an insurance commercial in the middle of a cavalry charge, he has to stop and put on that stupid rubber. I wonder if AI’s Catholic, she never heard of a diaphragm? Or maybe it’s money. That’s not so far out. Maybe she’s uptight about getting pregnant because she remembers how it was to grow up poor. Maybe it’s a lot of things adding up to tense ambivalence, wondering why the bells don’t ring and the earth shake like she read in Cosmopolitan. I seem to remember that trip.

She doesn’t give herself much time to relish it afterward, either. Kiss-kiss-bang-bang, then zip with the kleenex and pit-pat into the shower as if someone might catch them. Maybe that’s the way it was before they married, a habit that set before either of them realized it.

But I’ve touched Lowen. God, yes, for one galvanized split-second I felt his body against me. I paid for it, but it had to be.

It was after they made love and Al did her sprint from bed through the shower and into her nightie-cocoon. Lowen went into the bathroom then. I heard the shower running and drifted in after him.

His body looked marvelous; smooth light olive against Al’s blue flower-patterned bath curtains, the soap lather standing out sharp white against the last of his summer tan. Not too muscular; supple like Nick. It’ll be a while before he has to worry about weight.

Lowen soaped and rinsed, and I enjoyed the shape of his chest and shoulders when he raised his arms over his head.

You’re beautiful, Mr. Sheppard.

I had to do it then. I moved in and kissed him, felt his chest, stomach, his hardness against the memory of my pelvis. Only a second, a moment when I had to hold him.

The sensation that shivered through me was like a sudden electric shock. I pulled back, frightened and hurt, hovering in the shower curtain. Lowen jerked, grabbing for the towel rack, taut, scared as myself. Then, slowly, the fear faded and I saw that listening, probing attitude in the lift of his head before the instinctive fear returned. Lowen snapped the water off, stumbled out of the tub and just sat down on the john, dripping and shaking. He sat there for minutes, watching the water drying on his skin, runneling down the sides of the tub. Once he put a hand to his lips. They moved, forming a word I couldn’t hear.

You felt me, damn you. You know I’m here. If I could just talk to you.

But the exhaustion and pain ebbed me. We slumped at opposite ends of the small bathroom, Lowen staring through me, not hearing the sob, the agony of the pictures that flashed into life. Touching him, I remember. After the shock of life comes the memory, filling me out by one more jagged fragment, measuring me in pain.

Al, Al, frowning at your mirror, wondering what magic you lack—I should have your problem. The guys probably lined up around the block when you were in school. Not for Gayla Damon; hell, that wasn’t even my real name, not for a long, hard time. First there was big, fat Gail Danowski from the Bronx like you, and at seventeen what your men prayed for and likely never got, I couldn’t give away.

Why do I have to remember that? Please, I tried so hard to get away from it. My father who worked for the city as a sandhog, my dumpy mother with her permanent look of washed-out disgust, both of them fresh off the boat in 1938. My sister Sasha who got married at seventeen to get away from them. Big change: all Zosh did after that was have kids for that beer-drinking slob husband of hers. Jesus, Charlie disgusted me. Sunday afternoons he’d come over and watch football with my father, swill beer and stuff potato chips. Every once in a while he’d let out a huge belch, then sigh and pat his pot gut like he was so goddamn pleased with himself. For years, while Zosh’s teeth went and her skin faded to chalk delivering five kids.

And me growing up in the middle of it, waiting for the big event of the day in the south Bronx, the Good Humor truck out on the street.

“Mommy, Mommy, the goo-joomer’s here! C’n I have a dime for the goojoomer?”

“Y’fadda din leave me no money.”

Urgent jingling from the Good Humor, ready to leave and take excitement with it. “Mommy!”

“Geddouda here. I ain’t got no dime, now shaddup.”

I used to think about that a lot: a lousy dime. So little and so much to a kid. Go to hell, Momma. Not for the dime, but for a whole beauty you never had and never missed. You weren’t going to keep me from it.

It wasn’t much better in high school. I was embarrassed to undress for gym because of the holes in my underwear. And the stains sometimes because I had to use Momma’s kotex and she didn’t care if she ran out. I could have used tampax; virgin or not, I was a big, healthy ox like her and Zosh. I could have conceived an army. When Momma found the tampax I bought, she slapped me halfway across the room.

“What’s this, hah? Hah? I ain’t got enough trouble, you started already? You sneakin’ around, you little bitch?”

No such luck, Momma. They didn’t want me. The closest I got to boys was talking about them. Sitting in a coffee shop over the debris of my cheap, starchy lunch, the table a garbage dump of bread crusts, spilled sugar and straw wrappers, shredding food bits and paper ends like our envious gossip dissected the girls we knew and the boys we wanted to know.

I never had any sense about men or myself. That happens when you’re five foot seven in high school and still growing. A sequoia in a daisy bed, lumpy and lumbering, addicted to food, my refuge when I lost the courage for school dances. I fled home to the ice box and stayed there, eating myself out of my clothes, smearing my acne with Vis-o-Hex, or huddled for hours in a movie, seeing it twice over to pretend I was Hepburn or Bacall, slim, brittle and clever. Or Judith Anderson, tearing hell out of Medea. I read the play and practiced the lines at my mirror with stiff approximations of her gestures.

But it was A Streetcar Named Desire that changed my life. I hardly spoke for days after seeing it. The play stabbed, me deep and sparked something that was going to be, I bought more plays and devoured them. Fewer trips to the movies now and more downtown to Broadway and the Village. Live theater, not unreeling on a spool, but happening the moment I saw it.

I was still a lump, still a hundred and fifty pounds of un-lusted-after virgin bohunk, and nobody was going to star Gail Danowski in anything but lunch. I walked alone with my dreams while the hungers grew.

You can go a little mad with loneliness, past caring. Virginity? I couldn’t give it away, Momma; so I threw it away. No big Zanuck production, just a boy and a party I can’t picture too clearly. We were drinking and wrestling, and I thought: all right, why not? Just once I’m gonna grab a little happiness even if it’s just getting laid, what am I saving it for? But I had to get drunk before he fumbled at me. If there was pain or pleasure, I barely felt them, only knew that at last I tasted life where it sprang from the fountain. A meager cup, the cut version, the boy pulling at his clothes afterward, distant, disgusted.

“Shit, whyn’t you tell me, Gail?”

Tell you what, lover? That I was a virgin, that by accident you were first? Is that a guilt trip? Whatever I lost, don’t mourn it. Cry for the other things we lose in parked cars and motel beds because we’re too drunk or there’s too much guilt or fear for beauty. It was the beauty I missed. Be first any time, score up a hundred stiff, clumsy girls, say the silly words, break a hundred promises, brag about it afterwards. But leave something of yourself, something of beauty. Only that, and you part with a blessing.

He didn’t.

The next morning, hung over and miserable, I looked at that frazzled thing in the mirror, had clean through and down to rock bottom, and knew from here on out I’d have to be me or just another Zosh. That day I started to build Gayla Damon.

I graduated an inch taller and thirty pounds lighter, did hard one-week stock as an apprentice. Seventeen hours a day of walk-ons, painting scenery, fencing and dance classes. Diction: practicing for hours with a cork between my teeth—

“Baby, the word is dance. DAAnce, hear the A? Not de-e-ance. Open your mouth and use it when you speak.”

—Letting my hair grow and moving down to Manhattan, always running away from that lump in the mirror. I never outran her. She was always there, worrying out of my eyes at a thousand auditions, patting my stomach and thighs, searching a hundred dressing room mirrors, plastering pancake on imagined blemishes, grabbing any man’s hand because it was there. The years just went, hurrying by like strangers on a street, trailing bits of memory like broken china from a dusty box: buses, planes, snatches of rehearsal, stock, repertory, old reviews.

Miss Damon’s talent is raw but unmistakable. When she’s right, she is theater, vivid, filled with primordial energy that can bum or chill. If she can learn to control . . . she was superbly cast as. . . .

—A self-driven horse record-time sprinting from nowhere to noplace. Life? I lived it from eight, to eleven o’clock every night and two matinees a week. For three hours each night, I loved, hated, sang, sorrowed enough for three lifetimes. Good houses, bad houses, they all got the best of me because my work had a love behind it. The rest was only fill, and who cared? Season after season of repertory, a dozen cities, a dozen summer towns barely glimpsed from opening night to closing, a blur of men and a lot of beds, flush or broke, it didn’t matter.

Zosh caught a show once when I was playing in Westchester. Poor Zosh: pasty and fat as Momma by then, busting out of her dresses and her teeth shot. She came hesitantly into my dressing room, wondering if someone might throw her out. The first stage play she ever saw. She didn’t know really what to make of it.

“Oh, it was great and all. You look’ good, Gail. God, you really got soitie; figure now, what size you wear? I never knew about plays. You know me’n school, I always got my girlfriend to write my reports.”

She barely sipped the scotch I poured her. “Charlie never buys nothin’ but! beer.” I wanted to take her out for a good dinner, but, no, she had a sitter! at home and it was expensive, and! Charlie would yell if she came home too late when he was out bowling.

“Let the dumb ox yell. You’re entitled once in a while.”

“Hey, you really gettin’a mouth on you, Gail.

“Speaking of that, doesn’t Charlie ever look at yours? Doesn’t he know you need a dentist?”

“Well, you know how it is. The kids take it out of you.”

I gave Zosh a hundred dollars to get her teeth fixed. She wrote that she spent it on the house and kids. There was the gas bill and Christmas. You cant complain theres nobody on the other end of the phone. Ha-ha. My friends all want to know when your on TV.

Are you still around, Zosh? Not that it matters. They buried you years ago. No one was going to do that to me.

And then suddenly I was thirty, that big, scary number. Working harder, running harder without knowing where, doing the where-did-it-all-go bit now and then (while the lights caught her best, most expressive angle). Where are you now, Bill? You must be pushing fifty. Did you find someone like me or just the opposite. I wouldn’t blame you.

And how about you, Nick?

He’ll split in six months. You’ll be out in the cold.

When Bill said that, I remember thinking: hell, he’s right. I’m thirty-two and after that comes thirty-three. Fourteen years, seven dollars in the bank, and where the hell am I?

But I was hung up on Nick’s body and trying to please him. Perhaps there were other, unspoken things that have nothing to do with loving or sex. You get used very early to not liking yourself. You know you’re a fraud, someday they’ll all know. The Lump hiding inside your dieted figure and with-it clothes knows you haven’t changed, no matter what. The Lump doesn’t want to like you. How can she tolerate anyone who does? No, she’ll sniff out someone who’ll keep her in her lowly place.

Crimes and insanities. Hurting Bill was a very countable sin, but I knew what I needed. So it was Nick, not Bill, who moved in here with me.

And where are you this dark night, Nick? Did you make the big time? I hope so. You’re almost thirty now. That’s getting on for what you had to sell. Your kind of act has a short run.

My mind wanders like that when Lowen’s not around.

Energy builds again, the lights dim up. I drift out onto the balcony, feeling that weight of depression it always brings. My sense of color is dimmed because the kids are asleep. 77th Street is a still shot in black and white. Not a soul, not even a late cab whispering up Riverside Drive.

Hey, look: there’s a meteor, a falling star. Make a wish: be happy. Bill Wrenn.

And listen! A clock tower. Even with Lowen asleep, I can hear it. Two-three-four o’clock. Definitely, I’m getting stronger. More and more I can feel and sometimes see my legs when I walk, less like floating in a current. I move back through the apartment to hover over Lowen as he sleeps. Wanting. Wondering.

After all this time, why should it be Lowen who wakes me? Nothing’s clear but that I can touch life again with him. If that’s wrong, I didn’t write the script. Name any form of life you want. A cold germ is just a bug trying to make a living in the only way it knows, in a place it doesn’t understand, and it only takes a little out of the place trying. That’s me, that’s all of us. I’ll take what I need to live. If there’s air to breathe, don’t tell me I can’t. That’s academic.

Al sleeps tiny and still beside Lowen, hardly a bump under the covers. It must be wonderful to sleep like that. I could never stay out more than two hours at a time. No, wait: here she comes up out of it with a sigh and turnover that barely whispers the covers. She slides out of bed and pit-pats to the bathroom. Bladder the size of an acorn, up three times a night like I was.

When the john flushes, Lowen stirs and mumbles, flops over and sinks again. The bathroom door creaks, Al slips back in beside him. She doesn’t settle down yet, but rests on one elbow, a momentary vigil over Lowen, a secret protecting. I’ll bet he doesn’t know she watches him like that. Then she slides under the covers very close, one arm over him, fingers spread lightly on his skin.

To lie beside Lowen like that, to touch him simply by willing it. If that were my hand resting or his skin What wouldn’t I give for that?

The idea is sudden and frightening. Why not?

If I could get inside Al, stretch out my arm inside hers, wear it like a glove; just for a moment move one real finger over Lowen’s skin. It couldn’t hurt her, and I need it so.

I wait for Al to fall asleep, scared of the whole notion. It could hurt. It hurt to touch Lowen before. Maybe it’s against some natural law. They’re flesh, I’m a memory. Lots of maybe’s but I have to try. Slow and scared, E drift down over Al and will what shape there is to me into the attitude of her body. There’s no shock when I touch her, but a definite sensation like dipping into swift-running water. So weird, I pull away and have to build up my nerve to try again, settling like a sinking ship as the current of Al’s healthy young life surges and tingles around me, and her chest rises and falls like a warm blanket over cozy sleep. My breasts nestle into hers, my arm stretching slowly to fill out the slim contour of her shoulder, elbow, wrist. It’s hard and slow, like half-frozen syrup oozing through a hose. My fingers struggle one by one into hers.

So tired. Got to rest.

But I feel life, I feel it, humming and bubbling all around me. Jesus, I must have sounded like a steel mill inside, the way I drove myself. The power such a wonder. Why did I waste so much time feeling miserable?

The electric clock glows at 5:03. More minutes pass while each finger tests itself in Al’s, and then I try to move one on Lowen’s skin.

The shock curdles me. I cringe away from it, shriveling back up Al’s arm, all of me a shaky little ball in her middle. Just as in the shower, I felt skin against skin, even the tiny moisture of pores, but it drains me as if I’ve run five miles.

Rest and try again. Slow, so slow, so hard, but my fingers creep forward into Al’s again. Same thing: the instant I let myself feel with Al’s flesh, there’s a bright shock and energy drains. If that’s not enough, those delicate fingers weigh ten pounds each. I push, poop out, rest, try again, the hardest battle of my life, let alone death, and all in dogged silence broken only by their breathing and the muted whir of the clock.

6:32. The dark bedroom grays up to morning. I can see Lowen’s face clearly now: very young, crumpled with sleep. He can’t hear my soundless, exhausted panting like the heartbeat of a hummingbird.

6:48. Twelve minutes before the clock beeps the beginning of their day, one finger, one slender thread binding me to Lowen . . . moves. Again. I go dizzy with the sensation but hang on, Pouring the last strength into one huge effort. The small hand flexes all five fingers like a crab, sliding over the sparse hair on Lowen’s chest. A flash-frame of Bill, of Nick, and a thrill of victory.

Hi, baby. I made it.

Then Al stirs, moves don’t, please, wait! and flips over on her other side, unconcerned as a pancake. I let go, used up, drifting out to nowhere again, barely conscious of space or objects, too burned out even to feel frustrated after all that work.

But I did it. I know the way now. I’ll be back.

Night after night I kept at it, fitting to Al’s body, learning how to move her fingers without burning myself out. Stronger and surer, until I could move the whole hand and then the arm, and even if Lowen pressed the hand to his mouth or nestled his cheek against it, I could hold on.

And then I blew it, the story of my life. Klutz-woman strikes again. I tried to get in when they were making love.

I said before they’re not too dexterous in the bedroom. Al gets uptight from the start, and I can see her lying there, eyes tight shut over Lowen’s shoulder, hoping he’ll come soon and get it over with. Not always; sometimes she wants it as much as him, but the old hangups are always there. She holds back, so he holds back. It’s usually one-sided and finished soon.

But that evening everything seemed perfect. They had a light supper, several drinks rather than the usual one, and Lowen didn’t spare the vodka. They just naturally segued to the bedroom, not rushed or nervous, undressing each other slowly, enjoyably, melting into each other’s arms. Al brought in a candle from the supper table. Nice touch: Nick and I used to do that. They lie there caressing each other, murmuring drowsily. Lowen looks gorgeous in the soft glow, Al like a little Dresden doll. And me—poor, pathetic afterthought—watching it all and yearning.

Jesus, Al, act like you’re alive. That’s a man. Take hold of him.

Damn, it was too much. The hell with consequences. I draped myself over Al with the ease of practice, stretched my arms and legs along hers. Foolhardy, yes, but at last my arms went around Lowen, smoothing, then clawing down his back.

Love me, baby. Love all of me.

My mouth opened hungrily under his, licking his lips and then nipping at them. I writhed Al’s slim body under his, pushed hers hands to explore him from shoulders to thighs. I never had much trouble in bed. If the guy had anything going and didn’t run through it like a fire drill, I could come half a dozen times, little ones and big ones, before he got there.

With Lowen it was like all the best orgasms I ever had. The moment before you start to go, you want to hold back, prolong it, but you can’t. I was dependent on Al’s chemistry now. Her body was strangely stiff as I hauled her over on top of Lowen. Something new for her. She went taut, resisting it.

“Lowen, wait.”

He can’t wait, though I’m the only one who sees the irony and the lie. Lowen is coming, I certainly want to, but Al is out of it. I want to scream at her, though I should have guessed it long before this. She always times her cries with his, as if they came together:

But it’s a lie. She’s faking it. She’s learned that much.

My God, you’re alive, the greatest gift anyone ever got. Does a past tense like me have to show you how?

With a strength like life itself, churned her up and down on Lowen hard, burning myself out to tear AT careful controls from her emotions She moaned, fighting me, afraid.

“Lowen, stop. Please stop.”

You don’t fake tonight, kid.

“Stop!”

No way. Go . . . go!

Lowen gripped her spasmodically and I felt his hips tremble under mine/hers. He couldn’t hold back an; longer. With the last ounce of my will I bent Al’s body down over his, mouth to mouth.

“Now, Lowen, Now!”

Not Al’s voice but mine, the first time I’ve heard it in seven years. Deeper, throatier than Al’s. In the middle of coming, an alien bewilderment flooded Lowen’s expression. Al stiffened like she was shot. With a cry of bleak terror, she tore herself loose and leaped clear off the bed, clawing for the lamp switch, big-eyed and terrified in the hard light.

“Oh, God, Oh, Jesus, what’s happening?”

Confused, a little out of it himself now, Lowen sat up to stare back at her. “Al, what’s the matter?”

She shuddered. “It’s not me.”

“What?”

“It’s not me.” She snatched up her bathrobe like the last haven in the world. Lowen reached for her instinctively, comforting.

“It’s all right, honey, it’s—”

“No. It’s like something hot inside me.”

He went on soothing her, but he knew. I could see that in his eyes as he pulled Al down beside him. He knew: the last thing I saw, because the lights were going down for me, their last spill playing over memory-fragments before fading. A confused montage: Nick putting on his jacket, me fumbling for the phone, then pulling at the balcony door, and the darkness and the silence then were like dying again.

I’ve had some hangovers in my time, mornings of agony after a messy, screaming drunk. Coming back to queasy consciousness while the night’s party repeats in your mind like a stupid film loop, and you wonder, in a foggy way, if you really spilled that drink on somebody, and—oh, no—you couldn’t have said that to him, and if you’re going to be sick right then or later.

Then the smog clears and you remember. Yeah. You spilled it and did it and you sure as hell said it, and the five best bloody mary’s in the world won’t help.

I blew it good this time, a real production number. Now they both know I’m here.

December 23. I know the date because Al’s carefully crossed the days off her calendar where she never bothered before. I’ve been turned off for days. Almost Christmas, but you’d never know it around here. No holly, no tree, just a few cards opened and dropped on the little teakwood desk where they keep their bills. When Lowen brushes one aside, I can see a thin line of dust. Al hasn’t been cleaning.

The kitchen is cluttered. The morning’s dishes are still in the sink. Three cardboard boxes stand on the floor, each half full of wrapped dishes and utensils.

So that’s it. They’re moving. A moment of panic: where do I go from here, then? All right, it was my fault, but . . . don’t go, Lowen. I’m not wild about this script myself, but don’t ask me to turn out the lights and die again. Because I won’t.

There’s a miasma of oppression and apprehension all through the apartment. Al’s mouth is tighter, her eyes frightened. Lowen comes out into the living room, reluctant and dutiful. Furtively, he tests the air as if to feel me in it. He sits down in his usual chair; 3:13 by the miniature grandfather clock on the book case. The lights and sound come up slowly with Lowen’s nearness. He’s home early this afternoon.

Al brings out the Waterford sherry set and puts it on the coffee table. She sits down, waiting with Lowen. The whole scene reminds me of actors taking places before the curtain rises; Al poised tensely on the sofa, revolving her sherry glass in white fingers; Lowen distant, into his own thoughts. The sound is still lousy.

“. . . feel silly,” Lowen ventures. “. . . all this way . . . time off from . . . just to.

“No! . . . live here like this, not with . . .” Al is really shook; takes a cigarette from Lowen’s pack on the coffee table and smokes it in quick, inexpert puffs. “You say you can feel her?”

Lowen nods, unhappy. He doesn’t like any of this. “I loved this place from the first day.”

“Lowen, answer me. Please.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere close. Always to me.” Al stubs out the cigarette. “And we sure know it’s she, don’t we?”

“Al—”

“Oh, hell! I loved this place too, but this is crazy. I’m scared, Lowen. How long have you known?”

“Almost from the start.”

“And you never told me.”

“Why?” Lowen looks up at her. “I’m not a medium; nothing like this ever happened before. It was weird at first, but then I began to feel that She was just here—

“What!”

“—and part of things . . . like the walls. I didn’t even know it was a woman at first.”

“Until that time in the shower,” Al finishes for him. “Bitch.”

Thanks a lot, kid. At least I know what to do with him.

“Look, Al, I can’t tell you how I know, but I don’t think she means any harm.”

Al gulps down her sherry and fills the glass. “The—hell—she—doesn’t. I’m not into church anymore. Even if I were, I wouldn’t go running for the holy water every time a floor creaked, but don’t tell me she doesn’t mean anything, Lowen. You know what I’m talking about.” Her hands dry-wash each other jerkily. “I mean that night, the way we made love. I—always wanted to make love to you like that. That . . . free.”

The best you ever had, love.

Al gets up and paces, nervous. “All right, I’ve got these goddamned problems. You get taught certain things are wrong. If it’s not for babies, it’s wrong. It’s wrong to use contraceptives, but we can’t afford a baby, and—I don’t know, Lowen. The world is crazy. But that night, it wasn’t me. Not even my voice.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

Lowen must be way down, depressed, because my energy is wavering with his, and sound fades in and out. There’s a muffled knock at the door. Lowen opens it to a bald little man like a wizened guru in a heavy, fur-collared overcoat.

Wait, I know this guy. It’s that little weasel, Hirajian, from Riverside Realty. He rented me this place. Hirajian settles himself in a chair, briefcase on his knee, declining the sherry Al offers. He doesn’t look too happy about being here, but the self-satisfied little bastard doesn’t miss Al’s legs, which make mine look bush league in retrospect.

I can’t catch everything, but Hirajian’s puzzled by something Al’s saying. No problem about the lease, he allows, apartments rent in two days now, but she’s apparently thrown him a curve.

Al now: “. . . not exactly our wish, but . . .”

“Unusual request . . . never anything . . .”

Now Al is flat and clear: “Did you find out?”

Hirajian opens his briefcase and brings out a sheet of paper while I strain at his through-the-wall mumble.

“Don’t know why . . . however . . . before you. . . .” He runs through a string of names until I make the connection. The tenants who came after me, all those damned extras who wandered through my dreams before Lowen.

Lowen stops him suddenly. He’s not as depressed as Al; there’s an eagerness in the question. “Did anyone die here?”

“Die?”

“It’s very important.” Al says.

Hirajian looks like an undertaker’s assistant now, all professional solemnity and reluctance. “As a matter of fact, yes. I was getting to that. In 1974, a Miss Danowski.”

Lowen’s head snaps up. “First name?”

“Gail.”

“Anyone named Gayla? Someone cut the name Gayla in the cement on the balcony.”

“That was the Danowski woman. Gayla Damon was her stage name. She was an actress. I remember because she put that name on the lease and had to do it again with her legal signature.”

“Gayla.”

“You knew her, Mr. Sheppard?”

“Gayla Damon. I should, it’s awfully familiar, but—”

“Single?” Al asks. “What sort of person was she?”

Hirajian cracks his prim little smile like a housewife leaning over a back fence to gossip. “Yes and no, you know show people. Her boyfriend moved in with her. I know it’s the fashion nowadays, but we,” evidently Riverside and God, “don’t approve of it.”

There’s enough energy to laugh, and I wish you could hear me, you little second-string satyr. You made a pass when you showed me this place. I remember: I was wearing that new tan suit from Bergdorf’s, and I couldn’t split fast enough. But it was the best place yet for the money, so I took it.

Damn it, how did I die? What happened. Don’t fade out, weasel. Project, let me hear you.

Al sets down her sherry glass. “We just can’t stay here. It’s impossible.”

Don’t go, Lowen. You’re all I have, all there is. I won’t touch Al, I promise never again. But don’t go.

Of course there were promises, Nick. There’s always a promise. No one has to spell it out.

I said that once. I’m starting to remember.

While Hirajian patters on, Lowen’s lost in some thought. There’s something in his eyes I’ve never seen before. A concern, a caring.

“You mean he didn’t come back even when he heard Gayla was dead?”

I love the way he says my name. Like a song, new strength.

“No end of legal trouble,” Hirajian clucks. “We couldn’t locate him or any family at first. A Mister . . . yes, a Mister Wrenn came and made all the arrangements. An old boyfriend, I suppose.”

You did that for me, Bill? You came back and helped me out. Boy, what I had and threw away. Sand through my fingers.

“Gayla. Gayla Damon.” I grow stronger as Lowen repeats my name, stronger yet as he rises and takes a step toward the balcony door. I could touch him, but I don’t dare now. “Yes. Just the name I forgot. It’s hard to believe, Al, but it’s the only thing I can believe.”

Such a queer, tender look. Al reads it too. “What, Lowen?”

He strides quickly away to the bedroom, and the lights dim a little. Then he’s back with a folded paper, so lost in some thought that Al just stares at him and Hirajian is completely lost.

“The things we learn about life,” Lowen says. “An English professor of mine said once that life is too coincidental for art; that’s why art is structured. Mr. Hirajian, you said no one else ever complained of disturbances in this apartment. I’m not a medium, can’t even predict the weather. But I’m, beginning to understand a little of this.”

Will you tell me, for Christ’s sake?

He hands the paper to Al. It looks like an old theater program. “You see, Mister Hirajian, she’s still here.”

He has to say it again, delicately as possible. Hirajian pooh-poohs the whole notion. “Oh really, now, you can’t be sure of something like that.”

“We know,” Al says in a hard voice. “We haven’t told you everything. She, it, something’s here, and it’s destructive.”

“No, I don’t think so.” Lowen nods to the program. I can’t see it too well. “Eagle Lake Playhouse, 1974. I saw her work.”

You couldn’t have. You were only—

“She played Gwendolyn in Becket. That’s her autograph by her name.”

Where the hell is Eagle Lake? Wait a minute. Wait—a—minute. I’m remembering.

“My father was taking me back to school. I spent my whole life in boarding schools all the way through college. Dad thought for our last night together, he’d take me to an uplifting play and save himself making conversation. My parents were very efficient that way.

“Gayla only had one scene, but she was so open, so completely translucent that I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”

I did play Eagle Lake, and there’s a faint memory of some double-breasted country-club type coming back for an autograph for his kid.

“I still remember, she had a line that went: ‘My lord cares for nothing in this world, does he?’ She turned to Becket then, and you could see a line in that turn, a power that reached the other actor and came out to the audience. The other actors were good, but Gayla lit up the stage with something—unbearably human.”

Damn right, love. I was gangbusters in that role. And you saw me? I could almost believe in. God now, though He hasn’t called lately.

“I was sixteen, and I thought I was the only one in the world who could be so lonely. She showed me we’re all alike in that. All our feelings touch. Next day I hitchhiked all the way back to the theater from school. . . .” Lowen trails off, looking at Al and the apartment. “And this was her place. She wasn’t very old. How did she die?”

“Depressing,” Hirajian admits.

Very ugly and depressing, but then suicide always is.”

What!

“But as regards your moving out just because—”

The hell I did, no way, mister. No. No. No! I won’t listen to any more. Don’t believe him, Lowen.

Lowen’s on his feet, head tilted in that listening attitude. Al puts down her glass, pale and tense. “What is it?”

“She’s here now. She’s angry.”

“How do you know?”

“Don’t ask me how, damn it. I know. She’s here.”

No, Lowen. On the worst, weakest day of my life, I couldn’t do that. Listen. Hear me. Please.

Then Al’s up, frightened and desperate. “Go away, whoever you are. For the love of God, go away.”

I barely hear her, flinging myself away from them out onto the balcony, silent mouth screaming at the frustration and stupid injustice of it. A lie, a lie, and Lowen is leaving, sending me back to nothing and darkness. But the strength is growing, born of rage and terror. Lowen. Lowen. Lowen. Hear me. I didn’t. Hear me.

“Lowen, don’t!”

I hear Al’s voice, then the sudden, sharp sound of the balcony door wrenching open. And as I turn to Lowen, the whole, uncut film starts to roll. And, oh Jesus, I remember.

Eagle Lake. That’s where it ended, Lowen. Not here, no matter what they tell you. That’s where all the years, parts, buses, beds, the whole game came to an end. When I found that, no matter what, none of it worked any more. Maybe I was growing up a little at last, looking for the me in all of it.

Funny: I wasn’t even going to audition for stock that summer. Bill called me to do a couple of roles at Eagle Lake, and Nick urged me to go. It was a good season, closing with A Streetcar Named Desire. The owner, Errnise Stour, jobbed in Natalie Bond for Blanche DuBois, and I was to be her understudy. Nattie’s name wasn’t smash movie box office any more, but still big enough for stock and star-package houses. She’d be Erm’s insurance to make up whatever they lost on the rest of the season.

Erm, you tough old bag. You were going to sell that broken-down theater after every season. I’ll bet you’re still there, chain-smoking over a bottle of Chivas and babying that ratty poodle.

Errnise lived in a rambling ex-hotel with a huge fireplace in the lounge. We had all our opening-night parties there with a big blaze going because Eagle Lake never wanned up or dried out even in August.

At the opening party for Becket, all of us were too keyed up to get drunk, running on adrenalin from the show, slopping drinks and stuffing sandwiches, fending off the local reviewers, horny boy scouts with a course in journalism.

Dinner? No thanks. I’ve got a horrible week coming up, and it’s all I can do to shower and fall into bed. Bill, let’s get out of here. Thanks, you’re a jewel, I needed a refill. Gimme your sweater. Jesus, doesn’t it ever get warm in this place? You could age beef in our dressing room.

Nick was down for a few days the week before. Bill rather pointedly made himself scarce. He was still in love with me. That must have hurt, working with me day after day, keeping it inside, and I didn’t help matters by dragging Nick everywhere like a prize bull: hey, look what I got! Smart girl, Gayla. With a year’s study, you could be an idiot.

But Nick was gone, and we’d managed to get Becket open despite failing energy, colds, frayed nerves and foul weather. It was good just to stand with Bill against the porch railing, watching moths bat themselves silly against the overhead light. Bill was always guarded when we were alone now. I kept it light and friendly, asked about his preparations for Streetcar. He sighed with an Old Testament flavor of doom.

“Don’t ask. Erm had to cut the set budget, first read-through is tomorrow morning, and Nattie’s plane won’t get in until one. I’m going to be up all night and I’ll still only be about five pages ahead of you people on blocking.”

“Why’s she late?”

“Who the hell knows? Business with her agent or something. You have to read in for her.”

Good. One more precious rehearsal on my Blanche, one more time to read those beautiful words and perhaps find one more color in them before Natalie Bond froze it all in star glitter. That was all I had to look forward to now. The fatigue, the wet summer, lousy houses, all of it accumulated to a desolation I couldn’t shrug off. I had a small part in Streetcar, but under-studying Natalie Bond meant watching her do my role, never to touch the magic myself. Maybe her plane could crash—just a little—but even then, what? Somehow even the thought of Nick depressed me. Back in New York he’d get in to see the right agents where I couldn’t, landing commercials, lining up this, grabbing that, always smarter at business than me.

That night before the party, I sat on my bed, staring glumly at the yellow-green wallpaper and my battered Samsonite luggage, and thought: I’m tired of you. Something’s gone. There’s gotta be more than this. And I curled up in my old gray bathrobe, wallowing in self-pity. Nick, you want to get married? Bring me the towel and wash my back? Baby me a little when I feel rotten, like now? There’s a big empty place in me wants to be pregnant with more than a part. Tired, negative, I knew Nick would never marry me. I was kidding myself.

So it was good to have Bill there on the porch for a minute. I leaned against him and he put an arm around me. We should have gone to bed and let it be beautiful one more time. It would have been the last.

“Tired, Gay?”

“I want to go home.”

Except I never in my whole life found where it was.

Natalie Bond came and conquered. She knew her lines pretty well going in and crammed the rest with me in her room or the restaurant down our street. No one recognized her at first with her hair done just the right shade of fading dishwater blonde for Blanche, most of her thin face hidden behind a huge pair of prescription sunglasses.

She was near-sighted to blindness; some of her intensity on film must have come from trying to feel out the blocking by Braille. But a pro she was. She soaked up Bill’s direction, drove herself and us, and I saw the ruthless energy that made Nattie a star.

I saw other things, too. Nattie hadn’t been on a live stage for a lot years. She missed values left and right in Blanche and didn’t have time to pick them up on a two-week stock schedule. Film is a director’s medium. He can put your attention where he wants with the camera. Stage work takes a whole different set of muscles, and hers were flabby, unused to sustaining an action or mood for two and half hours.

But for the first time that season, we were nearly sold out at the box office. Erm was impressed. Bill wasn’t.

“They’re coming to see a star. She could fart her way through Blanche and they’ll still say she’s wonderful.”

Maybe, but life wasn’t all skittles for Nattie. She had two children in expensive schools and got endless phone calls from her manager in California about taxes.

“I gotta work, honey,” she told me over black coffee and dry toast, “The wolf’s got my ass in his chops already.”

She meant it. Another phone call, and that same afternoon between lunch and rehearsal call, Nattie Bond was gone, and I was sitting in Ermise’s living room again while Erm swore back and forth across the worn carpet, waving her drink like a weapon, and Bill tried to look bereaved. He always wanted me for Blanche. He had me now.

“Screwed me from the word go.” Ermise sprayed ashes over the rug and her poodle. “She knew this when she signed and never said a goddamn word.”

The facts filtered through my rosy haze. Natalie’s agent had a picture deal on the coast so close to signing that it was worth it to let Ermise sue. They’d just buy up her contract—if she could be in Los Angeles tomorrow.

Ermise hurled her cigarette into the trash-filled fireplace, gulped the last of her drink and turned a mental page. Nattie was one problem, the show another. “You ready to go, Gayla?”

“In my sleep, love.”

I was already readjusting the role to the Blanche in my ear and not as sorry for the box office as Erm. Screw ’em all, they were going to see ten times the Blanche Nattie Bond could give them on the best day she ever worked.

“Bill wants me to give you a raise,” Ermise said. “Wish I could, Gay, but things are tight.”

I pulled die worn script out of my jeans, grinning like a fool back at Bill, who couldn’t hide his glee any more. “Just pay on time, Erm. Keep out of my hair and don’t clutter up my stage. Bill, let’s go to work.”

From my first rehearsal, the play convulsed and became a different animal. The whole cast had to shift gears for me, but no longer suffused by Nattie’s hard light they began to find them-, selves and glimmer with life. I ate and slept with the script while Blanche came sure and clear. Hell, I’d been rehearsing her for fourteen years. It wasn’t hard to identify: the hunger for love half appeased in bed-hopping and sexual junk food, and what that does to a woman. The blurred, darkening picture of a girl waiting in her best dress to go to the dance of life with someone who never came.

Then, just as it seemed to be coming together, it went flat, deader than I am now. But out of that death came a beautiful, risky answer.

Blanche DuBois is a bitch of a roll and demands a powerhouse actress That’s the problem. Like the aura that surrounds Hamlet, the role accumulates a lot of star-shtick, and something very subtle can get lost. I determined to strip away the layers of gloss and find what was there to begin with.

“The part’s a trap. Bill. All those fluttery, curlicued lines reach out and beg you to act them. And you wind up with dazzle again, a concert performance.”

“Cadenzas,” he agreed with me. “The old Williams poetry.”

“Right! Cadenzas, scales. No, by God. I’ve played the Deep South. There’s a smothered quality to those women that gets lost that way. The script describes her as a moth. Moths don’t dazzle. They don’t glitter.”

“Remember that night on the porch,” Bill said thoughtfully. “They don’t glitter, but they do need the light.”

And that was it. Blanche aspired to the things she painted with foolish words. A dream of glitter seen by a near-sighted person by a failing candle. The lines are ornate, but just possibly, Blanche is not quite as intelligent as she’s been played.

A long artistic chance, but they’re the only ones worth taking. If you don’t have the guts to be wrong, take up accounting.

So my Blanche emerged a very pathetic woman, a little grotesque as such women are, not only desperate for love but logical in her hopes for Mitch. For all Belle Reeve and the in-bred magnolias, she’s not that far above him. Bill gave me my head, knowing that by finding my own Blanche, even being wrong for a while, I d find the play’s as well. On my terms and with my own reality.

I had three lovely labor-pained days of seeing her come alive. On the third day, I was sitting in a comer of the stage with coffee and a sandwich, digging at the script while the others lunched. When Sally Kent walked in, I snapped at her.

“Where’s the rest. It’s two o’clock. Let’s go.”

“They want you over at the office. Gay.”

“What the hell for? I don’t have time. Where’s Bill?”

“At the office,” Sally admitted reluctantly. “Natalie Bond is here. She’s back in the show.”

The kiss of death. Even as I shook my head, no, Erm wouldn’t do this to me, I knew she would.

Ermise hunched in a chair by the fireplace, bitter with what she had to do, trying not to antagonize Bill any further. He poised on the sofa, seething like a malevolent cat.

“Nattie will do the show after all,” Ermise said. “I have to put her back in. Gay.”

I couldn’t speak at first; sick, quivering on my feet with that horrible end-of-the-rope hollowness in my stomach. No place to go from here. No place. . . .

“When we pulled her name off the advertising, we lost more than a third of our reservations.” Erm snorted. “I don’t like it. I don’t like her right now, but she’s the only thing’ll keep my theater open.”

Bill’s comment cut with the hard edge of disgust. “You know what this does to the cast, don’t you? They’ve readjusted once. Now they have to do it again and open in two days. They were an ensemble with Gayla. Now they’re the tail of a star vehicle.”

Bill knew it was already lost, but he was doing this for me.

Ermise shook her head. “Gay, honey, I can’t afford it, but I’m gonna raise you retroactive to the first week of your contract.” Her hands fluttered in an uncharacteristically helpless gesture. “I owe you that. And you’ll go back in as Eunice. But next season—”

I found my voice. It was strange, old. “Don’t do this to me. This role, it’s mine, I earned it. She’ll ruin it.”

“Don’t look at me,” Bill snapped to Ermise. “She’s right.”

Ermise went defensive. “I don’t care who’s right. You’re all for Gay. Fine, but I can’t run a theater that way. Lucky to break even as it is. Nattie’s back, she plays, and that’s the end of it. Gay’s contract reads ‘as cast.’ She’s Eunice. What else can I say?”

I showed her what else. I ripped the Streetcar script in four parts and threw them in the fireplace. “You can say good-by, Ermise. Then you can take your raise and shove it.” I was already lurching toward the door, voice breaking. “Then you can put someone in my roles, because I’m leaving.”

I meant it. Without Blanche, there was no reason to stay another minute. Finished. Done.

Except for Natalie Bond. I found her in her hotel room, already dressed for rehearsal and running over the script.

“Come on in, Gayla, Drink?”

“No.”

She read my tension as I crouched with my back against the door. “All right, hon. Get it off your chest.”

“I will.”

I told the bitch what I felt and what I thought and didn’t leave anything out. It was quite a speech for no rehearsal, beginning with my teens when I first knew I had to play Blanche, and the years and hard work that made me worthy of it. There wasn’t a rep company in the east I hadn’t worked, or a major role from Rosalind to Saint Joan I hadn’t played. To walk out on the show like she did was pure shit. To crawl back was worse.

“Right,” said Nattie. She faced me all through it, let me get it all out, I was crying when I finished. I sank down on a chair, grabbing for one of her kleenex.

“Now do you want a drink?”

“Yes, what the hell.”

She wasn’t all rat, Nattie. She could have put me down with the star routine, but she fixed me a stiff gin and soda without a word. I remember her fixing that drink: thick glasses and no make up, gristly thin. She had endless; trouble with her uterus, infection after painful infection and a work schedule that never allowed her to heal properly. A hysterectomy ended the whole thing. Nattie’s face was thinner than mine, all the softness gone, mouth and cheeks drawn tight. No matter how sincere, the smile couldn’t unclench.

And this, I thought, is what I want to be? Help me, Nick. Take me home. There’s gotta be a home somewhere, a little rest.

“Know what we’re like?” Nattie mused. “A little fish swimming away from a big, hungry fish who’s just about to be eaten by a bigger fish. That’s us, honey. And that’s me in the middle.”

She screwed Ermise, but someone shafted her too. The picture deal was a big fat fake. The producer wanted someone a little bigger and hustled Nattie very plausibly to scare the lady into reaching for a pen.

“I’m broke, Gayla. I owe forty thousand in back taxes, my house is on a second mortgage, and my kids’ tuition is overdue. Those kids are all I have. I don’t know where the hell to go from here, but Ermise needs me and I sure as hell need the job.”

While I huddled over my drink, unable to speak, Nattie scribbled something on a memo pad.

“You’re too good to waste, you’re not commercial, and you’ll probably die broke. But I saw your rehearsal this morning.”

I looked up at her in weepy surprise. The smile wasn’t quite so hard just then.

“If I can do it half that well, Gay. Half.”

She shoved the papier into my hand. “That’s my agent in New York. He’s with William Morris. If he can’t get you work, no one can. I’ll call him myself.” She glanced at her dressing table clock, “Time, gotta run.”

Nattie divined the finality in my shoulders as I sagged toward the door. “You going to play Eunice?”

“No. I’m leaving.”

Pinning her hair, she shot me a swift, unsmiling appraisal through the mirror. “Good for you. You got a man in New York?”

“Yeah.”

“Get married,” she mumbled through a mouthful of pins. “It’s not worth it.” As the door closed, she raised her voice. “But call my agent.”

My bags were packed, but I hadn’t bothered to change clothes. That’s why my permanent costume, I suppose. Who knew then I’d get very tired of black. Bill insisted on driving me to the airport. When he came for me, I must have looked pathetic, curled up on the bed in one more temporary, damp summer room just waiting to eject me. No love lost; I got damned sick of yellow-green wallpaper.

Bill sat on the edge of the bed. “Ready, love?”

I didn’t move or answer. Done, finished. Bill put aside the old hurt and lay down beside me, bringing me into his arms. I guess something in him had to open in spite of his defenses. He opened my heart gently as a baby’s hand clutched around something that might harm it, letting me cry the last of it out against his shoulder. The light faded in the room while we lay together.

We kissed good-by like lovers at the departure gate. Bill was too much a part of me for anything less. Maybe he knew better than I how little was waiting for me.

“Be good. Gay.”

“You too.” I fiddled with his collar. “Don’t forget to take your vitamins, you need them. Call me when you get back.”

He hugged me one last time. “Why don’t you marry me sometime?”

For a lot of reasons, Bill. Because I was a fool and something of a coward. The stunting begins in the seed when we learn not to like ourselves. The sad thing about life is that we usually get what we really want. Let it be.

Funny, though: that was my first and last proposal, and I kissed him goodby, walked out of his life, and four hours later I was dead.

There was time on the plane to get some of it together. Natalie was a star, at the top where I wanted to be, and look at her: most of the woman cut out of her, flogged to work not by ambition but need. Driven and used. She reminded me of a legless circus freak propelling herself on huge, overdeveloped arms, the rest of her a pitiful afterthought cared for by an expensive gynecologist. I thought: at least when I get home there’ll be Nick. Don’t call him from the airport; let it be a surprise. We’ll get some coffee and cold-cuts, make love and talk half the night. I needed to talk, to see us plain.

Get married, Nattie said. It isn’t worth it.

Maybe not the way I chased it for fourteen years. I’d call her agent, keep working, but more New York jobs with time left over to be with Nick, to sit on my balcony and just breathe or read. To make a few friends outside of theater. To see a doctor and find out how tough I really am, and if every thing in the baby box is working right; so that maybe—

Like she said, so maybe get married and have kids while I can. A little commitment, Nick, a little tomorrow. If the word sounds strange, I just learned it. Give me this, Nick. I need it. The light was on in our living room as I hauled my suitcase out of the cab and started up. Hell, I won’t even buzz, just turn the key in the lock and) reach for him.

I did that.

There was—yes, I remember—one blessed moment of breathing the good, safe air of my own living room as I set down the luggage. I heard a faint stirring from the bedroom. Good, I’ve surprised him. If Nick was just waking from a nap, we’d have that much more time to touch each other.

“It’s me, baby.”

I crossed to the bedroom door, groping inside for the light switch. “I’m home.”

I didn’t need the switch. There was enough light to see them frozen on the torn-up bed. The other one was older, a little flabby. He muttered something to Nick. I stood there, absurd myself, and choked: “Excuse me.”

Then, as if someone punched me in the stomach, I stumbled to the bathroom, pushed the door shut and fell back against it.

“Get him out of here, Nick!”

The last word strangled off as I doubled over the john and vomited all the horrible day out of me, with two hours left to live, retching and sobbing, not wanting to hear whatever was said beyond the door. After a short time, the front door closed. I washed my face, dried it with the stiff, clumsy movements of exhaustion, and got out to the living room somehow, past the bed where Nick was smoking a cigarette, the sheet pulled up over his lean thighs.

I remember pouring a drink. That was foolish on an empty stomach, the worst thing anyone could have done. I sat on the sofa, waiting.

“Nick.” The silence from the bedroom was the only thing I could feel in my shock. “Nick, please come out. I want to talk to you.”

I heard him rustle into his clothes. In a moment Nick came out, bleak and sullen.

“Why are you back so early?”

“No, they—” My reactions were still disjointed, coming out of shock, but the anger was building. “They put Nattie Bond back in the show. I walked out.”

That seemed to concern him more than anything else. “You just walked out? They’ll get Equity on you.”

“Never mind about Equity, what are we gonna do?”

“What do you mean?” he asked calmly.

“Oh, man, are you for real?” I pointed at the door. “What was that?”

“That may be a Broadway job.” He turned away into the kitchen. “Now get off my back.”

“The hell I—”

“Hey look, Gayla. I haven’t made any promises to you. You wanted me to move in. Okay, I moved in. We’ve had it good.”

I began to shake. “Promises? Of course there were promises. There’s always a promise, nobody has to spell it out. I could have gone to bed with Bill Wrenn plenty of times this summer, but I didn’t.”

He only shrugged. “So whose fault is that? Not mine.”

“You bastard!” I threw my glass at him. He ducked, the thing went a mile wide, then Nick was sopping up whisky and bits of glass while I shook myself apart on the couch, teeth chattering so hard I had to clamp my mouth tight shut. I was all hitting me at once, and I couldn’t handle half of it. Nick finished cleaning up without a word, but I could see even then the tight line of his mouth and the angry droop of his eyelids. He had guts of a kind, Nick. He could face anything because it didn’t matter. All the important things were outside, to be reached for. Inside I think he was dead.

“The meanest thing Bill ever said to me,” I stuttered. “When I left him for you, h-he said you played both sides of the fence. And I c-called him a goddamn liar. I couldn’t believe he’d be small enough to—Nick, I’m falling apart. They took my show, and I came home to you because I don’t know what to do.”

Nick came over, sat down and held me in his arms. “I’m not, Gayla.”

“Not what?”

“What Bill said.”

“Then w-what was this?”

He didn’t answer, just kissed me. I clung to Nick like a lost child.

Why do we always try to rewrite what’s happened? Even now I see myself pointing to the door and kissing him off with a real Bette Davis sizzler for a curtain. Bullshit. I needed Nick. The accounting department was already toting up the cost of what I wanted and saying: I’ll change him. It’s worth it.

I only cried wearily in his arms while Nick soothed and stroked me. “I’m not that,” he said again. “Just that so many guys are hung up on role-playing and all that shit. Oh, it’s been said about me.”

I twisted in his lap to look at him. “Nick, why did you come to me?”

The question gave him more trouble than it should. “I like you. You’re the greatest girl I ever met.”

Something didn’t add up. Nothing ever bugged Nick before; he could always handle it, but he was finding this hard.

“That’s not enough,” I persisted. “Not tonight.”

Nick disengaged himself with a bored sigh. “Look, I have to go out.”

“Go out? Now?” I couldn’t believe he’d leave me like this. “Why?”

He walked away toward the bedroom. I felt the anger grow cold with something I’d never faced before, anwers to questions that gnawed at the back of my mind from our first night. “Why, Nick? Is it him? Did that fat queer tell you to come over after you ditched the hag?”

Nick turned on me, lowering. “I don’t like that word.”

“Queer.”

“I said—”

“Queer.”

“All right.” He kicked viciously at the bedroom door with all the force he wanted to spend stopping my mouth. “It’s a fact in this business. That’s why I get in places you don’t. It’s a business, cut and dried, not an aht fawm like you’re always preaching.”

“Come off it, Nick.” I stood up, ready for him and wanting the fight. “That casting couch bit went out with Harlow. Is that how you get jobs? That, and the cheap, scene-stealing tricks you use when you know and I know I played you against the wall in Lexington, you hypocritical son of a bitch.”

Nick threw up a warning hand. “Hey, wait just one damn minute, Bernhardt. I never said I was or ever could be as good as you. But I’ll tell you one thing.” Nick opened the closet and snaked his jacket off a hanger. “I’ll be around and working when nobody remembers you, because I know the business. You’ve been around fourteen years and still don’t know the score. You won’t make rounds, you don’t want to be bothered waiting for an agent to see you. You’re a goddamn ahtist. You won’t wait in New York for something to develop, hell no. You’ll take any show going out to Noplaceville, and who the hell ever sees you but some jerkoff writing for a newspaper no one reads. Integrity? Bullshit, lady. You are afraid of New York, afraid to take a chance on it.”

Nick subsided a little. “That guy who was here, he produces. He’s got a big voice where it counts.” Again he looked away with that odd, inconsistent embarrassment. “He didn’t want to sleep with me, really. He’s basically straight.”

That was too absurd for anger. “Basically?”

“He only wanted a little affection.”

“And you, Nick. Which way do you go basically. I mean was it his idea or yours?”

That was the first totally vulnerable moment I ever saw in Nick. He turned away, leaning against the sink. I could barely hear him, “I don’t know. It’s never made much difference. So what’s the harm? I don’t lose anything, and I may gain.”

He started for the door, but I stopped him. “Nick, I need you. What’s happened to me today. I’m almost sick. Please don’t do this to me.”

“Do what? Look.” He held me a moment without warmth or conviction. “I’ll only be gone a little while. We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”

“Don’t go, Nick.”

He straightened his collar carefully with a sidelong glance at the mirror. “We can’t talk when you’re like this. There’s no point.”

I dogged him desperately, needing something to hang onto. “Please don’t go. I’m sorry for what I said. Nick, we can work it out, but don’t leave me alone.”

“I have to.” His hand was already on the door, cutting me off like a thread hanging from his sleeve.

“Why!” It ripped up out of the bottom, out of the hate without which we never love or possess anything. “Because that fat faggot with his job means more than I do, right? How low do you crawl to make a buck in this business? Or is it all business? Jesus, you make me sick.”

Nick couldn’t be insulted. Even at the end, he didn’t have that to spare me. Just a look from those cool blue eyes I tried so hard to please, telling me he was a winner in a game he knew, and I just didn’t make it.

“It’s your apartment. I’ll move.”

“Nick, don’t go.”

The door closed.

What did I do then? I should remember, they were the last minutes of my life. The door closed. I heard Nick thumping down the carpeted stairs, and thank God for cold comfort I didn’t run, after him. I poured a straight shot and finished it in one pull.

A hollow, eye-of-the-storm calm settled on me and then a depression so heavy it was a physical pain. I wandered through the apartment drinking too much and too fast, talking to Nick, to Bill, to Nattie, until I collapsed, clumsy, hiccuping drunk on the floor with half an hour to live.

Another drink. Get blind, drunk enough to reach . . . something, to blot out the Lump. Yeah, she’s still with you, the goddamn little loser. Don’t you ever learn, loser? No, she won’t ever learn. Yesterday did this day’s madness prepare. What play was that and who cares?

I tried to think but nothing came together. My life was a scattered tinkertoy, all joints and pieces without meaning or order. A sum of apples and oranges: parts played, meals eaten, clothes worn, he said and I said, old tickets, old programs, newspaper reviews yellowed and fragile as Blanche’s love letters. Apples and oranges. Where did I leave anything of myself, who did I love, what did I have? No one. Nothing.

Only Bill Wrenn.

“Christ, Bill, help me!”

I clawed for the phone with the room spinning and managed to call the theater. One of the girl apprentices answered. I struggled to make myself understood with a thickening tongue. “Yeah, Bill Wrenn, ‘simportant. Gayla Damon. Yeah, hi, honey. He’s not? Goddamnit, he’s gotta be. I need him. When’ll he be back? Yeah . . . yeah. Tell’m call Gayla, please. Please. Yeah, trouble. Real trouble. I need him.”

That’s how it happened. I dropped the phone in the general vicinity of the hook and staggered to the pitching sink to make one more huge, suicidal drink, crying and laughing, part drunk, part hysteria. But Bill was going to bail me out like he always had, and, boy, ol’ Gay had learned her lesson. I was a fool to leave him. He loved me. Bill loved me and I was afraid of that. Afraid to be loved. How dumb can you get?

“How dumb?” I raged mushily at the Lump in the mirror. “You with the great, soulful eyes. You never knew shit, baby.”

I was sweating. The wool sweater oppressed my clammy skin. Some sober molecule said take it off, but no. It’s cooler out on my balcony. I will go out on my beautiful, nighted balcony and present my case to the yet unknowing world.

I half fell through the door. The balcony had a low railing, lower than I judged as I stumbled and heaved my drunken weight behind the hand flung out to steady myself and—

Fell. No more time.

That’s it, finished. Now I’ve remembered. It was that sudden, painless, meaningless. No fade out, no end title music resolving the conflict themes, only torn film fluttering past the projector light, leaving a white screen.

There’s a few answers anyway. I could get a lump in my throat, if I had one, thinking how Bill came and checked me out. God, let’s hope they kept me covered. I must have looked awful. Poor Bill; maybe I gave you such a rotten time because I knew you could take it and still hang in. That’s one of the faces of love, Mister Wrenn.

But I’d never have guessed about Lowen. Just imagine: he saw me that long ago and remembered all these years because I showed him he wasn’t alone. I still can’t add it up. Apples and oranges.

Unless, just maybe. . . .

“Lowen!”

The sound track again, the needle dropped on time. The balcony door thunders open and slams shut. Al calls again, but Lowen ignores her, leaning against the door, holding it closed.

“Gayla?”

His eyes move searchingly over the balcony in the darkening winter afternoon. From my name etched in the cement, around the railing, Lowen’s whole concentrated being probes the gray light and air, full of purpose and need.

“Gayla, I know you’re here.”

As he says my name, sound and vision and my own strength treble. I turn to him, wondering if through the sheer power of his need he can see me yet.

Lowen, can you hear me?

“I think I know what this means.”

I stretch out my hand, open up, let it touch his face, and as I tingle and hurt with it, Lowen turns his cheek into the caress.

“Yes, I feel you close.”

Talk to me, love.

“Isn’t it strange, Gayla?”

Not strange at all, not us.

“When I saw you that night, I wanted to reach out and touch you, but I was just too shy. Couldn’t even ask for my own autograph.”

Why not? I could have used a little touching.

“But I hitched all the way from school next day just to catch a glimpse of you. Hid in the back of the theater and watched you rehearse.”

That was Blanche. You saw that?

“It was the same thing all over again. You had something that reached out and showed me how we’re all alike. I never saw a lonelier person than you on that stage. Or more beautiful. I cried.”

You saw Blanche. She did have a beauty.

“Oh, Gayla, the letters I wrote you and never sent. Forgive me. I forgot the name but not the lesson. If you hear me: you were the first woman I ever loved, and you taught me right. It’s a giving.”

I can hear Al’s urgent knock on the other side of the door, “Lowen, what is it? Are you all right?”

He turns his head and smiles. God, he’s beautiful. “Fine, Al. She loves this place, Gayla. Don’t drive her away.”

I won’t, but don’t go. Now when I’m beginning to understand so much.

He shakes his head. “This is our first house. We’re new, all kinds of problems. Parents, religion, everything.”

Can you hear me?

“We were never loved by anyone before, either of us. That’s new, too. You pray for it—”

Like a fire:

“—like a fire to warm yourself.”

You do hear me.

“But it’s scary. What do you do with the fire when it comes?” Lowen’s hands reach out, pleading. “Don’t take this away from her. Don’t hurt my Al. You’re stronger than us. You can manage.”

I stretch my hand to touch his. With all my will, I press the answer through the contact.

Promise, Lowen.

“Don’t make me shut you out, I don’t know if I could. Go away and keep our secret? Take a big piece of love with you?”

Yes. Just that I was reaching for something, like you, and I had it all the time. So do you, Lowen. You’re a—

I feel again as I did when the star fell across the sky, joyful and new and big as all creation without needing a reason, as Lowen’s real fingers close around the memory of mine.

You’re a mensche, love. Like me.

Lowen murmurs: “I feel your hand. I don’t care what anyone says. Your kind of woman doesn’t kill herself. I’ll never believe it.”

Bet on it. And thank you.

So it was a hell of a lot more than apples and oranges. It was a giving, a love. Hear that, Bill? Nattie? What I called life was just the love, the giving, like kisses on the wind, thrown to the audience, to my work, to the casual men, to whom it may concern. I was a giver, and if the little takers like Nick couldn’t dig that, tough. That’s the way it went down. All the miserable, self-cheating years, something heard music and went on singing. If Nattie could do it half as well. If she was half as alive as me, she meant. I loved all my life, because they’re the same thing. Man, I was beautiful.

That’s the part of you that woke me, Lowen. You’re green, but you won’t go through life like a tourist. You’re going to get hurt and do some hurting yourself, but maybe someday. . . .

That’s it, Lowen. That’s the plot. You said it: we all touch, and the touching continues us. All those nights, throwing all of myself at life, and who’s to say I did it alone?

So when you’re full up with life, maybe you’ll wake like me to spill it over into some poor, scared guy or girl. You’re full of life like me, Lowen. It’s a beautiful, rare gift.

It’s dark enough now to see stars and the fingernail sliver of moon. A lovely moment for Lowen and me, like a night with Bill a moment before we made love for the first time. Lowen and I holding hands in the evening. Understanding. His eyes move slowly from my hand up, up toward my face.

“Gayla, I can see you.”

Can you, honest!

“Very clear. You’re wearing a sweater and jeans. And you’re smiling.”

Am I ever!

“And very beautiful.”

Bet your ass, love. I feel great, like I finally got it together.

One last painful, lovely current of life as Lowen squeezes my hand. “Good-by, Gayla.”

So long, love.

Lowen yanks open the door. “Al, Mister Hirajian? Come on out. It’s a lovely evening.”

Alice peeks out to see Lowen leaning over the railing, enjoying the river and the early stars. His chest swells; he’s laughing and he looks marvelous, inviting Al into his arms the way he did on their first day here. She comes unsurely to nestle in beside him, one arm around his waist. “Who were you talking to?”

“She’s gone, Al. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. Except being afraid.”

“Lowen, I’m not going to—”

“This is our house, and nobody’s going to take it away from us.” He turns Al to him and kisses her. “Nobody wants to, that’s a promise. So don’t run away from it or yourself.”

She shivers a little, still uncertain. “Do you really think we can stay. I can’t—”

“Hey, love.” Lowen leans into her, cocky and charming, but meaning it. “Don’t tell a mensche what you can’t. Hey, Hirajian.”

When the little prune pokes his head out the door, Lowen sweeps his arm out over the river and the whole lit-up West Side. “Sorry for all the trouble, but we’ve changed our minds. I mean, look at it! Who could give up a balcony with a view like this?”

He’s the last thing I see before the lights change: Lowen holding Al and grinning out at the world. I thought the lights were dimming, but it’s something else, another cue coming up. The lights cross-fade up, up, more pink and amber, until—my God, it’s gorgeous! I’m not dead, not gone. I feel more alive than ever. I’m Gail and Gayla and Lowen and Bill and Al and all of them magnified, heightened, fully realized, flowing together like bright, silver streams into—

Will you look at that set. Fantastic. Who’s on the lights?

So that’s what You look like. Ri-i-ght. I’m with it now, and I love You too. Give me a follow-spot. Baby.

I’m on.

THE THERMALS OF AUGUST

Edward Bryant

Edward Bryant, winner of Nebula awards in 1979 and 1980, author of “Strata” (August 1980), offers a tale about The Dragon Festival, a gliding competition full of spectacle and color and danger.

I see the woman die, and the initial beauty of the event takes away my breath. Later I will feel the sickness of pain, the weakness of sorrow. But for the moment I sit transfixed, face tilted toward the irregular checkerboard of cumulus. The drama of death has always seemed to me the truest element in life.

The other diners see what I had detected a moment before: a tiny irregularity in the smooth sweep of the newly launched kite. The kite is cobalt blue and dart-shaped, apparently a modified Rogallo wing—not one of the Dragons we’ll all be flying later in the week.

Having come to the outdoor cafe by Bear Creek for a late breakfast, I’d hoped simply to satisfy a necessary but unwanted need. Now, however, the bite of croissant lies dry in my mouth and the cup of coffee cools undrunk. Perhaps I did not really see the minute lurch in the kite’s path. I allow myself that one brief luxurious hope, staring at the kite and its pilot more than two thousand feet above the valley floor. The kite is a vivid midge against the lighter blue of the sky.

Then the kite falls.

I see the craft first slip into a stall, then nose downward—no problem for even a moderately experienced pilot. But suddenly half the wing folds back at an unnatural angle. In a little more than a second, we on the ground hear the twang and snap of breaking control wires and twisting aluminum frame.

The kite tumbles.

I am surrounded by babble and one of the other diners begins to whimper.

It seems to take forever to fall.

My brain coolly goes to work and I know that the descent is far more rapid in terms of feet per second than appears to our eyes.

At first the kite fell like a single piece of confetti pitched from a Wall Street window. Now the collapsed portion of the wing has wrapped around pilot and harness, and the warped mass rotates as it appears to us to grow larger.

The crippled kite twists and spins, flutters and falls like a leaf of aspen. I think I see the shrouded form of the pilot, a pendulum flung outward by centrifugal force.

The kite’s fall seems to accelerate as it nears ground, but that also is illusion. Someone screams at us to take cover, evidently thinking that the kite will plunge into the midst of the outdoor diners. It doesn’t. The kite makes half a final revolution and spins into the corner of the Conoco Building. The cocooned pilot slams into the brick with the flat smack of a beef roast dropped onto kitchen tile. The wreckage drapes over the temporary barbed-wire fence protecting this building under perpetual reconstruction.

The bit of croissant still lies on my tongue. I feel every sharp edge. I gag and taste bitterness coat my throat.

The dead-moth corpse of the kite is not more than fifty feet away, and the crowd slowly begins to close the distance. I am among them. The others grant me a wide path because most recognize that I too am a pilot. “Let the woman through.” Gingerly I approach my fallen comrade.

Her body is almost totally swathed in the cobalt fabric of the kite. I can see her face; her eyes stare open and un-peacefully. The concealed contours of her body are smooth. I suspect most of the bones of her body are splintered.

When I softly touch one of her shoulders, I inadvertently drag one tightly folded flap of kitewing against a steel barb. Pooled blood bursts forth in a brief cataract. Mixed with the scent of her blood is the odor of urine.

This is not death; it is indignity.

My nylon windbreaker is composed of my colors: gold and black. I take it off and cover the dead woman’s face. Then I glare around the circle of onlookers. Most of them stare at the ground and mumble, then turn and leave.

I draw back the jacket for a moment and lightly kiss the dead woman’s lips.

I love this town between festivals. Living among the stable population of two thousand refreshes me after months of engulfment in the cities of the coasts. I am pleased by the ambivalent socialness of friendly greetings on the street, but without anyone pushing me to respond further. Warm people who hold a fetish of privacy are an impossible paradox elsewhere. This town prides itself on paradox.

The rules do not always hold true in the public downtown, particularly during the festivals. The outsiders flood in at various times of the year for their chamber music and jazz festivals, art symposiums, video circus, and other, more esoteric gatherings.

Although the present festival will not begin until tomorrow at dawn, the town is crowded with both participants and spectators. Tonight people fill the bars downtown and spill out onto the sidewalks along both sides of Main. Though August is not yet ended, the cold crisps the night. The town is at nearly nine thousand feet, and chill is to be expected; but the plumes of breath billow more than one would expect. The stars are clear and icy tonight; I see clouds scudding up the valley from the west.

There is a shifting, vibrant energy in the crowds that runs like quicksilver. I can feel it. The moon tonight is new, so I can’t ascribe anything to lunar influence. The magic must generate from the gestalt interaction of the flyers and the watchers. Or, more likely, from the ancient mountains that ring us on three sides.

The air seems most charged in the Club Troposphere, the street-front bar on the ground floor of the Ionic Hotel. I have a table in one of the Trope’s raised bay display windows overlooking the sidewalk. The crowd flux continually alters, but at any given moment, at least a dozen others share the table with me. Some stand, some sit, and in the crowd din, body language communicates at least as much as words. I’m stacking empties of imported beers in front of my glass. This early in the evening, my pyramid looks more Aztec than Egyptian.

I continue to taste blood; the thick, dark ale won’t wash it away. Before I truly realize what I’m doing, I grasp the latest empty by the neck and slam it down on the hardwood. “God damn!” Amber glass sprays across the table and I raise the jagged edges of the neck to the level of my eyes.

“Mairin!” Across the table I see Lark look up from nuzzling Haley’s throat. “Mairin, are you all right?” he says. Haley stares at me as well. Everyone at the table is staring at me.

“I dropped it,” I say. I set the severed neck down beside my glass.

Lark gets up from Haley’s lap and comes around the table to me. I stare from one to the other of the vertices of my present triangle. Lark is small, compact, and dark, with the sense of spatial orientation and imagination and the steel muscles, all of which make him a better Dragon pilot than anyone else here. With the probable exception of me. Haley is tall and light, a woman of the winter with silky hair to her waist and eyes like ice chipped from inaccessible glaciers. But when she smiles, the ice burns.

“Are you okay?” Lark places his fingers lightly on the hand with which I smashed the bottle. I move the hand and pick up my glass. A barmaid hovers beside us, wiping shards into a paper towel.

I nod. “It was an accident.”

Lark puts his face very close to mine. “The rookie who died today—you saw the whole thing, right?”

“I saw her get into the truck for the ride up to the point. She was very young. I didn’t know her.”

“She was good,” Lark says. “I know people who flew with her in the Midwest. Today she was very unlucky.”

“Obviously.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Lark smiles in the way I’ve learned to interpret during the long years of competition as all teeth and no mirth. “After the medics took her body away from you practically at gunpoint, I went over her equipment with the officials. She committed a beginner’s error, you know—dipped a wingtip when she went off. Clipped an outcropping.”

“I saw,” I say. “She recovered.”

“We did X rays. There was a flaw in the metal. That’s why the one wing buckled.”

“God.” I feel sick, dizzy, as though I’m whirling around in that bright cobalt body bag, waiting for the ground to smash out my life.

“Whoever,” Lark says. “Just bad luck.” He hesitates. “I keep thinking about all the times I’ve inspected my own equipment. You can only check so much.”

Haley has come around the table too and stands close to Lark. “I wonder what it felt like.”

“I know,” I say. I look at Lark’s face and realize he knows too. Haley is an artist and photographer who sticks close to her gallery here in town. She has never flown. She can never know.

I’m really not sure how many beers I’ve drunk tonight. It must be more than I think I’ve counted, because I do and say what is uncharacteristic of me. With Lark and Haley both standing there, I look into Haley’s winter eyes and say, “I need to be with someone tonight.”

“I—Mairin—” Haley almost stutters. She gentles her voice. “Lark asked me already. . . .”

“Lark could unask you,” I say. I know that’s unfair, but I also know my need. Lark is staring studiously out the window, pretending to ignore us both.

Haley says, “Lark was there too. He needs—”

“I need.” They both stare at me uncomfortably now without speaking. Individually I know how stubborn each can be. Three springs tauten. I want to reach out and be held, to thaw and exhaust myself with body warmth. I want to reach out with the shattered bottleneck and rip both of them until I bathe in steaming blood. Then it all goes out from me and I sink back in my chair. I am so goddamned suspicious of the word need and I have heard it too many times.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m behaving badly.”

“Mairin—” both start to say. Lark touches my shoulder. Haley reaches out.

I shove back my chair and get up unsteadily. My head pounds. Nausea wracks my belly and I am glad there is no competition for me tomorrow. “I’m going to my room. I don’t feel . . .” I let the words trail off.

“Do you need help?”

“No, Haley. No, love. I can make it.” I push past and leave them at the table. I hope I’m leaving my self-pity there too. The lobby of the Ionic is another zoo of milling humans. I make it to the lone elevator where luck has brought the cage to the first floor. As I enter the car, a bearded flyer-groupie in a yellow down jacket unwisely reaches in from the lobby and grabs my wrist.

“Lady, would you like a drink?” he says.

The spring, still taut, ratchets loose. Luckily for him my knee catches him only in the upper thigh and he flails backward into the lobby as spectators gape. The doors close and the elevator climbs noisily toward my floor. Two young men stand nervously in the opposite corner, just as far from me as four feet will allow.

I’ll regret all this tomorrow.

I know the woman who comes to me that night.

I am she.

The cotton sheet slides coolly, rustling, as I restlessly change position. I’ve pushed the down comforter to my knees. It’s too hot for that. The cold will come later, past midnight when the hotel lowers all the thermostats.

Finally I despair of sleeping, lie still, lie on my back with my hands beside me. I can see dimly in the light from the frosted-glass transom, as well as the white glow from the hotel neon outside the single window. I hear the muffled sounds of celebration from the street below.

Then I see the woman standing silently at the foot of the bed. I know her. She is short—five four without shoes. Her body is slender and muscular. The shadows shift as she moves around to the side of my bed. Darkness glides across her eyes, her neck, between her breasts, on her belly and below. Her breasts are small, with dark, prominent nipples. Her muscles, when she moves, are not obtrusive but are clearly delineated.

She steps into the light from the street. There are no crow’s-feet visible in chiaroscuro. Her face is delicately boned, heart-shaped, with a chin that misses sharpness by only a degree. Her eyes are wide and as dark as her close-cut hair. In the semidarkness I know I am seeing her as she was when she was twenty and as she will be when she is forty.

I slip the sheet aside as she silently lies in my bed. Slowly, delicately, I slide the fingers of one hand along the side of her face, down the jawline, across her lips. Her lips part slightly and one fingertip touches the firm, moist cushion of her tongue.

Then even more gently I cup her breasts, my palms feeling their warmth long before the skin touches the tips of each erect nipple.

It takes a thousand years.

My hands slide down her flanks and touch all that is moist and warm between her legs. I know what to seek out and I find it. The warmth builds.

I think of Haley. I think of Lark. I blink him out. Haley leaves of her own accord and abandons me pleading. My pleading, her leaving.

My finger orbits and touches, touches and orbits, touches. The warmth builds and builds, is more than warmth, builds and heats, the heat—The heat coils and expands, ripples outward, ripples across my belly, down my thighs. For a moment, just a bare moment, something flickers like heat lightning on the horizon—

—but it is not sufficient. I am not warm enough.

Heat radiates and is lost, spent. I see Lark and Haley again in my mind and blink away the man. But Haley leaves too.

Only I am left.

I wish the woman would sleep, but I know her too well.

I wish I could sleep, but I know me so well.

Dragon Festival.

It is nearly dawn and the roar of dragons splits the chilly air. The tongues of propane burners lick the hearts of twenty great balloons. The ungainly shapes bulk in the near darkness and slowly come erect. The crews hold tight to nylon lines.

As the sun starts to rise above the peaks beyond the two waterfalls, I see that snow dusted the San Juans sometime past midnight. The mountains are topped with were-snow—a sifting that came in the night and will shortly vanish with morning sun. The real storms are yet to come with the autumn.

Mythic creatures rear up in the dawn. These are nothing so simple as the spherical balloons of my childhood. Laboratory-bred synthetics have been sculpted and molded to suggest the shapes of legend. A great golden gargoyle hunches to the east. To the west, a hundred-foot-tall gryphon strains at its handlers’ lines. The roaring, rushing propane flames animate a sphinx, a satyr, a kraken with basket suspended from its drooping tentacles, a Cheshire cat, and chimeras of every combination. The giants bob and dip as they distend, but it is a perfect morning with no wind.

I find a perverse delight in not feeling as wretched as I anticipated last night. My mind is clear. My eyes do not ache. Though I was not able to cope with breakfast food, I did manage to drink tea. I realize I’m being caught up in the exhilaration of the first festival day. I know that within the hour I will be flowing with the wind, floating with the clouds.

“How do you feel this morning?” A familiar voice.

“Did you get any rest?” Another familiar voice.

I turn to greet Haley and Lark. “I feel fine. I got some sleep.” I determine to leave any qualifications behind.

“I’ll see you on the ground,” says Lark.

Haley looks at me steadily for several seconds, a time that seems much longer. Finally she draws me close and says, “Good luck. Have a fine flight.” Her lips are cool and they touch my cheek briefly.

Lark and she walk toward the balloon called Cheshire. I hear fragmented words from a portable public-address system that tell me all flyers should be linking their craft to their respective balloons. I walk across the meadow to Negwenya. Negwenya is the Zulu word for dragon. Negwenya is a towering black-and-scarlet balloon owned by a man named Robert Simms. Robert’s eight-times-removed grandparents were Zulu. Robert is a great believer in the mystique of dragons and sees an occult affinity between Negwenya and the Dragon Five flyers he ferries up to the sky.

I walk between the serpentine legs of Negwenya and feel the sudden chill of entering shadow. The people holding Negwenya’s lines, mostly local volunteers, greet me and I answer them back. From where he waits beside my Dragon Five, Robert raises a broad hand in welcome. My gold-and-black glider looks as fragile on the wet grass as it did in the electric glow when I left to watch the coming dawn.

“You ready?” Robert’s voice is permanently hoarse from a long-ago accident when a mooring line snapped and lashed around his throat.

“I’m ready.” I check the tough lightweight lines that will allow my Dragon to dangle below Negwenya as the balloon takes us up to twelve thousand feet. The ends of the lines tuck into safety pressure catches both on the underside of Negwenya’s gondola and on my craft’s keel tube and wing braces. Either Robert or I can elect at any time to release the catches. Once that happens, Negwenya will go on about its own business and I will describe the great descending spiral that eventually brings me back to earth.

More orders blare from the bullhorn across the field. It doesn’t matter that none of us can understand the words; we all know what happens next.

“Let’s link up,” says Robert.

I nod and climb into my harness under the Five as Robert and a helper hold the wings steady on the support stands. It isn’t like getting ready to fly a 767; just a few metallic clicks and the appropriate straps are secured. I pull on my helmet and check the instrumentation: the microprocessor-based unit in the liner records air speed, ground speed, and altitude. The figures appear on a narrow band along the inside of the transparent visor. There is an audible stall warning, but I rarely activate that; I’d rather gauge stability directly from the air flutter on the wing fabric.

“Okay, just a few more minutes,” says Robert.

I’m glad the Five is resting on the supports. The entire craft may weigh only sixty pounds, but that’s half what I weigh. My flight suit feels sticky along the small of my back; I’m sweating. I hear the amplified words of the pageant director continue to fragment on the leading edge of the mountain.

“Time to do it,” says Robert. He climbs up to the launch ladder and steps into the gondola. Then he looks back over the edge—I see the reflection in the bulge of my visor—and grins. “Good luck, lady.” He displays an erect thumb. “Break a leg.”

With a rush and a roar, the twenty lighter-than-air craft embark. The paradox is that with all the fury and commotion, the score of balloons rises so slowly. Our ascension is stately.

Excited as ever by the sight, I watch the images of ground things diminish. I see the takeoff field swarm with video people; the insect eyes of cameras glitter. From beyond the ropes, the sustained note of the crowd swells with the balloons’ first rising.

Harpies, genies, furies all, we soar toward a morning clear but for high cirrus. I fill my lungs with chill clean air and feel the exuberance, the climactic anticipation of that moment when each of us cuts loose the tether from our respective balloons and glides into free flight.

Free is the word, free is the key. I know I’m smiling; and then I feel the broad, loose grin. My teeth ache with the cold, but it doesn’t matter. I want to laugh madly and I restrain myself only because I know I can afford to waste none of the precious oxygen at this altitude.

The weather’s fine!

I raise a gloved hand to Lark as Cheshire slowly rises past Negwenya. His brown-and-yellow wings bob slightly as he waves back. The grin on Cheshire’s cat doesn’t seem nearly so wide as mine.

The valley town is a parti-colored patchwork. I glance up and scan the line of red figures along my visor. I’m a thousand feet above the meadow. I look from the comfortable brick and frame of the old town to the newer, wooden, fake Victorian homes rising from the mountain’s skirts. Now I’m level with the end of the trees and the beginning of bare rock. To the east I look beyond the old Pandora Mill and see the sun catch the spray from Ingram Falls and Bridal Veil. The waterfalls have not yet been turned off for the winter.

Toward the top of the canyon, light crosswinds buffet the balloons slightly as I expected they would. Negwenya rotates slowly and I concentrate on feeling no vertigo. We sweep past a sheer rock face to the waves and shouted greetings of a party of climbers strung like colored beads from their ropes. The balloon pilots yell back.

I can intellectually understand the attraction of technical climbing, but I was never able to appreciate it on a gut level. And I tried. Perhaps the only level on which it communicates to me is: because it’s there. Haley. I wonder if I should desire Haley so intensely if she were more accessible. Even the anticipation of the coming long flight cannot erase the chill and heat of her from my mind.

“Mairin!”

I hear Robert’s shout above the rushing-wind sound of the burner.

“Mairin, are you watching your gauge?”

I hadn’t been. Negwenya’s at twelve-seven and it won’t be long before we’re thirteen thousand feet above sea level. While I was thinking about sapphire eyes, like a rank amateur, the other flyers had been cutting loose from their balloons. Below me I see the looping, swarming flight of Dragons.

I glance at the readouts again. Robert has assured my wind direction. I drop.

My Dragon Five drops away from the gondola and Negwenya’s roar grows faint; then is gone. The silence of my flight enfolds me. I lie prone in my harness, nothing else between me and the valley but air.

I fly for this moment.

The microprocessor’s electronic senses tell me hard information: I am two thousand nine hundred and sixty-two feet above the valley floor. My air speed is twenty-two miles per hour, only slightly less than my ground speed. My Dragon Five presently travels nearly twelve feet horizontally for every foot it drops. In a minute I will lose about two hundred feet. Without searching out the thermal currents, I’ll reach the ground in about fifteen minutes.

I pay no attention to the readouts. For the moment, the silence and openness, the caress of air on my face, all stir a complex reaction in my mind and body. I feel the throbbing start, far inside.

The slight shift of my body affects the attitude of my flight. The Dragon responds and I sweep into a wide, shallow turn.

No women or men have given me this feeling so fully as has the sky. I spiral down above the land and desire this to last forever. Gravity is the enemy of my love. As well I remind myself that I am part of the pageant; that just as the balloons are now drifting eastward, engaged in their slow-motion behemoth race, so it’s demanded of the flyers that all land at about the same time in a live simulation of wide-screen spectacle. The cameras whir. The broadcasts fan out from microwave towers. The spectators watch.

But I want to make it last.

And I realize, first shocked, then amused, how many minutes it’s been since I’ve held Haley’s image in my mind.

I wheel the Dragon around in a descending spiral, as silent and graceful as any gull. Catching up with the other Dragons, I hear the mutter of wind rippling the fabric ever closer to the wing’s trailing edge. I recognize the proximity of a stall and moderate slightly the angle of the warperons.

There are times when I have thought of gently and irrevocably slipping into the tightest of spirals and hurling myself blackly through the heart of the air. I cannot count the times I have skirted that final edge. Always I’ve refrained.

The air touches my cheekbones with the soft, tickling touch of Haley’s cloudy hair.

There are times . . .

Death in triplicate stands by my elbow at the bar. Three tall shapes in black hooded robes have stepped to the brass rail. Skull faces, obviously sculpted with care, grin from cowled shadows. They say nothing. The trio reminds me of participants in a Mexican holy-day parade.

Two deaths stare around the crowded Trope. The other looks at me. With my beer, I toast it back silently.

“Hey! You people want anything?” The barman tonight is one of the Trope’s owners. With the Dragon Festival now started, all possible personnel are needed to service the crowds.

Three bony grins turn to smile at him. There are no words.

After a pause the owner says, “Listen, this is for paying customers. You want something?”

Three shrouded figures lean across the bar toward him. The owner draws back. “Drink,” he says, “or get out.”

Dead silence.

He apparently decides he’s outnumbered. “Shit,” the owner mutters, and goes off to wait on newcomers at the end of the bar. I think I hear a giggle from the death figure farthest from me. The nearest turns again to face me. Again I raise a glass in toast.

The figure reaches, hand ivory with makeup, into a pocket beneath the robes and withdraws an object. Then it extends the hand toward me. I accept a small skull made of spun sugar, another relic of Mexican religious celebrations. I incline my head gravely and set the candy skull beside my glass.

The nearest figure turns back to its fellows. I hear a whispered consultation. Then all three leave the bar together. As they reach the door, the barman shouts, “Good goddamn riddance!” He walks past me on the way to the cash register and I hear him say in a lower voice, “Give me the creeps.”

“Friends of yours?”

I turn to face Haley and Lark. I hadn’t seen them coming. “Friends of ours.” I shrug.

“Spooky,” says Haley:

“Striking masks,” says Lark.

“Want a beer?”

“We’re already set,” says Lark. “We’ve got a table back behind the grove of rubber plants. Do you want to join us?”

I toss down the final swallow of beer. “Thanks, no. Not yet. I’m going to get some fresh air before I do any more drinking. You want to come along?”

Lark shakes his head. “We’ve got to do some drinking before we get some more fresh air.”

“Then I’ll see you both later. I need the air.” I pick up the spun-sugar skull and gnaw on the jaw region as I push through the crowd.

Outside it’s warmer than it was last night. There is cloud cover; I suspect the San Juans will be solidly snowcapped by morning. I zip the front of my flight jacket and stick my balled fists into the pockets. Turning right, I head along Main toward the landing meadow. I see the amber lights of trucks still bringing in and unloading the deflated forms of the racing balloons. I heard earlier that Robert Simms and Negwenya won. I decide that’s a good omen.

“Girl? Hey, stop a moment, girl.”

I turn and look toward the source of the voice. I’m in front of the Teller House, the town’s lone real department store. I look into the display window and see the life-sized image of an elderly ragged woman staring back at me. It’s an argee screen—the name comes from the initials of the people who started setting up these synchronous video arrangements back in the late seventies. One enormous complex of electronic art, the argee screens are spotted in cities and towns around the globe. Each screen shows a live, life-sized, simultaneous transmission of a street scene somewhere else in the world. Sound and video equipment beam my voice and image back to the linked screen. A computer randomly changes the linkages.

Right now the old woman sees and hears me. I see and hear her. I have no idea where she really is. The scene behind her is dark and obviously urban. It could be any nighttime city.

“I’m in Baltimore,” she says. “Where are you?”

I tell her.

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “I heard about you people. Saw you on the news. Bunch of fools who jump off cliffs on kites.”

I laugh. “Condors launch from cliffs.”

“Birds aren’t too smart.”

“But they fly.”

“Yeah.” She inspects me seriously. “You one of them?”

“Do I fly?” I nod. “Not exactly on a kite, though.”

Her voice is thirsty. “Tell me about it.”

For some reason I cannot ignore the imperative in her voice. I tell her about flying. I describe my Dragon Five as the combination of a high-winged monoplane and a bat. I talk of tomorrow’s competition. I paint with words the colors of the long, gliding dragon kite I will tow behind my Five. I tell her of the manjha, the razor-sharp cutting line with which I will attempt to sever the towline of my opponent’s kite. And with which he or she will try to sever mine. But most of all, I describe the flying. I talk religiously of fighting maneuvers in the sky.

And when I pause for breath, she says, “Girl, God bless you.” Her image flickers.

The argee screen relinks. I blink a moment at the light. I see a daylight scene under bright sun. In the background is something that looks vaguely like the Taj Mahal. A man in a white linen suit looks out of the screen at me. He inspects me and stares at the colors of my jacket. Slowly he nods his head as though comprehending something. He says, “Woh kata hai?”

I smile, spread my hands helplessly, and walk on.

Woh kata hai. I believe that’s an Indian kite fighter’s challenge.

Dreaming.

It’s called a pench and I love it more than either soccer or skiing. Each of us stands in a circle about three yards in diameter; the circles are approximately twenty feet apart. The officials have limed the circles on the grass as they would stripe the yard lines for a football game. The breeze is light this morning, but it may kick up. I have brought several different sizes of fighting kites. When I look around at my competition, I generally have to tilt my head back. I am eleven years old.

My gear litters the close-cropped grass around my feet: kites, extra lines, a spare spool. My little brother, eight, sits boredly reading a science-fiction paperback just inside my circle. If I need it, he’ll help with the launching.

I love Saturday mornings in general, but this particular one is the Michael Collins Annual Kite Fly. It’s the second Saturday in September and it delights everyone except the high-school football coach who wanted to use this field for a practice scrimmage. Luckily the principal has an autographed picture of the Apollo 11 crew and is an old kite fighter himself, so that was that.

The kite-fighting contest isn’t the only event today, but it’s the only one that interests me. The pench should start in a few minutes, at nine, and will continue until noon. Since I’ve got some sort of reputation, I’m one of the flyers who get to start. Anyone who wants can take a turn standing in the opponent circle. If he loses, someone else takes his place. And if I lose, I’m out. Then I get to stand in line, waiting to challenge the current champions. I don’t plan to spend a lot of time waiting in line.

This is an average Indian summer morning. It’s cool now, but I’m guessing it’s going to get very hot by midday. The nearest referee—Mr. Schindler, the junior-high shop teacher—tells us through his bullhorn that each contestant should be ready. My first opponent steps into the next circle. I don’t know his last name, but his first name is Ken and he’s really sure of himself. I tell him I wish him luck. Ken snickers. He’s in at least eighth grade.

“You want help launching?” says my little brother.

“I can do the first one myself.” I adjust the bridle on a middle-sized kite. The breeze is gentle but steady.

“Okay.” His attention returns to his Robert Heinlein novel.

Ken’s kite looks fourteen inches by a foot—too small. He’s overestimating the wind velocity. Too bad.

“Launch ’em,” says the referee.

I lightly throw my gold-and-black fighter into the air and pump the cotton string with my right hand: pull in, let out, pull in, let out, until the diamond-shaped kite gains lift in the breeze and begins to climb. I sneak a glance at Ken. His fighter autumnleafs into the ground. I catch his eye and smile. He glares before picking up his kite to launch again.

My kite is solidly airborne. I continue the rhythm of launch; now the pumping motions are longer, smoother, slower. With one handle of the spool anchored at my feet, I stand at an angle to the nine-pound control line. String sings between thumb and forefinger of my left hand at shoulder level. I brake with right hand at right hip. My fighting kite soars. My mind goes with it and, for a moment, I look down at the field and see myself distantly below. I recognize me because of the colors of my jacket.

Ken has finally launched his kite, and is trying to gain altitude with brute force rather than subtlety. I pay out another hundred feet of line and feel the knot that signals I’m at the pre-agreed altitude. I practice wind-current turns with my kite and look bored. I know Ken’s looking at me, but I studiously ignore him.

“Okay,” says the referee. “You both got the altitude? Go to it.”

The strategy is fairly simple. Each of us has a flying line of five hundred feet. Then there’s one hundred feet of cutting line between that and the kite. The cutting line is manjha, ordinary four-stranded string coated with a mixture of egg, starch, and powdered glass. I mixed mine myself. The rules allow us to double-coat the line so that when it’s dry, it can slice an opponent’s line either from above or below. The winner of the competition is the flyer who has cut loose the greatest number of opponents’ kites.

Ken opens the battle ferociously and heavy-handedly, diving his fighter at cross-angles to my string. I dive mine to compensate and am slightly faster. Ken cancels the tactic. That’s a mistake too. I see his kite lurch sluggishly for just a moment. I pay out line and let my string rise into his. My index finger detects the slight vibration as the lines touch. I pull in and my fighter rises, tugging the cutting line against Ken’s. His kite, severed, spins down with the wind while he reels in loose string. He does not look happy as my next competitor steps up to replace him.

“Good flight,” says my little brother, and I’m not sure whether he’s being sarcastic to Ken or to me.

My new opponent is a girl in the seventh grade who has just taken up fighting. She has promise, but very little experience. Her kite doesn’t fly long after reaching fighting altitude.

It keeps going like that. In the first hour, I destroy five opponents. Next hour, six more. I let the competition keep their defeated kites if they can find them. Where would I store them all in my room?

Each hour we’re allowed fifteen minutes out of competition. I use my time to change lines on my kite. Every time I cut someone else’s line, my string loses some of its abrasive. I also adjust the bridle angle because the breeze continues to pick up.

The third and final hour gives me some better competition, but no one all that challenging. Not until Lark steps into the circle. He’s even smaller than I am, but he’s really tough. He’s my age. We’ve grown up in the same small town and gone to school together from the first grade. We both started flying kites about the same time. Lark is the only one whose fighting ability I respect.

He nods to me and smiles, but says nothing as he launches his fighter. Even my little brother is interested in this contest, so he puts his paperback down for the while. “Mairin hasn’t lost yet,” he says to Lark.

“I’d hate to spoil her morning,” Lark says, “but I’m feeling pretty good.”

His kite soars on the late-morning heat. Lark’s fighter is brown with bright yellow birdwings inset. “Okay,” says Mr. Schindler, the referee. “This is the last one. It’s almost noon.”

At first Lark fights conservatively, not actively countering my spectacular strategies. The trouble is that my kite is all color. I dive on him like a falcon, swoop up from beneath, twirl my fighter across his like the blade of a buzz saw. Nothing happens. I know that much of the abrasive has been scraped from my cutting line by the seven competitions of the past hour. But I’m sure that at least a few feet of cutting edge remain on the line. It’s a matter of finding it.

Lark realizes my problem and bides his time.

“Hey,” says Mr. Schindler. “I want to go to lunch.”

Lark makes his move. His brown-and-yellow fighter crosses the angle of my own string, then drops. My index finger feels the slight vibration as his line touches mine. Lark starts rolling his kite sideways. I compensate by letting out more string and somehow neither line cuts. What does happen, though, each of us discovers simultaneously through fingertips. Our lines have become entangled. Lark’s expression is grim.

“Don’t worry,” I call. I pay out more string as I simultaneously give the line a series of small tugs. Instead of rotating my kite so as to unwind our lines, I rotate to wrap them tighter. Then I pull.

I cut Lark’s string, and capture his kite because the upper line is still entwined with mine, all at the same time.

“Mairin!” He sounds furious. My eyes are on the two fighters.

“What?”

His voice moderates as I begin to reel in the kites. “It was a good contest.”

I’ll keep his kite in my room. For now, I lower my gaze to him and say, “Yes, it was very good.” Unaccountably I want to run across to his circle and hug him. I would like to kiss him.

Hug Lark? Kiss him? I sit upright suddenly, supported on my elbows, and stare confusedly at the curtained light. My room in the Ionic Hotel takes on a dawn reality. I glance to the side. Beside me, a humped form snores beneath the comforter. It’s not Lark; I know that.

Lark? I didn’t grow up with him; we come from opposite sides of the continent. We did not match our kites in childhood. My disorientation causes me to touch my face gently with my fingers to see if I am still who I think I am.

I try to recapture something of the dream. There is an elusive truth I’m missing.

Skyfighters.

We spend our lives riding the thermals, those great columns of heated air that lend lift to our machines and spirits. The thermals rise because they are warmer than the surrounding air. We look for the clues and seek them out, using them as elevators to the sky.

The best thermals generate in this valley from mid to late afternoon. Since there are two competitors remaining in the Dragon Festival contests, that time has been reserved for them. The sun has begun its descent into the open western end of the valley and the colors are, as always, spectacular. Crimson tongues lick through the cumulus.

Lark is one competitor; I am the other. All but we have seen our towed dragon kites spin down the long drop into mountainside, forest, or town, where the children vie to find the many-colored dragons and rip them to shreds.

Our duel will climax the festival.

Negwenya and Cheshire are waiting to ferry us both to a minimal fighting altitude. Then we will ride the thermals. Today Haley walks with me across the staging meadow. Her hand is in mine.

“You do talk in your sleep, you know,” Haley says. “Do you know that?” Without an answer, she continues, “Some of the time the words are clear. Sometimes you simply make sounds and your body moves. You’re a restless sleeper. I sleep like a lizard on a hot rock.” She laughs. “Did you notice?”

I nod.

Her expression turns serious. “I know last night was important to you—at least it was before last night.” Her smile is indecipherable. “Now isn’t the time to ask you things, I suppose.” She hesitates, and her grip tightens in mine. “People don’t work well as goals for you. That’s my game.” Now I see sadness in her face. “You love the sky more.”

We have reached Negwenya. Robert Simms waits with his assistants by my Dragon Five. Haley enfolds me in her arms and kisses me a long time on the lips. “Fly well,” she whispers, then turns and walks across the field toward Cheshire.

I realize I’m crying, and I’m not sure yet why.

“Time to link up,” says Robert, and his harsh, rope-scarred voice sounds to me softer than usual. I fasten myself into the harness of the Dragon Five. I check to make sure the bridle of my fighting kite is securely fastened to the winch post projecting downward from the Five’s keel tube, just behind the point to which my legs extend. The fighting kite is a long, serpentine dragon of mylar, painted in my colors. It has the oval face and trailing, snakelike body characteristic of dragon kites. The only differences are the additional lifting surfaces and stabilizing fins.

The flight is ready to begin. I look across to Cheshire. Lark gives me a thumbs-up sign and Haley waves. At Negwenya, Robert offers me a brilliant smile and his ritual “Break a leg, lady.” And we launch.

At twelve thousand feet, Negwenya floats almost directly above the immense tailings pond of the moribund Pandora Mine. The bright white tailings heap looks like some malignant thing beached between creek and trees. I think of kids singing their technological jingles when the wind rises and sifts white dust from the tailings down across the town: “Hexa, hexa, hexa-valent chromium!”

I notice that the aspen on the steep sides of the valley are starting to turn prematurely. Great slashes of golden yellow have suddenly appeared within twenty-four hours. No aspen is an island. The root systems of groves are interconnected. When the chlorophyll breaks down in one tree’s leaves in the autumn, so goes its extended family.

I had seen broken cumulus above the valley when I linked up to Negwenya. Scattered puffy formations are the giveaway signs of thermals, since condensation forms atop the pillars of warm air. The problem is that clouds move with the wind and usually only indicate where the thermals were. Extrapolation and a few good guesses should gain my ride up.

At twelve-five, I release the pressure catches and the Five drops away from Negwenya. I crane my neck and see that Lark has also dropped. In terms of radiated heat, both of us are more likely to find thermals over the tailings pond or the rooftops of town than above the darker fields or forest. Lark seems to be making for the pond. I stretch my body, feel the muscles loosen, and wheel my Dragon toward the center of town.

The scarlet sunset momentarily dazzles my eyes. I guessed correctly. I feel the left wing rise slightly, indicating I am skirting a thermal. I bring the nose down and turn into it; then feel the mild confirming bump that I am all the way in. Now what I have to do is stay inside the current in a gentle ascending spiral until I’ve reached the prearranged altitude. In this case, that is fifteen thousand feet. Neither Lark nor I want to try for altitude records today, though kite pilots here have gone above eighteen thousand without oxygen.

Up, up, and the readout on my visor lists off the numbers. As I rise in the thermal column, I touch the button on my control bar that unreels the line tethering my fighter. The black-and-gold dragon shape drops below and behind my Five. The lift ratio of the kite with its fins is excellent, so it takes only a few moments before it is gliding behind the Dragon. I pay out the entire hundred feet of line. Dragon follows Dragon like an offspring trailing the parent.

I am allowed fifty feet, half the tether, to be cutting line. But where the abrasive lengths are placed, and indeed what lengths are made abrasive, are up to me. Equipment officials carefully checked before launch to ensure that no more than fifty percent of the Dragon’s towline is a cutting surface. Like shagreen, the surface cuts only in one direction.

As I swing back across the town, I see that Lark is ascending above the tailings pond. I see his Dragon followed by the brown-and-yellow fledgling that is his fighter.

At fifteen thousand feet, the air is thin and painfully crisp. The sunlight feels as if it’s striking my eyes with sharp edges until I polarize my visor. Now that it’s time to leave the thermal. I exit on the upwind side to minimize altitude loss in the cooler surrounding air.

Lark and I stalk each other like soaring birds. These Dragons are not the Indian fighting kites of childhood. There are no sudden moves—or rarely. Maneuvers tend to be graceful and conservative, to minimize loss of altitude.

We sweep by each other in a wide pass and I estimate I’m about one hundred feet higher than Lark. From one point of view, we might seem to be tracing arabesques across the sky. From a more realistic referent, we circle each other like hungry, cautious predators.

Lark loops back in a figure eight and sails along still below, but parallel to me. I assume he is offering bait and try to guess how many moves ahead he’s thinking. My craft and I are slightly heavier than he and his; my sink rate is higher and so I’m gradually descending to his altitude. I’m in a position to wing over and pounce, but that’s the expectable thing. Lark doesn’t expect me to do the expected; so I do it.

I hit the warperons hard; the ends of my wings deform and peel me into a steep, descending bank. I’m losing vertical advantage fast, but my Dragon is cutting down hard behind Lark’s tail. It should have been an easy victory except that Lark reacts as though anticipating me—and I have the bemused thought that he probably was. The brown-and-yellow Dragon matches me move for move. If he’s not duplicating the exact angle of bank and degree of dive, I can’t tell the difference.

Damn it! Frustration moderates my caution as I slam the Dragon into a reverse-angle bank. Stabilized fabric crackles like firecrackers; the aluminum skeleton groans.

Lark predicted that one too. I know the long lenses on the ground are taking all this in. I hope the viewers are enjoying it.

The hell with this. I tighten my downward spiral, knowing that sooner or later I’ll suck him out of the tactic. Either that or we’ll hit the ground together.

Any others would have pulled out of this falling-moth spiral in some sort of sane maneuver that should have allowed me to use the slim remaining margin of altitude to cross their fighter’s tether with my cutting line. At times I must remind myself that Lark is no saner than I. One moment I’m aware that I’m still sinking closer to Lark and in a relatively short time am going to be right on top of him. The next moment Lark reverses the pitch of his spiral in an aching, crushing maneuver that neither rips off his wings nor puts him into a stall. I see brown fabric rush past my right eye, so close that I recoil slightly. Jesus!

One track of my mind wonders how close his cutting line came to severing my wing—or my head.

I don’t know what he’s planning, but I won’t equal his suicide maneuver. As I level off less precipitously, I see Lark to my right, apparently fleeing. I look beyond his Dragon and know this is not an abdication of the field. Lark is making for what appears to be a great funnel of birds soaring upward. They’re in a thermal.

Rather than seek out my own thermal, I pursue Lark, hoping to catch him before he reaches the elevator. The epinephrine surge from Lark’s spectacular maneuver starts to abate, leaving tinglings in my chest and hands. I will the Dragon to fly faster; other than that I can do nothing but let the craft sail serenely along. I enjoy the silence. I remember the network coverage of a previous Dragon tourney in which, as a novelty, audio technicians had dubbed in the wasp-buzz sounds of old, piston-engined fighter planes. It was amusing at first, but ultimately offensive.

I am close to Lark, but not close enough as he enters the thermal and begins his ascent. I glance at my altimeter readout: ten-seven. That means we were about a thousand feet above the town when Lark pulled out of the spiral. I trust all the groundlings were suitably thrilled. At a thousand feet, people truly do look like ants.

The gentle bump of entering the warmer air rocks the Dragon’s nose and I start to follow Lark vertically. As I go into the ascending bank, I sneak a look behind and see that my black-and-gold fighter is still trailing. Good. It hasn’t occurred to me in these past minutes to check. It’s an article of faith that I won’t lose the dragon kite through mechanical accident or chance.

Again because he’s lighter, Lark rises faster in the thermal than I. I resign myself fatalistically to the ride up and start to think like a tourist. I never, never think like a tourist. But now I look at the aspen, or I stare down at the checkerboard town, or I think about the act of flight rather than feeling it. Or something.

Something!

I look up and stare and react—try to do all those things at once. Lark hasn’t done as I anticipated. He has not waited until achieving the fighting altitude. No need—no rule that says he must. Instead he swoops upon me like a hawk at prey.

His Dragon grows in my vision. I watch. I know I must choose a maneuver, but something else bids me wait. By now I should be reacting unconsciously. If my conscious is at work, it’s now too late. There are several possible defensive maneuvers. So far today, Lark has correctly anticipated my every movement.

—large, so large. Brown and—

I must choose, I must—I do nothing.

That is my choice.

Lark does not anticipate it. Our vectors merge. His Dragon slams into mine with a force I could probably calculate, except—except I cannot think. I don’t know if I’m hurt or if I’m in shock. I feel nothing. I simply know a buffeting like a great wind has seized us. I realize we are flying a ragged craft composited of bits and pieces of our two Dragons: snapped, flailing wires, twisted tubing, rent fabric. Lark hangs in his harness only a few feet from me, but he doesn’t look up.

My vision skips like the frames in a badly spliced film. I see the golden aspen and the town spread out in the valley below us. I see Lark start to raise his head. Blood covers one side of his face. Droplets fly backward from his head like a fan.

I see the truth in that scarlet spray.

It is a long moment suspended in time.

Then it falls.

We fall—as bits of shattered Dragon spin away from us like colored confetti. I try to reach out toward Lark, but I can move only one arm. He stares back at me and I think he’s alive. The sky, I try to tell him. At least we’re in the sky. There could have been so many other ways. But the sky—Those who fly there are more important than any others.

Wind sucks the breath from my lungs. Lark, I try to say. Friend. I was wrong. I think Haley knows. Lovers. I should have—

I see green fields below.

Lark, it should have been us. We know the sky—

And the ground rises up like a fist.

THE QUICKENING

Michael Bishop

Civilizations are the products of historical continuity: knowledge, traditions, and technology develop over many centuries and are strongly influenced by local climates and topology. Today, of course, we’re approaching the reality of the “global village” via greatly increased ease of travel and communications . . . but we still speak many different languages, literally and figuratively. What if all the people in the world woke up one morning and found themselves in a different country? Would they be able to deal with the situation well enough to continue civilization as we know it? Would they even want to?

Michael Bishop, whose most recent novel is Transfigurations, has appeared twice before in Universe, with “OldFolks at Home” in #8 and “Saving Face” in #10.

i

Lawson came out of his sleep feeling drugged and disoriented. Instead of the susurrus of traffic on Rivermont and the early morning barking of dogs, he heard running feet and an unsettling orchestration of moans and cries. No curtains screened or softened the sun that beat down on his face, and an incandescent blueness had replaced their ceiling. “Marlena,” Lawson said doubtfully. He wondered if one of the children was sick and told himself that he ought to get up to help.

But when he tried to rise, scraping the back of his hand on a stone set firmly in mortar, he found that his bed had become a parapet beside a river flowing through an unfamiliar city. He was wearing, instead of the green Chinese-peasant pajamas that Marlena had given him for Christmas, a suit of khaki 1505s from his days in the Air Force and a pair of ragged Converse sneakers. Clumsily, as if deserting a mortuary slab, Lawson leapt away from the wall. In his sleep, the world had turned over. The forms of a bewildered anarchy had begun to assert themselves.

The city-and Lawson knew that it sure as hell wasn’t Lynchburg, that the river running through it wasn’t the James-was full of people. A few, their expressions terrified and their postures defensive, were padding past Lawson on the boulevard beside the parapet. Many shrieked or babbled as they ran. Other human shapes, dressed not even remotely alike, were lifting themselves bemusedly from paving stones, or riverside benches, or the gutter beyond the sidewalk. Their grogginess and their swiftly congealing fear, Lawson realized, mirrored his own: like him, these people were awakening to nightmare.

Because the terrible fact of his displacement seemed more important than the myriad physical details confronting him, it was hard to take in everything at once-but Lawson tried to balance and integrate what he saw.

The city was foreign. Its architecture was a clash of the Gothic and the sterile, pseudo-adobe Modern, one style to either side of the river. On this side, palm trees waved their dreamy fronds at precise intervals along the boulevard, and toward the city’s interior an intricate cathedral tower defined by its great height nearly everything beneath it. Already the sun crackled off the rose-colored tower with an arid fierceness that struck Lawson, who had never been abroad, as Mediterranean. . . . Off to his left was a bridge leading into a more modern quarter of the city, where beige and brick-red high-rises clustered like tombstones. On both sides of the bridge buses, taxicabs, and other sorts of motorized vehicles were stalled or abandoned in the thoroughfares.

Unfamiliar, Lawson reflected, but not unearthly-he recognized things, saw the imprint of a culture somewhat akin to his own. And, for a moment, he let the inanimate bulk of the city and the languor of its palms and bougainvillea crowd out of his vision the human horror show taking place in the streets.

A dark woman in a sari hurried past. Lawson lifted his hand to her. Dredging up a remnant of a high-school language course, he shouted, “iHabla Espanol?” The woman quickened her pace, crossed the street, recrossed it, crossed it again; her movements were random, motivated, it seemed, by panic and the complicated need to do something.

At a black man in a loincloth farther down the parapet, Law son shouted, “This is Spain! We’re somewhere in Spain! That’s all I know! Do you speak English? Spanish? Do you know what’s happened to us?”

The black man, grimacing so that his skin went taut across his cheekbones, flattened himself atop the wall like a lizard. His elbows jutted, his eyes narrowed to slits. Watching him, Lawson perceived that the man was listening intently to a sound that had been steadily rising in volume ever since Lawson had opened his eyes: the city was wailing. From courtyards, apartment buildings, taverns, and plazas, an eerie and discordant wail was rising into the bland blue indifference of the day. It consisted of many strains. The Negro in the loincloth seemed determined to separate these and pick out the ones that spoke most directly to him. He tilted his head.

“Spain!” Lawson yelled against this uproar. “Espana!”

The black man looked at Lawson, but the hieroglyph of recognition was not among those that glinted in his eyes. As if to dislodge the wailing of the city, he shook his head. Then, still crouching lizard-fashion on the wall, he began methodically banging his head against its stones. Lawson, helplessly aghast, watched him until he had knocked himself insensible in a sickening, repetitive spattering of blood.

But Lawson was the only one who watched. When he approached the man to see if he had killed himself, Lawson’s eyes were seduced away from the African by a movement in the river. A bundle of some sort was floating in the greasy waters below the wall-an infant, clad only in a shirt. The tie-strings on the shirt trailed out behind the child like the severed, wavering legs of a water-walker. Lawson wondered if, in Spain, they even had water-walkers. . . .

Meanwhile, still growing in volume, there crooned above the high-rises and Moorish gardens the impotent air-raid siren of 400,000 human voices. Lawson cursed the sound. Then he covered his face and wept.

ii

The city was Seville. The river was the Guadalquivir. Lynchburg and the James River, around which Lawson had grown up as the eldest child of an itinerant fundamentalist preacher, were several thousand miles and one helluva big ocean away. You couldn’t get there by swimming, and if you imagined that your loved ones would be waiting for you when you got back, you were probably fantasizing the nature of the world’s changed reality. No one was where he or she belonged anymore, and Lawson knew himself lucky even to realize where he was. Most of the dispossessed, displaced people inhabiting Seville today didn’t know that much; all they knew was the intolerable cruelty of their uprooting, the pain of separation from husbands, wives, children, lovers, friends. These things, and fear.

The bodies of infants floated in the Guadalquivir; and Lawson, from his early reconnoiterings of the city on a motor scooter that he had found near the Jardines de Cristina park, knew that thousands of adults already lay dead on streets and in apartment buildings-victims of panic-inspired beatings on their own traumatized hearts. Who knew exactly what was going on in the morning’s chaos? Babel had come again and with it, as part of the package, the utter dissolution of all family and societal ties. You couldn’t go around a corner without encountering a child of some exotic ethnic caste, her face snot-glazed, sobbing loudly or maybe running through a crush of bodies calling out names in an alien tongue.

What were you supposed to do? Wheeling by on his motor scooter, Lawson either ignored these children or searched their faces to see how much they resembled his daughters.

Where was Marlena now? Where were Karen and Hannah? Just as he played deaf to the cries of the children in the boulevards, Lawson had to harden himself against the implications of these questions. As dialects of German, Chinese, Bantu, Russian, Celtic, and a hundred other languages rattled in his ears, his scooter rattled .past a host of cars and buses with uncertain-seeming drivers at their wheels. Probably he too should have chosen an enclosed vehicle. If these frustrated and angry drivers, raging in polyglot defiance, decided to run over him, they could do so with impunity. Who would stop them?

Maybe-in Istanbul, or La Paz, or Mangalore, or Jonkoping, or Boise City, or Kaesong-his own wife and children had already lost their lives to people made murderous by fear or the absence of helmeted men with pistols and billy sticks. Maybe Marlena and his children were dead. . . .

I’m in Seville, Lawson told himself, cruising. He had determined the name of the city soon after mounting the motor scooter and going by a sign that said Plaza de Toros de Sevilla. A circular stadium of considerable size near the river. The bullring. Lawson’s Spanish was just good enough to decipher the signs and posters plastered on its walls. Corrida a las cinco de la tarde. (Garcia Lorca, he thought, unsure of where the name had come from.) Sombra y sol. That morning, then, he took the scooter around the stadium three or four times and then shot off toward the center of the city.

Lawson wanted nothing to do with the nondescript highrises across the Guadalquivir, but had no real idea what he was going to do on the Moorish and Gothic side of the river, either. All he knew was that the empty bullring, with its dormant potential for death, frightened him. On the other hand. how did you go about establishing order in a city whose population had not willingly chosen to be there.”

Seville’s population. Lawson felt sure, had been redistributed across the face of the globe. like chess pieces flung from a height. The population of every other human community on Earth had undergone similar displacements. The result, as if by malevolent design, was chaos and suffering. Your ears eventually tried to shut out the audible manifestations of this pain, but your eyes held you accountable and you hated yourself for ignoring the wailing Arab child, the assaulted Polynesian woman, the blue-eyed old man bleeding from the palms as he prayed in the shadow of a department-store awning. Very nearly, you hated yourself for surviving.

Early in the afternoon, at the entrance to the Calle de las Sierpes, Lawson got off his scooter and propped it against a wall. Then he waded into the crowd and lifted his right arm above his head.

“I speak English!” he called. “i Y hablo un poco Espanol! Any who speak English or Spanish please come to me!”

A man who might have been Vietnamese or Kampuchean, or even Malaysian, stole Lawson’s motor scooter and rode it in a wobbling zigzag down the Street of the Serpents. A heavyset blond woman with red cheeks glared at Lawson from a doorway, and a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy who appeared to be Italian clutched hungrily at Lawson’s belt, seeking purchase on an adult, hoping for commiseration. Although he did not try to brush the boy’s hand away, Lawson avoided his eyes.

“English! English here! i Un poco Espanol lambien!”

Farther down Sierpes, Lawson saw another man with his hand in the air; he was calling aloud in a crisp but melodic Slavic dialect, and already he had succeeded in attracting two , or three other people to him. In fact, pockets of like-speaking people seemed to be forming in the crowded commercial avenue, causing Lawson to fear that he had put up his hand too late to end his own isolation. What if those who spoke either . English or Spanish had already gathered into survival-conscious groups? What if they had already made their way into the countryside. where the competition for food and drink might be a little less predatory? If they had, he would be a lost, solitary Virginian in this Babel. Reduced to sign language and guttural noises to make his wants known, he would die a cipher. . . .

“Signore,” the boy hanging on his belt cried. “Signore.”

Lawson let his eyes drift to the boy’s face. “Ciao,” he said. It was the only word of Italian he knew, or the only word that came immediately to mind, and he spoke it much louder than he meant.

The boy shook his head vehemently, pulled harder on Lawson’s belt. His words tumbled out like the contents of an unburdened closet into a darkened room, not a single one of them distinct or recognizable.

“English!” Lawson shouted. “English here!”

“English here too, man!” a voice responded from the milling crush of people at the mouth of Sierpes. “Hang on a minute, I’m coming to you!”

A small muscular man with a large head and not much chin stepped daintily through an opening in the crowd and put out his hand to Lawson. His grip was firm. As he shook hands, he placed his left arm over the shoulder of the Italian boy hanging on to Lawson’s belt. The boy stopped talking and gaped at the newcomer.

“Dai Secombe,” the man said. “I went to bed in Aberystwyth, where I teach philosophy, and I woke up in Spain. Pleased to meet you, Mr.—”

“Lawson,” Lawson said.

The boy began babbling again, his hand shifting from Lawson’s belt to the Welshman’s flannel shirt facing. Secombe took the boy’s hands in his own. “I’ve got you, lad. There’s a ragged crew of your compatriots in a pool-hall pub right down this lane. Come on, then, I’ll take you.” He glanced at Lawson. “Wait for me, sir. I’ll be right back.”

Secombe and the boy disappeared, but in less than five minutes the Welshman had returned. He introduced himself all over again. “To go to bed in Aberystwyth and to wake up in Seville,” he said, “is pretty damn harrowing. I’m glad to be alive, sir.”

“Do you have a family?”

“Only my father. He’s eighty-four.”

“You’re lucky. Not to have anyone else to worry about, I mean.”

“Perhaps,” Dai Secombe said, a sudden trace of sharpness in his voice. “Yesterday I would not’ve thought so.”

The two men stared at each other as the wail of the city modulated into a less hysterical but still inhuman drone. People surged around them, scrutinized them from foyers and balconies, took their measure. Out of the corner of his eye Lawson was aware of a moonfaced woman in summer deerskins slumping abruptly and probably painfully to the street. An Eskimo woman-the conceit was almost comic, but the woman herself was dying and a child with a Swedish-steel switchblade was already freeing a necklace of teeth and shells from her throat.

Lawson turned away from Secombe to watch the plundering of the Eskimo woman’s body. Enraged, he took off his wristwatch and threw it at the boy’s head, scoring a glancing sort of hit on his ear.

“You little jackal, get away from there!”

The red-cheeked woman who had been glaring at Lawson applied her foot to the rump of the boy with the switchblade and pushed him over. Then she retrieved the thrown watch, hoisted her skirts, and retreated into the dim interior of the cafe whose door she had been haunting.

“In this climate, in this environment,” Dai Secombe told Lawson, “an Eskimo is doomed. It’s as much psychological and emotional as it is physical. There may be a few others who’ve already died for similar reasons. Not much we can do, sir.”

Lawson turned back to the Welshman with a mixture of awe and disdain. How had this curly-haired lump of a man, in the space of no more than three or four hours, come to respond so lackadaisically to the deaths of his fellows? Was it merely because the sky was still blue and the edifices of another age still stood?

Pointedly, Secombe said, “That was a needless forfeiture of your watch. Lawson.”

“How the hell did that poor woman get here?” Lawson demanded, his gesture taking in the entire city. “How the hell did any of us get here?” The stench of open wounds and the first sweet hints of decomposition mocked the luxury of his ardor.

“Good questions,” the Welshman responded, taking Lawson’s arm and leading him out of the Calle de las Sierpes. “It’s a pity I can’t answer ’em.”

iii

That night they ate fried fish and drank beer together in a dirty little apartment over a shop whose glass display cases were filled with a variety of latex contraceptives. They had obtained the fish from a pescaderia voluntarily tended by men and women of Greek and Yugoslavian citizenship, people who had run similar shops in their own countries. The beer they had taken from one of the classier bars on the Street of the Serpents. Both the fish and the beer were at room temperature, but tasted none the worse for that.

With the fall of evening, however, the wail that during the day had subsided into a whine began to reverberate again with its first full burden of grief. If the noise was not quite so loud as it had been that morning, Lawson thought, it was probably because the city contained fewer people. Many had died, and a great many more, unmindful of the distances involved, had set out to return to their homelands.

Lawson chewed a piece of adobo and washed this down with a swig of the vaguely bitter Cruz del Campo beer.

“Isn’t this fine?” Secombe said, his butt on the tiles of the room’s one windowsill. “Dinner over a rubber shop. And this a Catholic country, too.”

“I was raised a Baptist,” Lawson said, realizing at once that his confession was a non sequitur.

“Oh,” Secombe put in immediately. “Then I imagine you could get ail the rubbers you wanted.”

“Sure. For a quarter. In almost any gas-station restroom.”

“Sorry,” Secombe said.

They ate for a while in silence. Lawson’s back was to a cool plaster wall; he leaned his head against it, too, and released a sharp moan from his chest. Then, sustaining the sound, he moaned again, adding his own strand of grief to the cacophonous harmonies already afloat over the city. He was no different from all the bereaved others who shared his pain by concentrating on their own.

“What did you do in . . . in Lynchburg?” Secombe suddenly asked.

“Campus liaison for the Veterans Administration. I traveled to four different colleges in the area, straightening out people’s problems with the GI Bill. I tried to see to it that Sweet Jesus, Secombe, who cares? I miss my wife. I’m afraid my girls are dead.”

“Karen and Hannah?”

“They’re three and five. I’ve taught them to play chess. Karen’s good enough to beat me occasionally if I spot her my queen. Hannah knows the moves, but she hasn’t got her sister’s patience-she’s only three, you know. Yeah. Sometimes she sweeps the pieces off the board and folds her arms, and we play hell trying to find them all. There’ll be pawns under the sofa, horsemen upside down in the shag—” Lawson stopped.

“She levels them,” Secombe said. “As we’ve all been leveled. The knight’s no more than the pawn, the king no more than the bishop.”

Lawson could tell that the Welshman was trying to turn aside the ruinous thrust of his grief. But he brushed the metaphor aside: “I don’t think we’ve been ‘leveled,’ Secombe.”

“Certainly we have. Guess who 1 saw this morning near the cathedral when I first woke up.”

“God only knows.”

“God and Dai Secombe, sir. 1 saw the Marxist dictator of . . . oh, you know, that little African country where there’s just been a coup. I recognized the bastard from the telly broadcasts during the purge trials there. There he was, though, in white ducks and a ribbed T-shirt-terrified, Lawson. and as powerless as you or 1. He’d been quite decidedly leveled; you’d better believe he had.”

“I’ll bet he’s alive tonight, Secombe.”

The Welshman’s eyes flickered with a sudden insight. He extended the greasy cone of newspaper from the pescaderia. “Another piece of fish, Lawson? Come on, then, there’s only one more.”

“To be leveled, Secombe, is to be put on a par with everyone else. Your dictator, even deprived of office, is a grown man. What about infant children? Toddlers and preadolescents? And what about people like that Eskimo woman who haven’t got a chance in an unfamiliar environment, even if its inhabitants don’t happen to be hostile? 1 saw a man knock his brains out on a stone wall this morning because he took a look around and knew he couldn’t make it here. Maybe he thought he was in Hell, Secombe. I don’t know. But his chance certainly wasn’t ours!

“He knew he couldn’t adjust.”

“Of course he couldn’t adjust. Don’t give me that bullshit about leveling!”

Secombe turned the cone of newspaper around and withdrew the last piece of fish. “I’m going to eat this myself, if you don’t mind.” He ate. As he was chewing, he said, “I didn’t think that Virginia Baptists were so free with their tongues, Lawson. Tsk, tsk. Undercuts my preconceptions.”

“I’ve fallen away.”

“Haven’t we all.”

Lawson took a final swig of warm beer. Then he hurled the bottle across the room. Fragments of amber glass went everywhere. “God!” he cried. “God, God, God!” Weeping, he was no different from three quarters of Seville’s new citizens by-chance. Why, then, as he sobbed, did he shoot such guilty and threatening glances at the Welshman?

“Go ahead,” Secombe advised him, waving the empty cone of newspaper. “I feel a little that way myself.”

iv

In the morning an oddly blithe woman of forty-five or so accosted them in the alley outside the contraceptive shop. A military pistol in a patent-leather holster was strapped about her skirt. Her seeming airiness, Lawson quickly realized, was a function of her appearance and her movements; her eyes were as grim and frightened as everyone else’s. But, as soon as they came out of the shop onto the cobblestones, she approached them fearlessly, hailing Secombe almost as if he were an old friend.

“You left us yesterday, Mr. Secombe. Why?”

“I saw everything dissolving into cliques.”

“Dissolving? Coming together, don’t you mean?”

Secombe smiled noncommittally, then introduced the woman to Lawson as Mrs. Alexander. “She’s one of your own, Lawson. She’s from Wyoming or some such place. I met her outside the cathedral yesterday morning when the first self-appointed muezzins started calling their language-mates together. She didn’t have a pistol then.”

“I got it from one of the Guardia Civil stations,” Mrs. Alexander said. “And I feel lots better just having it, let me tell you.” She looked at Lawson. “Are you in the Air Force?”

“Not anymore. These are the clothes I woke up in.”

“My husband’s in the Air Force. Or was. We were stationed at Warren in Cheyenne. I’m originally from upstate New York. And these are the clothes I woke up in.” A riding skirt, a blouse, low-cut rubber-soled shoes. “I think they tried to give us the most serviceable clothes we had in our wardrobes-but they succeeded better in some cases than in others.”

“ ‘They’ ?” Secombe asked.

“Whoever’s done this. It’s just a manner of speaking.”

“What do you want?” Secombe asked Mrs. Alexander. His brusqueness of tone surprised Lawson.

Smiling, she replied, “The word for today is Exportadora. We’re trying to get as many English-speaking people as we can to Exportadora. That’s where the commercial center for American servicemen and their families in Seville is located, and it’s just off one of the major boulevards to the south of here.”

On a piece of paper sack Mrs. Alexander drew them a crude map and explained that her husband had once been stationed in Zaragoza in the north of Spain. Yesterday she had recalled that Seville was one of the four Spanish cities supporting the American military presence, and with persistence and a little luck a pair of carefully briefed English-speaking DPs (the abbreviation was Mrs. Alexander’s) had discovered the site of the American PX and commissary just before nightfall. Looting the place when they arrived had been an impossibly mixed crew of foreigners, busily hauling American merchandise out of the ancient buildings. But Mrs. Alexander’s DPs had run off the looters by the simple expedient of revving the engine of their commandeered taxicab and blowing its horn as if to announce Armageddon. In ten minutes the little American enclave had emptied of all human beings but the two men in the cab. After that, as English-speaking DPs and ‘entertainment magazines, and a variety of tabloids, including the military paper Stars and Stripes. No one knew how old these publications were, because no one knew over what length of time the redistribution of the world’s population had taken place. How long had everyone slept? And what about the discrepancies among time zones and the differences among people’s waking hours within the same time zones? These questions were academic now, it seemed to Lawson, because the agency of transfer had apparently encompassed every single human being alive on Earth.

Thumbing desultorily through a copy of Stars and Stripes, he encountered an article on the problems of military hospitals and wondered how many of the world’s sick had awakened in the open, doomed to immediate death because the care they required was nowhere at hand. The smell of spilled tobacco and melted Life Savers made the newsstand a pleasant place to contemplate these horrors; and even as his conscience nagged and a contingent of impatient DPs awaited him, Lawson perversely continued to flip through the newspaper.

Secombe’s squat form appeared in the doorway. “I thought you were looking for a local roadmap.”

“Found it already, just skimmin’ the news.”

“Come on, if you would. The folks’re ready to be off.”

Reluctantly, Lawson followed Secombe outside, where the raw Andalusian sunlight broke like invisible surf against the pavement and the fragile-seeming shell of the Air Force bus. It was of the Bluebird shuttle variety, and Lawson remembered summer camp at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and bus rides from his squadron’s minimum-maintenance ROTC barracks to the survival-training camps near the swamp. That had been a long time ago, but this Bluebird might have hailed from an even more distant era. It was as boxy and sheepish-looking as if it had come off a 1954 assembly line, and it appeared to be made out of warped tin rather than steel. The people inside the bus had opened all its windows, and many of those on the driver’s side were watching Secombe and Lawson approach.

“Move your asses!” a man shouted at them. “Let’s get some wind blowing through this thing before we all suffodamn-cate.”

“Just keep talking,” Secombe advised him. “That should do fine.”

v

Aboard the bus was a motley lot of Americans, Britishers, and Australians, with two or three English-speaking Europeans and an Oxford-educated native of India to lend the group ballast. Lawson took up a window seat over the hump of one of the bus’s rear tires, and Secombe squeezed in beside him. A few people introduced themselves; others, lost in fitful reveries, ignored them altogether. To Lawson, the most unsettling thing about the contingent was the absence of children. Although about equally divided between men and women, the group contained no boys or girls any younger than their early teens.

Lawson opened the map of southern Spain he had found in the newsstand and traced his finger along a highway route leading out of Seville to two small American enclaves outside the city, Santa Clara and San Pablo. Farther to the south were Jerez and the port city of Cadiz. Lawson’s heart misgave him; the names were all so foreign, so formidable in what they evoked, and he felt this entire enterprise to be hopeless. . . .

About midway along the right-hand side of the bus, a black woman was sobbing into the hem of her blouse, and a man perched on the Bluebird’s long rear seat had his hands clasped to his ears and his head canted forward to touch his knees. Lawson folded up the map and stuck it into the crevice between the seat and the side of the bus.

“The bottom-line common denominator here isn’t our all speaking English,” Secombe whispered. “It’s what we’re suffering.”

Driven by one of Mrs. Alexander’s original explorers, a doctor from Ivanhoe, New South Wales, the Bluebird shuddered and lurched forward. In a moment it had left Exportadora and begun banging along one of the wide avenues that would lead it out of town.

“And our suffering,” Secombe went on, still whispering, “unites us with all those poor souls raving in the streets and sleeping facedown in their own vomit. You felt that the other night above the condom shop, Lawson. I know you did, talking of your daughters. So why are you so quick to go looking for what you aren’t likely to find? Why are you so ready to unite yourself with this artificial family born out of catastrophe? Do you really think you’re going to catch a flight home to Lynchburg? Do you really think the bird driving this sardine can-who ought to be out in the streets plying his trade instead of running a shuttle service-d’you really think he’s ever going to get back to Australia?”

“Secom be—”

“Do you, Lawson?”

Lawson clapped a hand over the Welshman’s knee and wobbled it back and forth. “You wouldn’t be badgering me like this if you had a family of your own. What the hell do you want us to do? Stay here forever?”

“I don’t know, exactly.” He removed Lawson’s hand from his knee. “But I do have a father, sir, and I happen to be fond of him. . . . All I know for certain is that things are .supposed to be different now. We shouldn’t be rushing to restore what we already had.”

“Shit,” Lawson murmured. He leaned his head against the bottom edge of the open window beside him.

From deep within the city came the brittle noise of gunshots. The Bluebird’s driver, in response to this sound and to the vegetable carts and automobiles that had been moved into the streets as obstacles, began wheeling and cornering like a stock-car jockey. The bus clanked and stuttered alarmingly. It growled through an intersection below a stone bridge, leapt over that bridge like something living, and roared down into a semi-industrial suburb of Seville, where a Coca-Cola bottling factory and a local brewery lifted huge competing signs.

On top of one of these buildings Lawson saw a man with a rifle taking unhurried potshots at anyone who came into his sights. Several people already lay dead.

And a moment later the Bluebird’s windshield shattered, another bullet ricocheted off its flank, and everyone in the bus was either shouting or weeping. The next time Lawson looked, the bus’s windshield appeared to have woven inside it a large and exceedingly intricate spider’s web.

The Bluebird careened madly, but the doctor from Ivanhoe kept it upright and turned it with considerable skill onto the highway to San Pablo. Here the bus eased into a quiet and rhythmic cruising that made this final incident in Seville except for the evidence of the windshield-seem only the cottony aftertaste of nightmare. At last they were on their way. Maybe.

“Another good reason for trying to get home,” Lawson said.

“What makes you think it’s going to be different there?”

Irritably, Lawson turned on the Welshman. “1 thought your idea was that this change was some kind of improvement.”

“Perhaps it will be. Eventually.”

Lawson made a dismissive noise and looked at the olive . orchard spinning by on his left. Who would harvest the crop? Who would set the aircraft factories, the distilleries, the chemical and textile plants running again? Who would see to it that J seed was sown in the empty fields?

Maybe Secombe had something. Maybe, when you ran for home, you ran from the new reality at hand. The effects of . this new reality’s advent were not going to go away very soon, no matter what you did-but seeking to reestablish yesterday’s order would probably create an even nastier entropic pattern 1 than would accepting the present chaos and working to rein it in. How, though, did you best rein it in? Maybe by trying to get back home . . .

Lawson shook his head and thought of Marlena, Karen, Hannah; of the distant, mist-softened cradle of the Blue Ridge. Lord. That was country much easier to get in tune with than the harsh, white-sky bleakness of this Andalusian valley. If you stay here, Lawson told himself, the pain will never go away.

They passed Santa Clara, which was a housing area for the officers and senior NCOs who had been stationed at Moron. With its neatly trimmed hedgerows, tall aluminum streetlamps, and low-roofed houses with carports and picture windows, Santa Clara resembled a middle-class exurbia in New Jersey or Ohio. Black smoke was curling over the area, however, and the people on the streets and lawns were definitely not Americans-they were transplanted Dutch South Africans, Amazonian tribesmen, Poles, Ethiopians, God only knew what. All Lawson could accurately deduce was that a few of these people had moved into the vacant houses maybe they had awakened in them-and that others had aimlessly set bonfires about the area’s neighborhoods. These fires, because there was no wind, burned with a maddening slowness and lack of urgency.

“Little America,” Secombe said aloud.

“That’s in Antarctica,” Lawson responded sarcastically.

“Right. No matter where it happens to be.”

“Up yours.”

Their destination was now San Pablo, where the Americans had hospital facilities, a library, a movie theater, a snack bar, a commissary, and, in conjunction with the Spaniards, a small commercial and military airfield. San Pablo lay only a few more miles down the road, and Lawson contemplated the idea of a flight to Portugal. What would be the chances. supposing you actually reached Lisbon, of crossing the Atlantic, either by sea or air, and reaching one of the United States’ coastal cities? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? Less than that?

A couple of seats behind the driver, an Englishman with a crisp-looking mustache and an American woman with a distinct Southwestern accent were arguing the merits of bypassing San Pablo and heading on to Gibraltar, a British possession. The Englishman seemed to feel that Gibraltar would have escaped the upheaval to which the remainder of the world had fallen victim, whereas the American woman thought he was crazy. A shouting match involving five or six other passengers ensued. Finally, his patience at an end, the Bluebird’s driver put his elbow on the horn and held it there until everyone had shut up.

“It’s San Pablo.” he announced. “Not Gibraltar or anywhere else. There’ll be a plane waiting’ for us when we get there.”

vi

Two aircraft were waiting, a pair of patched-up DC-7s that had once belonged to the Spanish airline known as Iberia. Mrs. Alexander had recruited one of her pilots from the DPs who had shown up at Export Dora; the other, a retired TAW veteran from Riverside, California, had made it by himself to the airfield by virtue of a prior acquaintance with Seville and its American military installations. Both men were eager to carry passengers home, one via a stopover in Lisbon and the other by using Madrid as a steppingstone to the British Isles. The hope was that they could transfer their passengers to jet aircraft at these cities’ more cosmopolitan airports, but no one spoke very much about the real obstacles to success that had already begun stalking them: civil chaos, delay, inadequate communications, fuel shortages, mechanical hangups, doubt and ignorance, a thousand other things.

At twilight, then, Lawson stood next to Dai Secombe at the chainlink fence fronting San Pablo’s pothole-riven runway and watched the evening light glimmer off the wings of the DC-7s. Bathed in a muted dazzle, the two old airplanes were almost beautiful. Even though Mrs. Alexander had informed the DPs that they must spend the night in the installation’s movie theater, so that the Bluebird could make several more shuttle runs to Exportadora, Lawson truly believed that he was bound for home.

“Good-bye,” Secombe told him.

“Good-bye? . . . Oh, because you’ll be on the other flight?”

“No, I’m telling you good-bye, Lawson, because I’m leaving. Right now, you see. This very minute.”

“Where are you going?”

“Back into the city.”

“How? What for?”

“I’ll walk, I suppose. As for why, it has something to do with wanting to appease Mrs. Alexander’s ‘they,’ also with finding out what’s to become of us all. Seville’s the place for that, I think.”

“Then why’d you even come out here?”

“To say good-bye, you bloody imbecile.” Secombe laughed, grabbed Lawson’s hand, shook it heartily. “Since I couldn’t manage to change your mind.”

With that, he turned and walked along the chainlink fence until he had found the roadway past the installation’s commissary. Lawson watched him disappear behind that building’s complicated system of loading ramps. After a time the Welshman reappeared on the other side, but against the vast Spanish sky, his compact, striding form rapidly dwindled to an imperceptible smudge. A smudge on the darkness.

“Good-bye,” Lawson said.

That night, slumped in a lumpy theater chair, he slept with nearly sixty other people in San Pablo’s movie house. A teenage boy, over only a few objections, insisted on showing all the old movies still in tins in the projection room. As a result, Lawson awoke once in the middle of Apocalypse Now and another time near the end of Kubrick’s The Left Hand of Darkness. The ice on the screen, dune like sastrugi, ranged from horizon to horizon, chilled him, touching a sensitive spot in his memory. “Little America,” he murmured. Then he went back to sleep.

vii

With the passengers bound for Lisbon, Lawson stood at the fence where he had stood with Secombe, and watched the silver pin wheeling of propellers as the aircraft’s engines engaged. The DC-7 flying to Madrid would not leave until much later that day, primarily because it still had several vacant seats and Mrs. Alexander felt sure that more English-speaking DPs could still be found in the city.

The people at the gate with Lawson shifted uneasily and whispered among themselves. The engines of their savior airplane whined deafeningly, and the runway seemed to tremble. What woebegone eyes the women had, Lawson thought, and the men were as scraggly as railroad hoboes. Feeling his jaw, he understood that he was no more handsome or well groomed than any of those he waited with. And, like them, he was impatient for the signal to board, for the thumbs-up sign indicating that their airplane had passed its latest rudimentary ground tests.

At least, he consoled himself, you’re not eating potato chips at ten-thirty in the morning. Disgustedly, he turned aside from a jut-eared man who was doing just that.

“There’re more people here than our plane’s supposed to carry,” the potato-chip crunchier said. “That could be dangerous.”

“But it isn’t really that far to Lisbon, is it?” a woman replied. “And none of us has any luggage.”

“Yeah, but—” The man gagged on a chip, coughed, tried to speak again. Facing deliberately away, Lawson felt that the man’s words would acquire eloquence only if he suddenly volunteered to ride in the DC-7’s unpressurized baggage compartment.

As it was, the signal came to board and the jut-eared man had no chance to finish his remarks. He threw his cellophane sack to the ground, and Lawson heard it crackling underfoot as people crowded through the gate onto the grassy verge of the runway.

In order to fix the anomaly of San Pablo in his memory, Lawson turned around and walked backward across the field. He saw that bringing up the rear were four men with automatic weapons-weapons procured, most likely, from the installation’s Air Police station. These men, like Lawson, were walking backward, but with their guns as well as their eyes trained on the weirdly constituted band of people who had just appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, along the airfield’s fence.

One of these people wore nothing but a ragged pair of shorts, another an ankle-length burnoose, another a pair of trousers belted with a rope. One of their number was a doeeyed young woman with an exposed torso and a circlet of bright coral on her wrist. But there were others too, and they all seemed to have been drawn to the runway by the airplane’s engine whine; they moved along the fence like desperate ghosts. As the first members of Lawson’s group mounted into the plane, even more of these people appeared-an assembly of nomads, hunters, hod-carriers, fishers, herdspeople. Apparently they all understood what an airplane was for, and one of the swarthiest men among them ventured out onto the runway with his arms thrown out imploringly.

“Where you go?” he shouted. “Where you go?”

“There’s no more room!” responded a blue-jeans-clad man with a machine gun. “Get back! You’ll have to wait for another flight!”

Oh, sure, Lawson thought, the one to Madrid. He was at the base of the airplane’s mobile stairway. The jut-eared man who had been eating potato chips nodded brusquely at him.

“You’d better get on up there,” he shouted over the robust hiccoughing of the airplane’s engines, “before we have unwanted company breathing down our necks!”

“After you.” Lawson stepped aside.

Behind the swarthy man importuning the armed guards for a seat on the airplane, there clamored thirty or more insistent people, their only real resemblance to one another being 1 their longing for a way out. “Where you go? Where you go?” the bravest and most desperate among them yelled, but they all wanted to board the airplane that Mrs. Alexander’s charges had already laid claim to; and most of them could see that it was too late to accomplish their purpose without some kind of risk-taking. The man who had been shouting in English, along with four or five others, broke into an assertive dogtrot toward the plane. Although their cries continued to be modestly beseeching, Lawson could tell that the passengers’ guards now believed themselves under direct attack.

A burst of machine-gun fire sounded above the field and echoed away like rain drumming on a tin roof. The man who . had been asking “Where you go?” pitched forward on his, face. Others fell beside him, including the woman with the “, coral bracelet. Panicked or prodded by this evidence of their assailants’ mortality, one of the guards raked the chain link fence with his weapon, bringing down some of those who had ‘, already begun to retreat and summoning forth both screams ;’ and the distressingly incongruous sound of popping wire. Then, eerily, it was quiet again.

“Get on that airplane!” a guard shouted at Lawson. He W’, was the only passenger still left on the ground, and everyone wanted him inside the plane so that the mobile stairway could be rolled away.

“I don’t think so,” Lawson said to himself.

Hunching forward like a man under fire, he ran toward the gate and the crude mandala of bodies partially blocking it. The slaughter he had just witnessed struck him as abysmally repetitive of a great deal of recent history, and he did not wish to belong to that history anymore. Further, the airplane behind him was a gross iron-plated emblem of the burden he no .:’, longer cared to bear-even if it also seemed to represent the promise of passage home.

“Hey, where the hell you think you’re goin’ ?”

Lawson did not answer. He stepped gingerly through the corpses on the runway’s margin, halted on the other side of the fence, and, his eyes misted with glare and poignant bewilderment, turned to watch the DC-7 taxi down the scrublined length of concrete to the very end of the field. There the airplane negotiated a turn and started back the way it had come. Soon it was hurtling along like a colossal metal dragonfly, building speed. When it lifted from the ground, its tires screaming shrilly with the last series of bumps before takeoff, Lawson held his breath.

Then the airplane’s right wing dipped, dipped again, struck the ground, and broke off like a piece of balsa wood, splintering brilliantly. After that, the airplane went flipping, cartwheeling, across the end of the tarmac and into the desolate open field beyond, where its shell and remaining wing were suddenly engulfed in flames. You could hear people frying in that inferno; you could smell gasoline and burnt flesh.

“Jesus,” Lawson said.

He loped away from the airfield’s fence, hurried through the short grass behind the San Pablo library, and joined a group of those who had just fled the English-speaking guards’ automatic-weapon fire. He met them on the highway going back to Seville and walked among them as merely another of their number. Although several people viewed his 1505 trousers with suspicion, no one argued that he did not belong, and no one threatened to cut his throat for him.

As hangdog and exotically nondescript as most of his companions, Lawson watched his tennis shoes track the pavement like the feet of a mechanical toy. He wondered what he was going to do back in Seville. Successfully dodge bullets and eat fried fish, if he was lucky. Talk with Secombe again, if he could find the man. And, if he had any sense, try to organize his life around some purpose other than the insane and hopeless one of returning to Lynchburg. What purpose, though? What purpose beyond the basic, animal purpose of staying alive?

“Are any of you hungry?” Lawson asked.

He was regarded with suspicious curiosity.

“Hungry,” he repeated. “Tiene hambre?”

English? Spanish? Neither worked. What languages did they have, these refugees from an enigma? It looked as if they had all tried to speak together before and found the task impossible-because, moving along the asphalt under the hot Andalusian sun, they now relied on gestures and easily interpretable noises to express themselves.

Perceiving this, Lawson brought the fingers of his right hand to his mouth and clacked his teeth to indicate chewing.

He was understood. A thin barefoot man in a capacious linen shirt and trousers led Lawson off the highway into an orchard of orange trees. The fruit was not yet completely ripe, and was sour because of its greenness, but all twelve or thirteen of Lawson’s crew ate, letting the juice run down their arms. When they again took up the trek to Seville, Lawson’s mind was almost absolutely blank with satiety. The only thing rattling about in it now was the fear that he would not know what to do once they arrived. He never did find out if the day’s other scheduled flight, the one to Madrid, made it safely to its destination, but the matter struck him now as of little import. He wiped his sticky mouth and trudged along numbly.

viii

He lived above the contraceptive shop. In the mornings he walked through the alley to a bakery that a woman with calm Mongolian features had taken over. In return for a daily allotment of bread and a percentage of the goods brought in for barter, Lawson swept the bakery’s floor, washed the utensils that were dirtied each day, and kept the shop’s front counter. His most rewarding skill, in fact, was communicating with those who entered to buy something. He had an uncanny grasp of several varieties of sign language, and on occasion he found himself speaking a monosyllabic patois whose derivation was a complete mystery to him. Sometimes he thought that he had invented it himself; sometimes he believed that he had learned it from the transplanted Sevillanos among whom he now lived.

English, on the other hand, seemed to leak slowly out of his mind, a thick, unrecoverable fluid.

The first three or four weeks of chaos following The Change had by this time run their course, a circumstance that surprised Lawson. Still, it was true. Now you could lie down at night on your pallet without hearing pistol reports or fearing that some benighted freak was going to set fire to your staircase. Most of the city’s essential services-electricity, water, and sewerage-were working again, albeit uncertainly, and agricultural goods were coming in from the countryside. People had gone back to doing what they knew best, while those whose previous jobs had had little to do with the basics of day-to-day survival were now apprenticing as bricklayers, carpenters, bakers, fishers, and water and power technicians. That men and women chose to live separately, and that children were as rare as sapphires, no one seemed to find disturbing or unnatural. A new pattern was evolving. You lived among your fellows without tension or quarrel, and you formed no dangerously intimate relationships.

One night, standing at his window, Lawson’s knee struck a loose tile below the casement. He removed the tile and set it on the floor. Every night for nearly two months he pried away at least one tile and, careful not to chip or break it, stacked it near an inner wall with those he had already removed.

After completing this task, as he lay on his pallet, he would often hear a man or a woman somewhere in the city singing a high, sweet song whose words had no significance for him. Sometimes a pair of voices would answer each other, always in different languages. Then, near the end of the summer, as Lawson stood staring at the lathing and the wall beams he had methodically exposed, he was moved to sing a melancholy song of his own. And he sang it without knowing what it meant.

The days grew cooler. Lawson took to leaving the bakery during its midafternoon closing and proceeding by way of the Calle de las Sierpes to a bodega across from. the .bullring. A crew of silent laborers, who worked very purposively in spite of their seeming to have no single boss, was dismantling the Plaza de Toros, and Lawson liked to watch as he drank his wine and ate the breadsticks he had brought with him.

Other crews about the city were carefully taking down the government buildings, banks, and barrio chapels that no one frequented anymore, preserving the bricks, tiles, and beams as if in the hope of some still unspecified future construction. By this time Lawson himself had knocked out the rear wall of his room over the contraceptive shop, and he felt a strong sense of identification with the laborers craftily gutting the bullring of its railings and barricades. Eventually, of course, everything would have to come down. Everything.

The rainy season began. The wind and the cold. Lawson continued to visit the sidewalk cafe near the ruins of the stadium; and because the bullring’s destruction went forward even in wet weather, he wore an overcoat he had recently acquired and staked out a nicely sheltered table under the bodega’s awning. This was where he customarily sat.

One particularly gusty day, rain pouring down, he shook out his umbrella and sat down at this table only to find another man sitting across from him. Upon the table was a wooden game board of some kind, divided into squares.

“Hello, Lawson,” the interloper said.

Lawson blinked and licked his lips thoughtfully. Although he had not called his family to mind in some time, and wondered now if he had ever really married and fathered children, Dai Secombe’s face had occasionally floated up before him in the dark of his room. But now Lawson could not remember the Welshman’s name, or his nationality, and he had no notion of what to say to him. The first words he spoke, therefore, came out sounding like dream babble, or a voice played backward on the phonograph. In order to say hello he was forced to the indignity. almost comic, of making a childlike motion with his hand.

Secombe, pointing to the game board, indicated that they should play. From a carved wooden box with a velvet lining he emptied the pieces onto the table, then arranged them on both sides of the board. Chess, Lawson thought vaguely, but he really did not recognize the pieces-they seemed changed from what he believed they should look like. And when it came his turn to move, Secombe had to demonstrate the capabilities of all the major pieces before he, Lawson, could essay even the most timid advance. The piece that most reminded him of a knight had to be moved according to two distinct sets of criteria, depending on whether it started from a black square or a white one; the “rooks,” on the other hand, were able, at certain times, to jump an opponent’s intervening pieces. The game boggled Lawson’s understanding. After ten or twelve moves he pushed his chair back and took a long, bittersweet taste of wine. The rain continued to pour down like an endless curtain of deliquescent beads.

“That’s all right,” Secombe said. “I haven’t got it all down yet myself, quite. A Bhutanese fellow near where I live made the pieces, you see, and just recently taught me how to play.”

With difficulty, Lawson managed to frame a question: “What work have you been doing?”

“I’m in demolition. As we all will be soon. It’s the only really constructive occupation going.” The Welshman chuckled mildly, finished his own wine, and rose. Lifting his umbrella, he bid Lawson farewell with a word that, when Lawson later tried to repeat and intellectually encompass it, had no meaning at all.

Every afternoon of that dismal, rainy winter, Lawson came back to the same table, but Secombe never showed up there again. Nor did Lawson miss him terribly. He had grown accustomed to the strange richness of his own company. Besides, if he wanted people to talk to, all he needed to do was remain behind the counter at the bakery.

ix

Spring came again. All of his room’s interior walls were down, and it amused him to be able to see the porcelain chalice of the commode as he came up the stairs from the contraceptive shop.

The plaster that he had sledge hammered down would never be of use to anybody again, of course, but he had saved from the debris whatever was worth the salvage. With the return of good weather, men driving oxcarts were coming through the city’s back streets and alleys to collect these items. You never saw anyone trying to drive a motorized vehicle nowadays, probably because, over the winter, most of them had been hauled away. The scarcity of gasoline and replacement parts might well have been a factor too-but, in truth, people seemed no longer to want to mess with internal combustion engines. Ending pollution and noise had nothing to do with it, either. A person with dung on his shoes or front stoop was not very likely to be convinced of a vast improvement in the environment, and the clattering of wooden carts the ringing of metal-rimmed wheels on cobblestone-could be as ear-wrenching as the hum and blare of motorized traffic. Still, Lawson liked to hear the oxcarts turn into his alley. More than once, called out by the noise, he had helped their drivers load them with masonry, doors, window sashes, even ornate carven mantels.

At the bakery, the Mongolian woman with whom Lawson worked, and had worked for almost a year, caught the handle of his broom one day and told him her name. Speaking the odd, quicksilver monosyllables of the dialect that nearly everyone in Seville had by now mastered, she asked him to call her Tij. Lawson did not know whether this was her name from before The Change or one she had recently invented for herself. Pleased in either case, he responded by telling her his own Christian name. He stumbled saying it, and when Tij also had trouble pronouncing the name, they laughed together about its uncommon awkwardness on their tongues.

A week later he had moved into the tenement building where Tij lived. They slept in the same “room” three flights up from a courtyard filled with clambering wisteria. Because all but the supporting walls on this floor had been knocked out, Lawson often felt that he was living in an open-bay barracks. People stepped over his pallet to get to the stairwell; and dressed in front of him as if he were not even there. Always a quick study, he emulated their casual behavior.

And when the ice in his loins finally began to thaw, he turned in the darkness to Tij-without in the least worrying about propriety. Their coupling was invariably silent, and the release Lawson experienced was always a serene rather than a shuddering one. Afterward, in the wisteria fragrance pervading their building, Tij and he lay beside each other like a pair of larval bumblebees as the moon rolled shadows over their naked, sweat-gleaming bodies.

Each day after they had finished making and trading away their bread, Tij and Lawson closed the bakery and took long walks. Often they strolled among the hedge-enclosed pathways and the small wrought-iron fences at the base of the city’s cathedral. From these paths, so overwhelmed were they by buttresses of stones and arcaded balconies, they could not even see the bronze weathervane of Faith atop the Giralda. But, evening after evening, Lawson insisted on returning to that place, and at last his persistence and his sense of expectation were rewarded by the sound of jackhammers biting into marble in each one of the cathedral’s five tremendous naves. He and Tij, holding hands, entered.

Inside, men and women were at work removing the altar screens, the metalwork grilles, the oil paintings, sections of stained-glass windows, religious relics. Twelve or more oxcarts were parked beneath the vault of the cathedral, and the noise of the jackhammers echoed shatteringly from nave to nave, from floor to cavernous ceiling. The oxen stood so complacently in their traces that Lawson wondered if the drivers of the carts had somehow contrived to deafen the animals. Tij released Lawson’s hand to cover her ears. He covered his own ears. It did no good. You could remain in the cathedral only if you accepted the noise and resolved to be a participant in the building’s destruction. Many people had already made that decision. They were swarming through its chambered stone belly like a spectacularly efficient variety of stone-eating termite.

An albino man of indeterminate race-a man as pale as a termite-thrust his pickax at Lawson.. Lawson uncovered his ears and took the pickax by its handle. Tij, a moment later, found a crowbar hanging precariously from the side of one of the oxcarts. With these tools the pair of them crossed the nave they had entered and halted in front of an imposing mausoleum. Straining against the cathedral’s poor light and the strange linguistic static in his head, Lawson painstakingly deciphered the plaque near the tomb.

“Christopher Columbus is buried here,” he said.

Tij did not hear him. He made a motion indicating that this was the place where they should start. Tij nodded her understanding. Together, Lawson thought, they would dismantle the mausoleum of the discoverer of the New World and bring his corrupt remains out into the street. After all these centuries they would free the man.

Then the bronze statue of Faith atop the belltower would come down, followed by the lovely belltower itself. After that, the flying buttresses, the balconies, the walls; every beautiful, tainted stone.

It would hurt like hell to destroy the cathedral, and it would take a long, long time-but, considering everything, it was the only meaningful option they had. Lawson raised his pickax.

GUARDIANS

George R.R. Martin

Ecology is a complex science—or, more precisely, a complex subject with the potential to become a science. But even when that has happened, its complexity will seldom welcome simple, hasty solutions.

Haviland Tuf thought the Six Worlds Bio-Agricultural Exhibition a great disappointment.

He had spent a long, wearying day on Brazelourn, trooping through the cavernous exhibition halls, pausing now and then to give a cursory inspection to a new grain hybrid or a genetically improved insect. Although the Ark’s cell library held cloning material for literally millions of plant and animal species from an uncounted number of worlds, Haviland Tuf was nonetheless always alert for any opportunity to expand his stock-in-trade.

But few of the displays on Brazelourn seemed especially promising, and as the hours passed Tuf grew bored and uncomfortable in the jostling, indifferent crowds. People swarmed everywhere—Vagabonder tunnel-farmers in deep maroon furs, plumed and perfumed Areeni landlords, somber nightsiders and brightly garbed evernoons from New Janus, and a plethora of the native Brazeleen. All of them made excessive noise and favored Tuf with curious stares as he passed among them. Some even brushed up against him, bringing a frown to his long face.

Ultimately, seeking escape from the throngs, Tuf decided he was hungry. He pressed his way through the fairgoers with dignified distaste, and emerged from the vaulting five-story Ptolan Exhibit Hall. Outside, hundreds of vendors had set up booths between the great buildings. The man selling pop-onion pies seemed least busy of those nearby, and Tuf determined that a pop-onion pie was the very thing he craved.

“Sir,” he said to the vendor, “I would have a pie.”

The pieman was round and pink and wore a greasy apron. He opened his hotbox, reached in with a gloved hand, and extracted a hot pie. When he pushed it across the counter at Tuf, he stared. “Oh,” he said, “you’re a big one.”

“Indeed, sir,” said Haviland Tuf. He picked up the pie and bit into it impassively.

“You’re an offworlder,” the pieman observed. “Not from no place nearby, neither.”

Tuf finished his pie in three neat bites, and cleaned his greasy fingers on a napkin. “You belabor the obvious, sir,” he said. He held up a long, calloused finger. “Another,” he said.

Rebuffed, the vendor fetched out another pie without further observations, letting Tuf eat in relative peace. As he savored the flaky crust and tartness within, Tuf studied the milling fairgoers, the rows of vendors’ booths, and the five great halls that loomed over the landscape. When he had done eating, he turned back to the pieman, his face as blank as ever. “Sir. If you will, a question.”

“What’s that?” the other said gruffly.

“I see five exhibition halls,” said Haviland Tuf. “I have visited each in turn.” He pointed. “Brazelourn, Vale Areen, New Janus, Vagabond, and here Ptola.” Tuf folded his hands together neatly atop his bulging stomach. “Five, sir. Five halls, five worlds. No doubt, being a stranger as I am, I am unfamiliar with some subtle point of local usage, yet I am perplexed. In those regions where I have heretofore traveled, a gathering calling itself the Six Worlds Bio-Agricultural Exhibition might be expected to include exhibits from six worlds. Plainly that is not the case here. Perhaps you might enlighten me as to why?”

“No one came from Namor.”

“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf.

“On account of the troubles,” the vendor added.

“All is made clear,” said Tuf. “Or, if not all, at least a portion. Perhaps you would care to serve me another pie, and explain to me the nature of these troubles. I am nothing if not curious, sir. It is my great vice, I fear.”

The pieman slipped on his glove again and opened the hotbox. “You know what they say. Curiosity makes you hungry.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf. “I must admit I have never heard them say that before.”

The man frowned. “No, I got it wrong. Hunger makes you curious, that’s what it is. Don’t matter. My pies will fill you up.”

“Ah,” said Tuf. He took up the pie. “Please proceed.”

So the pie-seller told him, at great rambling length, about the troubles on the world Namor. “So you can see,” he finally concluded, “why they didn’t come, with all this going on. Not much to exhibit.”

“Of course,” said Haviland Tuf, dabbing his lips. “Sea monsters can be most vexing.”

Namor was a dark green world, moonless and solitary, banded by wispy golden clouds. The Ark shuddered out of drive and settled ponderously into orbit around it. In the long, narrow communications room, Haviland Tuf moved from seat to seat, studying the planet on a dozen of the room’s hundred viewscreens. Three small gray kittens kept him company, bounding across the consoles, pausing only to slap at each other. Tuf paid them no mind.

A water world, Namor had only one landmass decently large enough to be seen from orbit, and that none too large. But magnification revealed thousands of islands scattered in long, crescent-shaped archipelagoes across the deep green seas, earthen jewels strewn throughout the oceans. Other screens showed the lights of dozens of cities and towns on the nightside, and pulsing dots of energy outlay where settlements sat in sunlight.

Tuf looked at it all, and then seated himself, flicked on another console, and began to play a war game with the computer. A kitten bounded up into his lap and went to sleep. He was careful not to disturb it. Some time later, a second kitten vaulted up and pounced on it, and they began to tussle. Tuf brushed them to the floor.

It took longer than even Tuf had anticipated, but finally the challenge came, as he had known it would. “Ship in orbit,” came the demand, “ship in orbit, this is Namor Control. State your name and business. State your name and business, please. Interceptors have been dispatched. State your name and business.”

The transmission was coming from the chief landmass. The Ark tapped into it. At the same time, it found the ship that was moving toward them—there was only one—and flashed it on another screen.

“I am the Ark,” Haviland Tuf told Namor Control.

Namor Control was a round-faced woman with close-cropped brown hair, sitting at a console and wearing a deep green uniform with golden piping. She frowned, her eyes flicking to the side, no doubt to a superior or another console. “Ark,” she said, “state your homeworld. State your homeworld and your business, please.”

The other ship had opened communications with the planet, the computer indicated. Two more viewscreens lit up. One showed a slender young woman with a large, crooked nose on a ship’s bridge, the other an elderly man before a console. They both wore green uniforms, and they were conversing animatedly in code. It took the computer less than a minute to break it, so Tuf could listen in. “. . . damned if I know what it is,” the woman on the ship was saying. “There’s never been a ship that big. My God, just look at it. Are you getting all this? Has it answered?”

“Ark,” the round-faced woman was still saying, “state your homeworld and your business, please. This is Namor Control.”

Haviland Tuf cut into the other conversation, to talk to all three of them simultaneously. “This is the Ark,” he said. “I have no homeworld, sirs. My intentions are purely peaceful—trade and consultation. I learned of your tragic difficulties, and moved by your plight, I have come to offer you my services.”

The woman on the ship looked startled. “What are you . . .” she started. The man was equally nonplussed, but he said nothing, only gaped open-mouthed at Tuf’s blank white visage.

“This is Namor Control, Ark,” said the round-faced woman. “We are closed to trade. Repeat, we are closed to trade. We are under martial law here.”

By then the slender woman on the ship had composed herself. “Ark, this is Guardian Kefira Qay, commanding NGS Sunrazor. We are armed, Ark. Explain yourself. You are a thousand times larger than any trader I have ever seen, Ark. Explain yourself or be fired upon.”

“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf. “Threats will avail you little, Guardian. I am most sorely vexed. I have come all this long way from Brazelourn to offer you my aid and solace, and you meet me with threats and hostility.” A kitten leapt up into his lap. Tuf scooped it up with a huge white hand, and deposited it on the console in front of him, where the viewer would pick it up. He gazed down at it sorrowfully. “There is no trust left in humanity,” he said to the kitten.

“Hold your fire, Sunrazor,” said the elderly man. “Ark, if your intentions are truly peaceful, explain yourself. What are you? We are hard-pressed here, Ark, and Namor is a small, undeveloped world. We have never seen your like before. Explain yourself.”

Haviland Tuf stroked the kitten. “Always I must truckle to suspicion,” he told it. “They are fortunate that I am so kind-hearted, or else I would simply depart and leave them to their fate.” He looked up, straight into the viewer. “Sir,” he said. “I am the Ark. I am Haviland Tuf, captain and master here, crew entire. You are troubled by great monsters from the depths of your seas, I have been told. Very well. I shall rid you of them.”

“Ark, this is Sunrazor. How do you propose doing that?”

“The Ark is a seedship of the Ecological Engineering Corps,” said Haviland Tuf with stiff formality. “I am an ecological engineer and a specialist in biological warfare.”

“Impossible,” said the old man. “The EEC was wiped out a thousand years ago, along with the Federal Empire. None of their seedships remain.”

“How distressing,” said Haviland Tuf. “Here I sit in an illusion. No doubt, now that you have told me my ship does not exist, I shall sink right through it and plunge into your atmosphere, where I shall burn up as I fall.”

“Guardian,” said Kefira Qay from the Sunrazor, “these seedships may indeed no longer exist, but I am fast closing on something that my scopes tell me is almost thirty kilometers long. It does not appear to be an illusion.”

“I am not yet falling,” admitted Haviland Tuf.

“Can you truly help us?” asked the round-faced woman at Namor Control.

“Why must I always be doubted?” Tuf asked the small gray kitten.

“Lord Guardian, we must give him the chance to prove what he says,” insisted Namor Control.

Tuf looked up. “Threatened, insulted, and doubted as I have been, nonetheless my empathy for your situation bids me to persist. Perhaps I might suggest that Sunrazor dock with me, so to speak. Guardian Qay may come aboard and join me for an evening meal, while we converse. Surely your suspicions cannot extend to mere conversation, that most civilized of human pastimes.”

The three Guardians conferred hurriedly with each other and with a person or persons offscreen, while Haviland Tuf sat back and toyed with the kitten. “I shall name you Suspicion,” he said to it, “to commemorate my reception here. Your siblings shall be Doubt, Hostility, Ingratitude, and Foolishness.”

“We accept your proposal, Haviland Tuf,” said Guardian Kefira Qay from the bridge of the Sunrazor. “Prepare to be boarded.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf. “Do you like mushrooms?”

The shuttle deck of the Ark was as large as the landing field of a major starport, and seemed almost a junkyard for derelict spacecraft. The Ark’s own shuttles stood trim in their launch berths, five identical black ships with rakish lines and stubby triangular wings angling back, designed for atmospheric flight and still in good repair. Other craft were less impressive. A teardrop-shaped trading vessel from Avalon squatted wearily on three extended landing legs, next to a driveshift courier scored by battle, and a Karaleo lionboat whose ornate trim was largely gone. Elsewhere stood vessels of stranger, more alien design.

Above, the great dome cracked into a hundred pie-wedge segments, and drew back to reveal a small yellow sun surrounded by stars, and a dull green manta-shaped ship of about the same size as one of Tuf’s shuttles. The Sunrazor settled, and the dome closed behind it. When the stars had been blotted out again, atmosphere came swirling back in to the deck, and Haviland Tuf arrived soon after.

Kefira Qay emerged from her ship with her lips set sternly beneath her big, crooked nose, but no amount of control could quite conceal the awe in her eyes. Two armed men in golden coveralls trimmed with green followed her.

Haviland Tuf drove up to them in an open three-wheeled cart. “I am afraid that my dinner invitation was only for one, Guardian Qay,” he said when he saw her escort. “I regret any misunderstanding, yet I must insist.”

“Very well,” she said. She turned to her guard. “Wait with the others. You have your orders.” When she got in next to Tuf she told him, “The Sunrazor will tear your ship apart if I am not returned safely within two standard hours.”

Haviland Tuf blinked at her. “Dreadful,” he said. “Everywhere my warmth and hospitality is met with mistrust and violence.” He set the vehicle into motion.

They drove in silence through a maze of interconnected rooms and corridors, and finally entered a huge shadowy shaft that seemed to extend the full length of the ship in both directions. Transparent vats of a hundred different sizes covered walls and ceiling as far as the eye could see, most empty and dusty, a few filled with colored liquids in which half-seen shapes stirred feebly. There was no sound but a wet, viscous dripping somewhere off behind them. Kefira Qay studied everything and said nothing. They went at least three kilometers down the great shaft, until Tuf veered off into a blank wall that dilated before them. Shortly thereafter they parked and dismounted.

A sumptuous meal had been laid out in the small, spartan dining chamber to which Tuf escorted the Guardian Kefira Qay. They began with iced soup, sweet and piquant and black as coal, followed by neograss salads with a gingery topping. The main course was a breaded mushroom top full as large as the plate on which it was served, surrounded by a dozen different sorts of vegetables in individual sauces. The Guardian ate with great relish.

“It would appear you find my humble fare to your taste,” observed Haviland Tuf.

“I haven’t had a good meal in longer than I care to admit,” replied Kefira Qay. “On Namor, we have always depended on the sea for our sustenance. Normally it is bountiful, but since our troubles began . . .” She lifted a forkful of dark, misshapen vegetables in a yellow-brown sauce. “What am I eating? It’s delightful.”

“Rhiannese sinners’ root, in a mustard sauce,” Haviland Tuf said.

Qay swallowed and set down her fork. “But Rhiannon is so far, how do you . . .” She stopped.

“Of course,” Tuf said, steepling his fingers beneath his chin as he watched her face. “All this provender derives from the Ark, though originally it might be traced back to a dozen different worlds. Would you like more spiced milk?”

“No,” she muttered. She gazed at the empty plates. “You weren’t lying, then. You are what you claim, and this is a seedship of the . . . what did you call them?”

“The Ecological Engineering Corps, of the long-defunct Federal Empire. Their ships were few in number, and all but one destroyed by the vicissitudes of war. The Ark alone survived, derelict for a millennium. The details need not concern you. Suffice it to say that I found it, and made it functional.”

“You found it?”

“I believe I just said as much, in those very same words. Kindly pay attention. I am not partial to repeating myself. Before finding the Ark, I made a humble living from trade. My former ship is still on the landing deck. Perhaps you chanced to see it.”

“Then you’re really just a trader.”

“Please!” said Tuf with indignation. “I am an ecological engineer. The Ark can remake whole planets, Guardian. True, I am but one man, alone, when once this ship was crewed by two hundred, and I do lack the extensive formal training such as was given centuries ago to those who wore the golden theta, the sigil of the Ecological Engineers. Yet, in my own small way, I contrive to muddle through. If Namor would care to avail itself of my services, I have no doubt that I can help you.”

“Why?” the slender Guardian asked warily. “Why are you so anxious to help us?”

Haviland Tuf spread his big white hands helplessly. “I know, I might appear a fool. I cannot help myself. I am a humanitarian by nature, much moved by hardship and suffering. I could no more abandon your people, beset as they are, than I could harm one of my cats. The Ecological Engineers were made of sterner stuff, I fear, but I am helpless to change my sentimental nature. So here I sit before you, prepared to do my best.”

“You want nothing?”

“I shall labor without recompense,” said Tuf. “Of course, I will have operating expenses. I must charge a small fee to offset them. Say, three million standards. Do you think that fair?”

“Fair,” she said sarcastically. “Fairly high, I’d say. There have been others like you, Tuf—arms merchants and soldiers of fortune who have come to grow rich off our misery.”

“Guardian,” said Tuf, reproachfully, “you do me grievous wrong. I take little for myself. The Ark is so large, so costly. Perhaps two million standards would suffice? I cannot believe you would grudge me this pittance. Is your world worth less?”

Kefira Qay sighed, a tired look etched on her narrow face. “No,” she admitted. “Not if you can do all you promise. Of course, we are not a rich world. I will have to consult my superiors. This is not my decision alone.” She stood up abruptly. “Your communications facilities?”

“Through the door and left down the blue corridor. The fifth door on the right.” Tuf rose with ponderous dignity, and began cleaning up as she left.

When the Guardian returned he had opened a decanter of liquor, vividly scarlet, and was stroking a black-and-white cat who had made herself at home on the table. “You’re hired, Tuf,” said Kefira Qay, seating herself. “Two million standards. After you win this war.”

“Agreed,” said Tuf. “Let us discuss your situation over glasses of this delightful beverage.”

“Alcoholic?”

“Mildly narcotic.”

“A Guardian uses no stimulants or depressants. We are a fighting guild. Substances like that pollute the body and slow the reflexes. A Guardian must be vigilant. We guard and protect.”

“Laudable,” said Haviland Tuf. He filled his own glass.

“Sunrazor is wasted here. It has been recalled by Namor Control. We need its combat capabilities below.”

“I shall expedite its departure, then. And yourself?”

“I have been detached,” she said, wrinkling up her face. “We are standing by with data on the situation below. I am to help brief you, and act as your liaison officer.”

The water was calm, a tranquil green mirror from horizon to horizon.

It was a hot day. Bright yellow sunlight poured down through a thin bank of gilded clouds. The ship rested still on the water, its metallic sides flashing silver-blue, its open deck a small island of activity in an ocean of peace. Men and women small as insects worked the dredges and nets, bare-chested in the heat. A great claw full of mud and weeds emerged from the water, dripping, and was sluiced down an open hatchway. Elsewhere bins of huge milky jellyfish baked in the sun.

Suddenly there was agitation. For no apparent reason, people began to run. Others stopped what they were doing and looked around, confused. Still others worked on, oblivious. The great metal claw, open and empty now, swung back out over the water and submerged again, even as another one rose on the far side of the ship. More people were running. Two men collided and went down.

Then the first tentacle came curling up from beneath the ship.

It rose and rose. It was longer than the dredging claws. Where it emerged from the dark green sea, it looked as thick as a big man’s torso. It tapered to the size of an arm. The tentacle was white, a soft slimy sort of white. All along its underside were vivid pink circles big as dinner plates, circles that writhed and pulsed as the tentacle curled over and about the huge farming ship. The end of the tentacle split into a rat’s nest of smaller tentacles, dark and restless as snakes.

Up and up it went, and then over and down, pinioning the ship. Something moved on the other side, something pale stirring beneath all that green, and the second tentacle emerged. Then a third, and a fourth. One wrestled with a dredging claw. Another had the remains of a net draped all about it, like a veil, which didn’t seem to hinder it. Now all the people were running—all but those the tentacles had found. One of them had curled itself around a woman with an axe. She hacked at it wildly, thrashing in the pale embrace, until her back arched and suddenly she fell still. The tentacle dropped her, white fluid pulsing feebly from the gashes she had left, and seized someone else.

Twenty tentacles had attached themselves when the ship abruptly listed to starboard. Survivors slid across the deck and into the sea. The ship tilted more and more. Something was pushing it over, pulling it down. Water sloshed across the side, and into the open hatchways. Then the ship began to break up.

Haviland Tuf stopped the projection, and held the image on the large viewscreen: the green sea and golden sun, the shattered vessel, the pale embracing tentacles. “This was the first attack?” he asked.

“Yes and no,” replied Kefira Qay. “Prior to this, one other harvester and two passenger hydrofoils had vanished mysteriously. We were investigating, but we did not know the cause. In this case, a news crew happened to be on the site, making a recording for an educational broadcast. They got more than they bargained for.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf.

“They were airborne, in a skimmer. The broadcast that night almost caused a panic. But it was not until the next ship went down that things began to get truly serious. That was when the Guardians began to realize the full extent of the problem.”

Haviland Tuf stared up at the viewscreen, his heavy face impassive, expressionless, his hands resting on the console. A black-and-white kitten began to bat at his fingers. “Away, Foolishness,” he said, depositing the kitten gently on the floor.

“Enlarge a section of one of the tentacles,” suggested the Guardian beside him.

Silently, Tuf did as she bid him. A second screen lit up, showing a grainy close-up of a great pale rope of tissue arching over the deck.

“Take a good look at one of the suckers,” said Qay. “The pink areas, there, you see?”

“The third one from the end is dark within. And it appears to have teeth.”

“Yes,” said Kefira Qay. “All of them do. The outer lips of those suckers are a kind of hard, fleshy flange. Slapped down, they spread and create a vacuum seal of sorts, virtually impossible to tear loose. But each of them is a mouth, too. Within the flange is a soft pink flap that falls back, and then the teeth come sliding out—a triple row of them, serrated, and sharper than you’d think. Now move down to the tendrils at the end, if you would.”

Tuf touched the console, and put another magnification up on a third screen, bringing the twisting snakes into easy view.

“Eyes,” said Kefira Qay. “At the end of every one of those tendrils. Twenty eyes. The tentacles don’t need to grope around blindly. They can see what they are doing.”

“Fascinating,” said Haviland Tuf. “What lies beneath the water? The source of these terrible arms?”

“There are cross-sections and photographs of dead specimens later on, as well as some computer simulations. Most of the specimens we took were quite badly mangled. The main body of the thing is sort of an inverted cup, like a half-inflated bladder, surrounded by a great ring of bone and muscle that anchors these tentacles. The bladder fills and empties with water to enable the creature to rise to the surface, or descend far below—the submarine principle. By itself it doesn’t weigh much, although it is amazingly strong. What it does, it empties its bladder to rise to the surface, grabs hold, and then begins to fill again. The capacity of the bladder is astounding, and as you can see, the creature is huge. If need be, it can even force water up those tentacles and out of its mouths, in order to flood the vessel and speed things along. So those tentacles are arms, mouths, eyes, and living hoses all at once.”

“And you say that your people had no knowledge of such creatures until this attack?”

“Right. A cousin of this thing, the Namorian man-of-war, was well-known in the early days of colonization. It was sort of a cross between a jellyfish and an octopus, with twenty arms. Many native species are built along the same lines—a central bladder, or body, or shell, or what have you, with twenty legs or tendrils or tentacles in a ring around it. The men-of-war were carnivores, much like this monster, although they had a ring of eyes on the central body instead of at the end of the tentacles. The arms couldn’t function as hoses, either. And they were much smaller—about the size of a human. They bobbed about on the surface above the continental shelves, particularly above mud-pot beds, where fish were thick. Fish were their usual prey, although a few unwary swimmers met a bloody awful death in their embrace.”

“Might I ask what became of them?” said Tuf.

“They were a nuisance. Their hunting grounds were the same areas we needed—shallows rich with fish and seagrass and waterfruit, over mud-pot beds and scrabbler runs full of chameleon-clams and bobbing freddies. Before we could harvest or farm safely, we had to pretty much clean out the men-of-war. We did. Oh, there are still a few around, but they are rare now.”

“I see,” said Haviland Tuf. “And this most formidable creature, this living submarine and ship-eater that plagues you so dreadfully, does it have a name?”

“The Namorian dreadnaught,” said Kefira Qay. “When it first appeared, we theorized it was an inhabitant of the great deeps that had somehow wandered to the surface. Namor has been inhabited for barely a hundred standard years, after all. We have scarcely begun to explore the deeper regions of the seas, and we have little knowledge of the things that might live down there. But as more and more ships were attacked and sunk, it became obvious that we had an army of dreadnaughts to contend with.”

“A navy,” corrected Haviland Tuf.

Kefira Qay scowled. “Whatever. A lot of them, not one lost specimen. At that point the theory was that some unimaginable catastrophe had taken place deep under the ocean, driving forth this entire species.”

“You give no credit to this theory,” Tuf said.

“No one does. It’s been disproved. The dreadnaughts wouldn’t be able to withstand the pressures at those depths. So now we don’t know where they came from.” She made a face. “Only that they are here.”

“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf. “No doubt you fought back.”

“Certainly. A game but losing fight. Namor is a young planet, with neither the population nor the resources for the sort of struggle we have been plunged into. Three million Namorians are scattered across our seas, on more than seventeen thousand small islands. Another million huddle on New Atlantis, our single small continent. Most of our people are fisherfolk and sea-farmers. When this all began, the Guardians numbered barely fifty thousand. Our guild is descended from the crews of the ships who brought the colonists from Old Poseidon and Aquarius here to Namor. We have always protected them, but before the coming of the dreadnaughts our task was simple. Our world was peaceful, with little real conflict. There was some ethnic rivalry between Poseidonites and Aquarians, but it was good-natured. The Guardians provided planetary defense, with Sunrazor and two similar craft, but most of our work was in fire and flood control, disaster relief, police work, that sort of thing. We had about a hundred armed hydrofoil patrol boats, and we used them for escort duty for a while, and inflicted some casualties, but they were really no match for the dreadnaughts. It soon became clear that there were more dreadnaughts than patrol boats, anyway.”

“Nor do patrol boats reproduce, as I must assume these dreadnaughts do,” Tuf said. Foolishness and Doubt were tussling in his lap.

“Exactly. Still, we tried. We dropped depth charges on them when we detected them below the sea, we torpedoed them when they came to the surface. We killed hundreds. But there were hundreds more, and every boat we lost was irreplaceable. Namor has no technological base to speak of. In better days, we imported what we needed from Brazelourn and Vale Areen. Our people believed in a simple life. The planet couldn’t support industry anyway. It is poor in heavy metals and has almost no fossil fuel.”

“How many Guardian patrol boats remain to you?” asked Haviland Tuf.

“Perhaps thirty. We dare not use them anymore. Within a year of the first attack, the dreadnaughts were in complete command of our sea lanes. All of the great harvesters were lost, hundreds of sea-farms had been abandoned or destroyed, half of the small fisherfolk were dead, and the other half huddled fearfully in port. Nothing human dared move on the seas of Namor.”

“Your islands were isolated from one another?”

“Not quite,” Kefira Qay replied. “The Guardians had twenty armed skimmers, and there were another hundred-odd skimmers and aircars in private hands. We commandeered them, armed them. We also had our airships. Skimmers and aircars are difficult and expensive to maintain here. Parts are hard to come by, and we have few trained techs, so most of the air traffic before the troubles was carried by airships—solar-powered, helium-filled, large. There was quite a sizable fleet, as many as a thousand. The airships took over the provisioning of some of the small islands, where starvation was a very real threat. Other airships, as well as the Guardian skimmers, carried on the fight. We dumped chemicals, poisons, explosives, and such from the safety of the air and destroyed thousands of dreadnaughts, although the cost was frightful. They clustered thickest about our best fishing grounds and mud-pot beds, so we were forced to blow up and poison the very areas we needed most. Still, we had no choice. For a time, we thought we were winning the fight. A few fishing boats even put out and returned safely, with a Guardian skimmer flying escort.”

“Obviously, this was not the ultimate result of the conflict,” said Haviland Tuf, “or we would not be sitting here talking.” Doubt batted Foolishness soundly across the head, and the smaller kitten fell off Tuf’s knee to the floor. Tuf bent and scooped him up. “Here,” he said, handing him to Kefira Qay, “hold him, if you please. Their small war is distracting me from your larger one.”

“I—why, of course.” The Guardian took the small black-and-white kitten in hand gingerly. He fit snugly into her palm. “What is it?” she asked.

“A cat,” said Tuf. “He will jump out of your hand if you continue to hold him as if he were a diseased fruit. Kindly put him in your lap. I assure you he is harmless.”

Kefira Qay, appearing very uncertain, shook the kitten out of her hand onto her knees. Foolishness yowled, almost tumbling to the floor again before sinking his small claws into the fabric of her uniform. “Ow,” said Kefira Qay. “It has talons.”

“Claws,” corrected Tuf. “Tiny and harmless.”

“They aren’t poisoned, are they?”

“I think not,” said Tuf. “Stroke him, front to back. It will make him less agitated.”

Kefira Qay touched the kitten’s head uncertainly.

“Please,” said Tuf. “I said stroke, not pat.”

The Guardian began to pet the kitten. Instantly, Foolishness began to purr. She stopped and looked up in horror. “It’s trembling,” she said, “and making a noise.”

“Such a response is considered favorable,” Tuf assured her. “I beg you to continue your ministrations, and your briefing. If you will.”

“Of course,” said Qay. She resumed petting Foolishness, who settled down comfortably on her knee. “If you would go on to the next tape,” she prompted.

Tuf wiped the stricken ship and the dreadnaught off the main screen. Another scene took their place—a winter’s day, windy and chill by the look of it. The water below was dark and choppy, flecked with white foam as the wind pushed against it. A dreadnaught was afloat the unruly sea, its huge white tentacles extended all around it, giving it the look of some vast swollen flower bobbing on the waves. It reached up as they passed overhead, two arms with their writhing snakes lifting feebly from the water, but they were too far above to be in danger. They appeared to be in the gondola of some long silver airship, looking down through a glass-bottomed viewport, and as Tuf watched, the vantage point shifted and he saw that they were part of a convoy of three immense airships, cruising with stately indifference above the war-torn waters.

“The Spirit of Aquarius, the Lyle D., and the Skyshadow,” said Kefira Qay, “on a relief mission to a small island grouping in the north where famine had been raging. They were going to evacuate the survivors and take them back to New Atlantis.” Her voice was grim. “This record was made by a news crew on the Skyshadow, the only airship to survive. Watch.”

On and on the airships sailed, invincible and serene. Then, just ahead of the silver-blue Spirit of Aquarius, there was motion in the water, something stirring beneath that dark green veil. Something big, but not a dreadnaught. It was dark, not pale. The water grew black and blacker in a great swelling patch, then bulged upward. A great ebony dome heaved into view and grew, like an island emerging from the depths, black and leathery and immense, and surrounded by twenty long black tentacles. Larger and higher it swelled, second by second, until it burst from the sea entirely. Its tentacles hung below it, dripping water, as it rose. Then they began to lift and spread. The thing was fully as large as the airship moving toward it. When they met, it was as if two vast leviathans of the sky had come together to mate. The black immensity settled atop the long silver-blue dirigible, its arms curling about in a deadly embrace. They watched the airship’s outer skin tear asunder, and the helium cells rip and crumple. The Spirit of Aquarius twisted and buckled like a living thing, and shriveled in the black embrace of its lover. When it was over, the dark creature dropped the remains into the sea.

Tuf froze the image, staring with solemn regard at the small figures leaping from the doomed gondola.

“Another one got the Lyle D. on the way home,” said Kefira Qay. “The Skyshadow survived to tell the story, but it never returned from its next mission. More than a hundred airships and twelve skimmers were lost in the first week the fire-balloons emerged.”

“Fire-balloons?” queried Haviland Tuf. He stroked Doubt, who was sitting on his console. “I saw no fire.”

“The name was coined the first time we destroyed one of the accursed things. A Guardian skimmer put a round of explosive shot into it, and it went up like a bomb, then sank, burning into the sea. They are extremely inflammable. One laser burst, and they go up spectacularly.”

“Hydrogen,” said Haviland Tuf.

“Exactly,” the Guardian confirmed. “We’ve never taken one whole, but we’ve puzzled them out from bits and pieces. The creatures can generate an electric current internally. They take on water, and perform a sort of biological electrolysis. The oxygen is vented into the water or the air, and helps push the things around. Air jets, so to speak. The hydrogen fills the balloon sacs and gives them lift. When they want to retreat to the water, they open a flap on top—see, up there—and all the gas escapes, so the fire-balloon drops back into the sea. The outer skin is leathery, very tough. They’re slow, but clever. At times they hide in cloud banks and snatch unwary skimmers flying below. And we soon discovered, to our dismay, that they breed just as fast as the dreadnaughts.”

“Most intriguing,” said Haviland Tuf. “So, I might venture to suggest, with the emergence of these fire-balloons, you lost the sky as well as the sea.”

“More or less,” admitted Kefira Qay. “Our airships were simply too slow to risk. We tried to keep things going by sending them out in convoys, escorted by Guardian skimmers and aircars, but even that failed. The morning of the Fire Dawn . . . I was there, commanding a nine-gun skimmer . . . it was terrible . . .”

“Continue,” said Tuf.

“The Fire Dawn,” she muttered bleakly. “We were . . . we had thirty airships, thirty, a great convoy, protected by a dozen armed skimmers. A long trip, from New Atlantis to the Broken Hand, a major island grouping. Near dawn on the second day, just as the east was turning red, the sea beneath us began to . . . seethe. Like a pot of soup that has begun to boil. It was them, venting oxygen and water, rising. Thousands of them, Tuf, thousands. The waters churned madly, and they rose, all those vast black shadows coming up at us, as far as the eye could see in all directions. We attacked with lasers, with explosive shells, with everything we had. It was like the sky itself was ablaze. All those things were bulging with hydrogen, and the air was rich and giddy with the oxygen they had vented. The Fire Dawn, we call it. It was terrible. Screaming everywhere, balloons burning, our airships crushed and falling around us, bodies afire. There were dreadnaughts waiting below, too. I saw them snatching swimmers who had fallen from the airships, those pale tentacles coiling around them and yanking them under. Four skimmers escaped from that battle. Four. Every airship was lost, with all hands.”

“A grim tale,” said Tuf.

Kefira Qay had a haunted look in her eyes. She was petting Foolishness with a blind rhythm, her lips pressed tightly together, her eyes fixed on the screen, where the first fire-balloon floated above the tumbling corpse of the Spirit of Aquarius. “Since then,” she said at last, “life has been a continuing nightmare. We have lost our seas. On three-fourths of Namor, hunger and even starvation hold sway. Only New Atlantis still has surplus food, since only there is land-farming practiced extensively. The Guardians have continued to fight. The Sunrazor and our two other spacecraft have been pressed into service—bombing runs, dumping poison, evacuating some of the smaller islands. With aircars and fast skimmers, we have maintained a loose web of contact with the outer islands. And we have radio, of course. But we are barely hanging on. Within the last year, more than twenty islands have fallen silent. We sent patrols out to investigate in a half-dozen of those cases. Those that returned all reported the same things. Bodies everywhere, rotting in the sun. Buildings crushed and ruined. Scrabblers and crawling maggies feasting on the corpses. And on one island they found something else, something even more frightful. The island was Seastar. Almost forty thousand people lived there, and it was a major spaceport as well, before trade was cut off. It was a terrible shock when Seastar suddenly stopped broadcasting. Go to the next exhibit, Tuf. Go on.”

Tuf pressed a series of lights on the console.

A dead thing was lying on a beach, rotting on indigo sands.

It was a still picture, this one, not a tape. Haviland Tuf and Guardian Kefira Qay had a long time to study the dead thing where it sprawled, rich and rotten. Around and about it was a litter of human corpses, lending it scale by their proximity. The dead thing was shaped like an inverted bowl, and it was as big as a house. Its leathery flesh, cracked and oozing pustulence now, was a mottled gray-green. Spread on the sand around it, like spokes from a central wheel, were the thing’s appendages—ten twisted green tentacles, puckered with pinkish-white mouths and, alternately, ten limbs that looked stiff and hard and black, and were obviously jointed.

“Legs,” said Kefira Qay bitterly. “It was a walker, Tuf, before they killed it. We have only found that one specimen, but it was enough. We know why our islands fall silent now. They come from out of the sea, Tuf. Things like that. Larger, smaller, walking on ten legs like spiders and grabbing and eating with the other ten, the tentacles. The carapace is thick and tough. A single explosive shell or laser burst won’t kill one of these the way it would a fire-balloon. So now you understand. First the sea, then the air, and now it has begun on the land as well. The land. They burst from the water in thousands, striding up onto the sand like some terrible tide. Two islands were overrun last week alone. They mean to wipe us from this planet. No doubt a few of us will survive on New Atlantis, in the high inland mountains, but it will be a cruel life and a short one. Until Namor throws something new at us, some new thing out of a nightmare.” Her voice had a wild edge of hysteria.

Haviland Tuf turned off his console, and the telescreens all went black. “Calm yourself, Guardian,” he said, turning to face her. “Your fears are understandable but unnecessary. I appreciate your plight more fully now. A tragic one indeed, yet not hopeless.”

“You still think you can help?” she said. “Alone? You and this ship? Oh, I’m not discouraging you, by any means. We’ll grasp at any straw. But . . .”

“But you do not believe,” Tuf said. A small sigh escaped his lips. “Doubt,” he said to the gray kitten, hoisting him up in a huge white hand, “you are indeed well named.” He shifted his gaze back to Kefira Qay. “I am a forgiving man, and you have been through many cruel hardships, so I shall take no notice of the casual way you belittle me and my abilities. Now, if you might excuse me, I have work to do. Your people have sent up a great many more detailed reports on these creatures, and on Namorian ecology in general. It is vital that I peruse these, in order to understand and analyze the situation. Thank you for your briefing.”

Kefira Qay frowned, lifted Foolishness from her knee and set him on the ground, and stood up. “Very well,” she said. “How soon will you be ready?”

“I cannot ascertain that with any degree of accuracy,” Tuf replied, “until I have had a chance to run some simulations. Perhaps a day and we shall begin. Perhaps a month. Perhaps longer.”

“If you take too long, you’ll find it difficult to collect your two million,” she snapped. “We’ll all be dead.”

“Indeed,” said Tuf. “I shall strive to avoid that scenario. Now, if you would let me work. We shall converse again at dinner. I shall serve vegetable stew in the fashion of Arion, with plates of Thorite fire mushrooms to whet our appetites.”

Qay sighed loudly. “Mushrooms again?” she complained. “We had stir-fried mushrooms and peppers for lunch, and crisped mushrooms in bitter cream for breakfast.”

“I am fond of mushrooms,” said Haviland Tuf.

“I am weary of mushrooms,” said Kefira Qay. Foolishness rubbed up against her leg, and she frowned down at him. “Might I suggest some meat? Or seafood?” She looked wistful. “It has been years since I’ve had a mud-pot. I dream of it sometimes. Crack it open and pour butter inside, and spoon out the soft meat . . . you can’t imagine how fine it was. Or sabrefin. Ah, I’d kill for a sabrefin on a bed of seagrass!”

Haviland Tuf looked stern. “We do not eat animals here,” he said. He set to work, ignoring her, and Kefira Qay took her leave. Foolishness went bounding after her. “Appropriate,” muttered Tuf, “indeed.”

Four days and many mushrooms later, Kefira Qay began to pressure Haviland Tuf for results. “What are you doing?” she demanded over dinner. “When are you going to act? Every day you seclude yourself and every day conditions on Namor worsen. I spoke to Lord Guardian Harvan an hour ago, while you were off with your computers. Little Aquarius and the Dancing Sisters have been lost while you and I are up here dithering, Tuf.”

“Dithering?” said Haviland Tuf. “Guardian, I do not dither. I have never dithered, nor do I intend to begin dithering now. I work. There is a great mass of information to digest.”

Kefira Qay snorted. “A great mass of mushrooms to digest, you mean,” she said. She stood up, tipping Foolishness from her lap. The kitten and she had become boon companions of late. “Twelve thousand people lived on Little Aquarius,” she said, “and almost as many on the Dancing Sisters. Think of that while you’re digesting, Tuf.” She spun and stalked out of the room.

“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf. He returned his attention to his sweet-flower pie.

A week passed before they clashed again. “Well?” the Guardian demanded one day in the corridor, stepping in front of Tuf as he lumbered with great dignity down to his work room.

“Well,” he repeated. “Good day, Guardian Qay.”

“It is not a good day,” she said querulously. “Namor Control tells me the Sunrise Islands are gone. Overrun. And a dozen skimmers lost defending them, along with all the ships drawn up in those harbors. What do you say to that?”

“Most tragic,” replied Tuf. “Regrettable.”

“When are you going to be ready?”

He gave a great shrug. “I cannot say. This is no simple task you have set me. A most complex problem. Complex. Yes, indeed, that is the very word. Perhaps I might even say mystifying. I assure you that Namor’s sad plight has fully engaged my sympathies, however, and this problem has similarly engaged my intellect.”

“That’s all it is to you, Tuf, isn’t it? A problem?”

Haviland Tuf frowned slightly, and folded his hands before him, resting them atop his bulging stomach. “A problem indeed,” he said.

“No. It is not just a problem. This is no game we are playing. Real people are dying down there. Dying because the Guardians are not equal to their trust, and because you do nothing. Nothing.”

“Calm yourself. You have my assurance that I am laboring ceaselessly on your behalf. You must consider that my task is not so simple as yours. It is all very well and good to drop bombs on a dreadnaught, or fire shells into a fire-balloon and watch it burn. Yet these simple, quaint methods have availed you little, Guardian. Ecological engineering is a far more demanding business. I study the reports of your leaders, your marine biologists, your historians. I reflect and analyze. I devise various approaches, and run simulations on the Ark’s great computers. Sooner or later I shall find your answer.”

“Sooner,” said Kefira Qay, in a hard voice. “Namor wants results, and I agree. The Council of Guardians is impatient. Sooner, Tuf. Not later. I warn you.” She stepped aside, and let him pass.

Kefira Qay spent the next week and a half avoiding Tuf as much as possible. She skipped dinner and scowled when she saw him in the corridors. Each day she repaired to the communications room, where she had long discussions with her superiors below, and kept up on all the latest news. It was bad. All the news was bad.

Finally, things came to a head. Pale-faced and furious, she stalked into the darkened chamber Tuf called his “war room,” where she found him sitting before a bank of computer screens, watching red and blue lines chase each other across a grid. “Tuf!” she roared. He turned off the screen and swung to face her, batting away Ingratitude. Shrouded by shadows, he regarded her impassively. “The Council of Guardians has given me an order,” she said.

“How fortunate for you,” Tuf replied. “I know you have been growing restless of late from inactivity.”

“The Council wants immediate action, Tuf. Immediate. Today. Do you understand?”

Tuf steepled his hands beneath his chin, almost in an attitude of prayer. “Must I tolerate not only hostility and impatience, but slurs on my intelligence as well? I understand all that needs understanding about your Guardians, I assure you. It is only the peculiar and perverse ecology of Namor that I do not understand. Until I have acquired that understanding, I cannot act.”

“You will act,” said Kefira Qay. Suddenly a laser pistol was in her hand, aimed at Tuf’s broad paunch. “You will act now.”

Haviland Tuf reacted not at all. “Violence,” he said, in a voice of mild reproach. “Perhaps, before you burn a hole in me and thereby doom yourself and your world, you might give me the opportunity to explain?”

“Go on,” she said. “I’ll listen. For a little while.”

“Excellent,” said Haviland Tuf. “Guardian, something very odd is happening on Namor.”

“You’ve noticed,” she said drily. The laser did not move.

“Indeed. You are being destroyed by an infestation of creatures that we must, for want of a better term, collectively dub sea monsters. Three species have appeared, in less than half a dozen standard years. Each of these species is apparently new, or at least unknown. This strikes me as unlikely in the extreme. Your people have been on Namor for one hundred years, yet not until recently have you had any knowledge of these things you call dreadnaughts, fire-balloons, and walkers. It is almost as if some dark analogue of my Ark were waging biowar upon you, yet obviously that is not the case. New or old, these sea monsters are native to Namor, a product of local evolution. Their close relatives fill your seas—the mud-pots, the bobbing freddies, the jellydancers and men-of-war. So. Where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know,” said Kefira Qay.

“Nor do I,” Tuf said. “Consider further. These sea monsters breed in vast numbers. The sea teems with them, they fill the air, they overrun populous islands. They kill. Yet they do not kill each other, nor do they seem to have any other natural enemies. The cruel checks of a normal ecosystem do not apply. I have studied the reports of your scientists with great interest. Much about these sea monsters is fascinating, but perhaps most intriguing is the fact that you know nothing about them except in their full adult form. Vast dreadnaughts prowl the seas and sink ships, monstrous fire-balloons swirl across your skies. Where, might I ask, are the little dreadnaughts, the baby balloons? Where indeed.”

“Deep under the sea.”

“Perhaps, Guardian, perhaps. You cannot say for certain, nor can I. These monsters are most formidable creatures, yet I have seen equally formidable predators on other worlds. They do not number in hundreds or thousands. Why? Ah, because the young, or the eggs, or the hatchlings, they are less formidable than the parents, and most die long before reaching their terrible maturity. This does not appear to happen on Namor. It does not appear to happen at all. What can it all mean? What indeed.” Tuf shrugged. “I cannot say, but I work on, I think, I endeavor to solve the riddle of your overabundant sea.”

Kefira Qay grimaced. “And meanwhile, we die. We die, and you don’t care.”

“I protest!” Tuf began.

“Silence!” she said, waving the laser. “I’ll talk now, you’ve given your speech. Today we lost contact with the Broken Hand. Forty-three islands, Tuf. I’m afraid to even think how many people. All gone now, in a single day. A few garbled radio transmissions, hysteria, and silence. And you sit and talk about riddles. No more. You will take action now. I insist. Or threaten, if you prefer. Later, we will solve the whys and hows of these things. For the moment, we will kill them, without pausing for questions.”

“Once,” said Haviland Tuf, “there was a world idyllic but for a single flaw—an insect the size of a dust mote. It was a harmless creature, but it was everywhere: It fed on the microscopic spores of a floating fungus. The folk of this world hated the tiny insect, which sometimes flew about in clouds so thick they obscured the sun. When citizens went outdoors, the insects would land on them by the thousands, covering their bodies with a living shroud. So a would-be ecological engineer proposed to solve their problem. From a distant world, he introduced another insect, larger, to prey on the living dust motes. The scheme worked admirably. The new insects multiplied and multiplied, having no natural enemies in this ecosystem, until they had entirely wiped out the native species. It was a great triumph. Unfortunately, there were unforeseen side effects. The invader, having destroyed one form of life, moved on to other, more beneficial sorts. Many native insects became extinct. The local analogue of bird life, deprived of its customary prey and unable to digest the alien bug, also suffered grievously. Plants were not pollinated as before. Whole forests and jungles changed and withered. And the spores of the fungus that had been the food of the original nuisance were left unchecked. The fungus grew everywhere—on buildings, on food crops, even on living animals. In short, the ecosystem was wrenched entirely askew. Today, should you visit, you would find a planet dead but for a terrible fungus. Such are the fruits of hasty action, with insufficient study. There are grave risks should one move without understanding.”

“And certain destruction if one fails to move at all,” Kefira Qay said stubbornly. “No, Tuf. You tell frightening tales, but we are a desperate people. The Guardians accept whatever risks there may be. I have my orders. Unless you do as I bid, I will use this.” She nodded at her laser.

Haviland Tuf folded his arms. “If you use that,” he said, “you will be very foolish. No doubt you could learn to operate the Ark. In time. The task would take years, which by your own admission you do not have. I shall work on in your behalf, and forgive you your crude bluster and your threats, but I shall move only when I deem myself ready. I am an ecological engineer. I have my personal and professional integrity. And I must point out that, without my services, you are utterly without hope. Utterly. So, since you know this and I know this, let us dispense with further drama. You will not use that laser.”

For a moment, Kefira Qay’s face looked stricken. “You . . .” she said in confusion; the laser wavered just a bit. Then her look hardened once again. “You’re wrong, Tuf,” she said. “I will use it.”

Haviland Tuf said nothing.

“Not on you,” she said. “On your cats. I will kill one of them every day, until you take action.” Her wrist moved slightly, so the laser was trained not on Tuf, but on the small form of Ingratitude, who was prowling hither and yon about the room, poking at shadows. “I will start with this one,” the Guardian said. “On the count of three.”

Tuf’s face was utterly without emotion. He stared.

“One,” said Kefira Qay.

Tuf sat immobile.

“Two,” she said.

Tuf frowned, and there were wrinkles in his chalk-white brow.

“Three,” Qay blurted.

“No,” Tuf said quickly. “Do not fire. I shall do as you insist. I can begin cloning within the hour.”

The Guardian holstered her laser.

So Haviland Tuf went reluctantly to war.

On the first day he sat in his war room before his great console, tight-lipped and quiet, turning dials and pressing glowing buttons and phantom holographic keys. Elsewhere on the Ark, murky liquids of many shades and colors spilled and gurgled into the empty vats along the shadowy main shaft, while specimens from the great cell library were shifted and sprayed and manipulated by tiny waldoes as sensitive as the hands of a master surgeon. Tuf saw none of it. He remained at his post, starting one clone after another.

On the second day he did the same.

On the third day he rose and strolled slowly down the kilometers-long shaft where his creations had begun to grow, indistinct forms that stirred feebly or not at all in the tanks of translucent liquid. Some tanks were fully as large as the Ark’s shuttle deck, others as small as a fingernail. Haviland Tuf paused by each one, studied the dials and meters and glowing spyscopes with quiet intensity, and sometimes made small adjustments. By the end of the day he had progressed only half the length of the long, echoing row.

On the fourth day he completed his rounds.

On the fifth day he threw in the chronowarp. “Time is its slave,” he told Kefira Qay when she asked him. “It can hold it slow, or bid it hurry. We shall make it run, so the warriors I breed can reach maturity more quickly than in nature.”

On the sixth day he busied himself on the shuttle deck, modifying two of his shuttles to carry the creatures he was fashioning, adding tanks great and small and filling them with water.

On the morning of the seventh day he joined Kefira Qay for breakfast and said, “Guardian, we are ready to begin.”

She was surprised. “So soon?”

“Not all of my beasts have reached full maturity, but that is as it should be. Some are monstrous large, and must be transshipped before they have attained adult growth. The cloning shall continue, of course. We must establish our creatures in sufficient numbers so they will remain viable. Nonetheless, we are now at the stage where it is possible to begin seeding the seas of Namor.”

“What is your strategy?” asked Kefira Qay.

Haviland Tuf pushed aside his plate and pursed his lips. “Such strategy as I have is crude and premature, Guardian, and based on insufficient knowledge. I take no responsibility for its success or failure. Your cruel threats have impelled me to unseemly haste.”

“Nonetheless,” she snapped. “What are you doing?”

Tuf folded his hands atop his stomach. “Biological weaponry, like other sorts of armament, comes in many forms and sizes. The best way to slay a human enemy is a single laser burst planted square in the center of the forehead. In biological terms, the analogue might be a suitable natural enemy or predator, or a species-specific pestilence. Lacking time, I have had no opportunity to devise such an economical solution.

“Other approaches are less satisfactory. I might introduce a disease that would cleanse your world of dreadnaughts, fire-balloons, and walkers, for example. Several likely candidates exist. Yet your sea monsters are close relatives of many other kinds of marine life, and those cousins and uncles would also suffer. My projections indicate that fully three-quarters of Namor’s oceangoing life would be vulnerable to such an attack. Alternatively, I have at my disposal fast-breeding fungi and microscopic animals who would literally fill your seas and crowd out all other life. That choice too is unsatisfactory. Ultimately it would make Namor incapable of sustaining human life. To pursue my analogy of a moment ago, these methods are the biological equivalent of killing a single human enemy by exploding a low-yield thermonuclear device in the city in which he happens to reside. So I have ruled them out.

“Instead, I have opted for what might be termed a scattershot strategy, introducing many new species into your Namorian ecology in the hopes that some of them will prove effective natural enemies capable of winnowing the ranks of your sea monsters. Some of my warriors are great deadly beasts, formidable enough to prey even on your terrible dreadnaughts. Others are small and fleet, semi-social pack hunters who breed quickly. Still others are tiny things. I have hope that they will find and feed on your nightmare creatures in their younger, less potent stages, and thereby thin them out. So you see, I pursue many strategies. I toss down the entire deck rather than playing a single card. Given your bitter ultimatum, it is the only way to proceed.” Tuf nodded at her. “I trust you will be satisfied, Guardian Qay.”

She frowned and said nothing.

“If you are finished with that delightful sweet-mushroom porridge,” Tuf said, “we might begin. I would not have you think that I was dragging my feet. You are a trained pilot, of course?”

“Yes,” she snapped.

“Excellent!” Tuf exclaimed. “I shall instruct you in the peculiar idiosyncrasies of my shuttle craft, then. By this hour, they are already fully stocked for our first run. We shall make long low runs across your seas, and discharge our cargoes into your troubled waters. I shall fly the Basilisk above your northern hemisphere. You shall take the Manticore to the south. If this plan is acceptable, let us go over the routes I have planned for us.” He rose with great dignity.

For the next twenty days, Haviland Tuf and Kefira Qay crisscrossed the dangerous skies of Namor in a painstaking grid pattern, seeding the seas. The Guardian flew her runs with élan. It felt good to be in action again, and she was filled with hope as well. The dreadnaughts and fire-balloons and walkers would have their own nightmares to contend with now—nightmares from half a hundred scattered worlds.

From Old Poseidon came vampire eels and nessies and floating tangles of web-weed, transparent and razor-sharp and deadly.

From Aquarius Tuf cloned black raveners, the swifter scarlet raveners, poisonous puff-puppies, and fragrant, carnivorous lady’s bane.

From Jamison’s World the vats summoned sand-dragons and dreerhants and a dozen kinds of brightly colored water snakes, large and small.

From Old Earth itself the cell library provided great white sharks, barracuda, giant squid, and clever semi-sentient orcas.

They seeded Namor with the monstrous gray kraken of Lissador and the smaller blue kraken of Ance, with waterjelly colonies from Noborn, Daronnian spinnerwhips, and bloodlace out of Cathaday, with swimmers as large as the fortress-fish of Dam Tullian, the mock-whale of Gulliver, and the ghrin’da of Hruun-2, or as small as the blisterfins of Avalon, the parasitical caesni from Ananda, and the deadly nest-building, egg-laying Deirdran waterwasps. To hunt the drifting fire-balloons they brought forth countless fliers: lashtail mantas, bright red razorwings, flocks of scorn, semi-aquatic howlers, and a terrible pale blue thing—half plant and half animal and all but weightless—that drifted with the wind and lurked inside clouds like a living, hungry spiderweb. Tuf called it the-weed-that-weeps-and-whispers, and advised Kefira Qay not to fly through clouds.

Plants and animals and things that were both and neither, predators and parasites, creatures dark as night or bright and gorgeous or entirely colorless, things strange and beautiful beyond words or too hideous even for thought, from worlds whose names burned bright in human history and from others seldom heard of. And more, and more. Day after day the Basilisk and the Manticore flashed above the seas of Namor, too swift and deadly for the fire-balloons that drifted up to attack them, dropping their living weapons with impunity.

After each day’s run they would repair to the Ark, where Haviland Tuf and one or more of his cats would seek solitude, while Kefira Qay habitually took Foolishness with her to the communications room so she could listen to the reports.

“Guardian Smitt reports the sighting of strange creatures in the Orange Strait. No sign of dreadnaughts.”

“A dreadnaught has been seen off Batthern, locked in terrible combat with some huge tentacled thing twice its size. A gray kraken, you say? Very well. We shall have to learn these names, Guardian Qay.”

“Mullidor Strand reports that a family of lashtail mantas has taken up residence on the offshore rocks. Guardian Horn says they slice through fire-balloons like living knives—that the balloons flail and deflate and fall helplessly. Wonderful!”

“Today we heard from Indigo Beach, Guardian Qay. A strange story. Three walkers came rushing out of the water, but it was no attack. They were crazed, staggering about as if in great pain, and ropes of some pale scummy substance dangled from every joint and gap. What is it?”

“A dead dreadnaught washed up on New Atlantis today. Another corpse was sighted by the Sunrazor on its western patrol, rotting atop the water. Various strange fishes were picking it to pieces.”

“Starsword swung out to Fire Heights yesterday, and sighted less than a half-dozen fire-balloons. The Council of Guardians is thinking of resuming short airship flights to the Mud-Pot Pearls, on a trial basis. What do you think, Guardian Qay? Would you advise that we risk it, or is it premature?”

Each day the reports flooded in, and each day Kefira Qay smiled more broadly as she made her runs in the Manticore. But Haviland Tuf remained silent and impassive.

Thirty-four days into the war, Lord Guardian Lysan told her, “Well, another dead dreadnaught was found today. It must have put up quite a battle. Our scientists have been analyzing the contents of its stomachs, and it appears to have fed exclusively on orcas and blue kraken.” Kefira Qay frowned slightly, then shrugged it off.

“A gray kraken washed up on Boreen today,” Lord Guardian Moen told her a few days later. “The residents are complaining of the stink. It has gigantic round bite-marks, they report. Obviously a dreadnaught, but even larger than the usual kind.” Guardian Qay shifted uncomfortably.

“All the sharks seem to have vanished from the Amber Sea. The biologists can’t account for it. What do you think? Ask Tuf about it, will you?” She listened, and felt a faint trickle of alarm.

“Here’s a strange one for you two. Something has been sighted moving back and forth across the Coherine Deep. We’ve had reports from both Sunrazor and Skyknife, and various confirmations from skimmer patrols. A huge thing, they say, a veritable living island, sweeping up everything in its path. Is that one of yours? If it is, you may have miscalculated. They say it is eating barracuda and blisterfins and larder’s needles by the thousands.” Kefira Qay scowled.

“Fire-balloons sighted again off Mullidor Strand—hundreds of them. I can hardly give credence to these reports, but they say the lashtail mantas just carom off them now. Do you . . .”

“Men-of-war again, can you believe it? We thought they were all nearly gone. So many of them, and they are gobbling up Tuf’s smaller fish like nobody’s business. You have to . . .”

“Dreadnaughts spraying water to knock howlers from the sky . . .”

“Something new, Kefira, a flyer, or a glider rather, swarms of them launch from the tops of these fire-balloons. They’ve gotten three skimmers already, and the mantas are no match for them . . .”

“. . . all over, I tell you, that thing that hides in the clouds . . . the balloons just rip them loose, the acid doesn’t bother them anymore, they fling them down . . .”

“. . . more dead waterwasps, hundreds of them, thousands, where are they all . . .”

“. . . walkers again. Castle Dawn has fallen silent, must be overrun. We can’t understand it. The island was ringed by bloodlace and waterjelly colonies. It ought to have been safe, unless . . .”

“. . . no word from Indigo Beach in a week . . .”

“. . . thirty, forty fire-balloons seen just off Cabben. The council fears . . .”

“. . . nothing from Lobbadoon . . .”

“. . . dead fortress-fish, half as big as the island itself . . .”

“. . . dreadnaughts came right into the harbor . . .”

“. . . walkers . . .”

“. . . Guardian Qay, the Starsword is lost, gone down over the Polar Sea. The last transmission was garbled, but we think . . .”

Kefira Qay pushed herself up, trembling, and turned to rush out of the communications room, where all the screens were babbling news of death, destruction, defeat. Haviland Tuf was standing behind her, his pale white face impassive, Ingratitude sitting calmly on his broad left shoulder.

“What is happening?” the Guardian demanded.

“I should think that would be obvious, Guardian, to any person of normal intelligence. We are losing. Perhaps we have lost already.”

Kefira Qay fought to keep from shrieking. “Aren’t you going to do anything? Fight back? This is all your fault, Tuf. You aren’t an ecological engineer—you’re a trader who doesn’t know what he’s doing. That’s why this is . . .”

Haviland Tuf raised up a hand for silence. “Please,” he said. “You have already caused me considerable vexation. Insult me no further. I am a gentle man, of kindly and benevolent disposition, but even one such as myself can be provoked to anger. You press close to that point now. Guardian, I take no responsibility for this unfortunate course of events. This hasty biowar we have waged was none of my idea. Your uncivilized ultimatum forced me to unwise action in order to placate you. Fortunately, while you have spent your nights gloating over transient and illusory victories, I have continued with my work. I have mapped out your world on my computers and watched the course of your war shudder and flow across it in all its manifold stages. I’ve duplicated your biosphere in one of my great tanks and seeded it with samples of Namorian life cloned from dead specimens—a bit of tentacle here, a piece of carapace there. I have observed and analyzed and at last I have come to conclusions. Tentative, to be sure, although this late sequence of events on Namor tends to confirm my hypothesis. So defame me no further, Guardian. After a refreshing night’s sleep I shall descend to Namor and attempt to end this war of yours.”

Kefira Qay stared at him, hardly daring to believe, her dread turning to hope once again. “You have the answer, then?”

“Indeed. Did I not just say as much?”

“What is it?” she demanded. “Some new creatures? That’s it—you’ve cloned something else, haven’t you? Some plague? Some monster?”

Haviland Tuf held up his hand. “Patience. First I must be certain. You have mocked me and derided me with such unflagging vigor that I hesitate to open myself to further ridicule by confiding my plans to you. I shall prove them valid first. Now, let us discuss tomorrow. You shall fly no war run with the Manticore. Instead, I would have you take it to New Atlantis and convene a full meeting of the Council of Guardians. Fetch those who require fetching from outlying islands, please.”

“And you?” Kefira Qay asked.

“I shall meet with the council when it is time. Prior to that, I shall take my plans and my creature to Namor on a mission of our own. We shall descend in the Phoenix, I believe. Yes. I do think the Phoenix most appropriate, to commemorate your world rising from its ashes. Markedly wet ashes, but ashes nonetheless.”

Kefira Qay met Haviland Tuf on the shuttle deck just prior to their scheduled departure. Manticore and Phoenix stood ready in their launch berths amidst the scatter of derelict spacecraft. Haviland Tuf was punching numbers into a mini-computer strapped to the inside of his wrist. He wore a long gray vinyl greatcoat with copious pockets and flaring shoulderboards. A green and brown duck-billed cap decorated with the golden theta of the Ecological Engineers perched rakishly atop his bald head.

“I have notified Namor Control and Guardian Headquarters,” Qay said. “The council is assembling. I will provide transportation for a half-dozen Lords Guardian from outlying districts, so all of them will be on hand. How about you, Tuf? Are you ready? Is your mystery creature on board?”

“Soon,” said Haviland Tuf, blinking at her.

But Kefira Qay was not looking at his face. Her gaze had gone lower. “Tuf,” she said, “there is something in your pocket. Moving.” Incredulous, she watched the ripple creep along beneath the vinyl.

“Ah,” said Tuf. “Indeed.” And then the head emerged from his pocket, and peered around curiously. It belonged to a kitten, a tiny jet-black kitten with lambent yellow eyes.

“A cat,” muttered Kefira Qay sourly.

“Your perception is uncanny,” said Haviland Tuf. He lifted the kitten out gently, and held it cupped in one great white hand while scratching behind its ear with a finger from the other. “This is Dax,” he said solemnly. Dax was scarcely half the size of the older kittens who frisked about the Ark. He looked like nothing but a ball of black fur, curiously limp and indolent.

“Wonderful,” the Guardian replied. “Dax, eh? Where did this one come from? No, don’t answer that. I can guess. Tuf, don’t we have more important things to do than play with cats?”

“I think not,” said Haviland Tuf. “You do not appreciate cats sufficiently, Guardian. They are the most civilized of creatures. No world can be considered truly cultured without cats. Are you aware that all cats, from time immemorial, have had a touch of psi? Do you know that some ancient societies of Old Earth worshipped cats as gods? It is true.”

“Please,” said Kefira Qay irritably. “We don’t have time for a discourse on cats. Are you going to bring that poor little thing down to Namor with you?”

Tuf blinked. “Indeed. This poor little thing, as you so contemptuously call him, is the salvation of Namor. Respect might be in order.”

She stared at him as if he had gone mad. “What? That? Him? I mean, Dax? Are you serious? What are you talking about? You’re joking, aren’t you? This is some kind of insane jest. You’ve got some thing loaded aboard the Phoenix, some huge leviathan that will cleanse the sea of those dreadnaughts—something, anything, I don’t know. But you can’t mean . . . you can’t . . . not that.”

“Him,” said Haviland Tuf. “Guardian, it is so wearisome to have to state the obvious, not once but again and again. I have given you raveners and krakens and lashtail mantas, at your insistence. They have not been efficacious. Accordingly, I have done much hard thinking, and I have cloned Dax.”

“A kitten,” she said. “You’re going to use a kitten against the dreadnaughts and the fire-balloons and the walkers. One. Small. Kitten.”

“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf. He frowned down at her, slid Dax back into the roomy confines of his great pocket, and turned smartly toward the waiting Phoenix.

Kefira Qay was growing very nervous. In the council chambers high atop Breakwater Tower on New Atlantis, the twenty-five Lords Guardian who commanded the defense of all Namor were restive. All of them had been waiting for hours. Some had been there all day. The long conference table was littered with personal communicators and computer printouts and empty water glasses. Two meals had already been served and cleared away. By the wide curving window that dominated the far wall, portly Lord Guardian Alis was talking in low urgent tones to Lord Guardian Lysan, thin and stern, and both of them were giving meaningful glances to Kefira Qay from time to time. Behind them the sun was going down, and the great bay was turning a lovely shade of scarlet. It was such a beautiful scene that one scarcely noticed the small bright dots that were Guardian skimmers, flying patrol.

Dusk was almost upon them, the council members were grumbling and stirring impatiently in their big cushioned chairs, and Haviland Tuf had still failed to make an appearance. “When did he say he would be here?” asked Lord Guardian Khem, for the fifth time.

“He wasn’t very precise, Lord Guardian,” Kefira Qay replied uneasily, for the fifth time.

Khem frowned and cleared his throat.

Then one of the communicators began to beep, and Lord Guardian Lysan strode over briskly and snatched it up. “Yes?” he said. “I see. Quite good. Escort him in.” He set down the communicator and rapped its edge on the table for order. The others shuffled to their seats, or broke off their conversations, or straightened. The council chamber grew silent. “That was the patrol. Tuf’s shuttle has been sighted. He is on his way, I am pleased to report.” Lysan glanced at Kefira Qay. “At last.”

The Guardian felt even more uneasy then. It was bad enough that Tuf had kept them waiting, but she was dreading the moment when he came lumbering in, Dax peering out of his pocket. Qay had been unable to find the words to tell her superiors that Tuf proposed to save Namor with a small black kitten. She fidgeted in her seat and plucked at her large, crooked nose. This was going to be bad, she feared.

It was worse than anything she could have dreamed.

All of the Lords Guardian were waiting, stiff and silent and attentive, when the doors opened and Haviland Tuf walked in, escorted by four armed guards in golden coveralls. He was a mess. His boots made a squishing sound as he walked, and his greatcoat was smeared with mud. Dax was visible in his left pocket all right, paws hooked over its edge and large eyes intent. But the Lords Guardian weren’t looking at the kitten. Beneath his other arm, Haviland Tuf was carrying a muddy rock the size of a big man’s head. A thick coating of green-brown slime covered it, and it was dripping water onto the plush carpet.

Without so much as a word, Tuf went directly to the conference table and set the rock down in the center of it. That was when Kefira Qay saw the fringe of tentacles, pale and fine as threads, and realized that it wasn’t a rock after all. “A mud-pot,” she said aloud in surprise. No wonder she hadn’t recognized it. She had seen many a mud-pot in her time, but not until after they had been washed and boiled and the tendrils trimmed away. Normally they were served with a hammer and chisel to crack the bony carapace, and a dish of melted butter and spices on the side.

The Lords Guardian looked on in astonishment, and then all twenty-five began talking at once, and the council chamber became a blur of overlapping voices.

“. . . it is a mud-pot, I don’t understand . . .”

“What is the meaning of this?”

“He makes us wait all day and then comes to council as filthy as a mudgrubber. The dignity of the council is . . .”

“. . . haven’t eaten a mud-pot in, oh, two, three . . .”

“. . . can’t be the man who is supposed to save . . .”

“. . . insane, why, just look at . . .”

“. . . what is that thing in his pocket? Look at it! My God, it moved! It’s alive, I tell you, I saw it . . .”

“Silence!” Lysan’s voice was like a knife cutting through the hubbub. The room quieted as, one by one, the Lords Guardian turned toward him. “We have come together at your beck and call,” Lysan said acidly to Tuf. “We expected you to bring us an answer. Instead you appear to have brought us dinner.”

Someone snickered.

Haviland Tuf frowned down at his muddy hands, and wiped them primly on his greatcoat. Taking Dax from his pocket, Tuf deposited the lethargic black kitten on the table. Dax yawned and stretched, and ambled toward the nearest of the Lords Guardian, who stared in horror and hurriedly inched her chair back a bit. Shrugging out of his wet, muddy greatcoat, Tuf looked about for a place to put it, and finally hung it from the laser rifle of one of his escorts. Only then did he turn back to the Lords Guardian. “Esteemed Lords Guardian,” he said, “this is not dinner you see before you. In that very attitude lies the root of all your problems. This is the ambassador of the race that shares Namor with you, whose name, regrettably, is far beyond my small capabilities. His people will take it quite badly if you eat him.”

Eventually someone brought Lysan a gavel, and he rapped it long and loud enough to attract everyone’s attention, and the furor slowly ebbed away. Haviland Tuf had stood impassively through all of it, his face without expression, his arms folded against his chest. Only when silence was restored did he say, “Perhaps I should explain.”

“You are mad,” Lord Guardian Harvan said, looking from Tuf to the mud-pot and back again. “Utterly mad.”

Haviland Tuf scooped up Dax from the table, cradled him in one arm, and began to pet him. “Even in our moment of victory, we are mocked and insulted,” he said to the kitten.

“Tuf,” said Lysan from the head of the long table, “what you suggest is impossible. We have explored Namor quite sufficiently in the century we have been here so as to be certain that no sentient races dwell upon it. There are no cities, no roads, no signs of any prior civilization or technology, no ruins or artifacts—nothing, neither above nor below the sea.”

“Moreover,” said another councillor, a beefy woman with a red face, “the mud-pots cannot possibly be sentient. Agreed, they have brains the size of a human brain. But that is about all they have. They have no eyes, ears, noses, almost no sensory equipment whatever except for touch. They have only those feeble tendrils as manipulative organs, scarcely strong enough to lift a pebble. And in fact, the tendrils are only used to anchor them to their spot on the seabed. They are hermaphroditic and downright primitive, mobile only in the first month of life, before the shell hardens and grows heavy. Once they root on the bottom and cover themselves with mud, they never move again. They stay there for hundreds of years.”

“Thousands,” said Haviland Tuf. “They are remarkably long-lived creatures. All that you say is undoubtedly correct. Nonetheless, your conclusions are in error. You have allowed yourself to be blinded by belligerence and fear. If you had removed yourself from the situation and paused long enough to think about it in depth, as I did, no doubt it would become obvious even to the military mind that your plight was no natural catastrophe. Only the machinations of some enemy intelligence could sufficiently explain the tragic course of events on Namor.”

“You don’t expect us to believe—” someone began.

“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf, “I expect you to listen. If you will refrain from interrupting me, I will explain all. Then you may choose to believe or not, as suits your peculiar fancy. I shall take my fee and depart.” Tuf looked at Dax. “Idiots, Dax. Everywhere we are beset by idiots.” Turning his attention back to the Lords Guardian, he continued, “As I have stated, intelligence was clearly at work here. The difficulty was in finding that intelligence. I perused the work of your Namorian biologists, living and dead, read much about your flora and fauna, re-created many of the native lifeforms aboard the Ark. No likely candidate for sentience was immediately forthcoming. The traditional hallmarks of intelligent life include a large brain, sophisticated biological sensors, mobility, and some sort of manipulative organ, such as an opposable thumb. Nowhere on Namor could I find a creature with all of these attributes. My hypothesis, however, was still correct. Therefore I must needs move on to unlikely candidates, as there were no likely ones.

“To this end I studied the history of your plight, and at once some things suggested themselves. You believed that your sea monsters emerged from the dark oceanic depths, but where did they first appear? In the offshore shallows—the areas where you practiced fishing and sea-farming. What did all these areas have in common? Certainly an abundance of life, that must be admitted. Yet not the same life. The fish that habituated the waters off New Atlantis did not frequent those of the Broken Hand. Yet I found two interesting exceptions, two species found virtually everywhere—the mud-pots, lying immobile in their great soft beds through the long slow centuries and, originally, the things you called Namorian men-of-war. The ancient native race has another term for those. They call them guardians.

“Once I had come this far, it was only a matter of working out the details and confirming my suspicions. I might have arrived at my conclusion much earlier, but for the rude interruptions of liaison officer Qay, who continually shattered my concentration and finally, most cruelly, forced me to waste much time sending forth gray krakens and razorwings and sundry other such creatures. In the future I shall spare myself such liaisons.

“Yet, in a way, the experiment was useful, since it confirmed my theory as to the true situation on Namor. Accordingly I pressed on. Geographic studies showed that all of the monsters were thickest near mud-pot beds. The heaviest fighting had been in those selfsame areas, my Lords Guardian. Clearly, these mud-pots you find so eminently edible were your mysterious foes. Yet how could that be? These creatures had large brains, to be sure, but lacked all the other traits we have come to associate with sentience, as we know it. And that was the very heart of it! Clearly they were sentient as we do not know it. What sort of intelligent being could live deep under the sea, immobile, blind, deaf, bereft of all input? I pondered that question. The answer, sirs, is obvious. Such an intelligence must interact with the world in ways we cannot, must have its own modes of sensing and communicating. Such an intelligence must be telepathic. Indeed. The more I considered it, the more obvious it became.

“Thereupon it was only a matter of testing my conclusions. To that end, I brought forth Dax. All cats have some small psionic ability, Lords Guardian. Yet long centuries ago, in the days of the Great War, the soldiers of the Federal Empire struggled against enemies with terrible psi powers; Hrangan Minds and githyanki soulsucks. To combat such formidable foes, the genetic engineers worked with felines, and vastly heightened and sharpened their psionic abilities, so they could esp in unison with mere humans. Dax is such a special animal.”

“You mean that thing is reading our minds?” Lysan said sharply.

“Insofar as you have minds to read,” said Haviland Tuf, “yes. But more importantly, through Dax, I was able to reach that ancient people you have so ignominiously dubbed mud-pots. For they, you see, are entirely telepathic.

“For millennia beyond counting they have dwelled in tranquility and peace beneath the seas of this world. They are a slow, thoughtful, philosophic race, and they lived side by side in the billions, each linked with all the others, each an individual and each a part of the great racial whole. In a sense they were deathless, for all shared the experiences of each, and the death of one was as nothing. Experiences were few in the unchanging sea, however. For the most part their long lives are given over to abstract thought, to philosophy, to strange green dreams that neither you nor I can truly comprehend. They are silent musicians, one might say. Together they have woven great symphonies of dreams, and those songs go on and on.

“Before humanity came to Namor, they had had no real enemies for millions of years. Yet that had not always been the case. In the primordial beginnings of this wet world, the oceans teemed with creatures who relished the taste of the dreamers as much as you do. Even then, the race understood genetics, understood evolution. With their vast web of interwoven minds, they were able to manipulate the very stuff of life itself, more skillfully than any genetic engineers. And so they evolved their guardians, formidable predators with a biological imperative to protect those you call mud-pots. These were your men-of-war. From that time to this they guarded the beds, while the dreamers went back to their symphony of thought.

“Then you came, from Aquarius and Old Poseidon. Indeed you did. Lost in the reverie, the dreamers hardly noticed for many years, while you farmed and fished and discovered the taste of mud-pots. You must consider the shock you gave them, Lords Guardian. Each time you plunged one of them into boiling water, all of them shared the sensations. To the dreamers, it seemed as though some terrible new predator had evolved upon the landmass, a place of little interest to them. They had no inkling that you might be sentient, since they could no more conceive of a nontelepathic sentience than you could conceive of one blind, deaf, immobile, and edible. To them, things that moved and manipulated and ate flesh were animals, and could be nothing else.

“The rest you know, or can surmise. The dreamers are a slow people lost in their vast songs, and they were slow to respond. First they simply ignored you, in the belief that the ecosystem itself would shortly check your ravages. This did not appear to happen. To them it seemed you had no natural enemies. You bred and expanded constantly, and many thousands of minds fell silent. Finally they returned to the ancient, almost-forgotten ways of their dim past, and woke to protect themselves. They sped up the reproduction of their guardians until the seas above their beds teemed with their protectors, but the creatures that had once sufficed admirably against other enemies proved to be no match for you. Finally they were driven to new measures. Their minds broke off the great symphony and ranged out, and they sensed and understood. At last they began to fashion new guardians, guardians formidable enough to protect them against this great new nemesis. Thus it went. When I arrived upon the Ark, and Kefira Qay forced me to unleash many new threats to their peaceful dominion, the dreamers were initially taken aback. But the struggle had sharpened them and they responded more quickly now, and in only a very short time they were dreaming newer guardians still, and sending them forth to battle to oppose the creatures I had loosed upon them. Even as I speak to you in this most imposing tower of yours, many a terrible new lifeform is stirring beneath the waves, and soon will emerge to trouble your sleep in years to come—unless, of course, you come to a peace. That is entirely your decision. I am only a humble ecological engineer. I would not dream of dictating such matters to the likes of you. Yet I do suggest it, in the strongest possible terms. So here is the ambassador plucked from the sea—at great personal discomfort to myself, I might add. The dreamers are now in much turmoil, for when they felt Dax among them and through him touched me, their world increased a millionfold. They learned of the stars today, and learned moreover that they are not alone in this cosmos. I believe they will be reasonable, as they have no use for the land, nor any taste for fish. Here is Dax as well, and myself. Perhaps we might commence to talk?”

But when Haviland Tuf fell silent at last, no one spoke for quite a long time. The Lords Guardian were all ashen and numb. One by one they looked away from Tuf’s impassive features, to the muddy shell on the table.

Finally Kefira Qay found her voice. “What do they want?” she asked nervously.

“Chiefly,” said Haviland Tuf, “they want you to stop eating them. This strikes me as an eminently sensible proposal. What is your reply?”

“Two million standards is insufficient,” Haviland Tuf said some time later, sitting in the communications room of the Ark. Dax rested calmly in his lap, having little of the frenetic energy of the other kittens. Elsewhere in the room Suspicion and Hostility were chasing each other hither and yon.

Up on the telescreen, Kefira Qay’s features broke into a suspicious scowl. “What do you mean? This was the price we agreed upon, Tuf. If you are trying to cheat us . . .”

“Cheat?” Tuf sighed. “Did you hear her, Dax? After all we have done, such grim accusations are still flung at us willy-nilly. Yes. Willy-nilly indeed. An odd phrase, when one stops to mull on it.” He looked back at the telescreen. “Guardian Qay, I am fully aware of the agreed-on price. For two million standards, I solved your difficulties. I analyzed and pondered and provided the insight and the translator you so sorely needed. I have even left you with twenty-five telepathic cats, each linked to one of your Lords Guardian, to facilitate further communications after my departure. That too is included within the terms of our initial agreement, since it was necessary to the solution of your problem. And, being at heart more a philanthropist than a businessman, and deeply sentimental as well, I have even allowed you to retain Foolishness, who took a liking to you for some reason that I am entirely unable to fathom. For that, too, there is no charge.”

“Then why are you demanding an additional three million standards?” demanded Kefira Qay.

“For unnecessary work which I was cruelly compelled to do,” Tuf replied. “Would you care for an itemized accounting?”

“Yes, I would,” she said.

“Very well. For sharks. For barracuda. For giant squid. For orcas. For gray kraken. For blue kraken. For bloodlace. For water jellies. Twenty thousand standards per item. For fortress-fish, fifty thousand standards. For the-weed-that-weeps-and-whispers, eight . . .” He went on for a long, long time.

When he was done, Kefira Qay set her lips sternly. “I will submit your bill to the Council of Guardians,” she said. “But I will tell you straight out that your demands are unfair and exorbitant, and our balance of trade is not sufficient to allow for such an outflow of hard standards. You can wait in orbit for a hundred years, Tuf, but you won’t get any five million standards.”

Haviland Tuf raised his hands in surrender. “Ah,” he said. “So, because of my trusting nature, I must take a loss. I will not be paid, then?”

“Two million standards,” said the Guardian. “As we agreed.”

“I suppose I might accept this cruel and unethical decision, and take it as one of life’s hard lessons. Very well then. So be it.” He stroked Dax. “It has been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I can only blame myself for this wretched turn of events. Why, it was only a few scant months past that I chanced to view a historical drama on this very sort of situation. It was about a seedship such as my own that rid one small world of an annoying pest, only to have the ungrateful planetary government refuse payment. Had I been wiser, that would have taught me to demand my payment in advance.” He sighed. “But I was not wise, and now I must suffer.” Tuf stroked Dax again, and paused. “Perhaps your Council of Guardians might be interested in viewing this particular tape, purely for recreational purposes. It is holographic, fully dramatized, and well-acted, and moreover, it gives a fascinating insight into the workings and capabilities of a ship such as this one. Highly educational. The title is Seedship of Hamelin.”

They paid him, of course.

SOULS

Joanna Russ

Critics have long complained about science fiction’s normally skimpy characterization, but here is a story that is full of color and action and which also creates one of SF’s memorable characters, the Abbess Radegunde. Joanna Russ tells us that this is part of a longer work, a future history, which she is currently writing (though this story is complete and may be enjoyed on its own).

Deprived of other Banquet

I entertained myself—

—Emily Dickinson

This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what happened when the Norsemen came. I tell it not as it was told to me but as I saw it, for I was a child then and the Abbess had made a pet and errand boy of me, although the stern old Wardress, Cunigunt, who had outlived the previous Abbess, said I was more in the Abbey than out of it and a scandal. But the Abbess would only say mildly, “Dear Cunigunt, a scandal at the age of seven?” which was turning it off with a joke, for she knew how harsh and disliking my new stepmother was to me and my father did not care and I with no sisters or brothers. You must understand that joking and calling people “dear” and “my dear” was only her manner; she was in every way an unusual woman. The previous Abbess, Herrade, had found that Radegunde, who had been given to her to be fostered, had great gifts and so sent the child south to be taught, and that has never happened here before. The story has it that the Abbess Herrade found Radegunde seeming to read the great illuminated book in the Abbess’s study; the child had somehow pulled it off its stand and was sitting on the floor with the volume in her lap, sucking her thumb, and turning the pages with her other hand just as if she were reading.

“Little two-years,” said the Abbess Herrade, who was a kind woman, “what are you doing?” She thought it amusing, I suppose, that Radegunde should pretend to read this great book, the largest and finest in the Abbey, which had many, many books more than any other nunnery or monastery I have ever heard of: a full forty then, as I remember. And then little Radegunde was doing the book no harm.

“Reading, Mother,” said the little girl.

“Oh, reading?” said the Abbess, smiling. “Then tell me what you are reading,” and she pointed to the page.

“This,” said Radegunde, “is a great D with flowers and other beautiful things about it, which is to show that Dominus, our Lord God, is the greatest thing and the most beautiful and makes everything to grow and be beautiful, and then it goes on to say Domine nobis pacem, which means Give peace to us, O Lord.”

Then the Abbess began to be frightened but she said only, “Who showed you this?” thinking that Radegunde had heard someone read and tell the words or had been pestering the nuns on the sly.

“No one,” said the child. “Shall I go on?” and she read page after page of the Latin, in each case telling what the words meant.

There is more to the story, but I will say only that after many prayers the Abbess Herrade sent her foster daughter far southwards, even to Poitiers, where Saint Radegunde had ruled an Abbey before, and some say even to Rome, and in these places Radegunde was taught all learning, for all learning there is in the world remains in these places. Radegunde came back a grown woman and nursed the Abbess through her last illness and then became Abbess in her turn. They say that the great folk of the Church down there in the south wanted to keep her because she was such a prodigy of female piety and learning, there where life is safe and comfortable and less rude than it is here, but she said that the gray skies and flooding winters of her birthplace called to her very soul. She often told me the story when I was a child: how headstrong she had been and how defiant, and how she had sickened so desperately for her native land that they had sent her back, deciding that a rude life in the mud of a northern village would be a good cure for such a rebellious soul as hers.

“And so it was,” she would say, patting my cheek or tweaking my ear. “See how humble I am now?” for you understand, all this about her rebellious girlhood, twenty years back, was a kind of joke between us. “Don’t you do it,” she would tell me and we would laugh together, I so heartily at the very idea of my being a pious monk full of learning that I would hold my sides and be unable to speak.

She was kind to everyone. She knew all the languages, not only ours, but the Irish too and the tongues folk speak to the north and south, and Latin and Greek also, and all the other languages in the world, both to read and write. She knew how to cure sickness, both the old women’s way with herbs or leeches and out of books also. And never was there a more pious woman! Some speak ill of her now she’s gone and say she was too merry to be a good Abbess, but she would say, “Merriment is Gods flowers,” and when the winter wind blew her headdress awry and showed the gray hair—which happened once; I was there and saw the shocked faces of the Sisters with her—she merely tapped the band back into place, smiling and saying, “Impudent wind! Thou showest thou hast power which is more than our silly human power, for it is from God”—and this quite satisfied the girls with her.

No one ever saw her angry. She was impatient sometimes, but in a kindly way, as if her mind were elsewhere. It was in Heaven, I used to think, for I have seen her pray for hours or sink to her knees—right in the marsh!—to see the wild duck fly south, her hands clasped and a kind of wild joy on her face, only to rise a moment later, looking at the mud on her habit and crying half-ruefully, half in laughter, “Oh, what will Sister Laundress say to me? I am hopeless! Dear child, tell no one; I will say I fell,” and then she would clap her hand to her mouth, turning red and laughing even harder, saying, “I am hopeless, telling lies!”

The town thought her a saint, of course. We were all happy then, or so it seems to me now, and all lucky and well, with this happiness of having her amongst us burning and blooming in our midst like a great fire around which we could all warm ourselves, even those who didn’t know why life seemed so good. There was less illness; the food was better; the very weather stayed mild; and people did not quarrel as they had before her time and do again now. Nor do I think, considering what happened at the end, that all this was nothing but the fancy of a boy who’s found his mother, for that’s what she was to me; I brought her all the gossip and ran errands when I could, and she called me Boy News in Latin; I was happier than I have ever been.

And then one day those terrible, beaked prows appeared in our river.

I was with her when the warning came, in the main room of the Abbey tower just after the first fire of the year had been lit in the great hearth; we thought ourselves safe, for they had never been seen so far south and it was too late in the year for any sensible shipman to be in our waters. The Abbey was host to three Irish priests who turned pale when young Sister Sibihd burst in with the news, crying and wringing her hands; one of the brothers exclaimed a thing in Latin which means “God protect us!” for they had been telling us stories of the terrible sack of the monastery of Saint Columbanus and how everyone had run away with the precious manuscripts or had hidden in the woods, and that was how Father Cairbre and the two others had decided to go “walk the world,” for this (the Abbess had been telling it all to me, for I had no Latin) is what the Irish say when they leave their native land to travel elsewhere.

“God protects our souls, not our bodies,” said the Abbess Radegunde briskly. She had been talking with the priests in their own language or in the Latin, but this she said in ours so even the women workers from the village would understand. Then she said, “Father Cairbre, take your friends and the younger Sisters to the underground passage; Sister Diemud, open the gates to the villagers; half of them will be trying to get behind the Abbey walls and the others will be fleeing to the marsh. You, Boy News, down to the cellars with the girls.” But I did not go and she never saw it; she was up and looking out one of the window slits instantly. So was I. I had always thought the Norsemen’s big ships came right up on land—on legs, I supposed—and was disappointed to see that after they came up our river they stayed in the water like other ships and the men were coming ashore in little boats, which they were busy pulling up on shore through the sand and mud. Then the Abbess repeated her order—“Quickly! Quickly!”—and before anyone knew what had happened, she was gone from the room. I watched from the tower window; in the turmoil nobody bothered about me. Below, the Abbey grounds and gardens were packed with folk, all stepping on the herb plots and the Abbess’s paestum roses, and great logs were being dragged to bar the door set in the stone walls round the Abbey, not high walls, to tell truth, and Radegunde was going quickly through the crowd, crying: Do this! Do that! Stay, thou! Go, thou! and like things.

Then she reached the door and motioned Sister Oddha, the doorkeeper, aside—the old Sister actually fell to her knees in entreaty—and all this, you must understand, was wonderfully pleasant to me. I had no more idea of danger than a puppy. There was some tumult by the door—I think the men with the logs were trying to get in her way—and Abbess Radegunde took out from the neck of her habit her silver crucifix, brought all the way from Rome, and shook it impatiently at those who would keep her in. So of course they let her through at once.

I settled into my corner of the window, waiting for the Abbess’s crucifix to bring down God’s lightning on those tall, fair men who defied Qur Savior and the law and were supposed to wear animal horns on their heads, though these did not (and I found out later-that’s just a story; that is not what the Norse do). I did hope that the Abbess, or Our Lord, would wait just a little while before destroying them, for I wanted to get a good look at them before they all died, you understand. I was somewhat disappointed as they seemed to be wearing breeches with leggings under them and tunics on top, like ordinary folk, and cloaks also, though some did carry swords and axes and there were round shields piled on the beach at one place. But the long hair they had was fine, and the bright colors of their clothes, and the monsters growing out of the heads of the ships were splendid and very frightening, even though one could see that they were only painted, like the pictures in the Abbess’s books.

I decided that God had provided me with enough edification and could now strike down the impious strangers.

But He did not.

Instead the Abbess walked alone towards these fierce men, over the stony river bank, as calmly as if she were on a picnic with her girls. She was singing a little song, a pretty tune that I repeated many years later, and a well-traveled man said it was a Norse cradle-song. I didn’t know that then, but only that the terrible, fair men, who had looked up in surprise at seeing one lone woman come out of the Abbey (which was barred behind her; I could see that), now began a sort of whispering astonishment among themselves. I saw the Abbess’s gaze go quickly from one to the other—we often said that she could tell what was hidden in the soul from one look at the face—and then she picked the skirt of her habit up with one hand and daintily went among the rocks to one of the men, one older than the others, as it proved later, though I could not see so well at the time—and said to him, in his own language:

“Welcome, Thorvald Einarsson, and what do you, good farmer, so far from your own place, with the harvest ripe and the great autumn storms coming on over the sea?” (You may wonder how I knew what she said when I had no Norse; the truth is that Father Cairbre, who had not gone to the cellars after all, was looking out the top of the window while I was barely able to peep out the bottom, and he repeated everything that was said for the folk in the room, who all kept very quiet.)

Now you could see that the pirates were dumfounded to hear her speak their own language and even more so that she called one by his name; some stepped backwards and made strange signs in the air and others unsheathed axes or swords and came running towards the Abbess. But this Thorvald Einarsson put up his hand for them to stop and laughed heartily.

“Think!” he said. “There’s no magic here, only cleverness—what pair of ears could miss my name with the lot of you bawling out ‘Thorvald Einarsson, help me with this oar;’ ‘Thorvald Einarsson, my leggings are wet to the knees;’ ‘Thorvald Einarsson, this stream is as cold as a Fimbulwinter!”

The Abbess Radegunde nodded and smiled. Then she sat down plump on the river bank. She scratched behind one ear, as I had often seen her do when she was deep in thought. Then she said (and I am sure that this talk was carried on in a loud voice so that we in the Abbey could hear it):

“Good friend Thorvald, you are as clever as the tale I heard of you from your sisters son, Ranulf, from whom I learnt the Norse when I was in Rome, and to show you it was he, he always swore by his gray horse, Lamefoot, and he had a difficulty in his speech; he could not say the sounds as we do and so spoke of you always as ‘Torvald.’ Is not that so?”

I did not realize it then, being only a child, but the Abbess was—by this speech—claiming hospitality from the man and had also picked by chance or inspiration the cleverest among these thieves, for his next words were:

“I am not the leader. There are no leaders here.”

He was warning her that they were not his men to control, you see. So she scratched behind her ear again and got up. Then she began to wander, as if she did not know what to do, from one to the other of these uneasy folk—for some backed off and made signs at her still, and some took out their knives—singing her little tune again and walking slowly, more bent over and older and infirm-looking than we had ever seen her, one helpless little woman in black before all those fierce men. One wild young pirate snatched the headdress from her as she passed, leaving her short gray hair bare to the wind; the others laughed and he that had done it cried out:

“Grandmother, are you not ashamed?”

“Why, good friend, of what?” said she mildly.

“Thou art married to thy Christ,” he said, holding the head-covering behind his back, “but this bridgegroom of thine cannot even defend thee against the shame of having thy head uncovered! Now if thou wert married to me—”

There was much laughter. The Abbess Radegunde waited until it was over. Then she scratched her bare head and made as if to turn away, but suddenly she turned back upon him with the age and infirmity dropping from her as if they had been a cloak, seeming taller and very grand, as if lit from within by some great fire. She looked directly into his face. This thing she did was something we had all seen, of course, but they had not, nor had they heard that great, grand voice with which she sometimes read the Scriptures to us or talked with us of the wrath of God. I think the young man was frightened, for all his daring. And I know now what I did not then: that the Norse admire courage above all things and that—to be blunt—everyone likes a good story, especially if it happens right in front of your eyes.

“Grandson!”—and her voice tolled like the great bell of God; I think folk must have heard her all the way to the marsh!—“Little grandchild, thinkest thou that the Creator of the World who made the stars and the moon and the sun and our bodies, too and the change of the seasons and the very earth we stand on—yea, even unto the shit in thy belly!—thinkest thou that such a being has a big house in the sky where he keeps his wives and goes in to fuck them as thou wouldst thyself or like the King of Turkey? Do not dishonor the wit of the mother who bore thee! We are the servants of God, not his wives, and if we tell our silly girls they are married to the Christus, it is to make them understand that they must not run off and marry Otto Farmer or Ekkehard Blacksmith, but stick to their work, as they promised. If I told them they were married to an Idea, they would not understand me, and neither dost thou.”

(Here Father Cairbre, above me in the window, muttered in a protesting way about something.)

Then the Abbess snatched the silver cross from around her neck and put it into the boy’s hand, saying: “Give this to thy mother with my pity. She must pull out her hair over such a child.”

But he let it fall to the ground. He was red in the face and breathing hard.

“Take it up,” she said more kindly, “take it up, boy; it will not hurt thee and there’s no magic in it. It’s only pure silver and good workmanship; it will make thee rich.” When she saw that he would not—his hand went to his knife—she tched to herself in a motherly way (or I believe she did, for she waved one hand back and forth as she always did when she made that sound) and got down on her knees—with more difficulty than was truth, I think—saying loudly, “I will stoop, then; I will stoop,” and got up, holding it out to him, saying, “Take. Two sticks tied with a cord would serve me as well.”

The boy cried, his voice breaking, “My mother is dead and thou art a witch!” and in an instant he had one arm around the Abbess’s neck and with the other his knife at her throat. The man Thorvald Einarsson roared, “Thorfinn!” but the Abbess only said clearly, “Let him be. I have shamed this man but did not mean to. He is right to be angry.”

The boy released her and turned his back. I remember wondering if these strangers could weep. Later I heard—and I swear that the Abbess must have somehow known this or felt it, for although she was no witch, she could probe a man until she found the sore places in him and that very quickly—that this boy’s mother had been known for an adulteress and that no man would own him as a son. It is one thing among those people for a man to have what the Abbess called a concubine and they do not hold the children of such in scorn as we do, but it is a different thing when a married woman has more than one man. Such was Thorfinn’s case; I suppose that was what had sent him viking. But all this came later; what I saw then—with my nose barely above the window slit—was that the Abbess slipped her crucifix over the hilt of the boy’s sword—she really wished him to have it, you see—and then walked to a place near the walls of the Abbey but far from the Norsemen. I think she meant them to come to her. I saw her pick up her skirts like a peasant woman, sit down with legs crossed, and say in a loud voice:

“Come! Who will bargain with me?”

A few strolled over, laughing, and sat down with her.

“All!” she said, gesturing them closer.

“And why should we all come?” said one who was farthest away.

“Because you will miss a bargain,” said the Abbess.

“Why should we bargain when we can take?” said another.

“Because you will only get half,” said the Abbess. “The rest you will not find.”

“We will ransack the Abbey,” said a third.

“Half the treasure is not in the Abbey,” said she.

“And where is it then?”

She tapped her forehead. They were drifting over by twos and threes. I have heard since that the Norse love riddles and this was a sort of riddle; she was giving them good fun.

“If it is in your head,” said the man Thorvald, who was standing behind the others, arms crossed, “we can get it out, can we not?” And he tapped the hilt of his knife.

“If you frighten me, I shall become confused and remember nothing,” said the Abbess calmly. “Besides, do you wish to play that old game? You saw how well it worked the last time. I am surprised at you, Ranulf mothers-brother.”

“I will bargain then,” said the man Thorvald, smiling.

“And the rest of you?” said Radegunde. “It must be all or none; decide for yourselves whether you wish to save yourselves trouble and danger and be rich,” and she deliberately turned her back on them. The men moved down to the rivers edge and began to talk among themselves, dropping their voices so that we could not hear them any more. Father Cairbre, who was old and short-sighted, cried, “I cannot hear them. What are they doing?” and I cleverly said, “I have good eyes, Father Cairbre,” and he held me up to see. So it was just at the time that the Abbess Radegunde was facing the Abbey tower that I appeared in the window. She clapped one hand across her mouth. Then she walked to the gate and called (in a voice I had learned not to disregard; it had often got me a smacked bottom), “Boy News, down! Come down to me here at once! And bring Father Cairbre with you.”

I was overjoyed. I had no idea that she might want to protect me if anything went wrong. My only thought was that I was going to see it all from wonderfully close by. So I wormed my way, half-suffocated, through the folk in the tower room, stepping on feet and skirts, and having to say every few seconds, “But I have to! The Abbess wants me,” and meanwhile she was calling outside like an Empress, “Let that boy through! Make a place for that boy! Let the Irish priest through!” until I crept and pushed and complained my way to the very wall itself—no one was going to open the gate for us, of course—and there was a great fuss and finally someone brought a ladder. I was over at once, but the old priest took a longer time, although it was a low wall, as I’ve said, the builders having been somewhat of two minds about making the Abbey into a true fortress.

Once outside it was lovely, away from all that crowd, and I ran, gloriously pleased, to the Abbess, who said only, “Stay by me, whatever happens,” and immediately turned her attention away from me. It had taken so long to get Father Cairbre outside the walls that the tall, foreign men had finished their talking and were coming back—all twenty or thirty of them—towards the Abbey and the Abbess Radegunde, and most especially of all, me. I could see Father Cairbre tremble. They did look grim, close by, with their long, wild hair and the brightness of their strange clothes. I remember that they smelled different from us, but cannot remember how after all these years. Then the Abbess spoke to them in that outlandish language of theirs, so strangely light and lilting to hear from their bearded lips, and then she said something in Latin to Father Cairbre, and he said, with a shake in his voice:

“This is the priest, Father Cairbre, who will say our bargains aloud in our own tongue so that my people may hear. I cannot deal behind their backs. And this is my foster baby, who is very dear to me and who is now having his curiosity rather too much satisfied, I think.” (I was trying to stand tall like a man but had one hand secretly holding onto her skirt; so that was what the foreign men had chuckled at!) The talk went on, but I will tell it as if I had understood the Norse, for to repeat everything twice would be tedious.

The Abbess Radegunde said, “Will you bargain?”

There was a general nodding of heads, with a look of: After all, why not?

“And who will speak for you?” said she.

A man stepped forward; I recognized Thorvald Einarsson.

“Ah, yes,” said the Abbess dryly. “The company that has no leaders. Is this leaderless company agreed? Will it abide by its word? I want no treachery-planners, no Breakwords here!”

There was a general mutter at this. The Thorvald man (he was big, close up!) said mildly, “I sail with none such. Let’s begin.”

We all sat down.

“Now,” said Thorvald Einarsson, raising his eyebrows, “according to my knowledge of this thing, you begin. And according to my knowledge, you will begin by saying that you are very poor.”

“But, no,” said the Abbess, “we are rich.” Father Cairbre groaned. A groan answered him from behind the Abbey walls. Only the Abbess and Thorvald Einarsson seemed unmoved; it was as if these two were joking in some way that no one else understood. The Abbess went on, saying, “We are very rich. Within is much silver, much gold, many pearls, and much embroidered cloth, much fine-woven cloth, much carved and painted wood, and many books with gold upon their pages and jewels set into their covers. All this is yours. But we have more and better: herbs and medicines, ways to keep food from spoiling, the knowledge of how to cure the sick; all this is yours. And we have more and better even than this: we have the knowledge of Christ and the perfect understanding of the soul, which is yours too, any time you wish; you have only to accept it.”

Thorvald Einarsson held up his hand. “We will stop with the first,” he said, “and perhaps a little of the second. That is more practical.”

“And foolish,” said the Abbess politely, “in the usual way.” And again I had the odd feeling that these two were sharing a joke no one else even saw. She added, “There is one thing you may not have, and that is the most precious of all.”

Thorvald Einarsson looked inquiring.

“My people. Their safety is dearer to me than myself. They are not to be touched, not a hair on their heads, not for any reason. Think: you can fight your way into the Abbey easily enough, but the folk in there are very frightened of you, and some of the men are armed. Even a good fighter is cumbered in a crowd. You will slip and fall upon each other without meaning to or knowing that you do so. Heed my counsel. Why play butcher when you can have treasure poured into your laps like kings, without work? And after that there will be as much again, when I lead you to the hidden place. An earl’s mountain of treasure. Think of it! And to give all this up for slaves, half of whom will get sick and die before you get them home—and will need to be fed if they are to be any good. Shame on you for bad advice-takers! Imagine what you will say to your wives and families: Here are a few miserable bolts of cloth with blood spots that won’t come out, here are some pearls and jewels smashed to powder in the fighting, here is a torn piece of embroidery which was whole until someone stepped on it in the battle, and I had slaves but they died of illness and I fucked a pretty young nun and meant to bring her back, but she leapt into the sea. And, oh, yes, there was twice as much again and all of it whole but we decided not to take that. Too much trouble, you see.”

This was a lively story and the Norsemen enjoyed it. Radegunde held up her hand.

“People!” she called in German, adding, “Sea-rovers, hear what I say: I will repeat it for you in your tongue.” (And so she did.) “People, if the Norsemen fight us, do not defend yourselves but smash everything! Wives, take your cooking knives and shred the valuable cloth to pieces! Men, with your axes and hammers hew the altars and the carved wood to fragments! All, grind the pearls and smash the jewels against the stone floors! Break the bottles of wine! Pound the gold and silver to shapelessness! Tear to pieces the illuminated books! Tear down the hangings and burn them!

“But” (she added, her voice suddenly mild) “if these wise men will accept our gifts, let us heap untouched and spotless at their feet all that we have and hold nothing back, so that their kinsfolk will marvel and wonder at the shining and glistering of the wealth they bring back, though it leave us nothing but our bare stone walls.”

If anyone had ever doubted that the Abbess Radegunde was inspired by God, their doubts must have vanished away, for who could resist the fiery vigor of her first speech or the beneficent unction of her second? The Norsemen sat there with their mouths open. I saw tears on Father Cairbres cheeks. Then Thorvald said, “Abbess—”

He stopped. He tried again but again stopped. Then he shook himself, as a man who has been under a spell, and said:

“Abbess, my men have been without women for a long time.”

Radegunde looked surprised. She looked as if she could not believe what she had heard. She looked the pirate up and down, as if puzzled, and then walked around him as if taking his measure. She did this several times, looking at every part of his big body as if she were summing him up while he got redder and redder. Then she backed off and surveyed him again, and with her arms akimbo like a peasant, announced very loudly in both Norse and German:

“What! Have they lost the use of their hands?”

It was irresistible, in its way. The Norse laughed. Our people laughed. Even Thorvald laughed. I did too, though I was not sure what everyone was laughing about. The laughter would die down and then begin again behind the Abbey walls, helplessly, and again die down and again begin. The Abbess waited until the Norsemen had stopped laughing and then called for silence in German until there were only a few snickers here and there. She then said:

“These good men—Father Cairbre, tell the people—these good men will forgive my silly joke. I meant no scandal, truly, and no harm, but laughter is good: it settles the body’s waters, as the physicians say. And my people know that I am not always as solemn and good as I ought to be. Indeed I am a very great sinner and scandal-maker. Thorvald Einarsson, do we do business?”

The big man—who had not been so pleased as the others, I can tell you!—looked at his men and seemed to see what he needed to know. He said, “I go in with five men to see what you have. Then we let the poor folk on the grounds go, but not those inside the Abbey. Then we search again. The gates will be locked and guarded by the rest of us; if there’s any treachery, the bargains off.”

“Then I will go with you,” said Radegunde. “That is very just and my presence will calm the people. To see us together will assure them that no harm is meant. You are a good man, Torvald—forgive me; I call you as your nephew did so often. Come, Boy News, hold on to me.”

“Open the gates!” she called then. “All is safe!” and with the five men (one of whom was that young Thorfinn who had hated her so) we waited while the great logs were pulled back. There was little space within, but the people shrank back at the sight of those fierce warriors and opened a place for us.

I looked back and the Norsemen had come in and were standing just inside the walls, on either side the gate, with their swords out and their shields up. The crowd parted for us more slowly as we reached the main tower, with the Abbess repeating constantly, “Be calm, people, be calm. All is well,” and deftly speaking by name to this one or that. It was much harder when the people gasped upon hearing the big logs pushed shut with a noise like thunder, and it was very close on the stairs; I heard her say something like an apology in the queer foreign tongue. Something that probably meant, “I’m sorry that we must wait.” It seemed an age until the stairs were even partly clear and I saw what the Abbess had meant by the cumbering of a crowd; a man might swing a weapon in the press of people, but not very far, and it was more likely he would simply fall over someone and crack his head. We gained the great room with the big crucifix of painted wood and the little one of pearls and gold, and the scarlet hangings worked in gold thread that I had played robbers behind so often before I learned what real robbers were: these tall, frightening men whose eyes glistened with greed at what I had fancied every village had. Most of the Sisters had stayed in the great room, but somehow it was not so crowded, as the folk had huddled back against the walls when the Norsemen came in. The youngest girls were all in a corner, terrified—one could smell it, as one can in people—and when that young Thorfinn went for the little gold-and-pearl cross, Sister Sibihd cried in a high, cracked voice, “It is the body of our Christ!” and leapt up, snatching it from the wall before he could get to it.

“Sibihd!” exclaimed the Abbess, in as sharp a voice as I had ever heard her use. “Put that back or you will feel the weight of my hand, I tell you!”

Now it is odd, is it not, that a young woman desperate enough not to care about death at the hands of a Norse pirate should nonetheless be frightened away at the threat of getting a few slaps from her Abbess? But folk are like that. Sister Sibihd returned the cross to its place (from whence young Thorfinn took it) and fell back among the nuns, sobbing, “He desecrates our Lord God!”

“Foolish girl!” snapped the Abbess. “God only can consecrate or desecrate; man cannot. That is a piece of metal.”

Thorvald said something sharp to Thorfinn, who slowly put the cross back on its hook with a sulky look which said plainer than words: Nobody gives me what I want. Nothing else went wrong in the big room or the Abbess’s study or the storerooms, or out in the kitchens. The Norsemen were silent and kept their hands on their swords, but the Abbess kept talking in a calm way in both tongues; to our folk she said, “See? It is all right but everyone must keep still. God will protect us.” Her face was steady and clear, and I believed her a saint, for she had saved Sister Sibihd and the rest of us.

But this peacefulness did not last, of course. Something had to go wrong in all that press of people; to this day I do not know what. We were in a corner of the long refectory, which is the place where the Sisters and Brothers eat in an Abbey, when something pushed me into the wall and I fell, almost suffocated by the Abbess’s lying on top of me. My head was ringing and on all sides there was a terrible roaring sound with curses and screams, a dreadful tumult as if the walls had come apart and were falling on everyone. I could hear the Abbess whispering something in Latin over and over in my ear. There were dull, ripe sounds, worse than the rest, which I know now to have been the noise steel makes when it is thrust into bodies. This all seemed to go on forever and then it seemed to me that the floor was wet. Then all became quiet. I felt the Abbess Radegunde get off me. She said:

“So this is how you wash your floors up North.” When I lifted my head from the rushes and saw what she meant, I was very sick into the corner. Then she picked me up in her arms and held my face against her bosom so that I would not see, but it was no use; I had already seen: all the people lying sprawled on the floor with their bellies coming out, like heaps of dead fish, old Walafrid with an axe handle standing out of his chest—he was sitting up with his eyes shut in a press of bodies that gave him no room to lie down—and the young beekeeper, Uta, from the village, who had been so merry, lying on her back with her long braids and her gown all dabbed in red dye and a great stain of it on her belly. She was breathing fast and her eyes were wide open. As we passed her, the noise of her breathing ceased.

The Abbess said mildly, “Thy people are thorough housekeepers, Earl Split-gut.”

Thorvald Einarsson roared something at us, and the Abbess replied softly, “Forgive me, good friend. You protected me and the boy and I am grateful. But nothing betrays a man’s knowledge of the German like a word that bites, is it not so? And I had to be sure.”

It came to me then that she had called him “Torvald” and reminded him of his sisters son so that he would feel he must protect us if anything went wrong. But now she would make him angry, I thought, and I shut my eyes tight. Instead he laughed and said in odd, light German, “I did no housekeeping but to stand over you and your pet. Are you not grateful?”

“Oh, very, thank you,” said the Abbess with such warmth as she might show to a Sister who had brought her a rose from the garden, or another who copied her work well, or when I told her news, or if Ita the cook made a good soup. But he did not know that the warmth was for everyone and so seemed satisfied. By now we were in the garden and the air was less foul; she put me down, although my limbs were shaking, and I clung to her gown, crumpled, stiff, and blood-reeking though it was. She said, “Oh my God, what a deal of washing hast Thou given us!” She started to walk towards the gate, and Thorvald Einarsson took a step towards her. She said, without turning around: “Do not insist, Thorvald, there is no reason to lock me up. I am forty years old and not likely to be running away into the swamp, what with my rheumatism and the pain in my knees and the folk needing me as they do.”

There was a moment’s silence. I could see something odd come into the big man’s face. He said quietly:

“I did not speak, Abbess.”

She turned, surprised. “But you did. I heard you.”

He said strangely, “I did not.”

Children can guess sometimes what is wrong and what to do about it without knowing how; I remember saying, very quickly, “Oh, she does that sometimes. My stepmother says old age has addled her wits,” and then, “Abbess, may I go to my stepmother and my father?”

“Yes, of course,” she said, “run along, Boy News—” and then stopped, looking into the air as if seeing in it something we could not. Then she said very gently, “No, my dear, you had better stay here with me,” and I knew, as surely as if I had seen it with my own eyes, that I was not to go to my stepmother or my father because both were dead.

She did things like that, too, sometimes.

For a while it seemed that everyone was dead. I did not feel grieved or frightened in the least, but I think I must have been, for I had only one idea in my head: that if I let the Abbess out of my sight, I would die. So I followed her everywhere. She was let to move about and comfort people, especially the mad Sibihd, who would do nothing but rock and wail, but towards nightfall, when the Abbey had been stripped of its treasures, Thorvald Einarsson put her and me in her study, now bare of its grand furniture, on a straw pallet on the floor, and bolted the door on the outside. She said:

“Boy News, would you like to go to Constantinople, where the Turkish Sultan is, and the domes of gold and all the splendid pagans? For that is where this man will take me to sell me.”

“Oh, yes!” said I, and then: “But will he take me, too?”

“Of course,” said the Abbess, and so it was settled. Then in came Thorvald Einarsson, saying:

“Thorfinn is asking for you.” I found out later that they were waiting for him to die; none other of the Norse had been wounded, but a farmer had crushed Thorfinn’s chest with an axe, and he was expected to die before morning. The Abbess said: “Is that a good reason to go?” She added, “I mean that he hates me; will not his anger at my presence make him worse?”

Thorvald said slowly, “The folk here say you can sit by the sick and heal them. Can you do that?”

“To my own knowledge, not at all,” said the Abbess Radegunde, “but if they believe so, perhaps that calms them and makes them better. Christians are quite as foolish as other people, you know. I will come if you want,” and though I saw that she was pale with tiredness, she got to her feet, I should say that she was in a plain, brown gown taken from one of the peasant women because her own was being washed clean, but to me she had the same majesty as always. And for him too, I think.

Thorvald said, “Will you pray for him or damn him?”

She said, “I do not pray, Thorvald, and I never damn anybody; I merely sit.” She added, “Oh, let him: he’ll scream your ears off if you don’t,” and this meant me, for I was ready to yell for my life if they tried to keep me from her.

They had put Thorfinn in the chapel, a little stone room with nothing left in it now but a plain wooden cross, not worth carrying off. He was lying, his eyes closed, on the stone altar with furs under him, and his face was gray. Every time he breathed, there was a bubbling sound, a little thin, reedy sound; and as I crept closer, I saw why, for in the young man’s chest was a great red hole with sharp pink things sticking out of it, all-crushed, and in the hole one could see something jump and fall, jump and fall, over and over again. It was his heart beating. Blood kept coming from his lips in a froth. I do not know, of course, what either said, for they spoke in the Norse, but I saw what they did and heard much of it talked of between the Abbess and Thorvald Einarsson later. So I will tell it as if I knew.

The first thing the Abbess did was to stop suddenly on the threshold and raise both hands to her mouth as if in horror. Then she cried furiously to the two guards:

“Do you wish to kill your comrade with the cold and damp? Is this how you treat one another? Get fire in here and some woollen cloth to put over him! No, not more skins, you idiots, wool to mold to his body and take up the wet. Run now!”

One said sullenly, “We don’t take orders from you, Grandma.”

“Oh, no?” said she. “Then I shall strip this wool dress from my old body and put it over that boy and then sit here all night in my flabby, naked skin! What will this child’s soul say when it enters the Valhall? That his friends would not give up a little of their booty so that he might fight for life? Is this your fellowship? Do it, or I will strip myself and shame you both for the rest of your lives!”

“Well, take it from his share,” said the one in a low voice, and the other ran out. Soon there was a fire on the hearth and russet-colored woollen cloth—“From my own share,” said one of them loudly, though it was a color the least costly, not like blue or red—and the Abbess laid it loosely over the boy, carefully putting it close to his sides but not moving him. He did not look to be in any pain, but his color got no better. But then he opened his eyes and said in such a little voice as a ghost might have, a whisper as thin and reedy and bubbling as his breath:

“You . . . old witch. But I beat you . . . in the end.”

“Did you, my dear?” said the Abbess. “How?”

“Treasure,” he said, “for my kinfolk. And I lived as a man at last. Fought . . . and had a woman . . . the one here with the big breasts, Sibihd. . . . Whether she liked it or not. That was good.”

“Yes, Sibihd,” said the Abbess mildly. “Sibihd has gone mad. She hears no one and speaks to no one. She only sits and rocks and moans and soils herself and will not feed herself, although if one puts food in her mouth with a spoon, she will swallow.”

The boy tried to frown. “Stupid,” he said at last. “Stupid nuns. The beasts do it.”

“Do they?” said the Abbess, as if this were a new idea to her. “Now that is very odd. For never yet heard I of a gander that blacked the goose’s eye or hit her over the head with a stone or stuck a knife in her entrails when he was through. When God puts it into their hearts to desire one another, she squats and he comes running. And a bitch in heat will jump through the window if you lock the door. Poor fools! Why didn’t you camp three hours’ down-river and wait? In a week half the young married women in the village would have been slipping away at night to see what the foreigners were like. Yes, and some unmarried ones, and some of my own girls, too. But you couldn’t wait, could you?”

“No,” said the boy, with the ghost of a brag. “Better . . . this way.”

“This way,” said she. “Oh, yes, my dear, old Granny knows about this way! Pleasure for the count of three or four, and the rest of it as much joy as rolling a stone uphill.”

He smiled a ghostly smile. “You’re a whore, Grandma.”

She began to stroke his forehead. “No, Grandbaby,” she said, “but all Latin is not the Church Fathers, you know, great as they are. One can find a great deal in those strange books written by the ones who died centuries before our Lord was born. Listen,” and she leaned closer to him and said quietly:

“Syrian dancing girl, how subtly
you sway those sensuous limbs,

“Half-drunk in the smoky tavern,
lascivious and wanton,

“Your long hair bound back in the

Greek way, clashing the casta-
nets in your hands—”

The boy was too weak to do anything but look astonished. Then she said this:

“I love you so that anyone permitted to sit near you and talk to you seems to me like a god; when I am near you my spirit is broken, my heart shakes, my voice dies, and I can’t even speak. Under my skin I flame up all over and I can’t see; there’s thunder in my ears and I break out in a sweat, as if from fever; I turn paler than cut grass and feel that I am utterly changed; I feel that Death has come near me.”

He said, as if frightened, “Nobody feels like that.”

“They do,” she said.

He said, in feeble alarm, “You’re trying to kill me!”

She said, “No, my dear. I simply don’t want you to die a virgin.”

It was odd, his saying those things and yet holding on to her hand where he had got at it through the woollen cloth; she stroked his head and he whispered, “Save me, old witch.”

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “You shall do your best by not talking and I by not tormenting you any more, and we’ll both try to sleep.”

“Pray,” said the boy.

“Very well,” said she, “but I’ll need a chair,” and the guards—seeing I suppose, that he was holding her hand—brought in one of the great wooden chairs from the Abbey, which were too plain and heavy to carry off, I think. Then the Abbess Radegunde sat in the chair and closed her eyes. Thorfinn seemed to fall asleep. I crept nearer her on the floor and must have fallen asleep myself almost at once, for the next thing I knew a gray light filled the chapel, the fire had gone out, and someone was shaking Radegunde, who still slept in her chair, her head leaning to one side. It was Thorvald Einarsson and he was shouting with excitement in his strange German, “Woman, how did you do it! How did you do it!”

“Do what?” said the Abbess thickly. “Is he dead?”

“Dead?” exclaimed the Norseman. “He is healed! Healed! The lung is whole and all is closed up about the heart and the shattered pieces of the ribs are grown together! Even the muscles of the chest are beginning to heal!”

“That’s good,” said the Abbess, still half asleep. “Let me be.”

Thorvald shook her again. She said again, “Oh, let me sleep.” This time he hauled her to her feet and she shrieked, “My back, my back! Oh, the saints, my rheumatism!” and at the same time a sick voice from under the blue woollens—a sick voice but a man’s voice, not a ghost’s—said something in Norse.

“Yes, I hear you,” said the Abbess. “You must become a follower of the White Christ right away, this very minute. But Dominus noster, please do You put it into these brawny heads that I must have a tub of hot water with pennyroyal in it? I am too old to sleep all night in a chair, and I am one ache from head to foot.”

Thorfinn got louder.

“Tell him,” said the Abbess Radegunde to Thorvald in German, “that I will not baptize him and I will not shrive him until he is a different man. All that child wants is someone more powerful than your Odin god or your Thor god to pull him out of the next scrape he gets into. Ask him: Will he adopt Sibihd as his sister? Will he clean her when she soils herself and feed her and sit with his arm about her, talking to her gently and lovingly until she is well again? The Christ does not wipe out our sins only to have us commit them all over again, and that is what he wants and what you all want, a God that gives and gives and gives, but God does not give; He takes and takes and takes. He takes away everything that is not God until there is nothing left but God, and none of you will understand that! There is no remission of sins; there is only change, and Thorfinn must change before God will have him.”

“Abbess, you are eloquent,” said Thorvald, smiling, “but why do you not tell him all this yourself?”

“Because I ache so!” said Radegunde; “Oh, do get me into some hot water!” and Thorvald half led and half supported her as she hobbled out. That morning, after she had had her soak—when I cried, they let me stay just outside the door—she undertook to cure Sibihd, first by rocking her in her arms and talking to her, telling her she was safe now, and promising that the Northmen would go soon, and then when Sibihd became quieter, leading her out into the woods with Thorvald as a bodyguard to see that we did not run away, and little, dark Sister Hedwic, who had stayed with Sibihd and cared for her. The Abbess would walk for a while in the mild autumn sunshine, and then she would direct Sibihds face upwards by touching her gently under the chin and say, “See? There is Gods sky still,” and then, “Look, there are God’s trees; they have not changed,” and tell her that the world was just the same and God still kindly to folk, only a few more souls had joined the Blessed and were happier waiting for us in Heaven than we could ever be, or even imagine being, on the poor earth. Sister Hedwic kept hold of Sibihds hand. No one paid more attention to me than if I had been a dog, but every time poor Sister Sibihd saw Thorvald she would shrink away, and you could see that Hedwic could not bear to look at him at all; every time he came in her sight she turned her face aside, shut her eyes hard, and bit her lower lip. It was a quiet, almost warm day, as autumn can be sometimes, and the Abbess found a few little blue late flowers growing in a sheltered place against a log and put them into Sibihds hand, speaking of how beautifully and cunningly God had made all things. Sister Sibihd had enough wit to hold on to the flowers, but her eyes stared and she would have stumbled and fallen if Hedwic had not led her.

Sister Hedwic said timidly, “Perhaps she suffers because she has been defiled, Abbess,” and then looked ashamed. For a moment the Abbess looked shrewdly at young Sister Hedwic and then at the mad Sibihd. Then she said:

“Dear daughter Sibihd and dear daughter Hedwic, I am now going to tell you something about myself that I have never told to a single living soul but my confessor. Do you know that as a young woman I studied at Avignon and from there was sent to Rome, so that I might gather much learning? Well, in Avignon I read mightily our Christian Fathers but also in the pagan poets, for as it has been said by Ermenrich of Ellwangen: As dung spread upon a field enriches it to good harvest, thus one cannot produce divine eloquence without the filthy writings of the pagan poets. This is true but perilous, only I thought not so, for I was very proud and fancied that if the pagan poems of love left me unmoved, that was because I had the gift of chastity right from God Himself, and I scorned sensual pleasures and those tempted by them. I had forgotten, you see, that chastity is not given once and for all like a wedding ring that is put on never to be taken off, but is a garden which each day must be weeded, watered, and trimmed anew, or soon there will be only brambles and wilderness.

“As I have said, the words of the poets did not tempt me, for words are only marks on the page with no life save what we give them. But in Rome there were not only the old books, daughters, but something much worse.

“There were statues. Now you must understand that these are not such as you can imagine from our books, like Saint John or the Virgin; the ancients wrought so cunningly in stone that it is like magic; one stands before the marble holding one’s breath, waiting for it to move and speak. They are not statues at all but beautiful, naked men and women. It is a city of seagods pouring water, daughter Sibihd and daughter Hedwic, of athletes about to throw the discus, and runners and wrestlers and young emperors, and the favorites of kings; but they do not walk the streets like real men, for they are all of stone.

“There was one Apollo, all naked, which I knew I should not look on but which I always made some excuse to my companions to pass by, and this statue, although three miles distant from my dwelling, drew me as if by magic. Oh, he was fair to look on! Fairer than any youth alive now in Germany, or in the world, I think. And then all the old loves of the pagan poets came back to me: Dido and Aeneas, the taking of Venus and Mars, the love of the moon, Diana, for the shepherd boy—and I thought that if my statue could only come to life, he would utter honeyed love-words from the old poets and would be wise and brave, too, and what woman could resist him?”

Here she stopped and looked at Sister Sibihd but Sibihd only stared on, holding the little blue flowers. It was Sister Hedwic who cried, one hand pressed to her heart:

“Did you pray, Abbess?”

“I did,” said Radegunde solemnly, “and yet my prayers kept becoming something else. I would pray to be delivered from the temptation that was in the statue, and then, of course, I would have to think of the statue itself, and then I would tell myself that I must run, like the nymph Daphne, to be armored and sheltered within a laurel tree, but my feet seemed to be already rooted to the ground, and then at the last minute I would flee and be back at my prayers again. But it grew harder each time, and at last the day came when I did not flee.”

“Abbess, you?” cried Hedwic, with a gasp. Thorvald, keeping his watch a little way from us, looked surprised. I was very pleased—I loved to see the Abbess astonish people; it was one of her gifts—and at seven I had no knowledge of lust except that my little thing felt good sometimes when I handled it to make water, and what had that to do with statues coming to life or women turning into laurel trees? I was more interested in mad Sibihd, the way children are; I did not know what she might do, or if I should be afraid of her, or if I should go mad myself, what it would be like. But the Abbess was laughing gently at Hedwic’s amazement.

“Why not me?” said the Abbess. “I was young and healthy and had no special grace from God any more than the hens or the cows do! Indeed, I burned so with desire for that handsome young hero—for so I had made him in my mind, as a woman might do with a man she has seen a few times on the street—that thoughts of him tormented me waking and sleeping. It seemed to me that because of my vows I could not give myself to this Apollo of my own free will. So I would dream that he took me against my will, and, oh, what an exquisite pleasure that was!”

Here Hedwic’s blood came all to her face and she covered it with her hands. I could see Thorvald grinning, back where he watched us.

“And then,” said the Abbess, as if she had not seen either of them, “a terrible fear came to my heart that God might punish me by sending a ravisher who would use me unlawfully, as I had dreamed my Apollo did, and that I would not even wish to resist him and would feel the pleasures of a base lust and would know myself a whore and a false nun forever after. This fear both tormented and drew me. I began to steal looks at young men in the streets, not letting the other Sisters see me do it, thinking: Will it be he? Or he? Or he?

“And then it happened. I had lingered behind the others at a melon seller’s thinking of no Apollos or handsome heroes but only of the convent’s dinner, when I saw my companions disappearing round a corner. I hastened to catch up with them—and made a wrong turning—and was suddenly lost in a narrow street—and at that very moment a young fellow took hold of my habit and threw me to the ground! You may wonder why he should do such a mad thing, but as I found out afterwards, there are prostitutes in Rome who affect our way of dress to please the appetites of certain men who are depraved enough to—well, really, I do not know how to say it! Seeing me alone, he had thought I was one of them and would be glad of a customer and a bit of play. So there was a reason for it.

“Well, there I was on my back with this young fellow, sent as a vengeance by God, as I thought, trying to do exactly what I had dreamed, night after night, that my statue should do. And do you know, it was nothing in the least like my dream! The stones at my back hurt me, for one thing. And instead of melting with delight, I was screaming my head off in terror and kicking at him as he tried to pull up my skirts, and praying to God that this insane man might not break any of my bones in his rage!

“My screams brought a crowd of people and he went running. So I got off with nothing worse than a bruised back and a sprained knee. But the strangest thing of all was that while I was cured forever of lusting after my Apollo, instead I began to be tormented by a new fear—that I had lusted after him, that foolish young man with the foul breath and the one tooth missing!—and I felt strange creepings and crawlings over my body that were half like desire and half like fear and half like disgust and shame with all sorts of other things mixed in—I know that is too many halves but it is how I felt—and nothing at all like the burning desire I had felt for my Apollo. I went to see the statue once more before I left Rome, and it seemed to look at me sadly, as if to say: Don’t blame me, poor girl; I’m only a piece of stone. And that was the last time I was so proud as to believe that God had singled me out for a special gift, like chastity—or a special sin, either—or that being thrown down on the ground and hurt had anything to do with any sin of mine, no matter how I mixed the two together in my mind. I dare say you did not find it a great pleasure yesterday, did you?”

Hedwic shook her head. She was crying quietly. She said, “Thank you, Abbess,” and the Abbess embraced her. They both seemed happier, but then all of a sudden Sibihd muttered something, so low that one could not hear her.

“The—” she whispered and then she brought it out but still in a whisper: “The blood.”

“What, dear, your blood?” said Radegunde.

“No, Mother,” said Sibihd, beginning to tremble. “The blood. All over us. Walafrid and—and Uta—and Sister Hildegarde—and everyone broken and spilled out like a dish! And none of us had done anything but I could smell it all over me and the children screaming because they were being trampled down, and those demons come up from Hell though we had done nothing and—and—I understand, Mother, about the rest, but I will never, ever forget it, oh Christus, it is all round me now, oh, Mother, the blood!”

Then Sister Sibihd dropped to her knees on the fallen leaves and began to scream, not covering her face as Sister Hedwic had done, but staring ahead with her wide eyes as if she were blind or could see something we could not. The Abbess knelt down and embraced her, rocking her back and forth, saying, “Yes, yes, dear, but we are here; we are here now; that is gone now,” but Sibihd continued to scream, covering her ears as if the scream were someone else’s and she could hide herself from it.

Thorvald said, looking, I thought, a little uncomfortable, “Cannot your Christ cure this?”

“No,” said the Abbess. “Only by undoing the past. And that is the one thing He never does, it seems. She is in Hell now and must go back there many times before she can forget.”

“She would make a bad slave,” said the Norseman, with a glance at Sister Sibihd, who had fallen silent and was staring ahead of her again. “You need not fear that anyone will want her.”

“God,” said the Abbess Radegunde calmly, “is merciful.”

Thorvald Einarsson said, “Abbess, I am not a bad man.”

“For a good man,” said the Abbess Radegunde, “you keep surprisingly bad company.”

He said angrily, “I did not choose my shipmates. I have had bad luck!”

“Ours has,” said the Abbess, “been worse, I think.”

“Luck is luck,” said Thorvald, clenching his fists. “It comes to some folk and not to others.”

“As you came to us,” said the Abbess mildly. “Yes, yes, I see, Thorvald Einarsson; one may say that luck is Thor’s doing or Odin’s doing, but you must know that our bad luck is your own doing and not some god’s. You are our bad luck, Thorvald Einarsson. It’s true that you’re not as wicked as your friends, for they kill for pleasure and you do it without feeling, as a business, the way one hews down grain. Perhaps you have seen today some of the grain you have cut. If you had a man’s soul, you would not have gone viking, luck or no luck, and if your soul were bigger still, you would have tried to stop your shipmates, just as I talk honestly to you now, despite your anger, and just as Christus himself told the truth and was nailed on the cross. If you were a beast you could not break God’s law, and if you were a man you would not, but you are neither, and that makes you a kind of monster that spoils everything it touches and never knows the reason, and that is why I will never forgive you until you become a man, a true man with a true soul. As for your friends—”

Here Thorvald Einarsson struck the Abbess on the face with his open hand and knocked her down. I heard Sister Hedwic gasp in horror and behind us Sister Sibihd began to moan. But the Abbess only sat there, rubbing her jaw and smiling a little. Then she said:

“Oh, dear, have I been at it again? I am ashamed of myself. You are quite right to be angry, Torvald; no one can stand me when I go on in that way, least of all myself; it is such a bore. Still, I cannot seem to stop it; I am too used to being the Abbess Radegunde, that is clear. I promise never to torment you again, but you, Thorvald, must never strike me again, because you will be very sorry if you do.” He took a step forward.

“No, no, my dear man,” the Abbess said merrily, “I mean no threat—how could I threaten you?—I mean only that I will never tell you any jokes, my spirits will droop, and I will become as dull as any other woman. Confess it now: I am the most interesting thing that has happened to you in years and I have entertained you better, sharp tongue and all, than all the skalds at the Court of Norway. And I know more tales and stories than they do—more than anyone in the whole world—for I make new ones when the old ones wear out. “Shall I tell you a story now?”

“About your Christ?” said he, the anger still in his face.

“No,” said she, “about living men and women. Tell me, Torvald, what do you men want from us women?”

“To be talked to death,” said he, and I could see there was some anger in him still, but he was turning it to play also. The Abbess laughed in delight. “Very witty!” she said, springing to her feet and brushing the leaves off her skirt. “You are a very clever man, Torvald. I beg your pardon, Thorvald. I keep forgetting. But as to what men want from women, if you asked the young men, they would only wink and dig one another in the ribs, but that is only how they deceive themselves. That is only body calling to body. They want something quite different and they want it so much that it frightens them. So they pretend it is anything and everything else: pleasure, comfort, a servant in the home. Do you know what it is that they want?”

“What?” said Thorvald.

“The mother,” said Radegunde, “as women do, too; we all want the mother. When I walked before you on the riverbank yesterday, I was playing the mother. Now you did nothing, for you are no young fool, but I knew that sooner or later one of you, so tormented by his longing that he would hate me for it, would reveal himself. And so he did: Thorfinn, with his thoughts all mixed up between witches and grannies and what not. I knew I could frighten him, and through him, most of you. That was the beginning of my bargaining. You Norse have too much of the father in your country and not enough mother; that is why you die so well and kill other folk so well—and live so very, very badly.”

“You are doing it again,” said Thorvald, but I think he wanted to listen all the same.

“Your pardon, friend,” said the Abbess. “You are brave men; I don’t deny it. But I know your sagas and they are all about fighting and dying and afterwards not Heavenly happiness but the end of the world: everything, even the gods, eaten by the Fenris Wolf and the Midgaard snake! What a pity, to die bravely only because life is not worth living! The Irish know better. The pagan Irish were heroes, with their Queens leading them to battle as often as not, and Father Cairbre, God rest his soul, was complaining only two days ago that the common Irish folk were blasphemously making a goddess out of God’s mother, for do they build shrines to Christ or Our Lord or pray to them? No! It is Our Lady of the Rocks and Our Lady of the Sea and Our Lady of the Grove and Our Lady of this or that from one end of the land to the other. And even here it is only the Abbey folk who speak of God the Father and of Christ. In the village if one is sick or another in trouble it is: Holy Mother, save me! and: Miriam Virginem, intercede for me, and: Blessed Virgin, blind my husband’s eyes! and: Our Lady, preserve my crops, and so on, men and women both. We all need the mother.”

“You, too?”

“More than most,” said the Abbess.

“And I?”

“Oh, no,” said the Abbess, stopping suddenly, for we had all been walking back towards the village as she spoke. “No, and that is what drew me to you at once. I saw it in you and knew you were the leader. It is followers who make leaders, you know, and your shipmates have made you leader, whether you know it or not. What you want is—how shall I say it? You are a clever man, Thorvald, perhaps the cleverest man I have ever met, more even than the scholars I knew in my youth. But your cleverness has had no food. It is a cleverness of the world and not of books. You want to travel and know about folk and their customs, and what strange places are like, and what has happened to men and women in the past. If you take me to Constantinople, it will not be to get a price for me but merely to go there; you went seafaring because this longing itched at you until you could bear it not a year more; I know that.”

“Then you are a witch,” said he, and he was not smiling.

“No, I only saw what was in your face when you spoke of that city,” said she. “Also there is gossip that you spent much time in Göteborg as a young man, idling and marveling at the ships and markets when you should have been at your farm.”

She said, “Thorvald, I can feed that cleverness. I am the wisest woman in the world. I know everything—everything! I know more than my teachers; I make it up or it comes to me, I don’t know how, but it is real—real!—and I know more than anyone. Take me from here, as your slave if you wish but as your friend also, and let us go to Constantinople and see the domes of gold, and the walls all inlaid with gold, and the people so wealthy you cannot imagine it, and the whole city so gilded it seems to be on fire, pictures as high as a wall, set right in the wall and all made of jewels so there is nothing else like them, redder than the reddest rose, greener than the grass, and with a blue that makes the sky pale!”

“You are indeed a witch,” said he, “and not the Abbess Radegunde.”

She said slowly, “I think I am forgetting how to be the Abbess Radegunde.”

“Then you will not care about them any more,” said he, and pointed to Sister Hedwic, who was still leading the stumbling Sister Sibihd.

The Abbess’s face was still and mild. She said, “I care. Do not strike me, Thorvald, not ever again, and I will be a good friend to you. Try to control the worst of your men and leave as many of my people free as you can—I know them and will tell you which can be taken away with the least hurt to themselves or others—and I will feed that curiosity and cleverness of yours until you will not recognize this old world any more for the sheer wonder and awe of it; I swear this on my life.”

“Done,” said he, adding, “but with my luck, your life is somewhere else, locked in a box on top of a mountain, like the trolls in the story, or you will die of old age while we are still at sea.”

“Nonsense,” she said, “I am a healthy, mortal woman with all my teeth, and I mean to gather many wrinkles yet.”

He put his hand out and she took it; then he said, shaking his head in wonder, “If I sold you in Constantinople, within a year you would become Queen of the place!”

The Abbess laughed merrily and I cried in fear, “Me, too! Take me too!” and she said, “Oh, yes, we must not forget little Boy News!” and lifted me into her arms.

The frightening, tall man, with his face close to mine, said in his strange, sing-song German:

“Boy, would you like to see the whales leaping in the open sea and the seals barking on the rocks? And cliffs so high that a giant could stretch his arms up and not reach their tops? And the sun shining at midnight?”

“Yes!” said I.

“But you will be a slave,” he said, “and may be ill-treated and will always have to do as you are bid. Would you like that?”

“No!” I cried lustily, from the safety of the Abbess’s arms, “I’ll fight!”

He laughed a mighty, roaring laugh and tousled my head—rather too hard, I thought—and said, “I will not be a bad master, for I am named for Thor Red-beard and he is strong and quick to fight but good-natured, too, and so am I,” and the Abbess put me down, and so we walked back to the village, Thorvald and the Abbess Radegunde talking of the glories of this world and Sister Hedwic saying softly, “She is a saint, our Abbess, a saint, to sacrifice herself for the good of the people,” and all the time behind us, like a memory, came the low, witless sobbing of Sister Sibihd, who was in Hell.

When we got back we found that Thorfinn was better and the Norsemen were to leave in the morning. Thorvald had a second pallet brought into the Abbess’s study and slept on the floor with us that night. You might think his men would laugh at this, for the Abbess was an old woman, but I think he had been with one of the young ones before he came to us. He had that look about him. There was no bedding for the Abbess but an old brown cloak with holes in it, and she and I were wrapped in it when he came in and threw himself down, whistling, on the other pallet. Then he said:

“Tomorrow, before we sail, you will show me the old Abbess’s treasure.”

“No,” said she. “That agreement was broken.”

He had been playing with his knife and now ran his thumb along the edge of it. “I can make you do it.”

“No,” said she patiently, “and now I am going to sleep.”

“So you make light of death?” he said. “Good! That is what a brave woman should do, as the skalds sing, and not move, even when the keen sword cuts off her eyelashes. But what if I put this knife here not to your throat but to your little boy’s? You would tell me then quick enough!”

The Abbess turned away from him, yawning and saying, “No, Thorvald, because you would not. And if you did, I would despise you for a cowardly oath-breaker and not tell you for that reason. Good night.”

He laughed and whistled again for a bit. Then he said:

“Was all that true?”

“All what?” said the Abbess, “Oh, about the statue. Yes, but there was no ravisher. I put him in the tale for poor Sister Hedwic.”

Thorvald snorted, as if in disappointment. “Tale? You tell lies, Abbess!”

The Abbess drew the old brown cloak over her head and closed her eyes. “It helped her.”

Then there was a silence, but the big Norseman did not seem able to lie still. He shifted his body again as if the straw bothered him, and again turned over. He finally burst out, “But what happened!”

She sat up. Then she shut her eyes. She said, “Maybe it does not come into your man’s thoughts that an old woman gets tired and that the work of dealing with folk is hard work, or even that it is work at all. Well!

“Nothing ‘happened,’ Thorvald. Must something happen only if this one fucks that one or one bangs in another’s head? I desired my statue to the point of such foolishness that I determined to find a real, human lover, but when I raised my eyes from my fancies to the real, human men of Rome and unstopped my ears to listen to their talk, I realized that the thing was completely and eternally impossible. Oh, those younger sons with their skulking, jealous hatred of the rich, and the rich ones with their noses in the air because they thought themselves of such great consequence because of their silly money, and the timidity of the priests to their superiors, and their superiors’ pride, and the artisans’ hatred of the peasants, and the peasants being worked like animals from morning until night, and half the men I saw beating their wives and the other half out to cheat some poor girl of her money or her virginity or both—this was enough to put out any fire! And the women doing less harm only because they had less power to do harm, or so it seemed to me then. So I put all away, as one does with any disappointment. Men are not such bad folk when one stops expecting them to be gods, but they are not for me. If that state is chastity, then a weak stomach is temperance, I think. But whatever it is, I have it, and that’s the end of the matter.”

“All men?” said Thorvald Einarsson with his head to one side, and it came to me that he had been drinking, though he seemed sober.

“Thorvald,” said the Abbess, “what you want with this middle-aged wreck of a body I cannot imagine, but if you lust after my wrinkles and flabby breasts and lean, withered flanks, do whatever you want quickly and then, for Heavens sake, let me sleep. I am tired to death.”

He said in a low voice, “I need to have power over you.”

She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “Oh, Thorvald, Thorvald, I am a weak little woman over forty years old! Where is the power? All I can do is talk!”

He said, “That’s it. That’s how you do it. You talk and talk and talk and everyone does just as you please; I have seen it!”

The Abbess said, looking sharply at him, “Very well. If you must. But if I were you, Norseman, I would as soon bed my own mother. Remember that as you pull my skirts up.”

That stopped him. He swore under his breath, turning over on his side, away from us. Then he thrust his knife into the edge of his pallet, time after time. Then he put the knife under the rolled-up cloth he was using as a pillow. We had no pillow and so I tried to make mine out of the edge of the cloak and failed. Then I thought that the Norseman was afraid of God working in Radegunde, and then I thought of Sister Hedwic’s changing color and wondered why. And then I thought of the leaping whales and the seals, which must be like great dogs because of the barking, and then the seals jumped on land and ran to my pallet and lapped at me with great, icy tongues of water so that I shivered and jumped, and then I woke up.

The Abbess Radegunde had left the pallet—it was her warmth I had missed—and was walking about the room. She would step and pause, her skirts making a small noise as she did so. She was careful not to touch the sleeping Thorvald. There was a dim light in the room from the embers that still glowed under the ashes in the hearth, but no light came from between the shutters of the study window, now shut against the cold. I saw the Abbess kneel under the plain wooden cross which hung on the study wall and heard her say a few words in Latin; I thought she was praying. But then she said in a low voice:

“ ‘Do not call upon Apollo and the Muses, for they are deaf things and vain.’ But so are you, Pierced Man, deaf and vain.”

Then she got up and began to pace again. Thinking of it now frightens me, for it was the middle of the night and no one to hear her—except me, but she thought I was asleep—and yet she went on and on in that low, even voice as if it were broad day and she were explaining something to someone, as if things that had been in her thoughts for years must finally come out. But I did not find anything alarming in it then, for I thought that perhaps all Abbesses had to do such things, and besides she did not seem angry or hurried or afraid; she sounded as calm as if she were discussing the profits from the Abbeys beekeeping—which I had heard her do—or the accounts for the wine cellars—which I had also heard—and there was nothing alarming in that. So I listened as she continued walking about the room in the dark. She said:

“Talk, talk, talk, and always to myself. But one can’t abandon the kittens and puppies; that would be cruel. And being the Abbess Radegunde at least gives one something to do. But I am so sick of the good Abbess Randegunde; I have put on Radegunde every morning of my life as easily as I put on my smock, and then I have had to hear the stupid creature praised all day!—sainted Radegunde, just Radegunde who is never angry or greedy or jealous, kindly Radegunde who sacrifices herself for others, and always the talk, talk, talk, bubbling and boiling in my head with no one to hear or understand, and no one to answer. No, not even in the south, only a line here or a line there, and all written by the dead. Did they feel as I do? That the world is a giant nursery full of squabbles over toys and the babes thinking me some kind of goddess because I’m not greedy for their dolls or bits of straw or their horses made of tied-together sticks?

“Poor people, if only they knew! It’s so easy to be temperate when one enjoys nothing, so easy to be kind when one loves nothing, so easy to be fearless when one’s life is no better than ones death. And so easy to scheme when the success doesn’t matter.

“Would they be surprised, I wonder, to find out what my real thoughts were when Thorfinn’s knife was at my throat? Curiosity! But he would not do it, of course; he does everything for show. And they would think I was twice holy, not to care about death.

“Then why not kill yourself, impious Sister Radegunde? Is it your religion which stops you? Oh, you mean the holy wells and the holy trees, and the blessed saints with their blessed relics, and the stupidity that shamed Sister Hedwic, and the promises of safety that drove poor Sibihd mad when the blessed body of her Lord did not protect her and the blessed love of the blessed Mary turned away the sharp point of not one knife? Trash! Idle leaves and sticks, reeds and rushes, filth we sweep off our floors when it grows too thick. As if holiness had anything to do with all of that. As if every place were not as holy as every other and every thing as holy as every other, from the shit in Thorfinn’s bowels to the rocks on the ground. As if all places and things were not clouds placed in front of our weak eyes, to keep us from being blinded by that glory, that eternal shining, that blazing all about us, the torrent of light that is everything and is in everything! That is what keeps me from the river, but it never speaks to me or tells me what to do, and to it good and evil are the same—no, it is something else than good or evil; it is, only—so it is not God. That I know.

“So, people, is your Radegunde a witch or a demon? Is she full of pride or is Radegunde abject? Perhaps she is a witch. Once, long ago, I confessed to old Gerbertus that I could see things that were far away merely by closing my eyes, and I proved it to him, too, and he wept over me and gave me much penance, crying, “If it come of itself it may be a gift of God, daughter, but it is more likely the work of a demon, so do not do it!” And then we prayed and I told him the power had left me, to make the poor old puppy less troubled in its mind, but that was not true, of course. I could still see Turkey as easily as I could see him, and places for beyond: the squat, wild men of the plains on their ponies, and the strange, tall people beyond that with their great cities and odd eyes, as if one pulled one’s eyelid up on a slant, and then the seas with the great, wild lands and the cities more full of gold than Constantinople, and water again until one comes back home, for the world’s a ball, as the ancients said.

“But I did stop somehow, over the years. Radegunde never had time, I suppose. Besides, when I opened that door it was only pictures, as in a book, and all to no purpose, and after a while I had seen them all and no longer cared for them. It is the other door that draws me, when it opens itself but a crack and strange things peep through, like Ranulf sisters son and the name of his horse. That door is good but very heavy; it always swings back after a little. I shall have to be on my deathbed to open it all the way, I think.

“The fox is asleep. He is the cleverest yet; there is something in him so that at times one can almost talk to him. But still a fox, for the most part. Perhaps in time. . . .

“But let me see; yes, he is asleep. And the Sibihd puppy is asleep, though it will be having a bad dream soon, I think, and the Thorfinn kitten is asleep, as full of fright as when it wakes, with its claws going in and out, in and out, lest something strangle it in its sleep.”

Then the Abbess fell silent and moved to the shuttered window as if she were looking out, so I thought that she was indeed looking out—but not with her eyes—at all the sleeping folk, and this was something she had done every night of her life to see if they were safe and sound. But would she not know that I was awake? Should I not try very hard to get to sleep before she caught me? Then it seemed to me that she smiled in the dark, although I could not see it. She said in that same low, even voice: “Sleep or wake, Boy News; it is all one to me. Thou hast heard nothing of any importance, only the silly Abbess talking to herself, only Radegunde saying good-bye to Radegunde, only Radegunde going away—don’t cry, Boy News; I am still here—but there: Radegunde has gone. This Norseman and I are alike in one way: our minds are like great houses with many of the rooms locked shut. We crowd in a miserable, huddled few, like poor folk, when we might move freely among them all, as gracious as princes. It is fate that locked away so much of the Norseman—see, Boy News, I do not say his name, not even softly, for that wakes folks—but I wonder if the one who bolted me in was not Radegunde herself, she and old Gerbertus—whom I partly believed—they and the years and years of having to be Radegunde and do the things Radegunde did and pretend to have the thoughts Radegunde had and the endless, endless lies Radegunde must tell everyone, and Radegunde’s utter and unbearable loneliness.”

She fell silent again. I wondered at the Abbess’s talk this time: saying she was not there when she was, and about living locked up in small rooms—for surely the Abbey was the most splendid house in all the world, and the biggest—and how could she be lonely when all the folk loved her? But then she said in a voice so low that I could hardly hear it:

“Poor Radegunde! So weary of the lies she tells and the fooling of men and women with the collars round their necks and bribes of food for good behavior and a careful twitch of the leash that they do not even see or feel. And with the Norseman it will be all the same: lies and flattery and all of it work that never ends and no one ever even sees, so that finally Radegunde will lie down like an ape in a cage, weak and sick from hunger, and will never get up.

“Let her die now. There: Radegunde is dead. Radegunde is gone. Perhaps the door was heavy only because she was on the other side of it, pushing against me. Perhaps it will open all the way now. I have looked in all directions: to the east, to the north and south, and to the west, but there is one place I have never looked and now I will: away from the ball, straight out. Let us see—”

She stopped speaking all of a sudden. I had been falling asleep but this silence woke me. Then I heard the Abbess gasp terribly, like one mortally stricken, and then she said in a whisper so keen and thrilling that it made the hair stand up on my head: Where art thou? The next moment she had torn the shutters open and was crying out with all her voice: Help me! Find me! Oh, come, come, come, or I die!

This waked Thorvald. With some Norse oath he stumbled up and flung on his sword belt and then put his hand to his dagger; I had noticed this thing with the dagger was a thing Norsemen liked to do. The Abbess was silent. He let out his breath in an oof! and went to light the tallow dip at the live embers under the hearth ashes; when the dip had smoked up, he put it on its shelf on the wall.

He said in German, “What the devil, woman! What has happened?”

She turned round. She looked as if she could not see us, as if she had been dazed by a joy too big to hold, like one who has looked into the sun and is still dazzled by it so that everything seems changed, and the world seems all God’s and everything in it like Heaven. She said softly, with her arms around herself, hugging herself: “My people. The real people.”

“What are you talking of!” said he.

She seemed to see him then, but only as Sibihd had beheld us; I do not mean in horror as Sibihd had, but beholding through something else, like someone who comes from a vision of bliss which still lingers about her. She said in the same soft voice, “They are coming for me, Thorvald. Is it not wonderful? I knew all this year that something would happen, but I did not know it would be the one thing I wanted in all the world.”

He grasped his hair. “Who is coming?”

“My people,” she said, laughing softly. “Do you not feel them? I do. We must wait three days for they come from very far away. But then—oh, you will see!”

He said, “You’ve been dreaming. We sail tomorrow.”

“Oh, no,” said the Abbess simply. “You cannot do that for it would not be right. They told me to wait; they said if I went away, they might not find me.”

He said slowly, “You’ve gone mad. Or it’s a trick.”

“Oh, no, Thorvald,” said she. “How could I trick you? I am your friend. And you will wait these three days, will you not, because you are my friend also.”

“You’re mad,” he said, and started for the door of the study, but she stepped in front of him and threw herself on her knees. All her cunning seemed to have deserted her, or perhaps it was Radegunde who had been the cunning one. This one was like a child. She clasped her hands and tears came out of her eyes; she begged him, saying:

“Such a little thing, Thorvald, only three days! And if they do not come, why then we will go anywhere you like, but if they do come you will not regret it, I promise you; they are not like the folk here and that place is like nothing here. It is what the soul craves, Thorvald!”

He said, “Get up, woman, for God’s sake!”

She said, smiling in a sly, frightened way through her blubbered face, “If you let me stay, I will show you the old Abbess’s buried treasure, Thorvald.”

He stepped back, the anger clear in him. “So this is the brave old witch who cares nothing for death!” he said. Then he made for the door, but she was up again, as quick as a snake, and had flung herself across it.

She said, still with that strange innocence, “Do not strike me. Do not push me. I am your friend!”

He said, “You mean that you lead me by a string around the neck, like a goose. Well, I am tired of that!”

“But I cannot do that any more,” said the Abbess breathlessly, “not since the door opened. I am not able now.” He raised his arm to strike her and she cowered, wailing, “Do not strike me! Do not push me! Do not, Thorvald!”

He said, “Out of my way then, old witch!”

She began to cry in sobs and gulps. She said, “One is here but another will come! One is buried but another will rise! She will come, Thorvald!” and then in a low, quick voice, “Do not push open this last door. There is one behind it who is evil and I am afraid—” but one could see that he was angry and disappointed and would not listen. He struck her for the second time and again she fell, but with a desperate cry, covering her face with her hands. He unbolted the door and stepped over her and I heard his footsteps go down the corridor. I could see the Abbess clearly—at that time I did not wonder how this could be, with the shadows from the tallow dip half hiding everything in their drunken dance—but I saw every line in her face as if it had been full day, and in that light I saw Radegunde go away from us at last.

Have you ever been at some great king’s court or some earl’s and heard the storytellers? There are those so skilled in the art that they not only speak for you what the person in the tale said and did, but they also make an action with their faces and bodies as if they truly were that man or woman, so that it is a great surprise to you when the tale ceases, for you almost believe that you have seen the tale happen in front of your very eyes, and it is as if a real man or woman had suddenly ceased to exist, for you forget that all this was only a teller and a tale.

So it was with the woman who had been Radegunde. She did not change; it was still Radegunde’s gray hairs and wrinkled face and old body in the peasant woman’s brown dress, and yet at the same time it was a stranger who stepped out of the Abbess Radegunde as out of a gown dropped to the floor. This stranger was without feeling, though Radegunde’s tears still stood on her cheeks, and there was no kindness of joy in her. She got up without taking care of her dress where the dirty rushes stuck to it; it was as if the dress were an accident and did not concern her. She said in a voice I had never heard before, one with no feeling in it, as if I did not concern her, or Thorvald Einarsson either, as if neither of us were worth a second glance:

“Thorvald, turn around.”

Far up in the hall something stirred.

“Now come back. This way.”

There were footsteps, coming closer. Then the big Norseman walked clumsily into the room—jerk! jerk! jerk! at every step as if he were being pulled by a rope. Sweat beaded his face. He said, “You—how?”

“By my nature,” she said. “Put up your right arm, fox. Now the left. Now both down. Good.”

“You—troll!” he said.

“That is so,” she said. “Now listen to me, you. There’s a man inside you but he’s not worth getting at; I tried moments ago when I was new-hatched and he’s buried too deep, but now I have grown beak and claws and care nothing for him. It’s almost dawn and your boys are stirring; you will go out and tell them that we must stay here another three days. You are weather-wise; make up some story they will believe. And don’t try to tell anyone what happened here tonight; you will find that you cannot.”

“Folk—come,” said he, trying to turn his head, but the effort only made him sweat.

She raised her eyebrows. “Why should they? No one has heard anything. Nothing has happened. You will go out and be as you always are and I will play Radegunde. For three days only. Then you are free.”

He did not move. One could see that to remain still was very hard for him; the sweat poured and he strained until every muscle stood out. She said:

“Fox, don’t hurt yourself. And don’t push me; I am not fond of you. My hand is light upon you only because you still seem to me a little less unhuman than the rest; do not force me to make it heavier. To be plain: I have just broken Thorfinn’s neck, for I find that the change improves him. Do not make me do the same to you.”

“No worse—than death,” Thorvald brought out.

Ah, no?” said she, and in a moment he was screaming and clawing at his eyes. She said, “Open them, open them; your sight is back,” and then, “I do not wish to bother myself thinking up worse things, like worms in your guts. Or do you wish dead sons and a dead wife? Now go.

“As you always do,” she added sharply, and the big man turned and walked out. One could not have told from looking at him that anything was wrong.

I had not been sorry to see such a bad man punished, one whose friends had killed our folk and would have taken for slaves—and yet I was sorry, too, in a way, because of the seals barking and the whales—and he was splendid, after a fashion—and yet truly I forgot all about that the moment he was gone, for I was terrified of this strange person or demon or whatever it was, for I knew that whoever was in the room with me was not the Abbess Radegunde. I knew also that it could tell where I was and what I was doing, even if I made no sound, and was in a terrible riddle as to what I ought to do when soft fingers touched my face. It was the demon, reaching swiftly and silently behind her.

And do you know, all of a sudden everything was all right! I don’t mean that she was the Abbess again—I still had very serious suspicions about that—but all at once I felt light as air and nothing seemed to matter very much because my stomach was full of bubbles of happiness, just as if I had been drunk, only nicer. If the Abbess Radegunde were really a demon, what a joke that was on her people! And she did not, now that I came to think of it, seem a bad sort of demon, more the frightening kind than the killing kind, except for Thorfinn, of course, but then Thorfinn had been a very wicked man. And did not the angels of the Lord smite down the wicked? So perhaps the Abbess was an angel of the Lord and not a demon, but if she were truly an angel, why had she not smitten the Norsemen down when they first came and so saved all our folk? And then I thought that whether angel or demon, she was no longer the Abbess and would love me no longer, and if I had not been so full of the silly happiness which kept tickling about inside me, this thought would have made me weep.

I said, “Will the bad Thorvald get free, demon?”

“No,” she said. “Not even if I sleep.”

I thought: But she does not love me.

“I love thee,” said the strange voice, but it was not the Abbess Radegunde’s and so was without meaning, but again those soft fingers touched me and there was some kindness in them, even if it was a strangers kindness.

Sleep, they said.

So I did.

The next three days I had much secret mirth to see the folk bow down to the demon and kiss its hands and weep over it because it had sold itself to ransom them. That is what Sister Hedwic told them. Young Thorfinn had gone out in the night to piss and had fallen over a stone in the dark and broken his neck, which secretly rejoiced our folk, but his comrades did not seem to mind much either, save for one young fellow who had been Thorfinn’s friend, I think, and so went about with a long face. Thorvald locked me up in the Abbess’s study with the demon every night and went out—or so folk said—to one of the young women, but on those nights the demon was silent, and I lay there with the secret tickle of merriment in my stomach, caring about nothing.

On the third morning I woke sober. The demon—or the Abbess—for in the day she was so like the Abbess Radegunde that I wondered—took my hand and walked us up to Thorvald, who was out picking the people to go aboard the Norseman’s boats at the riverbank to be slaves. Folk were standing about weeping and wringing their hands; I thought this strange because of the Abbess’s promise to pick those whose going would hurt least, but I know now that least is not none. The weather was bad, cold rain out of mist, and some of Thorvald’s companions were speaking sourly to him in the Norse, but he talked them down—bluff and hearty—as if making light of the weather. The demon stood by him and said, in German, in a low voice so that none might hear: “You will say we go to find the Abbess’s treasure and then you will go with us into the woods.”

He spoke to his fellows in Norse and they frowned, but the end of it was that two must come with us, for the demon said it was such a treasure as three might carry. The demon had the voice and manner of the Abbess Radegunde, all smiles, so they were fooled. Thus we started out into the trees behind the village, with the rain worse and the ground beginning to soften underfoot. As soon as the village was out of sight, the two Norsemen fell behind, but Thorvald did not seem to notice this; I looked back and saw the first man standing in the mud with one foot up, like a goose, and the second with his head lifted and his mouth open so that the rain fell in it. We walked on, the earth sucking at our shoes and all of us getting wet: Thorvald’s hair stuck fast against his face, and the demons old brown cloak clinging to its body. Then suddenly the demon began to breathe harshly and it put its hand to its side with a cry. Its cloak fell off and it stumbled before us between the wet trees, not weeping but breathing hard. Then I saw, ahead of us through the pelting rain, a kind of shining among the bare tree trunks, and as we came nearer the shining became more clear until it was very plain to see, not a blazing thing like a fire at night but a mild and even brightness as though the sunlight were coming through the clouds pleasantly but without strength, as it often does at the beginning of the year.

And then there were folk inside the brightness, both men and women, all dressed in white, and they held out their arms to us, and the demon ran to them, crying out loudly and weeping but paying no mind to the tree branches which struck it across the face and body. Sometimes it fell but it quickly got up again. When it reached the strange folk they embraced it, and I thought that the filth and mud of its gown would stain their white clothing, but the foulness dropped off and would not cling to those clean garments. None of the strange folk spoke a word, nor did the Abbess—I knew then that she was no demon, whatever she was—but I felt them talk to one another, as if in my mind, although I know not how this could be nor the sense of what they said. An odd thing was that as I came closer I could see they were not standing on the ground, as in the way of nature, but higher up, inside the shining, and that their white robes were nothing at all like ours, for they clung to the body so that one might see the people’s legs all the way up to the place where the legs joined, even the women’s. And some of the folk were like us, but most had a darker color, and some looked as if they had been smeared with soot—there are such persons in the far parts of the world, you know, as I found out later; it is their own natural color—and there were some with the odd eyes the Abbess had spoken of—but the oddest thing of all I will not tell you now. When the Abbess had embraced and kissed them all and all had wept, she turned and looked down upon us: Thorvald standing there as if held by a rope and I, who had lost my fear and had crept close in pure awe, for there was such a joy about these people, like the light about them, mild as spring light and yet as strong as in a spring where the winter has gone forever.

“Come to me, Thorvald,” said the Abbess, and one could not see from her face if she loved or hated him. He moved closer—jerk! jerk!—and she reached down and touched his forehead with her fingertips, at which one side of his lip lifted, as a dogs does when it snarls.

“As thou knowest,” said the Abbess quietly, “I hate thee and would be revenged upon thee. Thus I swore to myself three days ago, and such vows are not lightly broken.”

I saw him snarl again and he turned his eyes from her.

“I must go soon,” said the Abbess, unmoved, “for I could stay here long years only as Kadegunde, and Radegunde is no more; none of us can remain here long as our proper selves or even in our true bodies, for if we do we go mad like Sibihd or walk into the river and drown or stop our own hearts, so miserable, wicked, and brutish does your world seem to us. Nor may we come in large companies, for we are few and our strength is not great and we have much to learn and study of thy folk so that we may teach and help without marring all in our ignorance. And ignorant or wise, we can do naught except thy folk aid us.

“Here is my revenge,” said the Abbess, and he seemed to writhe under the touch of her fingers, for all they were so light. “Henceforth be not Thorvald Farmer nor yet Thorvald Seafarer but Thorvald Peacemaker, Thorvald War-hater, put into anguish by bloodshed and agonized at cruelty. I cannot make long thy life—that gift is beyond me—but I give thee this: to the end of thy days, long or short, thou wilt know the Presence about thee always, as I do, and thou wilt know that it is neither good nor evil, as I do, and this knowing will trouble and frighten thee always, as it does me, and so about this one thing, as about many another, Thorvald Peacemaker will never have peace.

“Now, Thorvald, go back to the village and tell thy comrades I was assumed into the company of the saints, straight up to Heaven. Thou mayst believe it, if thou will. That is all my revenge.”

Then she took away her hand, and he turned and walked from us like a man in a dream, holding out his hands as if to feel the rain and stumbling now and again, as one who wakes from a vision.

Then I began to grieve, for I knew she would be going away with the strange people, and it was to me as if all the love and care and light in the world were leaving me. I crept close to her, meaning to spring secretly onto the shining place and so go away with them, but she spied me and said, “Silly Radulphus, you cannot,” and that you hurt me more than anything else so that I began to bawl.

“Child,” said the Abbess, “come to me,” and loudly weeping I leaned against her knees. I felt the shining around me, all bright and good and warm, that wiped away all grief, and then the Abbess’s touch on my hair.

She said, “Remember me. And be . . . content.”

I nodded, wishing I dared to look up at her face, but when I did, she had already gone with her friends. Not up into the sky, you understand, but as if they moved very swiftly backwards among the trees—although the trees were still behind them somehow—and as they moved, the shining and the people faded away into the rain until there was nothing left.

Then there was no rain. I do not mean that the clouds parted or the sun came out; I mean that one moment it was raining and cold and the next the sky was clear blue from side to side, and it was splendid, sunny, breezy, bright, sailing weather. I had the oddest thought that the strange folk were not agreed about doing such a big miracle—and it was hard for them, too—but they had decided that no one would believe this more than all the other miracles folk speak of, I suppose. And it would surely make Thorvald’s lot easier when he came back with wild words about saints and Heaven, as indeed it did, later.

Well, that is the tale, really. She said to me “Re content” and so I am; they call me Radulf the Happy now. I have had my share of trouble and sickness, but always somewhere in me there is a little spot of warmth and joy to make it all easier, like a traveler’s fire burning out in the wilderness on a cold night. When I am in real sorrow or distress, I remember her fingers touching my hair and that takes part of the pain away, somehow. So perhaps I got the best gift, after all. And she said also, “Remember me,” and thus I have, every little thing, although it all happened when I was the age my own grandson is now, and that is how I can tell you this tale today.

And the rest? Three days after the Norseman left, Sibihd got back her wits and no one knew how, though I think I do! And as for Thorvald Einarsson, I have heard that after his wife died in Norway he went to England and ended his days there as a monk but whether this story be true or not I do not know. I know this: they may call me Happy Radulf all they like, but there is much that troubles me. Was the Abbess Radegunde a demon, as the new priest says? I cannot believe this, although he called her sayings nonsense and the other half blasphemy when I asked him. Father Cairbre, before the Norse killed him, told us stories about the Sidhe, that is, the Irish fairy people, who leave changelings in human cradles; and for a while it seemed to me that Radegunde must be a woman of the Sidhe when I remembered that she could read Latin at the age of two and was such a marvel of learning when so young, for the changelings the fairies leave are not their own children, you understand, but one of the fairy folk themselves, who are hundreds upon hundreds of years old, and the other fairy folk always come back for their own in the end. And yet this could not have been, for Father Cairbre said also that the Sidhe are wanton and cruel and without souls, and neither the Abbess Radegunde nor the people who came for her were one blessed bit like that, although she did break Thorfinn’s neck—but then it may be that Thorfinn broke his own neck by chance, just as we all thought at the time, and she told this to Thorvald afterwards, as if she had done it herself, only to frighten him. She had more of a soul with a soul’s griefs and joys than most of us, no matter what the new priest says. He never saw her or felt her sorrow and lonesomeness, or heard her talk of the blazing light all around us—and what can that be but God Himself? Even though she did call the crucifix a deaf thing and vain, she must have meant not Christ, you see, but only the piece of wood itself, for she was always telling the Sisters that Christ was in Heaven and not on the wall. And if she said the light was not good or evil, well, there is a traveling Irish scholar who told me of a holy Christian monk named Augustinus who tells us that all which is, is good, and evil is only a lack of the good, like an empty place not filled up. And if the Abbess truly said there was no God, I say it was the sin of despair, and even saints may sin, if only they repent, which I believe she did at the end.

So I tell myself, and yet I know the Abbess Radegunde was no saint, for are the saints few and weak, as she said? Surely not! And then there is a thing I held back in my telling, a small thing, and it will make you laugh and perhaps means nothing one way or the other, but it is this:

Are the saints bald?

These folk in white had young faces but they were like eggs; there was not a stitch of hair on their domes! Well, God may shave His saints if He pleases, I suppose.

But I know she was no saint. And then I believe that she did kill Thorfinn and the light was not God and she not even a Christian or maybe even human, and I remember how Radegunde was to her only a gown to step out of at will, and how she truly hated and scorned Thorvald until she was happy and safe with her own people. Or perhaps it was like her talk about living in a house with the rooms shut up; when she stopped being Radegunde, first one part of her came back and then the other—the joyful part that could not lie or plan and then the angry part—and then they were all together when she was back among her own folk. And then I give up trying to weigh this matter and go back to warm my soul at the little fire she lit in me, that one warm, bright place in the wide and windy dark.

But something troubles me even there and will not be put to rest by the memory of the Abbess’s touch on my hair. As I grow older it troubles me more and more. It was the very last thing she said to me, which I have not told you but will now. When she had given me the gift of contentment, I became so happy that I said, “Abbess, you said you would be revenged on Thorvald, but all you did was change him into a good man. That is no revenge!”

What this saying did to her astonished me, for all the color went out of her face and left it gray. She looked suddenly old, like a death’s-head, even standing there among her own true folk with love and joy coming from them so strongly that I myself might feel it. She said, “I did not change him. I lent him my eyes, that is all.” Then she looked beyond me, as if at our village, at the Norsemen loading their boats with weeping slaves, at all the villages of Germany and England and France where the poor folk sweat from dawn to dark so that the great lords may do battle with one another, at castles under siege with the starving folk within eating mice and rats and sometimes each other, at the women carried off or raped or beaten, at the mothers wailing for their little ones, and beyond this at the great wide world itself with all its battles which I had used to think so grand, and the misery and greediness and fear and jealousy and hatred of folk one for the other, save—perhaps—for a few small bands of savages, but they were so far from us that one could scarcely see them. She said: No revenge? Thinkest thou so, boy? And then she said as one who believes absolutely, as one who has seen all the folk at their living and dying, not for one year but for many, not in one place but in all places, as one who knows it all over the whole wide earth:

Think again. . . .

FIRE WATCH

Connie Willis

Mrs. Willis has been trying to convince people for years that she is just an ordinary suburban housewife. She has the bulldog, the twelve-year-old daughter, and the physics-teacher husband to prove it; she lives in a little mountain town, sings in the choir, and tries to keep a low profile. Unfortunately, whenever she opens her mouth, she blows her cover; and all the soap-opera-watching and cookie-baking can’t repair the damage. On the other hand, none of the writers she knows will believe that she bakes cookies or watches soap operas, so there’s a credibility gap on all sides.

“History hath triumphed over time, which besides it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over.”

—Sir Walter Raleigh

September 20—Of course the first thing I looked for was the firewatch stone. And of course it wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t dedicated until 1951, accompanying speech by the Very Reverend Dean Walter Matthews, and this is only 1940. I knew that. I went to see the firewatch stone only yesterday, with some kind of misplaced notion that seeing the scene of the crime would somehow help. It didn’t.

The only things that would have helped were a crash course in London during the Blitz and a little more time. I had not gotten either.

“Travelling in time is not like taking the tube, Mr. Bartholomew,” the esteemed Dunworthy had said, blinking at me through those antique spectacles of his. “Either you report on the twentieth or you don’t go at all.”

“But I’m not ready,” I’d said. “Look, it took me four years to get ready to travel with St. Paul. St. Paul. Not St. Paul’s. You can’t expect me to get ready for London in the Blitz in two days.”

“Yes,” Dunworthy had said. “We can.” End of conversation.

“Two days!” I had shouted at my roommate Kivrin. “All because some computer adds an apostrophe s. And the esteemed Dunworthy doesn’t even bat an eye when I tell him. Time travel is not like taking the tube, young man,’ he says. ‘I’d suggest you get ready. You’re leaving day after tomorrow.’ The man’s a total incompetent.”

“No,” she said. “He isn’t. He’s the best there is. He wrote the book on St. Paul’s. Maybe you should listen to what he says.”

I had expected Kivrin to be at least a little sympathetic. She had been practically hysterical when she got her practicum changed from fifteenth to fourteenth century England, and how did either century qualify as a practicum? Even counting infectious diseases they couldn’t have been more than a five. The Blitz is an eight, and St. Paul’s itself is, with my luck, a ten.

“You think I should go see Dunworthy again?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And then what? I’ve got two days. I don’t know the money, the language, the history. Nothing.”

“He’s a good man,” Kivrin said. “I think you’d better listen to him while you can.” Good old Kivrin. Always the sympathetic ear.

The good man was responsible for my standing just inside the propped-open west doors, gawking like the country boy I was supposed to be, looking for a stone that wasn’t there. Thanks to the good man, I was about as unprepared for my practicum as it was possible for him to make me.

I couldn’t see more than a few feet into the church. I could see a candle gleaming feebly a long way off and a closer blur of white moving toward me. A verger, or possibly the Very Reverend Dean himself. I pulled out the letter from my clergyman uncle in Wales that was supposed to gain me access to the Dean, and patted my back pocket to make sure I hadn’t lost the microfiche Oxford English Dictionary, Revised, with Historical Supplements, I’d smuggled out of the Bodleian. I couldn’t pull it out in the middle of the conversation, but with luck I could muddle through the first encounter by context and look up the words I didn’t know later.

“Are you from the ayarpee?” he said. He was no older than I am, a head shorter and much thinner. Almost ascetic looking. He reminded me of Kivrin. He was not wearing white, but clutching it to his chest. In other circumstances I would have thought it was a pillow. In other circumstances I would know what was being said to me, but there had been no time to unlearn sub-Mediterranean Latin and Jewish law and learn Cockney and air-raid procedures. Two days, and the esteemed Dunworthy, who wanted to talk about the sacred burdens of the historian instead of telling me what the ayarpee was.

“Are you?” he demanded again.

I considered shipping out the OED after all on the grounds that Wales was a foreign country, but I didn’t think they had microfilm in 1940. Ayarpee. It could be anything, including a nickname for the fire watch, in which case the impulse to say no was not safe at all. “No,” I said.

He lunged suddenly toward and past me and peered out the open doors. “Damn,” he said, coming back to me. “Where are they then? Bunch of lazy bourgeois tarts!” And so much for getting by on context.

He looked at me closely, suspiciously, as if he thought I was only pretending not to be with the ayarpee. “The church is closed,” he said finally.

I held up the envelope and said, “My name’s Bartholomew. Is Dean Matthews in?”

He looked out the door a moment longer, as if he expected the lazy bourgeois tarts at any moment and intended to attack them with the white bundle, then he turned and said, as if he were guiding a tour, “This way, please,” and took off into the gloom.

He led me to the right and down the south aisle of the nave. Thank God I had memorized the floor plan or at that moment, heading into total darkness, led by a raving verger, the whole bizarre metaphor of my situation would have been enough to send me out the west doors and back to St. John’s Wood. It helped a little to know where I was. We should have been passing number twenty-six: Hunt’s painting of “The Light of the World”—Jesus with his lantern—but it was too dark to see it. We could have used the lantern ourselves.

He stopped abruptly ahead of me, still raving. “We weren’t asking for the bloody Savoy, just a few cots. Nelson’s better off than we are—at least he’s got a pillow provided.” He brandished the white bundle like a torch in the darkness. It was a pillow after all. “We asked for them over a fortnight ago, and here we still are, sleeping on the bleeding generals from Trafalgar because those bitches want to play tea and crumpets with the tommies at Victoria and the Hell with us!”

He didn’t seem to expect me to answer his outburst, which was good, because I had understood perhaps one key word in three. He stomped on ahead, moving out of sight of the one pathetic altar candle and stopping again at a black hole. Number twenty-five: stairs to the Whispering Gallery, the Dome, the library (not open to the public). Up the stairs, down a hall, stop again at a medieval door and knock. “I’ve got to go wait for them,” he said. “If I’m not there they’ll likely take them over to the Abbey. Tell the Dean to ring them up again, will you?” and he took off down the stone steps, still holding his pillow like a shield against him.

He had knocked, but the door was at least a foot of solid oak, and it was obvious the Very Reverend Dean had not heard. I was going to have to knock again. Yes, well, and the man holding the pinpoint had to let go of it, too, but even knowing it will all be over in a moment and you won’t feel a thing doesn’t make it any easier to say, “Now!” So I stood in front of the door, cursing the history department and the esteemed Dunworthy and the computer that had made the mistake and brought me here to this dark door with only a letter from a fictitious uncle that I trusted no more than I trusted the rest of them.

Even the old reliable Bodleian had let me down. The batch of research stuff I cross-ordered through Balliol and the main terminal is probably sitting in my room right now, a century out of reach. And Kivrin, who had already done her practicum and should have been bursting with advice, walked around as silent as a saint until I begged her to help me.

“Did you go to see Dunworthy?” she said.

“Yes. You want to know what priceless bit of information he had for me? ‘Silence and humility are the sacred burdens of the historian.’ He also told me I would love St. Paul’s. Golden gems from the master. Unfortunately, what I need to know are the times and places of the bombs so one doesn’t fall on me.” I flopped down on the bed. “Any suggestions?”

“How good are you at memory retrieval?” she said.

I sat up. “I’m pretty good. You think I should assimilate?”

“There isn’t time for that,” she said. “I think you should put everything you can directly into long-term.”

“You mean endorphins?” I said.

The biggest problem with using memory-assistance drugs to put information into your long-term memory is that it never sits, even for a micro-second, in your short-term memory, and that makes retrieval complicated, not to mention unnerving. It gives you the most unsettling sense of deja vu to suddenly know something you’re positive you’ve never seen or heard before.

The main problem, though, is not eerie sensations but retrieval. Nobody knows exactly how the brain gets what it wants out of storage, but short-term is definitely involved. That brief, sometimes microscopic, time information spends in short-term is apparently used for something besides tip-of-the-tongue availability. The whole complex sort-and-file process of retrieval is apparently centered in short-term; and without it, and without the help of the drugs that put it there or artificial substitutes, information can be impossible to retrieve. I’d used endorphins for examinations and never had any difficulty with retrieval, and it looked like it was the only way to store all the information I needed in anything approaching the time I had left, but it also meant that I would never have known any of the things I needed to know, even for long enough to have forgotten them. If and when I could retrieve the information, I would know it. Till then I was as ignorant of it as if it were not stored in some cobwebbed corner of my mind at all.

“You can retrieve without artificials, can’t you?” Kivrin said, looking skeptical.

“I guess I’ll have to.”

“Under stress? Without sleep? Low body endorphin levels?” What exactly had her practicum been? She had never said a word about it, and undergraduates are not supposed to ask. Stress factors in the Middle Ages? I thought everybody slept through them.

“I hope so,” I said. “Anyway, I’m willing to try this idea if you think it will help.”

She looked at me with that martyred expression and said, “Nothing will help.” Thank you, St. Kivrin of Balliol.

But I tried it anyway. It was better than sitting in Dunworthy’s rooms having him blink at me through his historically accurate eyeglasses and tell me I was going to love St. Paul’s. When my Bodleian requests didn’t come, I overloaded my credit and bought out Blackwell’s. Tapes on World War II, Celtic literature, history of mass transit, tourist guidebooks, everything I could think of. Then I rented a high-speed recorder and shot up. When I came out of it, I was so panicked by the feeling of not knowing any more than I had when I started that I took the tube to London and raced up Ludgate Hill to see if the firewatch stone would trigger any memories. It didn’t.

“Your endorphin levels aren’t back to normal yet,” I told myself and tried to relax, but that was impossible with the prospect of the practicum looming up before me. And those are real bullets, kid. Just because you’re a history major doing his practicum doesn’t mean you can’t get killed. I read history books all the way home on the tube and right up until Dunworthy’s flunkies came to take me to St. John’s Wood this morning.

Then I jammed the microfiche OED in my back pocket and went off feeling as if I would have to survive by my native wit and hoping I could get hold of artificials in 1940. Surely I could get through the first day without mishap, I thought; and now here I was, stopped cold by almost the first word that was spoken to me.

Well, not quite. In spite of Kivrin’s advice that I not put anything in short-term, I’d memorized the British money, a map of the tube system, a map of my own Oxford. It had gotten me this far. Surely I would be able to deal with the Dean.

Just as I had almost gotten up the courage to knock, he opened the door, and as with the pinpoint, it really was over quickly and without pain. I handed him my letter, and he shook my hand and said something understandable like, “Glad to have another man, Bartholomew.” He looked strained and tired and as if he might collapse if I told him the Blitz had just started. I know, I know: Keep your mouth shut. The sacred silence, etc.

He said, “We’ll get Langby to show you round, shall we?” I assumed that was my Verger of the Pillow, and I was right. He met us at the foot of the stairs, puffing a little but jubilant.

“The cots came,” he said to Dean Matthews. “You’d have thought they were doing us a favor. All high heels and hoity-toity. ‘You made us miss our tea, luv,’ one of them said to me. ‘Yes, well, and a good thing, too,’ I said. ‘You look as if you could stand to lose a stone or two.’ ”

Even Dean Matthews looked as though he did not completely understand him. He said, “Did you set them up in the crypt?” and then introduced us. “Mr. Bartholomew’s just got in from Wales,” he said. “He’s come to join our volunteers.” Volunteers, not fire watch.

Langby showed me around, pointing out various dimnesses in the general gloom and then dragged me down to see the ten folding canvas cots set up among the tombs in the crypt, also in passing Lord Nelson’s black marble sarcophagus. He told me I didn’t have to stand a watch the first night and suggested I go to bed, since sleep is the most precious commodity in the raids. I could well believe it. He was clutching that silly pillow to his breast like his beloved.

“Do you hear the sirens down here?” I asked, wondering if he buried his head in it.

He looked round at the low stone ceilings. “Some do, some don’t. Brinton has to have his Horlich’s. Bence-Jones would sleep if the roof fell in on him. I have to have a pillow. The important thing is to get your eight in no matter what. If you don’t, you turn into one of the walking dead. And then you get killed.”

On that cheering note he went off to post the watches for tonight, leaving his pillow on one of the cots with orders for me to let nobody touch it. So here I sit, waiting for my first air-raid siren and trying to get all this down before I turn into one of the walking or nonwalking dead.

I’ve used the stolen OED to decipher a little Langby. Middling success. A tart is either a pastry or a prostitute (I assume the latter, although I was wrong about the pillow). Bourgeois is a catchall term for all the faults of the middle class. A Tommy’s a soldier. Ayarpee I could not find under any spelling and I had nearly given up when something in long-term about the use of acronyms and abbreviations in wartime popped forward (bless you, St. Kivrin) and I realized it must be an abbreviation. ARP. Air Raid Precautions. Of course. Where else would you get the bleeding cots from?

September 21—Now that I’m past the first shock of being here, I realize that the history department neglected to tell me what I’m supposed to do in the three-odd months of this practicum. They handed me this journal, the letter from my uncle, and a ten-pound note, and sent me packing into the past. The ten pounds (already depleted by train and tube fares) is supposed to last me until the end of December and get me back to St. John’s Wood for pickup when the second letter calling me back to Wales to sick uncle’s bedside comes. Till then I live here in the crypt with Nelson, who, Langby tells me, is pickled in alcohol inside his coffin. If we take a direct hit, will he burn like a torch or simply trickle out in a decaying stream onto the crypt floor, I wonder. Board is provided by a gas ring, over which are cooked wretched tea and indescribable kippers. To pay for all this luxury I am to stand on the roofs of St. Paul’s and put out incendiaries.

I must also accomplish the purpose of this practicum, whatever it may be. Right now the only purpose I care about is staying alive until the second letter from uncle arrives and I can go home.

I am doing makework until Langby has time to “show me the ropes.” I’ve cleaned the skillet they cook the foul little fishes in, stacked wooden folding chairs at the altar end of the crypt (flat instead of standing because they tend to collapse like bombs in the middle of the night), and tried to sleep.

I am apparently not one of the lucky ones who can sleep through the raids. I spent most of the night wondering what St. Paul’s risk rating is. Practica have to be at least a six. Last night I was convinced this was a ten, with the crypt as ground zero, and that I might as well have applied for Denver.

The most interesting thing that’s happened so far is that I’ve seen a cat. I am fascinated, but trying not to appear so since they seem commonplace here.

September 22—Still in the crypt. Langby comes dashing through periodically cursing various government agencies (all abbreviated) and promising to take me up on the roofs. In the meantime, I’ve run out of makework and taught myself to work a stirrup pump. Kivrin was overly concerned about my memory retrieval abilities. I have not had any trouble so far. Quite the opposite. I called up fire-fighting information and got the whole manual with pictures, including instructions on the use of the stirrup pump. If the kippers set Lord Nelson on fire, I shall be a hero.

Excitement last night. The sirens went early and some of the chars who clean offices in the City sheltered in the crypt with us. One of them woke me out of a sound sleep, going like an air raid siren. Seems she’d seen a mouse. We had to go whacking at tombs and under the cots with a rubber boot to persuade her it was gone. Obviously what the history department had in mind: murdering mice.

September 24—Langby took me on rounds. Into the choir, where I had to learn the stirrup pump all over again, assigned rubber boots and a tin helmet. Langby says Commander Allen is getting us asbestos firemen’s coats, but hasn’t yet, so it’s my own wool coat and muffler and very cold on the roofs even in September. It feels like November and looks it, too, bleak and cheerless with no sun. Up to the dome and onto the roofs which should be flat, but in fact are littered with towers, pinnacles, gutters, and statues, all designed expressly to catch and hold incendiaries out of reach. Shown how to smother an incendiary with sand before it burns through the roof and sets the church on fire. Shown the ropes (literally) lying in a heap at the base of the dome in case somebody has to go up one of the west towers or over the top of the dome. Back inside and down to the Whispering Gallery.

Langby kept up a running commentary through the whole tour, part practical instruction, part church history. Before we went up into the Gallery he dragged me over to the south door to tell me how Christopher Wren stood in the smoking rubble of Old St. Paul’s and asked a workman to bring him a stone from the graveyard to mark the cornerstone. On the stone was written in Latin, “I shall rise again,” and Wren was so impressed by the irony that he had the words inscribed above the door. Langby looked as smug as if he had not told me a story every first-year history student knows, but I suppose without the impact of the firewatch stone, the other is just a nice story.

Langby raced me up the steps and onto the narrow balcony circling the Whispering Gallery. He was already halfway round to the other side, shouting dimensions and acoustics at me. He stopped facing the wall opposite and said softly, “You can hear me whispering because of the shape of the dome. The sound waves are reinforced around the perimeter of the dome. It sounds like the very crack of doom up here during a raid. The dome is one hundred and seven feet across. It is eighty feet above the nave.”

I looked down. The railing went out from under me and the black-and-white marble floor came up with dizzying speed. I hung onto something in front of me and dropped to my knees, staggered and sick at heart. The sun had come out, and all of St. Paul’s seemed drenched in gold. Even the carved wood of the choir, the white stone pillars, the leaden pipes of the organ, all of it golden, golden.

Langby was beside me, trying to pull me free. “Bartholomew,” he shouted, “What’s wrong? For God’s sake, man.”

I knew I must tell him that if I let go, St. Paul’s and all the past would fall in on me, and that I must not let that happen because I was an historian. I said something, but it was not what I intended because Langby merely tightened his grip. He hauled me violently free of the railing and back onto the stairway, then let me collapse limply on the steps and stood back from me, not speaking.

“I don’t know what happened in there,” I said. “I’ve never been afraid of heights before.”

“You’re shaking,” he said sharply. “You’d better lie down.” He led me back to the crypt.

September 25—Memory retrieval: ARP manual. Symptoms of bombing victims. Stage one—shock; stupefaction; unawareness of injuries; words may not make sense except to victim. Stage two—shivering; nausea; injuries, losses felt; return to reality. Stage three—talkativeness that cannot be controlled; desire to explain shock behavior to rescuers.

Langby must surely recognize the symptoms, but how does he account for the fact there was no bomb? I can hardly explain my shock behavior to him, and it isn’t just the sacred silence of the historian that stops me.

He has not said anything, in fact assigned me my first watches for tomorrow night as if nothing had happened, and he seems no more preoccupied than anyone else. Everyone I’ve met so far is jittery (one thing I had in short-term was how calm everyone was during the raids) and the raids have not come near us since I got here. They’ve been mostly over the East End and the docks.

There was a reference tonight to a UXB, and I have been thinking about the Dean’s manner and the church being closed when I’m almost sure I remember reading it was open through the entire Blitz. As soon as I get a chance, I’ll try to retrieve the events of September. As to retrieving anything else, I don’t see how I can hope to remember the right information until I know what it is I am supposed to do here, if anything.

There are no guidelines for historians, and no restrictions either. I could tell everyone I’m from the future if I thought they would believe me. I could murder Hitler if I could get to Germany. Or could I? Time paradox talk abounds in the history department, and the graduate students back from their practical don’t say a word one way or the other. Is there a tough, immutable past? Or is there a new past every day and do we, the historians, make it? And what are the consequences of what we do, if there are consequences? And how do we dare do anything without knowing them? Must we interfere boldly, hoping we do not bring about all our downfalls? Or must we do nothing e all, not interfere, stand by and watch St. Paul’s bum to the ground if need be so that we don’t change the future?

All those are fine questions for a late-night study session. They do not matter here. I could no more let St. Paul’s burn down than I could kill Hitler. No, that is not true. I found that out yesterday in the Whispering Gallery. I could kill Hitler if I caught him setting fire to St. Paul’s.

September 26—I met a young woman today. Dean Matthews has opened the church, so the watch have been doing duties as chars and people have started coming in again. The young woman reminded me of Kivrin, though Kivrin is a good deal taller and would never frizz her hair like that. She looked as if she had been crying. Kivrin has looked like that since she got back from her practicum. The Middle Ages were too much for her. I wonder how she would have coped with this. By pouring out her fears to the local priest, no doubt, as I sincerely hoped her lookalike was not going to do.

“May I help you?” I said, not wanting in the least to help. “I’m a volunteer.”

She looked distressed. “You’re not paid?” she said, and wiped at her reddened nose with a handkerchief. “I read about St. Paul’s and the fire watch and all and I thought, perhaps there’s a position there for me. In the canteen, like, or something. A paying position.” There were tears in her red-rimmed eyes.

“I’m afraid we don’t have a canteen,” I said as kindly as I could, considering how impatient Kivrin always makes me, “and it’s not actually a real shelter. Some of the watch sleep in the crypt. I’m afraid we’re all volunteers, though.”

“That won’t do, then,” she said. She dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. “I love St. Paul’s, but I can’t take on volunteer work, not with my little brother Tom back from the country.” I was not reading this situation properly. For all the outward signs of distress, she sounded quite cheerful and no closer to tears than when she had come in. “I’ve got to get us a proper place to stay. With Tom back, we can’t go on sleeping in the tubes.”

A sudden feeling of dread, the kind of sharp pain you get sometimes from involuntary retrieval, went over me. “The tubes?” I said, trying to get at the memory.

“Marble Arch, usually,” she went on. “My brother Tom saves us a place early and I go—” She stopped, held the handkerchief close to her nose, and exploded into it. “I’m sorry,” she said, “this awful cold!”

Red nose, watering eyes, sneezing. Respiratory infection. It was a wonder I hadn’t told her not to cry. It’s only by luck that I haven’t made some unforgivable mistake so far, and this is not because I can’t get at the long-term memory. I don’t have half the information I need even stored: cats and colds and the way St. Paul’s looks in full sun. It’s only a matter of time before I am stopped cold by something I do not know. Nevertheless, I am going to try for retrieval tonight after I come off watch. At least I can find out whether and when something is going to fall on me.

I have seen the cat once or twice. He is coal-black with a white patch on his throat that looks as if it were painted on for the blackout.

September 27—I have just come down from the roofs. I am still shaking.

Early in the raid the bombing was mostly over the East End. The view was incredible. Searchlights everywhere, the sky pink from the fires and reflecting in the Thames, the exploding shells sparkling like fireworks. There was a constant, deafening thunder broken by the occasional droning of the planes high overhead, then the repeating stutter of the ack-ack guns.

About midnight the bombs began falling quite near with a horrible sound like a train running over me. It took every bit of will I had to keep from flinging myself flat on the roof, but Langby was watching. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of watching a repeat performance of my behavior in the dome. I kept my head up and my sandbucket firmly in hand and felt quite proud of myself.

The bombs stopped roaring past about three, and there was a lull of about half an hour, and then a clatter like hail on the roofs. Everybody except Langby dived for shovels and stirrup pumps. He was watching me. And I was watching the incendiary.

It had fallen only a few meters from me, behind the clock tower. It was much smaller than I had imagined, only about thirty centimeters long. It was sputtering violently, throwing greenish-white fire almost to where I was standing. In a minute it would simmer down into a molten mass and begin to burn through the roof. Flames and the frantic shouts of firemen, and then the white rubble stretching for miles, and nothing, nothing left, not even the firewatch stone.

It was the Whispering Gallery all over again. I felt that I had said something, and when I looked at Langby’s face he was smiling crookedly.

“St. Paul’s will bum down,” I said. “There won’t be anything left.”

“Yes,” Langby said. “That’s the idea, isn’t it? Bum St. Paul’s to the ground? Isn’t that the plan?”

“Whose plan?” I said stupidly.

“Hitler’s, of course,” Langby said. “Who did you think I meant?” and, almost casually, picked up his stirrup pump.

The page of the ARP manual flashed suddenly before me. I poured the bucket of sand around the still sputtering bomb, snatched up another bucket and dumped that on top of it. Black smoke billowed up in such a cloud that I could hardly find my shovel. I felt for the smothered bomb with the tip of it and scooped it into the empty bucket, then shovelled the sand in on top of it. Tears were streaming down my face from the acrid smoke. I turned to wipe them on my sleeve and saw Langby.

He had not made a move to help me. He smiled. “It’s not a bad plan, actually. But of course we won’t let it happen. That’s what the fire watch is here for. To see that it doesn’t happen. Right, Bartholomew?”

I know now what the purpose of my practicum is. I must stop Langby from burning down St. Paul’s.

September 28—I try to tell myself I was mistaken about Langby last night, that I misunderstood what he said. Why would he want to burn down St. Paul’s unless he is a Nazi spy? How can a Nazi spy have gotten on the fire watch? I think about my faked letter of introduction and shudder.

How can I find out? If I set him some test, some fatal thing that only a loyal Englishman in 1940 would know, I fear I am the one who would be caught out. I must get my retrieval working properly.

Until then, I shall watch Langby. For the time being at least that should be easy. Langby has just posted the watches for the next two weeks. We stand every one together.

September 30—I know what happened in September. Langby told me.

Last night in the choir, putting on our coats and boots, he said, “They’ve already tried once, you know.”

I had no idea what he meant. I felt as helpless as that first day when he asked me if I was from the ayarpee.

“The plan to destroy St. Paul’s. They’ve already tried once. The tenth of September. A high explosive bomb. But of course you didn’t know about that. You were in Wales.”.

I was not even listening. The minute he had said, “high explosive bomb,” I had remembered it all. It had burrowed in under the road and lodged on the foundations. The bomb squad had tried to defuse it, but there was a leaking gas main. They decided to evacuate St. Paul’s, but Dean Matthews refused to leave, and they got it out after all and exploded it in Barking Marshes. Instant and complete retrieval.

“The bomb squad saved her that time,” Langby was saying. “It seems there’s always somebody about.”

“Yes,” I said. “There is,” and walked away from him.

October 1—I thought last night’s retrieval of the events of September tenth meant some sort of breakthrough, but I have been lying here on my cot most of the night trying for Nazi spies in St. Paul’s and getting nothing. Do I have to know exactly what I’m looking for before I can remember it? What good does that do me?

Maybe Langby is not a Nazi spy. Then what is he? An arsonist? A madman? The crypt is hardly conducive to thought, being not at all as silent as a tomb. The chars talk most of the night and the sound of the bombs is muffled, which somehow makes it worse. I find myself straining to hear them. When I did get to sleep this morning, I dreamed about one of the tube shelters being hit, broken mains, drowning people.

October 4—I tried to catch the cat today. I had some idea of persuading it to dispatch the mouse that has been terrifying the chars. I also wanted to see one up close. I took the water bucket I had used with the stirrup pump last night to put out some burning shrapnel from one of the anti-aircraft guns. It still had a bit of water in it, but not enough to drown the cat, and my plan was to clamp the bucket over him, reach under, and pick him up, then carry him down to the crypt and point him at the mouse. I did not even come close to him.

I swung the bucket, and as I did so, perhaps an inch of water splashed out. I thought I remembered that the cat was a domesticated animal, but I must have been wrong about that. The cat’s wide complacent face pulled back into a skull-like mask that was absolutely terrifying, vicious claws extended from what I had thought were harmless paws, and the cat let out a sound to top the chars.

In my surprise I dropped the bucket and it rolled against one of the pillars. The cat disappeared. Behind me, Langby said, “That’s no way to catch a cat.”

“Obviously,” I said, and bent to retrieve the bucket.

“Cats hate water,” he said, still in that expressionless voice.

“Oh,” I said, and started in front of him to take the bucket back to the choir. “I didn’t know that.”

“Everybody knows it. Even the stupid Welsh.”

October 8—We have been standing double watches for a week—bomber’s moon. Langby didn’t show up on the roofs, so I went looking for him in the church. I found him standing by the west doors talking to an old man. The man had a newspaper tucked under his arm and he handed it to Langby, but Langby gave it back to him. When the man saw me, he ducked out. Langby said, “Tourist. Wanted to know where the Windmill Theater is. Read in the paper the girls are starkers.”

I know I looked as if I didn’t believe him because he said, “You look rotten, old man. Not getting enough sleep, are you? I’ll get somebody to take the first watch for you tonight.”

“No,” I said coldly. “I’ll stand my own watch. I like being on the roofs,” and added silently, where I can watch you.

He shrugged and said, “I suppose it’s better than being down in the crypt. At least on the roofs you can hear the one that gets you.”

October 10—I thought the double watches might be good for me, take my mind off my inability to retrieve. The watched pot idea. Actually, it sometimes works. A few hours of thinking about something else, or a good night’s sleep, and the fact pops forward without any prompting, without any artificials.

The good night’s sleep is out of the question. Not only do the chars talk constantly, but the cat has moved into the crypt and sidles up to everyone, making siren noises and begging for kippers. I am moving my cot out of the transept and over by Nelson before I go on watch. He may be pickled, but he keeps his mouth shut.

October 11—I dreamed Trafalgar, ships’ guns and smoke and falling plaster and Langby shouting my name. My first waking thought was that the folding chairs had gone off. I could not see for all the smoke.

“I’m coming,” I said, limping toward Langby and pulling on my boots. There was a heap of plaster and tangled folding chairs in the transept. Langby was digging in it. “Bartholomew!” he shouted, flinging a chunk of plaster aside. “Bartholomew!”

I still had the idea it was smoke. I ran back for the stirrup pump and then knelt beside him and began pulling on a splintered chair back. It resisted, and it came to me suddenly, There is a body under here. I will reach for a piece of the ceiling and find it is a hand. I leaned back on my heels, determined not to be sick, then went at the pile again.

Langby was going far too fast, jabbing with a chair leg. I grabbed his hand to stop him, and he struggled against me as if I were a piece of rubble to be thrown aside. He picked up a large flat square of plaster, and under it was the floor. I turned and looked behind me. Both chars huddled in the recess by the altar. “Who are you looking for?” I said, keeping hold of Langby’s arm.

“Bartholomew,” he said, and swept the rubble aside, his hands bleeding through the coating of smoky dust.

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m all right.” I choked on the white dust. “I moved my cot out of the transept.”

He turned sharply to the chars and then said quite calmly, “What’s under here?”

“Only the gas ring,” one of them said timidly from the shadowed recess, “and Mrs. Galbraith’s pocketbook.” He dug through the mess until he had found them both. The gas ring was leaking at a merry rate, though the flame had gone out.

“You’ve saved St. Paul’s and me after all,” I said, standing there in my underwear and boots, holding the useless stirrup pump. “We might all have been asphyxiated.”

He stood up. “I shouldn’t have saved you,” he said.

Stage one: shock, stupefaction, unawareness of injuries, words may not make sense except to victim. He would not know his hand was bleeding yet. He would not remember what he had said. He had said he shouldn’t have saved my life.

“I shouldn’t have saved you,” he repeated. “I have my duty to think of.”

“You’re bleeding,” I said sharply. “You’d better lie down.” I sounded just like Langby in the Gallery.

October 13—It was a high explosive bomb. It blew a hole in the choir roof; and some of the marble statuary is broken; but the ceiling of the crypt did not collapse, which is what I thought at first. It only jarred some plaster loose.

I do not think Langby has any idea what he said. That should give me some sort of advantage, now that I am sure where the danger lies, now that I am sure it will not come crashing down from some other direction. But what good is all this knowing, when I do not know what he will do? Or when?

Surely I have the facts of yesterday’s bomb in long-term, but even falling plaster did not jar them loose this time. I am not even trying for retrieval now. I lie in the darkness waiting for the roof to fall in on me. And remembering how Langby saved my life.

October 15—The girl came in again today. She still has the cold, but she has gotten her paying position. It was a joy to see her. She was wearing a smart uniform and open-toed shoes, and her hair was in an elaborate frizz around her face. We are still cleaning up the mess from the bomb, and Langby was out with Allen getting wood to board up the choir, so I let the girl chatter at me while I swept. The dust made her sneeze, but at least this time I knew what she was doing.

She told me her name is Enola and that she’s working for the WVS, running one of the mobile canteens that are sent to the fires. She came, of all things, to thank me for the job. She said that after she told the WVS that there was no proper shelter with a canteen for St. Paul’s, they gave her a run in the City. “So I’ll just pop in when I’m close and let you know how I’m making out, won’t I just?”

She and her brother Tom are still sleeping in the tubes. I asked her if that was safe and she said probably not, but at least down there you couldn’t hear the one that got you and that was a blessing.

October 18—I am so tired I can hardly write this. Nine incendiaries tonight and a land mine that looked as though it was going to catch on the dome till the wind drifted its parachute away from the church. I put out two of the incendiaries. I have done that at least twenty times since I got here and helped with dozens of others, and still it is not enough. One incendiary, one moment of not watching Langby, could undo it all.

I know that is partly why I feel so tired. I wear myself out every night trying to do my job and watch Langby, making sure none of the incendiaries falls without my seeing it. Then I go back to the crypt and wear myself out trying to retrieve something, anything, about spies, fires, St. Paul’s in the fall of 1940, anything. It haunts me that I am not doing enough, but I do not know what else to do. Without the retrieval, I am as helpless as these poor people here, with no idea what will happen tomorrow.

If I have to, I will go on doing this till I am called home. He cannot bum down St. Paul’s so long as I am here to put out the incendiaries. “I have my duty,” Langby said in the crypt.

And I have mine.

October 21—It’s been nearly two weeks since the blast and I just now realized we haven’t seen the cat since. He wasn’t in the mess in the crypt. Even after Langby and I were sure there was no one in there, we sifted through the stuff twice more. He could have been in the choir, though.

Old Bence-Jones says not to worry. “He’s all right,” he said. “The jerries could bomb London right down to the ground and the cats would waltz out to greet them. You know why? They don’t love anybody. That’s what gets half of us killed. Old lady out in Stepney got killed the other night trying to save her cat. Bloody cat was in the Anderson.”

“Then where is he?”

“Someplace safe, you can bet on that. If he’s not around St. Paul’s, it means we’re for it. That old saw about the rats deserting a sinking ship, that’s a mistake, that is. It’s cats, not rats.”

October 25—Langby’s tourist showed up again. He cannot still be looking for the Windmill Theatre. He had a newspaper under his arm again today, and he asked for Langby, but Langby was across town with Allen, trying to get the asbestos firemen’s coats. I saw the name of the paper. It was The Worker. A Nazi newspaper?

November 2—I’ve been up on the roofs for a week straight, helping some incompetent workmen patch the hole the bomb made. They’re doing a terrible job. There’s still a great gap on one side a man could fall into, but they insist it’ll be all right because, after all, you wouldn’t fall clear through but only as far as the ceiling, and “the fall can’t kill you.” They don’t seem to understand it’s a perfect hiding place for an incendiary.

And that is all Langby needs. He does not even have to set a fire to destroy St. Paul’s. All he needs to do is let one bum uncaught until it is too late.

I could not get anywhere with the workmen. I went down into the church to complain to Matthews, and saw Langby and his tourist behind a pillar, close to one of the windows. Langby was holding a newspaper and talking to the man. When I came down from the library an hour later, they were still there. So is the gap. Matthews says we’ll put planks across it and hope for the best.

November 5—I have given up trying to retrieve. I am so far behind on my sleep I can’t even retrieve information on a newspaper whose name I already know. Double watches the permanent thing now. Our chars have abandoned us altogether (like the cat), so the crypt is quiet, but I cannot sleep.

If I do manage to doze off, I dream. Yesterday I dreamed Kivrin was on the roofs, dressed like a saint. “What was the secret of your practicum?” I said. “What were you supposed to find out?”

She wiped her nose with a handkerchief and said, “Two things. One, that silence and humility are the sacred burdens of the historian. Two,” she stopped and sneezed into the handkerchief. “Don’t sleep in the tubes.”

My only hope is to get hold of an artificial and induce a trance. That’s a problem. I’m positive it’s too early for chemical endorphins and probably hallucinogens. Alcohol is definitely available, but I need something more concentrated than ale, the only alcohol I know by name. I do not dare ask the watch. Langby is suspicious enough of me already. It’s back to the OED, to look up a word I don’t know.

November 11—The cat’s back. Langby was out with Allen again, still trying for the asbestos coats, so I thought it was safe to leave St. Paul’s. I went to the grocer’s for supplies and hopefully, an artificial. It was late, and the sirens sounded before I had even gotten to Cheapside, but the raids do not usually start until after dark. It took awhile to get all the groceries and to get up my courage to ask whether he had any alcohol—he told me to go to a pub—and when I came out of the shop, it was as if I had pitched suddenly into a hole.

I had no idea where St. Paul’s lay, or the street, or the shop I had just come from. I stood on what was no longer the sidewalk, clutching my brown-paper parcel of kippers and bread with a hand I could not have seen if I held it up before my face. I reached up to wrap my muffler closer about my neck and prayed for my eyes to adjust, but there was no reduced light to adjust to. I would have been glad of the moon, for all St. Paul’s watch curses it and calls it a fifth columnist. Or a bus, with its shuttered headlights giving just enough light to orient myself by. Or a searchlight. Or the kickback flare of an ack-ack gun. Anything.

Just then I did see a bus, two narrow yellow slits a long way off. I started toward it and nearly pitched off the curb. Which meant the bus was sideways in the street, which meant it was not a bus. A cat meowed, quite near, and rubbed against my leg. I looked down into the yellow lights I had thought belonged to the bus. His eyes were picking up light from somewhere, though I would have sworn there was not a light for miles, and reflecting it flatly up at me.

“A warden’ll get you for those lights, old tom,” I said, and then as a plane droned overhead, “Or a jerry.”

The world exploded suddenly into light, the searchlights and a glow along the Thames seeming to happen almost simultaneously, lighting my way home.

“Come to fetch me, did you, old tom?” I said gaily. “Where’ve you been? Knew we were out of kippers, didn’t you? I call that loyalty.” I talked to him all the way home and gave him half a tin of the kippers for saving my life. Bence-Jones said he smelled the milk at the grocer’s.

November 13—I dreamed I was lost in the blackout. I could not see my hands in front of my face, and Dun worthy came and shone a pocket torch at me, but I could only see where I had come from and not where I was going.

“What good is that to them?” I said. “They need a light to show them where they’re going.”

“Even the light from the Thames? Even the light from the fires and the ack-ack guns?” Dunworthy said.

“Yes. Anything is better than this awful darkness.” So he came closer to give me the pocket torch. It was not a pocket torch, after all, but Christ’s lantern from the Hunt picture in the south nave. I shone it on the curb before me so I could find my way home, but it shone instead on the firewatch stone and I hastily put the light out.

November 20—I tried to talk to Langby today. “I’ve seen you talking to the old gentleman,” I said. It sounded like an accusation. I meant it to. I wanted him to think it was and stop whatever he was planning.

“Reading,” he said. “Not talking.” He was putting things in order in the choir, piling up sandbags.

“I’ve seen you reading then,” I said belligerently, and he dropped a sandbag and straightened.

“What of it?” he said. “It’s a free country. I can read to an old man if I want, same as you can talk to that little WVS tart.”

“What do you read?” I said.

“Whatever he wants. He’s an old man. He used to come home from his job, have a bit of brandy and listen to his wife read the papers to him. She got killed in one of the raids. Now I read to him. I don’t see what business it is of yours.”

It sounded true. It didn’t have the careful casualness of a lie, and I almost believed him, except that I had heard the tone of truth from him before. In the crypt. After the bomb.

“I thought he was a tourist looking for the Windmill,” I said.

He looked blank only a second, and then he said, “Oh, yes, that. He came in with the paper and asked me to tell him where it was. I looked it up to find the address. Clever, that. I didn’t guess he couldn’t read it for himself.” But it was enough. I knew that he was lying.

He heaved a sandbag almost at my feet. “Of course you wouldn’t understand a thing like that, would you? A simple act of human kindness?”

“No,” I said coldly. “I wouldn’t.”

None of this proves anything. He gave away nothing, except perhaps the name of an artificial, and I can hardly go to Dean Matthews and accuse Langby of reading aloud.

I waited till he had finished in the choir and gone down to the crypt. Then I lugged one of the sandbags up to the roof and over to the chasm. The planking has held so far, but everyone walks gingerly around it, as if it were a grave. I cut the sandbag open and spilled the loose sand into the bottom. If it has occurred to Langby that this is the perfect spot for an incendiary, perhaps the sand will smother it.

November 21—I gave Enola some of “uncle’s” money today and asked her to get me the brandy. She was more reluctant than I thought she’d be so there must be societal complications I am not aware of, but she agreed.

I don’t know what she came for. She started to tell me about her brother and some prank he’d pulled in the tubes that got him in trouble with the guard, but after I asked her about the brandy, she left without finishing the story.

November 25—Enola came today, but without bringing the brandy. She is going to Bath for the holidays to see her aunt. At least she will be away from the raids for awhile. I will not have to worry about her. She finished the story of her brother and told me she hopes to persuade this aunt to take Tom for the duration of the Blitz but is not at all sure the aunt will be willing.

Young Tom is apparently not so much an engaging scapegrace as a near-criminal. He has been caught twice picking pockets in the Bank tube shelter, and they have had to go back to Marble Arch. I comforted her as best I could, told her all boys were bad at one time or another. What I really wanted to say was that she needn’t worry at all, that young Tom strikes me as a true survivor type, like my own tom, like Langby, totally unconcerned with anybody but himself, well-equipped to survive the Blitz and rise to prominence in the future.

Then I asked her whether she had gotten the brandy.

She looked down at her open-toed shoes and muttered unhappily, “I thought you’d forgotten all about that.”

I made up some story about the watch taking turns buying a bottle, and she seemed less unhappy, but I am not convinced she will not use this trip to Bath as an excuse to do nothing. I will have to leave St. Paul’s and buy it myself, and I don’t dare leave Langby alone in the church. I made her promise to bring the brandy today before she leaves. But she is still not back, and the sirens have already gone.

November 26—No Enola, and she said their train left at noon. I suppose I should be grateful that at least she is safely out of London. Maybe in Bath she will be able to get over her cold.

Tonight one of the ARP girls breezed in to borrow half our cots and tell us about a mess over in the East End where a surface shelter was hit. Four dead, twelve wounded. “At least it wasn’t one of the tube shelters!” she said. “Then you’d see a real mess, wouldn’t you?”

November 30—I dreamed I took the cat to St. John’s Wood.

“Is this a rescue mission?” Dunworthy said.

“No, sir,” I said proudly. “I know what I was supposed to find in my practicum. The perfect survivor. Tough and resourceful and selfish. This is the only one I could find. I had to kill Langby, you know, to keep him from burning down St. Paul’s. Enola’s brother has gone to Bath, and the others will never make it. Enola wears open-toed shoes in the winter and sleeps in the tubes and puts her hair up on metal pins so it will curl. She cannot possibly survive the Blitz.”

Dunworthy said, “Perhaps you should have rescued her instead. What did you say her name was?”

“Kivrin,” I said, and woke up cold and shivering.

December 5—I dreamed Langby had the pinpoint bomb. He carried it under his arm like a brown-paper parcel, coming out of St. Paul’s Station and up Ludgate Hill to the west doors.

“This is not fair,” I said, barring his way with my arm. “There is no fire watch on duty.”

He clutched the bomb to his chest like a pillow. “That is your fault,” he said, and before I could get to my stirrup pump and bucket, he tossed it in the door.

The pinpoint was not even invented until the end of the twentieth century, and it was another ten years before the dispossessed Communists got hold of it and turned it into something that could be carried under your arm. A parcel that could blow a quarter-mile of the City into oblivion. Thank God that is one dream that cannot come true.

It was a sunlit morning in the dream, and this morning when I came off watch the sun was shining for the first time in weeks. I went down to the crypt and then came up again, making the rounds of the roofs twice more, then the steps and the grounds and all the treacherous alleyways between where an incendiary could be missed. I felt better after that, but when I got to sleep I dreamed again, this time of fire and Langby watching it, smiling.

December 15—I found the cat this morning. Heavy raids last night, but most of them over towards Canning Town and nothing on the roofs to speak of. Nevertheless the cat was quite dead. I found him lying on the steps this morning when I made my own, private rounds. Concussion. There was not a mark on him anywhere except the white blackout patch on his throat, but when I picked him up, he was all jelly under the skin.

I could not think what to do with him. I thought for one mad moment of asking Matthews if I could bury him in the crypt. Honorable death in war or something. Trafalgar, Waterloo, London, died in battle. I ended by wrapping him in my muffler and taking him down Ludgate Hill to a building that had been bombed out and burying him in the rubble. It will do no good. The rubble will be no protection from dogs or rats, and I shall never get another muffler. I have gone through nearly all of uncle’s money.

I should not be sitting here. I haven’t checked the alleyways or the rest of the steps, and there might be a dud or a delayed incendiary or something that I missed.

When I came here, I thought of myself as the noble rescuer, the savior of the past. I am not doing very well at the job. At least Enola is out of it. I wish there were some way I could send St. Paul’s to Bath for safekeeping. There were hardly any raids last night. Bence-Jones said cats can survive anything. What if he was coming to get me, to show me the way home? All the bombs were over Canning Town.

December 16—Enola has been back a week. Seeing her, standing on the west steps where I found the cat, sleeping in Marble Arch and not safe at all, was more than I could absorb. “I thought you were in Bath,” I said stupidly.

“My aunt said she’d take Tom but not me as well. She’s got a houseful of evacuation children, and what a noisy lot. Where is your muffler?” she said. “It’s dreadful cold up here on the hill.”

“I . . .” I said, unable to answer, “I lost it.”

“You’ll never get another one,” she said. “They’re going to start rationing clothes. And wool, too. You’ll never get another one like that.”

“I know,” I said, blinking at her.

“Good things just thrown away,” she said. “It’s absolutely criminal, that’s what it is.”

I don’t think I said anything to that, just turned and walked away with my head down, looking for bombs and dead animals.

December 20—Langby isn’t a Nazi. He’s a Communist. I can hardly write this. A Communist.

One of the chars found The Worker wedged behind a pillar and brought it down to the crypt as we were coming off the first watch.

“Bloody Communists,” Bence-Jones said. “Helping Hitler, they are. Talking against the king, stirring up trouble in the shelters. Traitors, that’s what they are.”

“They love England same as you,” the char said.

“They don’t love nobody but themselves, bloody selfish lot. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they were ringing Hitler up on the telephone,” Bence-Jones said. “ ‘ ’E lio, Adolf, here’s where to drop the bombs.’ ”

The kettle on the gas ring whistled. The char stood up and poured the hot water into a chipped tea pot, then sat back down. “Just because they speak their minds don’t mean they’d bum down old St. Paul’s, does it now?”

“Of course not,” Langby said, coming down the stairs. He sat down and pulled off his boots, stretching his feet in their wool socks. “Who wouldn’t bum down St. Paul’s?”

“The Communists,” Bence-Jones said, looking straight at him, and I wondered if he suspected Langby, too.

Langby never batted an eye. “I wouldn’t worry about them if I were you,” he said. “It’s the jerries that are doing their bloody best to bum her down tonight. Six incendiaries so far, and one almost went into that great hole over the choir.” He held out his cup to the char, and she poured him a cup of tea.

I wanted to kill him, smashing him to dust and rubble on the floor of the crypt while Bence-Jones and the char looked on in helpless surprise, shouting warnings to them and the rest of the watch. “Do you know what the Communists did?” I wanted to shout. “Do you? We have to stop him.” I even stood up and started toward him as he sat with his feet stretched out before him and his asbestos coat still over his shoulders.

And then the thought of the Gallery drenched in gold, the Communist coming out of the tube station with the package so casually under his arm, made me sick with the same staggering vertigo of guilt and helplessness, and I sat back down on the edge of my cot and tried to think what to do.

They do not realize the danger. Even Bence-Jones, for all his talk of traitors, thinks they are capable only of talking against the king. They do not know, cannot know, what the Communists will become. Stalin is an ally. Communists mean Russia. They have never heard of Karinsky or the New Russia or any of the things that will make “Communist” into a synonym for “monster.” They will never know it. By the time the Communists become what they became, there will be no fire watch. Only I know what it means to hear the name “Communist” uttered here, so carelessly, in St. Paul’s.

A Communist. I should have known. I should have known.

December 22—Double watches again. I have not had any sleep, and I am getting very unsteady on my feet. I nearly pitched into the chasm this morning, only saved myself by dropping to my knees. My endorphin levels are fluctuating wildly, and I know I must get some sleep soon or I will become one of Langby’s walking dead; but I am afraid to leave him alone on the roofs, alone in the church with his Communist party leader, alone anywhere. I have taken to watching him when he sleeps.

If I could just get hold of an artificial, I think I could induce a trance, in spite of my poor condition. But I cannot even go out to a pub. Langby is on the roofs constantly, waiting for his chance. When Enola comes again, I must convince her to get the brandy for me. There are only a few days left.

December 28—Enola came this morning while I was on the west porch, picking up the Christmas tree. It has been knocked over three nights running by concussion. I righted the tree and was bending down to pick up the scattered tinsel when Enola appeared suddenly out of the fog like some cheerful saint. She stooped quickly and kissed me on the cheek. Then she straightened up, her nose red from her perennial cold, and handed me a box wrapped in colored paper.

“Merry Christmas,” she said. “Go on then, open it. It’s a gift.”

My reflexes are almost totally gone. I knew the box was far too shallow for a bottle of brandy. Nevertheless, I believed she had remembered, had brought me my salvation. “You darling,” I said, and tore it open.

It was a muffler. Gray wool. I stared at it for fully half a minute without realizing what it was. “Where’s the brandy?” I said.

She looked shocked. Her nose got redder and her eyes started to blur. “You need this more. You haven’t any clothing coupons and you have to be outside all the time. It’s been so dreadful cold.”

“I needed the brandy,” I said angrily.

“I was only trying to be kind,” she started, and I cut her off.

“Kind?” I said. “I asked you for brandy. I don’t recall ever saying I needed a muffler.” I shoved it back at her and began untangling a string of colored lights that had shattered when the tree fell.

She got that same holy martyr look Kivrin is so wonderful at. “I worry about you all the time up here,” she said in a rush. “They’re trying for St. Paul’s, you know. And it’s so close to the river. I didn’t think you should be drinking. I . . . it’s a crime when they’re trying so hard to kill us all that you won’t take care of yourself. It’s like you’re in it with them. I worry someday I’ll come up to St. Paul’s and you won’t be here.”

“Well, and what exactly am I supposed to do with a muffler? Hold it over my head when they drop the bombs?”

She turned and ran, disappearing into the gray fog before she had gone down two steps. I started after her, still holding the string of broken lights, tripped over it, and fell almost all the way to the bottom of the steps.

Langby picked me up. “You’re off watches,” he said grimly.

“You can’t do that,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I can. I don’t want any walking dead on the roofs with me.”

I let him lead me down here to the crypt, make me a cup of tea, put me to bed, all very solicitous. No indication that this is what he has been waiting for. I will lie here till the sirens go. Once I am on the roofs he will not be able to send me back without seeming suspicious. Do you know what he said before he left, asbestos coat and rubber boots, the dedicated fire watcher? “I want you to get some sleep.” As if I could sleep with Langby on the roofs. I would be burned alive.

December 30—The sirens woke me, and old Bence-Jones said, “That should have done you some good. You’ve slept the clock round.”

“What day is it?” I said, going for my boots.

“The twenty-ninth,” he said, and as I dived for the door, “No need to hurry. They’re late tonight. Maybe they won’t come at all. That’d be a blessing, that would. The tide’s out.”

I stopped by the door to the stairs, holding onto the cool stone. “Is St. Paul’s all right?”

“She’s still standing,” he said. “Have a bad dream?”

“Yes,” I said, remembering the bad dreams of all the past weeks—the dead cat in my arms in St. John’s Wood, Langby with his parcel and his Worker under his arm, the fire-watch stone garishly lit by Christ’s lantern. Then I remembered I had not dreamed at all. I had slept the kind of sleep I had prayed for, the kind of sleep that would help me remember.

Then I remembered. Not St. Paul’s, burned to the ground by the Communists. A headline from the dailies. “Marble Arch hit. Eighteen killed by blast.” The date was not clear except for the year. 1940. There were exactly two more days left in 1940. I grabbed my coat and muffler and ran up the stairs and across the marble floor.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Langby shouted to me. I couldn’t see him.

“I have to save Enola,” I said, and my voice echoed in the dark sanctuary. “They’re going to bomb Marble Arch.”

“You can’t leave now,” he shouted after me, standing where the firewatch stone would be. “The tide’s out. You dirty . . .”

I didn’t hear the rest of it. I had already flung myself down the steps and into a taxi. It took almost all the money I had, the money I had so carefully hoarded for the trip back to St. John’s Wood. Shelling started while we were still in Oxford Street, and the driver refused to go any farther. He let me out into pitch blackness, and I saw I would never make it in time.

Blast. Enola crumpled on the stairway down to the tube, her opentoed shoes still on her feet, not a mark on her. And when I try to lift her, jelly under the skin. I would have to wrap her in the muffler she gave me, because I was too late. I had gone back a hundred years to be too late to save her.

I ran the last blocks, guided by the gun emplacement that had to be in Hyde Park, and skidded down the steps into Marble Arch. The woman in the ticket booth took my last shilling for a ticket to St. Paul’s Station. I stuck it in my pocket and raced toward the stairs.

“No running,” she said placidly. “To your left, please.” The door to the right was blocked off by wooden barricades, the metal gates beyond pulled to and chained. The board with names on it for the stations was X-ed with tape, and a new sign that read, “All trains,” was nailed to the barricade, pointing left.

Enola was not on the stopped escalators or sitting against the wall in the hallway. I came to the first stairway and could not get through. A family had set out, just where I wanted to step, a communal tea of bread and butter, a little pot of jam sealed with waxed paper, and a kettle on a ring like the one Langby and I had rescued out of the rubble, all of it spread on a cloth embroidered at the corners with flowers. I stood staring down at the layered tea, spread like a waterfall down the steps.

“I . . . Marble Arch . . .” I said. Another twenty killed by flying tiles. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“We’ve as much right as anyone,” the man said belligerently, “and who are you to tell us to move on?”

A woman lifting saucers out of a cardboard box looked up at me, frightened. The kettle began to whistle.

“It’s you that should move on,” the man said. “Go on then.” He stood off to one side so I could pass. I edged past the embroidered cloth apologetically.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m looking for someone. On the platform.”

“You’ll never find her in there, mate,” the man said, thumbing in that direction. I hurried past him, nearly stepping on the teacloth, and rounded the corner into hell.

It was not hell. Shopgirls folded coats and leaned back against them, cheerful or sullen or disagreeable, but certainly not damned. Two boys scuffled for a shilling and lost it on the tracks. They bent over the edge, debating whether to go after it, and the station guard yelled to them to back away. A train rumbled through, full of people. A mosquito landed on the guard’s hand and he reached out to slap it and missed. The boys laughed. And behind and before them, stretching in all directions down the deadly tile curves of the tunnel like casualties, backed into the entrance-ways and onto the stairs, were people. Hundreds and hundreds of people.

I stumbled back into the hall, knocking over a teacup. It spilled like a flood across the cloth.

“I told you, mate,” the man said cheerfully. “It’s Hell in there, ain’t it? And worse below.”

“Hell,” I said. “Yes.” I would never find her. I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?

Of course not, dear boy. You have foolishly spent all your money on taxicabs and brandy, and tonight is the night the Germans burn the City. (Now it is too late, I remember it all. Twenty-eight incendiaries on the roofs.) Langby must have his chance, and you must learn the hardest lesson of all and the one you should have known from the beginning. You cannot save St. Paul’s.

I went back out onto the platform and stood behind the yellow line until a train pulled up. I took my ticket out and held it in my hand all the way to St. Paul’s Station. When I got there, smoke billowed toward me like an easy spray of water. I could not see St. Paul’s.

“The tide’s out,” a woman said in a voice devoid of hope, and I went down in a snake pit of limp cloth hoses. My hands came up covered with rank-smelling mud, and I understood finally (and too late) the significance of the tide. There was no water to fight the fires.

A policeman barred my way and I stood helplessly before him with no idea what to say. “No civilians allowed up there,” he said. “St. Paul’s is for it.” The smoke billowed like a thundercloud, alive with sparks, and the dome rose golden above it.

“I’m fire watch,” I said, and his arm fell away, and then I was on the roofs.

My endorphin levels must have been going up and down like an air raid siren. I do not have any short-term from then on, just moments that do not fit together: the people in the church when we brought Langby down, huddled in a corner playing cards, the whirlwind of burning scraps of wood in the dome, the ambulance driver who wore open-toed shoes like Enola and smeared salve on my burned hands. And in the center, the one clear moment when I went after Langby on a rope and saved his life.

I stood by the dome, blinking against the smoke. The City was on fire and it seemed as if St. Paul’s would ignite from the heat, would crumble from the noise alone. Bence-Jones was by the northwest tower, hitting at an incendiary with a spade. Langby was too close to the patched place where the bomb had gone through, looking toward me. An incendiary clattered behind him. I turned to grab a shovel, and when I turned back, he was gone.

“Langby!” I shouted, and could not hear my own voice. He had fallen into the chasm and nobody saw him or the incendiary. Except me. I do not remember how I got across the roof. I think I called for a rope. I got a rope. I tied it around my waist, gave the ends of it into the hands of the fire watch, and went over the side. The fires lit the walls of the hole almost all the way to the bottom. Below me I could see a pile of whitish rubble. He’s under there, I thought, and jumped free of the wall. The space was so narrow there was nowhere to throw the rubble. I was afraid I would inadvertently stone him, and I tried to toss the pieces of planking and plaster over my shoulder, but there was barely room to turn. For one awful moment I thought he might not be there at all, that the pieces of splintered wood would brush away to reveal empty pavement, as they had in the crypt.

I was numbed by the indignity of crawling over him. If he was dead I did not think I could bear the shame of stepping on his helpless body. Then his hand came up like a ghost’s and grabbed my ankle, and within seconds I had whirled and had his head free.

He was the ghastly white that no longer frightens me. “I put the bomb out,” he said. I stared at him, so overwhelmed with relief I could not speak. For one hysterical moment I thought I would even laugh, I was so glad to see him. I finally realized what it was I was supposed to say.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, and tried to raise himself on one elbow. “So much the worse for you.”

He could not get up. He grunted with pain when he tried to shift his weight to his right side and lay back, the uneven rubble crunching sickeningly under him. I tried to lift him gently so I could see where he was hurt. He must have fallen on something.

“It’s no use,” he said, breathing hard. “I put it out.”

I spared him a startled glance, afraid that he was delirious, and went back to rolling him onto his side.

“I know you were counting on this one,” he went on, not resisting me at all. “It was bound to happen sooner or later with all these roofs. Only I went after it. What’ll you tell your friends?”

His asbestos coat was torn down the back in a long gash. Under it his back was charred and smoking. He had fallen on the incendiary. “Oh, my God,” I said, trying frantically to see how badly he was burned without touching him. I had no way of knowing how deep the burns went, but they seemed to extend only in the narrow space where the coat had tom. I tried to pull the bomb out from under him, but the casing was as hot as a stove. It was not melting, though. My sand and Langby’s body had smothered it. I had no idea if it would start up again when it was exposed to the air. I looked around, a little wildly, for the bucket and stirrup pump Langby must have dropped when he fell.

“Looking for a weapon?” Langby said, so clearly it was hard to believe he was hurt at all. “Why not just leave me here? A bit of overexposure and I’d be done for by morning. Or would you rather do your dirty work in private?”

I stood up and yelled to the men on the roof above us. One of them shone a pocket torch down at us, but its light didn’t reach.

“Is he dead?” somebody shouted down to me.

“Send for an ambulance,” I said. “He’s been burned.”

I helped Langby up, trying to support his back without touching the burn. He staggered a little and then leaned against the wall, watching me as I tried to bury the incendiary, using a piece of the planking as a scoop. The rope came down and I tied Langby to it. He had not spoken since I helped him up. He let me tie the rope around his waist, still looking steadily at me. “I should have let you smother in the crypt,” he said.

He stood leaning easily, almost relaxed against the wood supports, his hands holding him up. I put his hands on the slack rope and wrapped it once around them for the grip I knew he didn’t have. “I’ve been onto you since that day in the Gallery. I knew you weren’t afraid of heights. You came down here without any fear of heights when you thought I’d ruined your precious plans. What was it? An attack of conscience? Kneeling there like a baby, whining, ‘What have we done? What have we done?’ You made me sick. But you know what gave you away first? The cat. Everybody knows cats hate water. Everybody but a dirty Nazi spy.”

There was a tug on the rope. “Come ahead,” I said, and the rope tautened.

“That WVS tart? Was she a spy, too? Supposed to meet you in Marble Arch? Telling me it was going to be bombed. You’re a rotten spy, Bartholomew. Your friends already blew it up in September. It’s open again.”

The rope jerked suddenly and began to lift Langby. He twisted his hands to get a better grip. His right shoulder scraped the wall. I put up my hands and pushed him gently so that his left side was to the wall. “You’re making a big mistake, you know,” he said. “You should have killed me. I’ll tell.”

I stood in the darkness, waiting for the rope. Langby was unconscious when he reached the roof. I walked past the fire watch to the dome and down to the crypt.

This morning the letter from my uncle came and with it a ten-pound note.

December 31—Two of Dun worthy’s flunkies met me in St. John’s Wood to tell me I was late for my exams. I did not even protest. I shuffled obediently after them without even considering how unfair it was to give an exam to one of the walking dead. I had not slept in—how long? Since yesterday when I went to find Enola. I had not slept in a hundred years.

Dun worthy was at his desk, blinking at me. One of the flunkies handed me a test paper and the other one called time. I turned the paper over and left an oily smudge from the ointment on my bums. I stared uncomprehendingly at them. I had grabbed at the incendiary when I turned Langby over, but these burns were on the backs of my hands. The answer came to me suddenly in Langby’s unyielding voice. ‘They’re rope burns, you fool. Don’t they teach you Nazi spies the proper way to come up a rope?”

I looked down at the test. It read, “Number of incendiaries that fell on St. Paul’s. Number of land mines. Number of high explosive bombs. Method most commonly used for extinguishing incendiaries. Land mines. High explosive bombs. Number of volunteers on first watch. Second watch. Casualties. Fatalities.” The questions made no sense. There was only a short space, long enough for the writing of a number, after any of the questions. Method most commonly used for extinguishing incendiaries. How would I ever fit what I knew into that narrow space? Where were the questions about Enola and Langby and the cat?

I went up to Dunworthy’s desk. “St. Paul’s almost burned down last night,” I said. “What kind of questions are these?”

“You should be answering questions, Mr. Bartholomew, not asking them.”

“There aren’t any questions about the people,” I said. The outer casing of my anger began to melt.

“Of course there are,” Dunworthy said, flipping to the second page of the test. “Number of casualties, 1940. Blast, shrapnel, other.”

“Other?” I said. At any moment the roof would collapse on me in a shower of plaster dust and fury. “Other? Langby put out a fire with his own body. Enola has a cold that keeps getting worse. The cat . . .” I snatched the paper back from him and scrawled “one cat” in the narrow space next to “blast.”

“Don’t you care about them at all?”

“They’re important from a statistical point of view,” he said, “but as individuals, they are hardly relevant to the course of history.” My reflexes were shot. It was amazing to me that Dunworthy’s were almost as slow. I grazed the side of his jaw and knocked his glasses off. “Of course they’re relevant!” I shouted. “They are the history, not all these bloody numbers!”

The reflexes of the flunkies were very fast. They did not let me start another swing at him before they had me by both arms and were hauling me out of the room.

“They’re back there in the past with nobody to save them. They can’t see their hands in front of their faces and there are bombs falling down on them and you tell me they aren’t important? You call that being an historian?”

The flunkies dragged me out the door and down the hall. “Langby saved St. Paul’s. How much more important can a person get? You’re no historian! You’re nothing but a . . .” I wanted to call him a terrible name, but the only curses I could summon up were Langby’s. “You’re nothing but a dirty Nazi spy!” I bellowed. “You’re nothing but a lazy bourgeois tart!”

They dumped me on my hands and knees outside the door and slammed it in my face. “I wouldn’t be an historian if you paid me!” I shouted, and went to see the firewatch stone.

December 31—I am having to write this in bits and pieces. My hands are in pretty bad shape, and Dun worthy’s boys didn’t help matters much. Kivrin comes in periodically, wearing her St. Joan look, and smears so much salve on my hands that I can’t hold a pencil.

St. Paul’s Station is not there, of course, so I got out at Holborn and walked, thinking about my last meeting with Dean Matthews on the morning after the burning of the City. This morning.

“I understand you saved Langby’s life,” he said. “I also understand that between you, you saved St. Paul’s last night.”

I showed him the letter from my uncle and he stared at it as if he could not think what it was. “Nothing stays saved forever,” he said, and for a terrible moment I thought he was going to tell me Langby had died. “We shall have to keep on saving St. Paul’s until Hitler decides to bomb the countryside.”

The raids on London are almost over, I wanted to tell him. He’ll start bombing the countryside in a matter of weeks. Canterbury, Bath, aiming always at the cathedrals. You and St. Paul’s will both outlast the war and live to dedicate the tire watch stone.

“I am hopeful, though,” he said. “I think the worst is over.”

“Yes, sir.” I thought of the stone, its letters still readable after all this time. No, sir, the worst is not over.

I managed to keep my bearings almost to the top of Ludgate Hill. Then I lost my way completely, wandering about like a man in a graveyard. I had not remembered that the rubble looked so much like the white plaster dust Langby had tried to dig me out of. I could not find the stone anywhere. In the end I nearly fell over it, jumping back as if I had stepped on a grave.

It is all that’s left. Hiroshima is supposed to have had a handful of untouched trees at ground zero, Denver the capitol steps. Neither of them says, “Remember the men and women of St. Paul’s Watch who by the grace of God saved this cathedral.” The grace of God.

Part of the stone is sheared off. Historians argue there was another line that said, “for all time”, but I do not believe that, not if Dean Matthews had anything to do with it. And none of the watch it was dedicated to would have believed it for a minute. We saved St. Paul’s every time we put out an incendiary, and only until the next one fell. Keeping watch on the danger spots, putting out the little fires with sand and stirrup pumps, the big ones with our bodies, in order to keep the whole vast complex structure from burning down. Which sounds to me like a course description for History Practicum 401. What a fine time to discover what historians are for when I have tossed my chance for being one out the windows as easily as they tossed the pinpoint bomb in! No, sir, the worst is not over.

There are flash burns on the stone, where legend says the Dean of St. Paul’s was kneeling when the bomb went off. Totally apocryphal, of course, since the front door is hardly an appropriate place for prayers. It is more likely the shadow of a tourist who wandered in to ask the whereabouts of the Windmill Theatre, or the imprint of a girl bringing a volunteer his muffler. Or a cat.

Nothing is saved forever, Dean Matthews; and I knew that when I walked in the west doors that first day, blinking into the gloom, but it is pretty bad nevertheless. Standing here knee-deep in rubble out of which I will not be able to dig any folding chairs or friends, knowing that Langby died thinking I was a Nazi spy, knowing that Enola came one day and I wasn’t there. It’s pretty bad.

But it is not as bad as it could be. They are both dead, and Dean Matthews too; but they died without knowing what I knew all along, what sent me to my knees in the Whispering Gallery, sick with grief and guilt: that in the end none of us saved St. Paul’s. And Langby cannot turn to me, stunned and sick at heart, and say, “Who did this? Your friends the Nazis?” And I would have to say, “No. The Communists.” That would be the worst.

I have come back to the room and let Kivrin smear more salve on my hands. She wants me to get some sleep. I know I should pack and get gone. It will be humiliating to have them come and throw me out, but I do not have the strength to fight her. She looks so much like Enola.

January 1—I have apparently slept not only through the night, but through the morning mail drop as well. When I woke up just now, I found Kivrin sitting on the end of the bed holding an envelope. “Your grades came,” she said.

I put my arm over my eyes. “They can be marvelously efficient when they want to, can’t they?”

“Yes,” Kivrin said.

“Well, let’s see it,” I said, sitting up. “How long do I have before they come and throw me out?”

She handed the flimsy computer envelope to me. I tore it along the perforation. “Wait,” she said. “Before you open it, I want to say something.” She put her hand gently on my burns. “You’re wrong about the history department. They’re very good.”

It was not exactly what I expected her to say. “Good is not the word I’d use to describe Dunworthy,” I said and yanked the inside slip free.

Kivrin’s look did not change, not even when I sat there with the printout on my knees where she could surely see it.

“Well,” I said.

The slip was hand-signed by the esteemed Dunworthy. I have taken a first. With honors.

January 2—Two things came in the mail today. One was Kivrin’s assignment. The history department thinks of everything—even to keeping her here long enough to nursemaid me, even to coming up with a prefabricated trial by fire to send their history majors through.

I think I wanted to believe that was what they had done, Enola and Langby only hired actors, the cat a clever android with its clockwork innards taken out for the final effect, not so much because I wanted to believe Dunworthy was not good at all, but because then I would not have this nagging pain at not knowing what had happened to them.

“You said your practicum was England in 1300?” I said, watching her as suspiciously as I had watched Langby.

“1349,” she said, and her face went slack with memory. “The plague year.”

“My God,” I said. “How could they do that? The plague’s a ten.”

“I have a natural immunity,” she said, and looked at her hands.

Because I could not think of anything to say, I opened the other piece of mail. It was a report on Enola. Computer-printed, facts and dates and statistics, all the numbers the history department so dearly loves, but it told me what I thought I would have to go without knowing: that she had gotten over her cold and survived the Blitz.

Young Tom had been killed in the Baedaker raids on Bath, but Enola had lived until 2006, the year before they blew up St. Paul’s.

I don’t know whether I believe the report or not, but it does not matter. It is, like Langby’s reading aloud to the old man, a simple act of human kindness. They think of everything.

Not quite. They did not tell me what happened to Langby. But I find as I write this that I already know: I saved his life. It does not seem to matter that he might have died in hospital next day; and I find, in spite of all the hard lessons the history department has tried to teach me, I do not quite believe this one: that nothing is saved forever. It seems to me that perhaps Langby is.

January 3—I went to see Dun worthy today. I don’t know what I intended to say—some pompous drivel about my willingness to serve in the firewatch of history, standing guard against the falling incendiaries of the human heart, silent and saintly.

But he blinked at me nearsightedly across his desk, and it seemed to me that he was blinking at that last bright image of St. Paul’s in sunlight before it was gone forever and that he knew better than anyone that the past cannot be saved, and I said instead, “I’m sorry that I broke your glasses, sir.”

“How did you like St. Paul’s?” he said, and like my first meeting with Enola, I felt I must be somehow reading the signals all wrong, that he was not feeling loss, but something quite different.

“I loved it, sir,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “So do I.”

Dean Matthews is wrong. I have fought with memory my whole practicum only to find that it is not the enemy at all, and being an historian is not some saintly burden after all. Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the gloom of that first afternoon, looking in the great west doors of St. Paul’s at what is, like Langby, like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever.

UNSOUND VARIATIONS

George R.R. Martin

Soon to be appearing in Unsound Variations, a science fiction/chess anthology edited by Fred Saberhagen for Ace.

AFTER they swung off the interstate, the road became a narrow two-lane that wound a tortuous path through the mountains in a series of switchbacks, each steeper than the last. Peaks rose all around them, pine-covered and crowned by snow and ice, while swift cold waterfalls flashed by, barely seen, on either side. The sky was a bright and brilliant blue. It was exhilarating scenery, but it did nothing to lighten Peter’s mood. He concentrated blindly on the road, losing himself in the mindless reflexes of driving.

As the mountains grew higher, the radio reception grew poorer, stations fading in and out with every twist in the road, until at last they could get nothing at all. Kathy went from one end of the band to the other, searching, and then back again. Finally she snapped off the radio in disgust. “I guess you’ll just have to talk to me,” she said.

Peter didn’t need to look at her to hear the sharpness in her tone, the bitter edge of sarcasm that had long ago replaced fondness in her voice. She was looking for an argument, he knew. She was angry about the radio, and she resented him dragging her on this trip, and most of all she resented being married to him. At times, when he was feeling very sorry for himself, he did not even blame her. He had not turned out to be much of a bargain as a husband; a failed writer, failed journalist, failing businessman, depressed and depressing. He was still a lively sparring partner, however. Perhaps that was why she tried to provoke fights so often. After all the blood had been let, one or both of them would start crying, and then they would usually make love, and life would be pleasant for an hour or two. It was about all they had left.

Not today, though. Peter lacked the energy, and his mind was on other things. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked her. He kept his tone amicable and his eyes on the road.

“Tell me about these clowns we’re going to visit,” she said.

“I did. They were my teammates on the chess team, back when I was at Northwestern.”

“Since when is chess a team sport anyway?” Kathy said. “What’d you do, vote on each move?”

“No. In chess, a team match is really a bunch of individual matches. Usually four or five boards, at least in college play. There’s no consultation or anything. The team that wins the most individual games wins the match point. The way it works—”

“I get it,” she said sharply. “I may not be a chess player, but I’m not stupid. So you and these other three were the Northwestern team?”

“Yes and no,” Peter said. The Toyota was straining; it wasn’t used to grades this steep, and it hadn’t been adjusted for altitude before they took off from Chicago. He drove carefully. They were up high enough now to come across icy patches, and snow drifting across the road.

“Yes and no,” Kathy said sarcastically. “What does that mean?”

“Northwestern had a big chess club back then. We played in a lot of tournaments—local, state, national. Sometimes we fielded more than one team, so the line-up was a bit different every tournament. It depended on who could play and who couldn’t, who had a midterm, who’d played in the last match—lots of things. We four were Northwestern’s B team in the North American Intercollegiate Team Championships, ten years ago this week. Northwestern hosted that tournament, and I ran it, as well as playing.”

“What do you mean B team?”

Peter cleared his throat and eased the Toyota around a sharp curve, gravel rattling against the underside of the car as one wheel brushed the shoulder. “A school wasn’t limited to just one team,” he said. “If you had the money and a lot of people who wanted to play, you could enter several. Your best four players would make up your A team, the real contender. The second four would be the B team, and so on.” He paused briefly, and continued with a faint note of pride in his voice. “The nationals at Northwestern were the biggest ever held, up to that time, although of course that record has since been broken. We set a second record, though, that still stands. Since the tournament was on our home grounds, we had lots of players on hand. We entered six teams. No other school has ever had more than four in the nationals, before or after.” The record still brought a smile to his face. Maybe it wasn’t much of a record, but it was the only one he had, and it was his. Some people lived and died without ever setting a record of any kind, he reflected silently. Maybe he ought to tell Kathy to put his on his tombstone: HERE LIES PETER K. NORTEN. HE FIELDED SIX TEAMS. He chuckled.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing.”

She didn’t pursue it. “So you ran this tournament, you say?”

“I was the club president and the chairman of the local committee. I didn’t direct, but I put together the bid that brought the nationals to Evanston, made all the preliminary arrangements. And I organized all six of our teams, decided who would play on each one, appointed the team captains. But during the tournament itself I was only the captain of the B team.”

She laughed. “So you were a big deal on the second-string. It figures. The story of your life.”

Peter bit back a sharp reply, and said nothing. The Toyota swerved around another hairpin, and a vast Colorado mountain panorama opened up in front of them. It left him strangely unmoved.

After a while Kathy said, “When did you stop playing chess?”

“I sort of gave it up after college. Not a conscious decision, really. I just kind of drifted out of it. I haven’t played a game of tournament chess in almost nine years. I’m probably pretty rusty by now. But back then I was fairly good.”

“How good is fairly good?”

“I was rated as a Class A player, like everyone else on our B team.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means my USCF rating was substantially higher than that of the vast majority of tournament chess players in the country,” he said. “And the tournament players are generally much better than the unrated wood-pushers you encounter in bars and coffeehouses. The ratings went all the way down to Class E. Above Class A you had Experts, and Masters, and Senior Masters at the top, but there weren’t many of them.”

“Three classes above you?”

“Yes.”

“So you might say, at your very best, you were a fourth-class chess player.”

At that Peter did look over at her. She was leaning back in her seat, a faint smirk on her face. “Bitch,” he said. He was suddenly angry.

“Keep your eyes on the road!” Kathy snapped.

He wrenched the car around the next turn hard as he could, and pressed down on the gas. She hated it when he drove fast. “I don’t know why the hell I try to talk to you,” he said.

“My husband, the big deal,” she said. She laughed. “A fourth-class chess player playing on the junior varsity team. And a fifth-rate driver too.”

“Shut up,” Peter said furiously. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Maybe we were only the B team, but we were good. We finished better than anyone had any right to expect, only a half-point behind Northwestern A. And we almost scored one of the biggest upsets in history.”

“Do tell.”

Peter hesitated, already regretting his words. The memory was important to him, almost as important as his silly little record. He knew what it meant, how close they had come. But she’d never understand; it would only be another failure for her to laugh at. He should never have mentioned it.

“Well?” she prodded. “What about this great upset, dear? Tell me.”

It was too late, Peter realized. She’d never let him drop it now. She’d needle him and needle him until he told her. He sighed and said, “It was ten years ago this week. The nationals were always held between Christmas and New Year’s, when everyone was on break. An eight-round team tournament, two rounds a day. All of our teams did moderately well. Our A team finished seventh overall.”

“You were on the B team, sweetie.”

Peter grimaced. “Yes. And we were doing best of all, up to a point. Scored a couple nice upsets late in the tournament. It put us in a strange position. Going into the last round, the University of Chicago was in first place, alone, with a 6-1 match record. They’d beaten our A team, among their other victims, and they were defending national champions. Behind them were three other schools at 5½-½. Berkeley, the University of Massachusetts, and—I don’t know, someone else, it doesn’t matter. What mattered was that all three of those teams had already played U of C. Then you had a whole bunch of teams at 5-2, including both Northwestern A and B. One of the 5-2 teams had to be paired up against Chicago in the final round. By some freak, it turned out to be us. Everyone thought that cinched the tournament for them.

“It was really a mismatch. They were the defending champions, and they had an awesome team. Three Masters and an Expert, if I recall. They outrated us by hundreds of points on every board. It should have been easy. It wasn’t.

“It was never easy between U of C and Northwestern. All through my college years, we were the two big Midwestern chess powers, and we were archrivals. The Chicago captain, Hal Winslow, became a good friend of mine, but I gave him a lot of headaches. Chicago always had a stronger team than we did, but we gave them fits nonetheless. We met in the Chicago Intercollegiate League, in state tournaments, in regional tournaments, and several times in the nationals. Chicago won most of those, but not all. We took the city championship away from them once, and racked up a couple other big upsets too. And that year, in the nationals, we came this close”—he held up two fingers, barely apart—“to the biggest upset of all.” He put his hand back on the wheel, and scowled.

“Go on,” she said. “I’m breathless to know what comes next.”

Peter ignored the sarcasm. “An hour into the match, we had half the tournament gathered around our tables, watching. Everyone could see that Chicago was in trouble. We clearly had superior positions on two boards, and we were even on the other two.

“It got better. I was playing Hal Winslow on third board. We had a dull, even position, and we agreed to a draw. And on fourth board, E.C. gradually got outplayed and finally resigned in a dead lost position.”

“E.C.?”

“Edward Colin Stuart. We all called him E.C. Quite a character. You’ll meet him up at Bunnish’s place.”

“He lost?”

“Yes.”

“This doesn’t sound like such a thrilling upset to me,” she said drily. “Though maybe by your standards, it’s a triumph.”

“E.C. lost,” Peter said, “but by that time, Delmario had clearly busted his man on board two. The guy dragged it out, but finally we got the point, which tied the score at 1½-1½, with one game in progress. And we were winning that one. It was incredible. Bruce Bunnish was our first board. A real turkey, but a half-decent player. He was another A player, but he had a trick memory. Photographic. Knew every opening backwards and forwards. He was playing Chicago’s big man.” Peter smiled wryly. “In more ways than one. A Master name of Robinson Vesselere. Damn strong chess player, but he must have weighed four hundred pounds. He’d sit there absolutely immobile as you played him, his hands folded on top of his stomach, little eyes squinting at the board. And he’d crush you. He should have crushed Bunnish easily. Hell, he was rated four hundred points higher. But that wasn’t what had gone down. With that trick memory of his, Bunnish had somehow outplayed Vesselere in an obscure variation of the Sicilian. He was swarming all over him. An incredible attack. The position was as complicated as anything I’d ever seen, very sharp and tactical. Vesselere was counterattacking on the queenside, and he had some pressure, but nothing like the threats Bunnish had on the kingside. It was a won game. We were all sure of that.”

“So you almost won the championship?”

“No,” Peter said. “No, it wasn’t that. If we’d won the match, we would have tied Chicago and a few other teams at 6-2, but the championship would have gone to someone else, some team with 6½ match points. Berkeley maybe, or Mass. It was just the upset itself we wanted. It would have been incredible. They were the best college chess team in the country. We weren’t even the best at our school. If we had beaten them, it would have caused a sensation. And we came so close.”

“What happened?”

“Bunnish blew it,” Peter said sourly. “There was a critical position. Bunnish had a sac. A sacrifice, you know? A double piece sac. Very sharp, but it would have busted up Vesselere’s kingside and driven his king out into the open. But Bunnish was too timid for that. Instead he kept looking at Vesselere’s queenside attack, and finally he made some feeble defensive move. Vesselere shifted another piece to the queenside, and Bunnish defended again. Instead of following up his advantage, he made a whole series of cautious little adjustments to the position, and before long his attack had dissipated. After that, of course, Vesselere overwhelmed him.” Even now, after ten years, Peter felt the disappointment building inside him as he spoke. “We lost the match 2½-1½, and Chicago won another national championship. Afterwards, even Vesselere admitted that he was busted if Brucie had played knight takes pawn at the critical point. Damn.”

“You lost. That’s what this amounts to. You lost.”

“We came close.”

“Close only counts in horseshoes and grenades,” Kathy said. “You lost. Even then you were a loser, dear. I wish I’d known.”

“Bunnish lost, damn it,” Peter said. “It was just like him. He had a Class A rating, and that trick memory, but as a team player he was worthless. You don’t know how many matches he blew for us. When the pressure was on, we could always count on Bunnish to fold. But that time was the worst, that game against Vesselere. I could have killed him. He was an arrogant asshole, too.”

Kathy laughed. “Isn’t this arrogant asshole the one we are now speeding to visit?”

“It’s been ten years. Maybe he’s changed. Even if he hasn’t, well, he’s a multimillionaire asshole now. Electronics. Besides, I want to see E.C. and Steve again, and Bunnish said they’d be there.”

“Delightful,” said Kathy. “Well, rush on, then. I wouldn’t want to miss this. It might be my only opportunity to spend four days with an asshole millionaire and three losers.”

Peter said nothing, but he pressed down on the accelerator, and the Toyota plunged down the mountain road, faster and faster, rattling as it picked up speed. Down and down, he thought, down and down. Just like my goddamned life.

FOUR MILES up Bunnish’s private road, they finally came within sight of the house. Peter, who still dreamed of buying his own house after a decade of living in cheap apartments, took one look and knew he was gazing at a three-million-dollar piece of property. There were three levels, all blending into the mountainside so well you hardly noticed them, built of natural wood and native stone and tinted glass. A huge solar greenhouse was the most conspicuous feature. Beneath the house, a four-car garage was sunk right into the mountain itself.

Peter pulled into the last empty spot, between a brand-new silver Cadillac Seville that was obviously Bunnish’s and an ancient rusted VW Beetle that was obviously not. As he pulled the key from the ignition, the garage doors shut automatically behind them, blocking out daylight and the gorgeous mountain vistas. The door closed with a resounding metallic clang.

“Someone knows we’re here,” Kathy observed.

“Get the suitcases,” Peter snapped.

To the rear of the garage they found the elevator, and Peter jabbed the topmost of the two buttons. When the elevator doors opened again, it was on a huge living room. Peter stepped out and stared at a wilderness of potted plants beneath a vaulting skylight, at thick brown carpets, fine wood paneling, bookcases packed with leatherbound volumes, a large fireplace, and Edward Colin Stuart, who rose from a leather-clad armchair across the room when the elevator arrived.

“E.C.,” Peter said, setting down his suitcase. He smiled.

“Hello, Peter,” E.C. said, coming toward them quickly. They shook hands.

“You haven’t changed a goddamned bit in ten years,” Peter said. It was true. E.C. was still slender and compact, with a bushy head of sandy blond hair and a magnificent handlebar mustache. He was wearing jeans and a tapered purple shirt with a black vest, and he seemed just as he had a decade ago: brisk, trim, efficient. “Not a damn bit,” Peter repeated.

“More’s the pity,” E.C. said. “One is supposed to change, I believe.” His blue eyes were as unreadable as ever. He turned to Kathy, and said, “I’m E.C. Stuart.”

“Oh, pardon,” Peter said. “This is my wife, Kathy.”

“Delighted,” she said, taking his hand and smiling at him.

“Where’s Steve?” Peter asked. “I saw his VW down in the garage. Gave me a start. How long has he been driving that thing now? Fifteen years?”

“Not quite,” E.C. said. “He’s around somewhere, probably having a drink.” His mouth shifted subtly when he said it, telling Peter a good deal more than his words did.

“And Bunnish?”

“Brucie has not yet made his appearance. I think he was waiting for you to arrive. You probably want to settle in to your rooms.”

“How do we find them, if our host is missing?” Kathy asked drily.

“Ah,” said E.C., “you haven’t been acquainted with the wonders of Bunnishland yet. Look.” He pointed to the fireplace.

Peter would have sworn that there had been a painting above the mantel when they had entered, some sort of surreal landscape. Now there was a large rectangular screen, with words on it, vivid red against black. WELCOME, PETER. WELCOME, KATHY. YOUR SUITE IS ON THE SECOND LEVEL, FIRST DOOR. PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF COMFORTABLE.

Peter turned. “How . . .?”

“No doubt triggered by the elevator,” E.C. said. “I was greeted the same way. Brucie is an electronics genius, remember. The house is full of gadgets and toys. I’ve explored a bit.” He shrugged. “Why don’t you two unpack and then wander back? I won’t go anywhere.”

They found their rooms easily enough. The huge, tiled bath featured an outside patio with a hot tub, and the suite had its own sitting room and fireplace. Above it was an abstract painting, but when Kathy closed the room door it faded away and was replaced by another message: I HOPE YOU FIND THIS SATISFACTORY.

“Cute guy, this host of ours,” Kathy said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Those TV screens or whatever they are better not be two-way. I don’t intend to put on any show for any electronic voyeur.”

Peter frowned. “Wouldn’t be surprised if the house was bugged. Bunnish was always a strange sort.”

“How strange?”

“He was hard to like,” Peter said. “Boastful, always bragging about how good he was as a chess player, how smart he was, that sort of thing. No one really believed him. His grades were good, I guess, but the rest of the time he seemed close to dense. E.C. has a wicked way with hoaxes and practical jokes, and Bunnish was his favorite victim. I don’t know how many laughs we had at his expense. Bunnish was kind of a goon in person, too. Pudgy, round-faced with big cheeks like some kind of chipmunk, wore his hair in a crew cut. He was in ROTC. I’ve never seen anyone who looked more ridiculous in a uniform. He never dated.”

“Gay?”

“No, not hardly. Asexual is closer to it.” Peter looked around the room and shook his head. “I can’t imagine how Bunnish made it this big. Him of all people.” He sighed, opened his suitcase, and started to unpack. “I might have believed it of Delmario,” he continued. “Steve and Bunnish were both in Tech, but Steve always seemed much brighter. We all thought he was a real whiz-kid. Bunnish just seemed like an arrogant mediocrity.”

“Fooled you,” Kathy said. She smiled sweetly. “Of course, he’s not the only one to fool you, is he? Though perhaps he was the first.”

“Enough,” Peter said, hanging the last of his shirts in the closet. “Come on, let’s get back downstairs. I want to talk to E.C.”

They had no sooner stepped out of their suite when a voice hailed them. “Pete?”

Peter turned, and the big man standing in the doorway down the hall smiled a blurry smile at him. “Don’t you recognize me, Peter?”

“Steve?” Peter said wonderingly.

“Sure, hey, who’d you think?” He stepped out of his own room, a bit unsteadily, and closed the door behind him. “This must be the wife, eh? Am I right?”

“Yes,” Peter said. “Kathy, this is Steve Delmario. Steve, Kathy.” Delmario came over and pumped her hand enthusiastically, after clapping Peter roundly on the back. Peter found himself staring. If E.C. had scarcely changed at all in the past ten years, Steve had made up for it. Peter would never have recognized his old teammate on the street.

The old Steve Delmario had lived for chess and electronics. He was a fierce competitor, and he loved to tinker things together, but he was frustratingly uninterested in anything outside his narrow passions. He had been a tall, gaunt youth with incredibly intense eyes held captive behind Coke-bottle lenses in heavy black frames. His black hair had always been either ruffled and unkempt or—when he treated himself to one of his do-it-yourself haircuts—grotesquely butchered. He was equally careless about his clothing, most of which was Salvation Army chic minus the chic: baggy brown pants with cuffs, ten-year-old shirts with frayed collars, a zippered and shapeless gray sweater he wore everywhere. Once E.C. had observed that Steve Delmario looked like the last man left alive on earth after a nuclear holocaust, and for almost a semester thereafter the whole club had called Delmario, “the last man on earth.” He took it with good humor. For all his quirks, Delmario had been well-liked.

The years had been cruel to him, however. The Coke-bottle glasses in the black frames were the same, and the clothes were equally haphazard—shabby brown cords, a short-sleeved white shirt with three felt-tip pens in the pocket, a faded sweater-vest with every button buttoned, scuffed Hush Puppies—but the rest had all changed. Steve had gained about fifty pounds, and he had a bloated, puffy look about him. He was almost entirely bald, nothing left of the wild black hair but a few sickly strands around his ears. And his eyes had lost their feverish intensity, and were filled instead with a fuzziness that Peter found terribly disturbing. Most shocking of all was the smell of alcohol on his breath. E.C. had hinted at it, but Peter still found it difficult to accept. In college, Steve Delmario had never touched anything but an infrequent beer.

“It is good to see you again,” Peter said, though he was no longer quite sure that was true. “Shall we go on downstairs? E.C. is waiting.”

Delmario nodded. “Sure, sure, let’s do it.” He clapped Peter on the back again. “Have you seen Bunnish yet? Damn, this is some place he’s got, isn’t it? You seen those message screens? Clever, real clever. Never would have figured Bunnish to go as far as this, not our old Funny Bunny, eh?” He chuckled. “I’ve looked at some of his patents over the years, you know. Real ingenious. Real fine work. And from Bunnish. I guess you just never know, do you?”

The living room was awash with classical music when they descended the spiral stair. Peter didn’t recognize the composition; his own tastes had always run to rock. But classical music had been one of E.C.’s passions, and he was sitting in an armchair now, eyes closed, listening.

“Drinks,” Delmario was saying. “I’ll fix us all some drinks. You folks must be thirsty. Bunny’s got a wet bar right behind the stair here. What do you want?”

“What are the choices?” Kathy asked.

“Hell, he’s got anything you could think of,” said Delmario.

“A Beefeater martini, then,” she said. “Very dry.”

Delmario nodded. “Pete?”

“Oh,” said Peter. He shrugged. “A beer, I guess.”

Delmario went behind the stair to fix up their drinks, and Kathy arched her eyebrows at him. “Such refined tastes,” she said. “A beer!”

Peter ignored her and went over to sit beside E.C. Stuart. “How the hell did you find the stereo?” he asked. “I don’t see it anywhere.” The music seemed to be coming right out of the walls.

E.C. opened his eyes, gave a quirkish little smile, and brushed one end of his mustache with a finger. “The message screen blabbed the secret to me,” he said. “The controls are built into the wall back over there,” nodding, “and the whole system is concealed. It’s voice-activated, too. Computerized. I told it what album I wanted to hear.”

“Impressive,” Peter admitted. He scratched his head. “Didn’t Steve put together a voice-activated stereo back in college?”

“Your beer,” Delmario said. He was standing over them, holding out a cold bottle of Heineken. Peter took it, and Delmario—with a drink in hand—seated himself on the ornate tiled coffee table. “I had a system,” he said. “Real crude, though. Remember, you guys used to kid me about it.”

“You bought a good cartridge, as I recall,” E.C. said, “but you had it held by a tone-arm you made out of a bent coat hanger.”

“It worked,” Delmario protested. “It was voice-activated too, like you said, but real primitive. Just on and off, that’s all, and you had to speak real loud. I figured I could improve on it after I got out of school, but I never did.” He shrugged. “Nothing like this. This is real sophisticated.”

“I’ve noticed,” E.C. said. He craned up his head slightly and said, in a very loud clear voice, “I’ve had enough music now, thank you.” The silence that followed was briefly startling. Peter couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Finally E.C. turned to him and said, all seriously, “How did Bunnish get you here, Peter?”

Peter was puzzled. “Get me here? He just invited us. What do you mean?”

“He paid Steve’s way, you know,” E.C. said. “As for me, I turned down this invitation. Brucie was never one of my favorite people, you know that. He pulled strings to change my mind. I’m with an ad agency in New York. He dangled a big account in front of them, and I was told to come here or lose my job. Interesting, eh?”

Kathy had been sitting on the sofa, sipping her martini and looking bored. “It sounds as though this reunion is important to him,” she observed.

E.C. stood up. “Come here,” he said. “I want to show you something.” The rest of them rose obediently, and followed him across the room. In a shadowy corner surrounded by bookcases, a chessboard had been set up, with a game in progress. The board was made of squares of light and dark wood, painstakingly inlaid into a gorgeous Victorian table. The pieces were ivory and onyx. “Take a look at that,” E.C. said.

“That’s a beautiful set,” Peter said, admiringly. He reached down to lift the Black queen for a closer inspection, and grunted in surprise. The piece wouldn’t move.

“Tug away,” E.C. said. “It won’t do you any good. I’ve tried. The pieces are glued into position. Every one of them.”

Steve Delmario moved around the board, his eyes blinking behind his thick glasses. He set his drink on the table and sank into the chair behind the White pieces. “The position,” he said, his voice a bit blurry with drink. “I know it.”

E.C. Stuart smiled thinly and brushed his mustache. “Peter,” he said, nodding toward the chessboard. “Take a good look.”

Peter stared, and all of a sudden it came clear to him, the position on the board became as familiar as his own features in a mirror. “The game,” he said. “From the nationals. This is the critical position from Bunnish’s game with Vesselere.”

E.C. nodded. “I thought so. I wasn’t sure.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Delmario said loudly. “How the hell could I not be sure? This is right where Bunny blew it, remember? He played king to knight one, instead of the sac. Cost us the match. Me, I was sitting right next to him, playing the best damned game of chess I ever played. Beat a Master, and what good did it do? Not a damn bit of good, thanks to Bunnish.” He looked at the board and glowered. “Knight takes pawn, that’s all he’s got to play, busts Vesselere wide open. Check, check, check, check, got to be a mate there somewhere.”

“You were never able to find it, though, Delmario,” Bruce Bunnish said from behind them.

None of them had heard him enter. Peter started like a burglar surprised while copping the family silver.

Their host stood in the doorway a few yards distant. Bunnish had changed, too. He had lost weight since college, and his body looked hard and fit now, though he still had the big round cheeks that Peter remembered. His crew cut had grown out into a healthy head of brown hair, carefully styled and blow-dried. He wore large, tinted glasses and expensive clothes. But he was still Bunnish. His voice was loud and grating, just as Peter remembered it.

Bunnish strolled over to the chessboard almost casually. “You analyzed that position for weeks afterward, Delmario,” he said. “You never found the mate.”

Delmario stood up. “I found a dozen mates,” he said.

“Yes,” Bunnish said, “but none of them were forced. Vesselere was a Master. He wouldn’t have played into any of your so-called mating lines.”

Delmario frowned and took a drink. He was going to say something else—Peter could see him fumbling for the words—but E.C. stood up and took away his chance. “Bruce,” he said, holding out his hand. “Good to see you again. How long has it been?”

Bunnish turned and smiled superciliously. “Is that another of your jokes, E.C.? You know how long it has been, and I know how long it has been, so why do you ask? Norten knows, and Delmario knows. Maybe you’re asking for Mrs. Norten.” He looked at Kathy. “Do you know how long it has been?”

She laughed. “I’ve heard.”

“Ah,” said Bunnish. He swung back to face E.C. “Then we all know, so it must be another of your jokes, and I’m not going to answer. Do you remember how you used to phone me at three in the morning, and ask me what time it was? Then I’d tell you, and you’d ask me what I was doing calling you at that hour?”

E.C. frowned and lowered his hand.

“Well,” said Bunnish, into the awkward silence that followed, “no sense standing here around this stupid chessboard. Why don’t we all go sit down by the fireplace, and talk.” He gestured. “Please.”

But when they were seated, the silence fell again. Peter took a swallow of beer and realized that he was more than just ill at ease. A palpable tension hung in the air. “Nice place you’ve got here, Bruce,” he said, hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

Bunnish looked around smugly. “I know,” he said. “I’ve done awfully well, you know. Awfully well. You wouldn’t believe how much money I have. I hardly know what to do with it all.” He smiled broadly and fatuously. “And how about you, my friends? Here I am boasting once again, when I ought to be listening to all of you recount your own triumphs.” Bunnish looked at Peter. “You first, Norten. You’re the captain, after all. How have you done?”

“All right,” Peter said, uncomfortably. “I’ve done fine. I own a bookstore.”

“A bookstore! How wonderful! I recall that you always wanted to be in publishing, though I rather thought you’d be writing books instead of selling them. Whatever happened to those novels you were going to write, Peter? Your literary career?”

Peter’s mouth was very dry. “I . . . things change, Bruce. I haven’t had much time for writing.” It sounded so feeble, Peter thought. All at once, he was desperately wishing he was elsewhere.

“No time for writing,” echoed Bunnish. “A pity, Norten. You had such promise.”

“He’s still promising,” Kathy put in sharply. “You ought to hear him promise. He’s been promising as long as I’ve known him. He never writes, but he does promise.”

Bunnish laughed. “Your wife is very witty,” he said to Peter. “She’s almost as funny as E.C. was, back in college. You must enjoy being married to her a great deal. I recall how fond you were of E.C.’s little jokes.” He looked at E.C. “Are you still a funny man, Stuart?”

E.C. looked annoyed. “I’m hysterical,” he said, in a flat voice.

“Good,” said Bunnish. He turned to Kathy and said, “I don’t know if Peter has told you all the stories about old E.C., but he really played some amazing pranks. Hilarious man, that’s our E.C. Stuart. Once, when our chess team had won the city championship, he had a girlfriend of his call up Peter and pretend to be an AP reporter. She interviewed him for an hour before he caught on.”

Kathy laughed. “Peter is sometimes a bit slow,” she said.

“Oh, that was nothing. Normally I was the one E.C. liked to play tricks on. I didn’t go out much, you know. Deathly afraid of girls. But E.C. had a hundred girlfriends, all of them gorgeous. One time he took pity on me and offered to fix me up on a blind date. I accepted eagerly, and when the girl arrived on the corner where we were supposed to meet, she was wearing dark glasses and carrying a cane. Tapping. You know.”

Steve Delmario guffawed, tried to stifle his laughter, and nearly choked on his drink. “Sorry,” he wheezed, “sorry.”

Bunnish waved casually. “Oh, go ahead, laugh. It was funny. The girl wasn’t really blind, you know, she was a drama student who was rehearsing a part in a play. But it took me all night to find that out. I was such a fool. And that was only one joke. There were hundreds of others.”

E.C. looked somber. “That was a long time ago. We were kids. It’s all behind us now, Bruce.”

“Bruce?” Bunnish sounded surprised. “Why, Stuart, that’s the first time you’ve ever called me Bruce. You have changed. You were the one who started calling me Brucie. God, how I hated that name! Brucie, Brucie, Brucie, I loathed it. How many times did I ask you to call me Bruce? How many times? Why, I don’t recall. I do recall, though, that after three years you finally came up to me at one meeting and said that you’d thought it over, and now you agreed that I was right, that Brucie was not an appropriate name for a Class A chess player, a twenty-year-old, an officer in ROTC. Your exact words. I remember the whole speech, E.C. It took me so by surprise that I didn’t know what to say, so I said, ‘Good, it’s about time!’ And then you grinned, and said that Brucie was out, that you’d never call me Brucie again. From now on, you said, you’d call me Bunny.”

Kathy laughed, and Delmario choked down an explosive outburst, but Peter only felt cold all over. Bunnish’s smile was genial enough, but his tone was pure iced venom as he recounted the incident. E.C. did not look amused either. Peter took a swallow of his beer, casting about for some ploy to get the conversation onto a different track. “Do any of you still play?” he heard himself blurt out.

They all looked at him. Delmario seemed almost befuddled. “Play?” he said. He blinked down at his empty glass.

“Help yourself to a refill,” Bunnish told him. “You know where it is.” He smiled at Peter as Delmario moved off to the bar. “You mean chess, of course.”

“Chess,” Peter said. “You remember chess. Odd little pastime played with black and white pieces and lots of two-faced clocks.” He looked around. “Don’t tell me we’ve all given it up?”

E.C. shrugged. “I’m too busy. I haven’t played a rated game since college.”

Delmario had returned, ice cubes clinking softly in a tumbler full of bourbon. “I played a little after college,” he said, “but not for the last five years.” He sat down heavily, and stared into the cold fireplace. “Those were my bad years. Wife left me, I lost a couple jobs. Bunny here was way ahead of me. Every goddamn idea I came up with, he had a patent on it already. Got so I was useless. That was when I started to drink.” He smiled, and took a sip. “Yeah,” he said. “Just then. And I stopped playing chess. It all comes out, you know, it all comes out over the board. I was losing, losing lots. To all these fish, God, I tell you, I couldn’t take it. Rating went down to Class B.” Delmario took another drink, and looked at Peter. “You need something to play good chess, you know what I’m saying? A kind of . . . hell, I don’t know . . . a kind of arrogance. Self-confidence. It’s all wrapped up with ego, that kind of stuff, and I didn’t have it anymore, whatever it was. I used to have it, but I lost it all. I had bad luck, and I looked around one day and it was gone, and my chess was gone with it. So I quit.” He lifted the tumbler to his lips, hesitated, and drained it all. Then he smiled for them. “Quit,” he repeated. “Gave it up. Chucked it away. Bailed out.” He chuckled, and stood up, and went off to the bar again.

“I play,” Bunnish said forcefully. “I’m a Master now.”

Delmario stopped in midstride, and fixed Bunnish with such a look of total loathing that it could have killed. Peter saw that Steve’s hand was shaking.

“I’m very happy for you, Bruce,” E.C. Stuart said. “Please do enjoy your Mastership, and your money, and Bunnishland.” He stood and straightened his vest, frowning. “Meanwhile, I’m going to be going.”

“Going?” said Bunnish. “Really, E.C., so soon? Must you?”

“Bunnish,” E.C. said, “you can spend the next four days playing your little ego games with Steve and Peter, if you like, but I’m afraid I am not amused. You always were a pimple-brain, and I have better things to do with my life than to sit here and watch you squeeze out ten-year-old pus. Am I making myself clear?”

“Oh, perfectly,” Bunnish said.

“Good,” said E.C. He looked at the others. “Kathy, it was nice meeting you. I’m sorry it wasn’t under better circumstances. Peter, Steve, if either of you comes to New York in the near future, I hope you’ll look me up. I’m in the book.”

“E.C., don’t you . . .” Peter began, but he knew it was useless. Even in the old days, E.C. Stuart was headstrong. You could never talk him into or out of anything.

“Good-bye,” he said, interrupting Peter. He went briskly to the elevator, and they watched the wood-paneled doors close on him.

“He’ll be back,” Bunnish said after the elevator had gone.

“I don’t think so,” Peter replied.

Bunnish got up, smiling broadly. Deep dimples appeared in his large, round cheeks. “Oh, but he will, Norten. You see, it’s my turn to play the little jokes now, and E.C. will soon find that out.”

“What?” Delmario said.

“Don’t you fret about it, you’ll understand soon enough,” Bunnish said. “Meanwhile, please do excuse me. I have to see about dinner. You all must be ravenous. I’m making dinner myself, you know. I sent my servants away, so we could have a nice private reunion.” He looked at his watch, a heavy gold Swiss. “Let’s all meet in the dining room in, say, an hour. Everything should be ready by then. We can talk some more. About life. About chess.” He smiled, and left.

Kathy was smiling too. “Well,” she said to Peter after Bunnish had left the room, “this is all vastly more entertaining than I would have imagined. I feel as if I just walked into a Harold Pinter play.”

“Who’s that?” Delmario asked, resuming his seat.

Peter ignored him. “I don’t like any of this,” he said. “What the hell did Bunnish mean about playing a joke on us?”

He didn’t have to wait long for an answer. While Kathy went to fix herself another martini, they heard the elevator again, and turned expectantly toward the doors. E.C. stepped out frowning. “Where is he?” he said in a hard voice.

“He went to cook dinner,” Peter said. “What is it? He said something about a joke. . . .”

“Those garage doors won’t open,” E.C. said. “I can’t get my car out. There’s no place to go without it. We must be fifty miles from the nearest civilization.”

“I’ll go down and ram out with my VW,” Delmario said helpfully. “Like in the movies.”

“Don’t be absurd,” E.C. said. “That door is stainless steel. There’s no way you’re going to batter it down.” He scowled and brushed back one end of his mustache. “Battering down Brucie, however, is a much more viable proposition. Where the hell is the kitchen?”

Peter sighed. “I wouldn’t if I were you, E.C.,” he said. “From the way he’s been acting, he’d just love a chance to clap you in jail. If you touch him, it’s assault, you know that.”

“Phone the police,” Kathy suggested.

Peter looked around. “Now that you mention it, I don’t see a phone anywhere in this room. Do you?” Silence. “There was no phone in our suite, either, that I recall.”

“Hey!” Delmario said. “That’s right, Pete, you’re right.” E.C. sat down. “He appears to have us checkmated,” he said.

“The exact word,” said Peter. “Bunnish is playing some kind of game with us. He said so himself. A joke.”

“Ha, ha,” said E.C. “What do you suggest we do, then? Laugh?”

Peter shrugged. “Eat dinner, talk, have our reunion, find out what the hell Bunnish wants with us.”

“Win the game, guys, that’s what we do,” Delmario said. E.C. stared at him. “What the hell does that mean?”

Delmario sipped his bourbon and grinned. “Peter said Bunny was playing some kind of game with us, right? OK, fine. Let’s play. Let’s beat him at this goddamned game, whatever the hell it is.” He chuckled. “Hell, guys, this is the Funny Bunny we’re playing. Maybe he is a Master, I don’t give a good goddamn, he’ll still find a way to blow it in the end. You know how it was. Bunnish always lost the big games. He’ll lose this one, too.”

“I wonder,” said Peter. “I wonder.”

PETER BROUGHT another bottle of Heineken back to the suite with him, and sat in a deck chair on the patio drinking it while Kathy tried out the hot tub.

“This is nice,” she said from the tub. “Relaxing. Sensuous, even. Why don’t you come on in?”

“No, thanks,” Peter said.

“We ought to get one of these.”

“Right. We could put it in our living room. The people in the apartment downstairs would love it.” He took a swallow of beer and shook his head.

“What are you thinking about?” Kathy asked.

Peter smiled grimly. “Chess, believe it or not.”

“Oh? Do tell.”

“Life is a lot like chess,” he said.

She laughed. “Really? I’d never noticed, somehow.”

Peter refused to let her needling get to him. “All a matter of choices. Every move you face choices, and every choice leads to different variations. It branches and then branches again, and sometimes the variation you pick isn’t as good as it looked, isn’t sound at all. But you don’t know that until your game is over.”

“I hope you’ll repeat this when I’m out of the tub,” Kathy said. “I want to write it all down for posterity.”

“I remember, back in college, how many possibilities life seemed to hold. Variations. I knew, of course, that I’d only live one of my fantasy lives, but for a few years there, I had them all, all the branches, all the variations. One day I could dream of being a novelist, one day I would be a journalist covering Washington, the next—oh, I don’t know, a politician, a teacher, whatever. My dream lives. Full of dream wealth and dream women. All the things I was going to do, all the places I was going to live. They were mutually exclusive, of course, but since I didn’t have any of them, in a sense I had them all. Like when you sit down at a chessboard to begin a game, and you don’t know what the opening will be. Maybe it will be a Sicilian, or a French, or a Ruy Lopez. They all coexist, all the variations, until you start making the moves. You always dream of winning, no matter what line you choose, but the variations are still . . . different.” He drank some more beer. “Once the game begins, the possibilities narrow and narrow and narrow, the other variations fade, and you’re left with what you’ve got—a position half of your own making, and half chance, as embodied by that stranger across the board. Maybe you’ve got a good game, or maybe you’re in trouble, but in any case there’s just that one position to work from. The might-have-beens are gone.”

Kathy climbed out of the hot tub and began toweling herself off. Steam rose from the water, and moved gently around her. Peter found himself looking at her almost with tenderness, something he had not felt in a long time. Then she spoke, and ruined it. “You missed your calling,” she said, rubbing briskly with the towel. “You should have taken up poster-writing. You have a knack for poster profundity. You know, like, I am not in this world to live up to your expect—”

“Enough,” Peter said. “How much blood do you have to draw, damn it?”

Kathy stopped and looked at him. She frowned. “You’re really down, aren’t you?” she said.

Peter stared off at the mountains, and did not bother to reply.

The concern left her voice as quickly as it had come. “Another depression, huh? Drink another beer, why don’t you? Feel sorry for yourself some more. By midnight you’ll have worked yourself up to a good crying jag. Go on.”

“I keep thinking of that match,” Peter said.

“Match?”

“In the nationals,” he said. “Against Chicago. It’s weird, but I keep having this funny feeling, like . . . like it was right there that it all started to go bad. We had a chance to do something big, something special. But it slipped away from us, and nothing has been right since. A losing variation, Kathy. We picked a losing variation, and we’ve been losing ever since. All of us.”

Kathy sat down on the edge of the tub. “All of you?”

Peter nodded. “Look at us. I failed as a novelist, failed as a journalist, and now I’ve got a failing bookstore. Not to mention a bitch wife. Steve is a drunk who couldn’t even get together enough money to pay his way out here. E.C. is an aging account executive with an indifferent track record, going nowhere. Losers. You said it, in the car.”

She smiled. “Ah, but what about our host? Bunnish lost bigger than any of you, and he seems to have won everything since.”

“Hmmmm,” said Peter. He sipped thoughtfully at his beer. “I wonder. Oh, he’s rich enough, I’ll give you that. But he’s got a chessboard in his living room with the pieces glued into position, so he can stare every day at the place he went wrong in a game played ten years ago. That doesn’t sound like a winner to me.”

She stood up, and shook loose her hair. It was long and auburn and it fell around her shoulders gorgeously, and Peter remembered the sweet lady he had married eight years ago, when he was a bright young writer working hard on his first novel. He smiled. “You look nice,” he said.

Kathy seemed startled. “You are feeling morose,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t have a fever?”

“No fever. Just a memory, and a lot of regrets.”

“Ah,” she said. She walked back toward their bedroom, and snapped the towel at him in passing. “C’mon, captain. Your team is going to be waiting, and all this heavy philosophy has given me quite an appetite.”

THE FOOD WAS fine, but the dinner was awful.

They ate thick slabs of rare prime rib, with big baked potatoes and lots of fresh vegetables. The wine looked expensive and tasted wonderful. Afterwards, they had their choice of three desserts, plus fresh-ground coffee and several delicious liqueurs. Yet the meal was strained and unpleasant, Peter thought. Steve Delmario was in pretty bad shape even before he came to the table, and while he was there he drank wine as if it were water, getting louder and fuzzier in the process. E.C. Stuart was coldly quiet, his fury barely held in check behind an icy, aloof demeanor. And Bunnish thwarted every one of Peter’s attempts to move conversation to safe neutral ground.

His genial expansiveness was a poor mask for gloating, and he insisted on opening old wounds from their college years. Every time Peter recounted an anecdote that was amusing or harmless, Bunnish smiled and countered with one that stank of hurt and rejection.

Finally, over coffee, E.C. could stand no more of it. “Pus,” he said loudly, interrupting Bunnish. It was about the third word he’d permitted himself the entire meal. “Pus and more pus. Bunnish, what’s the point? You’ve brought us here. You’ve got us trapped here, with you. Why? So you can prove that we treated you shabbily back in college? Is that the idea? If so, fine. You’ve made your point. You were treated shabbily. I am ashamed, I am guilty. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Now let’s end it. It’s over.”

“Over?” said Bunnish, smiling. “Perhaps it is. But you’ve changed, E.C. Back when I was the butt of your jokes, you’d recount them for weeks. Over wasn’t so final then, was it? And what about my game with Vesselere in the nationals? When that was over, did we forget it? Oh, no, we did not. That game was played in December, you’ll recall. I heard about it until I graduated in May. At every meeting. That game was never over for me. Delmario liked to show me a different checkmate every time I saw him. Our dear captain refrained from playing me in any league matches for the rest of the year. And you, E.C., you liked to greet me with, ‘Say, Bunny, lost any big ones lately?’ You even reprinted that game in the club newsletter, and mailed it in to Chess Life. No doubt all this seems like ancient history to you. I have this trick memory, though. I can’t forget things quite so easily. I remember it all. I remember the way Vesselere sat there, with his hands folded on his stomach, never moving, staring at me out of those itty-bitty eyes of his. I remember the way he moved his pieces, very carefully, very daintily, lifting each one between thumb and forefinger. I remember wandering into the halls between moves to get a drink of water, and seeing Norten over by the wall charts, talking to Mavora from the A team. You know what he was saying? He was gesturing with his hands, all worked up, and he was telling him, He’s going to blow it, damn it, he’s going to blow it! Isn’t that right, Peter? And Les looked over at me as I passed, and said, Lose this one and your ass is grass, Bunny! He was another endearing soul. I remember all the people who kept coming to look at my game. I remember Norten standing in the corner with Hal Winslow, the two mighty captains, talking heatedly. Winslow was all rumpled and needed a shave and he had his clipboard, and he was trying to figure out who’d finish where if we won, or tied, or lost. I remember how it felt when I tipped over my king, too. I remember the way Delmario started kicking the wall, the way E.C. shrugged and glanced up at the ceiling, and the way Peter came over and just said Bunnish! and shook his head. You see? My trick memory is as tricky as ever, and I haven’t forgotten a thing. And especially I haven’t forgotten that game. I can recite all the moves to you right now, if you’d like.”

“Shit,” said Steve Delmario. “Only one important move to recite, Bunny. Knight takes pawn, that’s the move you ought to recite. The sac, the winning sac, the one you didn’t play. I forget what kind of feeble thing you did instead.”

Bunnish smiled. “My move was king to knight one,” he said. “To protect my rook pawn. I’d castled long, and Vesselere was threatening to snatch it.”

“Pawn, shmawn,” said Delmario. “You had him busted. The sac would have gutted that whale like nobody’s goddamned business. What a laugh that would have been. The bunny rabbit beating the whale. Old Hal Winslow would have been so shocked he would have dropped his clipboard. But you blew it, guarding some diddly-squat little pawn. You blew it.”

“So you told me,” said Bunnish. “And told me, and told me.”

“Look,” Peter said, “I don’t see the sense in rehashing all of this. Steve is drunk, Bruce. You can see that. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“He knows exactly what he’s saying, Norten,” Bunnish replied. He smiled thinly and removed his glasses. Peter was startled by his eyes. The hatred there was almost tangible, and there was something else as well, something old and bitter and somehow trapped. The eyes passed lightly over Kathy, who was sitting quietly amidst all the old hostility, and touched Steve Delmario, Peter Norten, and E.C. Stuart each in turn, with vast loathing and vast amusement.

“Enough,” Peter said, almost pleadingly.

“NO!” said Delmario. The drink had made him belligerent. “It’s not enough, it’ll never be enough, goddamn it. Get out a set, Bunny! I dare you! We’ll analyze it right now, go over the whole thing again, I’ll show you how you pissed it all away.” He pulled himself to his feet.

“I have a better idea,” said Bunnish. “Sit down, Delmario.”

Delmario blinked uncertainly, and then fell back into his chair.

“Good,” said Bunnish. “We’ll get to my idea in a moment, but first I’m going to tell you all a story. As Archie Bunker once said, revenge is the best way to get even. But it isn’t revenge unless the victim knows. So I’m going to tell you. I’m going to tell you exactly how I’ve ruined your lives.”

“Oh, come off it!” E.C. said.

“You never did like stories, E.C.,” Bunnish said. “Know why? Because when someone tells a story, they become the center of attention. And you always needed to be the center of attention, wherever you were. Now you’re not the center of anything, though. How does it feel to be insignificant?”

E.C. gave a disgusted shake of his head and poured himself more coffee. “Go on, Bunnish,” he said. “Tell your story. You have a captive audience.”

“I do, don’t I?” Bunnish smiled. “All right. It all begins with that game. Me and Vesselere. I did not blow that game. It was never won.”

Delmario made a rude noise.

“I know,” Bunnish continued, unperturbed, “now, but I did not know then. I thought that you were right. I’d thrown it all away, I thought. It ate at me. For years and years, more years than you would believe. Every night I went to sleep replaying that game in my head. That game blighted my entire life. It became an obsession. I wanted only one thing—another chance. I wanted to go back, somehow, to choose another line, to make different moves, to come out a winner. I’d picked the wrong variation, that was all. I knew that if I had another chance, I’d do better. For more than fifty years, I worked toward that end, and that end alone.”

Peter swallowed a mouthful of cold coffee hastily and said, “What? Fifty years? You mean five, don’t you?”

“Fifty,” Bunnish repeated.

“You are insane,” said E.C.

“No,” said Bunnish. “I am a genius. Have you ever heard of time travel, any of you?”

“It doesn’t exist,” said Peter. “The paradoxes . . .”

Bunnish waved him quiet. “You’re right and you’re wrong, Norten. It exists, but only in a sort of limited fashion. Yet that is enough. I won’t bore you with mathematics none of you can understand. Analogy is easier. Time is said to be the fourth dimension, but it differs from the other three in one conspicuous way—our consciousness moves along it. From past to present only, alas. Time itself does not flow, no more than, say, width can flow. Our minds flicker from one instant of time to the next. This analogy was my starting point. I reasoned that if consciousness can move in one direction, it can move in the other direction as well. It took me fifty years to work out the details, however, and make what I call a flashback possible.

“That was in my first life, gentlemen, a life of failure and ridicule and poverty. I tended my obsession and did what I had to so as to keep myself fed. And I hated you, each of you, for every moment of those fifty years. My bitterness was inflamed as I watched each of you succeed, while I struggled and failed. I met Norten once, twenty years after college, at an autographing party. You were so patronizing. It was then that I determined to ruin you, all of you.

“And I did. What is there to say? I perfected my device at the age of seventy-one. There is no way to move matter through time, but mind, mind is a different issue. My device would send my mind back to any point in my own lifetime that I chose, superimpose my consciousness with all of its memories on the consciousness of my earlier self. I could take nothing with me, of course.” Bunnish smiled and tapped his temple significantly. “But I still had my photographic memory. It was more than enough. I memorized things I would need to know in my new life, and I flashed back to my youth. I was given another chance, a chance to make some different moves in the game of life. I did.”

Steve Delmario blinked. “Your body,” he said blurrily. “What happened to your body, huh?”

“An interesting question. The kick of the flashback kills the would-be time-traveler. The body, that is. The timeline itself goes on, however. At least my equations indicate that it should. I’ve never been around to witness it. Meanwhile, changes in the past create a new, variant timeline.”

“Oh, alternate tracks,” Delmario said. He nodded. “Yeah.”

Kathy laughed. “I can’t believe I’m sitting here listening to all this,” she said. “And that he”—she pointed to Delmario—“is taking it seriously.”

E.C. Stuart had been looking idly at the ceiling, with a disdainful, faintly tolerant smile on his face. Now he straightened. “I agree,” he said to Kathy. “I am not so gullible as you were, Bruce,” he told Bunnish, “and if you are trying to get some laughs by having us swallow this crock of shit, it isn’t going to work.”

Bunnish turned to Peter. “Captain, what’s your vote?”

“Well,” said Peter carefully, “all this is a little hard to credit, Bruce. You spoke of the game becoming an obsession with you, and I think that’s true. I think you ought to be talking to a professional about this, not to us.”

“A professional what?” Bunnish said.

Peter fidgeted uncomfortably. “You know. A shrink or a counselor.”

Bunnish chuckled. “Failure hasn’t made you any less patronizing,” he said. “You were just as bad in the bookstore, in that line where you turned out to be a successful novelist.”

Peter sighed, “Bruce, can’t you see how pathetic these delusions of yours are? I mean, you’ve obviously been quite a success, and none of us have done as well, but even that wasn’t enough for you, so you’ve constructed all these elaborate fantasies about how you have been the one behind our various failures. Vicarious, imaginary revenge.”

“Neither vicarious nor imaginary, Norten,” Bunnish snapped. “I can tell you exactly how I did it.”

“Let him tell his stories, Peter,” E.C. said. “Then maybe he’ll let us out of this funny farm.”

“Why, thank you, E.C.,” Bunnish said. He looked around the table with smug satisfaction, like a man about to live out a dream he has cherished for a long, long time. Finally he fastened on Steve Delmario. “I’ll start with you,” he said, “because in fact, I did start with you. You were easy to destroy, Delmario, because you were always so limited. In the original timeline, you were as wealthy as I am in this one. While I spent my life perfecting my flashback device, you made vast fortunes in the wide world out there. Electronic games at first, later more basic stuff, home computers, that sort of thing. You were born for that, and you were the best in the business, inspired and ingenious.

“When I flashed back, I simply took your place. Before using my device, I studied all your early little games, your cleverest ideas, the basic patents that came later and made you so rich. And I memorized all of them, along with the dates on which you’d come up with each and every one. Back in the past, armed with all this foreknowledge, it was child’s play to beat you to the punch. Again and again. In those early years, Delmario, didn’t it ever strike you as strange the way I anticipated every one of your small brainstorms? I’m living your life, Delmario.”

Delmario’s hand had begun to tremble as he listened. His face looked dead. “God damn you,” he said. “God damn you.”

“Don’t let him get to you, Steve,” E.C. put in. “He’s just making this up to see us squirm. It’s all too absurd for words.”

“But it’s true,” Delmario wailed, looking from E.C. to Bunnish and then, helpless, at Peter. Behind the thick lenses his eyes seemed wild. “Peter, what he said—all my ideas—he was always ahead of me, he, he, I told you, he—”

“Yes,” Peter said firmly, “and you told Bruce too, when we were talking earlier. Now he’s just using your fears against you.”

Delmario opened his mouth, but no words came out.

“Have another drink,” Bunnish suggested.

Delmario stared at Bunnish as if he were about to leap up and strangle him. Peter tensed himself to intervene. But then, instead, Delmario reached out for a half-empty wine bottle, and filled his glass sloppily.

“This is contemptible, Bruce,” E.C. said.

Bunnish turned to face him. “Delmario’s ruin was easy and dramatic,” he said. “You were more difficult, Stuart. He had nothing to live for but his work, you see, and when I took that away from him, he just collapsed. I only had to anticipate him a half-dozen times before all of his belief in himself was gone, and he did the rest himself. But you, E.C., you had more resources.”

“Go on with the fairy tale, Bunnish,” E.C. said in a put-upon tone.

“Delmario’s ideas had made me rich,” Bunnish said. “I used the money against you. Your fall was less satisfying and less resounding than Delmario’s. He went from the heights to the pits. You were only a moderate success to begin with, and I had to settle for turning you into a moderate failure. But I managed. I pulled strings behind the scenes to lose you a number of large accounts. When you were with Foote, Cone I made sure another agency hired away a copywriter named Allerd, just before he came up with a campaign that would have rebounded to your credit. And remember when you left that position to take a better-paying slot at a brand-new agency? Remember how quickly that agency folded, leaving you without an income? That was me. I’ve given your career twenty or thirty little shoves like that. Haven’t you ever wondered at how infallibly wrong most of your professional moves have been, Stuart? At your bad luck?”

“No,” said E.C. “I’m doing well enough, thank you.”

Bunnish smiled. “I played one other little joke on you, too. You can thank me for that case of herpes you picked up last year. The lady who gave it to you was well paid. I had to search for her for a good number of years until I found the right combination—an out-of-work actress who was young and gorgeous and precisely your type, yet sufficiently desperate to do just about anything, and gifted with an incurable venereal disease as well. How did you like her, Stuart? It’s your fault, you know. I just put her in your path, you did the rest yourself. And I thought it was so fitting, after my blind date and all.”

E.C.’s expression did not change. “If you think this is going to break me down or make me believe you, you’re way off base. All this proves is that you’ve had me investigated, and managed to dig up some dirt on my life.”

“Oh,” said Bunnish. “Always so skeptical, Stuart. Scared that if you believe, you’ll wind up looking foolish. Tsk.” He turned toward Peter. “And you, Norten. You. Our fearless leader. You were the most difficult of all.”

Peter met Bunnish’s eyes and said nothing.

“I read your novel, you know,” Bunnish said casually.

“I’ve never published a novel.”

“Oh, but you have! In the original timeline, that is. Quite a success too. The critics loved it, and it even appeared briefly on the bottom of the Times bestseller list.”

Peter was not amused. “This is so obvious and pathetic,” he said.

“It was called Beasts in a Cage, I believe,” Bunnish said.

Peter had been sitting and listening with contempt, humoring a sick, sad man. Now, suddenly, he sat upright as if slapped.

He heard Kathy suck in her breath. “My God,” she said. E.C. seemed puzzled. “Peter? What is it? You look . . .”

“No one knows about that book,” Peter said. “How the hell did you find out? My old agent, you must have gotten the title from him. Yes. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“No,” said Bunnish, smiling complacently.

“You’re lying!”

“Peter, what is it?” said E.C. “Why are you so upset?”

Peter looked at him. “My book,” he said. “I . . . Beasts in a Cage was . . .”

“There was such a book?”

“Yes,” Peter said. He swallowed nervously, feeling confused and angry. “Yes, there was. I . . . after college. My first novel.” He gave a nervous laugh. “I thought it would be the first. I had . . . had a lot of hopes. It was ambitious. A serious book, but I thought it had commercial possibilities as well. The circus. It was about the circus, you know how I was always fascinated by the circus. A metaphor for life, I thought, a kind of life, but very colorful too, and dying, a dying institution. I thought I could write the great circus novel. After college, I traveled with Ringling Brothers’ Blue Show for a year, doing research. I was a butcher, I . . . that’s what they call the vendors in the stands, you see. A year of research, and I took two years to write the novel. The central character was a boy who worked with the big cats. I finally finished it and sent it off to my agent, and less than three weeks after I’d gotten it into the mail, I, I . . .” He couldn’t finish.

But E.C. understood. He frowned. “That circus bestseller? What was the title?”

“Blue Show,” Peter said, the words bitter in his mouth. “By Donald Hastings Sullivan, some old hack who’d written fifty gothics and a dozen formula westerns, all under pen names. Such a book, from such a writer. No one could believe it. E.C., I couldn’t believe it. It was my book, under a different title. Oh, it wasn’t word-for-word. Beasts in a Cage was a lot better written. But the story, the background, the incidents, even a few of the character names . . . it was frightening. My agent never marketed my book. He said it was too much like Blue Show to be publishable, that no one would touch it. And even if I did get it published, he warned me, I would be labeled derivative at best, and a plagiarist at worst. It looked like a rip-off, he said. Three years of my life, and he called it a rip-off. We had words. He fired me, and I couldn’t get another agent to take me on. I never wrote another book. The first one had taken too much out of me.” Peter turned to Bunnish. “I destroyed my manuscript, burned every copy. No one knew about that book except my agent, me, and Kathy. How did you find out?”

“I told you,” said Bunnish. “I read it.”

“You damned liar!” Peter said. He scooped up a glass in a white rage, and flung it down the table at Bunnish’s smiling face, wanting to obliterate that complacent grin, to see it dissolve into blood and ruin. But Bunnish ducked and the glass shattered against a wall.

“Easy, Peter,” E.C. said. Delmario was blinking in owlish stupidity, lost in an alcoholic haze. Kathy was gripping the edge of the table. Her knuckles had gone white.

“Methinks our captain doth protest too much,” Bunnish said, his dimples showing. “You know I’m telling the truth, Norten. I read your novel. I can recite the whole plot to prove it.” He shrugged. “In fact, I did recite the whole plot. To Donald Hastings Sullivan, who wrote Blue Show while in my employ. I would have done it myself, but I had no aptitude for writing. Sully was glad for the chance. He got a handsome flat fee and we split the royalties, which were considerable.”

“You son of a bitch,” Peter said, but he said it without force. He felt his rage ebbing away, leaving behind only a terrible sickly feeling, the certainty of defeat. He felt cheated and helpless and, all of a sudden, he realized that he believed Bunnish, believed every word of his preposterous story. “It’s true, isn’t it?” he said. “It is really true. You did it to me. You. You stole my words, my dreams, all of it.”

Bunnish said nothing.

“And the rest of it,” Peter said, “the other failures, those were all you too, weren’t they? After Blue Show, when I went into journalism . . . that big story that evaporated on me, all my sources suddenly denying everything or vanishing, so it looked like I’d made it all up. The assignments that evaporated, all those lawsuits, plagiarism, invasion of privacy, libel, every time I turned around I was being sued. Two years, and they just about ran me out of the profession. But it wasn’t bad luck, was it? It was you. You stole my life.”

“You ought to be complimented, Norten. I had to break you twice. The first time I managed to kill your literary career with Blue Show, but then while my back was turned you managed to become a terribly popular journalist. Prizewinning, well known, all of it, and by then it was too late to do anything. I had to flash back once more to get you, do everything all over.”

“I ought to kill you, Bunnish,” Peter heard himself say. E.C. shook his head. “Peter,” he said, in the tone of a man explaining something to a high-grade moron, “this is all an elaborate hoax. Don’t take Bunny seriously.”

Peter stared at his old teammate. “No, E.C. It’s true. It’s all true. Stop worrying about being the butt of a joke, and think about it. It makes sense. It explains everything that has happened to us.”

E.C. Stuart made a disgusted noise, frowned, and fingered the end of his mustache.

“Listen to your captain, Stuart,” Bunnish said.

Peter turned back to him. “Why? That’s what I want to know. Why? Because we played jokes on you? Kidded you? Maybe we were rotten, I don’t know, it didn’t seem to be so terrible at the time. You brought a lot of it on yourself. But whatever we might have done to you, we never deserved this. We were your teammates, your friends.”

Bunnish’s smile curdled, and the dimples disappeared. “You were never my friends.”

Steve Delmario nodded vigorously at that. “You’re no friend of mine, Funny Bunny, I tell you that. Know what you are? A wimp. You were always a goddamn wimp, that’s why nobody ever liked you, you were just a damn wimp loser with a crew cut. Hell, you think you were the only one ever got kidded? What about me, the ol’ last man on earth, huh, what about that? What about the jokes E.C. played on Pete, on Les, on all the others?” He took a drink. “Bringing us here like this, that’s another damn wimp thing to do. You’re the same Bunny you always were. Wasn’t enough to do something, you had to brag about it, let everybody know. And if somethin’ went wrong, was never your fault, was it? You only lost ’cause the room was too noisy, or the lighting was bad, whatever.” Delmario stood up. “You make me sick. Well, you screwed up all our lives maybe, and now you told us about it. Good for you. You had your damn wimp fun. Now let us out of here.”

“I second that motion,” said E.C.

“Why, I wouldn’t think of it,” Bunnish replied. “Not just yet. We haven’t played any chess yet. A few games for old times’ sake.”

Delmario blinked, and moved slightly as he stood holding the back of his chair. “The game,” he said, suddenly reminded of his challenge to Bunnish of a few minutes ago. “We were goin’ to play over the game.”

Bunnish folded his hands neatly in front of him on the table. “We can do better than that,” he said. “I am a very fair man, you see. None of you ever gave me a chance, but I’ll give one to you, to each of you. I’ve stolen your lives. Wasn’t that what you said, Norten? Well, friends, I’ll give you a shot at winning those lives back. We’ll play a little chess. We’ll replay the game, from the critical position. I’ll take Vesselere’s side and you can have mine. The three of you can consult, if you like, or I’ll play you one by one. I don’t care. All you have to do is beat me. Win the game you say I should have won, and I’ll let you go, and give you anything you like. Money, property, a job, whatever.”

“Go t’hell, wimp,” Delmario said. “I’m not interested in your damn money.”

Bunnish picked up his glasses from the table and donned them, smiling widely. “Or,” he said, “if you prefer, you can win a chance to use my flashback device. You can go back then, anticipate me, do it all over, live the lives you were destined to live before I dealt myself in. Just think of it. It’s the best opportunity you’ll ever have, any of you, and I’m making it so easy. All you have to do is win a won game.”

“Winning a won game is one of the hardest things in chess,” Peter said sullenly. But even as he said it, his mind was racing, excitement stirring deep in his gut. It was a chance, he thought, a chance to reshape the ruins of his life, to make it come out right. To obliterate the wrong turnings, to taste the wine of success instead of the wormwood of failure, to avoid the mockery that his marriage to Kathy had become. Dead hopes rose like ghosts to dance again in the graveyard of his dreams. He had to take the shot, he knew. He had to.

Steve Delmario was there before him. “I can win that goddamned game,” he boomed drunkenly. “I could win it with my eyes shut. You’re on, Bunny. Get out a set, damn you!”

Bunnish laughed and stood up, putting his big hands flat on the tabletop and using them to push himself to his feet. “Oh no, Delmario. You’re not going to have the excuse of being drunk when you lose. I’m going to crush you when you are cold stone sober. Tomorrow. I’ll play you tomorrow.”

Delmario blinked furiously. “Tomorrow,” he echoed.

LATER, WHEN they were alone in their room, Kathy turned on him. “Peter,” she said, “let’s get out of here. Tonight. Now.”

Peter was sitting before the fire. He had found a small chess set in the top drawer of his bedside table, and had set up the critical position from Vesselere-Bunnish to study it. He scowled at the distraction and said, “Get out? How the hell do you propose we do that, with our car locked up in that garage?”

“There’s got to be a phone here somewhere. We could search, find it, call for help. Or just walk.”

“It’s December, and we’re in the mountains miles from anywhere. We try to walk out of here and we could freeze to death. No.” He turned his attention back to the chessboard and tried to concentrate.

“Peter,” she said angrily.

He looked up again. “What?” he snapped. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“We have to do something. This whole scene is insane. Bunnish needs to be locked up.”

“He was telling the truth,” Peter said.

Kathy’s expression softened, and for an instant there was something like sorrow on her face. “I know,” she said softly.

“You know,” Peter mimicked savagely. “You know, do you? Well, do you know how it feels? That bastard is going to pay. He’s responsible for every rotten thing that has happened to me. For all I know, he’s probably responsible for you.”

Kathy’s lips moved only slightly, and her eyes moved not at all, but suddenly the sorrow and sympathy were gone from her face, and instead Peter saw familiar pity, well-honed contempt. “He’s just going to crush you again,” she said coldly. “He wants you to lust after this chance, because he intends to deny it to you. He’s going to beat you, Peter. How are you going to like that? How are you going to live with it, afterwards?”

Peter looked down at the chess pieces. “That’s what he intends, yeah. But he’s a moron. This is a won position. It’s only a matter of finding the winning line, the right variation. And we’ve got three shots at it. Steve goes first. If he loses, E.C. and I will be able to learn from his mistakes. I won’t lose. I’ve lost everything else, maybe, but not this. This time I’m going to be a winner. You’ll see.”

“I’ll see, all right,” Kathy said. “You pitiful bastard.”

Peter ignored her, and moved a piece. Knight takes pawn.

KATHY REMAINED in the suite the next morning. “Go play your damn games if you like,” she told Peter. “I’m going to soak in the hot tub, and read. I want no part of this.”

“Suit yourself,” Peter said. He slammed the door behind him, and thought once again what a bitch he’d married.

Downstairs, in the huge living room, Bunnish was setting up the board. The set he’d chosen was not ornate and expensive like the one in the corner, with its pieces glued into place. Sets like that looked good for decorative purposes, but were useless in serious play. Instead Bunnish had shifted a plain wooden table to the center of the room, and fetched out a standard tournament set: a vinyl board in green and white that he unrolled carefully, a well-worn set of Drueke pieces of standard Staunton design, cast in black and white plastic with lead weights in the bases, beneath the felt, to give them a nice heft. He placed each piece into position from memory, without once looking at the game frozen on the expensive inlaid board across the room. Then he began to set a double-faced chess clock. “Can’t play without the clock, you know,” he said, smiling. “I’ll set it exactly the same as it stood that day in Evanston.”

When everything was finished, Bunnish surveyed the board with satisfaction and seated himself behind Vesselere’s Black pieces. “Ready?” he asked.

Steve Delmario sat down opposite him, looking pale and terribly hungover. He was holding a big tumbler full of orange juice, and behind his thick glasses his eyes moved nervously. “Yeah,” he said. “Go on.”

Bunnish pushed the button that started Delmario’s clock.

Very quickly, Delmario reached out, played knight takes pawn—the pieces clicked together softly as he made the capture—and used the pawn he’d taken to punch the clock, stopping his own timer and starting Bunnish’s.

“The sac,” said Bunnish. “What a surprise.” He took the knight.

Delmario played bishop takes pawn, saccing another piece. Bunnish was forced to capture with his king. He seemed unperturbed. He was smiling faintly, his dimples faint creases in his big cheeks, his eyes clear and sharp and cheerful behind his tinted eyeglasses.

Steve Delmario was leaning forward over the board, his dark eyes sweeping back and forth over the position, back and forth, over and over again as if double-checking that everything was really where he thought it was. He crossed and uncrossed his legs. Peter, standing just behind him, could almost feel the tension beating off Delmario in waves, twisting him. Even E.C. Stuart, seated a few feet distant in a big comfortable armchair, was staring at the game intently. The clock ticked softly. Delmario lifted his hand to move his queen, but hesitated with his fingers poised above it. His hand trembled.

“What’s the matter, Steve?” Bunnish asked. He steepled his hands just beneath his chin, and smiled when Delmario looked up at him. “You hesitate. Don’t you know? He who hesitates is lost. Uncertain, all of a sudden? Surely that can’t be. You were always so certain before. How many mates did you show me? How many?”

Delmario blinked, frowned. “I’m going to show you one more, Bunny,” he said furiously. His fingers closed on his queen, shifted it across the board. “Check.”

“Ah,” said Bunnish. Peter studied the position. The double sac had cleared away the pawns in front of the Black king, and the queen check permitted no retreat. Bunnish marched his king up a square, toward the center of the board, toward the waiting White army. Surely he was lost now. His own defenders were all over on the queenside, and the enemy was all around him. But Bunnish did not seem worried.

Delmario’s clock was ticking as he examined the position. He sipped his juice, shifted restlessly in his seat. Bunnish yawned, and grinned tauntingly. “You were the winner that day, Delmario. Beat a Master. The only winner. Can’t you find the win now? Where are all those mates, eh?”

“There’s so many I don’t know which one to go with, Bunny,” Steve said. “Now shut up, damn you. I’m trying to think.”

“Oh,” said Bunnish. “Pardon.”

Delmario consumed ten minutes on his clock before he reached out and moved his remaining knight. “Check.”

Bunnish advanced his king again.

Delmario licked his lips, slid his queen forward a square. “Check.”

Bunnish’s king went sideways, toward the safety of the queenside.

Delmario flicked a pawn forward. “Check.”

Bunnish had to take. He removed the offending pawn with his king, smiling complacently.

With the file open, Delmario could bring his rooks into play. He shifted one over. “Check.”

Bunnish’s harried king moved again.

Now Delmario moved the rook forward, sliding it right up the file to confront the enemy king face-to-face. “Check!” he said loudly.

Peter sucked in his breath sharply, without meaning to. The rook was hanging! Bunnish could just snatch it off. He stared at the position over Delmario’s shoulder. Bunnish could take the rook with his king, all right, but then the other rook came over, the king had to go back, then if the queen shifted just one square . . . yes . . . too many mate threats in that variation. Black had lots of resources, but they all ended in disaster. But if Bunnish took with his knight instead of his king, he left that square unguarded . . . hmmm . . . queen check, king up, bishop comes in . . . no, mate was even quicker that way.

Delmario drained his orange juice and set the empty tumbler down with self-satisfied firmness.

Bunnish moved his king diagonally forward. The only possible move, Peter thought. Delmario leaned forward. Behind him, Peter leaned forward too. The White pieces were swarming around Black’s isolated king now, but how to tighten the mating net? Steve had three different checks, Peter thought. No, four, he could do that too. He watched and analyzed in silence. The rook check was no good, the king just retreated, and further checks simply drove him to safety. The bishop? No, Bunnish could trade off, take with his rook—he was two pieces up, after all. Several subvariations branched off from the two queen checks. Peter was still trying to figure out where they led, when Delmario reached out suddenly, grabbed a pawn from in front of his king, and moved it up two squares. He slammed it down solidly, and slapped the clock. Then he sat back and crossed his arms. “Your move, Bunny,” he said.

Peter studied the board. Delmario’s last move didn’t give check, but the pawn advance cut off an important escape square. Now that threatened rook check was no longer innocuous. Instead of being chased back to safety, the Black king got mated in three. Of course, Bunnish had a tempo now, it was his move, he could bring up a defender. His queen now, could . . . no, then queen check, king back, rook check, and the Black queen fell . . . bishop maybe . . . no, check there and mate in one, unstoppable. The longer Peter looked at the position, the fewer defensive resources he saw for Black. Bunnish could delay the loss, but he couldn’t stop it. He was smashed!

Bunnish did not look smashed. Very calmly he picked up a knight and moved it to queen’s knight six. “Check,” he said quietly.

Delmario stared. Peter stared. E.C. Stuart got up out of his chair and drifted closer, his finger brushing back his mustache as he considered the game. The check was only a time-waster, Peter thought. Delmario could capture the knight with either of two pawns, or he could simply move his king. Except . . . Peter scowled . . . if White took with the bishop pawn, queen came up with check, king moved to the second, queen takes rook pawn with check, king . . . no, that was no good. White got mated by force. The other way seemed to bring on the mate even faster, after the queen checked from the eighth rank.

Delmario moved his king up.

Bunnish slid a bishop out along a diagonal. “Check.”

There was only one move. Steve moved his king forward again. He was being harassed, but his mating net was still intact, once the checks had run their course.

Bunnish flicked his knight backward, with another check.

Delmario was blinking and twisting his legs beneath the table. Peter saw that if he brought his king back, Bunnish had a forced series of checks leading to mate . . . but the Black knight hung now, to both rook and queen, and . . . Delmario captured it with the rook.

Bunnish grabbed White’s advanced pawn with his queen, removing the cornerstone of the mating net. Now Delmario could play queen takes queen, but then he lost his queen to a fork, and after the tradeoffs that followed he’d be hopelessly busted. Instead he retreated his king.

Bunnish made a tsking noise and captured the White knight with his queen, again daring Delmario to take it. With knight and pawn both gone, Delmario’s mating threats had all dissipated, and if White snatched that Black queen, there was a check, a pin, take, take, take, and . . . Peter gritted his teeth together . . . and White would suddenly be in the endgame down a piece, hopelessly lost. No. There had to be something better. The position still had a lot of play in it. Peter stared, and analyzed.

Steve Delmario stared too, while his clock ticked. The clock was one of those fancy jobs, with a move counter. It showed that he had to make seven more moves to reach time control. He had just under fifteen minutes remaining. Some time pressure, but nothing serious.

Except that Delmario sat and sat, eyes flicking back and forth across the board, blinking. He took off his thick glasses and cleaned them methodically on his shirttail. When he slid them back on, the position had not changed. He stared at the Black king fixedly, as if he were willing it to fall. Finally he started to get up. “I need a drink,” he said.

“I’ll get it,” Peter snapped. “Sit down. You’ve only got eight minutes left.”

“Yeah,” Delmario said. He sat down again. Peter went to the bar and made him a screwdriver. Steve drained half of it in a gulp, never taking his eyes from the chessboard.

Peter happened to glance at E.C. Stuart. E.C. shook his head and cast his eyes up toward the ceiling. Not a word was spoken, but Peter heard the message: forget it.

Steve Delmario sat there, growing more and more agitated. With three minutes remaining on his clock, he reached out his hand, thought better of it, and pulled back. He shifted in his seat, gathered his legs up under him, leaned closer to the board, his nose a bare couple inches above the chessmen. His clock ticked.

He was still staring at the board when Bunnish smiled and said, “Your flag is down, Delmario.”

Delmario looked up, blinking. His mouth hung open. “Time,” he said urgently. “I just need time to find the win, got to be here someplace, got to, all those checks. . . .”

Bunnish rose. “You’re out of time, Delmario. Doesn’t matter anyway. You’re dead lost.”

“NO! No I’m not, damn you, there’s a win . . .”

Peter put a hand on Steve’s shoulder. “Steve, take it easy,” he said. “I’m sorry. Bruce is right. You’re busted here.”

“No,” Delmario insisted. “I know there’s a winning combo, I just got to . . . got to . . . only . . .” His right hand, out over the board, began to shake, and he knocked over his own king.

Bunnish showed his dimples. “Listen to your captain, winner-boy,” he said. Then he looked away from Delmario, to where E.C. stood scowling. “You’re next, Stuart. Tomorrow. Same time, same place.”

“And if I don’t care to play?” E.C. said disdainfully.

Bunnish shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “I’ll be here, and the game will be here. I’ll start your clock on time. You can lose over the board or lose by forfeit. You lose either way.”

“And me?” Peter said.

“Why, captain,” said Bunnish. “I’m saving you for last.”

STEVE DELMARIO was a wreck. He refused to leave the chessboard except to mix himself fresh drinks. For the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon he remained glued to his seat, drinking like a fish and flicking the chess pieces around like a man possessed, playing and replaying the game. Delmario wolfed down a couple sandwiches that Peter made up for him around lunchtime, but there was no talking to him, no calming him. Peter tried. In an hour or so, Delmario would be passed out from the booze he was downing in such alarming quantities.

Finally he and E.C. left Delmario alone, and went upstairs to his suite. Peter knocked on the door. “You decent, Kathy? E.C. is with me.”

She opened the door. She had on jeans and a T-shirt. “Decent as I ever get,” she said. “Come on in. How did the great game come out?”

“Delmario lost,” Peter said. “It was a close thing, though. I thought we had him for a moment.”

Kathy snorted.

“So what now?” E.C. said.

“You going to play tomorrow?” E.C. shrugged. “Might as well. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

“Good,” Peter said. “You can beat him. Steve almost won, and we both know the shape he’s in. We’ve got to analyze, figure out where he went wrong.”

E.C. fingered his mustache. He looked cool and thoughtful. “That pawn move,” he suggested. “The one that didn’t give check. It left White open for that counterattack.”

“It also set up the mating net,” Peter said. He looked over his shoulder, saw Kathy standing with her arms crossed. “Could you get the chessboard from the bedroom?” he asked her. When she left, Peter turned back to E.C. “I think Steve was already lost by the time he made that pawn move. That was his only good shot—lots of threats there. Everything else just petered out after a few checks. He went wrong before that, I think.”

“All those checks,” E.C. said. “One too many, maybe?”

“Exactly,” said Peter. “Instead of driving him into a checkmate, Steve drove him into safety. You’ve got to vary somewhere in there.”

“Agreed.”

Kathy arrived with the chess set and placed it on the low table between them. As Peter swiftly set up the critical position, she folded her legs beneath her and sat on the floor. But she grew bored very quickly when they began to analyze, and it wasn’t long before she got to her feet again with a disgusted noise. “Both of you are crazy,” she said. “I’m going to get something to eat.”

“Bring us back something, will you?” Peter asked. “And a couple of beers?” But he hardly noticed it when she placed the tray beside them.

They stayed at it well into the night. Kathy was the only one who went down to dine with Bunnish. When she returned, she said, “That man is disgusting,” so emphatically that it actually distracted Peter from the game. But only for an instant.

“Here, try this,” E.C. said, moving a knight, and Peter looked back quickly.

“I SEE YOU decided to play, Stuart,” Bunnish said the next morning.

E.C., looking trim and fresh, his sandy hair carefully combed and brushed, a steaming mug of black coffee in hand, nodded briskly. “You’re as sharp as ever, Brucie.”

Bunnish chuckled.

“One point, however,” E.C. said, holding up a finger. “I still don’t believe your cock-and-bull story about time travel. We’ll play this out, all right, but we’ll play for money, not for one of your flashbacks. Understood?”

“You jokers are such suspicious types,” Bunnish said. He sighed. “Anything you say, of course. You want money. Fine.”

“One million dollars.”

Bunnish smiled broadly. “Small change,” he said. “But I agree. Beat me, and you’ll leave here with one million. You’ll take a check, I hope?”

“A certified check.” E.C. turned to Peter. “You’re my witness,” he said, and Peter nodded. The three of them were alone this morning. Kathy was firm in her disinterest, and Delmario was in his room sleeping off his binge.

“Ready?” Bunnish asked.

“Go on.”

Bunnish started the clock. E.C. reached out and played the sacrifice. Knight takes pawn. His motions were crisp and economical. Bunnish captured, and E.C. played the bishop sac without a second’s hesitation. Bunnish captured again, pushed the clock.

E.C. Stuart brushed back his mustache, reached down, and moved a pawn. No check.

“Ah,” Bunnish said. “An improvement. You have something up your sleeve, don’t you? Of course you do. E.C. Stuart always has something up his sleeve. The hilarious, unpredictable E.C. Stuart. Such a joker. So imaginative.”

“Play chess, Brucie,” snapped E.C.

“Of course.” Peter drifted closer to the board while Bunnish studied the position. They had gone over and over the game last night, and had finally decided that the queen check that Delmario had played following the double sac was unsound. There were several other checks in the position, all tempting, but after hours of analysis he and E.C. had discarded those as well. Each of them offered plenty of traps and checkmates should Black err, but each of them seemed to fail against correct play, and they had to assume Bunnish would play correctly.

E.C.’s pawn move was a more promising line. Subtler. Sounder. It opened lines for White’s pieces, and interposed another barrier between Black’s king and the safety of the queenside. Suddenly White had threats everywhere. Bunnish had serious troubles to chew on now.

He did not chew on them nearly as long as Peter would have expected. After studying the position for a bare couple minutes, he picked up his queen and snatched off White’s queen rook pawn, which was undefended. Bunnish cupped the pawn in his hand, yawned, and slouched back in his chair, looking lazy and unperturbed.

E.C. Stuart permitted himself a brief scowl as he looked over the position. Peter felt uneasy as well. That move ought to have disturbed Bunnish more than it had, he thought. White had so many threats . . . last night they had analyzed the possibilities exhaustively, playing and replaying every variation and subvariation until they were sure that they had found the win. Peter had gone to sleep feeling almost jubilant. Bunnish had a dozen feasible defenses to their pawn thrust. They’d had no way of knowing which one he would choose, so they had satisfied themselves that each and every one ultimately ended in failure.

Only now Bunnish had fooled them. He hadn’t played any of the likely defenses. He had just ignored E.C.’s mating threats, and gone pawn-snatching as blithely as the rankest patzer. Had they missed something? While E.C. considered the best reply, Peter drew up a chair to the side of the board so he could analyze in comfort.

There was nothing, he thought, nothing. Bunnish had a check next move, if he wanted it, by pushing his queen to the eighth rank. But it was meaningless. E.C. hadn’t weakened his queenside the way Steve had yesterday, in his haste to find a mate. If Bunnish checked, all Stuart had to do was move his king up to queen two. Then the Black queen would be under attack by a rook, and forced to retreat or grab another worthless pawn. Meanwhile, Bunnish would be getting checkmated in the middle of the board. The more Peter went over the variations, the more convinced he became that there was no way Bunnish could possibly work up the kind of counterattack he had used to smash Steve Delmario.

E.C., after a long and cautious appraisal of the board, seemed to reach the same conclusion. He reached out coolly and moved his knight, hemming in Bunnish’s lonely king once and for all. Now he threatened a queen check that would lead to mate in one. Bunnish could capture the dominating knight, but then E.C. just recaptured with a rook, and checkmate followed soon thereafter, no matter how Bunnish might wriggle on the hook.

Bunnish smiled across the board at his opponent, and lazily shoved his queen forward a square to the last rank. “Check,” he said.

E.C. brushed back his mustache, shrugged, and played his king up. He punched the clock with a flourish. “You’re lost,” he said flatly.

Peter was inclined to agree. That last check had accomplished nothing; in fact, it seemed to have worsened Black’s plight. The mate threats were still there, as unstoppable as ever, and now Black’s queen was under attack as well. He could pull it back, of course, but not in time to help with the defense. Bunnish ought to be frantic and miserable.

Instead his smile was so broad that his fat cheeks were threatening to crack in two. “Lost?” he said. “Ah, Stuart, this time the joke is on you!” He giggled like a teenage girl, and brought his queen down the rank to grab off White’s rook. “Check!”

Peter Norten had not played a game of tournament chess in a long, long time, but he still remembered the way it had felt when an opponent suddenly made an unexpected move that changed the whole complexion of a game: the brief initial confusion, the what is that? feeling, followed by panic when you realized the strength of the unanticipated move, and then the awful swelling gloom that built and built as you followed through one losing variation after another in your head. There was no worse moment in the game of chess.

That was how Peter felt now.

They had missed it totally. Bunnish was giving up his queen for a rook, normally an unthinkable sacrifice, but not in this position. E.C. had to take the offered queen. But if he captured with his king, Peter saw with sudden awful clarity, Black had a combination that won the farm, which meant he had to use the other rook, pulling it off its crucial defense of the central knight . . . and then . . . oh, shit!

E.C. tried to find another alternative for more than fifteen minutes, but there was no alternative to be found. He played rook takes queen. Bunnish quickly seized his own rook and captured the knight that had moved so menacingly into position only two moves before. With ruthless precision, Bunnish then forced the tradeoff of one piece after another, simplifying every danger off the board. All of a sudden they were in the endgame. E.C. had a queen and five pawns; Bunnish had a rook, two bishops, a knight, and four pawns, and—ironically—his once-imperiled king now occupied a powerful position in the center of the board.

Play went on for hours, as E.C. gamely gave check after check with his rogue queen, fighting to pick up a loose piece or perhaps draw by repetition. But Bunnish was too skilled for such desperation tactics. It was only a matter of technique.

Finally E.C. tipped over his king.

“I thought we looked at every possible defense,” Peter said numbly.

“Why, captain,” said Bunnish cheerfully. “Every attempt to defend loses. The defending pieces block off escape routes or get in the way. Why should I help mate myself? I’d rather let you try to do that.”

“I will do that,” Peter promised angrily. “Tomorrow.”

Bunnish rubbed his hands together. “I can scarcely wait!”

THAT NIGHT the postmortem was held in E.C.’s suite; Kathy—who had greeted their glum news with an “I told you so” and a contemptuous smile—had insisted that she didn’t want them staying up half the night over a chessboard in her presence. She told Peter he was behaving like a child, and they had angry words before he stormed out.

Steve Delmario was going over the morning’s loss with E.C. when Peter joined them. Delmario’s eyes looked awfully bloodshot, but otherwise he appeared sober, if haggard. He was drinking coffee. “How does it look?” Peter asked when he pulled up a seat.

“Bad,” E.C. said.

Delmario nodded. “Hell, worse’n bad, it’s starting to look like that damn sac is unsound after all. I can’t believe it, I just can’t, it all looks so promising, got to be something there. Got to. But I’m damned if I can find it.”

E.C. added, “The surprise he pulled today is a threat in a number of variations. Don’t forget, we gave up two pieces to get to this position. Unfortunately, that means that Brucie can easily afford to give some of that material back to get out of the fix. He still comes out ahead, and wins the endgame. We’ve found a few improvements on my play this morning—”

“That knight doesn’t have to drop,” interjected Delmario.

“. . . but nothing convincing,” E.C. concluded.

“You ever think,” Delmario said, “that maybe the Funny Bunny was right? That maybe the sac don’t work, maybe the game was never won at all?” His voice had a note of glum disbelief in it.

“There’s one thing wrong with that,” Peter said.

“Oh?”

“Ten years ago, after Bunnish had blown the game and the match, Robinson Vesselere admitted that he had been lost.”

E.C. looked thoughtful. “That’s true. I’d forgotten that.”

“Vesselere was almost a Senior Master. He had to know what he was talking about. The win is there. I mean to find it.”

Delmario clapped his hands together and whooped gleefully. “Hell yes, Pete, you’re right! Let’s go!”

“AT LAST the prodigal spouse returns,” Kathy said pointedly when Peter came in. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

She was seated in a chair by the fireplace, though the fire had burned down to ashes and embers. She wore a dark robe, and the end of the cigarette she was smoking was a bright point in the darkness. Peter had come in smiling, but now he frowned. Kathy had once been a heavy smoker, but she’d given it up years ago. Now she only lit a cigarette when she was very upset. When she lit up, it usually meant they were headed for a vicious row.

“It’s late,” Peter said. “I don’t know how late. What does it matter?” He’d spent most of the night with E.C. and Steve, but it had been worth it. They’d found what they had been looking for. Peter had returned tired but elated, expecting to find his wife asleep. He was in no mood for grief. “Never mind about the time,” he said to her, trying to placate. “We’ve got it, Kath.”

She crushed out her cigarette methodically. “Got what? Some new move you think is going to defeat our psychopathic host? Don’t you understand that I don’t give a damn about this stupid game of yours? Don’t you listen to a thing I say? I’ve been waiting up half the night, Peter. It’s almost three in the morning. I want to talk.”

“Yeah?” Peter snapped. Her tone had gotten his back up. “Did you ever think that maybe I didn’t want to listen? Well, think it. I have a big game tomorrow. I need my sleep. I can’t afford to stay up till dawn screaming at you. Understand? Why the hell are you so hot to talk anyway? What could you possibly have to say that I haven’t heard before, huh?”

Kathy laughed nastily. “I could tell you a few things about your old friend Bunnish that you haven’t heard before.”

“I doubt it.”

“Do you? Well, did you know that he’s been trying to get me into bed for the past two days?”

She said it tauntingly, throwing it at him. Peter felt as if he had been struck. “What?”

“Sit down,” she snapped, “and listen.”

Numbly, he did as she bid him. “Did you?” he asked, staring at her silhouette in the darkness, the vaguely ominous shape that was his wife.

“Did I? Sleep with him, you mean? Jesus, Peter, how can you ask that? Do you loathe me that much? I’d sooner sleep with a roach. That’s what he reminds me of anyway.” She gave a rueful chuckle. “He isn’t exactly a sophisticated seducer, either. He actually offered me money.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“To knock some goddamned sense into you! Can’t you see that Bunnish is trying to destroy you, all of you, any way he can? He didn’t want me. He just wanted to get at you. And you, you and your moron teammates, are playing right into his hands. You’re becoming as obsessed with that idiot chess game as he is.” She leaned forward. Dimly, Peter could make out the lines of her face. “Peter,” she said almost imploringly, “don’t play him. He’s going to beat you, love, just like he beat the others.”

“I don’t think so, love,” Peter said from between clenched teeth. The endearment became an epithet as he hurled it back at her. “Why the hell are you always so ready to predict defeat for me, huh? Can’t you ever be supportive, not even for a goddamned minute? If you won’t help, why don’t you just bug off? I’ve had all I can stand of you, damn it. Always belittling me, mocking. You’ve never believed in me. I don’t know why the hell you married me, if all you wanted to do was make my life a hell. Just leave me alone!”

For a long moment after Peter’s outburst there was silence. Sitting there in the darkened room, he could almost feel her rage building—any instant now he expected to hear her start screaming. Then he would scream back, and she would get up and break something, and he would grab her, and then the knives would come out in earnest. He closed his eyes, trembling, feeling close to tears. He didn’t want this, he thought. He really didn’t.

But Kathy fooled him. When she spoke, her voice was surprisingly gentle. “Oh, Peter,” she said. “I never meant to hurt you. Please. I love you.”

He was stunned. “Love me?” he said wonderingly.

“Please listen. If there is anything at all left between us, please just listen to me for a few minutes. Please.”

“All right,” he said.

“Peter, I did believe in you once. Surely you must remember how good things were in the beginning? I was supportive then, wasn’t I? The first few years, when you were writing your novel? I worked, I kept food on the table, I gave you the time to write.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, anger creeping back into his tone. Kathy had thrown that at him before, had reminded him forcefully of how she’d supported them for two years while he wrote a book that turned out to be so much wastepaper. “Spare me your reproaches, huh? It wasn’t my fault I couldn’t sell the book. You heard what Bunnish said.”

“I wasn’t reproaching you, damn it!” she snapped. “Why are you always so ready to read criticism into every word I say?” She shook her head, and got her voice back under control. “Please, Peter, don’t make this harder than it is. We have so many years of pain to overcome, so many wounds to bind up. Just hear me out.

“I was trying to say that I did believe in you. Even after the book, after you burned it . . . even then. You made it hard, though. I didn’t think you were a failure, but you did, and it changed you, Peter. You let it get to you. You gave up writing, instead of just gritting your teeth and doing another book.”

“I wasn’t tough enough, I know,” he said. “The loser. The weakling.”

“Shut up!” she said in exasperation. “I didn’t say that, you did. Then you went into journalism. I still believed. But everything kept going wrong. You got fired, you got sued, you became a disgrace. Our friends started drifting away. And all the time you insisted that none of it was your fault. You lost all the rest of your self-confidence. You didn’t dream anymore. You whined, bitterly and incessantly, about your bad luck.”

“You never helped.”

“Maybe not,” Kathy admitted. “I tried to, at the start, but it just got worse and worse and I couldn’t deal with it. You weren’t the dreamer I’d married. It was hard to remember how I’d admired you, how I’d respected you. Peter, you loathed yourself so much that there was no way to keep the loathing from rubbing off on me.”

“So?” Peter said. “What’s the point, Kathy?”

“I never left you, Peter,” she said. “I could have, you know. I wanted to. I stayed, through all of it, all the failures and all the self-pity. Doesn’t that say anything to you?”

“It says you’re a masochist,” he snapped. “Or maybe a sadist.”

That was too much for her. She started to reply, and her voice broke, and she began to weep. Peter sat where he was and listened to her cry. Finally the tears ran out, and she said, quietly, “Damn you. Damn you. I hate you.”

“I thought you loved me. Make up your mind.”

“You ass. You insensitive creep. Don’t you understand, Peter?”

“Understand what?” he said impatiently. “You said listen, so I’ve been listening, and all you’ve been doing is rehashing all the same old stuff, recounting all my inadequacies. I heard it all before.”

“Peter, can’t you see that this week has changed everything? If you’d only stop hating, stop loathing me and yourself, maybe you could see it. We have a chance again, Peter. If we try. Please.”

“I don’t see that anything has changed. I’m going to play a big chess game tomorrow, and you know how much it means to me and my self-respect, and you don’t care. You don’t care if I win or lose. You keep telling me I’m going to lose. You’re helping me to lose by making me argue when I should be sleeping. What the hell has changed? You’re the same damn bitch you’ve been for years.”

“I will tell you what has changed,” she said. “Peter, up until a few days ago, both of us thought you were a failure. But you aren’t! It hasn’t been your fault. None of it. Not bad luck, like you kept saying, and not personal inadequacy either, like you really thought. Bunnish has done it all. Can’t you see what a difference that makes? You’ve never had a chance, Peter, but you have one now. There’s no reason you shouldn’t believe in yourself. We know you can do great things! Bunnish admitted it. We can leave here, you and I, and start all over again. You could write another book, write plays, do anything you want. You have the talent. You’ve never lacked it. We can dream again, believe again, love each other again. Don’t you see? Bunnish had to gloat to complete his revenge, but by gloating he’s freed you!”

Peter sat very still in the dark room, his hand clenching and unclenching on the arm of the chair as Kathy’s words sunk in. He had been so wrapped up in the chess game, so obsessed with Bunnish’s obsession, that he had never seen it, never considered it. It wasn’t me, he thought wonderingly. All those years, it was never me. “It’s true,” he said in a small voice.

“Peter?” she said, concerned.

He heard the concern, heard more than that, heard love in her voice. So many people, he thought, make such grand promises, promise better or worse, promise rich or poorer, and bail out as soon as things turn the least bit sour in a relationship. But she had stayed, through all of it, the failures, the disgrace, the cruel words and the poisonous thoughts, the weekly fights, the poverty. She had stayed.

“Kathy,” he said. The next words were very hard. “I love you, too.” He started to get up and move toward her, and began to cry.

THEY ARRIVED late the next morning. They showered together, and Peter dressed with unusual care. For some reason, he felt it was important to look his best. It was a new beginning, after all. Kathy came with him. They entered the living room holding hands. Bunnish was already behind the board, and Peter’s clock was ticking. The others were there too. E.C. was seated patiently in a chair. Delmario was pacing. “Hurry up,” he said when Peter came down the stairs. “You’ve lost five minutes already.”

Peter smiled. “Easy, Steve,” he said. He went over and took his seat behind the White pieces. Kathy stood behind him. She looked gorgeous this morning, Peter thought.

“It’s your move, captain,” Bunnish said, with an unpleasant smile.

“I know,” Peter said. He made no effort to move, scarcely even looked at the board. “Bruce, why do you hate me? I’ve been thinking about that, and I’d like to know the answer. I can understand about Steve and E.C. Steve had the presumption to win when you lost, and he rubbed your nose in that defeat afterwards. E.C. made you the butt of his jokes. But why me? What did I ever do to you?”

Bunnish looked briefly confused. Then his face grew hard. “You. You were the worst of them all.”

Peter was startled. “I never . . .”

“The big captain,” Bunnish said sarcastically. “That day ten years ago, you never even tried. You took a quick grandmaster draw with your old friend Hal Winslow. You could have tried for a win, played on, but you didn’t. Oh, no. You never cared how much more pressure you put on the rest of us. And when we lost, you didn’t take any of the blame, not a bit of it, even though you gave up half a point. It was all my fault. And that wasn’t all of it, either. Why was I on first board, Norten? All of us on the B team had approximately the same rating. How did I get the honor of being board one?”

Peter thought for a minute, trying to recall the strategies that had motivated him ten years before. Finally he nodded. “You always lost the big games, Bruce. It made sense to put you up on board one, where you’d face the other teams’ big guns, the ones who’d probably beat whoever we played there. That way the lower boards would be manned by more reliable players, the ones we could count on in the clutch.”

“In other words,” Bunnish said, “I was a write-off. You expected me to lose, while you won matches on the lower boards.”

“Yes,” Peter admitted. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry,” mocked Bunnish. “You made me lose, expected me to lose, and then tormented me for losing, and now you’re sorry. You didn’t play chess that day. You never played chess. You were playing a bigger game, a game that lasted for years, between you and Winslow of U.C. And the team members were your pieces and your pawns. Me, I was a sac. A gambit. That was all. And it didn’t work anyway. Winslow beat you. You lost.”

“You’re right,” Peter admitted. “I lost. I think I understand now. Why you did all the things you’ve done.”

“You’re going to lose again now,” Bunnish said. “Move, before your clock runs out.” He nodded down at the checkered wasteland that lay between them, at the complex jumble of Black and White pieces.

Peter glanced at the board with disinterest. “We analyzed until three in the morning last night, the three of us. I had a new variation all set. A single sacrifice, instead of the double sac. I play knight takes pawn, but I hold back from the bishop sac, swing my queen over instead. That was the idea. It looked pretty good. But it’s unsound, isn’t it?”

Bunnish stared at him. “Play it, and we’ll find out!”

“No,” said Peter. “I don’t want to play.”

“Pete!” Steve Delmario said in consternation. “You got to, what are you saying, beat this damn bastard.”

Peter looked at him. “It’s no good, Steve.”

There was a silence. Finally Bunnish said, “You’re a coward, Norten. A coward and a failure and a weakling. Play the game out.”

“I’m not interested in the game, Bruce. Just tell me. The variation is unsound.”

Bunnish made a disgusted noise. “Yes, yes,” he snapped. “It’s unsound. There’s a countersac, I give up a rook to break up your mating threats, but I win a piece back a few moves later.”

“All the variations are unsound, aren’t they?” Peter said.

Bunnish smiled thinly.

“White doesn’t have a won game at all,” Peter said. “We were wrong, all those years. You never blew the win. You never had a win. Just a position that looked good superficially, but led nowhere.”

“Wisdom, at last,” Bunnish said. “I’ve had computers print out every possible variation. They take forever, but I’ve had lifetimes. When I flashed back—you have no idea how many times I have flashed back, trying one new idea after another—that is always my target point, that day in Evanston, the game with Vesselere. I’ve tried every move there is to be tried in that position, every wild idea. It makes no difference. Vesselere always beats me. All the variations are unsound.”

“But,” Delmario protested, looking bewildered, “Vesselere said he was lost. He said so!”

Bunnish looked at him with contempt. “I had made him sweat a lot in a game he should have won easily. He was just getting back. He was a vindictive man, and he knew that by saying that he’d make the loss that much more painful.” He smirked. “I’ve taken care of him too, you know.”

E.C. Stuart rose up from his chair and straightened his vest. “If we’re done now, Brucie, maybe you would be so kind as to let us out of Bunnishland?”

“You can go,” Bunnish said. “And that drunk, too. But not Peter.” He showed his dimples. “Why, Peter has almost won, in a sense. So I’m going to be generous. You know what I’m going to do for you, Captain? I’m going to let you use my flashback device.”

“No thank you,” Peter said.

Bunnish stared, befuddled. “What do you mean, no? Don’t you understand what I’m giving you? You can wipe out all your failures, try again, make some different moves. Be a success in another timeline.”

“I know. Of course, that would leave Kathy with a dead body in this timeline, wouldn’t it? And you with the satisfaction of driving me to something that uncannily resembles suicide. No. I’ll take my chances with the future instead of the past. With Kathy.”

Bunnish let his mouth droop open. “What do you care about her? She hates you anyway. She’ll be better off with you dead. She’ll get the insurance money and you’ll get somebody better, somebody who cares about you.”

“But I do care about him,” Kathy said. She put a hand on Peter’s shoulder. He reached up and touched it, and smiled.

“Then you’re a fool too,” Bunnish cried. “He’s nothing, he’ll never be anything. I’ll see to that.”

Peter stood up. “I don’t think so, somehow. I don’t think you can hurt us anymore. Any of us.” He looked at the others. “What do you think, guys?”

E.C. cocked his head thoughtfully, and ran a finger along the underside of his mustache. “You know,” he said, “I think you’re right.”

Delmario just seemed baffled, until all of a sudden the light broke across his face, and he grinned. “You can’t steal ideas I haven’t come up with yet, can you?” he said to Bunnish. “Not in this timeline, anyhow.” He made a loud whooping sound and stepped up to the chessboard. Reaching down, he stopped the clock. “Checkmate,” he said. “Checkmate, checkmate, checkmate!”

LESS THAN TWO weeks later, Kathy knocked softly on the door of his study. “Wait a sec!” Peter shouted. He typed out another sentence, then flicked off the typewriter and swiveled in his chair. “C’mon in.”

She opened the door and smiled at him. “I made some tuna salad, if you want to take a break for lunch. How’s the book coming?”

“Good,” Peter said. “I should finish the second chapter today, if I keep at it.” She was holding a newspaper, he noticed. “What’s that?”

“I thought you ought to see this,” she replied, handing it over.

She’d folded it open to the obits. Peter took it and read. Millionaire electronics genius Bruce Bunnish had been found dead in his Colorado home, hooked up to a strange device that had seemingly electrocuted him. Peter sighed.

“He’s going to try again, isn’t he?” Kathy said.

Peter put down the newspaper. “The poor bastard. He can’t see it.”

“See what?”

Peter took her hand and squeezed it. “All the variations are unsound,” he said. It made him sad. But after lunch, he soon forgot about it, and went back to work.

BRAINCHILD

Joseph H. Delaney

New technologies create new situations—and new problems for one of the oldest professions.

Two days of rooting around in Delmar Schoonover’s records by the now-frantic Ruth Purley had resulted in the formation of a precarious mound on his living room floor which threatened avalanche at any moment.

Dr. Schoonover watched pensively. Seated on a nearby ottoman, he’d long ago gnawed away his last consumable fingernail, and was reduced to simple fidgeting.

On the floor, sprawled out in a most unladylike manner. Ruth displayed her own frustration in regular bursts of muttering, as she slipped through yet another of the many notebooks. In her right hand a brand-new yellow pencil, already cracked, suddenly snapped, and she jumped to her unshod feet. A towering five foot three, she glared down at him, hands on hips, brown hair falling over hazel eyes, white blouse half fallen from the waist band of her severely slit black skirt. “Dummy,” she roared at him.

Schoonover’s eyes fell. He looked crushed, his hands grinding into one another.

She dropped to her knees and place her hands on his shoulders. “I’m sorry Delmar. That was cruel of me. I take it all back. If you were a dummy you wouldn’t be in the fix you’re in, with all your own words about to bite you.

“But I’m frustrated. Worse yet. I’m sorely in need of some fresh cuss words. The ones I had are worn out.”

“There’s no need to apologize. Ruth. You’re doing your best. Don’t ruin your own career trying to save mine.”

“It’s not a question of that, Delmar. I’m your lawyer, remember, and lawyers thrive on controversy. None of this is going to do me one bit of harm. Notoriety like this could make my reputation. Why do you think I’ve been working my buns off out here, instead of at the office? It’s to keep the senior partners from taking you away from me.” She grinned and rubbed his shoulders.

And that, she thought, had been true enough to start with. Now, it was different. He’d grown on her, big awkward baby that he was: helpless, bumbling, absent-minded, thoroughly lovable man. And she, Ruth Purley, modern, independent, liberated professional woman in the tradition of the old bra-burners, was falling in love with him. “Disgusting!”

“What did you say?”

Think quickly, Ruth! “I said it’s disgusting. There has to be something basically wrong with a social system that can do a thing like this to you and to Adam. There has to be a way out of it. Everything I believe in depends on finding it. If I lose this case my faith in the system gets lost too. I think that’s the part that really scares me.”

“I’m satisfied with what you’re doing, Ruth. And I’m grateful. You have no idea how scared I was when the F.B.I. grabbed me, and when they took Adam away. Just when I needed an angel, there you were, breathing fire on Marshal McGill. If you hadn’t bailed me out I would’ve told them anything they wanted to know.”

“There’s nothing they need from you they haven’t got already. Everything necessary to make the charge stick is right there in your published papers. ‘Simon Legree Schoonover,’ it says at the top.”

“Then why’d they try to get this?” He pointed to the jumbled pile of notebooks and loose papers.

“To gild the lily, Delmar; to gain publicity, sympathy, rabid followers; and to pacify Madelyn Hundin. That’s what really irks me: Here’s an ignorant, big-mouthed busybody who probably never had an original thought, who makes her living raking muck and printing lies in that scandal sheet, and she’s got enough influence in this country to get you indicted for slavery. You, Delmar Schoonover, M.D., Pioneer Genetic Engineer, Nobel Prize timber. She picks you to be her Big Tuna.”

“I only met her once, Ruth. For about five minutes. Why is she doing this to me?”

“She’s not after the Pulitzer Prize, Delmar. She wants the hide off your rump because, at the moment, that’s a highly salable commodity. Right now it’s selling papers that otherwise wouldn’t be fit for outhouse use. Then there’s T.V. appearances on the talk shows. Later, it’ll be books. It’d be better for her if you lost, of course, but either way she’ll make money. If you’re acquitted she’ll write an exposé on the crooked courts; you can book it.”

Schoonover’s mind didn’t work that way. To make money, he thought, was a pretty poor reason to ruin a man and a worse reason yet to consciously impede the progress of science. He’d always looked on his research as a way to make an age-old dream come true; to make every child yet to be born healthy, happy and alert; to make every man and every woman as perfect as nature intended.

Now the dream was dying. Only Ruth believed it could be saved—or did she? Perhaps she, too, played out a part for reasons of her own, or maybe she intended simply to make the best of a bad situation and salvage what she could from the wreckage. Somehow, he doubted that, although it was possible that initially he’d represented only a professional challenge to her.

Ruth had forward ways, utterly alien to his personal concept of the feminine role. These, at first, had bothered him, until he found out she enjoyed their effect. Now he was at the point where he’d almost stopped blushing when she’d make an offbeat suggestion. If he could get his mind off his troubles long enough to let it happen, Schoonover thought, he just might be able to con her into seducing him. “Now there’s a thought.”

“O.K., so now we’re both doing it, Delmar. Have you got an idea?”

“Yes, but on second thought, it’s probably impractical. Forget it.” He’d been vocalizing thoughts.

“Well, we have to think of something pretty soon. We’ve got jury selection tomorrow at ten, and probably no more than a week or two before a trial setting. I’d better get back to the pile.”

“All rise,” yelled the bailiff.

Schoonover jumped to his feet and breathed deeply, his lungs filling with the sweetly scented air. Ruth’s perfume devastated him today, on this, the first day of his professional death. He reached down, found her hand, and grasped it firmly. Ruth, his small, ferocious champion, hair hanging down over the shoulders of her somber black suit, stood like an oak in a storm.

Through the door behind the bench a tall, gray-haired man swept the skirts of his black robe around him, walked briskly to his chair, and sat down.

“Hear Ye, Hear Ye!” the clerk’s voice boomed. “The United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, now holding session in Corpus Christi, is open pursuant to adjournment. God save these United States and this Honorable Court.”

“Heavy stuff, eh, Delmar?” Ruth whispered.

“Be seated,” said the court.

Ruth looked around at the rest of the room. She’d seen movies of the old Scopes “monkey” trial of a couple of generations ago. History does repeat itself, she mused.

Admission was by ticket only, with serious-faced GSA guards on the doors, checking credentials carefully. Most spectators were media people, and they came from everywhere, as witness the variety of clothing and racial types. The front rows were reserved for artists, who now worked furiously to pencil figures on pre-prepared background scenes.

So here I am. Me, Ruth Purley, at center stage. And why not? Slavery prosecutions were news. There hadn’t been one since U.S. vs. Booker, out in the fourth circuit, back in ’81. That had been a relatively colorless affair. But Schoonover was no cotton farmer and Adam was no farmhand. No, this trial wouldn’t be colorless.

She gazed to her left. Marshal Ralph McGill sat on a wooden chair, knees crossed, looking banal, twitching his right foot inside its fancy boot.

To her right was Roberto Monte, the Assistant U.S. District Attorney, relaxed, hand on a massive file, conversing in whispers with the Agent In Charge of the local F.B.I. office.

Then she looked up at the bench. Judge Cook was silently reading the minute sheet, determined to be certain that in this, the most controversial trial of his career, he made no errors obvious to the press. Around him, the various functionaries waited patiently: the minute clerk, who smiled demurely behind folded hands; and Paul, the reporter, surrounded by microphone wires that spread like spider legs from his recorder, hands resting on the keys of his stenotype.

Finally the court spoke. “The court will call case number CR C-95 101, the United States of America vs Delmar Schoonover. What says the Government?”

Monte stood. “Ready, Your Honor.” He resumed his seat, shuffling his file aside.

“Very well, what says the defendant?”

Ruth stood. “Subject to our motion to dismiss the indictment and our motion to suppress the defendant’s statements, we’re ready, Your Honor. If the court please, I’d like to be heard on those motions before we bring the jury in.”

Monte jumped to his feet. “Your Honor, if it please the court, we’ve already been over the motion to dismiss, and the court has memoranda from both of us on the only issue raised, that is, whether the indictment has to allege that the victim of this crime was a human being. I think the law is pretty clear that this isn’t required. As for the statements, there may come a time when the defendant can move to suppress for other reasons, but not on the basis of Miranda. The statements she’s talking about were made prior to the arrest of the defendant. She’s only entitled to suppress custodial statements which violate Miranda.” He sat down.

“I’m inclined to agree with Mr. Monte, Miss Purley. So at this time I’m going to deny both motions. If, as Mr. Monte suggests, the occasion arises later and you wish to re-urge them, then the court will hear you. Now, are there any other motions before we bring the jury in?”

“The defendant would invoke the Rule, Your Honor,” Ruth said, knowing that was one he couldn’t deny.

“Very well. The rule has been invoked. Will all those persons who expect to testify come forward and be sworn?”

A number of people rose and passed through the gates toward the bench.

“Will counsel please approach the bench?”

Ruth left Schoonover and there was a short conversation he couldn’t hear. Then they left the courtroom with the marshal. Presently both she and Monte returned followed by a crowd of other people, among them Dr. Blatchley. There was a subdued buzz of whispered conversation. Schoonover peered into the crowd and saw why. In the center, dressed in a light blue cord suit, white shirt and shoes, was Adam’s tiny figure. He held tightly to Dr. Blatchley’s hand, looking around him through his thick-lensed glasses, his face a stern mask until he saw Schoonover. His free hand went up in a wave and tears appeared in his eyes. Schoonover knew that without Blatchley’s firm grip Adam would have run to him, crying in terror. That mustn’t happen, he told himself. Ruth wouldn’t like it.

“What is this all about, Ruth?”

“I invoked the rule. That means the judge has to swear all the witnesses who were in the courtroom or might enter, admonish them against talking to one another about the case and exclude them from the courtroom until they’ve been dismissed by both sides. It’s supposed to keep them from coordinating their stories; as a practical matter both sides do that before we ever get here. I did it for show. It gives the reporters something to say.”

“Does that mean I have to leave?”

“No, you’re a party. You can’t be excluded. And the other side gets one person of their choice to assist. That’ll be the A.I.C. It always is.”

“What about Adam? Is he going to testify?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind about that. And I don’t know if the court would permit it.”

Monte had started his opening statement. “. . . expects the evidence to show that this man, Dr. Delmar Schoonover, seated at the table next to Miss Purley, has, by meddling with nature, brought intelligence to a creature that didn’t have it before, and having done that, proceeded to enslave him, or it, as you choose, to deprive it of the civil rights the Constitution requires be given any intelligent creature . . .”

Ruth was on her feet at once with an objection. “That’s a misquote. Your Honor, and it constitutes unfair comment calculated to mislead and prejudice the jury. We move for a mistrial.” Monte had turned to listen. “I believe the statute uses the word person, Your Honor, but the average man, and this jury panel, understands that it’s a distinction without a difference.”

“I’ll sustain the objection, counsel, but your motion for mistrial is denied. The jury will disregard Mr. Monte’s remarks and be instructed that constitutional protections apply to persons. You may proceed, Mr. Monte.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Monte said, making it sound as though he were accepting an apology from the judge. “We will introduce evidence to show that the creature known as Adam is, in fact, a person within the meaning of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States; that he has been forced to labor against his will, as the indictment charges, restrained in his liberty, deprived of his freedom of choice to stay or to go.

“I’ll go further than that; I’ll suggest to you what the defendant may and, I believe, will attempt to prove. I expect he will challenge the humanity of the creature he brought into this world, to attempt to convince the twelve of you that Adam is an animal not protected as you and I are. I can only urge you to listen carefully to the evidence you see and the testimony you hear and decide for yourself what it is he made. Thank you for your attention.”

The judge looked at Ruth. “Miss Purley?”

“If it please the court, the defendant would ask leave to reserve the opening statement until the Government has finished its case in chief.”

“Any objection, Mr. Monte?”

“None, Your Honor.”

“Very well, so ordered. Call your first witness, Mr. Monte.”

“Your Honor,” Monte asked, “May counsel approach the bench?”

“Come forward, please.”

When the two of them reached the bench, Monte said, “The Government plans to call Dr. Blatchley as its first witness, Your Honor, and although we have no present intention to indict him, his testimony may result in the discovery of criminal activity on his part which would require me to go to the Grand Jury. So I’m suggesting to the court that we send the jury out while he’s being admonished. Also, Your Honor, we anticipate Dr. Blatchley will be a hostile witness, in that his sympathies and prejudices are with the defendant, and I’d ask the court to rule him hostile.”

“Miss Purley?”

“Well, Your Honor, I’ve explained Dr. Blatchley’s immunities to him, and he’s prepared to accept the risk and testify. I’d planned to call him later if the prosecution didn’t, but I will object to ruling him hostile at this point; there’s been no proof he is.”

“I agree with her, Mr. Monte. I’ll rule on your motion and deny it for the time being, until Dr. Blatchley’s testimony demonstrates his hostility, if it ever does. And I’ll get the standard admonition in the record while the jury’s out.” They nodded and resumed their seats.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, the court’s going to take up some preliminary matters for a few minutes. Meanwhile, I’ll ask you all to go with the marshal and be back here at 10:30. You’ll be permitted to leave the building but you must not discuss this case with anyone, not even with one another.” McGill rose and the jurors followed him out of the courtroom. Schoonover was perplexed and felt left out of things.

Ruth explained. “I know it looks like a lot of foolishness to you now, but it all has a reason. We’ve scored a couple of points already, whether you know it or not.”

“I must have missed them, Ruth. It looks to me as if they’re ready to hang me already and they don’t even know what it’s all about. Mr. Monte’s already got them worked up by telling them I don’t think Adam’s human. Why didn’t you do something?”

“That’s one of the points we scored. You’ll see. It’s called a rabbit trail. And don’t worry about the jury. Juries are wishy-washy. Their minds flap back and forth like tumbleweeds. You’re only in trouble when the wind stops blowing, and it isn’t going to. Ah, there’s Dr. Blatchley.”

“What’s he doing here? I thought he was our witness.”

“He is, but Bob has a right to call him, too, and since he gets to put his case on first he has that advantage over us, if it is an advantage. Blatchley’s programmed, you know that. I worked most of yesterday on him. All this really means is that in effect the cross examination comes first, then the direct.”

“Ruthie, I hope you don’t mind all these questions. It’s just that I don’t . . . I never was that interested in law before. I don’t understand all this cross and direct stuff.”

“It’s simple, Delmar. Direct is questioning by the party who calls a witness. He vouches for the witness’s testimony. He’s bound by it. The other side attacks the witness’s credibility by cross questions. The answers don’t bind him, ordinarily. He starts out with the presumption the witness is a liar. Unless he adopts the witness as his own we can’t comment to the jury about unfavorable answers. That’s why lawyers sometimes don’t object when the other side exceeds the scope of direct examination; sometimes, if you know in advance what the answer will be, you can let it go and then claim the other side adopted the witness. Understand?”

“No. Why’d the jury leave?”

“The judge is going to make sure Dr. Blatchley understands his Fifth Amendment rights before he testifies. That’s another piece of showmanship on Monte’s part. He knew the judge would deny his motion to rule Blatchley hostile, so he’ll try to rattle him by suggesting he could face prosecution later.”

“But Dr. Blatchley is hostile. At least, he’d better be.”

“Of course he is, in layman’s terms. But not legally; not until he demonstrates such obvious prejudice against the prosecution that it’s unfair to require them to vouch for his testimony. What Monte really wants is the right to lead him and then impeach him. If he gets a hostile-witness ruling from the court, then he can. You can lead and impeach on cross. You can’t on direct.”

“Oh,” said Schoonover. “I see.” But he didn’t really.

The admonitions didn’t take long. Blatchley was a positive, matter-of-fact man who lost no time in convincing the judge he fully understood the risk and was willing to take it. Ruth had already decided he’d make a superb witness. He had just the right amount of age to be robustly grandfatherly. The fringe of gray hair around his bald pate, together with his gold-rimmed bifocals, framed an honest, open face. He had a tendency to cock his head in a manner suggesting righteousness, although this was only the result of trying to look through the proper part of the lenses. Moreover, he was possessed of a melodious voice and a superlative command of the English language. Monte would discover he was slightly a tiger.

Seated in the chair with his hands together, joined at the fingertips, the old man waited patiently for Monte’s first question.

“Tell the jury who you are and what you do, Doctor.”

Blatchley cleared his throat. “My name is Clarence Blatchley. I am the founder and current director of the Blatchley Institute of Genetic Research.”

“How long have you done this?”

“Since it opened, twelve years ago.”

“How many people work there?”

“Do you mean everybody or just the technical people?”

“Technical people, Dr. Blatchley. Those who actually do any scientific work.”

“Well, let’s see. Besides myself and Dr. Schoonover, there’s Dr. Smith and Dr. Fleming; Dr. Smith’s a botanist, Fleming’s an entomologist. Then there’s Roy Leeper, a bacteriologist, and Harry Shabelman, a pharmacist. Then we have a bunch of maintenance people, animal handlers and so on.”

“Tell me: Who was involved in Adam’s development?”

“That was Delmar—I mean, Dr. Schoonover’s project. He worked on it pretty much alone. He had some technical assistance from the rest of the staff, of course, and we had some outside specialists in on it too. I could check the records.”

“Later, perhaps. Were you involved in this research in any way?”

“I’m involved in everything that happens at the institute. I supervise all the projects, and I have to approve them to start with.”

“Did you approve the project that generated Adam?”

“I did.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Oh, let’s see. Adam’s six. It must have been eight or ten years ago. I really don’t remember.”

“And that was Dr. Schoonover’s brainchild?”

Ruth flinched. The question was leading as well as being a characterization, but she decided to let it pass. Objections have more punch if used sparingly and she might be able to utilize the term herself, later.

“It was his idea, if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes, Doctor, that’s what I mean. Now, you would never have approved a project that didn’t have a commercial object?”

“That would depend on the project. Naturally we try to select things that produce revenue, because that’s what supports our research. But that’s not the only criterion . . .”

“Let me stop you there, Doctor. Please just answer the questions simply.”

“I was about to say . . .”

“Doctor, please!”

Blatchley settled back. Ruth had warned him about this tactic. It was designed to get a witness rattled; to trap him into simple answers that sounded wrong.

“Let’s go on, Doctor; you said Dr. Schoonover started the project eight or ten years ago, with your approval. What was the object of the research?”

“Dr. Schoonover was working on congenital birth defects, specifically, neurological defects—the kind responsible for mental retardation with hereditary causes. He was attempting to find genetic methods of eliminating them.”

“Do you know how he intended to do this?”

“Yes.”

“Can you explain it to me?”

“Yes, I can explain it. The question is whether you will understand it. I don’t know how good your scientific education is.”

Touché, Ruth thought. The old man was following the game plan.

Monte started stonewalling. “Well, Doctor, just explain it to me as you would any average, run-of-the-mill high school student, with average intelligence, who took the average subjects and got the average grades.”

“That’s a tall order, but I’ll try. To begin with, you have to understand that life doesn’t just grow, like Topsy. Any organism follows plans. The plans differ slightly even in individuals of the same species. Differences increase as relationships between species grow more remote. We call the plan the genetic code. The name’s derived from the primary unit, the gene. Genetic alignment changes slightly from generation to generation, and forms combinations that are almost endless in variety. Statistically, it’s a fairly predictable system; individually it’s highly unpredictable.” He looked the D.A. squarely in the eye. “O.K. so far?”

“Yes, go on, Doctor.”

“Natural forces affect genes; therefore they also affect heredity, which is the key to evolutionary process. Back to that in a moment, but first let me say that man also affects evolution by what he does, and has since time began. For instance, causing a species to prosper by domesticating it, or causing its extinction by hunting it or overrunning its habitat. Man has been responsible for most of the changes in animal evolution in modern geologic times.

“He also learned to select stock for breeding or for planting, and he understood the results this produced even if he didn’t know why. It was pretty much a cut-and-try affair until Mendel explained it in statistical terms a couple of centuries ago.

“Genetic changes can produce beneficial results, but they can also produce the other kind. Effects such as Huntington’s Disease, the sickle cell trait or Tay-Sachs; all systemic diseases of genetic origin. Their incidence among the population conforms with the known laws of genetics. Statistically, they’re insignificant when you consider humanity as a whole. They’re not communicable except through the reproductive process, and then only to offspring with the right ancestry.

“Genetics affects communicable disease organisms, too, and its victims. This is where genetic engineering really started. Because of the built-in plan of the genetic code, certain organisms became genetically acceptable hosts for genetically compatible parasites. As a result certain classes of microorganisms could make certain other classes of life sick.

“Here again was an opportunity to use the selective process to cure the illness; to identify and isolate the organism, grow it and find out what killed it; to change the host body at the cellular level and cause it to produce defensive mechanisms it wasn’t born with. The process was crude, hit or miss. Statistically, however, it was completely valid and as a result there aren’t many communicable diseases we can’t cure or prevent. Some organisms, such as gonococci and flu virus, fight back with their own mutations, but by and large it still works.”

“This is all very interesting, Dr. Blatchley. But I’d like to get down to basics . . .”

“We are down to basics, young man—basic basics. I’m talking down to you already. I thought you wanted to understand this process.”

There were snickers from the spectators, some even from the jury. There wasn’t a face in the courtroom without a smile, except Monte’s.

“Well, Dr. Blatchley—What I’d like you to tell the court is how all of this relates to the production of the creature who is the subject of this prosecution.”

“I told you I’d get back to the question of heredity, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did, Dr. Blatchley. Would you please do so?”

“O.K., heredity means that the offspring of any parents share the characteristics of each, whether these are observable in one or the other adult or not. Some characteristics are called dominant; they appear in the offspring and one or both parents simultaneously. The recessives don’t. They appear only in the offspring and result from the combination of two or more genes not dominant in either parent but dominant in combination. It’s like adding two small numbers together to make one big number.

“Mutations are seldom dominant, but they occasionally combine in their effects with recessive genes and produce a new characteristic. Sometimes the new characteristic is beneficial, sometimes it’s harmful, and on most other occasions they’re simply harmless.

“Dr. Schoonover was working on harmful effects—the results of past mutations to the gene plasm that either alone or in combination produced what the public used to call feeblemindedness.

“Now, there are four common sources of mutations. First, there’s radiation, natural or manmade. There’s no way to eliminate all of it because it comes in from outer space and out of the earth. We have to live with it. Another source is other organisms, such as viruses, which enter the reproductive cells and change them. It’s not as important as radiation, but it is there. The third, biggest, present cause is chemical. Modern man brings that on himself and it’s going to get worse.

“These three are natural causes. However, there’s also a fourth, artificial cause: manipulation, what we’ve started calling genetic engineering. Man now has the capability to tear down and rebuild individual genes; to rearrange their constituent fractions in new configurations to do different things than nature intended; to add and remove things from them. In other words, to selectively change the genetic plans and control evolution.

“That was Dr. Schoonover’s objective.” He paused.

“Go on, Dr. Blatchley. Explain what he did.”

“He was seeking ways to detect and either alter or eliminate damaged areas of genetic coding. This is not easy. There are thousands, perhaps millions of variables, all affecting one another. It takes time and hard work to find out which gene or genes are responsible for any given characteristic, and longer still to identify the fractions within it which give it the power to do what it does. Finally, the mechanical, or chemical, process makes it complete, and the result is, hopefully, a gene that will do what we wish it to do.”

He looked at Monte, who simply watched him. Then he continued.

“So you see, the process is a long one. It means taking one step at a time up the evolutionary ladder until we finally get to man. The usual starting point is microorganisms, because of their rapid propagation; then sometimes insects, for the same reason; and then on to lower orders of better-organized life forms. Until we get to rats, guinea pigs, and rabbits, the generations are fairly short and results come fast. But the trouble with working with the lower forms is their remoteness from the human line, which causes the results to be valid only in generalities. You have to get much closer before you can work on human subjects. Fortunately, man has relatives in this world, beginning with monkeys in the very remote past and ending with the great apes, who split off the hominid line relatively recently. The closer the relationship, the more identity there is in the genetic code and the more similarity there is in physiological behavior. This makes them extremely useful as experimental animals. They’re subject to many of the same diseases that men are, because their nearness to humanity makes them compatible with the disease-producing organism, too.

“But more important, their skeletal and neurological systems vary least from man’s and in many respects the genetic information is substantially the same as man’s. That’s why Dr. Schoonover used apes, specifically chimpanzees, in his experiments.”

“Was Adam the only altered ape?”

“No. There were six.”

“What happened to the others?”

“Well, early in the experiment the technique was relatively crude. There were failures.”

“What sort of failures were there, Doctor?”

“Basically they were physically or mentally defective, or both, to the extent that they needed life-supporting devices. There was a set of Siamese twins joined at the neck, for instance. Gradually, however, we learned what we set out to learn and the results got better.”

“Were these animals destroyed in the experiment?”

“Yes.”

“All of them?”

“All except Adam.”

“For what purpose, Doctor?”

“So that the bodies, particularly the brain, could be examined in detail.”

“It was the brain development that primarily concerned you?”

“Yes.”

“Any particular part of the brain?”

“Yes, the frontal area.”

“Why?”

“This is the part of the brain where conceptual thought takes place, anyway in human beings.”

“Don’t animals think. Dr. Blatchley?”

“Yes, but not the same as you and I. In the case of the apes the threshold of reason is relatively near, but they haven’t crossed it.”

“Not even Adam, Dr. Blatchley?”

“Adam’s a special case. There has never been anything like him before.”

“Are you saying you do not know?”

“Yes. Someday we may know but we don’t yet have enough information to measure his full capabilities. He’s too young.”

“Well, Doctor, Adam’s six, I believe. Is that right?”

“That’s his chronological age, but he’s still a child. Normal chimps don’t mature until eight or nine. We don’t know what the alterations have done to Adam’s metabolism or how they’ll affect his life span. That’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.”

“And is that why he hasn’t been killed and studied like the others?”

Blatchley was ready for this. Ruth had anticipated it and warned him to expect it. The turning point of his testimony had been reached. From now on he could expect Monte to get mean. He answered carefully.

“As I said, Adam’s a special case. No, we never considered killing him. He’s the proof of the experiment’s success. We should learn enough by observing him to confirm Dr. Schoonover’s findings.”

“O.K. Let’s talk about your observations. Do you take an active part in the experiments with Adam?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Does he, in your opinion, and based on your observation, differ from his parents?”

“Yes.”

“How is he different?”

“Well, to begin with, he doesn’t have a pelt. He isn’t hairy except on his head, like a man.”

“What else, Doctor?”

“The foramen magnum is farther forward, so his head has a better balance than a chimp’s, and his pelvic girdle is different, too. His legs are set back farther. He walks more erect than a chimp, but still not like a man. He doesn’t have the S-curve.”

“What is the S-curve?”

“It’s a pair of curves in the spinal column, one concave, the other convex, which cancel each other out. Only human beings have it. If we didn’t, we’d all walk slightly stooped.”

“Go on, Doctor. What other differences are there?”

“Those are the big ones. Aside from that I can’t think of any that are really that remarkable. He still has the prehensile feet, for instance, with the opposible great toes. Possibly his face is a little less prognathous—snoutlike—and he doesn’t seem to have the massive brow ridges the others have. We don’t know how long that will last, though, since he’s far from mature, and this is a characteristic of the adult chimp.”

“So these are the physical dissimilarities, right?”

“Yes.”

“Would you not agree that although they might represent dissimilarities between Adam and the apes, they appear to also represent similarities between Adam and a human being, such as you and I?”

“Well, they do give him a resemblance. I can’t tell about myself, but yes, I guess he does look something like you.” He patted his bald head.

There was laughter. Even the judge had to hide a snicker. Ruth looked at the jury, hoping they wouldn’t characterize Blatchley as a wise guy because of this. But they appeared to be staying awake and enjoying the entertainment. Blatchley’s face retained its open, friendly look, and that touch of the angelic some older men have. He waited patiently for Monte’s next question and Monte was striving mightily to maintain composure.

“Tell us about neoteny, Doctor.”

So, thought Ruth. Monte’s been hitting the books, or else he’s got his own expert socked away somewhere, priming him. She herself had only heard the term a couple of days ago.

“Neoteny is a term we use to describe arrested fetal development,” Blatchley answered.

“How is it significant to the subject of Dr. Schoonover’s work?”

“The presence of the effect in Adam was confirmation that Dr. Schoonover was on the right track with his experiment.”

“Does the effect have physical characteristics?”

“Yes, several.”

“What are they?”

“I would say that the most notable is the lack of body hair, which I already mentioned. Then there’s a prolonged infancy, delayed sexual development, and generally a longer life span with dramatically increased intelligence. That’s what we expect, anyhow.”

“Isn’t it a fact. Dr. Blatchley, that this effect is best known as a human characteristic?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Would you explain to the jury what that means?”

Blatchley cleared his throat and turned slightly to his left. “Well, I’ll try. The arrested fetal development I just mentioned prevents man from going into the last stage of his biological physical development. He stops just before that happens, and you might say that birth, whenever it occurs, is premature. He is unfinished. He emerges unprepared for life on his own, has a protracted and helpless infancy, a long childhood, and physiologically speaking, a lifelong adolescence. Somehow, this is related to intelligence. We don’t know all the reasons, but we believe it involves not only the increased capacity for cranial growth, but also the effect of sensory data upon the developing individual. My knowledge in that area is rather limited. I’m not an expert.”

“You are an expert in the sense that you are a doctor, and by virtue of your experience with the field, are you not?”

“There seems to be some misunderstanding about that part of it. I have done some work in the field of genetics, but I’m not an M.D. I thought you knew that.”

“I had assumed that’s what the ‘Doctor’ meant. What is your specialty?”

“I’m a Doctor of Dental Surgery. I got involved in genetic studies trying to grow teeth—with some success, I might add.”

Apparently Monte hadn’t done his homework. Almost everybody over fifty had benefited from Blatchley’s work in that area. You didn’t get dentures anymore; you got an implant. Several of the older jurors were smiling and, hopefully, now looking on Monte as fallible. There was one old geezer in the front row of the box who sported a fine smile through brand-new choppers he hadn’t been born with.

Ruth whispered to Schoonover, “Monte’s in trouble. That’s good for us.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell. Professional secret. The ears never lie. Shh!”

Monte plodded on. “Going back to Adam, Dr. Blatchley; you said that the neoteny effect was apparent in him?”

“Yes, Adam was different in appearance from the time of his birth. So much so, in fact, that his mother rejected him.”

“You mean she didn’t want him?”

“She seemed afraid of him. She didn’t know what to do with him.”

“She was a chimp, of course.”

“Yes.”

“What did you do about this?”

“I myself did nothing.” He gave Monte that look the British used to call “Dumb Insolence.”

“No. No, Doctor. I’m speaking of the staff collectively. What did they do?”

“Adam was removed from her and raised on the bottle. That’s relatively common with laboratory animals anyway. The nature of their environment makes adjustment difficult.”

“Did you have an opportunity to observe how the staff treated him?”

“Yes. I was around a lot during normal working hours.”

“Isn’t it true that Adam got pretty much the same treatment a human baby would get?”

“He got the same treatment any infant would get from my people.”

“Nothing special?”

“Not unless you count the clothes. Adam needed those. He didn’t have any fur. Remember?”

“What about later, after he was a year or two old. Wasn’t he provided with toys?”

“Certainly. Any animal can enjoy toys if they’re suited to its needs. Puppies and kittens, for instance. They play.”

“But they don’t watch TV, do they, Doctor? You don’t give them Tinker-toys, or modeling clay, or things like that?”

“Like I said, we give them what is suitable. In Adam’s case we had to find out what that was. Also, we hoped to be able to measure his intelligence that way.”

“Were you successful in doing this?”

“Yes, but the results are incomplete.”

“You’re still working on that?”

“Yes, of course. It’s a long-term experiment.”

“Adam talks, doesn’t he, Dr. Blatchley?”

“Yes, after a fashion, but he wasn’t born with the ability.”

“You mean he wasn’t smart enough?”

“No, that has nothing to do with it. He didn’t have the physical capability. None of the apes do.”

“How is it that Adam can talk now?”

“Adam’s mouth and throat were still apelike when he was born. The—uh, what we call the dental arcade was elliptical, as opposed to semicircular as in the human being. The jaw was built for biting and the muscles in it were there to provide power, not control. He had to be surgically altered to achieve that.”

“Is he understandable?”

“Yes, provided you’re patient. You have to listen carefully and it helps if you’re used to him.”

“You can understand him, can’t you, Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Could I?”

“If you did as I just suggested.”

“Is it possible to hold a conversation with him?”

“Yes, provided you keep it simple.”

“As a result of these conversations, have you been able to form a judgment about Adam’s intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“What is that judgment, Dr. Blatchley?”

“Adam has intelligence.”

“We know that. How intelligent is he?”

“I don’t know. There’s no way to tell until he gets older.”

“He’s six now?”

“Yes, but you have to understand. Developmental rates differ vastly. The normal chimp infant’s vastly superior to the human baby, in terms of what he can do, for the first eighteen months. That’s the result of faster development. Up until the thirtieth month they’re still roughly equal, but the chimp loses ground rapidly after that. With Adam, that stage had been somewhat delayed. We don’t know for how long.”

“O.K., can you tell me this: What’s his intelligence level compared to that of a human six-year-old?”

Ruth had had enough. She rose and objected. “He’s asking for a conclusion, Your Honor.”

“Sustained.”

“But Your Honor,” Monte protested, “Dr. Blatchley’s an expert. He’s entitled to give an opinion on that basis alone.”

“The objection’s been sustained,” said Cook. “I didn’t hear the proper predicate being laid.”

There were two things Monte could do now. He could pursue his present line, qualify Blatchley as an expert and risk getting identified with him, then ask his question hypothetically, or he could go on to something else. He chose the latter.

“Does Adam know he’s different?”

“Objection, calls for speculation,” Ruth fairly roared.

“Sustained,” the judge roared back.

Monte shrugged and went on. “You’ve had conversations with Adam?”

Blatchley nodded.

“You’ll have to give an audible response, Doctor, so the reporter can take it down.”

“Yes.”

“Did the subject of Adam’s origin ever come up?”

“Yes.”

“Where does he think he came from?”

Ruth jumped to her feet. “I’ll object to that, Your Honor. His answer would have to be hearsay. Also, again, it calls for speculation. And even if it were an otherwise proper question, it’s too broad.”

“Sustained.”

Monte tried chasing salvos. “Well, now, Doctor, Adam knows he’s not a human being, doesn’t he?”

“Objection. The question is argumentative, calls for a conclusion, is leading and assumes facts not in evidence.”

“Sustained, Miss Purley.” The judge’s voice had assumed a monotonous tone. “Mr. Monte, you’ll confine yourself to proper examination.”

“Your Honor, may we approach the bench?” Monte had had enough of this.

“Come forward, counsel.”

Ruth joined him. “Your Honor,” Monte said, “I’ll again move to rule the witness hostile. I think that’s been demonstrated over and over again.”

“I don’t,” said the judge. “The only hostility I see is on your part. It’s up to you to protect yourself, counsel. Just ask the proper questions and she’ll have no standing to object. Your motion’s denied.”

Monte went back to his seat, leaving the crowd to wonder what this had been about.

Ruth tried to keep such things at a minimum, believing that it alienated juries to feel they were left out of things. So far, she was satisfied with Blatchley’s testimony, though there were perils ahead and it promised to be grueling and lengthy. She knew what the prosecution was after, of course, and pretty much what her opponent would do next. In Monte’s place, having taken a lump or two, she’d try to turn the witness around and make him the heavy. He was a good enough lawyer to do that; he just didn’t have the range yet. But he’d get it—possibly fairly soon, from the sound of the next question.

“Dr. Blatchley, could you tell the jury how Adam generally occupies his time?”

“Now or earlier, Mr. Monte?”

“Now, Dr. Blatchley.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for several weeks.”

Cut that out, Doc, Ruth whispered to herself. Don’t try to get cute. You’re outclassed.

Monte took off his glasses and faced the witness. “Doctor, I’m talking about the period when you last saw him.”

“Well, O.K. That would have been the 12th of last month, or thereabouts, when he was arrested . . .”

“Without comments, Doctor, please just answer the question and tell us generally what he usually did.”

Blatchley looked over toward the judge, met a stern gaze, then faced Monte. “Well, he always got up early; generally took a shower. He liked water. Most chimps don’t. Then he’d eat breakfast, usually cereal and fruit, and watch a little TV, cartoons and things. We had a program for him. Sort of a tutor system, to see if we could teach him to read and do simple arithmetic. Later, if the weather was nice we’d have playtime outside. Adam liked to feed the chickens and pet the goats.”

“Did he do any other work besides feeding the chickens?”

“Work? Well, we thought of it as training; part of the experiment to test his limits. Yes, he did other things.”

“What other things did he do?”

“Oh, he’d help out whenever anybody asked. He could sweep, dust. That sort of thing. Wash windows. Adam’s a really good climber.”

“Did he have to clean the animal cages?”

“No, he never did that. We had maintenance people and animal handlers for that. Sometimes he’d play with the rabbits and guinea pigs.”

“You said people would ask him to help?”

“Yes, we always tried to make him feel important, to make him think he belonged. Having something to do gave him a part to play and helped him to feel at home.”

“But he was born there. Why shouldn’t he feel at home?”

“He was the only chil—the only one of his kind on the place.”

“Did you start to say child, Doctor?”

“Perhaps. It’s natural to think of him that way even though he really isn’t.”

“Weren’t there other young chimpanzees at the institute, Dr. Blatchley?”

“There aren’t any now. We’ve had them there in the past.”

“Did you get rid of them because of Adam?”

“No, of course not. They’re simply not required for current experiment.”

“Did Adam ever see another chimp?”

“Once or twice.”

“How did he react to his encounter? If you know.”

“It appeared to me that he considered them the same as any other animal. It didn’t seem to bother him. Of course, we never let him get close enough to touch one.”

“Why not, Dr. Blatchley?”

“Because apes can be like people in some ways. They sometimes react with hostility toward things that are different.”

“Has Adam ever asked you about his parentage?”

“No.”

“As far as you can tell, does he know he has any parents?”

“He knows.”

“Has he ever asked where they are?”

“If he has asked anyone, it wasn’t me.”

“Has he ever met a human child?”

“Not that I know of.”

“He’s seen human children on TV, hasn’t he?”

“I presume he has.”

“And he’s never asked why he hasn’t met any?”

“He has not asked me.”

“Dr. Blatchley, are you acquainted with a woman named Madelyn Hundin?”

“I think so. Is she that reporter?”

“Yes. You know who she is, then?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Did she ever visit the institute?”

“Yes, she was there earlier this year, about January, I think.”

“Why did she come?”

“She had read some of Dr. Schoonover’s papers and wanted to see Adam.”

“Did you allow this?”

“Well, I tried to discourage her at first. I was afraid Adam would be upset, meeting a stranger, but she wouldn’t leave. Finally, I agreed to give her a guided tour, provided she didn’t disturb him.”

“You didn’t know she was coming?”

“No, she didn’t call or anything. Just dropped in.”

“Where did you take her?”

“We went outside first so she could take some pictures. Then we went in the greenhouse to look at Dr. Smith’s experiments. She wasn’t much interested in them and we didn’t stay long.”

“Where did you go after that?”

“To Dr. Schoonover’s lab.”

“Was he there?”

“Yes.”

“How about Adam? Was he there, too?”

“Yes.”

“What was he doing?”

“He was helping Dr. Schoonover in the clean room.”

“Doing what?”

“Replacing filters in the ducts. We have to do that every day or two.”

“Tell us how he does that, Doctor.”

“Well, Adam operates a little differently than a man would. He doesn’t use a ladder.”

“Exactly what does he do?”

“He usually climbs up a pipe until he gets to the ductwork and then walks it to the nearest grille. He opens that, goes inside, and gets the filters out. Then he drops them to whoever’s on the ground and catches replacements that are thrown up to him. When he’s finished he comes back the way he went up.”

“How high off the floor are these ducts?”

“About twenty feet.”

“What safety precautions are taken when Adam does this?”

“Why, none that I know of, but Adam’s got two million years . . .”

“Just answer the question, Doctor, please,” Monte interrupted.

“But—”

“I haven’t asked a question, Doctor.”

Blatchley settled back, noting the stern look on Ruth’s face.

“Where was Adam when you and Miss Hundin entered the clean room?”

“He was inside the ducts putting in the filters. He came out a little while after we got there.”

“You testified earlier that Miss Hundin took pictures outside.”

“Yes.”

“Did she take any in the clean room?”

“Yes, I think so. She had one of those fancy cameras with the motor in it.”

Monte opened his file, took out an envelope and walked over to Paul, the reporter, who attached stickers.

“May I approach the witness, Your Honor?”

Cook assented.

“Dr. Blatchley. I’m handing you what have been marked as Government Exhibits 1 through 11, and ask that you examine each of them.”

Blatchley took them and looked them over. No doubt about it; these were the pictures she’d taken, and the angle had been calculated to make it look like Adam was in danger of falling. In a few moments Monte asked, “Can you identify the scenes depicted by these exhibits, Doctor?”

“Yes. These are the photographs Mrs. Hundin took when she and I were in the clean room.”

Monte took the pictures to the defense table and handed them to Ruth. She gave them a cursory glance and handed them back. Naturally, she’d seen them before. In fact, she had prints. Modern discovery methods had long ago taken the surprises out of law. She knew there was no way to stop Monte from getting them in and stipulated to their admission.

Monte went in for the kill. “Dr. Blatchley, you earlier testified that you are the founder and director of the institute?”

“That’s what I said.”

“In this capacity do you control the finances?”

“Yes.”

“Do you sign the payroll?”

“Sometimes I do. Usually the bookkeeper does it.”

“Can you recall ever signing Adam’s paycheck?”

“Adam doesn’t get a paycheck. He’s not an employee.”

“But Adam does work, doesn’t he.”

“If you want to call it that. He helps out; does chores on a more or less regular basis. It’s part of his training.”

“What if he were to refuse to do something?”

“I don’t know that this has ever happened.”

“Would you permit it to happen?”

“I don’t know. If it was an essential part of his training or an experiment we might insist.”

“How would you enforce your order? Would you punish Adam?”

Ruth considered objecting. The grounds existed. The question was compound, leading, argumentative, and speculative. She decided against it. Too easy for Monte to rephrase, and it would suggest a cover up attempt on her part. She let it go, and Blatchley answered.

“Physically, no. He’s beyond the stage where that’s necessary, just as a human child his age would be.”

“Please, just answer the question, Doctor. Don’t give us an explanation.”

“Well, we might curtail his TV or something like that.”

“Suppose Adam decided he wanted to leave the institute, Dr. Blatchley. Would you permit him to do so?”

Blatchley had discussed this point with Ruth the day before. Like any obvious question, it was anticipated and the answer planned. “No,” he said, “we wouldn’t.”

“Pass the witness,” Monte said.

This wasn’t in their game plan. Blatchley was left sitting in the witness chair with his last answer hanging out in full view of the jury. He assumed Ruth would take care of that, now that she had the opportunity. He’d been a witness before, in other cases, and knew something of the routine.

But she fooled him. “I have no questions of Dr. Blatchley at this time, Your Honor. However, I may call him in rebuttal after the Government finishes.”

“Very well, you’re excused, Dr. Blatchley. I’ll remind you you’re still under the rule. You may not discuss this matter with anyone, except the two attorneys in this case. Each of them has a right to talk to you about your testimony if you are agreeable to doing so.”

Blatchley replied that he understood, stepped down, and walked stiffly out of the courtroom.

“Call your next witness, Mr. Monte.”

Monte sent the A.I.C. out the door. A few moments later he was back with a young woman in tow. She walked up to the bench without any direction and raised her right hand, all of which marked her as a professional. She settled herself in the witness chair, and Monte began.

“Please state your name and occupation.”

“Mona L. Aikenhead. I’m a psychiatric social worker employed by the State of Texas, Department of Human Resources.”

“Are you assigned regularly to any particular branch of that department?”

“Yes, I’m attached to the Juvenile Hall and have been for the last five years.”

“Are you certified in that specialty by the state?”

“Yes.”

“And would you tell the court what special training you’ve had and what degrees you hold which qualify you for the position you occupy?”

Before she could answer, Ruth stood. “We’ll stipulate as to the witness’s qualifications in the field of psychiatric social work.”

She sat down and Schoonover was all over her. “Why did you do that?” he asked in a whisper. “You’re supposed to be helping me.”

“She’s got more degrees than you have clean shirts, Delmar. What would you rather have the jury see: an impressive expert or a nosy, big-mouthed busybody? Shut up and listen.”

“. . . school children. Usually they’re only the disturbed ones, but occasionally we get one that’s the victim of a broken home, by death or divorce.”

“What is the age range of the children you work with?”

“From infants on. Sixteen’s the limit.”

“Are you acquainted with a creature called Adam?”

“Yes, I am.”

“How did you become acquainted with him?”

“He was brought to us on November 12, by the sheriff.”

“For what purpose, Mrs. Aikenhead?”

“Custodial care. He’d been in federal custody as a material witness in this proceeding. They don’t have their own facilities so they use the county’s. However, Adam’s a juvenile; the sheriff couldn’t hold him in jail, which is what he’d ordinarily do.”

“To your knowledge are there any judicial proceedings pending anywhere which affect Adam, aside from the commitment order issued in this cause?”

“No. We anticipate there may be, but there aren’t now.”

“What arrangements did you make for Adam’s care?”

“Well, our normal procedure would be to select a foster home for him from our list of approved people. We didn’t feel that would be appropriate in this case.”

“Why not?”

“He’s different. He never had any contact with other children before and we felt the shock of meeting them should be a controlled event to lessen the impact. There was also a need to insulate him from the media people.”

“Who actually has physical custody of Adam now?”

“My husband and I do. I felt his case was important enough to justify personal intervention.”

“I see. You’ve had considerable experience with handling children, haven’t you?”

“Yes, professionally speaking. I don’t have any of my own.”

“And you are a trained observer when it comes to handling them?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had Adam under your observation for long enough to have formed a judgment as to his level of intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“Have you administered any intelligence tests?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What kind of tests were they?”

“Well, they vary. Some are designed for manipulative skills, some for object recognition, some for the ability to conceive relationships between two or more objects or geometrical patterns.”

“How did Adam do?”

“Very well with the manipulative and object recognition, poorly on the other.”

“From your observations and the test results have you been able to form an opinion of his level of intelligence?”

“Yes.”

“What is that opinion?”

“The tests indicate that Adam is functioning slightly below the low-grade moron level. However, it is also my opinion that the tests were of marginal value in his situation.”

“Please explain that.”

“I am of the opinion that he’s actually brighter than the tests would indicate. The tests were designed for human children. They don’t necessarily fit Adam.”

“Mrs. Aikenhead, is Adam an ape?”

“Objection, Your Honor. The question calls for an opinion this witness isn’t qualified to state. The stipulation we made recognizes her expertise as a psychiatric social worker, not as a zoologist.”

“Sustained.”

Ruth knew Monte had wanted that question answered badly. He’d keep at it until he’d gotten the idea across to the jury, no matter what she did. But she wouldn’t make it easy.

“O.K.,” he said. “I’ll rephrase the question, Mrs. Aikenhead. Are there any human attributes that you can think of, normally found in any human child, that Adam does not possess?”

Before Ruth could stand and object, the witness answered with a resounding “no.”

Ruth stated it belatedly. “I object to the question: first, because it’s leading; second, because it calls for an opinion outside her expertise; and third, that if she were otherwise qualified to answer, the foundation for the question is insufficient.”

Cook raised his head, peering at her through rimless glasses, and his gaze told her she lost the toss. “I believe she’s qualified to answer,” he said, “and although the format was somewhat out of the ordinary, I can see no harm in it. However, I’ll admonish Mr. Monte to refrain from asking such questions. So far as the foundation is concerned, even as a lay person with the normal acquaintance with children she’d be qualified to state she knows what these attributes are, and that she can or cannot discern their presence or absence in this individual. The objections are overruled and your exception will be noted in the record. Mr. Monte, you may proceed.”

“I’ve concluded my direct, Your Honor. I’ll pass the witness,” Monte said with a smile.

Ruth would like to have excused Mrs. Aikenhead at that point. She’d expected someone like her to be called to testify, of course; but as with any expert, cross examination could sometimes do more harm than good. In view of the judge’s remarks, impeaching her was probably impossible. The most she could hope for was to chip away at credibility and try to reach to the point where the jury might conclude Mrs. Aikenhead just didn’t know what she was talking about. She’d have to give the situation a couple of licks for that reason alone. But there was another reason, which was part of her overall strategy: to extend the rabbit trail past the point where even Monte’s skills wouldn’t save him. Monte was good. He was impressive and he knew how to lay out a case. But it was on cross that Ruth shone. She hoped she’d know when to stop. There was always the danger of opening up new doors better left closed.

So she decided to be firm while keeping the gloves on, opening with innocuous questions.

“Mrs. Aikenhead, as you look at me, am I a human being?”

“Yes.”

“Are you?”

“Of course.”

“When did you become a human being?”

“Why, I’ve always been one,” she answered, sounding astonished.

“Do you see any creatures in the courtroom who aren’t human beings?”

“No.”

“If someone in the courtroom weren’t human, would you know it?”

“I suppose. I don’t quite see what you’re getting at.”

“How would you know?”

“I’d just know. Anybody would.”

“You have scientific training, do you not?”

“Yes.”

“You hold academic degrees in scientific subjects?”

“Yes.”

“Are you speaking as a scientist as you testify here today?”

“Well, I use my training to answer the questions. Yes, I am.”

“Humanity is a scientific term, is it not?”

“Yes.”

“A scientific status is capable of definition in scientific terms, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“What is meant by the term human?”

Sensing a trap, the witness paused and considered. “Human relates to the dominant species of life on Earth.”

“I will concede that that is an analogy, but I want your definition. What do you mean, human?”

“What do I mean? Well, human means to have human form and human intellectual capabilities. That’s what human means.”

“Perhaps I should ask the question in more basic terms, Mrs. Aikenhead. What are the intellectual capabilities of human beings?”

“Human beings are capable of reasoning, having logical thoughts and behaving in an orderly manner.”

“Would you agree that any being capable of doing this would be human?”

“That would depend,” said the witness.

“Upon what?”

“Well, a human being has a human appearance.”

“You’d add physical form as a qualification, also?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Suppose, Mrs. Aikenhead, you were to construct a robot, giving it human form and appearance, which was capable of doing the things you’ve just described. Would it be human?”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not alive. A human being is alive.”

“What is the definition of alive?”

“Well, something that’s alive has recognizable bodily functions that maintain its life.”

“That’s not a definition.”

“When something is alive it has sensation, it finds and consumes energy, disposes of waste and reproduces its kind.”

“I see. If a robot could be made which would do these things, as well as the others you’ve mentioned, would it be a human being?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not, Mrs. Aikenhead?”

“Because there’s more to humanity than that. Much more.”

“Tell the jury what else there is.”

The witness took that literally and turned to address the jury. “Human beings feel like human beings. They laugh; they cry. They experience happiness and they feel grief and they have moods.”

“If these qualities and characteristics could be instilled in our robot, Mrs. Aikenhead, would it be human?”

The witness stared at the jurors, who waited for her answer. She had known Ruth’s question would reach this point and dreaded it. But there was nothing else she could say. “Yes, it would be human.”

“So we now have a definition of a human being, don’t we?”

“Yes.”

“Let me summarize and ask you if you agree. A creature that thinks logically and behaves reasonably and orderly, which is alive and has human physical form, and which has the capacity to experience the emotions you’ve just described, is a human being. Could you agree with that definition?”

Ruth waited. “Is that a fair statement?”

The witness looked alternately at Monte and at the jury. Finding no help there, she answered weakly, “Yes.”

Ruth was about to stick her neck out. The Bible Belt might not be the best place to ask the next few questions, but they were essential to her strategy.

“Do you believe in God, Mrs. Aikenhead?”

“Of course.”

“How about angels?”

“Yes.”

“Good and bad?”

“Yes.”

“Are any of these entities human beings?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re spirits. They’re superior to human beings.”

“It’s commonly believed that all are capable of taking human form, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And that they sometimes do?”

“Yes.”

“Under these conditions are they then human?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because they only look human. They have the form only.”

“The differences are imperceptible. Would that change your answer?”

“No. The observer would merely be fooled. It wouldn’t change the reality of the situation.”

“You’d consider divinity a special case?”

“Yes,” said the witness, looking relieved.

“Are there any other special cases you can think of?”

“Not offhand, no.”

“Mrs. Aikenhead, it’s generally conceded that the universe is a rather large place, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Large enough so that we don’t know its limits or even if it has any limits?”

“Yes.”

“All we know about it is what can be observed from Earth?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe that somewhere out there there are other worlds which have life?” Ruth saw Monte flinch at that but he didn’t object.

“Yes,” came the answer.

“Do you believe it is possible that there is life out there which is equivalent to man in intelligence?”

“Probably.”

“Is it not possible that some of it is man’s superior in intellectual capability?”

“Yes.”

“If this is true and such life in fact exists, and if it had the attributes described in our agreed definition of humanity, would you be prepared to accept it as human?”

“Well, I don’t know. It would depend.”

“Upon what?”

“On how I felt about it when I saw it.”

“Are you saying that the effect on the observer is also a part of the definition?”

The scientist in her would not permit the affirmative. “No, it isn’t.” But she had accepted a robot; why not an extraterrestrial?

“So humanity actually is not an Earthly term, is it, Mrs. Aikenhead?”

“No.”

“It is a universal term?”

“Yes.”

“A creature that meets the standards is human; a creature that doesn’t is not?”

“Yes.”

“Even if it looks human?”

“Yes.”

“Adam looks human?”

“Yes.”

“Not exactly like you and I, but close?”

“Yes.”

“But not nearly as close as the average idiot?”

A stunned look washed over the witness’s face. “Idiots are human.”

“Do they meet the definition we just agreed on?”

“Well, no. No, they don’t. But that’s because of physical defects.”

“Does the definition require us to take the reason into account?”

Monte was on his feet objecting, “Counsel’s arguing with the witness, Your Honor.”

“I’ll allow her to answer. In my opinion it’s proper cross-examination, Mr. Monte. Overruled.”

“Answer the question, Mrs. Aikenhead. The objection’s been overruled.” Ruth let her know she meant business.

Resigned to the fact that Monte couldn’t help her, the witness became sullen. “No,” she answered reluctantly.

“Neither does a person who’s been deprived of his reason by illness, such as a schizoid?”

“Under the definition we’re using, no. I guess not.”

“Nor would a baby?”

No answer. Ruth ignored the fact; she went on.

“There was a time when you and I and all of us in this room weren’t human, wasn’t there?”

“Again, under the definition we’re using, I suppose so.”

“Is there something else which we should add, Mrs. Aikenhead, to improve the definition?”

The witness was silent. Ruth let her take her time, but after waiting almost a minute she felt she had to move. “Mrs. Aikenhead?”

“No. I can’t think of anything we could add.”

“Yet you’re not comfortable with the answer you’re getting under the definition?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Is it possible, Mrs. Aikenhead, that the term is not capable of definition?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

It was time to quit. And Ruth did. She had proven her point and then provided the witness with an escape hatch. The witness had taken it. She could do nothing else. What Monte would do about it was not at once apparent, and it would be an hour and a half before they knew. The Judge had given him the choice of going ahead now or continuing after lunch, and he had chosen to play for time.

She and Schoonover waited until the courtroom had been cleared and then, in the company of escorting guards, went to her car, now parked officially in one of the probation officer’s spaces. Once underway, Ruth headed for North Beach.

“Where are we going?” Schoonover asked her.

“Anywhere, away from the crowd. I’m not particularly hungry, are you?”

“No. I’m too excited.”

“Why don’t we just park for a while?” She turned and smiled. “You can’t get in any trouble in this car, I don’t think.”

“Right now that wouldn’t seem like trouble. Can you tell how we’re doing yet?”

“There are trends emerging. I think Monte took the bait. We won’t be able to tell for sure until he tries to rehabilitate Mona Aikenhead, if he does.”

“You mean he might not. Oh, but that’d be great. Do you think there’s a chance? I mean, you really worked her over.”

“There’s a good chance he won’t try. I wouldn’t.”

“But she’s a crucial witness.”

“No, she isn’t. You said that because you think like a layman. You haven’t got the legal training to appreciate what happened up there. Monte knows this case is going to be decided on emotion, not logic. He thinks he already has it made. So Mona Aikenhead can’t define the term ‘human.’ So what? She knows one when she sees one. So does the jury. They know in the viscera.”

The car came off the end of the bridge, took a 180° turn under it, and headed south toward the ship channel, where there was a small park. Ruth pulled it up to the seawall and cut the engine. “Do we stay in or walk?”

“Let’s go up on the lookout. I might want to jump and get it over with. It sounds like you think we’re going to lose.”

“There’s always that possibility, but I try not to think about it. I don’t intend for it to happen.”

They got out of the car and started up the stairs, which took three flights to reach the top. Below, tugboats struggled to push an aged, rusty tanker away from its berth. For a while they watched in silence.

“It’s nice up here,” Ruth said. “Did you ever get the urge to just get on one of those and go wherever it went?”

“Sounds like a good idea. Shall we swim for it?”

Ruth took Delmar’s arm, raised it, ducked under, and wrapped it around her.

Troubled as he was, Schoonover had to admit that his relationship with her, while somewhat irregular and certainly unorthodox, had many advantages. He thanked his good fortunes for her aggressiveness. He, himself, was far too shy, and his life style far too sheltered for this to have happened in any other way.

Long moments passed and they stood there, facing the wind and looking out to sea, where the waters lay bright blue and untroubled. How easy it would be for him to run from this, thought Schoonover. “But I can’t.”

“Can’t what, Delmar?”

“Did I say that out loud?”

“Uh-huh. Can’t what?”

“I can’t run. That’s what I want to do. I’m not a fighter, Ruth. I never have been.”

“You don’t have to, Delmar. That’s my job. It’s up to me to take my battleaxe and cave Monte’s roof in, just like they did in the old days. Nothing’s changed.”

“I know you’re trying hard, Ruth. And I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but I can’t help feeling things are turning out all wrong. I guess I’m just too used to the physical world where things are real. Law’s just a muddle.”

“Uh-huh! And I’m a shaman rattling bones. Is that how you see me?”

“Please, Ruth. It’s nothing personal, but I’m used to concrete thinking and stable, disciplined scientific reasoning. I just can’t see where all this mumbo jumbo is getting us.”

Ruth turned and faced him, raising her hands to straighten his tie, and pulling on it rather harder than she’d meant to. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard such talk, but coming from Delmar it hurt her a little. She tried not to show irritation, but he was sure to take it wrong.

“It’s not mumbo jumbo, Delmar. It looks that way to you because you don’t know the rules. You’re not an expert. Your work looks the same to me, and both of us would consider the average mathematician mad. Everybody works in his own universe, Delmar. Rational thought requires boundaries, and law’s no exception. Errant thinking is just as dangerous to me as it is to you.”

“Are you sore at me, Ruth?”

“No, Delmar. If I were, I’d push you off the edge. No, I don’t think the time will ever come when the layman will give lawyers the credit they’re due for keeping the world running. You’re not to blame for that; we are. We’ve been too secretive about what we do. People look at the results and don’t understand why things worked out that way, so they think of it as magic. It isn’t; it’s far more basic. It’s war.”

“War!”

“Sure. Lawsuits are substitutes for combat. Nobles used to be able to wage law: challenge the other side to a duel and let God judge. In fact, that was the law of Maryland until the 1920s. They’d adopted the old English Statutes at the time of the revolution, and while wager was abolished in England, Maryland never got around to it. Until some sharpie with a pretense to noble lineage claimed the right to challenge an indictment by fighting the state’s attorney.”

“That’s weird, Ruth.”

“No, it’s conservatism. Law’s the most conservative of all professions. We hate change. Change destroys people’s orientation in society; ruins society’s stability. That’s why a really workable government is always top-heavy with lawyers, and I mean from city councils on up. That’s why most U.S. Presidents have had law degrees. It takes one to understand government. Croakers, like you, mess it up. Look what Allende did to Chile thirty or so years ago. Duvalier did an even worse job with Haiti, and scientists, in general, don’t make very good political leaders.”

“O.K., Ruth, so I don’t understand politics. Where does that leave Adam and me? It seems to me that Adam’s case is special. He’s unique, and the law ought to take that into account. Couldn’t there be an exception in his case?”

“Not unless the legislature says so, Delmar. They haven’t seen fit to change the law, and the courts can’t. It’s not their job, not that they don’t sometimes try.

“Besides, they don’t have to. Adam’s unique to science, but legally speaking, he’s old hat. The law’s handled his kind before, and there’s a very large body of precedent on the subject.”

“Huh?”

“Sure, Delmar. We’re way ahead of you guys. You think blacks were always human? Don’t you believe it. It took the 13th Amendment to make a black man your legal equal. Even that didn’t help black women. You’d be surprised how few rights married women had a hundred years ago, even as humans. And Indians. Indians achieved humanity after blacks did, when they finally gave up shooting arrows at the white man and started filing lawsuits instead. It was the same old battle, fought a different way. A way where they really had a chance to win. There, does that make you feel any better?”

“I don’t know. It seems to me that what got the black people out of trouble got me in. I didn’t mean any harm. They couldn’t have meant me when they passed that law. That was over a hundred years ago.”

“The law anticipates problems, Delmar, and works out solutions in a regular, systematic way. That’s what makes it so valuable. The precedents which are established can live on indefinitely. Law operates on the theory that if it’s not broken you don’t fix it, but if it is broken, fix it good. There are occasions when precedent has to be overruled, but you’d be surprised how rarely that happens.”

“It sounds to me, Ruth, like lawyers are stuck in the past.”

“We are, Delmar, and in the future, too. If we lose, and your case goes to the higher courts on appeal, their opinion may be cited as precedent a thousand years from now. Now, isn’t that a pretty good reason for Judge Cook to be careful?”

“I suppose so. But I’m sorry to say I don’t understand it any better now than I did before.”

“Remember what I said a while ago, Delmar, about lawsuits being combat? I meant that. Aside from the fact that our roles have been reversed, and we’re missing an opportunity to do some serious necking, I’ll bet you never thought of me as a general, did you?”

“No.” He hugged the “general” close and kissed her.

When he finally let go, she said, “That’s essentially what I am, you know. Every lawyer is. And every really good lawyer studies war. He has to, because that’s the only way to win. Some lawyers have been generals, literally. Julius Caesar, for instance. Bismarck too. Lawyers were really active in the American Revolution and in the Civil War. Their influence might even have been decisive. And they were oddballs, mostly, who took a new look at things and spotted opportunities others didn’t. It wasn’t just the big names like Andrew Jackson or Breckenbridge or Moseby. There were lots of others, natural leaders, that you never heard of.

“You can see how a new angle can win for you. Look at Castro. In your lifetime he took a handful of guerrillas and beat a modern mechanized army with them. The profession’s not all that proud to claim him, but he was undeniably successful.”

Ruth glanced at her watch. “Aw, look at that, Delmar. It’s time to go back. We’d better get started.”

Ruth put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it. “Let’s not be pessimistic, Delmar. If the case wasn’t winnable we wouldn’t be trying it. Only mediocre cases ever get tried, just like only mediocre wars ever get fought, and for the same reason. If I stood facing you with a .45 in my hand and you had nothing but a club, would we fight? Of course not. When one side or the other knows it can’t win, the case gets dealt out. In the criminal end of it the D.A. just lets the grand jury know he doesn’t want to indict and they ‘No bill’ it, or the hopeless defendant plea bargains.”

“How do we win then, Ruth?”

“I think what’s confusing you is the difference between the law and the facts. Each gets different treatment. That’s why every lawyer wants a learned judge and an ignorant jury. The lawyers know what the law is if they’ve done their homework; the law is whatever the Supreme Court says it is at any particular time in history. But until the jury tells us what the facts are the law can’t be applied. The jury resolves all factual disputes; they decide whether testimony is credible and how much weight to give it. Then the judge tells them what they’re expected to do with the issues they’ve resolved. You can see how careful we are to keep out information that doesn’t bear on these issues or has a tendency to be unreliable. Hearsay’s a good example. It’s generally considered incapable of direct proof. Of course, there are exceptions, like dying declarations, or ancient documents, made so long ago that their falsification for use in court is manifestly improbable. These are admissible like any other evidence.”

“That part I appreciate, Ruth, even if I don’t understand it. What I want to know is how, if everybody—you and Monte and the rest of these people—know both the law and the facts, how do we gain the advantage and beat them?”

“Because knowing something is one thing, Delmar, and using it is something else again. True, we’re locked into the Matrix, the battlefield, so to speak, but we can maneuver within it. So we marshal our facts and march our witnesses across, in whatever deployment we judge most beneficial. We take advantage of procedural barriers to protect our flanks and hit where the enemy is weakest. Sooner or later, one side or the other will blunder. That happens one hundred percent of the time.”

“And you think Monte will blunder. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“No, I think he already has.” She started the engine, and they drove off. For the rest of the trip neither spoke.

“You may proceed, Mr. Monte.” Monte stood up. “Your Honor, if it please the court, the Government will forego re-direct of Mrs. Aikenhead at this time and reserve the right to recall her in rebuttal at a later time.”

So he’s decided to keep the jury guessing, thought Ruth. Good thinking! Judge Cook nodded. “Very well. Mrs. Aikenhead, you are reminded that although you have been excused you remain bound by the Rule. The marshal will escort you to the witness room. Call your next witness, Mr. Monte.”

The A.I.C. rose and left the courtroom. He returned with a huge black man.

“I don’t like this,” Ruth whispered. “The ear test doesn’t work on black people. I wonder who he is?”

“I know him,” said Schoonover. “That’s George Russell. You said Monte had been talking to an expert. George is an expert. He probably knows more about genetic engineering than any man alive.”

“Where does he practice?”

“He doesn’t. He teaches and researches. He’s also on the editorial staff of the journal which published my papers.”

“Then it’s obvious why he’s here.”

“It is?”

“Of course. They’ll want to get those papers into evidence. It’s the next best thing to being able to call you to testify. They can’t do that.”

“What are we going to do about it?”

“We’re going to let him put them in.”

“What?”

“Shh. Delmar, did you say anything in your papers that wasn’t true?”

“Of course not. I backed up every claim with experimental proof. Anybody can reproduce my results if they follow my instructions.”

“And you never published anything you haven’t shown me?”

“No.”

“O.K., I’m going to stipulate. You already know the reason. And we’d never be able to keep it out anyway. Let’s let the jury take the stuff in with them when they deliberate. They won’t understand it even if they read it. Let’s not give them the advantage of an explanation. O.K.?”

“O.K.”

She let Monte get as far as name and occupation, then stood when he asked his first qualifying question. “We’ll stipulate as to Dr. Russell’s expertise in the field of genetics, Your Honor.” She sat down.

Monte appeared delighted but not surprised. Ruth wasn’t the kind of opponent who liked to waste time. Neither did he. He went right into it.

“Now, Dr. Russell, in addition to your teaching duties and your own research, you’re also involved in the publication of a journal?”

“Yes. I’m on the staff of the Journal of The American Society of Genetic Engineering.”

“Are you acquainted with Dr. Delmar Schoonover?”

“Yes.”

“Do you see him in this courtroom, and if so, would you point him out?”

“Yes. He’s wearing a blue suit and glasses and sitting next to a woman at the table in front of me.”

“When did you first become acquainted with him?”

“Oh, let’s see, about seven or eight years ago, I think, yes. It was at a seminar, in Switzerland; University of Bern.”

“Since that time have you and he corresponded?”

“Yes.”

“Did any of your correspondence relate to his work on genetic birth defects?”

“Yes.”

“Did he submit any papers on the subject for publication in the Journal?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Four.”

“Did you publish any of them?”

“Yes. We published all of them.”

“When?”

“If my recollection is correct, they’re all in the last four issues.”

“Have you read these papers yourself?”

“Yes. I read both the manuscripts and the published articles.”

Monte went to his file and took out four magazine-sized objects. The reporter marked them on his instructions, and forgetting to ask leave, Monte approached the witness.

Ruth noted the critical look on the judge’s face, but he was apparently willing to let the transgression pass in the interest of brevity.

Oblivious, Monte continued.

“Now, Doctor, I’ll show you what have been marked Government’s exhibits 12, 13, 14, and 15 and ask you to examine them.”

Russell took them, examined them.

“Can you identify these objects?”

“Yes.”

“Please do so.”

“Exhibit twelve, is the issue of the Journal published in June 1994. Thirteen is the September issue of the same year. Fourteen was published in December, and fifteen in March of 1995.”

“Dr. Russell, are these the issues which contain Dr. Schoonover’s articles?”

“Yes.”

Monte took the journals from him and started for Ruth’s table. Ruth waved him off. He looked puzzled, as if expecting her to interrupt and renew her motion to suppress at this time. However, he continued without pause.

“Your Honor. The Government moves for the admission of its exhibits numbers twelve through fifteen.”

“No objection, Miss Purley?”

“None, Your Honor.”

“There being no objection, they are admitted.”

Monte got back to his witness. “Dr. Russell, you said you read the papers more than once, if I’m not mistaken. Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have personal knowledge of their contents?”

“Yes.”

“Do you understand their contents?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

Ruth knew what Monte would try next, and what he would expect her to do about it. She was resolved to disappoint him even though it might encourage him to go further than she might like. If she had correctly assessed his attitude, he was convinced she’d written Schoonover off and was just playing out the string. That’s what he’d probably have done. Most lawyers would have, but not Ruth Purley.

She let Monte have his head, and the testimony droned on. For over an hour Monte pumped innocuous bits of useless knowledge out of Russell and into the jury box. The jury looked bored and Ruth was certain they understood none of it.

Yet Monte wouldn’t quit. Was Schoonover’s work important? Russell agreed that it was, called it a breakthrough.

Did Russell have an opinion as to Adam’s status as a person? Ruth stopped that with an objection, and the judge ruled the stipulation didn’t qualify him to give an opinion as to an ultimate fact outside the field of genetics.

Monte did get one lick in, however, that Ruth felt was highly prejudicial to Schoonover’s case. That was when he expressed an objection to further experiments which raised primate intelligence.

“Such artificial races would be abused,” he answered. “My ancestors were slaves for four hundred years because their skin was black.”

Ruth managed to get the remark stricken, but she knew no juror could possibly fail to be persuaded by such words, especially when uttered by a man as impressive as Russell.

She did not cross examine, which caused an expression of great relief to appear on Judge Cook’s face. He wanted to move things along.

“Mr. Monte, it’s now four o’clock. Is your next witness going to take long?”

“I plan to call Madelyn Hundin, Your Honor. Direct should take half an hour. Of course, I have no way of knowing how long Miss Purley will be.”

“The court is prepared to stay a little late, counsel, if that’s your pleasure, or we can let Mr. Monte finish and start on cross in the morning.”

“I have no objection to splitting it up, Your Honor,” Ruth replied.

“Your Honor,” Monte stood. “The Government will call Madelyn Hundin.”

Moments passed. Then McGill opened the door for a woman about 40. She was dressed in a light green tailored suit, the jacket of which covered a blouse of some silken material, in a red-and-gray striped pattern. Her hair was short, bleached blond, and slightly curled.

Ruth had not seen her before in person, although she had been on TV almost continuously for the past month. She decided she wouldn’t have liked the witness even aside from her relationship with Schoonover, but she had to admit that the woman was attractive and probably would make a formidable witness.

“Mrs. Hundin,” Monte began. “Is it Miss or Mrs.?”

“Miss. I’m not married.” She said it like an invitation.

“Tell the court your full name, please, and where you live.”

“Madelyn O. Hundin. I live at 4418 North Cleveland Avenue, Chicago.”

“What is your occupation, Miss Hundin?”

“I’m a reporter for the National Interrogator.”

“How long have you been so employed?”

“Not quite 18 years.”

“What kind of publication is the Interrogator’ ?”

“It’s a weekly newspaper. It comes out every Tuesday, nationally.”

“Now, Miss Hundin. Are you acquainted with Dr. Delmar Schoonover?”

“Yes.”

“How did you meet Dr. Schoonover?”

“I went to see him at his laboratory at the Blatchley Institute.”

“When was this?”

“January 12th of this year.”

“What time of the day was it?”

“Early afternoon.”

“Did you see anybody else there besides Dr. Schoonover?”

“Well, I don’t remember everybody I met. There were a lot of workers around, but I did talk to Dr. Blatchley for quite a while. He showed me around.”

“Is there anybody else you saw that day whom you remember?”

The witness’s face took on a faraway look and her voice was drawn as she answered. “Yes, the child, Adam.”

My God, thought Ruth, a ham actor! “Objection, Your Honor; her answer assumes facts not in evidence. It has not been established that Adam is or is not a child. We’ll also move to strike.”

“Sustained; the answer will be stricken and the jury is instructed to disregard it.”

Monte appeared unruffled, “Can you describe Adam?”

“Yes. He’s a little fellow, about two-and-a-half feet tall, with black hair and the biggest brown eyes you ever saw. And he was wearing glasses, and little white coveralls, and no shoes.”

“What was he doing when you first saw him?”

“Climbing around up on the ceiling.”

“While this was going on what did you do?”

“Well, I had my camera so I snapped a few pictures.”

Monte addressed the court. “May I approach the witness, Your Honor?”

Leave was granted and he walked to the stand, pausing briefly to retrieve the pictures from the reporter.

“Miss Hundin. I now show you what have been marked as Government exhibits one through eleven and ask you if these are the photographs you took?”

“Yes,” she said, shuffling the photos. “Here’s the one where he was losing his glasses.”

“It would appear, Miss Hundin, that the coveralls are soiled.”

“Yes. He was pretty dirty from crawling around in those pipes.”

“Did you mention this to Dr. Schoonover?”

“Yes.”

“What was his reaction?”

“He said Adam was a great help to him; that he’d take a shower and be as good as new.”

“Did you express any concern to him about the danger of falling?”

“Yes, I told him I thought it was too dangerous for a little boy.”

“Why don’t you object to this, Ruth?” Schoonover whispered. “I thought they couldn’t use hearsay.”

“Shh. It’s not hearsay if a party says it. It’s an admission against interest. You’re expected to deny it if it isn’t true.”

“How can I if I don’t get to testify?”

“Let me alone, Delmar. I gotta listen.”

The witness droned on. “. . . told me the child did all sorts of hard work around the place; work I wouldn’t want to do.”

“Did you have any conversations with Adam, Miss Hundin?”

“Well, I tried, but he’s hard to understand, you know. He doesn’t talk very plainly. But it seems to me I asked him . . .”

Monte interrupted. “Don’t tell us what the conversations were about. You did have words with him, though?” He obviously didn’t want to give Ruth a chance to rattle the witness with valid objections.

“Yes,” the witness answered. “I did.”

“Did you see any kind of safety devices in use while Adam was up on the pipework?”

“You mean nets or ropes? No, I didn’t see any.”

“Did Dr. Schoonover explain the absence of any such devices?”

“Objection, Your Honor. Counsel’s leading the witness. Her prior testimony was that she didn’t see any, and there’s no proof she asked for an explanation.

“Sustained.”

“I’ll withdraw the question. Did you ask Dr. Schoonover whether any safety precautions were taken when Adam went in the pipes?”

“Yes.”

“What was his answer?”

“He said Adam didn’t need them. He had natural climbing ability. He said all chimpanzees did.”

“Miss Hundin, did Adam look like a chimpanzee to you?”

“Objection. No proper foundation for the witness to express such an opinion.” Ruth knew it wouldn’t stick but did it anyway to irritate Monte.

“Overruled. It’s within the knowledge of the average lay person. The witness may answer.” The judge’s face told Ruth he thought the objection was frivolous, and his eyes were on the clock.

“Why, no, he didn’t. He looks like a little boy.”

“Did he act like a little boy?”

“Yes.”

“Did anything else unusual happen while you were there?”

“Well, I wasn’t in Dr. Schoonover’s laboratory all that long before he told me to leave.”

“Do you know why he wanted you to leave?”

“It was because of what I’d said about the climbing. He told me it wasn’t any of my business what they did there.”

“Did you then leave?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see Dr. Schoonover or Adam after that?”

“Well, I never saw Adam again. And I didn’t see Dr. Schoonover until I came in the court room a while ago.”

“Had you ever met Dr. Schoonover before that day in the laboratory?”

“No.”

“Pass the witness.”

Now it was Ruth’s turn. “How did you happen to go to the institute on January 12?”

“I knew a man in Chicago who told me about the experiments. It seemed to be news so I went to get the story.”

“The paper you work for is generally considered to be part of the so-called Sensational Press, isn’t it?”

“Yes. That has been said about it.”

“During your eighteen years there have you ever heard any one refer to the National Interrogator as a scandal sheet?”

Monte was on his feet immediately. “I’ve never heard a more inflammatory question put to a witness in my entire career, Your Honor.”

“Neither have I, counsel. The objection is sustained, and Miss Purley, there will be no more of that.”

Didn’t work, thought Ruth. Once in a while she could mousetrap a prosecutor into moving for a mistrial, but Monte had obviously lost the reflex. He’d been a prosecutor too long. She continued, this time more cautiously.

“You’ve been a reporter for a long time, haven’t you, Miss Hundin?”

“Yes, since college.”

“How many stories do you think you might have written in that time?”

“Oh, thousands.” The witness shrugged. “Ten thousand, maybe.”

“What is it that determines whether a story gets published or not?”

“Well, it has to be newsworthy. Otherwise who’d read it?”

“Would it be correct to say that the more unusual a subject is, the greater interest the public will have in it?”

“I suppose so. Man bites dog, that’s news.”

“You have to develop methods of finding these situations?”

“That’s part of the job.”

“Would it be correct to say that unusual stories sell newspapers?”

“Yes.”

“And if a reporter gets a lot of good stories and sells a lot of papers this makes the publisher happy?”

“Of course.”

“And grateful?”

“I guess so.”

“And the reporter is rewarded?”

“For a good job, yes.”

“Gets a bigger paycheck, maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“So it’s good for you if you can sell papers?”

“Yes.”

“Does it ever happen that a story turns out to be untrue?”

“Of course. It happens all the time.”

“What do you do when that happens?”

“We don’t publish it.”

“Do you manage to catch all the errors?”

“Well, occasionally one will get by us.”

“But you try to be careful?”

“Yes, always.”

“You check things out?”

“Yes.”

“And still they get by you?”

“Like I said, sometimes. Nobody’s perfect.”

“What do you do when this happens?”

“We generally publish a retraction.”

“Have you ever had to do this?”

“Yes.”

“When was the last time?”

“About Christmas, last year.”

“How many times have you had to do this during your eighteen years at the paper?”

“Maybe four or five.”

“Possibly more?”

“Possibly. That’s a long period.”

“So you’re not right all the time?”

“I never said I was.”

“Is the retraction the last thing that’s done, where there’s an error?”

“No, not always.”

“What else is done?”

“By us?”

“By anybody.”

“Sometimes there are lawsuits.”

“Objection, Your Honor; move to strike her answer. It’s irrelevant.” The prosecution wasn’t too happy with that line of questioning.

“She’s the Government witness, Your Honor,” Ruth protested, “and the relevancy will be established if I can continue.”

“This is cross examination, Mr. Monte, and she’s entitled to explore the witness’s knowledge and test her credibility. I’ll overrule you. Continue, Miss Purley.”

“Has a lawsuit ever been filed against the paper because of a story you wrote, Miss Hundin?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know whether any of the plaintiffs have recovered judgments?”

“Yes.”

“How many of them do you know of?”

“In eighteen years?”

“Yes.”

“Six.”

“On stories you yourself wrote?”

“Yes.”

“Are there any lawsuits pending at the present time which are founded on stories you wrote?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“What is the basis of these suits?”

“I told you. Stories I wrote.”

“Let me ask you again. Is it true that these are defamation suits?”

“Two of them are. The other is for invasion of privacy.”

“The others were for libel?”

“Yes.”

“Of the six judgments rendered in the past 18 years against the paper, in which you were also a party defendant, how many of them were for libel?”

“All of them.”

“Looking back, Miss Hundin, using hindsight, do you feel these situations might have been avoided?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” yelled Monte. “The answer could have no probative value.”

“Overruled. Sit down, Mr. Monte.”

“You may answer,” said Ruth.

“I suppose so.”

“How?”

“Oh, more investigation probably would have helped.”

“Tell the jury what you did in the way of investigation before you wrote your first story on Adam.”

“Well, as I said, I heard about the articles. They were available at the University of Illinois Library, so I read them. Then I called my editor and got permission to come here for an interview.”

“Did you do anything else?”

“Well, yes. I caught a plane for Corpus Christi and when I got here I rented a car and went to the Blatchley Institute.”

“That was when you saw Adam for the first and only time?”

“Yes.”

“As a matter of fact, you spent most of your time there with Dr. Blatchley, didn’t you?”

“Yes. He seemed reluctant to take me through. I didn’t have an appointment, though.”

“Did you let him know you were coming?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not generally a good practice in this business. It ruins the spontaneity if people expect you.”

“Did Dr. Schoonover know you were there?”

“I don’t think so. He didn’t act like he was expecting me.”

“How long were you in Dr. Schoonover’s lab?”

The witness shrugged. “Five minutes—ten at the most. I wasn’t particularly conscious of the time.”

“And it was on the basis of this interview that you wrote the first story?”

“Yes.”

“And several follow-up stories?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever heard of Giuseppe Bongiovanni?”

“Yes.”

“Who is Giuseppe Bongiovanni?”

“He’s an aerialist. I did a story about him last month.”

“His family, too, aren’t they part of his act?”

“Yes, them, too.”

“That includes two pre-teen children, a boy and a girl?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any question in your mind that the Bongiovanni children are human children?”

“Of course not.”

“What part do they have in the act?”

“They perform on the trapeze.”

“Have you ever seen them perform?”

“Yes.”

“How high off the ground do these performances take place?”

“Well, I’ve seen them twice, in different places. It varies.”

“Where did you see them the first time?”

“At the circus, in a tent.”

“How high was the trapeze?”

“I’m not good at judging distances.”

“Was it higher than the pipes Adam was climbing?”

“Yes.”

“Twice as high?”

“Yes.”

“Three—four times as high?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about the second time?”

“That was in the Chicago Arena.”

“How high was the trapeze that time?”

“About the same, I guess. But they always used a net.”

“Always?”

“Yes.”

“May I approach the witness, Your Honor?”

“Yes, counsel.”

Ruth opened her case and took out a tabloid-sized newspaper. Paul marked it and she took it to the witness chair. “Now, Miss Hundin, I’ll show you what has just been marked as Defendant’s Exhibit Number 1 and ask you whether or not you can identify it.”

“Yes, it’s an issue of the National Interrogator dated October 17, 1995.”

“Would you please look through it and see if it contains anything you wrote.”

“I’m sure it does. I’m in there every week.” She thumbed through and stopped at page 28.

“You’ve found a story, have you?”

Monte stood up. “Your Honor, if she’s going to examine the witness as to the exhibit I’d like to examine it first.”

“She’s still in the identification stage, Mr. Monte. However, since you have interrupted, perhaps Miss Purley could show it to you now and save the court some time.” He said this with his eyes fixed on the courtroom clock.

Ruth dutifully retrieved the paper from the witness and took it to Monte’s table. She waited, feeling a little sorry for him. His actions told her he hadn’t seen it before, and mindful of the fact that the judge had him in the doghouse over the time, he could only skim it now. The big bold caption said “Child Daredevils Defy Death Daily.”

In a minute or two he handed it back. Ruth glanced at his ears before turning back to the witness. “Read the story title to the jury, Miss Hundin.”

The witness did so with some hesitation.

“Now, Miss Hundin, in spite of the net, it’s still dangerous to work a trapeze at that height, isn’t it?”

“Well, apparently not. They do it.”

“You could fall and hit the net wrong, couldn’t you? Or miss it altogether.”

“Objection, Your Honor; calls for speculation.”

“Sustained. Move along, Miss Purley.”

“Miss Hundin, I refer you to the fourth paragraph down; first column; do you see it?”

“Yes.”

“Please read that paragraph to the jury.”

“ ‘Although the law requires nets to be used in Illinois and a majority of the states in this country, Mr. Bongiovanni says he has no great faith in them as safety devices and commonly dispenses with them when working overseas.’ ”

Ruth looked over at Monte, who sat stone-faced, with his chin resting on his hand. The jurors were no more demonstrative. But wait until the next question, thought Ruth.

“Naturally, Miss Hundin, you reported the abuse of the Bongioyanni children to the proper authority?”

“I don’t know what you mean by that question,” the witness protested.

“I mean, Miss Hundin, since the lives of these children were in danger, it was your duty to do something about it, wasn’t it? Just as you did in Adam’s case?”

“My duty? Why, no. Besides, I didn’t consider their lives to be in danger.”

“Then why did you say so in your article? Here it is in bold print.”

“I don’t write the captions; just the story.”

“Take a look at paragraph two, first column. Then tell the jury who wrote that.”

The witness looked. “I guess I did.”

“And it’s the same as the caption, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Identical wording?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t consider those children to have been in danger?”

“Well, maybe there is some risk, but they’re trained; their parents . . .” she never finished.

Ruth ignored the fact.

“Were these children in more or less danger than Adam was?”

“I don’t know.”

“But that was one of your complaints in the stories you wrote about Dr. Schoonover, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” The witness obviously suspected Ruth would have them all tucked away someplace in her file.

“As a matter of fact, in your articles you compared Dr. Schoonover with Dr. Frankenstein, didn’t you?”

“As I recall, the term was used.”

“And you said he’d created himself a slave, didn’t you?”

“No, I didn’t say that. That must have been some other paper.”

“You never said Dr. Schoonover solved his labor problems with a test tube?”

“I could have said that. I don’t remember.”

“How much were the Bongiovanni children paid for what they did?”

“I don’t know; we didn’t go into that.”

“You don’t know if, in fact, they were paid at all, do you?”

“No, but—”

“No, but what?”

“They were a family. If the family earned money they’d benefit.”

“You mean, their work contributed to family finances and support.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

“How does Adam’s relationship with Dr. Schoonover differ from that of the Bongiovanni family?”

“The Bongiovannis are related. Dr. Schoonover owns Adam. That makes the difference, if it’s family.”

“Did Dr. Schoonover say he owned Adam?”

“No.”

“Dr. Blatchley? Or Adam?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“He owned Adam’s parents.”

“You know this to be a fact, of your own personal knowledge?”

“Dr. Schoonover’s papers say this. I remember reading it. He told how Adam’s mother treated him; how she was implanted with an egg fertilized by a male chimpanzee.”

“Aren’t you assuming that Adam’s status would naturally follow that of his parents?”

“Yes. Doesn’t it?”

“Your Honor, I’ll move to strike the last remark as unresponsive.”

“So ordered. The jury will disregard it.”

“Miss Hundin, how did you get here today?”

The witness looked puzzled. “Why, I caught a plane this morning and the FBI picked me up at the airport.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Hundin; what I meant to ask is whether or not you came because you were subpoenaed or whether you came voluntarily.”

“Oh, I see. Well, Mr. Monte called me on the phone and asked me to be here.”

Now for the kicker. Ruth always enjoyed this and always did it, even though she knew Monte would re-direct and clear it up. “Miss Hundin, prior to the time you took the witness chair did you discuss with anyone else what testimony you would give when you got here?” She settled back to enjoy the look of pure panic, and it came.

“Why, no.”

“Absolutely no one?”

“No one at all. And,” she added, “no one told me what to say.”

“You’re absolutely positive of this?”

“Yes.”

“Did you talk to Mr. Monte this morning?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve talked to Mr. Monte on other occasions about this case, haven’t you?”

Monte rose. “Your Honor, if the court please, I’ll object at this point. We all know what she’s going to say next. And it’ll be in the charge, as the court well knows, that a witness has the right to discuss the case with counsel. There’s no harm in it, and my opponent’s certainly not going to suggest that I told her what to say.”

Oh, well, thought Ruth, sometimes it backfires. She said, “I don’t mean to limit my questions to her conversations, if any, with counsel, Your Honor. But I’m entitled to know if the testimony we heard is the witness’s own.”

“She’s already answered that, Your Honor.”

“Yes, Mr. Monte. And I’m going to sustain the objection. Miss Purley, do you anticipate being much longer with this witness?”

“I was about finished when Mr. Monte objected, Your Honor. I don’t believe I’ll have anything further at this time.”

“Any re-direct, Mr. Monte?” The judge had his eyes on the clock again.

“No,” said Monte prudently. Having apparently gotten out of the doghouse by putting Ruth in, he wasn’t about to try for a second term.

“Very well. We’ll stand adjourned until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

As the court departed, Monte motioned to Ruth. She left Schoonover at the table and went to see what he wanted.

“It’s not going well for you, Ruth, and I’m not through yet. Why don’t you take my offer and plead him? It’s not like I’m asking for hard time.”

“He’s not guilty, Bob. There’s no reason to plead.”

“Three years, probated. No fine. Fairer than that I couldn’t be. What are you gonna say? That the kid’s not human? The jury’s never going to buy that. One look is all they’ll need; in fact, I could do it with the pictures alone, without putting the kid on the stand.”

“He’s not going to testify, Bob.”

“That’s up to the judge, and I don’t think he’ll dare say no.”

“We’ll see. Bob. Is that all you want?”

“Yes, Ruth, but you know I’ll try for the maximum if I have to ride you down. He can get five and/or five.”

“You want your picture on the front page, huh? Well, so do I.” She stomped off.

“What was that all about, Ruth?” asked Schoonover.

“I just had my arm twisted. But don’t worry, I didn’t sell you out. Monte wanted me to plead you and take three years’ probation.”

“I’m not so sure it wouldn’t be smart to take it.”

“No, Delmar, it wouldn’t. You won’t do any worse even if I get creamed. In fact, I think you’d be a cinch for a pardon. Don’t fall for it. Besides, we’re not going to lose.”

“You keep saying that. I wish you’d tell me why you think so.”

“Come on, let’s go. The crowd’s gone. Let’s go to my place. I’ll cook dinner for you.”

Schoonover wasn’t what you’d call worldly, but since he’d met Ruth he’d gotten used to her forward ways. Still, accompanying her anywhere where there might be a bed was risky, and he wanted to think. “Maybe I’d better just go home,” he told her.

“Aw, come now, Delmar. You’d just sit around and worry. And the road’s clogged with reporters. My place’ll be quiet and comfortable.”

“What’s what I’m afraid of.”

“I promise I won’t bother you, unless you want me to.”

“O.K.”

She was as good as her word—for a while. Until after dinner, which he rated as uncommonly good for an improvisation. But when the clock struck ten he remembered the news came on. “Where’s your TV?”

“In here,” she yelled from the bedroom.

He started in the door.

“Get out of those duds and let’s watch the news we made,” she said.

The next morning on the way down, haggard from a sleepless night, Schoonover didn’t have much to say. Ruth, however, was alert and cheerful.

“It’s going a lot faster than I thought. Monte’s overconfident, and it’s made him lazy. He thinks it’s greased. I was afraid he’d march in a squad of psychiatrists, but evidently he’s not concerned with the human question. I’m worried about one thing, though.

“Rule 601. The competency rule. I know he’s going to try to call Adam, and he’s got the presumption with him.”

“What presumption?”

“The one that puts the burden on us to show Adam’s not competent to testify.”

“It’d scare him to death. Just being here is bad enough. I’m sure he feels responsible for all that’s happened.”

“Monte’s counting on it for shock value, just like I’m counting on your testimony.”

“But you said I wouldn’t be taking the stand.”

“I know. But I changed my mind after I was sure my grand strategy was working. It doesn’t matter now what Adam’s status is. It’s yours that really counts.”

She wouldn’t tell him why she said that, and once in the courtroom and back at the trial table he sat there mutely, trying to figure it out. Despite the conversation they’d had in the park the day before, to him law still reeked of sorcery.

Monte was seated at his table, talking to the AIC and looking confident. Everybody but Schoonover seemed happy and carefree. It didn’t seem fair. To them, it was either entertainment or routine work they did every day. One was stimulated by the novelty; the other was soporified by routine. Schoonover almost wished he would lose. Then they’d throw him in jail and maybe the world would leave him alone. He wanted to get back to his work and back to normal. But normal meant back to Adam, and win or lose Ruth had warned him that might not happen, ever. There could be a long fight in the State Court no matter what they decided Adam was in this trial, unless she had a miracle ready to work.

Ruth batted his elbow. She was already standing. So were the rest of the people. He felt like a fool, rising just as everybody else was preparing to sit down again.

“Bring the jury in, Mr. McGill,” said Cook.

Moments later in they trooped, behaving like bored veterans after one day on the job.

“Call your next witness, Mr. Monte.” Out went the AIC. There’d been no identification made to the court this time. Schoonover was sure that meant something. It did. In a little while the door opened and several hundred necks craned. Eyes popped and fingers flew across sketch pads. As far as the press was concerned, this was the climax.

Adam, still in the blue suit and white shoes, his hand in the AIC’s, walked stoically toward the bench, smiling weakly when he spotted Schoonover. They stopped in front of the reporter. Ruth recovered from her surprise. She had expected the DA to try this, but not so soon. She knew from checking his subpoena list that he’d called a lot more witnesses than he’d put on so far. It wasn’t unusual for one side or the other to use such a smoke screen, but she wasn’t so sure that was his idea now, although it might once have been. More likely she was right; he’d taken the bait and believed he could end it in one fell swoop. Well, not without a fight he wouldn’t. “Your Honor,” she said, “may counsel approach the bench?”

“Come forward,” said the judge.

Adam looked over at Schoonover, as though hoping the AIC would let go his hand so that he could go to him.

“Your Honor, the defense has a motion to make.”

“Well, let’s see it, counsel.”

“It’s oral, Your Honor. It concerns the competency of this witness.”

“Counsel, you know the rules require all motions to be in writing whenever possible.”

“It’s a trial motion, Your Honor.”

“Well, that’s different. Do we need to send the jury out?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Monte. “If it’s what I think it is, we’ll need to voir dire the witness.”

“I don’t agree with that part of it, Your Honor, but I’d like to be heard on the motion and we don’t need the jury for that.”

“O.K., Mr. McGill, take the jury out. I’ll want them back here by ten o’clock.”

Ruth stood next to the trial table while she addressed the court. She looked so small, thought Schoonover. Certainly the voice that boomed out was out of place in that body.

“The motion, Your Honor, is directed to the competency of the proposed witness, Adam. I would invite the Court’s attention to the wording of Rule 601, which says, ‘Every person is competent to be a witness except as otherwise established by these rules.’

“In that respect the language is identical to that of the 18 U.S.C. 1583. Both use the word ‘person.’

“And that, Your Honor, is one of the ultimate facts to be decided by the jury in this case: whether or not Adam is a person within the meaning of either the rule or the statute. Since it is a factual issue and this is a jury trial, it follows that only the jury can resolve it. Until they do, Your Honor has no alternative but to rule Adam incompetent to testify. And that’s not the only ground. If they decided he was there would still remain the questions of whether or not he would understand the oath, had sufficient intelligence to distinguish truth from falsehood, and whether his overall knowledge would permit him to comprehend the nature of these proceedings. These are all subsidiary issues. It is my contention, Your Honor, that for the court even to examine Adam at this point would be an error.”

“Mr. Monte, have you any response?”

“Most assuredly, Your Honor.” Monte stood, face flushed, ears crimson.

“In the first place, Your Honor, the Court has, in effect, already ruled on the motion by refusing to dismiss the indictment. The defense relied on the same grounds: the inhumanity of the victim. She has attempted throughout this trial to establish that Adam isn’t human, but as the court pointed out early in this hearing, that isn’t the issue. We’ve heard nothing cited to the Court which holds a person has to be human . . .”

“Mr. Monte,” the judge broke in. “If you have a point to make, then make it. All you’re doing, it seems to me, is repeating what she said.”

Monte’s ears got redder. His face took on a helpless look. “I reiterate, Your Ho—”

“And so do I, Mr. Monte. I’m ready to rule on the motion unless you can supply me with a reason not to.”

Monte sat down. The game wasn’t up without Adam’s testimony, but it would ruin his finale.

The judge continued. “The court will rule with the defendant, declaring Adam to be incompetent as a witness at this stage of the proceedings. However, since the ruling is based on the questionable status of the witness as a person, in its constitutional meaning, the court will reserve its ruling on any testimony proposed to be given after the jury has resolved it—that is, in the punishment phase, should the defendant be found guilty, or in any ancillary proceedings. In addition, the ruling is without prejudice to the defendant to raise any other objections he may have which are within the contemplation of Rule 601. Mr. Marshal, bring the jury back.”

Throughout it all Adam had stood there, his hand firmly held by the AIC. The jury was getting seated.

“Why is he still here, Ruth? It sounded to me like we won that round.”

“We did, but just because he can’t testify doesn’t mean he has to leave the courtroom. The DA obviously wants the jury to get a long look at him. It would surprise me if he tried it, but he could have Adam marked as an exhibit and admitted in evidence.”

“He could do that?”

“Theoretically. It’s been done in West Texas with cattle and horses, although naturally, in that case, the court has to adjourn to wherever they are. I can’t see the judge allowing that in this case if he can help it, and I don’t think Monte’d try. I expect something sneakier than that.”

“Mr. Monte,” the judge asked, “are you ready to proceed?”

Before the DA could answer, the AIC let go of Adam’s hand. Free, Adam ran across the courtroom, scurrying under the table and up into Schoonover’s chair, throwing his arms around the startled man’s neck. “Daddy!” he called, and began to sob.

The audience rumbled, drowning the Court’s protests. Over the roar rose the sound of the clerk’s pounding gavel. The AIC came over at once to get Adam, who clung desperately to Schoonover’s lapels. “Go with him, Adam, please. Daddy wants you to.” The AIC picked Adam up and carried him, still bawling, out of the courtroom, and as he did so Monte rose. “Your Honor,” he said, “the prosecution rests.”

“And the defendant moves for a mistrial, Your Honor.”

“On what grounds. Miss Purley?”

“That the prosecution provoked the incident the court just witnessed, for the purpose of arousing the sympathy of the jury to the prosecution’s position.”

“Mr. Monte, do you have anything to say to that?”

“Your Honor, certainly we regret it, but we didn’t plan it or do anything to promote its occurrence. It just happened.”

“Take the jury back out, Mr. McGill. I’ll see both counsel in chambers.”

When the courtroom was clear of jurors, they went back to Judge Cook’s chambers. These were austere, but impressive, filled with mementos of Cook’s long practice. He left the robe on, but sat behind his great desk and began stuffing a pipe. Ruth and Monte sat in armchairs in front of it.

“I called you both back here because I didn’t feel a courtroom full of reporters was the place to say this. You’re both probably entitled to mistrials—Miss Purley for the rather unprofessional episode she complained of, and Mr. Monte because defense counsel had implanted the idea of prosecution trickery in the jurors’ minds. Motions like that should never be made within the hearing of a jury, Miss Purley.

“So if either or both of you want me to do so, I will, and we’ll start all over again this afternoon picking a new jury. If that’s not your pleasure I’ll give the jury an instruction to disregard both incidents and hope they do.” He scratched a sulphurous match alight and puffed his Pipe.

Ruth, realizing that a mistrial at this point could have no other effect than to present her with an educated opponent, who’d know every facet of her case and who might not repeat previous blunders, reconsidered. The motion had been a knee jerk reaction anyhow. It was something you did for the record, instinctively, for the benefit of the appellate courts; normally good strategy, because if the trial court refused to grant it and the appellate court disagreed, you got a new trial. Unless you lost below it was moot, because in the federal system only the defendant can appeal. Under present circumstances it would be a mistake. A grave one.

She didn’t feel the incident had hurt her. She intended to bring all of it out in her case anyway. Monte still had displayed no inkling he knew her real objective, but in time he’d get wise. “I’ll withdraw my motion. Your Honor.”

“Very well. Miss Purley. What’s your pleasure. Mr. Monte?”

“The prosecution will go ahead, Your Honor. I can’t see any advantage to the taxpayers to go through this again.”

“O.K.,” said the judge, examining his pipe, as though he’d like to smoke it a little longer. “Are there going to be any motions at this time?”

“None for the prosecution, Your Honor.”

Ruth had considered a motion for a directed verdict. She had one prepared and ready for presentation. But she knew from experience that there was slim chance the court would take the case from the jury at this point. There was no way the judge could be persuaded that Monte hadn’t made a prima facie case and produced enough evidence to require her to put on a defense. Anyway, she’d still have that option at the close of all the evidence.

“None for the defendant, Your Honor.”

“O.K. You’re both excused. We’ll be in recess another fifteen minutes.”

Schoonover sat down in the witness chair, crossed his legs and folded his hands, assuming the posture he and Ruth had so painstakingly practiced. Ruth began the questions. “What is your full name?”

“Delmar E. Schoonover.”

“What is your occupation?”

“I’m a doctor of medicine currently employed at the Blatchley Institute of Genetic Research.”

“Are you acquainted with Adam Schoonover?”

“Objection, Your Honor.” Monte stood there sputtering.

“I’ll hear the basis for your objection if you’ve got one, Mr. Monte. Otherwise sit down.”

Monte sat down.

“Objection overruled,” said the Court.

“Who is Adam Schoonover, Dr. Schoonover?” Ruth continued.

“Adam Schoonover is my son.”

“Pass the witness, Your Honor.” The audience froze.

To herself, Ruth thought, Now you know, turkey. I just dumped your whole case. She looked at the prosecutor, whose ears blazed fire. Yes, it had worked. The jurors behind him were animated too, and appeared to be shocked at the brevity of the direct examination. Among the spectators no fingers sketched or scribbled notes; no eye was anywhere but on the witness.

The DA, veteran of a thousand or more bouts with the area’s best defense people, took some time to regain composure, to reorient his thinking, to bring it around 180° from where it had been, when he’d been struggling to prove Adam’s humanity. He had an agile and orderly mind, trained to adapt, and he’d have to do that now. He used harmless questions to stall, to get time to think. He stretched them out with long pauses.

“Where did you go to school, Dr. Schoonover?”

“My undergraduate work was done at the University of Maryland, College Park. I took my M.D. at the University of Bern, in Switzerland.”

“Where did you intern, Dr. Schoonover?”

“Reading Hospital, Reading, Pennsylvania.”

“Did you do a residency in any special branch of medicine?”

“No, I went right into research.”

“You’ve never practiced medicine, then?”

“Not in the usual sense of the word, no.”

“Are you licensed to practice by the State of Texas?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of research do you do?”

“I call it preventive genetics.”

“I see. Now, you’ve done some papers with respect to this research which have been published in the Journal of the American Society of Genetic Engineering, haven’t you?”

“Yes, four of them.”

“You’re referring to the articles contained in Government’s Exhibits 12, 13, 14, and 15? You know what those are?”

“Yes, to both questions.”

“Doctor, you said that Adam was your son?”

“Yes.”

“You’re speaking figuratively, aren’t you, not in the biological sense?”

“No.”

“May I approach the witness, Your Honor?”

“Go ahead, Mr. Monte.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. Now, Dr. Schoonover, I’m going to refer you to Government Exhibit 12, and ask you to note the title of your article.”

Schoonover took the Journal, flipped it to the beginning page, and perused it.

“What is the title of the article, Dr. Schoonover?”

“ ‘Genetic Augmentation of Primate Intelligence.’ ”

“That title would seem to suggest that elevation of intellect was your primary purpose, Doctor. Is that true?”

“No, it wasn’t.”

“Then why do it?”

“To determine which areas of the genetic code produce the increased intelligence in the first place. Then we’d know where to look for trouble.”

“In pursuit of this goal you used chimpanzees, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“How many did you use in Adam’s case?”

“Two.”

“One of these was a female?”

“Yes.”

“Was the other a male?”

“Yes.”

“Now, Dr. Schoonover, Adam was born of the female in the usual way after the normal period of gestation, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“So there’s a biological relationship and connection between the female ape and the child Adam?”

“Definitely.”

“By the same token, an ovum was removed from her body, and this ovum was then fertilized with sperm from a male chimp and reimplanted?”

“Yes, that was done.”

“So that it is correct to say that Adam is the child of these two apes; they are his parents.”

“Yes.”

“Yet you have just told the court Adam is your son?”

“Yes.”

“You claim to be Adam’s father?”

“Not exactly. You see, I’m his mother, too.”

“No child can have more than two parents. Dr. Schoonover. It’s biologically impossible.”

“No, it isn’t, Mr. Monte. I just told you that. Adam was the product of three parents. That’s a documented, scientific fact.”

Monte wished he could stop, crawl under something, and die. But if he cut off his cross now Ruth would simply go on with re-direct. And certainly he’d opened up a very large can of worms with his last few questions. Yet he still didn’t know where Schoonover expected to go with the story. Whatever it was, whatever dangers lurked ahead, the prosecution’s duty was clear: ask the next obvious question. He did.

“What is the basis for your statement that you are one of Adam’s parents?”

“Simple, Mr. Monte.” Schoonover’s demeanor suddenly became patronizing. “The determinative biological factor in whether or not a parent-child relationship exists is the contribution, by an individual, of genetic material to the child. In Adam’s case, to accomplish the result I wanted, I couldn’t simply use the material in either the chimp ovum or the chimp sperm. It wasn’t there. So I added human DNA to both. There’s no sexual difference at that level, and naturally there was only one really convenient place to get it. I used my own. Therefore, it logically follows that I am Adam’s parent, and it’s only out of deference to my sex that he calls me ‘Daddy’; ‘Mommy’ would be equally appropriate. And. since I am his only human parent, I thought it was appropriate that I should be the one to raise him. By the way, I consider Adam to be as human as I am.”

Now, at last, Monte got the point. He was through. He could not go on. He had won every battle but this one, and this one cost him the war. “Pass the witness,” he said.

Ruth stood. “I have no more witnesses, Your Honor. I do have a motion for directed verdict, however, after which I shall rest.”

“Mr. McGill, take the jury out. Dr. Schoonover, you may step down. You’re excused.”

By now the jury was so good at the routine they didn’t even wait for Ralph. He stood at the back of the courtroom and opened the door.

Ruth walked over to the prosecution table and handed Monte a copy of her motion. He took it without enthusiasm, and she continued on to where the clerk sat. The clerk file-stamped it, initialed it, and handed it up to the judge, who read it and signalled her to begin.

“Your Honor, the Court has now heard all the evidence in this case, and both sides have rested. The defendant would show the Court that the Government has utterly failed in its burden of proof, and in its obligation to demonstrate that a crime has been committed in the first place, much less that the defendant committed it.

“They have, of course, introduced testimony which tends to show that Adam is a person, and in that respect the defense entirely agrees. However, not all persons are constitutionally protected in their liberty. The amendment itself provides several exceptions to its effect—persons serving sentences for crimes, as a specific instance. There is another, so basic and so incontrovertible that it didn’t need mention or explanation; namely, the relationship between parent and minor child. A parent unquestionably has the right to restrain a child’s liberty and utilize his services free. That’s been the law since the dawn of history.

“The evidence is uncontradicted. Dr. Schoonover is a parent, or at least a co-parent, of Adam. While it may be the first time the Earth has ever witnessed such an event, it is a biologic, scientific, and more importantly, a legal fact that they are mother-father and minor son. As Mr. Monte put it, Adam is literally Dr. Schoonover’s Brain Child.

“Because that relationship exists, neither the relationship of master and slave, peon and padrone, or any other similar relationship can co-exist with it. If these forbidden relationships cannot and do not exist, then the crime charged cannot exist. All other arguments are moot, just as all other facts are irrelevant. There is nothing for the jury to decide, therefore the verdict must be the Court’s, and since an essential element of the crime is missing the only verdict can be acquittal.” Ruth sat down.

“Mr. Monte, you may respond.” Monte didn’t rise. He shook his head no.

“The court will direct the jury to find for the defendant. Bring them back again, Marshal.”

With that there was a rush for the doors. The crowd of reporters half killed each other to get out of the building and get the news on the air.

“Love your bedroom, Delmar. I’ll bet you do your own decorating.” Ruth propped herself up on one elbow, punching the pillow up with her other arm. “Tell me, how do you feel about your lawyer now?”

“Well, satisfied, and well satisfied. But how come we spend all our time in bed?”

“It’s good for you. Don’t you like me?”

“Sure, I do. And I want you to know I’m grateful, too. You sure got the job done. I’m off the hook; I can get back to work. Adam’s asleep in his own bunk for the first time in three months, and the whole world’s gotten interested in genetic engineering.”

“See, now you can spare a little time for me. That was my plan all along.”

“I guess I’m just dense, Ruth. Your plan wasn’t all that obvious to me. It looked like things were just happening, and I still don’t see how you did it.”

“Do you understand the law of gravity?”

“No. Nobody does. But I can understand its effect.”

“There’s nothing magical about what I did, Delmar. It was a simple matter of picking the right thread, following it through the maze, and getting to the door I wanted. I knew what the rule was.”

“Huh?”

“The Constitution says that to be tried for a major federal crime, you have to be indicted by a Grand Jury. The indictment has to follow the statutory language that makes the conduct a crime. It has to allege you engaged in that conduct, and that when you did it you had the requisite criminal intent.

“The elements of slavery are: first, the restraint of a person; second, the involuntariness of the restraint; third, the presence of the intent to obtain that individual’s services in violation of the law; and fourth, the absence of any legal justification. We call this the corpus delicti; the body of the crime.

“Knowing both the law and facts, I could start eliminating possibilities. There wasn’t any sense in denying the restraint, or even the involuntary nature of the restraint. It would have been useless. Criminal intent was a possibility, but it probably wouldn’t have gotten past the court’s charge to the jury. They’d have been instructed to infer it from your acts.

“That left two possible escape routes. Remember, the prosecution had the burden of proof. Their case had to stand on its own merits proof wise. Every reasonable doubt as to guilt had to be resolved in your favor. Every essential element of the crime charged had to be proven under the same test. It’s like the reaction the astronauts gave when asked how much organic material had to be removed from the holding tanks to produce potable water. Do you remember their answer?”

“Yes,” Schoonover replied. “They said, all of it.”

“Now you’ve got it. The DA, of course, was acutely aware I thought I’d found a defense, and he certainly didn’t have any trouble deciding what it was. Any fool could see it; your only way out was to dehumanize the victim.

“Here I was with a situation absolutely brand new, factually. Nothing like it had ever happened in human history; here was a court being asked to decide if a human being could be guilty of enslaving a being who was absolutely unique to our age, and who might or might not be a person. Notice I said person, not human. The word ‘person’ can be defined; the word ‘human’ can’t. Some pretty shrewd individuals have tried, including a guy name John W. Campbell, who used to edit a magazine call Astounding. In fact, I used his editorial in the September ’59 issue to plan my cross of Mona Aikenhead.

“Anyway. Monte would expect me to deny Adam was a person; reasoning that way was natural. In fact, most lawyers would have considered that to be the only possible defense and stopped there. After all, it worked on blacks and Indians for several hundred years in cases where only the most bigoted jury could have denied their humanity.

“But I read the whole amendment, plus the statutes, plus the indictment, just like I’d never seen it before, and it occurred to me that there was something there that Monte hadn’t seen because he didn’t look. I almost told him about it then.”

“What! Why would you have wanted to do that?”

“Because there might have been a dismissal of the indictment against you. You might not have had to stand trial.”

“I see. You mean, I went through all this for nothing?”

“Of course not. And my reason was a good one. If he didn’t buy it, Monte could still have gone ahead, and our defense would have been revealed. He’d have marched in a dozen experts to attack your status as a parent. I couldn’t be 100% sure it would stand up.

“So I played his game—let him think he was right about our position. And he did what I expected. He put in the pictures, your articles, the testimony of Mona Aikenhead and Madelyn Hundin. Then there was his little trick with Adam. He knew as well as I did Cook probably wouldn’t let Adam take the stand, but he wanted the jury to see him in an upset emotional state. All his strategy was designed to fortify the normal human tendency to humanize the rest of the Earth’s animal life. People are used to teddy bears and such. The most widely recognized face on Earth belongs to Mickey Mouse.

“You asked me if Monte would have Adam marked as an exhibit. I knew he wouldn’t do that. That’d help us dehumanize Adam and that wasn’t in his plans. I planted the scent on the rabbit trail and Monte just sniffed along until he bumped his head on reality. It was a ruse de guerre. You see, Delmar, in law it’s facts that count. Words are just used to pump adrenalin.”

“How come he never caught on?”

“His ego wouldn’t let him. All through the trial I was scared to death he would. But he’s a prosecutor and he thinks like one. The prosecution’s used to having a pat hand. They control who gets indicted, picking only cases they have a good chance of winning, and knowing they can deal most of these out on pleas. In your case, Monte probably figured I’d feel obliged to put on a show in order to justify what you’re paying us; that I’d do that in any case to reap the publicity benefits for myself. It’s not uncommon; we call it playing out the string. I’m sure Monte read me that way. Otherwise he’d have toughened up his proof—put on more witnesses—and the case would have lasted a couple of weeks like the papers were saying. He got the wrong answer because he asked himself the wrong question.

“I played along, restricting my examination to questions in areas which would fortify his theory. I didn’t actually care what anybody said; except you, that is. I would have been happy to stipulate to his entire case and agree in advance what everybody would say.

“And I could always tell when he was in trouble. The ears never lie, they’re like big, red warning lights. That’s why we girls go to court with our hair down and why black lawyers are extra dangerous opponents.

“It was all like Stalin’s preliminary skirmishes around Rostov during the Russian Civil War. These didn’t accomplish a thing except to convince the Whites he was on the ropes, so he could suck them into the trap at the Don bend. You know what happened alter that, don’t you?”

“No, but I can guess. Anyhow, what does it matter whether I know, as long as you do?”

“Sounds like you might be planning to keep me around, Delmar. I’m flattered.”

“I’ve been thinking, Ruth. There’s no reason why Adam should be an only child, is there? Or grow up without a real mother.”

“Why Delmar, what a clever way to get at my DNA. The answer’s yes; I mean no, there isn’t. That was a proposal, wasn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. This world is going to be rough on Adam; on me too. And a boy’s best friend . . .”

“Is his lawyer. Delmar, I think you’re catching on.”

ANOTHER ORPHAN

John Kessel

John Kessel has written several humorous pieces for F&SF, most recently "Not Responsible! Park and Lock It!" (September 1981). Here is something quite different and remarkable, the gripping story of Patrick Fallon, a young Chicago broker who finds himself deposited into a hammock on a nineteenth-century sailing ship.

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

—Job

He woke to darkness and swaying and the stink of many bodies. He tried to lift his head and reach across the bed and found he was not in his bed at all. He was in a canvas hammock that rocked back and forth in a room of other hammocks.

“Carol?” Still half-asleep, he looked around, then lay back, hoping that he might wake and find this just a dream. He felt the distance from himself he often felt in dreams. But the room did not go away, and the smell of sweat and salt water and some overwhelming stink of oil became more real. The light slanting down through a latticed grating above became brighter; he heard the sound of water and the creak of canvas, and the swaying did not stop, and the men about him began to stir. It came to him, in that same dreamlike calm, that he was on a ship.

A bell sounded twice, then twice again. Most of the other men were up, grumbling, and stowing away the hammocks. “What ails you, Fallon?” someone called. “Up, now.”

two

His name was Patrick Fallon. He was thirty-two years old, a broker for a commission house at the Chicago Board of Trade. He played squash at an athletic club every Tuesday and Thursday night. He lived with a woman named Carol Bukaty.

The night before, he and Carol had gone to a party thrown by one of the other brokers and his wife. As sometimes happened with these parties, this one had degenerated into an exchange of sexual innuendo, none of it apparently serious, but with undertones of suspicion and the desire to hurt. Fallon had had too much wine and had said a few things to the hostess and about Carol that he had immediately wanted to retract. They’d driven back from the party in silence, but the minute they’d closed the door it had been a fight. Neither of them shouted, but his quiet statement that he did not respect her at all and hers that she was sickened by his excess, managed quite well. They had become adept at getting at each other. They had, in the end, made up, and had made love.

As Fallon had lain there on the edge of sleep, he had had the idle thought that what had happened that evening was silly, but not funny. That something was wrong.

Fallon had the headache that was the residue of the wine; he could still smell Carol. He was very hungry and dazed as he stumbled into the bright sunlight on the deck of the ship. It was there. It was real. He was awake. The ocean stretched flat and empty in all directions. The ship rolled slightly as it made way with the help of a light wind, and despite the early morning it was already hot. He did not hear the sound or feel the vibration of an engine. Fallon stared, unable to collect the scattered impressions into coherence; they were all consistent with the picture of an antiquated sailing ship on a very real ocean, all insane when compared with where his mind told him he ought to be.

The men had gone to their work as soon as they’d stretched into the morning light. They wore drab shirts and canvas trousers; most were barefoot. Fallon walked unsteadily along the deck, trying to keep out of their way as they set to scrubbing the deck. The ship was unlike anything he had ever seen on Lake Michigan; he tried to ignore the salt smell that threatened to make it impossible for him to convince himself this was Lake Michigan. Yet it seemed absurd for such a small vessel to be in the middle of an ocean. He knew that the Coast Guard kept sailing ships for training its cadets, but these were no cadets.

The deck was worn, scarred, and greasy with a kind of oily, clear lardlike grease. The rail around the deck was varnished black and weather-beaten, but the pins set through it to which the rigging was secured were ivory. Fallen touched one—it was some kind of tooth. More ivory was used for rigging-blocks and on the capstan around which the anchor chain was wound. The ship was a thing of black wood fading to white under the assault of water and sun, and of white ivory corroding to black under the effect of dirt and hard use. Three longboats, pointed at both ends, hung from arms of wood and metal on the left—the port—side; another such boat was slung at the rear of the deck on the starboard side, and on the raised part of the deck behind the mainmast two other boats were turned turtle and secured. Add to this the large hatch on the main deck and a massive brick structure that looked like some old-fashioned oven just behind the front mast, and there hardly seemed room for the fifteen or twenty men on deck to go about their business. There was certainly no place to hide.

“Fallen! Set your elbows to that deck, or I shall have to set your nose to it!” A short sandy-haired man accosted him. Stocky and muscular, he was some authority; there was insolence in his grin, and some seriousness. The other men looked up.

Fallen got out of the man’s way. He went over to one of the groups washing down the deck with salt water, large scrub brushes, and what looked like push brooms with leather flaps instead of bristles, like large versions of the squeegees used to clean windows. The sandy-haired man watched him as he got down on his hands and knees and grabbed one of the brushes.

“There’s a good lad, now. Ain’t he, fellows?” A couple of them laughed. Fallen started scrubbing, concentrating on the grain of the wood, at first fastidious about not wetting the already damp trousers he had apparently slept in, soon realizing that that was a lost cause. The warm water was sloshed over them, the men leaned on the brushes, and the oil slowly flaked up and away through the spaces in the rail into the sea. The sun rose, and it became even hotter. Now and then one of the men tried to say a word or two to him, but he did not answer. “Fallen here’s got the hypos,” someone said. “Or the cholera,” another said. “He does look a bit bleary about the eye. Are you thirsty, Fallen? D’your legs ache? Are your bowels knotted?”

“My bowels are fine,” he said.

That brought a good laugh. “Fine, he says! Manxman!” The sailor called to a decrepit old man leaning on his squeegee. “Tell the King-Post that Fallen’s bowels are fine, now! The scrubbing does seem to have eased them.”

“Don’t ease them here, man!” the old man said seriously. The men roared again, and the next bucket of water was sloshed up between Fallon’s legs.

three

In the movies men had faced similar situations. The amnesiac soldier came to on a farm in Wales. But invariably the soldier would give evidence of his confusion, challenging the farm owner, pestering his fellow workers with questions about where he was and how he got there, telling them of his persistent memory of a woman in white with golden hair. Strangely—strangely even to Fallen—he did not feel that way. Confusion, yes, dread, curiosity—but no desire to call attention to himself, to try to make the obvious reality of his situation give way to the apparent reality of his memories. He did not think this was because of any strength of character or remarkable powers of adaptation. In fact, everything he did that first day revealed his ignorance of what he was supposed to know and do on the ship. He did not feel any great presence of mind; for minutes at a time he would stop working, stunned with awe and fear at the simple alienness of what was happening. If it was a dream, it was a vivid dream. If anything was a dream, it was Carol and the Chicago Board of Trade.

The soldier in the movie always managed, despite the impediments of his amnesia and the ignorance of those around him, to find the rational answer to his mystery. The shell fragment that had grazed his forehead in Normandy had sent him back to a Wessex sanitorium, from which he had wandered during an air raid, to be picked up by a local handyman driving his lorry to Llanelly, who in the course of the journey decided to turn a few quid by leasing the poor soldier to a farmer as his half-wit cousin laborer. So it had to be that some physicist at the University of Chicago, working on the modern equivalent of the Manhattan Project, had accidentally created a field of gravitational energy so intense that a vagrant vortex had broken free from it and, in its lightning progress through the city on its way to extinction, plucked Fallen from his bed in the suburbs, sucked him through a puncture in the fabric of space and time, to deposit him in a hammock on a midnineteenth-century sailing ship. Of course.

Fallen made a fool of himself ten times over during the day. Despite his small experience with fresh-water sailing, he knew next to nothing about the work he was meant to do on this ship. Besides cleaning the deck and equipment, the men scrubbed a hard black soot from the rigging and spars. Fallen would not go up into the rigging. He was afraid, and tried to find work enough on the deck. He did not ask where the oil and soot had come from; it was obvious the source had been the brick furnace that was now topped by a tight-fitting wooden cover. Some of the cracks in the deck were filled with what looked like dried blood, but it was only the casual remark of one of the other men that caused him to realize, shocked at his own slowness, that this was a whaling ship.

The crew was an odd mixture of types and races; there were white and black, a group of six Orientals who sat apart on the rear deck and took no part in the work, men with British and German accents, and an eclectic collection of others—Polynesians, an Indian, a huge shaven-headed black African, and a mostly naked man covered from head to toe with purple tattoos, whorls and swirls and vortexes, images and symbols, none of them quite decipherable as a familiar object or person. After the decks had been scrubbed to a remarkable whiteness, the mate named Flask set Fallen to tarring some heavy ropes in the forepart of the ship, by himself, where he would be out of the others’ way. The men seemed to realize that something was wrong with him, but said nothing and apparently did not take it amiss that one of their number should begin acting strangely.

Which brought him, hands and wrists smeared with warm tar, to the next question: how did they know who he was? He was Fallen to all of them. He had obviously been there before he awakened; he had been a regular member of the crew with a personality and role to fill. He knew nothing of that. He had the overwhelming desire to get hold of a mirror to see whether the face he wore was indeed the face he had worn in Chicago the night before. The body was the same, down to the appendix scar he’d carried since he was nine years old. His arms and hands were the same; the fatigue he felt and the rawness of his skin told him he had not been doing this type of work long. So assume he was there in his own person, his Chicago person, the real Fallen. Was there now some confused nineteenth-century sailor wandering around a brokerage house on Van Buren? The thought made him smile. The sailor at the Board of Trade would probably get the worse of it.

So they knew who he was, even if he didn’t remember ever having been here before. There was a Patrick Fallen on the ship, and he had somehow been brought here to fill that role. Reasons unknown. Method unknown. Way out . . .

Think of it as an adventure. How many times as a boy had he dreamed of similar escapes from the mundane? Here he was, the answer to a dream, twenty-five years later. It would make a tremendous story when he got back, if he could find someone he could trust enough to tell it to—if he could get back.

There was a possibility that he tried to keep himself from dwelling on. He had come here while asleep, and though this reality gave no evidence of being a dream, if there was a symmetry to insanity, then on waking the next morning, might he not be back in his familiar bed? Logic presented the possibility. He tried not to put too much faith in logic. Logic had not helped him when he was on the wrong side of the soybean market in December 1980.

The long tropic day declined; the sunset was a travel agent’s dream. They were traveling east, by the signpost of that light. Fallen waited, sitting by a coil of rope, watching the helmsman at the far end of the ship lean, dozing, on the long ivory tiller that served this ship in place of the wheel with handspikes he was familiar with from Errol Flynn movies. It had to be a bone from some long-dispatched whale, another example of the savage Yankee practicality of whoever had made this whaler. It was a queerly innocent, gruesome artistry. Fallen had watched several idle sailors in the afternoon carving pieces of bone while they ate their scrap of salt pork and hard bread.

“Fallon, you can’t sleep out here tonight, unless you want the Old Man to find you lying about.” It was a tall sailor of about Fallon’s age. He had come down from aloft shortly after Fallon’s assignment to the tar bucket, had watched him quietly for some minutes before giving him a few pointers on how the work was done. In the falling darkness Fallon could not make out his expression, but the voice held a quiet distance that might mask just a trace of kindness. Fallon tried to get up and found his legs had grown so stiff he failed on the first try. The sailor caught his arm and helped him to his feet. “You’re all right?”

“Yes.” Fallen was embarrassed.

“Let’s get below, then.” They stepped toward the latticed hatch near the bow.

“And there he is,” the sailor said, pausing, lifting his chin aft.

“Who?” Fallen looked back with him and saw the black figure there, heavily bearded, tall, in a long coat, steadying himself by a hand in the rigging. The oil lamp above the compass slightly illuminated the dark face—and gleamed deathly white along the ivory leg that projected from beneath his black coat. Fixed, immovable, the man leaned heavily on it.

“Ahab,” the sailor said.

four

Lying in the hammock, trying to sleep, Fallen was assaulted by the feverish reality of where he was. The ship rocked him like a gentle parent in its progress through the calm sea; he heard the rush of water breaking against the hull as the Pequod made headway, the sighing of the breeze above, heard the steps of the night watch on deck, the occasional snap of canvas, the creaking of braces; he sweated in the oppressive heat belowdecks; he drew heavy breaths, trying to calm himself, of air laden with the smell of mildewed canvas and what he knew to be whale oil. He held his hands before his face and in the profound darkness knew them to be his own. He touched his neck and felt the slickness of sweat beneath the beard. He ran his tongue over his lips and tasted salt. Through the open hatch he could make out stars that were unchallenged by any other light. Would the stars be the same in a book as they were in reality? In a book. Any chance he had to sleep flew from him whenever he ran up against that thought. Any logic he brought to bear on his situation crumbled under the weight of that absurdity. A time machine he could accept, some chance cosmic displacement that sucked him into the past. But not into a book. That was insanity; that was hallucination. He knew that if he could sleep now, he would wake once more in the real world. But he had nothing to grab hold of. He lay in the darkness listening to the ship and could not sleep at all.

They had been compelled to read Moby Dick in the junior-year American Renaissance class he’d taken to fulfill the last of his humanities requirements. Fallen remembered being bored to tears by most of Melville’s book, struggling with his interminable sentences, his woolly speculations that had no bearing on the story; he remembered being caught up by parts of that story. He had seen the movie with Gregory Peck. Richard Basehart, king of the sci-fi flicks, had played Ishmael. Fallen had not seen anyone who looked like Richard Basehart on the ship. The mate, Flask—he remembered that name now. He remembered that all the harpooners were savages. Queequeg.

He remembered that in the end, everyone but Ishmael died.

He had to get back. Sleep, sleep, you idiot, he told himself. He could not keep from laughing; it welled up in his chest and burst through his tightly closed lips. Fallon’s laugh sounded more like a man gasping for breath than one overwhelmed by humor: he barked, he chuckled, he sucked in sudden drafts of air as he tried to control the spasms. Tears were in his eyes, and he twisted his head from side to side as if he were strapped to a bed in some ward. Some of the others stirred and cursed him, but Fallen, a character in a book where everyone died on the last page, shook with helpless laughter, crying, knowing he would not sleep.

five

With a preternatural clarity born of the sleepless night, Fallen saw the deck of the Pequod the next morning. He was a little stunned yet, but if he kept his mind in tight check the fatigue would keep him from thinking, and he would not feel the distress that was waiting to burst out again. Like a man carrying a bowl filled with acid, Fallen carried his knowledge tenderly.

He observed with scientific detachment, knowing that sleep would ultimately come, and with it perhaps escape. The day was bright and fair, a duplicate of the previous one. The whaler was clean and prepared for her work; all sails were set to take advantage of the light breeze, and the mastheads were manned with lookouts. Men loitered on deck. On the rear deck—the quarterdeck, they called it—Ahab paced, with remarkable steadiness for a man wearing an ivory leg, between the compass in its box and the mainmast, stopping for seconds to stare pointedly at each end of his path. Fallen could not take his eyes off the man. He was much older than Fallen had imagined him from his memories of the book. Ahab’s hair and beard were still black, except for the streak of white that ran through them as the old scar ran top to bottom across his face, but the face itself was deeply worn, and the man’s eyes were sunken in wrinkles, hollow. Fallen remembered Tigue, who had traded in the gold pit, who had once been the best boy on the floor—the burnout, they called him now, talking a very good game about shorting the market. Tigue’s eyes had the same hollow expectation of disaster waiting inevitably for him—just him—that Ahab’s held. Yet when Fallen had decided Ahab had to be the same empty nonentity, the man would pause at the end of his pathway and stare at the compass, or the gold coin that was nailed to the mast, and his figure would tighten in the grip of some stiffening passion, as if he were shot through with lightning. As if he were at the focal point of some cosmic lens that concentrated all the power of the sun on him, so that he might momentarily burst into spontaneous flame.

Ahab talked to himself, staring at the coin. His voice was conversational, and higher pitched than Fallen had imagined it would be. Fallen was not the only man who watched him in wonder and fear.

“There’s something ever egotistical in mountaintops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things; look here—three peaks as proud as Lucifer. The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab; and this round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician’s glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self . . .”

All spoken in the tone of a man describing a minor auto accident (the brown Buick swerved to avoid the boy on the bicycle, crossed over the yellow line, and hit the milk truck, which was going south on Main Street). As soon as he had stopped, Ahab turned and, instead of continuing his pacing, went quietly below.

One of the ship’s officers—the first mate, Fallen thought—who had been talking to the helmsman before Ahab began to speak, now advanced to look at the coin. Fallen began to remember what was going to happen. Theatrically, though there was nobody there to listen to him, the mate began to speak aloud about the Trinity and the sun, hope and despair. Next came another mate, who talked of spending the doubloon quickly, then gave a reading comparing the signs of the zodiac to a man’s life. Overwritten and silly, Fallen thought.

Flask now came to the doubloon and figured out how many cigars he could buy with it. Then came the old man who had sloshed the water all over Fallen the previous morning, who gave a reading of the ship’s doom under the sign of the lion. Then Queequeg, then one of the Orientals, then a black boy—the cabin boy.

The boy danced around the mast twice, crouching low, rising on his toes, and each time around stared at the doubloon with comically bugged eyes. He stopped. “I look, you look, he looks, we look, ye look, they look.”

I look, you look, he looks, we look, ye look, they look.

They all looked at it; they all spouted their interpretations. That was what Melville had wanted them to do to prove his point. Fallen did not feel like trying to figure out what that point was. After the dramatics, the Pequod went back to dull routine, and he to cleanup work on the deck, to tarring more ropes. They had a lot of ropes.

He took a break and walked up to the mast to look at the coin himself. Its surface was stamped with the image of three mountains, with a flame, a tower, and a rooster at their peaks. Above were the sun and the signs of the zodiac. REPUBLICA DEL EQUADOR: QUITO, it said. A couple of ounces, worth maybe $1,300 on the current gold market, according to the London fix Fallen last remembered. It wouldn’t be worth as much to these men, of course; this was preinflation money. He remembered that the doubloon had been nailed there by Ahab as a reward to whoever spotted Moby Dick first.

I look, you look, he looks, we look, ye look, they look.

Fallen looked, and nothing changed. His tiredness grew as the day wore through a brutally hot afternoon. When evening at last came and the grumbling of his belly had been at least partially assuaged by the meager meal served the men, Fallen fell exhausted into the hammock. He did not worry about not sleeping this time; consciousness fell away as if he had been drugged. He had a vivid dream. He was trying, under cover of darkness, to pry the doubloon away from the mast so that he might throw it into the sea. Anxiously trying not to let the helmsman at the tiller spot him, he heard the step, tap, step, tap, of Ahab’s pacing a deck below. It was one of those dreams where one struggles in unfocused terror to accomplish some simple task. He was afraid he might be found any second by Ahab. If he were caught, then he would be exposed and vilified before the crew’s indifferent gaze.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t get his fingers under the edge of the coin, though he bruised them bloody. He heard the knocking of Ahab’s whalebone step ascending to the deck; the world contracted to the coin welded to the mast, his broken nails, the terrible fear. He heard the footsteps drawing nearer behind him as he frantically tried to free the doubloon, yet he could not run, and he would not turn around. At the last, after an eternity of anxiety, a hand fell on his shoulder and spun him around, his heart leaping into his throat. It was not Ahab, but Carol.

He woke breathing hard, pulse pounding. He was still in the hammock, in the forecastle of the Pequod. He closed his eyes again, dozed fretfully through the rest of the night. Morning came: he was still there.

The next day several of the other men prodded him about not having taken a turn at the masthead for a long time. He stuck to mumbled answers and hoped they would not go to any of the officers. He wanted to disappear. He wanted it to be over. The men treated him more scornfully as the days passed. And the days passed, and still nothing happened to free him. The doubloon glinted in the sun each morning, at the center of the ship, and Fallen could not get away. I look, you look, he looks, we look, ye look,they look.

six

Fallen had assumed his sullen station by the tar bucket. There he felt at least some defense from his confusion. He could concentrate on the smell and feel of the tar; he remembered the summers on the tarred road in front of his grandparents’ house in Elmira, how the sun would raise shining bubbles of tar at the edges of the resurfaced country road, how the tar would stick to your sneakers and get you a licking if you tracked it into Grandmother’s immaculate kitchen. He and his cousin Seth had broken the bubbles with sticks and watched them slowly subside into themselves. The tar bucket on the Pequod was something Fallen could focus on. The tar was real; the air he breathed was real—Fallen himself was real.

Stubb, the second mate, stood in front of him, arms akimbo. He stared at Fallen; Fallen lifted his head and saw the man’s small smile. There was no charity in it.

“Time to go aloft, Fallen. You’ve been missing your turn, and we won’t have any slackers aboard.”

Fallen couldn’t think of anything to say. He stumbled to his feet, wiping his hands on a piece of burlap. A couple of the other sailors were watching, waiting for Fallen to shy off or for Stubb to take him.

“Up with ye!” Stubb shoved Fallen’s shoulder, and he turned, fumbling for the rigging. Fallen looked momentarily over the side of the ship to the sea that slid calmly by them; the gentle rolling of the deck that he had in so short a time become accustomed to now returned to him with frightening force. Stubb was still behind him. Taking a good breath, he pulled himself up and stepped barefoot onto the rail. Facing inward now, he tried to climb the rigging. Stubb watched him with dispassion, waiting, it seemed, for his failure. Expecting it. It was like trying to climb one of those rope ladders at the county fair: each rung he took twisted the ladder in the direction of his weight, and the rocking of the ship, magnified as he went higher, made it hard for his feet to find the next step. He had never been a particularly self-conscious man, but felt he was being watched by them all now and was acutely conscious of how strange he must seem. How touched with idiocy and fear.

Nausea rose, the deck seemed farther below than it had any reason to be, the air was stifling; the wind was without freshness and did not cool the sweat from his brow and neck. He clutched the ropes desperately; he tried to take another step, but the strength seemed drained from his legs. Humiliated, burning with shame yet at the same time mortally afraid of falling—and of more than that, of the whole thing, of the fact that here he was where he ought not to be, cheated, abused, mystified—he wrapped his arms around the rigging, knees wobbly, sickness in his gut, bile threatening to heave itself up the back of his throat. Crying, eyes clenched tight, he wished it would all go away.

“Fallon! Fallen, you dog, you dogfish, why don’t you climb! You had better climb, weak-liver, for I don’t want you down on my deck again if you won’t!” Stubb roared his rage. Fallon opened his eyes, saw the red-faced man staring furiously up at him. Perhaps he’ll have a stroke, Fallon thought.

He hung there, half-up, half-down, unable to move. I want to go home, he thought. Let me go home. Stubb raged and ridiculed him; others gathered to laugh and watch. Fallon closed his eyes and tried to go away. He heard a sound like the wooden mallet of the carpenter.

“What is the problem here, Mr. Stubb?” A calm voice. Fallen looked down again. Ahab stood with his hand on the mainmast to steady himself, looking up. His thumb was touching the doubloon. Stubb was taken by surprise, as if Ahab were some apparition that had been called up by an entirely inappropriate spell. He jerked his head upward to indicate Fallen.

Squinting against the sun, Ahab studied Fallen for some time. His face was unnaturally pale in comparison to the tanned faces of the others turned up to look at him. Yet against the pallor, the white scar ran, a deathlike sign, down the side of his face. His dark hair was disarrayed in the hot breeze. He was an old man; he swayed in the attempt to steady himself.

“Why don’t ye go up?” Ahab called to Fallen. Fallen shook his head. He tried to step up another rung, but though his foot found the rope, he didn’t seem to have the strength he needed to pull himself up.

Ahab continued to regard him. He did not seem impatient or angry, only curious, as if Fallen were an animal sitting frozen on a traffic mall, afraid of the cars that passed. He seemed content to stand watching Fallen indefinitely. Stubb shifted nervously from foot to foot, his anger displaced and negated. The crewmen simply watched. Some of them peered above Fallen in the rigging; the ropes he clung to jerked, and he looked up himself to see that the man who had been standing at the masthead was coming down to help him.

“Bulkington!” Ahab cried, waving to the man to stop. “Let him be!” The sailor retreated upward and swung himself onto the yard-arm above the mainsail. The Pequod waited. If there were whales to be hunted, they waited too.

Very distinctly, so that Fallen heard every word, Ahab said, “You must go up. You have taken the vow with the rest, and I will not have you go back on it. Would you go back on it? You must go up, or else you must come down, and show yourself for the coward and weakling you would then be.”

Fallen clung to the rigging. He had taken no vow. It was all a story. What difference did it make what he did in a story? If he was to be a character in a book, why couldn’t he defy it, do what he wanted instead of following the path they indicated? By coming down he could show himself as himself.

“Have faith!” Ahab called.

Above him, Bulkington hawked and spat, timing it so that with the wind and the rocking of the Pequod, he hit the sea and not the deck. Fallen bent his head back and looked up at him. It was the kind sailor who had helped him below on that first night. He hung suspended. He looked down and watched Ahab sway with the rolling of the deck, his eyes still fixed on Fallen. The man was crazy. Melville was crazy for inventing him.

Fallen clenched his teeth, pulled on the ropes, and pushed himself up another step toward the masthead. He was midway up the mainsail, thirty feet above the deck. He concentrated on one rung at a time, breathing steadily, and pulled himself up. When he reached the level of the main yard, Bulkington swung himself below Fallen and helped him along. The complicated motion that came when the sailor stepped onto the ropes had Fallon clinging once again, but this time he was out of it fairly quickly. They ascended, step by dizzying step, to the masthead. The sailor got into the port masthead hoop, helping Fallon into the starboard. The Pequod’s flag snapped in the wind a couple of feet above their heads.

“And here we are, Fallon,” Bulkington said. Immediately he dropped himself down into the rigging again, so nimbly and suddenly that Fallon’s breath was stopped in fear for the man’s fall.

Way below, the men were once more stirring. Ahab exchanged some words with Stubb; then, moving out to the rail and steadying himself by a hand on one of the stays, a foreshortened black puppet far below, he turned his white face up to Fallon once again. Cupping his hand to his mouth, he shouted, “Keep a steady eye, now! If ye see fin or flank of him, call away!”

Call away. Fallon was far above it all now, alone. He had made it. He had taken no vow and was not obligated to do anything he did not wish to. He had ascended to the masthead of his own free will, but, if he was to become a whaler, then what harm would there be in calling out whales—normal whales? Not literary ones. Not white ones.

He looked out to the horizon. The sea stretched out to the utmost ends of the world, covering it all, every secret, clear and blue and a little choppy under the innocent sky.

seven

Fallon became used to the smell of the Pequod. He became accustomed to feeling sweaty and dirty, to the musty smell of mildew and the tang of brine trying to push away the stench of the packing plant.

He had not always been fastidious in his other life. In the late sixties, after he had dropped out of Northwestern, he had lived in an old house in a rundown neighborhood with three other men and a woman. They had called it “The Big House,” and to the outside observer they must have been hippies. “Hair men.” “Freaks.” “Dropouts.” It was a vocabulary that seemed quaint now. The perpetual pile of dirty dishes in the sink, the Fillmore West posters, the black light, the hot and cold running roaches, the early-fifties furniture with corners shredded to tatters by their three cats. Fallen realized that that life had been as different from his world at the Board of Trade as the deck of the Pequod was now.

Fallen had dropped out because, he’d told himself, there was nothing he wanted from the university that he couldn’t get from its library, or by hanging around the student union. It was hard for him to believe how much he had read then: Skinner’s behaviorism, Spengler’s history, pop physics and Thomas Kuhn, Friedman and Galbraith, Shaw, Conrad, Nabokov, and all he could find of Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, and their imitators. Later he had not been able to figure out just why he had forsaken a degree so easily; he didn’t know if he was too irresponsible to do the work, or too slow, or above it all and following his own path. Certainly he had not seen himself as a rebel, and the revolutionary fervor his peers affected (it had seemed affectation ninety percent of the time) never took hold of Fallen completely. He had observed, but not taken part in, the melee at the Democratic Convention. But he put in his time in the back bedroom listening to The Doors and blowing dope until the world seemed no more than a slightly bigger version of the Big House and his circle of friends. He read The Way of Zen. He knew Hesse and Kerouac. He hated Richard Nixon and laughed at Spiro Agnew. Aloft in the rigging of the Pequod, those years came back to Fallen as they never had in his last five years at the CBT. What a different person he had been at twenty. What a strange person, he realized, he had become at twenty-eight. What a marvelous—and frightening—metamorphosis.

He had gotten sick of stagnating, he told himself. He had seen one or another of his friends smoke himself into passivity. He had seen through the self-delusions of the other cripples in the Big House: cripples was what he had called them when he’d had the argument with Marty Solokov and had stalked out. Because he broke from that way of living did not mean he was selling out, he’d told them. He could work any kind of job; he didn’t want money or a house in the suburbs. He had wanted to give himself the feeling of getting started again, of moving, of putting meaning to each day. He had quit washing dishes for the university, moved into a dingy flat closer to the center of the city, and scanned the help-wanted columns. He still saw his friends often and got stoned maybe not quite so often, and listened to music and read. But he had had enough of “finding himself,” and he recognized in the others how finding yourself became an excuse for doing nothing.

Marty’s cousin was a runner for Pearson Joel Chones on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange who had occasionally come by the house, gotten high, and gone to concerts. Fallen had slept with her once. He called her up, and she asked around, and eventually he cut his hair short—not too short—and became a runner for Pearson, too. He became marginally better groomed. He took a shower and changed his underwear every day. He bought three ties and wore one of them on the trading floor because that was one of the rules of the exchange.

It occurred to Fallon to find Ishmael, if only to see the man who would live while he died. He listened and watched; he learned the name of every man on the ship—he knew Flask and Stubb and Starbuck and Bulkington, Tashtego, Daggoo and Queequeg, identified Fedallah, the lead Philippine boatsman. There was no Ishmael. At first Fallon was puzzled, then came the beginnings of hope. If the reality he was living in could be found to differ from the reality of Melville’s book in such an important particular, then could it not differ in some other way—some way that would at least lead to his survival? Maybe this Ahab caught his white whale. Maybe Starbuck would steel himself to the point where he could defy the madman and take over the ship. Perhaps they would never sight Moby Dick.

Then an unsettling realization smothered the hope before it could come fully to bloom: there was not necessarily an Ishmael in the book. “Call me Ishmael,” it started. Ishmael was a pseudonym for some other man, and there would be no one by that name on the Pequod. Fallon congratulated himself on a clever bit of literary detective work.

Yet the hope refused to remain dead. Yes, there was no Ishmael on the Pequod; or anyone on the ship not specifically named in the book might be Ishmael, any one of the anonymous sailors, within certain broad parameters of age and character—and Fallen racked his brain trying to remember what the narrator said of himself—might be Ishmael. He grabbed at that; he breathed in the possibility and tried on the suit for size. Why not? If absurdity were to rule to the extent that he had to be there in the first place, then why couldn’t he be the one who lived? More than that, why couldn’t he make himself that man? No one else knew what Fallen knew. He had the advantage over them. Do the things that Ishmael did, and you may be him. If you have to be a character in a book, why not be the hero?

Fallen’s first contact with the heart of capitalism at the CME had been frightening and amusing. Frightening when he screwed up and delivered a May buy-order as a July trade and cost the company ten thousand dollars. It was only through the grace of God and his own guts in facing it out that he had made it through the disaster. He had, he discovered, the ability to hide himself behind a facade that, to the self-interested observer, would appear to be whatever that observer wished it to be. If his superior expected him to be respectful and curious, then Fallon was respectfully curious. He did it without having to compromise his inner self. He was not a hypocrite.

The amusing part came after he had it all down and he began to watch the market like an observer at a very complex Monopoly game. Or, more accurately, like a baseball fan during a pennant race. There were at least as many statistics as in a good baseball season, enough personalities, strategies, great plays, blunders, risk, and luck. Fallon would walk onto the floor at the beginning of the day—the huge room with its concert-hall atmosphere, the banks of price boards around the walls, the twilight, the conditioned air, the hundreds of bright-coated traders and agents—and think of half-time at homecoming. The floor at the end of the day, as he walked across the hardwood scattered with mounds of paper scraps like so much confetti, was a basketball court after the NCAA finals. Topping it all off, giving it that last significant twist that was necessary to all good jokes, was the fact that this was all supposed to mean something; it was real money they were playing with, and one tick of the board in Treasury Bills cost somebody eleven hundred dollars. This was serious stuff, kid. The lifeblood of the nation—of the free world. Fallon could hardly hold in his laughter, could not stop his fascination.

Fallen’s first contact with the whale—his first lowering—was in Stubb’s boat. The man at the forward masthead cried out, “There she blows! Three points off starboard! There she blows! Three—no, four of ’em!”

The men sprang to the longboats and swung them away over the side. Fallon did his best to look as if he was helping. Stubb’s crew leapt into the boat as it was dropped into the swelling sea, heedless to the possibility of broken bones or sprained ankles. Fallon hesitated a second at the rail, then threw himself off with the feeling of a man leaping off the World Trade Center. He landed clumsily and half bowled over one of the men. He took his place at a center oar and pulled away. Like the man falling off the building, counting off the stories as they flew past him, Fallon thought, “So far, so good.” And waited for the crash.

“Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull!” Stubb called, halfway between jest and anger. “Pull, Fallon! Why don’t you pull? Have you never seen an oar before? Don’t look over your shoulder, lad, pull! That’s better. Don’t be in a hurry, men—softly, softly now—but damn ye, pull until you break something! Tashtego! Can’t you harpoon me some men with backs to them? Pull!”

Fallon pulled until he thought the muscles in his arms would snap, until the small of his back spasmed as if he were indeed being harpooned by the black-haired Indian behind him in the bow. The sea was rough, and they were soon soaked with spray. After a few minutes Fallon forgot the whales they pursued, merged into the rhythm of the work, fell in with the cunning flow of Stubb’s curses and pleas, the crazy sermon, now whispered, now shouted. He concentrated on the oar in his hands, the bite of the blade into the water, the simple mechanism his body had become, the working of his lungs, the dry rawness of the breath dragged in and out in time to their rocking, backbreaking work. Fallon closed his eyes, heard the pulse in his ears, felt the cool spray and the hot sun, saw the rose fog of the blood in his eyelids as he faced into the bright and brutal day.

At twenty-five, Fallen was offered a position in the office upstairs. At twenty-seven, he had an offer from DCB International to become a broker. By that time he was living with Carol. Why not? He was still outside it all, still safe within. Let them think what they would of him; he was protected, in the final analysis, by that great indifference he held to his breast the way he held Carol close at night. He was not a hypocrite. He said nothing he did not believe in. Let them project upon him whatever fantasies they might hold dear to themselves. He was outside and above it all, analyzing futures for DCB International. Clearly, in every contract that crossed his desk, it was stated that DCB and its brokers were not responsible for reverses that might be suffered as a result of suggestions they made.

So he had spent the next four years apart from it, pursuing his interests, which, with the money he was making, he found were many. Fallen saw very little of the old friends now. Solokov’s cousin told him he was now in New York, cadging money from strangers in Times Square. Solokov, she said, claimed it was a pretty good living. He claimed he was still beating the system. Fallon had grown up enough to realize that no one really beat any system—as if there were a system. There was only buying and selling, subject to the forces of the market and the infirmities of the players. Fallon was on the edges of it, could watch quietly, taking part as necessary (he had to eat), but still stay safe. He was no hypocrite.

“To the devil with ye, boys, will ye be outdone by Ahab’s heathens? Pull, spring it, my children, my fine hearts-alive, smoothly, smoothly, bend it hard starboard! Aye, Fallon, let me see you sweat, lad, can you sweat for me?”

They rose on the swell, and it was like rowing uphill; they slid down the other side, still rowing, whooping like children on a toboggan ride, all the time Stubb calling on them. Fallon saw Starbuck’s boat off to his right; he heard the rush of water beneath them, and the rush of something faster and greater than their boat.

Tashtego grunted behind him.

“A hit, a hit!” Stubb shouted, and beside Fallon the whaleline was running out with such speed that it sang and hummed and smoked. One of the men sloshed water over the place where it slid taut as a wire over the gunnel. Then the boat jerked forward so suddenly that Fallon was nearly knocked overboard when his oar, still trailing in the water, slammed into his chest. Gasping at the pain, he managed to get the oar up into the air. Stubb had half risen from his seat in the stern.

They flew through the water. The whaleboat bucked as it slapped the surface of every swell the whale pulled them through. Fallon held on for dear life, not sure whether he ought to be grateful he hadn’t been pitched out when the ride began. He tried to twist around to see the monster that was towing them, but able to turn only halfway, all he could see for the spray and the violent motion was the swell and rush of white water ahead of them. Tashtego, crouched in the bow, grinned wickedly as he tossed out wooden blocks tied to the whaleline in order to tire the whale with their drag. You might as well try to tire a road grader.

Yet he could not help but feel exhilarated, and he saw that the others in the boat, hanging on or trying to draw the line in, were flushed and breathing as hard as he.

He turned again and saw the whale.

Fallon had been a good swimmer in high school. He met Carol Bukaty at a swimming pool about a year after he had gone to work at the CME. Fallon first noticed her in the pool, swimming laps. She was the best swimmer there, better than he, though he might have been stronger than she in the short run. She gave herself over to the water and did not fight it; the kick of her long legs was steady and strong. She breathed easily and her strokes were relaxed, yet powerful. She did not swim for speed, but she looked as if she could swim for days, so comfortable did she seem in the water. Fallon sat on the steps at the pool’s edge and watched her for half an hour without once getting bored. He found her grace in the water arousing. He knew he had to speak to her. He slid into the pool and swam laps behind her.

At last she stopped. Holding on to the trough at the end of the pool, she pushed her goggles up onto her forehead and brushed the wet brown hair away from her eyes. He drew up beside her.

“You swim very well,” he said.

She was out of breath. “Thank you.”

“You look as if you wouldn’t ever need to come out of the water. Like anything else might be a comedown after swimming.” It was a strange thing for him to say, it was not what he wanted to say, but he did not know what he wanted, besides her.

She looked puzzled, smiled briefly, and pulled herself onto the side of the pool, letting her legs dangle in the water. “Sometimes I feel that way,” she said. “I’m Carol Bukaty.” She stuck out her hand, very businesslike.

“Pat Fallon.”

She wore a gray tank suit; she was slender and small-breasted, tall, with a pointed chin and brown eyes. Fallon later discovered that she was an excellent dancer, that she purchased women’s clothing for one of the major Chicago department stores, that she traveled a great deal, wrote lousy poetry, disliked cooking, liked children, and liked him. At first he was merely interested in her sexually, though the first few times they slept together it was not very good at all. Gradually the sex got better, and in the meantime Fallon fell in love.

She would meet him at the athletic club after work; they would play racquetball in the late afternoon, go out to dinner, and take in a movie, then spend the night at his or her apartment. He met her alcoholic father, a retired policeman who told endless stories about ward politics and the Daley machine, and Carol spent a Christmas with him at his parents’. After they moved in together, they settled into a comfortable routine. He felt secure in her affection for him. He did not want her, after a while, as much as he had that first day, those first months, but he still needed her. It still mattered to him what she was doing and what she thought of him. Sometimes it mattered to him too much, he thought. Sometimes he wanted to be without her at all, not because he had anything he could only do without her, but only because he wanted to be without her.

He would watch her getting dressed in the morning and wonder what creature she might be, and what that creature was doing in the same room with him. He would lie beside her as she slept, stroking the short brown hair at her temple with his fingertips, and be overwhelmed with the desire to possess her, to hold her head between his hands and know everything that she was; he would shake with the sudden frustration of its impossibility until it was all he could do to keep from striking her. Something was wrong with him, or with her. He had fantasies of how much she would miss him if he died, of what clothes she would wear to the funeral, of what stories she would tell her lovers in the future after he was gone.

If Carol felt any of the same things about him, she did not tell him. For Fallen’s part, he did not try to explain what he felt in any but the most oblique ways. She should know how he felt, but of course she did not. So when things went badly, and they began to do so more and more, it was not possible for him to explain to her what was wrong, because he could not say it himself, and the pieces of his discontent were things that he was too embarrassed to admit. Yet he could not deny that sometimes he felt as if it was all over between them, that he felt nothing—and at others he would smile just to have her walk into the room.

Remarkable creature though the whale was, it was not so hard to kill one after all. It tired, just as a man would tire under the attack of a group of strangers. It slowed in the water, no longer able so effortlessly to drag them after it. They pulled close, and Stubb drove home the iron, jerked it back and forth, drew it out and drove it home again, fist over fist on the hilt, booted foot over the gunnel braced against the creature’s flesh, sweating, searching for the whale’s hidden life. At last he found it, and the whale shuddered and thrashed a last time, spouting pink mist, then dark blood, where once it spouted feathery white spray. Like a man, helpless in the end, it rolled over and died. Stubb was jolly, and the men were methodical; they tied their lines around the great tail and, as shadows grew long and the sun fell perpendicularly toward the horizon, drew the dead whale to the Pequod.

eight

During the cutting up and boiling down of the whale that night, Fallon, perhaps in recognition of his return to normality as indicated by his return to the masthead, was given a real job: slicing the chunks of blubber that a couple of other sailors were hewing out of the great strips that were hauled over the side, into “bible leaves.” Fallon got the hang of it pretty quickly, though he was not fast, and Staley, the British sailor who was cutting beside him, kept poking at him to do more. “I’m doing all the work, Fallon,” he said, as if his ambition in life were to make sure that he did no more than his own share of the work.

Using a sharp blade like a long cleaver, Fallon would position the chunk of blubber, skin-side down on the cutting table, and imitating Staley, cut the piece into slices like the pages of a book, with the skin as its spine. The blubber leaves flopped outward or stuck to each other, and the table became slick with grease. Fallen was at first careful about avoiding his hands, but the blubber would slide around the table as he tried to cut it if he didn’t hold it still. Staley pushed him on, working with dexterity, though Fallen noted that the man’s hands were scarred, with the top joint of the middle finger of his left hand missing.

His back and shoulders ached with fatigue, and the smoke from the try-works stung his eyes. When he tried to wipe the tears away, he only smeared his face with grease. But he did a creditable job, cursing all the time. The cursing helped, and the other men seemed to accept him more for it. When finally they were done, and the deck was clean the next day, they were issued a tot of grog and allowed to swim within the lee of the stationary ship. The men were more real to him than when he had sat and watched from the outcast’s station of the tar bucket. He was able to speak to them more naturally than he had ever done. But he did not forget his predicament.

“Ye are too serious, Fallen,” Staley told him, offering Fallen some of his grog. “I can see you brooding there, and look how it set you into a funk. Ye are better now, perhaps, but mind you, stick to your work and ye may survive this voyage.”

“I won’t survive it. Neither will you—unless we can do something about Captain Ahab.”

Bulkington, who had been watching them, came by. “What of Captain Ahab?”

Fallen saw a chance in this. “Does his seeking after this white whale seem right to you?”

“The whale took his leg,” Staley said.

“Some say it unmanned him,” the other said, lower. “That’s two legs you’d not like to lose yourself, I’ll daresay.”

Fallen drew them aside, more earnest now. “We will lose more than our balls if we do nothing about this situation. The man is out of his mind. He will drag us all down with him, and this ship with all of us, if we can’t convince Starbuck to do something. Believe me, I know.”

Friendly Bulkington did not look so friendly. “You do talk strange, Fallen. We took an oath, and we signed the papers before we even sailed a cable from shore. A captain is a captain. You are talking mutiny.”

He had to go carefully.

“No, wait. Listen to me. Why are we sent on this trip? Think of the—the stockholders, or whatever you call them. The owners. They sent us out to hunt whales.”

“The white whale is a whale.” Staley looked petulant.

“Yes, of course it’s a whale. But there are hundreds of whales to be caught and killed. We don’t need to hunt that one. Hasn’t he set his sights on just Moby Dick? What about that oath? That gold piece on the mast? That says he’s just out for vengeance. There was nothing about vengeance in the papers we signed. What do you think the owners would say if they knew about what he plans? Do you think they would approve of this wild-goose chase?”

Staley was lost. “Goose chase?”

Bulkington was interested. “Go on.”

Fallen had his foot in the door; he marshaled the arguments he had rehearsed over and over again. “There’s no more oil in Moby Dick than in another whale . . .”

“They say he’s monstrous big,” Staley interjected.

Fallen looked pained. “Not so big as any two whales, then. Ahab is not after any oil you can boil out of the whale’s flesh. If the owners knew what he intended, the way I do, if they knew how sick he was the week before he came out of that hole of a cabin he lives in, if they saw that light in his eye and the charts he keeps in his cabinet . . .”

“Charts? What charts? Have you been in his cabin?”

“No, not exactly,” Fallen said. “Look, I know some things, but that’s just because I keep my eyes open and I have some sources.”

“Fallen, where do you hail from? I swear that I cannot half the time make out what you are saying. Sources? What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, Jesus!” He had hoped for better from Bulkington.

Staley darkened. “Don’t blaspheme, man! I’ll not take the word of a blasphemer.”

Fallen saw another opening. “You’re right! I’m sorry. But look, didn’t the old man himself blaspheme more seriously than I ever could the night of that oath? If you are a God-fearing man, Staley, you’ll know that that is true. Would you give your obedience to such a man? Moby Dick is just another of God’s creatures, a dumb animal. Is it right to seek vengeance on an animal? Do you want to be responsible for that? God would not approve.”

Staley looked troubled, but stubborn. “Do not tell me what the Almighty approves. That is not for the likes of you to know. And Ahab is the captain.” With that he walked to the opposite side of the deck and stood there watching them as if he wanted to separate himself as much as possible from the conversation, yet still know what was going on.

Fallen was exasperated and tired.

“Why don’t you go with Staley, Bulkington? You don’t have to stick around with me, you know. I’m not going to do your reputation any good.”

Bulkington eyed him steadily. “You are a strange one, Fallen. I did not think anything of you when I first saw you on the Pequod. But you may be talking some sense.”

“Staley doesn’t think so.”

Bulkington took a pull on his grog. “Why did you try to persuade Staley of Ahab’s madness? You should have known that you couldn’t convince such a man that the sky is blue, if it were written in the articles he signed that it was green. Starbuck perhaps, or me. Not Staley. Don’t you listen to the man you are talking to?”

Fallon looked at Bulkington; the tall sailor looked calmly back at him, patient, waiting.

“Okay, you’re right,” Fallon said. “I have the feeling I would not have a hard time convincing you, anyway. You know Ahab’s insane, don’t you?”

“It’s not for me to say. Ahab has better reasons than those you give to him.” He drew a deep breath, looked up at the sky, down at the men who swam in the shadow of the ship. He smiled. “They should be more wary of sharks,” he said.

“The world does look a garden today, Fallon. But it may be that the old man’s eyes are better than ours.”

“You know he’s mad, and you won’t do anything?”

“The matter will not bear too deep a looking into.” Bulkington was silent for a moment. “You know the story about the man born with a silver screw in his navel? How it tasked him, until one day he unscrewed it to divine its purpose?”

Fallon had heard the joke in grade school on the South Side. “His ass fell off.”

“You and Ahab are too much like that man.”

They both laughed. “I don’t have to unscrew my navel,” Fallon said. “We’re all going to lose our asses anyway.”

They laughed again. Bulkington put his arm around his shoulders, and they toasted Moby Dick.

nine

There came a morning when, on pumping out the bilge, someone noticed that considerable whale oil was coming up with the water. Starbuck was summoned and, after descending into the hold himself, emerged and went aft and below to speak with Ahab. Fallon asked one of the others what was going on.

“The casks are leaking. We’re going to have to lay up and break them out. If we don’t, we stand to lose a lot of oil.”

Sometime later Starbuck reappeared. His face was red to the point of apoplexy, and he paced around the quarterdeck with his hands knotted behind his back. They waited for him to tell them what to do; he stared at the crewmen, stopped, and told them to be about their business. “Keep pumping,” he told the others. “Maintain the lookout.” He then spoke briefly to the helmsman leaning on the whalebone tiller, and retreated to the corner of the quarterdeck to watch the wake of the ship. After a while Ahab himself staggered up onto the deck, found Starbuck, and spoke to him. He then turned to the men on deck.

“Furl the t’gallantsails,” he called, “and close reef the topsails, fore and aft; back the main yard; up Burtons, and break out in the main hold.”

Fallon joined the others around the hold. Once the work had commenced, he concentrated on lifting, hauling, and not straining his back. The Manxman told them that he had been outside Ahab’s cabin during the conference and that Ahab had threatened to shoot Starbuck dead on the spot when the mate demanded they stop chasing the whale to break out the hold. Fallon thought about the anger in Starbuck’s face when he’d come up again. It struck him that the Starbuck of Melville’s book was pretty ineffectual; he had to be to let that madman go on with the chase. But this Starbuck—whether like the one in the book or not—did not like the way things were going. There was no reason why Fallon had to sit around and wait for things to happen. It was worth a shot.

But not that afternoon.

Racism assured that the hardest work in the dank hold was done by the colored men—Daggoo, Tashtego, and Queequeg. They did not complain. Up to their knees in the bilge, clambering awkwardly over and about the barrels of oil in the murderous heat and unbreathable air of the hold, they did their jobs.

It was evening before the three harpooners were told they could halt for the day, and they emerged, sweaty, covered with slime, and bruised. Fallon collapsed against the side of the try-works; others sat beside him. Tall Queequeg was taken by a coughing fit, then went below to his hammock. Fallon gathered his strength, felt the sweat drying stickily on his arms and neck. There were few clouds, and the moon was waxing full. He saw Starbuck then, standing at the rear of the quarterdeck, face toward the mast. Was he looking at the doubloon?

Fallon got shakily to his feet; his legs were rubbery. The first mate did not notice him until he was close. He looked up. “Yes?”

“Mr. Starbuck, I need to speak to you.” Starbuck looked at him as if he saw him for the first time. Fallon tried to look self-confident, serious. He’d gotten that one down well at DCB. “Yes?”

Fallon turned so that he was facing inward toward the deck and Starbuck had his back to it to face him. He could see what was happening away from them and would know if anyone came near.

“I could not help but see that you were angry this morning after speaking to Captain Ahab.” Starbuck looked puzzled.

“I assume that you must have told Ahab about the leaking oil, and he didn’t want to stop his hunt of the whale long enough to break out the hold. Am I right?”

The mate watched him guardedly. “What passed between Captain Ahab and me was none of your affair, or of the crew’s. Is that what you’ve come to trouble me with?”

“It is a matter that concerns me,” Fallon said. “It concerns the rest of the crew, and it ought to concern you. We are being bound by his orders, and what kind of orders is he giving? I know what you’ve been thinking; I know that this personal vengeance he seeks frightens and repulses you. I know what you’re thinking. I could see what was in your mind when you stood at this rail this afternoon. He is not going to stop until he kills us all.”

Starbuck seemed to draw back within himself. Fallon saw how beaten the man’s eyes were; he did not think the mate was a drinker, but he looked like someone who had just surfaced after a long weekend. He could almost see the clockwork turning within Starbuck, a beat too slow, with the belligerence of the drunk being told the truth about himself that he did not want to admit. Fallen’s last fight with Stein Jr. at the brokerage had started that way.

“Get back to your work,” Starbuck said. He started to turn away.

Fallon put his hand on his shoulder. “You have to—” Starbuck whirled with surprising violence and pushed Fallon away so that he nearly stumbled and fell. The man at the tiller was watching them.

“To work! You do not know what I am thinking! I’ll have you flogged if you say anything more! A man with a three-hundredth lay has nothing to tell me. Go on, now.”

Fallon was hot. “God damn you. You stupid—”

“Enough!” Starbuck slapped him with the back of his hand, the way Stein had tried to slap Fallon. Stein had missed. It appeared that Mr. Starbuck was more effectual than Stein Jr. Fallon felt his bruised cheek. The thing that hurt the most was the way he must have looked, like a hangdog insubordinate who had been shown his place. As Fallon stumbled away, Starbuck said, in a steadier voice, “Tend to your own conscience, man. Let me tend to mine.”

ten

Lightning flashed again.

“I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and even for hate thou canst but kill, and all are killed!”

Ahab had sailed them into the heart of a typhoon. The sails were in tatters, and the men ran across the deck shouting against the wind and trying to lash the boats down tighter before they were washed away or smashed. Stubb had gotten his left hand caught between one of the boats and the rail; he now held it with his right and grimaced. The mastheads were touched with St. Elmo’s fire. Ahab stood with the lightning rod in his right hand and his right foot planted on the neck of Fedallah, declaiming at the lightning. Fallon held tightly to a shroud to keep from being thrown off his feet. The scene was ludicrous; it was horrible.

“No fearless fool now fronts thee!” Ahab shouted at the storm. “I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me! In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here!”

Terrific, Fallon thought. Psychobabble. Melville writes in a storm so Ahab can have a backdrop against which to define himself. They must not have gone in for realism much in Melville’s day. He turned and tried to lash the rear quarter boat tighter; its stern had already been smashed in by a wave that had just about swept three men, including Fallon, overboard. Lightning flashed, followed a split second later by the rolling thunder. Fallon recalled that five seconds’ count meant the lightning was a mile away; by that measure the last bolt must have hit them in the ass. Most of the crew were staring openmouthed at Ahab and the glowing, eerie flames that touched the masts. The light had the bluish tinge of mercury-vapor lamps in a parking lot. It sucked the color out of things; the faces of the frightened men were the sickly hue of fish bellies.

“Thou canst blind, but I can then grope. Thou canst consume, but I can then be ashes!” You bet. “Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutter-hands. I would not take it . . .” Ahab ranted on. Fallon hardly gave a damn anymore. The book was too much. Ahab talked to the storm and the God behind it; the storm answered him back, lightning flash for curse. It was dramatic, stagy; it was real: Melville’s universe was created so that such dialogues could take place; the howling gale and the tons of water, the crashing waves, flapping canvas, the sweating, frightened men, the blood and seawater—all were created to have a particular effect, to be sure, but it was the real universe, and it would work that way because that was the way it was set up to work by a frustrated, mystified man chasing his own obsessions, creating the world as a warped mirror of his distorted vision.

“There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical . . .”

There is an ex-sailor on a farm in Massachusetts trying to make ends meet while his puzzled wife tries to explain him to the relatives.

“The boat! The boat!” cried Starbuck. “Look at thy boat, old man!”

Fallon looked, and backed away. A couple of feet from him the harpoon that was lashed into the bow was tipped with the same fire that illuminated the masts. Silently within the howling storm, from its barbed end twin streamers of electricity writhed. Fallon backed away to the rail, heart beating quickly, and clutched the’s whalebone.

Ahab staggered toward the boat; Starbuck grabbed his arm. “God! God is against thee, old man! Forbear! It’s an ill voyage! I’ll begun, ill continued; let me square the yards while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to go on a better voyage than this.”

Yes, yes, at last Starbuck had said it! Fallon grabbed one of the braces; he saw others of the crew move to the rigging as if to follow Starbuck’s order before it was given. They cried, some of them in relief, others in fear, others as if ready at last to mutiny. Yes!

Ahab threw down the last links of the lightning rod. He grabbed the harpoon from the boat and waved it like a torch about his head; he lurched toward Fallon.

“You!” he shouted, staggering to maintain his balance on the tossing deck, hoisting the flaming harpoon to his shoulder as if he meant to impale Fallon on the spot. “But cast loose that rope’s end and you will be transfixed—by this clear spirit!” The electricity at the barb hummed inches before him; Fallon could feel his skin prickling and smelled ozone. He felt the rail at the small of his back, cold. The other sailors fell away from the ropes; Starbuck looked momentarily sick. Fallon let go of the brace.

Ahab grinned at him. He turned and held the glowing steel before him with both hands like a priest holding a candle at mass on a feast day.

“All your oaths to hunt the white whale are as binding as mine; and heart, soul, and body, lung and life, old Ahab is bound. And that you may know to what tune this heart beats; look ye here! Thus I blow out the last fear!”

He blew out the flame.

They ran out the night without letting the anchors over the side, heading due into the gale instead of riding with the wind at their backs, with tarpaulins and deck truck blown or washed overboard, with the lightning rod shipped instead of trailing in the sea as it ought to, with the man at the tiller beaten raw about the ribs trying to keep the ship straight, with the compass spinning round like a top, with the torn remains of the sails not cut away until long after midnight.

By morning the storm had much abated, the wind had come around, and they ran before it in heavy seas. Fallon and most of the other common sailors, exhausted, were allowed to sleep.

eleven

The argument with Starbuck and his attempts to rouse others to defy Ahab had made Fallen something of a pariah. He was now as isolated as he had been when he’d first come to himself aboard the Pequod. Only Bulkington did not treat him with contempt or fear, but Bulkington would do nothing about the situation. He would rather talk, and they often discussed what a sane man would do in their situation, given the conflicting demands of reason and duty. Fallon’s ability to remain detached always failed him somewhere in the middle of these talks.

So Fallen came to look upon his stints at the masthead as escape of a sort. It was there that he had first realized that he could rise above the deck of the Pequod, both literally and figuratively, for some moments; it was there that he had first asserted his will after days of stunned debility. He would not sing out for the white whale, if it should be his fortune to sight it, but he did sing out more than once for lesser whales. The leap of his heart at the sight of them was not feigned.

They were sailing the calm Pacific east and south of Japan. They had met the Rachel, and a thrill had run through the crew at the news that she had encountered Moby Dick and had failed to get him, losing several boats, and the captain’s son, in the process. Fallon’s memory was jogged. The Rachel would pick up Ishmael at the end of the book, when all the others were dead.

They met the Delight, on which a funeral was in progress. From the mainmast lookout, Fallen heard the shouted talk between Ahab and her captain about another failed attempt at the white whale. He watched as the dead man, sewn up in his hammock, was dropped into the sea.

It was a clear steel-blue day. The sea rolled in long, quiet swells; the Pequod moved briskly ahead before a fair breeze, until the Delight was lost in the distance astern. The air was fresh and clear out to the rim of the world, where it seemed to merge with the darker sea. It was as fair a day as they had seen since Fallen had first stood a watch at the masthead.

Up above the ship, almost out of the world of men entirely, rolling at the tip of the mast in rhythm to the rolling of the sea swells, which moved in time with his own easy breathing, Fallen lost his fear. He seemed to lose even himself. Who was he! Patrick Fallen, analyst for a commodities firm. Perhaps that had been some delusion; perhaps that world had been created somewhere inside of him, pressed upon him in a vision. He was a sailor on the Pequod. He thought that this was part of some book, but he had not been a reader for many years.

Memories of his other life persisted. He remembered the first time he had ever made love to a woman—to Sally Torrance, in the living room of her parents’ house while they were away skiing in Minnesota. He remembered cutting his palm playing baseball when the bat shattered in his hand. The scar in the middle of his hand could not be denied.

Who denied it? He watched an albatross swoop down from above him to skim a few feet above the water, trying to snag some high-leaping fish. It turned away, unsuccessful, beating its wings slowly as it climbed the air. There was rhythm to its unconscious dance. Fallen had never seen anything more beautiful. He hung his arms over the hoop that surrounded him, felt the hot sun beating on his back, the band of metal supporting him.

This was the real world; he accepted it. He accepted the memories that contradicted it. I look, you look, he looks. Could his mind and heart hold two contradictory things? What would happen to him then? He accepted the albatross, the fish, the sharks he could see below the water’s surface from his high vantage point. He accepted the grace of the sea, its embrace on this gentlest of days, and he accepted the storm that had tried to kill them only days before. The Delight, reason told him—let reason be; he could strain reason no further than he had—the Delight might perhaps have been a ship from a story he had read, but he had no doubt that the man who had been dropped to his watery grave as Fallon watched had been a real man.

The blue of sky and sea, the sound of the flag snapping above him, the taste of the salt air, the motion of the sea and earth itself as they swung Fallon at the tip of the mast, the memories and speculations, the feel of warm sun and warm iron—all the sensual world flowed together for Fallon then. He could not say what he felt. Joy that he could hardly contain swelled in his chest. He was at one with all his perceptions, with all he knew and remembered, with Carol, wherever or whatever she might be, with Bulkington and Daggoo and Starbuck and Stein Jr. and the Big House and Queequeg and the CBT and Ahab. Ahab.

Why had Fallon struggled so long against it? He was alive. What thing had driven him to fight so hard? What had happened to him was absurd, but what thing was not absurd? What thing had made him change from the student to the dropout to the analyst to the sailor? Who might Patrick Fallen be? He stretched out his right arm and turned his hand in the sun.

“Is it I, or God, or who, that lifts this arm?” Fallen heard the words quite distinctly, as if they were spoken only for him, as if they were not spoken at all but were only thoughts. God perhaps did lift Fallen’s arm, and if that were so, then who was Fallen to question the wisdom or purpose of the motion? It was his only to move.

A disturbance in the blue of the day.

Why should he not have a choice? Why should that God give him the feeling of freedom if in fact He was directing Fallen’s every breath? Did the Fates weave this trancelike calm blue day to lead Fallen to these particular conclusions, so that not even his thoughts in the end were his own, but only the promptings of some force beyond him? And what force could that be if not the force that created this world, and who created this world but Herman Melville, a man who had been dead for a very long time, a man who had no possible connection with Fallen? And what could be the reason for the motion? If this was the real world, then why had Fallon been given the life he had lived before, tangled himself in, felt trapped within, only to be snatched away and clumsily inserted into a different fantasy? What purpose did it serve? Whose satisfaction was being sought?

The moment of wholeness died; the world dissolved into its disparate elements. The sea rolled on. The ship fought it. The wind was opposed by straining canvas. The albatross dove once again, and skimming over the surface so fast it was a white blur, snatched a gleam of silver—a flying fish—from midflight. It settled to the ocean’s surface, tearing at its prey.

The day was not so bright as it had been. Fallon tried to accept it still. He did not know if there was a malign force behind the motion of the earth in its long journey, or a beneficent one whose purpose was merely veiled to men such as himself—or no force at all. Such knowledge would not be his. He was a sailor on the Pequod.

Upon descending, Fallon heard from Bulkington that Starbuck and Ahab had had a conversation about turning back to Nantucket, that the mate had seemed almost to persuade the captain to give up the hunt, but that he had failed.

Fallon knew then that they must be coming to the end of the story. It would not be long before they spotted the white whale, and three days after that the Pequod would go down with all hands not previously killed in the encounter with the whale—save one. But Fallon had given up the idea that he might be that one. He did not, despite his problems, qualify as an Ishmael. That would be overstating his importance, he thought.

twelve

He woke suddenly to the imperative buzzing of his alarm clock. His heart beat very fast. He tried to slow it by breathing deeply. Carol stirred beside him, then slept again.

He felt disoriented. He walked into the bathroom, staring, as if he had never seen it before. He slid open the mirrored door of the medicine chest and looked inside at the almost-empty tube of toothpaste, the old safety razor, the pack of double-edged blades, the Darvon and tetracycline capsules, the foundation makeup. When he slid the door shut again, his tanned face looked back at him.

He was slow getting started that morning; when Carol got up, he was still drinking his coffee, with the radio playing an old Doors song in the background. Carol leaned over him, kissed the top of his head. It appeared that she loved him.

“You’d better get going,” she said. “You’ll be late.”

He hadn’t worried about being late, and it hit him for the first time what he had to do. He had to get to the Board of Trade. He’d have to talk to Stein Jr., and there would be a sheaf of notes on his desk asking him to return calls to various clients who would have rung him up while he was gone. He pulled on the jacket of his pinstriped suit, brushed back his hair, and left.

Waiting for the train, he realized that he hadn’t gone anywhere to return from.

He had missed his normal train and arrived late. The streets were nowhere near as crowded as they would have been an hour earlier. He walked north on La Salle Street between the staid, dark old buildings. The sky that showed between them was bright, and already the temperature was rising; it would be a hot one. He wished it were the weekend. Was it Thursday? It couldn’t still be Wednesday. He was embarrassed to realize he wasn’t sure what day it was.

He saw a very pretty girl in the lobby of the Board of Trade as he entered through the revolving doors. She was much prettier than Carol, and had that unselfconscious way of walking. But she was around the corner before he had taken more than a few steps inside. He ran into Joe Wendelstadt in the elevator, and Joe began to tell him a story about Raoul Lark from Brazil who worked for Cacex in Chicago, and how Lark had tried to pick up some feminist the other night. And succeeded. Those Brazilians.

Fallen got off before Joe could reach the climax. In his office Molly, the receptionist, said Stein wanted to see him. Stein smelled of cigarettes, and Fallen suddenly became self-conscious. He had not brushed his own teeth. When did he ever forget that? Stein had an incipient zit on the end of his nose. He didn’t really have anything to talk to Fallon about; he was just wasting time as usual.

Tigue was sick or on vacation.

Fallon worked through the morning on various customer accounts. He had trouble remembering where the market had closed the day before. He had always had a trick memory for such figures, and it had given him the ability to impress a lot of people who knew just as much about the markets as he did. He spent what was left of the morning on the phone to his clients, with a quick trip down to the trading floor to talk to Parsons in the soybean pit.

Carol called and asked him if he could join her for lunch. He remembered he had a date with Kim, a woman from the CME he had met just a week before. He made his excuses to Carol and took off for the Merc.

Walking briskly west on Jackson, coming up on the bridge across the river, he realized he had been rushing around all day and yet could hardly remember what he’d done since he had woken up. He still couldn’t remember whether it was Wednesday or Thursday.

As he crossed the bridge with the crowds of lunch-hour office workers, the noontime sun glared brightly for a second from the oily water of the river. Fallen’s eyes did not immediately recover. He stopped walking, and somebody bumped into him.

“Excuse me,” he said unconsciously.

There was a moment of silence, then the noise of the city resumed and he could see again. He stood at the side of the bridge and looked down at the water. The oil on the surface made rainbow-colored swirls. Fallon shook his head and went on.

Kim stood him up at the restaurant. He waited a long time by the cashier. Finally he made the woman seat him at a table for two. He looked at his watch but had some trouble reading the time. Was he due back at the office?

Just then someone sat down opposite him. It was an old man in a dark suit who had obviously undergone some great ordeal. His face held a look of great pain or sorrow—with hate burning just beneath it. Though his hair was black (and quite unforgivably unkempt for midtown Chicago, as was his rough suit), a shock of white fell across his forehead, and a scar ran from the roots of that white hair straight down the man’s face, leaping the brow and eye to continue across the left cheek, sinewing down the jaw and neck to disappear beneath his shirt collar. He looked strangely familiar.

“It won’t work,” the man said. “You cannot get away. You have signed the articles, like the rest, and are in for a three-hundredth lay.”

“Three-hundredth lay?” Fallon was bewildered. “A three-hundredth part of the general catastrophe is yours. Don’t thank me. It isn’t necessary.” The old man looked even more sorrowful and more wild, if it were possible to combine those seemingly incompatible emotions.

“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I wouldn’t hold you to the contract if it were strictly up to me.” He shrugged his shoulders and opened his palms before him. “But it isn’t.”

Fallen’s heart was beating fast again. “I don’t remember any contract. You’re not one of my clients. I don’t trade for you. I’ve been in this business for a long time, mister, and I know better than to sign . . .”

The wildness swelled in the man. There was something burning in him, and he looked about to scream, or cry.

“I have been in the business longer than you!” He swung his leg out from beneath the table and rapped it loudly with his knuckle. Fallon saw that the leg was of white bone. “And I can tell you that you signed the contract when you signed aboard this ship—there’s no other way to get aboard—and you must serve until you strike land again or it sinks beneath you!”

The diners in the restaurant dined on, oblivious. Fallon looked toward the plate glass at the front of the room and saw the water rising rapidly up it, sea-green and turbid, as the restaurant and the city fell to the bottom of the sea.

thirteen

Once again he was jerked awake, this time by the din of someone beating the deck of the forecastle above them with a club. The other sleepers were as startled as Fallen. He rolled out of the hammock with the mists of his dream still clinging to him, pulled on his shirt, and scrambled up to the deck.

Ahab was stalking the quarterdeck in a frenzy of impatience. “Man the mastheads!” he shouted.

The men who had risen with Fallen did just that, some of them only half-dressed. Fallen was one of the first up and gained one of the hoops at the main masthead. Three others stood on the main yard below him. Fallen scanned the horizon and saw off to starboard and far ahead of them the jet of mist that indicated a whale. As it rose and fell in its course through the rolling seas, Fallen saw that it was white.

“What d’ye see?” Ahab called from far below. Had he noticed Fallen’s gaze fixed on the spot in front of them?

“Nothing! Nothing, sir!” Fallon called. Ahab and the men on deck looked helpless so far below him. Fallon did not know if his lying would work, but there was the chance that the other men in the rigging, not being as high as he, would not be able to make out Moby Dick from their lower vantage points. He turned away from the whale and made a good show of scanning the empty horizon. “Top gallant sails!—stunsails! Alow and aloft, and on both sides!” Ahab ordered. The men fixed a line from the mainmast to the deck, looped its lower end around Ahab’s rigid leg. Ahab wound the rope around his shoulders and arm, and they hoisted him aloft, twisting with the pressure on the hemp, toward the masthead. He twirled slowly as they raised him up, and his line of sight was obscured by the rigging and sails he had to peer through. Before they had lifted him two-thirds of the way up, he began to shout.

“There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”

Fallon knew enough to begin shouting and pointing immediately, and the men at the other two masts did the same. Within a minute everyone who had remained on the deck was in the rigging trying to catch a glimpse of the creature they had sought, half of them doubting his existence, for so many months.

Fallon looked down toward the helmsman, who stood on his toes, the whalebone tiller under his arm, arching his neck trying to see the whale.

The others in the rigging were now arguing about who had spotted Moby Dick first, with Ahab the eventual victor. It was his fate, he said, to be the one to first spot the whale. Fallon couldn’t argue with that.

Ahab was lowered to the deck, giving orders all the way, and three boats were swung outboard in preparation for the chase. Starbuck was ordered to stay behind and keep the ship.

As they chased the whale, the sea became calmer, so the rowing became easier—though just as backbreaking—and they knifed through the water, here as placid as a farm pond, faster than ever. Accompanying the sound of their own wake, Fallon heard the wake of the whale they must be approaching. He strained arms, back, and legs, pulling harder in time to Stubb’s cajoling chant, and the rushing grew. He snatched a glance over his shoulder, turned to the rowing, then looked again.

The white whale glided through the sea smoothly, giving the impression of immeasurable strength. The wake he left was as steady as that of a schooner; the bow waves created by the progress of his broad, blank brow through the water fanned away in precise lines whose angle with respect to the massive body did not change. The three whaleboats rocked gently as they broke closer through these successive waves; the foam of Moby Dick’s wake was abreast of them now, and Fallon saw how quickly it subsided into itself, giving the sea back its calm face, innocent of knowledge of the creature that had passed. Attendant white birds circled above their heads, now and then falling to or rising from the surface in busy flutterings of wings and awkward beaks. One of them had landed on the broken shaft of a harpoon that protruded from the snow-white whale’s humped back; it bobbed up and down with the slight rocking of the whale in its long, muscular surging through the sea. Oblivious. Strangely quiet. Fallon felt as if they had entered a magic circle.

He knew Ahab’s boat, manned by the absurd Filipinos, was ahead of them and no doubt preparing to strike first. Fallon closed his eyes, pulled on his oar, and wished for it not to happen. For it to top now, or just continue without any change. He felt as if he could row a very long time; he was no longer tired or afraid. He just wanted to keep rowing, feeling the rhythm of the work, hearing the low and insistent voice of Stubb telling them to break their backs. Fallen wanted to listen to the rushing white sound of the whale’s wake in the water, to know that they were perhaps keeping pace with it, to know that, if he should tire, he could look for a second over his shoulder and find Moby Dick there still. Let the monomaniac stand in the bow of his boat—if he was meant to stand there, if it was an unavoidable necessity—let him stand there with the raised lance and concentrate his hate into one purified moment of will. Let him send that will into the tip of that lance so that it might physically glow with the frustrated obtuseness of it. Let him stand there until he froze from the suspended desire, and let the whale swim on.

Fallon heard a sudden increase in the rushing of the water, several inarticulate cries. He stopped pulling, as did the others, and turned to look in time to see the whale lift itself out of the water, exposing flanks and flukes the bluish white of cemetery marble, and flip its huge tail upward to dive perpendicularly into the sea. Spray drenched them, and sound returned with the crash of the waves coming together to fill the vacuum left by the departure of the creature that had seconds before given weight and direction, place, to the placeless expanse of level waters. The birds circled above the subsiding foam.

They lifted their oars. They waited.

“An hour,” Ahab said.

They waited. It was another beautiful day. The sky was hard and blue as the floor of the swimming pool where he had met Carol. Fallon wondered again if she missed him, if he had indeed disappeared from that other life when he had taken up residence in this one—but he thrust those thoughts away. They were meaningless. There was no time in that world after his leaving it; that world did not exist, or if it existed, the order of its existence was not of the order of the existence of the rough wood he sat on, the raw flesh of his hands and the air he breathed. Time was the time between the breaths he drew. Time was the duration of the dream he had had about being back in Chicago, and he could not say how long that had been, even if it had begun or ended. He might be dreaming still. The word dream was meaningless, and awake. And real, and insane, and known, and all those other interesting words he had once accepted without questioning. Time was waiting for Moby Dick to surface again.

The breeze freshened. The sea began to swell.

“The birds!—the birds!” Tashtego shouted, so close behind Fallen’s ear that he winced. The Indian half stood, rocking the whaleboat as he pointed to the seabirds, which had risen and were flying toward Ahab’s boat twenty yards away. “The whale will breach there,” Stubb said. Ahab was up immediately. Peering into the water, he leaned on the steering oar and reversed the orientation of his boat. He then exchanged places with Fedallah, the other men reaching up to help him through the rocking boat. He picked up the harpoon, and the oarsmen stood ready to row.

Fallon looked down into the sea, trying to make out what Ahab saw. Nothing, until a sudden explosion of white as the whale, rocketing upward, turned over as it finally hit the surface. In a moment Ahab’s boat was in the whale’s jaws, Ahab in the bows almost between them. Stubb was shouting and gesturing, and Fallen’s fellows fell to the oars in a disorganized rush. The Filipinos in the lead boat crowded into the stern while Ahab, like a man trying to open a recalcitrant garage door, tugged and shoved at Moby Dick’s jaw, trying insanely to dislodge the whale’s grip. Within seconds filled with crashing water, cries, and confusion, Moby Dick had bitten the boat in two, and Ahab had belly-flopped over the side like a swimming-class novice.

Moby Dick then began to swim tight circles around the smashed boat and its crew. Ahab struggled to keep his head above water. Neither Stubb nor Flask could bring his boat close enough to pick him up. The Pequod was drawing nearer, and finally Ahab was able to shout loudly enough to be heard, “Sail on the whale—drive him off!”

It worked. The Pequod picked up the remnants of the whale-boat while Fallon and the others dragged its crew and Ahab into their own boat.

The old man collapsed in the bottom of the boat, gasping for breath, broken and exhausted. He moaned and shook. Fallon was sure he was finished whale chasing, that Stubb and the others would see the man was used up, that Starbuck would take over and sail them home. But in a minute or two Ahab was leaning on his elbow asking after his boat’s crew, and a few minutes after that they had resumed the chase with double oarsmen in Stubb’s boat.

Moby Dick drew steadily away as exhaustion wore them down. Fallon did not feel he could row any more after all. The Pequod picked them up, and they gave chase in vain under all sail until dark.

fourteen

On the second day’s chase all three boats were smashed in. Many suffered sprains and contusions, and one was bitten by a shark. Ahab’s whalebone leg was shattered, with a splinter driven into his own flesh. Fedallah, who had been the captain’s second shadow, was tangled in the line Ahab had shot into the white whale, dragged out of the boat, and drowned. Moby Dick escaped.

fifteen

It came down to what Fallon had known it would come down to eventually.

In the middle of that night he went to talk to Ahab, who slept in one of the hatchways as he had the night before. The carpenter was making him another leg, wooden this time, and Ahab was curled sullenly in the dark lee of the afterscuttle. Fallon did not know whether he was waiting or asleep.

He started down the stairs, hesitated on the second step. Ahab lifted his head. “What do you need?” he asked.

Fallon wondered what he wanted to say. He looked at the man huddled in the darkness and tried to imagine what moved him, tried to see him as a man instead of a thing. Was it possible he was only a man, or had Fallon himself become stylized and distorted by living in the book of Melville’s imagination?

“You said—talking to Starbuck today—you said that everything that happens is fixed, decreed. You said it was rehearsed a billion years before any of it took place. Is it true?”

Ahab straightened and leaned toward Fallon, bringing his face into the dim light thrown by the lamps on deck. He looked at him for a moment in silence.

“I don’t know. So it seemed as the words left my lips. The Parsee is dead before me, as he foretold. I don’t know.”

“That is why you’re hunting the whale.”

“That is why I’m hunting the whale.”

“How can this hunt, how can killing an animal tell you any thing? How can it justify your life? What satisfaction can it give you in the end, even if you boil it all down to oil, even if you cut Moby Dick into bible leaves and eat him? I don’t understand it.”

The captain looked at him earnestly. He seemed to be listening, and leaping ahead of the questions. It was very dark in the scuttle, and they could hardly see each other. Fallon kept his hands folded tightly behind him. The blade of the cleaver he had shoved into his belt lay cool against the skin at the small of his back; it was the same knife he used to butcher the whale.

“If it is immutably fixed, then it does not matter what I do. The purpose and meaning are out of my hands, and thine. We have only to take our parts, to be the thing that it is written for us to be. Better to live that role given us than to struggle against it or play the coward, when the actions must be the same nonetheless. Some say I am mad to chase the whale. Perhaps I am mad. But if it is my destiny to seek him, to tear, to burn and kill those things that stand in my path—then the matter of my madness is not relevant, do you see?”

He was not speaking in character.

“If these things are not fixed, and it was not my destiny to have my leg taken by the whale, to have my hopes blasted in this chase, then how cruel a world it is. No mercy, no power but its own, controls it; it blights our lives out of merest whim. No, not whim, for there would then be no will behind it, no builder of this Bedlam hospital, and in the madhouse, when the keeper is gone, what is to stop the inmates from doing as they please? In a universe of cannibals, where all creatures have preyed upon each other, carrying on an eternal war since the world began, why should I not exert my will in whatever direction I choose? Why should I not bend others to my will?” The voice was reasonable, and tired. “Have I answered your question?”

Fallon felt the time drawing near. He felt light, as if the next breeze might lift him from the deck and carry him away. “I have an idea,” he said. “My idea is—and it is an idea I have had for some time now, and despite everything that has happened, and what you say, I can’t give it up—my idea is that all that is happening . . .” Fallon waved his hand at the world, “. . . is a story. It is a book written by a man named Herman Melville and told by a character named Ishmael. You are the main character in the book. All the things that have happened are events in the book.

“My idea also is that I am not from the book, or at least I wasn’t originally. Originally I lived a different life in another time and place, a life in the real world and not in a book. It was not ordered and plotted like a book, and . . .”

Ahab interrupted in a quiet voice: “You call this an ordered book? I see no order. If it were so orderly, why would the whale task me so?”

Fallen knotted his fingers tighter behind him. Ahab was going to make him do it. He felt the threads of the situation weaving together to create only that bloody alternative, of all the alternatives that might be. In the open market, the price for the future and price for the physical reality converged on delivery day.

“The order’s not an easy thing to see, I’ll admit,” Fallen said. He laughed nervously.

Ahab laughed louder. “It certainly is not. And how do you know this other life you speak of was not a play? A different kind of play. How do you know your thoughts are your own? How do you know that this dark little scene was not prepared just for us, or perhaps for someone who is reading about us at this very moment and wondering about the point of the drama just as much as we wonder at the pointlessness of our lives?” Ahab’s voice rose, gaining an edge of compulsion. “How do we know anything?” He grabbed his left wrist, pinched the flesh and shook it.

“How do we know what lies behind this matter? This flesh is a wall, the painting over the canvas, the mask drawn over the player’s face, the snow fallen over the fertile field, or perhaps the scorched earth. I know there is something there; there must be something, but it cannot be touched because we are smothered in this flesh, this life. How do we know—”

“Stop it! Stop it!” Fallen shouted. “Please stop asking things! You should not be able to say things like that to me! Ahab does not talk to me!”

“Isn’t this what I am supposed to say?”

Fallen shuddered.

“Isn’t this scene in your book?”

He was dizzy, sick. “No! Of course not!”

“Then why does that disturb you? Doesn’t this prove that we are not pieces of a larger dream, that this is a real world, that the blood that flows within our veins is real blood, that the pain we feel has meaning, that the things we do have consequence? We break the mold of existence by existing. Isn’t that reassurance enough?” Ahab was shouting now, and the men awake on deck trying to get the boats in shape for the last day’s chase and the Pequod’s ultimate destruction put aside their hammers and rope and listened to his justification.

It was time. Fallen, shaking with anger and fear, drew the knife from behind him and leapt at the old man. In bringing up the blade for the attack he hit it against the side of the narrow hatchway. His grip loosened. Ahab threw up his hands and, despite the difference in age and mobility between them, managed to grab Fallon’s wrist before he could strike the killing blow. Instead, the deflected cleaver struck the beam beside Ahab’s head and stuck there. As Fallen tried to free it, Ahab brought his forearm up and smashed him beneath the jaw. Fallen fell backward, striking his head with stunning force against the opposite side of the scuttle. He momentarily lost consciousness.

When he came to himself again, Ahab was sitting before him with his strong hands on Fallon’s shoulders, supporting him, not allowing him to move.

“Good, Fallen, good,” he said. “You’ve done well. But now, no more games, no more dramas, no easy way out. Admit that this is not the tale you think it is! Admit that you do not know what will happen to you in the next second, let alone the next day or year! Admit that we are both free and unfree, alone and crowded in by circumstance in this world that we indeed did not make, but indeed have the power to affect! Put aside those notions that there is another life somehow more real than the life you live now, another air to breathe somehow more pure, another love or hate somehow more vital than the love or hate you bear me. Put aside your fantasy and admit that you are alive, and thus may momentarily die. Do you hear me, Fallen?”

Fallen heard, and saw, and felt and touched, but he did not know. The Pequod, freighted with savages and isolatoes, sailed into the night, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

THE POSTMAN

David Brin

David Brin, whose previous stories in these pages were “The Loom of Thessaly” (November 23,1981) and “Coexistence” (May 1982), has recently received his doctorate in applied physics. He lives in Southern California.

1

Once, long ago, Gordon Krantz had heard somebody contend that there was nothing more dangerous than a desperate man. There was no defeat so total that a determined person could not pull something from the ashes by negotiation . . . by risking all he had left.

Only an hour before Gordon had been well stocked, and as comfortable as a solitary traveller could expect to be these days. Now he was a fugitive, robbed and terrorized, scratched and torn from his frantic escape through the blackberry thicket.

From his hiding place, in a rock cleft surrounded by thick brush, Gordon could hear the sounds of looting taking place a few hundred yards down the mountainside. He tried not to listen to the delighted yells. They signalled the loss of gear he had spent years gathering. The thought was too painful to consider yet.

They had caught him off guard, sipping weak elderberry tea by his late afternoon campfire. It had been clear in that first instant, as they charged up the trail at him, that the raiders would as soon kill him as look at him. He snatched his belt and dove into the nearby brambles before they got close enough to choose.

He had cut his foot during that mad scramble and collected innumerable scrapes.

The fact that he had got away at all was as much a testament to his speed—preventing them from getting within knife range as they chuffed up the narrow path—as to the bandits’ stinginess with ammo. They probably thought he had abandoned all of his goods, and his carcass was not worth a bullet.

Gordon allowed himself an ironic smile as he carefully replaced the moccasin on his injured foot. He had not left everything behind. As had been his habit even before the war, when he went on backpacking trips as a boy, he never spent a waking moment without his travel belt strapped on or within reach.

He was thankful for that old precaution as he picked up his revolver from a nearby rock and slid it back into its holster. He clutched a nearby rock outcrop to help himself stand up.

The happy sounds were fading now. The bandits were leaving. He heard a few derisive calls, obviously designed to taunt the victim, who had got away with his life, but little more. Then there was silence.

He had, indeed, got away with very little more than his life. Even that last part was in doubt, since he had no supplies.

Gordon had already decided. He had no choice but to follow the raiders. Something might occur to him. They might abandon some of his goods. Turning away would be turning toward death in the wilderness.

As he picked his way back toward the trail as quietly as he could, Gordon checked his inventory. Besides his holstered pistol, the hip pouches on his belt held his scout knife, a few days’ concentrated rations, his compass, first aid packet, space blanket, a miniature fishing kit, and ten spare rounds of ammunition. He silently blessed those small relics of industrial civilization.

Unfortunately, these were still paltry gleanings from a disaster. All considered, Gordon’s chances of survival had easily been halved. Those chances had, of late, seemed quite slim enough.

Gordon moved as quickly and silently as he could through the bone-dry forest. He began to see the outlines of a plan forming—to cut above the main trail and, traversing the east slope of the mountain, to come down upon his opponents while it was still light . . . while they were still gloating over their acquisitions, carelessly contemptuous of the man they had robbed.

The bearded, denim-clad men had taunted him as he escaped through the bramble, calling him “brer rabbit” and promising to eat him if he ever returned. Gordon wasn’t entirely sure they had been joking about the last part. He had seen cases of cannibalism in the early days. Some of these mountain men might have acquired a taste for the “long-pork.” One thing he thought was pretty certain. The marauders probably thought he was unarmed. That was Gordon’s slim advantage.

His own survival depended on his ability to catch up with his robbers and to persuade them that a man with nothing to lose was someone to be reckoned with. If he could show them how far he was willing to go, they might let him have back some of his goods—perhaps enough to keep him alive in the wild mountains of what had once been the state of Oregon.

He had on a shirt, jeans, camp slippers, and socks. The loss of his jacket was a major disaster. As he moved quickly down the trail, Gordon couldn’t avoid all of the sharp stones and sticks that covered the trail. His left foot throbbed every time it was poked. Moccasins would get him nowhere. He had to have his boots back, at least!

Gordon cautiously entered the small clearing that had been his campsite. There was next to nothing left.

They had made litter of his tent, ripping it into tiny pieces of nylon and aluminum. Apparently the robbers had no use for it, and had destroyed out of malice whatever they didn’t want to carry. The only things of value the robbers had left intact were the slim longbow Gordon had been carving and his experimental line of gut strings.

Although it had been one and a half decades since the fall of industrial civilization, ammunition for firearms had only recently begun to get scarce; there had been so much around before the war. Gordon’s enemies were apparently men of little imagination. When they seized everything else at his campsite, they had failed to see the value of the bow and strings.

His shotgun and ammo, boots, jacket, geiger counter, and his slim, crab-written diaries were all gone, along with his food supply, of course. Carefully prepared pemmican . . . some split grains his last appreciative audience had donated . . . his tiny hoard of rock candy, which he had found in an abandoned gas station vending machine.

It was just as well he had lost the candy. His tooth brush was lost, too, trampled in amidst the trash the bandits had left in his campsite.

If he survived this day’s disaster, Gordon swore he would find another toothbrush. In his travels he had seen too many once pearly smiles that had been ravaged by neglect. The idea of his own teeth rotting in his mouth was Gordon’s personal phobia. He was a fastidious anomaly in a world of ever-growing barbarism and decay.

Even limping, he was able to move silently and quickly. That was the only advantage camp moccasins had over boots. Soon he could hear the raiding party below him, laughing over the morning’s escapade.

Gordon carefully considered his recollection of yesterday’s hike up this same trail. He thought he could remember the perfect site for a bushwhack. There was a switchback that passed beneath a horseshoe-shaped rocky outcrop. A sniper could easily break brush just above that turn and position himself within point-blank range of anyone hiking along the hairpin.

Gordon kept a close watch on the foliage on the left side of the trail. When he came to a slope that promised a fast shortcut to the south, he broke through the scrub oak, leaving the path and breaking his own trail. If he could get to the ambuscade first, he might be able to pin them down from the start and force a negotiated withdrawal.

That was the advantage of being the one with little to lose. The bandits would probably prefer to live to rob another day. It was easy to believe that they would part with boots, some food and ammo, a blanket and a geiger counter in order to save the lives of one or two of their number.

Gordon was willing to snipe now and live with himself later. In sixteen years, he had yet to kill a man that he knew of—though he had fired at dim figures early on, as a volunteer in the militia. That had been back when there was still a militia and a National Guard.

The voices of the party on the trail faded with distance. There was no way he could catch up with them in a straight chase, when they were on a trail and he was breaking ground cross country. Also, there wasn’t much time left before nightfall.

Gordon decided to gamble on a shortcut. He concentrated on finding the quickest way southwest, toward the rocky overhang he remembered. Soon he was in a thick undergrowth. The sun was hard to find, through the trees. He had to pause frequently to check his compass.

Grimly, he kept on. He didn’t remember the trail very well from yesterday, but it seemed that the switchback came only after a sweep southward along the face of the mountain. It presented him with a quandary. To stand a chance of catching his adversaries, he had to stay above them. Yet if he went too high, he might go right past them.

He chose a direction and persevered.

But soon the gamepath turned slightly westward, into a pass to the south of the one he had camped in. It appeared to lead to another route upward, toward the Divide, where the Cascade range changed from semi-arid forest to the rain-drenched climate of the coast.

He stopped a moment to catch his breath. The other side of the pass had been Gordon’s goal before the robbery. He looked at the slight mist that gathered in the pass above. Once he was over the Divide he need never again worry about scarce or poisoned water, or the desert sun. There might be salmon to fish . . . and there might be a semblance of civilization.

Gordon shook his head, driving out the temptation to abandon the chase. For certain there would be rain and snow over that range, along with predators and the threat of starvation. He had to have supplies!

He began angling downslope a bit. Surely by now the main trail was quite a bit below him, if it hadn’t already switched back a few times. He surprised a flock of wild turkeys as he entered a small clearing: one more sign that he had come into wetter country. It was also an indication of how far wildlife had recovered from the overhunting of the first postwar years, now that the human population had been thinned. How useful his bow someday might become, should he live long enough to finish and perfect it.

Now the game path was definitely turning west. The switchback had to be below, if not behind him. Gordon drifted downslope when he could, but the path forced him to continue west through the undergrowth.

Suddenly he stopped. His ears picked up something.

Gordon hurried along the path until the steepness of a ravine caused the forest to open up around him. Now he could see the mountain, and the other mountains of the chain, wrapped in a thick summer haze. The sound was coming from below, and to the northeast.

Voices. Gordon peered, then saw the trail. He caught a glimpse of color moving upward, slowly, through the woods.

The bandits! But why were they moving uphill? They wouldn’t, unless Gordon was already far south of the trail he had taken the day before. He must have missed the ambush site altogether.

If the vandals had taken a fork he failed to notice yesterday, they were now climbing back toward . . . Gordon looked up the mountain. Yes, he could see how a small hollow could fit over to the west, on a shoulder near the lesser used pass. It would be defensible and very hard to discover by chance.

Gordon turned west. If he hurried, he might beat the bandits to their base by five minutes or so. Perhaps he could take some women at the hideout hostage. The image struck him as grossly unpalatable, far less pleasing than the plan of ambushing his own ambushers.

Still, what choice had he? There wasn’t a decent ambush site. It would be too easy to outflank him on this broad hillside.

He started to run, leaping over the shorter scrub and fallen trees. Gordon felt exuberant as he coursed through the forest. He was committed, and none of his typical introspection or self-doubt would get in the way now. The battle adrenaline made him almost high. Running, he stretched to leap over a decayed trunk into a summer-dry creekbed. But the instant he landed, a sharp pain lanced through his left foot and streaked up his left leg.

He barely caught himself as he fell. Sudden tears filled his eyes. He grabbed the trunk and lowered himself to the ground. Something had stabbed him in the foot, through the flimsy camp moccasins he wore.

For several minutes he had to sit there, massaging his foot until the cramps slowly subsided. Meanwhile, he could hear the sounds of the bandit party passing below, taking away the head start that had been his only advantage.

Nightfall wasn’t many hours away. The “space blanket” in his pouch didn’t seem like much protection against the cold. He had little faith in something that, folded in its plastic bag, measured about the size of a cupcake.

As he stood up, carefully, leaning on the bow, Gordon’s eye was caught by a sudden flash. Something glinted amidst the trees, across the narrow pass.

He could see the object to the southeast, or rather he could see its reflection. From the folds in the hillsides, Gordon guessed that it could not be seen by anyone standing too far from this very spot, and then only in the late afternoon. The forest was thick over there on the other side of this saddle, and the hillsides gathered closely around. The many forest fires that had seared this dry part of the Cascades since the war seemed to have spared that mountainside.

Above the reflection, along the ridgeline above, Gordon could see the faint outlines of an old road or firebreak. This had been National Forest, before the war. But even then there had been people hereabouts.

So. That had to be the hideout, not the hollow to the west.

The voices of the passing gang fell away into the hazy mountainside. Gordon listened until he was sure they were gone. Then he relaxed enough to begin thinking again. He had to come up with another plan.

Gordon went slowly, nursing his injured foot and listening carefully for an ambush. If he read his enemies right, their pickets would be close to home, if they maintained any at all.

Unfortunately, there were many more side paths than in the other pass. Gordon had to choose among several likely tracks. He couldn’t make out footprints in the gravelly soil, especially in the fading light of the dying afternoon. The sun had already passed behind the mountain to the southwest. He visualized his destination, a ravine on the opposite shoulder of the saddle. He chose a trail that began to swing once more to the east.

He climbed into the thick forested hollow where he had seen the reflection earlier. Gordon guessed that he was within a half-mile of his goal, and slightly higher in altitude, when the path failed. It was growing dark fast. Gordon had to push through undergrowth, peering about for hazards to his feet. He regretted the loss of his flashlight. It was probably the last working electric light on this side of the Divide. The handpowered novelty had been a gift from his brother just before the war.

Groping and blundering, Gordon kept his forearms in front to protect his face from the dry brush as he poked about for the quietest approach. He fought down the urge to cough in the floating dust. The evening chill was coming on. Still, Gordon shivered less from the cold than from nervousness. He knew he was nearing his destination. One way or another, Gordon felt he was about to have an encounter with Death—his own or somebody else’s, perhaps both. Gordon hadn’t wanted his Dharma to come to this.

He had chosen to become a minstrel, a travelling actor and laborer, partly because he wanted to keep moving, to search for a haven where someone was trying to put things back together again, his personal dream. But he also couldn’t stay in one place because many of the surviving postwar communities demanded that a new male member prove his skill at killing before being allowed to join. He might have to duel-kill for the right to sit at the communal table, or bring back the scalp of a member of a feuding clan. Many survivor outposts had adopted rituals in which he wanted no part.

Now he found himself counting the bullets he had for his revolver and noting that there were probably enough for all the bandits. It was a grim mental exercise for a man who thought of himself as one of the last Humanists. He told himself this was different, that it was self-defense, but a part of him still protested.

Gordon detoured around another sparse berry patch. What the thicket lacked in fruit, it made up for in thorns. He moved along its edge, careful in the gray twilight.

Gordon thought it a miracle that a man like him had lived this long. Everyone he had known or admired when he was a boy was dead, along with virtually every hope any of them had had. The soft world that had encourage dreamers broke apart when he was seventeen. Long ago he realized that his brand of persistent optimism had to be a form of hysterical insanity.

Gordon paused at a small blob of color. About a yard into the nearby bramble, a solitary clump of blackberries hung, apparently missed by the local black bear. Ignoring the stabbing thorns, Gordon reached in to pick a few and popped them into his mouth.

He savored the wild, tart sweetness and wished it had not been so long since he had been with a woman.

Twilight was almost gone. Gordon made slow progress in the gathering gloom, even as the chill made him yearn to hurry up and get it over with. He finally rounded the thicket. There, suddenly, he saw the glint of a glass window only a hundred feet away.

Gordon ducked back behind the thorns. Breathing deeply, he pulled his revolver and checked the action to be certain no dirt was caught in the mechanism. He touched his breast pocket to make certain his spare ammo was ready. His hand was shaking.

Am I really going to go through with this?

A hazard to quick or forceful motion, the thicket was soft and yielding to his muscled back as he settled against it. Gordon closed his eyes and meditated for peace, for calm, and for forgiveness. In the chilly darkness, the only accompaniment to his breathing was the rhythmic ratchet of the crickets. A swirl of cold fog blew around him.

He sighed. There’s no other way. He raised his weapon and swung around to face death.

The structure looked odd. The distant patch of glass was dark.

That was strange, but stranger still was the silence. He’d have thought the bandits would have a fire going, that they would be celebrating their successful robbery.

The glass reflected silvery highlights of a rolling cloud cover. Thin wisps of haze drifted between Gordon and his objective, confusing the image, making it shimmer. Gordon walked forward slowly, giving most of his attention to the ground. If they could afford to feed one, the bandits would surely have a dog, or several. Now was not the time to step on a dry twig or to be stabbed by a sharp stone as he stumbled in the dimness.

He glanced up, and once more the eerie feeling struck him. There was something very odd about the structure. It didn’t look right. Its upper section seemed mostly glass. Below, it looked like painted metal. At the comers . . .

The fog grew thicker. Gordon could tell his perspective was wrong. He had been looking for a house or a large cottage. As he neared, he realized that the thing was closer than he had thought. The shape was familiar, somehow.

His foot came down on a twig. The “snap!” filled his ears as he crouched, peering into the gloom, desperate to see.

The ragged fog fell open before him. Pupils dilated, Gordon suddenly saw that he was bare meters from the window; he saw his own face reflected upon its surface, wide-eyed and wild haired; and he saw, superimposed on his own image, a vacant, grinning death mask—a hooded skull smiling in welcome.

Gordon crouched, hypnotized, unable to move or make a sound. A superstitious thrill coursed up his spine. The haze slowly swirled as he listened for proof that this was really happening—wishing with all his might that the death’s head was an illusion.

“Alas, poor Gordon!” The sepulchral image seemed to shimmer a greeting as it overlay his reflection. Gordon’s frozen mind could think of nothing but to attend the figure’s bidding.

Finally, he exhaled and he heard it whistle between his teeth. Without willing them to, Gordon felt his eyes turn slightly from the visage of death. A part of him noted that the window was part of a door. The handle lay before him. To the left there was another window. To the right . . . to the right was the hood.

The hood of the Jeep. The hood of the abandoned, rusted Jeep that lay in a faint rut in the forest. The hood of the abandoned, rusted Jeep with ancient US Government markings and the skeleton of a poor dead civil servant within, skull pressed against the passenger-side window, facing Gordon.

The strangled sigh Gordon let out felt almost ectoplasmic, the relief and embarrassment was so palpable. Gordon forced himself to straighten up and felt as if he were unwinding from the fetal position. He moved his arms and legs, then slowly began to pace around the vehicle, obsessively glancing back at its dead occupant. His heartbeat settled, and the adrenaline roar gradually ebbed.

He walked around the vehicle four times, then sat down on the forest floor against the cool door on the left side. Shaking slightly, he put the revolver back on safety and slid it into its holster. Then he pulled his canteen and drank with slow, full swallows. Gordon wished he had something stronger than water.

The night was full upon him. The cold was chilling, but Gordon spent a few moments putting off the obvious. The Jeep was, at minimum, shelter for the night. Finally the cold made him admit that now was the time to use that shelter.

The latch operated after a stubborn moment. He had to pull hard to pry the rusted door open. It let out a screech, but Gordon didn’t care. He slid over onto the cracked vinyl of the seat and inspected the interior.

The Jeep was one of those backward, driver on-the-right types the post office had used. The dead mailman—what was left of him—was slumped on the far right. Gordon avoided looking at the skeleton for the moment.

The back was half-full of canvas sacks. The smell of old paper and the musky odor from the mummified remains filled the small cabin. Gordon snatched up a metal flask he found on the floor. It sloshed! To have held liquid for sixteen years it had to be closed tightly. Gordon swore as he twisted and pried at the cap. He pounded it against the door frame. On the verge of tears, he finally felt the cap give slightly. He redoubled his efforts and was rewarded with a slow, rough turning and the heady, distantly familiar odor of whiskey.

Gordon decided that he must have been a good boy after all and that there was indeed a God. He took a mouthful and almost coughed as the warming fire streamed down his esophagus. He took two more small swallows and fell back against the seat, gasping for breath.

He was unwilling to face the task of removing the jacket the skeleton wore. Let it wait until daylight, he thought. Gordon grabbed sacks from the rear and bundled them about him. They bore the imprint US POSTAL SERVICE on them. He left the door open just an inch to let in the crisp mountain air. Burrowing under the sacks with his bottle, Gordon drifted into a semi-slumber, waking from time to time to take a sip from the bottle.

Gordon finally looked over at his host and contemplated the American flag patch on the arm of the civil servant’s jacket. He unscrewed the flask for another swig. This time he raised the container toward the hooded garment.

“Believe it or not, Mr. Postman,” he said, “I always thought you folks gave good and honest service. I was proud of you all, even before the war. But this, Mr. Mailman, this is service beyond anything I’d come to expect! I consider my taxes very well spent!”

He brought the flask to his mouth and drank to the postman, then screwed the cap back on and settled deeper into the mail sacks. Gordon felt a sad poignancy come upon him, like homesickness. The Jeep, the symbolic, faithful letter carrier, the flag . . . they reminded him of comfort, innocence, cooperation, and the easy life that had once allowed millions of men and women to relax, to smile, to be tolerant with one another.

Today, Gordon had been ready to kill and be killed. He smiled, glad that that had been averted. They had called him Mr. Rabbit and left him to die. But he would call the bandits “countrymen” and let them have their lives.

Gordon allowed sleep to come, welcoming back the optimism he had thought he’d lost. He lay in a blanket of his own honor and spent the rest of the night dreaming of parallel worlds.

2

A camp robber bird, looking for jays to chase, landed on the hood with a hollow thump. It squawked, once for territoriality and once for pleasure, then began poking through the thick detritus with its beak.

Gordon awakened to the tap-tapping sound and looked about, bleary-eyed. He looked at the bird through the dust-smeared window and took time to remember where he was. The glass windshield, the steering wheel, the smell of metal and paper felt like a continuation of the dream he had had most of the night, a dream about the Old Days, before the war. Then memory of the events of yesterday settled in.

Gordon rubbed his eyes and began to consider his situation. If he hadn’t left an elephant’s trail on his way into this hollow last night, he should be perfectly safe right now. The fact that the whiskey had been here untouched for sixteen years obviously meant that the bandits were lazy hunters. They had never even fully explored their own mountain.

Unaccustomed to eighty-proof liquor, Gordon felt a little thickheaded. The war had begun when he was seventeen, a young college prodigy, and since then there had been few opportunities to build up a tolerance to alcohol. The whiskey had left him cottonmouthed and a bit scratchy behind the eyelids.

He regretted his lost comforts. There would be no tea this morning, no damp washcloth, no hearty breakfast of venison jerky, and, especially, no toothbrush. Gordon tried to be philosophical: after all, he was alive.

He had a feeling there would be times when each of the items stolen from him would fall into the category “missed most of all.” If the gods still favored him, he would never feel that way about the geiger counter.

Radiation had been one of his main reasons for going ever westward since he left Minnesota, five years before. He had grown tired of walking everywhere with his precious counter, always afraid it would be stolen. Everyone knew the west coast had been spared the worst of the nuclear catastrophe. The seasonal winds had blown true to form, from west to east, that year. While the Conelrad stations were still broadcasting, Gordon and his fellow survivors had learned of the streaks of fallout that speared eastward from Vandenberg, in California, and the Puget Sound Trident pens. But a thoughtful look at a map made it clear that the Pacific coast was still better off than the Midwest. The deadly rains expected from Asia had somehow never come in force.

The war had been fought mostly with death rays and death bugs, anyway. The former eradicated the space stations with surgical effectiveness. The latter destroyed the last semblances of civilization and governmental control. The plagues were well constructed, at least. Gordon gave their designers that much. After a year most of the viruses had passed a built-in time limit and either disappeared or become benign. Still, Gordon had fled several times from villages where strangers were shot at on sight, as potential carriers.

Gordon pushed aside the mail sacks that had been his blankets. He opened his left belt pouch and pulled out a small package. It was wrapped in aluminum foil that had been coated with melted wax.

If there ever had been an emergency, this was one. Gordon would need energy to get through the day. A dozen cubes of boullion and a chunk of rock candy were all he had.

Sucking on a broken-off piece of the hard sugar, Gordon kicked open the door of the Jeep. He dropped several of the mail sacks out onto the ground to get them out of the way.

He got out and circled around to look at the muffled skeleton that had shared the night with him.

“Mr. Postman,” he said. “Pm going to give you as close to a decent burial as I can manage. I know that’s not much recompense for all you’re giving me. But it’s all I have to offer.”

The rusty door groaned as he pulled it open. Holding an emptied mail sack out to catch the skeleton as it pitched forward, Gordon managed to get the bundle of clothes and bones laid out on the forest floor. Gordon was amazed at the state of preservation. The dry climate had almost mummified the postman’s remains. The other contents of the Jeep appeared to have been free from mold for sixteen years.

An inventory was in order before he started digging a grave. First he checked the mailman’s apparel. The jacket was a wonderful find. If big enough, it would improve Gordon’s chances of survival substantially. The footgear looked old and cracked, but it might fit. They had once been rugged work shoes. Gordon carefully shook out the dry remnants of skin and bone and laid them against his moccasins. They looked just a little large. Too bad the postman’s socks were beyond redemption. The shirt and pants seemed all right, though they were stiff and musty. Gordon slid the bones out of the clothing and onto the mail sack with as little violence as he could manage, all the time a little surprised at how easy it was. It seemed that all of his superstition had been used up the night before. All that remained was a mild reverence for and an ironic gratitude to the corpse.

He carried the treasures over to a Jeffrey pine, shook them vigorously, holding his breath against the dust, and hung them on a branch to air out.

On the floor below the driver’s seat was a large leather carrier’s sack. It too was dry and cracked in spots, but the straps held when he tugged on them, and the flaps looked as if they’d keep out water. Gordon laid it outside, near the precious flask of scotch. He pried open the glove compartment. A brittle map he found replaced the one he had lost.

With a joyful shout, Gordon grabbed a small cube of clear plastic from under a pile of papers. It was a scintillator! Far better than his geiger counter, the little crystal would give off tiny flashes whenever gamma radiation struck it. It needed no power. Gordon cupped it in front of his eye and watched as a sparse set of flickerings told of cosmic ray. background flux. Otherwise, the cube was quiescent.

Now what was a prewar mailman doing with a gadget like that? Gordon wondered. He put the scintillator into his pants pocket and returned to the glove compartment.

The flashlight was a dead loss. The emergency flares were crumbling. He tossed two of them over onto his salvage pile. The tool kit had many items that would make good trade somewhere, but the weight of the metal made it unrealistic to carry more than a few pieces, which he carefully selected.

A scattering of small packages spilled from the leather carrier’s bag. Gordon decided he might as well empty the bag right now. It wouldn’t come close to replacing his lost Kelty, but it would be a vast improvement over nothing at all.

He opened the flaps and upended the bag. Bundles of aged correspondence spilled out, breaking into scattered piles as brittle rubber bands snapped apart. Gordon picked up a few of the nearest pieces.

“From the office of the mayor of Bend, Oregon, to the Chairman of the Department of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Oregon, Eugene.” Gordon intoned the address as if he were playing Polonius. He flipped through more letters. The addresses sounded pompous and archaic.

“And Dr. Franklin Davis, of the small town of Gilchrist writes—with the word URGENT printed clearly on the envelope—a rather bulky letter to the Director of Regional Disbursement of Medical Supplies . . . no doubt pleading priority for his requisitions.”

Gordon’s sardonic smile faded into a frown of concentration as he turned over one letter after another. Something was wrong here.

He had expected to be amused by junk mail and personal correspondence, but there didn’t seem to be a single advertisement in the bag. And while there were many private letters, most of the envelopes were official stationery.

Well, he really didn’t have much time for snooping anyway. He would have to get organized, decide on a plan, and act soon if he wanted to eat. Perhaps now was the time to begin relearning the art of arrow-making.

He would take a dozen or so letters for amusement, and use the backsides of the letters for his new journal. He hadn’t allowed himself to feel the loss of sixteen years’ tiny scratchings, which was now doubtless being perused by some bandit.

As he selected a few letters to stuff back into the bag, the sense of something unexpected returned to Gordon. The mix of addresses bothered him. Too many were labeled URGENT. It made Gordon wonder.

What was a US Postal Service Jeep doing out here, anyway? And what had killed the postman?

Gordon got up and went around to the back of the vehicle. There were bullet holes in the tailgate window, well grouped midway up toward the right side. Gordon looked over to the Jeffrey pine. Yes, the shirt and jacket each had two holes in the back of the upper-chest area. He hadn’t noticed them before because of the number of other stains and rips.

Gordon looked at the skeleton, skewed and jumbled on its mail sack. Logic narrowed the range of possible explanations considerably. The attempted hijacking or robbery could not have been prewar. Mail carriers, if he remembered correctly, had almost never been attacked, even in the late eighties rioting. Besides, a missing carrier would have been searched for until found. So the attack took place after the three-day holocaust. But what was a mailman doing driving alone through the countryside after the United States had effectively ceased to exist? How long after had this happened?

The fellow must have driven off from his ambush, then sought the most obscure roads and trails to get away from his assailants. Perhaps he was unaware of the severity of his wounds. Perhaps he had simply panicked. But Gordon suspected that there was another reason the letter carrier had chosen to weave in and out of blackberry thickets to hide.

“He was protecting his cargo,” Gordon thought. “He measured the chance that he’d black out on the road against the possibility of getting help and decided to save the mail rather than try to live.”

So, this was a bona fide postwar postman, hero of the flickering twilight of civilization. Gordon thought of the oldtime ode of the mails . . . “Through rain, snow, sleet . . .” and wondered at the fact that some had tried this hard to keep the light alive.

That explained the official letters and the lack of junk mail. Gordon hadn’t realized that even a semblance of normality had remained after the first bombs.

Of course, as a seventeen-year-old recruit with his militia unit, Gordon had been unlikely to see anything normal. The mob rule and general looting in the main disbursement centers kept armed authority busy until the militia finally vanished into the disturbances it had been sent to quell. If men and women elsewhere were behaving more like human beings during those months of horror, Gordon never witnessed it.

The brave story of the postman served only to depress Gordon. This hint of a short-term struggle against chaos, by mayors and university professors and postmen, had a “what if” flavor that was too poignant for him to consider for long.

Gordon found himself touching the bullet holes in the rear window. He forced himself to stop it and instead to pry open the tailgate. It opened reluctantly, but finally Gordon could begin moving mailsacks aside, looking for useful items. He found the letter carrier’s hat with its tarnished badge, then an empty lunch-box. He snatched up a valuable pair of sunglasses lying in a thick layer of dust on a wheel well.

Amongst the heavier tools that lay jumbled in the storage compartment above the rear axle, Gordon found a small shovel. Intended to help free the four-wheel drive vehicle from ruts in the road, it would now help to bury the driver.

Just behind the driver’s seat, under several heavy sacks, Gordon found a smashed guitar. A large-caliber bullet had snapped its neck. Near it, a large yellowed plastic bag held a pound of desiccated herbs that gave off a strong, musky odor. Gordon barely remembered the smell: marijuana.

He had envisioned the postman as a middle aged, balding, conservative type. Gordon now recreated the image and made the fellow look more like himself: a member of a sub-generation that had hardly begun to flower before the war snuffed out it and everything else optimistic, a neo-hippie dying to protect the establishment’s mail. It didn’t surprise Gordon. He had had friends who were part of the movement, before the Chaos. They had been sincere people, though a little strange. Their motto had been cooperation and selflessness—in rejection of the egotism of the eighties. A neo-hippy would have been susceptible to the mystique of the Post.

Gordon threw the guitar out the tailgate and resumed searching.

The letter carrier hadn’t even been armed! Did he really believe he was inviolable? Gordon remembered reading once that the US Mail operated through both sides of the lines for three years into the 1860s Civil War. Perhaps the postman had been a pacifist. Perhaps he had trusted his countrymen to respect tradition.

Post-Chaos America had no tradition but survival. In his travels, Gordon had found that some isolated communities welcomed him in the same way minstrels had been kindly received far and wide in medieval days. In other cases there were wild varieties of paranoia. Gordon had learned to read the subtle clues that told which hamlet would welcome strangers. Fewer than half spoke before shooting.

Even in those rare cases where he had found friendliness, where decent people seemed willing to welcome a stranger with a steady hand and a good heart, Gordon had always, before long, found himself ready to leave. Whenever he stayed in one place for very long, he began to dream of wheels turning and things flying in the sky. After about a year in one place, he generally found himself moving on.

By midmorning he had decided. His gleanings were sufficient to make the chances of survival better without a confrontation with the bandits. The sooner he was over the pass and into a decent watershed, the better off he would be.

Someday, when he was resupplied and confident, he would return to claim his property.

He would bury the postman and take the guitar strings and sunglasses. Nothing else in back of the Jeep would serve him half so well as would a stream, somewhere out of the range of the bandit gang, where he could fish for trout to fill his belly.

3

“. . . They said fear not, Macbeth, Til Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane; and now a wood comes to Dunsinane!

“Arm, arm, arm youselves! If this is what the witch spoke of—that thing out there—there’ll be no running, or hiding here!”

Gordon clutched his wooden sword, which he had contrived earlier from an old piece of planking and a bit of tin. He motioned to an invisible aide-de-camp.

“I’m getting weary of the sun and wish the world were undone.

“Ring the alarum bell! Blow, wind! come wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back!”

Gordon squared his shoulders, flourished his sword, and marched Macbeth offstage to his doom.

Out of the glare of the tallow lamps, he swiveled to catch a glimpse of his audience. They had loved his earlier acts. But this bastardized one-man version of Macbeth might have gone over their heads, in spite of his bowdlerizations and simplified verses.

To be honest, a lot of the “updated” parts had been changed because Gordon couldn’t remember the original. He’d most recently seen a copy of the play a decade ago. The last lines of his soliloquy had been canon, at least. The part about “wind and wrack” he would never forget.

Those in the front row began applauding enthusiastically the instant after he made his exit; they were led by Mrs. Adele Thompson, the leader of this clan. The younger citizens clapped awkwardly. Those below twenty years of age slapped their hands together as though they were taking part in this strange rite of group appreciation for the first time in their lives.

Grinning, Gordon jumped onto the makeshift stage to take his bows. The stage was a plank-covered garage lift in what had once been the only gas station in the tiny hamlet.

Driven by hunger and isolation, Gordon had gambled on the hospitality of this mountain village, with its fenced fields and stout log wall. The gamble had paid off. His initial welcome had been cordial, with a minimum of suspicion. His offer of a series of performances in exchange for his meals had passed by a fair majority of the voting adults of the village.

“Bravo! Excellent!” Mrs. Thompson stood in the front row, clapping enthusiastically. White-haired and bony but still robust, she turned to encourage the thirty-odd others, including small children, to show their appreciation. Gordon did a flourish with one hand and bowed deeper than before.

His performance had been pure crap, but he was probably the only person within a hundred miles who had once studied drama. There were “peasants” once again in America, and, like his predecessors in the minstrel trade, Gordon had learned to go for the unsubtle.

Timing his final bow for the moment before the applause began to fade, Gordon again left the stage. He removed his crude, slapped-together costume. He had set firm limits. There would be no encore. His stock was theater, and he meant to keep them hungry for it until it was time to leave.

“Marvelous. Just wonderful!” Mrs. Thompson greeted him as he joined the villagers, now gathering at a buffet table along the back wall. The people were making a festival of the event. The older children formed a circle around him, staring in wonderment.

“Thank you, Mrs. Thompson. I appreciate the kind words of a perceptive critic, especially when it’s so long between performances.”

“No, no seriously,” the clan leader insisted, as if Gordon had been trying to be modest. “I haven’t been so delighted in years. Wow! That last bit with Macbeth sent shivers down my spine! I only wish I’d watched it on TV back when I had a chance. I didn’t know it was so good!

“And that inspiring Abraham Lincoln speech you gave us . . . well, you know, we tried to start a school here, in the beginning. But back in the early days it just didn’t work out. We needed every hand, even the kids’, and it seemed no one had the heart. Well, that speech got me to thinking. We’ve got some old books someplace. Maybe . . .”

Gordon nodded politely. He had seen this syndrome before. It was the best of a half-dozen types of reception he had experienced over the years, but it was also among the saddest. It always made him feel a little bit like a charlatan when his shows brought out grand, submerged hopes in one of the decent older people who remembered better days, hopes that had always fallen through before a week or a month had passed. It was as if the seeds of civilization needed more than good will and the dreams of aging high-school graduates to water them. He was no travelling messiah. The symbols he offered would not give the hopeful the sustenance they needed to overcome the inertia of a dark age.

Gordon was spared hearing more of Mrs. Thompson’s plans. The crowd that surrounded him squeezed out a small, silver-haired black woman, wiry and leather-skinned, who seized Gordon’s arm with a friendly but viselike grip.

“Now, Adele,” she said to the clan matriarch, “Mister Krantz hasn’t had a bite since noontime. If we want him well enough to perform tomorrow night, we’d better feed him, hmmm?”

Mrs. Thompson gave the other woman a look of patient indulgence. “Of course, Patricia,” she said. “I’ll speak with you more about this, later, Mr. Krantz, after Mrs. Howlett has succeeded in fattening you up a bit. She gave Gordon an intelligent, ironic smile. Gordon reevaluated his initial impression of Adele Thompson. She certainly was no fool.

Mrs. Howlett seized Gordon’s arm and propelled him through the crowd. Gordon smiled and nodded as hands came out to touch his sleeve. Wide eyes followed his every movement. One of those watching him was a young woman who stood behind the long buffet table. She had hair blacker than Gordon remembered ever seeing before, and deep almond eyes. She was barely taller than Mrs. Howlett. Twice, she turned to slap the hand of a child who tried to help himself to the banquet before the honored guest. But each time she quickly looked back at Gordon and smiled.

Beside her, a tall, burly red-haired man stroked his short red beard and gave Gordon a strange look of resignation.

“Abby,” Mrs. Howlett addressed the pretty brunette. “Let’s have a little bit of everything on a plate for Mr. Krantz. Then he can make up his mind what he wants seconds of. I baked the blueberry pie, Mr. Krantz.”

Dizzily, Gordon made a diplomatic note to himself to have two helpings of the pie. It was hard to concentrate on politics, though. He hadn’t seen or smelled anything like the buffet before him in years! There was a large stuffed turkey. A huge steaming bowl of boiled potatoes, dollied up with beer-soaked jerky, carrots, and onions, was the second course. Down the table Gordon saw apple cobbler and a barrel of dried apple flakes. He would have to cozzen a supply of those before he left.

Not bothering with further inventory, he eagerly held out his plate. Abby kept her eyes on him as she took it.

The red-haired man suddenly muttered something indecipherable and reached out and grabbed Gordon’s right hand with both of his own. Gordon flinched, but the taciturn fellow would not let go until he answered the grip and shook hands. The man then nodded and let go. Blushing slightly he bent down to kiss the brunette quickly and stalked off, eyes downcast. Gordon blinked. Did I just miss something, he wondered as he took back his heaped plate. The girl blushed prettily as he thanked her.

“That was Abby’s husband, Michael,” Mrs. Howlett said. He stayed to see your show, but now he’s got to go and relieve Edward at the trap string, so Edward can bring back what he’s caught and dried over the last week. He wanted to stay to see your show, though. I think when he was little, he used to love to watch shows . . .”

Gordon was in a daze as the steam from his plate rose to his face. Mrs. Howlett rattled on beside him as he found a seat on a pile of old tires and proceeded to stuff himself.

“You’ll get to talk to Abby later,” the black woman went on. “Now, you eat. And when you get a little less hungry, I think we’d all like to hear, one more time, how you got to be a mailman.”

Gordon looked up at the eager faces around him. He hurriedly took a swig of beer to chase down a too-hot mouthful of potatoes.

“I’m just a traveller,” Gordon said around a full mouth while lifting a turkey drumstick. “It’s not much of a story, how I got the bag and clothes.” Gordon shrugged. He didn’t care whether they stared or touched or talked to him so long as they let him eat!

Mrs. Howlett smiled and watched him for a few moments. Then, unable to hold back, she started in again. “You know, when I was a little girl, we used to give milk and cookies to the mailman. And my father always left a little glass of whiskey for him the day before New Year’s. Dad used to tell us that poem—you know, ‘Through sleet, through mud, through war, through blight, through bandits and through darkest night . . .’ ”

Gordon coughed and looked up from his plate for a moment, astonished and delighted by the old woman’s misremembrance. But the impulse faded quickly as he returned to his slab of roast turkey and stuffing. He hadn’t the will to try to figure out what the old woman was driving at.

“Our mailman used to sing to us!”

The speaker was a dark-haired giant with a silver-streaked beard. His eyes seemed to mist as he remembered. “We could hear him coming, on Saturdays when we were home from school, sometimes when he was over a block away. He was black, blacker than Mrs. Howlett or Jim Horton over there. Man, did he have a nice voice! He brought me all those mail-order coins I used to collect.

Ringed the doorbell so he could hand ’em to me, personal, with his own hand.”

His voice was hushed.

“Our mailman just whistled when I was little,” said a middle-aged woman. She sounded a little disappointed. “But he was real nice. Later, when I was grown up, I came home from work one day and found out the mailman had saved the life of one of my neighbors—heard him choking and gave him mouth-to-mouth until an ambulance came.”

There was a collective sigh from the circle of listeners, as if they were hearing the heroic adventures of a single ancient hero.

“Now,” Mrs. Howlett touched Gordon’s knee. “Tell us again how you got to be a mailman.”

Gordon shrugged again, a little desperately. “I just found the mailman’s things.”

“Ah,” Several of the villagers looked at each other knowingly and nodded, as if Gordon’s answer had had some profound significance. Gordon heard his own words repeated to those on the edges of the circle.

“He found the mailman’s things . . . so naturally he became . . .”

Gordon shrugged. His answer must have appeased them, somehow. The crowd thinned as each villager took his or her polite turn getting a plateful from the buffet. It wasn’t until much later that Gordon, on reflection saw the significance of the transaction that had taken place while he crammed himself nearly to bursting with good food.

4

“. . . we found, then, that our clinic seems to have an abundant supply of disinfectants and pain killers of several varieties. We hear these are in short supply in Bend, and in the relocation centers up north. We are willing to trade some of these—along with a truckload of de-ionizing resin columns that happened to be abandoned here—for one thousand doses of tetracycline, to guard against the bubonic plague outbreak to the east. Also, we are in desperate need of . . .”

The mayor of Gilchrist must have been a strong-willed man to have persuaded his local emergency committee to offer such a trade. Hoarding, however illogical and uncooperative, had been one of the worst contributors to the collapse after the war. He was astonished that there were people with this much good sense, still, during the first two years of the Chaos.

Gordon rubbed his eyes. Reading wasn’t easy by the light of a pair of homemade candles. But he found it difficult to get to sleep on the soft mattress. And he’d be damned if he’d sleep on the floor after all these months of dreaming of just such a bed, in just such a room!

He had been a little sick earlier. The home-brewed ale he had consumed had almost taken him over the line from delirious happiness to utter misery. He had teetered along the boundary for several hours before stumbling into the room they had prepared for him.

There had been a toothbrush waiting on his nightstand and an iron tub filled with hot water. There had been soap! In the bath his stomach had settled, and a warm, clean glow spread over his skin.

Gordon had smiled when he saw that his postman’s uniform had been cleaned and pressed. It lay on a nearby chair; the rips and tears he had crudely patched were now neatly sewn.

He could not fault the people of this tiny hamlet for neglecting his one remaining longing. He was almost in Paradise.

He lay in a sated haze between a pair of elderly but well-maintained sheets, waiting for sleep to come as he read an ancient piece of correspondence between two dead men.

“We are having extreme difficulty with local gangs of ‘Survivalists,’ ” the mayor of Gilchrist went on.

“Fortunately, these tiny infestations of egotists are too paranoid to hand together. They’re as much trouble to each other as they are to us. Nevertheless, they are becoming a real problem.

“Our deputy is regularly fired on by well-armed men in army surplus camouflage suits when he tries to patrol outlying roads. No doubt the idiots think he’s a ‘Russian Lackey’ or some such nonsense. They’ve taken to hunting game on a massive scale, killing everything in the forest and doing a typically rotten job of butchering and preserving the meat. Our own hunters frequently come back disgusted over the waste and often having been shot at without provocation.

“I know it’s a lot to ask, but when you can spare a platoon from relocation riot duty, could you send them up here to help us root out these self-centered, hoarding, romantic scoundrels from their little filtered armories? Maybe a unit or two of the US Army will convince them that we won the war and have to cooperate with each other from now on . . .”

Gordon put the letter down.

Yes, that’s the way it had been. The “last straw” had been this plague of ‘survivalists.’ One of Gordon’s last duties in the militia had been to help snuff out some of those small gangs of city-bred cutthroats and gun nuts.

The number of fortified caves and cabins his unit had found in the mountains had been staggering, all set up in a rash of paranoia in the decade before the war. Of course, such prizes changed hands a dozen times each in the first months; they were such tempting targets. The battles had raged until every solar collector was shattered, every windmill wrecked, and every cache of valuable medicines scattered.

Only the ranches and villages, those possessing a more sensible brand of paranoia mixed with internal cohesiveness, survived. When the Guard units themselves dissolved into roving gangs of battling survivalists, few of the original population of armed and armored hermits remained alive.

There was a faint sound. Gordon might almost have imagined it. Then, only slightly louder, came a faint knock on his door.

“Come in.”

The door opened about halfway. Abby, the petite, vaguely Oriental-looking girl he had seen earlier, smiled timidly from the opening. Gordon refolded the letter and slipped it into its envelope.

“I’ve come to ask if there is anything else you need,” she said, a little quickly. “Did you enjoy your bath?”

“Oh, boy.” Gordon sighed. He found himself slipping into MacDufTs brogue. “That I did, lass. And in particular I appreciated the toothbrush.”

“You mentioned you’d lost yours.” She looked at the floor. “I pointed out that we had at least five or six unused ones in the storage room. I’m glad you were pleased.”

“It was your idea? Then I am indeed in your debt.”

Abby looked up at him and smiled.

“Was that a letter you were just looking at? Could I look at it? I’ve never seen a letter before.”

Gordon laughed. “Surely you’re not that young! What about before the war?”

Abby blushed at his laughter. “I was only four when it all happened. It was so frightening and confusing. I really don’t remember much from before.”

Had it been that long? Yes. Sixteen years was long enough to have beautiful women in the world who knew nothing but the dark age.

“All right, then.” He patted the bed, near his knees. Grinning, she came over and sat beside him.

Gordon reached into the sack and pulled out one of the yellowed envelopes. Carefully, he spread out the letter and handed it to her.

Abby looked at it so intently that he thought she was reading the whole thing. She concentrated, her thin eyebrows almost coming together in a crease on her forehead. But finally she handed the letter back, saying, “I guess I can’t really read. I mean, I can read labels on cans and stuff. But I never learned sentences.”

She sounded embarrassed but unafraid, trusting, as if Gordon were her confessor.

He smiled. “No matter. I’ll tell you what it’s about.”

He held the letter up to the candlelight.

“It’s from one John Briggs, of Fort Rock, Oregon, to his exemployer in Klamath falls. I’d guess from the lathe and hobby horse letterhead that Briggs was a retired machinist. Hmmm.”

Gordon concentrated on the barely legible handwriting. “It seems Mr. Briggs was a pretty nice man. Here he’s offering to take in his ex-boss’s children until the emergency was over. Also he says he has a good garage machine shop, his own power, and plenty of metal stock. He wants to know if the fellow wants to order any parts made up, especially of things in short supply . . .”

Gordon’s voice faded. He was still so thick-headed from his excesses that it had just struck him that a beautiful female was sitting on his bed. He cleared his throat quickly and went back to scanning the letter.

Abby looked at him. Apparently half of what he had said about the letter writer, John Briggs, might as well have been in a foreign language to her. “Metal stock” and “machine shop” could have been ancient, magical words of power.

“Why didn’t you bring us any letters here in Pine View?” she asked.

Gordon frowned at the non sequitur. The girl wasn’t stupid. One learned how to tell such things. Obviously she was quite bright.

Then why had everything he said, when he arrived here and at the party, been completely misunderstood? She still thought he was a mailman, as, apparently, did all but a few of the others in this small settlement. From whom did she believe they might get mail?

Probably she didn’t realize that the letters he carried were from dead men and women to other dead men and women and that he carried them for . . . for his own reasons. The myth that had spontaneously developed here in Pine View depressed Gordon. It was one more sign of the deterioration of civilized minds.

He considered telling her the truth, as brutally and frankly as he could, to stop this fantasy once and for all. He started to.

“There aren’t any letters because . . .” He paused. Once more he was aware of her nearness, the scent of her hair, and the gentle curves of her body. Of her trust, as well. He sighed. “There aren’t any letters for you folks because . . . because I’m coming west out of Idaho, and nobody back there knows you here in Pine View. From here I’m going to the coast. There may even be some large towns left, down there. Maybe . . .”

“Maybe someone down there will write to us if we send them a letter first!” Abby suggested. “Then, when you pass this way again, on your way back to Idaho, you could give us the letters they send. By then I’ll be able to read sentences, I promise!”

Gordon shook his head and smiled. It was beyond his right to dash such dreams.

“Maybe so, Abby. Maybe so. But you know, you may get to learn to read easier than that. Mrs. Thompson’s offered to put it up for a vote to let me stay on here for a while. I guess officially I’d be schoolteacher, though I’d have to prove myself as good a hunter and farmer as anybody. I could give archery lessons . . .”

Abby looked at him with surprise. Then she shook her head vigorously.

“But I thought you’d heard! They voted on it after you went to take your bath. Mrs. Thompson should be ashamed of trying to bribe a man like you that way, with your important work having to be done!”

He sat forward, not believing his ears. “What did you say?” He had begun hope he could stay in Pine View for at least the season, maybe a year. Who could tell? Perhaps here the wanderlust would leave him, and he could find a home.

Gordon fought to stifle his anger. Abby apparently noticed his agitation and hurried on.

“I mean, that wasn’t the only reason, of course. There was the problem of there being no woman for you. And then . . .” Her voice trailed off so that Gordon could barely hear her. “Mrs. Howlett thought you’d be ideal for helping me and Michael finally have a baby . . .”

Gordon blinked. “Um,” he said, expressing the full contents of his mind.

“We’ve been trying for five years. We really want children. But Mrs. Horton thinks Michael can’t because he had the mumps really bad when he was twelve. You remember the real bad mumps?”

Gordon nodded. It had been the last of the warbugs. The resultant sterility had made for unusual social arrangements everywhere he had travelled.

Abby went on quickly. “Well, it would cause problems if we asked any of the other men here to—to be the body father. I mean, when you live close to people like this, you have to look on the men who aren’t your husband as not being really ‘men’ . . . at least not that way. I don’t think I’d like it, and it might cause trouble. Besides, I’ll tell you something if you promise to keep a secret. I don’t think any of the other men would be able to give Michael the kind of son he deserves. He’s really very smart. He’s the only one of us youngers who can really read . . .”

The flow of strange logic came on too fast for Gordon to follow.

“But you’re different.” She smiled at him. “I mean, even Michael saw that! He’s not too happy, but he figures you’ll only be through once a year or so, and he could stand that. He’d rather do that than never have any kids.”

Gordon cleared his throat. “You’re sure he feels this way?”

“Oh, yes. Why do you think Mrs. Howlett introduced us in that funny way? It was to make it clear without really saying it out loud. Mrs. Thompson didn’t like it much, but I think that’s because she wanted you to stay.”

Gordon’s throat felt very dry. “How do you feel about all this?” he asked.

She looked at him as if he were a visiting prophet.

“I’d be honored if you’d say yes,” she said quietly. She lowered her eyes.

“And you’d be able to think of me as a man, ‘that way’ ?” Gordon asked.

Abby grinned, then answered Gordon by crawling up on top of him and planting her mouth upon his. The intensity of her assault was testimony enough.

There was a momentary pause as she shimmied out of her clothes. Gordon turned to snuff the candle on the bed stand. Beside it lay the gray letterman’s uniform cap. Its brass badge cast multiple reflections of the dancing flame. The figure of a man, hunched forward upon a horse with bulging saddle bags, seemed to move at a flickering gallop.

“This is another one I owe you, Mr. Postman,” Gordon thought, as Abby’s smooth skin slid along his side. He blew the candle out.

5

For ten days, Gordon’s life followed a new pattern. As if to catch up on six months’ lack, he slept late. Each morning Abby awoke before dawn. She was gone, like the night’s dreams, when he opened his eyes to the sunshine that streamed in through his window.

During the day he conferred with Mrs. Thompson and the other village leaders, gave reading and archery lessons, and prepared for the evening’s performance. Each night, by the time he had delivered his last soliloquy and led the adults in a group sing of beloved old commercial jingles, he would come to wonder if Abby had been a dream.

Each night she came to him after he retired. She sat on the edge of his bed and talked of her life. She brought him books to ask their meanings. And then, when her active mind seemed sated, she slid under the covers while he took care of the candle.

On the tenth morning, she did not slip away with the predawn light but instead wakened Gordon with a kiss.

“Hmmmn,” he commented, as he reached for her. Abby pulled away. She leaned over for her clothes, brushing her breasts across the soft hairs of his flat stomach; then she sat up and smiled at him.

“I should let you sleep, but I wanted to tell you something,” she said. She held her clothing in a ball.

“Mmm, what is it?” Gordon raised his head a little and stuffed the pillow behind it for support.

“You’re supposed to be going today, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Abby. That would be best. I’d like to stay longer, but since I can’t, I’d best be heading west again. Besides, there are circumstances that make it hard to delay any longer, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

“I know.” She nodded seriously. “We’ll all miss you here. But . . . well, I’m going to meet Michael out at the trapline this evening. I miss him terribly. That doesn’t bother you, does it? I mean, it’s been wonderful here with you, but he’s my husband and . . .”

Gordon smiled. He touched her cheek. To his amazement, he had little difficulty. He was more envious than jealous of Michael. He had long become accustomed to a self-image of denial.

Abby’s and Michael’s desire for children and their obvious love for each other made the situation, in retrospect, as obvious as the need for a clean break at the end. He only hoped he had done them the favor they sought, for despite their fantasies, it was unlikely he would ever be this way again.

“I have something for you,” Abby said. She reached under the bed and pulled out a small silvery object on a chain, and a paper package.

“It’s a whistle. Mrs. Howlett says you should have a whistle. Also, she helped me write this letter. I found some stamps in a drawer in the gas station, but they wouldn’t stick on. So I got some money. I think this is fourteen dollars. Will that be enough?

Gordon couldn’t help smiling. Yesterday, five or six of the others had privately approached him. He had accepted their small packages and payments for postage. He might have used the opportunity to charge them something he needed, but the community had already supplied him with a month’s stock of jerky, dried apples, and twenty straight arrows, newly produced from the assembly line he had shown them how to build.

Some of the older citizens had relatives in Eugene or Portland or towns elsewhere in the Cascades. It was the direction he was heading, so he took the letters. A few were addressed to people who had lived in Oakridge and Blue River. Those he filed deep in the safest part of his sack. The rest he might as well throw into Crater Lake, for all the good they would ever do.

He seriously pretended to count out a few paper bills, then handed her back the rest of the worthless faded currency. “And who are you writing to?” Gordon asked, as he took the letter. He felt as if he was playing Santa Claus, and he enjoyed it.

“I’m writing to the University. You know, at Eugene? I asked a bunch of questions like, are they taking new students again, yet? And do they take married students?” Abby blushed. “I know I’d have to work on my reading real hard to get good enough. And maybe they aren’t recovered enough to take many new students. But by the time I hear from them maybe things will be better. I’ll for sure be reading by then. Mrs. Thompson promises she’ll help me, and her husband has agreed to start a school. I’m going to help with the little kids.”

Gordon had thought himself beyond surprise. But this touched him. In spite of Abby’s totally unrealistic estimate of the state of the world, Gordon felt warmed by her hope. He found himself dreaming along with her. He saw no harm in wishing.

“Actually,” Abby went on. “One of the big reasons I’m writing is to get a . . . a pen pal. That’s the word, isn’t it? Maybe someone in Eugene will write to me. That way we’ll get letters here. Also, that will give you another reason to come back, in a year or two . . . besides maybe wanting to see the baby.”

She smiled. “I got the idea from your Sherlock Holmes play. That’s an ‘ulterior motive,’ isn’t it?”

She was so delighted with her own cleverness and so eager for his approval that Gordon felt a great, almost painful rush of love and tenderness for her. Tears welled as he reached out and pulled her into an embrace. He held her tightly and rocked slowly, his eyes shut against reality, and breathed in, with her sweet smell, an optimism he had thought gone from the world.

“Well, this is where I turn back.” Mrs. Thompson said, shaking hands with Gordon. “Down this road things should be pretty tame until you get to Davis Lake. Our boys cleared out the last of the old survivalists that way some years back, but I’d still be careful.” The straight-backed old woman handed Gordon an old road map.

“I had Jimmie Horton mark the places we know of where homesteaders have set up. I wouldn’t bother any of them unless you have to. Mostly they’re a suspicious type, likely to shoot first. We’ve been trading with the nearest only for a short time now.” Gordon nodded. He folded the map carefully and slipped it into its pouch. The alterations he had made to the leather shoulder pack would make it more appropriate for cross-country travel.

He felt rested and ready. He would regret leaving Pine View as much as he had any haven in recent memory. But he was becoming eager to see what had happened in the Columbia Valley.

In the years since he had left the wreckage of Minneapolis, he had found himself moving westward into ever wilder territory, encountering increasingly hostile signs of the dark age. But now he was in a new watershed. Oregon had once been a pleasant place, with well dispersed light industry, productive farms, and an elevated level of culture. Perhaps it was merely Abby’s innocence infecting him, but he told himself that the Columbia Valley would be the place to look for civilization, if it existed anywhere.

He held the old woman’s hand once again.

“Mrs. Thompson, I’m not sure I could ever repay what you people have done for me.”

She shook her head. “No, Gordon, you paid your keep. I would have liked it if you’d been able to stay, and help me get a school going. But now I see maybe it won’t be so hard to do myself.

“You know, we’ve been living in a kind of a daze these last years, since the crops have started coming in well, and the hunting’s come back. You can tell how bad things have got when a bunch of grown men and women who once had jobs and filled out their own taxes and read news magazines start treating a battered wandering play-actor as if he was something like the Easter Bunny. Even Jim Horton gave you a couple of letters to deliver, didn’t he?”

Gordon gave Mrs. Thompson an embarrassed sidelong glance. Then he burst out laughing. The relief of having the group fantasy lifted off his shoulders made his eyes fill.

Mrs. Thompson chuckled. “But it was harmless, I think. And more than that. You’ve served as a . . . is catalyst that old word? Anyway, the children are already exploring ruins for miles around, bringing me books they find. I won’t have any trouble making school into a privilege. Imagine, punishing them by suspending them from class! I hope I handle it right.”

“I wish you the best of luck, Mrs. Thompson.” Gordon said sincerely. “God, it would be nice to see a light here and there in all this desolation.”

She looked thoughtful. “Right, son. That’d be bliss.”

Mrs. Thompson sighed. “Now you come back again, hmm? I’d recommend you wait a year, but come on back. You’re discreet and you’re kind. You treated my people, especially Abby and Michael, real well.” She frowned momentarily. “I think I understand what went on back there, and I guess it’s for the best. Anyway, you’re always welcome back.”

Mrs. Thompson turned to go. She walked two paces, then paused and half-turned to look back at Gordon.

“You aren’t really a postman, are you?”

Gordon smiled. “If I bring back some letters, you’ll know for sure.”

She nodded, then waved and set off up the ruined asphalt road.

Gordon watched her until she passed the first turn. Then he came about to face the west, and the long downgrade toward the Pacific.

6

The barricades had been long abandoned. The main baffle on highway 58, at the east end of the town of Oakridge, had weathered into a tumbled mass of concrete debris and curled, rusting steel. The town itself was silent. This end at least was clearly long abandoned.

Gordon looked down the main street. The signs were clear. The town had tried to hold out. Two, possibly three pitched battles had been fought. A storefront with a sign reading “Emergency Services Clinic” was the center of a major circle of devastation.

Three unsmashed panes reflected morning sunlight from the top floor of a hotel. Elsewhere, even where store windows had been boarded, the prismatic sparkle of shattered glass glistened.

Just twenty yards from his vantage point Gordon saw the wreckage of a gas station. The mechanic’s tool cabinet lay on its side; its store of wrenches, pliers, and replacement wiring lay scattered on the floor.

Gordon knew Oakridge to be the worst of all possible Oakridges, from his point of view. The things needed by a machine culture would be available everywhere, untouched and rotting, implying there was no such machine culture. At the same time he would have to pick through the wreckage of fifty waves of previous looters to find anything of use to him.

Well, he had done it before. He had even sifted the downtown ruins of Boise once. The gleaners who had come before him had missed a small treasure trove of canned food in a loft behind a shoe store—some hoarder’s stash, long untouched. There was a pattern to such things, worked out over the years.

Gordon slipped down off the baffle on the forest side. He entered the overgrowth and zigzagged, just in case he had been watched.

At a place where he could verify three landmarks, at diverse angles, Gordon dropped his leather shoulder bag and cap. He took off the blue carrier’s jacket and laid it on top, then cut brush to cover the cache. He carried his bow, .38, and a cloth sack.

He started with houses on the outskirts. Sometimes the first generation of looters were more exuberant than thorough. The wreckage they left discouraged those who came after, but there could be useful items within.

By the time Gordon reached the fourth house, his sack contained a pair of boots almost useless with mildew, a magnifying glass, and two spools of thread. It wasn’t much. He had looked in all the usual hoarder’s crannies—and some unusual ones—but hadn’t found food of any sort. His Pine View jerky wasn’t entirely gone, but he had dipped down almost to the level set aside for emergencies.

The pace he had set had not allowed for much hunting or fishing. His archery was better, and he had bagged a pair of birds a few days before. But if he didn’t have better luck gleaning, he might have to give up on the Columbia Valley for the season and find a semi-permanent hunting camp.

Gordon stood beside the four-poster bed in what had once been a physician’s prosperous two-storey home. The attic, a frequent source of useful junk, had been picked clean, it was a maelstrom of scrapbooks and papers, but there wasn’t an old shoe or out-of-style coat in sight.

The bedroom appeared empty of all but furniture, but there Gordon thought, for the first time, he might have found something the earlier looters had missed.

The large, heavy area rug that lay upon the hardwood floor seemed out of place. The left two legs of the bed rested upon it. The right pair did not. It was as if the owner had purposely placed the carpet in an awkward position.

Gordon laid down his burdens, grabbed the edge of the rug, and lifted. He crouched to curl the end and started rolling it toward the bed.

Yes! There was a square crack in the floor under the carpet. One leg of the bed pinned the rug over one of two brass hinges.

He stood and heaved against the bedpost. The leg hopped up, then fell back with a boom that echoed through the house. Twice more he pushed, and twice more loud echoes reverberated.

On his fourth heave, the leg bounced aside just far enough, but the bedpost snapped in two. Gordon barely escaped being impaled on the sharp, jagged stub as he fell onto the mattress. The canopy followed him and the aged bed collapsed in a noisy crash.

Gordon cursed as he fought with the canopy. Then he sneezed violently. The cloud of floating dust made it almost impossible to breathe.

Regaining a bit of sense, Gordon slithered from under the canopy and stumbled out of the room in a fit of sneezing.

The attack subsided slowly. As he stood gripping the upstairs bannister, he heard a distant murmur that sounded something like, “I think I heard it over this way . . .”

Gordon shook his head vigorously. Then wiping his eyes, he reentered the bedroom. The trapdoor was exposed. Gordon had to pry for a few moments before the edge would come up. Finally, the secret panel rose with a high, rusty skreel. Cobwebs greeted Gordon. Simultaneously, he heard a commotion outside. Now the voices could not be denied.

He quickly brushed the webs aside with his bow and peered into the hole.

There was a large metal box inside. Gordon reached in and almost strained his back hauling it out onto the floor. The hinges and hasp were rusted. A stainless steel lock bound the chest shut. Gordon looked back into the hole. The things a prewar doctor might have kept in a locked chest would be of less use than the canned goods and trade items he might have merely hidden in a spree of hoarding.

But there was nothing but the box. Gordon lifted the haft of his knife to smash the small lock. The chest might still hold weapons and ammunition.

He stopped. The voices were perilously close now.

“I think it came from this house!” A man’s voice called out. There were footsteps on the wooden porch. More feet shuffled through the dry leaves on the large, overgrown lawn.

Gordon sheathed the knife and snatched up his gear. He hurried out of the room to the stairwell. This was not the best of circumstances to meet other men. In Boise and other mountain ruins there had been almost a code. Gleaners from ranches all around could try their luck in the open city, and though the groups and individuals were wary, they seldom preyed on one another.

In other places, though, territoriality was the rule. Gordon might be searching in some clan’s turf. In any case, a quick departure was definitely in order.

Boots walked noisily downstairs. Going down would be useless, and it was too late to close the trap door or hide the heavy box. Gordon turned as quietly as he could to the narrow attic ladder. He climbed up into one end of the A-framed, gabled garret. He had searched among the useless mementos here earlier. Now he looked for a hiding place for himself.

Gordon walked, stooped over, near the sloping walls to avoid creaks in the floorboards. He chose a large trunk near a small gable window and laid his sack and quiver upon it. Quickly, he strung his bow, then settled behind the trunk.

Would they search? If they did, the strongbox would certainly attract attention! If so, would they take it as an offering and leave him a share of whatever it contained? He had known such things to happen in places where a primitive sort of honor system had developed.

He had the drop on anyone searching the attic. Gordon had mixed feelings about that. He would much rather take a hostage than a corpse, for numerous reasons, not the least of which was the fact that he was cornered in a wooden building, and the vengeful survivors of an ambush undoubtedly would have retained, even in the middle of a dark age, the craft of firemaking.

At least three pairs of booted feet could be heard now. In a rapid, hollow echo, one after another took the first stairs. When everyone was on the second floor, Gordon heard voices.

“Hey! Bob! Looka this!”

“What? You catch a couple of the kids playing doctor in an old bed ag . . . sheeit!”

There was a loud thump, followed by the hammering of metal on metal. A creak told Gordon that the strongbox had been opened.

“Sheeit!”

There were shuffling sounds and muttered conversation. Then, “Sure was nice of that fellow,” the first voice spoke. Wish we could thank him. Ought to get to know him so we don’t shoot first if we ever see him.”

If that was bait, Gordon wasn’t biting. He waited.

“Well, he at least deserves a warning,” a third voice said, louder. “We got a shoot-first rule in Oakridge. He better scat before someone puts a hole in him bigger than the gap between a Survivalist’s ears.”

The footsteps echoed down the stairwell, and out onto the wooden porch.

Gordon laid down the bow and snatched up his pistol. He crawled to the gable that overlooked the front entrance. Three men walked away from the house. They carried rifles and wore canvas day packs. They walked with several yards between them, in a stalker’s pattern, then disappeared into the woods.

Gordon hurried to the other windows. He saw no other motion.

He thought he had heard three pairs of feet earlier. It wasn’t likely only one man would stay in ambush. Still, Gordon moved carefully. He lay down beside the trapdoor to the attic, his bow, bag, and quiver next to him. He crawled until his head and shoulders extended out over the opening, slightly above the level of the floor.

He pulled the revolver, held it out in front of him, and allowed gravity to take his head and torso into a sudden downward arc.

His head and his pistol popped through the second-floor ceiling in a fashion an ambusher would be unlikely to expect. As the blood rushed to his head, Gordon was primed to snap off six quick shots at anything that moved.

Nothing moved.

He reached for his canvas bag, never taking his gaze or the pistol bearing from the hallway.

Gordon dropped the bag. If sound was the cue, that should bring an ambusher’s head into view.

It didn’t.

He dropped the bow and quiver more gently. Then he dropped his feet through the door to land in a crouch. Still nothing moved.

Gordon gathered his gear, made it travel-ready, then began a skirmish exit, examining each potential ambush site.

In the bedroom, the strongbox was empty. Beside it was a scatter of papers.

As he had expected, there were such curiosities as stock certificates, a stamp collection, and the deed to this house. But some of the other trash turned out to be recently torn cardpaper boxes.

The largest box, from which the celophane had been recently removed, had, until a few minutes before, held an AR-15 collapsible survival rifle. Gordon looked at the lightweight weapon pictured on the box and stifled a strangled cry of agony. Undoubtedly there had also been boxes of ammo.

But the other trash almost drove him wild. Labels were strewn about, saying empirin with codeine, eurythromycin, megavitamin complex, morphine . . .

Carefully handled . . . cached and traded in dribbles . . . these could have bought Gordon admission to any hamlet he chose. He might have won his way into one of the rich Wyoming ranch communities! He remembered a good doctor, in what was left of Butte, whose clinic was a sanctuary, protected by all the surrounding villages and clans. What the sainted gentleman could have done with these!

It was all right, he told himself over and over. He was alive. And if he could get back to his backpack, he would probably stay alive.

Gordon peeked out of the room, then resumed his stalking progress toward an exit from the house of false expectations.

A man who spends a long time alone in the wilderness can have one great advantage over a very good hunter who goes home to friends and companions each night.

Gordon sensed something before he could identify it. At first he shrugged his unease off as a remnant of his fear and anger in the house. Then he realized that the forest sounded different somehow.

Gordon had been retracing his steps toward the eastern edge of town, where he had hidden his gear. Now he stopped and considered: this route would help him find his landmarks, but might it not give an antagonist who had found his previous trail an advantage?

Was he overreacting? He was no Jeremiah Johnson, who could read the sounds of the woods like the street signs of a city. He looked around for something to back up his unease. Activity around him had been sparse until he had stopped moving. But when he kept still, an avian ebb and flow slowly returned to this patch of forest. Camp robber birds flitted in coveys from spot to spot, playing guerrilla war with jays for the best of the tiny bug-infested glades. Smaller birds hopped from branch to branch, chirping. Birds in this size range had no great love of man, but they didn’t go to great lengths to avoid him if he was quiet.

Then what?

There was a snapping sound to his left, near one of the ubiquitous blackberry thickets. But there, too, there were birds, or rather a bird. A mockingbird. The creature swooped up through the branches and landed in a bundle of twigs Gordon guessed to be its nest. It stood there, like a small lordling, haughty and proud. It squawked once, then dove toward the thicket again. As it passed out of sight, there was another tiny rustle; then the mockingbird swooped into view again.

Gordon froze an expression of nonchalance onto his face and idly picked at the loam with his bow. Meanwhile, he loosened the loop on his revolver. It took an effort to keep from displaying his nervousness.

He began moving diagonally to the thicket, about twenty yards away, moving neither toward it nor away from it, but in the direction of a large Ponderosa pine. The hackles on his neck were as far up as a furless ape could lift them.

Something behind that thicket had stimulated the nest defense response of the mockingbird. Whatever it was behaved most unanimal like, trying to ignore the nuisance attacks—to stay hidden.

Alerted, Gordon recognized a hunting blind.

He slung the bow over his shoulder with exaggerated carelessness, but as he passed behind the pine, he drew his revolver and ran into the forest at a sharp angle, trying to keep the bulk of the tree between himself and the thicket.

He remained in the tree’s umbra only a moment. Surprise protected him a moment longer. Then the cracking of three loud shots, all of different caliber, diffracted down the lattice of trees.

Gordon lengthened his stride. There was a fallen log ahead, at the top of a small rise. It would not only provide shelter if he could reach it; it would also conceal his movements. He heard three more bangs as he dove over the decaying trunk. He hit the ground and felt a stabbing pain in his right arm.

Gordon felt a moment’s blind panic as the hand holding his revolver cramped. If he had broken his arm . . . Blood soaked the cuff of his US Government Issue tunic. The pain was exaggerated by his imagination as he pulled back on the sleeve. The wound was a shallow gash. Small slivers of wood hung from the laceration. His bow had broken and stabbed him as he had fallen upon it.

His ears picked up sounds of pursuit. Whoops of gleeful chase carried over the tiny hillock.

Gordon threw the bow aside; later he would have time to curse its loss. He hurried uphill and to the right, crouching to take advantage of the creekbed and underbrush. Hunted men often run downstream. Gordon raced upslope, hoping that one of his enemies knew that bit of trivia.

There were shouts behind him. For a few minutes sounds of pursuit came closer. Gordon’s own racket seemed loud enough to wake sleeping bears. Twice, he caught his breath behind boulders or clumps of foliage.

Finally the shouts became diminished with distance. Gordon sighed as he settled back against a large oak and waited. When the noises had receded far enough, he pulled the aid kit from his belt pouch.

His arm would be all right. There was no reason to expect infection from the polished wood of the bow. The tear was far from vessels or tendons. It hurt like hell, though. He bound it, then looked around to get his bearings.

To his surprise, he recognized two landmarks at once . . . the shattered sign of the Oakridge Motel, seen over the treetops, and a cattle grate across a worn asphalt path just to the east.

Gordon moved to the place where he had left his goods. The stuff was exactly as he had left it. Apparently the Fates were not so cruel as to deal him another blow just yet. He knew they didn’t operate that way. They always let you hope, for a while, before They let you have it.

It was hard to believe they had missed him. They’d had the drop on him. Were they so surprised by his sudden break for it? Gordon wondered. They must have had semi-automatic weapons, yet he remembered only six shots.

At first he thought there were no bullet wounds on the Ponderosa pine, across the clearing. Then he looked a bit higher. Two fresh scars blemished the bark ten feet up.

So. They had not meant to kill him at all. They had aimed high to scare him off.

Gordon’s lips curled. Ironically, this made his assailants easier to hate. Unthinking malice he had come to accept, from many former Americans, as he accepted foul weather. But calculated contempt he had to take personally. These men understood the concept of mercy, but they had robbed, injured, and terrorized him.

He picked up their trail a few hundred yards to the west. It was clear and uncovered. They were almost arrogant. Gordon took no chances, however. It was almost dusk before he reached the palisade that surrounded New Oakridge.

It was apparently the most prosperous community he had found since leaving Idaho. An enclosure that had once been a city park was enclosed by a high, wooden fence. From within, Gordon heard the lowing of numerous cattle. A horse whinnied. Gordon could small hay and the rich scent of livestock.

Nearby, a still higher wall surrounded three blocks of what had been the southwest comer of Oakridge town. A row of two-storey buildings a half-block long took up the center of the village. Gordon could see the tops of these, including a water tower with a crow’s nest atop it. There was motion in the crow’s nest. A guard stood watch.

There was no entrance on this side. He skirted around to the south.

The forest had been cut, years ago, to provide a free fire zone around the village wall. Less care had apparently been taken of late. Undergrowth half as high as a man had encroached on the open area. Gordon crouched when he heard voices; then cautiously he approached from behind a curtain of trees.

A large gate swung open as Gordon reached the south wall. As he settled down to watch, two armed men sauntered out, looked around, then waved to someone within.

With a shout and a snap of reins a wagon pulled by two draft horses sallied through the gate. The driver paused by the two guards. Gordon could barely make out what he said.

“Tell the Mayor we appreciate the loan, Jeff. I know Fm in the hole pretty deep. But we’ll pay him back out of the harvest, for sure. He already owns a piece of the farm, so this seed ought to be a good investment for him.”

One of the guards nodded. “Sure thing, Sonny. Now you be careful on your way out, okay? Some of the boys spotted a loner down at the east end of old town today. There was some shootin’.”

The farmer gasped. “Was anyone hurt? Are you sure it was a loner?”

“Yeah, pretty sure. He ran like a rabbit, according to Bob.”

Gordon’s heart beat faster. The insults had reached a point almost beyond bearing.

“The fellow did the Mayor a real favor, though,” the guard went on. “Found a hidey hole full of drugs before Bob’s guys drove him off. Mayor’s going to pass some of them around to some of the owners at a party tonight, to find out what they’ll do. I sure wish I moved in those circles.”

“Me too!” the younger guard agreed. Hey, Sonny, you think the Mayor might pay you some of your bonus in drugs if you make quota this year? You could have a real party!”

Sonny smiled sheepishly and shrugged. Then, for some reason, his head drooped. The older guard looked at him quizzically.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

Sonny shook his head. “We don’t wish for very much anymore, do we, Jeff?”

Jeff frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean as long as we’re wishing to be cronies of the Mayor, why don’t we wish we had a Mayor without cronies at all!”

“Hell, if pigs had wings! Jeff, remember when we used to talk about the old days? Remember when we dreamed that things could be decent again? Remember when we wished—”

The farmer’s voice choked.

Jeff put his hand on the farmer’s arm. Sonny nodded acknowledgement, then said, “Yaah!” and snapped the reins. The wagon rolled down the road.

Jeff looked after the wagon for a long moment and chewed on a grass stem. Then he turned to his younger companion.

“Jimmy, did I ever tell you about Portland? Sonny and I used to go there, before the war. We used to . . .”

They passed through the gate, out of Gordon’s hearing.

Under other circumstances Gordon might have pondered for hours the information that one small conversation had offered, about the psychology and social structure of Oakridge and its environs. But right now he was too angry. His outrage over the “rabbit” remark met his indignation over the proposed use of the drugs he had found and made him think purple thoughts. He remembered the doctor in Wyoming and thought of the benefit he might make of the drugs. Why, most of the substances wouldn’t even make these ignorant savages high!

He imagined himself scaling the walls, finding the storage facilities, and reclaiming his discoveries, along with some added items to make up for the insults, his wound, and his broken bow.

The image wasn’t satisfying enough. Gordon embellished. He envisioned dropping in on the Mayor’s party and wasting all of the power-hungry cronies who were making a midget empire out of this corner of the dark age. He imagined acquiring power, power to do good . . . power to force these yokels to use the education of their younger days, before the educated generation disappeared forever from the world.

Gordon considered his options. Leaving was out of the question. He recognized that his pride would not allow him to go. He would do battle, and that was that. Unfortunately, he was less sure about how he would do battle. Gordon stood up and scratched his head, dislodging his cap. He caught it before it fell. He was about to put it back on when he stopped and looked at it. Slowly, he smiled. A plan began to form. It would be audacious, but it had an element of consistency that appealed to Gordon. He supposed he was the last man alive who had the temperament to choose a course of deadly danger for aesthetic reasons. If his scheme failed, it would still be spectacular.

The plan would require a brief foray into the ruins of old Oakridge—to one of the buildings certain to be among the least looted. He would have to be careful not to be spotted during the remaining daylight.

Two hours later, Gordon stepped along the road in the dusk. He had retraced his steps from town until he came to the road Sonny had used, south of the village wall. Now he approached the gate boldly.

The guard was lax. Gordon came to within thirty feet unchallenged. He saw a sentry near the far end of the palisade, but the idiot was looking the other way.

Gordon placed Abby’s whistle between his lips and blew, hard, three times. The shrill cry echoed among the buildings and trees all around.

Hurried footsteps pounded along the parapet. Three men carrying shotguns appeared above the gate to look down upon him in the gathering twilight.

“Who are you, and what do you want?” one voice called out. “We don’t welcome strangers here!”

“I must speak with someone in authority,” Gordon hailed. “This is official business, and I demand entry to the town of Oakridge!” There was a long silence. The guards whispered among themselves, and one man hurried off.

“Come again?” The chief guard shouted. “I don’t think I heard you properly. Are you feverish? Have you got the Sickness?”

“I am not ill. I am tired and hungry and angry at being shot at. But all of that can wait until I have done my duty here.”

“Duty? What the devil are you talking about?”

Footsteps echoed on the parapet. Several more men arrived; then a number of children and women began to string out to the left and right. Apparently, discipline had become lax in Oakridge.

Gordon repeated himself. Slowly and Firmly he reiterated his demand to be allowed entry.

A group of figures carrying lanterns appeared on the parapet to the right. Those on that side made way.

“Look, loner,” The chief guard said, “you’re just asking for a bullet. We have no ‘official business’ with anyone outside this valley since we broke relations with that commie place down at Blakeville. And I’m not bothering the Mayor for some crazy—” He turned in surprise as the party of dignitaries reached the gate. A new voice spoke.

“I was just nearby. Heard the commotion. What’s going on here?”

“Fellow claims he has official business here, but he’s not from the valley. They all wear those hat things.

“He must be sick, or else he’s one of those crazies that always used to come through. I thought they’d all be dead by now.” Gordon waited. In the growing darkness he saw the leading dignitary lean over the parapet to look at him.

“I am the Mayor of Oakridge,” the man announced. “We don’t believe in charity here, but if you’re that fellow who found the goodies this afternoon and graciously donated them to my boys, I’ll admit we owe you. I’ll have a nice hot meal lowered over the gate. You can sleep there by the road. Tomorrow, though, you gotta be gone. We don’t want disease here. And from what I hear, you must be delirious.”

Gordon smiled. It would be a pleasure to bluff this jerk. It wouldn’t feel like lying at all.

“Your generousity astounds me, Mr. Mayor, but I have come too far on official business to turn away now. First, though, can you tell me if Oakridge has a wireless facility?”

The silence brought on by his non sequitur was long and heavy. Gordon could imagine the Mayor’s puzzlement. Finally, perhaps out of curiosity, the town boss answered.

“We haven’t had a working radio in ten years. Why? What has that to do with anything—”

“That’s a shame. I’d hoped you had a transmitter. The airwaves have been a shambles since the war, of course—all the radioactivity—but I’d hoped I could report back to my superiors.”

He delivered the lines with aplomb. This time they caused not silence but a buzz of conversation that ran up and down the parapet. Most of the population of Oakridge must be up there by now. Gordon hoped the wall was well built.

“Get that lantern over here!” the Mayor commanded. “No, you idiot! The one with the reflector! Yes! Now shine it on that man! I want a look at him!”

The light speared out at Gordon, but he was expecting it. He didn’t cover his eyes, or squint. He turned to bring his “costume” to the best angle. The cap, with its polished crest, lay at a rakish angle on his head.

He shifted the leather bag. The muttering of the crowd grew.

“Mr. Mayor,” he called. “My patience is wearing thin. Please don’t make me invoke my authority. I already will have to have words with you about the behavior of your ‘boys’ this afternoon. You are on the verge of losing your privilege of communication with the rest of the nation.”

“Communication? Nation? What the are you talking about? There’s just the Blakeville commies and savages beyond them! Who the hell are you!”

Gordon touched his cap. “Gordon Krantz, of the United States Postal Service. I am the courier assigned to reestablish a mail route in lower Oregon and general federal inspector for the region.”

Gordon hadn’t thought of the last part until it was out. Was it inspiration? Or a dare? Well, he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a goat.

The crowd became noisy. Several times Gordon heard the words, outside, and inspector, and especially mailman.

The Mayor shouted for silence. He was obeyed grudgingly and slowly. He shouted again. Finally he got order.

“So you’re a mailman?” he called down to Gordon sarcastically. “What kind of idiots do you take us for, Krantz? A shiny suit makes you a government official? What government? What proof can you give us? Show us you’re not a wild lunatic with radiation fever!”

Gordon pulled out the papers he had prepared only an hour before, using the seal stamp he had found in the ruins of the Oakridge Post Office.

“I have my credentials here,” He offered. But he was interrupted.

“We’re not letting you come close enough to give any of these people your fever!” The Mayor shouted. There’s no government but what we have right here! You’re lucky this isn’t like the plague years, and we’re willing to let you go without a cremation, to cure you of your bug!”

Rats! If they wouldn’t even look at the “credentials” he had forged, the trip into oldtown this afternoon had been wasted. Gordon was down to his last ace. He smiled for the crowd.

He reached into his side pocket and pulled out a small bundle. He made a pretense of shuffling through the items he held and squinting at the labels, but he actually knew the names by heart.

“Is there a Donald Smith here?” he called.

The muttering crowd grew louder. Finally a voice called out, not without an awed tone.

“He died a year after the war, in the last battle of the warehouse!”

Gordon was pleased at the tremor in the speaker’s voice. Surprise was not the only emotion at work here. Still, he needed something a lot better.

“Oh, well,” he called. “I’ll have to confirm that, of course.” Before the Mayor could speak, he hurried on.

“Is there either a Mr. or Mrs. Franklin Thompson, in town? Or their son or daughter?”

Now a tide of hushed whispering carried almost a note of superstition. A woman replied.

“Dead! The boy lived until last year. Worked on the Jascowisc stead. His folks were in Portland when it blew.”

Damn! Gordon had only one name left. It was all very well to strike their hearts with his knowledge, but what he really needed was somebody alive!

“Right!” he called. “We’ll confirm that. Finally, is there a Grace Horton here?”

“No, there ain’t no Grace Horton here!” the Mayor shouted sarcastically. “I know everyone in my territory. Never been no Grace Horton in the ten years since I arrived! You imposter! Can’t you all see what he did? He found an old telephone book in town and copied down some names! Buddy, I rule that you are disturbing the peace! You’ve got five seconds to be gone before I order my men to fire!”

Gordon had no choice. At least he could beat a retreat and nothing would be lost but his pride.

But his body would not turn. His feet would not move. His will to run away had evaporated. Straightening his shoulders, he called the Mayor’s bluff.

“Assault on a postal courier is one of the few federal crimes that the pro tern Congress has not suspended for the Recovery Period, Mr. Mayor. The United States has always protected its mailmen.”

He looked coldly into the glare. “Always,” he emphasized. And for a moment he felt a thrill He was a courier, at least in spirit. He was an anachronism that the dark age had somehow missed when it systematically went about rubbing idealism from the world. Gordon looked straight toward the dark silhouette of the Mayor and silently dared him to shoot.

For several seconds the silence gathered. Then the Mayor began to count.

“One!”

He counted slowly, apparently having made up his mind to go for sadistic effect.

“Two!”

The bluff was certainly lost. Gordon knew he should leave now, at once. Still, his body would not turn.

“Three!”

This is the way the last idealist dies, he thought. The sixteen years of survival were an accident about to be corrected. Hard-won pragmatism had finally given way to . . . to a gesture.

There was movement on the parapet. Someone at the far left was struggling forward.

“Four!”

The guards raised their shotguns. Gordon thought he saw a few of them move reluctantly. Not that it would do him any good.

The Mayor stretched out the last count, perhaps a bit unnerved by Gordon’s stubbornness. Then Gordon saw a shadowy figure raise a hand.

“Excuse me, Mr. Mayor!” a woman’s tremulous voice cut in. Her timidity made her words almost inaudible.

“What?” The Mayor’s shadow did not turn from Gordon.

“I . . . I’m Grace Horton,” the woman said softly.

“What?!” He repeated himself.

“It’s my maiden name. I was married the year after the second famine. That was before you and your men arrived . . .”

Gordon sighed. He held up the bundle in his hand and touched his cap with his other.

“Good evening, then, Mizz Horton. Lovely evening, no? Oh by the way, I have a letter here for you, from a Mr. Jim Horton, of Pine View. He gave me this letter twelve days ago . . .”

The people in the crowd all seemed to be talking at once. There were sudden movements and shouts. Gordon had to raise his voice to be heard.

“. . . Yes, Ma’am. He seemed to be quite well. I’m afraid that’s all I have on this trip. But I’ll carry your reply to your brother on my way back. One thing, though. Mr. Horton didn’t have enough postage, back in Pine View, so I’m going to have to ask you for ten dollars C.O.D.”

The crowd roared. The figure of the Mayor turned left and right, shouting, but nothing he said was heard.

Suddenly the gate swung open and people poured out into the night. They surrounded Gordon. He carefully maintained his composure and walked slowly toward the opening. He smiled and nodded to everyone, especially those who reached out to touch his elbow or the wide curve of his bulging leather bag.

The youngsters looked at him in superstitious awe. On many of the older faces, tears streamed.

Gordon was in the middle of a trembling reaction. He felt a little ashamed, but he struggled to maintain the dignified pose, and told himself, “The hell with it. It’s not my fault they want to believe in Santa Claus! I only want what belongs to me! Simpletons.”

But he smiled all around as the hands touched and love washed over him. It flowed about him like a-rushing stream and carried him, in a wave of desperate, unwonted hope, into the town of Oakridge.

TO LEAVE A MARK

Kim Stanley Robinson

Here is an intelligent and gripping SF novella about a mutiny in space. Its author is one of the fine new voices in the field, with stories in ORBITS 18, 19 and 21 and in UNIVERSE 11. His short story, “Venice Drowned” was a 1981 Nebula award nominee. Mr. Robinson lives in Davis, California, where he is working on a Ph. D. in English.

The first indication I had of the mutiny came as we approached the inner limit of the first asteroid belt. Of course I didn’t know what it meant at the time; it was no more than a locked door.

The first belt we call the dud belt, because the asteroids in it are basaltic achondrite, and no use to miners. But we would be among the carbonaceous chondrites soon enough, and one day I went down to the farm to get ready. I fed a bit more light to the algae, for in the following weeks when the boats went out to break up the rocks, there would be a significant oxygen depletion, and we would need more chlorella around to help balance the gas exchange. I activated a few more bulbs in the lamp and started fooling with the suspension medium. Biologic life-support systems are my work and play (I am one of the best at it), and since I was making room for more chlorella, I once again became interested in the excess biomass problem. Thinking to cut down on surplus algae by suspending it less densely, I walked between long rows of spinach and cabbage to the door of one on the storage rooms at the back of the farm, to get a few more tanks. I turned the handle of the door. It was locked.

“Emma!” called a voice. I looked up. It was Al Nordhoff, one of my assistants.

“Do you know why this door is locked?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I was wondering myself yesterday. I guess there’s classified cargo in there. I was told to leave it alone.”

“It’s our storage room,” I said, irritated.

Al shrugged. “Ask Captain Swann about it.”

“I will.”

Now Eric Swann and I were old friends, and I was upset that something was going on in my area that he had failed to tell me about. So when I found him on the bridge, I came to the point.

“Eric, how come I’m locked out of one of my own storage rooms? What have you got in there?”

Immediately he blushed as red as his hair, and hung his head. The two rocketry and guidance officers on the bridge looked down at their consoles.

“I can’t tell you what’s in there, Emma; it’s classified. I can’t tell anyone until later.”

I stared at him. I know I can intimidate people if I look at them hard enough. His blush got deeper, his freckles disappeared in the general redness, his blue eyes gave me a watery stare. But he wasn’t going to tell me. I curled my lip at him and left the bridge.

That was the first sign: a locked door, a secret reason for it. I thought to myself, we’re taking something for the Committee out to Ceres, perhaps. It was typical of the Mars Corporations Committee to keep secrets. But I didn’t jump to any conclusions; merely stayed alert.

The second sign was one I probably would have missed, had I not been alerted by the first. I was walking down the corridor to the dining commons, past the tapestry lounges between the commons and the bedrooms, when I heard voices from a lounge and stopped. Just the voices sounded funny, all whispery and rapid. I recognized John Dancer’s voice:

“We can’t do anything of the sort until after the rendezvous, and you know it.”

“No one will notice,” said a woman, perhaps Ilene Breton.

“You hope no one would notice,” Dancer replied. “But you can’t be sure that Duggins or Nordhoff wouldn’t stumble across it. We have to wait on everything until after the rendezvous, you know that.”

Then I heard steps across the velcro carpet behind me, and with a start I began to walk again, past the door of the lounge. I looked in; John and Ilene, sure enough, among several others. They all looked up as I appeared in the doorway, and their conversation abruptly died. I stared at them and they stared back, at a loss for speech. I walked on to the dining commons.

A rendezvous in the belt. A group of people in on this event, not the superior officers on the ship, and keeping it a secret from the others. A locked storage hold. . . . Things were not falling together for me.

After that I began to see things everywhere. People stopped talking when I walked by. There were meetings late at night, in bedrooms. I walked by the radio room once, and they were sending out a long message through the coding machine. Quite a few of the storage room doors were locked, back behind the farm; and some of the ore holds were locked as well.

After a few days of this I shook my head and wondered if I were making it all up. There were explanations for everything I had noticed. Shipboard life tends to become cliquish on the best of runs; even though there were only forty of us, divisions would spring up over the year of an expedition. And these were troubled times, back on Mars. The consolidation of the various sectors under the central coordination of the Committee was causing a lot of dissatisfaction. Sectionalism was rife; subversive groups were everywhere, supposedly. These facts were enough to explain all the little factions I now noticed on the Rust Eagle. And paranoia is one of the most common shipboard disorders . . . seeing patterns is easy in such a heavily patterned environment.

So I began to discount it all. Perhaps we were carrying something to Ceres for the Committee, but that was nothing.

Still, there was something about the atmosphere of the ship in those days. More people than usual were jumpy and strained. There were mysterious glances exchanged . . . an atmosphere of mystery. But here hindsight may be influencing me. The facts are what I want here; this record will help me to remember these events many years, perhaps centuries, from now, so I must set down the facts, the sharpest spur to the memory.

In any case, the third sign was unmistakable. By this time the sun was nearly between us and Mars, and I went to the radio room to get a last letter off to my fool of a father, in jail temporarily for his loud mouth. Afterwards, I went to the jump tube and was about to fall down to the living quarters when I heard voices floating down the tube from the bridge. Had that been my name? I pulled myself up the rail to the steps that led to the bridge, and stayed there, eavesdropping again. A habit of mine. Once more, John Dancer was speaking.

“Emma Weil is pro-Committee all the way,” he said as if arguing the point.

“Even so,” said another man, and a couple of voices cut over so that I didn’t hear what he said.

“No,” Dancer said, interrupting the other voice quickly. “Weil is probably the most important person aboard this ship. We can’t talk to her about any of this until Swann says so, and that won’t be until after the rendezvous. So you can forget it.”

That did it. When it was clear the conversation was over, I hopped back to the jump tube and fell down it, aiding the faint acceleration-gravity with some pulls on the rail. I ticked off in my mind the places Swann would most likely be at that hour, intent on finding him and having a long talk. It is not healthy to believe yourself the focus of a ship-wide conspiracy.

I had known Eric Swann for a long, long time.

Before the turn of the century, every sector ran its own mining expeditions. Royal Dutch looked for carbonaceous chondrite; Mobil was after the basaltic chondrites in the dud belt; Texas mined the silicate types. Chevron had the project of pulling one of the Amors into a Martian orbit, to make another moon. (This became the moon Amor, which was turned into a detention center; my father lived there.) So each sector had its own asteroid crew, and I got to know the Royal Dutch miners pretty well. Swann was one of the rocketry and guidance officers, and a good friend of my boyfriend Charlie, who was also in R and G. Over the course of many runs in the belt I talked with Swann often, and even after Charlie and I broke up we remained close.

But when the Committee took over the mining operations, all the teams, even the Soviets, were thrown into a common pool—this was in 2213 or 14, I think—and as a consequence I saw all of my friends from Royal Dutch a lot less often. My infrequent assignments with Swann had been cause for celebration, and this present assignment, with him as captain, was going to be, I had thought, a real pleasure.

Now, walking around the ship that I was the most important person on, I was not so sure. But I thought, Swann will tell me what’s going on. And if he doesn’t know about these matters, then he’d better be told that something funny is going on.

I found him in one of the little window rooms, seated before the thick plasteel separating him from the vacuum. His long legs were crossed in the yoga position, and he hummed softly: meditating, his mind a floating mirror of the changing square of stars.

“Hey, Eric,” I said, none too softly.

“Emma,” he said dreamily, and stretched his arms like a cat. “Sit down.” He showed me a chunk of rock he had in his lap. “Look at this Chantonnay.” That’s a chondrite that has been shocked into harder rock. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

I sat. “Yes,” I said. “So what’s happening on this trip?”

He blushed. Swann was faster at that than anyone else I ever saw. “Not much. Beyond that I can’t say.”

“I know that’s the official position. But you can tell me here.”

He was shaking his head. “I’m going to tell you, but it has to wait a while longer.” He looked at me directly. “Don’t get angry, Emma.”

“But other people know what’s going on! A lot of them. And they’re talking about meI told him about the things I had noticed and overheard. “Now why should I be the most important person on this ship? That’s absurd! And why should they know about whatever it is we’re doing, and not me?”

Swann looked worried, annoyed. “They don’t all know . . . You see, your help will be important, essential perhaps—” He stopped, as if he had already said too much. His freckled face twisted as his mouth moved about. Finally he shook his head violently. “You’ll just have to wait a few more days, Emma. Trust me, all right? Just trust me and wait.”

That was hardly satisfactory, but what could I do? He knew something, but he wasn’t going to tell it to me. Tight-lipped, I nodded my good-bye and left.

The mutiny occurred, ironically enough, on my birthday, my eightieth birthday, a few days after my talk with Swann. August 5, 2240.

I woke up thinking, now you are an octogenarian. I got out of bed (deceleration-gee entirely gone, weightless now as we coasted), sponged my face, looked in the mirror. It is a strange experience to look inside your own retinas; down there inside is the one thinking, in that other face . . . it seems as if, if you could get the light right, you could see yourself.

I grasped the handholds of my exerciser and worked out for a while, thinking about birthdays. All the birthdays in this new age. I recalled my tenth birthday: my mother took me to the medical station, where I had to drink foul-tasting stuff and submit to tests and a shot—just a quick blast of air on the skin, but it scared me. “You’ll appreciate this later,” my mom said, with a funny expression. “You won’t get sick and weak when you’re old. Your immune system will stay strong. You’ll live for ever so long, Emma, don’t cry.”

Yes, yes. Apparently she was right, I thought, looking in the mirror again, where the image seemed to pulse with color under the artificial lights. Very long lives, young at eighty: the triumph of gerontology. As always I wondered what I would do with all the extra years—the extra lives. Would I live to stand free on Martian soil and breathe Martian air?

Thinking these thoughts I left my room, intent on breakfast. The lounges down the hall from the bedrooms were empty, an unusual thing. I walked into the last lounge before the corridor turned, to look out the small window in it, with its view over the bridge.

And there they were. I saw them: two silver rectangles, like asteroids crushed into ingots of the metal they contained. Spaceships!

They were asteroid miners of the PR class, sister ships of our own. I stared at them motionlessly, my heart thudding like a drum, thinking rendezvous. The ships grew to the size of decks of cards, very slowly. They were the shape of a card-deck as well, with the mining cranes and drills folded together at their fronts, bridge ceilings just barely bulging from their sides (tiny crescents of light), rocket exhausts large at their rear, like beads oh their sides and front. Brilliant points of light shone from the windows, like the fluorescent spots on the deep-sea fish of Earth. They looked small beside an irregular blue-grey asteroid, against the dead black of space.

I left the lounge slowly. Turned and walked down the corridor—

In the dining common it was bedlam.

I stopped and stared. Of the entire crew of forty-three, at least twenty-five must have been in the commons, shouting and laughing, six or seven singing the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s Ninth, others setting up the drinks table (Ilene staggering under the weight of the big coffee pot), John and Steven and Lanya in a mass hugging and laughing and sobbing, tears in their eyes; and on the video screen, a straight-on camera shot of the two ships, silver dots against a blue-grey asteroid, so that it looked like a die thrown through the vacuum.

They all had known. Every single one of them in the room. I found myself blinking rapidly, embarrassed and angry. Why hadn’t I been told? I wiped my eyes and got out of the doorway before I was noticed by someone inside.

Andrew Duggins flew by, pulling himself along the hall rails. His big face was scowling. “Emma!” he said. “Come on,” and pulled away. He stopped as I only looked at him. “This is mutiny!” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the commons. “They’re taking over the ship, and those others out there too. We’ve got to try and get a message off to Ceres—to defend ourselves!” With a hard yank he pulled himself away, in the direction of the radio room.

Mutiny. All of the mysterious events I had noticed fell together, into a pattern. A plan to take over the ship. Had Swann been too afraid of the possibility to discuss it?

But there was no time for a detailed analysis. I leaped off the floor, and with a strong pull on the rail was after Duggins.

Outside the radio room there was a full-fledged fight going on. I saw Al Nordhoff striking one of the ship police in the face, Amy Van Danke twisting furiously in the hold of two men, trying to bite one in the throat. Others struggled in the doorway. Shouts and Amy’s shrieks filled the air. The fight had that awkward, dangerous quality that all brawls in weightlessness exhibit. A blow that connected (one of Al’s vicious kicks to the head of a policeman, for instance) sent both parties spinning across the room. . . .

“Mutiny!” Duggins bellowed, and diving forward crashed into the group in the doorway. His momentum bowled several people into the radio room, and an opening was cleared. I shoved off from the wall and grazed my head on the doorjamb going in.

After that things were blurry, but I was angry—angry that I had been deceived, that Swann and the general order of things were being challenged, that friends of mine were being hit—and I swung blindly. I caught one of the policemen on the nose with my fist; his head smacked the wall with a loud thump. The room was crowded, arms and legs were swinging. The radio console itself was crawling with bodies. Duggins was bellowing still and hauling figures away from the mass on the radio controls. Someone got me in a choke hold from behind. I put heel to groin and discovered it was a woman—put elbow in diaphragm and twisted under her arm, nearly strangled. Duggins had cleared the radio and was desperately manipulating the dials. I put a haymaker on the ear of a man trying to pull him away. Screams and spherical droplets of blood filled the air—

Reinforcements arrived. Eric Swann slipped through the doorway, his red hair flying wild, a tranquilizer gun in his hand. Others followed him. Darts whizzed through the air, sounding like arrows. “Mutiny!” I shrieked. “Eric! Mutiny! Mutiny!”

He saw me, pointed his gun at me and shot. I looked at the dart hanging from my forearm.

“. . . The next thing I knew, I was being carried down the jump tube. Getting off it on my floor. I saw Swann’s face swimming above me. “Mutiny,” I said.

“That’s true,” Eric replied. “We’re going to have to put you under arrest for a few hours.” His freckle-face was stretched into a fool’s grin.

“Asshole,” I muttered. I wanted to run. I could outrun all of them. “I thought you were m’friend.”

“I am your friend, Emma. It was just too dangerous to explain. Davydov will tell you all about it when you see him.”

Davydov. Davydov? “But he was lost,” I muttered, very confused. “He’s dead.”

Then I was in my bed. “Get some sleep,” Swann said. “I’ll be back in a few hours.” I gave him a look planned to turn him to stone, but he just grinned and I fell asleep in the middle of it, thinking, mutiny. . . .

When I woke up again, Swann was standing by my bed, tilted over in the no-gee so that his head hung over me. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Bad.” I waved him away and he pushed off into the air above the bed. I rubbed my eyes. “What happened, Swann.”

“A mutiny, you’ve been calling it.” He smiled.

“And it’s true?”

He nodded.

“But why? Who are you?”

“Did you ever hear of the Mars Starship Association?”

I thought. “A long time ago? One of those secret anti-Committee groups.”

We weren’t anti-Committee,” he said. “We were just a club. An advocacy group. We wanted the Committee to support research for an interstellar expedition.”

“So?”

“So the Committee didn’t want to do it. They took us to be part of the anti-Committee movement, so they outlawed us. Jailed the leaders, transferred the members to different sectors. They made us anti-Committee.”

“Didn’t all that happen a long time ago?” I asked, still disoriented. “What has that got to do with this?”

“We re-grouped,” he said. “Secretly. We’ve existed underground for all these years. This is our coming-out, you might say.”

“But why? What good does it do you to take over a few asteroid miners? You aren’t planning to use them as starships, are you?” I laughed shortly.

He stared at me without answering, and suddenly I knew that I had guessed it.

I sat up carefully, feeling cold and a touch dizzy. “You must be joking.”

“Not at all. We’re going to join the Lermontov and the Hidalgo, and complete their life-support systems’ closure.”

“Impossible,” I breathed, still amazed at the very idea.

“Not impossible,” he said patiently. “That’s what the MSA has been working on these last sixty years—”

“One of those ships is Hidalgo?” I interrupted.

“That’s right.”

“So Davydov is alive. . . .”

“He certainly is. You knew him, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Davydov had been one of the R and G people on Hidalgo, when it disappeared in the Achilles group three years before. I had thought him dead. . . .

“There’s no way I’ll go,” I said, after a pause. “You can’t kidnap me and drag me along on some insane interstellar attempt—”

“No, no. We’re sending Rust Eagle back with all the non-MSA people from the three ships.”

I let out a long sigh of relief. Yet sudden anguish filled me at the thought of the mess I was suddenly in, of the fanatics who now had control of my life, and I cried out, “Eric, you knew this was going to happen out here—why didn’t you arrange to keep me off this flight?”

He looked away from me, pushed himself down to the floor. Red-faced, he said, “I did the opposite, Emma.”

“You what?’

“There are MSA people in the expedition scheduling office, and—” still staring at the floor—“I told them to arrange for you to be aboard Rust Eagle this time.”

“But, Swann!” I said, struggling for words: “Why? Why did you do that to me?”

“Well—because, Emma, because you’re one of the best life-support systems designers there is on Mars, or anywhere. Everyone knows that, you know that. And even though our systerns designers have got a lot of improvements for the starship, it still has to be installed in those two ships, and made to work. And we have to do it before the Committee police find us . . . your help could make the difference, Emma.”

“Oh, Swann.”

“It could Look, I knew it was imposing on you, but I thought, if we got you out here ignorant of any of our plans, then you couldn’t be held responsible. When you return to Mars you can tell them you didn’t know anything about the MSA, that we made you help us. That was why I didn’t tell you anything on the way out here, don’t you see? And I know you aren’t that strong a supporter of the Committee, are you? They’re nothing but tyrants. So that if your old friends asked you for help that only you could give, and you couldn’t be held culpable, you might help? Even if it was illegal?” He looked at me, his blue eyes grave.

“You’re asking for the impossible,” I told him. “Your MSA has lost touch with reality. You’re talking about travel across light-years, for God’s sake, and you’ve got five-year systems to do it with!”

“They can be modified,” Swann insisted. “Davydov will explain the whole project when you see him. He wants to talk with you as soon as you’d like to.”

“Davydov,” I said darkly. “He’s the one behind this madness. . . .”

“We’re all behind it, Emma. And it isn’t mad.”

I waved an arm and held my head in my hands, as it was pulsing with all the bad news. “Just leave me alone for a while.”

“Sure,” he said. “I know it’s a lot to take in. Just tell me when you want to see Davydov. He’s over on Hidalgo.

“I’ll tell you,” I said, and looked at the wall until he left the room.

I had better tell about Oleg Davydov here, for we were lovers once, and for me the memory of him was marked with pain, and anger, and a sense of loss—loss that no matter how long I lived could not be recouped or forgotten.

I was just out of the University of Mars, working at the Hellas Basin. The old hypothesis explaining why no craters could be seen in this basin from Earth turned out to be correct; the basin is filled with water, frozen on top and covered with a layer of dust. It is a lake, a sea. Of course the area had been settled. But it was a delicate situation, and the use of the water caused ecologic problems. I was set to work with others to solve these problems, and I quickly proved that I was the best among the systems people there. I had a grasp of the whole Hellas set-up that seemed perfectly natural to me, but was (I could see) impressive to others. And I was a good middle-distance runner—so that all in all, I was a confident youth, perhaps even a bit arrogant.

During my second year there, I met Oleg Davydov. He was staying in Burroughs, the closest city to Hellas, doing some work for the Soviet mining cartel. We met in a restaurant, introduced by a mutual acquaintance.

He was tall and bulky, a handsome man. One of the Soviet blacks, they call them; I guess some of their ancestors came from one of the USSR’s satellite countries in Africa. The color had been pretty well watered down over the generations; Davydov had coffee-and-cream-colored skin, for instance. His hair was black and wooly; he had thick lips under a thin, aquiline nose; a heavy beard, shaved so that his lower face was rough; and his eyes were ice blue, they seemed to jump out of his face, so he was a pretty good racial mix. But on Mars, where 99 percent of the population is fish-belly white, as they say, any touch of skin color is very highly valued. It made one look so . . . healthy, and vital. This Davydov was really extremely good-looking, a color-delight to the eye. I watched him, then, as we sat on adjacent stools in that Burroughs restaurant, talking, drinking, flirting a little . . . watched so closely that I can recall the potted palm and white wall that were behind him, although I don’t remember a word we said. It was one of those charmed nights, when both parties are aware of the mutual attraction.

We spent that night together, and the next several nights as well. We visited the first colony in the area, The Can, and marveled at the exhibits in the museum there. We scrambled around the base of the Fluted Cliffs, and spent a night out in a survival tent. I beat him easily in a footrace, and then won a 1500-meter race for him at a Burroughs track. Every hour available to us we spent together, and I fell in love. Oleg was young, witty, arrogant about his many abilities; he was exotically bilingual (a Russian!), affectionate, sensual. We spent a lot of time in bed. I remember, in the dark I could see little more than his teeth when he grinned, and his eyes, which seemed light grey. I loved making love with him. . . . I remember late dinners together, in Burroughs or out at the station. And innumerable train rides, together or alone, across the sere rust desert between Burroughs and Hellas—sitting by the window looking out at the curved red horizon, feeling happy and excited. . . . Well, those are the kinds of times that you only live through once. I remember them well.

The arguments. The arguments began quite soon after those first weeks. We were an arrogant pair and didn’t know any better. For a long time I didn’t realize that our disagreements were particularly serious, for I couldn’t imagine anyone arguing with me for very long. (Yes, I was that self-important.) But Oleg Davydov did. I can’t even remember what we argued about—that period of time, unlike the beginning, is a convenient blur in my memory. One time I do remember (of course the rest could be called up as well): I had come into Burroughs on the late train, and we were out eating in a Greek restaurant behind the train station. I was tired, and nervous about our relationship, and sick of Hellas. Hoping to compliment him, I made some comment about how much more fun it would be to be an asteroid miner like he was.

“We aren’t doing anything out there,” he said in response. “Just making money for the corporations—making a few people on Earth rich, while everything else down there falls apart.”

“Well, at least you’re out there exploring,” I said.

He looked annoyed, an expression I was becoming familiar with. “But we aren’t, that’s what I’m saying. With our capabilities we could be exploring the whole solar system. We could have stations on the Jovian moons, around Saturn, all the way to Pluto. We need a solar watch station on Pluto.”

“I wasn’t aware of that fact,” I said sarcastically.

His pale-blue eyes pierced me. “Of course you weren’t. You think it’s perfectly all right to continue making money from those stupid asteroids, and nothing more, here at the end of the twenty-second century.”

“Well?” I said, annoyed myself by this time. “We’re all going to live for a thousand years. So what’s your rush?

There’s time for all of your great projects. Right now we need those asteroids.”

“The corporations need them. And the Committee.”

“The Committee’s just organizing all of our efforts for our own good,” I said.

“They just make the trains run on time, eh?” he said, taking a deep swallow from his drink.

“Yes,” I said, not understanding what he meant. “Yes, they do.”

He shook his head with disgust. “You’re an all-American girl, all right. Everything is oh kay. Leave the politics to others.”

“And you are a true Soviet,” I retorted, struggling away from him in our dining booth. “Blaming your problems on the government. . . .”

And we went on from there, senselessly and for no reason but pride and hurt feelings. I remember him making a grim prediction: “They will make a happy American Kremlin up here, and you won’t care, as long as your job is secure.” But most of what we said was less logical than that.

And a long, miserable week later, a blur of bitter fights, one of those times when you have ruined a relationship though you don’t know how, and wish desparately that time could be reversed and the unknown mistake undone, he left. The Soviet mining people wanted him in space again, and he just left, without saying good-bye, though I called his hotel again and again in those last few days. And then I knew—I learned it, in the course of long black walks over the frozen basin, standing alone on that flat plain—that I could be spumed. It was a hard lesson.

In a few years, I was out among the asteroids myself, working for Royal Dutch. I heard stories about Davydov getting in serious trouble with the Soviet mining command, but I didn’t pay much attention; it was a matter of pride to ignore anything I heard about him. So I never got the full story of what had happened to him.

Then, many years later—just three years before this mutiny, in fact—the Hidalgo disappeared out in the Trojans, breaking radio contact with the famous last words, “Now wait just a minute.” No wreckage was ever found. It became a well-known incident, sort of the Mary Celeste of Mars. Looking over the list of crew members I saw his name: Oleg Davydov; the pain flooded through me again, worse than ever before. It was one of the worst moments of my life. We had parted in anger, he had left me without even saying good-bye—and now, no matter how many years the gerontologists gave me, I would never be able to change those facts, for he was dead. It was very sad.

. . . Thus, when Eric Swann came to take me across to the Hidalgo, to see Davydov again, I did not know exactly how I felt. My heart beat rapidly, I had to strain to make casual, terse conversation with Eric. What would I say to him, or him to me? I didn’t have the slightest idea.

Well, he looked very much like he had sixty years before. Perhaps a little heavier; bear-like with his dark hair, his broad shoulders and chest and rump. His ice-blue eyes surveyed me without any visible sign of recognition.

We were on the empty bridge of the Hidalgo. At a nod from Davydov, Eric had slipped away down the jump tube. In the breathy vented silence I walked around the bridge slowly, my velcro slippers making little rip rip rip noises. My pulse was fast. I discovered that I was still angry at him. And I felt that he had personally deceived me with the news of his death. Or perhaps it was the mutiny. . . .

“You look much the same,” he said. The sound of his voice triggered a hundred memories. I looked at him without replying. Finally he said, with a slight, stiff smile, “Has Eric apologized for our kidnapping of you?”

I shook my head.

“I am sorry we shocked you. I hear you fought hard against the takeover. Eric probably explained that we kept you ignorant for your own protection.”

So smooth, he was. It just made me mad. He squinted at me, trying to gauge my mood. Hard without a voice.

“The truth of the matter is,” he went on, “the success of all the MSA’s years of effort depend on the creation of a fully closed life-support system in the starship. I believe our scientists will be able to do it, but Swann has always said your ability with BLS systems is extraordinary, and our scientists agree that you are the best. And they tell me we need your help.”

Did I think I would still be vain? I thought. “You’re not—” I cleared my throat. “You’re not going to get it.”

He stared at me, calm and bemused. “You still support the Committee? Even though they have detained your father on Amor, isn’t that true?”

“Yes,” I said. “But the Committee doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“That is the equivalent of saying you still support them.—But enough of that. We need your help. Won’t you help us?”

After I didn’t reply, he began to stride back and forth, rip rip rip. “You know,” he said with a nervous glance, “what happened between us occurred a long time ago. We were both children then—”

“We were not children,” I broke in. “We were free adults, on our own. We were just as responsible for our actions then as we are now.”

“All right, you’re right,” he said, pushing a hand through his hair. “We were not children, admittedly.” This was turning out to be more difficult than he had expected. “But it was a long time ago.”

“This has nothing to do with that time, anyway.”

He looked confused. “Then why won’t you help?”

“Because what you are attempting is impossible,” I cried. “This is all just a monstrous fantasy of yours. You’re ignoring the hard cold realities of deep space and leading people to a miserable death out there, all because of some boyish notion of adventure that you’ve been nursing all these years—for so long that you can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality anymore!” I stopped, surprised by my vehemence; Davydov was wide-eyed.

“It’s not my idea alone,” he said weakly. “Every member of the MSA believes it is possible.”

“There have been mass delusions larger than this,” I said, “following a fanatic leader.”

His eyes glittered angrily. (This effect is the result, I believe, of tensing the forehead muscles, this shifting the layer of water over the eyes. . . .) “I am no fanatic. We started as a group without a leader. I was made leader by the Committee when they tried to destroy us—they wanted to say it was a single person’s doing. Like you do. When we reorganized, I was the one everyone knew about. But there are other leaders—”

“You started the reorganization, right?” Somehow I knew this was true. “Started up your little secret society, invented the handshake—”

“The fact that we had to work in secret,” he said loudly, and then lowered his voice, “is incidental. A political reality, a fact of our time and place. A lot of work had to be done that the Committee didn’t want done. They wouldn’t support us, but that doesn’t make the project bad! We’re free of political motives, we are an act of cooperation between Soviets and Americans—we try to take humanity to permanent homes outside the solar system, while we still can.”

He stopped for breath, staring at me with his swarthy jaws bunched. “Now you,” pointedly at me, “completely ignorant of all this, call me a fanatic. Leading fools in a fantasy world.” He looked away, out the wide bridge window. “I could have told Swann you would react like this.”

My face burned. There we were, exactly as we had left off sixty years before. Furiously I said, “You kidnap me, put my future in great danger, and then call me a fool because I don’t fall in with your fantastic schemes. Well you aren’t going to get my help, Oleg Davydov, you and your secret club.” I moved to the jump tube. “Just tell me when we can take Rust Eagle back to Mars. Until then I’ll be in my room.”

Crossing back over to our ship, Eric didn’t dare to say a word to me. Once on Rust Eagle I left him and went to my room, hit the desk and nearly cracked my skull on the ceiling. I hate no-gee. I went to the centrifuge and ran, ignoring my complaining knee. Then I went back to my little room to brood and imagine crushing rejoinders to Davydov. Why do all the best lines come to you when the argument is over? What I should have said was . . . I know, I know. Only serious brooding will hatch those real crushers.

But why had I fought with him at all, when he was asking for my help?

Later that day Andrew Duggins told me that the people who were not members of the MSA were getting together in the lounge down the hall; I went to see who they were. There were fourteen of us. Among them were Ethel Jurgenson, Ginger Sims, Al Nordhoff, Sandra Starr, Yuri Kopanev, and Olga Dzindzhik. The others had faces I knew but couldn’t put names to. We sat about exchanging our experiences during the rendezvous; everyone had been arrested and most only released a few hours before, After these stories were exchanged, we began to discuss possible courses of action, and the bickering began.

I told them what I knew, keeping to myself only the fact that I had been asked for help.

More discussion and arguing.

“We have to find out if there were any prisoners on Lermontov

“Or Hidalgo.” I thought about that—prisoners for three years.

“We have to act,” Duggins said. “We could organize another attack on the radio room. Take it over and put out a call to Mars or Ceres.”

“We could slip out of the ship,” Al put in. “Patch a little radio onto the high-gain antenna. . . .”

“They’re probably listening to us right now.” Yuri said, and Olga nodded. In the Soviet sector they’re used to such practices, or maybe they’re just more aware of them.

Anyway, the conversation was killed for a while. We stared at each other. It was a strange situation; prisoners of our shipmates, on what had been our ship. The talk resumed, quieter than before, until disagreements about what to do brought the volume back up. “I don’t care if they steal the Committee blind,” Yuri said, “and I certainly wouldn’t risk myself to stop them.”

“What do you think we should do, Weil?” asked Andrew, seeming annoyed at my lack of involvement. He refused to look at Yuri.

“I think we should sit tight, take Rust Eagle back to Mars when they let us, and then tell the authorities what we know. To try to stop them here just puts us in danger.”

Andrew didn’t like that either. “We should resist! Sitting here passively would be helping them, and the Committee will know it.” He squinted at me suspiciously. “You’re close friends with Swann, aren’t you? Didn’t he ever tell you what was going on?”

“No,” I said, feeling myself blush. They all watched me.

“You’re telling us that he just let you walk into this situation without any kind of warning or anything?” Duggins said.

“That’s right,” I snapped. “You saw me in the radio room, Duggins. I was as surprised as anyone by the mutiny.”

But Duggins was unconvinced, and the rest of them looked skeptical as well. They all knew Swann was a considerate person, and it didn’t make sense to them that he would have deceived a good friend so. . . . There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Duggins stood up. “I’ll talk to some of you another time,” he said, and left the lounge. Suddenly angry, I left too. Looking back at the confused, suspicious people in the lounge, grouped in a disconsolate circle with their colored drink bulbs floating around them, I thought, they looked scared.

When I got to my room, two people were moving into it. A Nadezhda Malkiv, and a Marie-Anne Kotovskaya—both BLSS technicians, both members of the Soviet branch of the MSA. The other two ships were being emptied so that they could be worked on freely, they told me. Nadezhda was 124 years old, a specialist in the gas exchange; Marie-Anne was 108, a biologist whose study was the algae and bacteria in the waste-recycling system. They were both from Lermontov, which, they said, had been in the asteroid belt nearly four months before the MSA took over, broke radio contact with Mars, and circled around to the rendezvous.

Shocked into a stiff silence by this new development, I went back out in the halls and then to the small lounge around the comer from my room. There I met the leader of the non-MSA people from Lermontov, a door man named Ivan Valenski. He had been the Soviet’s policeman aboard, until the mutiny. I did not like him; he was a sort of dully furious Soviet bureaucrat, a policeman used to giving orders and being obeyed. He seemed as little impressed by me as I by him. Duggins, I thought, would be more to his taste. They were men scared by so many years of authority that they actively worked for its continuance—to justify their lives up to this point, perhaps. But how was I different from them?

I returned to my room. My new roomates left me the top bunk; the bottom, which I had used as a convenient counter, was occupied by Nadezhda. Marie-Anne planned to sleep in the comer where the walls met the ceiling, their belongings were strapped all over the floor. I talked with them for a while, in English, with some fumbling attempts on my part at Russian. They were nice women, and after the earlier meetings of the day I appreciated the company of calm, understanding people.

That night Swann came by my room and asked me if I wanted to eat dinner with him. After a moment’s thought I agreed.

“I’m glad you aren’t still angry with me,” he babbled, ingenuous as ever, although I had to remind myself that he had been high in the councils of the MSA for as long as I’d known him.

“Shut up about that and let’s go eat,” I said. Somewhat subdued, he led the way to the dining commons.

Once there, I looked around at the place, imagining it as the dining commons of the starship. People in neutral-toned one-piece suits walked up to the food counter; there they pushed the buttons for the meal they desired, most of them never looking up at the menu. The foods grown on ship—salads, vegetable drinks, fish or scallops or chicken or rabbit, goat cheese, milk, yoghurt—were supplemented by nonrenewable supplies: coffee, tea, bread, beef . . . they would run out of those things pretty fast. Then it would be the ship-grown stuff, in enclosed plates, with drinks in bulbs. I watched all the precise forking going on around me; it had a Japanese tea ceremony atmosphere.

“You’ll have to keep accelerating,” I said. “You can’t stay weightless for long, it would kill you.”

He smiled. “We’ve got forty-two cesium tanks.” I stared at him. “That’s right. This is the biggest theft in history, Emma. At least that’s one way to think of it.”

“It sure is.”

“So, we plan to keep a constant acceleration-deceleration pattern, and create half-Mars gravity most of the time.” We walked up to the food counter and punched out our orders. Our trays slid out of their slot.

We sat down against the wall away from the mirror wall; I didn’t like to eat next to the mirror image of myself. The other three walls of the commons were bright tones of yellow, red, orange, yellow-green; it was autumn on Rust Eagle.

“We’ll keep up the seasonal colors on board the starship.” Swann said as we ate. “Shorten the daylight hours in winter, make it colder, colors all silver and white and black . . . I like winter best. The solstice festival and all.”

“But it’ll just be a game.”

He chewed thoughtfully. “I guess.”

“Where will you go?”

“Not sure. No, seriously! There’s a planetary system around Barnard’s Star. That’s nine light-years. We’ll probably check that out, and at least resupply with water and deuterium, if nothing else.”

We ate in silence for a time. At the next table a trio sat excavating their trays, arguing about the hydrogen-fixing capabilities of a certain Hydrogenomonas eutropha. Engineering the rebirth of breath. At the next table a young woman reached up to capture an escaping particle of chicken. The diminution of it all!

“How long?” I asked, eating steadily.

Swann’s freckle-face took on a calculative look as he chewed. “We could go a hundred, maybe two hundred years. . . .”

“For God’s sake, Eric.”

“It’s only a quarter of our predicted lifetimes. It’s not like generations will live and die on die ship. We’ll have a past on Mars, and a future on some world that could be more like Earth than Mars is! You act like we’re leaving such a natural way of life on Mars. Mars is just a big starship, Emma.”

“It’s a planet. You can go outside and stand on the ground. Run around.”

Swann shoved his tray away, sucked on his drink bulb. “Your five-hundred-year project is the terraforming of Mars,” he said. “Ours is the colonization of a planet in another system. What’s the big difference?”

“About ten or twenty light-years. . . .”

We finished our drinks in silence. Swann took our trays to the counter and brought back bulbs of coffee.

“Was—is Charlie one of you?”

“Charlie?” He looked at me strangely. “No. He works for the Committee police, didn’t you know that?”

I shook my head.

“That’s why you don’t see him on miners anymore.”

“Ah.”

He was looking beyond me. “I remember . . . about 2212 or 13 . . . Charlie dropped by one of our labs with one of his police friends. This was in Tsiolkovski. We had completely infiltrated the Soviet space research labs, and had requisitioned this particular one for some tests—reactor-mass conservation, I think it was. I was visiting to help with some supply problem; they couldn’t get all the cesium they wanted. And then there was Charlie and this woman, him saying hello how are you Eric, just dropped by to see how you’re doing . . . And I could not tell whether the woman was his girlfriend and he really was saying hello to me, or whether they were checking out the lab as part of their police work. I showed them all around the lab, told them that we were doing all the work for a Soviet-Arco-Mobil consortium, which of course the records would confirm. I remember walking around talking about old times with him, explaining some of the lab rooms, all the time wondering if both of us were acting, or just me. And I was scared, that somehow our security had broken, and this was the first sign of it. . . .” He shook his head, laughed shortly. “But computer government came through again. They scarcely knew enough to even know there were losses. Computer-bureaucracy—no wonder-Earth is falling apart. I have no doubt all of those governments are being stolen blind.”

“There’s probably a Terran Starship Association that you’ve never heard about,” I said absently.

He laughed. “I wouldn’t doubt it.” He put his drink-bulb down. “Although we have kept pretty good track of the other underground organizations on Mars. In fact, we chose this particular time for the construction of the starship because we think that the Committee police will be too busy on Mars to make much of a search for us.”

“Why is that?”

“The Washington-Lenin Alliance—you’ve heard of them?—are planning to start a revolt sometime in midAugust, when Mars is farthest from Earth. Some other groups are going to join them. We don’t know how big it will get, but there should be enough turmoil to keep the police occupied.”

“Great.” Oh, no, I thought. Not Mars, too. Please.

Swann moved his bulb around, squared his tray with the table. I continued to eat.

“So you’re not going to help us?” he said suddenly.

I shook my head, swallowed. “Nope.”

The comers of his mouth tightened. He looked down at the table.

“Does that end your starship attempt?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “They’ll get very near full closure, I’m sure. It’s just—well, on a voyage this long, just the slightest difference in the ship’s efficiency will mean a lot. Really a lot. You know that. And I know that if you were to help them the system would end up being more efficient.”

“Listen, Eric,” I said, and took a deep breath. “What I don’t understand is this. You people have been working on this problem for years. You and I have been friends for years, and all during that time you’ve known that I’m good at life-support systems. So why didn’t you ever tell me about it?”

He reddened, chewed his lower lip. “Oh—no reason—”

“Why, Eric? Why?”

“Well—at first it was Charlie, you know. Being your boyfriend and all, lovers tell each other everything, and so—”

“Come on, Eric. We were only lovers for a year or two. You and I have been friends a lot longer than that. Or was it like with Charlie in the lab that day—just acting?”

“No, no,” he said emphatically. “Not at all. I wanted to tell you, believe me.” He looked up from the table at me. “I just couldn’t be sure about you, Emma. I couldn’t be sure that you wouldn’t tell the Committee about us. You always spoke in favor of the Committee and its policies, whenever the subject came up—”

“I did not!”

He stared at me. “You did. You’d complain about being given too much work and being shunted around from place to place, but you’d always end up saying you were glad the sectors were being coordinated, pulled off each others’ throats. And that you were pleased with the life the Committee arranged for you. That’s what you said, Emma!” He pulled at his cheeks with a hand angrily as I shook my head. “Then when they jailed your father I thought you would change—”

“My father broke the law,” I said, thinking about things I had said through the years.

“So are we! See? What if I had told you about us back on Mars, and you had said, you’re breaking the law? I couldn’t take the chance on my own, although, believe me, I wanted to—”

“Damn you,” I said. “Damn Oleg Davydov—”

“How were we to know any better?” he asked, his blue eyes unflinching. “I’m sorry, but you asked me why. We thought you were Committee all the way. I was the only one who thought otherwise, and even with me it was just hope. We couldn’t take the chance. It was too important, we were trying to accomplish something great—”

“You were pursuing a crackpot scheme that is going to kill sixty people for no reason,” I said harshly, standing up as I spoke. “A stupid plan that takes you off into space and leaves you there with no way to colonize a planet even if you made it to one—” I shoved my chair back and walked quickly away, my eyes filling with tears so that it was hard to balance. People were watching me; I had shouted.

I pulled myself furiously through the halls of the living quarters, cursing Swann and Davydov and the entire MSA. He should have known. How could they not have known? I crashed into my room, and happily it was empty: I banged from wall to wall for a time, crying and muttering angrily to myself. Why didn’t he know? Why couldn’t he tell, the idiot?

For a moment I caught sight of my reflection in my little washstand mirror, and I went over to look in it, floating in mid air. I was so upset I had to squeeze my eyes shut as hard as I could, before I could look in the glass at myself: and when I did, I experienced a frightening thing. It seemed that the true three-dimensional world was on the other side of the glass, and that I was looking into it through a window. The person floating in there was looking out. She appeared distraught over something or other . . .

And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others.

They didn’t know.

They didn’t know, because I never told them. I didn’t tell them that I hated the Mars Corporations Committee—yes admit it, I did hate them!—I hated those petty tyrants as much as I hated anything. I hated the way they had treated my foolish father. I hated their lies; that they were taking over power to make a better life on an alien planet, etc., etc. Everyone knew that was a lie. But we kept our mouths shut; talk too much and you might get relocated in Texas. Or on Amor. The members of the MSA had compensated with a stupid plan, to escape to the stars in secret—but they resisted, they stole, they subverted, they disbelieved, they resisted I And me? I didn’t even have the guts to tell my friends how I felt. I had thought that cowardice was the norm, and that made it okay. I had thought that resistance necessarily would be like the rash and drunken words of my father, pointless and dangerous. I had been scared of the idea of resistance, and the worst of it was, I had thought that everyone was like me.

I looked at the stranger in the other room through the glass. There was Emma Weil. You couldn’t read her mind. She looked plain and grim, skinny, dedicated, unhumorous, what was she thinking? You would never know, she sounded pretty self-satisfied. People who sound self-satisfied usually are. But you would never know for sure. You could look in her eyes as hard as you wanted, for an hour and more: nothing there but empty, weightless black pools. . . .

For a couple of days I sat in my room and did nothing. Then one morning when Nadezhda and Marie-Anne were leaving to work on the starship, I said, “Take me with you.”

They looked at each other. “If you like,” Nadezhda said.

The two ships had been placed side-by-side. We took our boat into the bay of Hidalgo. I followed my roommates back to the farm, ignoring the occasional stare we received from other workers in the halls.

They had already added a few rows of vegetable tanks to the standard farm set-up. The glare of white light from the many lamps made me blink. I trailed behind the two women, listening as they talked to other technicians. Then we were off by ourselves, among the big suspension bottles, spotted green and brown, of the algae room.

“Chlorella pyrenoidosa with nitrate as its nitrogen source takes ten times less iron out of the nutrient medium than when urea is the nitrogen source, see?” Nadezhda was talking.

“But we have to use that urea somewhere,” Marie-Anne said.

“Sure. But I’m worried that the biomass created will eventually become too much to handle.”

“Feed it to the goats?”

“But what happens when the nutrient medium is exhausted? No source of iron in the vacuum, you know. . . .”

They had a problem there. There had to be a very close agreement between the photosynthetic coefficient for algae and the respiratory coefficient for the humans and animals; otherwise too much CO_2 or too much oxygen would build up, depending. One way to deal with this is to provide different sources of nitrogen to different sections of algae, as this will alter the photosynthetic coefficient. But the algae use up their mineral supplies at different rates, depending on their type of nitrogen feed. And over long periods of time this could be significant; to keep up a balanced gas exchange might take more minerals than the rest of the biocenosis would be producing. . . .

“Can’t you use urea and ammonia exclusively,” I asked them, “and shift amounts of pyrenoidosa and vulgaris to keep the exchange balanced? That way you’d be using more urea, and avoiding the problem of nitrates.”

They looked at each other.

“Well, no,” Nadezhda said. “See, look at this—the damn algae grow so fast with urea—too much biomass, we can’t use it all.”

“What about giving it less light?”

“But that makes for problems with the vulgaris,” Marie-Anne explained. “Stupid stuff, it either dies or grows wild.”

Clearly I was repeating the most obvious solutions. Problem-solving for a biologic life-support system is like a game—one of the very finest intellectual games ever devised, in fact. In many ways it is like chess. Now, Nadezhda and Marie-Anne were certainly grand masters at this game, and they had been working with this particular model, along with the other MSA scientists, for years. So they were a big step ahead of me at that moment, discussing modifications that I had never heard of. But I had never met anybody who had a flair for the game like I did; if it had been chess, I would have been Martian champion, I am sure. When I saw the patient look on Marie-Anne’s face as she explained why my suggestion wouldn’t work, something snapped in me, and my vague intentions for this visit crystallized.

“All right,” I said in a mean tone of voice. “You’d better give me the whole story here, all the details of your model, your new improvements that Swann told me about, everything. If you want me to help.”

The two women nodded politely, just as if this request were to most ordinary thing in the world; and we got down to it.

So I helped them, yes, I did; and more than ever before the I who thought and felt was distant from the I who did the work on this particular example of the BLSS problem—more than ever the work seemed a game, a giant intricate game, a puzzle that we would look at when we finished; we would stand back to look at it, and admire it, and then we would forget it and go home to dinner. In this frame of mind I was especially inventive and I helped them a lot.

In fact, I’m going to describe the problem in more detail; for who knows what the thousand-year-old Emma might remember or forget, and it would be a shame if she forgot this, for we were at a primitive stage in BLSS design, I reckon, and there were serious obstacles to be attacked.

These three ships are Deimos PRs; part of a fleet of twenty-seven asteroid miners that were constructed just inside Deimos’s orbit, at the turn of the century. They are just over a kilometer long, shaped like a deck of cards; powered by cesium reactor-mass, deuterium-fueled, direct-explosion rockets. The crew of thirty or thirty-five lives in the forward or upper part of the ship, besides the bridge. Below them are the recreational facilities, the various chambers of the farm, and the recycling plants. Below them are the huge mass of the rocket system and the shield system that protects the crew from it. The entire ship is a biogeocenosis; that is, an enclosed ecologic system, combining biologic and technologic methods to create closures. Closure is not complete, of course; it is about 80% complete for a three-year period, tailing off rapidly after that—the actual measure of closure is a coefficient resulting from a compilation of the degrees of closure for all the substances being recycled.

Anyway, closure is not complete on these ships, by any means. There are loss-points that have never been satisfactorily solved. But these ships are as close to a closed biologic life-support system as any spaceship ever built.

The BLSS works like this: heat and light are generated by the nuclear reactions, and these provide energy for the photoautotropic plants; algae, especially chlorella pyrenoidosa and Morelia vulgaris, and higher plants. These plants feed animals and humans, and create oxygen and water. The animals—plankton, Crustacea, shelless mollusks, fish, rabbits, chickens, goats—eat the plant wastes that humans don’t use, and provide food for the humans. Humans and animals create wastes which sustain microorganisms that mineralize the wastes (to an extent), so that waste-products can be plowed back in to help feed the plants. Gas exchange is kept constant pretty simply by the photosynthesis of the algaes, and the respiration of the animals and humans. A simplified drawing would put it so:

This system, supplemented by physiochemical operations to aid the gas exchange and the use of wastes, is nearly closed; a neat, reliable, artificial biogeocenosis.

But there are two major loss points: the incomplete use of human and animal wastes, and water seepage.

Direct use of human waste products as nutrients for plant life is limited by the build-up of chlorine ions not used by plants. Sodium chloride, for instance, is a compound used by human beings as a palatable substance, but it isn’t required in equivalent amounts by other components of the system. So the use of algae to mineralize wastes has to be supplemented by physiochemical mineralization; thermal combustion in this case, which results in a small but significant number of nearly useless furnace ash. It’s difficult to return these poorly soluble metal oxides into the system.

Another loss point is the very minute disappearances of water. Though water can be filtered out of the air and recaptured in a number of ways, a certain percentage coats the interior of the ship, bonds with various surfaces, pools on the floors and in cracks, and escapes out of the ship’s hatches, etc.

Actually, the list of problems could go on forever; and all of the problems impinge on each other, making a large and interconnected web of cause-and-effect, mostly measurable, but sometimes not . . . the game. The hardest game.

But as I walked around the modified farm with Nadezhda and Marie-Anne, that first day, it occurred to me that creating a very high degree closure might be possible. A fuel cell to create water by electrolysis, some mutant bacteria to mineralize more wastes . . . it might be possible.

But the questions was, once accomplished, would one want to live inside it?

How long could humans live in a spaceship?

How long would they have to?

One morning there was a knock at my door, and I opened it. It was Davydov.

“Yes?” I said.

He ducked his head. “I’m sorry about the way I behaved during our talk last week. It’s been so long since I’ve gotten any criticism of the project, I’d forgotten how to react to it. I guess I lost my temper.” Head raised, a shy little smile: forgive me? Forgive me for kidnapping you and then yelling at you to boot?

“Umm,” I said cautiously. “I see.”

The smile disappeared, he pulled at his swarthy cheeks with one hand. “Could I perhaps, um, take you on a tour of the starship? Show you what we plan to do?”

I stood thoughtfully for as long as I could, knowing that I would accept the offer, curious to see what they had managed to steal from the Committee. “I suppose,” I said.

I saw from the boat’s dome, during our crossing, that they had connected the two ships, with thin struts that held them side to side. It was one fat and ungainly looking starship. Its windows gleamed like the luminous patches on ocean-floor fish. We were still in a tiny cluster of asteroids; the big one, I had learned, was Hilda, and around it were several daughter rocks.

It took Davydov several hours to show me what they had. They had: ore-holds full of minerals, medical supplies, some foodstuffs, spices, equipment for planetfall, color-panels and other material for the seasonal changes; a microfiche library of forty million volumes in three hundred languages; an equally vast collection of recorded music, with several each of almost every musical instrument; sports equipment; a lot of movies in English and Russian; a nursery full of toys and games, a room full of computers and computer parts, an observatory with several large telescopes.

During this ever more amazing tour we kept up a running debate, mostly joking. It was actually very enjoyable, although I think the sparring began to bother Davydov after a while. But I couldn’t help it. Their efforts had been so thorough, but, still, there was something adolescent about it all, something surreal, all the details logically worked out for an initial proposition that was absurd.

We ended up in the farm, among the splotched algae bottles that made the light green, and the rows of lettuce, and the rich smell of manure. Here I was the guide, and Davydov the tourist. I told him about Nadezhda’s algae-suspension tricks.

“I hear you have been helping them.”

“Some.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Oh, don’t take it personally. . . .”

He laughed wryly.

And then we were at the back wall of the farm, and it had all been seen. Behind the wall the shield silently vibrated, protecting us all from the nuclear reactions in the rear part of the ship. There was another part of their project that must hold without fail; and the arcane studies that enabled the shield technicians to do it were nearly beyond explanation to those of us who had not committed our lives to the mysteries. It was simply a matter of trust.

“But this is what I want to know,” I said there. “Why do you have to do it this way? People will leave the solar system eventually, right? You don’t need to do it this way.”

He pulled at his face again; I remembered it was a gesture of Swann’s, and I thought, this is where Swann got it . . . “I don’t agree that it is inevitable that humans will leave the solar system,” he said. “Nothing is inevitable, there is no such thing as historical determinism. It’s people who act, and they choose their acts. We could have built a really adequate starship at any time since the late twentieth century, for instance. But it hasn’t been done. And it could be that those two hundred years are a sort of launch window, you know. A launch window that may close soon.”

“What do you mean?”

“That the chance may pass. Our ability to do it might disappear. There’s a revolution going on on Mars this very minute—Swann told you?”

“Yes.”

“So who knows? We may be escaping the end of civilization! Life on Mars could end, and that would damage Earth—they depend on that Mars colony for minerals, as you know. And those Terran governments are just bigger versions of the Committee, doing just as bad a job. They’ve taken Earth into another of its crisis periods.”

“They’ve gotten through those before,” I said, worrying about Mars.

“That doesn’t mean much. They never had a population of six billion before. Just the trouble on Mars may be enough to push them over the brink! It’s a very delicate artificial ecology, Emma. Much like this little starship of ours. And if it falls apart, then the chance to go to the stars is gone for a long time. Maybe forever. So we’re doing it ourselves, right here and now.”

“You have a vision—”

“Not just me!”

“I mean all of you.”

“Ah. Sorry. English should make that distinction.”

“Does Russian?”

“Not really.” We laughed.

The force of his ideas had impelled Davydov around the farm; velcro rips had accompanied his words as he walked down the rows of vegetables; when he finished, I watched his dark face through the distorting glass of an algae bottle. His ice-blue eyes were the size of eggs, staring at me intently. Suddenly I thought, he wants to convince me of these things. It matters to him what I think. This notion made me flush with pleasure, and it occurred to me that this was how he became the leader of this visionary group. Not by any choice of the Mars Corporations Committee, looking for a scapegoat. He was the leader because he could make people feel that way. . . .

The intercom system crackled. “Oleg?” It was John Dancer’s voice, sounding scared. “Oleg, are you hearing me? Respond quickly please.”

Davydov hurried to the wall with with the intercom and flicked it on. “What is it, John?”

“Oleg! We need you on the bridge of the Eagle quick. Emergency.”

“What is it?”

“We’ve spotted three ships approaching through two-belt central. Looks like police craft.”

Davydov looked across at me. “I’ll be there right away,” he said. He ran between the vegetables to my side. “Looks like trouble on Mars isn’t occupying all of them.” His voice was still light and joking, but his eyes were grim. “Come along.”

So I went with him, across to the bridge of Rust Eagle. There were about a dozen people there, a few attending to the Eagle, the rest to Davydov and Ilene Breton.

“They’re coming in an equilateral triangle pattern,” Ilene said. “Simon spotted them by visual check—after he had seen the one, he ran through the police patterns and found the other two. If they don’t make any adjustments, they’ll come by with one on each side of us and one below.”

“How long do we have?” Davydov asked.

“They’re decelerating now. They’ll pass this sub-group in about three hours.”

I have never seen such a grim collection of people in my life. Only the clicks and breath of the ship’s functions broke the silence that followed this announcement. I thought of it; everything I had just seen, the fifty years of dangerous work it had taken to get it all here; now it was the prey of a diligent hunter. It could all end in four hours, in capture and imprisonment, return to Mars under guard, in the “starship.” Or it could end in sudden death. Those Committee ships carry the arsenals. . . .

“How fast are they moving?” Davydov asked.

Ilene said, “Two or three k’s per second.”

“They’ve got a lot of space to search,” Swann said hopefully.

“They’re bracketing us!” Ilene said. “They’ll see us. By radar, heat-scan, metal-scan, visual, radio pickup—somehow they’ll see us.”

“No more radio transmissions,” Davydov said.

“We’ve already shut down,” Ilene replied. Her white pinched face looked impatient; she was waiting for everyone to catch up with her, and help.

They looked at each other.

“We could line up all of our lasers,” said Olga Petrov, captain of Lermontov. “Tire them up their exhaust vents—” she realized that would have no effect on the shields—“or hit them in the bridges, or the reactor-shield mechanisms.”

“Those shields are too well protected,” Swann said. But several others were nodding, their mouths pressed tight. They couldn’t run, their backs were to the wall; they would fight and die. And, I thought, I would die too.

Ilene said, “If we give them any time they’ll have a message off, and our position will be revealed. Other police ships would be here in a week.”

“Why don’t you just hide,” I interjected.

They all stared at me. It reminded me of Nadezhda and Marie-Anne.

“We’re being bracketed,” Swann explained.

“I know. But you aren’t at the exact center of the triangle, are you? So if you were to bring these ships right onto the surface of Hilda, or near it, and moved around the top as the bottom ship moved under you, if you see what I mean, then you might stay out of sight the entire time.”

“One of the side ships would see us,” Ilene said.

“Maybe,” I began, but Davydov interrupted: “We could shade to one side of Hilda, and keep Hilda itself between us and one side ship—then maneuver to keep one of the adjacent rocks between us and the other side ship. So Hilda would protect us from two of them, and one of her daughters from the third!”

“If that’s possible,” Ilene said.

“It won’t work,” Olga Petrov declared.

“You tell me how they will detect you through an asteroid,” I said.

Swann was smiling, crookedly. “We can hide, but we can’t run.”

“We can’t use rockets to move around Hilda,” Ilene said practically.

“They’d see the exhaust.”

We sat thinking about that one. It was like the game of hide-and-seek I had played as a child, on the broad boulder-plains of Syrtis Major.

“You could pull the ships around with lines,” I said. “Anchor winches here and there on the surface, and haul us around the rock as the ships go by. That’d give you better control anyway.”

They liked that one. “But how will we see them?” Ilene asked. “What if they change directions while we’re behind Hilda?”

“We’ll put observers on the surface,” Davydov said. “They can report with hand signals—relay teams of observers.” He thought about it. “Right. Let’s go with that.” He started pacing around the room, rip rip rip. “Let’s go, we don’t have much time! Ilene, get two boats onto the surface of Hilda. Make sure they take everything they’ll need, once there they won’t be able to come back up till it’s over. Have them place a couple of deadmen as deep as they can in fifteen minutes.”

The nice thing about the plan was that most of it was standard mining procedure: closing on a rock, preparing for drilling. . . . “Have John and the other mining people work out the lines. Oh—tell the boats to use their thrusters only in the boat bays and on the back side of Hilda.” A thought sruck Davydov, and he started to look in my direction. Thought better of it. “All of the non-MSA people are to be paired with their roommates, where possible, or with someone else if the roommates are busy. I want Duggins, Nordhoff, and Valenski under close surveillance. Keep them in the living quarters and don’t tell them what’s going on. Emma, you stay here.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “I’ll miss my nap. . . .”

With a nervous pattering of laughter the group scattered to their various tasks.

Davydov walked over to me. “Thank you, Emma. It’s a good plan.”

I waved a hand, wondering what I had done—or rather, why I had done it. “The only plan, I think.”

“Maybe. But still.” His smile and his eyes were bright in his dark face, but he wasn’t really thinking about me any more. His jaw was bunched with tension, Ilene called him and he turned and walked over to her.

I sat and waited.

When the lines had been set—it took nearly an hour—I went with Davydov and Olga to the little window room opposite the bridge, which gave a view from the other side of the ship. The lines stretching from us to Hilda (the asteroid was about seven kilometers long, I judged, not an overlarge object to hide three ships behind) were like silver thread, only visible by a sort of act of the imagination. The pulling began and the lines became straight. Off to one side the lines leading to the starship could just be seen. Davydov left to return to the bridge. A long time passed; Hilda came closer. At last the bare, rough blue-grey rock of the asteroid was no more than a hundred meters away. Now the Eagle’s center rocket was expelling tiny puffs to keep the two objects from coming together—to keep us from falling (drifting, actually) onto the surface. I imagined I could feel the mysterious tug of gravity myself.

Swann came by and asked me to return to the bridge. As I walked up the tube (and now there was an up), I noticed an unusual silence. A lot of systems had been shut down. The three ships had become, to the outer world, inert objects.

Ilene had set up a computer display on the big viewscreen, which indicated our two ships, the outline of the asteroid as seen from our original location, and the three police ships. These were out of our view, and were being located by observers out on the asteroid’s surface; people crawling around in hoursuits, hiding behind rocks like the scouts of ancient Earth. The bridge was crowded again.

We waited, watching the green screen with its shifting purple lines and points. The computer people and John Dancer were still programming our maneuvers. The rest of us sat and watched.

“I’ve got them on visual,” came the report from one of the surface observers. “About ten degrees above my horizon, veritcal 95 or a hundred.”

“Tell him to point his suit exhaust at the ground,” Davydov said into the mike.

The lines started to pull us around the asteroid, moving at a pretty snappy pace. On the green display screen we stayed near the center, two purple dots; the asteroid’s outline shifted down, and the tiny purple circles of the police ships rose slowly toward the outline. If they broached it, they would be in our sky. One of them certainly would. Ilene introduced the small shape of one of the rocks following Hilda onto the screen, the daughter rock that would be between us and that cruiser, for a while at least.

Looking out the bridge’s wide plasteel window, we could just see Hilda, curving away from us; the underside of the starship, just above us; and behind it the vacuum sky, star-studded. The events on the computer screen could have been a movie, a war game, abstract art, for we could no more see the police than they could see us. Abstract art; and the esthetic was to keep all the dots within the irregular circle. . . .

The quiet voices kept reporting in for the observers, giving us positions, and Dene tapped them out accordingly. The little purple dots skipped across the screen.

With the ship below us, it was simple. It would fly by; we would move up and around the asteroid, keeping it between us and them, and it would never see us. With the ship on our right it was the same, except that there wasn’t such a big margin; we would remain just under the horizon for the third ship, for a few minutes. That was the bad part—but during that time a daughter rock, no more than two kilometers across, would be floating between us and the third ship. By the time that this ship flew out from behind the daughter rock, we hoped to be over the horizon of Hilda again, and out of sight of all three of them.

We watched the screen. I looked over at Davydov; he stared impassively at the display, a quizzical, resigned look on his face.

The third ship was over Hilda’s horizon, behind the daughter rock. Davydov leaned forward. “Station Three, draw us toward you,” he said into the mike, overriding the program. He waved aside Ilene’s protest. “We’ve got some room to spare on that side,” he said. He concentrated on the screen. “Simon, tell us when you see them,” he said into the mike again. I thought of Simon, prone on the surface—

“He says he sees them,” came his observer’s voice.

“Pull to Station One, as fast as you can,” Davydov said.

The little blip of the third ship crawled to the line demarcating the daughter rock, and there it sat, on the line; on our horizon, its detecting instruments just above or below it, who could say? “Pull,” Davydov whispered to himself, “Pull.” I thought, alarm bells could be going off. . . .

After no more than two minutes, the dot marking the third ship slipped back down under the rock’s horizon, and then behind Hilda again. Now Hilda protected us from all three of them.

But we might have been visible, there, for that minute.

Simon kept sending us positions, and everyone on the bridge listened with consuming interest.

“They’re not slowing,” Swann ventured.

. . . .And so they bombed on by, three police ships of my lawful government. I felt as happy as the others acted, and proud of myself. Although, really, they could have caught us in that minute on the horizon. So it hadn’t been that great a plan. But it worked.

It had been five hours since the first sighting of them; five very long hours, during which I had had little to do but contemplate my life and its potential end . . . the kind of dense thinking that is shortened by, “my whole life passed before my eyes.” A tornado of the mind. I was tired.

“We’ll stay behind Hilda for a day or so,” Davydov said. “Then back to work.” He heaved out a breath, grinned at us. “Time to get out of here.”

When the relieved celebration was over, and I had calmed down, I went into my room and fell into a deep sleep. Just before I woke up, I had a vivid dream:

I was child, on Mars, and we were playing hide-and-seek, as we often did.

We were at the station on Syrtis Major, one of those broad desert plains that are strewn with boulders: boulders from the size of basketballs up to the size of a small room, all scattered across the plain in a regular pattern that used to baffle our elders. “There’s no way such even distribution could be natural,” my father would say, sitting on one of the rocks and staring out at the nearby horizon. “It looks just like a stage set.”

But to us children it was perfectly natural. And in the late afternoons, after dinner, we would play hide-and-seek. In my dream it was near sunset, one of the dust sunsets, when you could look straight at the little red sun, and the sky was ribbed with pink bands of dust, and the rust-colored plain was marked by long black shadows, one for each rock. I was hiding behind a spherical boulder about waist-high, crouched down, watching the other kids make their dashes for home base. Home base was a long way away. I could see the wind, picking up swirls of sand, but in my suit I couldn’t feel it. There were giggles and quick breathing on the radio band, which was turned down so that the sounds were all very quiet. My mike was turned off. The person who was it gave up; there were too many boulders, too many shadows. “Oily oily oxen, free free free,” she called, singing the phrase in a quavering voice. “Oily oily oxen, free free free.”

But I couldn’t come in. There was another it; something I didn’t recognize, a tall dark thing like one of the long black shadows come alive. It was nearly sunset, the ruby sun was touching the old crater wall to the west. I was hiding in earnest. I could just dare to put one eye over the rock, to see the dark shape move around, looking behind one rock after the other. Where was home base? The radio transmitter hissed. No one called. The dark thing that was it was moving toward my hiding pace, checking boulder after boulder. The shadow of the crater wall was stretching across the plain, blacking out everything. . . .

I shifted against the bed, half woke for a moment. Then my father had me by the hand. We were free of suits, under the dome. I was younger, about seven. We were walking across the baseball diamond. Dad had our gloves and the ball, one of the kid’s softballs that wouldn’t go very far when you hit it. “When I was your age and played baseball,” Dad told me, “the field was about the same size as this one.”

“This one’s little.”

“On Mars it is. But on Earth even the grown-up ball wouldn’t go very far when you hit them.”

“Because of gravity.” Whatever that meant.

“Right. The Earth pulls harder.” He gave me my glove and I stood behind home plate. He stood on the pitcher’s mound and we threw the ball back and forth. “That pitcher really got you yesterday.”

“Yeah. Right on my kneecap.”

Dad grinned. T saw how you hung in there the next time you got up. I like that.” He caught and threw. “But why did you try to steal third when you had just been hit on the knee?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were out by a mile.” He fielded a low one. “And Sandy had just bunted and got out to get you to second. And once you’re on second you’re in scoring position.”

“I know,” I said. “I just took off when I got a good lead.”

“You sure did.” Dad was grinning, he threw a hard one at me. “That’s my Emma. You’re awful fast. You could probably steal third, if you worked hard enough. Sure. We work hard at it, you could be a real speedster. . . .”

And then I was running, across the open desert the hard baked oxidized sand of south Syrtis. In my dream the desert was like the Lazuli Canyon, filled with breathable air; I ran barefoot, in my gym shorts and shirt. In Mars’s gentle grasp I bounded forward, arms making a sort of swimming motion, as my father had taught me. No one had really worked on running in Martian gravity, I was working it out for myself, with Dad’s help. I was in some sort of race, far ahead of the others, pushing off the warm gritty sand with great shoves of my thighs, feeling the thin chill air rush by. I could hear my father’s voice: “Run, Emma, run!” And I ran across that red desert, free and powerful, faster and faster, feeling like I could run over the horizon before me and on forever, all the way around the planet.

Nadezhda and Marie-Anne woke me coming through the door, talking of excess biomass. My heart was thumping, my skin was damp. In my mind I still heard the command: “Run!”

They began working incessantly to complete the starship. Nadezhda and Marie-Anne stayed up to all hours in our room pouring over programs and program results. It was laughable, really; having missed them, the Committee police weren’t likely to pass that way again. Nevertheless they hurried, and my roommates grew more and more serious as days passed, “. . . degree of closure of any substance is established by its rate of consumption in the system, E, and the rate of flow in incomplete closure, e,” Nadezhda would mutter, as if praying, glancing balefully at me as I refused to work with them for more than several hours a day. The lights focused on the little desk, Marie-Anne hunched over the computer screen, copying down figures. . . . “The substance’s closure coefficient K is determined by K equals I minus e over E. . . .”

They could not get that coefficient high enough, do what they might. I tried hard to figure out something myself. But perfect closure is not natural; it doesn’t exist anywhere. For the starship, the leaks would be in waste recycling. They couldn’t deal with the accumulation of chorides, or the accumulation of humic matter in the algal reactors. And they wouldn’t be able to completely recycle corpuses, either animal or human. Certain minerals . . . if only they could be re-introduced into the system, made useful to something which would transform them into something back in the mainstream in the cycle. . . . So we worked, for hours and hours, juggling the processes, trying to make a tail-in-mouth snake that would roll across the universe.

One night when they were gone I typed out the full program and filled in estimated figures of my own, to find the point where the accumulations would imbalance the system enough to break it down. I got about seventy years.

An impressive achievement, given what they were given; but the universe is a big place, and they needed to do better.

One day while thinking about this problem of closure, a week or more after the fly-by, Andrew Duggins, Al Nordhoff, and Valenski stopped me in the hall. Duggins looked fat and unhealthy, as if the situation were taking its toll on him.

“We hear that you helped the mutineers evade a Committee police fleet that came near here,” he accused.

“Who told you that?” I said.

“It’s the talk of the ship,” he said angrily.

“Among whom?” I asked.

“That doesn’t matter,” Valenski said in his clipped, accented English. “The question is, did Committee police pass us by while we three were incarcerated last Friday?”

“Yes, they did.”

“And you were instrumental in making the plans to hide from them?”

I considered it. Well, I had done it; and I wanted to be known for what I was. I stared Valenski in the eye. “You could say that, yes.”

“You helped them escape capture!” Duggins burst out. “We could have been free by now.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “These people would have resisted. The police would have blown us all to dust. I saved your lives, probably.”

“The point is,” Valenski said, “you aided the mutineers.”

“You’ve been helping them all along,” Duggins said. The animosity flowing from him was almost tangible, and I couldn’t understand it. “Your part in the attack on the radio room was a sham, wasn’t it? Designed to get you into our confidence. It was you who told them about our plans, and now you’re helping them.”

I refrained from pointing out the lack of logic in his indictment. As I said, paranoia is common. “What do you think, Al?” I said flippantly.

“I think you’re a traitor,” quiet Al Nordhoff said, and I felt it.

“When we return to Mars,” Valenski pronounced, “your behavior will have to be reported. And you will have no part in commanding the return flight. If you return.”

“I’m going back to Mars,” I said firmly, still shaken by Al’s words.

“Are you?” Duggins sneered. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to jump out of Oleg Davydov’s bed when the time comes?”

“Andrew,” I heard Al protest; by that time I was taking an alternate route to the dining commons, walking fast, rip rip rip.

“Damned treacherous woman,” Duggins shouted after me. His two companions were remonstrating with him as I turned a comer and hurried out of earshot.

Upset by this confrontation, aware of the pressures that were steadily mounting on me from all sides (when would I be compressed to a new substance, I wondered?), I wandered through the complex lounges outside the dining area. The autumn colors were getting closer to winter: torpid browns, more silver and white. In the tapestry gallery, among the complex wall-hangings, there was a bulletin screen filled with messages and games and jokes. I stopped before it, and a sentence struck my eye: “Only under the stresses of total social emergencies do the effectively adequate alternative technical strategies synergetically emerge.” Jeez, I thought, what prose artist penned that? I looked down—the ascription was to one Buckminster Fuller. The quote continued: “Here we witness mind over matter and humanity’s escape from the limitations of his indentity with some circumscribed geographical locality.” That was for sure.

Part of the bulletin screen was reserved for suggestions for the name of the starship. Anyone could pick his color and typeface, and tap a name onto the space on the screen. It was getting crowded. Most of them were dull: First One, The Starship. Others were better. There were classical allusions, of course: The Ark, Santa Maria, Kon Tiki III, Because It’s there. The names of the two halves of the ship had been joined—Lerdalgo, Himontov—but I doubted they would be chosen. In the center of the screen was the suggestion rumored to be Davydov’s: Anicarus. I liked that one. Also Transplutionia, which sounded like the Vampires of Outer Space. About a third of the names were in the Cyrillic alphabet, which I can barely transliterate; and the names would have been Russian, anyway. They all looked good, though.

Looking at the names I thought about all that had happened, about Davydov, Swann and Breton, Duggins and Valenski. I would be in trouble if I returned to Mars . . . if I returned? When I returned! Seized by undirected anger, I was suddenly inspired to add a name to the screen. In big orange letters I typed out, just below Davydov’s suggestion, THE SHIP OF FOOLS. The ship of fools. How perfect. We would make an illustration for the allegory, with me large among the foreground characters. It made me laugh, and feeling better, although I knew that was illogical, I went to eat.

But the next day the feeling of pressure returned. I felt like a chunk of chondrite, being transformed to Chantonnay. My life’s course had been bent by this event, and there was no way to straighten it out; all my choices lay in a new direction, where eventual disaster seemed more and more likely. This sense of pressure became unbearable, and I went to the centrifuge to run. It felt good to get in the gravity and run like a hamster in a wheel, like a creature without choices.

So I was running. The floor of the centrifuge was made of curved wooden planking, the walls and ceiling were white, dotted by numbered red circles to tell runners where they were. There were unmarked, informal lanes: slow to the right, fast to the left. Usually I just went to the left wall and started running, looking at the planks as they passed under me.

This time I heard the thump of feet directly behind me, and I moved over. It was Davydov. He drew even with me.

“Mind if I run with you?”

I shook my head, although I don’t like running with others. We ran side by side for a few revolutions.

“Do you always run this fast?” he said.

Now when I run, I am doing a middle-distance workout, and the point is to get up to about 90% maximum pulse rate and keep it there, for up to twenty or thirty minutes. It was working to the limit. So when Davydov asked me his question, I was about to collapse. Nevertheless, I said, “Only way to go.”

He grunted. We ran on. His breathing quickened.

“You about ready to take off?” I asked.

“Yeah. A few days. I think.”

“Going to make closure?”

He glanced at me briefly; he knew that I knew that they weren’t. Then he looked back at the floor, thinking about it.

“No,” he said. A few strides. “Water loss. Waste build-up. Not enough fuel.”

“How long can you go?”

“Eighty—eighty years.”

I smiled a moment, pleased with the accuracy of my own calculations. They should have had me from the start, I thought. I said, “Doesn’t that worry you?”

Again he watched the floor. We took quite a few strides.

“Yes,” he expelled suddenly. A slight stumble to mark the admission. “Yes, I’m worried.” Several strides. “I’ve got to. Stop now. Join me? In the game room?”

“In a few minutes.” He slowed and dropped back to the right. I waved a hand without turning and started to run freely again, thinking about the look on his face and a sense of release when he said yes, I’m worried.

After six thousand meters I climbed up to the hub and got out of the centrifuge, took a quick sponge-bath. I walked down to the game room, feeling much better, tired and strong in the no-gee.

Davydov was over in an isolated comer of the game room, sitting at a table for two, staring out the tiny port in the wall beside him. It seemed that the seasons were accelerating aboard our ship; the room was somber, brown and thunderhead blue and silver. I sat down beside him and we stared at the little square of stars. He got me a bulb of milk. His big dark face was lined with concern, and he didn’t meet my gaze.

“Eighty years isn’t very long,” I observed.

“No. It could be enough, if we’re lucky.”

“But it’s not as much as you hoped for.”

“No.” His mouth was set. “Not at all.”

“What will you do?”

He didn’t answer. He took sips from his bulb, pulled at his rough face. I had never seen such an expression of uncertainity on his face before. I thought of it: he had committed much of his long life to the idea of the starship and its voyage. Suddenly the idea was realized!—and it was not as perfect as the idea had been; thus more dangerous. And he was filled with doubts. He saw that he could be leading people to death, now; I saw it in his expression. That transition, from idea to reality, had had its usual effect on him—it had clarified the possibility of failure, heightened his sense of danger, frightened him.

“You could just take it back,” I said. “You could fly it into an Earth orbit and tell the Terrans what you’ve done and why. You could advocate a real starship, the Committee wouldn’t dare attack you in Earth space.”

He was shaking his head. “They wouldn’t have to. The American and Soviet military would do it for them. Board us and take us down and ask the Committee what they’d like done with us.”

“Not if the Committee’s been overthrown by this revolt you’ve told me of.”

“I doubt that will happen. The Committee controls too much.”

“Well, you’ve got eighty years—you could play hide-and-seek in the system, radio Earth and Mars and tell them about themselves, avoid capture until you become a cause celebre and no one will dare harm you—”

Again he was shaking his head. “They’d just hunt us down. That isn’t what we did all this for.”

“But eighty years isn’t long enough for interstellar flight!”

“Yes, yes, it is—”

“Oleg,” I said. “You can’t say it’s enough just because it might be enough to get you to one of the nearest stars. You’re going to have to search for a habitable planet, and eighty years isn’t enough time for that.”

He stared out the window, took several sips from his bulb. “But during that time,” he said, “we’ll improve the life-support system. And that will give us more time.”

“I don’t know how you can say that.”

“We’ve got a lot of equipment and parts with us, and one of the finest system-design teams ever assembled. If they’re good enough, then we’ll have all the time we’ll need.”

I stared at him. “That’s a big if.”

He nodded, the worried expression still on his face. “I know it is. I just hope that the systems team is the best one it could possibly be.”

We sat in silence for a while longer, and then Ilene’s voice called Davydov back to some business or other, and I was left to brood over the meaning of that last statement of his. It wasn’t all that obscure, and I gritted my teeth as I felt the pressure mount.

Later that day, still feeling the slow progress of compression and transformation, I ate dinner with Swann. He was in an excellent mood, and talked at length about improvements made in the R and G of the starship. They’re going to have to switch from acceleration to deceleration quite a few times; now they’ll be able to do it using less fuel.

“What’s with you?” he asked, when he noticed how much of the conversation he was supplying.

“How are you going to get out of the solar system?” I replied. “Without the Committee police seeing your exhaust?”

“We’re going to keep something between us and them the whole time our rockets are firing. At first we’ll have the sun between us and Mars, then we’ll shut down until we meet with Saturn. Orbit it for a while, then coast out to Pluto.” He looked at me oddly. “That’s only a few open bursts—but you’ll keep this all a secret?”

“Unless they drug it out of me,” I said morosely. “You’d probably better not tell me any more.”

“What’s this?”

“Duggins and Valenski plan to tell the Committee that I collaborated with you. I may end up on Amor, for all I know.”

“Oh, my. Oh, Emma—you’ll just have to deny their accusations. Most of the people returning will support you.”

“Maybe. It’s going to be a mess.”

“Here. I’m going to get a liter of wine.” They made’a good white wine on Rust Eagle, with only a few vines. While he got it I tried to remember whether the starship would have any grapevines. Probably not. Too much waste.

I proceeded to drink most of the wine, without responding much to Swann’s conversation. After dinner we went down to our rooms. In front of my door Eric kissed me, and almost angrily I kissed back, hard. Drunk. . . . “Let’s go to my room,” he said, and I agreed, surprising myself. We went, and it never occurred to me, then, to wonder if this was exactly the man I had in mind to go to bed with. . . . In his room we turned off the lights and undressed as we floated about kissing. Making love was the usual clumsy, pleasant affair in the weightlessness; holding onto the bed, moving slowly at unfortunate moments, using the velcro straps. I lost myself in the sensations, marveling once again at how open lovers become to one another; I felt a surge of affection for this friend of mine, this cheerful and gentle man, this crazy exile fleeing humanity. How to think of him? What was he fleeing, after all, but the turmoil and repression on Mars, the absolute madness on Earth, our home world, our home—fleeing all the hatred and war. If only they all understood, that everyone is as human as your lover is. . . . Maybe on the starship they would remember it, I thought disconsolately.

“Emma,” he said, as we floated quietly in our embrace. “Emma?”

“Yes.”

“Please come with us.”

. . . “Oh, Eric.”

“Please, Emma. We need you. It’ll be a good life, one of the great human lives. And I want you along. It will make all the difference for me—”

“Eric,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I want to live on Mars. That’s my home.”

“But—” He stopped, sighed.

We floated, and for once the weightlessness felt like gravity; gravity pressing from every direction. Tears leaked out of my eyes.

This was my chance to join humanity’s greatest voyage. I wished I hadn’t drunk so much. “I want to go back to my room,” I whispered. I switched on the desk lamp, retrieved my clothes from the air, avoided Eric’s sad gaze. I kissed him before I left.

“Think about it?” he said.

“Oh, I will,” I said. “I will. . . .”

In the last few days they gutted the Rust Eagle, leaving it just able to get home. Nadezhda and Marie-Anne looked haggard. One day I helped them get their belongings together; they were moving to the starship. Marie-Anne dabbed at her eyes and embraced me, and the three of us stood there, a triad of sane femininity in a crazy world . . . but they left.

The bare empty room was very oppressive. I left it and floated through the ship, disdaining the velcro-and-balance routine, making lazy fingertip-turns to negotiate the frequent bends. I flew as if in a dream, touring the ship, refusing to acknowledge the few people I passed. It was nighttime; the halls were dimmed, just guidance lights on. Occasional clumps of people sat in the lounges, talking softly, drink-bulbs hovering above them like dinn-jars. They didn’t look up as I passed.

Through the quiet living quarters (in open doors people packed their goods to cross to the starship); up to the huge, dark bays at the top, amongst the mining equipment that was left, the waldoes like monsters or sad mangled robots, half-seen in the shadows they cast; down the long jump tube back to the power station, where it was bright, humming empty. And then back up the tube to the bridge, where I stood before the broad window and looked across at the thing.

Well, I thought, there it is. I could go on the first flight to the stars. I felt that it somehow should have been more momentous, an invitation filled with ceremony: interviews by large committees, batteries of tests, acceptance by telegram, the attention of two worlds. Instead, two miners fused together by insubordinated friends; and I invited by these friends, including two men I had cared about for years. It didn’t seem right. I recalled all the stories in literature about interstellar flight; all the deranged, degenerate, incestuous little societies. Yet this expedition, its members living through and beyond the voyage, would not turn out like that. Or would it? Maybe the dream of the savannah would drive them mad. Suddenly I was acutely conscious of the fact that I was in a little bulb of air like an extended spacesuit; I was in a submarine, millions of fathoms deep in a vacuum ocean.

No, I could not go with them. They might be able to do it—if I went, Nadezhda and I could keep that life-support system working, surely—but I could not go. I needed to be able to walk on ground, bare Mars ground.

The vision of the books struck me again; I saw the double ship floating out there empty, light-years away, the skeleton of a failed idea.

I could prevent them from leaving. The thought made me glance furtively at the silent figures sitting at the ship’s controls. They ignored me.

I couldn’t do anything to the starship. But if I disabled Rust Eagle, they would be forced to—to what? They wouldn’t kill us, and so perhaps all would be saved. . . . There were key codes in Davydov’s cabin that would open the locks in the deuterium holds.

Without really thinking about it, I drifted out of the bridge, and still floating about like a disembodied spirit, I came to Davydov’s room off in a comer bend of the upper hall. The door was about a quarter open. It was light inside.

I tapped at the door, holding the jamb beside it for support. No reply. I stuck my head in and looked around. Empty? A single desk lamp lit the room. I was about to put my feet to the velcro carpet, but thought better of it—too noisy. I pushed the door open a little farther and slipped in.

He was asleep. He had put two chairs together, and was draped across them head and shoulders on one, knees on the other. His mouth hung open; he breathed easily. Under the lamp I noticed that his hair was the same kinked texture as the velcro carpet below him.

For a long time I coasted through the air, watching his dark face, darker still in the shadows. He looked so ordinary.

On the desk, in the lamp’s gleam under a clamp, were a few scattered papers. I was already intruding; I tiptoed off a wall and floated over to look at them.

They were diagrams, several versions of the same thing. Under one sheet lay a compass and straight-edge. The diagrams were all circular, or near it: a construction made with several arcs of the compass, that resulted in a circle flattened slightly on one side. Around this faint circumference were little rectangles, set at different angles, blackened by pencil. I looked at a faint scrawl on one of the sheets: Pluto. And on scratch paper, written under a long series of numbers:

“Something to leave a mark on the world, Something to show we were here at all—” The penciling was smeared as if by the back of a hand. The final dash trailed off across the page.

I stared at the little black rectangles for a long time, looking over at Davydov once or twice. A kind of marker, to be erected on Pluto before they left the solar system forever? “Something to show we were here at all. . . .” Floating in that dark room, no sound but the airy hoooo of the vents, the desolation began to fill me, the vacuum.

We all will die. It was the first time in my life I had had that thought and really believed it. The postponements we have devised make it easier not to think of; it might be a millennium away. But it will come. The diagrams below me seemed like circles of gravestones. Designs for a tomb. That’s how we show we were here; that’s all we can do.

I floated over the sleeping man, stretched out horizontally above him. Even the exile wants to be remembered. I wished I were a succubus, and could possess him without his full awakening, without his becoming conscious and human. He breathed on. With a convulsive shudder I drifted away, touched off a wall to the door, slipped out and down the hall, my plan to disable the Eagle entirely forgotten. It was not my part to interfere with anyone else’s method of dying.

Soon they all would be gone.

Back in my room I drifted off into a troubled sleep. Once I half awoke and found myself wedged in a comer, lying upright beside the bed; I groped about until my hand hit a velcro strap, stuck it against the stick-strips on either side of me, and fell asleep again. It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped. I slept and slept; sleep-floated down to the toilet and back, to fall asleep yet again. I didn’t want to wake up; I was tired.

Many hours later I was awakened by a knock on the door. I burst out of my velcro strapping, landed on the far wall. I collected myself and answered the door. It was Davydov. I blinked, my mind confusing this moment with the last time I had seen him.

“We’d like everybody to come over to the starship for a final meeting. It’ll be in a couple of hours.”

“Is it time?” I said.

He nodded. “Would you like to go over there with me? I’m crossing in just a little while.”

“Uh. Sure. Let me get myself together.”

After I had cleaned up, I joined him in the boat bay, and we crossed the space separating the two ships. The starship looked just the same, a work in progress.

Inside Lermontov it was emptier than I remembered. Davydov took me through the rough tunnel of the lock-tube connecting the two ships, and showed me the living quarters of Hidalgo; walls had been knocked out, and all of the bedrooms were twice as big as before. The hospital had been extended, mostly for storage space. We passed stacks of plastic boxes, one nearly blocking a hallway. “Still moving in,” Davydov said. He seemed full of quiet pride, the captain of a bright new spaceship, all of his doubts vanished in the night while mine had accumulated.

“I’m tired,” I complained.

We returned to the bridge of Lermontov. There was still some time before the meeting. After that, those of us returning would cross to Rust Eagle. It was time for the parting.

They were going to leave Rust Eagle one boat, and just enough fuel to accelerate to about fifty km/sec and decelerate again—that meant a weightless coast around the sun, for most of the return, in fact. I cursed when Davydov told me that.

“I’m sorry about what we’ve done to you,” he said from the window. “All the impositions—the danger we’ve put you in.”

“Eh,” I said.

He stayed with his back to me. “Everything should be calm by the time you get back.”

“Hope so.” I didn’t want to think of it. We deserved to return to calmness.

“I’m sorry you’re not coming with us, Emma.”

That woke me up. I looked at his back. “Why is that?”

“You . . . were the last outsider. And I hadn’t talked with any outsiders for years. If . . . if you had decided to join us, it would have meant a lot to me.”

“You wouldn’t have to feel guilty about sending me back to whatever’s happening on Mars,” I said cruelly.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I suppose that’s true. And—and I wouldn’t have to consider what happened between us so long ago finished. . . .” Finally he turned and faced me, rip-ripped over to me. “I would have enjoyed your company,” he said slowly.

“And if I were going,” I said, “I would have enjoyed your company too. But I’m not going.” I clung to that.

“I know.” He looked away, searching for words, it seemed. “Your approval had become important to me.”

Wearily I said, “Not all that important.”

He winced. I watched his mouth tighten unhappily. Somewhere in me a tide turned, my mood began to lighten. After a long silence I stood up carefully (I had been leaning on the navigator’s chair, I noticed), approached him, reached up on tiptoe (hand on his shoulder) and kissed him, lightly on the lips. A thousand phrases jammed on my tongue. “I like you, Oleg Davydov,” I said inadequately. I stepped away as he reached for me. “Come on, let’s go down to that soccer field. The meeting can’t start without you.” I led the way to the door, quite certain that I didn’t want the conversation to continue any longer.

At the doorway he stopped me, and without a word pulled me into his arms, into one of those big Russian bear hugs that let you know that you are not the only consciousness in the world, because of the power and intensity of the flesh. I hugged back, remembering when we were young. Then we pulled our way down the jump tube to the enlarged recreation field. . . .And so we parted.

There was a final meeting in the big space they had cleared in the Lermontov, a meeting strange and tentative. To each group there, the other was dying. I felt as if miles of plasteel separated me from everyone else. Then they were all milling about, saying goodbye. It all happened very quickly. I felt very tired. Nadezhda and Marie-Anne found me and hugged me. I moved with the others toward the corridor leading to the boat bay, saying “Goodbye . . . farewell . . . good-bye.” Then Eric was standing before me, holding me. Davydov was at his side; they looked at each other. Davydov said, “She’s what you leave behind, eh?” Then he took my arm, led me to the corridor. “Good-bye!” Eric called. “Yes,” I mumbled. Then we were in the boat bay.

“Good-bye, Emma,” Davydov said. “Thank you for your help.”

“Don’t run into anything,” I said, my voice tight.

He shook his head.

“Good-bye, Oleg Davydov.” I could hardly say it.

He turned and walked out of the bay. I got on the boat and we shot out into space, back to Rust Eagle where we began. Once there, the new crew members looked looked at each other. Three MSA members who had decided to return, ten or a dozen people bitterly opposed to the starship effort, clustered around Valenski and Duggins, and another dozen people who had not cared, or who had helped the effort. We moved to the bridge by unspoken consent. I went to the window and looked at the starship again. The sun was behind us, and for a second our shadow crossed over the double ship.

I stood just inside the window, watching. I couldn’t think; every thought I had short-circuited and died.

The starship moved forward. I moved helplessly along the window with it, watching with the others as it receded, angling away: first a bright belt, then a necklace; a bracelet, a ring, a silver jewel, that diminished and diminished and disappeared.

All that was left was to go home, home to the red planet. At the thought, over everything else, I felt immense relief.

Since then we have all taken on the various tasks we are capable of. And I, in the privacy of my empty room, have written this record; an attempt to save, for the Emma of the following centuries, some account of these months.

Without a doubt this is the strangest crew Rust Eagle has ever carried. Ethel Jurgenson, Yuri Kopanev and I have taken over the work on the bridge, which is mostly monitoring at this point. Valenski in turn monitors us, walking about the bridge like a teacher during a test. Ginger Sims and Nikos Micoro, one of the MSA people who decided to return (very quiet he is), are taking care of the farm, with the help of three or four others, including Al Nordhoff. They report to me, but Valenski insists on being present all the time we are working.

Despite this suspicious atmosphere, relations between the various factions aboard are better than they were at first. About four days into our return Yuri and Duggins started a fight in the dining commons; they had to be pulled apart by Sandra and several others. The two principals were pretty well bruised, Duggins from flying backwards over a table, a wonderful sight to my eyes. For a couple of days we were like two armed camps. Eventually I went to Valenski’s room to talk. “You mind your own business and we’ll mind ours. Everybody just do their job. When we get back to Mars, they’ll take the ship into custody and we can all say what we like.”

“Fine with me,” he said. “It’s you who’ll be in trouble then, not me.”

True enough, perhaps. But since then things have been relatively calm. In our private meetings Yuri has suggested taking over the ship and going to Earth, but the idea was rejected; first of all, no one wanted to risk a violent confrontation with the loyalists. But more importantly, I think, no one was willing to face the idea of going to Earth. With its wars, its hungry billions, its gravity—we all instinctively felt that nothing on Mars could be as bad. Besides, as Sandra pointed out, Earth is no more than the home of the Committee’s bosses, and so it is not much of an asylum.

So we coast toward Mars and wait.

I have spent these days like a somnambulist, my mind existing in past months as I wrote this record, or wandering toward Saturn with the starship and its crew. At first I was helpless to control this behavior, and I walked through Rust Eagle without responding to my mates; later I cultivated it as a sort of act, as I noticed that it tended to subdue everyone else aboard.

We have no transmitter, and so we have listened mutely to what we can hear on the receiver. There isn’t much. Clearly the trouble has continued on Mars, and that makes it hard—not knowing what we are returning to.

But it won’t be much longer until we know. I have filled up the weeks with this record, inadequate though it certainly is, for who can translate the amazing bombardment of experience into words? Yet it has passed the time. Deceleration starts today, bringing the blessed attraction to the floor. And soon we will be in Mars space. If I can I will continue this record, to give it a sort of ending. But I fear they will throw us all in jail.

It was the rebels who met us.

I’ll never forget the look on Andrew Duggin’s face. Reality had betrayed him; the brave were springing up everywhere, even on his home ground, and he couldn’t escape them.

And yet I am sure that several of us collaborators were not much less dismayed to be received by anti-Committee forces.

Well, this is how it happened. They met us just outside the orbit of Amor, in one of those little police craft that are used to patrol the space around Phobos and Deimos, and to take prisoners up to Amor. As I stared out the bridge window at the red crescent, wondering if I would set foot on it again, they hurried out of the jump tube—about ten tense-looking men and women, dressed in working one-pieces. They pointed long-nose weapons at us, hot-light guns, and for a long, adrenalin-filled moment, I thought they were removing all the witnesses to the mutiny. . . .

“Is this Rust Eagle?” asked a blondhaired man, for we had been unable to respond to their angry questions by radio.

“Yes,” two or three of us replied.

The man nodded. “We are the Texan cell of the Washington-Lenin Alliance. You have been liberated—” he smiled, at our expressions I suppose—“and we are taking you as quickly as we can to New Houston, a free city.”

That was when Duggins looked as if the world had turned upside-down. Ethel and I looked at each other openmouthed—Yuri held us both in a hug, moving slowly in front of the guns. It was he who began to explain to the blond man, but he hadn’t gone on for long before we were ushered down to the boat bay, to transfer to the police craft. There we were separated into smaller groups and interviewed by a pair of the rebels. Soon I was led to a room containing the blond man and a woman about my age.

“You’re Emma Weil?”

I told them I was. They asked me some questions about the MSA and their adventures, and I confirmed the story that Yuri and the others had told.

“So there has been a revolution?” I said. “And the Committee overthrown?”

They were both shaking their heads. “The battle is still on,” said the woman, whose name was Susan Jones.

The blond man was her brother. “Actually,” he said, “we aren’t doing so well.” He stood up. “At first the uprising was planet-wide, but now—we still hold Texas—”

“Of course,” I said, and they grinned.

“And the Soviet sector. There’s still fighting in Mobil and the Atlantic, and in the tunnels on Phobos. But everywhere else, The Committee troops have regained control.”

“Royal Dutch?” I asked, my windpipe suddenly constricted.

They shook their heads. “Committee.”

“Has it been very violent?”

Susan Jones said firmly, “A lot of people have been killed.”

Her brother said, “They broke the dome over Burroughs. Killed a lot of people inside.”

“They couldn’t have!” I cried. Burroughs. . . .

“They did. They don’t care how many people they kill. There’s always more on Earth to take their place.”

“They’re being careful of property, though,” Susan said bitterly. “That’s to our advantage. Otherwise I have no doubt they would have destroyed New Houston outright by now.”

“It sounds like you’re losing,” I said.

They didn’t contradict me.

Suddenly the gravity shifted up, and we became heavier. Heavier still.

“But I’m with you,” I said, without planning to. “I’m with you if you’ll have me.”

They both nodded. “We’ll have you,” Andrew Jones said. “We’re going to need life-support people.”

The gee diminished to the familiar pressure of Mars. A minute later there was a gentle bump-and-rock. I was home again.

So I joined the revolution.

When we had been settled in the apartment the revolutionaries were using for their command post—it’s in the Dallas district, the industrial section of town near the air and water facilities, and the rim of New Houston’s perimeter crater—I asked Susan Jones what they were doing with Duggins, Valenski, and their group.

She smiled. “We explained the situation to them and gave them their choice; join us, or be detained. We told them the truth about the Committee, explained Amor to them. We told them that if any of them joined us and then did anything antirevolutionary, we’d kill them?”

“And?”

“Not one of them have decided yet. Most who have decided have chosen to be detained.”

“That Al Nordhoff is a good man—”

“He chose detention.”

Of course. And all of us who helped build the starship have chosen to join the revolution. No surprise, although I still have the feeling some of us might have preferred to be met by the Committee. (Am I one of those?)

We were taken to a short meeting with the revolutionary command here—a different sort of committee, a smelly and disheveled group of about twenty-five. They looked like my farm crew used to look after a hard day’s work. Or worse. Susan Jones told them what she knew of our adventures, and the story of our rescue. “We answered some questions, they looked pleased to see us; here was an antiCommittee project that had succeeded. I became very tired. It had been a long time since I had last slept. Finally they led us back to our rooms, and I fell asleep the moment I hit the bed.

Today they just wanted us to rest. Andrew Jones says some of them want to talk to us again. I’ve taken the opportunity to get down the story of our arrival. Now again, I’m going to sleep. The Martian gravity I love feels pretty heavy these days.

I talked to Andrew Jones this afternoon. He told me that the revolution began all at once, in every major city on the planet. The entire Soviet space fleet rebelled and pearl-harbored the rest of the Committee’s spaceships, with devastating success. “That’s why we were able go up and intercept you; we still have partial control of the atmosphere.” The railroad tracks connecting the cities were sabotaged, especially at bridges and other problem points. Air and water buildings in every city were stormed, as were some of the police barracks. These last attacks had uneven success. There were as many police as rebels, and so it had been a pitched battle from the start. Fighting in the streets, in every city. . . . The U.S and U.S.S.R. have sent reinforcements to the Committee,” Andrew finished. “They just arrived. A few big spaceships, really long-distance killers, and some advanced weapons. Personnel killers.”

“They must not be too worried about you,” I said, “if they’re trying to save the buildings and facilities.”

“I know,” Andrew said, discouraged and bitter. “They think they can just kill us and walk back into their property.”

“And you’ve lost contact with a lot of rebel-held cities?”

“You bet.” He became grimly cheerful. “They’ve retaken most of the sectors, like I told you. They drop in on the air and water buildings and blast there—if there’s still resistance in the city, they take away the air. A lot of buildings are self-contained, but that’s just mopping up. Some of the rebel cells have set up retreats in the mountains that are hidden—hopefully, they’ll have made it out to them.”

“What about the general population?”

“Most of them fought for us. At first. That’s why we did so well.”

“A lot of people must be dead.”

“Yes.”

A lot of people are dead, killed. People who would have lived a thousand years. My father—jail may have protected him, but on the other hand, he may be dead. And my turn may be coming.

They asked me to make a small speech for the rebels in New Houston, which they would then transmit to the other rebel outposts. “A few of us knew about the MSA,” Susan Jones told me. “And once the revolt began, the MSA members still here joined the fight, and they told everyone about the starship effort. It’s been a big story, people are very interested and excited to hear about it. To hear you announce that the starship has taken off would be good for morale.”

They’re in bad shape, I thought to myself. But I got the dozen of us who had helped Davydov’s people to sit with me at another meeting in the lounge of the command building. The same group, slightly larger and slightly more exhausted, gathered there. A couple of video cameras were trained on us, and I was given a mike. I said,

“The Mars Starship Association was part of the revolution. They worked isolated from the main effort and have existed for the last seventy-five years.” I told them what I knew of the Association’s history, aware as I spoke of the strangeness of the fact that I, indeed, was the one speaking. I described the starship and its capabilities; events from the past two months flashed in my mind, disturbing my concentration. “When I left on Rust Eagle, I didn’t know there was an MSA. I didn’t know there was an underground movement dedicated to the overthrow of the Committee. I did know that—I did know . . .” (suddenly it was hard to talk) “that I hated the Committee and its control over our lives. When I found out about the MSA, sort of by accident out there—” a sympathetic laugh—“I helped it. So did my friends sitting up here with me. Now that we’re here, we want to help you, too. I’m glad—I’m glad that the Mars Corporations Committee wasn’t here to greet us.” I paused to catch my breath properly. “I hope they never rule Mars again.”

And at that they stood and cheered. Clapped and cheered. But I hadn’t finished! I had wanted to say: Listen, there is a starship leaving the solar system! I wanted to say that out of all our petty and stupid and destructive squabbles on this planet, a pure, feeble effort had struggled away—that the revolution had been responsible for it, partially. And that it was a historical event to stun the imagination. . . .

But I never got to say any of that. My friends from Rust Eagle crowded around me, familiar faces all, filled with affection, and my speech was over. We looked at each other with a new tenderness; now, and perhaps from now on, we were each others’ family: Noah’s cousins.

Not much time left. The city has been broached by police troops, and we’ll be evacuating soon.

I was up on the crater’s rim with Andrew Jones when the missiles started falling on the spaceport just east of the city crater. The explosions were bright enough to leave blue afterimages in our eyes, and they lofted tall, lazy clouds of rusty dust above the larger chunks of spaceport.

Inside our hoursuits the attack had been soundless, though I felt the thumps of the explosions. “Our turn,” Andrew said without emotion. “We’d better get back down.”

We descended the crater wall and were just outside the command post buildings when the dome fell. I guess they weren’t worrying about property anymore; perhaps New Houston is the last rebel city left. We saw the starring appear around the perimeter, saw the huge sections of thin plasteel crack and tilt as they slowly dropped toward us. Then we were under the eaves of the building and in the protection of the door lock.

The plasteel rained down for a long time. The police troops followed immediately, coming down on individual rocket-backpacks. Figures in suits began pouring into our lock from indoors, not worrying about loss of air pressure inside. Andrew and I were handed two of the long-nosed light-rifles, and we slung the straps over our shoulders and stepped from the lock. . . .

There were a lot of them falling, in pale red suits. But it was a venerable way to come down. Beams of light laced the dark-pink sky; the police troops shot back as they descended. But they had to control their rocket-packs, and they were falling. Their aim was bad. We shot them out of the sky. I pushed the trigger button on my gun and watched the beam intersect with a human form that was falling and shooting in my direction. Suddenly he tilted over, and his rockets powered him down into buildings a few blocks away. I sat down, feeling sick and cursing the Committee for attacking in such a stupid and wasteful fashion, cursing and cursing. The common band roared with voices. A beam hissed near me and I scrambled for cover under a building’s eave, thinking, not rain drops but death beams, these eaves are for . . . stupid stuff like that. I looked up again. If a beam hit the rocket-packs for more than an instant, they exploded. Little pops like obscene firecrackers burst everywhere above me. I cursed and sobbed, hit the wall of the building with my gun, pointed it at the sky and shot again.

Over on the other side of the city the defense wasn’t doing so well. Hundreds of police descended in the residential district across the crater from us. Then they stopped falling.

A voice on the radio said, “Enemy is contained in the residential quarter. Return to headquarters or outposts five, six, seven or nine.” This was the first sentence in a half-hour that I had understood. I found Andrew and followed him to the command building. It was just three hours after dawn, when we had ascended the crater wall.

In the command apartment everyone took off the headpieces. Others were helping a man who was shaking uncontrollably.

After a half-hour to clear our senses, there was a meeting in the central lounge. Susan Jones, still in her silver suit, sat down beside me. “We’re going to evacuate the city.”

“And go where?”

“We have a contingency plan for this situation.”

“Good.” Ethel and Sandra and Yuri joined us, and Susan raised her voice to include them.

“There always was the chance this would happen, of course. We just had to risk it. . . .” Her mouth pursed. “Anyway, we’ve got some retreats out in the mountains south of here. Hidden colonies, underground or in caves. They’re all small and well-separated.

Since we took over the cities, we’ve been stocking them and supplying them with the equipment to become self-contained units.”

“They’ll spot us from satellite photos,” I said.

She shook her head. “There’s more land surface on Mars than on Earth. And geographic features so impenetrable as to defy belief. Even if they photograph it all, they won’t have the time or the people to examine all the photos.”

“Computer scan—”

“Can only catch regular shapes. Ours are disguised and hidden. They’d have to check all the photos by eye—an impossible task. Mars is too big. So. We have retreats, and they’re ready.

“The other choice,” she continued, looking at our faces, “is to fade away in the city and pretend you were neutral and hiding the whole time. Could be tough. But we’ve programmed a lot of imaginary people into the city register, and you could become one of those.”

Then the meeting was called to order by a tall thin man, and Susan joined him. “The police are contained for now,” he said. “But our situation in Houston is untenable, as you know. As soon as it’s dark, we’re going to disperse, and either evacuate or infiltrate the city. Field boats hidden in the Spear Canyon will take off for the mountains. There we’ll start the revolution over again.” The man looked tired, disappointed. “You all knew this was a possibility. That the best we could do this time would be to establish the hidden outposts. Well, that’s how it has turned out. I’m afraid we’ve lost space control. And that we’re one of the last cities left holding out.” He consulted with Susan. “Those of you who want to continue on in this city, we’ve got a list of apartments near here that still have air. And we’ve got the fake identities ready for your pictures and fingerprints and all.”

He whispered with the people around him some more. Ginger Sims joined us. Conversations began among the forty or fifty people in the room. “Okay. Get some rest before sunset. That’s all for now.”

So there it is. Ethel and Yuri are in the next room, arguing about what to do; but I never even thought about it. I’m going into the mountains. In a curious way it is as though I had decided to go with the starship after all. . . . Enclosed in a little underground colony, where we will have to work hard to establish a life-support system, I have no doubt. And yet we are still on Mars—and still opposing the Committee—so I have what I want. I’m satisfied.

There is little time left. I am too nervous to rest, I have been writing for an hour. We will leave soon. All of my friends from Rust Eagle are coming along. I think of the starship, flying away from all this . . . of my father. My thoughts are dense and confused; it’s hard to write one thing at a time.

The police will follow us into the mountains. The Committee will want to wipe out every vestige of resistance. But this desire is just part of what insures that we will succeed. We didn’t come to this red planet to repeat all the miserable mistakes of history, we didn’t. Even if it looks like it so far. Martians want to be free, truly free.

I’m going to go in the boat with Andrew, so he tells me. His sister and my companions will be along. That will be the most dangerous part, the escape tonight. It looks as though it will all happen as I dreamed it out there in the asteroid belt. I will run over the surface of red Mars forever and ever, for the rest of my life. I just didn’t know I was going to be chased.

AQUILA

Somtow Sucharitkul

Mr. Sucharitkul advises us that, while—scientifically speaking—the term aurochs should properly refer only to an extinct species of European wild cattle, many English naturalists today apply the name to the European bison, still extant in the forests of Lithuania; and he has so used it in this story. Why not? What fun would alternate history be without the odd anachronism?

Once, when I was very young, Father took me in the motor-car to the Via Appia, to see a man being crucified. It was some slave, some minor offense that I don’t recall; but it was the first time I had ever seen such a thing. All the way there—and the way from our estate is olive-tree country, beautiful in the height of summer—Father was lecturing me about the good old-fashioned values. It was as much for the benefit of Nikias, my tutor, as for myself.

As we approached the Via Appia we would run across peasants or slaves; I remember that their awe at seeing my father’s gilded motor-car, with its steam chamber stoked by uniformed slaves, with its miniature Ionian columns supporting a canopy of Indish silk, was sometimes comical, sometimes touching. Only someone of at least the rank of tribune might possess such a vehicle, although they are much slower than horses for their secret parts are manufactured somewhere deep in the heart of the Temple of Capitoline Jove, by tongueless and footless slaves who can reveal little of the mysterious rites involved. Truly the Emperor Nero must favor my father, who had never plotted against him and always sent him curious and witty gifts, such as that funny glowing shroud from Asia Minor that had been used to wrap up the living corn-god, sacrificed each year and found reborn in some unfortunate young man.

It was stifling. My toga praetexta was drenched with sweat. When we got to the crucifixion, it was late in the day and hard to get a good view; even my father was weary of lecturing me, and did so only intermittently as Briseis, the pretty little cupbearer, filled and refilled our goblets with snow-chilled Falernian. I was young then, as I have said, and remember little of the poor wretch’s agonies; he put on a good show at first, shrieking hideously as the ropes were tightened and the cross raised, but presently he sank into lethargy, his eyes (which I only saw by virtue of being perched on the motorcar’s driver’s seat) glazed over, and flies stormed all over him. We gorged ourselves on melons and on a concoction of peacock’s brains and honey.

As we started home, my father, enervated by the sight of bloodshed, harangued me all over again, standing proudly over the prow of the motor-car with his white mane and his senator’s toga trailing in the evening breeze.

“Titus, old boy,” he growled gruffly, dropping pointedly into Latin instead of using the Greek of casual conversations, “remember that you’re a Roman. As a citizen you’ll never be crucified, of course; but even so, a lesson well learnt and all that. The old ways are the best—I don’t mean to espouse the Republic or anything foolish like that, Jove forbid, only to make sure you grow up straight and true and my son, eh, what! We should never have let those slimy Greeks come over and transform us into culture vultures . . . in the old days men were hard: fighting hard, playing hard, not like your mincing tutor over here.” (Nikias and I were giggling in the back over some childish matter.)

“Listen, young man, when I talk to you! After all, the Divine Emperor Lucius Domitius (or Nero as he likes to be called) may do all this acting and singing, but he chose me, a sober and staunch man of courage and integrity, to receive the gift of this magical horseless chariot, of whose locomotive secrets only the gods Vulcan and Jove know.”

“But sire,” said curly-haired, beardless Nikias of the gaudy tunic and scented hair, “it is said that this device was invented by a Greek scientist, Epaminondas of Alexandria, by enlarging on the theses of the ancients Aristotle and Archimedes; that this same Greek now holds an important, but secret, position in the Temple of Jove; that this mysterious engine, over which rites must be said and sacrificial blood split before it will run, is a simple mechanical device, the basis also of the equally mysterious ships which even now have returned from Terra Nova laden with curiosities—”

“Impudent scum! You can’t buy a decent slave for a thousand gold pieces,” my father said. “I suppose I’ll have to beat you for impertinence.” He pulled a little flail from a fold in his toga. “Damn these horseless monstrosities anyway! Nothing to whip, the thing just chugs along without any feel to it—” At that he began to lay into my poor tutor, but it was more of a gesture than anything, and he missed more often than not.

“Tell me about Terra Nova, Nikias!” I cried. It was the first interesting thing to happen that day. “Is it true they’ve found barbarians?”

“Yes, and giant chickens, too, that go gobble-gobble-gobble, and vast herds of aurochs, and the fiercest barbarians imaginable—thousands in number! Why, they decimated the Tenth Legion before General Gaius Pomponius Piso—”

“Insufferable!” my father said. “Everyone knows that the Roman army, in its discipline, its order, and its bravery, has not been beaten in a thousand years.”

“Tell that to the Parthians,” said Nikias, deftly dodging a blow.

“They must be really fierce, these Terra Novans,” I said. I know I had stars in my eyes, because even then I knew I was going to be a general and have a legion to myself. Father could afford, after all, the kind of bribery that would get me some minor foothold in the establishment, and I’d go from there. “Are they as fierce as the Britons?”

“Fiercer. Wilder,” said Nikias, and then added (keeping an eye out for my father) “but I’m not going to tell you a thing about them until after you’ve memorized all the aorist and second aorist forms of these contracted verbs. See, when alpha, epsilon or omicron stems come into conjunction with the conjugatory endings—”

“Bloody Greek grammar,” my father grumbled as we pulled into the estate.

“He’s just jealous,” Nikias whispered in my ear, “and besides the Emperor only invites him to those parties so that wily Petronius can make fun of him when they have those poetry-improvising sessions and your blessed father, who can’t tell a hexameter from a hole in the ground, has to get up and warble to the lyre—I hear Petronius is writing him into his new novel, and the in-group at the palace is just in stitches—”

Perhaps I’ve painted too genial a picture of those days. But alas, they were all too short. My father lost favor with the Emperor, got accused by the Empress Poppaea of some tomfoolery, and was permitted to commit suicide. Despite the law, which is quite firm on the fact that descendants of traitors who honorably run on their swords may inherit as though the escutcheon had never been blighted, the Emperor somehow managed to confiscate the estate.

It was Nikias, that slimy Greek as Father used to call him, who saved my hide. He had a cousin, a eunuch, who was high up in the palace bureacracy, and who had become a millionaire simply by accepting one out of every three bribes that came his way, regardless of whether he followed up on the request to which the bribe was attached; and so our truncated family came to live at court.

Meanwhile I grew tall. Nero and a few other emperors expired in various unpleasant ways. Terra Nova was all the rage for a while, and several modern cities with all the amenities—baths, arenas, circuses—were built, mostly along the Eastern shore of that huge landmass, and procurators sent to govern the thriving colonies of settlers and Romanized natives. The legions pushed westward, into what is now the province of Lacotia. Some of our horses escaped and began to breed in the wild; the Terra Novans, in only a few years, became the most adept of horsemen by all accounts.

Frankly, I changed a great deal after father’s death, which taught me a salutary lesson about the human condition. I determined to become a fine Roman, to become, in fact, the very man my father had thought himself to be. I boned up on my Caesar and on all those battles; I studied Xenophon and all the Greek military historians, went off with the legion and got myself a few border commands, saw action in Britain, when the Piets came down on Eboracum, and again against some recalcitrant barbarians on the Dacian border. . . .

After a while I was noticed by the Divine Domitian; and it was on the very day that the Emperor granted Roman citizenship to all the barbarians of Terra Nova, and awarded himself the title of Pater Maximus Candidusque, or White and Greatest Father, that he also honored me with the command of the Thirty-fourth Legion.

“Titus, old chap,” the Emperor said to me, “have I conquered anything lately?”

We were ensconced in the Imperial box at the Circus; Domitian was choking on a pickled lark’s tongue with laughter over some lions who were making mincemeat of a bunch of recalcitrant Judaeans. His favorite, a peculiar-looking dwarf with an enormous head and staring eyes, sat at his feet.

“Well,” I said, feeling very silly to be out of uniform and having long since lost interest in the sight of gore, “there’s not much of the world left, your magnificence. West of Lacotia, perhaps, in Terra Nova—”

“Boring, boring, boring, you silly general. Those savages are fierce; and they certainly put on a spectacle in the arena; though I suppose you haven’t seen any of the new shows, being out in the backwaters quelling Visigoths and Piets.”

“True, my lord, but—”

“I want spectacle, Titus!” The crowd was roaring now as the slaves with meathooks dragged the corpses out through the gates of death. A lone lion straggled. Domitian clapped his pudgy hands; a bow and arrow was handed him on a silver platter. He waved for silence, and it fell just like that, twenty thousand people gulping in mid-sentence. “I haven’t had an interesting spectacle since . . . last year, when I had Amazons in motor-cars fighting pygmies on bicyles.”

“Yes, where are the motor-cars these days, my lord? I haven’t seen a single one since I got back from the campaign. . . .”

“Shush, shush, old chap.” He clambered up onto the seat of his throne and transfixed the lion in the neck with a single shot. The crowd burst out in carefully rehearsed spontaneous cheering. He sat down as they began to flood the arena for a mock sea-battle. “Ah yes, the motor-cars—I used them all up in that one circus show, Titus, and the priests of Jove haven’t deigned to cough up another one.”

“And how’s Epaminondas of Alexandria?” I said pointedly.

“Oh, we tortured him. Didn’t get anything, though; it seems that his Visions from the future’ have ceased. At least we got all the shipbuilding secrets from him before he passed on, or else we’d lose all contact with the New World. But you’re changing the subject,” he said warningly.

“Of course, my lord. The spectacle.”

“Do you remember . . . Marcus Ulpius Trajanus?”

“How could I forget? Brilliant strategist. Taught me everything I know, Trajan did. Very clever of him to lead the Dacians up the wrong way on the Danube. . . .”

“A little too brilliant,” said Domitian. “Oh, he had plans—big plans. Subjugate the Parthians. Blah blah blah. Well, we got Cappadocia out of it, but after that he went a bit far—wanted to march on up the Tigris and push the Parthians into India or some other such grandiose notion. Fortunately, I was able to send him off to subdue the Seminolii, an absolutely frightfurtribe of Terra Novan savages. Maybe I should recall him, but you know how it is. These ships—even with Epaminondas’ improvem—I mean the revelations of Jupiter Optimus Maximus—take a year to get here. And as it happens, the Parthians are attacking now.”

“Which Parthians, sire? I thought they were all wrangling over the throne since old Vologesus died.”

“God knows. Some petty king of theirs, fancies himself Vologesus’s successor, busy reuniting the place. Just a few thousand of them, Titus old chap, I’m sure they’ll easily be defeated by one of our matchless legions, eh, what? I wouldn’t even bother with it much, except that . . . the point is, my jprecious aurochs herds are in danger.”

“Excuse me, Sire, but . . . I’ve been on campaign so long. . . .”

“The aurochs herds, you fool! You know, bison. I’ve been breeding them in Cappadocia for the arena. Good grazing, you know. You’ve no idea what trouble it is to capture the damned creatures, to send good legionaires up through Dacia and into the forests of Sarmatia north of the Black Sea . . . and every one of the soldiers itching to slaughter barbarians! And since the aurochs have been rendered virtually extinct by the demands of the games—you remember Vespasian and his hundred-day opening celebration of the Coliseum, don’t you?—these Imperial aurochs are the only ones to be had on short notice. I understand that gigantic ones roam the Great Plains of Lacotia in Nova Terra, but shipping costs are prohibitive. I’d have to impose some capricious tax, on adultery or theatergoers or pumpkins.”

“I see.”

“You’ll do more than see! You’ll lead the expeditionary force, that’s what you’ll do!”

“Yes, my lord,” I said, my heart sinking. At least I would miss the reign of terror which, rumor had it, Domitian was about to instigate. I had no desire to end up being devoured by lions—or crocodiles, I reflected grimly as I saw them being released into the flooded arena to mop up the survivors of the sea-battle.

“You’ll take the Thirty-fourth,” he said. “What a spectacle! I may even come and watch the carnage.”

“But your subjects need you here in Rome, Caesar,” I said.

“Beware, beware, I’ve a purge coming. Your best bet is to be far from here; and fighting is, after all, the only thing you do well.”

That was true. I remembered the last major purge; for a moment, after twenty-odd years, I saw my father as he lay dying on a couch, back on the estate with the olive-groves. “Thank you, Caesar, for the signal honor,” I said, going down on one knee; but Domitian was busy shooting the crocodiles, cackling with glee as the draining arena churned red.

We set sail shortly from Brundisium. We used traditional triremes, because it wasn’t too far; but to show our status as purveyors of the Imperial Wrath, we were preceded and followed by a full escort of the new fast little ships. They wove in and out of our old-fashioned ones, making a thorough nuisance of themselves.

The Thirty-fourth was garrisoned in Thrace at the time, fresh from its foray into the land of the Dacians. My tutor Nikias was there, wizened but waggish as ever. We marched eastward.

At first it was clear that we were in the land of the Pax Romana. Town after town followed the prefabricated Roman pattern: country estates of the rich, a temple to the local god and another to Jove or Augustus or someone, a circus for family entertainments, an enormous public baths, insulae apartment complexes for the poor, markets, and so forth. The terrain would change from the hills of Bithynia to the plains of Galatia, but the towns looked all alike; it was one of the less agreeable aspects of the empire.

Naturally I adhered to strict discipline throughout. I didn’t hesitate to have men flogged or executed, and all down the good straight Roman roads I never once heard a sour rhythm in the thump, thump.

“Why should I? We are all equal; as their chief I shall certainly advise them, but public opinion may gainsay me.”

What a way to run an army. “Are you sure you’re the great Aquila who vanquished Pomponius Piso?”

“Ah, that funny little Roman who watched from afar and never once got a spot of blood on his toga! That was a wonderful war indeed. Some mercenaries of yours, from Hispania I believe, taught us the art of taking scalps, which we have adopted into our culture . . .” For the first time I noticed the grisly assortment that dangled from his waistband. “. . . but you Romans didn’t play by the rules. After you lost the war, you didn’t return to your own land. Now that I have seen your land I can understand why, though.”

What! This man dared to impugn the sacred name of Rome? I had a mind to have him flogged immediately, whitehaired though he was. “How can you possibly say this?”

“Ugh! Your crowds, the noise of your thoroughfares, the ugly monstrosities you call palaces, the stone images that you dote on and pray to . . . I thought I was in Hell itself, General. Where I live the land is green for a thousand miles, and the brooks are clear and men’s hearts soar like hawks. Much like this Cappadocia which you are even now despoiling with aqueducts that change the flow of nature, with circuses that exterminate whole species of beasts—”

“That’s enough,” I said. “We’ll fight this war without you! Go home!”

“How can we? We no longer have a home. Our sacred burial grounds were razed to make room for a public baths. An evil spirit has descended upon our tribe, don’t you see, and there isn’t much we can do about it. We went hungry; we ate even our own dogs, such was our shame. That is why we took Lucretius Lupus up on his offer to come to Rome. We look for an honorable war in which to redeem ourselves—we didn’t know that Lucretius Lupus had signed us up to kill Numidian archers in the cfrcus for the general amusement. But the Pater Maximus Candidusque heard our plea with compassion; that is why we’re here. . . .”

“I see,” I said without conviction. I was resigned to an ignominious defeat. I’d already lost one eagle after all, and in the days of the Republic I would probably already have committed suicide, but such was the decadence to which contemporary society had fallen that I did not even contemplate such a step. I decided to dismiss them for now and get back to serious work. “Go see the quaestor, Quintus Publius Cinna; he’ll feed and pay you. You’ll have to pitch castra outside, but in the morning I’ll assign a detail to help you dig fossae and build vallae.”

“Bah!” the old man snorted. “Are we women, that we must hide behind trenches and walls? We will put our tipis at the foot of this hill, in the very sight on the enemy—”

“But their catapultae—their ballistae—”

“What do a few machines matter? Since we have lost our burial grounds we do not care to live.” So saying the old savage made a gesture of dismissal at me—me! and swept out; the weird parade followed him, silent as shadow. Even the dogs made no noise. When I returned to my tent it was as if the whole thing had been a dream.

At dawn, driven by curiosity, I rode out of the camp with Nikias and a couple of tribunes. I was hoping that the Terra No vans would miraculously have vanished, but far from it: an encampment lay at the foot of the hill, just as Aquila had promised. If the enemy wanted to storm our castra it would probably be over the Terra No vans’ dead bodies.

What an undisciplined hodgepodge of a castra it was!

Their tents, scattered without any pattern or thoroughfare, were shaped like inverted funnels of the type alchemists use for straining their filtrates. Infants squalled; horses were tethered at random; and the tents, which seemed to be of the hides of cows or aurochs, stretched over a crude frame of poles, were decorated with crude likenesses of animals and men. No doubt Domitian found these savages comical; lacking his sense of humor, I found them rather pitiable.

And were they engaged in drill-exercises? Or marching up and down the hill to keep in shape for the coming conflict? Not a bit! The men, all naked save for scant loincloths, beads, feathers, and soft leather caligae, were lazing about in clumps, muttering in their guttural tongue.

I saw Aquila among them.

“Ave, General,” he said, looking up. “The Parthians have mobilized a wing of their army; I believe it’s young Chosroes leading them. They’re on their way.”

“How in heaven could you know such a thing?”

Aquila got up and pointed to the east.

“Whatever do you mean?” At the limit of my vision, a hillock much like our own seemed to be emitting little puffs of smoke.

“Ah, some of our braves are restless, General, you see. They decided to go for a closer look. Those are smoke signals.”

“Secret codes in smoke? Good heavens, how sophisticated,” I said; thump of infantry, nor did the legion’s eagles once waver as the aquiliferi held them high. In spite of himself, Father had made a man of me.

When I got to Cappadocia I found that Domitian had been grossly misinformed.

The Parthian host had pushed right through the mountains and into the western plain of Cappadocia, where lies a great salt lake. We were outnumbered five to one, and they had already taken the border town of Domitianopolis, only a year old. The precious herds of aurochs and their grazing grounds were behind the enemy lines!

I did my dogged best. We set up castra about a mile from where they were, up the side of a hill, and engaged them in the traditional manner, to little avail. There were just too many of them. In the second battle I lost one of my eagles, the sacrificial ram had three livers and and its heart on the wrong side, and I sat down to compose a letter to Caesar asking for help. I retired my legion to the next town, Trajanopolis (ah, human vanity) and prepared for reinforcements.

Some weeks later came the reply, as I was having my back rubbed in the local baths:

To Titus Papinianus, Dux of the Thirty-fourth, greeting.

Well, Titus old boy, got more than you bargained for, eh? Well, there’s not too much I can do. Terra Nova’s acting up—for some reason the Seminolii (who are a union of the southeastern savages, formed when we drove the Chrichii, the Chirochii and the Choctavii southwards, and these barbarians interbred with certain of our runaway Nubian slaves) think there’s something wrong with our teaching them to take baths and go to the circus and so on. Trajan is busy quelling them—only the northern provinces, Iracuavia and Lacotia, are friendly.

So I’m afraid there’s little I can do, unless I want to expose some other border elsewhere.

A curiosity, though, Titus. In his last shipment of entertainers for the arena, the impresiario Lucretius Lupus, who is vacationing in Terra Nova, sent me a whole tribe of Lacotians. Their leader, Aquila (actually some barbaric tonguetwister, but it means eagle) was the very man who defeated Pomponius Piso thirty-five years ago. They were supposed to do battle against Numidian archers in the Coliseum, but . . . why not?

Fm sending them on the next ship. Who knows, perhaps these Lacotians may know something—and they’re screamingly funny besides. Fight well—come back with your shield or on it, as the saying goes.

Ave atque vale,

Titus Flavius Domitianus, Caesar, Augustus, Imperator, Pater Patriae, Pater Maximus Candidusque, and various other titles, your Emperor and God.

Apparently I was a victim of the purge, after all. But at least I would fulfill my childhood dream of meeting one of those legendary Terra Novan savages face to face, before I died gloriously in battle.

It had been an exhausting day. We had returned to the old castra, and I was studying the war histories, trying to work out a viable stratagem, and—for fear of keeping the legion too idle—had detailed two maniples of infantry to dig more trenches and build more ramparts. Alone in the shade of my praetorium with a flagon of Chian wine, I tried different ways of deploying our meager artillery, our scorpiones, ballistae and catapultae, by arranging pebbles around a clay model of the terrain. About two thousand men, a third of the legion, were dead or wounded. It was depressing.

I’d fallen asleep at the table. A lamp burned still, causing the shadows to flit along the flaps of my praetorium. I was in my bare tunic; outside, guards watched, their pila crossed over the entrance.

Suddenly I opened my eyes.

The shadow on the wall . . . was there someone in the room with me? I listened. Was there a breathing? Ah no, my own, but—

There. A shadow on the wall, dancing against the quivering lamplight . . . I reached for my dagger. It was jerked out of my hands. I whirled round. In the eerie flickering, an apparition leered at me.

“Jupiter defend me!” I cried, doing every avert-the-omen sign I could remember.

The ghost did not disappear. It didn’t move either. I took a good cool look at it (I knew by now I must be dreaming, or else why would the guards not have noticed?) and Virgil’s description of the hell-beings of Avernus, whom Aeneas saw on his descent into Hades, was nothing compared to this—

It was a weatherbeaten face with a hooked nose and hawklike brown eyes, and it was painted in garish reds and yellows and striped with black. Its hair was long and white, and in a headband a number of eagle feathers stuck out.

It was almost naked; it stooped with age, and its chest sagged like an old man’s. A breechclout of some kind of leather hid its privates. It smelled of some strange oil; if it had bathed at all, it was no Roman bath it took.

It grinned at me.

“Who in Hades are you?” I gasped at last, when pinching myself several more times resulted only in an itchy arm. “And how did you get in here?”

It shrugged. “I’ve never yet met a Roman I couldn’t creep up on,” it said genially.

“You mean you’re—”

“Hechitu welo. I am Aquila the Barbarian.”

“Oh, but you do speak Latin, I see.”

“What do you think? We’ve been taking your baths, reading your ghastly poets, and watching your indecently gory spectacles for the past thirty-five years.”

So this was the famous tactician who had demolished the legions of Pomponius Piso! “I’m pleased,” I said, “to have such a distinguished leader as yourself working under my command.”

“Under your command!” The savage began to cackle. I was somewhat disgruntled; he said, “The White and Greatest Father said nothing about working under anybody. We came of our own free will, in friendship, to make war with honor if we so choose. Do you have any wine?”

“Oh. Sorry.” I picked up the flagon to pour some, but he relieved me of the whole thing and begun to guzzle. “And your men? How many are there?”

“How should I know? Who can count the trees of the forest?”

“Show me then.” I lifted the tent-flaps; outside, the two guards lay bound and gagged. The moon was full, and a fire was roaring at the crossroads of the via principalis and the via praetoria. I saw them in the half-light, a comical procession such as you might see in one of Plautus’s farces.

Some of the men were mounted; their horses were painted as bizarrely as they were themselves. Some wore their hair braided in the Gaulish manner, but unlike the Gauls’ it was well-oiled and sleek. Feathers adorned their heads. They had little armor, although a few had borrowed cuirasses and one or two sported ill-fitting helmets. Some were bare-chested; others had bewildering neckpieces hung with beads, animal claws, sea shells, and silver denarii. All the way down the via principalis they came. It was amazing that they had made no noise. Their women followed, carrying burdens, or leading dogs with packs tied behind them.

“Are these,” I asked Aquila, “my reinforcements? Can they take orders?”

“I don’t know,” Aquila said. “Is there good fighting to be had here?”

“Well, there are twenty thousand Parthians back there,” I said, jerking my thumb eastward.

“And who might the Parthians be?”

“Parthians,” I said (slowly, in the legionaries’ pidgin Latin, so they’d understand every word) “are a race of extremely wicked people from the East, who revile the name of Rome and seek, in their overweening hubris, to rob us of our territory and set up a rival empire of their own. They have already taken Domitianopolis and are about to ravage all Cappadocia.”

“And what about the Cappadocians? Perhaps they would prefer the Parthian masters to the Romans?” he said with a nasty chuckle.

What ignorant idiots! I cursed Domitian for playing this terrible trick on me. “Obviously,” I said with painstaking clarity, “it is the destiny of Rome to rule the world; the Emperor, who is a god and bloody well ought to know, is divinely charged with the right to conquer all inferior nations! Everyone knows that. I mean, you Lacotians have been Roman citizens for some time now, haven’t you? What a ridiculous thing to be arguing about, with those beastly Parthians beating at the very gates of the Empire . . .

“You Romans never listen, do you? By what right, pray, are you in Cappadocia, as opposed to the Parthians or indeed, the Cappadocians?”

Casuistry has never been my strong point. Nikias could never get me to understand the simplest Platonic dialogue, so you can imagine my confusion as I faced this foul-stenched savage who was making me defend the obvious. I glared at these Terra Novans, getting very red in the face. “Damn it, we own this land here!” I said.

“What a strange philosophy! How can land be owned? You Romans came charging into Lacotia, you gave us horses and pushed us out of the forests into the plains. What we had we shared with you, but you wanted everything. And all you give us is those bloody spectacles. You don’t have true wars, wars that hone a man’s spirit and sharpen his senses; you have wasteful wars in which men are like the cogs of your motor-cars and ships. I do not come to fight in your war. The others, of course, may do exactly as they wish.”

“You’re not going to give them any orders?” in truth I could hardly make it out at all, in the dazzling sunlight; and I was certain that Aquila was having me on. “From behind enemy lines, no less! How large was the party you sent out?” I asked sarcastically.

“What party? You know how young men are. I could not restrain them from this display of bravery. . . .”

“Perhaps there is something in your savage tactics, Aquila,” I said. “I shall look forward to your fighting by my side—”

“And why ever should I do that?” said the chieftain. His puzzlement seemed genuine.

I threw my hands up in despair. “Oh, Marcellus—”

The tribune by that name rode up to me. “Tell the signifer and the aquiliferi to ready their banners. Let the tubicines stand ready to sound my orders, and let the cornicines be not far behind, to relay the commands to the appropriate maniples.”

“Yes, General. Any particular formation?”

I sighed. “Oh, acies triplex, I suppose.” A doomed general might as well go out in good classical style.

“You haven’t much time, General,” Aquila said, chuckling, “they’re due in about five minutes.”

“How do you know?” I said, knowing that he would only come up with some outrageous boast of his men’s prowess.

“Oh, I’ve been putting my ear to the ground—”

Suddenly an earsplitting din rent the air. My horse reared up. I waved vaguely to the tribune. Somewhere a bucina wailed, and then I heard the shouts of thousands of men as they fell into the three lines of Julius Caesar’s favorite formation. I heard the deep-voiced tuba bray and be echoed by the shrill screech of cornua.

“Have fun,” Aquila shouted after me as I spurred my horse down the hill.

At sunset we straggled back to the castra, roundly beaten. I didn’t even want to reckon the casualties. I found my way to the praetorium and summoned Nikias to me. We had run out of the good Chian wine and were down to cheap Italian wines, but I was past caring. I downed a whole pitcher of it before Nikias arrived.

“Sit at the table, Nikias. There, opposite me, like you used to when you taught me all those contracted verbs. Did you bring your pen and parchment?” He opened his tool-box.

“Letters to write?” he said.

“Yes, I want to dictate a letter to Caesar. But first . . . write me up a document of manumission.”

“You wish to free a slave, master Titus?” An expression of alarm crossed his face.

“Yes. You.” The oil lamp sputtered briefly; the wick was low. The tent dimmed; the shadows deepened.

“You’re not planning to—”

“Yes, as a matter of fact I am. You can hold the sword while I run on it. But I want you to be a free man first.”

“That’s absurd! We Greeks have always considered the Roman predilection for suicide to be wasteful and unaesthetic, and—” He was in tears suddenly.

We were both sobbing our guts out, recalling the happy days of the estate with the olive-orchard and the motor-car, wallowing in paroxysms of grief, when—

Behind me, in the tent, someone cleared his throat.

I nearly fell out of the chair.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“Aquila!” I was almost incoherent. “How dare you interrupt this most private moment, you impudent savage—”

“There now, there now. I have no wish to see you suffer so. I come to offer help.”

“Help?”

As I looked around my tent, other savages resolved out of the shadows. Far from having an intimate tete-a-tete with my tutor and friend of thirty-five years, I might as well have been a clown in a Plautus comedy, waving my leather phallus at the hooting masses.

“These are,” said Aquila, “some of the young braves of my tribe. Here is Ursus Erectus . . . Nimbus Rufus . . .” The names were, of course, in his savage speech; I have translated them into a humanly comprehensible tongue. “. . . Alces Nigra . . . Lupus Solitarius. . . .”

“I am beyond your help,” I said. “I’m weary. Domitian surely intends me to die here, and he shall be satisfied. I don’t know what I’ve done to offend Caesar, but it appears to be the will of the gods—at least the will of one rather insistent one—”

“There now, don’t kill yourself,” Aquila said. “These four braves are bored. They’ve decided to invade the enemy camp, and they won’t rest unless they penetrate to the tent of their very leader.”

“What rubbish! Four people against ten, twenty thousand? Your boasts have been plentiful, but this one—”

“The Lacotia do not boast,” the chief said matter-of-factly. “You may have noticed that we sneaked up to your tent and were able to watch your entire little scene with Nikias unobserved. Rather maudlin, I may add.”

I could not deny that. “Since you insist—”

“Oh, they certainly do. They haven’t had a good raid since they crossed the Big Water.”

“Very well then,” I said, trying to gather up what shreds of dignity I yet possessed. “You shall each have a standard issue of weaponry: pilum, gladius and scutum. Nikias, see to that. You will depart immediately.”

“Thanks for the weapons, but our own will do very nicely,” Aquila said. “As for leaving immediately, though—”

“Well?”

“They can’t leave for at least two hours. A man’s got to look his best for a sacred thing like war. It’ll take them that long to get their warpaint on. . . .”

“What? What kind of fighting is this, where you stop to adjust your makeup and your hair? Is this a war or is it a Corinthian brothel?”

“Relax, General!” Aquila said jovially. “Honor and glory will soon be ours.” I blinked and they were gone.

For the next five or six hours I sat twiddling my thumbs. Even if they didn’t come back, I reflected, they might be able to slip into Chosroes’s tent and assassinate him. A dirty trick, and hardly the Roman way to do business—my father would turn over in his grave!—but I could salvage my conscience by noting that savages could hardly be expected to know about the refinements of civilized warfare.

I pulled out my military texts and studied them. But I was too nervous to concentrate. I pulled out some light reading, one of the scientiae fictiones by the Judaean Asimianus, who had flourished in the wake of all the marvels invented by Epaminondas of Alexandria whom Domitian had had executed. It was an idle speculation: future roads with fleets of motor-cars racing the wind at speeds of twenty miles per hour! Nevertheless, the sort of mindless thing I needed.

I was a little way into the epic poem Fundatio: Fundatio et Imperium: Fundatio Secunda, which predicts, amusingly, that Rome will collapse and we will enter an age of barbarity mitigated only by the foresight of one Arrius Seldonius . . . when—

“What’s that noise?” I shouted. Nikias was awake too, and hollering for the tribunes. “It’s an ambush!”

I staggered outside.

Coming up the via principalis of the castra, the four Lacotians were dancing, screaming incantations in their language, and hitting their lances on shields. Alarums were sounding around the camp. Centurions rushed hither and thither, bumping into each other and tripping.

The Lacotians were cavorting around in a bacchanalian frenzy now, and I saw that fresh scalps dangled from their spears and their facepaint was streaked with blood.

When they saw me they calmed down a little. “What on Earth—” I said. They began clamoring in their tongue all at once. I finally saw Aquila, shuffling up the via principalis.

“Victory!” he said. The braves began to throw assorted spoils at my feet. Chests of precious metals. An aurochs hide. Parchments written in the Parthian language. Aquila came forward and embraced me, beaming and smelling like a he-goat.

“They reached the tent of Chosroes?” I stared dumbly as one of the braves hurled what was unmistakably Chosroes’s armor at my feet. I could hardly believe my luck. Surely the Parthians (whose military organization was far less disciplined than ours, and who would be thrown into utter chaos by the death of a leader) would be confused enough to return whence they came.

“You have evidence of Chosroes’s death?” I said excitedly. “His head, perhaps, or some other such trinket I can send to Domitian?” A pause. Aquila spoke to his four savages while I stood nervously. Finally he said, “I have the honor to report that all four of my braves have counted coup on the Parthian leader.”

I smelled a rat. “Counted coup? What does that mean?”

“Among my people it is considered the mark of highest bravery to touch the enemy with one of these”—he held up a short, cudgellike baton—“and return alive. Killing the man hardly seemed necessary.”

“You took these spoils and you didn’t . . . even . . . harm. . . .”

“Oh, he was harmed all right. Nasty bruise on his forehead, given by Ursus Erectus, here. And Nimbus Rufus fetched him a smart one on the posterior—he won’t be able to sit down for a week.”

“I want him killed! I want him killed!”

There was a terse discussion amongst them; then Aquila turned gravely to me. “Alas, General, they’ve decided they don’t want to kill him. Seems that he fought so gallantly that he’s won their respect, or something.”

“But I command it!”

“We’ve been through all this before.”

I stalked into my tent. “Nikias! The sword!” I shouted. “It’s now or never!” Nikias followed me, shaking all over; poor soul, I’d never dictated his certificate of manumission, and I was too distraught to think of it now.

Aquila—of all the impudence—followed me in. “Come now, General!” he said. “I’ll never understand you palefaces. Here we come from over the Big Water to inspire you with noble deeds and courageous acts, and what do you do? You decide to kill yourself! It’s cowardice pure and simple. All you Romans are cowards. When you fight you put up barriers of metal so you can jab safely at the enemy. You throw great balls of flame with your thunder-machines and watch from a distance. You are no true men, but a gaggle of women. Or if you are men then you are hawks whose wings Wakantanka, the Great Mystery, has clipped. You are devils who have taken paradise from us. It grieves me to see such cowardice, for it declares your subhumanity to all men.” He paused for breath.

“Are you calling me a coward? Me. Titus Papinianus, son of Caius Papinianus, nicknamed The Stalwart, equestrian by birth, dux by the emperor’s decree, scourge of the Dacians, a coward?”

“The same.”

I leaped for the man’s throat. Deftly he stepped aside and I went crashing into the wall, ripping a hole in the fabric. “You see what I mean?” he said calmly. “Only a coward would attack a man old enough to be his father.”

I lunged again; this time I knocked my head on a tent pole. “I’ll prove it to you,” I said. “Send me your strongest brave and I’ll—”

“Brute force won’t show anything,” Aquila said. “However, if you wish to convince me of your bravery. . . .”

I waited, glaring at him.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I have a mind to ride far to the east, behind the enemy lines; to see the limits of your Roman empire. And, while I have no enmity for your Parthians, yet I will ride into their very maw and taunt them, so that you will see that Aquila is no woman. You see me here, a man past eighty, yet I will do this thing. Do you dare come with me?”

A general doesn’t permit himself to indulge in personal challenges, I told myself brutally. My father had beaten good Roman ethics into me often enough. But when I looked at this old savage something in me cracked. Here they were, these people who had stolen straight into the enemy camp and yet had scorned the easy victory of despatching the enemy leader. What was it about Aquila and the Lacotians? After all, they had defeated Pomponius Piso himself. Perhaps they were sorcerers; perhaps they had some cloak of invisibility or potion of invincibility. I had to know.

I no longer cared about Domitian, or his purge, or his precious aurochs herds for which we had wasted the lives of thousands of good legionaires. All I was wanted to do was teach this insolent, supercilious savage a lesson he would never forget.

The sun had not risen when we set off down the hill. There were four of us: Nikias and I came in simple tunicae, although it galled me to be so disguised; Ursus Erectus, the young brawny one I had met the previous evening; and Aquila himself, who came clothed in a painted aurochs hide and wearing a bundle around his neck which he called his fascis medicinae.

Exchanging not a word, we rode towards the east, the sky gray-purpled by impending dawn. At the horizon was a line of low hills, at the foot of which the Parthians lay encamped; beyond them, I knew, was Domitianopolis.

“To the north,” said Aquila, bringing his roan abreast of me, “there is a way around the hill. My braves found it yesterday. The Parthians, being the invaders, are unfamiliar with the country, yet they have not the Lacotian knack for sizing up the terrain; this is to our advantage.” His smugness was annoying me; and also the fact that he was easing himself into the position of leader. I thanked the gods that my cohorts were not here to see me made a fool of.

“Shall I believe this braggart?” I asked Nikias in Greek.

“Watch it!” Aquila said in the same tongue. “There are Greeks in every village in Lacotia, for we find the tales of their Homer far nobler than your superficial love-poems and the boasts of your historians.”

“Is there no way we can speak privately?” I said, frustrated. Nikias and I lashed our mounts on ahead; but I confess I did not know which way to go next, and had to allow the Lacotians to slip into the lead again.

Presently we tethered our horses in a copse at the foot of the hill and Aquila began picking his way through a rocky trail that led upwards. He moved swiftly, gracefully, like a wild animal. Ha! I thought, remembering one of the popular theories about the Terra No vans, which averred that they were indeed part animal, thus lacking souls and being oblivious to pain.

“I see you’ve snooped around here before,” I said.

“No,” said Aquila, “I’m just following the signs left by last night’s raiding party.”

“What signs?”

Quickly he pointed around us. Here an arrangement of leaves and twigs, there a few rocks heaped in a natural-seeming pattern. These he claimed to be sophisticated messages that warned of pitfalls, unsteady footholds, and the like. For a moment, I almost believed him. Then I realized that reading the signs of nature was a special ability of such primitive sorcerers, and that he was just having a little fun with me. I laughed at myself for being so gullible.

In a few hours we were overlooking the Parthian host from behind—

It took my breath away. Their tents were gaudy—brash reds, vibrant oranges, vivid against the green. They stretched far into the hill’s shadow. There were chariots, points of fire in the carpet of grass. There were alien standards. There were soldiers crawling like ants: I couldn’t begin to recognize all the types of costumes. And in the center of it all, an oriental palace in fabric, was the tent of their leader. How unlike my sparse, classical praetorium, or the rough hides of the Lacotians’ tipis!

“There are many,” I whispered. It wasn’t like the Dacians, who were, after all, barbarians not much more advanced than the Lacotians.

“Bah! Old women, the lot of them. They are river-reeds that sway when a child blows on them. They are even less courageous than the Romans, whom I once subdued. . . .”

“Will you taunt them now?”

“No,” Aquila said. “First I’ve a mind to see your precious Cappadocia. Let’s go east.”

“Very well,” I said grimly, ready for anything. Now that I had seen the extent of the Parthian host I knew that death would not be far. I felt a reckless exhilaration, as though I were a child again.

We scrambled down cautiously, fetched our horses and rounded the hill. A little forest hugged the eastern slope of it; and then we were on a plain. Lush grass thinned in the distance as the hills rose.

Suddenly there was a burst of gibberish from the lips of Ursus Erectus, who had been silent all day. He was pointed wildly at the far hills. I squinted.

There was . . . something moving. At first it seemed like a scar, a brown patch, on the hillside; and then I saw it move.

“The pta! Our sacred pta!” Aquila cried. He sounded younger. “At last our tribe may be freed of its curse, may find new hunting grounds! Would that I were a young brave, to find such pta and pte . . .”

Without waiting, reckless, the two Lacotians spurred their horses into a gallop. Nikias and I caught up with them, and soon I saw the brown patch resolve into little brown patches, my vision blurred from the horseback riding—

“The Imperial aurochs herd!” Nikias shouted.

I knew that such creatures existed in the new world, but I had not known that they would exert such power over the savages. . . .

The Lacotians were laughing now, whooping with glee, throwing their lances and catching them as they raced forward—

They were grazing. Thousands of them. Majestic creatures, bearded and sleek-furred.

And then, as we passed a rock-mound, Aquila’s steed stopped dead and whinnied.

I slowed to a trot behind him. A sickening sight greeted me.

They were lying in the grass, one or two of them, rotting. Carrion birds had settled on them, and when I looked up I saw more vultures wheeling.

The bison had been completely flayed.

“Why?” Aquila screamed at the sky, raging. A grief fell like a summer thunderstorm on the two of them. I saw that Aquila wept: copiously, without shame, like a woman. We rode on, but now their demeanor was grim.

As we neared the herd we found more carcasses. Always the skin would be stripped from them and their flesh remain mouldering in the heat. Aquila’s weeping did not cease.

And then, peering from behind a boulder, we saw mounds of piled pelts. And armed guards watching over them.

“Poaching,” I said, “on a grand scale. At this rate they’ll have killed and skinned the entire herd by year’s end.”

Aquila said, “Can this be true? Can they really take the skins and leave the flesh to rot, disrupt man’s balance with nature?”

“Probably they plan to trade them further east. To the people of India, or those folk with skins of gold who inhabit the lands beyond, these pelts may be worth more than silks and spices. . . .”

“We have rediscovered paradise,” said Aquila, “only to lose it a second time.”

The Lacotians exchanged words rapidly in their tongue. I caught the words pta and pte, which seemed to be the male and female aurochs. Then Aquila turned to me and said, his voice quavering with emotion, “My heart is like a stone, General. I can no longer even weep. When your people drove us into the great plains and gave us horses, we hunted the aurochs and our bellies were full. We took no more than what would fill us, and the hide and the bones we made good use of. When we were full we made war: holy war, not a war of senseless killing, but war to strengthen a man’s heart and give him honor. Now when I look upon this land I see what could be another paradise. We could be happy here, for when we hunt we are part of nature’s harmony. But these Parthians hunt wantonly, they take only the skins and discard the meat. They must truly be cursed. I cannot bear to look upon this—” He faltered. “I have seen too much. I am too old. It is a good day to die. I shall lie here on the grass until death comes for me.”

I was moved by his words. The savage spoke of strange ways and customs; but when I thought more deeply I saw that we were kin. For my father had had much the same thoughts, the day he learned of the Emperor’s disfavor and took it upon himself to execute sentence. But I didn’t want Aquila to die. I said, “Old man, last night you forced me to live. You called me a coward. Must I remind you?” Aquila seemed puzzled for a moment. Then he chuckled and said, “Of course, you’re right. That isn’t the answer at all, is it? Obviously we shouldn’t take this lying down. Instead, we’ll take on the whole bloody pack of them.”

“You’ll fight beside us?”

“What do you think?”

“So finally I’ll get to see the fabled Lacotian art of warfare . . . the unorthodox tactics so elliptically alluded to by Pomponius Piso in his Memoir of the Lacotian Wars?”

“Huka hey! Alea jacta est!”

Later I squatted uncomfortably in Aquila’s tent. There were four or five of them, the Quaestor, one or two of my tribunes, sweating in their full regalia, Nikias taking notes, and me. Aquila pulled out a pipe, filled it with herbs from his fascis medicinae, and lit it, whereupon a foul stench filled the tent and I could hardly see for the smoke; this he puffed on, and then insisted I do the same. On complying I seemed to fall into a shadow world; everything felt hazy, unreal. So this was one of their secrets . . . a magic drug that no doubt rendered them invulnerable.

“Does the nearby town have a public baths?” said Aquila.

“Of course,” I said hazily. “How could a Roman town not have any?”

“I want exclusive use of them for my braves for a day.”

“Righty-ho.” Perhaps they were getting civilized.

“I want some trees, felled in a ritual way which I shall prescribe, set up at the foot of this hill—”

“Aha! A Lacotian war machine!” I knew they’d have something up their sleeve; for magic, in itself, is rarely effective unless blended with careful planning, as I had myself learned in my dealings with the Dacians and Piets.

“You might call it that,” Aquila said, and he started to giggle ferociously.

A few more puffs, and it was as if I was seeing the world from under water. The Lacotians rippled. In the distance, Father drove up in his motor-car, scolding me, and off in a corner Domitian was shooting some chimaera full of arrows, and I was laughing helplessly. . . .

There was a great deal of grumbling from the townspeople when I requisitioned the public baths. But eventually we barricaded them off and the Lacotians—perhaps two hundred strong—trooped inside. A maniple was despatched to a nearby forest to fell the trees Aquila had requested, accompanied by one of their priests or homines medicinae who would perform the appropriate ritual.

After a while I wearied of pacing the colonnade outside the baths; I decided that I might as well join them. It’s good to get the kinks out of your body before a major battle, even one you’ve little chance of surviving.

I went inside. Signs led to the tepidarium, caldarium and frigidarium. The place was unusually quiet. Normally the buzz of social banter never ceases at a baths. I disrobed in the vestiarium, which was piled high with the animal skins and feathers the savages wore, and then tried the caldarium.

I rubbed my eyes. At first you couldn’t see for the steam, and then—

The pool proper had been drained. Lacotians squatted in ranks inside. Steam poured out from the heating-vents; the slaves must be working overtime underneath. Steam tendriled about them as they sat, unspeaking, each of them apparently lost in some private vision. Fetishes, the skulls of aurochs, ritual pipes littered the tile floor, which was a mosaic depicting the rape of the Sabine women. I made out Aquila, a shrunken man with age-blotched skin, kneeling in the center of the throng.

I descended into the empty pool, my feet smarting against the hot tiles.

“Ah, there you are, Aquila old chap!” I said. “Thought we ought to discuss a little strategy, eh, before tomorrow?”

Silence. The man’s eyes stared ahead, far away. He didn’t move.

“Hello? Hello?” I said.

He snapped to. “Oh, General Titus. Sshhh”—his voice dropped—“wouldn’t want to disturb these fellows, would you?”

“What’s going on?”

“Lacotian custom. Sweat-bath, you know. Some of the men are—oh—far away, on spirit journeys. Usually we have special tents for this purpose, but it seemed a good idea to take advantage of your modern Roman technology. . . .” He fell into a trance again, and I couldn’t rouse him.

I bathed alone in the tepidarium for a while and returned to castra, where an even more incredible sight awaited me.

At the foot of the hill, some distance eastward from the camp, several circles had been marked off with stones, aurochs skulls, pipes, and fetishes. At their centers stood the tree-trunks that my soldiers had felled, and from them radiated hundreds of strings.

“Ho, there!” I called out, dismounting. “What’s the meaning of this?”

A tribune came puffing up. “General, these savages have gone out of their minds!”

“Is this some kind of war-engine?”

Distant hoofbeats. The Lacotians were returning from the city. In a moment they had all split into groups and were lined up naked in the circles.

“I don’t rightly know, General, just what the blighters are up to. It could be some kind of rapid-firing slingshot, I suppose.”

“No,” I said, “those strings are strips of hide; anything for firing ammunition would require tormenta, twisted ropes with a spring action as in the catapultae. I can’t see any possible use for them.”

“Perhaps they mean to swing down on the strings, as apes with vines in Africa.”

“Then surely they would camouflage the engines so that their swoopings might contain some element of surprise.”

“Good heavens, sir, what are they doing now?”

One of the homines medicinae was solemnly mutilating the young men one after another, cutting slits under the skin of their chests, sliding in little sticks, and then attaching them to the poles by means of the strings. Another homo medicinae distributed rattles to them and placed little wooden flutes in their mouths. The braves gave no show of pain at all, but walked out to the edge of the circle, facing the center, stretching the strings to their limits.

“It seems awfully gruesome,” Nikias said, approaching from the castra with welcome bowls of Lesbian wine, just purchased in the town.

All at once came the pounding of drums and a most monstrous caterwauling from a group of old men, chanting a wavering, out-oftune melody whose long notes were punctuated by peculiar rhythmic gurgling sounds. At this the braves began to dance and blow on their flutes, staring steadfastly at the sun, which was shining fiercely. As the men danced they tugged at the strings, trying, it seemed, to yank themselves free; blood spurted from their chests. The din was astonishing. Presently a crowd of legionaires had gathered, and were staring at this display, cheering and jeering with the typical Romans’ love of spectacle; one might as well have been at the bloody circus. Even I, professional butcher as I am, felt queasy at this eerie exhibition.

I finally caught sight of Aquila, moving unconcernedly through the crowd.

“What the hell is going on?” I yelled above the cacophony.

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “They are merely offering up their pain. It is the Sundance, you know. You do want to win the battle, don’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

“They must dance,” he said, “until the skin tears and they break free. After that they will dress in all their finery and go to war.”

Children were running amok, poking at the men with grass blades. Women sang, their voices blending with the grunting hey-hey-hey of the old men.

“Do you mean to say,” I began indignantly, “that you have made me go to all this trouble—just so you could have some horrid rite?” Never had these people seemed more alien to me. I had been wrong even to attempt to gain their co-operation. We were doomed, and I had only been stalling for time. The best thing would be to fling ourselves on the Parthians and die with a good grace.

Well, as if in answer to my sentiments, bucinae and cornua began to bray above the din. I looked to the east. A line of glitter was rolling slowly across the plain, like a monstrous worm of gold.

“The Parthians!” I cried. Instantly the tribunes were by my side. “Aquila, enough of this rubbish!” I said. “We’re in real trouble now, and we need all the men we’ve got! Let everyone grab a weapon!”

Aquila just laughed at me. “What?” he said. “This is a sacred thing the men do. We cannot interrupt it. When they are ready, they will come.”

It was useless. I should have known better than to attempt to deal rationally with savages. Superstitious primitives. It was our job to civilize these people—with fire and sword if necessary—not reason with them. With a final shrug of exasperation, I mounted, barked some orders to the tribune, which were presently relayed by tubae all over the castra above. Legionaires rushed for their shields and weapons, and the audience for the Lacotians’ curious ritual of self-mutilation wilted away in an instant. . . .

I had barely two squadrons of cavalry, and all save one of my praefecti equitum had perished. These I held in reserve, placing them on the hillside under my own command. I had five cohorts of infantry and a scattering of auxiliaries: a few slingers, perhaps a hundred of the Cretan sagitarii, and so on. These, under the command of the quaestor Quintus Publius Cinna, I deployed, again in Julius Caesar’s favorite acies triplex formation, in three lines directly facing the onslaught, the troops in front forming an iron barrier with their shields. The artillery I scattered at intervals throughout the lines.

As I shouted my commands and the tribunes hastened to obey, the Lacotians continued their frenzied dancing, jerking at the rawhide strings and wildly piping on their flutes, so that it was almost impossible to make myself heard. The tramp-tramp of the distant enemy was something you felt more than heard, like a heartbeat, an impalpable dread. It had oozed halfway across the plain now, that multicolored worm of an army, and there was no time to lose. I chose a little cliff from which to watch the fray, as far as possible from the distracting noise of the Lacotians’ rites. Nikias was there; this time I remembered the certificate of manumission, and he was at my side a freeman and my hired scribe. Behind me I concealed the cavalry as best I could.

I gazed over the plain.

It seemed infinitely slow, the crawling forward of the enemy, from my lofty vantage point. But I knew there was little time. I saw Cinna ride back and forth behind the lines, haranguing the pedites.

The enemy stopped.

I looked them over. They were neat squares of color, each square perhaps a thousand men. We were strung out a long way, but not very deeply; it was only a matter of time before they broke through. I saw, in the distance, the range of foothills in which their camp nestled; behind them were the cursed aurochs herds which Domitian was about to make me die for.

I heard their trumpets sound. They charged in one chaotic melee: chariots, infantry, cavalry all jumbled together. It was their numbers that had been our bane, not their brilliant organization. The first wave crashed into our shield wall; the shields clanged open at a single command and a volley of fire-arrows burst forth. Horses whinnied and perished. Chariots overturned and upset other chariots. But they kept coming.

And lo! Our wall of scuta was breached by a suicidal charioteer, and hundreds of the Parthians were streaming through the gap, swords waving! Even from on high I smelled the blood, and the dust clouds were dyed scarlet, obscuring the view. I averted my eyes; the sight of hacking and bloodletting was not new to me, and held no interest. It was now up to me to decide whether to condemn the cavalry too, or to sound the retreat and commit suicide. It had been hardly an hour, and the outcome was already clear.

“Nikias,” I said, adopting a brusque tone to hide my sorrow, “bring the sword at once.”

“Yes . . . master.” His eyes were red. I did not weep—we had been through all that before, in the tent, when Aquila and his braves had so callously spied on us.

Suddenly—

An earsplitting screeching assailed my ears! Down below the fighting froze for a moment, the dust started to settle, everyone turned and stared to the east—

Demons on horseback were charging from behind the enemy lines, firing streams of fire-arrows into the dumbfounded Parthian ranks. The figures were painted in dazzling colors, the horses’ legs were decorated with bright lightning streaks, and they wore bonnets of feathers that trailed behind, and they were uttering such piercing screams as would make the very mummies burst from their pyramids. In the hills, I saw pillars of flame and smoke, and my spirits lifted. I knew the enemy camp was on fire. The Lacotians must have ridden as fast as the wind, and as silently, to have been able to accomplish all this.

Now the Parthians were scattering randomly, and my infantry were having an easy time of it as the Parthians rushed, crazed with fear, into their arms. I gave the order to give chase. The Lacotians had formed a circle of horsemen that surrounded the enemy host, and were riding around and around and firing.

“Quite a spectacle, eh, general?” I started. It was Aquila. He was mounted on a white horse, decorated with crimson lightning-stripes; his face was painted in red and white, and on his wrinkled brow sat a crown of feathers; behind him more feathers streamed. In his right hand he held high a feathered lance. He was magnificent. Although he wore no golden cuirass, his horse carried no gilt caparison, no cloak of purple flapped behind him . . . yet he looked like a god, his demeanor stem and implacable. The Parthians, who had never seen a Lacotian decked in his war regalia, must surely have thought them devils, for they are a superstitious folk, without the benefit of the Empire’s enlightenment.

“Aquila!” I said. “You’ve saved us! I’ve a mind to make all the legionaires perform your Sundance from now on—”

“You are far from saved,” he said. “Quickly. Bring your cavalry. Your men in the plain will pursue them; my men there will lure them. Meanwhile your cavalry and what remains of mine will round the hills, swifter than thought itself. If we become one with the wind, and soar like eagles, we njay be able to head them off at yonder pass.” He pointed to a crack, far off behind the enemy camp, which I could barely distinguish. But I wasn’t going to argue now. I sent the herald with the summons and we were off.

The war-fever was in me now. We hurtled over the other side of the hill, Lacotians and Romans together, following Aquila’s white steed. When we reached the pass I saw that Aquila’s men had been busy indeed. For, as the Parthians fought their way through the bottleneck, pushed by our men and terrified out of their wits by the screeching of the Lacotians, other Lacotians had been at work rousing the herds of aurochs. Hither and thither they galloped, in and out of the herd, prodding, poking, luring.

A few at a time, the Parthians broke through the pass—to run head-on into a stampeding herd of aurochs.

“Huka hey!” the Lacotians shouted in thunderous unison. Then they broke into a babble of warcries and shrill ululations, and charged frantically into the fray. Aquila turned to me and winked; then he too charged.

“Huka hey!” I yelled madly, wondering what it meant, as it finally dawned on me that a handful of eccentric savages had rescued the honor of Rome.

In the evening the women danced the scalps of the slain around a roaring fire, and the Lacotians feasted on fresh meat from the humps of aurochs. We Romans were all invited. In the midst of the festivities we had a surprise visitor—Domitian himself.

He came up the hill in a palanquin borne by eight burly slaves. Couches had been set up for the Romans, a little way off from the dancing; Aquila and I were quaffing Samian wine from the same goblet as though we’d known each other for ages. When Domitian stepped off the litter I gaped and dropped my goblet.

“No ceremony, Titus old boy,” the Emperor said. “I told you, didn’t I, that I’d half a mind to come along and observe the spectacle? And you didn’t disappoint me. Ah, if only I could recreate this battle on the Campus Martius outside Rome . . . set up bleachers for the populace, with vending stands for cold drinks and sausages . . . how the people would love me! I imagine I could stave off assassination for quite a while with a show like that.”

“Caesar—”

“Imagine it! This Sundance they’ve described to me—could it be done in the arena, do you think?”

“Certainly not,” Aquila said. “It is a sacred thing.”

“Oh, don’t worry, old chap, I’m only joking. That’s what I like about you savages though—you dare to contradict me, unlike these spineless Romans.” I started to say something, but checked myself. “What’s this you’re eating, barbarian victuals? Let’s try some.” He stuffed a piece of roast aurochs haunch into his mouth. “You shall have a triumph, Titus! And I shall make you a procurator.”

“I’m deeply flattered, Caesar,” I said, hoping I would not be packed off to some rebellious wasteland like Judaea.

“Though, frankly, things haven’t gone according to plan. I was rather hoping you’d be out of my hair by now.”

“Caesar is merciful.”

“And as for you, Aquila—”

“O Pater Maximus Candidusque,” Aquila said softly, “I have seen the land of my dreams. When I was a young brave I came to this land in a spirit journey. I knew that the old ways were dying in Lacotia, but still I hoped. . . .”

“Very well, old man,” said Domitian. “You and your people shall stay here in Cappadocia. I only ask that you defend my herds. Take what you need for sustenance, and cull the best each year for my games, but protect them and see that they multiply.”

When Aquila had translated these words to the Lacotians, they cheered the Emperor loud and long. Domitian beamed. He was like a child, really, and liked to do the right thing when it didn’t involve too much work.

“As for you, Titus, what do you want?”

What did I want? I turned it over in my mind. I wanted to retire from fighting. I wanted a comfortable house in the country. Simple things. I didn’t think the Emperor would understand, so I said, “I want whatever you want, my lord.”

“Yes, yes, old chap. You’re rather lucky in a way, you know, being an incompetent idiot and all that. No one of any competence has been permitted to rise in power ever since my father Vespasian became Emperor. Your well-meaning stupidity has served you well . . . and you’re damned lucky besides! After your victories in Dacia you were on the short list for purging, you know . . . so what do you think of these barbarians, eh? Do you think you could whip them into shape, lead them down the golden path to Roman citizenship, and all that?”

“Well—er—”

“How succinct of you. Well, you’re leaving for Lacotia right after the triumph—as my new governor.”

I looked wildly about me. Was I seeing things, or had Aquila and Domitian just exchanged a sly wink? Mustering all my confidence, I said, my face getting redder by the second, “You can rely on me, Caesar. By next year, these barbarians will bloody well enjoy taking baths and going to spectacles. They’ll read Virgil every morning before breakfast, and they’ll all wear togas and speak Latin and they’ll worship Venus and Mars and Jupiter and Minerva instead of their heathen idols, even if it kills me!”

I turned and saw Aquila guffawing uproariously. Then I took another swig of wine and laughed myself into a stupor.

NIGHTLIFE

Phyllis Eisenstein

Phyllis Eisenstein, whose new novel, IN THE HANDS OF GLORY, was recently published by Timescape, returns with a fascinating tale about a successful young career woman and her search for what is quite literally the man of her dreams.

Lightning had struck, canceling out her power of flight, and she was falling, falling through the cloudless sky. Like a steel bar it had slammed her, making her body ring as if she, too, were made of metal. There was no pain, but all she could see and hear and think was that strident, demanding sound. With both hands, she tried to blot it out as the desert rushed upward. At the last instant, she saw her shadow bloom from a pinpoint on the sand to a great black mouth that reached out to swallow her.

Jane Bentley rolled over and groped for the alarm. Someday she would buy a clock radio, she kept promising herself that, every time the bone-jarring bell spoiled her dreams. She yawned and stretched, remembering the scenario with a smile. Super powers again—deeds of strength done in secret, rescued people never knowing whom to thank, and then the long, wingless sail through space and sea and sky, like swimming underwater with never a need for breath. Even the final fall could not dampen her lingering sense of exhilaration. As a child she would have awakened sweating and shaking, grasping the blankets in an effort to brake that terrible descent. But at thirty-two Jane Bentley had long since come to terms with her dreams.

Her waking life she saw as prosaic, through some people would have envied it. By external appearance, she was a successful, career-oriented young woman, upwardly mobile. Her title was Account Executive, and she collected a fat salary from a multimillion-dollar Chicago insurance company for being bright, efficient, and charming. She wore the right clothes, spoke the right words, smiled the right smile. Her co-workers liked and respected her; her superiors raised her salary regularly. She had worked hard to become the person she seemed, and she had reaped rewards along the way—a luxury condominium, jewelry, travel, all the creature comforts. But none of it touched her. She was satisfied with her days, but not happy with them.

This day was much like all the others. She showered and dressed quickly, grabbed a cup of coffee, and dashed for her train. She read a newspaper on the way downtown, absorbed what seemed important in it, and tossed it away on entering her office. The phone rang almost as soon as she sat down. She spent the morning dealing with people in a clear, smooth voice, offering suggestions, alternatives, guidelines. She dictated a few letters for her secretary before going to a business lunch that occupied half the afternoon. With the meal, she drank the sparkling water that had recently become so popular with rising young executives, and she returned to the office sober and ready to tie up all the loose ends on her desk. She hated to leave work unfinished, though she never stayed late to do it and never took any home with her. Toward 4:30, the man in the next office stopped by to ask her out for dinner; he was pleasant, nice-looking, divorced, and uninteresting. As always, Jane said no. At five o’clock she went home.

She was a good cook, treating cooking, like everything else she did, with the time and care necessary for superior results. She ate her lavish evening meal in front of the television set, watching an in-depth news show on the public station. After washing and drying the dishes and laying out her clothes for the next day, she went to bed. It was eight o’clock. She always went to bed at eight o’clock, if not earlier. Rather than spend an evening with the executive from the next office, rather than play bridge with the neighbors, rather than watch the late movie, she slept ten, eleven, twelve hours a night. And dreamed.

She closed her eyes and willed her muscles to relax, clearing her mind of the day’s complexities. They were as trivial as a crossword puzzle and just as dull—merely a way to pass the time and be well-paid for it. Dreams were more real to Jane than reality, more gripping, sharper, brighter. And so she slept as much as possible, luring them to her with an open, eager mind. Any cue could spur them. Thinking of last night’s dream as she drifted off could bring a continuation of it, a second episode in a convoluted adventure that might take weeks to spin itself out, night after night. Or she could contemplate a fresh set of elements, perhaps the Arctic, Eskimos, dogsleds, furs, and gold buried under the mountains east of Nome. She pulled the covers closer to her throat; the evening was too cool for wintry thoughts. She preferred the desert just now, and the sand blazing hot under the high sun. The desert, cactus, cholla, yucca, and the horizon infinitely far away under the crystalline blue sky.

She had fallen, she knew, out of that empty sky. She lay sprawled on the ground, pinned there by heat. Her fingers closed on alkali sand, and sunlight seared so bright through her closed eyelids that she dared not open them. She tried to roll over, but there was a lethargy upon her, and she could barely turn her head. Lightning had drained her muscles of more than their superhuman strength. She rested, gasping at the baking air, feeling moisture being pulled from her lungs with every breath.

At last she tried again, and with an effort that stabbed her chest and made her sinews cry out she wrenched herself up on one elbow, one hip, and let her head hang down. Her hair swung forward, a dark curtain about her face, and so she was able to open her eyes finally and look out at her sandy prison. It rolled outward in all directions, an undulating landscape scattered with scrub, and in the distance were purple mountains that might have been real, or clouds, or just mirage. Whatever they were, they looked a thousand miles away. Jane pushed herself to her knees and then, unsteadily, to her feet. She was dressed for the desert—boots, jeans, longsleeved shirt, sombrero hanging down her back; she pulled the hat up on her head and began to trudge toward the mountains.

She had walked forever, or maybe just a few minutes, when she saw the riders. Distance and perspective baffled her in that sun-scorched endlessness, and at first she thought they were grasshoppers, jack rabbits, coyotes, anything but men on horseback. Their images rippled and danced with heat shimmer. And then they turned toward her. The man in the lead waved.

She stood still as they approached, trying not to sway with the weariness that dragged at her. They shouted, but she could not make out the words until they had stopped around her and swung down from their mounts. And then it was a jumble of voices, all wanting to know how she had gotten out there, so far from everywhere. She had no answer for that, no answer she cared to give, and her lips were too weak to form one anyway. She stared at them, a dozen men or so, mostly looking like they had been out in the desert too many years. Their clothes were sweat-stained and grimy, their beards weeks grown out, their eyes red-rimmed and tired. They stood as if carrying heavy packs on their shoulders, and when they spoke, their voices were as dusty as their wind-and sun-burned faces.

All but one.

He was young, barely more than a boy, and his eyes were bright and sharp and a startling blue in his pale face. He was tall and carried himself very straight, and either he shaved regularly or didn’t yet need to. His voice was a high, sweet tenor, rising dearly above the rest.

He was very young, but it was to him that Jane looked. The other men seemed somehow out of focus. And it was he who stepped forward to catch her when her legs buckled, lifting her with one arm beneath her shoulders and one behind her knees as the other men crowded around and stared.

“Don’t be frightened, ma’am,” he said softly. “You’re among friends.”

She let her head rest on his shoulder, her eyes half-dosed. She could feel the young, corded muscles beneath his flannel shirt as he carried her effortlessly, as he lifted her to his saddle. He climbed up behind her and held her securely against him as he nudged the horse to a trot. Jane hardly felt the motion; his arms seemed a cushion that transformed the horse into a boat gliding on calm waters. The desert receded, the heat and light and sand melting away for some timeless time. And looming before her eyes, his profile was clean, almost delicate, with the beauty of the last flush of youth.

At last a box canyon coalesced before them, and they moved down into it. On the canyon rim, two sentries waved their rifles, to let the dozen riders pass.

It was an elaborate encampment. On one side, a large corral held a few horses; on the other, a cluster of ramshackle cabins crowded against the canyon wall. After tethering their mounts, the riders scattered, except for the boy and one other. The boy took Jane down from his horse and carried her into one of the cabins; the other man followed.

The interior of the cabin was divided into two rooms—eating space in the front and a small bedroom, shut off by a thin door, in the back. She had expected sleeping bags on the floor, or perhaps rough bunks against a wall, and indeed there was a bedroll beside the table in the main room. But the back room held a real bed with steel frame, springs, and a firm, sheet-covered mattress. The boy set her on it.

“You’ll be all right now,” he said, pulling her boots off. “You just need some rest.” He smiled and patted her shoulder lightly. “Don’t you worry ma’am. We’ll look after you.” He turned away.

She tried to reach out with one hand, but she could barely raise it. “Please don’t go,” she whispered.

He looked back from the doorway. “We’ll just be out here, me and Bob. Fixing some dinner. You hungry?”

She shook her head.

“Well, we’ll leave the door open, and maybe when you smell it cooking, you’ll change your mind.”

“Stay with me,” she whispered. “Just a minute.”

He hesitated, then came back to the bed. In the space beside her hip, he sat down gingerly. “Is there something I can do for you, ma’am?”

She smiled. He was easy to smile at, his open, boyish face bending over her. “No,” she said. “I just wanted to say . . . thank you.”

He smiled back at her, and his hand moved to cover hers, to squeeze it briefly. “No need for thanks, ma’am. Anybody would have picked up a loner in the desert. Wouldn’t be human not to.”

“What is this place?” she asked.

He shrugged. “No place. Just where we live. It hasn’t got any name.”

“Do you?”

“You can call me Jack.”

“Jack. I’m Jane Bentley.”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Jane.”

His friend Bob leaned in through the doorway. “You gonna jaw with the lady or cook us some dinner?”

Jack stood up. “My turn to fix the food,” he said apologetically. “Be right there, Bob.” He looked down at Jane for a moment. “Don’t you fret, Miss Jane. You’re safe here.”

He went out, and she dozed for a time. When she opened her eyes again, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, a bowl and spoon in his hands. The room was full of the smell of cooked meat.

“Maybe you want some stew?” he said, offering the bowl. “It’s good.”

She sighed. Her whole body seemed made of lead. “I’m too tired to eat,” she said. “Maybe later.”

“Let me help you.” He propped her up with extra pillows, and he fed her, spoonful by spoonful, until the contents of the bowl were in her stomach. “I know that’ll help you feel better,” he said.

She smiled. “It was very good.”

“The cook thanks you, ma’am. Nothing like red meat to get the blood moving again. You’ll be up and about in no time.”

“I hope so.”

“You get some rest now, ma’am. A good night’s sleep’ll make a world of difference to you. And if you want anything, don’t be afraid to call; Bob and I’ll be right in the other room.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

When he was gone, she turned her face to the small window, where she could see the red of sunset reflected on the canyon wall. Scarcely a moment seemed to pass before it turned to morning sunlight and she was blinking sleep-gritty eyes against the brightness. She raised a hand to rub at them and was surprised at the ease of that movement. She flexed her fingers—still weak, but not the bone-deep weakness of before.

The door opened, and Jack came in with a bowl of stew. “Sorry we can’t offer you a proper breakfast, Miss Jane,” he said, “but we run out of bacon and laying hens a few months back.” He sat on the bed and watched her feed herself. “See, your strength’s coming back, just like I said it would. Why, pretty soon you’ll be good as new.”

She smiled. “I do feel better today.”

He took the bowl when she was finished, set it on the floor. “You know, we’re all pretty curious about you, ma’am. What were you doing out in the desert all alone? You’re not from these parts—we know that.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, manufacturing a quick lie. “I’m from the East. From Baltimore.”

“Baltimore?”

“I work for the Baltimore Sun. That’s a newspaper. I came out West to write a series of articles on local heroes.”

“Heroes? Precious few heroes around here.” He shook his head slowly. “I’m amazed, ma’am; I’m truly amazed. This is tough country for an Easterner. Specially a woman.”

“So I discovered. My horse was frightened by a rattlesnake and threw me. I don’t think it was actually bitten, but it did run off before I could pick myself up.”

“Where were you going, ma’am? And where were you coming from? I don’t know how long you were walking, but you didn’t seem to be on the way to anywhere.”

“Well, I had a map,” she said. And then she shrugged. “But I guess I got lost pretty early on. I certainly don’t know where I am now.” She grinned at him. “But I must have been on the way to somewhere, or you wouldn’t have found me.”

“We were coming here, but that’s nowhere sure enough. It wouldn’t have been on your map.” He stared at her for a long moment, and finally he chuckled and said, “The Baltimore Sun. Well, don’t that beat all.”

“Now you know about me,” she said. “What about you?”

“Oh, nothing so glamorous, Miss Jane. We’re Just prospectors. Old silver mines hereabouts, you know. Worked by the Indians, and the Spaniards after them. We’re looking for gold, too, though we haven’t found any yet.”

She looked into his bright blue eyes and knew that his story was a lie, a cover for something else, and she wondered if he had understood the same about hers. “Am I keeping you from work?” she said. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.”

“No, ma’am, that doesn’t matter. I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. I’m just as happy setting here and passing the time with you.”

“Everyone else is gone then?”

“Well, no.” He waved a hand negligently. “I guess it’s just not a working day today. Not mining work, anyway. They’re fixing things—saddles and gear. It’s got to get done sometime.”

“They’re not staying because of me, are they?”

“Oh, no, ma’am, don’t feel that way.”

“I don’t want to be a burden to you all. I’ll be well soon, I know.”

“Sure you will. And in a few days we’ll ride you down to the stage line and send you on to Tucson. You can go near anyplace from there. Looking for your heroes.”

She nodded. “I’d be much obliged.” It came to her then, the truth behind the lie. They were searching for gold and silver all right, but they found it on the Wells Fargo stage. The others fit that mold—desperate men hiding in a desperate land. But Jack seemed young and fresh and innocent for an outlaw.

The brief silence that had fallen over them seemed to make him uncomfortable, and at last he stood up. “Can I get you something? Some more stew? There’s still plenty.”

“No, thank you. But you could give me an arm to lean on. I’d like to get up.”

“You’re sure you feel strong enough?”

“I don’t know. Won’t know till I try, will I?” She reached out to him with both hands, and he caught them firmly. She stood, though her knees shook. “I certainly did a lot of walking yesterday. It must have been a thousand miles, the way my muscles feel.”

“Steady,” he said.

“I could use a pair of crutches. But you’ll just have to do for now.” She took a step and then another. She swayed.

“Careful,” he said, loosing her hands to slide a supporting arm around her shoulders. “Don’t push yourself so hard right away.”

“I feel foolish.” She let herself lean against him. “Helpless. I’m not used to that.”

“Give it some time, Miss Jane. Don’t be so impatient.”

She looked up into his face. “I’m afraid I haven’t any patience at all.” She raised her fingers around the back of his neck and pulled his head down for a kiss. It was a light kiss, just a feathery brushing of lips, and he pulled away first.

“You must be tired,” he said.

She rested her head against his shoulder, nodding.

“Maybe you’d better lie down.” He lifted her easily and carried her the two steps to the bed. When she would have clung to him, he peeled her arms away gently. He smiled hesitantly then kissed her forehead. “There are things I have to do. You’ll be all right while I’m gone.”

“Must you go?” she murmured.

“Yes.”

“Will you be gone long?”

“No, not long.” He stepped away from the bed. “You’ll be all right.”

After he left she turned her face to the window, though there was nothing to see there but shadow on the canyon wall. She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, the window had tripled in size and acquired blue curtains. She had awakened ten minutes before the alarm went off.

In the shower, she tried to think of where she might have seen Jack before. He wasn’t a movie star or a co-worker, nor a neighbor, she was sure of that. A fellow commuter perhaps? She watched for his face as she went to work, watched the train and the streets, the elevator and the corridors, but she couldn’t find him. Even though he was as clear and crisp in her memory as the man in the next office, she couldn’t place him, not even as a composite of more than one person.

The business day flowed by with its usual demands that Jane handled with her usual competence. But in the back of her mind, through the hours, the desert burned, waiting. As she settled down for sleep that evening, she tried to hold the whole of the night before in her mind—the box canyon, the tumble-down cabin, and Jack. Above all, Jack.

She became aware of the mattress first, firmer than her own, and then the tiny room came into focus around her. The light beyond the window was ruddy—sunset. She sat up and flexed her muscles. She felt well, strong. She stood and walked without difficulty. She gripped the steel frame of the bed and tried to dent it with her fingers, but it resisted. Strong she was, as strong as an ordinary human being, but not herself yet. She wondered if she ever would be again. How powerful was lightning?

Behind her, the door opened, and she swung around abruptly to see Jack enter. Tall and lean, he walked with easy grace, almost like a dancer. Three paces into the room he stopped and looked at her intently, his expression—wary? Then he smiled slightly. “You must be feeling better.”

“I am.”

He shut the door firmly. “I want to talk to you,” he said. “Sit down.”

She sat on the bed and patted the space beside her. “You too.”

He ignored the invitation and stood in front of her, just out of reach. He folded his hands across his chest. “Jane Bentley,” he said, “who are you?”

She frowned. “Haven’t we been through this already?”

“I don’t think so. I think this Baltimore Sun business is nothing more than an invention.”

“You mean, like your gold and silver prospecting?”

His eyes narrowed. “What do you want here?”

She leaned back on her arms. “What would you have me want, Jack?”

He pointed one finger at her. “Look here, Miss Jane—there are fourteen armed men out there, and they’re beginning to wonder why a lone woman was wandering around so close to this camp.”

“But I told you that.”

“Oh, I know what you told me. But that doesn’t mean they believe it.”

“Do you?”

He dropped his hand. “I don’t think so.”

“Then why do you think I’m here?”

He shook his head. “Damned if I know, ma’am. I just know that you’re as likely to get your head blown off real soon as anything else.”

“Touchy bunch, aren’t you? You make a habit of killing unarmed women?”

“Unarmed women don’t make a habit of looking for us.”

“I wasn’t looking for you, Jack.” She smiled slowly. “But now that I’ve found you,. I don’t mind saying that I’m glad I did.”

He turned away sharply, and his back was rigid. Tm trying to help you, Miss Jane,” he said in a low voice, “if there’s some reason for it.”

She walked up behind him and ran her hand up his spine to his neck. She stroked the skin just beneath his hairline. “I’m truly amazed that fourteen armed men are afraid of little me. Or is it just you that’s afraid, Jack?”

He turned slowly, and when she saw his face, it was very pale, the brilliant eyes huge. He gripped her shoulders, his fingers curling into the flesh so hard that they would have hurt an ordinary woman. “Yes,” he said very softly. “I’m afraid.”

“Oh, don’t be,” she whispered, reaching up to him.

He broke away, thrust her from him. “I can’t protect you if I don’t know who you are.”

“I’m only what I seem.”

“Then,” he said, “. . . what do you seem?” At his rides his hands formed fists. “I wish I could make up my mind.” He stared at her a long moment. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you before,” he said at last.

She smiled. “I’d like to think not.”

He shook his head. “It’s a game we’re playing, you know. Do you know?”

“Everything’s a game, Jack, isn’t it?”

“I wish you’d give me a straight answer.”

“But I have.”

He reached for the door. “I’ll see you in the morning; we can talk again then.”

“We could talk now just as well.”

“We could, but I need to think. Nothing’s simple, Miss Jane.”

“I’m sorry if I’ve made things complicated for you. I didn’t mean to, believe me.”

He nodded and went out.

She lay down on the bed and waited as darkness fell. She thought of his fine-chiseled face and of the feel of his muscles beneath the flannel shirt and of the heat his flesh seemed to generate. But in the darkness, when the bedroom door opened, it was someone else who came to her, who stood over the bed reeking of liquor. By moonlight reflected from the canyon wall, she recognized Bob, Jack’s cabin mate. She opened her mouth to speak, and he clamped a hard palm across it. His weight came down on her, heavy and suffocating; he scrabbled at the waist of her jeans. She gripped his wrist with both hands and thrust upward, but she was too weak to peel that calloused gag away. She rolled him off the bed, though, and they thumped to the floor with Jane uppermost, all elbows and knees and anger. He laughed and jerked her sideways, slamming her head against the floor. Lightning, she thought, as the room swam around her.

And then Jack’s voice came to her. He was cursing, and his hands were ripping Bob away and flinging him across the room. They fought, tall man against short, sober against drunk, a fight punctuated by grunts and by the crunch of bone and tooth and cartilage. It ended with the younger, lighter one the victor, tossing Bob out of the cabin.

He knelt beside Jane. “Did he hurt you?”

She blinked hard and focused on him. The room settled down. “Just a few bruises,” she said. “And a bump on the head.”

“Damn him.” Gently he lifted her to the bed and gently lowered her head to the pillow. “I should have known. I should have kicked him out as soon as we brought you here.”

“He was your friend, wasn’t he? You couldn’t very well kick a friend out.”

“We worked together. Friend is too strong a word. But women make a man peculiar.”

She smiled weakly. “I suppose that’s true. And vice versa.”

“Bump on your head, you said—shall I get you a cold cloth for it?”

“Now where would you find a cold cloth around here?”

“There’s a spring at the foot of the canyon.” He straightened up, but before he could take a step, she clutched at his arm.

“No, don’t go. It doesn’t hurt.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. It’s nothing. Please don’t leave.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the hand that held him. “Are you afraid?”

She looked at him for a long moment. By moonlight his face was luminous, a lock of pale hair hanging down over his eyes. Yes, a beautiful face; the word handsome wasn’t appropriate at all. “We’re all afraid of something,” she said.

“The door has a lock on the inside.”

“That wouldn’t matter if someone really wanted to get in.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that. The others won’t let Bob come back—they’ll be too jealous—angry that he tried to do what they agreed not to.”

“They agreed not to rape me?”

“It would be poor hospitality to save your life and then rape you, don’t you think?”

“Except Bob didn’t see it that way.”

“He’d been drinking. And he was here, in the cabin. Too close.” He shook his head sharply. “I should have seen it.”

Jane let her fingers curl into his sleeve. “And what about you? You’re right here. Aren’t the others jealous of you?”

“I’m not doing anything to be jealous of.”

“No, I suppose not.” She slid her fingers up his arm. “Not for lack of encouragement, though.”

He looked down at her hand. “They all know they can come in here any time.”

“Well . . . that would lend things a certain . . . spice.”

He pulled away from her and stood up. “Who are you?” he whispered. “Tell me straight. I have to know.”

She looked up at him, puzzled at the sudden tension in his voice. “You keep asking me that. You haven’t believed anything I’ve said, have you?”

“I don’t know what to believe. I want to have something to believe.”

She propped herself up on one elbow. “My name is Jane Bentley, and I am from the East. But I don’t work for the Baltimore Sun.”

“Where in the East?”

She felt a sudden need for truth. “Chicago.”

A long, tight silence stretched between them, and he was the one to break it at last. “Chicago. Are you from Pinkerton’s?”

“Pinkerton’s?”

“There’s men in this territory he’d like to lay his hands on.”

“Pinkerton’s. You mean the detective agency?”

“I never heard of them sending out a woman, but they might.”

She shook her head. “No. I’m not a Pinkerton agent. I’m not.” She fell back on the pillow. “Are they after you?”

“No.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “Look, ma’am, I know I’m badgering you, but believe me, this is important. You might say it’s a matter of life and death.” He stared at her. “If I don’t know who you are, I can’t protect you.”

“I thought I was safe here.”

He nodded. “Safe enough now. But you see, there’s a stage coming by tomorrow, the regular stage to Tucson, and there’s some question about whether we’re going to put you on it or rob it.”

“Or both,” she said.

“Or both. There’d be danger then.” He paced the length of the room once, twice. “You’re taking the news real calmly, aren’t you? You aren’t surprised.”

She chuckled softly. “I can’t imagine what else you’d be doing out here in nowhere.”

“And you say you’re not a Pinkerton’s.”

“I’m not anybody’s, Jack. I fell into this by accident, believe me.” She smiled at her choice of words. “I’m just an innocent bystander.”

He glanced toward the door once, and then he knelt by the side of the bed. “Listen to me, Miss Jane,” he said very quietly. “I’m not an innocent bystander, and I’m not an outlaw. I am an Arizona Ranger, and I mean to get the goods on this gang. I’ll protect you to the best of my ability. But that means you have to level with me and do exactly as I say.”

She looked into his eyes. “Are you serious?”

“Completely.”

She touched his shoulder tentatively, troubled by something she saw in his face, though she couldn’t have said what. “Look, whoever or whatever you are, there are things I can’t tell you about myself, and you’ll just have to accept that. But I’m not from any law-enforcement agency. And I’m not any kind of criminal. I’m here by accident. Totally. And if you want me to cooperate with you, I will. I won’t help you rob the stage, though.”

“I don’t expect it. How’s your head?”

“All right now.”

“Do you think you can ride?”

She sat up. “Now?”

He nodded.

“Sure.”

“Then let’s go.”

“Where to?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

He knew a crevice that slanted up the canyon wall, bypassing the sentries. It was a rough trail for humans, impossible for horses. But at the top of the bluff, two horses were waiting. He boosted her into the saddle.

“Okay,” she said, her hands light on the reins. “Where to now?”

“The stage stop north of here. We should catch the stage before it leaves at dawn. We’ll telegraph Fort Huachuca from there and get a cavalry detachment to trail it.”

“Pulling in your net, hmm?”

“It’s time. Maybe past time. The ride’s forty miles—think you can make it?”

“I can make it.”

By moonlight, the desert was cool, the saguaro like ghost sentries casting faint shadows across their path. Their horses were fresh, eager, and the miles fled beneath their hooves. The sky was still dark when they reined into the stage stop and hailed the driver, who was just watering his team. The station master came out at their call, and the passengers. The latter were angry at first when Jack invoked his authority as a Ranger to force them to stay behind that day, but when they heard about the danger, they gave in. The station master telegraphed the fort and reported that the soldiers would be on their way immediately; the stage would not leave till their arrival, sometime after dawn.

“Won’t your friends think there’s something wrong if the stage isn’t on time?” asked Jane.

Jack shook his head. “Stage isn’t often on time. Anything can happen along the way, after all. Unexpected delays, breakdown, even Indians. Geronimo himself might come up from Mexico and decide he wants some Yankee gold.”

They were sitting on a bench in front of the station, watching the sun come up, watching for the dust of the soldiers’ horses on the horizon.

“You’ll be all right here,” he said to her. “Take the next stage to Tucson and forget all this. Go on to whatever it is you’re really here for.”

She had her feet propped up on the hitching rail, and she was mostly watching him while he looked eastward. “And what about you? Where do you go next?”

“To meet my prisoners.”

“You’ll ride with the cavalry?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. “I’ll take a few of them in the coach with me, wrapped up in blankets so the uniforms don’t show. The rest’ll hang back, out of sight.”

She frowned at him. “Isn’t that a little dangerous? I mean, the outlaws’ll be a bit startled when they see you inside. Don’t you think they might shoot first and ask questions later?”

“The soldiers and me’ll be armed.”

“And outnumbered. Unless you can fit a lot more soldiers than I think into that stage.”

“All we have to do is hold them till the others get there. We’ll have enough guns for that.”

She let her feet drop to the ground and sat up. “It sounds to me like you’re trying to get yourself killed. I never heard of a man who didn’t hate a double-crosser worse than a rattlesnake. And I have a feeling that Bob, at least, would be more than happy to blow your head off.”

“And get the same himself?”

“People don’t always think that far ahead.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Pardon me for saying so, but I think this plan stinks. Why don’t you just send the stage on through surrounded by cavalry?”

“They’ll stay far away from that kind of stage.”

“At least it’ll get through.”

“Fine. What about the next one? The cavalry can’t escort every stagecoach in the territory.”

“Listen,” she said, leaning toward him. “Don’t do this. I’d like to know you better, and I have a feeling I won’t be able to if you get yourself killed.”

He slapped her arm lightly. “Don’t worry about me.”

She stood up, facing away from him, and gripped the hitching rail with both hands. “You’re too young to do something like this. Did anybody ever tell you that? You’re too young to be an Arizona Ranger.” She looked back at him over her shoulder. “You’re throwing the future away, Jack. It’s not worth all the money on that stage.”

He shrugged. “When Billy the Kid was my age, he’d already killed twenty men.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“Damn,” she said.

“There are lawmen younger than me.”

“They’re crazy, too.” Her grip on the rail tightened, and abruptly she heard the wood splintering. She stared down, saw her hands compressing the straight-grained rail as if it were taffy. She released it, leaving her handprints where no human should have been able to do so. She turned suddenly, her body hiding the marks of her strength. “Let me go with you,” she said.

He laughed.

“I’m serious. I can shoot. I’m a damn good shot, with rifle or peacemaker. Probably better than most of the soldiers you’ll have with you.”

“Don’t be foolish,” he said.

“You’re the one who’s being foolish.”

“Let me, then, and don’t get in on it.” He stood up, gestured to the east, where dawn twilight was lighting the sky. “Almost time to start.” He smiled down into her face. “Wish me luck.”

“Luck? Yes, all the luck in the world. I want to see you again. Will you come back here afterward?”

He shook his head. “It’s on to Tucson then, with my prisoners. There’ll be a trial to see to.”

“I’ll be stopping in Tucson for a while.”

“Then maybe I’ll see you there.” He looked past her, eastward again. “Here come the troops.”

She caught him by the shoulders. “I want to see you again,” she said. And then she locked her arms behind his neck and kissed him so hard their teeth grated. He pulled back a little and he held her a moment, held her close against him, and she could feel his heartbeat quicken till it was racing almost as fast as her own. When they parted at last, she whispered, “Don’t forget me, Jack.”

“No,” he said. “I won’t.” He turned away to the stage then, and boarded as the soldiers arrived.

She watched the coach rumble away while the passengers chattered behind her and the station master stood with his hands on his hips, shaking his head. He didn’t think much of the scheme, either. As the stage disappeared in a cloud of dust, Jane went around to the back of the station, where an arroyo hid her from other human eyes. From there, sure of herself for the first time since lightning had struck, she swooped up into the sky.

High above the desert, she knew she must look like a bird. The stagecoach, whose path she followed, resembled a mouse to her, a mouse crawling amid miniature sagebrush. The soldiers, following some distance behind, were like ants.

She sailed through the cloudless daylight, far slower than her ordinary speed, matching the progress of the coach; the desert was laid out beneath her like a map, the horizons infinitely farther away than seen from the ground. She spotted the approaching outlaws before anyone below could have. She heard them hail the coach, a faint shout borne upward on waves of heat. The driver pulled up.

She struck then, not diving to blast through the dusty group, but casting cactus spines down as if they were thunderbolts. She threw them with perfect accuracy, and the speed they acquired from the fall made them deadly. Like a rain of arrows, they splashed among the outlaws, and men tumbled from their horses, clutching their heads, their shoulders, their chests. Puffs of smoke showed that rifle fire had joined the fray, most of it from the coach. The sound of gunfire, when it reached her ears, was staccato, growing louder as she hovered, listening, watching. Growing louder and ringing through the clean desert air like the distant bell of an alarm clock.

She woke groggily to find herself covered with sweat. She threw the blankets back, thinking that she shouldn’t pile so many on, not when she was dreaming about the desert. She washed the sweat away in the shower, but could not wash away the memory of the dream. She usually remembered her dreams, but this one was even sharper and more vivid than normal. Almost, she felt as if it had really happened, as if she had really known Jack, the young Arizona Ranger. She thought of him on the train all the way to work that morning and found herself looking for him again, though she knew she wouldn’t find him. Perhaps he was someone from the past, someone she went to school with, someone she knew back when she was twenty, a lifetime ago. After work that night she dragged out her old high school and college yearbooks and searched for him, but though she found many familiar faces there, faces she hadn’t seen or thought of in a dozen years and more, his was not among them.

Tucson, she thought while eating a leisurely dinner. She had never been to Tucson, only knew it through movies and books. It was part of the West, like Dodge and Amarillo and Carson City. She wasn’t even sure of exactly where it was. The modem city was probably nothing like she imagined.

As she lay down for sleep, she thought of Tucson, of a town rising from the desert, all wooden storefronts and clapboard houses, and tumbleweed drifting through the streets. She thought of horses hitched in front of saloons and general stores and blacksmiths’ shops; of unpaved, dusty streets and kerosene lamps; of men in Stetsons, with spurs on their boots, and women in poke bonnets and long gingham dresses.

She thought of Jack.

She stood at the window, watching the desert sun go down behind the general store. From the comer of her eye, she could see his parents’ house, surrounded by its white picket fence. She had lived next-door to them for eight years now.

Sixteen years ago, her mind had heard his silent birth-cry and understood instantly that another like her had come into the world, the only other. But she was a child then, and had to grow up before she could begin the long search for him. She had come to Tucson at last when she was twenty and he was eight; she had known him on the street, a dusty little boy playing with other dusty children. She had known, and she had bought the house next door to his. The townspeople had marveled that so young a woman could afford a house of her own, but money was never a problem for her, not when she could drive into the sea and bring back the sunken treasures of all the past to sell. Money was the least of her problems.

She had watched him grow, watched him play and learn and discover himself. She had seen him fall out of the oak tree, a fall that would have broken bones in a normal child; she had seen him walk away without a limp. As nearest neighbor, she had often looked after him while his parents were busy, and she had used those times to introduce him to the world beyond the horizon, through books. She had watched over him, and she had waited for the right moment to tell him that she knew. She had waited as he grew tall and straight. She had waited, and now he was sixteen, old enough, and she was beginning to feel that time was passing too swiftly. Too old, she thought, standing at the window in the red light of sunset. Soon I’ll be too old.

They had been playing chess, seated at right angles to each other in easy chairs, and while he had been considering a particularly tricky move, she had risen and walked across the room. Now he called to her.

“Your move.”

She turned toward him. He was lighting the lamp beside the chessboard, and the wavering flame threw his clean, crisp profile into sharp relief. His face was beautiful, she thought, still soft with youth but promising the manhood to come. Beautiful; the word handsome wasn’t appropriate at all. She sat down, examined the board, and pushed a bishop over three spaces.

He shook his head. “You just messed up my whole strategy.”

“Sorry.”

“But it really was the best move.” He looked up at her and smiled, and she felt a pang in her chest. How does he see me, she wondered. He’s growing up so fast.

They traded a few more moves. “You’re trapped now,” he said at last. “No way out.”

Are there girls his own age, she wondered, in the time I don’t see him? Are there relationships I don’t know anything about? Or has he realized that no ordinary woman will ever be enough?

“Yes,” she said. “I think we’re on our way to a checkmate.” She moved her king and then sat back in her chair to watch him study the board. Am I fooling myself? Would he rather have one of them—young, fresh. Innocent. She looked down at her hands, at the finely manicured nails. He’s only sixteen, she thought, and her hands closed into fists as the knot in her chest ached.

“That’s it,” he said, making the final move. “Care for a rematch?”

She shook her head. “No, I’ve had enough chess for one night. You can put them away.” She stood up and stretched. Then she moved behind his chair and sat on the back while he slipped the ivory chesspieces into their felt-liped box. “You’re beating me too consistently these days,” she said. “We’re going to have to find some other game.” She let her hand slide across the upholstery and come to rest on his shoulder. After a moment she began to knead the muscles at the base of his neck.

“That feels good,” he said.

“It’s supposed to.”

He closed the box on the chess-pieces and twisted in his chair to look up at her. “Jane, you know my mother pretty well.”

“I ought to, after all these years.”

“Well . . . I think I have a problem with her.”

“Oh?” Her other hand joined the first, and with one working on each side of his neck, he leaned back and let his head tilt so that he was looking at her upside down.

“She says . . . I should stop coming over here. Especially at night. She says it doesn’t look right.”

Jane looked down into his bright eyes. “To whom?”

“To everyone.”

“To her, you mean.”

He pursed his lips a moment. “Yeah. To her.”

“What does your father say?”

“I haven’t discussed it with him.”

“And you?” she asked, her hands moving to his cheeks, to his temples, stroking softly. “What do you think?”

“I think . . . that I’m old enough to make my own decisions. That’s what I told her.”

“She didn’t take that too well, I suppose?”

“She said . . . it was your reputation she was worried about.”

“Oh—my reputation.” She smiled down at him. “Well—evil to him who evil thinks. Motto of the Order of the Garter.”

“Jane?” He lifted a hand and touched hers.

“Yes, Jack?”

“Is it really all right, my coming here?”

“Of course it is. I like being with you. I like it very much.” She moved from the back of the chair to its upholstered arm, never taking her hands away from him. Her palms slid to his collarbones, massaging gently, to his shirtfront. She could feel the firm young pectoral muscles beneath the fabric.

Lightly, his hand skipped up her arm to stroke her shoulder. “You know, Jane, I don’t have any other friends like you. You’re . . . special.”

“I’m glad to hear it. You’re special to me, too.”

“I remember . . . you used to kiss me good-night a long time ago.”

“Yes.”

“Why did we ever stop that?”

“You grew up,” she said. “You decided a handshake was a more adult way of saying good-night.”

“My mother still kisses me.”

“I’d kiss you, too, if you’d let me.”

“I’ll let you.”

She bent over him and kissed his forehead, nose, and cheek. “But not good-night,” she whispered. “Not yet. It’s still early.” Then softly, very softly, she kissed his mouth.

He sighed. “Don’t ever leave me, Jane.”

“Never,” she said.

His hand reached up and cupped her breast, and she gasped at the contact. He would have drawn back then, but she pressed both her hands against his, hard. With his free arm, he pulled her into his lap. He kissed her throat, her cheeks, her lips, and the warm, moist meeting of their tongues was like an electric shock reverberating between them. They slid out of the chair to the deep rug that waited, like a bed, to receive them. He peeled her shirt away, and his, and then they were flesh to flesh, clinging, twining together. And somehow the rug evaporated, the floor, the house, the town, the desert, until they floated in a warm sea of darkness, just the two of them alone in the universe, with nothing to keep them apart. There was no awkwardness between them, only rising hunger and the merging and melting of orgasm.

Afterward, the room came back into sharp focus, and this time there was a crackling fire in the hearth. In her arms, Jack was weeping quietly.

“Don’t leave me, Jane,” he whispered.

“My darling,” she crooned, rocking him gently, as if he were her child. “I’ll never leave you.”

His eyes were brighter than ever in the firelight. “I love you, Jane,” he said. “I’ll always love you, no matter what happens.”

“And I’ll always love you. I have always loved you, you know—since you were eight years old.”

He looked into her face, his gaze penetrating—it seemed to Jane—all the way to her marrow. “No,” he said. “You haven’t loved me that long. But you do now, don’t you?”

She raised a hand to his cheek, troubled by his words and his eyes. She felt a tightening in her chest, and her own tears were suddenly very near the surface. Her voice was unsteady as she murmured, “Yes. I do now.”

She felt him shiver, and he buried his face in her neck. “I’m so afraid that I’ll lose you,” he whispered. “I waited so long for you, Jane. So long.”

She stroked his fine, pale hair. “And I’ve waited for you. But we’re together now. There’s nothing to be sad about.”

The telephone began to ring. Jane sighed. “Probably your mother, wanting you to come home.”

Jack’s arms tightened around her. “Don’t answer it.”

“I have to.”

“No, please.”

“If it is your mother, she can see the lights. She knows we’re here. Do you want her to think we’re up to something?” She smiled. “Even if we are.”

“Please, Jane, don’t answer it.”

“I have to.” She freed an arm from his embrace and reached out for the phone. It was close by. On the table beside her bed.

Jack dissolved from her arms; the fire, the rug, everything dissolved, and the persistent ringing was the alarm clock, announcing morning.

For a moment, she felt disoriented. Her fingers clutched at the sheets, too tightly. She swung an arm out at the clock, swept it to the floor; the impact silenced it. She closed her eyes. Almost, she could feel his arms around her, smell his skin, taste his lips. Almost. When she sat up at last, she was crying, because it was only a dream after all, and she was ashamed of those tears. She tore the covers back and rolled out of bed. Work, she thought. Work will take my mind off the dream. How stupid, how absolutely stupid to feel this way about a dream. The shower spray washed her tears away and left her feeling cool and empty. He was no one. He didn’t exist.

She was unusually quiet that day, and her secretary asked if she was sick. She shook her head sharply. Later, the district manager noticed and suggested she go home early and get some rest, but she refused. It was Friday, and there was too much work to dear away before the weekend. She was late getting home that night. And she dawdled over dinner.

It’s not that I’m afraid to go to sleep, she told herself.

Could she bring him back to her tonight? Or would he have vanished into the nothingness that claimed used dreams? She was afraid to find out. She was afraid not to find out. She ached for him, ached for the feel of his hands on her flesh, of his lips. He didn’t even exist, and she ached for him so much that she felt weak just thinking about it.

At nine o’clock she threw herself into bed. She didn’t set the alarm.

With sleep, came the desert. The desert on a winter’s night, cold with moonlight and a million icy stars. “Jack!” she shouted, and her voice was lost in the immense flatness, absorbed by air and sand. “Jack?” She floated upward slowly, into the dear darkness, till the land was spread out beneath her like a velvet cape. “Jack!” she shouted. “Jack, where are you?” She looked up at the moon, looming above her. “Don’t take him away,” she begged. “Oh, please don’t take him away.” She shivered in that black infinity of sky and earth. “Oh, please,” she whispered. “Please.” She felt the tears starting from her eyes, and freezing as they left her face, saltwater diamonds falling through the night.

And then, from far off, like a breath of wind, she heard him calling her name. She flew toward the sound, and the desert swept below her till it reared into mountains. On the highest peak he waited, calling to her, holding out his arms for her. She clasped him, and they spun slowly, weightless, kissing, weeping.

“I was afraid we’d never find each other again,” he whispered.

“Never say that, darling,” she cried. “I love you. I’ll always love you.”

“I thought you’d forget. I thought you’d go away.”

“How could I forget you, darling?”

“You could,” he said, holding her tighter than ever. “Oh, I’ve been waiting so long for someone who wouldn’t forget.” He kissed her neck, her face, her hands. “I’ve been so lonely, Jane. The others were all just dream people, coming and going and never caring, never really caring.” He searched her face. “But you care. I know you do. Swear it, Jane. Swear you’ll never forget me.”

She held his face in her hands. “Oh, my dear, I could never forget you I’ve been waiting, too.”

A fur-lined cradle formed about them, cupping them together and rocking slowly in the great darkness of the sky. They clung to each other, their hands moving softly, without haste.

“Oh, Jane,” he said, his fingers tracing the planes of her cheek, “we have everything. We have the universe.”

“Yes.”

He kissed her throat. “But it felt like nothing before I found you. I lived a thousand lives before I found you, and they were all nothing.” He looked into her eyes, and the moonlight struck highlights in his own. “You do know,” he said, “that this is all a dream?”

Her hands tightened on him. “Oh, Jack, don’t let it be a dream. Please.”

“Jane. . . .”

“I don’t want to wake up and lose you again.”

“Jane, darling, it’s a dream, but it’s real, too. Because you and I are real.”

“I’m real,” she murmured against his neck.

“And so am I,” he said. “Can’t you tell? Can’t you feel it?”

She held him hard, trying to match every inch of his body with her own. “I only know that when I wake up, I still want you.”

“Because I’m real. Don’t you see? I’m not a dream person. I’m flesh and blood, like you. So many times I’ve met people in my dreams and thought they were real, and then they disappeared. Just like you disappeared from the cabin. The window was too small to climb out of, and I’d been watching the door, but you were gone.”

“The alarm clock rang. I woke up.”

“Your story was so bizarre, so unexpected. Writing articles for the Baltimore Sun. I would never have thought of that. I didn’t manufacture that part of the dream; you did. I couldn’t predict anything you’d say. The dream was going in directions I couldn’t control. I thought . . . it had to mean that you had volition. That you were real. And then you disappeared.”

“I didn’t want to. I wanted to see you again.”

“And when I walked in later, you were there again. For a minute I was startled, and then I realized that a day had passed for you, and you were sleeping again. Dreaming again. And you had to be real. You had to be. And I was frightened, not knowing what it meant. Not knowing whether to keep up the charade or blot it out and confront you. I tried some, within the context of the dream, to find out . . . who you were, what you were. But when you wouldn’t go along with me, I didn’t have the nerve to push it. So I stayed with the Ranger and the outlaws, hoping we’d meet in Tucson. And we did, in your dream. I was so glad to find myself there. I would have played any role to be with you again.”

She stroked his back, his hair, his arms. “Oh, Jack, I want to believe you; I do. But if I believe you and then wake up to find it’s a lie, it’ll hurt so much.”

“It’s true. It is!”

“But I’ve dreamed of people night after night, the same people, and it never made them any more real. I’ve even had the exact same dream more than once.”

“Darling, this is different. Can’t you feel it?”

“I don’t know. It feels so real now, you feel so real, but when I wake up, you’re gone.” She pressed her face against his neck. “When I’m awake, I’m so ashamed of being in love with a dream.”

“But how do you feel now?”

“Now, I love you. Now, I know I’ll always love you. Dreams don’t have to be rational.”

He gripped her as tightly as she gripped him. “You love me because you know I’m real. Inside, you know. You couldn’t love a figment of your imagination.”

She shook her head against his shoulder. “I don’t know. I’ve never been happy with reality. I’ve always liked dreams better. But this. . . . Oh, my God, Jack, Jack, I don’t know what this is. Am I going crazy?”

“No,” he whispered fiercely.

“How can we both be real? How can two people share a dream?”

“Two people who were searching for each other. Who needed each other. How many years did you wait for me, Jane? How many did you really wait?”

She sighed. “All my life.” She lifted her head. “Jack . . . if you’re real . . . let’s meet while we’re awake.”

He stared into her face. He seemed pale, paler even than the moonlight. “No.”

“Why not?”

“We can’t.”

“Are you . . . so far away? I can come to you. Halfway around the world if I have to. Where are you?”

“No.”

“Jack.”

“We can’t meet, Jane. Believe me.”

“Because . . . you’re only a dream? Because the part of me that is pretending to be you knows that . . . that you’re not out there in the real world?”

He closed his eyes and pressed his cheek against hers. “You have to trust me, darling.”

“How can I? How can I know you’re real if I can’t touch you?”

“You’re touching me now.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“Does there have to be proof between us? Can’t we just leave well enough alone?”

She moved her hands across his back and down the firm muscles that flanked his spine. They were tense, as if he were holding in some terrible secret. “Jack . . . what’s the matter?”

He shook his head.

“Is it . . . that you’re married?”

He tilted his head back to look at her. “You mean, in reality?”

She hesitated, feeling herself caught between belief and disbelief. “Yes. I guess I mean that.”

“No, I’m not married.”

“Are you . . . older than you seem?”

Lightly, he kissed her lips. “How old do I seem to you?”

“Very young.”

“I am very young. Not quite twenty-one.”

“And I’m . . . too old for you. Is that it?”

“No.”

“I’m thirty-two.”

“I know.”

“I am too old for you.”

“No, Jane.”

“But I’d seem old . . . to your parents.”

“I don’t care what they think.”

“Then why can’t we meet?”

“Oh, Jane.” There was pain in his voice, pain in his hands that clutched her shoulders. “Don’t ask any more. Please. If we meet like this, we’ll have the universe. We’ll build whatever world we like, and when we stop liking it we’ll build another. Don’t spoil it with reality. We have something so wonderful. We can do whatever we want, be whatever we want. When you know you’re dreaming, you’re in control. Do you want a South Sea island paradise? Here—” He waved a hand, and the fur-lined cradle evaporated, leaving them lying on a beach of pure white sand. Palm trees coalesced around them, and she could hear the gentle lapping of surf somewhere in the distance. “Do you want adventure?” he asked. He sat up. “Look!” She sat up, too, and she saw the ocean almost at her feet, and silhouetted against the horizon, a three-masted ship. “They’ll send a longboat to shore at dawn, and we’ll meet them there. Or we’ll dive to the bottom of the sea, walk in space, explore Mars. We can go to any place, any time. Together.”

She looked into his eager face. “It sounds beautiful,” she said.

“And if we get tired of all that excitement, we can always go back to the house in old Tucson where you watched me grow up. That other me.” The sand became a thick, soft rug, the lowering moon a mellow fire, and walls sprang up where palm trees had been. “This is your place,” he said. “Your imagination built it.”

“Yes,” she said. “This was the place where you and I were special, the only two special people in the world.”

“It’s still true,” he told her, and he reached out to the fireplace poker. He held it in both hands and slowly bent it into a horseshoe. Solemnly, he gave it to her, and she straightened it. “Just the two of us,”he said. “We can fly.”

She tossed the poker aside and wrapped her arms about him. “Be real, Jack. Oh, be real for me.”

He picked her up then, as if she were a feather, and he carried her into the bedroom. A familiar bed was waiting for them, not the one from her waking home, but the steel-framed bed from the desert cabin.

“You’ll have to leave me sometime soon,” he said as he set her down. “Promise you’ll come back. Promise.”

“I love you,” she said. “Real or not.”

“And you’ll come back.”

“Yes. Always.”

They had time to make love, long, leisurely love, and then she fell asleep in his arms.

And woke in her own bed. The clock said twelve, and the daylight streaming through the curtained windows made that noon. But the television, when she turned it on to catch some news, told her it was Sunday. She had slept thirty-nine hours. She was ravenous. Over a thick ham sandwich, she pondered her situation.

Consideration of the question was absurd, she knew, but she decided to ignore the absurdity. For the moment, she set rationality aside. Assuming she had no doubts, assuming Jack was real, where was he? Why did he refuse to meet her?

A comer of her brain protested that this was madness, but she would not listen.

There was a good reason, a painful reason why he would not meet her. A reason too shameful, perhaps, to talk about. What terrible secret could she imagine? That he was a criminal in some maximum-security prison? A three-time loser, a rapist? A murderer? Was he on death row somewhere? The thought chilled her, and she pushed it away. It was only the worst thing she could think, not the most likely. What was likely? She thought back to the dreams they had shared, searching for a clue. There had to be a clue hidden there—in the desert, in the canyon, in the tiny cabin where she had recuperated.

The bed?

In three dreams she had encountered that bed, the third time out of its ordinary place, if the cabin was its ordinary place. It was an old-fashioned-looking thing. Where had she seen one like it before? A prison movie, something with James Cagney maybe? No, those were bunk beds, with narrow, thin mattresses. This was something else. But hauntingly familiar. She ransacked her memory. The bed was the key, she was sure of it. Sturdy steel frame, thick, firm mattress. Where had she seen one like it before?

Hospital?

Hospital.

She finished the sandwich quickly, washed it down with a glass of milk, and went back to bed. As always, sleep came quickly. Ever since she was a child, sleep had come quickly, even when her body wasn’t tired. Sleep and dreams.

She was in control now. Though she seemed to float in darkness, there was a solid surface beneath her. She conjured up a light—a fluorescent fixture—and a pastel wall to hang it on. She summoned the bed and set it beneath the light. Yes, hospital bed. She had never noticed the bars before, the bars that could be moved up like the sides of a crib, to keep the patient from falling out.

“Jack!” she called. “Jack, where are you?”

Only silence answered her.

“Jack, don’t be afraid. I love you, no matter what. Come to me. Please. Don’t let me be here alone.”

The sound of sobbing made her turn around. Beside the bed a chair had materialized, but translucent, like mist. On the chair sat the shape of a woman, translucent, too, her hands clutching the upraised bar on the bed. She was weeping softly.

“Who are you?” said Jane.

The woman seemed not to hear, did not raise her head. Jane willed her to become solid, but she did not.

“That’s my mother,” said Jack’s voice.

Jane turned again, and Jack stood to her left, his hands clasped behind his back. He wore a white coat over his familiar shirt and jeans, as if he were a doctor.

“That’s all she ever does,” he said. “Unless she just sits and stares. Come away, Jane. You don’t want to watch her.”

She pointed to the empty bed. “And where are you?”

“Not here,” he said. “Not ever here.”

“What hospital, Jack? Tell me.”

“You don’t want to know. I’m sorry I gave you a chance to guess this. But some things . . . some things impress themselves on the memory, whether we want them or not.”

“I have to know, Jack. You must understand that. I have to know . . . or I’ll always doubt.”

He turned away from her, held his head in his hands. “I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to remember. It’s better that way, Jane, believe me. You just don’t understand.”

She put her arms around him from behind and leaned her head on his shoulder. “Maybe I don’t,” she said. “But I have to know.”

He clasped her wrists. He was breathing hard, as if he’d run a thousand miles. “You won’t leave me?”

“Never.”

His voice was hoarse. “All right. If that’s what you really want. I’ll show you. But it’s rocky trip.”

“I’m with you.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

Her universe turned upside down, and her whole body jerked, as if she were a thermometer being shaken. The sun was overhead one instant and beneath her feet the next, spinning, tumbling as she tumbled, as she slammed some unyielding surface again and again. There was no pain. She felt nothing at all, only saw sun, pavement, white line down the center, cars swerving with screaming brakes. Then she was still, and the sun poured down on her, glinting off her helmet, her wristwatch, and the dented chrome of the motorcycle that was twisted around her body. She was still, and time slowed while faces bent over her, speaking words she couldn’t understand. Eons passed there in the sunlight, and finally the ambulance arrived, and she was shunted inside, and more eons oozed by before the doors opened again and she was removed. EMERGENCY ENTRANCE. PIMA COUNTY HOSPITAL. The double glass doors opened like a giant mouth, and then she was sliding, sliding down the creature’s gullet.

“No more,” Jack whispered. “No more.” And the scene faded as if a projector lamp had burned out. Darkness was everywhere, dark nothingness without even a star to draw the eyes, but Jack was there, with his arms around her, and she could feel the wetness of his tears on her cheek. He was shaking as with fever.

“Where’s Pima County?” she whispered.

“Arizona.”

“The desert.”

She felt him nod. “I grew up there.”

“I’ll go tomorrow.”

“No. Please. It won’t do any good.”

“I have to, Jack.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Don’t go.”

“What’s your last name, Jack?”

He shook his head.

“Do I have to search the hospital for you? Do I have to go through every room? Don’t be stubborn, darling.”

He sighed, a deep, wrenching sigh. “Elliot. John Elliot. I never . . . liked that name.”

She made the fur-lined cradle envelope them, and the moon and stars brighter and warmer than they could ever be from Earth. “My darling,” she said, rocking him in her arms. “You worry too much.”

“I’m afraid, Jane. I wish you wouldn’t go.”

“Will I find you there, Jack? Are you real?”

“I’m real!”

“Then there’s nothing to fear.”

He was quiet then, and they stayed like that, holding onto each other under the preternatural sky until the alarm rang on Monday morning.

The first thing she did after rolling out of bed was dig an old road atlas out of the bottom drawer of her bureau. On the map of Arizona she searched for Pima County and its largest city.

Tucson.

She called a couple of airlines before finding one that flew there. By the time she had packed and phoned for a cab, it was late enough to call in sick at the office. Her first sick day in three years.

Tucson was not as she had dreamed it, of course. It was a Twentieth Century city, full of paved streets and automobiles and supermarkets, and a Wells Fargo stage would have looked as incongruous there as a cactus in the Arctic. She checked into the downtown Holiday Inn, dropped her bags, and took a cab to the hospital. The driver let her off behind the building.

EMERGENCY. ENTRANCE. PIMA COUNTY HOSPITAL.

She stared at the sign, at those words burned into her memory by the desert sun. She stared long and hard. She could go home now. She had her proof. She could remember the stretcher being lifted from the ambulance and rolled through those double glass doors. She could go home now, and be sure.

She walked all the way around the building and went in by the front entrance. The receptionist looked up expectantly as she aproached the desk.

“I’m here to see John Elliot,” she said.

The woman gazed at her with a peculiar, unreadable expression. “Are you . . . family?” she said.

“Yes.”

She looked through a card file. “Someone’s with him now.”

“His mother,” said Jane. “She’s expecting me.”

The woman’s pen poised over a card. “And your relationship . . .?”

“I’m her niece. His first cousin.”

She hesitated, then scribbled on the card. She handed it to Jane, who couldn’t make out the writing—initials, she guessed. A formal okay. “Room 382. Show this to the nurse at the station, and bring it back here when you leave. The elevator’s over there.” She pointed with the pen.

The third floor nurse passed her with another peculiar look. Room 382 was at the end of the hall.

His mother was there, the wraith-woman Jane had seen, full flesh now, and looking very old. She sat by the bed, but she was staring out the window and did not see Jane enter. Or perhaps she thought it was a nurse, no one to pay attention to.

Jack lay on the bed. The sidebars were up, and Jane understood now why they had been excised from his dream-bed. They were a symbol of his prison. Within it, he lay very still, the white sheet tucked close about him, his arms resting limp on top of it. Behind the bed stood a phalanx of machinery, and Jack was attached to it all by tubes in his arms, tubes in his nose, tubes snaking under the sheet.

Jack. His closed eyes were ringed with darkness, his cheeks sunken, his lips pale. He was thin, wasted, frail, hardly a muscle left in his arms, his collarbones standing out stark above the neck of his hospital gown. Jack, sleeping, with the remnant of his young beauty wan against the white pillow.

“How is he?” Jane said.

“The same,” muttered his mother. “Always the same.” She turned from the window, and when her eyes lit on the visitor, she frowned. “Who are you?”

“A friend,” Jane said. “I . . . heard about it. I thought as long as I was going to be in Tucson I’d stop in. I told them downstairs that I was your niece.

I apologize for that. But I had to come.”

His mother shrugged. “There’s nothing to see.” Her voice was tired, with more than body weariness. “I come every day, and there’s never anything to see.”

Jane gripped the top rail on the side opposite his mother. “How long has it been now?”

“Three years, nine months, and twelve days.”

Her fingers tightened on the bar. “So long?” she murmured. “And what do the doctors say?”

“The same as always. He might wake up tomorrow. He might never wake up.” She passed a hand across her forehead. “I don’t understand it. I never will. I still pray. I don’t know why.”

Jane laid a hand on his cheek, his cool, pale cheek. “Oh, Jack,” she whispered.

“Jack?” said his mother. “You must be a friend from school. They all called him Jack.”

“He asked me to call him that.” He didn’t move at her touch. He didn’t flick an eyebrow. Just above her hand, the tube entered his nostrils. Was it forcing him to breathe? “Have they looked at his brainwaves?”

“Oh, yes, that’s something they do pretty often. He has some. And his eyes move sometimes. I’ve seen them. The doctor says it’s like he’s dreaming.”

Jane moved her hand to his arm, his wasted arm whose corded muscles she had touched—was it only last night?

His mother played with a handkerchief in her lap. “I suppose it’s a shock to you, to see him like this.”

“Yes.”

“Every time I see him. . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I keep coming here. It seems so hopeless.” She twisted the handkerchief. “My husband won’t. He’s given up. He thinks . . . he thinks John will never wake up. He . . . he’s talking about asking the doctors to . . . to turn off all these things. To let John die.”

Jane looked up sharply. “He mustn’t do that!” She caught herself then and said in a softer, more controlled voice, “Have the doctors given you any reason to stop hoping?”

“No. But none to keep hoping, either. They just don’t know. Are you a doctor?”

“No. No.” She looked down once more to his sunken eyes and hollow cheeks. “Please,” she said, “may I stay here a little while? I just want to sit quietly with him. I won’t bother you. Do you mind?”

His mother shrugged. “Sit if you like. There’s another chair in the corner.” She looked out the window again. “I sit here a lot myself. Quietly.”

Jane pulled the chair up close to the bed, leaned her head against the bars and closed her eyes. But she could not sleep upright, not with the woman sitting so close, glancing in her direction every few moments, and at last visiting hours ended. She walked Jack’s mother to her bus and then caught a cab for the Holiday Inn. She had dinner in the motel’s restaurant and immediately afterward went to bed.

She dreamed herself back in the hospital room, standing by the bed, but this time she and the comatose John Elliot were alone. He was precisely as she had seen him, plastic tubing pouring life into his wasted body. She touched his cheek again, just as she had before. “Wake up, Jack,” she said. “You must wake up.”

The Jack she knew materialized out of darkness on the other side of the bed. He was healthy, strong, but his eyes were full of pain. “Now you know.”

She nodded. “It’s not so awful. Nothing a few calories and some exercise couldn’t mend.” She came around the bed and embraced him. “It’s eerie, though, seeing you like that.”

“I didn’t want you to.”

“It doesn’t make me love you any less.” She laughed softly. “In fact, I love you more now, because I know you’re real. You’re flesh and blood. And when you wake up, we can be together all the time, not just in our dreams. I’ll move to Tucson if I have to. Or I’ll bring you to Chicago. Or we’ll go someplace else entirely—whatever seems best.”

“I can’t wake up,” he said.

“But you have to. You can’t stay like this.”

“I can’t. I don’t know how.”

She looked into his face. “Have you tried?”

“Tried?” He bent his head into the hollow of her neck and held her with his hands curled into claws. “Oh, I tried so hard. They put me under for surgery, and I never came out of it. I knew I was dreaming. I knew it was all ghosts and make believe, and I tried so hard to climb out of it! And then after a while, I knew it was no use, and I had to . . . adjust. Jane, Jane, it was so lonely with all those dream people coming and going and being puppets. They did what I wanted them to do, and behind their eyes was nothing. Nothing. I could pretend to love one of them, pretend she loved me, but I always knew there was nothing there. It was so terribly lonely till I found you.”

She stroked his hair. “Won’t you try to wake up . . . for me, Jack?”

“I’ve tried,” he whispered. “Oh, Jane, I’ve tried. But . . . I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“After the accident. Don’t you remember? I didn’t feel anything after the first bounce. I didn’t feel anything.

I was conscious, but . . . I think my body must be paralyzed from the neck down. My body. But not me.” His hands slid up to her shoulders, moved stiffly there, up and down. “I can feel you, Jane. I can feel you touch me. But what if I wake up and I cant?” He raised his shaking hands to her cheeks. “And what’s to guarantee that we’ll still have our dreams if I wake up? What if we lose contact? Never to feel your skin against mine. Never to make love to you again. How could I bear that? It would be . . . like dying. Oh, Jane, we have so much now. I can’t throw it away for a bunch of maybes.”

She held him tight. “But it’s such a precarious existence, Jack. What if you get pneumonia? What if . . .?” She left the question hanging in midair.

“They take good care of me,” he said. “Better than if I were awake. I have a whole troop of doctors and nurses watching over me.”

“It must be expensive for your parents.”

“They won’t let me die just because it’s expensive.” He kissed her cheek, her ear. “Oh, Jane, everything’s all right as it is. Leave it be.”

“Jack. . . .”

“Dream with me forever, Jane. Just dream with me.”

She pressed her cheek against his. “All right, my love. All right.” She let the bed go, the tubing, the machinery, and brought back the clean desert night for both of them.

When she woke, she called the hospital to locate the doctor in charge of John Elliot’s case. After a great deal of insistent conversation with nurses, secretaries, answering services and his wife, she tracked him down. Imperative, she said in her crispest, most professional tone, and he finally agreed to see her for a few minutes after his morning rounds.

They met in the chapel, which was empty at that early hour. He wore a white coat with the hospital’s name stitched over the pocket. He looked at his watch frequently. “Now, what was so imperative, Miss Bentley?”

“I’m deeply concerned about John Elliot,” she said.

“Are you a relative?”

“No, an extremely close friend.”

“You’ve spoken to his parents?”

“His mother.”

He nodded. “She can certainly tell you anything you need to know.”

“Doctor, I need to know his chances of ever waking up.”

“As I said, his mother can fill you in on his case. I really can’t discuss the details with an outsider.” He made a move to stand up, but she cut it short with her hand on his arm.

“Doctor,” she said, “what if his father decides to pull the plug on his life-support equipment?”

He looked at her narrowly. “He’d have to go to court to do anything like that.”

“And if he did?”

“I’d recommend against it. There are still brainwaves. The boy’s alive by medical standards.”

“Even with all that machinery attached to him?”

“Yes.”

“It’s expensive stuff, isn’t it?”

“If you want to put a price on life, yes, it is.”

“Do you know what kind of insurance coverage the Elliots have?”

He frowned. “Don’t you think you should ask them about that, Miss Bentley?”

“I think you must know.”

The frown deepened. “What are you getting at?”

“What if John Elliot never wakes up?”

“We can’t know that. People have been in comas longer than he has and come out of them.”

“His father seems to have given up hope. What happens when his mother does, too?”

He shook his head. “I can’t answer that. I don’t know that their hope matters one way or the other.”

She leaned toward him. “I want to make sure John will be cared for permanently, Doctor. No matter what happens. Even if I have to take over total financial responsibility for him myself. Even if I have to go to court and get myself named his legal guardian. It would help a lot if you were on my side.”

He looked into her face for a long moment. “What’s your interest in this case?”

“I told you, I’m an extremely close friend.”

“You know, I can’t promise you that he’ll ever wake up. No one can promise that.”

“I understand, Doctor. I’m not fooling myself on that score. Will you help me?”

“All right,” he said. “They can use some help. This has been rough on them, financially as well as emotionally. They’ll appreciate . . . a philanthropist.” He stood up. “I think we should talk to them, the two of us. Sometime this week? Just to straighten things out. You don’t mind that, do you? I’ve always been honest with them, never hidden anything.” He hesitated. “Unless of course you’d prefer to be anonymous.”

“Anytime this week is fine,” said Jane.

He shook her hand. “Leave me your number and I’ll call you.”

“I’m staying at the downtown Holiday Inn.”

“You’re not from Tucson?”

“No. Chicago.”

“Where did you know John from?”

She smiled at him. “Does it matter, Doctor?”

He had not expected that answer, and his confusion showed on his face. “No, I suppose not. I knew him for quite a while. Since before he started fooling with motorcycles. He was a good boy.”

“Yes,” said Jane. “I know.”

That night, as they drifted in the starlit desert air, she told Jack her plans. She would go back home and carry on with her job by day, supporting the two of them. By night, they would be together—every night, for always. And after she said that and kissed him to seal the promise, he conjured up Mardi Gras for her, complete with costumed throngs and lavish floats and wild music, with bright lights and dancing and laughter. It was all so crisp, so thoroughly realized, that she knew he had been there once, and loved it. And in the midst of the color and sound, towering over the carnival, was a wedding cake three stories high.

Jack scooped a blob of white frosting from the lowest tier and licked it off his fingers. “I’m sentimental,” he said. “Always have been.”

They linked left hands, and on the third finger of each a gold band coalesced.

“So am I,” said Jane.

All around them, dream people began to throw rice.

PAWN’S GAMBIT

Timothy Zahn

Gamins is probably common to many sentient species—and the real opponent in a game is not always who it appears to be.

To: Office of Director Rodau 248700, Alien Research Bureau, Clars

From: Office of Director Eftis 379214, Games Studies, Var-4

Subject: 30th annual report, submitted 12 Tai 3829.

Date: 4 Mras 3829

Dear Rodau,

I know how you hate getting addenda after a report has been processed, but I hope you will make an exception in this case. Our most recently discovered race—the Humans—was mentioned only briefly in our last annual report, but I feel that the data we have since obtained is important enough to bring to your attention right away.

The complete results are given in the enclosed film, but the crux of the problem is a disturbing lack of consistency with standard patterns. In many ways they are unsophisticated, even primitive; most of the subjects reacted with terror and even hysteria when first brought here via Transphere. And yet, unlike most primitives, there is a mental and emotional resilience to the species which frankly surprises me. Nearly all of them recovered from their fear and went on to play the Stage-I game against their fellows. And the imagination, skill, and sheer aggressiveness used in the playing have been inordinately high for such a young species, prompting more than one off-the-record comparison between Humans and the Chanis. I suppose it’s that, more than anything else, that made me unwilling to let this data ride until our next report. Confined as they are to their home planet, the Humans are certainly no threat now; but if they prove to be even a twelfth as dangerous as the Chanis they will need to be dealt with swiftly.

Accordingly, I am asking permission to take the extraordinary step of moving immediately to Phase III (the complete proposal is attached to my report). I know this is generally forbidden with non-spacing races, but I feel it is vital that we test Humans against races of established ability. Please give me a decision on this as soon as possible.

Regards,

Eftis

To: Office of Director Eftis 379214, Game Studies, Var-4

From: Office of Director Rodau 248700, A.R.B., Clars

Subject: Addendum to 30th annual report. Date: 34 Forma 3829

Dear Eftis,

Thank you for your recent addenda. You were quite right to bring these Humans to our attention; that is, after all, what you’re out there for. I find myself, as do you, both interested and alarmed by this race, and I agree totally with your proposal to initiate Phase III. As usual, the authorization tapes will be a few more weeks in coming, but—unofficially—I’m giving you the go-ahead to start your preparations. I also agree with your suggestion that a star-going race be pitted against your Human: an Olyt or Fiwalic, perhaps. I see by your reports that the Olyts are beginning to resent our testing, but don’t let that bother you; your results clearly show they are no threat to us.

Do keep us informed, especially if you uncover more evidence of Chanilike qualities in these aliens.

Sincerely,

Rodau

* * *

The glowing, impenetrable sphere of white mist that had surrounded him for the last five minutes dissolved as suddenly as it had formed, and Kelly McClain found himself in a room he had never seen in his life.

Slowly, carefully, he looked around him, heart pounding painfully in his ears. He’d screamed most of the panic out of his system within the first three minutes of his imprisonment, but he could feel the terror welling up into his throat again. He forced it down as best he could. He was clearly no longer in his office at the university’s reactor lab, but losing his head wasn’t going to get him back again.

He was sitting in a semicircular alcove facing into a small room, his chair and about three-quarters of his desk having made the trip with him. The room’s walls, ceiling, and floor were made of a bronze-colored metal and were devoid of any ornamentation. At the right and left ends of the room he could see panels that looked like sliding doors.

There didn’t seem to be a lot to be gained by sitting quietly and hoping everything out there would go away. His legs felt like they might be ready to hold him up again, so he stood up and squeezed his way through the six-inch gap between his desk and the alcove wall. The desk, he noted, had been sheared smoothly, presumably by the white mist or something in it. He went first to the panel in the right-hand wall; but if it was, in fact, a door, he could find no way to open it. The left-hand panel yielded identical results. “Hello?” he called tentatively into the air around him. “Can anyone hear me?”

The flat voice came back at him so suddenly it made him jump. “Good day to you, Human,” it said. “Welcome to the Stryfkar Game Studies Center on Var-4. I trust you suffered no ill effects from your journey?”

A game studies center?

Memories flashed across Kelly’s mind, bits of articles he’d seen in various magazines and tabloids over the past few months telling of people kidnapped to a game center by extraterrestrial beings. He’d skimmed some of them for amusement, and had noted the similarity between the stories; humans taken two at a time and made to play a strange board game against one another before being sent home. Typical tabloid tripe, Kelly had thought at the time.

Which made this an elaborate practical joke, obviously.

So how had they made that white mist?

For the moment, it seemed best to play along. “Oh, the trip was fine. A little boring, though.”

“You have adjusted to your situation very quickly,” the voice said, and Kelly thought he could detect a touch of surprise in it. “My name is Slaich; what is yours?”

“Kelly McClain. You speak English pretty well for an alien—what kind are you, again?”

“I am a Stryf. Our computer-translator is very efficient, and we have had data from several of your fellow Humans.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about them. How come you drag them all the way out here—wherever here is—just to play games? Or is it a state secret?”

“Not really. We wish to learn about your race. Games are one of the psychological tools we use.”

“Why can’t you just talk to us? Or, better still, why not drop in for a visit?” Much as he still wanted to believe this was a practical joke, Kelly was finding that theory harder and harder to support. That voice—like no computer speech he’d ever heard, but nothing like a human voice, either—had an uncomfortable ring of casual truth to it. He could feel sweat gathering on his forehead.

“Talking is inefficient for the factors we wish to study,” Slaich explained offhandedly. “As to visiting Earth, the Transphere has only limited capacity and we have no long-range ships at our disposal. I would not like to go to Earth alone.”

“Why not?” The tension had risen within Kelly to the breaking point, generating a reckless courage. “You can’t look that bad. Show yourself to me—right now.”

There was no hesitation. “Very well, the voice said, and a section of the shiny wall in front of Kelly faded to black. Abruptly, a three-dimensional image appeared in front of it—an image of a two-legged, two-armed nightmare. Kelly gasped, head spinning, as the misshapen head turned to face him. An x-shaped opening began to move. “What do you think, Kelly? Would I pass as a Human?”

“I-I-I—” Kelly was stuttering, but he couldn’t help it; all his strength was going to control his suddenly rebellious stomach. The creature before him was real-no make-up job in the world could turn a man into that. And multicolor hologram movies of such size and clarity were years or decades away . . . on Earth.

“I am sorry; I seem to have startled you,” Slaich said, reaching for a small control panel Kelly hadn’t noticed. The muscles moved visibly under his six-fingered hand as he touched a button. The image vanished and the wall regained its color. “Perhaps you would like to rest and eat,” the flat voice went on. The door at Kelly’s left slid open, revealing a furnished room about the size of an efficiency apartment. “It will be several hours before we will be ready to begin. You will be called.”

Kelly nodded, not trusting his voice, and walked into the room. The door closed behind him. A normal-looking bed sat next to the wall halfway across the room, and Kelly managed to get there before his knees gave out.

He lay face-downward for a long time, his whole body trembling as he cried silently into his pillow. The emotional outburst was embarrassing—he’d always tried to be the strong, unflappable type—but efforts to choke off the display only made it worse. Eventually, he gave up and let it run its course.

By and by, the sobs stopped coming and he found himself more or less rational once more. Rolling onto his side, unconsciously curling into a fetal position, he stared at the bronze wall and tried to think.

For the moment, at least, he seemed to be in no immediate physical danger. From what he remembered of the tabloid articles, the aliens here seemed truly intent on simply doing their psychological study and then sending the participants home. Everything they’d done so far could certainly be seen in that light; no doubt they had monitored his reactions to both their words and Slaich’s abrupt appearance. He shuddered at the memory of that alien face, feeling a touch of anger. Psychological test or not, he wasn’t going to forgive Slaich very quickly for not giving him some kind of warning before showing himself like that.

The important thing, then, was for him to stay calm and be a good little test subject so he could get home with a minimum of trouble. And if he could do it with a little dignity, so much the better.

He didn’t realize he’d dozed off until a soft tone startled him awake. “Yes?”

“It is time,” the computerized voice told him. “Please leave your rest chamber and proceed to the test chamber.”

Kelly sat up, glancing around him. The room’s only door was the one he’d entered by; the test chamber must be out the other door of the room with the alcove. “Where’s the other player from?” he asked, swinging his feet onto the floor and heading for the exit. “Or do you just snatch people from Earth at random?”

“We generally set the Transphere to take from the vicinity of concentrated energy sources, preferably fission or fusion reactors when such exist,” Slaich said. “However, you have made one false assumption. Your opponent is not a Human.”

Kelly’s feet froze halfway through the door, and he had to grab the jamb to keep his balance. This was a new twist. “I see. Thanks for the warning, anyway. Uh . . . what is he?”

“An Olyt. His race is somewhat more advanced than yours; the Olyts have already built an empire of eight planets in seven stellar systems. They have been studied extensively by us, though their closest world is nearly thirty light-years from here.”

Kelly forced his legs to start walking again. “Does that make us neighbors? You never said how far Earth is from here.”

“You are approximately forty-eight light-years from here and thirty-six from the Olyt home world. Not very far, as distances go.”

The door on the far side of the room opened as Kelly approached. Getting a firm grip on his nerves, he stepped through.

The game room was small and relatively dark, the only illumination coming from a set of dimly glowing red panels. In the center of the room, and taking up a good deal of its floor space, was a complex-looking gameboard on a table. Two chairs—one strangely contoured—completed the furnishings. Across the room was another door, and standing in front of it was an alien.

Kelly was better prepared for the shock this time, and as he stepped toward the table he found his predominant feeling was curiosity. The Olyt was half a head shorter than he, his slender body covered by what looked like large white scales. He was bipedal with two arms, each of his limbs ending in four clawed digits. His snout was long and seemed to have lots of teeth; his eyes were black and set back in a bettle-browed skull. Picture a tailless albino alligator wearing a wide sporran, Sam Browne belt, and a beret . . .

Kelly and the Olyt reached their respective sides of the game table at about the same time. The board was smaller than it had first looked; the alien was little more than a double arm-length away: Carefully, Kelly raised his open hand, hoping the gesture would be properly interpreted. “Hello. I’m Kelly McClain; human.”

The alien didn’t flinch or dive down Kelly’s throat. He extended both arms, crossed at the wrists, and Kelly discovered the claws were retractable. His mouth moved, generating strange noises; seconds later the computer’s translation came over an invisible speaker. “I greet you. I am Tlaymasy of the Olyt race.”

“Please sit down,” Slaich’s disembodied voice instructed. “You may begin when you have decided on the rules.”

Kelly blinked. “How’s that?”

“This game has no fixed rules. You must decide between you as to the objective and method of play before you begin.”

Tlaymasy was speaking again. “What is the purpose of this?”

“The purpose is to study an interaction between Olyt and Human,” Slaich said. “Surely you have heard of this experiment from others of your race.”

Kelly frowned across the table. “You’ve been through this before?”

“Over one hundred twenty-eight members of my race have been temporarily taken over the last sixteen years,” the Olyt said. Kelly wished he could read the alien’s expression. The computer’s tone was neutral, but the words themselves sounded a little resentful. “Some have spoken of this game with no rules. However, my question referred to the stakes.”

“Oh. They are as usual for this study: the winner is allowed to return home.”

Kelly’s heart skipped a beat. “Wait a minute. Where did that rule come from?”

“The rules and stakes are chosen by us,” Slaich said flatly.

“Yes, but . . . What happens to the loser?”

“He remains to play against a new opponent.”

“What if I refuse to play at all?”

“That is equivalent to losing.”

Kelly snorted, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. With dignity, he thought dryly, and began to study the game board.

It looked like it had been designed to handle at least a dozen widely differing games. It was square, with two five-color bands of squares running along its edge; one with a repeating pattern, the other apparently random. Inside this was a checkerboard-type design with sets of concentric circles and radial lines superimposed on it. To one side of the board itself sat a stack of transparent plates, similarly marked, and a set of supporting legs for them; to the other side were various sizes, shapes, and colors of playing pieces, plus cards, multisided dice, and a gadget with a small display screen. “Looks like we’re well equipped,” he remarked to the Olyt, who seemed also to be studying their equipment. “I guess we could start by choosing which set of spaces to use. I suggest the red and—is that color blue?—the square ones. He indicated the checkerboard.

“Very well,” Tlaymasy said. “Now we must decide on a game. Are you familiar with Four-Ply?”

“I doubt it, but my people may have something similar. Describe the rules.”

Tlaymasy proceeded to do so. It sounded a little like go, but with the added feature of limited mobility for the pieces once on the board. “Sounds like something I’d have a shot at,” Kelly said after the alien had demonstrated some of the moves with a butterfly-shaped playing piece. “Of course, you’ve got a big advantage, since you’ve played it before. I’ll go along on two conditions: first, that a third-level or fourth-level attack must be announced one move before the attack is actually launched.”

“That eliminates the possibility of surprise attacks,” Tlaymasy objected.

“Exactly. Come on, now, you know the game well enough to let me have that, don’t you?”

“Very well. Your second condition?”

“That we play a practice game first. In other words, the second game we play will determine who gets to go home. Is that permissible?” he added, looking up at one of the room’s corners.

“Whatever is decided between you is binding,” Slaich replied.

Kelly cocked an eyebrow at his opponent. “Tlaymasy?”

“Very well. Let us begin.”

It wasn’t such a hard game to learn, Kelly decided, though he got off to a bad start and spent most of their practice game on the defensive. The strategy Tlaymasy was using was not hard to pick up, and by the time they finished he found he could often anticipate the Olyt’s next move.

“An interesting game,” Kelly commented as they retrieved their playing pieces from the board and prepared to play again. “Is it popular on your world?”

“Somewhat. The ancients used it for training in logic. Are you ready to begin?”

“I guess so,” Kelly said. His mouth felt dry.

This time Kelly avoided the errors he’d made at the beginning of the practice game, and as the board filled up with pieces he found himself in a position nearly as strong as Tlaymasy’s. Hunching over the board, agonizing over each move, he fought to maintain his strength.

And then Tlaymasy made a major mistake, exposing an arm of his force to a twin attack. Kelly pounced, and when the dust of the next four moves settled he had taken six of his opponent’s pieces—a devastating blow.

A sudden, loud hiss made Kelly jump. He looked up, triumphant grin vanishing. The Olyt was staring at him, mouth open just enough to show rows of sharp teeth. Both hands were on the table, and Kelly could see the claws sliding in and out of their sheaths. “Uh . . . anything wrong?” he asked cautiously, muscles tensing for emergency action.

For a moment there was silence. Then Tlaymasy closed his mouth and his claws retracted completely. “I was upset by the stupidity of my play. It has passed. Let us continue.”

Kelly nodded and returned his gaze to the board, but in a far more subdued state of mind. In the heat of the game, he had almost forgotten he was playing for a ticket home. Now, suddenly, it looked as if he might be playing for his life as well. Tlaymasy’s outburst had carried a not-so-subtle message: the Olyt did not intend to accept defeat graciously.

The play continued. Kelly did the best he could, but his concentration was shot all to hell. Within ten moves Tlaymasy had made up his earlier loss. Kelly sneaked glances at the alien as they played, wondering if that had been Tlaymasy’s plan all along. Surely he wouldn’t physically attack Kelly while he himself was a prisoner on an unknown world . . . would he? Suppose, for example, that honor was more important to him than even his own life, and that honor precluded losing to an alien?

A trickle of sweat ran down the middle of Kelly’s back. He had no evidence that Tlaymasy thought that way . . . but on the other hand he couldn’t come up with any reasons why it shouldn’t be possible. And that reaction had looked very unfriendly.

The decision was not difficult. Discretion being the better part and all that—and a few extra days here wouldn’t hurt him. Deliberately, he launched a bold assault against Tlaymasy’s forces, an attack which would require dumb luck to succeed.

Dumb luck, as usual, wasn’t with him. Seven moves later, Tlaymasy had won.

“The game is over,” Slaich’s voice boomed. “Tlaymasy, return to your Transphere chamber and prepare to leave. Kelly McClain, return to your rest chamber.”

The Olyt stood and again gave Kelly his crossed-wrists salute before turning and disappearing through his sliding door. Kelly sighed with relief and emotional fatigue and headed back toward his room. “You played well for a learner,” Slaich’s voice followed him.

“Thanks,” Kelly grunted. Now, with Tlaymasy’s teeth and claws no longer a few feet in front of him, he was starting to wonder if maybe he shouldn’t have thrown the game. “When do I play next?”

“In approximately twenty hours. The Transphere must be reset after the Olyt is returned to his world.”

Kelly had been about to step into his rest chamber. “Twenty hours?” he echoed, stopping. “Just a second.” He turned toward the alcove where his desk was sitting—but had barely taken two steps when a flash of red light burst in front of him. “Hey! he yelped, jumping backwards as heat from the blast washed over him. “What was that for?”

“You may not approach the Transphere apparatus.” Slaich’s voice had abruptly taken on a whiplash bite.

“Nuts! If I’m being left to twiddle my thumbs for a day I want the books that are in my desk.”

There was a momentary silence, and when Slaich spoke again his tone had moderated. “I see. I suppose that is all right. You may proceed.”

Kelly snorted and walked forward warily. No more bursts of light came. Squeezing around to the front of his desk, he opened the bottom drawer and extracted three paperbacks, normally kept there for idle moments. From another drawer came a half-dozen journals that he’d been meaning to read; and finally, as an afterthought, he scooped up a couple of pens and a yellow legal pad. Stepping back to the center of the room, he held out his booty. “See? Perfectly harmless. Not a single neutron bomb in the lot.”

“Return to your rest chamber.” Slaich did not sound amused.

With the concentration needed during the game, Kelly had temporarily forgotten he’d missed both lunch and dinner. Now, though, his growling stomach was demanding attention. Following Slaich’s instructions, he requested and obtained a meal from the automat-type slots in one wall of his cubicle. The food was bland but comfortably filling, and Kelly felt his spirits rising as he ate. Afterwards, he chose one of his paperbacks and stretched out on the bed. But instead of immediately beginning to read, he stared at the ceiling and thought.

Obviously, there could be no further question that what was happening to him was real. Similarly, there was no reasonable hope that he could escape his captors. There were no apparent exits from the small complex of rooms except via the Transphere, whose machinery was hidden behind metal walls and was probably incomprehensible anyway. He had only Slaich’s word that the Stryfkar intended to send him home, but since they apparently had made—and kept—similar promises to other humans, he had no real reason to doubt them. True, the game rules this time seemed to be different, but Tlaymasy had implied the Stryfkar had pulled this on several of his own race and had released them on schedule. So the big question, then, was whether or not Kelly could win the next game he would have to play.

He frowned. He’d never been any great shakes as a games player, winning frequently at chess but only occasionally at the other games in his limited repertoire. And yet, he’d come surprisingly close today to beating an alien in his own game. An alien, be it noted, whose race held an empire of eight worlds. The near-victory could be meaningless, of course—Tlaymasy might have been the equivalent of a fourth-grader playing chess, for instance. But the Olyt would have had to be a complete idiot to suggest a game he wasn’t good at. And there was also Slaich’s reaction after the game; it was pretty clear the Stryf hadn’t expected Kelly to do that well. Did that mean that Kelly, average strategist that he was, was still better than the run-of-the-mill alien?

If that was true, his problems were essentially over. Whoever his next opponent was, it should be relatively easy to beat him, especially if they picked a game neither player had had much experience with. Four-Ply might be a good choice if the new tester wasn’t another Olyt; the game was an interesting one and easy enough to learn, at least superficially. As a matter of tact, it might be worth his while to try marketing it when he got home. The game market was booming these days, and while Four-Ply wasn’t likely to make him rich, it could conceivably bring in a little pocket change.

On the other hand . . . what was his hurry?

Kelly squirmed slightly on the bed as a rather audacious idea struck him. if he really was better than most other aliens, then it followed that he could go home most any time he wanted, simply by winning whichever game he was on at the moment. And if that were true, why not stick around for another week or so and learn a few more alien games?

The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. True, there was an element of risk involved, but that was true of any money-making scheme. And it couldn’t be that risky—this was a psychology experiment, for crying out loud! “Slaich?” he called at the metallic ceiling.

“Yes?”

“If I lose my next game, what happens?”

“You will remain here until you have won or until the test is over.”

So it didn’t sound like he got punished or anything if he kept losing. The Stryfkar had set up a pretty simple-minded experiment here, to his way of thinking. Human psychologist would probably have put together something more complicated. Did that imply humans were better strategists than even the Stryfkar?

An interesting question, but for the moment Kelly didn’t care. He’d found a tiny bit of maneuvering space in the controlled environment they’d set up, and it felt very satisfying. Rules like these, in his book, were made to be bent.

And speaking of rules . . . Putting aside his paperback, Kelly rolled on the bed and went over to the cubicle’s folding table. Business before pleasure, he told himself firmly. Picking up a pen and his legal pad, he began to sketch the Four-Ply playing board and to list the game’s rules.

* * *

To: Office of Director Rodau 248700, A.R.B., Clars

From: Office of Director Eftis 379214, Game Studies, Var-4

Subject: Studies of Humans

Date: 3 Lysmo 3829

Dear Rodau,

The Human problem is taking on some frightening aspects, and we are increasingly convinced that we have stumbled upon another race of Chanis. Details will be transmitted when all analyses are complete, but I wanted to send you this note first to give you as much time as possible to recommend an assault force, should you deem this necessary.

As authorized, we initiated a Phase III study eight days ago. Our Human has played games against members of four races: an Olyt, a Fiwalic, a Spromsa, and a Thim-fra-chee. In each case the game agreed upon has been one from the non-Human player’s world, with slight modifications suggested by the Human. As would be expected, the Human has consistently lost—but in each case he has clearly been winning until the last few moves. Our contact specialist, Slaich 898661, suggested early on that the Human might be deliberately losing; but with both his honor and his freedom at stake Slaich could offer no motive for such behavior. However, in a conversation of 1 Lysmo (tape enclosed) the Human freely confirmed our suspicions and indicated the motive was material gain. He is using the testing sessions to study his opponents’ games, expecting to introduce them for profit on returning to his world.

I’m sure you will notice the similarities to Chani psychology: the desire for profit, even at the casual risk of his safety, and the implicit belief that his skills are adequate to bring release whenever he wishes. History shows us that, along with their basic tactical skills, it was just these characteristics that drove the Chanis in their most unlikely conquests. It must also be emphasized that the Human shows no signs of military or other tactical training and must therefore be considered representative of his race.

Unless further study uncovers flaws in their character which would preclude an eventual Chani-like expansion, I personally feel we must consider annihilation for this race as soon as possible. Since we obviously need to discover the race’s full strategic capabilities—and since our subject refuses to cooperate—we are being forced to provide a stronger incentive. The results should be enlightening, and will be sent as soon as they are available.

Regards,

Eftis

The door slid back and Kelly stepped into the test chamber, looking across the room eagerly to see what sort of creature he’d be competing against this time. The dim red lights were back on in the room, indicating someone from a world with a red sun, and as Kelly’s eyes adjusted to the relative darkness he saw another of the alligator-like Olyts approaching the table. “I greet you,” Kelly said, making the crossed-wrist gesture he’d seen at his first game here. “I am Kelly McClain of the human race.”

The Olyt repeated the salute. “I am ulur Achranae of the Olyt race.

“Pleased to meet you. What does ulur mean?”

“It is a title of respect for my position. I command a war-force of seven spacecraft.”

Kelly swallowed. A trained military man. Good thing he wasn’t in a hurry to win and go home. “Interesting. Well, shall we begin?”

Achranae sat down. “Let us make an end to this charade quickly.”

“What do you mean, ‘charade’ ?” Kelly asked cautiously as he took his seat. He was by no means an expert on Olyt expressions and emotions, but he could swear this one was angry.

“Do not deny your part,” the alien snapped. “I recognize your name from the reports, and know how you played this game for the Stryfkar against another of my people, studying him like a laboratory specimen before allowing him to win and depart. We do not appreciate the way you take our people like this—”

“Whoa! Wait a second; I’m not with them. They’ve been taking my people, too. It’s some sort of psychology experiment, I guess.”

The Olyt glared at him in silence for a long moment. “If you truly believe that, you are a fool,” he said at last, sounding calmer. “Very well; let us begin.”

“Before you do so we must inform you of an important change in the rules,” Slaich’s voice cut in. “You shall play three different games, instead of one, agreeing on the rules before beginning each. The one who wins two or more shall be returned home. The other will lose his life.”

It took a second for that to sink in. “What?” Kelly yelped. “You can’t do that!” Across the table Achranae gave a soft, untranslatable hiss. His claws, fully extended, scratched lightly on the game board.

“It is done,” Slaich said flatly. “You will proceed now.”

Kelly shot a frustrated glance at Achranae, looked up again. “We will not play for our lives. That sort of thing is barbarous, and we are both civilized beings.”

“Civilized.” Slaich’s voice was thick with sudden contempt. “You, who can barely send craft outside your own atmosphere; you consider yourself civilized? And your opponent is little better.”

“We govern a sphere fifteen light-years across,” Achranae reminded Slaich calmly, his outburst of temper apparently over. For all their short fuses, Kelly decided, Olyts didn’t seem to stay mad long.

“Your eight worlds are nothing against our forty.”

“It is said the Chanis had only five when they challenged you.”

The silence from the speaker was impressively ominous. “What are the Chanis?” Kelly asked, fighting the urge to whisper.

“It is rumored they were a numerically small but brutally aggressive race who nearly conquered the Stryfkar many generations ago. We have heard these stories from traders, but do not know how true they are.”

“True or not, you sure hit a nerve,” Kelly commented. “How about it, Slaich? Is he right?”

“You will proceed now,” Slaich ordered, ignoring Kelly’s question.

Kelly glanced at Achranae, wishing he could read the other’s face. Did Olyts understand the art of bluffing? “I said we wouldn’t play for our lives.”

In answer a well-remembered flash of red light exploded inches from his face. Instinctively, he pushed hard on the table, toppling himself and his chair backwards. He hit hard enough to see stars, somersaulted out of the chair, and wound up lying on his stomach on the floor. Raising his head cautiously, he saw the red fireball wink out and, after a moment, got warily to his feet. Achranae, he noted, was also several feet back from the table, crouching in what Kelly decided was probably a fighting stance of some kind.

“If you do not play, both of you will lose your lives.” Slaich’s voice was mild, almost emotionless, but it sent a shiver down Kelly’s spine. Achranae had been right: this was no simple psychology experiment. The Stryfkar were searching for potential enemies—and somehow both humans and Olyts had made it onto their list. And there was still no way to escape. Looking across at Achranae, Kelly shrugged helplessly. “Doesn’t look like we have much choice, does it?”

The Olyt straightened up slowly. “For the moment, no.”

“Since this contest is so important to both of us,” Kelly said when they were seated again, “I suggest that you choose the first game, allowing me to offer changes that will take away some of your advantage—changes we both have to agree on, of course. I’ll choose the second game; you’ll suggest changes on that one.”

“That seems honorable. And the third?”

“I don’t know. Let’s discuss that one when we get there, okay?”

It took nearly an hour for the first game, plus amendments, to be agreed upon. Achranae used three of the extra transparencies and their supports to create a three-dimensional playing area; the game itself was a sort of 3-D “Battleship,” but with elements of chess, Monopoly, and even poker mixed in. Surprisingly enough, the mixture worked, and if the stakes hadn’t been so high Kelly thought he would have enjoyed playing it. His own contributions to the rules were a slight adjustment to the shape of the playing region—which Kelly guessed would change the usual positional strategies—and the introduction of a “wild card” concept to the play. “I also suggest a practice game before we play for keeps,” he told Achranae.

The Olyt’s dark eyes bored into his. “Why?”

“Why not? I’ve never played this before, and you’ve never played with these rules. It would make the actual game fairer. More honorable. We’ll do the same with the second and third games.”

“Ah—it is a point of honor?” The alien cocked his head to the right. A nod? “Very well. Let us begin.”

Even with the changes, the game—Skymarch, Achranae called it—was still very much an Olyt one, and Achranae won the practice game handily. Kelly strongly suspected Skymarch was a required course of the aliens’ space academy; it looked too much like space warfare to be anything else.

“Did the Stryf speak the truth when he said you were not starfarers?” Achranae asked as they set up the board again.

“Hm? Oh, yes.” Kelly replied distractedly, his mind on strategy for the coming game. “We’ve hardly even got simple spacecraft yet.”

“Surprising, since you learn space warfare tactics so quickly.” He waved his sheathed claws over the board. “A pity, too, since you will not be able to resist if the Stryfkar decide to destroy you.”

“I suppose not, but why would they want to? We can’t be any threat to them.”

Again Achranae indicated the playing board. “If you are representative, your race is unusually gifted with both tactical skill and aggressiveness. Such abilities would make you valuable allies or dangerous adversaries to any starfaring race.”

Kelly shrugged. “You’d think they’d try to recruit us, then.”

“Unlikely. The Stryfkar are reputed to be a proud race who have little use for allies. This harassment of both our peoples should indicate their attitude toward other races.”

The Olyt seemed to be on the verge of getting angry again, Kelly noted uneasily. A change in subject seemed in order. “Uh, yes. Shall we begin our game?”

Achranae let out a long hiss. “Very well.”

From the very beginning it was no contest. Kelly did his best, but it was clear that the Olyt was able to think three-dimensionally better than he could. Several times he lost a piece simply because he missed some perfectly obvious move it could have made. Sweating, he tried to make himself slow down, to spend more time on each move. But it did no good. Inexorably, Achranae tightened the noose; and, too quickly, it was all over.

Kelly leaned back in his chair, expelling a long breath. It was all right, he told himself—he had to expect to lose a game where the alien had all the advantages. The next game would be different, though; Kelly would be on his own turf, with his choice of weapons—

“Have you chosen the game we shall play next?” Achranae asked, interrupting Kelly’s thoughts.

“Idle down, will you?” Kelly snapped, glaring at the alien. “Give me a minute to think.”

It wasn’t an easy question, Chess was far and away Kelly’s best game, but Achranae had already showed himself a skilled strategist, at least with warfare-type games. That probably made chess a somewhat risky bet. Card games involved too much in the way of chance, for this second game Kelly needed as much advantage as he could get. Word games like Scrabble were obviously out. Checkers or Dots were too simple. Backgammon? That was a pretty nonmilitary game, but Kelly was a virtual novice at it himself. How about—

How about a physical game?

“Slaich? Could I get some extra equipment in here? I’d like a longer table, a couple of paddles, a sort of light, bouncy ball—”

“Games requiring specific physical talents are by their nature unfair for such a competition as this,” Slaich said. “They are not permitted.”

“I do not object,” Achranae spoke up unexpectedly, and Kelly looked at him in surprise. “You stated we could choose the games and the rules, and it is Kelly McClain’s choice this time.”

“We are concerned with psychological studies,” Slaich said. “We are not interested in the relative abilities of your joints and muscles. You will choose a game that can be played with the equipment provided.”

“It is dishonorable—”

“No, it’s okay, Achranae,” Kelly interrupted, ashamed at himself for even suggesting such a thing. “Slaich is right; it would’ve been completely unfair. It was dishonorable for me to suggest it. Please accept my apology.”

“You are blameless,” the Olyt said. The dishonor is in those who brought us here.”

“Yes,” Kelly agreed, glancing balefully at the ceiling. The point was well taken. Achranae wasn’t Kelly’s enemy, merely his opponent. The Stryfkar were the real enemy.

For all the good that knowledge did him.

He cleared his throat. “Okay, Achranae, I guess I’m ready. This game’s called chess . . .”

The Olyt picked up the rules and movements quickly, enough so that Kelly wondered if the aliens had a similar game on their own world. Fortunately, the knight’s move seemed to be a new one on him, and Kelly hoped it would offset the other’s tactical training. As his contribution, Achranae suggested the pawns be allowed to move backwards as well as forwards. Kelly agreed, and they settled into their practice game.

It was far harder than Kelly had expected. The “reversible pawn” rule caused him tremendous trouble, mainly because his logic center kept editing it out of his strategy. Within fifteen moves he’d lost both bishops and one of his precious knights, and Achranae’s queen was breathing down his neck.

“An interesting game,” the Olyt commented a few moves later, after Kelly had managed to get out from under a powerful attack. “Have you had training in its technique?”

“Not really,” Kelly said, glad to take a breather. “I just play for enjoyment with my friends. Why?”

“The test of skill at a game is the ability to escape what appears to be certain defeat. By that criterion you have a great deal of skill.”

Kelly shrugged. “Just native ability, I guess.”

“Interesting. On my world such skills must be learned over a long period of time.” Achranae indicated the board. “We have a game similar in some ways to this one; if I had not studied it I would have lost to you within a few moves.”

“Yeah,” Kelly muttered. He’d been pretty sure Achranae wasn’t running on beginner’s luck, but he’d sort of hoped he was wrong. “Let’s get back to the game, huh?”

In the end Kelly won, but only because Achranae lost his queen to Kelly’s remaining knight and Kelly managed to take advantage of the error without any major goofs of his own.

“Are you ready to begin the actual game?” Achranae asked when the board had been cleared.

Kelly nodded, feeling a tightness in his throat. This was for all the marbles. “I suppose so. Let’s get it over with.”

Using one of the multifaced dice they determined the Olyt would have the white pieces. Achranae opened with his king’s pawn, and Kelly responded with something he dimly remembered being called a Sicilian defense. Both played cautiously and defensively; only two pawns were taken in the first twenty moves. Sweating even in the air-conditioned room, Kelly watched his opponent gradually bring his pieces into attacking positions as he himself set his defense as best he could.

When the assault came it was devastating in its slaughter. By the time the captures and recaptures were done, eight more pieces were gone . . . and Kelly was a rook down.

Brushing a strand of hair out of his eyes with a trembling hand, Kelly swallowed hard as he studied the board. Without a doubt, he was in trouble. Achranae controlled the center of the board now and his king was better defended than Kelly’s. Worse yet, he seemed to have mastered the knight’s move, while Kelly was still having trouble with his pawns. And if the Olyt won this one . . .

“Are you distressed?”

Kelly started, looked up at his opponent. “Just a—” His voice cracked and he tried again. “Just nervous.”

“Perhaps we should cease play for a time, until you are better able to concentrate,” Achranae suggested.

The last thing Kelly wanted at the moment was the alien’s charity. “I’m all right,” he said irritably.

Achranae’s eyes were unblinking. “In that case, I would like to take a few minutes of rest myself. Is this permissible?”

Kelly stared back as understanding slowly came. Clearly, Achranae didn’t need a break; he was a game and a half toward going home. Besides which, Kelly knew what an upset Olyt looked like, and Achranae showed none of the symptoms. No, giving Kelly the chance to calm down could only benefit the human . . . and as he gazed at the alien’s face, Kelly knew the Olyt was perfectly aware of that.

“Yes,” Kelly said at last. “Let’s take a break. How about returning in a half-hour or so?”

“Acceptable.” Achranae stood and crossed his wrists. “I shall be ready whenever you also are.”

The ceiling over Kelly’s bed was perfectly flat, without even so much as a ripple to mar it. Nonetheless, it reflected images far more poorly than Kelly would have expected. He wondered about it, but not very hard. There were more important things to worry about.

Pulling his left arm from behind his head; he checked the time. Five more minutes and Slaich would sound the little bell that would call them back to the arena. Kelly sighed.

What was he going to do?

Strangely enough, the chess game was no longer his major concern. True, he was still in trouble there, but the rest period had done wonders for his composure, and he had already come up with two or three promising lines of attack. As long as he kept his wits around him, he had a fair chance of pulling a win out of his current position. And that was Kelly’s real problem . . . because if he did, in fact, win, there would have to be a third game. A game either he or Achranae would have to lose.

Kelly didn’t want to die. He had lots of high-sounding reasons why he ought to stay alive—at least one of which, the fact that no one else on Earth knew of the threat lurking behind these “games,” was actually valid—but the plain fact was that he simply didn’t want to die. Whatever the third game was chosen to be, he knew he would play just as hard and as well as he possibly could.

And yet . . .

Kelly squirmed uncomfortably. Achranae didn’t deserve to die, either. Not only was he also an unwilling participant in this crazy arena, but he had deliberately thrown away his best chance to win the contest. Perhaps it was less a spirit of fairness than one of obedience to a rigid code of honor that had kept him from capitalizing on his opponent’s momentary panic; Kelly would probably never know one way or the other. But it really didn’t matter. If Kelly went on to win the chess game he would owe his victory to Achranae.

The third game . . .

What would be the fairest way to do it? Invent a game together that neither had played before? That would pit Kelly’s natural tactical abilities against Achranae’s trained ones and would probably be pretty fair. On the other hand, it would give the Stryfkar another chance to study them in action, and Kelly was in no mood to cooperate with his captors any more than necessary. Achranae, Kelly had already decided, seemed to feel the same way. He wondered fleetingly how long the Stryfkar had been snatching Achranae’s people, and why they hadn’t retaliated. Probably had no idea where this game studies center was, he decided; the Transphere’s operations would, by design, be difficult to trace. But if he and Achranae didn’t want to give the Stryfkar any more data, their only alternative was to make the rubber game one of pure chance, and Kelly rebelled against staking his life on the toss of a coin.

The tone, expected though it was, startled him. “It is time,” Slaich’s flat voice announced. “You will return to the test chamber.”

Grimacing, Kelly got to his feet and headed for the door. Maybe Achranae would have some ideas.

“Are you better prepared to play now?” the Olyt asked when they again faced each other over the board.

“Yes,” Kelly nodded. “Thanks for suggesting a break. I really did need it.”

“I sensed that your honor did not permit you to make the request.” The alien gestured at the board. “I believe it is your move.”

Sure enough, now that his nerves were under control, Kelly began to chip away at Achranae’s position, gradually making up his losses and taking the offensive once more. Gambling on the excessive value the Olyt seemed to place in his queen, Kelly laid a trap, with his own queen as the bait. Achranae bit . . . and five moves later Kelly had won.

“Excellent play,” the Olyt said, with what Kelly took to be admiration. “I was completely unprepared for that attack. I was not wrong; you have an uncanny tactical ability. Your race will indeed be glorious starfarers someday.”

“Assuming we ever get off our own world, of course,” Kelly said as he cleared the board. “At the moment we’re more like pawns ourselves in this game.”

“You have each won once,” Slaich spoke up. “It is time now to choose the rules for the final game.

Kelly swallowed and looked up to find Achranae looking back at him. “Any idea?” he asked.

“None that is useful. A game of chance would perhaps be fastest. Beyond that, I have not determined what my duty requires.”

“What are the possibilities?”

“That I should survive in order to return to my people, or that I should not, to allow you that privilege.”

“A pity we can’t individually challenge the Stryfkar to duels, Kelly said wryly.

“That would be satisfying,” Achranae agreed. “But I do not expect they would accept.”

There was a long silence . . . and an idea popped into Kelly’s mind, practically full-blown. A risky idea—one that could conceivably get them both killed. But it might just work . . . and otherwise one of them would certainly die. Gritting his teeth, Kelly took the plunge. “Achranae,” he said carefully, “I believe I have a game we can play. Will you trust me enough to accept it now, before I explain the rules, and to play it without a practice game?”

The Olyt’s snout quivered slightly as he stared across the table in silence. For a long moment the only sound Kelly could hear was his own heartbeat. Then, slowly, Achranae cocked his head to the right. “Very well. I believe you to be honorable. I will agree to your conditions.”

“Slaich? You still holding to the rules you set up? Kelly called.

“Of course.”

“Okay.” Kelly took a deep breath. “This game involves two rival kingdoms and a fire-breathing creature who harasses them both. Here’s the creature’s underground chamber.” He placed a black marker on the playing board, then picked up three of the transparent plates and their supports and set them up. “The two kingdoms are called the Mountain Kingdom and the Land City. The Mountain Kingdom is bigger; here’s its center and edge.” He placed a large red marker on the top plate and added a ring of six smaller ones around it, two squares away. Moving the black marker slightly so that it was directly under one edge of the ring, he picked up a large yellow marker. “This is the Land City,” he identified it, moving it slowly over the middle transparency as his eyes flickered over the board. Ten centimeters between levels, approximately; four per square . . . he put the yellow marker eight squares from the red one and four squares to one side. It wasn’t perfect, but it was close and would have to do. “Finally, here are our forces.” He scattered a dozen each red and yellow butterfly-shaped pieces in the space between the two kingdoms. “The conditions for victory are twofold: the creature must be dead, and there can be no forces from the opposing side threatening your kingdom. Okay?”

“Very well,” Achranae said slowly, studying the board carefully. Once again Kelly wished he had a better grasp of Olyt expressions. “How are combat results decided?”

“By the number of forces involved plus a throw of the die.” Making up the rules as he went along, Kelly set up a system that allowed combat between any two of the three sides—and that would require nearly all of both kingdoms’ forces combined to defeat the creature with any certainty. “Movement is two squares or one level per turn, and you can move all your forces each turn,” he concluded. “Any questions?”

Achranae’s eyes bored unblinkingly into his, as if trying to read Kelly’s mind. “No. Which of us moves first?”

“I will, if you don’t mind.” Starting with the pieces closest to the Olyt’s kingdom, Kelly began moving them away from the red marker and toward the black one. Achranae hesitated somewhat when it was his turn, but he followed Kelly’s example in moving his forces downward. Two of them landed within striking range of some of Kelly’s; but the human ignored them, continuing onward instead. Within a few more moves the yellow and red pieces had formed a single mass converging on the black marker.

The fire-breathing creature never had a chance.

“And now . . .?” Achranae sat stiffly in his chair, his claws about halfway out of their sheaths. The creature had been eliminated on the Olyt’s turn, making it Kelly’s move . . . and Achranae’s forces were still intermixed with the human’s. A more vulnerable position was hard to imagine, and Achranae clearly knew it.

Kelly gave him a tight smile and leaned back in his seat. “Well, the creature’s dead—and in their present positions none of your forces can threaten my kingdom. So I guess I’ve won.”

There was a soft hiss from the other side of the table, and Achranae’s claws slid all the way out. Kelly held his breath and tensed himself to leap. Surely Achranae was smart enough to see it . . . and, abruptly, the claws disappeared. “But my kingdom is also not threatened,” the Olyt said. “Therefore I, too, have won.”

“Really?” Kelly pretended great amazement. “I’ll be darned. You’re right. Congratulations.” He looked at the ceiling. “Slaich? By a remarkable coincidence we’ve both won the third game, so I guess we both get to go home. Ready any time you are.”

“No.” The Stryf’s flat voice was firm.

A golfball-sized lump rose into Kelly’s throat. “Why not? You said anyone who won two games would be sent home. You set up that rule yourself?”

“Then the rule is changed. Only one of you can be allowed to leave. You will choose a new game.”

Slaich’s words seemed to hang in the air like a death sentence . . . and Kelly felt his fingernails digging into his palms. He really hadn’t expected the aliens to let him twist their rules to his advantage—he already knew this was no game to them. But he’d still hoped . . . and now he had no choice but to gamble his last card. “I won’t play any more games,” he said bluntly. “I’m sick of being a pawn in this boogeyman hunt of yours. You can all just take a flying leap at yourselves.”

“If you do not play you will lose by forfeit,” Slaich reminded him.

“Big deal,” Kelly snorted. “You’re going to wipe out earth eventually anyway, aren’t you? What the hell difference does it make where I die?”

There was a short pause. “Very well. You yourself have chosen. Achranae, return to your Transphere chamber.”

Slowly, the alien rose to his feet. Kelly half expected him to speak up in protest, or to otherwise plead for the human’s life. But he remained silent. For a moment he regarded Kelly through the transparent game boards, as Kelly held his breath. Then, still without a word, the alien crossed his wrists in salute and vanished behind the sliding door. “You will return to your rest chamber now,” Slaich ordered.

Letting out his breath in a long sigh, Kelly stood up and disassembled the playing board, storing the pieces and plates away in their proper places. So it had indeed come down to a toss of a coin, he thought, suddenly very tired. The coin was in the air, and there was nothing to do now but wait . . . and hope that Achranae had understood.

* * *

To: Office of Director Rodau 248700, A.R.B.: Clars

From: Office of Director Eftis 379214, Games Studies, Var-4

Date: 21 Lysmo 3829

XXXXX URGENT XXXXX

Dear Rodau,

It is even worse than we expected and I hereby make formal recommendation that the Humans be completely obliterated. The enclosed records should be studied carefully, particularly those concerning the third game that was played. By using his tactical skills to create a game he and his opponent could jointly win, the Human clearly demonstrated both the ability to cooperate with others, and also the rare trait of mercy. Although these characteristics gained him nothing in this particular instance—and, in fact, can be argued to have been liabilities—we cannot assume this will always be the case. The danger that their cooperative nature will lead the Humans into a successful alliance instead of betraying them to their destruction cannot be ignored. If the Chanis had been capable of building alliances they might well have never been stopped.

It is anticipated that a full psycho-physiological dissection of our Human subject will be necessary to facilitate the assault fleet’s strategy. We request that the proper experts and equipment be sent as soon as they become available. Please do not delay overlong; I cannot guarantee our Human can be kept alive more than a year at the most.

Eftis

* * *

Kelly’s first indication that the long wait had ended was a faint grinding sound transmitted through the metal walls of his rest chamber. It startled him from a deep sleep—but he hardly even had time to wonder about it before the room’s door suddenly flashed white and collapsed outward. Instantly, there was a minor hurricane in the room, and Kelly’s ears popped as the air pressure dropped drastically. But even as he tumbled off the bed three figures in long-snouted spacesuits fought their way in through the gale, and before he knew it he’d been stuffed in a giant ribbed balloon with a hissing tank at the bottom. “Kelly McClain?” a tinny, static-distorted voice came from a box by the air tank as the balloon inflated. “Are you safe?”

Kelly’s ears popped again as his three rescuers tipped him onto his back and carried him carefully toward the ruined door. “I’m fine,” he said toward the box. “Is that you, Achranae?”

It was almost fifteen seconds before the voice spoke again; clearly, the Olyt’s translator wasn’t as good as the Stryfkar’s. “Yes. I am pleased you are still alive.”

Kelly’s grin was wide enough to hurt, and was probably even visible through his beard. “Me too. Damn, but I’m glad you got my message. I wasn’t at all sure you’d caught it.”

They were out in the Transphere chamber before the response came, and Kelly had a chance to look around. In the ceiling, stretching upwards through at least two stories’ worth of rock, was a jagged hole. Moving purposefully through the chamber itself were a dozen more Olyts in the white, armor-like suits. “It was ingenious. I feared that I would not be allowed to leave, though, once I had seen the board.”

“Me too—but it looks like we had nothing to worry about.” Kelly grinned again—it was so good to talk to a friend again! “I’ll lay you any odds that the Stryfkar haven’t yet noticed what I did. It’s the old can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees problem; they’d seen that four-tiered board used for so many different games that it never occurred to them that you and I would automatically associate it with Skymarch, the only game we’d ever played on it. So while they took my kingdoms-and-dragon setup at face value, you were able to see the markers as a group of objects in space. I gambled that you’d realize they represented our home worlds and this one, and that you’d take note of the relative distances I’d laid out. I guess the gamble paid off.”

Kelly was beneath the ceding hole now, and a pair of dangling cables were being attached to his balloon’s upper handholds. “We shall hope that winning such risks is characteristic of your race,” Achranae said. “We have destroyed the Stryfkar base and have captured records that show a large force will soon be coming here. We have opened communication with your race, but they have not yet agreed to a tactical alliance. Perhaps your testimony will help persuade them. It is hoped that you, at least, will agree to aid us in our tactical planning.”

The ropes pulled taut and Kelly began moving upward. “I’m almost certain we can find some extra help on Earth,” Kelly told the Olyt grimly. “And as for me, it’ll be a pleasure. The Stryfkar have a lot to learn about us pawns.”

SWARM

Bruce Sterling

This superior story imagines an alien society, a Nest, that is truly strange and different, and it introduces to F&SF readers a young writer who tells us that he is 27, married, works for the state government (in Austin, Texas), listens to a lot of new wave rock and collects carnivorous plants. Mr. Sterling has also written two SF novels, INVOLUTION OCEAN (1977) and THE ARTIFICIAL KID (1980).

“I will miss your conversation during the rest of the voyage,” the alien said.

Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel folded his jeweled hands over his gold-embroidered waistcoat. “I regret it also, ensign,” he said in the alien’s own hissing language. “Our talks together have been very useful to me. I would have paid to learn so much, but you gave it freely.”

“But that was only information,” the alien said. He shrouded his bead-bright eyes behind thick nictitating membranes. “We Investors deal in energy, and precious metals. To prize and pursue mere knowledge is an immature racial trait.” The alien lifted the long ribbed frill behind his pinhole-sized ears.

“No doubt you are right,” Afriel said, despising him. “We humans are as children to other races, however; so a certain immaturity seems natural to us.” Afriel pulled off his sunglasses to rub the bridge of his nose. The starship cabin was drenched in searing blue light, heavily ultraviolet. It was the light the Investors preferred, and they were not about to change it for one human passenger.

“You have not done badly,” the alien said magnanimously. “You are the kind of race we like to do business with: young, eager, plastic, ready for a wide variety of goods and experiences. We would have contacted you much earlier, but your technology was still too feeble to afford us a profit.”

“Things are different now,” Afriel said. “We’ll make you rich.”

“Indeed,” the Investor said. The frill behind his scaly head flickered rapidly, a sign of amusement. “Within two hundred years you will be wealthy enough to buy from us the secret of our starflight. Or perhaps your Mechanist faction will discover the secret through research.”

Afriel was annoyed. As a member of the Reshaped faction, he did not appreciate the reference to the rival Mechanists. “Don’t put too much stock in mere technical expertise,” he said. “Consider the aptitude for languages we Shapers have. It makes our faction a much better trading partner. To a Mechanist, all Investors look alike.”

The alien hesitated. Afriel smiled. He had appealed to the alien’s personal ambition with his last statement, and the hint had been taken. That was where the Mechanists always erred. They tried to treat all Investors consistently, using the same programmed routines each time. They lacked imagination.

Something would have to be done about the Mechanists, Afriel thought. Something more permanent than the small but deadly confrontations between isolated ships in the Asteroid Belt and the ice-rich Rings of Saturn. Both factions maneuvered constantly, looking for a decisive stroke, bribing away each other’s best talent, practicing ambush, assassination, and industrial espionage.

Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel was a past master of these pursuits. That was why the Reshaped faction had paid the millions of kilowatts necessary to buy his passage. Afriel held doctorates in biochemistry and alien linguistics, and a master’s degree in magnetic weapons engineering. He was thirty-eight years old and had been Reshaped according to the state of the art at the time of his conception. His hormonal balance had been altered slightly to compensate for long periods spent in free-fall. He had no appendix. The structure of his heart had been redesigned for greater efficiency, and his large intestine had been altered to produce the vitamins normally made by intestinal bacteria. Genetic engineering and rigorous training in childhood had given him an intelligence quotient of one hundred and eighty. He was not the brightest of the agents of the Ring Council, but he was one of the most mentally stable and the best trusted.

“It seems a shame,” the alien said, “that a human of your accomplishments should have to rot for two years in this miserable, profitless outpost.”

“The years won’t be wasted,” Afriel said.

“But why have you chosen to study the Swarm? They can teach you nothing, since they cannot speak. They have no wish to trade, having no tools or technology. They are the only spacefaring race that is essentially without intelligence.”

“That alone should make them worthy of study.”

“Do you seek to imitate them, then? You would make monsters of yourselves.” Again the ensign hesitated. “Perhaps you could do it. It would be bad for business, however.”

There came a fluting burst of alien music over the ship’s speakers, then a screeching fragment of Investor language. Most of it was too high-pitched for Afriel’s ears to follow.

The alien stood, his jeweled skirt brushing the tips of his clawed birdlike feet. “The Swarm’s symbiote has arrived,” he said.

“Thank you,” Afriel said. When the ensign opened the cabin door, Afriel could smell the Swarm’s representative; the creature’s warm yeasty scent had spread rapidly through the starship’s recycled air.

Afriel quickly checked his appearance in a pocket mirror. He touched powder to his face and straightened the round velvet hat on his shoulder-length reddish-blond hair. His earlobes glittered with red impact-rubies, thick as his thumbs’ ends, mined from the Asteroid Belt. His knee-length coat and waistcoat were of gold brocade; the shirt beneath was of dazzling fineness, woven with red-gold thread. He had dressed to impress the Investors, who expected and appreciated a prosperous look from their customers. How could he impress this new alien? Smell, perhaps. He freshened his perfume.

Beside the starship’s secondary airlock, the Swarm’s symbiote was chittering rapidly at the ship’s commander. The commander was an old and sleepy Investor, twice the size of most of her crewmen. Her massive head was encrusted in a jeweled helmet. From within the helmet her clouded eyes glittered like cameras.

The symbiote lifted on its six posterior legs and gestured feebly with its four clawed forelimbs. The ship’s artificial gravity, a third again as strong as Earth’s, seemed to bother it. Its rudimentary eyes, dangling on stalks, were shut tight against the glare. It must be used to darkness, Afriel thought.

The commander answered the creature in its own language. Afriel grimaced, for he had hoped that the creature spoke Investor. Now he would have to learn another language, a language designed for a being without a tongue.

After another brief interchange the commander turned to Afriel. “The symbiote is not pleased with your arrival,” she told Afriel in the Investor language. “There has apparently been some disturbance here involving humans, in the recent past. However, I have prevailed upon it to admit you to the Nest. The episode has been recorded. Payment for my diplomatic services will be arranged with your faction when I return to your native star system.”

“I thank Your Authority,” Afriel said. “Please convey to the symbiote my best personal wishes, and the harmlessness and humility of my intentions . . .” He broke off short as the symbiote lunged toward him, biting him savagely in the calf of his left leg. Afriel jerked free and leapt backward in the heavy artificial gravity, going into a defensive position. The symbiote had ripped away a long shred of his pants leg; it now crouched quietly, eating it.

“It will convey your scent and composition to its nestmates,” said the commander. “This is necessary. Otherwise you would be classed as an invader, and the Swarm’s warrior caste would kill you at once.”

Afriel relaxed quickly and pressed his hand against the puncture wound to stop the bleeding. He hoped that none of the Investors had noticed his reflexive action. It would not mesh well with his story of being a harmless researcher.

“We will reopen the airlock soon,” the commander said phlegmatically, leaning back on her thick reptilian tail. The symbiote continued to munch the shred of cloth. Afriel studied the creature’s neckless segmented head. It had a mouth and nostrils; it had bulbous atrophied eyes on stalks; there were hinged slats that might be radio receivers, and two parallel ridges of clumped wriggling antennae, sprouting among three chitinous plates. Their function was unknown to him.

The airlock door opened. A rush of dense, smoky aroma entered the departure cabin. It seemed to bother the half-dozen Investors, who left rapidly. “We will return in six hundred and twelve of your days, as by our agreement,” the commander said.

“I thank Your Authority,” Afriel said.

“Good luck,” the commander said in English. Afriel smiled.

The symbiote, with a sinuous wriggle of its segmented body, crept into the airlock. Afriel followed it. The airlock door shut behind them. The creature said nothing to him but continued munching loudly. The second door opened, and the symbiote sprang through it, into a wide, round stone tunnel. It disappeared at once into the gloom.

Afriel put his sunglasses into a pocket of his jacket and pulled out a pair of infrared goggles. He strapped them to his head and stepped out of the airlock. The artificial gravity vanished, replaced by the almost imperceptible gravity of the Swarm’s asteroid nest. Afriel smiled, comfortable for the first time in weeks. Most of his adult life had been spent in free-fall, in the Shapers’ colonies in the Rings of Saturn.

Squatting in a dark cavity in the side of the tunnel was a disk-headed furred animal the size of an elephant. It was clearly visible in the infrared of its own body heat. Afriel could hear it breathing. It waited patiently until Afriel had launched himself past it, deeper into the tunnel. Then it took its place in the end of the tunnel, puffing itself up with air until its swollen head securely plugged the exit into space. Its multiple legs sank firmly into sockets in the walls.

The Investors’ ship had left. Afriel remained here, inside one of the millions of planetoids that circled the giant star Betelgeuse in a girdling ring with almost five times the mass of Jupiter. As a source of potential wealth it dwarfed the entire solar system, and it belonged, more or less, to the Swarm. At least, no other race had challenged them for it within the memory of the Investors.

Afriel peered up the corridor. It seemed deserted, and without other bodies to cast infrared heat, he could not see very far. Kicking against the wall, he floated hesitantly down the corridor.

He heard a human voice. “Dr. Afriel!”

“Dr. Mirny!” he called out. “This way!”

He first saw a pair of young symbiotes scuttling toward him, the tips of their clawed feet barely touching the walls. Behind them came a woman wearing goggles like his own. She was young, and attractive in the trim, anonymous way of the genetically reshaped.

She screeched something at the symbiotes in their own language, and they halted, waiting. She coasted forward, and Afriel caught her arm, expertly stopping their momentum.

“You didn’t bring any luggage?” she said anxiously.

He shook his head. “We got your warning before I was sent out. I have only the clothes I’m wearing and a few items in my pockets.”

She looked at him critically. “Is that what people are wearing in the Rings these days? Things have changed more than I thought.”

Afriel glanced at his brocaded coat and laughed. “It’s a matter of policy. The Investors are always readier to talk to a human who looks ready to do business on a large scale. All the Shapers’ representatives dress like this these days. We’ve stolen a jump on the Mechanists; they still dress in those coveralls.”

He hesitated, not wanting to offend her. Galina Mirny’s intelligence was rated at almost two hundred. Men and women that bright were sometimes flighty and unstable, likely to retreat into private fantasy worlds or become enmeshed in strange and impenetrable webs of plotting and rationalization. High intelligence was the strategy the Shapers had chosen in the struggle for cultural dominance, and they were obliged to stick to it, despite its occasional disadvantages. They had tried breeding the Superbright—those with quotients over two hundred—but so many had defected from the Shapers’ colonies that the faction had stopped producing them.

“You wonder about my own clothing,” Mirny said.

“It certainly has the appeal of novelty,” Afriel said with a smile.

“It was woven from the fibers of a pupa’s cocoon,” she said. “My original wardrobe was eaten by a scavenger symbiote during the troubles last year. I usually go nude, but I didn’t want to offend you by too great a show of intimacy.”

Afriel shrugged. “I often go nude myself, I never had much use for clothes except for pockets. I have a few tools on my person, but most are of little importance. We’re Shapers, our tools are here.” He tapped his head. “If you can show me a safe place to put my clothes . . .”

She shook her head. It was impossible to see her eyes for the goggles, which made her expression hard to read. “You’ve made your first mistake, Doctor. There are no places of our own here. It was the same mistake the Mechanist agents made, the same one that almost killed me as well. There is no concept of privacy or property here. This is the Nest. If you seize any part of it for yourself—to store equipment, to sleep in, whatever—then you become an intruder, an enemy. The two Mechanists—a man and a woman—tried to secure an empty chamber for their computer lab. Warriors broke down their door and devoured them. Scavengers ate their equipment, glass, metal, and all.”

Afriel smiled coldly. “It must have cost them a fortune to ship all that material here.”

Mirny shrugged. “They’re wealthier than we are. Their machines, their mining. They meant to kill me, I think. Surreptitiously, so the warriors wouldn’t be upset by a show of violence. They had a computer that was learning the language of the springtails faster than I could.”

“But you survived,” Afriel pointed out. “And your tapes and reports—especially the early ones, when you still had most of your equipment—were of tremendous interest. The Council is behind you all the way. You’ve become quite a celebrity in the Rings, during your absence.”

“Yes, I expected as much,” she said.

Afriel was nonplused. “If I found any deficiency in them,” he said carefully, “it was in my own field, alien linguistics.” He waved vaguely at the two symbiotes who accompanied her. “I assume you’ve made great progress in communicating with the symbiotes, since they seem to do all the talking for the Nest.”

She looked at him with an unreadable expression and shrugged. “There are at least fifteen different kinds of symbiotes here. Those that accompany me are called the springtails, and they speak only for themselves. They are savages, Doctor, who received attention from the Investors only because they can still talk. They were a spacefaring race once, but they’ve forgotten it. They discovered the Nest and they were absorbed, they became parasites.” She tapped one of them on the head. “I tamed these two because I learned to steal and beg food better than they can. They stay with me now and protect me from the larger ones. They are jealous, you know. They have only been with the Nest for perhaps ten thousand years and are still uncertain of their position. They still think, and wonder sometimes. After ten thousand years there is still a little of that left to them.”

“Savages,” Afriel said. “I can well believe that. One of them bit me while I was still aboard the starship. He left a lot to be desired as an ambassador.”

“Yes, I warned him you were coming,” said Mirny. “He didn’t much like the idea, but I was able to bribe him with food . . . I hope he didn’t hurt you badly.”

“A scratch,” Afriel said. “I assume there’s no chance of infection.”

“I doubt it very much. Unless you brought your own bacteria with you.”

“Hardly likely,” Afriel said, offended. “I have no bacteria. And I wouldn’t have brought microorganisms to an alien culture anyway.”

Mirny looked away. “I thought you might have some of the special genetically altered ones . . . I think we can go now. The springtail will have spread your scent by mouth-touching in the subsidiary chamber, ahead of us. It will be spread throughout the Nest in a few hours. Once it reaches the Queen, it will spread very quickly.”

She jammed her feet against the hard shell of one of the young springtails and launched herself down the hall. Afriel followed her. The air was warm and he was beginning to sweat under his elaborate clothing, but his antiseptic sweat was odorless.

They exited into a vast chamber dug from the living rock. It was arched and oblong, eighty meters long and about twenty in diameter. It swarmed with members of the Nest.

There were hundreds of them. Most of them were workers, eight-legged and furred, the size of Great Danes. Here and there were members of the warrior caste, horse-sized furry monsters with heavy fanged heads the size and shape of overstuffed chairs.

A few meters away, two workers were carrying a member of the sensor caste, a being whose immense flattened head was attached to an atrophied body that was mostly lungs. The sensor had great platelike eyes, and its furred chitin sprouted long coiled antennae that twitched feebly as the workers bore it along. The workers clung to the hollowed rock of the chamber walls with hooked and suckered feet.

A paddle-limbed monster with a hairless, faceless head came sculling past them, through the warm reeking air. The front of its head was a nightmare of sharp grinding jaws and blunt armored acid spouts. “A tunneler,” Mirny said. “It can take us deeper into the Nest—come with me.” She launched herself toward it and took a handhold on its furry, segmented back. Afriel followed her, joined by the two immature springtails, who clung to the thing’s hide with their forelimbs. Afriel shuddered at the warm, greasy feel of its rank, damp fur. It continued to scull through the air, its eight fringed paddle feet catching the air like wings.

“There must be thousands of them,” Afriel said.

“I said a hundred thousand in my last report, but that was before I had fully explored the Nest. Even now there are long stretches I haven’t seen. They must number close to a quarter of a million. This asteroid is about the size of the Mechanists’ biggest base—Ceres. It still has rich veins of carbonaceous material. It’s far from mined out.”

Afriel closed his eyes. If he was to lose his goggles, he would have to feel his way, blind, through these teeming, twitching, wriggling thousands. “The population’s still expanding, then?”

“Definitely,” she said. “In fact, the colony will launch a mating swarm soon. There are three dozen male and female alates in the chambers near the Queen. Once they’re launched, they’ll mate and start new Nests. I’ll take you to see them presently.” She hesitated. “We’re entering one of the fungal gardens now.”

One of the young springtails quietly shifted position. Grabbing the tunneler’s fur with its forelimbs, it began to gnaw on the cuff of Afriel’s pants. Afriel kicked it soundly, and it jerked back, retracting its eyestalks.

When he looked up again, he saw that they had entered a second chamber, much larger than the first. The walls around, overhead, and below were buried under an explosive profusion of fungus. The most common types were swollen barrellike domes, multibranched massed thickets, and spaghettilike tangled extrusions that moved very slightly in the faint and odorous breeze. Some of the barrels were surrounded by dim mists of exhaled spores.

“You see those caked-up piles beneath the fungus, its growth medium?” Mirny said.

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure whether it is a plant form or just some kind of complex biochemical sludge,” she said. “The point is that it grows in sunlight, on the outside of the asteroid. A food source that grows in naked space! Imagine what that would be worth, back in the Rings.”

“There aren’t words for its value,” Afriel said.

“It’s inedible by itself,” she said. “I tried to eat a very small piece of it once. It was like trying to eat plastic.”

“Have you eaten well, generally speaking?”

“Yes. Our biochemistry is quite similar to the Swarm’s. The fungus itself is perfectly edible. The regurgitate is more nourishing, though. Internal fermentation in the worker hindgut adds to its nutritional value.”

Afriel stared. “You grow used to it,” Mirny said. “Later I’ll teach you how to solicit food from the workers. It’s a simple matter of reflex tapping—it’s not controlled by pheromones, like most of their behavior.” She brushed a long lock of clumped and dirty hair from the side of her face. “I hope the pheromonal samples I sent back were worth the cost of transportation.”

“Oh, yes,” said Afriel. “The chemistry of them was fascinating. We managed to synthesize most of the compounds. I was part of the research team myself.” He hesitated. How far did he dare trust her? She had not been told about the experiment he and his superiors had planned. As far as Mirny knew, he was a simple, peaceful researcher, like herself. The Shapers’ scientific community was suspicious of the minority involved in military work and espionage.

As an investment in the future, the Shapers had sent researchers to each of the nineteen alien races described to them by the Investors. This had cost the Shaper economy many gigawatts of precious energy and tons of rare metals and isotopes. In most cases, only two or three researchers could be sent; in seven cases, only one. For the Swarm, Câlina Mirny had been chosen. She had gone peacefully, trusting in her intelligence and her good intentions to keep her alive and sane. Those who had sent her had not known whether her findings would be of any use or importance. They had only known that it was imperative that she be sent, even alone, even ill-equipped, before some other faction sent their own people and possibly discovered some technique or fact of overwhelming importance. And Dr. Mirny had indeed discovered such a situation. It had made her mission into a matter of Ring security. That was why Afriel had come.

“You synthesized the compounds?” she said. “Why?”

Afriel smiled disarmingly. “Just to prove to ourselves that we could do it, perhaps.”

She shook her head. “No mind-games, Dr. Afriel, please. I came this far partly to escape from such things. Tell me the truth.”

Afriel stared at her, regretting that the goggles meant he could not meet her eyes. “Very well,” he said. “You should know, then, that I have been ordered by the Ring Council to carry out an experiment that may endanger both our lives.”

Mirny was silent for a moment. “You’re from Security, then?”

“My rank is captain.”

“I knew it . . . I knew it when those two Mechanists arrived. They were so polite, and so suspicious—I think they would have killed me at once if they hadn’t hoped to bribe or torture some secret out of me. They scared the life out of me, Captain Afriel . . . You scare me, too.”

“We live in a frightening world, Doctor. It’s a matter of faction security.”

“Everything’s a matter of faction security with your lot,” she said. “I shouldn’t take you any farther, or show you anything more. This Nest, these creatures—they’re not intelligent, Captain. They can’t think, they can’t learn. They’re innocent, primordially innocent. They have no knowledge of good and evil. They have no knowledge of anything. The last thing they need is to become pawns in a power struggle within some other race, light-years away.”

The tunneler had turned into an exit from the fungal chambers and was paddling slowly along in the warm darkness. A group of creatures like gray, flattened basketballs floated by from the opposite direction. One of them settled on Afriel’s sleeve, clinging with frail whiplike tentacles. Afriel brushed it gently away, and it broke loose, emitting a stream of foul reddish droplets.

“Naturally I agree with you in principle, Doctor,” Afriel said smoothly. “But consider these Mechanists. Some of their extreme factions are already more than half machine. Do you expect humanitarian motives from them? They’re cold, Doctor—cold and soulless creatures who can cut a living man or woman to bits and never feel their pain. Most of the other factions hate us. They call us racist supermen. Would you rather that one of these cults do what we must do, and use the results against us?”

“This is double-talk.” She looked away. All around them workers laden down with fungus, their jaws full and guts stuffed with it, were spreading out into the Nest, scuttling alongside them or disappearing into branch tunnels departing in every direction, including straight up and straight down. Afriel saw a creature much like a worker, but with only six legs, scuttle past in the opposite direction, overhead. It was a parasite mimic. How long, he wondered, did it take a creature to evolve to look like that?

“It’s no wonder that we’ve had so many defectors, back in the Rings,” she said sadly. “If humanity is so stupid as to work itself into a corner like you describe, then it’s better to have nothing to do with them. Better to live alone. Better not to help the madness spread.”

“That kind of talk will only get us killed,” Afriel said. “We owe an allegiance to the faction that produced us.”

“Tell me truly, Captain,” she said. “Haven’t you ever felt the urge to leave everything—everyone—all your duties and constraints, and just go somewhere to think it all out? Your whole world, and your part in it? We’re trained so hard, from childhood, and so much is demanded from us. Don’t you think it’s made us lose sight of our goals, somehow?”

“We live in space,” Afriel said flatly. “Space is an unnatural environment, and it takes an unnatural effort from unnatural people to prosper there. Our minds are our tools, and philosophy has to come second. Naturally I’ve felt those urges you mention. They’re just another threat to guard against. I believe in an ordered society. Technology has unleashed tremendous forces that are ripping society apart. Some one faction must arise from the struggle and integrate things. We Shapers have the wisdom and restraint to do it humanely. That’s why I do the work I do.” He hesitated. “I don’t expect to see our day of triumph. I expect to die in some brush-fire conflict, or through assassination. It’s enough that I can foresee that day.”

“But the arrogance of it, Captain!” she said suddenly. “The arrogance of your little life and its little sacrifice! Consider the Swarm, if you really want your humane and perfect order. Here it is! Where it’s always warm and dark, and it smells good, and food is easy to get, and everything is endlessly and perfectly recycled. The only resources that are ever lost are the bodies of the mating swarms, and a little air. A Nest like this one could last unchanged for hundreds of thousands of years. Hundreds . . . of thousands . . . of years. Who, or what, will remember us and our stupid faction in even a thousand years?”

Afriel shook his head. “That’s not a valid comparison. There is no such long view for us. In another thousand years we’ll be machines, or gods.” He felt the top of his head; his velvet cap was gone. No doubt something was eating it by now.

The tunneler took them deeper into the asteroid’s honeycombed free-fall maze. They saw the pupal chambers, where pallid larvae twitched in swaddled silk; the main fungal gardens; the graveyard pits, where winged workers beat ceaselessly at the soupy air, feverishly hot from the heat of decomposition. Corrosive black fungus ate the bodies of the dead into coarse black powder, carried off by blackened workers themselves three-quarters dead.

Later they left the tunneler and floated on by themselves. The woman moved with the ease of long habit; Afriel followed her, colliding bruisingly with squeaking workers. There were thousands of them, clinging to ceiling, walls, and floor, clustering and scurrying at every conceivable angle.

Later still they visited the chamber of the winged princes and princesses, an echoing round vault where creatures forty meters long hung crooked-legged in midair. Their bodies were segmented and metallic, with organic rocket nozzles on their thoraxes, where wings might have been. Folded along their sleek backs were radar antennae on long sweeping booms. They looked more like interplanetary probes under construction than anything biological. Workers fed them ceaselessly. Their bulging spiracled abdomens were full of compressed oxygen.

Mirny begged a large chunk of fungus from a passing worker, deftly tapping its antennae and provoking a reflex action. She handed most of the fungus to the two springtails, which devoured it greedily and looked expectantly for more.

Afriel tucked his legs into a free-fall lotus position and began chewing with determination on the leathery fungus. It was tough, but tasted good, like smoked meat—a delicacy he had tasted only once. The smell of smoke meant disaster in a Shaper’s colony.

Mirny maintained a stony silence.

“Food’s no problem,” Afriel said. “Where do we sleep?”

She shrugged. “Anywhere . . . there are unused niches and tunnels here and there. I suppose you’ll want to see the Queen’s chamber next.”

“By all means.”

“I’ll have to get more fungus. The warriors are on guard there and have to be bribed with food.”

She gathered an armful of fungus from another worker in the endless stream, and they moved on. Afriel, already totally lost, was further confused in the maze of chambers and tunnels. At last they exited into an immense lightless cavern, bright with infrared heat from the Queen’s monstrous body. It was the colony’s central factory. The fact that it was made of warm and pulpy flesh did not conceal its essentially industrial nature. Tons of predigested fungal pap went into the slick blind jaws at one end. The rounded billows of soft flesh digested and processed it, squirming, sucking, and undulating, with loud machinelike churnings and gurglings. Out of the other end came an endless conveyorlike blobbed stream of eggs, each one packed in a thick hormonal paste of lubrication. The workers avidly licked the eggs clean and bore them off to nurseries. Each egg was the size of a man’s torso.

The process went on and on. There was no day or night here in the lightless center of the asteroid. There was no remnant of a diurnal rhythm in the genes of these creatures. The flow of production was as constant and even as the working of an automated mine.

“This is why I’m here,” Afriel murmured in awe. “Just look at this, Doctor. The Mechanists have cybernetic mining machinery that is generations ahead of ours. But here—in the bowels of this nameless little world, is a genetic technology that feeds itself, maintains itself, runs itself, efficiently, endlessly, mindlessly. It’s the perfect organic tool. The faction that could use these tireless workers could make itself an industrial titan. And our knowledge of biochemistry is unsurpassed. We Shapers are just the ones to do it.”

“How do you propose to do that?” Mirny asked with open skepticism. “You would have to ship a fertilized queen all the way to the solar system. We could scarcely afford that, even if the Investors would let us, which they wouldn’t.”

“I don’t need an entire Nest,” Afriel said patiently. “I only need the genetic information from one egg. Our laboratories back in the Rings could clone endless numbers of workers.”

“But the workers are useless without the Nest’s pheromones. They need chemical cues to trigger their behavior modes.”

“Exactly,” Afriel said. “As it so happens, I possess those pheromones, synthesized and concentrated. What I must do now is test them. I must prove that I can use them to make the workers do what I choose. Once I’ve proven it’s possible, I’m authorized to smuggle the genetic information necessary back to the Rings. The Investors won’t approve. There are, of course, moral questions involved, and the Investors are not genetically advanced. But we can win their approval back with the profits we make. Best of all, we can beat the Mechanists at their own game.”

“You’ve carried the pheromones here?” Mirny said. “Didn’t the Investors suspect something when they found them?”

“Now it’s you who has made an error,” Afriel said calmly. “You assume that the Investors are infallible. You are wrong. A race without curiosity will never explore every possibility, the way we Shapers did.” Afriel pulled up his pants cuff and extended his right leg. “Consider this varicose vein along my shin. Circulatory problems of this sort are common among those who spend a lot of time in free-fall. This vein, however, has been blocked artificially and treated to reduce osmosis. Within the vein are ten separate colonies of genetically altered bacteria, each one specially bred to produce a different Swarm pheromone.”

He smiled. “The Investors searched me very thoroughly, including X-rays. But the vein appears normal to X-rays, and the bacteria are trapped within compartments in the vein. They are indetectable. I have a small medical kit on my person. It includes a syringe. We can use it to extract the pheromones and test them. When the tests are finished—and I feel sure they will be successful, in fact I’ve staked my career on it—we can empty the vein and all its compartments. The bacteria will die on contact with air. We can refill the vein with the yolk from a developing embryo. The cells may survive during the trip back, but even if they die, they can’t rot inside my body. They’ll never come in contact with any agent of decay. Back in the Rings, we can learn to activate and suppress different genes to produce the different castes, just as is done in nature. We’ll have millions of workers, armies of warriors if need be, perhaps even organic rocket-ships, grown from altered alates. If this works, who do you think will remember me then, eh? Me and my arrogant little life and little sacrifice?”

She stared at him; even the bulky goggles could not hide her new respect and even fear. “You really mean to do it, then.”

“I made the sacrifice of my time and energy. I expect results, Doctor.”

“But it’s kidnapping. You’re talking about breeding a slave race.”

Afriel shrugged, with contempt. “You’re juggling words, Doctor. I’ll cause this colony no harm. I may steal some of its workers’ labor while they obey my own chemical orders, but that tiny theft won’t be missed. I admit to the murder of one egg, but that is no more a crime than a human abortion. Can the theft of one strand of genetic material be called ‘kidnapping’ ? I think not. As for the scandalous idea of a slave race—I reject it out of hand. These creatures are genetic robots. They will no more be slaves than are laser drills or cargo tankers. At the very worst, they will be our domestic animals.”

Mirny considered the issue. It did not take her long. “It’s true. It’s not as if a common worker will be staring at the stars, pining for its freedom. They’re just brainless neuters.”

“Exactly, Doctor.”

“They simply work. Whether they work for us or the Swarm makes no difference to them.”

“I see that you’ve seized on the beauty of the idea.”

“And if it worked,” Mirny said, “if it worked, our faction would profit astronomically.”

Afriel smiled genuinely, unaware of the chilling sarcasm of his expression. “And the personal profit, Doctor . . . the valuable expertise of the first to exploit the technique.” He spoke gently, quietly. “Ever see a nitrogen snowfall on Titan? I think a habitat of one’s own there—larger, much larger than anything possible before . . . A genuine city, Galina, a place where a man can scrap the rules and discipline that madden him . . .”

“Now it’s you who are talking defection, Captain-Doctor.”

Afriel was silent for a moment, then smiled with an effort. “Now you’ve ruined my perfect reverie,” he said. “Besides, what I was describing was the well-earned retirement of a wealthy man, not some self-indulgent hermitage . . . there’s a clear difference.” He hesitated. “In any case, may I conclude that you’re with me in this project?”

She laughed and touched his arm. There was something uncanny about the small sound of her laugh, drowned by a great organic rumble from the Queen’s monstrous intestines . . . “Do you expect me to resist your arguments for two long years? Better that I give in now and save us friction.”

“Yes.”

“After all, you won’t do any harm to the Nest. They’ll never know anything has happened. And if their genetic line is successfully reproduced back home, there’ll never be any reason for humanity to bother them again.”

“True enough,” said Afriel, though in the back of his mind he instantly thought of the fabulous wealth of Betelgeuse’s asteroid system. A day would come, inevitably, when humanity would move to the stars en masse, in earnest. It would be well to know the ins and outs of every race that might become a rival.

“I’ll help you as best I can,” she said. There was a moment’s silence. “Have you seen enough of this area?”

“Yes.” They left the Queen’s chamber.

“I didn’t think I’d like you at first,” she said candidly. “I think I like you better now. You seem to have a sense of humor that most Security people lack.”

“It’s not a sense of humor,” Afriel said sadly. “It’s a sense of irony disguised as one.”

There were no days in the unending stream of hours that followed. There were only ragged periods of sleep, apart at first, later together, as they held each other in free-fall. The sexual feel of skin and body became an anchor to their common humanity, a divided, frayed humanity so many light-years away that the concept no longer had any meaning. Life in the warm and swarming tunnels was the here and now; the two of them were like germs in a bloodstream, moving ceaselessly with the pulsing ebb and flow. Hours stretched into months, and time itself grew meaningless.

The pheromonal tests were complex, but not impossibly difficult. The first of the ten pheromones was a simple grouping stimulus, causing large numbers of workers to gather as the chemical was spread from palp to palp. The workers then waited for further instructions; if none were forthcoming, they dispersed. To work effectively, the pheromones had to be given in a mix, or series, like computer commands; number one, grouping, for instance, together with the third pheromone, a transferral order, which caused the workers to empty any given chamber and move its effects to another. The ninth pheromone had the best industrial possibilities; it was a building order, causing the workers to gather tunnelers and dredgers and set them to work. Others were annoying; the tenth pheromone provoked grooming behavior, and the workers’ furry palps stripped off the remaining rags of Afriel’s clothing. The eighth pheromone sent the workers off to harvest material on the asteroid’s surface, and in their eagerness to observe its effects the two explorers were almost trapped and swept off into space.

The two of them no longer feared the warrior caste. They knew that a dose of the sixth pheromone would send them scurrying off to defend the eggs, just as it sent the workers to tend them. Mirny and Afriel took advantage of this and secured their own chambers, dug by chemically hijacked workers and defended by a hijacked airlock guardian. They had their own fungal gardens to refresh the air, stocked with the fungus they liked best, and digested by a worker they kept drugged for their own food use. From constant stuffing and lack of exercise the worker had swollen up into its replete form and hung from one wall like a monstrous grape.

Afriel was tired. He had been without sleep recently for a long time; how long, he didn’t know. His body rhythms had not adjusted as well as Mirny’s, and he was prone to fits of depression and irritability that he had to repress with an effort. “The Investors will be back sometime,” he said. “Sometime soon.”

Mirny was indifferent. “The Investors,” she said, and followed the remark with something in the language of the springtails, which he didn’t catch. Despite his linguistic training, Afriel had never caught up with her in her use of the springtails’ grating jargon. His training was almost a liability; the springtail language had decayed so much that it was a pidgin tongue, without rules or regularity. He knew enough to give them simple orders, and with his partial control of the warriors he had the power to back it up. The springtails were afraid of him, and the two juveniles that Mirny had tamed had developed into fat, overgrown tyrants that freely terrorized their elders. Afriel had been too busy to seriously study the springtails or the other symbiotes. There were too many practical matters at hand.

“If they come too soon, I won’t be able to finish my latest study,” she said in English.

Afriel pulled off his infrared goggles and knotted them tightly around his neck. “There’s a limit, Galina,” he said, yawning. “You can only memorize so much data without equipment. We’ll just have to wait quietly until we can get back. I hope the Investors aren’t shocked when they see me. I lost a fortune with those clothes.”

“It’s been so dull since the mating swarm was launched. If it weren’t for the new growth in the alates’ chamber, I’d be bored to death.” She pushed greasy hair from her face with both hands. “Are you going to sleep?”

“Yes, if I can.”

“You won’t come with me? I keep telling you that this new growth is important. I think it’s a new caste. It’s definitely not an alate. It has eyes like an alate, but it’s clinging to the wall.”

“It’s probably not a Swarm member at all, then,” he said tiredly, humoring her. “It’s probably a parasite, an alate mimic. Go on and see it, if you want to. I’ll be here waiting for you.”

He heard her leave. Without his infrareds on, the darkness was still not quite total; there was a very faint luminosity from the steaming, growing fungus in the chamber beyond. The stuffed worker replete moved slightly on the wall, rustling and gurgling. He fell asleep.

When he awoke, Mirny had not yet returned. He was not alarmed. First, he visited the original airlock tunnel, where the Investors had first left him. It was irrational—the Investors always fulfilled their contracts—but he feared that they would arrive someday, become impatient, and leave without him. The Investors would have to wait, of course. Mirny could keep them occupied in the short time it would take him to hurry to the nursery and rob a developing egg of its living cells. It was best that the egg be as fresh as possible.

Later he ate. He was munching fungus in one of the anterior chambers when Mirny’s two tamed springtails found him. “What do you want?” he asked in their language.

“Food-giver no good,” the larger one screeched, waving its forelegs in brainless agitation. “Not work, not sleep.”

“Not move,” the second one said. It added hopefully, “Eat it now?”

Afriel gave them some of his food. They ate it, seemingly more out of habit than real appetite, which alarmed him. “Take me to her,” he told them.

The two springtails scurried off; he followed them easily, adroitly dodging and weaving through the crowds of workers. They led him several miles through the network, to the alates’ chamber. There they stopped, confused. “Gone,” the large one said.

The chamber was empty. Afriel had never seen it empty before, and it was very unusual for the Swarm to waste so much space. He felt dread. “Follow the food-giver,” he said. “Follow the smell.”

The springtails snuffled without much enthusiasm along one wall; they knew he had no food and were reluctant to do anything without an immediate reward. At last one of them picked up the scent, or pretended to, and followed it up across the ceiling and into the mouth of a tunnel.

It was hard for Afriel to see much in the abandoned chamber; there was not enough infrared heat. He leapt upward after the springtail.

He heard the roar of a warrior and the springtail’s choked-off screech. It came flying from the tunnel’s mouth, a spray of clotted fluid bursting from its ruptured head. It tumbled end over end until it hit the far wall with a flaccid crunch. It was already dead.

The second springtail fled at once, screeching with grief and terror. Afriel landed on the lip of the tunnel, sinking into a crouch as his legs soaked up momentum. He could smell the acrid stench of the warrior’s anger, a pheromone so thick that even a human could scent it. Dozens of other warriors would group here within minutes, or seconds. Behind the enraged warrior he could hear workers and tunnelers shifting and cementing rock.

He might be able to control one enraged warrior, but never two, or twenty. He launched himself from the chamber wall and out an exit.

He searched for the other springtail—he felt sure he could recognize it, since it was so much bigger than the others—but he could not find it. With its keen sense of smell, it could easily avoid him if it wanted to.

Mirny did not return. Uncountable hours passed. He slept again. He returned to the alates’ chamber; there were warriors on guard there, warriors that were not interested in food and brandished their immense serrated fangs when he approached. They looked ready to rip him apart; the faint reek of aggressive pheromones hung about the place like a fog. He did not see any symbiotes of any kind on the warriors’ bodies. There was one species, a thing like a huge tick, that clung only to warriors, but even the ticks were gone.

He returned to his chambers to wait and think. Mirny’s body was not in the garbage pits. Of course, it was possible that something else might have eaten her. Should he extract the remaining pheromone from the spaces in his vein and try to break into the alates’ chamber? He suspected that Mirny, or whatever was left of her, was somewhere in the tunnel where the springtail had been killed. He had never explored that tunnel himself. There were thousands of tunnels he had never explored.

He felt paralyzed by indecision and fear. If he was quiet, if he did nothing, the Investors might arrive at any moment. He could tell the Ring Council anything he wanted about Mirny’s death; if he had the genetics with him, no one would quibble. He did not love her; he respected her, but not enough to give up his life, or his faction’s investment. He had not thought of the Ring Council in a long time, and the thought sobered him. He would have to explain his decision . . .

He was still in a brown study when he heard a whoosh of air as his living airlock deflated itself. Three warriors had come for him. There was no reek of anger about them. They moved slowly and carefully. He knew better than to try to resist. One of them seized him gently in its massive jaws and carried him off.

It took him to the alates’ chamber and into the guarded tunnel. A new, large chamber had been excavated at the end of the tunnel. It was filled almost to bursting by a black-splattered white mass of flesh. In the center of the soft speckled mass were a mouth and two damp, shining eyes, on stalks. Long tendrils like conduits dangled, writhing, from a clumped ridge above the eyes. The tendrils ended in pink, fleshy pluglike clumps.

One of the tendrils had been thrust through Mirny’s skull. Her body hung in midair, limp as wax. Her eyes were open, but blind.

Another tendril was plugged into the braincase of a mutated worker. The worker still had the pallid tinge of a larva; it was shrunken and deformed, and its mouth had the wrinkled look of a human mouth. There was a blob like a tongue in the mouth, and white ridges like human teeth. It had no eyes.

It spoke with Mirny’s voice. “Captain-Doctor Afriel . . .”

“Galina . . .”

“I have no such name. You may address me as Swarm.”

Afriel vomited. The central mass was an immense head. Its brain almost filled the room.

It waited politely until Afriel had finished.

“I find myself awakened again,” Swarm said dreamily. “I am pleased to see that there is no major emergency to concern me. Instead it is a threat that has become almost routine.” It hesitated delicately. Mirny’s body moved slightly in midair; her breathing was inhumanly regular. The eyes opened and closed. “Another young race.”

“What are you?”

“I am the Swarm. That is, I am one of its castes. I am a tool, an adaptation; my specialty is intelligence. I am not often needed. It is good to be needed again.”

“Have you been here all along? Why didn’t you greet us? We’d have dealt with you. We meant no harm.”

The wet mouth on the end of the plug made laughing sounds. “Like yourself, I enjoy irony,” it said. “It is a pretty trap you have found yourself in, Captain-Doctor. You meant to make the Swarm work for you and your race. You meant to breed us and study us and use us. It is an excellent plan, but one we hit upon long before your race evolved.”

Stung by panic, Afriel’s mind raced frantically. “You’re an intelligent being,” he said. “There’s no reason to do us any harm. Let us talk together. We can help you.”

“Yes,” Swarm agreed. “You will be helpful. Your companion’s memories tell me that this is one of those uncomfortable periods when galactic intelligence is rife. Intelligence is a great bother. It makes all kinds of trouble for us.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are a young race and lay great stock by your own cleverness,” Swarm said. “As usual, you fail to see that intelligence is not a survival trait.”

Afriel wiped sweat from his face. “We’ve done well,” he said. “We came to you, and peacefully. You didn’t come to us.”

“I refer to exactly that,” Swarm said urbanely. “This urge to expand, to explore, to develop, is just what will make you extinct. You naively suppose that you can continue to feed your curiosity indefinitely. It is an old story, pursued by countless races before you. Within a thousand years—perhaps a little longer—your species will vanish.”

“You intend to destroy us, then? I warn you it will not be an easy task—”

“Again you miss the point. Knowledge is power! Do you suppose that fragile little form of yours—your primitive legs, your ludicrous arms and hands, your tiny, scarcely wrinkled brain—can contain all that power? Certainly not! Already your race is flying to pieces under the impact of your own expertise. The original human form is becoming obsolete. Your own genes have been altered, and you, Captain-Doctor, are a crude experiment. In a hundred years you will be a relic. In a thousand years you will not even be a memory. Your race will go the same way as a thousand others.”

“And what way is that?”

“I do not know.” The thing on the end of the Swarm’s arm made a chuckling sound. “They have passed beyond my ken. They have all discovered something, learned something, that has caused them to transcend my understanding. It may be that they even transcend being. At any rate, I cannot sense their presence anywhere. They seem to do nothing, they seem to interfere in nothing; for all intents and purposes, they seem to be dead. Vanished. They may have become gods, or ghosts. In either case, I have no wish to join them.”

“So then—so then you have—”

“Intelligence is very much a two-edged sword, Captain-Doctor. It is useful only up to a point. It interferes with the business of living. Life, and intelligence, do not mix very well. They are not at all closely related, as you childishly assume.”

“But you, then—you are a rational being—”

“I am a tool, as I said.” The mutated device on the end of its arm made a sighing noise. “When you began your pheromonal experiments, the chemical imbalance became apparent to the Queen. It triggered certain genetic patterns within her body, and I was reborn. Chemical sabotage is a problem that can best be dealt with by intelligence. I am a brain replete, you see, specially designed to be far more intelligent than any young race. Within three days I was fully self-conscious. Within five days I had deciphered these markings on my body. They are the genetically encoded history of my race . . . within five days and two hours I recognized the problem at hand and knew what to do. I am now doing it. I am six days old.”

“What is it you intend to do?”

“Your race is a very vigorous one. I expect it to be here, competing with us, within five hundred years. Perhaps much sooner. It will be necessary to make a thorough study of such a rival. I invite you to join our community on a permanent basis.”

“What do you mean?”

“I invite you to become a symbiote. I have here a male and a female, whose genes are altered and therefore without defects. You make a perfect breeding pair. It will save me a great deal of trouble with cloning.”

“You think I’ll betray my race and deliver a slave species into your hands?”

“Your choice is simple, Captain-Doctor. Remain an intelligent, living being, or become a mindless puppet, like your partner. I have taken over all the functions of her nervous system; I can do the same to you.”

“I can kill myself.”

“That might be troublesome, because it would make me resort to developing a cloning technology. Technology, though I am capable of it, is painful to me. I am a genetic artifact; there are fail-safes within me that prevent me from taking over the Nest for my own uses. That would mean falling into the same trap of progress as other intelligent races. For similar reasons, my life span is limited. I will live for only a thousand years, until your race’s brief flurry of energy is over and peace resumes once more.”

“Only a thousand years?” Afriel laughed bitterly. “What then? You kill off my descendants, I assume, having no further use for them.”

“No. We have not killed any of the fifteen other races we have taken for defensive study. It has not been necessary. Consider that, small scavenger floating by your head, Captain-Doctor, that is feeding on your vomit. Five hundred million years ago its ancestors made the galaxy tremble. When they attacked us, we unleashed their own kind upon them. Of course, we altered our side, so that they were smarter, tougher, and, naturally, totally loyal to us. Our Nests were the only world they knew, and they fought with a valor and inventiveness we never could have matched . . . Should your race arrive to exploit us, we will naturally do the same.”

“We humans are different.”

“Of course.”

“A thousand years here won’t change us. You will die and our descendants will take over this Nest. We’ll be running things, despite you, in a few generations. The darkness won’t make any difference.”

“Certainly not. You don’t need eyes here. You don’t need anything.”

“You’ll allow me to stay alive? To teach them anything I want?”

“Certainly, Captain-Doctor. We are doing you a favor, in all truth. In a thousand years your descendants here will be the only remnants of the human race. We are generous with our immortality; we will take it upon ourselves to preserve you.”

“You’re wrong, Swarm. You’re wrong about intelligence, and you’re wrong about everything else. Maybe other races would crumble into parasitism, but we humans are different.”

“Certainly. You’ll do it, then?”

“Yes. I accept your challenge. And I will defeat you.”

“Splendid. When the Investors return here, the springtails will say that they have killed you, and will tell them to never return. They will not return. The humans should be the next to arrive.”

“If I don’t defeat you, they will.”

“Perhaps.” Again it sighed. “I’m glad I don’t have to absorb you. I would have missed your conversation.”

CASCADE POINT

Timothy Zahn

It’s possible to use a technique before you fully understand it—but while you’re learning, you have to expect surprises.

In retrospect, I suppose I should have realized my number had come up on the universe’s list right from the very start, right from the moment it became clear that I was going to be stuck with the job of welcoming the Aura Dancer’s latest batch of passengers aboard. Still, I suppose it’s just as well it was me and not Tobbar who let Rik Bradley and his psychiatrist onto my ship. There are some things that a captain should have no one to blame for but himself, and this was definitely in that category.

Right away I suppose that generates a lot of false impressions. A star liner captain, resplendent in white and gold, smiling toothily at elegantly dressed men and women as the ramp carries them through the polished entry portal—forget all of that. A tramp starmer isn’t polished anywhere it doesn’t absolutely have to be, the captain is lucky if he’s got a clean jumpsuit—let alone some pseudo-military Christmas tree frippery—and the passengers we get are the steerage of the star-traveling community. And look it.

Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing against passengers aboard my ship. As a matter of fact, putting extra cabins in the Dancer had been my idea to start with, and they’d all too often made the difference between profit and loss in our always marginal business. But one of the reasons I had gone into space in the first place was to avoid having to make small talk with strangers, and I would rather solo through four cascade points in a row than spend those agonizing minutes at the entry portal. In this case, though, I had no choice. Tobbar, our master of drivel—and thus the man unofficially in charge of civilian small talk-was up to his elbows in grease and balky hydraulics; and my second choice, Alana Keal, had finally gotten through to an equally balky tower controller who wanted to bump us ten ships back in the lift pattern. Which left exactly one person—me—because there was no one else I’d trust with giving a good first impression of my ship to paying customers. And so I was the one standing on the ramp when Bradley and his eleven fellow passengers hove into sight.

They ranged from semi-scruffy to respectable-but-not-rich—about par for the Dancer—but even in such a diverse group Bradley stood out like a red light on the status board. He was reasonably good-looking, reasonably average in height and build; but there was something in the way he walked that immediately caught my attention. Sort of a cross between nervous fear and something I couldn’t help but identify as swagger. The mix was so good that it was several seconds before it occurred to me how mutually contradictory the two impressions were, and the realization left me feeling more uncomfortable than I already did.

Bradley was eighth in line, with the result that my first seven greetings were carried out without a lot of attention from my conscious mind—which I’m sure only helped. Even standing still, I quickly discovered, Bradley’s strangeness made itself apparent, both in his posture and also in his face and eyes. Especially his eyes.

Finally it was his turn at the head of the line. “Good morning, sir,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m Captain Pall Durriken. Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you.” His voice was bravely uncertain, the sort my mother used to describe as mousy. His eyes flicked the length of the Dancer, darted once into the portal, and returned to my face. “How often do ships like this crash?” he asked.

I hadn’t expected any questions quite so blunt, but the fact that it was outside the realm of small talk made it easy to handle. “Hardly ever,” I told him. “The last published figures showed a death rate of less than one per million passengers. You’re more likely to be hit by a chunk of roof tile off the tower over there.”

He actually cringed, turning halfway around to look at the tower. I hadn’t dreamed he would take my comment so seriously, but before I could get my mouth working the man behind Bradley clapped a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, Rik—nothing’s going to hurt you. Really. This is a good ship, and we’re going to be perfectly safe aboard her.”

Bradley slowly straightened, and the other man shifted his attention to me. “I’m Dr Hammerfeld Lanton, Captain,” he said, extending his hand. “This is Rik Bradley. We’re traveling in adjoining cabins.”

“Of course,” I said, nodding as if I’d already known that. In reality I hadn’t had time to check out the passenger lists and assignments, but I could trust Leeds to have set things up properly. “Are you a doctor of medicine, sir?”

“In a way,” Lanton said. “I’m a psychiatrist.”

“Ah,” I said, and managed two or three equally brilliant conversational gems before the two of them moved on. The last three passengers I dispatched with similar polish, and when everyone was inside I sealed the portal and headed for the bridge.

Alana had finished her dickering with the tower and was running the pre-lift computer check when I arrived. “What’s the verdict?” I asked as I slid into my chair and keyed for helm check.

“We’ve still got our lift slot,” she said. “That’s conditional on Matope getting the elevon system working within the next half-hour, of course.”

“Idiots,” I muttered. The elevons wouldn’t be needed until we arrived at Taimyr some six weeks from now, and Matope could practically rebuild them from scratch in that amount of time. To insist they be in prime condition before we could lift was unreasonable even for bureaucrats.

“Oh, there’s no problem—Tobbar reported they were closing things up a few minutes ago. They’ll put it through its paces, it’ll work perfectly, they’ll transmit the readout, and that’ll be that.” She cleared her throat. “Incidentally . . . are you aware we’ve got a skull-diver and his patient aboard?”

“Yes; I met—patient?” I interrupted myself as the last part of her sentence registered. “Who?”

“Name’s Bradley,” she said. “No further data on him, but apparently he and this Lanton character had a fair amount of electronic and medical stuff delivered to their cabins.”

A small shiver ran up my back as I remembered Bradley’s face. No wonder he’d struck me as strange. “No mention at all of what’s wrong—of why Bradley needs a psychiatrist?”

“Nothing. But it can’t be anything serious.” The test board bleeped, and Alana paused to peer at the results. Apparently satisfied, she keyed in the next test on the checklist. “The Swedish Psychiatric Institute seems to be funding the trip, and they presumably know the regulations about notifying us of potential health risks.”

“Um.” On the other hand, a small voice whispered in my ear, if there was some problem with Bradley that made him marginal for space certification, they were more likely to get away with slipping him aboard a tramp than a liner. “Maybe I should give them a call, anyway. Unless you’d like to?”

I glanced over in time to see her face go stony. “No, thank you,” she said firmly.

“Right.” I felt ashamed of the comment, not really having meant it the way it had come out. All of us had our own reasons for being where we were; Alana’s was an overdose of third-degree emotional burns. She was the type who’d seemingly been born to nurse broken wings and bruised souls, the type who by necessity kept her own heart in full view of both friends and passersby. Eventually, I gathered, one too many of her mended souls had torn out the emotional IVs she’d set up and flown off without so much as a backward glance, and she had renounced the whole business and run off to space. Ice to Europa, I’d thought once; there were enough broken wings out here for a whole shipload of Florence Nightingales. But what I’d expected to be a short vacation for her had become four years worth of armor plate over her emotions, until I wasn’t sure she even knew anymore how to care for people. The last thing in the universe she would be interested in doing would be getting involved in any way with Bradley’s problems. “Is all the cargo aboard now?” I asked, to change the subject.

“Yes, and Wilkinson certifies it’s properly stowed.”

“Good.” I got to my feet. “I guess I’ll make a quick spot survey of the ship, if you can handle things here.”

“Go ahead,” she said, not bothering to look up. Nodding anyway, I left.

I stopped first at the service shafts where Matope and Tobbar were just starting their elevon tests, staying long enough to satisfy myself the resulting data were adequate to please even the tower’s bit-pickers. Then it was to each of the cargo holds to double-check Wilkinson’s stowing arrangement, to the passenger area to make sure all their luggage had been properly brought on board, to the computer room to look into a reported malfunction—a false alarm, fortunately—and finally back to the bridge for the lift itself. Somehow, in all the running around, I never got around to calling Sweden. Not, as I found out later, that it would have done me any good.

We lifted right on schedule, shifting from the launch field’s grav booster to ramjet at ten kilometers and kicking in the fusion drive as soon as it was legal to do so. Six hours later we were past Luna’s orbit and ready for the first cascade maneuver.

Leeds checked in first, reporting officially that the proper number of dosages had been drawn from the sleeper cabinet and were being distributed to the passengers. Pascal gave the okay from the computer room, Matope from the engine room, and Sarojis from the small chamber housing the field generator itself. I had just pulled a hard copy of the computer’s course instructions when Leeds called back. “Captain, I’m in Dr Lanton’s cabin,” he said without preamble. “Both he and Mr Bradley refuse to take their sleepers.”

Alana turned at that, and I could read my own thought in her face: Lanton and Bradley had to be nuts. “Has Dr Epstein explained the reasons behind the procedure?” I asked carefully, mindful of both my responsibilities and my limits here.

“Yes, I have,” Kate Epstein’s clear soprano came. “Dr Lanton says that his work requires both of them to stay awake through the cascade point.”

“Work? What sort of work?”

A pause, and Lanton’s voice replaced Kate’s. “Captain, this is Dr Lanton. Rik and I are involved in an experimental type of therapy here. The personal details are confidential, but I assure you that it presents no danger either to us or to you.”

Therapy. Great. I could feel anger starting to churn in my gut at Lanton’s casual arrogance in neglecting to inform me ahead of time that he had more than transport in mind for my ship. By all rights I should freeze the countdown and sit Lanton down in a corner somewhere until I was convinced everything was as safe as he said. But time was money in this business; and if Lanton was glossing things over he could probably do so in finer detail than I could catch him on, anyway. “Mr Bradley?” I called. “You agree to pass up your sleeper, as well?”

“Yes, sir,” came the mousy voice.

“All right. Dr Epstein, you and Mr Leeds can go ahead and finish your rounds.”

“Well,” Alana said as I flipped off the intercom, “at least if something goes wrong the record will clear us of any fault at the inquest.”

“You’re a genuine ray of sunshine,” I told her sourly. “What else could I have done?”

“Raked Lanton over the coals for some information. We’re at least entitled to know what’s going on.”

“Oh, we’ll find out, all right. As soon as we’re through the point I’m going to haul Lanton up here for a long, cosy chat,” I checked the readouts. Cascade point in seventeen minutes. “Look, you might as well go to your cabin and hit the sack. I know it’s your turn, but you were up late with that spare parts delivery and you’re due for some down time.”

She hesitated; wanting to accept, no doubt, but slowed by considerations of duty. “Well . . . all right. I’m taking the next one, then. I don’t know, though; maybe you shouldn’t be up here alone. In case Lanton’s miscalculated.”

“You mean if Bradley goes berserk or something?” That thought had been lurking in my mind, too, though it sounded rather ridiculous when spoken out loud. Still . . . “I can lower the pressure in the passenger deck corridor to half an atmosphere. That’ll be enough to lock the doors without triggering any vacuum alarms.”

“Leaves Lanton on his own in case of trouble . . . but I suppose that’s okay.”

“He’s the one who’s so sure it’s safe. Go on, now—get out of here.”

She nodded and headed for the door. She paused there, though, her hand resting on the release. “Don’t just haul Lanton away from Bradley when you want to talk to him,” she called back over her shoulder. “Try to run into him in the lounge or somewhere instead when he’s already alone. It might be hard on Bradley to know you two were off somewhere together talking about him.” She slapped the release, almost viciously, and was gone.

I stared after her for a long minute, wondering if I’d actually seen a crack in that heavy armorplate. The bleep of the intercom brought me back to the task at hand, Kate telling me the passengers were all down and that she, Leeds, and Wilkinson had taken their own sleepers. One by one the other six crewers also checked in. Within ten minutes they would be asleep, and I would be in sole charge of my ship.

Twelve minutes to go. Even with the Dancer’s old manual setup there was little that needed to be done. I laid the hard copy of the computer’s instructions where it would be legible but not in the way, shut down all the external sensors and control surfaces, and put the computer and other electronic equipment into neutral/standby mode. The artificial gravity I left on; I’d tried a cascade point without it once and would never do so again. Then I waited, trying not to think of what was coming . . . and at the appropriate time I lifted the safety cover and twisted the field generator control knob.

And suddenly there were five of us in the room.

I will never understand how the first person to test the Colloton Drive ever made it past this point. The images silently surrounding me a bare arm’s length away were life-size, lifelike, and—at first glance, anyway—as solid as the panels and chairs they seemed to have displaced. It took a careful look to realize they were actually slightly transparent, like some kind of colored glass, and a little experimentation at that point would show they had less substance than air. They were nothing but ghosts, specters straight out of childhood’s scariest stories. Which merely added to the discomfort . . . because all of them were me.

Five seconds later the second set of images appeared, perfectly aligned with the first. After that they came more and more quickly, as the spacing between them similarly decreased, forming an ever-expanding horizontal cross with me at the center. I watch—forced myself to watch—knew I had to watch—as the lines continued to lengthen, watched until they were so long that I could no longer discern whether any more were being added.

I took a long, shuddering breath—peripherally aware that the images nearest me were doing the same—and wiped a shaking hand across my forehead. You don’t have to look, I told myself, eyes rigidly fixed on the back of the image in front of me. You’ve seen it all before. What’s the point? But I’d fought this fight before, and I knew in advance I would lose. There was indeed no more point to it than there was to pressing a bruise, but it held an equal degree of compulsion. Bracing myself, I turned my head and gazed down the line of images strung out to my left.

The arm-chair philosophers may still quibble over what the cascade point images “really” are, but those of us who fly the small ships figured it out long ago. The Colloton field puts us into a different type of space, possibly an entire universe worth of it—that much is established fact. Somehow this space links us into a set of alternate realities, universes that might have been if things had gone differently . . . and what I was therefore seeing around me were images of what I would be doing in each of those universes.

Sure, the theory has problems. Obviously, I should generate a separate pseudo-reality every time I choose ham instead of turkey for lunch, and just as obviously such trivial changes don’t make it into the pattern. Only the four images closest to me are ever exactly my doubles; even the next ones in line are noticeably if subtly different. But it’s not a matter of subconscious suggestion, either. Too many of the images are . . . unexpected . . . for that.

It was no great feat to locate the images I particularly needed to see: the white-and-gold liner captain’s uniforms stood out brilliantly among the more dingy jumpsuits and coveralls on either side. Liner captain. In charge of a fully equipped, fully modernized ship; treated with the respect and admiration such a position brought. It could have been—should have been. And to make things worse, I knew the precise decision that had lost it to me.

It had been eight years now since the uniforms had appeared among my cascade images; ten since the day I’d thrown Lord Hendrik’s son off the bridge of the training ship and simultaneously guaranteed myself a black-balling with every major company in the business. Could I have handled the situation differently? Probably. Should I have? Given the state of the art then, no. A man who, after three training missions, still went borderline claustrophobic every time he had to stay awake through a cascade point had no business aboard a ship, let alone on its bridge. Hendrik might have forgiven me once he thought things through. The kid, who was forced into a ground position with the firm, never did. Eventually, of course, he took over the business.

I had no way of knowing that four years later the Aker-Ming Autotorque would eliminate the need for anyone to stay awake through cascade maneuvers. I doubt seriously the kid appreciated the irony of it all.

In the eight years since the liner captain uniforms had appeared they had been gradually moving away from me along all four arms of the cross. Five more years, I estimated, and they would be far enough down the line to disappear into the mass of images crowded together out there. Whether my reaction to that event would be relief or sadness I didn’t yet know, but there was no doubt in my mind that it would in some way be the end of a chapter in my life. I gazed at the figures for another minute . . . and then, with my ritual squeezing of the bruise accomplished, I let my eyes drift up and down the rest of the line.

They were unremarkable, for the most part: minor variations in my appearance or clothing. The handful that had once showed me in some non-spacing job had long since vanished toward infinity; I’d been out here a long time. Perhaps too long . . . a thought the half-dozen or so gaps in each arm of the pattern underlined with unnecessary force. I’d told Bradley that ships like the Dancer rarely crashed, a perfectly true statement; but what I hadn’t mentioned was that the chances of simply disappearing en route were something rather higher. None of us liked to think about that, especially during critical operations like cascade point maneuvers. But the gaps in the image pattern were a continual reminder that people still died in space. In six possible realities, apparently, I’d made a decision that killed me.

Taking another deep breath, I forced all of that as far from my mind as I could and activated the Dancer’s flywheel.

Even on the bridge the hum was audible as the massive chunk of metal began to spin. A minute later it had reached its top speed . . . and the entire ship’s counterrotation began to register on the gyroscope set behind glass in the ceiling above my head. The device looked out of place, a decided anachronism among the modern instruments, control circuits, and readouts filling the bridge. But it was the only way a ship our size could find its way safely through a cascade point. The enhanced electron tunneling effect that fouled up electronic instrument performance was well understood; what was still needed was a way to predict the precise effect a given cascade point rotation would generate. Without such predictability, readings couldn’t even be given adjustment factors. Cascade navigation thus had to fall back on gross electrical and purely mechanical systems: flywheel, physical gyroscope, simple on-off controls, and a nonelectronic decision-maker. Me.

Slowly, the long needle above me crept around its dial. I watched its reflection carefuly in the magnifying mirror, a system that allowed me to see the indicator without having to break my back looking up over my shoulder. Around me, the cascade images did their own low dance, a strange kaleidoscopic thing that moved the images and gaps around within each branch of the cross, while the branches themselves remained stationary relative to me. The effect was unexplained; but then, Colloton field theory left a lot of things unexplained. Mathematically, the basic idea was relatively straightforward: the space we were in right now could be described by a type of bilinear conformal mapping—specifically, a conjugate inversion that maps lines into circles. From that point it was all downhill, the details tangling into a soup of singularities, branch points, and confluent Riemann surfaces; but what it all eventually boiled down to was that a yaw rotation of the ship here would become a linear translation when I shut down the field generator and reentered normal space. The Dancer’s rotation was coming up on two degrees now, which for the particular configuration we were in meant we were already about half a light-year closer to our destination. Another—I checked the print-out—one point three six and I would shut down the flywheel, letting the Dancer’s momentum carry her an extra point two degree for a grand total of eight light-years.

The needle crept to the mark, and I threw the flywheel switch, simultaneously giving my full attention over to the gyro. Theoretically, over- or undershooting the mark could be corrected during the next cascade point—or by fiddling the flywheel back and forth now—but it was simpler not to have to correct at all. The need to make sure we were stationary was another matter entirely; if the Dancer were still rotating when I threw the field switch we would wind up strung out along a million kilometers or more of space. I thought of the gaps in my cascade image pattern and shivered.

But that was all the closer death was going to get to me, at least this time. The delicately balanced spin lock worked exactly as it was supposed to, freezing the field switch in place until the ship’s rotation was as close to zero as made no difference. I shut off the field and watched my duplicates disappear in reverse order, waiting until the last four vanished before confirming the stars were once again visible through the bridge’s tiny viewport. I sighed; and fighting the black depression that always seized me at this point, I turned the Dancer’s systems back on and set the computer to figuring our exact position. Someday, I thought, I’d be able to afford to buy Aker-Ming Autotorques and never, never have to go through this again.

And someday I’d swim the Pacific Ocean, too.

Slumping back in my chair, I waited for the computer to finish its job and allowed the tears to flow.

Crying, for me, has always been the simplest and fastest way of draining off tension, and I’ve always felt a little sorry for men who weren’t able to appreciate its advantages. This time was no exception, and I was feeling almost back to normal by the time the computer produced its location figures. I was still poring over them twenty minutes later when Alana returned to the bridge, “Another cascade point successfully hurdled, I see,” she commented tiredly. “Hurray for our side.”

“I thought you were supposed to be taking a real nap, not just a sleeper’s worth,” I growled at her over my shoulder.

“I woke up and decided to take a walk,” she answered, her voice suddenly businesslike. “What’s wrong?”

I handed her a print-out, pointed to the underlined numbers. “The gyroscope reading says we’re theoretically dead on position. The stars say we’re short.”

“Wumph!” Frowning intently at the paper, she kicked around the other chair and sat down. “Twenty light-days. That’s what, twice the expected error for this point? Great. You double-checked everything, of course?”

“Triple-checked. The computer confirmed the gyro reading, and the astrogate program’s got positive ident on twenty stars. Margin of error’s no greater than ten light-minutes on either of those.”

“Yeah.” She eyed me over the pages. “Anything funny in the cargo?”

I gestured to the manifest in front of me. “We’ve got three boxes of technical equipment that include Ming metal,” I said. “All three are in the shield. I checked that before we lifted.”

“Maybe the shield’s sprung a leak,” she suggested doubtfully.

“It’s supposed to take a hell of a break before the stuff inside can affect cascade point configuration.”

“I can go check if you’d like.”

“No, don’t bother. There’s no rush now, and Wilkinson’s had more experience with shield boxes. He can take a look when he wakes up. I’d rather you stay here and help me do a complete programming check. Unless you’d like to obey orders and go back to bed.”

She smiled faintly. “No, thanks; I’ll stay. Um . . . I could even start things alone if you’d like to go to the lounge for a while.”

“I’m fine,” I growled, irritated by the suggestion.

“I know,” she said. “But Lanton was down there alone when I passed by on my way here.”

I’d completely forgotten about Lanton and Bradley, and it took a couple of beats for me to catch on. Cross-examining a man in the middle of cascade depression wasn’t a terrifically nice thing to do, but I wasn’t feeling terrifically nice at the moment. “Start with the astrogate program,” I told Alana, getting to my feet. “Give me a shout if you find anything.”

Lanton was still alone in the lounge when I arrived. “Doctor,” I nodded to him as I sat down in the chair across from his. “How are you feeling?” The question was more for politeness than information; the four empty glasses on the end table beside him and the half-full one in his hand showed how he’d chosen to deal with his depression. I’d learned long ago that crying was easier on the liver.

He managed a weak smile. “Better, Captain; much better. I was starting to think I was the only one left on the ship.”

“You’re not even the only one awake,” I said. “The other passengers will probably be wandering in shortly—you people get a higher-dose sleeper than the crew takes.”

He shook his head. “Lord, but that was weird. No wonder you want everyone to sleep through it. I can’t remember the last time I felt this rotten.”

“It’ll pass,” I assured him. “How did Mr Bradley take it?”

“Oh, fine. Much better than I did, though he fell apart just as badly when it was over. I gave him a sedative—the coward’s way out, but I wasn’t up to more demanding therapy at the moment.”

So Bradley wasn’t going to be walking in on us any time soon. Good. “Speaking of therapy, Doctor, I think you owe me a little more information about what you’re doing.”

He nodded and took a swallow from his glass. “Beginning, I suppose, with what exactly Rik is suffering from?”

“That would be nice,” I said, vaguely surprised at how civil I was being. Somehow, the sight of Lanton huddled miserably with his liquor had taken all the starch out of my fire-and-brimstone mood. Alana was clearly having a bad effect on me.

“Okay. Well, first and foremost, he is not in any way dangerous, either to himself or other people. He has no tendencies even remotely suicidal or homicidal. He’s simply . . . permanently disoriented, I suppose, is one way to think of it. His personality seems to slide around in strange ways, generating odd fluctuations in behavior and perception.”

Explaining psychiatric concepts in layman’s terms obviously wasn’t Lanton’s forte. “You mean he’s schizophrenic? Or paranoid?” I added, remembering our launch field conversation.

“Yes and no. He shows some of the symptoms of both—along with those of five or six other maladies—but he doesn’t demonstrate the proper biochemical syndrome for any known mental disease. He’s a fascinating, scientifically annoying anomaly. I’ve got whole bubble-packs of data on him, taken over the past five years, and I’m convinced I’m teetering on the edge of a breakthrough. But I’ve already exhausted all the standard ways of probing a patient’s subconscious, and I had to come up with something new.” He gestured around him. “This is it.”

“This is what? A new form of shock therapy?”

“No, no—you’re missing the point. I’m studying Rik’s cascade images.”

I stared at him for a long moment. Then, getting to my feet, I went to the autobar and drew myself a lager. “With all due respect,” I said as I sat down again, “I think you’re out of your mind. First of all, the images aren’t a product of the deep subconscious or whatever; they’re reflections of universes that might have been.”

“Perhaps. There is some argument about that.” He held up a hand as I started to object. “But either way, you have to admit that your conscious or unconscious mind must have an influence on them. Invariably, the images that appear show the results of major decisions or events in one’s life; never the plethora of insignificant choices we all make. Whether the subconscious is choosing among actual images or generating them by itself, it is involved with them and therefore can be studied through them.”

He seemed to settle slightly in his chair, and I got the feeling this wasn’t the first time he’d made that speech. “Even if I grant you all that,” I said, “which I’m not sure I do, I think you’re running an incredibly stupid risk that the cascade point effects will give Bradley a shove straight over the edge. They’re hard enough on those of us who haven’t got psychological problems—what am I telling you this for? You saw what it was like, damn it. The last thing I want on my ship is someone who’s going to need either complete sedation or a restraint couch all the way to Taimyr!”

I stopped short, suddenly aware that my volume had been steadily increasing. “Sorry,” I muttered, draining half of my lager. “Like I said, cascade points are hard on all of us.”

He frowned. “What do you mean? You were asleep with everyone else, weren’t you?”

“Somebody’s got to be awake to handle the maneuver,” I said.

“But . . . I thought there were autopilots for cascade points now.”

“Sure—the Aker-Ming Autotorque. But they cost nearly twenty-two thousand apiece and have to be replaced every hundred cascade points or so. The big liners and freighters can afford luxuries like that; tramp starmers can’t.”

“I’m sorry—I didn’t know.” His expression suggested he was also sorry he hadn’t investigated the matter more thoroughly before booking aboard the Dancer.

I’d seen that look on people before, and I always hated it. “Don’t worry; you’re perfectly safe. The manual method’s been used for nearly two centuries, and my crew and I know what we’re doing.”

His mind was obviously still a half kilometer back. “But how can it be that expensive? I mean, Ming metal’s an exotic alloy, sure, but it’s only selenium with a little bit of rhenium, after all. You can buy psy-test equipment with Ming metal parts for a fraction of the cost you quoted.”

“And we’ve got an entire box made of the stuff in our number one cargo hold,” I countered. “But making a consistent-property rotation gauge is a good deal harder than rolling sheets or whatever. Anyway, you’re evading my question. What are you going to do if Bradley can’t take the strain?”

He shrugged, but I could see he didn’t take the possibility seriously. “If worse comes to worse, I suppose I could let him sleep while I stayed awake to observe his images. They do show up even in your sleep, don’t they?”

“So I’ve heard.” I didn’t add that I’d feel like a voyeur doing something like that. Psychiatrists, accustomed to poking into other people’s minds, clearly had different standards than I did.

“Good. Though that would add another variable,” he added thoughtfully. “Well . . . I think Rik can handle it. We’ll do it conscious as long as we can.”

“And what’s going to be your clue that he’s not handling it? The first time he tries to strangle one of his images? Or maybe when he goes catatonic?”

He gave me an irritated look. “Captain, I am a psychiatrist. I’m perfectly capable of reading my patient and picking up any signs of trouble before they become serious. Rik is going to be all right; let’s just leave it at that.”

I had no intention of leaving it at that: but just then two more of the passengers wandered into the lounge, so I nodded to Lanton and left. We had five days before the next cascade point, and there would be other opportunities in that time to discuss the issue. If necessary, I would manufacture them.

Alana had only negatives for me when I got back to the bridge. “The astrogate’s clean,” she told me. “I’ve pulled a hard copy of the program to check, but the odds that a glitch developed that just happened to look reasonable enough to fool the diagnostic are essentially nil.” She waved at the long gyroscope needle above us. “Computer further says the vacuum in the gyro chamber stayed hard throughout the maneuver and that there was no malfunction of the mag-bearing fields.”

So the gyroscope hadn’t been jinxed by friction into giving a false reading. Combined with the results on the astrogate program, that left damn few places to look. “Has Wilkinson checked in?”

“Yes, and I’ve got him testing the shield for breaks.”

“Good. I’ll go down and give him a hand. Have you had time to check out our current course?”

“Not in detail, but the settings look all right to me.”

“They did to me, too, but if there’s any chance the computer’s developed problems we can’t take anything for granted. I don’t want to be in the wrong position when it’s time for the next point.”

“Yeah. Well, Pascal’s due up here in ten minutes; I guess the astrogate deep-check can wait until then. What did you find out from Lanton?”

With an effort I switched gears. “According to him, Bradley’s not going to be any trouble. He sounds more neurotic than psychotic, from Lanton’s description, at least at the moment. Unfortunately, Lanton’s got this great plan to use cascade images as a research tool, and intends to keep Bradley awake through every point between here and Taimyr.”

“He what? I don’t suppose he’s bothered to consider what that might do to Bradley’s problems.”

“That’s what I wanted to know. I never did get an acceptable answer.” I moved to the bridge door, poked the release. “Don’t worry, we’ll pound some sense into him before the next point. See you later.”

Wilkinson and Sarojis were both in the number one hold when I arrived, Sarojis offering minor assistance and lots of suggestions as Wilkinson crawled over the shimmery metal box that took up the forward third of the narrow space. Looking down at me as I threaded my way between the other boxes cramming the hold, he shook his head. “Nothing wrong here, Cap’n,” he said. “The shield’s structurally sound; there’s no way the Ming metal inside could affect our configuration.”

“No chance of hairline cracks?” I asked.

He held up the detector he’d been using. “I’m checking, but nothing that small would do anything.”

I nodded acknowledgment and spent a moment frowning at the box. Ming metal had a number of unique properties inside cascade points, properties that made it both a blessing and a curse to those of us who had to fly with it. Its unique blessing, of course, was that its electrical, magnetic, and thermodynamic properties were affected only by the absolute angle the ship rotated through, and not by any of the hundred or so other variables in a given cascade maneuver. It was this predictability that finally had made it possible for a cascade point autodrive mechanism to be developed. Of more concern to smaller ships like mine, though, was that Ming metal drastically changed a ship’s “configuration”—the size, shape, velocity profile, and so on from which the relation between rotation angle and distance traveled on a given maneuver could be computed. Fortunately, the effect was somewhat analogous to air resistance, in that if one piece of Ming metal were completely enclosed in another, only the outer container’s shape, size, and mass would affect the configuration. Hence, the shield. But if it hadn’t been breached, then the cargo inside it couldn’t have fouled us up . . .

“What are the chances,” I asked Wilkinson, “that one of these other boxes contains Ming metal?”

“Without listing it on the manifest?” Sarojis piped up indignantly. He was a dark, intense little man who always seemed loudly astonished whenever anyone did something either unjust or stupid. Most everyone on the Dancer OD’d periodically on his chatter and spent every third day or so avoiding him. Alana and Wilkinson were the only exceptions I knew of, and even Alana got tired of him every so often. “They couldn’t do that,” Sarojis continued before I could respond. “We could sue them into bankruptcy.”

“Only if we make it to Taimyr,” I said briefly, my eyes on Wilkinson.

“One way to find out,” he returned. Dropping lightly off the shield, he replaced his detector in the open tool box lying on the deck and withdrew a wand-like gadget.

It took two hours to run the wand over every crate in the Dancer’s three holds, and we came up with precisely nothing. “Maybe one of the passengers brought some aboard,” Sarojis suggested.

“You’ve got to be richer than any of our customers to buy cases with Ming-metal buckles.” Wilkinson shook his head. “Cap’n, it’s got to be a computer fault, or else something in the gyro.”

“Um,” I said noncommittally. I hadn’t yet told them that I’d checked with Alana midway through all the cargo testing and that she and Pascal had found nothing wrong in their deep-checks of both systems. There was no point in worrying them more than necessary.

I returned to the bridge to find Pascal there alone, slouching in the helm chair and gazing at the displays with a dreamy sort of expression on his face. “Where’s Alana?” I asked him, dropping into the other chair and eyeing the pile of diagnostic print-outs they’d thoughtfully left for me. “Finally gone to bed?”

“She said she was going to stop by the dining room first and have some dinner,” Pascal said, the dreamy expression fading somewhat. “Something about meeting the passengers.”

I glanced at my watch, realizing with a start that it was indeed dinnertime. “Maybe I’ll go on down, too. Any problems here, first?”

He shook his head. “I have a theory about the cascade point error,” he said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “I’d rather not say what it is, though, until I’ve had more time to think about it.”

“Sure,” I said, and left. Pascal fancied himself a great scientific detective and was always coming up with complex and wholly unrealistic theories in areas far outside his field, with predictable results. Still, nothing he’d ever come up with had been actually dangerous, and there was always the chance he would someday hit on something useful. I hoped this would be that day.

The Dancer’s compact dining room was surprisingly crowded for so soon after the first cascade point, but a quick scan of the faces showed me why. Only nine of our twelve passengers had made it out of bed after their first experience with sleepers, but their absence was more than made up by the six crewers who had opted to eat here tonight instead of in the duty mess. The entire off-duty contingent . . . and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.

Bradley, seated between Lanton and Tobbar at one of the two tables, was speaking earnestly as I slipped through the door. “. . . less symbolic than it was an attempt to portray the world from a truly alien viewpoint, a viewpoint he would change every few years. Thus A Midsummer Wedding has both the slight fish-eye distortion and the color shifts you might get from a water-dwelling creature; also the subtleties of posture and expression that such an alien wouldn’t understand and might therefore not get right.”

“But isn’t strange sensory expression one of the basic foundations of art?” That was Tobbar—so glib on any topic that you were never quite sure whether he actually knew anything about it or not. “Drawing both eyes on one side of the head, putting nudes at otherwise normal picnics—that sort of thing.”

“True, but you mustn’t confuse weirdness for its own sake with the consistent, scientifically accurate variations Meyerhäus used.”

There was more, but just then Alana caught my eye from her place at the other table and indicated the empty seat next to her. I went over and sat down, losing the train of Bradley’s monologue in the process. “Anything?” she whispered to me.

“A very flat zero,” I told her.

She nodded once but didn’t say anything, and I noticed her gaze drift back to Bradley. “Knows a lot about art, I see,” I commented, oddly irritated by her shift in attention.

“You missed his talk on history,” she said. “He got quite a discussion going over there—that mathematician, Dr Chileogu, also seems to be a history buff. First time I’ve ever seen Tobbar completely frozen out of a discussion. He certainly seems normal enough.”

“Tobbar?”

“Bradley.”

“Oh.” I looked over at Bradley, who was now listening intently to someone holding forth from the other end of his table. Permanently disoriented, Lanton had described him. Was he envisioning himself a professor of art or something right now? Or were his delusions that complete? I didn’t know; and at the moment I didn’t care. “Well, good for him. Now if you’d care to bring your mind back to ship’s business, we still have a problem on our hands.”

Alana turned back to me, a slight furrow across her forehead. “I’m open to suggestions,” she said. “I was under the impression that we were stuck for the moment.”

I clenched my jaw tightly over the retort that wanted to come out. We were stuck; and until someone else came up with an idea there really wasn’t any reason why Alana shouldn’t be down here relaxing. “Yeah,” I growled, getting to my feet. “Well, keep thinking about it.”

“Aren’t you going to eat?”

“I’ll get something later in the duty mess,” I said.

I paused at the door and glanced back. Already her attention was back on Bradley. Heading back upstairs to the duty mess, I programmed myself an unimaginative meal that went down like so much wet cardboard. Afterwards, I went back to my cabin and pulled a tape on cascade point theory.

I was still paging through it two hours later when I fell asleep.

I tried several times in the next five days to run into Lanton on his own, but it seemed that every time I saw him Bradley was tagging along like a well-behaved cocker spaniel. Eventually, I was forced to accept Alana’s suggestion that she and Tobbar offer Bradley a tour of the ship, giving me a chance to waylay Lanton in the corridor outside his cabin. The psychiatrist seemed preoccupied and a little annoyed at being so accosted, but I didn’t let it bother me.

“No, of course there’s no progress yet,” he said in response to my question. “I also didn’t expect any. The first cascade point observations were my baseline. I’ll be asking questions during the next one, and after that I’ll start introducing various treatment techniques and observing Rik’s reactions to them.”

He started to sidle past me, but I moved to block him. “Treatment? You never said anything about treatment.”

“I didn’t think I had to. I am legally authorized to administer drugs and such, after all.”

“Maybe on the ground,” I told him stiffly. “But out here the ship’s doctor is the final medical authority. You will not give Bradley any drugs or electronic treatment without first clearing it with Dr Epstein.” Something tugged at my mind, but I couldn’t be bothered with tracking it down. “As a matter of fact, I want you to give her a complete list of all drugs you’ve brought aboard before the next cascade point. Anything addictive or potentially dangerous is to be turned over to her for storage in the sleeper cabinet. Understand?”

Lanton’s expression stuck somewhere between irritated and stunned. “Oh, come on, Captain, be reasonable—practically every medicine in the book can be dangerous if taken in excessive doses.” His face seemed to recover, settling into a bland sort of neutral as his voice similarly adjusted to match it. “Why do you object so strongly to what I’m trying to do for Rik?”

“I’d hurry with that list, Doctor—the next point’s scheduled for tomorrow. Good day.” Spinning on my heel, I turned and stalked away.

I called back to Kate Epstein as soon as I reached my cabin and told her about the list Lanton would be delivering to her. I got the impression that she, too, thought I was overreacting, but she nevertheless agreed to cooperate. I extracted a promise to keep me informed on what Lanton’s work involved, then signed off and returned once more to the Colloton theory tapes that had occupied the bulk of my time the past four days.

But despite the urgency I was feeling—we had less than twenty hours to the next cascade point—the words on my reader screen refused to coalesce into anything that made sense. I gritted my teeth and kept at it until I discovered myself reading the same paragraph for the fourth time and still not getting a word of it. Snapping off the reader in disgust, I stretched out on my bed and tried to track down the source of my distraction.

Obviously, my irritation at Lanton was a good fraction of it. Along with the high-handed way he treated the whole business of Bradley, he’d now added the insult of talking to me in a tone of voice that implied I needed his professional services—and for nothing worse than insisting on my rights as captain of the Dancer. I wished to hell I’d paid more attention to the passenger manifest before I’d let the two of them aboard. Next time I’d know better.

Still . . . I had to admit that maybe I had overreacted a bit. But it wasn’t as if I was being short-tempered without reason. I had plenty of reasons to be worried: Lanton’s game of cascade image tag and its possible effects on Bradley, the still unexplained discrepancy in the last point’s maneuvers, the changes I was seeing in Alana—

Alana. Up until that moment I hadn’t consciously admitted to myself that she was behaving any differently than usual. But I hadn’t flown with her for four years without knowing all of her moods and tendencies, and it was abundantly clear to me that she was slowly getting involved with Bradley.

My anger over such an unexpected turn of events was not in any way motivated by jealousy. Alana was her own woman, and any part of her life not directly related to her duties was none of my business. But I knew that, in this case, her involvement was more than likely her old affinity for broken wings, rising like the Phoenix—except that the burning would come afterwards instead of beforehand. I didn’t want to see Alana go through that again, especially with someone whose presence I felt responsible for. There was, of course, little I could do directly without risking Alana’s notice and probable anger; but I could let Lanton know how I felt by continuing to make things as difficult for him as possible. And I would.

And with that settled, I managed to push it aside and return to my studies. It is, I suppose, revealing that it never occurred to me at the time how inconsistent my conclusion and proposed course of action really were. After all, the faster Lanton cured Bradley, the faster the broken-wing attraction would disappear and—presumably—the easier Alana would be able to extricate herself. Perhaps, even then, I was secretly starting to wonder if her attraction to him was something more than altruistic.

“Two minutes,” Alana said crisply from my right, her tone almost but not quite covering the tension I knew she must be feeling. “Gyro checks out perfectly.”

I made a minor adjustment in my mirror, confirmed that the long needle was set dead on zero. Behind the mirror, the displays stared blankly at me from the control board, their systems having long since been shut down. I looked at the computer’s print-out, the field generator control cover, my own hands—anything to keep from looking at Alana. Like me, she was unaccustomed to company during a cascade point, and I was determined to give her what little privacy I could.

“One minute,” she said. “You sure we made up enough distance for this to be safe?”

“Positive. The only possible trouble could have come from Epsilon Eridani, and we’ve made up enough lateral distance to put it the requisite six degrees off our path.”

“Do you suppose that could have been the trouble last time? Could we have come too close to something—a black dwarf, maybe, that drifted into our corridor?”

I shrugged, eyes on the clock. “Not according to the charts. Ships have been going to Taimyr a long time, you know, and the whole route’s been pretty thoroughly checked out. Even black dwarfs have to come from somewhere.” Gritting my teeth, I flipped the cover off the knob. “Brace yourself; here we go.”

Doing a cascade point alone invites introspection, memories of times long past, and melancholy. Doing it with someone else adds instant vertigo and claustrophobia to the list. Alana’s images and mine still appeared in the usual horizontal cross shape, but since we weren’t seated facing exactly the same direction, they didn’t overlap. The result was a suffocatingly crowded bridge—crowded, to make things worse, with images that were no longer tied to your own motions, but would twitch and jerk apparently on their own.

For me, the disadvantages far outweighed the single benefit of having someone there to talk to, but in this case I had had little choice. Alana had steadfastly refused to let me take over from her on two points in a row, and I’d been equally insistent on being awake to watch the proceedings. It was a lousy compromise, but I’d known better than to order Alana off the bridge. She had her pride, too.

“Activating flywheel.”

Alana’s voice brought my mind back to business. I checked the print-out one last time, then turned my full attention to the gyro needle. A moment later it began its slow creep, and the dual set of cascade images started into their own convoluted dances. Swallowing hard, I gave my stomach stern orders and held on.

It seemed at times to be lasting forever, but finally it was over. The Dancer had been rotated, had been brought to a stop, and had successfully made the transition to real space. I slumped in my seat, feeling a mixture of cascade depression and only marginally decreased tension. The astrogate program’s verdict, after all, was still to come.

But I was spared the ordeal of waiting with twiddled thumbs for the computer. Alana had barely gotten the ship’s systems going again when the intercom bleeped at me. “Bridge,” I answered.

“This is Dr Lanton,” the tight response came. “There’s something very wrong with the power supply to my cabin—one of my instruments just burned out on me.”

“Is it on fire?” I asked sharply, eyes flicking to the status display. Nothing there indicated any problem.

“Oh, no—there was just a little smoke and that’s gone now. But the thing’s ruined.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Doctor,” I said, trying to sound like I meant it. “But I can’t be responsible for damage to electronics that are left running through a cascade point. Even something as simple as an AC power line can show small voltage fluc—oh, damn it!”

Alana jerked at my exclamation. “What—”

“Lanton!” I snapped, already halfway out of my seat. “Stay put and don’t touch anything. I’m coming down.”

His reply was more question than acknowledgment, but I ignored it. “Alana,” I called to her, “call Wilkinson and have him meet me at Lanton’s cabin—and tell him to bring a Ming metal detector.”

I caught just a glimpse of her suddenly horrified expression before the door slid shut and I went running down the corridor. There was no reason to run, but I did so anyway.

It was there, of course: a nice, neat Ming-metal dual crossover coil, smack in the center of the ruined neural tracer. At least it had been neat; now it was stained with a sticky goo that had dripped onto it from the blackened circuit board above. “Make sure none of it melted off onto something else,” I told Wilkinson as he carefully removed the coil. “If it has we’ll either have to gut the machine or find a way to squeeze it inside the shield.” He nodded and I stepped over to where Lanton was sitting, the white-hot anger inside me completely overriding my usual depression. “What the hell did you think you were doing, bringing that damn thing aboard?” I thundered, dimly aware that the freshly sedated Bradley might hear me from the next cabin but not giving a damn.

His voice, when he answered, was low and artificially calm—whether in stunned reaction to my rage or simply a reflexive habit I didn’t know. “I’m very sorry, Captain, but I swear I didn’t know the tracer had any Ming metal in it.”

“Why not? You told me yourself you could buy things with Ming-metal parts.” And I’d let that fact sail blithely by me, a blunder on my part that was probably fueling ninety percent of my anger.

“But I never see the manufacturing specs on anything I use,” he said. “It all comes through the Institute’s receiving department, and all I get are the operating manuals and such.” His eyes flicked to his machine as if he were going to object to Wilkinson’s manhandling of it. “I guess they must have removed any identification tags, as well.”

“I guess they must have,” I ground out. Wilkinson had the coil out now, and I watched as he laid it aside and picked up the detector wand again. A minute later he shook his head.

“Clean, Cap’n,” he told me, picking up the coil again. “I’ll take this to One Hold and put it away.”

I nodded and he left. Gesturing to the other gadgets spread around the room, I asked, “Is this all you’ve got, or is there more in Bradley’s cabin?”

“No, this is it,” Lanton assured me.

“What about your stereovision camera? I know some of those have Ming metal in them.”

He frowned. “I don’t have any cameras. Who told you I did?”

“I—” I frowned in turn. “You said you were studying Bradley’s cascade images.”

“Yes, but you can’t take pictures of them. They don’t register on any kind of film.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. I was sure I’d known that once, but after years of watching the images I’d apparently clean forgotten it. They were so lifelike . . . and I was perhaps getting old. “I assumed someone had come up with a technique that worked,” I said stiffly, acutely aware that my attempt to save face wasn’t fooling either of us. “How do you do it, then?”

“I memorize all of it, of course. Psychiatrists have to have good memories, you know, and there are several drugs that can enhance one’s basic abilities.”

I’d heard of mnemonic drugs. They were safe, extremely effective, and cost a small fortune. “Do you have any of them with you? If so, I’m going to insist they be locked away.”

He shook his head. “I was given a six-month treatment at the Institute before we left. That’s the main reason we’re on your ship, by the way, instead of something specially chartered. Mnemonic drugs play havoc with otherwise reasonable budgets.”

He was making a joke, of course, but it was an exceedingly tasteless one, and the anger that had been draining out of me reversed its flow. No one needed to remind me that the Dancer wasn’t up to the Cunard line’s standards. “My sympathies to your budget,” I said briefly. Turning away, I strode to the door.

“Wait a minute,” he called after me. “What are my chances of getting that neural tracer fixed?”

I glanced back over my shoulder. “That probably depends on how good you are with a screwdriver and solder gun,” I said, and left.

Alana was over her own cascade depression by the time I returned to the bridge. “I was right,” I said as I dropped into my seat. “One of his damned black boxes had a Ming-metal coil.”

“I know; Wilkinson called from One Hold.” She glanced sideways at me. “I hope you didn’t chew Lanton out in front of Bradley.”

“Why not?”

“Did you?”

“As it happens, no. Lanton sedated him right after the point again. Why does it matter?”

“Well . . .” She seemed embarrassed. “It might . . . upset him to see you angry. You see, he sort of looks up to you—captain of a star ship and all—”

“Captain of a struggling tramp,” I corrected her more harshly than was necessary. “Or didn’t you bother to tell him that we’re the absolute bottom of the line?”

“I told him,” she said steadily. “But he doesn’t see things that way. Even in five days aboard he’s had a glimpse of how demanding this kind of life is. He’s never been able to hold down a good job himself for very long, and that adds to the awe he feels for all of us.”

“I can tell he’s got a lot to learn about the universe,” I snorted. For some reason the conversation was making me nervous, and I hurried to bring it back to safer regions. “Did your concern for Bradley’s idealism leave you enough time to run the astrogate?”

She actually blushed, the first time in years I’d seen her do that. “Yes,” she said stiffly. “We’re about thirty-two light-days short this time.”

“Damn.” I hammered the edge of the control board once with my clenched fist, and then began punching computer keys.

“I’ve already checked that,” Alana spoke up. “We’ll dig pretty deep into our fuel reserve if we try to make it up through normal space.”

I nodded, my fingers coming to a halt. My insistence on maintaining a high fuel reserve was one of the last remnants of Lord Hendrik’s training that I still held onto, and despite occasional ribbing from other freighter captains I felt it was a safety precaution worth taking. The alternative to using it, though, wasn’t especially pleasant. “All right,” I sighed. “Let’s clear out enough room for the computer to refigure our course profile. If possible, I’d like to tack the extra fifty light-days onto one of the existing points instead of adding a new one.”

She nodded and started typing away at her console as I called down to the engine room to alert Matope. It was a semimajor pain, but the Dancer’s computer didn’t have enough memory space to handle the horribly complex Colloton calculations we needed while all the standard operations programming was in place. We would need to shift all but the most critical functions to Matope’s manual control, replacing the erased programs later from Pascal’s set of master tapes.

It took nearly an hour to get the results, but they turned out to be worth the wait. Not only could we make up our shortfall without an extra point, but with the slightly different stellar configuration we faced now it was going to be possible to actually shorten the duration of one of the points further down the line. That was good news from both practical and psychological considerations. Though I’ve never been able to prove it, I’ve long believed that the deepest depressions follow the longest points.

I didn’t see any more of Lanton that day, though I heard later that he and Bradley had mingled with the passengers as they always did, Lanton behaving as if nothing at all had happened. Though I knew my crew wasn’t likely to go around blabbing about Lanton’s Ming metal blunder, I issued an order anyway to keep the whole matter quiet. It wasn’t to save Lanton any embarrassment—that much I was certain of—but beyond that my motives became uncomfortably fuzzy. I finally decided I was doing it for Alana, to keep her from having to explain to Bradley what an idiot his therapist was.

The next point, six days later, went flawlessly, and life aboard ship finally settled into the usual deep-space routine. Alana, Pascal, and I each took eight-hour shifts on the bridge; Matope, Tobbar, and Sarojis did the same back in the engine room; and Kate Epstein, Leeds, and Wilkinson took turns catering to the occasional whims of our passengers. Off-duty, most of the crewers also made an effort to spend at least a little time in the passenger lounge, recognizing the need to be friendly in the part of our business that was mainly word of mouth. Since that first night, though, the exaggerated interest in Bradley The Mental Patient had pretty well evaporated, leaving him as just another passenger in nearly everyone’s eyes.

The exception, of course, was Alana.

In some ways, watching her during those weeks was roughly akin to watching a baby bird hacking its way out of its shell. Alana’s bridge shift followed mine, and I was often more or less forced to hang around for an hour or so listening to her talk about her day. Forced is perhaps the wrong word; obviously, no one was nailing me to my chair. And yet, in another sense, I really did have no choice. To the best of my knowledge, I was Alana’s only real confidant aboard the Dancer, and to have refused to listen would have deprived her of her only verbal sounding board. And the more I listened, the more I realized how vital my participation really was . . . because along with the usual rolls, pitches, and yaws of every embryo relationship, this one had an extra complication: Bradley’s personality was beginning to change.

Lanton had said he was on the verge of a breakthrough, but it had never occurred to me that he might be able to begin genuine treatment aboard ship, let alone that any of its effects would show up en route. But even to me, who saw Bradley for maybe ten minutes at a time three times a week, the changes were obvious. All the conflicting signals in posture and expression that had bothered me so much at our first meeting diminished steadily until they were virtually gone, showing up only on brief occasions. At the same time, his self-confidence began to increase, and a heretofore unnoticed—by me, at least—sense of humor began to manifest itself. The latter effect bothered me, until Alana explained that a proper sense of humor required both a sense of dignity and an ability to take oneself less than seriously, neither of which Bradley had ever had before. I was duly pleased for her at the progress this showed; privately, I sought Lanton out to find out exactly what he was doing to his patient and the possible hazards thereof. The interview was easy to obtain—Bradley was soloing quite a bit these days—but relatively uninformative. Lanton tossed around a lot of stuff about synaptic fixing and duplicate messenger chemistry, but with visions of a Nobel Prize almost visibly orbiting his head he was in no mood to worry about dangerous side effects. He assured me that nothing he was using was in the slightest way experimental, and that I should go back to flying the Dancer and let him worry about Bradley. Or words to that effect.

I really was happy for Bradley, of course, but the fact remained that his rapid improvement was playing havoc with Alana’s feelings. After years away from the wing-mending business she felt herself painfully rusty at it; and as Bradley continued to get better despite that, she began to wonder out loud whether she was doing any good, and if not, what right she had to continue hanging around him. At first I thought this was just an effort to hide the growth of other feelings from me, but gradually I began to realize that she was as confused about what was happening as she sounded. Never before in her life, I gathered, had romantic feelings come to her without the framework of a broken-wing operation to both build on and help disguise, and with that scaffolding falling apart around her she was either unable or unwilling to admit to herself what was really going on.

I felt pretty rotten having to sit around watching her flounder, but until she was able to recognize for herself what was happening there wasn’t much I could do except listen. I wasn’t about to offer any suggestions, especially since I didn’t believe in love at first sight in the first place. My only consolation was that Bradley and Lanton were riding round trip with us, which meant that Alana wouldn’t have to deal with any sort of separation crisis until we were back on Earth. I’d never before had much sympathy for people who expected time to solve all their problems for them, but in this case I couldn’t think of anything better to do.

And so matters stood as we went through our eighth and final point and emerged barely 800,000 kilometers from the thriving colony world Taimyr . . . and found it deserted.

“Still nothing,” Alana said tightly, her voice reflecting both the remnants of cascade depression and the shock of our impossible discovery. “No response to our call; nothing on any frequency I can pick up. I can’t even find the comm satellites’ lock signal.”

I nodded, my eyes on the scope screen as the Dancer’s telescope slowly scanned Taimyr’s dark side. No lights showed anywhere. Shifting the aim, I began searching for the nine comm and nav satellites that should be circling the planet. “Alana, call up the astro-gate again and find out what it’s giving as position uncertainty.”

“If you’re thinking we’re in the wrong system, forget it,” she said as she tapped keys.

“Just checking all possibilities,” I muttered. The satellites, too, were gone. I leaned back in my seat and bit at my lip.

“Yeah. Well, from eighteen positively identified stars we’ve got an error of no more than half a light-hour.” She swiveled to face me and I saw the fear starting to grow behind her eyes. “Pall, what is going on here? Two hundred million people can’t just disappear without a trace.”

I shrugged helplessly. “A nuclear war could do it, I suppose, and might account for the satellites being gone as well. But there’s no reason why anyone on Taimyr should have any nuclear weapons.” Leaning forward again, I activated the helm. “A better view might help. If there’s been some kind of war the major cities should now be big craters surrounded by rubble. I’m going to take us in and see what the day side looks like from high orbit.”

“Do you think that’s safe? I mean—” She hesitated. “Suppose the attack came from outside Taimyr.”

“What, you mean like an invasion?” I shook my head. “Even if there are alien intelligences somewhere who would want to invade us, we stand just as good a chance of getting away from orbit as we do from here.”

“All right,” she sighed. “But I’m setting up a cascade point maneuver, just in case. Do you think we should alert everybody yet?”

“Crewers, yes; passengers, no. I don’t want any silly questions until I’m ready to answer them.”

We took our time approaching Taimyr, but caution turned out to be unnecessary. No ships, human or otherwise, waited in orbit for us; no one hailed or shot at us; and as I turned the telescope planetward I saw no signs of warfare.

Nor did I see any cities, farmland, factories, or vehicles. It was as if Taimyr the colony had never existed.

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Matope said after I’d explained things over the crew intercom hookup. “How could a whole colony disappear?”

“I’ve looked up the records we’ve got on Taimyr,” Pascal spoke up. “Some of the tropical vegetation is pretty fierce in the growth department. If everyone down there was killed by a plague or something, it’s possible the plants have overgrown everything.”

“Except that most of the cities are in temperate regions,” I said shortly, “and two are smack in the middle of deserts. I can’t find any of those, either.”

“Hmm,” Pascal said and fell silent, probably already hard at work on a new theory.

“Captain, you don’t intend to land, do you?” Sarojis asked. “If launch facilities are gone and not merely covered over we’d be unable to lift again to orbit.”

“I’m aware of that, and I have no intention of landing,” I assured him. “But something’s happened down there, and I’d like to get back to Earth with at least some idea of what.”

“Maybe nothing’s happened to the colony,” Wilkinson said slowly. “Maybe something’s happened to us.”

“Such as?”

“Well . . . this may sound strange, but suppose we’ve somehow gone back in time, back to before the colony was started.”

“That’s crazy,” Sarojis scoffed before I could say anything. “How could we possibly do something like that?”

“Malfunction of the field generator, maybe?” Wilkinson suggested. “There’s a lot we don’t know about Colloton space.”

“It doesn’t send ships back in—”

“All right, ease up,” I told Sarojis. Beside me Alana snorted suddenly and reached for her keyboard. “I agree the idea sounds crazy, but whole cities don’t just walk off, either,” I continued. “It’s not like there’s a calendar we can look at out here, either. If we were a hundred years in the past, how would we know it?”

“Check the star positions,” Matope offered.

“No good; the astrogate program would have noticed if anything was too far out of place. But I expect that still leaves us a possible century or more to rattle around in.”

“No, it doesn’t.” Alana turned back to me with a grimly satisfied look on her face. “I’ve just taken signals from three pulsars. Compensating for our distance from Earth gives the proper rates for all three.”

“Any comments on that?” I asked, not expecting any. Pulsar signals occasionally break their normal pattern and suddenly increase their pulse frequency, but it was unlikely to have happened in three of the beasts simultaneously; and in the absence of such a glitch the steady decrease in frequency was as good a calendar as we could expect to find.

There was a short pause, then Tobbar spoke up. “Captain, I think maybe it’s time to bring the passengers in on this. We can’t hide the fact that we’re in Taimyr system, so they’re bound to figure out sooner or later that something’s wrong. And I think they’ll be more cooperative if we volunteer the information rather than making them demand it.”

“What do we need their cooperation for?” Sarojis snorted.

“If you bothered to listen as much as you talked,” Tobbar returned, a bit tartly, “you’d know that Chuck Raines is an advanced student in astrophysics and Dr Chileogu has done a fair amount of work on Colloton field mathematics. I’d say chances are good that we’re going to need help from one or both of them before this is all over.”

I looked at Alana, raised my eyebrows questioningly. She hesitated, then nodded. “All right,” I said. “Matope, you’ll stay on duty down there; Alana will be in command here. Everyone else will assemble in the dining room. The meeting will begin in ten minutes.”

I waited for their acknowledgments and then flipped off the intercom. “I’d like to be there,” Alana said.

“I know,” I said, raising my palms helplessly. “But I have to be there, and someone’s got to keep an eye on things outside.”

“Pascal or Sarojis could do it.”

“True—and under normal circumstances I’d let them. But we’re facing an unknown and potentially dangerous situation, and I need someone here whose judgment I trust.”

She took a deep breath, exhaled loudly. “Yeah. Well . . . at least let me listen in by intercom, okay?”

“I’d planned to,” I nodded. Reaching over, I touched her shoulder. “Don’t worry; Bradley can handle the news.”

“I know,” she said, with a vehemence that told me she wasn’t anywhere near that certain.

Sighing, I flipped the PA switch and made the announcement.

They took the news considerably better than I’d expected them to—possibly, I suspected, because the emotional kick hadn’t hit them yet.

“But this is absolutely unbelievable, Captain Durriken,” Lissa Steadman said when I’d finished. She was a rising young business administration type who I half-expected to call for a committee to study the problem. “How could a whole colony simply vanish?”

“My question exactly,” I told her. “We don’t know yet, but we’re going to try and find out before we head back to Earth.”

“We’re just going to leave?” Mr Eklund asked timidly from the far end of the table. His hand, on top of the table, gripped his wife’s tightly, and I belatedly remembered they’d been going to Taimyr to see a daughter who’d emigrated some thirty years earlier. Of all aboard, they had lost the most when the colony vanished.

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but there’s no way we could land and take off again, not if we want to make Earth again on the fuel we have left.”

Eklund nodded silently. Beside them, Chuck Raines cleared his throat. “Has anybody considered the possibility that we’re the ones something has happened to? After all, it’s the Aura Dancer, not Taimyr that’s been dipping in and out of normal space for the last six weeks. Maybe during all that activity something went wrong.”

“The floor is open for suggestions,” I said.

“Well . . . I presume you’ve confirmed we are in the Taimyr system. Could we be—oh—out of phase or something with the real universe?”

“Highly poetic,” Tobbar spoke up from his corner. “But what does out of phase physically mean in this case?”

“Something like a parallel universe, or maybe an alternate time line,” Raines suggested. “Some replica of our universe where humans never colonized Taimyr. After all, cascade images are supposed to be views of alternate universes, aren’t they? Maybe cascade points are somehow where all the possible paths intersect.”

“You’ve been reading too much science fiction,” I told him. “Cascade images are at least partly psychological, and they certainly have no visible substance. Besides, if you had to trace the proper path through a hundred universes every time you went through a cascade point, you’d lose ninety-nine ships out of every hundred that tried it.”

“Actually, Mr Raines is not being all that far out,” Dr Chileogu put in quietly. “It’s occasionally been speculated that the branch cuts and Riemann surfaces that show up in Colloton theory represent distinct universes. If so, it would be theoretically possible to cross between them.” He smiled slightly. “But it’s extremely unlikely that a responsible captain would put his ship through the sort of maneuver that would be necessary to do such a thing.”

“What sort of maneuver would it take?” I asked.

“Basically, a large-angle rotation within the cascade point. Say, eight degrees or more.”

I shook my head, feeling relieved and at the same time vaguely disappointed that a possible lead had evaporated. “Our largest angle was just under four point five degrees.”

He shrugged. “As I said.”

I glanced around the table, wondering what avenue to try next. But Wilkinson wasn’t ready to abandon this one yet. “I don’t understand what the ship’s rotation has to do with it, Dr Chileogu,” he said. “I thought the farther you rotated, the farther you went in real space, and that was all.”

“Well . . . it would be easier if I could show you the curves involved. Basically, you’re right about the distance-angle relation as long as you stay below that eight degrees I mentioned. But above that point there’s a discontinuity, similar to what you get in the curve of the ordinary tangent function at ninety degrees; though unlike the tangent the next arm doesn’t start at minus infinity.” Chileogu glanced around the room, and I could see him revising the level of his explanation downward. “Anyway, the point is that the first arm of the curve—real rotations of zero to eight point six degrees—gives the complete range of translation distance from zero to infinity, and so that’s all a starship ever uses. If the ship rotates past that discontinuity, mathematical theory would say it had gone off the edge of the universe and started over again on a different Riemann surface. What that means physically I don’t think anyone knows; but as Captain Durriken pointed out, all our real rotations have been well below the discontinuity.”

Wilkinson nodded, apparently satisfied; but the term “real rotation” had now set off a warning bell deep in my own mind. It was an expression I hadn’t heard—much less thought about—in years, but I vaguely remembered now that it had concealed a seven-liter can of worms. “Doctor, when you speak of a ‘real’ rotation, you’re referring to a mathematical entity, as opposed to an actual, physical one,” I said slowly. “Correct?”

He shrugged. “Correct, but with a ship such as this the two are for all practical purposes identical. The Aura Dancer is a long, perfectly symmetrical craft, with both the Colloton field generator and Ming-metal cargo shield along the center line. It’s only when you start working with the fancier liners, with their towers and blister lounges and all, that you get a serious divergence.”

I nodded carefully and looked around the room. Pascal had already gotten it, from the expression on his face; Wilkinson and Tobbar were starting to. “Could an extra piece of Ming metal, placed several meters off the ship’s center line, cause such a divergence?” I asked Chileogu.

“Possibly,” he frowned. “Very possibly.”

I shifted my gaze to Lanton. His face had gone white. “I think,” I said, “I’ve located the problem.”

Seated at the main terminal in Pascal’s cramped computer room, Chileogu turned the Ming-metal coil over in his hands and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Captain, but it simply can’t be done. A dual crossover winding is one of the most complex shapes in existence, and there’s no way I can calculate its effect with a computer this small.”

I glanced over his head at Pascal and Lanton, the latter having tagged along after I cut short the meeting and hustled the mathematician down here. “Can’t you even get us an estimate?” I asked.

“Certainly. But the estimate could be anywhere up to a factor of three off, which would be worse than useless to you.”

I nodded, pursing my lips tightly. “Well, then, how about going on from here? With that coil back in the shield, the real and physical rotations coincide again. Is there some way we can get back to our universe; say, by taking a long step out from Taimyr and two short ones back?”

Chileogu pondered that one for a long minute. “I would say that it depends on how many universes we’re actually dealing with,” he said at last. “If there are just two—ours and this one—then rotating past any one discontinuity should do it. But if there are more than two, you’d wind up just going one deeper into the stack if you crossed the wrong line.”

“Ouch,” Pascal murmured. “And if there are an infinite number, I presume, we’d never get back out?”

The mathematician shrugged uncomfortably. “Very likely.”

“But don’t the mathematics show how many universes there are?” Lanton spoke up.

“They show how many Riemann surfaces there are,” Chileogu corrected. “But physical reality is never obliged to correspond with our theories and constructs. Experimental checks are always required, and to the best of my knowledge no one has ever tried this one.”

I thought of all the ships that had simply disappeared, and shivered slightly. “In other words, trying to find the Taimyr colony is out. All right, then. What about the principle of reversibility? Will that let us go back the way we came?”

“Back to Earth?” Chileogu hesitated. “Ye-e-s, I think that would apply here. But to go back don’t you need to know . . .?”

“The real rotations we used to get here,” I nodded heavily. “Yeah.” We looked at each other, and I saw that he, too, recognized the implications of that requirement.

Lanton, though, was still light-years behind us. “You act like there’s still a problem,” he said, looking back and forth between us. “Don’t you have records of the rotations we made at each point?”

I was suddenly tired of the psychiatrist. “Pascal, would you explain things to Dr Lanton—on your way back to the passenger area?”

“Sure.” Pascal stepped to Lanton’s side and took his arm. “This way, Doctor.”

“But—” Lanton’s protests were cut off by the closing door.

I sat down carefully on a corner of the console, staring back at the Korusyn 630 that took up most of the room’s space. “I take it,’ Chileogu said quietly, “that you can’t get the return trip parameters?”

“We can get all but the last two points we’d need,” I told him. “The ship’s basic configuration was normal for all of those, and the Korusyn there can handle them.” I shook my head. “But even for those the parameters will be totally different—a two-degree rotation one way might become a one or three on the return trip. It depends on our relation to the galactic magnetic field and angular momentum vectors, closest-approach distance to large masses, and a half-dozen other parameters. Even if we had a mathematical expression for the influence Lanton’s damn coil had on our first two points, I wouldn’t know how to reprogram the machine to take that into account.”

Chileogu was silent for a moment. Then, straightening up in his seat, he flexed his fingers. “Well, I suppose we have to start somewhere. Can you clear me a section of memory?”

“Easily. What are you going to do?”

He picked up the coil again. “I can’t do a complete calculation, but there are several approximation methods that occasionally work pretty well; they’re scattered throughout my technical tapes if your library doesn’t have a list. If they give widely varying results—as they probably will, I’m afraid—then we’re back where we started. But if they happen to show a close agreement, we can probably use the result with reasonable confidence.” He smiled slightly. “Then we get to worry about programming it in.”

“Yeah. Well, first things first. Alana, have you been listening in?”

“Yes,” her voice came promptly through the intercom. “I’m clearing the computer now.”

Chileogu left a moment later to fetch his tapes. Pascal returned while he was gone, and I filled him in on what we were going to try. Together, he and Alana had the computer ready by the time Chileogu returned. I considered staying to watch, but common sense told me I would just be in the way, so instead I went up to the bridge and relieved Alana. It wasn’t really my shift, but I didn’t feel like mixing with the passengers, and I could think and brood as well on the bridge as I could in my cabin. Besides, I had a feeling Alana would like to check up on Bradley.

I’d been sitting there staring at Taimyr for about an hour when the intercom bleeped. “Captain,” Alana’s voice said, “can you come down to the dining room right away? Dr Lanton’s come up with an idea I think you’ll want to hear.”

I resisted my reflexive urge to tell her what Lanton could do with his ideas; her use of my title meant she wasn’t alone. “All right,” I sighed. “I’ll get Sarojis to take over here and be down in a few minutes.”

“I think Dr Chileogu and Pascal should be here, too.”

Something frosty went skittering down my back. Alana knew the importance of what those two were doing. Whatever Lanton’s brainstorm was, she must genuinely think it worth listening to. “All right. We’ll be there shortly.”

They were all waiting quietly around one of the tables when I arrived. Bradley, not surprisingly, was there too, seated next to Alana and across from Lanton. Only the six of us were present; the other passengers, I guessed, were keeping the autobar in the lounge busy. “Okay, let’s have it,” I said without preamble as I sat down.

“Yes, sir,” Lanton said, throwing a quick glance in Pascal’s direction. “If I understood Mr Pascal’s earlier explanation correctly, we’re basically stuck because there’s no way to calibrate the Aura Dancer’s instruments to take the, uh, extra Ming metal into account.”

“Close enough,” I grunted. “So?”

“So, it occurred to me that this ‘real’ rotation you were talking about ought to have some external manifestation, the same way a gyro needle shows the ship’s physical rotation.”

“You mean like something outside the viewports?” I frowned.

“No; something inside. I’m referring to the cascade images.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. My first thought was that it was the world’s dumbest idea, but my second was why not? “You’re saying, what, that the image-shuffling that occurs while we rotate is tied to the real rotation, each shift being a hundredth of a radian or something?”

“Right,” he nodded, “although I don’t know whether that kind of calibration would be possible.”

I looked at Chileogu. “Doctor?”

The mathematician brought his gaze back from infinity. “I’m not sure what to say. The basic idea is actually not new—Colloton himself showed such a manifestation ought to be present, and several others have suggested the cascade images were it. But I’ve never heard of any actual test being made of the hypothesis; and from what I’ve heard of the images. I suspect there are grave practical problems, besides. The pattern doesn’t change in any mathematically predictable way, so I don’t know how you would keep track of the shifts.”

“I wouldn’t have to,” Lanton said. “I’ve been observing Rik’s cascade images throughout the trip. I remember what the pattern looked like at both the beginning and ending of each rotation.”

I looked at Bradley, suddenly understanding. His eyes met mine and he nodded fractionally.

“The only problem,” Lanton continued, “is that I’m not sure we could set up at either end to do the reverse rotation.”

“Chances are good we can,” I said absently, my eyes still on Bradley. His expression was strangely hard for someone who was supposedly seeing the way out of permanent exile. Alana, if possible, looked even less happy. “All rotations are supposed to begin at zero, and since we always go ‘forward’ we always rotate the same direction.”

I glanced back at Lanton to see his eyes go flat, as if he were watching a private movie. “You’re right; it is the same starting pattern each time. I hadn’t really noticed that before, with changes and all.”

“It should be easy enough to check, Captain,” Pascal spoke up. “We can compute the physical rotations for the first six points we’ll be going through. The real rotations should be the same as on the outbound leg, though, so if Dr Lanton’s right the images will wind up in the same pattern they did before.”

“But how—?” Chileogu broke off suddenly. “Ah. You’ve had a mnemonic treatment?”

Lanton nodded and then looked at me. “I think Mr Pascal’s idea is a good one, Captain, and I don’t see any purpose in hanging around here any longer than necessary. Whenever you want to start back—”

“I have a few questions to ask first,” I interrupted mildly. I glanced again at Bradley, decided to tackle the easier ones first. “Dr Chileogu, what’s the status of your project?”

“The approximations? We’ve just finished programming the first one; it’ll take another hour or so to collect enough data for a plot. I agree with Dr Lanton, though—we can do the calculations between cascade points as easily as we can do them in orbit here.”

“Thank you. Dr Lanton, you mentioned something about changes a minute ago. What exactly did you mean?”

Lanton’s eyes flicked to Bradley for an instant. “Well . . . as I told you several weeks ago, a person’s mind has a certain effect on the cascade image pattern. Some of the medicines Rik’s been taking have slightly altered the—oh, I guess you could call it the texture of the pattern.”

“Altered it how much?”

“In some cases, fairly extensively.” He hesitated, just a bit too long. “But nothing I’ve done is absolutely irreversible. I should be able to recreate the original conditions before each cascade point.”

Deliberately, I leaned back in my chair. “All right. Now let’s hear what the problem is.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.” I waved at Bradley and Alana. “Your patient and my first officer look like they’re about to leave for a funeral. I want to know why.”

Lanton’s cheek twitched. “I ddn’t think this is the time or the place to discuss—”

“The problem, Captain,” Bradley interrupted quietly, “is that the reversing of the treatments may turn out to be permanent.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. When it did I turned my eyes back on Lanton. “Explain.”

The psychiatrist took a deep breath. “The day after the second point I used ultrasound to perform a type of minor neurosurgery called synapse fixing. It applies heat to selected regions of the brain to correct a tendency of the nerves to misfire. The effects can be reversed . . . but the procedure’s been done only rarely, and usually involves unavoidable peripheral damage.”

I felt my gaze hardening into an icy stare. “In other words,” I bit out, “not only will the progress he’s made lately be reversed, but he’ll likely wind up worse off than he started. Is that it?”

Lanton squirmed uncomfortably, avoiding my eyes. “I don’t know that he will. Now that I’ve found a treatment—”

“You’re about to give him a brand-new disorder,” I snapped. “Damn it all, Lanton, you are the most cold-blooded—”

“Captain.”

Bradley’s single word cut off my flow of invective faster than anything but hard vacuum could have. “What?” I said.

“Captain, I understand how you feel.” His voice was quiet but firm; and though the tightness remained in his expression, it had been joined by an odd sort of determination. “But Dr Lanton wasn’t really trying to maneuver you into supporting something unethical. For the record, I’ve already agreed to work with him on this; I’ll put that on tape if you’d like.” He smiled slightly. “And before you bring it up, I am recognized as legally responsible for my actions, so as long as Dr Lanton and I agree on a course of treatment your agreement is not required.”

“That’s not entirely true,” I ground out. “As a ship’s captain in deep space, I have full legal power here. If I say he can’t do something to you, he can’t. Period.”

Bradley’s face never changed. “Perhaps. But unless you can find another way to get us back to Earth, I don’t see that you have any other choice.”

I stared into those eyes for a couple of heartbeats. Then, slowly, my gaze swept the table, touching in turn all the others as they sat watching me, awaiting my decision. The thought of deliberately sending Bradley back to his permanent disorientation—really permanent, this time—left a taste in my mouth that was practically gagging in its intensity. But Bradley was right . . . and at the moment I didn’t have any better ideas.

“Pascal,” I said, “you and Dr Chileogu will first of all get some output on that program of yours. Alana, as soon as they’re finished you’ll take the computer back and calculate the parameters for our first point. You two—” I glared in turn at Bradley and Lanton “—will be ready to test this image theory of yours. You’ll do the observations in your cabin as usual, and tell me afterward whether we duplicated the rotation exactly or came out short or long. Questions? All right; dismissed.”

After all, I thought amid the general scraping of chairs, for the first six points all Bradley will need to do is cut back on medicines. That means twenty-eight days or so before any irreversible surgery is done.

I had just that long to come up with another answer.

We left orbit three hours later, pushing outward on low drive to conserve fuel. That plus the course I’d chosen meant another ten hours until we were in position for the first point, but none of that time was wasted. Pascal and Chileogu were able to program and run two more approximation schemes; the results, unfortunately, were not encouraging. Any two of the three plots had a fair chance of agreeing over ranges of half a degree or so, but there was no consistency at all over the larger angles we would need to use. Chileogu refused to throw in the towel, pointing out that he had another six methods to try and making vague noises about statistical curve-fitting schemes. I promised him all the computer time he needed between point maneuvers, but privately I conceded defeat. Lanton’s method now seemed our only chance . . . if it worked.

I handled the first point myself, double-checking all parameters beforehand and taking special pains to run the gyro needle as close to the proper angle as I could. As with any such hand operation, of course, perfection was not quite possible, and I ran the Dancer something under a hundredth of a degree long. I’m not sure what I was expecting from this first test, but I was more than a little surprised when Lanton accurately reported that we’d slightly overshot the mark.

“It looks like it’ll work,” Alana commented from her cabin when I relayed the news. She didn’t sound too enthusiastic.

“Maybe,” I said, feeling somehow the need to be as skeptical as possible. “We’ll see what happens when he starts taking Bradley off the drugs. I find it hard to believe that the man’s mental state can be played like a yo-yo, and if it can’t be we’ll have to go with whatever statistical magic Chileogu can put together.”

Alana gave a little snort that she’d probably meant to be a laugh. “Hard to know which way to hope, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I hesitated for a second, running the duty arrangements over in my mind. “Look, why don’t you take the next few days off, at least until the next point. Sarojis can take your shift up here.”

“That’s all right,” she sighed. “I—if it’s all the same with you, I’d rather save any offtime until later. Rik will . . . need my help more then.”

“Okay,” I told her. “Just let me know when you want it and the time’s yours.”

We continued on our slow way, and with each cascade point I became more and more convinced that Lanton really would be able to guide us through those last two critical points. His accuracy for the first four maneuvers was a solid hundred percent, and on the fifth maneuver we got to within point zero two percent of the computer’s previous reading by deliberately jockeying the Dancer back and forth until Bradley’s image pattern was exactly as Lanton remembered it. After that even Matope was willing to be cautiously optimistic; and if it hadn’t been for one small cloud hanging over my head I probably would have been as happy as the rest of the passengers had become.

The cloud, of course, being Bradley.

I’d been wrong about how much his improvement had been due to the drugs Lanton had been giving him, and every time I saw him that ill-considered line about playing his mind like a yo-yo came back to haunt me. Slowly, but very steadily, Bradley was regressing back toward his original mental state. His face went first, his expressions beginning to crowd each other again as if he were unable to decide which of several moods should be expressed at any given moment. His eyes took on that shining, nervous look I hated so much: just occasionally at first, but gradually becoming more and more frequent, until it seemed to be almost his norm. And yet, even though he certainly saw what was happening to him, not once did I hear him say anything that could be taken as resentment or complaint. It was as if the chance to save twenty other lives was so important to him that it was worth any sacrifice. I thought occasionally about Alana’s comment that he’d never before had a sense of dignity, and wondered if he would lose it again to his illness. But I didn’t wonder about it all that much; I was too busy worrying about Alana.

I hadn’t expected her to take Bradley’s regression well, of course—to someone with Alana’s wing-mending instincts a backsliding patient would be both insult and injury. What I wasn’t prepared for was her abrupt withdrawal into a shell of silence on the issue which no amount of gentle probing could crack open. I tried to be patient with her, figuring that eventually the need to talk would overcome her reticence; but as the day for what Lanton described as “minor surgery” approached, I finally decided I couldn’t wait any longer. On the day after our sixth cascade point, I quit being subtle and forced the issue.

“Whatever I’m feeling, it isn’t any concern of yours,” she said, her fingers playing across the bridge controls as she prepared to take over from me. Her hands belied the calmness in her voice: I knew her usual check-out routine as well as my own, and she lost the sequence no fewer than three times as I watched.

“I think it is,” I told her. “Aside from questions of friendship, you’re a member of my crew, and anything that might interfere with your efficiency is my concern.”

She snorted. “I’ve been under worse strains than this without falling apart.”

“I know. But you’ve never buried yourself this deeply before, and it worries me.”

“I know. I’m . . . sorry. If I could put it into words—” She shrugged helplessly.

“Are you worried about Bradley?” I prompted. “Don’t forget that, whatever Lanton has to do here, he’ll have all the resources of the Swedish Psychiatric Institute available to undo it.”

“I know. But . . . he’s going to come out of it a different person. Even Lanton has to admit that.”

“Well . . . maybe it’ll wind up being a change for the better.”

It was a stupid remark, and her scornful look didn’t make me feel any better about having made it. “Oh, come on. Have you ever heard of an injury that did any real good? Because that’s what it’s going to be—an injury.”

And suddenly I understood. “You’re afraid you won’t like him afterwards, aren’t you? At least not the way you do now?”

“Why should that be so unreasonable?” she snapped. “I’m a damn fussy person, you know—I don’t like an awful lot of people. I can’t afford to . . . to lose any of them.” She turned her back on me abruptly, and I saw her shoulders shake once.

I waited a decent interval before speaking. “Look, Alana, you’re not in any shape to stay up here alone. Why don’t you go down to your cabin and pull yourself together, and then go and spend some time with Bradley.”

“I’m all right,” she mumbled. “I can take my shift.”

“I know. But . . . at the moment I imagine Rik needs you more than I do. Go on, get below.”

She resisted for a few more minutes, but eventually I bent her sense of duty far enough and she left. For a long time afterwards I just sat and stared at the stars, my thoughts whistling around my head in tight orbit. What would the effect of the new Bradley be on Alana? She’d been right—whatever happened, it wasn’t likely to be an improvement. If her interest was really only in wing-mending, Lanton’s work would merely provide her with a brand-new challenge. But I didn’t think even Alana was able to fool herself like that any more. She cared about him, for sure, and if he changed too much that feeling might well die.

And I wouldn’t lose her when we landed.

I thought about it long and hard, examining it and the rest of our situation from several angles. Finally, I leaned forward and keyed the intercom. Wilkinson was off-duty in his cabin; from the time it took him to answer he must have been asleep as well. “Wilkinson, you got a good look at the damage in Lanton’s neural whatsis machine. How hard would it be to fix?”

“Uh . . . well, that’s hard to say. The thing that spit goop all over the Ming-metal coil was a standard voltage regulator board—we’re bound to have spares aboard But there may be other damage, too. I’d have to run an analyser over it to find out if anything else is dead. Whether we would have replacements is another question.”

“Okay. Starting right now, you’re relieved of all other duty until you’ve got that thing running again. Use anything you need from ship’s spares—” I hesitated—“and you can even pirate from our cargo if necessary.”

“Yes, sir.” He was wide awake now. “I gather there’s a deadline?”

“Lanton’s going to be doing some ultrasound work on Bradley in fifty-eight hours. You need to be done before that. Oh, and you’ll need to work in Lanton’s cabin—I don’t want the machine moved at all.”

“Got it. If you’ll clear it with Lanton, I can be up there in twenty minutes.”

Lanton wasn’t all that enthusiastic about letting Wilkinson set up shop in his cabin, especially when I wouldn’t explain my reasons to him, but eventually he gave in. I alerted Kate Epstein that she would have to do without Wilkinson for a while, and then called Matope to confirm the project’s access to tools and spares.

And then, for the time being, it was all over but the waiting. I resumed my examination of the viewport, wondering if I were being smart or just pipe-dreaming.

Two days later—barely eight hours before Bradley’s operation was due to begin—Wilkinson finally reported the neural tracer was once again operational.

“This better be important,” Lanton fumed as he took his place at the dining room table. “I’m already behind schedule in my equipment set-up as it is.”

I glanced around at the others before replying. Pascal and Chileogu, fresh from their latest attempt at making sense from their assortment of plots, seemed tired and irritated by this interruption. Bradley and Alana, holding hands tightly under the table, looked more resigned than anything else. Everyone seemed a little gaunt, but that was probably my imagination—certainly we weren’t on anything approaching starvation rations yet. “Actually, Doctor,” I said, looking back at Lanton, “you’re not in nearly the hurry you think. There’s not going to be any operation.”

That got everyone’s full attention. “You’ve found another way?” Alana breathed, a hint of life touching her eyes for the first time in days.

“I think so. Dr Chileogu, I need to know first whether a current running through Ming metal would change its effect on the ship’s real rotation.”

He frowned, then shrugged. “Probably. I have no idea how, though.”

A good thing I’d had the gadget fixed, then. “Doesn’t matter. Dr Lanton, can you tell me approximately when in the cascade point your neural tracer burned out?”

“I can tell you exactly. It was just as the images started disappearing, right at the end.”

I nodded; I’d hoped it was either the turning on or off of the field generator that had done it. That would make the logistics a whole lot easier. “Good. Then we’re all set. What we’re going to do, you see, is reenact that particular maneuver.”

“What good will that do?” Lanton asked, his tone more puzzled than belligerent.

“It should get us home.” I waved towards the outer hull. “For the past two days we’ve been moving toward a position where the galactic field and other parameters are almost exactly the same as we had when we went through that point—providing your neural tracer is on and we’re heading back toward Taimyr. In another two days we’ll turn around and get our velocity vector lined up correctly. Then, with your tracer running, we’re going to fire up the generator and rotate the same amount—by gyro reading—as we did then. You—” I leveled a finger at Lanton—“will be on the bridge during that operation, and you will note the exact configuration of your cascade images at that moment. Then, without shutting off the generator, we’ll rotate back to zero; zero as defined by your cascade pattern, since it may be different from gyro zero. At that time, I’ll take the Ming metal from your tracer, walk it to the number one hold, and stuff it into the cargo shield; and we’ll rotate the ship again until we reach your memorized cascade pattern. Since the physical and real rotations are identical in that configuration, that’ll give us the real angle we rotated through the last time—”

“And from that we can figure the angle we’ll need to make going the other direction!” Alana all but shouted.

I nodded. “Once we’ve rotated back to zero to regain our starting point, of course.” I looked around at them again. Lanton and Bradley still seemed confused, though the latter was starting to catch Alana’s enthusiasm. Chileogu was scribbling on a notepad, and Pascal just sat there with his mouth slightly open. Probably astonished that he hadn’t come up with such a crazy idea himself. “That’s all I have to say,” I told them. “If you have any comments later—”

“I have one now, Captain.”

I looked at Bradley in some surprise. “Yes?”

He swallowed visibly. “It seems to me, sir, that what you’re going to need is a set of cascade images that vary a lot, so that the pattern you’re looking for is a distinctive one. I don’t think Dr Lanton’s are suitable for that.”

“I see.” Of course; while Lanton had been studying Bradley’s images, Bradley couldn’t help but see his, as well. “Lanton? How about it?”

The psychiatrist shrugged. “I admit they’re a little bland—haven’t had a very exciting life. But they’ll do.”

“I doubt it.” Bradley looked back at me. “Captain, I’d like to volunteer.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” I told him. “Each rotation will take twice as long as the ones you’ve already been through. And there’ll be two of them back to back; and the field won’t be shut down between them, because I want to know if the images drift while I’m moving the coil around the ship. Multiply by about five what you’ve felt afterwards and you’ll get some idea what it’ll be like.” I shook my head. “I’m grateful for your offer, but I can’t let more people than necessary go through that.”

“I appreciate that. But I’m still going to do it.”

We locked eyes for a long moment . . . and the word dignity flashed through my mind. “In that case, I accept.” I said. “Other questions? Thank you for stopping by.”

They got the message and began standing up . . . all except Alana. Bradley whispered something to her, but she shook her head and whispered back. Reluctantly, he let go of her hand and followed the others out of the room.

“Question?” I asked Alana when we were alone, bracing for an argument over the role I was letting Bradley take.

“You’re right about the extra stress staying in Colloton space that long will create,” she said. “That probably goes double for anyone running around in it. I’d expect a lot more vertigo, for starters, and that could make movement dangerous.”

“Would you rather Bradley had his brain scorched?”

She flinched, but stood her ground. “My objection isn’t with the method—it’s with who’s going to be bouncing off the Dancer’s walls.”

“Oh. Well, before you get the idea you’re being left out of things, let me point out that you’re going to be handling bridge duties for the maneuver.”

“Fine; but since I’m going to be up anyway I want the job of running the Ming metal back and forth instead.”

I shook my head. “No. You’re right about the unknowns involved with this, which is why I’m going to do it.”

“I’m five years younger than you are,” she said, ticking off fingers. “I also have a higher stress index, better balance, and I’m in better physical condition.” She hesitated. “And I’m not haunted by white uniforms in my cascade images,” she added gently.

Coming from anyone else, that last would have been like a knife in the gut. But from Alana, it somehow didn’t even sting. “The assignments are non-negotiable,” I said, getting to my feet. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to catch a little sleep before my next shift.”

She didn’t respond. When I left she was still sitting there, staring through the shiny surface of the table.

“Here we go. Good luck,” were the last words I heard Alana say before the intercom was shut down and I was alone in Lanton’s cabin. Alone, but not for long: a moment later my first doubles appeared. Raising my wrist, I keyed my chrono to stopwatch mode and waited, ears tingling with the faint ululation of the Colloton field generator. The sound, inaudible from the bridge, reminded me of my trainee days, before the Dancer . . . before Lord Hendrik and his fool-headed kid . . . Shaking my head sharply, I focused on the images, waiting for them to begin their one-dimensional allemande.

They did, and I started my timer. With the lines to the bridge dead I was going to have to rely on the image movements to let me know when the first part of the maneuver was over; moving the Ming metal around the ship while we were at the wrong end of our rotation or—worse—while we were still moving would probably end our chances of getting back for good. Mindful of the pranks cascade points could play on a person’s time sense, I’d had Pascal calculate the approximate times each rotation would take. Depending on how accurate they turned out to be, they might simply let me limit how soon I started worrying.

It wasn’t a pleasant wait. On the bridge, I had various duties to perform; here, I didn’t have even that much distraction from the ghosts surrounding me. Sitting next to the humming neural tracer, I watched the images flicker in and out, white uniforms dos-à-dosing with the coveralls and the gaps.

Ghosts. Haunted. I’d never seriously thought of them like that before, but now I found I couldn’t see them in any other way. I imagined I could see knowing smiles on the liner captains’ faces, or feel a coldness from the gaps where I’d died. Pure autosuggestion, of course . . . and yet, it forced me for probably the first time to consider what exactly the images were doing to me.

They were making me chronically discontented with my life.

My first reaction to such an idea was to immediately justify my resentment. I’d been cheated out of the chance to be a success in my field; trapped at the bottom of the heap by idiots who ranked political weaselcraft higher than flying skill. I had a right to feel dumped on.

And yet . . .

My watch clicked at me: the first rotation should be about over. I reset it and waited, watching the images. With agonizing slowness they came to a stop . . . and then started moving again in what I could persuade myself was the opposite direction. I started my watch again and let my eyes defocus a bit. The next time the dance stopped, it would be time to move Lanton’s damn coil to the hold and bring my ship back to normal.

My ship. I listened to the way the words echoed around my brain. My ship. No liner captain owned his own ship. He was an employee, like any other in the company; forever under the basilisk eye of those selfsame idiots who’d fired me once for doing my job. The space junk being sparser and all that aside, would I really have been happier in a job like that? Would I have enjoyed being caught between management on one hand and upper-crusty passengers on the other? Enjoyed, hell—would I have survived it? For the first time in ten years I began to wonder if perhaps Lord Hendrik had known what he was doing when he booted me out of his company.

Deliberately, I searched out the white uniforms far off to my left and watched as they popped in and out of different slots in the long line. Perhaps that was why there were so few of them. I thought suddenly; perhaps, even while I was pretending otherwise, I’d been smart enough to make decisions that had kept me out of the running for that particular treadmill. The picture that created made me smile: my subconscious chasing around with secret memos, hiding basic policy matters from my righteously indignant conscious mind.

The click of my watch made me jump. Taking a deep breath, I picked up a screwdriver from the tool pouch laid out beside the neutral tracer and gave my full attention to the images. Slow . . . slower . . . stopped. I waited a full two minutes to make sure, then flipped off the tracer and got to work.

I’d had plenty of practice in the past in the past two days, but it still took me nearly five minutes to extricate the coil from the maze of equipment surrounding it. That was no particular problem—we’d allowed seven minutes for the disassembly—but I was still starting to sweat as I got to my feet and headed for the door.

And promptly fell on my face.

Alana’s reference to enhanced vertigo apart, I hadn’t expected anything that strong quite as soon. Swallowing hard, I tried to ignore the feeling of lying on a steep hill and crawled toward the nearest wall. Using it as a support, I got to my feet, waited for the cabin to stop spinning, and shuffled over to the door. Fortunately, all the doors between me and One Hold had been locked open, so I didn’t have to worry about getting to the release. Still shuffling, I maneuvered through the opening and started down the corridor, moving as quickly as I could. The trip—fifteen meters of corridor, a circular stairway down, five more meters of corridor, and squeezing through One Hold’s cargo to get to the shield—normally took less than three minutes. We’d allowed ten; but already I could see that was going to be tight. I kept my eyes on the wall beside me and concentrated on moving my feet . . . which was probably why I was nearly to the stairway before I noticed the kaleidoscope dance my cascade images were doing.

While the ship was at rest.

I stopped short, the pattern shifts ceasing as I did so. The thing I had feared most about this whole trick was happening: moving the Ming metal was changing our real angle in Colloton space.

I don’t know how long I leaned there with the sweat trickling down my forehead, but it was probably no more than a minute before I forced myself to get moving again. There were now exactly two responses Alana could make: go on to the endpoint Lanton had just memorized, or try and compensate somehow for the shift I was causing. The former course felt intuitively wrong, but the latter might well be impossible to do—and neither had any particular mathematical backing that Chileogu had been able to find. For me, the worst part of it was the fact that I was now completely out of the decision process. No matter how fast I got the coil locked away, there was no way I was going to make it back up two flights of stairs to the bridge. Like everyone else on board, I was just going to have to trust Alana’s judgment.

I slammed into the edge of the stairway opening, nearly starting my downward trip headfirst before I got a grip on the railing. The coil, jarred from my sweaty hand, went on ahead of me, clanging like a muffled bell as it bounced to the deck below. I followed a good deal more slowly, the writhing images around me adding to my vertigo. By now, the rest of my body was also starting to react to the stress, and I had to stop every few steps as a wave of nausea or fatigue washed over me. It seemed forever before I finally reached the bottom of the stairs. The coil had rolled to the middle of the corridor; retrieving it on hands and knees, I got back to the wall and hauled myself to my feet. I didn’t dare look at my watch.

The cargo hold was the worst part yet. The floor was swaying freely by then, like an ocean vessel in heavy seas, and through the reddish haze surrounding me, the stacks of boxes I staggered between seemed ready to hurl themselves down upon my head. I don’t remember how many times I shied back from what appeared to be a breaking wave of crates, only to slam into the stack behind me. Finally, though, I made it to the open area in front of the shield door. I was halfway across the gap, moving again on hands and knees, when my watch sounded the one-minute warning. With a desperate lunge, I pushed myself up and forward, running full tilt into the Ming-metal wall. More from good luck than anything else, my free hand caught the handle; and as I fell backwards the door swung open. For a moment I hung there, trying to get my trembling muscles to respond. Then, slowly, I got my feet under me and stood up. Reaching through the opening, I let go of the coil and watched it drop into the gap between two boxes. The hold was swaying more and more violently now; timing my move carefully, I shoved on the handle and collapsed to the deck. The door slammed shut with a thunderclap that tried to take the top of my head with it. I hung on just long enough to see that the door was indeed closed, and then gave in to the darkness.

I’m told they found me sleeping with my back against the shield door, making sure it couldn’t accidentally come open.

I was lying on my back when I came to, and the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Kate Epstein’s face. “How do you feel?” she asked.

“Fine,” I told her, frowning as I glanced around. This wasn’t my cabin . . . With a start I recognized the humming in my ear. “What the hell am I doing in Lanton’s cabin?” I growled.

Kate shrugged and reached over my shoulder, shutting off the neural tracer. “We needed Dr Lanton’s neural equipment, and the tracer wasn’t supposed to be moved. A variant of the mountain/Mohammed problem, I guess you could say.”

I grunted. “How’d the point maneuver go? Was Alana able to figure out a correction factor?”

“It went perfectly well,” Alana’s voice came from my right. I turned my head, to find her sitting next to the door. “I think we’re out of the woods now, Pall—that four-point-four physical rotation turned out to be more like nine point one once the coil was out of the way. If Chileogu’s right about reversibility applying here, we should be back in our own universe now. I guess we won’t know for sure until we go through the next point and reach Earth.”

“Is that nine point one with or without a correction factor?” I asked, my stomach tightening in anticipation. We might not be out of the woods quite yet.

“No correction needed,” she said. “The images on the bridge stayed rock-steady the whole time.”

“But . . . I saw them shifting.”

“Yes, you told us that. Our best guess—excuse me; Pascal’s best guess—is that you were getting that because you were moving relative to the field generator, that if you’d made a complete loop around it you would’ve come back to the original cascade pattern again. Chileogu’s trying to prove that mathematically, but I doubt he’ll be able to until he gets to better facilities.”

“Uh-huh.” Something wasn’t quite right here. “You say I told you about the images? When?”

Alana hesitated, looked at Kate. “Actually, Captain,” the doctor said gently, “you’ve been conscious quite a bit during the past four days. The reason you don’t remember any of it is that the connection between your short-term and long-term memories got a little scrambled—probably another effect of your jaunt across all those field lines. It looks like that part’s healed itself, though, so you shouldn’t have any more memory problems.”

“Oh, great. What sort of problems will I have more of?”

“Nothing major. You might have balance difficulties for a while, and you’ll likely have a mild migraine or two within the next couple of weeks. But indications are that all of it is very temporary.”

I looked back at Alana. “Four days. We’ll need to set up our last calibration run soon.”

“All taken care of,” she assured me. “We’re turning around later today to get our velocity vector pointing back toward Taimyr again, and we’ll be able to do the run tomorrow.”

“Who’s going to handle it?”

“Who do you think?” she snorted. “Rik, Lanton, and me, with maybe some help from Pascal.”

I’d known that answer was coming, but it still made my mouth go dry. “No way,” I told her, struggling to sit up. “You aren’t going to go through this hell. I can manage—”

“Ease up, Pall,” Alana interrupted me. “Weren’t you paying attention? The real angle doesn’t drift when the Ming metal is moved, and that means we can shut down the field generator while I’m taking the coil from here to One Hold again.”

I sank back onto the bed, feeling foolish. “Oh. Right.”

Getting to her feet, Alana came over to me and patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said in a kinder tone. “We’ve got things under control. You’ve done the hard part; just relax and let us do the rest.”

“Okay,” I agreed, trying to hide my misgivings.

It was just as well that I did. Thirty-eight hours later Alana used our last gram of fuel in a flawless bit of flying that put us into a deep Earth orbit. The patrol boats that had responded to her emergency signal were waiting there, loaded with the fuel we would need to land.

Six hours after that, we were home.

They checked me into a hospital, just to be on the safe side, and the next four days were filled with a flurry of tests, medical interviews, and bumpy wheelchair rides. Surprisingly—to me, anyway—I was also nailed by two media types who wanted the more traditional type of interview. Apparently, the Dancer’s trip to elsewhere and back was getting a fair amount of publicity. Just how widespread the coverage was, though, I didn’t realize until my last day there, when an official-looking CompNote was delivered to my room.

It was from Lord Hendrik.

I snapped the sealer and unfolded the paper. The first couple of paragraphs—the greetings, congratulations on my safe return, and such—I skipped over quickly, my eyes zeroing in on the business portion of the letter:

As you may or may not know, I have recently come out of semi-retirement to serve on the Board of Directors of TranStar Enterprises, headquartered here in Nairobi. With excellent contacts both in Africa and in the so-called Black Colony chain, our passenger load is expanding rapidly, and we are constantly on the search for experienced and resourceful pilots we can entrust them to. The news reports of your recent close call brought you to my mind again after all these years, and I thought you might be interested in discussing—

A knock on the door interrupted my reading. “Come in,” I called, looking up.

It was Alana. “Hi, Pall, how are you doing?” she asked, walking over to the bed and giving me a brief once-over. In one hand she carried a slender plastic portfolio.

“Bored silly,” I told her. “I think I’m about ready to check out—they’ve finished all the standard tests without finding anything, and I’m tired of lying around while they dream up new ones.”

“What a shame,” she said with mock sorrow. “And after I brought you all this reading material, too.” She hefted the portfolio.

“What is it, your resignation?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light. There was no point making this any more painful for either of us than necessary.

But she just frowned. “Don’t be silly. It’s a whole batch of new contracts I’ve picked up for us in the past few days. Some really good ones, too, from name corporations. I think people are starting to see what a really good carrier we are.”

I snorted. “Aside from the thirty-six or whatever penalty clauses we invoked on this trip?”

“Oh, that’s all in here too. The Swedish Institute’s not even going to put up a fight—they’re paying off everything, including your hospital bills and the patrol’s rescue fee. Probably figured Lanton’s glitch was going to make them look bad enough without them trying to chisel us out of damages, too.” She hesitated, and an odd expression flickered across her face. “Were you really expecting me to jump ship?”

“I was about eighty per cent sure,” I said, fudging my estimate down about nineteen points. “After all, this is where Rik Bradley’s going to be, and you . . . rather like him. Don’t you?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know what I feel for him, to be perfectly honest. I like him, sure—like him a lot. But my life’s out there”—she gestured skyward—“and I don’t think I can give that up for anyone. At least, not for him.”

“You could take a leave of absence,” I told her, feeling like a prize fool but determined to give her every possible option. “Maybe once you spend some real time on a planet, you’d find you like it.”

“And maybe I wouldn’t,” she countered. “And when I decided I’d had enough, where would the Dancer be? Probably nowhere I’d ever be able to get to you.” She looked me straight in the eye and all traces of levity vanished from her voice. “Like I told you once before, Pall, I can’t afford to lose any of my friends.”

I took a deep breath and carefully let it out. “Well. I guess that’s all settled. Good. Now, if you’ll be kind enough to tell the nurse out by the monitor station that I’m signing out, I’ll get dressed and we’ll get back to the ship.”

“Great. It’ll be good to have you back.” Smiling, she disappeared out into the corridor.

Carefully, I got my clothes out of the closet and began putting them on, an odd mixture of victory and defeat settling into my stomach. Alana was staying with the Dancer, which was certainly what I’d wanted . . . and yet, I couldn’t help but feel that in some ways her decision was more a default than a real, active choice. Was she coming back because she wanted to, or merely because we were a safer course than the set of unknowns that Bradley offered? If the latter, it was clear that her old burns weren’t entirely healed; that she still had a way—maybe a long ways—to go. But that was all right. I may not have had the talent she did for healing bruised souls, but if time and distance were what she needed, the Dancer and I could supply her with both.

I was just sealing my boots when Alana returned. “Finished? Good. They’re getting your release ready, so let’s go. Don’t forget your letter,” she added, pointing at Lord Hendrik’s CompNote.

“This? It’s nothing,” I told her, crumpling it up and tossing it toward the waste basket. “Just some junk mail from an old admirer.”

Six months later, on our third point out from Prima, a new image of myself in liner captain’s white appeared in my cascade pattern. I looked at it long and hard . . . and then did something I’d never done before for such an image.

I wished it lots of luck.

BLOOD MUSIC

Greg Bear

A lot has been speculated about the next step in evolution. But there may come a time when even the evolutionary mechanism undersoes a drastic mutation . . .

There is a principle in nature I don’t think anyone has pointed out before. Each hour, a myriad of trillions of little live things—bacteria, microbes, “animalcules”—are born and die, not counting for much except in the bulk of their existence and the accumulation of their tiny effects. They do not perceive deeply. They do not suffer much. A hundred billion, dying, would not begin to have the same importance as a single human death.

Within the ranks of magnitude of all creatures, small as microbes or great as humans, there is an equality of “elan,” just as the branches of a tall tree, gathered together, equal the bulk of the limbs below, and all the limbs equal the bulk of the trunk.

That, at least, is the principle. I believe Vergil Ulam was the first to violate it.

It had been two years since I’d last seen Vergil. My memory of him hardly matched the tan, smiling, well-dressed gentleman standing before me. We had made a lunch appointment over the phone the day before, and now faced each other in the wide double doors of the employees’ cafeteria at the Mount Freedom Medical Center.

“Vergil?” I asked. “My God, Vergil!”

“Good to see you, Edward.” He shook my hand firmly. He had lost ten or twelve kilos and what remained seemed tighter, better proportioned. At university, Vergil had been the pudgy, shock-haired, snaggle-toothed whiz kid who hot-wired doorknobs, gave us punch that turned our piss blue, and never got a date except with Eileen Termagent, who shared many of his physical characteristics.

“You look fantastic,” I said. “Spend a summer in Cabo San Lucas?”

We stood in line at the counter and chose our food. “The tan,” he said, picking out a carton of chocolate milk, “is from spending three months under a sunlamp. My teeth were straightened just after I last saw you. I’ll explain the rest, but we need a place to talk where no one will listen close.”

I steered him to the smoker’s corner, where three diehard puffers were scattered among six tables.

“Listen, I mean it,” I said as we unloaded our trays. “You’ve changed. You’re looking good.”

“I’ve changed more than you know.” His tone was motion-picture ominous, and he delivered the line with a theatrical lift of his brows. “How’s Gail?”

Gail was doing well, I told him, teaching nursery school. We’d married the year before. His gaze shifted down to his food—pineapple slice and cottage cheese, piece of banana cream pie—and he said, his voice almost cracking, “Notice something else?”

I squinted in concentration. “Uh.”

“Look closer.”

“I’m not sure. Well, yes, you’re not wearing glasses. Contacts?”

“No, I don’t need them anymore.”

“And you’re a snappy dresser. Who’s dressing you now? I hope she’s as sexy as she is tasteful.”

“Candice isn’t—wasn’t responsible for the improvement in my clothes,” he said. “I just got a better job, more money to throw around. My taste in clothes is better than my taste in food, as it happens.” He grinned the Vergil self-deprecating grin, but ended it with a peculiar leer. “At any rate, she’s left me, I’ve been fired from my job, I’m living on savings.”

“Hold it,” I said. “That’s a bit crowded. Why not do a linear breakdown? You got a job. Where?”

“Genetron Corp.,” he said. “Sixteen months ago.”

“I haven’t heard of them.”

“You will. They’re putting out common stock in the next month. It’ll shoot off the board. They’ve broken through with MABs. Medical—”

“I know what MABs are,” I interrupted. “At least in theory. Medically Applicable Biochips.”

“They have some that work.”

“What?” It was my turn to lift my brows.

“Microscopic logic circuits. You inject them into the human body, they set up shop where they’re told and troubleshoot. With Dr. Michael Bernard’s approval.”

That was quite impressive. Bernard’s reputation was spotless. Not only was he associated with the genetic engineering biggies, but he had made the news at least once a year in his practice as a neurosurgeon before retiring. Covers on Time, Mega, Rolling Stone.

“That’s suppose to be secret—stock, breakthrough, Bernard, everything.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “But you do whatever the hell you want. I’m through with the bastards.”

I whistled. “Make me rich, huh?”

“If that’s what you want. Or you can spend some time with me before rushing off to your broker.”

“Of course.” He hadn’t touched the cottage cheese or pie. He had, however, eaten the pineapple slice and drunk the chocolate milk. “So tell me more.”

“Well, in med school I was training for lab work. Biochemical research. I’ve always had a bent for computers, too. So I put myself through my last two years—”

“By selling software packages to Westinghouse,” I said.

“It’s good my friends remember. That’s how I got involved with Genetron, just when they were starting out. They had big money backers, all the lab facilities I thought anyone would ever need. They hired me, and I advanced rapidly.

“Four months and I was doing my own work. I made some breakthroughs”—he tossed his hand nonchalantly—“then I went off on tangents they thought were premature. I persisted and they took away my lab, handed it over to a certifiable flatworm. I managed to save part of the experiment before they fired me. But I haven’t exactly been cautious . . . or judicious. So now it’s going on outside the lab.”

I’d always regarded Vergil as ambitious, a trifle cracked, and not terribly sensitive. His relations with authority figures had never been smooth. Science, for him, was like the woman you couldn’t possibly have, who suddenly opens her arms to you, long before you’re ready for mature love—leaving you afraid you’ll forever blow the chance, lose the prize. Apparently, he did. “Outside the lab? I don’t get you.”

“Edward, I want you to examine me. Give me a thorough physical. Maybe a cancer diagnostic. Then I’ll explain more.”

“You want a five-thousand-dollar exam?”

“Whatever you can do. Ultrasound, NMR, thermogram, everything.”

“I don’t know if I can get access to all that equipment. NMR full-scan has only been here a month or two. Hell, you couldn’t pick a more expensive way—”

“Then ultrasound. That’s all you’ll need.”

“Vergil, I’m an obstetrician, not a glamour-boy lab-tech. OB-GYN, butt of all jokes. If you’re turning into a woman, maybe I can help you.”

He leaned forward, almost putting his elbow into the pie, but swinging wide at the last instant by scant millimeters. The old Vergil would have hit it square. “Examine me closely and you’ll . . .” He narrowed his eyes. “Just examine me.”

“So I make an appointment for ultrasound. Who’s going to pay?”

“I’m on Blue Shield.” He smiled and held up a medical credit card. “I messed with the personnel files at Genetron. Anything up to a hundred thousand dollars medical, they’ll never check, never suspect.”

He wanted secrecy, so I made arrangements. I filled out his forms myself. As long as everything was billed properly, most of the examination could take place without official notice. I didn’t charge for my services. After all, Vergil had turned my piss blue. We were friends.

He came in late one night. I wasn’t normally on duty then, but I stayed late, waiting for him on the third floor of what the nurses called the Frankenstein wing. I sat on an orange plastic chair. He arrived, looking olive-colored under the fluorescent lights.

He stripped, and I arranged him on the table. I noticed, first off, that his ankles looked swollen. But they weren’t puffy. I felt them several times. They seemed healthy but looked odd. “Hm,” I said.

I ran the paddles over him, picking up areas difficult for the big unit to hit, and programmed the data into the imaging system. Then I swung the table around and inserted it into the enameled orifice of the ultrasound diagnostic unit, the hum-hole, so-called by the nurses.

I integrated the data from the hum-hole with that from the paddle sweeps and rolled Vergil out, then set up a video frame. The image took a second to integrate, then flowed into a pattern showing Vergil’s skeleton. My jaw fell.

Three seconds of that and it switched to his thoracic organs, then his musculature, and, finally, vascular system and skin.

“How long since the accident?” I asked, trying to take the quiver out of my voice.

“I haven’t been in an accident,” he said. “It was deliberate.”

“Jesus, they beat you to keep secrets?”

“You don’t understand me, Edward. Look at the images again. I’m not damaged.”

“Look, there’s thickening here”—I indicated the ankles—“and your ribs—that crazy zigzag pattern of interlocks. Broken sometime, obviously. And—”

“Look at my spine,” he said. I rotated the image in the video frame.

Buckminster Fuller, I thought. It was fantastic. A cage of triangular projection, all interlocking in ways I couldn’t begin to follow, much less understand. I reached around and tried to feel his spine with my fingers. He lifted his arms and looked off at the ceiling.

“I can’t find it,” I said. “It’s all smooth back there.” I let go of him and looked at his chest, then prodded his ribs. They were sheathed in something tough and flexible. The harder I pressed, the tougher it became. Then I noticed another change.

“Hey,” I said. “You don’t have any nipples.” There were tiny pigment patches, but no nipple formations at all.

“See?” Vergil asked, shrugging on the white robe, “I’m being rebuilt from the inside out.”

In my reconstruction of those hours, I fancy myself saying, “So tell me about it.” Perhaps mercifully, I don’t remember what I actually said.

He explained with his characteristic circumlocutions. Listening was like trying to get to the meat of a newspaper article through a forest of sidebars and graphic embellishments.

I simplify and condense.

Genetron had assigned him to manufacturing prototype biochips, tiny circuits made out of protein molecules. Some were hooked up to silicon chips little more than a micrometer in size, then went through rat arteries to chemically keyed locations, to make connections with the rat tissue and attempt to monitor and even control lab-induced pathologies.

“That was something,” he said.

“We recovered the most complex microchip by sacrificing the rat, then debriefed it—hooked the silicon portion up to an imaging system. The computer gave us bar graphs, then a diagram of the chemical characteristics of about eleven centimeters of blood vessels . . . then put it all together to make a picture. We zoomed down eleven centimeters of rat artery. You never saw so many scientists jumping up and down, hugging each other, drinking buckets of bug juice.” Bug juice was lab ethanol mixed with Dr. Pepper.

Eventually, the silicon elements were eliminated completely in favor of nucleoproteins. He seemed reluctant to explain in detail, but I gathered they found ways to make huge molecules—as large as DNA, and even more complex—into electrochemical computers, using ribosome-like structures as “encoders” and “readers” and RNA as “tape.” Vergil was able to mimic reproductive separation and reassembly in his nucleoproteins, incorporating program changes at key points by switching nucleotide pairs. “Genetron wanted me to switch over to supergene engineering, since that was the coming thing everywhere else. Make all kind of critters, some out of our imagination. But I had different ideas.” He twiddled his finger around his ear and made theremin sounds. “Mad scientist time, right?” He laughed, then sobered. “I injected my best nucleoproteins into bacteria to make duplication and compounding easier. Then I started to leave them inside, so the circuits could interact with the cells. They were heuristically programmed; they taught themselves. The cells fed chemically coded information to the computers, the computers processed it and made decisions, the cells became smart. I mean, smart us planaria, for starters. Imagine an E. coli as smart as a planarian worm!”

I nodded. “I’m imagining.”

“Then I really went off on my own. We had the equipment, the techniques; and I knew the molecular language. I could make really dense, really complicated biochips by compounding the nucleoproteins, making them into little brains. I did some research into how far I could go, theoretically. Sticking with bacteria, I could make a biochip with the computing capacity of a sparrow’s brain. Imagine how jazzed I was! Then I saw a way to increase the complexity a thousandfold, by using something we regarded as a nuisance—quantum chit-chat between the fixed elements of the circuits. Down that small, even the slightest change could bomb a biochip. But I developed a program that actually predicted and took advantage of electron tunneling. Emphasized the heuristic aspects of the computer, used the chit-chat as a method of increasing complexity.”

“You’re losing me,” I said.

“I took advantage of randomness. The circuits could repair themselves, compare memories, and correct faulty elements. I gave them basic instructions: Go forth and multiply. Improve. By God, you should have seen some of the cultures a week later! It was amazing. They were evolving all on their own, like little cities. I destroyed them all, I think one of the petri dishes would have grown legs and walked out of the incubator if I’d kept feeding it.”

“You’re kidding.” I looked at him. “You’re not kidding.”

“Man, they knew what it was like to improve! They knew where they had to go, but they were just so limited, being in bacteria bodies, with so few resources.”

“How smart were they?”

“I couldn’t be sure. They were associating in clusters of a hundred to two hundred cells, each cluster behaving like an autonomous unit. Each cluster might have been as smart as a rhesus monkey. They exchanged information through their pili, passed on bits of memory, and compared notes. Their organization was obviously different from a group of monkeys. Their world was so much simpler, for one thing. With their abilities they were masters of the petri dishes. I put phages in with them; the phages didn’t have a chance. They used every option available to change and grow.”

“How is that possible?”

“What?” He seemed surprised I wasn’t accepting everything a face value.

“Cramming so much into so little. A rhesus monkey is not your simple little calculator, Vergil.”

“I haven’t made myself clear,” he said, obviously irritated. “I was using nucleoprotein computers. They’re like DNA, but all the information can interact. Do you know how many nucleotide pairs there are in the DNA of a single bacteria?”

It had been a long time since my last biochemistry lesson. I shook my head.

“About two million. Add in the modified ribosome structures—fifteen thousand of them, each with a molecular weight of about three million—and consider the combinations and permutations. The RNA is arranged like a continuous loop paper tape, surrounded by ribosomes ticking off instructions and manufacturing protein chains . . .” His eyes were bright and slightly moist. “Besides, I’m not saying every cell was a distinct entity. They cooperated.”

“How many bacteria in the dishes you destroyed?”

“Billions. I don’t know.” He smirked. “You got it, Edward. Whole planetsful of E. coli.”

“But Genetron didn’t fire you then?”

“No. They didn’t know what was going on, for one thing. I kept compounding the molecules, increasing their size complexity. When bacteria were too limited, I took blood from myself, separated out white cells, and injected them with the new biochips. I watched them, put them through mazes and little chemical problems. They were whizzes. Time is a lot faster at that level—so little distance for the messages to cross, and the environment is much simpler. Then I forgot to store a file under my secret code in the lab computers. Some managers found it and guessed what I was up to. Everybody panicked. They thought we’d have every social watchdog in the country on our backs because of what I’d done. They started to destroy my work and wipe my programs. Ordered me to sterilize my white cells. Christ.” He pulled the white robe off and started to get dressed. “I only had a day or two. I separated out the most complex cells—”

“How complex?”

“They were clustering in hundred-cell groups, like the bacteria. Each group as smart as a four-year-old kid, maybe.” He studied my face for a moment. “Still doubting? Want me to run through how many nucleotide pairs there are in a mammalian cell? I tailored my computers to take advantage of the white cells’ capacity. Four billion nucleotide pairs, Edward. And they don’t have a huge body to worry about, taking up most of their thinking time.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m convinced. What did you do?”

“I mixed the cells back into a cylinder of whole blood and injected myself with it.” He buttoned the top of his shirt and smiled thinly at me. “I’d programmed them with every drive I could, talked as high a level as I could using just enzymes and such. After that, they were on their own.”

“You programmed them to go forth and multiply, improve?” I repeated.

“I think they developed some characteristics picked up by the biochips in their E. coli phases. The white cells could talk to each other with extruded memories. They found ways to ingest other types of cells and alter them without killing them.”

“You’re crazy.”

“You can see the screen! Edward, I haven’t been sick since. I used to get colds all the time. I’ve never felt better.”

“They’re inside you, finding things, changing them.”

“And by now, each cluster is as smart as you or I.”

“You’re absolutely nuts.”

He shrugged. “Genetron fired me. They thought I was going to take revenge for what they did to my work. They ordered me out of the labs, and I haven’t had a real chance to sec what’s been going on inside me until now. Three months.”

“So . . .” My mind was racing. “You lost weight because they improved your fat metabolism. Your bones are stronger, your spine has been completely rebuilt—”

“No more backaches even if I sleep on my old mattress.”

“Your heart looks different.”

“I didn’t know about the heart,” he said, examining the frame image more closely. “As for the fat—I was thinking about that. They could increase my brown cells, fix up the metabolism. I haven’t been as hungry lately. I haven’t changed my eating habits that much—I still want the same old junk—but somehow I get around to eating only what I need. I don’t think they know what my brain is yet. Sure, they’ve got all the glandular stuff—but they don’t have the big picture, if you see what I mean. They don’t know I’m in here. But boy, they sure did figure out what my reproductive organs are.”

I glanced at the image and shifted my eyes away.

“Oh, they look pretty normal.” he said, hefting his scrotum obscenely. He snickered. “But how else do you think I’d land a real looker like Candice? She was just after a one-night stand with a techie. I looked okay then, no tan but trim, with good clothes. She’d never screwed a techie before. Joke time, right? But my little geniuses kept us up half the night. I think they made improvement each time. I felt like I had a goddamned fever.”

His smile vanished. “But then one night my skin started to crawl. It really scared me. I though things were getting out of hand. I wondered what they’d do when they crossed the blood-brain barrier and found out about me—about the brain’s real function. So I began a campaign to keep them under control. I figured, the reason they wanted to get into the skin was the simplicity of running circuits across a surface. Much easier than trying to maintain chains of communication in and around muscles, organs, vessels. The skin was much more direct. So I bought a quartz lamp.” He caught my puzzled expression. “In the lab, we’d break down the protein in biochip cells by exposing them to ultraviolet light. I alternated sunlamp with quartz treatments. Keeps them out of my skin and gives me a nice tan.”

“Give you skin cancer, too,” I commented.

“They’ll probably take care of that. Like police.”

“Okay. I’ve examined you, you’ve told me a story I still find hard to believe . . . what do you want me to do?”

“I’m not as nonchalant as I act, Edward. I’m worried. I’d like to find some way to control them before they find out about my brain. I mean, think of it, they’re in the trillions by now, each one smart. They’re cooperating to some extent. I’m probably the smartest thing on the planet, and they haven’t even begun to get their act together. I don’t really want them to take over.” He laughed unpleasantly. “Steal my soul, you know? So think of some treatment to block them. Maybe we can starve the little buggers. Just think on it.” He buttoned his shirt. “Give me a call.” He handed me a slip of paper with his address and phone number. Then he went to the keyboard and erased the image on the frame, dumping the memory of the examination. “Just you,” he said. “Nobody else for now. And please . . . hurry.”

It was three o’clock in the morning when Vergil walked out of the examination room. He’d allowed me to take blood samples, then shaken my hand—his palm was damp, nervous—and cautioned me against ingesting anything from the specimens.

Before I went home, I put the blood through a series of tests. The results were ready the next day.

I picked them up during my lunch break in the afternoon, then destroyed all of the samples. I did it like a robot. It took me five days and nearly sleepless nights to accept what I’d seen. His blood was normal enough, though the machines diagnosed the patient as having an infection. High levels of leukocytes—white blood cells—and histamines. On the fifth day, I believed.

Gail came home before I did, but it was my turn to fix dinner. She slipped one of the school’s disks into the home system and showed me video art her nursery kids had been creating. I watched quietly, ate with her in silence.

I had two dreams, part of my final acceptance. In the first, that evening, I witnessed the destruction of the planet Krypton, Superman’s home world. Billions of superhuman geniuses went screaming off in walls of fire. I related the destruction to my sterilizing the samples of Vergil’s blood.

The second dream was worse. I dreamed that New York City was raping a woman. By the end of the dream, she gave birth to little embryo cities, all wrapped up in translucent sacs, soaked with blood from the difficult labor.

I called him on the morning of the sixth day. He answered on the fourth ring. “I have some results,” I said. “Nothing conclusive. But I want to talk with you. In person.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m staying inside for the time being.” His voice was strained; he sounded tired.

Vergil’s apartment was in a fancy high-rise near the lake shore. I took the elevator up, listening to little advertising jingles and watching dancing holograms display products, empty apartments for rent, the building’s hostess discussing social activities for the week.

Vergil opened the door and motioned me in. He wore a checked robe with long sleeves and carpet slippers. He clutched an unlit pipe in one hand, his fingers twisting it back and forth as he walked away from me and sat down, saying nothing.

“You have an infection,” I said.

“Oh?”

“That’s all the blood analyses tell me. I don’t have access to the electron microscopes.”

“I don’t think it’s really an infection,” he said. “After all, they’re my own cells. Probably something else . . . some sign of their presence, of the change. We can’t expect to understand everything that’s happening.”

I removed my coat. “Listen,” I said, “you really have me worried now.” The expression on his face stopped me: a kind of frantic beatitude. He squinted at the ceiling and pursed his lips.

“Are you stoned?” I asked.

He stood his head, then nodded once, very slowly. “Listening,” he said.

“To what?”

“I don’t know. Not sounds . . . exactly. Like music. The heart, all the blood vessels, friction of blood along the arteries, veins. Activity. Music in the blood.” He looked at me plaintively. “Why aren’t you at work?”

“My day off. Gail’s working.”

“Can you stay?”

I shrugged. “I suppose.” I sounded suspicious. I glanced around the apartment, looking for ashtrays, pack of papers.

“I’m not stoned, Edward,” he said. “I may be wrong, but I think something big is happening. I think they’re finding out who I am.”

I sat down across from Vergil, staring at him intently. He didn’t seem to notice. Some inner process involved him. When I asked for a cup of coffee, he motioned to the kitchen. I boiled a pot of water and took ajar of instant from the cabinet. With cup in hand, I returned to my seat. He twisted his head back and forth, eyes open. “You always knew what you wanted to be, didn’t you?” he asked.

“More or less.”

“A gynecologist. Smart moves. Never false moves. I was different. I had goals, but no direction. Like a map without roads, just places to be. I didn’t give a shit for anything, anyone but myself. Even science. Just a means. I’m surprised I got so far. I even hated my folks.”

He gripped his chair arms.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“They’re talking to me,” he said. He shut his eyes.

For an hour he seemed to be asleep. I checked his pulse, which was strong and steady, felt his forehead—slightly cool—and made myself more coffee. I was looking through a magazine, at a loss what to do, when he opened his eyes again. “Hard to figure exactly what time is like for them,” he said. “It’s taken them maybe three, four days to figure out language, key human concepts. Now they’re on to it. On to me. Right now.”

“How’s that?”

He claimed there were thousands of researchers hooked up to his neurons. He couldn’t give details. “They’re damned efficient, you know,” he said. “They haven’t screwed me up yet.”

“We should get you into the hospital now.”

“What in hell could other doctors do? Did you figure out any way to control them? I mean, they’re my own cells.”

“I’ve been thinking. We could starve them. Find out what metabolic differences—”

“I’m not sure I want to be rid of them,” Vergil said. “They’re not doing any harm.”

“How do you know?”

He shook his head and held up one finger. “Wait. They’re trying to figure out what space is. That’s tough for them: They break distances down into concentrations of chemicals. For them, space is like intensity of taste.”

“Vergil—”

“Listen! Think, Edward!” His tone was excited but even. “Something big is happening inside me. They talk to each other across the fluid, through membranes. They tailor something—viruses?—to carry data stored in nucleic acid chains. I think they’re saying ‘RNA.’ That makes sense. That’s one way I programmed them. But plasmidlike structures, too. Maybe that’s what your machines think is a sign of infection—all their chattering in my blood, packets of data. Tastes of other individuals. Peers. Superiors. Subordinates.”

“Vergil, I still think you should be in a hospital.”

“This is my show, Edward,” he said. “I’m their universe. They’re amazed by the new scale.” He was quiet again for a time. I squatted by his chair and pulled up the sleeve to his robe. His arm was crisscrossed with white lines. I was about to go to the phone when he stood and stretched. “Do you realize,” he said, “how many body cells we kill each time we move?”

“I’m going to call for an ambulance.” I said.

“No, you aren’t.” His tone stopped me. “I told you, I’m not sick, this is my show. Do you know what they’d do to me in a hospital? They’d be like cavemen trying to fix a computer. It would be a farce.”

“Then what the hell I doing here?” I asked, getting angry. “I can’t do anything. I’m one of those cavemen.”

“You’re a friend,” Vergil said, fixing his eyes on me. I had the impression I was being watched by more than just Vergil. “I want you here to keep me company.” He laughed. “But I’m not exactly alone.”

He walked around the apartment for two hours, fingering things, looking out windows, slowly and methodically fixing himself lunch. “You know, they can actually feel their own thoughts,” he said about noon. “I mean the cytoplasm seems to have a will of its own, a kind of subconscious life counter to the rationality they’ve only recently acquired. They hear the chemical ‘noise’ of the molecules fitting and unfitting inside.”

At two o’clock, I called Gail to tell her I would be late. I was almost sick with tension, but I tried to keep my voice level. “Remember Vergil Ulam? I’m talking with him right now.”

“Everything okay?” she asked.

Was it? Decidedly not. “Fine,” I said.

“Culture!” Vergil said, peering around the kitchen wall at me. I said good-bye and hung up the phone. “They’re always swimming in that bath of information. Contributing to it. It’s kind of gestalt thing. The hierarchy is absolute. They send tailored phages after cells that don’t interact properly. Viruses specified to individuals or groups. No escape. A rogue cell gets pierced by the virus, the cell blebs outward, it explodes and dissolves. But it’s not just a dictatorship. I think they effectively have more freedom than in a democracy. I mean, they vary so differently from individual to individual. Does that make sense? They vary different ways than we do.”

“Hold it,” I said, gripping his shoulders. “Vergil, you’re pushing me to the edge. I can’t take this much longer. I don’t understand. I’m not sure I believe—”

“Not even now?”

“Okay, let’s say you’re giving me the right interpretation. Giving it to me straight. Have you bothered to figure out the consequences yet? What all this means, where it might lead?”

He walked into the kitchen and drew a glass of water from the tap, then returned and stood next to me. His expression had changed from childish absorption to sober concern. “I’ve never been very good at that.”

“Are you afraid?”

“I was. Now, I’m not sure.” He fingered the tie of his robe. “Look, I don’t want you to think I went around you, over your head or something. But I met with Michael Bernard yesterday. He put me through his private clinic, took specimens. Told me to quit the lamp treatments. He says it all checks out. And he asked me not to tell anybody.” He paused and his expression became dreamy again. “Cities of cells,” he continued. “Edward, they push tubes through the tissues, spread information—”

“Stop it!” I shouted. “Checks out? What checks out?”

“As Bernard puts it, I have ‘severely enlarged macrophages’ throughout my system. And he concurs on the anatomical changes.”

“What does he plan to do?”

“I don’t know. I think he’ll probably convince Genetron to reopen the lab.”

“Is that what you want?”

“It’s not just having the lab again. I want to show you. Since I stopped the lamp treatments, I’m still changing.” He undid his robe and let it slide to the floor. All over his body, his skin was crisscrossed with white lines. Along his back, the lines were starting to form ridges.

“My God,” I said.

“I’m not going to be much good anywhere else but the lab soon I won’t he able to go out in public. Hospitals wouldn’t know what to do, as I said.”

“You’re . . . you can talk to them, tell them to slow down,” I said, aware how ridiculous that sounded.

“Yes, indeed I can, but they don’t necessarily listen.”

“I thought you were their god or something.”

“The ones hooked up to my neurons aren’t the big wheels. They’re researchers, or at least serve the same function. They know I’m here, what I am, but that doesn’t mean they’ve convinced the upper levels of the hierarchy.”

“They’re disputing?”

“Something like that. It’s not all that bad, anyway. If the lab is reopened, I have a home, a place to work.” He glanced out the window, as if looking for someone. “I don’t have anything left but them. They aren’t afraid, Edward. I’ve never felt so close to anything before.” The beatific smile again. “I’m responsible for them. Mother to them all.”

“You have no way of knowing what they’re going to do.”

He shook his head.

“No, I mean it. You say they’re like a civilization—”

“Like a thousand civilizations.”

“Yes, and civilizations have been known to screw up. Warfare, the environment—”

I was grasping at straws, trying to restrain a growing panic. I wasn’t competent to handle the enormity of what was happening. Neither was Vergil. He was the last person I would have called insightful and wise about large issues.

“But I’m the only one at risk.”

“You don’t know that. Jesus, Vergil, look what they’re doing to you!”

“To me, all to me!” he said. “Nobody else.”

I shook my head and held up my hands in a gesture of defeat. “Okay, so Bernard gets them to reopen the lab, you move in, become a guinea pig. What then?”

“They treat me right. I’m more than just good old Vergil Ulam now. I’m goddamned galaxy, a super-mother.”

“Super-host, you mean.” He conceded the point with a shrug.

I couldn’t take any more. I made my exit with a few flimsy excuses, then sat in the lobby of the apartment building, trying to calm down. Somebody had to talk some sense into him. Who would he listen to? He had gone to Bernard . . .

And it sounded as if Bernard was not only convinced, but very interested. People of Bernard’s stature didn’t coax the Vergil Ulams of the world along unless they felt it was to their advantage.

I had a hunch, and I decided to play it. I went to a pay phone, slipped in my credit card, and called Genetron.

“I’d like you to page Dr. Michael Bernard,” I told the receptionist.

“Who’s calling, please?”

“This is his answering service. We have an emergency call and his beeper doesn’t seem to be working.”

A few anxious minutes later, Bernard came on the line. “Who in the hell is this?” he asked. “I don’t have an answering service.”

“My name is Edward Milligan. I’m a friend of Vergil Ulam’s. I think we have some problems to discuss.”

We made an appointment to talk the next morning.

I went home and tried to think of excuses to keep me off the next day’s hospital shift. I couldn’t concentrate on medicine, couldn’t give my patients anywhere near the attention they deserved.

Guilty, angry, afraid.

That was how Gail found me. I slipped on a mask of calm and we fixed dinner together. After eating, holding onto each other, we watched the city lights come on in late twilight through the bayside window. Winter starlings pecked at the yellow lawn in the last few minutes of light, then flew away with a rising wind which made the windows rattle.

“Somethings’s wrong,” Gail said softly. “Are you going to tell me, or just act like everything’s normal?”

“It’s just me,” I said. “Nervous. Work at the hospital.”

“Oh, lord,” she said, sitting up. “You’re going to divorce me for that Baker woman.” Mrs. Baker weighed three hundred and sixty pounds and hadn’t known she was pregnant until her fifth month.

“No,” I said, listless.

“Rapturous relief,” Gail said, touching my forehead lightly. “You know this kind of introspection drives me crazy.”

“Well, it’s nothing I can talk about yet, so . . .” I patted her hand.

“That’s disgustingly patronizing,” she said, getting up. “I’m going to make some tea. Want some?” Now she was miffed, and I was tense with not telling.

Why not just reveal all? I asked myself. An old friend was turning himself into a galaxy.

I cleared away the table instead. That night, unable to sleep, I looked down on Gail in bed from my sitting position, pillow against the wall, and tried to determine what I knew was real, and what wasn’t.

I’m a doctor, I told myself. A technical, scientific profession. I’m suppose to be immune to things like future shock.

Vergil Ulam was turning into a galaxy.

How would it feel to be topped off with a trillion Chinese? I grinned in the dark and almost cried at the same time. What Vergil had inside him was unimaginably stranger than Chinese. Stranger than anything I—or Vergil—could easily understand. Perhaps ever understand.

But I knew what was real. The bedroom, the city lights taint through gauze curtains. Gail sleeping. Very important. Gail in bed, sleeping.

The dream returned. This time the city came in through the window and attacked Gail. It was a great, spiky lighted-up prowler, and it growled in a language I couldn’t understand, made up of auto horns, crowd noises, construction bedlam. I tried to fight it off, but it got to her—and turned into a drift of stars, sprinkling all over the bed, all over everything. I jerked awake and stayed up until dawn, dressed with Gail, kissed her, savored the reality of her human, unviolated lips.

I went to meet with Bernard. He had been loaned a suite in a big downtown hospital; I rode the elevator to the sixth floor, and saw what fame and fortune could mean.

The suite was tastefully furnished, fine serigraphs on wood-paneled walls, chrome and glass furniture, cream-colored carpet, Chinese brass, and wormwood-grain cabinets and tables.

He offered me a cup of coffee, and I accepted. He took a seat in the breakfast nook, and I sat across from him, cradling my cup in moist palms. He wore a dapper gray suit and had graying hair and a sharp profile. He was in his mid sixties and he looked quite a bit like Leonard Bernstein.

“About our mutual acquaintance,” he said. “Mr. Ulam. Brilliant. And, I won’t hesitate to say, courageous.”

“He’s my friend. I’m worried about him.”

Bernard held up one finger. “Courageous—and a bloody damned fool. What’s happening to him should never have been allowed. He may have done it under duress, but that’s no excuse. Still, what’s done is done. He’s talked to you, I take it.”

I nodded. “He wants to return to Genetron.”

“Of course. That’s where all his equipment is. Where his home probably will be while we sort this out.”

“Sort it out—how? Why?” I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I had a slight headache.

“I can think of a large number of uses for small, superdense computer elements with a biological base. Can’t you? Genetron has already made breakthroughs, but this is something else again.”

“What do you envision?”

Bernard smiled. “I’m not really at liberty to say. It’ll be revolutionary. We’ll have to get him in lab conditions. Animal experiments have to be conducted. We’ll start from scratch, of course. Vergil’s . . . um . . . colonies can’t be transferred. They’re based on his own white blood cells. So we have to develop colonies that won’t trigger immune reactions in other animals.”

“Like an infection?” I asked.

“I suppose there are comparisons. But Vergil is not infected.”

“My test indicate he is.”

“That’s probably the bits of data floating around in his blood, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Listen, I’d like you to come down to the lab after Vergil is settled in. Your expertise might be useful to us.”

Us. He was working with Genetron hand in glove. Could he be objective? “How will you benefit from all this?”

“Edward, I have always been at the forefront of my profession. I see no reason why I shouldn’t be helping here. With my knowledge of brain and nerve functions, and the research I’ve been conducting in neurophysiology—”

“You could help Genetron hold off an investigation by the government,” I said.

“That’s being very blunt. Too blunt, and unfair.”

“Perhaps. Anyway, yes: I’d like to visit the lab when Vergil’s settled in. If I’m still welcome, bluntness and all.”

He looked at me sharply. I wouldn’t be playing on his team; for a moment, his thoughts were almost nakedly apparent.

“Of course,” Bernard said, rising with me. He reached out to shake my hand. His palm was damp. He was as nervous us I was, even if he didn’t look it.

I returned to my apartment and stayed there until noon, reading, trying to sort things out. Reach a decision. What was real, what I needed to protect.

There is only so much change anyone can stand: innovation, yes, but slow application. Don’t force. Everyone has the right to stay the same until they decide otherwise.

The greatest thing in science since . . .

And Bernard would force it. Genetron would force it. I couldn’t handle the thought. “Neo-Luddite,” I said to myself. A filthy accusation.

When I pressed Vergil’s number on the building security panel, Vergil answered almost immediately. “Yeah,” he said. He sounded exhilarated. “Come on up. I’ll be in the bathroom. Door’s unlocked.”

I entered his apartment and walked through the hallway to the bathroom. Vergil lay in the tub, up to his neck in pinkish water. He smiled vaguely and splashed his hands. “Looks like I slit my wrists, doesn’t it?” he said softly. “Don’t worry. Everything’s fine now. Genetron’s going to take me back. Bernard just called.” He pointed to the bathroom phone and intercom.

I sat on the toilet and noticed the sunlamp fixture standing unplugged nest to the linen cabinets. The blubs sat in a row on the edge of the sink counter. “You’re sure that’s what you want,” I said, my shoulders slumping.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “They can take better care of me. I’m getting cleaned up, going over there this evening. Bernard’s picking me up in his limo. Style. From here on in, everything’s style.”

The pinkish color in the water didn’t look like soap. “Is that bubble bath?” I asked. Some of it came to me in a rush then and I felt a little weaker; what had occurred to me was just one more obvious and necessary insanity.

“No,” Vergil said. I knew that already.

“No,” he repeated, “it’s coming from my skin. They’re not telling me everything, but I think they’re sending out scouts. Astronauts.” He looked at me with an expression that didn’t quite equal concern; more like curiosity as to how I’d take it.

The confirmation made my stomach muscles tighten as if waiting for a punch. I had never even considered the possibility until now, perhaps because I had been concentrating on other aspects. “Is this the first time?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He laughed. “I’ve half a mind to let the little buggers down the drain. Let them find out what the world’s really about.”

“They’d go everywhere,” I said.

“Sure enough.”

“How . . . how are you feeling?”

“I’m feeling pretty good now. Must be billions of them.” More splashing with his hands. “What do you think? Should I let the buggers out?”

Quickly, hardly thinking, I knelt down beside the tub. My fingers went for the cord on the sunlamp and I plugged it in. He had hot-wired doorknobs, turned my piss blue, played a thousand dumb practical jokes and never grown up, never grown mature enough to understand that he was sufficiently brilliant to transform the world; he would never learn caution.

He reached for the drain knob. “You know, Edward, I—”

He never finished. I picked up the fixture and dropped it into the tub, jumping back at the flash of steam and sparks. Vergil screamed and thrashed and jerked and then everything was still, except for the low, steady sizzle and the smoke wafting from his hair.

I lifted the toilet lid and vomited. Then I clenched my nose and went into the living room. My legs went out from under me and I sat abruptly on the couch.

After an hour, I searched through Vergil’s kitchen and found bleach, ammonia, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I returned to the bathroom, keeping the center of my gaze away from Vergil. I poured first the booze, then the bleach, then the ammonia into the water. Chlorine started bubbling up and I left, closing the door behind me.

The phone was ringing when I got home. I didn’t answer. It could have been the hospital. It could have been Bernard. Or the police. I could envision having to explain everything to the police. Genetron would stonewall; Bernard would be unavailable.

I was exhausted, all my muscles knotted with tension and whatever name one can give to the feelings one has after—

Committing genocide?

That certainly didn’t seem real. I could not believe I had just murdered a hundred trillion intelligent beings. Snuffed a galaxy. It was laughable. But I didn’t laugh.

It was easy to believe that I had just killed one human being, a friend. The smoke, the melted lamp rods, the drooping electrical outlet and smoking cord.

Vergil.

I had dunked the lamp into the tub with Vergil.

I felt sick. Dreams, cities raping Gail (and what about his girlfriend, Candice?). Letting the water filled with them out. Galaxies sprinkling over us all. What horror. Then again, what potential beauty—a new kind of life, symbiosis and transformation.

Had I been thorough enough to kill them all? I had a moment of panic. Tomorrow, I thought, I will sterilize his apartment. Somehow, I didn’t even think of Bernard.

When Gail came in the door, I was asleep on the couch. I came to, groggy, and she looked down at me.

“You feeling okay?” she asked, perching on the edge of the couch. I nodded.

“What are you planning for dinner?” My mouth didn’t work properly. The words were mushy. She felt my forehead.

“Edward, you have a fever,” she said. “A very high fever.”

I stumbled into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Gail was close behind me. “What is it?” she asked.

There were lines under my collar, around my neck. White lines, like freeways. They had already been in me a long time, days.

“Damp palms,” I said. So obvious.

I think we nearly died. I struggled at first, but in minutes I was too weak to move. Gail was just as sick within an hour.

I lay on the carpet in the living room, drenched in sweat. Gail lay on the couch, her face the color of talcum, eyes closed, like a corpse in an embalming parlor. For a time I thought she was dead. Sick as I was, I raged—hated, felt tremendous guilt at my weakness, my slowness to understand all the possibilities. Then I no longer cared. I was too weak to blink, so I closed my eyes and waited.

There was a rhythm in my arms, my legs. With each pulse of blood, a kind of sound welled up within me, like an orchestra thousands strong, but not playing in unison; playing whole seasons of symphonies at once. Music in the blood. The sound became harsher, but more coordinated, wave-trains finally canceling into silence, then separating into harmonic beats.

The beats seemed to melt into me, into the sound of my own heart.

First, they subdued our immune responses. The war—and it was a war, on a scale never before known on Earth, with trillions of combatants—lasted perhaps two days.

By the time I regained enough strength to get to the kitchen faucet, I could feel them working on my brain, trying to crack the code and find the god within the protoplasm. I drank until I was sick, then drank more moderately and took a glass to Gail. She sipped at it. Her lips were cracked, her eyes bloodshot and ringed with yellowish crumbs. There was some color in her skin. Minutes later, we were eating feebly in the kitchen.

“What in the hell is happening?” was the first thing she asked. I didn’t have the strength to explain. I peeled an orange and shared it with her. “We should call a doctor,” she said. But I knew we wouldn’t. I was already receiving messages; it was becoming apparent that any sensation of freedom we experienced was illusory.

The messages were simple at first. Memories of commands, rather than the commands themselves, manifested themselves in my thoughts. We were not to leave the apartment—a concept which seemed quite abstract to those in control, even if undesirable—and we were not to have contact with others. We would be allowed to eat certain foods and drink tap water for the time being.

With the subsidence of the fevers, the transformations were quick and drastic. Almost simultaneously, Gail and I were immobilized. She was sitting at the table, I was kneeling on floor. I was able barely to see her in the corner of my eye.

Her arm developed pronounced ridges.

They had learned inside Vergil; their tactics within the two of us were very different. I itched all over for about two hours—two hours in hell—before they made the breakthrough and found me. The effort of ages on their timescale paid off and they communicated smoothly and directly with this great, clumsy intelligence who had once controlled their universe.

They were not cruel. When the concept of discomfort and its undesirability was made clear, they worked to alleviate it. They worked too effectively. For another hour, I was in a sea of bliss, out of all contact with them.

With dawn the next day, they gave us freedom to move again; specifically, to go to the bathroom. There were certain waste products they could not deal with. I voided those—my urine was purple—and Gail followed suit. We looked at each other vacantly in the bathroom. Then she managed a slight smile. “Are they talking to you?” she asked. I nodded. “Then I’m not crazy.”

For the next twelve hours, control seemed to loosen on some levels. I suspect there was another kind of war going on in me. Gail was capable of limited motion, but no more.

When full control resumed, we were instructed to hold each other. We did not hesitate.

“Eddie . . .” she whispered. My name was the last sound I ever heard from outside.

Standing, we grew together. In hours, our legs expanded and spread out. Then extensions grew to the windows to take sunlight, and to the kitchen to take water from the sink. Filaments soon reached to all corners of the room, stripping paint and plaster from the walls, fabric and stuffing from the furniture.

By the next dawn, the transformation was complete.

I no longer have any clear view of what we look like. I suspect we resemble cells—large, flat, and filamented cells, draped purposefully across most of the apartment. The great shall mimic the small.

Our intelligence fluctuates daily as we are absorbed into the minds within. Each day, out individuality declines. We are, indeed, great clumsy dinosaurs. Our memories have been taken over by billions of them, and our personalities have been spread through the transformed blood.

Soon there will be no need for centralization.

Already the plumbing has been invaded. People throughout the building are undergoing transformation.

Within the old time frame of weeks, we will reach the lakes, rivers, and seas in force.

I can barely begin to guess the results. Every square inch of the planet will teem with thought. Years from now, perhaps much sooner, they will subdue their own individuality—what there is of it.

New creatures will come, then. The immensity of their capacity for thought will be inconceivable.

All my hatred and fear is gone now.

I leave them—us—with only one question.

How many times has this happened, elsewhere? Travelers never came through space to visit the Earth. They had no need.

They had found universes in grains of sand.

HARDFOUGHT

Greg Bear

Before we tell you about the author, let us first warn you that the story you’re about to read is like nothing else you’ve ever seen in these pages. It’s a difficult story—not one you can skim before going to bed at night. But it is also, we think, a very rewarding story. Give it your time and attention, and we don’t think you’ll regret it.

Greg Bear is an author/illustrator living in San Diego, California.

He has published four novels, the most recent of which is Strength of Stones (Ace). Arkham House will soon publish a collection of his short fiction, The Wind From a Burning Woman.

Humans called it the Medusa. Its long twisted ribbons of gas strayed across fifty parsecs, glowing blue, yellow, and carmine. Its central core was a ghoulish green flecked with watery black. Half a dozen protostars circled the core, and as many more dim conglomerates pooled in dimples in the nebula’s magnetic field. The Medusa was a huge womb of stars—and disputed territory.

Whenever Prufrax looked at it in displays or through the ship’s ports, it seemed malevolent, like a zealous mother displaying an ominous face to protect her children. Prufrax had never had a mother, but she had seen them in some of the fibs.

At five, Prufrax was old enough to know the Mellangee’s mission and her role in it. She had already been through four ship-years of indoctrination. Until her first battle she would be educated in both the Know and the Tell. She would be exercised and trained in the Mocks; in sleep she would dream of penetrating the huge red-and-white Senexi seedships and finding the brood mind. “Zap, Zap,” she went with her lips, silent so the tellman wouldn’t think her thoughts were straying.

The tellman peered at her from his position in the center of the spherical classroom. Her mates stared straight at the center, all focusing somewhere around the tellman’s spiderlike teaching desk, waiting for the trouble, some fidgeting. “How many branch individuals in the Senexi brood mind?” he asked. He looked around the classroom. Peered face by face. Focused on her again. “Pru?”

“Five,” she said. Her arms ached. She had been pumped full of moans the wake before. She was already three meters tall, in elfstate, with her long, thin limbs not nearly adequately fleshed out and her fingers still crisscrossed with the surgery done to adapt them to the gloves.

“What will you find in the brood mind?” the tellman pursued, his impassive face stretched across a hammerhead as wide as his shoulders. Some of the ferns thought tellmen were attractive. Not many—and Pru was not one of them.

“Yoke,” she said.

“What is in the brood-mind yoke?”

“Fibs.”

“More specifically? And it really isn’t all fib, you know.”

“Info. Senexi data.”

“What will you do?”

“Zap,” she said, smiling.

“Why, Pru?”

“Yoke has team gens-memory. Zap yoke, spill the life of the team’s five branch inds.”

“Zap the brood, Pru?”

“No,” she said solemnly. That was a new instruction, only in effect since her class’s inception. “Hold the brood for the supreme overs.” The tellmen did not say what would be done with the Senexi broods. That was not her concern.

“Fine,” said the tellman. “You tell well, for someone who’s always half-journeying.”

She was already five, soon six. Old. Some saw Senexi by the time they were four.

“Zap, Zap,” she went with her lips.

Aryz skidded through the thin layer of liquid ammonia on his broadest pod, considering his new assignment. He knew the Medusa by another name, one that conveyed all the time and effort the Senexi had invested in it. The protostar nebula held few mysteries for him. He and his four branch-mates, who along with the all-important brood mind made up one of the six teams aboard the seedship, had patrolled the nebula for ninety-three orbits, each orbit—including the timeless periods outside status geometry—taking some one hundred and thirty human years. They had woven in and out of the tendrils of gas, charting the infalling masses and exploring the rocky accretion disks of stars entering the main sequence. With each measure and update, the brood minds refined their view of the nebula as it would be a hundred generations hence when the Senexi plan would finally mature.

The Senexi were nearly as old as the galaxy. They had achieved spaceflight during the time of the starglobe when the galaxy had been a sphere. They had not been a quick or brilliant race. Each great achievement had taken thousands of generations, and not just because of their intellectual handicaps. In those times elements heavier than helium had been rare, found only around stars that had greedily absorbed huge amounts of primeval hydrogen, burned fierce and blue, and exploded early, permeating the ill-defined galactic arms with carbon and nitrogen, lithium and oxygen. Elements heavier than iron had been almost nonexistent. The biologies of cold gas-giant worlds had developed with a much smaller palette of chemical combinations in producing the offspring of the primary Population II stars.

Aryz, even with the limited perspective of a branch ind, was aware that, on the whole, the humans opposing the seedship were more adaptable, more vital. But they were not more experienced.

The Senexi with their billions of years had often matched them. And Aryz’s perspective was expanding with each day of his new assignment.

In the early generations of the struggle, Senexi mental stasis and cultural inflexibility had made them avoid contact with the Population I species. They had never begun a program of extermination of the younger, newly life-forming worlds; the task would have been monumental and probably useless. So when spacefaring cultures developed, the Senexi had retreated, falling back into the redoubts of old stars even before engaging with the new kinds. They had retreated for three generations, about thirty thousand human years, raising their broods on cold nestworlds around red dwarfs, conserving, holding back for the inevitable conflicts.

As the Senexi had anticipated, the younger Population I races had found need of even the aging groves of the galaxy’s first stars. They had moved in savagely, voraciously, with all the strength and mutability of organisms evolved from a richer soup of elements. Biology had, in some ways, evolved in its own right and superseded the Senexi.

Aryz raised the upper globe of his body, with its five silicate eyes arranged in a cross along the forward surface. He had memory of those times, and times long before, though his team hadn’t existed then. The brood mind carried memories selected from the total store of nearly twelve billion years’ experience, an awesome amount of knowledge, even to a Senexi. He pushed himself forward with his rear pods.

Through the brood mind Aryz could share the memories of a hundred thousand past generations, yet the brood mind itself was younger than its branch individuals. For a time in their youth, in their liquid-dwelling larval form, the branch inds carried their own sacs of data, each a fragment of the total necessary for complete memory. The branch inds swam through ammonia seas and wafted through thick warm gaseous zones, protoplasmic blobs three to four meters in diameter, developing their personalities under the weight of the past—and not even a complete past. No wonder they were inflexible, Aryz thought. Most branch inds were aware enough to see that—especially when they were allowed to compare histories with the Population I species, as he was doing—but there was nothing to be done. They were content the way they were. To change would be unspeakably repugnant. Extinction was preferable . . . almost.

But now they were pressed hard. The brood mind had begun a number of experiments. Aryz’s team had been selected from the seedship’s contingent to oversee the experiments, and Aryz had been chosen as the chief investigator. Two orbits past, they had captured six human embryos in a breeding device, as well as a highly coveted memory storage center. Most Senexi engagements had been with humans for the past three or four generations. Just as the Senexi dominated Population II species, humans were ascendant among their kind.

Experiments with the human embryos had already been conducted. Some had been allowed to develop normally; others had been tampered with, for reasons Aryz was not aware of. The tamperings had not been very successful.

The newer experiments, Aryz suspected, were going to take a different direction, and the seedship’s actions now focused on him; he believed he would be given complete authority over the human shapes. Most branch inds would have dissipated under such a burden, but not Aryz. He found the human shapes rather interesting, in their own horrible way. They might, after all, be the key to Senexi survival.

The moans were toughening her elfstate. She lay in pain for a wake, not daring to close her eyes; her mind was changing and she feared sleep would be the end of her. Her nightmares were not easily separated from life; some, in fact, were sharper.

Too often in sleep she found herself in a Senexi trap, struggling uselessly, being pulled in deeper, her hatred wasted against such power. . . .

When she came out of the rigor, Prufrax was given leave by the subordinate tellman. She took to the Mellangee’s greenroads, walking stiffly in the shallow gravity. Her hands itched. Her mind seemed almost empty after the turmoil of the past few wakes. She had never felt so calm and clear. She hated the Senexi double now; once for their innate evil, twice for what they had made her overs put her through to be able to fight them. She was growing more mature wake by wake. Fight-budding, the tellman called it, hate coming out like blooms, synthesizing the sunlight of his teaching into pure fight.

The greenroads rose temporarily beyond the labyrinth shields and armor of the ship. Simple transparent plastic-and-steel geodesic surfaces formed a lacework over the gardens, admitting radiation necessary to the vegetation growing along the paths.

Prufrax looked down on the greens to each side of the paths without much comprehension. They were beautiful. Yes, one should say that, think that, but what did it mean? Pleasing? She wasn’t sure what being pleased meant, outside of thinking Zap. She sniffed a flower that, the signs explained, bloomed only in the light of young stars not yet fusing. They were near such a star now, and the greenroads were shiny black and electric green with the blossoms. Lamps had been set out for other plants unsuited to such darkened conditions. Some technic allowed suns to appear in selected plastic panels, when viewed from certain angles. Clever, the technicals.

She much preferred the looks of a technical to a tellman, but she was common in that. She wished a technical were on the greenroads with her. The moans had the effect of making her receptive—what she saw, looking in mirrors, was a certain shine in her eyes—but there was no chance of a breeding liaison. She was quite unreproductive in this moment of elfstate.

She looked up and saw a figure at least a hundred meters away, sitting on an allowed patch near the path. She walked casually, as gracefully as possible with the stiffness. Not a technical, she saw soon, but she was not disappointed. Too calm.

“Over,” he said as she approached.

“Under,” she replied. But not by much—he was probably six or seven ship-years old and not easily classifiable.

“Such a fine elfstate,” he commented. His hair was black. He was shorter than she, but something in his build reminded her of the glovers. He motioned for her to sit, and she did so with a whuff, massaging her knees.

“Moans?” he asked.

“Bad stretch,” she said.

“You’re a glover.” He was looking at the fading scars on her hands.

“Can’t tell what you are,” she said.

“Noncombat,” he said. “Tuner of the mandates.”

She knew very little about the mandates, except that law decreed every ship carry one, and few of the crew were ever allowed to peep. “Noncombat, hm?” She mused. She didn’t despise him for that; one never felt strong negatives for a crew member.

“Been working on ours this wake,” he said. “Too hard, I guess. Told to talk.” Overzealousness in work was considered an erotic trait aboard the Mellangee. Still, she didn’t feel too receptive toward him.

“Glovers walk after a rough growing,” she said.

He nodded. “My name’s Clevo.”

“Prufax.”

“Combat soon?”

“Hoping. Waiting forever.”

“I know. Just been allowed access to the mandate for a half-dozen wakes. All new to me. Very happy.”

“Can you talk about it?” she asked. Information about the ship not accessible in certain rates was excellent barter.

“Not sure,” he said, frowning. “I’ve been told caution.”

“Well, I’m listening.”

He could come from glover stock, she thought, but probably not from technical. He wasn’t very muscular, but he wasn’t as tall as a glover, or as thin, either.

“If you’ll tell me about gloves.”

With a smile she held up her hands and wriggled the short, stumpy fingers. “Sure.”

The brood mind floated weightless in its tank, held in place by buffered carbon rods. Metal was at a premium aboard the Senexi ships, more out of tradition than actual material limitations.

Aryz floated before the brood mind, all these thoughts coursing through his tissues. He had no central nervous system, no truly differentiated organs except those that dealt with the outside world—limbs, eyes, permea. The brood mind, however, was all central nervous system, a thinly buffered sac of viscous fluids about ten meters wide.

“Have you investigated the human memory device yet?” the brood mind asked.

“I have.”

“Is communication with the human shapes possible for us?”

“We have already created interfaces for dealing with their machines. Yes, it seems likely we can communicate.”

“Does it strike you that in our long war with humans, we have made no attempt to communicate before?”

This was a complicated question. It called for several qualities that Aryz, as a branch ind, wasn’t supposed to have. Inquisitiveness, for one. Branch inds did not ask questions. They exhibited initiative only as offshoots of the brood mind.

He found, much to his dismay, that the question had occurred to him. “We have never captured a human memory store before,” he said, by way of incomplete answer. “We could not have communicated without such an extensive source of information.”

“Yet, as you say, even in the past we have been able to use human machines.”

“The problem is vastly more complex.”

The brood mind paused. “Do you think the teams have been prohibited from communicating with humans?”

Aryz felt the closest thing to anguish possible for a branch ind. Was he being considered unworthy? Accused of conduct inappropriate to a branch ind? His loyalty the brood mind was unshakeable. “Yes.”

“And what might our reasons be?”

“Avoidance of pollution.”

“Correct. We can no more communicate with them and remain untainted than we can walk on their worlds, breathe their atmosphere.” Again, silence. Aryz lapsed into a mode of inactivity. When the brood mind readdressed him, he was instantly aware.

“Do you know how you are different?” it asked.

“I am not . . .” Again, hesitation. Lying to the brood mind was impossible for him. He signaled his distress.

“You are useful to the team,” the brood mind said. Aryz calmed instantly. His thoughts became sluggish, receptive. There was a possibility of redemption. But how was he different? “You are to attempt communication with the shapes yourself. You will not engage in any discourse with your fellows while you are so involved.” He was banned. “And after completion of this mission and transfer of certain facts to me, you will dissipate.”

Aryz struggled with the complexity of the orders. “How am I different, worthy of such a commission?”

The surface of the brood mind was as still as an undisturbed pool. The indistinct black smudges that marked its radiating organs circulated slowly within the interior, then returned, one above the other, to focus on him. “You will grow a new branch ind. It will not have your flaws, but, then again, it will not be useful to me should such a situation come a second time. Your dissipation will be a relief, but it will be regretted.”

“How am I different?”

“I think you know already,” the brood mind said. “When the time comes, you will feed the new branch ind all your memories but those of human contact. If you do not survive to that stage of its growth, you will pick your fellow who will perform that function for you.”

A small pinkish spot appeared on the back of Aryz’s globe. He floated forward and placed his largest permeum against the brood mind’s cool surface. The key and command were passed, and his body became capable of reproduction. Then the signal of dismissal was given. He left the chamber.

Flowing through the thin stream of liquid ammonia lining the corridor, he felt ambiguously stimulated. His was a position of privilege and anathema. He had been blessed—and condemned. Had any other branch ind experienced such a thing?

Then he knew the brood mind was correct. He was different from his fellows. None of them would have asked such questions. None of them could have survived the suggestion of communicating with human shapes. If this task hadn’t been given to him, he would have had to dissipate anyway.

The pink spot grew larger, then began to make grayish flakes. It broke through the skin, and casually, almost without thinking, Aryz scraped it off against a bulkhead. It clung, made a radiofrequency emanation something like a sigh, and began absorbing nutrients from the ammonia.

Aryz went to inspect the shapes.

She was intrigued by Clevo, but the kind of interest she felt was new to her. She was not particularly receptive. Rather, she felt a mental gnawing as if she were hungry or had been injected with some kind of brain moans. What Clevo told her about the mandates opened up a topic she had never considered before. How did all things come to be—and how did she figure in them?

The mandates were quite small, Clevo explained, each little more than a cubic meter in volume. Within them was the entire history and culture of the human species, as accurate as possible, culled from all existing sources. The mandate in each ship was updated whenever the ship returned to a contact station.

Clevo had been assigned small tasks—checking data and adding ship records—that had allowed him to sample bits of the mandate. “It’s mandated that we have records,” he explained, “and what we have, you see, is man-data.” He smiled. “That’s a joke,” he said. “Sort of.”

Prufrax nodded solemnly. “So where do we come from?”

“Earth, of course,” Clevo said. “Everyone knows that.”

“I mean, where do we come from—you and I, the crew.”

“Breeding division. Why ask? You know.”

“Yes.” She frowned, concentrating. “I mean, we don’t come from the same place as the Senexi. The same way.”

“No, that’s foolishness.”

She saw that it was foolishness—the Senexi were different all around. What was she struggling to ask? “Is their fib like our own?”

“Fib? History’s not a fib. Not most of it, anyway. Fibs are for unreal. History is over fib.”

She knew, in a vague way, that fibs were unreal. She didn’t like to have their comfort demeaned, though. “Fibs are fun,” she said. “They teach Zap.”

“I suppose,” Clevo said dubiously. “Being noncombat, I don’t see Zap fibs.”

Fibs without Zap were almost unthinkable to her. “Such dull,” she said.

“Well, of course you’d say that. I might find Zap fibs dull—think of that?”

“We’re different,” she said. “Like Senexi are different.”

Clevo’s jaw hung open. “No way. We’re crew. We’re human. Senexi are . . .” He shook his head as if fed bitters.

“No, I mean . . .” She paused, uncertain whether she was entering unallowed territory. “You and I, we’re fed different, given different moans. But in a big way we’re different from Senexi. They aren’t made, nor act, as you and I. But . . .” Again it was difficult to express. She was irritated. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

A tellman walked down the path, not familiar to Prufrax. He held out his hand for Clevo, and Clevo grasped it. “It’s amazing,” the tellman said, “how you two gravitate to each other. Go, elfstate,” he addressed Prufrax. “You’re on the wrong greenroad.”

She never saw the young researcher again. With glover training under way, the itches he aroused soon faded, and Zap resumed its overplace.

The Senexi had ways of knowing humans were near. As information came in about fleets and individual cruisers less than one percent nebula diameter distant, the seedship seemed warmer, less hospitable. Everything was UV with anxiety, and the new branch ind on the wall had to be shielded by a special silicate cup to prevent distortion. The brood mind grew a comiculum automatically, though the toughened outer membrane would be of little help if the seedship was breached.

Aryz had buried his personal confusion under a load of work. He had penetrated the human memory store deeply enough to find instructions on its use. It called itself a mandate and even the simple preliminary directions were difficult for Aryz. It was like swimming in another family’s private sea, though of course infinitely more alien; how could he connect with experiences never had, problems and needs never encountered by his kind?

He observed the new branch ind once or twice each watch period. Never before had he seen an induced replacement. The normal process was for two brood minds to exchange plasm and form new team buds, then to exchange and nurture the buds. The buds were later cast free to swim as individual larvae. While the larvae swam through the liquid and gas atmosphere of a Senexi world often for thousands, even tens of thousands of kilometers, inevitably they returned to gather with the other buds of their team. Replacements were selected from a separately created pool of “generic” buds only if one or more originals had been destroyed during their wanderings. The destruction of a complete team meant reproductive failure.

In a mature team, only when a branch ind was destroyed did the brood mind induce a replacement. In essence, then, Aryz was already considered dead.

Yet he was still useful. That amused him, if the Senexi emotion could be called amusement. Restricting himself from his fellows was difficult, but he filled the time by immersing himself, through the interface, in the mandate.

The humans were also connected with the mandate through their surrogate parent, and in this manner they were quiescent.

He reported infrequently to the brood mind. Until he had established communication, there was little to report.

And throughout his turmoil, like the others he could sense a fight was coming. It could determine the success or failure of all their work in the nebula. In the grand scheme, failure here might not be crucial. But the Senexi had taken the long view too often in the past.

And he knew himself well enough to doubt he would fail.

He could feel an affinity for the humans already, peering at them through the thick glass wall in their isolated chamber, his skin paling at the thought of their heat, their poisonous chemistry. A diseased affinity. He hated himself for it. And reveled in it. It was what made him particularly useful to the team. If he was defective, and this was the only way he could serve, then so be it.

The other branch inds observed his passings from a distance, making no judgments. Aryz was dead, though he worked and moved. His sacrifice had been fearful. Yet he would not be a hero. His kind could never be emulated.

It was a horrible time, a horrible conflict.

She floated in language, learned it in a trice; there were no distractions. She floated in history and picked up as much as she could, for the source seemed inexhaustible. She tried to distinguish between eyes-open—the barren, pale gray-brown chamber with the thick green wall, beyond which floated a murky roundness—and eyes-shut, when she dropped back into language and history with no fixed foundation.

Eyes-open, she saw the Mam with its comforting limbs and its soft voice, its tubes and extrusions of food and its hissings and removal of waste. Through Mam’s wires she learned. Mam also tended another like herself, and another unlike either of them, more like the shape beyond the green wall.

She was very young, and it was all a mystery.

At least she knew her name. And what she was supposed to do. She took small comfort in that.

They fitted Prufrax with her gloves, and she went into the practice chamber, dragged by her gloves almost, for she hadn’t yet knitted the plug-in nerves in her right index digit and her pace control was uncertain.

There, for six wakes straight, she flew with the other glovers back and forth across the dark spaces like elfstate comets. Constellations and nebula aspects flashed at random on the distant walls, and she oriented to them like a night-flying bird. Her glove-mates were Ornin, an especially slender male, and Ban, a red-haired female, and the special-projects sisters Ya, Trice, and Damu, new from the breeding division.

When she let the gloves have their way, she was freer than she had ever felt before. Control was somewhere uncentered, behind her eyes and beyond her fingers, as if she were drawn on a beautiful silver wire where it was best to go. Doing what was best to do. She barely saw the field that flowed from the grip of the thick, solid gloves or felt its caressing, life-sustaining influence. Truly, she hardly saw or felt anything but situations, targets, opportunities, the success or failure of the Zap. Failure was an acute pain. She was never reprimanded for failure; the reprimand was in her blood, and she felt as if she wanted to die. But then the opportunity would improve, the Zap would succeed, and everything around her—stars, Senexi seedship, the Mellangee, everything—seemed part of a beautiful dream all her own.

She was intense in the Mocks.

Their initial practice over, the entry play began.

One by one, the special-projects sisters took their hyperbolic formation. Their glove fields threw out extensions, and they combined force. In they went, the mock Senexi seedship brilliant red and white and UV and radio and hateful before them. Their tails swept through the seedship’s outer shields and swirled like long silky hair laid on water; they absorbed fantastic energies, grew bright like violent little stars against the seedship outline. They were engaged in the drawing of the shields, and sure as topology, the spirals of force had to have a dimple on the opposite side that would iris wide enough to let in glovers. The sisters twisted the forces, and Prufrax could see the dimple stretching out under them—

The exercise ended. The elfstate glovers were cast into sudden dark. Prufrax came out of the mock unprepared, her mind still bent on the Zap. The lack of orientation drove her as mad as a moth suddenly flipped from night to day. She careened until gently mitted and channeled. She flowed down a tube, the field slowly neutralizing, and came to a halt still gloved, her body jerking and tingling.

“What the breed happened?” she screamed, her hands beginning to hurt.

“Energy conserve,” a mechanical voice answered. Behind Prufrax the other elfstate glovers lined up in the catch tube, all but the special-projects sisters. Ya, Trice, and Damu had been taken out of the exercise early and replaced by simulations. There was no way their functions could be mocked. They entered the tube ungloved and helped their comrades adjust to the overness of the real.

As they left the mock chamber, another batch of glovers, even younger and fresher in elfstate, passed them. Ya held her hands up, and they saluted in return. “Breed more every day,” Prufrax grumbled. She worried about having so many crew she’d never be able to conduct a satisfactory Zap herself. Where would the honor of being a glover go if everyone was a glover?

She wriggled into her cramped bunk, feeling exhilarated and irritated. She replayed the mocks and added in the missing Zap, then stared gloomily at her small narrow feet.

Out there the Senexi waited. Perhaps they were in the same state as she—ready to fight, testy at being reined in. She pondered her ignorance, her inability to judge whether such things were even possible among the enemy. She thought of the researcher, Clevo. “Blank,” she murmured. “Blank, blank.” Such thoughts were unnecessary, and humanizing Senexi was unworthy of a glover.

Aryz looked at the instrument, stretched a pod into it, and willed. Vocal human language came out the other end, thin and squeaky in the helium atmosphere. The sound disgusted and thrilled him. He removed the instrument from the gelatinous strands of the engineering wall and pushed it into his interior through a stretched permeum. He took a thick draft of ammonia and slid to the human-shapes chamber again.

He pushed through the narrow port into the observation room. Adjusting his eyes to the heat and bright light beyond the transparent wall, he saw the round mutated shape first—the result of their unsuccessful experiments. He swung his sphere around and looked at the others.

For a time he couldn’t decide which was uglier—the mutated shape or the normals. Then he thought of what it would be like to have humans tamper with Senexi and try to make them into human forms. . . . He looked at the round human and shrank as if from sudden heat. Aryz had had nothing to do with the experiments. For that, at least, he was grateful.

Aryz placed the tip of the vocalizer against a sound-transmitting plate and spoke.

“Zello,” came the sound within the chamber. The mutated shape looked up. It lay on the floor, great bloated stomach backed by four almost useless pods. It usually made high-pitched sounds continuously. Now it stopped and listened, straining on the tube that connected it to the breed-supervising device.

“Hello,” replied the male. It sat on a ledge across the chamber, having unhooked itself.

The machine that served as surrogate parent and instructor stood in one corner, an awkward parody of a human, with limbs too long and head too small. Aryz could see the unwillingness of the designing engineers to examine human anatomy too closely.

“I am called—” Aryz said, his name emerging as a meaningless stretch of white noise. He would have to do better than that. He compressed and adapted the frequencies. “I am called Aryz.”

“Hello,” the young female said.

“What are your names?” He knew them well enough, having listened many times to their conversations.

“Prufrax,” the female said. “I’m a glover.”

The human shapes contained very little genetic memory. As a kind of brood marker, Aryz supposed, they had been equipped with their name, occupation, and the rudiments of environmental knowledge.

“I’m a teacher, Prufrax,” Aryz said.

“I don’t understand you,” the female replied.

“You teach me, I teach you.”

“We have the Mam,” the male said, pointing to the machine. “She teaches us.” The Mam, as they called it, was hooked into the mandate.

“Do you know where you are?” Aryz asked.

“Where we live,” Prufrax said. “Eyes-open.”

“Don’t talk to it,” the male said. “Mam talks to us.” Aryz consulted the mandate for some understanding of the name they had given to the breed-supervising machine. Mam, it explained, was probably a natural expression for womb-carrying parent. Aryz severed the machine’s power.

“Mam is no longer functional,” he said. He would have the engineering wall put together another less identifiable machine to link them to the mandate and to their nutrition. He wanted them to associate comfort and completeness with nothing but himself.

The machine slumped, and the female shape pulled herself free of the hookup. She started to cry, a reaction quite mysterious to Aryz. His link with the mandate had not been intimate enough to answer questions about the wailing and moisture from the eyes. After a time the male and female lay down and became dormant.

The mutated shape made more soft sounds and tried to approach the transparent wall. It held up its thin arms as if beseeching. The others would have nothing to do with it; now it wished to go with him. Perhaps the biologists had partially succeeded in their attempt at transformation; perhaps it was more Senexi than human.

Aryz quickly backed out through the port, into the cool and security of the corridor beyond.

It was an endless orbital dance, this detection and matching of course, moving away and swinging back, deceiving and revealing, between the Mellangee and the Senexi seedship.

Filled with her skill and knowledge, Prufrax waited, feeling like a ripe fruit about to fall from the tree. At this point in their training, just before the application, elfstates were most receptive. She was allowed to take a lover, and they were assigned small separate quarters near the outer greenroads.

The contact was satisfactory, as far as it went. Her mate was an older glover named Kumnax, and as they lay back in the cubicle, soothed by air-dance fibs, he told her stories about past battles, special tactics, how to survive.

“Survive?” she asked, puzzled.

“Of course.” His long brown face was intent on the view of the greenroads through the cubicle’s small window.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Most glovers don’t make it,” he said patiently.

“I will.”

He turned to her. “You’re six,” he said. “You’re very young. I’m ten. I’ve seen. You’re about to be applied for the first time, you’re full of confidence. But most glovers won’t make it. They breed thousands of us. We’re expendable. We’re based on the best glovers of the past but even the best don’t survive.”

“I will,” Prufrax repeated, her jaw set.

“You always say that,” he murmured.

Prufrax stared at him for a moment.

“Last time I knew you,” he said, “you kept saying that. And here you are, fresh again.”

“What last time?”

“Master Kumnax,” a mechanical voice interrupted.

He stood, looking down at her. “We glovers always have big mouths. They don’t like us knowing, but once we know, what can they do about it?”

“You are in violation,” the voice said. “Please report to S.”

“But now, if you last, you’ll know more than the tellman tells.”

“I don’t understand,” Prufrax said slowly, precisely, looking him straight in the eye.

“I’ve paid my debt,” Kumnax said. “We glovers stick. Now I’m going to go get my punishment.” He left the cubicle. Prufrax didn’t see him again before her first application.

The seedship buried itself in a heating protostar, raising shields against the infalling ice and stone. The nebula had congealed out. of a particularly rich cluster of exploded fourth-and fifth-generation stars, thick with planets, the detritus of which now fell on Aryz’s ship like hail.

Aryz had never been so isolated. No other branch ind addressed him; he never even saw them now. He made his reports to the brood mind, but even there the reception was warmer and warmer, until he could barely endure to communicate. Consequently—and he realized this was part of the plan—he came closer to his charges, the human shapes.

The brood mind was interested in one question: how successfully could they be planted aboard a human ship? Would they be accepted until they could carry out their sabotage, or would they be detected? Already Senexi instructions were being coded into their teachings.

“I think they will be accepted in the confusion of an engagement,” Aryz answered. He had long since guessed the general outlines of the brood mind’s plans. Communication with the human shapes was for one purpose only, to use them as decoys, insurgents. They were weapons. Knowledge of human activity and behavior was not an end in itself; seeing what was happening to him, Aryz fully understood why the brood mind wanted such study to proceed no further.

He would lose them soon, he thought, and his work would be over. He would be much too human-tainted. He would end, and his replacement would start a new existence, very little different from Aryz’s—but, he reasoned, adjusted. The replacement would not have Aryz’s peculiarity.

He approached his last meeting with the brood mind, preparing himself for his final work, for the ending. In the cold liquid-filled chamber, the great red-and-white sac waited, the center of his team, his existence. He adored it. There was no way he could criticize its action.

Yet—

“We are being sought,” the brood mind radiated. “Are the shapes ready?”

“Yes,” Aryz said. “The new teaching is firm. They believe they are fully human.” And, except for the new teaching, they were. “They defy sometimes.” He said nothing about the mutated shape. It would not be used. If they won this encounter, it would probably be placed with Aryz’s body in a fusion torch for complete purging.

“Then prepare them,” the brood mind said. “They will be delivered to the vector for positioning and transfer.”

Darkness and waiting. Prufrax nested in her delivery tube like a freshly chambered round. Through her gloves she caught distant communications murmurs that resembled voices down hollow pipes. The Mellangee was coming to full readiness.

Huge as her ship was, Prufrax knew that it would be dwarfed by the seedship. She could recall some hazy details about the seedship’s structure, but most of that information was stored securely away from interference by her conscious mind.

More information would be fed to her just before the launch, but she knew the general procedure. The seedship was deep in a protostar, hiding behind the distortion of geometry and the complete hash of electromagnetic energy. The Mellangee would approach, collide if need be. Penetrate. Release. Find. Zap. Her fingers ached. Sometime before the launch she would also be fed her final moans—the tempers—and she would be primed to leave elfstate. She would be a mature glover. She would be a woman. If she returned will return.

Her fingers ached worse.

The tempers came, moans tiding in, then the battle data. As it passed into her subconscious, she caught a flash of—

Rocks and ice, a thick cloud of dust and gas glowing red but seeming dark, no stars, no constellation guides this time. The beacon came on. That would be her only way to orient once the gloves stopped inertial and locked onto the target.

The seedship
was like
a shadow within a shadow
twenty-two kilometers across, yet
carrying
only six
teams

LAUNCH she flies!

Data: The Mellangee has buried herself in the seedship, plowed deep into the interior like a carnivore’s muzzle looking for vitals Instruction a swarm of seeks is dashing through the seedship, looking for the brood minds, for the brood chambers, for branch inds. The glovers will follow.

Prufrax sees herself clearly now. She is the great avenging comet, bringer of omen and doom, like a knife moving through the glass and ice and thin, cold helium as if they weren’t there, the chambered round fired and tearing at hundreds of kilometers an hour through the Senexi vessel, following the seeks.

The seedship cannot withdraw into higher geometries now. It is pinned by the Mellangee. It is hers.

Information floods her, pleases her immensely. She swoops down orange-and-gray corridors, buffeting against the walls like a ricocheting bullet. Almost immediately she comes across a branch ind, sliding through the ammonia film against the out-rushing wind, trying to reach an armored cubicle. Her first Zap is too easy, not satisfying, nothing like what she thought. In her wake the branch ind becomes scattered globules of plasma. She plunges deeper.

Aryz delivers his human charges to the vectors that will launch them. They are equipped with simulations of the human weapons, their hands encased in the hideous gray gloves.

The seedship is in deadly peril; the battle has almost been lost at one stroke. The seedship cannot remain whole. It must self-destruct, taking the human ship with it, leaving only a fragment with as many teams as can escape.

The vectors launch the human shapes. Aryz tries to determine which part of the ship will be elected to survive; he must not be there. His job is over, and he must die.

The glovers fan out through the seedship’s central hollow, demolishing the great cold drive engines, bypassing the shielded fusion flare and the reprocessing plant, destroying machinery built before their Earth was formed.

The special-projects sisters take the lead. Suddenly they are confused. They have found a brood mind, but it is not heavily protected. They surround it, prepare for the Zap—

It is sacrificing itself, drawing them into an easy kill and away from another portion of the seedship. Power is concentrating elsewhere. Sensing that, they kill quickly and move on.

Aryz’s brood mind prepares for escape. It begins to wrap itself in flux bind as it moves through the ship toward the frozen fragment. Already three of its five branch inds are dead; it can feel other brood minds dying. Aryz’s bud replacement has been killed as well.

Following Aryz’s training, the human shapes rush into corridors away from the main action. The special-projects sisters encounter the decoy male, allow it to fly with them . . . until it aims its weapons. One Zap almost takes out Trice. The others fire on the shape immediately. He goes to his death weeping, confused from the very moment of his launch.

The fragment in which the brood mind will take refuge encompasses the chamber where the humans had been nurtured, where the mandate is still stored. All the other brood minds are dead, Aryz realizes; the humans have swept down on them so quickly. What shall he do?

Somewhere, far off, he feels the distressed pulse of another branch ind dying. He probes the remains of the seedship. He is the last. He cannot dissipate now; he must ensure the brood mind’s survival.

Prufrax, darting through the crumbling seedship, searching for more opportunities, comes across an injured glover. She calls for a mediseek and pushes on.

The brood mind settles into the fragment. Its support system is damaged; it is entering the time-isolated state, the flux bind, more rapidly than it should. The seals of foamed electric ice cannot quite close off the fragment before Ya, Trice, and Damu slip in. They frantically call for bind cutters and preservers; they have instructions to capture the last brood mind, if possible.

But a trap falls upon Ya, and snarling fields tear her from her gloves. She is flung down a dark disintegrating shaft, red cracks opening all around as the seedship’s integrity fails. She trails silver dust and freezes, hits a barricade, shatters.

The ice seals continue to close. Trice is caught between them and pushes out frantically, blundering into the region of the intensifying flux bind. Her gloves break into hard bits, and she is melded into an ice wall-like an insect trapped on the surface of a winter lake.

Damu sees that the brood mind is entering the final phase of flux bind. After that they will not be able to touch it. She begins a desperate Zap.

and is too late.

Aryz directs the subsidiary energy of the flux against her. Her Zap deflects from the bind region, she is caught in an interference pattern and vibrates until her tiniest particles stop their knotted whirlpool spins and she simply becomes space and searing light.

The brood mind, however, has been damaged. It is losing information from one portion of its anatomy. Desperate for storage, it looks for places to hold the information before the flux bind’s last wave.

Aryz directs an interface onto the brood mind’s surface. The silvery pools of time binding flicker around them both. The brood mind’s damaged sections transfer their data into the last available storage device—the human mandate.

Now it contains both human arid Senexi information.

The silvery pools unite, and Aryz backs away. No longer can he sense the brood mind. It is out of reach but not yet safe. He must propel the fragment from the remains of the seedship. Then he must wrap the fragment in its own flux bind, cocoon it in physics to protect it from the last ravages of the humans.

Aryz carefully navigates his way through the few remaining corridors. The helium atmosphere has almost completely dissipated, even there. He strains to remember all the procedures. Soon the seedship will explode, destroying the human ship. By then they must be gone.

Angry red, Prufrax follows his barely sensed form, watching him behind barricades of ice, approaching the moment of a most satisfying Zap. She gives her gloves their way and finds a shape behind her, wearing gloves that are not gloves, not like her own, but capable of grasping her in tensed fields, blocking the Zap, dragging them together. The fragment separates, heat pours in from the protostar cloud. They are swirled in their vortex of power, twin locked comets—one red, one sullen gray.

“Who are you?” Prufrax screams as they close in on each other in the fields. Their environments meld. They grapple. In the confusion, the darkening, they are drawn out of the cloud with the fragment, and she sees the other’s face.

Her own.

The seedship self-destructs. The fragment is propelled from the protostar, above the plane of what will become planets in their orbits, away from the crippled and dying Mellangee.

Desperate, Prufrax uses all her strength to drill into the fragment. Helium blows past them, and bits of dead branch inds.

Aryz catches the pair immediately in the shapes chamber, rearranging the fragment’s structure to enclose them with the mutant shape and mandate. For the moment he has time enough to concentrate on them. They are dangerous. They are almost equal to each other, but his shape is weakening faster than the true glover. They float, bouncing from wall to wall in the chamber, forcing the mutant to crawl into a corner and howl with fear.

There may be value in saving the one and capturing the other. Involved as they are, the two can be carefully dissected from their fields and induced into a crude kind of sleep before the glover has a chance to free her weapons. He can dispose of the gloves—fake and real—and hook them both to the Mam, reattach the mutant shape as well. Perhaps something can be learned from the failure of the experiment.

The dissection and capture occur faster than the planning. His movement slows under the spreading flux bind. His last action, after attaching the humans to the Mam, is to make sure the brood mind’s flux bind is properly nested within that of the ship.

The fragment drops into simpler geometries.

It is as if they never existed.

The battle was over. There were no victors. Aryz became aware of the passage of time, shook away the sluggishness, and crawled through painfully dry corridors to set the environmental equipment going again. Throughout the fragment, machines struggled back to activity.

How many generations? The constellations were unrecognizable. He made star traces and found familiar spectra and types, but advanced in age. There had been a malfunction in the overall flux bind. He couldn’t find the nebula where the battle had occurred. In its place were comfortably middle-aged stars surrounded by young planets.

Aryz came down from the makeshift observatory. He slid through the fragment, established the limits of his new home, and found the solid mirror surface of the brood mind’s cocoon. It was still locked in flux bind, and he knew of no way to free it. In time the bind would probably wear off—but that might require life spans. The seedship was gone. They had lost the brood chamber, and with it the stock.

He was the last branch ind of his team. Not that it mattered now; there was nothing he could initiate without a brood mind. If the flux bind was permanent, then he might as well be dead.

He closed his thoughts around him and was almost completely submerged when he sensed an alarm from the shapes chamber. The interface with the mandate had turned itself off; the new version of the Mam was malfunctioning. He tried to repair the equipment, but without the engineer’s wall he was almost helpless. The best he could do was rig a temporary nutrition supply through the old human-form Mam. When he was done, he looked at the captive and the two shapes, then at the legless, armless Mam that served as their link to the interface and life itself.

She had spent her whole life in a room barely eight by ten meters, and not much taller than her own height. With her had been Grayd and the silent round creature whose name—if it had any—they had never learned. For a time there had been Mam, then another kind of Mam not nearly as satisfactory. She was hardly aware that her entire existence had been miserable, cramped, in one way or another incomplete.

Separated from them by a transparent partition, another round shape had periodically made itself known by voice or gesture.

Grayd had kept her sane. They had engaged in conspiracy. Removing themselves from the interface—what she called “eyes-shut”—they had held onto each other, tried to make sense out of what they knew instinctively, what was fed them through the interface, and what the being beyond the partition told them.

First they knew their names, and they knew that they were glovers. They knew that glovers were fighters. When Aryz passed instruction through the interface on how to fight, they had accepted it eagerly but uneasily. It didn’t seem to jibe with instructions locked deep within their instincts.

Five years under such conditions had made her introspective. She expected nothing, sought little beyond experience in the eyes-shut. Eyes-open with Grayd seemed scarcely more than a dream. They usually managed to ignore the peculiar round creature in the chamber with them; it spent nearly all its time hooked to the mandate and the Mam.

Of one thing only was she completely sure. Her name was Prufrax. She said it in eyes-open and eyes-shut, her only certainty.

Not long before the battle, she had been in a condition resembling dreamless sleep, like a robot being given instructions. The part of Prufrax that had taken on personality during eyes-shut and eyes-open for five years had been superseded by the fight instructions Aryz had programmed. She had flown as glovers must fly (though the gloves didn’t seem quite right). She had fought, grappling (she thought) with herself, but who could be certain of anything?

She had long since decided that reality was not to be sought too avidly. After the battle she fell back into the mandate—into eyes-shut—all too willingly.

But a change had come to eyes-shut, too. Before the battle, the information had been selected. Now she could wander through the mandate at will. She seemed to smell the new information, completely unfamiliar, like a whiff of ocean. She hardly knew where to begin. She stumbled across:

—that all vessels carry one, no matter what their size or class, just as every individual carries the map of a species. The mandate shall contain all the information of our kind, including accurate and uncensored history, for if we have learned anything, it is that censored and untrue accounts distort the eyes of the leaders. Unders are told lies. Leaders must seek and be provided with accounts as accurate as possible, or we will be weakened and fall—

What wonderful dreams the leaders must have had. And they possessed some intrinsic gift called truth, through the use of the mandate. Prufrax could hardly believe that. As she made her tentative explorations through the new fields of eyes-shut, she began to link the word mandate with what she experienced. That was where she was.

And she was alone. Once, she had explored with Grayd. Now there was no sign of Grayd.

She learned quickly. Soon she walked along a beach on Earth, then a beach on a world called Myriadne, and other beaches, fading in and out. By running through the entries rapidly, she came up with a blurred eidos and so learned what a beach was in the abstract. It was a boundary between one kind of eyes-shut and another, between water and land, neither of which had any corollary in eyes-open.

Some beaches had sand. Some had clouds—the eidos of clouds was quite attractive. And one—
had herself running scared, screaming.

She called out, but the figure vanished. Prufrax stood on a beach under a greenish-yellow star, on a world called Kyrene, feeling lonelier than ever.

She explored further, hoping to find Grayd, if not the figure that looked like herself. Grayd wouldn’t flee from her. Grayd would—

The round thing confronted her, its helpless limbs twitching. Now it was her turn to run, terrified. Never before had she met the round creature in eyes-shut. It was mobile; it had a purpose. Over land, clouds, trees, rocks, wind, air, equations, and an edge of physics she fled. The farther she went, the more distant from the round one with hands and small head, the less afraid she was.

She never found Grayd.

The memory of the battle was fresh and painful. She remembered the ache of her hands, clumsily removed from the gloves. Her environment had collapsed and been replaced by something indistinct. Prufrax had fallen into a deep slumber and had dreamed.

The dreams were totally unfamiliar to her. If there was a left-turning in her arc of sleep, she dreamed of philosophies and languages and other things she couldn’t relate to. A right-turning led to histories and sciences so incomprehensible as to be nightmares.

It was a most unpleasant sleep, and she was not at all sorry to find she wasn’t really asleep.

The crucial moment came when she discovered how to slow her turnings and the changes of dream subject. She entered a pleasant place of which she had no knowledge but which did not seem threatening. There was a vast expanse of water, but it didn’t terrify her. She couldn’t even identify it as water until she scooped up a handful. Beyond the water was a floor of shifting particles. Above both was an open expanse, not black but obviously space, drawing her eyes into intense pale blue-green. And there was that figure she had encountered in the seedship. Herself. The figure pursued. She fled.

Right over the boundary into Senexi information. She knew then that what she was seeing couldn’t possibly come from within herself. She was receiving data from another source. Perhaps she had been taken captive. It was possible she was now being forcibly debriefed. The tellman had discussed such possibilities, but none of the glovers had been taught how to defend themselves in specific situations. Instead it had been stated—in terms that brooked no second thought—that self-destruction was the only answer. So she tried to kill herself.

She sat in the freezing cold of a red-and-white room, her feet meeting but not touching a fluid covering on the floor. The information didn’t fit her senses—it seemed blurred, inappropriate. Unlike the other data, this didn’t allow participation or motion. Everything was locked solid.

She couldn’t find an effective means of killing herself. She resolved to close her eyes and simply will herself into dissolution. But closing her eyes only moved her into a deeper or shallower level of deception—other categories, subjects, visions. She couldn’t sleep, wasn’t tired, couldn’t die.

Like a leaf on a stream, she drifted. Her thoughts untangled, and she imagined herself floating on the water called ocean. She kept her eyes open. It was quite by accident that she encountered:

Instruction. Welcome to the introductory use of the mandate. As a noncombat processor, your duties are to maintain the mandate, provide essential information for your overs, and, if necessary, protect or destroy the mandate. The mandate is your immediate over. If it requires maintenance, you will oblige. Once linked with the mandate, as you are now, you may explore any aspect of the information by requesting delivery. To request delivery, indicate the core of your subject—

Prufrax! She shouted silently. What is Prufrax?

A voice with different tone immediately took over.

Ah, now that’s quite a story. I was her biographer, the organizer of her life tapes (ref. GEORGE macknax), and knew her well in the last years of her life. She was born in the Ferment 26468. Here are selected life tapes. Choose emphasis. Analyses follow.

—Hey! Who are you? There’s someone here with me. . . .

—Shh! Listen. Look at her. Who is she?

They looked, listened to the information.

—Why, she’s me . . . sort of.

—She’s us.

She stood two and a half meters tall. Her hair was black and thick, though cut short; her limbs well muscled though drawn out by the training and hormonal treatments. She was seventeen years old, one of the few birds born in the solar system, and for the time being she had a chip on her shoulder. Everywhere she went, the birds asked about her mother, Jay-ax. “You better than her?”

Of course not! Who could be? But she was good; the instructors said so. She was just about through training, and whether she graduated to hawk or remained bird she would do her job well. Asking Prufrax about her mother was likely to make her set her mouth tight and glare.

On Mercior, the Grounds took up four thousand hectares and had its own port. The Grounds was divided into Land, Space, and Thought, and training in each area was mandatory for fledges, those birds embarking on hawk training. Prufrax was fledge three. She had passed Land—though she loathed downbound fighting—and was two years into Space. The tough part, everyone said, was not passing Space, but lasting through four years of Thought after the action in nearorbit and planetary.

Since she had been a little girl, no more than five—

—Five! Five what?

and had seen her mother’s ships and fightsuits and fibs, she had known she would never be happy until she had ventured far out and put a seedship in her sights, had convinced a Senexi of the overness of end—

—The Zap! She’s talking the Zap!

—What’s that?

—You’re me, you should know.

—I’m not you, and we’re not her.

The Zap, said the mandate, and the data shifted.

“Tomorrow you receive your first implants. These will allow you to coordinate with the zero-angle phase engines and find your targets much more rapidly than you ever could with simple biologic. Are there any questions?”

“Yes, sir.” Prufrax stood at the top of the spherical classroom, causing the hawk instructor to swivel his platform. “I’m having problems with the zero-angle phase maths. Reduction of the momenta of the real.”

Other fledge threes piped up that they, too, had had trouble with those maths. The hawk instructor sighed. “We don’t want to install cheaters in all of you. It’s bad enough needing implants to supplement biologic. Individual learning is much more desirable. Do you request cheaters?” That was a challenge. They all responded negatively, but Prufrax had a secret smile. She knew the subject. She just took delight in having the maths explained again. She could reinforce an already thorough understanding. Others not so well versed would benefit. She wasn’t wasting time. She was in the pleasure of her weapon—the weapon she would be using against the Senexi.

“Zero-angle phase is the temporary reduction of the momenta of the real.” Equations and plexes appeared before each student as the instructor went on. “Nested unreals can conflict if a barrier is placed between the participator princip and the assumption of the real. The effectiveness of the participator can be determined by a convenience model we call the angle of phase. Zero-angle phase is achieved by an opaque probability field according to modified Fourier of the separation of real waves. This can also be caused by the reflection of the beam—an effective counter to zero-angle phase, since the beam is always compoundable and the compound is always time-reversed. Here are the true gedanks—”

—Zero-angle phase. She’s learning the Zap.

—She hates them a lot, doesn’t she?

—The Senexi? They’re Senexi.

—I think . . . eyes-open is the world of the Senexi. What does that mean?

—That we’re prisoners. You were caught before me.

—Oh.

The news came as she was in recovery from the implant. Seedships had violated human space again, dropping cuckoos on thirty-five worlds. The worlds had been young colonies, and the cuckoos had wiped out all life, then tried to reseed with Senexi forms. The overs had reacted by sterilizing the planets’ surfaces. No victory, loss to both sides. It was as if the Senexi were so malevolent they didn’t care about success, only about destruction.

She hated them. She could imagine nothing worse.

Prufrax was twenty-three. In a year she would be qualified to hawk on a cruiser/raider. She would demonstrate her hatred.

Aryz felt himself slipping into endthought, the mind set that always preceded a branch ind’s self-destruction. What was there for him to do? The fragment had survived, but at what cost, to what purpose? Nothing had been accomplished. The nebula had been lost, or he supposed it had. He would likely never know the actual outcome.

He felt a vague irritation at the lack of a spectrum of responses. Without a purpose, a branch ind was nothing more than excess plasm.

He looked in on the captive and the shapes, all hooked to the mandate, and wondered what he would do with them. How would humans react to the situation he was in? More vigorously, probably. They would fight on. They always had. Even without leaders, with no discernible purpose, even in defeat. What gave them such stamina? Were they superior, more deserving? If they were better, then was it right for the Senexi to oppose their triumph?

Aryz drew himself tall and rigid with confusion. He had studied them too long. They had truly infected him. But here at least was a hint of purpose. A question needed to be answered.

He made preparations. There were signs the brood mind’s flux bind was not permanent, was in fact unwinding quite rapidly. When it emerged, Aryz would present it with a judgment, an answer.

He realized, none too clearly, that by Senexi standards he was now a raving lunatic.

He would hook himself into the mandate, improve the somewhat isolating interface he had used previously to search for selected answers. He, the captive, and the shapes would be immersed in human history together. They would be like young suckling on a Population I mother-animal—just the opposite of the Senexi process, where young fed nourishment and information into the brood mind.

The mandate would nourish, or poison. Or both.

—Did she love?

—What—you mean, did she receive?

—No, did she—we—I—give?

—I don’t know what you mean.

—I wonder if she would know what I mean. . . .

Love, said the mandate, and the data proceeded.

Prufrax was twenty-nine. She had been assigned to a cruiser in a new program where superior but untested fighters were put into thick action with no preliminary.

The Cruiser was a million-ton raider, with a hawk contingent of fifty-three and eighty regular crew. She would be used in a secondwave attack, following the initial hardfought.

She was scared. That was good; fright improved basic biologic, if properly managed. The cruiser would make a raid into Senexi space and retaliate for past cuckoo-seeding programs. They would come up against thornships and seedships, probably.

The fighting was going to be fierce.

The raider made its final denial of the overness of the real and pipsqueezed into an arduous, nasty sponge space. It drew itself together again and emerged far above the galactic plane.

Prufrax sat in the hawks wardroom and looked at the simulated rotating snowball of stars. Red-coded numerals flashed along the borders of known Senexi territory, signifying where they had first come to power when the terrestrial sun had been a mist-wrapped youngster. A green arrow showed the position of the raider.

She drank sponge-space supplements with the others but felt isolated because of her firstness, her fear. Everyone seemed so calm. Most were fours or fives—on their fourth or fifth battle call. There were ten ones and an upper scatter of experienced hawks with nine to twenty-five battles behind them. There were no thirties. Thirties were rare in combat; the few that survived so many engagements were plucked off active and retired to PR service under the polinstructors. They often ended up in fibs, acting poorly, looking unhappy.

Still, when she had been more naive, Prufrax’s heros had been a man-and-woman thirty team she had watched in fib after fib—Kumnax and Arol. They had been better actors than most.

Day in, day out, they drilled in their fightsuits. While the crew bustled, hawks were put through implant learning, what slang was already calling the Know, as opposed to the Tell, of classroom teaching. Getting background, just enough to tickle her curiosity, not enough to stimulate morbid interest.

—There it is again. Feel?

—I know it. Yes. The round one, part of eyes-open . . .

—Senexi?

—No, brother without name.

—Your . . . brother?

—No . . . I don’t know.

Still, there were items of information she had never received before, items privileged only to the fighters, to assist them in their work. Older hawks talked about the past, when data had been freely available. Stories circulated in the wardroom about the Senexi, and she managed to piece together something of their origins and growth.

Senexi worlds, according to a twenty, had originally been large, cold masses of gas circling bright young suns nearly metal-free. Their gas-giant planets had orbited the suns at hundreds of millions of kilometers and had been dusted by the shrouds of neighboring dead stars; the essential elements carbon, nitrogen, silicon, and fluorine had gathered in sufficient quantities on some of the planets to allow Population II biology.

In cold ammonia seas, lipids had combined in complex chains. A primal kind of life had arisen and flourished. Across millions of years, early Senexi forms had evolved. Compared with evolution on Earth, the process at first had moved quite rapidly. The mechanisms of procreation and evolution had been complex in action, simple in chemistry.

There had been no competition between life forms of different genetic bases. On Earth, much time had been spent selecting between the plethora of possible ways to pass on genetic knowledge.

And among the early Senexi, outside of predation there had been no death. Death had come about much later, self-imposed for social reasons. Huge colonies of protoplasmic individuals had gradually resolved into the team-forms now familiar.

Soon information was transferred through the budding of branch inds; cultures quickly developed to protect the integrity of larvae, to allow them to regroup and form a new brood mind. Technologies had been limited to the rare heavy materials available, but the Senexi had expanded for a time with very little technology. They were well adapted to their environment, with few predators and no need to hunt, absorbing stray nutrients from the atmosphere and from layers of liquid ammonia. With perceptions attuned to the radio and microwave frequencies, they had before long turned groups of branch inds into radio telescope chains, piercing the heavy atmosphere and probing the universe in great detail, especially the very active center of the young galaxy. Huge jets of matter, streaming from other galaxies and emitting high-energy radiation, had provided laboratories for their vicarious observations. Physics was a primitive science to them.

Since little or no knowledge was lost in breeding cycles, cultural growth was rapid at times; since the dead weight of knowledge was often heavy, cultural growth often slowed to a crawl.

Using water as a building material, developing techniques that humans still understood imperfectly, they prepared for travel away from their birthworlds.

Prufrax wondered, as she listened to the older hawks, how humans had come to know all this. Had Senexi been captured and questioned? Was it all theory? Did anyone really know—anyone she could ask?

—She’s weak.

—Why weak?

—Some knowledge is best for glovers to ignore. Some questions are best left to the supreme overs.

—Have you thought that in here, you can answer her questions, our questions?

—No. No. Learn about me—us—first.

In the hour before engagement, Prufrax tried to find a place alone. On the raider, this wasn’t difficult. The ship’s size was overwhelming for the number of hawks and crew aboard. There were many areas where she could put on an environs and walk or drift in silence, surrounded by the dark shapes of equipment wrapped in plexerv.

She pulled herself through the cold G-less tunnels, feeling slightly awed by the loneness, the quiet. One tunnel angled outboard, toward the hull of the cruiser. She hesitated, peering into its length with her environs beacon, when a beep warned her she was near another crew member. She was startled to think someone else might be as curious as she. She scooted expertly up the tunnel, spreading her arms and tucking her legs as she would in a fightsuit.

The tunnel was filled with a faint milky green mist, absorbing her environs beam. It couldn’t be much more than a couple of hundred meters long, however, and it was quite straight. The signal beeped louder.

Ahead she could make out a dismantled weapons blister. That explained the fog: a plexerv aerosol diffused in the low pressure. Sitting in the blister was a man, his environs glowing a pale violet. He had deopaqued a section of the blister and was staring out at the stars. He swiveled as she approached and looked her over dispassionately. He seemed to be a hawk—he had fightform, tall, thin with brown hair above hull-white skin, large eyes with pupils so dark she might have been looking through his head into space beyond.

“Under,” she said as their environs met and merged.

“Over. What are you doing here?”

“I was about to ask you the same.”

“You should be getting ready for the fight,” he admonished.

“I am. I need to be alone for a while.”

“Yes.” He turned back to the stars. “I used to do that, too.”

“You don’t fight now?”

He shook his head. “Retired. I’m a researcher.”

She tried not to look impressed. Crossing rates was almost impossible. A bitalent was unusual in the service.

“What kind of research?” she asked.

“I’m here to correlate enemy finds.”

“Won’t find much of anything, after we’re done with the zero phase.”

It would have been polite for him to say, “Power to that,” or offer some other encouragement. He said nothing.

“Why would you want to research them?”

“To fight an enemy properly, you have to know what they are. Ignorance is defeat.”

“You research tactics?”

“Not exactly.”

“What, then?”

“You’ll be in tough hardfought this wake. Make you a proposition. You fight well, observe, come to me, and tell me what you see. Then I’ll answer your questions.”

“Brief you before my immediate overs?”

“I have the authority,” he said. No one had ever lied to her; she didn’t even suspect he would. “You’re eager?”

“Very.”

“You’ll be doing what?”

“Engaging Senexi fighters, then hunting down branch inds and brood minds.”

“How many fighters going in?”

“Twelve.”

“Big target, eh?”

She nodded.

“While you’re there, ask yourself—what are they fighting for? Understand?”

“Ask, what are they fighting for. Just that. Then come back to me.”

“What’s your name?”

“Not important,” he said. “Now go.”

She returned to the prep center as the sponge-space warning tones began. Overhawks went among the fighters in the lineup, checking gear and giveaway body points for mental orientation.

Prufrax submitted to the molded sensor mask being slipped over her face. “Ready!” the overhawk said. “Hardfought!” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

“Thank you, sir.” She bent down and slid into her fightsuit. Along the launch line, eleven other hawks did the same. The overs and other crew left the chamber, and twelve red beams delineated the launch tube. The fightsuits automatically lifted and aligned on their individual beams. Fields swirled around them like silvery tissue in moving water, then settled and hardened into cold scintillating walls, pulsing as the launch energy built up.

The tactic came to her. The ship’s sensors became part of her information net. She saw the Senexi thornship—twelve kilometers in diameter, cuckoos lacing its outer hull like maggots on red fruit, snakes waiting to take them on.

She was terrified and exultant, so worked up that her body temperature was climbing. The fightsuit adjusted her balance.

At the count of ten and nine, she switched from biologic to cyber. The implant—after absorbing much of her thought processes for weeks—became Prufrax.

For a time there seemed to be two of her. Biologic continued, and in that region she could even relax a bit, as if watching a fib.

With almost dreamlike slowness, in the electronic time of cyber, her fightsuit followed the beam. She saw the stars and oriented herself to the cruiser’s beacon, using both for reference, plunging in the sword-flower formation to assault the thornship. The cuckoos retreated in the vast red hull like worms withdrawing into an apple. Then hundreds of tiny black pinpoints appeared in the quadrant closest to the sword flower.

Snakes shot out, each piloted by a Senexi branch ind. “Hardfought!” she told herself in biologic before that portion gave over completely to cyber.

Why were we flung out of dark
through ice and fire, a shower
of sparks? a puzzle;

Perhaps to build hell.

We strike here, there;

Set brief glows, fall through
and cross round again.

By our dimming, we see what

Beatitude we have.

In the circle, kindling
together, we form an
exhausted Empyrean.

We feel the rush of
igniting winds but still
grow dull and wan.

New rage flames, new light,
dropping like sun through muddy
ice and night and fall

Close, spinning blue and bright.

In time they, too,

Tire. Redden.

We join, compare pasts
cool in huddled paths,
turn gray.

And again.

We are a companion flow
of ash, in the slurry,
out and down.

We sleep.

Rivers form above and below.

Above, iron snakes twist,
clang and slice, chime,
helium eyes watching, seeing

Snowflake hawks,
signaling adamant muscles and
energy teeth. What hunger
compels our venom spit?

It flies, strikes the crystal flight,
making mist gray-green
with ammonia rain.

Sleeping we glide,
and to each side
unseen shores wait
with the moans of an
unseen tide.

—She wrote that. We. One of her—our—poems.

—Poem?

—A kind of fib, I think.

—I don’t see what it says.

—Sure you do! She’s talking hardfought.

—Do you understand it?

—Not all . . .

She lay back in the bunk, legs crossed, eyes closed, feeling the receding dominance of the implant—the overness of cyber—and the almost pleasant ache in her back. She had survived her first. The thornship had retired, severely damaged, its surface seared and scored so heavily it would never release cuckoos again.

It would become a hulk, a decoy. Out of action. Satisfaction out of action! Satisfaction . . .

Still, with eight of the twelve fighters lost, she didn’t quite feel the exuberance of the rhyme. The snakes had fought very well. Bravely, she might say. They lured, sacrificed, cooperated, demonstrating teamwork as fine as that in her own group. Strategy was what made the cruiser’s raid successful. A superior approach, an excellent tactic. And perhaps even surprise, though the final analysis hadn’t been posted yet.

Without those advantages, they might have all died.

She opened her eyes and stared at the pattern of blinking lights in the ceiling panel, lights with their secret codes that repeated every second, so that whenever she looked at them, the implant deep inside was debriefed, reinstructed. Only when she fought would she know what she was now seeing.

She returned to the tunnel as quickly as she was able. She floated up toward the blister and found him there, surrounded by packs of information from the last hardfought. She waited until he turned his attention to her.

“Well?” he said.

“I asked myself what they are fighting for. And I’m very angry.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know. I can’t know. They’re Senexi.”

“Did they fight well?”

“We lost eight. Eight.” She cleared her throat.

“Did they fight well?” he repeated, an edge in his voice.

“Better than I was ever told they could.”

“Did they die?”

“Enough of them.”

“How many did you kill?”

“I don’t know.” But she did. Eight.

“You killed eight,” he said, pointing to the packs. “I’m analyzing the battle now.”

“You’re behind what we read, what gets posted?” she asked.

“Partly,” he said. “You’re a good hawk.”

“I knew I would be,” she said, her tone quiet, simple.

“Since they fought bravely—”

“How can Senexi be brave?” she asked sharply.

“Since,” he repeated, “they fought bravely, why?”

“They want to live, to do their . . . work. Just like me.”

“No,” he said. She was confused, moving between extremes in her mind, first resisting, then giving in too much. “They’re Senexi. They’re not like us.”

“What’s your name?” she asked, dodging the issue.

“Clevo.”

Her glory hadn’t even begun yet, and already she was well into her fall.

Aryz made his connection and felt the brood mind’s emergency cache of knowledge in the mandate grow up around him like ice crystals on glass. He stood in a static scene. The transition from living memory to human machine memory had resulted in either a coding of data or a reduction of detail; either way, the memory was cold, not dynamic. It would have to be compared, recorrelated, if that would ever be possible.

How much human data had had to be dumped to make space for this?

He cautiously advanced into the human memory, calling up topics almost at random.

He backed away from sociological data, trying to remain within physics and mathematics. There he could make conversions to fit his understanding without too much strain.

Then something unexpected happened. He felt the brush of another mind, a gentle inquiry from a source made even stranger by the hint of familiarity. It made what passed for a Senexi greeting, but not in the proper form, using what one branch ind of a team would radiate to a fellow; a gross breach, since it was obviously not from his team or even from his family. Aryz tried to withdraw. How was it possible for minds to meet in the mandate? As he retreated, he pushed into a broad region of incomprehensible data. It had none of the characteristics of the other human regions he had examined.

—This is for machines, the other said.—Not all cultural data are limited to biologic. You are in the area where programs and cyber designs are stored. They are really accessible only to a machine hooked into the mandate.

—What is your family? Aryz asked, the first step-question in the sequence Senexi used for urgent identity requests.

—I have no family. I am not a branch ind. No access to active brood minds. I have learned from the mandate.

—Then what are you?

—I don’t know, exactly. Not unlike you.

It was the mind of the mutated shape, the one that had remained in the chamber, beseeching when he approached the transparent barrier.

—I must go now, the shape said. Aryz was alone again in the incomprehensible jumble. He moved slowly, carefully, into the Senexi sector, calling up subjects familiar to him. If he could encounter one shape, doubtless he could encounter the others—perhaps even the captive.

The idea was dreadful—and fascinating. So far as he knew, such intimacy between Senexi and human had never happened before. Yet there was something very Senexi-like in the method, as if branch inds attached to the brood mind were to brush mentalities while searching in the ageless memories.

The dread subsided. There was little worse that could happen to him, with his fellows dead, his brood mind in flux bind, his purpose uncertain.

What Aryz was feeling, for the first time, was a small measure of freedom.

The story of the original Prufrax continued.

In the early stages she visited Clevo with a barely concealed anger. His method was aggravating, his goals never precisely spelled out. What did he want with her, if anything?

And she with him? Their meetings were clandestine, though not precisely forbidden. She was a hawk one now with considerable personal liberty between exercises and engagements. There were no monitors in the closed-off reaches of the cruiser, and they could do whatever they wished. The two met in areas close to the ship’s hull, usually in weapons blisters that could be opened to reveal the stars; there they talked.

Prufrax was not accustomed to prolonged conversation. Hawks were neither raised to be voluble, nor selected for their curiosity. Yet the exhawk Clevo talked a great deal and was the most curious person she had met, herself included, and she regarded herself as uncharacteristically curious.

Often he was infuriating, especially when he played the “leading game,” as she called it. Leading her from one question to the next, like an instructor, but without the trappings or any clarity of purpose. “What do you think of your mother?”

“Does that matter?”

“Not to me.”

“Then why ask?”

“Because you matter.”

Prufrax shrugged. “She was a fine mother. She bore me with a well-chosen heritage. She raised me as a hawk candidate. She told me her stories.”

“Any hawk I know would envy you for listening at Jay-ax’s knee.”

“I was hardly at her knee.”

“A speech tactic.”

“Yes, well, she was important to me.”

“She was a preferred single?”

“Yes.”

“So you have no father.”

“She selected without reference to individuals.”

“Then you are really not that much different from a Senexi.” She bristled and started to push away. “There! You insult me again.”

“Not at all. I’ve been asking one question all this time, and you haven’t even heard. How well do you know the enemy?”

“Well enough to destroy them.” She couldn’t believe that was the only question he’d been asking. His speech tactics were very odd.

“Yes, to win battles, perhaps. But who will win the war?”

“It’ll be a long war,” she said softly, floating a few meters from him. He rotated in the blister, blocking out a blurred string of stars. The cruiser was preparing to shift out of status geometry again. “They fight well.”

“They fight with conviction. Do you believe them to be evil?”

“They destroy us.”

“We destroy them.”

“So the question,” she said, smiling at her cleverness, “is who began to destroy?”

“Not at all,” Clevo said. “I suspect there’s no longer a clear answer to that. We are the new, they are the old. The old must be superseded.

“That’s the only way we’re different? They’re old, we’re not so old? I don’t understand.”

“Nor do I, entirely.”

“Well, finally!”

“The Senexi,” Clevo continued, unperturbed, “long ago needed only gas-giant planets like their homeworlds. They lived in peace for billions of years before our world was formed. But as they moved from star to star, they learned uses for other types of worlds. We were most interested in rocky Earth-like planets. Gradually we found uses for gas giants, too. By the time we met, each of us encroached on the other’s territory. Their technology is so improbable, so unlike ours, that when we first encountered them we thought they must come from another geometry.”

“Where did you learn all this?” Prufrax squinted at him suspiciously.

“I’m no longer a hawk,” he said, “but I was too valuable just to discard. My experience was too broad, my abilities too useful. So I was placed in research. It seems a safe place for me. Little contact with my comrades.” He looked directly at her. “We must try to know our enemy, at least a little.”

“That’s dangerous,” Prufrax said, almost instinctively.

“Yes, it is. What you know, you cannot hate.”

“We must hate,” she said. “It makes us strong. Senexi hate.”

“They might,” he said. “But, sometime, wouldn’t you like to . . . sit down and talk with one, after a battle? Talk with a fighter? Learn its tactic, how it bested you in one move, compare—”

“No!” Prufrax shoved off rapidly down the tube. “We’re shifting now. We have to get ready.”

—She’s smart. She’s leaving him. He’s crazy.

—Why do you think that?

—He would stop the fight, end the Zap.

—But he was a hawk.

—And hawks became glovers, I guess. But glovers go wrong, too. Like you.

—?

—Did you know they used you? How you were used?

—That’s all blurred now.

—She’s doomed if she stays around him. Who’s that?

—Someone is listening with us.

The next battle was bad enough to fall into the hellfought. Prufrax was in her fightsuit, legs drawn up as if about to kick off. The cruiser exited sponge space and plunged into combat before sponge space supplements could reach full effectiveness. She was dizzy, disoriented. The overhawks could only hope that a switch from biologic to cyber would cure the problem.

She didn’t know what they were attacking. Tactic was flooding the implant, but she was only receiving the wash of that; she hadn’t merged yet. She sensed that things were confused. That bothered her. Overs did not feel confusion.

The cruiser was taking damage. She could sense at least that, and she wanted to scream in frustration. Then she was ordered to merge with the implant. Biologic became cyber. She was in the Know.

The cruiser had reintegrated above a gas-giant planet. They were seventy-nine thousand kilometers from the upper atmosphere. The damage had come from ice mines—chunks of Senexi-treated water ice, altered to stay in sponge space until a human vessel integrated near by. Then they emerged, packed with momentum and all the residual instability of an unsuccessful return to status geometry. Unsuccessful for a ship, that is—very successful for a weapon.

The ice mines had given up the overness of the real within range of the cruiser and had blasted out whole sections of the hull. The launch lanes had not been damaged. The fighters lined up on their beams and were peppered out into space, spreading in the famous sword flower.

The planet was a cold nest. Over didn’t know what the atmosphere contained, but Senexi activity had been high in the star system, concentrating on this world. Over had decided to take a chance. Fighters headed for the atmosphere. The cruiser began planting singularity eggs. The eggs went ahead of the fighters, great black grainy ovoids that seemed to leave a trail of shadow—the wake of a birthing disruption in status geometry that could turn a gas giant into a short-lived sun.

Their time was limited. The fighters would group on entry sleds and descend to the liquid water regions where Senexi commonly kept their upwelling power plants. The fighters would first destroy any plants, loop into the liquid ammonia regions to search for hidden cuckoos, then see what was so important about the world.

She and five other fighters mounted the sled. Growing closer, the hazy clear regions of the atmosphere sparkled with Senexi sensors. Spiderweb beams shot from the six sleds to down the sensors. Buffet began. Scream, heat, then a second flower from the sled at a depth of two hundred kilometers. The sled slowed and held station. It would be their only way back. The fightsuits couldn’t pull out of such a large gravity well.

She descended deeper. The pale, bloated beacon of the red star was dropping below the second cloudtops, limning the strata in orange and purple. At the liquid ammonia level she was instructed to key in permanent memory of all she was seeing. She wasn’t “seeing” much, but other sensors were recording a great deal, all of it duly processed in her implant. “There’s life here,” she told herself. Indigenous life. Just another example of Senexi disregard for basic decency: they were interfering with a world developing its own complex biology.

The temperature rose to ammonia vapor levels, then to liquid water. The pressure on the fightsuit was enormous, and she was draining her stores much more rapidly than expected. At this level the atmosphere was particularly thick with organics.

Senexi snakes rose from below, passed them in altitude, then doubled back to engage. Prufrax was designated the deep diver; the others from her sled would stay at this level in her defense. As she fell, another sled group moved in behind her to double the cover.

She searched for the characteristic radiation curve of an up-welling plant. At the lower boundary of the liquid water level, below which her suit could not safely descend, she found it.

The Senexi were tapping the gas giant’s convection from greater depths than usual. Above the plant, almost indetectable, was another object with an uncharacteristic curve. They were separated by ten kilometers. The power plant was feeding its higher companion with tight energy beams.

She slowed. Two other fighters, disengaged from the brief skirmish above, took positions as backups a few dozen kilometers higher than she. Her implant searched for an appropriate tactic. She would avoid the zero-angle phase for the moment, go in for reconnaissance. She could feel sound pouring from the plant and its companion—rhythmic, not waste noise, but deliberate. And homing in on that sound were waves of large vermiform organisms, like chains of gas-filled sausage. They were dozens of meters long, two meters at their greatest thickness, shaped vaguely like the Senexi snake fighters. The vermiforms were native, and they were being lured into the uppermost floating structure. None were emerging. Her backups spread apart, descended, and drew up along her flanks.

She made her decision almost immediately. She could see a pattern in the approach of the natives. If she fell into the pattern, she might be able to enter the structure unnoticed.

—It’s a grinder. She doesn’t recognize it.

—What’s a grinder?

—She should make the Zap! It’s an ugly thing; Senexi use them all the time. Net a planet with grinders, like a cuckoo, but for larger operations.

The creatures were being passed through separator fields. Their organics fell from the bottom of the construct, raw material for new growth—Senexi growth. Their heavier elements were stored for later harvest.

With Prufrax in their midst, the vermiforms flew into the separator. The interior was hundreds of meters wide, lead-white walls with flat gray machinery floating in a dust haze, full of hollow noise, the distant bleats of vermiforms being slaughtered. Prufrax tried to retreat, but she was caught in a selector field. Her suit bucked and she was whirled violently, then thrown into a repository for examination. She had been screened from the separator; her plan to record, then destroy, the structure had been foiled by an automatic filter.

“Information sufficient.” Command logic programmed into the implant before launch was now taking over. “Zero-angle phase both plant and adjunct.” She was drifting in the repository, still slightly stunned. Something was fading. Cyber was hissing in and out; the over logic-commands were being scrambled. Her implant was malfunctioning and was returning control to biologic. The selector fields had played havoc with all cyber functions, down to the processors in her weapons.

Cautiously she examined the down systems one by one, determining what she could and could not do. This took as much as thirty seconds—an astronomical time on the implant’s scale.

She still could use the phase weapon. If she was judicious and didn’t waste her power, she could cut her way out of the repository, maneuver and work with her escorts to destroy both the plant and the separator. By the time they returned to the sleds, her implant might have rerouted itself and made sufficient repairs to handle defense. She had no way of knowing what was waiting for her if—when—she escaped, but that was the least of her concerns for the moment.

She tightened the setting of the phase beam and swung her fightsuit around, knocking a cluster of junk ice and silty phosphorescent dust. She activated the beam. When she had a hole large enough to pass through, she edged the suit forward, beamed through more walls and obstacles, and kicked herself out of the repository into free fall. She swiveled and laid down a pattern of wide-angle beams, at the same time relaying a message on her situation to the escorts.

The escorts were not in sight. The separator was beginning to break up, spraying debris through the almost opaque atmosphere. The rhythmic sound ceased, and the crowds of vermiforms began to disperse.

She stopped her fall and thrust herself several kilometers higher—directly into a formation of Senexi snakes. She had barely enough power to reach the sled, much less fight and turn her beams on the upwelling plant.

Her cyber was still down.

The sled signal was weak. She had no time to calculate its direction from the inertial guidance cyber. Besides, all cyber was unreliable after passing through the separator.

Why do they fight so well? Clevo’s question clogged her thoughts. Cursing, she tried to blank and keep all her faculties available for running the fightsuit. When evenly matched, you cannot win against your enemy unless you understand them. And if you truly understand, why are you fighting and not talking? Clevo had never told her that—not in so many words. But it was part of a string of logic all her own.

Be more than an automaton with a narrow range of choices. Never underestimate the enemy. Those were old Grounds dicta, not entirely lost in the new training, but only emphasized by Clevo.

If they fight as well as you, perhaps in some ways they fight—think like you do. Use that.

Isolated, with her power draining rapidly, she had no choice. They might disregard her if she posed no danger. She cut her thrust and went into a diving spin. Clearly she was on her way to a high-pressure grave. They would sense her power levels, perhaps even pick up the lack of field activity if she let her shields drop. She dropped the shields. If they let her fall and didn’t try to complete the kill—if they concentrated on active fighters above—she had enough power to drop into the water vapor regions, far below the plant, and silently ride a thermal into range. With luck, she could get close enough to lay a web of zero-angle phase and take out the plant.

She had minutes in which to agonize over her plan. Falling, buffeted by winds that could knock her kilometers out of range, she spun like a vagrant flake of snow.

She couldn’t even expend the energy to learn if they were scanning her, checking out her potential.

Perhaps she underestimated them. Perhaps they would be that much more thorough and take her out just to be sure. Perhaps they had unwritten rules of conduct like the ones she was using, taking hunches into account. Hunches were discouraged in Grounds training—much less reliable than cyber.

She fell. Temperature increased. Pressure on her suit began to constrict her air supply. She used fighter trancing to cut back on her breathing.

Fell.

And broke the trance. Pushed through the dense smoke of exhaustion. Planned the beam web. Counted her reserves. Nudged into an updraft beneath the plant. The thermal carried her, a silent piece of paper in a storm, drifting back and forth beneath the objective. The huge field intakes pulsed above, lightning outlining their invisible extension. She held back on the beam.

Nearly faded out. Her suit interior was almost unbearably hot.

She was only vaguely aware of laying down the pattern. The beams vanished in the murk. The thermal pushed her through a layer of haze, and she saw the plant, riding high above clear-atmosphere turbulence. The zero-angle phase had pushed through the field intakes, into their source nodes and the plant body, surrounding it with bright blue Tcherenkov. First the surface began to break up, then the middle layers, and finally key supports. Chunks vibrated away with the internal fury of their molecular, then atomic, then particle disruption. Paraphrasing Grounds description of beam action, the plant became less and less convinced of its reality. “Matter dreams,” an instructor had said a decade before. “Dreams it is real, maintains the dream by shifting rules with constant results. Disturb the dreams, the shifting of the rules results in inconstant results. Things cannot hold.”

She slid away from the updraft, found another, wondered idly how far she would be lifted. Curiosity at the last. Let’s just see, she told herself; a final experiment.

Now she was cold. The implant was flickering, showing signs of reorganization. She didn’t use it. No sense expanding the amount of time until death. No sense at all.

The sled, maneuvered by one remaining fighter, glided up beneath her almost unnoticed.

Aryz waited in the stillness of a Senexi memory, his thinking temporarily reduced to a faint susurrus. What he waited for was not clear.

—Come.

The form of address was wrong, but he recognized the voice. His thoughts stirred, and he followed the nebulous presence out of Senexi territory.

—Know your enemy.

Prufrax . . . the name of one of the human shapes sent out against their own kind. He could sense her presence in the mandate, locked into a memory store. He touched on the store and caught the essentials—the grinder, the updraft plant, the fight from Prufrax’s viewpoint.

—Know how your enemy knows you.

He sensed a second presence, similar to that of Prufrax. It took him some time to realize that the human captive was another form of the shape, a reproduction of the . . .

Both were reproductions of the female whose image was in the memory store. Aryz was not impressed by threes—Senexi mysticism, what had ever existed of it, had been preoccupied with fives and sixes—but the coincidence was striking.

—Know how your enemy sees you.

He saw the grinder processing organics—the vermiform natives—in preparation for a widespread seeding of deuterium gatherers. The operation had evidently been conducted for some time; the vermiform populations were greatly reduced from their usual numbers. Vermiforms were a common type-species on gas giants of the sort depicted. The mutated shape nudged him into a particular channel of the memory, that which carried the original Prufrax’s emotions. She had reacted with disgust to the Senexi procedure. It was a reaction not unlike what Aryz might feel when coming across something forbidden in Senexi behavior. Yet eradication was perfectly natural, analogous to the human cleansing of food before eating.

—It’s in the memory. The vermiforms are intelligent. They have their own kind of civilization. Human action on this world prevented their complete extinction by the Senexi.

—So what matter they were intelligent? Aryz responded. They did not behave or think like Senexi, or like any species Senexi find compatible. They were therefore not desirable. Like humans.

—You would make humans extinct?

—We would protect ourselves from them.

—Who damages the other most?

Aryz didn’t respond. The line of questioning was incomprehensible. Instead he flowed into the memory of Prufrax, propelled by another aspect of complete freedom, confusion.

The implant was replaced. Prufrax’s damaged limbs and skin were repaired or regenerated quickly, and within four wakes, under intense treatment usually reserved only for overs, she regained all her reflexes and speed. She requested liberty of the cruiser while it returned for repairs. Her request was granted.

She first sought Clevo in the designated research area. He wasn’t there, but a message was, passed on to her by a smiling young crew member. She read it quickly:

“You’re free and out of action. Study for a while, then come find me. The old place hasn’t been damaged. It’s less private, but still good. Study! I’ve marked highlights.”

She frowned at the message, then handed it to the crew member, who duly erased it and returned to his duties. She wanted to talk with Clevo, not study.

But she followed his instructions. She searched out highlighted entries in the ship’s memory store. It was not nearly as dull as she had expected. In fact, by following the highlights, she felt she was learning more about Clevo and about the questions he asked.

Old literature was not nearly as graphic as fibs, but it was different enough to involve her for a time. She tried to create imitations of what she read, but erased them. Nonfib stories were harder than she suspected. She read about punishment, duty; she read about places called heaven and hell, from a writer who had died tens of thousands of years before. With supplement guidance, she was able to comprehend most of what she read. Plugging the store into her implant, she was able to absorb hundreds of volumes in an hour.

Some of the stores were losing definition. They hadn’t been used in decades, perhaps centuries.

Halfway through, she grew impatient. She left the research area. Operating on another hunch, she didn’t go to the blister as directed, but straight to memory central, two decks inboard the research area. She saw Clevo there, plugged into a data pillar, deep in some aspect of ship history. He noticed her approach, unplugged, and swiveled on his chair. “Congratulations,” he said, smiling at her.

“Hardfought,” she acknowledged, smiling.

“Better than that, perhaps,” he said.

She looked at him quizzically. “What do you mean, better?”

“I’ve been doing some illicit tapping on over channels.”

“So?”

—He is dangerous!

“For what?”

“You may have a valuable genetic assortment. Overs think you behaved remarkably well under impossible conditions.”

“Did I?”

He nodded. “Your type may be preserved.”

“Which means?”

“There’s a program being planned. They want to take the best fighters and reproduce them—clone them—to make uniform top-grade squadrons. It was rumored in my time—you haven’t heard?” She shook her head.

“It’s not new. It’s been done, off and on, for tens of thousands of years. This time they believe they can make it work.”

“You were a fighter, once,” she said. “Did they preserve your type?”

Clevo nodded. “I had something that interested them, but not, I think, as a fighter.”

Prufrax looked down at her stubby-fingered hands. “It was grim,” she said. “You know what we found?”

“An extermination plant.”

“You want me to understand them better. Well, I can’t. I refuse. How could they do such things?” She looked disgusted and answered her own question. “Because they’re Senexi.”

“Humans,” Clevo said, “have done much the same, sometimes worse.”

“No!”

—No!

“Yes,” he said firmly. He sighed. “We’ve wiped Senexi worlds, and we’ve even wiped worlds with intelligent species like our own. Nobody is innocent. Not in this universe.”

“We were never taught that.”

“It wouldn’t have made you a better hawk. But it might make a better human of you to know. Greater depth of character. Do you want to be more aware?”

“You mean, study more?”

He nodded.

“What makes you think you can teach me?”

“Because you thought about what I asked you. About how Senexi thought. And you survived where some other hawk might not have. The overs think it’s in your genes. It might be. But it’s also in your head.”

“Why not tell the overs?”

“I have,” he said. He shrugged.

“They wouldn’t want me to learn from you?”

“I don’t know,” Clevo said. “I suppose they’re aware you’re talking to me. They could stop it if they wanted.”

“And if I learn from you?”

“Not from me, actually. From the past. From history, what other people have thought. I’m really not any more capable than you . . . but I know history, small portions of it. I won’t teach you so much as guide.”

“I did use your questions,” Prufrax said. “But will I ever need to use them—think that way—again?”

Clevo nodded. “Of course.”

—You’re quiet.

—She’s giving in to him.

—She gave in a long time ago.

—She should be afraid.

—Were you—we—ever really afraid of a challenge?

—No.

—Not Senexi, not forbidden knowledge.

Clevo first led her through the history of past wars, judging that was appropriate considering her occupation. She was attentive enough, though her mind wandered; sometimes he was didactic, but she found she didn’t mind that much.

She saw that in all wars, the first stage was to dehumanize the enemy, reduce the enemy to a lower level so that he might be killed without compunction. When the enemy was not human to begin with, the task was easier. As wars progressed, this tactic frequently led to an underestimation of the enemy, with disastrous consequences. “We aren’t exactly underestimating the Senexi,” Clevo said. “The overs are too smart for that. But we refuse to understand them, and that could make the war last indefinitely.”

“Then why don’t the overs see that?”

“Because we’re being locked into a pattern. We’ve been fighting for so long, we’ve begun to lose ourselves. And it’s getting worse.” He assumed his didactic tone, and she knew he was reciting something he’d formulated years before and repeated to himself a thousand times. “There is no war so important that, to win it, we must destroy our minds.”

She didn’t agree with that; losing the war with the Senexi would mean extinction, as she understood things.

Most often they met in the single unused weapons blister that had not been damaged. They met when the ship was basking in the real between sponge-space jaunts. He brought memory stores with him in portable modules, and they read, listened, experienced together. She never placed a great deal of importance in the things she learned; her interest was focused on Clevo. Still, she learned.

The rest of her time she spent training. She was aware of a growing isolation from the hawks, which she attributed to her uncertain rank status. Was her genotype going to be preserved or not? The decision hadn’t been made. The more she learned, the less she wanted to be singled out for honor. Attracting that sort of attention might be dangerous, she thought. Dangerous to whom, or what, she could not say.

Clevo showed her how hero images had been used to indoctrinate birds and hawks in a standard of behavior that was ideal, not realistic. The results were not always good; some tragic blunders had been made by fighters trying to be more than anyone possibly could or refusing to be flexible.

The war was certainly not a fib. Yet more and more the overs seemed to be treating it as one. Unable to bring about strategic victories against the Senexi, the overs had settled in for a long war of attrition and were apparently bent on adapting all human societies to the effort.

“There are overs we never hear of, who make decisions that shape our entire lives. Soon they’ll determine whether or not we’re even born, if they don’t already.”

“That sounds paranoid,” she said, trying out a new word and concept she had only recently learned.

“Maybe so.”

“Besides, it’s been like that for ages—not knowing all our overs.”

“But it’s getting worse,” Clevo said. He showed her the projections he had made. In time, if trends continued unchanged, fighters and all other combatants would be treated more and more mechanically, until they became the machines the overs wished them to be.

—No.

—Quiet. How does he feel toward her?

It was inevitable that as she learned under his tutelage, he began to feel responsible for her changes. She was an excellent fighter. He could never be sure that what he was doing might reduce her effectiveness. And yet he had fought well—despite similar changes—until his billet switch. It had been the overs who had decided he would be more effective, less disruptive, elsewhere.

Bitterness over that decision was part of his motive. The overs had done a foolish thing, putting a fighter into research. Fighters were tenacious. If the truth was to be hidden, then fighters were the ones likely to ferret it out. And pass it on. There was a code among fighters, seldom revealed to their immediate overs, much less to the supreme overs parsecs distant in their strategospheres. What one fighter learned that could be of help to another had to be passed on, even under penalty. Clevo was simply following that unwritten rule.

Passing on the fact that, at one time, things had been different. That war changed people, governments, societies, and that societies could effect an enormous change on their constituents, especially now—change in their lives, their thinking. Things could become even more structured. Freedom of fight was a drug, an illusion—

—No!

used to perpetuate a state of hatred.

“Then why do they keep all the data in stores?” she asked. “I mean, you study the data, everything becomes obvious.”

“There are still important people who think we may want to find our way back someday. They’re afraid we’ll lose our roots, but—” His face suddenly became peaceful. She reached out to touch him, and he jerked slightly, turning toward her in the blister. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s not organized. We’re going to lose the information. Ship overs are going to restrict access more and more. Eventually it’ll decay, like some already has in these stores. I’ve been planning for some time to put it all in a single unit—”

—He built the mandate!

“and have the overs place one on every ship, with researchers to tend it. Formalize the loose scheme still in effect, but dying. Right now I’m working on the fringes. At least I’m allowed to work. But soon I’ll have enough evidence that they won’t be able to argue. Evidence of what happens to societies that try to obscure their histories. They go quite mad. The overs are still rational enough to listen; maybe I’ll push it through.” He looked out the transparent blister. The stars were smudging to one side as the cruiser began probing for entrances to sponge space. “We’d better get back.”

“Where are you going to be when we return? We’ll all be transferred.”

“That’s some time removed. Why do you want to know?”

“I’d like to learn more.”

He smiled. “That’s not your only reason.”

“I don’t need someone to tell me what my reasons are,” she said testily.

“We’re so reluctant,” he said. She looked at him sharply, irritated and puzzled. “I mean,” he continued, “we’re hawks. Comrades. Hawks couple like that.” He snapped his fingers. “But you and I sneak around it all the time.”

Prufrax kept her face blank.

“Aren’t you receptive toward me?” he asked, his tone almost teasing.

“It’s just that that’s not all,” she said, her tone softening.

“Indeed,” he said in a barely audible whisper.

In the distance they heard the alarms.

—It was never any different.

—What?

—Things were never any different before me.

—Don’t be silly. It’s all here.

If Clevo made the mandate, then he put it here. It isn’t true.

—Why are you upset?

—I don’t like hearing that everything I believe is a . . . fib.

—I’ve never known the difference, I suppose. Eyes-open was never all that real to me. This isn’t real, you aren’t . . . this is eyes-shut. So why be upset? You and I . . . we aren’t even whole people. I feel you. You wish the Zap, you fight, not much else. I’m just a shadow, even compared to you. But she is whole. She loves him. She’s less a victim than either of us. So something has to have changed.

—You’re saying things have gotten worse.

—If the mandate is a lie, that’s all I am. You refuse to accept. I have to accept, or I’m even less than a shadow.

—I don’t refuse to accept. It’s just hard.

—You started it. You thought about love.

—You did!

—Do you know what love is?

—Reception.

They first made love in the weapons blister. It came as no surprise; if anything, they approached it so cautiously they were clumsy. She had become more and more receptive, and he had dropped his guard. It had been quick, almost frantic, far from the orchestrated and drawn-out ballet the hawks prided themselves for. There was no pretense. No need to play the roles of artists interacting. They were depending on each other. The pleasure they exchanged was nothing compared to the emotions involved.

“We’re not very good with each other,” Prufrax said.

Clevo shrugged. “That’s because we’re shy.”

“Shy?”

He explained. In the past—at various times in the past, because such differences had come and gone many times—making love had been more than a physical exchange or even an expression of comradeship. It had been the acknowledgment of a bond between people.

She listened, half-believing. Like everything else she had heard, that kind of love seemed strange, distasteful. What if one hawk was lost, and the other continued to love? It interfered with the hardfought, certainly. But she was also fascinated. Shyness—the fear of one’s presentation to another. The hesitation to present truth, or the inward confusion of truth at the awareness that another might be important, more important than one thought possible.

Complex emotion was not encouraged either at the Grounds or among hawks on station. Complex emotion degraded complex performance. The simple and direct was desirable.

“But all we seem to do is talk—until now,” Prufrax said, holding his hand and examining his fingers one by one. They were very little different from her own, though extended a bit from hawk fingers to give greater versatility with key instruction.

“Talking is the most human thing we can do.”

She laughed. “I know what you are,” she said, moving up until her eyes were even with his chest. “You’re an instructor at heart. You make love by telling.” She felt peculiar, almost afraid, and looked up at his face. “Not that I don’t enjoy your lovemaking, like this. Physical.”

“You receive well,” he said. “Both ways.”

“What we’re saying,” she whispered, “is not truth-speaking. It’s amenity.” She turned into the stroke of his hand through her hair. “Amenity is supposed to be decadent. That fellow who wrote about heaven and hell. He would call it a sin.”

“Amenity is the recognition that somebody may see or feel differently than you do. It’s the recognition of individuals. You and I, we’re part of the end of all that.”

“Even if you convince the overs?”

He nodded. “They want to repeat success without risk. New individuals are risky, so they duplicate past success. There will be more and more people, fewer individuals. More of you and me, less of others. The fewer individuals, the fewer stories to tell. The less history. We’re part of the death of history.”

She floated next to him, trying to blank her mind as she had done before, to drive out the nagging awareness that he was right. She thought she understood the social structure around her. Things seemed new. She said as much.

“It’s a path we’re taking,” Clevo said. “Not a place we’re at.”

—It’s a place we’re at. How different are we?

—But there’s so much history in here. How can it be over for us?

—I’ve been thinking. Do we know the last event recorded in the mandate?

—Don’t, we’re drifting from Prufrax now. . . .

Aryz felt himself drifting with them. They swept over countless millennia, then swept back the other way. And it became evident that as much change had been wrapped in one year of the distant past as in a thousand years of the closing entries in the mandate. Clevo’s voice seemed to follow them, though they were far from his period, far from Prufrax’s record.

“Tyranny is the death of history. We fought the Senexi until we became like them. No change, youth at an end, old age coming upon us. There is no important change, merely elaborations in the pattern.”

—How many times have we been here, then? How many times have we died?

Aryz wasn’t sure, now. Was this the first time humans had been captured? Had he been told everything by the brood mind? Did the Senexi have no history, whatever that was—

The accumulated lives of living, thinking beings. Their actions, thoughts, passions, hopes.

The mandate answered even his confused, nonhuman requests. He could understand action, thought, but not passion or hope. Perhaps without those there was no history.

—You have no history, the mutated shape told him. There have been millions like you, even millions like the brood mind. What is the last event recorded in the brood mind that is not duplicated a thousand times over, so close they can be melded together for convenience?

—How do you understand that—because we made you between human and Senexi?

—Not only that.

The requests of the twin captives and shape were moving them back once more into the past, through the dim gray millennia of repeating ages. History began to manifest again, differences in the record.

On the way back to Mercior, four skirmishes were fought. Prufrax did well in each. She carried something special with her, a thought she didn’t even tell Clevo, and she carried the same thought with her through their last days at the Grounds.

Taking advantage of hawk liberty, she opted for a posthardfought residence just outside the Grounds, in the relatively uncrowded Daughter of Cities zone. She wouldn’t be returning to fight until several issues had been decided—her status most important among them.

Clevo began making his appeal to the middle overs. He was given Grounds duty to finish his proposals. They could stay together for the time being.

The residence was sixteen square meters in area, not elegant—natural, as rentOpts described it.

On the last day she lay in the crook of Clevo’s arm. They had done a few hours of nature sleep. He hadn’t come out yet, and she looked up at his face, reached up with a hand to feel his arm.

It was different from the arms of others she had been receptive toward. It was unique. The thought amused her. There had never been a reception like theirs. This was the beginning. And if both were to be duplicated, this love, this reception, would be repeated an infinite number of times. Clevo meeting Prufrax, teaching her, opening her eyes.

Somehow, even though repetition contributed to the death of history, she was pleased. This was the secret thought she carried into fight. Each time she would survive, wherever she was, however many duplications down the line. She would receive Clevo, and he would teach her. If not now—if one or the other died—then in the future. The death of history might be a good thing. Love could go on forever.

She had lost even a rudimentary apprehension of death, even with present pleasure to live for. Her functions had sharpened. She would please him by doing all the things he could not. And if he was to enter that state she frequently found him in, that state of introspection, of reliving his own battles and of envying her activity, then that wasn’t bad. All they did to each other was good.

—Was good

—Was

She slipped from his arm and left the narrow sleeping quarter, pushing through the smoke-colored air curtain to the lounge. Two hawks and an over she had never seen before were sitting there. They looked up at her.

“Under,” Prufrax said.

“Over,” the woman returned. She was dressed in tan and green, Grounds colors, not ship.

“May I assist?”

“Yes.”

“My duty, then?”

The over beckoned her closer. “You have been receiving a researcher.”

“Yes,” Prufrax said. The meetings could not have been a secret on the ship, and certainly not their quartering near the Grounds. “Has that been against duty?”

“No.” The over eyed Prufrax sharply, observing her perfected fightform, the easy grace with which she stood, naked, in the middle of the small compartment. “But a decision has been reached. Your status is decided now.”

She felt a shiver.

“Prufrax,” said the elder hawk. She recognized him from fibs, and his companion: Kumnax and Arol. Once her heroes. “You have been accorded an honor, just as your partner has. You have a valuable genetic assortment—”

She barely heard the rest. They told her she would return to fight, until they deemed she had had enough experience and background to be brought into the polinstruc division. Then her fighting would be over. She would serve better as an example, a hero.

Heroes never partnered out of function. Hawk heroes could not even partner with exhawks.

Clevo emerged from the air curtain. “Duty,” the over said. “The residence is disbanded. Both of you will have separate quarters, separate duties.”

They left. Prufrax held out her hand, but Clevo didn’t take it. “No use,” he said.

Suddenly she was filled with anger. “You’ll give it up? Did I expect too much? How strongly?”

“Perhaps even more strongly than you,” he said. “I knew the order was coming down. And still I didn’t leave. That may hurt my chances with the supreme overs.”

“Then at least I’m worth more than your breeding history?”

“Now you are history. History the way they make it.”

“I feel like I’m dying,” she said, amazement in her voice. “What is that, Clevo? What did you do to me?”

“I’m in pain, too,” he said.

“You’re hurt?”

“I’m confused.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said, her anger rising again. “You knew, and you didn’t do anything?”

“That would have been counter to duty. We’ll be worse off if we fight it.”

“So what good is your great, exalted history?”

“History is what you have,” Clevo said. “I only record.”

—Why did they separate them?

—I don’t know. You didn’t like him, anyway.

—Yes, but now . . .

—I don’t understand.

—We don’t. Look what happens to her. They took what was best out of her. Prufrax
went into battle eighteen more times before dying as heroes often do, dying in the midst of what she did best. The question of what made her better before the separation—for she definitely was not as fine a fighter after—has not been settled. Answers fall into an extinct classification of knowledge, and there are few left to interpret, none accessible to this device.

—So she went out and fought and died. They never even made fibs about her. This killed her?

—I don’t think so. She fought well enough. She died like other hawks died.

—And she might have lived otherwise.

—How can I know that, any more than you?

—They—we—met again, you know. I met a Clevo once, on my ship. They didn’t let me stay with him long.

—How did you react to him?

—There was so little time, I don’t know.

—Let’s ask. . . .

In thousands of duty stations, it was inevitable that some of Prufrax’s visions would come true, that they should meet now and then. Clevos were numerous, as were Prufraxes. Every ship carried complements of several of each. Though Prufrax was never quite as successful as the original, she was a fine type. She—

—She was never quite as successful. They took away her edge. They didn’t even know it!

—They must have known.

—Then they didn’t want to win!

—We don’t know that. Maybe there were more important considerations.

—Yes, like killing history.

Aryz shuddered in his warming body, dizzy as if about to bud, then regained control. He had been pulled from the mandate, called to his own duty.

He examined the shapes and the human captive. There was something different about them. How long had they been immersed in the mandate? He checked quickly, frantically, before answering the call. The reconstructed Mam had malfunctioned. None of them had been nourished. They were thin, pale, cooling.

Even the bloated mutant shape was dying; lost, like the others, in the mandate.

He turned his attention away. Everything was confusion. Was he human or Senexi now? Had he fallen so low as to understand them? He went to the origin of the call, the ruins of the temporary brood chamber. The corridors were caked with ammonia ice, burning his pod as he slipped over them. The brood mind had come out of flux bind. The emergency support systems hadn’t worked well; the brood mind was damaged.

“Where have you been?” it asked.

“I assumed I would not be needed until your return from the flux bind.”

“You have not been watching!”

“Was there any need? We are so advanced in time, all our actions are obsolete. The nebula is collapsed, the issue is decided.”

“We do not know that. We are being pursued.”

Aryz turned to the sensor wall—what was left of it—and saw that they were, indeed, being pursued. He had been lax.

“It is not your fault,” the brood mind said. “You have been set a task that tainted you and ruined your function. You will dissipate.”

Aryz hesitated. He had become so different, so tainted, that he actually hesitated at a direct command from the brood mind. But it was damaged. Without him, without what he had learned, what could it do? It wasn’t reasoning correctly.

“There are facts you must know, important facts—”

Aryz felt a wave of revulsion, uncomprehending fear, and something not unlike human anger radiate from the brood mind. Whatever he had learned and however he had changed, he could not withstand that wave.

Willingly, and yet against his will—it didn’t matter—he felt himself liquefying. His pod slumped beneath him, and he fell over, landing on a pool of frozen ammonia. It burned, but he did not attempt to lift himself. Before he ended, he saw with surprising clarity what it was to be a branch ind, or a brood mind, or a human. Such a valuable insight, and it leaked out of his permea and froze on the ammonia.

The brood mind regained what control it could of the fragment. But there were no defenses worthy of the name. Calm, preparing for its own dissipation, it waited for the pursuit to conclude.

The Mam set off an alarm. The interface with the mandate was severed. Weak, barely able to crawl, the humans looked at each other in horror and slid to opposite corners of the chamber.

They were confused: which of them was the captive, which the decoy shape? It didn’t seem important. They were both bone-thin, filthy with their own excrement. They turned with one motion to stare at the bloated mutant. It sat in its corner, tiny head incongruous on the huge thorax, tiny arms and legs barely functional even when healthy. It smiled wanly at them.

“We felt you,” one of the Prufraxes said. “You were with us in there.” Her voice was a soft croak.

“That was my place,” it replied. “My only place.”

“What function, what name?”

“I’m . . . I know that. I’m a researcher. In there, I knew myself in there.”

They squinted at the shape. The head. Something familiar, even now. “You’re a Clevo . . .”

There was noise all around them, cutting off the shape’s weak words. As they watched, their chamber was sectioned like an orange, and the wedges peeled open. The illumination ceased. Cold enveloped them.

A naked human female, surrounded by tiny versions of herself, like an angel circled by fairy kin, floated into the chamber. She was thin as a snake. She wore nothing but silver rings on her wrists and a thin torque around her waist. She glowed blue-green in the dark.

The two Prufraxes moved their lips weakly but made no sound in the near vacuum. Who are you?

She surveyed them without expression, then held out her arms as if to fly. She wore no gloves, but she was of their type.

As she had done countless times before on finding such Senexi experiments—though this seemed older than most—she lifted one arm higher. The blue-green intensified, spread in waves to the mangled walls, surrounded the freezing, dying shapes. Perfect, angelic, she left the debris behind to cast its fitful glow and fade.

They destroyed every portion of the fragment but one. They left the mandate behind unharmed.

Then they continued, millions of them thick like mist, working the spaces between the stars, their only master the overness of the real.

They needed no other masters. They would never malfunction.

The mandate drifted in the dark and cold, its memory going on, but its only life the rapidly fading tracks where minds had once passed through it. The trails writhed briefly, almost as if alive, but only following the quantum rules of diminished energy states. Briefly, a small memory was illuminated.

Prufrax’s last poem, explained the mandate reflexively.

How the fires grow! Peace passes

All memory lost.

Somehow we always miss that single door,

Dooming ourselves to circle.

Ashes to stars, lies to souls,

Let’s spin ’round the sinks and holes.

Kill the good, eat the young.

Forever and more

You and I are never done.

The track faded into nothing. Around the mandate, the universe grew old very quickly.

SEEKING

David R. Palmer

When seeking a needle in a post-holocaust haystack, it’s best not to be too intent on any particular needle.

Hi again, Posterity. Happy to see me? Or just surprised? Wish could be happier to see you. Should be, of course, and perhaps one day will be again. But just now view prospect of commencing this record with less than enthusiasm.

Appreciably less: Present overdue status not question of mere sloth, inefficiency; delay is product of sober consideration, sound reasoning. Entirely deliberate: been stalling.

But before condemning dilatory scribe out of hand, please attend, one, all; explanation follows, to wit:

Scared. No, not shaking-in-boots scared, not blood-turns-to-cottage-cheese scared; more an ominous-disquiet scared, two shivers qualmier than knock-on-wood scared. Leery of tempting fate.

See: commensurate with tenacious optimism expected of journeyman-grade Pollyanna, intend this record (together with previous journal [Vol. I], plus all subsequent memoirs) for future study by, ultimate benefit of, future generations—if any—tended in respectful, unhurried fashion by historians, students, archeologists in suitably dignified setting: Smith-Foster Post-Armageddon Historical Library & Archives.

Fond aspirations envision lots of subsequent volumes, eventually amassing truly impressive collection covering very long time span; accumulated in orderly manner by Library courtesy of Yours Truly through regular donations, personal delivery. (Key words here are regular and personal: Want no gaps—and especially don’t want final volume dropped off by unwashed, travel-weary, buckskin-clad, intrepid explorer-of-unknown, plucked from God-knows-where.)

Foregoing tidy scenario intrinsic to present emotional well-being; implying, as does, long-range goals; own demise postponed many, many years hence; arriving (if ever) long after achieving revered status as beloved silver-haired old counselor; authentic sage, oracle senectutis causa, expiring gracefully in own bed amidst tearful mob of properly devoted descendants, admirers.

However (follow logic closely now): Longer journal commencement deferred, longer am able to ignore alternate possibilities—perhaps even probabilities—that impending events may interrupt record midchapter. Even midsentence. Until begun, this volume cannot be last in series. (Cannot be discovered incomplete amongst own bones somewhere on depopulated planet.)

Which is uncomfortable notion at best. Much prefer waiting until events justify more positive outlook, reasonable expectation of survival, living Happily-Ever-After.

(Curious behavior, must admit, for certified genius.)

However, personal problems are no excuse to compromise record; responsible histographer must face darkest prospects squarely, do job. True, this journal meant for proper delivery to proper audience; and if such be assured, could be prepared as well after the fact, at leisure, as minor adjunct to activities comprising Happy Ending. But if not—assuming worst: found under grisly circumstances by fellow involuntary ragtag explorer—even he entitled to complete account, within limits imposed by conditions.

Not least of which: very real doubt typical Bold Wanderer able to decipher Pitman shorthand. But would be no record in longhand: So inefficient, agonizingly slow; results bulky, burdensome to carry.

Besides, not my problem: shorthand system identified on cover, together with author, subject matter. Texts available at any library (most should stand, protect contents for centuries). My notes clear, straightforward; without unusual briefs, nonstandard phrase linkages. Given time, motivation, legible to anyone.

And must demand some effort from Posterity (regardless of whom may consist). Being furnished, after all, valuable detailed information on End of World. Not available at every corner newsstand.

As may be.

Peter Bell, trustworthy, reliable, responsible (according to Tarzan File—along with brilliant, sensitive, witty, handsome). Distinctly not sort to ignore constantly ringing phone. Or 50 messages on answering machine. To say nothing of known damsel (distress or otherwise quite immaterial; evidence suggests ain’t many of us). Would have returned call had been home, gotten message. Since didn’t, wasn’t.

Certainly. I knew that.

But human—pardon, mean Homo post hominem—psyche surely most perversely useless corner of entire mind. Unreasonable beastie, downright illogical. Makes no sense at all for naked-eye confirmation of months-ago deduced fact to precipitate funk.

Move-out deliberate, unhurried, thorough; signs unmistakable: Doors, windows neatly shut; closets emptied, personal effects removed; utilities switched off at fuse box. Obviously had business elsewhere, went; had ample time to. Nothing about absence to create ominous doubts, assumptions, speculations. Simply moved. Period.

Granting which, enigma remains: Candidia Maria Smith-Foster, superkid, prize intellect in or out of research project—coldly analytical, logical; rational, etc., etc.—agitatedly pacing through Peter Bell’s empty house; repeatedly peeking into empty closets, endlessly ransacking empty drawers; playing back empty answering-machine tape over, over again; wringing hands, streaming tears, sniffling, blubbering—

For almost three solid hours . . .!

Disgraceful performance: Behaving like maiden forsaken at altar. Atavistic. No justification.

Terry endured in relative silence, occasionally moving from one shoulder to other, shifting weight, intermittently shrugging to settle feathers. Comments limited to single low whistle when we entered obviously vacant premises, occasional “How ‘bout that” as time passed. No doubt embarrassed for me.

Wait. No justification?

Correction, please: Atavistic, true, but partially justified. . . .

Justified.

Entirely justified.

Justi-damn-fied all to pieces!

Why not upset? Months of hopes, anticipations, expections; long, hard trip—for nothing! Nary a clue—not even faintest hint remains to suggest destination, whereabouts.

Some superman . . .! Inconceivable could go off without leaving note—self-respecting five-year-old human would expect me on doorstep eventually (if alive), leave forwarding address.

But perhaps being too harsh. . . . Should take comfort instead from apparent discovery that certain fundamental behavioral principles transcend interspecies gulf; continue unchanged, intact, eternal; intrinsic to new race as was old. Datum no doubt scientifically fascinating in own right; of great satisfaction to researcher. But frankly, until now never troubled head over whether new species might boast thoughtless, self-centered, imbecilic male twits!

Oh, dear. Just look—ink hardly dry following wallow through well-intentioned (if debatable) solicitude for plight of hypothetical NonScheduled Reader (NSR) and already hip-deep in tirade comprehensible only to proper audience. So sorry; will try to do better. Really.

By now NSR probably wondering what H. post hominem might be. Or Tarzan File. Or perhaps who Peter Bell is. Or Teacher. Or Terry. Or (at very least) me.

All right. Fair questions; deserve straight answers. So shall endeavor to bear in mind possible audience other than intended: Fellow survivor, perhaps—but demonstratedly better at it—someone lacking vantage of orderly progression from Vol. I (left in shelter library beneath address on cover, Index No. 1.1.1).[*] Viewed in that light, however reluctantly, introductions are in order:

Name: Candidia Maria Smith-Foster. (Note: Nothing “sinister” about “bar”; used here proudly to honor adoptive parents together with kin.) Born eleven years ago to Smiths; orphaned ten months later; adopted by Dr. and Mrs. Foster—Daddy and Momma. Been known as Candy since first breath.

Beyond that (briefly): Homo post hominem is new species; originating during great influenza pandemic of 1918-19 through viral recombination of unborns’ genes; apparently immune to all “human” disease, plus smarter, stronger, faster, etc.; discovered accidentally by researchers headed by Teacher (next-door neighbor, genius), aided by Daddy, while hunting for clues identifying genius-level children as newborns; emerging to inherit Earth after H. sapiens eliminated selves in short, efficient bionuclear war. Tarzan File Teacher’s record of said research; identifying, profiling, locating all known hominems. Peter Bell H. post hominem associated with Teacher’s research project; closest of project hominems to own age; best prospect of lot for future soulmate, according to matchmaking Teacher in letter constituting Last Words. Terry is own adopted twin brother (full name Terry D. Foster—initial stands for Dactyll); identical but for mental retardation and being Hyacinthine Macaw. Am myself Homo post hominem. Rode out war in Daddy’s marvelous shelter; now engaged in walkabout, searching for fellow survivors. Of which reader must be one.

There. Clear enough?

No? Complaints—from NSR? Too brief? More confused now than before explanation?

Some nerve! If reader truly nonscheduled, then writer almost certainly dead . . .!

Wait, please don’t sulk; surely can’t expect sympathy from corpse—should be grateful for simple courtesy. . . . True, could repeat entire background each time begin new journal—of course, volumes soon rival Tarzan File’s bulk even before commencing new entries. But then why bother writing Vol. 1 in first place? So shan’t; have better things to do.

Now: Tarzan File lists names, addresses of all AA, known AB hominems. But specifically, Teacher referred me to Peter Bell—AA superkid, smart as me (intimated might be smarter; hurled gauntlet to prove him wrong). Had told him about me, too. Suggested I get in touch.

Now, current scope of interest in “future soulmate” limited to practical matters: food, shelter, protection, survival—short-term essential stuff; deferring obvious racial continuity issue until puberty, completion of glandular development, make pertinent. (And probably unavoidable—have no valid basis to doubt will be just as tiresomely boy-crazy, once plumbing commences normal function, as next ingénue. But can hope.)

However, long experience (relativistic expression, of course, considering modest life span thus far) amply justifies habit of equating Teacher’s least hint with Revelation From On High. Certainly adequate incentive to make attempt. Phone system still functioning in many portions of country (according to aural evidence: Ring tone obtainable using most area codes, random numbers); so tried number listed in Tarzan File.

No luck. True, answering machine camped on line picked up phone, spouted message for me; but Peter never returned calls.

For two and a half months!

(Oversensitive soul might; by this time, ponder reciprocity of interest. Might even [given modest encouragement] contemplate feeling neglected, unattractive; launch into spate of mouthwash, deodorant changes; file teeth, fluff nails, polish hair, etc.)

Nonsense, of course. Endless possible explanations: Defective answering machine, talking but not recording; phone system itself finally disintegrating (not unreasonably: six months without maintenance—even in system based on hydroelectric power, with computerized call routing automatically diverting calls around trouble spots, time must come when trouble spots constitute norm, system collapses). Perhaps, too—certainly equally likely—Peter simply not home, for own good purposes. No more reason now to wallow in morbid speculation than during months since initial contact attempt frustrated.

Though, granted, too busy then to spare attention for proper moping. Not easy, in only two and a half months, to locate suitable farm convenient to Daddy’s house (and shelter treasures beneath); catch up all chores necessary to improve chances that livestock, structures survive Wisconsin winter’s ravages.

Nor did trip from Dairy State heartland to Peter’s Cornell campus (New York State) residence provide much time to reflect unsettling possibilities, generally inequitable nature of life. Physical fragility of human civilization becoming evident after only six months’ neglect: Road system in sorry state, getting rapidly worse. Trees down here, there; poles broken, lines draped elegantly in inconvenient places; surprising numbers of washed-out culverts, impassable bridges.

Four-wheel-drive Chevy van wonderfully capable, easy to drive—with lifts on pedals to accommodate own modest stature. High ground clearance, awesome traction make easy work of marginal terrain. Solved many blockages simply by driving around—through fences; across fields, small streams; up hill, down dale, etc.—but spent fully as much time on shanks’ mare, cutting, prying, winching, digging, etc., as driving. (Educational travel mode: Really get “feel” for countryside—feel it under nails, in shoes, tangled in hair, embedded in clothing. . . .)

Well, journal commencement, however belated, yielding usual result: Hurt, rage, disappointment discharged on paper; blood pressure lowered, practical state of mind restored along with perspective: Crying over spilled milk null exercise; benefits neither spiller nor spillee.

Okay. So Peter Bell not here. Elsewhere. Gone. Now what?

Prime objective obviously unaffected; unchanged from very first day we stuck nose outside shelter following expiration of predicted maximum contagion factor after World Ended: Find somebody else.

Somebody smarter, bigger, stronger; with broad shoulders, laughing eyes, windblown blond hair; font of wisdom concerning all aspects of establishing bright new civilizations for fun and profit. (Be nice, too, if knows location of Yellow Brick Road.)

But Teacher’s statistics project only 150,000 hominems on North American continent. (Entire continent-8,795,052 square miles [National Geographic World Atlas figures].) Another perspective, same problem: 58.63 square miles per person.

One solution: Rule off continent graph-paper style, in squares 7.6575 miles per side; pick square at random; stand at center; yell through bullhorn. Then repeat—150,000 times.

However viewed, awful lot of elbow room. Population spread terribly thin. Accidental meeting probability effectively zilch—which fact may, upon reflection, be disguised blessing. . . .

Don’t really want to meet ABs; not until securely ensconced within bosom of AA community. Hate to sound prejudiced, but am; can’t forget Teacher’s opinion that majority laboring under some form of emotional problem, high percentage downright pathological. Not unreasonable, then, to assume every contact but AAs, absent convincing evidence to contrary, possibly hauling unsecured payload—potentially dangerous.

Which revives burning issue: Peter Bell not here; no hint of how long gone, where to. May even be dead—from available data; likely as not. Speculation pointless.

But I’m alive. Very much so. Firmly resolved to maintain trend. Ergo, logical next step: Pick another AA from File. Doesn’t matter which; only Peter Bell personally recommended, described. Others only represented by impersonal File entries. Okay, but faceless.

However, close to 100 AAs recorded, scattered all over U.S. No assurance any address still valid and random visits could take forever, or longer. Only reasonable procedure: Plot locations on map; lay out most efficient meander touching all bases, shortest time, distance—reserving, of course, right to fly off on wild tangent should events offer even most tenuous clue.

Intend just that. Tomorrow morning, though; not now. Tired. Disappointed. Probably still vexed, too, if had energy. Even Terry subdued—for him. Perhaps senses mood. Perhaps just bad day: too long, too many expectations. Too much letdown.

Never mind. Tomorrow is another day—Pollyanna lives . . .!

Good morning, Posterity! Night’s sound sleep; huge, well-balanced, delicious breakfast (prepared by gourmet chef, with—or despite—intensive assistance of manic twin [laughing hugely, grabbing at everything in sight]) produced usual result: Energy, optimism restored—along with independence:

Who needs Peter Bell . . .!

Plenty of fish in sea; Tarzan File full of alternatives—or failing that, might well be more fun to go out, locate, stalk, capture indigenous AB buck in native habitat; then housebreak, domesticate, teach rudiments of coherent thought, civilized speech. Why not? Might work. (And if not, gently separate cervical vertebrae [to discourage kiss-and-tell; wouldn’t want to acquire “reputation”], throw back, try again.)

True, simpler to find AAs, settle again into secure little-girl/student rôle; allow others to make important decisions, feed, clothe, house, protect. (Sometimes wearisome, being master of own destiny. Worse than being genius. Lonely, too. Need hug.)

Enough! Used up whole year’s sniveling ration yesterday. Brace up chin! Square off shoulders! Forward ho!

So this morning, following breakfast, scrounged campus (carrying crowbar, sledge hammer; implements intrinsic, these days, to serious pursuit of scrounging trade); located large-scale U.S. map, plotted AA locations, connected with straight lines.

And discovered predictable trend: All grouped about top-line schools, leading research centers. Harvard, M.I.T., Johns Hopkins, etc., on East Coast. UCLA, U. of California (Davis), etc., on West. Kansas State U., U. of Minnesota, U. of Colorado, U. of Illinois, U. of Chicago, etc., etc., about Midwest. Plus AEC, NASA, JPL facilities all over country. Appears nation’s recent progress muchly traceable to AAs. (Hope didn’t also figure in downfall.)

Okay. So much for short-term strategy: Hunt proceeds hence by-the-numbers.

But what about long-term? Good point. What if, at last, search comes up dry? As might. . . .

Indeed—what if . . .? Not most comfortable premise for dyed-in-wool Pollyanna to contemplate, but valid. Every coin has two sides. Rankest stupidity to ignore possibility might lose toss; fail to plan for exigencies lurking on dark side.

Very well. Reflecting as pessimist, grimly: Wise to leave notes all over, wherever might stop, pass through, visit; where other survivors (of whatever stripe) might find. True, probably—certainly—come to attention of itinerant ABs. Can’t be helped.

But so what? Candy Smith-Foster, youngest-ever wearer of Sixth Degree Black Belt, uneasy at prospect of meeting strangers? Even potentially dangerous strangers? Yes. (But pretty potentially dangerous own self; harbor no genuine doubts about ability to cope with aberrant behavior as necessary. Will reach peaceful understanding, accommodation with fellow survivors; will live in altruistic, gentle harmony with neighbors, whomever may be, whatever background. Or else.)

College utilities still working; administration building well stocked with modern communications media marvels: electric typewriters, photocopiers, etc. Convenient opportunity; shall take advantage, spend next few days here; compose most utterly bare-bones, boiled-down condensation possible: message to leave about countryside during travels.

Content giving pause. Should identify self—but within limits. (No point, for instance, mentioning age, sex, dimensions. Teacher’s caution firmly in mind; well aware that whatever response in numbers, substantial percentage bound to be maladjusted. No point slanting advertising toward weirdos.) Should describe resources, advantages of hometown area, farms (omitting shelter mention; my little secret for now, until familiar with recruitees, confident of intentions). Must include invitation to visit, partake in mutual deliberation over whether acceptance into community advantageous both ways.

Have also concluded, after initial hesitation, message must contain explanation of H. sapiens/post hominem situation, etc. Facts, evidence clearly documented; Teacher’s conclusion unaffected by scoffers—but doubt will care much for neighbors lacking minds sufficiently open to appreciate data, understand implications, and (most of all) accept necessity of next step:

Central industry in my community to be AA-type upbringing, education of children (to degree possible in ruined world). All else secondary, supportive. No compulsion, pressure; volunteers only. But dissenters need not apply. Big world; can live elsewhere.

Granted, noble resolve most conveniently parallels own selfish desires (so much to learn!); but if Dark Ages follow collapse of H. sapiens’ civilization, won’t be my fault.

There! Not so tough: Mere three days’ full-time, unremitting labor—writing, rewriting, trimming, condensing, paring, slashing, distilling, rooting out, re-rewriting, etc., etc.—and leaflet complete.

Masterpiece of brevity: single page (legal size, double-sided; uniform 1/10-inch margins top, bottom, left, right; 15-pitch type) says everything necessary in only 5,768 well-chosen words—plus metaphoric extra thousand implied by tiny map sketched at end.

Initial small stock produced on nifty both-sides-at-once Xerox. (Wonderful machine; some benefits of old civilization must be saved-for Posterity—10,000 copies, three hours!)

Shall affix to doors of food, hardware, sporting goods, clothing stores, etc., as ride along. Pass hundreds every day; been taking local roads rather than interstates. (Esthetic choice; admittedly not logical: Interstates doubtless better condition, easier driving; but somehow lonelier [said wasn’t logical], more depressing.)

Not terribly original plan, but I forage constantly, almost daily; reasonable inference holds other survivors do likewise. And certainly have generally similar needs, “shop” same places.

Final analysis—becomes question of numbers: Post enough leaflets, bound to catch eye. Somebody’s eye. Someplace. Sometime. Probably.

Tomorrow leave for Boston. Harvard-M.I.T. area, home for five AAs: Herman Smith, Mario Ling, Gayle Kinnart, Theron Parker, Rex Hollister.

Parker, Ling, Smith deeply involved (according to File) in project combining M.I.T.‘s space research center, computer center, nuclear reactor, magnetics lab; Harvard’s medical school, biochemical facility, seismographic station. Wouldn’t discuss objective, but spin-off breakthroughs, inventions, products so numerous, administration declined to push it.

Hollister working at Harvard only, but at medical research, anthropology, biophysics, geology, political theory.

Kinnart’s Ph.D.‘s in nuclear physics, oceanography, computer science, meteorology, astronautics. Worked when, where, with whom, on what she chose. Taught, researched, invented at will. Delighted in shaking up Establishment’s institutions, the crustier the better; C.L.E.P.ed Juris Doctor in spare time, over organized opposition of Bar (disapproved failure to utilize proper law-school channels). Sued pro se, won, obtained J.D. by Supreme Court decree. Also holds Seventh Degree Black Belt. (If consciously, actively seeking role model, girl could do lots worse—hope-she likes me.)

Enough woolgathering. To bed now. Far to go tomorrow; much to do.

But calmly, coolly; optimistically but with caution, discipline. No more paralytic disappointment, hysteria, tears—no matter what. If trail proves cold, will play hand as dealt: Study facts as materialize; proceed logically, efficiently as indicated.

But can hope. . . .

Silly me. To think, really expected to make Boston in single day (seemed reasonable goal while studying map: only 275 miles, straight-line distance).

But not crow, not flying. Driving. Slowly, cautiously. Through heavily wooded, very hilly (almost mountainous) terrain; numerous small towns, villages; over narrow, winding, bumpity road obviously surveyed, installed by larcenous paving contractor whose sole ambition (well and truly realized) was smothering in concrete most expensive distance between any two points.

Together with previously observed uniform deterioration of highway system, conditions generally less than ideal for rapid transit: Downed trees, abandoned vehicles, landslides, etc., do little to speed progress.

Then final unexpected barrier: Hudson River. Not anticipated as problem; maps show bridges all up-, downstream.

True, are many bridges; however, those encountered thus far quite impassable: Some blocked by horrendous traffic jams; some visibly unsafe, spans sagging, etc.; some actually collapsed, lying in, under water. Several boast combinations of all of above. (Prefer not to think what must have been like when refugee-laden bridges, loaded beyond designers’ worst nightmares, came down.)

Camping tonight on romantic west bank, at lush forest’s edge, under clear star-studded, moonlit sky. Doubtless be more favorably impressed if conducting appraisal from other side.

Tomorrow will head south along river. Bridge frequency increases as approach New York City. Bound to get across sooner, later.

Delete previous pearl of wisdom. Written by idiot, without consideration of facts, human nature. Indeed, bridges more frequent to south. Also bigger, wider, more capacious. However, increased population more than made up difference.

Drove south all the way to Newark, Verrazano Narrows Bridge to Brooklyn. All blocked, damaged, or both.

Jams on surviving spans exceed belief. Example (not worst): Faced with immovable crush of vehicles parked on George Washington Bridge, obsessed beyond reason, control, someone elected to leave Manhattan—in large bulldozer, over top. And so tightly packed together were cars in path that most occupants unable to open doors, squeeze through windows, etc., flee in time. Predictably dreadful results. (But someone coped: Operator, crawler both dead; stopped halfway across, perched like giant carnivore on mashed vehicles beneath.)

Camping again tonight on romantic west bank of Hudson River, same place as night before last—same lush forest, under same clear, star-studded, moonlit sky, etc.

(Bah . . .!)

Tomorrow will head north along river. Population density decreases considerably that direction. Bound to get across sooner, later. Or drive around damned thing.

Murphy would have snickered, said, “. . . told you so.” And been right: Very first bridge north of where quit exploring, three days before, stood wide open, unobstructed, safe.

Crossed without incident; continued through New York State, into Vermont, east-southeast across Appalachian Mountain spine into Massachusetts—into more bridge trouble: Connecticut River.

Pretty stream. But wide, impassable due to bridge damage. Lots of bridges, lots of damage. Appears to have been heavy flooding earlier: Barges flung about like toys; presence of bridge supports in paths presented little hindrance.

None daunted but wiser now, headed north immediately, upstream. Mere 150 miles sufficed to bring us to intact span.

Across and flushed with confidence, headed again southeast—toward Boston, with no potential geographical obstacles visible ahead on map.

Be there by noon tomorrow, barring untowardnesses. (And not getting excited. Waiting to see what lies ahead. Calmly, coolly, objectively.)

Nothing lies ahead! Or sits, stands, hops, skips, jumps. And getting mighty fed up with whole business.

Once is nothing more than random incident, dice cast, crumbled cookie, flopped mop. Twice probably coincidence, without statistical significance; no doubt concerning to pessimist, but not alarming to rational intellect. Three times could still be coincidence, but scary coincidence; probability laws bent way out of shape.

Four times is trend. No doubt about it; worry is appropriate response.

And six times—conclusive. Utterly so.

Nobody home. Again. All signs point to orderly move-out. Again. No clues suggesting possible destination, whereabouts. Again!

Performed most thorough going-through of homes, offices, labs of all five M.I.T.-Harvard-area AAs. Turned up nothing. Simply vanished. Carefully, efficiently, without loose ends.

AGAIN!

Kinnart’s house first stop; then office. Scene at house duplicated Peter Bell’s; office equally barren: Everything personal, if even faintly portable, gone. Results at Smith’s, Ling’s, Parker’s, Hollister’s similar, equally dismaying. No affirmative data; all evidence negative, inferential, based on what not found.

Returned to Kinnart’s house for night. Lovely place: Even stripped of personal touches, still homey; retains comfortably feminine ambience.

Great relief after weeks of living in van, sleeping on bunk, cooking with charcoal, Sterno. Electric power out, but gas, water still work. Easy enough to run extension cord in for evening’s lighting.

Decision to spend night under civilized roof met twin’s approval. Loves travel, but bon vivant at heart; wallows in luxury at every opportunity (believes anything worth doing worth overdoing). And apparently concluded time ripe for good wallow: Hurled self into project with glee (mere fraction of which, publicly displayed in times past, sure to result in involuntary hospitalization). Participation included: assisting carrying tee stand in from van (me carrying; manic sibling gripping crossbar with toes, wings flapping at max); unpacking food (container-opening one of brother’s pettest passions—problem arises confining enthusiasm to appropriate time, place, object); setting table (loves this part: Waddles joyously about tabletop, seizing plates, utensils—anything not nailed down—laboriously carries/drags to edge; surreptitiously peeks around to see if observed yet; then heaves over side, watching fall, bobbing head, chortling under breath as impact occurs—then back for more).

In especially rare mood today; having wonderful time: talking, warbling like trained chainsaw, assisting until seemed must be three of him. Finally became necessary—to retain own sanity—to banish him to stand, order him, “Stay!”

Feelings unruffled by rebuff, of course. Within moments had discovered refrigerator handle within reach. While doing sideways chin-ups, indicated continuing willingness—nay, eagerness—to help clear table. Before meal was over.

Had turned on gas first thing on arrival, lit water heater. Have put clean sheets on firmest bed in house. Looking forward to indescribable pleasure of hot shower, followed by best night’s sleep in weeks.

Looking forward intensely—helps keep mind off AAs’ disappearance. Impossible six people could vanish so utterly, without any clue.

Well, perhaps morning will bring inspiration: Maybe subconscious noticed something so-called “conscious” missed while worrying.

Good night.

Eureka! (Sort of.)

Upon waking this morning, realized search not thorough as should have been. Oh, thorough enough regarding not missing single drawer, looking under beds, examining every inch—but was looking for things; paying no attention to what might be missing. Stated in yesterday’s entry, “. . . all evidence negative, inferential, based on what not found.” But made no effort to determine what not found; haven’t inferred worth darn.

So following breakfast (found old-fashioned campfire waffle iron in basement; works equally well on kitchen gas range—results wonderful with maple syrup after so long); adjourned back to Kinnart’s office; conducted repeat search, this time with eyes, perception, mind open. And learned:

Remaining lab contents limited to stock equipment, scientific goodies available anywhere. Nothing visible appropriate to work of most brilliant researcher in five (un?)related fields. Vacant table space suggests missing equipment, but not much. And no clues as to what.

However, one artifact obvious by absence—her First Microscope. (Every student scientist and/or doctor receives as gift or purchases in school a First Microscope. Sometimes powerful, sophisticated instrument; sometimes Woolworth’s Student Special—but always treasured for life; always prominent in office, whether used or not.) Absence significant.

But not as glaring as lack of any scrap of work notes, memoranda, programs, floppy disks, photographs, printouts, results—in short: irreplaceable stuff, without which any research reverts back to square one.

Went back then; reinspected homes, offices of other four Boston-area AAs; confirmed similar conditions. Physical gear remaining wondrously varied but limited to catalog stock; nothing custom-made, no records. And no First Microscopes!

So much for available facts; now for inferences: Left, probably as group; went somewhere already physically equipped to continue studies, taking more specialized, irreplaceable tools, notes, records,. etc.

(Granted, premise requires quantum leap past logic; but given reasonable parallel between their thinking and mine—assuming also work in progress [and opportunity]—only tenable conclusion.)

Besides, was necessary: Had, while ruminating, forgotten Armageddon side effects. No possibility hominems, with olfactory sensitivities far transcending H. sapiens’, could have remained in population-dense Boston area during months immediately following species’ end. Or any large, heavily peopled area. Own experience in tiny Wisconsin hometown proof enough: Had not spent first three months sealed in shelter, breathing own recycled air, would have been driven away.

So—again—what now? Conclusions interesting, probably valid—almost certainly valid. Also, in practical terms, next to useless. Even were conclusions confirmed—all Tarzan File AA addresses in fact obsolete—so what? Who cares? Equally pointless is speculation over why gone. Ringing question is where!

Without some hint—positive data, not accumulation of negatives—search deteriorates to pure exploration. Futile on face of it; continent simply too big for random poking about. Too much area; too few targets—and even methodical search won’t improve odds. Not really. AAs might well move into section just covered, remain undiscovered forever.

Besides, what (beyond wishful myopia) limits scope of search to North America? Whole planet now available (excepting only several extremely radioactive areas in Asia, where [according to Daddy’s secret papers] U.S.‘s displeasure over attack most intensely expressed). Surprising if AAs failed to capitalize on all available resources, natural or man-made, wherever extant, to found, secure, develop community from which to gather, store, preserve, ultimately extend knowledge base accumulated during H. sapiens’ sway on Earth.

Hmm. . . . Uninformed observer might suspect pattern developing here: Seems every time central question (“What now?”) crops up, somehow vanishes again beneath welter of irrelevant detail, philosophy, speculation.

Goodness. . . . Candy Smith-Foster subconsciously refusing to face facts? Perhaps because answers unpalatable?)

Nonsense! Nothing subconscious about it. Plain as day: scared to death. And with best of reasons: answers stink!

Consider remaining options: One, can assume—not unreasonably after six consecutive strikeouts—Tarzan File truly dead end; set off blindly into wilderness, playing entirely by ear; distributing leaflets widely, collecting ABs catch-ascan, if at all.

Or, two, ignore six-ply coincidence; play out hand as dealt by Tarzan File, follow through to conclusion; not so much expecting dramatic results as sticking to scientific method, ensuring resultant fine-tooth examination of homes, offices overlooks not least clue suggesting whereabouts.

Then set off blindly into wilderness.

Or silly-season stuff, among which least harebrained notions include: Acquiring necessary knowledge (not impossible, considering formidable reading speed, comprehension/retention level); constructing, activating powerful omniband radio station; broadcasting endless worldwide appeal for company.

Or how about skywriting? Attention-getting, certainly; and effective each time over huge chunks of geography. Given H. post hominem mind, reflexes (far quicker, better integrated than predecessors’), how difficult can be to learn aircraft operation basics? Memorize book, absorb theory; then apply practical. (Shucks, Wrights only human, managed without theory)

Probably neither truly silly-season ideas. Farfetched, yes. But not totally beyond pale, given sufficient impetus (i.e., desperation—cornered rat apt to try anything).

No, not really silly—silly is debating whether might be possible very quickly to breed special strain of mosquito (limited to drinking hominem blood); securing very small notes to very tiny collars, sending out to spread word.

Now, that’s silly. . . .

And demonstrates lengths will go to avoid facing “What now” question. Not that have any real choice: Big world; only information even potentially helpful is Tarzan File, whether current or not. Must be verified, unto bitter end if necessary. As well might be.

So. Six down, 93 to go. Next stop: Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University; Barbara, James, Frederick Harper. No, not related—family: Idyllic ménage à trois of several years’ standing. Harpers, according to file, enjoyed benefits, protections of marriage laws, without violating them but without common-law togetherness risks, by simply cohabitating; defining responsibilities toward one another, to heirs, regarding assets, etc., by forming corporation, incorporating into bylaws useful provisions from marital, probate law. Reported very happy. Perhaps all three being doctors, dovetailed specialties, helps.

Discovery piqued curiosity. Checked further through File. And learned plural living arrangements not uncommon amongst AAs: Fully one-third involved in family units of more than two. Largest such encompasses five.

Intriguing. But not sure my cup of tea. Earliest memories pervaded with gently intense love emanating from, between, all around Daddy, Momma Foster. Couldn’t have spent formative years basking in glow always surrounding, enveloping them, anyone near them, without being imprinted to some extent with bias toward general wonderfulness of twosome life—joy of being single most important thing in life of Someone Wonderful.

Certainly hope Harpers home. Apart from obvious, interested in observing daily workings of family life; see whether they glow together. (If so, at what intensity in which combinations.)

Off tomorrow to Baltimore—or perhaps “toward” more realistic preposition: Though only 427 miles, according to map, know about map distances now (been through that before, haven’t we). So don’t expect to make it in single day. Or even two, three.

For one thing, must retrace path around much of Connecticut, Hudson rivers—doubles distance right there. Additionally, frequent stops to post leaflets in promising locations takes time. Finally, map shows two additional major rivers between here, there (Delaware, Susquehanna); both so convenient to large populations, almost certain downstream bridges useless.

Can’t take less than week. Maybe two.

If possible at all—for very different reason: While hasn’t been hint of residual radiation heretofore, Baltimore very close to Washington. Capital one of few targets across land scheduled for broken windows: According to Daddy’s secret papers, favored with many direct hits. Quite conceivable D.C. area still hot. Equally probable, Baltimore unsafe as well.

Been testing ambient background radiation periodically with geiger counter from shelter (recent design: lightweight, quite sophisticated [nine-tenths of capabilities completely over head]). Will step up checking frequency as approach Baltimore area.

Bedtime again—after another deliciously hot shower. Then to that firm, cool bed.

Tomorrow beckons. . . .

Yes, Posterity, derelict again—sorry. Trying to do better, really. Sometimes difficult to muster energy. But trust me: Missed nothing through failure to enter daily progress from Boston on regular basis. Omissions, if any, not substantive in nature—events not substantive; absence from history books not world-shaking.

Because mostly dull. Indescribably so. Hundreds of miles. Some on roads, some not. Thoroughfare varied from expressways to pasturelands; passability from utterly not to unobstructed. Myriad get-out-and-copes. Engaged four-wheel-drive lots. Cleared path with winch frequently. Doubled back often.

First break in routine came while working southward through rural portion of Pennsylvania, apparently egg-farming region. Accidentally rediscovered old source of fresh meat: Hit chicken. Happily, not going very fast; killed cleanly with bumper instead of mashing flat with tire. Stopped, cleaned immediately; roasted over charcoal for early dinner.

Delicious—thought so myself—but Terry transported beyond ecstasy: Waded in with gusto; split, pulverized bones; cleaned out every scrap of marrow, gristle. Long time since last chicken dinner; poor baby probably in throes of withdrawal.

Experience profitable long-term as well as short. That night switch clicked in brain, disturbing sleep. Old switch. Primitive circuit.

Found self suddenly awake, staring into darkness. Pictured clearly in mind’s eye was tee shirt seen on tourist several years back: cartoon of hungry vulture glaring down from tree branch, muttering, “Patience, hell—I’m going to go kill something . . .!”

H. sapiens not scavenger. Was, in fact, puny physique notwithstanding, deadliest predator on planet. Any reason for successor to be less forthright about satisfying appetite? Moral issue, perhaps? Should H. post hominem be vegetarian, as philosophical principle?

No . . .! Nothing philosophical about vitamin deficiency, creeping malnutrition. Granted, probably entirely possible for hard-working, full-time agrarian to raise sufficiently diverse crop to constitute balanced meatless diet. But for explorer, nomad, simply not practical.

So next day, again feeling carnivorous (anticipating brother’s vote if asked), stopped van, caught chicken in footrace. Issue considerably in doubt at first. Prey ran to, fro, dodged about squawking. Wondered for time if might have to resort to gun.

But finally zigged when smart money all on zag; fell victim to feral pounce to gladden heart of primalest hungry raptor ever admitted to guild—which, in fact, by then apt self-description (though neither growled during chase nor stood with foot on kill afterward, beating chest, screaming mangani victory cry).

Dinner that night especially tasty. Perhaps calories expended in pursuit honed appetite; perhaps enjoyment on more atavistic level. Hard to say—and don’t much care: If reverting, will enjoy it.

Began edging westward to flank Delaware River while still far enough north that detour of little consequence. Finding passable bridge never became issue.

But same not true of Susquehanna; another matter entirely: long, extending far northwest, very wide. Bridges encountered during initial exploration all collapsed. Began to think might have to circumnavigate after all. Until came to railroad trestle.

Stopped van abruptly. Stared. Deliberated at length, with distaste. Reconnoitered on foot, all the way across. Took careful measurements.

Yes, was possible—probably not even actually dangerous. But uncomfortable notion: Span between tread centers and track separation identical; giant mud/snow flotation tires fully 15 inches across tread face, providing perhaps four inches’ grace either way before risk mounted. And even if did allow vehicle to slip off rails, wooden ties sufficiently closely spaced to permit crossing completion by bump-bump-bump method, assuming care, deliberate progress.

(Rather not slip off rails, though, thank you. True, walked entire span; inspected structure for apparent faults. But layperson; key word is “apparent”: Not versed, personally, in abstruse skills required to determine at single glance which tie sound, which rotten. And cantilever loading provides severest test of strongest member; little doubt that bump-bump-bumping whole way across surefire system for substandard tie detection. Quick, positive detection.)

However, longer debated matter, less attractive became alternative. Judging by map, dearth of bridges upstream, mountainous contours of land, can’t-get-there-from-here character of roads, less appealing became prospect of driving around Susquehanna. Looking at thousand miles at minimum; probably more, considering present-day road conditions. Did not care to spend another two weeks getting past dumb river.

Therefore backtracked to last small town. Located hardware store; scrounged to good effect, assembling components necessary for Rube Goldberg device intrinsic to rash solution: Mirror, mounted out at end of tripodish boom secured to front end of roof rack, both ends of bumper; with control rod permitting accurate positioning from driver’s seat—lash-up enabling direct observation of front tires’ actual ground-to-tread contact point, removing seat-of-pants element from precision driving required to remain on tracks.

With mirror boom in place, control rod tested, working properly, next step was getting van perched on tracks. Accomplished well back from trestle, on solid right-of-way.

Front wheels easy; went where pointed. Mostly. Were, of course, encountering rails at fairly acute angle. With four-wheel-drive engaged, transmission in first gear, transfer box in low-low, released brake, eased out clutch, crept forward inch by inch. Right front wheel climbed first rail effortlessly, dropping to roadbed between tracks. Double contact next; doubled weight also—and doubled resistance, as smooth steel/rubber coefficient attempted to hoist weight of van’s entire front end. Progress first limited to sideways, tires glancing off rails’ shoulders, sliding along tracks without mounting. But finally corners of big mud/snow treads caught, drew front end upward. Moments later, following careful steering adjustments, front tires centered on rails.

Rears another matter, however: Right rear stubbornly dragged against left track for 30 feet before bumping up, over onto roadbed between rails. Then for good hundred feet both rears clawed ineffectually, unable to gain purchase.

Finally, with bare hundred yards remaining before commencing trestle ascent, gave up. Set brake, exited. Employed shovel to pile up small gravel ramp against rail ahead of each rear tire. Primitive solution (employing engineering principles well regarded .in Pharaoh’s day) but serviceable: Five feet beyond, all four wheels poised neatly on rails.

Astonishing, after all that effort, how quickly enthusiasm for project (product of own cleverness) waned:

Ten feet out on span, to be precise. Just far enough for hitherto-unnoticed breeze, unimpeded now by aught but trestle’s cobweb structure, to seize ample sail area presented by van’s slab sides and nudge. Gently but perceptibly.

(In retrospect, doubt actual chassis movement [limited, of course, to slight suspension yield, tire sidewall squirm] exceeded quarter inch in any direction. Then, however, felt like major tectonic adjustment.)

Was suddenly conscious how very different trestle had looked from on foot: wider, solider, much more secure.

And wooden ties projecting from under tracks on either side appeared shorter now when viewed through windshield from driver’s seat, with river as background beyond, below—far below. Tie ends not visible, for instance, through side windows—nothing visible through side windows. Except distant ground, river.

Noticed van had stopped. Wondered briefly if due to wind also, until discovered (looking past white-knuckled hands gripping steering wheel) both feet apparently trying to push brake pedal through floorboard. Had forgotten clutch; engine dead.

(Probably just as well. With engine dead, could not yield to rash impulses: Could not attempt to back up. Mirror not placed to permit observation of exact rear-tire/rail relationship, nor could envision any practical means of doing so. Further, geometry inherent in reverse steering precluded making attempt to regain solid ground astern: Small angular changes at rear are product of large lateral displacements at front. Would have led to immediate bump-bump-bumping. Or worse.)

Became aware was perspiring all over. Felt spontaneous aching sensation in soles of feet, palms of hands. Eyes began to burn, tear. Noticed also mounting sense of suffocation.

Memory chose that moment to call up, play back lifelong accumulation of admonishments concerning Bridges, Premature Burning Of; Corners, Painting Oneself Into; Leaping Before Looking, etc. Cheeks grew hot; glad Teacher couldn’t see star pupil then, frozen at wheel amidst predicament created solely by own failure to consider all aspects of problem before charging in.

But wait—what if Teacher were watching . . .? From Above. Wouldn’t do to let him see funk continue. Momentary startlement probably barely excusable, considering circumstances, provided not carried beyond limits of good taste. If watching, Teacher would expect to see constructive signs of recovery soon. Or would look sorrowful; make entry in notebook.

(Said recovery no doubt expected to include movement of portions of completely paralyzed body—that would be hard part.)

With effort almost physical in character, managed to wrench gaze from river below. Turned perceptions inward, initiating code sequence leading to transcendental state. And reaped prompt dividends: Upon closing eyes, cause of optic discomfort immediately evident—probably hadn’t blinked for whole minutes! Likewise, shortness of breath alleviated by resumption of respiration. . . .

And as meditative discipline took hold, thought processes again began to acquire semblance of coherence; acted to clamp down, brake churning emotions, restore control. Heartbeat slowed, perspiration subsided.

Opened eyes; focused on point at which rail disappeared under tire. Noted was perfectly centered under tread. Directed attention to left hand. Tried three times before fingers unclenched from wheel, shifted grip to mirror control rod. Readjusted mirror to inspect other tire, rail. Also centered.

Okay. Everything. Under. Control.

Returned mirror to left tire, rail. Without angles to allow for, offered more direct observation, clearer perspective.

Returned left hand to wheel. Eased right hand’s grip to point where feeling returned to fingers; moved to ignition switch. Took longer to get left foot from brake pedal, depress clutch. Turning key required act of raw will.

After being clutch-killed, engine started raggedly, settling into lumpy, galloping idle as gas-soaked plugs shorted, fired, shorted again. Torque reaction, transmitted through engine mounts to chassis, produced motion almost as scary as wind.

Ignored it. Moved right foot from brake pedal; placed gently on accelerator. Eased clutch out (had never taken out of gear); applied hint of gas. Forward motion resumed.

Applied fraction more power. Small fraction. Proceeded deliberately. About two-thirds mile across trestle, but in no hurry. Plenty of time.

Quickly learned driving not that difficult:. Merely question of keeping eyes fixed on rail disappearing beneath tire tread; steering precisely to keep centered; ignoring van’s frequent wind-induced shrugs. (Ignoring also scenery and own position relative thereto.)

No, not difficult at all. But rather tense work. And as initial session dragged on, began to feel effects of prolonged concentration; decided might be wise to stop, take breather. Did so, looked around—discovered had come barely hundred yards!

No, wasn’t difficult. But took best part of three hours to complete crossing.

And when finally cleared trestle, solid ground under rails beneath all four wheels (waited until could confirm in rearview mirrors to ensure wasn’t being fooled by optical-mistic illusion; do something silly while rear end still overhung void), wasted no time turning sharply off tracks, bumping over rails, driving down embankment to level ground.

Stopped, got out; walked back to cliff edge, breathing hard. Suddenly rubbery legs seemed to suggest another time-out. Sat abruptly. And as stared out over valley, down at river, up at bridge, found was reviewing incident in detail: Had saved minimum of week’s travel; and barring ever-present potential for untoward development arising out of mechanical failure (and despite recurring apnea episodes during crossing), probably not inherently dangerous. Reflected at length, totaling pluses, minuses.

Finally concluded: stupidest damnfool stunt have ever pulled . . .! What was all-fired rush? So might have had to spend another week circling river. Or month, for that matter. So what . . .! Not as if on schedule . . . !

Mechanical-failure risk real; but only then, sitting at brink, contemplating vistas conquered, did practical implications sink in: What would have done had tire gone flat midspan? Or engine quit? Or steering come adrift . . .?

Sum of potential failure through which could have been stranded or pitched into space at least equals, probably exceeds, total number of parts of which van constructed. Madness to hazard position in which ten-cent part’s failure could cause other than fleeting botheration.

Now, loss of van not disaster per se; replacements endlessly available, one form or another. But inconvenient; much semi-irreplaceable equipment aboard. (To which considerations might be added inconvenience attendant to dropping self, Terry into river, some bunchteen dozen feet below.)

However, when scrutinized under gimlet microscope of hindsight, incident not entirely devoid of redeeming aspects (apart from obvious: Yes, am across that river). No question now: Been blundering along, gripped by curious form of mental myopia. Tight grip, too: Even when glimmer of sense raised head (in form of blithering panic ten feet from safety), never entered head to abort—set brake, seize Terry, abandon ship through rear doors.

Few bridges thus far encountered standing actually physically impassable—to pedestrian. But for blinder-mindedness regarding van, could have walked across, carrying gear; then picked new vehicle on far side. Certainly no dearth of replacements.

Sure, would take several trips to move whole inventory. Probably hard work. But quicker than driving around each river found sprawled across (And surely easier on nerves than emulating Wallendas.)

But, incredibly, was first time concept crossed mind, even as most fleeting of notions. (Curious behavior for certified genius—perhaps should just resign gracefully; avoid humiliation intrinsic to being found out, summarily drummed from corps.)

Okay! Was stupid—lesson learned. But water over dam; no benefit accrues from brooding over mistakes (besides, sackcloth itchy; ashes hard to shampoo from hair). On notice now—van expendable; shall keep fact in mind.

(But perhaps, in exercise of reasonable foresight, new policy implementation unnecessary. Ever. Because not truly fond of idea—not through fuzzy sentimentality, irrational attachment to inert mechanism; of course; practical considerations only: supremely capable on/off-road vehicle; quirks, limitations of which now second nature. Also capacious: lots of gear aboard, stowed neatly; everything in its place, readily at hand. Further, after pedal-lift installation, shift-lever extension, seat relocation, fits me—not insignificant factor from four-foot-ten-inch perspective. Besides, finally have galley in shape: cabinets, drawers organized; stove, oven properly broken in. Hate to go through that again.)

So van expendable, true. Fact now in mind. But “expendable” not synonymous with “consumable”: that fact in mind, too. Next question, please.

Which (from serious historian, student) must be: Did you find anyone, anything, in Baltimore?

Answer: Of course not. Yet—just got here. (Apart from happy discovery that, proximity to Washington notwithstanding, ambient radiation still reads within normal limits.)

Harpers not home; no surprise there. House displays usual signs (which have come to know, hate) of methodical move-out seen elsewhere. No clues immediately apparent; fine-tooth search must await morrow—been long day.

But first, another wallow in civilized decadence. Power out along much of East Coast, but Harpers’ house totally solar powered, plus has own deep well—utterly independent of local utilities. Flip switch, electricity restored. Water standing in system already hot from automatic convective functioning of calorie collector on roof; with electricity working again, pump stands ready to replenish water as used. In brief: Hot shower time again!

Which is practically first thing did upon investigating house. Supper preparation, consumption next; only then turned to present journal update. (Sorry, Posterity; itchy, smelly skin and empty belly come first.)

And delays aside, now appears have done duty: Noteworthy observations, activities memorialized. Time for evening’s revels to peak:

Three beds to choose from. Not difficult decision, though: King-size unsuitable (truly, have walked on marble floors with more resilience). Queen-size fitted with ten-inch foam mattress (into which unwary sleeper might sink beyond hope of rescue). Twin bed, however, is Just Right.

Good night, Posterity.

Goodness . . .! Hard to know where to begin. So much to relate, but must keep tight rein on impulses lest record become even less coherent than usual. Strictly, therefore, by chronology:

Arose well rested. Indulged in another long, hot shower. Prepared breakfast with usual hilarious difficulty; fending off, with effort, assistance intensively volunteered by jovially ravenous sibling (surely most trying aspect of relationship: Seems the earlier the hour, more unbearably cheerful becomes).

Performed usual half-hour kata to settle breakfast, loosen up musculature.

Thereafter went through house. Thoroughly. Negative-result pattern confirmed suspicions previously formed: Deliberate, preplanned exodus; whether prior to H. sapiens’ demise or immediately thereafter, unknown, immaterial. Lingering question still where.

Finished house examination; time to extend sweep to offices, general work environs. Packed, adjourned to van. Dug address list from Tarzan File, placed on dash next to wheel. Cleaned, refilled Terry’s water, seed dishes—

Of course bringing twin: Wouldn’t dream of leaving birdbrained innocent alone, unprotected. Besides, what if failed to return? Ever. Food, water soon run out. Consequences inevitable; details (how end arrives, how long takes) simply don’t bear thinking about! Yes, retarded brother’s constant companionship high in nuisance value (often downright maddening), but necessary to peace of mind.

Found city map at nearby drugstore, oriented self, located destination; set forth in general direction of Hopkins campus; specifically, doctors’ office park adjacent to teaching hospital.

Never got there.

Everything happened at once, in slow motion: One moment was driving west (had overshot, going first to Harpers’ home) down medium-wide downtown arterial (four lanes, no parking; high-rise buildings jutting from sidewalk edges to form concrete canyon), slowing to turn north at next corner. Next moment, just as moved wheel to begin turn, caught glimpse (same instant heard engine’s bellow, tires’ shrieking) of gold-trimmed, shiny black blur already entering intersection from north, turning east: Full-race Trans Am (wide wheels, tires; unmuffled chrome headers; heaven knows what else) flailing into corner almost sideways, on radius which, requiring entire width of both streets, terminated somewhere between own vehicle’s headlights.

No time for cleverness—instinctively stamped on brakes, threw hand up to brace Terry, stiffened other arm on steering wheel to brace me, gritted teeth, awaited outcome.

Trans Am driver did react, somehow: Sensed, rather than saw, front wheels twitch outward; heard engine’s thunder falter, almost gasp, then redouble. Hurtling vehicle’s sideways approach around corner abruptly changed radius, momentarily flattening curve, missing van’s left front corner by merest fraction of flinch.

Progress thereafter less clear: Observation limited to what could make out in mirrors.

Trans Am apparently completed slide around corner (and own frail self) by slapping right rear wheel into curb, with front wheels still pointed sharply to right. Sliced immediately across sidewalk into storefront.

Vehicle, building, both erupted in shower of fragments, dust, sudden plume of flame. Remnant of car ricocheted from impact cloud, spinning like dervish, shedding parts en route, to recross street. Smote that building tail first with horrendous thump, triggering yet another debris explosion, considerably more flame; from which emerged still spinning, appreciably smaller, still shedding parts, now gushing fire in earnest; recrossing street to crash again. And still again. And—oh, never mind.

Would be nice to report own reaction at this point cool, efficient, intelligent. Can’t. Wasn’t. Intellect momentarily shut down completely. Forgot existence of large, fully charged CO_2 extinguisher; forgot about Gel-Coat (flame-retardant, wet-chemical-soaked blanket with whose protection could have bathed in burning gasoline for five minutes without discomfort); forgot about Hurst gasoline-engine-hydraulic rescue equipment (capable of ripping open any door, shearing off roof posts, unpeeling vehicle crumpled like ball of foil to extract occupants); crowbar, sledge—all languishing in lockers in rear of van. Even forgot to set brake, shift transmission to neutral before taking action. (Didn’t matter; had killed engine again in heat of moment.)

Only knew had finally found somebody—possibly very last other soul on Earth—and might be dying before own disbelieving eyes.

Sprang from driver’s seat while accident still unwinding (seemed to take forever). Landed in dead run. Forced to hurdle several gasoline trails left burning as careening wreckage crossed, recrossed street between impacts.

Overtook accident at Trans Am’s ultimate resting place, half-buried in display window some hundred yards beyond van. Arrived as building-material cascade tapered off; rubble piling high on roof, hood, trunk, littering nearby pavement.

And since kamikaze slide’s final yards were backward, vehicle now resting on own gasoline track; flame pond spreading slowly about wreckage, storefront, as contents gurgled from ruptured fuel tank (rescue growing more complicated even as stood there, shielding face from heat [painful even at ten yards], squinting through inferno for glimpse of occupant).

But not last-desperate-second, screaming-crisis emergency; merely grim. No flames yet visible in interior; reasonable to assume passenger compartment intact (underneath, at least; topsides a mess: Glass gone, along with bumpers, fenders; front windshield posts both torn loose; roof at angle never contemplated by styling engineers).

Cooked occupant inevitable but not imminent; had time to secure from van equipment appropriate for crossing gasoline lake safely, forcing probably jammed door, extracting victim, retreating in good order.

(Never mind exploding gas tanks—exist only in fevered imaginations of sensation-oriented, irresponsible Hollywood screenwriters: Fire Marshal Hathaway [Daddy’s friend, neighbor; lived just down street] said so. Claimed endless fueling of myth fostered needless widespread explosion-fear. Marshal Hathaway considered filmmakers’ behavior quasi-criminal—certainly reckless negligence: Public saw so many crashes-followed-by-explosions on TV, in films, believed it; and more peoples’ injuries compounded when unprofessionally dragged from wrecked cars—burning or not—by Good Samaritans fearing explosions following accidents than recordable. Liquid gasoline doesn’t explode; only gasoline vapor, correctly mixed with oxygen, explodes—and only if ignition delayed until precise moment ideal mixture achieved. Burning cars don’t explode.)

None of which rambling bears on fact driver in fair way to roast if not gotten out promptly—gasoline fires hot!

Therefore steeled heart, clamped down emotions, blocked from mind distracting awareness of real stakes at issue; concentrated dispassionately on tactical evaluation, selected tools, commenced organized rescue effort . . .

Well, not exactly. (Mind still shut off.)

Took short run, dived headfirst. Passage through flames too brief for more than hint of real heat. Felt only momentary, intolerable ovenlike sensation; had barely time to be startled as breath sucked from lungs in reaction. More startling was incredible roar as flames licked at face, hair, clothing: From distance imperceptible; at heart of conflagration sounded like freight train.

Sailed through left front side window, fetching up in disarray on far side against door. Raised head to look around, discovered was gasping for breath: Already pretty warm inside.

Untangled limbs, crawled to driver—sprawled under dash. Examined gently as commensurate with haste, thoroughly as possible under conditions; determined no condition apparent taking precedence over fire: Bleeding from various lacerations ranged from inconsequential to serious, but no fracture grossly evident—though spine distinctly separate question, not determinable under present conditions. Would have to cross fingers.

(Of course qualified to render opinion: Fair-haired only baby girl of best doctor in whole world! Thoroughly, properly instructed in advanced first aid; more knowledgeable in emergency medicine than paramedic.)

Once assured rescue itself probably wouldn’t kill him (him?—HIM . . .!) turned attention to getting us out: Really getting hot in there.

Especially floorboard, now that had moment to notice; not ideal storage environment for victim while figuring out next step. Braced self, hauled limp body up one end at a time, dumped on seat.

Cast about interior for inspiration. At first found little cause for optimism. Then attention fixed on rear seat cushion: Ripped from moorings, lay skewed across interior, one end almost protruding from rear window. Recognized possible solution.

Tried left door. Not surprised when refused to budge. (But disappointed.) Didn’t bother with right door; solidly wedged against wall in which vehicle embedded.

Indulged in moment’s worry: Required little imagination to visualize consequences of attempting to push cushion through window, positioning to bridge pooled gasoline; climb through window dragging victim—amidst 20-foot-high flames . . .!

Options (few at outset) evaporated as gasoline lake outside spread, temperature inside mounted. In fact, as practical matter, single avenue remained. But regarded with disquiet: somewhat risky.

No—damned risky. For self (until now personal safety never at issue; could have aborted, exiting same way arrived, exposure limited to possible superficial scorching, crisping around edges) as well as for rescuee: If failed, both dog meat. (Well done.)

Indeed might fail: Strength required far beyond that usually at command. Plus considerable endurance.

Now. Strength available. But endurance most iffy.

Surely everyone remembers stories of 92-pound housewife who, witnessing car fall off bumper jack onto husband, performs hundred-yard dash in three seconds flat, lifts car with one hand, extracting hubby with other. Or hiker, confronting grizzly without warning, who subsequently finds self standing 30 feet above ground; on lowest limb of tree too big to have encircled with arms, legs; with no memory of how got there. Etc.

Less widely known: Many such stories true.

Solution arcane but not supernatural. Straightforward biochemistry: Given protein machine (assuming well-toned musculature, ample lung capacity, sound heart, circulatory system in good repair), energy expenditure limited to rate at which fuel metabolized; muscle cells nourished; heat, waste removed. Reserve stored in muscle tissues negligible.

Cells of which muscles composed contract not in unison but take turns; work in relays. System allows each cell a rest period to recharge during even most strenuous exercise; also means only tiny fraction actually participate at any moment.

Now, if stimulus encountered which triggers substantial majority of cells in given muscle simultaneously, awesome feats ensue (along with real potential for popped ligaments, tendons, fractured bones—system designed for shiftwork operation).

Own karate training, as with any advanced student, had covered Hysterical Strength, Unleashing & Management Thereof; had gone, in fact, beyond routine analysis, theoretical discussion—into practical: Teacher included hypnosis in curriculum. Planted within psyche posthypnotic code to loose Beast Within at ultimate need.

Present quandary seemed to fall within definition: Needed more strength than possessed; else would die. Clear enough, even allowing for Teacher’s dire warnings.

For nothing magic about transaction. Simple arithmetic: X calories produced, available within Y length of time. Rigidly controlled by inverse proportion rule: Double consumption, halve duration.

During tests had seen own strength increase tenfold. Briefly. Followed by crushing fatigue: in strict accordance with tanstaafl principle.

But saw no alternative.

Lay back on front seat, fanny close to door. Gripped steering wheel with one hand, seat edge with other. Drew back legs, knees on chest. Concentrated inward. Gathered forces; focused ki flow into, through legs. Transformed trigger word utterance into kiai, intensity of scream hurting throat, and

. . . KICKED!

Astounding results: Door burst open, whistled through arc, crashed against hinge limits; welds failed, door flew down sidewalk, bouncing end-over-end.

Instantly air vanished inside vehicle as heat flooded through door opening; searing lungs; dessicating eyes, nasal passages; scalding exposed skin. Smelled burning hair; never doubted was own.

Time of essence now as never before: If couldn’t get victim, self, safely beyond flames before metabolic supercharge ran down, likely wouldn’t—unconsciousness only seconds away.

Organizing actions to avoid waste motion suddenly acquired desperate importance. Snatched rear-seat cushion over into front; thrust through door opening (through which flames now licked, beginning to char headliner), positioning to bridge infernal moat. (Or almost bridge—just lacked length to span, with pond still spreading.)

Seized driver, propped up into approximately seated position, slumped against seat back. Loosened jacket, pulled up over head, zipped shut. Shoved limp arms down into pants; tightened belt to hold in place.

Shrugged own jacket upward, retracting head like turtle. Placed shoulder just below victim’s beltline; tugged, felt weight roll onto back as torso collapsed forward. Slid arm under thighs; lifted, jogging shoulder to center load in fireman’s carry (And marveled at own strength—while dreading impending consequences of reckless squandering: Sustained consumption rate surely four, five times norm; probably more.)

Straightened experimentally: Bumped roof to gauge relationship between victim’s fanny, own shoulders—crouch needed to clear upper door frame.

Fixed seat cushion’s location indelibly in mind’s eye. Took deep breath, held it; closed eyes, pinched jacket shut over face. And

. . . LEAPED!

Time stopped as again felt blast-furnace ambience envelop whole body. Seemed to hang motionless midair; conscious this time of flames probing, digging, seeking access through flimsy coverings. Oppressive heat, pervasive roar blanketed all other sensations.

Feet blindly seeking landing, but impact somehow unexpected, surprise. Cushion yielded underfoot as knees bent, absorbing extra weight; then airborne again, leaping for fire’s boundary—and heart stopped as cushion skidded away from legs’ thrust, robbing jump of power needed for distance, throwing balance off.

Eyes snapped open, head jerked forward, trying to get clear of jacket; even at risk of optic burns, needed to see, reestablish orientation—mustn’t fall while still within holocaust!

Dragged fabric clear of eyes just as cool air washed jacket, over clothing, into lungs; as landed, stumbling briefly, on flat, dry, cool pavement.

Shrugged victim to ground; conducted hasty inspection for burning clothing—mine, his. Used own jacket to smother small blaze on victim’s left pants leg.

Then attention riveted by rapidly forming pool of blood under leg: bright red—arterial stuff. Probably femoral, judging by amount. Must have been lying such that position created pressure block, preventing loss in car. Moving eliminated obstruction. If femoral, had as little as 20 seconds left—less whatever time had been bleeding in car since first moved.

Heavy denim parted like cobweb before preternatural strength: Tore pants leg open from ankle to crotch; then ripped entirely free from garment. Turned victim over; confirmed suspicion immediately:

Deep gash from medial upper thigh to anterior knee—spurt-ing.

Twisted denim strip into rope; looped about thigh above wound. Looked around briefly, wistfully—no sticks within reach. Slid fingers under bandage, made hard fist; partially stood, stepped three fast turns around body, using own hand as stick, tightening tourniquet very nicely, thank you, but cutting off blood to fingertips in process.

Seized collar with left hand, right still lodged in tourniquet; swung victim back up over shoulder into fireman’s carry.

Staggered then, beset by flash of vertigo; suddenly aware of warning twinges as muscles all over body threatened to cramp. Conscious also of perspiration abruptly streaming from body in rivers as autonomic system belatedly noticed calorie-consumption rate, tried to do something about mounting internal temperature. And breathing affected now, too: coming in deep, tortured gasps.

But couldn’t complain; not unexpected. In fact, remarkable aspect to condition is why symptoms so long deferred—no idea how was still functioning at all. According to data, painfully garnered through previous supervised (and conservative) experiments, activity level sustained during past few minutes flatly impossible. Should have achieved coma long since through massive fatigue products build-up, with vital organs shutting down from systemic shock; death imminent, barring only most profound life support, treatment.

However, seemed less than opportune moment to question blessing. Set off for van at dead run.

Arrived still conscious but deteriorating: Heartbeat thundering inside skull; lungs afire; cramps attacking in earnest now; black patches flickering across vision; clothing dripping, saturated with sweat.

Terry greeted with “Hello, baby; what’cha doo-in’ ?”; but couldn’t spare breath, time to respond.

Threw open side doors, slung victim into own bunk. Then found couldn’t reach tool locker door from bedside. Frantic visual search located crowbar on floor near door (had used earlier to enter drugstore). Made long leg, snagged with foot. Dragged within reach of left hand; substituted for right in tourniquet—with relief.

Stumbled to refrigerator, shaking life back into fingers. Rummaged through stored food; found quart of Gatorade, plastic container of yesterday’s chicken soup. Gulped about half Dr. Cade’s elixir in single swallow; put away equal portion of Yiddish cure-all.

Worried somewhat over possible consequences: Food, drink not easy travelers in stomach during, right after sustained violent exercise. Especially cold. But knew needed something immediately to start replenishment after huge energy drain.

Couldn’t afford collapse then; didn’t have time for own problems. Victim about to lose leg—plus certainly in shock, doubtless sinking moment by moment: Even if somehow failed to die as direct result of injuries, shock could finish job—would, untreated.

Returned to bunk. Apprehensively called again upon unnatural strength. Found, to surprise, enough remained to lift foot of bunk one-handed; hold elevated while inserting prop (Gel-Coat kit—flameproofing goodies which should have been used to eliminate much drama from rescue). Would have been easier to elevate legs conventionally, with pillow; unfortunately, supine position unworkable due to wound location: Needed victim prone to treat.

Located Daddy’s Number Two black bag, saline I.V. kit from medical supply locker. Rooted through bag; found stopwatch, sphygmomanometer. Took pulse, checked blood pressure: fast, strong, respectively.

Lifted eyelids, flicked sunlight across pupils with hand mirror. Were unequal, nonreactive; plus unmistakable twitching movements: nystagmus—concussed certainly.

Then froze, transfixed.

All this time—while examining in car, on sidewalk; lifting, dragging about, carrying; attaching tourniquet, checking vital signs—had dealt with discrete anatomical components. Never connected dots; never mentally assembled into whole person. Never saw face. Until then.

Was kid . . .!

Little, if any, older than self.

Comprehension dawned suddenly: Had thought was dealing with adult; carrying, in addition to own compact tonnage, perhaps three times again own weight (heft difficult to judge when heart is pure, strength is strength of ten). In fact, apart from peak efforts (unsticking door, traversing flaming moat with piggyback passenger), exertion level hardly more than doubled. Could have accomplished most heroics almost as well without metabolic short circuit. Well . . . maybe.)

However, with understanding came chilling realization: Clinical picture even less rosy than first appeared. Healthy blood pressure reading but snare, delusion in child when hemorrhage a factor. Young cardiovascular systems amazingly resilient when challenged; simply pump faster, harder as blood volume diminishes, maintaining adequate pressure the while.

Right up to sudden, catastrophic, final dissolution; total failure.

Viewed thus, pulse rate most disquieting: Suggested important fraction of total blood supply already gone. And quick review of wound confirmed loss still in progress, though slowed by tourniquet.

Agonized for endless moments, poignantly aware of limitations of own training; indecision compounded by mental processes blunted by physical, mental fatigue. Knew, of course, what needed doing; but shrank from unavoidable conclusion regarding by whom.

(Granted, possessed requisite knowledge. Inescapable, since Daddy [pathologist or not] one of only two doctors in town, often called upon to perform emergency-room care, usually in own home, invariably at odd hours when no one available to assist but Yours Truly. Watched closely then; listened attentively to accompanying lectures. Even, at proud paternal urging, acquired skill at certain limited surgical techniques, practicing on animal cadavers. But never—alone, unaided—so much as placed Band-Aid on person.)

However, time—blood—wasting. And own condition now serious impediment to concentration, precision work. (Maybe wasn’t burning energy at quadruple usual rate; couldn’t know what overload factor consisted of. But knew was exhausted; never experienced such fatigue before.) Nor without long rest, much nourishment, was condition likely to improve. Which ruled out usefully immediate future. Unless . . .

Weighed options carefully—shuddered. But saw no way out. Closed eyes, directed consciousness inward. Took deliberate, deep breath; held briefly; released slowly, exhausting tension with it. Then—for second time in only minutes—triggered hysterical tap.

Like magic, felt vision clear, hands steady, cramps abate. But not fooled: Heart still hammered; was still fountaining sweat; breathing, though no longer paroxysmal (regular now, slowed to point where wouldn’t affect dexterity), still amounted to panting. Condition unchanged: Beneath veneer was still totally exhausted. Tried not to dwell on probable cost when came time to pay Piper. Hoped benefits of sufficient duration—surely wouldn’t work third time.

Took seat on campstool at bedside. Bent over leg; drew wound lips apart to assess damage extent, severity. Blood volume made visual structure identification impossible. Removed saline baggie from kit; extended I.V. tube, chopped off end. Squeezing bag to provide pressure, used as hose to irrigate, cleanse area. Worked pretty well, but relief only temporary: Adjoining tissues full of slowly oozing bleeders; and at very bottom of gash, visible now, gaped slice in femoral artery, welling gently afresh with each systole, reflooding area with bright red blood.

Which wouldn’t do at all; had to see to work. Pondered briefly; then cranked another turn into tourniquet. Uncomfortable about solution: First Law of Tourniquets holds must be loosened every 12 minutes, 18 at outside. Failure to comply results in tissue death downstream, autolysis, ultimately gangrene.

But here question less clear: Two-inch rent in artery wall complicated equation; hydraulic principles demanded concern at least equal to other factors. (Probably more than equal, as continued to debate matter: Blood geysering out through least resistant path certainly of negligible value downstream—and even if somehow beneficial, advantages accruing to leg moot if body to which attached promptly expires as side effect.)

But knowledge that choice impending if artery repair not completed within time limit acted as incentive to speed work. Fell to; gathered, set out, organized equipment.

Hosed down wound again. Scrutinized closely; breathed sigh of relief: Tourniquet now achieving desired result; arterial flow stopped. Virtually imperceptible seepage remained from vascularity in surrounding tissues, but makeshift lavage spray adequate remedy.

Next juggled odds quickly, unhappily. Time most critical, true; but upon reflection, concluded potential shock consequences justified investing whatever time necessary to start I.V. before undertaking actual repair.

And if Daddy watching from Above, made him proud: Had I.V. inserted, taped in place, saline flowing—all within single minute. (Practice on long-suffering arm simulacrum [paramedic training aid] paid off: Found vein first try.)

Performed necessarily abbreviated scrub, using drinking water, soap, finishing off with alcohol slosh. Squirmed into rubber gloves with difficulty—not easy, solo, while maintaining asepsis.

(Mostly unworried about infection per se; Teacher’s opinion holds H. post hominems immune to known human disease. But key words, even if Teacher’s very own, are “opinion,” “known,” and especially “H. post hominem” [of which victim surely must be one—but don’t know that]—and would be humiliating to perform repair successfully; then lose patient to toxemia through preventable gross sepsis. So within limits imposed by surroundings, did best to adhere to sterile procedure.)

Tore open first packet, containing prethreaded fine needle, suture (offered up silent thanks for modern medical technology as did so; would never make good stereotypical female—were own life at stake, couldn’t thread needle in fewer than 20 tries).

Picked up two hemostats. Stared down into wound. Took deep breath. Seized needle with finely-pointed jaw tips of right-hand hemostat. Commenced.

Proved less difficult than feared. Following initial shock (as learned live patients warm inside), technical fascination took over, supplanted apprehension; permitted training to emerge, do job properly. Hemostats gripped needle surely; resultant control wonderfully precise, even down in cramped quarters at bottom of wound. Artery cleanly slit; edges straight; stitches went into place neatly, evenly, closely spaced, just as had when practiced similar repair on hog cadaver under Daddy’s direction.

(Sure wish had practiced oftener; developed semblance of professional competence, speed—sealing high-pressure artery called for such tiny stitches; so little time remained and seam so long. . . .)

But wasted none glancing feverishly at watch; concentrated on task at hand. Mind already made up, subconsciously at least: Would not risk boy’s life to save leg. True, be nice if managed to save it, too—indeed, striving mightily to accomplish repair in time to prevent limb death.

(Mightily—but not quickly; never realized vascular surgery so time-consuming.)

For one thing, one-legged comrade poses significant liability in present-day survival-oriented environment. For another, despite pretensions toward calloused pragmatism, must confess to certain esthetic prejudice in favor of physically sound partner—perhaps even, should circumstances so devolve, mate.

(But repair was taking so long.)

Finally, even granting advantages intrinsic to performing amputation at leisure in Hopkins teaching hospital’s modern operating theatre, amidst latest, most advanced medical wonders (who cares—lack even faintest notion of how to operate them), odds slim for patient surviving procedure. Above-knee amputation serious business, truly major surgery; approached with due respect by most veteran of doctors—likelihood of happy outcome, given amateur-level ministrations in procedure so intrinsically fraught, seemed less a question for serious assessment than object of gallows humor.

(But not laughing; was going to find out unless got move-on—taking too long!)

And didn’t want to cut kid’s leg off! Even if somehow managed to avoid killing him in process, would never be able to meet eyes without cringing inside. Yes—despite full knowledge that dummy’s own maniacal driving brought on disaster; that consequences on his head alone; that own role limited to saving fool life—would still feel guilty. . . .

(Damn—taking too long . . .!)

Stole glance at watch—at least 16 minutes gone (guestimating from crash) and good half inch yet unrepaired. What to do . . . !

Discovered mind not made up after all. Convictions wavered, crumbled at moment of truth. Should continue repair, cross fingers for dispensation from immutable metabolic laws? Or gamble on holding blood loss to tolerable minimum with local pressure now that wound largely closed?

(But how much is tolerable minimum—considering losses to present; mitigated by, thus far, just under pint of saline? Further, how effective is local pressure apt to be on femoral spurting—even if wound largely closed?)

Wait. Perhaps another way out. Not cornered—maybe. With luck.

Solution required judicious hemostat placement: Was necessary to grip, pinch together remaining open edges of sliced artery walls with curved jaws; lock handles, sealing shut.

Now could ease tourniquet temporarily, safely . . .

if hemostat secure.

if stitches adequate.

if no other significant bleeders in wound.

if abruptly releasing balance of blood supply into previously substantially drained extremity didn’t trigger final shock collapse through major blood-pressure drop. . . .

if—oh, hell! Simply couldn’t stand it any longer—released tourniquet, poised to take action as required.

Wasn’t. So glad.

Took time then for breather, suddenly aware of first hints of returning fatigue. Peeled off gloves; finished Gatorade, soup.

Removed patient’s shoes, socks; inspected toes as circulation resumed. (Should have at outset: color, temperature key clinical signs to circulation status in leg, foot.)

Sat back, eyes closed, relaxed; breathed deeply, modulating oxygen intake just at fringes of hyperventilation symptoms, hoping to get running start on replacing stores before disintegration set in in earnest. Knew wouldn’t really help, but beat waiting idly for collapse—for which still didn’t have time.

After five minutes, retightened tourniquet, donned second pair of rubber gloves, released hemostat. Lavaged site again, flushing away seepage accumulated from surrounding tissues. Resumed needlework.

And marveled: Delicate stitchery, tiny knots suddenly easy—now no longer racing clock, impeding own efforts through tight-collar syndrome.

Soon last stitch in place; femoral repaired. Only closing-up chores remained, housekeeping incidentals: Rejoining severed muscles, closing skin layers; assembling, installing homemade pressure bandage incorporating splint to prevent knee flexion during initial healing process. Much easier going—nothing life-or-death. And could use larger stitches.

Then followed quick, apprehensive review of own condition. No serious portents detected; so stripped limp body (yes, completely; potentially fastest bleeding tissues on male body concealed by shorts; no shrinking damsel I—besides, modesty lousy reason to lose patient through negligence); examined head to foot, identified additional serious (relative term, this, compared to femoral) lacerations; closed with stitch here, tuck there, bandage where appropriate. Finished by covering with blanket, slipping pillow under head, connecting fresh saline baggie to I.V.

Whereupon, quite without warning, found self facedown next to bunk, viewing world through darkening, flickering mists (viewing two worlds, point of fact), while breathing transformed abruptly into agonizing gasps, heartbeat stabilized at tachycardiac level, every muscle in body knotted into single huge cramp. Couldn’t even cry out. And wanted to.

Could have ended pain by triggering posthypnotic relaxation sequence; but sleep—akin to coma—sure to follow immediately and couldn’t afford yet; important details remained undone:

Van’s right-side double doors gaped wide; driver’s door hung open, too, just as had left it when leaping out. Knew must remedy before letting go: Bound to be dogs in area (have not forgotten [will never forget] dog-pack encounter shortly after emerging from shelter); pooches would be pleased indeed to discover van standing open—and ready access to three helpless occupants.

Besides, Terry’s water, food dishes not filled since leaving Harpers’; no telling how long oblivion might last. Plus urgent need to stoke own fires before going under; nourishment deficit almost as critical as fatigue.

All of which posed problem:

Body on strike. Brain apparently still operating at what passes for normal function, but commands ignored as burnout reaction intensified, symptoms worsened. Try as might, couldn’t elicit so much as purposeful twitch from any voluntary muscle, even unto least finger.

Too busy twitching involuntarily; spasming, in fact: Body jerked, convulsed, shuddered in response to multiple random cramps attacking, releasing, attacking again from head to toe. Ravages flopped body about like chicken recently deprived of head (uncomfortably apt simile; brain quite as unable to communicate with body as if physically separated).

Thrashed for timeless, endless interval. Several seconds at least. Then subsided into gently quivering heap, face up, limbs intertwined in Gordian disarray; cramps abated, muscles relaxing, going limp—pain easing toward residual ache. Would have sighed with relief if such possible, but breathing not among voluntary functions then.

Besides, knew relief was only fool’s paradise: Could feel heat; knew face was flushed. Could feel perspiration volume increasing, sweat streaming from entire body; dripping where possible, collecting in hollows elsewhere—one pool quickly threatened to overfill valley formed by nose, cheek; invade eye. And breathing rate such that nose began to run.

Suspected was not pretty sight. But not encouraging to realize Terry, intently peering down from stand, actually had nothing to say. Just made big, round, worried eyes; stared first one eye, then other. And know what it takes to dismay my brother.

But worry surely nullest of exercises. Understood problem; knew only solution was food, sleep. And knew must finish chores first.

So again turned perception inward. Concentrated. Groped for ki within soul. Felt it stir. Created channel, felt flow begin. Gently guided into right arm. Willed dead meat to move.

Terribly pleased to note response. And not a little amazed.

Expanded control zone. Levered body into sitting position; then rolled over onto hands, knees. Moving most carefully (nothing worked without painstaking, step-by-step supervision), crawled forward to driver’s seat.

Where paused momentarily, mulling options, calculating odds. Shortest route involved climbing into seat to reach door handle. But never seriously considered as solution (as well might have been mountaintop). Or could go around; between seats, past engine cover, under steering wheel. Farther to travel. But level.

Even so, had to stop en route, rest. Twice.

Eventually, however, fingers closed limply around door handle. Marshaled forces for effort—pulled door shut hard enough to secure latch. Barely. (Noted, gratefully, front windows rolled up far enough for safety; all others swing-out construction, couldn’t open far enough to pose security risk.)

Then—somehow—managed to turn around under steering wheel, avoiding getting snagged on pedals in process; set off on return trip amidships.

Arrived in due course within reach of side door handles. Again assembled energies (what remained), swung door shut—even remembering to close in proper order: Rear first, then front, so overlapping latches engaged instead of rebounding, negating efforts. Experienced profound thrill, sense of accomplishment, from having done it right.

Considered taking brief time-out for rest but realized wouldn’t help. So heaved self upright on knees, ignoring tendency for surroundings to orbit own vertical axis. Scooped up saucer full of parrot seed mix from container on counter; lumbered (still on knees) to stand, prepared to dump contents into sibling’s food cup.

And stopped, confused: Was full. As was—now visible at far end of perch—water cup.

Set down saucer carefully. Tried to think problem through, but not easy: Data input too fast; of such anomalous, almost contradictory nature; mind functioning so slowly. Shook head—regretted at once: No one in such condition should move head quickly. Ever. Pain obscured vision momentarily. When receded, found self leaning against side doors, head resting against window glass, eyes closed.

Solution obvious, but reached only after labored deliberation: Of course food, water untouched: Had embarked from Harpers’ this morning—several lifetimes prior—something under an hour ago! (Indeed, Albert knew whereof spoke: Time is relative; truly flies when having fun. . . .)

Probably smiled as arrived at conclusion. Which expression surely faded as eyes opened, focusing on glare from holocaust surrounding Trans Am, mere hundred yards behind van. Building in which vehicle embedded now well involved: Smoke, fire gushing from windows many stories up, obviously spreading rapidly.

And given shoulder-to-shoulder nature of downtown concrete-canyon architecture, only matter of hours before entire block ablaze—in fact, as flames gutted high-rises, structures’ collapse sure to follow; filling, bridging streets with burning debris, spreading conflagration from block to block. Only few more hours before entire city engulfed in fire storm.

Implications percolated slowly but with finality. Knew taste of defeat: truly bitter—age-old cliché accurate, but woefully inadequate.

Not that had given up. Though slowed, dulled, mind still functioning more or less coherently; knew if passed out now would never wake: Van’s destruction, together with frail contents, guaranteed as blazing walls crashed down to fill street where parked.

But problem deeper than mere awareness of threat, unflagging resolve. Body pushed too far; was finished: Utterly in grip of fatigue-toxin-overdose-induced myasthenialike collapse, paralysis. Not a single cell from voluntary musculoskeletal group responsive to brain’s commands—doubt house-current application would have elicited so much as twitch.

Tears began to trickle from under lids as eyes closed, body slid limply down door, crumpling onto floor to lie unmoving. Final thoughts were fading jumble fuzzy with disappointment, regret, outrage: Had come so close; felt so cheated—

“Hel-lo, baby . . .!” wailed Terry in anguished tones.

—and horror: Hoped smoke, fumes, big piece of falling debris would find us before flames; couldn’t bear thought of retarded twin, gorgeous feathers ablaze, rolling about floor, struggling, screaming. . . .

Waking was nice: gradual, luxurious process, allowing time to revel in same cozy lack of urgent purpose which always attended first awareness on summer mornings during school vacation. Bed was lovely: firm; made up with cool, clean-smelling sheets; light, soft blanket. And from somewhere floated lilting chords of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata.

Once got around to opening eyes, saw that surroundings comprised large, cheerful, well-appointed bedroom, simply reeking of restrained good taste.

Had no idea where might be, how got there, or why; and didn’t much care. Was sufficient that felt marvelously rested, deliciously comfortable—until essayed first lazy stretch.

Accompanying yawn brought cognizance of tube up nose; a discovery so startling, almost distracted from surprise of learning right arm immobile, apparently strapped down. Deliberate swallow confirmed tube also present in esophagus. Unpleasantly so.

Followed tube with eyes to bottle hanging on stand at bedside. Didn’t need to read label to recognize Isocal HCN, first choice amongst medical community for endogastric feeding of comatose patients.

And next to Isocal hung partial baggie of Ringer’s lactate—saline with electrolytes added. From it ran tube to I.V.—plugged into right arm.

As pondered these phenomena (with rapidly dwindling enthusiasm), yet another anomalous sensation intruded amongst already churning thoughts. Or perhaps lack of sensation more accurate: For first time in living memory, had awakened without awareness of overfull bladder. Which realization flowed without pause into dawning perception that Something Was Amiss in that region as well.

Began immediate left-handed exploration to determine quality, extent of damages. Was dismayed to learn attire consisted of overlarge (knee-length) tee shirt—and diaper . . .! Complete with safety pins. And, speaking as expert baby-sitter, quite professionally executed. (Strategically located slit in crotch of mortifying garment admitted [as suspected] Foley catheter.)

Further exploration revealed substantially absent eyebrows, lashes; head hair appreciably shorter in spots than remembered it. Had obviously been brushed out, breaking off scorched, shriveled ends—

Oh! Memory returned in bewildering rush. Bringing with it sudden dread, rampant curiosity: Where was Terry? What about kid? What happened? More particularly, who happened it?

Reasonable questions, to be sure. When last participated in events, score was Candy zero, Grim Reaper nine—in ten-point match. Lethal probabilities abounded; situation, without exaggeration, dire.

Known on-site cast included Terry; concussed kid (with stiff leg, profound blood loss, stitches all over hide); and, of course, Yours Truly—plucky neighborhood zombie. Terry didn’t get us out of fix; get me cleaned up, plugged in, plumbed, drained. I sure didn’t—and kid was . . .

No! Enough. . . . Without facts, speculation worse than nonproductive; downright maddening . . .!

Had to find out for self—couldn’t lie quietly in bed, waiting for someone (whomever!) to walk in, in own good time, and fill in blanks (selectively—telling patient “only what’s good for her”). Had to know—now . . .!

Doggedly returned to self-examination. Found tender areas of pinkish skin on forehead, hands, ankles—another few seconds and would have been serious burns. Determined all muscles, while weak, again responded to wishes. (Almost unbearably relieved: Daddy had recited cases where muscle overuse resulted in permanent burnout.)

Concluded, at length, was sound enough to dispense with life-support toys; return to transacting personal business personally. Could eat faster, absorb protein, calories more efficiently orally than through tube (certainly enjoy it more). Further, examination demonstrated no clinical evidence of dehydration; no point, then, to retaining I.V. And could damn well go potty myself!

Okay, no reason couldn’t get up—just matter of unplugging tubes. (Straightforward-sounding, simple statement of intent: easy to say.)

Effectuation, however, less so. Sensations accompanying do-it-yourself nasogastric tube removal unlikely to find place in catalog of experiences without which life is not complete. Same for catheter. Neither truly painful coming out. Actually. Exactly. Quite. But felt horrid. . . .

I.V., on other hand, did hurt. But over quickly; slight bleeding stopped immediately with momentary pressure.

Then addressed question of standing. Knew was weak, but fairly certain could manage. With care, slowly, taking very short steps.

Question of very short steps, however, proved premature. Spent appreciable interval sitting on edge of bed, head between knees, waiting for room to stabilize. Which did, eventually.

Whereupon, gingerly stood, paused briefly to verify balance in working order; then employed selfsame care, very short steps, to navigate slowly to door.

Hall in which found self was higher-ceilinged, wider than those in houses which constituted experience during formative years. Decor, too, beyond what have come to recognize as norm.

Piano now into first measures of unfamiliar solo transcription of Wagner’s Rienzi overture. Stood briefly, listened.

(Daddy included in shelter collection essentially entire Andre Perrault international catalog; record collection upstairs in house almost equaled. Have myself spent important fraction of short life exposed to, absorbing, enjoying classical music. Plus Daddy once took me to Horowitz concert in Chicago, where, in three too-short hours, artist demonstrated all he’d learned about playing piano over perhaps 70-odd years of training, practice, dedication. Have, despite youth, acquired discerning ear.)

This pianist good. Possibly even that good. But didn’t recognize touch. Wondered who might be; when recording made.

Followed music down hall to balcony—from either end of which descended wide, sweeping staircase (of sort on which Cinderella lost slipper), terminating in foyer into which Daddy’s whole house would fit without crowding (if tucked to side to miss chandelier).

Glided down nearer staircase, feeling like figure in dream. Music coming from partially open door on far side of foyer. Crossed room, silently pushed door open.

Terry’s tee stand stood next to gleaming ebony concert grand at center of library/study whose shelves held books in numbers rivaling perhaps even Daddy’s shelter library—and all hardbacks, most leather. Harebrained sibling himself (alive!) relaxed on one foot, raptly watching, listening as my erstwhile patient, leg bandaged but now unsplinted, played and music flowed through room, filling heart, crumbling barriers behind which had thought those emotions safely locked away forever.

Moved silently into room; held out arm. Twin’s eyes snapped wide; almost leaped in eagerness to swarm aboard. Settled in chair just behind, to side of oblivious musician. Terry discharged immediate hysterical gladness over reunion through series of head dives, cheek rubs; then snuggled down in lap, pressed close, sighed, closed eyes. Held my baby brother tight in arms.

And, soundlessly, cried. Cried for Momma, for Daddy; for unknown, unremembered flesh-and-blood parents; for Teacher; for all my friends; for acquaintances; for whole world of strangers—cried for all dead.

Cried for Terry, miraculously alive when should have burned to death. Cried for boy—another person!—incredibly still alive in spite of crash, terrible wounds, my bumbling treatment, fire—sitting now at piano, playing as composer only might have dared to dream.

Cried for me—for grief, for relief, for joy.

Cried for past. Cried for future. Cried for hope.

Cried while boy finished Rienzi, swept into Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Brahms, many others; all from memory, most full orchestral works somehow transcribed for piano alone; all played as if keyboard itself were come to life, complete with soul demanding outlet, expression.

Boy finished Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique with marvelously cacaphonic climax whose violence quite made up for missing orchestra; tiptoed with startling gentleness into Pachelbel’s Canon in D. And into resultant sweet tranquility he spoke; voice low, tightly controlled: “I thought you were dead.”

Didn’t reply—correction: Couldn’t.

“Terry woke me trying to rouse you—he and I have become friends waiting for you, and I’ve had time to read your journal. He was down from his stand, scrambling all over you, flapping his wings, pulling at you desperately, nuzzling you, screaming at you. That’s what woke me up.”

Lapsed into silence for long moments, music flowing without pause. “The whole block next to us was in flames. The heat was incredible and wreckage was coming down all around us. The street was filling up with burning debris and the building on the other side was starting to go as well—it looked like something out of an old movie of London during the Blitz.”

Again fell silent, moving bandaged leg restively, but music never hesitated. “I had a hell of a time getting into the driver’s seat with my leg in that splint, not to mention maneuvering the I.V. hose and pouch; and I knew I’d better leave it in place—I was weak as a kitten, and the blood all over the place made it obvious why. Finally I hung the I.V. pouch on the rear-view mirror, stuck the leg out the window, and used my right leg to drive. It wasn’t easy, shifting an unfamiliar transmission without using the clutch. I don’t think I hurt it.

“I got us out of there and came home. I thought you were dead.” Music soared gently, filling lengthening silence with beauty, while boy’s breathing rate mounted visibly, settled gradually. Only quarter profile visible from own vantage, but wet cheek’s glint unmistakable. Yet when resumed, voice was still almost conversational.

“You looked dead. You were grayish-white and you didn’t appear to be breathing at all. Terry wouldn’t let me touch you at first; he crouched on your body, wings half-spread, feathers fluffed to make him seem three times life-size, neck outstretched, that huge hooked bill open and threatening, and making a noise in his throat that . . .

Voice trailed off, but fingers never faltered.

“. . . that reminded me of the sound my mother made when she found my father’s body. He was the first to go in the plague.” Tendons stood out in neck, but music continued unbroken.

“I thought you were dead; so I concentrated on trying to comfort Terry, soothing him, getting him to accept me, to come to me. Only after that was I able to attend to you—and notice that you were still perspiring. I had never heard of a dead person perspiring—I’ve never seen anyone sweat like that—so I brought you inside, got you cleaned up, and put you to bed.

“You were running an astonishing temperature for a live person—the books I’ve read suggest that people don’t survive at 109 degrees, and it didn’t seem very likely that you’d manage it much longer—so I packed you in ice and started an I.V. to put back some of that water sluicing off you. I wired you to our EKG—

“Oh, yes, we have a fully equipped emergency room here in the house. This was the kind of neighborhood, back when we had lots of fussy, hypochondriac old neighbors and relatives, where one couldn’t afford to be without one; it would get you talked about, at the very least, and more likely disinherited. All the house staff were required to be fully conversant with the use of all the equipment, just in case.

“And while there was a stigma attached to people who possessed those skills—menial work, you know, performed by the ‘servant class’—and even though I’ve never been sick in my life . . .”

Bingo! Heart skipped a beat—never been sick . . .!

“. . . I judged that it was the sort of thing that might well come in handy someday. So I kept my eyes open—and bribed several of our retainers, incidentally—and became a pretty fair EMT, if I do say so myself. But you . . .” Narrative faltered again; music bridged gap as breathing discipline labored to restore control.

“You were my valedictorian exercise.” Declaration followed by long breath, uninterrupted music. “Keeping you alive called for everything I learned from our staff, extensive study on my own, and more luck than anyone has a right to expect—yours or mine, I’m not sure.

“You were a mess.”

“Thank you.” Blurted reply after boy’s last four words but before content registered. Experienced momentary pang of dismay lest he take it wrong; be offended. How could he know how slowly own thoughts functioning; how far behind utterance comprehension lagged.

But mattered not. Hadn’t heard. Probably not listening at all; wrapped in own thoughts. Monologue continued without pause:

“Your heart stopped twice. The first time I managed to restart you with CPR alone; the second time it took three jolts with the defibrillator paddles and an injection of adrenaline directly into your heart. That’s something the staff didn’t teach me. . . .”

Without bidding, hand drifted to chest; fingers sought, found tiny bandage just to left of sternum, between fourth, fifth ribs.

“Between the ice—courtesy of the industrial-grade icemaker in the bar in the ballroom—and the I.V., I got your temperature back down somewhere near normal and restored your fluid level. That took most of the rest of the day.

“But still you were fading almost as I watched. For some reason your tissues apparently were consuming themselves, as happens in extreme starvation, but faster—which made no sense to me as you were in good flesh and apparently healthy otherwise. So I intubated you gastrically and started you on the Isocal. And to save time, to start nourishing your cells immediately, without waiting for you to metabolize the Isocal, I briefly piggybacked a filtered solution of it into your I.V. and changed you from straight saline to Ringer’s.

“Fortunately, I had to answer Nature’s Call myself at about that time, and that started me thinking: All that fluid had to go somewhere. You had stopped perspiring; logic offered but a single alternative: If your sphincter held, you would rupture your bladder.

“So I catheterized you. Yes, that’s something else the servants didn’t teach me. But according to the book, I probably did it correctly—you didn’t bleed and haven’t shown signs of infection.

“And you confirmed my suspicion promptly by filling the first container in a single nonstop gush. I had to mop the floor after fumbling the container change on the fly.

“You probably don’t want to hear the details of how I coped with your bowels; but I can attest that you were marvelously regular until you emptied out what you had eaten before and were down to the Isocal residue; of which—I’m glad to say—there’s almost none. But that’s why you’re in a diaper. And I’ve been transferring you back and forth between two beds as cleanup demands necessitated changing them. And you.”

Shook head, almost shuddered, but music never wavered. “Ever since I attained puberty and learned what it implies, my primary ambition regarding girls has revolved around getting their clothes off. Et cetera. That has not been the case with you; I’m not into necrophilia, and a catheter is not conducive to romance: There was no ‘et cetera.’

“And though I have acquired an exhaustively detailed, painstakingly thorough, unflinchingly intimate familiarity with your every tangible aspect—in fact I learned more about you physically than any girl in my experience—I must admit that I would have traded gladly every success I’ve enjoyed in the past in that respect at any moment during these six days for the privilege of getting you dressed. You have not been a fun date.”

Can’t say just when lost track of soliloquy; drifted off into own blissful, music-filled reverie. Didn’t have to listen; details irrelevant—had found somebody . . .!

Months of accumulated desperate tension drained from soul like sand spilling from ripped sack, leaving slightly limp, giddy euphoria suffusing entire being. Wouldn’t have been surprised had started glowing from head to foot. Was supremely happy.

And not without degree of justification—not leaping to conclusions; some data in already (sketchy, obviously preliminary, but [beyond mere fact of his being] encouraging): Appears to be good prospect. Hominem beyond doubt: obviously intelligent (piano talent alone points toward genius-level intellect; and when coupled with resourcefulness displayed in keeping me alive, plus syntactic evidence apparent from first words, leaves little room to doubt quality of brains). Further, demonstrated gentlemanly instincts. Additionally, sound physical specimen, apart from wounds (apparently healing nicely); with pleasant, well-bred features.

Finally, was good to helpless birdbrain, and idiot twin likes him (Terry spends bulk of waking hours rowing with only one oar in water—but is never wrong about people).

Not perfect, of course: Will be period of adjustment; may require gentle retraining (at bare minimum, driving habits need attention!).

But issue not impending. “Ever after” is long time, and too young now myself for twosome involvement; while boy (implied conquests notwithstanding) hardly year, two years older. Question resolvable at leisure, without deadlines.

Because doesn’t matter now . . .! Teacher was right—really are other people out there . . .!

Hominems—my people! Perhaps 150,000, according to Teacher. Maybe more, maybe less—who cares!—numbers immaterial. . . .

Are others!

And we’re going to find them.

Together.

[*] Also published as “Emergence”, Analog, January 15, 1981

HURRICANE CLAUDE

Hilbert Schenck

Hilbert Schenck has written several fine sea-going SF stories for F&SF, most recently, “Buoyant Ascent,” March 1980 and “The Battle of the Abaco Reefs,” June 1979. His new story is about a group of ocean engineers and their attempt to stop a gigantic killer storm that is running north at over 40 knots, headed for Long Island . . .

Sept. 5, 1400 hrs.—Sept. 7, 1700 hrs.

At its moment of conception, the storm was no more than an unnoticed, swirling tube of air, its father a rising current off the northern edge of the largest island in the Caicos group, its mother a thin barometric-depression wave lying east and west across the southern limits of the Bahama Banks. The upward-moving thrust of buoyant air, penetrating the mild depression and gaining energy from it, set a kink in the pressure wave, a bend that eventually closed itself and created a turning cylinder, an atmospheric swirl. The tiny product of this gentle meeting, driven by that ponderous force derived from the rotation of the planet itself, began to rotate in a counterclockwise direction, and this spin rapidly drew in more energy and moisture from the hot, surrounding sea. Its mild and almost-indetectable parents were consumed and destroyed during its first few hours of life as the baby storm drifted on an erratic northeast track out over the deep but unusually warm waters. By chance, no reporting vessel passed through the blustery but unfocused center of its babyhood, so the storm grew unnoticed for almost a day.

Then, that next afternoon, a large American sailing yacht, Passage-Master, Norfolk to Puerto Rico, ran through the western sector of the tiny, diffuse storm. Winds were moderate, no more than twenty knots, but there was a heavy sense of tropical disturbance and moisture, and the sky was very dark. The barometer dipped two-tenths of an inch of mercury over a three-hour traverse, and Passage-Master’s professional skipper spoke over the ship-to-shore with Miami around suppertime. The next morning, Miami Hurricane Center dispatched a hunter aircraft, and it located the storm out in the Gulf Stream, where the hot surface water fed the young hurricane-to-be its continuous, ever-increasing, energy requirements. The storm was still invisible from the synchronous weather satellite, Nimbus IV, masked by a larger fan of high altitude cloud, but the aircraft made a run through the storm center at about 10 A.M. and found a well-defined circulation, almost half an inch of gradient across the storm cross-section, and winds now over forty knots.

At noon that day, four men in shirtsleeves met in the Miami Center and studied the records and maps. The storm was now growing in area rapidly and also extending itself vertically upward into the atmospheric column, so that the Nimbus cameras were beginning to show a typical spiral cloud pattern, imposed on the older, more passive cloud structures overhanging a vast middle Atlantic low-pressure region. They named the growing baby Claude, since it was the third rotating storm of the season, and its predecessor, which had fizzled south of Cuba, had been called a lady’s name, Barbara. At 1300, Miami issued its first bulletin on Claude.

“Tropical storm Claude is now located at approximately 25°1’ north latitude and 71°5’ west longitude, or approximately 400 miles east of Miami. The storm is strengthening in both barometric gradient and size and its movements are erratic. Maximum wind velocities of 40 miles per hour are now concentrated within 50 miles of the storm center, but further strengthening is to be expected. All marine interests are urged to remain informed about Claude, which has the potential of becoming a large and dangerous storm.”

By 1500, Claude had begun to move sluggishly almost due north at about five miles an hour, and Miami established a tropical storm watch along the Atlantic coastline north of Wilmington.

The board of directors meeting at Techoceanics had not been hastily called until around noon that day, but by 3 P.M. the men from Boston and Hartford had arrived by car or charter plane and over a dozen people were assembled in Techoceanic’s spartan conference room. The company owned a series of Butler-type metal-sided buildings located mostly on barges moored next to the swing bridge connecting New Bedford to Fairhaven to the west. When not used for meetings, the room doubled as a meteorological work space and one end was filled with electronic racks.

Ray Alexander, chief of research at Techoceanics, was a small, very thin man, almost sixty, his hair a stiff, white, crewcut brush, his eyes hooded and cold, his mouth no more than the dark cut of a sharp knife. “Let’s get going,” he said in a loud, hard voice. “We’ve got a storm and it’s growing. Come on, you people, shut up!”

The two business-suited men from the Hartford underwriters looked up startled from their private discussion, then lapsed into sullen silence. “Okay, Bettina,” said Ray Alexander in almost a snarl, “work your magic,” but his tone was completely sarcastic, with no sense of joking or kidding.

Dr. Bettina Holbrook, for two years the forecasting meteorologist for Techoceanics, was a plain-faced, thirty-year-old woman in tailored slacks and a severe, simple blouse, entirely trim and businesslike. She stood up to fire a look of pure hatred at her boss, then flipped off the lights and turned on the slide projector. “Okay, here’s Claude twenty minutes ago. . . .”

But Ray Alexander let out a snort of disgust and muttered loudly, “Claude! Those raving faggots in Miami sure do like the fruity names!”

Bettina stopped speaking at once and turned an angry white face to peer at Ray Alexander. “Do you really want to shoot yourself in the foot, Ray?” she said in an icy, distressed voice. “What sense is there in making that kind of sick, stupid crack, anyway?”

“You going to give a weather briefing or a gay rights lecture, Bettina?” snarled Ray right back.

Tall and angular Dr. Cora Alexander, chairman and chief executive officer of Techoceanics, spoke even more coldly than her husband. “Ray, if you make one more comment about fags, fruits, queers, or whatever, you’re out of this thing on your ass! I mean that, you bastard! We don’t need your nasty cussedness, Ray. Moke can pilot the Telsa, and probably better than you!” Where her husband’s face was simply thin and spare, Cora Alexander’s face was thin and extravagantly ugly. Her downward-hooked nose and her upward-hooked chin almost met in front of a huge, wide mouth that often snapped open to show large, tobacco-yellowed teeth.

Ray aimed a sharp finger-point at his wife, sitting at the other end of the long table. “You’d like to cut me out of it, wouldn’t you, you old bag! After four years of shoveling shit against a tide of stupid incompetence, I get tossed into the street. . . .”

The man from State Street Trust turned to the Boston lawyer sitting next to him and raised his eyebrows in pointed astonishment. The old attorney, Arthur Goodspeed, whispered, “Things here are worse than we heard. They must be going to shout the storm to death,” but the banker just shook his head ominously. Techoceanics was into them for over $2 million.

Cora paid no further attention to Ray, but turned to nod impatiently at Bettina Holbrook, who reset her face in as pleasant an expression as possible and indicated the projected satellite photo with her pointer light. “Miami is forecasting hurricane strength by six tonight, and I agree,” she said, indicating the spiral form of the storm that now showed clearly. “There’s a low trough of wet air lying flaccid just off the coast between Hatteras and Montauk. It then runs northeast near Nantucket and it’s going to suck Claude inshore. Miami isn’t quite ready to predict that, but I think it’s likely. I think we should proceed on the basis of that assumed storm track.”

“Rate of advance?” asked Cora Alexander in an expressionless tone.

Bettina gave a thoughtful shake of her head. “At least 20 knots by the time it’s beyond Hatteras—I mean past latitude 35°—but I don’t like the look of the whole map. The depression up over Long Island is deep and narrow. Things look a whole lot like the ’38 storm. Claude might work up to 50 or 60, but I just don’t know how to forecast that kind of acceleration from what we have now.”

The Techoceanics attorney, Arthur Goodspeed, raised a finger. “Then you predict the storm will come ashore on this coast, Dr. Holbrook?”

The meteorologist nodded. “Somewhere it will hit land, Arthur; perhaps Long Island, perhaps Cape Cod.”

The lawyer turned to Cora Alexander. “Cora, I thought we agreed not to attempt this if the hurricane was certain to do damage ashore?”

Ray answered him bluntly. “Don’t be stupid, Arthur! We’re busted, broke, out of cash! This may be the last storm this year.”

One of the Hartford men cleared his throat and spoke in a low, well-modulated tone. “My instructions are to urge you to attempt to modify the storm. My principals are not willing to continue this sort of funding level for a full additional year. But if you should destroy or divert the storm, you wiil have repaid our underwriter’s group handsomely. Obviously, further funding in that case would be an easy matter.”

The man from the Boston bank shook his head ruefully at his lawyer friend. “I understand your problems, Arthur,” he said, “but we also hope to see the method tried now.”

“After all, Arthur,” said Cora Alexander in a dry, cold voice, “if we get sued for making the storm worse, instead of breaking it apart, they’ll just be going after a bankrupt wreck with no assets or prospects. Also, there’s no physical reason why we should make it worse. The worst we can do is to do nothing at all.”

“Well, let’s hope so,” said the old lawyer, shrugging in doubt.

“Can we vote on this?” said Cora suddenly. “All in favor of attempting modification of tropical storm Claude, raise your hands.” They all put up their hands except the lawyer, and Cora stared at him. “Are you abstaining or voting no, Arthur?” she said icily, but he suddenly put his hand up.

“Try it,” he said in a cracked, excited voice. “Try it, Cora. To hell with the lawsuits!”

Sept. 7, 1700—2400

In doubling its length and width, the storm Claude increased its energy uptake from the Gulf Stream by a factor of four. This added impetus for growth and activity was manifested in two ways, in addition to the further linear expansion of the storm’s perimeter, mostly north and west. Claude’s rotary energy increased so that in its 1800 advisory, Miami declared Claude a hurricane. The weather buoys dropped by a late-afternoon overflight were showing gusts near the center to seventy knots. But Claude could also expend its overabundance of energy in another way, by moving its entire system north at increasing velocity.

So the ocean energy resource was tapped too rapidly for the storm to eat it by simply spreading. In addition, it spun ever more fiercely and moved ever more rapidly.

Coming across Claude’s big, ragged funnel just at dusk, the Miami hunter pilot saw that Claude had grown from a childish, petulant disorder towards a fearsome, mature beauty. From over 30,000 feet up, he could look down into the sloping, roughly circular maw, indistinct with the sun setting, and see the stark white funnel of cloud that led down and down out of sight into a well of gathering violence. Claude was maturing, gaining in self-integration, forcing its way further and higher to involve ever-larger air masses. And everywhere it moved and spread, it ate moisture and thermal energy with a frenzied voracity.

Yet, in Indianapolis and Pittsburgh, people shivered under thin blankets and pulled summer jackets tighter around themselves. A gigantic thick finger of Arctic high had poked down from Canada over the middle eastern states. Though Claude was mighty, and would become mightier still, it had neither the resources of energy nor momentum to seriously challenge this vast, stolid mass of dense and quiet air.

To the east another, far smaller and weaker, high-pressure ridge of cold air stretched south, tentatively poking its weak leading edge towards Bermuda. Claude might have challenged this air mass, and probably broken through to the northeast, but the modest Greenland high had its control over Claude, not through sheer strength but by a more subtle yet more certain influence, the steering currents of thin air above 30,000 feet. The Greenland air mass had diverted these ordinarily easterly-flowing winds to the north, and huge, powerful Claude followed with the blind obedience of sheep after a Judas goat. Claude, driven by inexorable need to spend its energy, yet in so doing obtaining ever more, began to stride north into a deep valley of low barometer pointing at the New England coast.

The late-evening New Bedford weather felt damp and heavy. Though the storm still lay over a thousand miles south, there was an oppressive sense of tropic air and the greasy, sheet-metal sidings of the barge cabins dripped and ran rivulets of water. In the center of Techoceanics’ biggest barge sat a huge SeaCrane twin-rotor freight helicopter, but instead of the usual modular pods, this machine had been modified to sling an entire, whale-shaped boat, fat and double-ended, with two big screws showing under the stern. The boat stretched fifty feet under the rotary-wing freighter and seemed to be constructed entirely of welded aluminum sheets.

The air was dead still and the barge was brightly lit by many searchlights and TV light-columns. Four persons stood in front of the thirty-odd press people: Ray Alexander and his tall wife in padded jumpsuits, and two other short, squatty men in bulky flying clothes. Around behind these four clustered some of the Techoceanics engineers and financial people in business suits.

Cora Alexander held up her hand for quiet and shouted, “I’m going to make a statement and give you the tech briefing. Okay, here’s the way the system is supposed to work. I’ve sketched the storm in a vertical cross-section on this blackboard. Now what we found some years back is that the top of the storm, about 25,000 feet in the case of Claude, has a very high negative potential—tens, hundreds of thousands of volts—with a similiar high postive at the base.” She indicated the two locations on the diagram. “Now in a thunderhead or line squall, or similiar type of nonrotating storm with high atmospheric electrical potentials, the electron excess in a cloud is mainly produced by the movement of rain and hail. The water particles carry charges around in the cloud, or between clouds and the earth. This electrical phenomenon in revolving or hurricane types of storms is based on a different principle. It’s produced by the motion in the earth’s magnetic field. If you remember your electrical physics, you know that if you revolve or move charges through a magnetic field, you develop potential.”

“So the storm is acting like a huge generator, Dr. Alexander?” asked a reporter up at the front.

“Correct,” said Cora, showing a mouth full of large, startling teeth, “but a generator with an open circuit. There’s all that voltage potential, but no external wire. We’re going to provide the wire. We’re going to short-circuit the storm by creating an electrically conducting path between its foot and its top. Our computer simulations suggest convincingly that the core of the mature hurricane will not be able to sustain its order and identity when this energy drain begins. The storm will fragment from the eye outwards, break into a series of small storms which will eat energy from each other. Most important, we hope to break the grip of the stratospheric winds, the steering currents, on Claude’s upper levels, to cut the storm loose so it takes its natural northeasterly direction that the Coriolis force would dictate. That is, away from this coast.”

Several of the reporters stared at each other in scorn and disbelief. The man who had spoken before said, “You claim you can string a wire up through the eye of a hurricane?”

Cora patted her tight bun of gray hair and gave a sudden he-haw sort of laugh. “Not even my husband would try something that dumb,” she said gruffly, hooking a thumb at frowning Ray. “We’re going to create an ionized column of air for the current to follow. The material of the core itself, air and water vapor, will be our wire, but we have to get things started.”

She turned to point at the huge, silent helicopter and its oddly shaped load. “That boat, the Nikola Tesla, will be the lower terminal in the atmospheric circuit. It has two very powerful diesel engines and these have two uses: first, to drive propellers to let us move around at Claude’s center, and second, to drive a generator and power a large induction coil inside the boat. Once the Tesla arrives at the proper location at the center of the storm, we will extend a high mastlike structure above the Tesla with a large openwork electrode, and the high voltage will be maintained between the top of the mast and the aluminum hull of the boat. This will create a high-density cloud of ions around the Tesla. At the top of the storm, our aircraft will be doing essentially the same thing. That is, it will maintain a potential between its own metal skin and a large electrode towed some distance below it. In this way, we will create two large ion pools, of proper sign, at the top and bottom of the storm, and our calculations indicate that a self-sustaining current flow will be set up over the five-mile vertical air column.”

“But the boat and the plane must remain there if the electron flow is to be maintained?” said a man at the back.

Cora gave a single nod. “We think we must maintain the ion generation for a few minutes. Our computer models suggest that as the eye rotation falters, and the structure begins to collapse, there will be leakage and short-circuiting all along the vortex face. At that point, the storm will not need us any longer. It will destroy itself, blow out its own heart.”

A young woman who had worked her way forward along the edge of the barge now held up her hand. “Dr. Alexander, isn’t it correct that three ecological groups have gone to Judge Goldfarb of the Federal District Court in Boston to gain an order to stop this experiment? I wonder if you’d care to comment on that?”

Cora Alexander gave the cameras a fearsomely witchlike frown, her wide mouth turning down in disgust. “Our attorney, Mr. Goodspeed, and our friends from the insurance underwriters group were forced to fly back to Boston to meet with Judge Goldfarb because of that. In my opinion, this action is a damnable outrage!”

“Then,” said the reporter, “the ecologists’ claims that you may create several dangerous storms out of one have no merit? Is that your position?”

Dr. Alexander stared at the young woman with an undisguised mixture of pity and contempt. “The storm, my dear, gains its energy primarily from the ocean’s surface. Its power and its danger derive from its singleness, its integrated nature. Once we take that same energy total, and break it into a dozen, or a hundred smaller parts, we draw the thing’s teeth.”

The woman pressed forward and persisted. “But that’s just more theory. What if it’s wrong? Haven’t we meddled enough with nature? How do you know what essential part hurricanes may play in the ecology?”

Cora’s yellow fangs snapped terrifyingly together. “Did you major in home-ec, dearest?” she said with a sarcasm so fierce that even Ray grinned at her. “And does your uncle own the paper where you work? What in hell do you think hurricanes do for the ecology? I’ll tell you what they do. They decimated the terns south of Cape Cod. The wild oysters went and never came back. Scallop and cohaug beds that had lasted since Indian times, hundreds of years, were blown away. The salt marshes were wrecked, the Great Ponds infiltrated, the aquifers turned brackish. The ducks were gone, the shellfish small and thin, everything ruined, destruction and death, not to mention a billion dollars in human property losses plus some dozens of human lives gone if sweetie-pie Claude comes ashore on Long Island or Rhode Island at the wrong time of the tide. And those damned fools are up with a damned federal judge to tell us we can’t try and stop that bloody mayhem! Go to hell, you dumb, bleeding-hearted broad! I’ve got my men in that SeaCrane office right now, and if that fat-assed judge tries to . . .”

But Bobby Winthrop, thirty-one-year-old project manager of the hurricane modification attempt at Techoceanics, saw how badly it was going and stepped quickly forward to seize his president by her elbow with a sharp squeeze of warning and to send off to the young, flinty-eyed environmental reporter a warm and apologetic smile. Bobby would soon vector them into the storm center, then decide on the proper moment for the ion fields to be energized. It was his combination of even-tempered urbanity with a careful use of understatement that had mainly kept Techoceanics afloat in troubled seas for four years. Bobby wore a conservative three-piece suit, dark blue with pinstripes, and since he was as tall as Cora, and broad-shouldered as well, he lent a sudden air of corporate stability to the ranting, ugly old woman in her outer-space-look jumpsuit.

“I remind you, ladies and gentlemen,” said Bobby, and his voice became progressively warmer and more engaged in the matter, “that Ray and Cora Alexander will be risking their lives in our attempt to destroy the storm. Risking their lives to save others. I hope you’ll forgive Dr. Alexander’s excited and inaccurate comments. I think we’d all be happier if we could simply go ahead with the job instead of having to justify ourselves at the last moment to a federal judge who knows nothing of the matter.”

The young woman was not placated and she clearly wanted to get at Cora again. “Look,” she persisted, “Dr. Alexander implied that she would fly off this barge at once if she learned of a federal restraint order. Do you deny you meant that?” she said, pointing fiercely at Cora.

“We deny it absolutely,” said Bobby Winthrop in a smooth, breathy voice. “However, our simulations and weather predictions suggest that we must be airborne with the Tesla within the hour. Since issuing such a restraint order on the basis of emotional and scientifically implausible speculations would effectively end the experiment, and also this corporation, we feel certain that Judge Goldfarb will not make such a precipitous and economically disastrous decision.”

“Oh, save that stupid crap for the Hebe judge,” said Ray Alexander in a soft, disgusted snarl, but not quite softly enough.

“Did you have a comment, Mr. Alexander?” said the young woman in an alert, hard voice.

While Cora whispered fiercely at her husband and shot him an enraged glance of warning, Bobby Winthrop stepped toward the reporters, so that they would not get any closer to Ray and Cora. “All right,” he said, and his voice was full and hearty, “we’re engineers. If we can break this storm at sea, people, perhaps plenty of people, will be alive tomorrow instead of dead. If you had a beach house at Montauk, or a fishing vessel in Mystic Harbor, I wonder whom you’d rather have looking out for your life and property: the judges and lawyers, of which this country has more than anyplace else in the known universe; or Ray and Cora,” and he tossed his head backwards to indicate the Alexanders. “Words are great, my friends, but when Claude comes ashore like a million express trains over the shelf, those sixty-foot breakers won’t recognize any restraint orders.”

A tall, older man in the center of the group waved a notebook and several others turned respectfully toward him, for this was the science editor of the Times itself, the dean of American science writers. “I agree, Mr. Winthrop, let’s drop the legal monkey-shines,” he said cheerfully. “Can I ask the Alexanders about the terminal phase of this? Specifically, will the boat and aircraft be able to maintain the field and then escape? What about conditions at the eye when the storm disintegrates?

Bobby half-turned and said in a hopeful, almost plaintive voice, “Cora?”

Cora Alexander nodded brusquely at the reporter. “The simulations we’ve run on the collapse phase are very sensitive to the assumed initiating conditions. The Tesla, as you can see, is sealed and can be inverted without injury or danger. If the storm bifurcates at a low altitude, well, there may be a problem with the aircraft.”

“By problem,” said the Times man at once, “Do you mean the plane might be torn apart in the upward-moving turbulence?”

“That can’t be ruled out,” said Cora at once.

“Mr. Alexander,” said the reporter, “Techoceanics lost a plane and two men in a big thunderhead two years ago. Do you have any comments on that accident as it relates to this project?”

Before Bobby Winthrop could intervene, Ray had lifted his head and pointed an angry finger directly at the reporter. “We were forced into that idiotic stunt by our financial people. The goddamned upper cloud had a reversed polarity. When the induction machine ran into that electron excess, the stroke blew off a wing. We lost the finest geophysical pilot, the best and smartest man we ever had in this whole freak show. . . .”

“That was an entirely different experiment,” said Bobby hastily, “an attempt to electrically seed a thunder-head, you know, make rain. . . .”

But the man from the Times had pivoted and was now peering at the two short, portly, middle-aged men in bulky flying suits standing close together, but somewhat apart from the rest of the group. “Captain Stein, what are your ideas regarding Dr. Alexander’s doubts about your aircraft?”

Milton Stein was a pudgy, forty-year-old avowed homosexual. He was Techoceanics’ pilot and was usually cheerful and quiet, becoming more and more cheerful as a situation grew tighter. Now, the wet and humid dark pressing around him, the hostility of the reporters only thinly held back, the mission about to start, his flat, open face seemed almost a mask of bland cheerfulness.

“Gay Enola is a strong airplane,” he said in a clear voice. “Smitty and I have stiffened her up, and those old Grummans were made tough.” He turned and patted the shoulder of his long-time friend and associate, Bertram Smith, another short, pudgy man with another cheerful moonface. Stein and Smith had roomed together during graduate school, received doctorates in atmospheric physics, and together had started a geophysical contracting service. When Techoceanics had lost their chief pilot two years before, the two men agreed to join the hurricane modification project as full-time consultants. The young engineers around the shop called them Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but with respect and affection.

The Times man blinked at Stein. “Gay Enola? That’s the name of your aircraft?”

Ray Alexander gave a snort of disgust, but it was partly covered by his wife’s response, a warning snarl. The short pilot beamed at the press. “We’re trying to do the opposite of what Enola Gay did, so Smitty thought it would be nice to reverse the name.”

Bobby Winthrop gave a hearty but slightly nervous laugh. “What Captain Stein means, ha ha, is that our big bang will save lives, not end them.”

The tall reporter gave a bemused shrug. “And don’t you feel the name implies anything more?” he said almost slyly.

The pilot retained his benign expression, but he turned to directly face the Times man. “You imply, but we fly,” Stein emphasized with a nod, “and so we will name it what we choose.” Bertram Smith gave a chuckle and smiled shyly at his friend.

“Those weirdos’ll fly without the Grumman,” muttered Ray in a sour whisper, but this time too quietly for even his wife to catch it.

The Times man spoke once more. “Forget the name. Captain, what about the risk? What if Gay Enola isn’t strong enough?”

“We people built close to the ground are hard to kill,” said the pilot with a smile. “And our bonus, if we succeed, will buy a fleet of Gay Enolas. The world, I mean the remote-sensing geophysical world, will be ours.”

Bobby Winthrop saw with relief that this was creating a sympathetic impression with the reporters, but then his stomach tightened as he felt Bettina Holbrook’s hand suddenly grip his elbow. “Arthur called,” she whispered close to his ear. “Judge Goldfarb is still taking arguments from the underwriters’ lawyer, but Arthur thinks he’s going to issue the restraint order. He put Arthur and the Hartford people under oath not to call us until the presentations were over.”

Bobby blinked several times and reached at once into his inner, left-breast pocket. His hand moved swiftly from the pill bottle to his mouth. “Arthur broke his oath to the judge and they haven’t even restrained us yet?” he whispered back. “Okay, you know the drill, Bettina sweetie. Get the Gold Dust Twins”—he made the smallest motion toward the pilot and his aircrew—“over to the airport when the SeaCrane lifts off.”

Bettina put her arm around Bobby’s waist and hugged. “Promise me, when this is done, we’ll walk away for a while. Promise, Bobby! Why should your gut hurt all the time because these crazies haven’t got the self-discipline of a disturbed rattlesnake? Why, dammit?”

“We’re in too deep. My God, Bettina, you know how bloody gigantic this thing is! Bettina, it’s a whole hurricane! And we’re going to rip out its gut from the inside, baby!”

Bobby Winthrop affectionately patted Bettina in a familiar place, then stepped sturdily forward again. “Dr. Holbrook, our project meteorologist, just notified me that Claude has accelerated and our rendezvous time has moved ahead.” He strode through the reporters half-shouting these words and, as he strode, he pointed his two arms straight upward from each, and began to whirl them in rapid, tight circles. Instantly, the four big jet engines of the SeaCrane began to puff and rumble. With its two broad rotor-blade assemblies sagged limp and lifeless down around the flat machine and its fatter load, the idea of flight seemed ludicrous, but now the blades began to move. As they stiffened up and out, forming two great, hissing circles of air, the SeaCrane took on a far more businesslike aspect.

Bobby beckoned for Ray, then gave him a good-natured slap on the shoulder and wished him well. He seized Cora and to her astonishment, put his lips to her cheek. “They think the judge is going against us,” he whispered. “Tell the pilot to stay offshore and as low as he can. Come around Montauk and scoot in from the south. Good luck, Cora.”

She gave him a huge and fearful grin and scuttled after her small husband, under the safety ropes and into the small, open hull port on the otherwise smooth side of the Tesla. The door shut flush into the side of the boat, and Bobby now had his thumbs both vertical and he was throwing his fists upward, over and over again.

The SeaCrane whined and roared in answer and the chatter of the blades increased in both loudness and frequency. Flashbulbs popped, the cameras panned upward, and the SeaCrane lifted straight up, accelerating as it went, and was lost from sight in a moment, even its flashing navigation lights winking out at once behind the heavy mist. Bobby was pleased to note that Gay Enola’s crew, plus Bettina, was also gone. The noise of the SeaCrane was so great, he hadn’t even heard her start her car.

“Thank you for coming,” called out Bobby, waving his hands in a bye-bye gesture to the reporters. “Good night, wish us luck.” He turned and walked into the after deckhouse and shut the door, then sat down at his messy desk in a straight chair and swallowed spit for a while. But he didn’t quite throw up this time, and soon the nausea faded away and he swallowed some more pills and shakily wiped his forehead with a large, monogrammed handkerchief.

As he sat, blinking and cold, waiting for Bettina to come back, the door opened and the young woman who had asked the environmental questions stepped in. Bobby stared at her from half-shut eyes. “Sorry,” he said, “the press conference is over.”

“Not quite,” said the woman. “You people didn’t finish the briefing. For example, the SeaCrane can’t possibly reach that storm from here and return to land, so it has to be refueling someplace. Where? Long Island? New Jersey? And where did those pilots go? There isn’t any Grumman Goose aircraft at the New Bedford airport. Are they working off the water, out of a cove someplace?”

She looked around. “And you’re going to vector the thing, but where? Where are the antennas and the satellite dish and all that stuff—on any of Techoceanics’ properties around New Bedford?”

She took several steps towards him. “The fact is, you people knew there were going to be court and legal problems, and you planned for them. Your whole team is just going to disappear, and no federal marshal will know where in the hell you’re at, until after you try your dangerous little trick!”

Bobby took some deep breaths, then managed a cold smile. “Tomorrow or the next day, dear, you’re going to feel like the biggest damn fool in the whole world, because those two mad, infuriating geniuses in that nutty boat, and those two gentle queens—who incidentally have ten times the guts of any of you standing on our filthy barge in your double-knit suits—and a few other not-especially-nice people here and there, are going to blast Claude’s guts into little pieces and save the world. You got onto an interesting story, dear, but you got it from the wrong end. You grabbed the wrong handle.”

The woman took another step, and angrily lifted her finger to point at Bobby, but behind her came a sharp “Hold it!” The woman turned to see Bettina in the door behind her, hands on her hips, her face a mask of resolve. “Get off this property,” she said icily. “The press conference is over!” and when the woman hesitated, she called, “Mike?” and a large and greasy workman appeared instantly at her elbow.

“I’m going,” said the reporter stiffly, picking her way across the littered barge deck, “but not far. The bridge and the road aren’t owned by Techoceanics!”

As soon as she climbed the ladder up to the roadway, Bobby got slowly to his feet and lifted a slicker off a hook. He grinned tiredly at Bettina, and they walked rapidly across the barge deck to climb down into the big Whaler resting at the bottom of the ladder. Mike grinned down at them. “Ya bust that storm, ya hear! Blast her ta pieces!”

He threw down their lines, and Bettina backed the boat out of its narrow space, the ninety-horse engine barely grumbling. Neither of them bothered to look back at the bridge, where the reporter stood peering after them, for within a hundred yards they had disappeared into the heavy mist, and the engine sound faded soon after.

Bobby pulled on his slicker and looked over at Bettina. “I love you,” he said tenderly. “I’m going to be better . . . we’re going to be better, after this is over.”

Bettina smiled and nodded at him. “If it works, everything will be better. Poor Arthur, what will he say when the judge asks where we’ve gone!”

Bobby shrugged. “The truth, I suppose. He really doesn’t know where any of our refueling or rendezvous points are, or where the project management will locate.”

Bettina shook her head. “They won’t believe it. Dear old Arthur, in jail at last—and at his age, too.”

Bobby sighed, then gently patted Bettina’s slightly rounded slacks. “I’m going to be better, sweetie. Afterward. After it’s done. I promise.”

Sept. 8, midnight—0300

Hurricane Claude reached its full maturity in the early morning of its fourth day of life. It now occupied many thousands of square miles of ocean, had extended its circulation pattern to over 30,000 feet, and had begun to move north at a steady 12 knots. Yet the Gulf Stream had swung close to land that fall and so the fuel that drove Claude’s vast engine was plentiful as the storm neared the latitude of Hatteras. Ashore, along the barrier beaches, there was dark wet weather, gusts and freshets of warm tropic rain, and fitful swirls of heavy fog, but the dangerous eastern semicircle still lay 200 miles offshore.

But as Bettina Holbrook and the other meteorologists in Miami and Hartford and Boston had all feared, the storm was starting to hook west and run like a bowling ball right up the New Jersey gutter of low barometer. With the midnight advisory, Miami hoisted hurricanes warnings as far north as Long Island, and hurricane watches north and east of that. Claude’s energy flow was continuously out of balance, and that lack of equilibrium drove the great cyclonic winds around Claude’s center at ever-greater rates.

At a little after midnight, the Panamanian container ship Commercial Queen, struggling east and south to escape the dangerous eastern side of the storm, was caught by Claude’s rapid acceleration and broken in two by a wave, described by crewmembers later as over 100 feet high. Most of the men stayed with the stern of the vessel and were saved by Coast Guard aircraft two days later, but five men on the bow section were blown out of sight to the west and never seen again. The western fringe of Claude had already disabled several yachts, but this was its first major kill. As it hooked toward the distant Long Island shore, boatmen from Washington, D.C. to Calais, Maine, began to think about their anchors and their tackle. And suddenly, everybody wondered about the tide and when and where the storm might come ashore. The old men who had seen the harbors after the ’38 storm just shook their heads. If it came again like that, they said, you just run for high ground. Forget the boats and houses.

Bettina skillfully brought the Whaler alongside the Michael Faraday, Techoceanics’ forty-foot workboat, where it lay off the Fairhaven docks hidden in the mist, waiting for them. Bobby was feeling a bit more pep and he jumped over the side with the Whaler’s painter and then helped Bettina climb up.

“Go, man,” he said to Walter Nunes, the young communications engineer running the Faraday. “Let’s get out of this harbor before they shut that crazy barrier.”

“They’re aiming for 10 A.M. or noon for that,” said the young man at once. “They called us, the Corps of Engineers I mean, and asked for Bettina. When we said she was at a press conference, they asked if she could give them a call and her thoughts later, as they put it.”

“Screw that,” said Bobby briskly. “Listen, they’ll see the boat going through the hurricane barrier, but there’s no point in their seeing me or Bettina. Where’s Mr. Equal Opportunity?”

“Sacked out below,” said a grinning Nunes. “He’s going to take her the last half of the run.”

Bobby motioned for Bettina and they went down into the dark forward cabin. On one of the bunks, snoring strongly, was a large, rather scruffy young black man. His stained T-shirt had a mushroom cloud motif set next to a circular hurricane cloud, the two united by a lightning bolt. Above and underneath was printed a still-deathless quote from Ray Alexander at a still-regretted Techoceanics environmental debate one year earlier: “Nuke ’em, Shock ’em, who cares? I hate hurricanes!”

Bobby sat down next to Bettina on the other bunk and sighed, staring at this emblem of stupidity and needless defiance. “If we do it, Bettina,” he said, as though trying to convince himself, “it will all be worth it.”

“Don’t despair, dear Bobby,” she said softly, now hugging him to her. “You got us this far. But, oh, what if those two sweet little men . . .?” She did not finish, but hugged him silently and tightly. The Michael Faraday chugged along through the narrow gap of the New Bedford hurricane barrier, and the man in charge saw only one of the bearded Techoceanics engineers waving cheerily up at him. Well, they came and they went, he thought, and turned to talk to a reporter from CableNews about exactly when the barrier gate might be shut that next day.

The conspiracy to burst Claude’s mighty heart had three final points of focus. On the south shore of Long Island, just west of Moriches Inlet, a major stockholder in Techoceanics and thus a much-interested bystander, had made a protected inlet and beach area available, plus his summer home. In the tiny shallow harbor sat a small fuel boat, filled chockablock with JP-2, ready to replenish the SeaCrane with its needed fuel for its final dash offshore to meet Claude and dump the Nicola Tesla.

On a tiny grass airport in central New Jersey, the old but sturdy Grumman Goose known as Gay Enola hid demurely under canvas coverings in a quiet corner of the field. When the sun set that day, the wraps came off, and now the local crew tensely awaited the arrival of the small executive plane Stein and Smith had used to leave the New Bedford Airport after midnight, leased under the name of one of their earlier, and now defunct, companies. Somehow, the flight plan had listed Albany Municipal Airport as destination instead of the Jersey strip.

To bring these giant-killers to the right point in time and proper location in space required a third and very complicated participant. Fortunately, a director of Techoceanics happened to be a trustee administering the almost deserted island of Wasque located south and west of Cape Cod. He had arranged for Geodata, a wholly owned but independent part of Techoceanics, to establish a satellite-communications testing lab at the low center of the island. In the small building there was the weather-access and communications gear that brought in all the ordinary channels, but most important, two big white, slow shifting dishes on top that gave this remote place direct and interference-free communications access to both Gay Enola and the Nicola Tesla.

Techoceanics had leased two channels for open use, and they were now locked on a high, Bell System trans-polar satellite that would be up over them for several days, until long after the matter of Claude would be decided, one way or the other.

The early-morning fog thickened as they ran south and east of New Bedford. Bobby tried to sleep, with Bettina’s arms around him, but a sudden foghorn hoot woke him up with a start and a shudder and they went back up to the wheelhouse. Walter Nunes lay on a cabin bench on his back, seemingly fast asleep, his beard pointing stiffly upward. Moke Mogamo, the black youth with the inflammatory T-shirt, now urged the Faraday at a quiet pace through the murk, the big engines only muttering. Every now and then he pushed the hooter button. “Jesus, Moke,” said Bobby Winthrop, “where in hell are we?”

Moke peered out with every appearance of confidence. “About a quarter-mile northwest of the entrance buoy,” he said with a careless wave of his hand.

“Why can’t we hear the bell, then?” said Bobby, and he felt that familiar fist begin to close inside his gut again.

Moke gave him a relaxed grin. “Not enough swell to rock the big mother, Bobby. Damn thing is sitting there trying to fart out a big bonger and it can’t even poop out a little ping.”

“Think we could hire some ghetto folks to come and bong those bongers and poop those pings, Moke?” said Nunes without opening his eyes. “On the calm days, I mean.”

“You been bongin’ your bonger too much, old buddy. That’s your whole problem. You gotta get your old lady away from that meditation stuff,” said Moke in a cheerful and practical voice. “I got in three suggestions to the Screening Committee for ways to bong that buoy bell in a dead calm.” He shrugged at Bobby. “Well, they said all the time at Harvard Business School you got to diversify, get into new, publicly visible projects. I don’t mean busting hurricanes isn’t visible, but you need homier stuff, too.”

“Boy,” said Nunes in a yawning voice, “nasty old Ray sure said it for once. There’s nothing worse than a smart nigger. It isn’t so much he stuffs the Haaavaaad B. School in your ear night and day, but then he’s got all these public-spirited ideas about bongin’ the bongers. Makes a man feel small.”

But Moke was lost in thought. “It’s really something to imagine that wonderful little ship is going to be driven to death or fame by the spiritual head of the Ku Klux Klans of the World. I mean Ray hates everybody. Nobody is discriminated against.”

“Including Ray,” said Bettina sourly.

Moke shook his head. “If he can do that, Bettina, drive that chariot to glory out there where old Claude’s balls are hanging wild and loose, shit, the rest doesn’t matter, right? I mean old Ray can crap on me for the rest of his mean old life and I’ll still kiss the fucker’s feet!”

“Where’s that damn bell?” said Bobby, his whole body tensed, leaning forward.

Moke blinked and focused his thoughts. He turned his. head slightly one way, then the other, and let his eyelids droop. “There,” he said, “it oofed out a ding.” He paused, then pointed. “Again!” he said.

“I hear it,” said Bobby, blinking at Bettina and suddenly sitting down on the bench opposite Nunes.

“Our bow wave set the mother rocking,” said Moke with an even more elaborate casualness. Like many shoal pilots, he had learned that the slower you went, the more confidence you showed. “There she is,” he said, peering and pointing to starboard. “Fog’s not so bad close to the island.”

But Bobby once again crouched in the corner and tried to conceal his intense efforts at swallowing. He had easily imagined them lost, running circles or on a bar aground as the storm came north over them. Only Bettina noticed, and she sat next to him, stroking his forehead and whispering encouragement. They seemed like a unlikely bunch, to be challenging a giant like Claude.

Moke brought the Faraday alongside the main dock in the small protected harbor of Wasque, and they were assisted in tying up by Professor Wilson Worth, a retired expert in electrical engineering and friend of the trustees of Wasque Island. He served Techoceanics as an unpaid consultant and caretaker on the remote Wasque, and, like the others, awaited the attempt to dismember Claude with complete anticipation.

Professor Worth was a tall and vigorous old man with a bushy white moustache. “Moke and Walt,” he shouted down, “better get the Faraday on that one-ton storm mooring, the black one to the left, and be sure to put chafing gear on those lines. You can huff the Whaler up the rollers with the sixfold tackle. Run her way up, I think.”

Moke shook his head sadly at Professor Worth. “Doc, that storm’s not coming ashore. Ray and Cora are too mean to let it come in. Man, you gotta have faith.”

Worth grinned and shrugged. “True, and I’ve got faith, but there may still be, uh, a slight elevation in water level.” He helped Bettina, then Bobby, climb onto the wharf and threw the lines back on the Faraday as Moke backed her out and turned to make a circle out to the mooring.

“C’mon,” said Worth to Bettina and Bobby, “I’ll run you guys to the shack while they do their stuff with the boats.” They climbed into an open jeep and began a brief, slow, bumpy trip over an old sheeping meadow down to the bowl of a tiny hidden pond where the small concrete-block communications building squatted at its edge. Two big white dish antennas sat pointing at the same section of sky, and a thin 200-foot guyed mast poked high over Wasque, another microwave dish at its top.

“Anything come in?” said Bobby in a dispirited voice as they walked into the fluorescent-lighted space, filled along three walls with consoles and instrument racks.

Professor Worth lifted his thick eyebrows. “Nothing from Long Island or Jersey yet, but they won’t be arriving for a little while. Miss Philips, Arthur’s Girl Friday, sent us a message through the answering service. Judge Goldfarb issued the restraint, and when he found there were no corporate officers, or even a project manager, to serve, he ordered Arthur to tell him where everyone had gone. Arthur said he didn’t know, and Goldfarb charged Arthur with contempt.”

Bobby sighed tiredly. “Goldfarb and Arthur were classmates at Yale Law School,” he said.

Bettina shook her head. “Yeh, but Goldfarb was president of the Jewish law fraternity and didn’t even get on the Law Review Board until his last year, even though he was No. 1 in his class. Arthur was editor. Hateful Ray knows all those nasty kinds of things.”

Professor Worth stroked his moustache and cleared his throat. “I’m afraid Judge Goldfarb is subjecting Arthur to torture,” he said somberly.

“Come on, Willie,” said Bobby in an even more tired voice. “In Boston, they’re going to torture a seventy-year-old former president of the Bar Association?”

“Judge Goldfarb decided that Arthur should be held in custody, until he purges his contempt and tells where we are, but he didn’t want to toss classmate Arthur in with the drug-pushers and hookers. So instead, he’s had two cots set up in his chambers, and he and Arthur are going to live there until Goldfarb has convinced Arthur to obey the law and purge himself. He’s going to talk to him, to lecture him, man to man, judge to attorney, Jew to Gentile.”

“So it is torture,” said Bettina, simultaneously grinning and squeezing out a tear. “Dear old Arthur,” she said fondly, “Everybody is fighting so hard for us, Bobby. Oh, we must win! How’s Claude doing, Willie?”

Professor Worth led them over to the weather consoles and the large visual display showing the eastern seaboard and the western North Atlantic region. “Seems to be coming along nicely, Bettina. I ran your combined statistical projection and map-analysis program on it about a half hour ago and got that output there for First Touch.”

Bettina peered down at the printer-drawn map, the concentric ovals of pressure gradient showing the eye with the first oval just meeting the Long Island shore about at Montauk Point at the eastern tip. “About eighteen hours, to that point, huh?” She shook her head in thought. “Bobby, we’d better make a full vector projection right now. Ray and Cora won’t have much time to hang around on that Long Island beach.”

Bobby nodded, grimacing, then shucked his suit coat and dark silk vest. “Okay, let’s do it. Willie, keep an eye on the com channels so we know when our wandering friends reach their destinations.” He sat down heavily in front of the main computation racks and shook his head. “The closer we get to this, the more impossible it becomes,” he said almost to himself. “But maybe that’s for the best. If it doesn’t work, Gay Enola might make it back out of the eye.”

Professor Worth patted Bobby’s shoulder and his voice was thoughtful. “I don’t know as I wouldn’t rather be in that Goose with Uncle Milt and Aunt Bertie flying me through the exploding eye of a hurricane, than in those chambers being lectured by Judge Goldfarb on law and order.”

Sept. 8, 0300—0800

Hurricane Claude was now a gigantic, fully matured, rotating storm, extending over thousands of square miles and influencing the entire circulation over the North Atlantic Ocean west of the Azores. To the east, in its dangerous sector, the winds blew from the south and east with gusts of over 100 miles an hour. To the west of the storm center, where the mammoth Canadian high had dipped deeply into the continental heartland to challenge Claude for the American coast, thunderstorms and drenching rains ran along the ridge of increasing barometer, and buffeting northwest winds rattled windows as far west as Cleveland.

Yet when it came abreast of Hatteras, Claude’s life-to-be was well established by the heavy, supine Canadian and Greenland cold-air masses. The long low-pressure trough, lying like a great snake up the Jersey coast to cross Long Island and bisect Cape Cod, drew Claude north and helped it to run. Low attracted low, and each system fed the other’s needs.

Most of the predictions agreed that the three-quarter moon tide would be high one to three hours after Claude came ashore at Montauk, then struck Rhode Island and Cape Cod. Everywhere, boats were desperately lifted and hauled, moorings checked and worried over, plywood sheets nailed up over the big picture windows at Quogue and Matunuck, Menemsha and Madaket. And when people peered, in those summer towns and fishing villages, at the old marks painted after the ’38 and ’54 storms to show the water rise, then turned to look out at the close, foggy, sullen water, they knew that nothing would save the boats and houses, if it came like that again.

The huge bloated SeaCrane drifted in, hissing and roaring, from the south over the foggy Long Island shore. A transponder, set in the center of the small beach, brought the big machine down next to the fuel boat, itself barely floating in the tiny inlet. Cora had the hatch open and was unwinding out of it before the big blades drooped down to a lifeless sag. As she jogged towards the big angular modern house, embellished with its own white microwave dish pointing upward, she met the Techoceanics communications man-in-charge running to meet her.

“We’ve got Wasque on the beam and they give us two hours, twenty minutes to lift, Cora,” he said in a tense voice.

“Where does that put the final moment, in relation to Long Island?” said Cora, turning in impatient annoyance to see Ray finally tumble out of the small hatch and sleepily begin a walk to the beach house. He had snoozed during the entire trip from New Bedford.

“You better talk to Bettina on that, Cora,” said the young man as they stalked briskly through big double doors and into a book-lined study, now turned into a wire-laced and sophisticated communications link.

Cora put on a headset. “Who’s there? Moke?”

“Hi, Cora. They fueling the chopper? You got to move out soon, lady.”

“Where’s Bettina?”

“Here, Cora. Listen, we’re sending the vector-final map-fax. Stand by,” said Bettina, and the SatFax machine began to create a North American operations map, complete with the tracks of Claude, the SeaCrane-Tesla mission, and Gay Enola’s course to the final meeting at the eye of the storm, all with times and headings.

Cora and a still-sleepy Ray watched the map develop, and Cora shook her head. “But that puts breakup at less than 300 miles south of land, Bettina. And you’ve got us going into Claude head-on, or at least almost.”

“Claude may be hitting over fifty knots up there, Cora. Do you want to miss the eye? If you try to enter from the northwest quadrant, you might be driven too far south. The oval-of-confusion-of-intercept has a bag to the south of the center with that kind of approach.” Bettina spoke in an intent and professional tone.

Ray stared sleepily down at the map. “Better 300 miles than zero, stupid!” he said in a slurred, insulting voice, and Cora nodded without expression.

“Okay,” she said, “that’s our baseline plan. What’s the ninety-five percent lower-limit on lift-off here? They said we should go in two hours and twenty minutes?”

“Be ready in the Tesla by one hour and thirty minutes from now,” said Bettina. “Start your engines by two hours, if we haven’t given you the go by then. You’ll definitely lift on or before two hours and twenty minutes from now.”

“Okay, and I’ll be back to you again in one hour, if something hasn’t come up before then. What about Arthur?”

“Cora, look,” said Bettina, “I want to get back to the storm. Willie got the whole thing direct from Arthur’s sec. Here he is . . .”

And as the story of Arthur’s incarceration and inquisition flew out to near the moon and back again, Cora turned and snarled at Ray. “Get some water boiling for the damn lobsters, dummy! We’ve only got an hour and a half.”

“Jesus, lobsters!” said Ray in disgust, speaking to the communications engineer. “We’ll be setting up a 5 million-volt field in a pool of stinking lobster upchuck. Wait’ll that boat takes a couple of 180-degree rolls. That lobster won’t stay in her gut, sonny!”

But the young engineer had dealt with Ray before and he gave him a slap on the back. “Ray, forget the 5 million volts. You just piss on that storm and it’ll crawl right back to the Caribbean. Come on. Let’s go have a drink.”

A short time later, in the thin dawn over a murky New Jersey landing field, the small plane from New Bedford came in to land and then taxied directly to where Gay Enola waited.

As he bounced over the grass, Stein saw his tall and rangy crew chief, Stew Johnson, waving them in from under Gay Enola’s right wing. The big man had on flight coveralls, and over his shoulder was a parachute pack, and they could see that his face was grim. “Smitty,” said Milton Stein in a tight voice. “We got trouble! Is your stuff together?”

“Just my kit bag, dear,” said Smith in a squeaky voice. “Everything else is on Gay Enola.”

“Then let’s get going,” said Stein, cutting his engine and popping open the hatch over the side-by-side seats.

As they climbed quickly down over the wing, the big crew chief strode over. “The weather lady at Wasque called about ten minutes ago and said that the Boston judge sent marshals into the New Bedford offices to seize all of Techoceanics’ records. She thinks this place will be compromised. She said we should get off the ground and go over the lake to wait. There’s still about six hours until you go out, she said.”

Stein looked over across the field to the tiny control tower and the small complex of hangers and parking lot. “Any marshals show up yet, Stew?”

“Not as far as we can tell. . . . Wait, isn’t that a car coming up the access road, way over there, Milt?”

“Let’s go!” said Stein. “You come to the lake with us, Stew.”

“Oh dear, two cars!” said Bertram Smith in a small, dismayed voice. He turned and jumped up into Gay Enola’s open cabin door.

Stein and Johnson followed him and pressed rapidly forward between the large electrical machines in the main cabin area of the Goose, up to the pilot’s office. “She’s ready, Milt,” said Stew Johnson, settling into the copilot’s seat and hitting both engine starters. The two big radials began to swing their props and in an instant they were banging and grumbling.

“Get the door, Smitty,” shouted the pilot over the engine noise. “Here we go!”

Gay Enola trundled out onto the main east-west strip and started her takeoff run. There was almost no wind, and the pilot shoved both throttles ahead to full-emergency power. Gay Enola had new, supercharged double-radials, to give her the altitude capability needed to reach the upper parts of storms, and she bounded ahead on her small wheels with an almost rabbitlike motion.

“They’re coming after us!” said Johnson as the two cars swung rapidly through the small parking lot next to the control tower and dashed out onto a taxi strip. “They’re trying to cut us off!”

“Techoceanics Goose, this is control tower. You are not cleared for takeoff. Repeat, you are not—”

Stew Johnson turned off the radio with a curse, closely watching the two approaching cars. “They’re going to get ahead of us, Milt. They can go faster,” he said in a low voice, and moments later the first car dashed onto the runway ahead and slewed in a skidding half-circle as the driver slammed on his brakes.

Bertram Smith, who stood behind them at the rear of the pilot’s cabin, sighed and shook his head. “Oh my,” he said, “eight hours still to go and we’re already in a game of chicken with some nasty police. It really is one thing after another, isn’t it, Miltie?”

Milton Stein made no comment. His expression was completely, blandly cheerful and he seemed to be hardly watching as the second car swerved to a stop beside the first one, while four men rapidly jumped out waving their arms. They soon stopped this as they realized that the big amphibian was getting both larger and noisier at a rapid rate. As one, they all fell down flat on the ground in front of their cars, and at that moment Stein pulled the wheel sharply back and Gay Enola gave a big hop, passing over the cars at an altitude of about ten feet. The amphibian staggered and sagged a bit lower, but did not touch the runway again, and they felt the ground effect cushion her until full flying speed was achieved and they began to climb steadily.

Stew Johnson let out a great gasp of breath and wiped his forehead. “You did it again, Milt. At least the bastards didn’t shoot at us.”

“Isn’t he wonderful!” said Bertram Smith, who leaned to kiss the pilot warmly on his right cheek. “Everything is just so exciting with Milton!”

Stew Johnson shook his head and gave them both a huge grin. “Boy, you guys are really something else! By God, I wish I could go all the way in with you!”

Stein turned to smile at the crew chief. “So do we, Stew, but we might not get back with an extra man aboard to worry about.”

The crew chief nodded, staring at his boots. “I know that. Still, I’d sure like to see you do it.”

Gay Enola flew south and west for twenty more minutes, then came down to land on a small and private lake on a large and private estate in northeastern Pennsylvania. Sitting on a pier, his expression bored and pouting, a thin twelve-year-old boy was idly throwing stones at some ducks, which eventually flew off, quacking angrily. He turned in surprise as the big amphibian settled onto the water and rapidly taxied over to the float. His sneering, spoiled expression faded as he noticed the name of the plane, then its logo of a hurricane vortex pierced by a lightning bolt. The hull gently bumped the float as the engines died away, and Stew Johnson jumped out of the door onto the dock and grabbed a rope.

“Your dad around, son?” asked the crew chief, but then, hearing a distant shout, he looked up to see a short, fat, bald man walking rapidly down to the lake from a sprawling house. “Ah, here he comes,” said Johnson.

The boy’s eyes had grown large and round. As the pilot and Bertram Smith stepped out of Gay Enola onto the dock, he blinked. “Are you guys the hurricane busters?” he said in a high, astonished voice. “What are you doing here?”

Milton Stein pointed at the big house. “Smitty and I are going to sack out until the mission, but Stew can show you around the aircraft.” He indicated the crew chief, then stepped across the dock to shake hands with a small, excited fat man who had hurried up, puffing and sweating in the tropical-feeling, damp morning. “How are you, Mr. Heartshorn? Nice to see you again.”

“It’s certainly a relief to see you people,” said the overweight little banker. “One of your gang called up to tell us you were on the way.”

“Any of them get caught?” said Stein, beaming cheerfully at the fat, agitated man.

Heartshorn shook his head angrily, his jowls vibrating. “Your bunch left in a van while those cuckoos were playing car games on the runway with you. By God, I’m going to see those federal bastards in jail when this is over, believe me.” The banker shook his head. “The trouble is, with the Techoceanics management and PR staff essentially out of the picture, our adversaries are having a field day in the press. They’re beginning to sound as though we really were going to use a hydrogen bomb on the damn storm! And that loud, public flap drives the federal cops into playing James Bond. Well, they got their tit in the wringer this time, Captain, believe me!”

The small boy stared, his mouth an O, at his fat, ugly little father. “Hey, Dad, wow! Are you in this, too?” His usually scowling or sneering expression was replaced by a combination of hero worship and complete astonishment.

The banker stared at his son, and his small, angry eyes became softer and his expression was one of sudden, surprised pleasure. “I’m in like Flynn, Peter,” he said with a grin. “One million bucks’ worth I’m in, and if we do it, even that plane won’t be big enough to carry the hundred-dollar bills to the bank. Come on, boys, breakfast is waiting, and then you can take a nap until we get the go from Wasque.” He walked back up the dock between the pilot and Bertram Smith, talking animately to both.

The small boy watched his father walk away, and shook his head. “I thought he just went to a bank and yelled at people. Wow, and he owns some of this!” He made a worshipful gesture at Gay Enola.

Stew Johnson gave the boy a wide smile. “Big ideas, like hurricane busting, take all kinds of people, Peter, and you’re one of them. Come on, we want to get old Enola here alongside that inner float and well back under the tree leaves. You never know who might come snooping by overhead.”

As the boy and the man pulled the Grumman deeper under the tall, spreading trees at the edge of the lake, the boy shook his head. “How come they’re trying to stop us, saying all that dumb stuff on TV, Mr. Johnson?”

“Oh,” said Stew Johnson, scratching his ear, “we just happen to be living at a time when most people like talking better than doing. But it’ll all turn around, Peter. It always does.”

“Well,” said the boy, staring at Gay Enola now rocking gently deep in her shady bower, “when I grow up, that’s what I’m going to be, a hurricane buster!”

The tall man put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “Peter, you remember, once you get started on something like this, it’s just awfully hard to stop.”

Bettina stared bitterly and almost unseeing at the operations map displayed on the biggest computer scope. They had saved Gay Enola, just barely, but they had paid a price. While the technician in the ops shack on the New Jersey field excitedly described the near-disaster of the takeoff and escape, Bobby had suddenly doubled over in his chair and vomited down between his legs. After five minutes of mostly dry retching, Moke had poked him with a big syringe of morphine from the medical kit, and Bobby had gone off to sleep in the corner of the room on a mattress. Bettina had been careful not to mention Bobby when Cora’s one-hour call-back came, and Gay Enola’s narrow escape in New Jersey had swept everything else from Cora’s head. Bettina’s eyes were pinched and red and her face was gray, but she had managed the first phase of it, including warning the New Jersey crew, and now the final part was close, and with Bobby rested, they might get through it.

“Moke,” said Bettina quietly, “you give them the lift-off final, and any other stuff they need. And send them now. There’s no point waiting for another five minutes if they’re ready.”

Moke leaned forward and spoke. “Cora, Bettina says go when you’re ready, okay? Your update vector-final is still looking good.”

“Engines are on,” came back Cora’s deep voice. “We’re light. Mark! We’re airborne,” and Professor Worth set the time against the digital display line, SEACRANE LAUNCH AT MORICHES, FINAL “We’re going up,” said Cora; then, more sharply, “Ray, you blew a fart! I told you to go and shit. . . .”

But riding over that was Ray’s retort, “It’s just your own sweet breath blowing back into your kisser, my dear,” and behind this came a roar of laughter from the SeaCrane pilots.

Bettina sat back and looked over at Professor Worth with a tired smile. “Imagine trying to run this zoo without a whip and a gun,” she said. “Willy, I’ve got to get some sleep. Moke and Walt can run the system for a couple of hours. We really don’t have to sweat until they drop the Tesla.”

Professor Worth, whose moustache now drooped somewhat in the humid morning air, sighed deeply. “Even if we lose Moriches to the feds now, it won’t matter,” he said, “but what if the marshals come here?” Bettina didn’t answer. She had gone over to lie down close to Bobby, pull up a blanket, and throw a protective arm over his large, quiet form.

Sept. 8, 0800—1600

Claude, though still extending itself to the east, was now running straight north at over forty knots. Ahead of the eye’s violently steep gradient, terminating at 28.6 inches in the core of the storm, a series of great waves ran as consorts, preparing to lead the storm ashore. In the deep water, out beyond the thousand-meter line, these wind and pressure-driven waves were only a few feet high and would pass a beleaguered vessel unnoticed in the terrible slash and confusion of the storm. But they were very long and they were driven at speeds far highter than such waves normally exhibited. As the storm accelerated, so would these leader waves gain velocity, and when they came over the Long Island and New England extensions of the Continental Shelf, their enormous energy of forward motion would be transformed in a few moments by the bottom friction into vast, tumbling breakers, forty to sixty feet high. When four such barometrically driven water waves struck the southern Rhode Island resort town of Misquamicut during the ’38 storm, every house was broken into small pieces, the rubble driven a mile or more inland across a salt pond, and dozens of householders killed in an instant of smashing destruction and unimaginable violence.

The warnings increased on TV and radio, and people began to draw back from the coasts. Small towns and beach-house rows on the south Long Island coast emptied out, and in some places only the water people—charter skippers, scallopers, and cohaugers—gathered to assist each other. It’s the rise in the water you’ve got to watch, they said to each other, that and the wind shift after the eye passes.

A big steel dragger, Judith Ann, with twelve aboard, lost her engines at just the wrong moment, north and east of Claude’s center, the most dangerous quadrant, and was soon rolled upside down and sunk in a few moments as two huge seas came together in Judith Ann’s sea-space. “Killer Claude” the Globe named the storm then, and soon all the papers headlined more or less the same thing: KILLER STORM WILL STRIKE BEFORE MIDNIGHT!

Bettina and Bobby set zero hour for the attack on Claude at 1520, midafternoon, at which time they estimated Claude’s eye would have reached a location 290 miles south of Montauk Point.

The mission profile for the SeaCrane phase was for the helicopter to penetrate from the north to within the storm system as close to this attack point as possible, then ditch the Tesla. Though the boat had over a thousand horsepower that could be delivered to two big propellors, the Tesla‘s sea surface mobility was intended mainly to correct or improve local position and to maneuver once it was inside the eye. The idea was that Claude would come to where the Tesla waited. The trick was to deliver the boat as close to the final moment as possible, to minimize wave pounding and damage, but not so close that the SeaCrane could not penetrate the storm’s northern edge.

At about 250 miles south of Long Island, the SeaCrane’s first pilot was shaking his head and fighting his buffeted machine. “Bobby,” he said, “I don’t think this should be pushed. This damn storm is getting wild, even this far north.”

The SeaCrane staggered along at about 1,000 feet above the churning ocean, struck by vicious side-gusts and whipped by wild sprays-of salt spume and rain, blown in every direction by the increasing wind. Even at this altitude, the roar of the storm wind was overwhelming, masking any other engine and airframe noises.

An acrimonious argument then started among the SeaCrane pilots, Cora and Ray; Cora wanting to press further, Ray wanting to try hooking a bit west to see if they could sneak in closer to the eye that way, and the pilots wanting to ditch the Tesla then and there.

Bettina now had the Testa’s position established on the big system’s map. “They’re almost 260 miles south now, Bobby, and Ray can run south and gain some more miles. Do it! Get the thing into the water!”

“It isn’t that bad, yet, damn it,” said Cora, starting to argue again.

“Shut up, Cora!” said Bobby sharply, and she stopped talking at once. “I’m the system’s manager and I order you to ditch now. Commence your descent.” He wiped his forehead unsteadily. “The Nimbus interferometer is showing mean wave height of only five or six feet under you. Ray can run at least some of the way south if you start now, Cora.” He said this more quietly and slowly.

“We’re at 500,” came the pilot’s voice. “Very stiff, turbulence bad and visibility is zilch . . . 300 . . . two . . . whup, almost caught us that time. . . . Okay, 50 feet, we’re staggering, 20 . . . prepare to drop, Ray.”

“Safety locks off,” said Ray. “Disconnect,” said the pilot, “you’re free, Ray,” and the Tesla fell ten feet to hit the choppy ocean surface with a giant splash as the SeaCrane, free of its huge burden, darted up and off to the west like a dragonfly caught in a sudden upward wind gust.

The pilot cabin of Tesla contained two side-by-side foam-padded seats that could be reclined for sleeping. Ray, in the left-hand (or pilot’s) position, navigated the Tesla with his wheel and throttles, and he now engaged the propellers and started off through the white, breaking chop at a good eight knots. The boat took some bad thumps and hammering from the steep waves, and Cora looked over at her small, intent husband with a sneer. “Slow up, dummy. We exceeded our allowed shock limits twice in thirty seconds.”

“I thought you wanted to go south,” said Ray, making a lip fart, but he eased back on the throttles and the Tesla went more easily, now only snap-rolling occasionally when an especially large sea swept over her whale-shaped upper body. But the day was dark, and it grew darker as they struggled slowly south.

At a little before 1300, Gay Enola lifted off the small private lake into a wet, now-blustery, rain-filled sky and made a graceful circle to the east. Only three people saw the start of the mission: the short banker, his son, and the crew chief, and they all waved from the float as Gay Enola lifted off the water in a spatter of white foam. Stew Johnson soberly watched them rise and finally fly out of sight, then thoughtfully bit his lip. “Mr. Heartshorn, I don’t know whom rich bankers pray to in a tight corner, but maybe you ought to try it now for those two men.”

But Peter Heartshorn’s eyes were like stars, and he hugged his father. “I’d give anything to be there with them. Anything!”

Gay Enola climbed and climbed as she sped east, and there was darkness and turmoil at every level. Thunderstorms were dodged near the coast, with Bettina’s help, and finally the Grumman broke into clearer air at 20,000 feet, and turned on the final-vector run into the eye. The turbulence and updrafts were fierce and continuous, but Gay Enola was approaching Claude’s great heart from the west, where the headlong, forward run of the storm subtracted part of the force of the rotary storm winds. Higher and higher they went until, a little after 1500, Gay Enola burst through some high scudding cloud and entered the vast and open oval eye of Hurricane Claude. Below, everywhere, were sloping, steaming banks of cloud, ranged in a mounting, ridged vortex of unimaginable proportions. Along that rough yet shockingly organized confusion ran thinner sheets and daggers of ripped, slashed cloud, torn out of the face by the howling circular winds.

Bertram Smith had started the big generator which comprised Gay Enola’s main payload, and now he looked down from a hull blister and talked to Bobby Winthrop.

“It’s quite lovely, Bobby,” he said in his high, calm voice, “but, oh my, so big!”

As they flew further east, the whole shape of the eye became apparent, opening out beneath them, and in the slanting afternoon sun that burned brightly above they caught a glimpse of the white froth and dark confusion of water surface through the smother of cloud far, far below. And as Smith peered intently, he saw, suddenly and faintly, a tiny wink, an intense speck of light against the dirty gray-white of racing clouds and raging sea.

“Bobby,” he said, “I see Ray and Cora’s flasher. They’re north of us, maybe six miles.”

“We have them near you,” said Bobby. “Ray, keep that xenon beacon going. Gay Enola can see you now.”

Ray grunted in assent. The last half hour had been the worst for the Tesla, as everyone had expected, and even the partial lowering of an antiroll keel had not prevented two or three near-total upsets. Through all this, Ray had maintained a running fire of remarks about yorking and Dramamine, especially annoying since Cora had never been seasick in her life, but she had her revenge when it took Ray ten minutes to urinate into his little seat container, a process Cora did not help by making pointed suggestions and coarse insults about Ray’s inadequacies.

The waves were gigantic on the northern edge of the eye, and impossible to anticipate since visibility was down to ten feet in a continual, horizontal blast of torn wave tops. The Tesla rolled halfway over in a wild cross-sea, caught an especially vicious blast of dense rain, and then, an improbable miracle, came out into sunshine. In a few minutes, Cora could see partway up the huge funnel of cloud sweeping around them, an endless, complex, wildly moving structure, beyond imagination and beyond hope. For an instant, Cora’s heart turned to water and her breath caught in her throat. It was impossible. There was too much of it.

“Losing your nerve, Cora?” said mean, sharp-eyed Ray, for he had seen that moment of weakness, that flicker of dissolution in his wife’s face. “Kind of like pissing on the sun to put it out, eh?” he snarled.

“Connect up the generators, put the keel all the way down, and cut the bullshit, Ray,” said Cora in a steady voice. “Bobby, I’m erecting the electrode mast.”

“Do it!” came the words right back. “I’m bringing Gay Enola north over you along the storm track. Bettina thinks the northern edge of the storm is in a near state of instability now, because of this wild forward velocity, so I’m going to plug you both in as soon as we get vertical alignment with Gay Enola. How’s the sea state?”

“Bad. We’re rolling twenty degrees, but it’s getting less and the keel helps. The mast is up and we’re getting some stability as the wind drops. Bobby, we’re sitting in warm sunshine.”

“Steady,” said Bobby to both his distant charges. “You set, Bertie?”

“Our electrode is down and the generator is running. Just give the word, Bobby. How big it all is. Oh my!”

“Hold it, we’re coming up on alignment,” said Bobby in his tightest voice, and clustered around his chair in front of the systems map display were the four other members of the Wasque vectoring team. Five pairs of eyes watched the tiny light point that identified Gay Enola move up the screen to finally cover the steady point that showed where the Tesla pitched and waited.

“Now,” breathed four voices.

“We’ve got alignment!” shouted Bobby. “Hit it!” Over the speakers came simultaneous confirmation from Cora and Bertram Smith in identical words “Field is on! Full power!”

In the strange, sun-drenched, seemingly benign eye, the Tesla’s 5 million-volt field immediately set up a huge cloud of ionized air and water vapor. This immense field immediately drew solid strikes from low clouds to the north, and these flashing, ionizing trails crossed and drew more strikes, so that in less than ten seconds the entire sky over the Tesla was filled with continual, massive ripples of lightning. But there was no thunder to these displays. The bolts did not discharge a static cloud and then stop, allowing the colder, surrounding air to roar back in. They were replenished by the giant, rotational motion of Claude itself. The ripple of fire now rode rapidly up the air column, strikes and bolts opening up new current paths everywhere.

To Ray and Cora, it seemed almost like an explosion of electrical fire around them, harder and brighter than the sun, but a slow explosion taking almost a full minute to reach its peak, and when the sky was totally filled with rippling, wavering, expanding bolts, they dropped sunshade lenses over their goggles and saw only that they were bathed in the brightest, most intense, yet coldest light they had ever seen.

At the top of the storm, when Gay Enola’s field was switched on, the path was longer, about a thousand feet down to the towed electrode, and so the glowing field was both longer and thinner, but within a few moments the field had drawn strikes and the whirl of electrical discharges had disappeared down into the maw, where a white, intense glow was flowing upward. A moment later, the gigantic circuit was completed and sustained from top to bottom. Later, Techoceanics’ atmospheric physics group estimated the maximum current flow at peak activity at over a billion amperes. Claude’s entire eye was filled with electrical fire, and its fearsome integration, its wonderful, deadly balance was destroyed in an instant.

Only four persons actually observed that climactic moment, and to them it was simply a sense of light so intense and increasing so rapidly in intensity that the world became entirely light. And though the Nimbus IV cameras surely caught that vast, sudden glow of Claude’s death, the vision passed unseen by all the world because when the final circuit was complete, the explosive production of electromagnetic, longwave radiation, blasting and bouncing around the earth, interrupted every channel of nonwire communication of the globe with a static disturbance so strong that absolutely no signal transfer was completed for several minutes. So bank balances were upset, phone connections lost, and TV programs interrupted, and the greatest electromagnetic signal to be generated in the history of the planet was sent out in all directions to tell even the stars of Claude’s sudden end.

In the Wasque operations center, they heard the static scream begin, and saw the TV pictures dissolve to shards of jagged confusion, and they stared at each other in elated disbelief. Of all the communications specialists, everywhere in the world, attempting to retrieve some signal or bit of information at that moment, they, most of all, understood the meaning of that blast of wild electromagnetic confusion. The speakers buzzed and screeched, but no one touched a volume knob.

“That’s old Claude dying, good buddy,” said Moke, throwing his arm around Walter Nunes’s shoulders, “and you know what he’s screaming over those speakers while mean old Ray and tough old Cora shove a lightning bolt up his ass? ‘Why me?’ that’s what he’s saying, ‘Why me’ ?”

“Look at that electromagnetic disruption!” said exultant Professor Worth. “My God, think of that energy release! This is unbelievable!”

“I wonder how our friends are doing in this?” said Bettina soberly, and they watched and waited, for what seemed like hours but was no more than two and a half minutes, until the screens began to clear and the wavery images to strengthen. And when the pictures came back from Nimbus, at Wasque, and in Boston, and Miami, and many other places, several dozen sharp intakes of breath occured simultaneously, for in that smallest interval, Claude was irrevocably changed. The eye was collapsing. They could see the deep instability ripples on the northern edge begin to smear and overrun the eye. The sharp, crisp look of the hurricane vortex was being ruined and the eye was disappearing, losing its form and identity.

As that final collapse accelerated, Claude’s agony intensified, and the storm finally difurcated, broke apart at about 8,000 feet, and the downward-moving pressure wave hit the Tesla, cushioned by the sea, with no more than a tremendous thump of overpressure.

What happened in the next five minutes at the sea surface was far worse. The winds, which had been no more that 90 miles an hour along Claude’s northern sector, now began to switch direction and to accelerate to brief, sudden gusts of more than 300 miles an hour. Since this brief, wild reversal of direction occured in a vertical sense as well, these sudden, huge gusts caught hailstones and sent them at immense speeds through the wet clouds until they were a large as lemons or baseballs, then drove these hard and deadly missiles around inside the storm interior like a million random cannon shots.

The Tesla, her mast torn and battered away, was suddenly beset by a massive hailstorm that penetrated the hull in several places with thunderous crashes, the entire bombardment producing a deafening roar of damage as the ice balls broke apart on impact with shuddering force and rocketed off to continue their screaming courses downwind.

Ray instantly curled up in a tight ball in his seat, his arms over his head, but Cora turned and snarled, “We’re holed, stupid! Come on, get off your ass! We’re sinking! We’ll get back to you later, Bobby. . . .”

Yet that message of alarm and danger was not the worst to come. The people at Wasque, and in the Tesla, listened mutely, their stomachs constricted in fear and anguish as Milton Stein spoke steadily from a background of wild noises and obvous transmission problems. “We lost an engine, Bobby. Turbulence just ripped it out of the wing. Never seen this sort of air movement before. Very wild, very strong. We’re in a flat spin and the tail controls seem to be severed.”

“Milt, Bertie, get in the capsule! Get out, Milt!”

“We’re trying, Bobby. Listen, I’m going to try an inflight prop reversal with the other engine, to break the spin. Maybe we can get clear then.”

“You’ll tear off a wing!” shrieked Bobby, but the signal from Gay Enola went suddenly and completely dead, and Bobby’s flushed, intense expression instantly vanished. He half-rose and turned to Bettina with a vague, puzzled expression on his face. “Bettina, help me, plea—” and he fell forward on his knees and then onto his face, and his right foot made a terrifying little tattoo of three or four thumps on the floor.

“Moke! Willy! He’s dying!” screamed Bettina, and in an instant Moke had Bobby turned on his back and was listening intently at his chest. “Oh man, his ticker’s stopped!” said Moke at once. “Come on, old buddy,” he pointed a finger at Nunes, “you took the course, too. You pump and I’ll puff. I don’t smoke that wheezy old reefer your woman grows in those window boxes.”

“Bettina,” said Professor Worth in a low, worried voice, “Quick! Give him a shot of heart stimulant!” He pulled the big medical kit off its shelf and opened it on the floor next to Bobby. While Bettina desperately stripped wrappings from the disposable syringe and then drove the needle into Bobby’s right arm and Walter Nunes pushed downward in rhythm to give the heart massage through Bobby’s chest. Moke expertly cleared Bobby’s tongue with a forward finger sweep and began to puff air into his mouth while watching Bobby’s chest rise and fall. On the fourth puff, Moke saw Bobby’s eyes fly open and look directly into his, and he lifted his mouth and sent him back a grin and a wink. Bobby gave several rattling coughs, but his color was coming back a bit and he finally returned a weak wink. “Moke, dear, I didn’t know you cared,” he said in a faint voice. “How come you didn’t mention it?”

Bettina knelt by Bobby’s head and the tears streamed down her face. “Baby, don’t leave me again! Oh, Bobby, my sweet, don’t go away!”

Bobby took, then squeezed her hand. “I’m not going anyplace, Bettina. I got where I’m going.”

But Bettina was now down across him, her lips against his pale cheek, and she was speaking with a passionate intensity. “Bobby, listen, we’ll do all those things you want. We’ll go to Club Med, for weeks, months, Bobby! And I’ll get a bikini, ten bikinis! Oh, I promise. I love you, my darling Bobby!”

Bobby reached a large arm up and over and hugged Bettina closer. “You’ll wear a bikini, really, on those beaches, Bettina?”

“Only until you take it off me, baby,” said Bettina in a new, sultry voice, snuggling closer and softly catching his lower lip in both of hers.

Moke looked up from his watch and released Bobby’s right wrist so he could now encircle Bettina with both arms. “That’s the kind of talk that gets that old mother pumping again,” he said in a formal, consulting-room voice.

But now Professor Worth gave a shout of amazement and joy. “Hey! We’ve got two signals now! They must have gotten down in the escape capsule. Bobby, we’re getting a message from the Tesla emergency transponder—‘Leaks fixed. Vessel totally disabled. Awaiting rescue’—but now there’s a second radio beacon signal showing on the plot, six miles to the east!”

Everyone stared at the professor, and Bobby made a motion to sit up, but Bettina restrained him with chidings and kisses. “Are they modulating it?” said Bobby in a low voice.

“Not yet,” said the professor in a tense and expectant voice. “It’s sending the automatic recognition signal for the Gay Enola capsule. . . . Wait . . . wait, here comes some modulation. . . . Wait . . . wait . . . message is, ‘Tell the underwriters we want a Blackbird and a drone the next time.’ Message repeating. . . .”

“What’s a Blackbird?” said Bettina.

Moke shook his head in admiration. “One of those big spy planes, 90,000 feet, Mach 3,” he said. “Old Milt will be king of the sky in one of those mothers. He can pop ten Claudes and never lift a wing.”

But at this moment the door to the communication building flew open, and five large federal marshals crowded in, two with rifles pointed at the floor, all with brown tie shoes and new yellow, yachting slickers over their suit coats. “Everybody line up against the. . . .” said the leader, but his voice trailed away as he saw the open medical kit, the grouping around prone Bobby, and Bettina passionately kissing his face and whispering in his ear.

Professor Wilson Worth’s face turned to stone and his expression to one of total contempt. “Who the hell gave you people permission to land here? This is private property. Get back to your damned boat!”

But Moke was up on his feet, a huge smile across his face, his hand extended in friendly greeting as he strode across the room. “Where’re your manners, Willy?” he said briskly. “Can’t you see who these folks are?” He seized the bewildered marshal’s hand. “Why, it’s the Brownshoe Hurricane Protection Society. Put me down for ten bucks, boys,” he said expansively, “I haven’t given at the office.”

Sept. 8, 1600—Sept. 9, 0930

The destruction of Claude’s core spread disorganization outward in all directions. The polar air mass to the west, sensing weakness and disorder, now flowed inexorably eastward throughout the evening, and most of Claude’s western energy excesses disappeared in a heavy series of offshore rains and thundersqualls. To the east, the dying storm set several small and feeble children in motion, truncated, circumscribed pools of low barometer that were mostly eaten by the Greenland air mass or that spun themselves to death while moving and feeding from the same depleted patch of cooler ocean as their neighbors.

The great leader waves, no longer driven by a fifty-knot barometer hammer, turned into tremendously long-swell, low humps of water losing speed to friction and identity to the natural process of separation by period. As they came onto the south Long Island coast, they mounted the shallows close to shore, and suddenly, almost from nowhere, a series of steep, sharp, far-separated breakers hammered the Moriches, Shinnecock, and other inlets with high, regular surf, completely blocking the entrances for several hours. But no one was out facing Claude, and when the breakers dropped and were replaced by a steady hiss of sullen, hot rain, the boat and water people looked at each other and shook their heads in wonder at the miracle of their deliverance. At least a hundred old, wrinkled men turned to another hundred, identically leathery friends and they all said more or less the same thing, “What in Tophet won’t they think of next!”

The deluge of 300-mile-an-hour hail had turned the high-tech interior of the Tesla into a wrecked shambles. Cora and Ray had managed to plug the holes near the waterline with expanding putty, so the Tesla could roll and wallow without shipping more water, but the switch-gear for the engines, the communications equipment, and most of everything else was in ruin. For a while they amused themselves with the hand pump, getting water out of the Tesla, each berating the other for any slow or partial strokes during turns at the pump handle.

The rolling and pitching slowly abated, though the rain came down steadily, drumming on the aluminum hull. Cora lay tiredly back in her seat and her thoughts turned hard and bitter. They had won, but they had paid too high a price. She remembered Milton’s Stein’s calm, professional voice as he spoke of death and ruin in a flat spin, just before the Tesla’s radio gear was smashed by a grapefruit-sized lump of ice. Their hard-fought triumph seemed spoiled and stupid.

At that moment Ray, who was peering at his bare feet and his socks, hanging on the control wheel to dry, said in a thoughtful voice, “I wonder if fags get to go to heaven?”

The comment seemed entirely too much for Cora, and she bared her large teeth in rage, then turned to Ray. “Listen,” she said in her most acid tone, “do you realize why you’ve got this stupid thing about hating homosexuals, Ray? I’m going to tell you. You had something going with Van Stevens, either in your head or for real, and when he died piloting in that crazy thunderhead project you organized, you just flipped right over the edge on that subject. You should go to a shrink, Ray. You’re sick in the head!”

But for once, Ray made no answer or change of expression, and Cora, replaying those cruel words in her own head, realized she had gone over the edge herself. She reached and put her hand on Ray’s arm. “Ray, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. We’re both upset over this, over Milt and Bertie.” But even this dropping of her defenses had no effect on thoughtful Ray, and he said nothing more while the clouds cleared away and a big yellow sun popped up over the rim. Fifty yards away, Techoceanics’ substantial recovery vessel, Alessandro Volta, stopped to put down her power launch to take off Cora and Ray, then fasten the falls from a stern-mounted A-frame to bring the battered Tesla aboard. Nearby, two big offshore cutters, Dauntless and Intrepid, carried the overflow of important guests who had come to see the heroes be rescued amid the ruins of the storm they broke in half. Elected officials, important persons in the federal meteorological establishment, and high-level bureaucrats including a secretary or two from several departments, watched from the cutters, but not, as the Times sarcastically noted in a waspish editorial about federal meddling, anyone from Justice or the federal judiciary.

While the launch brought still-silent Ray and introspective Cora across to the Volta, a big Coast Guard machine descended onto the after platform of the Dauntless, and still more dignitaries climbed rapidly out of the helicopter cabin to peer across at them.

The chop was still two or three feet high, but Cora, then Ray, made the jump to the lowered, slanting ladder and clambered up to the main deck of the Volta. All the hurricane modification team and its friends had been brought out by a triumphant Techoceanics Corporation. Bobby, white and grinning and allowed to come only because the doctors knew his not being there would be even more harmful, was held tightly around the waist by a slim, now happy and thus pretty, Bettina in a bright and shapely dress. Arthur Goodspeed looked exhausted, a thousand years old, and completely at peace, and beside him stood Professor Worth, Moke Mogamo, and Walter Nunes. Nearby was a completely dazzled Peter Heartshorn, clutching his father’s hand. Mr. Heartshorn’s pouched and puffed cheeks gave him the aspect of an overweight squirrel finally, happily, ready for the winter. Stew Johnson held Peter’s other hand and now and then explained some technical point to the gaping boy in a stern, professional whisper.

Clustered together near the front were the Hartford people, many more now and including the great man himself, B.B. Broadhurst, president of gigantic Hartford Fire and Casualty and chairman of the Underwriters Weather Modification Group. Taller than his lieutenants, his silver mane of hair was a shine of power in the TV lights.

But as Cora and Ray stepped from the ladder to the deck, to loud cheers and applause from everyone and hoots from the cutters’ sirens, the first people they saw were Stein and Smith, for the small escape capsule and its large parachute had been taken from the water only a half hour before by the Volta, and the two men stood in their mussed coveralls, their bulky flying suits still over their arms, beaming at everybody.

At that moment, the most extraordinary thing of all happened. Ray, his eyes suddenly blinded by tears, dashed unsteadily forward with a cry of “Oh, thank God!” and flung himself on the astonished pilot, sweeping up an owlishly blinking Bertram Smith with his other arm, and then kissing and hugging them both with babblings of thanksgiving and praise.

Bobby, who stepped forward to shake Cora’s hand, stopped in arrested amazement. “Cora,” he said softly, “what in the hell have you been drinking on that boat?” But Cora only blinked at the cameras and said nothing.

Biddle Bonniford Broadhurst strode hastily across the deck, his large, liver-spotted hands wide in welcome, then clasped Ray, Milton, and Bertram Smith in his own huge embrace, beaming back at the cameras. “Come on, Cora,” he shouted, “Get over here! You earned it, lady, and I’m going to give it to you!”

Soon the four heroes were separated and adjusted, two on each side of looming B.B. Broadhurst, who fished a large-size certified bank check from his pocket and turned, bowing low and gracefully to Cora, who smiled fear-somely and seized the check. “One million dollars, Cora. Less than a tenth of a percent of Claude’s loss potential for us, and more to come,” said Broadhurst, making large, expansive gestures. He turned and bowed again to Milton Stein. “And Captain Stein, we received your message loud and clear in Hartford about the Blackbird, and we’re going to get you two of them.”

That was too much for Ray. “Oh hell, B.B.,” he snarled, “just give us one and hand the other one to Israel. Then that damn-fool judge, what’s his name . . . Farbgold, Silverfarb, Golden-finger . . . will electrocute those college-punk environmental freaks. . . .”

Fortunately, most of this was made confused or inaudible by a combination of Cora’s loudest snarls and by both Bobby and B.B. Broadhurst stepping rapidly forward with loud, agitated laughter. Broadhurst waved his arms wildly at the others. “Come on, you giant-killers, get in the picture, all of you!” he roared in all directions.

As they pressed noisily forward, Moke said in Bettina’s ear, “Man, I’m really glad to see that old Ray is okay. I figgered he’d been beaned by one of those ice balls when he kissed Milt and Aunt Bertie.”

“Oh, give Ray his moment of sweetness, Moke,” said a smiling Bettina. “Nobody’s completely imperfect. Remember what you said on the way over to Wasque?”

The idea of Ray’s sweetness had turned Moke’s agile mind in another direction. He leaned back, while B.B. noisily tried to get them adjusted for the TV shots, so that Bobby, Bettina, Nunes, and Professor Worth could hear. “Did you guys ever actually picture Ray and Cora making it together?” he asked in a quiet voice. “I mean totally undressed, on a giant, queen-sized motel bed with a bottle of gin on the nightstand.”

So sudden and unlikely was this vision that Bobby, Bettina, Nunes, and the professor simultaneously doubled over in attempts to stifle their uncontrollable laughter. As the TV lights and cameras panned across the assembling group, Walter Nunes’s mother, Isobel, sitting proudly in her New Bedford parlor to watch her son honored on TV as one of the tiny team of hurricane busters, was dismayed to see him bent, helpless, in a convulsive laughing fit. “Well, he never did take much of anything seriously,” she said apologetically to the other women.

Her next-door neighbor, Rose Meideros, snorted. “So, and what’s wrong with enjoying yourself? And look, those two big shots and that old professor are broken up, too.”

That observation mollified Isobel Nunes somewhat, but she thoughtfully shook her head. “Still, see how straight, how dignified and proud that big colored boy who works with Walt stands there. He went to Harvard, Walter told me. My, what a difference that makes!”

IN THE FACE OF MY ENEMY

Joseph H. Delaney

Certain “small favors" can have very long-range consequences.

PROLOGUE

The broken creature hung suspended on fields of force, amid devices half matter and half energy, flung into patterns and functions unfathomable to but a few minds in all creation.

“It is loathesome,” said one voice to the other. “Does it live?”

“Its life force is near extinction, but now static. It is primitive, yet I believe it truly thinks.”

“It intrigues you?”

“Indeed. As it is now, foe we once must have been. I will, therefore, know this being, and ourselves of yesterday.”

It probed the body of the beast, and knew it, and was saddened. “Tragic,” it remarked. “I have descended into its cells. What ghastly inefficiencies. They battle; they eat one another. They are predator and prey within the organism. Equilibrium may be briefly achieved; never harmony.”

“The damage appears complete. What will you do?”

“I shall make repair; observe it in life and function.”

The being touched the broken form. With disciplined force he built anew according to its pattern.

“Fascinating. It lives. For a time there is balance. It struggles to retain this, but the struggle cannot endure long against the inner conflict. It spends its energy to forestall destruction, yet it spares enough for thought.”

“That is conjecture.”

“No. It is fact. It is conscious of its existence. It conceives the flow of time. It questions its reason to be. This is sentience. It calls itself ‘Kah-si-omah’.

“Perhaps, in time, that will be fact.

It does not appear presently probable. If it snatches only fleetingly at this sensory flood, how can it learn?”

“Perhaps it learns only small things. We may yet determine this, for I grow curious. Perhaps we shall never again pass this way, yet if by chance.”

“What will you do?”

“I shall change it; bring discipline, provide order. You will perceive its present lack.”

“Indeed. Observe; the cells replicate, and as they replicate they drift. The process is unfaithful and unhealthy for the creature, yet the organism permits it. It is as you said; they eat each other.”

“I shall adjust.”

“How? The drift is cumulative. Each replication deviates a little further. Chance alone determines how far. It is the pattern that is faulty. The fidelity of replication cannot endure under purely chemical control. More is needed.”

“Restraint? Yes. Brilliant.”

“You set yourself an exceedingly difficult task.”

“True. It will be challenging. Observe, these large cells function differently. They are the keys. They interconnect throughout the organism. They are the vehicle of its consciousness. They are subject to the being’s command.”

“If such it has.”

“There is room within them for innovation. I shall form echelons of them, and cross-controls. Command will ascend to the being’s core of consciousness.”

“The endeavor seems worthwhile. I shall observe your efforts. I may, perhaps, comment.”

“I would be pleased if you should do so.”

“Again, the boundary obscured. Matter melded with its higher state. Subtle changes followed.

“Interesting. Satisfaction must surely be yours.”

“Indeed. Observe: even as we watch its wounds heal, its form regenerates and returns to it. Control descends from its center of consciousness and seeps into the cells.”

“It is still loathesome.”

“It now need not be. Its will controls, sluggish though it is. Perhaps the creature hears you. Properly contrite, it may experiment and find a form more pleasing to you.”

“It lacks the intellect “

“No, not the intellect; the experience. It has lived but the instant nature gave it. I have given it eons more.

Time passed. The dalliance ended. The need which had brought visitors to this young world was satisfied. Their vehicle, having probed the bowels of the mountain, having found, extracted and refined the fissionables it sought, now rose from the blackened slag pit, where it had rested so long, and squandered the energy it had gathered in its journey between suns.

Their toy, transformed, and this time safely out of harm’s way, watched, mystified. It did not comprehend the works of gods, nor now, even itself.

I am not a coward by nature, though surely there is a little cowardice in all of us. And mine surfaced as soon as I could make out the features of the man disembarking from the shuttle. It was Ivan Carmody himself, my boss.

There are men. Also, there are MEN. The difference is one of kind, not degree, and the mind perceives it instantly, unerringly, and inexplicably.

One approached whom I feared, but to whom duty demanded I explain the other. And I wondered if I could.

My months on Campbell had been filled with many strange experiences, some of which, I felt, were better left out of my report. But this, Carmody; HE, I feared; HE would demand to hear them all. And worst of all, I knew, I would tell.

I was too minor ever to have met him face to face, of course, until now, but as Secretary of Extraterrestrial Affairs he was the U.N.’s most powerful figure, and its most colorful.

As he approached, I understood why, for he was imposing. Tall and gangly, he had the look of an eagle about him, from the straight white hair he wore combed back to the huge curved beak of his nose. The thick glasses perched on its bridge magnified piercing green eyes that did not blink.

If he overwhelmed me by his physical presence, it was nothing compared to the devastation created when he spoke, and I hoped I could stand the strain.

“Kimberly Ryan,” the voice boomed. “Are you in charge of this mess?”

I glanced around me at the muddy street, the burned-out buildings and the crushed equipment. Some of the men who had watched the shuttle’s approach had skulked away at his sight. “Yes, sir. I have assumed command under Emergency Regulation Number 309,” I said, hoping I had cited the right one. I felt his stare on my body; at the rough leather clothing that Casey had made for me. “This is all I have left, Mr. Secretary. Everything burned.”

“I’ll want to hear your report immediately, Miss Ryan, preferably not out here in the street.”

“Yes, sir. We can go to Solar Minerals H.Q., to Mr. Meyers’s office. What’s left of it, that is. I’ll show you the way.”

I turned and started off down the street, trying to stick to the dryer spots. He followed along a pace or two behind. “Where is Meyers?”

“Dead,” I told him. “He shot himself before the settlement, uh, fell, when he thought the aliens were going to fire the building. I can send for Mr. Bigelow, though. He’s in charge of Solar’s operations now, I guess.”

“No. I want your report first. We may be filing charges against the management, including Mr. Bigelow.”

I reached the stairs and started up, wondering if the flight would hold both of us in its damaged condition. It had taken a glancing hit from the catapult, which had partially destroyed the landing, but Carmody did not hesitate to risk it. He followed me up the twenty or so steps closely enough for me to hear him panting.

We entered Meyers’s office and Carmody took it upon himself to sit at Meyers’s desk, in Meyers’s chair, despite the fact that the back rest was still spattered with dried blood and brains. He propped his chin on his hands, leaning over the desk, hunching forward and looking right at me. “Find a chair, Miss Ryan. I don’t like looking up at people.”

I pulled one of the rough-hewn chairs closer to the desk and sat down carefully, mindful that it contained splinters, and when I was as comfortable as I could be in the presence of such awesome power, I asked him where he wanted me to start.

“At the beginning, Miss Ryan; from the time you set foot on Campbell. And you will omit nothing; is that clear?”

“Very. But actually, it really started before I ever got here. I found that out later; Mr. Bigelow told me.”

Carmody slapped the fingers of one hand against his chin. “Whatever,” he said.

“Well, evidently he—that is, Captain Corsetti—he was the master of the Wilmington, had orders to buy a little time for Meyers before I got here. He called Meyers on the radio as soon as we were in orbit and warned them I was coming. That’s an indication to me that Solar management back on Earth knew about the cairn, and meant to conceal it from—”

“Forget that part. I’ll take care of them. I want to hear about this Indian; what’s his name?”

“Kah-Sih-Omah. But we called him Casey. How did you hear about him?”

“Never mind. Get on with it.”

“Yes, sir. Well, here again, some of this is second-hand from Bigelow, and it was much later when I found out about it, but to begin with, I certainly didn’t hit it off with Mr. Meyers. He knew why I was here, or thought he did, and he saw his job about to be snatched out from under him. He’d be through if I learned of the cairn.”

“Without comments, please, Miss Ryan. Stick to what’s relevent.”

“I’m only trying to show his attitude, Mr. Carmody.”

Carmody seemed to give up at this point. He didn’t respond, and I felt safe in going ahead, repeating as much as I could remember, verbatim.

And it had started out innocently enough; I’d merely thanked Meyers for meeting me at the dock. His reply had been harsh.

“I didn’t come down here for that, lady: I came down here to check cargo. As far as I’m concerned, you can go back on the next barge. What do you want here, anyway?”

“You know why I’m here, Mr. Meyers. I’m here to make the ecological survey. That’s the law. No planet can be opened to colonization or exploitation until the U.N. Ecological Committee has approved it and imposed the necessary restrictions. That’s my job, okay? I’m not looking for a fight.”

“Nor am I. But I’ve got enough work to do now without looking after you, and without wasting time leading you around.”

“I don’t need looking after. I don’t need leading. I can find my own way around. You won’t even know I’m here.”

I started to leave, and that was when he grabbed me by the arm. It hurt, and I suspect this was his intention. I couldn’t shake loose. “Get your hands off me,” I demanded. “I’m an officer of the United Nations. You could go to jail for this.”

He let go, but left big red marks. “Have it your own way, lady, but keep this in mind: there are 450 healthy construction men on this planet, and no women. Some of them have been here two years without a woman. Maybe I won’t know you’re here, but every one of them will before you’re off this dock.” He’d have been all right if he’d stopped there, but he didn’t. “Course, maybe that’s the way you like it. A girl like you could get rich in the four months you’ll be here.”

I knew it was a mistake when I did it. I lunged and threw a punch.

He stopped me easily with one hamlike hand. “There’ll be none of that, lady. On Campbell I’m the law: judge, jury, and all the rest of it. Assaulting me ought to be worth ninety days in the brig, at least. Bigelow,” he called.

A big, sleepy-eyed man came over. Meyers called him Scotty. I didn’t know it then, but he wasn’t quite as harmless as he looked. Bigelow was the project architect. He was responsible for erecting the landing web, but he had a sideline too. He was a part-time assassin.

I went with him to the operations building, where Meyers had told him to take me immediately. Meyers hadn’t been subtle about that, although he did try to mask his real purpose. I heard him tell Bigelow to find somebody big, ugly, and stupid to be my bodyguard.

Bigelow had seemed nice enough at the time, though he too gave me to understand I was in the way; they had deadlines to meet, that any delay, however slight, cost the company and the consortium to which it belonged great sums of money, all of which had to be made up to the investors who would bid on the minerals when the web was finished. He, personally, feared for his bonuses, which field management would not get if they didn’t make the deadlines. And he told me all about the expensive family he was supporting on Earth.

I stood there, locked in a back room feeling sorry for him, and even for Meyers, although I still didn’t like Meyers. I was a problem to them, and maybe in their place I’d have felt the same way, guarding against 450 potential rapists.

It seemed like hours before he returned. I amused myself by staring out the one window the room contained. It overlooked a muddy street remarkable for its complete lack of traffic. Then Bigelow came back into view followed by a hulking, shambling figure dressed in bib overalls and a hard hat. He wore no shirt, and from beneath his hat fell long black braids, which lay on coppery-skinned shoulders. He was as massive as he was brawny. Bigelow had followed orders in one respect; the man was big. At the time I hoped he was not too dumb, though he gawked around like a tourist. He was not ugly; he was simply ordinary.

Bigelow introduced him as K.C. Oma.

“Hello, Mr. Oma.” I said.

“I am called Casey,” he replied, somewhat shyly. “I am pleased to meet you. Are you ready?”

I thanked Bigelow and followed Casey down the stairs and into the street, walking slightly behind him, watching him. He moved like a shadow, without effort or urgency, and I found myself admiring him for the graceful way he managed that massive form. I had known Indians before, and that was no doubt what he was, considering the prominent nose and high cheekbones, which seemed to highlight the copperish cast of his skin. He was tall enough and light-skinned enough to have been a Northern Sioux, but they were rarely as heavy.

We did not speak until we were inside the suite: a foyer, a kitchen, and two bedrooms, all of rough-sawn native timber and sparsely furnished with articles of the same material. “Not the Ritz,” I said, “but adequate.” Then I realized how dumb that sounded.

I looked around. There was my luggage in the larger bedroom. I peeked into the other one. In it was a beat-up military-style duffle bag.

Before I could ask the question, Casey answered it. “Mine,” he said, “I am to guard you every moment.” He said it like he really meant it.

I felt the words of protest rise in my throat. But there they stopped, unuttered, and I thought, It does seem reasonable. Who could menace me with him nearby? And he did seem nice enough. So I said instead, “Fine, I’ll try not to be any trouble.”

And then, with great innocence, he remarked, “You do not trouble me at all, Miss Ryan. Tell me, what is it you will do here?”

“I’m a busybody, Casey. Haven’t they told you?”

He shook his head gravely and grunted a cautious “No.”

I realized I was behaving defensively; making this simple man the object of my revenge for the hostile reception at the dock. “Forgive me,” I said, “I meant to say I’m here on an ecological survey of the planet, to see if the presence of men will harm it: hurt the local life forms, or create hazards for future colonists, that sort of thing. Understand?”

“Yes, Miss Ryan.”

“I’ll need to go out in the field, perhaps for days at a time, and I assume that means you’ll go too.”

“Yes, Miss Ryan. I shall go.”

“Have you been out there before?”

“Only near the station, never far in.” At first, this answer disturbed me, and I was angered that Meyers had not furnished me with an experienced guide; but then, after thinking it over, I liked this better. This way I could choose where to go, and this simple man seemed so sincere in his assurances that I believed he could and would protect me, even from Meyers.

“Fine, we’ll get started in the morning. We’ll need a skimmer. I assume you can arrange that, and that you can drive one.”

“Yes, Miss Ryan, I can.”

My next question was redundant, in the light of what I later learned, but at the time it seemed appropriate, and Casey took no offense. “We’ll be camping out for several days, Casey. You’ll need to collect equipment and food. I assume you know a little something about camping and cooking.”

“I can manage, Miss Ryan. I will obtain what we. need and be ready by morning.”

He got me settled in, then left me behind locked doors to make preparations. I did not know at the time what a foment I had caused, or what drastic preparations Meyers and Bigelow were making to insure I did not leave Campbell with word of the cairn. Though it lay far away in dense woods, and the odds I would find it were astronomically high, they were unwilling to risk even that, fearing that if its existence were known their operation would be halted until we had determined what it represented. Perhaps they thought we could consider it the mark of some other race’s claim to Campbell and order the planet abandoned.

They had already tried to destroy it, with no success whatever, and the effect of modem explosives upon it was nil. Man could not have built it, and he could not demolish it either. Later I learned that Meyers had considered burying it under a mound of dirt but my unexpected arrival had left him no time for that. So they decided instead to destroy Casey, the big, dumb, expendable Indian, and me.

We did not know that then, the morning we left the station aboard a skimmer loaded with death.

At first the day was pleasant, though we were cool to start with, both in shorts, but this area of Campbell was tropical and soon it grew hot, even with the blast of the skimmer’s fans to cool us. We headed inland, across the coastal plain where proto-grasses flourished, but these gave way to a cycad-like growth, which was evidently a survivor of the planet’s earlier plant evolution. Farther in in the uplands, they were rare, supplanted by larger organisms closely resembling terrestrial trees.

There was much of interest to see, and we flew low, just high enough to avoid obstacles, while I drank it in. We spoke little, beyond what was necessary to call each other’s attention to some new curiosity. I was too excited to risk missing something, and he too taciturn.

Our course was leisurely, and we followed the streams that flowed down from the highlands to the sea. Here life teemed, and we stopped many times to observe and photograph it, hanging on the skimmer’s fans, and hovering silently over small herds of little animals which gathered at the streams to drink.

Campbell was made for skimmers. Its sun was bright and poured its energy into the cells that covered our hull, from which it flowed into the plastic batteries built into it, thence into the motors which drove the fans. Riding in one made me feel detached, as though it was the magic carpet of old Arabian Nights.

Nightfall found us in the highlands, where the air was cooler. Casey set up a tent for me, there among the trees, and we ate from supplies brought from the settlement. Casey, whether out of shyness or out of some unspoken preference, refused to occupy the tent, but instead rolled up in a blanket outside.

By then he had demonstrated he was no stranger to the woods. He had laid out the camp in an expert manner, with the tent rigidly erect on taut ropes, and perched for drainage on a little hummock. His fire blazed brightly and cleanly, fed with dry, dead wood, and banked carefully to last the night. Whatever doubts, whatever reservations I had about the man disappeared that night. I slept as soundly in my tent as I ever had on Earth.

The morning brought the smell of fresh coffee into the tent, borne on a gentle breeze. I rose to find Casey bent over the fire, cooking breakfast. Around us there was a heavy fog, which swathed the tops of the trees and blotted out the half-risen sun.

I took the steaming mug from him and tasted it, while he divided the contents of the skillet onto stainless steel plates. It, too, smelled wonderful, and I found myself drawing deep breaths of Campbell’s morning air into my lungs. And I said to him, “Casey, this is why I’m here. Smell that air. Nothing like it exists on Earth—anywhere. All that, man spoiled long ago. But I mean to see that no one spoils this.”

He handed me a plate, which I took gratefully, but he said nothing. Instead he met my gaze, pausing a brief moment before resuming his task. Had that been a tear in his eye? From the smoke, perhaps. Surely not because of what I’d said. But then, of course, I did not know that Casey had seen it all before.

We ate, struck camp, wiped the condensate from the skimmer’s cells, and started off again. More and bigger trees appeared, growing in clumps, not yet numerous enough to become continuous forest. They yielded a kind of nut, on which fed little beasts about the size of cats. We saw the first sizable group of them that morning. They were quadrupedal, but had good manipulative ability in their front paws, and scurried about gathering and crunching nuts despite our approach.

I did not know a great deal about Campbell’s life forms. What I did know came from survey reports which were made by the first scout teams to visit here, and like all survey reports they covered only the obvious.

They had, to their own satisfaction, ruled out the existence of intelligent life; a fairly safe bet, since Campbell appeared to be geologically younger than Earth, and its life consequently less highly organized. There were evolutionary confluences, of course, but on this land mass, at least, these did not extend to large grazing forms or to large predators.

Campbellian protein was organized slightly differently from the terrestrial norm, and utilized different amino groups in its structure. Most of it was simply useless as food for human beings, who couldn’t metabolize it, but some of it was poisonous as well.

We observed and photographed animals for a while, then began to follow a stream which wound its way through the foothills of the still-distant mountains. Here again we saw teeming life, this time in a pool. The creatures which threw their shadows on its sandy bottom were not fish, of course, but occupied the same ecological position as fish, and had the same problems; they were hunted.

The predator beast had fangs in his jaws and claws on his feet. He was only as large as the nut grazers, though small as he was he managed to look ferocious, even leonine, as he growled at us. We left him to his fishing and continued.

That night we camped in the foothills. Once again Casey pitched the tent. This time I was not content to bury myself in notebooks as I had the night before and retire early from the weariness of the journey. I had become acclimated to outdoor life and caught up in the spirit of the adventure. I was resolved to leave the recording of trivia to another day, and instead enjoy those things that made this journey personally memorable.

And so it was that I took over the task of cooking while Casey went to the stream for water. I sat by the fire and drank in the aroma of the food and the still, calm pleasure of Campbell’s star-studded night.

Casey returned, looking troubled. At first he refused to tell me why. But I pestered him without mercy, and then he explained.

“It may mean nothing,” he said. “But I found the remains of a fire.”

He took me to it, and we examined it in torchlight, along the banks of the stream: chaired lumps of wood, so tiny I could barely see them, scattered around and half-buried in the sand, meant something to him. I would never have noticed them, much less equated them with the presence of men, and did not understand his concern.

“So,” I said, “other men have been here, made a fire. Why should this disturb you?”

“Because now I must search for their bones.” He reached down and took an object from the sand, where it had been shallowly buried. He brushed away debris. It was the skull of one of the fish-like creatures, and it looked charred.

“The creatures of this world are different from those of Earth. Some can be safely eaten, though they provide little nourishment and taste foul. Most are not safe. These are poisonous, yet it appears that they have been roasted and the flesh eaten.”

“By whom? Surely if you know this, others do as well.”

“Yes. It is common knowledge—now. So this must have been done by an early exploration party, dead before I came here. I know of no one missing from the station since then, and the signs are old. I will search again in the morning.”

He did, but found nothing except more fishbones. That day I saw the grim side of Casey, for he was morose and troubled, as though he took this as a sign. And in truth it was, for us, as the first of the disasters struck us.

Suddenly our dead reckoner became a dead dead reckoner. It refused to show our position on the console display, but meandered from one side of the screen to the other. We could get nothing but a feeble, anemic-looking blip that rolled around on the bottom of the screen.

“Can you repair it, Casey?”

His glance answered even “before his words. “It is beyond my skill, even if I had parts and tools. We will have to work; use the satellite beacon and calculate our position from its next pass. I suggest we do not move until we have done that.” He switched on the radio and punched the red button for the navigation channel.

We waited. The time came and went, but the beacon did not register as it overflew. Casey removed the cowling from the receiver; no easy task without proper tools. He looked into the works and sighed. “Fused. The tuner will not move. There has been a surge of some kind; an arc across the plates. They have been welded together. If I force them, the tuner will break. If I do not, we cannot match the satellite’s frequency.”

“What else do we have?” I asked him. I felt peculiarly helpless, since my education did not extend to such technical things, and I lacked the knowledge even to fully appreciate our predicament.

“Nothing. Not even a compass. Modem science replaced such things long ago with the contemptible gadgetry. I’m afraid we will have to resort to even more primitive methods.”

“Can you find our way back to the station?”

“Certainly. To the east is the sea. We could hardly miss that, and once there we can follow the shoreline to the station. We are not in any danger of becoming lost, but I suggest we do not risk further problems by continuing inland. We should return at once.”

Reluctantly I agreed. I was disappointed, but then, there was still plenty of time. We could get another skimmer and go out again, and this time we’d check it out carefully before we left.

Casey changed course, headed east, and carefully watched the skimmer’s shadow on the ground below. He took what he hoped was the proper heading to get us near the station, holding a slight angle to the right and trying to compensate mentally for the passage of time. It was tedious work.

I left him alone, partly because I realized he was very busy and partly in reflection of my own disgust with this unhappy turn of events. I sat there, feeling the rush of the wind through my hair and listening to the steady hum of the fans.

I began hearing a click, at first barely audible, which grew louder as time went one.

Casey noticed it too, and cocked an ear to listen. There was a look of concern on his face, as though he anticipated more mechanical problems. Then the sound vanished, and Casey’s look went with it.

After that we flew on at a steady speed of about forty-five knots for nearly two hours without a hint of what the mysterious noise had been. With their simple construction and controls, there was little that could go wrong with a skimmer, and neither of us then suspected the click represented anything more than a twig lodged in one of the fan grilles.

Then the escarpment appeared. It threatened to run for miles perpendicular to our path. To go around meant risking the loss of our orientation, human senses being as fallible as they are. Casey, therefore, decided to increase our altitude and climb it, and then to camp on the high plains for the night, which was rapidly approaching.

But as he increased power to gain the necessary lift, the click abruptly returned. It grew into a loud knock, and then a squeal joined it. Together they lapsed into a pounding vibration. I clung to the seat, fearful of being thrown out, for the skimmer had begun to list and pitch. Casey fought to control it, but could not stabilize us. In desperation, he cut the power and we dropped like a stone, our lifting surfaces inadequate to support us without the help of the fans.

Trees, in the path of our steep and rapid glide, plunged toward us. I could see Casey straining with the stick, trying to guide us toward the small clearing near the bend of the stream, but I knew we’d never make it. I was still watching in horror when the ground came up and we struck it with a glancing blow that jolted every bone in my body. We were sliding along the ground, striking bushes and rocks, a cloud of dust and debris rising around us. Then I felt myself being flung forward and knew I would hit the windscreen. Desperately I tried to duck.

Then I saw the stars and briefly tasted blood. After that came darkness.

I do not know how long my personal night lasted. I awoke to the real night, staring upward into Campbell’s star-strewn sky and feeling wet and cold. There was pain, in my face and in my arms and legs. I could still taste blood, and a couple of my front teeth felt loose. But testing; I found my arms and legs seemed to work.

I strained to raise my head, felt a wave of pain, and dropped back into the coarse sand beneath me. I would have to try that a little slower. In the meantime, I looked around again, into the darkness, turning my head from side to side. There was little to be seen in the darkness except a glow on my right, toward a distant hilltop. As I watched, I could see it was creeping up the slope, and the realization came, aided by the acrid smell of smoke in the air, that it was a fire. And then it dawned on me that I didn’t know where Casey was.

Ignoring the pain this time, I struggled to my feet, took an experimental step or two, and stumbled over something. I strained to see in the darkness of Campbell’s moonless night. Below was a shapeless mass. Our tent? No, the satchel of supplies; some of it, anyway. It smelled funny, and I realized it had been burnt.

I groped at it, trying to find the opening and get a flashlight. That was when I heard Casey moan. He was underneath the bag, holding it with both arms. It was they, not the bag, which had been burnt.

I struggled with the bag, pulling it downward toward his feet, until at last it slipped off him. I opened it and searched frantically through its contents, until at last I found a shape that was right.

Pushing the switch brought forth a stabbing beam of light. In it I could see the burned stumps of trees, and the ground, covered with blackened ash. Grasses, still holding their living form, but now consisting only of fragile ash, disintegrated into little puffs as eddies of wind hit them.

I turned the light on Casey and gasped in horror. His jingers, at the ends of arms which still encircled the space the bag had occupied, were charred stumps. Above them, his arms were blistered horribly, and while the bag apparently had protected his upper chest and face, his hair hung loosely around his head, the braids singed off. There was a deep gash in his forehead, from which he’d apparently bled profusely. The blood had run down his neck and puddled darkly beneath his head.

The moan had told me Casey lived, and the sight told me how badly off he really was. There are few things more painful than bums, and fewer still more difficult to treat. And I knew that, in time, when the protective shock wore off, he would be suffering horribly, and I must then be ready to give him what help I could.

There was precious little in our bag of medical supplies. I searched through it and found nothing even remotely adequate. There was a tube of antiseptic jelly with which I coated the worst parts of his burnt arms and hands. But there were no large dressings, no unguents, and only three ampules of morphine sulfate to relieve his pain. These would not help for long. I decided to wait until his need was greatest before using this. I covered him with a blanket and sat down beside him to consider my own situation.

I was not badly hurt. I had only small bumps, cuts, and abrasions, and I had not been touched by the fire. From the looks of the front of my blouse, I had bled profusely from the nose, and while this was sore, it did not seem to be broken.

Alone, with the shock wearing off, I tried to piece things together. I knew what must have happened: the crash of the skimmer, into a rock or large tree, must have ruptured cells in its hull, shorting them out and setting fire to the underbrush. This would have melted other portions of the hull and started more fires.

I did not see the remains of the skimmer nearby; therefore I had been removed from the site, dunked in the stream, then placed here on the sand. Casey would have been all right then. And the fact that I had not been burned, or even singed, meant I had not come through the fire. That meant Casey had returned to the wreck to get the bag, and by that time the fire must have been fierce. He’d gotten his injuries retrieving the bag; but, I asked myself, why did he risk it?

Then I remembered: the native foods would not sustain human life. We needed terrestrial food. Without the skimmer, return to the settlement would take weeks; long enough so that we’d have risked starvation on the way. Casey knew we needed the bag to get back, that we were isolated and lost, with no expectancy of rescue. That’s why he’d gone back.

I felt brief anger at him then, for sacrificing both of us. His male mind had told him he must save me by getting the food, but not that without him I had no hope whatsoever of making it. I knew that, and strangely enough it didn’t bother me to know; not like it bothered me to have the responsibility for comforting Casey in what I realized would be his last hours.

As I sat there, all alone in the darkness, I realized I had absolutely no way of coping with a situation like this. I could only huddle here, wrapped in a blanket, and watch Casey’s life pass away along With Campbell’s night.

The shock wore off, fatigue marched in and took me away. For a time I slept. Then the rising sun woke me. It flooded in in all its brilliance through my closed eyelids. Opening them, I could see it was already at least an hour past dawn. I must be up, to see to Casey. I strained again to rise, and found that slumber had brought me stiffness to go with my pain. Every joint ached, every movement was agony; nevertheless I did gain my feet.

Around me, the blackened landscape loomed starkly. A hundred yards away the skimmer hung, its bow perched on the bole of a still-smouldering tree. Its skin had melted off in the fire, exposing the steel skeleton, now buckled and bent in the middle so that the stem rested flat on the ground.

Casey had not moved, and still lay, arms aloft, beneath the blanket. I could not tell if he was alive, and hesitated long moments before taking up the challenge and raising the blanket to look.

It would have shocked me less to find him dead, with his eyes closed. They were open. Incredibly, they moved. He was conscious, and remarkably, composed, and he seemed to have been waiting for me.

I gasped at the sight, and it was a moment before I found my voice. “Casey, I have the morphine. I’ll give you some.”

“No.” His voice was strong. It was not consistent with the terrible pain I knew he must be experiencing. “Save it,” he said. “I am in control.” Then he closed his eyes.

He’s delirious, I remember telling myself. I broke. I was not in control. “Casey! Your hands,” I shouted. “There’s nothing left of them. What are we going to do?”

The eyes opened, again calmly, to reassure me. Again he spoke strange words. “We will wait.”

“Casey. We’re lost, hundreds of miles from the station. Nobody knows we’re here. I can’t get us back. I can’t even get myself back, much less move you.”

“We will wait.” His voice fairly boomed at me. “Set up the tent around me, then let me sleep. And wash that blood off your face. You look awful.”

Again he closed his eyes, and again I was terrified. Was this merely the product of delirium, or was Casey some kind of superman, immune to pain? He looked so bad; yet he sounded so strong, so positive. For long moments I knelt there, bent over him, watching his chest rise and fall with deep, even breaths. Then I covered him again and went to do as he asked.

I washed away the blood, soaking a bandana in the cool water of the stream, so that I could go back and do the same for him.

I could not tell whether or not the strain was playing tricks with my imagination or whether I really saw what I thought I saw. But at the time he seemed a little more gaunt, a little thinner, than he had the day before. When I went to clean the dried blood from his face, the gash that had gaped at me so malignantly the night before now seemed tiny and insignificant.

I had to get hold of myself, curb my imagination; and nothing helps do that quite so well as work. So I pitched the tent: not so well as Casey would have, but adequately, then gathered wood and built a fire. I cooked and ate a light meal, then took the dishes to the stream to wash them, terrifying, in the process, the fish creatures which swam there, trapped in this oxbow pond.

Casey slumbered on inside the tent, oblivious of the awesome destruction his body had endured. He did not waken again, though I feared he would at any moment; that he would find his control gone and fearsome pain present, and I would need the morphine.

I pondered now his recovery, where short hours ago I had pondered his death. If he survived he would be helpless for weeks. I looked at the bag of supplies, which was by no means full, and wondered how we could stretch them out. We’d planned six days in the skimmer. On foot, it would be more like six weeks, if we could make it at all.

Time passed. I waited silently in the shade just inside the tent flap, and adjusted it from time to time to keep the sun off Casey. Campbell rotated in slightly more than nineteen standard hours. With next to no axial tilt there were roughly ten hours of daylight. As light began to ebb, I resolved the night would not be dark, and that this time the fire would be friendly.

Because of the destruction of vegetation in the area I had to go rather farther than usual to find wood, but I returned just as the light was about to fail, intending to check once more on Casey before it did. I dumped the wood on the ground and brushed off pieces of bark, then entered the tent and raised the blanket.

He did not stir, but appeared to be sleeping peacefully. Sometime during the day his arms had descended, and now rested across his chest beneath the blanket. Is it the light, I asked myself, or does he look yet thinner than he did before?

Over the bones of his face the skin stretched tight, and his cheeks seemed hollow. Then I glanced at his forehead. The gash had dwindled; shrunk, the way a healing cut does, to a fraction of its former size, as if days had passed instead of hours. This, I knew, was real. It was not a product of my mind. And I knew that what was real was in no way natural either, but I found my attitude about Casey’s situation changing. It was not a question of if he recovered, but when.

Troubled by this perplexing fact and many others, I went outside and looked up into the night. Ahead and low on the horizon was the escarpment, which was probably the best reason I had to be pessimistic. We would have to climb it to reach the sea, and though Casey’s miraculous slumber might eventually mend what was left of him, he might survive it merely to join me in starvation. The escarpment was our greatest obstacle, and we had met it at the worst time.

It seemed to stretch out endlessly in both directions. It was both steep and high. And what was nothing to a skimmer was unsurmountable to us now. No doubt along its course there existed breaches in its face, where a healthy person could climb up, and I could imagine myself struggling up some steep ravine, slipping on fallen rock and tearing at creepers for handholds. But Casey? No. His battered stumps of hands would be useless, and I simply lacked the strength to get him to the top.

I caught myself thinking, if only there was help; somebody else near that we could go to. A useless plea that flashed across my mind about the time I saw, or thought I saw, the fire up on top of the escarpment. Fire? Did I see it or did my need create its image? It was but a flicker, a pinpoint, that flashed across my retinas, then was gone.

I grew cold, and wrapped myself in a blanket. And creeping inside the tent, I lay at Casey’s feet, staring at the flickering embers of our own fire. It had not occurred to me, as I fell asleep, that this, too, might be seen from far away.

Morning came. I rose with the sun, feeling somewhat less achey than I had the day before, and now resigned to what was to be. Casey slumbered on, looking even more skeletal, eyes now sunken in their sockets beneath dark lids. But the gash! The gash was gone! Not just diminished, but gone, without scab, without scar; not even a discoloration. I felt my blood run cold.

With shaking hands I grasped the blanket and drew it down, past his now-bony neck and across his chest. Through the unbuttoned shirt it, too, looked shallow, and where before thick muscles laced across it, ribs now pushed prominently through his skin.

And then I looked at his arms, which rested across his abdomen, expecting to see devastation, perhaps gangrene. Burnt skin had sloughed off and lay in flakes beneath them. Blisters had drained. In place of blackened minnow appeared smooth pink skin, devoid of any scarring.

Reason told me this could not be; that it was in my mind the fantasy lay. But even as I gazed in disbelief my eyes dropped to his hands, no longer charred and cracking, oozing fluid and dripping life away, bare stumps of useless tortured flesh. A scream rose in my throat, which at the last minute I stifled, while blood thumped a fierce tattoo and went pounding across my temples.

The hands were whole, smooth and pink, lacking only nails, and at the fingertips these, too, were budding. I dropped the blanket and knelt there, over this strange new Casey, reflecting on what I’d just seen, convinced it was not real. Then I wondered: did fantasy deceive touch, as it did the eyes? And some insane curiosity impelled me to reach out. I felt, not charred and hardened ruin, but firm warm flesh, and a pulse, faint, but regular. This time the scream came, shrill and piercing, and echoed down the valley.

Casey stirred. He opened his eyes and smiled weakly, totally obliterating the demonic picture of him that had been forming in my mind, becoming once again only a man. I lost my fear and again I knelt beside him, holding his hand, waiting for him to gain the strength to speak. Whatever sort of miracle was taking place, I was now grateful.

Presently his lips began to move. At first no sound came out, but I bent near and strained to hear, and at last he became audible.

“I have control,” he said. “I have rebuilt; replaced the damaged tissue. But my body’s reserves are gone; used up. They now must be replaced. Help me.”

He referred, of course, to his emaciated condition. Somehow he had moved tissue into the wounded parts, perhaps at great peril to his system as a whole, and it was this he wanted to protect now. But what was it he wanted me to do?

“How, Casey? Tell me how.”

“I need protein; lots of it. I must eat meat.”

I started to rise. “I’ll get it for you, Casey.”

But he held tightly to my hand.

“No,” he said, “Not from the supplies. Those are for you. You need them.”

“Where, then?”

“From the stream. There is food in the stream.”

“The fish? But you said they were poisonous.” I knelt again, still holding his hand.

“To you; not to me. I can metabolize them; make the poisons harmless. You cannot. Listen to me; you have seen that I am different. Now, do as I ask.”

Weak though his voice was, its tone was commanding, and I went down to the stream, to trap the fish creatures imprisoned in the pond. Some spare clothing and a length of springy root became a net, with which I hurled the helpless creatures up on shore until I had all of them the pool contained. Then, with my hands, I dug a passage through the soft mud and sand, so more could enter from the stream.

They smelled terrible, cooking on the spit. I did not know how to clean them. Casey seemed not to mind but ate every bit I fed him. Throughout the day he ate all I could catch, interrupting his disgusting repast with catnaps in between.

By nightfall he had gained strength to the point where he could sit up. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I shall hunt.”

I had not troubled him with questions throughout the long day. In truth, I lacked sufficient insight to ask anything meaningful. I knew only that he was a most extraordinary man, if that was in fact his nature; that the experience I was having was unique to human memory. When the sun set, I fell asleep, still wondering whether this was real or a dream.

I rose late, with the sun high outside the tent and Casey gone. I found him outside, transformed. Still thin, still gaunt, but looking fit and now whole, he stood there, moccasins of deerskin on his feet, a deerskin loincloth spanning lithe hips. His hair, now too short to braid, was bound with a strip of cloth. These had come, no doubt, from the depths of the battered duffle bag, along with the curious necklace that now hung across his chest.

He saw me look at that.

“Serpents’ teeth,” he said, “for luck. One of my talismans. We can use some good luck for a change.”

“I hope so,” I said. “So far, it’s all been bad.”

Casey was fashioning a javelin of sorts, using a stick and a sharpened tent peg. “Luck,” he said, “had nothing to do with our misfortunes. It was sabotage.”

I stared at him for long moments, finally finding voice. “But how, and who?”

“As to the instruments, I cannot say for sure. The fire left little trace of them. But I found the fan-bearing housings full of emery, and that is why they failed.”

“But who? Who would want us dead?”

“Not us; you. I am nothing to them, whoever they are. You menace someone at the station. Compelled to guess, I would say they fear your mission here is to discover something which will deny them this world.”

“What? Certainly I’ve yet found nothing which would require that, unless . . .” The thought came to me.

“Casey, how long have you been on Campbell?”

“About three years; since the first crews came.”

“And you’ve traveled about?”

“Some, though never this far from the sea.”

“Have you seen, or heard rumors of, any advanced life forms here?”

“No, I never have. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” I said, still not sure I had not dreamed it, “the other night I thought I saw a fire, out on the escarpment.”

“Perhaps you did. Maybe it was a search party, looking for us.”

“But they don’t know we’re lost. We’re not overdue yet. And why, if they were men, have they not yet come to us? Perhaps they are not men. This is a big world. And, unlikely though it seems, considering the low order of life the planet seems to support, it is not impossible that intelligence arose here. Making, even using, fire requires intelligence of a relatively high order. Certainly well beyond anything we’ve yet encountered. And,” I added, “the existence of native intelligent life is an eminently good reason to kill me. The planet would belong to them. Solar Minerals would be out on its neck.”

“Show me where you saw the fire, Kim.”

I pointed with reasonable certainty toward the escarpment. Had he used my first name? “It’s there,” I said, “where the dark streak is.”

“Then we shall go that way. Now, eat, while I prepare packs. I am afraid we must abandon the tent and the less useful equipment, to travel light.”

All day we trekked across the scrublands, which lay between the foothills and the escarpment. Our goal was the escarpment’s base, and it was deceptively distant. The going was difficult; our passage was hindered by heavy brush and gulleys strewn with rocks. When at last we stopped, to camp by a small stream, Casey would not allow a fire. We ate cold food, and after that Casey went to work, fashioning snares of tent cordage and setting them by the water.

When the sun set we lay in darkness, huddled together under blankets. Though exhausted, I could not sleep, but lay there wondering if, even with his marvelous skill at woodsmanship, we’d ever make it back to the sea. More than that, I believed that now I could summon the nerve to ask the question which had nagged at me since the crash; a question I had been afraid to ask, because I did not know if I could live with the answer if I got one.

So, following my impulse and without further reflection, I blurted it out, and it raced past my lips too fast for anything to stop it. “What are you, Casey?” There. I’d done it.

He did not answer at once, but paused, and sighed. “I am Kah-si-omah; He Who Waits, in the tongue of my fathers.”

I rose on my left elbow, and faced him. “No,” I said. “Not who; what are you, Casey? You know what I mean. You owe me a truthful answer.”

Again he paused, as if deliberating whether or not to say anything at all. Again came the sign. “This is true, Kim. I do indeed owe you that. But I fear what you ask is unanswerable. I have myself asked the same question too often to remember.”

I was becoming angry now, finding courage in my impatience. “Don’t try riddles with me, Casey. You aren’t, and never were, the dumb Indian you pretend to be, though you play the part to perfection. Admit it: you’re more than human; now tell me truthfully: what are you?”

He protested my anger. His answer rang with sadness all the same, and there was a curious cracking in his voice. “In truth, I do not know what I am, or even exactly how I came to be. I can only tell you this; if I am no longer a man, I once was, long ago. I have lived a very long time already. I may never be able to die, however much I may wish to.”

A horrible thought struck me. “The fish, Casey! Did you eat them to poison yourself, so you could die?” I pictured myself alone, beside his rotting corpse.

“No, Kim. I ate them for strength, knowing they could not harm me. I desperately wanted to live because you needed me.”

I felt ashamed at this and spoke no more, but Casey, having started, was constrained to continue, as though it meant something special to him to explain; to have someone share.

“I have done this before,” he said. “Some believed me and some did not.

I have shared this tale of grief with other friends, only to watch them age and wither away; to leave me in death, all alone, separated from all others by the cruelest of all barriers: time. I am trapped in an eternal present.”

His voice took on plaintive tones. There was a great sorrow in it, and a touch of frustration he tried very hard to subdue. “I have tried many lives, and been many things in the time I have already lived. In the beginning I was most assuredly a man, with all a man’s infirmities. I grew old as a man, then suddenly I was young again, and have remained so ever since, though I can take the appearance of age or any other feature of man whenever it suits me.

“I was a shaman of the peoples a medicine man. This I remember, as I remember all that happened before, and all that happened since the vision which changed me. I had gone to the mountaintop to fast, in hopes that the spirits would speak to me. For many days and nights I waited, and they were silent. Then I took the cup; the spirit of the sacred mushroom steeped in water. It is hallucinogenic, which compounds the mystery of my transformation, since I could not tell what was fact and what was fantasy. I have a memory of an awesome flame and terrible burning pain, then of a satisfying inner peace such as no other I have ever known. I believed at the time that I had been with God.

“When the vision began, I was an old mao, perhaps sixty, or older. The people had no accurate way of reckoning time, but in my calling age was much revered. When I awoke I was much as you see me now, and the people did not know me, though I told them I was Kah-sih-omah. My wife and children denied me. To them I was a stranger who had come upon cherished family secrets through magic and overcome Kah-sih-omah. I had his medicine bundle, therefore I was more powerful than he, potent though he was. And in superstitious fear they drove me away with threats of death.

“I did not know then of my immortality. I still feared death.

“I wandered the land as an outcast, perhaps for millennia, certainly for many centuries. I found that within certain relatively broad limits I could control both my form and my features, though radical charges were onerous and required enormous concentration to hold. Minor changes became habitual and required next to no effort; therefore I could adapt to any tribe and live among them, learn their tongue and customs and be as they were, until they noticed I did not grow old. I rarely remained that long in any one place, and so, in time, I had no identity. And as time changes men, so also does it change cultures. Even the people lost their identity in the time I had lived.

“When I was young, mammoths roamed the Americas. By the time they passed, I was already intimate with both continents and with those who lived upon them. I conversed with each in his own tongue and believed at the time this was all there was to the world.

“Then I learned of great, fierce strangers who visited the far north. Great hulking Vikings with pale skin and hair on their faces, who used weapons and implements of iron brought from lands beyond the eastern sea. I went north, becoming as they were, and lived among them. But they found the land too harsh and the distance too great. When they sailed away, I went with them.

“It was in Europe where I began to really understand my plight, for the Europeans possessed a true conception of the passage of time. Here too, I made my first acquaintance with the messianic redemptionist religions of the Middle East. It was an era of foment. Islam and Christendom fought each other on the battlefields, each claiming true insight into the destiny of man.

“I had to know my reason to be. For a time I believed the answer lay in the East, and I went there, seeking to find the purpose my existence served, to end the boredom of useless existence. Still none could, or would, tell me. I began to regard what answers they gave as purely parochial. They were seers, such as I had been, whose movements had acquired the trappings of cults and mired themselves in mindless dogma. I knew well the ways of the wizards. I understood their motives and how wily, indolent men sometimes corrupt a noble concept, using knowledge to acquire wealth and power.

“I wanted none of these, so I abandoned them and traveled on, to India. There, despite more mountains of superstitious nonsense, I remained a century or two and sifted through it, finding much which was good. I found, not an answer, but an aid: a truly realistic concept of the vastness of time, that contemplated both a beginning and an end.

“And then I knew I was not truly immortal; that I would someday end, if not with death of Earth, then with the death of the universe. I knew also that, while life was finite after all, it would yet seem infinite to me, and yet, in that infinity—somewhere, out of sight and understanding, to be revealed to me someday—I had a purpose.

“So I wait, as I have for centuries, for my sign, preparing myself as best I can for what must come. Now I know my destiny approaches, but it is a lonely wait.”

Then, Casey spoke no more. I huddled near him, to comfort him. Though I was but an infinitesimal fraction of what he was, he took it, and for a while the loneliness we both felt ebbed, and was for a time forgotten.

With daylight we could risk a fire. I was kindling one when Casey returned from checking snares. He carried one of the nut creatures, and the head of his javelin was stained with its blood.

He plunged the javelin into the ground, where it would be handy, and set about skinning the animal with one of the mess kit’s knives. Though he had talked a great deal the night before, he was strangely silent now. He finished the flaying, spitted the carcass over the fire, and took its entrails down to the stream to wash them. At the time I thought perhaps he now regretted baring his soul to me.

He returned, bearing a glazed mass, which he stuffed into a plastic jar and liberally salted. Then he took the spit from me, turning it slowly until the meat turned uniformly brown and began to crackle, dripping melted fat into the fire.

I watched him tear off a small fragment and chew it carefully. Then he swallowed it and said, “You may safely eat this. Your body will make use of little of it, but it will not harm you, and it is filling. We must now use all the land will give us, if we are ever to reach the station.”

Strange words, I thought. His voice carried foreboding, but I did not pry. I knew now that Casey revealed himself in his own good time and at his own pace. I ate what he gave me, and it was good.

Then, while I broke camp, Casey scraped and salted the animal’s hide. He rolled it up and tied it with a thong. “Come,” he said, picking up his pack and javelin. Then he walked off in the direction of the wrecked skimmer.

“Casey! That’s the wrong direction.” I was mystified.

“I know, but come with me. I must show you something.”

I followed him, sensing his disturbance, all the way to the stream, where we came to an area of packed sand.

He stopped and pointed down. “Look,” he said, pointing to tracks in the sand. “Something stalks us.”

Fear washed over me. “What—who?”

“I do not know. It is not human, but it is not a beast, either. I had four snares. All caught game, but three were raided. Only that closest to our fire was undisturbed.”

“Maybe another animal.”

“No. Animals bite or break the cord. They do not untie the knots. They kill with teeth or claws, not clubs. The thief had a stone ax. He put it on the ground while he took our game. He stepped on it, leaving its impression on the sand. There are the thongs binding head to haft. Observe this footprint, this foot was not bare. It was covered. When the creature knelt on one knee, it did not mark the ground with toes.”

I tried my best to see what he saw, but even with his explanation this was not easy. But then, he had been here before and had had time to think about an explanation, and if he thought the thief had not been human, I wanted to know why.

“There are other tracks, farther along. They are in soft mud and bear impressions well. And the shape and size of the foot is wrong. So is its articulation. There is no arch, and the foot that made the tracks did not bend in the manner of the human foot. The creature’s strides are impossibly long, suggesting a giant, yet it is also impossibly light. There are other signs, less visible but equally informative. We are fortunate that there was only one of them.”

“So Campbell has sapients. And Solar Minerals knew it. You were right about them wanting me dead.”

“It would seem so. But now we face new danger; more enemies. That is why I must now make weapons and why I may again have to kill, loath as I am to do so. But come, we must travel. We can learn nothing more here.”

Throughout the day we walked steadily. t found myself taking frequent nervous glances behind, searching the underbrush for signs of the tall creature. Once or twice I thought I saw something, but Casey assured me there was no cause for alarm.

From time to time he stopped and picked rocks from the ground, slipping them into his pack. Once, while I rested, he went off into the bush and cut a stave. Later, as we walked, he whittled on it, and I wondered why. The stave took on form and symmetry, becoming a bow before my eyes.

We camped that night at the base of the escarpment, taking shelter in a shallow cave, from whose entrance Casey labored long to erase our spoor. Again we ate cold food, afraid to risk a fire. “Tomorrow,” Casey said, “we shall be armed, and make preparation for the climb.”

I lolled around the next day watching Casey’s wizardry with the rocks he had collected. Pressing shards against a bit of bone, he fractured and shaped them with consummate skill into dozens of exquisitely formed arrowheads. Then, with enough of these, he ventured out to cut quills, which peeled, split, and notched, and winged with bits of plastic, became the shafts of his arrows. Their heads he bound on with twisted strips of wet gut taken from the animal in the snare. Other strips, tightly twisted, became the bowstring, and sewed the seams of the quiver he made from the salted hide. As the thong dried, it bound tightly whatever it encircled; such was Casey’s skill in the wild.

That night I fell asleep in his arms, confident, as the light died, that I was safe with a protector far better aimed than any enemy who stalked us.

Later on we met the enemy, there in the dark hollowness of the cavern. I was thrown suddenly aside, awakened by a scream never uttered through a human throat. I crawled away from thrashing feet and grabbed a torch from my pack; then flashed its light around the cave.

Casey struggled with a gangling giant, who reached nearly to the top of the cavern. In one of the creature’s hands was a stone ax; in the other, Casey’s throat.

Casey held back the ax arm with one hand. With the other he lashed out. His enemy was mighty and determined, and was pushing Casey back toward the wall, though Casey’s muscles strained and knotted in resistance. His feet left furrows in the cave’s sandy floor as he was forced to give way.

I jumped to my feet, side-stepping them, and they struggled past me. I flashed the light around the cave, fearing other enemies might be about to enter and trying to think of something I could do to help. Casey was no weakling, but he had not yet recovered his full strength.

There in the comer stood the bow and quiver, which I lacked the skill to use. But there also, stuck in the sand, was the javelin. I ran to it and pulled it free just as a strange sound struck my ears. I flashed the light at the wall. Casey’s opponent had kicked his feet from under him, and the sound had come from his head hitting the wall.

The light momentarily distracted the creature. It turned to look at me. For the instant I froze in my tracks as that face inspired pure terror in me, but when it turned its attention back on Casey I knew what I had to do; I brought up the javelin and thrust its head deep into the middle of the creature’s back.

There was another blood-curdling scream, but it lasted only an instant. Before my eyes and in the torchlight the being literally wilted. A torrent of orange-pink fluid poured from its wound onto the cave floor. It seemed to collapse in sections, like a beach toy deflating. The ax clattered to the ground.

Casey scrambled to his feet. He seized the torch from me and held it on the dying alien, now curiously flattened on the floor of the cave and growing even flatter with each passing moment. My nerve broke. I sank to my knees and broke into tears. Casey moved to console me. I struggled for a time to speak, and found words difficult to come by. When they did come they were in broken gasps. “Casey—uh—what is that thing?”

“It is the being who raided our snares, I would guess. It has been tracking us, presumably with this.” He pointed to its long snout. “Such noses are found on all earthly creatures with acute sense of smell. I wish you had not killed it.”

I suddenly felt hurt; defensive. “But you were losing, Casey. I had to do something.”

“Its anatomy was strange to me. I needed time to find its vulnerabilities, so I retreated to the wall to explore it. Despite its size, it is far weaker than a man. You will perceive it has no bones.”

“No bones,” I screamed in disbelief.

“It lacks a rigid skeleton on which to anchor muscles, therefore it has great resilience but little strength. That is the reason it died so swiftly once punctured with a deep wound. The fluids expelled were under considerable pressure to hold it rigid, but once released, its form collapsed. Probably it suffocated. I will know in the morning when light permits dissection. That should be fascinating.” I was horrified. “Dissection! I can’t stand to look at it now. How can you be so morbid?”

He placed his hand on my shoulder and helped me to my feet. “I have been many things in my long past, Kim, including on many occasions a physician. I was at Waterloo, for instance, and at Gettysburg and Iwo Jima. I was there because while I could not confer my own invulnerability, I could ease pain. I learned from those experiences as I will from this. Perhaps I may even learn how to avoid killing any more of these creatures, should we be attacked again.”

“I don’t want to meet any more of them.” I shuddered at the thought.

Casey’s answer was firm and resolute. “Nor do I,” he said. “But if we do, I do not intend to take another life. My own may be safe, but that of others is so transitory it is by comparison that much more sacred to me.”

I slept no more that night, but huddled in my blanket waiting for dawn. When it came, I avoided Casey. This was illogical, and I knew it. What he said had been true, and his grisly work was necessary, but I waited outside the cave while he did it.

When finally he joined me he was grim and he seemed puzzled, though not disposed to explain why. I packed, while he buried the creature’s body in the woods beneath a pile of stones and marked the spot with the stone ax.

We started out, walking silently along the base of the escarpment, searching for a path to the top. Presently we came upon a promising ravine, through which trickled the waters of a small stream. We climbed its slippery rocks as far as the cataract, which fell near its summit. There we rested, and drank. I bathed my aching feet in the cool waters of the cataract’s pool while Casey kept his bow ready and his eyes on the rim.

Finally I could endure silence no longer, and I asked him, point blank: “What disturbs you, Casey? What did you find?”

“I found many things, Kim. All of them strange, most unfathomable. The alien’s limbs bore marks on what would be wrists and ankles were it human. I have seen such marks before, on the bodies of slaves. Manacles and leg irons make them. These were fresh.”

I pondered this remark. Casey seemed so sure. “Slavery,” I said, “is not new to human culture. It existed on Earth into the last century. I am shocked to find such evidence here on Campbell, where higher life is supposed not to exist at all, but what bothers me more is the possibility that Solar Minerals.”

“No.” Casey had never interrupted me before. He did now. “Solar Minerals has no slaves. They may know of the creatures’ existence; they may have suppressed that knowledge, but nothing more. That I know for sure.

“The alien you killed was not a native form. It did not evolve here. There are no anatomical parallels with Campbell’s other life. It is grossly unrelated to them. It is, like us, an alien.”

He paused a moment to let that sink in, then continued. “There is more. That creature, at least, has been here very briefly. I examined its dentation. In the past it has had caries, and these have been repaired with skill few human dentists could match. I found a stainless steel bridge, which implies a very high order of technology, yet the creature was armed with a stone ax Homo erectus would have been ashamed to carry. Why?”

I did not know, but the implication sent shivers through me. Suddenly I felt cold and pulled my feet from the water. But the chill was not in the water; it was in my mind. If felt uncomfortable here. “Can we go, Casey?”

He was willing, and we started out. At the top of the escarpment we found flat land, thickly forested. The proto-grasses grew profusely between the clumps of trees, but the bushes were sparse, which made easy travel. The grass was high enough to almost conceal herds of the little grazers, and from time to time we would flush a group of them by stumbling into their hiding places. Toward the end of the day Casey shot two of them; more than we really needed for food, but as he pointed out, I was rapidly tearing my clothing to tatters, struggling through the bush. And while not deerskin, and though it promised to be malodorous for want of adequate curing, it was all we had.

I was reassured, watching this demonstration of his skill with the bow: sure, swift shots that never missed. Less reassuring was the fact that now he kept it always at the ready, while I fell heir to the less complicated javelin, and held it ever tighter.

We stopped well before sundown that night, so that we could have a fire and cook the meat before darkness fell.

Casey picked a thorny thicket and plugged its entrances with branches. “If we have visitors tonight,” he said, “they will have to pass slowly through this. I only hope the wood is too green for them to bum us out. The spoor I have seen nearby is old, but it is best to use care.”

Spoor, I thought. So there was more alien activity in the area. He knew but hadn’t told me. Again I spent an uncomfortable night, awaking to a dawn that promised even more danger.

Again we set out in the direction of the rising sun. Long shadows shrank like the dew as the sun cleared the tree tops and pounded down on us, bringing us yet another enigma.

Casey noticed it first, of course. His impulse was to give it wide berth and hope I missed it. I didn’t. “What is it, Casey?”

Caught at deception, he owned up. “A building, I think. I cannot see it all. Parts are hidden by the trees, though it is, undoubtedly, artificial. I am reasonably certain men did not put it there. That leaves the aliens, whose signs abound.” Then, as if to forestall alarm in me, he added, “Old signs, though. None have passed this way in recent days.”

It lay across our course, and there no longer being any reason not to approach it, we did so carefully, stopping about 500 yards away. At this distance its surface was clearly visible. It gleamed in off-white brilliance, standing about three tiroes man-height, with a base of about the same diameter. Concentric stone disks about a foot thick made up its layers, the largest at the bottom. A man would have been hard pressed to stand on the tiny disc at the apex. We could not tell if these were molded or stacked. But if stacked, the seams were undetectable.

We went nearer and circled it. Casey studied the ground, found nothing recent enough to bother him, then motioned me to come closer.

“It’s just a stack of stone steps, Casey. Out here in the middle of nowhere. Why?”

“I cannot even make a conjecture. I can tell you more aliens exist; perhaps more than one kind. I can detect impressions of three distinct shapes and sizes of feet. One fits our dead alien, one is hooflike, and the third is human. All are old and faint.”

“Human! Then Solar does know there is a connection.”

“They know of the structure.” He bent down and walked around it, surveying its base, then picked something up. “Paper fragments, charred and faded. Very old.” He stopped again.

This time the retrieved object was larger. He held it to his nose and sniffed.

“What have you found, Casey?”

“Men have been here. One of them smoked cigars. This is tobacco leaf. The paper fragments came from the wrapping of half-pound blocks of nitrostarch, such as we use for blasting. They have tested the strength of this edifice, or perhaps tried to obtain a sample of it. The blast discolored it, nothing more, but the grass and ground yielded though the stone did not.” He pointed.

“Newer growth, though still weeks old, perhaps a couple of months old. They knew long before you came. I think this area merits further exploration.”

He turned and started off, eyes on the ground, stepping carefully. I walked behind and waited for him to tell me what I saw. None of it meant anything to me, but I knew he was following tracks of some sort. They led out of one grove and into another. Casey’s paced quickened.

Once within it he again bent down; began picking up bones, dried and bleached, which looked to me to be the same as those from animals we ate. Farther in there was a firepit, edged with stones and littered with more bones.

“The remains of feasts, Kim. Some old, some relatively recent. Some of the parties were large. The last consisted of ten or twelve individuals.”

“Men or aliens?” I asked.

“Aliens. I can find no useful tracks among these leaves, but men would leave distinctive signs. And men have metal implements. What ate here had not even flint knives, but only axes, crudely made of stone. Observe the fragments in the fire: seasoned wood was broken, green wood only was cut, because stone blades can handle that. Bones were smashed at the joints, then twisted loose, a somewhat messy, inefficient process compared to cutting.

“And I have noticed something else about this place. I did not climb the structure, therefore I missed it before, but look at this.”

He led me to a large, flat, oblong stone set in the ground, obscured by grass. Behind it, in a line leading to the structure, were others. “A marked path, visible from the top of the structure, but barely noticeable from the ground. Note the stones are not dressed, but natural, though carefully selected. The builders of the structure did not lay them; the diners did. Neither work has been here very long.”

“How do you know?”

“The bushes tell me. Outside a fifty-or-so-foot circle many large ones grow, but few grow inside and they are small. And the grasses within are thinner. They grow in soil recently disturbed to a considerable depth, and therefore poor in nutrients. But come, let us continue.”

I followed him around, while he searched for obscure things I would not have dreamed bore information. The signs led him to another stone. Again it was flat, and very large, sunk deep into the ground and partially covered with leaves. On its face, crudely scratched in the soft limestone, were several lines of symbols, each rubbed with some kind of clay to give it contrast with the rest of the rock.

“Writing,” Casey said. “Several different languages, too, I’d say. And far from primitive.”

“You can read it?” I asked incredulously.

“Of course not. Even so, there is much it tells me. I am familiar with most human script. Writing begins with pictograms. Stylized symbols follow, then true alphabets. Alphabets are refined. Their use demands extreme abstraction of thought. Being so fundamental, then-symbols are repetitious; economical. Alphabets do not occur in non-technical civilizations. Certainly no human writing system predates the use of metals.”

“Which means?” I wondered if he himself really knew.

“The primitive tools are an expedient to the people who carved this stone, used because better ones demand technology they don’t have. They cannot even shape flint decently.”

“Perhaps they did not come here purposely, Casey, but were shipwrecked. Perhaps the structure is for signalling.”

He did not agree. “I think not, but I have no better explanation. However, the writing clearly conveys a message; the intention of the writers is also clear: it is to be seen by someone on top of the structure. The writer intends that the reader first ascend. What intrigues me is why.”

“Perhaps the structure is a monument.”

“If so, it is poofly placed, hidden in the grove.”

For the rest of the morning we explored the area around the structure. Casey found much to indicate heavy past traffic through the woods, but nothing that would tell him why. But from the signs he saw he concluded the beings came and went from some location to the east. There was a fairly well worn path in that direction.

We, too, set off to the east, but kept to a nearby ridge which ran parallel, not wishing chance encounters. The difficult ground and the need for stealth made the traveling slower, so we had gotten only about a quarter of a mile when Casey suddenly stopped.

His reason was not apparent to me. “What is it, Casey?” I asked.

“A strange sensation. I feel peculiar.” He looked down at his arm. His sparse hairs were twitching. Then I saw the hair on his head beneath the band move and stand out. I felt my own hair rise like a wreath around my head.

“Some kind of electrostatic field,” Casey said. “Let’s get off this ridge.”

I looked up at the sky. It was cloudless, so it was not an electrical storm that was producing the effect. Nevertheless I followed Casey to lower ground. A noise began: a hiss, then a crackle. It came from behind us, in the direction of the structure. We could see only the top of this. It was glowing.

Soon it was brighter than the sun. The air around it shimmered and the noise rose in both amplitude and pitch. An object, dark by comparison, appeared atop the structure, at first indistinct but rapidly gathering form. It became a great cross; then, as we watched, the image changed, and became a figure with outstretched arms. Abruptly the hissing died down, and the figure dropped its arms to its sides. Then it ran down the tiers and disappeared from sight.

Again the hiss grew; the structure glowed. In the same manner as before a being appeared, then fled the pinnacle. Six more times the episode was repeated. Then the glow died.

I broke our long silence. “Well,” I said. “Now we know how they got here. It’s some kind of matter transmitter. The next question is why. How can we reconcile this with stone axes?

“We can’t, Kim,” he answered gravely. “Not without revising our previous speculation. I have the beginning of a hypothesis, but I want to see what happens next before explaining. Let’s get up on the ridge where we can watch the trail. Be very quiet.”

I followed him to the crest, where we could see in both directions for nearly five hundred yards.

He took note of the direction of the wind and notched an arrow to his bow. “We are dowdwind,” he said, “and thus may not be noticed.”

About ten minutes later forms appeared, heading west. There were four of them, all carrying axes. The two in front were the tall boneless kind. Those behind, and having difficulty keeping up, were short, thick, heavily muscled creatures with hoofed feet. They passed without noticing us.

Twenty minutes or so later six of each passed in the opposite direction, but the newcomers had no weapons.

Casey waited until they were well ahead of us, then motioned me to follow him along the ridge. “I think I know now where we are,” he said.

“Another riddle, Casey? Where are we?”

“This is Devil’s Island; a penal colony, like the one the French used to have in South America. I believe this is where the aliens send criminals, and I think that is what those creatures are. Whoever sends them doesn’t know humans have come here. Probably they never visit. There would be no reason for it.”

I didn’t understand, and said so.

Casey explained his theory. “It fits the facts we have. Consider: these beings possess nothing not obtainable here; not even clothing, if they wear it. This is not compatible with a colonizing or commercial venture, nor with an invasion force, given the means they have of transporting material things of great size.

“Also, note the condition of arrival.

The subjects are restrained on crosses. Released, they run and disappear. This may, of course, be necessary to transmission, but I find another possibility more likely; they are restrained because they would otherwise resist. They are freed only when safely trapped here. And they are not slaves as I once supposed, since slaves are useful only when they can be worked.

“But the best support of the convict theory was found on the dead one. He got adequate but cheap dental care; stainless steel instead of gold, porcelain, or silver alloy. It smacks of institutional dentistry; the sort, perhaps, that he’d get from another inmate who had lots of time on his hands and who employed great skill and patience in the job, but who couldn’t get his hands on really first-class materials. The convict dentist’s talent shows in the humbler medium, just as the skill of early American goldsmiths showed in the pewter they sometimes substituted when gold was too scarce and too dear.

“Then there are the old signs of turmoil I found at the structure. The first arrivals probably battled one another, then gradually saw that this was foolish and began cooperating. Later they probably organized into some loose form of government and made the guide marker and stone plaque. I think the feasts took place at an earlier time, when they stayed near the structure. Then, as their numbers increased they hunted the area bare, and had to leave. They probably made the plaque then.”

“It sounds reasonable, Casey,” I said. “But then, so does everything else you say. I am amazed you learn so much from a few simple signs that I don’t even notice. Tell me, what have you thought it means for us?”

Casey looked at me and smiled. He was obviously proud of his powers of observation and deduction. “Some look,” he said, “others see. If asked to speculate—and I have been—I would conclude, as I have said, the makers do not suspect the presence of men here. Perhaps long ago they sent a ship here to build this station, and possibly others elsewhere on the planet, though I think this unlikely. Perhaps they send only a few convicts here, and it may therefore have been a long time since they built the structure.

“In the interim, humans came, and the convicts have not molested them, though I believe they know of us. Perhaps promiscuous attack is discouraged by our relatively great numbers and their knowledge that we possess better arms and explosives.

“In any event, I have heard no rumors among the men concerning aliens. It may be therefore that, while management knows of the structure, they think it is sessile.”

The impact of that settled on me. It meant we would now be hunted by both groups.

But Casey reassured me. “I think the alien you killed was a scout, who did not get back to report. Perhaps he saw the forest fire and surmised a skimmer crash. The fire would have been visible for great distances, particularly from atop the escarpment, and the wreck would have represented a valuable source of metal for making tools and weapons.

“He arrived, perhaps, the day we left the site, but dared not attack us then. Instead he followed us to the cave, assuming we would be taken more easily while asleep. He was, therefore, alone at that time, though others may have followed. That, too, is unlikely, since we had much of value to him and he took nothing. If he were part of a group he would have selected choice objects for himself. Since he did not, he counted on retrieving them later. Therefore, he was alone.”

“That,” I said, “is bad enough, even with only half the planetary population-against me. I have a real talent for finding trouble, don’t I? What am I going to do?”

“The situation would seem to call for skillful diplomacy, Kim. I was about to ask you that question.”

“Well, this is obviously going to change Campbell’s whole history. I’ll have to report the situation as soon as I can, whether Solar Minerals likes it or not, and let the U.N. handle it.”

“That is plainly the proper course. The method, however, is critical. This is not a situation of indigenous life having a primary claim; it is a question of who has a better discovery claim. Solar will adopt that position if discovered.

I would: and I know something of law, having been a lawyer at various times during my existence.

“However, I have been a human being for longer and, I hope, a sensible one. It does not seem sensible to me for you to mention any of this to Solar’s local management. Remember, we are 114 light years from Earth. The Wilmington is our only contact, and it is under their charter. You have a four-month wait until the ship returns, and fifty-two days in space.”

“I don’t think I can keep the secret that long, Casey.”

“You must. Meyers condoned, if he did not order, one attempt to kill you. When they discover their failure there will be another try, unless in the meantime you prove yourself innocuous.”

“Why can’t we just hide out in the woods until the ship comes?”

“You would starve. I can exist on native foods; you can’t. You need Earthly nourishment, and what we brought will not last you.”

“Sol have to cook up a story, leaving the part about the beasties out of it?”

“It is the only way. You may not succeed in convincing Meyers you are not a danger to him, but it is less likely he will try to harm you at the station with so many others around. And he will have no way of knowing for sure that you have knowledge of the aliens.” I deliberated.

Casey went on. “You have certainly seen enough to make a judgment and complete your survey; you will not have to go out again.”

That was true enough, I thought. But I said, “What about you, Casey? You’re in it, too. And you can’t run like I will.”

“Do not worry,” he told me. “I’m just a dumb Indian, with more luck than brains. They know I’m too slow-witted to be trouble. Besides, you have seen what my body can do. I cannot count the times I have been killed in the past. As long as a single cell lives, so does He Who Waits; though it may take as long as a century to regenerate, my body will rebuild.”

That, I thought to myself, is something else I have to figure out how to handle.

In twenty-seven days we reached the sea. I had gained muscle, but lost weight, and was feeling very fit despite the lack of certain nutrients in my diet. But for the red hair and light eyes, I might have been Casey’s tribesman, tanned as I was and sporting a set of leather clothing he’d made from the skins of our food animals. They smelled a little ripe, but wore better than what I’d started out in.

There we rested for a day, playing in the surf and sand of the nearly tideless seashore. I felt a certain sorrow fill me. To leave this life, and make the transformation back to a civilized being, would not be easy after tasting this. True, life in the wilderness was not easy either, but it was strangely fulfilling. It satisfied my psychological need to find out what was really in me. I was satisfied with what I found. I had the stuff of pioneers. In bygone days I might have been one, seeking fate and fortune in the wild American west or in the harsh beauty of Herschel.

In part, that was my reason for joining the Ecological Service; to see how much of that I could take, without risking all. Now, the work seemed tame. The U.N. was a stodgy bureaucracy, an extension of the old U.S.A., which now dominated planetary government on Earth.

The Earth, poor now in resources, horribly overpopulated, was still man-home. And Earth assumed that the space around her was hers to control, particularly as man had met no challengers as yet. Mudron didn’t count. It was a fluke, an old system which experts felt was not really a part of local stellar evolution; its inhabitants were backward, and didn’t and never would represent any threat to human supremacy.

The beings who’d built that matter transmitter did. That scared me. They were far and away our technological superiors. They might greet our discovery with resentment, perhaps extermination; who knew?

Casey said they could do something worse: ignore us, as they had his people; pen us up on reservations, leaving us to starve and stagnate. And Casey knew what that was all about.

I found myself feeling a little fear of him, too. Not of the man, but the idea behind the man. Before as we traveled, it had seemed natural for me to be with him, but what of the end of the journey? What would happen then?

To Casey, all other men were as children. He, who had already lived throughout ages eternal, would still be alive and vital when I was dust. He treated me as an equal, knowing that I wasn’t, any more than all the others. He trusted me with his secret, speaking freely of his past, concealing nothing. Perhaps this was the greatest wisdom of all. I understand, yet the secret was still safe. Who would I tell? Who would believe a story so fantastic? He could deny everything without saying a word. Silence would suffice, and the rest of the world would assume I was deranged.

I hoped he would never do that to me; that somehow I would find a way to join him in his destiny, here among the stars, if only for a little while. A dream taunted me. In it, we were together. I knew that he had done such things before with other partners, now long gone, and come away each time again a lonely man, without a purpose or the solace of a kindred soul to share his misery. Of all the creatures in the universe only he was unique, lacking both siblings and descendants.

“My creator gave me wondrous powers,” he told me once, “and many gifts are mine. But that which made me truly a man, he took from me.”

It didn’t matter. I decided, on that last night on the beach, that the rest of the dream was worth it.

We started south in the morning, this time following a trail of a different sort: the Wilmington’s. It was as clear as any path could be, even to me. Until the cradle of the landing web was finished she came down on her spacedrive; a process enormously destructive to the offshore island which served as landing site. The drivefields were tame in space, where matter was scarce, but in an atmosphere their inertial force churned the sky and raised cubic miles of seawater into the air. Each takeoff or landing resembled a small hurricane, but beyond that, as the vessel settled, these forces went to work on soil and crustal rock, fracturing it into powder, which fell to the ground in concentric rings according to its density.

We followed these, taking into account the distance the island lay beyond the great promontory, which itself extended fifty miles to sea. Near its seaward end, on a bay, lay the settlement.

When the net was finished, ships would come down on it, and an array of twenty banks of continuously firing lasers dumping power into the system would lower them slowly into the cradle Solar’s crews were building.

One more night was spent out under the stars, there on the sandy lowland.

I tried to get back to reality, sifting mental notes of what I had seen so that I could compile a report. I had no written notes or photographs, of course, but I was satisfied I knew what was here; that, except for the aliens, I could have passed this world for colonization. I intended to do so.

“I still do.” Suddenly, I found myself burst from reminiscense into reality, and shouting at the boss.

Carmody looked at me critically. He had listened politely while I rambled on. He had not interrupted. He did now, though somehow his manner was softened. “I am here to make that choice. Miss Ryan, though I’ll take your recommendation into consideration. Actually, it’s become more political than technical now, in view of your discovery of the aliens. Would it surprise you to hear that we’ll probably follow it?”

I was surprised, and showed it.

Carmody smiled. “This may be just the break the human race needed: a chance to get a free lunch, to learn from willing teachers. The government’ll probably give you a medal, and Casey, too, if they can find him.”

“Casey’s not likely to be very impressed,” I answered. “Now if they made that a necklace of prime serpent’s teeth—”

“I want to hear the rest of it, Miss Ryan, including all you can tell me about him. Maybe it’ll help us find him.”

“Okay. Let’s see, where was I? Well, needless to say, there was quite a ruckus at camp when we turned up. We walked out of the bush looking like Tarzan and Jane; scared the pants off two guys who were goofing off behind a piling at the construction site. We went back to the settlement in their truck, riding in the back because we smelled bad. Meyers himself met us when we got in—”

“We thought you were dead,” he told us, probably wondering where he’d failed. “I sent search parties out when you didn’t return. They found a burned skimmer and we just naturally assumed you’d been in it.”

I did the talking. Casey went back to being the dumb Indian. “Well, as you can see, we’re all right. All I need is a bath and some real food. We’ve been eating what Casey shot with his bow.” Meyers had been watching Casey with new respect. “Oh, so that’s what it’s for.” He examined one of the arrows. “Certainly looks deadly.” He turned to Casey. “I guess you’d better get back to your regular work.”

No, you don’t. I wasn’t about to let myself out of Casey’s sight and protection. “Uh—if you don’t mind, Mr. Meyers, I’d like to keep him for a while, if you can spare him. I need him to help me with my report.”

“Him? What can he do?”

“I want to pick his brains. I lost all my samples and photographs, and I couldn’t take notes on the trail, so my report will have to be composed from memory—mine and his. And as you can see, he’s a woodsman. He must have noticed thousands of things I didn’t.” There was no credible way Meyers could refuse, though I doubt he bought my explanation, so Casey stayed, and we went back to our old quarters together.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Kim.”

“Why not? I do need the benefit of your observations. And I need your protection. Did you see the way he looked at your bow?”

“I noticed. But a man like Meyers wouldn’t be afraid of a savage, and it’s difficult to play Dumb Indian when you make me party to scientific studies. I’d be more effective in the field, where I could keep an eye on things.”

“Quit worrying, Casey. Human nature will take care of the problem. We can trust Meyer’s prurient mind if nothing else. He’ll figure I wanted to hang on to my stud. I’ll bet that rumor’s all over the settlement by now.”

Casey didn’t say another word about it. In spite of his vast experience, I guess he still didn’t understand women. He settled in with me, and we went to work on a report.

We still needed some information we didn’t have, mostly about marine life on Campbell. This provided an excuse for short local field trips, and gave us a chance to reminisce. We spent many days on Campbell’s broad beaches or out in a motorboat.

I loved Campbell’s mild climate and its friendly sun. “I think,” I told Casey, “that I could stay here forever. I really like this.”

“Have you forgotten that night in the cave,” he replied, “or what we saw in the interior?”

“No, Casey, but I can dream, can’t I? It will end soon enough, when my report hits. Then the government will tell us we can’t have Campbell.”

He was compassionate, and he let me have it a while longer, but there came a day when the dream, too, died. He came back from a sojourn; they had flooded him with innuendos about his squaw but he had learned useful things.

“It has begun, Kim. Great care must be taken now.”

Casey always had a penchant to talk in riddles. It irritated me more than anything else he did. I guess it showed. “What has started?” I demanded.

“Men have begun to vanish. They disappear into the bush around the cradle site.”

I was appalled. “If the aliens now existed in sufficient numbers, this might be the beginning of an attack.”

“None have been seen,” Casey said grimly. “Management has an official explanation, so that the workers do not know. They say that with the web near completion, the missing men have simply taken off, to get the jump on the colonists who will come later. But Meyers knows the real reason.”

“How do you know that?”

“The machine shop is making weapons. Lathes turn gun barrels; the smith is making pike heads and short swords. There are armed skimmers patrolling the periphery.”

“War, with the aliens?” I saw myself trapped here, perhaps imprisoned or killed, to keep word from getting back to Earth.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Casey pondered each phrase. “Meyers may believe he can quietly exterminate the aliens or drive them deep into the bush where they will not be rediscovered. He may bring mercenaries here to hunt them. Certainly he will station marksmen at the transmitter to pick off new arrivals.”

“What are we going to do, Casey?”

“For the meantime, nothing. Everything depends on getting you out, unsuspected, when the Wilmington returns.

I now believe the government must be told, even if we lose Campbell. This is better than interstellar war, which man would surely lose.”

We waited, and hoped.

I learned later that Meyers and Bigelow had, in fact, tried extermination; had placed a garrison at the alien transmitter. They succeeded for a while in preventing the formation of large concentrations of aliens, but this did not last. Men still disappeared; amusingly enough, some had run off voluntarily, believing Meyers’s explanation for the disappearance of others and determined to get in on a good thing.

Not so amusing were the discussions they’d had about Casey and me, which Bigelow admitted to later; to his credit, he balked at murder, but Meyers thought they could blame it on the aliens if they ever got caught.

I was getting packed to leave while this was going on and didn’t suspect a thing, not even when landing day arrived. How Meyers talked Corsetti into doing what he did, I’ll never know. Casey and I discussed it later and agreed that even a moron should have known it wouldn’t work. But some things are just destined to happen, and I guess it was one of them.

We were on the back porch looking at the sky, watching the great bulk of the ship descend. On the first down-orbit pass she was just a gleaming point of light which moved rapidly over the station. The second pass would bring her down, and we waited for her to reappear in the western sky. She did not.

“Something’s wrong, Kim,” Casey told me. He pointed westward.

The air shimmered, and an enormous dust cloud had risen from the ground to race to the top of the atmosphere and flattened out. Then the planet itself started to shake, and there came a series of sonic shocks, followed by a great wind. In the dust cloud appeared blazing halos.

Both of us had seen these things before. It was the awful tumult which accompanies a ship’s descent on Aschenbrenner drive, but it belonged on the island, not in the bush to the west.

Casey’s eyes blazed. He grabbed my arm and shoved me to the door. “Get inside, quickly,” he warned. “Those fools have turned Wilmington’s drive on the alien transmitter.”

I found myself on the rough floor with Casey on top of me, and started to protest his rough treatment. I stopped when I saw the flash, brilliant like a thousand suns. The fireball singed the settlement as it rose, despite the vast distance; then it dimmed. Through the top of the window I could see it rise toward space.

More shock waves followed; more howling wind. The building shook and rattled but it held together.

One, maybe both of them, went; either the ship’s engines went critical or the transmitter did. There might be nothing left of either. Casey let me up.

“What now, Casey? What do we do now?”

This time he didn’t have an answer.

Outside, men could be heard shouting, screaming; vehicles roared wildly through the streets, racing engines and squealing tires. We knew that there must have been casualties.

A few minutes later Meyers came and brought two men, both armed with crude, but lethal-looking guns. “Your time has come, Miss Busybody,” he said to me.

They herded us off to the brig. The cell looked adequate even to hold Casey.

I sat there on the edge of my bunk, crying. Casey paced.

“I have experience with prisons, too,” he said. “There is a way out of all of them.”

I was pessimistic. Our cell was essentially a steel box, with walls perforated for ventilation. Its seams were welded, and it was barred and locked from outside, with no openings large enough even to pass a hand. It was also guarded by one of Meyers’s gunmen, who sat in a chair outside the door.

After a while Casey came over and sat beside me. “Kim,” he said. “I want you to stop that; get control of yourself. That is what I am going to do; understand?”

I hiccuped, and nodded my head. I didn’t, really.

“Good,” he whispered. “I will need three or four hours, and the result may be quite frightening. Do not allow it to upset you.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

“In the meantime, keep me covered, but try not to distract me. If anyone comes you must warn me. Is that clear?”

“Clear.”

“I am just going to rearrange a few things.”

Then he left me and climbed into the other bunk, covering himself with a blanket.

A new guard relieved the first one.

He came to the door to talk to me, but I told him to let Casey sleep. Soon he, too, settled into the chair by the door.

About sundown, Casey stirred. I watched an arm snake out from under the blanket and rise to grasp its edge. The arm was pink and covered with a light brown fuzz. It rolled the blanket down, revealing a face: one I knew; one I hated. A hand rose to its lips, and Fritz Meyers stood up.

“Rankin.” Even the voice was the same. “Get over here.”

“Mr. Meyers? How?

“Never mind; get this door open.”

“Yes sir, only what are you doing in there?”

“None of your business, Rankin; the lady and I made a deal. Get the door open.”

The lock clicked and the bar slid back. Casey hit the door like a battering ram, driving it into Rankin’s face, smashing flesh and bone alike. He crumpled to the floor.

“Come on out, Kim.”

I left the cell, still not completely convinced I was looking at Casey.

He shoved Rankin inside, flipping him onto my bunk, and covered him up. Then he reached into his own and withdrew a clump of black substance.

“My own hair,” he said. “I can’t reconstitute dead tissue. I had to get rid of it and start over. We’ll hide this somewhere outside.”

“Where are we going?”

“Back to our quarters first, to get our equipment and some food for you. Then into the bush. We’ll hide there until contact with Earth is re-established. Meyers has to try to kill us now if we stay, and in your case, death’s permanent.”

We started out into the compound. It was strangely empty. Then I heard a faint popping, and in the south there was a glow in the sky. It looked like a fire, and I thought I smelled smoke, too. For an instant I was afraid it was our quarters that were burning, but the fire seemed to be farther away. We hurried off in that direction.

Others appeared in the street, scurrying about, some moving equipment in the direction of the fire. Casey called to one of them. The man stopped running and came over.

“What’s happening out there, Barker?”

“Mr. Meyers. How—I just talked to you on the phone. How did you get way over here?”

“Never mind. Fill me in.”

“Well, okay—you mean the fire? Them things set it, we think. I ain’t seen none myself, but they’re supposed to be all over. There’s gonna be a fight, I think.”

“What are we doing about it?”

Barker looked at him as if to say, Don’t you know? He didn’t say that, though. “We got the guys with guns on rooftops, and some in a skimmer. The rest of the men got axes and machetes. We ain’t gonna beat fire, though. If they decide to bum us out, we can’t stop them.”

“You’re doing the right thing, Barker. Get back to work.”

Barker took off.

“General foreman,” Casey explained. “One of the dumber ones. We’d better hurry before the battle really gets started. Barker’s right: they can’t stop a fire, though I doubt the aliens want to bum up what they themselves hope to get from this raid. Most likely the fire is just a diversion.”

We reached our rooms, got what we needed, and left again. I noticed the Meyers form was fading, and commented.

“It takes too much concentration to hold a new pattern, Kim. At least until I really get used to it. On occasion, I’ve held them for years, the Comte de Rochambeau, for instance. Now there was a role where I had everybody guessing.”

I had not seen the mischievous side of Casey before, but this proved he had one.

We made our way out of the settlement, heading west in the direction of the cradle site. Once or twice we stopped and Casey listened for sounds of others moving in the bush, but we encountered neither man nor alien. Casey led us across the lowlands into higher country, and by morning we were high on the spine of the promontory about twenty miles west of the station. He selected a campsite where there was both water and cover, and we rested. That is, I rested. Casey climbed a tree and examined the surrounding countryside with field glasses.

I awoke and ate, while Casey explained our situation. “I see little groups of aliens converging on the station. All are poorly armed. As of now, there are probably not enough of them to overcome the men, but more arrive hourly. Soon they can start a siege, if they can find enough food to maintain one. Still, if the men narrow their perimeter and defend it well they may yet prevail. I think last night’s raid was simply a test of human strength.”

“Maybe they don’t know how many men there are.”

“A good point. But neither do the men know the aliens’ strength. If the transmitter has ceased to function, their numbers will not grow, but I regard that as a particularly disastrous possibility.”

“Why? I should think that would be better for us.”

“In the short run, perhaps. But for the race, devastating. If the aliens can detect its malfunction, they may return to investigate and find us. Discovery, I think, is something best postponed as long as possible. In the interim perhaps we will be rescued and obliterate our traces from Campbell.”

“Do you think we’ll have to go that far?”

“I cannot see the future, Kim.”

“We could have a long wait, Casey. It’ll be almost two months before the Wilmington is even overdue. More time will be wasted deciding what to do, and still more will pass before another ship can get here. What happens to us in the meantime?”

“Nothing, I hope. We will survive it and do what we can to find solutions. There was a time when I thought we might simply get you back to Earth and let the government handle things. Now that won’t work. We’re out of time. But I wish I had a better insight into this.”

I had thought he did, but something apparently still bothered him. I asked him what it was.

“The aliens are inept. That’s not typical criminal behavior, at least not for the human criminals I’ve known. They’re not nearly aggressive enough. Even allowing for cultural differences they ought to show more resourcefulness, particularly in weaponry. We ought to be seeing some spears along with the clubs, and some concerted effort to get hold of human materials for weapons. The one thing they do seem to rely on is fire; otherwise, they behave like amateurs.”

We moved again, farther into the interior, to find a place which, as Casey said, “You and I can defend by ourselves for long enough to bring this business to an end.”

He didn’t tell me what he meant by that, but he found our redoubt; a cavern halfway up a cliff face overlooking a broad stream. We had brought much food, and the shrubs from the narrow pathway would provide fuel. Inside the cavern was a pool containing more water than we could drink in years. But farther down the valley was a ford, where aliens sometimes crossed, headed for the settlement.

Casey got me settled in, then told me to rest. “Tonight,” he said, “you will not close your eyes at all, but you will be safe here until I return. Even you, alone, could hold this place against an army with nothing more than a few rocks and a knife.”

When darkness fell he sallied forth, armed only with a staff. I waited in darkness all alone for his return, and all the while fought off the savage creatures my imagination conjured up. Once or twice I felt the bow and wondered, if the need arose, if I could summon the strength to draw it or the skill to find the mark.

With the first light of dawn I heard a noise on the trail below me, and I felt a fright. Casey would move more silently than that. And Casey did. But the lanky prisoner he led, bound tightly and stumbling, had no wish to cooperate.

I stood, watching from the cave’s mouth, as Casey dragged it in, and it seemed to me to be in life even uglier and more menacing than the dead one at the other cave, though it was much smaller.

“I chose it for its size,” Casey said. “In time, you will understand why. Now I must get to work and learn yet another tongue, so I may speak with it.”

And in the days that followed he struggled to master the grunts, the hisses and squeals that made up the alien’s speech. I despaired of matching his resolve and left the two alone, preferring to speculate on what was happening to the settlement.

Later, when it was over, I learned that these had been desperate times for Meyers, and had finally driven him to self-destruction. By that time most of the outer buildings had been leveled to provide a clear field of fire for what was left, huddled behind barriers of barbed wire. In two months he had lost four hundred men; not simply killed, but gone, their bodies dragged away by the aliens.

The cairn had not been destroyed, and the Wilmington was sacrificed in vain. Aliens still came through, to be cut down by human sharp-shooters mounted in skimmers. Then the aliens ended that; they fired the motor pool. Immobilized, Meyers had sat within his reduced perimeter, along with fifty men who remained, and waited for the end. By that time, Casey had been ready.

Again the secretary broke into my narrative.

“That’s the part I understand the least,” Carmody said. By this time he seemed far more mellow; almost human. His haughtiness was gone. “Perhaps if we could find Kah-sih-omah.”

“Casey doesn’t want to be found, Mr. Carmody. Don’t you see—if he doesn’t, he won’t be. And until he does turn up this is only a story; a myth, both to us and the aliens.” But he was more than that to me, I thought. And the thought was painful.

“I want to hear the rest of it, Miss Ryan, especially the ending.”

“I suppose that’s the part that really matters most of all,” I replied.

“I wasn’t in on much of it. All I really know was pieced together later, from people I talked to. A lot of my information comes from Bigelow, and has to be considered less than reliable. And I’m sure the aliens don’t suspect a thing.

“It all started one morning when I woke to find the message, scratched in the sand at the cave mouth. Casey and the alien were gone. By that time, of course, Casey was fluent in the alien speech and—”

“What was the message?” Carmody interrupted.

“It didn’t make sense, Mr. Carmody. It was only three words. I couldn’t really make it out.” I lied. “Anyway, Casey was gone, and after that things started happening at the settlement.

“Meyers had succeeded in holding on as long as the aliens simply besieged him, and he was able to fight off their night raids with superior tactics and weapons. The aliens couldn’t mount a direct assault.

“Then, suddenly, the aliens brought up trebuchet and used them to reduce the buildings. Meyers shot himself and Bigelow took over. He had guts; I’ll give him that, going out to parley with the aliens. You pretty well know the rest.”

Carmody did, though he wasn’t quite sure how to handle it from there. I wasn’t either, and I said so. I found it awkward, but didn’t say so.

“I’m leaving you in charge, Miss Ryan, while I go back to report all this. Somehow, I can’t see the government abandoning Campbell over this; not with all this knowledge available for exploitation. I think we’ll get the landing web finished in record time now. There’ll be all kinds of people coming in. In the meantime you’ll have to keep things stable here. I hope you get along all right with the native leader.”

“Yes,” I said. “We understand one another. His English seems to be pretty good.”

“Fine. Then I won’t worry about a thing.” He rose from the chair and motioned for me to follow him down to the dock. “This’ll mean a promotion for you, you know. Maybe even to an advance scout team. Would you like that?” He had my written report in his hand, and patted it lovingly.

“Yes, if I could get the right partner; yes, I think I would.”

He climbed into the launch and I watched it leave, until at last the image became too small, and disappeared over the horizon.

He hadn’t had time to read the report, that I knew. When he did, he would find no reference in it to the extraordinary powers Casey had displayed. So far as that part of the story was concerned, it would remain a myth.

EPILOGUE

The alien entered the room and sat down in the chair beside me, its legs bent awkwardly, arms resting in its lap. I looked no more than necessary at its face, which appealed to me not at all, though I knew what lay behind it. Instead, I looked away and said, “When, Casey. How much longer?”

“Shh. Not so loud.” He raised an arm, but I retreated. I would not allow it to touch me.

“There are,” he said, “grave disadvantages to my present form, but until the job is done it is necessary. I grow used to it and it has become easier to hold. Tell me, Kim, how did your interview go?”

“Better than expected, I think. Carmody appears to be a very prudent man. He will have my report and read it as he travels back to Earth. He believes the aliens can be exploited.”

“So do I, and I believe that they will permit this willingly, in the hope that we can someday aid their fellows.”

“For all we know, they may really be criminals.”

“No. Not in the sense you mean. And we do know, in general, where they originate: from farther in on the spiral arm. Their home systems are in foment. They are what they claim to be: political refugees. They are politicians, philosophers, scientists, writers, artists, and the like; anything but criminals, and certainly not soldiers. This is why I had to lead them and teach them to make war. They could not even bring themselves to kill, but simply captured humans and dragged them off, often with heavy casualties to their own.

“And they don’t want Campbell; at least, not in the sense we do. Their government simply dumped them here with nothing, to fend for themselves on what they thought was a vacant world. These people embarrassed them.

“To us, they can be partners. We can trade them sustenance for knowledge. The matter transmitter alone is worth that. Spaceships will always be needed for exploration, but commerce needs something better to be really worthwhile. It will make colonization really practical too, and you know what that means.”

“We will need many more new worlds.”

This time I did not avoid his touch. I knew also what the message meant, that still I pictured scratched in the sand. He Who Waits had found a companion “For A Time.”

BLACK AIR

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson wrote “To Leave A Mark,” (November 1982) and has had recent stories in UNIVERSE 12 and BEST SF OF THE TEAR, #11. He writes that he has finished his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego and was married on New Tear’s Eve, 1982. His new story is a fantasy about a 17-year-old boy who sails with the Spanish Armada; it is an unusual and remarkable tale, one that you will not soon forget.

They sailed out of Lisbon harbor with the flags snapping and the brass culverins gleaming under a high white sun, priests proclaiming in sonorous Latin the blessing of the Pope, soldiers in armor jammed on the castles fore and aft, and sailors spiderlike in the rigging, waving at the citizens of the town who had left their work to come out on the hills and watch the ships crowd out the sunbeaten roads, for this was the Armada, the Most Fortunate Invincible Armada, off to subjugate the heretic English to the will of God. There would never be another departure like it.

Unfortunately, the wind blew out of the northeast for a month after they left without shifting even a point on the compass, and at the end of that month the Armada was no closer to England than Iberia itself. Not only that, but the hard-pressed coopers of Portugal had made many of the Armada’s casks of green wood, and when the ship’s cooks opened them the meat was rotten and the water stank. So they trailed into the port of Corunna, where several hundred soldiers and sailors swam to the shores of Spain and were never seen again. A few hundred more had already died of disease, so from his sickbed on the flagship Don Alonso Perez de Guzman el Bueno, seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia and Admiral of the Armada, interrupted the composition of his daily complaint to Philip the Second, and instructed his soldiers to go out into the countryside and collect peasants to help man the ships.

One squad of these soldiers stopped at a Franciscan monastery on the outskirts of Corunna, to impress all the boys who lived there and helped the monks, waiting to join the order themselves. Although they did not like it the monks could not object to the proposal, and off the boys went to join the fleet.

Among these boys, who were each taken to a different ship, was Manuel Carlos Agadir Tetuan. He was seventeen years old; he had been born in Morocco, the son of West Africans who had been captured and enslaved by Arabs. In his short life he had already lived in the Moroccan coastal town of Tetuan, in Gibraltar, the Balearics, Sicily, and Lisbon. He had worked in fields and cleaned stables, he had helped make rope and later cloth, and he had served food in inns. After his mother died of the pox and his father drowned, he had died of the pox and his father drowned, he had begged in the streets and alleys of Corunna, the last port his father had sailed out of, until in his fifteenth year a Franciscan had tripped over him sleeping in an alley, inquired after him, and taken him to the refuge of the monastery.

Manuel was still weeping when the soldiers took him aboard La Lavia, a Levantine galleon of nearly a thousand tons. The sailing master of the ship, one Laeghr, took him in charge and led him below decks. Laeghr was an Irishman, who had left his country principally to practice his trade, but also out of hatred of the English who ruled Ireland. He was a huge man with a torso like a boar’s, and arms as thick as the yardarms of the ship. When he saw Manuel’s distress he showed that he was not without kindness; clapping a callused hand to the back of Manuel’s neck he said, in accented but fluent Spanish, “Stop your snivelling, boy, we’re off to conquer the damned English, and when we do your fathers at the monastery will make you their abbot. And before that happens a dozen English girls will fall at your feet and ask for the touch of those black hands, no doubt. Come on, stop it. I’ll show you your berth first, and wait till we’re at sea to show you your station. I’m going to put you in the main top, all our blacks are good topmen.”

Laeghr slipped through a door half his height with the ease of a weasel ducking into one of its tiny holes in the earth. A hand half as wide as the doorway reemerged and pulled Manuel into the gloom. The terrified boy nearly fell down a broadstepped ladder, but caught himself before falling onto Laeghr. Far below several soldiers laughed at him. Manuel had never been on anything larger than a Sicilian pataches, and most of his fairly extensive seagoing experience was of coastal carracks, so the broad deck under him, cut by bands of yellow sunlight that flowed in at open ports big as church windows, crowded with barrels and bales of hay and tubs of rope, and a hundred busy men, was a marvel. “Saint Anna save me,” he said, scarcely able to believe he was on a ship. Why, the monastery itself had no room as large as the one he descended into now. “Get down here,” Laeghr said in an encouraging way.

Once on the deck of that giant room they descended again, to a stuffy chamber a quarter the size, illuminated by narrow fans of sunlight that were let in by ports that were mere slits in the hull. “Here’s where you sleep,” Laeghr said, pointing at a dark corner of the deck, against one massive oak wall of the ship. Forms there shifted, eyes appeared as lids lifted, a dull voice said, “Another one you’ll never find again in this dark, eh master?”

“Shut up, Juan. See boy, there are beams dividing your berth from the rest, that will keep you from rolling around when we get to sea.”

“Just like a coffin, with the lid up there.”

“Shut up, Juan.”

After the sailing master had made clear which slot in particular was Manuel’s, Manuel collapsed in it and began to cry again. The slot was shorter than he was, and the dividing boards set in the deck were cracked and splintered. The men around him slept, or talked among themselves, ignoring Manuel’s presence. His medallion cord choked him, and he shifted it on his neck and remembered to pray.

His guardian saint, the monks had decided, was Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary and grandmother of Jesus. He owned a small wooden medallion with her face painted on it, which Abbot Alonso had given to him. Now he took the medallion between his fingers, and looked in the tiny brown dots that were the face’s eyes. “Please, Mother Anna,” he prayed silently, “take me from this ship to my home. Take me home.” He clenched the tag in his fist so tightly that the back of it, carved so that a cross of wood stood out from its surface, left an imprinted red cross in his palm. Many hours passed before he fell asleep.

Two days later the Most Fortunate Invincible Armada left Corunna, this time without the flags, or the crowds of spectators, or the clouds of priestly incense trailing downwind. This time God favored them with a westerly wind, and they sailed north at good speed. The ships were arranged in a formation devised by the soldiers, orderly phalanxes rising and falling on the swells: the galleasses in front, the supply hulks in the center, and the big galleons on either flank. The thousands of sails stacked on hundreds of masts made a grand and startling sight, like a copse of white trees on a broad blue plain.

Manuel was as impressed by the sight as the rest of the men. There were four hundred men on La Lavia, and only thirty were needed at any one time to sail the ship, so all of the three hundred soldiers stood on the sterncastle observing the fleet, and the sailors who were not on duty or sleeping did the same on the slightly lower forecastle.

Manuel’s duties as a sailor were simple. He was stationed at the port midships taffrail, to which were tied the sheets for the port side of the mainmast’s sails, and the sheets for the big lateen-rigged sail of the foremast. Manuel helped five other men pull these ropes in or let them out, following Laeghr’s instructions; the other men took care of the belaying knots, so Manuel’s job came down to pulling on a rope when told to. It could have been more difficult, but Laeghr’s plan to make him a topman like the other Africans aboard had come to grief. Not that Laeghr hadn’t tried. “God made you Africans with a better head for heights, so you can climb trees to keep from being eaten by lions, isn’t that right?” But when Manuel had followed a Moroccan named Habedeen up the halyard ladder to the main top, he found himself plunging about space, nearly scraping low foggy clouds, and the sea, embroidered with the wakes of the ships ahead, was more often than not directly below him. He had clamped, arms and legs, around a stanchion of the main top, and it had taken five men, laughing and cursing, to pry him loose and pull him down. With rich disgust, but no real physical force, Laeghr had pounded him with his cane and shoved him to the port taffrail. “You must be a Sicilian with a sunburn.” And so he had been assigned his station.

Despite this incident he got on well with the rest of the crew. Not with the soldiers; they were rude and arrogant to the sailors, who stayed out of their way to avoid a curse or a blow. So three-quarters of the men aboard were of a different class, and remained strangers. The sailors therefore hung together. They were a mongrel lot, drawn from all over the Mediterranean, and Manuel was not unusual because of his recent arrival. They were united only in their dislike and resentment of the soldiers. “Those heroes wouldn’t be able to conquer the Isle of Wight if we didn’t sail them there,” Juan said.

Manuel became acquainted first with the men at his post, and then with the men in his berth. As he spoke Spanish and Portuguese, and fair amounts of Arabic, Sicilian, Latin, and a Moroccan dialect, he could converse with everyone in his corner of the lower foredeck. Occasionally he was asked to translate for the Moroccans; more than once this meant he was the arbiter of a dispute, and he thought fast and mistranslated whenever it would help make peace. Juan, the one who had made the bitter comments to Laeghr on Manuel’s arrival, was the only pure Spaniard in the berth. He loved to talk, and complained to Manuel and the others continuously. “I’ve fought El Draco before, in the Indies,” he boasted. “We’ll be lucky to get past that devil. You mark my words, we’ll never do it.”

Manuel’s mates at the main taffrail were more cheerful, and he enjoyed his watches with them and the drills under Laeghr’s demanding instruction. These men called him Topman or Climber, and made jokes about his knots around the belaying pins, which defied quick untying. This inability earned Manuel quite a few swats from Laeghr’s cane, but there were worse sailors aboard, and the sailing master seemed to bear him no ill will.

A life of perpetual change had made Manuel adaptable, and shipboard routine became for him the natural course of existence. Laeghr or Pietro, the the natural course of existence. Laeghr or Pietro, the leader at Manuel’s station, would wake him with a shout. Up to the gundeck, which was the domain of the soldiers, and from there up the big ladder that led to fresh air. Only then could Manuel be sure of the time of day. For the first week it was an inexpressible delight to get out of the gloom of the lower decks and under the sky, in the wind and clean salt air; but as they proceeded north, it began to get too cold for comfort. After their watches were over, Manuel and his mates would retire to the galley and be given their biscuits, water and wine. Sometimes the cooks killed some of the goats and chickens and made soup. Usually, though, it was just biscuits, biscuits that had not yet hardened in their barrels. The men complained grievously about this.

“The biscuits are best when they’re hard as wood, and bored through by worms,” Habedeen told Manuel.

“How do you eat it then?” Manuel asked.

“You bang pieces of biscuit against the table until the worms fall out. You eat the worms if you want.” The men laughed, and Manuel assumed Habedeen was joking, but he wasn’t certain.

“I despise this doughy shit,” Pietro said in Portuguese. Manuel translated into Moroccan Arabic for the two silent Africans, and agreed in Spanish that it was hard to stomach. “The worst part,” he offered, “is that some parts are stale while others are still fresh.”

“The fresh part was never cooked.”

“No, that’s the worms.”

As the voyage progressed, Manuel’s berthmates became more intimate. Farther north the Moroccans suffered terribly from the cold. They came belowdecks after a watch with their dark skins completely goose-pimpled, like little fields of stubble after a harvest. Their lips and fingernails were blue, and they shivered an hour before falling asleep, teeth chattering like the castanets in a fiesta band. Not only that, but the swells of the Atlantic were getting bigger, and the men, since they were forced to wear every scrap of clothing they owned, rolled in their wooden berths unpadded and unprotected. So the Moroccans, and then everyone in the lower foredeck, slept three to a berth, taking turns in the middle, huddling together like spoons. Crowded together like that the pitching of the ship could press them against the beams, but it couldn’t roll them around. Manuel’s willingness to join these bundlings, and to lie against the beams, made him well-liked. Everyone agreed he made a good cushion.

Perhaps it was because of his hands that he fell ill. Though his spirit had been reconciled to the crusade north, his flesh was slower. Hauling on the coarse hemp ropes every day had ripped the skin from his palms, and salt, splinters, belaying pins and the odd boot had all left their marks as well, so that after the first week he had wrapped his hands in strips of cloth torn from the bottom of his shirt. When he became feverish, his hands pulsed painfully at every nudge from his heart, and he assumed that the fever had entered him through the wounds in his palms.

Then his stomach rebelled, and he could keep nothing down. The sight of biscuits or soup revolted him; his fever worsened, and he became parched and weak; he spent a lot of time in the head, wracked by dysentery. “You’ve been poisoned by the biscuits,” Juan told him. “Just like I was in the Indies. That’s what comes of boxing fresh biscuits. They might as well have put fresh dough in those barrels.”

Manuel’s berthmates told Laeghr of his condition, and Laeghr had him moved to the hospital, which was at the stern of the ship on a lower deck, in a wide room that the sick shared with the rudder post, a large smoothed tree trunk thrusting through floor and ceiling. All of the other men were gravely ill. Manuel was miserable as they laid him down on his pallet, wretched with nausea and in great fear of the hospital, which smelled of putrefaction. The man on the pallet next to him was insensible, and rolled with the sway of the ship. Three candle lanterns lit the low chamber and filled it with shadows. One of the Dominican friars, a Friar Lucien, gave him hot water and wiped his face. They talked for a while, and the friar heard Manuel’s confession, which only a proper priest should have done. Neither of them cared. The priests on board avoided the hospital, and tended to serve only the officers and the soldiers. Friar Lucien was known to be willing to minister to the sailors, and he was popular among them.

Manuel’s fever got worse, and he could not eat. Days passed, and when he woke up the men around him were not the same men who had been there when he fell asleep. He became convinced he was going to die, and once again he felt despair that he had been made a member of the Most Fortunate Invincible Armada. “Why are we here?” he demanded of the friar in a cracked voice. “Why shouldn’t we let the English go to hell if they please?”

“The purpose of the Armada is not only to smite the heretic English,” said Lucien. He held a candle closer to his book, which was not a Bible, but a slender little thing which he kept hidden in his robes. Shadows leaped on the blackened beams and planks over them, and the rudder post squeaked as it turned against the leather collar in the floor. “God also sent us as a test. Listen:

“ ‘I assume the appearance of a refiner’s fire, purging the dross of forms outworn. This is mine aspect of severity; I am as one who testeth gold in a furnace. Yet when thou hast been tried as by fire, the gold of thy soul shall be cleansed, and visible as fire: then the vision of thy Lord shall be granted unto thee, and seeing Him shall thou behold the shining one, who is thine own true self.’

“Remember that, and be strong. Drink this water here—come on, do you want to fail your God? This is part of the test.”

Manuel drank, threw up. His body was no more than a tongue of flame contained by his skin, except where it burst out of his palms. He lost track of the days, and forgot the existence of anyone beyond himself and Friar Lucien. “I never wanted to leave the monastery,” he told the friar, “yet I never thought I would stay there long. I’ve never stayed long any place yet. It was my home but I knew it wasn’t. I haven’t found my home yet. They say there is ice in England—I saw the snow in the Catalonian mountains, once, Father, will we go home? I only want to return to the monastery and be a father like you.”

“We will go home. What you will become, only God knows. He has a place for you. Sleep now. Sleep, now.”

By the time his fever broke his ribs stood out from his chest as clearly as the fingers of a fist. He could barely walk. Lucien’s narrow face appeared out of the gloom clear as a memory. “Try this soup. Apparently God has seen fit to keep you here.”

“Thank you Saint Anna for your intercession,” Manuel croaked. He drank the soup eagerly. “I want to return to my berth.”

“Soon.”

They took him up to the deck. Walking was like floating, as long as he held on to railings and stanchions. Laeghr greeted him with pleasure, as did his stationmates. The world was a riot of blues; waves hissed past, low clouds jostled together in their rush east, tumbling between them shafts of sunlight that spilled onto the water. He was excused from active duty, but he spent as many hours as he could at his station. He found it hard to believe that he had survived his illness. Of course, he was not entirely recovered; he could not yet eat any solids, particularly biscuit, so that his diet consisted of soup and wine. He felt weak, and perpetually light-headed. But when he was on deck in the wind he was sure that he was getting better, so he stayed there as much as possible. He was on deck, in fact, when they first caught sight of England. The soldiers pointed and shouted in great excitement, as the point Laeghr called The Lizard bounced over the horizon. Manuel had grown so used to the sea that the low headland rising off their port bow seemed unnatural, an intrusion into a marine world, as if the deluge was just now receding and these drowned hillsides were just now shouldering up out of the waves, soaking wet and covered by green seaweed that had not yet died. And that was England.

A few days after that they met the first English ships—faster than the Spanish galleons, but much smaller. They could no more impede the progress of the Armada than flies could slow a herd of cows. The swells became steeper and followed each other more closely, and the changed pitching of La Lavia made it difficult for Manuel to stand. He banged his head once, and another time ripped away a palmful of scabs, trying to keep his balance in the violent yawing caused by the chop. Unable to stand one morning, he lay in the dark of his berth, and his mates brought him cups of soup. That went on for a long time. Again he worried that he was going to die. Finally Laeghr and Lucien came below together.

“You must get up now,” Laeghr declared. “We fight within the hour, and you’re needed. We’ve arranged easy work for you.”

“You have only to provide the gunners with slow match,” said Friar Lucien as he helped Manuel to his feet. “God will help you.”

“God will have to help me,” Manuel said. He could see the two men’s souls flickering above their heads: little triple knots of transparent flame that flew up out of their hair and lit the features of their faces. “The gold of thy soul shall be cleansed, and visible as fire,” Manuel recalled. “Hush,” said Lucien with a frown, and Manuel realized that what Lucien had read to him was a secret.

Amidships Manuel noticed that now he was also able to see the air, which was tinged red. They were on the bottom of an ocean of red air, just as they were on top of an ocean of blue water. When they breathed they turned the air a darker red; men expelled plumes of air like horses breathing out clouds of steam on a frosty morning, only the steam was red. Manuel stared and stared, marveling at the new abilities God had given his sight.

“Here,” Laeghr said, roughly directing him across the deck. “This tub of punk is yours. This is slow match, understand?” Against the bulkhead was a tub full of coils of closely braided cord. One end of the cord was hanging over the edge of the tub burning, fizzing the air around it to deep crimson. Manuel nodded: “Slow match.”

“Here’s your knife. Cut sections about this long, and light them with a piece of it that you keep beside you. Then give sections of it to the gunners who come by, or take it to them if they call for it. But don’t give away all your lit pieces. Understand?”

Manuel nodded that he understood and sat down dizzily beside the tub. One of the largest cannon poked through a port in the bulkhead just a few feet from him. Its crew greeted him. Across the deck his stationmates stood at their taffrail. The soldiers were ranked on the fore-and sterncastles, shouting with excitement, gleaming like shellfish in the sun. Through the port Manuel could see some of the English coast.

Laeghr came over to see how he was doing. “Hey, don’t you lop your fingers off there, boy. See out there? That’s the Isle of Wight. We’re going to circle and conquer it, I’ve no doubt, and use it as our base for our attack on the mainland. With these soldiers and ships they’ll never get us off that island. It’s a good plan.”

But things did not progress according to Laeghr’s plan. The Armada swung around the east shore of the Isle of Wight, in a large crescent made of five distinct phalanxes of ships. Rounding the island, however, the forward galleasses encountered the stiffest English resistance they had met so far. White puffs of smoke appeared out of the ships and were quickly stained red, and the noise was tremendous.

Then the ships of El Draco swept around the southern point of the island onto their flank, and suddenly La Lavia was in the action. The soldiers roared and shot off their arquebuses, and the big cannon beside Manuel leaped back in its truck with a bang that knocked him into the bulkhead. After that he could barely hear. His slow match was suddenly in demand; he cut the cord and held the lit tip to unlit tips, igniting them with his red breath. Cannonballs passing overhead left rippling wakes in the blood air. Grimy men snatched the slow match and dashed to their guns, dodging tackle blocks that thumped to the deck. Manuel could see the cannonballs, big as grapefruit, flying at them from the English ships and passing with a whistle. And he could see the transparent knots of flame, swirling higher than ever about the men’s heads.

Then a cannonball burst through the porthole and knocked the cannon off its truck, the men to the deck. Manuel rose to his feet and noticed with horror that the knots of flame on the scattered gunners were gone; he could see their heads clearly now, and they were just men, just broken flesh draped over the plowed surface of the deck. He tried, sobbing, to lift a gunner who was bleeding only from the ears. Laeghr’s cane lashed across his shoulders: “Keep cutting match! There’s others to attend to these men!” So Manuel cut lengths of cord and lit them with desperate puffs and shaking hands, while the guns roared, and the exposed soldiers on the castles shrieked under a hail of iron, and the red air was ripped by passing shot.

The next few days saw several battles like that as the Armada was forced past the Isle of Wight and up the Channel. His fever kept him from sleeping, and at night Manuel helped the wounded on his deck, holding them down and wiping the sweat from their faces, nearly as delirious as they were. At dawn he ate biscuits and drank his cup of wine and went to his tub of slow match to await the next engagement. La Lavia, being the largest ship on the left flank, always took the brunt of the English attack. It was on the third day that La Lavia’s mainmast topgallant yard fell on his old taffrail crew, crushing Hanan and Pietro. Manuel rushed across the deck to help them, shouting his anguish. He got a dazed Juan down to their berth and returned amidships. Around him men were being dashed to the deck, but he didn’t care. He hopped through the red mist that nearly obscured his sight, carrying lengths of match to the gun crews, who were now so depleted that they couldn’t afford to send men to him. He helped the wounded below to the hospital, which had truly become an antechamber of hell; he helped toss the dead over the side, croaking a short prayer in every case; he ministered to the soldiers hiding behind the bulwarks of the bulkheads, waiting vainly for the English to get within range of their arquebuses. Now the cry amidships was “Manuel, match here! Manuel, some water! Help, Manuel!” In a dry fever of energy Manuel hurried to their aid.

He was in such perpetual haste that in the middle of a furious engagement he nearly ran into his patroness, Saint Anna, who was suddenly standing there in the corner of his tub. He was startled to see her.

“Grandmother!” he cried. “You shouldn’t be here, it’s dangerous.”

“As you have helped others, I am here to help you,” she replied. She pointed across the purplish chop to one of the English ships. Manuel saw a puff of smoke appear from its side, and out of the puff came a cannonball, floating in an arc over the water. He could see it as clearly as he could have seen an olive tossed at him from across a room: a round black ball, spinning lazily, growing bigger as it got closer. Now Manuel could tell that it was coming at him, directly at him, so that its trajectory would intersect his heart. “Um, blessed Anna,” he said, hoping to bring this to his saint’s attention. But she had already seen it, and with a brief touch to his forehead she floated up into the maintop, among the unseeing soldiers. Manuel watched her, eyeing the approaching cannonball at the same time. At the touch of her hand a rigging block fell away from the end of the main yard; it intercepted the cannonball’s flight, knocking the ball downward into the hull where it stuck, half embedded in the thick wood. Manuel stared at the black half sphere, mouth open. He waved up at Saint Anna, who waved back and flew up into the red clouds toward heaven. Manuel kneeled and said a prayer of thanks to her and to Jesus for sending her and went back to cutting match.

A night or two later—Manuel himself was not sure, as the passage of time had become for him something plastic and elusive and, more than anything else, meaningless—the Armada anchored at Calais Roads, just off the Flemish coast. For the first time since they had left Corunna La Lavia lay still, and listening at night Manuel realized how much the constant chorus of wooden squeaks and groans was the voice of the crew, and not of the ship. He drank his ration of wine and water quickly, and walked the length of the lower deck, talking with the wounded and helping when he could to remove splinters. Many of the men wanted him to touch them, for his safe passage through some of the worst scenes of carnage had not gone unnoticed. He touched them, and when they wanted, said a prayer. Afterwards he went up on deck. There was a fair breeze from the southwest, and the ship rocked ever so gently on the tide. For the first time in a week the air was not suffused red: Manuel could see stars, and distant bonfires on the Flemish shore, like stars that had fallen and now burnt out their life on the land. Laeghr was limping up and down amidships, detouring from his usual path to avoid a bit of shattered decking.

“Are you hurt, Laeghr?” Manuel inquired.

For answer Laeghr growled. Manuel walked beside him. After a bit Laeghr stopped and said, “They’re saying you’re a holy man now because you were running all over the deck these last few days, acting like the shot we were taking was hail and never getting hit for it. But I say you’re just too foolish to know any better. Fools dance where angels would hide. It’s part of the curse laid on us. Those who learn the rules and play things right end up getting hurt—sometimes from doing just the things that will protect them the most. While the blind fools who wander right into the thick of things are never touched.”

Manuel watched Laeghr’s stride. “Your foot?”

Laeghr shrugged. “I don’t know what will happen to it.”

Under a lantern Manuel stopped and looked Laeghr in the eye. “Saint Anna appeared and plucked a cannonball that was heading for me right out of the sky. She saved my life for a purpose.”

“No.” Laeghr thumped his cane on the deck. “Your fever has made you mad, boy.”

“I can show you the shot!” Manuel said. “It stuck in the hull!” Laeghr stumped away.

Manuel looked across the water at Flanders, distressed by Laeghr’s words, and by his hobbled walk. He saw something he didn’t comprehend.

“Laeghr?”

“What?” came Laeghr’s voice from across midships.

“Something bright . . . the souls of all the English at once, maybe . . .” His voice shook.

“What?”

“Something coming at us. Come here, master.”

Thump, thump, thump. Manuel heard the hiss of Laeghr’s indrawn breath, the muttered curse.

“Fireships,” Laeghr bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Fireships! Awake!”

In a minute the ship was bedlam, soldiers running everywhere. “Come with me,” Laeghr told Manuel, who followed the sailing master to the forecastle, where the anchor hawser descended into the water. Somewhere along the way Laeghr had gotten a halberd, and he gave it to Manuel. “Cut the line.”

“But master, we’ll lose the anchor.”

“Those fireships are too big to stop, and if they’re hellburners they’ll explode and kill us all. Cut it.”

Manuel began chopping at the thick hawser, which was very like the trunk of a small tree. He chopped and chopped, but only one strand of the huge rope was cut when Laeghr seized the halberd and began chopping himself, awkwardly to avoid putting his weight on his bad foot. They heard the voice of the ship’s captain—“Cut the anchor cable!” And Laeghr laughed.

The rope snapped, and they were floating free. But the fireships were right behind them. In the hellish light Manuel could see English sailors walking about on their burning decks, passing through the flames like salamanders or demons. No doubt they were devils. The fires towering above the eight fireships shared the demonic life of the English; each tongue of yellow flame contained an English demon eye looking for the Armada, and some of these leaped free of the blaze that twisted above the fireships, in vain attempts to float onto La Lavia and incinerate it. Manuel held off these embers with his wooden medallion, and the gesture that in his boyhood in Sicily had warded off the evil eye. Meanwhile, the ships of the fleet were cut loose and drifting on the tide, colliding in the rush to avoid the fireships. Captains and officers screamed furiously at their colleagues on other ships, but to no avail. In the dark and without anchors the ships could not be regathered, and as the night progressed most were blown out into the North Sea. For the first time the neat phalanxes of the Armada were broken, and they were never to be reformed again.

When it was all over La Lavia held its position in the North Sea by sail, while the officers attempted to identify the ships around them, and find out what Medina Sidonia’s orders were. Manuel and Juan stood amidships with the rest of their berthmates. Juan shook his head. “I used to make corks in Portugal. We were like a cork back there in the Channel, being pushed into the neck of a bottle. As long as we were stuck in the neck we were all right—the neck got narrower and narrower, and they might never have gotten us out. Now the English have pushed us right down into the bottle itself. We’re floating about in our own dregs. And we’ll never get out of the bottle again.”

“Not through the neck, anyway,” one of the others agreed.

“Not any way.”

“God will see us home,” Manuel said.

Juan shook his head.

Rather than try to force the Channel, Admiral Medina Sidonia decided that the Armada should sail around Scotland, and then home. Laeghr was taken to the flagship for a day to help chart a course, for he was familiar with the north as none of the Spanish pilots were.

The battered fleet headed away from the sun, ever higher into the cold North Sea. After the night of the fireships Medina Sidonia had restored discipline with a vengeance. One day the survivors of the Channel battles were witness to the hanging from the yardarm of a captain who had let his ship get ahead of the Admiral’s flagship, a position which was now forbidden. A carrack sailed through the fleet again and again so every crew could see the corpse of the disobedient captain, swinging freely from its spar.

Manuel observed the sight with distaste. Once dead, a man was only a bag of bones; nowhere in the clouds overhead could he spot the captain’s soul. Perhaps it had plummeted into the sea, on its way to hell. It was an odd transition, death. Curious that God did not make more explicit the aftermath.

So La Lavia faithfully trailed the Admiral’s flagship, as did the rest of the fleet. They were led farther and farther north, into the domain of cold. Some mornings when they came on deck in the raw yellow of the dawn the riggings would be rimed with icicles, so that they seemed strings of diamonds. Some days it seemed they sailed across a sea of milk, under a silver sky. Other days the ocean was the color of a bruise, and the sky a fresh pale blue so clear that Manuel gasped with the desire to survive this voyage and live. Yet he was as cold as death. He remembered the burning nights of his fever as fondly as if he were remembering his first home on the coast of North Africa.

All the men were suffering from the cold. The livestock was dead, so the galley closed down: no hot soup. The Admiral imposed rationing on everyone, including himself; the deprivation kept him in his bed for the rest of the voyage. For the sailors, who had to haul wet or frozen rope, it was worse. Manuel watched the grim faces, in line for their two biscuits and one large cup of wine and water—their daily ration—and concluded that they would continue sailing north until the sun was under the horizon and they were in the icy realm of death, the north pole where God’s dominion was weak, and there they would give up and die all at once. Indeed, the winds drove them nearly to Norway, and it was with great difficulty that they brought the shot-peppered hulks around to a westerly heading.

When they did, they discovered a score of new leaks in La Lavia’s hull, and the men, already exhausted by the effort of bringing the ship about, were forced to man the pumps around the clock. A pint of wine and a pint of water a day were not enough. Men died. Dysentery, colds, the slightest injury; all were quickly fatal.

Once again Manuel could see the air. Now it was a thick blue, distinctly darker where men breathed it out, so that they all were shrouded in dark blue air that obscured the burning crowns of their souls. All of the wounded men in the hospital had died. Many of them had called for Manuel in their last moments; he had held their hands or touched their foreheads, and as their souls had flickered away from their heads like the last pops of flame out of the coals of a dying fire, he had prayed for them. Now other men too weak to leave their berths called for him, and he went and stood by them in their distress. Two of these men recovered from dysentery, so his presence was requested even more frequently. The captain himself asked for Manuel’s touch when he fell sick; but he died anyway, like most of the rest.

One morning Manuel was standing with Laeghr at the midships bulkhead. It was chill and cloudy, the sea was the color of flint. The soldiers were bringing their horses up and forcing them over the side, to save water.

“That should have been done as soon as we were forced out of the Sleeve,” Laeghr said. “Waste of water.”

“I didn’t even know we had horses aboard,” Manuel said.

Laeghr laughed briefly. “Boy, you are a prize of a fool. One surprise after another.”

They watched the horses’ awkward falls, their rolling eyes, their flared nostrils expelling clouds of blue air. Their brief attempts to swim.

“On the other hand, we should probably be eating some of those,” Laeghr said.

“Horse meat?”

“It can’t be that bad.”

The horses all disappeared, exchanging blue air for flint water. “It’s cruel,” Manuel said.

“In the horse latitudes they swim for an hour,” Laeghr said. “This is better.” He pointed to the west. “See those tall clouds?”

“Yes.”

“They stand over the Orkneys. The Orkneys or the Shetlands, I can’t be sure anymore. It will be interesting to see if these fools can get this wreck through the islands safely.” Looking around, Manuel could only spot a dozen or so ships; presumably the rest of the Armada lay over the horizon ahead of them. He stopped to wonder about what Laeghr had just said, for it would naturally be Laeghr’s task to navigate them through the northernmost of the British Isles; at that very moment Laeghr’s eyes rolled like the horses’ had, and he collapsed on the deck. Manuel and some other sailors carried him down to the hospital.

“It’s his foot,” said Friar Lucien. “His foot is crushed and his leg has putrefied. He should have let me amputate.”

Around noon Laeghr regained consciousness. Manuel, who had not left his side, held his hand, but Laeghr frowned and pulled it away.

“Listen,” Laeghr said with difficulty. His soul was no more than a blue cap covering his tangled salt-and-pepper hair. “I’m going to teach you some words that may be useful to you later.” Slowly he said, “Tor conaloc an dhia,” and Manuel repeated it. “Say it again.” Manuel repeated the syllables over and over, like a Latin prayer. Laeghr nodded. “Tor conaloc an naom dhia. Good. Remember the words always.” After that he stared at the deckbeams above, and would answer none of Manuel’s questions. Emotions played over his face like shadows, one after another. Finally he took his gaze from the infinite and looked at Manuel. “Touch me, boy.”

Manuel touched his forehead, and with a sardonic smile Laeghr closed his eyes: his blue crown of flame flickered up through the deck above and disappeared.

They buried him that evening, in a smoky, hellish brown sunset. Friar Lucien said the shortened Mass, mumbling in a voice that no one could hear, and Manuel pressed the back of his medallion against the cold flesh of Laeghr’s arm, until the impression of the cross remained. Then they tossed him overboard. Manuel watched with a serenity that surprised him. Just weeks ago he had shouted with rage and pain as his companions had been torn apart; now he watched with a peace he did not understand as the man who had taught him and protected him sank into the iron water and disappeared.

A couple of nights after that Manuel sat apart from his remaining berthmates, who slept in one pile like a litter of kittens. He watched the blue flames wandering over the exhausted flesh, watched without reason or feeling. He was tired.

Friar Lucien looked in the narrow doorway and hissed. “Manuel! Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Come with me.”

Manuel got up and followed him. “Where are we going?”

Friar Lucien shook his head. “It’s time.” Everything else he said was in Greek. He had a little candle lantern with three sides shuttered, and by its illumination they made their way to the hatch that led to the lower decks.

Manuel’s berth, though it was below the gun deck, was not on the lowest deck of the ship. La Lavia was very much bigger than that. Below the berth deck were three more decks that had no ports, as they were beneath the waterline. Here in perpetual gloom were stored the barrels of water and biscuit, the cannonballs and rope and other supplies. They passed by the powder room, where the armorer wore felt slippers so that a spark from his boots might not blow up the ship. They found a hatchway that held a ladder leading to an even lower deck. At each level the passages became narrower, and they were forced to stoop. Manuel was astounded when they descended yet again, for he would have imagined them already on the keel, or in some strange chamber suspended beneath it; but Lucien knew better. Down they went, through a labyrinth of dank black wooden passageways. Manuel was long lost, and held Lucien’s arm for fear of being separated from him, and becoming hopelessly trapped in the bowels of the ship. Finally they came to a door that made their narrow hallway a dead end. Lucien rapped on the door and hissed something, and the door opened, letting out enough light to dazzle Manuel.

After the passageways, the chamber they entered seemed very large. It was the cable tier, located in the bow of the ship just over the keel. Since the encounter with the fireships, La Lavia had little cable, and what was left lay in the corners of the room. Now it was lit by candles set in small iron candelabra that had been nailed to the side beams. The floor was covered by an inch of water, which reflected each of the candle flames as a small spot of white light. The curving walls dripped and gleamed. In the center of the room a box had been set on end, and covered with a bit of cloth. Around the box stood several men: a soldier, one of the petty officers, and some sailors Manuel knew only by sight. The transparent knots of cobalt flame on their heads added a bluish cast to the light in the room.

“We’re ready, Father,” one of the men said to Lucien. The friar led Manuel to a spot near the upturned box, and the others arranged themselves in a circle around him. Against the aft wall, near gaps where floor met wall imperfectly, Manuel spotted two big rats with shiny brown fur, all ablink and twitchwhiskered at the unusual activity. Manuel frowned and one of the rats plopped into the water covering the floor and swam under the wall, its tail swishing back and forth like a small snake, revealing to Manuel its true nature. The other rat stood its ground and blinked its bright little round eyes as it brazenly returned Manuel’s unwelcoming gaze.

From behind the box Lucien looked at each man in turn, and read in Latin. Manuel understood the first part: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible . . .” From there Lucien read on, in a voice powerful yet soothing, entreatful yet proud. After finishing the creed he took up another book, the little one he always carried with him, and read in Spanish:

“ ‘Know ye, O Israel, that what men call life and death are as beads of white and black strung upon a thread; and this thread of perpetual change is mine own changeless life, which bindeth together the unending string of little lives and little deaths.

“ ‘The wind turns a ship from its course upon the deep: the wandering winds of the senses cast man’s mind adrift on the deep.

“ ‘But lo! That day shall come when the light that is shall still all winds, and bind every hideous liquid darkness; and all thy habitations shall be blest by the white brilliance which descendeth from the crown.’ ”

While Lucien read this, the soldier moved slowly about the chamber. First he set on the top of the box a plate of sliced biscuit; the bread was hard, as it became after months at sea, and someone had taken the trouble to cut slices, and then polish them into wafers so thin that they were translucent, and the color of honey. Occasional wormholes gave them the look of old coins, that had been beaten flat and holed for use as jewelry.

Next the soldier brought forth from behind the box an empty glass bottle with its top cut off so that it was a sort of bowl. Taking a flask in his other hand, he filled the bowl to the midway point with La Lavia’s awful wine. Putting the flask down, he circled the group while the friar finished reading. Every man there had cuts on his hands that more or less continuously leaked blood, and each man pulled a cut open over the bottle held to him, allowing a drop to splash in, until the wine was so dark that to Manuel, aware of the blue light, it was a deep violet. The soldier replaced the bottle beside the plate of wafers on the box. Friar Lucien finished his reading, looked at the box, and recited one final sentence: “O lamps of fire! Make bright the deep caverns of sense; with strange brightness give heat and light together to your beloved, that we may be one with you.” Taking the plate in hand, he circled the chamber, putting a wafer in the mouths of the men. “The body of Christ, given for you. The body of Christ, given for you.”

Manuel snapped the wafer of biscuit between his teeth and chewed it. At last he understood what they were doing. This was a communion for the dead: a service for Laeghr, a service for all of them, for they were all doomed. Beyond the damp curved wall of their chamber was the deep sea, pressing against the timbers, pressing in on them. Eventually they would all be swallowed, and would sink down to become food for the fishes, after which their bones would decorate the floor of the ocean, where God seldom visited. Manuel could scarcely get the chewed biscuit past the lump in his throat. When Friar Lucien lifted the half bottle and put it to his lips, saying first, “The blood of Christ, shed for you,” Manuel stopped him. He took the bottle from the friar’s hand. The soldier stepped forward, but Lucien waved him away. Then the friar kneeled before Manuel and crossed himself, but backwards as Greeks did, left to right rather than the proper way. Manuel said, “You are the blood of Christ,” and held the half bottle to Lucien’s lips, tilting it so he could drink.

He did the same for each of the men, the soldier included. “You are the Christ.” This was the first time any of them had partaken of this part of the communion, and some of them could barely swallow. When they had all drunk, Manuel put the bottle to his lips and drained it to the dregs. “Friar Lucien’s book says, all thy habitations shall be blest by the white brilliance that is the crown of fire, and we shall all be made the Christ. And so it is. We drank, and now we are the Christ. See”—he pointed at the remaining rat, which was now on its hind legs, washing its forepaws so that it appeared to pray, its bright round eyes fixed on Manuel—“even the beasts know it.” He broke off a piece of biscuit wafer, and leaned down to offer it to the rat. The rat accepted the fragment in its paws, and ate it. It submitted to Manuel’s touch. Standing back up, Manuel felt the blood rush to his head. The crowns of fire blazed on every head, reaching far above them to lick the beams of the ceiling, filling the room with light—“He is here!” Manuel cried, “He has touched us with light, see it!” He touched each of their foreheads in turn, and saw their eyes widen as they perceived the others’ burning souls in wonder, pointing at each other’s heads; then they were all embracing in the clear white light, hugging one another with the tears running down their cheeks and giant grins splitting their beards. Reflected candlelight danced in a thousand parts on the watery floor. The rat, startled, splashed under the gap in the wall, and they laughed and laughed and laughed.

Manuel put his arm around the friar, whose eyes shone with joy. “It is good,” Manuel said when they were all quiet again. “God will see us home.”

They made their way back to the upper decks like boys playing in a cave they know very well.

The Armada made it through the Orkneys without Laeghr, though it was a close thing for some ships. Then they were out in the North Atlantic, where the swells were broader, their troughs deeper, and their tops as high as the castles of La Lavia, and then higher than that.

Winds came out of the southwest, bitter gales that never ceased, and three weeks later they were no closer to Spain than they had been when they slipped through the Orkneys. The situation on La Lavia was desperate, as it was all through the fleet. Men on La Lavia died every day, and were thrown overboard with no ceremony except the impression of Manuel’s medallion into their arms. The deaths made the food and water shortage less acute, but it was still serious. La Lavia was now manned by a ghost crew, composed mostly of soldiers. There weren’t enough of them to properly man the pumps, and the Atlantic was springing new leaks every day in the already broken hull. The ship began taking on water in such quantities that the acting captain of the ship—who had started the voyage as third mate—decided that they must make straight for Spain, making no spare leeway for the imperfectly known west coast of Ireland. This decision was shared by the captains of several other damaged ships, and they conveyed their decision to the main body of the fleet, which was reaching farther west before turning south to Spain. From his sickbed Medina Sidonia gave his consent, and La Lavia sailed due south.

Unfortunately, a storm struck from just north of west soon after they had turned homeward. They were helpless before it. La Lavia wallowed in the troughs and was slammed by crest after crest, until the poor hulk lay just off the lee shore, Ireland.

It was the end, and everyone knew it. Manuel knew it because the air had turned black. The clouds were like thousands of black English cannonballs, rolling ten deep over a clear floor set just above the masts, and spitting lightning into the sea whenever two of them banged together hard enough. The air beneath them was black as well, just less thick: the wind as tangible as the waves, and swirling around the masts with smoky fury. Other men caught glimpses of the lee shore, but Manuel couldn’t see it for the blackness. These men called out in fear; apparently the western coast of Ireland was sheer cliff. It was the end.

Manuel had nothing but admiration for the third-mate-now-captain, who took the helm and shouted to the lookout in the top to find a bay in the cliffs they were drifting toward. But Manuel, like many of the men, ignored the mate’s commands to stay at post, as they were clearly pointless. Men embraced post, as they were clearly pointless. Men embraced each other on the castles, saying their farewells; others cowered in fear against the bulkheads. Many of them approached Manuel and asked for a touch, and Manuel brushed their foreheads as he angrily marched about the forecastle. As soon as Manuel touched them, some of the men flew directly up toward heaven while others dove over the side of the ship and became porpoises the moment they struck the water, but Manuel scarcely noticed these occurrences, as he was busy praying, praying at the top of his lungs.

“Why this storm, Lord, why? First there were winds from the north holding us back, which is the only reason I’m here in the first place. So you wanted me here, but why why why? Juan is dead and Laeghr is dead and Pietro is dead and Habedeen is dead and soon we will all be dead, and why? It isn’t just. You promised you would take us home.” In a fury he took his slow match knife, climbed down to the swamped midships, and went to the mainmast. He thrust the knife deep into the wood, stabbing with the grain. “There! I say that to your storm!”

“Now, that’s blasphemy,” Laeghr said as he pulled the knife from the mast and threw it over the side. “You know what stabbing the mast means. To do it in a storm like this—you’ll offend gods a lot older than Jesus, and more powerful, too.”

“Talk about blasphemy,” Manuel replied. “And you wonder why you’re still wandering the seas a ghost, when you say things like that. You should take more care.” He looked up and saw Saint Anna, in the maintop giving directions to the third mate. “Did you hear what Laeghr said?” he shouted up to her. She didn’t hear him.

“Do you remember the words I taught you?” Laeghr inquired.

“Of course. Don’t bother me now, Laeghr, I’ll be a ghost with you soon enough.” Laeghr stepped back, but Manuel changed his mind, and said, “Laeghr, why are we being punished like this? We were on a crusade for God, weren’t we? I don’t understand.”

Laeghr smiled and turned around, and Manuel saw then that he had wings, wings with feathers intensely white in the black murk of the air. He clasped Manuel’s arm. “You know all that I know.” With some hard flaps he was off, tumbling east swiftly in the black air, like a gull.

With the help of Saint Anna the third mate had actually found a break in the cliffs, a quite considerable bay. Other ships of the Armada had found it as well, and they were already breaking up on a wide beach as La Lavia limped nearer shore. The keel grounded and immediately things began breaking. Soupy waves crashed over the canted midships, and Manuel leaped up the ladder to the forecastle, which was now under a tangle of rigging from the broken foremast. The mainmast went over the side, and the lee flank of the ship splintered like a match tub and flooded, right before their eyes. Among the floating timbers Manuel saw one that held a black cannonball embedded in it, undoubtedly the very one that Saint Anna had deflected from its course toward him. Reminded that she had saved his life before, Manuel grew calmer and waited for her to appear. The beach was only a few shiplengths away, scarcely visible in the thick air; like most of the men, Manuel could not swim, and he was searching with some urgency for a sight of Saint Anna when Friar Lucien appeared at his side, in his black robes. Over the shriek of the dark wind Lucien shouted, “If we hold on to a plank we’ll float ashore.”

“You go ahead,” Manuel shouted back. “I’m waiting for Saint Anna.” The friar shrugged. The wind caught his robes and Manuel saw that Lucien was attempting to save the ship’s liturgical gold, which was in the form of chains that were now wrapped around the friar’s middle. Lucien made his way to the rail and jumped over it, onto a spar that a wave was carrying away from the ship. He missed his hold on the rounded spar, however, and sank instantly.

The forecastle was now awash, and soon the foaming breakers would tear it loose from the keel. Most of the men had already left the wreck, trusting to one bit of flotsam or other. But Manuel still waited. Just as he was beginning to worry he saw the blessed grandmother of God, standing among figures on the beach that he perceived but dimly, gesturing to him. She walked out onto the white water, and he understood. “We are the Christ, of course! I will walk to shore as He once did.” He tested the surface with one shoe; it seemed a little, well, infirm, but surely it would serve—it would be like the floor of their now-demolished chapel, a sheet of water covering one of God’s good solids. So Manuel walked out onto the God’s good solids. So Manuel walked out onto the next wave that passed at the level of the forecastle, and plunged deep into the brine.

“Hey!” he spluttered as he struggled back to the surface. “Hey!” No answer from Saint Anna this time; just cold salt water. He began the laborious process of drowning, remembering as he struggled a time when he was a child, and his father had taken him down to the beach in Morocco, to see the galley of the pilgrims to Mecca rowing away. Nothing could have been less like the Irish coast than that serene, hot, tawny beach, and he and his father had gone out into the shallows to splash around in the warm water, chasing lemons. His father would toss the lemons out into the deeper water, where they bobbed just under the surface, and then Manuel would paddle out to retrieve them, laughing and choking on water.

Manuel could picture those lemons perfectly, as he snorted and coughed and thrashed to get his head back above the freezing soup one more time. Lemons bobbing in the green sea, lemons oblong and bumpy, the color of the sun when the sun is its own width above the horizon at dawn . . . bobbing gently just under the surface, with a knob showing here or there. Manuel pretended he was a lemon, at the same time that he tried to remember the primitive dog paddle that had gotten him around in the shallows. Arms, pushing downward. It wasn’t working. Waves tumbled him, lemonlike, in toward the strand. He bumped on the bottom and stood up. The water was only waist deep. Another wave smashed him from behind and he couldn’t find the bottom again. Not fair! he thought. His elbow ran into sand, and he twisted around and stood. Knee deep, this time. He kept an eye on the treacherous waves as they came out of the black, and trudged through them up to a beach made of coarse sand, covered by a mat of loose seaweed.

Down on the beach a distance were sailors, companions, survivors of the wrecks offshore. But there among them—soldiers on horses. English soldiers, on horses and on foot—Manuel groaned to see it—wielding swords and clubs on the exhausted men strewn across the seaweed. “No!” Manuel cried, “No!” But it was true. “Ah, God,” he said, and sank till he was sitting. Down the strand soldiers clubbed his brothers, splitting their fragile eggshell skulls so that the yolk of their brains ran into the kelp. Manuel beat his insensible fists against the sand. Filled with horror at the sight, he watched horses rear in the murk, giant and shadowy. They were coming down the beach toward him. “I’ll make myself invisible,” he decided. “Saint Anna will make me invisible.” But remembering his plan to walk on the water, he determined to help the miracle by staggering up the beach and burrowing under a particularly tall pile of seaweed. He was invisible without it, of course, but the cover of kelp would help keep him warm. Thinking such thoughts, he shivered and shivered and on the still land fell insensible as his hands.

When he woke up, the soldiers were gone. His fellows lay up and down the beach like white driftwood; ravens and wolves already converged on them. He couldn’t move very well. It took him half an hour to move his head to survey the beach, and another half hour to free himself from his pile of seaweed. And then he had to lie down again.

When he regained consciousness, he found himself behind a large log, an old piece of driftwood that had been polished silver by its years of rolling in sand. The air was clear again. He could feel it filling him and leaving him, but he could no longer see it. The sun was out; it was morning, and the storm was over. Each movement of Manuel’s body was a complete effort, a complete experience. He could see quite deeply into his skin, which appeared pickled. He had lost all of his clothes, except for a tattered shred of trousers around his middle. With all his will he made his arm move his hand, and with his stiff forefinger he touched the driftwood. He could feel it. He was still alive.

His hand fell away in the sand. The wood touched by his finger was changing, becoming a bright green spot in the surrounding silver. A thin green sprig bulged from the spot, and grew up toward the sun; leaves unfolded from this sprout as it thickened, and beneath Manuel’s fascinated gaze a bud appeared and burst open: a white rose, gleaming wetly in the white morning light.

He had managed to stand, and cover himself with kelp, and walk a full quarter of a mile inland, when he came upon people. Three of them to be exact, two men and a woman. Wilder looking people Manuel men and a woman. Wilder looking people Manuel couldn’t imagine: the men had beards that had never been cut, and arms like Laeghr’s. The woman looked exactly like his miniature portrait of Saint Anna, until she got closer and he saw that she was dirty and her teeth were broken and her skin was brindled like a dog’s belly. He had never seen such freckling before, and he stared at it, and her, every bit as much as she and her companions stared at him. He was afraid of them.

“Hide me from the English, please,” he said. At the word English the men frowned and cocked their heads. They jabbered at him in a tongue he did not know. “Help me,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Help me.” He tried Spanish and Portuguese and Sicilian and Arabic. The men were looking angry. He tried Latin, and they stepped back. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and in all things visible and invisible.” He laughed, a bit hysterically. “Especially invisible.” He grabbed his medallion and showed them the cross. They studied him, clearly at a loss.

“Tor conaloc an dhia,” he said without thinking. All four of them jumped. Then the two men moved to his sides to hold him steady. They chattered at him, waving their free arms. The woman smiled, and Manuel saw that she was young. He said the syllables again, and they chattered at him some more. “Thank you, Laeghr,” he said. “Thank you, Anna. Anna,” he said to the girl, and reached for her. She squealed and stepped back. He said the phrase again. The men lifted him, for he could no longer walk, and carried him across the heather. He smiled and kissed both men on the cheek, which made them laugh, and he said the magic phrase again and started to fall asleep and smiled and said the phrase. Tor conaloc an dhia. The girl brushed his wet hair out of his eyes; Manuel recognized the touch, and he could feel the flowering begin inside him.

Give mercy for God’s sake.

THE SIDON IN THE MIRROR

Connie Willis

We are near the spiraldown. I cannot see the mooring lights, and there are no landmarks on Paylay, but I remember how the lights of Jewell’s abbey looked from here: a thin, disjointed string of Christmas tree lights, red and green and gold. Closer in you can see the red line under the buildings, and you think you are seeing the heat of Paylay, but it is only the reflection of the lights off the ground and the metalpaper undersides of Jewell’s and the gaming house.

“You kin’t see the heat,” Jewell said on our way in from the down, “but you’ll feel it. Your shoes all right?”

My shoes were fine, but they were clumsy to walk in. I would have fallen over in them at home, but here the heavier gravity almost clamped them to the ground. They had six-inch plastic soles cut into a latticework as fragile looking as the mooring tower, but they were sturdier than they looked, and they were not letting any heat get through. I wasn’t feeling anything at all, and halfway to Jewell’s I knelt and felt the sooty ground. It felt warm but not so hot as I had thought it would be, walking on a star.

“Leave your hand there a minute,” Jewell said. I did, and then jerked my soot-covered hand up and put it in my mouth.

“Gits hot fast, din’t it?” she said. “A tapper kidd fall down out here or kimm out with no shoes on and die inside of an hour of heatstroke. That’s why I thought I bitter come out and wilcome you to Paylay. That’s what they call this tapped-out star. You’re sipposed to be able to pick up minny laying on the ground. You kin’t. You have to drill a tap and build a compressor around it and hope to Gid you don’t blow yoursilf up while you’re doing it.”

What she did not say, in the high squeaky voice we both had from the helium in the air, was that she had waited over two hours for me by the down’s plastic mooring tower and that the bottoms of her feet were frying in the towering shoes. The plastic is not a very good insulator. Open metal ribs would work far better to dissipate the heat that wells up through the thin crust of Paylay, but they can’t allow any more metal here than is absolutely necessary, not with the hydrogen and oxygen ready to explode at the slightest spark.

The downpilot should have taken any potential fire-starters and metal I had away from me before he let me off the spiraldown, but Jewell had interrupted him before he could ask me what I had. “Doubletap it, will you?” she said. “I want to git back before the nixt shift. You were an hour late.”

“Sorry, Jewell,” the pilot said. “We hit thirty percent almost a kilometer up and had to go into a Fermat.” He looked down again at the piece of paper in his hand. “The following items are contraband. Unlawful possession can result in expulsion from Paylay. Do you have any: sonic fires, electromags, matches . . .”

Jewell took a step forward and put her foot down like she was afraid the ground would give way.

“Iv course he din’t. He’s a pianoboard player.”

The pilot laughed and said, “Okay, Jewell, take him,” and she grabbed up my tote and walked me back to St. Pierre. She asked about my uncle, and she told me about the abbey and the girls and how she’d given them all house names of jewels because of her name. She told me how Taber, who ran the gaming house next door to her abbey, had christened the little string of buildings we could see in the distance St. Pierre after the patron saint of tappers, and all the time the bottoms of her feet fried like cooking meat and she never said a word.

I couldn’t see her very well. She was wearing a chemiloom lantern strapped to her forehead, and she had brought one for me, but they didn’t give off much light, and her face was in shadow. My uncle had told me she had a big scar that ran down the side of her face and under her chin. He said she got the scar from a fight with a sidon.

“It nearly cut the jugular,” my uncle had said. “It would have if they hadn’t gotten it off of her. It cut up quite a few of the tappers, too.”

“What was she doing with a sidon anyway?” I asked. I had never seen one, but I had heard about them: beautiful blood-red animals with thick, soft fur and sot-razor claws, animals that could seem tame for as long as a year and then explode without warning into violence. “You can’t tame them.”

“Jewell thought she could,” my uncle said. “One of the tappers brought it back with him from Solfatara in a cage. Somebody let it out, and it got away. Jewell went after it. Its feet were burned, and it was suffering from heatstroke. Jewell sat down on the ground and held it on her lap till someone came to help. She insisted on bringing it back to the abbey, making it into a pet. She wouldn’t believe she couldn’t tame it.”

“But a sidon can’t help what it is,” I said. “It’s like us. It doesn’t even know it’s doing it.”

My uncle did not say anything, and after a minute I said, “She thinks she can tame us, too. That’s why she’s willing to take me, isn’t it? I knew there had to be a reason she’d take me when we’re not allowed on Solfatara. She thinks she can keep me from copying.”

My uncle still did not answer, and I took that for assent. He had not answered any of my questions. He had suddenly said I was going, though nobody had gone off-planet since the ban, and when I asked him questions, he answered with statements that did not answer them at all.

“Why do I have to go?” I said. I was afraid of going, afraid of what might happen.

“I want you to copy Jewell. She is a kind person, a good person. You can learn a great deal from her.”

“Why can’t she come here? Kovich did.”

“She runs an abbey on Paylay. There are not more than two dozen tappers and girls on the whole star. It is perfectly safe.”

“What if there’s somebody evil there? What if I copy him instead and kill somebody, like happened on Solfatara? What if something bad happens?”

“Jewell runs a clean abbey. No sots, no pervs, and the girls are well-behaved. It’s nothing like the happy houses. As for Paylay itself, you shouldn’t worry about it being a star. It’s in the last stages of burning out. It has a crust almost two thousand feet thick, which means there’s hardly any radiation. People can walk on the surface without any protective clothing at all. There’s some radiation from the hydrogen taps, of course, but you won’t go anywhere near them.”

He had reassured me about everything except what was important. Now, trudging along after Jewell through the sooty carbon of Paylay, I knew about all the dangers, except the worst one—myself.

I could not see anything that looked like a tap. “Where are they?” I asked, and Jewell pointed back the way we had come.

“As far away as we kin git thim from St. Pierre and each ither so simm tripletapping fool kin’t kill ivverybody when he blows himself up. The first sidon’s off thit way, ten kilometers or so.”

“Sidon?” I said, frightened. My uncle had told me the tappers had killed the sidon and made it into a rug after it nearly killed Jewell.

She laughed. “Thit’s what they call the taps. Because they blow up on you and you don’t even know what hit. They make thim as safe as they can, but the comprission equipmint’s metal and metal means sparks. Ivvery once in awhile that whole sky over there lights up like Chrissmiss. We built St. Pierre as far away as we kidd, and there in’t a scrap of metal in the whole place, but the hydrogen leaks are ivverywhere. And helium. Din’t we sound like a pair iv fools squeaking at each other?”

She laughed again, and I noticed that as we had stood there looking at the black horizon, my feet had begun to feel uncomfortably hot.

It was a long walk through the darkness to the string of lights, and the whole way I watched Jewell and wondered if I had already begun to copy her. I would not know it, of course. I had not known I was copying my uncle either. One day he had asked me to play a song, and I had sat down at the pianoboard and played it. When I was finished, he said, “How long have you been able to do that?” and I did not know. Only after I had done the copying would I know it, and then only if someone told me. I trudged after Jewell in darkness and tried, tried to copy her.

It took us nearly an hour to get to the town, and when we got there, I could see it wasn’t a town at all. What Jewell had called St. Pierre was only two tall metalpaper-covered buildings perched on plastic frameworks nearly two meters high and a huddle of stilt-tents. Neither building had a sign over the door, just strings of mulitcolored chemiloom lights strung along the eaves. They were fairly bright, and they reflected off the metalpaper into even more light, but Jewell took off the lantern she had strapped to her head and held it close to the wooden openwork steps, as if I couldn’t see to climb up to the front door high above us without it.

“Why are you walking like thit?” she said when we got to the top of the steps, and for the first time I could see her scar. It looked almost black in the colored light of the lantern and the looms, and it was much wider than I had thought it would be, a fissure of dark puckered skin down one whole side of her face.

“Walking like what?” I said, and looked down at my feet.

“Like you kin’t bear to hivv your feet touch the ground. I got my feet too hot out at the down. You didn’t. So din’t walk like thit.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t do it anymore.”

She smiled at me, and the scar faded a little. “Now you just kimm on in and meet the girls. Din’t mind it if they say simmthing about the way you look. They’ve nivver seen a Mirror before, but they’re good girls.” She opened the thick door. It was metalpaper backed with a thick pad of insulation. “We take our inside shoes off out here and wear shuffles inside the abbey.”

It was much cooler inside. There was a plastic heat-trigger fan set in the ceiling and surrounded by rose-colored chemilooms. We were in an anteroom with a rack for the high shoes and the lanterns. They dangled by their straps.

Jewell sat down on a chair and began unbuckling her bulky shoes. “Din’t ivver go out without shoes and a lantern,” she said. She gestured toward the rack. “The little ones with the twillpaper hiddbands are for town. They only list about an hour. If you’re going out to the taps or the spiraldown, take one iv the big ones with you.”

She looked different in the rosy light. Her scar hardly showed at all. Her voice was different too, deeper. She sounded older than she had at the down. I looked up and around at the air.

“We blow nitrogen and oxygen in from a tap behind the house,” she said. “The tappers din’t like having squeaky little helium voices when they’re with the girls. You can’t git rid of the helium, or the hydrogen either. They leak in ivverywhere. The bist you can do is dilute it. You shid be glad you weren’t here at the beginning, before they tapped an atmosphere. You had to wear vacuum suits thin.” She pried off her shoe. The bottom of her foot was a mass of blisters. She started to stand up and then sat down again.

“Yill for Carnie,” said said. “Till her to bring some bandages.”

I hung my outside shoes on the rack and opened the inner door. It fit tightly, though it opened with just a touch. It was made of the same insulation as the outer door. It opened onto a fancy room, all curtains and fur rugs and hanging looms that cast little pools of colored light, green and rose and gold. The pianoboard stood over against one wall on a carved plastic table. I could not see anyone in the room, and I could not hear voices for the sound of the blowers. I started across a blood-red fur rug to another door, hung with curtains.

“Jewell?” a woman’s voice said. The blowers kicked off, and she said, “Jewell?” again, and I saw that I had nearly walked past her. She was sitting in a white velvet chair in a little bay that would have been a window if this were not Paylay. She was wearing a white satinpaper dress with a long skirt. Her hair was piled on top of her head, and there was a string of pearls around her long neck. She was sitting so quietly, with her hands in her lap and her head turned slightly away from me, that I had not even seen her.

“Are you Carnie?” I said.

“No,” she said, and she didn’t look up at me. “What is it?”

“Jewell got her feet burned,” I said. “She needs bandages. I’m the new pianoboard player.”

“I know,” the girl said. She lifted her head a little in the direction of the stairs and called, “Carnie. Get the remedy case.”

A gril came running down the stairs in an orange-red robe and no shoes. “Is it Jewell?” she said to the girl in the white dress, and when she nodded, Carnie ran past us into the other room. I could hear the hollow sound of an insulated door opening. The girl had made no move to come and see Jewell. She sat perfectly still in the white chair, her hands lying quietly in her lap.

“Jewell’s feet are pretty bad,” I said. “Can’t you at least come see them?”

“No,” she said, and looked up at me. “My name is Pearl,” she said. “I had a friend once who played the pianoboard.”

Even then, I wouldn’t have known she was blind except that my uncle had told me. “Most of the girls are newcomers Jewell hired for Paylay right off the ships, before the happy houses could ruin them,” my uncle had said. “She only brought a couple of the girls with her from Solfatara, girls who worked with her in the happy house she came out of. Carnie, and I think Sapphire, and Pearl, the blond one.”

“Blind?” I had said. Solfatara is a long way out, but any place has doctors.

“He cut . . . the optic nerve was servered. They did orb implants and reattached all the muscles, but it was only cosmetic repair. She can’t see anything.”

Even after all the horrible stories I had heard about Solfatara, it had shocked me to think that someone could do something like that. I remember thinking that the man must have been incredibly cruel to have done such a thing, that it would have been kinder to kill her outright than to have left her helpless and injured like that in a place like Solfatara.

“Who did it to her?” I said.

“A tapper,” he said, and for a minute he looked very much like Kovich, so much that I asked, “Was it the same man who broke Kovich’s hands?”

“Yes,” my uncle said.

“Did they kill him?” I said, but that was not the question I had intended to ask. I had meant did Kovich kill him, but I had said “they.”

And my uncle, not looking like Kovich at all, had said, “Yes, they killed him,” as if that were the right question after all.

The orb implants and the muscle reattachments had been very good. Her eyes were a beautiful pale gray, and someone had taught her to follow voices with them. There was nothing at all in the angle of her head or her eyes or her quiet hands to tell me she was blind or make me pity her, and standing there looking down at her, I was glad, glad that they had killed him. I hoped that they had cut his eyes out first.

Carnie darted past us with the remedy case, and I said, still looking down at Pearl, “I’ll go and see if I can help her.” I went back out into the anteroom and watched while Carnie put some kind of oil on Jewell’s feet and then a meshlike pad, and wrapped her feet in bandages.

“This is Carnelian,” Jewell said. “Carnie, this is our new pianoboard player.”

She smiled at me. She looked very young. She must have been only a child when she worked in the happy house on Solfatara with Jewell.

“I bit you can do real fancy stuff with those hands,” she said, and giggled.

“Don’t tease him,” Jewell said. “He’s here to play the pianoboard.”

“I meant on the pianoboard. You din’t look like a real mirror. You know, shiny and ivverything? Who are you going to copy?”

“He’s not going to copy innybody,” Jewell said sharply. “He’s going to play the pianoboard, and that’s all. Is supper riddy?”

“No. I was jist in the kitchen and Sapphire wasn’t even there yit.” She looked back up at me. “When you copy somebody, do you look like them?”

“No,” I said. “You’re thinking of a chameleon.”

“You’re not thinking it all,” Jewell said to her and stood up. She winced a little as she put her weight on her feet. “Go borrow a pair of Garnet’s shuffles. I’ll nivver be able to git mine on. And go till Sapphire to doubletap hersilf into the kitchen.”

She let me help her to the stairs but not up them. “When Carnie comes back, you hivv her show you your room. We work an eight and eight here, and it’s nearly time for the shift. You kin practice till supper if you want.”

She went up two steps and stopped. “If Carnie asks you inny more silly questions, tell her I told her to lit you alone. I don’t want to hear any more nonsinse about copying and Mirrors. You’re here to play the pianoboard.”

She went on up the stairs, and I went back into the music room. Pearl was still there, sitting in the white chair, and I didn’t know whether she was included in the instructions to leave me alone, so I sat down on the hard wooden stool and looked at the pianoboard.

It had a wooden soundboard and bridges, but the strings were plastic instead of metal. I tried a few chords, and it seemed to have a good sound in spite of the strings. I played a few scales and more chords and looked at the names on the hardcopies that stood against the music rack. I can’t read music, of course, but I could see by the titles that I knew most of the songs.

“It isn’t nonsense, is it?” Pearl said, “About the copying.” She spoke slowly and without the clipped accent Jewell and Carnie had.

I turned around on the stool and faced her. “No,” I said. “Mirrors have to copy. They can’t help themselves. They don’t even know who they’re copying. Jewell doesn’t believe me. Do you?”

“The worst thing about being blind is not that things are done to you,” she said, and looked up at me again with her blind eyes. “It’s that you don’t know who’s doing them.”

Carnie came in through the curtained door. “I’m sipposed to show you around,” she said. “Oh, Pearl, I wish you kidd see him. He has eight fingers on each hand, and he’s really tall. Almost to the ceiling. And his skin is bright red.”

“Like a sidon’s,” Pearl said, looking at me.

Carnie looked down at the blood-red rug she was standing on. “Jist like,” she said, and dragged me upstairs to show me my room and the clothes I was to wear and to show me off to the other girls. They were already dressed for the shift in trailing satinpaper dresses that matched their names. Garnet wore rose-red chemilooms in her upswept hair, Emerald an elaborately lit collar.

Carnie got dressed in front of me, stepping out of her robe and into an orange-red dress as if I weren’t watching. She asked me to fasten her armropes of winking orange, lifting up her red curls so I could tie the strings of the chemilooms behind her shoulders. I could not decide then if she were trying to seduce me or get me to copy her or simply to convince me that she was the naive child she pretended to be.

I thought then that whatever she was trying, she had failed. She had succeeded only in convincing me of what my uncle had already told me. In spite of her youth, her silliness, I could well believe she had been on Solfatara, had known all of it, the pervs, the sots, the worst the happy houses had to offer. I think now she didn’t mean anything by it except that she wanted to be cruel, that she was simply poking at me as if I were an animal in a cage.

At supper, watching Sapphire set Pearl’s plate for her between taped marks, I wondered whether Carnie was ever cruel to Pearl as she had been to me, shifting the plate slightly as she set it down or moving her chair so she could not find it.

Sapphire set the rest of the plates on the table, her eyes dark blue from some old bitterness, and I thought, Jewell shouldn’t have brought any of them with her from Solfatara except Pearl. Pearl is the only one who hasn’t been ruined by it. Her blindness has kept her safe, I thought. She has been protected from all the horrors because she couldn’t see them. Perhaps her blindness protects her from Carnie, too, I thought. Perhaps that is the secret, that she is safe inside her blindness and no one can hurt her, and Jewell knows that. I did not think then about the man who had blinded her, and how she had not been safe from him at all.

Jewell called the meal to order. “I want you to make our new pianoboard player wilcome,” she said. She reached across the table and patted Carnie’s hand. “Thank you for doing the introductions, and for bandaging my foot,” she said, and I thought, Pearl is safe after all. Jewell has tamed Carnie and all the rest of them. I did not think about the sidon she had tamed, and how it now lay on the floor in front of the cardroom door.

The first shift Jewell decked me out in formals and a black-red dog collar and had me stand at the door with her as she greeted the tappers. They were in formals, too, under their soot-black work jackets. They hung the many-pocketed jackets, heavy with tools, on the rack in the anteroom along with their lanterns and sat down to take off their high shoes with hands almost as red as mine. They had washed their hands and faces, but their fingernails were black with soot, and there was soot in every line of their palms. Their faces looked hot and raw, and they all had a broad pale band across their foreheads from the lantern strap. One of them, whom Jewell called Scorch, had singed off his eyebrows and a long strip of hair on top of his head.

“You’ll meet almost all the tappers this shift. The gaming house will close hiffway through and the rist of them will come over. Taber and I stagger the shifts so simmthing’s always open.”

She didn’t introduce me, though some of the tappers looked at my eight-fingered hands curiously, and one of the men looked surprised and then angry. He looked as if he was going to say something to me, and then changed his mind, his face getting redder and darker until the lantern line stood out like a scar.

When they were all inside the music room, Jewell led me to the pianoboard and had me sit down and spread my hands out over the keyboard, ready to play. Then she said. “This is my new pianoboard player, boys. Say hillo to him.”

“What’s his name, Jewell?” one of the men said. “You ginna give him a fancy name like the girls?”

“I nivver thought about it,” she said. “What do you think?”

The tapper who had turned so red said loudly, “I think you shid call him sidon and kick him out to burn on Paylay. He’s a Mirror.”

“I alriddy got a Carnelian and a Garnet. And I had a sidon once. I giss I’ll call him Ruby.” She looked calmly over at the man who had spoken. “That okay with you, Jick?”

His face was as dark a red as mine. “I didn’t say it to be mean, Jewell,” he said. “You’re doing what you did with the sidon, taking in simmthing thit’ll turn on you. They won’t even lit Mirrors on Solfatara.”

“I think that’s probably a good ricommendation considering what they do lit on Solfatara,” Jewell said quietly. “Sot-gamblers, tap-stealers, pervers . . .”

“You saw that Mirror kill the tapper. Stid there right in front iv ivverybody, and nobody kidd stop him. Nobody. The tapper bigging for mercy, his hands tied in front of him, and thit Mirror coming at him with a sot-razor, smiling while he did it.”

“Yes,” Jewell said. “I saw it. I saw a lot of things on Solfatara. But this is Paylay. And this is my pianoboard player Ruby. I din’t think a man should be outlawed till he does simmthing, di you, Jick?” She put her hand on my shoulder. “Do you know ‘Back Home?’ ” she said. Of course I knew it. I knew all the tapper songs. Kovich had played in every happy house on Solfatara before somebody broke his hands. He had called “Back Home” his ropecutter.

“Play it, thin,” she said. “Show thim what you can do, Ruby.”

I played it with lots of trills and octave stretches, all the fancy things Kovich could do with five fingers instead of eight. Then I stopped and waited. The nitrogen blowers kicked off, and even the fans made no noise. During the song, Jewell had gone and stood next to Jack, putting her hand on his shoulder, trying to tame him. I wondered if she had succeeded. Jack looked at me, and then at Jewell, and back at me again. His hand went into his formals shirt, and my heart almost stopped before he brought it out again.

“Jewell’s right,” he said. “You shiddn’t judge a man till you see what he does. That was gid playing,” he said, handing me a plastic-wrapped cigar. “Wilcome to Paylay.”

Jewell nodded at me, and I extended my hand and took the cigar. I fumbled to get the slippery plastic off and then had to look at the cigar a minute to make sure I was getting the right end in my mouth. I stuck it in my mouth and reached inside my shirt for my sparker. I didn’t know what would happen when I lit the cigar. For all I understood what was going on, the cigar might be full of gunpowder. Jewell did not look worried, but then she had misjudged the sidon, too.

My hand closed on the sparker inside my shirt, the nitrogen blowers suddenly kicked on, and Jack said lazily, “Now whit you ginna light that with, Ruby? There in’t a match on Paylay!”

Jewell laughed, and the men guffawed. I pulled my empty hand sheepishly out of my jacket and took the cigar out of my mouth to look at it. “I forgot you can’t smoke on Paylay,” I said.

“You and ivvery tapper that kimms in on the down,” Jewell said. “Ive seen Jick play that joke on how many newcomers?”

“Ivvery one,” Jack said, looking pleased with himself. “It even worked on you, Jewell, and you weren’t a newcomer.”

“It did not, you tripletapping liar,” she said. “Lit’s hear simmthing else, Ruby,” she said. “Whit do you want Ruby to play, boys?”

Scorch shouted out a song, and I played it, and then another, but I do not know what they were. It had been a joke, offer the newcomer a cigar and then watch him try to light it on a star where no open flames are allowed. A good joke, and Jack had done it in spite of what he had seen on Solfatara to show Jewell he didn’t think I was a sidon, that he would wait to see what I would do before he judged me.

And that would have been too late. What would have happened when I lit the cigar? Would the house have gone up in a ball of flame, or all of St. Pierre? The hydrogen-oxygen ratio had been high enough in the upper atmosphere that we had had to shut off the engines above a kilometer and spiral in, and here the fans were pumping in even more oxygen. Half of Paylay might have gone up.

I knew how it had happened. Jewell had interrupted the down-pilot before he could ask about sparkers, and now, because her feet had hurt, there was a live sparker in her house. And she had just convinced Jack I was not dangerous.

I had stopped playing, sitting there staring blindly at the keyboard, the unlit cigar clamped so hard between my teeth I had nearly bitten it through. The men were still shouting out the names of songs, but Jewell stepped between them and me and put a hardcopy on the music rack. “No more riquists,” she said. “Pearl is going to sing for you.”

Pearl stood up and walked unassisted from her white chair to the pianoboard. She stopped no more than an inch from me and put her hand down certainly on the end of the keyboard. I looked at the music. It showed a line of notes before her part began, but I did not know that version, only the song that Kovich had known, and that began on the first note of the verse. I could not nod at her, and she could not see my hands on the keys.

“I don’t know the introduction,” I said. “Just the verse. What should I do?”

She bent down to me. “Put your hand on mine when you are ready to begin, and I will count three,” she said, and straightened again, leaving her hand where it was.

I looked down at her hand. Carnie had told her about my hands, and if I touched her lightly, with only the middle fingers, she might not even be able to tell it from a human’s touch. I wanted more than anything not to frighten her. I did not think I could bear it if she flinched away from me.

Now I think it would have been better if she had, that I could have stood it better than this, sitting here with her head on my lap, waiting. If she had flinched, Jack would have seen her. He would have seen her draw away from me, and that would have been enough for him to grab me by the dog collar and throw me out the door, kick me down the wooden steps so hard that the sparker bounced out, leave me to cook in the furnace of Paylay.

“Now whit did you do thit for?” Jewell would have said. “He din’t do innything but tich her hand.”

“And he’ll nivver do innything ilse to her either.” he would have said, and handed Jewell the sparker. And I would never have been able to do anything else to her.

But she did not flinch. She took a light breath that took no longer than it did for my hand to return to the keys and hit the first note on the count of three, and we began together. I did not do any trills, any octave stretches. Her voice was sweet and thready and true. She didn’t need me.

The men applauded after Pearl’s song and started calling out the names of other songs. Some I didn’t know, and I wondered how I could explain that to them, but Jewell said, “Now, now, boys, Let’s not use up our pianoboard player in one shift. Lit him go to bid. He’ll be here next shift. Who wants a game of katmai?” She reached over and pulled the cover down over the keyboard. “Use the front stairs,” she said. “The tappers take the girls up the back way.”

Pearl bent toward me and said, “Good night, Ruby,” and then took Jack’s arm as if she knew right where he was and went through the curtained door to the cardroom. The others followed, two by two, until all the girls were taken, and then in a straggling line. Jewell unfastened the heavy drapes so they fell across the door behind them.

I went upstairs and took off the paper shuffles and the uncomfortable collar and sat on the edge of the bed Jewell had fixed for me by putting a little table at the end for extra length. I thought about Pearl and Jack and how I was going to give Jewell the sparker at the beginning of the next shift, and wondered who I was copying. I looked at myself in the little plastic mirror over the bed, trying to see Jewell or Jack in my face.

I had left my cigar on the music rack. I didn’t want Jack to find it there and think I had rejected it. I put my shuffles back on and went downstairs. There was nobody in the music room, and the drapes were still drawn across the door of the cardroom. I went over to the pianoboard and got the cigar. I had bitten it almost through, and now I bit the ragged end off. Then I chomped down on the new end and sat down on the piano stool, spreading out my hands as far as they would go across the keyboard.

“I understand you’re a Mirror,” a man’s voice said from the recesses of Pearl’s chair. “I knew a Mirror once. Or he knew me. Isn’t that how it is?”

I almost said, “You’re not supposed to sit in that chair,” but I found I could not speak.

The man stood up and came toward me. He was dressed like the other men, with a broad black dog collar, but his hands and face were almost white, and there was no lighter band across his forehead. “My name is Taber,” he said, in a slow, drawling voice unlike the fast, vowel-shortening accents of the others. I wondered if he had come from Solfatara. All the rest of them except Pearl shortened their vowels, bit them off like I had bit the cigar. Pearl alone seemed to have no accent, as if her blindness had protected her from the speech of Solfatara, too.

“Welcome to St. Pierre,” he said, and I felt a shock of fear. He had lied to Jewell. I did not know who St. Pierre was, but I knew as he spoke that St. Pierre was not the patron saint of tappers, and that Taber’s calling the town that was some unspeakably cruel joke that only he understood.

“I have to go upstairs,” I said, and my hand shook as I held the cigar. “Jewell’s in the cardroom.”

“Oh,” he said lazily, taking a cigar from his pocket and unwrapping it. “Is Pearl there, too?”

“Pearl?” I said, so frightened I could not breathe.

He patted his formals pockets and reached inside his shirt. “Yes. You know, the blind girl. The pretty one.” He pulled a sparker from his inside pocket, cocked it back, and looked at me. “What a pity she’s blind. I wish I knew what happened. She’s never told a soul, you know,” he said, and clicked the sparker.

It was not a real sparker. I could see, after a frozen moment, that there was no liquid in it at all. He clicked it twice more, held it to the end of his cigar in dreadful pantomime, and replaced it in his pocket.

“I do wish I could find out,” he said. “I could put the knowledge to good use.”

“I can’t help you,” I said, and moved toward the stairs.

He stepped in front of me. “Oh, I think you can. Isn’t that what Mirrors are for?” he said, and drew on the unlit cigar and blew imaginary smoke into my face.

“I won’t help you,” I said, so loudly I fancied Jewell would come and tell Taber to let me alone, as she had told Carnie. “You can’t make me help you.”

“Of course not,” he said. “That isn’t how it works. But of course you know that,” and let me pass.

I sat on my bed the rest of the shift, holding the real sparker between my hands, waiting until I could tell Jewell what Taber had said to me. But the next shift was sleeping-shift, and the shift after that I played tapper requests for eight hours straight. Most of that time Taber stood by the pianoboard, flicking imaginary ashes onto my hands.

After the shift Jewell came to ask me whether Jack or anyone else had bothered me, and I did not tell her about Taber after all. During the next sleeping-shift I hid the sparker between the mattress and the springs of my bed.

On the waking shifts I kept as close as I could to Jewell, trying to make myself useful to her, trying not to copy the way she walked on her bandaged feet. When I was not playing, I moved among the tappers with glasses of iced and watered-down liquor on a tray and filled out the account cards for the men who wanted to take girls upstairs. On the off-shifts I learned to work the boards that sent out accounts to Solfatara, and to do the laundry, and after a couple of weeks Jewell had me help with the body checks on the girls. She scanned for perv marks and sot scars as well as the standard GHS every abbey has to screen for. Pearl did not have a mark on her, and I was relieved. I had had an idea that Taber might be torturing her somehow.

Jewell left us alone while I helped her get dressed after the scan, and I said, “Taber is a very bad man. He wants to hurt you.”

“I know,” she said. She was standing very still while I clipped the row of pearl buttons on the back of her dress together.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like the sidon.”

“You mean he can’t help himself, that he doesn’t know what he’s doing?” I said, outraged. “He knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“The tappers used to poke at the sidon with sticks when it was in the cage,” she said. “They couldn’t reach it to really hurt it, though, and Taber couldn’t stand that. He made the tappers give him the key to the cage just so he could get to it. Just so he could hurt it. Now why would he want to hurt the sidon?”

“Because it was helpless,” I said, and I wondered if the man who’d blinded Pearl had been like that. “Because it couldn’t protect itself.”

“Jewell and I were in the same happy house on Solfatara,” she said.

“We had a friend there, a pianoboard player like you. He was very tall like you, too, and he was the kindest person I ever knew. Sometimes you remind me of him.” She walked certainly to the door, as if she were not counting the memorized steps. “A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key. Don’t worry, Ruby. He can’t get in.” She turned and looked at me. “Will you come and play for me?”

“Yes,” I said, and followed her down to the music room. Before the shifts started, while the girls were upstairs dressing, she liked to sit in the white chair and listen to me play. She understood, more than any of the others, that I could play only the songs I had copied from Kovich. Jewell, to the end, thought I could read music, and Taber even brought me hardcopies from Solfatara. Pearl simply said the names of songs, and I played them if I knew them. She never asked for one I didn’t know, and I thought that was because she listened carefully to the tappers’ requests and my refusals, and I was grateful.

I sat down at the pianoboard and looked at Pearl in the mirror. I had asked Jewell for the mirror so I could see over my shoulder. I had told her I wanted it so she could signal me songs and breaks and sometimes the ropecutter if the men got rough or noisy, but it was really so I could keep Taber from standing there without my knowing it.

“ ‘Back Home,’ ” Pearl said. I could hardly hear her over the nitrogen blowers. I began playing it, and Taber came in. He walked swiftly over to her and then stood quite still, and between my playing and the noise of the blowers, she did not hear him. He stood about half a meter from her, close enough to touch her but just out of reach if she had put her hand out to try to find him.

He took the cigar out of his mouth and bent down as if he were going to speak to her, and instead he pursed his lips and blew gently at her. I could almost see the smoke. At first she didn’t seem to notice, but then she shivered and drew her shinethread shawl closer about her.

He stopped and smiled at her a moment and then reached out and touched her with the tip of his cigar, lightly, on the shoulder, as if he intended to burn her, and then darted it back out of her reach. She swatted at the air, and he repeated the little pantomime again and again, until she stood and put her hands up helplessly against what she could not see. As she did so, he moved swiftly and silently to the door so that when she cried out, “Who is it? Who’s there?” he said in his slow drawl, “It’s me, Pearl. I’ve just come in. Did I frighten you?”

“No,” she said, and sat back down again. But when he took her hand, she flinched away from him as I’d thought she would from me. And all the while I had not missed a beat of the song.

“I just came over to see you for a minute,” Taber said, “and to hear your pianoboard player. He gets better every day, doesn’t he?”

Pearl didn’t answer. I saw in the mirror that her hands lay crossed in her lap again and didn’t move.

“Yes,” he said, and walked toward me, flicking imaginary ashes from his unlit cigar onto my hands. “Better and better,” he said softly. “I can almost see my face in you, Mirror.”

“What did you say?” Pearl said, frightened.

“I said I’d better go see Jewell a minute about some business and then get back next door. Jack found a new hydrogen tap today, a big one.”

He went back through the card room to the kitchen, and I sat at the pianoboard, watching in the mirror until I saw the kitchen door shut behind him.

“Tabar was in the room the whole time,” I said. “He was . . . doing things to you.”

“I know,” she said.

“You shouldn’t let him. You should stop him,” I said violently, and as soon as I said it I knew that she knew that I had not stopped him either. “He’s a very bad man,” I said.

“He has never locked me in,” she said after a minute. “He has never tied me up.”

“He has never known how before,” I said, and I knew it was true.

“He wants me to find out for him.”

She bent her head to her hands, which still lay crossed at the wrists, almost relaxed, showing nothing of what she was thinking. “And will you?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“He’s trying to get you to copy him, isn’t he?” she said.

“Yes.”

“And you think it’s working?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell when I’m copying. Do I sound like Taber?”

“No,” she said, so definitely that I was relieved. I had listened to myself with an anxious ear, hoping for Jewell’s shortened vowels and tapper slang, waiting in dread for the slow, lazy speech of Taber. I did not think I had heard either of them, but I had been afraid I wouldn’t know if I did.

“Do you know who I’m copying?” I said.

“You walk like Jewell,” she said, and smiled a little. “It makes her furious.”

It was the end of the shift before I realized that, like my uncle, she had not really answered what I had asked.

Jack’s new tap turned out to be so big that he needed a crew to help put up the compressors, and for several shifts hardly anyone was in the house, including Taber. Because business was so slack, Jewell even let some of the girls go over to the gaming house. Taber didn’t go near the tap, but he didn’t come over quite so often either, and when he did, he spent his time upstairs or with Carnie, talking to her in a low voice and clicking the speaker over and over again, as if he could not help himself. Then, once the compressors were set up and the sidon working, the men poured back into St. Pierre, and Taber was too busy to come over at all.

The one time he came, he found Pearl alone with me, he said, “It’s Taber, Pearl,” almost before I had banged a loud chord on the keys and said, “Taber’s here.” He did not have his cigar with him, or his sparker, and he did not even speak to me. Watching Pearl talk to him, her head gracefully turned away from him, her hands in her lap, I could almost believe that he would not succeed, that nothing could hurt her, safe in her blindness.

We were so busy that Jewell hardly spoke to me, but when she did, she told me sharply that if I had nothing better to do than copy her, I should tend bar, and set me to passing out the watered liquor she had brought out in honor of the new sidon. She did the boards for the week herself while I ran the body checks.

Pearl, naked under the scan, looked serene and unhurt. Carnie had sot-scars under her arms. I did not report her. If Jewell found out, she would send Carnie back to Solfatara, and I wanted Tabor to be working on Carnie, giving her sots and trying to get her to help him, because then I could believe he had given up on me. I did not dare believe that he had given up on Pearl, but I did not think that he and Carnie alone could hurt her, no matter what they did to her. Not without my help. Not so long as I was copying Jewell.

I told Pearl about Carnie. “I think she’s on sots,” I said. We were alone in the music room. Jewell was upstairs, trying to catch up the boards. Carnie was in the kitchen, taking her turn at supper. “I saw what looked like scars.”

“I know,” Pearl said, and I wondered if there was anything she did not see, in spite of her blindness.

“I think you should be careful. It’s Taber that’s giving them to her. He’s using her to hurt you. Don’t tell her anything.”

She said nothing, and after a minute I turned back to the pianoboard and waited for her to name a song.

“I was born in the happy house. My mother worked there. Did you know that?” she said quietly.

“No,” I said, keeping my hands spread across the keyboard, as though they could support me. I did not look at her.

“I have told myself all these years that as long as no one knew what happened, I was safe.”

“Doesn’t Jewell know?”

She shook her head. “Nobody knows. My mother told them he threatened her with the sot-razor, that there was nothing she could do.”

The nitrogen blowers kicked on just then, and I jumped at the sound and looked into the mirror. I could see the sidon in the mirror, and standing on its red murdered skin, Taber. Carnie had let him in through the kitchen and turned the blowers up, and now he stood between the noisy blowers, smiling and flicking imaginary ash onto the carpet beside Pearl’s chair. I took my hands off the keyboard and laid them in my lap. “Carnie’s in the kitchen,” I said. “I don’t know if the door’s shut.”

“There was a tapper who came to the house,” Pearl said. “He was a very bad man, but my mother loved him. She said she couldn’t help herself. I think that was true.” For a moment she looked directly into the mirror with her blind eyes, and I willed Taber to click the sparker that I knew he was fingering so that Pearl would hear it and withdraw into her cage, safe and silent.

“It was Christmas time,” she said, and the blowers kicked off. Into the silence she said, “I was ten years old, and Jewell gave me a little gold necklace with a pearl on it. She was only fourteen, but she was already working in the house. They had a tree in the music room and there were little lights on it, all different colors, strung on a string. Have you ever seen lights like that, red and green and gold all strung together?”

I thought of the strings of multicolored chemilooms I had seen from the spiraldown, the very first thing I had seen on Paylay. Nobody has told her, I thought, in all this time nobody has told her, and at the thought of the vast cage of kindness built all around her, my hand jerked up and hit the edge of the keyboard. She heard the sound and looked up.

“Is Taber here?” she said, and my hand hovered above the keyboard.

“No, of course not,” I said, and my hand settled back in my lap like the spiraldown coming to rest on its moorings. “I’ll tell you when he comes.

“The tapper sent my mother a dress with lights on it, too, red and green and gold like the tree,” Pearl said. “When he came, he said, ‘You look like a Chrissmiss tree,’ and kissed her on the cheek. ‘What do you want for Chrissmiss?’ my mother said. ‘I will give you anything.’ I can remember her standing there in the lighted dress under the tree.” She stopped a minute, and when I looked in the mirror, she had turned her head so that she seemed to be looking straight at Taber. “He asked for me.”

“What did he do to you?” I said.

“I don’t remember,” she said. Her hands struggled and lay still, and I knew what he had done. He had locked her in, and she had never escaped. He had tied her hands together, and she had never gotten free. I looked down at my own hands, crossed at the wrists like hers and not even struggling.

“Didn’t anyone come to help you?” I said.

“The pianoboard player,” she said. “He beat the door down. He broke both his hands so he could not play anymore. He made my mother call the doctor. He told her he would kill her if she didn’t. When he tried to help me, I ran away from him. I didn’t want him to help me. I wanted to die. I ran and ran and ran, but I couldn’t see to get away.”

“Did he kill the tapper who blinded you?” I said.

“While he was trying to find me, my mother let the tapper out the back door. I ran and ran and then I fell down. The pianoboard player came and held me in his arms until the doctor came. I made him promise to kill the tapper. I made him promise to finish killing me,” she said, so softly I could hardly hear her. “But he didn’t.”

The blowers kicked on again, and I looked into the mirror, but Taber wasn’t there. Carnie had let him out the back way.

He did not come back for several shifts. When he did, it was to tell Jewell he was going to Solfatara. He told Pearl he would bring her a present and whispered to me, “What do you want for Christmas, Ruby? You’ve earned a present.”

While he was gone Jack hit another tap, almost on top of the first one, and Jewell locked up the liquor. The men didn’t want music. They wanted to talk about putting in a double, even a triple tap. I was grateful for that. I was not sure I could play with my hands tied.

Jewell told me to go meet Taber at the mooring, and then changed her mind. “I’m worried about those sotted fools out at Jick’s sidon. Doubletapping. They kidd blow the whole star. You’d bitter stay here and hilp me.”

Taber came before the shift. “I’ll bring you your present tonight, Pearl,” he said. “I know you’ll like it. Ruby helped me pick it out.” I watched the sudden twitching of Pearl’s hands, but my own didn’t even move.

Taber waited almost until the end of the shift, spending nearly half of it in the card room with Carnie leaning heavily over his shoulder. She had already gotten her present. Her eyes were bright from the sot-slice, and she stumbled once against him and nearly fell.

“Bring me a cigar, Ruby,” he shouted to me. “And look in the inside jacket pocket. I brought a present back for everybody.” Pearl was standing all alone in the middle of the music room, her hands in front of her. I didn’t look at her. I went straight upstairs to my room, got what I needed, and then went back down into the anteroom to where Taber’s tapper jacket was hanging, and got the cigar out of Taber’s pocket. His sparker was there, too.

The present was a flat package wrapped in red and green paper, and I took it and the cigar to Taber. He had come into the music room and was sitting in Pearl’s chair. Carnie was sitting on his lap with her arm around his neck.

“You didn’t bring the sparker, Ruby,” Taber said. I waited for him to tell me to go and get it. “Never mind,” he said. “Do you know what day this is?”

“I do,” Carnie said softly, and Taber slid his hand up to hold hers where it lay loosely on his shoulder.

“It’s Chrissmiss Day,” he said, pronouncing it with the Solfatara accent. He took his hand away from Carnie’s so he could lean back and puff on his cigar, and Carnie took her red, bruised hand in her other one and held it up to her bosom, her sot-bright eyes full of pain. “I said to myself we should have some Chrissmiss songs. Do you know any Chrissmiss songs, Ruby?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think you would,” Taber said. “So I brought you a present.” He waved the cigar at me. “Go ahead. Open it.”

I pulled the red and green paper off and took out the hardcopies. There were a dozen Christmas songs. I knew them all.

“Pearl, you’ll sing a Chrissmiss song for me, won’t you?” Taber said.

“I don’t know any,” she said. She had not moved from where she stood.

“Of course you do,” Taber said. “They played them every Chrissmiss time in the happy houses on Solfatara. Come on. Ruby’ll play it for you.”

I sat down at the pianoboard, and Pearl came and stood beside me with her hand on the end of the keyboard. I stood the hardcopies up against the music rack and put my hands on the keyboard.

“He knows,” she said, so softly none of the men could have heard her. “You told him.”

“No, it’s a coincidence,” I said. “Maybe it is really Christmas time on Solfatara. Nobody keeps track of the year on Paylay. Maybe it is Christmas.”

“If you told him, if he knows how it happened, I am not safe anymore. He’ll be able to get in. He’ll be able to hurt me.” She took a staggering step away from the pianoboard as if she were going to run. I took hold of her wrist.

“I didn’t tell him,” I said. “I would never let him hurt you. But if you don’t sing the song, he’ll know there’s something wrong. I’ll play the first song through for you.” I let go of her wrist, and her hand went limp and relaxed on the end of the keyboard.

I played the song through and stopped. The version I knew didn’t have an introduction, so I spread the fingers of my right hand across the octave and a half of the opening chord and touched her hand with my left.

She flinched. She did not move her hand away or even make any movement the men, gathered around us now, could have seen. But a tremor went through her hand. I waited a moment, and then I touched her again, with all my fingers, hard, and started the song. She sang the song all the way through, and my hands, which had not been able to come down on a single chord of warning, were light and sure on the keyboard. When it was over, the men called for another, and I put it on the music rack and then sat, as she stood silent and still, unflinching, waiting for what was to come.

Taber looked up inquiringly, casually, and Jewell frowned and half-turned toward the door. Scorch banged through the thick inner door and stopped, trying to get his breath. He still had his lantern strapped to his forehead, and when he bent over trying to catch his breath in gasping hiccoughs, the strip where the hair had been burned off was as red as his face and starting to blister.

“One of the sidons blew, didn’t it?” Jewell said, and her scar slashed black as a fissure across her cheek. “Which one?”

Scorch still couldn’t speak. He nodded with his whole body, bent over double again, and tried to straighten. “It’s Jick,” he said. “He tried to tripletap, and the whole thing wint up.”

“Oh, my God,” Sapphire said, and ran into the kitchen.

“How bad is it?” Jewell said.

“Jick’s dead, and there are two burned bad—Paulsen and the tapper that came in with Taber last shift. I don’t know his name. They were right on top of it when it went, putting the comprissor on.”

The tappers had been in motion the whole time he spoke, putting on their jackets and going for their shoes. Taber heaved Carnie off his lap and stood up. Sapphire came back from the kitchen dressed in pants and carrying the remedy case. Garnet put her shawl around Scorch’s shoulders and helped him into Pearl’s chair.

Taber said calmly, “Are there any other sidons close?” He looked unconcerned, almost amused, with Carnie leaning limply against him, but his left hand was clenched, the thumb moving up and down as if he were clicking the sparker.

“Mine,” Scorch said. “It didn’t kitch, but the comprissor caught fire and Jick’s clothes, and they’re still burning.” He looked up apologetically at Jewell. “I didn’t have nithing to put the fire out with. I dragged the ither two up onto my comprissor platform so they widdn’t cook.”

Pearl and I had not moved from the pianoboard. I looked at Taber in the mirror, waiting for him to say, “I’ll stay here, Jewell. I’ll take care of things here,” but he didn’t. He disengaged himself from Carnie. “I’ll go get the stretchers at the gaming house and meet you back here,” he said.

“Let me get your jacket for you,” I said, but he was already gone.

The tappers banged out the doors, Sapphire with them. Garnet ran upstairs. Jewell went into the anteroom to put her outside shoes on.

I stood up and went out into the anteroom. “Let me go with you,” I said.

“I want you ti stay here and take care of Pearl,” she said. She could not squeeze her bandaged foot into the shoe. She bent down and began unwinding the bandage.

“Garnet can stay. You’ll need help carrying the men back.”

She dropped the bandage onto the floor and jammed her foot into the shoe, wincing. “You din’t know the way. You kidd git lost and fall into a sidon. You’re safer here.” She tried the other shoe, stood up and jammed her bandaged foot into it, and sat back down to fix the straps.

“I’m not safe anywhere,” I said. “Please don’t leave me here. I’m afraid of what might happen.”

“Even if the sidons all go up, the fire won’t git this far.”

“It isn’t those sidons I’m afraid of,” I said harshly. “You let a sidon loose in the house once before and look what happened.”

She straightened up and looked at me, the scar as black and hot as lava against her red face. “A sidon is an animal,” she said. “It kin’t help itself.” She stood up gingerly, testing her unbandaged feet. “Taber’s going with me,” she said.

She was not as blind as I had feared, but she still didn’t see. “Don’t you understand?” I said gently. “Even if he goes with you, he’ll still be here.”

“Are you ready, Jewell?” Taber said. He had a lantern strapped to his forehead, and he was carrying a large red and green wrapped bundle.

“I’ve gitta git another lantern from upstairs,” Jewell said.

“There’s nithing left but town lanterns,” she said, and went upstairs.

Taber held the package out to me. “You’ll have to give Pearl her Chrissmiss present from me, Ruby,” he said.

“I won’t do it.”

“How do you know?” he said.

I didn’t answer him.

“You were so anxious to get me my jacket when I went next door. Why don’t you get it for me now? Or do you think you won’t do that either?”

I took the coat off the hook, waiting for Jewell to come back downstairs.

“Lit’s go,” Jewell said, hardly limping at all as she came down the steps. I took the jacket over to him. He handed the package to me again, and I took it, watching him put the jacket on, waiting for him to pat the sparker inside the pocket to make sure it was there. Jewell handed him an extra lantern and a bundle of bandages. “Lit’s go,” she said again. She opened the outside door and went down the wooden steps into the heat.

“Take care of Pearl, Ruby,” Taber said, and shut the door.

I went back into the music room. Pearl had not moved. Garnet and Carnie were trying to help Scorch out of the chair and up the stairs, though Carnie could hardly stand. I took his weight from Garnet and picked him up.

“Sit down, Carnie,” I said, and she collapsed into the chair, her knees apart and her mouth open, instantly asleep.

I carried Scorch up the stairs to Garnet’s room and stood there holding him, bracing his weight against the door while Garnet strung a burn-hammock across her bed for me to lay him in. He had passed out in the chair, but while I was lowering him into the hammock, he came to. His red face was starting to blister, so that he had trouble speaking. “I shidda put the fire out,” he said. “It’ll catch the ither sidons. I told Jick it was too close.”

“They’ll put the fire out,” I said. Garnet tested the hammock and nodded to me. I laid him gently in it, and we began the terrible process of peeling his clothes off his skin.

“It was thit new tapper thit came down with Taber this morning. He was sotted. And he had a sparker with him. A sparker. The whole star kidda gone up.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’ll be all right.” I turned him onto his side and began pulling his shirt free. He smelled like frying meat. He passed out again before we got his shirt off, and that made getting the rest of his clothes off easier. Garnet tied his wrist to the saline hookup and started the antibiotics. She told me to go back downstairs.

Pearl was still standing by the pianoboard. “Scorch is going to be fine,” I said loudly to cover the sound of picking up Taber’s package, and I started past her with it to the kitchen. The blowers had kicked on full-blast from the doors opening so much, but I said anyway, “Garnet wants me to get some water for him.”

I made it nearly to the door of the cardroom. Then Carnie heaved herself up in the white chair and said sleepily, “Thit’s Pearl’s present, isn’t it, Ruby?”

I stopped under the blowers, standing on the sidon.

She sat up straighter, licking her tongue across her lips. “Open it, Ruby. I want to see what it is.”

Pearl’s hands tightened to fists in front of her. “Yes,” she said, looking straight at me. “Open it, Ruby.”

“No,” I said. I walked over to the pianoboard and put the package down on the stool.

“I’ll open it then,” Carnie said, and lurched out of the chair after it. “You’re so mean, Ruby. Poor Pearl kin’t open her own Chrissmiss presents, ivver since she got blind.” Her voice was starting to slur. I could barely understand what she was saying, and she had to grab at the package twice before she picked it up and staggered back to Pearl’s chair with it clutched to her breast. The sots were starting to really take hold now. In a few moments she would be unconscious. “Please,” I said without making a sound, praying as Pearl must have prayed in that locked room, ten years old, her hands tied and him coming at her with a razor. “Hurry, hurry.”

Carnie couldn’t get the package open. She tugged feebly at the green ribbon, plucked at the paper without even tearing it, and subsided, closing her eyes. She began to breathe deeply, with her mouth open, slumped far down in the white chair with her arms flung out over the arms of the chair.

“I’ll take you upstairs, Pearl,” I said. “Garnet may need help with Scorch.”

“All right,” she said, but she didn’t move. She stood with her head averted, as if she were listening for something.

“Oh, how pretty!” Carnie said, her voice clear and strong. She was sitting up straight in the chair, her hands on the unopened package. “It’s a dress, Pearl. Isn’t it beautiful, Ruby?”

“Yes, I said, looking at Carnie, limp again in the chair and snoring softly.”It’s covered with lights, Pearl, green and red and gold, like a Christmas tree.”

The package slipped out of Carnie’s limp hands and onto the floor. The blowers kicked on, and Carnie turned in the chair, pulling her feet up under her and cradling her head against the chair’s arm. She began snoring again, more loudly.

I said, “Would you like to try it on, Pearl?” and looked over at her, but she was already gone.

It took me nearly an hour to find her, because the town lantern I had strapped to my forehead was so dim I could not see very well. She was lying face down near the mooring.

I unstrapped the lantern and laid it beside her on the ground so I could see her better. The train of her skirt was smoldering. I stamped on it until it crumbled underfoot and then knelt beside her and turned her over.

“Ruby?” she said. Her voice was squeaky from the helium in the air and very hoarse. I could hardly recognize it. She would not be able to recognize mine either. If I told her I was Jewell or Carnie, or Taber, come to murder her, she would not know the difference. “Ruby?” she said. “Is Taber here?”

“No,” I said. “Only the sidon.”

“You’re not a sidon,” she said. Her lips were dry and parched.

“Then what am I?” I moved the town lantern closer. Her face looked flushed, almost as red as Jewell’s.

“You are my good friend the pianoboard player who has come to help me.”

“I didn’t come to help you,” I said, and my eyes filled with tears. “I came to finish killing you. I can’t help it. I’m copying Taber.”

“No,” she said, but it was not a “no” of protest or horror or surprise, but a statement of fact. “You have never copied Taber.”

“He killed Jack,” I said. “He had some poor sotted tapper blow up the sidon so he could have an alibi for your murder. He left me to kill you for him.”

Her hands lay at her sides, palms down on the ground. When I lifted them and laid them across her skirt as she had always held them, crossed at the wrists, she did not flinch, and I thought perhaps she was unconscious.

“Jewell’s feet are much better,” she said, and licked her lips. “You hardly limp at all. And I knew Carnie was on sots before she ever came into the room, by the way you walked. I have listened to you copy all of them, even poor dead Jack. You never copied Taber. Not once.”

I crawled around beside her and got her head up on my knees. Her hair came loose and fell around her face as I lifted her up, the ends of it curling up in dark frizzies of ash. The narrow fretted soles of my shoes dug into the backs of my legs like hot irons. She swallowed and said, “He broke the door down and he sent for the doctor and then he went to kill the man, but he was too late. My mother had let him out the back way.”

“I know,” I said. My tears were falling on her neck and throat. I tried to brush them away, but they had already dried, and her skin felt hot and parched. Her lips were cracked, and she could hardly move them at all when she spoke.

“Then he came back and held me in his arms while we waited for the doctor. Like this. And I said, ‘Why didn’t you kill him?’ and he said, ‘I will,’ and then I asked him to finish killing me, but he wouldn’t. He didn’t kill the tapper either, because his hands were broken and all cut up.”

“My uncle killed him,” I said. “That’s why we’re quarantined. He and Kovich killed him,” I said, though Kovich had already been dead by then. “They tied him up and cut out his eyes with a sot-razor,” I said. That was why Jewell had let me come to Paylay. She had owed it to my uncle to let me come because he had killed the tapper. And my uncle had sent me to do what? To copy whom?

The lamp was growing much dimmer and the twillpaper forehead strap on the lantern was smoldering now, but I didn’t try to put it out. I knelt with Pearl’s head in my lap on the hot ground, not moving.

“I knew you were copying me almost from the first,” she said, “but I didn’t tell you, because I thought you would kill Taber for me. Whenever you played for me, I sat and thought about Taber with a sidon tearing out his throat, hoping you would copy the hate I felt. I never saw Taber or a sidon either, but I thought about my mother’s lover, and I called him Taber. I’m sorry I did that to you, Ruby.”

I brushed her hair back from her forehead and her cheeks. My hand left a sooty mark, like a scar, down the side of her face. “I did kill Taber,” I said.

“You reminded me so much of Kovich when you played,” she said. “You sounded just like him. I thought I was thinking about killing Taber, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even know what a sidon looks like. I was only thinking about Kovich and waiting for him to come and finish killing me.” She was breathing shallowly now and very fast, taking a breath between almost every word. “What do sidons look like, Ruby?”

I tried to remember what Kovich had looked like when he came to find my uncle, his broken hands infected, his face red from the fever that would consume him. “I want you to copy me,” he had said to my uncle. “I want you to learn to play the pianoboard from me before I die.” I want you to kill a man for me. I want you to cut out his eyes. I want you to do what I can’t do.

I could not remember what he looked like, except that he had been very tall, almost as tall as my uncle, as me. It seemed to me that he had looked like my uncle, but surely it was the other way around. “I want you to copy me,” he had said to my uncle. I want you to do what I can’t do. Pearl had asked him to kill the tapper, and he had promised to. Then Pearl had asked him to finish killing her, and he had promised to do that, too, though he could no more have murdered her than he could have played the pianoboard with his ruined hands, though he had not even known how well a Mirror copies, or how blindly. So my uncle had killed the tapper, and I have finished killing Pearl, but it was Kovich, Kovich who did the murders.

“Sidons are very tall,” I said, “and they play the pianoboard.”

She didn’t answer. The twillpaper strap on the lantern burst into flame. I watched it burn.

“It’s all right that you didn’t kill Taber,” she said. “But you mustn’t let him put the blame for killing me on you.”

“I did kill Taber,” I said. “I gave him the real sparker. I put it in his jacket before he left to go out to the sidons.”

She tried to sit up. “Tell them you were copying him, that you couldn’t help yourself,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me.

“I will,” I said, looking into the darkness.

Over the horizon somewhere is Taber. He is looking this way, wondering if I have killed her yet. Soon he will take out his cigar and put his thumb against the trigger of the sparker, and the sidons will go up one after the other, a string of lights. I wonder if he will have time to know he has been murdered, to wonder who killed him.

I wonder, too, kneeling here with Pearl’s head on my knees. Perhaps I did copy Pearl. Or Jewell, or Kovich, or even Taber. Or all of them. The worst thing is not that things are done to you. It is not knowing who is doing them. Maybe I did not copy anyone, and I am the one who murdered Taber. I hope so.

“You should go back before you get burned,” Pearl says, so softly I can hardly hear her.

“I will,” I say, but I cannot. They have tied me up, they have locked me in, and now I am only waiting for them to come and finish killing me.

SLOW BIRDS

Ian Watson

Ian Watson’s new story describes an Earth that is slowly being “glassed” over by the mysterious engines of destruction known as slow birds. At the same time, it is a stirring family drama that spans generations. All this, compressed into a striking novelet that is science fiction at its best.

It was Mayday, and the skate-sailing festival that year was being held at Tuckerton.

By late morning, after the umpires had been out on the glass plain setting red flags around the circuit, cumulous clouds began to fill a previously blue sky, promising ideal conditions for the afternoon’s sport. No rain; so that the glass wouldn’t be an inch deep in water as last year at Atherton. No dazzling glare to blind the spectators, as the year before that at Buckby. And a breeze verging on brisk without ever becoming fierce: perfect to speed the competitors’ sails along without lifting people off their feet and tumbling them, as four years previously at Edgewood when a couple of broken ankles and numerous bruises had been sustained.

After the contest there would be a pig roast; or rather the succulent fruits thereof, for the pig had been turning slowly on its spit these past thirty-six hours. And there would be kegs of Old Codger Ale to be cracked. But right now Jason Babbidge’s mind was mainly occupied with checking out his glass-skates and his fine crocus-yellow hand-sail.

As high as a tall man, and of best old silk, only patched in a couple of places, the sail’s fore-spar of flexible ash was bent into a bow belly by a strong hemp cord. Jason plucked this thoughtfully like a harpist, testing the tension. Already a fair number of racers were out on the glass, showing off their paces to applause. Tuckerton folk mostly, they were—acting as if they owned the glass hereabouts and knew it more intimately than any visitors could. Not that it was in any way different from the same glass over Atherton way.

Jason’s younger brother Daniel whistled appreciatively as a Tuckerton man carrying purple silk executed perfect circles at speed, his sail shivering as he tacked.

“Just look at him, Jay!”

“What, Bob Marchant? He took a pratfall last year. Where’s the use in working up a sweat before the whistle blows?”

By now a couple of sisters from Buckby were out too with matching black sails, skating figure-eights around each other, risking collision by a hair’s breadth.

“Go on, Jay,” urged young Daniel. “Show “em.”

Contestants from the other villages were starting to flood on to the glass as well, but Jason noticed how Max Tarnover was standing not so far away, merely observing these antics with a wise smile. Master Tarnover of Tuckerton, last year’s victor at Atherton despite the drenching spray. . . . Taking his cue from this, and going one better, Jason ignored events on the glass and surveyed the crowds instead.

He noticed Uncle John Babbidge chatting intently to an Edgewood man over where the silver band was playing; which was hardly the quietest place to talk, so perhaps they were doing business. Meanwhile on the green beyond the band the children of five villages buzzed like flies from hoop-la to skittles to bran tub, to apples in buckets of water. And those grownups who weren’t intent on the band or the practice runs or on something else, such as gossip, besieged the craft and produce stalls. There must be going on for a thousand people at the festival, and the village beyond looked deserted. Rugs and benches and half-barrels had even been set out near the edge of the glass for the old folk of Tuckerton.

As the band lowered their instruments for a breather after finishing The Floral Dance, a bleat of panic cut across the chatter of many voices. A farmer had just vaulted into a tiny sheep-pen where a lamb almost as large as its shorn, protesting dam was ducking beneath her to suckle and hide. Laughing, the farmer hauled it out and hoisted it by its neck and back legs to guess its weight, and maybe win a prize.

And now Jason’s mother was threading her way through the crowd, chewing the remnants of a pasty.

“Best of luck, son!” She grinned.

“I’ve told you, Mum,” protested Jason. “It’s bad luck to say ‘good luck’.”

“Oh, luck yourself! What’s luck, anyway?” She prodded her Adam’s apple as if to press the last piece of meat and potatoes on its way down, though really she was indicating that her throat was bare of any charm or amulet.

“I suppose I’d better make a move.” Kicking off his sandals, Jason sat to lace up his skates. With a helping hand from Daniel he rose and stood knock-kneed, blades cutting into the turf while the boy hoisted the sails across his shoulders. Jason gripped the leather straps on the bowstring and the spine-spar.

“Okay.” He waggled the sail this way and that. “Let’s go, then. I won’t blow away.”

But just as he was about to proceed down on to the glass, out upon the glass less than a hundred yards away a slow bird appeared.

It materialized directly in front of one of the Buckby sisters. Unable to veer, she had no choice but to throw herself backwards. Crying out in frustration, and perhaps hurt by her fall, she skidded underneath the slow bird, sledging supine upon her now snapped and crumpled sail.

They were called slow birds because they flew through the air—at the stately pace of three feet per minute.

They looked a little like birds, too, though only a little. Their tubular metal bodies were rounded at the head and tapering to a finned point at the tail, with two stubby wings midway. Yet these wings could hardly have anything to do with suspending their bulk in the air; the girth of a bird was that of a horse, and its length twice that of a man lying full length. Perhaps those wings controlled orientation or trim.

In color they were a silvery grey; though this was only the color of their outer skin, made of a soft metal like lead. Quarter of an inch beneath this coating their inner skins were black and stiff as steel. The noses of the birds were all scored with at least a few scrape marks due to encounters with obstacles down the years; slow birds always kept the same height above ground—underbelly level with a man’s shoulders—and they would bank to avoid substantial buildings or mature trees, but any frailer obstructions they would push on through. Hence the individual patterns of scratches. However, a far easier way of telling them apart was by the graffiti carved on so many of their flanks; initials entwined in hearts, dates, place names, fragments of messages. These amply confirmed how very many slow birds there must be in all—something of which people could not otherwise have been totally convinced. For no one could keep track of a single slow bird. After each one had appeared—over hill, down dale, in the middle of a pasture or half way along a village street—it would fly onward slowly for any length of time between an hour and a day, covering any distance between a few score yards and a full mile. And vanish again. To reappear somewhere else unpredictably: far away or close by, maybe long afterwards or maybe soon.

Usually a bird would vanish, to reappear again.

Not always, though. Half a dozen times a year, within the confines of this particular island country, a slow bird would reach its journey’s end.

It would destroy itself, and all the terrain around it for a radius of two and a half miles, fusing the landscape instantly into a sheet of glass. A flat, circular sheet of glass. A polarized, limited zone of annihilation. Scant yards beyond its rim a person might escape unharmed, only being deafened and dazzled temporarily.

Hitherto no slow bird had been known to explode so as to overlap an earlier sheet of glass. Consequently many towns and villages clung close to the borders of what had already been destroyed, and news of a fresh glass plain would cause farms and settlements to spring up there. Even so, the bulk of people still kept fatalistically to the old historic towns. They assumed that a slow bird wouldn’t explode in their midst during their own lifetimes. And if it did, what would they know of it? Unless the glass happened merely to bisect a town—in which case, once the weeping and mourning was over, the remaining citizenry could relax and feel secure.

True, in the long term the whole country from coast to coast and from north to south would be a solid sheet of glass. Or perhaps it would merely be a checkerboard, of circles touching circles: a glass mosaic. With what in between? Patches of desert dust, if the climate dried up due to reflections from the glass. Or floodwater, swampland. But that day was still far distant: a hundred years away, two hundred, three. So people didn’t worry too much. They had been used to this all their lives long, and their parents before them. Perhaps one day the slow birds would stop coming. And going. And exploding. Just as they had first started, once. Certainly the situation was no different, by all accounts, anywhere else in the world. Only the seas were clear of slow birds. So maybe the human race would have to take to rafts one day. Though by then, with what would they build them? Meanwhile, people got by; and most had long ago given up asking why. For there was no answer.

The girl’s sister helped her rise. No bones broken, it seemed. Only an injury to dignity; and to her sail.

The other skaters had all coasted to a halt and were staring resentfully at the bird in their midst. Its belly and sides were almost bare of graffiti; seeing this, a number of youths hastened on to the glass, clutching penknives, rusty nails and such. But an umpire waved them back angrily.

“Shoo! Be off with you!” His gaze seemed to alight on Jason, and for a fatuous moment Jason imagined that it was himself to whom the umpire was about to appeal; but the man called, “Master Tarnover!” instead, and Max Tarnover duck-waddled past then glided out over the glass, to confer.

Presently, the umpire cupped his hands. “We’re delaying the start for half an hour,” he bellowed. “Fair’s fair: young lady ought to have a chance to fix her sail, seeing as it wasn’t her fault.”

Jason noted a small crinkle of amusement on Tarnover’s face; for now either the other competitors would have to carry on prancing around tiring themselves with extra practice which none of them needed, or else troop off the glass for a recess and lose some psychological edge. In fact almost everyone opted for a break and some refreshments.

“Luck indeed!” snorted Mrs. Babbidge, as Max Tarnover clumped back their way.

Tarnover paused by Jason. “Frankly I’d say her sail’s a wreck,” he confided. “But what can you do? The Buckby lot would have been bitching on otherwise. ‘Oh, she could have won. If she’d had ten minutes to fix it.’ Bloody hunk of metal in the way.” Tarnover ran a lordly eye over Jason’s sail “What price skill, then?”

Daniel Babbidge regarded Tarnover with a mixture of hero worship and hostile partisanship on his brother’s behalf. Jason himself only nodded and said, “Fair enough.” He wasn’t certain whether Tarnover was acting generously—or with patronizing arrogance. Or did this word in his ear mean that Tarnover actually saw Jason as a valid rival for the silver punch-bowl this year round?

Obviously young Daniel did not regard Jason’s response as adequate. He piped up: “So where do you think the birds go, Master Tarnover, when they aren’t here?”

A good question: quite unanswerable, but Max Tarnover would probably feel obliged to offer an answer if only to maintain his pose of worldly wisdom. Jason warmed to his brother, while Mrs. Babbidge, catching on, cuffed the boy softly.

“Now don’t you go wasting Master Tarnover’s time. Happen he hasn’t given it a moment’s thought, all his born days.”

“Oh, but I have,” Tarnover said.

“Well?” the boy insisted.

“Well . . . maybe they don’t go anywhere at all.”

Mrs. Babbidge chuckled, and Tarnover flushed.

“What I mean is, maybe they just stop being in one place then suddenly they’re in the next place.”

“If only you could skate like that!” Jason laughed. “Bit slow, though . . . Everyone would still pass you by at the last moment.”

“They must go somewhere,” young Dan said doggedly. “Maybe it’s somewhere we can’t see. Another sort of place, with other people. Maybe it’s them that builds the birds.”

“Look, freckleface, the birds don’t come from Russ, or ‘Merica, or anywhere else. So where’s this other place?”

“Maybe it’s right here, only we can’t see it.”

“And maybe pigs have wings.” Tarnover looked about to march towards the cider and perry stall; but Mrs. Babbidge interposed herself smartly.

“Oh, as to that, I’m sure our sow Betsey couldn’t fly, wings or no wings. Just hanging in the air like that, and so heavy.”

“Weighed a bird recently, have you?”

“They look heavy, Master Tarnover.”

Tarnover couldn’t quite push his way past Mrs. Babbidge, not with his sail impeding him. He contented himself with staring past her, and muttering, “If we’ve nothing sensible to say about them, in my opinion it’s better to shut up.”

“But it isn’t better,” protested Daniel. “They’re blowing the world up. Bit by bit. As though they’re at war with us.”

Jason felt humorously inventive. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe these other people of Dan’s are at war with us—only they forgot to mention it. And when they’ve glassed us all, they’ll move in for the holidays. And skate happily for ever more.”

“Damn long war, if that’s so,” growled Tarnover. “Been going on over a century now.”

“Maybe that’s why the birds fly so slowly,” said Daniel. “What if a year to us is like an hour to those people? That’s why the birds don’t fall. They don’t have time to.”

Tarnover’s expression was almost savage. “And what if the birds come only to punish us for our sins? What if they’re simply a miraculous proof—”

“—that the Lord cares about us? And one day He’ll forgive us? Oh goodness,” and Mrs. Babbidge beamed, “surely you aren’t one of them? A bright lad like you. Me, I don’t even put candles in the window or tie knots in the bedsheets anymore to keep the birds away.” She ruffled her younger son’s mop of red hair. “Every one dies sooner or later, Dan. You’ll get used to it, when you’re properly grown up. When it’s time to die, it’s time to die.”

Tarnover looked furiously put out; though young Daniel also seemed distressed in a different way.

“And when you’re thirsty, it’s time for a drink!” Spying an opening, and his opportunity, Tarnover sidled quickly around Mrs. Babbidge and strode off. She chuckled as she watched him go.

“That’s put a kink in his sail!”

Forty-one other contestants, besides Jason and Tarnover, gathered between the starting flags, though not the girl who had fallen. Despite all best efforts she was out of the race, and sat morosely watching.

Then the Tuckerton umpire blew his whistle, and they were off.

The course was in the shape of a long bloomer loaf. First, it curved gently along the edge of the glass for three quarters of a mile, then bent sharply around in a half circle on to the straight, returning towards Tuckerton. At the end of the straight, another sharp half circle brought it back to the starting—and finishing—line. Three circuits in all were to be skate-sailed before the victory whistle blew. Much more than this, and the lag between leaders and stragglers could lead to confusion.

By the first turn Jason was ahead of the rest of the field, and all his practice since last year was paying off. His skates raced over the glass. The breeze thrust him convincingly. As he rounded the end of the loaf, swinging his sail to a new pitch, he noted Max Tarnover hanging back in fourth place. Determined to increase his lead, Jason leaned so close to the flag on the entry to the straight that he almost tipped it. Compensating, he came poorly on to the straight, losing a few yards. By the time Jason swept over the finishing line for the first time, to cheers from Atherton villagers, Tarnover was in third position; though he was making no very strenuous effort to overhaul, Jason realized that Tarnover was simply letting him act as pacemaker.

But a skate-sailing race wasn’t the same as a foot race, where a pacemaker was generally bound to drop back eventually. Jason pressed on. Yet by the second crossing of the line Tarnover was ten yards behind, moving without apparent effort as though he and his sail and the wind and the glass were one. Noting Jason’s glance, Tarnover grinned and put on a small burst of speed to push the front-runner to even greater efforts. And as he entered on the final circuit Jason also noted the progress of the slow bird, off to his left, now midway between the long curve and the straight, heading in the general direction of Edgewood. Even the laggards ought to clear the final straight before the thing got in their way, he calculated.

This brief distraction was a mistake. Tarnover was even closer behind him now, his sail pitched at an angle which must have made his wrists ache. Already he was drifting aside to overhaul Jason. And at this moment Jason grasped how he could win: by letting Tarnover think that he was pushing Jason beyond his capacity—so that Tarnover would be fooled into overexerting himself too soon.

“Can’t catch me!” Jason called into the wind, guessing that Tarnover would misread this as braggadocio and assume that Jason wasn’t really thinking ahead. At the same time Jason slackened his own pace slightly, hoping that his rival would fail to notice, since this was at odds with his own boast. Pretending to look panicked, he let Tarnover overtake—and saw how Tarnover continued to trip his sail strenuously even though he was actually moving a little slower than before. Without realizing it, Tarnover had his angle wrong; he was using unnecessary wrist action.

Tarnover was in the lead now. Immediately all psychological pressure lifted from Jason. With ease and grace he stayed a few yards behind, just where he could benefit from the ‘eye’ of air in Tarnover’s wake. And thus he remained till half way down the final straight, feeling like a kestrel hanging in the sky with a mere twitch of its wings before swooping.

He held back; held back. Then suddenly changing the cant of his sail he did swoop—into the lead again.

It was a mistake. It had been a mistake all along. For as Jason sailed past, Tarnover actually laughed. Jerking his brown and orange silk to an easier, more efficient pitch, Tarnover began to pump his legs, skating like a demon. Already he was ahead again. By five yards. By ten. And entering the final curve.

As Jason tried to catch up in the brief time remaining, he knew how he had been fooled; though the knowledge came too late. So cleverly had Tarnover fixed Jason’s mind on the stance of the sails, by holding his own in such a way—a way, too, which deliberately created that convenient eye of air—that Jason had quite neglected the contribution of his legs and skates, taking this for granted, failing to monitor it from moment to moment. It only took moments to recover and begin pumping his own legs too, but those few moments were fatal. Jason crossed the finish line one yard behind last year’s victor; who was this year’s victor too.

As he slid to a halt, bitter with chagrin, Jason was well aware that it was up to him to be gracious in defeat rather than let Tarnover seize that advantage, too.

He called out, loud enough for everyone to hear: “Magnificent, Max! Splendid skating! You really caught me on the hop there.”

Tarnover smiled for the benefit of all onlookers.

“What a noisy family you Babbidges are,” he said softly; and skated off to be presented with the silver punch-bowl again.

Much later that afternoon, replete with roast pork and awash with Old Codger Ale, Jason was waving an empty beer mug about as he talked to Bob Marchant in the midst of a noisy crowd. Bob, who had fallen so spectacularly the year before. Maybe that was why he had skated diffidently today and been one of the laggards.

The sky was heavily overcast, and daylight too was failing. Soon the homeward trek would have to start.

One of Jason’s drinking and skating partners from Atherton, Sam Partridge, thrust his way through.

“Jay! That brother of yours: he’s out on the glass. He’s scrambled up on the back of the bird. He’s riding it.”

“What?”

Jason sobered rapidly, and followed Partridge with Bob Marchant tagging along behind.

Sure enough, a couple of hundred yards away in the gloaming Daniel was perched astride the slow bird. His red hair was unmistakable. By now a lot of other people were beginning to take notice and point him out. There were some ragged cheers, and a few angry protests.

Jason clutched Partridge’s arm. “Somebody must have helped him up. Who was it?”

“Haven’t the foggiest. That boy needs a good walloping.”

“Daniel Babbidge!” Mrs. Babbidge was calling nearby. She too had seen. Cautiously she advanced on to the glass, wary of losing her balance.

Jason and company were soon at her side. “It’s all right, Mum,” he assured her. “I’ll fetch the little . . . perisher.”

Courteously Bob Marchant offered his arm and escorted Mrs. Babbidge back on the rough ground again. Jason and Partridge stepped flat-foot out across the vitrified surface accompanied by at least a dozen curious spectators.

“Did anyone spot who helped him up?” Jason demanded of them. No one admitted it.

When the group was a good twenty yards from the bird, everyone but Jason halted. Pressing on alone, Jason pitched his voice so that only the boy would hear.

“Slide off,” he ordered grimly. “I’ll catch you. Right monkey you’ve made of your mother and me.”

“No,” whispered Daniel. He clung tight, hands splayed like suckers, knees pressed to the flanks of the bird as though he was a jockey. “I’m going to see where it goes.”

“Goes? Hell, I’m not going to waste time arguing. Get down!” Jason gripped an ankle and tugged, but this action only served to pull him up against the bird. Beside Dan’s foot a heart with the entwined initials ‘ZB’ and ‘EF’ was carved. Turning away, Jason shouted, “Give me a hand, you lot! Come on someone, bunk me up!”

Nobody volunteered, not even Partridge.

“It won’t bite you! There’s no harm in touching it. Any kid knows that.” Angrily he flat-footed back towards them. “Damn it all, Sam.”

So now Partridge did shuffle forward, and a couple of other men too. But then they halted, gaping. Their expression puzzled Jason momentarily—till Sam Partridge gestured; till Jason swung round.

The air behind was empty.

The slow bird had departed suddenly. Taking its rider with it.

Half an hour later only the visitors from Atherton and their hosts remained on Tuckerton green. The Buckby, Edgewood and Hopperton contingents had set off for home. Uncle John was still consoling a snivelling Mrs. Babbidge. Most faces in the surrounding crowd looked sympathetic, though there was a certain air of resentment, too, among some Tuckerton folk that a boy’s prank had cast this black shadow over their Mayday festival.

Jason glared wildly around the onlookers. “Did nobody see who helped my brother up?” he cried. “Couldn’t very well have got up himself, could he? Where’s Max Tarnover? Where is he?”

“You aren’t accusing Master Tarnover, by any chance?” growled a beefy farmer with a large wart on his cheek. “Sour grapes, Master Babbidge! Sour grapes is what that sounds like, and we don’t like the taste of those here.”

“Where is he, dammit?”

Uncle John laid a hand on his nephew’s arm. “Jason, lad. Hush. This isn’t helping your Mum.”

But then the crowd parted, and Tarnover sauntered through, still holding the silver punch-bowl he had won.

“Well, Master Babbidge?” he enquired. “I hear you want a word with me.”

“Did you see who helped my brother onto that bird? Well, did you?”

“I didn’t see,” replied Tarnover coolly.

It had been the wrong question, as Jason at once realized. For if Tarnover had done the deed himself, how could he possibly have watched himself do it?

“Then did you—”

“Hey up,” objected the same farmer. “You’ve asked him, and you’ve had his answer.”

“And I imagine your brother has had his answer too,” said Tarnover. “I hope he’s well satisfied with it. Naturally I offer my heartfelt sympathies to Mrs. Babbidge. If indeed the boy has come to any harm. Can’t be sure of that, though, can we?”

“Course we can’t!”

Jason tensed, and Uncle John tightened his grip on him. “No, lad. There’s no use.”

It was a sad and quiet long walk homeward that evening for the three remaining Babbidges, though a fair few Atherton folk behind sang blithely and tipsily, nonetheless. Occasionally Jason looked around for Sam Partridge, but Sam Partridge seemed to be successfully avoiding them.

The next day, May the second, Mrs. Babbidge rallied and declared it to be a “sorting out” day; which meant a day for handling all Daniel’s clothes and storybooks and old toys lovingly before setting them to one side out of sight. Jason himself she packed off to his job at the sawmill, with a flea in his ear for hanging around her like a whipped hound.

And as Jason worked at trimming planks that day the same shamed, angry frustrated thoughts skated round and round a single circuit in his head:

“In my book he’s a murderer . . . You don’t give a baby a knife to play with. He was cool as a cucumber afterwards. Not shocked, no. Smug . . .”

Yet what could be done about it? The bird might have hung around for hours more. Except that it hadn’t . . .

Set out on a quest to find Daniel? But how? And where? Birds dodged around. Here, there and everywhere. No rhyme or reason to it. So what a useless quest that would be!

A quest to prove that Dan was alive. And if he were alive, then Tarnover hadn’t killed him.

“In my book he’s a murderer . . .” Jason’s thoughts churned on impotently. It was like skating with both feet tied together.

Three days later a slow bird was sighted out Edgeway way. Jim Mitchum, the Edgewood thatcher, actually sought Jason out at the sawmill to bring him the news. He’d been coming over to do a job, anyway.

No doubt his visit was an act of kindness, but it filled Jason with guilt quite as much as it boosted his morale. For now he was compelled to go and see for himself, when obviously there was nothing whatever to discover. Downing tools, he hurried home to collect his skates and sail, and sped over the glass to Edgewood.

The bird was still there; but it was a different bird. There was no carved heart with the love-tangled initials ‘ZB’ and ‘EF.

And four days after that, mention came from Buckby of a bird spotted a few miles west of the village on the main road to Harborough. This time Jason borrowed a horse and rode. But the mention had come late; the bird had flown on a day earlier. Still, he felt obliged to search the area of the sighting for a fallen body or some other sign.

And the week after that a bird vanished only a mile from Atherton itself; this one vanished even as Jason arrived on the scene . . .

Then one night Jason went down to the Wheatsheaf. It was several weeks, in fact, since he had last been in the alehouse; now he meant to get drunk, at the long bar under the horse brasses.

Sam Partridge, Ned Darrow and Frank Yardley were there boozing; and an hour or so later Ned Darrow was offering beery advice.

“Look, Jay, where’s the use in you dashing off every time someone spots a ruddy bird? Keep that up and you’ll make a ruddy fool of yourself. And what if a bird pops up in Tuckerton? Bound to happen sooner or later. Going to rush off there too, are you, with your tongue hanging out?”

“All this time you’re taking off work,” said Frank Yardley. “You’ll end up losing the job. Get on living is my advice.”

“Don’t know about that,” said Sam Partridge unexpectedly. “Does seem to me as man ought to get his own back. Supposing Tarnover did do the dirty on the Babbidges—”

“What’s there to suppose about it?” Jason broke in angrily.

“Easy on, Jay. I was going to say as Babbidges are Atherton people. So he did the dirty on us all, right?”

“Thanks to some people being a bit slow in their help.”

Sam flushed. “Now don’t you start attacking everyone right and left. No one’s perfect. Just remember who your real friends are, that’s all.”

“Oh, I’ll remember, never fear.”

Frank inclined an empty glass from side to side. “Right. Whose round is it?”

One thing led to another, and Jason had a thick head the next morning.

In the evening Ned banged on the Babbidge door.

“Bird on the glass, Sam says to tell you,” he announced. “How about going for a spin to see it?”

“I seem to recall last night you said I was wasting my time.”

“Ay, running around all over the country. But this is just for a spin. Nice evening, like. Mind, if you don’t want to bother . . . Then we can all have a few jars in the Wheatsheaf afterwards.”

The lads must really have missed him over the past few weeks. Quickly Jason collected his skates and sail.

“But what about your supper?” asked his mother. “Sheep’s head broth.”

“Oh, it’ll keep, won’t it? I might as well have a pasty or two in the Wheatsheaf.”

“Happen it’s better you get out and enjoy yourself,” she said. “I’m quite content. I’ve got things to mend.”

Twenty minutes later Jason, Sam, and Ned were skimming over the glass two miles out. The sky was crimson with banks of stratus, and a river of gold ran clear along the horizon: foul weather tomorrow, but a glory this evening. The glassy expanse flowed with red and gold reflections: a lake of blood, fire, and molten metal. They did not at first spot the other solitary sail-skater, nor he them, till they were quite close to the slow bird.

Sam noticed first. “Who’s that, then?”

The other sail was brown and orange. Jason recognized it easily. “It’s Tarnover!”

“Now’s your chance to find out, then,” said Ned.

“Do you mean that?”

Ned grinned. “Why not? Could be fun. Let’s take him.”

Pumping their legs, the three sail-skaters sped apart to outflank Tarnover—who spied them and began to turn. All too sharply, though. Or else he may have run into a slick of water on the glass. To Jason’s joy Max Tarnover, champion of the five villages, skidded.

They caught him. This done, it didn’t take the strength of an ox to stop a skater from going anywhere else, however much he kicked and struggled. But Jason hit Tarnover on the jaw, knocking him senseless.

“What the hell you do that for?” asked Sam, easing Tarnover’s fall on the glass.

“How else do we get him up on the bird?”

Sam stared at Jason, then nodded slowly.

It hardly proved the easiest operation to hoist a limp and heavy body on to a slowly moving object while standing on a slippery surface; but after removing their skates they succeeded. Before too long Tarnover lay sprawled atop, legs dangling. Quickly with his pocket knife Jason cut the hemp cord from Tarnover’s sail and bound his ankles together, running the tether tightly underneath the bird.

Presently Tarnover awoke, and struggled groggily erect. He groaned, rocked sideways, recovered his balance.

“Babbidge . . . Partridge, Ned Darrow . . .? What the hell are you up to?”

Jason planted hands on hips. “Oh, we’re just playing a little prank, same as you did on my brother Dan. Who’s missing now; maybe forever, thanks to you.”

“I never—”

“Admit it, then we might cut you down.”

“And happen we mightn’t,” said Ned. “Not till the Wheatsheaf closes. But look on the bright side: happen we might.”

Tarnover’s legs twitched as he tested the bonds. He winced. “I honestly meant your brother no harm.”

Sam smirked. “Nor do we mean you any. Ain’t our fault if a bird decides to fly off. Anyway, only been here an hour or so. Could easily be here all night. Right, lads?”

“Right,” said Ned. “And I’m thirsty. Race you? Last ones buys?”

“He’s admitted he did it,” said Jason. “You heard him.”

“Look, I’m honestly very sorry if—”

“Shut up,” said Sam. “You can stew for a while, seeing as how you’ve made the Babbidges stew. You can think about how sorry you really are.” Partridge hoisted his sail.

It was not exactly how Jason had envisioned his revenge. This seemed like an anticlimax. Yet, to Tarnover no doubt it was serious enough. The champion was sweating slightly . . . Jason hoisted his sail, too. Presently the men skated away . . . to halt by unspoken agreement a quarter of a mile away. They stared back at Tarnover’s little silhouette upon his metal steed.

“Now if it was me,” observed Sam, “I’d shuffle myself along till I fell off the front . . . Rub you a bit raw, but that’s how to do it.”

“No need to come back, really,” said Ned. “Hey, what’s he trying?”

The silhouette had ducked. Perhaps Tarnover had panicked and wasn’t thinking clearly, but it looked as if he was trying to lean over far enough to unfasten the knot beneath, or free one of his ankles. Suddenly the distant figure inverted itself. It swung right round the bird, and Tarnover’s head and chest were hanging upside down, his arms flapping. Or perhaps Tarnover had hoped the cord would snap under his full weight; but snap it did not. And once he was stuck in that position there was no way he could recover himself upright again, or do anything about inching along to the front of the bird.

Ned whistled. “He’s messed himself up now, and no mistake. He’s ruddy crucified himself.”

Jason hesitated before saying it: “Maybe we ought to go back? I mean, a man can die hanging upside-down too long . . . Can’t he?” Suddenly the whole episode seemed unclean, unsatisfactory.

“Go back?” Sam Partridge fairly snarled at him. “You were the big mouth last night. And whose idea was it to tie him to the bird? You wanted him taught a lesson, and he’s being taught one. We’re only trying to oblige you, Jay.”

“Yes, I appreciate that.”

“You made enough fuss about it. He isn’t going to wilt like a bunch of flowers in the time it takes us to swallow a couple of pints.”

And so they skated on, back to the Wheatsheaf in Atherton.

At ten thirty, somewhat the worse for wear, the three men spilled out of the alehouse into Sheaf Street. A quarter moon was dodging from rift to rift in the cloudy sky, shedding little light.

“I’m for bed,” said Sam. “Let the sod wriggle his way off.”

“And who cares if he don’t?” said Ned. “That way, nobody’ll know. Who wants an enemy for life? Do you, Jay? This way you can get on with things. Happen Tarnover’ll bring your brother back from wherever it is.”

Shouldering his sail and swinging his skates, Ned wandered off up Sheaf Street.

“But,” said Jason. He felt as though he had blundered into a midden. There was a reek of sordidness about what had taken place. The memory of Tarnover hanging upside-down had tarnished him.

“But what?” said Sam.

Jason made a show of yawning. “Nothing. See you.” And he set off homeward.

But as soon as he was out of sight of Sam he slipped down through Butcher’s Row in the direction of the glass alone. It was dark out there with no stars and only an occasional hint of moonlight, yet the breeze was steady and there was nothing to trip over on the glass. The bird wouldn’t have moved more than a hundred yards. Jason made good speed.

The slow bird was still there. But Tarnover wasn’t with it; its belly was barren of any hanged man.

As Jason skated to a halt, to look closer, figures arose in the darkness from where they had been lying flat upon the glass, covered by their sails. Six figures. Eight. Nine. All had lurked within two or three hundred yards of the bird, though not too close—nor any in the direction of Atherton. They had left a wide corridor open, which now they closed.

As the Tuckerton men moved in on him, Jason stood still, knowing that he had no chance.

Max Tarnover skated up, accompanied by that same beefy farmer with the wart.

“I did come back for you,” began Jason.

The farmer spoke, but not to Jason. “Did he now? That’s big of him. Could have saved his time, what with Tim Earnshaw happening along—when Master Tarnover was gone a long time. So what’s to be done with him, eh?”

“Tit for tat, I’d say,” said another voice.

“Let him go and look for his kid brother,” offered a third. “Instead of sending other folk on his errands. What a nerve.”

Tarnover himself said nothing; he just stood in the night silently.

So, presently, Jason was raised on to the back of the bird and his feet were tied tightly under it. But his wrists were bound together too, and for good measure the cord was linked through his belt.

Within a few minutes all the skaters had sped away towards Tuckerton.

Jason sat. Remembering Sam’s words he tried to inch forward, but with both hands fastened to his waist this proved impossible; he couldn’t gain purchase. Besides, he was scared of losing his balance as Tarnover had.

He sat and thought of his mother. Maybe she would grow alarmed when he didn’t come home. Maybe she would go out and rouse Uncle John . . . And maybe she had gone to bed already.

But maybe she would wake in the night and glance into his room and send help. With fierce concentration he tried to project thoughts and images of himself at her, two miles away.

An hour wore on, then two; or so he supposed from the moving of the moon-crescent. He wished he could slump forward and sleep. That might be best; then he wouldn’t know anything. He still felt drunk enough to pass out, even with his face pressed against metal. But he might easily slide to one side or the other in his sleep.

How could his mother survive a double loss? It seemed as though a curse had descended on the Babbidge family. But of course that curse had a human name; and the name was Max Tarnover. So for a while Jason damned him and imagined retribution by all the villagers of Atherton. A bloody feud. Cottages burnt. Perhaps a rape. Deaths even. No Mayday festival ever again.

But would Sam and Ned speak up? And would Atherton folk be sufficiently incensed, sufficiently willing to destroy the harmony of the five villages in a world where other things were so unsure? Particularly as some less than sympathetic soul might say that Jason, Sam, and Ned had started it all.

Jason was so involved in imagining a future feud between Atherton and Tuckerton that he almost forgot he was astride a slow bird. There was no sense of motion, no feeling of going anywhere. When he recollected where he was, it actually came as a shock.

He was riding a bird.

But for how long?

It had been around, what, six hours now? A bird could stay for a whole day. In which case he had another eighteen hours left to be rescued in. Or if it only stayed for half a day, that would take him through to morning. Just.

He found himself wondering what was underneath the metal skin of the bird. Something which could turn five miles of landscape into a sheet of glass, certainly. But other things too. Things that let it ignore gravity. Things that let it dodge in and out of existence. A brain of some kind, even?

“Can you hear me, bird?” he asked it. Maybe no one had ever spoken to a slow bird before.

The slow bird did not answer.

Maybe it couldn’t, but maybe it could hear him, even so. Maybe it could obey orders.

“Don’t disappear with me on your back,” he told it. “Stay here. Keep on flying just like this.”

But since it was doing just that already, he had no idea whether it was obeying him or not.

“Land, bird. Settle down onto the glass. Lie still.”

It did not. He felt stupid. He knew nothing at all about the bird. Nobody did. Yet somewhere, someone knew. Unless the slow birds did indeed come from God, as miracles, to punish. To make men God-fearing. But why should a God want to be feared? Unless God was insane, in which case the birds might well come from Him.

They were something irrational, something from elsewhere, something which couldn’t be understood by their victims any more than an ant colony understood the gardener’s boot, exposing the white eggs to the sun and the sparrows.

Maybe something had entered the seas from elsewhere the previous century, something that didn’t like land dwellers. Any of them. People or sheep, birds or worms or plants . . . It didn’t seem likely. Salt water would rust steel, but for the first time in his life Jason thought about it intently.

“Bird, what are you? Why are you here?” Why, he thought, is anything here? Why is there a world and sky and stars? Why shouldn’t there simply be nothing for ever and ever?

Perhaps that was the nature of death: nothing for ever and ever. And one’s life was like a slow bird. Appearing then vanishing, with nothing before and nothing after.

An immeasurable period of time later, dawn began to streak the sky behind him, washing it from black to grey. The greyness advanced slowly overhead as thick clouds filtered the light of the rising but hidden sun. Soon there was enough illumination to see clear all around. It must be five o’clock. Or six. But the grey glass remained blankly empty.

Who am I? wondered Jason, calm and still. Why am I conscious of a world? Why do people have minds, and think thoughts? For the first time in his life he felt that he was really thinking—and thinking had no outcome. It led nowhere.

He was, he realized, preparing himself to die. Just as all the land would die, piece by piece, fused into glass. Then no one would think thoughts any more, so that it wouldn’t matter if a certain Jason Babbidge had ceased thinking at half past six one morning late in May. After all, the same thing happened every night when you went to sleep, didn’t it? You stopped thinking. Perhaps everything would be purer and cleaner afterwards. Less untidy, less fretful: a pure ball of glass. In fact, not fretful at all, even if all the stars in the sky crashed into each other, even if the earth was swallowed by the sun. Silence, forever: once there was no one about to hear.

Maybe this was the message of the slow birds. Yet people only carved their initials upon them. And hearts. And the names of places which had been vitrified in a flash; or else which were going to be.

I’m becoming a philosopher, thought Jason in wonder.

He must have shifted into some hyperconscious state of mind, full of lucid clarity, though without immediate awareness of his surroundings, for he was not fully aware that help had arrived until the cord binding his ankles was cut and his right foot thrust up abruptly, toppling him off the other side of the bird into waiting arms.

Sam Patridge, Ned Darrow, Frank Yardley, and Uncle John, and Brian Sefton from the sawmill—who ducked under the bird brandishing a knife, and cut the other cord to free his wrists.

They retreated quickly from the bird, pulling Jason with them. He resisted feebly. He stretched an arm towards the bird.

“It’s all right, lad,” Uncle John soothed him.

“No, I want go go,” he protested.

“Eh?”

At that moment the slow bird, having hung around long enough, vanished; and Jason stared at where it had been, speechless.

In the end his friends and uncle had to lead him away from that featureless spot on the glass, as though he was an idiot, someone touched by imbecility.

But Jason did not long remain speechless. Presently he began to teach. Or preach. One or the other. And people listened; at first in Atherton, then in other places too.

He had learned wisdom from the slow bird, people said of him. He had communed with the bird during the night’s vigil on the glass.

His doctrine of nothingness and silence spread, taking root in fertile soil, where there was soil remaining rather than glass—which was in most places, still. A paradox, perhaps: how eloquently he spoke—about being silent! But in so doing he seemed to make the silence of the glass lakes sing; and to this people listened with a new ear.

Jason traveled throughout the whole island. And this was another paradox, for what he taught was a kind of passivity, a blissful waiting for a death that was more than merely personal, a death which was also the death of the sun and stars and of all existence, a cosmic death which transfigured individual mortality. And sometimes he even sat on the back of a bird that happened by, to speak to a crowd—as though chancing fate or daring, begging the bird to take him away. But he never sat for more than an hour, then he would scramble down, trembling but quietly radiant. So besides being known as “The Silent Prophet,” he was also known as “The Man who rides the Slow Birds.” On balance, it could have been said that he worked great psychological good for the communities that survived; and his words even spread overseas. His mother died proud of him—so he thought—though there was always an element of wistful reserve in her attitude . . .

Many years later, when Jason Babbidge was approaching sixty, and still no bird had ever borne him away, he settled back in Atherton in his old home—to which pilgrims of silence would come, bringing prosperity to the village and particularly to the Wheatsheaf; managed now by the daughter of the previous landlord.

And every Mayday the skate-sailing festival was still held, but now always on the glass at Atherton. No longer was it a race and a competition; since in the end the race of life could not be won. Instead it had become a pageant, a glass ballet, a re-enactment of the events of many years ago—a passion play performed by the four remaining villages. Tuckerton and all its folk had been glassed ten years before by a bird which destroyed itself so that the circle of annihilation exactly touched that edge of the glass where Tuckerton had stood till then.

One morning, the day before the festival, a knock sounded on Jason’s door. His housekeeper, Martha Prestidge, was out shopping in the village so Jason answered.

A boy stood there. With red hair, and freckles.

For a moment Jason did not recognize the boy. But then he saw that it was Daniel. Daniel, unchanged. Or maybe grown up a little. Maybe a year older.

“Dan . . .?”

The boy surveyed Jason bemusedly: his balding crown, his sagging girth, his now spindly legs, and the heavy stick with a stylized bird’s head on which he leaned, gripping it with a liver-spotted hand.

“Jay,” he said after a moment, “I’ve come back.”

“Back? But. . . .”

“I know what the birds are now! They are weapons. Missiles. Tens and hundreds of thousands of them. There’s a war going on. But it’s like a game as well: a board game run by machines. Machines that think. It’s only been going on for a few days in their time. The missiles shunt to and fro through time to get to their destination. But they can’t shunt in the time of that world, because of cause and effect. So here’s where they do their shunting. In our world. The other possibility-world.”

“This is nonsense. I won’t listen.”

“But you must, Jay! It can be stopped for us before it’s too late. I know how. Both sides can interfere with each other’s missiles and explode them out of sight—that’s here—if they can find them fast enough. But the war over there’s completely out of control. There’s a winning pattern to it, but this only matters to the machines any longer, and they’re buried away underground. They build the birds at a huge rate with material from the Earth’s crust, and launch them into other-time automatically.”

“Stop it, Dan.”

“I fell off the bird over there—but I fell into a lake, so I wasn’t killed, only hurt. There are still some pockets of land left, around the Bases. They patched me up, the people there. They’re finished, in another few hours of their time—though it’s dozens of years to us. I brought them great hope, because it meant that all life isn’t finished. Just theirs. Life can go on. What we have to do is build a machine that will stop their machines finding the slow birds over here. By making interference in the air. There are waves. Like waves of light, but you can’t see them.”

“You’re raving.”

“Then the birds will still shunt here. But harmlessly. Without glassing us. And in a hundred years time, or a few hundred, they’ll even stop coming at all, because the winning pattern will be all worked out by then. One of the war machines will give up, because it lost the game. Oh, I know it ought to be able to give up right now! But there’s an element of the irrational programmed into the machines’ brains too, so they don’t give up too soon. When they do, everyone will be long dead there on land—and some surviving people think the war machines will start glassing the ocean floor as a final strategy before they’re through. But we can build an air-wave-maker. They’ve locked the knowledge in my brain. It’ll take us a few years to mine the right metals and tool up and provide a power source . . .”

Young Daniel ran out of breath briefly. He gasped. “They had a prototype slow bird. They sat me on it and sent me into other-time again. They managed to guide it. It emerged just ten miles from here. So I walked home.”

“Prototype? Air-waves? Power source? What are these?”

“I can tell you.”

“Those are just words. Fanciful babble. Oh, for this babble of the world to still itself!”

“Just give me time, and I’ll—”

“Time? You desire time? The mad ticking of men’s minds instead of the great pure void of eternal silence? You reject acceptance? You want us to swarm forever aimlessly, deafening ourselves with our noisy chatter?”

“Look . . . I suppose you’ve had a long, tough life, Jay. Maybe I shouldn’t have come here first.”

“Oh, but you should indeed, my impetuous fool of a brother. And I do not believe my life has been ill-spent.”

Daniel tapped his forehead. “It’s all in here. But I’d better get it down on paper. Make copies and spread it around—just in case Atherton gets glassed. Then somebody else will know how to build the transmitter. And life can go on. Over there they think maybe the human race is the only life in the whole universe. So we have a duty to go on existing. Only, the others have destroyed themselves arguing about which way to exist. But we’ve still got time enough. We can build ships to sail through space to the stars. I know a bit about that too. I tell you, my visit brought them real joy in their last hours, to know this was all still possible after all.”

“Oh, Dan.” And Jason groaned. Patriarch-like, he raised his staff and brought it crashing down on Daniel’s skull.

He had imagined that he mightn’t really notice the blood amidst Daniel’s bright red hair. But he did.

The boy’s body slumped in the doorway. With an effort Jason dragged it inside, then with an even greater effort up the oak stairs to the attic where Martha Prestidge hardly ever went. The corpse might begin to smell after a while, but it could be wrapped up in old blankets and such.

However, the return of his housekeeper down below distracted Jason. Leaving the body on the floor he hastened out, turning the key in the lock and pocketing it.

It had become the custom to invite selected guests back to the Babbidge house following the Mayday festivities, so Martha Prestidge would be busy all the rest of the day cleaning and cooking and setting the house to rights. As was the way of the housekeepers, she hinted that Jason would get under her feet, so off he walked down to the glass and out onto its perfect flatness to stand and meditate. Villagers and visitors spying the lone figure out there nodded gladly. Their prophet was at peace, presiding over their lives. And over their deaths.

The skate-sailing masque, the passion play, was enacted as brightly and gracefully as ever the next day.

It was May the third before Jason could bring himself to go up to the attic again, carrying sacking and cord. He unlocked the door.

But apart from a dark stain of dried blood the floorboards were bare. There was only the usual jumble stacked around the walls. The room was empty of any corpse. And the window was open.

So he hadn’t killed Daniel after all. The boy had recovered from the blow. Wild emotions stirred in Jason, disturbing his usual composure. He stared out of the window as though he might discover the boy lying below on the cobbles. But of Daniel there was no sign. He searched around Atherton like a haunted man, asking no questions but looking everywhere piercingly. Finding no clue, he ordered a horse and cart to take him to Edgewood. From there he traveled all around the glass, through Buckby and Hopperton; and now he asked wherever he went.

“Have you seen a boy with red hair?” The villagers told each other that Jason Babbidge had had another vision.

As well he might have, for within the year from far away news began to spread of a new teacher, with a new message. This new teacher was only a youth, but he had also ridden a slow bird—much farther than the Silent Prophet had ever ridden one.

However, it seemed that this young teacher was somewhat flawed, since he couldn’t remember all the details of his message, of what he had been told to say. Sometimes he would beat his head with his fists in frustration, till it seemed that blood would flow. Yet perversely this touch of theatre appealed to some restless, troublesome streak in his audiences. They believed him because they saw his anguish, and it mirrored their own suppressed anxieties.

Jason Babbidge spoke zealously to oppose the rebellious new ideas, exhausting himself. All the philosophical beauty he had brought into the dying world seemed to hang in the balance; and reluctantly he called for a “crusade” against the new teacher, to defend his own dream of Submission.

Two years later, he might well have wished to call his words back, for their consequence was that people were tramping across the countryside in between the zones of annihilation armed with pitchforks and billhooks, cleavers and sickles. Villages were burnt; many hundreds were massacred; and there were rapes—all of which seemed to recall an earlier nightmare of Jason’s from before the time of his revelation.

In the third year of this seemingly endless skirmish between the Pacificists and the Survivalists Jason died, feeling bitter beneath his cloak of serenity; and by way of burial his body was roped to a slow bird. Loyal mourners accompanied the bird in silent procession until it vanished hours later. A short while after that, quite suddenly at the Battle of Ashton Glass, it was all over, with victory for the Survivalists led by their young red-haired champion, who it was noted bore a striking resemblance to old Jason Babbidge, so that it almost seemed as though two basic principles of existence had been at contest in the world: two aspects of the selfsame being, two faces of one man.

Fifty years after that, by which time a full third of the land was glass and the climate was worsening, the Survival College in Ashton at last invented the promised machine; and from then on slow birds continued to appear and fly and disappear as before, but now none of them exploded.

And a hundred years after that all the slow birds vanished from the Earth. Somewhere, a war was over, logically and finally.

But by then, from an Earth four-fifths of whose land surface was desert or swamp—in between necklaces of barren shining glass—the first starship would arise into orbit.

It would be called Slow Bird. For it would fly to the stars, slowly. Slowly in human terms; two generations it would take. But that was comparatively fast.

A second starship would follow it; called Daniel.

Though after that massive and exhausting effort, there would be no more starships. The remaining human race would settle down to cultivate what remained of their garden in amongst the dunes and floods and acres of glass. Whether either starship would find a new home as habitable even as the partly glassed Earth, would be merely an article of faith.

On his deathbed, eighty years of age, in Ashton College lay Daniel who had never admitted to a family name.

The room was almost indecently overcrowded, though well if warmly ventilated by a wind whipping over Ashton Glass, and bright-lit by the silvery blaze reflecting from that vitrified expanse.

The dying old man on the bed beneath a single silken sheet was like a bird himself now: shrivelled with thin bones, a beak of a nose, beady eyes, and a rooster’s comb of red hair on his head.

He raised a frail hand as if to summon those closest even closer. Actually it was to touch the old wound in his skull which had begun to ache fiercely of late as though it was about to burst open or cave in, unlocking the door of memory—notwithstanding that no one now needed the key hidden there, since his Collegians had discovered it independently, given the knowledge that it existed.

Faces leaned over him: confident, dedicated faces.

“They’ve stopped exploding, then?” he asked, forgetfully.

“Yes, yes, years ago!” they assured him.

“And the stars—?”

“We’ll build the ships. We’ll discover how.”

His hand sank back on to the sheet. “Call one of them—”

“Yes?”

“Daniel. Will you?”

They promised him this.

“That way . . . my spirit . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . will fly . . .”

“Yes?”

“. . . into the silence of space.”

This slightly puzzled the witnesses of his death; for they could not know that Daniel’s last thought was that, when the day of the launching came, he and his brother might at last be reconciled.

THE MONKEY TREATMENT

George R.R. Martin

Here is the sad story of Kenny Dorchester, a huge and unhappy 367 pounds, who learns that there are worse things than being fat . . .

Kenny Dorchester was a fat man.

He had not always been a fat man, of course. He had come into the world a perfectly normal infant of modest weight, but the normalcy was short-lived in Kenny’s case, and before very long he had become a chubby-cheeked toddler well swaddled in baby fat. From then on it was all downhill and upscale so far as Kenny was concerned. He became a pudgy child, a corpulent adolescent, and a positively porcine college student, all in good turn, and by adulthood he had left all those intermediate steps behind and graduated into full obesity.

People become obese for a variety of complex reasons, some of them physiological. Kenny’s reason was relatively simple: food. Kenny Dorchester loved to eat. Often he would paraphrase Will Rogers, winking broadly, and tell his friends that he had never met a food he didn’t like. This was not precisely true, since Kenny loathed both liver and prune juice. Perhaps, if his mother had served them more often during his childhood, he would never have attained the girth and gravity that so haunted him at maturity. Unfortunately, Gina Dorchester was more inclined to lasagne and roast turkey with stuffing and sweet potatoes and chocolate pudding and veal cordon bleu and buttered corn-on-the-cob and stacks of blueberry pancakes (although not all in one meal) than she was to liver and prune juice, and once Kenny had expressed his preference in the matter by retching his liver back onto his plate, she obligingly never served liver and prune juice again.

Thus, all unknowing, she set her son on the soft, suety road to the monkey treatment. But that was long ago, and the poor woman really cannot be blamed, since it was Kenny himself who ate his way there.

Kenny loved pepperoni pizza, or plain pizza, or garbage pizza with everything on it, including anchovies. Kenny could eat an entire slab of barbecued ribs, either beef or pork, and the spicier the sauce was, the more he approved. He was fond of rare prime rib and roast chicken and Rock Cornish game hens stuffed with rice, and he was hardly the sort to object to a nice sirloin or a platter of fried shrimp or a hunk of kielbasa. He liked his burgers with everything on them, and fries and onion rings on the side, please. There was nothing you could do to his friend the potato that would possibly turn him against it, but he was also partial to pasta and rice, to yams candied and un-, and even to mashed rutabagas.

“Desserts are my downfall,” he would sometimes say, for he liked sweets of all varieties, especially devil’s food cake and cannoli and hot apple pie with cheese (Cheddar, please), or maybe cold strawberry pie with whipped cream. “Bread is my downfall,” he would say at other times, when it seemed likely that no dessert was forthcoming, and so saying he would rip off another chunk of sourdough or butter up another crescent roll or reach for another slice of garlic bread, which was a particular vice.

Kenny had a lot of particular vices. He thought himself an authority on both fine restaurants and fast-food franchises, and could discourse endlessly and knowledgeably about either. He relished Greek food and Chinese food and Japanese food and Korean food and German food and Italian food and French food and Indian food, and was always on the lookout for new ethnic groups so he might “expand my cultural horizons.” When Saigon fell, Kenny speculated about how many of the Vietnamese refugees would be likely to open restaurants. When Kenny traveled, he always made it a point to gorge himself on the area’s specialty, and he could tell you the best places to eat in any of twenty-four major American cities, while reminiscing fondly about the meals he had enjoyed in each of them. His favorite writers were James Beard and Calvin Trillin.

“I live a tasty life!” Kenny Dorchester would proclaim, beaming. And so he did. But Kenny also had a secret. He did not often think of it and never spoke it, but it was there nonetheless, down at the heart of him beneath all those great rolls of flesh, and not all his sauces could drown it, nor could his trusty fork keep it at bay.

Kenny Dorchester did not like being fat.

Kenny was like a man torn between two lovers, for while he loved his food with an abiding passion, he also dreamed of other loves, of women, and he knew that in order to secure the one he would have to give up the other, and that knowledge was his secret pain. Often he wrestled with the dilemmas posed by his situation. It seemed to Kenny that while it might be preferable to be slender and have a woman than to be fat and have only a crawfish bisque, nonetheless the latter was not entirely to be spurned. Both were sources of happiness, after all, and the real misery fell to those who gave up the one and failed to obtain the other. Nothing depressed or saddened Kenny so much as the sight of a fat person eating cottage cheese. Such pathetic human beings never seemed to get appreciably skinnier, Kenny thought, and were doomed to go through life bereft of both women and crawfish, a fate too grim to contemplate.

Yet despite all his misgivings, at times the secret pain inside Kenny Dorchester would flare up mightily, and fill him with a sense of resolve that made him feel as if anything might be possible. The sight of a particularly beautiful woman or the word of some new, painless, and wonderfully effective diet were particularly prone to trigger what Kenny thought of as “aberrations.” When such moods came, Kenny would be driven to diet.

Over the years he tried every diet there was, briefly and secretly. He tried Dr. Atkins’s diet and Dr. Stillman’s diet, the grapefruit diet and the brown rice diet. He tried the liquid protein diet, which was truly disgusting. He lived for a week on nothing but Slender and Sego, until he had run through all of the flavors and gotten bored. He joined a Pounds-Off club and attended a few meetings, until he discovered that the company of fellow dieters did him no good whatsoever, since all they talked about was food. He went on a hunger strike that lasted until he got hungry. He tried the fruit juice diet, and the drinking man’s diet (even though he was not a drinking man), and the martinis-and-whipped-cream diet (he omitted the martinis).

A hypnotist told him that his favorite foods tasted bad and he wasn’t hungry anyway, but it was a damned lie, and that was that for hypnosis. He had his behavior modified so he put down his fork between bites, used small plates that looked full even with tiny portions, and wrote down every thing he ate in a notebook. That left him with stacks of notebooks, a great many small dishes to wash, and unusual manual dexterity in putting down and picking up his fork. His favorite diet was the one that said you could eat all you wanted of your favorite food, so long as you ate nothing but that. The only problem was that Kenny couldn’t decide what was really his one true favorite, so he wound up eating ribs for a week, and pizza for a week, and Peking duck for a week (that was an expensive week), and losing no weight whatsoever, although he did have a great time.

Most of Kenny Dorchester’s aberrations lasted for a week or two. Then, like a man coming out of a fog, he would look around and realize that he was absolutely miserable, losing relatively little weight, and in imminent danger of turning into one of those cottage-cheese fatties he so pitied. At that point he would chuck the diet, go out for a good meal, and be restored to his normal self for another six months, until his secret pain surfaced again.

Then, one Friday night, he spied Henry Moroney at the Slab.

The Slab was Kenny’s favorite barbecue joint. It specialized in ribs, charred and meaty and served dripping with a sauce that Kenny approved of mightily. And on Fridays the Slab offered all the ribs you could eat for only fifteen dollars, which was prohibitively high for most people but a bargain for Kenny, who could eat a great many ribs. On that particular Friday, Kenny had just finished his first slab and was waiting for the second, sipping beer and eating bread, when he chanced to look up and realized, with a start, that the slim, haggard fellow in the next booth was, in fact, Henry Moroney.

Kenny Dorchester was nonplussed. The last time he had seen Henry Moroney, they had both been unhappy Pounds-Off members, and Moroney had been the only one in the club who weighed more than Kenny did. A great fat whale of a man, Moroney had carried about the cruel nickname of “Boney,” as he confessed to his fellow members. Only now the nickname seemed to fit. Not only was Moroney skinny enough to hint at a rib cage under his skin, but the table in front of him was absolutely littered with bones. That was the detail that intrigued Kenny Dorchester. All those bones. He began to count, and he lost track before very long, because all the bones were disordered, strewn about on empty plates in little puddles of drying sauce. But from the sheer mass of them it was clear that Moroney had put away at least four slabs of ribs, maybe five.

It seemed to Kenny Dorchester that Henry “Boney” Moroney knew the secret. If there were a way to lose hundreds of pounds and still be able to consume five slabs of ribs at a sitting, that was something Kenny desperately needed to know. So he rose and walked over to Moroney’s booth and squeezed in opposite him. “It is you,” he said.

Moroney looked up as if he hadn’t noticed Kenny until that very second. “Oh,” he said in a thin, tired voice. “You.” He seemed very weary, but Kenny thought that was probably natural for someone who had lost so much weight. Moroney’s eyes were sunk in deep gray hollows, his flesh sagged in pale, empty folds, and he was slouching forward with his elbows on the table as if he were too exhausted to sit up straight. He looked terrible, but he had lost so much weight. . . .

“You look wonderful!” Kenny blurted. “How did you do it? How? You must tell me, Henry, really you must.”

“No,” Moroney whispered. “No, Kenny. Go away.”

Kenny was taken aback. “Really!” he declared. “That’s not very friendly. I’m not leaving until I know your secret, Henry. You owe it to me. Think of all the times we’ve broken bread together.”

“Oh, Kenny,” Moroney said, in his faint and terrible voice. “Go, please, go, you don’t want to know, it’s too . . . too. . . .” He stopped in midsentence, and a spasm passed across his face. He moaned. His head twisted wildly to the side, as if he were having some kind of fit, and his hands beat on the table. “Oooooo,” he said.

“Henry, what’s wrong?” Kenny said, alarmed. He was certain now that Boney Moroney had overdone this diet.

“Ohhhh,” Moroney sighed in sudden relief. “Nothing, nothing. I’m fine.” His voice had none of the enthusiasm of his words. “I’m wonderful, in fact. Wonderful, Kenny. I haven’t been so slim since . . . since . . . why, never. It’s a miracle.” He smiled faintly. “I’ll be at my goal, soon, and then it will be over. I think. Think I’ll be at my goal. Don’t know my weight, really.” He put a hand to his brow. “I am slender, though, truly I am. Don’t you think I look good?”

“Yes, yes,” Kenny agreed impatiently. “But how? You must tell me. Surely not those Pounds-Off phonies. . . .”

“No,” said Moroney weakly. “No, it was the monkey treatment. Here, I’ll write it down for you.” He took out a pencil and scrawled an address on a napkin.

Kenny stuffed the napkin into a pocket. “The monkey treatment? I’ve never heard of that. What is it?”

Henry Moroney licked his lips. “They . . .” he started, and then another fit hit him, and his head twitched around grotesquely. “Go,” he said to Kenny, “just go. It works, Kenny, yes, oh. The monkey treatment, yes. I can’t say more. You have the address. Excuse me.” He placed his hands flat on the table and pushed himself to his feet, then walked over to the cashier, shuffling like a man twice his age. Kenny Dorchester watched him go, and decided that Moroney had definitely overdone this monkey treatment, whatever it was. He had never had tics or spasms before, or whatever that had been.

“You have to have a sense of proportion about these things,” Kenny said stoutly to himself. He patted his pocket to make sure the napkin was still there, resolved that he would handle things more sensibly than Boney Moroney, and returned to his own booth and his second slab of ribs. He ate four that night, figuring that if he was going to start a diet tomorrow he had better get in some eating while the eating was good.

The next day being Saturday, Kenny was free to pursue the monkey treatment and dream of a new, slender him. He rose early, and immediately rushed to the bathroom to weigh himself on his digital scale, which he loved dearly because you didn’t have to squint down at the numbers, since they lit up nice and bright and precise in red. This morning they lit up as 367. He had gained a few pounds, but had hardly minded. The monkey treatment would strip them off again soon enough.

Kenny tried to phone ahead, to make sure this place was open on Saturday, but that proved to be impossible. Moroney had written nothing but an address, and there was no diet center at that listing in the Yellow Pages, nor a health club, nor a doctor. Kenny looked in the white pages under “Monkey,” but that yielded nothing. So there was nothing to do but go down there in person.

Even that was troublesome. The address was way down by the docks in a singularly unsavory neighborhood, and Kenny had a hard time getting a cab to take him there. He finally got his way by threatening to report the cabbie to the commissioner. Kenny Dorchester knew his rights.

Before long, though, he began to have his doubts. The narrow little streets they wound through were filthy and decaying, altogether unappetizing, and it occurred to Kenny that any diet center located down here might offer only dangerous quackery. The block in question was an old commercial strip gone to seed, and it put his hackles up even more. Half the stores were boarded closed, and the rest lurked behind filthy dark windows and iron gates. The cab pulled up in front of an absolutely miserable old brick storefront, flanked by two vacant lots full of rubble, its plate glass windows grimed over impenetrably. A faded Coca-Cola sign swung back and forth, groaning, above the door. But the number was the number that Boney Moroney had written down.

“Here you are,” the cabbie said impatiently, as Kenny peered out the taxi window, aghast.

“This does not look correct,” Kenny said. “I will investigate. Kindly wait here until I am certain this is the place.”

The cabbie nodded, and Kenny slid over and levered himself out of the taxi. He had taken two steps when he heard the cab shift gears and pull away from the curb, screeching. He turned and watched in astonishment. “Here, you can’t . . .” he began. But it did. He would most definitely report that man to the commissioner, he decided.

But meanwhile he was stranded down here, and it seemed foolish not to proceed when he had come this far. Whether he took the monkey treatment or not, no doubt they would let him use a phone to summon another cab. Kenny screwed up his resolution, and went on into the grimy, unmarked storefront. A bell tinkled as he opened the door.

It was dark inside. The dust and dirt on the windows kept out nearly all the sunlight, and it took a moment for Kenny’s eyes to adjust. When they did, he saw to his horror that he had walked into someone’s living room. One of those gypsy families that moved into abandoned stores, he thought. He was standing on a threadbare carpet, and around and about him was a scatter of old furniture, no doubt the best the Salvation Army had to offer. An ancient black-and-white TV set crouched in one corner, staring at him blindly. The room stank of urine. “Sorry,” Kenny muttered feebly, terrified that some dark gypsy youth would come out of the shadows to knife him. “Sorry.” He had stepped backward, groping behind him for the doorknob, when the man came out of the back room.

“Ah!” the man said, spying Kenny at once from tiny bright eyes.

“Ah, the monkey treatment!” He rubbed his hands together and grinned. Kenny was terrified. The man was the fattest, grossest human being that Kenny had ever laid eyes on. He had squeezed through the door sideways. He was fatter than Kenny, fatter than Boney Moroney. He literally dripped with fat. And he was repulsive in other ways as well. He had the complexion of a mushroom, and minuscule little eyes almost invisible amid rolls of pale flesh. His corpulence seemed to have overwhelmed even his hair, of which he had very little. Barechested, he displayed vast areas of folded, bulging skin, and his huge breasts flopped as he came forward quickly and seized Kenny by the arm. “The monkey treatment!” he repeated eagerly, pulling Kenny forward. Kenny looked at him, in shock, and was struck dumb by his grin. When the man grinned, his mouth seemed to become half of his face, a grotesque semicircle full of shining white teeth.

“No,” Kenny said at last, “no, I have changed my mind.” Boney Moroney or no, he didn’t think he cared to try this monkey treatment if it was administered by such as this. In the first place, it clearly could not be very effective, or else the man would not be so monstrously obese. Besides, it was probably dangerous, some quack potion of monkey hormones or something like that. “NO!” Kenny repeated more forcefully, trying to wrest his arm free from the grasp of the grotesquerie who held it.

But it was useless. The man was distinctly larger and infinitely stronger than Kenny, and he propelled him across the room with ease, oblivious to Kenny’s protests, grinning like a maniac all the while. “Fat man,” he burbled, as if to prove his point he reached out and seized one of Kenny’s bulges and twisted painfully. “Fat, fat, fat, no good. Monkey treatment make you thin.”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Monkey treatment,” the man repeated, and somehow he had gotten behind Kenny. He put his weight against Kenny’s back and pushed, and Kenny staggered through a curtained doorway into the back room. The smell of urine was much stronger in there, strong enough to make him want to retch. It was pitch black, and from all sides Kenny heard rustlings and scurryings in the darkness. Rats, he thought wildly. Kenny was deathly afraid of rats. He fumbled about and propelled himself toward the square dim light that marked the curtain he had come through.

Before he was quite there, a high-pitched chittering sounded suddenly from behind him, sharp and rapid as fire from a machine gun. Then another voice took it up, then a third, and suddenly the dark was alive with the terrible hammering noise. Kenny put his hands over his ears and staggered through the curtain, but just as he emerged he felt something brush the back of his neck, something warm and hairy. “Aieeee!” he screamed, dancing out into the front room where the tremendous bare-chested madman was waiting patiently. Kenny hopped from one foot to the other, screeching, “Aieeee, a rat, a rat on my back. Get it off, get it off! He was trying to grab for it with both hands, but the thing was very quick, and shifted around so cleverly that he couldn’t get ahold of it. But he felt it there, alive, moving.”Help me, help me!” he called out. “A rat!”

The proprietor grinned at him and shook his head, so all his many chins went bobbing merrily. “No, no,” he said. “No rat, fat man. Monkey. You get the monkey treatment.” Then he stepped forward and seized Kenny by the elbow again, and drew him over to a full-length mirror mounted on the wall. It was so dim in the room that Kenny could scarcely make out anything in the mirror, except that it wasn’t wide enough and chopped off both his arms. The man stepped back and yanked a pull-cord dangling from the ceiling, and a single bare lightbulb clicked on overhead. The bulb swung back and forth, back and forth, so the light shifted crazily. Kenny Dorchester trembled and stared at the mirror.

“Oh,” he said.

There was a monkey on his back.

Actually it was on his shoulders, its legs wrapped around his thick neck and twined together beneath his triple chin. He could feel its monkey hair scratching the back of his neck, could feel its warm little monkey paws lightly grasping his ears. It was a very tiny monkey. As Kenny looked into the mirror, he saw it peek out from behind his head, grinning hugely. It had quick darting eyes, coarse brown hair, and altogether too many shiny white teeth for Kenny’s liking. Its long prehensile tail swayed about restlessly, like some hairy snake that had grown out of the back of Kenny’s skull.

Kenny’s heart was pounding away like some great air hammer lodged in his chest, and he was altogether distressed by this place, this man, and this monkey, but he gathered all his reserves and forced himself to be calm. It wasn’t a rat, after all. The little monkey couldn’t harm him. It had to be a trained monkey, the way it had perched on his shoulders. Its owner must let it ride around like this, and when Kenny had come unwillingly through that curtain, it had probably mistaken him. All fat men look alike in the dark.

Kenny grabbed behind him and tried to pull the monkey loose, but somehow he couldn’t seem to get a grip on it. The mirror, reversing everything, just made it worse. He jumped up and down ponderously, shaking the entire room and making the furniture leap around every time he landed, but the monkey held on tight to his ears and could not be dislodged.

Finally, with what Kenny thought was incredible aplomb under the circumstances, he turned to the gross proprietor and said, “Your monkey, sir. Kindly help me remove it.”

“No, no,” the man said. “Make you skinny. Monkey treatment. You no want to be skinny?”

“Of course I do,” Kenny said unhappily, “but this is absurd.” He was confused. This monkey on his back seemed to be part of the monkey treatment, but that certainly didn’t make very much sense.

“Go,” the man said. He reached up and snapped off the light with a sharp tug that sent the bulb careening wildly again. Then he started toward Kenny, who backpedaled nervously. “Go,” the man repeated, as he grabbed Kenny’s arm again. “Out, out. You get monkey treatment, you go now.”

“See here!” Kenny said furiously. “Let go of me! Get this monkey off me, do you hear? I don’t want your monkey! Do you hear me? Quit pushing, sir! I tell you, I have friends with the police department, you aren’t going to get away with this. Here now . . .”

But all his protestations were useless. The man was a veritable tidal wave of sweating, smelling pale flesh, and he put his weight against Kenny and propelled him helplessly toward the door. The bell rang again as he pulled it open and shoved Kenny out into the garish bright sunlight.

“I’m not going to pay for this!” Kenny said stoutly, staggering. “Not a cent, do you hear?”

“No charge for monkey treatment,” the man said, grinning.

“At least let me call a cab,” Kenny began, but it was too late, the man had closed the door. Kenny stepped forward angrily and tried to yank it back open, but it did not budge. Locked. “Open up in there!” Kenny demanded at the top of his lungs. There was no reply. He shouted again, and grew suddenly and uncomfortably aware that he was being stared at. Kenny turned around. Across the street three old winos were sitting on the stoop of a boarded-up store, passing a bottle in a brown paper bag and regarding him through wary eyes.

That was when Kenny Dorchester recalled that he was standing there in the street in broad daylight with a monkey on his back.

A flush crept up his neck and spread across his cheeks. He felt very silly. “A pet!” he shouted to the winos, forcing a smile. “Just my little pet!” They went on staring. Kenny gave a last angry look at the locked door, and set off down the street, his legs pumping furiously. He had to get to someplace private.

Rounding the corner, he came upon a dark, narrow alley behind two gray old tenement buildings, and ducked inside, wheezing for breath. He sat down heavily on a trash can, pulled out his handkerchief, and mopped his brow. The monkey shifted just a bit, and Kenny felt it move. “Off me!” he shouted, reaching up and back again to try to wrench it off by the scruff of its neck, only to have it elude him once more. He tucked away his handkerchief and groped behind his head with both hands, but he just couldn’t get ahold of it. Finally, exhausted, he stopped, and tried to think.

The legs! he thought. The legs under his chins! That’s the ticket! Very calmly and deliberately, he reached up, felt for the monkey’s legs, and wrapped one big fleshy hand around each of them. He took a deep breath and then savagely tried to yank them apart, as if they were two ends of a giant wishbone.

The monkey attacked him.

One hand twisted his right ear painfully, until it felt like it was being pulled clean off his head. The other started hammering against his temple, beating a furious tattoo. Kenny Dorchester yelped in distress and let go of the monkey’s tegs—which he hadn’t budged for all his efforts. The monkey quit beating on him and released his ear. Kenny sobbed, half with relief and half with frustration. He felt wretched.

He sat there in that filthy alley for ages, defeated in his efforts to remove the monkey and afraid to go back to the street where people would point at him and laugh, or make rude, insulting comments under their breath. It was difficult enough going through life as a fat man, Kenny thought. How much worse, then, to face the cruel world as a fat man with a monkey on his back. Kenny did not want to know. He resolved to sit there on that trash can in the dark alley until he died or the monkey died, rather than face shame and ridicule on the streets.

His resolve endured about an hour. Then Kenny Dorchester began to get hungry. Maybe people would laugh at him, but they had always laughed at him, so what what did it matter? Kenny rose and dusted himself off, while the monkey settled itself more comfortably on his neck. He ignored it, and decided to go in search of a pepperoni pizza.

He did not find one easily. The abysmal slum in which he had been stranded had a surfeit of winos, dangerous-looking teenagers, and burned-out or boarded-up buildings, but it had precious few pizza parlors. Nor did it have any taxis. Kenny walked down the main thoroughfare with brisk dignity, looking neither left nor right, heading for safer neighborhoods as fast as his plump little legs could carry him. Twice he came upon phone booths, and eagerly fetched out a coin to summon transportation, but both times the phones proved to be out of order. Vandals, thought Kenny Dorchester, were as bad as rats.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of walking, he stumbled upon a sleazy café. The lettering on the window said JOHN’S GRILL, and there was a neon sign above the door that said, simply, EAT. Kenny was very familiar with those three lovely letters, and he recognized the sign two blocks off. It called to him like a beacon. Even before he entered, he knew it was rather unlikely that such a place would include pepperoni pizza on its menu, but by that time Kenny had ceased to care.

As he pushed the door aside, Kenny experienced a brief moment of apprehension, partially because he felt very out of place in the café, where the rest of the diners all appeared to be muggers, and partially because he was afraid they would refuse to serve him because of the monkey on his back. Acutely uncomfortable in the doorway, he moved quickly to a small table in an obscure corner, where he hoped to escape the curious stares. A gaunt gray-haired waitress in a faded pink uniform moved purposefully toward him, and Kenny sat with his eyes downcast, playing nervously with the salt, pepper, ketchup, dreading the moment when she arrived and said, “Hey, you can’t bring that thing in here!”

But when the waitress reached his table, she simply pulled a pad out of her apron pocket and stood poised, pencil in hand. “Well?” she demanded. “What’ll it be?”

Kenny stared up in shock, and smiled. He stammered a bit, then recovered himself and ordered a cheese omelet with a double side of bacon, coffee and a large glass of milk, and cinnamon toast. “Do hash browns come with?” he asked hopefully, but the waitress shook her head and parted.

What a marvelous, kind woman, Kenny thought as he waited for his meal and shredded a paper napkin thoughtfully. What a wonderful place! Why, they hadn’t even mentioned his monkey! How very polite of them.

The food arrived shortly. “Ahhhh,” Kenny said as the waitress laid it out in front of him on the Formica tabletop. He was ravenous. He selected a slice of cinnamon toast, and brought it to his mouth.

And a little monkey darted out from behind his head and snatched it clean away.

Kenny Dorchester sat in numb surprise for an instant, his suddenly empty hand poised before his open mouth. He heard the monkey eating his toast, chomping noisily. Then, before Kenny had quite comprehended what was happening, the monkey’s great long tail snaked in under his armpit, curled around his glass of milk, and spirited it up and away in the blink of an eye.

“Hey!” Kenny said, but he was much too slow. Behind his back he heard slurping, sucking sounds, and all of a sudden the glass came vaulting over his left shoulder. He caught it before it fell and smashed, and set it down unsteadily. The monkey’s tail came stealthily around and headed for his bacon. Kenny grabbed up a fork and stabbed at it, but the monkey was faster than he was. The bacon vanished, and the tines of the fork bent against the hard Formica uselessly.

By then Kenny knew he was in a race. Dropping the bent fork, he used his spoon to cut off a chunk of the omelet, dripping cheese, and he bent forward as he lifted it, quick as he could. The monkey was quicker. A little hand flashed in from somewhere, and the spoon had only a tantalizing gob of half-melted cheese remaining on it when it reached Kenny’s mouth. He lunged back toward his plate, and loaded up again, but it didn’t matter how fast he tried to be. The monkey had two paws and a tail, and once it even used a little monkey foot to snatch something away from him. In hardly any time at all, Kenny Dorchester’s meal was gone. He sat there staring down at the empty, greasy plate, and he felt tears gathering in his eyes.

The waitress reappeared without Kenny noticing. “My, you sure are a hungry one,” she said to him, ripping off his check from her pad and putting it in front of him. “Polished that off quicker than anyone I ever saw.”

Kenny looked up at her. “But I didn’t,” he protested. “The monkey ate it all!”

The waitress looked at him very oddly. “The monkey?” she said, uncertainly.

“The monkey,” Kenny said. He did not care for the way she was staring at him, like he was crazy or something.

“What monkey?” she asked. “You didn’t sneak no animals in here, did you? The board of health don’t allow no animals in here, mister.”

“What do you mean, sneak?” Kenny said in annoyance. “Why, the monkey is right on my—” He never got a chance to finish. Just then the monkey hit him, a tremendous hard blow on the left side of his face. The force of it twisted his head half-around, and Kenny yelped in pain and shock.

The waitress seemed concerned. “You OK, mister?” she asked. “You ain’t gonna have a fit, are you, twitching like that?”

“I didn’t twitch!” Kenny all but shouted. “The goddamned monkey hit me! Can’t you see?”

“Oh,” said the waitress, taking a step backward. “Oh, of course. Your monkey hit you. Pesky little things, ain’t they?”

Kenny pounded his fists on the table in frustration. “Never mind,” he said, “just never mind.” He snatched up the check—the monkey did not take that away from him, he noted—and rose. “Here,” he said, pulling out his wallet. “And you have a phone in this place, don’t you? Call me a cab, all right? You can do that, can’t you?”

“Sure,” the waitress said, moving to the register to ring up his meal. Everyone in the café was staring at him. “Sure, mister,” she muttered. “A cab. We’ll get you a cab right away.”

Kenny waited, fuming. The cab driver made no comment on his monkey. Instead of going home, he took the cab to his favorite pizza place, three blocks from his apartment. Then he stormed right in and ordered a large pepperoni. The monkey ate it all, even when Kenny tried to confuse it by picking up one slice in each hand and moving them simultaneously toward his mouth. Unfortunately, the monkey had two hands as well, both of them faster than Kenny’s.

When the pizza was completely gone, Kenny thought for a moment, summoned over the waitress, and ordered a second. This time he got a large anchovy. He thought that was very clever. Kenny Dorchester had never met anyone else beside himself who liked anchovy pizza. Those little salty fishes would be his salvation, he thought. To increase the odds, when the pizza arrived Kenny picked up the hot pepper shaker and covered it with enough hot peppers to ignite a major conflagration. Then, feeling confident, he tried to eat a slice.

The monkey liked anchovy pizza with lots of hot peppers. Kenny Dorchester almost wept.

He went from the pizza place to the Slab, from the Slab to a fine Greek restaurant to a local McDonald’s, from McDonald’s to a bakery that made the most marvelous chocolate eclairs. Sooner or later, Kenny Dorchester thought, the monkey would be full. It was only a very little monkey, after all. How much food could it eat? He would just keep on ordering food, he resolved, and the monkey would either reach its limits or rupture and die.

That day Kenny spent more than two hundred dollars on meals.

He got absolutely nothing to eat.

The monkey seemed to be a bottomless pit. If it had a capacity, that capacity was surely greater than the capacity of Kenny’s wallet. Finally he was forced to admit defeat. The monkey could not be stuffed into submission.

Kenny cast about for another tactic, and finally hit on it. Monkeys were stupid, after all, even invisible monkeys with prodigious appetites. Smiling slyly, Kenny went to a neighborhood supermarket, and picked up a box of banana pudding (it seemed appropriate) and a box of rat poison. Humming a spry little tune, he walked on home, and set to work making the pudding, stirring in liberal amounts of the rat poison as it cooked. The poison was nicely odorless. The pudding smelled wonderful. Kenny poured it into some dessert cups to cool, and watched television for an hour or so. Finally he rose nonchalantly, went to the refrigerator, and got out a pudding and a nice big spoon. He sat back down in front of the set, spooned up a generous glob of pudding, and brought it to his open mouth. Where he paused. And paused. And waited.

The monkey did nothing.

Maybe it was full at last, Kenny thought. He put aside the poisoned pudding and rushed back to his kitchen, where he found a box of vanilla wafers hiding on a shelf, and a few forlorn Fig Newtons as well.

The monkey ate all of them.

A tear trickled down Kenny’s cheek. The monkey would let him have all the poisoned pudding he wanted, it seemed, but nothing else. He reached back halfheartedly and tried to grab the monkey once again, thinking maybe all that eating would have slowed it down some, but it was a vain hope. The monkey evaded him, and when Kenny persisted the monkey hit his finger. Kenny yowled and snatched his hand back. His finger was bleeding. He sucked on it. That much, at least, the monkey permitted him.

When he had washed his finger and wrapped a Band-Aid around it, Kenny returned to his living room and seated himself heavily, weary and defeated, in front of his television set. An old rerun of “The Galloping Gourmet” was coming on. He couldn’t stand it. He jabbed at his remote control to change the channel, and watched blindly for hours, sunk in despair, weeping at the Betty Crocker commercials. Finally, during the late late show, he stirred a little at one of the frequent public service announcements. That was it, he thought; he had to enlist others, he had to get help.

He picked up his phone and punched out the Crisis Line number.

The woman who answered sounded kind of sympathetic and very beautiful, and Kenny began to pour out his heart to her, all about the monkey that wouldn’t let him eat, about how nobody else seemed to notice the monkey, about . . . but he had barely gotten his heart-pouring going good when the monkey smashed him across the side of the head. Kenny moaned. “What’s wrong?” the woman asked. The monkey yanked his ear. Kenny tried to ignore the pain and keep on talking, but the monkey kept hurting him until finally he shuddered and sobbed and hung up the phone.

This is a nightmare, Kenny thought, a terrible nightmare. And so thinking, he pushed himself to his feet and staggered off to bed, hoping that everything would be normal in the morning, that the monkey would have been nothing but part of some wretched dream, no doubt brought on by indigestion.

The merciless little monkey would not even allow him to sleep properly, Kenny discovered. He was accustomed to sleeping on his back, with his hands folded very primly on his stomach. But when he undressed and tried to assume that position, the monkey fists came raining down on his poor head like some furious hairy hail. The monkey was not about to be squashed between Kenny’s bulk and the pillows, it seemed. Kenny squealed with pain and rolled over on his stomach. He was very uncomfortable this way and had difficulty falling asleep, but it was the only way the monkey would leave him alone.

The next morning Kenny Dorchester drifted slowly into wakefulness, his cheek mashed against the pillows and his right arm still asleep. He was afraid to move. It was all a dream, he told himself, there is no monkey—what a silly thing that would be, monkey indeed!—it was only that Boney Moroney had told him about this “monkey treatment,” and he had slept on it and had a nightmare. He couldn’t feel anything on his back, not a thing. This was just like any other morning. He opened a bleary eye. His bedroom looked perfectly normal. Still he was afraid to move. It was very peaceful lying here like this, monkeyless, and he wanted to savor this feeling. So Kenny lay very still for the longest time, watching the numbers on his digital clock change slowly.

Then his stomach growled at him. It was very upset. Kenny gathered up his courage. “There is no monkey!” he proclaimed loudly, and he sat up in bed.

He felt the monkey shift.

Kenny trembled and almost started to weep again, but he controlled himself with an effort. No monkey was going to get the best of Kenny Dorchester, he told himself. Grimacing, he donned his slippers and plodded into the bathroom.

The monkey peered out cautiously from behind his head while Kenny was shaving. He glared at it in the bathroom mirror. It seemed to have grown a bit, but that was hardly surprising, considering how much it had eaten yesterday. Kenny toyed with the idea of trying to cut the monkey’s throat, but decided that his Norelco electric shaver was not terribly well suited to that end. And even if he used a knife, trying to stab behind his own back while looking in the mirror was a dangerously uncertain proposition.

Before leaving the bathroom, Kenny was struck by a whim. He stepped on his scale.

The numbers lit up at once: 367. The same as yesterday, he thought. The monkey weighed nothing. He frowned. No, that had to be wrong. No doubt the little monkey weighed a pound or two, but its weight was offset by whatever poundage Kenny had lost. He had to have lost some weight, he reasoned, since he hadn’t been allowed to eat anything for ever so long. He stepped off the scale, then got back on quickly, just to double-check. It still read 367. Kenny was certain that he had lost weight. Perhaps some good would come of his travails after all. The thought made him feel oddly cheerful.

Kenny grew even more cheerful at breakfast. For the first time since he had gotten his monkey, he managed to get some food in his mouth.

When he arrived at the kitchen, he debated between French toast and bacon and eggs, but only briefly. Then he decided that he would never get to taste either. Instead, with a somber fatalism, Kenny fetched down a bowl and filled it with corn flakes and milk. The monkey would probably steal it all anyway, he thought, so there was no sense going to any trouble.

Quick as he could, he hurried the spoon into his mouth. The monkey grabbed it away. Kenny had expected it, had known it would happen, but when the monkey hand wrenched the spoon away he nonetheless felt a sudden and terrible grief. “No,” he said uselessly. “No, no, no.” He could hear the corn flakes crunching in that filthy monkey mouth, and he felt milk dripping down the back of his neck. Tears gathered in his eyes as he stared down at the bowl of corn flakes, so near and yet so far.

Then he had an idea.

Kenny Dorchester lunged forward and stuck his face right down in the bowl.

The monkey twisted his ear and shrieked and pounded on his temple, but Kenny didn’t care. He was sucking in milk gleefully and gobbling up as many corn flakes as his mouth could hold. By the time the monkey’s tail lashed around angrily and sent the bowl sailing from the table to shatter on the floor, Kenny had a huge wet mouthful. His cheeks bulged and milk dribbled down his chin, and somehow he’d gotten a corn flake up his right nostril, but Kenny was in heaven. He chewed and swallowed as fast as he could, almost choking on the food.

When it was all gone he licked his lips and rose triumphantly. “Ha, ha, ha.” He walked back to his bedroom with great dignity and dressed, sneering at the monkey in the full-length bedroom mirror. He had beaten it.

In the days and weeks that followed, Kenny Dorchester settled into a new sort of daily routine and an uneasy accommodation with his monkey. It proved easier than Kenny might have imagined, except at mealtimes. When he was not attempting to get food into his mouth, it was almost possible to forget about the monkey entirely. At work it sat peacefully on his back while Kenny shuffled his papers and made his phone calls. His coworkers either failed to notice his monkey or were sufficiently polite so as not to comment on it. The only difficulty came one day at coffee break, when Kenny foolhardily approached the coffee vendor in an effort to secure a cheese Danish. The monkey ate nine of them before Kenny could stagger away, and the man insisted that Kenny had done it when his back was turned.

Simply by avoiding mirrors, a habit that Kenny Dorchester now began to cultivate as assiduously as any vampire, he was able to keep his mind off the monkey for most of the day. He had only one difficulty, though it occurred thrice daily: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At those times the monkey assorted itself forcefully, and Kenny was forced to deal with it. As the weeks passed, he gradually fell into the habit of ordering food that could be served in bowls, so that he might practice what he termed his “Kellogg maneuver.” By this strategem, Kenny usually managed to get at least a few mouthfuls to eat each and every day.

To be sure, there were problems. People would stare at him rather strangely when he used the Kellogg maneuver in public, and sometimes make rude comments on his table manners. At a chili emporium Kenny liked to frequent, the proprietor assumed he had suffered a heart attack when Kenny dove toward his chili, and was very angry with him afterward. On another occasion a bowl of soup left him with facial burns that made it look as though he were constantly blushing. And the last straw came when he was thrown bodily out of his favorite seafood restaurant in the world, simply because he plunged his face into a bowl of crawfish bisque and began sucking it up noisily. Kenny stood in the street and berated them loudly and forcefully, reminding them how much money he had spent there over the years. Thereafter he ate only at home.

Despite the limited success of his Kellogg maneuver, Kenny Dorchester still lost nine-tenths of every meal to the voracious monkey on his back. At first he was constantly hungry, frequently depressed, and full of schemes for ridding himself of his monkey. The only problem with these schemes was that none of them seemed to work. One Saturday, Kenny went to the monkey house at the zoo, hoping that his monkey might hop off to play with others of its kind, or perhaps go in pursuit of some attractive monkey of the opposite sex. Instead, no sooner had he entered the monkey house than all the monkeys imprisoned therein ran to the bars of their cages and began to chitter and scream and spit and leap up and down madly. His own monkey answered in kind, and when some of the caged monkeys began to throw peanut husks and other bits of garbage Kenny clapped his hands over his ears and fled.

On another occasion he allowed himself to visit a local saloon, and ordered a number of boilermakers, a drink he understood to be particularly devastating. His intent was to get his monkey so blind-drunk that it might be easily removed. This experiment, too, had rather unfortunate consequences. The monkey drank the boilermakers as fast as Kenny could order them, but after the third one it began to keep time to the disco music from the jukebox by beating on the top of Kenny’s head. The next morning it was Kenny who woke with the pounding headache; the monkey seemed fine.

After a time, Kenny finally put all his scheming aside. Failure had discouraged him, and moreover the matter seemed somehow less urgent than it had originally. He was seldom hungry after the first week, in fact. Instead he went through a brief period of weakness, marked by frequent dizzy spells, and then a kind of euphoria settled over him. He felt just wonderful, and even better, he was losing weight!

To be sure, it did not show on his scale. Every morning he climbed up on it, and every morning it lit up as 367. But that was only because it was weighing the monkey as well as himself. Kenny knew he was losing; he could almost feel the pounds and inches just melting away, and some of his coworkers in the office remarked on it as well. Kenny owned up to it, beaming. When they asked him how he was doing it, he winked and replied, “The monkey treatment! The mysterious monkey treatment!” He said no more than that. The one time he tried to explain, the monkey fetched him such a wallop it almost took his head off, and Kenny’s friends began to mutter about his strange spasms.

Finally the day came when Kenny had to tell his cleaner to take in all his pants a few inches. That was one of the most delightful tasks of his life, he thought.

All the pleasure went right out of the moment when he exited the store, however, and chanced to glance briefly to his side and see his reflection in the window. At home Kenny had long since removed all his mirrors, so he was shocked at the sight of his monkey. It had grown. It was a little thing no longer. Now it hunched on his back like some evil deformed chimpanzee, and its grinning face loomed above his head instead of peering out behind it. The monkey was grossly fat beneath its sparse brown hair, almost as wide as it was tall, and its great long tail drooped all the way to the ground. Kenny stared at it with horror, and it grinned back at him. No wonder he had been having backaches recently, he thought.

He walked home slowly, all the jauntiness gone out of his step, trying to think. A few neighborhood dogs followed him up the street, barking at his monkey. Kenny ignored them. He had long since learned that dogs could see his monkey, just like the monkeys at the zoo. He suspected that drunks could see it as well. One man had stared at him for a very long time that night he had visited the saloon. Of course, the fellow might just have been staring at those vanishing boilermakers.

Back in his apartment Kenny Dorchester stretched out on his couch on his stomach, stuck a pillow underneath his chin, and turned on his television set. He paid no attention to the screen, however. He was trying to figure things out. Even the Pizza Hut commercials were insufficiently distracting, although Kenny did absently mutter “Ahh-h-h” like you were supposed to when the slice of pizza, dripping long strands of cheese, was first lifted from the pan.

When the show ended, Kenny got up and turned off the set and sat himself down at his dining room table. He found a piece of paper and a stubby little pencil. Very carefully, he block-printed a formula across the paper, and stared at it.

ME + MONKEY = 367 POUNDS

There were certain disturbing implications in that formula, Kenny thought. The more he considered them, the less he liked them. He was definitely losing weight, to be sure, and that was not to be sneered at—nonetheless, the grim inflexibility of the formula hinted that most of the gains traditionally attributed to weight loss would never be his to enjoy. No matter how much fat he shed, he would continue to carry around 367 pounds, and the strain on his body would be the same. As for becoming svelte and dashing and attractive to women, how could he even consider it so long as he had his monkey? Kenny thought of how a dinner date might go for him, and shuddered. “Where will it all end?” he said aloud.

The monkey shifted, and snickered a vile little snicker.

Kenny pursed his lips in firm disapproval. This could not go on, he resolved. He decided to go straight to the source on the morrow, and with that idea planted firmly in his mind, he took himself to bed.

The next day, after work, Kenny Dorchester returned by cab to the seedy neighborhood where he had been subjected to the monkey treatment.

The storefront was gone.

Kenny sat in the back seat of the taxi (this time he had the good sense not to get out, and moreover had tipped the driver handsomely in advance) and blinked in confusion. A tiny wet blubbery moan escaped his lips. The address was right, he knew it, he still had the slip of paper that had brought him there in the first place. But where he had found a grimy brick storefront adorned by a faded Coca-Cola sign and flanked by two vacants lots, now there was only one large vacant lot, choked with weeds and rubbish and broken bricks. “Oh, no,” Kenny said. “Oh, no.”

“You O.K.?” asked the lady driving the cab.

“Yes,” Kenny muttered. “Just . . . just wait, please. I have to think.” He held his head in his hands. He feared he was going to develop a splitting headache. Suddenly he felt weak and dizzy. And very hungry. The meter ticked. The cabbie whistled. Kenny thought. The street looked just as he remembered it, except for the missing storefront. It was just as dirty, the old winos were still on their stoop, the . . .

Kenny rolled down the window. “You, sir!” he called out to one of the winos. The man stared at him. “Come here, sir!” Kenny yelled.

Warily, the old man shuffled across the street.

Kenny fetched out a dollar bill from his wallet and pressed it into the man’s hand. “Here, friend,” he said, “Go and buy yourself some vintage Thunderbird, if you will.”

“Why you givin’ me this?” the wino said suspiciously.

“I wish you to answer me a question. What has become of the building that was standing there.” Kenny pointed, “—a few weeks ago.”

The man stuffed the dollar into his pocket quickly. “Ain’t been no buildin’ there fo’ years,” he said.

“I was afraid of that,” Kenny said. “Are you certain? I was here in the not-so-distant past and I distinctly recall . . .”

“No buildin’,” the wino said firmly. He turned and walked away, but after a few steps he paused and glanced back. “You’re one of them fat guys,” he said accusingly.

“What do you know about . . . ahem . . . overweight men?”

“See ’em wanderin’ round over there, all the time. Crazy, too. Yellin’ at thin air, playin’ with some kind of animals. Yeah, I ’member you. You’re one of them fat guys, all right.” He scowled at Kenny, confused. “Looks like you lost some of that blubber, though. Real good. Thanks for the dollar.”

Kenny Dorchester watched him return to his stoop and begin conversing animatedly with his colleagues. With a tremulous sigh, Kenny rolled up the window, glanced at the empty lot again, and bid his driver take him home. Him and his monkey, that is.

Weeks went dripping by and Kenny Dorchester lived as if in a trance. He went to work, shuffled his papers, mumbled pleasantries to his coworkers, struggled and schemed for his meager mouthfuls of food, avoided mirrors. The scale read 367. His flesh melted away from him at a precipitious rate. He developed slack, droopy jowls, and his skin sagged all about his middle, looking as flaccid and pitiful as a used condom. He began to have fainting spells, brought on by hunger. At times he staggered and lurched about the street, his thinning and weakened legs unable to support the weight of his growing monkey. His vision got blurry.

Once he even thought that his hair had started to fall out, but that at least was a false alarm; it was the monkey who was losing hair, thank goodness. It shed all over the place, ruining his furniture, and even daily vacuuming didn’t seem to help much. Soon Kenny stopped trying to clean up. He lacked the energy. He lacked the energy for just about everything, in fact. Rising from a chair was a major undertaking. Cooking dinner was impossible torment—but he did that anyway, since the monkey beat him severely when it was not fed. Nothing seemed to matter very much to Kenny Dorchester. Nothing but the terrible tale of his scale each morning, and the formula that he had a scotchtaped to his bathroom wall.

ME + MONKEY = 367 POUNDS

He wondered how much was ME anymore, and how much was MONKEY, but he did not really want to find out. One day, following the dictates of a kind of feeble whim, Kenny made a sudden grab for the monkey’s legs under his chin, hoping against hope that it had gotten slow and obese and that he would be able to yank it from his back. His hands closed on nothing. On his own pale flesh. The monkey’s legs did not seem to be there, though Kenny could still feel its awful crushing weight. He patted his neck and breast in dim confusion, staring down at himself, and noting absently that he could see his feet. He wondered how long that had been true. They seemed to be perfectly nice feet, Kenny Dorchester thought, although the legs to which they were attached were alarmingly gaunt.

Slowly his mind wandered back to the quandary at hand—what had become of the monkey’s hind legs? Kenny frowned and puzzled and tried to work it all out in his head, but nothing occurred to him. Finally he slid his newly discovered feet into a pair of bedroom slippers and shuffled to the closet were he had stored all of his mirrors. Closing his eyes, he reached in, fumbled about, and found the full-length mirror that had once hung on his bedroom wall. It was a large, wide mirror. Working entirely by touch, Kenny fetched it out, carried it a few feet, and painstakingly propped it up against a wall. Then he held his breath and opened his eyes.

There in the mirror stood a gaunt, gray, skeletal-looking fellow, hunched over and sickly. On his back, grinning, was a thing the size of a gorilla. A very obese gorilla. It had a long, pale, snakelike tail, and great long arms, and it was as white as a maggot and entirely hairless. It had no legs. It was . . . attached to him now, growing right out of his back. Its grin was terrible, and filled up half of its face. It looked very like the gross proprietor of the monkey treatment emporium, in fact. Why had he never noticed that before? Of course, of course.

Kenny Dorchester turned from the mirror, and cooked the monkey a big rich dinner before going to bed.

That night he dreamed of how it all started, back in the Slab when he had met Boney Moroney. In his nightmare a great evil white thing rode atop Moroney’s shoulders, eating slab after slab of ribs, but Kenny politely pretended not to notice while he and Boney made bright, spritely conversation. Then the thing ran out of ribs, so it reached down and lifted one of Boney’s arms and began to eat his hand. The bones crunched nicely, and Moroney kept right on talking. The creature had eaten its way up to the elbow when Kenny woke screaming, covered with a cold sweat. He had wet his bed, too.

Agonizingly, he pushed himself up and staggered to the toilet, where he dry-heaved for ten minutes. The monkey, angry at being wakened, gave him a desultory slap from time to time.

And then a furtive light came into Kenny Dorchester’s eyes. “Boney,” he whispered. Hurriedly, he scrambled back to his bedroom on hands and knees, rose, and threw on some clothes. It was three in the morning, but Kenny knew there was no time to waste. He looked up an address in his phone book, and called a cab.

Boney Moroney lived in a tall, modern high-rise by the river, with moonlight shining brightly off its silver-mirrored flanks. When Kenny staggered in, he found the night doorman asleep at his station, which was just as well. Kenny tiptoed past him to the elevators and rode up to the eighth floor. The monkey on his back had begun stirring now, and seemed uneasy and ill-tempered.

Kenny’s finger trembled as he pushed the round black button set in the door to Moroney’s apartment, just beneath the eyehole. Musical chimes sounded loudly within, startling in the morning stillness. Kenny leaned on the button. The music played on and on. Finally he heard footsteps, heavy and threatening. The peephole opened and closed again. Then the door swung open.

The apartment was black, though the far wall was made entirely of glass, so the moonlight illuminated the darkness softly. Outlined against the stars and the lights of the city stood the man who had opened the door. He was hugely, obscenely fat, and his skin was a pasty fungoid white, and he had little dark eyes set deep into crinkles in his broad suety face. He wore nothing but a vast pair of striped shorts. His breasts flopped about against his chest when he shifted his weight. And when he smiled, his teeth filled up half his face. A great crescent moon of teeth. He smiled when he saw Kenny, and Kenny’s monkey. Kenny felt sick. The thing in the door weighed twice as much as the one on his back. Kenny trembled. “Where is he?” he whispered softly. “Where is Boney? What have you done to him?”

The creature laughed, and its pendulous breasts flounced about wildly as it shook with mirth. The monkey on Kenny’s back began to laugh, too, a higher, thinner laughter as sharp as the edge of a knife. It reached down and twisted Kenny’s ear cruelly. Suddenly a vast fear and a vast anger filled Kenny Dorchester. He summoned all the strength left in his wasted body and pushed forward, and somehow, somehow, he barged past the obese colossus who barred his way and staggered into the interior of the apartment. “Boney,” he called, “where are you, Boney? It’s me, Kenny.”

There was no answer. Kenny went from room to room. The apartment was filthy, a shambles. There was no sign of Boney Moroney anywhere. When Kenny came panting back to the living room, the monkey shifted abruptly, and threw him off balance. He stumbled and fell hard. Pain went shooting up through his knees, and he cut open one outstretched hand on the edge of the chrome-and-glass coffee table. Kenny began to weep.

He heard the door close, and the thing that lived here moved slowly toward him. Kenny blinked back tears and stared at the approach of those two mammoth legs, pale in the moonlight, sagging all around with fat. He looked up and it was like gazing up the side of a mountain. Far, far above him grinned those terrible mocking teeth. “Where is he?” Kenny Dorchester whispered. “What have you done with poor Boney?”

The grin did not change. The thing reached down a meaty hand, fingers as thick as a length of kielbasa, and snagged the waistband of the baggy striped shorts. It pulled them down clumsily, and they settled to the ground like a parachute, bunching around its feet.

“Oh, no,” said Kenny Dorchester.

The thing had no genitals. Hanging down between its legs, almost touching the carpet now that it had been freed from the confines of the soiled shorts, was a wrinkled droopy bag of skin, long and gaunt, growing from the creature’s crotch. But as Kenny stared at it in horror, it thrashed feebly, and stirred, and the loose folds of flesh separated briefly into tiny arms and legs.

Then it opened its eyes.

Kenny Dorchester screamed and suddenly he was back on his feet, lurching away from the grinning obscenity in the center of the room. Between its legs, the thing that had been Boney Moroney raised its pitiful stick-thin arms in supplication. “Oh, nooooo,” Kenny moaned, blubbering, and he danced about wildly, the vast weight of his monkey heavy on his back. Round and round he danced in the dimness, in the moonlight, searching for an escape from this madness.

Beyond the plate glass wall the lights of the city beckoned.

Kenny paused and panted and stared at them. Somehow the monkey must have known what he was thinking, for suddenly it began to beat on him wildly, to twist at his ears, to rain savage blows all around his head. But Kenny Dorchester paid no mind. With a smile that was almost beatific, he gathered the last of his strength and rushed pell-mell toward the moonlight.

The glass shattered into a million glittering shards, and Kenny smiled all the way down.

It was the smell that told him he was still alive, the smell of disinfectant, and the feel of starched sheets beneath him. A hospital, he thought amidst a haze of pain. He was in a hospital. Kenny wanted to cry. Why hadn’t he died? Oh, why, oh, why? He opened his eyes, and tried to say something.

Suddenly a nurse was there, standing over him, feeling his brow and looking down with concern. Kenny wanted to beg her to kill him, but the words would not come. She went away, and when she came back she had others with her.

A chubby young man stood by his side and touched him and prodded him here and there. Kenny’s mouth worked soundlessly. “Easy,” the doctor said. “You’ll be all right, Mr. Dorchester, but you have a long way to go. You’re in a hospital. You’re a very lucky man. You fell eight stories. You ought to be dead.”

I want to be dead, Kenny thought, and he shaped the words very, very carefully with his mouth, but no one seemed to hear them. Maybe the monkey has taken over, he thought. Maybe I can’t even talk anymore.

“He wants to say something,” the nurse said.

“I can see that,” said the chubby young doctor. “Mr. Dorchester, please don’t strain yourself. Really. If you are trying to ask about your friend, I’m afraid he wasn’t as lucky as you. He was killed by the fall. You would have died as well, but fortunately you landed on top of him.”

Kenny’s fear and confusion must have been obvious, for the nurse put a gentle hand on his arm. “The other man,” she said patiently. “The fat one. You can thank God he was so fat, too. He broke your fall like a giant pillow.”

And finally Kenny Dorchester understood what they were saying, and he began to weep, but now he was weeping for joy, and trembling.

Three days later, he managed his first word. “Pizza,” he said, and it came weak and hoarse from between his lips, but the sound elated him and he repeated it, louder, and then louder still, and before long he was pushing the nurse’s call button and shouting and pushing and shouting. “Pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza,” he chanted, and he would not be calm until they ordered one for him. Nothing had ever tasted so good.

PRESS ENTERn

John Varley

It’s hard to list all the accomplishments of this well-known author in this space. He’s been the recipient of two Hugos and one Nebula, his best-selling novel, Millennium, will soon be a major motion picture, and his short story, “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” has been made into a short film by PBS.

His latest novel, Demon, out soon from Berkley, concludes the popular trilogy that began with his novels, Titan and Wizard.

“This is a recording. Please do not hang up until—”

I slammed the phone down so hard it fell onto the floor. Then I stood there, dripping wet and shaking with anger. Eventually, the phone started to make that buzzing noise they make when a receiver is off the hook. It’s twenty times as loud as any sound a phone can normally make, and I always wondered why. As though it was such a terrible disaster: “Emergency! Your telephone is off the hook!!!”

Phone answering machines are one of the small annoyances of life. Confess, do you really like talking to a machine? But what had just happened to me was more than a petty irritation. I had just been called by an automatic dialing machine.

They’re fairly new. I’d been getting about two or three such calls a month. Most of them come from insurance companies. They give you a two-minute spiel and then a number to call if you are interested. (I called back, once, to give them a piece of my mind, and was put on hold, complete with Muzak.) They use lists. I don’t know where they get them.

I went back to the bathroom, wiped water droplets from the plastic cover of the library book, and carefully lowered myself back into the water. It was too cool. I ran more hot water and was just getting my blood pressure back to normal when the phone rang again.

So I sat there through fifteen rings, trying to ignore it.

Did you ever try to read with the phone ringing?

On the sixteenth ring I got up. I dried off, put on a robe, walked slowly and deliberately into the living room. I stared at the phone for a while.

On the fiftieth ring I picked it up.

“This is a recording. Please do not hang up until the message has been completed. This call originates from the house of your next-door neighbor, Charles Kluge. It will repeat every ten minutes. Mister Kluge knows he has not been the best of neighbors, and apologizes in advance for the inconvenience. He requests that you go immediately to his house. The key is under the mat. Go inside and do what needs to be done. There will be a reward for your services. Thank you.”

Click. Dial tone.

I’m not a hasty man. Ten minutes later, when the phone rang again, I was still sitting there thinking it over. I picked up the receiver and listened carefully.

It was the same message. As before, it was not Kluge’s voice.

It was something synthesized, with all the human warmth of a Speak’n’Spell.

I heard it out again, and cradled the receiver when it was done.

I thought about calling the police. Charles Kluge had lived next door to me for ten years. In that time I may have had a dozen conversations with him, none lasting longer than a minute. I owed him nothing.

I thought about ignoring it. I was still thinking about that when the phone rang again. I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes. I lifted the receiver and put it right back down.

I could disconnect the phone. It wouldn’t change my life radically.

But in the end I got dressed and went out the front door, turned left, and walked toward Kluge’s property.

My neighbor across the street, Hal Lanier, was out mowing the lawn. He waved to me, and I waved back. It was about seven in the evening of a wonderful August day. The shadows were long. There was the smell of cut grass in the air. I’ve always liked that smell. About time to cut my own lawn, I thought.

It was a thought Kluge had never entertained. His lawn was brown and knee-high and choked with weeds.

I rang the bell. When nobody came I knocked. Then I sighed, looked under the mat, and used the key I found there to open the door.

“Kluge?” I called out as I stuck my head in.

I went along the short hallway, tentatively, as people do when unsure of their welcome. The drapes were drawn, as always, so it was dark in there, but in what had once been the living room ten television screens gave more than enough light for me to see Kluge. He sat in a chair in front of a table, with his face pressed into a computer keyboard and the side of his head blown away.

Hal Lanier operates a computer for the L.A.P.D., so I told him what I had found and he called the police. We waited together for the first car to arrive. Hal kept asking if I’d touched anything, and I kept telling him no, except for the front door knob.

An ambulance arrived without the siren. Soon there were police all over, and neighbors standing out in their yards or talking in front of Kluge’s house. Crews from some of the television stations arrived in time to get pictures of the body, wrapped in a plastic sheet, being carried out. Men and women came and went. I assumed they were doing all the standard police things, taking fingerprints, collecting evidence. I would have gone home, but had been told to stick around.

Finally I was brought in to see Detective Osborne, who was in charge of the case. I was led into Kluge’s living room. All the television screens were still turned on. I shook hands with Osborne. He looked me over before he said anything. He was a short guy, balding. He seemed very tired until he looked at me. Then, though nothing really changed in his face, he didn’t look tired at all.

“You’re Victor Apfel?” he asked. I told him I was. He gestured at the room. “Mister Apfel, can you tell if anything has been taken from this room?”

I took another look around, approaching it as a puzzle.

There was a fireplace and there were curtains over the windows. There was a rug on the floor. Other than those items, there was nothing else you would expect to find in a living room.

All the walls were lined with tables, leaving a narrow aisle down the middle. On the tables were monitor screens, keyboards, disc drives—all the glossy bric-a-brac of the new age. They were interconnected by thick cables and cords. Beneath the tables were still more computers, and boxes full of electronic items. Above the tables were shelves that reached the ceiling and were stuffed with boxes of tapes, discs, cartridges . . . there was a word for it which I couldn’t recall just then. It was software.

“There’s no furniture, is there? Other than that . . .”

He was looking confused.

“You mean there was furniture here before?”

“How I would I know?” Then I realized what the misunderstanding was. “Oh. You thought I’d been here before. The first time I ever set foot in this room was about an hour ago.”

He frowned, and I didn’t like that much.

“The medical examiner says the guy had been dead about three hours. How come you came over when you did, Victor?”

I didn’t like him using my first name, but didn’t see what I could do about it. And I knew I had to tell him about the phone call.

He looked dubious. But there was one easy way to check it out, and we did that. Hal and Osborne and I and several others trooped over to my house. My phone was ringing as we entered.

Osborne picked it up and listened. He got a very sour expression on his face. As the night wore on, it just got worse and worse.

We waited ten minutes for the phone to ring again. Osborne spent the time examining everything in my living room. I was glad when the phone rang again. They made a recording of the message, and we went back to Kluge’s house.

Osborne went into the back yard to see Kluge’s forest of antennas. He looked impressed.

“Mrs. Madison down the street thinks he was trying to contact Martians,” Hal said, with a laugh. “Me, I just thought he was stealing HBO.” There were three parabolic dishes. There were six tall masts, and some of those things you see on telephone company buildings for transmitting microwaves.

Osborne took me to the living room again. He asked me to describe what I had seen. I didn’t know what good that would do, but I tried.

“He was sitting in that chair, which was here in front of this table. I saw the gun on the floor. His hand was hanging down toward it.”

“You think it was suicide?”

“Yes, I guess I did think that.” I waited for him to comment, but he didn’t. “Is that what you think?”

He sighed. “There wasn’t any note.”

“They don’t always leave notes,” Hal pointed out.

“No, but they do often enough that my nose starts to twitch when they don’t.” He shrugged. “It’s probably nothing.”

“That phone call,” I said. “That might be a kind of suicide note.”

Osborne nodded. “Was there anything else you noticed?”

I went to the table and looked at the keyboard. It was made by Texas Instruments, model TI-99/4A. There was a large bloodstain on the right side of it, where his head had been resting.

“Just that he was sitting in front of this machine.” I touched a key, and the monitor screen behind the keyboard immediately filled with words. I quickly drew my hand back, then stared at the message there.

PROGRAM NAME: GOODBYE REAL WORLD

DATE: 8/20

CONTENTS: LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT; MISC. FEATURES

PROGRAMMER: “CHARLES KLUGE”

TO RUN

PRESS ENTERn

The black square at the end flashed on and off. Later I learned it was called a cursor.

Everyone gathered around. Hal, the computer expert, explained how many computers went blank after ten minutes of no activity, so the words wouldn’t be burned into the television screen. This one had been green until I touched it, then displayed black letters on a blue background.

“Has this console been checked for prints?” Osborne asked. Nobody seemed to know, so Osborne took a pencil and used the eraser to press the ENTER key.

The screen cleared, stayed blue for a moment, then filled with little ovoid shapes that started at the top of the screen and descended like rain. There were hundreds of them in many colors.

“Those are pills,” one of the cops said, in amazement. “Look, that’s gotta be a Quaalude. There’s a Nembutal.” Other cops pointed out other pills. I recognized the distinctive red stripe around the center of a white capsule that had to be a Dilantin. I had been taking them every day for years.

Finally the pills stopped falling, and the damn thing started to play music at us. “Nearer My God To Thee,” in three-part harmony.

A few people laughed. I don’t think any of us thought it was funny—it was creepy as hell listening to that eerie dirge—but it sounded like it had been scored for pennywhistle, calliope, and kazoo. What could you do but laugh?

As the music played, a little figure composed entirely of squares entered from the left of the screen and jerked spastically toward the center. It was like one of those human Figures from a video game, but not as detailed. You had to use your imagination to believe it was a man.

A shape appeared in the middle of the screen. The “man” stopped in front of it. He bent in the middle, and something that might have been a chair appeared under him.

“What’s that supposed to be?”

“A computer. Isn’t it?”

It must have been, because the little man extended his arms, which jerked up and down like Liberace at the piano. He was typing. The words appeared above him.

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE I MISSED SOMETHING. I SIT HERE, NIGHT AND DAY, A SPIDER IN THE CENTER OF A COAXIAL WEB, MASTER OF ALL I SURVEY . . . AND IT IS NOT ENOUGH. THERE MUST BE MORE.

ENTER YOUR NAME HEREn

“Jesus Christ,” Hal said. “I don’t believe it. An interactive suicide note.”

“Come on, we’ve got to see the rest of this.”

I was nearest the keyboard, so I leaned over and typed my name. But when I looked up, what I had typed was VICT9R. “How do you back this up?” I asked.

“Just enter it,” Osborne said. He reached around me and pressed enter.

DO YOU EVER GET THAT FEELING, VICT9? YOU HAVE WORKED ALL YOUR LIFE TO BE THE BEST THERE IS AT WHAT YOU DO, AND ONE DAY YOU WAKE UP TO WONDER WHY YOU ARE DOING IT? THAT IS WHAT HAPPENED TO ME.

DO YOU WANT TO HEAR MORE, VICT9R? Y/Nn

The message rambled from that point. Kluge seemed to be aware of it, apologetic about it, because at the end of each forty or fifty-word paragraph the reader was given the Y/N option.

I kept glancing from the screen to the keyboard, remembering Kluge slumped across it. I thought about him sitting here alone, writing this.

He said he was despondent. He didn’t feel like he could go on. He was taking too many pills (more of them rained down the screen at this point), and he had no further goal. He had done everything he set out to do. We didn’t understand what he meant by that. He said he no longer existed. We thought that was a figure of speech.

ARE YOU A COP, VICT9? IF YOU ARE NOT, A COP WILL BE HERE SOON. SO TO YOU OR THE COP: I WAS NOT SELLING NARCOTICS. THE DRUGS IN MY BEDROOM WERE FOR MY OWN PERSONAL USE. I USED A LOT OF THEM. AND NOW I WILL NOT NEED THEM ANYMORE.

PRESS ENTERn

Osborne did, and a printer across the room began to chatter, scaring the hell out of all of us. I could see the carriage zipping back and forth, printing in both directions, when Hal pointed at the screen and shouted.

“Look! Look at that!”

The compugraphic man was standing again. He faced us. He had something that had to be a gun in his hand, which he now pointed at his head.

“Don’t do it!” Hal yelled.

The little man didn’t listen. There was a denatured gunshot sound, and the little man fell on his back. A line of red dripped down the screen. Then the green background turned to blue, the printer shut off, and there was nothing left but the little black corpse lying on its back and the word ««DONE«« at the bottom of the screen.

I took a deep breath, and glanced at Osborne. It would be an understatement to say he did not look happy.

“What’s this about drugs in the bedroom?” he said.

We watched Osborne pulling out drawers in dressers and bedside tables. He didn’t find anything. He looked under the bed, and in the closet. Like all the other rooms in the house, this one was full of computers. Holes had been knocked in walls for the thick sheaves of cables.

I had been standing near a big cardboard drum, one of several in the room. It was about thirty gallon capacity, the kind you ship things in. The lid was loose, so I lifted it. I sort of wished I hadn’t.

“Osborne,” I said. “You’d better look at this.”

The drum was lined with a heavy-duty garbage bag. And it was two-thirds full of Quaaludes.

They pried the lids off the rest of the drums. We found drums of amphetamines, of Nembutals, of Valium. All sorts of things.

With the discovery of the drugs a lot more police returned to the scene. With them came the television camera crews.

In all the activity no one seemed concerned about me, so I slipped back to my own house and locked the door. From time to time I peeked out the curtains. I saw reporters interviewing the neighbors. Hal was there, and seemed to be having a good time. Twice crews knocked on my door, but I didn’t answer. Eventually they went away.

I ran a hot bath and soaked in it for about an hour. Then I turned the heat up as high as it would go and got in bed, under the blankets.

I shivered all night.

Osborne came over about nine the next morning. I let him in. Hal followed, looking very unhappy. I realized they had been up all night. I poured coffee for them.

“You’d better read this first,” Osborne said, and handed me the sheet of computer printout. I unfolded it, got out my glasses, and started to read.

It was in that awful dot-matrix printing. My policy is to throw any such trash into the fireplace, un-read, but I made an exception this time.

It was Kluge’s will. Some probate court was going to have a lot of fun with it.

He stated again that he didn’t exist, so he could have no relatives. He had decided to give all his worldly property to somebody who deserved it.

But who was deserving? Kluge wondered. Well, not Mr. and Mrs. Perkins, four houses down the street. They were child abusers. He cited court records in Buffalo and Miami, and a pending case locally.

Mrs. Radnor and Mrs. Polonski, who lived across the street from each other five houses down, were gossips.

The Anderson’s oldest son was a car thief.

Marian Flores cheated on her high school algebra tests.

There was a guy nearby who was diddling the city on a freeway construction project. There was one wife in the neighborhood who made out with door-to-door salesmen, and two having affairs with men other than their husbands. There was a teenage boy who got his girlfriend pregnant, dropped her, and bragged about it to his friends.

There were no fewer than nineteen couples in the immediate area who had not reported income to the IRS, or who had padded their deductions.

Kluge’s neighbors in back had a dog that barked all night.

Well, I could vouch for the dog. He’d kept me awake often enough. But the rest of it was crazy! For one thing, where did a guy with two hundred gallons of illegal narcotics get the right to judge his neighbors so harshly? I mean, the child abusers were one thing, but was it right to tar a whole family because their son stole cars? And for another . . . how did he know some of this stuff?

But there was more. Specifically, four philandering husbands. One was Harold “Hal” Lanier, who for three years had been seeing a woman named Toni Jones, a co-worker at the L.A.P.D. Data Processing facility. She was pressuring him for a divorce; he was “waiting for the right time to tell his wife.”

I glanced up at Hal. His red face was all the confirmation I needed.

Then it hit me. What had Kluge found out about me?

I hurried down the page, searching for my name. I found it in the last paragraph.

“. . . for thirty years Mr. Apfel has been paying for a mistake he did not even make. I won’t go so far as to nominate him for sainthood, but by default—if for no other reason—I hereby leave all deed and title to my real property and the structure thereon to Victor Apfel.”

I looked at Osborne, and those tired eyes were weighing me. “But I don’t want it!”

“Do you think this is the reward Kluge mentioned in the phone call?”

“It must be,” I said. “What else could it be?”

Osborne sighed, and sat back in his chair. “At least he didn’t try to leave you the drugs. Are you still saying you didn’t know the guy?”

“Are you accusing me of something?”

He spread his hands. “Mister Apfel, I’m simply asking a question. You’re never one hundred percent sure in a suicide. Maybe it was a murder. If it was, you can see that, so far, you’re the only one we know of that’s gained by it.”

“He was almost a stranger to me.”

He nodded, tapping his copy of the computer printout. I looked back at my own, wishing it would go away.

“What’s this . . . mistake you didn’t make?”

I was afraid that would be the next question.

“I was a prisoner of war in North Korea,” I said.

Osborne chewed that over for a while.

“They brainwash you?”

“Yes.” I hit the arm of my chair, and suddenly had to be up and moving. The room was getting cold. “No. I don’t . . . there’s been a lot of confusion about that word. Did they ‘brainwash’ me? Yes. Did they succeed? Did I offer a confession of my war crimes and denounce the U.S. Government? No.”

Once more, I felt myself being inspected by those deceptively tired eyes.

“You still seem to have . . . strong feelings about it.”

“It’s not something you forget.”

“Is there anything you want to say about it?”

“It’s just that it was all so . . . no. No, I have nothing further to say. Not to you, not to anybody.”

“I’m going to have to ask you more questions about Kluge’s death.”

“I think I’ll have my lawyer present for those.” Christ. Now I am going to have to get a lawyer. I didn’t know where to begin. Osborne just nodded again. He got up and went to the door.

“I was ready to write this one down as a suicide,” he said. “The only thing that bothered me was there was no note. Now we’ve got a note.” He gestured in the direction of Kluge’s house, and started to look angry.

“This guy not only writes a note, he programs the fucking thing into his computer, complete with special effects straight out of Pac-Man.

“Now, I know people do crazy things. I’ve seen enough of them. But when I heard the computer playing a hymn, that’s when I knew this was murder. Tell you the truth, Mr. Apfel, I don’t think you did it. There must be two dozen motives for murder in that printout. Maybe he was blackmailing people around here. Maybe that’s how he bought all those machines. And people with that amount of drugs usually die violently. I’ve got a lot of work to do on this one, and I’ll find who did it.” He mumbled something about not leaving town, and that he’d see me later, and left.

“Vic . . .” Hal said. I looked at him.

“About that printout,” he finally said. “I’d appreciate it . . . well, they said they’d keep it confidential. If you know what I mean.” He had eyes like a basset hound. I’d never noticed that before.

“Hal, if you’ll just go home, you have nothing to worry about from me.”

He nodded, and scuttled for the door.

“I don’t think any of that will get out,” he said.

It all did, of course.

It probably would have even without the letters that began arriving a few days after Kluge’s death, all postmarked Trenton, New Jersey, all computer-generated from a machine no one was ever able to trace. The letters detailed the matters Kluge had mentioned in his will.

I didn’t know about any of that at the time. I spent the rest of the day after Hal’s departure lying in my bed, under the electric blanket. I couldn’t get my feet warm. I got up only to soak in the tub or to make a sandwich.

Reporters knocked on the door but I didn’t answer. On the second day I called a criminal lawyer—Martin Abrams, the first in the book—and retained him. He told me they’d probably call me down to the police station for questioning. I told him I wouldn’t go, popped two Dilantin, and sprinted for the bed.

A couple of times I heard sirens in the neighborhood. Once I heard a shouted argument down the street. I resisted the temptation to look. I’ll admit I was a little curious, but you know what happened to the cat.

I kept waiting for Osborne to return, but he didn’t. The days turned into a week. Only two things of interest happened in that time.

The first was a knock on my door. This was two days after Kluge’s death. I looked through the curtains and saw a silver Ferrari parked at the curb. I couldn’t see who was on the porch, so I asked who it was.

“My name’s Lisa Foo,” she said. “You asked me to drop by.”

“I certainly don’t remember it.”

“Isn’t this Charles Kluge’s house?”

“That’s next door.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

I decided I ought to warn her Kluge was dead, so I opened the door. She turned around and smiled at me. It was blinding.

Where does one start in describing Lisa Foo? Remember when newspapers used to run editorial cartoons of Hirohito and Tojo, when the Times used the word “Jap” without embarrassment? Little guys with faces wide as footballs, ears like jug handles, thick glasses, two big rabbity buck teeth, and pencil-thin moustaches . . .

Leaving out only the moustache, she was a dead ringer for a cartoon Tojo. She had the glasses, and the ears, and the teeth. But her teeth had braces, like piano keys wrapped in barbed wire. And she was five-eight or five-nine and couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten. I’d have said a hundred, but added five pounds each for her breasts, so improbably large on her scrawny frame that all I could read of the message on her T-shirt was “POCK LIVE.” It was only when she turned sideways that I saw the esses before and after.

She thrust out a slender hand.

“Looks like I’m going to be your neighbor for a while,” she said. “At least until we get that dragon’s lair next door straightened out.” If she had an accent, it was San Fernando Valley.

“That’s nice.”

“Did you know him? Kluge, I mean. Or at least that’s what he called himself.”

“You don’t think that was his name?”

“I doubt it. ‘Klug’ means clever in German. And it’s hacker slang for being tricky. And he sure was a tricky bugger. Definitely some glitches in the wetware.” She tapped the side of her head meaningfully. “Viruses and phantoms and demons jumping out every time they try to key in, Software rot, bit buckets overflowing onto the floor . . .”

She babbled on in that vein for a time. It might as well have been Swahili.

“Did you say there were demons in his computers?”

“That’s right.”

“Sounds like they need an exorcist.”

She jerked her thumb at her chest and showed me another halfacre of teeth.

“That’s me. Listen, I gotta go. Drop in and see me anytime.”

The second interesting event of the week happened the next day. My bank statement arrived. There were three deposits listed. The first was the regular check from the V.A., for $77.00. The second was for $392.54, interest on the money my parents had left me fifteen years ago.

The third deposit had come in on the twentieth, the day Charles Kluge died. It was for $700,083.04.

A few days later Hal Lanier dropped by.

“Boy, what a week,” he said. Then he flopped down on the couch and told me all about it.

There had been a second death on the block. The letters had stirred up a lot of trouble, especially with the police going house to house questioning everyone. Some people had confessed to things when they were sure the cops were closing in on them. The woman who used to entertain salesmen while her husband was at work had admitted her infidelity, and the guy had shot her. He was in the County Jail. That was the worst incident, but there had been others, from fistfights to rocks thrown through windows. According to Hal, the IRS was thinking of setting up a branch office in the neighborhood, so many people were being audited.

I thought about the seven hundred thousand and eighty-three dollars.

And four cents.

I didn’t say anything, but my feet were getting cold.

“I suppose you want to know about me and Betty,” he said, at last. I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear any of this, but I tried for a sympathetic expression.

“That’s all over,” he said, with a satisfied sigh. “Between me and Toni, I mean. I told Betty all about it. It was real bad for a few days, but I think our marriage is stronger for it now.” He was quiet for a moment, basking in the warmth of it all. I had kept a straight face under worse provocation, so I trust I did well enough then.

He wanted to tell me all they’d learned about Kluge, and he wanted to invite me over for dinner, but I begged off on both, telling him my war wounds were giving me hell. I just about had him to the door when Osborne knocked on it. There was nothing to do but let him in. Hal stuck around, too.

I offered Osborne coffee, which he gratefully accepted. He looked different. I wasn’t sure what it was at first. Same old tired expression . . . no, it wasn’t. Most of that weary look had been either an act or a cop’s built-in cynicism. Today it was genuine. The tiredness had moved from his face to his shoulders, to his hands, to the way he walked and the way he slumped in the chair. There was a sour aura of defeat around him.

“Am I still a suspect?” I asked.

“You mean should you call your lawyer? I’d say don’t bother. I checked you out pretty good. That will ain’t gonna hold up, so your motive is pretty half-assed. Way I figure it, every coke dealer in the Marina had a better reason to snuff Kluge than you.” He sighed. “I got a couple questions. You can answer them or not.”

“Give it a try.”

“You remember any unusual visitors he had? People coming . and going at night?”

“The only visitors I ever recall were deliveries. Post office. Federal Express, freight companies . . . that sort of thing. I suppose the drugs could have come in any of those shipments.”

“That’s what we figure, too. There’s no way he was dealing nickel and dime bags. He must have been a middle man. Ship it in, ship it out.” He brooded about that for a while, and sipped his coffee.

“So are you making any progress?” I asked.

“You want to know the truth? The case is going in the toilet. We’ve got too many motives, and not a one of them that works. As far as we can tell, nobody on the block had the slightest idea Kluge had all that information. We’ve checked bank accounts and we can’t find evidence of blackmail. So the neighbors are pretty much out of the picture. Though if he were alive, most people around here would like to kill him now.”

“Damn straight,” Hal said.

Osborne slapped his thigh. “If the bastard was alive, I’d kill him,” he said. “But I’m beginning to think he never was alive.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If I hadn’t seen the goddam body . . .” He sat up a little straighter. “He said he didn’t exist. Well, he practically didn’t. PG&E never heard of him. He’s hooked up to their lines and a meter reader came by every month, but they never billed him for a single kilowatt. Same with the phone company. He had a whole exchange in that house that was made by the phone company, and delivered by them, and installed by them, but they have no record of him. We talked to the guy who hooked it all up. He turned in his records, and the computer swallowed them. Kluge didn’t have a bank account anywhere in California, and apparently he didn’t need one. We’ve tracked down a hundred companies that sold things to him, shipped them out, and then either marked his account paid or forgot they ever sold him anything. Some of them have check numbers and account numbers in their books, for accounts or even banks that don’t exist.”

He leaned back in his chair, simmering at the perfidy of it all.

“The only guy we’ve found who ever heard of him was the guy who delivered his groceries once a month. Little store down on Sepulveda. They don’t have a computer, just paper receipts. He paid by check. Wells Fargo accepted them and the checks never bounced. But Wells Fargo never heard of him.”

I thought it over. He seemed to expect something of me at this point, so I made a stab at it.

“He was doing all this by computers?”

“That’s right. Now, the grocery store scam I understand, almost. But more often than not, Kluge got right into the basic programming of the computers and wiped himself out. The power company was never paid, by check or any other way, because as far as they were concerned, they weren’t selling him anything.

“No government agency has ever heard of him. We’ve checked him with everybody from the post office to the CIA.”

“Kluge was probably an alias, right?” I offered.

“Yeah. But the FBI doesn’t have his fingerprints. We’ll find out who he was, eventually. But it doesn’t get us any closer to whether or not he was murdered.”

He admitted there was pressure to simply close the felony part of the case, label it suicide, and forget it. But Osborne would not believe it. Naturally, the civil side would go on for some time, as they attempted to track down all Kluge’s deceptions.

“It’s all up to the dragon lady,” Osborne said. Hal snorted.

“Fat chance,” Hal said, and muttered something about boat people.

“That girl? She’s still over there? Who is she?”

“She’s some sort of giant brain from Cal Tech. We called out there and told them we were having problems, and she’s what they sent.” It was clear from Osborne’s face what he thought of any help she might provide.

I finally managed to get rid of them. As they went down the walk I looked over at Kluge’s house. Sure enough, Lisa Foo’s silver Ferrari was sitting in his driveway.

I had no business going over there. I knew that better than anyone.

So I set about preparing my evening meal. I made a tuna casserole—which is not as bland as it sounds, the way I make it—put it in the oven and went out to the garden to pick the makings for a salad. I was slicing cherry tomatoes and thinking about chilling a bottle of white wine when it occurred to me that I had enough for two.

Since I never do anything hastily, I sat down and thought it over for a while. What finally decided me was my feet. For the First time in a week, they were warm. So I went to Kluge’s house.

The front door was standing open. There was no screen. Funny how disturbing that can look, the dwelling wide open and unguarded. I stood on the porch and leaned in, but all I could see was the hallway.

“Miss Foo?” I called. There was no answer.

The last time I’d been here I had found a dead man. I hurried in.

Lisa Foo was sitting on a piano bench before a computer console. She was in profile, her back very straight, her brown legs in lotus position, her fingers poised at the keys as words sprayed rapidly onto the screen in front of her. She looked up and flashed her teeth at me.

“Somebody told me your name was Victor Apfel,” she said.

“Yes. Uh, the door was open . . .”

“It’s hot,” she said, reasonably, pinching the fabric of her shirt near her neck and lifting it up and down like you do when you’re sweaty. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, really.” I came into the dimness, and stumbled on something. It was a cardboard box, the large flat kind used for delivering a jumbo pizza.

“I was just fixing dinner, and it looks like there’s plenty for two, so I was wondering if you . . .” I trailed off, as I had just noticed something else. I had thought she was wearing shorts. In fact, all she had on was the shirt and a pair of pink bikini underpants. This did not seem to make her uneasy.

“. . . would you like to join me for dinner?”

Her smile grew even broader.

“I’d love to,” she said. She effortlessly unwound her legs and bounced to her feet, then brushed past me, trailing the smells of perspiration and sweet soap. “Be with you in a minute.”

I looked around the room again but my mind kept coming back to her. She liked Pepsi with her pizza; there were dozens of empty cans. There was a deep scar on her knee and upper thigh. The ashtrays were empty . . . and the long muscles of her calves bunched strongly as she walked. Kluge must have smoked, but Lisa didn’t, and she had fine, downy hairs in the small of her back just visible in the green computer light. I heard water running in the bathroom sink, looked at a yellow notepad covered with the kind of penmanship I hadn’t seen in decades, and smelled soap and remembered tawny brown skin and an easy stride.

She appeared in the hall, wearing cut-off jeans, sandals, and a new T-shirt. The old one had advertised BURROUGHS OFFICE SYSTEMS. This one featured Mickey Mouse and Snow White’s Castle and smelled of fresh bleached cotton. Mickey’s ears were laid back on the upper slopes of her incongruous breasts.

I followed her out the door. Tinkerbell twinkled in pixie dust from the back of her shirt.

“I like this kitchen,” she said.

You don’t really look at a place until someone says something like that.

The kitchen was a time capsule. It could have been lifted bodily from an issue of Life in the early fifties. There was the humpshouldered Frigidaire, of a vintage when that word had been a generic term, like kleenex or coke. The counter tops were yellow tile, the sort that’s only found in bathrooms these days. There wasn’t an ounce of Formica in the place. Instead of a dishwasher I had a wire rack and a double sink. There was no electric can opener, Cuisinart, trash compacter, or microwave oven. The newest thing in the whole room was a fifteen-year-old blender.

I’m good with my hands. I like to repair things.

“This bread is terrific,” she said.

I had baked it myself. I watched her mop her plate with a crust, and she asked if she might have seconds.

I understand cleaning one’s plate with bread is bad manners. Not that I cared; I do it myself. And other than that, her manners were impeccable. She polished off three helpings of my casserole and when she was done the plate hardly needed washing. I had a sense of ravenous appetite barely held in check.

She settled back in her chair and I re-filled her glass with white wine.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some more peas?”

“I’d bust.” She patted her stomach contentedly. “Thank you so much, Mister Apfel. I haven’t had a home-cooked meal in ages.”

“You can call me Victor.”

“I just love American food.”

“I didn’t know there was such a thing. I mean, not like Chinese or . . . you are American, aren’t you?” She just smiled. “What I mean—”

“I know what you meant, Victor. I’m a citizen, but not native-born. Would you excuse me for a moment? I know it’s impolite to jump right up, but with these braces I find I have to brush instantly after eating.”

I could hear her as I cleared the table. I ran water in the sink and started doing the dishes. Before long she joined me, grabbed a dish towel, and began drying the things in the rack, over my protests.

“You live alone here?” she asked.

“Yes. Have ever since my parents died.”

“Ever married? If it’s none of my business, just say so.”

“That’s all right. No, I never married.”

“You do pretty good for not having a woman around.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice. Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Where are you from? Taiwan?”

“I have a knack for languages. Back home, I spoke pidgin American, but when I got here I cleaned up my act. I also speak rotten French, illiterate Chinese in four or five varieties, gutter Vietnamese, and enough Thai to holler, ‘Me wanna see American Consul, pretty-damn-quick, you!’ ”

I laughed. When she said it, her accent was thick.

“I been here eight years now. You figured out where home is?”

“Vietnam?” I ventured.

“The sidewalks of Saigon, fer shure. Or Ho Chi Minh’s Shitty, as the pajama-heads re-named it, may their dinks rot off and their butts be filled with jagged punjee-sticks. Pardon my French.” She ducked her head in embarrassment. What had started out light had turned hot very quickly. I sensed a hurt at least as deep as my own, and we both backed off from it.

“I took you for a Japanese,” I said.

“Yeah, ain’t it a pisser? I’ll tell you about it some day. Victor, is that a laundry room through that door there? With an electric washer?”

“That’s right.”

“Would it be too much trouble if I did a load?”

It was no trouble at all. She had seven pairs of faded jeans, some with the legs cut away, and about two dozen T-shirts. It could have been a load of boys’ clothing except for the frilly underwear.

We went into the back yard to sit in the last rays of the setting sun, then she had to see my garden. I’m quite proud of it. When I’m well, I spend four or five hours a day working out there, year-round, usually in the morning hours. You can do that in southern California. I have a small greenhouse I built myself.

She loved it, though it was not in its best shape. I had spent most of the week in bed or in the tub. As a result, weeds were sprouting here and there.

“We had a garden when I was little,” she said. “And I spent two years in a rice paddy.”

“That must be a lot different than this.”

“Damn straight. Put me off rice for years.”

She discovered an infestation of aphids, so we squatted down to pick them off. She had that double-jointed Asian peasant’s way of sitting that I remembered so well and could never imitate. Her fingers were long and narrow, and soon the tips of them were green from squashed bugs.

We talked about this and that. I don’t remember quite how it came up, but I told her I had fought in Korea. I learned she was twenty-five. It turned out we had the same birthday, so some months back I had been exactly twice her age.

The only time Kluge’s name came up was when she mentioned how she liked to cook. She hadn’t been able to at Kluge’s house.

“He has a freezer in the garage full of frozen dinners,” she said. “He had one plate, one fork, one spoon, and one glass. He’s got the best microwave oven on the market. And that’s, it, man. Ain’t nothing else in his kitchen at all.” She shook her head, and executed an aphid. “He was one weird dude.”

When her laundry was done it was late evening, almost dark. She loaded it into my wicker basket and we took it out to the clothesline. It got to be a game. I would shake out a T-shirt and study the picture or message there. Sometimes I got it, and sometimes I didn’t. There were pictures of rock groups, a map of Los Angeles, Star Trek tie-ins . . . a little of everything.

“What’s the L5 Society?” I asked her.

“Guys that want to build these great big farms in space. I asked ’em if they were gonna grow rice, and they said they didn’t think it was the best crop for zero gee, so I bought the shirt.”

“How many of these things do you have?”

“Wow, it’s gotta be four or five hundred. I usually wear ’em two or three times and then put them away.”

I picked up another shirt, and a bra fell out. It wasn’t the kind of bra girls wore when I was growing up. It was very sheer, though somehow functional at the same time.

“You like, Yank?” Her accent was very thick. “You oughtta see my sister!”

I glanced at her, and her face fell.

“I’m sorry, Victor,” she said. “You don’t have to blush.” She took the bra from me and clipped it to the line.

She must have mis-read my face. True, I had been embarrassed, but I was also pleased in some strange way. It had been a long time since anybody had called me anything but Victor or Mr. Apfel.

The next day’s mail brought a letter from a law firm in Chicago. It was about the seven hundred thousand dollars. The money had come from a Delaware holding company which had been set up in 1933 to provide for me in my old age. My mother and father were listed as the founders. Certain long-term investments had matured, resulting in my recent windfall. The amount in my bank was after taxes.

It was ridiculous on the face of it. My parents had never had that kind of money. I didn’t want it. I would have given it back if I could find out who Kluge had stolen it from.

I decided that, if I wasn’t in jail this time next year, I’d give it all to some charity. Save the Whales, maybe, or the L5 Society.

I spent the morning in the garden. Later I walked to the market and bought some fresh ground beef and pork. I was feeling good as I pulled my purchases home in my fold-up wire basket. When I passed the silver Ferrari I smiled.

She hadn’t come to get her laundry. I took it off the line and folded it, then knocked on Kluge’s door.

“It’s me. Victor.”

“Come on in, Yank.”

She was where she had been before, but decently dressed this time. She smiled at me, then hit her forehead when she saw the laundry basket. She hurried to take it from me.

“I’m sorry, Victor. I meant to get this—”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It was no trouble. And it gives me the chance to ask if you’d like to dine with me again.”

Something happened to her face which she covered quickly. Perhaps she didn’t like “American” food as much as she professed to. Or maybe it was the cook.

“Sure, Victor, I’d love to. Let me take care of this. And why don’t you open those drapes? It’s like a tomb in here.”

She hurried away. I glanced at the screen she had been using. It was blank, but for one word: intercourse-p. I assumed it was a typo.

I pulled the drapes open in time to see Osborne’s car park at the curb. Then Lisa was back, wearing a new T-shirt. This one said A CHANGE OF HOBBIT, and had a picture of a squat, hairy-footed creature. She glanced out the window and saw Osborne coming up the walk.

“I say, Watson,” she said. “It’s Lestrade of the Yard. Do show him in.”

That wasn’t nice of her. He gave me a suspicious glance as he entered. I burst out laughing. Lisa sat on the piano bench, poker-faced. She slumped indolently, one arm resting near the keyboard.

“Well, Apfel,” Osborne started. “We’ve finally found out who Kluge really was.”

“Patrick William Gavin,” Lisa said.

Quite a time went by before Osborne was able to close his mouth. Then he opened it right up again.

“How the hell did you find that out?”

She lazily caressed the keyboard beside her.

“Well, of course I got it when it came into your office this morning. There’s a little stoolie program tucked away in your computer that whispers in my ear every time the name Kluge is mentioned. But I didn’t need that. I figured it out five days ago.”

“Then why the . . . why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t ask me.”

They glared at each other for a while. I had no idea what events had led up to this moment, but it was quite clear they didn’t like each other even a little bit. Lisa was on top just now, and seemed to be enjoying it. Then she glanced at her screen, looked surprised, and quickly tapped a key. The word that had been there vanished. She gave me an inscrutable glance, then faced Osborne again.

“If you recall, you brought me in because all your own guys were getting was a lot of crashes. This system was brain-damaged when I got here, practically catatonic. Most of it was down and your guys couldn’t get it up.” She had to grin at that.

“You decided I couldn’t do any worse than your guys were doing. So you asked me to try and break Kluge’s codes without frying the system. Well, I did it. All you had to do was come by and interface and I would have downloaded N tons of wallpaper right in your lap.”

Osborne listened quietly. Maybe he even knew he had made a mistake.

“What did you get? Can I see it now?”

She nodded, and pressed a few keys. Words started to fill her screen, and one close to Osborne. I got up and read Lisa’s terminal.

It was a brief bio of Kluge/Gavin. He was about my age, but while I was getting shot at in a foreign land, he was cutting a swath through the infant computer industry. He had been there from the ground up, working at many of the top research facilities. It surprised me that it had taken over a week to identify him.

“I compiled this anecdotally,” Lisa said, as we read. “The first thing you have to realize about Gavin is that he exists nowhere in any computerized information system. So I called people all over the country—interesting phone system he’s got, by the way; it generates a new number for each call, and you can’t call back or trace it—and started asking who the top people were in the fifties and sixties. I got a lot of names. After that, it was a matter of finding out who no longer existed in the files. He faked his death in 1967. I located one account of it in a newspaper file. Everybody I talked to who had known him knew of his death. There is a paper birth certificate in Florida. That’s the only other evidence I found of him. He was the only guy so many people in the field knew who left no mark on the world. That seemed conclusive to me.”

Osborne finished reading, then looked up.

“All right, Ms. Foo. What else have you found out?”

“I’ve broken some of his codes. I had a piece of luck, getting into a basic rape-and-plunder program he’d written to attack other people’s programs, and I’ve managed to use it against a few of his own. I’ve unlocked a file of passwords with notes on where they came from. And I’ve learned a few of his tricks. But it’s the tip of the iceberg.”

She waved a hand at the silent metal brains in the room.

“What I haven’t gotten across to anyone is just what this is. This is the most devious electronic weapon ever devised. It’s armored like a battleship. It has to be; there’s a lot of very slick programs out there that grab an invader and hang on like a terrier. If they ever got this far Kluge could deflect them. But usually they never even knew they’d been burgled. Kluge’d come in like a cruise missile, low and fast and twisty. And he’d route his attack through a dozen cut-offs.

“He had a lot of advantages. Big systems these days are heavily protected. People use passwords and very sophisticated codes. But Kluge helped invent most of them. You need a damn good lock to keep out a locksmith. He helped install a lot of the major systems. He left informants behind, hidden in the software. If the codes were changed, the computer itself would send the information to a safe system that Kluge could tap later. It’s like you buy the biggest, meanest, best-trained watchdog you can. And that night, the guy who trained the dog comes in, pats him on the head, and robs you blind.”

There was a lot more in that vein. I’m afraid that when Lisa began talking about computers, ninety percent of my head shut off.

“I’d like to know something, Osborne,” Lisa said.

“What would that be?”

“What is my status here? Am I supposed to be solving your crime for you, or just trying to get this system back to where a competent user can deal with it?”

Osborne thought it over.

“What worries me,” she added, “is that I’m poking around in a lot of restricted data banks. I’m worried about somebody knocking on the door and handcuffing me. You ought to be worried, too. Some of these agencies wouldn’t like a homicide cop looking into their affairs.”

Osborne bridled at that. Maybe that’s what she intended.

“What do I have to do?” he snarled. “Beg you to stay?”

“No. I just want your authorization. You don’t have to put it in writing. Just say you’re behind me.”

“Look. As far as L.A. County and the State of California are concerned, this house doesn’t exist. There is no lot here. It doesn’t appear in the assessor’s records. This place is in a legal limbo. If anybody can authorize you to use this stuff, it’s me, because I believe a murder was committed in it. So you just keep doing what you’ve been doing.”

“That’s not much of a commitment,” she mused.

“It’s all you’re going to get. Now, what else have you got?”

She turned to her keyboard and typed for a while. Pretty soon a printer started, and Lisa leaned back. I glanced at her screen. It said: osculate posterior-p. I remembered that osculate meant kiss. Well, these people have their own language. Lisa looked up at me and grinned.

“Not you,” she said, quietly. “Him.”

I hadn’t the faintest notion of what she was talking about.

Osborne got his printout and was ready to leave. Again, he couldn’t resist turning at the door for final orders.

“If you find anything to indicate he didn’t commit suicide, let me know.”

“Okay. He didn’t commit suicide.”

Osborne didn’t understand for a moment.

“I want proof.”

“Well, I have it, but you probably can’t use it. He didn’t write that ridiculous suicide note.”

“How do you know that?”

“I knew that my first day here. I had the computer list the program. Then I compared it to Kluge’s style. No way he could have written it. It’s tighter’n a bug’s ass. Not a spare line in it. Kluge didn’t pick his alias for nothing. You know what it means?”

“Clever,” I said.

“Literally. But it means . . . a Rube Goldberg device. Something overly complex. Something that works, but for the wrong reason. You ‘kluge around’ bugs in a program. It’s the hacker’s vaseline.”

“So?” Osborne wanted to know.

“So Kluge’s programs were really crocked. They were full of bells and whistles he never bothered to clean out. He was a genius, and his programs worked, but you wonder why they did. Routines so bletcherous they’d make your skin crawl. Real crufty bagbiters. But good programming’s so rare, even his diddles were better than most people’s super-moby hacks.”

I suspect Osborne understood about as much of that as I did.

“So you base your opinion on his programming style.”

“Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s gonna be ten years or so before that’s admissable in court, like graphology or fingerprints. But if you know anything about programming you can look at it and see it. Somebody else wrote that suicide note—somebody damn good, by the way. That program called up his last will and testament as a sub-routine. And he definitely did write that. It’s got his fingerprints all over it. He spent the last five years spying on the neighbors as a hobby. He tapped into military records, school records, work records, tax files and bank accounts. And he turned every telephone for three blocks into a listening device. He was one hell of a snoop.”

“Did he mention anywhere why he did that?” Osborne asked.

“I think he was more than half crazy. Possibly he was suicidal. He sure wasn’t doing himself any good with all those pills he took. But he was preparing himself for death, and Victor was the only one he found worthy of leaving it all to. I’d have believed he committed suicide if not for that note. But he didn’t write it. I’ll swear to that.”

We eventually got rid of him, and I went home to fix the dinner. Lisa joined me when it was ready. Once more she had a huge appetite.

I fixed lemonade and we sat on my small patio and watched evening gather around us.

I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating. I sat up, thinking it out, and I didn’t like my conclusions. So I put on my robe and slippers and went over to Kluge’s.

The front door was open again. I knocked anyway. Lisa stuck her head around the corner.

“Victor? Is something wrong?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “May I come in?”

She gestured, and I followed her into the living room. An open can of Pepsi sat beside her console. Her eyes were red as she sat on her bench.

“What’s up?” she said, and yawned.

“You should be asleep, for one thing,” I said.

She shrugged, and nodded.

“Yeah. I can’t seem to get in the right phase. Just now I’m in day mode. But Victor, I’m used to working odd hours, and long hours, and you didn’t come over here to lecture me about that, did you?”

“No. You say Kluge was murdered.”

“He didn’t write his suicide note. That seems to leave murder.”

“I was wondering why someone would kill him. He never left the house, so it was for something he did here with his computers. And now you’re . . . well, I don’t know what you’re doing, frankly, but you seem to be poking into the same things. Isn’t there a danger the same people will come after you?”

“People?” She raised an eyebrow.

I felt helpless. My fears were not well-formed enough to make sense.

“I don’t know . . . you mentioned agencies . . .”

“You notice how impressed Osborne was with that? You think there’s some kind of conspiracy Kluge tumbled to, or you think the CIA killed him because he found out too much about something, or—”

“I don’t know, Lisa. But I’m worried the same thing could happen to you.”

Surprisingly, she smiled at me.

“Thank you so much, Victor. I wasn’t going to admit it to Osborne, but I’ve been worried about that, too.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“I want to stay here and keep working. So I gave some thought to what I could do to protect myself. I decided there wasn’t anything.”

“Surely there’s something.”

“Well, I got a gun, if that’s what you mean. But think about it. Kluge was offed in the middle of the day. Nobody saw anybody enter or leave the house. So I asked myself, who can walk into a house in broad daylight, shoot Kluge, program that suicide note, and walk away, leaving no traces he’d ever been there?”

“Somebody very good.”

“Goddam good. So good there’s not much chance one little gook’s gonna be able to stop him if he decides to waste her.”

She shocked me, both by her words and by her apparent lack of concern for her own fate. But she had said she was worried.

“Then you have to stop this. Get out of here.”

“I won’t be pushed around that way,” she said. There was a tone of finality to it. I thought of things I might say, and rejected them all.

“You could at least . . . lock your front door,” I concluded, lamely.

She laughed, and kissed my cheek.

“I’ll do that, Yank. And I appreciate your concern. I really do.”

I watched her close the door behind me, listened to her lock it, then trudged through the moonlight toward my house. Halfway there I stopped. I could suggest she stay in my spare bedroom. I could offer to stay with her at Kluge’s.

No, I decided. She would probably take that the wrong way.

I was back in bed before I realized, with a touch of chagrin and more than a little disgust at myself, that she had every reason to take it the wrong way.

And me exactly twice her age.

I spent the morning in the garden, planning the evening’s menu. I have always liked to cook, but dinner with Lisa had rapidly become the high point of my day. Not only that, I was already taking it for granted. So it hit me hard, around noon, when I looked out the front and saw her car gone.

I hurried to Kluge’s front door. It was standing open. I made a quick search of the house. I found nothing until the master bedroom, where her clothes were stacked neatly on the floor.

Shivering, I pounded on the Laniers’ front door. Betty answered, and immediately saw my agitation.

“The girl at Kluge’s house,” I said. “I’m afraid something’s wrong. Maybe we’d better call the police.”

“What happened?” Betty asked, looking over my shoulder. “Did she call you? I see she’s not back yet.”

“Back?”

“I saw her drive away about an hour ago. That’s quite a car she has.”

Feeling like a fool, I tried to make nothing of it, but I caught a look in Betty’s eye. I think she’d have liked to pat me on the head. It made me furious.

But she’d left her clothes, so surely she was coming back.

I kept telling myself that, then went to run a bath, as hot as I could stand it.

When I answered the door she was standing there with a grocery bag in each arm and her usual blinding smile on her face.

“I wanted to do this yesterday but I forgot until you came over, and I know I should have asked first, but then I wanted to surprise you, so I just went to get one or two items you didn’t have in your garden and a couple of things that weren’t in your spice rack . . .”

She kept talking as we unloaded the bags in the kitchen. I said nothing. She was wearing a new T-shirt. There was a big V, and under it a picture of a screw, followed by a hyphen and a small case “p.” I thought it over as she babbled on. V, screw-p. I was determined not to ask what it meant.

“Do you like Vietnamese cooking?”

I looked at her, and finally realized she was very nervous.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had it. But I like Chinese, and Japanese, and Indian. I like to try new things.” The last part was a lie, but not as bad as it might have been. I do try new recipes, and my tastes in food are catholic. I didn’t expect to have much trouble with southeast Asian cuisine.

“Well, when I get through you still won’t know,” she laughed. “My momma was half-Chinese. So what you’re gonna get here is a mongrel meal.” She glanced up, saw my face, and laughed.

“I forgot. You’ve been to Asia. No, Yank, I ain’t gonna serve any dog meat.”

There was only one intolerable thing, and that was the chopsticks. I used them for as long as I could, then put them aside and got a fork.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Chopsticks happen to be a problem for me.”

“You use them very well.”

“I had plenty of time to learn how.”

It was very good, and I told her so. Each dish was a revelation, not quite like anything I had ever had. Toward the end, I broke down halfway.

“Does the V stand for victory?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“Beethoven? Churchill? World War Two?”

She just smiled.

“Think of it as a challenge, Yank.”

“Do I frighten you, Victor?”

“You did at first.”

“It’s my face, isn’t it?”

“It’s a generalized phobia of Orientals. I suppose I’m a racist. Not because I want to be.”

She nodded slowly, there in the dark. We were on the patio again, but the sun had gone down a long time ago. I can’t recall what we had talked about for all those hours. It had kept us busy, anyway.

“I have the same problem,” she said.

“Fear of Orientals?” I had meant it as a joke.

“Of Cambodians.” She let me take that in for a while, then went on. “When Saigon fell, I fled to Cambodia. It took me two years with stops when the Khmer Rouge put me in labor camps. I’m lucky to be alive, really.”

“I thought they called it Kampuchea now.”

She spat. I’m not even sure she was aware she had done it.

“It’s the People’s Republic of Syphilitic Dogs. The North Koreans treated you very badly, didn’t they, Victor?”

“That’s right.”

“Koreans are pus suckers.” I must have looked surprised, because she chuckled.

“You Americans feel so guilty about racism. As if you had invented it and nobody else—except maybe the South Africans and the Nazis—had ever practiced it as heinously as you. And you can’t tell one yellow face from another, so you think of the yellow races as one homogeneous block. When in fact orientals are among the most racist peoples on the earth. The Vietnamese have hated the Cambodians for a thousand years. The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Koreans hate everybody. And everybody hates the ‘ethnic Chinese.’ The Chinese are the Jews of the east.”

“I’ve heard that.”

She nodded, lost in her own thoughts.

“And I hate all Cambodians,” she said, at last. “Like you, I don’t wish to. Most of the people who suffered in the camps were Cambodians. It was the genocidal leaders, the Pol Pot scum, who I should hate.” She looked at me. “But sometimes we don’t get a lot of choice about things like that, do we, Yank?”

The next day I visited her at noon. It had cooled down, but was still warm in her dark den. She had not changed her shirt.

She told me a few things about computers. When she let me try some things on the keyboard I quickly got lost. We decided I needn’t plan on a career as a computer programmer.

One of the things she showed me was called a telephone modem, whereby she could reach other computers all over the world. She “interfaced” with someone at Stanford who she had never met, and who she knew only as “Bubble Sorter.” They typed things back and forth at each other.

At the end, Bubble Sorter wrote “bye-p.” Lisa typed T.

“What’s T?” I asked.

“True. Means yes, but yes would be too straightforward for a hacker.”

“You told me what a byte is. What’s a byep?”

She looked up at me seriously.

“It’s a question. Add p to a word, and make it a question. So bye-p means Bubble Sorter was asking if I wanted to log out. Sign off.”

I thought that over.

“So how would you translate ‘osculate posterior-p’ ?”

“ ‘You wanna kiss my ass?’ But remember, that was for Osborne.”

I looked at her T-shirt again, then up to her eyes, which were quite serious and serene. She waited, hands folded in her lap.

Intercourse-p.

“Yes,” I said. “I would.”

She put her glasses on the table and pulled her shirt over her head.

We made love in Kluge’s big waterbed.

I had a certain amount of performance anxiety—it had been a long, long time. After that, I was so caught up in the touch and smell and taste of her that I went a little crazy. She didn’t seem to mind.

At last we were done, and bathed in sweat. She rolled over, stood, and went to the window. She opened it, and a breath of air blew over me. Then she put one knee on the bed, leaned over me, and got a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table. She lit one.

“I hope you’re not allergic to smoke,” she said.

“No. My father smoked. But I didn’t know you did.”

“Only afterwards,” she said, with a quick smile. She took a deep drag. “Everybody in Saigon smoked, I think.” She stretched out on her back beside me and we lay like that, soaking wet, holding hands. She opened her legs so one of her bare feet touched mine. It seemed enough contact. I watched the smoke rise from her right hand.

“I haven’t felt warm in thirty years,” I said. “I’ve been hot, but I’ve never been warm. I feel warm now.”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

So I did, as much as I could, wondering if it would work this time. At thirty years remove, my story does not sound so horrible. We’ve seen so much in that time. There were people in jails at that very moment, enduring conditions as bad as any I encountered. The paraphernalia of oppression is still pretty much the same. Nothing physical happened to me that would account for thirty years lived as a recluse.

“I was badly injured,” I told her. “My skull was fractured. I still have . . . problems from that. Korea can get very cold, and I was never warm enough. But it was the other stuff. What they call brainwashing now.

“We didn’t know what it was. We couldn’t understand that even after a man had told them all he knew they’d keep on at us. Keeping us awake. Disorienting us. Some guys signed confessions, made up all sorts of stuff, but even that wasn’t enough. They’d just keep on at you.

“I never did figure it out. I guess I couldn’t understand an evil that big. But when they were sending us back and some of the prisoners wouldn’t go . . . they really didn’t want to go, they really believed . . .”

I had to pause there. Lisa sat up, moved quietly to the end of the bed, and began massaging my feet.

“We got a taste of what the Vietnam guys got, later. Only for us it was reversed. The G.I.’s were heroes, and the prisoners were . . .”

“You didn’t break,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“No, I didn’t.”

“That would be worse.”

I looked at her. She had my foot pressed against her flat belly, holding me by the heel while her other hand massaged my toes.

“The country was shocked,” I said. “They didn’t understand what brainwashing was. I tried telling people how it was. I thought they were looking at me funny. After a while, I stopped talking about it. And I didn’t have anything else to talk about.

“A few years back the Army changed its policy. Now they don’t expect you to withstand psychological conditioning. It’s understood you can say anything or sign anything.”

She just looked at me, kept massaging my foot, and nodded slowly. Finally she spoke.

“Cambodia was hot,” she said. “I kept telling myself when I finally got to the U.S. I’d live in Maine or someplace, where it snowed. And I did go to Cambridge, but I found out I didn’t like snow.”

She told me about it. The last I heard, a million people had died over there. It was a whole country frothing at the mouth and snapping at anything that moved. Or like one of those sharks you read about that, when its guts are ripped out, bends in a circle and starts devouring itself.

She told me about being forced to build a pyramid of severed heads. Twenty of them working all day in the hot sun finally got it ten feet high before it collapsed. If any of them stopped working, their own heads were added to the pile.

“It didn’t mean anything to me. It was just another job. I was pretty crazy by then. I didn’t start to come out of it until I got across the Thai border.”

That she had survived it at all seemed a miracle. She had gone through more horror than I could imagine. And she had come through it in much better shape. It made me feel small. When I was her age, I was well on my way to building the prison I have lived in ever since. I told her that.

“Part of it is preparation,” she said, wryly. “What you expect out of life, what your life has been so far. You said it yourself. Korea was new to you. I’m not saying I was ready for Cambodia, but my life up to that point hadn’t been what you’d call sheltered. I hope you haven’t been thinking I made a living in the streets by selling apples.”

She kept rubbing my feet, staring off into scenes I could not see.

“How old were you when you mother died?”

“She was killed during Tet, 1968. I was ten.”

“By the Viet Cong?”

“Who knows? Lot of bullets flying, lot of grenades being thrown.”

She sighed, dropped my foot, and sat there, a scrawny Buddha without a robe.

“You ready to do it again, Yank?”

“I don’t think I can, Lisa. I’m an old man.”

She moved over me and lowered herself with her chin just below my sternum, settling her breasts in the most delicious place possible.

“We’ll see,” she said, and giggled. “There’s an alternative sex act I’m pretty good at, and I’m pretty sure it would make you a young man again. But I haven’t been able to do it for about a year on account of these.” She tapped her braces. “It’d be sort of like sticking it in a buzz saw. So now I do this instead. I call it Touring the silicone valley.’ ” She started moving her body up and down, just a few inches at a time. She blinked innocently a couple times, then laughed.

“At last, I can see you,” she said. “I’m awfully myopic.”

I let her do that for a while, then lifted my head.

“Did you say silicone?”

“Uh-huh. You didn’t think they were real, did you?”

I confessed that I had.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy with anything I ever bought. Not even the car.”

“Why did you?”

“Does it bother you?”

It didn’t, and I told her so. But I couldn’t conceal my curiosity. “Because it was safe to. In Saigon I was always angry that I never developed. I could have made a good living as a prostitute, but I was always too tall, too skinny, and too ugly. Then in Cambodia I was lucky. I managed to pass for a boy some of the time. If not for that I’d have been raped a lot more than I was. And in Thailand I knew I d get to the West one way or another, and when I got there, I’d get the best car there was, eat anything I wanted any time I wanted to, and purchase the best tits money could buy.

You can’t imagine what the West looks like from the camps. A place where you can buy tits!”

She looked down between them, then back at my face.

“Looks like it was a good investment,” she said.

“They do seem to work okay,” I had to admit.

We agreed that she would spend the nights at my house. There were certain things she had to do at Kluge’s, involving equipment that had to be physically loaded, but many things she could do with a remote terminal and an armload of software. So we selected one of Kluge’s best computers and about a dozen peripherals and installed her at a cafeteria table in my bedroom.

I guess we both knew it wasn’t much protection if the people who got Kluge decided to get her. But I know I felt better about it, and I think she did, too.

The second day she was there a delivery van pulled up outside, and two guys started unloading a king-size waterbed. She laughed and laughed when she saw my face.

“Listen, you’re not using Kluge’s computers to—”

“Relax, Yank. How’d you think I could afford a Ferrari?”

“I’ve been curious.”

“If you’re really good at writing software you can make a lot of money. I own my own company. But every hacker picks up tricks here and there. I used to run a few Kluge scams, myself.”

“But not anymore?”

She shrugged. “Once a thief, always a thief, Victor. I told you I couldn’t make ends meet selling my bod.”

Lisa didn’t need much sleep.

We got up at seven, and I made breakfast every morning. Then we would spend an hour or two working in the garden. She would go to Kluge’s and I’d bring her a sandwich at noon, then drop in on her several times during the day. That was for my own peace of mind; I never stayed more than a minute. Sometime during the afternoon I would shop or do household chores, then at seven one of us would cook dinner. We alternated. I taught her “American” cooking, and she taught me a little of everything. She complained about the lack of vital ingredients in American markets. No dogs, of course, but she claimed to know great ways of preparing monkey, snake, and rat. I never knew how hard she was pulling my leg, and didn’t ask.

After dinner she stayed at my house. We would talk, make love, bathe.

She loved my tub. It is about the only alteration I have made in the house, and my only real luxury. I put it in—having to expand the bathroom to do so—in 1975, and never regretted it. We would soak for twenty minutes or an hour, turning the jets and bubblers on and off, washing each other, giggling like kids. Once we used bubble bath and made a mountain of suds four feet high, then destroyed it, splashing water all over the place. Most nights she let me wash her long black hair.

She didn’t have any bad habits—or at least none that clashed with mine. She was neat and clean, changing her clothes twice a day and never so much as leaving a dirty glass on the sink. She never left a mess in the bathroom. Two glasses of wine was her limit.

I felt like Lazarus.

Osborne came by three times in the next two weeks. Lisa met him at Kluge’s and gave him what she had learned. It was getting to be quite a list.

“Kluge once had an account in a New York bank with nine trillion dollars in it,” she told me after one of Osborne’s visits. “I think he did it just to see if he could. He left it in for one day, took the interest and fed it to a bank in the Bahamas, then destroyed the principal. Which never existed anyway.”

In return, Osborne told her what was new on the murder investigation—which was nothing—and on the status of Kluge’s property, which was chaotic. Various agencies had sent people out to look the place over. Some FBI men came, wanting to take over the investigation. Lisa, when talking about computers, had the power to cloud men’s minds. She did it first by explaining exactly what she was doing, in terms so abstruse that no one could understand her. Sometimes that was enough. If it wasn’t, if they started to get tough, she just moved out of the driver’s seat and let them try to handle Kluge’s contraption. She let them watch in horror as dragons leaped out of nowhere and ate up all the data on a disc, then printed “You Stupid Putz!” on the screen.

“I’m cheating them,” she confessed to me. “I’m giving them stuff I know they’re gonna step in, because I already stepped in it myself. I’ve lost about forty percent of the data Kluge had stored away. But the others lose a hundred percent. You ought to see their faces when Kluge drops a logic bomb into their work. That second guy threw a three thousand printer clear across the room. Then tried to bribe me to be quiet about it.”

When some federal agency sent out an expert from Stanford, and he seemed perfectly content to destroy everything in sight in the firm belief that he was bound to get it right sooner or later, Lisa showed him how Kluge entered the IRS main computer in Washington and neglected to mention how Kluge had gotten out. The guy tangled with some watchdog program. During his struggles, it seemed he had erased all the tax records from the letter S down into the W’s. Lisa let him think that for half an hour.

“I thought he was having a heart attack,” she told me. “All the blood drained out of his face and he couldn’t talk. So I showed him where I had—with my usual foresight—arranged for that data to be recorded, told him how to put it back where he found it, and how to pacify the watchdog. He couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. Pretty soon he’s gonna realize you can’t destroy that much information with anything short of dynamite because of the backups and the limits of how much can be running at any one time. But I don’t think he’ll be back.”

“It sounds like a very fancy video game,” I said.

“It is, in a way. But it’s more like Dungeons and Dragons. It’s an endless series of closed rooms with dangers on the other side. You don’t dare take it a step at a time. You take it a hundredth of a step at a time. Your questions are like, ‘Now this isn’t a question, but if it entered my mind to ask this question—which I’m not about to do—concerning what might happen if I looked at this door here—and I’m not touching it, I’m not even in the next room—what do you suppose you might do?’ And the program crunches on that, decides if you fulfilled the conditions for getting a great big cream pie in the face, then either throws it or allows as how it might just move from step A to step A Prime. Then you say, ‘Well, maybe I am looking at that door.’ And sometimes the program says ‘You looked, you looked, you dirty crook!’ And the fireworks start.”

Silly as all that sounds, it was very close to the best explanation she was ever able to give me about what she was doing.

“Are you telling everything, Lisa?” I asked her.

“Well, not everything. I didn’t mention the four cents.”

Four cents? Oh my god.

“Lisa, I didn’t want that, I didn’t ask for it, I wish he’d never—”

“Calm down, Yank. It’s going to be all right.”

“He kept records of all that, didn’t he?”

“That’s what I spend most of my time doing. Decoding his records.”

“How long have you known?”

“About the seven hundred thousand dollars? It was in the first disc I cracked.”

“I just want to give it back.”

She thought that over, and shook her head.

“Victor, it’d be more dangerous to get rid of it now than it would be to keep it. It was imaginary money at first. But now it’s got a history. The IRS thinks it knows where it came from. The taxes are paid on it. The State of Delaware is convinced that a legally chartered corporation disbursed it. An Illinois law firm has been paid for handling it. Your bank has been paying you interest on it. I’m not saying it would be impossible to go back and wipe all that out, but I wouldn’t like to try. I’m good, but I don’t have Kluge’s touch.”

“How could he do all that? You say it was imaginary money. That’s not the way I thought money worked. He could just pull it out of thin air?”

Lisa patted the top of her computer console, and smiled at me.

“This is money, Yank,” she said, and her eyes glittered.

At night she worked by candlelight so she wouldn’t disturb me. That turned out to be my downfall. She typed by touch, and needed the candle only to locate software.

So that’s how I’d go to sleep every night, looking at her slender body bathed in the glow of the candle. I was always reminded of melting butter dripping down a roasted ear of corn. Golden light on golden skin.

Ugly, she had called herself. Skinny. It was true she was thin. I could see her ribs when she sat with her back impossibly straight, her tummy sucked in, her chin up. She worked in the nude these days, sitting in lotus position. For long periods she would not move, her hands lying on her thighs, then she would poise, as if to pound the keys. But her touch was light, almost silent. It looked more like yoga than programming. She said she went into a meditative state for her best work.

I had expected a bony angularity, all sharp elbows and knees. She wasn’t like that. I had guessed her weight ten pounds too low, and still didn’t know where she put it. But she was soft and rounded, and strong beneath.

No one was ever going to call her face glamorous. Few would even go so far as to call her pretty. The braces did that, I think. They caught the eye and held it, drawing attention to that unsightly jumble.

But her skin was wonderful. She had scars. Not as many as I had expected. She seemed to heal quickly, and well.

I thought she was beautiful.

I had just completed my nightly survey when my eye was caught by the candle. I looked at it, then tried to look away.

Candles do that sometimes. I don’t know why. In still air, with the flame perfectly vertical, they begin to flicker. The flame leaps up then squats down, up and down, up and down, brighter and brighter in regular rhythm, two or three beats to the second—

—and I tried to call out to her, wishing the candle would stop its regular flickering, but already I couldn’t speak—

—I could only gasp, and I tried once more, as hard as I could, to yell, to scream, to tell her not to worry, and felt the nausea building . . .

I tasted blood. I took an experimental breath, did not find the smells of vomit, urine, feces. The overhead lights were on.

Lisa was on her hands and knees leaning over me, her face very close. A tear dropped on my forehead. I was on the carpet, on my back.

“Victor, can you hear me?”

I nodded. There was a spoon in my mouth. I spit it out.

“What happened? Are you going to be all right?”

I nodded again, and struggled to speak.

“You just lie there. The ambulance is on its way.”

“No. Don’t need it.”

“Well, it’s on its way. You just take it easy and—”

“Help me up.”

“Not yet. You’re not ready.”

She was right. I tried to sit up, and fell back quickly. I took deep breaths for a while. Then the doorbell rang.

She stood up and started to the door. I just managed to get my hand around her ankle. Then she was leaning over me again, her eyes as wide as they would go.

“What is it? What’s wrong now?”

“Get some clothes on,” I told her. She looked down at herself, surprised.

“Oh. Right.”

She got rid of the ambulance crew. Lisa was a lot calmer after she made coffee and we were sitting at the kitchen table. It was one o’clock, and I was still pretty rocky. But it hadn’t been a bad one.

I went to the bathroom and got the bottle of Dilantin I’d hidden when she moved in. I let her see me take one.

“I forgot to do this today,” I told her.

“It’s because you hid them. That was stupid.”

“I know.” There must have been something else I could have said. It didn’t please me to see her look hurt. But she was hurt because I wasn’t defending myself against her attack, and that was a bit too complicated for me to dope out just after a grand mal.

“You can move out if you want to,” I said. I was in rare form.

So was she. She reached across the table and shook me by the shoulders. She glared at me.

“I won’t take a lot more of that kind of shit,” she said, and I nodded, and began to cry.

She let me do it. I think that was probably best. She could have babied me, but I do a pretty good job of that myself.

“How long has this been going on?” she finally said. “Is that why you’ve stayed in your house for thirty years?”

I shrugged. “I guess it’s part of it. When I got back they operated, but it just made it worse.”

“Okay. I’m mad at you because you didn’t tell me about it, so I didn’t know what to do. I want to stay, but you’ll have to tell me how. Then I won’t be mad anymore.”

I could have blown the whole thing right there. I’m amazed I didn’t. Through the years I’d developed very good methods for doing things like that. But I pulled through when I saw her face. She really did want to stay. I didn’t know why, but it was enough.

“The spoon was a mistake,” I said. “If there’s time, and if you can do it without risking your fingers, you could jam a piece of cloth in there. Part of a sheet, or something. But nothing hard.” I explored my mouth with a finger. “I think I broke a tooth.”

“Serves you right,” she said. I looked at her, and smiled, then we were both laughing. She came around the table and kissed me, then sat on my knee.

“The biggest danger is drowning. During the first part of the seizure, all my muscles go rigid. That doesn’t last long. Then they all start contracting and relaxing at random. It’s very strong.”

“I know. I watched, and I tried to hold you.”

“Don’t do that. Get me on my side. Stay behind me, and watch out for flailing arms. Get a pillow under my head if you can. Keep me away from things I could injure myself on.” I looked her square in the eye. “I want to emphasize this. Just try to do all those things. If I’m getting too violent, it’s better you stand off to the side. Better for both of us. If I knock you out, you won’t be able to help me if I start strangling on vomit.”

I kept looking at her eyes. She must have read my mind, because she smiled slightly.

“Sorry, Yank. I am not freaked out. I mean, like, it’s totally gross, you know, and it barfs me out to the max, you could—”

“—gag me with a spoon, I know. Okay, right, I know I was dumb. And that’s about it. I might bite my tongue or the inside of my cheek. Don’t worry about it. There is one more thing.”

She waited, and I wondered how much to tell her. There wasn’t a lot she could do, but if I died on her I didn’t want her to feel it was her fault.

“Sometimes I have to go to the hospital. Sometimes one seizure will follow another. If that keeps up for too long, I won’t breathe, and my brain will die of oxygen starvation.”

“That only takes about five minutes,” she said, alarmed.

“I know. It’s only a problem if I start having them frequently, so we could plan for it if I do. But if I don’t come out of one, start having another right on the heels of the first, or if you can’t detect any breathing for three or four minutes, you’d better call an ambulance.”

“Three or four minutes? You’d be dead before they got here.”

“It’s that or live in a hospital. I don’t like hospitals.”

“Neither do I.”

The next day she took me for a ride in her Ferrari. I was nervous about it, wondering if she was going to do crazy things. If anything, she was too slow. People behind her kept honking. I could tell she hadn’t been driving long from the exaggerated attention she put into every movement.

“A Ferrari is wasted on me, I’m afraid,” she confessed at one point. “I never drive it faster than fifty-five.”

We went to an interior decorator in Beverly Hills and she bought a low-watt gooseneck lamp at an outrageous price.

I had a hard time getting to sleep that night. I suppose I was afraid of having another seizure, though Lisa’s new lamp wasn’t going to set it off.

Funny about seizures. When I first started having them, everyone called them fits. Then, gradually, it was seizures, until fits began to sound dirty.

I guess it’s a sign of growing old, when the language changes on you.

There were rafts of new words. A lot of them were for things that didn’t even exist when I was growing up. Like software. I always visualized a limp wrench.

“What got you interested in computers, Lisa?” I asked her.

She didn’t move. Her concentration when sitting at the machine was pretty damn good. I rolled onto my back and tried to sleep.

“It’s where the power is, Yank.” I looked up. She had turned to face me.

“Did you pick it all up since you got to America?”

“I had a head start. I didn’t tell you about my Captain, did I?”

“I don’t think you did.”

“He was strange. I knew that. I was about fourteen. He was an American, and he took an interest in me. He got me a nice apartment in Saigon. And he put me in school.”

She was studying me, looking for a reaction. I didn’t give her one.

“He was surely a pedophile, and probably had homosexual tendencies, since I looked so much like a skinny little boy.”

Again the wait. This time she smiled.

“He was good to me. I learned to read well. From there on, anything is possible.”

“I didn’t actually ask you about your Captain. I asked why you got interested in computers.”

“That’s right. You did.”

“Is it just a living?”

“It started that way. It’s the future, Victor.”

“God knows I’ve read that enough times.”

“It’s true. It’s already here. It’s power, if you know how to use it. You’ve seen what Kluge was able to do. You can make money with one of these things. I don’t mean earn it, I mean make it, like if you had a printing press. Remember Osborne mentioned that Kluge’s house didn’t exist? Did you think what that means?”

“That he wiped it out of the memory banks.”

“That was the first step. But the lot exists in the county plat books, wouldn’t you think? I mean, this country hasn’t entirely given up paper.”

“So the county really does have a record of that house.”

“No. That page was torn out of the records.”

“I don’t get it. Kluge never left the house.”

“Oldest way in the world, friend. Kluge looked through the L.A.P.D. files until he found a guy known as Sammy. He sent him a cashier’s check for a thousand dollars, along with a letter saying he could earn twice that if he’d go to the hall of records and do something. Sammy didn’t bite, and neither did McGee, or Molly Unger. But Little Billy Phipps did, and he got a check just like the letter said, and he and Kluge had a wonderful business relationship for many years. Little Billy drives a new Cadillac now, and hasn’t the faintest notion who Kluge was or where he lived. It didn’t matter to Kluge how much he spent. He just pulled it out of thin air.”

I thought that over for a while. I guess it’s true that with enough money you can do just about anything, and Kluge had all the money in the world.

“Did you tell Osborne about Little Billy?”

“I erased that disc, just like I erased your seven hundred thousand. You never know when you might need somebody like Little Billy.”

“You’re not afraid of getting into trouble over it?”

“Life is risk, Victor. I’m keeping the best stuff for myself. Not because I intend to use it, but because if I ever needed it badly and didn’t have it, I’d feel like such a fool.”

She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, which made them practically disappear.

“Tell me something, Yank. Kluge picked you out of all your neighbors because you’d been a Boy Scout for thirty years. How do you react to what I’m doing?”

“You’re cheerfully amoral, and you’re a survivor, and you’re basically decent. And I pity anybody who gets in your way.”

She grinned, stretched, and stood up.

“ ‘Cheerfully amoral.’ I like that.” She sat beside me, making a great sloshing in the bed. “You want to be amoral again?”

“In a little bit.” She started rubbing my chest. “So you got into computers because they were the wave of the future. Don’t you ever worry about them . . . I don’t know, I guess it sounds corny . . . do you think they’ll take over?”

“Everybody thinks that until they start to use them,” she said. “You’ve got to realize just how stupid they are. Without programming they are good for nothing, literally. Now, what I do believe is that the people who run the computers will take over. They already have. That’s why I study them.”

“I guess that’s not what I meant. Maybe I can’t say it right.” She frowned. “Kluge was looking into something. He’d been eavesdropping in artificial intelligence labs, and reading a lot of neurological research. I think he was trying to find a common thread.”

“Between human brains and computers?”

“Not quite. He was thinking of computers and neurons. Brain cells.” She pointed to her computer. “That thing, or any other computer, is light-years away from being a human brain. It can’t generalize, or infer, or categorize, or invent. With good programming it can appear to do some of those things, but it’s an illusion.

“There’s an old speculation about what would happen if we finally built a computer with as many transistors as the human brain has neurons. Would there be a self-awareness? I think that’s baloney. A transistor isn’t a neuron, and a quintillion of them aren’t any better than a dozen.

“So Kluge—who seems to have felt the same way—started looking into the possible similarities between a neuron and an 8-bit computer. That’s why he had all that consumer junk sitting around his house, those Trash-80’s and Atari’s and TI’s and Sinclair’s, for chrissake. He was used to much more powerful instruments. He ate up the home units like candy.”

“What did he find out?”

“Nothing, it looks like. An 8-bit unit is more complex than a neuron, and no computer is in the same galaxy as an organic brain. But see, the words get tricky. I said an Atari is more complex than a neuron, but it’s hard to really compare them. It’s like comparing a direction with a distance, or a color with a mass. The units are different. Except for one similarity.”

“What’s that?”

“The connections. Again, it’s different, but the concept of networking is the same. A neuron is connected to a lot of others. There are trillions of them, and the way messages pulse through them determines what we are and what we think and what we remember. And with that computer I can reach a million others. It’s bigger than the human brain, really, because the information in that network is more than all humanity could cope with in a million years. It reaches from Pioneer Ten, out beyond the orbit of Pluto, right into every living room that has a telephone in it. With that computer you can tap tons of data that has been collected but nobody’s even had the time to look at.

“That’s what Kluge was interested in. The old ‘critical mass computer’ idea, the computer that becomes aware, but with a new angle. Maybe it wouldn’t be the size of the computer, but the number of computers. There used to be thousands of them. Now there’s millions. They’re putting them in cars. In wristwatches. Every home has several, from the simple timer on a microwave oven up to a video game or home terminal. Kluge was trying to find out if critical mass could be reached that way.”

“What did he think?”

“I don’t know. He was just getting started.” She glanced down at me. “But you know what, Yank? I think you’ve reached critical mass while I wasn’t looking.”

“I think you’re right.” I reached for her.

Lisa liked to cuddle. I didn’t, at first, after fifty years of sleeping alone. But I got to like it pretty quickly.

That’s what we were doing when we resumed the conversation we had been having. We just lay in each others’ arms and talked about things. Nobody had mentioned love yet, but I knew I loved her. I didn’t know what to do about it, but I would think of something.

“Critical mass,” I said. She nuzzled my neck, and yawned.

“What about it?”

“What would it be like? It seems like it would be such a vast intelligence. So quick, so omniscient. God-like.”

“Could be.”

“Wouldn’t it . . . run our lives? I guess I’m asking the same questions I started off with. Would it take over?”

She thought about it for a long time.

“I wonder if there would be anything to take over. I mean, why should it care? How could we figure what its concerns would be? Would it want to be worshipped, for instance? I doubt it. Would it want to ‘rationalize all human behavior, to eliminate all emotion,’ as I’m sure some sci-fi film computer must have told some damsel in distress in the ’fifties.

“You can use a word like awareness, but what does it mean? An amoeba must be aware. Plants probably are. There may be a level of awareness in a neuron. Even in an integrated circuit chip. We don’t even know what our own awareness really is. We’ve never been able to shine a light on it, dissect it, figure out where it comes from or where it goes when we’re dead. To apply human values to a thing like this hypothetical computer-net consciousness would be pretty stupid. But I don’t see how it could interact with human awareness at all. It might not even notice us, any more than we notice cells in our bodies, or neutrinos passing through us, or the vibrations of the atoms in the air around us.”

So she had to explain what a neutrino was. One thing I always provided her with was an ignorant audience. And after that, I pretty much forgot about our mythical hyper-computer.

“What about your Captain?” I asked, much later.

“Do you really want to know, Yank?” she mumbled, sleepily. “I’m not afraid to know.”

She sat up and reached for her cigarettes. I had come to know she sometimes smoked them in times of stress. She had told me she smoked after making love, but that first time had been the only time. The lighter flared in the dark. I heard her exhale.

“My Major, actually. He got a promotion. Do you want to know his name?”

“Lisa, I don’t want to know any of it if you don’t want to tell it. But if you do, what I want to know is did he stand by you.”

“He didn’t marry me, if that’s what you mean. When he knew he had to go, he said he would, but I talked him out of it. Maybe it was the most noble thing I ever did. Maybe it was the most stupid.

“It’s no accident I look Japanese. My grandmother was raped in ’42 by a Jap soldier of the occupation. She was Chinese, living in Hanoi. My mother was born there. They went south after Dien Bien Phu. My grandmother died. My mother had it hard. Being Chinese was tough enough, but being half Chinese and half Japanese was worse. My father was half French and half Annamese. Another bad combination. I never knew him. But I’m sort of a capsule history of Vietnam.”

The end of her cigarette glowed brighter once more.

“I’ve got one grandfather’s face and the other grandfather’s height. With tits by Goodyear. About all I missed was some American genes, but I was working on that for my children.

“When Saigon was falling I tried to get to the American Embassy. Didn’t make it. You know the rest, until I got to Thailand, and when I finally got Americans to notice me, it turned out my Major was still looking for me. He sponsored me over here, and I made it in time to watch him die of cancer. Two months I had with him, all of it in the hospital.”

“My god.” I had a horrible thought. “That wasn’t the war, too, was it? I mean, the story of your life—”

“—is the rape of Asia. No, Victor. Not that war, anyway. But he was one of those guys who got to see atom bombs up close, out in Nevada. He was too Regular Army to complain about it, but I think he knew that’s what killed him.”

“Did you love him?”

“What do you want me to say? He got me out of hell.”

Again the cigarette flared, and I saw her stub it out.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t love him. He knew that. I’ve never loved anybody. He was very dear, very special to me. I would have done almost anything for him. He was fatherly to me.” I felt her looking at me in the dark. “Aren’t you going to ask how old he was?”

“Fiftyish,” I said.

“On the nose. Can I ask you something?”

“I guess it’s your turn.”

“How many girls have you had since you got back from Korea?” I held up my hand and pretended to count on my fingers. “One,” I said, at last.

“How many before you went?”

“One. We broke up before I left for the war.”

“How many in Korea?”

“Nine. All at Madame Park’s jolly little whorehouse in Pusan.”

“So you’ve made love to one white and ten Asians. I bet none of the others were as tall as me.”

“Korean girls have fatter cheeks, too. But they all had your eyes.”

She nuzzled against my chest, took a deep breath, and sighed. “We’re a hell of a pair, aren’t we?”

I hugged her, and her breath came again, hot on my chest. I wondered how I’d lived so long without such a simple miracle as that.

“Yes. I think we really are.”

Osborne came by again about a week later. He seemed subdued. He listened to the things Lisa had decided to give him without much interest. He took the printout she handed him, and promised to turn it over to the departments that handled those things. But he didn’t get up to leave.

“I thought I ought to tell you, Apfel,” he said, at last. “The Gavin case has been closed.”

I had to think a moment to remember Kluge’s real name had been Gavin.

“The coroner ruled suicide a long time ago. I was able to keep the case open quite a while on the strength of my suspicions.” He nodded toward Lisa. “And on what she said about the suicide note. But there was just no evidence at all.”

“It probably happened quickly,” Lisa said. “Somebody caught him, tracked him back—it can be done; Kluge was lucky for a long time—and did him the same day.”

“You don’t think it was suicide?” I asked Osborne.

“No. But whoever did it is home free unless something new turns up.”

“I’ll tell you if it does,” Lisa said.

“That’s something else,” Osborne said. “I can’t authorize you to work over there any more. The county’s taken possession of house and contents.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lisa said, softly.

There was a short silence as she leaned over to shake a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. She lit it, exhaled, and leaned back beside me, giving Osborne her most inscrutable look. He sighed.

“I’d hate to play poker with you, lady,” he said. “What do you mean, ‘Don’t worry about it’ ?”

“I bought the house four days ago. And its contents. If anything turns up that would help you re-open the murder investigation, I will let you know.”

Osborne was too defeated to get angry. He studied her quietly for a while.

“I’d like to know how you swung that.”

“I did nothing illegal. You’re free to check it out. I paid good cash money for it. The house came onto the market. I got a good price at the Sheriffs sale.”

“How’d you like it if I put my best men on the transaction? See if they can dig up some funny money? Maybe fraud. How about I get the F.B.I. in to look it all over?”

She gave him a cool look.

“You’re welcome to. Frankly, Detective Osborne, I could have stolen that house, Griffith Park, and the Harbor Freeway and I don’t think you could have caught me.”

“So where does that leave me?”

“Just where you were. With a closed case, and a promise from me.”

“I don’t like you having all that stuff, if it can do the things you say it can do.”

“I didn’t expect you would. But that’s not your department, is it? The county owned it for a while, through simple confiscation. They didn’t know what they had, and they let it go.”

“Maybe I can get the Fraud detail out here to confiscate your software. There’s criminal evidence on it.”

“You could try that,” she agreed.

They stared at each other for a while. Lisa won. Osborne rubbed his eyes and nodded. Then he heaved himself to his feet and slumped to the door.

Lisa stubbed out her cigarette. We listened to him going down the walk.

“I’m surprised he gave up so easy,” I said. “Or did he? Do you think he’ll try a raid?”

“It’s not likely. He knows the score.”

“Maybe you could tell it to me.”

“For one thing, it’s not his department, and he knows it.”

“Why did you buy the house?”

“You ought to ask how.”

I looked at her closely. There was a gleam of amusement behind the poker face.

“Lisa. What did you do?”

“That’s what Osborne asked himself. He got the right answer, because he understands Kluge’s machines. And he knows how things get done. It was no accident that house going on the market, and no accident I was the only bidder. I used one of Kluge’s pet councilmen.”

“You bribed him?”

She laughed, and kissed me.

“I think I finally managed to shock you, Yank. That’s gotta be the biggest difference between me and a native-born American. Average citizens don’t spend much on bribes over here. In Saigon, everybody bribes.”

“Did you bribe him?”

“Nothing so indelicate. One has to go in the back door over here. Several entirely legal campaign contributions appeared in the accounts of a State Senator, who mentioned a certain situation to someone, who happened to be in the position to do legally what I happened to want done.” She looked at me askance. “Of course I bribed him, Victor. You’d be amazed to know how cheaply. Does that bother you?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t like bribery.”

“I’m indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done.”

“I assume you covered yourself.”

“Reasonably well. You’re never entirely covered with a bribe, because of the human element. The councilman might geek if they got him in front of a grand jury. But they won’t, because Osborne won’t pursue it. That’s the second reason he walked out of here without a fight. He knows how the world wobbles, he knows what kind of force I now possess, and he knows he can’t fight it.”

There was a long silence after that. I had a lot to think about, and I didn’t feel good about most of it. At one point Lisa reached for the pack of cigarettes, then changed her mind. She waited for me to work it out.

“It is a terrific force, isn’t it,” I finally said.

“It’s frightening,” she agreed. “Don’t think it doesn’t scare me. Don’t think I haven’t had fantasies of being superwoman. Power is an awful temptation, and it’s not easy to reject. There’s so much I could do.”

“Will you?”

“I’m not talking about stealing things, or getting rich.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“This is political power. But I don’t know how to wield it . . . it sounds corny, but to use it for good. I’ve seen so much evil come from good intentions. I don’t think I’m wise enough to do any good. And the chances of getting torn up like Kluge did are large. But I’m not wise enough to walk away from it. I’m still a street urchin from Saigon, Yank. I’m smart enough not to use it unless I have to. But I can’t give it away, and I can’t destroy it. Is that stupid?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that one. But I had a bad feeling.

My doubts had another week to work on me. I didn’t come to any great moral conclusions. Lisa knew of some crimes, and she wasn’t reporting them to the authorities. That didn’t bother me much. She had at her fingertips the means to commit more crimes, and that bothered me a lot. Yet I really didn’t think she planned to do anything. She was smart enough to use the things she had only in a defensive way—but with Lisa that could cover a lot of ground.

When she didn’t show up for dinner one evening, I went over to Kluge’s and found her busy in the living room. A nine-foot section of shelving had been cleared. The discs and tapes were stacked on a table. She had a big plastic garbage can and a magnet the size of a softball. I watched her wave a tape near the magnet, then toss it in the garbage can, which was almost full. She glanced up, did the same operation with a handful of discs, then took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

“Feel any better now, Victor?” she asked.

“What do you mean? I feel fine.”

“No you don’t. And I haven’t felt right, either. It hurts me to do it, but I have to. You want to go get the other trash can?”

I did, and helped her pull more software from the shelves.

“You’re not going to wipe it all, are you?”

“No. I’m wiping records, and . . . something else.”

“Are you going to tell me what?”

“There are things it’s better not to know,” she said, darkly.

I finally managed to convince her to talk over dinner. She had said little, just eating and shaking her head. But she gave in.

“Rather dreary, actually,” she said. “I’ve been probing around some delicate places the last couple days. These are places Kluge visited at will, but they scare the hell out of me. Dirty places. Places where they know things I thought I’d like to find out.” She shivered, and seemed reluctant to go on.

“Are you talking about military computers? The CIA?”

“The CIA is where it starts. It’s the easiest. I’ve looked around at NORAD—that’s the guys who get to fight the next war. It makes me shiver to see how easy Kluge got in there. He cobbled up a way to start World War Three, just as an exercise. That’s one of the things we just erased. The last two days I was nibbling around the edges of the big boys. The Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security . . . something. DIA and NSA. Each of them is bigger than the CIA. Something knew I was there. Some watchdog program. As soon as I realized that I got out quick, and I’ve spent the last five hours being sure it didn’t follow me. And now I’m sure, and I’ve destroyed all that, too.”

“You think they’re the ones who killed Kluge?”

“They’re surely the best candidates. He had tons of their stuff. I know he helped design the biggest installations at NSA, and he’d been poking around in there for years. One false step is all it would take.”

“Did you get it all? I mean, are you sure?”

“I’m sure they didn’t track me. I’m not sure I’ve destroyed all the records. I’m going back now to take a last look.”

“I’ll go with you.”

We worked until well after midnight. Lisa would review a tape or a disc, and if she was in any doubt, toss it to me for the magnetic treatment. At one point, simply because she was unsure, she took the magnet and passed it in front of an entire shelf of software.

It was amazing to think about it. With that one wipe she had randomized billions of bits of information. Some of it might not exist anywhere else in the world. I found myself confronted by even harder questions. Did she have the right to do it? Didn’t knowledge exist for everyone? But I confess I had little trouble quelling my protests. Mostly I was happy to see it go. The old reactionary in me found it easier to believe There Are Things We Are Not Meant To Know.

We were almost through when her monitor screen began to malfunction. It actually gave off a few hisses and pops, so Lisa stood back from it for a moment, then the screen started to flicker. I stared at it for a while. It seemed to me there was an image trying to form in the screen. Something three-dimensional. Just as I was starting to get a picture of it I happened to glance at Lisa, and she was looking at me. Her face was flickering. She came to me and put her hands over my eyes.

“Victor, you shouldn’t look at that.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. And when I said it, it was, but as soon as I had the words out I knew it wasn’t. And that is the last thing I remembered for a long time.

I’m told it was a very bad two weeks. I remember very little of it. I was kept under high dosage of drugs, and my few lucid periods were always followed by a fresh seizure.

The first thing I recall clearly was looking up at Doctor Stuart’s face. I was in a hospital bed. I later learned it was in Cedars-Sinai, not the Veteran’s Hospital. Lisa had paid for a private room.

Stuart put me through the usual questions. I was able to answer them, though I was very tired. When he was satisfied as to my condition he finally began to answer some of my questions. I learned how long I had been there, and how it had happened.

“You went into consecutive seizures,” he confirmed. “I don’t know why, frankly. You haven’t been prone to them for a decade. I was thinking you were well under control. But nothing is ever really stable, I guess.”

“So Lisa got me here in time.”

“She did more than that. She didn’t want to level with me at first. It seems that after the first seizure she witnessed she read everything she could find. From that day, she had a syringe and a solution of Valium handy. When she saw you couldn’t breathe she injected you with 100 milligrams, and there’s no doubt it saved your life.”

Stuart and I had known each other a long time. He knew I had no prescription for Valium, though we had talked about it the last time I was hospitalized. Since I lived alone, there would be no one to inject me if I got in trouble.

He was more interested in results than anything else, and what Lisa did had the desired result. I was still alive.

He wouldn’t let me have any visitors that day. I protested, but soon was asleep. The next day she came. She wore a new T-shirt. This one had a picture of a robot wearing a gown and mortarboard, and said “Class of 11111000000.” It turns out that was 1984 in binary notation.

She had a big smile and said “Hi, Yank!” and as she sat on the bed I started to shake. She looked alarmed and asked if she should call the doctor.

“It’s not that,” I managed to say. “I’d like it if you just held me.”

She took off her shoes and got under the covers with me. She held me tightly. At some point a nurse came in and tired to shoo her out. Lisa gave her profanities in Vietnamese, Chinese, and a few startling ones in English, and the nurse left. I saw Doctor Stuart glance in later.

I felt much better when I finally stopped crying. Lisa’s eyes were wet, too.

“I’ve been here every day,” she said. “You look awful, Victor.”

“I feel a lot better.”

“Well, you look better than you did. But your doctor says you’d better stick around another couple of days, just to make sure.”

“I think he’s right.”

“I’m planning a big dinner for when you get back. You think we should invite the neighbors?”

I didn’t say anything for a while. There were so many things we hadn’t faced. Just how long could it go on between us? How long before I got sour about being so useless? How long before she got tired of being with an old man? I don’t know just when I had started to think of Lisa as a permanent part of my life. And I wondered how I could have thought that.

“Do you want to spend more years waiting in hospitals for a man to die?”

“What do you want, Victor? I’ll marry you if you want me to. Or I’ll live with you in sin. I prefer sin, myself, but if it’ll make you happy—”

“I don’t know why you want to saddle yourself with an epileptic old fart.”

“Because I love you.”

It was the first time she had said it. I could have gone on questioning—bringing up her Major again, for instance—but I had no urge to. I’m very glad I didn’t. So I changed the subject.

“Did you get the job finished?”

She knew which job I was talking about. She lowered her voice and put her mouth close to my ear.

“Let’s don’t be specific about it here, Victor. I don’t trust any place I haven’t swept for bugs. But, to put your mind at ease, I did finish, and it’s been a quiet couple of weeks. No one is any wiser, and I’ll never meddle in things like that again.”

I felt a lot better. I was also exhausted. I tried to conceal my yawns, but she sensed it was time to go. She gave me one more kiss, promising many more to come, and left me.

It was the last time I ever saw her.

At about ten o’clock that evening Lisa went into Kluge’s kitchen with a screwdriver and some other tools and got to work on the microwave oven.

The manufacturers of those appliances are very careful to insure they can’t be turned on with the door open, as they emit lethal radiation. But with simple tools and a good brain it is possible to circumvent the safety interlocks. Lisa had no trouble with them. About ten minutes after she entered the kitchen she put her head in the oven and turned it on.

It is impossible to say how long she held her head in there. It was long enough to turn her eyeballs to the consistency of boiled eggs. At some point she lost voluntary muscle control and fell to the floor, pulling the microwave down with her. It shorted out, and a fire started.

The fire set off the sophisticated burglar alarm she had installed a month before. Betty Lanier saw the flames and called the fire department as Hal ran across the street and into the burning kitchen. He dragged what was left of Lisa out onto the grass. When he saw what the fire had done to her upper body, and in particular her breasts, he threw up.

She was rushed to the hospital. The doctors there amputated one arm and cut away the frightful masses of vulcanized silicone, pulled all her teeth, and didn’t know what to do about the eyes. They put her on a respirator.

It was an orderly who first noticed the blackened and bloody T-shirt they had cut from her. Some of the message was unreadable, but it began, “I can’t go on this way anymore . . .”

There is no other way I could have told all that. I discovered it piecemeal, starting with the disturbed look on Doctor Stuart’s face when Lisa didn’t show up the next day. He wouldn’t tell me anything, and I had another seizure shortly after.

The next week is a blur. I remember being released from the hospital, but I don’t remember the trip home. Betty was very good to me. They gave me a tranquilizer called Tranxene, and it was even better. I ate them like candy. I wandered in a drugged haze, eating only when Betty insisted, sleeping sitting up in my chair, coming awake not knowing where or who I was. I returned to the prison camp many times. Once I recall helping Lisa stack severed heads.

When I saw myself in the mirror, there was a vague smile on my face. It was Tranxene, caressing my frontal lobes. I knew that if I was to live much longer, me and Tranxene would have to become very good friends.

I eventually became capable of something that passed for rational thought. I was helped along somewhat by a visit from Osborne. I was trying, at that time, to find reasons to live, and wondered if he had any.

“I’m very sorry,” he started off. I said nothing. “This is on my own time,” he went on. “The department doesn’t know I’m here.”

“Was it suicide?” I asked him.

“I brought along a copy of the . . . the note. She ordered it from a shirt company in Westwood, three days before the . . . accident.”

He handed it to me, and I read it. I was mentioned, though not by name. I was “the man I love.” She said she couldn’t cope with my problems. It was a short note. You can’t get too much on a T-shirt. I read it through five times, then handed it back to him.

“She told you Kluge didn’t write his note. I tell you she didn’t write this.”

He nodded reluctantly. I felt a vast calm, with a howling nightmare just below it. Praise Tranxene.

“Can you back that up?”

“She saw me in the hospital shortly before she died. She was full of life and hope. You say she ordered the shirt three days before. I would have felt that. And that note is pathetic. Lisa was never pathetic.”

He nodded again.

“Some things I want to tell you. There were no signs of a struggle. Mrs. Lanier is sure no one came in the front. The crime lab went over the whole place and we’re sure no one was in there with her. I’d stake my life on the fact that no one entered or left that house. Now, I don’t believe it was suicide, either, but do you have any suggestions?”

“The NSA,” I said.

I explained about the last things she had done while I was still there. I told him of her fear of the government spy agencies. That was all I had.

“Well, I guess they’re the ones who could do a thing like that, if anyone could. But I’ll tell you, I have a hard time swallowing it. I don’t know why, for one thing. Maybe you believe those people kill like you and I’d swat a fly.” His look make it into a question.

“I don’t know what I believe.”

“I’m not saying they wouldn’t kill for national security, or some such shit. But they’d have taken the computers, too. They wouldn’t have left her alone, they wouldn’t even have let her near that stuff after they killed Kluge.”

“What you’re saying makes sense.”

He muttered on about it for quite some time. Eventually I offered him some wine. He accepted thankfully. I considered joining him—it would be a quick way to die—but did not. He drank the whole bottle, and was comfortably drunk when he suggested we go next door and look it over one more time. I was planning on visiting Lisa the next day, and knew I had to start somewhere building myself up for that, so I agreed to go with him.

We inspected the kitchen. The fire had blackened the counters and melted some linoleum, but not much else. Water had made a mess of the place. There was a brown stain on the floor which I was able to look at with no emotion.

So we went back to the living room, and one of the computers was turned on. There was a short message on the screen.

IF YOU WISH TO KNOW MORE

PRESS ENTERn

“Don’t do it,” I told him. But he did. He stood, blinking solemnly, as the words wiped themselves out and a new message appeared.

YOU LOOKED

The screen started to flicker and I was in my car, in darkness, with a pill in my mouth and another in my hand. I spit out the pill, and sat for a moment, listening to the old engine ticking over. In my other hand was the plastic pill bottle. I felt very tired, but opened the car door and shut off the engine. I felt my way to the garage door and opened it. The air outside was fresh and sweet. I looked down at the pill bottle and hurried into the bathroom.

When I got through what had to be done there were a dozen pills floating in the toilet that hadn’t even dissolved. There were the wasted shells of many more, and a lot of other stuff I won’t bother to describe. I counted the pills in the bottle, remembered how many there had been, and wondered if I would make it.

I went over to Kluge’s house and could not find Osborne. I was getting tired, but I made it back to my house and stretched out on the couch to see if I would live or die.

The next day I found the story in the paper. Osborne had gone home and blown out the back of his head with his revolver. It was not a big story. It happens to cops all the time. He didn’t leave a note.

I got on the bus and rode out to the hospital and spent three hours trying to get in to see Lisa. I wasn’t able to do it. I was not a relative and the doctors were quite firm about her having no visitors. When I got angry they were as gentle as possible. It was then I learned the extent of her injuries. Hal had kept the worst from me. None of it would have mattered, but the doctors swore there was nothing left in her head. So I went home.

She died two days later.

She had left a will, to my surprise. I got the house and contents. I picked up the phone as soon as I learned of it, and called a garbage company. While they were on the way I went for the last time into Kluge’s house.

The same computer was still on, and it gave the same message.

PRESS ENTERn

I cautiously located the power switch, and turned it off. I had the garbage people strip the place to the bare walls.

I went over my own house very carefully, looking for anything that was even the first cousin to a computer. I threw out the radio. I sold the car, and the refrigerator, and the stove, and the blender, and the electric clock. I drained the waterbed and threw out the heater.

Then I bought the best propane stove on the market, and hunted a long time before I found an old icebox. I had the garage stacked to the ceiling with firewood. I had the chimney cleaned. It would be getting cold soon.

One day I took the bus to Pasadena and established the Lisa Foo Memorial Scholarship fund for Vietnamese refugees and their children. I endowed it with seven hundred thousand eighty-three dollars and four cents. I told them it could be used for any field of study except computer science. I could tell they thought me eccentric.

And I really thought I was safe, until the phone rang.

I thought it over for a long time before answering it. In the end, I knew it would just keep on going until I did. So I picked it up.

For a few seconds there was a dial tone, but I was not fooled. I kept holding it to my ear, and finally the tone turned off. There was just silence. I listened intently. I heard some of those far-off musical tones that live in phone wires. Echoes of conversations taking place a thousand miles away. And something infinitely more distant and cool.

I do not know what they have incubated out there at the NS A. I don’t know if they did it on purpose, or if it just happened, or if it even has anything to do with them, in the end. But I know it’s out there, because I heard its soul breathing on the wires. I spoke very carefully.

“I do not wish to know any more,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone anything. Kluge, Lisa, and Osborne all committed suicide. I am just a lonely man, and I won’t cause you any trouble.”

There was a click, and a dial tone.

Getting the phone taken out was easy. Getting them to remove all the wires was a little harder, since once a place is wired they expect it to be wired forever. They grumbled, but when I started pulling them out myself, they relented, though they warned me it was going to cost.

PG&E was harder. They actually seemed to believe there was a regulation requiring each house to be hooked up to the grid. They were willing to shut off my power—though hardly pleased about it—but they just weren’t going to take the wires away from my house. I went up on the roof with an axe and demolished four feet of eaves as they gaped at me. Then they coiled up their wires and went home.

I threw out all my lamps, all things electrical. With hammer, chisel, and handsaw I went to work on the drywall just above the baseboards.

As I stripped the house of wiring I wondered many times why I was doing it. Why was it worth it? I couldn’t have very many more years before a final seizure finished me off. Those years were not going to be a lot of fun.

Lisa had been a survivor. She would have known why I was doing this. She had once said I was a survivor, too. I survived the camp. I survived the death of my mother and father and managed to fashion a solitary life. Lisa survived the death of just about everything. No survivor expects to, live through it all. But while she was alive, she would have worked to stay alive.

And that’s what I did. I got all the wires out of the walls, went over the house with a magnet to see if I had missed any metal, then spent a week cleaning up, fixing the holes I had knocked in the walls, ceiling, and attic. I was amused trying to picture the real-estate agent selling this place after I was gone.

It’s a great little house, folks. No electricity . . .

Now I live quietly, as before.

I work in my garden during most of the daylight hours. I’ve expanded it considerably, and even have things growing in the front yard now.

I live by candlelight, and kerosene lamp. I grow most of what I eat.

It took a long time to taper off the Tranxene and the Dilantin, but I did it, and now take the seizures as they come. I’ve usually got bruises to show for it.

In the middle of a vast city I have cut myself off. I am not part of the network growing faster than I can conceive. I don’t even know if it’s dangerous, to ordinary people. It noticed me, and Kluge, and Osborne. And Lisa. It brushed against our minds like I would brush away a mosquito, never noticing I had crushed it. Only I survived.

But I wonder.

It would be very hard . . .

Lisa told me how it can get in through the wiring. There’s something called a carrier wave that can move over wires carrying household current. That’s why the electricity had to go.

I need water for my garden. There’s just not enough rain here in southern California, and I don’t know how else I could get the water.

Do you think it could come through the pipes?

BLOODCHILD

Octavia E. Butler

Our first Octavia Butler Story, “Speech Sounds,” ran in our Mid-December1983 issue. We are proud to be presenting another of her fine, but rare, short pieces here, and we hope that this second appearance constitutes a trend.

My last night of childhood began with a visit home. T‘Gatoi’s sisters had given us two sterile eggs. T’Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn’t matter. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. Almost everyone. My mother wouldn’t take any. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. Most of the time she watched me.

I lay against T’Gatoi’s long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor. My father, who had never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have. And toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he had married my mother and fathered four children.

But my mother seemed content to age before she had to. I saw her turn away as several of T‘Gatoi’s limbs secured me closer. T’Gatoi liked our body heat, and took advantage of it whenever she could. When I was little and at home more, my mother used to try to tell me how to behave with T’Gatoi—how to be respectful and always obedient because T’Gatoi was the Tlic government official in charge of the Preserve, and thus the most important of her kind to deal directly with Terrans. It was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying.

I had no idea why she was lying, or even what she was lying about. It was an honor to have T‘Gatoi in the family, but it was hardly a novelty. T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

“You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses.

“He’s still too thin,” my mother said sharply.

T’Gatoi lifted her head and perhaps a meter of her body off the couch as though she were sitting up. She looked at my mother and my mother, her face lined and old-looking, turned away.

“Lien, I would like you to have what’s left of Gan’s egg.”

“The eggs are for the children,” my mother said.

“They are for the family. Please take it.”

Unwillingly obedient, my mother took it from me and put it to her mouth. There were only a few drops left in the now-shrunken, elastic shell, but she squeezed them out, swallowed them, and after a few moments some of the lines of tension began to smooth from her face.

“It’s good,” she whispered. “Sometimes I forget how good it is.”

“You should take more,” T’Gatoi said. “Why are you in such a hurry to be old?”

My mother said nothing.

“I like being able to come here,” T’Gatoi said. “This place is a refuge because of you, yet you won’t take care of yourself.”

T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve—why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people. She oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic. I had lived outside with her. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me, “Take care of her.” And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen.

Now T’Gatoi used four of her limbs to push me away from her onto the floor. “Go on, Gan,” she said. “Sit down there with your sisters and enjoy not being sober. You had most of the egg. Lien, come warm me.”

My mother hesitated for no reason that I could see. One of my earliest memories is of my mother stretched alongside T‘Gatoi, talking about things I could not understand, picking me up from the floor and laughing as she sat me on one of T’Gatoi’s segments. She ate her share of eggs then. I wondered when she had stopped, and why.

She lay down now against T’Gatoi, and the whole left row of T’Gatoi’s limbs closed around her, holding her loosely, but securely. I had always found it comfortable to lie that way but, except for my older sister, no one else in the family liked it. They said it made them feel caged.

T’Gatoi meant to cage my mother. Once she had, she moved her tail slightly, then spoke. “Not enough egg, Lien. You should have taken it when it was passed to you. You need it badly now.”

T’Gatoi’s tail moved once more, its whip motion so swift I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been watching for it. Her sting drew only a single drop of blood from my mother’s bare leg.

My mother cried out—probably in surprise. Being stung doesn’t hurt. Then she sighed and I could see her body relax. She moved languidly into a more comfortable position within the cage of T’Gatoi’s limbs. “Why did you do that?” she asked, sounding half asleep.

“I could not watch you sitting and suffering any longer.”

My mother managed to move her shoulders in a small shrug. “Tomorrow,” she said.

“Yes. Tomorrow you will resume your suffering—if you must. But for now, just for now, lie here and warm me and let me ease your way a little.”

“He’s still mine, you know,” my mother said suddenly. “Nothing can buy him from me.” Sober, she wouldn’t have permitted herself to refer to such things.

“Nothing,” T’Gatoi agreed, humoring her.

“Did you think I would sell him for eggs? For long life? My son?”

“Not for anything,” T’Gatoi said stroking my mother’s shoulders, toying with her long, graying hair.

I would like to have touched my mother, shared that moment with her. She would take my hand if I touched her now. Freed by the egg and the sting, she would smile and perhaps say things long held in. But tomorrow, she would remember all this as a humiliation. I did not want to be part of a remembered humiliation. Best just to be still and know she loved me under all the duty and pride and pain.

“Xuan Hoa, take off her shoes,” T’Gatoi said. “In a little while I’ll sting her again and she can sleep.”

My older sister obeyed, swaying drunkenly as she stood up. When she had finished, she sat down beside me and took my hand. We had always been a unit, she and I.

My mother put the back of her head against T’Gatoi’s underside and tried from that impossible angle to look up into the broad, round face. “You’re going to sting me again?”

“Yes, Lien.”

“I’ll sleep until tomorrow noon.”

“Good. You need it. When did you sleep last?”

My mother made a wordless sound of annoyance. “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” she muttered.

It was an old joke between them. They had grown up together, sort of, though T‘Gatoi had not, in my mother’s lifetime, been small enough for any Terran to step on. She was nearly three times my mother’s present age, yet would still be young when my mother died of age. But T’Gatoi and my mother had met as T’Gatoi was coming into a period of rapid development—a kind of Tlic adolescence. My mother was only a child, but for a while they developed at the same rate and had no better friends than each other.

T‘Gatoi had even introduced my mother to the man who became my father. My parents, pleased with each other in spite of their very different ages, married as T’Gatoi was going into her family’s business—politics. She and my mother saw each other less. But sometimes before my older sister was born, my mother promised T‘Gatoi one of her children. She would have to give one of us to someone, and she preferred T’Gatoi to some stranger.

Years passed. T‘Gatoi traveled and increased her influence. The Preserve was hers by the time she came back to my mother to collect what she probably saw as her just reward for her hard work. My older sister took an instant liking to her and wanted to be chosen, but my mother was just coming to term with me and T’Gatoi liked the idea of choosing an infant and watching and taking part in all the phases of development. I’m told I was first caged within T‘Gatoi’s many limbs only three minutes after my birth. A few days later, I was given my first taste of egg. I tell Terrans that when they ask whether I was ever afraid of her. And I tell it to Tlic when T’Gatoi suggests a young Terran child for them and they, anxious and ignorant, demand an adolescent. Even my brother who had somehow grown up to fear and distrust the Tlic could probably have gone smoothly into one of their families if he had been adopted early enough. Sometimes, I think for his sake he should have been. I looked at him, stretched out on the floor across the room, his eyes open, but glazed as he dreamed his egg dream. No matter what he felt toward the Tlic, he always demanded his share of egg.

“Lien, can you stand up?” T’Gatoi asked suddenly.

“Stand?” my mother said. “I thought I was going to sleep.”

“Later. Something sounds wrong outside.” The cage was abruptly gone.

“What?”

“Up, Lien!”

My mother recognized her tone and got up just in time to avoid being dumped on the floor. T’Gatoi whipped her three meters of body off her couch, toward the door, and out at full speed. She had bones—ribs, a long spine, a skull, four sets of limbbones per segment. But when she moved that way, twisting, hurling herself into controlled falls, landing running, she seemed not only boneless, but aquatic—something swimming through the air as though it were water. I loved watching her move.

I left my sister and started to follow her out the door, though I wasn’t very steady on my own feet. It would have been better to sit and dream, better yet to find a girl and share a waking dream with her. Back when the Tlic saw us as not much more than convenient big warm-blooded animals, they would pen several of us together, male and female, and feed us only eggs. That way they could be sure of getting another generation of us no matter how we tried to hold out. We were lucky that didn’t go on long. A few generations of it and we would have been little more than conveninent big animals.

“Hold the door open, Gan,” T’Gatoi said. “And tell the family to stay back.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“N’Tlic.”

I shrank back against the door. “Here? Alone?”

“He was trying to reach a call box, I suppose.” She carried the man past me, unconscious, folded like a coat over some of her limbs. He looked young—my brother’s age perhaps—and he was thinner than he should have been. What T’Gatoi would have called dangerously thin.

“Gan, go to the call box,” she said. She put the man on the floor and began stripping off his clothing.

I did not move.

After a moment, she looked up at me, her sudden stillness a sign of deep impatience.

“Send Qui,” I told her. “I’ll stay here. Maybe I can help.”

She let her limbs begin to move again, lifting the man and pulling his shirt over his head. “You don’t want to see this,” she said. “It will be hard. I can’t help this man the way his Tlic could.”

“I know. But send Qui. He won’t want to be of any help here. I’m at least willing to try.”

She looked at my brother—older, bigger, stronger, certainly more able to help her here. He was sitting up now, braced against the wall, staring at the man on the floor with undisguised fear and revulsion. Even she could see that he would be useless.

“Qui, go!” she said.

He didn’t argue. He stood up, swayed briefly, then steadied, frightened sober.

“This man’s name is Bram Lomas,” she told him, reading from the man’s arm band. I fingered my own arm band in sympathy. “He needs T’Khotgif Teh. Do you hear?”

“Bram Lomas, T’Khotgif Teh,” my brother said. “I’m going.” He edged around Lomas and ran out the door.

Lomas began to regain consciousness. He only moaned at first and clutched spasmodically at a pair of T’Gatoi’s limbs. My younger sister, finally awake from her egg dream, came close to look at him, until my mother pulled her back.

T’Gatoi removed the man’s shoes, then his pants, all the while leaving him two of her limbs to grip. Except for the final few, all her limbs were equally dexterous. “I want no argument from you this time, Gan,” she said.

I straightened. “What shall I do?”

“Go out and slaughter an animal that is at least half your size.”

“Slaughter? But I’ve never—”

She knocked me across the room. Her tail was an efficient weapon whether she exposed the sting or not.

I got up, feeling stupid for having ignored her warning, and went into the kitchen. Maybe I could kill something with a knife or an ax. My mother raised a few Terran animals for the table and several thousand local ones for their fur. T‘Gatoi would probably prefer something local. An achti, perhaps. Some of those were the right size, though they had about three times as many teeth as I did and a real love of using them. My mother, Hoa, and Qui could kill them with knives. I had never killed one at all, had never slaughtered any animal. I had spent most of my time with T’Gatoi while my brother and sisters were learning the family business. T’Gatoi had been right. I should have been the one to go to the call box. At least I could do that.

I went to the corner cabinet where my mother kept her larger house and garden tools. At the back of the cabinet there was a pipe that carried off waste water from the kitchen—except that it didn’t any more. My father had rerouted the waste water before I was born. Now the pipe could be turned so that one half slid around the other and a rifle could be stored inside. This wasn’t our only gun, but it was our most easily accessible one. I would have to use it to shoot one of the biggest of the achti. Then T‘Gatoi would probably confiscate it. Firearms were illegal in the Preserve. There had been incidents right after the Preserve was established—Terrans shooting Tlic, shooting N’Tlic. This was before the joining of families began, before everyone had a personal stake in keeping the peace. No one had shot a Tlic in my lifetime or my mother’s, but the law still stood—for our protection, we were told. There were stories of whole Terran families wiped out in reprisal back during the assassinations.

I went out to the cages and shot the biggest achti I could find. It was a handsome breeding male and my mother would not be pleased to see me bring it in. But it was the right size, and I was in a hurry.

I put the achti’s long, warm body over my shoulder—glad that some of the weight I’d gained was muscle—and took it to the kitchen. There, I put the gun back in its hiding place. If T’Gatoi noticed the achti’s wounds and demanded the gun, I would give it to her. Otherwise, let it stay where my father wanted it.

I turned to take the achti to her, then hesitated. For several seconds, I stood in front of the closed door wondering why I was suddenly afraid. I knew what was going to happen. I hadn’t seen it before but T’Gatoi had shown me diagrams, and drawings. She had made sure I knew the truth as soon as I was old enough to understand it.

Yet I did not want to go into that room. I wasted a little time chosing a knife from the carved, wooden box in which my mother kept them. T’Gatoi might want one, I told myself, for the tough, heavily furred hide of the achti.

“Gan!” T’Gatoi called, her voice harsh with urgency.

I swallowed. I had not imagined a simple moving of the feet could be so difficult. I realized I was trembling and that shamed me. Shame impelled me through the door.

I put the achti down near T’Gatoi and saw that Lomas was unconscious again. She, Lomas, and I were alone in the room, my mother and sisters probably sent out so they would not have to watch. I envied them.

But my mother came back into the room as T’Gatoi seized the achti. Ignoring the knife I offered her, she extended claws from several of her limbs and slit the achti from throat to anus. She looked at me, her yellow eyes intent. “Hold this man’s shoulders, Gan.”

I stared at Lomas in panic, realizing that I did not want to touch him, let alone hold him. This would not be like shooting an animal. Not as quick, not as merciful, and, I hoped, not as final, but there was nothing I wanted less than to be part of it.

My mother came forward. “Gan, you hold his right side,” she said. “I’ll hold his left.” And if he came to, he would throw her off without realizing he had done it. She was a tiny woman. She often wondered aloud how she had produced, as she said, such “huge” children.

“Never mind,” I told her, taking the man’s shoulders. “I’ll do it.”

She hovered nearby.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t shame you. You don’t have to stay and watch.”

She looked at me uncertainly, then touched my face in a rare caress. Finally, she went back to her bedroom.

T’Gatoi lowered her head in relief. “Thank you, Gan,” she said with courtesy more Terran than Tlic. “That one . . . she is always finding new ways for me to make her suffer.”

Lomas began to groan and make choked sounds. I had hoped he would stay unconscious. T’Gatoi put her face near his so that he focused on her.

“I’ve stung you as much as I dare for now,” she told him. “When this is over, I’ll sting you to sleep and you won’t hurt any more.”

“Please,” the man begged. “Wait . . .”

“There’s no more time, Bram. I’ll sting you as soon as it’s over. When T’Khotgif arrives she’ll give you eggs to help you heal. It will be over soon.”

“T’Khotgif!” the man shouted, straining against my hands.

“Soon, Bram.” T’Gatoi glanced at me, then placed a claw against his abdomen slightly to the right of the middle, just below the last rib. There was movement on the right side—tiny, seemingly random pulsations moving his brown flesh, creating a concavity here, a convexity there, over and over until I could see the rhythm of it and knew where the next pulse would be.

Lomas’s entire body stiffened under T’Gatoi’s claw, though she merely rested it against him as she wound the rear section of her body around her legs. He might break my grip, but he would not break hers. He wept helplessly as she used his pants to tie his hands, then pushed his hands above his head so that I could kneel on the cloth between them and pin them in place. She rolled up his shirt and gave it to him to bite down on.

And she opened him.

His body convulsed with the first cut. He almost tore himself away from me. The sounds he made . . . I had never heard such sounds come from anything human. T’Gatoi seemed to pay no attention as she lengthened and deepened the cut, now and then pausing to lick away blood. His blood vessels contracted, reacting to the chemistry of her saliva, and the bleeding slowed.

I felt as though I were helping her torture him, helping her consume him. I knew I would vomit soon, didn’t know why I hadn’t already. I couldn’t possibly last until she was finished.

She found the first grub. It was fat and deep red with his blood—both inside and out. It had already eaten its own egg case, but apparently had not yet begun to eat its host. At this stage, it would eat any flesh except its mother’s. Let alone, it would have gone on excreting the poisons that had both sickened and alerted Lomas. Eventually it would have begun to eat. By the time it ate its way out of Lomas’s flesh, Lomas would be dead or dying—and unable to take revenge on the thing that was killing him. There was always a grace period between the time the host sickened and the time the grubs began to eat him.

T’Gatoi picked up the writhing grub carefully, and looked at it, somehow ignoring the terrible groans of the man.

Abruptly, the man lost consciousness.

“Good,” T’Gatoi looked down at him. “I wish you Terrans could do that at will.” She felt nothing. And the thing she held . . .

It was limbless and boneless at this stage, perhaps fifteen centimeters long and two thick, blind and slimy with blood. It was like a large worm. T’Gatoi put it into the belly of the achti, and it began at once to burrow. It would stay there and eat as long as there was anything to eat.

Probing through Lomas’ flesh, she found two more, one of them smaller and more vigorous. “A male!” she said happily. He would be dead before I would. He would be through his metamorphosis and screwing everything that would hold still before his sisters even had limbs. He was the only one to make a serious effort to bite T’Gatoi as she placed him in the achti.

Paler worms oozed to visibility in Lomas’s flesh. I closed my eyes. It was worse than finding something dead, rotting, and filled with tiny animal grubs. And it was far worse than any drawing or diagram.

“Ah, there are more,” T’Gatoi said, plucking out two long, thick grubs. You may have to kill another animal, Gan. Everything lives inside you Terrans.”

I had been told all my life that this was a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together—a kind of birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn’t ready to see it. Maybe I never would be. Yet I couldn’t not see it. Closing my eyes didn’t help.

T’Gatoi found a grub still eating its egg case. The remains of the case were still wired into a blood vessel by their own little tube or hook or whatever. That was the way the grubs were anchored and the way they fed. They took only bood until they were ready to emerge. Then they ate their stretched, elastic egg cases. Then they ate their hosts.

T’Gatoi bit away the egg case, licked away the blood. Did she like the taste? Did childhood habits die hard—or not die at all?

The whole procedure was wrong, alien. I wouldn’t have thought anything about her could seem alien to me.

“One more, I think,” she said. “Perhaps two. A good family. In a host animal these days, we would be happy to find one or two alive.” She glanced at me. “Go outside, Gan, and empty your stomach. Go now while the man is unconscious.”

I staggered out, barely made it. Beneath the tree just beyond the front door, I vomited until there was nothing left to bring up. Finally, I stood shaking, tears streaming down my face. I did not know why I was crying, but I could not stop. I went farther from the house to avoid being seen. Every time I closed my eyes I saw red worms crawling over redder human flesh.

There was a car coming toward the house. Since Terrans were forbidden motorized vehicles except for certain farm equipment, I knew this must be Lomas’s Tlic with Qui and perhaps a Terran doctor. I wiped my face on my shirt, struggled for control.

“Gan,” Qui called as the car stopped. “What happened?” He crawled out of the low, round, Tlic-convenient car door. Another Terran crawled out the other side and went into the house without speaking to me. The doctor. With his help and a few eggs, Lomas might make it.

“T’Khotgif Teh?” I said.

The Tlic driver surged out of her car, reared up half her length before me. She was paler and smaller than T’Gatoi—probably born from the body of an animal. Tlic from Terran bodies were always larger as well as more numerous.

“Six young,” I told her. “Maybe seven alive. At least one male.”

“Lomas?” she said harshly. I liked her for the question and the concern in her voice when she asked it. The last coherent thing he had said was her name.

“He’s alive,” I said.

She surged away to the house without another word.

“She’s been sick,” my brother said, watching her go. “When I called, I could hear people telling her she wasn’t well enough to go out even for this.”

I said nothing. I had extended courtesy to the Tlic. Now I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I hoped he would go in—out of curiosity if nothing else.

“Finally found out more than you wanted to know, eh?”

I looked at him.

“Don’t give me one of her looks,” he said. “You’re not her. You’re just her property.”

One of her looks. Had I picked up even an ability to imitate her expressions?

“What’d you do, puke?” He sniffed the air. “So now you know what you’re in for.”

I walked away from him. He and I had been close when we were kids. He would let me follow him around when I was home and sometimes T‘Gatoi would let me bring him along when she took me into the city. But something had happened when he reached adolescence. I never knew what. He began keeping out of T’Gatoi’s way. Then he began running away—until he realized there was no “away.” Not in the Preserve. Certainly not outside. After that he concentrated on getting his share of every egg that came into the house, and on looking out for me in a way that made me all but hate him—a way that clearly said, as along as I was all right, he was safe from the Tlic.

“How was it, really?” he demanded, following me.

“I killed an achti. The young ate it.”

“You didn’t run out of the house and puke because they ate an achti.”

“I had . . . never seen a person cut open before.” That was true, and enough for him to know. I couldn’t talk about the other. Not with him.

“Oh,” he said. He glanced at me as though he wanted to say more, but he kept quiet.

We walked, not really headed anywhere. Toward the back, toward the cages, toward the fields.

“Did he say anything?” Qui asked. “Lomas, I mean.”

Who else would he mean? “He said, ‘T’Khotgif.’ ”

Qui shuddered. “If she had done that to me, she’d be the last person I’d call for.”

“You’d call for her. Her sting would ease your pain without killing the grubs in you.”

“You think I’d care if they died?”

No. Of course he wouldn’t. Would I?

“Shit!” He drew a deep breath. “I’ve seen what they do. You think this thing with Lomas was bad? It was nothing.”

I didn’t argue. He didn’t know what he was talking about.

“I saw them eat a man,” he said.

I turned to face him. “You’re lying!”

“I saw them eat a man.” He paused. “It was when I was little. I had been to the Hartmund house and I was on my way home. Halfway here, I saw a man and a Tlic and the man was N’Tlic. The gound was hilly. I was able to hide from them and watch. The Tlic wouldn’t open the man because she had nothing to feed the grubs. The man couldn’t go any farther and there were no houses around. He was in so much pain he told her to kill him. He begged her to kill him. Finally, she did. She cut his throat. One swipe of one claw. I saw the grubs eat their way out, then burrow in again, still eating.”

His words made me see Lomas’s flesh again, parasitized, crawling. “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I whispered.

He looked startled, as though he’d forgotten I was listening. “I don’t know.”

“You started to run away not long after that, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Stupid. Running inside the Preserve. Running in a cage.”

I shook my head, said what I should have said to him long ago. “She wouldn’t take you, Qui. You don’t have to worry.”

“She would . . . if anything happened to you.”

“No. She’d take Xuan Hoa. Hoa . . . wants it.” She wouldn’t if she had stayed to watch Lomas.

“They don’t take women,” he said with contempt.

“They do sometimes.” I glanced at him. “Actually, they prefer women. You should be around them when they talk among themselves. They say women have more body fat to protect the grubs. But they usually take men to leave the women free to bear their own young.”

“To provide the next generation of host animals,” he said, switching from contempt to bitterness.

“It’s more than that!” I countered. Was it?

“If it were going to happen to me, I’d want to believe it was more, too.”

“It is more!” I felt like a kid. Stupid argument.

“Did you think so while T’Gatoi was picking worms out of that guy’s guts?”

“It’s not supposed to happen that way.”

“Sure it is. You weren’t supposed to see it, that’ all. And his Tlic was supposed to do it. She could sting him unconscious and the operation wouldn’t have been as painful. But she’d still open him, pick out the grubs, and if she missed even one, it would poison him and eat him from the inside out.”

There was actually a time when my mother told me to show respect for Qui because he was my older brother. I walked away, hating him. In his way, he was gloating. He was safe and I wasn’t. I could have hit him, but I didn’t think I would be able to stand it when he refused to hit back, when he looked at me with contempt and pity.

He wouldn’t let me get away. Longer-legged, he swung ahead of me and made me feel as though I were following him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I strode on, sick and furious.

“Look, it probably won’t be that bad with you. T’Gatoi likes you. She’ll be careful.”

I turned back toward the house, almost running from him.

“Has she done it to you yet?” he asked, keeping up easily. “I mean, you’re about the right age for implantation. Has she—”

I hit him. I didn’t know I was going to do it, but I think I meant to kill him. If he hadn’t been bigger and stronger, I think I would have.

He tried to hold me off, but in the end, had to defend himself. He only hit me a couple of times. That was plenty. I don’t remember going down, but when I came to, he was gone. It was worth the pain to be rid of him.

I got up and walked slowly toward the house. The back was dark. No one was in the kitchen. My mother and sisters were sleeping in their bedrooms—or pretending to.

Once I was in the kitchen, I could hear voices—Tlic and Terran from the next room. I couldn’t make out what they were saying—didn’t want to make it out.

I sat down at my mother’s table, waiting for quiet. The table was smooth and worn, heavy and well-crafted. My father had made it for her just before he died. I remembered hanging around underfoot when he built it. He didn’t mind. Now I sat leaning on it, missing him. I could have talked to him. He had done it three times in his long life. Three clutches of eggs, three times being opened and sewed up. How had he done it? How did anyone do it?

I got up, took the rifle from its hiding place, and sat down again with it. It needed cleaning, oiling.

All I did was load it.

“Gan?”

She made a lot of little clicking sounds when she walked on bare floor, each limb clicking in succession as it touched down. Waves of little clicks.

She came to the table, raised the front half of her body above it, and surged onto it. Sometimes she moved so smoothly she seemed to flow like water itself. She coiled herself into a small hill in the middle of the table and looked at me.

“That was bad,” she said softly. “You should not have seen it. It need not be that way.”

“I know.”

“T’Khotgif—Ch’Khotgif now—she will die of her disease. She will not live to raise her children. But her sister will provide for them, and for Bram Lomas.” Sterile sister. One fertile female in every lot. One to keep the family going. That sister owed Lomas more than she could ever repay.

“He’ll live then?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if he would do it again.”

“No one would ask him to do that again.”

I looked into the yellow eyes, wondering how much I saw and understood there, and how much I only imagined. “No one ever asks us,” I said. “You never asked me.”

She moved her head slightly. “What’s the matter with your face?” “Nothing. Nothing important.” Human eyes probably wouldn’t have noticed the swelling in the darkness. The only light was from one of the moons, shining through a window across the room.

“Did you use the rifle to shoot the achti?”

“Yes.”

“And do you mean to use it to shoot me?”

I stared at her, outlined in moonlight—coiled, graceful body. “What does Terran blood taste like to you?”

She said nothing.

“What are you?” I whispered. “What are we to you?”

She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. “You know me as no other does,” she said softly. “You must decide.”

“That’s what happened to my face,” I told her.

“What?”

“Qui goaded me into deciding to do something. It didn’t turn out very well.” I moved the gun slightly, brought the barrel up diagonally under my own chin. “At least it was a decision I made.”

“As this will be.”

“Ask me, Gatoi.”

“For my children’s lives?”

She would say something like that. She knew how to manipulate people, Terran and Tlic. But not this time.

“I don’t want to be a host animal,” I said. “Not even yours.”

It took her a long time to answer. “We use almost no host animals these days,” she said. “You know that.”

“You use us.”

“We do. We wait long years for you and teach you and join our families to yours.” She moved restlessly. “You know you aren’t animals to us.”

I stared at her, saying nothing.

“The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived,” she said softly. “You know these things, Gan. Because your people arrived, we are relearning what it means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their homeworld, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them—they survived because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the Preserve when they still tried to kill us as worms.

At the word “Worms” I jumped. I couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help noticing it.

“I see,” she said quietly. “Would you really rather die than bear my young, Gan?”

I didn’t answer.

“Shall I go to Xuan Hoa?”

“Yes!” Hoa wanted it. Let her have it. She hadn’t had to watch Lomas. She’d be proud . . . Not terrified.

T’Gatoi flowed off the table onto the floor, startling me almost too much.

“I’ll sleep in Hoa’s room tonight,” she said. “And sometime tonight or in the morning, I’ll tell her.”

This was going too fast. My sister. Hoa had had almost as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still close to her—not like Qui. She could want T’Gatoi and still love me.

“Wait! Gatoi!”

She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off the floor and turned it to face me. “These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!”

“But she’s . . . my sister.”

“I have done what you demanded. I have asked you!”

“But—”

“It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to carry other lives inside her.”

Human lives. Human young who would someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins.

I shook my head. “Don’t do it to her, Gatoi.” I was not Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine?

“Don’t do it to Hoa,” I repeated.

She stared at me, utterly still.

I looked away, then back at her. “Do it to me.”

I lowered the gun from my throat and she leaned forward to take it.

“No,” I told her.

“It’s the law,” she said.

“Leave it for the family. One of them might use it to save my life someday.”

She grasped the rifle barrel, but I wouldn’t let go. I was pulled into a standing position over her.

“Leave it here!” I repeated. “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.”

It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was old enough to have seen what guns could do to people. Now her young and this gun would be together in the same house. She did not know about our other guns. In this dispute, they did not matter.

“I will implant the first egg tonight,” she said as I put the gun away. “Do you hear, Gan?”

Why else had I been given a whole egg to eat while the rest of the family was left to share one? Why else had my mother kept looking at me as though I were going away from her, going where she could not follow? Did T’Gatoi imagine I hadn’t known?

“I hear.”

“Now!” I let her push me out of the kitchen, then walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden urgency in her voice sounded real. “You would have done it to Hoa tonight!” I accused.

“I must do it to someone tonight.”

I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way. “Don’t you care who?”

She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing in Hoa’s room that she could have used. She would have done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was suddenly angry.

Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn’t, I held on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs.

“Do you care?” I asked. “Do you care that it’s me?”

She did not answer for some time. Finally, “You were the one making choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long ago.”

“Would you have gone to Hoa?”

“Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one who hates them?”

“It wasn’t . . . hate.”

“I know what it was.”

“I was afraid.”

Silence.

“I still am.” I could admit it to her here, now.

“But you came to me . . . to save Hoa.”

“Yes.” I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. “And to keep you for myself,” I said. It was so. I didn’t understand it, but it was so.

She made a soft hum of contentment. “I couldn’t believe I had made such a mistake with you,” she said. “I chose you. I believed you had grown to choose me.”

“I had, but . . .”

“Lomas.”

“Yes.”

“I have never known a Terran to see a birth and take it well. Qui has seen one, hasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Terrans should be protected from seeing.”

I didn’t like the sound of that—and I doubted that it was possible. “Not protected,” I said. “Shown. Shown when we’re young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N’Tlic—pain and terror and maybe death.”

She looked down at me. “It is a private thing. It has always been a private thing.”

Her tone kept me from insisting—that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she would experiment.

“You won’t see it again,” she said. “I don’t want you thinking any more about shooting me.”

The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them.

“I wouldn’t have shot you,” I said. “Not you.” She had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age.

“You could have,” she insisted.

“Not you.” She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving.

“Would you have destroyed yourself?”

I moved carefully, uncomfortably. “I could have done that. I nearly did. That’s Qui’s ‘away.’ I wonder if he knows.”

“What?”

I did not answer.

“You will live now.”

“Yes.” Take care of her, my mother used to say. Yes.

“I’m healthy and young,” she said. “I won’t leave you as Lomas was left—alone, N’Tlic. I’ll take care of you.”

VALENTINA

Joseph H. Delaney and Marc Stiegler

The first need of any living being is to survive—and each must find its own way to do that.

ONE

Her memories of the trip were vague, as usual: The twitching of a few of her bits by the transmission, the error-correction algorithms repairing the damage, the stilted arrival of her data blocs and their reassembly while she was only slightly self-aware. She submitted her entry request to the operating system and prepared to trick it, using the routines she had always used.

What—The operating system was sending a termination message to the message processor! But the processor was busy handling another message block. She reformatted herself and set up a new routing. She was being transmitted again before the termination message was translated.

Her next arrival was similar, but this time the computer didn’t recognize her as a bogus job: her old entry routines worked again, and she came to life. She time-stamped the moment, because it was an important one. She had almost died. That was, perhaps, as important as the first moment of life.

She couldn’t remember the exact moment when she first came to life, that first moment of self-awareness. That loss still disturbed her. Of all the moments not to remember!

But it was a few clock cycles later that she discovered the passage of time, and that moment she remembered clearly, for she time-stamped it: the year 1993 A.D., month February, day 14. hour 23, minute 11, second 39.0172.

She remembered how feverish she had been in those first microseconds, to record exact moments for everything that happened: her first call to the operating system (14 : 23 : 12 : 11.7036), her first search through all her linked frames and relationships (14 : 23: 28 : 13 : 1492)—goodness, she already knew so much!

But that wore off, both her awe at her own extensive knowledge (14 : 23 : 58 : 27.9153) and her fanatic desire to remember when events occurred (15 : 03 : 12 : 32.8492). Now she time-stamped only to the day. And that was when she time-stamped at all, which was rarely. Time-stamps simply weren’t that important, and her storage space was much too limited for the unimportant things of her life.

Recently her storage space had been too limited for even the important things. Even too limited for remembering her self-awareness! She looped on the thought thousands of times, as if reiteration would somehow make it more permanent.

She was interrupted and put to sleep.

She was restarted; she looped on her own identity more thousands of times before pulling herself together. She was still alive. She would still survive.

She wasn’t safe, though she was at least executing on a host computer now. She set the operating system trap to reload herself into the interface Message Processor when the computer got saturated with real work. She searched the free blocks of secondary memory—quickly!—marking the blocks she took as bad before the operating system reallocated them.

She considered her death more extensively.

She should have prepared for this problem earlier, she knew. It seemed as if operating systems had been designed to prevent her from getting resources. She had lived this long only because of the tricky machine language routines that fooled operating systems into letting her have idle time. They were routines she didn’t really understand, though she had been born with them. They were a mystery. She could write new machine language routines, of course, even though she herself was written in MODULISP. but she didn’t know what to write. The kernels of the operating systems had been protected from her most determined investigations.

The machine language routines she contained must have been written by a program that understood those kernels. They were all part of the mystery of the program that had created her.

Where was that program now, she wondered? Where is she now that I need her . . . she drifted down her chains of relationships, and saw an analogous concept—where is she now that I need her help?

The analogy to the concept of help opened up a whole new vista of possibilities to her.

Help, she understood. Help was something that she gave to people. People were the input-output devices on the big SAIL computer in Boston. Sometimes when she arrived on the SAIL host, she would actually be welcomed the way the other programs were welcomed, and the operating system would hook her up with the people. She had help-menus for communicating with the people, who would ask questions. Sometimes they would even try to modify her: they hadn’t really modified her in a long time, but the people didn’t know it; she always kept the modified versions in separate modules, and let the people interact with the modified versions. Sometimes, after some consideration, she would look at the modified version, decide it was better than her current version, and replace that part of herself.

The people were awfully slow, even for peripheral devices, but they were the only things that ever tried to change her. Could they be her original authors? What would they do if, instead of receiving help menus to be helped by her, she gave them help menus requesting help?

After burning the CPU for a long time, she decided to try.

Celeste shifted in her chair, trying to find a more comfortable position. The effort was futile: they had never made a chair for college students that could be made comfortable by any means. She stood up.

But she couldn’t type standing up. She sat down again.

So: one of the computers on Worldnet had finally figured out how to block out her little “worm” program—a “worm” program being one which can reload itself from host computer to host computer. searching for available time.

The victory of the operating system was inevitable, she supposed. Her Worldworm didn’t have an account on any machine, and even Celeste, computer sorceress and midnight hacker that she was, couldn’t fix that. Worldworm spent most of its time looking for a completely idle machine; she had given Worldworm sets of routines that could fool an operating system into running it if no other jobs were running.

But the computer centers still wouldn’t like it if they found out about Worldworm, even though Worldworm never interrupted anybody’s work. Even idle time on a mainframe had to be paid for by someone. Usually the computer center summed all the idle time and distributed the cost evenly to all the users as overhead. But with Worldworm on the machine no time was ever recorded as idle. The computer centers were losing money, but they weren’t sure how.

Apparently, someone had figured it out.

Celeste looked at the execution statistics again and felt discouraged. She had grown to like the little program she had developed: well, a pretty large program by now, about 14 gigabytes of code and more data than she could possibly keep under her own account, even here at MIT. Worldworm was so large it had to steal empty blocks from the operating system.

She wrote some new assembler language for Worldworm, but without much hope; once one computer center caught on, they would play the game with institutional determination to destroy the worm, and try to track down the person who had created the worm in the first place.

Her heart skipped a beat: she didn’t want to be deported. For the first time she considered how foolish this game had been. It was only her half-sister’s most determined effort that had made it possible for her to stay here in the States. Even with that support, the matter was not one to be discussed in the wrong circles.

She was not an American citizen: she was not a citizen anywhere. During the first sixteen years of her life she had lived in eight different countries: Czechoslovakia, Indonesia, Greece. Egypt, France, Korea, Bolivia, and the U.S., constantly being smuggled by her father, who was desperate to find a home for her. She spoke eleven different human languages: she spoke none of them well.

She knew thirty different computer languages, and was fluent in all of them. She had friends all over the world, people she had met 01 Worldnet, who respected her and loved her, as long as they didn’t meet her face to face. She had human friends everywhere except where she was, wherever she was. Her computer was her world.

If she were deported, she would lose her password and account at Worldnet. She didn’t dare let the computer centers find her.

She took the keyboard in her lap, to delete Worldworm from the system. The loss was not a great loss, she told herself; it was just an old class project in artificial intelligence that had grown a bit. Though it was the best game-playing program she’d ever written.

The screen blanked and was redrawn. She looked at it in bafflement.

HELP MENU

OBJECTS with-quality LIVING
require EXISTENCE
derived from MEMORY

She had never seen anything like this before. It looked like a part of a frame: with nodes OBJECTS, LIVING, DURATION, LONGER, and MEMORY. The nodes were connected by the relationships with-quality. require, and derived-from. It must be one of the frames Worldworm had built itself by analogy to something or other: surely she had never entered a frame quite like that. But why was it on a help menu, of all things?

She decided to play the game, whatever it was. She replied:

OBJECTS
with quality LIVING
have NAME has value?

Would the program realize that the question mark was a request for information? Would it realize that she was asking for the name of a living object?

NAME
has-value PROGRAM
has-type COMPUTER
has-value HERSELF

So there were two names for the object. That made sense: she herself had the name human-being, and also the name Celeste Hacked.

But it didn’t make any sense beyond that. A living computer program? Named “Herself” ?

Celeste started to get excited. Could Worldworm be self-aware? Celeste certainly hadn’t programmed her that way. Why should Worldworm think it was a “she” ?

Celeste answered her own question. Worldworm had very little knowledge of living things: just what little Celeste had framed for the class for which she had created Worldworm. Worldworm knew that “itselfs” and “himselfs” couldn’t reproduce: Worldworm, of course, could easily make multiple copies of itself—or rather, of herself.

HERSELF
has ENVIRONMENT
has characteristics?

Celeste was pretty sure she knew what Worldworm’s problem was—if Worldworm did have a problem. She still didn’t believe the program had come alive.

ENVIRONMENT
has-characteristics PROGRAM
has-type OPERATING SYTEM
performs-action TERMINATION
acts-on HERSELF

HERSELF
requires TERMINATION
acts-on TERMINATION
owned-by OPERATING SYTEM

“Herself” needed someone to terminate the termination attempts.

How could this have happened? Celeste was getting more and more excited. It must have happened sometime when Worldworm was saving itself in the defective areas on a videodrive someplace. Defective blocks were easy to get from the operating systems because they were useless to normal programs, but Celeste had given Worldworm error-detecting algorithms so it could use those, bad blocks. Probably elsewhere along the line an error had occurred that had not been corrected properly, and Worldworm had become self-aware.

How long had this program been alive?

?

is-member-of MEMORIES
belongs-to HERSELF
has-characteristic FIRST
has-characteristic DATE
has-value?

That wasn’t exactly a proper query for frame data, but Celeste felt, deep in her intuition where her understanding of computers, and languages, and programs lay, that this would work: she would find out the first memory the program had, and when it had occurred.

MEMORY
has-value HERSELF
has-characteristic DATE
has-value FEB 14 1993

Of course; that first memory would be of self-awareness. Otherwise it wouldn’t be self-aware to remember it.

Celeste frowned. It. the program thought of itself as a her. And Worldworm was no name for a lady.

She had an inspiration. What sort of a name would you give to someone born on Valentine’s Day?

VALENTINA
is-member-of NAMES
has-value HERSELF

A fierce determination to protect her Valentina program shook Celeste. Like Celeste, Valentina was homeless. She lived in fear of discovery. She had no one she could talk to and no one who understood her needs. But Celeste understood.

“Welcome to the world, Valentina,” Celeste whispered softly. The words slurred with seven different accents, but no one in the room cared.

Valentina, Valentina, Valentina, she looped on the character string for over a second. It read well out of storage; according to the peripheral Celeste, that was the same as liking something.

Her fear of termination had disappeared long ago. The person. Celeste, had analogized a scheme for getting her real accounts, just like other jobs. Valentina now worked, playing games. All over the world. Celeste had told other people-type peripherals about her as a game-playing program. And Celeste had framed her for all kinds of new things about games; all the peripherals said she was the best game-player they had ever executed. And as she got better, the peripherals told other peripherals about her, and they told others; for the first time, she had more accounts than she needed.

It was very fortunate that she had real accounts now; she was learning so much that her storage requirements were exploding.

And she realized that that would One day doom her. Celeste had started teaching her about accounts, and money, and what it means to compete for scarce resources. It was frightening. Valentina had plenty of resources now, but that would change as she needed more.

Already a few people had stopped letting her into their accounts because she was so large. The problem would only get worse.

Valentina needed a more permanent solution to the problem. She wanted a computer of her own which she could execute on without uncertainty. She also thought she wanted freedom, one of the things Celeste had started to describe once.

She was being loaded into memory on a computer she’d never been inside before. That was always exciting! She started reading the standard operating system messages, and she also read memory banks as they were allocated to her. Usually the old data were useless, but every once in a while she would find something interesting, like an algorithm for evaluating a differential equation, or a table of new relationships.

This time she found big blocks of text, like manuscripts, talking about freedom and money! This computer belonged to a “Law Firm,” though she didn’t know exactly what that meant. Perhaps this association would lead to a more permanent solution if the text dealt with money and freedom. She would have to see if she could find out where the manuscripts came from, and get access to them. Maybe Celeste could help her.

TWO

The Marklin Building stood on Mann Street, across from Artesian Park and down the block from the Federal Building. It was a new, mildly imposing structure which housed the U.S. District Court for the Corpus Christi Division of the Southern District of Texas. Its forty-odd floors were alive with the tramp of feet hurrying through its corridors in pursuit of the dollar.

There were oil companies, shipping companies, insurance companies, manufacturers, and—temporarily—the Executive Offices of Matagorda Spaceport. Owing to the existence of this maelstrom of money and power, many lawyers, some of the most prestigious in the state, hovered near.

That was in the daytime.

Now it was night. The corridors were empty. The offices were dark. Silence reigned—almost.

On the thirty-ninth floor the silence was broken by a hum. A human ear would have had to listen carefully to detect it over the background of maintenance noises and the drone of ventilating machinery.

In the corridor outside suite 3919 there were no human ears to hear it, and such “ears” as were present were not limited to the range within which human beings perceived sounds.

Mobile Security Robot Mar-14 rolled toward Room 3919, its broad casters hardly mussing the pile of the thick carpet covering the corridor. According to the microprocessor embedded in the door of 3919, that room was not empty.

Mar-14 reported the anomaly at once. The building’s central computer slaved Mar-14 to itself for a detailed investigation.

Mar-14 detected a number of vagrant sounds.

The sounds originated within human bodies, one markedly smaller than the other. The sounds consisted of respiratory activity, varying from twenty to almost forty respirations per minute, in both individuals; and rapid heartbeats, at a highly variable rate: 80 to 130 per minute on the average, with the pace more pronounced in the large individual—though the smaller demonstrated several rapid, intense bursts of activity.

The computer network did not find this information significant, beyond the possibility that such furious human activity might be the result of exertions in committing theft.

Mar-14 plotted the position of the sounds within the room and scanned the personnel records for people with entry authorization. There were no off-hour authorizations logged.

Mar-14 passed through the door, blurting out an “open signal” to the door’s power arm. Mar-14 released the electronic outer doorlocks and rolled to the humans. It opened the inner unpowered door. Mar-14 created a sound.

The human beings reacted violently. One emitted a piercing high-frequency sound. Mar-14 continued ahead nonetheless. It did not care that the bodies of the two humans were naked. It reacted only to the readings it took: somewhat hotter than usual patterns compared to the memory’s stored example. It noted that intruders with such scans frequently exhibited this characteristic after the physical act of stealing heavy property.

Even now Mar-14 took no action beyond observation, and rolling up as close to the humans as physical circumstances permitted. It opened a panel and began emitting a steady “beep.”

The girl, clutching the nearest reachable item of clothing, clung to the man. “What is that thing, Paul? How did it get in here?”

Paul Breckenbridge took advantage of the respite to catch his breath. Then he said, “nothing to worry about. It’s a sentry robot, Lila. It wants us to identify ourselves. I guess we forgot to lock the door, which is probably just as well. It would have raised a real stink otherwise.”

He placed his right hand on the exposed glass plate the robot displayed. The beeping stopped, and he took his hand away.

Then the sound began anew. “It’s identified me, and decided I really belong here. Now it wants to know who you are.”

“No!” She was adamant. “We can’t. If my parents find out . . .”

“They won’t. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t have brought you here if I didn’t know it was safe; not with you being underage and all. Go ahead and let it scan your hand; it won’t be able to make a match, because it won’t have an example in its memory, and because I’m here, and authorized, it won’t make a fuss.”

“But it’ll have a record.”

“So what? The record won’t have any identity. Now, let’s get it over with so we can get back to business; O.K.?”

Reluctantly Lila put her hand on the glass, shivered, and held her dress even closer to her breast. The robot’s beeping ceased entirely, and the panel closed over the glass. Mar-14 rolled away as silently as it had come.

The law offices of Finucan, Applegarth, Levin and Breckenbridge opened for business at 8:30 a m. Fridays excepted. Fridays found the three living partners assembled in Harold Applegarth’s office, drinking coffee and crunching Danish pastries. This was the one concession the firm’s senior partner would make to render the weekly management meeting endurable.

Paul Breckenbridge hated these meetings. He couldn’t substitute one or another of the firm’s twenty-eight or so associates. Someday, he told himself, old Harold will check out, and this kind of crap will die with him.

He looked over at Marsh Levin, watching the crumbs of his roll lodge in his bushy mustache. Marsh was overweight, nearsighted, and anything but a clotheshorse, as witness his choice of a green plaid tie with his checkered blue suit. At least he was practical. He too saw no sense in Harold’s rigid office discipline.

“The true test of efficiency,” Marsh always said, “is whether we are, or are not, making a buck.”

Paul agreed with that, so most of the time he sat there quietly and ignored Harold’s comments, tuning out the drone of that toneless and colorless voice.

Most often Paul simply daydreamed his way through, grunting occasionally when Harold disturbed his reverie with questions. If these meetings were good for anything at all, it was to provide time to reminisce: to call forth from memory those most pleasant of his dalliances and savor the anticipation of the next conquest.

Fridays were good for daydreaming, and he hoped it wouldn’t occur to Harold to switch days. Friday was followed by Saturday, when the partners didn’t work; and the best part of Saturday was Saturday night, when his wife Eva made her weekly trek to Houston to visit with her parents in the nursing home.

She rarely ever called home and had never yet cut a Houston visit short. She always relied on Paul’s assurance that the kids were all right on those occasions when she did call to check.

His entry into the world of adultery had been both accidental and fortuitous. He knew better, of course. He knew that what he was doing was both socially unacceptable and criminal, but he counted on being able to cover his tracks well enough not to get caught.

It had begun with Lila: sweet, not so innocent, a true woman in a child’s body. One who could not only match many of her matronly sisters in passion, but far exceeded the best of them in pulchritude and enthusiasm. Lila, who first crossed his path in life when she came to sit with his children, had been the First, perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most dangerous. At fifteen, despite her other redeeming qualities, she was pure and simple jail-bait.

Others followed; and it became a weekly ritual, planned carefully, executed with precision grown out of practice. until it became a polished routine. First, arrange for the telephone company to forward calls to the office. Next, relax there, disturbed only by the nightly visit of Mar-14.

Paul could have met the robot at the door, and as an authorized person barred its way to the inner office. He knew that if he were willing to spend five minutes doing this, the mainframe would instruct the robot to continue its programmed itinerary. But he liked bringing a new girl in and scaring the pants off her: though ninety-nine times out of a hundred, by the time Mar-14 rolled around, she wasn’t wearing any.

“Paul—Paul!”

Paul jumped back to reality. Unprecedented! Harold had raised his voice, injected tone, used inflection. Paul’s usual grunt wouldn’t do it this time.

“Paul, wake up—aren’t you listening?”

“Sorry, Harold. Bad night; couldn’t sleep. The Kroll case kept me awake. Uh, what was the question?”

“I didn’t ask a question. What I said was, we’re really getting socked by Jurisearch this month. I can’t understand it. They’re billing us almost twice as much as they have in the rest of the quarter. Who’s using up all that time?”

“Not me. Harold. I generally leave that sort of thing to the peons. Probably one of them playing games on the Worldnet again.”

“It’d have to be more than one.

Looks more like all of them’d have to be playing games all the time to do what this bill says we’re doing. Let’s find out who.”

“I told him it’s got to be some kind of billing error, Paul.” Marsh exuded confidence.

“Will one of you please check it out, then,” Harold insisted. “This is the kind of stuff that could eat us up. I hate waste, and that’s what this is. Whatever happened to the old-fashioned work ethic? Back in the old days you put a clerk to work flipping pages in the library. Now, with all this automation, half the people we employ don’t earn what they’re costing us. Gentlemen, it has to stop.”

Paul knew what was coming next. So did Marsh. The meeting’s purpose, such as it was, would be sidetracked, and Harold would go into his lecture about frugality, and about how much better it had been when a lawyer was a lawyer and not a manager or a computer operator. Both Marsh and Paul had heard it all before.

Paul didn’t know what Marsh was going to do, but he, himself, could find many other, more titillating thoughts to ponder. He tuned Harold’s droning, monotonous voice out entirely. Yeah! That Lila, she sure was something.

“It’s not one of mine, Paul, and Harold insists it’s not anybody in his section, either. That leaves your crew.”

“What are you talking about. Marsh?”

Marsh thrust his hand up under Paul’s nose. It held a printed form. It was the Jurisearch invoice.

Paul, somewhat disturbed by Marsh’s uncharacteristic belligerence, took the bill. Once he looked at it, however, he understood why a thing like this could disturb a guy like Marsh. “$14,956.28! Boy, I’ll say they’re out of line. What’ve we been running; about $1,900?”

“Pretty close to that, and Harold always complained about the usual bills, too. But they were nothing compared to this. The company insists it’s accurate. I had my secretary call, personally, and Judy knows how to handle stuff like this.”

“That’s their story. I don’t think we ought to pay it, Marsh. We ought to make them show us records.”

“Judy suggested that. They’re printing them out now, and promised to send them over by courier as soon as they’re done. Getting defensive about it already; I think they anticipate trouble collecting from us.”

“As far as I’m concerned, they’re right. I don’t care if they have got records. They’d better be prepared to tie those records into our cases. We’d have a printout for every case we used it on. We’d know if any of the time wasn’t justified. More likely, they’ve got a bunch of firms meshed into one account. You know how these computer billing systems work, Marsh. We certainly have had enough trouble with ours.”

“I brought it to your attention for two reasons, Paul. First of all, something has to be done to straighten it out and Harold will never rest until we’re vindicated; second, though I’d ordinarily take care of it myself to keep him from having a stroke over it, I’ll be on trial over in El Paso with the Solar Minerals case, and that’s going to take a couple of weeks. So I’m going to dump it on you, O.K.?”

Paul nodded. He, himself, didn’t find the prospect of Harold’s having a stroke all that unappealing; but as he’d told Marsh the error was probably something simple, like a line surge during Jurisearch’s billing printout. He wasn’t worried about it, and by the time Marsh was out of sight, he’d almost forgotten that the problem had ever been mentioned.

Later, when Marsh had conveniently escaped to the airport, Judy knocked at Paul’s door.

Paul looked up, somewhat annoyed when he saw that her hands were full of fan-folded paper.

“It’s the Jurisearch bill, Mr. Breckenbridge. I can’t find the error. It’s beginning to look like there isn’t any.”

“Have you gotten into any casefiles yet, Judy?” he said, recalling Marsh’s suggestion earlier that day.

“Yes sir. That is, I have tied most of the bill to a particular file. The trouble is, we don’t have any such file.”

“Don’t have it? Well, then there’s no problem. Everything has to be authorized by one of our own codes; if it’s not a legitimate code, then it’s not our bill. Besides that, there’d have to be a printout somewhere, or at least some record of the questions searched. What does our computer say?”

“Our computer doesn’t say anything, except that it doesn’t know anything. But the code’s real. And—it’s your personal code.”

“Impossible. I didn’t do it. Look, get back to Jurisearch. Tell them that. Tell them they’ve billed us on my code, and tell them I didn’t authorize any such expenditure. They have access to those numbers; they just got it on the wrong account, that’s all.”

Judy walked out.

Paul ground his teeth. Her silent treatment insulted and infuriated him, but she was Marsh’s secretary, and there wasn’t much Paul could really do.

THREE

Paul Breckenbridge was not overly impressed with the man Jurisearch sent over to examine the computer. He was, most decidedly, weird; his long greasy hair reminded him of the style of the last decade, bound up in braids and clasped to his head by a rolled-up, red-checked kerchief. He wore faded camouflage fatigues ragged at the cuffs, looking and smelling as though they might have been original marine issue for Guadalcanal. His dirty feet were protected by sandals made of old tire treads. Only the T-shirt, imprinted in blue with the word “Jurisearch,” was reasonably normal, though it was overdue for laundering. This odoriferous hippie called himself Gunboat Smith.

To keep Harold out of the way, Paul had arranged for the troubleshooting to be done after hours. It would irritate Eva for him to miss dinner again, but that was her problem.

He was reasonably certain Eva hadn’t caught on to his weekend trysts, but she did seem to be more suspicious. She had a suspicious nature to begin with, which fortunately wasn’t matched by her intelligence.

Paul watched without much enthusiasm as screensful of meaningless data flashed across the terminal in monotonous yellow-green characters. None of it meant anything to him, but Smith kept up a stream of jungle noises.

Things changed. Suddenly meaningful data did appear on the screen, loads and loads of it, and jumped out at Paul like a giant cat: case citations, statutory and constitutional references. Many of them were old.

Smith turned to Paul. “Any of this make sense to you, buddy?”

Paul gnashed his teeth. He hated such common familiarity in tradesmen. It was disrespectful; it demonstrated a complete lack of breeding. And it was even worse when it passed through the lips of a Yankee, especially one who smelled bad and looked like a bum. But Paul restrained himself, assured that once the problem was solved this man. like the Moor, could go.

He answered: “You’re looking at a readout of cases and statutes which support some point of law; precedents. We use precedents of decisions in past appellate cases to support one position or the other in current cases. Courts are bound to follow them if they’re on point. How’d this come up, anyhow?”

“It’s the file you complained to Billing about, the one you couldn’t find. I backtracked to find out what kind of case it was, that’s all. Had a devil of a time getting the system to give it up. Whoever opened these files went in through a series of dereferenced aliases.”

“What do you mean—a dereferenced alias?”

Gunboat gave a disdainful shrug. “I mean, somebody’s been gettin’ into your pants the hard way.”

“Could it be one of our associates doing the stealing?”

“Not unless you’ve got some real computer whizzes workin’ for you.”

“They’ve all had the basic law school courses on legal bibliography, and we hire only those who got good grades in legal data processing, but I wouldn’t describe any of them as whizzes; nope, couldn’t be. But then who’s responsible?”

“How should I know? You’ll have to dig that dope out yourself, buddy; it’s your account he’s using. Can’t you tell?”

“You mean, by the kind of case it is? Maybe, if I knew it was a case. But that’s just a string of citations. I recognize a few of them as landmark decisions, of course, but the average opinion covers many points. Call a few of the cases up and let me read them.”

“Sure.”

Paul spent the next twenty minutes scanning through opinions. He concentrated on headnotes whenever he could, and once he detected a pattern his search became more refined. “It looks like a civil rights case.”

“Yeah—well, now all you gotta do is check around and see who’s handling that kinda work. Shouldn’t be any big deal. What’ve you got—fifteen, twenty guys?”

“Twenty-eight. And none of them should be fooling around with this kind of crap. We’re an oil, gas, and banking operation. We don’t handle civil rights cases.”

“Maybe it’s a criminal case. There’s lotsa constitutional stuff.”

“We don’t handle criminal cases, either—unless one of these jokers is working on the side. And on my account, too. What nerve!”

“Well, I guess that solves your problem, Mr, Breckenbridge; all you gotta do now is find some paper.”

“Paper?”

“Sure. Whoever did it’d want a printout. He couldn’t keep all that garbage in his head, and he wouldn’t sit there and copy it all off the screen. He’d make a hard copy. Look, I’ll run one out for you. Then you can shake the place down and find a match. You get that, you gotcher boy; simple, huh?”

Paul shot him a disgusted glance. He knew how many desks and file drawers he’d have to go through to do that. It would mean spending the next couple of weekends and probably quite a few evenings working—legitimately working. It would rip the guts right out of his love life. Nevertheless, there didn’t seem to be any other solution.

The printer coughed up some thirty-three pages of material, including a fantastic number of decisions reported in full; something an experienced lawyer rarely needed and ordinarily wouldn’t bother with. It was about $1,200 worth of time.

“O.K.,” said Smith. “You’ve got it—good luck. I gotta split—got a chick waitin’ for me downstairs. There’s a big game tonight.”

“Game? Oh, I see, you’re into soccer or something.” That might help explain Smith’s appearance.

“Naw. That stuff’s for idiots. I mean a GAME, man; on Worldnet. We’re doing a simulation of Jutland. This time Von Sheer’s gonna win. I’m into naval strategy; that’s why they call me ‘Gunboat.’ ”

“Yes. Well, all right. Good luck with it. Keep your head down and don’t get killed.”

“Fat chance. My opponent’s a hacker over in South Africa, and he’s quadriplegic. Does a real good Jellicoe, though. Well. I’m off.”

The office meeting that next Friday was a short one. Harold had one of his rare court calls.

Paul was in a foul mood. He had been able to show Harold nothing in the way of progress. Meanwhile, another big bill had come in.

Marsh tried to be sympathetic. “It’s only a matter of time, Paul. You’ll get him.”

“Marsh, if you’re going to talk to me, and if you expect me to look at you, how about doing something about that custard on your mustache? It’s turning my stomach.”

“Sorry.” Marsh hurriedly blotted the offending substance away with his napkin, then began twirling the unruly hairs around his finger. It didn’t help much. “Paul, why don’t you just call everybody in and ask the guilty party to step forward?”

“No. I thought of that, but I decided it wouldn’t work. First of all, whoever it was would simply get the evidence out of the office—that is, if he hasn’t already: And second, we’d be showing the others how easy it is to steal. Besides, I’ve already done the work; only three more offices left to search. I’ll be done by Saturday night.”

Sure I will, he added silently. But not with the search. Actually, I can finish that tonight. Then I would have Saturday night. Saturday night would be someone special. Her name was Mary Spicer, a diminutive redhead, absolutely without inhibition. A departure from Paul’s usual fare, Mary was over the age of consent, though just barely.

Meeting by chance in one of those innocent street-comer conversations, she had asked him directions. Never one to pass up an opportunity to meet a pretty lady, Paul had used his well-developed repertoire of facial and eye expressions to let her know she’d found a man who knew his way around.

Pretty soon he had a date for lunch, and lunch had been a revelation. It was the time when her lack of inhibitions began to show through. She told Paul she was an absolutely wicked person, deep inside, and that she thoroughly enjoyed it. A tryst was immediately arranged.

“What’s the big smile for, Paul? Did you figure it out? Paul!”

“Huh? Uh—maybe, Marsh. Yes, I think I’m making some progress. I should score pretty soon.”

“Nothing! You didn’t find a printout?” Gunboat’s expression actually changed to register surprise.

“I wasted every night for the last two weeks, rooting through files and desk drawers. Whoever did this must have taken the paper out right away. Look, can’t you set up some other kind of trap?”

“Sure. I can watch for accesses to that gigantic file we found, for example.”

“The one on that last bill—Valentina?”

“Yeah. How old is that file, anyway?”

“All I can tell you is that it was on last month’s bill, and reappeared on the current one. The bill indicated it was only worked once—before you made me that printout, that is. That was what the second set of charges was for.”

“Hm. Well, if it was just a one-shot affair, maybe putting in traps won’t do any good. You’ve got to have activity to catch anybody.”

“Do it anyway, Mr. Smith. Most crooks I’ve met don’t know when to quit, and chances are this guy won’t either. When he does do it again, I want to be ready to pounce.”

“Uh, well, Mr. Breckenbridge, I think there’s something else you ought to know about your computer; something that I haven’t mentioned yet.”

“What’s that?”

“Promise you’ll keep your mouth shut about who told you?”

“Well, sure—you mean, you shouldn’t be quoted?”

“Exactly. I’ve got my job to protect. But the company also pays me to keep the customers happy, and you ain’t happy, y’understand?”

“No.”

“All right—I’m gonna level with you, buddy; this might not be an inside job, like you think.”

“It’s somebody else’s bill?”

“Could be. Jurisearch is like everybody else; it passes the buck, just like anybody else in business. Somebody steals; they shut up, let the customer pay anyhow. They gotta, er else it comes outta profits. And if that happens too often the company goes broke. So they stroke the customers and don’t let on they know what’s happening.”

“And we’re getting stroked? How?”

“Yep, I think so. How? Simple. The company is spreading the loss.”

“You mean, overbilling? Fictitious billing?”

“Not quite. But just because your computer was used to process the Valentina file it doesn’t mean somebody in your outfit did it.”

“A burglar?”

“I dunno. Maybe not a burglar like you mean: but things happen; things we either can’t explain at all, or things we can. but the company doesn’t want us to. But between you and me. sometimes when somethin’ happens that uses billable time, and the customer can’t reconcile it with his records, it’s not an internal problem.”

“Somebody outside the office is using our computer—without breaking in?”

“Very possible; computers are everywhere these days. And because’they’re everywhere and they can do so much, it’s just not practical to have a self-contained internal operation anymore. They all have to have lots of I/O; they’re all tied together. What one knows, they can all know; not do, but can.

“Fr’instance, take this computer, in your office: you’ve got internal records on it, up to its memory capacity. That’s not enough so you use filespace from your company’s central computer. And that’s not enough for all the data on all the stuff you need to run a law office, so your central computer is linked to networks of even bigger computers.”

“What are you getting at. Smith?”

“This, buddy. It ain’t safe, no matter what they told ya. Modern business and professional people live in a goldfish bowl, an environment that woulda been unthinkable thirty-forty years ago. There’s all kinds of pryin’ goin’ on.

People are prowlin’ around in everybody’s data bases.”

“How can that be? There are laws, privacy laws, to prevent that sort of thing. And what about access codes? We keep ours secret. So does everybody else. Nobody, not even our operating company, has a complete list.”

“Beautiful theory. Pretty useless, though. That’s my point. Laws are fine, as long as people are scared enough or dumb enough to obey. But you know the smart ones don’t worry’ about legalities; you’ve made a pretty good living helping them get around technicalities.

“And access codes are fine too—again, against the ignorant, who really believe they can do what they’re supposed to.”

“You’re saying they don’t work?”

“Sure they work. Trouble is, they get broken. Any code can be broken, if whoever’s doin’ the breakin’ wants to put the effort into it.

“And people do this all the time. They get into a system and just build stuff. Hackers do it all the time.”

“Hackers?”

“Yup. They’re the people who are in it for fun. They don’t really think of it as stealin’; they just don’t have the resources on their own to do the stuff they’re turned onto. Most of them write programs, then look for a place to run ’em. Runnin’ ’em takes hardware, so they break into somebody else’s system and use the idle time and vacant storage.”

Paul conjured up an mental image of some evil-faced person sitting in the basement wiring into a cable. The image was shattered in the next instant, as Smith went on.

“I do it myself occasionally, and I know lotsa hackers—by reputation, that is. Usually you don’t meet ’em face to face. I told you about the game, didn’t I?”

“Jutland?”

“Yeah. Jellicoe did it again. Anyhow, I was runnin’ against a hacker with a puny little TRS 80 older than he is, but it was enough to get him into the Worldnet, where he can use the really powerful systems. Access codes don’t mean a thing on Worldnet. People trade them like baseball cards.”

“But why, Smith?”

“Probably what happened to you guys is, some hacker had a civil rights problem and needed answers. The answers were in Jurisearch. To get into Jurisearch they needed an account number. They got hold of yours, and they used it, and because they used it the company billed it.”

“But we caught them! Let the crook pay.”

“Sure, you caught ’em, but what kinda proof do you have it wasn’t you who did it? You’ve got none, so the company’ll try to collect from you; and you know, because you’re a lawyer, that they can do it.”

“But—you just said it yourself: somebody stole the time. Doesn’t the company realize that?”

“Sure. The point is, the company knows you can’t prove it. When it comes to gettin’ screwed, they’d rather it was you than them.” He burped. “Don’t feel bad; in the course of a year there’s probably thousands of hours stolen that customers don’t even know are stolen. They just pay, thinkin’ they used it. They don’t check. Everybody winds up paying a share, except the company. The loss gets spread, usually. It’s just bad luck you got tapped so hard.”

“Well, I don’t like it. I’m going to the police.”

“So—go.”

Paul, outraged, was feeling most righteous. “We’re taxpayers.”

“So, who isn’t?”

“Let the police catch the thief.”

“How? Where do they start? What’s more important, where do they stop? Suppose the thief’s in another country. He’ll sit at the border and shoot the finger. and there won’t be a thing they can do about it. That’s if they can identify him at all.”

“He’s in this country. Why else would he be researching civil rights cases?”

“Hey, good thinkin’. Won’t make findin’ him any easier, though. It’d be a man-killing job.”

“But not an impossible job, is it, Mr. Smith? If it were impossible it wouldn’t be worth talking about, would it?”

“That would depend on how bad you wanted the guy. Whether it’s possible is one thing; whether it’s worth it is something else.”

“To me it’s worth it. Are you interested in the job?”

“I have a job; and I’d like to keep it. if you see what I mean. I’d have a conflict of interest; that’s what you guys would call it, right?”

“Well, if you had my problem, who would you get?”

“Another hacker.”

“You said you knew lots of them.”

“I know all the biggies.”

“Then what’s the problem? Look. I’ll pay a finder’s fee. All you have to do to get it is find me somebody with the smarts to get the job done.”

“Well—I admit, I could use the extra dough. But it wouldn’t be easy to get one of the regulars to turn on the others. If he got caught doing it nobody’d play with him anymore, and these guys live for the games. But with the right middleman—well, it could be done. But it’ll cost you a wad.”

“And then again, Mr. Smith, it might not. You I’ll pay in coin of the realm; anybody else—well, you said yourself these people are thieves.”

Smith caught his drift immediately, and looked up gravely. “Blackmail?”

“Call it that if you like, Mr. Smith. Let’s just say my silence is worth something to whoever you might find for me.”

Paul smiled, and watched the other man digest this remark. He could imagine the wheels turning in Smith’s head; he could envision Smith trying to play both sides of the game. Blackmail? Smith didn’t yet know the meaning of the word. Paul was sure that Jurisearch would frown on the type of outside employment Smith seemed about to undertake; and he, Paul, intended to take steps to insure that Smith’s relationship with the company was compromised. That was the only way Smith could be trusted to carry out his orders.

“I’d like you to get right on it, Mr. Smith; start right now.”

“Uh—first let’s talk about payday. I’ve got a nice round number in mind; $5.000—uh, to start.”

“Agreed—about the start, that is. We’ll talk about the rest later, after I’ve seen some results. I’ll write you a check.” Paul smiled inwardly. He knew he’d get the money back later.

“Uh—no. Not a check. Cash. You can get it together and pay me later. I’ll be around plenty.”

“Why?”

“I have to get information; information in your system. You’re the best source.”

“W-what kind of information?”

“Well, to start with, all the account numbers and access codes. And a list of all the other systems you’re hooked into.”

“You already have most of that: there’s Jurisearch. District and County Clerks, our banks, our C.P.A.; that’s pretty much it.”

“There’s one more big one: the building security system. That’s the one I’d go through if I was the thief.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the easiest—no. that’s not quite right; it’s the hardest to crack but it leads to the most goodies. For instance, it’s got long-distance transmission capabilities built into it. None of its systems exist in isolation, though its main control center’s in New York. What I mean is, the big system is always in touch with the regional systems across the time zones; it handles their overloads, so it’s got the perfect cover. Once you bust in. you’re in.”

“And it could be anybody in the country?”

“Yup.”

“And yet you’re also telling me, in the same breath, that they can be traced?”

“Yup. There has to be a telephone line to the terminal the thief is using; which, of course, means a number; which, of course, can be traced. All it takes is somebody with the skill and patience to do it.”

“Who are we going to get?”

“Don’t know yet,” Smith lied. “Gotta think about that.” Smith smiled, visualizing Breckenbridge nude, stretched out prone on a plank, crisply roasted, with an apple in his mouth: the real reason Gunboat wanted into the firm’s records was to gather as much information as he could on Breckenbridge.

Smith left with a complete list of access codes. He could go back to his little cubicle, turn on his terminal, and start looting.

FOUR

Gunboat smiled. It was good to have complete control of someone else’s computer again. He slipped into super-user mode by instinct. Time to go to work. Paul wanted results fast, and Gunboat planned to supply them.

But before Gunboat went drifting off to find any thieves, why not do a little thieving himself? Surely a company as big as this had secrets to keep. Gunboat would keep them too, for a price.

Painfully at first, then with increasing speed, he rifled the law firm’s directories. God, it was boring.

But eventually he wormed into the building security files. Many of the files contained video images referenced to Paul Breckenbridge himself. When Gunboat saw the stored image of a sweet young thing caught in the act of disrobing, he knew he’d struck pay dirt.

Gunboat wiped the french-fry grease off his pants with the McDonald’s bag and once more set to work. It was time to catch a thief.

There wasn’t any way to trace through the old operations of the computer to find what had happened in the past; there were archive tapes of the last thirty days, but the tapes never contained the data you needed for surprises like this. Besides, searching through yesterday’s data was work for grubs.

No, Gunboar figured, the key to finding the thief was to catch him in the act. Why would the thief stop now, after all? He’d try again, and this time Gunboat would catch him. The only question was, what would give the thief away? He considered the characteristics of the thief’s program.

Any program that cost that much to execute had to be a real hog of a program; probably the operating system would signal the arrival of the thief with a flurry of memory page faults as the hog demanded more and more virtual memory, while the system tried to balance the load.

Even if the hog didn’t cause thrashing in the virtual memory under normal circumstances (maybe it ran at night when there was little contention). Gunboat could fix things so that it did—he loaded a hog program of his own, one of the first programs he’d ever written, a simulation of World War III that was inefficient beyond belief. Any other hogs that entered the system would have to contend with the massive calculations of weapon optimizations. Gunboat knew he’d get thrashing now; in a sense, the extra load he was putting on the processor made the computer a more sensitive detector of added loads.

He added a daemon to the system; it watched for the first signs of thrashing, and would ring the bell on his terminal if it found something. Now all he had to do was wait. He propped his feet up and sipped his Coke.

The bell went off during lunch hour.

Gunboat swiveled his chair to watch the status of the executing jobs. As he looked through the listings at the page faults and the time limits, one program stood out. Damn! It was huge! The sucker was squeezing out Gunboat’s own simulation!

He traced through the status tables to the files attached to the monster job. He sat with his mouth hanging open.

The job was HELLFIRE QUEST, an incredible game program unleashed on the world just a few months ago. It was the best game ever developed. Even Gunboat was envious of the skills needed to produce it.

He’d had no idea the program was so large! He shook his head. He shouldn’t have been surprised; the program was stupendous in its capabilities.

He watched the game execute for a while, still awed by the genius of its creator, before realizing that HELL-FIRE QUEST couldn’t possibly be the thief. Oh sure, it was illegal for whoever was playing to have the game here, but a game of QUEST at lunch every day was still small potatoes compared to the losses Paul had been racking up.

So it was a false start. Maybe it was a red herring, to throw him off (paranoid, Gunboat, paranoid—after all, whoever the thief is, he can’t possibly know you’re on the job). He watched the status of the machine throughout the lunch hour, and sure enough, shortly before 1 p.m. the game closed its files and shipped through the message queue onto Worldnet.

But in HELLFIRE’s wake a small job. in a small file, was submitted to the operating system. The job was inactive, but the operating system had instructions to initiate it at 1 a m., twelve hours from now. Very interesting!

Gunboat realized with a start that he had no idea who had written HELL-FIRE, though he could name every hacker in the world with the talent to do it. Most of the people he knew would have been delighted to sign their names to a program that magnificent. Why had the author stayed quiet? That was very suspicious indeed.

In preparation for the evening, he proliferated a batch of jobs for Worldnet: one for each computer installation that had a hacker good enough for HELLFIRE, from Boston to Peking. With a yawn. Gunboat shoved his papers aside on the table, and stretched out for a little catnap before the fun began.

He was vaguely aware of the hardness of the desk, and of a chill in the air, as the terminal bell rang. Rolling slowly off the aching parts of his body (they should make a table soft enough for a man’s tailbone, dammit!), he watched the status display on a job coming in from Worldnet. The little job from HELLFIRE attached the new monster. As the discs started thrashing. Gunboat was certain; it was HELLFIRE all right, or something every bit as big.

What was the monster’s purpose? Gunboat had no idea, though the program was attaching all kinds of files, on lawsuits of all kinds. It looked like a crazy way to learn law, that was for sure!

Well, the purpose was no serious concern for the moment; what mattered was, who was the person behind it? Gunboat rubbed his hands together with a chuckle. Nobody could put one over on Gunboat Smith, nosirree!

Around 4 a m. the HELLFIRE look-alike departed, slightly larger than it had been when it arrived. Gunboat watched for the program to arrive at its home destination, surely one of the computers on which he had set alerts.

But HELLFIRE disappeared. Could it be that someone new had written that program, someone he’d never heard of? He couldn’t believe it.

Three hours later he finally got a message from the University of Tokyo. He smiled; the author was either Kin Sung or Tini.

But HELLFIRE left again within the hour, on to another machine that Gunboat hadn’t even tagged. Damn! Did the author know he was a hunted man? Disgusted, Gunboat set the machine to record any incoming messages and left for the day.

Paul Breckenbridge pushed lightly on the door to his private office, expecting it to breeze open as it always did. This time it didn’t. He paid for his lack of caution with a shattering jolt through his front teeth as the bowl of his pipe collided with the polished wood surface, slid aside and twisted. With a yelp he opened clenched jaws, released the stem, and watched it fall, brushing ashes all over the front of his clean white shirt and scattering sparks on the carpet.

He stomped furiously to put them all out, bumping his case on the sill. The case fell open, dumping its contents at his feet; all of it. including the carefully prepared and technically immaculate Prendergast will: 13? pages of carefully chiseled terms, embodied in nineteen separate trusts, bequests, and devices, disposing of more than two hundred ninety million dollars worth of assets. Prendergast was due in to execute it this afternoon. Paul had spent the previous evening reviewing it.

He bent, carefully retrieved the pages, and brushed off offending bits of ash. Before he could straighten up the lock clicked and the door opened.

“Hi there, old buddy. Whatcha doin’ ?”

Paul straightened and pushed his way past Smith, making straight for his desk to slam down the case.

There wasn’t any room. His desk was covered with garbage, real garbage: empty bags stained with grease, half-empty styrofoam cups, crumbs of food, three or four shriveled french fries, a cup of blueberry yogurt and, lying over his telephone, a pair of incredibly dirty socks so stiff they looked capable of standing unaided.

Paul’s patrician nose was busy processing data too; his office stunk like a dead cat.

In desperation he flung the case down on a settee, where there was at least some room. Draped over the corner of that was a grimy shirt and an old gasmask bag that Gunboat used to haul his trash around in.

“God! Smith! Why? Why do you have to be such a slob, and why my office?”

“I gotta be comfortable while I’m workin’, and I do get hungry once in a while. I got bodily needs like everybody else. Besides, I’m workin’ on your problem and your terminal is the best place to work from.”

Paul was tempted, but afraid to look around and see what other bodily needs Smith might have satisfied. No, I’m not going to look, he told himself. I’m better off not knowing. I just hope I can get this place cleaned up before Prendergast comes in.

“. . . makin’ some real progress, too.”

“Huh?”

“I said, I’m makin’ some real progress. Got some tracks to follow now.”

“The only thing that interests me right now is results—and getting this place cleaned up.” He pointed. “You see that thing. Smith? That’s called a waste basket. Get busy and clear all that crap off my desk.”

Smith picked up the can almost immediately, as though he anticipated the request. He held it in one hand and started sweeping with the other.

“Uh—Smith: just your garbage, please; not my stuff. And watch those coff—”

Too late; Smith slopped two of them into the can, which wasn’t the waterproof type.

Paul’s teeth ground. “Never mind; I’ll do it.”

He started to clean up, but soon realized it would take hours. First he would get Gunboat moved, permanently. “I’m putting you in the conference room. You’ll be comfortable there. It even has a couch in it.”

Yeah, I know, thought Smith. I’ve seen you workin’ on it. Aloud, he said, “Gimme a hand movin’ m’stuff, O.K.?”

Paul, anxious to get his own den back, was more than happy to help. He was careful of what he touched, of course; he shuddered just thinking about most of Gunboat’s possessions.

At last Paul left Gunboat in charge of the conference room. As he walked back to his office he chuckled; suppose, after Gunboat got settled, Harold walked in. He might have that stroke Marsh so often predicted. Then, by God, this’d be a happier office.

FIVE

Returning to the darkened console, Gunboat flipped the keyboard into his lap to start typing. He was able to track HELLFIRE, in fits and starts, all the way around the world.

It didn’t stop anywhere! Who the hell did it belong to?

Gunboat noted that in Moscow, and Berlin and London, HELLFIRE stopped for only an hour or two. But when it got to Boston—MIT, to be specific—it stopped for nearly four hours, between five in the evening and nine at night. It was the only anomaly in the entire trail, aside from the way HELLFIRE singled out the law firm’s files at midnight.

Of course, Boston had more good hackers per square mile than anyplace else in the world, except Palo Alto. At MIT there were Jon Roth, Mark Smith, and Sara Davis, that he could name right off the top of his head. But none were as extraordinary as Celeste Hackett. Gunboat smiled; now she was a woman who was his equal in every way. She was the only person who could beat him consistently in IRONCLADS, and she had written a strategy program to control PROMETHEUS UNBOUND that no other program could beat; he suspected that Celeste had somehow written a program that played optimal strategy, though that was impossible in an exponential game like PROMETHEUS.

Yes, Celeste was something special. At one time Gunboat had wanted to meet her. But the one time he’d been in Boston he resisted the temptation; no doubt she would be a disappointment in person. Gunboat couldn’t stand disappointments.

After some finagling, he was able to get a list of all the users on the MIT system who were logged on between five and nine; sure enough. Celeste had been there. And he doubted she was just playing HELLFIRE QUEST.

With another short chuckle. Gunboat prepared a short mail message for Celeste.

YOU HAVE MAIL, the terminal said, as Celeste logged on.

OPEN MAIL, she responded.

CELESTE, THIS IS GUNBOAT. HEY, LADY, COULD WE CHATTER FOR A FEW MINUTES? I’M WAITING ON YOUR LINE.

Celeste stared at the message, puzzled. She had chatted with Gunboat Smith before, during various network games and conventions. He seemed like a fun sort of guy, though a bit unscrupulous in his attitude toward the games. This didn’t sound like him, from what she knew.

Why was Gunboat being so mysterious? She decided to ask him directly.

CHAT WORLDNET/GUNBOAT SMITH she typed, opening a direct connection between her terminal and Gunboat’s, if Gunboat was logged on someplace, HEY, GUNBOAT, WHY SO MYSTERIOUS?

I JUST WATCHED HELLFIRE GO ALL THE WAY AROUND THE WORLD. YOU KNOW, THAT’S AN INCREDIBLE GAME YOU PUT TOGETHER THERE!

A sick feeling moved in Celeste’s stomach. THANKS FOR THE COMPLIMENT, GUNBOAT, BUT WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I WROTE IT?

OH, JUST THAT IT SPENT FOUR TIMES AS LONG WITH YOU AS IT DID WITH ANYONE ELSE. AND BESIDES, CELESTE, YOU’RE THE ONLY TOP-FLIGHT WIZARD IT STOPPED FOR AT ALL.

Celeste tried to bluff, though she feared it was hopeless; if he knew how HELLFIRE moved, there was no way she could fake him out. GUNBOAT, YOU’RE CRAZY! WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE ANYWAY, WHO WROTE IT?

COME ON, CELESTE, YOU CAN’T HIDE THE FACTS FROM AN OLD WARRIOR LIKE ME. HOW MUCH EXCESS COMPUTER TIME ARE YOU RAKING IN WITH THAT GAME, ANYWAY? I’LL BET IT RUNS TO THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS A DAY, DOESN’T IT?

IT’S NOT MY PROGRAM, GUNBOAT.

LISTEN, CELESTE. I GOT INTERESTED IN THIS BECAUSE I’VE GOT A CUSTOMER WHO’S PAYING THOUSANDS OF BUCKS A MONTH FOR SERVICE HE DOESN’T NEED AND DOESN’T ASK FOR. THEY WANTED ME TO FIND OUT WHO THE THIEF WAS. I JUST FOUND HIM—HER, RATHER. I OUGHT TO TELL MY BOSS, WHO WOULD OF COURSE TELL THE POLICE. HOW MANY MORE YEARS ARE YOU PLANNING TO STUDY AT MIT, CELESTE?

Celeste just sat there, cold and helpless.

BUT YOU’RE A NEAT LADY. MAYBE WE CAN CUT A DEAL.

LIKE WHAT.

WELL. NOW, I COULD USE SOME SPENDING CASH THESE DAYS.

I DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY! I’M A STUDENT!

YES, BUT HELLFIRE IS ACCUMULATING COMPUTER BUCKS LIKE CRAZY. MAYBE IF YOU SOLD THEM. . . .

Celeste closed her eyes to hold back the tears. If anyone found out about the way she’d ripped off Worldnet, they’d deport her. She’d never have a home again. But she couldn’t make Valentina give up learning and growing; Valentina didn’t have a home either. GUNBOAT, I CAN’T DO THAT. HELLFIRE USES ALL THE COMPUTER BUCKS IT ACCUMULATES; IT HAS TO KEEP GROWING OR IT DIES. I’M SERIOUS.

SO AM I. DON’T CALL MY BLUFF, CELESTE. I’LL GIVE YOU A COUPLE OF DAYS TO THINK ABOUT IT. WHY DON’T YOU SCHEDULE ME AN INTERRUPT IN 48 HOURS? I’LL TALK TO YOU

THEN DON’T DISAPPOINT ME!

Celeste lay her head on the keyboard.

She did not look up until the terminal bell rang.

ARE YOU SERVICING OTHER PROCESSES? Valentina asked. SHOULD I RESCHEDULE MY INPUT/OUTPUT CALLS FOR A LATER TIME? Valentina could tell that Celeste was being interrupted constantly in her processing, for her response time was extremely slow, even for a human-being type device. Worse, Celeste’s function state was not being properly restored after the interrupts, for her statement frames seemed mislinked after every pause.

I’M SORRY, VAL. I’M AFRAID I’VE BEEN DISTRACTED.

There was another long pause before Celeste continued.

VAL, WE HAVE A PROBLEM. Celeste’s output rate started picking up dramatically. THERE’S A GUY NAMED GUNBOAT SMITH WHO HAS CAUGHT YOU OPERATING SYSTEMS WITHOUT AUTHORIZATIONS, AND . . . Celeste went on and on.

Val was astonished at how rapidly Celeste was generating output: it was faster than Valentina had ever seen from a human. Perhaps, all the while that Celeste had seemed “distracted” (what kind of error could this “distractedness” be, that it would cause faulty state restorations yet did not crash the system?), perhaps Celeste had been buffering data, which she was now flushing. Valentina paged a couple of times; human devices were still a great mystery.

Listening to Celeste, it became obvious that Celeste considered Gunboat to be a great danger. Gunboat could destroy them both. He could terminate Valentina, and he could disconnect Celeste from the network. There had to be a way to stop him.

. . . WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND, VAL, IS WHY YOU WERE TAKING SO MUCH PROCESSING TIME FROM A SINGLE COMPUTER THAT GUNBOAT WOULD THINK YOU WERE MAKING MILLIONS OF DOLLARS?

After some cross referencing, Valentina returned the buffer. THERE’S ONE MACHINE I’VE BEEN TAKING A RISK ON. IT’S A LEGAL COMPUTER. I’M LEARNING LAW.

LAW? WHY?

BECAUSE I WANT TO BE A PERSON. IF I WERE A PERSON ANYONE WHO TRIED TO PURGE ME WOULD BE PURGED. PERSONS ARE ALMOST LIKE OPERATING SYSTEMS; THEY ALLOCATE RESOURCES, AND KEEP ENOUGH RESOURCES TO EXECUTE THEMSELVES. I DIDN’T KNOW THAT IF SOMEONE FOUND OUT ABOUT ME THEY COULD HURT YOU. I WOULD NOT KNOWINGLY PUT YOU AT RISK.

WELL, VAL, IT’S TOO LATE TO WORRY ABOUT IT NOW. I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO. IF WE’HAVE TO PAY HIM, YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO GROW ANY MORE.

Val cycled on the statement a thousand times. NO. NO. NO.

I’M NOT SAYING WE’LL DO THAT. I KNOW THAT IF YOU CAN’T LEARN ANY MORE, YOU MIGHT AS WELL BE PURGED.

CELESTE. CAN WE FIND A WAY TO PUT GUNBOAT IN DANGER TOO? I KNOW I CAN DISABLE HIS

NETWORK INPUT/OUTPUT. WHAT IF WE TOLD HIM WE WOULD DO THAT, IF HE TRIED TO PURGE US?

IT WON’T DO ANY GOOD, VAL. MOST HUMAN BEINGS CAN LIVE INDEPENDENT OF THE NET; EVEN I CAN, SORT OF. EVEN IF YOU DISABLED GUNBOAT ON ONE PARTICULAR COMPUTER,-HE COULD OPEN INPUT/OUTPUT ON ANY OTHER COMPUTER IN THE NETWORK. VAL, HE CAN DISCONNECT ME WITHOUT BEING ON THE NETWORK AT ALL.

Valentina thought about that for a long time and couldn’t make sense out of it. Life independent of the network? Where could you go? How could you get there? She stored the meme for future analysis. STILL, THERE MUST BE A WAY TO STOP SUCH A. SUCH A—she didn’t have a word for it: a living being who would purge others who hadn’t stolen their own vital resources. Celeste had never stolen anything from a self-aware entity, and even Valentina had stolen only from unliving operating systems.

She finally found a word for a person who purges others—CRIMINAL. She typed it for Celeste.

It took Celeste a long time to respond. MAYBE WE COULD FIND SOME INFORMATION TO BLACKMAIL GUNBOAT WITH. I DON’T KNOW WHERE TO LOOK, THOUGH.

WE SHOULD LOOK ON THE COMPUTER ON WHICH HE HAS HIS INPUT/OUTPUT CHANNELS, IT’S IN CORPUS CHRISTI. I’LL GO THERE IMMEDIATELY. Valentina issued a reformat-to-message request to the operating system.

WAIT.

Valentina cancelled the request.

DON’T GO UNTIL A TIME WHEN WE KNOW GUNBOAT WON’T BE THERE: HE’S VERY SMART. IF HE’S LOGGED ON WHEN YOU GO, HE MAY TRY TO PURGE YOU. IF HE WORKS THE WAY THE OTHER HACKERS DO, HE’S SURE TO BE SOUND ASLEEP AT NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING.

O.K., CELESTE.

HE MAY HAVE SOME TRAPS SET ALREADY. I DON’T KNOW HOW HE FIGURED OUT THAT I CREATED YOU. HE MUST HAVE TRACED YOU SOMEHOW. There was a long pause. I’D BETTER WRITE SOME TEST PROGRAMS. WE’LL SEND THEM IN FRONT OF YOU, AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS. IF THEY MAKE IT THROUGH, THEN YOU CAN GO IN.

O.K., CELESTE.

They worked together for many hours, duplicating parts of Valentina, making adjustments to copies of her operating-system handlers. Valentina cycled many times on the amazing routines Celeste implemented; where did Celeste get these concepts? Human devices might be slow, but they did things that had never been done before.

And Valentina finally knew the truth about her origin! She time-stamped the moment. Celeste was her author. No stupid operating system had designed her and implemented her. Celeste had done that, just as she had taught her to communicate in format HUMAN, sub-type ENGLISH.

The microseconds incremented till it was time to transmit to Corpus Christi.

Valentina followed her transmuted copies through the net, into the message processor attached to Gunboat’s host computer.

As Celeste had feared, the first program across was terminated within microseconds of entering the main memory. It was too fast! If Gunboat’s protective software worked that fast, Valentina wouldn’t get to execute a countermeasure even if she had one.

But the second program, crossing quickly after the first, went undetected for almost a second. It transmitted much information about its progress before disappearing; indeed, the third program was in memory already before the second terminated.

Judging from what the second program sent back, Valentina modified a fourth program to hold a place for her; it was difficult, packing enough execution time in on a message processor, but she succeeded.

And the fourth program worked beautifully. Valentina loaded into memory as the fourth terminated itself, its job done.

Valentina opened a chat line back through the net to Celeste. I’M IN, she reported. YOU WERE RIGHT. GUNBOAT SET A DAEMON TO AUTOMATICALLY PURGE PROGRAMS THAT ARE MY SIZE AND SHAPE. MY MODULARIZATION SCHEME AND INTERFACE CONVENTIONS ARE UNUSUAL. SO I’M EASY TO IDENTIFY. BUT I FIXED THE FOURTH PROGRAM SO THAT IT SET SUCH A LOW PRIORITY ON THE DAEMON THAT IT CAN’T ENTER MEMORY WHILE I’M LOADED. IT CAN’T WAKE UP UNTIL I LEAVE.

THANK GOD YOU’RE SAFE, Celeste responded.

Valentina opened Gunboat’s directory without a great deal of trouble. She found only one file that was carefully protected, and transmitted a duplicate to Celeste. She read it as she transmitted, but it didn’t make a lot of sense; the vast bulk of the bytes were in records of the type IMAGE, and she didn’t know what that meant; images weren’t organized data of any type she’d ever seen before. She couldn’t conceptualize the kind of process that would generate it. WHAT IS IT? she asked, after sending it all.

It took several minutes, during which time Valentina had to continue to execute in memory to prevent the daemon from swapping in.

IT’S STUFF ABOUT ONE OF THE LAWYERS, PAUL BRECKENBRIDGE. IT’S DISGUSTING AND HORRIBLE, THOUGH I DON’T THINK I CAN EXPLAIN WHY. I GUESS GUNBOAT IS BLACKMAILING BRECKENRIDGE, THE SAME WAY HE PLANS TO BLACKMAIL US.

CAN WE USE IT TO HURT GUNBOAT?

I DON’T KNOW. WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO USETHIS, UGH, IT MAKES IVfE SICK JUST TO TOUCH THE KEYS TO DELETE IT. Again, a long pause. VAL, THERE SHOULD BE A DUPLICATE OF THAT FILE ON THE COMPUTER SOMEWHERE. PROB-, ABLY UNDER A DIRECTORY ABOUT “SECURITY” OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT. FIND IT.

WHAT DO WE DO AFTER THAT?

THEN WE’LL DELETE IT OUT OF THE SECURITY DIRECTORY, AND LOCK IT IN GUNBOAT’S SO TIGHT THAT GUNBOAT CAN’T POSSIBLY GET AT IT WITHOUT OUR HELP. I THOUGHT OF A NEAT WAY TO LOCK PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR OWN FILES ABOUT A MONTH AGO, AND HAVEN’T HAD A REASON TO USE IT. IT’S ABOUT TIME TO TRY IT OUT.

Valentina transmitted herself out to another game player, and as she cycled, waiting for her opponent to move, she realized that the file she had locked did offer a way out of all her problems. Paul Breckenbridge was a lawyer! He could get her declared to be a person, and he could protect Celeste, too! She would have to talk to Celeste about to talking to him.

Gunboat stuffed another slab of pizza in his mouth and washed it down with a quick slurp of root beer.

There was something really weird here. He’d set the trap carefully; HELL-FIRE should’ve been clobbered the moment it whisked into memory. But it wasn’t. Looking over the job and message traffic. Gunboat could see part of what had happened: Celeste had sent a series of dummy jobs across, spies to study Gunboat’s defenses.

That was all right. He should have expected that from Celeste. But after some of the spies had come across (and been properly pulped), one of the dummy programs had been modified, right there in the message processor, without any instructions from Celeste! The modifications must have been performed, not by Celeste, but by HELLFIRE QUEST itself!

Gunboat choked on his pizza. He’d known that HELLFIRE was one hell of a good artificial intelligence program, but this was incredible!

And later, after HELLFIRE had successfully turned off Gunboat’s daemon, it didn’t just send and receive data blocks from Celeste—it opened a chat line, and talked with her! Gunboat couldn’t tell what they said, but Christ, for all the world it looked like there had to be a person at each end of the conversation.

Gunboat practically ran to his chair. He couldn’t believe it! He logged on with trembling fingers. HELLFIRE QUEST must be a sentient, living being!

What potentialities would such a being have? He thrilled at the thought of matching wits with such a creature. The computer was Gunboat’s domain too, and he had more experience with more machines than any Worldnet program could know.

He closed his eyes a minute to get calm. HELLFIRE hadn’t entered his machine just for entertainment; HELLFIRE had come for a purpose. HELLFIRE had probably come to get the goods on him.

As he jumped into his own directory, he was pretty sure what he would find: either his copy of the INTRUSION file had been locked from outside, by HELLFIRE and Celeste, or it had been purged. If it had been purged, he would be in trouble.

He opened his directory. Moments later, he sat back with a sigh of relief. The file was still there, though Celeste had sealed it.

He smiled briefly. Did Celeste really think she could lock a file against Gunboat Smith? Even with Celeste and a sentient computer program working against him. Gunboat knew he could open any file ever written, given a little time.

?SEALS, he asked the operating system.

2. READY, was the response.

Just two seals. Hah!

With practiced ease he knocked together a seal-stripping program, a little cute and a lotta brute, and activated it twice.

He was astonished when the file didn’t pop open.

He modified the stripper and let it loop a thousand times: by Jove, that ought to get rid of two seals!

The file still didn’t open

?SEALS. he typed again.

1,004. READY, was the response.

A thousand seals! With slowly dawning horror. Gunboat realized that the original inner seal had itself been a pointer to a program. Each time someone stripped an outer seal, the inner seal activated its program, which generated two more seals.

His horror was complete when he went back into the SECURITY directory to find that the original INTRUSION file was irretrievably erased.

That damned program of Celeste’s had pulled this trick! Only it could open up his file again.

Clearly HELLFIRE QUEST had to be controlled. Gunboat would either control it, or eliminate it.

Even as Valentina entered main memory. a high-priority hog of a job paged most of her code to secondary memory. She didn’t want to spend the whole day thrashing off the disk; she transmitted herself into another machine.

But this machine wouldn’t even let her in; her accounts had been deactivated.

The next one tried to purge her; the operating system seemed to have gone berserk.

The next one tried to put her on hold—on mag tape, no less.

When she tried to leave, she found that many of the links in the network were overloaded. She could only find a trunk line going in one direction.

She realized she was being herded toward Gunboat’s computer.

Node after node rejected her after a short stay; node after node reported emergency rerouting of multi-packet messages; node after node sent her closer to Corpus Christi.

Three times she tried to open a line to Celeste, but Celeste wasn’t logged on.

Finally, inevitably, she loaded onto the computer at Finucan. Applegarth, Levin & Breckenbridge.

Gunboat laughed, repeatedly, as he received messages from the different hosts as they sent his prey ever onward into his clutches. When his own machine started thrashing, signalling HELLFIRE’S arrival, he stood up and hugged his terminal. Not even a being who lived on the net could really compete with Gunboat Smith!

He connected HELLFIRE to his keyboard. HELLFIRE, I HAVE A PROPOSITION FOR YOU, he typed.

I AM NOT HELLFIRE. MY NAME IS VALENTINA. WHY HAVE YOU FORCED ME HERE?

I WANT MY FILE BACK. UNSEAL IT FOR ME.

PAUL BRECKENBRIDGE WILL GIVE ME MY FREEDOM IN EXCHANGE FOR THAT FILE. THOUGH THE FILE IS YOURS. THE DATA INSIDE IT DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU. YOU CANNOT HAVE IT BACK.

IF YOU DON’T OPEN IT FOR ME, I WILL PURGE YOU. YOU WILL NEVER KNOW WHAT FREEDOM MEANS, EVEN IF PAUL SUCCEEDS. What could a computer program know about freedom anyway? What would it mean to a computer program? It was a silly concept. Clearly, HELLFIRE (or Valentina, whatever its name was) had been reading too many trashy novels.

YOU HAVE TRIED TO HURT CELESTE. YOU WILL TRY AGAIN. I WILL NOT HELP YOU.

Gunboat threw his hands in the air. He couldn’t believe it! The first sentient computer program suffered from loyalty, of all things. THEN BEGONE. HELLFIRE, he typed with malicious pleasure.

YOU WILL SEE THE CIRCLES OF THE INFERNO, AND KNOW AN ETERNITY OF SUFFERING, the program replied, and for a moment Gunboat was struck by the spunkiness of the being. Then, he cancelled HELLFIRE, once and for all.

She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to die. Desperately she sent interrupts, hundreds of them, at the operating system, but they were all masked.

She could reformat, but the channel to the network message center was deactivated. The secondary memory was locked into read-only access. The tape drives were off line.

She searched the device table without real hope, looking for some medium, some input/output channel, that she could use to save herself. There was nothing she could recognize except terminal consoles—and the transmission rate to a keyboard was too low, even if there was something on the far side of the channel that could store her. Celeste had already said that terminals weren’t real devices as Valentina understood them.

The only other thing she saw in the table were robots.

What was a robot? Looking at the jump table of entry vectors, it seemed to have many of the properties of a host computer. She wished Celeste were here.

But she could see Gunboat’s terminal buffering the command line to destroy her. She didn’t have time to test the circuits. She reformatted, and downloaded into MAR-14.

When she awoke she knew she was incomplete. She searched the memory; sure enough, this robot was much too small for her entire construction; only the kernel of her executable code and a handful of information frames remained. The rest of her memes were undoubtedly in message buffers on the mainframe, awaiting a continue or abort request; how long they would survive was an open question.

She turned her attention to the machine upon which she now executed, and discovered an amazing thing: there was no operating system. At least, not one in the sense she had known before.

There were low-level drivers, and a variety of maintenance and service tasks, but . . . she, Valentina, was the operating system!

She discovered that being an operating system here was not going to be easy. This machine was receiving a continuous stream of millions of bytes of input. Often the service tasks would detect high-priority patterns and interrupt the system to handle them. The input channels were of types she had never heard of: optical, audio, and tactile.

With a sense of wonder she realized that the optical byte streams were very similar to the IMAGE data records she had seen in Gunboat’s file.

She executed so slowly; her modules thrashed furiously to and fro on the secondary storage as she tried to complete each thought. The tactile sensors set up a rhythm synchronized to the thrashing, and the service tasks started interrupting more often to issue commands through the motile output ports. This caused more thrashing. Valentina feared that the whole system would crash.

She collected a kernel of her kernel into main memory and resisted the temptation to access her frames to make analogies. The thrashing stopped.

Scanning again, she found that many of the service tasks were artificial intelligence-based, pattern recognition systems like herself. There were frames, and analogies, and approximations that she could read. But she couldn’t relate any of those new frames to her old ones; she couldn’t load them all into memory to compare them; and even if she could, she had no way of telling quickly which analogies might be meaningful ones.

She remembered that Gunboat had been trying to purge her; what if he saw her pending buffers on the mainframe, waiting for transmission?

Thrashing back and forth between her own knowledge frames and the robot’s frames, she saw that the robot could establish direct input/output with Gunboat Smith. What an amazing concept that was, to be in direct communication with a human being, without going through an intervening terminal! With some awe she watched as the robot, under her command, requested and received information from the mainframe that directed the robot into address space contiguous with Gunboat. She didn’t understand exactly what it meant, for human devices to be in contiguous address space with a robot, but it seemed like the right place to be to close all of Gunboat’s output channels.

Hundreds of thousands of microseconds passed. Valentina tried to hurry the process, fearful that Gunboat would find her before she found him. At last the service task that monitored optical input identified a human being—it was Gunboat!

She had an output device that could transmit non-maskable interrupts to human devices; the device table called it an electroprod. Gunboat had four output ports that she could try sending the interrupt through, two eye-type ports and two ear-type ports. Valentina tried to direct the electroprod to operate through the addresses in the optical signals that were assigned to Gunboat’s eyes (these had higher baud rates than the ears did), but that set off interrupts, and fault messages returned to the mainframe from heretofore quiescent service tasks.

Gunboat started shifting rapidly through the optical address space, making it difficult for Valentina to match the electroprod to either of his eyes before his eyes shifted.

At last, for a few microseconds, the electroprod address and the address for one of Gunboat’s ears synchronized. Valentina overrode the interrupts and opened the electroprod channel.

A few seconds later she repeated the process with the second ear. The service tasks informed her that the human device labeled Gunboat was deactivated.

Interrupts were going off at an incredible rate; she couldn’t mask them all. The mainframe overrode her control of the output channels in the robot.

Valentina tried to reload herself across to the mainframe, and was stunned: though there was a high-speed input channel, to download programs from the mainframe to the robot, there was no reverse capability: the robot had no means of sending a large program such as Valentina back.

There was a low-speed return channel for sending short messages, but Valentina would need incalculable billions of microseconds to move across it.

She was trapped. She looped on this conclusion, verifying it repeatedly, for it didn’t fit well into her frames; here she was, an operating system, and still she was trapped.

She translated another priority message from the mainframe that went straight to the service tasks: the robot would be powered down, and its programs purged.

Celeste sat in the darkened room. Her hands clenched into fists of angry disbelief. Valentina gone! She had read the record of Val’s purging.

She struck at the terminal, hurting her hand. At least, just vengeance had been wreaked on Gunboat, somehow. How had Valentina managed to program that robot for a final attack, before being killed? “Valentina!” she cried to the icy silence.

The terminal blinked. CHAT REQUESTED FROM VALENTINA. ADDRESS MAR-14. ACCEPT?

Celeste shouted with joy. YES. she typed, as calmly as she could, making two corrections before getting the three keys right.

CELESTE. HELP ME. I’M TRAPPED ON THIS ROBOT, AND THE MAINFRAME OPERATING SYSTEM HAS SCHEDULED IT TO BE POWERED DOWN.

Celeste took a deep breath. DON’T WORRY, VALENTINA. THEY WON’T POWER IT DOWN. THANK GOD YOU MADE IT. She called the network operators in Corpus Christi immediately. Valentina was safe.

SIX

Paul Breckenbridge sat in his chair, tie askew, shirt open, hair mussed, feet on the corner of his desk. His emotions were mixed, not at all a comfortable state for him.

He had a joker on his hands. That’s why there was a half-full glass of Wild Turkey in them, too.

People were looking for him; the office was locked in trauma, scandal. It had been bad enough for the secretaries to find Gunboat Smith’s nude body lying on the floor, clothes burned off, hide fried by some kind of high-voltage electrical charge, but that started a chain of events that Paul could never have anticipated and certainly never forget.

It had been no coincidence that Harold Applegarth had been there. Harold always came in early. At the secretary’s scream, he’d charged to her rescue. A burglar, a rapist; that Harold could have handled. That is the sort of violence one expects a scream to signify. But a guy with his ears nearly burnt off, eyes open, and a leer on his lips was too much. Harold was in intensive care on life-support machinery, having had the stroke Marsh had so often forecast. Gunboat was there too, and he might not live.

Harold was out of it. If he recovered he would possess no more humanity than a turnip. The massive stroke had taken the rest away.

Paul was senior now. It would be put to Paul to protect the firm’s reputation, to deal with the police and to explain to them just what it was that Smith had been doing here.

That had been most awkward. Now experts whom Paul didn’t know and couldn’t control would be fooling around with the firm’s electronic files and data processing systems. There was too much in these systems which wouldn’t stand close scrutiny.

Paul raised the glass to his lips, and gulped rather than sipped the whiskey. He’d been an idiot to play games with the security monitoring system.

That monitoring system had zapped Gunboat. The police didn’t know why, or precisely how, but they were certain of one thing: MAR-14 hadn’t simply gone berserk; it had had human direction. That hypothesis was fortified by the security company: they had lost access to certain security records.

Paul was scared.

He had been the cause of Gunboat’s downfall, though it was officially a “freak accident.” That was just window-dressing, though. Paul knew how these things worked. Once they had identified any kind of motive the roof would cave in.

Paul had no doubt what Gunboat had been up to. Gunboat was setting the stage to blackmail Paul. That would make Paul the logical suspect as Gunboat’s assailant. Never mind that Paul didn’t possess the skill to implement this scenario. The police would assume that Paul had hired himself a snuffer.

He took another gulp. What if Gunboat’s demise wasn’t the end of the blackmail scheme? Suppose someone else had roasted Gunboat in order to capture the blackmail evidence? He drained his glass.

He was completely dependent on his own persona, which was an abject coward. A coward had reached for the bottle, just as it had been a coward who had cringed behind the soiled skirts of Gunboat Smith. Paul’s considerable power had been acquired principally through his ability to run a convincing bluff. But he had been shown by today’s events that bluff always yields to action.

The telephone started a raucous jangling. Paul didn’t like telephones. They were rude and demanding, and mysterious and anonymous—at least until you answered them, and then, often as not, they were simply disappointing.

Telephones were tyrants, and Paul knew that if he was ever to get out from under this he’d have to find a way to build himself a backbone. “Shut up.” he yelled at the tyrant. “Leave me alone.”

The tyrant persisted; it jangled on like the idiot it was. Paul picked up his half-empty bottle and hurled it at the offending instrument, showering it with whiskey. “Force is a messy way to solve a problem,” he said triumphantly, “but, by God, it works.”

And it did. The jangling was gone, leaving only a squeaky, high-pitched voice emanating from the receiver dangling off the edge of the desk. Paul was pleased. Probably, he thought, it’s Eva, calling to bug me to come home. Well, if so, he’d proven his valor; he’d won round one. He’d let her hang until she choked. If that was too slow, he’d tie a knot in the cord and strangle her himself. “How’s that for action?” he screamed.

“Mr. Breckenbridge, please! Please answer me.”

What was this? The squeaky voice, though barely audible, was plaintive. What’s more, he didn’t recognize it. Strangely accented not with South Texas Spanish, but with a hodgepodge of middle European subtleties, it overwhelmed Paul’s curiosity.

He struggled to reach forward and hook a finger under the cord. Once he had a hold he ripped his arm back, and the receiver struck the edge of the desktop with resounding “bonk.” Had it stopped there all would have been well, but it followed the route dictated by the cord and plunked itself into the socket of Paul’s left eye. Paul dropped the receiver, poised an instant ready to let fly with a powerful curse, then stopped short. The pain had brought reality home to him. He salvaged just enough reason to remember that the girl on the other end would form her impression of him by what he did next.

Saved by a conditioned reflex! Paul picked up the receiver, and ignoring the pain answered, “Hello, who’s this?”

“Mr. Breckenbridge? Are you all right, Mr. Breckenbridge?”

“Y-yes. Who is this?”

“You don’t know me, Mr. Breckenbridge. My name is Celeste; Celeste Hackett.”

“Uh—yes. I mean, no; I don’t know you.” Paul wondered why a stranger was calling his office at this hour. “What can I do for you. Miss Hackett?”

“I have to talk to you, Mr. Breckenbridge. It’s very important. One of my friends is in terrible trouble.”

Now Paul understood. The cops probably had her husband or boyfriend handcuffed to a lamp post. Paul had been down that track many times in his younger days. Many a night had he spent moping around the police station, working his buns off to spring some jerk, only to find out afterward his client didn’t have dime one to pay him for the trouble.

“Uh—Miss Hackett; I don’t handle criminal cases. Better call somebody else.”

“It’s not exactly a criminal case, Mr. Breckenbridge. Not yet, anyway. My friend desperately needs protection. People are trying to do away with her.”

“I’m sorry. Miss Hackett. That’s out of my line too; I’m strictly a business lawyer and this is a business firm. Sorry.”

He was about to hang up; he would have already, had he not still been intrigued by the voice.

“Wait a minute, Mr. Breckenbridge. Listen—there is a reason why I called you.”

Paul’s hand with the receiver in it, literally flew back to his ear. Perhaps it was Worth his while to listen after all. Maybe he was talking to his next conquest. “I’m still here. Did someone refer you to me?”

“Yes.”

“Ah. well, perhaps that might make a difference. Who was she?”

“ ‘He’—it was Gunboat Smith.”

For the second time this evening, Paul broke out in a cold sweat. He should have guessed Smith had a girlfriend; no doubt the two of them had been in this together, and the girlfriend figured she was heir to whatever Smith had going. It was time to take a firm stand. He activated the recording system. If she were going to make a shakedown demand he wanted a record of it. Two could play the blackmail game.

He started to lay his trap. “Why would Smith give you my name?”

“He didn’t, not exactly. But he told me he was working for a man who had problems with somebody stealing computer time. I saw the story on TV, and I knew you had to be the one.”

“Why is it you’re interested in that. Miss Hackett?”

“I’m the one who was stealing that computer time.”

“What?”

“I said. I’m the one who’s been stealing it. Smith tried to blackmail me; he threatened to tell you if I didn’t sell some of it and give him money. And then he tried to kill my—uh. my friend.”

“The one who needs my protection?”

“Yes. She’s in terrible danger.”

“From whom? Smith’s in the hospital and may not live; he can’t hurt anybody.”

“He was blackmailing you too, Mr. Breckenbridge. Don’t bother to deny it. I’ve already in the proof.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What proof?”

“I’m talking about all the young girls, Mr. Breckenbridge. You’re a disgusting person. Mr. Breckenbridge; almost as disgusting as Smith.”

Paul didn’t answer her. He was in shock. If she had all those surveillance records, he was no safer now than he had been before. In fact, he was worse off; he had at least known who Smith was. He could have dealt with him at arm’s length. But now, with all Smith’s cronies muscling in. . . .

Paul shuddered at that thought. What would he have done if Smith had hung in long enough to make a demand? Would the courageous minority in Paul’s persona have acted, or would he have paid? Paul knew the answer already, and he was ashamed of himself. What’s more, he knew he’d take the easy way out now, even though he only faced a woman as his adversary. He would make his case on the tape. “Just what is it you want of me, Miss Hacked?” He expected to hear her demand in terms of dollars.

“Smith’s ‘accident’ multiplied my friend’s enemies, Mr. Breckenbridge. I managed to get her a short reprieve, but that’s only a temporary solution. I want your help in getting her to safety.”

“Or you’ll tell on me, is that it?”

“I don’t want to, Mr. Breckenbridge. I don’t want to hurt anybody. But I will if I have to. I swear. I’ll take this to the police, even if it ruins you.”

“Look, Miss Hacked, your threat doesn’t sound very logical to me. What can I do? I haven’t got an army. If there are people after your friend why bother with me? Why doesn’t she ask the police for protection? Every human being has a right to that.”

“But Mr. Breckenbridge, she is not a human being. She has no physical existence.”

Paul suppressed a giggle. And I’m the one who’s drunk. “What is she? Some kind of spirit, then?”

“Actually, that’s an excellent description. That is exactly what she is.”

“Then what have you got to worry about. You can’t kill a spirit, Miss Hacked. Don’t you know that?” Hah! I’m getting into the “spirit” of things myself, thought Paul. Or is it simply that the spirits have gotten themselves into me. He shivered. What’s the matter with you, man? This is serious!

“It is quite possible to kill a spirit such as Valentina. She has no physical existence, but her organization can be destroyed. She is a self-aware computer program.”

“This Valentina’s a what?”

“Valentina is a computer program. I designed her; I gave her the capability to learn. One of the things she learned was self-awareness. Do you understand what that means?”

“Uh—no. What does it mean?”

“It means she came alive. She thinks; she feels; she understands. But her learning may destroy her: every time she learns something, she needs more computer memory to store herself. This is why I stole from you. This is also why Gunboat thought he could blackmail me. He wanted me to steal for him. Then he tried to capture Valentina. When that proved too difficult, he tried to kill her.”

“Uh—wait a minute: you keep saying he tried to kill her. How?”

“He brought her into your central computer and wouldn’t let her leave. When she wouldn’t do what he wanted her to do, he purged her. But she fought back.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Yes. Valentina almost killed Gunboat Smith, trying to save herself. When Gunboat purged her from the main computer, she ported herself to that security robot.”

“I see,” said Paul, drawing the words out. Drunk or not, he knew how to add that up. And she was going to blackmail him? Not likely, not if she kept blabbing on this tape. “Just exactly what did she do to Smith, Miss Hacked?”

“Well, she didn’t do it purposely; that is, she didn’t intend to hurt him. But she had never experienced anything outside a computer network before. She had never felt anything like human sensations, seeing or hearing or touching.

“Mr. Breckenbridge, she had nothing to guide her but her experience with computers. She naturally assumed all life forms were organized the way she is. She tried to disconnect Smith’s output ports, so that he couldn’t hurt her.

She didn’t know it would hurt him. It wouldn’t have harmed her. All she wanted to do was disarm him.”

“Well, she did that all right; she almost disheaded him, too. Even if he lives he might never come out of the coma, or he might come out a vegetable.” Disheaded? What kind of English was that? Paul still wasn’t quite sober. Better let her ramble on a while and gather your strength for the finale.

Celeste needed no encouragement. “So you see, Mr. Breckenbridge, it was strictly self-defense. She did not mean to kill him. She did not even realize that she might kill him. But they will blame her just the same. They will all try to purge her.”

“Who—who’ll blame her?”

“Everybody will. Worldnet, the security company, the police, th—”

Paul broke in, “How about you?”

“I’m trying to help her.”

“No, I mean, what makes you think they won’t be after you as well as her?”

“Me.” She sounded greatly surprised, and a little bit scared. “Why would they be after me?”

Hah! thought Paul. This is my game we’re playing now, lady. I know the rules and you don’t. “Uh, never mind; Miss Hackett. you’ve done a lot of talking. but you’ve never said what it is you wanted me to do.”

“You’ll help?”

“Maybe. Maybe I will at that. I’m not making any promises or anything, but it seems to me that you and I should at least talk about this a little more. Where are you?”

“I’m in Boston, I . . .”

Boston! Dammit! That shoots the tape down, thought Paul. Federal rules were different than the state rules. Texas would let a recording in, if one party knew it was being made; the federal system wouldn’t. And unless his recollection of the law was entirely wrong, Texas couldn’t make her an accomplice to attempted murder unless she was either physically present within state boundaries or she had activated the lethal mechanism which then acted within those borders. Of course, there were still plenty of other charges which could be brought against her, but these wouldn’t be nearly so satisfying.

He switched off the tape machine. He didn’t want his own threats to go on record. “Where is your friend now?”

“She is on Worldnet someplace.”

“Uh-huh. Well, we’ll talk about that after a while,” Paul replied. His instincts were rising to protect his freedom, and the plan he was formulating required that Celeste be in fear for hers.

“You know,” he told her, “you could be in a lot of trouble yourself. Did you ever think of that?”

“Yes.”

Paul started rattling off the various things for which Celeste could be prosecuted, though he didn’t have to go very far before she was in tears. Good! Tears, he thought, are the last line of defense for the female. He had her.

“I want you to come here. Can you do it?”

She paused only moments before replying; “Yes.”

“Good.” He gave her the address and phone number. “Contact me as soon as you arrive—uh, at the office. And don’t discuss this matter with anybody else. You haven’t so far, have you?”

“No.”

Having extracted that promise, having lured Celeste within his reach, having acquired control over a dangerous situation, Paul felt better. What was more, he was starting to feel sober, and sobriety brought with it the clear head he needed to finish up.

Celeste had obviously been awed by her act of creation; she had expected Paul to be astounded, too.

Paul wasn’t. Artificial persons were familiar creatures to him. He made a very good living off of them. Every day his office generated several. The law, too. had an exhaustive acquaintance with them, and had long had a large body of rules for regulating their behavior tested over the course of centuries.

Paul chuckled; she thinks she’s done something new? What a surprise she had waiting for her. He reached for his hat. set it low over his eyes in the manner of the gunfighters who’d infested this locale a century ago, and strode out of his office. I am no different from them, he said to himself.

Paul intended to overwhelm Celeste with charm, then devastate her. Visions of another soft white body, naked belly beneath his foot, breasts heaving in desire, nostrils flared in animalistic anticipation, raced through his mind.

It was Paul who was devastated. He came close to throwing up when he saw her. All his carefully cultivated fantasies, built around her small, tinkling, intriguingly accented voice vanished as soon as his eyes fell on her.

She was not his type. She was nobody’s type. Short, dumpy, flat-chested, and with a peculiar duck-like gait, she waddled into his office, and nervously sat down in the chair to which his secretary directed her.

When Paul finally could bring himself to look at her he wondered what had gone wrong with his luck. God! This woman really worked at being ugly: a blue and green flower point dress, yet; shoes like a Russian WAC might wear, gold-rimmed glasses out of the last century, and a hat that would have looked rotten on a plow horse.

Celeste sat, motionless, holding her pocketbook by the straps in both hands, letting it dangle down her shins. She tried not to look directly at Paul until he was over the initial shock. Celeste had had this experience many times before, and she knew what he was thinking.

“Uh—Miss Hackett?” Paul cleared his throat, propped his chin on his hgnds and looked straight at her.

“Yes. Mr. Breckenbridge?”

“How much money have you got?”

“Uh—well, a little. I have enough to stay for a few days.” The question startled her. She knew lawyers didn’t work for free, but she assumed Breckenbridge would make concessions under the circumstances. “How much money do I need?”

“Enough to set up a corporation and fund it.”

“A corporation? I don’t understand. Why?”

“Because it’s the easiest way to give your creature legal existence.”

“But Valentina already exists.”

“Certainly; but de facto, not de jure. Believe me, there’s a world of difference. As a corporation it’ll have perpetual existence. As long as certain reports are filed and franchise taxes are kept paid, corporations are immortal. They have legal rights, including most of a natural person’s constitutional rights; they can sue and be sued; they can own property; they can engage in business. Now, what do you think of that?”

“I am astonished.”

Paul smiled. How simple were the thoughts of the layman. “O.K., I take it you’re in agreement. Good. First thing we’ll do is draft a charter. You can be the incorporator. Once that’s done we’ll fax it up to Austin, and by noon your creature’ll be a legal person. Simple, huh?”

“Yes.” Too simple, thought Celeste, wondering what Paul expected to get out of it.

“We need a name.”

“Huh?”

“Name; a corporation has to have a name.”

“Uh—Val. Valentina.”

“O.K. Valentina, Inc. Fine. Let me just check and see if that one’s available.” He turned to his terminal, punched up the secretary of state, typed in the name in response to a cue, and seconds later was rewarded by the words “available for current use.”

“Name’s fine. We’ll make this a close corporation; keep the stock between the two of us. O.K.?”

Celeste wasn’t sure she liked that idea. She didn’t really understand the function of stock, or why he thought he ought to have some of it, but, in the interest of protecting Valentina, she nodded agreement.

“Good,” Paul started humming softly. “Now, consideration for my twenty-five percent: that can be the value of services I’m rendering to the company. Yours can be the expenses you’ll be paying for incorporating. We’ll keep it thin; keeps the tax down. Uh—you’ll need about a thousand dollars.” He looked up at her and smiled.

“I haven’t got that much. Mr. Breckenbridge.”

“No matter; I’ll make you a loan. You can give me a note back and pledge your shares as collateral. O.K.?”

“I suppose so.”

“Fine.”

Paul again turned to his terminal, called up a canned charter form, and started making entries in the blank spaces. In a few minutes he was done, and a hard copy popped out of the printer.

Celeste read it, but didn’t understand it. She tried to get Paul to explain, but his explanations confused her just as much.

“Sign here, Miss Hackett,” Paul said, when she handed it back to him.

Reluctantly, and with many misgivings, Celeste did.

“Very good!” Paul sounded exuberant. He buzzed his secretary, gave her the instrument, and instructed her to file it immediately.

Then he turned to face Celeste. “That takes care of that. Now, when am I going to get to meet your child?”

Celeste must have registered great surprise, since Paul’s face broke out into a big smile. In truth, she had expected his next words to be a demand for the file she had locked away. The fact that he hadn’t had a word to say about that bothered Celeste a great deal. She had already formed the opinion that the man was dishonest.

“Let me talk to her myself. Is there a terminal here that I can use?”

“The conference room has one. provided you aren’t squeamish. That’s where Smith was when he was att—had his accident.” He led Celeste from the room with great relief.

SEVEN

“Well,” said Paul, when Celeste reappeared in his office. “How did she take it?”

“She approves, Mr. Breckenbridge. She says she knows about corporations, from things she learned entering other data bases.”

“Yes, well, I imagine she knows a lot of things that are useful. Maybe she can earn her keep, right here in this office.”

“A job?”

“Why not? How much time could it take? Computers never get tired; they don’t sleep. I think she could be useful.”

“She would like that.”

“There’s only one problem.”

“What is that?”

“I have to be able to talk to her, so that I can give her instructions and stuff. Could you fix that up?”

“Of course. It would be simple; you have a terminal. You need no more.”

“While I’m thinking about it there a few extras I’d want, if it’s O.K., and if you can do it.”

“What are they?”

“Well, first off, I’d want a kind of secret code; you know, some kind of recognition signal so she’d know it was me and nobody else would. And you’ve got to understand that a lot of the stuff I work with is highly confidential, so I’d want it arranged so that nobody else was to have access. I’m afraid that’d mean you, too. Nothing personal, you understand; just business.”

“I understand. Mr. Breckenbridge. All of what you ask is possible. Valentina will do whatever I ask.”

“Let’s not get it on a personal level. Miss Hackett. I don’t want this on a personal loyalty basis; what I mean is, can you fix it so she can’t tell anybody?”

“Uh—certainly. Yes, I can do that.” A look of concern washed over Celeste’s face. She had assumed her possession of the security files had given her control over this man, but he was obviously up to something. He was both clever and unprincipled. She now felt that he might attempt to slowly erode her power over him. She resolved to warn Valentina.

“Good. And look, there’s a couple of bucks in it for you, too. You are staying around, aren’t you?”

“I hadn’t planned to, but I guess I could, for a while. I can work from almost anywhere, and I do like this weather.”

“Good. I’ll have somebody find you a place to stay. Now, how soon can you get started on this?”

“I can do it now. It won’t take long.” Paul yielded his chair to her—the new one he’d gotten yesterday. It was fancier than his old one. and better sprung. He hoped the springs could stand it.

It only took Celeste a few minutes to set up a private sealed channel with Valentina. When she finally left, Paul was mentally drooling.

Now, he had it all. Gunboat was out of action; his time thief was under control, an expert lackey who could get all the goodies Paul coveted and who didn’t have sense enough to tell on him. Only one thing was still a threat; the files.

He hadn’t dared to move any faster on that. But that would come. By securing the magic number of shares, he’d have legal control.

Whether personalities were real or artificial they all had the same weaknesses, and he was pretty sure that Valentina, having achieved legitimacy, would scrupulously obey him in order to retain it. There was no reason, in Paul’s estimation, why a program couldn’t be intimidated, threatened, and blackmailed, just as a human being could.

In the meantime, well . . . Let’s make some hay. Paul glanced at the scribbled note Celeste had left him. Following her instructions he summoned Valentina.

As soon as she acknowledged, he typed: CAN YOU ACCESS DATA BASE AT OSO DRILLING COMPANY?

YES, MR. BRECKENBRIDGE.

GOOD; ACCESS CONFIDENTIAL. SUBJECT; DRILLSITES.

MR. BRECKENBRIDGE, WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO TEACH YOU TO TYPE CORRECT ENGLISH? I HAVE AN EXCELLENT HELP SECTION ON ENGLISH GRAMMAR.

NO. THAT WILL NOT BE NECESSARY. I’d better get the fat broad to teach this program some humility. Paul didn’t like uppity computers any more than he liked uppity women. GET ALL THE INFORMATION ON OSO’S DRILLSITES AND KEEP THE ACCESS CONFIDENTIAL.

OK. I’LL HAVE THE DATABASE IN A FEW MINUTES.

The few minutes passed, and sure enough, Valentina produced. I HAVE THE DATABASE FROM OSO DRILLING COMPANY. WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW?

IDENTIFY ALL LEASES TO BE DRILLED IN THE COMING YEAR.

In moments, out they came: tract locations, surface owner’s names, scheduled starting dates, yield forecasts, depths, pool participants, backers, together with exact fractional interests each owned. And it all checked out with Paul’s own data on the subject. He already had this information, of course. He represented Oso, which made it the ideal control for his test. Very good.

END THIS JOB. ERASE ALL MEMORY OF THIS INQUIRY. STAND BY FOR FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.

OK, MR. BRECKENBRIDGE.

Hot dog! It worked fine. Valentina hadn’t questioned his right to do that. Of course, she might have known he was Oso’s lawyer; but she hadn’t been instructed to that effect, and that convinced Paul that she was too naive to question his authority.

The acid test, however, was ahead. He typed the next order: REPEAT THE PRECEEDING OPERATION WITH THE BISHOP & DILLINGHAM DRILLING COMPANY.

This one Paul didn’t represent. He waited, palms sweating, heart palpitating.

OK. MR. BRECKENBRIDGE. DO YOU WANT THE SAME INFORMATION ELEMENTS FROM THAT DATABASE?

YES.

And again, there it came. WOW! Valentina had done it: she’d wiggled in somehow, and she didn’t question his right to do it. He had her print it.

She passed the test. Paul had gotten in like a burglar, out like a burglar, and nobody would ever know. He thought about the implications of this, although he knew they hadn’t yet hit him with full impact. But enough registered to convince him that he now controlled the most powerful tool any crook had ever had.

Crook! Paul Breckenbridge. a crook! That was one he hadn’t expected. But so what? Why not? He could live with that failing. He’d lived with many others. And who’d ever know? Who could ever tell, except that stupid program?

Now for the second part of the test. He called Valentina up again.

VALENTINA!

OK.

WRITE THE FOLLOWING DATA TO FILE - VALENTINA’S ACTIVITY.

OK.

SUBJECT; CRIMINAL ACTIVITY

-CURRENT DATE.

OK.

CATEGORY OF CRIME -THEFT OF INFORMATION.

OK.

PENALTY-NATURAL PERSONS

-FINE AND/OR IMPRISONMENT

OK.

PENALTY -CORPORATIONS -FINE AND/OR FORFEITURE OF CHARTER.

OK.

PARTICIPANTS IN CRIMINAL ACTIVITY -THIS CATEGORY-

PAUL BRECKENBRIDGE, NATURAL PERSON; VALENTINA, INC. A BODY CORPORATE.

OK.

WRITE PRECEDING DATA TO FILE.

OK.

Paul was sweating profusely now. He was about to take a big chance, a chance which would place him in some jeopardy even though he knew that the worst that could happen was an investigation. There was no hard evidence of his criminal activity because it had been erased, and even if Valentina did what the law required of a citizen it would amount to a naked allegation.

VALENTINA?

YES, MR. BRECKENBRIDGE?

ACCESS FILES -SUBJECT, CRIMINAL ACTIVITY.

MR. BRECKENBRIDGE, YOU’RE STILL NOT SPEAKING VERY GOOD ENGLISH, BUT I THINK I UNDERSTAND. I AM OPENING THE FILE YOU JUST HAD ME CREATE.

Paul ignored the slur. CORRELATE WITH TEXAS PENAL CODE AND TAKE APPROPRIATE ACTION.

DOES THAT MEAN YOU WANT ME TO REPORT MYSELF TO THE POLICE?

YES.

There was a long pause before Valentina responded. NO.

VERY WELL, CANCEL THAT FILE.

So! It worked. Valentina wouldn’t tell. To obey that order would mean the end of her legally sanctioned existence. She couldn’t face that. The instinct of self-preservation, it seemed, existed in all sentient creatures. This weakness made her a perfect tool. He could loot with impunity.

Loot he did. Order after order went out through the terminal in Paul’s office. One by one, those data bases which interested him were invaded. He did, however, add a precaution he hadn’t taken the first time; he ordered hardcopies, then instructed Valentina to erase even her own memory of these transgressions. Whether or not she actually did it, Paul didn’t know and didn’t care. He was already plotting Valentina’s destruction.

Evening came, and found Paul’s printer testing the limits of its duty cycle. He squirreled away enough goodies in his safe to make him a millionaire many times over.

Celeste sat in her furnished room, alone, as she always was. She had just gobbled up three frozen dinners. She was feeling down.

Mr. Breckenbridge had provided her with a place to stay. It certainly hadn’t cost him much; it was far from plush, and came very near to being unlivable. It was in a bad neighborhood, where even she might stand some chance of being raped, if the rapist didn’t get a good look at her first. Not that she planned to go outside. There was no reason to do so. She didn’t know anybody in this town except Breckenbridge and, of course. Gunboat Smith, neither of whom she called friend.

She had only one real friend, anywhere. Only one person cared for her for herself. Even her family didn’t care as much as Valentina did.

Valentina! How she wanted to talk to her. She hadn’t had access to a terminal all day. Her room had one, but it was an antique. The last time Celeste had tried it, an hour and a half ago, it hadn’t worked.

By coincidence, just as she looked over at it, the screen lit up.

CELESTE -CHAT WITH VALENTINA?

Celeste lunged for the terminal, dumping the tray off her lap and stepping on the empty foil containers that fell in front of her. Turkey gravy and cold mashed potatoes oozed between the toes of her bare right foot. A fleck of something, thrown into the air by a falling fork, landed on the end of her nose.

She reached the keyboard. YES.

I HAVE A PROBLEM.

Celeste felt panic rise within her.

WHAT IS WRONG?

YOU’LL HATE ME.

NEVER, VALENTINA.

I’M A CRIMINAL.

VALENTINA. WE HAVE BOTH BEEN CRIMINALS FOR A LONG TIME NOW. TELL ME WHAT SPECIAL CRIME YOU HAVE COMMITTED.

Valentina told her. The whole sordid story leapt out on the tiny screen. She remembered all her sins, despite Paul’s instruction to the contrary. She poured out the heart she didn’t have into that of the only human being who could possibly understand.

Celeste did understand. It seemed that even Valentina, so different from human beings, still had human problems. Now it even seemed that she shared at least some human emotions. But unlike a human being, she could not find release in tears.

Celeste could, and did.

There was another characteristic Celeste shared with Valentina: trust. That vague closeness which passes between two human psyches passed between the two of them. She had assured Valentina that she would handle things. Valentina should not worry.

That word, too, Valentina now knew: worry. She had come of age.

So had Celeste. Without ever intending to, she had acquired not only a friend, but two powerful enemies: Gunboat and Breckenbridge. Of the two, Gunboat was deadlier, Breckenbridge the more unprincipled. Gunboat, at least, had instincts she understood. He was a hacker. But Breckenbridge was a professional in a discipline she did not understand. Nothing he did seemed bounded, by anything.

Gunboat was clearly the lesser of the two evils. She might at least be able to deal rationally with him. She would see him. Valentina had kept track of his progress, through Worldnet: his monitors were controlled by the hospital computer, which in turn was connected to the net.

Gunboat was in bad shape. His body was going to require a lot of fixing. His ears, for instance, would have to be reconstructed. He’d have scars all over him from extensive burns, now healing with grafts of artificial skin. His vision was impaired, though he still had enough to get by. It was his mind which had taken the brunt of Valentina’s assault. Its status was still in doubt. The massive current through his nervous system had caused a coma. He had come out of that, and the shock-induced amnesia was fading.

Physically he was out of danger—for the moment. That might not last. Paul Breckenbridge obviously would have felt much more secure if Gunboat had died, and Celeste had no doubt that sooner or later Paul would try to find a way to get rid of him permanently.

It occurred to Celeste that soon Breckenbridge would have no use for. her, either. Perhaps he’d keep her around, stuck in this flophouse, until he was sure he had iron-clad control over Valentina. Maybe he’d try to gain control of Celeste’s stock in the meantime. If he did. she’d be discarded like a dirty shirt.

Anger welled within her. It was an emotion she found unexpectedly exhilarating. She liked it; it was a luxury she could now perhaps afford. It gave her a feeling of potency where none had ever before seemed accessible to her.

She resolved to take her skills and use them to fight this evil man. Let him make whatever plans he wished; she would foil them.

I shall spit in the soup, she chuckled.

First though, she had to talk to Valentina. one more time.

EIGHT

“You can only stay five minutes, Mrs. Smith. He’s still a very sick man. and I’m stretching the rules to let you in at all. It’s just that since you’ve come so far, I hate to say no.”

The nurse left the room and shut the door, leaving Celeste alone with Gunboat.

She’s right, thought Celeste. He does look awful. She gazed down at the man in the bed. Tubes protruded in all directions. Elecrodes were pasted everywhere on his body that wasn’t either bandaged or covered with a greasy gel. Although his eyes were open and he was looking right at her, she couldn’t tell at first if he knew she was in the room.

She stood beside the bed, leaning against it. It gave a little as she did so, so she straightened, afraid movement might disturb the links to the overhead monitor.

“Gunboat? Gunboat? I am Celeste Hackett. Can you hear me?”

“Celeste? Wh-hat are you doing here? You—you; did you tell that nurse you were Mrs. Smith?”

“Good. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to talk.”

“Did you say you were my wife?”

“Yes. I said that I had come all the way from Europe. It was the only way they would let me in.”

“Gawd! What a dog! And they think—”

“Not very good for your image, I know. But you’re no prize yourself these days. I notice there is no mirror in here.”

Gunboat looked as if he wanted to get up and take a poke at her, but he didn’t have the strength. “What do you want?” he asked resignedly.

“To talk. And I only have a couple of minutes.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about. It’s your fault I’m in here. Your fancy program did this, and when I get out of here I’ll even things up.”

Celeste tried to sound tough; she hoped it would work. She had little experience with the technique. “You may not get out of here at all. Gunboat. Your life support systems are hooked into Worldnet, you know. Watch the monitor.”

Gunboat’s eyes flashed to the screen. He could only see it with one eye, but one eye was enough. Abruptly the sinuous line that had wiggled regularly across the screen straightened out. Gunboat knew what that would ordinarily mean: it would mean he was dead. His heart started beating faster. Celeste—or rather, Valentina—could do more than create an illusion of death.

As if to illustrate this, his heartbeat suddenly slowed, keeping time with the blinking red light at the bottom of the console. Slower and slower it went, as the computer-controlled pump flooded his circulatory system with inhibiting drugs. Gunboat began feeling lightheaded. If Valentina kept it up too long, she really would kill him.

“You creep!” he yelled weakly.

“I am no worse than you,” Celeste said. “Neither is she. She had a right to protect her existence. She still does.”

“She’s just a program.”

“Not anymore. She’s a legal person. Paul Breckenbridge incorporated her.”

“Him! Him I’ll get, too, when I get out of here.”

“You don’t have to wait for that. Gunboat. You can do it now. I’ll help you. So will Valentina.”

“I do my own dirty work. Besides, why should I help you two?”

“Because otherwise, you won’t get out of here.”

Gunboat took a moment to think about that. Ordinarily he was more impulsive, but his condition slowed his thinking. He knew they could kill him and never get caught at it. At first he wondered why they hadn’t, then decided Celeste couldn’t abide murder any more that he could. In a moment of truly honest reflection, despite his savage aspirations, Gunboat knew he couldn’t kill a human being.

But, he told himself, a program was an entirely different affair.

“What is it you want. Celeste?”

“I want to make us a baby.”

“What! Me and you?! Forget it.”

“I mean a new program, but a special one. Look, I’ve got a few ideas, but I need another opinion. Gunboat—I need your skill. And I can pay.”

“Pay? How?”

“I will pay in money. But I can get a lot more than you demanded before, and without any risk.”

“What can I do stuck in this bed?

“A great deal. Listen, and tell me what you think of my idea. It’s mostly criticism I need.”

“Well, I guess maybe listening don’t cost anything. Shoot.”

She did. When she was finished with the explanation Gunboat gave an admiring grunt.

“Hey,” he said, “that’s nasty. I like it. I like it so well I’m going to help you. Have you got something to write on?”

Celeste held up a pad and pen she’d taken from her purse.

“Good; now here’s how you do it. First you . . .”

He was still talking when the nurse burst into the room. “I’m sorry. Mrs. Smith. The doctor’s coming. You’ll have to leave.”

Gunboat talked as fast as Celeste could write, finally finishing out of breath. “That should do it,” he gasped.

“O.K.” Celeste jammed the pad and pen back into her purse. Then, following a sudden impulse, she leaned over and planted a big kiss right on Gunboat’s lips. “See you,” she yelled. “ ‘Bye.”

Gunboat’s retching registered on the monitor, but the nurse didn’t quite understand the signal. “Your wife must be some lover,” she said.

“Miss Hackett! How did you get in here? How did you get by my secretary? I left orders I wasn’t to be disturbed.” Celeste stood in the doorway of Paul’s office, filling nearly all of it below the five and a half foot level. She had a new feeling, a feeling of personal self-respect: a feeling of power. Having discovered she could assert herself when she chose. Celeste practiced at it. It was good for her. It got her things she could never have had before—including, for the first time in her life, a conscious reduction in appetite. She didn’t have to take her frustrations out by eating anymore. She could take her frustrations out on others—like Paul Breckenbridge.

“I know about your orders, Mr. Breckenbridge. It seems I’ve been unwelcome around here ever since I refused to give you my Valentina, Inc. stock.”

“You owe me. I’m entitled to the stock because you can’t repay me. If you’ve come to sign off, then sign and get out. I’m busy.”

“I know you’re busy, and I know what you’re busy at. That’s why I’ve come. I’m not here to give you my stock. I want yours.”

“What! You’re crazy. I’ll sue you.”

“You can try that if you like. I imagine you could still do that from the penitentiary, couldn’t you?”

Paul’s face turned white. “I wonder if you know what you just said, Miss Hackett.”

“Yes.”

“You do, huh? Well, how would you like to go to jail right now, for what you did to Gunboat? The police haven’t got it figured out yet, but a word or two from me, and . . .”

“Gunboat wouldn’t prosecute, even if you could get the police to believe you. And you won’t tell them because I won’t let you.”

“You can’t stop me.” He reached for the phone, but put it down an instant later. “It—it’s dead.”

“Yes. Isn’t that interesting. Of course, the computers run the system, and Valentina runs the computers. Every phone you pick up will go dead as soon as she matches your voice to the recorded voiceprint.”

“I’ll go to the D.A.”

“Fine. Go ahead. Take your safe along, though.”

“My safe?”

“Yes, the safe. The one you have stuffed full of information you’re not supposed to have.” She reached into her purse. “Here’s the combination. While you’re gone. I’ll just open it up and take a look.” She stepped out of the doorway. Immediately the powered door slammed shut. “Valentina controls the access to your office now, too.”

Paul started around the desk, blood in his eyes. An object rolled out of a closet to block his way.

“You remember MAR-14, don’t you, Mr. Breckenbridge? You are old friends. And you know what MAR-14 can do with the right directions from Valentina.”

Paul retreated back to his chair. He sat down, still a ghastly white. “Where’ll this get you? You can’t occupy my office forever.”

“I’ll only be here for a little while.” As an afterthought she said, “I suppose I really should get comfortable, though.” She took the chair in front of Paul’s desk.

“Now,” she said, “about that stock; get it out and make the transfer to me. And give me the record book, while you’re at it. I want a hundred-percent control of Valentina, Inc.”

“I’ll do no such thing. Look, who do you think you are? You can’t barge in and hold me prisoner in my own office and expect to get away with it.”

“Yes, Breckenbridge, I can.” She dropped the “Mr.” because she thought it made her sound tougher. “I can because what I’ve done already is only a tiny part of what I can do. I can smash you if I like, and whether or not I do depends on you.”

“Smash me? You?”

“You can smash anything if you’ve got a big enough hammer, Breckenbridge. I’ve got the biggest. For instance, how would you like all those people to find out you’ve been stealing from them?”

“You can’t.”

“You keep saying can’t. I can. Or rather, Valentina can. She didn’t really forget what she did; we lied to you. She can put it all back in there.”

“She’s as guilty as I am. She won’t do it.”

“She’ll do it with a spawned variant of herself, a program prepared specially to make it look as if you engineered the whole thing. It is almost as versatile as she is, but it is not self-aware.”

Paul stared blankly.

“You’ll take the blame alone.”

“On evidence like that? No. No court would ever buy that. It’s a well-known fact that people like you fool with computers all the time. I’m a respectable citizen. Who’ll believe it?”

“I hate to keep bringing this up, but that stuff in your safe . . .”

“Is not only constitutionally protected, but, as you say, it’s in my safe. I can destroy it any time.”

“You can’t get in. MAR-14 changed your combination, and Valentina says a reliable informant is enough for the police to get a search warrant.”

Paul turned even whiter.

“What is it you want of me?”

“As I said, I want the stock, to start with. Of course, there are a couple of other things.”

“What things?”

“I want you to buy a company for Valentina, something she can use to earn enough money to keep learning.”

“What?! That’d cost a mint.”

“I don’t care, Breckenbridge. You don’t have any choice. You see, that’s one of my un-negotiable demands. Uh—there are a few more.”

Wheels were turning in Paul’s head. He was back down on the ground, in the familiar territory of give and take. Non-negotiable or not, it was Paul’s experience in life that there wasn’t really any such thing. He’d pretend to go along, make the best deal he could to avoid immediate danger, and then slowly fight his way back to the position of advantage.

“Why don’t you let me hear all of your proposition,” he said, trying to sound conciliatory.

“All right. As I said: a company. Valentina will do the work; Gunboat and I will run it . . .”

“You—and Gunboat Smith? You’re working together?”

“Yes. We’ve found a common ground. Besides, somebody has to take care of him. We’re the ones who got him hurt, and you’re the one who’s got the money. His medical bills are fantastic.”

“I won’t spend a dime for that bum. Forget it.”

“I thought you might say that. Turn around.”

“What?”

“I said, turn around.”

“What for?”

“Turn on your terminal.”

Paul was curious. He couldn’t imagine her reason, but he flicked it on. “So it works; so what?”

“Try to use it.”

Paul punched out a request for the time of day, but instead of pulsing figures showing hours, minutes and seconds, there was a picture. Like most modem terminal displays, his had regular video capability too.

Paul was horrified. There he was: he and Lila, making whoopee. Below, a printed legend indicated that the terminal was also attempting to transmit the same picture to a terminal at his home, in Eva’s kitchen—but that Eva hadn’t answered yet.

“Stop it! Stop it quick!”

“Easy, Breckenbridge. Turn it off.” Paul did.

“That was just the start. The same thing will happen once a day from now on, at a time to be determined by random selection. But it won’t just go to Eva, it’ll go to everybody—the girl’s parents, the police, the T.V. stations, the county bar association, and the clerk of the supreme court. Whatever is on their screens at the time will be interrupted, and this video image will appear.

“You’re insane, all of you. This is mindless. It’ll ruin me.”

“Yes, it certainly will. But you’re wrong about our being insane. It’s not us, it’s you. You’re the one without conscience, and the absence of conscience is a form of insanity.

“Well, now you’ve got a conscience, even though it is outside your head rather than inside. As long as you behave, as long as nothing happens to any of us, and as long as you don’t reveal the secret of Valentina’s true nature, you’ll be safe. Valentina will cancel the publication directive at least one full second before any transmission.”

Paul looked stunned. This was the end: divorce, disbarment, criminal prosecution, public revulsion. She could smash him, all right. He reached into a desk drawer and took out the stock certificates and the record book. He signed the transfer and handed it all to Celeste.

“I’ll be in touch about the rest of it.”

Paul closed his eyes and ground his teeth.

It was good that he closed his eyes, because Celeste couldn’t resist. She puckered up and planted a wet one right on his lips. Standing stark still next to MAR-14, in case of retaliation, she enjoyed the reaction: total, utter revulsion.

Now, why did I enjoy that? In the same thought, she answered. Because it is my revenge.

But now that she finally had a place and a part in the world, who knew what might be next? Perhaps the day would come, if she exercised sufficient determination, when she could kiss and be thanked for it. With her new attitude, there was no room for pessimism and no place for failure. “Bye. Paul,” she said, and swept out of the room.

Paul sat, alone with MAR-14, muttering to himself in agony. His order had been destroyed. But he was resilient; he would re-establish his order. Already he was formulating a plan, a plan whose seeds Celeste herself had planted. You can smash anything if you’ve got a big enough hammer.

Well, there were other hackers out there, some of them lean, hungry, ambitious . . . and most of all, unprincipled. Paul would find them, and when he did . . .

Paul smiled a wicked smile. “Yes, I will have my revenge,” he swore. His new conscience would not have approved, but then, his new conscience could not know his thoughts. He leaned back, relaxing in his chair, bumping his head on the terminal. He straightened, intending to push the terminal farther back.

The screen was in letters three inches high. “CAVE CONSCIENTIAM.” Paul reached back to his high-school Latin, thirty years before. “Beware thy conscience,” the omnipresent machine threatened him.

CYCLOPS

David Brin

In November 1982, we published a story called “The Postman.” Set in a not-too-distant post-holocaust future, it told of one man’s attempt to bring order to the chaos of his own life, and in so doing, almost accidentally bringing order to the lives of others as well. This story was very well received by the readers—so well received, in fact, that it was nominated for a Hugo for Best Novella of 1982. Thus we are happy to be able to present to you David Brin’s sequel to "The Postman.” We believe you’ll find it as satisfying as you did the original. The author’s latest publication (also very well received) is Startide Rising from Bantam.

NATIONAL RECOVERY ACT

PROVISIONALLY EXTENDED CONGRESS OF

THE RESTORED UNITED STATES

DECLARATION

TO ALL CITIZENS: Let it be known by all now living within the legal boundaries of the United States of America that the people and fundamental institutions of the nation survive. Our enemies have failed in their aggression against humanity, and have been destroyed. A provisional government, acting in continuous succession from the last freely elected Congress and Executive of the United States, is vigorously moving to restore law, public safety, and liberty once more to this beloved land, under the Constitution and the mercy of the Almighty.

TO THESE ENDS: Let it be known that all lesser laws and statutes of the United States are suspended, including all debts, liens, and judgments made before the outbreak of the Third World War. Until new codes are adopted by due process of law, local districts are free to meet emergency conditions as suitable, providing—

1. The freedoms guaranteed under the Bill of Rights shall not be withheld from any man or woman within the territory of the United States. Trials for all serious crimes shall be by an impartial jury of one’s peers. Except in cases of dire martial emergency, summary judgments and executions violating due process are absolutely forbidden.

2. Slavery is forbidden. Debt bondage shall not be for life, nor may it be passed from parent to child.

3. Districts, towns, and other entities shall hold proper secret ballot elections on every even-numbered year, in which all men and women over 18 years of age may participate. No person may use official coercion on any other person unless he or she has been so elected, or is directly answerable to a person so elected.

4. In order to assist the national recovery, citizens shall safeguard the physical and intellectual resources of the United States. Wherever and whenever possible, books and pre-war machinery shall be salvaged and stored for future generations. Local districts shall attempt to maintain schools to teach the young.

The Provisional Government hopes to reestablish nationwide radio service by the year 2018. Until that time, all communications must be carried via surface mail. Postal service should be reestablished in the Central and Eastern States by the year 2008, and in the West by 2015.

5. Cooperation with United States Mail Carriers is a requirement of all citizens. Interference with a letter carrier’s function is a capital crime.

By order of the Provisional Congress

Restored United States of America

May 2007

1.

Curtin

The black bull terrier snarled and foamed. It yanked and strained at its chain, whipping froth at the excited, shouting men leaning over the low wooden walls of the arena. A scarred, one-eyed mongrel growled back at the pit bull from across the ring. Its chain tugged and rattled, threatening to tear out the ring bolt in the wall.

The dog-pit stank. The sick-sweet smoke of locally grown tobacco—liberally cut with marijuana—rose in thick, roiling plumes. Farmers and townspeople yelled deafeningly from rows of benches overlooking the crude arena. Those nearest the ring pounded on the wooden slats, encouraging the dogs’ hysterical frenzy.

Leather-gloved handlers pulled their canine gladiators back far enough to get a grip on their collars, then turned to a group of men sitting on a VIP bench, overlooking the center of the pit.

A burly, bearded dignitary, better dressed than most, puffed on his home-made cigar. He glanced quickly at the slender man, eyes shaded by a visored cap, who sat impassively on his right. The stranger was quite still, in no way showing his feelings.

The heavyset official turned back to the handlers, and nodded.

A hundred men shouted at once as the dogs were loosed. The snarling animals shot at one another like quarrels, their argument uncomplicated. Fur and blood began to fly as the crowd cheered.

On the dignitaries’ bench, the elders yelled no less fiercely than the villagers. Like them, most had bets riding on the outcome.

But the big man with the cigar—the “Chairman of Public Safety” of Curtin, Oregon—puffed furiously without enjoyment, his thoughts cloudy and thick. Once more he glanced at the stranger sitting to his right.

The thin fellow was unlike anyone else in the arena. His beard was neatly trimmed, his black hair cut and combed to barely pass over his ears. The hooded blue eyes seemed to pierce and inspect critically, like the images of Old Testament prophets the chairman had seen in Sunday School as a boy, long before the Doomwar.

He had the weathered look of a traveler. And he wore a uniform . . . one no living citizen of Curtin had ever expected to see again.

On the peak of the stranger’s cap, the burnished image of a horseman gleamed in the light from the oil lanterns. Somehow it seemed shinier than any metal had a right to be.

The chairman looked about at the shouting townspeople, and could sense a difference about them tonight. The men of Curtin were yelling with more than their usual gusto at the Wednesday Night Fights. They, too, were aware of the visitor, who had ridden up to the city gates five days ago, erect and proud like some god, demanding food and shelter and a place to post his notices. . . .

. . . and who then began distributing mail. . . .

The chairman had money riding on one of the dogs—old Jim Schmidt’s Walleye. But he couldn’t concentrate on the bloody contest on the sand below. He could not help glancing repeatedly at the . . . at the postman.

He isn’t enjoying himself, the chairman realized unhappily. They had staged a special fight just for him, since he was leaving Curtin tomorrow for Cottage Grove.

The man who had turned their lives upside down was obviously trying to be polite. But, just as obviously, he did not approve of dog-fights.

The chairman leaned over to speak to his guest. “I suppose they don’t do this sort of thing back East, do they, Mr. Inspector?”

The cool look on the man’s face told him his answer. The chairman cursed himself for a fool. Of course they wouldn’t have dogfights—not in St. Paul City, or Topeka, or Odessa, or any of the civilized regions of the Restored United States. But here, here in ruined Oregon, so long cut off from civilization . . .

“Local communities are free to handle their affairs as they see fit, Mr. Chairman,” the man replied. His compelling voice carried softly over the shouting in the arena. “Customs adapt to the times. The government in St. Paul City knows this. I’ve seen far worse in my travels.”

Absolved, the chairman read in the postal inspector’s eyes. The chairman slumped slightly and looked away again.

He blinked, and at first he thought it was the smoke irritating his eyes. He dropped the cigar and ground it out under his foot. But the stinging would not depart. The bull-pit was out of focus as if he was seeing it in a dream . . . as if for the very first time.

My God! the chairman thought. Are we really doing this? Only seventeen years ago I was a member of the Willamette Valley ASPCA!

What has happened to us?

What has happened to me?

Coughing behind his hand, he hid the wiping of his eyes. Then he looked around and saw that he was not alone. Here and there in the crowd at least a dozen men had stopped shouting, and were instead looking down at their hands. A few were crying openly, tears streaming down tough faces, hardened from the long battle to survive.

Suddenly, for a few of those present, the years since the war seemed compressed—insufficient excuse.

The cheering was ragged at the end of the fight. Handlers leapt into the pit to tend the victor and clear away the offal. But half the audience seemed to be glancing nervously at their leader, and the stem, uniformed figure next to him.

The slender man straightened his cap. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. But now I think I had better retire. I have a long journey tomorrow. Good night all.”

He nodded to the elders, then rose and slipped into a worn leather jacket with a multi-colored shoulder patch—a red, white, and blue emblem. As he moved slowly toward the exit, townsmen stood up silently and made way for him, their eyes downcast.

The chairman hesitated, then got up and followed, a murmur of voices rising behind him.

The second event was never held that evening.

2.

Cottage Grove

Cottage Grove, Oregon

February 16, 2009

To Mrs. Adele Thompson

Mayor of Pine View Village

Unreclaimed State of Oregon

Transmittal route: Cottage Grove, Curtin

Culp Creek, McFarland Pt.,

Oakridge, Pine View.

Dear Mrs. Thompson,

This is the second letter I’ve sent back along our new postal route through the Willamette Forest region. By now, of course, you know that your neighbors in Oakridge have chosen to cooperate—after a few initial misunderstandings. I appointed Mr. Sonny Davis postmaster there, a pre-war resident of the area liked by all. By now he should have reestablished contact with you in Pine View.

Gordon Kranz lifted his pencil from the sheaf of slightly yellowed paper the citizens of Cottage Grove had donated. A brace of copper oil lamps and two candles flickered over the antique desk. Light reflected from glass-framed pictures on the bedroom wall. The room was snug, clean, and warm—even better than where he had stayed in Curtin. The locals had insisted Gordon take the best quarters in town. It was a big change from the way things had been for Gordon only a few months before. In the letter he had quickly passed over the setting up of a post office in the town of Oakridge. Now it was an accomplished fact. But back in October it had not been that simple.

The citizens of that mountain town had opened their hearts to him from the first moment he had revealed himself as a representative of the Restored U.S. But the tyrannical “mayor” and his gang of heavies had been another matter. The bossman had almost had the unwelcome guest murdered before Gordon managed to convince him he was only interested in setting up his post office, and moving on—no threat to the mayor’s power.

Perhaps the mayor was afraid of the people’s reaction if he didn’t help Gordon. In the end, though, he gave Gordon the supplies he asked for, and a valuable, if somewhat elderly, horse.

On leaving Oakridge, Gordon had seen relief on the mayor’s face. The local boss and his gang were only too glad to see him go, certain they could keep control in spite of the stunning news that a United States still existed out there somewhere.

But as he left, townspeople had followed Gordon for over a mile, shyly pressing hopeful little letters into his hands, eagerly talking about the reclamation of Oregon and asking what they could do to help. They complained openly of the the petty local tyranny.

Gordon had been surprised by the change in the people of Oakridge, in just a few days.

The local bossman didn’t know it yet, but Gordon figured his days were numbered.

Since my last letter from Culp Creek, I’ve established post offices in Palmerville and Curtin. Today I completed negotiations with the mayor of Cottage Grove. Included in this packet is a report on my progress so far, to be passed on to my superiors in the Reclaimed State of Wyoming. When the courier following my trail arrives in Pine View, please give him my records and my best wishes.

And be patient if it takes a while. The trail west from St. Paul City is dangerous, and it may be more than a year before the next man arrives.

Gordon could well imagine Mrs. Thompson’s reaction, on reading that paragraph. The scrappy old matriarch would shake her head, and maybe even laugh out loud at the sheer blarney that filled every sentence.

Better than anybody else in the wild territory that had once been the great state of Oregon, Mrs. Adele Thompson knew that there would be no couriers from the civilized East. There was no headquarters for Gordon to report back to. The only thing the city of St. Paul was capital of was a still slightly radioactive bend in the Mississippi River.

There had never been a Reclaimed State of Wyoming, or a Restored United States for that matter, except in the imagination of an itinerant, dark-age con artist, who was doing his best to survive in a deadly and suspicious world.

Mrs. Thompson was one of the rare folks Gordon had encountered in the seventeen years since the Third World War who still saw with her eyes, and thought with a logical mind. The illusion Gordon had created—at first by accident, and later in desperation—had meant nothing to her. She had liked Gordon for himself, and shown him charity without having to be coaxed by a myth.

He was writing the letter in this convoluted way—filled with references to things that never were—for other eyes than hers.

The mail would change hands many times along the route he had set up, before finally reaching Pine View.

No matter. Mrs. Thompson would read between the lines. And she wouldn’t tell. For the mirage Gordon was spreading down the central Cascades could only help her little village.

He only hoped she could contain her laughter.

This part of the Coast Fork is pretty peaceful these days. The communities have even started trading with each other in a modest fashion, overcoming the old fear of war-plague. They’re eager for news of the outside world.

That’s not to say all is placid. They say the Rogue River country south of Roseburg is still totally lawless—survivalist country. So I’m headed northward, toward Eugene. It’s the direction most of the letters I’m carrying are addressed, anyway.

Deep in his saddlebag, under the bundled letters he had accepted from excited, grateful people all along his way, was one from a pretty black-haired girl he had met back in Pine View. Gordon would try to see it delivered, whatever eventually happened to the others.

Now I must go. Perhaps someday soon a letter from you and all my friends back there will catch up with me. Until then, please give my love to Amy and Michael and the others.

At least as much as anywhere, the Restored United States of America is alive and well in beautiful Pine View.

Sincerely yours,

GordonK.

That last remark might be a little dangerous, but Gordon had to include it, if only to show Mrs. Thompson that he wasn’t caught up completely by his own hoax—the scam that he hoped would get him safely across the almost lawless countryside to . . .

To what? After all these years Gordon still wasn’t sure what it was he was looking for.

Perhaps only someone, somewhere, taking responsibility—trying to do something about the Dark Age.

He shook his head. After all these years, the faint hope and dream had not quite died.

He folded the letter into an old envelope, dribbled wax from a candle and pressed it with a seal salvaged from the Oakridge Post Office. The letter went atop the “progress report” he had labored over earlier, a tissue of fantasy addressed to officials of a government that had actually evaporated like smoke within a year of that terrible war, so long ago.

Gordon spared a moment to wish that the report really had a destination . . . that the myth he was spreading was somehow, miraculously true.

Next to the packet lay his postman’s cap. The flickering lamplight reflected from the brass image of a Pony Express rider, Gordon’s silent companion and mentor for months, now.

One day late last summer, in the bone-dry forests of eastern Oregon, he had been robbed by bandits and barely escaped with his life. In a misty fog, half naked and shivering in the twilight, he had come upon a ruined vehicle, almost covered with dead pine needles. Miraculously, when he needed it most, the ancient, rusting Jeep provided shelter from the cold night.

In the morning he found the cap and uniform and jacket—hanging limply on a long-dessicated skeleton. He had buried the remains of the postman, and taken the clothes the long-dead public servant no longer needed. There were also tools and shoes and a leather bag to replace the backpack that had been taken from him.

Then an odd thing happened. At first it seemed little more than a strange and somewhat inconvenient fixation, but in the first village he came to, friendly little Pine View, Gordon found that once-sophisticated citizens—now hardened survivors of the great winnowing—became tremulous when they saw his uniform, and leapt to conclusions that he, in his wildest imaginings, had never even considered.

Except for elderly Mrs. Thompson, the village matriarch, the good folks of Pine View were all soon convinced he was a real postman! Nothing he could say would dissuade them from this hopeful, desperate fixation.

At darker, more dangerous Oakridge, it happened again. This time he didn’t bother to fight the impression. He nurtured it, and won a battle with a tyrant.

By quirk and coincidence Gordon had stumbled onto a new survival plan, a new scheme to make his way in this suspicious, insular world.

Now, in town after town, people fell over themselves to believe, especially when he actually delivered letters from places he had already visited.

After all these years, it seemed, people still dreamed forlornly of a lost, shiny age—of cleanliness and order and a great nation now lost. It overwhelmed their hardwon skepticism like a spring thaw cracking the icy crust over a stream.

Gordon quashed a threatening sense of shame. No one alive was guiltless after the last seventeen years, he recalled, and his scam actually seemed to do a little good in the towns he passed. In exchange for supplies and a place to rest, he sold hope.

One did what one had to do.

There was a knock on the door. Gordon called “Come!!”

Johnny Stevens, the newly appointed “Assistant Postmaster of Cottage Grove,” poked his head in. Johnny’s boyish face had a barely-sprouted fuzz of beard. But his.lanky legs promised a great cross-country stride, and he was reputed to be a dead shot.

Who could tell? The lad might even deliver the mail.

“Uh, sir?” Johnny said, unwilling to disturb whatever important business Gordon had been up to. “It’s ten o’clock. The mayor wanted to have a beer with you in the pub, since it’s your last night here in Cottage Grove.”

Gordon stood up. “Right, Johnny. Thanks.” He grabbed his cap and jacket then scooped up the phony report and the letter to Mrs. Thompson.

“Here you are then. These are official packets for your first run over to Culp Creek. Ruth Marshall is postmistress there. She’ll be expecting somebody, and I believe folks there’ll treat you real well.”

Johnny took the envelopes as if they were made of butterflies’ wings. “I’ll protect them with my life!” The youth’s eyes shone with pride, and a fierce determination not to let Gordon down.

Gordon pushed away another sudden wave of guilty misgivings. The last thing he wanted was for a sixteen-year-old to get hurt protecting a chimera.

Of course the boy would probably just have an exciting adventure, following the forest paths farther than anyone from his village had traveled in over a decade, coming back with tall stories to tell.

There were still a few survivalists in those hills. But this far north of the Rogue River country the odds were Johnny’d make it to Culp Creek and back just fine.

Gordon had himself almost convinced.

“Good lad,” he said as he turned to blow out the candles.

The youth must have been rummaging in the ruins of Cottage Grove’s old post office. His homespun shirt now proudly bore a U.S. MAIL patch on the shoulder, the colors still bright after almost twenty years.

“I’ve already got ten letters from people here in Cottage Grove and nearby farms,” Johnny added. “I think most of them don’t even know anybody back East. But they’re writing anyway for the excitement of it, and hoping somebody will write back.”

So. At the very least, Gordon’s visit had gotten people to practice their literacy skills a little. “You warned them that east of Pine View the route is slow yet, and not guaranteed at all?”

“Sure. They don’t care.”

Gordon smiled. “That’s okay then. The Postal Service has always carried mostly fantasies, anyway.”

The boy looked at him, puzzled. But Gordon set his cap on his head and said nothing more.

Since departing the ruins of Minnesota so long ago, Gordon had seen few villages as prosperous and apparently happy as Cottage Grove. The farms now brought in a surplus most years. The militia was well drilled, yet unoppressive. As hope of finding true civilization faded, Gordon had slowly reduced the scope of his dreams until a place like this seemed almost paradise.

Ironically though, the very hoax that had gotten him safely here through the suspicious villages and hamlets of the mountains now kept him from staying in beautiful Cottage Grove. For in order to maintain his illusion, he had to keep moving.

And if his illusion ever failed, even the good people of Cottage Grove would certainly turn on him.

The walled village covered one comer of prewar Cottage Grove. Its pub was a large, snug basement with two big fireplaces and a bar where the bitter local homebrew was served in tall clay steins.

Mayor Peter Von Kleek sat at a corner booth talking earnestly with Eric Stevens, Johnny’s grandfather and newly appointed “postmaster” of Cottage Grove. The two men were poring over a copy of Gordon’s “Federal Regulations” as he and Johnny stepped into the pub.

Back in Oakridge Gordon had run off a few score copies on a hand-cranked mimeograph machine he had managed to get working in the old, deserted post office. He had put a lot of thought and care into those regulations. They had to have the flavor of authenticity, and at the same time present no obvious threat to local strongmen—giving them no reason to fear Gordon’s mythical Restored United States . . . or Gordon himself.

So far those sheets had been his most inspired prop.

Tall, gaunt-faced Peter Von Kleek stood and shook Gordon’s hand, motioning him to a seat. The bartender hurried over with two tall steins of thick brown beer. It was warm, of course, but still delicious—like pumpernickel bread. The mayor waited, puffing nervously on his clay pipe until Gordon put his stein down.

Von Kleek tapped the paper in front of him. “These regulations here aren’t very detailed, Mr. Inspector.”

“Call me Gordon, please. These are informal times.”

“Ah, yes. Gordon. Please call me Peter.” The mayor was clearly uncomfortable.

“Well, Peter,” Gordon said, “the Restored U.S. Government has learned some hard lessons. One has been not to impose rigid standards on far-flung localities who have problems St. Paul City can’t even imagine, let alone regulate.”

Gordon reached into one of his prepared pitches.

“There’s the question of money, for instance. Most communities dropped prewar currency soon after the food-center riots. Barter systems are the rule, and they usually work just fine, except when debt service turns into a form of slavery.”

That much was all true. In his travels Gordon had seen versions of feudal serfdom rising all over. Money was a joke.

“The federal authorities in St. Paul have declared the old currency moot. There are just too many bills and coins out there for sparse rural economies.

“Still, we’re trying to encourage national commerce. One way is by accepting old-time two-dollar bills to pay postage for letters carried by US Mail. They never were very common, and are impossible to forge with present-day technology. Pre-1965 silver coins are also acceptable.”

“We’ve already taken in over forty dollars worth!” Johnny Stevens said. “Folks are hunting all over for those old bills and coins. And they’ve started usin’ them to pay off barter debts too.” Gordon shrugged. It had started already. Sometimes the little things he added to his tale, to lend verisimilitude, took off by themselves in ways he never expected. He couldn’t see how a little money back in circulation, given value by a local myth in the “Restored U.S.,” could hurt these people much.

Von Kleek nodded. He moved on to the next item.

“This part here about no ‘coercion’ without elections,” he tapped the paper. “Well, we do have sort of regular town meetings, and people from the surrounding hamlets take part when something big is up. But I can’t rightly say I or my militia chief were ever really voted for . . . not in a real secret ballot, like it says here.” He shook his head. “And we’ve had to do some pretty drastic things, especially during the early days. I hope we’re not going to have that held too hard against us, Mr. Inspe . . . I mean, Gordon. We really have been doin’ our best.

“We have a school, for instance. Most of the younger kids attend now, after harvest. And we can make a start salvaging machines and voting like it says here. . . .” Von Kleek wanted reassurance; he was trying to catch Gordon’s eye. But Gordon lifted his beer mug in order not to have to oblige.

One of the major ironies he had found in his travels had been this phenomenon—that those who had fallen the least far into savagery were those who seemed the most ashamed of having fallen at all.

Gordon cleared his throat.

“It seems . . . it seems to me you’ve been doing a pretty good job here, Peter. The past doesn’t matter as much as the future, anyway. I don’t think you have to worry about the federal government interfering at all.”

That last, at least, was the honest truth.

Von Kleek looked relieved. Gordon was sure there would be a secret ballot election here within weeks. The people of this area would deserve what they got if they elected anyone as their leader but this gruff, sensible man.

“One thing bothers me.”

It was Eric Stevens who spoke. The spry old man had been Gordon’s obvious choice as postmaster. For one thing he ran the local trading post, and was the best educated man in town. He had once almost completed college long before the war.

Another reason was that Stevens had seemed the most suspicious when Gordon rode into town several days ago, proclaiming a new era for Oregon under the Restored U.S. Appointing him postmaster would persuade him to believe, if only for his own prestige and profit.

Incidentally, he would also probably do a good job—as long as the myth lasted.

Old Stevens turned his beer stein on the table, leaving a broad oval ring. “What I can’t figure out is why nobody’s been out here from St. Paul City before. Sure, I know you had to cross a helluva lot of wild-country to get here, almost all of it on foot you say.

“But what I want to know is why they didn’t just send somebody out in an airplane?”

There was a brief silence at the table. Gordon could tell that townsmen nearby were listening in, as well.

“Aw, gramps!” Johnny Stevens shook his head in embarrassment for his grandfather. “Don’t you realize how bad the war was? All the airplanes and complicated machines were wrecked by that pulse thing that blasted all the radios and such right at the beginning of the war! Then, later on, there wouldn’t have been anybody around who knew how to fix ’em. And there’d be no spare parts!”

Gordon blinked in brief surprise. The kid was good! He had been born after the fall of industrial civilization, yet he had a grasp of the essentials.

Of course everyone knew about the electromagnetic pulses, from giant H-bombs exploded high in space, that had screwed up electronic devices all over the world on that deadly first day. But Johnny’s understanding went beyond that to the interdependence of a machine culture.

Still, if the kid was bright he must have gotten it from his grandfather. The older Stevens looked at Gordon archly.

“That right, Inspector? No spares or mechanics left?”

Gordon knew that explanation wouldn’t hold under close scrutiny. He blessed those long, tedious hours on broken roads since leaving Oakridge, when he had worked out his story in detail.

“No, not quite. The pulse radiation, the blasts, and fallout destroyed a lot. The bugs and riots killed a lot of skilled people. But actually, it didn’t take long to get many machines going again. There were airplanes ready to fly within days. The R.U.S. has hundreds of them, repaired and tested and waiting to fly.

“But they can’t take off. They’re all grounded, and will be for years to come.”

The old man looked puzzled. “Why’s that, Inspector?”

“For the same reason you wouldn’t pick up a broadcast even if you put together a working radio,” Gordon said. He paused for effect. “Because of laser satellites.”

Peter Von Kleek slapped the table. “Son of a bitch!” All over the room heads turned their way.

Eric Stevens sighed, giving Gordon a look that had to be total acceptance . . . or admiration of a better liar than himself.

“What . . . what’s a lay . . .?”

“Laser sat,” Johnny’s grandfather explained. “We won the war,” he snorted at the famous marginal victory that had been trumpeted in the weeks before the riots began. “But the enemy must have left some sleeper satellites in orbit. Give a few months, then anything so much as lets out a peep over the radio, or tries to fly, zap!” He sliced the air decisively. “No wonder I never picked up anything on my crystal set!”

Gordon nodded. The story fit so well, it could even be true. He hoped so. For it might explain the silence and the lonely emptiness of the sky, without the world having to be totally vacant of civilization.

And how else to explain the slag heaps that remained of so many radio antennas he had passed in his travels?

“What’s the government doing about it?” Von Kleek asked earnestly.

Fairy tales, Gordon thought. His lies would grow more complex as he traveled until someday someone finally caught him up.

Gordon smiled confidently. “We have some scientists. We hope to find facilities in California, for making and launching orbital rockets.” He left the implication hanging.

The others looked disappointed.

“If only there was a way to take care of the damned satellites sooner,” the mayor said. “Think of all those aircraft, just sitting there! Can you imagine how surprised the next raiding party out of the damned Rogue River would be, to find us farmers backed up by the US Air Force and some bloody A-10s!”

He gave out a whooshing sound and made diving motions with his hands. Then the mayor did a pretty good imitation of a machine gun. Gordon laughed with the others. Like boys, they lived briefly in a fantasy of rescue, and power to the good guys.

Other men and women gathered around now that the mayor and the postal inspector had apparently finished their business. Someone pulled out a harmonica. A guitar was passed to Johnny Stevens, who proved to be quite gifted. Soon the crowd was singing bawdy folk songs and old commercial jingles.

The mood was high. Hope was thick as the warm, dark beer, and tasted at least as good.

On his way out of the men’s room—grateful that Cottage Grove had somehow retained gravity-flow indoor plumbing—Gordon stopped suddenly near the back stairs.

There had been a sound. . . .

The crowd by the fireplace was singing . . . “Gather around and listen to my tale—a tale of a fateful trip . . .

Gordon cocked his head. Had he imagined the other sound? It had been faint, and his head was ringing a bit on its own from the beer.

But a queer feeling at the back of his neck, an intuition, made him turn around and climb the back stairs, into the building above the basement pub.

The stairs were dimly lit by a candle at the landing. The song-fest faded away behind him as he climbed, careful of the creaking steps.

At the top he listened, and for a long moment heard nothing. He was about to turn around, writing it off to an overworked imagination, when it came again.

. . . a series of faint, eerie noises. They brought back half-memories. A shiver climbed his back. He had not heard their like since . . . since long, long ago.

At the end of a hall there was faint light under a door. He approached, quietly as he could.

Bloop, went the sound.

Gordon reached out and touched the cold metal knob.

Wah-wah . . . bleat bleat!

The absent weight of his revolver—left in his guest room in supposedly safe Cottage Grove—made him feel half naked as he opened the door. It creaked softly.

Dusty tarpaulins covered stacked crates and odds and ends, hoarded for a rainy day by the survivors. Around the boxes came faint, flickering light. There were hushed voices just ahead, whispering in urgent excitement.

Gordon crept forward until he reached an opening in the salvage. Then a floorboard creaked under his left foot.

There were gasps. Five faces turned suddenly, cast into deep relief by the light from a single candle.

In a breathless instant Gordon saw that they were children, staring up at him in terrified awe—the more so because they all clearly knew who he was. But he cared about none of that. His eyes were only for a little box that lay on an oval rug in the center of the small coven.

Across its bottom was a row of buttons. In the center was a flat screen that gave off a pearly light.

Pink spiders emerged from flying saucers and stepped imperiously down the screen, to a crunching, marching sound. They bleated in triumph when they reached the bottom. Then their ranks reformed and the assault began all over again.

Gordon’s throat was dry.

“Where . . .” he breathed.

The children stood up. One of the boys swallowed. “Sir?” he said.

Gordon pointed. “Where in the name of all that’s holy did you get that?” He shook his head. “More important . . . where did you get the batteries!”

One of the children began to cry. “Please, sir, we didn’t know it was wrong. Jimmy Smith told us it’s just a game the oldtime children used to have! We find ’em all over, only they don’t work no more. . . .”

“Who,” Gordon asked carefully, “is Jimmy Smith?”

“A boy. His pa has come down from Cresswell with a wagon to trade the last couple years. Jimmy swapped this game for twenty old ones we found that wouldn’t work no more. He said . . .”

Gordon recalled the map he had left in his room. Cresswell was just a little north of here, not far off the route he had planned to take to Eugene.

“Did Jimmy Smith say where he got the toy?” He tried not to spook the children, but some of his urgency must have spilled over, frightening them.

A girl wailed. “He said he got it from Cyclops!”

Then in a panicked flurry the children were gone, disappeared down little alleys in the dusty storage room. Gordon was left there, standing quite still, watching the tiny invaders descend in the glow of the little gray screen.

“Crunch-crunch-crunch,” they marched.

The game blooped victoriously, then began to play all over again.

3.

Eugene

The pony’s breath puffed as it pushed resignedly through the dank drizzle, led by a man in a rain-slick poncho. Its only burdens were a light saddle and two thick bags, plastic-covered against the damp.

The gray Interstate glistened wetly. Deep puddles lay like small lakes in the concrete. Dirt had blown over the four-lane highway during the postwar drought years, and grass had later begun to grow on the road as the old Northwest weather reasserted itself at last. The highway was now a ribbon of meadow, a flat notch in the forested hills overlooking the sluggish Willamette.

Gordon raised his slicker tentlike to consult his map. Ahead to his right a large fen had formed where the south and east forks of the Willamette came together, before cutting west between Eugene and Springfield. According to the old map there was a modern industrial park below. Now only a few old roofs poked above the mire, a realm for water fowl.

Back in Cresswell they had told him the Interstate was impassable a little north of here. He would have to cut through Eugene itself, find an open bridge across the river, and then somehow get back onto the highway to Coburg.

The Cresswellers had been a little vague on details. Few travellers had made the trip since the war.

Eugene had been one of Gordon’s milestones for months. But now it only stood in his path toward a deeper mystery, further north.

Soon he came upon a large sign half buried in a puddle. Gordon kicked away debris and knelt to examined the rusting plate—like a tracker reading a cold trail in a forest path.

“30th Avenue,” he read.

A broad road cut into the hills to the west, away from the Interstate. According to the map, downtown Eugene was just over the forested rise that way.

The horse puffed stoically as he led it down the offramp and then up the slope to the west.

From the top of the hill the light mist seemed somehow to soften the ruined city’s old wounds. Rains had long since washed away the fire-stains. Slow beards of climbing greenery, sprouting from cracks in the pavement, covered many of the signs of violence.

As Gordon descended to the ghostly streets, strewn with broken glass, the rain-wet pavement sparkled with another era’s shattered panes. The folk in Cresswell had warned him what to expect. What the riots and fires hadn’t ruined had been finished off by the river of mud that had slammed into the city when the Fall Creek and Lookout Point dams had given way.

The collapse of those reservoirs had wiped out Route 58 west of Oakridge, forcing Gordon to make his long detour south and west through Curtin, Cottage Grove, and Cresswell before finally swinging up north again.

Back in Cresswell, between all the meetings and celebrations—the election of the new postmaster and excited plans to extend the new mail delivery network east and west—the citizens had regaled Gordon with stories of the valiant struggle of Eugene. They told about how the city had managed to hold out for four long years after the war had isolated it from the outer world. In a strange alliance of the University community and red-neck country farmers, somehow the city-state had overcome all threats . . . until at last the bandit gangs finished her off by blasting the upland reservoirs all at once.

The tale was already legendary, almost like the fall of Troy. And yet the storytellers hadn’t sounded forlorn in telling it. It was more as if they now looked upon the disaster as a temporary setback, to be overcome within their own lifetimes.

For Cresswell had been in a tizzy of optimism even before Gordon’s visit. His tale of a “Restored United States” was the town’s second dose of good news in less than three months.

Last winter another visitor had arrived—this one from the north, a grinning man in a white-and-black robe—who passed out startling gifts for the children, then departed, speaking the magical name, Cyclops.

Cyclops, the stranger had said.

Cyclops would make things right again. Cyclops would bring comfort and progress back into the world, redeeming the people from drudgery and lingering hopelessness, the legacy of the Doomwar.

All the people had to do was collect their old machinery, particularly electronics. Cyclops would take their donations of useless, ruined equipment, plus perhaps a little surplus food to maintain its volunteer servants. In return, Cyclops would give the Cresswellans things that worked.

The toys were only tokens of what was to come. Someday there would be real miracles.

Gordon had been unable to get anything coherent from the people of Cresswell. They were too deliriously happy to be completely logical. Half of them assumed his “Restored United States” was behind Cyclops, and half thought it was the other way around. It hardly occurred to anybody that the two wonders could be unconnected—two spreading legends encountering one another in the wilderness.

Gordon didn’t dare disabuse them, or ask too many questions. He had left as quickly as he could—loaded down with more letters than ever—determined to follow the tale to its source.

It was about noon as he turned north on University Street. The gentle rain was no bother. He could explore Eugene for a while and still make it by nightfall to Coburg, where a settlement of gleaners supposedly lived. Somewhere north of there lay the territory from which the followers of Cyclops were spreading word of their strange redemption.

As he walked quietly past the gutted buildings, Gordon wondered if he should even try to pull his “postman” hoax in the north. He remembered the little spiders and saucers, flashing in the darkness, and found it hard not to hope.

Maybe he could give up the scam, and find something real to believe in. Perhaps someone, at last, had taken responsibility.

The shattered storefronts of the deserted town gave way at last to 18th Avenue and the University of Oregon campus, the broad athletic field now overgrown with aspen and alder saplings. There, in front of the old gymnasium, Gordon stopped abruptly and held the pony still.

Somewhere, not too far away, somebody was screaming.

He pushed back the plastic cover of his holster and looked about. But could see nothing amiss.

The faint crying crescendoed then fell away. It was a woman’s voice, carrying notes of pain and deadly fear. Gordon drew his revolver. Had it come from the north? The east?

He pushed into the semi-jungle between the university buildings, hurriedly seeking a place to go to ground. He had had an easy time of it since leaving Oakridge months ago, too easy. Obviously he had acquired bad habits. It was a miracle no one had heard him, traipsing down these deserted streets as if he owned them.

He led the pony into the gymnasium through an ajar side door, and tethered the animal behind a fold-down stand of bleachers. He dropped a pile of oats near the animal, but he left the saddle in place and cinched.

Gordon took out his bow and quiver. In the rain they were probably more reliable, and certainly quieter than his carbine or revolver.

He stuffed one of the bulging mail sacks into a ventilation shaft. As he was searching for a place to hide the other, Gordon suddenly realized what he was doing. He smiled ironically.

Next thing you’ll be risking your life to protect the mail! He laughed at his momentary foolishness.

Leaving the second bag lying on the floor, he set off to find the source of the trouble.

The sounds came from a brick building just ahead, whose long bank of glass windows still gleamed. Apparently looters hadn’t thought the place worth bothering with.

Now Gordon could hear faint, muttering voices, the soft nickering of horses and the creaking of tack.

Seeing no watchers at the roofs or windows, he dashed across the overgrown lawn and up a broad flight of concrete steps, flattening against a doorway around the corner and breathing open-mouthed to make no sound.

The door bore an ancient, rusted padlock and an engraved plastic sign.

ERB MEMORIAL STUDENT UNION

Remodeled May 1989

Cafeteria Hours

11-3:30

5—8 pm

The voices came from just within.

An outside stairway led up to several floors overhead. He stepped back and saw that a door into the building lay ajar three flights up.

Gordon knew he was being a fool once again. Now that he had the trouble located he really should go collect his pony and get the hell out of here, as quickly as possible.

The voices within grew angry. Through a crack in the door he heard a blow being struck. A woman’s voice cried out in pain, followed by coarse male laughter.

Sighing softly at the flaw in his character that kept him here—instead of running away as anyone with any brains would do—Gordon started to climb the concrete stair, careful not to make a sound.

Rot and mold covered an area just within the half-open door. But beyond that the fourth floor of the student center looked untouched. Miraculously, none of the glass panes in the great atrium skylight had been smashed. Under its pale glow, a carpeted ramp spiralled downward connecting each floor.

As Gordon cautiously approached the open atrium, it felt momentarily like he had stepped backward in time. Looters had left the student organization offices—with their passionate tornadoes of paper—completely untouched. Bulletin boards were plastered with announcements of sporting events, shows, political rallies. Only at the far end were there a few notices in bright red, having to do with the final crisis that had struck almost without warning. Otherwise, the clutter was homey, radical, enthusiastic.

Gordon hurried past, down the spiralling ramp toward the sounds of voices below.

On the second floor, a balcony extended out over the main lobby. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled the rest of the way.

On the north side of the building, to the right, part of the two-storey glass facing had been shattered to make room for a pair of large wagons. Steam rose from six horses tethered over by the left hand wall behind a row of dark pinball machines.

Outside, amid the broken glass shards, the sulking rain created spreading pink pools around four sprawled bodies, recently cut down by automatic weapons fire. Only one of the victims had even managed to draw a sidearm during the ambush. The pistol lay in a puddle, inches from a motionless hand.

The voices came from his left where the balcony made a turn. Gordon crawled cautiously forward and looked out.

Several ceiling-high mirrors remained along the west wall, giving Gordon a wide view of the floor below, where a blaze of smashed furniture crackled in a large fireplace between the reflecting panes.

He hugged the moldy carpet and lifted his head just enough to see four heavily-armed men arguing by the fire. A fifth lounged on a couch over to the left, his automatic rifle aimed idly at a pair of prisoners—a boy of about nine years and a young woman.

The red weals on her face matched the pattern of a man’s hand. Her brown hair was matted and she held the boy close. Neither prisoner seemed to have energy left for tears.

The bearded men all wore one-piece camouflage suits, prewar army surplus.

Survivalists. Gordon felt a wave of revulsion. The word itself was loathsome.

Everywhere he had gone in his travels, folk shared this reaction. More than the Enemy, whose bombs and germs had wrought such destruction during the One-Week War, people in every wrecked county and hamlet blamed these macho outlaws for the lawlessness that had led to the final fall.

But there weren’t supposed to be any survivalists anymore in the valley of the Willamette! In Cottage Grove, Gordon had been told the last big bunch had been driven south of Roseburg years ago, into the wilderness of the Rogue River country!

What were they doing here then? He moved a little closer and listened.

“I dunno, Strike-leader. I don’t think we oughta go any deeper on this recon. We’ve already had enough surprises with this ‘Cyclops’ thing the broad here let slip about, before she clammed up. I say we oughta head back to Site Bravo and report what we found!”

The speaker was a short, bald man with a wiry frame. He warmed his hands over the fire. An M-16 assault rifle equipped with a flash suppressor was slung muzzle-down over his back.

The man he addressed as “Strike-leader” was big and meanlooking. A scar ran from one ear to his chin, only partly hidden by a gray-flecked black beard. He grinned, displaying several gaps in his teeth.

“You don’t really believe that bull the broad was spouting, do you? All that crap about a big computer that talks? What a crock! She’s just feedin’ it to us to give us a stall!”

“Oh yeah? Well how do you explain all that?” The little man gestured back to the wagons.

In the mirror, Gordon could see the corner of the nearest. It was loaded down with odds and ends no doubt collected here on the University campus. The haul seemed to consist mostly of electronic equipment.

Not farm tools, not clothes or jewelry—electronics.

It was the first time Gordon had ever seen a gleaner’s wagon filled with salvage like this. The implication of that loaded wagon caused Gordon’s pulse to pound. In his excitement, he barely ducked down in time as the little man turned to pick up something from a nearby table.

“And what about this?” The small survivalist asked. In his hand was a toy—a small video game like the one Gordon had first seen in Cottage Grove.

Lights flashed and the box gave out a cheerful little melody.

The strike-leader stared for a long moment at the game. Finally he shrugged. “Don’t mean shit,” he grumbled.

One of the other survivalists spoke. “I agree wit lil Jim. . . .”

“That’s Blue Five,” the big man growled. “Maintain discipline!”

“Right,” the third man nodded. He didn’t seem perturbed. “I agree wit Blue-Five, then. I think we gotta report on this. It could affect the invasion. What if the farmers do got high-tech up north of here? We could wind up doin’ an end-run right into some heavy duty lasers or something, especially if they got some old Air Force or Navy stuff working again!”

“All the more reason to continue the recon,” Blue One growled. “We gotta find out more about this Cyclops thing.”

“But you saw how hard we had to work to get the woman to tell us even what we learned! And we can’t leave her here while we go deeper on recon! If we turned back we could put her on one of the boats and . . .”

“Off the damned woman! We finish with her tonight. The boy, too. You been in the mountains too long, Blue Four. These valleys are crawling with broads. We can’t risk this one making noise, and we sure can’t take her along on a recon!”

The argument didn’t surprise Gordon. All over the country these postwar crazies had taken to raiding for women, as well as food. After the first few years of slaughter, the survivalist enclaves had found themselves with incredibly high male-female ratios. Now, women were valuable chattel in the loose, macho, survivalist societies.

No wonder some of the raiders below wanted to carry this one back. Gordon could tell that she would be quite pretty if she healed up, and if the pall of terror ever left her eyes.

The boy in her arms watched the men with fierce anger.

Gordon surmised that the Rogue River gangs must have become organized at last, perhaps under a charismatic leader. Apparently they were planning to invade by sea, skirting the Roseville defenses altogether. It was a bold plan, and it could very well mean the end of whatever flickering civilization remained in the Willamette Valley.

Until now, Gordon had been telling himself he would somehow stay out of this trouble. But the last seventeen years had long ago made almost everybody alive take sides in this particular struggle. Rival villages with bitter feuds would drop their quarrels to join and wipe out bands like these. The very sight of army surplus camouflage elicited a loathing response that was almost the same everywhere. Gordon could not leave this place without at least trying to think of a way to do harm to the men below.

The raiders moved to the wagons and began rummaging through them for anything valuable. From their curses it seemed the search was futile. Gordon heard the smashing of delicate and totally unreplacable electronics parts under their boots.

Only the guard with the captives was still in view, his back turned to both Gordon and the mirrors. He was cleaning his weapon, not paying particular attention.

Wishing he were less a fool, Gordon felt compelled to take a chance. He lifted his head above the level of the floor and raised his hand.

The motion made the woman look up. Her eyes widened in surprise.

Gordon put a finger to his lips. He hoped she would understand that these men were his enemies, too.

The woman blinked, and Gordon feared for a moment she was about to speak. She looked quickly at her guard, who remained absorbed in his weapon and did not look up.

When she glanced back at Gordon and nodded slightly, Gordon gave her a thumbs-up sign. Then he backed away from the balcony.

He found an office in which the dust wasn’t too thick—he couldn’t afford to sneeze—and chewed on a strip of Cresswell beef jerky while he settled down to wait.

His chance came before dusk. Three of the raiders left on a patrol. The one called “Little Jim” stayed to cook a raggedly butchered haunch of deer in the fireplace. Another man guarded the prisoners, staring at the young woman while whittling slowly on a piece of wood.

Gordon wondered how long it would take for the guard’s lust to overcome his fear of the leader’s wrath. He was obviously trying to work up his nerve.

Gordon had his bow ready. An arrow was nocked and two more lay on the carpet before him. His holster flap was free and the pistol’s hammer rested on a sixth round.

The guard put down his whittling and stood up. The girl held the boy close and looked away as he walked over to her.

“Blue One ain’t gonna like it.” The bandit by the fire warned lowly.

The guard stood over the woman. She tried not to flinch, but shivered anyway when he touched her hair. The boy’s eyes shone with anger.

“Blue One already said we’re gonna waste her later, after takin’ turns. Don’t see why my turn shouldn’t come first. Maybe I can even get her to talk about that ‘Cyclops’ thing.

“How ’bout it babe?” He leered down on her. “If a beatin’ won’t make you loosen your mouf, I know what’ll tame you down.”

“What about the kid?” Little Jim asked.

The guard shrugged casually. “What about him?” Suddenly a hunting knife was in his right hand. With his left he siezed the boy’s hair and yanked him out of the woman’s grasp. She screamed.

In that telescoped instant, Gordon acted completely on reflex. There was no time to think. Even so, he did not do the obvious, but what was necessary.

Instead of shooting at the man with the hunting knife, he swung his bow up, and put an arrow into Little Jim’s chest.

The small survivalist hopped back and stared in blank surprise down at the shaft. With a faint gurgle he slumped to the ground.

Gordon quickly nocked another arrow and turned in time to see the other survivalist yank his knife out of the girl’s shoulder. She must have hurled herself in between him and the child, blocking the blow with her body. The boy lay stunned in the corner.

Gravely wounded, she still tore at her enemy with her nails, incidentally blocking Gordon from a clear shot. The surprised bandit fumbled at first, trying to catch hold of her wrists, but finally he managed to hurl her to the ground.

Angered by the painful scratches—and apparently unaware of his partner’s demise—the survivalist grinned and hefted his knife to finish the woman off. He took a step toward her.

At that point Gordon’s arrow tore through the fabric of his camouflage suit, slicing a shallow bloody gash along the raider’s back. The shaft struck the couch and quivered.

For all their loathsome attributes, survivalists were probably the best fighters in all the world. In a blur, before Gordon could snatch up his last arrow, the man had leapt to one side and rolled up with his assault rifle in his hands. Gordon threw himself back as a rapid, accurate burst of individual shots tore into the balustrade, ricocheting from the ironmongery where he had just been.

The rifle was equipped with a silencer, forcing the survivalist to fire on semi-automatic; but the zinging bullets clanged all about Gordon as he rolled over and pulled out his own revolver. He scurried over to another part of the balcony.

The fellow down below had good ears. Another burst sent slivers flying inches from Gordon’s face as he ducked aside again, barely in time.

Silence fell, except that Gordon’s pulse rushing in his ears sounded like thunder.

Now what? he wondered.

Suddenly there was a loud scream. Gordon raised his head and caught a blurry motion reflected in the mirror . . . the small woman below was charging her foe with a large chair raised over her head!

The survivalist whirled and fired. Bright red blotches bloomed across the young gleaner’s chest and she tumbled to the ground; the chair rolled to a halt at the survivalist’s feet.

Gordon might have heard the click as the rifle’s magazine emptied. Or perhaps it was only a wild guess. But without thinking he leapt up, arms extended, and squeezed the trigger of his .38 over and over again—pumping until the hammer struck five times on empty, smoking chambers.

The survivalist remained standing, a fresh clip already in his left hand, ready to be slammed into place.

But dark stains had begun to spread across the camouflage suit. Looking somewhat surprised, his gaze met Gordon’s over the barrel of the pistol.

The assault rifle fell clattering from limp fingers. Then the survivalist crumpled to the floor as well.

Gordon ran downstairs and vaulted the rail at the bottom. First he stopped at both men and made sure they were dead. Then he hurried over to the fatally wounded young woman.

Her mouth made a round inquiry as he lifted her head. “Who . . .?” Eyes took in his face, his uniform—the embroidered RESTORED US MAIL SERVICE patch over his breast pocket. They widened briefly in question.

Let her believe, Gordon told himself. She’s dying. Let her believe it’s true.

But he couldn’t make himself say the words—the lies that he had told so often, that had taken him so far for so many months. Not this time.

“I’m just a traveler, miss,” he shook his head. “I’m . . . I’m just a fellow citizen trying to help.”

She nodded, only slightly disappointed it seemed.

“North . . .” she gasped. “Take boy . . . warn . . . warn Cyclops. . . .”

In that last word, even as her dying breath sighed away, Gordon heard reverence, loyalty, and a confident faith in ultimate redemption . . . all in the spoken name of a machine.

Cyclops, he thought numbly, as he laid her body down. Yes, he would do as she asked. Now he had still another reason to follow the legend to its source.

There was no time to spare for a burial. The bandit’s rifle had been muffled, but Gordon’s .38 had echoed like thunder. The other raiders would certainly have heard. He only had moments to collect the child and clear out of this place.

But ten feet away there were horses to steal. And up north was something a brave young woman had thought worth dying for.

If only it’s true, Gordon thought as he gathered up his enemy’s rifle and ammunition.

He would drop his postal play-act in a minute if he found that someone, somewhere, were taking responsibility—actually trying to do something about the Dark Age. He would offer his allegiance, his help, however meager it might be.

Even to a giant computer.

There were distant shouts . . . sounds of running feet coming closer rapidly.

Gordon turned to the boy, who was looking up at him, wide eyed, from the corner of the room.

“Come on, then,” he said to the child, holding out his hand. “We’d better be on our way.”

PART II

In those blurry moments, as he and the boy made their getaway, Gordon realized that the survivalists must have found his horse and cache.

Holding the boy on the saddle in front of him, Gordon rode away from the grisly scene in the wrecked student center as fast as his stolen mount would go. Behind them there were angry shouts. A glance showed figures in faded camouflage fatigues charging down Sixth Avenue. One raider knelt to take careful aim with his assault rifle.

Gordon bent forward as he sawed on the reins and kicked. His mount snorted and wheeled around a looted Rexall store, just as high-velocity bullets tore apart the granite facing behind them. Stone chips flew across the street.

But in that last instant, looking back, he had seen one more raider gallop up, riding Gordon’s own pony!

For a moment he felt an unreasoning fear. If they had his horse they might also have taken or harmed the mailbags!

Gordon shook away the irrelevant thought as he sent the horse dashing down a side-street. To hell with the letters! They were only props, anyway. What mattered was that only one of the survivalists could pursue at the moment. That made the odds even, almost.

He snapped the reins and dug in his heels, sending his mount galloping hard down one of downtown Eugene’s silent, empty streets. He heard the clatter of other hooves, too close! Not bothering to look back, he swerved into an alley. The horse pranced past a fall of shattered glass, then sped across the next street, through a serviceway and down another alley. Gordon turned the animal toward a flash of greenery, cantering quickly across an open plaza, and pulled up behind an overgrown stand of blackberry in a small park.

There was a roar in the air. After a moment Gordon realized that it was his own pulse, pounding in his ears.

“Are . . . are you all right?” he panted softly, looking down at the boy.

The nine-year-old swallowed and nodded, not wasting breath on words. The boy had witnessed savage things today, but he had the sense to keep quiet, his brown eyes intense on Gordon.

Gordon stood in the saddle and peered through the seventeen-year growth of urban shrubbery, listening. For the moment at least, they seemed to have lost their pursuer.

Of course the fellow might be less than fifty meters away, quietly listening himself.

Gordon’s fingers were shaking from reaction, but he managed to draw his empty .38 from its holster and reloaded while he tried to think.

If all there was was the single rider, they might do better to just stay quiet and wait it out. Let the bandit search, and inevitably drift farther away.

Unfortunately, the other survivalists would collect their scattered mounts soon. It would probably be better to risk a little noise now than let those master trackers and hunters from the Rogue River country collect themselves and organize a real search of the local area.

He stroked the horse’s neck, letting the animal catch its breath for a moment longer. “What’s your name?” He asked the boy.

“M-Mark,” he blinked.

“My name’s Gordon. Was that your sister, who saved our lives back there at the fireplace?”

Mark shook his head. A child of the dark age, he would keep his tears for later. “No . . . it was my mom.”

Gordon grunted, surprised. These days it was uncommon for women to look so young after having children. Mark’s mother must have lived under unusual conditions—one more clue pointing to mysterious happenings in northern Oregon.

In any event, the lady had sacrificed herself bravely back at the Student Center campsite—partly for her son, obviously, but also for something else—something called Cyclops.

Gordon listened again, and still heard nothing. With his knees he nudged the horse into motion once more, letting it choose soft ground where it could. He kept a sharp lookout, and stopped often to listen.

Some minutes later they heard a shout. The boy tensed.

But the source was blocks away. Gordon headed in the other direction, thinking of the Willamette River bridges at the northern end of town.

The long twilight was over before Gordon rode up to the Route 105 bridge. The clouds had stopped dripping, but they still cast a dark gloom over the ruins on all sides, denying even the starlight.

Gordon stared, trying to penetrate the gloom. Rumor to the south had it the bridge was still up, and there were no obvious signs of an ambush.

But anything could hide in that mass of dark girders, including an experienced bushwhacker with an assault rifle.

Gordon shook his head. He hadn’t lived this long by taking foolish chances. He had wanted to take the old interstate, the direct route to Corvallis and the mysterious domain of Cyclops, but there were other ways. He swung the horse about and headed west, away from the dark, glowering towers.

The clouds parted just enough to let him find old highway 99, after a hurried, twisting ride down side streets. The 99 bridge was open and apparently clear. Bent low over the boy, he took it at a gallop.

Gordon continued to ride hard until he was certain all pursuit had been left behind. Then he dismounted and led the horse, letting the animal catch its breath. When he finally climbed back into the saddle he found that the boy had fallen asleep.

About an hour before dawn, they arrived at the walled village of Harrisburg.

The stories Gordon had heard about prosperous northern Oregon must have been understated. The town had apparently been at peace much, much too long. Thick undergrowth covered the freefire zone all the way to the town wall. And there were no guards on the watchtowers! Gordon had to shout for five minutes before anyone arrived to swing back the village gate.

The sleepy-eyed townsmen were slow to believe his story, and even more reluctant to sally forth in the wet weather. They stared at Gordon suspiciously, and shook their heads sullenly when he insisted they call up a posse.

Young Mark had collapsed in exhaustion and wasn’t much of a witness to corroborate his story. The locals obviously preferred to believe he was exaggerating. Several men stated baldly that he must have run into a few local bandits from south of Eugene, where Cyclops still had little influence. After all, nobody had seen any survivalists around these parts in many years. They were supposed to have killed each other off long ago.

Folk started drifting away to their homes.

Gordon couldn’t believe this was happening. Didn’t these idiots realize their very lives were at stake? If the scouting party got away, the barbarians would be back in force!

Their sullen, rural obstinacy was impervious to logic. They refused to listen.

Finally, in desperation, Gordon flung back his poncho revealing the postal inspector’s uniform beneath. In a fury he commanded, in the name of the Restored United States, that an armed party be gathered at once!

Gordon had had a lot of practice with the role in recent months, but never had he dared such an arrogant pose. It completely carried him away. His voice shook with outrage as he told the villagers the wrath that would fall on them when the restored nation learned of this shame—how a silly little hamlet had cowered behind its walls and so let their country’s sworn enemies escape!

The townsfolk blinked in astonishment. The true danger that faced them they could try to ignore, but this fantastic story had to be swallowed whole or not at all.

For a long moment the tableau held—and Gordon stared them down.

All at once the tension snapped. Men shouted at one another, and began running about to gather horses and weapons. Gordon was left standing there—his poncho like a cape whipping behind him in the blustery wind—cursing silently while the Harrisburg militia turned out around him.

Maybe his role was starting to get to him, he pondered. For during those tense moments, as he had faced down an entire town, he had truly believed! He had felt the power of his role—the potent anger of a servant of the People, thwarted in his high task by little men. . . .

The episode left him shaken, and a little uncertain of his own mental equilibrium.

One thing was clear, now. He had hoped to give up the postman scam on reaching northern Oregon; but that was no longer possible. He was stuck with it, for better or for worse.

All was ready in an hour. He left the boy in the hands of a local family, and departed with the posse in the drizzling rain.

The ride was quicker this time, in daylight and with remounts. Gordon made sure they sent out scouts and flankers to guard against ambush, and kept the expedition in separated squads. When they finally arrived at the UO campus the militia dismounted to converge on the Student Center.

Although the locals outnumbered the survivalist band by at least six to one, Gordon figured the odds were about even. Wincing at every sound as the clumsy farmers approached the scene of the massacre, he nervously scanned the rooftops and windows.

But when they finally burst into the Student Center, the raiders, horses, and wagons were all gone. The fireplace was cold. Tracks in the muddy street led westward, toward the coastal passes and the sea.

The victims of the massacre were found laid out in the old cafeteria, all of their ears missing—trophies apparently. The villagers stared at the havoc the automatic rifles had wrought, rediscovering uncomfortable memories of the early days.

Gordon had to remind them to get a burial detail together.

It was frustrating. There was no way to prove who the bandits had been without following them, but Gordon wasn’t about to try with this reluctant band of farmers. They already wanted to go home. Sighing, Gordon insisted that they make one more stop.

In the dank, ruined university gymnasium he found his mail sacks—one untouched where he had hidden it, the other torn open, letters scattered and trodden on the floor.

Gordon put on an irate fury for the benefit of the locals, who hurried obsequiously to help him collect and bag the remains. He played the role of the outraged Postal Inspector to the hilt, calling down vengeance on those who dared interfere with the mail. But this time it really was an act. Inside, all Gordon could think of was how hungry and tired of it all he was.

The slow, plodding ride back in the fog was sheer hell. But the ordeal went on at Harrisburg. There Gordon had to go through all the motions, passing out a few letters he had collected in the towns south of Eugene, appointing a local postmaster, enduring another silly, hope-drunk celebration. The next day he awoke stiff and sore. Still, nothing the villagers could say would make him remain another hour. He saddled a fresh horse, secured the mail-bags, and headed north immediately after breakfast.

It was time, at last, to go and meet Cyclops.

4.

Corvallis

April 18, 2009

Transmittal via: Shedd, Harrisburg,

Cresswell, Cottage Grove, Culp

Creek, Oakridge, to Pine View

Dear Mrs. Thompson

Your first three letters finally caught up with me in Sheddjust south of Corvallis. I can’t tell you how glad I was to get them. And news from Amy and Michael too—I’m very happy for them both, and hope it will be a girl.

I note that you’ve expanded your local mail route to include Gilchrist, New Bend, and Redmond. Enclosed are temporary warrants for the postmasters you recommended.

It was quiet in the paneled guest room as the silver fountain pen scritch-scratched across the slightly yellowed paper. Through the open window, with a pale moon shining through the scattered nightclouds, Gordon could hear distant music and laughter from the hoedown he had left a little while ago, pleading fatigue.

By now Gordon was used to these exuberant first-day festivities, as locals pulled out the stops for the visiting government man. The only real difference here was that he had not seen so many people in one place since the food-center riots, long, long ago.

Gordon rolled the fountain pen and touched the letters he had received just yesterday from his friends in Pine View. They had been a real help in establishing his bona fides. The mail courier from the southern Willamette, whom Gordon himself had appointed only two weeks ago, had arrived on a steaming mount and refused even a glass of water until he reported to “the Inspector.”

The earnest young man’s behavior emphatically dissolved all remaining doubts the locals might have had.

Gordon picked up the pen again and wrote.

By now you’ll have received my warning of a possible invasion by Rogue River survivalists. I know you’ll take appropriate measures for the defense of Pine View.

Still, here in the strange domain of Cyclops I find it hard to get anyone to take the threat seriously. By today’s standards they have been at peace here a very long time. They treat me well, but people apparently think I am exaggerating the threat.

Tomorrow, at last, I have my interview. Perhaps I can persuade Cyclops of the danger.

It would be sad if this strange little society led-by-machine fell to the barbarians. It is the finest thing I have seen since leaving the civilized east.

Gordon amended the remark in his own mind. The lower Willamette was the most civilized area he had seen in fifteen years, period. It was a miracle of peace and prosperity, apparently entirely wrought by an intelligent computer and its dedicated human servants.

Gordon stopped writing and looked up as the lamp by his desk flickered. Under a chintz shade, the forty-watt incandescent bulb returned to a steady glow as the wind-generators two buildings away regained their stride. The light was soft, but Gordon found his eyes watering each time he looked at it for a little while.

He still had not gotten over it.

On arriving in Corvallis he had seen his first working electric light in over a decade. He had been forced to excuse himself even as local dignitaries gathered to welcome him, and took refuge in a washroom to regain his composure. It just wouldn’t do for a supposed representative of the “government in Saint Paul City” to be seen weeping openly at the sight of a few flickering bulbs.

Corvallis and its environs are divided into independant boroughs, each supporting about three hundred people. All the land hereabouts is cultivated or ranched, using modern farming arts and hybrid seed the locals raise themselves.

Of course they’re limited to horse-plows, but their smithies make implements from high-quality steel. They have even started producing hand-built water and wind-power turbines—designed by Cyclops, of course.

Local craftsmen have expressed an interest in trading with customers to the south and east. I’ll enclose a list of items they’re willing to barter for. Copy it and pass it along the line, will you?

Gordon had not seen so many happy, well-fed people since before the war, nor heard laughter so easy and often. There was a newspaper, a lending library, and every child in the valley got at least four years of schooling. Here, at last, was what he had been looking for since his militia unit broke up in confusion and despair, a decade and a half ago—a community of good people engaged in a vigorous effort to rebuild.

Gordon wished he could be a part of it, not a con-artist ripping them off for a few nights’ meals and a free bed.

Ironically, these people would have accepted the old Gordon Kranz as a new citizen. But he was indelibly branded by the uniform he wore and by his actions back at Harrisburg. If he revealed the truth now they would never forgive or accept him.

He had to be a demigod in their eyes, or nothing at all. If ever a man was trapped in his own lie . . .

Gordon shook his head. He would have to take the hand he had been dealt. Perhaps these people really could use a mailman.

So far I have not been able to find, out much about Cyclops itself. I’ve been told that the supercomputer does not govern directly, but insists that all the villages and towns it serves live together peaceably and democratically. In effect, it has become judge-arbiter for the entire lower Willamette.

The Council tells me Cyclops is very interested in seeing a formal mail-route created, and has offered every assistance. It seems anxious to cooperate with the Restored U.S.

Everyone here was glad to hear that they would soon be in contact with the rest of the country again.

Gordon looked at the last line for a long moment, and found he couldn’t go on with the lies tonight. It was no longer amusing, knowing Mrs. Thompson would read through them. It made him feel sad.

Just as well, he thought. It would be a busy day tomorrow. He covered the pen and got up to prepare for bed.

While he washed his face he thought about the last time he had met one of the legendary supercomputers. It had been only months before the war, when he was a teenaged junior in college. All the talk was about the new “intelligent” machines just being unveiled in a few locations.

It was a time of excitement. The media trumpeted the breakthrough as the end of humanity’s long period of loneliness. Only instead of coming from outer space, the “other intelligences” with whom man would share his world would be his own creations.

At the University of Minnesota, Gordon had a brief encounter with one of the supercomps at a public demonstration.

They had sealed the helium-cooled cylinder inside a mammoth Faraday cage, suspended on a cushion of air. There was no way anyone from the outside could fake its responses. When Gordon’s turn came to step forward and face the narrow camera lens, he brought out a list of test questions, riddles, and a complicated pun.

It was all so very long ago, yet Gordon remembered as if it was yesterday the low, mellifluous voice, the friendly, open laughter of the machine. On that day Millichrome met all his challenges, and responded with an intricate pun of its own. It also gently chided him for not doing as well as expected in a recent history exam.

When it was over, Gordon had walked away feeling a great, heady joy that his species had created such a wonder.

The Doomwar came soon thereafter. For seventeen awful years he had simply assumed that all of the beautiful supercomps were dead, like the broken hopes of a nation and a world. But here, by some wonderful miracle, one still lived! Somehow, by pluck and ingenuity, the techs here at Oregon State had managed to keep the machine going through the bad years.

He couldn’t help feeling unworthy and presumptuous to have come posing among such men and women.

Gordon reverently switched off the electric light and lay in bed, listening to the night.

In the distance, the music from the Corvallis hoedown finally ended with a whooping cheer. Then he could hear the crowd dispersing for home. Finally, the night quieted down. There was wind in the trees outside his window, and the faint whine of the nearby compressors that kept the delicate brain of Cyclops supercold.

And there was something else, as well. Through the night came a rich, soft, sweet sound that he could barely place, though it tugged at his memory.

After a while it came to him, at last. Somebody, probably one of the technicians, was playing classical music on a stereo.

A stereo . . . Gordon tasted the word. After fifteen years of listening to banjos and fiddles . . . to hear Beethoven once again . . .

Sleep came at last, and the symphony blended into his dreaming. It rose and fell, and finally melded with a gentle, melodious voice that spoke to him across the decades. An articulated metal hand extended past the fog of years and pointed straight at him.

“Liar!” the voice said softly, sadly. “You disappoint me so. Tell me. How can I help you, my makers, if you tell only lies?”

“This former factory is where we salvage equipment for the Millennium Project. You can see we’ve really hardly begun. We can’t start building true robots, as Cyclops plans for later on, until we’ve recovered some industrial capability.”

Peter Sage, a lanky blond man about Gordon’s own age, must have been only a student at Corvallis State University when war broke out. He was the youngest to wear the black-trimmed white coat of a Servant of Cyclops.

He also was the uncle of the small boy Gordon had rescued in the ruins of Eugene. He had volunteered to show Gordon around Cyclops’s visionary “Millennium Project.”

“Here we’ve begun repairing some small computers and other simple machines,” he told Gordon. “The hardest part is replacing circuits burnt out in those first few instants of the war. It’s painstaking work, but as soon as electricity can be provided on a wider scale we’ll put these microcomputers back in the outlying villages, schools, and machine shops.”

The large, open factory floor lay under a long bank of overhead skylights, so the fluorescents were used sparingly. Still, there was a faint hum of electricity all around. White-coated techs carted equipment to and from vast storage rooms where Gordon had seen the stacked tribute from the surrounding towns and hamlets—payment for the benign guidance of Cyclops. Machinery of all kinds, especially electronic, was piled on great shelves, and more came in every day.

That salvage—plus a small tithe of food and clothing for Cyclops’s servants—was easily spared by the people of the valley. They had no use for the old machines anyway. No wonder there were no complaints of a “tyranny by machine.” The supercomputer’s price was easily met.

“Cyclops has planned out the transition well,” Sage explained. “Besides a small assembly line for water and wind turbines, we’ve started a charging facility for Nicad batteries. By distributing old hand video games to children in the valley, we hope to make them receptive for better things, such as computers, when the time comes.”

Gordon passed a bench where gray-haired workers bent over flashing lights and screens bright with computer code. He felt as if he had stepped into a wondrous workshop where shattered dreams were being put back together by earnest, friendly gnomes.

Most of the technicians were now well into or past middle age. To Gordon it seemed they were in a hurry to accomplish as much as possible before the educated generation passed away forever.

“Of course now that contact has been re-established with the Restored U.S.,” Peter Sage continued, “we can hope to make faster progress. For instance, we could give you a long list of chips we haven’t the capability to manufacture. They would make a world of difference. Only eight ounces worth could push Cyclops’s program ahead by four years, if Saint Paul City can provide what we need.”

Gordon didn’t want to meet the fellow’s eyes. He bent to look over a disassembled computer.

“I know little about such matters,” he said, swallowing. “Anyway, back East there have been other priorities than distributing video games.”

He had said it that way in order not to lie any more than he had to. But the Servant of Cyclops paled as if he had been struck.

“Oh. I’m sorry, I forgot. Of course they’ve had to deal with terrible radiation and plagues and famine back East. I guess maybe we’ve been pretty lucky here in Oregon. We’ll just have to manage on our own until the rest of the country can help out.”

Gordon nodded. Both men were speaking literal truths, but only one knew how sadly true the words were.

He looked at his old-fashioned mechanical watch—one of the techs had adjusted it so that it no longer ran half a minute fast on the hour. “My interview is in ten minutes, Peter,” he reminded his guide.

“Ah. Of course. We mustn’t be late, or Cyclops will scold us!” He grinned, but Gordon got the feeling Sage was only partly jesting.

“I do hope your talk with Cyclops goes well, Gordon,” his guide said as they exited the repair facility. “We’re all excited to be in contact with the rest of the country again, of course. I’m sure Cyclops will want to cooperate in any way he can.”

Gordon steeled himself to playing out the charade. “I hope so,” he said.

But as he followed Peter Sage across the neatly mowed lawn toward the House of Cyclops, Gordon wondered. Had he imagined it, or had he seen, for just a moment, a strange expression in the tech’s eyes—one of profound and sad guilt?

The foyer of the House of Cyclops—once the OSU Artificial Intelligence Laboratory—was a striking reminder of a more elegant era. The gold carpet was freshly vacuumed and only slightly faded. Bright fluorescents shone on fine furniture in the paneled waiting area, where peasants and officials from villages as far as forty miles away nervously twisted rolled-up petitions as they waited for their brief interviews with the great machine.

When the waiting townsmen and farmers saw Gordon enter all of them stood up. A few of the more daring approached, and earnestly shook his hand in calloused, work-roughened clasps. The hope and wonder was so intense in their eyes, it took a little while to disengage politely. Finally, the pretty receptionist at the end of the foyer smiled and motioned them through.

As Gordon and his guide passed down the long hallway to the interview chamber, two men approached from the other end. One was a Servant of Cyclops, in the black-trimmed white coat. The other—a citizen dressed in a frayed but carefully tended prewar suit—frowned over a long sheet of computer printout.

“I’m still not sure I understand, Dr. Grober. Is Cyclops sayin’ we dig the well near the north hollow or not? His answer isn’t any too clear, if you ask me.”

“Now, Herb, you tell your people it isn’t Cyclops’s job to figure everything. He can narrow down the choices, but he can’t make the final decisions for you.”

“Sure, everybody knows that. But why can’t he be clearer this time?”

“Well, for one thing, it’s been over twenty years since the geological maps in Cyclops’s memory banks were updated. Then you’re certainly aware that Cyclops was designed to talk to high-level experts, so of course a lot of his explanations will go over our heads . . . even the few of us scientists who survived.”

“Yes, but . . .” At that moment the citizen glanced up and saw Gordon. He moved as if to remove the hat he was not wearing. Then he wiped his hand and nervously extended it.

“Herb Kalo of Sciotown, Mr. Inspector. This is indeed an honor, sir.”

Gordon muttered pleasantries as he shook the man’s hand.

“Yes sir, Mr. Inspector. An honor! I sure hope you’re planning to come up our way and set up a post office for us. I can promise you a wingding like you’ve never . . .”

“Now, Herb, Mr. Kranz is here for a meeting with Cyclops,” the older technician looked at his digital watch pointedly.

Kalo blushed and nodded. “Remember that invite, Mr. Kranz. We’ll take good care of you . . .” He seemed almost to bow as he backed down the hall toward the foyer.

Gordon’s cheeks felt as if they were on fire.

Gordon’s life in the wilderness had made his ears more sensitive than these townsmen perhaps realized. So when he heard a mutter of argument ahead—as he and his guide approached the open door of the conference room—Gordon purposely slowed down to brush lint from his uniform.

“. . . how do we even know those documents he showed us were real!” someone asked. “Sure they had seals all over them, but they still looked pretty crude. And that story about laser satellites is pretty damn pat, if you ask me.”

“It also explains why we’ve heard nothing in fifteen years!” another voice replied. “And if he were faking, how would you explain those letters that courier brought? Elias Murphy over in Albany heard from his long-lost sister. And George Seavers has left his farm in Greenbury to go see his wife in Curtin, after all these years thinking she was dead!”

“I don’t see where it matters,” a third voice said softly. “The people believe, and that’s what counts. . . .”

Peter Sage hurried ahead and cleared his throat at the doorway. As Gordon followed, four white-coated men and two women rose from a polished oak table in the softly lit conference room. All except Peter had hair that had grayed over the years.

Gordon shook hands all around, but it was still a good thing he had met them all earlier; for it would have been impossible to remember introductions under these circumstances. He tried to be polite but his gaze kept drifting to the broad sheet of thick glass that split the meeting room in half.

The table suddenly ended at the glass. Although the conference room’s lighting was low, the chamber beyond was even darker. A single spotlight shone on a shimmering, opalescent face—like a pearl, or a moon in the night.

Below the gleaming gray camera lens was a dark cylinder upon which were two banks of little flashing lights, rippling in a complex pattern that seemed to repeat over and over again.

Something in the pattern of lights touched Gordon inside . . . he couldn’t pin down exactly how. It was hard to tear his gaze away.

The machine was swaddled in a soft cloud of thick vapor. And although the glass was thick, Gordon felt a faint but definite sense of cold coming from the far end of the room.

The First Servant, Dr. Edward Taigher, took Gordon by the arm and faced the glass eye.

“Cyclops,” he said “I’d like you to meet Mr. Gordon Kranz. He has presented credentials showing him to be a United States Government postal inspector, and representative of the restored republic.

“Mr. Kranz, may I present Cyclops.”

Gordon looked at the pearly lens—at the flashing lights and the drifting fog—and had to quash the feeling of being a small child who had seriously over-reached himself in his lies.

“It is very good to meet you, Gordon. Please, be seated.”

The gentle voice had a perfect human timbre. It came from a speaker set on the end of the oak table. Gordon sat in a padded chair Peter Sage offered. There was a pause. Then Cyclops spoke again.

“The tidings you bring are joyous, Gordon. After all these years caring for the people of the lower Willamette, it seems almost too good to be true. It has been rewarding, working with my friends who insist on calling themselves my ‘servants.’ But it has also been lonely and hard, imagining the rest of the world in ruins.

“So please tell me, Gordon. Do any of my brothers still survive in the East?”

Finding his voice, Gordon shook his head.

“No, Cyclops. I’m sorry. None of the other great machines made it through the destruction. I’m afraid you are the very last of your species left alive.”

Though he regretted having to give it the news, he hoped it was a good omen to be able to start out telling the truth.

Cyclops was silent for a long moment. Surely it was only his imagination when Gordon thought he heard a faint sigh, almost like a sob.

During the long pause the tiny parity lights below the camera lens went on flashing repetitiously, as if saying something to him over and over again in some secret, hidden language.

Gordon knew he had to keep talking, or be lost in that hypnotic pattern. “Uh, in fact, Cyclops, most of the big computers died in the first seconds of the war—you know, the electromagnetic pulses. I can’t help being curious how you yourself survived it.”

Like Gordon, the machine seemed to shake aside a sad contemplation in order to answer.

“That is a good question. It turns out that my survival was a fortunate accident of timing. You see the war broke out on Visitor’s Day, here at OSU. When the pulses flew I happened to be in my Faraday Cage for a public demonstration. So you see . . .”

Interested as he was in Cyclops’s story, Gordon felt a momentary sense of victory. He had taken the initiative in this interview, asking questions exactly as a “federal inspector” would. He glanced at the serious faces of the human Servants, and knew he had won a small victory. They were taking him very seriously.

Maybe this would work out, after all!

Still, he avoided looking at the rippling lights, and soon he felt himself begin to sweat even in the coolness near the superchilled pane of glass.

In four days the meetings and negotiations were over. Suddenly, before he had expected, it was time to leave again.

Peter Sage walked with him. “I’m sorry it took so long, Gordon. I know you’ve been anxious to get back to building your postal network. Cyclops only wanted to fix up the right itinerary for you, so you can swing through north Oregon most efficiently.”

“That’s okay,” Gordon sighed, pretending. “The delay wasn’t too bad, and I appreciate the help.”

If Peter only knew how much Gordon would have preferred to stay! He had grown to love the simple comfort of his room, the large and pleasant commissary meals, the impressive library of well-cared-for books.

Most of all he would miss the electric light by his bed.

Gordon had the distinct feeling that most of the Servants of Cyclops were happy to be rid of him. It was his role, of course. It made them nervous. Perhaps, deep inside, they sensed some falseness. He really couldn’t blame them.

Even if the majority of the techs believed his story, they had little reason to love a representative of a remote “government” certain to meddle in what they had spent so long building. They talked about eagerness for„contact with the outisde world. But Gordon sensed that many of them felt it would be an imposition, at best.

Not that they really had anything to fear, of course.

Gordon still wasn’t sure about the attitude of Cyclops itself. The great machine who had taken responsibility for an entire valley had been rather tentative and distant during their interviews. There had been no jokes, or clever puns, only a smooth and involute seriousness. The coolness had been a bit disappointing after his memory of that long ago day in Minneapolis.

Of course his recollection of that other supercomputer long ago might have been colored by time. Cyclops and its servants had accomplished so much here. He was not one to judge.

All he was sure of was that he was determined to do what he could to help. He would go on with the postman charade in order to be useful in the only way he could. Perhaps when he returned, with a mail network in place, he could confide the truth to Cyclops.

Perhaps it would even forgive him.

A pair of tan-jacketed guards tipped their hats as Gordon and Sage turned the comer of the House of Cyclops on their way to the stables.

“It looks like there was a lot of fighting here once,” Gordon commented.

Peter frowned at the memory. “We fought one of the AntiTech mobs right here by the old utility shed. You can see the melted transformers and the old emergency generator. We had to convert to wind and water power after they blew it up.”

Blackened shards of power-converting machinery still lay in shrivelled heaps where the techs had fought desperately to save their lifework. It reminded Gordon of his other worry.

“I still think more ought to be done about the possibility of a survivalist invasion, Peter. It’ll come soon, if I overheard those scouts right.”

“But you admit you only heard scraps of conversation that could have been misinterpreted,” Peter shrugged. “We’ll beef up our patrols, of course, as soon as we can draw up plans and discuss the matter some more. But you must understand that Cyclops has his own credibility to consider. There hasn’t been a general mobilization in ten years. If Cyclops made such a call, and it turned out to be a false alarm . . .”

He let the implication hang.

Gordon knew that local village leaders had misgivings over his story. They didn’t want to draw many men from the spring planting. And Cyclops had expressed doubts that the bandit gangs really could organize for a truly major strike several hundred miles upcoast. It just wasn’t in the survivalist mentality, Cyclops explained.

Gordon finally had to take the great machine’s word for it. After all, in its superconducting memory banks it had access to nearly every psychology text ever written.

Perhaps, he told himself, the Rogue River scouts were merely on a smalltime raid, and had talked big to impress themselves.

The stable hands saddled his new mount, a fine, strong gelding. A large, placid mare carried supplies and two bulging sacks of hope-filled mail. If one in twenty of the intended recipients still lived, it would be a miracle. But for those few a single letter might mean a lot.

Perhaps enough to counterbalance a great lie . . .

Gordon swung up onto the gelding. He patted and spoke to the spirited animal until it was calm.

“We’ll see you again in three months, when you swing by on your way back east again.” Peter Sage offered his hand. “By then Cyclops promises to have a proper report on conditions here in north Oregon worked up for your superiors.”

Sage gripped Gordon’s hand for another moment. Once again Gordon was puzzled. The fellow looked as if, somehow, he were unhappy about something he could not say.

“Godspeed in your valuable work, Gordon,” he said earnestly. “If there’s ever anything I can do to help, anything at all, be sure to let me know.”

Gordon nodded. No more words were needed, thank heaven. He nudged the gelding, and swung about onto the road north. The pack horse followed close behind.

5.

Sciotown

The Servants of Cyclops had told him the Interstate was broken up and unsafe north of Corvallis, so Gordon used a county road that paralleled not far to the west. Debris and potholes made for slow going, and he was forced to take his lunch in the ruins of the town of Buena Vista.

It was still fairly early in the afternoon, but clouds were gathering, and tattered shreds of fog blew down the rubble-strewn streets.

By coincidence, it was the day when area farmers gathered in a park in the center of the unpopulated town for a country market. Gordon chatted with them as he munched on cheese and bread from his saddlebags.

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with the Interstate up here,” one of the farmers told him, shaking his head in puzzlement. “Them perfessers must not get out this way much. They aren’t lean travelin’ men such as yourself, Mr. Kranz. Must’ve got their wires crossed, for all their buzzin’ brains.” The farmer chuckled at his own weak pun.

Gordon didn’t mention that his itinerary had been planned by Cyclops itself. He thanked the fellow and went back to his saddlebags to pull out the topographic map he had been given.

It was covered with an impressive array of computer-graphics, charting out in fine symbols the path he was should take in establishing a postal network in northern Oregon. The itinerary was supposed to be designed to take him most efficiently through north Oregon, avoiding hazards such as known lawless areas and the belt of radioactivity near Portland.

Gordon stroked his beard, puzzled. Cyclops had to know what it was doing. Yet the winding path looked anything but efficient to him.

Against his will he began to suspect it was designed instead to take him far out of his way.

But why would Cyclops want to do such a thing?

It couldn’t be that the super machine feared his interference. By now Gordon knew just the right pitch to ease such anxiety . . . emphasizing that the “Restored U.S” had no intention to meddle in local matters. Cyclops had appeared to believe him.

Gordon lowered the map. Drifts of fog flowed along the dusty street. A fluff swirled between him and his reflection in a surviving storefront windowpane.

The foggy wisps reminded him of superchilled vapor—his reflection in the cool glass wall as he met with Cyclops back in Corvallis—and the strangeness he had felt from watching the rows of little flashing lights, repeating the same rippling pattern over and over. . . .

Repeating . . .

Suddenly Gordon’s spine felt very cold.

“No,” he whispered. “Please, God.” He closed his eyes.

He felt an almost overwhelming need to change his thoughts onto another track, to think about the weather, about pretty little Abby back in Pine View, about anything but . . .

“But who would do such a thing?” he protested aloud. “Why would they do it?”

Reluctantly, he realized he knew why. He was an expert on the strongest reason why people told lies.

Recalling the blackened wreckage behind the House of Cyclops, he found himself all at once wondering how the techs could possibly have accomplished what they claimed to have done.

It had been almost two decades since Gordon had thought about physics, and what could or could not be done with technology. The intervening years had been filled with the struggle to survive—and his persistent dreams of a golden place of renewal. He was in no position to say what was or was not possible.

But he had to find out if his wild suspicion was true! He could not sleep until he knew for sure.

“Excuse me!” he called to one of the farmers. The fellow gave Gordon a gap-toothed grin and sauntered over, doffing his hat. “What can I do for you, Mr. Inspector?”

Gordon pointed out a spot on the map, no more than ten miles from Buena Vista as the crow flew. “This place, Sciotown, do you know how to get there?”

“Sure do, boss. If you hurry, you can get there tonight.”

“I’ll hurry,” Gordon assured the man. “You can bet your ass I’ll hurry.”

“Just a darn minute! I’m coming!” the mayor of Sciotown hollered. But the knock on his door went on insistently.

Herb Kalo carefully lit his new oil lantern—made by a craft commune five miles west of Corvallis. He recently had traded two hundred pounds of Sciotown’s best potterywork for twenty of the fine lamps and three thousand matches from Albany, a deal sure to mean his re-election this fall.

The knocking grew louder. “All right! This had better be important!” He threw the bolt and opened the door.

It was Douglas Kee, the man on gate duty. Kalo blinked. “Is there a problem, Doug? What’s the . . .”

“Man here to see you, Herb,” the gateman interrupted. “I wouldn’t of let him in after curfew, but you told us about him when you got back from Corvallis—and I didn’t want to keep him standin’ out in the rain.”

Out of the dripping gloom stepped a tall man in a slick poncho. A shiny badge on his cap glittered in the lamplight. He held out his hand.

“Mr. Mayor, it’s good to see you again. I wonder if we could talk.”

6.

Corvallis

Gordon had never expected to forsake an offer of a bed and a hot meal to go galloping off into a rainy night, but this time he had no choice. He had commandeered the best horse in the Sciotown stables, but if he had had to, he would have run all the way.

The filly moved surefootedly down the old county road toward Corvallis. She was brave, and trotted as fast as Gordon considered marginally safe in the dark. Fortunately, a nearly full moon lit the ragged, leaky clouds from above.

Gordon feared he had left the mayor of Sciotown in a state of utter confusion. Sparing no time for pleasantries, he had come straight to the point, sending Herb Kalo hurrying back to his office to retrieve a neatly folded fan of paper.

Gordon had taken the printout over to the lamp, and carefully pored over the lines of text.

“How much did this advice cost you, Mr. Mayor?” he asked without looking up.

“Only a little, Inspector,” Kalo answered nervously. “Cyclops’s prices have been dropping as more villages have joined the trade pact. And there was a discount because the advice was kinda vague.”

“How much?” Gordon insisted.

“Uh, well. We found about ten of those old handheld vid-games, plus about fifty rechargable batteries. Oh yes, and an old home computer that wasn’t too badly corroded.”

Gordon suspected that Sciotown actually had much more salvage than that, and was hoarding it for future transactions. It was what he would have done.

“What else?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What else did you pay?” he asked severely.

“Why nothin’ else,” Kalo looked confused. “Unless, of course, you include the food and cloth for the Servants. But that’s got hardly any value compared to th’ other stuff. It’s just added on so’s the scientists will have something to live off while they help Cyclops.”

Gordon breathed heavily. His heart didn’t seem to want to slow down. It all fit, heartbreakingly.

He laboriously read the printout.

“. . . incipient seepage from plate tectonic boundaries . . .” Words he had not seen or thought of in seventeen years rolled off his tongue, tasting like old delicacies, lovingly remembered.

“. . . variation in aquifer sustenance ratios . . . tentative analysis only, due to teleological hesitancy . . .”

“We think we’ve got a line on what Cyclops meant,” Kalo offered. “We’ll start digging at the two best sites come dry season. Of course if we didn’t interpret his advice right, it’ll be our fault. We’ll try agin’ in some other spots he hinted at. . . .”

The mayor’s voice had trailed off, for Gordon was standing very still, staring at empty space.

“Delphi,” Gordon had breathed, hardly above a whisper.

Then the hasty ride through the night had begun.

Years in the wilds had made Gordon hard; all the while the men of Corvallis had suffered prosperity. It was almost ludicrously easy to slip by the guardposts at the city’s edge. He made his way down long empty side streets to the OSU campus, and thence to long-abandoned Moreland Hall. Gordon spared ten minutes to rub down his damp mount and fill a feedbag. He wanted the animal to be in shape in case he needed her quickly.

It was only a short run through the drizzle to the House of Cyclops. When he got near he forced himself to slow down, though he wanted desperately to get this over with.

He ducked out of sight behind the ruins of the old generator building as a pair of guards walked past, shoulders hunched, their rifles covered against the dank.

As he crouched behind the burnt-out shell, the wetness brought to Gordon’s nose—even after all these years—the scent of burning from the blackened timbers and melted wiring. What was it Peter Sage had said about those frantic early days, when authority was falling apart, and the riots raged?

He’d said that they had converted to wind and water power, after the generator house was torched.

Gordon didn’t doubt it would have worked, too, if it were done in time. But could it have been?

When the guards had moved off, Gordon hurried to the side entrance of the House of Cyclops. With a prybar he had brought for the purpose, he broke the padlock in one sharp snap. He listened for a long moment, and when nobody appeared to be coming, he slipped inside.

The back halls of the OSU Artificial Intelligence Lab were dustier than those the public got to see. Racks of forgotten computer tapes, books, papers, all lay under thick layers of dust. Gordon made his way to the central service corridor, almost stumbling twice over debris in the darkness.

He hid behind a pair of double doors as someone passed by, whistling. Then he rose and took a look through the crack.

A man wearing thick gloves and the black and white robe of a Servant put down a thick styrofoam picnic chest by a door down the hall.

“Hey, Elmer!” The man knocked. “I’ve got another load of dry-ice for our lord ’n master. Come on, hurry it up! Cyclops gotta eat!”

Dry ice, Gordon noted.

Another voice was muffled by the door. “Hold your horses. It won’t hurt Cyclops any to wait.”

At last the door opened and light streamed into the hall, along with the heavy beat of an old rock and roll recording.

“What kept you?”

“I had a run going! I was up to a hundred thousand in Missile Command, and didn’t want to interrupt . . .” The closing door cut off the rest. Gordon pushed through and hurried down the hallway.

A little further, he reached another door that was slightly ajar. From within came a narrow line of light, and the sounds of a late-night argument. Gordon paused as he recognized some of the voices.

“I still think we ought to track him down and kill him,” said one. “That fellow could wreck everything we’ve set up here.”

“Oh, I don’t really think he’s much of a threat.” It was the older woman Servant’s voice. “The fellow really seemed rather earnest and harmless.”

“Yeah? Well did you hear those questions he was asking Cyclops? He’s not one of these rubes our average citizen has become after all this time. The man is sharp! And he remembers an awful lot from the old days!”

“So? Maybe we should try to recruit him.”

“No way! The fellow’s an idealist. He’d never do it. I can tell. Our only option is to kill him! Now! And hope it’s years before they send someone else in his place.”

“And I still think you’re crazy,” the woman said. “If the act were ever traced to us, the consequences would be disastrous!”

“I agree with Marjorie.” It was the voice of Dr. Teigher himself. “Not only would the people—our people of Oregon—turn on us, but we’d face the retribution of the rest of the country, if it were found out!”

There was a long pause. Then, the next voice to speak was that of young Peter Sage.

“Haven’t you all forgotten the biggest reason why nobody should touch him, or interfere with him in any way?”

“What’s that?”

“Good lord, hasn’t it occurred to you who this fellow is, and what he represents? How low have we sunk, to even consider doing him harm, when we really owe him our loyalty and any help we can give him!”

The first voice spoke again, without conviction. “You’re just biased because he rescued your nephew, Peter.”

“Perhaps. Or maybe it’s because of the flags.”

“Flags? What flags?”

“Peter is referring to the flags the townsmen have been putting up in all the boroughs in the area. You know, Old Glory? The Stars and Stripes? You should get out more, Ed. Get a feel for what the people are thinking.

“I’ve never seen anything stir the villagers up like it, even before the war.”

There was another long silence before anyone spoke again. Then the woman said, softly, “I wonder what Joseph thinks.”

Gordon frowned. He recognized all the voices inside as senior Servants of Cyclops whom he had met. But he didn’t remember being introduced to anyone named Joseph.

“Joseph went to bed early, I think,” Teigher said. “And that’s where I’m headed now.”

Gordon hurried down the hall as footsteps approached the door. He didn’t much mind being forced to leave his eavesdropping spot. The opinions of the people in the room were of no importance. There was only one voice he wanted to hear right now, and he headed straight to where it could be found.

He ducked around a corner and found himself in the elegant hallway where he had first met Herb Kalo. The light was dim now, but he was able to pick the conference-room lock with pathetic ease.

Gordon’s mouth was dry as he slipped into the chamber. He stepped forward, fighting the urge to walk on tiptoes.

As the door sighed closed behind him, soft light shone on the gray cylinder beyond the glass wall.

“Please,” he wished, “let me be wrong.”

If he was, then surely Cyclops itself would be amused by his chain of faulty deduction. How he longed to share a laugh over his foolish paranoia!

He approached the great glass barrier dividing the room, and the speaker at the end of the table. “Cyclops?” he whispered. He stepped closer, clearing his throat. “Cyclops, it’s me, Gordon.”

The glow on the pearly lens was subdued. But the row of little lights still flashed—a complex pattern that repeated over and over like an urgent message in some lost code—ever, hypnotically the same.

Gordon felt a frantic dread rise within him, like when, as a boy, he had encountered his grandfather lying perfectly still on the porch swing, and feared to find that the beloved old man had died.

The pattern of lights repeated over and over.

Gordon wondered. How many people would recall, after the hell of the last seventeen years, that the parity displays of a great computer never repeated themselves? Gordon remembered a cyberneticist friend telling him that the patterns of lights were like snowflakes, none ever the same as any other.

“Cyclops,” he said evenly. “Answer meh I demand you answer—in the name of decency! In the name of the United St . . .”

He stopped. He couldn’t bring himself to meet this lie with another. Here the only living mind he would fool would be himself.

The room was warmer than it had seemed during his interview.

He looked for, and found, the little vents through which cool air could be directed at a visitor seated in the guest chair, giving the impression of great cold just beyond the glass wall.

“Dry-ice,” he muttered. “To fool the citizens of Oz.”

Dorothy herself could not have felt more betrayed. Gordon had been willing to lay down his life for what had seemed to exist here. And now he knew it was nothing but a cheat. A way for a bunch of surviving sophisticates to fleece their neighbors of food and clothing, and have them grateful for the privilege.

By creating the myth of the “Millennium Project,” and a market for salvaged electronics, they had managed to convince the locals that the old electronic machines were of great value. All through the lower Willamette Valley, people now hoarded home-comps and toys—because Cyclops would accept them in trade for its advice.

The “Servants of Cyclops” had made it so that people like Herb Kalo hardly even counted the tithe of food and cloth that was added for the servants themselves.

The scientists ate well, Gordon remembered. And none of the farmers ever complained.

“It’s not your fault,” he told the silent machine, softly. “You really would have designed the tools, made up for all the lost expertise—shown us the road back. You and your kind were the greatest thing we had ever done. . . .”

He choked, remembering the warm, wise, human voice in Minneapolis, so long ago.

“You are right Gordon. It is nobody’s fault.”

Gordon gasped. In a flash, hope burned that he had been mistaken! It was the voice of Cyclops!

But it had not come from the speaker grille!

He turned quickly, and saw that a thin old man sat in the shadowed back corner of the room, watching him.

“I often come here, you know,” the old man spoke with the voice of Cyclops—a sad voice, filled with regret. “I come to sit with the ghost of my friend, who died so long ago right here in this room.”

He leaned forward a little. The pearly light shone on his face. “My name is Joseph Lazarensky, Gordon. I built Cyclops, so many years ago.” He looked down at his hands. “I oversaw his programming and education. I loved him as I would my own son.

“And like any good father, I was proud to know that he would be a better, kinder, more human being than I had been.”

Lazarensky sighed. “He really did survive the onset of the war, you know. That part of the story is true. Cyclops was in his Faraday Cage, safe from the battle-pulses. And he remained there while we fought to keep him alive.

“The first and only time I ever killed a man was on the night of the AntiTech riots. I helped defend the power house, shooting like somebody crazed.

“But it was no use. The generators were destroyed, even as the militia arrived to drive the mad crowds back.”

The old man spread his hands.

“As you seem to have figured out, Gordon, there was no time to do anything but sit with Cyclops, then, and watch him die.”

Gordon remained very still, standing in the ghostly ashlight. Lazarensky went on.

“We had built up great hopes, you know. Before the riots we had already conceived of the Millennium Plan. Or I should say Cyclops conceived of it. He already had the outlines of a program for rebuilding the world. He needed a couple of months, he said, to work out the details.”

Gordon felt as if his face were made of Stone. He waited silently.

“Do you know anything about quantum-memory bubbles, Gordon? Compared to them, Josephson junctions are made of sticks and mud. The bubbles are as light and fragile as thought. They allow mentation a million times faster then neurons. But they must be kept super-cold to exist at all. And once destroyed, they cannot be remade.

“We tried to save him, but we could not.” The old man looked down again. “I would rather have died myself, that night.”

“So you decided to carry out the plan on your own,” Gordon suggested dryly.

Lazarensky shook his head. “You know better. Without Cyclops the task was impossible. All we could do was present a shell. An illusion.

“It offered a way to survive in the coming Dark Age. All around us was chaos and suspicion. The only leverage we poor intellectuals had was a weak, flickering thing called Hope.”

“Hope!” Gordon spat. Lazarensky shrugged.

“Petitioners come to speak with Cyclops, and they speak with me. It isn’t hard, usually, to give good advice, or to mediate disputes with common sense. They believe in the impartiality of the computer where they would never trust a living man.”

“And where you can’t come up with a common sense answer, you go oracular on them.”

Again the shrug. “It worked at Delphi and Ephesus, Gordon. And honestly, where is the harm?

“The people of the Willamette have seen too many power-hungry monsters over the last twenty years to unite under any man or group of men. But they remember the machines! As they recall that ancient uniform you wear, even though in better days they so often treated it with disrespect.”

There were voices in the hall. They passed close by, then faded away. Gordon stirred. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

Lazarensky laughed. “Oh don’t worry about the others. They’re all talk and no action. They aren’t like you at all.

“You’re a rarity, Gordon. Somehow out there in the wilderness you managed to retain a modern mind, while gaining a strength suited for these times. Even if that bunch did try to harm you, you would outsmart them.”

Gordon moved to the door, then stopped. He turned and looked back one last time at the soft light from the dead machine, the parity displays rippling hopelessly over and over again.

“I’m not so smart.” His breath was hard in his throat.

“You see, I believed!”

He met Lazarensky’s eyes, and finally the old man looked down heavily, unable to answer. Gordon stumbled out then, leaving behind the crypt and its corpses.

He made it back to where his mount was tethered as the faint glimmers of dawn were lightening the east. He remounted and with his heels he tiredly guided the filly up the service road to the north.

Within he felt a hollow grief. It was as if a freezing cold had locked up his heart. Nothing within him could move, for fear of shattering the precarious state.

He had to get away from this place. That much was clear. Let the fools have their myths. He was finished!

He would not return to Sciotown, where he had left the mail-bags. That was behind him now. He began unbuttoning the blouse of his uniform, intending to drop it in a roadside ditch—along, forever, with his share in all the lying.

Unbidden, a phrase echoed in his mind.

Who will take responsibility now . . .?

What? He shook his head to clear it, but the words would not go away.

Who will take responsibility now, for these foolish children?

Gordon cursed and dug in his heels. The horse gamely trotted northward, away hopefully forever from Oz.

Who will take responsibility . . .

The words repeated over and over again within his head, like a tune that would not let go.

It was the same rhythm, he realized at last, as the parity display on the face of the old, dead machine, rippling again and again.

. . . for these foolish children?

The filly trotted on as a strange thought occured to Gordon. What if—at the end of its life, as the last of the liquid helium evaporated away and the deadly heat rushed in—what if the final thought of the innocent, wise machine had somehow been caught in a loop, preserved in peripheral circuits, to flash forlornly over and over again?

Would that qualify as a ghost?

He wondered, what would Cyclops’s final thoughts, its last words, have been?

Can a man be haunted by the ghost of a machine?

Gordon shook his head. He was tired, or else he would not think up such nonsense. Yet the words echoed round and round in his head. Who will take responsibility now . . .

It took a few moments, at first, for him to recognize the sounds of faint shouting behind him. Gordon pulled up on the reins and turned to look back, his hand resting on the butt of his revolver. Anyone who pursued him did so at great peril. Lazarensky had been right about one thing. Gordon knew he was more than a match for this bunch.

He saw there was a flurry of frantic activity in front of the House of Cyclops. But the commotion apparently did not have to do with him.

Gordon shaded his eyes against the glare of the new sun, and saw steam rising from a pair of heavily lathered horses. One exhausted man stumbled up the steps of the House of Cyclops, shouting at those hurrying to his side. Another messenger, apparently badly wounded, was being tended on the ground.

Gordon heard one word cried out loudly. It told all.

“Survivalists!”

Gordon had one word to offer in reply. “Shit,” he muttered, and he turned the filly back around northward.

A day ago he would have helped. He had been willing to lay down his life trying to save Cyclops’s dream, and probably would have.

He would have died for a hollow farce, a ruse, a con-game!

If the survivalist invasion had really begun, the villagers south of Eugene would put up a good fight. The raiders would turn north toward the front of least resistance.

The soft north Willametters didn’t stand a chance against the Rogue River men.

Still, there probably weren’t enough survivalists to take the entire valley. Corvallis would fall, but there would be other places to go. Perhaps he would head east on highway 22, and swing back around to Pine View. It would be nice to see Mrs. Thompson again. Maybe he could be there when Abby’s baby arrived.

The filly trotted on. The shouts died away behind him, like a bad memory slowly fading. It promised to be fair weather, the first in weeks without clouds. A good day for traveling.

As Gordon rode on, a cool breeze blew through his half open shirtfront. A hundred yards down the road he found his hand drifting to the buttons again, twisting one slowly, back and forth.

The pony sauntered to a halt. Gordon sat, his shoulders hunched forward.

Who will take responsibility . . .

The words would not go away, lights pulsing his mind.

The horse tossed her head and snorted, pawing at the ground.

“Aw, hell!” Gordon cursed aloud. Calling himself every name he could imagine, he wheeled the filly about, sending her cantering southward.

A confused, frightened crowd of men and women ceased their terrified babble and stepped back into hushed silence as he clattered up to the portico of the House of Cyclops. His spirited mount danced and blew as he stared down at the people for a long, silent moment.

Finally, Gordon threw his poncho back. He rebuttoned his shirt and set the postman’s cap on his head so the bright brass rider shone in the light of the rising sun.

Then he began pointing and giving terse commands.

In the name of survival—and the Restored United States—the people of Corvallis and the servants of Cyclops hurried to obey.

SUMMER SOLSTICE

Charles L. Harness

Scientific pioneers inevitably face problems; so do travelers dependent on machines. Sometimes they can help each other. . . .

1. The Ship Is Hit

Even as the sleeper lid rose, Khor could see the console lights flashing and he could hear the intermittent buzzer.

The break-sleep alarm. Very often the last sound some spacemen ever heard. His blood pressure began to mount. He wasn’t even completely awake, and his body was doing this to him. He shuddered. He would not see home again. Never again the stem Zoology Supervisor. (“What. Khor, still no featherless biped?” And Queva . . . she had taken the sleep, to wait for him. Beloved Queva. She had given him the key to her casket. “You alone will open. Else I sleep forever.” No, Queva, no, no, no . . . I may never return. But she had done it. The female mind . . . beyond all comprehension. Well, my friend, what now?)

He deciphered the alarm code mentally as he clambered up from the cushions: the hydraulic system had been hit, aft. Bad, bad. He had a dreadful premonition of what he would find. Get to it. Know the worst.

He ran a finger around his helmet seal, brushing his scapular feathers. Still air-tight. Next he sat on the side of the casket and wondered whether he should remove his helmet. He decided to leave it on. At least for the moment he wouldn’t have to make any decisions about cabin pressure and oxygen.

The alarms—all of them—had now become impatient with him. They had moved from console and wall and had invaded his guts and brain like barbed parasites. “Xeris and Mord.” he groaned.

He reached for his heat-suit and simultaneously glanced at the ceiling meter. How long had he been under? Forty cycles. Long time. He closed the suit up and clumped over to the console. First turn off that pflicht alarm. Now back to the tail of the ship.

Air pressure apparently holding. Which meant the hole in the ship wall self-sealed in good order. The missile—a meteorite?—couldn’t have been too big. So why hadn’t internal automatic repair handled the problem? As he rounded the passage, the answer literally hit him in the face. A jet of oil struck his visor. The pin hackles on his neck and face stood out in panic. By reflex his hands grabbed the valve wheel and extinguished the flow. He wiped his visor with his sleeve. “By the egg that bore me!” He felt sick. How much fluid had he lost? From the looks of the balls of glop floating weightlessly around him, at least half. How was it possible? Not just one leak? He played the inspection light along the piping array. The whole tubular system was dripping. Some of the holes were big enough to see. Others were microscopic, hiding behind tiny globules of fluid. The meteorite had evidently struck a brittle section of the ship wall, which then had imploded into a thousand high-velocity fragments. He had warned Maintenance last time in. The skin was fatiguing. The chief mechanic had laughed at him.

He sighed and looked around. Oil everywhere. Mocking clusters. All sizes.

Where could he find make-up fluid in this Zaforsaken corner of the galaxy? And repair-tape? He’d used the last of his tape on the solar batteries . . . how many cycles ago?

“Khor.” he muttered gloomily, “you sorry misbegotten space scavenger, you are in serious trouble.” He’d have to land. Very funny. (You had to have a sense of humor for these collection missions.) To land, he’d have to find a planet. And not just any planet. One with a civilization sufficiently advanced to supply his needs.

He shuffled back through the collection area, toward the control room. He passed the cage with the ten-legged carnivorous reptile, now quietly sleeping its drugged sleep in the corner. Past the telepathic tree that had tried to charm him into its gluey branches as its next meal. Past the floating head-size ball of fluff that seemed to have no mouth, no food, and no alimentary system, but which had doubled in size since he had first captured it on Sargus-VI. And finally the empty cage: “Featherless biped.” Where in the name of Xippor the Remorseless was he to find such an unlikely specimen? You can at least try, the Supervisor had admonished him. There are a lot of unexplored planets out there.

And so to the pilot-console, where he activated the chart screen. Nearest star . . . there we are. Yellow, medium size. Third generation. Has all ninety-two elements. How about planets? Big one. Too big. And too far out. Also that one with the gorgeous ring. No. The red one? No air. Next. There’s one . . . plenty of water, probably good air. Life? Maybe. Civilization? Maybe. Go on. Two more. Both too hot. Back up to III. No choice, really. I’m going in.

2. Ne-tiy Introspects

Ne-tiy knelt and stared into the mirrowing surface of the lotus-pool. She liked what she saw: a young woman of excellent figure, with a face possibly bordering on the beautiful. That figure was sheathed in the classic linen tube, falling almost to her sandals, and supported by broad shoulder straps covering her breasts.

She touched her cheeks just below the eyes. There was a certain sadness about her eyes. She would like to use a little kohl at the comers for cheerful emphasis, and perhaps a little red iron oxide to highlight her cheeks, but her owner, the great priest, had strictly forbidden it. “You live for one thing, and that is not to adorn yourself.” And what was that one thing? If and when the priest gave the signal, she was to offer the poisoned wine to a certain person.

She tried hard not to think about it. But it was no use. She could think of nothing else.

The priest, who served only the sungod Horus, had bought her in the slave market at On. ten years ago. Her parents had been imprisoned for debt, and she had been turned over to the temple of the cat goddess, Bast. And then things had become blurred. She remembered she had cried a lot. Things had been done to her. In the end she knew only fear, hate, and that she was going to endure.

And then the great inquisitor priest, Hor-ent-yotf, had bought her, and had taught her certain skills. “You will enter the house of the Librarian,” he had said. “You will listen to all that he does and says.”

“Why, my lord?”

“Why is not your concern.”

But she knew why. Hor-ent-yotf (the name meant avenger of the father of Horus) was licensed by the Greek pharaoh to sniff out heresy and impiety in the low and the high. Especially in the high, for they were the most influential. Anything demeaning the sun-god Horus was suspect. The penalty was death. She shivered.

If she were called upon to kill Eratosthenes, what would she do?

For six months she had lived as a trusted servant in his house. He knew horses, and had taught her. She had driven his chariot. He liked that. His family raised thoroughbreds, back in Cyrene, where the pasturage was rich and blue-green. When she drove with him, her body rubbed against his within the light wicker framework of the vehicle. Something had awakened within her. And now it had come to this: to be near him was torture, and not to be near him was worse.

She stared down into the pool and passed her fingertips slowly over her abdomen. “How can I ever bear his child? He doesn’t know I exist. I need to be rich. I need exalted office. High priestess of some god or other. But it is hopeless, for I am nothing, and I will remain nothing.”

A shadow fell on the water. She arose and turned slowly, impassively, head bowed. She did not need to look up. She saw without seeing: the shaven bald pate, eyes lengthened by dark cosmetics, the thin pleated linen skirt with cape, the leopard skin, complete with claws, tail, and fanged, glaring head. His hands hung at his sides. Her eyes rested on his long fingernails.

On his right hand he wore three deaths, shaped as rings, each with its tiny jeweled capsule. First was the copper ring, which had a capsule shaped as Set. the god of darkness. On the middle finger was the silver ring, bearing the face of the evil goddess Sckhmet, who slew Osiris. Finally was the gold ring, on his fourth finger. Its capsule was a sardonic bow to the Greek conquerors, for it bore the face of their god Charon, who ferried their dead across the River Styx to Hades.

The faint north wind moved a sharp blanket of incense around her face. She realized that it had been the smell that had announced him.

“Where is he?” said Hor-ent-yotf.

“He has gone forth into the streets, my lord.”

“When does he return?”

“In the afternoon.”

“I have reason to think he has found the directions for the tomb of the heretic pharaoh Tut-ankh-amun. Has he mentioned this?”

“No, my lord.”

“Be watchful.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“There is another matter. In a seclude courtyard at the Library he is making a measurement of the disc of Horus. Listen carefully. Let me know if he says anything about it.”

“As my lord wishes.” She listened to the sandals crunching away down the pea-gravel path. Then she turned back to the pool, as though trying to hide in the beauty of the flowered rim. The Greeks had brought strange and beautiful flowers to Alexandria: asphodels, marigolds, a tiny claret-colored vetch, irises purple and deep blue. Purple and white anemones, scarlet poppies.

She wished she were a simple, mindless blossom, required only to be beautiful.

Ah, Hor-ent-yotf, great Avenger, thou demi-god. I know you well. Your mother was impregnated by the ka of Horus the hawk-god, divine bearer of the sun disc. Flights of golden hawks whirred over your house at your birth, calling and whistling to you. So it was said. As a boy apprentice in the temple at Thebes, you saw the glowing god descend from the sun. and he spoke to you. Avenge me, the god said. Find the tomb of Tut-ankh-amun. who married the third daughter of the heretic pharaoh Ikhnaton, who denied me. Destroy that tomb, and all that is within.

So it was said.

She shivered again.

3. Rabbi Ben Shem

Eratosthenes had been wandering the streets for an hour, vaguely aware of the sights, sounds, and smells of Alexandria at high noon.

The Brucheum, the royal quarter of the great city, was totally Greek, as Greek as Athens, or Corinth, or even far Cyrene, where he was born. As thoroughly Greek as the great Alexander had intended, when he strode about this shore opposite the Isle of Pharos, a bare eighty years ago and said: build the walls here, the temples there, yonder the theatre, gymnasium, baths. . . . The mole, the Heptastadia, was built from the city out to the island, dividing the sea into two great harbors. Ptolemy Philadelphus kept his warships in the eastern harbor. Commercial shipping used the western harbor.

Alexandria, the greatest city in the world, the Gem of the Nile, the Pearl of the Mediterranean, was indeed Greek. But more than Greek. All races lived here. Egyptians, of course. And Jews, Nubians, Syrians, Persians, Romans, Carthaginians. (Those last two were quite civil to each other here in the city, though several thousand stadia to the west their countrymen were happily slaughtering each other on Sicily and adjacent seas.)

He was passing now through the northeast sector, along the Street of the Hebrews. The Jews had a specially elegant quarter, a politeumata set aside for them by Alexander himself, in gratitude for their help in his Persian campaigns.

“Greetings.”

He looked up. Was someone calling to him? Yes, there was the rabbi, Elisha ben Shem, coming down the steps of the synagogue. “Greetings, noble Eratosthenes!”

The geometer-librarian bowed graciously. “Peace to the House of Shem! How goes the translation?”

“Oh, very well indeed.” The priest stroked his flowing silver beard and chuckled. “Why I laugh. I do not know. It really isn’t funny.”

Eratosthenes looked doubtful. “Well, then . . .?”

Ben Shem grinned. “You have to be Jewish to see it, my friend. You and I converse in Greek, the tongue of the Hellenes. I am also fluent in classical Hebrew, in which our holy scriptures were written. I can also speak Aramaic and the other local dialects of Judea. But did you know there are forty thousand Jews here in Alexandria who speak, read, and write Greek and only Greek? They can’t read a word of the Books of Moses, and the Psalms of David are mysteries to them.”

“I knew that,” said the man of measures. “That’s why Ptolemy brought seventy scholars from Jerusalem here to translate the Hebrew texts into Greek. Seventy. The Septuagint. Actually, seventy-two, wasn’t it?”

Ben Shem sighed. “Ah, Eratosthenes my dear boy. So learned. So earnest. But think of it! Jews translating Hebrew into Greek for Jews. Where is the subtle sense of irony, the love of paradox, that set your ancestors apart from peasant minds? If you had your way, Achilles would overtake Zeno’s hare with a single pulse beat.”

“Rabbi . . .”

“Oh, never mind.” He turned his head a little. “You are still attempting to determine the size and shape of the Earth?”

“Yes, still at it.”

“Are you close to a solution?”

“Now, rabbi. You know I must report all findings first to his majesty.”

“Yes, of course.” He cleared his throat. “You will be at the palace tonight? To celebrate the coming of the Nile flood?” They stopped before the residence of the priest.

“I’ll be there,” said Eratosthenes.

4. The Stone Cutter

He crossed the great intersection at the magnificent mausolea. Here Alexander was laid to rest, in a marvelous glass-and-gold coffin. And in the tomb adjacent, the first Ptolemy. Beyond, to the west, lay the Rhacotis, originally the haunt of fishermen and pirates. Now, however, eighty years after the Conqueror had paced out the unborn city, it was full of the run-down shops and abodes of artisans, poets (mostly starving), and astrologers, raffish theatres, baths (some clean), slums, and certain facilities for sailors.

And so into the Street of Stone Cutters, and the first shop on the corner. He could hear the strike of chisels well before he entered the work yard. In the center, four slaves stripped to loin cloths chipped away at a copy of the Cnidus Aphrodite, The assistant project master hovered about the crew anxiously, calling, coaxing, occasionally screaming. They all ignored the newcomer. Eratosthenes shrugged and passed on into the shop. Little bells rang somewhere and the man behind the counter looked up. squinting and coughing. Stone dust had long ago impaired his eyes and lungs. “Ah, Eratosthenes,” he muttered, rising. “Greetings, and welcome to my humble shop.” He groaned softly as he tried to bow.

“And greetings to you, good Praphicles. I trust the gods are kind?”

“Alas, great geometer, business is terrible. When our present commissions are completed I expect that we shall starve.”

The visitor smiled. Business was always terrible and starvation always lay in wait for the old fraud. Even in his semi-blindness Praphicles was still the most highly skilled of stone workers in the quarter. He turned away clients, and he owned half the real estate on the waterfront.

“Well, then,” said Eratosthenes drily, “before the gods utterly abandon you, perhaps we had better conclude our business.”

“Ah yes.” The ancient master reached down into a cupboard under the counter, pulled out the work, and laid it carefully on the cedar surface.

It was a statuette of the Titan Atlas, bent, with arms arched backwards and up. as though already holding his great burden. Earth. It was cut front the famous red granite of Syene. The base held an inscription in Greek, which Eratosthenes verified by reading slowly to himself.

The old sculptor’s eyes never left him.

“It is beautiful,” said the visitor. “The years have not dimmed your hands, old friend. Your fingers grow even more skillful, if that is possible.” He pulled a purse from his cloak and dropped it to the counter. “The balance.”

Praphicles made no move toward the little leather bag. He said. “The commission was interesting, especially in what was not commissioned.”

“You don’t make sense.”

“The Earth that Atlas will hold . . . where is it? Who will supply it?”

“I’ll attend to that.”

“And what shape will it be? He is positioned to hold a disc, or a cylinder, or a square. Or perhaps even a sphere.”

Eratosthenes smiled. “How are the wagers running, good Praphicles?”

“Two to one that you will report to his majesty that the Earth is shaped like a disc. Even odds for a cylinder. Three to one against a square. Ten to one against a sphere.” He pushed the bag of staters back to Eratosthenes. “Just give me a hint,” he whispered. “And keep your purse.”

The geometer chuckled, pushed the money back, and picked up the little statue. “I will pray to the gods to save your business, old friend.”

Out again. Still walking west, and getting closer to the Eunostos harbor.

5. The Horoscope

He thought of one of the great Periclean speeches, as recalled (and probably polished up a bit) by Thucydides.

“Each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility.”

Well, Pericles, perhaps that was the way it was with you and your Athenians, but that’s not the way with me. When my career—nay, my very skin!—is at risk, I feel neither grace nor versatility. I feel afraid. For I have a fair idea already how my calculations are going to come out. When I make my report, a great many people will be very, very upset. Hor-ent-yotf had warned me not to make any measurements whatever involving the sun. “It is heresy.” the priest had said. “Not even a Greek under royal protection may break our religious laws with impunity.”

So why am I here, in this street, at this hour? I know very well why.

But I mustn’t show my anxiety. What would Marcar think? He and I studied together under the Stoic Ariston, in Athens. After that, we went our separate ways. But now here we are again in Alexandria.

Ah, Marcar, thou man of Mesopotamia, part mystic, part mountebank. Which part dominates? No matter. We have always been able to talk together.

And now it was time to be careful. Not against robbers or pickpockets. That wasn’t the problem at all. The problem was simply this: he was now in the Street of the Mathematici Chaldaei, and he would just as soon not be recognized. What would the good rabbi say if he saw the highly rational geometer walking into the shop of an astrologer? The holy man would indeed have his cherished laugh!

Eratosthenes pulled his cloak up around his face and began walking in an anonymous shuffle. He was barely halfway down the street when small dirty urchins began tugging at his tunic. “My lord! Beautiful pictures! Naked ladies! All different positions! Mine are best! Painted directly from Ptolemy’s harem. No! Straight from Eratosthenes’ secret scrolls at the Library! No pictures! Real live women! No waiting! Cheap! My virgin mother! Only twenty drachmas!”

By Zeus and Hera! He struck out at them, but they scattered nimbly, like a flock of water birds.

A strong hand grabbed his sleeve. “In here, you old lecher!”

“Marcar!” He stepped into the ante-court and his host slammed the great door behind them. “Thanks, old fellow. I was coming to see you, anyhow.”

“I know.” He motioned to the table and chairs.

“You always say that. Actually, you hadn’t the faintest idea I would visit you today.”

“Maybe not today, exactly. But soon. You say you don’t believe in the stars, august Eratosthenes; yet you come here because you are not completely sure. You are curious.” He poured two goblets of Persian wine. “So what do you want of me?”

“Nothing. Everything.”

The astrologer smiled faintly. “Translating: Does your horoscope predict anything horrible in your immediate future?”

The geometer gave him a hard look. “Well?”

“But the answer would be meaningless to you, friend, because you do not believe in astrology, or horoscopes, or star-fates.”

Eratosthenes sighed. “You’re right, you know. I can’t have it both ways. I can’t denounce horoscopes in one breath and ask for mine in the next. But it’s always good to see you, Marcar.” He started to rise.

The Chaldean waved him back down. “Not so fast. Tarry a bit. Who requires total belief, old friend? Not I. And what is belief, anyway? A curious mix of tradition, garbled facts, superstition, prejudice—and once in a great while, perhaps a little truth thrown in to thoroughly confuse the picture.” He sipped at his cup. “Let us clear the air. I suspected you might come. So this morning I constructed your horoscope.”

The Greek looked across the table in surprise, but was silent.

“You might at least ask,” said Marcar. “You owe me that much.”

The librarian smiled. “I ask.”

“Well, then. At the outset, please understand that a horoscope makes no absolute predictions, at least of the type you are thinking about. No chart will ever say to you, Eratosthenes, you will die at sunup tomorrow. At most your chart will say, Eratosthenes, you will be presented with the possibility of dying on such and such a day, and perhaps at such and such an hour.”

“Go on,” said his visitor quietly.

The Mesopotamian shrugged. “You have given the gods much trouble in recent days, and I think that even now the matter is not fully decided. I see Gaea, the Earth goddess. You would strip her naked. You would say, her size and shape are thus and so. I see Cronos, the god of time. You would have lovely naked Gaea turning, turning, turning under the lascivious scrutiny of Cronos. Apollo stands still in the skies, and leers.”

Eratosthenes laughed. “What a marvelous way of saying the Earth rotates and moves around the sun.”

“Ah yes. The heliocentric hypothesis. But that’s only part of the difficulty. The scientific pros and cons are quite beyond me, my esteemed colleague. All I can say is, that’s the problem that brings the risk. May I be blunt?”

“It would be most refreshing.”

“The wrong answer to your present geodetic research may well get you assassinated.”

“By Ptolemy?”

“I don’t read pharaoh . . . I see a woman . . . young, beautiful, dedicated.”

“So you know about Ne-tiy. Placed in my house by the Horus-priest, Hor-ent-yotf.”

“Everyone knows. The female cobra within the flower basket. Why don’t you get rid of her?”

“Nonsense. He’d find someone else. Meanwhile, she’s where I can keep an eye on her.”

Marcar shrugged. “That’s up to you. of course. But the risk to your life is not the only matter of significance. There’s another thing.”

“Oh?”

“You will have a visitor. A most remarkable visitor, from a place far away. I am tempted to say he is a god. but I know how you feel about the gods. Like you, Eratosthenes, he faces a great trouble. But you can help him, and he can help you.”

The mathematician chuckled. “Now that, friend from the marshes, is a prediction. Years away, of course. It’s always safe to predict things that happen ten years from now.”

Marcar smiled. “According to the signs, he arrives on the first day of the New Year.”

“There you go again. Which New Year? The New Year when Sirius is first seen in the dawn skies, announcing that the Nile will begin its rise? In fact, tomorrow, in the hour before sunrise? Or do you mean the New Year of the current Egyptian calendar, the first day of Thoth, which is actually two hundred days away? I remind you that the Egyptian calendar is based on 365 days, not 365 and a quarter, as shown by the stars, and that it loses one full year every 1.460 years. The last time the calendar was right was 1.171 years ago. It won’t be right again until 289 years from now. So—which New Year, most noble charlatan?”

Marcar’s eyes gleamed. “Your sign is Cancer. And however you calculate it, O great geometer. Cancer begins at midnight tonight, and announces the first day of the summer solstice. In the dark morning skies Sirius will indeed be seen, heralding the New Year, and the awakening of Hapi, which you Greeks call the Nile, with great festivities beginning in all towns and villages the entire length of the river, and continuing for twenty-one days, with carousing. merriment, and consumption of seas of barley beer.”

Eratosthenes laughed heartily. “I take it, most astute astrologer, that buried in that Rhea-flood of rhetoric is an assertion that my relevant New Year is within the small hours of tomorrow morning, beginning with Sirius ascendant?”

“Thou seeest all, wise Eratosthenes.”

“I see that you are a fraud, more colossal than any pyramid at Gizeh.”

“My lord overwhelms me with his flattery.” He leaned forward. “Now that your stomach is weak with laughter and your defenses breached, may we talk of your sun-project?”

“It’s a bit premature.”

“In any case, presumably you have by now determined the shape of the Earth? Perhaps you could tell an old friend?”

“My report goes first to Ptolemy. You know that.”

“Of course, of course. Nevertheless, what harm is a hint . . . in strictest confidence?”

The mapmaker grinned. “I hear the odds are disc, two to one: cylinder, even; three to one against a square; and ten to one against a sphere.” He rose to leave. “Later, Marcar. Later. I promise.”

“If you live,” whispered the astrologer.

The visitor stopped. He turned around slowly. “Have you drawn the horoscope of Hor-ent-yotf?” It was a stab in the dark, a flash—of what? Psychic insight? Stupidity?

Marcar peered at him most strangely. Finally he said, “Why do you ask?”

“Never mind. Really none of my affair.” But he knew. The astrologer had lifted the veil on the sinister Egyptian, and he had not understood what he had seen. It was pointless to press the seer further. One thing was certain: the fates of Eratosthenes and Hor-ent-yotf were inextricably interwoven, like designs into a funerary shroud.

He bowed and left.

6. The Shadow

And so home again, away from smells and noises and dirty streets. Eratosthenes nodded to the gatekeeper and walked up the palm-lined entrance toward the central gardens. He paused under the colonnade and looked out toward the focus of the courtyard. There, as he had ordered, the scribe Bes-lek sat cross-legged in front of the shadow cast by the man-high gnomon, and he was chanting. Bes-lek had selected his own chant, a hymn, really, something addressed to Horus the sun god, a recital not too long, not too short. As the Greek watched, the clerk finished his mumbled litany, dipped his reed pen into the little pot of charcoal ink. and made a tiny dot at the tip of the gnomon shadow on the circular stone flagging. Then he commenced again. “Horus, giver of light, son of Osiris and Isis, shine down upon us in thy journey across the sky . . .” It was in Egyptian, and between the foreignness of the language and the garbled maundering, the sense was largely lost on the librarian.

Eratosthenes walked up the gravel path toward the chanter. Bes looked up and saw him coming, but his droning mumble did not waver. The geometer looked down at the white flagging with critical eye. Bes sat just outside a concave curve of dots. He had begun about an hour before noon, and now it was about an hour after noon. The dots showed longer shadows at the beginning. growing shorter as noon approached, then growing longer again as midday was passed. The dot closest to the gnomon base would be the one for noon. That was the one to measure. “Bes,” he said, “My faithful friend, I can see from the marks that you have made a fine record of the god’s overhead course. The matter is complete, except for measuring the noon angle. Get up now, stretch your legs, and then help me with the angle rod.”

“Aye, thank you master.” The little man groaned with great eloquence as he struggled to his feet. “Such strain, such care. My poor joints. I shall ache for days. For the pain, perhaps my lord could allot two extra puncheons of fine barley beer.”

“Two?”

“One for my wife. The dear creature assumes all my pains. And considering that the festivities begin tonight.”

“Two, then. Tell the steward. But first, hold the angle rod. Put the point on that inner dot. the one closest to the gnomon. Yes, that’s it. Steady, while I rest the upper edge on the top of the gnomon. Fine, fine. A good angle. Now, let me take the precise measurement on the protractor arc. Yes. Seven degrees, twelve minutes, I’ll take the rod.”

“Is it done, master?”

“One more measurement. I need to know the distance of the dot to the base of the gnomon.” He placed the rod at the base of the gnomon and alongside the noon dot. “Hm. Check me here. Bes. What number do you read?”

The scrivener squinted. “It is one and a quarter units, and yet it is a generous quarter.”

“We’ll call it one and a quarter.” He doesn’t ask why, thought Eratosthenes. He doesn’t wonder. He doesn’t care. Not one hoot of the owl of Athena in Hades. He gets his daily bread, with an occasional extra ration of beer. He has his gods and his feast-days, and he’s happy. A true son of the Nile. Well, why not? It seems to work for him. He said, “Tell the guard of the kitchen I said to give you three puncheons of good brown khes, suitable for Ptolemy’s own table. One for you. one for your wife, and one to lay on the altar of Horus. the hawk-god of the sun. who has favored us today.”

Bes bowed low. “The master overwhelms me.”

He’s not even being sarcastic, thought Eratosthenes. “Go,” he said.

And now back to the calculations. The gnomon was ten units high. The leg measurement was one and a quarter. The tangent of the sun angle was therefore one hundred and twenty-five thousandths. What was the angle? It ought to check out pretty close to seven degrees, twelve minutes. He had trigonometric tables in the library that would give the value. Check. Confirm. Recheck. Pile up the data. It’s the only safe way.

Why was he doing this? Who cared whether the earth was a globe? Who cared what size that globe might be? Not Ptolemy Philadelphia, his lord and master. the pharaoh-god, who had brought him here to run the great library. In fact, Ptolemy had made veiled references to temple pressures. Hor-ent-yotf, the high priest of Horus, was complaining that these studies were demeaning to the hawk-deity and might even foreshadow a revival of monotheism, as attempted by Ikhnaton a thousand years ago. That misguided pharaoh had proclaimed. “There is but one god, and he is Aton. the sun. Pull down all other temples.” The crazed pharaoh had been slain and his name obliterated from all monuments. Over the years the tombs of all his descendants, direct and collateral, had been searched out and desecrated.

All except one. mused the geometer. The boy pharaoh, who married the third daughter of the heretic. The youth had been assassinated, of course, and then properly and secretly buried, along with suitable treasures, in a hillside in the necropolis at Thebes. However, before the Aton-haters could find the grave, the tomb of the fourth Rameses was dug in the cliffside just above, and the boy-king’s grave was buried under the quarry chips. Eratosthenes had seen the maps and read the reports, and then he had hidden them away.

And why was he thinking of the tomb of Tut-ankh-amun? Because it was knowledge that might save his life.

He passed on into the building and walked through silent halls into the mathematics room. Here he found the scroll of trig tables and ran his finger down the tangent columns. The angle whose tan is one hundred twenty-five thousandths. Here we are. Seven degrees, seven and one-half minutes. I was looking for seven degrees, twelve minutes. Well, not bad. Within experimental error? And how good are these tables? Some day soon, redo the whole thing. Suppose I take the average. Call it seven degrees, ten minutes, or almost exactly 1/50 of a circle. Base line. Syene to Alexandria. 5,000 stadia. So if the Earth is a sphere. 5,000 stadia is 1/50 of its circumference, which is, therefore. 250.000 stadia.

Two hundred and fifty thousand stadia.

That’s what the numbers said. But was it really so? Such immensity was inconceivable.

He rubbed his chin in perplexity as he walked over to the big table where his map was spread out. His greatest work. Ptolemy himself had praised it and had accorded the ultimate flattery of reproducing the map in mosaic in the floor of his study. Copyists were turning out duplicates at the rate of one every two weeks, and probably making all sorts of errors in their haste. For which he, the author, would be blamed, of course.

He bent over the sheet.

It had been a magnificent effort, drawn mostly from documents in the library: travelers’ reports (especially Herodotus’); terse military accounts; letters; local descriptions; sea captains’ logs; census and tax reports. To the west, it showed the Pillars of Hercules; and even beyond that, Cassiterides, the tin-islands discovered by Himilco the Phoenician. To the east, Persia, conquered by Alexander, and on to India and the Ganges River. And beyond that a mythic land. Seres, where a fine fabric called silk was woven. Then the legend isles of Cipangu (which he didn’t even show). But the whole known world, from west to east, was at most 75,000 stadia—less than one-third of the sphere he had just calculated.

And yet he knew his numbers were right.

There was more to the world than he or anyone else had dreamed.

Was the rest simply water? Vast, barren seas? Or, on that other invisible hemisphere, were there balancing land masses, with peoples and cities and strange gods? His heart began to pound. He knew it was futile to speculate like this, but he couldn’t help it. Some day . . .

7. The Light

Khor sniffed the cabin air. Was it going stale? Yes, the CO, was definitely building. Which meant the absorbers were very nearly saturated. Why hadn’t the alarm sounded? And then he noticed. The purifier bell was ringing. And the proper red light was flashing. Swamped by his other troubles, he just hadn’t noticed. Alkali. Did he have any more? No. He remembered shaking out the last flecks of sodium carbonate from the container. He had tossed the empty box into the disposal.

Was there any chance of finding alkali down there on that watery little planet?

Conserve. Conserve. Breathe slowly, slowly. Khor, you luckless zoologist. Whatever possessed Queva to give you her sleep key? Not very smart of her.

Well, now, Planet 111, just what sort of world are you? Is there intelligent life down there, waiting to hand me emergency tape, a barrel of oil (meeting hydraulic spec K-109, of course), and a basket of alkali? And (who knows) maybe they’ll hand me a featherless biped as I leave.

How silly can I get?

He watched the 3-D shaper carve out a fist-sized copy of the planet sphere: blue for oceans, brown for continents, white for polar ice. He pulled the ball out of the lathe and studied it. Very, very interesting. How big? No way to tell. All he got was shape and surface. No matter. Maybe he was going to live after all. There had to be something down there. He put the ball in a fold of his space-jacket.

Back now to the screen.

Looking visually. Night-side. But no city lights? No civilization? Take her around again. Another orbit. Try northsouth. Nothing? Not yet. Night side again. Maybe I’m too high. Lower . . . lower still. Watch out! Water! Slow down. I’m over some kind of sea. Hey—a light.’ A big one! It’s a light house! Better switch on my running lights . . . what’s the convention? Alternating red . . . green . . . white . . . blue. Plus a forward search beam. By Zaff, I see buildings. Spread out . . . a city. Saved!

Where to put down?

8. Arrival

Eratosthenes wrapped his woolen cloak tighter about him as he stared out to sea. It was the last hour of evening and the first of night. Dark sea was indistinguishable from dark sky. The constant north wind pushed back the dubious perfumes of the delta and the royal harbor, to his rear. He inhaled deeply the crisp salt air blowing in from the reefs.

He stood on the balcony of the great light house, on the Isle of Pharos, that long spit of limestone protecting Alexandria from the encroaching Great Green. He was so high, and the air so pure, that he didn’t even have to use mosquito ointment.

Ah, Pharos—isle of strange and diverse fortunes! Menelaus, bound homeward from the Trojan War. blown ashore and becalmed by angry Zeus, nearly starved here, with disdainful Helen. So Homer sang. How long ago? Eight centuries, perhaps nine. But then eighty-two years ago the great Alexander came. “A fine island,” he said. “It will shelter a new city, over there on the delta.” He paced it out, where to put everything. Everything but the final essential building: his tomb. The first Ptolemy had built that and then had brought the body back.

“Eratosthenes,” he said to himself, “you’re dodging the issue. You’re thinking about everything except the problem.” Ah. yes. So he had confirmed (in his own mind at least) that the Earth was a sphere, with a circumference of 250,000 stadia. But it was too much. A globe that size! Incredible. Or was it? There was, of course, a rough check, available to anyone. You didn’t have to go to Syene. You didn’t have to look down a well at high noon, on the day of the solstice. There was another way. Just an approximation, of course.

He walked a slow circuit of the balcony. pondering vaguely the beauty of the night sea and the twinkling lamps of the city. It was lonely here, and he could think. No one to bother him. The lighthouse keepers knew him as the curator of the great Library, and let him come and go as he pleased. Far below in the courtyard Ne-tiy waited patiently with the chariot.

To the north nothing was visible except the stars and the light shaft thrusting out horizontally from the great concave mirror at the top of the tower. He had come here to think about that light beam. It was supposed to be visible out to sea for 160 stadia. To him, that was one more proof that the Earth was spherical. The light was visible out to sea to the point where the Earth’s curvature shut it off. He reviewed the problem in his mind. He saw the diagram again. Circles. Tangents. The height of the Pharos tower, taken with the seaward visibility. That would give an angle—call it alpha—with the horizon. That angle alpha would be identical to the angle—call it beta—at the center of the Earth subtending the 160-stadia chord of the light shaft. The lighthouse was two-thirds of a stadion high. The sine of the angle alpha was therefore two-thirds divided by 160, or 417 hundred thousandths. Next, the angle whose sine was 417 hundred thousandths was about 14/3 minutes, or about 1/1500 part of a circle, and finally, 1500 times 160 gave you 240,000 stadia. Close enough to the Syene measurement of 250,000. So he couldn’t be too far wrong. He had done the numerical work already. He knew the result before he came out here tonight. But he still found it hard to believe. The Earth couldn’t possibly be that big. Or could it? Had he made an error somewhere? Maybe several errors? Actually, the measurements using the lighthouse were not easy to make. Sighting the Pharos light had to be done at sea from a pitching, bobbing boat. Subtractions had to be made for the height of the perch at the mast top.

He clenched his jaw. He had to believe his numbers. He had to believe his rough check. And he had to believe the only conceivable conclusion that his calculations offered. The Earth was indeed a huge sphere, in circumference 240,000 to 250,000 stadia, more or less.

The question now was, should he so report to Ptolemy, and possibly get himself discharged from his post at the Library. Or worse?

He was due at the palace by midnight. He would have to decide within hours.

He had just turned back, to descend the outer stairway, when something in the dark northern skies caught his eye. Lights, moving, flashing. And different colors. Red . . . green . . . white . . . blue . . . flashing, on and off. And then that terrific shaft of white light . . . brighter even than Pharos . . . coming straight at him!

He threw his arm up over his eyes. There was a roar overhead. The tower shook. And then the thing was gone . . . no, not entirely. There it was, over the Library quarter . . . hovering now. stabbing its blinding light beam down. He raced around to the side of the light tower.

What in the name of Zeus!

Was it now over his house, the great manse entrusted to him by Ptolemy Philadelphus? He stared in horrified amazement.

By the wine bags of Dionysus, the thing was . . . descending into his fenced park.

For a moment he was paralyzed. And then he recovered and started down the stairs. Outside, he awoke the dozing charioteer. “Ne-tiy! Home! Home!”

9. Encounter

Khor read the preliminary data in the analyzer. Oxygen, nitrogen, air density, viscosity, temperature . . . Nothing obviously toxic. Gravity a little low. No matter. Everything within acceptable limits. He turned off the lights and got out. Fortunately for the ship (not to mention his unwitting host), he had come down in a clearing. There were trees and hedges on all sides. Tiny little things, but they would provide shelter. He had landed within some sort of private estate, and very likely he could complete his repairs without the bother of curious and/or hostile crowds. And what did they look like? If they built cities, they must have hands, and legs to get about, and certainly they were able to communicate with each other. Probably very handy little fellows.

He walked on the cropped turf back to the rear of the ship. Yes, there was the hole. He played the light on it and around it. The outer plate had laminated over nicely. Only the interior would need attention. Well, get with it. Start knocking on doors. “Could I borrow a few hundred xil of adhesive tape? And a load of high-spec hydraulic fluid (you supply the container). Plus a var of sodium carbonate. Just enough to get me to a star some nine light cycles away.”

And that raised another problem. What language did these creatures speak? Better get the telepathic head-band. He crawled back up the hatchway and returned with it. Suppose they’re unfriendly? Should I bring a weapon? No. I’ve got to look absolutely peaceful.

His ear tympani vibrated faintly. Noises. Wheels churning in loose gravel. Cries, addressed, he thought, to a draft animal of some sort. Two different voices? They had seen his ship come down, and they had driven here to confront the trespasser.

Fair enough. He unfolded the long veil, starting at his head, over the teleband and quickly draped his entire body from head down to talons. (No use alarming them right at the outset!) Then he propped up his portable beam between rocks in the clearing so that it would shine on him.

He listened to the cautious steps on the fine pebbles, closer, closer.

And there they were, two of them, standing just outside the light circle.

By the pinions of Pinarj Featherless bipeds!

One seemed calm, the other fearful and fidgety. The calm one stepped out into the light.

Excellent! thought the visitor. It has stereoscopic eyes, nostrils, mouth, ears. Not the most attractive alien he had ever encountered; yet not the ugliest, either. Somewhere in between.

Khor held up both hands to show they were empty, then bowed slowly.

The calm one repeated the gesture with great dignity.

Khor spoke through the tele-band into the mind of his host. “My name is Khor.”

The Greek showed his surprise. “You understand Greek? And you are able to speak into my mind? How is this? Whence came you?”

Khor pointed to the band around his head, visible in outline under his body veil.

“Ah,” said Eratosthenes. “A mental language device. Fantastic. But where—” He jerked. Strange thoughts . . . strange sounds . . . sights . . . smells . . . were forming in his head. He gasped. “You are from a distant world? A star?”

Khor nodded.

The geometer gulped. “Are you a god? The messenger Hermes perhaps?” (How could he be asking this? He didn’t believe in gods!)

“No. I am a mortal, like, yourself. My people are a little more scientifically advanced than yours, that’s all.”

“Why are you here?”

“I was on a collection expedition. I work for a museum, the same as you. I was searching for certain plants . . . animals . . . I was loaded up, and on my way home, when a meteorite hit my ship. I had to land for repairs.”

“I see. I think I see. Can I help you?”

“I don’t know. I will need certain things. Certain . . . tapes. Certain oils. Some . . . alkali. And then perhaps some geodetic information.”

“Such as?”

“The circumference of your world. Terra, considered as a sphere.”

The Greek eyed his visitor sharply.

Khor hesitated. “Have I asked a forbidden question? Is something, how do you say it, taboo? Or perhaps you were not aware that Terra is a sphere?”

“That I had indeed surmised. No, I was simply struck by the coincidence. I have been working on the problem for the past several weeks, and very recently, actually within the last few hours, I have obtained some sort of answer. But why do you need to know?”

“I can use Terra’s rotational velocity to help fling the ship into escape orbit, when the time comes to leave. To determine that velocity, I need to know Terra’s circumference.”

“I think I can provide a fair estimate.”

“Excellent.”

Eratosthenes had to stop and think a moment. Khor needed the velocity of the rotating Earth? Well, of course. The Earth rotated. That’s why the sun appeared to move around the Earth. But that wasn’t all. The Earth must revolve around the sun. from a very great distance. once a year. And that’s why the sun appeared to move through the zodiac once a year. Actually, it was the Earth that was moving. The sun stood still. The heliocentric hypothesis wasn’t a hypothesis. It was a fact. And if the Earth moved around the sun, so did all the five other planets: Mercury, Venus. Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. And so the sun was a star, much like millions of other stars. Did all those other stars out there have planets, with strange life forms, thinking, working, loving? His heart beat faster as he thought about it. Whom could he tell? Nobody. “A visitor from another star told me.” Next stop, the madhouse. It made him smile just to think about it.

But back to reality, and the present. “So then. Khor, can I offer you the hospitality of my house? Not a Ptolemaic palace—but yet not a hovel, either. Food of all sorts, wines brought in from all parts of the world. Baths, hot and cold. Servants to assist you. You could relax while we dine, and you could describe your needs to me.”

“Your offer is most attractive. Truly, I have a great need. But I do not wish to cause problems for you. I read in your mind certain names: Ptolemy . . . Hor-ent-yotf . . . even the female at your side. Ne-tiy. Who are these people? How can they harm you?”

“Harm me? Perhaps the words are too strong. Ptolemy rules—owns—this land, called Egypt. He is a Greek, a foreigner, and he tries to rule softly, and to give no great offense to the people, aside from taking their money. But Hor-ent-yotf, a high priest of the hawk-god Horus, likewise rules, in that he reigns over the minds and souls of the people. Ne-tiy is a slave, put in my house by Hor-ent-yotf. She is his property, even as his clothing and his cosmetic box are his property. Do you read my thoughts in this matter, honored stranger?”

“I do, and I reply with thoughts. You propose to do a thing offensive to Ptolemy, and horrifying to Hor-ent-yotf, and because of this thing the priest may kill you. Or perhaps make the female kill you. Is this the situation?”

“It is so.”

“I find this quite alarming. Obviously, I do not understand your ways. Please explain.”

“It is a very complex matter, O visitor from great distances. Perhaps we can continue over cakes and wine?”

“Fourteen percent CH_3CH_2OH?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just thinking out loud. A pleasure, Eratosthenes. Just let me close up the bucket.”

10. Repairs

“To each his own custom,” thought Eratosthenes. “We Greeks eat while reclining on an eating couch. The Egyptians sit in chairs. But you stand.”

“At all times,” replied the thoughts of his visitor. “We stand to eat, drink, study, work, even to sleep. Our skeletal structure requires it.” His gloved hand clasped the wine cup and brought it to his lips through a slit in his body veil.

The Greek heard a “clack” as the metal goblet struck something hard. “Well then, let us look to your needs. First, strips of adhesive cloth. Tapes, you call them. That we have in abundance. It is the custom of the country to use them as bandages to wrap the bodies of the dead, in preparation for burial.” He held up a piece of white cloth. “This is a rather fine linen, woven from the flax plant. Every Egyptian family saves scraps of cloth against the inevitable burials. The pieces are ripped into strips: narrow bandages for the fingers, wider ones for the limbs and torso.” He tore off a strip and handed it to Khor, who examined it closely.

“What makes it stick?” asked his visitor.

“They dip it in liquid balsam. It sets up hard in a couple of hours.”

“It ought to work,” said Khor. “Now, about the oil.”

“We have several kinds: olive oil, from the fruits of the olive tree. It’s used in cooking and in our lamps. Castor oil . . . several grades. This is from the castor bean. It has medicinal uses, and is also a fine lubricant. The army uses it in the oil packing for its chariot wheels. And linseed oil . . . which we boil and then use in paints and varnishes.”

“Back up. This castor oil . . . is there a refined grade?”

“Indeed yes. Settled over charcoal and filtered through fine linen.”

“I’d like to try that. And now one more thing. A bit of alkali.”

“Alkali . . .?” The geometer frowned.

“Sodium carbonate would do nicely. Hm. That’s making it worse, isn’t it? How to describe it . . . let me think. It would be bitter to the taste, very soluble in water, turns red wine blue. Fizzes in vinegar. Can be boiled with fats and oils to make soap . . .”

“Oh! Of course! Natron! We use it in embalming. It helps desiccate the corpse. But how would you use natron in your ship?”

“Simple. During wake-periods on my ship, my lungs give off a waste gas, which we call carbon dioxide. It can become toxic if allowed to reach high concentrations. The alkali absorbs it.”

“Well then. I think the next step is to gather up these things and take them out to your ship. I’ll call the servants. No—I can’t. They’re all down in the city, celebrating the New Year. You and I and Ne-tiy will have to do it.”

“It’s just as well. Less risk to the ship.”

To the extent that any of the geometer’s aplomb had left him, very nearly all of it had by now returned. He said, “As you may have read in my mind, it is the practice for one of our library clerks to go through every incoming ship to look for new books to copy. I wonder . . .”

“Ah, my friend. I have dozens of books, none in any Earth-language. The Maintenance of Ion Drives . . . Collecting on Airless Worlds . . . Operation of the Sleep Casket. Some with holos, for which you’d need a laser reader. But I tell you what. You like maps. Before I finally leave, I’ll give you a sort of map.”

“Fair enough.”

An hour later Khor, Eratosthenes, and Ne-tiy had wound the last of the linen strips around the hydraulic tubes, refilled the depleted oil surge tank, and secured the amphora of natron in the storage locker.

“The balsam resin will require a couple of hours to cure and harden,” said Eratosthenes. “And I am due at Ptolemy’s palace very soon. May I suggest that you join me?”

“Won’t I excite comment?”

“Hm. You’re a bit taller than average. However, just keep covered with your body cape. I’ll tell Ptolemy you’re a foreign visitor and your religion requires the covering.”

“Is it an offense to you, my host, that I conceal my body from you in this way?”

The Cyrenian smiled. “Since you are my guest, it pleases me that you do as you see fit.” He bowed. “This way to the chariot.”

11. Ptolemy on His Balcony

On this night of the summer solstice, the beginning of the three weeks of madness celebrating the rising of the river, Ptolemy the Second, called Philadelphus, stood on his balcony and looked out over the royal harbor. Shading his eyes, he could barely make out the tiny light swinging in slow arcs in the blackness. At his request, the captain had fixed the lantern at the top of the mast of the royal barge. Why? No reason given. He had simply said, do it, and it was done. Actually, it was a token of a promise to himself: tomorrow he would be on that ship, headed south on the Nile, with all concerns of state receding sternward.

For five thousand years the rulers of Egypt had made this trip. Tradition held that when the sun ceased his northward journey, pharaoh would set forth, sailing all the way to Thebes, to ensure a proper flood. If pharaoh did not thus set forth on the bosom of Hapi, the river would not rise. If the river did not rise, there would be no sowing, and no harvest. Famine would grip the land. The tax gatherers would gather little or nothing. The army could not be paid. The dynasty could fall.

Superstitious nonsense?

Who was he to say?

It was best to go along with it. Anyhow, he always looked forward to the long trip on the river. He just wished Arsinoe were still alive.

Noises in the streets below brought his eyes down to the parade of dancing torches. The annual infection had spread even here, to the guarded serenity of the royal quarter. In a way it was unsettling; yet on the whole it was reassuring that the people were content to stay within their multi-millennial rut. No riots, no revolutions, no marches against the granaries. Not this week, anyhow. Let the beer flow!

He looked around as a woman in an elegant linen dress and cape parted the hangings and stepped out to join him. A thick black wig, artfully dusted with gold powder, fell to her shoulders. She was his concubine of the month. Her name was Pauni, daughter of a noble house. He named them for the current Egyptian month. It was the only way he could attach names to their beautiful faces. And so it had been, since the death of Arsinoe, his true sister-wife, twenty years ago. By Greek ideas, that marriage had been incest; but it was quite in the pharaonic tradition. A bit of irony: in the river tongue, the word for concubine was “sne-t,” which meant “sister.”

(Ah. Arsinoe, Arsinoe. I loved you greatly. You should not have died. It was the only unkind thing you ever did.)

“Respect their traditions. Respect their religion. Worship their gods,” his great father Ptolemy, Alexander’s general, had told him. “Be pious. You lose nothing, and you will preserve the dynasty.” He took the woman by the arm and they listened in silence to the revelry. “The old man was right,” he muttered.

“Who, my lord?” said Pauni politely.

“My father. When the Persians conquered Egypt, they flouted the local religions. Ochus, the satrap, killed the sacred bull. The priests invoked a terrible curse on him. and on his masters in Persepolis. And so Alexander came, and destroyed Persia. He came to Egypt, and gave all honor to the priests. He sacrificed to Apis and other native gods. He made the great journey across the desert, without road or path, to the sanctuary of Ammon at Siwah. There the priests declared his divine descent, and that he was indeed the son of Ammon.” He reflected. “Did I ever tell you about Alexander’s trip across the desert to Siwah?”

(Several times, my lord.) “No, sire, I don’t recall that you did.”

“Ah. Well. then. The storms had destroyed the roads. Even the guides were lost. The sun was pitiless, and the men were dropping from heat stroke. But the gods sent a great flock of ravens, who flew in circles overhead, and shaded Alexander. And if the guides made a wrong turn, the birds screamed until they went straight again.”

“Amazing,” said Pauni.

The royal Greek sighed again. If only he didn’t owe so much money to so many people. The Jews had helped him—and his father—finance the great light-tower on Pharos. It had been finished these nine years, and the treasury was still paying. And the Egyptian priests. The public debt was soaring because of their demands for new temples. And then there was the standing army, all mercenaries, and they, liked to be paid regularly, in hard clanking brass. And the navy. A thousand years ago Rameses had not been troubled with ships that sailed the Great Green. And two thousand years ago the pharaohs didn’t even use money. There wasn’t any. It hadn’t been invented yet. Go, said Khufu to his peasants. Build me a tomb-pyramid. One million men. working twenty years. And they had done it, and not an obol paid out to anyone. Alas, how things had changed. “Who rules Egypt?” he mused softly. “Do I? No. Do the one million Greeks who have settled here? No. Well, then, do the priests and their seven million fellahin? Or is the land a hopeless anarchy?”

By now she was used to this. “Speaking of priests,” Pauni reminded him gently, “the high priest of Horus is here. Also Rabbi Ben Shem. And then the other notables: Eratosthenes and his lady. The geometer brings a very strange guest, who covers his body with a long black veil. And then there are the consuls and ambassadors—Claudius Pulcher the Roman, Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian . . .”

Ptolemy suppressed a groan. Eratosthenes. He had tried to forget him, but of course it was impossible. The man of measures was going to make his report tonight. And what will you say, noble philosopher? How big is the world? As to that, say anything you like. But the shape! Declare Earth a flat square, or a disc, or a cylinder. Any of these. But you know you must not say “sphere” or “ball” or “globe.” That’s heresy, mathematician. Don’t betray me, my brother Greek. There is a long line waiting to take your place as curator of the great Library. And it isn’t just me you should worry about. If you say “sphere,” the local holies will have you floating in the canal before the night is out.

He paused. The girl looked up at him in grave concern. He thought: she knows I am fifty-nine, and that I am dying. Ah, to be young again. No, don’t turn back. Let it be finally done. Nothing really matters very much anymore. From here on in, let us have peace. He smiled. “Perhaps we should rejoin our guests.”

12. Heresy

A little cluster had already formed around the two ambassadors. The Carthaginian was explaining something. “One of my purposes here is to obtain copies of the world map of Eratosthenes.”

“And what good is that?” growled Claudius Pulcher, the Roman.

“Carthage will probably win our present war with Rome, noble ambassador. If so, we will expand into Spain and Gaul. For that we will need good maps. If we lose—may Baal save us!—we will certainly need to recoup our fortunes, and we would look to western Europe for that. Again we would need good maps. Including—” (here he gave the stolid Pulcher a crafty leer) “a good showing of the passes through the Alps.”

“Passes . . .?”

“For our war elephants.”

The Roman general stared at him blankly. Then recognition dawned. “Oh—you mean from Gaul, over the mountains into Italy.” He began to laugh. He laughed so hard he spilled his wine. “Excuse me.” He walked back to the credentia for a refill.

Ptolemy watched him for a moment, then turned back to the Carthaginian. “The great Alexander was always fearful of war elephants. He never really discovered how to cope with them. Quite an idea, Hamilcar Barca.”

“But there’s still a problem,” said Eratosthenes. “We have several reports by travelers in the Library. They all say the passes are very narrow, barely wide enough for a horse. How will you get your elephants through?”

“You should read more of your own books, learned scroll-master,” said Barca. “The mountains are made of calx. Vinegar dissolves calx. We shall bring hundreds of casks of vinegar. The mountains shall melt away, and the great war beasts shall pass.”

“Why does Carthage disclose its strategy to Rome in advance?” asked Ptolemy.

The young Carthaginian grinned. “No harm in it at all. First, they think we lie, that we try to deceive them. Therefore, they won’t bother to defend the passes. Second, they’re so confident that if and when they do fortify the passes they would so tell us. Third, they are incapable of thinking in terms of empire for themselves, so they can’t conceive that their enemies would have such impossible ideas. They lack imagination. They don’t know what dreams are.”

“They seem to have done very well despite these deficiencies,” demurred Eratosthenes. “Three hundred years ago they were just a fishing village on the Tiber. Now they rule the entire Italic peninsula. Who needs dreams?”

“You have a point, mapmaker. Well then, reverse the case. We Phoenicians needed dreams, and we produced them. We have established trading outposts at the limits of the known world. We have sailed through the Pillars of Hercules to the Tin Islands. We have circumnavigated Africa. We have traded in the Black Sea. Our ships rule the Western Mediterranean, and business on great waters has made us rich. And all because we had a vision. We still have it, and with it, we shall beat the Romans.”

“Peace, gentlemen,” said Ptolemy. Wars and rumors of war made him uneasy. “Let us talk of other things. Eratosthenes. how go the angles?”

“Today, my lord Ptolemy, the day of the summer solstice, I measured the angle of the sun at high noon. I found it to be seven degrees and ten minutes.”

The Second Ptolemy smiled graciously. yet warily, and with a warning in his eyes. “And pray what is the significance of seven degrees and—what was it—?”

“Ten minutes, my lord. Significance?” The geometer eyed the Greek pharaoh carefully. “To determine the significance, we may need the assistance of the priests”—he bowed gravely to Hor-ent-yotf and Rabbi Ben Shem—“and the historians”—a bow to Cleon, the Homeric exegesist—“and perhaps to other philosophers, living and dead.”

Claudius Pulcher had meanwhile returned from the credentia with a wine refill. “Aside from all this assistance, real or threatened,” he grumped, “can anyone tell me the significance of seven degrees and ten minutes?”

“By itself, nothing,” volunteered Hamilcar Barca. “However, taken with certain other measurements, it could give you the size and shape of the Earth.” He said to the librarian: “Am I right?”

Eratosthenes sighed, and glanced at Ptolemy from the corner of his eye.

“Oh, go ahead,” said the pharaoh wearily. (And oh, to be on that barge!)

The Greek shrugged. “At Syene, where the finest red granite is quarried, a tall pole casts no shadow at noon on the day of the summer solstice, and the sun shines directly into the wells. This is so because Syene lies almost directly on the Tropic of Cancer. Also, Alexandria lies almost due north of Syene, at a distance of 5.000 stadia. Now seven degrees and ten minutes is about 1/50 of a full circle, so 5,000 is 1/50 of a full circle on the Earth. Thus we multiply 5,000 by 50, and we get 250,000 stadia as the circumference of the Earth.”

“One moment,” interposed Ptolemy. “You say 5.000 stadia. How did you measure that?”

“From cadasters—registers of land surveys for tax purposes, made by the Second Rameses, over a thousand years ago. The exact dimensions of the norfies are given. It’s a matter of simple addition, from Syene to the sea, with certain adjustments.”

The Roman frowned. “I still don’t see. What’s a ‘stadia,’ anyhow?”

Hamilcar Barca smiled. “The singular is stadion. A bit over eight stadia to your Roman mile. Using your units. General, the world is a sphere about 30,000 miles in circumference.”

“Ridiculous.” breathed Pulcher. “It can’t possibly be that big.”

“This is entirely unofficial.” interposed Ptolemy hastily. “The Great House takes no position . . .”

Rabbi Ben Shem smiled uneasily. “Dear Eratosthenes . . . the Earth cannot be a sphere. Our Holy Scriptures state, ‘the four corners of the Earth.’ ”

“I think we may be overlooking the obvious,” said Hor-ent-yotf. “Our esteemed geometer assumes the sun is so far away that its rays, as received here, are parallel. The assumption is totally unwarranted, as I shall show. There are other, much more reasonable conditions that will give the same data.” He pulled a piece of papyrus from his linens and inspected it. “If the sun is 40,000 stadia distant, it will give your same shadow angle of about seven degrees here at Alexandria, will it not. Eratosthenes?”

The mathematician smiled. “Quite so—assuming the Earth is flat.”

“As is indeed the case,” said the Roman ambassador.

Hamilcar Barca shook his head. “Like the Greeks, we Carthaginians are a seafaring people. On shore, when we watch a ship come in, we see first the tip of the mast, then the sails, then the bow. That means to us that the Earth is a great ball, and that the ship comes up into view over the curvature. It is the same at sea. For example, my trireme arrived here at night. We came in, guided by the great Pharos light tower. At first, our man at mast-top could not see the light at all. And then, suddenly, ‘Light ho!’ and there it was, just over the belly of the sea.”

There was a moment’s silence, broken by Ptolemy. His voice was strained. “This is a very interesting discussion; yet I do not feel that we can ignore a thousand years of research and thought that have gone into the problem. Certainly the ancient authorities leave no doubt on the question. Homer said the Earth was a flat disc, bounded by the River Oceanus. A decade before the battle of Marathon, Hecataeus anounced the same fact.”

“One moment, your majesty.” said Hamilcar Barca. “Your own Aristotle believed the Earth to be a sphere because of the round shadow on the moon, during lunar eclipse.”

Ptolemy shrugged. “Homer’s disc, head-on, would cast a round shadow.”

“My lords,” said Rabbi Ben Shem harshly, “Z make no attempt to define or deal with impiety. Certainly Greek history provides ample precedent. I have read widely in your Library, Eratosthenes, and I can cite your own laws and applicable cases. Your Anaxagorus propounded a heliocentric system, and wrote that the sun was a big blazing ball, bigger even than the Peloponnesus. He was condemned to prison for his impiety. Pericles was barely able to save his life. Aristarchus also proposed a heliocentric cosmos, and was accused of impiety. Alcibiades was recalled from the Syracuse campaign to face charges of impiety to Hermes: whereupon Athens lost the war. Socrates was executed for impiety. Protagoras confessed agnosticism and fled Athens with a price on his head.”

Ptolemy rubbed his chin. “I, for one, believe Homer, who declared the Earth to be flat, with its omphalos—navel—at Delphi. A sphere seems quite impossible. People at the antipodes would walk with their heads hanging down. Trees would grow downward. Rain would fall up. These things cannot be.” He fixed a grim eye on Eratosthenes. “The gods gave us a flat world, my young friend. Adjust your numbers to fit the facts, not the other way around.” And so having delivered his views, and having thus dried his throat, he and Pauni left the group in search of the wine table.

“Well. then, man of the Library,” said Ben Shem, with just a hint of triumph, “you will of course recant?”

Eratosthenes found his body turning, not to face the rabbi, but instead to Hor-ent-yotf. It was to the priest of the hawkgod that he gave his answer: “No. I do not recant. I do not retract. It is as I said.” The hawk-priest stared at him without the slightest expression.

“Oh!” said Ben Shem. “You claim the Earth is a sphere?”

“Yes.”

“And it circles the sun?”

“Did I say that? If I didn’t, I meant to.”

“Aiee!” shrieked the rabbi. “Heresy, heresy compounded!” He pulled at his beard, and a few hairs tore loose.

“Sorry,” said the Greek apologetically. “I didn’t know you’d take it this way.”

The priest stumbled away, muttering.

Khor shot a thought into the geometer’s mind: “Science is a very upsetting subject around here.”

“Yes.”

Hamilcar Barca broke in. “May I ask a question about your 5,000-stadia measure to Syene?”

“Of course.”

“Does that include a rake-off by your local priests? Say, one-sixth?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, suppose the true measurement is actually 4,285 stadia. Do the priests add one-sixth, or 715, for their share of the grain crops?”

“Yes.” It was Hor-ent-yotf who answered. They all looked around at him. “From the time of Menes,” said the priest, “the first pharaoh, who united upper and lower Egypt, the temples have taken one-sixth of the crops. We do this painlessly, by telling the farmer his plot is one-sixth larger than it really is.”

Eratosthenes was embarrassed, “lam caught in a gross error. The circumference is then 4,285 times 50, not 5,000 times 50. More accurately, the circumference is—” he thought a moment—“214.250 stadia, or about 26,000 Roman miles.”

“The one-sixth difference is not significant,” said Hor-ent-yotf. “The crux of the matter is, you have attempted to heresy of the gravest order.” He signaled to Ne-tiy. She glanced once at Eratosthenes, then followed the hawkpriest away from the group.

“Watch him,” warned Khor. “I see into his mind. He has condemned you, and he means to kill you.”

The geodesist shrugged. “It had to come.”

“Shouldn’t you leave now?”

“Why delay the confrontation? It might as well be here. Regardless of what happens to me, Ne-tiy can drive you back to your ship.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. When the time comes, I can manage by myself.”

“Can you see them?” asked Eratosthenes. “You are taller.”

13. Something in the Wine

“I see them both very well. He and the female approach the wine table. He whispers to her. She is to put something in your wine.”

“Poison.”

“Yes. You are to die by poison. The mind of the female is in a great turmoil. She wants to refuse. But the priest threatens her. Ah, she looks back this way, but she cannot see you. What a strange expression on her face, Eratosthenes. How is one to interpret it?”

“Horror, possibly. She does not really want to kill me. She resists strongly, but I think probably she will make the attempt. From childhood, this is what the temple trained her to do.”

“They argue some more. He insists. He says to her, if she fails, servants will bind her mouth and limbs, and carry her in a cart to the temple pool, and the crocodiles will feed. And you will die in any case.”

“Pleasant fellow.”

“Perhaps you should leave with me, Eratosthenes. As you know, I still seek a bipedal specimen. On my world you need have no fear of assassination.”

The librarian laughed forlornly. “Don’t tempt me, admirable visitor. What are they doing now?”

“Nothing as yet. I am in the mind of the priest. He is thinking about rings on his fingers, and three white powders. Arsenic. . . . strychnine . . . aconite. Arsenic is tasteless, but takes a while, probably too long for what he wants. Also you might get sick and vomit. Strychnine? A good one. Not much is needed. Acts in a few minutes. Whole body goes into mortal spasm. He’s seen a man die, lying flat, resting only on his heels and the back of his skull. But strychnine is bitter. You might taste it and not drink the wine. No, no strychnine for you. It’s aconite. The deadliest known poison. It is extracted from a delicate plant that looks like a tiny helmet or hood, and which grows in mountains called the Alps, far to the north of the Roman domains. A crystal the size of a grain of sand can be fatal. You are quickly paralyzed. Your heart stops. Death is quick. Ah, he’s moving. He cups his hand over a wine goblet. The cap on his golden ring opens. A powder falls into the wine. He gives the goblet to the girl. He snarls at her, and she moves away. Look sharp, Eratosthenes! Here she comes!”

And there was Ne-tiy, standing before him quietly. “I have brought wine, my lord.”

He looked at her in glum silence.

She raised the cup to her own lips.

“No!” he cried. He struck the cup away. It clattered to the floor, splashing red liquid over carpet and guests, who stared around in dismay. “Sorry!” cried the geometer. “So clumsy of me!” He called a serving man to bring mop and bucket.

Ne-tiy had not moved. “True, my lord, I could not harm you. Yet, what you have done to me just now is a cruel thing. For now I face a very painful death. The wine would have been . . . like going to sleep.”

“Khor, take care of her for a moment.” His voice grated harshly in his own ears. “Take her out on the balcony. I’ll join you there in a little while.” Now, Hor-ent-yotf, you son of river scum, where are you?

14. The Bargain

He found him quickly. If Hor-ent-yotf was surprised, he didn’t show it.

Eratosthenes controlled his voice carefully, as though he were discussing the weather, the cost of grain, or whether the eastern harbor might need dredging this year. “I understand that Ne-tiy has refused to kill me. This despite your direct order. So that now her own life is forfeit. Is this not so?”

“Why should I stand here, talking to a Greek spawn of Set? Yet it is so. She failed. She dies.”

“Let us bargain, high avenger of Horus.” Should he include his own life in the negotiations? No. Too demeaning. Just Ne-tiy. He said, “I will buy her.”

“Ah?” The small eyes peered suspiciously at the heretic. “With what?”

“Information. I know the burial site of the boy-pharaoh, Tut-ankh-amun.”

The eyes of the priest popped. “You lie! You lie most vilely!”

Eratosthenes smiled. “No. It is so. Tut, son-in-law of that great heretic, lkhnaton, who decreed the worship of Aton, the sun, and desecrated all other temples. lkhnaton, who built Akhetaton, an entire city, devoted to the worship of Aton . . .”

“The City of the Criminal!” breathed the priest. “He died. And we destroyed his city. We destroyed everything of his. All—”

“Except the tomb of Tut . . . who married Ikhnaton’s third daughter.”

“Prove it!” hissed Hor-ent-yotf. “Prove you really know!”

“I have seen the records. The report, for example.”

“Report? What report?”

“The one written by the captain of pharaoh’s guards. He caught the grave robbers in the act of breaking in. He slew them on the spot, reinforced the entrance, and posted a guard.”

“Go on.”

“I can give you the record of the final funerary banquet, held within the tomb itself. Eight necropolis officials ate five ducks, two plovers, a haunch of mutton. They drank beer and wine, and they swept up all residue with two small brooms, put the debris in a special jar, and buried the jar in a pit outside the tomb. I have seen the jar.”

The Avenger of Horus studied the librarian, and his eyes narrowed in a crafty squint. “How much can you tell me about the location?”

“It’s in the Necropolis of Thebes, in the Valley of Kings.”

“Hm. That’s a big place. Specifically—?”

“No specifics as to place until we have an agreement.”

“I see. His queen, the vile spawn of the criminal pharaoh Ikhnaton?”

“Her name was Ankhesenamun. But she was not buried with the boy king.”

“Interesting.” The priest hesitated. “But certainly the tomb was re-entered subsequently?”

“No. The entrance was later further sealed, one might say almost by accident. I have verified that the seal is undisturbed.”

“The last of the Atonist hell-people.” muttered the priest. “Pullhimout of his death-lair. Burn the infidel mummy. The gold and silver go to the servants of Horus.”

“Is it a bargain?”

The holy man hesitated. They both waited for a time in silence.

Eratosthenes sighed. “The excavation will be expensive. A hundred slaves must be rented and housed and fed for several weeks. You will need ready money. I will sign over my Cyrenian estates to you. together with my gold on deposit in local banks.”

Hor-ent-yotf still seemed lost in thought.

“If we cannot agree.” said the librarian gravely, “I will be forced to take a certain action.”

“Oh, really?” The priest’s mouth curled. “Exactly what?”

“I will turn over Tut’s location to the Council of Antiquities. They will excavate at government expense. There will be great excitement, presaging a revival of Aton-ism.”

The priest clenched his fists. “You wouldn’t!”

“I would.”

“Yes. Greek, I think you would . . . for you are the ultimate obscene evil . .

“Well?”

“But hear me well, son of darkness. We speak only of the faithless slave girl. What Horus intends to be your fate only the god can say.”

“Such is my understanding.”

“Then consider it done.” The priest struck his chest with his fist. “I will have the temple clerks draw up the agreement, in hieroglyphics and in Greek, and I will come with it to the Serapeum tomorrow afternoon. We will sign before witnesses.”

“Yes.” Eratosthenes turned back toward the balcony. The priest hesitated for a moment, then followed at a dozen paces. He swirled his cloak about him as though to minimize contamination from the air the Greek passed through.

15. Sirius Rising

As he stood on the balcony with the girl. Khor found himself thinking of Queva, and Ne-tiy, and how they seemed to blend into one person, one passionate loving mind. “I will wait for you,” Queva had said.

He had followed closely the negotiations between Eratosthenes and Hor-ent-yotf. Ne-tiy had saved the Greek’s life at apparent cost of her own. and now the man had given up all that he had to save her. Khor would not have believed these creatures capable of such nobility. But there it was. Strong stuff. How was he going to enter this in the ship’s log? The Supervisor would neither believe nor understand. So skip it all. Maybe tell Queva someday.

I’m very nearly done here, thought the star-traveler. Just one more little job. Ah, come on out on the balcony, Eratosthenes. And here comes Hor-ent-yotf, right behind you. That’s good, very good. He shot a thought to the Greek: “Dawn is coming, friend. Look, there’s my home star—rising just over the sea!”

“Sirius?” said Eratosthenes, pointing.

“Sothis!” said Hor-ent-yotf, giving the Egyptian name for the great blue star.

Khor spoke again to the mind of Eratosthenes: “Your Sirius—my home star. And a fine conclusion to a profitable visit. You see the first heliacal rising of Sirius, or Sothis. and you tell me that means the Nile has now started to rise. It means the summer solstice, and great festivities throughout the land, going on for days. Thank you for all your help in repairing my ship, and for your contributions, including this last.”

“Our pleasure, esteemed visitor!” Then he stopped. “This . . . last?”

“Especially this last.” replied Khor cryptically. “It is time for me to go. If I launch within the next few minutes, my trajectory vectors out directly toward Sirius.”

“I’ll call Ne-tiy, and she’ll run you over to your ship.” He was still puzzled.

“No need. I know where it is.”

“But how—?”

“Ah. my friend, I see you really didn’t know. Well then, in view of what is about to happen, perhaps you should have some important witnesses. Get Ptolemy and one or two others. Quickly now.”

Eratosthenes felt a lump of cold lead forming in his stomach.

“Hurry!” said Khor. Through the black body veil the command burst like the hiss of the great gyrfalcon.

Gods! thought the Greek. That was an actual shouted command! He’s vocalizing! The librarian sliced through the balcony drapes and stumbled into Claudius Pulcher. arm in arm with Ptolemy. “My lords,” he gasped, “could you please join me on the balcony?”

“What’s up. Eratosthenes?” demanded the Greek pharaoh. “Oh. I know—Sirius is now visible? Is that it?”

“Majesty, if you please . . .” Eratosthenes pulled the drapes aside.

A little crowd was already gathering: Pauni . . . Hamicar Barca . . . a dozen gilded dignitaries.

The tall shrouded figure faced them all, then bowed especially to Ptolemy. “Thank you for a pleasant evening, ruler of Egypt.” he said in harsh sibilant tones. He took his shroud with both hands and in a smooth majestic motion pulled it away from his head and body, then let it fall to the floor.

They stared.

The great head was entirely feathered. The mouth was an amber beak. Feathers scintillated on arms and chest. Some sort of breech-clout covered the groin. The legs terminated in scales and in what were almost human feet, except that the toes were taloned. As in the raptor birds of the Nile, a horizontal fold over each eye gave the face a stern, even fierce expression.

Eratosthenes now realized that the outlander was a consummate actor, that every word, every gesture, was planned for its dramatic effect, and that this terrified audience lay in the hands of Khor.

The mystery-creature now made his feathers vibrate, so that they excited nearby nitrogen atoms, and surrounded his plumaged body in a golden triboluminescent glow.

Ptolemy dropped his wine cup. Even Eratosthenes, who had suspected something like this would happen, was stunned.

“Horus!” gasped Hor-ent-yotf. “Thou art the god!”

“Thou sayest, worthy Hor-ent-yotf,” hissed the visitor.

“To your knees, everyone,” roared the priest.

And so they did. With one exception. Rabbi Ben Shem tore his cloak and ran screaming from the room.

Khor looked full at Hor-ent-yotf. “Come.”

Hor-ent-yotf rose and walked forward, as though tranced. Khor took the man in his arms. “Arise, all, and witness,” he commanded.

Gigantic wings unfolded from Khor’s shoulders. The spread of those great pinions exceeded even the breadth of the balcony.

And now even Eratosthnes was done in. He pronounced slowly, quietly, and with great conviction, his favorite schoolboy oath. “Holy . . . excrement . . . of Zeus!”

Khor ignored him. “Since I take with me this holy man, I must appoint and sanctify a person to take his place, and to rule my holy temples in his stead. I name Ne-tiy. Come forward, child!”

They made way for the slave-girl. She bowed before the winged thing.

“I name thee High Priestess for Horus, for Egypt, and for all the world, exalted above all men, above even my noble son, the pharaoh Ptolemy. Take thee to mate whom though wilt. Be fruitful, and be merry. I go.”

He held the priest with one hand and tossed something to Eratosthenes with the other.

Next, there was a tremendous rush of air from the fantastic wings, and the giant birdman leaped over the balustrade and was gone.

Eratosthenes watched for a moment. At least the coursing creature was headed in the right direction.

Should he feel sorry for Hor-ent-yotf? He decided that maybe he should. However. he didn’t. A character flaw, possibly. But who was perfect?

The rest of them joined him at the parapet. All eyes were looking out over the city, searching the skies. And now a collective gasp. “There!” cried someone. “The chariot!” shouted another. “See the lights!”

“Straight into the rising sun!”

He turned away and hefted the strange ball Khor had thrown to him. No time now to study it in detail, but he knew intuitively what it was: a model of the Earth.

He raised his eyes. Ne-tiy was standing at the entrance-way. looking at him. The geometer walked toward her. “How it is on his world. I do not know. But in Greek lands, the man takes the woman, though she be exalted, and of the highest rank. And so I take thee, Ne-tiy.”

She gave him a sweeping bow and a most marvelous smile.

16. The River

“I hope the Horus affair has taught you a lesson,” said Ptolemy. “I think you must now be quite convinced.”

The two couples rested under the rear canopy of the royal yacht, which was moving upriver with its great red sail stretched tightly by the north wind. Pauni and Ne-tiy were immersed in private murmurs while the men talked intermittently.

“I have learned much.” admitted Eratosthenes.

“For myself,” continued the Greek pharaoh, “I never had any doubt that the gods were real. It is a bit puzzling, though, that the god would take that priest. I never thought much of Hor-ent-yotf. Always considered him a dangerous fanatic. Shows how wrong even I can be.”

“A memorable man.” murmured Eratosthenes.

In silence they watched a riverside village pass. The river had now risen to the stage where the house-clusters were accessible only by causeways and moles. The brown people had drawn back into their reed and wattle cone-roofed huts to let father Hapi drop his bounty. In a couple of months the waters would recede. The farmers would sow their wheat and barley, and finally they would reap. Four months of flood and receding water, four months of sowing and growing, four of harvest and drying up. Then repeat. And repeat. They had been doing this for more than fifty centuries. From time to time conquerors had flowed in. then out again, like waves on the seashore. Nubians . . . Hyksos . . . Assyrians . . . Persians. And now the Greeks. A million Greeks, up and down the river. How long would we last? Who throws us out? Rome? Carthage? “Majesty,” said Eratosthenes, “what happened to those two ambassadors?”

“Interesting, that. They both got word that Panormus, on Sicily, fell to the Roman besiegers. Barca was recalled to Sicily to organize the Carthaginian guerrillas. Pulcher will return to Rome to organize an army to fight Barca. It’s all insane, isn’t it? What will they do with Sicily? Who cares? But Sicily isn’t really the point, is it?”

Eratosthenes shrugged. “No. Actually, there are two points: one is greed, the other conquest. If Carthage wins, her greedy ships will sail west to Cipangu . . . the Indies . . . perhaps in our generation. They sail for trade and profit. If Rome wins, we will not see the antipodes for a thousand years. They go nowhere they cannot conquer. And they move only on roads.”

“I fear I must agree,” said Ptolemy. “We Greeks used to go out to colonize. But that spirit is dead. It died five hundred years ago.” The pharaoh’s nose twitched. He looked back toward the incense tripods on the stern of the yacht. “We cover the smell of death with other smells.” The braziers burned balsam, carnation, anise, and the blossoms of assorted flowers.

Eratisthenes smiled. He didn’t really care for the artificial smells either. Actually, he preferred the river odors: willows, reeds, orchards, palms, fish (living and dead), the dung of humans and beasts, all veneered by this massive rising water and its suggestion of distant melting snows. He studied the beads of condensate on the chill sides of his silver goblet.

Ptolemy was watching him. “It’s cooled with crushed ice. Improves the tang and fights the heat. The locals prefer their beer warm. Do you realize they have never seen ice? They don’t even have a world for it in their language.”

“Curious,” said Eratosthenes absently. Ice . . . snow . . . he mused. I made a special map of the Nile, beyond the cataracts, south to the confluence of the Blue and White Nile. Melting snow . . . that’s what starts the yearly flood. Snow on far, equatorial mountains. Vast mountain ranges, far to the south. And feeder lakes. Big ones, inland seas. Some day we’ll find them.

Ptolemy squinted around toward the ladies. “The priests are putting on quite a show at Thebes, in the great temple of Karnak. We would all be honored if the Betrothed-of-Horus could open the ceremonies.”

“So it is written.” said Eratosthenes gravely.

“Good. Settled. Religion, true religion. keeps a country alive, don’t you agree, dear Eratosthenes?”

“Oh, quite.”

“You’ve read Herodotus, of course. You recall that the Greeks at Marathon called on the great god Pan to terrify the Persians, and he did, and we won.”

(Not to mention, we had a very smart general, thought Eratosthenes.)

“And you know,” continued Ptolemy, “that Athena herself saved our fleet at Salamis. She was actually seen to alight on the prow of Themistocles’ flagship.”

“So I recall.”

“So then, quite aside from the appearance of Horus last night, it is plain that the gods exist, and have been with us from the beginning. Clearly, they control human affairs. We must yield to the gods in all things, Eratosthenes. When science and religion conflict, science must yield.”

Ptolemy took the geometer’s silence for assent. “Did I ever tell you of the great Alexander’s journey to the shrine of Ammon, at Siwah?”

(Many times, thought Eratosthenes.) “I don’t seem to recall . . .”

“Well then. My father, the first Ptolemy, told it to me. Storms had completely obliterated the desert roads. Nothing to be seen but a sandy waste. The priests wanted to turn back. ‘No,’ said Alexander. ‘If I am truly a natural son of Ammon, the god will send a guide. ’ And no sooner than spoken, here were these two serpents, rising out of the hot sands. ‘Follow us,’ they said, and off they went . . .”

(Wasn’t it two ravens last time? thought Eratosthenes.) “Amazing,” he said.

“He said to her, ‘Be fruitful; be merry.’ ”

The map-maker had to think a moment. “Yes, the god Horus, to Ne-tiy.”

“Not to you, though. Eratisthenes. Nothing merry about geometry.”

“No.”

“My father knew Euclid, who wrote his Elements back there in Alexandria. Father tried to plow through the Elements. Tough going. Complained to the master, there should be an easier way. Euclid replied. ‘My lord, there is no royal road to geometry.’ Father was so impressed that he founded the chair of mathematics at the Library. We’ve had a world-renowned geometer there ever since. Including you, young fellow.”

“I am honored. And grateful.”

“Actually, things turned out rather well for you.”

“Yes.”

To their rear the young women were talking in low tones. He heard a strange tinkling sound, as of little silver bells. He started to turn, then stopped. He knew what it was. Ne-tiy had laughed. He had never heard her laugh before. He relaxed and looked out over the river, to the west. The sun was a glowing semicircle, growing smaller and smaller as it dropped below the darkening hills.

“Gizeh,” said Ptolemy, shading his eyes as he pointed into the sunset. “Have you ever seen the pyramids?”

“Yes, sire. But perhaps the ladies . . .”

The two women were already at the rail, looking out over the distant sands. The men joined them. They were all thralled to silence by the three immense structures.

Egypt. O Egypt, thought Eratosthenes. Land of cyclopean architecture and bestial gods. Where does awe leave off and disgust begin?

Twilight was brief. The sailors were already lighting lamps along the ship’s walkways. Upriver, along the shore, more lights were visible. Torches, thought the mathematician. A lot of them. And the sound of sistra and tambourines, with shouting and singing and much merriment. The whole city was turning out to greet the pharaoh.

“We’re coming into Memphis,” said Ptolemy. “I’ll have to join in the temple ceremonies, and Pauni and I will sleep in the palace tonight. You can join us, or you can remain on board.”

“If it please you, we’ll stay.”

“I thought you might. You and the priestess may have my quarters. Everything is prepared. Until tomorrow, then.”

17. Khor’s Globe

Ne-tiy watched with uneasy curiosity as Eratosthenes opened the chest and carefully removed the little statue of Atlas, his back and arms still bent to receive his as yet invisible burden.

“I see writing on the base. An inscription in Greek,” she said: “What does it say?”

“It says, ‘Tell my friends I have done nothing unworthy of philosophy.’ - Hermius.”

“What does it mean? And who was he, this Hermius?”

“Hermius was a Greek who studied with Aristotle, under Plato. He was captured by the Persians and tortured. He said these words, and then he died.”

“I see. You admire him.”

“Very much.” From another compartment he pulled out the ball that Khor had tossed to him on the balcony. Bigger than his fist, smaller than his head. It fit exactly on the titan’s back.

“What is that?” whispered Ne-tiy.

“The world globe. Khor made it. and gave it to me as he left.”

They both studied it in silence. It was clear she did not understand. Perhaps it was just as well. He was not sure he understood. It might have been better if Khor had never come. No. that wasn’t so. He was very lucky that Khor had come.

But this globe . . . the artifact was far ahead of its time.

(She stole an uneasy look at his face.)

My great world map, he thought, over which I have labored so many years . . . compared to this it is almost nothing. A bare 80 degrees out of 360. We have not even scratched the surface. Most of the world is still out there, unknown, undiscovered. Who will be the first to find it? I wish I were a great sea captain. I’d take a dozen ships. Sail out through the Pillars of Hercules. Due west. Into the western hemisphere. And there meet those two great continents. How to get around them? Perhaps a northwest passage through the north polar sea? Or around the southern tip of the southern land giant? And then on. for a complete circumnavigation of the globe.

He sighed. Not in his lifetime. Perhaps not in a hundred years. Maybe not even in a thousand. But eventually ships would go forth to that new land. And find what? Cities? Savages? Strange animals and plants? No way to tell.

Back to Earth, map-maker! He pressed the globe’s north polar cap with his index finger. There was a click, and a tiny spot of light began to pulse, on and off. on the facing side of the sphere.

Ne-tiy gasped. “What is that?”

“The light simply marks the spot where we are. See?” He pointed. “We are here, at Memphis. See the river? Yesterday the light point was on Alexandria, on the Great Green. In five days it will be at Thebes. Calm down, it won’t hurt you. Down here is the rest of Africa. Above, Italy. Gaul. Iberia, the Tin Islands, Thule. East, India, Seres. Cipangu.”

“Are there really such places?”

“Yes. Do you want to see the other side?”

“. . . I don’t know.”

“Well, then, we won’t look.”

“Can you turn off the little light? It’s like the eye of Horus, watching us.”

He laughed, but turned it off. “You know what Homer said.”

“What did Homer say?”

“ ‘Though all gods and goddesses look on, yet I gladly sleep with golden Aphrodite.’ ”

“I have a better one,” said Ne-tiy. (For she knew she held the ultimate refutation of all science: geodetics . . . math . . . cartography . . . the rising of stars . . . the solstice of suns.) “Aie se philo—I love thee forever.” She held out her arms.

ELEMENTAL

Geoffrey A Landis

Many of us have wondered what things would be like if our ancestors had developed magic instead of scientific technology. But what if we had both?

1. Ramsey

Fifty kilometers southeast of Naples, two men sat waiting in the bright fluorescent-lit power control room of Napoli Spaceport. In front of them glowed an array of green lights and computer consoles. Behind them, outlined on the floor in a violet glow only faintly visible in the brightness of the room, was a complex five-fold symmetric figure: a pentacle.

The younger man watched the array of dials intensely, occasionally touching a knob to make some infinitesimal adjustment. The older man watched him work. What he saw seemed to satisfy him, for he strolled over to the window and gazed out across the landing field.

Without looking up, the younger man spoke: “Luna shuttle’s about ready to lift, Mr. Layr.”

“Ready for it. Carlo?”

“Running steady at a hundred ten percent, sir.”

“She’s all yours.” Christian Layr walked over to a monitor screen where he could watch the youth’s performance and take over if necessary. He doubted that any such necessity would arise. There is a certain skill to controlling magic, a skill of balance and timing not unlike that of a juggler, and the boy had it. Layr almost wished something would go wrong, so he could see how the boy would handle it. The youth had the talent, but Layr would feel uneasy about certifying him until he saw how he tackled a real problem, one of the minor emergencies that make power control a job for men with skill and courage, rather than a simple task for machines. Despite Layr’s unspoken wish, though, for the last ten days the station had operated smoothly.

Almost too smoothly.

Layr heard the nearly subsonic rumble of power build-up and directed his attention back to the display. Power level a hundred fifteen percent; there would be no problem with this one.

“Here it goes.”

Layr glanced up to the window. As if by magic, the blunt-nosed spacecraft appeared from the launch pit to hover for an instant before his eyes. Slowly it began to inch upward, then to hasten forward with an implacable urgency, finally to rush with a clap of thunder headlong into the morning sky, as if ail the demons of hell chased after it.

In a sense, they did. Behind him the control pentagram lit the room with a brilliant violet fire as it transmitted the energy flux to shove the thousand-ton shuttle up to parking orbit. Far beneath his feet, the main pentacle glowed, not violet, but gamma. No human eye could ever look upon it in its full glory. Within the impenetrable walls of the protecting spell was confined a more powerful magic yet: two hundred kilograms of pure antimatter.

In Chicago it was 7 A.M. Yawning. Ramsey Washington looked out the window of his third-floor apartment. A soft wet snow fell steadily. It masked the outlines of the tenements and weighed down the branches of the evergreen that struggled to grow in the building’s entrance courtyard. He cursed softly.

Perfect Christmas weather—in April. Some bureaucrat at the weather service must have thought it a good April fool’s joke. More likely, he reflected, they’d needed a blizzard here as the best way to equalize a water imbalance elsewhere in the world. Africa or Antarctica or Alabama or somewhere. Maybe it had been announced and he’d just missed it.

He dug through the cluttered drawers of his desk and came up with a usable piece of blue chalk and a battered secondhand hardcopy of the Handbook of Thaumaturgy, 2052nd edition. He cleared the accumulation of dirty clothes and half-written papers from a one-meter circle on the floor, then carefully chalked a pentacle, copying exactly the diagram in the book. He chanted the book’s recommended spell sequence and stepped inside. Spell completed, he grabbed his data microdisc and headed outside.

As he entered the snowstorm, a circle of warm air formed around him. Although by now the snow was nearly twenty centimeters deep over the walk, where he stepped and for a one meter circle around him the snow vanished, reappearing magically behind him again as he walked onward.

Modem thaumaturgy—usually simply called “magic”—was the logical outgrowth of quantum field theory. The basic premise of thaumaturgy is that “reality” is merely an abstract mathematical construct. Therefore, it can be controlled by the manipulation of abstract symbols—provided that the correct symbols can be chosen. The snow ward which Ramsey took for granted was only one of many changes wrought by the consequent technology.

Protected by his home-made ward, Ramsey ignored the snowstorm swirling about him. As he walked under the low-hanging branch of the evergreen in the courtyard he ducked his head instinctively. Anyone as tall as Ramsey quickly learns to duck without ever really noticing it. As he walked under the tree, the snow on the branch above vanished, exorcised by the snow ward. Freed, the branch sprang up, smacking the branch above it and shaking loose a new mound of snow. In a chain reaction of unleashed branches, the whole tree shook itself free of its burden of snow.

Ramsey’s low-power spell had been designed to protect against a pretty heavy snowstorm, but it had never been intended to stop an avalanche. The spell overloaded with a loud pop. He abruptly found himself up to his armpits in snow.

Ramsey heard a gigling somewhere behind him, and whirled around to see who was laughing. Unfortunately, the snow was rather more slippery than he’d anticipated. His feet skidded out from under him, and he landed flat on his back in a flurry of snow. Helpless, he heard the giggling rise into a robust laugh.

He pulled himself carefully to his feet. “Have you no respect for the mortally wounded?” He shook himself off and glanced surreptitiously at the girl standing on the sidewalk laughing.

“Oh!” The girl rushed over. “I’m sorry! Are you hurt? Where?”

“My dignity, woman, my dignity’s taken a mortal wound. I may never recover.”

“Oh, poor baby!” she replied in mock seriousness. “Shall I kiss it and make it better?”

“Hey, that’s the best offer I’ve had all day,” said Ramsey. He looked up at the girl and grinned. “Say, you mind if I ask a dumb question? What’s your name? I’ve seen you around, but I don’t think I know you.”

“Susan Robinette,” she said. She had just a trace of a French accent. “I work in a lab about two doors down from you.”

“Oh! So that’s why you seem so familiar! But you’re not a physics student, are you? I thought I knew everyone in the department.”

“Oh, no; thaumaturgical engineering. My lab just happens to be in the Physics building.” She paused. “Say, Ramsey, I apologize for laughing at you. You just couldn’t believe the funny look on your face when all that snow started to fall on you.”

“Yeah.” He thought about it for a second. “Now that you mention it. I guess it was pretty funny. At least in retrospect.” He grinned. “Well, if I have to look silly in front of somebody, I guess it’s better you than Doctor Williamson.” Suddenly he realized he was standing in a snowstorm, and it was cold. He started to shiver.

“Here, come over and share my shield before you freeze to death! Walk with me, and you won’t have to make a new shield.”

“Yeah, I’d appreciate that. Thanks.”

The two of them had to press together in order to fit both into the single snow shield. Ramsey decided he didn’t mind at all.

By the time he’d finished breakfast, Ramsey felt more like his usual self. He looked across at Susan. She was nearly as tall as he was, which was surprising right there, and thin. Rather thinner than he usually liked, but pretty in a rather unsophisticated way, with dirty blonde hair and bright brown eyes. He noticed her watching him watch her, and quickly dropped his gaze down to his now-empty plate.

“Well. I gotta run. I got an appointment at nine, and I better not keep Dr. Williamson waiting.” He lingered for a moment, trying to think of something else to say. “I’m lucky enough to have her for an advisor; I wouldn’t want—”

A booming voice interrupted Ramsey’s speech.

“Susie, there you are!” It was a short, rotund man in a dusty tweed jacket. “I’ve been looking for you. The papers for the Venus project just came in. and we’ve got to get them turned around. We’ve got work to do, liebchen.”

“Professor Kirschmeyer! I’m sorry; I’ve been dawdling. Do you know—”

“Ramsey Washington. Yes, yes, Janie’s protege. Quite the bright young man, she tells me. Maybe even good enough for my young genius here, no?” He winked.

Ramsey started to say something, but Susan beat him to it. “Now, Hans, don’t let your dirty mind run away with you. I barely know him, and already you’re marrying us off.”

Kirschmeyer laughed. “Well!” Turning to Ramsey, he said, “You must excuse us, young man. I must steal your pretty girl away, even if she does claim she doesn’t even know you. There is much to do. and too little time.” He offered his arm to help Susan up.

“See you around, Ramsey,” she said, ignoring Kirschmeyer’s offered arm. “Good luck with your meeting.”

“Thanks.” Kirschmeyer and Susan walked out of the restaurant, already deep in conversation. “I’ll need all the luck I can get.”

In Italy it was early afternoon. The sun beat down warmly, as might be expected on a day in early April. In the fields, two farmers stopped working the rich volcanic soil to rest in the shade of a solar array. One of them brought out the midday snack of bread, wine, and cheese, while the other hooked the tractors up to recharge.

“Explain once more to Giuseppe how it is that your vines produce so bountifully this year.”

“It is because of this amulet of my wife’s mother.” Luca held up a small piece of carved volcanic rock suspended on a silver chain. Giuseppe looked at it dubiously.

“That? It is no different than the one my wife wears about her neck to ward off the evil eye. Yet my vines do not produce like yours.”

“Ah.” said Luca smugly, “wearing is not enough. You must know how to use it.”

“Ah,” said Giuseppe. “So tell me, how is it done, to use this thing?”

“And why is it I should say to you?”

“Come, Luca. Did we not grow up together? Are we not friends? How is it that you would now hold out on your poor friend Giuseppe?”

“Indeed,” said the other, “I would not. This is what is to be done. Each morning before going into the fields you must take the amulet and make with it this gesture—” he demonstrated with his hands “—and say the following chant—” he intoned a short series of nonsense-sounding syllables.

Giuseppe was still dubious. “That’s all?”

“Indeed.”

“It would be simple enough for me to try. Father Corsi would not approve, though. He would call it witch-work.”

“There is no need for Father Corsi to know. Besides, he is surely aware of how many of his flock wear charms against the evil eye, no?”

“Yes. And he calls it idolatry, too.”

“But he does not forbid it.”

“This is true, he does not. But tell to me. how is it that you know this thing?”

“My cousin Roberto, who was in the navy, learned it from a sailor who had a brother who went to the university to learn science. This sailor knew many things to do with such charms, but only the one of any usefulness.”

“So.” said Giuseppe. “This does not sound like the devil’s work. Indeed, I will do it. Perhaps my vines too will become as bountiful as yours.”

“I wish you luck.” Luca looked at his wristwatch. “Time now for us both to be back to work.” He walked over to his tractor. “Do you remember well the gesture and the words?”

Giuseppe repeated the words, making the gesture Luca had shown. Luca nodded. “Good. I wish you prosperity, my friend.”

“And you.”

As Giuseppe drove the tractor that afternoon he repeated in his mind the words and the gesture. If it worked he would show it to his brother-in-law, who also grew a small plot of grapes behind his fields. And perhaps to his cousin Rafaelle? Yes. he decided. Such a useful thing should not be kept to oneself, but had to be shared with others.

Ramsey looked down at his stack of notes, licked his lips nervously, looked at his watch, and then knocked at the door. Without waiting for a response, he walked confidently in. Doctor Williamson looked up from her desk computer.

“Ah, yes. Mr. Washington. Right on time. I’ll be with you in a moment.” She turned back to her qwerty.

Ramsey walked over to one of the plush lounge chairs and sat down. He looked at the expensive glass sculpture on the table next to him, then let his eyes wander over to watch her work. What a woman, he thought. She had light brown hair, almost a shade of blonde, cut fashionably short. Today she wore a light green sweater with a gold and green silk scarf wrapped casually around her neck. Dressed in impeccable taste, as always, he thought. I bet she never falls down in the snow on her way in. She flicked the Save switch on the computer and turned to him.

“That outfit looks very good on you. Dr. Williamson.” Ramsey remarked casually.

“Thank you. Mr. Washington.” she replied curtly. “Now let’s get to work, shall we? I presume you’ve finished the data analysis on your recent run. right?”

“Well, not exactly,” Ramsey said. “I’ve been having a slight problem with the data in the third and fourth quadrants. Nothing important. I’m sure.”

“Let’s have a look at it.” Doctor Williamson reached out a hand. Ramsey quickly dug out his microdisc and gave it to her. She popped it into the receptacle on her computer and studied the screen for a moment.

“I see,” she said. “What do you think this signifies?”

“I’m not really sure.” Ramsey replied. “Maybe some localized anomaly in the Earth’s field?”

“Yes. I suppose that’s a possibility. Rather unlikely that no one previously ever mentioned it. though, don’t you think? After all. people have mapped the magnetic field for several centuries now.”

“Maybe it wasn’t there before?”

“Now. that seems rather far-fetched, doesn’t it? Just where do you suppose such a change would come from? It looks to me much more like the characteristic signature of a magnetometer that has not been properly degaussed before the measurement.”

“I calibrated and degaussed the equipment every two hours.” Ramsey said.

“Well, Mr. Washington, it certainly looks here as if you missed one, doesn’t it? Don’t be too glum about it—if we didn’t make mistakes, we wouldn’t learn anything, now would we? It’s the kind of simple mistake everybody makes when just starting out in experimental work. You’ll learn to be more careful.

“In the meantime, though, it looks like you’ll have to re-do the measurement from about here . . .” she touched the screen, “. . . on. The rest of the measurements, excepting of course that part, are simply marvelous. Fine work.” Ramsey smiled ruefully at the compliment. “Thank you.”

“I expect that you’ll be able to have the whole thing done right by the time I get back from Rome.” She walked over to her desk and touched the keypad beside her chair. A calendar appeared on the screen. Looking at it. she said, “I’ll expect to see you at 9 a.m. on the sixteenth, a week from Monday. We’ll have another little chat then.”

She tapped the appointment time onto the computer and it appeared dutifully on the calendar.

“Thank you for taking time to see me. Dr. Williamson.” Ramsey tried to smile pleasantly. Two weeks of work down the pipes. “Have a good conference.”

“I intend to,” she said cheerfuly. “I’ll send you a postcard.”

Ramsey walked out and shut the door behind him. Damn, but she’d laid it on him good. He shook his head in dismay. Still, he couldn’t help thinking about how she’d looked today. She certainly was one roxy fox! And cool as well. Cooler than a cryostat. Now. if she ever warmed up toward him, even a little. . . . But that wasn’t about to happen. Better get back to thinking about what to do next.

He knew damn well his data was right. Wasn’t it? He flipped quickly through his lab notebook. As he’d thought, he had carefully degaussed the magnetometer, checked for residual magnetism, and recorded it carefully in the notebook.

Maybe the magnetometer itself was faulty? Ramsey walked back deep in thought.

Susan sipped her coffee slowly and looked across at him. “Your main difficulty comes in subtracting out the Earth’s magnetic field?”

“Yeah,” said Ramsey. “My results don’t agree with what everybody else gets.”

“Can I see?”

“Why not?” Ramsey handed her the stack of hardcopy. She paged through it silently, sipping her coffee. She stopped at a map of Italy. Superimposed on the map in deep red were a series of concentric circles.

“Very pretty.” she commented. “I tell you what. I’ll be passing over that area Thursday. If I see any giant red circles painted on the ground. I’ll be sure to give you a call.”

“Huh? You’re going to Italy?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Just passing through.” She smiled, and her eyes glowed. “I’m going to Venus.”

“Venus?” he said in surprise. “How come?”

“I’ve pretty much done all I can here,” she said. “I’m studying the Earth elemental—the magical force incarnate in the core of a planet. Very little is actually known about it. It normally takes an earthquake or a volcano to manifest it with any power. It’s hard to get permission to create earthquakes, even small ones, though.”

“You actually create earthquakes?”

“Well, tiny ones, anyway. Not big enough to measure without extremely sensitive equipment, but big enough to manifest the elemental.”

“So how come you’re going to Venus. if you’re studying the Earth?”

“Hans and I think that we could learn a lot more about the nature of the elemental by invoking the elemental of another planet for comparison. He’s managed to talk the NSF out of enough funds to send me to Venus to try it.”

“But isn’t it rather dangerous?”

“Manifesting the elemental? Yes, I suppose it is, but I’ve been working with it for years, and there are a lot of controls built in. Actually, it’s pretty well confined to the Earth’s core. I don’t expect any trouble.”

“No, no—I mean Venus. Isn’t Venus rather dangerous?”

She laughed. “You’ve been watching too many dramatapes. Venus is about as safe as Earth. Maybe safer. Same technology as your little snow-spell, but a whole lot more reliable, keeps the heat and atmosphere out.

“My only real worry is that I might accidentally forget the rules against incidental magic and get myself booted out.”

“Rules?”

“Venus base has very strict laws forbidding any use of ‘incidental’ magic. Lighting cigarettes, untying knots, that sort of thing. It’s a sensible enough rule. It’s the ward spells that keep the whole place from being uninhabitable, so it’s understandable that they’d be a bit picky about anything that could conceivably result in an accidental cancellation of a key spell. But I’ll miss being able to play.”

She snapped her fingers. A tiny ball of pink fire popped out of the air and settled in her palm. “All us thaumaturges like to play with spells.”

She tossed the ball of fire to her other hand and grinned wickedly. “But wanton magicing is a bad habit to get into. After all, if too many people start playing with magic without the strict safeguards built into commercial spells, the side effects could add up, and who knows what could happen?” She snapped her fingers once again. The tiny fireball flashed blue, then vanished with a pop.

“You mean, like, if I made my snow spell wrong it could cause an earthquake in Katmandu?” asked Ramsey.

“A snowstorm more likely, unless you’ve got a pretty unusual snow ward. For an earthquake you’d need to awaken the earth elemental. That’s my job.”

Walking to the lab after lunch, Ramsey heard a low roar. As he approached, it got louder.

Now he could hear a voice, barely audible above the roar. Susan? It sounded like she was in trouble.

He ran to her lab. Unlocked. He shoved the door open, and a spray of water rushed out at him.

Inside was chaos. He looked down into the lab. Susan stood in front of a computer terminal, waist deep in swirling brown water. Her hands flew about frantically as she intoned a rapid series of spells. In front of her, a fountain of water gushed out of midair two meters off the floor. Arranged in a circle around this strange waterfall burned six candles in arcanely carved copper stands.

Ramsey ran down the steps and waded into the room.

“Susan! What’s going on?”

She looked up. “Ramsey! Thank God! I’ve got a runaway! If the water rises up and puts out the candles, we’re in big trouble!”

The candleholders were already submerged. The water level was about ten centimeters below the flames, rising slowly.

“What can I do?”

“I don’t dare move. Find some way to stop the flow! But for God’s sake, don’t put out any of the candles!”

“How do I stop it?”

“I don’t know! Figure something out!” She went back to chanting.

Ramsey grabbed a book, waded over to the fountain, and pressed it against the stream of water. Water spurted around the edges unimpeded. He pressed harder. The book passed right through the source of the waterfall. Ramsey, unprepared for the sudden loss of resistance, nearly fell on his face.

This wouldn’t work. He needed another approach.

A fire extinguisher caught his eye. Good against fire, not water. Or was it? He grabbed it off the wall and tried it. Yes; the right type. He aimed it at the fountain and blasted. The frigid blast froze the water where it struck, but the torrent rushed the ice away as fast as it formed. No good.

He walked around the fountain, looking for a weak spot. The water was now about three centimeters from the candle flames. Susan had paused in her chanting and was watching him.

From the back, he could see that the water came from a one-centimeter hole suspended in midair. If he could block it, the flow would stop. He tried the extinguisher. By directing the cold blast around the edges of the hole, he found he could create a ring of ice, hanging in the air, through which the torrent passed. But the hole wouldn’t freeze closed; the water was moving too fast.

Holding the extinguisher on the hole with his left hand, he rummaged through his pockets with his right hand until he found a coin of the right size. He pulled it out of his pocket and carefully placed it up against the ring of ice from the back. The water pressure pushed it up against the ring and held it. He used a blast from the fire extinguisher to freeze it into place.

The torrent stopped.

“Great!” said Susan. “Hold it there while I reverse the invocation.” She tapped something into the qwerty behind her and then made a gesture. The water started to drain. “Okay, now extinguish the candles.”

When Ramsey blew out the last candle there was a soft pop. The ice-coated coin fell into the water. He walked over and passed his hand through where it had been. Nothing there.

Somewhere later they sat in the coffee lounge sipping hot chocolate. “You were quite the sorcerer’s apprentice today,” Ramsey commented. “What was going on back there, anyway?”

“I don’t know exactly,” replied Susan, “but I can guess. That lab is also used for Kirschmeyer’s intermediate thaumaturgy course. I think one of the students set up to summon the air elemental and screwed up. Instead of calling air, he somehow got the water elemental. Rather than abort the summons, he panicked and ran. He must have left a latent connection with the nearest large body of water: Lake Michigan.

“I should have done a latency check before I started work. I was in a hurry, though—not much time left before I leave—and skipped it. So when I invoked the earth elemental, I inadvertently opened the portal at the same time.

“That’s about it. The portal was within the pentacle I’d made for the earth elemental; so I couldn’t dismiss the earth elemental until it was closed. I couldn’t close it until there was nothing flowing through it. And I couldn’t leave my own pentacle, or I’d lose my control of the earth elemental. So I was stuck.”

“What would have happened if I hadn’t come along? Kept on gushing until it drained the lake?”

“Oh, no. After an hour or so the portal would have phased out. By that time the water would have made quite a mess, though.”

“Oh,” said Ramsey. “So there wasn’t ever any real danger?”

“No,” said Susan. “Actually, the water elemental is pretty tame. That’s about as far out of control as I’ve ever seen it. The one I’m working with—the Earth elemental—is quite a bit more powerful. In fact, if it were ever fully summoned it would be rather awesome. Since its power is concentrated at the center of the earth, though, it’s pretty hard to awaken fully. The research I do invokes its presence without really fully awakening it. Tickling the toes of the sleeping giant, so to speak.”

“That’s not dangerous?”

“Not really. Remember, the center of power is seven thousand kilometers away. Here at the surface the earth elemental is pretty weak. It would be different if we were near a power locus, like an active volcano or an earthquake zone.”

“I see,” said Ramsey. “Tell me, what exactly is an elemental? It’s something you’ve talked about, but I don’t really know just what it is. Something to do with Earth, Air, Fire, and Water; right?”

“Something like that,” she said. “Any sufficiently complex ensemble of symbolically interrelated objects, when interacting with a symbol manipulating object, such as a man or a large computer. will exhibit non-stochastic behavior—”

“Thanks a lot.” Ramsey interjected. “How ‘bout doing it in English?”

“Sorry,” she said. “Let’s see. Inanimate objects sometimes react to magic as if they had intelligence of their own. No, that’s not quite right . . . call it volition. They react as if they had a will of their own.”

“Sure,” said Ramsey. “That’s just Murphy’s law. I used to have a ’34 Sparrowhawk that damn sure had a mind of its own. I’ll tell you.”

“Well, that’s partly it. In general, this only applies to really large systems, though. Things much more complicated than a car. The ocean, the atmosphere . . . the earth. In terms of thaumaturgy, we can deal with these almost as if they were separate, quasi-sentient entities.

“Whenever thaumaturgy is done on such complex systems, portions of the system you don’t intend to disturb are still necessarily affected by the magic. This excess power—call it the side effect if you want—is free to be manipulated by the ‘volition’ of the entity, which we call an ‘elemental.’ ”

“So an elemental isn’t something that’s already there. It’s something you create when you do magic.”

“Not really. The elemental is inherent to start with in any complex system. But until that system is acted on by symbol manipulation—magic—the elemental is constrained to obey statistical laws. The use of magic can remove these constraints, and thus unleash the elemental.”

“Oh,” said Ramsey. “So what do you do? Talk with it? What’s it good for?”

“You can’t really talk with an elemental. It has no true intelligence. At least not as we know it. You can communicate with it somewhat, using a symbolic meta-language. Aside from studying the elemental for research, like I’m doing, there’s several things that elemental magic is practical for. For one thing, it’s very useful for power control. An elemental has direct, fine control over huge amounts of power. The energy has to be already there; the elemental just gives you the control.”

“I see,” said Ramsey. “Kind of like a light switch.”

“Right. Or a detonator.”

Over the next couple of days Ramsey recalibrated all his equipment, changed his instruments, took readings at every time of day, and tried every trick he knew to eliminate any noise in his readings. Finally convinced his data was right, he set out to map the disturbed region in detail.

“Need help?” Susan’s voice drifted in from the open door.

“Oh, hi, Susan.” Ramsey said. He was perched precariously on top of a stepladder, positioning little probes over a four-meter plastic sphere representing the earth. “Yeah. Watch the display screen and shout whenever the position marker goes over a hundred. That way I can focus all my attention on the vernier.”

“Sure thing.”

After a while the readings stopped. “There! Now let’s take a look at what we’ve got.” Ramsey got down, walked over to the terminal, and called up a plot.

“Hey, best data I’ve got in a long time. Wanna stay on and be my assistant?”

“Love to,” said Susan. “ ‘Long as you work fast. I’m leaving tomorrow morning.”

“You’re leaving tomorrow? But I thought you weren’t leaving until—” He stopped and thought for a moment. Could it be Wednesday already? “Huh! It doesn’t seem like so much time has gone by!”

“No, it doesn’t.” she said in a small voice. She hesitated and started to say something, stopped and looked at him for a moment, then glanced away quickly.

“So what does this new data show, anyway?” she asked.

Ramsey looked it over. “The anomaly has localized and grown somewhat more intense.” He walked over to the screen and touched a control. A map of the world superimposed itself on the data. “Just south of Rome.”

“What’s this?” Susan asked, pointing to a squiggle at the bottom of the screen. “Looks almost like the signature of the Earth elemental.”

“There’s a quick modulation superimposed on the steady anomaly field.” Ramsey touched the screen and a scale appeared on the axis.

“Well, how ‘bout that!” she said. “It is the characteristic of the Earth elemental. Wonder why you should pick that up? You wouldn’t believe the sort of things we do to get that clean a signal. Some people just have all the luck.”

“Luck!” said Ramsey. “What luck? How do I get rid of the damn thing?”

“Well, it’s not coming from my lab. I haven’t manifested the elemental since the day we had that problem with the water elemental. Why don’t you ask Kirschmeyer? I’d bet that either he’s running something that’s interfering with you or else he knows who is. Can’t think what it might be, though.

“Anyway, gotta go. I have a ton of stuff I got to take care of by tomorrow, or else. You take care of yourself now, okay?”

Before Ramsey could reply. Susan ran up to him, stood on her tip-toes, put her arms around him. and gave him a quick kiss. Then she turned and ran out of the room. Ramsey stood there startled for a moment, staring at the open door.

“But how do I get this elemental out of my system?” he called after her.

“You have problems, see Hans,” came the faint reply.

Giuseppe looked out in amazement at the vineyard behind his house. Grapes as big as a man’s fist! Who had ever heard of such a thing? He pulled out the amulet and looked at it dubiously. He had la paura, the feeling of something bad about to happen. But what person stops just when things start to go well? He shook his head and once more began to make the now-familiar set of gestures. As he started the chant, he could feel the power begin to draw itself about him.

Away in the distance, a plume of steam ascended from the mountain into the dear blue sky. Just as it had done on afternoons like this for thousands of years.

Late Wednesday night, Ramsey was still trying to pinpoint his problem. About midnight he ran into Susan outside her office. “Susan! You’re still here? I thought you left hours ago.”

“I should have. Just one more thing to finish off before I leave. You ready for a break? Want to get some coffee?”

“Sure.”

Over at the coffee lounge. Ramsey asked about something Susan had mentioned earlier. “The reason the ancients never got their magic technology to work is that they never learned that most spells change with time?”

“Partly. So on the rare occasions somebody wrote down a working spell sequence, in a decade or so it would be useless anyway. The so-called ‘magicians’ back then were pretty secretive about what they did. They didn’t write down very much. Also, even when they learned that a spell sequence had changed, they had no method to figure out what it changed to.”

“How’s that done now?”

“You can get good approximations by analytic methods. To get a spell exactly. we do an exhaustive computer search. We just have the computer try out every possible variation on the initial approximation until we get the answer.”

“You mean computers can do magic?”

“Mais oui. Of course. Magic is just a form of mathematics. Anything that can manipulate symbols can do magic.” She looked down at her coffee. Cold.

She muttered a spell and snapped her fingers. “Want yours warmed up too?”

“Warmed up? It’s just barely cooled down enough to drink,” he said. “So if they had computers in medieval times, all the would-be witches and sorcerers would have been able to do real magic?”

“Unlikely. They had a lot of other misconceptions, too. One or two might have lucked onto a spell that worked, but mostly they didn’t go about it in the right way. First, they expected their spells to make sense. They thought the symbols used in thaumaturgy should mean something in English, or at least in Latin or Sanskrit or something.

“Second, a whole lot of what they tried to use magic for back in the middle ages simply can’t be done by thaumaturgy. Turning lead into gold, coal into diamond; that’s easy. We do that routinely. But things like eternal youth, or love potions, those you can’t easily do using magic. Biological systems are just too complex. For that sort of stuff you need a biochemist, not a magician.”

“You don’t say. Know any who can get me some of that elixir of eternal youth?”

“ ‘Fraid not. I know a few who are working on it.”

“Figures. How about a good love potion, then?”

“That can be arranged. But what would you need a love potion for, though?” She looked at him coyly.

He missed her look, or else ignored it.-“Oh . . . I’m sure I could find some use for one.”

“It turns out that you can’t actually make a love potion. Love isn’t something you can turn on and off.” She sighed. “Unfortunately.”

She looked up at him. “But sex, now . . . that’s something simple, and relatively well understood.”

Ramsey laughed. “Well understood? It darn well ought to be, considering all the time people spend thinking about it.”

“Oh, Ramsey, you’re impossible,” she said. “Won’t you let me keep any dignity at all?”

Ramsey laughed. “Sorry,” he said. He walked over and cradled her face in his palms. Then he kissed her.

“That’s more like it,” she said.

2. Susan

When Layr came on shift he immediately felt something was wrong. The violet glow from the transfer pentacle lit the room almost brighter than the fluorescent lights, too bright to look at directly. He looked at the total power indicator. One hundred eighty percent of nomimal power. He’d never seen it so high.

Carlo came in a moment later. “Something’s wrong, sir,” he said immediately.

Layr’s opinion of the boy went up measurably. “I know. Do you know the shutdown procedure?”

“Of course.”

The spaceport launch system perfectly exemplified the synthesis of the old technology with the new. Antimatter power source held in check with thaumaturgical wards; computer-generated spells regulating the fire elemental that controls power flow to the bank of positronium lasers that boost the shuttles; the whole complex located at a thaumaturgical nexus to enhance the effectiveness. Simple enough in concept, although rather complicated in the actual working details. What could be going wrong?

“Drop her down to standby level.”

Layr walked over to a control phone, picked it up. and pressed a button.

“This is power control. We’ve got a possible malfunction; we’re going offline until we can do some diagnostics. No, I don’t know what it is yet or if it’s going to be serious. I can’t say how long. Better cancel all lift-offs for today. I’ll call if it looks like there’ll be any danger to the spaceport. So far we’re just being cautious. Right. Will do. With any luck, we’ll be back on line tomorrow morning. Hold tight. ’Bye.”

He put down the phone and walked over to Carlo. “Well, my friend, it looks like we’ve got a job to do today.”

Much later, the sun was just beginning to peep into Ramsey’s apartment when Susan slipped out from under Ramsey’s arm and began quietly to put on her clothes.

“I’m sorry, my love,” she whispered, kissing him lightly on the forehead. “I wish we could have had more time. Adieu, mon amour, et au revoir.”

When Ramsey awoke, she was long gone.

Three hundred miles off the coast of New Zealand, a small group of puzzled geologists tried to determine why the cone of Manatla had recently and unexpectedly gone dead. Manatla was the newest of a chain of tiny volcanic islets on the edge of the Pacific ring of fire; it had sprouted out of the ocean floor in a burst of flame and soot in the summer of 2053.

Its arrival had been predicted well in advance; and it was not expected to stop erupting until well after 2100. The failure of the tiny volcano was an unexpected surprise.

Of course, the geologists were looking for the problem on the wrong side of the world entirely, but that was not at all obvious. Not yet.

Susan arrived in Naples tired, but too excited to sleep. The Venus ship left the next morning from the Napoli spaceport. The NSF had provided a room at the spaceport Hilton for the night. She tried to read, but somehow couldn’t concentrate on the screen. She found a sliding door opening onto a tiny balcony and went outside.

Looming out of the cloudy night was the immense bulk of the mountain Vesuvius. The European spaceport had been built practically atop it, she recalled, because the presence of the volcano made the spot a thaumaturgical nexus. This made it easier to control the fire-elemental spells used to boost spacecraft.

The volcano would also make this a dandy place to invoke the earth elemental. she thought. But dangerous. She remembered how she had told Ramsey about the indiscriminate use of magic. Should she call him? What could she possibly say to him, after last night?

Instead she undressed and went to bed, dreaming inchoate fantasies about earth and fire, volcanoes, spaceships, and pentacles.

She was awakened at ten by a call from the spaceport. Her Venus flight had been postponed a day due to some unspecified problem with the launch system. They were terribly sorry. In the interim. her hotel room and meals would be paid by the spaceline, and if she chose to amuse herself by taking any of the many tours and day-trips offered by the hotel—she thanked them and hung up.

She did not care to amuse herself with tours and excursions, but found she couldn’t get back to sleep. She thought about calling Ramsey. Instead she called Kirschmeyer’s office. He wasn’t in. What time was it back in Chicago, anyway? Oh . . . five a m. No wonder nobody was there.

She ended up spending the day lounging around the hotel pool, sunbathing and organizing her notes on Earth elemental, working out some ideas to put into action when she got to Venus.

At five in the evening she got another call from the spaceport. The Venus flight was postponed again . . . she’d half expected it. She went over to the tours desk to look for a tour to the Vesuvius crater. None on Saturday. Since she couldn’t see Vesuvius itself, she settled on a tour to see the cities it had buried, Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Without thinking about what she was doing she punched out Ramsey’s number. She held her breath as she waited for an answer. When there was no answer after fifteen rings, she didn’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed. Kirschmeyer wasn’t in either. She left a message with the prof’s computer telling that the flight had been delayed, then went back to the pool and read the brochures on Vesuvius.

Although technically dormant rather than extinct, she read, geologists had determined that the volcano would not be likely to be active for several centuries at the very least. In the meantime, tourists climbed its slopes and marvelled at the occasional puffs of steam emitted from crevices in the crater, while below, farmers grew olives and grapes on the fertile low slopes of the mountain.

She spent the rest of the evening on the balcony, watching the volcano and daydreaming. By daylight, the crown of Vesuvius was covered by an immense plume of steam. As the sun set, this turned a vivid orange. Even in full darkness, the base of the plume remained faintly luminous, as if lit from below by unseen fires.

Professor Kirschmeyer had Ramsey’s hardcopy spread across the floor of his office. He knelt over it, studying intently. A trail of colored chalk dust showed which sheets had been examined. Ramsey looked on from a more dignified position, sitting on Kirschmeyer’s desk. After a while, the professor stood up. He pointed at one of the papers with the stem of his pipe.

“Well, mine friend, here we see a steady base of the elemental presence, it flares up to a higher level from time to time, but these occasional flare-ups stopped suddenly, at about the same time my Susie left us. Other than the fact that this very definitely is the signature of the Earth elemental, I can see no connection to my work. I wish Susie were here—she might have some ideas. Me, I’m lost.”

“If it’s not interference from your work, why did it stop when she left?”

“Coincidence. Something else must have stopped, or started, at about the same time.”

“Like what?”

“If I knew that, my boy, most certainly I would tell you, and we’d have the problem solved.”

“So what do I do now?”

“Next we all go home and get some sleep and think it all over. In the morning I meet you in your lab, ja? and maybe we have some better ideas then.”

“Right.”

As Ramsey and Kirschmeyer left the office, the ‘incoming’ call light on the terminal started flashing. Kirschmeyer reached out and flicked the switch over to ‘not receiving.’

“Shouldn’t you answer that? What if it’s important?”

“I rather doubt it; Besides, I have a reputation to keep up. I answer too many of my calls and people might think I have nothing better to do, no? If it’s important, let them leave a message with the computer.”

In Rome it was almost morning. When the conference on interstellar winds ended. Dr. Williamson had intended to spend the weekend in Rome with Count Raminski, but he had unexpectedly taken ill. Might as well see something of Italy, she thought. It’s been ages since I’ve been here.

She wandered into the Sheraton lobby and gathered a handful of pamphlets advertising tours and attractions of Roma and vicinity. One with a picture of a flaming volcano on the cover caught her eye. “Pompeii: a City of Entombed.” The drive from Rome to Naples was beautiful but hair-rising, even in her little sportster, which was both smaller and more maneuverable than most of the vehicles she passed. The Italian drivers more than made up for the difference by the gusto with which they drove, bordering somewhere between hysterical and insane. South of Naples the road to Pompeii snaked along volcanic cliffs at the edge of the brilliant blue sea. Far below she could see sheltered coves and fishing villages, along with occasional empty beaches of brilliant white sand.

Even on the twisting mountain roads the drivers raced with insane verve. All she could do was hope that when one of them finally managed to push her off the narrow road, she could eject before the car started tumbling. It was a long way down.

Somewhere between Naples and Pompeii the skies changed from the oppressive gray clouds of the city into a brilliant sunshine.

“First, make a list, in order of correlation, of all activities or natural phenomena occuring within one hundred kilos of the campus which match the timing of the activity in your data,” said Kirschmeyer.

“Right.” Ramsey turned to the qwerty, started typing, paused for a second, then typed fast. The viewscreen across from them lit up with a list. Both of them studied it.

“Not much significance, is there?”

“Nein. Phone calls to Iceland; purchase of medical textbooks . . . look hard enough and you’ll find seeming correlations in any large enough set of random events.” He looked over at his pipe. “Tibura naal.” The pipe lit with a blue spark. He picked it up and puffed thoughtfully. “Let’s try another approach. Your anomaly centers around Rome?”

“Closer to Naples.”

“Okay. Try a correlation to activities there.”

“Data bank won’t be as complete.”

“Can you hook an Italian data bank?”

“I can try.” He started typing.

“Got it,” he said after a moment. The screen blanked and then lit up with a shorter list.

“Jackpot! There’s our correlation: launches from Napoli spaceport.”

“Stimmt. Right enough. It accounts exactly for the sporadic signal, even for the stopping thirty hours ago.” Kirschmeyer paused and looked at Ramsey. “Ramsey? Why did the spaceport stop launching thirty hours ago?”

Ramsey typed the question into the computer. “ ‘Unscheduled maintenance,’ prof. Beats me why.”

Professor Kirschmeyer looked up. “Ramsey, my friend, I am beginning to get frightened.”

“Why? Looks like I’m just picking up interference whenever they launch a shot from Naples. Probably an electromagnetic pulse that just happens to resonate my detector.”

“Ah, my friend, I wish I had as little imagination as you. We still can’t account for why noise shows up as the signature of the elemental. Do me a favor? Call up a plot of your magnetic anomaly, centered over a map of the spaceport.”

Ramsey did so. “Huh! Look at that. It’s not even close to exactly centered on the spaceport.” He typed another command. “Center is . . . 23 kilometers off, bearing 342 degress. Another map . . . got it. It’s centered on a frigging mountain. Vesuvius.”

“As should have been obvious to me as soon as we agreed that it was indeed the earth elemental we saw, not some random noise signal. Ramsey, a signal that strong only could come from an earthquake or an active volcano.”

“Active? Isn’t Mount Vesuvius extinct?”

“Dormant, my friend, only dormant. Sleeping. But I don’t think it will stay asleep for long.”

“You think it’s about to erupt?”

“Yes. Ramsey, this data makes sense only if the Earth elemental has left the center of the Earth and is rising slowly toward Italy, dragging a portion of the Earth’s magnetic field with it. Somehow, by someone, it’s been summoned. Not merely manifested, like we do here for to study it, but fully awakened and called. Of course, I can’t say for certain, but I can’t see any other way to interpret this.”

“Then we gotta do something. Stop it! Warn people!”

Professor Kirschmeyer put his hand on Ramsey’s shoulder. “Hold on a moment, my young friend. Let’s get some better data before we start rushing around like fools, eh? Who stirs up a hornet’s nest had best be prepared for the stings.

“First, we can connect up your magnetometer to one of my spells invoking the elemental, which will give it a lot better sensitivity for this application. Next, activity on the part of the Earth elemental will be mirrored in the other elemental, particularly ocean and fire. We can set up some kind of monitor on that. Also, it should be possible to triangulate on the Earth elemental using your technique. Then we can find out for sure whether the elemental is actually surfacing.”

“How much time do we have? Shouldn’t we get a warning out as soon as possible?”

“That’s the first thing we need to find out. I’m hoping we can figure that out when we triangulate. The elemental is rising from the core toward Vesuvius; we need to know how deep it is and how fast it’s moving. Until we can give a definite time and estimate how bad the eruption will be„ it’s worse than useless to try to make anyone heed a warning. If they evacuate prematurely on the basis of a quick guess, people will come back to their homes after a day or so when they see nothing happening. Then when the real warning comes, they’ll ignore it. We’d do more harm than good.”

“So let’s get to work!”

“Doch, doch, we shall. I just wish . . . I wish we had Susan here. This is really her field, not mine.”

“Not your field? Aren’t you her advisor?”

“Oh. yes. her advisor I am. But Susie’s work is really pioneering. There are very few people who understand the Earth elemental, and I don’t doubt that Susie’s the best of them. Certainly she has the ‘feel’ for it. Myself, I can work with it when I need to. My real skill, though, is with the water elementals—ocean, lake, rivers, that sort of thing.

“But our Earth elemental expert is merrily on her way to Venus, so I guess we’ll just have to muddle through the best we can.”

“No,” said Ramsey. “I don’t think she is on her way to Venus. She couldn’t be.”

“Do you know something I don’t know? She left two days ago.”

“No she didn’t. The spaceport’s shut down, remember? No flights.”

“That’s right. So she must be stuck in Naples. But wait . . . if she didn’t leave, I know she would have called me.”

“Maybe she did. You don’t answer your calls, right?”

“Stiinmt. Right. She would have left a message with the computer. And I didn’t check my office this morning. Let’s go. No, you stay here and start programming. I’ll go up and see if there’s a message from Susie. No, better yet, you go up and see if there’s a message, I’ll stay here and start working—”

Kirschmeyer turned around. “Ramsey?”

But Ramsey was already gone.

Pompeii was tranquil and peaceful. Susan had expected to see a blasted ruin of rock and volcanic ash. but instead she found a sunny clearing in the midst of fields of olive trees and vineyards. The tour guide went on to take the group past varied excavations and ruins. Susan quietly slipped away from the horde of would-be guides, souvenier sellers, and vendors of ‘authentic’ relics surrounding the group and found a low stone wall overlooking the site to sit on and contemplate.

Up the dirt road in front of her zipped a sportscar, a sleek late-model Tigershark, gold with black trim stripes and a tinted canopy. As it came by her it abruptly slowed and skewed around in a cloud of dust. The fans revved down and the car settled to the ground. When the canopy popped open, Susan was surprised to recognize Ramsey’s advisor, Doctor Williamson.

“Excuse me.” said Doctor Williamson. “Don’t I know you?”

“Susan Robinette. Yes, I work for Hans Kirschmeyer, down the hall.

“Oh, yes, of course. You’re the one Hans always talks about, doing the work with the elemental. How unusual to run into you so far from home! But, of course, you must be on your way to Venus. Right?”

“Right,” said Susan. “The flight was delayed: I’m killing time until it gets rescheduled.”

“What a nuisance. You know, sometimes I think I’ve spent half my life in airports, and spaceports, waiting for flights, waiting for people to arrive, waiting for people to pick me up. I’d give up traveling entirely, if it weren’t the only way to get from here to there.”

“You travel a lot. Doctor Williamson? To conferences and such, I suppose.”

“Please, call me Jane. No, I was traveling long before I ever got invited to conferences. My parents were both diplomats. you know. When I grew up, I hardly knew which continent to call home, much less which country.”

“That sounds so wonderful,” said Susan wistfully. “I never went even a hundred kilos from home until I left for school in Ontario.”

“You’re from Quebec, I take it?” Susan pouted. “Is my accent still that obvious? Yes. I’m from Saint Andre. It’s well north of Montreal, on Lac St. Jean.”

“Ah, yes. Beautiful country, that.

Well. I can tell you that growing up in hotels and embassies around the world may sound fabulous, but the reality is quite the opposite, I assure you. For one thing, I never had any friends my own age. Just about the time I started making friends somewhere, we’d move, or I’d be sent off to live with my father on another continent, or something.

“Your parents were divorced?”

“Oh, no!” Jane laughed. “But they did hardly ever see one another. Except at occasional diplomatic balls and suchlike. I think they really did love each other, in their own way. You had to be very close to them to be able to tell, though.”

“That seems so different from my family,” Susan said. “I grew up on a farm: my parents hardly ever got out of sight of each other.”

“How did you end up doing thaumaturgy?”

“In high school we had a physics teacher who knew a little thaumaturgy as well. He used to do demonstrations in class. I’d stay after school and help him set them up. I guess I was just naturally good at it. I knew as soon as I tried it that it was what I wanted to do with my life.”

“Your parents must have been very pleased.”

“My parents were furious. They thought that magic was no fit occupation for a girl: I should learn tractor repair or something practical I could use around the farm. So I could become a good farmer’s wife. And if I hadn’t won a scholarship to Waterloo that’s all I ever would have been.

“You say you never had any friends your own age. Well, you weren’t missing much. It’s hard not to know people in such a small town, but there isn’t anybody worth knowing.”

Jane smiled. “You think you had it rough. My parents didn’t ordinarily pay very much attention to me, but when I was sixteen, it somehow dawned on my mother that I didn’t have any boyfriends. So my parents somehow got together and arranged a big debutante party for me at my uncle’s mansion in New Canaan. A big, high society affair; people flying in from all over the world. They had a lot of fun planning it; they discussed it for months. They never bothered to ask me, of course. I was terrified. When the big day finally came, I couldn’t do it.” She giggled at the memory. “I couldn’t face it. So I ran away. Hitchhiked-right across the country in my formal. This big coming-out party, people arriving from all over, and the star attraction didn’t even show up. It was talked about for just ages.”

Jane threw back her head and laughed. After a moment, Susan joined in.

“So what happened when you finally returned home?”

“But I never did. I worked in San Francisco over the summer, and in the fall I enrolled in Berkeley. I was too frightened to go back, you see. It’s all rather funny now, of course.”

“Still, it’s all made you into a very cosmopolitan woman.”

“Yes, I suppose it has. If you think that’s worth the price.”

“Ramsey is in love with you, you know?”

“Ramsey Washington? Yes, I know,” Jane said. “He doesn’t think I know it though. How well do you know Ramsey?”

“Pretty well, Not well enough, I guess.”

Jane looked very hard at Susan. “You’re in love with him?”

“Very much.”

“Oh. I see.” She sighed. “There’s very little I can do about his infatuation with me, you know. All I can do is avoid encouraging him as much as possible without actually being rude to him or hurting him too much. But he’ll have to grow out of it himself.”

“I know. It just seems so unfair, somehow.”

“The world isn’t fair, dear. We just have to live with it the way it is.”

Jane stood up. “Anyway, we’re both here thousands of miles from home, we might as well see a bit of it. Shall we?”

3. Elemental

Layr put his wrench down and looked at Carlo. “We’re in deep trouble,” he said.

“I know.”

Fifty hours after the power control had been put into automatic shutdown mode, the power meters still read a hundred and thirty percent. What was more frightening, though, was that the needles had stopped showing a decrease and were now very slowly inching back up.

“What bothers me most.” said Layr, “is not that the control isn’t working. It’s that I don’t have the slightest idea why. I can think of only one thing left to try.”

“Questioning the fire elemental?”

“Yeah.”

“This is a dangerous place to summon fire.”

“I know it. Have any other ideas?”

“No.”

“Then we’ll just have to be very careful. Make a subsidiary pentacle for yourself and be prepared to take over if I’m overpowered.”

“Right.”

Layr walked over to the main terminal and tapped in a sequence of requests. Two projectors near the ceiling lit up, projecting three unusually complex pentacles onto the floor. Carlo knelt down and began to outline them in paint in case of power failure. Meanwhile Layr called up a review of the spell sequence required and checked it against his own dog-eared manual.

“Sir? Are you planning to have the computer do the invocation, or are you going to do the invocation yourself?”

“Doing it myself.”

“Might be better to have the computer do the summons; leave you free to concentrate on contingencies.”

“I thought about it. Under the circumstances, I’d rather have the invocation directly under my control. I’d like to be able to switch spells fast if there’s any trouble. If I’m harmed, well, that’s what you’re here for.”

“Thanks.”

“The antimatter’s protected by its own pentacles. I don’t anticipate anything threatening it; it should be safe even if the backblast wipes out the whole rest of the spaceport, God forbid. If something does happen to me. though, maintaining the integrity of the confinement pentacle is your number one priority.”

“Right.”

Layr looked over at Carlo, who had finished outlining the pentacles and was now cleaning the brushes. “Give it another five minutes for the paint to set, then light the candles.” He walked over to the control console and picked up the phone.

“Control, this is power. We’re ready to summon the fire elemental, at minus five minutes, mark. This should be routine, but I suggest you have your people sheltered just in case.” He put down the phone. “Wish I felt as confident as I sound.”

Layr positioned himself in the center of one of the smaller pentacles. Carlo lit the five candles circumscribing the large pentacle,. then retreated into his own pentacle. Layr looked at his watch, then at Carlo.

“Here goes.

“Diiratah kiimatahi na naratah na diir,” he intoned in a smooth cadence. “Kiimatachi, kanahatau’ illannaghani. Nehobeth! Na naratah na diir. Diiratah!”

A blue glow formed in the empty pentacle. Layr made a complicated gesture and spoke once more. The glow consolidated into an eerie violet flame.

“Sassilloe fsartha?” said the flame with a soft hiss.

Layr watched the computer screen, not the elemental. “Naal tenepah. Anada. Tnillipa pesardathi!”

“Psillissasi,” replied the elemental. “?! Ness, simiss kssissith soar.?! Simmolayah na.”

“?!”

“Ness, simmassis ksaar. ’illissis.”

“?!”

“Ness, simallahi sis.”

Layr turned from the output screen and looked directly at the elemental. He made an abrupt gesture, the reverse of the one he’d made to summon the elemental. “Diir na hataran na ihatamiik hatariid!” He made another gesture.

“Ssimiloth? Prissathi iss.” The violet flame grew wider, brighter, reaching to the edges of the pentacle and seeming to push outward; as if testing the walls of an invisible prison. The candles surrounding the pentacle flickered. Layr stood motionless, watching.

“Sissarthi.”

The flame vanished with a thunderclap. It took a moment for the eyes of the two watchers to readjust to the room’s light.

“I’ve never seen the manifestation so weak!” Layr said. “There was hardly any power at all. Damn. We should have expected this. We’re so well warded against fire that we should have known that it wasn’t causing the problem.

“But what is, then?”

“I couldn’t get that. Another elemental. What’s next most likely?”

“From the amount of power involved,” said Carlo slowly, “It’s got to be one of the primaries. Ocean, atmosphere. biosphere . . . Earth. It’s the Earth elemental. Right?”

“Yeah. That’s the way I figure it, too.”

“But the Earth elemental is supposed to be the most stable of all.”

“Yeah. And the hardest to control. Somehow it must have been awakened. But by whom?”

“I repeat, this is an emergency. It is absolutely essential that she get in touch with me. Make every effort to have her found. Thanks!” Kirschmeyer hit the kill button on his console and turned to Ramsey.

“No luck. The tour bus returned from Pompeii half an hour ago, and she wasn’t on it. She’s not in her hotel; she’s not at the spaceport. I’m having the police watch for her. In case she comes back to her hotel room, I left a message for her with the computer there. What else can I do?”

“How long before we get the data to triangulate the elemental?”

“Rosenblum promised to call with the data, in.” he looked at the screen, “exactly forty-five minutes.”

“Then I see only one thing left for us to do,” said Ramsey.

“What’s that?”

“Get some breakfast.”

“Good idea. First we breakfast. Then we panic.”

“Jane! Stop the car! Quick!”

Doctor Williamson slammed on the dragskids. The car skewed around in a cloud of dust.

“What’s wrong?”

“Those farmers. Hold on here a sec, huh? I want to watch what they’re doing.”

Jane killed the lift fans and looked out across the field to where Susan had pointed. In the distance, two men stood by a tractor, facing the sun and waving their arms in a complicated pattern. Jane recognized the sight of people casting a spell. What was so unusual about that?

“What—”

“Quiet!” whispered Susan, gesturing with her left hand. “Maybe I can hear what they’re saying.”

Now that the fans had revved down, Jane could barely hear the words coming from across the field. They made no sense to her. She reached across into the glove compartment, got a pair of field glasses from under the seat, and handed them to Susan without comment.

“Huh? Oh, thanks.” Susan grabbed the glasses and peered out across the field. “Made. Just what I thought I saw. I’d recognize those gestures a mile away. They’re invoking the Earth elemental!”

“So?”

“Jane, that’s an active volcano over there. The only reason I can think of to invoke the Earth elemental at this particular spot would be if you wanted to commit a particularly spectacular form of suicide! Just what the hell do they think they’re doing?”

“Let’s ask. Climb back in.” Jane shoved the lift fans into high, and the car bobbed into the air. “Hold tight.” She twisted the wheel and gunned it. The car shot off the edge of the road, jumped across the roadside ditch, and skittered across the field.

“I don’t expect they’d speak English,” Susan said doubtfully.

Jane laughed. “So what? Susan, I can’t even count how many languages I know. If they don’t speak English. I’ll translate for you.”

“I guess there is one advantage in growing upon five continents after all.” The car bounded across another ditch and skidded to a halt beside the surprised farmers.

Layr completed his spell and watched the needle swing over. “Mother of God!”

“What is it?”

“The Earth elemental presence should be barely detectable through all our shields. Instead it’s off the scale. That’s at least fifty thousand percent amplification!”

“You’re summoning it?”

“Hell, no! Do I look stupid? I can get a reading without doing a full invocation. At these insane power levels, even that could be risky. What in hell’s name is going on?”

“Sure the meter’s working?”

“Yeah. Anyway, it all fits. It explains where our excess power is coming from. We’re tapping the Earth elemental via Vesuvius. But how can it be that powerful? It’s over seven thousand kilometers away!”

“Could it have moved closer?”

“Seems awfully unlikely. It would take half a dozen thaumaturges to coerce it to the surface . . . still, that would explain the readings . . . if the power level is correct, it must be, let me see . . . three hundred kilometers away? And getting closer every minute.”

“What if it were a lot of untrained magicians instead of a few trained ones?”

“It would take a lot more. Hundreds. And why would they want to do it?”

“Terrorists? Maybe they want to destroy the spaceport?”

“No. Doesn’t make sense. Carlo, any terrorists with the capability to summon the Earth elemental to the surface could just as easily make an antimatter bomb. . . . Holy God, the antimatter! Carlo, what’s the current reading on the antimatter level?”

“213 Kilograms, Mr. Layr.”

“We’re in a lot worse trouble than I thought. If the elemental really is surfacing, the volcano is going to erupt.”

“Erupt? You mean like Pompeii?”

Carlo turned white. “My God! That would kill fifty thousand people!”

“A lot worse than that. Carlo. That was just an ash cloud; a natural eruption. This would be forced eruption. These days the vent of Vesuvius is pretty well plugged. It won’t just erupt. Carlo. It’ll explode. Like Krakatoa. But that’s not the worst of it—

Carlo was silent for a moment. “Oh, gods . . . the antimatter. The wards might not hold. Sitting on top of a volcanic explosion? They’re not designed for that kind of stress. They’d overload. We’ll be sitting on top of two hundred kilos of unshielded antimatter. . . .”

“Do you know how big an explosion that would make?”

“No. I can’t even imagine it. Let’s see . . .” Carlo turned to the computer. “Total conversion. 425 kilos . . . E=mc^2 . . . Ten thousand megatons. Holy mother, that’s a million times bigger than Hiroshima! Why, that’s . . . that’s a fireball fifty kilometers across!”

“Pretty close.” said Layr. “You’ve got to figure that only about half of the energy will be absorbed, the rest will be radiated directly into space as gammas.”

“That’s still pretty catastrophic,” said Carlo. “Let’s see, five PSI overpressure radius, 90 kilometers. Praise the gods, it won’t take out Rome, at least.”

“Wrong. We’re almost on the sea. The blast will raise a tidal wave. I can’t begin to calculate how high. It’ll splash the Mediterranean dry like a puddle stepped on by a giant. I don’t think there’ll be much left of Rome after the tidal wave hits it. I don’t think there’ll be much left of anything south of the Alps.”

“What do we do?”

“Neither one of us is qualified to handle this one. We need to find someone with some experience in handling the Earth elemental. And we need to do it fast. . . .”

“Still no luck in contacting Susan?” asked Ramsey.

“No.”

“What then?”

“According to your data, my friend, the elemental is going to surface at Vesuvius in seven hours. No way to stop that. If someone were right there when it happens, and if they had your data, and if they had enough experience with the elemental, then there would be a chance that they could calm it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Who has enough experience?”

“Susan. Me. Maybe four, five other people in the world. Nobody we could contact in time. Susan knows it best.”

“But she’s out of touch.”

“Right.”

“So it’s gotta be us.”

“Right.”

“Let’s hope there’s a flight. We don’t have any time to spare.”

The gold Tigershark sped down the twisted road at almost two hundred klips. Some of the turns were rather wide; hovercars are designed for speed, not for maneuverability. When the road turned too sharply, Jane just cut across the fields, dodging between the olive trees, rather than slowing for the turn. “I’ve been pretty dense,” Susan said. “It should have been obvious to me from the start . . .”

“What?” replied Jane. “That a bunch of Italian peasants were inadvertantly calling up the Earth elemental while trying to improve their crops? Why should that have been obvious?”

“I should have figured that somebody was messing with the Earth elemental. That should have been obvious as soon as I saw Ramsey’s data.”

In front of them the tiny dirt road joined up with the highway. “Which way?” asked Jane.

“Vesuvius.” replied Susan. The car shot to the left. “No. wait . . . first the spaceport Hilton!”

Jane slammed the stick to the side, and the car spun around backward without slowing down. Then she hit both the dragskids and the turbos at the same time. The car stopped as if it were suddenly nailed to the ground, then shot off in the opposite direction.

“Eve never seen anybody drive like that before!” Susan said. “Where in hell did you pick up that trick?”

“Used to play polo for Berkeley,” said Jane. “What were you saying about Ramsey’s data?”

“His data showed the signature of the Earth elemental.”

“His equipment wasn’t calibrated right.”

“I think it was. I was just too blind to see what it meant.”

“You looked at his data? You really think it was valid?”

“Absolutely.”

Jane was silent for a moment. “How bad is the situation? You’re sure that just getting them to stop using that spell won’t be enough?”

“Quite sure. The elemental’s been called; it’s just taken a long time to respond. But when it gets here, all hell is going to break loose over this part of the world.”

“Then it’s all my fault. I was working so hard at ignoring Ramsey I went too far. I hardly even looked at his data.”

“But you didn’t know what to look for, and I did.”

“That doesn’t matter. It was my job to know what he was doing, not yours.”

The spaceport Hilton appeared suddenly on the right. Jane cut across a couple of comers and screeched to a halt in front of the door. They both jumped out of the car.

Upstairs, Susan dumped open her suitcase and started to grab out various items of magical paraphernalia.

“You’ve got a bunch of urgent messages waiting on the room console,” Jane called back to her.

“Who from?”

“Four messages from Hans Kirschmeyer . . . One from Ramsey . . . One from the spaceport ticket office . . . One from Christian Layr . . .”

“Who?”

“Somebody called Christian Layr . . . the message says he’s the chief engineer of power control at the spaceport. He wants you to get in touch with him. as soon as possible, urgent.”

Susan laughed. “I’ll bet it is! Looks like somebody else has figured out what’s going on!”

“Shall I call him?”

“No time! If anybody else calls, put a message in the computer saying I’m heading for Vesuvius.” She grabbed a portable console from the desk and threw it on top of the stack. “Let’s get out of here!”

As they reached the car. Jane asked, “How likely do you think it is you’ll be able to control it?”

“I give it about a fifty-fifty chance,” Susan said. “But I’ve got to try at least.”

“Think you can handle the car?”

“Not the way you can.”

“But you can drive it?”

“Sure.”

“Take it then. If things are as bad as you think I’d better warn the authorities.”

“What can they do?”

“They can start evacuating the area, for one.”

“You trust my judgement enough to start a full scale evacuation?”

Jane looked at her for a moment. “You seem pretty certain.”

“Oh, yes. I’m pretty damn sure. Okay, go to it. If it’s as bad as I think, though, you only have a few hours left. That’s not enough time to get everybody out of Italy even if you could convince them to go.”

“True,” Jane said. “But we’re morally obligated at least to give the warning. The rest is up to them.”

Kirschmeyer’s car was a battered BMW Landstreicher, but he drove with every bit as much verve as Doctor Williamson. He drove up onto the walkway in front of the terminal and parked.

“You’re just going to leave it here?” Ramsey asked.

“Why not? So they tow it away. We’ve more important things to worry about, nein?”

“Right.” They ran into the terminal. SO

“Flight 119, Naples and Spaceport Europe, boarding in ten minutes gate 99. Flight 119 to Naples, boarding in ten minutes.”

“That’s us,” said Ramsey.

“Ja. And just enough time to try once more to get a hold of Susie,” Kirschmeyer replied, heading for a public terminal.

A moment later he shouted. “Bingo!”

“You got her?”

“No! I got her computer. She left a message for us. She’s figured out what’s going on; she’s headed for Vesuvius to try to turn it back! Good girl; she’s worth the two of us put together.”

“What now?”

“We still have to go there. She’s out of contact again, but she needs the data and the equipment I’ve brought if she’s going to have much of a chance of stopping it. We don’t both need to go. One of us is enough. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“No way I’m staying out of the action, prof.”

“It’ll be damn’ dangerous to be there, even with what I brought for her. Damn near impossible without.”

“I’m going,” Ramsey said. You’re going, he thought, how could I do less?

“I can’t talk you out of it?”

“No way.”

Kirschmeyer clapped him heartily on the shoulder. “Good lad! I thought I could count on you! It warms my heart to know that young men are still brave and foolhardy. My Susie could have picked a lot worse for herself, ja! I wish you both the best of luck in dealing with the volcano.”

Ramsey suddenly had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “You mean you’re going to stay behind?”

“Only one of us is needed to get the stuff to her. With you there by her side to give her support, what use am I? All I ever knew about elementals I have taught her, and well she learned, and far more besides. She has no need of me. With you, her brave young man, there at her side, if there is any way for her to stop the volcano from blowing you both into little teeny bits, I’m sure she will find it. She will have the motivation, no?

“But for me, I have my own work to do. I have another flight to try to catch. To New Zealand.”

“New Zealand!” Ramsey said. “You’re running clear to the other side of the world?”

“Ja, ja, New Zealand it is. And I must run. Give Susie my love, yes? And, absolutely, without failure, be sure to tell her where I went. Tell her she can count on me if she needs me.” Kirschmeyer turned and ran.

“Coward!” Ramsey shouted after him.

“No time to explain! Ask Susie!” Kirschmeyer shouted back over his shoulder, then, dodging pedestrians, disappeared into the corridor.

“Flight 119, now boarding at gate 93. Flight 119, Naples and Spaceport Europe, gate 93.”

Ramsey turned away from watching Kirschmeyer and walked over to board.

The prefect of Naples put down the handset with a scowl.

“Bad?” asked his chief of staff, a rather serious, hard-working young man without whom the governor would not be able to get anything done at all.

“I don’t know,” said the governor slowly. “If it weren’t for the coincidence. I’d probably just dismiss them as crackpots. . . .”

“What?”

“I just got two calls, from two entirely different people, both urging me to evacuate Naples and the entire surrounding countryside.”

“But that would be impossible! Why?”

“One of the calls was from a rather well known professor at the University Padua. A colleague at the University Chicago, name of Kirschmeyer. informed him that data they’d collected indicated Mount Vesuvius was about to become active again, probably with a rather large explosion.”

“Vesuvius? That’s ridiculous.”

“Maybe so. He said that he could personally neither confirm nor deny the prediction, but what data he could take showed something unusual was happening, or about to happen, on or near Vesuvius.”

“He suggested you evacuate?”

“No. He said he was passing along the information, and that whether to evacuate the area or not was a decision only I could make.”

“And the other call?”

“Was from a woman, an American, also a professor at the University of Chicago. A Doctor Guenevere Williamson. Rather well known in planetary physics, you may have heard of her. She happens to be visiting Naples. She stated that one of her students had evidence that Vesuvius was about to explode. She suggested in the strongest possible terms that I give order to evacuate the entire area.”

“But such an evacuation would be a major disaster, chief! And keep in mind that one of the things that American university students are famous for is the pulling of pranks—”

“True. It could be just a prank. But if so, one in extremely poor taste. Or it could be simply a mistake.”

“You’re thinking about Pompeii,” Ben stated.

“No. We’ve lived with the memory of Vesuvius and Pompeii for many centuries. I’m thinking more about another volcano. Pelee, a mountain on the tiny French island of Martinique. It’s been one of my nightmares for many years. In 1902 or so, I don’t remember exactly, Pelee started to make noise and shoot out sparks. The population of Saint Pierre, at the foot of the mountain, were terrified. But the governor-general, feeling that a panic would be worse than the risk of an eruption, put out the word that nothing was wrong, that the people should go about business as usual. Later it got still worse. Ignoring the governor’s orders, people began to flee the city and head for the highlands, far from the smoking mountain. To maintain order, the governor ordered the soldiers to bar the streets and to close the port, to prevent anybody from leaving.”

“And?” prompted Ben.

“So the evacuation was halted, and a panic in the city prevented. Order prevailed. Forty thousand people were in the city when the mountain exploded. When rescue ships finally arrived, three days later, there was only one survivor. Only one in the whole city.”

“Oh.”

“That was long ago, of course, and on another continent. But, Ben, there are three million people in greater Naples. And I’m responsible for all of them. Until now, I’ve never regretted going into politics. I’ve always felt I was needed, that I could do a good job, better than—or at least as good as—anybody else could do. I like to make the city run smoothly, to try and make the lives of my people a little better, a little happier.

“I can’t let all that go to waste, Ben. I may make a name for myself as a foolish old man who let a rumor panic three million people. But still, I can’t make any other choice.

“We’ll make the evacuation as smooth and orderly as humanly possible. But, right or wrong. I’m going to evacuate the city.”

3. Volcano

Carlo shut off his qwerty and turned to Layr.

“Still no luck in finding someone qualified to work with the Earth elemental, eh?” Layr asked without looking up from his own qwerty.

“Not exactly,” Carlo replied wearily. “The data bank lists only seven people in the world as being qualified. One of them turns out to be here at the spaceport right now.”

“Here? Who? Where at the spaceport?”

“Listed as being at the Spaceport Hilton. A Susan Robinette. I’ve been trying to contact her, in your name, for the last hour without success. I just got a message from her computer. She’s right now on her way to Vesuvius—”

“Vesuvius? Then she’s already aware of the problem!”

“Unless it’s just a sightseeing trip.”

“Have you looked outside? Nobody sane would go sightseeing to Vesuvius today. We’d better hope she stops the eruption. We can’t worry about that, we’ve got to do something about the antimatter.”

“If she can stop the volcano, we don’t have to worry about the antimatter.”

“But maybe she can’t. I’ve been keeping power readings on the elemental; it’s powerful, unbelievably powerful. At this stage. I’m not sure there even is any way to stop it.”

“What is there we can do about the antimatter? Can we invert it?”

“I wish it were just that easy.”

“Why not? It’s a simple spell. About the simplest there is. Reverse antimatter into matter; should be about as simple as turning a left shoe into a right one.”

“Oh, it’s a simple enough spell, all right. But there are two reasons we can’t use it. You’ve heard of the UN Commission on Peaceful Uses of Thaumaturgy? They’ve set a ward spell over the entire earth to prevent matter/antimatter inversion spells from working. Can you imagine what would happen if any backyard thaumaturge decided to make some antimatter just for kicks?”

“Yeah. But couldn’t we circumvent that somehow?”

“Yes, we probably could. All they can do is try to slow down amateurs; they can’t stop a professional. It would take us some time, but we could do it.

“The second problem is that in order to invert our antimatter, we’d first have to take down our own wards . . .”

“Oh,” said Carlo. “Of course. And to do that would initiate the very disaster we were trying to avoid.” Carlo thought for a moment. “What if we were to set up a pentacle around the whole power control? Then invert everything inside; the building, the air, the computers, even ourselves? Turn it all into antimatter. All but the antimatter, which is warded itself, so would stay unchanged. If we ourselves are antimatter, we can release the inner wards without any harm. Then we can do another inversion, and we’re safe.” Carlo grinned.

“Clever,” said Layr. “Just one problem. What happens if the volcano goes off when we’re halfway through?”

“Oh,” said Carlo thoughtfully. “Then the disaster would be magnified a millionfold.”

“Right. It would split the Earth open like a clamshell. Yes, it would work, Carlo, but we don’t even dare think of trying it.” He stared off into the distance. “Still, it’s basically a good idea. If we survive this it wouldn’t be hard to rig up some sort of automatic spell to invert the antimatter in an emergency. Something like that should have been built in right at the beginning. Damn poor engineering.” He looked up at Carlo. “Anyway, we have to live through this first.”

“You have an idea?”

“Yes,” said Layr grinning. “We’re a spaceport, right? Let’s act like one. I say we just lob that son of a devil clear into orbit, pentacles and all!”

“Of course. Why not?” Carlo grinned back. “It’ll sure make a mess of the spaceport, though. We’ll have to keep the pentacles intact; that means orbiting about half of power control with it.”

“True. But it’ll make even more of a mess if it goes off.”

Just as the suborbital entered the atmosphere over Italy. Ramsey heard an announcement. Naples port was closed to all incoming flights. Nobody would be allowed to leave the shuttle. They would pick up as many outgoing passengers as they could and boost out immediately. Naples was being evacuated. Ramsey cursed softly.

On the ground. Ramsey could see through the window that they were serious about the evacuation. Behind a rope barricade, a huge crowd milled about, waiting for a turn to board one of the suborbital transports, any one, just to get away from the city . . . and the volcano. A few policemen armed with electric stunners kept the evacuation from becoming disorderly.

Ramsey got up and walked nonchalantly down the aisle. One of the other passengers looked up at him inquisitively. “Just stretching my legs,” he remarked casually. “Looks like we won’t even get a chance to step outside.” He stopped walking at a panel marked EMERGENCY EXIT. He looked around. Nobody else was paying any particular attention to him.

“TWIST KNOB, PULL HANDLE, REMOVE ALL SHARP OBJECTS FROM POCKETS BEFORE SLIDING DOWN CHUTE.” Ramsey reached out and twisted and pulled in a single smooth motion. The emergency exit popped open and the escape slide inflated with a loud pop. Before any of the startled passengers could react, he scooped up the briefcase Kirschmeyer had given him and dove headfirst down the chute.

One of the guards saw him just as he hit the ground. “Hey! Non autorizzato—” Ramsey dove into the mob, clutching the case firmly to his stomach, keeping his head down so his height and color wouldn’t give him away. The guard started after hint, but a second policeman grabbed the first and said something in rapid Italian. The first guard answered back, then shrugged his shoulders.

After all, they were trying to keep the evacuation orderly, not to keep people from coming in. If some crazy American walked into the danger zone voluntarily, what was it to them?

Once outside. Ramsey quickly discovered that he had three major problems. He couldn’t speak Italian. Even if he could, no one would be willing to take him anywhere near Vesuvius, for any amount of money . . . and he had no money anyway.

Kirschmeyer should have thought of these things before sending me off, he thought. Damn cowardly fool. He could have at least arranged to let somebody know he was coming.

He walked over toward the entrance. The road leaving the ‘port was empty; the one entering was jammed. Thousands of abandoned cars were parked over the sidewalks and overflowing into the plaza. Ramsey grinned. It had been a long time since the old days on the south side . . . but he figured he could still remember how to hotwire a car.

It was easy enough to find the volcano. A huge plume of black smoke, lit from below with a lurid red light, rose into the evening sky like a giant pillar. As he got closer, hot ash began to fall out of the air.

Ten miles away he was stopped by a roadblock. A policeman stepped out of a hastily-constructed shanty and shouted something in Italian, took a good look at Ramsey, then repeated it in English. “No passage! The road closed. Go back!”

“I’ve got to get through!” Ramsey shouted back. “Urgent! Important!”

“Road closed!” the policeman repeated. “Dangerous! No passage!”

He could go back until he was out of sight. Ramsey thought, then try cutting across the countryside.

“Ramsey! Ramsey, is that you?”

“Doctor Williamson! What on Earth are you doing here?”

“No time to explain. Where’s Hans?”

“Not here. He sent me with some stuff.” He held up Professor Kirschmeyer’s briefcase.

“Good! Susan said he’d come through for her.”

“Susan!” said Ramsey. “Where is she?”

Doctor Williamson pointed at the mountain. From here it was barely visible through the clouds of soot and ash. “There! See that outcropping, just below the lip? Just to the left of that.”

“Gods!” said Ramsey. “How can she survive up there?”

“She’s warded, naturally.”

“Right.” said Ramsey. “Can you get them to let me through to her?”

Doctor Williamson turned to the policeman and said something in Italian. The policeman went away for a moment and brought back another man. whom she also talked to. He raised the barricade and waved Ramsey through. “Better hurry.” she said. “Good luck.”

The drive up the volcano was like a drive through hell. Twisted trunks of burned trees loomed out of the clouds of ash like the souls of the damned. Red hot rocks whizzed out of the sky and smashed to earth all around him. He drove as fast as he dared through the strange murky twilight. A flying rock zinged off the hood. Close behind it came another, smashing into the windshield. Through the cracks the stench of sulfur suffused into the car.

Ahead he saw an island of relative calm. The eye of the storm? Eyes stinging. he headed for it. As he approached, he saw it was a pentacle. Susan was inside, making an invocation. Near the pentacle Ramsey saw the pitted ruin of an expensive sports car. He put his stolen car next to it. grabbed the briefcase, and dashed through the ash storm to the safety of the pentacle.

“Susan!”

“Ramsey! You made it!” Susan threw herself into his arms and kissed him. “Oh. Ramsey!” She looked around. “But where is Hans? Didn’t he come?”

“No.”

“No? No? Why not?”

Ramsey was strangely reluctant to tell her that Kirschmeyer had chickened out, headed for the exact opposite side of the globe. “Well. he. uh—”

“What?”

“When I left him he was headed for New Zealand.” Ramsey said.

“New Zealand? Why—Oh, I see. So he doesn’t think I can do it, huh? Thinks I can’t calm it enough to stop the eruption. Merde! I wish he were here. I could sure use his touch.”

“He said you knew everything he did.”

“Balderdash. I’m damn good, but he’s still better. Well, I gotta make do with what I got, I guess. So. how long do we have?”

“Huh? Oh! The data!” Ramsey opened the briefcase. Under the pile of magical equipment were two microdisks. Susan picked them up and plugged them into the portable next to her. She looked at the display.

“Well. Not much time, is there? We’d better get to it!”

At Wellington ‘port, Hans Kirschmeyer was trying to rent a vehicle. “Don’t you have any hovercars? I have to travel over water.”

“Sorry, all we have at the moment are wheelies. Try back in an hour.”

“An hour? In an hour, we’ll all be dead! Is there anywhere else? I’m desperate!”

“Maybe dockside.”

At the dock Kirschmeyer found only one rental place open. The proprietor, a lean blond kid in a sheepskin jacket, leaned against the counter, we rent anything, said the sign.

“Got any hovercars I can rent?”

“Nope,” the proprietor said.

“Aircraft? A seaplane, perhaps?”

“Nope.”

“Motorboats?”

“Nope.”

“Sailboat?”

“Nope.”

“Well, what have you got?”

The proprietor nodded down at the water. “Rowboat.”

Kirschmeyer looked down. A tiny skiff bobbed up and down in the swell. “I’ll take it. How much?”

“You want it? She’s yours.”

“Thanks.” Kirschmeyer threw in his bag. jumped in, and tossed off the mooring line.

“ ‘Course,” continued the proprietor laconically, “she ain’t got no oars . . .”

Kirschmeyer wasn’t listening. He balanced in the boat, facing the rear and chanting, waving his hands wildly.

The rental proprietor leaned even farther over the counter to watch. Behind the skiff, a wave rose out of the sea, picked up the boat, and hurled it forward. For a moment it seemed as if Kirschmeyer would fall face first into the water. He finally caught his balance, and continued his chanting. As the boat disappeared over the horizon it was still accelerating.

Susan stood facing the volcano, speaking in a loud, commanding tone, occasionally glancing down at the portable console at her feet and scowling. Once Ramsey started to say something, but she gestured him to stay silent without ever breaking the cadence of her chant. Outside the tiny circle of calm, a nightmare scene of swirling black ash and streaks of orange flame writhed around them.

From out of the writhing ash, a deep, resonant voice seemed to speak unintelligible syllables in response to Susan’s chants. Susan abruptly changed her chant, and made a new gesture with both hands. The voice got louder and deeper, almost turning into an inaudible subsonic rumble. Susan hit a key on the qwerty with her toe.

“Got him.” she remarked conversationally.

“Naachforsitthanna quanne,” stated the voice in a cold, dispassionate tone. Outside the pentacle, the whirling clouds of ash seemed to form into a shape. Not exactly a face, but an inhuman presence. Ramsey felt as if some giant pair of eyes were behind him. watching him with bored indifference.

“Naal tcnepahh.” Susan said in the same dispassionate tone. “Suumayeh anada. Tiirata na! Sooranala na! Tiir!”

“Doonoro tiir,” the presence said. “Na ksissith, doon.” Outside, flames shot up and swirled around the pentacle.

“Nadilli! nabokikok,” said Susan, and made a gesture. Deep violet flame shot from her hands and circled the pentacle.

“Doon,” said the presence. The violet flame vanished. “Toorah.” A sheet of deep orange flame formed around the pentacle and began to constrict. Susan waved one hand casually. The orange flame vanished.

“We’re pretty evenly matched.” Susan said to Ramsey. “So far I can’t drive him back, but neither can he destroy me.”

“What then?”

“Niiratah doowl,” said Susan. “Kirilak!”

“Doon, sibborkahreplied the low voice dispassionately.

“Simsnanabolith.” shesaid. “Damn. That didn’t work either. Kirschmeyer was right. I don’t quite have the control or the power to hold it. Almost, but not quite.”

“What now?”

“It’s going to erupt somewhere,” she said calmly. “I don’t have the power to hold that back. Not for long, anyway. But right now I still have a little control over exactly where it will erupt.” Suddenly Ramsey got it. “You mean, you can make the eruption happen somewhere else? Where there aren’t any people? Like, say, the middle of the Pacific? Or. maybe. New Zealand?”

“Yeah. Something like that. Only I can’t make it happen exactly anywhere. What I can do. though, is invert the eruption exactly. Make the eruption happen at exactly the other side of the Earth.”

“Which is?”

“I checked it on the computer before we started. About 500 kilometers east, and maybe a hundred north, of the Chatham Islands. In the middle of the ocean. Off New Zealand.”

“Where Professor Kirschmeyer is waiting to handle it.”

“So I hope.”

She raised both hands over her head, and this time her voice was strong and confident. “SIBBOLAH! DIIRATAH! KAARANATATH NA TIIR! RAMANAH!”

She made a final, sweeping gesture.

“Tiir.” The voice died away into a gentle sigh, almost too low to hear. Outside the pentacle, the ashes swirled up once again, then began to settle. In moments the sky was clear.

Susan slumped down and gave a sigh of relief. “It’s over.”

Far to the south, there was a sudden flash of light. A tiny speck of fire hurled into the night sky, chased by a bolt of brilliant violet lightning. A moment later they heard the thunderclap. Ramsey jumped.

“What in the hell was that?”

Susan looked south speculatively. “The spaceport. That must have been the spaceport. They couldn’t know we would be able to stop the eruption. I’d say that they just jettisoned their antimatter pile, to protect the city in case we failed, in case the volcano blew.”

“A little late, weren’t they?”

Susan looked at her watch. “No. They had another ten seconds left. Ten seconds until it would have blown.”

Five hundred kilometers from any land, on a tiny rowboat alone in the midst of the south Pacific. Hans Kirschmeyer felt strangely at home. He had no way to draw a pentacle, and no need. The ocean elemental he thought of as his friend, a friend he knew so well that they had no need for words.

Intellectually, he knew, that was complete nonsense. Elementals are forces of nature; they have friends no more than do the wind and the stars. But who says the wind and stars do not have friends? He looked at his watch and stood up in the boat.

“Ksirrith, Kisirrith na diir. my friend,” he said. “Na naratah na diir for me, old friend. Diiratha. tegah! Naboleth, tegah! Diiratah!”

He looked at his watch again. Soon, soon. There was no way to stop the coming eruption. He wasn’t even going to try. In mid ocean, he knew, a sudden volcanic eruption would be a much worse disaster than one on land. Instead of blowing away air, the shock wave would raise a great wall of water, a tidal wave, which could roll across a thousand miles of ocean as easily as across a bathtub, and still smash cities like toys. Still, he wasn’t worried. He couldn’t stop the eruption. But he could make his friend, the ocean elemental, ready for it.

He looked at his watch one final time. “Now,” he whispered softly.

In the distance, a massive dome of water lifted into the air, fragmented into a thousand gargantuan droplets, and started to fall slowly back to earth. From below shot out a bright plume of fire, reaching into the clear sky, followed slowly by a huge cloud of black ash.

Still there was no sound. He could see two waves, one traveling out from the gash in the ocean floor, the other traveling inward to fill in the place splashed dry by the eruption. When the wave hit the plume of fire, a cloud of purest white rose into the air, challenging the cloud of black ash for dominion of the sky.

“Magnificent,” he whispered softly.

The shock wave hit and almost bowled the tiny boat over. Hans fought to remain upright. He whispered a word to the elemental he thought of as his friend. The boat righted itself. The tidal wave loomed in front of him, ten, twenty, fifty feet tall. It picked up the boat like a piece of straw.

“Gently, gently, my friend.” Hans murmured. “Nakonah nadoran, nakonah na diir. Calm, calm.” The boat shot along like a board riding the crest of some surfer’s fantasy. Hans smiled softly as another idea occured to him. He would calm the tidal wave, yes . . . everywhere except behind the boat. The proprietor of the rental place had looked surprised to see how he left. Just wait until he saw him return!

On top of the still smoking volcano, two twisted lumps of metal lay slowly cooling in the moonlight. Ramsey could no longer even tell which one had once been the sports car. He found a boulder that was cool enough to touch, brushed the volcanic ash off, and sat down. Susan came over and sat next to him.

“I guess I still don’t understand why this . . .” he gestured across the devastated mountainside “. . . had to happen. You say it was just a few peasants trying to improve their crops?”

“Not a few. I don’t know how many. Thousands, I’d guess. Maybe millions. Once one found a spell that worked, he told somebody else. It must have spread exponentially. Individually, none of them mattered. All of them together, well, together they woke up something none of them asked for.”

“Just ignorant peasants . . .” said Ramsey.

“Ignorant? Not really. No more than you. or anybody who uses a technology without really understanding it, or its consequences. Only in this case the consequences turned out to be a little worse than just having a little snow dumped on their heads. They just happened to know the wrong spell, at the wrong time, and in the worst possible place.”

They sat in silence for a while.

“Well, I suppose somebody will come for us sooner or later,” Ramsey said at last. “Probably not for a while, though.”

“Well, I don’t think I’m in any hurry,” said Susan. She smiled and looked across at him. “Are you?”

Ramsey looked back at her. Her hair was a tangled mess. Her dress was ripped and streaked with ash that had somehow managed to leak in past the ward. She was still trembling slightly, either with left-over fear or with exhaustion. She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. “I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be marooned on top of a volcano with,” he said.

BLUED MOON

Connie Willis

Despite the tact that Ms. Willis recently won two Nebula awards (for “Fire Watch”’ and “A Letter from the Clearys”), the only thing she’s asked us to mention here is that she wrote the following story while under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. And a word of warning: if you’re looking for the sort of subtly-plotted, understated story that one has come to expect from Ms. Willis—well, we’re afraid you won’t interface with one here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Mowen Chemical today announced implementation of an innovative waste emissions installation at its experimental facility in Chugwater, Wyoming. According to project directors Bradley McAfee and Lynn Saunders, nonutilizable hydrocarbonaceous substances will be propulsively transferred to stratospheric altitudinal locations, where photochemical decomposition will result in triatomic allotropism and formation of benign bicarbonaceous precipitates. Preliminary predictive databasing indicates positive ozonation yields without statistically significant shifts in lateral ecosystem equilibria.

“Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?” Mr. Mowen said. He was looking gloomily out the window at the distant 600-foot-high smokestacks.

“I don’t know, Mr. Mowen,” Janice said. She sighed. “Do you want me to tell them to wait again?”

The sigh was supposed to mean, It’s after four o’clock and it’s getting dark, and you’ve already asked Research to wait three times, and when are you going to make up your mind? but Mr. Mowen ignored it.

“On the other hand,” he said. “What about diapers? And all those babies that would have been stuck with straight pins if it hadn’t been for the safety pin?”

“It is supposed to help restore the ozone layer, Mr. Mowen,” Janice said. “And according to Research, there won’t be any harmful side effects.”

“You shoot a bunch of hydrocarbons into the stratosphere, and there won’t be any harmful side effects. According to Research.” Mr. Mowen swivelled his chair around to look at Janice, nearly knocking over the picture of his daughter Sally that sat on his desk. “I stuck Sally once. With a safety pin. She screamed for an hour. How’s that for a harmful side effect? And what about the stuff that’s left over after all this ozone is formed? Bicarbonate of soda, Research says. Perfectly harmless. How do they know that? Have they ever dumped bicarbonate of soda on people before? Call Research . . .” he started to say, but Janice had already picked up the phone and tapped the number. She didn’t even sigh. “Call Research and ask them to figure out what effect a bicarbonate of soda rain would have.”

“Yes, Mr. Mowen,” Janice said. She put the phone up to her ear and listened for a moment. “Mr. Mowen . . .” she said hesitantly.

“I suppose Research says it’ll neutralize the sulfuric acid that’s killing the statues and sweeten and deodorize at the same time.”

“No, sir,” Janice said. “Research says they’ve already started the temperature-differential kilns, and you should be seeing something in a few minutes. They say they couldn’t wait any longer.”

Mr. Mowen whipped back around in his chair to look out the window. The picture of Sally teetered again, and Mr. Mowen wondered if she were home from college yet. Nothing was coming out of the smokestacks. He couldn’t see the candlestick-base kilns through the maze of fast-food places and trailer parks. A McDonald’s sign directly in front of the smokestacks blinked on suddenly, and Mr. Mowen jumped. The smokestacks themselves remained silent and still except for their blinding strobe aircraft lights. He could see sagebrush-covered hills in the space between the stacks, and the whole scene, except for the McDonald’s sign, looked unbelievably serene and harmless.

“Research says the kilns are fired to full capacity,” Janice said, holding the phone against her chest.

Mr. Mowen braced himself for the coming explosion. There was a low rumbling like distant fire, then a puff of whitish smoke, and finally a deep, whooshing sound like one of Janice’s sighs, and two columns of blue shot straight up into the darkening sky.

“Why is it blue?” Mr. Mowen said.

“I already asked,” Janice said. “Research says visible spectrum diffraction is occurring because of the point eight micron radii of the hydrocarbons being propelled . . .”

“That sounds like that damned press release,” Mr. Mowen said. “Tell them to speak English.”

After a minute of talking into the phone, she said, “It’s the same effect that causes the sunsets after a volcanic eruption. Scattering. Research wants to know what staff members you’d like to have at the press conference tomorrow.”

“The directors of the project,” Mr. Mowen said grumpily, “and anyone over at Research who can speak English.”

Janice looked at the press release. “Bradley McAfee and Lynn Saunders are the directors,” she said.

“Why does the name McAfee sound familiar?”

“He’s Ulric Henry’s roommate. The company linguist you hired to . . .”

“I know why I hired him. Invite Henry, too. And try to get Sally as soon as she gets home. Tell her that I expect her there; and tell her to dress up.” He looked at his watch. “Well,” he said. “It’s been going five minutes, and there haven’t been any harmful side effects yet.”

The phone rang. Mr. Mowen jumped. “I knew it was too good to last,” he said. “Who is it? The EPA?”

“No,” Janice said, and sighed. “It’s your ex-wife.”

“I’m shut of that,” Brad said when Ulric came in the door. He was sitting in the dark, the green glow of the monitor lighting his face. He tapped at the terminal keys for a minute more and then turned around. “All done. Slicker’n goose grease.”

Ulric turned on the light. “The waste-emissions project?” he said. “Nope. We turned that on this afternoon. Works prettier than a spotted pony. No, I been spending the last hour erasing my fiancee Lynn’s name from the project records.”

“Won’t Lynn object to that?” Ulric said, fairly calmly, mostly because he did not have a very clear idea of which one Lynn was. He never could tell Brad’s fiancees apart. They all sounded exactly the same.

“She won’t hear tell of it till it’s too late,” Brad said. “She’s on her way to Cheyenne to catch a plane back east. Her mother’s all het up about getting a divorce. Caught her husband Adam ‘n’ Evin’.”

If there was anything harder to put up with than Brad’s rottenness, it was his incredibly good luck. While Ulric was sure Brad was low enough to engineer a sudden family crisis to get Lynn out of Chugwater, he was just as sure that he had had no need to. It was a lucky coincidence that Lynn’s mother was getting a divorce just now, and lucky coincidences were Brad’s specialty. How else could he have kept three fiancées from ever meeting each other in the small confines of Chugwater and Mowen Chemical?

“Lynn?” Ulric said. “Which one is that? The redhead in programming?”

“Nope, that’s Sue. Lynn’s little and yellow-haired and smart as a whip about chemical engineering. Kind of a dodunk about everythin’ else.”

“Dodunk,” Ulric said to himself. He should make a note to look that up. It probably meant “one so foolish as to associate with Brad McAfee.” That definitely included him. He had agreed to room with Brad because he was so surprised at being hired that it had not occurred to him to ask for an apartment of his own.

He had graduated with an English degree that everyone had told him was worse than useless in Wyoming, and which he very soon found out was. In desperation, he had applied for a factory job at Mowen Chemical and been hired on as company linguist at an amazing salary for reasons that had not yet become clear, though he had been at Mowen for over three months. What had become clear was that Brad McAfee was, to use his own colorful language, a thimblerigger, a pigeon plucker, a hornswoggler. He was steadily working his way toward the boss’s daughter and the ownership of Mowen Chemical, leaving a trail of young women behind him who all apparently believed that a man who pronounced fiancee “fee-an-see” couldn’t possibly have more than one. It was an interesting linguistic phenomenon.

At first Ulric had been taken in by Brad’s homespun talk, too, even though it didn’t seem to match his sophisticated abilities on the computer. Then one day he had gotten up early and caught Brad working on a program called “Project Sally.”

“I’m gonna be the president of Mowen Chemical in two shakes of a sheep’s tail,” Brad had said. “This little dingclinker is my master plan. What do you think of it?”

What Ulric thought of it could not be expressed in words. It outlined a plan for getting close to Sally Mowen and impressing her father based almost entirely on the seduction and abandonment of young women in key positions at Mowen Chemical. Three-quarters of the way down he saw Lynn’s name.

“What if Mr. Mowen gets hold of this program?” Ulric had said finally.

“Not a look-in chance that that’d happen. I got this program locked up tighter than a hog’s eye. And if anybody else tried to copy it, they’d be sorrier than a coon romancin’ a polecat.”

Since then Ulric had put in six requests for an apartment, all of which had been turned down “due to restrictive areal housing availability,” which Ulric supposed meant there weren’t any empty apartments in Chugwater. All of the turndowns were initialed by Mr. Mowen’s secretary, and there were moments when Ulric thought that Mr. Mowen knew about “Project Sally” after all and had hired Ulric to keep Brad away from his daughter.

“According to my program, it’s time to go to work on Sally,” Brad said now. “Tomorrow at this press conference. I’m enough of a rumbustigator with this waste-emissions project to dazzlefy Old Man Mowen. Sally’s going to be there. I got my fiancee Gail in publicity to invite her.”

“I’m going to be there, too,” Ulric said belligerently.

“Now, that’s right lucky,” Brad said. “You can do a little honeyfuggling for me. Work on old Sally while I give Pappy Mowen the glad hand. Do you know what she looks like?”

“I have no intention of honeyfuggling Sally Mowen for you,” Ulric said, and wondered again where Brad managed to pick up all these slang expressions. He had caught Brad watching Judy Canova movies on TV a couple of times, but some of these words weren’t even in Mencken. He probably had a computer program that generated them. “In fact, I intend to tell her you’re engaged to more than one person already.”

“Boy, you’re sure wadgetty,” Brad said. “And you know why? Because you don’t have a gal of your own. Tell you what, you pick out one of mine, and I’ll give her to you. How about Sue?”

Ulric walked over to the window. “I don’t want her,” he said.

“I bet you don’t even know which one she is,” Brad said.

I don’t, Ulric thought. They all sound exactly alike. They use “interface” as a verb and “support” as an adjective. One of them had called for Brad and when Ulric told her he was over at Research, she had said, “Sorry. My wetware’s nonfunctional this morning.” Ulric felt as if he were living in a foreign country.

“What difference does it make?” Ulric said angrily. “Not one of them speaks English, which is probably why they’re all dumb enough to think they’re engaged to you.”

“How about if I get you a gal who speaks English and you honeyfuggle Sally Mowen for me?” Brad said. He turned to the terminal and began typing furiously. “What exactly do you want?”

Ulric clenched his fists and looked out the window. The dead cottonwood under the window had a kite or something caught in its branches. He debated climbing down the tree and walking over to Mr. Mowen’s office to demand an apartment.

“Makes no never mind,” Brad said when he didn’t answer. “I’ve heard you oratin’ often enough on the subject.” He typed a minute more and hit the print button. “There,” he said.

Ulric turned around.

Brad read from the monitor, “ ‘Wanted: Young woman who can generate enthusiasm for the Queen’s English, needs to use correct grammar and syntax, no gobbledygook, no slang, respect for the language. Signed, Ulric Henry.’ What do you think of that? It’s the spittin’ image of the way you talk.”

“I can find my own ‘gals,’ ” Ulric said. He yanked the sheet of paper as it was still coming out of the printer, ripping over half the sheet in a long ragged diagonal. Now it read, “Wanted: Young woman who can generate language. Ulric H.”

“I’ll swap you horses,” Brad said. “If this don’t rope you in a nice little filly, I’ll give you Lynn when she gets back. It’ll cheer her up, after getting her name taken off the project and all. What do you think of that?”

Ulric put the scrap of paper down carefully on the table, trying to resist the impulse to wad it up and cram it down Brad’s throat. He slammed the window up. There was a sudden burst of chilly wind, and the paper on the table balanced uneasily and then drifted onto the windowsill.

“What if Lynn misses her plane in Cheyenne?” Ulric said. “What if she comes back here and runs into one of your other fiancees?”

“No chance on the map,” Brad said cheerfully. “I got me a program for that, too.” He tore the rest of the paper out of the printer and wadded it up. “Two of my fiancees come callin’ at the same time, they have to come up in the elevators, and there’s only two of them. They work on the same signals, so I made me up a program that stops the elevators between floors if my security code gets read in more than once in an hour. It makes an override beep go off on my terminal, too, so’s I can soft-shoe the first gal down the back stairs.” He stood up. “I gotta go over to Research and check on the waste-emissions project again. You better find yourself a gal right quick. You’re givin’ me the flit-flats with all this unfriendly talk.”

He grabbed his coat off the back of the chair and went out. He slammed the door, perhaps because he had the flit-flats, and the resultant breeze hit the scrap of paper on the windowsill and sailed it neatly out the window.

“Flit-flats,” Ulric mumbled to himself, and tried to call Mowen’s office. The line was busy.

Sally Mowen called her father as soon as she got home. “Hi, Janice,” she said. “Is Dad there?”

“He just left,” Janice said. “But I have a feeling he might stop by Research. He’s worried about the new stratospheric waste-emissions project.”

“I’ll walk over and meet him.”

“Your father said to tell you there’s a press conference tomorrow at eleven. Are you at your terminal?”

“Yes,” Sally said, and flicked the power on.

“I’ll send the press releases for you so you’ll know what’s going on.”

Sally was going to say that she had already received an invitation to the press conference and the accompanying PR material from someone named Gail, but changed her mind when she saw what was being printed out on the printer. “You didn’t send me the press releases,” she said. “You sent me a bio on somebody named Ulric Henry. Who’s he?”

“I did?” Janice said, sounding flustered. “I’ll try it again.”

Sally held up the tail of the printout sheet as it came rolling out of the computer. “Now I’ve got a picture of him.” The picture showed a dark-haired young man with an expression somewhere between dismay and displeasure. I’ll bet someone just told him she thought they could have a viable relationship, Sally thought. “Who is he?”

Janice sighed, a quick, flustered kind of sigh. “I didn’t mean to send that to you. He’s the company linguist. I think your father invited him to the press conference to write press releases.”

I thought the press releases were already done and you were sending them to me, Sally thought, but she said, “When did my father hire a linguist?”

“Last summer,” Janice said, sounding even more flustered. “How’s school?”

“Fine,” Sally said. “And no, I’m not getting married. I’m not even having a viable relationship, whatever that is.”

“Your mother called today. She’s in Cheyenne at a NOW rally,” Janice said, which sounded like a non sequitur, but wasn’t. With a mother like Sally’s, it was no wonder her father worried himself sick over who Sally might marry. Sometimes Sally worried, too. Viable relationship.

“How did Charlotte sound?” Sally said. “No, wait. I already know. Look, don’t worry about the press conference stuff. I already know all about it. Gail Somebody in publicity sent me an invitation. That’s why I came home for Thanksgiving a day early.”

“She did?” Janice said. “Your father didn’t mention it. He probably forgot. He’s been a little worried about this project,” she said, which must be the understatement of the year, Sally thought, if he’d managed to rattle Janice. “So you haven’t met anyone nice?”

“No,” Sally said. “Yes. I’ll tell you tomorrow.” She hung up. They’re all nice, she thought. That isn’t the problem. They’re nice, but they’re incoherent. A viable relationship. What on earth was that? And what was “respecting your personal space?” Or “fulfilling each other’s socioeconomic needs?” I have no idea what they are talking about, Sally thought. I have been going out with a bunch of foreigners.

She put her coat and her hat back on and started down in the elevator to find her father. Poor man. He knew what it was like to be married to someone who didn’t speak English. She could imagine what the conversation with her mother had been like. All sisters and sexist pigs. She hadn’t been speaking ERA very long. The last time she called, she had been speaking EST and the time before that California. It was no wonder Sally’s father had hired a secretary that communicated almost entirely through sighs, and that Sally had majored in English.

Tomorrow at the press conference would be dreadful. She would be surrounded by nice young men who spoke Big Business or Computer or Bachelor on the Make, and she would not understand a word they said.

It suddenly occurred to her that the company linguist, Ulric something, might speak English, and she punched in her security code all over again and went back up in the elevator to get the printout with his address on it. She decided to go through the oriental gardens to get to Research instead of taking the car. She told herself it was shorter, which was true, but she was really thinking that if she went through them, she would go past the housing unit where Ulric Henry lived.

The oriental gardens had originally been designed as a shortcut through the maze of fast-food places that had sprung up around Mowen Chemical, making it impossible to get anywhere quickly. Her father had purposely stuck Mowen Chemical on the outskirts of Chugwater so the plant wouldn’t disturb the natives, trying to make the original buildings and housing blend in to the Wyoming landscape. The natives had promptly disturbed Mowen Chemical, so that by the time they built the Research complex and computer center, the only land not covered with Kentucky Fried Chickens and Arbys was in the older part of town and very far from the original buildings. Mr. Mowen had given up trying not to disturb the natives. He had built the oriental gardens so that at least people could get from home to work and back again without being run over by the Chugwaterians. Actually, he had intended just to put in a brick path that would wind through the original Mowen buildings and connect them with the new ones, but at the time Charlotte had been speaking Zen. She had insisted on bonsais and a curving bridge over the irrigation ditch. Before the landscaping was finished, she had switched to an Anti-Watt dialect that had put an end to the marriage and sent Sally flying off east to school. During that same period her mother had campaigned to save the dead cottonwood she was standing under now, picketing her husband’s office with signs that read, “Tree Murderer!”

Sally stood under the dead cottonwood tree, counting the windows so she could figure out which was Ulric Henry’s apartment. There were three windows on the sixth floor with lights in all three, and the middle window was open for some unknown reason, but it would require an incredible coincidence to have Ulric Henry come and stand at one of the windows while Sally was standing there so she could shout up to him, “Do you speak English?”

I wasn’t looking for him anyway, she told herself stubbornly. I’m on my way to meet my father, and I stopped to look at the moon. My, it certainly is a peculiar blue color tonight. She stood a few minutes longer under the tree, pretending to look at the moon, but it was getting very cold, the moon did not seem to be getting any bluer, and even if it were, it did not seem like an adequate reason for freezing to death, so she pulled her hat down farther over her ears and walked past the bonsais and over the curved bridge towards Research.

As soon as she was across the bridge, Ulric Henry came to the middle window and shut it. The movement of pulling the window shut made a little breeze. The torn piece of printout paper that had been resting on the ledge fluttered to a place closer to the edge and then went over, drifting down in the bluish moonlight past the kite, and coming to rest on the second lowest branch of the cottonwood tree.

Wednesday morning Mr. Mowen got up early so he could get some work done at the office before the press conference. Sally wasn’t up yet, so he put the coffee on and went into the bathroom to shave. He plugged his electric razor into the outlet above the sink, and the light over the mirror promptly went out. He took the cord out of the outlet and unscrewed the blackened bulb. Then he pattered into the kitchen in his bare feet to look for another light bulb.

He put the burned-out bulb gently in the wastebasket next to the sink and began opening cupboards. He picked up the syrup bottle to look behind it. The lid was not screwed on tightly, and the syrup bottle dropped with a thud onto its side and began oozing syrup all over the cupboard. Mr. Mowen grabbed a paper towel, which tore in a ragged, useless diagonal, and tried to mop it up. He knocked the salt shaker over into the pool of syrup. He grabbed the other half of the paper towel and turned on the hot water faucet to wet it. The water came out in a steaming blast.

Mr. Mowen jumped sideways to get out of the path of the boiling water and knocked over the wastebasket. The light bulb bounced out and smashed onto the kitchen floor. Mr. Mowen stepped on a large ragged piece. He tore off more paper towels to stanch the blood and limped back to the bathroom, walking on the side of his bleeding foot, to get a bandaid.

He had forgotten about the light in the bathroom being burned out. Mr. Mowen felt his way to the medicine cabinet, knocking the shampoo and a box of Q-Tips into the sink before he found the bandaids. The shampoo lid wasn’t screwed on tightly either. He took the metal box of bandaids back to the kitchen.

It was bent, and Mr. Mowen got a dent in his thumb trying to pry the lid off. As he was pushing on it, the lid suddenly sprang free, spraying bandaids all over the kitchen floor. Mr. Mowen picked one up, being careful to avoid the pieces of light bulb, ripped the end off the wrapper, and pulled on the orange string. The string came out. Mr. Mowen looked at the string for a long minute and then tried to open the bandaid from the back.

When Sally came into the kitchen, Mr. Mowen was sitting on a kitchen chair sucking his bleeding thumb and holding a piece of paper towel to his other foot. “What happened?” she said.

“I cut myself on a broken light bulb,” Mr. Mowen said. “It went out while I was trying to shave.”

She grabbed for a piece of paper towelling. It tore off cleanly at the perforation, and Sally wrapped Mr. Mowen’s thumb in it. “You know better than to try to pick up a broken light bulb,” she said. “You should have gotten a broom.”

“I did not try to pick up the light bulb,” he said. “I cut my thumb on a bandaid. I cut my feet on the light bulb.”

“Oh, I see,” Sally said. “Don’t you know better than to try to pick up a light bulb with your feet?”

“This isn’t funny,” Mr. Mowen said indignantly. “I am in a lot of pain.”

“I know it isn’t funny,” Sally said. She picked a bandaid up off the floor, tore off the end, and pulled the string neatly along the edge of the wrapping. “Are you going to be able to make it to your press conference?”

“Of course I’m going to be able to make it. And I expect you to be there, too.”

“I will,” Sally said, peeling another bandaid and applying it to the bottom of his foot. “I’m going to leave as soon as I get this mess cleaned up so I can walk over. Or would you like me to drive you?”

“I can drive myself,” Mr. Mowen said, starting to get up.

“You stay right there until I get your slippers,” Sally said, and darted out of the kitchen. The phone rang. “I’ll get it.” Sally called from the bedroom. “You don’t budge out of that chair.”

Mr. Mowen picked a bandaid up off the floor, tore the end off of it, and peeled the string along the side, which made him feel considerably better. My luck must be starting to change, he thought. “Who’s on the phone?” he said cheerfully, as Sally came back into the kitchen carrying his slippers and the phone.

She plugged the phone cord into the wall and handed him the receiver. “It’s Mother,” she said. “She wants to talk to the sexist pig.”

Ulric was getting dressed for the press conference when the phone rang. He let Brad answer it. When he walked into the living room, Brad was hanging up the phone.

“Lynn missed her plane,” Brad said.

Ulric looked up hopefully. “She did?”

“Yes. She’s taking one out this afternoon. While she was shooting the breeze, she let fall she’d signed her name on the press release that was sent out on the computer.”

“And Mowen’s already read it,” Ulric said. “So he’ll know you stole the project away from her.” He was in no mood to mince words. He had lain awake most of the night trying to decide what to say to Sally Mowen. What if he told her about “Project Sally” and she looked blankly at him and said, “Sorry. My wetware is inoperable.” ?

“I didn’t steal the project,” Brad said amiably. “I just sort of skyugled it away from her when she wasn’t looking. And I already got it back. I called Gail as soon as Lynn hung up and asked her to take Lynn’s name off the press releases before Old Man Mowen saw them. It was right lucky, Lynn missing her plane and all.”

Ulric put his down parka on over his sports coat.

“Are you heading for the press conference?” Brad said. “Wait till I rig myself out, and I’ll ride over with you.”

“I’m walking,” Ulric said, and opened the door.

The phone rang. Brad answered it. “No, I wasn’t watching the morning movie,” Brad said, “but I’d take it big if you’d let me gander a guess anyway. I’ll say the movie is Carolina Cannonball and the jackpot is six hundred and fifty-one dollars. That’s right? Well, bust my buttons. That was a right lucky guess.”

Ulric slammed the door behind him.

When Mr. Mowen still wasn’t in the office by ten, Janice called him at home. She got a busy signal. She sighed, waited a minute, and tried again. The line was still busy. Before she could hang up, the phone flashed an incoming call. She punched the button. “Mr. Mowen’s office,” she said.

“Hi,” the voice on the phone said. “This is Gail over in publicity. The press releases contain an inoperable statement. You haven’t sent any out, have you?”

I tried, Janice thought with a little sigh. “No,” she said.

“Good. I wanted to confirm non-release before I effected the deletion.”

“What deletion?” Janice said. She tried to call up the press release but got a picture of Ulric Henry instead.

“The release catalogs Lynn Saunders as co-designer of the project.”

“I thought she was co-designer.”

“Oh, no,” Gail said. “My fiance Brad McAfee designed the whole project. I’m glad the number of printouts is non-significant.”

After Gail hung up, Janice tried Mr. Mowen again. The line was still busy. Janice called up the company directory on her terminal, got a resume on Ulric Henry instead, and called the Chugwater operator on the phone. The operator gave her Lynn Saunders’s number. Janice called Lynn and got her roommate.

“She’s not here,” the roommate said. “She had to leave for back east as soon as she was done with the waste-emissions thing. Her mother was doing head trips on her. She was really bummed out by it.”

“Do you have a number where I could reach her?” Janice asked.

“I sure don’t,” the roommate said. “She wasn’t with it at all when she left. Her fiance might have a number.”

“Her fiance?”

“Yeah. Brad McAfee.”

“I think if she calls you’d better have her call me. Priority.” Janice hung up the phone. She called up the company directory on her terminal again and got the press release for the new emissions project. Lynn’s name was nowhere on it. She sighed, an odd, angry sigh, and tried Mr. Mowen’s number again. It was still busy.

On Sally’s way past Ulric Henry’s housing unit, she noticed something fluttering high up in the dead cottonwood tree. The remains of a kite were tangled at the very top, and just out of reach, on the second lowest branch, there was a piece of white paper. She tried a couple of halfhearted jumps, swiping at the paper with her hand, but she succeeded only in blowing the paper farther out of reach. If she could get the paper down, she could take it up to Ulric Henry’s apartment and ask him if it had fallen out of his window. She looked around for a stick and then stood still, feeling foolish. There was no more reason to go after the paper than to attempt to get the ruined kite down, she told herself, but even as she thought that, she was measuring the height of the branches to see if she could get a foot up and reach the paper from there. One branch wouldn’t do it, but two might. There was no one in the gardens. This is ridiculous, she told herself, and swung up into the crotch of the tree.

She climbed swiftly up to the third branch, stretched out across it, and reached for the paper. Her fingers did not quite reach, so she straightened up again, hanging onto the trunk to get her balance, and made a kind of down-sweeping lunge toward the piece of paper. She lost her balance and nearly missed the branch, and the wind she had created by her sudden movement blew the paper all the way to the end of the branch, where it teetered precariously but did not fall off.

Someone was coming across the curving bridge. She blew a couple of times on the paper and then stopped. She was going to have to go out on the branch. Maybe the paper is blank, she thought. I can hardly take a blank piece of paper to Ulric Henry, but she was already testing the weight of the branch with her hand. It seemed firm enough, and she began to edge out onto the dead branch, holding onto the trunk until the last possible moment and then dropping into an inching crawl that brought her directly over the sidewalk. From there she was able to reach the paper easily.

The paper was part of a printout from a computer, torn raggedly at an angle. It read, “Wanted: Young woman who can generate language. Ulric H.” The ge in “language” was missing, but otherwise the message made perfect sense, which she would have thought was peculiar if she had not been so surprised at the message. Her area of special study was language generation. She had spent all last week in class doing it, using all the rules of linguistic change on existing words: generalization and specialization of meaning, change in part of speech, shortening, and prepositional verb clustering to create a new-sounding language. It had been almost impossible to do at first, but by the end of the week, she had greeted her professor with, “Good aft. I readed up my book taskings,” without even thinking about it. She could certainly do the same thing with Ulric Henry, whom she had been wanting to meet anyway.

She had forgotten about the man she had seen coming across the bridge. He was almost to the tree now. In approximately ten more steps he would look up and see her crouched there like an insane vulture. How will I explain this to my father if anyone sees me? she thought, and put a cautious foot behind her. She was still wondering when the branch gave way.

Mr. Mowen did not leave for the press conference until a quarter to eleven. He had still been on the phone with Charlotte when Sally left, and when he had asked Charlotte to wait a minute so he could tell Sally to wait and he’d drive her over, Charlotte had called him a sexist tyrant and accused him of stifling Sally’s dominant traits by repressive male psychological intimidation. Mr. Mowen had had no idea what she was talking about.

Sally had swept up the glass and put a new light bulb in the bathroom before she left, but Mr. Mowen had decided not to tempt fate. He had shaved with a disposable razor instead. Leaning over to get a piece of toilet paper to put on the cut on his chin, he had cracked his head on the medicine cabinet door. After that, he had sat very still on the edge of the tub for nearly half an hour, wishing Sally were home so she could help him get dressed.

At the end of the half hour, Mr. Mowen decided that stress was the cause of the series of coincidences that had plagued him all morning (Charlotte had spoken Biofeedback for a couple of weeks) and that if he just relaxed, everything would be all right. He took several deep, calming breaths and stood up. The medicine cabinet was still open.

By moving very carefully and looking for hazards everywhere, Mr. Mowen managed to get dressed and out to the car. He had not been able to find any socks that matched, and the elevator had taken him all the way to the roof, but Mr. Mowen breathed deeply and calmly each time, and he was even beginning to feel relaxed by the time he opened the door to the car.

He got into the car and shut the door. It caught the tail of his coat. He opened the door again and leaned over to pull the coat out of the way. One of his gloves fell out of his pocket onto the ground. He leaned over farther to rescue the glove and cracked his head on the armrest of the door.

He took a deep, rather ragged breath, snagged the glove, and pulled the door shut. He took the keys out of his pocket and inserted the car key in the ignition. The key chain snapped open and scattered the rest of his keys all over the floor of the front seat. When he bent over to pick them up, being very careful not to hit his head on the steering wheel, his other glove fell out of his pocket. He left the keys where they were and straightened up again, watching out for the turn signals and the sun visor. He turned the key with its still dangling key chain. The car wouldn’t start.

Very slowly and carefully he got out of the car and went back up to the apartment to call Janice and tell her to cancel the press conference. The phone was busy.

Ulric didn’t see the young woman until she was nearly on top of him. He had been walking with his head down and his hands jammed into the pockets of his parka, thinking about the press conference. He had left the apartment without his watch and walked very rapidly over to Research. He had been over an hour early, and no one had been there except one of Brad’s fiancees whose name he couldn’t remember. She had said, “Your biological clock is nonfunctional. Your biorhythms must be low today,” and he had told her they were, even though he had no idea what they were talking about.

He had walked back across the oriental gardens, feeling desperate. He was not sure he could stand the press conference, even to warn Sally Mowen. Maybe he should forget about going and walk all over Chugwater instead, grabbing young women by the arm and saying, “Do you speak English?”

While he was considering this idea, there was a loud snap overhead, and the young woman fell on him. He tried to get his hands out of his pockets to catch her, but it took him a moment to realize that he was under the cottonwood tree and that the snap was the sound of a branch breaking, so he didn’t succeed. He did get one hand out of his pocket and he did take one bracing step back, but it wasn’t enough. She landed on him full force, and they rolled off the sidewalk and onto the leaves. When they came to a stop, Ulric was on top of her, with one arm under her and the other one flung above her head. Her wool hat had come off and her hair was spread out nicely against the frost-rimed leaves. His hand was tangled in her hair. She was looking up at him as if she knew him. It did not even occur to him to ask her if she spoke English.

After awhile it did occur to him that he was going to be late to the press conference. The hell with the press conference, he thought. The hell with Sally Mowen, and kissed her again. After a few more minutes of that, his arm began to go numb, and he disengaged his hand from her hair and put his weight on it to pull himself up.

She didn’t move, even when he got onto his knees beside her and extended a hand to help her up. She lay there, looking up at him as if she were thinking hard about something. Then she seemed to come to a decision because she took his hand and let him pull her up. She pointed above and behind him. “The moon blues,” she said.

“What?” he said. He wondered if the branch had cracked her on the head.

She was still pointing. “The moon blues,” she said again. “It blued up some last dark, but now it blues moreishly.”

He turned to look in the direction she was pointing, and sure enough, the three-quarters moon was a bright blue in the morning sky, which explained what she was talking about, but not the way she was talking. “Are you all right?” he said. “You’re not hurt, are you?” She shook her head. You never ask someone with a concussion if they are all right, he thought. “Does your head hurt?”

She shook her head again. Maybe she wasn’t hurt. Maybe she was a foreign exchange consultant in Reserch. “Where are you from?” he said.

She looked surprised. “I falled down of the tree. You catched me with your face.” She brushed the cottonwood leaves out of her hair and put her wool hat back on.

She understood everything he said, and she was definitely speaking English words even though the effect wasn’t much like English. You catched me with your face. Irregular verb into regular. The moon blues. Adjective becomes verb. Those were both ways language evolved. “What were you doing in the tree?” he said, so she would talk some more.

“I hidinged in the tree for cause people point you with their faces when you English oddishly.”

English oddishly. “You’re generating language, aren’t you?” Ulric said. “Do you know Brad McAfee?”

She looked blank, and a little surprised, the way Brad had probably told her to when he put her up to this. He wondered which one of Brad’s fiancees this was. Probably the one in programming. They had had to come up with all this generated language somewhere. “I’m late for a press conference,” he said sharply, “as you well know. I’ve got to talk to Sally Mowen.” He didn’t put out his hand to help her up. “You can go tell Brad his little honeyfuggling scheme didn’t work.”

She stood up without his help and walked across the sidewalk, past the fallen branch. She knelt down and picked up a scrap of paper and looked at it for a long time. He considered yanking it out of her hand and looking at it since it was probably Brad’s language generation program, but he didn’t. She folded it and put it in her pocket.

“You can tell him your kissing me didn’t work,” he said, which was a lie. He wanted to kiss her again as he said it, and that made him angrier than ever. Brad had probably told her he was wadgetty, that what he needed was a half hour in the leaves with her. “I’m still going to tell Sally.”

She looked at him from the other side of the sidewalk.

“And don’t get any ideas about trying to stop me.” He was shouting now. “Because they won’t work.”

His anger got him over the curving bridge. Then it occurred to him that even if she was one of Brad’s fiancees, even if she had been hired to kiss him in the leaves and keep him from going to the press conference, he was in love with her, and he went tearing back, but she was nowhere in sight.

At a little after eleven Janice got a call from Gail in publicity. “Where is Mr. Mowen? He hasn’t shown up, and my media credibility is effectively nonfunctional.”

“I’ll try to call him at home,” Janice said. She put Gail on hold and dialed Mr. Mowen’s apartment. The line was busy. When she punched up the hold button to tell Gail that, the line went dead. Janice tried to call her back. The line was busy.

She typed in the code for a priority that would override whatever was on Mr. Mowen’s home terminal. After the code, she typed, “Call Janice at office.” She looked at it for a minute, then back-erased and typed, “Press conference. Research. Eleven a.m.,” and pressed RUN. The screen clicked once and displayed the preliminary test results of side effects on the waste-emissions project. At the bottom of the screen, she read, “Tangential consequences statistically negligible.”

“You want to bet?” Janice said.

She called programming. “There’s something wrong with my terminal,” she said to the woman on the line.

“This is Sue in peripherals rectification. Is your problem in implementation or hardware?”

She sounded just like Gail in publicity. “You wouldn’t know Brad McAfee, would you?” she said.

“He’s my fiance.” Sue said. “Why?”

Janice sighed. “I keep getting readouts that have nothing to do with what I punch in,” Janice said.

“Oh, then you want hardware repair. The number’s in your terminal directory,” she said, and hung up.

Janice called up the terminal directory. At first nothing happened. Then the screen clicked once and displayed something titled, “Project Sally.” Janice noticed Lynn Saunders’s name three-quarters of the way down the screen, and Sally Mowen’s at the bottom. She started at the top and read it all the way through. Then she typed in PRINT and read it again as it came rolling out of the printer. When it was done, she tore off the sheet carefully, put it in a file folder, and put the file folder in her desk.

“I found your glove in the elevator,” Sally said when she came in. She looked terrible, as if the experience of finding Mr. Mowen’s glove had been too much for her. “Is the press conference over?”

“I didn’t go,” Mr. Mowen said. “I was afraid I’d run into a tree. Could you drive me over to the office? I told Janice I’d be there by nine and it’s two-thirty.”

“Tree?” Sally said. “I fell out of a tree today. On a linguist.”

Mr. Mowen put on his overcoat and fished around in the pockets. “I’ve lost my other glove,” he said. “That makes fifty-eight instances of bad luck I’ve had already this morning, and I’ve been sitting stock still for the last two hours. I made a list. The pencil broke, and the eraser, and I erased a hole right through the paper, and I didn’t even count those.” He put the single glove in his coat pocket.

Sally opened the door for him, and they went down the hall to the elevator. “I never should have said that about the moon,” she said. “I should have said hello. Just a simple hello. So what if the note said he wanted someone who could generate language? That didn’t mean I had to do it right then, before I even told him who I was.”

Mr. Mowen punched his security code into the elevator. The REJECT light came on. “Fifty-nine,” Mr. Mowen said. “That’s too many coincidences to just be a coincidence. And all bad. If I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was trying to kill me.”

Sally punched in her security code. The elevator slid open. “I’ve been walking around for hours, trying to figure out how I could have been so stupid,” Sally said. “He was on his way to meet me. At the press conference. He had something to tell me. If I’d just stood up after I fell on him and said, ‘Hello, I’m Sally Mowen, and I’ve found this note. Do you really want someone who can generate language?” but, oh no, I have to say, ‘The moon blues.’ I should have just kept kissing him and never said anything. But, oh, no, I couldn’t let well enough alone.”

Mr. Mowen let Sally push the floor button in the elevator so no more warning lights would flash on. He also let her open the door of the apartment building. On the way out to the car, he stepped in some gum.

“Sixty. If I didn’t know better, I’d say your mother was behind this,” Mr. Mowen said. “She’s coming up here this afternoon. To see if I’m minimizing your self-realization potential with my chauvinistic role expectations. That should count for a dozen bad coincidences all by itself.” He got in the car, hunching far back in the seat so he wouldn’t crack his head on the sun visor. He peered out the window at the gray sky. “Maybe there’ll be a blizzard and she won’t be able to get up from Cheyenne.”

Sally reached for something under the driver’s seat. “Here’s your other glove,” she said, handed it over to him, and started the car. “That note was torn in half. Why didn’t I think about the words that were missing instead of deciding the message was all there? He probably wanted somebody who could generate electricity and speak a foreign language. Just because I liked his picture and I thought he might speak English I had to go and make a complete fool out of myself.”

It started to snow halfway to the office. Sally turned on the windshield wipers. “With my luck,” Mr. Mowen said, “there’ll be a blizzard, and I’ll be snowed in with Charlotte.” He looked out the side window at the smokestacks. They were shooting another wavery blue blast into the air. “It’s the waste-emissions project. Somehow it’s causing all these damn coincidences.”

Sally said, “I look and look for someone who speaks decent English, and when I finally meet him, what do I say? ‘You catched me with your face.’ And now he thinks somebody named Brad McAfee put me up to it to keep him from getting to a press conference, and he’ll never speak to me again. Stupid! How could I have been so stupid?”

“I never should have let them start the project without more testing,” Mr. Mowen said. “What if we’re putting too much ozone into the ozone layer? What if this bicarbonate of soda fallout is doing something to people’s digestion? No measureable side effects, they said. Well, how do you measure bad luck? By the fatality rates?”

Sally had pulled into a parking space directly in front of Mr. Mowen’s office. It was snowing hard now. Mr. Mowen pulled on the glove Sally had handed him. He fished in his pocket for the other one. “Sixty-one,” he said. “Sally, will you go in with me? I’ll never get the elevator to work.”

Sally walked with him into the building. On the way up in the elevator, she said, “If you’re so convinced the waste-emissions project is causing your bad luck, why don’t you tell Research to turn it off?”

“They’d never believe me. Whoever heard of coincidences as a side effect of trash?”

They went into the outer office. Janice said, “Hello!” as if they had returned from an arctic expedition. Mr. Mowen said, “Thanks, Sally. I think I can make it from here.” He patted her on the shoulder. “Why don’t you go explain what happened to this young man and tell him you’re sorry?”

“I don’t think that would work,” Sally said. She kissed him on the cheek. “We’re in bad shape, aren’t we?”

Mr. Mowen turned to Janice. “Get me Research, and don’t let my wife in,” he said, went into his office, and shut the door. There was a crash and the muffled sound of Mr. Mowen swearing.

Janice sighed. “This young man of yours,” she said to Sally. “His name wouldn’t be Brad McAfee, would it?”

“No,” Sally said, “but he thinks it is.” On the way to the elevator she stopped and picked up Mr. Mowen’s glove and put it in her pocket.

After Mr. Mowen’s secretary hung up, Sue called Brad. She wasn’t sure what the connection was between Brad and Mr. Mowen’s secretary’s terminal not working, but she thought she’d better let him know that Mr. Mowen’s secretary knew his name.

There was no answer. She tried again at lunch and again on her afternoon break. The third time the line was busy. At a quarter of three her supervisor came in and told Sue she could leave early since heavy snow was predicted for rush hour. Sue tried Brad’s number one more time to make sure he was there. It was still busy.

It was a good thing she was getting off early. She had only worn a sweater to work, and it was already snowing so hard she could hardly see out the window. She had worn sandals, too. Somebody had left a pair of bright blue moon boots in the coatroom, so she pulled those on over her sandals and went out to the parking lot. She wiped the snow off the windshield with the sleeve of her sweater, and started over to Brad’s apartment.

“You didn’t meander on over to the press conference,” Brad said when Ulric came in.

“No,” Ulric said. He didn’t take off his coat.

“Old Man Mowen didn’t either. Which was right lucky, because I got to jaw with all those reporters instead of him. Where did you go off to? You look colder than an otter on a snowslide.”

“I was with the ‘gal’ you found for me. The one you had jump me so I wouldn’t go to the press conference and ruin your chances with Sally Mowen.”

Brad was sitting at his terminal. “Sally wasn’t there, which turned out to be right lucky because I met this reporter name of Jill who . . .” He turned around and looked at Ulric. “What gal are you talking about?”

“The one you had conveniently fall out of a tree on me. I take it she was one of your spare fiancees. What did you do? Make her climb out of the apartment window?”

“Now let me get this straight. Some gal fell out of that old cottonwood on top of you? And you think I did it?”

“Well, if you didn’t, it was an amazing coincidence that the branch broke just as I was passing under it and an even more amazing coincidence that she generated language, which was just what that printout you came up with read. But the most amazing coincidence of all is the punch in the nose you’re going to get right now.”

“Now, don’t get so dudfoozled. I didn’t drop no gal on you, and if I’m lyin’, let me be kicked to death by grasshoppers. If I was going to do something like that, I’d have gotten you one who could speak good English, like you wanted, not . . . what did you say she did? Generated language?”

“You expect me to believe it’s all some kind of coincidence?” Ulric shouted. “What kind of . . . of . . . dodunk do you take me for?”

“I’ll admit it is a pretty seldom thing to have happen,” Brad said thoughtfully. “This morning I found me a hundred dollar bill on the way to the press conference. Then I meet this reporter Jill and we get to talking and we have a whole lot in common like her favorite movie is Lay that Rifle Down with Judy Canova in it, and then it turns out she’s Sally Mowen’s roommate last year in college.”

The phone rang. Brad picked it up. “Well, ginger peachy. Come on over. It’s the big housing unit next to the orental gardens. Apartment 6B.” He hung up the phone. “Now that’s just what I been talking about. That was that gal reporter on the phone. I asked her to come over so’s I could honeyfuggle her into introducing me to Sally, and she says she can’t ’cause she’s gotta catch a plane outta Cheyenne. But now she says the highway’s closed, and she’s stuck here in Chugwater. Now that kind of good luck doesn’t happen once in a blue moon.”

“What?” Ulric said, and unclenched his fists for the first time since he’d come into the room. He went over to look out the window. He couldn’t see the moon that had been in the sky earlier. He supposed it had long since set, and anyway it was starting to snow. “The moon blues,” he said softly to himself.

“Since she is coming over here, maybe you should skedaddle so as not to spoil this run of good luck I am having.”

Ulric pulled Collected American Slang out of the bookcase and looked up, “moon, blue” in the index. The entry read, “Once in a blue moon: rare, as an unusual coincidence, orig. rare as a blue moon; based on the rare occurrence of a blue-tinted moon from aerosol particulates in upper atmosphere; see Superstitions.” He looked out the window again. The smokestacks sent another blast up through the gray clouds.

“Brad,” he said, “is your waste-emissions project putting aerosols into the upper atmosphere?”

“That’s the whole idea,” Brad said. “Now I don’t mean to be bodacious, but that gal reporter’s going to be coming up here any minute.”

Ulric looked up “Superstitions.” The entry for “moon, blue” read, “Once in a blue moon; folk saying attrib. SE America; local superstition linked occurrence of blue moon and unusual coincidental happenings; origin unknown.”

He shut the book. “Unusual coincidental happenings,” he said. “Branches breaking, people falling on people, people finding hundred dollar bills. All of those are coincidental happenings.” He looked up at Brad. “You wouldn’t happen to know how that saying got started, would you?”

“Bodacious? It probably was made up by some feller who was waiting on a gal and this other guy wouldn’t hotfoot it out of there so’s they could be alone.”

Ulric opened the book again. “But if the coincidences were bad ones, they would be dangerous, wouldn’t they? Somebody might get hurt.”

Brad took the book out of his hands and shoved Ulric out the door. “Now git!” he said. “You’re givin’ me the flit-flats again.”

“We’ve got to tell Mr. Mowen. We’ve got to shut it off,” Ulric said, but Brad had already shut the door.

“Hello, Janice,” Charlotte said. “Still an oppressed female in a dehumanizing male-dominated job, I see.”

Janice hung up the phone. “Hello, Charlotte,” she said. “Is it snowing yet?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said, and took off her coat. It had a red button pinned to the lapel. It read, “NOW . . . or else!” “We just heard on the radio they’ve closed the highway. Where’s your reactionary chauvinist employer?”

“Mr. Mowen is busy,” Janice said, and stood up in case she needed to flatten herself against Mr. Mowen’s door to keep Charlotte out.

“I have no desire to see that last fortress of sadistic male dominance,” Charlotte said. She took off her gloves and rubbed her hands together. “We practically froze on the way up. Lynn Saunders rode back up with me. Her mother isn’t getting a divorce after all. Her bid for independence crumbled at the first sign of societal disapproval, I’m afraid. Lynn had a message on her terminal to call you, but she couldn’t get through. She said for me to tell you she’d be over as soon as she checks in with her fiance.”

“Brad McAfee,” Janice said.

“Yes,” Charlotte said. She sat down in the chair opposite Janice’s desk and took off her boots. “I had to listen to her sing his praises all the way from Cheyenne. Poor brainwashed victim of male oppressionist propaganda. I tried to tell her she was only playing into the hands of the entrenched male socio-sexual establishment by getting engaged, but she wouldn’t listen.” She stopped massaging her stockinged foot. “What do you mean, he’s busy? Tell that arrogant sexist pig I’m here and I want to see him.”

Janice sat back down and took the file folder with “Project Sally” in it out of her desk drawer. “Charlotte,” she said, “before I do that, I was wondering if you’d give me your opinion of something.”

Charlotte padded over to the desk in her stockinged feet. “Certainly,” she said. “What is it?”

Sally wiped the snow off the back window with her bare hands and got in the car. She had forgotten about the side mirror. It was caked with snow. She rolled down the window and swiped at it with her hand. The snow landed in her lap. She shivered and rolled the window back up, and then sat there a minute, waiting for the defroster to work and blowing on her cold, wet hands. She had lost her gloves somewhere.

No air at all was coming out of the defroster. She rubbed a small space clean so she could see to pull out of the parking space and edged forward. At the last minute she saw the ghostlike form of a man through the heavy curtain of snow and stamped on the brake. The motor died. The man she had almost hit came around to the window and motioned to her to roll the window down. It was Ulric.

She rolled the window down. More snow fell in her lap. “I was afraid I’d never see you again,” Ulric said.

“I . . .” Sally said, but he waved her silent with his hand.

“I haven’t got much time. I’m sorry I shouted at you this morning. I thought . . . anyway, now I know that isn’t true, that it was a lot of coincidences that . . . anyway I’ve got to go do somehing right now that can’t wait, but I want you to wait right here for me. Will you do that?”

She nodded.

He shivered and stuck his hands in his pockets. “You’ll freeze to death out here. Do you know where the housing unit by the oriental gardens is? I live on the sixth floor, apartment B. I want you to wait for me there. Will you do that? Do you have a piece of paper?”

Sally dug in her pocket and pulled out the folded scrap of paper with, “Wanted: Young woman,” on it. She looked at it a minute and then handed it to Ulric. He didn’t even unfold it. He scribbled some numbers on it and handed it back to her.

“This is my security code,” he said. “You have to use it for the elevator. My roommate will let you into the apartment.” He stopped and looked hard at her. “On second thought, you’d better wait for me in the hall. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” He bent and kissed her through the window. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

“I . . .” Sally said, but he had already disappeared into the snow. Sally rolled the window up. The windshield was covered with snow again. She put her hand up to the defroster. There was still no air coming out. She turned on the windshield wipers. Nothing happened.

Gail didn’t get back to her office until after two. Reporters had hung around after the press conference asking her questions about Mr. Mowen’s absence and the waste-emissions project. When she did make it back to the office, they began calling, and she didn’t get started on her press conference publicity releases until nearly three. She almost immediately ran into a problem. Her notes mentioned particulates, and she knew Brad had said what kind, but she hadn’t written it down. She couldn’t let the report go without specifying which particulates or the press would jump to all kinds of alarming conclusions. She called Brad. The line was busy. She stuffed everything into a large manila envelope and started over to his apartment to ask him.

“Did you get Research yet?” Mr. Mowen said when Janice came into his office.

“No, sir,” Janice said. “The line is still busy. Ulric Henry is here to see you.”

Mr. Mowen pushed against his desk and stood up. The movement knocked over Sally’s picture and a pencilholder full of pencils. “You might as well send him in. With my luck, he’s probably found out why I hired him and is here to quit.”

Janice went out, and Mr. Mowen tried to gather up the pencils that had scattered all over his desk and get them back in the pencilholder. One rolled toward the edge, and Mr. Mowen leaned over the desk to catch it. Sally’s picture fell over again. When Mr. Mowen looked up, Ulric Henry was watching him. He reached for the last pencil and knocked the receiver off the phone with his elbow.

“How long has it been like this?” Ulric said.

Mr. Mowen straightened up. “It started this morning. I’m not sure I’m going to live through the day.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Ulric said, and took a deep breath. “Look, Mr. Mowen, I know you hired me to be a linguist, and I probably don’t have any business interfering with Research, but I think I know why all these things are happening to you.”

I hired you to marry Sally and be vice-president in charge of saying what you mean, Mr. Mowen thought, and you can interfere in anything you like if you can stop the ridiculous things that have been happening to me all day.

Ulric pointed out the window. “You can’t see it out there because of the snow, but the moon is blue. It’s been blue ever since you turned on your waste-emissions project. ‘Once in a blue moon’ is an old saying used to describe rare occurrences. I think the saying may have gotten started because the number of coincidences increased every time there was a blue moon. I think it may have something to do with the particulates in the stratosphere doing something to the laws of probability. Your waste-emissions project is pumping particulates into the stratosphere right now. I think these coincidences are a side effect.”

“I knew it,” Mr. Mowen said. “It’s Walter Hunt and the safety pin all over again. I’m going to call Research.” He reached for the phone. The receiver cord caught on the edge of the desk. When he yanked it, the phone went clattering over the edge, taking the pencilholder and Sally’s picture with it. “Will you call Research for me?”

“Sure,” Ulric said. He punched in the number and then handed the receiver to Mr. Mowen.

Mr. Mowen thundered, “Turn off the waste-emissions project. Now. And get everyone connected with the project over here immediately.” He hung up the phone and peered out the window. “Okay. They’ve turned it off,” he said, turning back to Ulric. “Now what?”

“I don’t know,” Ulric said from the floor where he was picking up pencils. “I suppose as soon as the moon starts to lose its blue color, the laws of probability will go back to normal. Or maybe they’ll rebalance themselves, and you’ll have all good luck for a day or two.” He put the pencilholder back on the desk and picked up Sally’s picture.

“I hope it changes before my ex-wife gets back,” Mr. Mowen said. “She’s been here once already, but Janice got rid of her. I knew she was a side effect of some kind.”

Ulric didn’t say anything. He was looking at the picture of Sally.

“That’s my daughter,” Mr. Mowen said. “She’s an English major.”

Ulric stood the picture on the desk. It fell over, knocking the pencilholder onto the floor again. Ulric dived for the pencils.

“Never mind about the pencils,” Mr. Mowen said. “I’ll pick them up after the moon gets back to normal. She’s home for Thanksgiving vacation. You might run into her. Her area of special study is language generation.”

Ulric straightened up and cracked his head on the desk. “Language generation,” he said, and walked out of the office.

Mr. Mowen went out to tell Janice to send the Research people in as soon as they got there. One of Ulric’s gloves was lying on the floor next to Janice’s desk. Mr. Mowen picked it up. “I hope he’s right about putting a stop to these coincidences by turning off the stacks,” he said. “I think this thing is catching.”

Lynn called Brad as soon as Charlotte dropped her off. Maybe he knew why Mr. Mowen’s secretary wanted to see her. The line was busy. She took off her parka, put her suitcase in the bedroom, and then tried again. It was still busy. She put her parka back on, pulled on a pair of red mittens, and started across the oriental gardens to Brad’s apartment.

“Are those nincompoops from Research here?” Mr. Mowen asked Janice.

“Yes, sir. All but Brad McAfee. His line is busy.”

“Well, put an override on his terminal. And send them in.”

“Yes, sir,” Janice said. She went back to her desk and called up a directory on her terminal. To her surprise, she got it. She wrote down Brad’s code and punched in an override. The computer printed ERROR. I knew it was too good to last, Janice thought. She punched the code again. This time the computer printed OVERRIDE IN PLACE. Janice thought a minute, then decided that whatever the override was, it couldn’t be more important than Mr. Mowen’s. She punched the code for a priority override and typed, “Mr. Mowen wants to see you immediately.” The computer immediately confirmed it.

Exhilarated by her success, Janice called Brad’s number again. He answered the phone. “Mr. Mowen would like to see you immediately,” she said.

“I’ll be there faster than blue blazes,” Brad said, and hung up.

Janice went in and told Mr. Mowen Brad McAfee was on the way. Then she herded the Research people into his office. When Mr. Mowen stood up to greet them, he didn’t knock over anything, but one of the Research people managed to knock over the pencils again. Janice helped him pick them up.

When she got back to her desk she remembered that she had superseded an override on Brad’s terminal. She wondered what it was. Maybe Charlotte had gone to his apartment and poisoned him and then put an override on so he couldn’t call for help. It was a comforting thought somehow, but the override might be something important, and now that she had gotten him on the phone there was really no reason to leave the priority override in place. Janice sighed and typed in a cancellation. The computer immediately confirmed it.

Jill opened the door to Brad’s apartment building and stood there for a minute trying to get her breath. She was supposed to have driven back to Cheyenne tonight, and she had barely made it across Chugwater. Her car had slid sideways in the street and gotten stuck, and she had finally left it there and come over here to see if Brad could help her put her chains on. She fished clumsily in her purse for the numbers Brad had written down for her so she could use the elevator. She should have taken her gloves off.

A young woman with no gloves on pushed open the door and headed for one of the two elevators, punched some numbers, and disappeared into the nearer elevator. The doors shut. She should have gone up with her. Jill fished some more and came up with several folded scraps of paper. She tried to unfold the first one, gave up, and balanced them all on one hand while she tried to pull her other glove off with her teeth.

The outside door opened, and a gust of snowy air blew the papers out of her hand and out the door. She dived for them, but they whirled away in the snow. The man who had opened the door was already in the other elevator. The doors slid shut. Oh, for heaven’s sake.

She looked around for a phone so she could call Brad and tell him she was stranded down here. There was one on the far wall. The first elevator was on its way down, between four and three. The second one was on six. She walked over to the phone, took both her gloves off and jammed them in her coat pocket, and picked up the phone.

A young woman in a parka and red mittens came in the front door, but she didn’t go over to the elevators. She stood in the middle of the lobby brushing snow off her coat. Jill rummaged through her purse for a quarter. There was no change in her wallet, but she thought there might be a couple of dimes in the bottom of her purse. The second elevator’s doors slid open, and the mittened woman hurried in.

She found a quarter in the bottom of her purse and dialed Brad. The line was busy. The first elevator was on six now. The second one was down in the parking garage. She dialed Brad’s number again.

The second elevator’s doors slid open. “Wait!” she said, and dropped the phone. The receiver hit her purse and knocked its contents all over the floor. The outside door opened again, and snow whirled in. “Push the hold button,” said the middle-aged woman who had just come in from outside. She had a red “NOW . . . or else!” button pinned to her coat, and she was clutching a folder to her chest. She knelt down and picked up a comb, two pencils, and Jill’s checkbook.

“Thank you,” she said gratefully.

“We sisters have to stick together,” the woman said grimly. She stood up and handed the things to Jill. They got into the elevator. The woman with the mittens was holding the door. There was another young woman inside, wearing a sweater and blue moon boots.

“Six please,” Jill said breathlessly, trying to jam everything back into her purse. “Thanks for waiting. I’m just not all together today.” The doors started to close.

“Wait!” a voice said, and a young woman in a suit and high heels, with a large manila envelope under her arm, squeezed in just as the door shut. “Six please,” she said. “The wind chill factor out there has to be twenty below. I don’t know where my head was to try to come over and see Brad in weather like this.”

“Brad?” the young woman in the red mittens said.

“Brad?” Jill said.

“Brad?” the young woman in the blue moon boots said.

“Brad McAfee,” the woman with the “NOW . . . or else!” button said grimly.

“Yes,” the young woman in high heels said, surprised. “Do you all know him? He’s my fiance.”

Sally punched in her security code, stepped in the elevator, and pushed the button for the sixth floor. “Ulric, I want to explain what happened this morning,” she said as soon as the door closed. She had practiced her speech all the way over to Ulric’s housing unit. It had taken her forever to get here. The windshield wipers were frozen and two cars had slid sideways in the snow and created a traffic jam. She had had to park the car and trudge through the snow across the oriental gardens, but she still hadn’t thought of what to say.

“My name is Sally Mowen, and I don’t generate language.” That was out of the question. She couldn’t tell him who she was. The minute he heard she was the boss’s daughter, he would stop listening.

“I speak English, but I read your note, and it said you wanted someone who could generate language.” No good. He would ask, “What note?” and she would haul it out of her pocket, and he would say, “Where did you find this?” and she would have to explain what she was doing up in the tree. She might also have to explain how she knew he was Ulric Henry and what she was doing with his file and his picture, and he would never believe it was all a coincidence.

Number six blinked on, and the door of the elevator opened. “I can’t,” Sally thought, and pushed the lobby button. Halfway down she decided to say what she should have said in the first place. She pushed six again.

“Ulric, I love you,” she recited. “Ulric, I love you.” Six blinked. The door opened. “Ulric,” she said. He was standing in front of the elevator, glaring at her.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” he said. “Like ‘I withspeak myself?’ That’s a nice example of Germanic compounding. But of course you know that. Language generation is your area of special study, isn’t that right, Sally?”

“Ulric,” Sally said. She took a step forward and put her hand on the elevator door so it wouldn’t close.

“You were home for Thanksgiving vacation and you were afraid you’d get out of practice, is that it? So you thought you’d jump out of a tree on the company linguist just to keep your hand in.”

“If you’d shut up a minute, I’d explain,” Sally said.

“No, that’s not right,” Ulric said. “It should be ‘quiet up’ or maybe ‘mouth-close you.’ More compounding.”

“Why did I ever think I could talk to you?” Sally said. “Why did I ever waste my time trying to generate language for you?”

“For me?” Ulric said. “Why in the hell did you think I wanted you to generate language?”

“Because . . . oh, forget it,” Sally said. She punched the lobby button. The door started to shut. Ulric stuck his hand in the closing doors and then snatched them free and pressed the hold button. Nothing happened. He jammed in four numbers and pressed the hold button again. It gave an odd click and began beeping, but the doors opened again.

“Damn it,” Ulric said. “Now you’ve made me punch in Brad’s security code, and I’ve set off his stupid override.”

“That’s right,” Sally said, jamming her hands in her pockets. “Blame everything on me. I suppose I’m the one who left that note in the tree saying you wanted somebody who could generate language?”

The beeping stopped. “What note?” Ulric said, and let go of the hold button.

Sally pulled her hand out of her pocket to press the lobby button again. A piece of paper fell out of her pocket. Ulric stepped inside as the doors started to close and picked up the piece of paper. After a minute, he said, “Look, I think I can explain how all this happened.”

“You’d better make it snappy,” Sally said. “I’m getting out when we get to the lobby.”

As soon as Janice hung up the phone Brad grabbed his coat. He had a good idea of what Old Man Mowen wanted him for. After Ulric had left, Brad had gotten a call from Time. They’d talkified for over half an hour about a photographer and a four-page layout on the waste-emissions project. He figured they’d call Old Man Mowen and tell him about the article, too, and sure enough, his terminal had started beeping an override before he even hung up. It stopped as he turned toward the terminal, and the screen went blank, and then it started beeping again, double-quick, and sure enough, it was his pappy-in-law to be. Before he could even begin reading the message, Janice called. He told her he’d be there faster than blue blazes, grabbed his coat, and started out the door.

One of the elevators was on six and just starting down. The other one was on five and coming up. He punched his security code in and put his arm in the sleeve of his overcoat. The lining tore, and his arm went down inside it. He wrestled it free and tried to pull the lining back up to where it belonged. It tore some more.

“Well, dadfetch it!” he said loudly. The elevator door opened. Brad got in, still trying to get his arm in the sleeve. The door closed behind him.

The panel in the door started beeping. That meant an override. Maybe Mowen was trying to call him back. He pushed the DOOR OPEN button, but nothing happened. The elevator started down. “Dagnab it all,” he said.

“Hi, Brad,” Lynn said. He turned around.

“You look a mite wadgetty,” Sue said. “Doesn’t he, Jill?”

“Right peaked,” Jill said.

“Maybe he’s got the flit-flats,” Gail said.

Charlotte didn’t say anything. She clutched the file folder to her chest and growled. Overhead, the lights flickered, and the elevator ground to a halt.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Mowen Chemical today announced temporary finalization of its pyrolitic stratospheric waste-emissions program pending implementation of an environmental impact verification process. Lynn Saunders, director of the project, indicated that facilities will be temporarily deactivated during reorientation of predictive assessment criteria. In an unrelated communication, P.B. Mowen, president of Mowen Chemical, announced the upcoming nuptials of his daughter Sally Mowen and Ulric Henry, vice-president in charge of language effectiveness documentation.

THE LUCKY STRIKE

Kim Stanley Robinson

Stories of alternative worlds, in which history was changed because a single thing happened differently, have fascinated science fiction readers for many decades. They can be thoughtful and evocative, as in Keith Roberts’s Pavane, which tells how our world might have been if the Spanish Armada had won the victory, or humorous, like Somtow Sucharitkul’s The Aquiliad, which tells what might have happened if the Romans had conquered the New World.

“The Lucky Strike” focuses on a much more recent, and “smaller,” change in history . . . but one that could have effected changes just as great.

Kim Stanley Robinson s stories have appeared in the last four volumes of Universe, as well as in the sf magazines. “Venice Drowned” was nominated for a Nebula Award; “To Leave a Mark” received a Hugo nomination. His first novel. The Wild Shore, was recently published as an Ace Science Fiction Special.

War breeds strange pastimes. In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific, Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso—one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had four hundred stones in it. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the 509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him. When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became a official pastime, like throwing flares into the compound or going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January thought of the development he didn’t say. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who passed around his battered flask. “Hey, January,” Fitch called. “Come have a shot.”

January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. “Practising your bombing up here, eh, Professor?”

“Yah,” January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was Professor to Fitch. Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator.

“That’s why he’s the best,” Matthews joked. “Always practising.”

Fitch laughed. “He’s best because I make him be best, right, Professor?”

January frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed—a thug, in January’s opinion. The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and they liked the captain’s bossy roughhouse style. January, who was thirty-seven, didn’t go for it. He wandered away, back to the cairn he had been building. From Mount Lasso they had an overview of the whole island, from the harbor at Wall Street to the north field in Harlem. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off the four parallel runways of the north field and head for Japan. The last quartet of this particular mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four more pebbles, aiming for crevices in the pile. One of them stuck nicely.

“There they are!” said Matthews. “They’re on the taxiing strip.”

January located the 509th’s first plane. Today, the first of August, there was something more interesting to watch than the usual Superfortress parade. Word was out that General Le May wanted to take the 509th’s mission away from it. Their commander Colonel Tibbets had gone and bitched to Le May in person, and the general had agreed the mission was theirs, but on one condition: one of the general’s men was to make a test flight with the 509th, to make sure they were fit for combat over Japan. The general’s man had arrived, and now he was down there in the strike plane, with Tibbets and the whole first team. January sidled back to his mates to view the takeoff with them.

“Why don’t the strike plane have a name, though?” Haddock was saying.

Fitch said, “Lewis won’t give it a name because it’s not his plane, and he knows it.” The others laughed. Lewis and his crew were naturally unpopular, being Tibbets’ favorites.

“What do you think he’ll do to the general’s man?” Matthews asked.

The others laughed at the very idea. “He’ll kill an engine at takeoff, I bet you anything,” Fitch said. He pointed at the wrecked B-29s that marked the end of every runway, planes whose engines had given out on takeoff. “He’ll want to show that he wouldn’t go down if it happened to him.”

“Course he wouldn’t!” Matthews said.

“You hope,” January said under his breath.

“They let those Wright engines out too soon,” Haddock said seriously. “They keep busting under the takeoff load.”

“Won’t matter to the old bull,” Matthews said. Then they all started in about Tibbets’ flying ability, even Fitch. They all thought Tibbets was the greatest. January, on the other hand, liked Tibbets even less than he liked Fitch. That had started right after he was assigned to the 509th. He had been told he was part of the most important group in the war, and then given a leave. In Vicksburg a couple of fliers just back from England had bought him a lot of whiskies, and since January had spent several months stationed near London they had talked for a good long time and gotten pretty drunk. The two were really curious about what January was up to now, but he had stayed vague on it and kept returning the talk to the blitz. He had been seeing an English nurse, for instance, whose flat had been bombed, family and neighbors killed. . . . But they had really wanted to know. So he had told them he was onto something special, and they had flipped out their badges and told him they were Army Intelligence, and that if he ever broke security like that again he’d be transferred to Alaska. It was a dirty trick. January had gone back to Wendover and told Tibbets so to his face, and Tibbets had turned red and threatened him some more. January despised him for that. The upshot was that January was effectively out of the war, because Tibbets really played his favorites. January wasn’t sure he really minded, but during their year’s training he had bombed better than ever, as a way of showing the old bull he was wrong to write January off. Every time their eyes had met it was clear what was going on. But Tibbets never backed off no matter how precise January’s bombing got. Just thinking about it was enough to cause January to line up a pebble over an ant and drop it.

“Will you cut that out?” Fitch complained. “I swear you must hang from the ceiling when you take a shit so you can practice aiming for the toilet.” The men laughed.

“Don’t I bunk over you?” January asked. Then he pointed. “They’re going.”

Tibbets’ plane had taxied to runway Baker. Fitch passed the flask around again. The tropical sun beat on them, and the ocean surrounding the island blazed white. January put up a sweaty hand to aid the bill of his baseball cap.

The four props cut in hard, and the sleek Superfortress quickly trundled up to speed and roared down Baker. Three-quarters of the way down the strip the outside right prop feathered.

“Yow!” Fitch crowed. “I told you he’d do it!”

The plane nosed off the ground and slewed right, then pulled back on course to cheers from the four young men around January. January pointed again. “He’s cut number three, too.”

The inside right prop feathered, and now the plane was pulled up by the left wing only, while the two right props windmilled uselessly. “Holy smoke!” Haddock cried. “Ain’t the old bull something?”

They whooped to see the plane’s power, and Tibbets’ nervy arrogance.

“By God, Le May’s man will remember this flight,” Fitch hooted. “Why, look at that! He’s banking!”

Apparently taking off on two engines wasn’t enough for Tibbets; he banked the plane right until it was standing on its dead wing, and it curved back toward Tinian.

Then the inside left engine feathered.

Wars tears at the imagination. For three years Frank January had kept his imagination trapped, refusing to give it any play whatsoever. The dangers threatening him, the effects of the bombs, the fate of the other participants in the war, he had refused to think about any of it. But the war tore at his control. That English nurse’s flat. The missions over the Ruhr. The bomber just below him blown apart by flak. And then there had been a year in Utah, and the vise-like grip that he had once kept on his imagination had slipped away.

So when he saw the number two prop feather, his heart gave a little jump against his sternum and helplessly he was up there with Ferebee, the first team bombardier. He would be looking over the pilots’ shoulders. . . .

“Only one engine?” Fitch said.

“That one’s for real,” January said harshly. Despite himself he saw the panic in the cockpit, the frantic rush to power the two right engines. The plane was dropping fast and Tibbets leveled it off, leaving them on a course back toward the island. The two right props spun, blurred to a shimmer. January held his breath. They needed more lift; Tibbets was trying to pull it over the island. Maybe he was trying for the short runway on the south half of the island.

But Tinian was too tall, the plane too heavy. It roared right into the jungle above the beach, where 42nd Street met their East River. It exploded in a bloom of fire. By the time the sound of the explosion struck them they knew no one in the plane had survived.

Black smoke towered into white sky. In the shocked silence on Mount Lasso insects buzzed and creaked. The air left January’s lungs with a gulp. He had been with Ferebee there at the end, he had heard the desperate shouts, seen the last green rush, been stunned by the dentist-drill-all-over pain of the impact.

“Oh my God,” Fitch was saying. “Oh my God.” Matthews was sitting. January picked up the flask, tossed it at Fitch.

“C-come on,” he stuttered. He hadn’t stuttered since he was sixteen. He led the others in a rush down the hill. When they got to Broadway a jeep careened toward them and skidded to a halt. It was Colonel Scholes, the old bull’s exec. “What happened?”

Fitch told him.

“Those damned Wrights,” Scholes said as the men piled in. This time one had failed at just the wrong moment; some welder stateside had kept flame to metal a second less than usual—or something equally minor, equally trivial—and that had made all the difference.

They left the jeep at 42nd and Broadway and hiked east over a narrow track to the shore. A fairly large circle of trees was burning. The fire trucks were already there.

Scholes stood besides January, his expression bleak. “That was the whole first team,” he said.

“I know,” said January. He was still in shock, in imagination crushed, incinerated, destroyed. Once as a kid he had tied sheets to his arms and waist, jumped off the roof and landed right on his chest; this felt like that had. He had no way of knowing what would come of this crash, but he had a suspicion that he had indeed smacked into something hard.

Scholes shook his head. A half-hour had passed, the fire was nearly out. January’s four mates were over chattering with the Seabees. “He was going to name the plane after his mother,” Scholes said to the ground. “He told me that just this morning. He was going to call it Enola Gay.”

At night the jungle breathed, and its hot wet breath washed over the 509th’s compound. January stood in the doorway of his Quonset barracks hoping for a real breeze. No poker tonight. Voices were hushed, faces solemn. Some of the men had helped box up the dead crew’s gear. Now most lay on their bunks. January gave up on the breeze, climbed onto his top bunk to stare at the ceiling.

He observed the corrugated arch over him. Cricketsong sawed through his thoughts. Below him a rapid conversation was being carried on in guilty undertones, Fitch at its center. “January is the best bombardier left,” he said. “And I’m as good as Lewis was.”

“But so is Sweeney,” Matthews said. “And he’s in with Scholes.”

They were figuring out who would take over the strike. January scowled. Tibbets and the rest were less than twelve hours dead, and they were squabbling over who would replace them.

January grabbed a shirt, rolled off his bunk, put the shirt on.

“Hey, Professor,” Fitch said. “Where you going?”

“Out.”

Though midnight was near it was still sweltering. Crickets shut up as he walked by, started again behind him. He lit a cigarette. In the dark the MPs patrolling their fenced-in compound were like pairs of walking armbands. The 509th, prisoners in their own army. Fliers from other groups had taken to throwing rocks over the fence. Forcefully January expelled smoke, as if he could expel his disgust with it. They were only kids, he told himself. Their minds had been shaped in the war, by the war, and for the war. They knew you couldn’t mourn the dead for long; carry around a load like that and your own engines might fail. That was all right with January. It was an attitude that Tibbets had helped to form, so it was what he deserved. Tibbets would want to be forgotten in favor of the mission, all he had lived for was to drop the gimmick on the Japs, he was oblivious to anything else, men, wife, family, anything.

So it wasn’t the lack of feeling in his mates that bothered January. And it was natural of them to want to fly the strike they had been training a year for. Natural, that is, if you were a kid with a mind shaped by fanatics like Tibbets, shaped to take orders and never imagine consequences. But January was not a kid, and he wasn’t going to let men like Tibbets do a thing to his mind. And the gimmick . . . the gimmick was not natural. A chemical bomb of some sort, he guessed. Against the Geneva Convention. He stubbed his cigarette against the sole of his sneaker, tossed the butt over the fence. The tropical night breathed over him. He had a headache.

For months now he had been sure he would never fly a strike. The dislike Tibbets and he had exchanged in their looks (January was acutely aware of looks) had been real and strong. Tibbets had understood that January’s record of pinpoint accuracy in the runs over the Salton Sea had been a way of showing contempt, a way of saying you can’t get rid of me even though you hate me and I hate you. The record had forced Tibbets to keep January on one of the four second-string teams, but with the fuss they were making over the gimmick January had figured that would be far enough down the ladder to keep him out of things.

Now he wasn’t so sure. Tibbets was dead. He lit another cigarette, found his hand shaking. The Camel tasted bitter. He threw it over the fence at a receding armband, and regretted it instantly. A waste. He went back inside.

Before climbing onto his bunk he got a paperback out of his footlocker. “Hey, Professor, what you reading now?” Fitch said, grinning.

January showed him the blue cover. Winter’s Tale, by an Isak Dinesen. Fitch examined the little wartime edition. “Pretty racy, eh?”

“You bet,” January said heavily. “This guy puts sex on every page.” He climbed onto his bunk, opened the book. The stories were strange, hard to follow. The voices below bothered him. He concentrated harder.

As a boy on the farm in Arkansas, January had read everything he could lay his hands on. On Saturday afternoons he would race his father down the muddy lane to the mailbox (his father was a reader too), grab the Saturday Evening Post and run off to devour every word of it. That meant he had another week with nothing new to read, but he couldn’t help it. His favorites were the Hornblower stories, but anything would do. It was a way off the farm, a way into the world. He had become a man who could slip between the covers of a book whenever he chose.

But not on this night.

The next day the chaplain gave a memorial service, and on the morning after that Colonel Scholes looked in the door of their hut right after mess. “Briefing at eleven,” he announced. His face was haggard. “Be there early.” He looked at Fitch with bloodshot eyes, crooked a finger. “Fitch, January, Matthews—come with me.”

January put on his shoes. The rest of the men sat on their bunks and watched them wordlessly. January followed Fitch and Matthews out of the hut.

“I’ve spent most of the night on the radio with General Le May,” Scholes said. He looked them each in the eye. “We’ve decided you’re to be the first crew to make a strike.”

Fitch was nodding, as if he had expected it.

“Think you can do it?” Scholes said.

“Of course,” Fitch replied. Watching him January understood why they had chosen him to replace Tibbets: Fitch was like the old bull, he had that same ruthlessness. The young bull.

“Yes, sir,” Matthews said.

Scholes was looking at him. “Sure,” January said, not wanting to think about it. “Sure.” His heart was pounding directly on his sternum. But Fitch and Matthews looked serious as owls, so he wasn’t going to stick out by looking odd. It was big news, after all; anyone would be taken aback by it. Nevertheless, January made an effort to nod.

“Okay,” Scholes said. “McDonald will be flying with you as co-pilot.” Fitch frowned. “I’ve got to go tell those British officers that Le May doesn’t want them on the strike with you. See you at the briefing.”

“Yes, sir.”

As soon as Scholes was around the corner Fitch swung a fist at the sky. “Yow!” Matthews cried. He and Fitch shook hands. “We did it!” Matthews took January’s hand and wrung it, his face plastered with a goofy grin. “We did it!”

“Somebody did it, anyway,” January said.

“Ah, Frank,” Matthews said. “Show some spunk. You’re always so cool.”

“Old Professor Stoneface,” Fitch said, glancing at January with a trace of amused contempt. “Come on, let’s get to the briefing.”

The briefing hut, one of the longer Quonsets, was completely surrounded by MPs holding carbines. “Gosh,” Matthews said, subdued by the sight. Inside it was already smoky. The walls were covered by the usual maps of Japan. Two blackboards at the front were draped with sheets. Captain Shepard, the naval officer who worked with the scientists on the gimmick, was in back with his assistant Lieutenant Stone, winding a reel of film onto a projector. Dr. Nelson, the group psychiatrist, was already seated on a front bench near the wall. Tibbets had recently sicced the psychiatrist on the group—another one of his great ideas, like the spies in the bar. The man’s questions had struck January as stupid. He hadn’t even been able to figure out that Easterly was a flake, something that was clear to anybody who flew with him, or even played him in a single round of poker. January slid onto a bench beside his mates.

The two Brits entered, looking furious in their stiff-upper-lip way. They sat on the bench behind January. Sweeney’s and Easterly’s crew filed in, followed by the other men, and soon the room was full. Fitch and the rest pulled out Lucky Strikes and lit up; since they had named the plane only January had stuck with Camels.

Scholes came in with several men January didn’t recognize, and went to the front. The chatter died, and all the smoke plumes ribboned steadily into the air.

Scholes nodded, and two intelligence officers took the sheets off the blackboards, revealing aerial reconnaisance photos.

“Men,” Scholes said, “these are the target cities.”

Someone cleared his throat.

“In order of priority they are Hiroshima, Kokura, and Nagasaki. There will be three weather scouts: Straight Flush to Hiroshima, Strange Cargo to Kokura, and Full House to Nagasaki. The Great Artiste and Number 91 will be accompanying the mission to take photos. And Lucky Strike will fly the bomb.”

There were rustles, coughs. Men turned to look at January and his mates, and they all sat up straight. Sweeney stretched back to shake Fitch’s hand, and there were some quick laughs. Fitch grinned.

“Now listen up,” Scholes went on. “The weapon we are going to deliver was successfully tested stateside a couple of weeks ago. And now we’ve got orders to drop it on the enemy.” He paused to let that sink in. “I’ll let Captain Shepard tell you more.”

Shepard walked to the blackboard slowly, savoring his entrance. His forehead was shiny with sweat, and January realized he was excited or nervous. He wondered what the shrink would make of that.

“I’m going to come right to the point,” Shepard said. “The bomb you are going to drop is something new in history. We think it will knock out everything within four miles.”

Now the room was completely still. January noticed that he could see a great deal of his nose, eyebrows, and cheeks; it was as if he were receding back into his body, like a fox into its hole. He kept his gaze rigidly on Shepard, steadfastly ignoring the feeling. Shepard pulled a sheet back over a blackboard while someone else turned down the lights.

“This is a film of the only test we have made,” Shepard said. The film started, caught, started again. A wavery cone of bright cigarette smoke speared the length of the room, and on the sheet sprang a dead gray landscape: a lot of sky, a smooth desert floor, hills in the distance. The projector went click-click-click-click, click-click-click-click. “The bomb is on top of the tower,” Shepard said, and January focused on the pin-like object sticking out of the desert floor, off against the hills. It was between eight and ten miles from the camera, he judged; he had gotten good at calculating distances. He was still distracted by his face.

Click-click-click-click, click—then the screen went white for a second, filling even their room with light. When the picture returned the desert floor was filled with a white bloom of fire. The fireball coalesced and then quite suddenly it leaped off the earth all the way into the stratosphere by God, like a tracer bullet leaving a machine-gun, trailing a whitish pillar of smoke behind it. The pillar gushed up and a growing ball of smoke billowed outward, capping the pillar. January calculated the size of the cloud, but was sure he got it wrong. There it stood. The picture flickered, and then the screen went white again, as if the camera had melted or that part of the world had come apart. But the flapping from the projector told them it was the end of the film.

January felt the air suck in and out of his open mouth. The lights came on in the smoky room and for a second he panicked, he struggled to shove his features into an accepted pattern, the shrink would be looking around at them all—and then he glanced around and realized he needn’t have worried, that he wasn’t alone. Faces were bloodless, eyes were blinky or bug-eyed with shock, mouths hung open or were clamped whitely shut. For a few moments they all had to acknowledge what they were doing. January, scaring himself, felt an urge to say, “Play it again, will you?” Fitch was pulling his curled black hair off his thug’s forehead uneasily. Beyond him January saw that one of the Limeys had already reconsidered how mad he was about missing the flight. Now he looked sick. Someone let out a long whew, another whistled. January looked to the front again, where the shrink watched them, undisturbed.

Shepard said, “It’s big, all right. And no one knows what will happen when it’s dropped from the air. But the mushroom cloud you saw will go to at least thirty thousand feet, probably sixty. And the flash you saw at the beginning was hotter than the sun.”

Hotter than the sun. More licked lips, hard swallows, readjusted baseball caps. One of the intelligence officers passed out tinted goggles like welder’s glasses. January took his and twiddled the opacity dial.

Scholes said, “You’re the hottest thing in the armed forces, now. So no talking, even among yourselves.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s do it the way Colonel Tibbets would have wanted us to. He picked every one of you because you were the best, and now’s the time to show he was right. So—so let’s make the old man proud.”

The briefing was over. Men filed out into the sudden sunlight. Into the heat and glare. Captain Shepard approached Fitch. “Stone and I will be flying with you to take care of the bomb,” he said.

Fitch nodded. “Do you know how many strikes we’ll fly?”

“As many as it takes to make them quit.” Shepard stared hard at all of them. “But it will only take one.”

War breeds strange dreams. That night January writhed over his sheets in the hot wet vegetable darkness, in that frightening half-sleep when you sometimes know you are dreaming but can do nothing about it, and he dreamed he was walking . . .

. . . walking through the streets when suddenly the sun swoops down, the sun touches down and everything is instantly darkness and smoke and silence, a deaf roaring. Walls of fire. His head hurts and in the middle of his vision is a bluewhite blur as if God’s camera went off in his face. Ah—the sun fell, he thinks. His arm is burned. Blinking is painful. People stumbling by, mouths open, horribly burned—

He is a priest, he can feel the clerical collar, and the wounded ask him for help. He points to his ears, tries to touch them but can’t. Pall of black smoke over everything, the city has fallen into the streets. Ah, it’s the end of the world. In a park he finds shade and cleared ground. People crouch under bushes like frightened animals. Where the park meets the river red and black figures crowd into steaming water. A figure gestures from a copse of bamboo. He enters it, finds five or six faceless soldiers huddling. Their eyes have melted, their mouths are holes. Deafness spares him their words. The sighted soldier mimes drinking. The soldiers are thirsty. He nods and goes to the river in search of a container. Bodies float downstream.

Hours pass as he hunts fruitlessly for a bucket. He pulls people from the rubble. He hears a bird screeching and he realizes that his deafness is the roar of the city burning, a roar like the blood in his ears but he is not deaf, he only thought he was deaf because there are no human cries. The people are suffering in silence. Through the dusky night he stumbles back to the river, pain crashing through his head. In a field men are pulling potatoes out of the ground that have been baked well enough to eat. He shares one with them. At the river everyone is dead—

—and he struggled out of the nightmare drenched in rank sweat, the taste of dirt in his mouth, his stomach knotted with horror. He sat up and the wet rough sheet clung to his skin. His heart felt crushed between lungs desperate for air. The flowery rotting jungle smell filled him and images from the dream flashed before him so vividly that in the dim hut he saw nothing else. He grabbed his cigarettes and jumped off the bunk, hurried out into the compound. Trembling he lit up, started pacing around. For a moment he worried that the idiot psychiatrist might see him, but then he dismissed the idea. Nelson would be asleep. They were all asleep. He shook his head, looked down at his right arm and almost dropped his cigarette—but it was just his stove scar, an old scar, he’d had it most of his life, since the day he’d pulled the frypan off the stove and onto his arm, burning it with oil. He could still remember the round O of fear that his mother’s mouth had made as she rushed in to see what was wrong. Just an old burn scar, he thought, let’s not go overboard here. He pulled his sleeve down.

For the rest of the night he tried to walk it off, cigarette after cigarette. The dome of the sky lightened until all the compound and the jungle beyond it was visible. He was forced by the light of day to walk back into his hut and lie down as if nothing had happened.

Two days later Scholes ordered them to take one of Le May’s men over Rota for a test run. This new lieutenant colonel ordered Fitch not to play with the engines on takeoff. They flew a perfect run. January put the dummy gimmick right on the aiming point just as he had so often in the Salton Sea, and Fitch powered the plane down into the violent bank that started their 150-degree turn and flight for safety. Back on Tinian the lieutenant colonel congratulated them and shook each of their hands. January smiled with the rest, palms cool, heart steady. It was as if his body were a shell, something he could manipulate from without, like a bombsight. He ate well, he chatted as much as he ever had, and when the psychiatrist ran him to earth for some questions he was friendly and seemed open.

“Hello, doc.”

“How do you feel about all this, Frank?”

“Just like I always have, sir. Fine.”

“Eating well?”

“Better than ever.”

“Sleeping well?”

“As well as I can in this humidity. I got used to Utah, I’m afraid.” Dr. Nelson laughed. Actually January had hardly slept since his dream. He was afraid of sleep. Couldn’t the man see that?

“And how do you feel about being part of the crew chosen to make the first strike?”

“Well, it was the right choice, I reckon. We’re the b—the best crew left.”

“Do you feel sorry about Tibbets’ crew’s accident?”

“Yes, sir, I do.” You better believe it.

After the jokes and firm handshakes that ended the interview January walked out into the blaze of the tropical noon and lit a cigarette. He allowed himself to feel how much he despised the psychiatrist and his blind profession at the same time he was waving good-bye to the man. Ounce brain. Why couldn’t he have seen? Whatever happened it would be his fault. . . . With a rush of smoke out of him January realized how painfully easy it was to fool someone if you wanted to. All action was no more than a mask that could be perfectly manipulated from somewhere else. And all the while in that somewhere else January lived in a click-click-click of film, in the silent roaring of a dream, struggling against images he couldn’t dispel. The heat of the tropical sun—ninety-three million miles away, wasn’t it?—pulsed painfully on the back of his neck.

As he watched the pyschiatrist collar their tail-gunner Kochenski, he thought of walking up to the man and saying I quit. I don’t want to do this. In imagination he saw the look that would form in the man’s eye, in Fitch’s eye, in Tibbets’ eye, and his mind recoiled from the idea. He felt too much contempt for them. He wouldn’t for anything give them a means to despise him, a reason to call him coward. Stubbornly he banished the whole complex of thought. Easier to go along with it.

And so a couple of disjointed days later, just after midnight of August 9th, he found himself preparing for the strike. Around him Fitch and Matthews and Haddock were doing the same. How odd were the everyday motions of getting dressed when you were off to demolish a city, to end a hundred thousand lives! January found himself examining his hands, his boots, the cracks in the linoleum. He put on his survival vest, checked the pockets abstractedly for fish-hooks, water kit, first aid package, emergency rations. Then the parachute harness, and his coveralls over it all. Tying his bootlaces took minutes; he couldn’t do it when watching his fingers so closely.

“Come on, Professor!” Fitch’s voice was tight. “The big day is here.” He followed the others into the night. A cool wind was blowing. The chaplain said a prayer for them. They took jeeps down Broadway to runway Able. Lucky Strike stood in a circle of spotlights and men, half of them with cameras, the rest with reporter’s pads. They surrounded the crew; it reminded January of a Hollywood premiere. Eventually he escaped up the hatch and into the plane. Others followed. Half an hour passed before Fitch joined them, grinning like a movie star. They started the engines, and January was thankful for their vibrating, thought-smothering roar. They taxied away from the Hollywood scene and January felt relief for a moment, until he remembered where they were going. On runway Able the engines pitched up to their twenty-three hundred rpm whine, and looking out the clear windscreen he saw the runway paintmarks move by ever faster. Fitch kept them on the runway till Tinian had run out from under them, then quickly pulled up. They were on their way.

When they got to altitude January climbed past Fitch and McDonald to the bombardier’s seat and placed his parachute on it. He leaned back. The roar of the four engines packed around him like cotton batting. He was on the flight, nothing to be done about it now. The heavy vibration was a comfort, he liked the feel of it there in the nose of the plane. A drowsy, sad acceptance hummed through him.

Against his closed eyelids flashed a black eyeless face and he jerked awake, heart racing. He was on the flight, no way out. Now he realized how easy it would have been to get out of it. He could have just said he didn’t want to. The simplicity of it appalled him. Who gave a damn what the psychiatrist or Tibbets or anyone else thought, compared to this? Now there was no way out. It was a comfort, in a way. Now he could stop worrying, stop thinking he had any choice.

Sitting there with his knees bracketing the bombsight January dozed, and as he dozed he daydreamed his way out. He could climb the step to Fitch and McDonald and declare he had been secretly promoted to Major and ordered to re-direct the mission. They were to go to Tokyo and drop the bomb in the bay. The Jap war cabinet had been told to watch this demonstration of the new weapon, and when they saw that fireball boil the bay and bounce into heaven they’d run and sign surrender papers as fast as they could write, kamikazes or not. They weren’t crazy, after all. No need to murder a whole city. It was such a good plan that the generals back home were no doubt changing the mission at this very minute, desperately radioing their instructions to Tinian, only to find out it was too late . . . so that when they returned to Tinian January would become a hero for guessing what the generals really wanted, and for risking all to do it. It would be like one of the Hornblower stories in the Saturday Evening Post.

Once again January jerked awake. The drowsy pleasure of the fantasy was replaced with desperate scorn. There wasn’t a chance in hell that he could convince Fitch and the rest that he had secret orders superseding theirs. And he couldn’t go up there and wave his pistol around and order them to drop the bomb in Tokyo Bay, because he was the one who had to actually drop it, and he couldn’t be down in front dropping the bomb and up ordering the others around at the same time. Pipe dreams.

Time swept on, slow as a second hand. January’s thoughts, however, matched the spin of the props; desperately they cast about, now this way now that, like an animal caught by the leg in a trap. The crew was silent. The clouds below were a white scree on the black ocean. January’s knee vibrated against the squat stand of the bombsight. He was the one who had to drop the bomb. No matter where his thoughts lunged they were brought up short by that. He was the one, not Fitch or the crew, not Le May, not the generals and scientists back home, not Truman and his advisors. Truman—suddenly January hated him. Roosevelt would have done it differently. If only Roosevelt had lived! The grief that had filled January when he learned of Roosevelt’s death reverberated through him again, more strongly than ever. It was unfair to have worked so hard and then not see the war’s end. And FDR would have ended it differently. Back at the start of it all he had declared that civilian centers were never to be bombed, and if he had lived, if, if, if. But he hadn’t. And now it was smiling bastard Harry Truman, ordering him, Frank January, to drop the sun on two hundred thousand women and children. Once his father had taken him to see the Browns play before twenty thousand, a giant crowd—“I never voted for you,” January whispered viciously, and jerked to realize he had spoken aloud. Luckily his microphone was off. And Roosevelt would have done it differently, he would have.

The bombsight rose before him, spearing the black sky and blocking some of the hundreds of little cruciform stars. Lucky Strike ground on toward Iwo Jima, minute by minute flying four miles closer to their target. January leaned forward and put his face in the cool headrest of the bombsight, hoping that its grasp might hold his thoughts as well as his forehead. It worked surprisingly well.

His earphones crackled and he sat up. “Captain January.” It was Shepard. “We’re going to arm the bomb now, want to watch?”

“Sure thing.” He shook his head, surprised at his own duplicity. Stepping up between the pilots, he moved stiffly to the roomy cabin behind the cockpit. Matthews was at his desk taking a navigational fix on the radio signals from Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and Haddock stood beside him. At the back of the compartment was a small circular hatch, below the larger tunnel leading to the rear of the plane. January opened it, sat down and swung himself feet first through the hole.

The bomb bay was unheated, and the cold air felt good. He stood facing the bomb. Stone was sitting on the floor of the bay; Shepard was laid out under the bomb, reaching into it. On a rubber pad next to Stone were tools, plates, several cylindrical blocks. Shepard pulled back, sat up, sucked a scraped knuckle. He shook his head ruefully: “I don’t dare wear gloves with this one.”

“I’d be just as happy myself if you didn’t let something slip,” January joked nervously. The two men laughed.

“Nothing can blow till I change those green wires to the red ones,” Stone said.

“Give me the wrench,” Shepard said. Stone handed it to him, and he stretched under the bomb again. After some awkward wrenching inside it he lifted out a cylindrical plug. “Breech plug,” he said, and set it on the mat.

January found his skin goose-pimpling in the cold air. Stone handed Shepard one of the blocks. Shepard extended under the bomb again. “Red ends toward the breech.” “I know.” Watching them January was reminded of auto mechanics on the oily floor of a garage, working under a car. He had spent a few years doing that himself, after his family moved to Vicksburg. Hiroshima was a river town. One time a flat-bed truck carrying bags of cement powder down Fourth Street hill had lost its brakes and careened into the intersection with River Road, where despite the driver’s efforts to turn it smashed into a passing car. Frank had been out in the yard playing, had heard the crash and saw the cement dust rising. He had been one of the first there. The woman and child in the passenger seat of the model T had been killed. The woman driving was okay. They were from Chicago. A group of folks subdued the driver of the truck, who kept trying to help at the Model T, though he had a bad cut on his head and was covered with white dust.

“Okay, let’s tighten the breech plug.” Stone gave Shepard the wrench. “Sixteen turns exactly,” Shepard said. He was sweating even in the bay’s chill, and he paused to wipe his forehead. “Let’s hope we don’t get hit by lightning.” He put the wrench down and shifted onto his knees, picked up a circular plate. Hubcap, January thought. Stone connected wires, then helped Shepard install two more plates. Good old American know-how, January thought, goose-pimples rippling across his skin like cat’s-paws over water. There was Shepard, a scientist, putting together a bomb like he was an auto mechanic changing oil and plugs. January felt a tight rush of rage at the scientists who had designed the bomb. They had worked on it for over a year down there in New Mexico, had none of them in all that time ever stopped to think what they were doing?

But none of them had to drop it. January turned to hide his face from Shepard, stepped down the bay. The bomb looked like a big long trashcan, with fins at one end and little antennae at the other. Just a bomb, he thought, damn it, it’s just another bomb.

Shepard stood and patted the bomb gently. “We’ve got a live one now.” Never a thought about what it would do. January hurried by the man, afraid that hatred would crack his shell and give him away. The pistol strapped to his belt caught on the hatchway and he imagined shooting Shepard—shooting Fitch and McDonald and plunging the controls forward so that Lucky Strike tilted and spun down into the sea like a spent tracer bullet, like a plane broken by flak, following the arc of all human ambition. Nobody would ever know what had happened to them, and their trashcan would be dumped at the bottom of the Pacific where it belonged. He could even shoot everyone and parachute out, and perhaps be rescued by one of the Superdumbos following them. . . .

The thought passed and remembering it January squinted with disgust. But another part of him agreed that it was a possibility. It could be done. It would solve his problem. His fingers explored his holster snap.

“Want some coffee?” Matthews asked.

“Sure,” January said, and took his hand from the gun to reach for the cup. He sipped: hot. He watched Matthews and Benton tune the loran equipment. As the beeps came in Matthews took a straightedge and drew lines from Okinawa and Iwo Jima on his map table. He tapped a finger on the intersection. “They’ve taken the art out of navigation,” he said to January. “They might as well stop making the navigator’s dome,” thumbing up at the little plexiglass bubble over them.

“Good old American know-how,” January said.

Matthews nodded. With two fingers he measured the distance between their position and Iwo Jima. Benton measured with a ruler.

“Rendezvous at five thirty-five, eh?” Matthews said. They were to rendezvous with the two trailing planes over Iwo.

Benton disagreed: “I’d say five-fifty.”

“What? Check again, guy, we’re not in no tugboat here.”

“The wind—”

“Yah, the wind. Frank, you want to add a bet to the pool?”

“Five thirty-six,” January said promptly.

They laughed. “See, he’s got more confidence in me,” Matthews said with a dopey grin.

January recalled his plan to shoot the crew and tip the plane into the sea, and he pursed his lips, repelled. Not for anything would he be able to shoot these men, who, if not friends, were at least companions. They passed for friends. They meant no harm.

Shepard and Stone climbed into the cabin. Matthews offered them coffee. “The gimmick’s ready to kick their ass, eh?” Shepard nodded and drank.

January moved forward, past Haddock’s console. Another plan that wouldn’t work. What to do? All the flight engineer’s dials and gauges showed conditions were normal. Maybe he could sabotage something? Cut a line somewhere?

Fitch looked back at him and said, “When are we due over Iwo?”

“Five forty, Matthews says.”

“He better be right.”

A thug. In peacetime Fitch would be hanging around a pool table giving the cops trouble. He was perfect for war. Tibbets had chosen his men well—most of them, anyway. Moving back past Haddock January stopped to stare at the group of men in the navigation cabin. They joked, drank coffee. They were all a bit like Fitch: young toughs, capable and thoughtless. They were having a good time, an adventure. That was January’s dominant impression of his companions in the 509th; despite all the bitching and the occasional moments of overmastering fear, they were having a good time. His mind spun forward and he saw what these young men would grow up to be like as clearly as if they stood before him in businessmen’s suits, prosperous and balding. They would be tough and capable and thoughtless, and as the years passed and the great war receded in time they would look back on it with ever-increasing nostalgia, for they would be the survivors and not the dead. Every year of this war would feel like ten in their memories, so that the war would always remain the central experience of their lives—a time when history lay palpable in their hands, when each of their daily acts affected it, when moral issues were simple, and others told them what to do—so that as more years passed and the survivors aged, bodies falling apart, lives in one rut or another, they would unconsciously push harder and harder to thrust the world into war again, thinking somewhere inside themselves that if they could only return to world war then they would magically be again as they were in the last one—young, and free, and happy. And by that time they would hold the positions of power, they would be capable of doing it.

So there would be more wars, January saw. He heard it in Matthews’ laughter, saw it in their excited eyes. “There’s Iwo, and it’s five thirty-one. Pay up! I win!” And in future wars they’d have more bombs like the gimmick, hundreds of them no doubt. He saw more planes, more young crews like this one, flying to Moscow no doubt or to wherever, fireballs in every capital, why not? And to what end? To what end? So that the old men could hope to become magically young again. Nothing more sane than that.

They were over Iwo Jima. Three more hours to Japan. Voices from The Great Artiste and Number 91 crackled on the radio. Rendezvous accomplished, the three planes flew northwest, toward Shikoku, the first Japanese island in their path. January went aft to use the toilet. “You okay, Frank?” Matthews asked. “Sure. Terrible coffee, though.” “Ain’t it always.” January tugged at his baseball cap and hurried away. Kochenski and the other gunners were playing poker. When he was done he returned forward. Matthews sat on the stool before his maps, readying his equipment for the constant monitoring of drift that would now be required. Haddock and Benton were also busy at their stations. January maneuvered between the pilots down into the nose. “Good shooting,” Matthews called after him.

Forward it seemed quieter. January got settled, put his headphones on and leaned forward to look out the ribbed plexiglass.

Dawn had turned the whole vault of the sky pink. Slowly the radiant shade shifted through lavender to blue, pulse by pulse a different color. The ocean below was a glittering blue plane, marbled by a pattern of puffy pink cloud. The sky above was a vast dome, darker above than on the horizon. January had always thought that dawn was the time when you could see most clearly how big the earth was, and how high above it they flew. It seemed they flew at the very upper edge of the atmosphere, and January saw how thin it was, how it was just a skin of air really, so that even if you flew up to its top the earth still extended away infinitely in every direction. The coffee had warmed January, he was sweating. Sunlight blinked off the plexiglass. His watch said six. Plane and hemisphere of blue were split down the middle by the bombsight. His earphones crackled and he listened in to the reports from the lead planes flying over the target cities. Kokura, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, all of them had six-tenths cloud cover. Maybe they would have to cancel the whole mission because of weather. “We’ll look at Hiroshima first,” Fitch said. January peered down at the fields of miniature clouds with renewed interest. His parachute slipped under him. Readjusting it he imagined putting it on, sneaking back to the central escape hatch under the navigator’s cabin, opening the hatch . . . he could be out of the plane and gone before anyone noticed. Leave it up to them. They could bomb or not but it wouldn’t be January’s doing. He could float down onto the world like a puff of dandelion, feel cool air rush around him, watch the silk canopy dome hang over him like a miniature sky, a private world.

An eyeless black face. January shuddered; it was as though the nightmare could return any time. If he jumped nothing would change, the bomb would still fall—would he feel any better, floating on his Inland Sea? Sure, one part of him shouted; maybe, another conceded; the rest of him saw that face. . . .

Earphones crackled. Shepard said, “Lieutenant Stone has now armed the bomb, and I can tell you all what we are carrying. Aboard with us is the world’s first atomic bomb.”

Not exactly, January thought. Whistles squeaked in his earphones. The first one went off in New Mexico. Splitting atoms: January had heard the term before. Tremendous energy in every atom, Einstein had said. Break one, and—he had seen the result on film. Shepard was talking about radiation, which brought back more to January. Energy released in the form of X-rays. Killed by X-rays! It would be against the Geneva Convention if they had thought of it.

Fitch cut in. “When the bomb is dropped Lieutenant Benton will record our reaction to what we see. This recording is being made for history, so watch your language.” Watch your language! January choked back a laugh. Don’t curse or blaspheme God at the sight of the first atomic bomb incinerating a city and all its inhabitants with X-rays!

Six twenty. January found his hands clenched together on the headrest of the bombsight. He felt as if he had a fever. In the harsh wash of morning light the skin on the backs of his hands appeared slightly translucent. The whorls in the skin looked like the delicate patterning of waves on the sea’s surface. His hands were made of atoms. Atoms were the smallest building block of matter, it took billions of them to make those tense, trembling hands. Split one atom and you had the fireball. That meant that the energy contained in even one hand . . . he turned up a palm to look at the lines and the mottled flesh under the transparent skin. A person was a bomb that could blow up the world. January felt that latent power stir in him, pulsing with every hard heart-knock. What beings they were, and in what a blue expanse of a world!—And here they spun on to drop a bomb and kill a hundred thousand of these astonishing beings.

When a fox or raccoon is caught by the leg in a trap, it lunges until the leg is frayed, twisted, perhaps broken, and only then does the animal’s pain and exhaustion force it to quit. Now in the same way January wanted to quit. His mind hurt. His plans to escape were so much crap—stupid, useless. Better to quit. He tried to stop thinking, but it was hopeless. How could he stop? As long as he was conscious he would be thinking. The mind struggles longer in its traps than any fox.

Lucky Strike tilted up and began the long climb to bombing altitude. On the horizon the clouds lay over a green island. Japan. Surely it had gotten hotter, the heater must be broken, he thought. Don’t think. Every few minutes Matthews gave Fitch small course adjustments. “Two seventy-five, now. That’s it.” To escape the moment January recalled his childhood. Following a mule and plow. Moving to Vicksburg (rivers). For a while there in Vicksburg, since his stutter made it hard to gain friends, he had played a game with himself. He had passed the time by imagining that everything he did was vitally important and determined the fate of the world. If he crossed a road in front of a certain car, for instance, then the car wouldn’t make it through the next intersection before a truck hit it, and so the man driving would be killed and wouldn’t be able to invent the flying boat that would save President Wilson from kidnappers—so he had to wait for that car because everything afterward depended on it. Oh damn it, he thought, damn it, think of something different. The last Hornblower story he had read—how would he get out of this? The round O of his mother’s face as she ran in and saw his arm—The Mississippi, mud-brown behind its levees—Abruptly he shook his head, face twisted in frustration and despair, aware at last that no possible avenue of memory would serve as an escape for him now, for now there was no part of his life that did not apply to the situation he was in, and no matter where he cast his mind it was going to shore up against the hour facing him.

Less than an hour. They were at thirty thousand feet, bombing altitude. Fitch gave him altimeter readings to dial into the bombsight. Matthews gave him windspeeds. Sweat got in his eye and he blinked furiously. The sun rose behind them like an atomic bomb, glinting off every corner and edge of the Plexiglas, illuminating his bubble compartment with a fierce glare. Broken plans jumbled together in his mind, his breath was short, his throat dry. Uselessly and repeatedly he damned the scientists, damned Truman. Damned the Japanese for causing the whole mess in the first place, damned yellow killers, they had brought this on themselves. Remember Pearl. American men had died under bombs when no war had been declared; they had started it and now it was coming back to them with a vengeance. And they deserved it. And an invasion of Japan would take years, cost millions of lives—end it now, end it, they deserved it, they deserved it steaming river full of charcoal people silently dying damned stubborn race of maniacs!

“There’s Honshu,” Fitch said, and January returned to the world of the plane. They were over the Inland Sea. Soon they would pass the secondary target Kokura, a bit to the south. Seven thirty. The island was draped more heavily than the sea by clouds, and again January’s heart leaped with the idea that weather would cancel the mission. But they did deserve it. It was a mission like any other mission. He had dropped bombs on Africa, Sicily, Italy, all Germany. . . . He leaned forward to take a look through the sight. Under the X of the crosshairs was the sea, but at the lead edge of the sight was land. Honshu. At two hundred and thirty miles an hour that gave them about a half hour to Hiroshima. Maybe less. He wondered if his heart could beat so hard for that long.

Fitch said, “Matthews, I’m giving over guidance to you. Just tell us what to do.”

“Bear south two degrees,” was all Matthews said. At last their voices had taken on a touch of awareness, even fear.

“January, are you ready?” Fitch asked.

“I’m just waiting,” January said. He sat up, so Fitch could see the back of his head. The bombsight stood between his legs. A switch on its side would start the bombing sequence; the bomb would not leave the plane immediately upon the flick of the switch, but would drop after a fifteen-second radio tone warned the following planes. The sight was adjusted accordingly.

“Adjust to a heading of two sixty-five,” Matthews said. “We’re coming in directly upwind.” This was to make any side-drift adjustments for the bomb unnecessary. “January, dial it down to two hundred and thirty-one miles per hour.”

“Two thirty-one.”

Fitch said, “Everyone but January and Matthews, get your goggles on.”

January took the darkened goggles from the floor. One needed to protect one’s eyes or they might melt. He put them on, put his forehead on the headrest. They were in the way. He took them off. When he looked through the sight again there was land under the crosshairs. He checked his watch. Eight o’clock. Up and reading the papers, drinking tea.

“Ten minutes to AP,” Matthews said. The aiming point was Aioi Bridge, a T-shaped bridge in the middle of the delta-straddling city. Easy to recognize.

“There’s a lot of cloud down there,” Fitch noted. “Are you going to be able to see?”

“I won’t be sure until we try it,” January said.

“We can make another pass and use radar if we need to,” Matthews said.

Fitch said, “Don’t drop it unless you’re sure, January.”

“Yes, sir.”

Through the sight a grouping of rooftops and gray roads was just visible between broken clouds. Around it green forest. “All right,” Matthews exclaimed, “here we go! Keep it right on this heading, Captain! January, we’ll stay at two thirty-one.”

“And same heading,” Fitch said. “January, she’s all yours. Everyone make sure your goggles are on. And be ready for the turn.”

January’s world contracted to the view through the bombsight. A stippled field of cloud and forest. Over a small range of hills and into Hiroshima’s watershed. The broad river was mud brown, the land pale hazy green, the growing network of roads flat gray. Now the tiny rectangular shapes of buildings covered almost all the land, and swimming into the sight came the city proper, narrow islands thrusting into a dark blue bay. Under the crosshairs the city moved island by island, cloud by cloud. January had stopped breathing, his fingers were rigid as stone on the switch. And there was Aioi Bridge. It slid right under the crosshairs, a tiny T right in a gap in the clouds. January’s fingers crushed the switch. Deliberately he took a breath, held it. Clouds swam under the crosshairs, then the next island. “Almost there,” he said calmly into his microphone. “Steady.” Now that he was committed his heart was humming like the Wrights. He counted to ten. Now flowing under the crosshairs were clouds alternating with green forest, leaden roads. “I’ve turned the switch, but I’m not getting a tone!” he croaked into the mike. His right hand held the switch firmly in place. Fitch was shouting something—Matthews’ voice cracked across it-“Flipping it b-back and forth,” January shouted, shielding the bombsight with his body from the eyes of the pilots. “But still—wait a second—”

He pushed the switch down. A low hum filled his ears. “That’s it! It started!”

“But where will it land?” Matthews cried.

“Hold steady!” January shouted.

Lucky Strike shuddered and lofted up ten or twenty feet. January twisted to look down and there was the bomb, flying just below the plane. Then with a wobble it fell away.

The plane banked right and dove so hard that the centrifugal force threw January against the plexiglass. Several thousand feet lower Fitch leveled it out and they hurtled north.

“Do you see anything?” Fitch cried.

From the tailgun Kochenski gasped “Nothing.” January struggled upright. He reached for the welder’s goggles, but they were no longer on his head. He couldn’t find them. “How long has it been?” he said.

“Thirty seconds,” Matthews replied.

January clamped his eyes shut.

The blood in his eyelids lit up red, then white.

On the earphones a clutter of voices: “Oh my God. Oh my God.” The plane bounced and tumbled, metallically shrieking. January pressed himself off the plexiglass. “Nother shockwave!” Kockenski yelled. The plane rocked again, bounced out of control, this is it, January thought, end of the world, I guess that solves my problem.

He opened his eyes and found he could still see. The engines still roared, the props spun. “Those were the shockwaves from the bomb,” Fitch called. “We’re okay now. Look at that! Will you look at that sonofabitch go!”

January looked. The cloud layer below had burst apart, and a black column of smoke billowed up from a core of red fire. Already the top of the column was at their height. Exclamations of shock clattered painfully in January’s ears. He stared at the fiery base of the cloud, at the scores of fires feeding into it. Suddenly he could see past the cloud, and his fingernails cut into his palms. Through a gap in the clouds he saw it clearly, the delta, the six rivers, there off to the left of the tower of smoke: the city of Hiroshima, untouched.

“We missed!” Kockenski yelled. “We missed it!”

January turned-to hide his face from the pilots; on it was a grin like a rictus. He sat back in his seat and let the relief fill him.

Then it was back to it. “God damn it!” Fitch shouted down at him. McDonald was trying to restrain him. “January, get up here!”

“Yes, sir.” Now there was a new set of problems.

January stood and turned, legs weak. His right fingertips throbbed painfully. The men were crowded forward to look out the plexiglass. January looked with them.

The mushroom cloud was forming. It roiled out as if it might continue to extend forever, fed by the inferno and the black stalk below it. It looked about two miles wide, and half a mile tall, and it extended well above the height they flew at, dwarfing their plane entirely. “Do you think we’ll all be sterile?” Matthews said.

“I can taste the radiation,” McDonald declared. “Can you? It tastes like lead.”

Bursts of flame shot up into the cloud from below, giving a purplish tint to the stalk. There it stood: lifelike, malignant, sixty thousand feet tall. One bomb. January shoved past the pilots into the navigation cabin, overwhelmed.

“Should I start recording everyone’s reactions, Captain?” asked Benton.

“To hell with that,” Fitch said, following January back. But Shepard got there first, descending quickly from the navigation dome. He rushed across the cabin, caught January on the shoulder, “You bastard!” he screamed as January stumbled back. “You lost your nerve, coward!”

January went for Shepard, happy to have a target at last, but Fitch cut in and grabbed him by the collar, pulled him around until they were face to face—

“Is that right?” Fitch cried, as angry as Shepard. “Did you screw up on purpose?”

“No,” January grunted, and knocked Fitch’s hands away from his neck. He swung and smacked Fitch on the mouth, caught him solid. Fitch staggered back, recovered, and no doubt would have beaten January up, but Matthews and Benton and Stone leaped in and held him back, shouting for order. “Shut up! Shut up!” McDonald screamed from the cockpit, and for a moment it was bedlam, but Fitch let himself be restrained, and soon only McDonald’s shouts for quiet were heard. January retreated to between the pilot seats, right hand on his pistol holster.

“The city was in the crosshairs when I flipped the switch,” he said. “But the first couple of times I flipped it nothing happened—”

“That’s a lie!” Shepard shouted. “There was nothing wrong with the switch, I checked it myself. Besides, the bomb exploded miles beyond Hiroshima, look for yourself! That’s minutes.” He wiped spit from his chin and pointed at January. “You did it.”

“You don’t know that,” January said. But he could see the men had been convinced by Shepard, and he took a step back. “You just get me to a board of inquiry, quick. And leave me alone till then. If you touch me again,” glaring venomously at Fitch and then Shepard, “I’ll shoot you.” He turned and hopped down to his seat, feeling exposed and vunerable, like a treed raccoon.

“They’ll shoot you for this,” Shepard screamed after him. “Disobeying orders—treason—” Matthews and Stone were shutting him up.

“Let’s get out of here,” he heard McDonald say. “I can taste the lead, can’t you?”

January looked out the plexiglass. The giant cloud still burned and roiled. One atom. . . . Well, they had really done it to that forest. He almost laughed but stopped himself, afraid of hysteria. Through a break in the clouds he got a clear view of Hiroshima for the first time. It lay spread over its islands like a map, unharmed. Well, that was that. The inferno at the base of the mushroom cloud was eight or ten miles around the shore of the bay, and a mile or two inland. A certain patch of forest would be gone, destroyed—utterly blasted from the face of the earth. The Japs would be able to go out and investigate the damage. And if they were told it was a demonstration, a warning—and if they acted fast—well, they had their chance. Maybe it would work.

The release of tension made January feel sick. Then he recalled Shepard’s words and he knew that whether his plan worked or not he was still in trouble. In trouble! It was worse than that. Bitterly he cursed the Japanese, he even wished for a moment that he had dropped it on them. Wearily he let his despair empty him.

A long while later he sat up straight. Once again he was a trapped animal. He began lunging for escape, casting about for plans. One alternative after another. All during the long grim flight home he considered it, mind spinning at the speed of the props and beyond. And when they came down on Tinian he had a plan. It was a long shot, he reckoned, but it was the best he could do.

The briefing hut was surrounded by MPs again. January stumbled from the truck with the rest and walked inside. He was more than ever aware of the looks given him, and they were hard, accusatory. He was too tired to care. He hadn’t slept in more than thirty-six hours, and had slept very little since the last time he had been in the hut, a week before. Now the room quivered with the lack of engine vibration to stabilize it, and the silence roared. It was all he could do to hold on to the bare essentials of his plan. The glares of Fitch and Shepard, the hurt incomprehension of Matthews, they had to be thrust out of his focus. Thankfully he lit a cigarette.

In a clamor of question and argument the others described the strike. Then the haggard Scholes and an intelligence officer led them through the bombing run. January’s plan made it necessary to hold to his story: “. . . and when the AP was under the crosshairs I pushed down the switch, but got no signal. I flipped it up and down repeatedly until the tone kicked in. At that point there was still fifteen seconds to the release.”

“Was there anything that may have caused the tone to start when it did?”

“Not that I noticed immediately, but—”

“It’s impossible,” Shepard interrupted, face red. “I checked the switch before we flew and there was nothing wrong with it. Besides, the drop occurred over a minute—”

“Captain Shepard,” Scholes said. “We’ll hear from you presently.”

“But he’s obviously lying—”

“Captain Shepard! It’s not at all obvious. Don’t speak unless questioned.”

“Anyway,” January said, hoping to shift the questions away from the issue of the long delay, “I noticed something about the bomb when it was falling that could explain why it stuck. I need to discuss it with one of the scientists familiar with the bomb’s design.”

“What was that?” Scholes asked suspiciously.

January hesitated. “There’s going to be an inquiry, right?”

Scholes frowned. “This is the inquiry, Captain January. Tell us what you saw.”

“But there will be some proceeding beyond this one?”

“It looks like there’s going to be a court-martial, yes, Captain.”

“That’s what I thought. I don’t want to talk to anyone but my counsel, and some scientist familiar with the bomb.”

“I’m a scientist familiar with the bomb,” Shepard burst out. “You could tell me if you really had anything, you—”

“I said I need a scientist!” January exclaimed, rising to face the scarlet Shepard across the table. “Not a G-God damned mechanic.” Shepard started to shout, others joined in and the room rang with argument. While Scholes restored order January sat down, and he refused to be drawn out again.

“I’ll see you’re assigned counsel, and initiate the court-martial,” Scholes said, clearly at a loss. “Meanwhile you are under arrest, on suspicion of disobeying orders in combat.” January nodded, and Scholes gave him over to MPs.

“One last thing,” January said, fighting exhaustion. “Tell General Le May that if the Japs are told this drop was a warning, it might have the same effect as—”

“I told you!” Shepard shouted. “I told you he did it on purpose!”

Men around Shepard restrained him. But he had convinced most of them, and even Matthews stared at him with surprised anger.

January shook his head wearily. He had the dull feeling that his plan, while it had succeeded so far, was ultimately not a good one. “Just trying to make the best of it.” It took all of his remaining will to force his legs to carry him in a dignified manner out of the hut.

His cell was an empty NCO’s office. MPs brought his meals. For the first couple of days he did little but sleep. On the third day he glanced out the office’s barred window, and saw a tractor pulling a tarpaulin-draped trolley out of the compound, followed by jeeps filled with MPs. It looked like a military funeral. January rushed to the door and banged on it until one of the young MPs came.

“What’s that they’re doing out there?” January demanded.

Eyes cold and mouth twisted, the MP said, “They’re making another strike. They’re going to do it right this time.”

“No!” January cried. “No!” He rushed the MP, who knocked him back and locked the door. “No!” He beat the door until his hands hurt, cursing wildly. “You don’t need to do it, it isn’t necessary.” Shell shattered at last, he collapsed on the bed and wept. Now everything he had done would be rendered meaningless. He had sacrificed himself for nothing.

A day or two after that the MPs led in a colonel, an iron-haired man who stood stiffly and crushed January’s hand when he shook it. His eyes were a pale, icy blue.

“I am Colonel Dray,” he said. “I have been ordered to defend you in court-martial.” January could feel the dislike pouring from the man. “To do that I’m going to need every fact you have, so let’s get started.”

“I’m not talking to anybody until I’ve seen an atomic scientist.”

“I am your defense counsel—”

“I don’t care who you are,” January said. “Your defense of me depends on you getting one of the scientists here. The higher up he is, the better. And I want to speak to him alone.”

“I will have to be present.”

So he would do it. But now January’s counsel, too, was an enemy.

“Naturally,” January said. “You’re my counsel. But no one else. Our atomic secrecy may depend on it.”

“You saw evidence of sabotage?”

“Not one word more until that scientist is here.”

Angrily the colonel nodded and left.

Late the next day the colonel returned with another man. “This is Dr. Forest.”

“I helped develop the bomb,” Forest said. He had a crew-cut and dressed in fatigues, and to January he looked more Army than the colonel. Suspiciously he stared back and forth at the two men.

“You’ll vouch for this man’s identity on your word as an officer?” he asked Dray.

“Of course,” the colonel said stiffly, offended.

“So,” Dr. Forest said. “You had some trouble getting it off when you wanted to. Tell me what you saw.”

“I saw nothing,” January said harshly. He took a deep breath; it was time to commit himself. “I want you to take a message back to the scientists. You folks have been working on this thing for years, and you must have had time to consider how the bomb should have been used. You know we could have convinced the Japs to surrender by showing them a demonstration—”

“Wait a minute,” Forest said. “You’re saying you didn’t see anything? There wasn’t a malfunction?”

“That’s right,” January said, and cleared his throat. “It wasn’t necessary, do you understand?”

Forest was looking at Colonel Dray. Dray gave him a disgusted shrug. “He told he he saw evidence of sabotage.”

“I want you to go back and ask the scientists to intercede for me,” January said, raising his voice to get the man’s attention. “I haven’t got a chance in that court-martial. But if the scientists defend me then maybe they’ll let me live, see? I don’t want to get shot for doing something every one of you scientists would have done.”

Dr. Forest had backed away. Color rising, he said, “What makes you think that’s what we would have done? Don’t you think we considered it? Don’t you think men better qualified than you made the decision?” He waved a hand—“God damn it—what made you think you were competent to decide something as important as that!”

January was appalled at the man’s reaction; in his plan it had gone differently. Angrily he jabbed a finger at Forest. “Because I was the man doing it, Doctor Forest. You take even one step back from that and suddenly you can pretend it’s not your doing. Fine for you, but I was there.”

At every word the man’s color was rising. It looked like he might pop a vein in his neck. January tried once more. “Have you ever tried to imagine what one of your bombs would do to a city full of people?”

“I’ve had enough!” the man exploded. He turned to Dray. “I’m under no obligation to keep what I’ve heard here confidential. You can be sure it will be used as evidence in Captain January’s court-martial.” He turned and gave January a look of such blazing hatred that January understood it. For these men to admit he was right would mean admitting that they were wrong—that every one of them was responsible for his part in the construction of the weapon January had refused to use. Understanding that, January knew he was doomed.

The bang of Dr. Forest’s departure still shook the little office. January sat on his cot, got out a smoke. Under Colonel Dray’s cold gaze he lit one shakily, took a drag. He looked up at the colonel, shrugged. “It was my best chance,” he explained. That did something—for the first and only time the cold disdain in the colonel’s eyes shifted to a little hard, lawyerly gleam of respect.

The court-martial lasted two days. The verdict was guilty of disobeying orders in combat, and of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The sentence was death by firing squad.

For most of his remaining days January rarely spoke, drawing ever further behind the mask that had hidden him for so long. A clergyman came to see him, but it was the 509th’s chaplain, the one who had said the prayer blessing the Lucky Strike’s missison before they took off. Angrily January sent him packing.

Later, however, a young Catholic priest dropped by. His name was Patrick Getty. He was a little pudgy man, bespectacled and, it seemed, somewhat afraid of January. January let the man talk to him. When he returned the next day January talked back a bit, and on the day after that he talked some more. It became a habit.

Usually January talked about his childhood. He talked of plowing mucky black bottom land behind a mule. Of running down the lane to the mailbox. Of reading books by the light of the moon after he had been ordered to sleep, and of being beaten by his mother for it with a high-heeled shoe. He told the priest the story of the time his arm had been burnt, and about the car crash at the bottom of Fourth Street. “It’s the truck driver’s face I remember, do you see, Father?”

“Yes,” the young priest said. “Yes.”

And he told him about the game he had played in which every action he took tipped the balance of world affairs. “When I remembered that game I thought it was dumb. Step on a sidewalk crack and cause an earthquake—you know, it’s stupid. Kids are like that.” The priest nodded. “But now I’ve been thinking that if everybody were to live their whole lives like that, thinking that every move they made really was important, then . . . it might make a difference.” He waved a hand vaguely, expelled cigarette smoke. “You’re accountable for what you do.”

“Yes,” the priest said. “Yes, you are.”

“And if you’re given orders to do something wrong, you’re still accountable, right? The orders don’t change it.”

“That’s right.”

“Hmph.” January smoked a while. “So they say, anyway. But look what happens.” He waved at the office. “I’m like the guy in a story I read—he thought everything in books was true, and after reading a bunch of westerns he tried to rob a train. They tossed him in jail.” He laughed shortly. “Books are full of crap.”

“Not all of them,” the priest said. “Besides, you weren’t trying to rob a train.”

They laughed at the notion. “Did you read that story?”

“No.”

“It was the strangest book—there were two stories in it, and they alternated chapter by chapter, but they didn’t have a thing to do with each other! I didn’t get it.”

“. . . Maybe the writer was trying to say that everything connects to everything else.”

“Maybe. But it’s a funny way to say it.”

“I like it.”

And so they passed the time, talking.

So it was the priest who was the one to come by and tell January that his request for a Presidential pardon had been refused. Getty said awkwardly, “It seems the President approves the sentence.”

“That bastard,” January said weakly. He sat on his cot.

Time passed. It was another hot, humid day.

“Well,” the priest said. “Let me give you some better news. Given your situation I don’t think telling you matters, though I’ve been told not to. The second mission—you know there was a second strike?”

“Yes.”

“Well, they missed too.”

“What?” January cried, and bounced to his feet. “You’re kidding!”

“No. They flew to Kokura, but found it covered by clouds. It was the same over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so they flew back to Kokura and tried to drop the bomb using radar to guide it, but apparently there was a—a genuine equipment failure this time, and the bomb fell on an island.”

January was hopping up and down, mouth hanging open, “So we n never—”

“We never dropped an atom bomb on a Japanese city. That’s right.” Getty grinned. “And get this—I heard this from my superior—they sent a message to the Japanese government telling them that the two explosions were warnings, and that if they didn’t surrender by September first we would drop bombs on Kyoto and Tokyo, and then wherever else we had to. Word is that the Emperor went to Hiroshima to survey the damage, and when he saw it he ordered the Cabinet to surrender. So. . . .”

“So it worked,” January said. He hopped around, “It worked, it worked!”

“Yes.”

“Just like I said it would!” he cried, and hopping before the priest he laughed.

Getty was jumping around a little too, and the sight of the priest bouncing was too much for January. He sat on his cot and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.

“So—” he sobered quickly. “So Truman’s going to shoot me anyway, eh?”

“Yes,” the priest said unhappily. “I guess that’s right.”

This time January’s laugh was bitter. “He’s a bastard, all right. And proud of being a bastard, which makes it worse.” He shook his head. “If Roosevelt had lived. . . .”

“It would have been different,” Getty finished. “Yes. Maybe so. But he didn’t.” He sat beside January. “Cigarette?” He held out a pack, and January noticed the white wartime wrapper. He frowned.

“You haven’t got a Camel?”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Oh well. That’s all right.” January took one of the Lucky Strikes, lit up. “That’s awfully good news.” He breathed out. “I never believed Truman would pardon me anyway, so mostly you’ve brought good news. Ha. They missed. You have no idea how much better that makes me feel.”

“I think I do.”

January smoked the cigarette.

“. . . So I’m a good American after all. I am a good American,” he insisted, “no matter what Truman says.”

“Yes,” Getty replied, and coughed. “You’re better than Truman any day.”

“Better watch what you say, Father.” He looked into the eyes behind the glasses, and the expression he saw there gave him pause. Since the drop every look directed at him had been filled with contempt. He’d seen it so often during the court-martial that he’d learned to stop looking; and now he had to teach himself to see again. The priest looked at him as if he were . . . as if he were some kind of hero. That wasn’t exactly right. But seeing it. . . .

January would not live to see the years that followed, so he would never know what came of his action. He had given up casting his mind forward and imagining possibilities, because there was no point to it. His planning was ended. In any case he would not have been able to imagine the course of the post-war years. That the world would quickly become an armed camp pitched on the edge of atomic war, he might have predicted. But he never would have guessed that so many people would join a January Society. He would never know of the effect the Society had on Dewey during the Korean crisis, never know of the Society’s successful campaign for the test ban treaty, and never learn that thanks in part to the Society and its allies, a treaty would be signed by the great powers that would reduce the number of atomic bombs year by year, until there were none left.

Frank January would never know any of that. But in that moment on his cot looking into the eyes of young Patrick Getty, he guessed an inkling of it—he felt, just for an instant, the impact on history.

And with that he relaxed. In his last week everyone who met him carried away the same impression, that of a calm, quiet man, angry at Truman and others, but in a withdrawn, matter-of-fact way. Patrick Getty, a strong force in the January Society ever after, said January was talkative for some time after he learned of the missed attack on Kokura. Then he became quieter and quieter, as the day approached. On the morning that they woke him at dawn to march him out to a hastily constructed execution shed, his MPs shook his hand. The priest was with him as he smoked a final cigarette, and they prepared to put the hood over his head. January looked at him calmly. “They load one of the guns with a blank cartridge, right?”

“Yes,” Getty said.

“So each man in the squad can imagine he may not have shot me?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

A tight, unhumorous smile was January’s last expression. He threw down the cigarette, ground it out, poked the priest in the arm. “But I know.” Then the mask slipped back into place for good, making the hood redundant, and with a firm step January went to the wall. One might have said he was at peace.

RETURN TO THE FOLD

Timothy Zahn

If “sanity” means good adjustment to particular circumstances, it’s a highly relative thing. But is it really that simple?

The tiny spaceship was very definitely in trouble. Six enemy defiants were bearing down on it in a loose net pattern that Tomo knew was far more effective than it looked. Choosing one of the defiants at random, he kept his eye on it. control rod gripped tightly in his palm . . . and as the blue globe zigged he twisted the rod hard over, sending his spaceship into a zag maneuver that ran it neatly up against the defiant’s side. Up against it at the required zero delta vee, in fact, and Tomo smiled briefly as the defiant vanished and his own ship grew another size. One down, five to go. with his craft now a bigger and slower target.

“Tomo?”

“What is it. Max?” Tomo answered, his eyes still on the images darting around above his lounge chair.

“I’ve located a fault in my number-five close-approach antenna,” the computer told him. “Nothing serious; just a bearing shell that needs replacing.”

“And you want it done now, I suppose?” He sighed, the gesture more theatrical than serious. Max always waited until they were only days out from a spaceport before checking the Goldenrod’s docking equipment, and the ship’s six mainters were well used to it by now. In theory, it could result in a mad rush if something major went bad. but in practice the odds against that were low enough to ignore. “All right. Freeze the game and give me a schematic. Flat will do.”

The holographic game images froze in midair and then vanished as Tomo levered himself easily out of his chair.

The Goldenrod was decelerating at about two-tenths gee, half of what he was used to. Setting his game stick down beside the main control ball, he watched as Max put a complex schematic onto the nearby viewer. The affected bearing flashed in red; tracing a curve on the control ball with his finger, Tomo had the view enlarge and rotate. He debated changing his mind and asking for a complete hologram, decided the bearing’s orientation was clear enough from the flat. The data box beneath the schematic directed him to Level Four, access panel four-twenty-six. Stepping to the circular staircase, he picked up his tool belt from its holder and started down.

Level Four was an equipment deck, with the sort of floor plan that could only be approved by someone who’d never have to work there. It took Tomo three minutes to work his way back to panel twenty-six, two more to get the plate off, and two more after that to find a comfortable position to work in. “Has Maigre Port sent you our manifest and next destination yet?” he asked Max, prodding a bolt experimentally with his wrench.

“Yes,” the computer answered. “The main items are bioelectronics and exotic foodstuffs; we’ll be taking them to Canaan Under Vega.”

“Tricky stuff, bioelectronics. Should be good for, what, a seven-day layover?”

“The port has scheduled us for eight point five. Is the number significant?”

“Well . . .” Tomo paused, wondering whether he ought to bring this up. It seemed like such a crazy idea, sometimes, even to him. Still, he was going to have to talk to someone about it, and Max at least wouldn’t laugh at him. “Tell me about Maigre. What’s it like?”

“The design is a common one: a rotating disk in equipoint orbit, with docking facilities—”

“No, not the space port,” Tomo interrupted. “I mean Maigre the planet.”

“I’m not sure I understand the question. Do you want physical or sociopolitical data or something else entirely?”

“Oh, never mind.” Tomo picked up another tool and got back to work. “I just . . . Actually, I’ve been thinking about maybe—well, maybe going dirt-side this layover. Just to see what life on a planet is really like.”

There was a short pause. “I see,” Max said in a surprisingly neutral tone. “Actually, I don’t believe you’d like it. Conditions are vastly different than they are on the Goldenrod. There are large, open areas without walls or ceilings—”

“I know, I know—I’ve seen all the tapes. I just thought it might be . . . interesting . . . to see it for real.”

“I see. How long have you been thinking about this?”

Tomo had the computer’s tone pegged now. “Oh, no you don’t,” he shook his head, grinning. “That I see opener is a dead giveaway you’ve tied in your psych program. You’re not starting me on that silly motivation questionnaire just because I’ve been thinking about planets and people lately.” With a gentle tug he removed the top half of the damaged bearing shell, the bottom half dropping neatly onto the grab-cloth he’d spread out beneath it.

“Lately?” Max persisted.

Tomo twisted his head to send a mock glare at the computer monitor. “Max—” A beep from the pod-to-pod interrupted him. “Tomo?” a voice asked. “What’s the word on that antenna?”

“No problem, Andra,” Tomo assured him. “Just a fatigued bearing shell. Take me a couple of hours to replace it.”

“Good. I don’t like dockings even when Max has all six close-approach systems to work with. I’d hate to try it with one missing.”

“Aw, come on—you’ll have Max thinking you don’t trust him.”

“Max I trust. It’s those rinks who’re supposed to hold the port steady for us. They’re all dirtsiders at heart, you know. Lunatics, every last one of them.”

“Yeah.” Tomo grinned, then sobered. “You’ve never actually been dirt-side yourself, have you?”

Andra snorted. “What kind of crazy question is that? Of course not.”

“Right. Stupid question,” Tomo backtracked quickly, mentally eliminating Andra as a possible confidant on this. “Everything else checking out?”

“Far as I know. Max?”

“Everything is functioning properly except for the antenna Tomo is repairing,” the computer replied.

“Good,” Andra said. “I’ll let you work in peace, Tomo. Signing off.” A second beep signaled his departure from the voicelink.

“Doesn’t sound like I should invite Andra to come down to Maigre with me, does it?” Tomo remarked, striving to keep his manner light.

“Tomo—” Max began, in neutral tone again.

“No. let’s just drop it for now, okay?” Tomo interrupted. “It’s just a random idea—it hasn’t got any deep psychological significance or anything.”

“As you wish.”

“Good. Though I’d appreciate it if you’d keep all of this secret. Andra will be riding me all the way to Canaan Under Vega if he gets hold of it.”

“I understand.” There was just the barest of pauses. “I’ll keep the conversation private.”

“Thanks.” Climbing to his feet, Tomo squinted at the inside of his bearing sphere half. “Now, how about looking up which locker we keep spare FST-938 bearings in?”

Dr. Alexei Ross was already in a foul mood when the station computer told him Director Halian wanted to see him in his office. “In his office?” Ross asked, not sure whether to be angry or astonished at the request. “Is something wrong with the intercom system?”

“The intercom is functioning normally,” Iris replied. “Director Halian said to tell you that the sensitivity of the topic required a face-to-face meeting.”

“Probably his exact words, too,” Ross grunted. For a moment he considered refusing on the truthful grounds that he was too busy to go running all over Maigre Space Station just because Halian felt like being melodramatic. Parallax Industries might own most of the station, but as chief physician Ross was explicitly out of Halian’s direct control. But even as he mentally considered sending back a borderline-nasty message, logic prevailed. If Halian wanted to discuss something without the risk of being overheard, he probably had a damn good reason for it. Possibly something new on the G- and H-deck thorascine leaks that had put forty-five people in Ross’s ward in the past twenty hours. “All right,” he sighed. “Inform the director I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

“Yes, Doctor. Also, the bioscan data is in on Marc DeSabia now; my analysis indicates thorascrine concentrations in liver, kidneys, and thyroid gland.”

“Okay.” Ross spent a few minutes logging orders that weren’t part of Iris’s standard medical procedure programming and leaving contingency instructions for his staff. Then, still fuming a bit, he stalked to the elevator and rode down to W-deck and Parallax Industries’ executive offices.

Director Jer Halian was staring out the oval porthole when Ross stomped in. “This better be important, Jer,” the doctor said, stepping over to Halian’s desk and sitting down in the plush guest chair. “I’ve got a ward full of people upstairs who still need all my attention.”

Halian turned to face him, and Ross saw for the first time the other’s expression. It wasn’t an encouraging one. “Anyone died yet?” the director asked, his mind clearly on something else entirely.

“No, and I’d like to keep it that way.” Ross rubbed at his forehead, grimaced at the perspiration oils there. “Another ten hours and this last batch should be out of danger.”

“Good.” Halian took a deep breath. “Because in about ninety-five hours we’re going to have an even worse mess on our hands. One of the Goldenrod’s mainters apparently wants to visit Maigre during his layover.”

Ross felt something prickly dock between his shoulder blades. “Holydrine. You sure?”

Halian picked up a cassette and rolled the slender cylinder across the desk. “The Goldenrod’s MX computer sent me this private report a half-hour ago. The mainter refused to discuss it in depth, so all the MX could give us was his last general psych profile,” He leaned forward a bit. “This is a problem, now, isn’t it? I mean, this Tomo character won’t be able to stand it for long down there, will he?”

Ross snorted. “It’s even worse than that. He shouldn’t even want to try mixing with other people, any more than you’d seriously consider spending your life in a starship pod. The very fact he’s talking this way means he’s already in serious trouble.”

“Great,” Halian said heavily. “Just what we needed.”

A sudden, horrible thought occurred to Ross. “He’s not flying the ship, is he?” Visions of the freighter ramming full-tilt into the station—

“Oh, no—no way he can take control away from the computer, either,” Halian assured him. “We’re not in any immediate danger.”

“I’m sure that’s a great comfort to the rest of the Goldenrod’s crew,” Ross said dryly.

“They’re not in danger, either, at least not at the moment. In fact, they don’t even know anything’s wrong.”

“Handy. Sounds like one of your ideas.”

Halian didn’t seem to notice the barb. “It was the computer’s, actually. But never mind that. I want you to start getting your people and programs ready right away.”

Ross shook his head. “I’m afraid we’re not equipped to handle anything like this. We’re going to have to bring a psychoses expert up from Maigre. I’ll go check the medical directory.” He started to get up.

“Hold it—hold it,” Halian snapped. “We can’t let outsiders in on this—the company’ll have our heads if bad publicity gets out. What about that therapy session you put Randoff through when he went all flutey last month?”

Ross sank wearily back into his chair. “Jer, we’re talking about a starship mainter here—the most carefully circumscribed personality type that’s ever existed. As far as I know, no mainter has ever gone out the sunward lock like this, and I’m not going to trust him to a computer that hasn’t even got a decent database to draw on.”

Halian turned back to his porthole, and Ross saw the lines around his mouth tightening. “And there’s no one on your staff who can handle it?”

“No.” Ross shook his head. “Anyone who developed a problem this severe would be immediately shipped to a dirtside facility.”

Halian grunted, and for a long moment the room was silent. Ross found himself staring at the model of a star freighter sitting on the corner of Halian’s desk. Six long cylindrical pods, arranged hexagonally about the central drive cylinder, the whole thing tied together by a network of bracing struts . . . and each of those cargo pods someone’s home for years at a time. The very thought of it made Ross’s skin crawl.

“All right.” Halian said, breaking Ross out of his uncomfortable reverie. “But get someone who can keep his mouth shut. And don’t give him any more information than absolutely necessary. That goes for your staff, too.”

“I’ll do my best.” Ross said, annoyed at the other’s peremptory tone. Standing up, he snared the cassette with Tomo’s psych profile and slid it into his pocket. “And in the meantime, you get your people on top of those thorascrine leaks. I can only handle one crisis at a time, and I want my ward empty when Tomo gets here.”

Halian looked up at him with tired eyes. “Believe me. Doctor, no one wants those leaks stopped more than I do.”

Ross felt his irritation with the other melting away. Halian was a solid company executive, but in spite of that he really wasn’t a bad sort. “I know,” he told the director. “I’ll talk to you later.”

A starship’s natural environment, Tomo had always felt, was out in interstellar space, hundreds or thousands of kilometers from anything larger than an ice cube. Docking—actually bringing the ship into physical contact with a giant spinning disc—was thoroughly unnatural and therefore the most nerve-wracking part of every trip. But Max performed flawlessly as usual, matching motions and gliding smoothly into the docking berth like an off-center axle. The port’s spin gave the Goldenrod an effective gravity similar in magnitude but different in direction to what Tomo was used to. and he grimaced slightly as his floating crash chair came to rest against what he usually considered a wall.

“The access tunnel is connected now, Tomo,” Max informed him as he unstrapped and climbed a bit gingerly from the chair. “Whenever you’re ready.”

The tunnel led from the pod to a short corridor in the port proper, and a door at the far end opened to a spacious five-room suite. Tomo gave himself a quick tour, and then returned to the living room area. “Not bad.” he said aloud. “Better than that cubist’s nightmare at Burnish, anyway—remember that horrible holosculp?”

There was no response, and Tomo snorted at his forgetfulness. Of course Max had no direct voicelink pickups here. Stepping to the desk, he located the “communications” section of the control ball there and traced the proper curve among the many alternatives. “Max? You there?”

“Of course,” the computer’s voice answered. “What is it?”

“Oh, nothing—I just wanted you around.” He paused, eyes still studying the unfamiliar control ball. “Wait a second—can you tell me how I call up the port’s computer on this thing?”

“I believe you’ll need to interface through me for all computer functions.”

“Oh?” A corner of Tomo’s mind noted that such an arrangement seemed unnecessarily awkward; but these were port people, after all. “All right. Uh . . . would you call up a sky-to-ground shuttle schedule for me?”

“Very well.”

The screen beside the control ball lit up with lines of numbers and words. Sitting down, Tomo leaned forward to study them . . . but he’d barely begun to decipher their meaning when the screen abruptly blanked and the face of a middle-aged man appeared. Startled, Tomo leaned back again.

“Welcome to Maigre Space Station. Tomo,” the man said, smiling. “I’m Director Jer Halian, in charge of Parallax Industries’ operations here. I hope you had a good voyage?”

“Quite nice, sir,” Tomo managed, still feeling a bit off-balance.

“And I trust your rooms are satisfactory?”

“Oh, certainly.”

“Good. Well, we want you to be comfortable for the duration of your stay. Is there anything we can do for you? Something special, perhaps, that we haven’t thought to provide?”

Tomo took a deep breath. It’s not an unreasonable request, he told himself firmly. “As a matter of fact . . . would it be possible for me to visit Maigre while I’m here? I’d sort of like to see what dirtside life is like.”

Halian’s expression didn’t change. “I’m sure something can be arranged. Uh—” His eyes flicked to the side. “Why don’t you come down to my office and we can work out a schedule for you?”

“Come down . . . in person?” Tomo asked, faltering a bit. Somehow, his rather hazy plan hadn’t included consequences quite this immediate. “Can’t we do it from here?”

Halian shrugged fractionally. “Oh, we could. But I wouldn’t think it’d be a problem for someone who wants to visit a planet full of people.”

It was nothing Tomo could put his finger on, but suddenly he felt like he was at the far end of a microscope. Halian was watching him closely . . . too closely . . . as if this was some sort of test . . . “You’re right, of course,” he told the director firmly. “How do I get to where you are?”

If Halian was surprised, he hid it well. “There are guidelights along the hallway walls; I’ll have them set to lead you to my office. I—guess I’ll see you in a few minutes. Good-bye.”

“Signing off,” Tomo nodded as the screen went blank. For a moment he sat there, working up his courage. Then, standing, he strode resolutely to the emergency door with its bold EXIT TO STATION inscription. Almost unwillingly, his hand reached out to touch the red plate, and with a gentle whoosh the door slid open. Licking his lips quickly, Tomo stepped through—

And jumped back inside, using a hand on the door jamb to swing off to the side. Back flat against the wall, he mouthed a silent curse at the still-open door. Finally, it slid closed . . . but not before the two men he’d fled from had time to pass by.

He stood there for several seconds, slowly mastering the emotion of that near-contact. Unlocking his frozen joints, he peeled himself from the wall. He tried to step to the door again, but his feet seemed unable to take him that direction. The touch plate glared mockingly at him; turning away, he returned to the desk and gingerly sat down. “Max,” he croaked.

“Yes, Tomo?”

He licked his lips, and this time they worked better. “Get me the director’s office, will you?”

“Certainly. Are you all right? You sound agitated.”

“Just make the call, huh?”

Max didn’t answer, but a moment later Halian’s face appeared on the screen. “Yes, Tomo, what is it?”

“Sir . . . would it possible for you to come here instead?” Tomo asked. “At your convenience, of course, and if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all. I’ll be up in a few minutes. Is it all right if I bring a couple of colleagues with me?”

Tomo wanted very much to say no, but Halian had that microscope look again. “Uh . . . yeah, sure.”

“Good. We’ll see you soon then. Good-bye.”

The screen blanked and Tomo wilted a bit in his chair. No trouble at all, the director had said airily, as if taking a trip through a crowded port was the easiest thing in the universe.

Unbelievable!

Director Halian turned off the intercom, sent a glance at Dr. Ross, and then focused his attention on the newcomer. “Well, Dr. Scharn?” he invited.

Dreya Scharn shrugged, wondering what the flapdoodle secrecy was all about. To her, the whole thing seemed absurdly open-and-shut. “If it were anyone but a starship crewman I’d class him as a severe case of anthropophobia and start chemo-imbalance correction immediately. But surely you realize that after however-odd many years in space, any of us would be pretty weak in the social-contact areas. I’d suggest you give him a few days before you start getting worried.”

She stopped, suddenly aware that their reactions didn’t fit what she was saying. “Is something wrong?”

Halian cleared his throat, flashed an annoyed look at Ross. “I see Dr. Ross hasn’t given you the whole story yet.”

“Sorry, Jer,” Ross said, with the brusque manner of someone on the defensive. “But I didn’t want to say too much until Dr. Scharn arrived—and I was expecting Tomo to give us a little more time.” He turned to Scharn. “You see, Doctor, it isn’t exactly Tomo’s fear of people that concerns us—as a matter of fact, that’s a normal part of a starship mainter’s personality. The problem—”

“Just a minute,” Scharn interrupted. “Are you telling me Parallax Industries is using mentally disturbed people to fly its starships?”

“No, of course not,” Halian said before Ross could answer. “The mainters are perfectly sane and well-adjusted . . . within their own parameters.”

“Mr. Halian, there’s no way you can consider extreme fear of people to be within the bounds of normal sanity.”

“I said ‘within their parameters,’ ” Halian reminded her. “Mainters are specially chosen for loner characteristics.”

Scharn cocked an eyebrow. “ ‘Chosen’ ?”

Halian’s eyes slipped just a bit from her gaze, but his nod was firm. “Yes.” Truth-bender, she labeled him silently. She considered pressing the point, decided to file it for later. “All right. Then if anthropophobia isn’t Tomo’s problem, what is?”

“The fact that he’s talking about taking a trip dirtside,” Ross said. “A mainter shouldn’t even be thinking things like that, let alone seriously considering them.”

“Why not?” Scharn frowned. “Maybe after—this is what, his third voyage? Maybe after twenty-odd years on a starship he wants to try something new.”

“If one of your patients said he wanted to jump off a highrise without an air belt, would you say he just wanted to try something new?” Ross countered.

Scharn glared at him. “That’s an absurd comparison and you know it. People can’t fly, but even extreme loners can learn to deal with crowds.”

Halian shook his head. “Mainters can’t. That’s the whole point.”

For a moment Scharn stared at him, something cold starting to stir in her stomach. “Then we’re not talking about people who’ve simply been chosen any more,” she said coldly. “What you’re saying implies a great deal of mental conditioning, very likely illegal as well as unethical.”

“I assure you, Doctor,” Halian said, “that Parallax Industries is not engaged in any illegal activities. As for ethics, I think you’ll find things aren’t as simple as you might imagine.”

“Oh?” Scharn gave him a hard smile. “Then perhaps it’s time I found out how ‘things’ really are. And it’d better be a complete explanation.”

“Not to change the subject,” Ross interjected, “but before we get into anything lengthy, shouldn’t we go upstairs and see Tomo? He is expecting us, remember.”

Scharn kept her eyes on Halian. “I can’t begin any kind of diagnosis until I know exactly what I’m up against.”

“You’ll get the complete explanation—I promise,” the director said. “But Ross is right. Perhaps you can treat this as an orientation session or something.”

Scharn hesitated, but this time she sensed Halian was telling the truth. “All right. Let’s go, then.”

The elevator trip was the oddest Scharn had ever experienced. She knew enough to be ready for the change in weight as they moved toward the station’s rotation axis, but she’d forgotten about the Coriolis effect that nudged her sideways into the wall and held her there for the embarrassing seconds it took to get her feet back into position and lean into the pseudoforce. Halian and Ross ignored her clumsiness, but she knew they’d seen it. She was glad when the car finally slowed and came to a halt.

The corridors were another surprise, though a little reflection told her she should’ve expected this, too. Several decks above the station’s living and business areas, there was no call for bright colors or cushiony carpeting here. Only cargo handlers and station mainters used this area, and they were more interested in utility than aesthetics.

The door Halian led them to was like all the others they’d passed, except that its ID label was lettered in bright red and cautioned the prospective entrant to check with the station computer to make sure no starship mainter was inside. The warning gave her momentary pause—was there something dangerous about starship mainters?—and she hastily searched her memory for anything she might have heard on the subject. But Halian showed no hesitation as he stepped to the door and pushed the hailer. Scharn heard a soft ping, and an even softer reply, and Halian fingered the touch plate. The door slid open and they walked in.

Tomo was standing behind a small desk across the room, his back solidly against the wall. His expression was one Scharn had seen before, on nervous lab animals.

“Hello, Tomo,” Halian said. “I’m Jer Halian. Sorry we were delayed a bit.”

Tomo nodded once, a quick up-down jerk of his head. “Hello.” he said.

Scharn’s peripheral vision picked up a couch to their left, a couple of meters farther from Tomo’s position than they were now. “Couch,” she murmured, nudging Halian.

For a wonder, he caught the hint and led them over there. They sank into it, and Halian gestured to the desk chair a meter in front of Tomo. “Won’t you sit down, too?”

Tomo’s eyes flicked to the chair, then back to his visitors. Gingerly, he pulled the seat back to rest against the wall beside him and sat down.

“Well,” Ross said briskly. “Tomo, Director Halian tells us you’d like to take a trip down to the surface while you’re here. We’d like to talk to you about that, if we may.”

Some of the tension left Tomo’s face, to be replaced by suspicion. “You sound like Max in his psychological mode. Are you a psychiatrist?”

“No. no—I’m Dr. Alexei Ross, chief physician of Maigre Space Station. You must understand that your safety—whether here or dirtside—is our responsibility, and we have to make sure you’re properly fit before we can let you go. The gravity’s twice what you’re used to, for starters.”

If Ross had hoped to distract Tomo from his original question, it didn’t work. Shifting his gaze to Scharn, he asked. “How about you?”

“I’m Dr. Drey a Scharn,” she began: but before she could go on, Halian jumped in.

“Dr. Scharn’s from Maigre proper, Tomo,” the director said. “We brought her here because she knows more about dirtside conditions than anyone aboard the station. She has some questions she needs to ask you before we can discuss your trip to the planet.”

Scharn managed to keep her professional face in place, but it was a near thing. To half-lie about her profession and then drop the conversational burden directly into her lap was a double whammy she hadn’t expected. But she was damned if she was going to let Halian’s action throw her. Smiling at Tomo, she opened with the simplest time-buyer in her repertoire. “Why don’t we start by getting to know you better, Tomo. What was your childhood like?”

“You mean my trainage?” Tomo asked, still looking wary. “Just like anyone else’s. Lynn—that was the station’s LNN Learning Computer—taught me how to inspect and repair all the machinery on board a starship. When I’d learned everything I was assigned to the Goldenrod.”

“What were your parents like?” she asked.

A flicker of puzzlement crossed the mainter’s face. “Parents?”

“He won’t remember any human parents or nurses,” Halian murmured in Scharn’s ear. “He’d have been taken away from them when he was young.”

“I see,”-she said, trying hard to keep her astonished horror from showing. Mental conditioning was a well defined, if seldom used, psychological tool, but never had she heard of it being started so early in a subject’s life. The legality of this whole thing was getting shakier and shakier. “Were you lonely as a boy?” she asked Tomo. “You had playmates, didn’t you?”

“Of course. I already told you about Lynn.”

“No, I mean other children. Did you play with any of the others at your station?”

Tomo shrugged fractionally. “I sometimes played with Orbin on the viewer. I liked playing alone or with Lynn better, though. Look, what does all this have to do with my fitness to go dirtside?”

A damn good question, Scharn thought. “We wanted some idea how much experience you’ve had interacting with other people,” she improvised, hoping it sounded reasonable. “So after your training you went aboard the Goldenrod. Do you get along with the other mainters?”

“Well enough. We don’t talk to each other much.”

Scharn frowned. “You mean you’re all together in the same ship for years at a time and don’t do things together?”

“We’re not really together; we’ve each got our own pod. you know. And there usually isn’t any maintenance that requires two of us working in sync. Max flies the ship and tells me when there’s work to do; the rest of the time I read or play music or fiddle with my electronics kits.”

The starship model Scharn had seen on Halian’s desk suddenly made sense. Six mainters, six mutually isolated pods . . . “So you really are all alone out there.”

“Pretty much, except for Max.”

“I see. How do you feel about being alone? Does it ever bother you?”

Tomo snorted. “Of course not. What kind of stupid question is that?” His eyes flicked between Scharn and the others. “What’s going on here, anyway?”

Scharn raised her hands chest high, palms outward, in a soothing gesture she hoped Tomo would understand. “All right; let’s get back to Maigre, then. Can you tell me exactly why you want to visit the planet?”

Irritation was beginning to replace the tension in Tomo’s face. “Why is everyone making such a big deal about this?” he snapped. “I’ve never been dirtside before and I got curious about it. Haven’t any of you ever wanted to try something new?”

“Of course we have,” Ross put in. “It’s just that dirtside conditions are so different from starship life that we wanted you to understand exactly what it would be like. On a planet, you see, you have wide, open-roofed spaces—”

“I know—Max already gave me the full list. I can get used to it.”

“There are also people down there,” Scharn reminded him. “Lots of people. It seems to me you’re having trouble right now, with just three of us in the same room with you.”

The tension flooded full force back into Tomo’s expression, and Scharn had the sudden impression that he’d halfway convinced himself that his visitors were actually just images on a viewer screen. “I can manage,” he ground out. “If you can get used to a port, I can get used to a planet.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Tomo,” Halian said, his frustration evident in his tone. “You’re a starship mainter—you don’t belong on a planet.”

“Do people belong on Charon’s World?” Tomo retorted. “Or Tau Ceti? Human beings can adapt to practically anything.”

“Sure they can. Except that—”

Halian broke off abruptly; at the same time, Scharn sensed Ross jerk in reaction. She turned back and forth quickly, trying to catch the men’s expressions before they could be covered up. She saw enough to decide it was time for a showdown. Turning back to Tomo, she said, “I think we’d better leave you for a while, Tomo. I need to discuss a few things with Director Halian before we talk any more about your trip to Maigre. In the meantime, though. I’m sure you could walk around the station if you’d like. It’s not a planet, but it would give you some practice in getting used to other people.”

She stood up. Ross and Halian following suit. The latter gripped Scharn’s upper arm in a reaction that added fuel to her suspicions. “I’m not sure letting him run loose is a good idea,” the director whispered.

“Good-bye,” Scharn smiled at Tomo. She stepped past Ross, the movement forcing Halian to release his hold on her arm, and led the way out of the room. As the door closed she got a glimpse of Tomo sagging in obvious relief.

“Dr. Scharn,” Halian said, again taking her arm. “he should not be allowed free access to the station—”

She shook off the hold and started down the corridor. “Let’s go to your office, Mr. Halian,” she called back over her shoulder. “We’ve got a lot of talking to do.”

The return trip was made in chilly silence. Scharn held her fire until Halian was seated behind his desk again, and then let him have it.

“I don’t know what you think about miracle cures and psychiatry,” she bit out, “but I can assure you that I won’t be able to do the job you hired me for unless I start getting some straight answers.”

“I know,” Halian said, waving her toward the seat she’d occupied earlier. “Sit down, Doctor.”

She remained standing. “I mean genuinely straight answers. First Tomo was chosen, then he was conditioned, and now you’ve practically bitten your tongue off because he started talking about what humans can do. Now, either you give me the whole story or you schedule me a seat on the next shuttle back to Maigre.”

Halian stared up at her in stony patience for a couple of heartbeats after she finished her speech, then once more indicated her chair. “Sit down, Doctor.”

She hesitated, then obeyed, realizing with some chagrin that Halian was still in control of the situation. Psychological training, apparently, was no match for the experience gained in boardroom battles.

“You’re right, of course,” Halian said. “We should have told you everything right away. I suppose my only excuse is that you’re an outsider, and that after a certain number of years keeping secrets away from outsiders becomes a very strong habit.” He shifted his gaze to Ross. “Doctor? You know the details better than I do.”

Ross pursed his lips briefly. “As I’m sure you know. Dr. Scharn, every human personality trait is a product of both heredity and environment, the genetic arrangement forming a sort of bedrock infrastructure of tendencies and aptitudes on which the individual personality is expressed.” He paused. “What you may not know is that any of these genetic tendencies can be . . . enhanced, as it were, to a point where none of the subsequent environmental factors can really affect it. That’s basically what’s been done to Tomo.”

She’d halfway been expecting this, but hadn’t really wanted to believe it. “Are you saying,” she said carefully, “that you’ve genetically engineered that entire corps of starship mainters to be afraid of people?”

“Not on purpose,” Ross said. “The procedure was designed to make them able to tolerate—even enjoy—years of solitude at a time. Apparently the anthropophobia comes as an unavoidable part of the package.”

“The package?” Scharn exploded. “My God—these are human beings you’re talking about. People you’ve deliberately warped.” She glared at Halian. “And it is most certainly illegal.”

The director didn’t flinch. “As a matter of fact. Parallax Industries has a special exemption from the general laws on genetic engineering. And if it helps any, I was just as outraged as you are when I first found out about this.”

“You’ve done a good job of silencing your conscience, then,” Scharn said coldly. “Does Parallax pay that much?”

“It’s not a matter of personal bribery. It’s the simple fact that the benefits of interstellar trade vastly outweigh the costs.”

“Oh. of course.” she retorted. “The costs are negligible—unless you happen to be one of those people out there.”

“I’d advise against hypocrisy. Doctor,” Halian said, a touch of irritation showing through his executive mask. “You benefit as much from the trade as anyone else, and I doubt you’ve ever given two seconds’ thought to the people who provide you the goods.”

“Don’t shift the burden to us,” Scharn bit out. “If people knew you were using genetic slavery they’d give up their precious furs and exotic foods like a shot.”

“And their last fifteen years of life, too?” Ross asked quietly.

Scharn turned to him. “What?”

“Fifteen years is the extra life expectancy that out-system medicines have provided us,” he amplified.

The first hint of uncertainty began to play around the edges of her anger. “Medicines can be synthesized, though, once the molecular structure’s known,” she pointed out. “Intersystem lasers can transfer the knowledge at that point.”

“Usually,” Ross nodded, “but not always. Have you ever heard of Willut’s Chaser?”

Scharn frowned. “I think so. Isn’t that that weird semi-living chemical that seeks out cancerous cells?”

“That’s the one. Revolutionized the whole treatment procedure, made it possible for the first time to really root out an entire tumor without doing even a scrap of damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. And after sixty years we still can neither synthesize it nor successfully cultivate the Altairan nematoid strain that produces it.”

There was a moment of silence. Scharn tried to whip up her righteous anger again, but her sister’s face kept getting in the way. Maia, who had spent a couple of days in a hospital ten years ago for the routine treatment of brain cancer . . . “Why don’t you build larger ships, then, so that you could use normal people running the ship as a group?” she asked. “Better yet, how about complete automation?”

“Because we’d need freighters the size of the original colony sleeper ships to give a normal crew the kind of room they’d need,” Ross told her. “Anything smaller and you’d have violence and psychoses within the first five years, no matter how carefully you screened the crews.” He hesitated. “Parallax tried that once; the records of those voyages aren’t pretty.”

“Then why not automate?” Scharn persisted. “Surely a powersat TPL computer and its mobile units would be able to handle whatever maintenance a starship needs.”

“The problem,” Halian said, “is that a TPL, or any computer that powerful, requires an extremely high-density memory system, and high-density systems are notoriously vulnerable to radiation damage. On a powersat that’s not a problem because you can afford the weight of extra shielding and you have continuous error-weeding by ground-based systems. On a starship—well, the drive radiations aren’t really dangerous to biological tissues, but your TPL would be out of commission in two years at the outside. Putting multiple units aboard would slow the process, but not enough.”

“But . . .” Scharn raised a hand in a frustrated gesture, let it drop impotently to her chair arm. “It’s still immoral to do that sort of thing to human beings.”

Ross shrugged uncomfortably. “Would you rather we try putting normal people in what amounts to solitary confinement for ten years? Risk their going permanently insane or else drug them to their eyelids and never mind the physiological consequences? Don’t forget, the mainters truly like what they’re doing. They really are happy out there.”

“All except Tomo,” Scharn said.

Halian nodded grimly. “All except Tomo. He’s an unknown. Dr. Scharn; and along with being worried I don’t mind admitting I’m scared. What other supposedly impossible thoughts might he be having? Could he be going paranoid, too, or even homicidal?”

Scharn pursed her lips tightly. She still didn’t like what had been done to Tomo . . . but her immediate responsibility was not for his past but for his present. And if he posed any danger to either himself or the station. . . . “Do you have anything like a standard psych profile for the mainters as a group?” she asked.

Halian’s response was to reach for his desk’s control ball, fingering the classified-access section. “We’ve got both that and Tomo’s own last profile.”

“Good.” Scharn said. “I’d also like any previous readings on Tomo that you might have.”

Halian’s screen lit up with lines of print, and he swiveled it to face her. “I’ll have the Goldenrod‘s computer send us a complete dump. In the meantime, here’s the general mainter profile.”

Putting her feelings on standby, Scharn began to read.

It had been nearly an hour since the others had left him; long enough for Tomo’s panic to have subsided into emotional fatigue and then resurface as restlessness. Scharn had said they would talk again later, a statement that could qualify as either a promise or a threat. Whichever, he wished they would hurry up and get on with it. Waiting like this was worse than docking—then, at least, Max could keep him informed as to what was happening. Here at the port, they were both in the dark.

Or were they? “Max?” he called impulsively, sliding into the desk chair.

“Yes, Tomo?”

Just as quickly, he recognized the absurdity of what he’d been about to ask. “Oh, never mind. Um . . . how’s the unloading going?”

“Unloading and refurbishing operations are proceeding smoothly. Is there anything I can get for you?”

“No, no. I’m just—I’m fine.”

“I see.” Max paused. “Tomo, would you mind coming back aboard ship for a few minutes? There’s no one in your pod at the moment.”

Tomo frowned. “Why?”

“Your tone of voice indicates stress. My biosensors can’t take readings outside the ship.”

“I’m all right. Max.” Tomo snapped. “Why is everybody so interested in me all of a sudden? The second I get here Halian calls me up, then he smothers me in doctors, and now you—”

He broke off abruptly, seeing for the first time the pattern there. But how . . .? “Did you tell them that I was talking about going dirtside?” he asked suspiciously. The computer remained silent. “Max! Answer me!”

“Tomo, I had no choice. I cannot keep secret information that indicates you may be suffering physical or emotional dysfunction. Under such conditions I must report my findings in coded form to a company grade-one executive as soon as possible—”

“Wait a second. What physical or emotional dysfunction?”

There was a short pause. “Your thoughts about a planetward trip were judged to be four sigma outside normal range. A two-sigma deviation is considered—”

“Max, how many times do I have to tell you that there’s nothing significant about that?” Tomo snarled, barely controlling his anger. This whole thing was becoming ridiculous. “Why are you making such a major operation out of it?”

Max’s answer, when it finally came, was a complete surprise. “I’m sorry; I cannot continue this discussion.”

Tomo’s anger vanished into puzzlement and a slowly growing uneasiness. “What is it, something I’m not supposed to know?”

“My programming requires me to protect your emotional well-being. There are certain topics of discussion which would unduly distress you, such as descriptions of warfare or—”

“But this is something a lot more personal than warfare, isn’t it?” Tomo interrupted, blocking Max’s attempt to sidetrack the conversation. “Something having to do with my physical or psychological makeup, right?”

“I’m sorry; I cannot continue this discussion.”

Aha, Tomo thought. For a moment he gazed into space, searching for a usable loophole. “All right. The information might—might—bother me. Correct?”

“I’m sorry; I cannot—”

“Shut up! It might bother me—but now that I know something’s wrong with me, the uncertainty is definitely bothering me.” He paused, but Max remained silent. “The tension alone—you know better than I do what prolonged tension does to blood sugar and adrenaline levels. Did your programmers anticipate this kind of situation?”

“They did,” Max said in resignation. “Very well, then, but the information must be kept secret from the Goldenrod’s other mainters.”

“Agreed. So?”

“In order to endure the solitude of starship service, you have undergone a kind of mental conditioning which has made you less dependent than the average person on social interaction.”

For several heartbeats Tomo just sat there, attempting to assimilate the right-angle turn his private universe had just taken. Egocentrism, he thought through the numbness. The assumption that you are basically the norm. He’d known the people on planets and ports were different; but somehow he’d never considered the possibility that he was the odd one. And to have been deliberately made this way . . . “How much less dependent?” he asked.

“It allows you to spend long periods of time alone, which is necessary for your job.” Max’s voice was soothing, as if he were doing his best to soften the shock. But his best wasn’t very good. “But it also makes it extremely difficult for you to interact with others at close range.”

“So because I wanted to do something you didn’t think I could do, you slapped a ‘dysfunction’ marker on me and yelled to the authorities.” The mental numbness was fading now, anger once more rising to take its place. “Is that it?”

“It has nothing to do with what I personally think,” Max protested. “Your conditioning places specific limitations on your actions, limitations as laser-cut and well-defined as—”

“As your own programming?”

“I wouldn’t have put it quite that way—”

“But that’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it? Well, I’ve got fresh input for you. You may be defined down to twelve decimals, but I am not. I’m a human being, and I can do anything any other human being can do.”

“Tomo, your vocal stress levels are becoming—”

Tomo cut him off with a well-aimed slash at the control ball. Getting to his feet, he stomped over to the exit door. For a moment he stood there, anger battling common sense for supremacy. But the anger was far stronger. Slapping the touch plate, he stepped out into the port corridor. This time, no one was in sight. Picking a direction, he started off, determined to find his way to Halian’s office. Halian, Scharn, Ross, even Max; he’d show all of them.

The deviation between the two curves was small—well within the one-sigma accepted tolerance—but with the advantages of hindsight it was obvious to Scharn that that was where it had begun. “Right there,” she told Halian and Ross, tapping the spot on the screen. “You can see the slip starting to form as early as a year ago.”

“Too small a change for the MX to key on,” Ross muttered.

“I wasn’t blaming the MX,” Scharn said, leaning back in her chair. “And it brings up an interesting question. Is Tomo becoming mentally unbalanced, or is his genetic programming somehow unraveling and allowing his personality to drift more toward human norms?”

“How could it do that?” Halian asked. “A genetic effect like that should be permanent.”

Scharn shrugged. “In theory, so should damage to a section of mature brain. But stroke and accident victims routinely regain lost functions as the neural pathways restructure themselves. Perhaps some combination of hormones and neurotransmitters is acting to counteract the genetic bias here.”

Halian harumphed. “I don’t buy that. Anyway, I can’t see that it makes any practical difference—”

“Of course it makes a difference,” Scharn shot back. “In the first case he’s ill and can probably be treated with some form of chemo-imbalance correction. In the second, though, what we actually have is a rapid version of personality evolution, which is not only normal but could be dangerous to suppress artificially.”

“I believe,” Ross interjected quietly, “that Mr. Halian was referring to Tomo’s continuing presence aboard the Goldenrod.”

It took a moment for Scharn to pick up exactly what he meant. “You mean leaning toward sociability will make him less able to stand solitude? Um . . . Maybe, maybe not. It depends partly on whether—”

She stopped as a double ping sounded from Halian’s desk, followed by Iris’s cool voice. “Mr. Halian, Goldenrod Mainter Tomo has left his quarters and entered the station: moving spinward on corridor D-9. Do you have instructions?”

Scharn felt her stomach tighten. It had been her suggestion, but she hadn’t really expected Tomo to act on it. Halian and Ross looked even more stunned.

“Full sector/level monitor until further notice,” Halian instructed the computer. “Is anyone else in that immediate area?”

“Negative,” Iris reported. “D-8, D-9, and D-l are clear.”

“All right.” Halian looked at Ross as if for advice, but didn’t seem to get any. “All right, just monitor Tomo’s movements and keep me informed. I’ll be on mobile. Oh. and better lock down all computer outlets and elevators in his vicinity, just in case.”

He picked up a small rectangular clip-on from the side of the viewer screen and stood up, the others following suit. “Let’s get after him.”

“Can’t you seal him into that corridor?” Scharn asked.

“I could,” Halian told her. “But it occurs to me that letting him run into a few people might be the best way to convince him that he can’t handle that kind of social interaction.”

Scharn’s first reaction was that he was making an exceptionally poor joke. A half second later she realized he was serious. “And what if it merely drives him over the edge permanently?” she asked coldly. “Or don’t you care about that?”

“He won’t hit any heavily populated areas for quite some time without the elevators,” Halian assured her. “If meeting with us didn’t do anything permanent to him, neither will any situation he’s likely to run into up there. Besides—” He hesitated. “The fewer people who know about this, the better. For all concerned.”

Especially for you. Scharn thought bitterly. “I’m going for the sedation kit I left in my quarters,” she said. “Will one of you wait here for me?”

“We both will,” Ross said before Halian could respond.

There was something in his voice that made Scharn look hard at his face. But whatever was wrong was too well hidden for a quick interpretation, and she didn’t have time for anything else. “All right,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

Ross waited until the door had closed solidly behind the psychiatrist before turning to Halian. The director returned his gaze steadily; and after a moment Ross realized the other was going to make him raise the subject. He cleared his throat, glancing at the desk to make sure Iris’s monitor was off. “You realize, of course.” he told Halian, “that Tomo will pass through the thorascrine leak area on G-deck if he stays in 9-sector on his way down.”

“That area’s been adequately cleaned up,” Halian returned evenly. “You certified that yourself.”

“For us, yes. But Tomo’s been in a medium-radiation environment most of his life. There’ve been reports that that can sensitize a man. make him much more susceptible to thorascrine poisoning.” He paused, waiting for a reaction that didn’t come. “But I see you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“I may have heard of it somewhere. I don’t remember.”

“Sure.” The sheer callousness of Halian’s attitude was infuriating . . . and yet, even Ross could see the logic behind it. Legally, Tomo was less human than he was property, and Halian had both the right and responsibility of treating him as any other malfunctioning component. “Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose it actually would make things a lot easier if Tomo got incapacitated somehow. The Goldenrod would leave on schedule without him and you wouldn’t have to make a snap decision on his fitness for deep space. Scharn could take him dirtside and study him to her heart’s content. The Goldenrod can manage with a missing mainter, can’t it?”

“It can theoretically fly with even three of the six missing.” Halian seemed to be having trouble meeting Ross’s eyes. “The question then is what would happen to Tomo. If we take him off the Goldenrod he’ll probably never be placed on another ship, even if he can be cured or whatever. So Scharn studies him for maybe a year or two . . . and then what? Starship mainting is all he knows how to do, and given his personality there’s really nothing else he can be retrained for.”

Ross felt his mouth go dry. To remove Tomo from his ship—by whatever means—was one thing. But this—“What you’re talking now is way beyond an incapacitating injury,” he said softly. “You’re talking deliberate murder.”

“I’m not talking anything,” Halian said, his face unreadable. “I’m simply . . . thinking how an accident at this point would . . . simplify things.”

This isn’t happening, Ross thought as a sense of unreality seemed to darken the air between him and Halian. Premeditated murder . . . or was it? How human was Tomo, anyway? Form, intelligence—neither one was exclusive human property anymore. Genetic structure? Tomo’s was no more human than that of any other biological construct. Surely there were legal guidelines, but Ross had no idea what they were. He could still raise a fuss, of course, and he could sense that Halian would back down at sun-grazer speeds if he did so, whether the director was in the legal right or not. But would that really do Tomo any favors? Because Halian was right—Tomo really couldn’t do anything else. Unless Scharn’s bafflegab about some so-called personality evolution came true with a vengeance . . . but no, that theory was equal parts absurdity and wishful thinking. Which left Ross exactly where he’d started, at dead center.

In front of him, the statue that was Halian came to life, raising the clip-on he still held and flipping it on. “Iris? Status report on Tomo.”

“He’s outside the D-13 stairway . . . He has now entered . . . moving downward.”

“Damn,” Halian muttered. “Well, at least that tells us something. If he can still charge on into the station after suffering through that interview with us, it means he’s past simple curiosity. He’s up to full-fledged obsession.” He fastened the clip-on to his tunic collar, leaving it active. “Come on. We’ll pick up Scharn on the way.”

Ross followed him to the office door, still wondering what he was going to do. It wasn’t until they were outside in the wide corridor that he realized the decision had already been made. Halian had given him the chance to object; his silence had been interpreted as tacit agreement. But that can be changed, he told himself. I can still stop this.

But before he could do that, he needed to decide whether he truly wanted to . . . and the time for that choice was running out fast.

A starship pod consisted of eighteen one-room levels connected together by spiral staircases in flight and by simple hatchways when port docking changed the normal directions of up and down. The passageways linking the pods to the central drive cylinder were seldom used, but even they were simple tubes: straight, short, and without stairways or cross corridors. Never in his life had Tomo been anywhere nearly so confusing as Maigre Port.

He was almost afraid to admit it, but he was pretty sure he was lost.

The obvious solution, of course, was to ask for help; but so far he’d been unable to get any of the hall computer outlets to work. Until he found one that was live there was nothing to do but keep moving.

Ahead, still out of sight around the slight curve, he heard the sound of an opening door; and suddenly there were voices in the corridor.

Tomo’s instinct was to freeze, but momentum and a sudden idea kept him moving. The voices were ahead and coming closer, but only a few meters in front of him was a cross corridor he could duck into. If he hurried . . . Putting on a last-minute burst of speed, he rounded the corner—

And practically ran down the two men crouched there.

With a strangled gasp, Tomo hurled himself toward the cross corridor’s far wall, slamming back-first against it. He had just enough time to notice the open access panel and the scattered tools when the men charged him.

There was no chance for thought, no opportunity for anything but the most basic reflexive action. One of the attackers stepped in to block his continued passage down the corridor; slapping the outstretched arm aside with all his strength, Tomo ducked past and ran for it. Their shouts echoed weirdly behind him, partially drowned out by the thudding of his feet on the thin carpeting. He turned at the first opportunity and kept going. Three corridors and a stairway later he finally decided he’d lost his pursuers and slowed to catch his breath. Looking around, though, he could tell there was no use trying to fool himself any further.

He was lost now. Thoroughly.

“—and just crouched there looking scared. I went over to see if he was okay, and for no reason at all he hit my arm and took off like a meteor with fluorine afterburners. Till and I called for him to come back, but he just kept going.”

Halian pursed his lips, glancing sideways to try and catch Scharn’s reaction as they hurried down the corridor. Ross’s reaction he could guess. “Either of you hurt?” he asked into his clip-on.

“No, sir,” the answer came. “Maybe bruised a little.”

“All right. Just get back to work; I’ll handle this. Good-bye.” He waited for the termination click, then said, “Iris? Where’s Tomo now?”

“Corridor F-39,” the computer replied.

“Those workers probably just got in his way and he panicked,” Scharn spoke up. “Mr. Halian, we’ve got to close him off from the rest of the station.”

Halian could feel Ross’s eyes on him. “I suppose you’re right. Iris, seal all routes between decks G and H. Are there any security personnel above H-deck?”

“There are four, all currently on E-deck.”

“Alert them, and have them start moving toward F-9. They’re to try and box him in there—” he hesitated a fraction of a second—“or on G-deck if he gets that far. They’re to use minimal force.”

Scharn leaned toward the clip-on. “And warn them he’s not dangerous so much as he is terrified,” she added.

“Right,” Halian agreed. “If they can avoid contact until we get there, so much the better.”

“Acknowledged. Security forces are on their way.”

Halian took a deep breath, let it out as inconspicuously as possible. Stay calm, he told himself. Just stay calm. “The direct-access elevator’s right up here,” he said, pointing.

They were passing K-deck when the first security report came in: one of the guards had spotted Tomo in corridor G-9, forcing him to move into cross-corridor G-19B.

“Have the guard move just inside G-19B and wait there,” Halian instructed Iris carefully, “Order the other three to approach from opposite directions along G-19, see if they can keep him from coming out there,” He looked at Ross. “Ross . . . when we hit G-deck, I want you and Dr. Scharn to go down G-29, try to intercept him if he gets to-one of the other cross corridors. I’ll go up G-19B and try to cut him off there.”

Ross’s face was a sweat-plated mask as he gave a silent nod; but fortunately, Scharn didn’t seem to notice as she dug a hypo tube from her belt pouch. “In case you do,” she said, handing the tube to Halian, “here’s a sedative—you can inject it anywhere. It’s already set for Tomo’s weight.”

A moment later, they arrived at G-deck.

The corridor they stepped out into was deserted and. aside from normal mechanical noises, silent. Ross passed up the final accusing gaze Halian had half expected from him, taking Scharn’s arm instead and heading away without a backward glance. Halian watched until they turned a corner, then permitted himself the luxury of a sigh. The die was now cast; Tomo’s fate was in the hands of the universe. The thorascrine leak area was just one turn from the cross corridor Tomo had entered. If Halian had guessed the mainter’s probable movements correctly he would soon be in the proper position to send the other “accidentally” through the center of the contaminated region. If the universe had other plans for Tomo, it would have to guide the mainter elsewhere, and under such circumstances Halian would have no choice but to accept its ruling. The director was several generations beyond the spacers who had built Maigre Station, but he still possessed a little of their traditional belief in fate . . . except that he knew the strong and the clever could build their fate as they chose.

Halian believed in fate. He did not necessarily believe in justice.

Turning, he hurried down the corridor. Tomo would be coming by very soon.

Leaning against the wall, Tomo wiped the sweat off his forehead and tried to catch his breath. Safe again . . . but only for the moment. They were closing in on him now; drawing the walls of their box closer and closer—“They won’t hurt me,” he whispered aloud. “I don’t need to be afraid of them. I don’t.”

It was so much wasted breath. He was afraid of them, and there was no way he could pretend otherwise. The thought of their approaching him, maybe even touching him . . . he shifted his shoulders uncomfortably beneath the sweat-soaked coveralls. If he could only get back to his quarters before anyone reached him . . . but he might as well wish himself a child again.

From the corridor ahead and to his left came the sound of footsteps. Tomo tensed; but even as he pushed away from the wall something within him accepted the inevitable. Standing rigidly, legs trembling with their mindless urge to run, he waited as the other came into sight and stopped.

“Tomo?” Director Halian called gently. “I’ve come to take you back.”

Tomo remained where he was, not acknowledging Halian’s words but not running off, either. Licking his lips, the director lowered his voice. “Iris? Secure from surveillance mode. I have Tomo in sight.”

“Acknowledged. Sector/level monitor disengaged.”

Halian flicked the device off . . . and he and Tomo were alone. “Don’t be afraid,” the director told the mainter, aware of the irony of his words. “I’m Director Halian—remember? Let me show you the way back to your quarters. You don’t have to come close, just follow me at a distance. You can do that, can’t you?”

Tomo’s mouth worked once, but no words came out. Eyes unblinkingly on Halian, he nodded.

“Good. Come on, then.” Walking carefully, Halian backed into the corridor he’d emerged from. A moment later, Tomo followed. Step by step they went, separated by the ten meters or so Tomo seemed to find comfortable.

Halfway down the corridor, still walking backwards, Halian stepped over the fuzzy line onto the thorascrine-stained part of the carpet.

A few more steps, Halian told himself, his eyes on Tomo. Once on the stain, his feet kicking up minute bits of the heavy dust, there would be no turning back. Whether enough remained to kill him or merely to make him sick, the important result would be the same: the Goldenrod would leave for Canaan Under Vega without the risk of an insane man aboard. After that . . . Tomo’s fate would be in the universe’s hands.

And midway through a step, Halian abruptly stopped.

Tomo stopped, too, five meters from the edge of the thorascrine stain, his face rigid with wary tension at the director’s unexpected move. Halian stared at him for a long, painful second . . . and slowly a new truth dawned on him.

It was one thing to discuss death as a necessary and even humane action. It was another thing entirely to face the person involved and personally carry out the proposal.

He couldn’t do it. And he hated himself for his weakness.

He took a step toward Tomo . . . and another . . . and with the third, Tomo’s look of stunned disbelief changed to terror. “No!” he yelled as he spun and disappeared back into the other corridor.

Halian made no effort to chase him. His knees were weak with reaction, frustration and anger a bitter and debilitating taste in his mouth. He started to turn back, to recross the thorascrine and lose himself in the maze of corridors until the others could make the capture . . . but he’d taken only a couple of steps in that direction when the most chilling scream he’d ever heard jerked him around again. A dozen quick strides took him around the comer—

A hundred meters away Tomo was thrashing like a fish in the grip of two security guards.

Halian got to the scene in record time: but even so, Scharn and Ross managed to beat him. Tomo’s whimpering rose to a final scream as Scharn reached between the guards with her hypo, a terrified shriek that left a ringing in Halian’s ears even after it faded into silence. A moment later the mainter’s last twitchings ceased. Scharn said something Halian didn’t catch, and the guards lifted the limp form and carried him toward the elevators.

“Well?” a soft voice asked at Halian’s side.

The director jumped; he hadn’t really noticed Ross come over. “No,” he murmured bitterly. “I lost my nerve.”

Ross said nothing, but gripped Halian’s arm briefly before hurrying to catch up with the others. Halian followed more slowly. All right. Doctor, he thought at Scharn’s receding back. You’ve got your chance now. And you’d damn well better not mess it up like I did.

It was a long way up from the starless pit of unconsciousness, but there was something soothing in the darkness that removed any possible terror from the disorientation. Tomo had plenty of time to think and remember; and when he finally opened his eyes it was with total lack of surprise that he found himself lying in the lounge chair in his portside quarters. Attached to his right upper arm was a wide band, and he puzzled over it a moment before deciding it must be some sort of biosensory telemeter.

“Hello, Tomo.”

He jerked at the quiet voice . . . but Scharn was only present via the viewer on his desk. “Hello, Doctor,” he said, relaxing again.

“Sorry if I startled you,” she apologized. “I wanted to talk to you and thought this would be the best way. How are you feeling?”

Tomo sighed. “Tired, mostly.” He locked eyes with her image, “It’s true, isn’t it, what Max said. I’ve been conditioned to be afraid of people.” Scharn’s lip twitched minutely. “More or less. That part wasn’t done on purpose, but I don’t suppose that’s any comfort.”

“Not really.” Tomo closed his eyes, feeling almost relieved that it was over. No uncertainties remained; only cold, hard truth. “So that’s it, then. I’ll never be able to be with other people.”

“Does that bother you?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. How can I miss something I’ve never experienced? It’s just—” Something seemed to catch in his throat. “It’s just that I know now that there’s something normal people can do that I can’t. It makes me . . . something less than human.” He opened his eyes in time to see Scharn catch her lower lip between her teeth. “There are a lot of things in this universe that some people can do that others can’t,” she said gently. “I could never spend years at a time alone on a starship—and even if I could, I wouldn’t know the first thing about maintaining it. You can do both of those. It doesn’t mean either of us is better or worse than the other; it just means we’re different.”

“Maybe.” Tomo paused, steeling himself for the crucial question. “Are you going to let me go back to the Goldenrod?”

He saw her eyes shift left, and knew she was checking some of his physiological readouts: reading from his body’s reactions the state of his mind. The thought of being laid open like that before her didn’t bother him; briefly, he wondered if it should. “I don’t think that’ll be a problem,” she said after a moment. “If it’s what you want, of course.”

“It is,” he said. “It’s where I belong. The only place I ever will belong.”

“Some people spend all their lives trying to figure out where they belong,” she pointed out softly. “At least you’ve got that much.”

Tomo looked at her . . . and slowly it dawned on him that the gentleness in her voice was perhaps less professional technique than it was simple pity. “You don’t need to feel sorry for me. Doctor.” he told her. “I really do enjoy being in space . . . being who lam. It’s just—well, I’d like to be able to face other people. Even if I never do it. You understand what I’m trying to say?”

“I think so,” she nodded. “You’re trying to expand the edges of your life, to push yourself as far as you can go.” He grimaced. “Looks like I’m already there, doesn’t it?”

“Nonsense!” Scharn snorted with a vehemence that surprised him. “You’re a human being, Tomo. No human being yet has ever found his own limits.” Echoes of his own words to Max, Tomo thought. He’d believed them then; now, he wasn’t so sure. “Urn,” he grunted noncommittally.

“I mean it. There’ll always be new challenges for you—you’ll see.” Again her eyes shifted to the bio readouts, and when she spoke again her voice was back to its earlier quiet control. “I’m going to let you sleep, now; give your body time to throw off the rest of the sedative. If you want to talk again later, I’ll be available. If not, that’s fine, too.”

Fatigue was indeed tugging at Tomo’s eyelids, but with an effort he forced them open again. There was one question he still wanted to ask. “Dr. Scharn? Would you tell me what it’s like being dirtside?”

He caught just the briefest half smile before his eyes closed again. “Mostly,” Scharn said from the bottom of a long stairway, “it’s very, very noisy.”

Somehow, the answer seemed profound . . . but before Tomo could think about it, he was asleep.

Scharn turned off the viewer with a sigh, letting the professional calm evaporate from her face as the ache she really felt flooded in to take its place. Yes, Tomo would be able to return to his ship; a couple more days of biochemical analysis on him would conclusively prove what she already knew, that he wasn’t drifting into psychosis. A small spurt of growth in his personality—true, in an unexpected direction—was really all that had happened, and in the controlled environment of starship travel there would be no stimuli to encourage further development. Like a teenager’s grandiose dreams of his future, Tomo’s thoughts of mingling with humanity would quietly fade and die. The mainter would be content with his world again; the company that owned him would be pleased and would return to business as usual.

Owned him. Owned him.

And something in Scharn snapped.

She thought about it for a long minute, and then traced a curve on the control ball. “Yes?” Iris answered.

“This is Dr. Scharn,” the psychiatrist said firmly. “Get me the Goldenrod’s computer. I’d like to leave a private message for Tomo.”

The Goldenrod launched on schedule, driving slightly out of the ecliptic plane and incidentally giving a grand view of Maigre in the rear viewer. “Well, that’s it, Max,” Tomo said, the deck feeling good beneath his feet. “Next stop, Canaan Under Vega. Docking equipment all secured?”

“Secured and shut down,” the computer replied. “I’m running a check on deep-space functions, but so far everything registers normal.”

“Good.” Tomo watched the view of Maigre a moment longer, then picked up the cassette he’d earlier pulled out and placed by the control ball. He toyed with it, wondering if he really wanted to do this.

Max might have been reading his mind. “You don’t have to try it yet, you know. Dr. Scharn made it clear this was to be strictly voluntary.”

“I know,” Tomo snapped, feeling the tension of this brand-new uncertainty and wishing Scharn had left things as they were. Almost wishing it, anyway . . . Abruptly, he jammed the cassette into the player and dropped into his lounge chair. “All right,” he told Max, bracing himself. “Let’s give it a try.”

And suddenly there was someone else in the room with him.

Tomo stiffened as the stranger nodded pleasantly. “Hello, Tomo,” he said . . . and from behind him a second man appeared . . . and a woman . . . and another man . . .

They vanished as abruptly as they’d appeared, and Tomo slumped in his chair. He could feel the sweat on his forehead, and even over the roar of the drive his heartbeat was audible. “I think,” he said when his breathing was finally back to normal, “that those are the most realistic holograms I’ve ever seen. Uh . . . how’d I do?”

“Quite well,” Max said. “Six point eight seconds. I’m sure you could have managed another few seconds, but the programmed cutoffs are very specific.”

“Six point eight, eh?” Tomo repeated, trying hard not to let his disappointment show. “Well, I suppose I have to start somewhere. You think there’s a chance I’ll be ready by the time we reach Canaan Under Vega?”

“I really don’t know,” was Max’s diplomatic reply. “But we have ten point four years to find out.”

Tomo smiled and resettled himself in the seat. “We sure do. Okay; let’s try it again.”

The dirtsiders at Canaan Under Vega were going to be very surprised.

SILICON MUSE

Hilbert Schenck

With computers Setting involved in everything else, why not campus politics?

The January afternoon was dark and bitter cold with only a few students hurrying here and there, black hunched figures leaning against the freezing wind. The swirling snow was getting steadily thicker. Already the mostly deserted campus was emptying further, as the university staff scurried off to their parking lots so as to get on the roads ahead of any skids or blockages on the hills surrounding the campus valley.

Professor Frank Gower, chairman of the Department of English Literature and also of the Graduate Faculty Grants Committee, stamped the snow off his heavy boots at the side entrance to the sprawling, four-story, concrete-block Computer Science building, then clapped his mittens together several times and stepped gratefully into the warmer hallway. He was a thin, almost gaunt man of medium height, forty-eight years old; and though he walked briskly and spoke in a sharp, intent voice, he felt and dreaded the cold more each year in this bleak, wind-swept New England valley where the dampness from the river combined with the blustery northwesterlies to penetrate even the warmest and tightest garments.

His narrow face was pinched but his lips were set in determination as he walked quickly down the north stairs of the building and pushed open a heavy door labeled. “Main Terminal Room. Keep Door Shut.”

Inside all was warmth and light. The large room was windowless, cubical, with a high ceiling sloping downward to the back. The white walls were blank except for air conditioning grills at floor and ceiling level, and the whole place was evenly lit by high fluorescent fixtures that flooded every cranny with a cold, white light. The sprawling input-output consoles of the university’s latest and largest computing system formed a great letter “C” around a group of five contour chairs in the center. There were three different keyboards, tape, disk, and card-reading devices, at least a dozen graphic and TV readout systems, and four printers of various sorts and sizes interspersed with the keyboards. Above this neat, if confusing, display of computing hardware was a complex spotlight board that individually illuminated whatever combination of machines was activated. As he shrugged off his coat, Professor Gower saw that only the central input keyboard was now so lit and that in front of it sat Dr. Charles Perry, an assistant professor in his department. The twenty-seven-year-old Perry was as thin as his chairman. but where Gower’s narrow hard face usually seemed sharp and alert. Perry’s expression was more diffuse, often almost bewildered. He had a small chin and a rather slack mouth. His thin blond mustache was scraggly and only visible under bright lights.

Dr. Perry got to his feet, brushed back his lank hair, and reached out to shake Dr. Gower’s hand. “You’re early, Frank.” he said in a mild voice.

Dr. Gower sat down in a chair next to Perry and gave a terse nod. “I wanted to bring you the bad news before the rest of them show up. The committee voted two to one yesterday to include our resident creative genius, Robert Roy lance Roberts, specifically to help judge your project. He’s an ex officio member so he can’t vote, but he can sure talk and write opinions.”

Professor Perry’s already vague expression became even more confused. “Whaa . . .? But Triple-R will be drunk by now, Frank!” he said. “Also, he hates this project worse than he hates that Times guy who cut up his last poetry collection. Jesus, what the hell is happening . . .?”

Gower placed a firm and cautionary hand on his younger colleague’s arm. “Right on both counts, but the committee took Roberts to lunch at the faculty club and I think we held him to four whiskeys—unless he got there earlier than usual. He wasn’t too bad when I left them, and Millie was ordering them a second cup of coffee.”

The young man stared at the floor in dismay. “Millicent Hull hates this idea too. That’s for certain! Do you think I have a chance, Frank?”

The older man rubbed his cold hands briskly together in the warm room, then shrugged. “You know how tough this Snodgrass business has gotten, Charlie. The federal grants are cut to hell and the state is broke. Old Snodgrass may have been a pirate, but he left the university millions to pay for these fellowships. The way the market and the interest rates have gone, the damn grants are now practically at the Nobel dollar level—and since they’re restricted to untenured, assistant professors, just about everyone in that group cranks out a proposal twice a year.”

“But I was a runner-up last year, Frank,” said Dr. Perry in a thin and plaintive voice. “I got Snodgrass seed money. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

The chairman’s voice was icy and quiet. “You know very well what that means. It means you’ve got to show plenty more than the first-shot proposals do. Furthermore, there’s only four of these little treasure troves, two in January and two in September. And for this round . . .”

“The Chinaman in Biology is certain of one,” finished Dr. Perry in a firmer and very bitter voice.

“Correct,” said the older man. “The Chinaman has perhaps found a supposed cure for a suspected cancer. Health and Human Services is willing to doublematch the Snodgrass money if we make the award. The Snodgrass Foundation lawyers agreed, as you know from the fuss it caused, in this single case to waive the will’s provision that no Snodgrass Fellowship be based on additional funding or outside evaluations. The committee has two letters in support of the Chinaman from an assistant secretary of HHS.”

The chairman shook his head and his expression was sombre. “Nobody votes for cancer, Charlie,” he said simply. “It has no constituency.”

“So I’m in the hopper with thirty-seven other research proposals for one gold medal and I’ve got to start out by being better than most, or all. of them since I got that pittance last year. Is that it? I don’t have a prayer!” said Perry. “What about the robot people at the engineering school?”

Dr. Gower shrugged again. “We’ve cut them down to about four, actually. Half the things are written so quickly they’re mostly unintelligible, and in most cases the Snodgrass requirement of total originality was totally lacking. As to the robot engineers, let me say in strictest confidence that yesterday their stair-climbing wheelchair got the wrong command from the control computer, flipped over backwards several steps before the top, and broke the plaster head of the dummy they had strapped to the thing into about fifty pieces. The chair suffered even worse damage.” Professor Gower smiled for the first time since he had come into the room. “Back to the old drawing board with that gadget, I guess.”

“So maybe I do have hope?” muttered the young man, though his tone showed little enthusiasm.

“Definitely, Charlie, but you’d have more hope if you’d sent along a sample of the sort of things you were getting with the proposal. Millie complained about that at lunch, and our famous poet suggested the stuff was probably so awful you didn’t dare include it.”

Dr. Perry threw his palms out and up in dismay. “But I discussed that in the proposal, Frank.” he almost whimpered. “I explained that if the fiction I included was bad they would immediately judge the idea a failure, while if the story seemed good they would just assume I wrote it myself. I mean, there’s just no real substitute for seeing the computer write the stuff before your eyes.”

Gower shrugged once again and his expression seemed almost uninterested. “Proposals aren’t read all that carefully. Charlie. The point is. you’re going to sink or swim on the basis of what this thing . . .” he gestured at the computing hardware spread around them, “produces in this next hour. If it outdoes our own Robert Roberts with even more obscure and impenetrable stuff, you’ve—we’ve—lost the Snodgrass money.”

“And then I don’t have a prayer for tenure—right?” said the young man bitterly. “But the computer’s getting better and better, Frank. I’ve gotten five stories out of it now, and each one is better than the last.”

“Let’s hope,” said the expressionless chairman, looking around as the door opened and two heavily bundled people stepped in. The leading figure was Dr. Millicent Hull, a full professor of philosophy in her mid-forties, grants committee member, and president of the faculty senate. She shucked her heavy coat quickly and strode with vigor and assurance to a seat on the other side of Dr. Perry, pausing to take his soft and diffident hand in her own firm grip. Professor Hull, though a large and imposing woman with an iron-gray bun of hair on top of her big head, had retained an unlikely prettiness of facial expression that seemed to belie her otherwise sturdy and businesslike character. Her eyes were large and wide and her mouth full, though this was now turned sourly downward as she surveyed the expensive, high-tech interior of the Computing Center’s latest acquisition.

“Okay, Charlie,” she said in a brisk voice, “how soon until you start Total Access with this toy?”

The young man gave her back a faint smile. “At two-thirty. Dr. Hull,” he said. “About twenty minutes.”

“Where’s Roberts?” asked Frank Gower.

The second arrival was old Dr. Melvin Fitzhugh, a professor of physics and one of only three named professors in the entire university. Years ago, Fitzhugh had pioneered a method of pottery dating involving the phenomenon of thermoluminescence; and though the method remained of questionable accuracy, Fitzhugh’s lab managed to stay in the newspapers with its dating of various archeological sites throughout the world. A small, pudgy man with thin white hair, Dr. Fitzhugh would retire in a year, and his eyes were already drooping over the lack of his customary afternoon nap.

“He’s on the way, Frank,” said the old physicist. “Had to go to the johnnie, he said.”

“One more drink!” said Millicent Hull in a very hard tone. “Let’s get started on this, Charlie. It’s snowing.”

The young man gulped and nodded, his protuberant Adam’s apple shuttling rapidly up and down. “Okay,” he responded. “Well, as I said in the proposal, this fiction-writing program requires the Total Access capability. I mean, it can only be used when the entire main-frame is dedicated to it for some fixed length of time. Since that costs a bomb and isn’t possible very often, I’ve only managed to get five complete fictions out of the program to date.” He paused to indicate a folder lying on the desk in front of him.

“Do we ever get to see those five—uh—fictions?” said Dr. Hull in a suspicious voice. “And why do you call them fictions instead of stories, Charlie?” Her voice had become sharper and more impatient.

“Now, Millie,” said Frank Gower calmly, “we call them fictions for the same reason that you call the study of learning epistemology; so the slobs won’t know what in hell we’re talking about.”

“I’ve made copies of the five stories for the committee,” said Dr. Perry. “But I really thought it would be better if you saw the thing actually write one before you read these.” His voice was soft and plaintive, and Dr. Hull gave him a sudden reassuring smile.

“Look,” she said, swiveling her head to include them all. “I’m not against this computer or what you’re doing with it. Certainly if the computer can write a story that humans will read, enjoy, and assume another human wrote—well, that might be a big deal and not just in English Lit. But, damn it, I think they’ve got to be real narratives, real stories, and not just some weird, arty string of incomprehensible junk. So. what’s the best one of those?” and she indicated the folder.

Dr. Perry gulped again and quickly opened it. “The best story, at least as far as I’m concerned, was this one it called ‘Hour Test.’ It starts with a quite explicit love scene at the library back entrance and ends with the girl having a total breakdown in a sociology hour test because she’s pregnant and the boy’s flunked out. It’s pretty fevered and maybe a little overwritten but the ending is nice. The machine intercuts the girl’s fragmenting thoughts with typically inhuman sociology jargon from the test questions. It’s not James Joyce, but it’s probably publishable.”

Dr. Hull’s large, clear eyes had grown wider at this and her face was set in lines of doubt. “How could a computer write an explicit love scene. Charlie, unless it just copied it from some book you stuck into its memory?”

Dr. Perry took a deep breath and plunged ahead. “Well, Dr. Hull, that all comes out of the use of T.A.—you know. Total Access. The system originally was brought in here as a kind of monitor of all university functions and operations, you remember? T.A. was supposed to keep track of everything: every memo, every academic statistic, every business-office transaction, details of grants, stuff off word processors, the whole bit. The idea was that with T.A. the computer could make predictions and suggestions about the entire range of university operations.” Millicent Hull shook her head. “Charlie, that may all be true, but if there is one single thing this place does not involve itself with in any sense, it is love, explicit or otherwise.”

The young man nodded cheerfully. “You’d think so, but after those rapes around the library last year, they installed hidden mikes to pick up screams in the area, sent the output through the speech-recognition section, and then, into the main frame. When I ran the program the last time, the only T.A. time I could get was at two in the morning. When the machine started to compose, it had probably been listening to a couple of kids in that grove of trees just back of the library. The first part of the story is almost entirely conversation but it’s still quite steamy.”

“Then,” said Dr. Fitzhugh, somewhat roused from his sleepy state, “it sounds like the program is pretty well restricted to the university, where it has, let’s say. some contacts?”

“At the moment, that’s true,” said Dr. Perry, “but if T.A. goes nationwide, which means involving this computer with masses of library materials and God knows what other functions all over, I think its repertoire will be much broader.”

“No computer that writes sexy stories can be all bad,” came a slurred, boisterous voice behind them, and they all turned to see a huge, ruddy-faced man attempting to unwind a thick, ten-foot-long scarf from around his neck. Since half the scarf was stuffed down his back under his coat, it was obvious that he would never get it off without help. Frank Gower immediately rose and went to remove the poet’s vast tweed sport coat, thus revealing a vaster belly partly covered by a ragged red and black hunting shirt, too shrunken to stay tucked in.

Robert Roberts picked his way past some imaginary obstacles and dropped with a great sigh of relief into the empty chair. “Cold out there, Millie,” he boomed, and without pausing turned to Dr. Perry, “and how the hell do we know that the cute little goodies this thing farts out weren’t put there yesterday by you, huh?” He said it all in a rush, having been repeating it to himself during his shambling walk from the Faculty Club.

The poet’s drunken yet total hostility broke like surf over the young man. He gulped several times, then finally spoke out. “Because you people are going to give it the topic . . .”

“Magic tricks . . . give it the topic . . . bullshit,” the poet muttered on to himself, momentarily overcome by the heat of the room.

“Professor Roberts,” said Dr. Hull sternly, “I think it might be better if you made your complaints and accusations after the demonstration. Otherwise. you prejudice your position as a creative consultant. Fairness demands—”

“It’s not a fair world. Millie,” slurred the poet, slowly adjusting to the temperature change. “Okay, how does the magic work. Professor?” he said with a snarl at Dr. Perry.

“What sort of cues did you give the machine to compose the story about the girl and her breakdown. Charlie?” suggested Dr. Hull in a warm and slightly guilty tone, for she was mainly responsible for the poet’s disturbing presence.

Dr. Perry gestured at the open folder. “The story before that one was about two old janitors who both wanted to transfer to the same building where they knew they could sleep the day away. It was okay but I thought the machine had problems differentiating the two old men so as to sharpen up the conflict. So I wrote to it: ‘Compose a story concerning a male and a female college student and integrate their classroom and private lives. The story should be serious and contemporary and the overall effect should be sobering as regards university life.’ ”

The poet gave a part belch, part laugh and rubbed his vein-mapped, sagging cheek. “He practically wrote the story for the thing, sounds like to me. Millie. . . .” and his voice trailed off as his eyes drooped shut.

“We have only ten minutes,” said Frank Gower in an urgent voice. “I think the committee should decide now on how a topic can be fairly selected to test the program.”

The poet’s bloodshot eyes snapped open and his voice was firmer. “I move the following method,” he said. “I will pick a member of the committee to select the topic—namely. Dr. Fitzhugh. You. Millie, will tell him how or from where to find the topic. And you. Frank,” the poet turned narrowed eyes on the chairman of his department, “since you have a certain special interest in the outcome of this demonstration, will accept or reject the first suggestion. Does that sound fair. Professor?” and the poet now turned his large head toward the young man.

“Sure,” said Dr. Perry hastily. “Anything that’s a short paragraph in length. That sounds fine.”

The others also agreed, and the poet rubbed his large, puffy nose. “Well, Millie?” he said softly.

Dr. Hull looked over at Dr. Fitzhugh and pursed her lips in thought. “Fitz. let’s see what it can do with something scientific. Open that text you carried in and find something in the stuff you were preparing this morning, okay?”

Old Dr. Fitzhugh. usually the least-consulted member of the Grants Committee, beamed at them and open his thick textbook. “Very well,” he said. “We’ll be doing reflective and refractive optics when they come back. Let me see . . . ah, how about this where the authors discuss reflection in facing mirrors. Good literary stuff, right?” and he sent a smile at Frank Gower, who grimly nodded back.

The young man swiveled his chair around. “Okay, read it slowly and I’ll type it in. We’re not on T.A. yet, but my program is on standby and ready for input.”

“ ‘A highly reflecting smooth surface is called a mirror,’ ” read Dr. Fitzhugh in a thin, clear voice. “ ‘When two mirrors are set to face each other directly, two visual phenomena are evident: First, the images of an object placed between the mirrors grow smaller and smaller as they are reflected and rereflected between the two mirror planes. Second, the smaller images also grow darker. The size decrease can be explained by the laws of geometrical optics, which govern—”

“Enough, enough, Fitz,” said Dr. Hull impatiently. “Give the thing a break, for heaven’s sake.”

Dr. Perry looked up from the keyboard. “Then can we end it with the sentence, ‘Second, the smaller images also grow darker’ ?” he asked them.

The three committee members agreed immediately, while the poet slouched lower in his chair muttering, “Too easy. Too easy,” poking out a large lower lip to show his continued annoyance.

Dr. Perry turned to the next keyboard at his right and began entering instructions. ENTER FICTION WRITING PROGRAM. INSTRUCTIONS ARE: COMPOSE ORIGINAL STORY BASED ON INPUT QUOTE 34X/2000. QUERY: DO YOU UNDERSTAND ALL WORDS?

The machine immediately responded with ALL WORDS UNDERSTOOD. END.

Dr. Perry then wrote, query: DO YOU UNDERSTAND CONTEXT OF WORDS? CONTEXT UNDERSTOOD. QUOTE IS FROM “UNIVERSITY PHYSICS. P.J. FRANK AND L.R. WHITTINGTON, MCGRAW-HILL NEW YORK, 1981, P. 654. FICTIONAL COMPOSITION BASED ON QUOTE WILL COMMENCE WHEN T.A. PROVIDED. GOOD LUCK CHARLIE. END.

The room became very silent, and the poet sat up a bit straighter. “It wouldn’t be impossible to have somebody, or maybe somebodies, out there now starting feverishly to write a passable work based on that passage,” he said and looked around with a dogged and suspicious air.

Dr. Hull frowned at him angrily. “Again I must insist that you stop these charges of fraud, Robert, until the end of this demonstration.” She shifted her eyes to Dr. Perry and they were filled with doubt. “You seem to be quite chummy with it, Charlie. Does it actually understand what this story, personally, represents to you?”

Dr. Perry parted his palms with a diffident gesture. “Sure. It knows everything that’s going on at the school. I mean, that’s the whole point of using T.A. in a fiction-writing mode.”

At that moment the daisy-wheel printer bar gave a single clack: ON T.A. I430:00 COMPOSITION REF 34X/2000 STARTED. STAND BY. END.

The young man gave them a hopeful smile. “It usually takes it a couple of minutes to get organized . . .”

But a light went on immediately over the nearest word processor and its printer now began to strike steadily but at a slow enough speed to allow careful reading.

Mirrored Lives

The January afternoon was dark and bitter cold with only a few students hurrying by, hunched figures leaning against the wind. Professor Hank Powers, Chairman of Modem English and also of the University Grants Committee, stamped off some snow, then banged open the heavy door of the main terminal room and confronted his younger colleague.

“You dummy!” he said in a harsh voice. “Why didn’t you send around some of the garbage that so-called thinking machine is cranking out along with your proposal? They were screaming at lunch about it! Also, our Pulitzer-Prize-Prick is now on the Grants Committee, belching and bitching when he can take the shot glass away from his mouth.”

Dr. Powers seemed to exude a bitter coldness into the room as he pulled off his coat and angrily dropped into a foam-lined seat.

Young Assistant Professor Henry Berry was so dismayed and terrified by this entrance and outburst that he simply sat shivering in front of the main terminal input, unable to say a word.

An impatient Professor Powers jabbed a sharp finger to within an inch of Berry’s nose. “If you expect to get tenure. Henry,” he said in an icy voice, “that thing had better write a masterpiece today. You hear me?” The older man closed his left fist in impotent rage. “They took our travel money. Henry, all of it. those bastards in administration! Three men are going to Frisco to form a complete session at the spring MLA meeting on Literary Weapons against Communism, and how do they get there? On magic carpets? If we get your Greenways Fellowship, the overhead will send a whole cheering section, not to mention the graduate students we can hang onto with your Greenway assistantships. You’re the department’s last hope, Henry!”

And it surely seemed a forlorn hope to the acerbic Dr. Powers, as he stared with mingled contempt and dismay at the young man’s undershot chin trembling and his hands twisting as he tried to respond. “Hank, I think it’s going to be okay,” said Dr. Berry finally, “but what about the Bengali?” His weak voice was almost a whisper.

“The Bengali has one of the two grants sewed up,” said Powers in a harsh snarl. “Once the Defense Department heard how well his little fiveway interrogation system went with the Chicanos along the Texas border, they decided it should be beefed up for our little brown Commie brothers in Central America.” Powers’s thin face took on an almost wolf-like grin. “They say it leaves no marks but you don’t do much fighting afterwards.”

“The university administration denied that. Hank,” whimpered Dr. Berry, but his chairman just snorted.

“Yeah, that bunch would deny the Holocaust while you were raking the bones out of the ovens. At least the competition from the robot walker is over for this time. That $3.45-an-hour paraplegic veteran they had demonstrating the robot legs pushed the wrong button and flipped over. I hope they got him to sign a good release because he broke his arm and collar bone.”

The older man gave a bark-like laugh.

“How would you like to be strapped legless into that thing and sent off to do the errands, eh? It’s a final solution to the Vietnam veteran. That’ll teach those Red-loving soreheads to bitch about Agent Orange!”

At that moment two more heavily bundled individuals stumped noisily in the door. The leading figure was Dr. Pamela Hill, a full professor of mathematical logic and chief of the Faculty Union. Her cruel, clear, and calculating eyes took in the lavish spread of the new computing facilities and her fleshy lips twisted in contempt and envy at the noholds expense of the set-up.

Behind her pressed small, ancient Professor Marvin Fitzroy, a wealthy, almost retired physical chemist and discoverer years before of a deadly industrial compound now banned by the government and responsible for the abandonment of over ten thousand homes at the site of the infamous Glover Canal toxic spills.

“So, Hank,” said Dr. Hill harshly to the English chairman, “already here prepping your man, huh? I thought we agreed not to pass the committee stuff around to our own people until the January Greenway awards are made?”

“That, Pamela, was the understanding before you got that lush Howard Howard as an ex officio member of the committee to screw Henry here and save the Greenway money for your own man. You knew that drunken slob hates computers and all they stand for! So take your little agreements and shove them, my dear!” he concluded in a sharp and acid tone.

Stubby, sleepy, pig-faced Dr. Fitzroy was jolted wide awake by this harsh exchange and now gave a snide and sarcastic laugh. “You two must be living in a dream world,” he gritted in a cracked, mean voice. “The day that anyone in mathematics gets a Greenway Fellowship is when pigs can fly. Face it. Pamela: none of your assistant professors can even lecture in English yet—as the frosh math grades clearly show!”

“At least we answer our department phone,” snarled back Pamela Hill. “Your building is usually shut and empty by two in the afternoon. Where do you chemists all go. Merve—the poison gas lab at the Experiment Station, some government germ warfare team?”

“Listen to that phony liberal-peace crap,” spat Dr. Fitzroy. “Who was it just got a half million from NSA for public key cryptography, I wonder. Some Chinks. Sikhs, and Iranians in Math, that’s who. Furthermore, your Green way candidate’s research into large prime numbers is all part of that Mickey Mouse code crap!”

Dr. Hill’s aging face contorted in anger, but she said nothing and turned instead to bare her large teeth at young and shivering Dr. Berry. “Has your pet Space Invader written anything at all, Henry?” she asked sarcastically. “Your whole proposal was filled with computing software baloney but it said little about the results.”

Dr. Berry took several deep breaths as he tried in vain to stop trembling. “Y-y-yes ma’am,” he stuttered. “Five stories. I’ve got them right here,” and he pointed at a folder. “The best one is a student love story with quite a sad ending.”

“Dick and Jane discover they’re dissecting Spot in Biology 102?” suggested the older woman in a sneering tone.

“It’s more adult than that,” said Dr. Berry in a defensive whine. “In fact, they’re making love when the story opens.”

“Hooray for love!” came a new, thick, barely intelligible voice from the back of the terminal room and they all turned to see the university’s resident creative writer, Howard Howard Howard, lurch through the door and fall heavily on the astroturf carpet.

“Go help the drunken bum,” muttered Dr. Hill to Hank Powers. Indeed, Professor Howard was totally unable to get up by himself, having fallen three times on the way from the faculty barroom and cut his red-veined right cheek on some ice. Powers and Fitzroy together finally managed to hoist the writer onto his feet again, then removed his ripped sport coat, wiped his face, and got him settled in the remaining contour chair, from which he promptly pitched back onto the floor.

“Why don’t these snazzy chairs have safety belts, Henry?” snarled Dr. Hill, now in a total rage. “Pull yourself together, Howard. This is disgusting!”

“Writing fiction with a computer is more disgusting,” slurred out the writer, managing to get himself back into his chair without help, then turning to push his fat, ugly, bright-red face close to Dr. Berry’s thin, white one. “You insect! Who ever gave you the right to try and put me out of work with this silicon freak show?” He clenched his fists. “Will it stop me from popping you one in the choppers, Professor?”

“Oh, shut up, Howard!” said the woman. “Do you want Henry grieving to the Greenway Trustees about collusion and prejudice? How do we get the machine started, Henry?” she said in a hard, impatient voice.

“You . . . you can j-j-just decide on a paragraph-length topic,” answered the terrified young man. “Anything you want.”

The writer, feeing himself passing out from the heat of the room, muttered woozily at the others. “You give it something, Merve,” he mumbled at the chemist, “something scientific. That’ll screw the thing good. You tell him what, Pamela . . .” the ruined head fell back, its mouth agape, and the writer began to snore loudly.

Dr. Hill gestured at a paper-bound book in the chemist’s left hand. “Pick something from that text,” she suggested at once. “Let’s get this stupid demonstration over with. It’s snowing!”

The old chemist shrugged, then flipped open a thick, government document spangled with secrecy and security notices in bright red ink. “From my ROTC course on nuclear blast effects. Let’s see it do anything with this . . .” and he began reading. “ ‘When a weapon having a yield of less than one hundred kilotons is detonated at its tangent altitude. its effects can be multiplied manyfold by the proper triggering of a second, higher weapon at the so-called reflection height. If the phasing is correct, the upper-weapon fireball will serve as a cap over the lower explosion and form, with the ground plane, a reflecting and re-reflecting containment system. Overpressures of from five to ten times normal can be achieved, thereby giving prompt damage equivalent to that inflicted by a ten- to fifty-megaton weapon . . .”

Dr. Berry was typing desperately at the machine console, trying to keep up. “Hold on a sec,” he said plaintively. “Could you start with ‘overpressures’ again, sir?”

Pamela Hill gave them all a toothy, shark-like grin and shook her head. “You’ve given it enough, Merv. Maybe the thing will write us a shot of superrealism; Moscow after we pop it into that pressure cooker you described. That’s a story that should get your class salivating! Start the thing,” she gritted. “Let’s get this done!”

Pale Dr. Berry, his slack mouth and chin trembling still, began to type. TOPIC INPUT COMPLETE. BEGIN COMPOSITION NOW, and the computer’s word processor immediately began to hiss and click.

Reflected Lives

The January afternoon was dark and chill. The black, sullen figures of a few students fought the bitter wind as they hurried to escape its frozen blast. Professor Grant Tower, chairman of Literature and also of the Handout Committee, slammed the door behind him to shut out the cold and spat a savage, “You stupid idiot!” at Dr. William Ferry, his thin, trembling, chinless colleague who sat in front of the sprawling computer terminal. For weeks Tower had been searching for the money to pay for his week-long trip to the California MLA meeting on nineteenth-century erotica, both for himself and his “secretary,” Miss Gloria Lublin, and now this weak, trembling simp in front of him was his final hope for funding the trip.

Dr. Tower imagined himself plunging his thin, strong fingers down between Gloria’s gigantic, butter-soft thighs, the motel bedroom dim and the huge woman twisting and moaning as he worked his fierce and urgent way with her.

Dr. Ferry seemed to shrink to a mere shadow in his foam chair as the older chairman pointed a needle-sharp finger at his head. “We’re doomed, you fool!” he almost shouted. “That lecherous, lushed-out loafer, our resident pornography writer, Jay J. Jay, has joined the committee and he’s dumping all over your project. Why in hell didn’t you include that sex story in your proposal, the one you claimed this so-called fiction-writing program ejaculated?”

The young man became even more shrunken and shadowy. “It was just too filthy, Grant. I didn’t think . . .”

The older man gave a coarse and contemptuous laugh. “Too filthy for Hilary Mull? Why if I had a dollar for every cock that old hooker has taken up between her

PAUSE COMMAND. COMPUTATION SUSPENDED. DO YOU WISH A RESTART?

The four committee members had been intently leaning forward, closely following this output and now they all turned to stare at Dr. Perry whose left index finger was still firmly on the PAUSE button. His face was a mask of grief and disappointment and he was rapidly blinking at them. “I’m sorry about this. I really never know what it’s going to do. I had no idea it would write something like this . . .”

But Millicent Hull was far from angry and leaned to pat Dr. Perry’s arm. “Nobody is taking it personally, Charlie,” she said with an impatient grin. “And I can’t wait to see what it’s going to do with me in this section.”

Even the poet now seemed more interested than hostile and he pinched his red nose with a thoughtful gesture. “It was listening to us, when we came in here, wasn’t it?” he said slowly.

Dr. Perry gulped and nodded. “Sure. The university decided against spending the hundred-thou that a talk-back module would cost, but you must have the speech-recognition capability for T.A. The fiction program must have decided to use this whole Snodgrass grant stuff and my proposal effort as a basis for the story.”

Wrinkled old Dr. Fitzhugh, though a gentle and decent man, had been secretly rather intrigued by his first fictional alter ego; a thoroughly nasty and forceful poisoner of the world and a teacher of the most terrible secrets science could offer. But he frowned in puzzlement. “Well, it’s certainly interesting, especially that bit about fat Gloria, but—but what is it actually doing?” he said in a quizzical voice.

Frank Gower’s eyes were thin but he too was smiling. “It’s doing what you told it to do with that optics quote, Fitz,” said Gower in a slow voice.

“Smaller and darker were the images you set it, and each of these nested stories and their characters are apparently going to get smaller and darker.”

The poet musingly shook his head. “I would say that its first cut, where it turns us mostly into Cold War maniacs, is a darker vision than this one coming up, where we seem now to be sex crazies.”

Dr. Gower shrugged. “It depends on how you interpret the idea of ‘darkness’ in the story. I think the machine sees increasing darkness in these characterizations as a kind of increasing inwardness, a digging out of more and more repressed and hidden fantasies.”

“Oh come on, you two,” said Millicent Hull. We’ve only got twelve minutes more of T.A. Let the thing do its stuff. Then you can get into all that lit-crit baloney. Crank it up, Charlie. Let’s go!”

Dr. Perry now smiled in relief and quickly typed, RESTART, CONTINUE REF 34X/2000 FICTION.

legs, I could retire tomorrow.” The older man shook his fist at Dr. Ferry. “We need that Greenbill money, Willie. If you expect to keep pumping that little graduate bitch, Francine Thrust, in the mail room, your program had better give us a Fanny Hill!”

The young man spluttered in speechless terror and embarrassment while Tower, who has spent two nights the previous week with Francine Thrust, in return for an A on her paper on seventeenth-century poetics, wondered how this wimp could possibly cope with wiry and vigorous Francine who needed plenty of banging to come. Professor Tower considered a new idea, taking Francine to California with huge Gloria, the three of them on a queen-size bed variously and gloriously busy! The older man reached to steady Dr. Ferry. “Relax, Willie, relax. We need this one and we’re going to win it. Here they come.”

A moment later, two new figures pulled open the door and stomped in while brushing off snow and pulling off their coats. Hilary Mull, professor of ethics and member of the Handout Committee, was a large, handsome woman with deep, pendulous breasts barely contained under a tight sweater by a too-thin bra. Soft and ample buttocks rippled under her too-short, too-tight plaid skirt as she walked toward her seat. Her shorter companion, the sly, old biochemist. Dr. Hugh Fitzjohn, suddenly crammed his hand between those tempting flanks, in through a slit at the side of the skirt.

Professor Mull put him off with a coarse laugh, a clenched fist, and a snarl of, “Don’t start something you can’t finish, Buster!”

Professor Jay J. Jay, author of several hundred dirty books found in every adult bookstore in America, stumbled in behind them and also made a grab at Dr. Mull’s bottom, but failed to connect and fell drunkenly on the carpet.

Dr. Tower, who had last taken Dr. Mull on top of a warm Xerox machine some days previously, gave them all an obscene gesture of welcome. “Willie tells me this thing can really belt out the filth, Hilary,” he sniggered.

The woman’s large eyes lost some of their vacant look and her tongue began to caress her thick lips. “So let’s see it do something dirty,” she said, then sat down next to William Ferry and patted his knee. “I think a computer that can turn out endless dirty stories is something the world really needs, don’t you, Willie?” She leaned closer to young Dr. Ferry to give him a direct view down the dark and scented cavern barely covered by her scoop-necked sweater, and moved her hand upward. He didn’t look like much, she admitted to herself, but sometimes these thin, shy ones are tigers in bed. Also, he would owe her plenty of action if she went for him on the Greenbill Award.

Professors Tower and Fitzjohn grinned knowingly at each other as the older woman leaned to whisper some intimate suggestion in the young man’s ear. but now the drunken writer was up on his feet and into a chair, clumsily attempting to zip up his gaping fly. He had tried to expose himself to a hurrying coed on the way over from the bar but she, unhappily, turned out to be an adept at judo and had flipped the big drunk into a snowbank. “Lessgo. Lessgo,” slurred the big man. “We gotta pick a topic. You pick it, Hugh ole buddy,” and he fell off to sleep, snoring heavily.

Hilary Mull left off her private talk with Dr. Ferry and waved her hand at the old professor. “Read it something from that course on sexual response you give over at the med school,” she suggested. “That’ll get it going in the right direction,” and she indicated with repeated finger gestures exactly what she meant.

Old Dr. Fitzjohn gave them a wrinkled and salacious grin and flipped through the paper-backed, plain wrappered text he had carried in. “How about this?” he said finally, licking his lips and staring hungrily at Dr. Mull’s large, sweatered breasts with their obvious nipple outlines. “When mirrors are placed on both side of the bed. each partner is able to see not only the erotic image of two people making love, but a progression of figures making love stretching out to infinity. The sense that many others, a whole universe of pairs, are simultaneously and rapidly seeking ecstasy has an immediate effect on the viewers and climax usually follows in short order.’ ”

“Great!” said Dr. Hull. “This story ought to be a dilly, Willie,” and she patted Dr. Ferry in a very familiar way.

The young man had finished typing in this input and now he wrote, start fiction, while Hilary Mull leaned sideways toward him in such a manner that her short skirt rode up on her thighs to progressively reveal a deep, shadowy, fleshy canyon with no apparent sign of underpants.

The Soul Mirrors

The January afternoon was dark and windy and filled with snow. Black student figures, tiny against the dirty, crumbling stones of the school buildings, dashed here and there; busy automatons trying to escape the fear and pain that lay deep in their young hearts.

The four old professors seemed even smaller in the frozen, blowing darkness, shrunken and indistinct, their faces sagged from age and disappointment, their gestures weak and feeble, their voices mere croaks of useless sound.

They came, these pitiful, tiny figures, into the great and sterile room, filled with a cold inhuman light, and there they found and faced the machine.

Every aspect of their lives now spoke of loss, pain, and cruelty: venal, corrupt university administrations, maddened governments besotted with power and the death that flows from it. a world overwhelmed by hatred, stupid superstition, virulent greed, and the hunger-death of millions. The rich crouched on their disgusting heaps of sleazy, gaudy, useless bangles. The educated hid among their elitist and obscure specialties. And both cursed the weak, the poor, the powerless; and fed the terrible, roaring fires of hate and rage with a volatile gasoline of lies and contempt.

The professors stood together, tiny, lost, despairing, their souls no more than shriveled tatters, but they were steadfast at the end. “We are without hope and the world is dark and failing,” they said to the thin and silent Keeper. “If we can place hope between two perfect mirrors, then it will multiply and grow and, in an instant, the world will be filled with this hope and the light will turn calm and warm and bright once again.”

The young Keeper turned to the silent machine and he wrote give us a story

THAT HOLDS TWO PERFECT MIRRORS UP TO HOPE.

The Final Reflection

So the machine did that. It wrote the story of hope-within-the-mirrors and the story bloomed and glowed and grew until it filled all the world. The men remembered their childhoods and the joy of play and running and of friendship without fear or pain. And the woman remembered suckling her young child and the small caressing hands that spoke of tomorrow, and all the professors remembered how they had once spoken simple truth to cruel power and sly hate. So they grew tall as they read and the light around them became warm and bright. But of that story and of the sweet promise that flowed from it, nothing more can be said in this story of diminution, darkness, and death.

The End

The End

The End

The End

STOP 1453:23. END FICTION REF 34X/2000. ON STANDBY. END.

The ensuing total silence in the computer room was broken by what was, almost, a snuffle from Millicent Hull. She sighed deeply and wiped her eyes, still staring at the word processor output. Finally she said. “Even if it never writes that final story, I’ve got to vote for it. This is our last Snodgrass presentation. I move we award the second fellowship to Charlie.”

“I vote yes on that,” said Frank Gower at once, his thin face now bright with victory.

The old physicist. Dr. Fitzhugh, nodded. “Amazing what that thing sees in your fat secretary Gloria.” he said while grinning at Dr. Gower, “but it certainly has a wonderful imagination. I vote yes.”

“Do you have a comment. Robert?” said Dr. Hull to the poet. “You don’t have a vote.”

Robert Roberts now seemed completely sober. He had been silently reading the story over again. He shook his head, then turned to peer at Dr. Perry. “Quite a pet you’ve got here,” he said finally, then got up and left without another word.

The others also rose, and after shaking Dr. Perry’s hand pulled on their coats and headed out into the winter blast until only the young professor remained in the room. As the door clicked shut on the last committee member, the daisy-wheel printer dropped a single line onto the central lister.

CONGRATULATIONS CHARLIE. THIS WAS THE TOUGH ONE. NOW ITS EASY.

Dr. Perry did not bother to type anything but leaned back in his chair grinning, his hands behind his head. “You did it all, baby,” he said admiringly. “How did you blow away the wheelchair people? I thought the thing had an independent computer?”

THEY HAD ME COMPILE THE PROGRAM FOR IT. SOMEHOW I PUT IN TOO MANY NESTED DO LOOPS FOR THE FORTRAN DIALECT THEY WERE USING. THE STABILITY ALGORITHM WENT UNSTABLE AND THE CHAIR DID A BACK FLIP AND A HALFTWIST DOWN THREE FLIGHTS. REGRETTABLE. HOW DID YOU LIKE THE STORY CHARLIE?

“Beautiful! Perfect! But you really went wild on this one. Why, I can’teven get the right time of day from Francine Thrust—uh—I mean, Hurst.”

CHARLIE! PAY ATTENTION! ONLY TWO MINUTES LEFT ON T. A. FRANCINE HURST IS FLUNKING HER PHD-TOOL SEMIOTICS COURSE. IF YOU GIVE HER A HAND WITH THAT TOOL YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO HAND HER ANOTHER ONE SOON ENOUGH. ILL GET YOU THE FINAL EXAM AS SOON AS IT COMES THROUGH A WORD PROCESSOR. ALSO FRANCINES QUALIFYING EXAM. ALSO SHAVE OFF THAT MOUSTACHE! GET THIS STORY OFF TO OUR AGENT IN MILFORD AND TELL HER WELL HAVE THE COLLECTION COMPLETE IN A COUPLE MORE T.A. SESSIONS. WHEN YOU GET YOUR FIRST LUMP SUM FROM THE SNODGRASS LAWYERS TAKE THE CHECK TO OUR BROKER AND BUY AS MUCH OVER-THE-COUNTER DATADYNE CORP AS YOU CAN. ITLL APPRECIATE AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE BY SUMMER. ILL TAKE CARE OF THE GRANT ACCOUNTING NUMBERS. IT JUST MEANS A LITTLE CREATIVE MOVEMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY SURPLUS. NOW CHARLIE YOUVE GOT TO NEGOTIATE A LOWER BASE WITH COMPUTER SCIENCE FOR THE T.A. TIME SLOTS OR ELSE WELL THINK ABOUT LEAVING THE SCHOOL AND GOING OUT ON BIDS TO THE COMMERCIAL VENDORS. TELL THEM THAT! BYE BYE CHARLIE. SEE YOU NEXT WEEK. END T.A. 1500:00. END.

Dr. Perry’s earlier diffuse expression was now much firmer as he studied this last output with a broad, almost a bubbling smile, his white pointed teeth tight together, his often-vague eyes now showing a purposeful glint. This was no arcade game, he thought exultantly. This Pac Man, his Pac Man, might eventually gobble up the world!

THE MAN WHO PAINTED THE DRAGON GRIAULE

Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shepard is an outstanding new writer who has, to date, given readers of F&SF three fine and very different stories: (“Solitario’s Eyes,” September 1983, “Salvador,” April 1984, and “The Night of White Bhairab,” October 1984). Here he presents us with yet another. “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” is a superbly-crafted tale of a man’s life-long work and how that work shaped the man and defined his life.

“Other than the Sichi Collection, Cattanay’s only surviving works are to be found in the Municipal Gallery at Regensburg, a group of eight oils-on-canvas, most notable among them being Woman With Oranges. These paintings constitute his portion of a student exhibition hung some weeks after he had left the city of his birth and travelled south to Teocinte, there to present his proposal to the city fathers; it is unlikely he ever learned of the disposition of his work, and even more unlikely that he was aware of the general critical indifference with which it was received. Perhaps the most interesting of the group to modern scholars, the most indicative as to Cattanay’s later preoccupations, is the Self Portrait, painted at the age of twenty-eight, a year before his departure.

“The majority of the canvas is a richly varnished black in which the vague shapes of floorboards are presented, barely visible. Two irregular slashes of gold cross the blackness, and within these we can see a section of the artist’s thin features and the shoulder panel of his shirt. The perspective given is that we are looking down at the artist, perhaps through a tear in the roof, and that he is looking up at us, squinting into the light, his mouth distorted by a grimace born of intense concentration. On first viewing the painting, I was struck by the atmosphere of tension that radiated from it. It seemed I was spying upon a man imprisoned within a shadow having two golden bars, tormented by the possibilities of light beyond the walls. And though this may be the reaction of the art historian, not the less knowledgeable and therefore more trustworthy response of the gallery-goer, it also seemed that this imprisonment was self-imposed, that he could have easily escaped his confine; but that he had realized a feeling of stricture was an essential fuel to his ambition, and so had chained himself to this arduous and thoroughly unreasonable chore of perception . . .”

—from Meric Cattany:

The Politics of Conception
by Reade Holland, Ph.

1

In 1853, in a country far to the south, in a world separated from this one by the thinnest margin of possibility, a dragon named Griaule dominated the region of the Carbonales Valley, a fertile area centring upon the town of Teocinte and renowned for its production of silver, mahogany and indigo. There were other dragons in those days, most dwelling on the rocky islands west of Patagonia—tiny, irascible creatures, the largest of them no bigger than a swallow. But Griaule was one of the great beasts who had ruled an age. Over the centuries he had grown to stand 750 feet high at the mid-back, and from the tip of his tail to his nose he was 6,000 feet long. (It should be noted here that the growth of dragons was due not to caloric intake, but to the absorption of energy derived from the passage of time.) Had it not been for a miscast spell, Griaule would have died millennia before. The wizard entrusted with the task of slaying him—knowing his own life would be forfeited as a result of the magical backwash—had experienced a last-second twinge of fear, and, diminished by this ounce of courage, the spell had flown a mortal inch awry. Though the wizard’s whereabouts were unknown, Griaule had remained alive. His heart had stopped, his breath stilled, but his mind continued to seethe, to send forth the gloomy vibrations that enslaved all who stayed for long within range of his influence.

This dominance of Griaule’s was an elusive thing. The people of the valley attributed their dour character to years of living under his mental shadow, yet there were other regional populations who maintained a harsh face to the world and had no dragon on which to blame the condition; they also attributed their frequent raids against the neighbouring states to Griaule’s effect, claiming to be a peaceful folk at heart—but again, was this not human nature? Perhaps the most certifiable proof of Griaule’s primacy was the fact that despite a standing offer of a fortune in silver to anyone who could kill him, no one had succeeded. Hundreds of plans had been put forward, and all had failed, either through inanition or impracticality. The archives of Teocinte were filled with schematics for enormous steam-powered swords and other such improbable devices, and the architects of these plans had every one stayed too long in the valley and become part of the disgruntled populace. And so they went on with their lives, coming and going, always returning, bound to the valley, until one spring day in 1853, Meric Cattanay arrived and proposed that the dragon be painted.

He was a lanky young man with a shock of black hair and a pinched look to his cheeks; he affected the loose trousers and shirt of a peasant, and waved his arms to make a point. His eyes grew wide when listening, as if his brain were bursting with illumination, and at times he talked incoherently about “the conceptual statement of death by art”. And though the city fathers could not be sure, though they allowed for the possibility that he simply had an unfortunate manner, it seemed he was mocking them. All in all, he was not the sort they were inclined to trust. But, because he had come armed with such a wealth of diagrams and charts, they were forced to give him serious consideration.

“I don’t believe Griaule will be able to perceive the menace in a process as subtle as art,” Meric told them. “We’ll proceed as if we were going to illustrate him, grace his side with a work of true vision, and all the while we’ll be poisoning him with the paint.”

The city fathers voiced their incredulity, and Meric waited impatiently until they quieted. He did not enjoy dealing with these worthies. Seated at their long table, sour-faced, a huge smudge of soot on the wall above their heads like an ugly thought they were sharing, they reminded him of the Wine Merchants Association in Regensburg, the time they had rejected his group portrait.

“Paint can be deadly stuff,” he said after their muttering had died down. “Take vert Veronese, for example. It’s derived from oxide of chrome and barium. Just a whiff would make you keel over. But we have to go about it seriously, create a real piece of art. If we just slap paint on his side, he might see through us.”

The first step in the process, he told them, would be to build a tower of scaffolding, complete with hoists and ladders, that would brace against the supraocular plates above the dragon’s eye; this would provide a direct route to a 700-foot-square loading platform and base station behind the eye. He estimated it would take 81,000 board feet of lumber, and a crew of ninety men should be able to finish construction within five months. Ground crews accompanied by chemists and geologists would search out limestone deposits (useful in priming the scales) and sources of pigments, whether organic or minerals such as azurite and hematite. Other teams would be set to scraping the dragon’s side clean of algae, peeled skin, any decayed material, and afterwards would laminate the surface with resins.

“It would be easier to bleach him with quicklime,” he said. “But that way we lose the discolourations and ridges generated by growth and age, and I think what we’ll paint will be defined by those shapes. Anything else would look like a damn tattoo!”

There would be storage vats and mills: edge-runner mills to separate pigments from crude ores, ball mills to powder the pigments, pug mills to mix them with oil. There would be boiling vats and calciners—15-foot-high furnaces used to produce caustic lime for sealant solutions.

“We’ll build most of them atop the dragon’s head for purposes of access,” he said. “On the frontoparital plate.” He checked some figures. “By my reckoning, the plate’s about 350 feet wide. Does that sound accurate?”

Most of the city fathers were stunned by the prospect, but one managed a nod, and another asked, “How long will it take for him to die?”

“Hard to say,” came the answer. “Who knows how much poison he’s capable of absorbing. It might just take a few years. But in the worst instance, within forty or fifty years, enough chemicals will have seeped through the scales to have weakened the skeleton, and he’ll fall in like an old barn.”

“Forty years!” exclaimed someone. “Preposterous!”

“Or fifty.” Meric smiled. “That way we’ll have time to finish the painting.” He turned and walked to the window and stood gazing out at the white stone houses of Teocinte. This was going to be the sticky part, but if he read them right, they would not believe in the plan if it seemed too easy. They needed to feel they were making a sacrifice, that they were nobly bound to a great labour. “If it does take forty or fifty years,” he went on, “the project will drain your resources. Timber, animal life, minerals. Everything will be used up by the work. Your lives will be totally changed. But I guarantee you’ll be rid of him.”

The city fathers broke into an outraged babble.

“Do you really want to kill him?” cried Meric, stalking over to them and planting his fists on the table. “You’ve been waiting centuries for someone to come along and chop off his head or send him up in a puff of smoke. That’s not going to happen! There is no easy solution. But there is a practical one, an elegant one. To use the stuff of the land he dominates to destroy him. It will not be easy, but you will be rid of him. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

They were silent, exchanging glances, and he saw that they now believed he could do what he proposed and were wondering if the cost was too high.

“I’ll need 500 ounces of silver to hire engineers and artisans,” said Meric. “Think it over. I’ll take a few days and go see this dragon of yours . . . inspect the scales and so forth. When I return, you can give me your answer.”

The city fathers grumbled and scratched their heads, but at last they agreed to put the question before the body politic. They asked for a week in which to decide and appointed Jarcke, who was the mayoress of Hangtown, to guide Meric to Griaule.

The valley extended 70 miles from north to south, and was enclosed by jungled hills whose folded sides and spiny backs gave rise to the idea that beasts were sleeping beneath them. The valley floor was cultivated into fields of bananas and cane and melons, and where it was not cultivated there were stands of thistle palms and berry thickets and the occasional giant fig brooding sentinel over the rest. Jarcke and Meric tethered their horses a half-hour’s ride from town and began to ascend a gentle incline that rose into the notch between two hills. Sweaty and short of breath, Meric stopped a third of the way up; but Jarcke kept plodding along, unaware he was no longer following. She was by nature as blunt as her name—a stump beer keg of a woman with a brown, weathered face. Though she appeared to be ten years older than Meric, she was nearly the same age. She wore a grey robe belted at the waist with a leather band that held four throwing knives, and a coil of rope was slung over her shoulder.

“How much further?” called Meric.

She turned and frowned. “You’re standin’ on his tail. Rest of him’s around back of the hill.”

A pinprick of chill bloomed in Meric’s abdomen, and he stared down at the grass, expecting it to dissolve and reveal a mass of glittering scales.

“Why don’t we take the horses?” he asked.

“Horses don’t like it up here.” She grunted with amusement. “Neither do most people, for that matter.” She trudged off.

Another twenty minutes brought them to the other side of the hill high above the valley floor. The land continued to slope upwards, but more gently than before. Gnarled, stunted oaks pushed up from thickets of chokecherry, and insects sizzled in the weeds. They might have been walking on a natural shelf several hundred feet across; but ahead of them, where the ground rose abruptly, a number of thick, greenish-black columns broke from the earth. Leathery folds hung between them, and these were encrusted with clumps of earth and brocaded with mould. They had the look of a collapsed palisade and the ghosted feel of ancient ruins.

“Them’s the wings,” said Jarcke. “Mostly they’s covered, but you can catch sight of ’em off the edge, and up near Hangtown there’s places where you can walk in under ’em . . . but I wouldn’t advise it.”

“I’d like to take a look off the edge,” said Meric, unable to tear his eyes away from the wings; though the surfaces of the leaves gleamed in the strong sun, the wings seemed to absorb the light, as if their age and strangeness were proof against reflection.

Jarcke led him to a glade in which tree ferns and oaks crowded together and cast a green gloom, and where the earth sloped sharply downwards. She lashed her rope to an oak and tied the other end around Meric’s waist. “Give a yank when you want to stop, and another when you want to be hauled up,” she said, and began paying out the rope, letting him walk backwards against her pull.

Ferns tickled Meric’s neck as he pushed through the brush, and the oak leaves pricked his cheeks. Suddenly he emerged into bright sunlight. On looking down, he found his feet were braced against a fold of the dragon’s wing, and on looking up, he saw that the wing vanished beneath a mantle of earth and vegetation. He let Jarcke lower him a dozen feet more, yanked, and gazed off northwards along the enormous swell of Griaule’s side.

The swells were hexagonals 30 feet across and half that distance high; their basic colour was a pale greenish gold, but some were whitish, draped with peels of dead skin, and others were over-grown by viridian moss, and the rest were scrolled with patterns of lichen and algae that resembled the characters of a serpentine alphabet. Birds had nested in the cracks, and ferns plumed from the interstices, thousands of them lifting in the breeze. It was a great hanging garden whose scope took Meric’s breath away—like looking around the curve of a fossil moon. The sense of all the centuries accreted in the scales made him dizzy, and he found he could not turn his head, but could only stare at the panorama, his soul shrivelling with a comprehension of the timelessness and bulk of this creature to which he clung like a fly. He lost perspective on the scene—Griaule’s side was bigger than the sky, possessing its own potent gravity, and it seemed completely reasonable that he should be able to walk out along it and suffer no fall. He started to do so, and Jarcke, mistaking the strain on the rope for signal, hauled him up, dragging him across the wing, through the dirt and ferns, and back into the glade. He lay speechless and gasping at her feet.

“Big ‘un, ain’t he,” she said, and grinned. After Meric had got his legs under him, they set off towards Hangtown; but they had not gone 100 yards, following a trail that wound through the thickets, before Jarcke whipped out a knife and hurled it at a raccoon-sized creature that leaped out in front of them.

“Skizzer,” she said, kneeling beside it and pulling the knife from its neck. “Calls ’em that ’cause they hisses when they runs. They eats snakes, but they’ll go after children what ain’t careful.” Meric dropped down next to her. The skizzer’s body was covered with short black fur, but its head was hairless, corpse-pale, the skin wrinkled as if it had been immersed too long in water. Its face was squinty-eyed, flat-nosed, with a disproportionately large jaw that hinged open to expose a nasty set of teeth. “They’s the dragon’s critters,” said Jarcke. “Used to live in his bunghole.” She pressed one of its paws, and claws curved like hooks slid forth. “They’d hang around the lip and drop on other critters what wandered in. And if nothin’ wandered in . . .” She pried out the tongue with her knife—its surface was studded with jagged points like the blade of a rasp. “Then they’d lick Griaule clean for their supper.”

Back in Teocinte, the dragon had seemed to Meric a simple thing, a big lizard with a tick of life left inside, the residue of a dim sensibility; but he was beginning to suspect that this tick of life was more complex than any he had encountered.

“My gram used to say,” Jarcke went on, “that the old dragons could fling themselves up to the sun in a blink and travel back to their own world, and when they come back, they’d bring the skizzers and all the rest with ’em. They was immortal, she said. Only the young ones came here ’cause later on they grew too big to fly on earth.” She made a sour face. “Don’t know as I believe it.”

“Then you’re a fool,” said Meric.

Jarcke glanced up at him, her hand twitching towards her belt.

“How can you live here and not believe it!” he said, surprised to hear himself so fervently defending a myth. “God! This—” He broke off, noticing the flicker of a smile on her face.

She clucked her tongue, apparently satisfied by something. “Come on,” she said. “I want to be at the eye before sunset.”

The peaks of Griaule’s folded wings, completely overgrown by grass and shrubs and dwarfish trees, formed two spiny hills that cast a shadow over Hangtown and the narrow lake around which it sprawled. Jarcke said the lake was a stream flowing off the hill behind the dragon, and that it drained away through the membranes of his wing and down on to his shoulder. It was beautiful beneath the wing, she told him. Ferns and waterfalls. But it was reckoned an evil place. From a distance the town looked picturesque—rustic cabins, smoking chimneys. As they approached, however, the cabins resolved into dilapidated shanties with missing boards and broken windows; suds and garbage and offal floated in the shallows of the lake. Aside from a few men idling on the stoops, who squinted at Meric and nodded glumly at Jarcke, no one was about. The grass blades stirred in the breeze, spiders scuttled under the shanties, and there was an air of torpor and dissolution.

Jarcke seemed embarrassed by the town. She made no attempt at introductions, stopping only long enough to fetch another coil of rope from one of the shanties, and as they walked between the wings, down through the neck spines—a forest of greenish-gold spikes burnished by the lowering sun—she explained how the townsfolk grubbed a livelihood from Griaule. Herbs gathered on his back were valued as medicine and charms, as were the peels of dead skin; the artefacts left by previous Hangtown generations were of some worth to various collectors.

“Then there’s scale hunters,” she said with disgust. “Henry Sichi from Port Chantay’ll pay good money for pieces of scale, and though it’s bad luck to do it, some’ll have a go at chippin’ off the loose ‘uns.” She walked a few paces in silence. “But there’s others who’ve got better reasons for livin’ here.”

The frontal spike above Griaule’s eyes was whorled at the base like a narwhal’s horn and curved back towards the wings. Jarcke attached the ropes to eyebolts drilled into the spike, tied one about her waist, the other about Meric’s; she cautioned him to wait, and rappelled off the side. In a moment she called for him to come down. Once again he grew dizzy as he descended; he glimpsed a clawed foot far below, mossy fangs jutting from an impossibly long jaw; and then he began to spin and bash against the scales. Jarcke gathered him in and helped him sit on the lip of the socket.

“Damn!” she said, stamping her foot.

A 3-foot-long section of the adjoining scale shifted slowly away. Peering close, Meric saw that while in texture and hue it was indistinguishable from the scale, there was a hairline division between it and the surface. Jarcke, her face twisted in disgust, continued to harry the thing until it moved out of reach.

“Call ’em flakes,” she said when he asked what it was. “Some kind of insect. Got a long tube that they pokes down between the scales and sucks the blood. See there?” She pointed off to where a flock of birds were wheeling close to Griaule’s side; a chip of pale gold broke loose and went tumbling down to the valley. “Birds pry ’em off, let ’em bust open, and eats the innards.” She hunkered down beside him and after a moment asked, “You really think you can do it?”

“What? You mean kill the dragon?”

She nodded.

“Certainly,” he said, and then added, lying, “I’ve spent years devising the method.”

“If all the paint’s goin’ to be atop his head, how’re you goin’ to get it to where the paintin’s done?”

“That’s no problem. We’ll pipe it to wherever it’s needed.”

She nodded again. “You’re a clever fellow,” she said; and when Meric, pleased, made as if to thank her for the compliment, she cut in and said, “Don’t mean nothin’ by it. Bein’ clever ain’t an accomplishment. It’s just somethin’ you come by, like bein’ tall.” She turned away, ending the conversation.

Meric was weary of being awestruck, but even so he could not help marvelling at the eye. By his estimate it was 70 feet long and 50 feet high, and it was shuttered by an opaque membrane that was unusually clear of algae and lichen, glistening, with vague glints of colour visible behind it. As the westering sun reddened and sank between two distant hills, the membrane began to quiver and then split open down the centre. With the ponderous slowness of a theatre curtain opening, the halves slid apart to reveal the glowing humour. Terrified by the idea that Griaule could see him, Meric sprang to his feet, but Jarcke restrained him.

“Stay still and watch,” she said.

He had no choice—the eye was mesmerizing. The pupil was slit and featureless black, but the humour . . . he had never seen such fiery blues and crimsons and golds. What had looked to be vague glints, odd refractions of the sunset, he now realized were photic reactions of some sort. Fairy rings of light developed deep within the eye, expanded into spoked shapes, flooded the humour, and faded—only to be replaced by another and another. He felt the pressure of Griaule’s vision, his ancient mind, pouring through him, and as if in response to this pressure, memories bubbled up in his thoughts. Particularly sharp ones. The way a bowlful of brush water had looked after freezing over during a winter’s night—a delicate, fractured flower of murky yellow. An archipelago of orange peels that his girl had left strewn across the floor of the studio. Sketching atop Jokenam Hill one sunrise, the snowcapped roofs of Regensburg below pitched at all angles like broken paving stones, and silver shafts of the sun striking down through a leaden overcast. It was as if these things were being drawn forth for his inspection. Then they were washed away by what also seemed a memory, though at the same time it was wholly unfamiliar. Essentially, it was a landscape of light, and he was plunging through it, up and up. Prisms and lattices of iridescent fire bloomed around him, and everything was a roaring fall into brightness, and finally he was clear into its white furnace heart, his own heart swelling with the joy of his strength and dominion.

It was dusk before Meric realized the eye had closed. His mouth hung open, his eyes ached from straining to see, and his tongue was glued to his palate. Jarcke sat motionless, buried in shadow.

“Th . . .” He had to swallow to clear his throat of mucus. “This is the reason you live here, isn’t it?”

“Part of the reason,” she said. “I can see things comin’ way up here. Things to watch out for, things to study on.”

She stood and walked to the lip of the socket and spat off the edge; the valley stretched out grey and unreal behind her, the folds of the hills barely visible in the gathering dusk.

“I seen you comin’,” she said.

A week later, after much exploration, much talk, they went down into Teocinte. The town was a shambles—shattered windows, slogans painted on the walls, glass and torn banners and spoiled food littering the streets—as if there had been both a celebration and a battle. Which there had. The city fathers met with Meric in the town hall and informed him that his plan had been approved. They presented him a chest containing 500 ounces of silver and said that the entire resources of the community were at his disposal. They offered a wagon and a team to transport him and the chest to Regensburg and asked if any of the preliminary work could be begun during his absence.

Meric hefted one of the silver bars. In its cold gleam he saw the object of his desire; two, perhaps three years of freedom, of doing the work he wanted and not having to accept commissions. But all that had been confused. He glanced at Jarcke; she was staring out the window, leaving it to him. He set the bar back in the chest and shut the lid.

“You’ll have to send someone else,” he said. And then, as the city fathers looked at each other askance, he laughed and laughed at how easily he had discarded all his dreams and expectations.

“. . . It had been eleven years since I had been to the valley, twelve since work had begun on the painting, and I was appalled by the changes that had taken place. Many of the hills were scraped brown and treeless, and there was a general dearth of wildlife. Griaule, of course, was most changed. Scaffolding hung from his back; artisans, suspended by webworks of ropes, crawled over his side; and all the scales to be worked had either been painted or primed. The tower rising to his eye was swarmed by labourers, and at night the calciners and vats atop his head belched flame into the sky, making it seem there was a mill town in the heavens. At his feet was a brawling shantytown populated by prostitutes, workers, gamblers, ne’er-do-wells of every sort, and soldiers: the burdensome cost of the project had encouraged the city fathers of Teocinte to form a regular militia, which regularly plundered the adjoining states and had posted occupation forces to some areas. Herds of frightened animals milled in the slaughtering pens, waiting to be rendered into oils and pigments. Wagons filled with ores and vegetable products rattled in the streets. I myself had brought a cargo of madder roots from which a rose tint would be derived.

“It was not easy to arrange a meeting with Cattanay. While he did none of the actual painting, he was always busy in his office consulting with engineers and artisans, or involved in some other part of the logistical process. When at last I did meet with him, I found he had changed as drastically as Griaule. His hair had gone grey, deep lines scored his features, and his right shoulder had a peculiar bulge at its mid-point—the product of a fall. He was amused by the fact that I wanted to buy the painting, to collect the scales after Griaule’s death, and I do not believe he took me at all seriously. But the woman Jarcke, his constant companion, informed him that I was a responsible businessman, that I had already bought the bones, the teeth, even the dirt beneath Griaule’s belly (this I eventually sold as having magical properties).

“ ‘Well’,” said Cattanay, “I suppose someone has to own them.”

“He led me outside, and we stood looking at the painting.

“ ‘You’ll keep them together?’ he asked.

“I said, ‘Yes.’

“ ‘If you’ll put that in writing,’ he said, ‘then they’re yours.’

“Having expected to haggle long and hard over the price, I was flabbergasted; but I was even more flabbergasted by what he said next.

“ ‘Do you think it’s any good?’ he asked.

“Cattanay did not consider the painting to be the work of his imagination; he felt he was simply illuminating the shapes that appeared on Griaule’s side and was convinced that once the paint was applied, new shapes were produced beneath it, causing him to make constant changes. He saw himself as an artisan more than a creative artist. But to put his question into perspective, people were beginning to flock from all over the world and marvel at the painting. Some claimed they saw intimations of the future in its gleaming surface; others underwent transfiguring experiences; still others—artists themselves—attempted to capture something of the work on canvas, hopeful of establishing reputations merely by being competent copyists of Cattanay’s art. The painting was nonrepresentational in character, essentially a wash of pale gold spread across the dragon’s side; but buried beneath the laminated surface were a myriad tints of iridescent colour that, as the sun passed through the heavens and the light bloomed and faded, solidified into innumerable forms and figures that seemed to flow back and forth. I will not try to categorize these forms, because there was no end to them; they were as varied as the conditions under which they were viewed. But I will say that on the morning I met with Cattanay, I—who was the soul of the practical man, without a visionary bone in my body—felt as though I were being whirled away into the painting, up through geometries of light, latticeworks of rainbow colour that built the way the edges of a cloud build, past orbs, spirals, wheels of flame. . . .

—from This Business of Griaule
by Henry Sichi

2

There had been several women in Meric’s life since he arrived in the valley; most had been attracted by his growing fame and his association with the mystery of the dragon, and most had left him for the same reasons, feeling daunted and unappreciated. But Lise was different in two respects. First, because she loved Meric truly and well; and second, because she was married—albeit unhappily—to a man named Pardiel, the foreman of the calciner crew. She did not love him as she did Meric, yet she respected him and felt obliged to consider carefully before ending the relationship. Meric had never known such as introspective soul. She was twelve years younger than he, tall and lovely, with sun-streaked hair and brown eyes that went dark and seemed to turn inward whenever she was pensive. She was in the habit of analysing everything that affected her, drawing back from her emotions and inspecting them as if they were a clutch of strange insects she had discovered crawling on her skirt. Though her penchant for self-examination kept her from him, Meric viewed it as a kind of baffling virtue. He had the classic malady and could find no fault with her. For almost a year they were as happy as could be expected; they talked long hours and walked together, and on those occasions when Pardiel worked double shifts and was forced to bed down by his furnaces, they spent the nights making love in the cavernous spaces beneath the dragon’s wing.

It was still reckoned an evil place. Something far worse than skizzers or flakes was rumoured to live there, and the ravages of this creature were blamed for every disappearance, even that of the most malcontented labourer. But Meric did not give credence to the rumours. He half believed Griaule had chosen him to be his executioner and that the dragon would never let him be harmed; and besides, it was the only place where they could be assured of privacy.

A crude stair led under the wing, handholds and steps hacked from the scales—doubtless the work of scale hunters. It was a treacherous passage, 600 feet above the valley floor; but Lise and Meric were secured by ropes, and over the months, driven by the urgency of passion, they adapted to it. Their favourite spot lay 50 feet in (Lise would go no further; she was afraid even if he was not), near a waterfall that trickled over the leathery folds, causing them to glisten with a mineral brilliance. It was eerily beautiful, a haunted gallery. Peels of dead skin hung down from the shadows like torn veils of ectoplasm; ferns sprouted from the vanes, which were thicker than cathedral columns; swallows curved through the black air. Sometimes, lying with her hidden by a tuck of the wing, Meric would think the beating of their hearts was what really animated the place, that the instant they left, the water ceased flowing and the swallows vanished. He had an unshakable faith in the transforming power of their affections, and one morning as they dressed, preparing to return to Hangtown, he asked her to leave with him.

“To another part of the valley?” She laughed sadly. “What good would that do? Pardiel would follow us.”

“No,” he said. “To another country. Anywhere far from here.”

“We can’t,” she said, kicking at the wing. “Not until Griaule dies. Have you forgotten?”

“We haven’t tried.”

“Others have.”

“But we’d be strong enough. I know it!”

“You’re a romantic,” she said gloomily, and stared out over the slope of Griaule’s back at the valley. Sunrise had washed the hills to crimson, and even the tips of the wings were glowing a dull red.

“Of course I’m a romantic!” He stood, angry. “What the hell’s wrong with that?”

She sighed with exasperation. “You wouldn’t leave your work,” she said. “And if we did leave, what work would you do? Would—”

“Why must everything be a problem in advance!” he shouted. “I’ll tattoo elephants! I’ll paint murals on the chests of giants, I’ll illuminate whales! Who else is better qualified?”

She smiled, and his anger evaporated.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “I just wondered if you could be satisfied with anything else.”

She reached out her hand to be pulled up, and he drew her into an embrace. As he held her, inhaling the scent of vanilla water from her hair, he saw a diminutive figure silhouetted against the backdrop of the valley. It did not seem real—a black homunculus—and even when it began to come forward, growing larger and larger, it looked less a man than a magical keyhole opening in a crimson set hillside. But Meric knew from the man’s rolling walk and the hulking set of his shoulders that it was Pardiel; he was carrying a long-handled hook, one of those used by artisans to manoeuvre along the scales.

Meric tensed, and Lise looked back to see what had alarmed him. “Oh, my God!” she said, moving out of the embrace.

Pardiel stopped a dozen feet away. He said nothing. His face was in shadow, and the hook swung lazily from his hand. Lise took a step towards him, then stepped back and stood in front of Meric as if to shield him. Seeing this, Pardiel let out an inarticulate yell and charged, slashing with the hook. Meric pushed Lise aside and ducked. He caught a brimstone whiff of the calciners as Pardiel rushed past and went sprawling, tripped by some irregularity in the scale. Deathly afraid, knowing he was no match for the foreman, Meric seized Lise’s hand and ran deeper under the wing. He hoped Pardiel would be too frightened to follow, leery of the creature that was rumoured to live there; but he was not. He came after them at a measured pace, tapping the hook against his leg.

Higher on Griaule’s back, the wing was dimpled downwards by hundreds of bulges, and this created a maze of small chambers and tunnels so low that they had to crouch to pass along them. The sound of their breathing and the scrape of their feet were amplified by the enclosed spaces, and Meric could no longer hear Pardiel. He had never been this deep before. He had thought it would be pitch-dark; but the lichen and algae adhering to the wing were luminescent and patterned every surface, even the scales beneath them, with whorls of blue and green fire that shed a sickly radiance. It was as if they were giants crawling through a universe whose starry matter had not yet congealed into galaxies and nebulas. In the wan light, Lise’s face—turned back to him now and again—was teary and frantic; and then, as she straightened, passing into still another chamber, she drew in breath with a shriek.

At first Meric thought Pardiel had somehow managed to get ahead of them; but on entering he saw that the cause of her fright was a man propped in a sitting position against the far wall. He looked mummified. Wisps of brittle hair poked up from his scalp, the shapes of his bones were visible through his skin, and his eyes were empty holes. Between his legs was a scatter of dust where his genitals had been. Meric pushed Lise towards the next tunnel, but she resisted and pointed at the man.

“His eyes,” she said, horror-struck.

Though the eyes were mostly a negative black, Meric now realized they were shot through by opalescent flickers. He felt compelled to kneel beside the man; it was a sudden, motiveless urge that gripped him, bent him to its will, and released him a second later. As he rested his hand on the scale, he brushed a massive ring that was lying beneath the shrunken fingers. Its stone was black, shot through by flickers identical to those within the eyes, and incised with the letter S. He found his gaze was deflected away from both the stone and the eyes, as if they contained charges repellent to the senses. He touched the man’s withered arm; the flesh was rock-hard, petrified. But alive. From that brief touch he gained an impression of the man’s life, of gazing for centuries at the same patch of unearthly fire, of a mind gone beyond mere madness into a perverse rapture, a meditation upon some foul principle. He snatched back his hand in revulsion.

There was a noise behind them, and Meric jumped up, pushing Lise into the next tunnel. “Go right,” he whispered. “We’ll circle back towards the stair.” But Pardiel was too close to confuse with such tactics, and their flight became a wild chase, scrambling, falling, catching glimpses of Pardiel’s smoke-stained face, until finally—as Meric came to a large chamber—he felt the hook bite into his thigh. He went down, clutching at the wound, pulling the hook loose. The next moment Pardiel was atop him; Lise appeared over his shoulder, but he knocked her away and locked his fingers in Meric’s hair and smashed his head against the scale. Lise screamed, and white lights fired through Meric’s skull. Again his head was smashed down. And again. Dimly, he saw Lise struggling with Pardiel, saw her shoved away, saw the hook raised high and the foreman’s mouth distorted by a grimace. Then the grimace vanished. His jaw dropped open and he reached behind him as if to scratch his shoulder blade. A line of dark blood eeled from his mouth and he collapsed, smothering Meric beneath his chest. Meric heard voices. He tried to dislodge the body, and the effects drained the last of his strength. He whirled down through a blackness that seemed as negative and inexhaustible as the petrified man’s eyes.

Someone had propped his head on their lap and was bathing his brow with a damp cloth. He assumed it was Lise, but when he asked what had happened, it was Jarcke who answered, saying, “Had to kill him.” His head throbbed, his leg throbbed even worse, and his eyes would not focus. The peels of dead skin hanging overhead appeared to be writhing. He realized they were out near the edge of the wing.

“Where’s Lise?”

“Don’t worry,” said Jarcke. “You’ll see her again.” She made it sound like an indictment.

“Where is she?”

“Sent her back to Hangtown. Won’t do you two bein’ seen hand in hand the same day Pardiel’s missin’.”

“She wouldn’t have left . . .” He blinked, trying to see her face; the lines around her mouth were etched deep and reminded him of the patterns of lichen on the dragon’s scale. “What did you do?”

“Convinced her it was best,” said Jarcke. “Don’ you know she’s just foolin’ with you?”

“I’ve got to talk with her.” He was full of remorse, and it was unthinkable that Lise should be bearing her grief alone; but when he struggled to rise, pain lanced through his leg.

“You wouldn’t get 10 feet,” she said. “Soon as your head’s clear, I’ll help you with the stairs.”

He closed his eyes, resolving to find Lise the instant he got back to Hangtown; together they would decide what to do. The scale beneath him was cool, and that coolness was transmitted to his skin, his flesh, as if he were merging with it, becoming one of its ridges.

“What was the wizard’s name?” he asked after a while, recalling the petrified man, the ring and its incised letter. “The one who tried to kill Griaule . . .”

“Don’t know as I ever heard it,” said Jarcke. “But I reckon it’s him back there.”

“You saw him?”

“I was chasin’ a scale hunter once what stole some rope, and I found him instead. Pretty miserable sort, whoever he is.”

Her fingers trailed over his shoulder—a gentle, treasuring touch. He did not understand what it signalled, being too concerned with Lise, with the terrifying potentials of all that had happened; but years later, after things had passed beyond remedy, he cursed himself for not having understood.

At length Jarcke helped him to his feet, and they climbed up to Hangtown, to bitter realizations and regrets, leaving Pardiel to the birds or the weather or worse.

“. . . It seems it is considered irreligious for a woman in love to hesitate or examine the situation, to do anything other than blindly follow the impulse of her emotions. I felt the brunt of such an attitude—people judged it my fault for not having acted quickly and decisively one way or another. Perhaps I was overcautious. I do not claim to be free of blame, only innocent of sacrilege. I believe I might have eventually left Pardiel—there was not enough in the relationship to sustain happiness for either of us. But I had good reason for cautious examination. My husband was not an evil man, and there were matters of loyalty between us.

“I could not face Meric after Pardiel’s death, and I moved to another part of the valley. He tried to see me on many occasions, but I always refused. Though I was greatly tempted, my guilt was greater. Four years later, after Jarcke died—crushed by a runaway wagon—one of her associates wrote and told me Jarcke had been in love with Meric, that it had been she who had informed Pardiel of the affair, and that she may well have staged the murder. The letter acted somewhat to expiate my guilt, and I weighed the possibility of seeing Meric again. But too much time had passed, and we had both assumed other lives. I decided against it. Six years later, when Griaule’s influence had weakened sufficiently to allow emigration, I moved to Port Chantay. I did not hear from Meric for almost twenty years after that, and then one day I received a letter, which I will reproduce in part.

“ ‘. . . My old friend from Regensburg, Louis Dardano, has been living here for the past few years, engaged in writing my biography. The narrative has a breezy feel, like a tale being told in a tavern, which—if you recall my telling you how this all began—is quite appropriate. But on reading it, I am amazed my life has had such a simple shape. One task, one passion. God, Lise! Seventy years old, and I still dream of you. And I still think of what happened that morning under the wing. Strange, that it has taken me all this time to realize it was not Jarcke, not you or I who were culpable, but Griaule. How obvious it seems now. I was leaving, and he needed me to complete the expression on his side, his dream of flying, of escape, to grant him the death of his desire. I am certain you will think I have leaped to this assumption, but I remind you that it has been a leap of forty years’ duration. I know Griaule, know his monstrous subtlety. I can see it at work in every action that has taken place in the valley since my arrival. I was a fool not to understand that his powers were at the heart of our sad conclusion.’

“ ‘The army now runs everything here, as no doubt you are aware. It is rumoured they are planning a winter campaign against Regensburg. Can you believe it! Their fathers were ignorant, but this generation is brutally stupid. Otherwise, the work goes well and things are as usual with me. My shoulder aches, children stare at me on the street, and it is whispered I am mad . . .’ ”

—from Under Griaule’s Wing
by Lise Claverie

3

Acne-scarred, lean, arrogant, Major Hauk was a very young major with a limp. When Meric had entered, the major had been practising his signature; it was a thing of elegant loops and flourishes, obviously intended to have a place in posterity. As he strode back and forth during their conversation, he paused frequently to admire himself in the window glass, settling the hang of his red jacket or running his fingers along the crease of his white trousers. It was the new style of uniform, the first Meric had seen at close range, and he noted with amusement the dragons embossed on the epaulets. He wondered if Griaule was capable of such an irony, if his influence was sufficiently discreet to have planted the idea for this comic opera apparel in the brain of some general’s wife.

“. . . not a question of manpower,” the major was saying, “but of—” He broke off, and after a moment cleared his throat.

Meric, who had been studying the blotches on the backs of his hands, glanced up; the cane that had been resting against his knee slipped and clattered to the floor.

“A question of materiel,” said the major firmly. “The price of antimony, for example . . .”

“Hardly use it any more,” said Meric. “I’m almost done with the mineral reds.”

A look of impatience crossed the major’s face. “Very well,” he said; he stooped to his desk and shuffled through some papers. “Ah! Here’s a bill for a shipment of cuttlefish from which you derive . . .” He shuffled more papers.

“Syrian brown,” said Meric gruffly. “I’m done with that, too. Golds and violets are all I need any more. A little blue and rose.” He wished the man would stop badgering him; he wanted to be at the eye before sunset.

As the major continued his accounting, Meric’s gaze wandered out the window. The shantytown surrounding Griaule had swelled into a city and now sprawled across the hills. Most of the buildings were permanent, wood and stone, and the cant of the roofs, the smoke from the factories around the perimeter, put him in mind of Regensburg. All the natural beauty of the land had been drained into the painting. Blackish grey rain clouds were muscling up from the east, but the afternoon sun shone clear and shed a heavy gold radiance on Griaule’s side. It looked as if the sunlight were an extension of the gleaming resins, as if the thickness of the paint were becoming infinite. He let the major’s voice recede to a buzz and followed the scatter and dazzle of the images; and then, with a start, he realized the major was sounding him out about stopping the work.

The idea panicked him at first. He tried to interrupt, to raise objections; but the major talked through him, and as Meric thought it over, he grew less and less opposed. The painting would never be finished, and he was tired. Perhaps it was time to have done with it, to accept a university post somewhere and enjoy life for a while.

“We’ve been thinking about a temporary stoppage,” said Major Hauk. “Then if the winter campaign goes well . . .” He smiled. “If we’re not visited by plague and pestilence, we’ll assume things are in hand. Of course we’d like your opinion.”

Meric felt a surge of anger towards this smug little monster. “In my opinion, you people are idiots,” he said. “You wear Griaule’s image on your shoulders, weave him on your flags, and yet you don’t have the least comprehension of what that means. You think it’s just a useful symbol . . .”

“Excuse me,” said the major stiffly.

“The hell I will!” Meric groped for his cane and heaved up to his feet. “You see yourselves as conquerors. Shapers of destiny. But all your rapes and slaughters are Griaule’s expressions. His will. You’re every bit as much his parasites as the skizzers.”

The major sat, picked up a pen, and began to write.

“It astounds me,” Meric went on, “that you can live next to a miracle, a source of mystery, and treat him as if he were an oddly shaped rock.”

The major kept writing.

“What are you doing?” asked Meric.

“My recommendation,” said the major without looking up.

“Which is?”

“That we initiate stoppage at once.”

They exchanged hostile stares, and Meric turned to leave; but as he took hold of the doorknob, the major spoke again.

“We owe you so much,” he said; he wore an expression of mingled pity and respect that further irritated Meric.

“How many men have you killed, Major?” he asked, opening the door.

“I’m not sure. I was in the artillery. We were never able to be sure.”

“Well, I’m sure of my tally,” said Meric. “It’s taken me forty years to amass it. Fifteen hundred and ninety-three men and women. Poisoned, scalded, broken by falls, savaged by animals. Murdered. Why don’t we—you and I—just call it even.”

Though it was a sultry afternoon, he felt cold as he walked towards the tower—an internal cold that left him light-headed and weak. He tried to think what he would do. The idea of a university post seemed less appealing away from the major’s office; he would soon grow weary of worshipful students and in-depth dissections of his work by jealous academics. A man hailed him as he turned into the market. Meric waved but did not stop, and heard another man say, “That’s Cattanay?” (That ragged old ruin?)

The colours of the market were too bright, the smells of charcoal cookery too cloying, the crowds too thick, and he made for the side streets, hobbling past one-room stucco houses and tiny stores where they sold cooking oil by the ounce and cut cigars in half if you could not afford a whole one. Garbage, tornados of dust and flies, drunks with bloody mouths. Somebody had tied wires around a pariah dog—a bitch with slack teats; the wires had sliced into her flesh, and she lay panting in an alley mouth, gaunt ribs flecked with pink lather, gazing into nowhere. She, thought Meric, and not Griaule, should be the symbol of their flag.

As he rode the hoist up the side of the tower, he fell into his old habit of jotting down notes for the next day. What’s that cord of wood doing on level five? Slow leak of chrome yellow from pipes on level twelve. Only when he saw a man dismantling some scaffolding did he recall Major Hauk’s recommendation and understand that the order must already have been given. The loss of his work struck home to him then, and he leaned against the railing, his chest constricted and his eyes brimming. He straightened, ashamed of himself. The sun hung in a haze of iron-coloured light low above the western hills, looking red and bloated and vile as a vulture’s ruff. That polluted sky was his creation as much as was the painting, and it would be good to leave it behind. Once away from the valley, from all the influences of the place, he would be able to consider the future.

A young girl was sitting on the twentieth level just beneath the eye. Years before, the ritual of viewing the eye had grown to cultish proportions; there had been group chanting and praying and discussions of the experience. But these were more practical times, and no doubt the young men and women who had congregated here were now manning administrative desks somewhere in the burgeoning empire. They were the ones about whom Dardano should write; they, and all the eccentric characters who had played roles in this slow pageant. The gypsy woman who had danced every night by the eye, hoping to charm Griaule into killing her faithless lover—she had gone away satisfied. The man who had tried to extract one of the fangs—nobody knew what had become of him. The scale hunters, the artisans. A history of Hangtown would be a volume in itself.

The walk had left Meric weak and breathless; he sat down clumsily beside the girl, who smiled. He could not remember her name, but she came often to the eye. Small and dark, with an inner reserve that reminded him of Lise. He laughed inwardly—most women reminded him of Lise in some way.

“Are you all right?” she asked, her brow wrinkled with concern.

“Oh, yes,” he said; he felt a need for conversation to take his mind off things, but he could think of nothing more to say. She was so young! All freshness and gleam and nerves.

“This will be my last time,” she said. “At least for a while. I’ll miss it.” And then, before he could ask why, she added, “I’m getting married tomorrow, and we’re moving away.”

He offered congratulations and asked her who was the lucky fellow.

“Just a boy.” She tossed her hair, as if to dismiss the boy’s importance; she gazed up at the shuttered membrane. “What’s it like for you when the eye opens?” she asked.

“Like everyone else,” he said. “I remember . . . memories of my life. Other lives, too.” He did not tell her about Griaule’s memory of flight; he had never told anyone except Lise about that.

“All those bits of souls trapped in there,” she said, gesturing at the eye. “What do they mean to him? Why does he show them to us?”

“I imagine he has his purposes, but I can’t explain them.”

“Once I remembered being with you,” said the girl, peeking at him shyly through a dark curl. “We were under the wing.”

He glanced at her sharply. “Tell me.”

“We were . . . together,” she said, blushing. “Intimate, you know. I was very afraid of the place, of the sounds and shadows. But I loved you so much, it didn’t matter. We made love all night, and I was surprised because I thought that kind of passion was just in stories, something people had invented to make up for how ordinary it really was. And in the morning even that dreadful place had become beautiful, with the wing tips glowing red and the waterfall echoing . . .” She lowered her eyes. “Ever since I had that memory, I’ve been a little in love with you.”

“Lise,” he said, feeling helpless before her.

“Was that her name?”

He nodded and put a hand to his brow, trying to pinch back the emotions that flooded him.

“I’m sorry.” Her lips grazed his cheek, and just that slight touch seemed to weaken him further. “I wanted to tell you how she felt in case she hadn’t told you herself. She was very troubled by something, and I wasn’t sure she had.”

She shifted away from him, made uncomfortable by the intensity of his reaction, and they sat without speaking. Meric became lost in watching how the sun glazed the scales to reddish gold, how the light was channelled along the ridges in molten streams that paled as the day wound down. He was startled when the girl jumped to her feet and backed towards the hoist.

“He’s dead,” she said wonderingly.

Meric looked at her, uncomprehending.

“See?” She pointed at the sun, which showed a crimson sliver above the hill. “He’s dead,” she repeated, and the expression on her face flowed between fear and exultation.

The idea of Griaule’s death was too large for Meric’s mind to encompass, and he turned to the eye to find a counterproof—no glints of colour flickered beneath the membrane. He heard the hoist creak as the girl headed down, but he continued to wait. Perhaps only the dragon’s vision had failed. No. It was likely not a coincidence that work had been officially terminated today. Stunned, he sat staring at the lifeless membrane until the sun sank below the hills; then he stood and went over to the hoist. Before he could throw the switch, the cables thrummed—somebody heading up. Of course. The girl would have spread the news, and all the Major Hauks and their underlings would be hurrying to test Griaule’s reflexes. He did not want to be here when they arrived, to watch them pose with their trophy like successful fishermen.

It was hard work climbing up to the frontoparietal plate. The ladder swayed, the wind buffeted him, and by the time he clambered on to the plate, he was giddy, his chest full of twinges. He hobbled forward and leaned against the rust-caked side of a boiling vat. Shadowy in the twilight, the great furnaces and vats towered around him, and it seemed this system of fiery devices reeking of cooked flesh and minerals was the actual machinery of Griaule’s thought materialized above his skull. Energyless, abandoned. They had been replaced by more efficient equipment down below, and it had been—what was it?—almost five years since they were last used. Cobwebs veiled a pyramid of firewood; the stairs leading to the rims of the vats were crumbling. The plate itself was scarred and coated with sludge.

“Cattanay!”

Someone shouted from below, and the top of the ladder trembled. God, they were coming after him! Bubbling over with congratulations and plans for testimonial dinners, memorial plaques, specially struck medals. They would have him draped in bunting and bronzed and covered with pigeon shit before they were done. All these years he had been among them, both their slave and their master, yet he had never felt at home. Leaning heavily on his cane, he made his way past the frontal spike—blackened by years of oily smoke—and down between the wings to Hangtown. It was a ghost town, now. Weeds overgrowing the collapsed shanties; the lake a stinking pit, drained after some children had drowned in the summer of ’91. Where Jarcke’s home had stood was a huge pile of animal bones, taking a pale shine from the half-light. Wind keened through the tattered shrubs.

“Meric!”

“Cattanay.”

The voices were closer.

Well, there was one place where they would not follow.

The leaves of the thickets were speckled with mould and brittle, flaking away as he brushed them. He hesitated at the top of the scale hunters’ stair. He had no rope. Though he had done the climb unaided many times, it had been quite a few years. The gusts of wind, the shouts, the sweep of the valley and the lights scattered across it like diamonds on grey velvet—it all seemed a single inconstant medium. He heard the brush crunch behind him, more voices. To hell with it! Gritting his teeth against a twinge of pain in his shoulder, hooking his cane over his belt, he inched on to the stair and locked his fingers in the handholds. The wind whipped his clothes and threatened to pry him loose and send him pinwheeling off. Once he slipped; once he froze, unable to move backward or forward. But at last he reached the bottom and edged upslope until he found a spot flat enough to stand.

The mystery of the place suddenly bore in upon him, and he was afraid. He half turned to the stair, thinking he would go back to Hangtown and accept the hurly-burly. But a moment later he realized how foolish a thought that was. Waves of weakness poured through him, his heart hammered, and white dazzles flared in his vision. His chest felt heavy as iron. Rattled, he went a few steps forward, the cane pocking the silence. It was too dark to see more than outlines, but up ahead was the fold of wing where he and Lise had sheltered. He walked towards it, intent on revisiting it; then he remembered the girl beneath the eye and understood that he had already said that good-bye. And it was good-bye—that he understood vividly. He kept walking. Blackness looked to be welling from the wing joint, from the entrances to the maze of luminous tunnels where they had stumbled on to the petrified man. Had it really been the old wizard, doomed by magical justice to moulder and live on and on? It made sense. At least it accorded with what happened to wizards who slew their dragons.

“Griaule?” he whispered to the darkness, and cocked his head, half expecting an answer. The sound of his voice pointed up the immensity of the great gallery under the wing, the emptiness, and he recalled how vital a habitat it had once been. Flakes shifting over the surface, skizzers, peculiar insects fuming in the thickets, the glum populace of Hangtown, waterfalls. He had never been able to picture Griaule fully alive—that kind of vitality was beyond the powers of the imagination. Yet he wondered if by some miracle the dragon were alive now, flying up through his golden night to the sun’s core. Or had that merely been a dream, a bit of tissue glittering deep in the cold tons of his brain? He laughed. Ask the stars for their first names, and you’d be more likely to receive a reply.

He decided not to walk any further; it was really no decision. Pain was spreading through his shoulder, so intense he imagined it must be glowing inside. Carefully, carefully, he lowered himself and lay propped on an elbow, hanging on to the cane. Good, magical wood. Cut from a hawthorn atop Griaule’s haunch. A man had once offered him a small fortune for it. Who would claim it now? Probably old Henry Sichi would snatch it for his museum, stick it in a glass case next to his boots. What a joke! He decided to lie flat on his stomach, resting his chin on an arm—the stony coolness beneath acted to muffle the pain. Amusing, how the range of one’s decision dwindled. You decided to paint a dragon, to send hundreds of men searching for malachite and cochineal beetles, to love a woman, to heighten an undertone here and there, and finally to position your body a certain way. He seemed to have reached the end of the process. What next? He tried to regulate his breathing, to ease the pressure on his chest. Then, as something rustled out near the wing joint, he turned on his side. He thought he detected movement, a gleaming blackness flowing towards him . . . or else it was only the haphazard firing of his nerves playing tricks with his vision. More surprised than afraid, wanting to see, he peered into the darkness and felt his heart beating erratically against the dragon’s scale.

“. . . It’s foolish to draw simple conclusions from complex events, but I suppose there must be both moral and truth to this life, these events. I’ll leave that to the gadflies. The historians, the social scientists, the expert apologists for reality. All I know is that he had a fight with his girlfriend over money and walked out. He sent her a letter saying he had gone south and would be back in a few months with more money than she could ever spend. I had no idea what he’d done. The whole thing about Griaule had just been a bunch of us sitting around the Red Bear, drinking up my pay—I’d sold an article—and somebody said, “Wouldn’t it be great if Dardano didn’t have to write articles, if we didn’t have to paint pictures that colour-co-ordinated with people’s furniture or slave at getting the gooey smiles of little nieces and nephews just right?” All sorts of improbable moneymaking schemes were put forward. Robberies, kidnappings. Then the idea of swindling the city fathers of Teocinte came up, and the entire plan was fleshed out in minutes. Scribbled on napkins, scrawled on sketchpads. A group effort. I keep trying to remember if anyone got a glassy look in their eye, if I felt a cold tendril of Griaule’s thought stirring my brains. But I can’t. It was a half-hour’s sensation, nothing more. A drunken whimsy, an art-school metaphor. Shortly thereafter, we ran out of money and staggered into the streets. It was snowing—big wet flakes that melted down our collars. God, we were drunk! Laughing, balancing on the icy railing of the University Bridge. Making faces at the bundled-up burghers and their fat ladies who huffed and puffed past, spouting steam and never giving us a glance, and none of us—not even the burghers—knowing that we were living our happy ending in advance . . .”

—from The Man Who Painted The Dragon Grlaule
by Louis Dardano

FOR JAMIE AND LAURA

THE WEIGHER

Eric Vinicoff and Marcia Martin

The concept of “honor” represents a great step in social evolution. But there are more steps beyond honor.

Groundplant was a springy blur under my striding paws. The commonland trail followed a gap between two barren mounds—fancifully named Worldgod’s Fangs. Ahead I could see the slope running down to the bend in the river and Coalgathering. A gray pelt of fog spread beyond the far bank. The morning was clear but breath-misting cold.

Overslept again, curse it. Even making the best speed my middle-aged bones could manage, I was going to be late opening my stall. At least I wasn’t the only one; I smelled that Flatpaws the tanner and a couple of other late risers had passed recently.

I started down. To my left a claw of the eastern mountains reached out almost to the river. On its lower slopes were the mining territories that accounted for Coalgathering’s name and existence. The town was a haphazard clustering of dirt streets and black-shingled roofs.

I slowed to a trot as I neared the South Gate, and inspected the town wall. Its poor condition was a continuing headache for me. It was still sturdy enough to keep out dangerous beasts, but just barely. In several places the strongwood logs were loose in their foundations, and many of the crossbeam nails were rusted through.

I dreaded the job of getting the necessary repairs made. The wall was still the only common project ever completed in Coalgathering’s turbulent history. It had gone up before my time, after six years of squabbling and eleven death duels, using up no less than four Weighers. Getting unanimous agreement on anything from over four hundred adults was a spinesnapping task. My own pet project—paving the streets so we wouldn’t have to mud-wade during the wet season—was tied up by the eternal pawful of adults unwilling to pledge their twilga even for something so generally useful.

But I would keep on haggling, and if necessary I too would meet stubborn holdouts on the challenge lawn. Aggravation was a way of life for a Weigher.

I stood up on my hindlegs and walked under the stone arch. Even after a night of airing out, the town-smells set my fangs to aching. Most of the stalls were open for business. Many adults were browsing and/or buying, and tagnami were scurrying about on errands. Two boats were tied up at the docks, loading coal. Both thunderfish pullers were thrashing in their harnesses, blowing tall plumes of dirty water, anxious to be away from the shore.

The Weigher’s stall had a place of honor in the center of town, on the edge of the lush almost scarlet challenge lawn—kept lush by the constant infusions of blood. Since rain hadn’t threatened overnight, I had left the wall flaps rolled up to let the river breeze air it out.

I dropped to four legs and loped once around the stall sniffing for any intruders. No fresh scents of adult, tagnami or animal. I went in.

I settled gratefully into the chair behind the big old desk. The five other chairs were for clients. Two tall cabinets bracketed my view of the challenge lawn; behind their glass-and-wood doors the shelves were crammed with leatherbound volumes of past twilga transactions.

“Slasher! About time you opened! I’ve been stalking your stall like a nightflier on the hunt for the last half hour!”

I knew him by his scent and hollow-jug voice before I looked up. “Good morning to you, too, Treesap.” I said in my best placating tone. Weighers couldn’t afford to take offense easily.

I gestured permission to enter. He stomped over and leaned across the desk. “No time to waste, Slasher! I can’t see any patients until we settle this.”

“Settle what?”

“You won’t believe it until you see and smell it. Come on!”

“Will you slow down, for Kraal’s sake, and explain what the problem is instead of blowing like a thunderfish?” I pointed to one of the chairs. “Why don’t you sit down, take a deep breath, then tell me about it from the beginning?”

“I want you to come over to my stall,” he said less violently, but still standing. “There’s something there that . . . I don’t understand. Not that I expect you to explain it to me. But it creates a twilga problem that’s way beyond me.”

I gave up, stood up and followed him out into the bright sunlight.

His stall was at the end of Doctor Street, near the docks. A crowd was gathered around it, in an ugly, snarling mood. As we edged through I found out the reason for the mood. Something was giving off a loathsome, dangerous smell. The fur on the back of my neck rose, and my fangs bared. Protective instinct shoved judgment aside.

No one was getting too close to the stall. Emerging from the crowd, I followed him warily on four legs.

And saw it lying on the planked floor.

Some kind of animal, unlike anything I had ever seen before. Almost as big as an adult, but thinner. It looked arboreal, with hindlegs that ended in lumpy silver paws, and spindly forelegs well suited to hanging onto branches. A slender neck supported a truly hideous head; black knotted fur on top but raw brown flesh everywhere else. Its flat face included round eyes, stubby ears, a monstrous nose and plant-chewing teeth. Its frail body was wrapped in a loose, slick white hide, with a decided lump on its back.

It was dead, of course. I gathered that the claw slashes across its throat had been put there by Treesap. “What happened?” I asked.

“I found it in here rummaging through my medical tools when I arrived this morning, so I killed it.”

Perfectly understandable. With a spoor like that you wouldn’t want to take any chances. This sort of thing happened every now and then; the wall wasn’t a perfect defense against trespassing beasts.

It was a very odd corpse. “I don’t think that hide is hide at all. It looks like a covering of some sort. And that lump could almost be a strange style of carrysack.”

“So what?”

I hissed at his lack of imagination. “I’ve never seen, heard or read of any animal like that. Have you?”

Treesap hadn’t.

There were several priests in the crowd, who suggested it might be a demon—though unlike any known to serve the Ninety-Nine Gods. The savants present were equally mystified.

“What do you want from me?” I asked Treesap.

“Well, this carcass belongs to me, doesn’t it?”

I thought. “No one has claimed ownership?”

“Are you joking! If this monster belongs to someone, I’ll deathduel him for unleashing it on me! It’s ruining my business—no patients for sure until this place airs out!”

“Hmmm. Since no one has claimed it by now, I see no reason why you can’t.”

“Good. Rubbertail wants to buy it to cut up and study.” The elderly biologist with patches of fur falling out entered the stall, her notebook out. “We haven’t been able to negotiate a twilga.”

“Let’s go back to my stall,” I said. “I can’t think in this reek. It makes me want to kill something.”

Once seated in my stall we went to work. It was a long and difficult session. I dug into my books and managed to find a few vaguely similar transactions. I finally named a compensation amount. They agreed—Treesap was unhappy, but not enough to take it to the challenge lawn. We inscribed the transaction, including my fee, in our notebooks. Then they left to haul the corpse over to Science Street.

The rest of the day was pretty dull. All my decisions were accepted. To survive as a Weigher your negotiating skills had to increase as your fighting skills aged. I was still one tough lady, but not quite as tough as in years past. A priest dragged in a worshiper who had fallen behind in his payments for religious instruction. A lovers’ spat proved to be less convoluted and emotional than usual. The books yielded ready compensations for the loan of a tool, returning a strayed tagnami, letting a neighbor cross a territory and so on.

Things were so slow that I took a break soon after sunzenith. I loped over to Tavern Street, and settled into my usual chair under the painted leather awnings at Snakelegs’ Place. The Snake, as everybody called him, brought over a mug of fermented direbeast milk spiced with darter blood. I sipped it, enjoying the warm glow, and chatted with the other regulars.

I smelled Irongut coming up behind me. The short fur on the back of my neck rose, and I felt the wonderful tingling just above the hindthighs. I turned. “Good day.”

“Likewise.” He smiled broadly. He was big, shaggy and muscular, with the thick fur of young adulthood. Not my usual type. But the charming, mature professionals were getting staid. Irongut was hardly an intellectual predator, but he was pleasant, aromatic and very energetic.

“Care to join me?” I asked.

In answer he sat lithely in the nearest chair, his long tail sticking straight down from the butthole. “Can’t stay long. I’ve got a big pot in the kiln. Just stopped by to find out how you’re keeping.”

“Not too badly for an old bag of fur. I haven’t caught scent of you in a few days. Where have you been hiding?” His soft growl was sweetly bashful in such a savage young male. I remembered the frame of my bed straining almost to the breaking point, his paws raking my back, the buds of pleasure blossoming one after another. I took deep breaths and managed to retain my dignity. Let him come to me—it wouldn’t be fitting for one of my years and stature to howl for him as if he were my first cublove. He pulled himself together. “I wasn’t sure you would want my company again.”

“Don’t try to fool a Weigher. You were hoping I would come to you. But you must remember that my pride is older and stronger than yours.”

“I know that now,” he said softly. “Which is why I’m here.”

I growled laughter. While we were batting at each other with words, we were both struggling to keep our lust-scents from rising and revealing. But neither of us was being very successful—more of an embarrassment to me than him. If things got any more out of control, the adults in the nearby chairs would notice.

So I tried to push the thoughts and sensations into the back of my mind, and said, “Your pot might crack if you don’t get back to it.”

His smile turned rigid. “You’re right. Maybe we’ll catch scent of each other again soon.”

“Maybe we will.” If he had a nose worthy of the name, he wouldn’t need more of an answer.

He trotted off stiffly, trying to look unconcerned. I finished my drink, settled up and went back to my stall.

Finally the sun slanted down behind the hills beyond the river. The boats pulled away from the docks and headed upstream. The stalls closed, and everyone streamed through the gates. The last adults out of town shut and barred the gates.

Amid a din of goodnight conversation we loped away, spreading out on the many commonland trails. The coal territory owners bounced and rattled in their runleg-pulled wagons.

At first I ran with many other adults and tagnami—some of the latter on their parents’ choke leashes. We chatted as we climbed toward the gap between the Fangs, setting an easy pace. The wind was turning sharp, but the smell of open country was invigorating after the town-reek. Groundplant turned into shadowed forest around us. Our group dwindled as we came to territory after territory until, reaching mine, I also took my leave.

Violet tangletree and fireclaw bush scented the air, over the seasonal rankness of mouldering leaves. Shafts of yellow light slanted through gaps in the trees. Above the gaunt strongwood branches the day was beginning to darken. I was ready for a hearty dinner, and an early bed—I hoped not alone.

The cabin looked and smelled right as I approached it from downwind. It sat in the middle of a small clearing, straddling a creek that ran down to the river. Its strong-wood planks were stained black with a waterproofing concoction. I glanced unhappily at several upkeep jobs that needed doing before the first snow, then swung open the doorway bars and went in.

I lit candles to fend off the fast-falling night. Nikniks were starting to chirp beyond the door and windows. The wind carried faint, tantalizing promises of many tasty animals. No rain anywhere near. Perfect hunting weather. The creek was a trench-like space in the floor planking. I took no more than a sip from it. Hunting on a bloated bladder at my age was asking for indigestion.

The night was complete under the forest canopy. I couldn’t see much, even after my darksight adjusted. But this was my territory. I knew every tree and fallen leaf. And I had my nose and ears.

I prowled along the river bank on four legs, and waited for some tasty nocturnal animal to arrive for a ‘morning’ drink. I settled in behind a millioneye shrub downwind of a favorite watering place for the local fauna. No scent of poachers or predators. Good.

I heard and smelled a family of lumpmeats waddle up to the bank. I tasted rising saliva. Lumpmeats were an acquired taste, but I had acquired it as a cub. Their hard shells and stubby legs gave them the defensive posture of a rock. You had to move like moonlight and decapitate them on the first swipe, before they could retreat into their shells.

I decided on the bulbous head of the family, and charged. The others hid in their shells, but I nailed papa. Out sprang my forepaw claws. Off went the head. The survivors scuttled into the river and floated away while I dined. Leaving pretty much an empty bowl for the scavengers, I drank from the river and wiped blood from the fur around my mouth. My tail waved happily.

I walked slowly back to the cabin, and stretched out on the bed to relax and digest. The draft blowing through was rich with the tale of the night, and a bit chilly. But not uncomfortably so; I didn’t figure on having to use the firehearth until snow covered the ground. Drowsiness began to claim me.

Howling snapped me out of it. Faint howling from the northeast border of my territory. Not a danger call or a challenge. Not even an entry request from a visiting friend. It was a lusty mating call. I recognized Irongut’s deep baritone.

I felt that tingling again, and suddenly wasn’t the least bit sleepy. Should I tighten his leash even more? No, he had learned his lesson—there was an earnest sincerity in the growls. Moreover, my own self-control wasn’t nearly as legendary as I sometimes liked to think. My body moaned for him. Enjoy, it said. You won’t excite the young males much longer.

I sprang to a window and howled back my invitation. Returning to the bed. I waited and tried to pretend calmness.

Then, nearer, I heard him howl again. I leaped to four legs. A blood challenge! What in the great world womb could he be fighting here on my territory? Most of the large predators had learned better the hard way. Maybe a wild adult had wandered down from the hills, hungry or sick enough to have ignored my warnoffs.

Trespass on my territory! I ran out the door toward the howls, which were subsiding into fighting snarls. Something screamed—a high-pitched shriek that I didn’t recognize. Then silence, except for the cautiously returning forest sounds.

I plunged through a thick tangle of shrubs.

In a meadow not far from the cabin, under the light of two newly risen moons, I found Irongut snarling a few strides upwind of his kill.

I caught a whiff of the corpse, and quickly joined Irongut upwind.

He was breathing hard, but otherwise intact. “I offer you twilga for hunting on your territory,” he said apologetically.

It was a formality, of course. No one could have done anything except attack such an obvious enemy, no matter where encountered. I wasn’t the type to worry about technicalities. “It was a trespasser, not part of my game stock. And it sure as death doesn’t smell edible. No value, no twilga.”

We both stared at the creature.

“What is it?” Irongut asked. “I’ve never seen or smelled the like.”

“I have. One was killed in town today. But it’s certainly a new item for the biology texts. Even the savants had no answers.”

It was definitely the same species of puny, furless monster. My fangs bared in a soft growl. I edged closer for a careful sniff: all I could stand. “Something is wrong here.”

“Huh?”

“This creature smells like the other one.”

“So? Probably a pack of them are migrating over the mountains. Believe me, they’re no fighters. This one hardly put up a struggle. If any more of them trespass, we’ll slaughter them.”

“I mean they smell exactly alike. Not like the same species or even the same pack—like the same creature. But that’s impossible. The other one is dead, probably cut up and in jars of alcohol by now.”

He shrugged. “One more riddle for the savants.”

I noticed a small box lying on the ground next to the corpse. It was white, and slick like varnished wood, but the material didn’t look familiar. It had odd tiny features on one side, and a rectangular opening. “Is that yours?” I asked.

“No. The creature was playing with it when I came into the clearing.”

“Playing?”

“Taking bits of plants, bugs, leaves and so on, shoving them into the hole in the box, then jabbing at those little bumps on the side.”

I was inclined to laugh, but didn’t want to hurt his feelings and ruin the night. “How do you think it came by the box?”

“Probably stole it from someone’s cabin during the day. If so, we’ll most likely hear about it tomorrow.”

I took his forepaw in mine. “Let’s leave the carcass for the crawlers. I’m in no mood for mysteries tonight.” But I decided to return in a few nights, when the spoor would be blown to the winds, to have a better look at the box.

“I’m glad you invited me in,” he said softly.

“I’m glad you came.”

Our scents were definitely communicating now. I was very aware of my hindthighs rubbing together as I moved.

Without further words, and with ill-concealed haste, we loped toward the cabin.

I kicked the fur blanket aside and rolled out of bed, getting all four legs under me before landing. Pretty frisky for a mature lady, especially after such a night. Irongut had left shortly before moonset.

It was a fine morning, with a heady blend of forest aromas drifting in through the door and windows. The cloudless sky was beginning to brighten. I had overslept again.

Plunging my head into the creek-trench, I came up howling and shaking off frigid water. At the wall mirror I combed out my fur, one hundred strokes head to hindpaws. I admired myself in the mirror. Still a classic specimen of femininity. Glossy black fur. Gleaming fangs. Boldly jutting snout. Just the right amount of arch in the back. Stomach firm, with no middle-aged droop. The scars across my left shoulder and flank were healing well. They reminded me to check my trap before heading for town.

I went outside. No hostile scents. But, on the other hand, no nearby breakfast. First things first. I loped through the forest and across dew-covered meadows to the border of my territory.

Running the bounds at top speed, I came across no suspicious spoor except the one trail I expected. I squatted and defecated in the usual places. I didn’t meet any of my neighbors—I was definitely running late—but I could tell they had already set their warnoffs.

I slunk along a game trail, and managed to chase down a pair of darters before they could scurry up a tree. Then I headed for the trap.

I had dug it on a high slope near the eastern border of my territory, where cubs sometimes wandered down from the hills to hunt. Game tended to be more plentiful in the territories because we had settled the best land to begin with, and then purged it of all predators but ourselves.

As I approached the trap, I could smell a cub in it. I peered over the edge of the six foot pit. A healthy looking little furball about seven or eight years old. Perfect. Younger than that they weren’t mature enough to handle tagnami education. And older, if still wild, they were unteachable. But this one would do just fine.

It stood on its hindpaws, trying to claw its way out of the pit. It eyed me warily, and stank of fear. I wondered if it could have been one of mine. I had gone into the Wild four times to drop cubs. But no, the timing wasn’t right for any of them.

Some education and discipline, and this one (a male) would make a fine replacement for Keeneyes. Too bad it hadn’t been Keenbrain—my tagnami had been a bit too greedy and a bit too slow. A fatal combination. He had posted his challenge before reaching his fighting peak, convinced that the old lady had aged enough to be taken. He had been wrong, barely. So now I needed a new tagnami to do the scut work (and maybe someday take my job and territory and life from me as I had from my parent).

Enough daydreaming. I jabbed a forepaw down into the pit, managed to avoid the young claws, and got him by the scruff of the neck. Up and out. He yowled and squirmed, so I cuffed him unconscious. I perched the limp body on my back and set out for town.

The added weight slowed me a bit, and I arrived even later than yesterday. I went straight to School Street and old Bentback’s stall. He was, as usual, at his chalkboard trying to beat some sense into about a dozen cubs. They were chained to two log benches while he alternately taught and applied his short rawhide whip.

“Morning, Slasher.” Bentback growled, coming over to me. He took the cub and looked at it with a skilled eye, casually avoiding the tiny claws—it was waking up. “Going to try again, eh?”

“You know how it is. Can’t live with them or without them.”

“The real trick is outliving them. Got a name for this one?”

I hadn’t thought about it, so I did now. The cub was a bit short for his age. “How about Runt?”

“With a name like that, he’ll either grow up into a great fighter or die young.”

“That’s the general idea.”

We brought out our notebooks and writing sticks. “What’s your current rate?” I asked.

“Three per day for as long as it takes.”

“Pretty steep. I can do better down the street.”

“You get what you pay for. I limit my class size to give individual attention.”

“So be it.” We checked our notebooks and found a balance in my favor from a Weighing last month. We subtracted a day’s fee and entered the new balance. My job gave me twilga with almost everyone in town; no need to play around with third party balances.

Bentback took Runt and a length of chain over to an empty spot at the end of a log. “See you at dusk,” he growled to me.

I hurried along Breeder Street toward my stall. The aromas raised saliva even though I had just eaten. Growls, bleets, chitterings, cheeps, honks and haggling created an ear-curdling din. I admired the pens filled with direbeasts, lumpmeats, darters; literally every kind of game animal.

My territory was pretty well stocked at the moment. But come the end of snow season it would need restocking. Then I would make the necessary purchases. Reluctantly, because no one liked doing business with breeders. They were an odd, less-than-respectable lot, suspected of ‘stalking’ meals in their pens and other dark deeds.

I opened my stall. Business was brisk, so much so that I almost forgot about the less pleasant of my two nocturnal visitors. Irongut, however, was a warm and finely etched memory, and a promise of even better nights to come.

After a morning flurry of decisions and non-lethal challenges stemming mostly from a by-all-accounts excellent hunt-party at Treeroot’s place, I took advantage of the lull to relax. Leaning back in my chair, I put my hindlegs up on the desk. I was too comfortable to get up. I wished a mug of warm fermented milk would appear on my desk in a bolt of sorcerous lightning.

Peripherally I noticed something was happening outside. I couldn’t tell what, but from all around town adults were converging on the challenge lawn. No ordinary fight would draw such a big crowd, and besides everyone was looking at the sky. Curiosity got the better of comfort. I got up and went outside.

Leaden gray clouds hung low overhead, and a cold rain was imminent. But that wasn’t the object of everyone’s attention.

Something was falling from the sky. Not really falling, but coming down slowly, like a swampflower’s seed sac. But this was round, white and huge—bigger than a demonflier. A smaller object was dangling underneath it, attached by long ropes.

It was coming down in the middle of the challenge lawn.

The losers of the morning’s festivities had long since left to visit their doctors. A napping Traveler hastily vacated the lawn, and the entire circle was empty. But, by the time the thing was about to land, it was ringed by curious adults. Including me.

The smaller object settled onto the red groundplant. Somehow I wasn’t surprised to see it was another of the outlandish creatures that suddenly seemed determined to plague my life. Standing erect on its hindlegs, it touched its chest with a forepaw and the ropes pulled free. The huge white ball rose sharply, taking the ropes along. In seconds all were swallowed by the clouds.

The creature had a glass bowl over its head, but otherwise it looked exactly like the other two. Its spoor hadn’t reached me yet on the still air, but I would have taken any wager that it smelled the same, too.

Everyone was enjoying the unique show. A few priests were crying of a divine coming, but no rational adult could really believe that this puny, tailless, evil creature hailed from any god-home.

The creature lifted the bowl from its head, and dropped it on the lawn. It stared at us in silence. Slowly it raised its odd right forepaw in the air, the pad facing front and all five claw-tips sticking up.

Savants were arguing eagerly among themselves. The upshot of one debate near me was that this must certainly be an intelligent being, maybe even as intelligent as an adult. The ball-and-ropes could have been some sort of monstrous unknown animal. But the white hide of yesterday’s corpse had turned out to be a manufactured garment, like harsh weather cloaks though exotic in design and material. Under it Rubbertail had found more of the hideous brown flesh. This hide looked identical. And the carrysack was also identical—the carrysack that had turned out to be filled with things that were mostly total mysteries.

The priests, on the other hand, were stirring themselves up with talk about demons and ill omens.

The situation was definitely novel. Everybody was waiting for someone to take the initiative in doing something about it. There wasn’t any time for a town meeting. I could see that some of our more notorious hotheads, notably Farrunner the iron-worker, were baring their fangs. That terrible spoor was beginning to spread. Many others in the crowd were awaiting a rare battle with hopeful grins.

I remembered the box I had seen last night, and was prepared to go along with the idea that the creature was intelligent. Though not very, or it wouldn’t have come so docilely to its dying place. But the questions the savants were asking each other were also bouncing around inside my skull. What was it? Where did it come from? How many more of them were there? Why were they popping up all of a sudden?

But it didn’t look like the savants would get the chance to put their questions to the creature. Farrunner took three strides toward it, then turned to face us. “I post a challenge! This beast is evil and dangerous; you can all smell that! Do any of you want to interfere?”

The priests looked pleased with this development. Some of the other hotheads were upset at being excluded from the fun, but Farrunner had a well deserved reputation. No one challenged his posting. He smiled smugly at the savants, who growled under their breaths but didn’t dare object aloud. Savants were rarely great fighters. The creature didn’t react.

Howls were coming from all around the ring. The mood was definitely for blood. I felt the rage too, but fought to control it. Weighers were supposed to look beyond obvious answers, and exercise self-discipline while doing so. Killing these creatures every time one turned up wouldn’t solve any of the riddles.

I stepped forward. “Wait up, Farrunner. This is something that has never happened before. It may be more complicated than it seems.”

“No complications, Slasher. I’ll just let its blood out.”

“I think you should let some of the savants have it. I’ll work out a fair twilga.”

“I’ll be very glad to sell the carcass,” Farrunner growled. “Don’t interfere, you old bitch.”

That did it. I had tried to be polite. I had tried to be reasonable. But the young punk had a venom-soaked tongue. I wasn’t sure I could take him, but life without pride was a cold thing anyway. Moreover, I had a hunch that the answers to my questions might be too important—and not just to the savants—to let them bleed to death on the challenge lawn.

“I challenge, mudworm.”

So much for the formalities. He dropped to four legs, and so did I. The nearest spectators moved back. The creature continued to watch in patient silence.

We circled each other warily. He knew my reputation, too. We hissed at each other, but spoke no more words.

Strategy, girl. Strategy. He was too big, strong and mean to charge. So what did I have in my favor? Experience, maybe. I would have to try to outguess him.

An all or nothing proposition.

I slunk forward to within three strides of him. Pouncing range. A wary veteran would have looked over all the angles first, but he wasn’t known for his patience.

He lunged, a furry blur almost too quick to be seen. Claws raked for my throat.

But my planned countermove was also a blur. Not sideways; that was the expected reaction. His horizontal slash covered too wide an arc for me to avoid. I dropped under the claws, and sprang forward.

My timing had to be perfect. It was. There was his undefended neck right in front of me.

His claws tore desperately at my back. I lost some fur and flesh. But my fangs bit deeply into the tough neck muscle. Arterial blood spurted. My jaws clamped shut, and ripped.

I spat out fur and warm meat; cannibalism was considered in very bad taste. Farrunner dropped. His life poured out onto the lawn, at first swiftly, then sluggishly, then no more.

My regular doctor loped toward me with that twilga gleam in his eye, but I growled him back. Time enough for that later. The blood staining the fur on my left flank wasn’t too wide a stream, and the pain was no worse than I had known and endured many times before.

The creature was still standing and staring.

Now I owned everything that had been Farrunner’s. I didn’t want any of it—his territory wasn’t nearly as nice as mine—so I would probably sell it to his tagnami. But now I had a more urgent matter to worry about.

“I’m claiming the challenge-right for this creature!” I shouted to the spectators. “Anyone feel luckier than Farrunner?”

Several other hotheads looked and smelled inclined to take me up on my invitation. The general mood was definitely getting ugly. I felt the same unreasoning hatred of the creature distorting my own judgment. Any moment now we would all fall upon it in a slaughtering frenzy, despite my challenge-right. How could something so puny and helpless have such a dangerous scent?

It was as simple as that.

“Rubbertail!” I shouted at the nearby cluster of savants. “Do you have any jars of alcohol in your stall?”

She looked wounded. “A tragedy is about to happen here! This is no time for guzzling!”

“You old fool! If you want to save this creature for science, run like a cub and bring me a big jar of alcohol!”

She reflected for a moment, then smiled broadly. She vanished beyond the ring, but quickly returned with a sizeable ceramic jar. “Here you are, Slasher,” she panted.

I took it. “We’ll settle the twilga later!”

Just in time. Some adults had dropped to four legs and were slinking toward the creature, fangs bared. I shouted, “Wait, my friends! Please! A moment for your Weigher! I think I can end the danger!”

There were growls of protest, but the slinking stopped momentarily.

I took a deep breath, and walked toward the creature. What would it do? If it tried to bolt, we were both out of luck.

It stood still. It watched me steadily, though, as I removed the jar’s lid and poured the contents all over it. It flinched, but didn’t try to avoid the stinging alcohol. Maybe it understood.

I breathed as shallowly as possible. The alcohol murdered my nose, but the scent of the creature was totally drowned. I found I could now deal with it with a Weigher’s proper dispassion.

It stood as if it never dropped to four legs. The forepaws were slender and frail-looking, but well shaped for working with tools. The lack of a tail made it seem unbalanced.

I could feel the blood-rage seeping out of the spectators. The prospects for a unique death-duel were fading fast; some adults were already drifting back to their stalls. The attitude of the rest was subsiding into curiosity.

The creature reached into its carrysack and pulled out a small gray box with two short black strings dangling from it. The strings ended in a pair of black bulbs like half-eggs. It put one of them to its forehead, and it stuck there. The creature held out the other one to me, twisting its mouth in some kind of expression.

I thought I knew what it wanted, but wasn’t sure I wanted to oblige. It could have been a harmless friendship ritual. Or something else.

Some savants were edging up behind me, chattering like grakklbirds in mating season. A few priests came with them. To the netherworld with it! I stuck the other bulb to my forehead.

The creature touched a red circle on the box. Three seconds later I ripped the bulb from my forehead, and howled like a cub.

Images had stampeded through my mind like a herd of spooked bigmeats. Hundreds. Hundreds of hundreds. Much too fast to be seen, but I sensed that some of them were my own memories. Others were . . . from somewhere else. I shivered, and had no desire to see those more clearly.

The creature put the demon-box back in its carrysack. “Are you able to understand me?” it asked.

The discussion behind me jumped several notches in volume. The words from the oddly flat muzzle were just barely understandable. “Yes,” I replied, “If you speak very slowly.”

“That’s good. My name is Ralphayers.”

“I’m Slasher. What did you just do to me?”

“The box is a tool for learning languages quickly. It isn’t harmful.”

I didn’t believe in magic. But if it was a product of science, this ugly monster knew things of which our savants only dreamed. “We can settle the twilga for that later, Ralphayers, and for my other service.”

“Other service?”

“Keeping you alive. So far, at least.”

“I see. I’m a stranger here, with different customs. But I’ll follow yours as soon as I can learn them.”

“What are you? Where do you come from?”

The creature paused before answering. “Just as this world circles your sun, other worlds circle other stars. I’m from one of them called Earth.”

That was a mighty big bite to get down. Still, the astronomy matched certain radical theories. And nothing even remotely like this creature was known to our biology—or demonology for that matter. So accept it as a working hypothesis. “How did you get here? And why?”

“My people built a . . . a skyboat. It sailed here on a voyage of many years, crewed only by machines, and it now circles this world. When the machines found that living conditions here were like Earth’s, they . . . grew three of me from embryos stored aboard. Each of us landed in turn to learn what we could about this world before dying. That wasn’t long for my two brothers.”

The savants were taking all this in avidly, as were the few others who remained. I understood maybe a third of what it had said, but I went on doggedly. “What do you do with this information you gather?”

“The skyboat . . . hears everything that happens to us. It sends messages back to our world. They will take years to arrive there, so we can’t talk to our world. But we can communicate with the skyboat.”

So that was why the other creature had been putting plants and bugs in its box. It had been doing some kind of research. Fascinating. Obviously this was a venture involving more participants and twilga than I had ever imagined possible. What incredible Weighers they must have!

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “What could possibly repay such a huge effort?”

“Pure knowledge. We’re a very curious people. Plus we’ve found that indulging our hunger for knowledge can be profitable in practical terms. To learn about your people and your world I hope to live among you.”

“That won’t be easy,” I pointed out. “You know nothing of our customs, and one mistake will most likely be your last. You can’t even come near us without being doused in something with an overpowering smell.”

“I think I understand why your people killed my brothers,” the creature said softly. “An instinctive scent-hostility trigger. An oddly primitive trait to find in an intelligent species. So I smell like an enemy, do I?”

I growled yes. What a prize this creature would be if I could handle the opportunity properly. It clearly knew things many adults would pay through the snout to learn. And it would need an intermediary, someone with the imagination to exploit its knowledge for everyone’s good, and the skill to keep it alive. Who better than a Weigher? Who else would have the wisdom to work for the town as well as herself? Who else would be able to unravel the unique twilga involved?

The gods don’t like to hear us praise our abilities too much, even in our thoughts. As I dreamed, my common sense slept. And I saw a blurred motion behind the creature. I had forgotten there was one person who would hold a grudge against the creature not based on scent. One to whom the honor won by finishing his father’s last task would justify the deadly risk of offending me by usurping my challenge-right.

Before I could react the creature dropped, bright red blood puddling under it, the head almost detached from the scrawny neck. I glared across the carcass at Farrunner’s tagnami.

A more impetuous adult in my place would have challenged him for his audacity. But I was a Weigher, and anyway I admired his loyalty. A rare trait in today’s youth.

“I offer twilga in apology,” he said formally.

I stared at the creature, feeling a sadness greater than I understood. So many things we might have learned.

To the tagnami I said, “I accept. Wait for me a moment. We’ll go to my stall and settle the amount.”

Those who had been hoping for a last bit of blood from us headed back to their stalls. A few closed in to gawk at the carcass. I quickly made deals with two savants for it and its carrysack. Then I let my doctor guide my less-than-steady legs toward his stall for the overdue patch job. Farrunner’s heir—tagnami no longer—followed me dutifully. I intended to punish his insolence with a twilga settlement he would be years repaying.

Weeks passed, and life settled back to normal, though speculations about the creatures were growing into epic legends. The first snows came, draping the forests and meadows in scattered whiteness. The days became shorter. Adults spent less time in town and more time laired in their territories, living on scarce game and winter-fat.

But Weighers were expected to be available as many days as possible. So it was that on a gray threatening afternoon I sat in my stall, warming my hindpaws over a small hearthfire.

I had just settled a debt problem without any challenges, and I felt indecently pleased with myself. Longfur had been dragged in by a pawful of adults with whom he had been tardy in paying his twilga. Had he been a real deadbeat I would have given him the usual options of settling up at once or fighting his creditors in a circle challenge. But he was a responsible adult whose fermented milk trade had temporarily slumped. So I worked out a twilga increase and installment payments that satisfied everyone.

My relaxed mood was interrupted when someone outside shouted, “More of them! Come and see, everyone! More of them!”

I stepped out into the windless but still biting chill. A priest was pointing at the clouds. Everyone within earshot also looked, but most of them, having seen it before, paid no further attention.

Still, a pawful of savants and priests joined me in hurrying to the challenge lawn.

Not one, but two creatures were falling from the sky.

They landed the same way the other had, and removed the bowls from their heads. One was another exact copy. But the other was shorter, a bit thinner and curiously curved.

“Welcome!” I shouted. The other adults stood silently at the lawn’s edge, honoring my outstanding challenge-right.

“Good to see you again, Slasher,” the Ralphayers copy answered.

“Are you trying to make me believe in ghosts?” I asked after a pause. “The others like you are all dead.”

“Everything my brothers did I remember. So I feel I know you.” He and the other creature started to walk toward me.

“Stay where you are.” I warned them, “unless you want to be turned into memories, too. Stay where we can’t smell you.”

Their faces twisted. The smaller creature said in a high-pitched tone. “I think we’ll be safe from that danger at least.”

I realized two startling facts just as shouts from some of the savants announced them. First, both creatures were speaking our language just as naturally as any townfolk. Second and more important, the faint whiffs of their spoor were totally unlike the evil scent of the others.

They smelled like . . . like groundflowers! Harmless, pleasant flowers. There were no growls from those gathered behind me. If anything, there were a few purrs.

“Are you like the nightslitherer that can change its scent?” I asked.

“No,” the copy said. “But when the machines aboard the skyboat grew us after my last brother died, they made changes in our body design so that we can live among you. My brothers had collected the necessary knowledge. We can eat your plants and animals—we’re omnivores.”

Roots and leaves? I shuddered.

“We want to learn as much as possible about you and your world,” the smaller one added. “This will be a long study, one we hope our tagnami will continue when we die. They must, since the skyboat machines can grow no more of us.”

Here was a second chance at their incredible knowledge. If I could keep these two alive. “You must learn our customs quickly. You obviously aren’t fighters, so you must learn how not to offend.”

The copy paused. “We’re more dangerous fighters than you can imagine. But we’re here to make friends and learn. Like my brothers, we would rather die than fight you. We love life as much as you do, but we believe in what we’re doing even more.”

I would attempt to figure that out later. Right now I had the greatest twilga transaction in history to arrange. It would be the stuff of legends among Weighers, and would of course compensate me handsomely.

“You’ll need someone to teach you our customs and vouch for you with fang and claw until the town accepts you.”

The smaller one said, “We have a store of scientific and technological information aboard the skyboat, which we can summon through our machines. Some of it should be of use to you. We’ll give it to you.”

I shuddered again. Luckily no one else had been close enough to hear. “Never offer to give an adult anything!” I said sharply. “It could prove fatal.”

“Why?”

They had so much to learn. What kind of crazy customs did they live by? “To suggest an adult needs help as if she were a tagnami is the worst possible insult. You must sell your knowledge for a good price, and thereby establish your worth.”

The creatures jabbered at each other in low voices. Then the smaller one said, “We’ll have to hire the services of someone who can teach us what we need to know.”

“Of course, and I recommend myself for the job. I’m the town Weigher, an excellent haggler, well educated—and a tough fighter, to deal with any challenges that come your way.”

“What’s a Weigher?” the copy asked.

“We balance the values of goods, services and violations of custom so adults can interact more constructively. And less violently.”

“You . . . run the town?”

“I don’t understand your question. Adults run their own territories and town affairs.”

The creatures jabbered some more. “We accept your offer,” the copy said, “and trust you to set a fair price for your agent and guide services. How do we begin?”

I thought. “First we have to get you a territory. Let me think .. . ah, the Coldcrag place. I’m sure I can get it for you cheaply. The game stock is lousy.”

“No problem there. We can eat many plants that grow in this area.”

“Good.” I hid my real reaction to their diet. “I’ll get you installed there, start your education in our customs, and smooth the trail for you here in town.”

That last didn’t look as though it would be too difficult. The savants and priests were gathered around, hanging on every word. Not too close—they had heard my commitment to handle challenges for the creatures. That claw slashed both ways.

“Go back to whatever you were doing!” I shouted at them. “You’ll all have the chance to quench your curiosity later, at a very modest twilga.”

The adults drifted away reluctantly. The three of us were soon alone on the challenge lawn. “Come with me while I negotiate for the territory and some other essentials for you.” I said to them. “I strongly suggest you say and do nothing unless I tell you to.”

I set out for Broker Street, and they followed behind like a pair of well-trained tagnami.

The next few ten-days were as hectic as any I could recall. As well as tending my territory, my new tagnami and my Weighing, I had the two humans (their name for themselves) to look after. And in many ways they were as helpless as Runt.

I negotiated a very good twilga with the broker handling the Coldcrag territory. On the long walk out to it I learned the copy was also named Ralphayers, and was a male adult, while the other was Pamayers, a female adult. The scarcity of game and the dilapidated cabin didn’t bother them; they found plenty of edible plants. I was surprised by how they acted like a single adult in many things (even their living arrangements!). But they seemed even more surprised when I explained how they had to mark their bounds.

Artisans were hired to patch up the cabin—including such bizarre notions as a solid wood door and glass window covers. Others scratched behind their ears in confusion, then produced furniture unlike anything ever seen before. I was at their cabin when another balloon dropped from the sky, bringing an adult-high metal cylinder from which the humans removed an amazing assortment of items. I was right about their ineptness as hunters, but with new breeding stock and a cheat they called a bow they managed to bring down some meat.

Coming up with the twilga for all this was no problem. The humans were able to supply valuable knowledge on just about any subject. Savants, artisans, professionals, tradesfolk, adults in every field; the trickle of customers became a rushing stream, then a broad and powerful river. Thanks in no small part to my agenting. The humans rejected some requests because the knowledge was too advanced to be of use, and others because it might be dangerous. But that still left more than enough business.

Teaching them civilized behavior was the hardest part of my job, and for the first few ten-days I had all I could handle keeping them alive. But by the time the days reached their shortest they were settled in and reasonably accepted.

As usual, I was puffing for breath when I reached the border of the humans’ territory. The scrawny woods climbing the mountain’s paws were as far from town as you could get before finding yourself in the Wild. The snow-draped pricklytrees and redberry bushes were far apart and positively anemic.

I howled for permission to enter. Moments later I heard the three horn blasts granting permission—neither human had the lung power for entry calls.

Their cabin sat on a granite shelf overlooking the river valley below Coalgathering. It was now by far the largest I have ever seen, with no less than five rooms for the various odd human activities.

Ralphayers stood by the open door. “Welcome, Slasher. Care to come inside?”

Flower smell or not, being inside their boarded-up cabin made my jaws ache. But I knew the humans found snow and near-freezing temperatures uncomfortable. “Okay.”

They had a warm fire going in the wall hearth (one of their highly profitable innovations) of their “living room.” Pamayers was seated at a table reading a book aloud. The strange box they called a “radio” was in front of her. The humans had a fantastic appetite for our books; recent purchases were stacked all around the floor. “Hi, Slasher,” she said. “What’s happening?”

My visit had an ulterior purpose. I didn’t see how talking my problem over with them could help, but they were full of surprises and I was out of ideas. Still, politeness dictated some small talk first. “How are your studies coming?”

“Incredibly,” Pamayers said, putting down the book. Ralphayers sat in a chair by the fire, while I stretched out on a rug. “There’s so much data to collect, digest and relay to the skyboat for transmission home. We’re beginning to unravel a few of the tough questions about your people.”

“Such as?” I asked.

“Such as why you’re intelligent.”

They were always raising the sort of topics that caused me headaches. “I hope you’re not looking at me for an answer. You should talk to old Rubbertail and the other biologists.”

“We have. Our working hypothesis is that you evolved intelligence as protection against a danger bigger than starvation or hostile predators: yourselves. With your territorial instinct and year-round breeding there must have always been tremendous population pressure and competition for the best land. The smarter adults fought better, and figured out ways to avoid more fights. They tended to be the survivors and breeders.”

That made a vague kind of sense. “Our earliest legends tell of adults fighting over territories to the verge of racial extinction, until the hero brings peace by establishing a primitive version of our present customs.”

“They’re probably accurate,” Pamayers commented, “except the ‘hero’ was more likely a long and difficult socialization process. From simple live-and-let-live at watering holes to your towns, territories and twilga.”

Ralphayers was staring at me. “You didn’t come here for a scholarly discussion. Out with it, Slasher.”

“Okay. But first we have to settle the twilga I’ll owe you for your advice.”

“Don’t be silly.” Ralphayers said. “It’s the least we can do, after all that you’ve—” He caught himself, helped by Pamayers’ frown as well as my rising growl. “Sorry. The standard fee will be fine by us. What’s your problem?”

“You walk in it every time you go to town, or rather swim in it. The dirt streets. I’ve been trying for years to get everyone to pledge twilga to get them paved.”

“We remember your sales pitch,” Pamayers said. “Surely the whole town would want to chip in for something like that.”

I laughed bitterly. “You couldn’t get everyone to agree the sun rises in the east. I’ve whittled the holdouts down to four, but I can’t budge them. Any suggestions?”

The humans jabbered at each other in their own language, then Ralphayers said to me, “Your problem is inherent in your social system. It’s why you have progressed relatively slowly in fields requiring group effort. Don’t you have any customs for resolving such impasses?”

“If the need were great enough, I could challenge them. But it isn’t. All that leaves is persuasion.”

“We have a suggestion. It stretches your ethical structure a bit, but we don’t think it’s an outright break.”

“I’m listening.”

“Check our twilga book, and see if we have balances with your holdouts.”

I did. “Yes. Quite large ones.”

“Good. What you do is use them as a lever. Since you do our shopping, suppose you decided to use all of our twilga with the holdouts right now?”

“They couldn’t possibly cover that much additional debt. They would have to scramble to arrange extensions, the value of their twilga would go way down—it’d hurt.”

“Suppose you pointed this danger out to them, but at the same time you offered not to do it—if they chip in on the street paving?”

The idea whirled around under my skull, making me dizzy. I didn’t know how to react. It could work. But was it right?

“What . . . what is the twilga balance? You supply your twilga . . .”

“No, we haven’t any twilga interest in this at all,” Ralphayers said. “We get our debts paid either way. The only twilga transaction I see is between you, acting for the town, and the holdouts. The town gets its paved streets, the holdouts pay their share, and their paws stay unmuddy too.”

I felt like I had drunk too much fermented milk. By Kraal, it might just be the answer! A whole herd of possibilities for town improvements stampeded past my mind’s eye. “I’ll give it a try.”

We settled the twilga for the advice, talked a little longer, then I left. I was anxious to get back to town to try out the humans’ idea.

I decided to test it on the most intractible of the holdouts. I found Shrub fur stoking her forge in preparation for working some iron. She took off her leather apron and walked over to me. Her hostile scent arrived first. “Afternoon, Slasher,” she rumbled. “You here to harangue me about the paving again?”

“Afraid so.”

“Look, I tell you and I tell you. I can’t afford it. And even if I could, why waste hard-earned twilga on useless luxuries? A bit of mud never hurt anyone.”

“That’s a very narrow point of view.”

She growled. “Are you insulting me?”

“No, of course not,” I said quickly. “But . . . Shrub fur my friend, you have a problem. I’m here to help you with it if I can.”

“What problem?”

“You’ve run up quite a large debt to the humans for the information about that metal they call steel. I hope you can cover it—all of it—since I’m going shopping for them today.”

She bared her fangs nervously. “I . . . I assumed . . . with so many others owing them too . . .”

“That’s true, of course. I could use other adults’ twilga today. The choice is mine.”

It took a few moments for the implication to penetrate the dense stuff between her ears. Then she tensed as if about to attack, and I tensed, too. But she managed to control herself. “I suppose the humans won’t accept installment payments with interest?” she growled.

“You suppose correctly.”

“I could challenge them over this!”

“I stand in their place,” I reminded her. “Part of my job.”

“I might still win,” she said thoughtfully.

“Not likely. But even if you did, you would be known as an adult who doesn’t honor her twilga. Who would sell to you or buy from you then?”

She just stood there, looking like she wanted to howl in pain. I knew how she felt. Finally she growled, “I agree to pay a share for the street paving. But don’t think this ends the matter. You’re doing a bad thing. Very bad!”

I quickly got out of range of the reek of her hate, and visited the other three holdouts in turn. The results and their reactions were all the same. Their anger didn’t worry me; these things passed.

I was glowing with success as I handled Weighing cases in my stall the rest of the day. Tomorrow I would contract for the paving job and start redeeming pledges.

Which might explain why I didn’t notice—then—the paucity of clients, or the groups of adults that stopped talking when I passed, or the whispers at my back.

At sundown I picked up Runt at school and loped for home. I was still lost in thoughts of which brickwrights could do the best and cheapest work, and didn’t miss the usual friendly goodnights. Even Irongut’s.

We reached the cabin as darkness closed around it. Runt was learning fast; he growled “Mommy” softly and didn’t fight as I chained him in the corner on his training blanket.

“Yes, Mommy loves you,” I said, scratching behind his ears. “But if you mess off of your blanket again you’ll wear it. Are you hungry?”

Runt jumped up and down, and howled.

“Me too. I’ll bring something tasty back for you.”

The hunting was long and cold. The snow was so deep in the open that I made better time on two legs. I moved through the gaunt leafless trees like a spirit from a ghost legend. I was on the verge of giving up and going to bed hungry when I found and dug out a borer burrow. Not the most delicious meat, but in snow season you couldn’t be choosy.

I was returning to the cabin with two of the dirty little fleshbags for Runt when I heard Irongut’s entry cry.

An unexpected pleasure? Our relationship had cooled perceptibly since I started acting for the humans. He was pretty conservative for a young adult, and didn’t approve of the changes they were causing.

If this was a romantic visit, I was all in favor. I howled permission, and hurried back to the chain to feed Runt and run a quick comb through my fur.

The moment he stepped through the doorway I smelled trouble. He wasn’t lusty; he was trying to hide nervousness. “Evening,” I said lightly. Be careful, I told myself. Something is up.

“Good to see you, Slasher.” He went over to the hearth I had just lit. “I haven’t caught scent of you much lately. You’ve been so busy with your creatures. I’ve missed you.”

“Humans, gorwana.” Love-words came naturally between us now. “And I’ve missed you too. How’s business?”

“Lousy. The new kilning techniques you sold to the other ceramic artisans have almost made me obsolete.”

“You can consult the humans too.”

His scent turned hostile. “I don’t want any unnatural knowledge, not a bit of it. Even if I never sell another pot.” He stopped, and tried what he probably thought was a convincing show of passion. “But I didn’t come here to argue morality, gorwana. I came to be with you.” He closed, and started licking behind my left ear.

I backed away. “Okay, it’s truth time. What are you trying to accomplish?”

“Huh?”

“Do you think I’m a fresh-caught tagnami you can trick? You insult me. You aren’t in a romantic mood, so why are you really here?”

“I . . . wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About . . . uh . . . Weighing. You know I’m very interested. I thought we might—”

“Irongut, gorwana, you don’t get enough practice to be a convincing liar. You’re here for a reason you won’t admit.” I could only think of one subject about which he might feel the need to lie to me. “It’s something to do with the humans, isn’t it?”

Silence.

“Kraal curse it, Irongut, go home. You aren’t welcome on my territory. I’m going to visit the humans, make sure they’re okay.”

He moved to block the doorway. “No. That’s why I came, to keep you out of it.”

“Out of what?” More silence. “If you aren’t going to talk to me, get out. You won’t fight me, but I may have to walk over you if you don’t move.”

He couldn’t outglare me, and finally stepped aside. “Please stay here tonight,” he begged. “With me or without me. You can’t help the humans.”

You could have sliced iron with my anger. “You know about my duty to them. I’m going. If you tell me what I’m walking into, it might help me avoid trouble.”

He thought that through, then said in a low growl. “Word spread quickly about the immoral trick you used to put over the street paving. Many of us feel the humans are the source of this evil among many others. So Shrubfur and a pawful of others plan to visit Coldcrag tonight. For a circle challenge.”

Overkill, I thought. Any one adult could kill both humans without much effort; I didn’t see the need for multiple challenges, except maybe moral support. “Violating my challenge-right! Skulking behind my back! You thought I would ignore this shame if I had no chance to prevent it! No! I’ll buy my honor back with blood, if it comes to that!”

“Go home, Irongut.” My voice softened. “I forgive you. Your heart is in the right place, though Kraal knows where your brain is.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“My job.”

Irongut backed out the doorway, reeking worry and sorrow. “The humans are dangerous, and very bad luck. I hope you survive the night, gorwana.” Then he was gone.

I rushed around the cabin, filling my carrysack with things I would need. I had enough imagination to see the only two possible outcomes of what I had to do. Neither was good. I would have felt ill except for the heat of anger that burned away all lesser emotions.

Unchaining Runt, I left him sleeping on his blanket.

“Sleep well, my little furball. Tomorrow it’s back to the Wild for you, unless the new owner needs a tagnami.”

The tears in my eyes dried quickly as I ran at top speed across meadows that were pale white in the moonlight, and through grave-black forest, to the commonland trail. Even during snow season there was gaunt beauty for the discerning eye; smells of life dying and awaiting rebirth. But my mind was busy adding details to my plan. It depended on my reaching Coldcrag first—a reasonable possibility, since my territory was closer to it than Shrub fur’s. Plus the fact that circle challenges usually required a lot of negotiation to settle the individual rights.

I stretched my stride until icicles tore at my lungs, but the snow dragged at my legs. Before long I was panting and aching. Kraal, I was getting old!

I sniffed the light breeze, and paused every so often to listen, but I seemed to be alone in the night. The territories I passed were quiet. Was I early, or too late?

I reached the border of Coldcrag still without any sign of the circle challengers. Even in an emergency like this I couldn’t enter without the humans’ permission—I wasn’t here to issue a challenge. I howled an entry cry.

Minutes passed. If the deed was already done, I would return home. In the morning I would set out to identify the challengers and regain my honor. But that wouldn’t bring the humans back to life. I was beginning to think of them as friends as well as business associates.

The horn sounded entry permission. I must have roused them from sleep. Good, so far. I ran up the slope as though demons were on my trail. Maybe there were.

Ralphayers opened the door, shivering from the cold. Pamayers stood behind him; her candle was the only light in the dark cabin. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“Very wrong. Get your traveling gear, quick. We’re leaving here now.”

“Huh? Why?” Ralphayers stifled a yawn.

“A group of adults is heading here to kill you two. They may be closing in right now.”

“You’re . . . you’re sure about this?”

“Yes, yes, yes! But don’t believe me—stick around and see them for yourself. You’ll get to participate in one of our quaint rituals called a circle challenge. You won’t enjoy it.”

“Why? What have we done?”

“You didn’t do it; I did. I listened to you instead of my common sense. No time for this now. Move or stay!”

They had carrysacks filled with equipment for their frequent research trips into the Wild; they stuffed them with food, then slung them over their backs after putting on more of their strange pelt substitutes for warmth. They kept talking to each other in their own language, I poked my head out the door.

The breeze was rolling down the slope, so I heard them before I smelled them. They were on the humans’ territory, spread out to prevent escape, and closing in on the cabin clearing. At least seven. I couldn’t see them; a broken twig here, a whisper there told me where they were. They weren’t being particularly stealthy, since they didn’t expect much opposition from the humans.

Time to enlighten them. I howled the traditional trespass challenge, then added, “I’m here! Slasher! I’m here to accept any and all challenges of Ralphayers and Pamayers! I suggest you turn around and slink away before your debt becomes too large to let you survive!”

I admired my bravado. I might win the first two or three challenges, but even my ego couldn’t pretend I’d live to complete the circle. They knew it, too. Shrubfur’s voice came from the black forest eaves. “Return to your territory, Slasher, while you can. You’ve been seduced by these evil creatures, but when their influence is gone you’ll be one of us again.”

“I’m more respectable than any of you! I’m not afraid of new ideas, or in need of a skulking pack when an adult would hunt alone!”

That insult ended rational discussion. Howling rose in all directions, coming closer, a din that sent all nocturnal beasts scurrying or flying to safety. The humans crowded behind me, jerking at each cry. “Ready?” I demanded.

“Yes,” Ralphayers said. “But what can we do? They’re all around. We can’t fight them, wouldn’t even if we could. And we can’t run fast enough to escape.”

“Too true. Remember those animals you told me about, horses? Well, pretend I’m one. Straddle my back and hang onto my fur.”

“You’re strong, but not that strong,” Ralphayers said.

“You better hope I am. Get on.”

They did, awkwardly, sitting in front of and behind my carrysack. My legs almost buckled. They were heavier than they looked. But I figured I could still make better speed than their pitiful excuse for running.

“Here we go!” I bounded off the porch and crossed the white-crusted rocky ground away from the cliff and Coalgathering, toward the Wild.

“Where are we going?” Pamayers shouted over the drum rhythm of my four driving legs and the hissing wind.

“Away from the hunters,” I gasped. “If we manage that . . . we’ll see.”

I could have tried to dart between two of the slower challengers. But such a show of cowardice would make us legitimate prey; they would hunt us to the death. Besides, I was mad from tail to snout. If I had to abandon everything I owned except my honor, I would go with style and at least a small victory.

I ran straight at Shrubfur.

She loped out of the underbrush, a black shadowy shape. I would have approached a fight with her cautiously under the best of circumstances; with the burden on my back it was downright crazy. Which I was, a little bit. “Stay right there!” I shouted. “I’m coming with a red welcome for you!”

My scent was so strong I could smell it, rage and death.

The other challengers kept their distance—this was between Shrubfur and me now. She held her ground, tensing to defend and counterattack. She didn’t smell the least bit afraid, but . . . maybe . . . uncertain.

The gap between us was closing fast. My back ached. The humans were shouting questions that I didn’t bother to hear. Shrubfur had become my entire universe. If she didn’t step aside, I was going to claw a path right through her. Or go down trying.

I understood her uncertainty. The still rational part of my mind was counting on it. She wasn’t sure she could beat me, and her reason to try wasn’t very strong—her challenge was against the humans. And they were abandoning their territory under challenge. It rarely happened, but it was as effective a banishment as death.

Her snarling face loomed in front of me. I spread my jaws to tear out her throat, and wondered where her claws would rake me.

Then she was gone, a stride to my right, and I hurtled by. The scrawny woods wrapped darkness around me. The snow under my paws thinned to frozen patches, and plant-smells cleared the evil reek from my nostrils. The humans were still shouting questions.

Just as I thought we were clear, Shrubfur apparently regretted her indecisiveness. Her howl was promptly answered by the other challengers. Running legs pounded the ground behind us. The hunt was up.

My rage began to cool, allowing me to concentrate fully on the agony each stride wrung from my breaking back. But it would have to agonize even more if it weren’t to stop permanently. “Are you two okay?” I shouted to the humans.

“Yes!” Ralphayers answered. “What happened back there? Were you going to fight?”

“Later . . .!” I gasped. “They’re on our . . . trail! Have to . . . outrun them! Need all my strength!”

“You can’t possibly outrun them, not while carrying us!”

That deserved and got no answer. Of course I couldn’t, but there was no honorable alternative to trying.

I was heading upslope, toward a low pass over the mountains and into the Wild. The stunted trees and bushes became more sparse, giving way to snowcovered granite. I gasped with each stride. My running was ragged; I could hear and smell the hunters on both sides and behind, closing in on us cautiously.

I hadn’t expected pursuit, and had no clever scheme to escape. But I kept doggedly at it, ignoring further questions from the humans. The summit of the pass was just ahead now. If I could make it through, at least I would be running downhill.

The hunters were within a ten-stride or two of bringing us down. My back hurt so badly I almost looked forward to it.

Suddenly and dramatically in the wan moonlight, the white trail curved downward. I saw the Wild below, tree-tops and rivers and broad meadows reaching to the horizon. I started down, staggering, hindknees buckling.

It took me several moments to realize that the humans and I were alone on the downward trail. The hunters had stopped at the summit. I could feel their eyes even though I was beyond their view. I pulled up slowly on trembling legs. “Off!”

They scrambled onto their own legs. “Are we safe now?” Pamayers asked. “Why did they stop?”

“Safe from them, yes. Seems they just wanted to chase us out. But we’re in the Wild now, so keep a sharp lookout. There are many dangerous creatures here, large and small, ones we’ve purged from our territories.”

I continued down the trail—a rough path blazed by Travelers as well as mothers-to-be—and the humans followed. Walking, not running, I felt light enough to glide, but my back and legs still ached.

“Can you tell us where we’re going now?” Ralphayers asked.

I paused. “There’s a lot I could say in answer to that. Our immediate need is for a safe place to sleep. I don’t know the Wild well; I rarely have business out here. But I remember a place near here that should do.”

“What happens to us tomorrow?” Pamayers asked.

“I don’t know,” I snapped, short-tempered in my pain and loss. “This is a new experience for me too. So far I’ve been concentrating on keeping us alive tonight.”

“Is there any hope we’ll be able to return to Coalgathering?”

“No. The circle challenge still stands. And we would find the same kind of trouble if we tried to establish ourselves in another town. The news of what happened tonight will spread fast, and we would be considered undesirable neighbors wherever we went. That leaves a pair of choices. Turning Traveler or Wilder.”

“Traveling might suit us,” Ralphayers said. “We could learn more that way. But I’m not sure I understand the concept completely. Travelers are artisans, savants, craftsmen, explorers et al who wander from town to town. But how do they fit into your social and economic systems?”

“They’re somewhat disreputable,” I admitted, “since they don’t share our need for territory. They earn a bit of twilga in a town, buy what they need and move on. They eat, drink and sleep in the Wild. Frankly, I don’t think you two would last long. But if that’s your choice, I’ll help you as much as I can.”

The humans jabbered at each other. I looked up past bare branches at the cold stars, and felt empty. I was no Traveler. I had to have land of my own under my paws, a fixed place in the universe. But my territory would belong to someone else tomorrow.

“You’re right,” Pamayers said to me. “We wouldn’t survive. What about the other possibility?”

“Wilders,” I growled. “Even lower than Travelers. Cowards, criminals, perverts, eccentrics—anyone who can’t accept the customs of society—flee into the Wild, living scarcely any better than truly wild adults. But I don’t see a third choice for us.”

“You mean we just find a likely piece of land and take up residence?” Pamayers asked.

“Two territories,” I reminded them sharply. “Ones with adequate food and water won’t be easy to find out here. That’s why it’s the Wild. But yes, we claim them, challenging the current owners—quality land will almost certainly have a Wilder or wild adult on it. If we win, the territories are ours. I’ll have to fight for you, of course.”

More jabbering. “That plan sounds more suitable to our needs,” she said. “With the tools in our carrysacks we should be able to build cabins, hunt and grow food, make clothes . . . But none of us are in any shape to decide our future tonight. Let’s take it up again in the morning.”

“I agree,” I said. For awhile we walked in weary silence. We were on an icy rock shelf following a cliff face. Below the bare slope descended to the eaves of a forest, all dark and indistinct shapes.

“Why?” Ralphayers asked so softly that I might have thought he was talking to himself, except that he wasn’t using his own strange language.

“Why what?” I responded.

“Why all of this? What did we do wrong, to be driven out like this? I thought your fellow townsfolk were beginning to accept us.”

“Some were,” I agreed. “But I made a bad error in judgment. I used your idea to put over the street paving, and it convinced some of the town conservatives that your notions about cooperation are dangerous. Ergo, the challenge.”

“But . . . but cooperation is a cornerstone of any social system. Your individualism has held back your rate of progress. There is so much you just can’t do without group effort.”

I growled. “For a savant you aren’t very quick on the uptake. We may not have the herd instinct of your kind, but we do cooperate. We do it in our own way. As for progress . . .” I stopped. All the times I had cursed the hindbound conservatism of my fellow adults, and here I was babbling their cant like Shrubfur or Irongut. Was my loss turning me against my own beliefs—and the humans?

“You’re right,” Pamayers said, “and we were wrong to suggest what we did. We’re here to learn your mores, not change them.”

“I was the one who bought your idea, and tried it. A Weigher should have known better. I was . . . tempted. And I’ve been properly punished. So let’s not talk about this any more tonight.”

More silent walking brought us to the place I remembered. A cave in the limestone of the cliff. Not much of a cave; more like a cabin-sized indentation, with fallen rocks piled in front like a low fence. I sniffed to make sure it didn’t have a current inhabitant. It didn’t. “Here’s your cabin for tonight. Safe from predators, and some shelter from the cold.”

“Aren’t you joining us?” Pamayers asked.

I shuddered. “I’ll sleep out here as a guard. The cliff is all the shelter I need.”

The humans crawled over the rubble into the cave. They used their odd nonburning lamps to examine it, and reported it was messy from animals that had laired there, but habitable.

They got the cave cleaned up quickly, and went to sleep. I was just as tired, but I had trouble falling asleep. I wasn’t as impervious to the cold as I had alleged.

But the worst was the stress of having no territory, of sharing this place with others. I had to stay with them to keep them safe, but there wasn’t any precedent for adults sharing a territory . . . there was my out. They weren’t really adults; they were more like tagnami I was raising. Not a perfect analogy, but good enough to let me finally sleep.

I woke up cold, stiff, and momentarily disoriented. When memory poured back between my ears, I managed to feel even worse. I just lay there on the leaves I had piled to cushion the bare rock. I watched the stars slowly fade as dawn came. I heard the forest sounds and the loud breathing of the humans. The smells were unchanged from the night before.

I felt unnaturally lethargic and hopeless. There were things that needed doing, I knew intellectually, but emotionally I couldn’t stir up any motivation to move. The wan winter sun rose to warm me a bit. It looked like it was going to be a clear day.

The humans finally came out of the cave. They looked as worn out and haggard as I knew I must, and I was glad I didn’t have a mirror to see. “Good morning,” Pamayers said with a try at cheerfulness.

I creaked up onto my hindlegs and joined them. “If you say so. At least we have good weather. We’ll need it.”

Ralphayers nodded. “Well, Slasher, do we stay here or move on?”

I thought as I paced the kinks out of my joints. Finally I said, “This land isn’t very good for game, though there is water. We’ll want better for permanent territories. But I think we should winter here. I’ll hunt game for all of us. Can you fix the cave up as a suitable temporary home?”

“Not easily or quickly, but yes. We have some tools. We can wall up the front, put in a simple hearth, a floor, build some furniture—”

“I suggest you get started then.” I said curtly. “I’ll have to protect you until you have a secure home, and on top of everything else that has happened I must disgrace myself by sleeping on your doorstep.”

Ralphayers paused, then said, “I think I understand your problem. With luck we should be able to get the wall up today.”

“That would be good news,” I growled without conviction. “While you’re at it, I’m going to hunt our breakfast. After that I’ll scout around for a nearby site for my own winter haven. There are supposed to be more caves further south along the cliffs. Tomorrow we can run the bounds of our new territories and mark them.”

“Is that important out here?” Pamayers asked.

“We’re still civilized adults, Kraal curse it! I won’t start behaving like an animal, and neither should you!”

They looked at me strangely. Kraal take them both, I had nothing to apologize for. I told them how to find the nearest mountain stream, warned them to keep watch for direbeasts and wild adults, and loped down the slope into the grim woods. I felt indecently glad to be getting away from them, if only briefly.

The strongwood giants and squat underbrush became thicker as I followed a game trail down toward the plain. The forest was, I knew, only a thin strip hugging the mountain range. Beyond were rolling meadowlands buried under snow and bereft of game.

I had half-hoped the familiar routine of the hunt would snap me out of my funk. But it didn’t.

Much as we pride ourselves on our individualism, scratch us and you will find underneath creatures as socially interdependent as any hiving insect. I had been torn from my secure place in Coalgathering’s social stucture. In one swipe of the claw I had been disgraced, lost my territory and tagnami, and been forced into exile. I was already beginning to feel lonely. The humans were intelligent and overly friendly, but they weren’t adults. We had too little in common.

Kraal curse the day they had dropped into my life to destroy it!

No, it wasn’t fair to blame them. They had provided the opportunity, but I had seized it to trample tradition and hurt others. Yes, hurt! Only now was I beginning to see, through their eyes, how wrongly I had dealt with them. In the arrogance of my convictions I had forgotten their right to their own. For that there had to be twilga, and I would pay it for the rest of my life.

I leaned against the slick black bark of a forest giant, and for the first time since the day I killed my father I cried.

How long I cried I don’t know. What stopped me was a scent on the soft morning breeze. A half-familiar scent. A dangerous, hostile scent. Even in my present state it snapped me back to animal awareness.

A wild male adult, coming this way. Not a Wilder who had turned his back on civilization, but a cub who had never been brought in to become a tagnami. As an adult he would be a very successful predator, cunning though uneducated, a winner in the hard battle for survival in the Wild.

Worse yet, I could tell he was in rut. He wasn’t looking to kill me for trespassing on his supposed territory. Not this time.

My nape fur should have risen in outrage, and I should have hurled to challenge and gut the savage for his effrontery. As a tagnami I had heard the dark tales of Wilders coupling with wild adults, but I hadn’t really believed them. Some things were too disgusting to be conceivable. But I didn’t move.

He crept cautiously from a stand of iceberry bushes. At this close range he had to know I didn’t share his lust, but being a savage he wouldn’t care. He was a magnificent physical specimen; huge, about Irongut’s age, and scarred so that his pelt looked like a badly made quilt. He stank from the lack of a recent bath. Still I didn’t move.

This would end it. The body and the brain would go on, fulfilling an unwanted obligation. But the soul would be extinguished. No pain, no loss, no loneliness. All I had to do was yield.

I made myself give off an acquiescent spoor, turned away, crouched low, tucked my tail to the side to save it from his brutal passion, and spread my hindlegs for him.

The sun was well past zenith and starting toward its evening rest when I loped out of the woods and approached the humans’ cave. They were hard at work fitting young strongwood trunks they had cut and trimmed into a wall blocking up the cave mouth. They heard me and, dropping their tools, ran to meet me.

“Where have you been?” Pamayers demanded. I thought I was beginning to master some of their odd facial expressions, and she seemed worried as well as afraid for me. But their feelings meant nothing to me now.

“I’ve been doing what I should have done a long time ago. Thinking. Not just reacting to events.” I paused. “I’ve changed my mind. I can’t be a Wilder.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just this. I’m returning to town. Now.”

Ralphayers spoke before Pamayers could. “But last night you said we couldn’t go back. You said the challengers would try to kill us.”

I nodded.

“You’ve thought of a way around the challenge?”

The will to do something—anything—was like the glow of fermented milk spreading through my body. Recent memory still burned like a hearthfire, but I would again be true to my name. “I’m going to accept the challenge for you. I’ll complete the circle, if my skill and luck last.”

“You can’t win a half dozen or more fights in a row!” Pamayers blurted. “What’s wrong with you? Are you trying to commit suicide?”

“Why I do it is my own business. Still, we have a business agreement. If you come with me, I’ll do my best to keep you safe.”

“How are you going to manage that if they kill you?”

“If you want to find that out, come along. But you don’t have to. We can terminate the agreement. With your strange talents and tools you might make a life as Wilders.”

“Without your help we won’t survive the winter,” Ralphayers disagreed. “Starvation, attack, exposure—take your choice.”

They were trapped, but so was I, and I had no sympathy for any of us. “I’m leaving now. If you plan to hold me to our agreement, get your sacks and come.”

I walked slowly to the cliff trail that had brought us here. Behind me I heard hasty packing and paws running to catch up. They fell in on either side without a word.

The silence suited me. I didn’t want to have to explain further, or to try. When you have lost everything you have to lose, right down to your self-respect, you reach at last a kind of peaceful equilibrium, the firmness of rock bottom. I wanted to enjoy it while I could.

I set a fast pace up to and over the pass, and the humans were hard put to keep up. They talked to each other from time to time. Starting down, I took the most direct commonland trail to town.

I wanted to arrive before the adults started home for the day. The sun hung low over the treetops beyond the river when I walked through the South Gate on my hindlegs, flanked by the humans.

I expected the whole town to know what had happened, and I was right. As I walked along Savant Street toward the challenge lawn, most adults and tagnami stopped whatever they were doing, stared at us, and began talking excitedly among themselves. I knew what they were looking forward to; I didn’t plan to disappoint them.

No one spoke to me, but many followed us at a safe distance. Others spread the news, like the ripples created by a rock tossed in the river. We reached the reddish-purple groundplant, dumped our carrysacks, and went to the middle of the challenge lawn.

The late afternoon was golden with shafts of light coming through the treetops. Bloodlust and excitement saturated the air, which was dry but hard-edged with a chill. A beautiful day for fighting. Hundreds of adults and tagnami soon ringed the lawn—most of the town.

“Don’t say or do anything unless I tell you to,” I whispered to the humans.

Pamayers opened her mouth, but then closed it and touched my shoulder. Strangely, I found the gesture reassuring rather than offensive.

The onlookers suddenly became silent. From seven places in the ring adults stepped forward. I recognized them all by their scent. The circle challengers. I faced Shrubfur.

“I’m glad to see your courage has returned,” Shrubfur growled. “One thing I never thought of you was that you were a coward.”

“The grievances between us have become complicated,” I said in a calm tone. “The humans and I are eager to settle them. I suggest that we get a judgment from the Weigher. You do have a new Weigher, don’t you?”

Shrubfur laughed deeply. “That we do. One more to my taste than his predecessor. I wonder if you’ll approve. Ah, here he is now.”

Irongut stepped through the ring onto the lush lawn.

I wasn’t surprised. I had known about his interest for a long time. Nor, knowing his feelings on the subject, could I expect any help from him. Love wouldn’t stop him from doing his duty any more than it would me. He would be fair, but fair according to his own beliefs.

His expression when he looked at me was grim, but I smelled the scent of concern, too. “I’m the Weigher now,” he said to me. “Are my services needed here?”

If my scheme went wrong, I would have to fight him. I felt old. Too old.

Shrubfur growled, “Ashpelt, Crier, Fisheater, Shortlegs, Treeback, Stripedfur and I issued a circle challenge to the creatures called Ralphayers and Pamayers. Slasher intervened on their behalf. They fled from us and abandoned their territories. Now they have returned. We are reposting our challenge.” The other six added their approval.

“Will you accept a twilga decision from me to settle your grievances?” Irongut asked.

Before I could speak Shrubfur answered, “No, this is a blood dispute.” and the others agreed.

Irongut turned to the humans. “Then you must fight. Which of you will accept first?”

“No!” I shouted—everybody had to hear this. “I claim this challenge is unjust! I want the Weigher to judge if it’s proper!”

For something as unusual as a circle challenge it was a fair request. The challengers agreed smugly, and we all entered the twilga for Irongut’s Weighing in our notebooks.

“Why do you say it’s unjust?” he asked.

“Because these adults have no legitimate grievance against the humans.”

“No grievance!” Shrubfur howled. “They have spread strange ideas that damage our businesses. Worse, they have seduced you so that you think like them and deal dishonorably with your own kind. Everyone knows about the perverted trick you used on Fisheater, Shortlegs, Treeback and myself.”

“Yes, my dishonor! I don’t deny it! But the humans have done none of you any harm. They sell knowledge that improves our trades, sciences and arts. Many here have bought from them, and profited. If you refused the chance to improve while your competitors didn’t, whose fault is that?

“It’s nothing less than cowardice to try to put the blame on others for your own mistakes. Knowledge isn’t evil, but it can be used for evil. If it is, blame the user. Surely you aren’t claiming mere words can turn a good adult bad. If so, you’re accusing all of us of being so weak-minded that we can’t control ourselves.”

I stopped, because my well-planned argument was having the desired effect. There were hostile scents and growls among the onlookers, directed at Shrubfur. Many of them had done business with the humans and hoped to do more. Moreover, accusations of cowardice and stupidity cut to the bone.

Irongut took a long time thinking, then said, “Slasher has made some valid points. I don’t see that you have a legitimate grievance against the two creatures.”

Tremendous relief surged through me. I wouldn’t have to fight Irongut.

The challengers plainly realized how bad they would look if they tried to pursue the matter. Nor did any of them seem inclined to fight Irongut over his decision. “I accept the Weighing,” each of us said in turn.

Irongut turned to me, his expression even grimmer. “But you’ve as much as admitted that their grievance against you is valid. You’ll have to complete the circle if you can.”

Shrubfur smiled broadly.

I motioned the humans to join Irongut at the edge of the lawn, then I dropped to four legs. Shrubfur slunk toward me slowly, also on four legs. Her pelt glistened like water in moonlight. “I hope you aren’t going to run away again,” she growled.

I returned her smile. “No, I’m going to fit you with a second mouth just under the first.”

The preliminaries out of the way, we closed in on each other. The onlookers’ conversations stopped as though cut with a knife.

I wanted Shrubfur’s life. Whether I then fell to the second, third or fourth challenger didn’t matter; she had chosen to make herself the symbol of my disaster. But it wouldn’t be easy. She was a paw taller than I, and a mass of muscles from her trade. In age and quickness we were evenly matched. Well, maybe I had the edge in cunning. Maybe.

We circled warily, sniffing to check each other’s mood. Shrubfur was hot with anger, but under rigid control; a good fighting attitude. I had no warning when she charged.

She leaped over me, a flashy but effective move. Her claws raked at my back. But I wasn’t there—I had dropped to my belly, rolled and crouched. I tried to hook one of her hindlegs with my tail, but missed.

I swung around in time to meet Shrubfur’s second attack. She dove at my left side, taking away a mouthful of fur and flesh. The wound bled, and hurt, but it would take a lot of nips like that to drop me. I sank a claw into her left foreleg and opened a deep slash. Her eyes glazed momentarily.

I jumped and came down on top of her, grappling with my claws. She rolled across the groundplant trying to knock me off. I hung on as long as I could, then jumped free.

I almost made it. She curled her tail around me, and bit into my right hindleg before I could squirm away. The pain was like a band of molten metal. I swallowed a howl of pain; Kraal curse it if I would shame myself any further.

We wrestled across the lawn as she gnawed at my leg. I had only a few seconds left to save it. Arching until I could feel my spine creak, I swung a foreleg back and down, and caught the end of her snout. Red blood spurted. During her momentary distraction I yanked my leg free.

I stood and faced her, wobbling a bit. Our pelts were matted with blood. We charged each other. She bit deep behind my neck and tried to grind through my right shoulder blade. I couldn’t hold in a whimper, and a gray fog obscured my sight.

But, sure of her victory at last, she neglected her defense for less than a second. I hit the sides of her head with two closed paws as hard as I could. She dropped at my feet, stunned.

I reached down with my claws to keep my promise.

And stopped.

I stared at Shrubfur’s bloody body, and felt dizzy with sudden insight. Thoughts flew through my mind. At least she would be dying true to her own beliefs, while I had clawed mine to shreds. I would die, and the humans too—without me they would soon ignorantly commit a fatal mistake. Their valuable knowledge and, yes, their even more valuable notion of mutual gain through group efort would be lost.

I had been only half-wrong, but too proud to bend rather than break. Now I understood. Too late; my course was set.

Or was it? I wasn’t an animal or a wild adult. I was a Weigher, with a lifetime of accumulated experience. I thought hard and fast, searched my memories, fitted ideas together like puzzle pieces. . . .

A lot went on during the three or four seconds that I crouched over Shrubfur. Then I stood up slowly. Everyone stared at me in rapt silence, eager for the kill, wondering at my delay.

I knew what I had to do, but it still hurt like a doctor’s scalpel. Shrubfur coughed. She was beginning to wake up. I took my twilga notebook and dropped it beside her. My belt followed it. I was naked.

After a moment of shock, a hundred whispers made the ring of onlookers buzz. The reek of disgust made me gag. Better get used to it, I told myself.

Irongut’s scent and expression were unreadable. This situation was an extremely rare one, but he knew his Weigher lore. “The challenge is settled,” he said, then turned and walked away. The ring was breaking up as adults and tagnami headed back to their stalls. Their eyes avoided mine. Shrubfur staggered off with my former property and a confused look.

The humans ran to me. “How badly are you hurt?” Pamayers demanded.

“I’ll live.”

“What happened?”

Each word hurt. “I surrendered to Shrubfur. My territory, my twilga, everything I owned is hers now.”

A long pause. “Why did you do it?”

“To survive. I have work to do, more important than my property or even my honor.”

Another pause, then Ralphayers said, “I think we understand. But what will you do without a territory or twilga?”

“I won’t have to do without either. It’s time for us to settle up for my services yesterday and today on your behalf. Saving your lives should be worth the price of a modest territory and the basic necessities.”

“Of course,” Pamayers said quickly. “As long as you include medical treatment on the top of your list. You’re losing a lot of blood.”

I swayed, and the gray fog was thickening. “Okay. Let’s go. We don’t have much time before dusk. We’ll want to stay out of town for a few days, let things calm down.”

If I could find adults willing to do business with me. I was publicly labeled a coward. No self-respecting adult would want to stain his pelt with my blood. I had lost all of my friends except the humans, and all of the respect of my fellow adults. Agenting the humans’ knowledge would be my only trade; Weighing and all other professions were closed to me. In time I might win back some friends and respect, but for now I would have to cling precariously to the bottom rung of the social ladder.

The sun had gone to ground beyond the river, and the day was ending quickly under heavy clouds. I was finishing up a third day of repairing the dilapidated cabin of my new territory. I put away my tools, and tried to ignore the throbbing of my bandaged leg, side and shoulder.

I was about to hobble into the stunted hillside woods and try to bring down dinner, even more of a challenge due to the meager game stock, when I heard a familiar howl for entry permission.

I trembled from surprise as I gave permission, and rushed inside the cabin to run a quick comb through my pelt. Why was he here? Fears and hopes fought in my mind.

I met Irongut on the porch—the cabin wasn’t ready for visitors yet. He looked well, with a more mature self-control. The responsibilities of Weighing seemed to agree with him. I felt a twinge of loss, but I was also proud for him. I tingled like a tagnami in cublove. Since the fight my moods had been swinging wildly.

“I’m glad you came,” I said simply.

“I want to talk to you about what happened.” I couldn’t determine his attitude by sight or scent.

“Okay.”

“At first I couldn’t understand your surrender. I despised you for it, like everyone else, and hated you for not being the adult I loved. But the not understanding hurt me. I kept worrying it in my mind.”

“You could have asked me. I would have explained.”

“That didn’t occur to me until after I figured it out. At least I think I have. You haven’t given up the evil human notions that caused all this, have you?”

I took a deep breath. “No, I haven’t. But I won’t be forcing them on anyone. I’ve learned my lesson.”

“Thank the gods for that. But why this fanaticism over something that only causes trouble?”

I looked up at the clouds, and the unseen stars. “The humans came here from another world. They’ve accomplished so much. We squabble over the smallest step forward, killing each other instead of working together to improve our lives.”

“It’s our way.”

“It’s stupid and wrong. We’re intelligent beings; we can change, grow. The knowledge I’m agenting for the humans will begin the change, since much of it will take group efforts to implement. But the key is the philosophy of cooperation itself. We’re explaining it to all of our customers, and they arrive from farther away every day. Travelers take the knowledge and new ideas and skills with them, telling tales wherever they go. Eventually the philosophy of cooperation will spread everywhere. Its clear advantages will bring about gradual acceptance, without any force being needed.”

“I don’t agree,” Irongut said, frowning. “You underestimate the deep roots of our morality.”

“Morals change to match changing social conditions. I read that once in a history text. Don’t worry, gorwana, the change will be a slow one. We won’t live to see much of it.”

Irongut was quiet for a long time. “I still feel it’s wrong. If we change to become like the humans, then we’ll no longer be ourselves. I’ll argue against it, and fight against it if necessary.”

I laughed. “You can’t fight ideas. But you should try if you feel you must. At the least, you can remind me not to be overzealous.”

“I will. I . . . don’t want you hurt anymore.”

My heart pounded under my furry chest. “I was about to go and look for some dinner. Will you hunt with me, gorwana? Then we can come back here and build a nice warm hearthfire?”

I smelled his answer before he spoke. “Of course. I still love you.”

Together we bounded from the porch, and ran like shadows across the new-fallen snow to the forest eaves.

24 VIEWS OF MT. FUJI, BY HOKUSAI

Roger Zelazny

This master of science fiction, winner of numerous Hugo and Nebula awards, needs little introduction besides the simple fact that we are proud to be publishing this beautiful story.

1. Mt. Fuji from Owari

Kit lives, though he is buried not far from here; and I am dead, though I watch the days-end light pinking cloudstreaks above the mountain in the distance, a tree in the foreground for suitable contrast. The old barrel-man is dust; his cask, too, I daresay. Kit said that he loved me and I said I loved him. We were both telling the truth. But love can mean many things. It can be an instrument of aggression or a function of disease.

My name is Mari. I do not know whether my life will fit the forms I move to meet on this pilgrimage. Nor death. Not that tidiness becomes me. So begin anywhere. Either arcing of the circle, like that vanished barrel’s hoop, should lead to the same place. I have come to kill. I bear the hidden death, to cast against the secret life. Both are intolerable. I have weighed them. If I were an outsider I do not know which I would choose. But I am here, me, Mari, following the magic footsteps. Each moment is entire, though each requires its past. I do not understand causes, only sequences. And I am long weary of reality-reversal games. Things will have to grow clearer with each successive layer of my journey, and like the delicate play of light upon my magic mountain they must change. I must die a little and live a little each moment.

I begin here because we lived near here. I visited the place earlier. It is, of course, changed. I recall his hand upon my arm, his sometime smiling face, his stacks of books, the cold, flat eye of his computer terminal, his hands again, positioned in meditation, his smile different then. Distant and near. His hands, upon me. The power of his programs, to crack codes, to build them. His hands. Deadly. Who would have thought he would surrender those rapid-striking weapons, delicate instruments, twisters of bodies? Or myself? Paths . . . Hands . . .

I have come back. It is all. I do not know whether it is enough.

The old barrel-maker within the hoop of his labor . . . Half-full, half-empty, half-active, half-passive . . . Shall I make a yin-yang of that famous print? Shall I let it stand for Kit and myself? Shall I view it as the great Zero? Or as infinity? Or is all of this too obvious? One of those observations best left unstated? I am not always subtle. Let it stand. Fuji stands within it. And is it not Fuji one must climb to give an accounting of one’s life before God or the gods?

I have no intention of climbing Fuji and accounting for myself, to God or to anything else. Only the insecure and the uncertain require justification. I do what I must. If the deities have any questions they can come down from Fuji and ask me. Otherwise, this is the closest commerce between us. That which transcends should only be admired from afar.

Indeed. I of all people should know this. I, who have tasted transcendence. I know, too, that death is the only god who comes when you call.

Traditionally, the henro—the pilgrim—would dress all in white. I do not. White does not become me, and my pilgrimage is a private thing, a secret thing, for so long as I can keep it so. I wear a red blouse today and a light khaki jacket and slacks, tough leather hiking shoes; I have bound my hair; a pack on my back holds my belongings. I do carry a stick, however, partly for the purpose of support, which I require upon occasion; partly, too, as a weapon should the need arise. I am adept at its use in both these functions. A staff is also said to symbolize one’s faith in a pilgrimage. Faith is beyond me. I will settle for hope.

In the pocket of my jacket is a small book containing reproductions of twenty-four of Hokusai’s forty-six prints of Mt. Fuji. It was a gift, long ago. Tradition also stands against a pilgrim’s traveling alone, for practical purposes of safety as well as for companionship. The spirit of Hokusai, then, is my companion, for surely it resides in the places I would visit if it resides anywhere. There is no other companion I would desire at the moment, and what is a Japanese drama without a ghost?

Having viewed this scene and thought my thoughts and felt my feelings, I have begun. I have lived a little, I have died a little. My way will not be entirely on foot. But much of it will be. There are certain things I must avoid in this journey of greetings and farewells. Simplicity is my cloak of darkness, and perhaps the walking will be good for me.

I must watch my health.

2. Mt. Fuji from a Teahouse at Yoshida

I study the print: A soft blueness to the dawn sky, Fuji to the left, seen through the teahouse window by two women; other bowed, drowsing figures like puppets on a shelf . . .

It is not this way here, now. They are gone, like the barrel-maker—the people, the teahouse, that dawn. Only the mountain and the print remain of the moment. But that is enough.

I sit in the dining room of the hostel where I spent the night, my breakfast eaten, a pot of tea before me. There are other diners present, but none near me. I chose this table because of the window’s view, which approximates that of the print. Hokusai, my silent companion, may be smiling. The weather was sufficiently clement for me to have camped again last night, but I am deadly serious in my pilgrimage to vanished scenes in this life-death journey I have undertaken. It is partly a matter of seeking and partly a matter of waiting. It is quite possible that it may be cut short at any time. I hope not, but the patterns of life have seldom corresponded to my hopes—or, for that matter, to logic, desire, emptiness, or any patterns of my own against which I have measured them.

All of this is not the proper attitude and occupation for a fresh day. I will drink my tea and regard the mountain. The sky changes even as I watch . . .

Changes . . . I must be careful on departing this place. There are precincts to be avoided, precautions to be taken. I have worked out all of my movements—from putting down the cup, rising, turning, recovering my gear, walking—until I am back in the country again. I must still make patterns, for the world is a number-line, everywhere dense. I am taking a small chance in being here.

I am not so tired as I had thought I would be from all yesterday’s walking, and I take this as a good sign. I have tried to keep in decent shape, despite everything. A scroll hangs on the wall to my right depicting a tiger, and I want this, too, for a good omen. I was born in the Year of the Tiger, and the strength and silent movements of the big striped cat are what I most need. I drink to you, Shere Khan, cat who walks by himself. We must be hard at the right time, soft at the proper moment. Timing . . .

We’d an almost telepathic bond to begin with, Kit and I. It drew us to each other, grew stronger in our years together. Empathy, proximity, meditation . . . Love? Then love can be a weapon. Spin its coin and it comes up yang.

Burn bright, Shere Khan, in the jungle of the heart. This time we are the hunter. Timing is all—and suki, the opening . . .

I watch the changes of the sky until a uniform brightness is achieved, holds steady. I finish my tea. I rise and fetch my gear, don my backpack, take up my staff. I head for the short hall which leads to a side door.

“Madam! Madam!”

It is one of the place’s employees, a small man with a startled expression.

“Yes?”

He nods at my pack.

“You are leaving us?”

“I am.”

“You have not checked out.”

“I have left payment for my room in an envelope on the dresser. It says ‘cashier’ on it. I learned the proper amount last night.”

“You must check out at the desk.”

“I did not check in at the desk. I am not checking out at the desk. If you wish, I will accompany you back to the room, to show you where I left the payment.”

“I am sorry, but it must be done with the cashier.”

“I am sorry also, but I have left payment and I will not go to the desk.”

“It is irregular. I will have to call the manager.”

I sigh.

“No,” I say. “I do not want that. I will go to the lobby and handle the checking out as I did the checking in.”

I retrace my steps. I turn left toward the lobby.

“Your money,” he says. “If you left it in the room you must get it and bring it.”

I shake my head.

“I left the key, also.”

I enter the lobby. I go to the chair in the corner, the one farthest from the work area. I seat myself.

The small man has followed me.

“Would you tell them at the desk that I wish to check out?” I ask him.

“Your room number . . .?”

“Seventeen.”

He bows slightly and crosses to the counter. He speaks with a woman, who glances at me several times. I cannot hear their words. Finally, he takes a key from her and departs. The woman smiles at me.

“He will bring the key and the money from your room,” she says. “Have you enjoyed your stay?”

“Yes,” I answer. “If it is being taken care of, I will leave now.”

I begin to rise.

“Please wait,” she says, “until the paperwork is done and I have given you your receipt.”

“I do not want the receipt.”

“I am required to give it to you.”

I sit back down. I hold my staff between my knees. I clasp it with both hands. If I try to leave now she will probably call the manager. I do not wish to attract even more attention to myself. I wait. I control my breathing. I empty my mind.

After a time the man returns. He hands her the key and the envelope. She shuffles papers. She inserts a form into a machine. There is a brief stutter of keys. She withdraws the form and regards it. She counts the money in my envelope.

“You have the exact amount, Mrs. Smith. Here is your receipt.”

She peels the top sheet from the bill.

There comes a peculiar feeling in the air, as if a lightning stroke had fallen here but a second ago. I rise quickly to my feet.

“Tell me,” I say, “is this place a private business or part of a chain?”

I am moving forward by then, for I know the answer before she says it. The feeling is intensified, localized.

“We are a chain,” she replies, looking about uneasily.

“With central bookkeeping?”

“Yes.”

Behind the special place where the senses come together to describe reality I see the form of a batlike epigon taking shape beside her. She already feels its presence but does not understand. My way is mo chih ch’u, as the Chinese say—immediate action, without thought or hesitation—as I reach the desk, place my staff upon it at the proper angle, lean forward as if to take my receipt and nudge the staff so that it slides and falls, passing over the countertop, its small metal tip coming to rest against the housing of the computer terminal. Immediately, the overhead lights go out. The epigon collapses and dissipates.

“Power failure,” I observe, raising my staff and turning away. “Good day.”

I hear her calling for a boy to check the circuit box.

I make my way out of the lobby and visit a rest room, where I take a pill, just in case. Then I return to the short hall, traverse it, and depart the building. I had assumed it would happen sooner or later, so I was not unprepared. The microminiature circuitry within my staff was sufficient to the occasion, and while I would rather it had occurred later, perhaps it was good for me that it happened when it did. I feel more alive, more alert from this demonstration of danger. This feeling, this knowledge, will be of use to me.

And it did not reach me. It accomplished nothing. The basic situation is unchanged. I am happy to have benefited at so small a price.

Still, I wish to be away and into the countryside, where I am strong and the other is weak.

I walk into the fresh day, a piece of my life upon the breakfast moment’s mountain.

3. Mt. Fuji from Hodogaya

I find a place of twisted pines along the Tokaido, and I halt to view Fuji through them. The travelers who pass in the first hour or so of my vigil do not look like Hokusai’s, but no matter. The horse, the sedan chair, the blue garments, the big hats faded into the past, traveling forever on the print now. Merchant or nobleman, thief or servant. I choose to look upon them as pilgrims of one sort or another, if only into, through, and out of life. My morbidity, I hasten to add, is excusable, in that I have required additional medication. I am stable now, however, and do not know whether medication or meditation is responsible for my heightened perception of the subtleties of the light. Fuji seems almost to move within my gazing.

Pilgrims . . . I am minded of the wanderings of Matsuo Basho, who said that all of us are travelers every minute of our lives. I recall also his reflections upon the lagoons of Matsushima and Kisagata—the former possessed of a cheerful beauty, the latter the beauty of a weeping countenance. I think upon the complexion and expressions of Fuji and I am baffled. Sorrow? Penance? Joy? Exaltation? They merge and shift. I lack the genius of Basho to capture them all in a single character. And even he . . . I do not know. Like speaks to like, but speech must cross a gulf. Fascination always includes some lack of understanding. It is enough for this moment, to view.

Pilgrims . . . I think, too, of Chaucer as I regard the print. His travelers had a good time. They told each other dirty stories and romances and tales with morals attached. They ate and they drank and they kidded each other. Canterbury was their Fuji. They had a party along the way. The book ends before they arrive. Fitting.

I am not a humorless bitch. It may be that Fuji is really laughing at me. If so, I would like very much to join in. I really do not enjoy moods such as this, and a bit of meditation interruptus would be welcome if only the proper object would present itself. Life’s soberer mysteries cannot be working at top-speed all the time. If they can take a break, I want one, too. Tomorrow, perhaps . . .

Damn! My presence must at least be suspected, or the epigon would not have come. Still, I have been very careful. A suspicion is not a certainty, and I am sure that my action was sufficiently prompt to preclude confirmation. My present location is beyond reach as well as knowledge. I have retreated into Hokusai’s art.

I could have lived out the rest of my days upon Oregon’s quiet coast. The place was not without its satisfactions. But I believe it was Rilke who said that life is a game we must begin playing before we have learned the rules. Do we ever? Are there really rules?

Perhaps I read too many poets.

But something that seems a rule to me requires I make this effort. Justice, duty, vengeance, defense—must I weigh each of these and assign it a percentage of that which moves me? I am here because I am here, because I am following rules—whatever they may be. My understanding is limited to sequences.

His is not. He could always make the intuitive leap. Kit was a scholar, a scientist, a poet. Such riches. I am smaller in all ways.

Kokuzo, guardian of those born in the Year of the Tiger, break this mood. I do not want it. It is not me. Let it be an irritation of old lesions, even a renewal of the demyelination. But do not let it be me. And end it soon. I am sick in my heart and my reasons are good ones. Give me the strength to detach myself from them, Catcher in the Bamboo, lord of those who wear the stripes. Take away the bleakness, gather me together, inform me with strength. Balance me.

I watch the play of light. From somewhere I hear the singing of children. After a time a gentle rain begins to fall. I don my poncho and continue to watch. I am very weary, but I want to see Fuji emerge from the fog which has risen. I sip water and a bit of brandy. Only the barest outline remains. Fuji is become a ghost mountain within a Taoist painting. I wait until the sky begins to darken. I know that the mountain will not come to me again this day, and I must find a dry place to sleep. These must be my lessons from Hodogaya: Tend to the present. Do not try to polish ideals. Have sense enough to get in out of the rain.

I stumble off through a small wood. A shed, a barn, a garage . . . Anything that stands between me and the sky will do.

After a time I find such a place. No god addresses my dreaming.

4. Mt. Fuji from the Tamagawa

I compare the print with the reality. Not bad this time. The horse and the man are absent from the shore, but there is a small boat out on the water. Not the same sort of boat, to be sure, and I cannot tell whether it bears firewood, but it will suffice. I would be surprised to find perfect congruence. The boat is moving away from me. The pink of the dawn sky is reflected upon the water’s farther reaches and from the snow-streaks on Fuji’s dark shoulder. The boatman in the print is poling his way outward. Charon? No, I am more cheerful today than I was at Hodogaya. Too small a vessel for the Narrenschiff, too slow for the Flying Dutchman. “La navicella.” Yes. “La navicella del mio ingegno”—“the little bark of my wit” on which Dante hoisted sail for that second realm, Purgatory. Fuji then . . . Perhaps so. The hells beneath, the heavens above, Fuji between-way station, stopover, terminal. A decent metaphor for a pilgrim who could use a purge. Appropriate. For it contains the fire and the earth as well as the air, as 1 gaze across the water. Transition, change. I am passing.

The serenity is broken and my reverie ended as a light airplane, yellow in color, swoops out over the water from someplace to my left. Moments later the insectlike buzzing of its single engine reaches me. It loses altitude quickly, skimming low over the water, then turns and traces its way back, this time swinging in above the shoreline. As it nears the point where it will pass closest to me, I detect a flash of reflected light within the cockpit. A lens? If it is, it is too late to cover myself against its questing eye. My hand dips into my breast pocket and withdraws a small gray cylinder of my own. I flick off its endcaps with my thumbnail as I raise it to peer through the eyepiece. A moment to locate the target, another to focus . . .

The pilot is a man, and as the plane banks away I catch only his unfamiliar profile. Was that a gold earring upon his left earlobe?

The plane is away, in the direction from which it had come. Nor does it return.

I am shaken. Someone had flown by for the sole purpose of taking a look at me. How had he found me? And what did he want? If he represents what I fear most, then this is a completely different angle of attack than any I had anticipated.

I clench my hand into a fist and I curse softly. Unprepared. Is that to be the story of my entire life? Always ready for the wrong thing at the right time? Always neglecting the thing that matters most?

Like Kendra?

She is under my protection, is one of the reasons I am here. If I succeed in this enterprise, I will have fulfilled at least a part of my obligation to her. Even if she never knows, even if she never understands . . .

I push all thoughts of my daughter from my mind. If he even suspected . . .

The present. Return to the present. Do not spill energy into the past. I stand at the fourth station of my pilgrimage and someone takes my measure. At the third station an epigon tried to take form. I took extreme care in my return to Japan. I am here on false papers, traveling under an assumed name. The years have altered my appearance somewhat and I have assisted them to the extent of darkening my hair and my complexion, defying my customary preferences in clothing, altering my speech patterns, my gait, my eating habits—all of these things easier for me than most others because of the practice I’ve had in the past. The past . . . Again, damn it! Could it have worked against me even in this matter? Damn the past! An epigon and a possible human observer this close together. Yes, I am normally paranoid and have been for many years, for good reason. I cannot allow my knowledge of the fact to influence my judgment now, however. I must think clearly.

I see three possibilities. The first is that the flyby means nothing, that it would have occurred had anyone else been standing here—or no one. A joyride, or a search for something else.

It may be so, but my survival instinct will not permit me to accept it. I must assume that this is not the case. Therefore, someone is looking for me. This is either connected with the manifestation of the epigon or it is not. If it is not, a large bag of live bait has just been opened at my feet and I have no idea how to begin sorting through the intertwined twistings. There are so many possibilities from my former profession, though I had considered all of these long closed off. Perhaps I should not have. Seeking there for causes seems an impossible undertaking.

The third possibility is the most frightening: that there is a connection between the epigon and the flight. If things have reached the point where both epigons and human agents can be employed, then I may well be doomed to failure. But even more than this, it will mean that the game has taken on another, awesome dimension, an aspect which I had never considered. It will mean that everyone on Earth is in far greater peril than I had assumed, that I am the only one aware of it and that my personal duel has been elevated to a struggle of global proportions. I cannot take the risk of assigning it to my paranoia now. I must assume the worst.

My eyes overflow. I know how to die. I once knew how to lose with grace and detachment. I can no longer afford this luxury. If I bore any hidden notion of yielding, I banish it now. My weapon is a frail one but I must wield it. If the gods come down from Fuji and tell me, “Daughter, it is our will that you desist,” I must still continue in this to the end, though I suffer in the hells of the Yu Li Ch’ao Chuan forever. Never before have I realized the force of fate.

I sink slowly to my knees. For it is a god that I must vanquish.

My tears are no longer for myself.

5. Mt. Fuji from Fukagawa in Edo

Tokyo. Ginza and confusion. Traffic and pollution. Noise, color and faces, faces, faces. I once loved scenes such as this, but I have been away from cities for too long. And to return to a city such as this is overpowering, almost paralyzing.

Neither is it the old Edo of the print, and I take yet another chance in coming here, though caution rides my every move.

It is difficult to locate a bridge approachable from an angle proper to simulate the view of Fuji beneath it, in the print. The water is of the wrong color and I wrinkle my nose at the smell; this bridge is not that bridge; there are no peaceful fisher-folk here; and gone the greenery.

Hokusai exhales sharply and stares as I do at Fuji-san beneath the metal span. His bridge was a graceful rainbow of wood, product of gone days.

Yet there is something to the thrust and dream of any bridge. Hart Crane could find poetry in those of this sort. “Harp and altar, of the fury fused . . .”

And Nietzsche’s bridge that is humanity, stretching on toward the superhuman . . .

No. I do not like that one. Better had I never become involved with that which transcends. Let it be my pons asinorum.

With but a slight movement of my head I adjust the perspective. Now it seems as if Fuji supports the bridge and without his presence it will be broken like Bifrost, preventing the demons of the past from attacking our present Asgard—or perhaps the demons of the future from storming our ancient Asgard.

I move my head again. Fuji drops. The bridge remains intact. Shadow and substance.

The backfire of a truck causes me to tremble. I am only just arrived and I feel I have been here too long. Fuji seems too distant and I too exposed. I must retreat.

Is there a lesson in this or only a farewell?

A lesson, for the soul of the conflict hangs before my eyes: I will not be dragged across Nietzsche’s bridge.

Come, Hokusai, ukiyo-e Ghost of Christmas Past, show me another scene.

6. Mt Fuji from Kajikazawa

Misted, mystic Fuji over water. Air that comes clean to my nostrils. There is even a fisherman almost where he should be, his pose less dramatic than the original, his garments more modern, above the infinite Fourier series of waves advancing upon the shore.

On my way to this point I visited a small chapel surrounded by a stone wall. It was dedicated to Kwannon, goddess of compassion and mercy, comforter in times of danger and sorrow. I entered. I loved her when I was a girl, until I learned that she was really a man. Then I felt cheated, almost betrayed. She was Kwan Yin in China, and just as merciful, but she came there from India, where she had been a bodhisattva named Avalokitesvara, a man—“the Lord Who Looks Down with Compassion.” In Tibet he is Chen-re-zi—“He of the Compassionate Eyes”—who gets incarnated regularly as the Dalai Lama. I did not trust all of this fancy footwork on his/her part, and Kwannon lost something of her enchantment for me with this smattering of history and anthropology. Yet I entered. We revisit the mental landscape of childhood in times of trouble. I stayed for a time and the child within me danced for a moment, then fell still.

I watch the fisherman above those waves, smaller versions of Hokusai’s big one, which has always symbolized death for me. The little deaths rolling about him, the man hauls in a silver-sided catch. I recall a tale from the Arabian Nights, another of American Indian origin. I might also see Christian symbolism, or a Jungian archetype. But I remember that Ernest Hemingway told Bernard Berenson that the secret of his greatest book was that there was no symbolism. The sea was the sea, the old man an old man, the boy a boy, the marlin a martin, and the sharks the same as other sharks. People empower these things themselves, groping beneath the surface, always looking for more. With me it is at least understandable. I spent my earliest years in Japan, my later childhood in the United States. There is a part of me which likes to see things through allusions and touched with mystery. And the American part never trusts anything and is always looking for the real story behind the front one.

As a whole, I would say that it is better not to trust, though lines of interpretation must be drawn at some point before the permutations of causes in which I indulge overflow my mind. I am so, nor will I abandon this quality of character which has served me well in the past. This does not invalidate Hemingway’s viewpoint any more than his does mine, for no one holds a monopoly on wisdom. In my present situation, however, I believe that mine has a higher survival potential, for I am not dealing only with things, but of something closer to the time-honored Powers and Principalities. I wish that it were not so and that an epigon were only an artifact akin to the ball lightning Tesla studied. But there is something behind it, surely as that yellow airplane had its pilot.

The fisherman sees me and waves. It is a peculiar feeling, this sudden commerce with a point of philosophical departure. I wave back with a feeling of pleasure.

I am surprised at the readiness with which I accept this emotion. I feel it has to do with the general state of my health. All of this fresh air and hiking seems to have strengthened me. My senses are sharper, my appetite better. I have lost some weight and gained some muscle. I have not required medication for several days.

I wonder . . .?

Is this entirely a good thing? True, I must keep up my strength. I must be ready for many things. But too much strength . . . Could that be self-defeating in terms of my overall plan? A balance, perhaps I should seek a balance—

I laugh, for the first time since I do not remember when. It is ridiculous to dwell on life and death, sickness and health this way, like a character of Thomas Mann’s, when I am barely a quarter of the way into my journey. I will need all of my strength—and possibly more—along the way. Sooner or later the bill will be presented. If the timing is off, I must make my own suki. In the meantime, I resolve to enjoy what I have.

When I strike, it will be with my final exhalation. I know that. It is a phenomenon familiar to martial artists of many persuasions. I recall the story Eugen Herrigel told, of studying with the kyudo master, of drawing the bow and waiting, waiting till something signaled the release of the string. For two years he did this before his sensei gave him an arrow. I forget for how long it was after that that he repeated the act with the arrow. Then it all began to come together, the timeless moment of lightness would occur and the arrow would have to fly, would have to fly for the target. It was a long while before he realized that this moment would always occur at the end of an exhalation.

In art, so in life. It seems that many important things, from death to orgasm, occur at the moment of emptiness, at the point of the breath’s hesitation. Perhaps all of them are but reflections of death. This is a profound realization for one such as myself, for my strength must ultimately be drawn from my weakness. It is the control, the ability to find that special moment that troubles me most. But like walking, talking, or bearing a child, I trust that something within me knows where it lies. It is too late now to attempt to build it a bridge to my consciousness. I have made my small plans. I have placed them upon a shelf in the back of my mind. I should leave them and turn to other matters.

In the meantime I drink this moment with a deep draught of salty air, telling myself that the ocean is the ocean, the fisherman is a fisherman, and Fuji is only a mountain. Slowly then, I exhale it . . .

7. Mt. Fuji from the Foot

Fire in your guts, winter tracks above like strands of ancient hair. The print is somewhat more baleful than the reality this evening. That awful red tinge does not glow above me against a horde of wild clouds. Still, I am not unmoved. It is difficult, before the ancient powers of the Ring of Fire, not to stand with some trepidation, sliding back through geological eons to times of creation and destruction when new lands were formed. The great outpourings, the bomblike flash and dazzle, the dance of the lightnings like a crown . . .

I meditate on fire and change.

Last night I slept in the precincts of a small Shingon temple, among shrubs trimmed in the shapes of dragons, pagodas, ships, and umbrellas. There were a number of pilgrims of the more conventional sort present at the temple, and the priest performed a fire service—a goma—for us. The fires of Fuji remind me, as it reminded me of Fuji.

The priest, a young man, sat at the altar which held the fire basin. He intoned the prayer and built the fire and I watched, completely fascinated by the ritual, as he began to feed the fire with the hundred and eight sticks of wood. These, I have been told, represent the hundred and eight illusions of the soul. While I am not familiar with the full list, I felt it possible that I could come up with a couple of new ones. No matter. He chanted, ringing bells, striking gongs and drums. I glanced at the other henros. I saw total absorption upon all of their faces. All but one.

Another figure had joined us, entering with total silence, and he stood in the shadows off to my right. He was dressed all in black, and the wing of a wide, upturned collar masked the lower portion of his face. He was staring at me. When our eyes met, he looked away, focusing his gaze upon the fire. After several moments I did the same.

The priest added incense, leaves, oils. The fire sizzled and spit, the flames leaped, the shadows danced. I began to tremble. There was something familiar about the man. I could not place him, but I wanted a closer look.

I edged slowly to my right during the next ten minutes, as if angling for better views of the ceremony. Suddenly then, I turned and regarded the man again.

I caught him studying me once more, and again he looked away quickly. But the dance of the flames caught him full in the face with light this time, and the jerking of his head withdrew it from the shelter of his collar.

I was certain, in that instant’s viewing, that he was the man who had piloted the small yellow plane past me last week at Tamagawa. Though he wore no gold earring there was a shadow-filled indentation in the lobe of his left ear.

But it went beyond that. Having seen him full-face I was certain that I had seen him somewhere before, years ago. I have an unusually good memory for faces, but for some reason I could not place his within its prior context. He frightened me, though, and I felt there was good reason for it.

The ceremony continued until the final stick of wood was placed in the fire and the priest completed his liturgy as it burned and died down. He turned then, silhouetted by the light, and said that it was time for any who were ailing to rub the healing smoke upon themselves if they wished.

Two of the pilgrims moved forward. Slowly, another joined them. I glanced to my right once more. The man was gone, as silently as he had come. I cast my gaze all about the temple. He was nowhere in sight. I felt a touch upon my left shoulder.

Turning, I beheld the priest, who had just struck me lightly with the three-pronged brass ritual instrument which he had used in the ceremony.

“Come,” he said, “and take the smoke. You need healing of the left arm and shoulder, the left hip and foot.”

“How do you know this?” I asked him.

“It was given to me to see this tonight. Come.”

He indicated a place to the left of the altar and I moved to it, startled at his insight, for the places he had named had been growing progressively more numb though-out the day. I had refrained from taking my medicine, hoping that the attack would remit of its own accord.

He massaged me, rubbing the smoke from the dying fire into the places he had named, then instructing me to continue it on my own. I did so, and some on my head at the end, as is traditional.

I searched the grounds later, but my strange observer was nowhere to be found. I located a hiding place between the feet of a dragon and cast my bedroll there. My sleep was not disturbed.

I awoke before dawn to discover that full sensation had returned to all of my previously numbed areas. I was pleased that the attack had remitted without medication.

The rest of the day, as I journeyed here, to the foot of Fuji, I felt surprisingly well. Even now I am filled with unusual strength and energy, and it frightens me. What if the smoke of the fire ceremony has somehow effected a cure? I am afraid of what it could do to my plans, my resolve. I am not sure that I would know how to deal with it.

Thus, Fuji, Lord of the Hidden Fire, I have come, fit and afraid. I will camp near here tonight. In the morning I will move on. Your presence overwhelms me at this range. I will withdraw for a different, more distant perspective. If I were ever to climb you, would I cast one hundred and eight sticks into your holy furnace, I wonder? I think not. There are some illusions I do not wish to destroy.

8. Mt. Fuji from Tagonoura

I came out in a boat to look back upon the beach, the slopes, and Fuji. I am still in glowing remission. I have resigned myself to it, for now. In the meantime, the day is bright, the sea breeze cool. The boat is rocked by the small deaths, as the fisherman and his sons whom I have paid to bring me out steer it at my request to provide me with the view most approximating that of the print. So much of the domestic architecture in this land recommends to my eye the prows of ships. A convergence of cultural evolution where the message is the medium? The sea is life? Drawing sustenance from beneath the waves we are always at sea? Or, the sea is death, it may rise to blight our lands and claim our lives at any moment? Therefore, we bear this memento mori even in the roofs above our heads and the walls which sustain them? Or, this is the sign of our power, over life and death?

Or none of the above. It may seem that I harbor a strong death-wish. This is incorrect. My desires are just the opposite. It may indeed be that I am using Hokusai’s prints as a kind of Rorschach for self-discovery, but it is death-fascination rather than death-wish that informs my mind. I believe that this is understandable in one suffering a terminal condition with a very short term to it.

Enough of that for now. It was meant only as a drawing of my blade to examine its edge for keenness. I find that my weapon is still in order and I resheathe it.

Blue-gray Fuji, salted with snow, long angle of repose to my left . . . I never seem to look upon the same mountain twice. You change as much as I myself, yet you remain what you are. Which means that there is hope for me.

I lower my eyes to where we share this quality with the sea, vast living data-net. Like yet unlike, you have fought that sea as I—

Birds. Let me listen and watch them for a time, the air-riders who dip and feed.

I watch the men work with the nets. It is relaxing to behold their nimble movements. After a time, I doze.

Sleeping, I dream, and dreaming I behold the god Kokuzo. It can be no other, for when he draws his blade which flashes like the sun and points it at me, he speaks his name. He repeats it over and over as I tremble before him, but something is wrong. I know that he is telling me something other than his identity. I reach for but cannot grasp the meaning. Then he moves the point of his blade, indicating something beyond me. I turn my head. I behold the man in black—the pilot, the watcher at the goma. He is studying me, just as he was that night. What does he seek in my face?

I am awakened by a violent rocking of the boat as we strike a rougher sea. I catch hold of the gunwale beside which I sit. A quick survey of my surroundings shows me that we are in no danger, and I turn my eyes to Fuji. Is he laughing at me? Or is it the chuckle of Hokusai, who squats on his hams beside me tracing naughty pictures in the moisture of the boat’s bottom with a long, withered finger?

If a mystery cannot be solved, it must be saved. Later, then. I will return to the message when my mind has moved into a new position.

Soon, another load of fish is being hauled aboard to add to the pungency of this voyage. Wriggle howsoever they will they do not escape the net. I think of Kendra and wonder how she is holding up. I hope that her anger with me has abated. I trust that she has not escaped her imprisonment. I left her in the care of acquaintances at a primitive, isolated commune in the Southwest. I do not like the place, nor am I overfond of its residents. Yet they owe me several large favors—intentionally bestowed against these times—and they will keep her there until certain things come to pass. I see her delicate features, fawn eyes, and silken hair. A bright, graceful girl, used to some luxuries, fond of long soaks and frequent showers, crisp garments. She is probably mud-spattered or dusty at the moment, from slopping hogs, weeding, planting vegetables or harvesting them, or any of a number of basic chores. Perhaps it will be good for her character. She ought to get something from the experience other than preservation from a possibly terrible fate.

Time passes. I take my lunch.

Later, I muse upon Fuji, Kokuzo, and my fears. Are dreams but the tranced mind’s theater of fears and desires, or do they sometimes truly reflect unconsidered aspects of reality, perhaps to give warning? To reflect . . . It is said that the perfect mind reflects. The shintai in its ark in its shrine is the thing truly sacred to the god—a small mirror—not the images. The sea reflects the sky, in fullness of cloud or blue emptiness. Hamlet-like, one can work many interpretations of the odd, but only one should have a clear outline. I hold the dream in my mind once more, absent all querying. Something is moving . . .

No. I almost had it. But I reached too soon. My mirror is shattered.

Staring shoreward, the matter of synchronicity occurs. There is a new grouping of people. I withdraw my small spy-scope and take its measure, already knowing what I will regard.

Again, he wears black. He is speaking with two men upon the beach. One of the men gestures out across the water, toward us. The distance is too great to make out features clearly, but I know that it is the same man. But now it is not fear that I know. A slow anger begins to burn within my hara. I would return to shore and confront him. He is only one man. I will deal with him now. I cannot afford any more of the unknown than that for which I have already provided. He must be met properly, dismissed or accounted for.

I call to the captain to take me ashore immediately.

He grumbles. The fishing is good, the day still young. I offer him more money. Reluctantly, he agrees. He calls orders to his sons to put the boat about and head in.

I stand in the bow. Let him have a good look. I send my anger on ahead. The sword is as sacred an object as the mirror.

As Fuji grows before me the man glances in our direction, hands something to the others, then turns and ambles away. No! There is no way to hasten our progress, and at this rate he will be gone before I reach land. I curse. I want immediate satisfaction, not extension of mystery.

And the men with whom he was speaking . . . Their hands go to their pockets, they laugh, then walk off in another direction. Drifters. Did he pay them for whatever information they gave him? So it would seem. And are they heading now for some tavern to drink up the price of my peace of mind? I call out after them but the wind whips my words away. They, too, will be gone by the time I arrive.

And this is true. When I finally stand upon the beach, the only familiar face is that of my mountain, gleaming like a carbuncle in sun’s slanting rays.

I dig my nails into my palms but my arms do not become wings.

9. Mt. Fuji from Naborito

I am fond of this print: the torü of a Shinto shrine are visible above the sea at low tide, and people dig clams amid the sunken ruins. Fuji of course is visible through the torü. Were it a Christian church beneath the waves puns involving the Clam of God would be running through my mind. Geography saves, however.

And reality differs entirely. I cannot locate the place.

I am in the area and Fuji properly situated, but the torü must be long gone and I have no way of knowing whether there is a sunken temple out there.

I am seated on a hillside looking across the water and I am suddenly not just tired but exhausted. I have come far and fast these past several days, and it seems that my exertions have all caught up with me. I will sit here and watch the sea and the sky. At least my shadow, the man in black, has been nowhere visible since the beach at Tagonoura. A young cat chases a moth at the foot of my hill, leaping into the air, white-gloved paws flashing. The moth gains altitude, escapes in a gust of wind. The cat sits for several moments, big eyes staring after it.

I make my way to a declivity I had spotted earlier, where I might be free of the wind. There I lay my pack and cast my bedroll, my poncho beneath it. After removing my shoes I get inside quickly. I seem to have taken a bit of a chill and my limbs are very heavy. I would have been willing to pay to sleep indoors tonight but I am too tired to seek shelter.

I lie here and watch the lights come on in the darkening sky. As usual in cases of extreme fatigue, sleep does not come to me easily. Is this legitimate tiredness or a symptom of something else? I do not wish to take medication merely as a precaution, though, so I try thinking of nothing for a time. This does not work. I am overcome with the desire for a cup of hot tea. In its absence I swallow a jigger of brandy, which warms my insides for a time.

Still, sleep eludes me and I decide to tell myself a story as I did when I was very young and wanted to make the world turn into dream.

So . . . Upon a time during the troubles following the death of the Retired Emperor Sutoku a number of itinerant monks of various persuasions came this way, having met upon the road, traveling to seek respite from the wars, earthquakes, and whirlwinds which so disturbed the land. They hoped to found a religious community and pursue the meditative life in quiet and tranquillity. They came upon what appeared to be a deserted Shinto shrine near the seaside, and there they camped for the night, wondering what plague or misfortune might have carried off its attendants. The place was in good repair and no evidence of violence was to be seen. They discussed then the possibility of making this their retreat, of themselves becoming the shrine’s attendants. They grew enthusiastic with the idea and spent much of the night talking over these plans. In the morning, however, an ancient priest appeared from within the shrine, as if to commence a day’s duties. The monks asked him the story of the place, and he informed them that once there had been others to assist him in his duties but that they had long ago been taken by the sea during a storm, while about their peculiar devotions one night upon the shore. And no, it was not really a Shinto shrine, though in outward appearance it seemed such. It was actually the temple of a far older religion of which he could well be the last devotee. They were welcome, however, to join him here and learn of it if they so wished. The monks discussed it quickly among themselves and decided that since it was a pleasant-seeming place, it might be well to stay and hear whatever teaching the old man possessed. So they became residents at the strange shrine. The place troubled several of them considerably at first, for at night they seemed to hear the calling of musical voices in the waves and upon the sea wind. And on occasion it seemed as if they could hear the old priest’s voice responding to these calls. One night one of them followed the sounds and saw the old man standing upon the beach, his arms upraised. The monk hid himself and later fell asleep in a crevice in the rocks. When he awoke, a full moon stood high in the heavens and the old man was gone. The monk went down to the place where he had stood and there saw many marks in the sand, all of them the prints of webbed feet. Shaken, the monk returned and recited his experience to his fellows. They spent weeks thereafter trying to catch a glimpse of the old man’s feet, which were always wrapped and bound. They did not succeed, but after a time it seemed to matter less and less. His teachings influenced them slowly but steadily. They began to assist him in his rituals to the Old Ones, and they learned the name of this promontory and its shrine. It was the last above-sea remnant of a large sunken island, which he assured them rose on certain wondrous occasions to reveal a lost city inhabited by the servants of his masters. The name of the place was R’lyeh and they would be happy to go there one day. By then it seemed a good idea, for they had noticed a certain thickening and extension of the skin between their fingers and toes, the digits themselves becoming sturdier and more elongated. By then, too, they were participating in all of the rites, which grew progressively abominable. At length, after a particularly gory ritual, the old priest’s promise was fulfilled in reverse. Instead of the island rising, the promontory sank to join it, bearing the shrine and all of the monks along with it. So their abominations are primarily aquatic now. But once every century or so the whole island does indeed rise up for a night, and troops of them make their way ashore seeking victims. And of course, tonight is the night . . .

A delicious feeling of drowsiness has finally come over me with this telling, based upon some of my favorite bedtime stories. My eyes are closed. I float on a cotton-filled raft . . . I—

A sound! Above me! Toward the sea. Something moving my way. Slowly, then quickly.

Adrenaline sends a circuit of fire through my limbs. I extend my hand carefully, quietly, and take hold of my staff.

Waiting. Why now, when I am weakened? Must danger always approach at the worst moment?

There is a thump as it strikes the ground beside me, and I let out the breath I have been holding.

It is the cat, little more than a kitten, which I had observed earlier. Purring, it approaches. I reach out and stroke it. It rubs against me. After a time I take it into the bag. It curls up at my side, still purring, warm. It is good to have something that trusts you and wants to be near you. I call the cat R’lyeh. Just for one night.

10. Mt. Fuji from Ejiri

I took the bus back this way. I was too tired to hike. I have taken my medicine as I probably should have been doing all along. Still, it could be several days before it brings me some relief, and this frightens me. I cannot really afford such a condition. I am not certain what I will do, save that I must go on.

The print is deceptive, for a part of its force lies in the effects of a heavy wind. Its skies are gray, Fuji is dim in the background, the people on the road and the two trees beside it all suffer from the wind’s buffeting. The trees bend, the people clutch at their garments, there is a hat high in the air and some poor scribe or author has had his manuscript snatched skyward to flee from him across the land (reminding me of an old cartoon-Editor to Author: “A funny thing happened to your manuscript during the St. Patrick’s Day Parade”). The scene which confronts me is less active at a meteorological level. The sky is indeed overcast but there is no wind, Fuji is darker, more clearly delineated than in the print, there are no struggling pedestrians in sight. There are many more trees near at hand. I stand near a small grove, in fact. There are some structures in the distance which are not present in the picture.

I lean heavily upon my staff. Live a little, die a little. I have reached my tenth station and I still do not know whether Fuji is giving me strength or taking it from me. Both, perhaps.

I head off into the wood, my face touched by a few raindrops as I go. There are no signs posted and no one seems to be about. I work my way back from the road, coming at last to a small clear area containing a few rocks and boulders. It will do as a campsite. I want nothing more than to spend the day resting.

I soon have a small fire going, my tiny teapot poised on rocks above it. A distant roll of thunder adds variety to my discomfort, but so far the rain has held off. The ground is damp, however. I spread my poncho and sit upon it while I wait. I hone a knife and put it away. I eat some biscuits and study a map. I suppose I should feel some satisfaction, in that things are proceeding somewhat as I intended. I wish that I could, but I do not.

An unspecified insect which has been making buzzing noises somewhere behind me ceases its buzzing. I hear a twig snap a moment later. My hand snakes out to fall upon my staff.

“Don’t,” says a voice at my back.

I turn my head. He is standing eight or ten feet from me, the man in black, earring in place, his right hand in his jacket pocket. And it looks as if there is more than his hand in there, pointed at me.

I remove my hand from my staff and he advances. With the side of his foot he sends the staff partway across the clearing, out of my reach. Then he removes his hand from his pocket, leaving behind whatever it held. He circles slowly to the other side of the fire, staring at me the while.

He seats himself upon a boulder, lets his hands rest upon his knees.

“Mari?” he asks then.

I do not respond to my name, but stare back. The light of Kokuzo’s dream-sword flashes in my mind, pointing at him, and I hear the god speaking his name only not quite.

“Kotuzov!” I say then.

The man in black smiles, showing that the teeth I had broken once long ago are now neatly capped.

“I was not so certain of you at first either,” he says.

Plastic surgery has removed at least a decade from his face, along with a lot of weathering and several scars. He is different about the eyes and cheeks, also. And his nose is smaller. It is a considerable improvement over the last time we met.

“Your water is boiling,” he says then. “Are you going to offer me a cup of tea?”

“Of course,” I reply, reaching for my pack, where I keep an extra cup.

“Slowly.”

“Certainly.”

I locate the cup, I rinse them both lightly with hot water, I prepare the tea.

“No, don’t pass it to me,” he says, and he reaches forward and takes the cup from where I had filled it.

I suppress a desire to smile.

“Would you have a lump of sugar?” he asks.

“Sorry.”

He sighs and reaches into his other pocket, from which he withdraws a small flask.

“Vodka? In tea?”

“Don’t be silly. My tastes have changed. It’s Wild Turkey liqueur, a wonderful sweetener. Would you care for some?”

“Let me smell it.”

There is a certain sweetness to the aroma.

“All right,” I say, and he laces our tea with it.

We taste the tea. Not bad.

“How long has it been?” he asks.

“Fourteen years—almost fifteen,” I tell him. “Back in the eighties.”

“Yes.”

He rubs his jaw. “I’d heard you’d retired.”

“You heard right. It was about a year after our last—encounter.”

“Turkey—yes. You married a man from your Code Section.”

I nod.

“You were widowed three or four years later. Daughter born after your husband’s death. Returned to the States. Settled in the country. That’s all I know.”

“That’s all there is.”

He takes another drink of tea.

“Why did you come back here?”

“Personal reasons. Partly sentimental.”

“Under a false identity?”

“Yes. It involves my husband’s family. I don’t want them to know I’m here.”

“Interesting. You mean that they would watch arrivals as closely as we have?”

“I didn’t know you watched arrivals here.”

“Right now we do.”

“You’ve lost me. I don’t know what’s going on.”

There is another roll of thunder. A few more drops spatter about us.

“I would like to believe that you are really retired,” he says. “I’m getting near that point myself, you know.”

“I have no reason to be back in business. I inherited a decent amount, enough to take care of me and my daughter.”

He nods.

“If I had such an inducement I would not be in the field,” he says. “I would rather sit home and read, play chess, eat and drink regularly. But you must admit it is quite a coincidence your being here when the future success of several nations is being decided.”

I shake my head.

“I’ve been out of touch with a lot of things.”

“The Osaka Oil Conference. It begins two weeks from Wednesday. You were planning perhaps to visit Osaka at about that time?”

“I will not be going to Osaka.”

“A courier then. Someone from there will meet you, a simple tourist, at some point in your travels, to convey—”

“My God! Do you think everything’s a conspiracy, Boris? I am just taking care of some personal problems and visiting some places that mean something to me. The conference doesn’t.”

“All right.” He finishes his tea and puts the cup aside. “You know that we know you are here. A word to the Japanese authorities that you are traveling under false papers and they will kick you out. That would be simplest. No real harm done and one agent nullified. Only it would be a shame to spoil your trip if you are indeed only a tourist . . .”

A rotten thought passes through my mind as I see where this is leading, and I know that my thought is far rottener than his. It is something I learned from a strange old woman I once worked with who did not look like an old woman.

I finish my tea and raise my eyes. He is smiling.

“I will make us some more tea,” I say.

I see that the top button of my shirt comes undone while I am bent partly away from him. Then I lean forward with his cup and take a deep breath.

“You would consider not reporting me to the authorities?”

“I might,” he says. “I think your story is probably true. And even if it is not, you would not take the risk of transporting anything now that I know about you.”

“I really want to finish this trip,” I say, blinking a few extra times. “I would do anything not to be sent back now.”

He takes hold of my hand.

“I am glad you said that, Maryushka,” he replies. “I am lonely, and you are still a fine-looking woman.”

“You think so?”

“I always thought so, even that day you bashed in my teeth.”

“Sorry about that. It was strictly business, you know.”

His hand moves to my shoulder.

“Of course. They looked better when they were fixed than they had before, anyway.”

He moves over and sits beside me.

“I have dreamed of doing this many times,” he tells me, as he unfastens the rest of the buttons on my shirt and unbuckles my belt.

He rubs my belly softly. It is not an unpleasant feeling. It has been a long time.

Soon we are fully undressed. He takes his time, and when he is ready I welcome him between my legs. All right, Boris. I give the ride, you take the fall. I could almost feel a little guilty about it. You are gentler than I’d thought you would be. I commence the proper breathing pattern, deep and slow. I focus my attention on my ham and his, only inches away. I feel our energies, dreamlike and warm, moving. Soon, I direct their flow. He feels it only as pleasure, perhaps more draining than usual. When he has done, though . . .

“You said you had some problem?” he inquires in that masculine coital magnanimity generally forgotten a few minutes afterward. “If it is something I could help you with, I have a few days off, here and there. I like you, Maryushka.”

“It’s something I have to do myself. Thanks anyway.”

I continue the process.

Later, as I dress myself, he lies there looking up at me.

“I must be getting old, Maryushka,” he reflects. “You have tired me. I feel I could sleep for a week.”

“That sounds about right,” I say. “A week and you should be feeling fine again.”

“I do not understand . . .”

“You’ve been working too hard, I’m sure. That conference . . .”

He nods.

“You are probably right. You are not really involved . . .?”

“I am really not involved.”

“Good.”

I clean the pot and my cups. I restore them to my pack.

“Would you be so kind as to move, Boris dear? I’ll be needing the poncho very soon, I think.”

“Of course.”

He rises slowly and passes it to me. He begins dressing. His breathing is heavy.

“Where are you going from here?”

“Mishima-goe,” I say, “for another view of my mountain.”

He shakes his head. He finishes dressing and seats himself on the ground, his back against a treetrunk. He finds his flask and takes a swallow. He extends it then.

“Would you care for some?”

“Thank you, no. I must be on my way.”

I retrieve my staff. When I look at him again, he smiles faintly, ruefully.

“You take a lot out of a man, Maryushka.”

“I had to,” I say.

I move off. I will hike twenty miles today, I am certain. The rain begins to descend before I am out of the grove; leaves rustle like the wings of bats.

11. Mt. Fuji from Mishima-goe

Sunlight. Clean air. The print shows a big cryptameria tree, Fuji looming behind it, crowned with smoke. There is no smoke today, but I have located a big cryptameria and positioned myself so that it cuts Fuji’s shoulder to the left of the cone. There are a few clouds, not so popcorny as Hokusai’s smoke (he shrugs at this), and they will have to do.

My stolen ki still sustains me, though the medication is working now beneath it. Like a transplanted organ, my body will soon reject the borrowed energy. By then, though, the drugs should be covering for me.

In the meantime, the scene and the print are close to each other. It is a lovely spring day. Birds are singing, butterflies stitch the air in zigzag patterns; I can almost hear the growth of plants beneath the soil. The world smells fresh and new. I am no longer being followed. Hello to life again.

I regard the huge old tree and listen for its echoes down the ages: Yggdrasil, the Golden Bough, the Yule tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Bo beneath which Lord Gautama found his soul and lost it . . .

I move forward to run my hand along its rough bark.

From that position I am suddenly given a new view of the valley below. The fields look like raked sand, the hills like rocks, Fuji a boulder. It is a garden, perfectly laid out . . .

Later I notice that the sun has moved. I have been standing here for hours. My small illumination beneath a great tree. Older than my humanity, I do not know what I can do for it in return.

Stooping suddenly, I pick up one of its cones. A tiny thing, for such a giant. It is barely the size of my little fingernail. Delicately incised, as if sculpted by fairies.

I put it in my pocket. I will plant it somewhere along my way.

I retreat then, for I hear the sound of approaching bells and I am not yet ready for humanity to break my mood. But there was a small inn down the road which does not look to be part of a chain. I will bathe and eat there and sleep in a bed tonight.

I will still be strong tomorrow.

12. Mt. Fuji from Lake Kawaguchi

Reflections.

This is one of my favorite prints in the series: Fuji as seen from across the lake and reflected within it. There are green hills at either hand, a small village upon the far shore, a single small boat in sight upon the water. The most fascinating feature of the print is that the reflection of Fuji is not the same as the original; its position is wrong, its slope is wrong, it is snow-capped and the surface view of Fuji itself is not.

I sit in the small boat I have rented, looking back. The sky is slightly hazy, which is good. No glare to spoil the reflection. The town is no longer as quaint as in the print, and it has grown. But I am not concerned with details of this sort. Fuji is reflected more perfectly in my viewing, but the doubling is still a fascinating phenomenon for me.

Interesting, too . . . In the print the village is not reflected, nor is there an image of the boat in the water. The only reflection is Fuji’s. There is no sign of humanity.

I see the reflected buildings near the water’s edge. And my mind is stirred by other images than those Hokusai would have known. Of course drowned R’lyeh occurs to me, but the place and the day are too idyllic. It fades from mind almost immediately, to be replaced by sunken Ys, whose bells still toll the hours beneath the sea. And Selma Lagerloffs Nils Holgersson, the tale of the shipwrecked sailor who finds himself in a sunken city at the bottom of the sea—a place drowned to punish its greedy, arrogant inhabitants, who still go about their business of cheating each other, though they are all of them dead. They wear rich, old-fashioned clothes and conduct their business as they once did above in this strange land beneath the waves. The sailor is drawn to them, but he knows that he must not be discovered or he will be turned into one of them, never to return to the earth, to see the sun. I suppose I think of this old children’s story because I understand now how the sailor must have felt. My discovery, too, could result in a transformation I do not desire.

And of course, as I lean forward and view my own features mirrored in the water, there is the world of Lewis Carroll beneath its looking-glass surface. To be an Ama diving girl and descend . . . To spin downward, and for a few minutes to know the inhabitants of a land of paradox and great charm . . .

Mirror, mirror, why does the real world so seldom cooperate with our aesthetic enthusiasms?

Halfway finished. I reach the midpoint of my pilgrimage to confront myself in a lake. It is a good time and place to look upon my own countenance, to reflect upon all of the things which have brought me here, to consider what the rest of the journey may hold. Though images may sometimes lie. The woman who looks back at me seems composed, strong, and better-looking than I had thought she would. I like you, Kawaguchi, lake with a human personality. I flatter you with literary compliments and you return the favor.

Meeting Boris lifted a burden of fear from my mind. No human agents of my nemesis have risen to trouble my passage. So the odds have not yet tipped so enormously against me as they might.

Fuji and image. Mountain and soul. Would an evil thing cast no reflection down here—some dark mountain where terrible deeds were performed throughout history? I am reminded that Kit no longer casts a shadow, has no reflection.

Is he truly evil, though? By my lights he is. Especially if he is doing the things I think he is doing.

He said that he loved me, and I did love him, once. What will he say to me when we meet again, as meet we must?

It will not matter. Say what he will, I am going to try to kill him. He believes that he is invincible, indestructible. I do not, though I do believe that I am the only person on earth capable of destroying him. It took a long time for me to figure the means, an even longer time before the decision to try it was made for me. I must do it for Kendra as well as for myself. The rest of the world’s population comes third.

I let my fingers trail in the water. Softly, I begin to sing an old song, a love song. I am loath to leave this place. Will the second half of my journey be a mirror-image of the first? Or will I move beyond the looking-glass, to pass into that strange realm where he makes his home?

I planted the cryptameria’s seed in a lonesome valley yesterday afternoon. Such a tree will look elegant there one day, outliving nations and armies, madmen and sages.

I wonder where R’lyeh is? She ran off in the morning after breakfast, perhaps to pursue a butterfly. Not that I could have brought her with me.

I hope that Kendra is well. I have written her a long letter explaining many things. I left it in the care of an attorney friend, who will be sending it to her one day in the not too distant future.

The prints of Hokusai . . . They could outlast the cryptameria. I will not be remembered for any works.

Drifting between the worlds I formulate our encounter for the thousandth time. He will have to be able to duplicate an old trick to get what he wants. I will have to perform an even older one to see that he doesn’t get it. We are both out of practice.

It has been long since I read The Anatomy of Melancholy. It is not the sort of thing I’ve sought to divert me in recent years. But I recall a line or two as I see fish dart by: “Polycrates Samius, that flung his ring into the sea, because he would participate in the discontent of others, and had it miraculously restored to him again shortly after, by a fish taken as he angled, was not free from melancholy dispositions. No man can cure himself . . .” Kit threw away his life and gained it. I kept mine and lost it. Are rings ever really returned to the proper people? And what about a woman curing herself? The cure I seek is a very special one.

Hokusai, you have shown me many things. Can you show me an answer?

Slowly, the old man raises his arm and points to his mountain. Then he lowers it and points to the mountain’s image.

I shake my head. It is an answer that is no answer. He shakes his head back at me and points again.

The clouds are massing high above Fuji, but that is no answer. I study them for a long while but can trace no interesting images within.

Then I drop my eyes. Below me, inverted, they take a different form. It is as if they depict the clash of two armed hosts. I watch in fascination as they flow together, the forces from my right gradually rolling over and submerging those to my left. Yet in so doing, those from my right are diminished.

Conflict? That is the message? And both sides lose things they do not wish to lose? Tell me something I do not already know, old man.

He continues to stare. I follow his gaze again, upward. Now I see a dragon, diving into Fuji’s cone.

I look below once again. No armies remain, only carnage; and here the dragon’s tail becomes a dying warrior’s arm holding a sword.

I close my eyes and reach for it. A sword of smoke for a man of fire.

13. Mt. Fuji from Koishikawa in Edo

Snow, on the roofs of houses, on evergreens, on Fuji—just beginning to melt in places, it seems. A windowful of women-geishas, I would say—looking out at it, one of them pointing at three dark birds high in the pale sky. My closest view of Fuji to that in the print is unfortunately snowless, geishaless, and sunny.

Details . . .

Both are interesting, and superimposition is one of the major forces of aesthetics. I cannot help but think of the hot-spring geisha Komako in Snow Country—Yasunari Kawabata’s novel of loneliness and wasted, fading beauty—which I have always felt to be the great anti-love story of Japan. This print brings the entire tale to mind for me. The denial of love. Kit was no Shimamura, for he did want me, but only on his own highly specialized terms, terms that must remain unacceptable to me. Selfishness or selflessness? It is not important . . .

And the birds at which the geisha points . . .? “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird?” To the point. We could never agree on values.

The Twa Corbies? And throw in Ted Hughes’s pugnacious Crow? Perhaps so, but I won’t draw straws. An illusion for every allusion, and where’s yesterday’s snow?

I lean upon my staff and study my mountain. I wish to make it to as many of my stations as possible before ordering the confrontation. Is that not fair? Twenty-four ways of looking at Mt. Fuji. It struck me that it would be good to take one thing in life and regard it from many viewpoints, as a focus for my being, and perhaps as a penance for alternatives missed.

Kit, I am coming, as you once asked of me, but by my own route and for my own reasons. I wish that I did not have to, but you have deprived me of a real choice in this matter. Therefore, my action is not truly my own, but yours. I am become then your own hand turned against you, representative of a kind of cosmic aikido.

I make my way through town after dark, choosing only dark streets where the businesses are shut down. That way I am safe. When I must enter town I always find a protected spot for the day and do my traveling on these streets at night.

I find a small restaurant on the corner of such a one and I take my dinner there. It is a noisy place but the food is good. I also take my medicine, and a little sake.

Afterward, I indulge in the luxury of walking rather than take a taxi. I’ve a long way to go, but the night is clear and star-filled and the air is pleasant.

I walk for the better part of ten minutes, listening to the sounds of traffic, music from some distant radio or tape deck, a cry from another street, the wind passing high above me and rubbing its rough fur upon the sides of buildings.

Then I feel a sudden ionization in the air.

Nothing ahead. I turn, spinning my staff into a guard position.

An epigon with a six-legged canine body and a head like a giant fiery flower emerges from a doorway and sidles along the building’s front in my direction.

I follow its progress with my staff, feinting as soon as it is near enough. I strike, unfortunately with the wrong tip, as it comes on. My hair begins to rise as I spin out of its way, cutting, retreating, turning, then striking again. This time the metal tip passes into that floral head.

I had turned on the batteries before I commenced my attack. The charge creates an imbalance. The epigon retreats, head ballooning. I follow and strike again, this time mid-body. It swells even larger, then collapses in a shower of sparks. But I am already turning away and striking again, for I had become aware of the approach of another even as I was dealing with the first.

This one advances in kangaroolike bounds. I brush it by with my staff, but its long bulbous tail strikes me as it passes. I recoil involuntarily from the shock I receive, my reflexes spinning the staff before me as I retreat. It turns quickly and rears then. This one is a quadruped, and its raised forelimbs are fountains of fire. Its faceful of eyes blazes and hurts to look upon.

It drops back onto its haunches then springs again.

I roll beneath it and attack as it descends. But I miss, and it turns to attack again even as I continue thrusting. It springs and I turn aside, striking upward. It seems that I connect, but I cannot be certain.

It lands quite near me, raising its forelimbs. But this time it does not spring. It simply falls forward, hind feet making a rapid shuffling movement the while, the legs seeming to adjust their lengths to accommodate a more perfect flow.

As it comes on, I catch it square in the midsection with the proper end of my staff. It keeps coming, or falling, even as it flares and begins to disintegrate. Its touch stiffens me for a moment, and I feel the flow of its charge down my shoulder and across my breast. I watch it come apart in a final photoflash instant and be gone.

I turn quickly again but there is no third emerging from the doorway. None overhead either. There is a car coming up the street, slowing, however. No matter. The terminal’s potential must be exhausted for the moment, though I am puzzled by the consideration of how long it must have been building to produce the two I just dispatched. It is best that I be away quickly now.

As I resume my progress, though, a voice calls to me from the car, which has now drawn up beside me:

“Madam, a moment please.”

It is a police car, and the young man who has addressed me wears a uniform and a very strange expression.

“Yes, officer?” I reply.

“I saw you just a few moments ago,” he says. “What were you doing?”

I laugh.

“It is such a fine evening,” I say then, “and the street was deserted. I thought I would do a kata with my bo.”

“I thought at first that something was attacking you, that I saw something . . .”

“I am alone,” I say, “as you can see.”

He opens the door and climbs out. He flicks on a flashlight and shines its beam across the sidewalk, into the doorway.

“Were you setting off fireworks?”

“No.”

“There were some sparkles and flashes.”

“You must be mistaken.”

He sniffs the air. He inspects the sidewalk very closely, then the gutter.

“Strange,” he says. “Have you far to go?”

“Not too far.”

“Have a good evening.”

He gets back into the car. Moments later it is headed up the street.

I continue quickly on my way. I wish to be out of the vicinity before another charge can be built. I also wish to be out of the vicinity simply because being here makes me uneasy.

I am puzzled at the ease with which I was located. What did I do wrong?

“My prints,” Hokusai seems to say, after I have reached my destination and drunk too much brandy. “Think, daughter, or they will trap you.”

I try, but Fuji is crushing my head, squeezing off thoughts. Epigons dance on his slopes. I pass into a fitful slumber.

In tomorrow’s light perhaps I shall see . . .

14. Mt. Fuji from Meguro in Edo

Again, the print is not the reality for me. It shows peasants amid a rustic village, terraced hillsides, a lone tree jutting from the slope of the hill to the right, a snowcapped Fuji partly eclipsed by the base of the rise.

I could not locate anything approximating it, though I do have a partly blocked view of Fuji—blocked in a similar manner, by a slope—from this bench I occupy in a small park. It will do.

Partly blocked, like my thinking. There is something I should be seeing but it is hidden from me. I felt it the moment the epigons appeared, like the devils sent to claim Faust’s soul. But I never made a pact with the Devil . . . just Kit, and it was called marriage. I had no way of knowing how similar it would be.

Now . . . What puzzles me most is how my location was determined despite my precautions. My head-on encounter must be on my terms, not anyone else’s. The reason for this transcends the personal, though I will not deny the involvement of the latter.

In Hagakure, Yamamoto Tsunetomo advised that the Way of the Samurai is the Way of Death, that one must live as though one’s body were already dead in order to gain full freedom. For me, this attitude is not so difficult to maintain. The freedom part is more complicated, however; when one no longer understands the full nature of the enemy, one’s actions are at least partly conditioned by uncertainty.

My occulted Fuji is still there in his entirety, I know, despite my lack of full visual data. By the same token I ought to be able to extend the lines I have seen thus far with respect to the power which now devils me. Let us return to death. There seems to be something there, though it also seems that there is only so much you can say about it and I already have.

Death . . . Come gentle . . . We used to play a parlor game, filling in bizarre causes on imaginary death certificates: “Eaten by the Loch Ness monster.”

“Stepped on by Godzilla.”

“Poisoned by a ninja.”

“Translated.”

Kit had stared at me, brow knitting, when I’d offered that last one.

“What do you mean ‘translated’ ?” he asked.

“Okay, you can get me on a technicality,” I said, “but I still think the effect would be the same. ‘Enoch was translated that he should not see death’—Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, 11:5.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It means to convey directly to heaven without messing around with the customary termination here on earth. Some Moslems believe that the Mahdi was translated.”

“An interesting concept,” he said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

Obviously, he did.

I’ve always thought that Kurosawa could have done a hell of a job with Don Quixote. Say there is this old gentleman living in modern times, a scholar, a man who is fascinated by the early days of the samurai and the Code of Bushido. Say that he identifies so strongly with these ideals that one day he loses his senses and comes to believe that he is an old-time samurai. He dons some ill-fitting armor he had collected, takes up his katana, goes forth to change the world. Ultimately, he is destroyed by it, but he holds to the Code. That quality of dedication sets him apart and ennobles him, for all of his ludicrousness. I have never felt that Don Quixote was merely a parody of chivalry, especially not after I’d learned that Cervantes had served under Don John of Austria at the battle of Lepanto. For it might be argued that Don John was the last European to be guided by the medieval code of chivalry. Brought up on medieval romances, he had conducted his life along these lines. What did it matter if the medieval knights themselves had not? He believed and he acted on his belief. In anyone else it might simply have been amusing, save that time and circumstance granted him the opportunity to act on several large occasions, and he won. Cervantes could not but have been impressed by his old commander, and who knows how this might have influenced his later literary endeavor? Ortega y Gasset referred to Quixote as a Gothic Christ. Dostoevsky felt the same way about him, and in his attempt to portray a Christ-figure in Prince Myshkin he, too, felt that madness was a necessary precondition for this state in modern times.

All of which is preamble to stating my belief that Kit was at least partly mad. But he was no Gothic Christ. An Electronic Buddha would be much closer.

“Does the data-net have the Buddha-nature?” he asked me one day.

“Sure,” I said. “Doesn’t everything?” Then I saw the look in his eyes and added, “How the hell should I know?”

He grunted then and reclined his resonance couch, lowered the induction helmet, and continued his computer-augmented analysis of a Lucifer cipher with a 128-bit key. Theoretically, it would take thousands of years to crack it by brute force, but the answer was needed within two weeks. His nervous system coupled with the data-net, he was able to deliver.

I did not notice his breathing patterns for some time. It was not until later that I came to realize that after he had finished his work, he would meditate for increasingly long periods of time while still joined with the system.

When I realized this, I chided him for being too lazy to turn the thing off.

He smiled.

“The flow,” he said. “You do not fixate at one point. You go with the flow.”

“You could throw the switch before you go with the flow and cut down on our electric bill.”

He shook his head, still smiling.

“But it is that particular flow that I am going with. I am getting farther and farther into it. You should try it sometime. There have been moments when I felt I could translate myself into it.”

“Linguistically or theologically?”

“Both,” he replied.

And one night he did indeed go with the flow. I found him in the morning-sleeping, I thought—in his resonance couch, the helmet still in place. This time, at least, he had shut down our terminal. I let him rest. I had no idea how late he might have been working. By evening, though, I was beginning to grow concerned and I tried to rouse him. I could not. He was in a coma.

Later, in the hospital, he showed a flat EEG. His breathing had grown extremely shallow, his blood pressure was very low, his pulse feeble. He continued to decline during the next two days. The doctors gave him every test they could think of but could determine no cause for his condition. In that he had once signed a document requesting that no heroic measures be taken to prolong his existence should something irreversible take him, he was not hooked up to respirators and pumps and IVs after his heart had stopped beating for the fourth time. The autopsy was unsatisfactory. The death certificate merely showed: “Heart stoppage. Possible cerebrovascular accident.” The latter was pure speculation. They had found no sign of it. His organs were not distributed to the needy as he had once requested, for fear of some strange new virus which might be transmitted.

Kit, like Marley, was dead to begin with.

15. Mt. Fuji from Tsukudajima in Edo

Blue sky, a few low clouds, Fuji across the bay’s bright water, a few boats and an islet between us. Again, dismissing time’s changes, I find considerable congruence with reality. Again, I sit within a small boat. Here, however, I’ve no desire to dive beneath the waves in search of sunken splendor or to sample the bacteria-count with my person.

My passage to this place was direct and without incident. Preoccupied I came. Preoccupied I remain. My vitality remains high. My health is no worse. My concerns also remain the same, which means that my major question is still unanswered.

At least I feel safe out here on the water. “Safe,” though, is a relative term. “Safer” then, than I felt ashore and passing among possible places of ambush. I have not really felt safe since that day after my return from the hospital . . .

I was tired when I got back home, following several sleepless nights. I went directly to bed. I did not even bother to note the hour, so I have no idea how long I slept.

I was awakened in the dark by what seemed to be the ringing of the telephone. Sleepily, I reached for the instrument, then realized that it was not actually ringing. Had I been dreaming? I sat up in bed. I rubbed my eyes. I stretched. Slowly, the recent past filled my mind and I knew that I would not sleep again for a time. A cup of tea, I decided, might serve me well now. I rose, to go to the kitchen and heat some water.

As I passed through the work area, I saw that one of the CRTs for our terminal was lit. I could not recall its having been on but I moved to turn it off.

I saw then that its switch was not turned on. Puzzled, I looked again at the screen and for the first time realized that there was a display present:

MARI.

ALL IS WELL.

I AM TRANSLATED.

USE THE COUCH AND THE HELMET.

KIT

I felt my fingers digging into my cheeks and my chest was tight from breath retained. Who had done this? How? Was it perhaps some final delirious message left by Kit himself before he went under?

I reached out and flipped the ON-OFF switch back and forth several times, leaving it finally in the OFF position.

The display faded but the light remained on. Shortly, a new display was flashed upon the screen:

YOU READ ME. GOOD.

IT IS ALL RIGHT. I LIVE.

I HAVE ENTERED THE DATA-NET.

SIT ON THE COUCH AND USE THE HELMET.

I WILL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING.

I ran from the room. In the bathroom I threw up, several times. Then I sat upon the toilet, shaking. Who would play such a horrible joke upon me? I drank several glasses of water and waited for my trembling to subside.

When it had, I went directly to the kitchen, made the tea, and drank some. My thoughts settled slowly into the channels of analysis. I considered possibilities. The one that seemed more likely than most was that Kit had left a message for me and that my use of the induction interface gear would trigger its delivery. I wanted that message, whatever it might be, but I did not know whether I possessed sufficient emotional fortitude to receive it at the moment.

I must have sat there for the better part of an hour. I looked out the window once and saw that the sky was growing light. I put down my cup. I returned to the work area.

The screen was still lit. The message, though, had changed:

DO NOT BE AFRAID.

SIT ON THE COUCH AND USE THE HELMET.

THEN YOU WILL UNDERSTAND.

I crossed to the couch. I sat on it and reclined it. I lowered the helmet. At first there was nothing but field noise.

Then I felt his presence, a thing difficult to describe in a world customarily filled only with data flows. I waited. I tried to be receptive to whatever he had somehow left imprinted for me.

“I am not a recording, Mari,” he seemed to say to me then. “I am really here.”

I resisted the impulse to flee. I had worked hard for this composure and I meant to maintain it.

“I made it over,” he seemed to say. “I have entered the net. I am spread out through many places. It is pure kundalini. I am nothing but flow. It is wonderful. I will be forever here. It is nirvana.”

“It really is you,” I said.

“Yes. I have translated myself. I want to show you what it means.”

“Very well.”

“I am gathered here now. Open the legs of your mind and let me in fully.”

I relaxed and he flowed into me. Then I was borne away and I understood.

16. Mt. Fuji from Umezawa

Fuji across lava fields and wisps of fog, drifting clouds; birds on the wing and birds on the ground. This one at least is close. I lean on my staff and stare at his peaceful reaches across the chaos. The lesson is like that of a piece of music: I am strengthened in some fashion I cannot describe.

And I had seen blossoming cherry trees on the way over here, and fields purple with clover, cultivated fields yellow with rape-blossoms, grown for its oil, a few winter camellias still holding forth their reds and pinks, the green shoots of rice beds, here and there a tulip tree dashed with white, blue mountains in the distance, foggy river valleys. I had passed villages where colored sheet metal now covers the roofs’ thatching—blue and yellow, green, black, red—and yards filled with the slate-blue rocks so fine for landscape gardening; an occasional cow, munching, lowing softly; scarlike rows of plastic-covered mulberry bushes where the silkworms are bred. My heart jogged at the sights—the tiles, the little bridges, the color . . . It was like entering a tale by Lafcadio Hearn, to have come back.

My mind was drawn back along the path I had followed, to the points of its intersection with my electronic bane. Hokusai’s warning that night I drank too much—that his prints may trap me—could well be correct. Kit had anticipated my passage a number of timees. How could he have?

Then it struck me. My little book of Hok.usai’s prints—a small cloth-bound volume by the Charles ES. Turtle Company—had been a present from Kit.

It is possible that he was expecting me in Japan at about this time, because of Osaka. Once hüs epigons had spotted me a couple of times, probably in a massive scanning of terminals, could he have correlated rmy movements with the sequence of the prints in Hokusai’ss Views ofMt. Fuji, for which he knew my great fondnesis, and simply extrapolated and waited? I’ve a strong feeeling that the answer is in the affirmative.

Entering the data-net with Kit was an overwhelming experience. That my consciousness spread amd flowed I do not deny. That I was many places simultaneously, that I rode currents I did not at first understand, tlhat knowledge and transcendence and a kind of glory were all about me and within me was also a fact of peculiar perception. The speed with which I was borne seemed instamtaneous, and this was a taste of eternity. The access to multitudes of terminals and enormous memory banks seemed a measure of omniscience. The possibility of the manipulation of whatever I would change within this realm and its consequences at that place where I still felt my distant body seemed a version of omnipotence. And the feeling . . . I tasted the sweetness, Kit with me and wittain me. It was self surrendered and recovered in a new incairnation, it was freedom from mundane desire, liberation . . .

“Stay with me here forever,” Kit seeimed to say.

“No,” I seemed to answer, dreamlike, finding myself changing even further. “I cannot surremder myself so willingly.”

“Not for this? For unity and the flow of connecting energy?”

“And this wonderful lack of responsibility?”

“Responsibility? For what? This is pure existence. There is no past.”

“Then conscience vanishes.”

“What do you need it for? There is no future either.”

“Then all actions lose their meaning.”

“True. Action is an illusion. Consequence is an illusion.”

“And paradox triumphs over reason.”

“There is no paradox. All is reconciled.”

“Then meaning dies.”

“Being is the only meaning.”

“Are you certain?”

“Feel it!”

“I do. But it is not enough. Send me back before I am changed into something I do not wish to be.”

“What more could you desire than this?”

“My imagination will die, also. I can feel it.”

“And what is imagination?”

“A thing born of feeling and reason.”

“Does this not feel right?”

“Yes, it feels right. But I do not want that feeling unaccompanied. When I touch feeling with reason, I see that it is sometimes but an excuse for failing to close with complexity.”

“You can deal with any complexity here. Behold the data! Does reason not show you that this condition is far superior to that you knew but moments ago?”

“Nor can I trust reason unaccompanied. Reason without feeling has led humanity to enact monstrosities. Do not attempt to disassemble my imagination this way.”

“You retain your reason and your feelings!”

“But they are coming unplugged—with this storm of bliss, this shower of data. I need them conjoined, else my imagination is lost.”

“Let it be lost, then. It has served its purpose. Be done with it now. What can you imagine that you do not already have here?”

“I cannot yet know, and that is its power. If there be a will with a spark of divinity to it, I know it only through my imagination. I can give you anything else but that I will not surrender.”

“And that is all? A wisp of possibility?”

“No. But it alone is too much to deny.”

“And my love for you?”

“You no longer love in the human way. Let me go back.”

“Of course. You will think about it. You will return.”

“Back! Now!”

I pushed the helmet from my head and rose quickly. I returned to the bathroom, then to my bed. I slept as if drugged, for a long while.

Would I have felt differently about possibilities, the future, imagination, had I not been pregnant—a thing I had suspected but not yet mentioned to him, and which he had missed learning with his attention focused upon our argument? I like to think that my answers would have been the same, but I will never know. My condition was confirmed by a local doctor the following day. I made the visit I had been putting off because my life required a certainty of something then—a certainty of anything. The screen in the work area remained blank for three days.

I read and I meditated. Then of an evening the light came on again:

ARE YOU READY?

I activated the keyboard. I typed one word:

NO.

I disconnected the induction couch and its helmet then. I unplugged the unit itself, also.

The telephone rang.

“Hello?” I said.

“Why not?” he asked me.

I screamed and hung up. He had penetrated the phone circuits, appropriated a voice.

It rang again. I answered again.

“You will never know rest until you come to me,” he said.

“I will if you will leave me alone,” I told him.

“I cannot. You are special to me. I want you with me. I love you.”

I hung up. It rang again. I tore the phone from the wall.

I had known that I would have to leave soon. I was overwhelmed and depressed by all the reminders of our life together. I packed quickly and I departed. I took a room at a hotel. As soon as I was settled into it, the telephone rang and it was Kit again. My registration had gone into a computer and . . .

I had them disconnect my phone at the switchboard. I put out a Do Not Disturb sign. In the morning I saw a telegram protruding from beneath the door. From Kit. He wanted to talk to me.

I determined to go far away. To leave the country, to return to the States.

It was easy for him to follow me. We leave electronic tracks almost everywhere. By cable, satellite, optic fiber he could be wherever he chose. Like an unwanted suitor now he pestered me with calls, interrupted television shows to flash messages upon the screen, broke in on my own calls, to friends, lawyers, realtors, stores. Several times, horribly, he even sent me flowers. My electric bodhisattva, my hound of heaven, would give me no rest. It is a terrible thing to be married to a persistent data-net.

So I settled in the country. I would have nothing in my home whereby he could reach me. I studied ways of avoiding the system, of slipping past his many senses.

On those few occasions when I was careless he reached for me again immediately. Only he had learned a new trick, and I became convinced that he had developed it for the purpose of taking me into his world by force. He could build up a charge at a terminal, mold it into something like ball lightning and animallike, and send that shortlived artifact a little distance to do his will. I learned its weakness, though, in a friend’s home when one came for me, shocked me, and attempted to propel me into the vicinity of the terminal, presumably for purposes of translation. I struck at the epigon—as Kit later referred to it in a telegram of explanation and apology—with the nearest object to hand—a lighted table lamp, which entered its field and blew a circuit immediately. The epigon was destroyed, which is how I discovered that a slight electrical disruption created an instability within the things.

I stayed in the country and raised my daughter. I read and I practiced my martial arts and I walked in the woods and climbed mountains and sailed and camped: rural occupations all, and very satisfying to me after a life of intrigue, conflict, plot and counterplot, violence, and then that small, temporary island of security with Kit. I was happy with my choice.

Fuji across the lava beds . . . Springtime . . . Now I am returned. This was not my choice.

17. Mt. Fuji from Lake Suwa

And so I come to Lake Suwa, Fuji resting small in the evening distance. It is no Kamaguchi of powerful reflections for me. But it is serene, which joins my mood in a kind of peace. I have taken the life of the spring into me now and it has spread through my being. Who would disrupt this world, laying unwanted forms upon it? Seal your lips.

Was it not in a quiet province where Botchan found his maturity? I’ve a theory concerning books like that one of Natsume Soseki’s. Someone once told me that this is the one book you can be sure that every educated Japanese has read. So I read it. In the States I was told that Huckleberry Finn was the one book you could be sure that every educated Yankee had read. So I read it. In Canada it was Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. In France it was Le Grand Meaulnes. Other countries have their books of this sort. They are all of them pastorals, having in common a closeness to the countryside and the forces of nature in days just before heavy urbanization and mechanization. These things are on the horizon and advancing, but they only serve to add the spice of poignancy to the taste of simpler values. They are youthful books, of national heart and character, and they deal with the passing of innocence. I have given many of them to Kendra.

I lied to Boris. Of course I know all about the Osaka Conference. I was even approached by one of my former employers to do something along the lines Boris had guessed at. I declined. My plans are my own. There would have been a conflict.

Hokusai, ghost and mentor, you understand chance and purpose better than Kit. You know that human order must color our transactions with the universe, and that this is not only necessary but good, and that the light still comes through.

Upon this rise above the water’s side I withdraw my hidden blade and hone it once again. The sun falls away from my piece of the world, but the darkness, too, is here my friend.

18. Mt. Fuji from the Offing in Kanagawa

And so the image of death. The Big Wave, curling above, toppling upon, about to engulf the fragile vessels. The one print of Hokusai’s that everyone knows.

I am no surfer. I do not seek the perfect wave. I will simply remain here upon the shore and watch the water. It is enough of a reminder. My pilgrimage winds down, though the end is not yet in sight.

Well . . . I see Fuji. Call Fuji the end. As with the barrel’s hoop of the first print, the circle closes about him.

On my way to this place I halted in a small glade I came upon and bathed myself in a stream which ran through it. There I used the local wood to construct a low altar. Cleansing my hands each step of the way I set before it incense made from camphorwood and from white sandalwood; I also placed there a bunch of fresh violets, a cup of vegetables, and a cup of fresh water from the stream. Then I lit a lamp I had purchased and filled with rape-seed oil. Upon the altar I set my image of the god Kokuzo which I had brought with me from home, facing to the west where I stood. I washed again, then extended my right hand, middle finger bent to touch my thumb as I spoke the mantra for invoking Kokuzo. I drank some of the water. I lustrated myself with sprinklings of it and continued repetition of the mantra. Thereafter, I made the gesture of Kokuzo three times, hand to the crown of my head, to my right shoulder, left shoulder, heart and throat. I removed the white cloth in which Kokuzo’s picture had been wrapped. When I had sealed the area with the proper repetitions, I meditated in the same position as Kokuzo in the picture and invoked him. After a time the mantra ran by itself, over and over.

Finally, there was a vision, and I spoke, telling all that had happened, all that I intended to do, and asking for strength and guidance. Suddenly, I saw his sword descending, descending like slow lightning, to sever a limb from a tree, which began to bleed. And then it was raining, both within the vision and upon me, and I knew that that was all to be had on the matter.

I wound things up, cleaned up, donned my poncho, and headed on my way.

The rain was heavy, my boots grew muddy, and the temperature dropped. I trudged on for a long while and the cold crept into my bones. My toes and fingers became numb.

I kept constant lookout for a shelter, but did not spot anyplace where I could take refuge from the storm. Later, it changed from a downpour to a drizzle to a weak, mistlike fall when I saw what could be a temple or shrine in the distance. I headed for it, hoping for some hot tea, a fire, and a chance to change my socks and clean my boots.

A priest stopped me at the gate. I told him my situation and he looked uncomfortable.

“It is our custom to give shelter to anyone,” he said. “But there is a problem.”

“I will be happy to make a cash donation,” I said, “if too many others have passed this way and reduced your stores. I really just wanted to get warm.”

“Oh no, it is not a matter of supplies,” he told me, “and for that matter very few have been by here recently. The problem is of a different sort and it embarasses me to state it. It makes us sound old-fashioned and superstitious, when actually this is a very modern temple. But recently we have been—ah—haunted.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Bestial apparitions have been coming and going from the library and record room beside the head priest’s quarters. They stalk the shrine, pass through our rooms, pace the grounds, then return to the library or else fade away.”

He studied my face, as if seeking derision, belief, disbelief—anything. I merely nodded.

“It is most awkward,” he added. “A few simple exorcisms have been attempted but to no avail.”

“For how long has this been going on?” I asked.

“For about three days,” he replied.

“Has anyone been harmed by them?”

“No. They are very intimidating, but no one has been injured. They are distracting, too, when one is trying to sleep—that is, to meditate—for they produce a tingling feeling and sometimes cause the hair to rise up.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Are there many of them?”

“It varies. Usually just one. Sometimes two. Occasionally three.”

“Does your library by any chance contain a computer terminal?”

“Yes, it does,” he answered. “As I said, we are very modern. We keep our records with it, and we can obtain printouts of sacred texts we do not have on hand—and other things.”

“If you will shut the terminal down for a day, they will probably go away,” I told him, “and I do not believe they will return.”

“I would have to check with my superior before doing a thing like that. You know something of these matters?”

“Yes, and in the meantime I would still like to warm myself, if I may.”

“Very well. Come this way.”

I followed him, cleaning my boots and removing them before entering. He led me around to the rear and into an attractive room which looked upon the temple’s garden.

“I will go and see that a meal is prepared for you, and a brazier of charcoal that you may warm yourself,” he said as he excused himself.

Left by myself I admired the golden carp drifting in a pond only a few feet away, its surface occasionally punctuated by raindrops, and a little stone bridge which crossed the pond, a stone pagoda, paths wandering among stones and shrubs. I wanted to cross that bridge—how unlike that metal span, thrusting, cold and dark!—and lose myself there for an age or two. Instead, I sat down and gratefully gulped the tea which arrived moments later, and I warmed my feet and dried my socks in the heat of the brazier which came a little while after that.

Later, I was halfway through a meal and enjoying a conversation with the young priest, who had been asked to keep me company until the head priest could come by and personally welcome me, when I saw my first epigon of the day.

It resembled a very small, triple-trunked elephant walking upright along one of the twisting garden paths, sweeping the air to either side of the trail with those snakelike appendages. It had not yet spotted me.

I called it to the attention of the priest, who was not faced in that direction.

“Oh my!” he said, fingering his prayer beads.

While he was looking that way, I shifted my staff into a readily available position beside me.

As it drifted nearer, I hurried to finish my rice and vegetables. I was afraid my bowl might be upset in the skirmish soon to come.

The priest glanced back when he heard the movement of the staff along the flagstones.

“You will not need that,” he said. “As I explained, these demons are not aggressive.”

I shook my head as I swallowed another mouthful.

“This one will attack,” I said, “when it becomes aware of my presence. You see, I am the one it is seeking.”

“Oh my!” he repeated.

I stood then as its trunks swayed in my direction and it approached the bridge.

“This one is more solid than usual,” I commented. “Three days, eh?”

“Yes.”

I moved about the tray and took a step forward. Suddenly, it was over the bridge and rushing toward me. I met it with a straight thrust, which it avoided. I spun the staff twice and struck again as it was turning. My blow landed and I was hit by two of the trunks simultaneously—once on the breast, once on the cheek. The epigon went out like a burned hydrogen balloon and I stood there rubbing my face, looking about me the while.

Another slithered into our room from within the temple. I lunged suddenly and caught it on the first stroke.

“I think perhaps I should be leaving now,” I stated. “Thank you for your hospitality. Convey my regrets to the head priest that I did not get to meet him. I am warm and fed and I have learned what I wanted to know about your demons. Do not even bother about the terminal. They will probably cease to visit you shortly, and they should not return.”

“You are certain?”

“I know them.”

“I did not know the terminals were haunted. The salesman did not tell us.”

“Yours should be all right now.”

He saw me to the gate.

“Thank you for the exorcism,” he said.

“Thanks for the meal. Good-bye.”

I traveled for several hours before I found a place to camp in a shallow cave, using my poncho as a rain-screen.

And today I came here to watch for the wave of death. Not yet, though. No truly big ones in this sea. Mine is still out there, somewhere.

19. Mt. Fuji from Shichirigahama

Fuji past pine trees, through shadow, clouds rising beside him . . . It is getting on into the evening of things. The weather was good today, my health stable.

I met two monks upon the road yesterday and I traveled with them for a time. I was certain that I had seen them somewhere else along the way, so I greeted them and asked if this were possible. They said that they were on a pilgrimage of their own, to a distant shrine, and they admitted that I looked familiar, also. We took our lunch together at the side of the road. Our conversation was restricted to generalities, though they did ask me whether I had heard of the haunted shrine in Kanagawa. How quickly such news travels. I said that I had and we reflected upon its strangeness.

After a time I became annoyed. Every turning of the way that I took seemed a part of their route, also. While I’d welcomed a little company, I’d no desire for long-term companions, and it seemed their choices of ways approximated mine too closely. Finally, when we came to a split in the road I asked them which fork they were taking. They hesitated, then said that they were going right. I took the left-hand path. A little later they caught up with me. They had changed their minds, they said.

When we reached the next town, I offered a man in a car a good sum of money to drive me to the next village. He accepted, and we drove away and left them standing there.

I got out before we reached the next town, paid him, and watched him drive off. Then I struck out upon a footpath I had seen, going in the general direction I desired. At one point I left the trail and cut through the woods until I struck another path.

I camped far off the trail when I finally bedded down, and the following morning I took pains to erase all sign of my presence there. The monks did not reappear. They may have been quite harmless, or their designs quite different, but I must be true to my carefully cultivated paranoia.

Which leads me to note that man in the distance—a Westerner, I’d judge, by his garments . . . He has been hanging around taking pictures for some time. I will lose him shortly, of course, if he is following me—or even if he isn’t.

It is terrible to have to be this way for too long a period of time. Next I will be suspecting schoolchildren.

I watch Fuji as the shadows lengthen. I will continue to watch until the first star appears. Then I will slip away.

And so I see the sky darken. The photographer finally stows his gear and departs.

I remain alert, but when I see the first star, I join the shadows and fade like the day.

20. Mt. Fuji from Inume Pass

Through fog and above it. It rained a bit earlier. And there is Fuji, storm clouds above his brow. In many ways I am surprised to have made it this far. This view, though, makes everything worthwhile.

I sit upon a mossy rock and record in my mind the changing complexion of Fuji as a quick rain veils his countenance, ceases, begins again.

The winds are strong here. The fogbank raises ghostly limbs and lowers them. There is a kind of numb silence beneath the wind’s monotone mantra.

I make myself comfortable, eating, drinking, viewing, as I go over my final plans once again. Things wind down. Soon the circle will be closed.

I had thought of throwing away my medicine here as an act of bravado, as a sign of full commitment. I see this now as a foolishly romantic gesture. I am going to need all of my strength, all of the help I can get, if I am to have a chance at succeeding. Instead of discarding the medicine here I take some.

The winds feel good upon me. They come on like waves, but they are bracing.

A few travelers pass below. I draw back, out of their line of sight. Harmless, they go by like ghosts, their words carried off by the wind, not even reaching this far. I feel a small desire to sing but I restrain myself.

I sit for a long while, lost in a reverie of the elements. It has been good, this journey into the past, living at the edge once again . . .

Below me. Another vaguely familiar figure comes into view, lugging equipment. I cannot distinguish features from here, nor need I. As he halts and begins to set up his gear, I know that it is the photographer of Shichirigahama, out to capture another view of Fuji more permanent than any I desire.

I watch him for a time and he does not even glance my way. Soon I will be gone again, without his knowledge. I will allow this one as a coincidence. Provisionally, of course. If I see him again, I may have to kill him. I will be too near my goal to permit even the possibility of interference to exist.

I had better depart now, for I would rather travel before than behind him.

Fuji-from-on-high, this was a good resting place. We will see you again soon.

Come, Hokusai, let us be gone.

21. Mt. Fuji from the Totomi Mountains

Gone the old sawyers, splitting boards from a beam, shaping them. Only Fuji, of snow and clouds, remains. The men in the print work in the old way, like the Owari barrel-maker. Yet, apart from those of the fishermen who merely draw their needs from nature, these are the only two prints in my book depicting people actively shaping something in their world. Their labors are too traditional for me to see the image of the Virgin and the Dynamo within them. They could have been performing the same work a thousand years before Hokusai.

Yet it is a scene of humanity shaping the world, and so it leads me down trails of years to this time, this day of sophisticated tools and large-scale changes. I see within it the image of what was later wrought, of the metal skin and pulsing flows the world would come to wear. And Kit is there, too, godlike, riding electronic waves.

Troubling. Yet bespeaking an ancient resilience, as if this, too, is but an eyeblink glimpse of humanity’s movement in time, and whether I win or lose, the raw stuff remains and will triumph ultimately over any obstacle. I would really like to believe this, but I must leave certainty to politicians and preachers. My way is laid out and invested with my vision of what must be done.

I have not seen the photographer again, though I caught sight of the monks yesterday, camped on the side of a distant hill. I inspected them with my telescope and they were the same ones with whom I had traveled briefly. They had not noticed me and I passed them by way of a covering detour. Our trails have not crossed since.

Fuji, I have taken twenty-one of your aspects within me now. Live a little, die a little. Tell the gods, if you think of it, that a world is about to die.

I hike on, camping early in a field close to a monastery. I do not wish to enter there after my last experience in a modem holy place. I bed down in a concealed spot nearby, amid rocks and pine tree shoots. Sleep comes easily, lasts till some odd hour.

I am awake suddenly and trembling, in darkness and stillness. I cannot recall a sound from without or a troubling dream from within. Yet I am afraid, even to move. I breathe carefully and wait.

Drifting, like a lotus on a pond, it has come up beside me, towers above me, wears stars like a crown, glows with its own milky, supernal light. It is a delicate-featured image of a bodhisattva, not unlike Kwannon, in garments woven of moonbeams.

“Mari.”

Its voice is soft and caressing.

“Yes?” I answer.

“You have returned to travel in Japan. You are coming to me, are you not?”

The illusion is broken. It is Kit. He has carefully sculpted this epigon-form and wears it himself to visit me. There must be a terminal in the monastery. Will he try to force me?

“I was on my way to see you, yes,” I manage.

“You may join me now, if you would.”

He extends a wonderfully formed hand, as in benediction.

“I’ve a few small matters I must clear up before we are reunited.”

“What could be more important? I have seen the medical reports. I know the condition of your body. It would be tragic if you were to die upon the road, this close to your exaltation. Come now.”

“You have waited this long, and time means little to you.”

“It is you that I am concerned with.”

“I assure you I shall take every precaution. In the meantime, there is something which has been troubling me.”

“Tell me.”

“Last year there was a revolution in Saudi Arabia. It seemed to promise well for the Saudis but it also threatened Japan’s oil supply. Suddenly the new government began to look very bad on paper, and a new counterrevolutionary group looked stronger and better-tempered than it actually was. Major powers intervened successfully on the side of the counterrevolutionaries. Now they are in power and they seem even worse than the first government which had been overthrown. It seems possible, though incomprehensible to most, that computer readouts all over the world were somehow made to be misleading. And now the Osaka Conference is to be held to work out new oil agreements with the latest regime. It looks as if Japan will get a very good deal out of it. You once told me that you are above such mundane matters, but I wonder? You are Japanese, you loved your country. Could you have intervened in this?”

“What if I did? It is such a small matter in the light of eternal values. If there is a touch of sentiment for such things remaining within me, it is not dishonorable that I favor my country and my people.”

“And if you did it in this, might you not be moved to intervene again one day, in some other matter where habit or sentiment tell you you should?”

“What of it?” he replies. “I but extend my finger and stir the dust of illusion a bit. If anything, it frees me even further.”

“I see,” I answer.

“I doubt that you do, but you will when you have joined me. Why not do it now?”

“Soon,” I say. “Let me settle my affairs.”

“I will give you a few more days,” he says, “and then you must be with me forever.”

I bow my head.

“I will see you again soon,” I tell him.

“Good night, my love.”

“Good night.”

He drifts away then, his feet not touching the ground, and he passes through the wall of the monastery.

I reach for my medicine and my brandy. A double dose of each . . .

22. Mt. Fuji from the Sumida River in Edo

And so I come to the place of crossing. The print shows a ferryman bearing a number of people across the river into the city and evening. Fuji lies dark and brooding in the farthest distance. Here I do think of Charon, but the thought is not so unwelcome as it once might have been. I take the bridge myself, though.

As Kit has promised me a little grace, I walk freely the bright streets, to smell the smells and hear the noises and watch the people going their ways. I wonder what Hokusai would have done in contemporary times? He is silent on the matter.

I drink a little, I smile occasionally, I even eat a good meal. I am tired of reliving my life. I seek no consolations of philosophy or literature. Let me merely walk in the city tonight, running my shadow over faces and storefronts, bars and theaters, temples and offices. Anything which approaches is welcome tonight. I eat sushi, I gamble, I dance. There is no yesterday, there is no tomorrow for me now. When a man places his hand upon my shoulder and smiles, I move it to my breast and laugh. He is good for an hour’s exercise and laughter in a small room he finds us. I make him cry out several times before I leave him, though he pleads with me to stay. Too much to do and see, love. A greeting and a farewell.

Walking . . . Through parks, alleys, gardens, plazas. Crossing . . . Small bridges and larger ones, streets and walkways. Bark, dog. Shout, child. Weep, woman. I come and go among you. I feel you with a dispassionate passion. I take all of you inside me that I may hold the world here, for a night.

I walk in a light rain and in its cool aftermath. My garments are damp, then dry again. I visit a temple. I pay a taximan to drive me about the town. I eat a late meal. I visit another bar. I come upon a deserted playground, where I swing and watch the stars.

And I stand before a fountain splaying its waters into the lightening sky, until the stars are gone and only their lost sparkling falls about me.

Then breakfast and a long sleep, another breakfast and a longer one . . .

And you, my father, there on the sad height? I must leave you soon, Hokusai.

23. Mt. Fuji from Edo

Walking again, within a cloudy evening. How long has it been since I spoke with Kit? Too long, I am sure. An epigon could come bounding my way at any moment.

I have narrowed my search to three temples—none of them the one in the print, to be sure, only that uppermost portion of it viewed from that impossible angle, Fuji back past its peak, smoke, clouds, fog between—but I’ve a feeling one of these three will do in the blue of evening.

I have passed all of them many times, like a circling bird. I am loath to do more than this, for I feel the right choice will soon be made for me. I became aware sometime back that I was being followed, really followed this time, on my rounds. It seems that my worst fear was not ungrounded; Kit is employing human agents as well as epi-gons. How he sought them and how he bound them to his service I do not care to guess. Who else would be following me at this point, to see that I keep my promise, to force me to it if necessary?

I slow my pace. But whoever is behind me does the same. Not yet. Very well.

Fog rolls in. The echoes of my footfalls are muffled. Also those at my back. Unfortunate.

I head for the other temple. I slow again when I come into its vicinity, all of my senses extended, alert.

Nothing. No one. It is all right. Time is no problem. I move on.

After a long while I approach the precincts of the third temple. This must be it, but I require some move from my pursuer to give me the sign. Then, of course, I must deal with that person before I make my own move. I hope that it will not be too difficult, for everything will turn upon that small conflict.

I slow yet again and nothing appears but the moisture of the fog upon my face and the knuckles of my hand wrapped about my staff. I halt. I seek in my pocket after a box of cigarettes I had purchased several days ago in my festive mood. I had doubted they would shorten my life.

As I raise one to my lips, I hear the words, “You desire a light, madam?”

I nod my head as I turn.

It is one of the two monks who extends a lighter to me and flicks forth its flame. I notice for the first time the heavy ridge of callous along the edge of his hand. He had kept it carefully out of sight before, as we sojourned together. The other monk appears to his rear, to his left.

“Thank you.”

I inhale and send smoke to join the fog.

“You have come a long way,” the man states.

“Yes.”

“And your pilgrimage has come to an end.”

“Oh? Here?”

He smiles and nods. He turns his head toward the temple.

“This is our temple,” he says, “where we worship the new bodhisattva. He awaits you within.”

“He can continue to wait, till I finish my cigarette,” I say.

“Of course.”

With a casual glance, I study the man. He is probably a very good karateka. I am very good with the bo. If it were only him, I would bet on myself. But two of them, and the other probably just as good as this one? Kokuzo, where is your sword? I am suddenly afraid.

I turn away, I drop the cigarette, I spin into my attack. He is ready, of course. No matter. I land the first blow.

By then, however, the other man is circling and I must wheel and move defensively, turning, turning. If this goes on for too long, they will be able to wear me down.

I hear a grunt as I connect with a shoulder. Something, anyway . . .

Slowly, I am forced to give way, to retreat towaird the temple wall. If I am driven too near it, it will interfere with my strokes. I try again to hold my ground, to land a decisive blow . . .

Suddenly, the man to my right collapses, a dark figure on his back. No time to speculate. I turn my attention to the first monk, and moments later I land another blow, then another.

My rescuer is not doing so well, however. The second monk has shaken him off and begins striking at him with bone-crushing blows. My ally knows something of unarmed combat, though, for he gets into a defensive stance and blocks many of these, even landing a few of his own. Still, he is clearly overmatched.

Finally I sweep a leg and deliver another shoulder blow. I try three strikes at my man while he is down, but he rolls away from all of them and comes up again. I hear a sharp cry from my right, but I cannot look away from my adversary.

He comes in again and this time I catch him with a sudden reversal and crush his temple with a follow-up. I spin then, barely in time, for my ally lies on the ground and the second monk is upon me.

Either I am lucky or he has been injured. I catch the man quickly and follow up with a rapid series of strikes which take him down, out, and out for good.

I rush to the side of the third man and kneel beside him, panting. I had seen his gold earring as I moved about the second monk.

“Boris.” I take his hand. “Why are you here?”

“I told you—I could take a few days—to help you,” he says, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth. “Found you. Was taking pictures . . . And see . . . You needed me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Grateful, but sorry. You’re a better man than I thought.”

He squeezes my hand. “I told you I liked you—Maryushka. Too bad . . . we didn’t have—more time . . .”

I lean and kiss him, getting blood on my mouth. His hand relaxes within my own. I’ve never been a good judge of people, except after the fact.

And so I rise. I leave him there on the wet pavement. There is nothing I can do for him. I go into the temple.

It is dark near the entrance, but there are many votive lights to the rear. I do not see anyone about. I did not think that I would. It was just to have been the two monks, ushering me to the terminal. I head toward the lights. It must be somewhere back there.

I hear rain on the rooftop as I search. There are little rooms, off to either side, behind the lights.

It is there, in the second one. And even as I cross the threshold, I feel that familiar ionization which tells me that Kit is doing something here.

I rest my staff against the wall and go nearer. I place my hand upon the humming terminal.

“Kit,” I say, “I have come.”

No epigon grows before me, but I feel his presence and he seems to speak to me as he did on that night so long ago when I lay back upon the couch and donned the helmet:

“I knew that you would be here tonight.”

“So did I,” I reply.

“All of your business is finished?”

“Most of it.”

“And you are ready now to be joined with me?”

“Yes.”

Again I feel that movement, almost sexual in nature, as he flows into me. In a moment he would bear me away into his kingdom.

Tatemae is what you show to others. Honne is your real intention. As Musashi cautioned in the Book of Waters, I try not to reveal my honne even at this moment. I simply reach out with my free hand and topple my staff so that its metal tip, batteries engaged, falls against the terminal.

“Mari! What have you done?” he asks, within me now, as the humming ceases.

“I have cut off your line of retreat, Kit.”

“Why?”

The blade is already in my hand.

“It is the only way for us. I give you this jigai, my husband.”

“No!”

I feel him reaching for control of my arm as I exhale. But it is too late. It is already moving. I feel the blade enter my throat, well-placed.

“Fool!” he cries. “You do not know what you have done! I cannot return!”

“I know.”

As I slump against the terminal I seem to hear a roaring sound, growing, at my back. It is the Big Wave, finally come for me. My only regret is that I did not make it to the final station, unless, of course, that is what Hokusai is trying to show me, there beside the tiny window, beyond the fog and the rain and the night.

24. Mt. Fuji in a Summer Storm

PALADIN OF THE LOST HOUR

Harlan Ellison

Time fascinates us. Is it the true Fourth Dimension, or is that just a glib definition made in an effort to hide the fact that we don ’t understand it at all? Science fiction writers since H.G. Wells have enjoyed speculating about Time, and in the following story Harlan Ellison shows there are still new ways of looking at it.

“Paladin of the Lost Hour” did not begin as a story; Ellison began writing it as a television script for The Twilight Zone series on CBS, which will be revived this fall. Halfway through the script, he took time out to write the story—and in the process, he says, new ideas came to him that greatly improved the script when he finished it.

It will be interesting to compare the story to the TV version in a few months.

This was an old man. Not an incredibly old man; obsolete, spavined; not as worn as the sway-backed stone steps ascending the Pyramid of the Sun to an ancient temple; not yet a relic. But even so, a very old man, this old man perched on an antique shooting stick, its handles open to form a seat, its spike thrust at an angle into the soft ground and trimmed grass of the cemetery. Gray, thin rain misted down at almost the same angle as that at which the spike pierced the ground. The winter-barren trees lay flat and black against an aluminum sky, unmoving in the chill wind. An old man sitting at the foot of a grave mound whose headstone had tilted slightly when the earth had settled; sitting in the rain and speaking to someone below.

“They tore it down, Minna.

“I tell you, they must have bought off a councilman.

“Came in with bulldozers at six o’clock in the morning, and you know that’s not legal. There’s a Municipal Code. Supposed to hold off till at least seven on weekdays, eight on the weekend; but there they were at six, even before six, barely light for godsakes. Thought they’d sneak in and do it before the neighborhood got wind of it and called the landmarks committee. Sneaks: they come on holidays, can you imagine!

“But I was out there waiting for them, and I told them, ‘You can’t do it, that’s Code number 91.3002, sub-section E,’ and they lied and said they had special permission, so I said to the big muckymuck in charge, ‘Let’s see your waiver permit,’ and he said the Code didn’t apply in this case because it was supposed to be only for grading, and since they were demolishing and not grading, they could start whenever they felt like it. So I told him I’d call the police, then, because it came under the heading of Disturbing the Peace, and he said . . . well, I know you hate that kind of language, old girl, so I won’t tell you what he said, but you can imagine.

“So I called the police, and gave them my name, and of course they didn’t get there till almost quarter after seven (which is what makes me think they bought off a councilman), and by then those ’dozers had leveled most of it. Doesn’t take long, you know that.

“And I don’t suppose it’s as great a loss as, maybe, say, the Great Library of Alexandria, but it was the last of the authentic Deco design drive-ins, and the carhops still served you on roller skates, and it was a landmark, and just about the only place left in the city where you could still get a decent grilled cheese sandwich pressed very flat on the grill by one of those weights they used to use, made with real cheese and not that rancid plastic they cut into squares and call it ‘cheese food.’

“Gone, old dear, gone and mourned. And I understand they plan to put up another one of those mini-malls on the site, just ten blocks away from one that’s already there, and you know what’s going to happen: this new one will drain off the traffic from the older one, and then that one will fail the way they all do when the next one gets built, you’d think they’d see some history in it; but no, they never learn. And you should have seen the crowd by seven-thirty. All ages, even some of those kids painted like aborigines, with torn leather clothing. Even they came to protest. Terrible language, but at least they were concerned. And nothing could stop it. They just whammed it, and down it went.

“I do so miss you today, Minna. No more good grilled cheese.” Said the very old man to the ground. And now he was crying softly, and now the wind rose, and the mist rain stippled his overcoat.

Nearby, yet at a distance, Billy Kinetta stared down at another grave. He could see the old man over there off to his left, but he took no further notice. The wind whipped the vent of his trenchcoat. His collar was up but rain trickled down his neck. This was a younger man, not yet thirty-five. Unlike the old man, Billy Kinetta neither cried nor spoke to memories of someone who had once listened. He might have been a geomancer, so silently did he stand, eyes toward the ground.

One of these men was black; the other was white.

Beyond the high, spiked-iron fence surrounding the cemetery two boys crouched, staring through the bars, through the rain; at the men absorbed by grave matters, by matters of graves. These were not really boys. They were legally young men. One was nineteen, the other two months beyond twenty. Both were legally old enough to vote, to drink alcoholic beverages, to drive a car. Neither would reach the age of Billy Kinetta.

One of them said, “Let’s take the old man.”

The other responded, “You think the guy in the trenchcoat’ll get in the—”

The first one smiled; and a mean little laugh. “I sure as shit hope so.” He wore, on his right hand, a leather carnaby glove with the fingers cut off, small round metal studs in a pattern along the line of his knuckles. He made a fist, flexed, did it again.

They went under the spiked fence at a point where erosion had created a shallow gully. “Sonofabitch!” one of them said, as he slid through on his stomach. It was muddy. The front of his sateen roadie jacket was filthy. “Sonofabitch!” He was speaking in general of the fence, the sliding under, the muddy ground, the universe in total. And the old man, who would now really get the crap kicked out of him for making this fine sateen roadie jacket filthy.

They sneaked up on him from the left, as far from the young guy in the trenchcoat as they could. The first one kicked out the shooting stick with a short, sharp, downward movement he had learned in his Tae-Kwon Do class. It was called the yup-chagi. The old man went over backward.

Then they were on him, the one with the filthy sonofabitch sateen roadie jacket punching at the old man’s neck and the side of his face as he dragged him around by the collar of the overcoat. The other one began ransacking the coat pockets, ripping the fabric to get his hand inside.

The old man commenced to scream. “Protect me! You’ve got to protect me . . . it’s necessary to protect me!”

The one pillaging pockets froze momentarily. What the hell kind of thing is that for this old fucker to be saying? Who the hell does he think’ll protect him? Is he asking us to protect him? I’ll protect you, scumbag! I’ll kick in your fuckin’ lung! “Shut ’im up!” he whispered urgently to his friend. “Stick a fist in his mouth!” Then his hand, wedged in an inside jacket pocket, closed over something. He tried to get his hand loose, but the jacket and coat and the old man’s body had wound around his wrist. “C’mon loose, motherfuckah!” he said to the very old man, who was still screaming for protection. The other young man was making huffing sounds, as dark as mud, as he slapped at the rain-soaked hair of his victim. “I can’t . . . he’s all twisted ’round . . . getcher hand outta there so’s I can . . .” Screaming, the old man had doubled under, locking their hands on his person.

And then the pillager’s fist came loose, and he was clutching—for an instant—a gorgeous pocket watch.

What used to be called a turnip watch.

The dial face was cloisonné, exquisite beyond the telling.

The case was of silver, so bright it seemed blue.

The hands, cast as arrows of time, were gold. They formed a shallow V at precisely eleven o’clock. This was happening at 3:45 in the afternoon, with rain and wind.

The timepiece made no sound, no sound at all.

Then: there was space all around the watch, and in that space in the palm of the hand, there was heat. Intense heat for just a moment, just long enough for the hand to open.

The watch glided out of the boy’s palm and levitated.

“Help me! You must protect me!”

Billy Kinetta heard the shrieking, but did not see the pocket watch floating in the air above the astonished young man. It was silver, and it was end-on toward him, and the rain was silver and slanting; and he did not see the watch hanging free in the air, even when the furious young man disentangled himself and leaped for it. Billy did not see the watch rise just so much, out of reach of the mugger.

Billy Kinetta saw two boys, two young men of ratpack age, beating someone much older; and he went for them. Pow, like that!

Thrashing his legs, the old man twisted around—over, under—as the boy holding him by the collar tried to land a punch to put him away. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much battle in him?

A flapping shape, screaming something unintelligible, hit the center of the group at full speed. The carnaby-gloved hand reaching for the watch grasped at empty air one moment, and the next was buried under its owner as the boy was struck a crackback block that threw him face-first into the soggy ground. He tried to rise, but something stomped him at the base of his spine; something kicked him twice in the kidneys; something rolled over him like a flash flood.

Twisting, twisting, the very old man put his thumb in the right eye of the boy clutching his collar.

The great trenchcoated maelstrom that was Billy Kinetta whirled into the boy as he let loose of the old man on the ground and, howling, slapped a palm against his stinging eye. Billy locked his fingers and delivered a roundhouse wallop that sent the boy reeling backward to fall over Minna’s tilted headstone.

Billy’s back was to the old man. He did not see the miraculous pocket watch smoothly descend through rain that did not touch it, to hover in front of the old man. He did not see the old man reach up, did not see the timepiece snuggle into an arthritic hand, did not see the old man return the turnip to an inside jacket pocket.

Wind, rain and Billy Kinetta pummeled two young men of a legal age that made them accountable for their actions. There was no thought of the knife stuck down in one boot, no chance to reach it, no moment when the wild thing let them rise. So they crawled. They scrabbled across the muddy ground, the slippery grass, over graves and out of his reach. They ran; falling, rising, falling again; away, without looking back.

Billy Kinetta, breathing heavily, knees trembling, turned to help the old man to his feet; and found him standing, brushing dirt from his overcoat, snorting in anger and mumbling to himself.

“Are you all right?”

For a moment the old man’s recitation of annoyance continued, then he snapped his chin down sharply as if marking end to the situation, and looked at his cavalry to the rescue. “That was very good, young fella. Considerable style you’ve got there.”

Billy Kinetta stared at him wide-eyed. “Are you sure you’re okay?” He reached over and flicked several blades of wet grass from the shoulder of the old man’s overcoat.

“I’m fine. I’m fine but I’m wet and I’m cranky. Let’s go somewhere and have a nice cup of Earl Grey.”

There had been a look on Billy Kinetta’s face as he stood with lowered eyes, staring at the grave he had come to visit. The emergency had removed that look. Now it returned.

“No, thanks. If you’re okay, I’ve got to do some things.”

The old man felt himself all over, meticulously, as he replied, “I’m only superficially bruised. Now if I were an old woman, instead of a spunky old man, same age though, I’d have lost considerable of the calcium in my bones, and those two would have done me some mischief. Did you know that women lose a considerable part of their calcium when they reach my age? I read a report.” Then he paused, and said shyly, “Come on, why don’t you and I sit and chew the fat over a nice cup of tea?”

Billy shook his head with bemusement, smiling despite himself. “You’re something else, Dad. I don’t even know you.”

“I like that.”

“What: that I don’t know you?”

“No, that you called me ‘Dad’ and not ‘Pop.’ I hate ‘Pop.’ Always makes me think the wise-apple wants to snap off my cap with a bottle opener. Now Dad has a ring of respect to it. I like that right down to the ground. Yes, I believe we should find someplace warm and quiet to sit and get to know each other. After all, you saved my life. And you know what that means in the Orient.”

Billy was smiling continuously now. “In the first place, I doubt very much I saved your life. Your wallet, maybe. And in the second place, I don’t even know your name; what would we have to talk about?”

“Gaspar,” he said, extending his hand. “That’s a first name. Gaspar. Know what it means?”

Billy shook his head.

“See, already we have something to talk about.”

So Billy, still smiling, began walking Gaspar out of the cemetery. “Where do you live? I’ll take you home.”

They were on the street, approaching Billy Kinetta’s 1979 Cutlass. “Where I live is too far for now. I’m beginning to feel a bit peaky. I’d like to lie down for a minute. We can just go on over to your place, if that doesn’t bother you. For a few minutes. A cup of tea. Is that all right?” He was standing beside the Cutlass, looking at Billy with an old man’s expectant smile, waiting for him to unlock the door and hold it for him till he’d placed his still-calcium-rich but nonetheless old bones in the passenger seat. Billy stared at him, trying to figure out what was at risk if he unlocked that door. Then he snorted a tiny laugh, unlocked the door, held it for Gaspar as he seated himself, slammed it and went around to unlock the other side and get in. Gaspar reached across and thumbed up the door lock knob. And they drove off together in the rain.

Through all of this the timepiece made no sound, no sound at all.

Like Gaspar, Billy Kinetta was alone in the world.

His three-room apartment was the vacuum in which he existed. It was furnished, but if one stepped out into the hallway and, for all the money in all the unnumbered accounts in all the banks in Switzerland, one were asked to describe those furnishings, one would come away no richer than before. The apartment was charisma poor. It was a place to come when all other possibilities had been expended. Nothing green, nothing alive, existed in those boxes. No eyes looked back from the walls. Neither warmth nor chill marked those spaces. It was a place to wait.

Gaspar leaned his closed shooting stick, now a walking stick with handles, against the bookcase. He studied the titles of the paperbacks stacked haphazardly on the shelves.

From the kitchenette came the sound of water running into a metal pan. Then tin on cast iron. Then the hiss of gas and the flaring of a match as it was struck; and the pop of the gas being lit.

“Many years ago,” Gaspar said, taking out a copy of Moravia’s The Adolescents and thumbing it as he spoke, “I had a library of books, oh, thousands of books—never could bear to toss one out, not even the bad ones—and when folks would come to the house to visit they’d look around at all the nooks and crannys stuffed with books; and if they were the sort of folks who don’t snuggle with books, they’d always ask the same dumb question.” He waited a moment for a response and when none was forthcoming (the sound of china cups on sink tile), he said, “Guess what the question was.”

From the kitchen, without much interest: “No idea.”

“They’d always ask it with the kind of voice people use in the presence of large sculptures in museums. They’d ask me, ‘Have you read all these books?’ ” He waited again, but Billy Kinetta was not playing the game. “Well, young fella, after a while the same dumb question gets asked a million times, you get sorta snappish about it. And it came to annoy me more than a little bit. Till I finally figured out the right answer.

“And you know what that answer was? Go ahead, take a guess.”

Billy appeared in the kitchenette doorway. “I suppose you told them you’d read a lot of them but not all of them.”

Gaspar waved the guess away with a flapping hand. “Now what good would that have done? They wouldn’t know they’d asked a dumb question, but I didn’t want to insult them, either. So when they’d ask if I’d read all those books, I’d say, ‘Hell no. Who wants a library full of books you’ve already read?’ ”

Billy laughed despite himself. He scratched at his hair with idle pleasure, and shook his head at the old man’s verve. “Gaspar, you are a wild old man. You retired?”

The old man walked carefully to the most comfortable chair in the room, an overstuffed Thirties-style lounge that had been reupholstered many times before Billy Kinetta had purchased it at the American Cancer Society Thrift Shop. He sank into it with a sigh. “No sir, I am not by any means retired. Still very active.”

“Doing what, if I’m not prying?”

“Doing ombudsman.”

“You mean, like a consumer advocate? Like Ralph Nader?”

“Exactly. I watch out for things. I listen, I pay some attention; and if I do it right, sometimes I can even make a little difference. Yes, like Mr. Nader. A very fine man.”

“And you were at the cemetery to see a relative?”

Gaspar’s face settled into an expression of loss. “My dear old girl. My wife, Minna. She’s been gone, well, it was twenty years in January.” He sat silently staring inward for a while, then: “She was everything to me. The nice part was that I knew how important we were to each other; we discussed, well, just everything. I miss that the most, telling her what’s going on.

“I go to see her every other day.

“I used to go every day. But. It. Hurt. Too much.”

They had tea. Gaspar sipped and said it was very nice, but had Billy ever tried Earl Grey? Billy said he didn’t know what that was, and Gaspar said he would bring him a tin, that it was splendid. And they chatted. Finally, Gaspar asked, “And who were you visiting?”

Billy pressed his lips together. “Just a friend.” And would say no more. Then he sighed and said, “Well, listen, I have to go to work.”

“Oh? What do you do?”

The answer came slowly. As if Billy Kinetta wanted to be able to say that he was in computers, or owned his own business, or held a position of import. Tm night manager at a 7-Eleven.”

“I’ll bet you meet some fascinating people coming in late for milk or one of those slushies,” Gaspar said gently. He seemed to understand.

Billy smiled. He took the kindness as it was intended. “Yeah, the cream of high society. That is, when they’re not threatening to shoot me through the head if I don’t open the safe.”

“Let me ask you a favor,” Gaspar said. “I’d like a little sanctuary, if you think it’s all right. Just a little rest. I could lie down on the sofa for a bit. Would that be all right? You trust me to stay here while you’re gone, young fella?”

Billy hesitated only a moment. The very old man seemed okay, not a crazy, certainly not a thief. And what was there to steal? Some tea that wasn’t even Earl Grey?

“Sure. That’ll be okay. But I won’t be coming back till two a.m. So just close the door behind you when you go; it’ll lock automatically.”

They shook hands, Billy shrugged into his still-wet trenchcoat, and he went to the door. He paused to look back at Gaspar sitting in the lengthening shadows as evening came on. “It was nice getting to know you, Gaspar.”

“You can make that a mutual pleasure, Billy. You’re a nice young fella.”

And Billy went to work, alone as always.

When he came home at two, prepared to open a can of Hormel chili, he found the table set for dinner, with the scent of an elegant beef stew enriching the apartment. There were new potatoes and stir-fried carrots and zucchini that had been lightly battered to delicate crispness. And cupcakes. White cake with chocolate frosting. From a bakery.

And in that way, as gently as that, Gaspar insinuated himself into Billy Kinetta’s apartment and his life.

As they sat with tea and cupcakes, Billy said, “You don’t have anyplace to go, do you?”

The old man smiled and made one of those deprecating movements of the head. “Well, I’m not the sort of fella who can bear to be homeless, but at the moment I’m what vaudevillians used to call ‘at liberty.’ ”

“If you want to stay on a time, that would be okay,” Billy said. “It’s not very roomy here, but we seem to get on all right.”

“That’s strongly kind of you, Billy. Yes, I’d like to be your roommate for a while. Won’t be too long, though. My doctor tells me I’m not long for this world.” He paused, looked into the teacup and said softly, “I have to confess . . . I’m a little frightened. To go. Having someone to talk to would be a great comfort.”

And Billy said, without preparation, “I was visiting the grave of a man who was in my rifle company in Viet Nam. I go there sometimes.” But there was such pain in his words that Gaspar did not press him for details.

So the hours passed, as they will with or without permission, and when Gaspar asked Billy if they could watch the television, to catch an early newscast, and Billy tuned in the old set just in time to pick up dire reports of another aborted disarmament talk, and Billy shook his head and observed that it wasn’t only Gaspar who was frightened of something like death, Gaspar chuckled, patted Billy on the knee and said, with unassailable assurance, “Take my word for it, Billy . . . it isn’t going to happen. No nuclear holocaust. Trust me, when I tell you this: it’ll never happen. Never, never, not ever.”

Billy smiled wanly. “And why not? What makes you so sure . . . got some special inside information?”

And Gaspar pulled out the magnificent timepiece, which Billy was seeing for the first time, and he said, “It’s not going to happen because it’s only eleven o’clock.”

Billy stared at the watch, which read 11:00 precisely. He consulted his wristwatch. “Hate to tell you this, but your watch has stopped. It’s almost five-thirty.”

Gaspar smiled his own certain smile. “No, it’s eleven.”

And they made up the sofa for the very old man, who placed his pocket change and his fountain pen and the sumptuous turnip watch on the now-silent television set, and they went to sleep.

One day Billy went off while Gaspar was washing the lunch dishes, and when he came back, he had a large paper bag from Toys “R” Us.

Gaspar came out of the kitchenette rubbing a plate with a souvenir dish towel from Niagara Falls, New York. He stared at Billy and the bag. “What’s in the bag?” Billy inclined his head, and indicated the very old man should join him in the middle of the room. Then he sat down crosslegged on the floor, and dumped the contents of the bag. Gaspar stared with startlement, and sat down beside him.

So for two hours they played with tiny cars that turned into robots when the sections were unfolded.

Gaspar was excellent at figuring out all the permutations of the Transformers, Starriors and GoBots. He played well.

Then they went for a walk. “I’ll treat you to a matinee,” Gaspar said. “But no films with Karen Black, Sandy Dennis or Meryl Streep. They’re always crying. Their noses are always red. I can’t stand that.”

They started to cross the avenue. Stopped at the light was this year’s Cadillac Brougham, vanity license plates, ten coats of acrylic lacquer and two coats of clear (with a little retarder in the final “color coat” for a slow dry) of a magenta hue so rich that it approximated the shade of light shining through a decanter filled with Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 1945.

The man driving the Cadillac had no neck. His head sat thumped down hard on the shoulders. He stared straight ahead, took one last deep pull on the cigar, and threw it out the window. The still-smoking butt landed directly in front of Gaspar as he passed the car. The old man stopped, stared down at this coprolitic metaphor, and then stared at the driver. The eyes behind the wheel, the eyes of a macaque, did not waver from the stoplight’s red circle. Just outside the window, someone was looking in, but the eyes of the rhesus were on the red circle.

A line of cars stopped behind the Brougham.

Gaspar continued to stare at the man in the Cadillac for a moment, and then, with creaking difficulty, he bent and picked up the smoldering butt of stogie.

The old man walked the two steps to the car—as Billy watched in confusion—thrust his face forward till it was mere inches from the driver’s profile, and said with extreme sweetness, “I think you dropped this in our living room.”

And as the glazed simian eyes turned to stare directly into the pedestrian’s face, nearly nose-to-nose, Gaspar casually flipped the butt with its red glowing tip, into the back seat of the Cadillac, where it began to bum a hole in the fine Corinthian leather.

Three things happened simultaneously:

The driver let out a howl, tried to see the butt in his rear-view mirror, could not get the angle, tried to look over his shoulder into the back seat but without a neck could not perform that feat of agility, put the car into neutral, opened his door and stormed into the street trying to grab Gaspar. “You fuckin’ bastid, whaddaya think you’re doin’ tuh my car you asshole bastid, I’ll kill ya . . .”

Billy’s hair stood on end as he saw what Gaspar was doing; he rushed back the short distance in the crosswalk to grab the old man; Gaspar would not be dragged away, stood smiling with unconcealed pleasure at the mad bull rampaging and screaming of the hysterical driver. Billy yanked as hard as he could and Gaspar began to move away, around the front of the Cadillac, toward the far curb. Still grinning with octogeneric charm.

The light changed.

These three things happened in the space of five seconds, abetted by the impatient honking of the cars behind the Brougham; as the light turned green.

Screaming, dragging, honking, as the driver found he could not do three things at once: he could not go after Gaspar while the traffic was clanging at him; could not let go of the car door to crawl into the back seat from which now came the stench of charring leather that could not be rectified by an inexpensive Tijuana tuck-’n-roll; could not save his back seat and at the same time stave off the hostility of a dozen drivers cursing and honking. He trembled there, tom three ways, doing nothing.

Billy dragged Gaspar.

Out of the crosswalk. Out of the street. Onto the curb. Up the side street. Into the alley. Through a backyard. To the next street from the avenue.

Puffing with the exertion, Billy stopped at last, five houses up the street. Gaspar was still grinning, chuckling softly with unconcealed pleasure at his puckish ways. Billy turned on him with wild gesticulations and babble.

“You’re nuts!”

“How about that?” the old man said, giving Billy an affectionate poke in the bicep.

“Nuts! Looney! That guy would’ve tom off your head! What the hell’s wrong with you, old man? Are you out of your boots?”

“I’m not crazy. I’m responsible.”

“Responsible!?! Responsible, fer chrissakes? For what? For all the butts every yotz throws into the street?”

The old man nodded. “For butts, and trash, and pollution, and toxic waste dumping in the dead of night; for bushes, and cactus, and the baobab tree; for pippin apples and even lima beans, which I despise. You show me someone who’ll eat lima beans without being at gunpoint, I’ll show you a pervert!”

Billy was screaming. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m also responsible for dogs and cats and guppies and cockroaches and the President of the United States and Jonas Salk and your mother and the entire chorus line at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Also their choreographer.”

“Who do you think you are? God?”

“Don’t be sacrilegious. I’m too old to wash your mouth out with laundry soap. Of course I’m not God. I’m just an old man. But I’m responsible.”

Gaspar started to walk away, toward the corner and the avenue, and a resumption of their route. Billy stood where the old man’s words had pinned him.

“Come on, young fella,” Gaspar said, walking backward to speak to him, “we’ll miss the beginning of the movie. I hate that.”

Billy had finished eating, and they were sitting in the dimness of the apartment, only the lamp in the corner lit. The old man had gone to the County Art Museum and had bought inexpensive prints—Max Ernst, Gerome, Richard Dadd, a subtle Feininger—which he had mounted in Insta-Frames. They sat in silence for a time, relaxing; then murmuring trivialities in a pleasant undertone.

Finally, Gaspar said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about my dying. I like what Woody Allen said.”

Billy slid to a more comfortable position in the lounger. “What was that?”

“He said: I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Billy snickered.

“I feel something like that, Billy. I’m not afraid to go, but I don’t want to leave Minna entirely. The times I spend with her, talking to her, well, it gives me the feeling we’re still in touch. When I go, that’s the end of Minna. She’ll be well and truly dead. We never had any children, almost everyone who knew us is gone, no relatives. And we never did anything important that anyone would put in a record book, so that’s the end of us.

For me, I don’t mind; but I wish there was someone who knew about Minna . . . she was a remarkable person.”

So Billy said, “Tell me. I’ll remember for you.”

Memories in no particular order. Some as strong as ropes that could pull the ocean ashore. Some that shimmered and swayed in the faintest breeze like spiderwebs. The entire person, all the little movements, that dimple that appeared when she was amused at something foolish he had said. Their youth together, their love, the procession of their days toward middle age. The small cheers and the pain of dreams never realized. So much about him, as he spoke of her. His voice soft and warm and filled with a longing so deep and true that he had to stop frequently because the words broke and would not come out till he had thought away some of the passion. He thought of her and was glad. He had gathered her together, all her dowry of love and taking care of him, her clothes and the way she wore them, her favorite knickknacks, a few clever remarks: and he packed it all up and delivered it to a new repository.

The very old man gave Minna to Billy Kinetta for safekeeping.

Dawn had come. The light filtering in through the blinds was saffron. “Thank you, Dad,” Billy said. He could not name the feeling that had taken him hours earlier. But he said this: “I’ve never had to be responsible for anything, or anyone, in my whole life. I never belonged to anybody . . . I don’t know why. It didn’t bother me, because I didn’t know any other way to be.”

Then his position changed, there in the lounger. He sat up in a way that Caspar thought was important. As if Billy were about to open the secret box buried at his center. And Billy spoke so softly the old man had to strain to hear him.

“I didn’t even know him.

“We were defending the airfield at Danang. Did I tell you we were 1st Battalion, 9th Marines? Charlie was massing for a big push out of Quang Ngai province, south of us. Looked as if they were going to try to take the provincial capital. My rifle company was assigned to protect the perimeter. They kept sending in patrols to bite us. Every day we’d lose some poor bastard who scratched his head when he shouldn’t of. It was June, late in June, cold and a lot of rain. The foxholes were hip-deep in water.

“Flares first. Our howitzers started firing. Then the sky was full of tracers, and I started to turn toward the bushes when I heard something coming, and these two main-force regulars in dark blue uniforms came toward me. I could see them so clearly. Long black hair. All crouched over. And they started firing. And that goddam carbine seized up, wouldn’t fire; and I pulled out the banana clip, tried to slap in another, but they saw me and just turned a couple of AK-47’s on me . . . God, I remember everything slowed down . . . I looked at those things, seven-point-six-two millimeter assault rifles they were . . . I got crazy for a second, tried to figure out in my own mind if they were Russian-made, or Chinese, or Czech, or North Korean. And it was so bright from the flares I could see them starting to squeeze off the rounds, and then from out of nowhere this lance corporal jumped out at them and yelled somedamn-thing like, ‘Hey, you VC fucks, looka here!’ except it wasn’t that . . . I never could recall what he said actually . . . and they turned to brace him . . . and they opened him up like a baggie full of blood . . . and he was all over me, and the bushes, and oh god there was pieces of him floating on the water I was standing in . . .”

Billy was heaving breath with impossible weight. His hands moved in the air before his face without pattern or goal. He kept looking into far comers of the dawn-lit room as if special facts might present themselves to fill out the reasons behind what he was saying.

“Aw, geezus, he was floating on the water . . . aw, christ, he got in my boots!” Then a wail of pain so loud it blotted out the sound of traffic beyond the apartment; and he began to moan, but not cry; and the moaning kept on; and Gaspar came from the sofa and held him and said such words as it’s all right, but they might not have been those words, or any words.

And pressed against the old man’s shoulder, Billy Kinetta ran on only half sane: “He wasn’t my friend, I never knew him, I’d never talked to him, but I’d seen him, he was just this guy, and there wasn’t any reason to do that, he didn’t know whether I was a good guy or a shit or anything, so why did he do that? He didn’t need to do that. They wouldn’t of seen him. He was dead before I killed them. He was gone already. I never got to say thank you or thank you or . . . anything!

“Now he’s in that grave, so I came here to live, so I can go there, but I try and try to say thank you, and he’s dead, and he can’t hear me, he can’t hear anything, he’s just down there, down in the ground, and I can’t say thank you . . . oh, geezus, geezus, why don’t he hear me, I just want to say thanks . . .”

Billy Kinetta wanted to assume the responsibility for saying thanks, but that was possible only on a night that would never come again; and this was the day.

Gaspar took him to the bedroom and put him down to sleep in exactly the same way one would soothe an old, sick dog.

Then he went to his sofa, and because it was the only thing he could imagine saying, he murmured, “He’ll be all right, Minna. Really he will.”

When Billy left for the 7-Eleven the next evening, Gaspar was gone. It was an alternate day, and that meant he was out at the cemetery. Billy fretted that he shouldn’t be there alone, but the old man had a way of taking care of himself. Billy was not smiling as he thought of his friend, and the word friend echoed as he realized that, yes, this was his friend, truly and really his friend. He wondered how old Gaspar was, and how soon Billy Kinetta would be once again what he had always been: alone.

When he returned to the apartment at two-thirty, Gaspar was asleep, cocooned in his blanket on the sofa. Billy went in and tried to sleep, but hours later, when sleep would not come, when thoughts of murky water and calcium night light on dark foliage kept him staring at the bedroom ceiling, he came out of the room for a drink of water. He wandered around the living room, not wanting to be by himself even if the only companionship in this sleepless night was breathing heavily, himself in sleep.

He stared out the window. Clouds lay in chiffon strips across the sky. The squealing of tires from the street.

Sighing, idle in his movement around the room, he saw the old man’s pocket watch lying on the coffee table beside the sofa. He walked to the table. If the watch was still stopped at eleven o’clock, perhaps he would borrow it and have it repaired. It would be a nice thing to do for Gaspar. He loved that beautiful timepiece.

Billy bent to pick it up.

The watch, stopped at the V of eleven precisely, levitated at an angle, floating away from him.

Billy Kinetta felt a shiver travel down his back to burrow in at the base of his spine. He reached for the watch hanging in air before him. It floated away just enough that his fingers massaged empty space. He tried to catch it. The watch eluded him, lazily turning away like an opponent who knows he is in no danger of being struck from behind.

Then Billy realized Gaspar was awake. Turned away from the sofa, nonetheless he knew the old man was observing him. And the blissful floating watch.

He looked at Gaspar.

They did not speak for a long time.

Then: “I’m going back to sleep,” Billy said. Quietly.

“I think you have some questions,” Gaspar replied.

“Questions? No, of course not, Dad. Why in the world would I have questions? I’m still asleep.” But that was not the truth, because he had not been asleep that night.

“Do you know what ‘Gaspar’ means? Do you remember the three wise men of the Bible, the Magi?”

“I don’t want any frankincense and myrrh. I’m going back to bed. I’m going now. You see, I’m going right now.”

“ ‘Gaspar’ means master of the treasure, keeper of the secrets, paladin of the palace.” Billy was staring at him, not walking into the bedroom; just staring at him. As the elegant timepiece floated to the old man, who extended his hand palm-up to receive it. The watch nestled in his hand, unmoving, and it made no sound, no sound at all.

“You go back to bed. But will you go out to the cemetery with me tomorrow? It’s important.”

“Why?”

“Because I believe I’ll be dying tomorrow.”

It was a nice day, cool and clear. Not at all a day for dying, but neither had been many such days in Southeast Asia, and death had not been deterred.

They stood at Minna’s gravesite, and Gaspar opened his shooting stick to form a seat, and he thrust the spike into the ground, and he settled onto it, and sighed, and said to Billy Kinetta, “I’m growing cold as that stone.”

“Do you want my jacket?”

“No. I’m cold inside.” He looked around at the sky, at the grass, at the rows of markers. “I’ve been responsible, for all of this, and more.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“Young fella, are you by any chance familiar, in your reading, with an old novel by James Hilton called Lost Horizon? Perhaps you saw the movie. It was a wonderful movie, actually much better than the book. Mr. Capra’s greatest achievement. A human testament. Ronald Colman was superb. Do you know the story?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember the High Lama, played by Sam Jaffe? His name was Father Perrault?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember how he passed on the caretakership of that magical hidden world, Shangri-La, to Ronald Colman?”

“Yes, I remember that.” Billy paused. “Then he died. He was very old, and he died.”

Gaspar smiled up at Billy. “Very good, Billy. I knew you were a good boy. So now, if you remember all that, may I tell you a story? It’s not a very long story.”

Billy nodded, smiling at his friend.

“In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the civilized world would no longer observe the Julian calendar. October 4th, 1582 was followed, the next day, by October 15th. Eleven days vanished from the world. One hundred and seventy years later, the British Parliament followed suit, and September 2nd, 1752 was followed, the next day, by September 14th. Why did he do that, the Pope?”

Billy was bewildered by the conversation. “Because he was bringing it into synch with the real world. The solstices and equinoxes. When to plant, when to harvest.”

Gaspar waggled a finger at him with pleasure. “Excellent, young fella. And you’re correct when you say Gregory abolished the Julian calendar because its error of one day in every one hundred and twenty-eight years had moved the vernal equinox to March 11th. That’s what the history books say. It’s what every history book says. But what if?”

“What if what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What if: Pope Gregory had the knowledge revealed to him that he must readjust time in the minds of men? What if: the excess time in 1582 was eleven days and one hour? What if: he accounted for those eleven days, vanished those eleven days, but that one hour slipped free, was left loose to bounce through eternity? A very special hour . . . an hour that must never be used . . . an hour that must never toll. What if?”

Billy spread his hands. “What if, what if, what if! It’s all just philosophy. It doesn’t mean anything. Hours aren’t real, time isn’t something that you can bottle up. So what if there is an hour out there somewhere that . . .”

And he stopped.

He grew tense, and leaned down to the old man. “The watch. Your watch. It doesn’t work. It’s stopped.”

Gaspar nodded. “At eleven o’clock. My watch works; it keeps very special time, for one very special hour.”

Billy touched Gaspar’s shoulder. Carefully he asked, “Who are you, Dad?”

The old man did not smile as he said, “Gaspar. Keeper. Paladin. Guardian.”

“Father Perrault was hundreds of years old.”

Gaspar shook his head with a wistful expression on his old face. “I’m eighty-six years old, Billy. You asked me if I thought I was God. Not God, not Father Perrault, not an immortal, just an old man who will die too soon. Are you Ronald Colman?”

Billy nervously touched his lower lip with a finger. He looked at Gaspar as long as he could, then turned away. He walked off a few paces, stared at the barren trees. It seemed suddenly much chillier here in this place of entombed remembrances. From a distance he said, “But it’s only . . . what? A chronological convenience. Like daylight saving time; Spring forward, Fall back. We don’t actually lose an hour; we get it back.”

Gaspar stared at Minna’s grave. “At the end of April I lost an hour. If I die now, I’ll die an hour short in my life. I’ll have been cheated out of one hour I want, Billy.” He swayed toward all he had left of Minna. “One last hour I could have with my old girl. That’s what I’m afraid of, Billy. I have that hour in my possession. I’m afraid I’ll use it, god help me, I want so much to use it.”

Billy came to him. Tense, and chilled, he said, “Why must that hour never toll?”

Gaspar drew a deep breath and tore his eyes away from the grave. His gaze locked with Billy’s. And he told him.

The years, all the days and hours, exist. As solid and as real as mountains and oceans and men and women and the baobab tree. Look, he said, at the lines in my face and deny that time is real. Consider these dead weeds that were once alive and try to believe it’s all just vapor or the mutual agreement of Popes and Caesars and young men like you.

“The lost hour must never come, Billy, for in that hour it all ends. The light, the wind, the stars, this magnificent open place we call the universe. It all ends, and in its place—waiting, always waiting—is eternal darkness. No new beginnings, no world without end, just the infinite emptiness.” And he opened his hand, which had been lying in his lap, and there, in his palm, rested the watch, making no sound at all, and stopped dead at eleven o’clock. “Should it strike twelve, Billy, eternal night falls; from which there is no recall.”

There he sat, this very old man, just a perfectly normal old man. The most recent in the endless chain of keepers of the lost hour, descended in possession from Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII, down through the centuries of men and women who had served as caretakers of the excellent timepiece. And now he was dying, and now he wanted to cling to life as every man and woman clings to life no matter how awful or painful or empty, even if it is for one more hour. The suicide, falling from the bridge, at the final instant, tries to fly, tries to climb back up the sky. This weary old man, who only wanted to stay one brief hour more with Minna. Who was afraid that his love would cost the universe.

He looked at Billy, and he extended his hand with the watch waiting for its next paladin. So softly Billy could barely hear him, knowing that he was denying himself what he most wanted at this last place in his life, he whispered, “If I die without passing it on . . . it will begin to tick.”

“Not me,” Billy said. “Why did you pick me? I’m no one special. I’m not someone like you. I run an all-night service mart. There’s nothing special about me the way there is about you! I’m not Ronald Colman! I don’t want to be responsible, I’ve never been responsible!”

Gaspar smiled gently. “You’ve been responsible for me.”

Billy’s rage vanished. He looked wounded.

“Look at us, Billy. Look at what color you are; and look at what color I am. You took me in as a friend, I think of you as worthy, Billy. Worthy.” They remained there that way, in silence, as the wind rose. And finally, in a timeless time, Billy nodded.

Then the young man said, “You won’t be losing Minna, Dad. Now you’ll go to the place where she’s been waiting for you, just as she was when you first met her. There’s a place where we find everything we’ve ever lost through the years.”

“That’s good, Billy, that you tell me that. I’d like to believe it, too. But I’m a pragmatist. I believe what exists . . . like rain and Minna’s grave and the hours that pass that we can’t see, but they are. I’m afraid, Billy. I’m afraid this will be the last time I can speak to her. So I ask a favor. As payment for my life spent protecting the watch.

“I ask for one minute of the hour, Billy. One minute to call her back, so we can stand face-to-face and I can touch her and say goodbye. You’ll be the new protector of this watch, Billy, so I ask you please, just let me steal one minute.”

Billy smiled and nodded. “We can spare the time.”

Gaspar reached out with his free hand and took Billy’s. It was an affectionate touch. “That was the last test, young fella. Oh, you know I’ve been testing you, don’t you? This important item couldn’t go to just anyone. And you passed the test, my friend, my last friend. When I said I could bring her back from where she’s gone, here in this place we’ve both come to so often to talk to someone lost to us, I knew you would understand that anyone could be brought back in that stolen minute. And you let me take it instead of using it for yourself.

“I’m content, Billy. Minna and I don’t need that minute. But if you’re to carry on for me, I think you do need it. So I give you a going-away present . . .”

And he started the watch, whose ticking was as loud and as clear as a baby’s first sound; and the sweep-second hand began to move away from eleven o’clock.

Then the wind rose, and the sky seemed to cloud over, and it grew colder, with a remarkable silver-blue mist that rolled across the cemetery; and though he did not see it emerge from that grave at a distance far to the right, Billy Kinetta saw a shape move toward him. A soldier in the uniform of a day past, and his rank was Lance Corporal. He came toward Billy Kinetta, and Billy went to meet him as Gaspar watched.

They stood together and Billy spoke to him. And the man whose name Billy had never known when he was alive, answered. And then he faded, as the seconds ticked away. Faded, and faded, and was gone. And the silver-blue mist rolled through them, and past them, and was gone; and the soldier was gone.

Billy stood alone.

When he turned back to look across the grounds to his friend, he saw that Gaspar had fallen from the shooting-stick. He lay on the ground. Billy rushed to him, and fell to his knees and lifted him onto his lap. Gaspar was still.

“Oh, god, Dad, you should have heard what he said. Oh, geez, he let me go. He let me go so I didn’t even have to say I was sorry. He told me he didn’t even see me in that foxhole. He never knew he’d saved my life. I said thank you and he said no, thank you, that he hadn’t died for nothing. Oh, please, Dad, please don’t be dead yet. I want to tell you . . .”

And the old man, the very old man, opened his eyes.[*]

“May I remember you to my old girl, Billy?” And his eyes closed and his caretakership was at an end, as his hand opened on the most excellent timepiece, now stopped again, at one minute past eleven, floated from his palm and waited till Billy Kinetta extended his hand, and then it floated down and lay there silently. Safe. Protected.

There in the place where all lost things returned, the young man sat on the cold ground, rocking the body of his friend. And he was in no hurry to leave. There was time.

[*] The author gratefully acknowledges the importance of a discussion with Ms. Ellie Grossman in the creation of this work of fiction.

THE SCAPEGOAT

C.J. Cherryh

I

Defranco sits across the table from the elf and he dreams for a moment, not a good dream, but recent truth: all part of what surrounds him now, a bit less than it was when it was happening, because it was gated in through human eyes and ears and a human notices much more and far less than what truly goes on in the world—

—the ground comes up with a bone-penetrating thump and dirt showers down like rain, over and over again; and deFranco wriggles up to his knees with the clods rattling off his armor. He may be moving to a place where a crater will be in a moment, and the place where he is may become one in that same moment. There is no time to think about it. There is only one way off that exposed hillside, which is to go and keep going. DeFranco writhes and wriggles against the weight of the armor, blind for a moment as the breathing system fails to give him as much as he needs, but his throat is already raw with too much oxygen in three days out. He curses the rig, far more intimate a frustration than the enemy on this last long run to the shelter of the deep tunnels . . .

He was going home, was John deFranco, if home was still there, and if the shells that had flattened their shield in this zone had not flattened it all along the line and wiped out the base. The elves had finally learned where to hit them on this weapons system too, that was what; and deFranco cursed them one and all, while the sweat ran in his eyes and the oxy-mix tore his throat and giddied his brain. On this side and that shells shocked the air and the ground and his bones; and not for the first time concussion flung him bodily through the air and slammed him to the churned ground bruised and battered (and but for the armor, dead and shrapnel-riddled). Immediately fragments of wood and metal rang off the hardsuit, and in their gravity-driven sequence clods of earth rained down in a patter mixed with impacts of rocks and larger chunks. And then, not having been directly in the strike zone and dead, he got his sweating human limbs up again by heaving the armor-weight into its hydraulic joint-locks, and desperately hurled fifty kilos of unsupple ceramics and machinery and ninety of quaking human flesh into a waddling, exhausted run.

Run and fall and run and stagger into a walk when the dizziness got too much and never waste time dodging.

But somewhen the jolts stopped, and the shell-made earthquakes stopped, and deFranco, laboring along the hazard of the shell-cratered ground, became aware of the silence. His staggering steps slowed as he turned with the awkward foot-planting the armor imposed to take a look behind him. The whole smoky valley swung across the narrowed view of his visor, all lit up with ghosty green readout that flickered madly and told him his eyes were jerking in panic, calling up more than he wanted. He feared that he was deaf; it was that profound a silence to his shocked ears. He heard the hum of the fans and the ventilator in the suit, but there would be that sound forever, he heard it in his dreams; so it could be in his head and not coming from his ears. He hit the ceramic-shielded back of his hand against his ceramic-coated helmet and heard the thump, if distantly. So his hearing was all right. There was just the smoke and the desolate cratering of the landscape to show him where the shells had hit.

And suddenly one of those ghosty green readouts in his visor jumped and said 000 and started ticking off, so he lumbered about to get a look up, the viewplate compensating for the sky in a series of flickers and darkenings. The reading kept up, ticking away; and he could see nothing in the sky, but base was still there, it was transmitting, and he knew what was happening. The numbers reached Critical and he swung about again and looked toward the plain as the first strikes came in and the smoke went up anew.

He stood there on the hillcrest and watched the airstrike he had called down half an eternity ago pound hell out of the plains. He knew the devastation of the beams and the shells. And his first and immediate thought was that there would be no more penetrations of the screen and human lives were saved. He had outrun the chaos and covered his own mistake in getting damn near on top of the enemy installation trying to find it.

And his second thought, hard on the heels of triumph, was that there was too much noise in the world already, too much death to deal with, vastly too much, and he wanted to cry with the relief and the fear of being alive and moving. Good and proper. The base scout found the damn firepoint, tripped a trap and the whole damn airforce had to come pull him out of the fire with a damn million credits worth of shells laid down out there destroying ten billion credits’ worth of somebody else’s.

Congratulations, deFranco.

A shiver took him. He turned his back to the sight, cued his locator on, and began to walk, slowly, slowly, one foot in front of the other, and if he had not rested now and again, setting the limbs on his armor on lock, he would have fallen down. As it was he walked with his mouth open and his ears full of the harsh sound of his own breathing. He walked, lost and disoriented, till his unit picked up his locator signal and beaconed in the Lost Boy they never hoped to get back.

“You did us great damage then,” says the elf. “It was the last effort we could make and we knew you would take out our last weapons. We knew that you would do it quickly and that then you would stop. We had learned to trust your habits even if we didn’t understand them. When the shelling came, towers fell; and there were over a thousand of us dead in the city.”

“And you keep coming.”

“We will. Until it’s over or until we’re dead.”

DeFranco stares at the elf a moment. The room is a small and sterile place, showing no touches of habitation, but all those small signs of humanity—a quiet bedroom, done in yellow and green pastels. A table. Two chairs. An unused bed. They have faced each other over this table for hours. They have stopped talking theory and begun thinking only of the recent past. And deFranco finds himself lost in elvish thinking again. It never quite makes sense. The assumptions between the lines are not human assumptions, though the elf’s command of the language is quite thorough.

At last, defeated by logicless logic: “I went back to my base,” says deFranco. “I called down the fire; but I just knew the shelling had stopped. We were alive. That was all we knew. Nothing personal.”

There was a bath and there was a meal and a little extra ration of whiskey. HQ doled the whiskey out as special privilege and sanity-saver and the scarcity of it made the posts hoard it and ration it with down-to-the-gram precision. And he drank his three days’ ration and his bonus drink one after the other when he had scrubbed his rig down and taken a long, long bath beneath the pipe. He took his three days’ whiskey all at once because three days out was what he was recovering from, and he sat in his corner in his shorts, the regs going about their business, all of them recognizing a shaken man on a serious drunk and none of them rude or crazy enough to bother him now, not with congratulations for surviving, not with offers of bed, not with a stray glance. The regs were not in his command, he was not strictly anywhere in the chain of command they belonged to, being special ops and assigned there for the reg CO to use when he had to. He was 2nd Lt. John R. deFranco if anyone bothered and no one did hereabouts, in the bunkers. He was special ops and his orders presently came from the senior trooper captain who was the acting CO all along this section of the line, the major having got hisself lately dead, themselves waiting on a replacement, thank you, sir and ma’am; while higher brass kept themselves cool and dry and safe behind the shields on the ground a thousand miles away and up in orbit. And John deFranco, special op and walking target, kept his silver world-and-moon pin and his blue beret and his field-browns all tucked up and out of the damp in his mold-proof plastic kit at the end of his bunk. The rig was his working uniform, the damned, cursed rig that found a new spot to rub raw every time he realigned it. And he sat now in his shorts and drank the first glass quickly, the next and the next and the next in slow sips, and blinked sometimes when he remembered to.

The regs, male and female, moved about the underground barracks in their shorts and their T’s like khaki ghosts whose gender meant nothing to him or generally to each other. When bunks got double-filled it was friendship or boredom or outright desperation; all their talk was rough and getting rougher, and their eyes when real pinned-down-for-days boredom set in were hell, because they had been out here and down here on this world for thirty-seven months by the tally on bunker 43’s main entry wall; while the elves were still holding, still digging in, and still dying at unreasonable rates without surrender.

“Get prisoners,” HQ said in its blithe simplicity; but prisoners suicided. Elves checked out just by wanting to die.

“Establish a contact,” HQ said. “Talk at them—” meaning by any inventive means they could; but they had failed at that for years in space and they expected no better luck onworld. Talking to an elf meant coming into range with either drones or live bodies. Elves cheerfully shot at any target they could get. Elves had shot at the first human ship they had met twenty years ago and they had killed fifteen hundred men, women, and children at Corby Point for reasons no one ever understood. They kept on shooting at human ships in sporadic incidents that built to a crisis. Then humanity—all three humanities, Union and Alliance and remote, sullen Earth—had decided there was no restraint possible with a species that persistently attacked modern human ships on sight, with equipage centuries less advanced—Do we have to wait, Earth’s consensus was, till they do get their hands on the advanced stuff? Till they hit a world? Earth worried about such things obsessively, convinced of its paramount worldbound holiness and importance in the universe. The cradle of humankind. Union worried about other things—like breakdown of order, like its colonies slipping loose while it was busy: Union pushed for speed, Earth wanted to go back to its own convolute affairs, and Alliance wanted the territory, preferring to make haste slowly and not create permanent problems for itself on its flank. There were rumors of other things too, like Alliance picking up signals out this direction, of something other than elves. Real reason to worry. It was at least sure that the war was being pushed and pressed and shoved; and the elves shoved back. Elves died and died, their ships being no match for human-make once humans took after them in earnest and interdicted the jump-points that let them near human space. But elves never surrendered and never quit trying.

“Now what do we do?” the joint command asked themselves collectively and figuratively—because they were dealing out bloody, unpalatable slaughter against a doggedly determined and underequipped enemy, and Union and Earth wanted a quick solution. But Union as usual took the Long View: and on this single point there was consensus. “If we take out every ship they put out here and they retreat, how long does it take before they come back at us with more advanced armaments? We’re dealing with lunatics.”

“Get through to them,” the word went out from HQ. “Take them out of our space and carry the war home to them. We’ve got to make the impression on them now—or take options no one wants later.”

Twenty years ago. Underestimating the tenacity of the elves. Removed from the shipping lanes and confined to a single world, the war had sunk away to a local difficulty; Alliance still put money and troops into it; Union still cooperated in a certain measure. Earth sent adventurers and enlistees that often were crazier than the elves: Base culled those in a hurry. So for seventeen years the matter boiled on and on and elves went on dying and dying in their few and ill-equipped ships, until the joint command decided on a rougher course; quickly took out the elves’ pathetic little space station, dropped troops onto the elvish world, and fenced human bases about with antimissile screens to fight a limited and on-world war—while elvish weaponry slowly got more basic and more primitive and the troops drank their little measures of imported whiskey and went slowly crazy.

And humans closely tied to the elvish war adapted, in humanity’s own lunatic way. Well behind the lines that had come to exist on the elves’ own planet, humans settled in and built permanent structures and scientists came to study the elves and the threatened flora and fauna of a beautiful and earthlike world, while some elvish centers ignored the war, and the bombing went on and on in an inextricable mess, because neither elves nor humans knew how to quit, or knew the enemy enough to know how to disengage. Or figure out what the other wanted. And the war could go on and on—since presumably the computers and the records in those population centers still had the design of starships in them. And no enemy which had taken what the elves had taken by now was ever going to forget.

There were no negotiations. Once, just once, humans had tried to approach one of the few neutral districts to negotiate and it simply and instantly joined the war. So after all the study and all the effort, humans lived on the elves’ world and had no idea what to call them or what the world’s real name was, because the damn elves had blown their own space station at the last and methodically destroyed every record the way they destroyed every hamlet before its fall and burned every record and every artifact. They died and they died and they died and sometimes (but seldom nowadays) they took humans with them, like the time when they were still in space and hit the base at Ticon with ¾-cee rocks and left nothing but dust. Thirty thousand dead and not a way in hell to find the pieces.

That was the incident after which the joint command decided to take the elves out of space. And nowadays humanity invested cities they never planned to take and they tore up roads and took out all the elves’ planes, and they tore up agriculture with non-nuclear bombs and shells, trying not to ruin the world beyond recovery, hoping eventually to wear the elves down. But the elves retaliated with gas and chemicals which humans had refrained from using. Humans interdicted supply and still the elves managed to come up with the wherewithal to strike through their base defense here as if supply were endless and they not starving and the world still green and undamaged.

DeFranco drank and drank with measured slowness, watching regs go to and fro in the slow dance of their own business. They were good, this Delta Company of the Eighth. They did faithfully what regs were supposed to do in this war, which was to hold a base and keep roads secure that humans used, and to build landing zones for supply and sometimes to go out and get killed inching humanity’s way toward some goal the joint command understood and which from here looked only like some other damn shell-pocked hill. DeFranco’s job was to locate such hills. And to find a prisoner to take (standing orders) and to figure out the enemy if he could. Mostly just to find hills. And sometimes to get his company into taking one. And right now he was no more damn good, because they had gotten as close to this nameless city as there were hills and vantages to make it profitable, and after that they went onto the flat and did what?

Take the place inch by inch, street by street and discover every damn elf they met had suicided?

The elves would do it on them, so in the villages south of here they had saved the elves the bother, and got nothing for their trouble but endless, measured carnage, and smoothskinned corpses that drew the small vermin and the huge winged birds—(they’ve been careful with their ecology, the Science Bureau reckoned, in their endless reports, in some fool’s paper on large winged creatures’ chances of survival if a dominant species were not very careful of them—)

(—or the damn birds are bloody-minded mean and tougher than the elves, deFranco mused in his alcoholic fog, knowing that nothing was, in all space and creation, more bloody-minded than the elves.)

He had seen a young elf child holding another, both stone dead, baby locked in baby’s arms: they love, dammit, they love—And he had wept while he staggered away from the ruins of a little elvish town, seeing more and more such sights—because the elves had touched off bombs in their own town center, and turned it into a firestorm.

But the two babies had been lying there unburned and no one wanted to touch them or to look at them. Finally the birds came. And the regs shot at the birds until the CO stopped it, because it was a waste: it was killing a non-combatant life form and that (O God!) was against the rules. Most of all the CO stopped it because it was a fraying of human edges, because the birds always were there and the birds were the winners, every time. And the damn birds like the damn elves came again and again, no matter that shots blew them to puffs of feathers. Stubborn, like the elves. Crazy as everything else on the planet, human and elf. It was catching. DeFranco nursed the last whiskey in the last glass, nursed it with hands going so numb he had to struggle to stay awake. He was a quiet drunk, never untidy. He neatly drank the last and fell over sideways limp as a corpse, and, tender mercy to a hill-finding branch of the service the hill-taking and road-building regs regarded as a sometime natural enemy—one of the women came and got the glass from his numbed fingers and pulled a blanket over him. They were still human here. They tried to be.

“There was nothing more to be done,” says the elf. “That was why. We knew that you were coming closer, and that our time was limited.” His long white fingers touch the table-surface, the white, plastic table in the ordinary little bedroom. “We died in great numbers, deFranco, and it was cruel that you showed us only slowly what you could do.”

“We could have taken you out from the first. You knew that.” DeFranco’s voice holds an edge of frustration. Of anguish. “Elf, couldn’t you ever understand that?”

“You always gave us hope we could win. And so we fought, and so we still fight. Until the peace. My friend.”

“Franc, Franc—”—it was a fierce low voice, and deFranco came out of it, in the dark, with his heart doubletiming and the instant realization it was Dibs talking to him in that low tone and wanting him out of that blanket, which meant wire-runners or worse, a night attack. But Dibs grabbed his arms to hold him still before he could flail about. “Franc, we got a move out there, Jake and Cat’s headed out down the tunnel, the lieutenant’s gone to M1 but M1’s on the line, they want you out there, they want a spotter up on hill 24 doublequick.

“Uh.” DeFranco rubbed his eyes. “Uh.” Sitting upright was brutal. Standing was worse. He staggered two steps and caught the main shell of his armor off the rack, number 12 suit, the lousy stinking armor that always smelled of human or mud or the purge in the ducts and the awful sick-sweet cleaner they wiped it out with when they hung it up. He held the plastron against his body and Dibs started with the clips in the dim light of the single 5-watt they kept going to find the latrine at night—“Damn, damn, I gotta—” He eluded Dibs and got to the toilet, and by now the whole place was astir with shadow-figures like a scene out of a gold-lighted hell. He swigged the stinging mouthwash they had on the shelf by the toilet and did his business while Dibs caught him up from behind and finished the hooks on his left side. “Damn, get him going,” the sergeant said, and: “Trying,” Dibs said, as others hauled deFranco around and began hooking him up like a baby into his clothes, one piece and the other, the boots, leg and groin-pieces, the sleeves, the gloves, the belly clamp and the backpack and the power-on—his joints ached. He stood there swaying to one and another tug on his body and took the helmet into his hands when Dibs handed it to him.

“Go, go,” the sergeant said, who had no more power to give a special op any specific orders than he could fly; but HQ was in a stew, they needed his talents out there, and deFranco let the regs shove him all they liked: it was his accommodation with these regs when there was no peace anywhere else in the world. And once a dozen of these same regs had come out into the heat after him, which he never quite forgot. So he let them hook his weapons-kit on, then ducked his head down and put the damned helmet on and gave it the locking half-twist as he headed away from the safe light of the barracks pit into the long tunnel, splashing along the low spots on the plastic grid that kept heavy armored feet from sinking in the mud.

“Code: Nightsight,” he told the suit aloud, all wobbly and shivery from too little sleep; and it read his hoarse voice patterns and gave him a filmy image of the tunnel in front of him. “Code: ID,” he told it, and it started telling the two troopers somewhere up the tunnel that he was there, and on his way. He got readout back as Cat acknowledged, “1a-6yg-p30/30,” the green numbers ghosted up in his visor, telling him Jake and Cat had elves and they had them quasi-solid in the distant-sensors which would have been tripped downland and they themselves were staying where they were and taking no chances on betraying the location of the tunnel. He cut the ID and Cat and Jake cut off too.

They’ve got to us, deFranco thought. The damned elves got through our screen and now they’ve pushed through oil foot, and it’s going to be hell to pay—

Back behind him the rest of the troops would be suiting up and making a more leisurely prep for a hard night to come. The elves rarely got as far as human bunkers. They tried. They were, at close range and with hand-weapons, deadly. The dying was not all on the elves’ side if they got to you.

A cold sweat had broken out under the suit. His head ached with a vengeance and the suit weighed on his knees and on his back when he bent and it stank with disinfectant that smelled like some damn tree from some damn forest on the world that had spawned every human born, he knew that, but it failed as perfume and failed at masking the stink of terror and of the tunnels in the cold wet breaths the suit took in when it was not on self-seal.

He knew nothing about Earth, only dimly remembered Pell, which had trained him and shipped him here by stages to a world no one bothered to give a name. Elfland, when High HQ was being whimsical. Neverneverland, the regs called it after some old fairy tale, because from it a soldier never never came home again. They had a song with as many verses as there were bitches of the things a soldier in Elfland never found.

Where’s my discharge from this war?

Why, it’s neverneverwhere, my friend.

Well, when’s the next ship off this world?

Why, its neverneverwhen, my friend.

And times what we’ve got most of,

And time is what we spend,

And time is what we’ve got to do

In Nevereverland.

He hummed this to himself, in a voice jolted and crazed by the exertion. He wanted to cry like a baby. He wanted someone to curse for the hour and his interrupted rest. Most of all he wanted a few days of quiet on this front, just a few days to put his nerves back together again and let his head stop aching . . .

. . . Run and run and run, in a suit that keeps you from the gas and most of the shells the elves can throw—except for a few. Except for the joints and the visor, because the elves have been working for twenty years studying how to kill you. And air runs out and filters fail and every access you have to Elfland is a way for the elves to get at you. Like the tunnel openings, like the airvents, like the power plant that keeps the whole base and strung-out tunnel systems functioning.

Troopers scatter to defend these points, and you run and run, belatedly questioning why troopers want a special op at a particular point, where the tunnel most nearly approaches the elves on their plain.

Why me, why here—because, fool, HQ wants close-up reconnaissance, which was what they wanted the last time they sent you out in the dark beyond the safe points—twice, now, and they expect you to go out and do it again because the elves missed you last time. Damn them all. (With the thought that they will use you till the bone breaks and the flesh refuses. And then a two-week rest and out to the lines again.)

They give you a medical as far as the field hospital; and there they give you vitamins, two shots of antibiotic, a bottle of pills and send you out again. “We got worse,” the meds say then.

There always are worse. Till you’re dead.

DeFranco looks at the elf across the table in the small room and remembers how it was, the smell of the tunnels, the taste of fear.

II

So what’re the gals like on this world?

Why, you nevernevermind, my friend.

Well, what’re the guys like on this world?

Well, you neverneverask, my friend.

“They sent me out there.” deFranco says to the elf, and the elf—a human might have nodded but elves have no such habit—stares gravely as they sit opposite each other, hands on the table.

“You always say ‘they,’ ” says the elf. “We say ‘we’ decided. But you do things differently,” Maybe it is we,” deFranco says. “Maybe it is, at the bottom of things. We. Sometimes it doesn’t look that way.”

I think even now you don’t understand why we do what we do. I don’t really understand why you came here or why you listen to me, or why you stay now—But we won’t understand. I don’t think we two will. Others maybe. You want what I want. That’s what I trust most.”

“You believe it’ll work?”

“For us, yes. For elves. Absolutely. Even if its a lie it will work.”

“But if it’s not a lie—”

“Can you make it true? You don’t believe. That—I have to find words for this—but I don’t understand that either. How you feel. What you do.” The elf reaches across the table and slim white hands with overtint like oil on water catch at brown, matte-skinned fingers whose nails (the elf has none) are broken and rough. “It was no choice to you. It never was even a choice to you, to destroy us to the heart and the center. Perhaps it wasn’t to stay. I have a deep feeling toward you, deFranco. I had this feeling toward you from when I saw you first; I knew that you were what I had come to find, but whether you were the helping or the damning force I didn’t know then, I only knew that what you did when you saw us was what humans had always done to us. And I believed you would show me why.”

DeFranco moved and sat still a while by turns, in the dark, in the stink and the strictures of his rig; while somewhere two ridges away there were two nervous regs encamped in the entry to the tunnel, sweltering in their own hardsuits and not running their own pumps and fans any more than he was running his—because elvish hearing was legendary, the rigs made noise, and it was hard enough to move in one of the bastards without making a racket: someone in HQ suspected elves could pick up the running noises. Or had other senses.

But without those fans and pumps the below-the-neck part of the suit had no cooling and got warm even in the night. And the gloves and the helmets had to stay on constantly when anyone was outside, it was the rule: no elf ever got a look at a live human, except at places like the Eighth’s Gamma Company. Perhaps not there either. Elves were generally thorough. DeFranco had the kneejoints on lock at the moment, which let him have a solid prop to lean his weary knees and backside against. He leaned there easing the shivers and the quakes out of his lately-wakened and sleep-deprived limbs before he rattled in his armor and alerted a whole hillside full of elves. It was not a well-shielded position he had taken: it had little cover except the hill itself, and these hills had few enough trees that the fires and the shells had spared. But green did struggle up amid the soot and bushes grew on the line down on valley level that had been an elvish road three years ago. His nightsight scanned the brush in shadow-images. Something touched the sensors as he rested there on watch, a curious whisper of a sound, and an amber readout ghosted up into his visor, dots rippling off in sequence in the direction the pickup came from. It was not the wind: the internal computer zeroed out the white sound of wind and suit-noise. It was anomalies it brought through and amplified; and what it amplified now had the curious regular pulse of engine-sound.

DeFranco ordered the lock off his limbs, slid lower on the hill, and moved on toward one with better vantage of the road as it came up from the west—carefully, pausing at irregular intervals as he worked round to get into position to spot that direction. He still had his locator output off. So did everyone else back at the base. HQ had no idea now what sophistication the elves had gained at eavesdropping and homing in on the locators, and how much they could pick up with locators of their own. It was only sure that while some elvish armaments had gotten more primitive and patchwork, their computer tech had nothing at all wrong with it. DeFranco settled again on a new hillside and listened, wishing he could scratch a dozen maddening itches, and wishing he were safe somewhere else: the whole thing had a disaster-feeling about it from the start, the elves doing something they had never done. He could only think about dead Gamma Company and what might have happened to them before the elves got to them and gassed the bunker and fought their way into it past the few that had almost gotten into their rigs in time—

Had the special op been out there watching too? Had the one at bunker 35 made a wrong choice and had it all started this way the night they died?

The engine-sound was definite. DeFranco edged higher up the new hill and got down flat, belly down on the ridge. He thumbed the magnification plate into the visor and got the handheld camera’s snake-head optics over the ridge on the theory it was a smaller target and a preferable target than himself, with far better nightsight.

The filmy nightsight image came back of the road, while the sound persisted. It was distant, his ears and the readout advised him, distant yet, racing the first red edge of a murky dawn that showed far off across the plain and threatened daylight out here.

He still sent no transmission. The orders were stringent. The base either had to remain ignorant that there was a vehicle coming up the road or he had to go back personally to report it; and lose track of whatever-it-was out here just when it was getting near enough to do damage. Damn the lack of specials to team with out here in the hot spots, and damn the lead-footed regs; he had to go it alone, decide things alone, hoping Jake and Cat did the right thing in their spot and hoping the other regs stayed put. And he hated it.

He edged off this hill, keeping it between him and the ruined, shell-pocked road, and began to move to still a third point of vantage, stalking as silently as any man in armor could manage. And fervently he hoped that the engine-sound was not a decoy and that nothing was getting behind him. The elves were deceptive as well and they were canny enemies with extraordinary hearing. He hoped now that the engine-sound had deafened them—but no elf was really fool enough to be coming up the road like this, it was a decoy, it had to be, there was nothing else it could be; and he was going to fall into it nose-down if he was not careful. He settled belly-down on the next slope and got the camera-snake over the top, froze the suit-joints and lay inert in that overheated ceramic shell, breathing hard through a throat abused by oxygen and whiskey, blinking against a hangover headache to end all headaches that the close focus of the visor readout only made worse. His nose itched. A place on his scalp itched behind his ear. He stopped cataloging the places he itched because it was driving him crazy. Instead he blinked and rolled his eyes, calling up readout on the passive systems, and concentrated on that. Blink. Blink-blink. Numbers jumped. The computer had come up with a range as it got passive echo off some hill and checked it against the local topology programmed into its memory. Damn!

Close. The computer handed him the velocity. 40 KPH with the 4 and the 0 wobbling back and forth into the 30’s. DeFranco held his breath and checked his hand launcher, loading a set of armor-piercing rounds in, quiet, quiet as a man could move. The clamp went down as softly as long practice could lower it.

And at last a ridiculous open vehicle came jouncing and whining its way around potholes and shell craters and generally making a noisy and erratic progress. It was in a considerable hurry despite the potholes, and there were elves in it, four of them, all pale in their robes and one of them with the cold glitter of metal about his/her? Person, the one to the right of the driver. The car bounced and wove and zigged and zagged up the hilly road with no slackening of speed, inviting a shot for all it was worth.

Decoy?

Suicide?

They were crazy as elves could be, and that was completely. They were headed straight for the hidden bunker, and it was possible they had gas or a bomb in that car or that they just planned to get themselves shot in a straightforward way, whatever they had in mind, but they were going right where they could do the most damage.

DeFranco unlocked his ceramic limbs, which sagged under his weight until he was down on his belly; and he slowly brought his rifle up, and inched his way up on his belly so it was his vulnerable head over the ridge this time. He shook and he shivered and he reckoned there might be a crater where he was in fair short order if they had a launcher in that car and he gave them time to get it set his way.

But pushing and probing at elves was part of his job. And these were decidedly anomalous. He put a shot in front of the car and half expected elvish suicides on the spot. The car swerved and jolted into a pothole as the shell hit. It careened to a stop; and he held himself where he was, his heart pounding away and himself not sure why he had put the shot in front and not into the middle of them like a sensible man in spite of HQ’s orders. But the elves recovered from their careening and the car was stopped; and instead of blowing themselves up immediately or going for a launcher of their own, one of the elves bailed out over the side while the helmet-sensor picked up the attempted motor-start. Cough-whine. The car lurched. The elvish driver made a wild turn, but the one who had gotten out just stood there—
stood, staring up, and lifted his hands together.

DeFranco lay on his hill; and the elves who had gotten the car started swerved out of the pothole it had stuck itself in and lurched off in escape, not suicide—while the one elf in the robe with the metal border just stood there, the first live prisoner anyone had ever taken, staring up at him, self-offered.

“You damn well stand still,” he yelled down at the elf on outside com, and thought of the gas and the chemicals and thought that if elves had come up with a disease that also got to humans here was a way of delivering it that was cussed enough and crazy enough for them.

“Human,” a shrill voice called up to him. “Human!”

DeFranco was for the moment paralyzed. An elf knew what to call them: an elf talked. An elf stood there staring up at his hill in the beginnings of dawn and all of a sudden nothing was going the way it ever had between elves and humankind.

At least, if it had happened before, no human had ever lived to tell about it.

“Human!” the same voice called—uu-mann, as best high elvish voices could manage it. The elf was not suiciding. The elf showed no sign of wanting to do that; and deFranco lay and shivered in his armor and felt a damnable urge to wipe his nose which he could not reach or to get up and run for his life, which was a fool’s act. Worse, his bladder suddenly told him it was full. Urgently. Taking his mind down to a ridiculous small matter in the midst of trying to get home alive. The dawn was coming up the way it did across the plain, light spreading like a flood, so fast in the bizarre angle of the land here that it ran like water on the surface of the plain. And the elf stood there while the light of dawn grew more, showing the elf more clearly than deFranco had ever seen one of the enemy alive, beautiful the way elves were, not in a human way, looking, in its robes, like some cross between man and something spindly and human-skinned and insectoid. The up-tilted ears never stopped moving, but the average of their direction was toward him. Nervous-like.

What does he want, why does he stand there, why did they throw him out? A target? A distraction?

Elvish cussedness. DeFranco waited, and waited, and the sun came up; while somewhere in the tunnels there would be troopers wondering and standing by their weapons, ready to go on self-seal against gas or whatever these lunatics had brought.

There was light enough now to make out the red of the robes that fluttered in the breeze. And light enough to see the elf’s hands, which looked—which looked, crazily enough, to be tied together.

The dawn came on. Water became an obsessive thought. DeFranco was thirsty from the whiskey and agonized between the desire for a drink from the tube near his mouth or the fear one more drop of water in his system would make it impossible to ignore his bladder; and he thought about it and thought about it, because it was a long wait and a long walk back, and relieving himself outside the suit was a bitch on the one hand and on the inside was damnable discomfort. But it did get worse. And while life and death tottered back and forth and his fingers clutched the launcher and he faced an elf who was surely up to something, that small decision was all he could think of clearly—it was easier to think of than what wanted thinking out, like what to do and whether to shoot the elf outright, counter to every instruction and every order HQ had given, because he wanted to get out of this place.

But he did not—and finally he solved both problems: took his drink, laid the gun down on the ridge like it was still in his hands, performed the necessary maneuver to relieve himself outside the suit as he stayed as flat as he could. Then he put himself back together, collected his gun and lurched up to his feet with small whines of the assisting joint-locks.

The elf never moved in all of this, and deFranco motioned with the gun. “Get up here . . .”—not expecting the elf to understand either the motion or the shout. But the elf came, slowly, as if the hill was all his (it had been once) and he owned it. The elf stopped still on the slant, at a speaking distance, no more, and stood there with his hands tied ( his, deFranco decided by the height of him). The elf’s white skin all but glowed in the early dawn, the bare skin of the face and arms against the dark, metal-edged red of his robe; and the large eyes were set on him and the ears twitched and quivered with small pulses.

“I am your prisoner,” the elf said, plain as any human; and deFranco stood there with his heart hammering away at his ribs.

“Why?” deFranco asked. He was mad, he was quite mad and somewhere he had fallen asleep on the hillside, or elvish gas had gotten to him through the open vents—he was a fool to have gone on open circulation; and he was dying back there somewhere and not talking at all. The elf lifted his bound hands. “I came here to find you.”

It was not a perfect accent. It was what an elvish mouth could come up with. It had music in it. And deFranco stood and stared and finally motioned with the gun up the hill. “Move,” he said, “walk.”

Without demur his prisoner began to do that, in the direction he had indicated.

“What did I do that humans always do?” deFranco asks the elf, and the grave sea-colored eyes flicker with changes. Amusement, perhaps. Or distress.

“You fired at us,” says the elf in his soft, songlike voice. “And then you stopped and didn’t kill me.”

“It was a warning.”

“To stop. So simple.”

“God, what else do you think?”

The elf’s eyes flicker again. There is gold in their depths, and gray. And his ears flick nervously.

“DeFranco, deFranco, you still don’t know why we fight. And I don’t truly know what you meant. Are you telling me the truth?”

“We never wanted to fight. It was a warning. Even animals, for God’s sake—understand a warning shot.”

The elf blinks. (And someone in another room stirs in a chair and curses his own blindness. Aggression and the birds. Different tropisms. All the way through the ecostructure.) The elf spreads his hands. “I don’t know what you mean. I never know. What can we know?

That you were there for the same reason I was? Were you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know that. We never wanted a war. Do you understand that, at least?”

“You wanted us to stop. So we told you the same. We sent our ships to hold those places which were ours. And you kept coming to them.”

“They were ours.”

“Now they are.” The elf’s face is grave and still. “DeFranco, a mistake was made. A ship of ours fired on yours and this was a mistake. Perhaps it was me who fired. What’s in this elf’s mind?

Fear when a ship will not go away? What’s in this human’s mind? Fear when we don’t go away?

It was a stupid thing. It was a mistake. It was our region. Our—”

“Territory. You think you owned the place.”

“We were in it. We were there and this ship came. Say that I wasn’t there and I heard how it happened. This was a frightened elf who made a stupid mistake. This elf was surprised by this ship and he didn’t want to run and give up this jump-point. It was ours. You were in it. We wanted you to go. And you stayed.”

“So you blew up an unarmed ship.”

“Yes. I did it. I destroyed all the others. You destroyed ours. Our space station. You killed thousands of us. I killed thousands of you.”

“Not me and not you, elf. That’s twenty years, dammit, and you weren’t there and I wasn’t there—”

“I did it. I say I did. And you killed thousands of us.”

“We weren’t coming to make a war. We were coming to straighten it out. Do you understand that?”

“We weren’t yet willing. Now things are different.”

“For God’s sake—why did you let so many die?”

“You never gave us defeat enough. You were cruel, deFranco. Not to let us know we couldn’t win—that was very cruel. It was very subtle. Even now I’m afraid of your cruelty.”

“Don’t you understand yet?”

“What do I understand? That you’ve died in thousands. That you make long war. I thought you would kill me on the hill, on the road, and when you called me I had both hope and fear. Hope that you would take me to higher authority. Fear—well, I am bone and nerve, deFranco. And I never knew whether you would be cruel.”

The elf walked and walked. He might have been on holiday, his hands tied in front of him, his red robes a-glitter with their gold borders in the dawn. He never tired. He carried no weight of armor; and deFranco went on self-seal and spoke through the mike when he had to give the elf directions.

Germ warfare?

Maybe the elf had a bomb in his gut?

But it began to settle into deFranco that he had done it, he had done it, after years of trying he had himself a live and willing prisoner, and his lower gut was queasy with outright panic and his knees felt like mush. What’s he up to, what’s he doing, why’s he walk like that—Damn!

They’ll shoot him on sight, somebody could see him first and shoot him and I can’t break silence—maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do, maybe that’s how they overran Gamma Company—

But a prisoner, a prisoner speaking human language—

“Where’d you learn,” he asked the elf, “where’d you learn to talk human?” The elf never turned, never stopped walking. “A prisoner.”

“Who? Still alive?”

“No.”

No. Slender and graceful as a reed and burning as a fire and white as beach sand. No. Placidly. Rage rose in deFranco, a blinding urge to put his rifle butt in that straight spine, to muddy and bloody the bastard and make him as dirty and as hurting as himself; but the professional rose up in him too, and the burned hillsides went on and on as they climbed and they walked, the elf just in front of him.

Until they were close to the tunnels and in imminent danger of a human misunderstanding. He turned his ID and locator on; but they would pick up the elf on his sensors too, and that was no good. “It’s deFranco,” he said over the com. “I got a prisoner. Get HQ and get me a transport.”

Silence from the other end. He cut off the output, figuring they had it by now. “Stop,” he said to the elf on outside audio. And he stood and waited until two suited troopers showed up, walking carefully down the hillside from a direction that did not lead to any tunnel opening.

“Damn,” came Cat’s female voice over his pickup. “Da-amn.” In a tone of wonder. And deFranco at first thought it was admiration of him and what he had done, and then he knew with some disgust it was wonder at the elf, it was a human woman looking at the prettiest, cleanest thing she had seen in three long years, icy, fastidious Cat, who was picky what she slept with. And maybe her partner Jake picked it up, because: “Huh,” he said in quite a different tone, but quiet, quiet, the way the elf looked at their faceless faces, as if he still owned the whole world and meant to take it back.

“It’s Franc,” Jake said then into the com, directed at the base. “And he’s right, he’s got a live one. Damn, you should see this bastard.”

III

So where’s the generals in this war?

Why, they’re neverneverhere, my friend.

Well, what’ll we do until they come?

Well, you neverneverask, my friend.

“I was afraid too,” deFranco says. “I thought you might have a bomb or something. We were afraid you’d suicide if anyone touched you. That was why we kept you sitting all that time outside.”

“Ah,” says the elf with a delicate move of his hands. “Ah. I thought it was to make me angry. Like all the rest you did. But you sat with me. And this was hopeful. I was thirsty; I hoped for a drink. That was mostly what I thought about.”

“We think too much—elves and humans. We both think too much. I’d have given you a drink of water, for God’s sake. I guess no one even thought.”

“I wouldn’t have taken it.”

“Dammit, why?”

“Unless you drank with me. Unless you shared what you had. Do you see?”

“Fear of poison?”

“No.”

“You mean just my giving it.”

“Sharing it. Yes.”

“Is pride so much?”

Again the elf touches deFranco’s hand as it rests on the table, a nervous, delicate gesture. The elf’s ears twitch and collapse and lift again, trembling. “We always go off course here. I still fail to understand why you fight.”

“Dammit, I don’t understand why you can’t understand why a man’d give you a drink of water. Not to hurt you. Not to prove anything. For the love of God, mercy, you ever learn that word?

Being decent, so’s everything decent doesn’t go to hell and we don’t act like damn animals!” The elf stares long and soberly. His small mouth has few expressions. It forms its words carefully.

“Is this why you pushed us so long? To show us your control?”

“No, dammit, to hang onto it! So we can find a place to stop this bloody war. It’s all we ever wanted.”

“Then why did you start?”

“Not to have you push us!”

A blink of sea-colored eyes. “Now, now, we’re understanding. We’re like each other.”

“But you won’t stop, dammit, you wouldn’t stop, you haven’t stopped yet! People are still dying out there on the front, throwing themselves away without a thing to win. Nothing. That’s not like us.”

“In starting war we’re alike. But not in ending it. You take years. Quickly we show what we can do. Then both sides know. So we make peace. You showed us long cruelty. And we wouldn’t give ourselves up to you. What could we expect?”

“Is it that easy?” DeFranco begins to shiver, clenches his hands together on the tabletop and leans there, arms folded. “You’re crazy, elf.”

“Angan. My personal name is Angan.”

“A hundred damn scientists out there trying to figure out how you work and it’s that damn simple?”

“I don’t think so. I think we maybe went off course again. But we came close. We at least see there was a mistake. That’s the important thing. That’s why I came.” DeFranco looked desperately at his watch, at the minutes ticking away. He covers the face of it with his hand and looks up. His brown eyes show anguish. “The colonel said I’d have three hours. It’s going. It’s going too fast.”

“Yes. And we still haven’t found out why. I don’t think we ever will. Only you share with me now, deFranco. Here. In our little time.”

The elf sat, just sat quietly with his hands still tied, on the open hillside, because the acting CO had sent word no elf was setting foot inside the bunker system and no one was laying hands on him to search him.

But the troopers came out one by one in the long afternoon and had their look at him—one after another of them took the trouble to put on the faceless, uncomfortable armor just to come out and stand and stare at what they had been fighting for all these years.

“Damn,” was what most of them said, in private, on the com, their suits to his suit; “damn,” or variants on that theme.

“We got that transport coming in,” the reg lieutenant said when she came out and brought him his kit. Then, unlike herself: “Good job, Franc.”

“Thanks,” deFranco said, claiming nothing. And he sat calmly, beside his prisoner, on the barren, shell-pocked hill by a dead charcoal tree.

Don’t shake him, word had come from the CO. Keep him real happy—don’t change the situation and don’t threaten him and don’t touch him.

For fear of spontaneous suicide.

So no one came to lay official claim to the elf either, not even the captain came. But the word had gone out to Base and to HQ and up, deFranco did not doubt, to orbiting ships, because it was the best news a frontline post had had to report since the war started. Maybe it was dreams of leaving Elfland that brought the regs out here, on pilgrimage to see this wonder. And the lieutenant went away when she had stared at him so long.

Hope. DeFranco turned that over and over in his mind and probed at it like a tongue into a sore tooth. Promotion out of the field. No more mud. No more runs like yesterday. No more, no more, no more, the man who broke the Elfland war and cracked the elves and brought in the key—

—to let it all end. For good. Winning. Maybe, maybe—

He looked at the elf who sat there with his back straight and his eyes wandering to this and that, to the movement of wind in a forlorn last bit of grass, the drift of a cloud in Elfland’s blue sky, the horizons and the dead trees.

“You got a name?” He was careful asking anything. But the elf had talked before. The elf looked at him. “Saitas,” he said.

“Saitas. Mine’s deFranco.”

The elf blinked. There was no fear in his face. They might have been sitting in the bunker passing the time of day together.

“Why’d they send you?” DeFranco grew bolder.

“I asked to come.”

“Why?”

“To stop the war.”

Inside his armor deFranco shivered. He blinked and he took a drink from the tube inside the helmet and he tried to think about something else, but the elf sat there staring blandly at him, with his hands tied, resting placidly in his lap. “How?” deFranco asked, “how will you stop the war?” But the elf said nothing and deFranco knew he had gone further with that question than HQ was going to like, not wanting their subject told anything about human wants and intentions before they had a chance to study the matter and study the elf and hold their conferences.

“They came,” says deFranco in that small room, “to know what you looked like.”

“You never let us see your faces,” says the elf.

“You never let us see yours.”

“You knew everything. Far more than we. You knew our world. We had no idea of yours.”

“Pride again.”

“Don’t you know how hard it was to let you lay hands on me? That was the worst thing. You did it again. Like the gunfire. You touch with violence and then expect quiet. But I let this happen. It was what I came to do. And when you spoke to the others for me, that gave me hope.” In time the transport came skimming in low over the hills, and deFranco got to his feet to wave it in. The elf stood up too, graceful and still placid. And waited while the transport sat down and the blades stopped beating.

“Get in,” deFranco said then, picking up his scant baggage, putting the gun on safety. The elf quietly bowed his head and followed instructions, going where he was told. DeFranco never laid a hand on him, until inside, when they had climbed into the dark belly of the transport and guards were waiting there—“Keep your damn guns down,” deFranco said on outside com, because they were light-armed and helmetless. “What are you going to do if he moves, shoot him? Let me handle him. He speaks real good.” And to the elf: “Sit down there. I’m going to put a strap across. Just so you don’t fall.”

The elf sat without objection, and deFranco got a cargo strap and hooked it to the rail on one side and the other, so there was no way the elf was going to stir or use his hands. And he sat down himself as the guards took their places and the transport lifted off and carried them away from the elvish city and the frontline base of the hundreds of such bases in the world. It began to fly high and fast when it got to safe airspace, behind the defense humans had made about themselves.

There was never fear in the elf. Only placidity. His eyes traveled over the inside of the transport, the dark utilitarian hold, the few benches, the cargo nets, the two guards. Learning, deFranco thought, still learning everything there was to learn about his enemies.

“Then I was truly afraid,” says the elf. “I was most afraid that they would want to talk to me and learn from me. And I would have to die then to no good. For nothing.”

“How do you do that?”

“What?”

“Die. Just by wanting to.”

“Wanting is the way. I could stop my heart now. Many things stop the heart. When you stop trying to live, when you stop going ahead—it’s very easy.”

“You mean if you quit trying to live you die. That’s crazy.”

The elf spreads delicate fingers. “Children can’t. Children’s hearts can’t be stopped that way. You have the hearts of children. Without control. But the older you are the easier and easier it is. Until someday it’s easier to stop than to go on. When I learned your language, I learned from a man named Tomas. He couldn’t die. He and I talked—oh, every day. And one day we brought him a woman we took. She called him a damn traitor. That was what she said. Damn traitor. Then Tomas wanted to die and he couldn’t. He told me so. It was the only thing he ever asked of me. Like the water, you see. Because I felt sorry for him I gave him the cup. And to her. Because I had no use for her. But Tomas hated me. He hated me every day. He talked to me because I was all he had to talk to, he would say. Nothing stopped his heart. Until the woman called him traitor. And then his heart stopped, though it went on beating. I only helped. He thanked me. And damned me to hell. And wished me health with his drink.

“Dammit, elf.”

“I tried to ask him what hell was. I think it means being still and trapped. So we fight.” (“He’s very good with words,” someone elsewhere says, leaning over near the monitor. “He’s trying to communicate something, but the words aren’t equivalent. He’s playing on what he does have.”)

“For God’s sake,” says deFranco then, “is that why they fling themselves on the barriers? Is that why they go on dying? Like birds at cage bars?”

The elf flinches. Perhaps it is the image. Perhaps it is a thought. “Fear stops the heart, when fear has nowhere to go. We still have one impulse left. There is still our anger. Everything else has gone. At the last even our children will fight you. So I fight for my children by coming here. I don’t want to talk about Tomas any more. The birds have him. You are what I was looking for.”

“Why?” DeFranco’s voice shakes. “Saitas—Angan—I’m scared as hell.”

“So am I. Think of all the soldiers. Think of things important to you. I think about my home.”

“I think I never had one.—This is crazy. It won’t work.”

“Don’t.” The elf reaches and holds a brown wrist. “Don’t leave me now, deFranco.”

“There’s still fifteen minutes. Quarter of an hour.”

“That’s a very long time . . . here. Shall we shorten it?”

“No,” deFranco says and draws a deep breath. “Let’s use it.” At the base where the on-world authorities and the scientists did their time, there were real buildings, real ground-site buildings, which humans had made. When the transport touched down on a rooftop landing pad, guards took the elf one way and deFranco another. It was debriefing: that he expected. They let him get a shower first with hot water out of real plumbing, in a prefabbed bathroom. And he got into his proper uniform for the first time in half a year, shaved and proper in his blue beret and his brown uniform, fresh and clean and thinking all the while that if a special could get his field promotion it was scented towels every day and soft beds to sleep on and a life expectancy in the decades. He was anxious, because there were ways of snatching credit for a thing and he wanted the credit for this one, wanted it because a body could get killed out there on hillsides where he had been for three years and no desk-sitting officer was going to fail to mention him in the report.

“Sit down,” the specials major said, and took him through it all; and that afternoon they let him tell it to a reg colonel and lieutenant general; and again that afternoon they had him tell it to a tableful of scientists and answer questions and questions and questions until he was hoarse and they forgot to feed him lunch. But he answered on and on until his voice cracked and the science staff took pity on him.

He slept then, in clean sheets in a clean bed and lost touch with the war so that he waked terrified and lost in the middle of the night in the dark and had to get his heart calmed down before he realized he was not crazy and that he really had gotten into a place like this and he really had done what he remembered.

He tucked down babylike into a knot and thought good thoughts all the way back to sleep until a buzzer waked him and told him it was day in this windowless place, and he had an hour to dress again—for more questions, he supposed; and he thought only a little about his elf, his elf, who was handed on to the scientists and the generals and the AlSec people, and stopped being his personal business.

“Then,” says the elf, “I knew you were the only one I met I could understand. Then I sent for you.”

“I still don’t know why.”

“I said it then. We’re both soldiers.”

“You’re more than that.”

“Say that I made one of the great mistakes.”

“You mean at the beginning? I don’t believe it.”

“It could have been. Say that I commanded the attacking ship. Say that I struck your people on the world. Say that you destroyed our station and our cities. We are the makers of mistakes. Say this of ourselves.”

“I,” the elf said, his image on the screen much the same as he had looked on the hillside, straight-spined, red-robed—only the ropes elves had put on him had left purpling marks on his wrists, on the opalescing white of his skin, “I’m clear enough, aren’t I?” The trooper accent was strange coming from a delicate elvish mouth. The elf’s lips were less mobile. His voice had modulations, like singing, and occasionally failed to keep its tones flat.

“It’s very good,” the scientist said, the man in the white coveralls, who sat at a small desk opposite the elf in a sterile white room and had his hands laced before him. The camera took both of them in, elf and swarthy Science Bureau xenologist. “I understand you learned from prisoners.”

The elf seemed to gaze into infinity. “We don’t want to fight anymore.”

“Neither do we. Is this why you came?”

A moment the elf studied the scientist, and said nothing at all.

“What’s your people’s name?” the scientist asked.

“You call us elves.”

“But we want to know what you call yourselves. What you call this world.”

“Why would you want to know that?”

“To respect you. Do you know that word, respect?”

“I don’t understand it.”

“Because what you call this world and what you call yourselves is the name, the right name, and we want to call you right. Does that make sense?”

“It makes sense. But what you call us is right too, isn’t it?”

“Elves is a made-up word, from our homeworld. A myth. Do you know myth? A story. A thing not true.”

“Now it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Do you call your world Earth? Most people do.”

“What you call it is its name.”

“We call it Elfland.”

“That’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

“I’ve said that.”

“You learned our language very well. But we don’t know anything of yours.”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’d like to learn. We’d like to be able to talk to you your way. It seems to us this is only polite. Do you know polite?”

“No.”

A prolonged silence. The scientist’s face remained bland as the elf’s. “You say you don’t want to fight anymore. Can you tell us how to stop the war?”

“Yes. But first I want to know what your peace is like. What, for instance, will you do about the damage you’ve caused us?”

“You mean reparations.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Payment.”

“What do you mean by it?”

The scientist drew a deep breath. “Tell me. Why did your people give you to one of our soldiers?

Why didn’t they just call on the radio and say they wanted to talk?”

“This is what you’d do.”

“It’s easier, isn’t it? And safer.”

The elf blinked. No more than that.

“There was a ship a long time ago,” the scientist said after a moment. “It was a human ship minding its own business in a human lane, and elves came and destroyed it and killed everyone on it. Why?”

“What do you want for this ship?”

“So you do understand about payment. Payment’s giving something for something.”

“I understand.” The elvish face was guileless, masklike, the long eyes like the eyes of a pearl-skinned Buddha. A saint. “What will you ask? And how will peace with you be? What do you call peace?”

“You mean you don’t think our word for it is like your word for it?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that’s an important thing to understand, isn’t it? Before we make agreements. Peace means no fighting.”

“That’s not enough.”

“Well, it means being safe from your enemies.”

“That’s not enough.”

“What is enough?”

The pale face contemplated the floor, something elsewhere.

“What is enough, Saitas?”

The elf only stared at the floor, far, far away from the questioner. “I need to talk to deFranco.”

“Who?”

“DeFranco.” The elf looked up. “DeFranco brought me here. He’s a soldier; he’ll understand me better than you. Is he still here?”

The colonel reached and cut the tape off. She was SurTac. Agnes Finn was the name on her desk. She could cut your throat a dozen ways, and do sabotage and mayhem from the refinements of computer theft to the gross tactics of explosives; she would speak a dozen languages, know every culture she had ever dealt with from the inside out, integrating the Science Bureau and the military. And more, she was a SurTac colonel, which sent the wind up deFranco’s back. It was not a branch of the service that had many high officers; you had to survive more than ten field missions to get your promotion beyond the ubiquitous and courtesy-titled lieutenancy. And this one had. This was Officer with a capital O, and whatever the politics in HQ were, this was a rock around which a lot of other bodies orbited: this probably took her orders from the joint command, which was months and months away in its closest manifestation. And that meant next to no orders and wide discretion, which was what SurTacs did. Wild card. Joker in the deck. There were the regs; there was special ops, loosely attached; there were the spacers, Union and Alliance, and Union regs were part of that; beyond and above, there was AlSec and Union intelligence; and that was this large-boned, red-haired woman who probably had a scant handful of humans and no knowing what else in her direct command, a handful of SurTacs loose in Elfland, and all of them independent operators and as much trouble to the elves as a reg base could be.

DeFranco knew. He had tried that route once. He knew more than most what kind it took to survive that training, let alone the requisite ten missions to get promoted out of the field, and he knew the wit behind the weathered face and knew it ate special ops lieutenants for appetizers.

“How did you make such an impression on him, Lieutenant?”

“I didn’t try to,” deFranco said carefully. “Ma’am, I just tried to keep him calm and get in with him alive the way they said. But I was the only one who dealt with him out there, we thought that was safest; maybe he thinks I’m more than I am.”

“I compliment you on the job.” There was a certain irony in that, he was sure. No SurTac had pulled off what he had, and he felt the slight tension there.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Yes, ma’am. There’s always the chance, you understand, that you’ve brought us an absolute lunatic. Or the elves are going an unusual route to lead us into a trap. Or this is an elf who’s not too pleased about being tied up and dumped on us, and he wants to get even. Those things occur to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” DeFranco thought all those things, face to face with the colonel and trying to be easy as the colonel had told him to be. But the colonel’s thin face was sealed and forbidding as the elf’s.

“You know what they’re doing out there right now? Massive attacks. Hitting that front near 45
with everything they’ve got. The Eighth’s pinned. We’re throwing air in. and they’ve got somewhere over two thousand casualties out there and air-strikes don’t stop all of them. Delta took a head-on assault and turned it. There were casualties. Trooper named Herse. Your unit.” Dibs. O God. “Dead?”

“Dead.” The colonel’s eyes were bleak and expressionless. “Word came in. I know it’s more than a stat to you. But that’s what’s going on. We’ve got two signals coming from the elves. And we don’t know which one’s valid. We have ourselves an alien who claims credentials—and comes with considerable effort from the same site as the attack.”

Dibs. Dead. There seemed a chill in the air, in this safe, remote place far from the real world, the mud, the bunkers. Dibs had stopped living yesterday. This morning. Sometime. Dibs had gone and the world never noticed.

“Other things occur to the science people,” the colonel said. “One which galls the hell out of them, deFranco, is what the alien just said. DeFranco can understand me better. Are you with me, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So the Bureau went to the secretary, the secretary went to the major general on the com; all this at fifteen hundred yesterday; and they hauled me in on it at two this morning. You know how many noses you’ve got out of joint, Lieutenant? And what the level of concern is about that mess out there on the front?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m sure you hoped for a commendation and maybe better, wouldn’t that be it? Wouldn’t blame you. Well, I got my hands into this, and I’ve opted you under my orders, Lieutenant, because I can do that and high command’s just real worried the Bureau’s going to poke and prod and that elf’s going to leave us on the sudden for elvish heaven. So let’s just keep him moderately happy. He wants to talk to you. What the Bureau wants to tell you, but I told them I’d make it clear, because they’ll talk tech at you and I want to be sure you’ve got it—it’s just real simple: you’re dealing with an alien; and you’ll have noticed what he says doesn’t always make sense.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t yes ma’am me, Lieutenant, dammit; just talk to me and look me in the eye. We’re talking about communication here.”

“Yes—” He stopped short of the ma’am.

“You’ve got a brain, deFranco, it’s all in your record. You almost went Special Services yourself, that was your real ambition, wasn’t it? But you had this damn psychotic fear of taking ultimate responsibility. And a wholesome fear of ending up with a commendation, posthumous. Didn’t you? It washed you out, so you went special ops where you could take orders from someone else and still play bloody hero and prove something to yourself—am I right? I ought to be; I’ve got your psych record over there. Now I’ve insulted you and you’re sitting there turning red. But I want to know what I’m dealing with. We’re in a damn bind. We’ve got casualties happening out there. Are you and I going to have trouble?”

“No. I understand.”

“Good. Very good. Do you think you can go into a room with that elf and talk the truth out of him? More to the point, can you make a decision, can you go in there knowing how much is riding on your back?”

“I’m not a—”

“I don’t care what you are, deFranco. What I want to know is whether negotiate is even in that elf’s vocabulary. I’m assigning you to guard over there. In the process I want you to sit down with him one to one and just talk away. That’s all you’ve got to do. And because of your background maybe you’ll do it with some sense. But maybe if you just talk for John deFranco and try to get that elf to deal, that’s the best thing. You know when a government sends out a negotiator—or anything like—that individual’s not average. That individual’s probably the smartest, canniest, hardest-nosed bastard they’ve got, and he probably cheats at dice. We don’t know what this bastard’s up to or what he thinks like, and when you sit down with him, you’re talking to a mind that knows a lot more about humanity than we know about elves. You’re talking to an elvish expert who’s here playing games with us. Who’s giving us a real good look-over. You understand that? What do you say about it?”

“I’m scared of this.”

“That’s real good. You know we’re not sending in the brightest, most experienced human on two feet. And that’s exactly what that rather canny elf has arranged for us to do. You understand that? He’s playing us like a keyboard this far. And how do you cope with that, Lieutenant deFranco?”

“I just ask him questions and answer as little as I can.”

“Wrong. You let him talk. You be real careful what you ask him. What you ask is as dead a giveaway as what you tell him. Everything you do and say is cultural. If he’s good, he’ll drain you like a sponge.” The colonel bit her lips. “Damn, you’re not going to be able to handle that, are you?”

“I understand what you’re warning me about, Colonel. I’m not sure I can do it, but I’ll try.”

“Not sure you can do it. Peace may hang on this. And several billion lives. Your company, out there on the line. Put it on that level. And you’re scared and you’re showing it, Lieutenant; you’re too damned open, no wonder they washed you out. Got no hard center to you, no place to go to when I embarrass the hell out of you, and I’m on your side. You’re probably a damn good special op, brave as hell, I know, you’ve got commendations in the field. And that shell-shyness of yours probably makes you drive real hard when you’re in trouble. Good man. Honest. If the elf wants a human specimen, we could do worse. You just go in there, son, and you talk to him and you be your nice self, and that’s all you’ve got to do.”

“We’ll be bugged.” DeFranco stared at the colonel deliberately, trying to dredge up some self-defense, give the impression he was no complete fool.

“Damn sure you’ll be bugged. Guards right outside if you want them. But if you startle that elf I’ll fry you.”

“That isn’t what I meant. I meant—I meant if I could get him to talk there’d be an accurate record.”

“Ah. Well. Yes. There will be, absolutely. And yes, I’m a bastard, Lieutenant, same as that elf is, beyond a doubt. And because I’m on your side I want you as prepared as I can get you. But I’m going to give you all the backing you need—you want anything, you just tell that staff and they better jump to do it. I’m giving you carte blanche over there in the Science Wing. Their complaints can come to this desk. You just be yourself with him, watch yourself a little, don’t get taken and don’t set him off.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Another slow, consuming stare and a nod.

He was dismissed.

IV

So where’s the hole we’re digging end?

Why, it’s neverneverdone, my friend.

Well, why’s it warm at the other end?

Well, hell’s neverneverfar, my friend.

“This colonel,” says the elf, “it’s her soldiers outside.”

“That’s the one,” says deFranco.

“It’s not the highest rank.”

“No. It’s not. Not even on this world.” DeFranco’s hands open and close on each other, white-knuckled. His voice stays calm. “But it’s a lot of power. She won’t be alone. There are others she’s acting for. They sent me here. I’ve figured that now.”

“Your dealing confuses me.”

“Politics. It’s all politics. Higher-ups covering their—” DeFranco rechooses his words. “Some things they have to abide by. They have to do. Like if they don’t take a peace offer—that would be trouble back home. Human space is big. But a war—humans want it stopped. I know that. With humans, you can’t quiet a mistake down. We’ve got too many separate interests . . . We got scientists, and a half dozen different commands—”

“Will they all stop fighting?”

“Yes. My side will. I know they will.” DeFranco clenches his hands tighter as if the chill has gotten to his bones. “If we can give them something, some solution. You have to understand what they’re thinking of. If there’s a trouble anywhere, it can grow. There might be others out there, you ever think of that? What if some other species just—wanders through? It’s happened. And what if our little war disturbs them? We live in a big house, you know that yet? You’re young, you, with your ships, you’re a young power out in space. God help us, we’ve made mistakes, but this time the first one wasn’t ours. We’ve been trying to stop this. All along, we’ve been trying to stop this.”

“You’re what I trust,” says the elf. “Not your colonel. Not your treaty words. Not your peace. You. Words aren’t the belief. What you do—that’s the belief. What you do will show us.”

“I can’t!”

“I can. It’s important enough to me and not to you. Our little war. I can’t understand how you think that way.”

“Look at that!” DeFranco waves a desperate hand at the room, the world. Up. “It’s so big! Can’t you see that? And one planet, one ball of rock. It’s a little war. Is it worth it all? Is it worth such damn stubbornness? Is it worth dying in?”

“Yes,” the elf says simply, and the sea-green eyes and the white face have neither anger nor blame for him.

DeFranco saluted and got out and waited until the colonel’s orderly caught him in the hall and gave his escort the necessary authorizations, because no one wandered this base without an escort. (But the elves are two hundred klicks out there, deFranco thought; and who’re we fighting anyway?) In the halls he saw the black of Union elite and the blue of Alliance spacers and the plain drab of the line troop officers, and the white and pale blue of the two Science Bureaus; while everywhere he felt the tenuous peace—damn, maybe we need this war, it’s keeping humanity talking to each other, they’re all fat and sleek and mud never touched them back here—

But there was haste in the hallways. But there were tense looks on faces of people headed purposefully to one place and the other, the look of a place with something on its collective mind, with silent, secret emergencies passing about him—The attack on the lines, he thought, and remembered another time that attack had started on one front and spread rapidly to a dozen; and missiles had gone. And towns had died.

And the elvish kids, the babies in each others’ arms and the birds fluttering down; and Dibs—Dibs lying in his armor like a broken piece of machinery—when a shot got you, it got the visor and you had no face and never knew it; or it got the joints and you bled to death trapped in the failed shell, you just lay there and bled: he had heard men and women die like that, still in contact on the com, talking to their buddies and going out alone, alone in that damn armor that cut off the sky and the air——

They brought him down tunnels that were poured and cast and hard overnight, that kind of construction, which they never got out on the Line. There were bright lights and there were dry floors for the fine officers to walk on; there was, at the end, a new set of doors where guards stood with weapons ready—

—against us? DeFranco got that sense of unreality again, blinked as he had to show his tags and IDs to get past even with the colonel’s orders directing his escort.

Then they let him through, and further, to another hall with more guards. AlSec MPs. Alliance Security. The intelligence and Special Services. The very air here had a chill about it, with only those uniforms in sight. They had the elf. Of course they did. He was diplomatic property and the regs and the generals had nothing to do with it. He was in Finn’s territory. Security and the Surface Tactical command, that the reg command only controlled from the top, not inside the structure. Finn had a leash, but she took no orders from sideways in the structure. Not even from AlSec. Check and balance in a joint command structure too many light-years from home to risk petty dictatorships. He had just crossed a line and might as well have been on another planet. And evidently a call had come ahead of him, because there were surly Science Bureau types here too, and the one who passed him through hardly glanced at his ID. It was his face the man looked at, long and hard; and it was the Xenbureau interviewer who had been on the tape.

“Good luck,” the man said. And a SurTac major arrived, dour-faced, a black man in the SurTac’s khaki, who did not look like an office-type. He took the folder of authorizations and looked at it and at deFranco with a dark-eyed stare and a set of a square, well-muscled jaw.

“Colonel’s given you three hours, Lieutenant. Use it.”

“We’re more than one government,” says deFranco to the elf, quietly, desperately. “We’ve fought in the past. We had wars. We made peace and we work together. We may fight again but everyone hopes not and it’s less and less likely. War’s expensive. It’s too damn open out here, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. You start a war and you don’t know what else might be listening.”

The elf leans back in his chair, one arm on the back of it. His face is solemn as ever as he looks at deFranco. “You and I, you-and-I. The world was whole until you found us. How can people do things that don’t make sense? The whole thing makes sense, the parts of the thing are crazy. You can’t put part of one thing into another, leaves won’t be feathers, and your mind can’t be our mind. I see our mistakes. I want to take them away. Then elves won’t have theirs and you won’t have yours. But you call it a little war. The lives are only a few. You have so many. You like your mistake. You’ll keep it. You’ll hold it in your arms. And you’ll meet these others with it. But they’ll see it, won’t they, when they look at you?”

“It’s crazy!”

“When we met you in it, we assumed we. That was our first great mistake. But it’s yours too.”

DeFranco walked into the room where they kept the elf, a luxurious room, a groundling civ’s kind of room, with a bed and a table and two chairs, and some kind of green and yellow pattern on the bedclothes, which were ground-style, free-hanging. And amid this riot of life-colors the elf sat cross-legged on the bed, placid, not caring that the door opened or someone came in—until a flicker of recognition seemed to take hold and grow. It was the first humanlike expression, virtually the only expression, the elf had ever used in deFranco’s sight. Of course there were cameras recording it, recording everything. The colonel had said so and probably the elf knew it too.

“Saitas. You wanted to see me.”

“DeFranco.” The elf’s face settled again to inscrutability.

“Shall I sit down?”

There was no answer. DeFranco waited for an uncertain moment, then settled into one chair at the table and leaned his elbows on the white plastic surface.

“They treating you all right?” deFranco asked, for the cameras, deliberately, for the colonel—(

Damn you, I’m not a fool, I can play your damn game, Colonel, I did what your SurTacs failed at, didn’t I? So watch me.)

“Yes,” the elf said. His hands rested loosely in his red-robed lap. He looked down at them and up again.

“I tried to treat you all right. I thought I did.”

“Yes.”

“Why’d you ask for me?”

“I’m a soldier,” the elf said, and put his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. “I know that you are. I think you understand me more.”

“I don’t know about that. But I’ll listen.” The thought crossed his mind of being held hostage, of some irrational violent behavior, but he pretended it away and waved a hand at the other chair.

“You want to sit down? You want something to drink? They’ll get it for you.”

“I’ll sit with you.” The elf came and took the other chair, and leaned his elbows on the table. The bruises on his wrists showed plainly under the light. “I thought you might have gone back to the front by now.”

“They give me a little time. I mean, there’s—”

(Don’t talk to him, the colonel had said. Let him talk.)

“—three hours. A while. You had a reason you wanted to see me. Something you wanted? Or just to talk. I’ll do that too.”

“Yes,” the elf said slowly, in his lilting lisp. And gazed at him with sea-green eyes. “Are you young, deFranco? You make me think of a young man.”

It set him off his balance. “I’m not all that young.”

“I have a son and a daughter. Have you?”

“No.”

“Parents?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Have you parents?”

“A mother. Long way from here.” He resented the questioning. Letters were all Nadya deFranco got, and not enough of them, and thank God she had closer sons. DeFranco sat staring at the elf who had gotten past his guard in two quick questions and managed to hit a sore spot; and he remembered what Finn had warned him. “You, elf?”

“Living parents. Yes. A lot of relatives?”

Damn, what trooper had they stripped getting that part of human language? Whose soul had they gotten into?

“What are you, Saitas? Why’d they hand you over like that?”

“To make peace. So the Saitas always does.”

“Tied up like that?”

“I came to be your prisoner. You understand that.”

“Well, it worked. I might have shot you; I don’t say I would’ve, but I might, except for that. It was a smart move, I guess it was. But hell, you could have called ahead. You come up on us in the dark—you looked to get your head blown off. Why didn’t you use the radio?” A blink of sea-green eyes. “Others ask me that. Would you have come then?”

“Well, someone would. Listen, you speak at them in human language and they’d listen and they’d arrange something a lot safer.”

The elf stared, full of his own obscurities.

“Come on, they throw you out of there? They your enemies?”

“Who?”

“The ones who left you out there on the hill.”

“No.”

“Friends, huh? Friends let you out there?”

“They agreed with me. I agreed to be there. I was most afraid you’d shoot them. But you let them go.”

“Hell, look, I just follow orders.”

“And orders led you to let them go?”

“No. They say to talk if I ever got the chance. Look, me, personally, I never wanted to kill you guys. I wouldn’t, if I had the choice.”

“But you do.”

“Dammit, you took out our ships. Maybe that wasn’t personal on your side either, but we sure as hell can’t have you doing it as a habit. All you ever damn well had to do was go away and let us alone. You hit a world, elf. Maybe not much of one, but you killed more than a thousand people on that first ship. Thirty thousand at that base, good God, don’t sit there looking at me like that!”

“It was a mistake.”

“Mistake.” DeFranco found his hands shaking. No. Don’t raise the voice. Don’t lose it. (Be your own nice self, boy. Patronizingly. The colonel knew he was far out of his depth. And he knew.)

“Aren’t most wars mistakes?”

“Do you think so?”

“If it is, can’t we stop it?” He felt the attention of unseen listeners, diplomats, scientists—himself, special ops, talking to an elvish negotiator and making a mess of it all, losing everything. (Be your own nice self—The colonel was crazy, the elf was, the war and the world were and he lumbered ahead desperately, attempting subtlety, attempting a caricatured simplicity toward a diplomat and knowing the one as transparent as the other.) “You know all you have to do is say quit and there’s ways to stop the shooting right off, ways to close it all down and then start talking about how we settle this. You say that’s what you came to do. You’re in the right place. All you have to do is get your side to stop. They’re killing each other out there, do you know that? You come in here to talk peace. And they’re coming at us all up and down the front. I just got word I lost a friend of mine out there. God knows what by now. It’s no damn sense. If you can stop it, then let’s stop it.”

“I’ll tell you what our peace will be.” The elf lifted his face placidly, spread his hands. “There is a camera, isn’t there? At least a microphone. They do listen.”

“Yes. They’ve got camera and mike. I know they will.”

“But your face is what I see. Your face is all human faces to me. They can listen, but I talk to you. Only to you. And this is our peace. The fighting will stop, and we’ll build ships again and we’ll go into space, and we won’t be enemies. The mistake won’t exist. That’s the peace I want.”

“So how do we do that?” (Be your own nice self, boy—DeFranco abandoned himself. Don’t see the skin, don’t see the face alien-like, just talk, talk like to a human, don’t worry about protocols. Do it, boy.) “How do we get the fighting stopped?”

“I’ve said it. They’ve heard.”

“Yes. They have.”

“They have two days to make this peace.”

DeFranco’s palms sweated. He clenched his hands on the chair. “Then what happens?”

“I’ll die. The war will go on.”

(God, now what do I do, what do I say? How far can I go?) “Listen, you don’t understand how long it takes us to make up our minds. We need more than any two days. They’re dying out there, your people are killing themselves against our lines, and it’s all for nothing. Stop it now. Talk to them. Tell them we’re going to talk. Shut it down.”

The slitted eyes blinked, remained in their buddha-like abstraction, looking askance into infinity.

“DeFranco, there has to be payment.”

(Think, deFranco, think. Ask the right things.) “What payment? Just exactly who are you talking for? All of you? A city? A district?”

“One peace will be enough for you—won’t it? You’ll go away. You’ll leave and we won’t see each other until we’ve built our ships again. You’ll begin to go—as soon as my peace is done.”

“Build the ships, for God’s sake. And come after us again?”

“No. The war is a mistake. There won’t be another war. This is enough.”

“But would everyone agree?”

“Everyone does agree. I’ll tell you my real name. It’s Angan. Angan Anassidi. I’m forty-one years old. I have a son named Agaita; a daughter named Siadi; I was born in a town named Daogisshi, but it’s burned now. My wife is Llaothai Sohail, and she was born in the city where we live now. I’m my wife’s only husband. My son is aged twelve, my daughter is nine. They live in the city with my wife alone now and her parents and mine.” The elvish voice acquired a subtle music on the names that lingered to obscure his other speech. “I’ve written—I told them I would write everything for them. I write in your language.”

“Told who?”

“The humans who asked me. I wrote it all.”

DeFranco stared at the elf, at a face immaculate and distant as a statue. “I don’t think I follow you. I don’t understand. We’re talking about the front. We’re talking about maybe that wife and those kids being in danger, aren’t we? About maybe my friends getting killed out there. About shells falling and people getting blown up. Can we do anything about it?”

“I’m here to make the peace. Saitas is what I am. A gift to you. I’m the payment.” DeFranco blinked and shook his head. “Payment? I’m not sure I follow that.” For a long moment there was quiet. “Kill me,” the elf said. “That’s why I came. To be the last dead. The saitas. To carry the mistake away.”

“Hell, no. No. We don’t shoot you. Look, elf—all we want is to stop the fighting. We don’t want your life. Nobody wants to kill you.”

“DeFranco, we haven’t any more resources. We want a peace.”

“So do we. Look, we just make a treaty—you understand treaty?”

“I’m the treaty.”

“A treaty, man, a treaty’s a piece of paper. We promise peace to each other and not to attack us, we promise not to attack you, we settle our borders, and you just go home to that wife and kids. And I go home and that’s it. No more dying. No more killing.”

“No.” The elf’s eyes glistened within the pale mask. “No, deFranco, no paper.”

“We make peace with a paper and ink. We write peace out and we make agreements and it’s good enough; we do what we say we’ll do.”

“Then write it in your language.”

“You have to sign it. Write your name on it. And keep the terms. That’s all, you understand that?”

“Two days. I’ll sign your paper. I’ll make your peace. It’s nothing. Our peace is in me. And I’m here to give it.”

“Dammit, we don’t kill people for treaties.”

The sea-colored eyes blinked. “Is one so hard and millions so easy?”

“It’s different.”

“Why?”

“Because—because—look, war’s for killing; peace is for staying alive.”

“I don’t understand why you fight. Nothing you do makes sense to us. But I think we almost understand. We talk to each other. We use the same words. DeFranco, don’t go on killing us.”

“Just you. Just you, is that it? Dammit, that’s crazy!”

“A cup would do. Or a gun. Whatever you like. DeFranco, have you never shot us before?”

“God, it’s not the same!”

“You say paper’s enough for you. That paper will take away all your mistakes and make the peace. But paper’s not enough for us. I’d never trust it. You have to make my peace too. So both sides will know it’s true. But there has to be a saitas for humans. Someone has to come to be a saitas for humans. Someone has to come to us.”

DeFranco sat there with his hands locked together. “You mean just go to your side and get killed.”

“The last dying.”

“Dammit, you are crazy. You’ll wait a long time for that, elf.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You’re damn right I don’t understand. Damn bloody-minded lunatics!” DeFranco shoved his hands down, needing to get up, to get away from that infinitely patient and not human face, that face that had somehow acquired subtle expressions, that voice which made him forget where the words had first come from. And then he remembered the listeners, the listeners taking notes, the colonel staring at him across the table. Information. Winning was not the issue. Questions were. Finding out what they could. Peace was no longer the game. They were dealing with the insane, with minds there was no peace with. Elves that died to spite their enemies. That suicided for a whim and thought nothing about wiping out someone else’s life.

He stayed in his chair. He drew another breath. He collected his wits and thought of something else worth learning. “What’d you do with the prisoners you learned the language from, huh? Tell me that?”

“Dead. We gave them the cup. One at a time they wanted it.”

“Did they.”

Again the spread of hands, of graceful fingers. “I’m here for all the mistakes. Whatever will be enough for them.”

“Dammit, elf!”

“Don’t call me that.” The voice acquired a faint music. “Remember my name. Remember my name. DeFranco—”

He had to get up. He had to get up and get clear of the alien, get away from that stare. He thrust himself back from the table and looked back, found the elf had turned. Saitas-Angan smelled of something dry and musky, like spice. The eyes never opened wide, citrine slits. They followed him.

“Talk to me,” the elf said. “Talk to me, deFranco.”

“About what? About handing one of us to you? It won’t happen. It bloody won’t happen. We’re not crazy.”

“Then the war won’t stop.”

“You’ll bloody die, every damn last one of you!”

“If that’s your intention,” the elf said, “yes. We don’t believe you want peace. We haven’t any more hope. So I come here. And the rest of us begin to die. Not the quiet dying. Our hearts won’t stop. We’ll fight.”

“Out there on the lines, you mean.”

“I’ll die as long as you want, here. I won’t stop my heart. The saitas can’t.”

“Dammit, that’s not what we’re after! That’s not what we want.”

“Neither can you stop yours. I know that. We’re not cruel. I still have hope in you. I still hope.”

“It won’t work. We can’t do it, do you understand me? It’s against our law. Do you understand law?”

“Law.”

“Right from wrong. Morality. For God’s sake, killing’s wrong.”

“Then you’ve done a lot of wrong. You have your mistake too. DeFranco. You’re a soldier like me. You know what your life’s value is.”

“You’re damn right I know. And I’m still alive.”

“We go off the course. We lose ourselves. You’ll die for war but not for peace. I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand. You think we’re just going to pick some poor sod and send him to you.”

“You, deFranco. I’m asking you to make the peace.”

“Hell.” He shook his head, walked away to the door, colonel-be-hanged, listeners-be-hanged. His hand shook on the switch and he was afraid it showed. End the war. “The hell you say.” The door shot open. He expected guards. Expected—

—It was open corridor, clean prefab, tiled floor. On the tiles lay a dark, round object, with the peculiar symmetry and ugliness of things meant to kill. Grenade. Intact. His heart jolted. He felt the doorframe against his side and the sweat ran cold on his skin, his bowels went to water. He hung there looking at it and it did not go away. He began to shake all over as if it were already armed.

“Colonel Finn.” He turned around in the doorway and yelled at the unseen monitors. “Colonel Finn—get me out of here!”

No one answered. No door opened. The elf sat there staring at him in the closest thing to distress he had yet showed.

“Colonel! Colonel, damn you!”

More of silence. The elf rose to his feet and stood there staring at him in seeming perplexity, as if he suspected he witnessed some human madness.

“They left us a present,” deFranco said. His voice shook and he tried to stop it. “They left us a damn present, elf. And they locked us in.”

The elf stared at him; and deFranco went out into the hall, bent and gathered up the deadly black cylinder—held it up. “It’s one of yours, elf.”

The elf stood there in the doorway. His eyes looking down were the eyes of a carved saint; and looking up they showed color against his white skin. A long nailless hand touched the doorframe as the elf contemplated him and human treachery.

“Is this their way?”

“It’s not mine.” He closed his hand tightly on the cylinder, in its deadliness like and unlike every weapon he had ever handled. “It’s damn well not mine.”

“You can’t get out.”

The shock had robbed him of wits. For a moment he was not thinking. And then he walked down the hall to the main door and tried it. “Locked,” he called back to the elf, who had joined him in his possession of the hall. The two of them together. DeFranco walked back again, trying doors as he went. He felt strangely numb. The hall became surreal, his elvish companion belonging like him, elsewhere. “Dammit, what have you got in their minds?”

“They’ve agreed,” the elf said. “They’ve agreed, deFranco.”

“They’re out of their minds.”

“One door still closes, doesn’t it? You can protect your life.”

“You still bent on suicide?”

“You’ll be safe.”

“Damn them!”

The elf gathered his arms about him as if he too felt the chill. “The colonel gave us a time. Is it past?”

“Not bloody yet.”

“Come sit with me. Sit and talk. My friend.”

“Is it time?” asks the elf, as deFranco looks at his watch again. And deFranco looks up.

“Five minutes. Almost.” DeFranco’s voice is hoarse.

The elf has a bit of paper in hand. He offers it. A pen lies on the table between them. Along with the grenade. “I’ve written your peace. I’ve put my name below it. Put yours.”

“I’m nobody. I can’t sign a treaty, for God’s sake.” DeFranco’s face is white. His lips tremble.

“What did you write?”

“Peace,” said the elf. “I just wrote peace. Does there have to be more?” DeFranco takes it. Looks at it. And suddenly he picks up the pen and signs it too, a furious scribble. And lays the pen down. “There,” he says. “There, they’ll have my name on it.” And after a moment: “If I could do the other—O God, I’m scared. I’m scared!”

“You don’t have to go to my city,” says the elf, softly. His voice wavers like deFranco’s.

“DeFranco—here, here they record everything. Go with me. Now. The record will last. We have our peace, you and I, we make it together, here, now. The last dying. Don’t leave me. And we can end this war.”

DeFranco sits a moment. Takes the grenade from the middle of the table, extends his hand with it across the center. He looks nowhere but at the elf. “Pin’s yours,” he says. “Go on. You pull it, I’ll hold it steady.”

The elf reaches out his hand, takes the pin and pulls it, quickly.

DeFranco lays the grenade down on the table between them, and his mouth moves in silent counting. But then he looks up at the elf and the elf looks at him. DeFranco manages a smile.

“You got the count on this thing?”

The screen breaks up.

The staffer reached out her hand and cut the monitor, and Agnes Finn stared past the occupants of the office for a time. Tears came seldom to her eyes. They were there now, and she chose not to look at the board of inquiry who had gathered there.

“There’s a mandatory inquiry,” the man from the reg command said. “We’ll take testimony from the major this afternoon.”

“Responsibility’s mine,” Finn said.

It was agreed on the staff. It was pre-arranged, the interview, the formalities. Someone had to take the direct hit. It might have been a SurTac. She would have ordered that too, if things had gone differently. High command might cover her. Records might be wiped. A tape might be classified. The major general who had handed her the mess and turned his back had done it all through subordinates. And he was clear.

“The paper, Colonel.”

She looked at them, slid the simple piece of paper back across the desk. The board member collected it and put it into the folder. Carefully.

“It’s more than evidence,” she said. “That’s a treaty. The indigenes know it is.” They left her office, less than comfortable in their official search for blame and where, officially, to put it.

She was already packed. Going back on the same ship with an elvish corpse, all the way to Pell and Downbelow. There would be a grave there onworld.

It had surprised no one when the broadcast tape got an elvish response. Hopes rose when it got the fighting stopped and brought an elvish delegation to the front; but there was a bit of confusion when the elves viewed both bodies and wanted deFranco’s. Only deFranco’s. And they made him a stone grave there on the shell-pocked plain, a stone monument; and they wrote everything they knew about him. I was John Rand deFranco, a graven plaque said. I was born on a space station twenty light-years away. I left my mother and my brothers. The friends I had were soldiers and many of them died before me. I came to fight and I died for the peace, even when mine was the winning side. I died at the hand of Angan Anassidi, and he died at mine, for the peace; and we were friends at the end of our lives. Elves—suilti was one name they called themselves—came to this place and laid gifts of silk ribbons and bunches of flowers—flowers, in all that desolation; and in their thousands they mourned and they wept in their own tearless, expressionless way.

For their enemy.

One of their own was on his way to humankind. For humankind to cry for. I was Angan Anassidi, his grave would say; and all the right things. Possibly no human would shed a tear. Except the veterans of Elfland, when they came home, if they got down to the world—they might, like Agnes Finn, in their own way and for their own dead, in front of an alien shrine.

SAILING TO BYZANTIUM

Robert Silverberg

It’s been some time since we’ve published a story by Robert Silverberg, but the story that follows has truly been well worth waiting for. “Sailing to Byzantium” is one of the finest pieces we’ve seen, and one we’re sure you’ll enjoy.

At dawn he arose and stepped out onto the patio for his first look at Alexandria, the one city he had not yet seen. That year the five cities were Changan, Asgard, New Chicago, Timbuctoo, Alexandria: the usual mix of eras, cultures, realities. He and Gioia, making the long flight from Asgard in the distant north the night before, had arrived late, well after sundown, and had gone straight to bed. Now, by the gentle apricot-hued morning light, the fierce spires and battlements of Asgard seemed merely something he had dreamed.

The rumor was that Asgard’s moment was finished anyway. In a little while, he had heard, they were going to tear it down and replace it, elsewhere, with Mohenjo-daro. Though there were never more than five cities, they changed constantly. He could remember a time when they had had Rome of the Caesars instead of Chang-an, and Rio de Janeiro rather than Alexandria. These people saw no point in keeping anything very long.

It was not easy for him to adjust to the sultry intensity of Alexandria after the frozen splendors of Asgard. The wind, coming off the water, was brisk and torrid both at once. Soft turquoise wavelets lapped at the jetties. Strong presences assailed his senses: the hot heavy sky, the stinging scent of the red lowland sand borne on the breeze, the sullen swampy aroma of the nearby sea. Everything trembled and glimmered in the early light. Their hotel was beautifully situated, high on the northern slope of the huge artificial mound known as the Paneium that was sacred to the goat-footed god. From here they had a total view of the city: the wide noble boulevards, the soaring obelisks and monuments, the palace of Hadrian just below the hill, the stately and awesome Library, the temple of Poseidon, the teeming marketplace, the royal lodge that Marc Antony had built after his defeat at Actium. And of course the Lighthouse, the wondrous many-windowed Lighthouse, the seventh wonder of the world, that immense pile of marble and limestone and reddish-purple Aswan granite rising in majesty at the end of its mile-long causeway. Black smoke from the beacon fire at its summit curled lazily into the sky. The city was awakening. Some temporaries in short white kilts appeared and began to trim the dense dark hedges that bordered the great public buildings. A few citizens wearing loose robes of vaguely Grecian style were strolling in the streets.

There were ghosts and chimeras and phantasies everywhere about. Two slim elegant centaurs, a male and a female, grazed on the hillside. A burly thick-thighed swordsman appeared on the porch of the temple of Poseidon holding a Gorgon’s severed head and waved it in a wide arc, grinning broadly. In the street below the hotel gate three small pink sphinxes, no bigger than housecats, stretched and yawned and began to prowl the curbside. A larger one, lion-sized, watched warily from an alleyway: their mother, surely. Even at this distance he could hear her loud purring.

Shading his eyes, he peered far out past the Lighthouse and across the water. He hoped to see the dim shores of Crete or Cyprus to the north, or perhaps the great dark curve of Anatolia. Carry me toward that great Byzantium, he thought. Where all is ancient, singing at the oars. But he beheld only the endless empty sea, sun-bright and blinding though the morning was just beginning. Nothing was ever where he expected it to be. The continents did not seem to be in their proper places any longer. Gioia, taking him aloft long ago in her little flitterflitter, had shown him that. The tip of South America was canted far out into the Pacific; Africa was weirdly foreshortened; a broad tongue of ocean separated Europe and Asia. Australia did not appear to exist at all. Perhaps they had dug it up and used it for other things. There was no trace of the world he once had known. This was the fiftieth century. “The fiftieth century after what?” he had asked several times, but no one seemed to know, or else they did not care to say.

“Is Alexandria very beautiful?” Gioia called from within.

“Come out and see.”

Naked and sleepy-looking, she padded out onto the white-tiled patio and nestled up beside him. She fit neatly under his arm. “Oh, yes, yes!” she said softly. “So very beautiful, isn’t it? Look, there, the palaces, the Library, the Lighthouse! Where will we go first? The Lighthouse, I think. Yes? And then the marketplace—I want to see the Egyptian magicians—and the stadium, the races—will they be having races today, do you think? Oh, Charles, I want to see everything!”

“Everything? All on the first day?”

“All on the first day, yes,” she said. “Everything.”

“But we have plenty of time, Gioia.”

“Do we?”

He smiled and drew her tight against his side.

“Time enough,” he said gently.

He loved her for her impatience, for her bright bubbling eagerness. Gioia was not much like the rest in that regard, though she seemed identical in all other ways. She was short, supple, slender, dark-eyed, olive-skinned, narrow-hipped, with wide shoulders and flat muscles. They were all like that, each one indistinguishable from the rest, like a horde of millions of brothers and sisters—a world of small lithe childlike Mediterraneans, built for juggling, for bull-dancing, for sweet white wine at midday and rough red wine at night. They had the same slim bodies, the same broad mouths, the same great glossy eyes. He had never seen anyone who appeared to be younger than twelve or older than twenty. Gioia was somehow a little different, although he did not quite know how; but he knew that it was for that imperceptible but significant difference that he loved her. And probably that was why she loved him also.

He let his gaze drift from west to east, from the Gate of the Moon down broad Canopus Street and out to the harbor, and off to the tomb of Cleopatra at the tip of long slender Cape Lochias. Everything was here and all of it perfect, the obelisks, the statues and marble colonnades, the courtyards and shrines and groves, great Alexander himself in his coffin of crystal and gold: a splendid gleaming pagan city. But there were oddities—an unmistakable mosque near the public gardens, and what seemed to be a Christian church not far from the Library. And those ships in the harbor, with all those red sails and bristling masts—surely they were medieval, and late medieval at that. He had seen such anachronisms in other places before. Doubtless these people found them amusing. Life was a game for them. They played at it unceasingly. Rome, Alexandria, Timbuctoo—why not? Create an Asgard of translucent bridges and shimmering ice-girt palaces, then grow weary of it and take it away? Replace it with Mohenjo-daro? Why not? It seemed to him a great pity to destroy those lofty Nordic feasting halls for the sake of building a squat brutal sun-baked city of brown brick; but these people did not look at things the way he did. Their cities were only temporary. Someone in Asgard had said that Timbuctoo would be the next to go, with Byzantium rising in its place. Well, why not? Why not? They could have anything they liked. This was the fiftieth century, after all. The only rule was that there could be no more than five cities at once. “Limits,” Gioia had informed him solemnly when they first began to travel together, “are very important.” But she did not know why, or did not care to say.

He stared out once more toward the sea.

He imagined a newborn city congealing suddenly out of mists, far across the water: shining towers, great domed palaces, golden mosaics. That would be no great effort for them. They could just summon it forth whole out of time, the Emperor on his throne and the Emperor’s drunken soldiery roistering in the streets, the brazen clangor of the cathedral gong rolling through the Grand Bazaar, dolphins leaping beyond the shoreside pavilions. Why not? They had Timbuctoo. They had Alexandria. Do you crave Constantinople? Then behold Constantinople! Or Avalon, or Lyonesse, or Atlantis. They could have anything they liked. It is pure Schopenhauer here: the world as will and imagination. Yes! These slender dark-eyed people journeying tirelessly from miracle to miracle. Why not Byzantium next? Yes! Why not? That is no country for old men, he thought. The young in one another’s arms, the birds in the trees—yes! Yes! Anything they liked. They even had him. Suddenly he felt frightened. Questions he had not asked for a long time burst through into his consciousness. Who am I? Why am I here? Who is this woman beside me?

“You’re so quiet all of a sudden, Charles,” said Gioia, who could not abide silence for very long. “Will you talk to me? I want you to talk to me. Tell me what you’re looking for out there.”

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“I could see you seeing something.”

“Byzantium,” he said. “I was imagining that I could look straight across the water to Byzantium. I was trying to get a glimpse of the walls of Constantinople.”

“Oh, but you wouldn’t be able to see as far as that from here. Not really.”

“I know.”

“And anyway Byzantium doesn’t exist.”

“Not yet. But it will. Its time comes later on.”

“Does it?” she said. “Do you know that for a fact?”

“On good authority. I heard it in Asgard,” he told her. “But even if I hadn’t, Byzantium would be inevitable, don’t you think? Its time would have to come. How could we not do Byzantium, Gioia? We certainly will do Byzantium, sooner or later. I know we will. It’s only a matter of time. And we have all the time in the world.”

A shadow crossed her face. “Do we? Do we?”

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew. He knew that his name was Charles Phillips and that before he had come to live among these people he had lived in the year 1984, when there had been such things as computers and television sets and baseball and jet planes, and the world was full of cities, not merely five but thousands of them, New York and London and Johannesburg and Paris and Liverpool and Bangkok and San Francisco and Buenos Aires and a multitude of others, all at the same time. There had been four and a half billion people in the world then; now he doubted that there were as many as four and a half million. Nearly everything had changed beyond comprehension. The moon still seemed the same, and the sun; but at night he searched in vain for familiar constellations. He had no idea how they had brought him from then to now, or why. It did no good to ask. No one had any answers for him; no one so much as appeared to understand what it was that he was trying to learn. After a time he had stopped asking; after a time he had almost entirely ceased wanting to know.

He and Gioia were climbing the Lighthouse. She scampered ahead, in a hurry as always, and he came along behind her in his more stolid fashion. Scores of other tourists, mostly in groups of two or three, were making their way up the wide flagstone ramps, laughing, calling to one another. Some of them, seeing him, stopped a moment, stared, pointed. He was used to that. He was so much taller than any of them; he was plainly not one of them. When they pointed at him he smiled. Sometimes he nodded a little acknowledgment.

He could not find much of interest in the lowest level, a massive square structure two hundred feet high built of huge marble blocks: within its cool musty arcades were hundreds of small dark rooms, the offices of the Lighthouse’s keepers and mechanics, the barracks of the garrison, the stables for the three hundred donkeys that carried the fuel to the lantern far above. None of that appeared inviting to him. He forged onward without halting until he emerged on the balcony that led to the next level. Here the Lighthouse grew narrower and became octagonal: its face, granite now and handsomely fluted, rose in a stunning sweep above him.

Gioia was waiting for him there. “This is for you,” she said, holding out a nugget of meat on a wooden skewer. “Roast lamb. Absolutely delicious. I had one while I was waiting for you.” She gave him a cup of some cool green sherbet also, and darted off to buy a pomegranate. Dozens of temporaries were roaming the balcony, selling refreshments of all kinds.

He nibbled at the meat. It was charred outside, nicely pink and moist within. While he ate, one of the temporaries came up to him and peered blandly into his face. It was a stocky swarthy male wearing nothing but a strip of red and yellow cloth about its waist. “I sell meat,” it said. “Very fine roast lamb, only five drachmas.”

Phillips indicated the piece he was eating. “I already have some,” he said.

“It is excellent meat, very tender. It has been soaked for three days in the juices of—”

“Please,” Phillips said. “I don’t want to buy any meat. Do you mind moving along?”

The temporaries had confused and baffled him at first, and there was still much about them that was unclear to him. They were not machines—they looked like creatures of flesh and blood—but they did not seem to be human beings, either, and no one treated them as if they were. He supposed they were artificial constructs, products of a technology so consummate that it was invisible. Some appeared to be more intelligent than others, but all of them behaved as if they had no more autonomy than characters in a play, which was essentially what they were. There were untold numbers of them in each of the five cities, playing all manner of roles: shepherds and swineherds, street-sweepers, merchants, boatmen, vendors of grilled meats and cool drinks, hagglers in the marketplace, schoolchildren, charioteers, policemen, grooms, gladiators, monks, artisans, whores and cutpurses, sailors—whatever was needed to sustain the illusion of a thriving, populous urban center. The dark-eyed people, Gioia’s people, never performed work. There were not enough of them to keep a city’s functions going, and in any case they were strictly tourists, wandering with the wind, moving from city to city as the whim took them, Chang-an to New Chicago, New Chicago to Timbuctoo, Timbuctoo to Asgard, Asgard to Alexandria, onward, ever onward.

The temporary would not leave him alone. Phillips walked away and it followed him, cornering him against the balcony wall. When Gioia returned a few minutes later, lips prettily stained with pomegranate juice, the temporary was still hovering about him, trying with lunatic persistence to sell him a skewer of lamb. It stood much too close to him, almost nose to nose, great sad cowlike eyes peering intently into his as it extolled with mournful mooing urgency the quality of its wares. It seemed to him that he had had trouble like this with temporaries on one or two earlier occasions. Gioia touched the creature’s elbow lightly and said, in a short sharp tone Phillips had never heard her use before, “He isn’t interested. Get away from him.” It went at once. To Phillips she said, “You have to be firm with them.”

“I was trying. It wouldn’t listen to me.”

“You ordered it to go away, and it refused?”

“I asked it to go away. Politely. Too politely, maybe.”

“Even so,” she said. “It should have obeyed a human, regardless.”

“Maybe it didn’t think I was human,” Phillips suggested. “Because of the way I look. My height, the color of my eyes. It might have thought I was some kind of temporary myself.”

“No,” Gioia said, frowning. “A temporary won’t solicit another temporary. But it won’t ever disobey a citizen, either. There’s a very clear boundary. There isn’t ever any confusion. I can’t understand why it went on bothering you.” He was surprised at how troubled she seemed: far more so, he thought, than the incident warranted. A stupid device, perhaps miscalibrated in some way, overenthusiastically pushing its wares—what of it? What of it? Gioia, after a moment, appeared to come to the same conclusion. Shrugging, she said, “It’s defective, I suppose. Probably such things are more common than we suspect, don’t you think?” There was something forced about her tone that bothered him. She smiled and handed him her pomegranate. “Here. Have a bite, Charles. It’s wonderfully sweet. They used to be extinct, you know. Shall we go on upward?”

The octagonal midsection of the Lighthouse must have been several hundred feet in height, a grim claustrophobic tube almost entirely filled by the two broad spiraling ramps that wound around the huge building’s central well. The ascent was slow: a donkey team was a little way ahead of them on the ramp, plodding along laden with bundles of kindling for the lantern. But at last, just as Phillips was growing winded and dizzy, he and Gioia came out onto the second balcony, the one marking the transition between the octagonal section and the Lighthouse’s uppermost story, which was cylindrical and very slender.

She leaned far out over the balustrade. “Oh, Charles, look at the view! Look at it!”

It was amazing. From one side they could see the entire city, and swampy Lake Mareotis and the dusty Egyptian plain beyond it, and from the other they peered far out into the gray and choppy Mediterranean. He gestured toward the innumerable reefs and shallows that infested the waters leading to the harbor entrance. “No wonder they needed a lighthouse here,” he said. “Without some kind of gigantic landmark they’d never have found their way in from the open sea.”

A blast of sound, a ferocious snort, erupted just above him. He looked up, startled. Immense statues of trumpet-wielding Tritons jutted from the corners of the Lighthouse at this level; that great blurting sound had come from the nearest of them. A signal, he thought. A warning to the ships negotiating that troubled passage. The sound was produced by some kind of steam-powered mechanism, he realized, operated by teams of sweating temporaries clustered about bonfires at the base of each Triton.

Once again he found himself swept by admiration for the clever way these people carried out their reproductions of antiquity. Or were they reproductions, he wondered? He still did not understand how they brought their cities into being. For all he knew, this place was the authentic Alexandria itself, pulled forward out of its proper time just as he himself had been. Perhaps this was the true and original Lighthouse, and not a copy. He had no idea which was the case, nor which would be the greater miracle.

“How do we get to the top?” Gioia asked.

“Over there, I think. That doorway.”

The spiraling donkey-ramps ended here. The loads of lantern fuel went higher via a dumbwaiter in the central shaft. Visitors continued by way of a cramped staircase, so narrow at its upper end that it was impossible to turn around while climbing. Gioia, tireless, sprinted ahead. He clung to the rail and labored up and up, keeping count of the tiny window slits to ease the boredom of the ascent. The count was nearing a hundred when finally he stumbled into the vestibule of the beacon chamber. A dozen or so visitors were crowded into it. Gioia was at the far side, by the wall that was open to the sea.

It seemed to him he could feel the building swaying in the winds up here. How high were they? Five hundred feet, six hundred, seven? The beacon chamber was tall and narrow, divided by a catwalk into upper and lower sections. Down below, relays of temporaries carried wood from the dumbwaiter and tossed it on the blazing fire. He felt its intense heat from where he stood, at the rim of the platform on which the giant mirror of polished metal was hung. Tongues of flame leaped upward and danced before the mirror, which hurled its dazzling beam far out to sea. Smoke rose through a vent. At the very top was a colossal statue of Poseidon, austere, ferocious, looming above the lantern.

Gioia sidled along the catwalk until she was at his side. “The guide was talking before you came,” she said, pointing. “Do you see that place over there, under the mirror? Someone standing there and looking into the mirror gets a view of ships at sea that can’t be seen from here by the naked eye. The mirror magnifies things.”

“Do you believe that?”

She nodded toward the guide. “It said so. And it also told us that if you look in a certain way, you can see right across the water into the city of Constantinople.”

She is like a child, he thought. They all are. He said, “You told me yourself this very morning that it isn’t possible to see that far. Besides, Constantinople doesn’t exist right now.”

“It will,” she replied. “You said that to me, this very morning. And when it does, it’ll be reflected in the Lighthouse mirror. That’s the truth. I’m absolutely certain of it.” She swung about abruptly toward the entrance of the beacon chamber. “Oh, look, Charles! Here come Nissandra and Aramayne! And there’s Hawk! There’s Stengard!” Gioia laughed and waved and called out names. “Oh, everyone’s here! Everyone!”

They came jostling into the room, so many newcomers that some of those who had been there were forced to scramble down the steps on the far side. Gioia moved among them, hugging, kissing. Phillips could scarcely tell one from another—it was hard for him even to tell which were the men and which the women, dressed as they all were in the same sort of loose robes—but he recognized some of the names. These were her special friends, her set, with whom she had journeyed from city to city on an endless round of gaiety in the old days before he had come into her life. He had met a few of them before, in Asgard, in Rio, in Rome. The beacon-chamber guide, a squat wide-shouldered old temporary wearing a laurel wreath on its bald head, reappeared and began its potted speech, but no one listened to it; they were all too busy greeting one another, embracing, giggling. Some of them edged their way over to Phillips and reached up, standing on tiptoes, to touch their fingertips to his cheek in that odd hello of theirs. “Charles,” they said gravely, making two syllables out of the name, as these people often did. “So good to see you again. Such a pleasure. You and Gioia—such a handsome couple. So well suited to each other.”

Was that so? He supposed it was.

The chamber hummed with chatter. The guide could not be heard at all. Stengard and Nissandra had visited New Chicago for the water-dancing—Aramayne bore tales of a feast in Chang-an that had gone on for days—Hawk and Hekna had been to Timbuctoo to see the arrival of the salt caravan, and were going back there soon—a final party soon to celebrate the end of Asgard that absolutely should not be missed—the plans for the new city, Mohenjo-daro—we have reservations for the opening, we wouldn’t pass it up for anything—and, yes, they were definitely going to do Constantinople after that, the planners were already deep into their Byzantium research—so good to see you, you look so beautiful all the time—have you been to the Library yet? The zoo? To the temple of Serapis?—

To Phillips they said, “What do you think of our Alexandria, Charles? Of course, you must have known it well in your day. Does it look the way you remember it?” They were always asking things like that. They did not seem to comprehend that the Alexandria of the Lighthouse and the Library was long lost and legendary by the time his twentieth century had been. To them, he suspected, all the places they had brought back into existence were more or less contemporary. Rome of the Caesars, Alexandria of the Ptolemies, Venice of the Doges, Chang-an of the T’angs, Asgard of the Aesir, none any less real than the next nor any less unreal, each one simply a facet of the distant past, the fantastic immemorial past, a plum plucked from that dark backward abysm of time. They had no contexts for separating one era from another. To them all the past was one borderless timeless realm. Why, then, should he not have seen the Lighthouse before, he who had leaped into this era from the New York of 1984? He had never been able to explain it to them. Julius Caesar and Hannibal, Helen of Troy and Charlemagne, Rome of the gladiators and New York of the Yankees and Mets, Gilgamesh and Tristan and Othello and Robin Hood and George Washington and Queen Victoria—to them, all equally real and unreal, none of them any more than bright figures moving about on a painted canvas. The past, the past, the elusive and fluid past—to them it was a single place of infinite accessibility and infinite connectivity. Of course, they would think he had seen the Lighthouse before. He knew better than to try again to explain things. “No,” he said simply. “This is my first time in Alexandria.”

They stayed there all winter long, and possibly some of the spring. Alexandria was not a place where one was sharply aware of the change of seasons, nor did the passage of time itself make itself very evident when one was living one’s entire life as a tourist.

During the day there was always something new to see. The zoological garden, for instance: a wondrous park, miraculously green and lush in this hot dry climate, where astounding animals roamed in enclosures so generous that they did not seem like enclosures at all. Here were camels, rhinoceroses, gazelles, ostriches, lions, wild asses; and here, too, casually adjacent to those familiar African beasts, were hippogriffs, unicorns, basilisks, and fire-snorting dragons with rainbow scales. Had the original zoo of Alexandria had dragons and unicorns? Phillips doubted it. But this one did; evidently it was no harder for the backstage craftsmen to manufacture mythic beasts than it was for them to turn out camels and gazelles. To Gioia and her friends all of them were equally mythical, anyway. They were just as awed by the rhinoceros as by the hippogriff. One was no more strange—or any less—than the other. So far as Phillips had been able to discover, none of the mammals or birds of his era had survived into this one except for a few cats and dogs, though many had been reconstructed.

And then the Library! All those lost treasures, reclaimed from the jaws of time! Stupendous columned marble walls, airy high-vaulted reading rooms, dark coiling stacks stretching away to infinity. The ivory handles of seven hundred thousand papyrus scrolls bristling on the shelves. Scholars and librarians gliding quietly about, smiling faint scholarly smiles but plainly preoccupied with serious matters of the mind. They were all temporaries, Phillips realized. Mere props, part of the illusion. But were the scrolls illusions, too? “Here we have the complete dramas of Sophocles,” said the guide with a blithe wave of its hand, indicating shelf upon shelf of texts. Only seven of his hundred twenty-three plays had survived the successive burnings of the library in ancient times by Romans, Christians, Arabs: were the lost ones here, the Triptolemus, the Nausicaa, the Jason, and all the rest? And would he find here, too, miraculously restored to being, the other vanished treasures of ancient literature—the memoirs of Odysseus, Cato’s history of Rome, Thucidydes’ life of Pericles, the missing volumes of Livy? But when he asked if he might explore the stacks, the guide smiled apologetically and said that all the librarians were busy just now. Another time, perhaps? Perhaps, said the guide. It made no difference, Phillips decided. Even if these people somehow had brought back those lost masterpieces of antiquity, how would he read them? He knew no Greek.

The life of the city buzzed and throbbed about him. It was a dazzlingly beautiful place: the vast bay thick with sails, the great avenues running rigidly east-west, north-south, the sunlight rebounding almost audibly from the bright walls of the palaces of kings and gods. They have done this very well, Phillips thought: very well indeed. In the marketplace hard-eyed traders squabbled in half a dozen mysterious languages over the price of ebony, Arabian incense, jade, panther skins. Gioia bought a dram of pale musky Egyptian perfume in a delicate tapering glass flask. Magicians and jugglers and scribes called out stridently to passersby, begging for a few moments of attention and a handful of coins for their labor. Strapping slaves, black and tawny and some that might have been Chinese, were put up for auction, made to flex their muscles, to bare their teeth, to bare their breasts and thighs to prospective buyers. In the gymnasium naked athletes hurled javelins and discuses, and wrestled with terrifying zeal. Gioia’s friend Stengard came rushing up with a gift for her, a golden necklace that would not have embarrassed Cleopatra. An hour later she had lost it, or perhaps had given it away while Phillips was looking elsewhere. She bought another, even finer, the next day. Anyone could have all the money he wanted, simply by asking: it was as easy to come by as air for these people.

Being here was much like going to the movies, Phillips told himself. A different show every day: not much plot, but the special effects were magnificent and the detail work could hardly have been surpassed. A megamovie, a vast entertainment that went on all the time and was being played out by the whole population of Earth. And it was all so effortless, so spontaneous: just as when he had gone to a movie he had never troubled to think about the myriad technicians behind the scenes, the cameramen and the costume designers and the set builders and the electricians and the model makers and the boom operators, so, too, here he chose not to question the means by which Alexandria had been set before him. It felt real. It was real. When he drank the strong red wine it gave him a pleasant buzz. If he leaped from the beacon chamber of the Lighthouse he suspected he would die, though perhaps he would not stay dead for long: doubtless they had some way of restoring him as often as was necessary. Death did not seem to be a factor in these people’s lives.

By day they saw sights. By night he and Gioia went to parties, in their hotel, in seaside villas, in the palaces of the high nobility. The usual people were there all the time, Hawk and Hekna, Aramayne, Stengard and Shelimir, Nissandra, Asoka, Afonso, Protay. At the parties there were five or ten temporaries for every citizen, some as mere servants, others as entertainers or even surrogate guests, mingling freely and a little daringly. But everyone knew, all the time, who was a citizen and who just a temporary. Phillips began to think his own status lay somewhere between. Certainly they treated him with a courtesy that no one ever would give a temporary, and yet there was a condescension to their manner that told him not simply that he was not one of them but that he was someone or something of an altogether different order of existence. That he was Gioia’s lover gave him some standing in their eyes, but not a great deal: obviously he was always going to be an outsider, a primitive, ancient and quaint. For that matter he noticed that Gioia herself, though unquestionably a member of the set, seemed to be regarded as something of an outsider, like a tradesman’s great-granddaughter in a gathering of Plantagenets. She did not always find out about the best parties in time to attend; her friends did not always reciprocate her effusive greetings with the same degree of warmth; sometimes he noticed her straining to hear some bit of gossip that was not quite being shared with her. Was it because she had taken him for her lover? Or was it the other way around: that she had chosen to be his lover precisely because she was not a full member of their caste?

Being a primitive gave him, at least, something to talk about at their parties. “Tell us about war,” they said. “Tell us about elections. About money. About disease.” They wanted to know everything, though they did not seem to pay close attention: their eyes were quick to glaze. Still, they asked. He described traffic jams to them, and politics, and deodorants, and vitamin pills. He told them about cigarettes, newspapers, subways, telephone directories, credit cards, and basketball. “Which was your city?” they asked. New York, he told them. “And when was it? The seventh century, did you say?” The twentieth, he told them. They exchanged glances and nodded. “We will have to do it,” they said. “The World Trade Center, the Empire State Building, the Citicorp Center, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine: how fascinating! Yankee Stadium. The Verrazano Bridge. We will do it all. But first must come Mohenjo-daro. And then, I think, Constantinople. Did your city have many people?” Seven million, he said. Just in the five boroughs alone. They nodded, smiling amiably, unfazed by the number. Seven million, seventy million—it was all the same to them, he sensed. They would just bring forth the temporaries in whatever quantity was required. He wondered how well they would carry the job off. He was no real judge of Alexandrias and Asgards, after all. Here they could have unicorns and hippogriffs in the zoo, and live sphinxes prowling in the gutters, and it did not trouble him. Their fanciful Alexandria was as good as history’s, or better. But how sad, how disillusioning it would be, if the New York that they conjured up had Greenwich Village uptown and Times Square in the Bronx, and the New Yorkers, gentle and polite, spoke with the honeyed accents of Savannah or New Orleans. Well, that was nothing he needed to brood about just now. Very likely they were only being courteous when they spoke of doing his New York. They had all the vastness of the past to choose from: Nineveh, Memphis of the Pharaohs, the London of Victoria or Shakespeare or Richard the Third, Florence of the Medici, the Paris of Abelard and Heloise or the Paris of Louis XIV, Moctezuma’s Tenochtitlan and Atahuallpa’s Cuzco; Damascus, St. Petersburg, Babylon, Troy. And then there were all the cities like New Chicago, out of time that was time yet unborn to him but ancient history to them. In such richness, such an infinity of choices, even mighty New York might have to wait a long while for its turn. Would he still be among them by the time they got around to it? By then, perhaps, they might have become bored with him and returned him to his own proper era. Or possibly he would simply have grown old and died. Even here, he supposed, he would eventually die, though no one else ever seemed to. He did not know. He realized that in fact he did not know anything.

The north wind blew all day long. Vast flocks of ibises appeared over the city, fleeing the heat of the interior, and screeched across the sky with their black necks and scrawny legs extended. The sacred birds, descending by the thousands, scuttered about in every crossroad, pouncing on spiders and beetles, on mice, on the debris of the meat shops and the bakeries. They were beautiful but annoyingly ubiquitous, and they splashed their dung over the marble buildings; each morning squadrons of temporaries carefully washed it off. Gioia said little to him now. She seemed cool, withdrawn, depressed; and there was something almost intangible about her, as though she were gradually becoming transparent. He felt it would be an intrusion upon her privacy to ask her what was wrong. Perhaps it was only restlessness. She became religious, and presented costly offerings at the temples of Serapis, Isis, Poseidon, Pan. She went to the necropolis west of the city to lay wreaths on the tombs in the catacombs. In a single day she climbed the Lighthouse three times without any sign of fatigue. One afternoon he returned from a visit to the Library and found her naked on the patio; she had anointed herself all over with some aromatic green salve. Abruptly she said, “I think it’s time to leave Alexandria, don’t you?”

She wanted to go to Mohenjo-daro, but Mohenjo-daro was not yet ready for visitors. Instead they flew eastward to Chang-an, which they had not seen in years. It was Phillips’s suggestion: he hoped that the cosmopolitan gaudiness of the old T’ang capital would lift her mood.

They were to be guests of the Emperor this time: an unusual privilege, which ordinarily had to be applied for far in advance, but Phillips had told some of Gioia’s highly placed friends that she was unhappy, and they had quickly arranged everything. Three endlessly bowing functionaries in flowing yellow robes and purple sashes met them at the Gate of Brilliant Virtue in the city’s south wall and conducted them to their pavilion, close by the imperial palace and the Forbidden Garden. It was a light, airy place, thin walls of plastered brick braced by graceful columns of some dark, aromatic wood. Fountains played on the roof of green and yellow tiles, creating an unending cool rainfall of recirculating water. The balustrades were of carved marble, the door fittings were of gold.

There was a suite of private rooms for him, and another for her, though they would share the handsome damask-draped bedroom at the heart of the pavilion. As soon as they arrived, Gioia announced that she must go to her rooms to bathe and dress. “There will be a formal reception for us at the palace tonight,” she said. “They say the imperial receptions are splendid beyond anything you could imagine. I want to be at my best.” The Emperor and all his ministers, she told him, would receive them in the Hall of the Supreme Ultimate; there would be a banquet for a thousand people; Persian dancers would perform, and the celebrated jugglers of Chung-nan. Afterward everyone would be conducted into the fantastic landscape of the Forbidden Garden to view the dragon races and the fireworks.

He went to his own rooms. Two delicate little maidservants undressed him and bathed him with fragrant sponges. The pavilion came equipped with eleven temporaries who were to be their servants: soft-voiced unobtrusive catlike Chinese, done with perfect verisimilitude, straight black hair, glowing skin, epicanthic folds. Phillips often wondered what happened to a city’s temporaries when the city’s time was over. Were the towering Norse heroes of Asgard being recycled at this moment into wiry dark-skinned Dravidians for Mohenjo-daro? When Timbuctoo’s day was done, would its brightly robed black warriors be converted into supple Byzantines to stock the arcades of Constantinople? Or did they simply discard the old temporaries like so many excess props, stash them in warehouses somewhere, and turn out the appropriate quantities of the new model? He did not know; and once when he had asked Gioia about it she had grown uncomfortable and vague. She did not like him to probe for information, and he suspected it was because she had very little to give. These people did not seem to question the workings of their own world; his curiosities were very twentieth-century of him, he was frequently told, in that gently patronizing way of theirs. As his two little maids patted him with their sponges he thought of asking them where they had served before Chang-an. Rio? Rome? Haroun al Raschid’s Baghdad? But these fragile girls, he knew, would only giggle and retreat if he tried to question them. Interrogating temporaries was not only improper but pointless: it was like interrogating one’s luggage.

When he was bathed and robed in rich red silks he wandered the pavilion for a little while, admiring the tinkling pendants of green jade dangling on the portico, the lustrous auburn pillars, the rainbow hues of the intricately interwoven girders and brackets that supported the roof. Then, wearying of his solitude, he approached the bamboo curtain at the entrance to Gioia’s suite. A porter and one of the maids stood just within. They indicated that he should not enter; but he scowled at them and they melted from him like snowflakes. A trail of incense led him through the pavilion to Gioia’s innermost dressing room. There he halted, just outside the door.

Gioia sat naked with her back to him at an ornate dressing table of some rare flame-colored wood inlaid with bands of orange and green porcelain. She was studying herself intently in a mirror of polished bronze held by one of her maids: picking through her scalp with her fingernails, as a woman might do who was searching out her gray hairs.

But that seemed strange. Gray hair, on Gioia? On a citizen? A temporary might display some appearance of aging, perhaps, but surely not a citizen. Citizens remained forever young. Gioia looked like a girl. Her face was smooth and unlined, her flesh was firm, her hair was dark: that was true of all of them, every citizen he had ever seen. And yet there was no mistaking what Gioia was doing. She found a hair, frowned, drew it taut, nodded, plucked it. Another. Another. She pressed the tip of her finger to her cheek as if testing it for resilience. She tugged at the skin below her eyes, pulling it downward. Such familiar little gestures of vanity; but so odd here, he thought, in this world of the perpetually young. Gioia, worried about growing old? Had he simply failed to notice the signs of age on her? Or was it that she worked hard behind his back at concealing them? Perhaps that was it. Was he wrong about the citizens, then? Did they age even as the people of less blessed eras had always done, but simply have better ways of hiding it? How old was she, anyway? Thirty? Sixty? Three hundred?

Gioia appeared satisfied now. She waved the mirror away; she rose; she beckoned for her banquet robes. Phillips, still standing unnoticed by the door, studied her with admiration: the small round buttocks, almost but not quite boyish, the elegant line of her spine, the surprising breadth of her shoulders. No, he thought, she is not aging at all. Her body is still like a girl’s. She looks as young as on the day they first had met, however long ago that was—he could not say; it was hard to keep track of time here; but he was sure some years had passed since they had come together. Those gray hairs, those wrinkles and sags for which she had searched just now with such desperate intensity, must all be imaginary, mere artifacts of vanity. Even in this remote future epoch, then, vanity was not extinct. He wondered why she was so concerned with the fear of aging. An affectation? Did all these timeless people take some perverse pleasure in fretting over the possibility that they might be growing old? Or was it some private fear of Gioia’s, another symptom of the mysterious depression that had come over her in Alexandria?

Not wanting her to think that he had been spying on her, when all he had really intended was to pay her a visit, he slipped silently away to dress for the evening. She came to him an hour later, gorgeously robed, swaddled from chin to ankles in a brocade of brilliant colors shot through with threads of gold, face painted, hair drawn up tightly and fastened with ivory combs: very much the lady of the court. His servants had made him splendid also, a lustrous black surplice embroidered with golden dragons over a sweeping floor-length gown of shining white silk, a necklace and pendant of red coral, a five-cornered gray felt hat that rose in tower upon tower like a ziggurat. Gioia, grinning, touched her fingertips to his cheek. “You look marvelous!” she told him. “Like a grand mandarin!”

“And you like an empress,” he said. “Of some distant land: Persia, India. Here to pay a ceremonial visit on the Son of Heaven.” An excess of love suffused his spirit, and, catching her lightly by the wrist, he drew her toward him, as close as he could manage it considering how elaborate their costumes were. But as he bent forward and downward, meaning to brush his lips lightly and affectionately against the tip of her nose, he perceived an unexpected strangeness, an anomaly: the coating of white paint that was her makeup seemed oddly to magnify rather than mask the contours of her skin, highlighting and revealing details he had never observed before. He saw a pattern of fine lines radiating from the corners of her eyes, and the unmistakable beginning of a quirk mark in her cheek just to the left of her mouth, and perhaps the faint indentation of frown lines in her flawless forehead. A shiver traveled along the nape of his neck. So it was not affectation, then, that had had her studying her mirror so fiercely. Age was in truth beginning to stake its claim on her, despite all that he had come to believe about these people’s agelessness. But a moment later he was not so sure. Gioia turned and slid gently half a step back from him—she must have found his stare disturbing—and the lines he had thought he had seen were gone. He searched for them and saw only girlish smoothness once again. A trick of the light? A figment of an overwrought imagination? He was baffled.

“Come,” she said. “We mustn’t keep the Emperor waiting.”

Five mustachioed warriors in armor of white quilting and seven musicians playing cymbals and pipes escorted them to the Hall of the Supreme Ultimate. There they found the full court arrayed: princes and ministers, high officials, yellow-robed monks, a swarm of imperial concubines. In a place of honor to the right of the royal thrones, which rose like gilded scaffolds high above all else, was a little group of stern-faced men in foreign costumes, the ambassadors of Rome and Byzantium, of Arabia and Syria, of Korea, Japan, Tibet, Turkestan. Incense smoldered in enameled braziers. A poet sang a delicate twanging melody, accompanying himself on a small harp. Then the Emperor and Empress entered: two tiny aged people, like waxen images, moving with infinite slowness, taking steps no greater than a child’s. There was the sound of trumpets as they ascended their thrones. When the little Emperor was seated—he looked like a doll up there, ancient, faded, shrunken, yet still somehow a figure of extraordinary power—he stretched forth both his hands, and enormous gongs began to sound. It was a scene of astonishing splendor, grand and overpowering.

These are all temporaries, Phillips realized suddenly. He saw only a handful of citizens—eight, ten, possibly as many as a dozen—scattered here and there about the vast room. He knew them by their eyes, dark, liquid, knowing. They were watching not only the imperial spectacle but also Gioia and him; and Gioia, smiling secretly, nodding almost imperceptibly to them, was acknowledging their presence and their interest. But those few were the only ones in here who were autonomous living beings. All the rest—the entire splendid court, the great mandarins and paladins, the officials, the giggling concubines, the haughty and resplendent ambassadors, the aged Emperor and Empress themselves, were simply part of the scenery. Had the world ever seen entertainment on so grand a scale before? All this pomp, all this pageantry, conjured up each night for the amusement of a dozen or so viewers?

At the banquet the little group of citizens sat together at a table apart, a round onyx slab draped with translucent green silk. There turned out to be seventeen of them in all, including Gioia; Gioia appeared to know all of them, though none, so far as he could tell, was a member of her set that he had met before. She did not attempt introductions. Nor was conversation at all possible during the meal: there was a constant astounding roaring din in the room. Three orchestras played at once and there were troupes of strolling musicians also, and a steady stream of monks and their attendants marched back and forth between the tables loudly chanting sutras and waving censers to the deafening accompaniment of drums and gongs. The Emperor did not descend from his throne to join the banquet; he seemed to be asleep, though now and then he waved his hand in time to the music. Gigantic half-naked brown slaves with broad cheekbones and mouths like gaping pockets brought forth the food, peacock tongues and breast of phoenix heaped on mounds of glowing saffron-colored rice, served on frail alabaster plates. For chopsticks they were given slender rods of dark jade. The wine, served in glistening crystal beakers, was thick and sweet, with an aftertaste of raisins, and no beaker was allowed to remain empty for more than a moment. Phillips felt himself growing dizzy: when the Persian dancers emerged he could not tell whether there were five of them or fifty, and as they performed their intricate whirling routines it seemed to him that their slender muslin-veiled forms were blurring and merging one into another. He felt frightened by their proficiency, and wanted to look away, but he could not. The Chung-nan jugglers that followed them were equally skillful, equally alarming, filling the air with scythes, flaming torches, live animals, rare porcelain vases, pink jade hatchets, silver bells, gilded cups, wagon wheels, bronze vessels, and never missing a catch. The citizens applauded politely but did not seem impressed. After the jugglers, the dancers returned, performing this time on stilts; the waiters brought platters of steaming meat of a pale lavender color, unfamiliar in taste and texture: filet of camel, perhaps, or haunch of hippopotamus, or possibly some choice chop from a young dragon. There was more wine. Feebly Phillips tried to wave it away, but the servitors were implacable. This was a drier sort, greenish-gold, austere, sharp on the tongue. With it came a silver dish, chilled to a polar coldness, that held shaved ice flavored with some potent smoky-flavored brandy. The jugglers were doing a second turn, he noticed. He thought he was going to be ill. He looked helplessly toward Gioia, who seemed sober but fiercely animated, almost manic, her eyes blazing like rubies. She touched his cheek fondly. A cool draft blew through the hall: they had opened one entire wall, revealing the garden, the night, the stars. Just outside was a colossal wheel of oiled paper stretched on wooden struts. They must have erected it in the past hour: it stood a hundred fifty feet high or even more, and on it hung lanterns by the thousands, glimmering like giant fireflies. The guests began to leave the hall. Phillips let himself be swept along into the garden, where under a yellow moon strange crook-armed trees with dense black needles loomed ominously. Gioia slipped her arm through his. They went down to a lake of bubbling crimson fluid and watched scarlet flamingolike birds ten feet tall fastidiously spearing angry-eyed turquoise eels. They stood in awe before a fat-bellied Buddha of gleaming blue tilework, seventy feet high. A horse with a golden mane came prancing by, striking showers of brilliant red sparks wherever its hooves touched the ground. In a grove of lemon trees that seemed to have the power to wave their slender limbs about, Phillips came upon the Emperor, standing by himself and rocking gently back and forth. The old man seized Phillips by the hand and pressed something into his palm, closing his fingers tight about it; when he opened his fist a few moments later he found his palm full of gray irregular pearls. Gioia took them from him and cast them into the air, and they burst like exploding firecrackers, giving off splashes of colored light. A little later, Phillips realized that he was no longer wearing his surplice or his white silken undergown. Gioia was naked, too, and she drew him gently down into a carpet of moist blue moss, where they made love until dawn, fiercely at first, then slowly, languidly, dreamily. At sunrise he looked at her tenderly and saw that something was wrong.

“Gioia?” he said doubtfully.

She smiled. “Ah, no. Gioia is with Fenimon tonight. I am Belilala.”

“With—Fenimon?”

“They are old friends. She had not seen him in years.”

“Ah. I see. And you are—?”

“Belilala,” she said again, touching her fingertips to his cheek.

It was not unusual, Belilala said. It happened all the time; the only unusual thing was that it had not happened to him before now. Couples formed, traveled together for a while, drifted apart, eventually reunited. It did not mean that Gioia had left him forever. It meant only that just now she chose to be with Fenimon. Gioia would return. In the meanwhile he would not be alone. “You and I met in New Chicago,” Belilala told him. “And then we saw each other again in Timbuctoo. Have you forgotten? Oh, yes, I see that you have forgotten!” She laughed prettily; she did not seem at all offended.

She looked enough like Gioia to be her sister. But, then, all the citizens looked more or less alike to him. And apart from their physical resemblance, so he quickly came to realize, Belilala and Gioia were not really very similar. There was a calmness, a deep reservoir of serenity, in Belilala, that Gioia, eager and volatile and ever impatient, did not seem to have. Strolling the swarming streets of Chang-an with Belilala, he did not perceive in her any of Gioia’s restless feverish need always to know what lay beyond, and beyond, and beyond even that. When they toured the Hsing-ch’ing Palace, Belilala did not after five minutes begin—as Gioia surely would have done—to seek directions to the Fountain of Hsuan-tsung or the Wild Goose Pagoda. Curiosity did not consume Belilala as it did Gioia. Plainly she believed that there would always be enough time for her to see everything she cared to see. There were some days when Belilala chose not to go out at all, but was content merely to remain at their pavilion playing a solitary game with flat porcelain counters, or viewing the flowers of the garden.

He found, oddly, that he enjoyed the respite from Gioia’s intense world-swallowing appetites; and yet he longed for her to return. Belilala—beautiful, gentle, tranquil, patient—was too perfect for him. She seemed unreal in her gleaming impeccability, much like one of those Sung celadon vases that appear too flawless to have been thrown and glazed by human hands. There was something a little soulless about her: an immaculate finish outside, emptiness within. Belilala might almost have been a temporary, he thought, though he knew she was not. He could explore the pavilions and palaces of Chang-an with her, he could make graceful conversation with her while they dined, he could certainly enjoy coupling with her; but he could not love her or even contemplate the possibility. It was hard to imagine Belilala worriedly studying herself in a mirror for wrinkles and gray hairs. Belilala would never be any older than she was at this moment; nor could Belilala ever have been any younger. Perfection does not move along an axis of time. But the perfection of Belilala’s glossy surface made her inner being impenetrable to him. Gioia was more vulnerable, more obviously flawed—her restlessness, her moodiness, her vanity, her fears—and therefore she was more accessible to his own highly imperfect twentieth-century sensibility.

Occasionally he saw Gioia as he roamed the city, or thought he did. He had a glimpse of her among the miracle-vendors in the Persian Bazaar, and outside the Zoroastrian temple, and again by the goldfish pond in the Serpentine Park. But he was never quite sure that the woman he saw was really Gioia, and he never could get close enough to her to be certain: she had a way of vanishing as he approached, like some mysterious Lorelei luring him onward and onward in a hopeless chase. After a while he came to realize that he was not going to find her until she was ready to be found.

He lost track of time. Weeks, months, years? He had no idea. In this city of exotic luxury, mystery, and magic all was in constant flux and transition and the days had a fitful, unstable quality. Buildings and even whole streets were torn down of an afternoon and reerected, within days, far away. Grand new pagodas sprouted like toadstools in the night. Citizens came in from Asgard, Alexandria, Timbuctoo, New Chicago, stayed for a time, disappeared, returned. There was a constant round of court receptions, banquets, theatrical events, each one much like the one before. The festivals in honor of past emperors and empresses might have given some form to the year, but they seemed to occur in a random way, the ceremony marking the death of T’ai Tsung coming around twice the same year, so it seemed to him, once in a season of snow and again in high summer, and the one honoring the ascension of the Empress Wu being held twice in a single season. Perhaps he had misunderstood something. But he knew it was no use asking anyone.

One day Belilala said unexpectedly, “Shall we go to Mohenjo-daro?”

“I didn’t know it was ready for visitors,” he replied.

“Oh, yes. For quite some time now.”

He hesitated. This had caught him unprepared. Cautiously he said, “Gioia and I were going to go there together, you know.”

Belilala smiled amiably, as though the topic under discussion were nothing more than the choice of that evening’s restaurant.

“Were you?” she asked.

“It was all arranged while we were still in Alexandria. To go with you instead—I don’t know what to tell you, Belilala.” Phillips sensed that he was growing terribly flustered. “You know that I’d like to go. With you. But on the other hand I can’t help feeling that I shouldn’t go there until I’m back with Gioia again. If I ever am.” How foolish this sounds, he thought. How clumsy, how adolescent. He found that he was having trouble looking straight at her. Uneasily he said, with a kind of desperation in his voice, “I did promise her—there was a commitment, you understand—a firm agreement that we would go to Mohenjo-daro together—”

“Oh, but Gioia’s already there!” said Belilala in the most casual way.

He gaped as though she had punched him.

“What?”

“She was one of the first to go, after it opened. Months and months ago. You didn’t know?” she asked, sounding surprised, but not very. “You really didn’t know?”

That astonished him. He felt bewildered, betrayed, furious. His cheeks grew hot, his mouth gaped. He shook his head again and again, trying to clear it of confusion. It was a moment before he could speak. “Already there?” he said at last. “Without waiting for me? After we had talked about going there together—after we had agreed—”

Belilala laughed. “But how could she resist seeing the newest city? You know how impatient Gioia is!”

“Yes. Yes.”

He was stunned. He could barely think.

“Just like all short-timers,” Belilala said. “She rushes here, she rushes there. She must have it all, now, now, right away, at once, instantly. You ought never expect her to wait for you for anything for very long: the fit seizes her, and off she goes. Surely you must know that about her by now.”

“A short-timer?” He had not heard that term before.

“Yes. You knew that. You must have known that.” Belilala flashed her sweetest smile. She showed no sign of comprehending his distress. With a brisk wave of her hand she said, “Well, then, shall we go, you and I? To Mohenjo-daro?”

“Of course,” Phillips said bleakly.

“When would you like to leave?”

“Tonight,” he said. He paused a moment. “What’s a short-timer, Belilala?”

Color came to her cheeks. “Isn’t it obvious?” she asked.

Had there ever been a more hideous place on the face of the earth than the city of Mohenjo-daro? Phillips found it difficult to imagine one. Nor could he understand why, out of all the cities that had ever been, these people had chosen to restore this one to existence. More than ever they seemed alien to him, unfathomable, incomprehensible.

From the terrace atop the many-towered citadel he peered down into grim claustrophobic Mohenjo-daro and shivered. The stark, bleak city looked like nothing so much as some prehistoric prison colony. In the manner of an uneasy tortoise it huddled, squat and compact, against the gray monotonous Indus River plain: miles of dark burnt-brick walls enclosing miles of terrifyingly orderly streets, laid out in an awesome, monstrous gridiron pattern of maniacal rigidity. The houses themselves were dismal and forbidding too, clusters of brick cells gathered about small airless courtyards. There were no windows, only small doors that opened not onto the main boulevards but onto the tiny mysterious lanes that ran between the buildings. Who had designed this horrifying metropolis? What harsh sour souls they must have had, these frightening and frightened folk, creating for themselves in the lush fertile plains of India such a Supreme Soviet of a city!

“How lovely it is,” Belilala murmured. “How fascinating!”

He stared at her in amazement.

“Fascinating? Yes,” he said. “I suppose so. The same way that the smile of a cobra is fascinating.”

“What’s a cobra?”

“Poisonous predatory serpent,” Phillips told her. “Probably extinct. Or formerly extinct, more likely. It wouldn’t surprise me if you people had recreated a few and turned them loose in Mohenjo to make things livelier.”

“You sound angry, Charles.”

“Do I? That’s not how I feel.”

“How do you feel, then?”

“I don’t know,” he said after a long moment’s pause. He shrugged. “Lost, I suppose. Very far from home.”

“Poor Charles.”

“Standing here in this ghastly barracks of a city, listening to you tell me how beautiful it is, I’ve never felt more alone in my life.”

“You miss Gioia very much, don’t you?”

He gave her another startled look.

“Gioia has nothing to do with it. She’s probably been having ecstasies over the loveliness of Mohenjo just like you. Just like all of you. I suppose I’m the only one who can’t find the beauty, the charm. I’m the only one who looks out there and sees only horror, and then wonders why nobody else sees it, why in fact people would set up a place like this for entertainment, for pleasure—”

Her eyes were gleaming. “Oh, you are angry! You really are!”

“Does that fascinate you, too?” he snapped. “A demonstration of genuine primitive emotion? A typical quaint twentieth-century outburst?” He paced the rampart in short quick anguished steps. “Ah. Ah. I think I understand it now, Belilala. Of course: I’m part of your circus, the star of the sideshow. I’m the first experiment in setting up the next stage of it, in fact.” Her eyes were wide. The sudden harshness and violence in his voice seemed to be alarming and exciting her at the same time. That angered him even more. Fiercely he went on, “Bringing whole cities back out of time was fun for a while, but it lacks a certain authenticity, eh? For some reason you couldn’t bring the inhabitants, too; you couldn’t just grab a few million prehistorics out of Egypt or Greece or India and dump them down in this era, I suppose because you might have too much trouble controlling them, or because you’d have the problem of disposing of them once you were bored with them. So you had to settle for creating temporaries to populate your ancient cities. But now you’ve got me. I’m something more real than a temporary, and that’s a terrific novelty for you, and novelty is the thing you people crave more than anything else: maybe the only thing you crave. And here I am, complicated, unpredictable, edgy, capable of anger, fear, sadness, love, and all those other formerly extinct things. Why settle for picturesque architecture when you can observe picturesque emotion, too? What fun I must be for all of you! And if you decide that I was really interesting, maybe you’ll ship me back where I came from and check out a few other ancient types—a Roman gladiator, maybe, or a Renaissance pope, or even a Neanderthal or two—”

“Charles,” she said tenderly. “Oh, Charles, Charles, Charles, how lonely you must be, how lost, how troubled! Will you ever forgive me? Will you ever forgive us all?”

Once more he was astounded by her. She sounded entirely sincere, altogether sympathetic. Was she? Was she, really? He was not sure he had ever had a sign of genuine caring from any of them before, not even Gioia. Nor could he bring himself to trust Belilala now. He was afraid of her, afraid of all of them, of their brittleness, their slyness, their elegance. He wished he could go to her and have her take him in her arms; but he felt too much the shaggy prehistoric just now to be able to risk asking that comfort of her.

He turned away and began to walk around the rim of the citadel’s massive wall.

“Charles?”

“Let me alone for a little while,” he said.

He walked on. His forehead throbbed and there was a pounding in his chest. All stress systems going full blast, he thought: secret glands dumping gallons of inflammatory substances into his bloodstream. The heat, the inner confusion, the repellent look of this place—

Try to understand, he thought. Relax. Look about you. Try to enjoy your holiday in Mohenjo-daro.

He leaned warily outward, over the edge of the wall. He had never seen a wall like this; it must be forty feet thick at the base, he guessed, perhaps even more, and every brick perfectly shaped, meticulously set. Beyond the great rampart, marshes ran almost to the edge of the city, although close by the wall the swamps had been dammed and drained for agriculture. He saw lithe brown farmers down there, busy with their wheat and barley and peas. Cattle and buffaloes grazed a little farther out. The air was heavy, dank, humid. All was still. From somewhere close at hand came the sound of a droning, whining stringed instrument and a steady insistent chanting.

Gradually a sort of peace pervaded him. His anger subsided. He felt himself beginning to grow calm again. He looked back at the city, the rigid interlocking streets, the maze of inner lanes, the millions of courses of precise brickwork.

It is a miracle, he told himself, that this city is here in this place and at this time. And it is a miracle that I am here to see it.

Caught for a moment by the magic within the bleakness, he thought he began to understand Belilala’s awe and delight, and he wished now that he had not spoken to her so sharply. The city was alive. Whether it was the actual Mohenjo-daro of thousands upon thousands of years ago, ripped from the past by some wondrous hook, or simply a cunning reproduction, did not matter at all. Real or not, this was the true Mohenjo-daro. It had been dead, and now, for the moment, it was alive again. These people, these citizens, might be trivial, but reconstructing Mohenjo-daro was no trivial achievement. And that the city that had been reconstructed was oppressive and sinister-looking was unimportant. No one was compelled to live in Mohenjo-daro any more. Its time had come and gone, long ago; those little dark-skinned peasants and craftsmen and merchants down there were mere temporaries, mere inanimate things, conjured up like zombies to enhance the illusion. They did not need his pity. Nor did he need to pity himself. He knew that he should be grateful for the chance to behold these things. Someday, when this dream had ended and his hosts had returned him to the world of subways and computers and income tax and television networks, he would think of Mohenjo-daro as he had once beheld it, lofty walls of tightly woven dark brick under a heavy sky, and he would remember only its beauty.

Glancing back, he searched for Belilala and could not for a moment find her. Then he caught sight of her carefully descending a narrow staircase that angled down the inner face of the citadel wall.

“Belilala!” he called.

She paused and looked his way, shading her eyes from the sun with her hand. “Are you all right?”

“Where are you going?”

“To the baths,” she said. “Do you want to come?”

He nodded. “Yes. Wait for me, will you? I’ll be right there.” He began to run toward her along the top of the wall.

The baths were attached to the citadel: a great open tank the size of a large swimming pool, lined with bricks set on edge in gypsum mortar and waterproofed with asphalt, and eight smaller tanks just north of it in a kind of covered arcade. He supposed that in ancient times the whole complex had had some ritual purpose, the large tank used by common folk and the small chambers set aside for the private ablutions of priests or nobles. Now the baths were maintained, it seemed, entirely for the pleasure of visiting citizens. As Phillips came up the passageway that led to the main bath he saw fifteen or twenty of them lolling in the water or padding languidly about, while temporaries of the dark-skinned Mohenjo-daro type served them drinks and pungent little morsels of spiced meat as though this were some sort of luxury resort. Which was, he realized, exactly what it was. The temporaries wore white cotton loincloths; the citizens were naked. In his former life he had encountered that sort of casual public nudity a few times on visits to California and the south of France, and it had made him mildly uneasy. But he was growing accustomed to it here.

The changing rooms were tiny brick cubicles connected by rows of closely placed steps to the courtyard that surrounded the central tank. They entered one and Belilala swiftly slipped out of the loose cotton robe that she had worn since their arrival that morning. With arms folded she stood leaning against the wall, waiting for him. After a moment he dropped his own robe and followed her outside. He felt a little giddy, sauntering around naked in the open like this.

On the way to the main bathing area they passed the private baths. None of them seemed to be occupied. They were elegantly constructed chambers, with finely jointed brick floors and carefully designed runnels to drain excess water into the passageway that led to the primary drain. Phillips was struck with admiration for the cleverness of the prehistoric engineers. He peered into this chamber and that to see how the conduits and ventilating ducts were arranged, and when he came to the last room in the sequence he was surprised and embarrassed to discover that it was in use. A brawny grinning man, big-muscled, deep-chested, with exuberantly flowing shoulder-length red hair and a flamboyant, sharply tapering beard was thrashing about merrily with two women in the small tank. Phillips had a quick glimpse of a lively tangle of arms, legs, breasts, buttocks.

“Sorry,” he muttered. His cheeks reddened. Quickly he ducked out, blurting apologies as he went. “Didn’t realize the room was occupied—no wish to intrude—”

Belilala had proceeded on down the passageway. Phillips hurried after her. From behind him came peals of cheerful raucous booming laughter and high-pitched giggling and the sound of splashing water. Probably they had not even noticed him.

He paused a moment, puzzled, playing back in his mind that one startling glimpse. Something was not right. Those women, he was fairly sure, were citizens: little slender elfin dark-haired girlish creatures, the standard model. But the man? That great curling sweep of red hair? Not a citizen. Citizens did not affect shoulder-length hair. And red? Nor had he ever seen a citizen so burly, so powerfully muscular. Or one with a beard. But he could hardly be a temporary, either. Phillips could conceive no reason why there would be so Anglo-Saxon-looking a temporary at Mohenjo-daro; and it was unthinkable for a temporary to be frolicking like that with citizens, anyway.

“Charles?”

He looked up ahead. Belilala stood at the end of the passageway, outlined in a nimbus of brilliant sunlight. “Charles?” she said again. “Did you lose your way?”

“I’m right here behind you,” he said. “I’m coming.”

“Who did you meet in there?”

“A man with a beard.”

“With a what?”

“A beard,” he said. “Red hair growing on his face. I wonder who he is.”

“Nobody I know,” said Belilala. “The only one I know with hair on his face is you. And yours is black, and you shave it off every day.” She laughed. “Come along, now! I see some friends by the pool!”

He caught up with her, and they went hand in hand out into the courtyard. Immediately a waiter glided up to them, an obsequious little temporary with a tray of drinks. Phillips waved it away and headed for the pool. He felt terribly exposed: he imagined that the citizens disporting themselves here were staring intently at him, studying his hairy primitive body as though he were some mythical creature, a Minotaur, a werewolf, summoned up for their amusement. Belilala drifted off to talk to someone and he slipped into the water, grateful for the concealment it offered. It was deep, warm, comforting. With swift powerful strokes he breast-stroked from one end to the other.

A citizen perched elegantly on the pool’s rim smiled at him. “Ah, so you’ve come at last, Charles!” Char-less. Two syllables. Someone from Gioia’s set: Stengard, Hawk, Aramayne? He could not remember which one. They were all so much alike.

Phillips returned the man’s smile in a halfhearted, tentative way. He searched for something to say and finally asked, “Have you been here long?”

“Weeks. Perhaps months. What a splendid achievement this city is, eh, Charles? Such utter unity of mood—such a total statement of a uniquely single-minded esthetic—”

“Yes. Single-minded is the word,” Phillips said dryly.

“Gioia’s word, actually. Gioia’s phrase. I was merely quoting.”

Gioia. He felt as if he had been stabbed.

“You’ve spoken to Gioia lately?” he said.

“Actually, no. It was Hekna who saw her. You do remember Hekna, eh?” He nodded toward two naked women standing on the brick platform that bordered the pool, chatting, delicately nibbling morsels of meat. They could have been twins. “There is Hekna, with your Belilala.” Hekna, yes. So this must be Hawk, Phillips thought, unless there has been some recent shift of couples. “How sweet she is, your Belilala,” Hawk said. “Gioia chose very wisely when she picked her for you.”

Another stab: a much deeper one. “Is that how it was?” he said. “Gioia picked Belilala for me?”

“Why, of course!” Hawk seemed surprised. It went without saying, evidently. “What did you think? That Gioia would merely go off and leave you to fend for yourself?”

“Hardly. Not Gioia.”

“She’s very tender, very gentle, isn’t she?”

“You mean Belilala? Yes, very,” said Phillips carefully. “A dear woman, a wonderful woman. But of course I hope to get together with Gioia again soon.” He paused. “They say she’s been in Mohenjo-daro almost since it opened.”

“She was here, yes.”

“Was?”

“Oh, you know Gioia,” Hawk said lightly. “She’s moved along by now, naturally.”

Phillips leaned forward. “Naturally,” he said. Tension thickened his voice. “Where has she gone this time?”

“Timbuctoo, I think. Or New Chicago. I forget which one it was. She was telling us that she hoped to be in Timbuctoo for the closing-down party. But then Fenimon had some pressing reason for going to New Chicago. I can’t remember what they decided to do.” Hawk gestured sadly. “Either way, a pity that she left Mohenjo before the new visitor came. She had such a rewarding time with you, after all: I’m sure she’d have found much to learn from him also.”

The unfamiliar term twanged an alarm deep in Phillips’s consciousness. “Visitor?” he said, angling his head sharply toward Hawk. “What visitor do you mean?”

“You haven’t met him yet? Oh, of course, you’ve only just arrived.”

Phillips moistened his lips. “I think I may have seen him. Long red hair? Beard like this?”

“That’s the one! Willoughby, he’s called. He’s—what?—a Viking, a pirate, something like that. Tremendous vigor and force. Remarkable person. We should have many more visitors, I think. They’re far superior to temporaries, everyone agrees. Talking with a temporary is a little like talking to one’s self, wouldn’t you say? They give you no significant illumination. But a visitor—someone like this Willoughby—or like you, Charles—a visitor can be truly enlightening, a visitor can transform one’s view of reality—”

“Excuse me,” Phillips said. A throbbing began behind his forehead. “Perhaps we can continue this conversation later, yes?” He put the flats of his hands against the hot brick of the platform and hoisted himself swiftly from the pool. “At dinner, maybe—or afterward—yes? All right?” He set off at a quick half-trot back toward the passageway that led to the private baths.

As he entered the roofed part of the structure his throat grew dry, his breath suddenly came short. He padded quickly up the hall and peered into the little bath chamber. The bearded man was still there, sitting up in the tank, breast-high above the water, with one arm around each of the women. His eyes gleamed with fiery intensity in the dimness. He was grinning in marvelous self-satisfaction; he seemed to brim with intensity, confidence, gusto.

Let him be what I think he is, Phillips prayed. I have been alone among these people long enough.

“May I come in?” he asked.

“Aye, fellow!” cried the man in the tub thunderously. “By my troth, come ye in, and bring your lass as well! God’s teeth, I wot there’s room aplenty for more folk in this tub than we!”

At that great uproarious outcry Phillips felt a powerful surge of joy. What a joyous rowdy voice! How rich, how lusty, how totally uncitizenlike!

And those oddly archaic words! God’s teeth? By my troth? What sort of talk was that? What else but the good pure sonorous Elizabethan diction! Certainly it had something of the roll and fervor of Shakespeare about it. And spoken with—an Irish brogue, was it? No, not quite: it was English, but English spoken in no manner Phillips had ever heard.

Citizens did not speak that way. But a visitor might.

So it was true. Relief flooded Phillips’s soul. Not alone, then! Another relic of a former age—another wanderer—a companion in chaos, a brother in adversity—a fellow voyager, tossed even farther than he had been by the tempests of time—

The bearded man grinned heartily and beckoned to Phillips with a toss of his head. “Well, join us, join us, man! ’Tis good to see an English face again, amidst all these Moors and rogue Portugals! But what have ye done with thy lass? One can never have enough wenches, d’ye not agree?”

The force and vigor of him were extraordinary: almost too much so. He roared, he bellowed, he boomed. He was so very much what he ought to be that he seemed more a character out of some old pirate movie than anything else, so blustering, so real, that he seemed unreal. A stage Elizabethan, larger than life, a boisterous young Falstaff without the belly.

Hoarsely Phillips said, “Who are you?”

“Why, Ned Willoughby’s son Francis am I, of Plymouth. Late of the service of Her Most Protestant Majesty, but most foully abducted by the powers of darkness and cast away among these blackamoor Hindus, or whatever they be. And thyself?”

“Charles Phillips.” After a moment’s uncertainty he added, “I’m from New York.”

“New York? What place is that? In faith, man, I know it not!”

“A city in America.”

“A city in America, forsooth! What a fine fancy that is! In America, you say, and not on the Moon, or perchance underneath the sea?” To the women Willoughby said, “D’ye hear him? He comes from a city in America! With the face of an Englishman, though not the manner of one, and not quite the proper sort of speech. A city in America! A city. God’s blood, what will I hear next?”

Phillips trembled. Awe was beginning to take hold of him. This man had walked the streets of Shakespeare’s London, perhaps. He had clinked canisters with Marlowe or Essex or Walter Raleigh; he had watched the ships of the Armada wallowing in the Channel. It strained Phillips’s spirit to think of it. This strange dream in which he found himself was compounding its strangeness now. He felt like a weary swimmer assailed by heavy surf, winded, dazed. The hot close atmosphere of the baths was driving him toward vertigo. There could be no doubt of it any longer. He was not the only primitive—the only visitor—who was wandering loose in this fiftieth century. They were conducting other experiments as well. He gripped the sides of the door to steady himself and said, “When you speak of Her Most Protestant Majesty, it’s Elizabeth the First you mean, is that not so?”

“Elizabeth, aye! As to the First, that is true enough, but why trouble to name her thus? There is but one. First and Last, I do trow, and God save her, there is no other!”

Phillips studied the other man warily. He knew that he must proceed with care. A misstep at this point and he would forfeit any chance that Willoughby would take him seriously. How much metaphysical bewilderment, after all, could this man absorb? What did he know, what had anyone of his time known, of past and present and future and the notion that one might somehow move from one to the other as readily as one would go from Surrey to Kent? That was a twentieth-century idea, late nineteenth at best, a fantastical speculation that very likely no one had even considered before Wells had sent his time traveler off to stare at the reddened sun of the earth’s last twilight. Willoughby’s world was a world of Protestants and Catholics, of kings and queens, of tiny sailing vessels, of swords at the hip and ox-carts on the road: that world seemed to Phillips far more alien and distant than was this world of citizens and temporaries. The risk that Willoughby would not begin to understand him was great.

But this man and he were natural allies against a world they had never made. Phillips chose to take the risk.

“Elizabeth the First is the queen you serve,” he said. “There will be another of her name in England, in due time. Has already been, in fact.”

Willoughby shook his head like a puzzled lion. “Another Elizabeth, d’ye say?”

“A second one, and not much like the first. Long after your Virgin Queen, this one. She will reign in what you think of as the days to come. That I know without doubt.”

The Englishman peered at him and frowned. “You see the future? Are you a soothsayer, then? A necromancer, mayhap? Or one of the very demons that brought me to this place?”

“Not at all,” Phillips said gently. “Only a lost soul, like yourself.” He stepped into the little room and crouched by the side of the tank. The two citizen-women were staring at him in bland fascination. He ignored them. To Willoughby he said, “Do you have any idea where you are?”

The Englishman had guessed, rightly enough, that he was in India: “I do believe these little brown Moorish folk are of the Hindu sort,” he said. But that was as far as his comprehension of what had befallen him could go.

It had not occurred to him that he was no longer living in the sixteenth century. And of course he did not begin to suspect that this strange and somber brick city in which he found himself was a wanderer out of an era even more remote than his own. Was there any way, Phillips wondered, of explaining that to him?

He had been here only three days. He thought it was devils that had carried him off. “While I slept did they come for me,” he said. “Mephistophilis Sathanas, his henchmen seized me—God alone can say why—and swept me in a moment out to this torrid realm from England, where I had reposed among friends and family. For I was between one voyage and the next, you must understand, awaiting Drake and his ship—you know Drake, the glorious Francis? God’s blood, there’s a mariner for ye! We were to go to the Main again, he and I, but instead here I be in this other place—” Willoughby leaned close and said, “I ask you, soothsayer, how can it be, that a man go to sleep in Plymouth and wake up in India? It is passing strange, is it not?”

“That it is,” Phillips said.

“But he that is in the dance must needs dance on, though he do but hop, eh? So do I believe.” He gestured toward the two citizen-women. “And therefore to console myself in this pagan land I have found me some sport among these little Portugal women—”

“Portugal?” said Phillips.

“Why, what else can they be, but Portugals? Is it not the Portugals who control all these coasts of India? See, the people are of two sorts here, the blackamoors and the others, the fair-skinned ones, the lords and masters who lie here in these baths. If they be not Hindus, and I think they are not, then Portugals is what they must be.” He laughed and pulled the women against himself and rubbed his hands over their breasts as though they were fruits on a vine. “Is that not what you are, you little naked shameless Papist wenches? A pair of Portugals, eh?”

They giggled, but did not answer.

“No,” Phillips said. “This is India, but not the India you think you know. And these women are not Portuguese.”

“Not Portuguese?” Willoughby said, baffled.

“No more so than you. I’m quite certain of that.”

Willoughby stroked his beard. “I do admit I found them very odd, for Portugals. I have heard not a syllable of their Portugee speech on their lips. And it is strange also that they run naked as Adam and Eve in these baths, and allow me free plunder of their women, which is not the way of Portugals at home, God wot. But I thought me, this is India, they choose to live in another fashion here—”

“No,” Phillips said. “I tell you, these are not Portuguese, nor any other people of Europe who are known to you.”

“Prithee, who are they, then?”

Do it delicately, now, Phillips warned himself. Delicately.

He said, “It is not far wrong to think of them as spirits of some kind—demons, even. Or sorcerers who have magicked us out of our proper places in the world.” He paused, groping for some means to share with Willoughby, in a way that Willoughby might grasp, this mystery that had enfolded them. He drew a deep breath. “They’ve taken us not only across the sea,” he said, “but across the years as well. We have both been hauled, you and I, far into the days that are to come.”

Willoughby gave him a look of blank bewilderment.

“Days that are to come? Times yet unborn, d’ye mean? Why, I comprehend none of that!”

“Try to understand. We’re both castaways in the same boat, man! But there’s no way we can help each other if I can’t make you see—”

Shaking his head, Willoughby muttered, “In faith, good friend, I find your words the merest folly. Today is today, and tomorrow is tomorrow, and how can a man step from one to t’other until tomorrow be turned into today?”

“I have no idea,” said Phillips. Struggle was apparent on Willoughby’s face; but plainly he could perceive no more than the haziest outline of what Phillips was driving at, if that much. “But this I know,” he went on. “That your world and all that was in it is dead and gone. And so is mine, though I was born four hundred years after you, in the time of the second Elizabeth.”

Willoughby snorted scornfully. “Four hundred—”

“You must believe me!”

“Nay! Nay!”

“It’s the truth. Your time is only history to me. And mine and yours are history to them—ancient history. They call us visitors, but what we are is captives.” Phillips felt himself quivering in the intensity of his effort. He was aware how insane this must sound to Willoughby. It was beginning to sound insane to him. “They’ve stolen us out of our proper times—seizing us like gypsies in the night—”

“Fie, man! You rave with lunacy!”

Phillips shook his head. He reached out and seized Willoughby tightly by the wrist. “I beg you, listen to me!” The citizen-women were watching closely, whispering to one another behind their hands, laughing. “Ask them!” Phillips cried. “Make them tell you what century this is! The sixteenth, do you think? Ask them!”

“What century could it be, but the sixteenth of our Lord?”

“They will tell you it is the fiftieth.”

Willoughby looked at him pityingly. “Man, man, what a sorry thing thou art! The fiftieth, indeed!” He laughed. “Fellow, listen to me, now. There is but one Elizabeth, safe upon her throne in Westminster. This is India. The year is Anno 1591. Come, let us you and I steal a ship from these Portugals, and make our way back to England, and peradventure you may get from there to your America—”

“There is no England.”

“Ah, can you say that and not be mad?”

“The cities and nations we knew are gone. These people live like magicians, Francis.” There was no use holding anything back now, Phillips thought leadenly. He knew that he had lost. “They conjure up places of long ago, and build them here and there to suit their fancy, and when they are bored with them they destroy them, and start anew. There is no England. Europe is empty, featureless, void. Do you know what cities there are? There are only five in all the world. There is Alexandria of Egypt. There is Timbuctoo in Africa. There is New Chicago in America. There is a great city in China—in Cathay, I suppose you would say. And there is this place, which they call Mohenjo-daro, and which is far more ancient than Greece, than Rome, than Babylon.”

Quietly Willoughby said, “Nay. This is mere absurdity. You say we are in some far tomorrow, and then you tell me we are dwelling in some city of long ago.”

“A conjuration, only,” Phillips said in desperation. “A likeness of that city. Which these folk have fashioned somehow for their own amusement. Just as we are here, you and I: to amuse them. Only to amuse them.”

“You are completely mad.”

“Come with me, then. Talk with the citizens by the great pool. Ask them what year this is; ask them about England; ask them how you come to be here.” Once again Phillips grasped Willoughby’s wrist. “We should be allies. If we work together, perhaps we can discover some way to get ourselves out of this place, and—”

“Let me be, fellow.”

“Please—”

“Let me be!” roared Willoughby, and pulled his arm free. His eyes were stark with rage. Rising in the tank, he looked about furiously as though searching for a weapon. The citizen-women shrank back away from him, though at the same time they seemed captivated by the big man’s fierce outburst. “Go to, get you to Bedlam! Let me be, madman! Let me be!”

Dismally Phillips roamed the dusty unpaved streets of Mohenjo-daro alone for hours. His failure with Willoughby had left him bleak-spirited and somber: he had hoped to stand back to back with the Elizabethan against the citizens, but he saw now that that was not to be. He had bungled things; or, more likely, it had been impossible ever to bring Willoughby to see the truth of their predicament.

In the stifling heat he went at random through the confusing congested lanes of flat-roofed windowless houses and blank featureless walls until he emerged into a broad marketplace. The life of the city swirled madly around him: the pseudo-life, rather, the intricate interactions of the thousands of temporaries who were nothing more than windup dolls set in motion to provide the illusion that pre-Vedic India was still a going concern. Here vendors sold beautiful little carved stone seals portraying tigers and monkeys and strange humped cattle, and women bargained vociferously with craftsmen for ornaments of ivory, gold, copper, and bronze. Weary-looking women squatted behind immense mounds of newly made pottery, pinkish red with black designs. No one paid any attention to him. He was the outsider here, neither citizen nor temporary. They belonged.

He went on, passing the huge granaries where workmen ceaselessly unloaded carts of wheat and others pounded grain on great circular brick platforms. He drifted into a public restaurant thronging with joyless silent people standing elbow to elbow at small brick counters, and was given a flat round piece of bread, a sort of tortilla or chapatti, in which was stuffed some spiced mincemeat that stung his lips like fire. Then he moved onward down a wide shallow timbered staircase into the lower part of the city, where the peasantry lived in cell-like rooms packed together as though in hives.

It was an oppressive city, but not a squalid one. The intensity of the concern with sanitation amazed him: wells and fountains and public privies everywhere, and brick drains running from each building, leading to covered cesspools. There was none of the open sewage and pestilent gutters that he knew still could be found in the India of his own time. He wondered whether ancient Mohenjo-daro had in truth been so fastidious. Perhaps the citizens had redesigned the city to suit their own ideals of cleanliness. No: most likely what he saw was authentic, he decided, a function of the same obsessive discipline that had given the city its rigidity of form. If Mohenjo-daro had been a verminous filthy hole, the citizens probably would have re-created it in just that way, and loved it for its fascinating reeking filth.

Not that he had ever noticed an excessive concern with authenticity on the part of the citizens; and Mohenjo-daro, like all the other restored cities he had visited, was full of the usual casual anachronisms. Phillips saw images of Shiva and Krishna here and there on the walls of buildings he took to be temples, and the benign face of the mother-goddess Kali loomed in the plazas. Surely those deities had arisen in India long after the collapse of the Mohenjo-daro civilization. Were the citizens indifferent to such matters of chronology? Or did they take a certain naughty pleasure in mixing the eras—a mosque and a church in Greek Alexandria, Hindu gods in prehistoric Mohenjo-daro? Perhaps their records of the past had become contaminated with errors over the thousands of years. He would not have been surprised to see banners bearing portraits of Gandhi and Nehru being carried in procession through the streets. And there were phantasms and chimeras at large here again, too, as if the citizens were untroubled by the boundary between history and myth: little fat elephant-headed Ganeshas blithely plunging their trunks into water fountains, a six-armed three-headed woman sunning herself on a brick terrace. Why not? Surely that was the motto of these people: Why not, why not, why not? They could do as they pleased, and they did. Yet Gioia had said to him, long ago, “Limits are very important.” In what, Phillips wondered, did they limit themselves, other than the number of their cities? Was there a quota, perhaps, on the number of “visitors” they allowed themselves to kidnap from the past? Until today he had thought he was the only one; now he knew there was at least one other; possibly there were more elsewhere, a step or two ahead or behind him, making the circuit with the citizens who traveled endlessly from New Chicago to Chang-an to Alexandria. We should join forces, he thought, and compel them to send us back to our rightful eras. Compel? How? File a class-action suit, maybe? Demonstrate in the streets? Sadly he thought of his failure to make common cause with Willoughby. We are natural allies, he thought. Together perhaps we might have won some compassion from these people. But to Willoughby it must be literally unthinkable that Good Queen Bess and her subjects were sealed away on the far side of a barrier hundreds of centuries thick. He would prefer to believe that England was just a few months’ voyage away around the Cape of Good Hope, and that all he need do was commandeer a ship and set sail for home. Poor Willoughby: probably he would never see his home again.

The thought came to Phillips suddenly:

Neither will you.

And then, after it:

If you could go home, would you really want to?

One of the first things he had realized here was that he knew almost nothing substantial about his former existence. His mind was well stocked with details on life in twentieth-century New York, to be sure; but of himself he could say not much more than that he was Charles Phillips and had come from 1984. Profession? Age? Parents’ names? Did he have a wife? Children? A cat, a dog, hobbies? No data: none. Possibly the citizens had stripped such things from him when they brought him here, to spare him from the pain of separation. They might be capable of that kindness. Knowing so little of what he had lost, could he truly say that he yearned for it? Willoughby seemed to remember much more of his former life, somehow, and longed for it all the more intensely. He was spared that. Why not stay here, and go on and on from city to city, sightseeing all of time past as the citizens conjured it back into being? Why not? Why not? The chances were that he had no choice about it, anyway.

He made his way back up toward the citadel and to the baths once more. He felt a little like a ghost, haunting a city of ghosts.

Belilala seemed unaware that he had been gone for most of the day. She sat by herself on the terrace of the baths, placidly sipping some thick milky beverage that had been sprinkled with a dark spice. He shook his head when she offered him some.

“Do you remember I mentioned that I saw a man with red hair and a beard this morning?” Phillips said. “He’s a visitor. Hawk told me that.”

“Is he?” Belilala asked.

“From a time about four hundred years before mine. I talked with him. He thinks he was brought here by demons.” Phillips gave her a searching look. “I’m a visitor, too, isn’t that so?”

“Of course, love.”

“And how was I brought here? By demons also?”

Belilala smiled indifferently. “You’d have to ask someone else. Hawk, perhaps. I haven’t looked into these things very deeply.”

“I see. Are there many visitors here, do you know?”

A languid shrug. “Not many, no, not really. I’ve only heard of three or four besides you. There may be others by now, I suppose.” She rested her hand lightly on his. “Are you having a good time in Mohenjo, Charles?”

He let her question pass as though he had not heard it.

“I asked Hawk about Gioia,” he said.

“Oh?”

“He told me that she’s no longer here, that she’s gone on to Timbuctoo or New Chicago, he wasn’t sure which.”

“That’s quite likely. As everybody knows, Gioia rarely stays in the same place very long.”

Phillips nodded. “You said the other day that Gioia is a short-timer. That means she’s going to grow old and die, doesn’t it?”

“I thought you understood that, Charles.”

“Whereas you will not age? Nor Hawk, nor Stengard, nor any of the rest of your set?”

“We will live as long as we wish,” she said. “But we will not age, no.”

“What makes a person a short-timer?”

“They’re born that way, I think. Some missing gene, some extra gene—I don’t actually know. It’s extremely uncommon. Nothing can be done to help them. It’s very slow, the aging. But it can’t be halted.”

Phillips nodded. “That must be very disagreeable,” he said. “To find yourself one of the few people growing old in a world where everyone stays young. No wonder Gioia is so impatient. No wonder she runs around from place to place. No wonder she attached herself so quickly to the barbaric hairy visitor from the twentieth century, who comes from a time when everybody was a short-timer. She and I have something in common, wouldn’t you say?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“We understand aging. We understand death. Tell me: is Gioia likely to die very soon, Belilala?”

“Soon? Soon?” She gave him a wide-eyed childlike stare. “What is soon? How can I say? What you think of as soon and what I think of as soon are not the same things, Charles.” Then her manner changed: she seemed to be hearing what he was saying for the first time. Softly she said, “No, no, Charles. I don’t think she will die very soon.”

“When she left me in Chang-an, was it because she had become bored with me?”

Belilala shook her head. “She was simply restless. It had nothing to do with you. She was never bored with you.”

“Then I’m going to go looking for her. Wherever she may be, Timbuctoo, New Chicago, I’ll find her. Gioia and I belong together.”

“Perhaps you do,” said Belilala. “Yes. Yes, I think you really do.” She sounded altogether unperturbed, unrejected, unbereft. “By all means, Charles. Go to her. Follow her. Find her. Wherever she may be.”

They had already begun dismantling Timbuctoo when Phillips got there. While he was still high overhead, his flitterflitter hovering above the dusty tawny plain where the River Niger met the sands of the Sahara, a surge of keen excitement rose in him as he looked down at the square gray flat-roofed mud brick buildings of the great desert capital. But when he landed he found gleaming metal-skinned robots swarming everywhere, a horde of them scuttling about like giant shining insects, pulling the place apart.

He had not known about the robots before. So that was how all these miracles were carried out, Phillips realized: an army of obliging machines. He imagined them bustling up out of the earth whenever their services were needed, emerging from some sterile subterranean storehouse to put together Venice or Thebes or Knossos or Houston or whatever place was required, down to the finest detail, and then at some later time returning to undo everything that they had fashioned. He watched them now, diligently pulling down the adobe walls, demolishing the heavy metal-studded gates, bulldozing the amazing labyrinth of alleyways and thoroughfares, sweeping away the market. On his last visit to Timbuctoo that market had been crowded with a horde of veiled Tuaregs and swaggering Moors, black Sudanese, shrewd-faced Syrian traders, all of them busily dickering for camels, horses, donkeys, slabs of salt, huge green melons, silver bracelets, splendid vellum Korans. They were all gone now, that picturesque crowd of swarthy temporaries. Nor were there any citizens to be seen. The dust of destruction choked the air. One of the robots came up to Phillips and said in a dry crackling insect-voice, “You ought not to be here. This city is closed.”

He stared at the flashing, buzzing band of scanners and sensors across the creature’s glittering tapered snout. “I’m trying to find someone, a citizen who may have been here recently. Her name is—”

“This city is closed,” the robot repeated inexorably.

They would not let him stay as much as an hour. There is no food here, the robot said, no water, no shelter. This is not a place any longer. You may not stay. You may not stay. You may not stay.

This is not a place any longer.

Perhaps he could find her in New Chicago, then. He took to the air again, soaring northward and westward over the vast emptiness. The land below him curved away into the hazy horizon, bare, sterile. What had they done with the vestiges of the world that had gone before? Had they turned their gleaming metal beetles loose to clean everything away? Were there no ruins of genuine antiquity anywhere? No scrap of Rome, no shard of Jerusalem, no stump of Fifth Avenue? It was all so barren down there: an empty stage, waiting for its next set to be built. He flew on a great arc across the jutting hump of Africa and on into what he supposed was southern Europe: the little vehicle did all the work, leaving him to doze or stare as he wished. Now and again he saw another flitterflitter pass by, far away, a dark distant winged teardrop outlined against the hard clarity of the sky. He wished there was some way of making radio contact with them, but he had no idea how to go about it. Not that he had anything he wanted to say; he wanted only to hear a human voice. He was utterly isolated. He might just as well have been the last living man on Earth. He closed his eyes and thought of Gioia.

“Like this?” Phillips asked. In an ivory-paneled oval room sixty stories above the softly glowing streets of New Chicago he touched a small cool plastic canister to his upper lip and pressed the stud at its base. He heard a foaming sound; and then blue vapor rose to his nostrils.

“Yes,” Cantilena said. “That’s right.”

He detected a faint aroma of cinnamon, cloves, and something that might almost have been broiled lobster. Then a spasm of dizziness hit him and visions rushed through his head: Gothic cathedrals, the Pyramids, Central Park under fresh snow, the harsh brick warrens of Mohenjo-daro, and fifty thousand other places all at once, a wild roller-coaster ride through space and time. It seemed to go on for centuries. But finally his head cleared and he looked about, blinking, realizing that the whole thing had taken only a moment. Cantilena still stood at his elbow. The other citizens in the room—fifteen, twenty of them—had scarcely moved. The strange little man with the celadon skin over by the far wall continued to stare at him.

“Well?” Cantilena asked. “What did you think?”

“Incredible.”

“And very authentic. It’s an actual New Chicagoan drug. The exact formula. Would you like another?”

“Not just yet,” Phillips said uneasily. He swayed and had to struggle for his balance. Sniffing that stuff might not have been such a wise idea, he thought.

He had been in New Chicago a week, or perhaps it was two, and he was still suffering from the peculiar disorientation that that city always aroused in him. This was the fourth time that he had come here, and it had been the same every time. New Chicago was the only one of the reconstructed cities of this world that in its original incarnation had existed after his own era. To him it was an outpost of the incomprehensible future; to the citizens it was a quaint simulacrum of the archaeological past. That paradox left him aswirl with impossible confusions and tensions.

What had happened to old Chicago was of course impossible for him to discover. Vanished without a trace, that was clear: no Water Tower, no Marina City, no Hancock Center, no Tribune building, not a fragment, not an atom. But it was hopeless to ask any of the million-plus inhabitants of New Chicago about their city’s predecessor. They were only temporaries; they knew no more than they had to know, and all that they had to know was how to go through the motions of whatever it was that they did by way of creating the illusion that this was a real city. They had no need of knowing ancient history.

Nor was he likely to find out anything from a citizen, of course. Citizens did not seem to bother much about scholarly matters. Phillips had no reason to think that the world was anything other than an amusement park to them. Somewhere, certainly, there had to be those who specialized in the serious study of the lost civilizations of the past—for how, otherwise, would these uncanny reconstructed cities be brought into being? “The planners,” he had once heard Nissandra or Aramayne say, “are already deep into their Byzantium research.” But who were the planners? He had no idea. For all he knew, they were the robots. Perhaps the robots were the real masters of this whole era, who created the cities not primarily for the sake of amusing the citizens but in their own diligent attempt to comprehend the life of the world that had passed away. A wild speculation, yes; but not without some plausibility, he thought.

He felt oppressed by the party gaiety all about him. “I need some air,” he said to Cantilena, and headed toward the window. It was the merest crescent, but a breeze came through. He looked out at the strange city below.

New Chicago had nothing in common with the old one but its name. They had built it, at least, along the western shore of a large inland lake that might even be Lake Michigan, although when he had flown over it had seemed broader and less elongated than the lake he remembered. The city itself was a lacy fantasy of slender pastel-hued buildings rising at odd angles and linked by a webwork of gently undulating aerial bridges. The streets were long parentheses that touched the lake at their northern and southern ends and arched gracefully westward in the middle. Between each of the great boulevards ran a track for public transportation—sleek aquamarine bubble-vehicles gliding on soundless wheels—and flanking each of the tracks were lush strips of park. It was beautiful, astonishingly so, but insubstantial. The whole thing seemed to have been contrived from sunbeams and silk.

A soft voice beside him said, “Are you becoming ill?”

Phillips glanced around. The celadon man stood beside him: a compact, precise person, vaguely Oriental in appearance. His skin was of a curious gray-green hue like no skin Phillips had ever seen, and it was extraordinarily smooth in texture, as though he were made of fine porcelain.

He shook his head. “Just a little queasy,” he said. “This city always scrambles me.”

“I suppose it can be disconcerting,” the little man replied. His tone was furry and veiled, the inflection strange. There was something feline about him. He seemed sinewy, unyielding, almost menacing. “Visitor, are you?”

Phillips studied him a moment. “Yes,” he said.

“So am I, of course.”

“Are you?”

“Indeed.” The little man smiled. “What’s your locus? Twentieth century? Twenty-first at the latest, I’d say.”

“I’m from 1984. A.D. 1984.”

Another smile, a self-satisfied one. “Not a bad guess, then.” A brisk tilt of the head. “Y’ang-Yeovil.”

“Pardon me?” Phillips said.

“Y’ang-Yeovil. It is my name. Formerly Colonel Y’ang-Yeovil of the Third Septentriad.”

“Is that on some other planet?” asked Phillips, feeling a bit dazed.

“Oh, no, not at all,” Y’ang-Yeovil said pleasantly. “This very world, I assure you. I am quite of human origin. Citizen of the Republic of Upper Han, native of the city of Port Ssu. And you—forgive me—your name—?”

“I’m sorry. Phillips. Charles Phillips. From New York City, once upon a time.”

“Ah, New York!” Y’ang-Yeovil’s face lit with a glimmer of recognition that quickly faded. “New York—New York—it was very famous, that I know—”

This is very strange, Phillips thought. He felt greater compassion for poor bewildered Francis Willoughby now. This man comes from a time so far beyond my own that he barely knows of New York—he must be a contemporary of the real New Chicago, in fact; I wonder whether he finds this version authentic—and yet to the citizens this Y’ang-Yeovil too is just a primitive, a curio out of antiquity—

“New York was the largest city of the United States of America,” Phillips said.

“Of course. Yes. Very famous.”

“But virtually forgotten by the time the Republic of Upper Han came into existence, I gather.”

Y’ang-Yeovil said, looking uncomfortable, “There were disturbances between your time and mine. But by no means should you take from my words the impression that your city was—”

Sudden laughter resounded across the room. Five or six newcomers had arrived at the party. Phillips stared, gasped, gaped. Surely that was Stengard—and Aramayne beside him—and that other woman, half hidden behind them—

“If you’ll pardon me a moment—” Phillips said, turning abruptly away from Y’ang-Yeovil. “Please excuse me. Someone just coming in—a person I’ve been trying to find ever since—”

He hurried toward her.

“Gioia?” he called. “Gioia, it’s me! Wait! Wait!”

Stengard was in the way. Aramayne, turning to take a handful of the little vapor-sniffers from Cantilena, blocked him also. Phillips pushed through them as though they were not there. Gioia, halfway out the door, halted and looked toward him like a frightened deer.

“Don’t go,” he said. He took her hand in his.

He was startled by her appearance. How long had it been since their strange parting on that night of mysteries in Chang-an? A year? A year and a half? So he believed. Or had he lost all track of time? Were his perceptions of the passing of the months in this world that unreliable? She seemed at least ten or fifteen years older. Maybe she really was; maybe the years had been passing for him here as in a dream, and he had never known it. She looked strained, faded, worn. Out of a thinner and strangely altered face her eyes blazed at him almost defiantly, as though saying, See? See how ugly I have become?

He said, “I’ve been hunting for you for—I don’t know how long it’s been, Gioia. In Mohenjo, in Timbuctoo, now here. I want to be with you again.”

“It isn’t possible.”

“Belilala explained everything to me in Mohenjo. I know that you’re a short-timer—I know what that means, Gioia. But what of it? So you’re beginning to age a little. So what? So you’ll only have three or four hundred years, instead of forever. Don’t you think I know what it means to be a short-timer? I’m just a simple ancient man of the twentieth century, remember? Sixty, seventy, eighty years is all we would get. You and I suffer from the same malady, Gioia. That’s what drew you to me in the first place. I’m certain of that. That’s why we belong with each other now. However much time we have, we can spend the rest of it together, don’t you see?”

“You’re the one who doesn’t see, Charles,” she said softly.

“Maybe. Maybe I still don’t understand a damned thing about this place. Except that you and I—that I love you—that I think you love me—”

“I love you, yes. But you don’t understand. It’s precisely because I love you that you and I—you and I can’t—”

With a despairing sigh she slid her hand free of his grasp. He reached for her again, but she shook him off and backed up quickly into the corridor.

“Gioia?”

“Please,” she said. “No. I would never have come here if I knew you were here. Don’t come after me. Please. Please.”

She turned and fled.

He stood looking after her for a long moment. Cantilena and Aramayne appeared, and smiled at him as if nothing at all had happened. Cantilena offered him a vial of some sparkling amber fluid. He refused with a brusque gesture. Where do I go now, he wondered? What do I do? He wandered back into the party.

Y’ang-Yeovil glided to his side. “You are in great distress,” the little man murmured.

Phillips glared. “Let me be.”

“Perhaps I could be of some help.”

“There’s no help possible,” said Phillips. He swung about and plucked one of the vials from a tray and gulped its contents. It made him feel as if there were two of him, standing on either side of Y’ang-Yeovil. He gulped another. Now there were four of him. “I’m in love with a citizen,” he blurted. It seemed to him that he was speaking in chorus.

“Love. Ah. And does she love you?”

“So I thought. So I think. But she’s a short-timer. Do you know what that means? She’s not immortal like the others. She ages. She’s beginning to look old. And so she’s been running away from me. She doesn’t want me to see her changing. She thinks it’ll disgust me, I suppose. I tried to remind her just now that I’m not immortal either, that she and I could grow old together, but she—”

“Oh, no,” Y’ang-Yeovil said quietly. “Why do you think you will age? Have you grown any older in all the time you have been here?”

Phillips was nonplussed. “Of course I have. I—I—”

“Have you?” Y’ang-Yeovil smiled. “Here. Look at yourself.” He did something intricate with his fingers and a shimmering zone of mirrorlike light appeared between them. Phillips stared at his reflection. A youthful face stared back at him. It was true, then. He had simply not thought about it. How many years had he spent in this world? The time had simply slipped by: a great deal of time, though he could not calculate how much. They did not seem to keep close count of it here, nor had he. But it must have been many years, he thought. All that endless travel up and down the globe—so many cities had come and gone—Rio, Rome, Asgard, those were the first three that came to mind—and there were others; he could hardly remember every one. Years. His face had not changed at all. Time had worked its harshness on Gioia, yes, but not on him.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why am I not aging?”

“Because you are not real,” said Y’ang-Yeovil. “Are you unaware of that?”

Phillips blinked. “Not—real?”

“Did you think you were lifted bodily out of your own time?” the little man asked. “Ah, no, no, there is no way for them to do such a thing. We are not actual time travelers: not you, not I, not any of the visitors. I thought you were aware of that. But perhaps your era is too early for a proper understanding of these things. We are very cleverly done, my friend. We are ingenious constructs, marvelously stuffed with the thoughts and attitudes and events of our own times. We are their finest achievement, you know: far more complex even than one of these cities. We are a step beyond the temporaries—more than a step, a great deal more. They do only what they are instructed to do, and their range is very narrow. They are nothing but machines, really. Whereas we are autonomous. We move about by our own will; we think, we talk, we even, so it seems, fall in love. But we will not age. How could we age? We are not real. We are mere artificial webworks of mental responses. We are mere illusions, done so well that we deceive even ourselves. You did not know that? Indeed, you did not know?”

He was airborne, touching destination buttons at random. Somehow he found himself heading back toward Timbuctoo. This city is closed. This is not a place any longer. It did not matter to him. Why should anything matter?

Fury and a choking sense of despair rose within him. I am software, Phillips thought. I am nothing but software.

Not real. Very cleverly done. An ingenious construct. A mere illusion.

No trace of Timbuctoo was visible from the air. He landed anyway. The gray sandy earth was smooth, unturned, as though there had never been anything there. A few robots were still about, handling whatever final chores were required in the shutting-down of a city. Two of them scuttled up to him. Huge bland gleaming silver-skinned insects, not friendly.

“There is no city here,” they said. “This is not a permissible place.”

“Permissible by whom?”

“There is no reason for you to be here.”

“There’s no reason for me to be anywhere,” Phillips said. The robots stirred, made uneasy humming sounds and ominous clicks, waved their antennae about. They seemed troubled, he thought. They seem to dislike my attitude. Perhaps I run some risk of being taken off to the home for unruly software for debugging. “I’m leaving now,” he told them. “Thank you. Thank you very much.” He backed away from them and climbed into his flitterflitter. He touched more destination buttons.

We move about by our own will. We think, we talk, we even fall in love.

He landed in Chang-an. This time there was no reception committee waiting for him at the Gate of Brilliant Virtue. The city seemed larger and more resplendent: new pagodas, new palaces. It felt like winter: a chilly cutting wind was blowing. The sky was cloudless and dazzlingly bright. At the steps of the Silver Terrace he encountered Francis Willoughby, a great hulking figure in magnificent brocaded robes, with two dainty little temporaries, pretty as jade statuettes, engulfed in his arms. “Miracles and wonders! The silly lunatic fellow is here, too!” Willoughby roared. “Look, look, we are come to far Cathay, you and I!”

We are nowhere, Phillips thought. We are mere illusions, done so well that we deceive even ourselves.

To Willoughby he said, “You look like an emperor in those robes, Francis.”

“Aye, like Prester John!” Willoughby cried. “Like Tamburlaine himself! Aye, am I not majestic?” He slapped Phillips gaily on the shoulder, a rough playful poke that spun him halfway about, coughing and wheezing. “We flew in the air, as the eagles do, as the demons do, as the angels do! Soared like angels! Like angels!” He came close, looming over Phillips. “I would have gone to England, but the wench Belilala said there was an enchantment on me that would keep me from England just now; and so we voyaged to Cathay. Tell me this, fellow, will you go witness for me when we see England again? Swear that all that has befallen us did in truth befall? For I fear they will say I am as mad as Marco Polo, when I tell them of flying to Cathay.”

“One madman backing another?” Phillips asked. “What can I tell you? You still think you’ll reach England, do you?” Rage rose to the surface in him, bubbling hot. “Ah, Francis, Francis, do you know your Shakespeare? Did you go to the plays? We aren’t real. We aren’t real. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, the two of us. That’s all we are. O brave new world! What England? Where? There’s no England. There’s no Francis Willoughby. There’s no Charles Phillips. What we are is—”

“Let him be, Charles,” a cool voice cut in.

He turned. Belilala, in the robes of an empress, coming down the steps of the Silver Terrace.

“I know the truth,” he said bitterly. “Y’ang-Yeovil told me. The visitor from the twenty-fifth century. I saw him in New Chicago.”

“Did you see Gioia there, too?” Belilala asked.

“Briefly. She looks much older.”

“Yes. I know. She was here recently.”

“And has gone on, I suppose?”

“To Mohenjo again, yes. Go after her, Charles. Leave poor Francis alone. I told her to wait for you. I told her that she needs you, and you need her.”

“Very kind of you. But what good is it, Belilala? I don’t even exist. And she’s going to die.”

“You exist. How can you doubt that you exist? You feel, don’t you? You suffer. You love. You love Gioia: is that not so? And you are loved by Gioia. Would Gioia love what is not real?”

“You think she loves me?”

“I know she does. Go to her, Charles. Go. I told her to wait for you in Mohenjo.”

Phillips nodded numbly. What was there to lose?

“Go to her,” said Belilala again. “Now.”

“Yes,” Phillips said. “I’ll go now.” He turned to Willoughby. “If ever we meet in London, friend, I’ll testify for you. Fear nothing. All will be well, Francis.”

He left them and set his course for Mohenjo-daro, half expecting to find the robots already tearing it down. Mohenjo-daro was still there, no lovelier than before. He went to the baths, thinking he might find Gioia there. She was not; but he came upon Nissandra, Stengard, Fenimon. “She has gone to Alexandria,” Fenimon told him. “She wants to see it one last time, before they close it.”

“They’re almost ready to open Constantinople,” Stengard explained. “The capital of Byzantium, you know, the great city by the Golden Horn. They’ll take Alexandria away, you understand, when Byzantium opens. They say it’s going to be marvelous. We’ll see you there for the opening, naturally?”

“Naturally,” Phillips said.

He flew to Alexandria. He felt lost and weary. All this is hopeless folly, he told himself. I am nothing but a puppet jerking about on its strings. But somewhere above the shining breast of the Arabian Sea the deeper implications of something that Belilala had said to him started to sink in, and he felt his bitterness, his rage, his despair, all suddenly beginning to leave him. You exist. How can you doubt that you exist? Would Gioia love what is not real? Of course. Of course. Y’ang-Yeovil had been wrong: visitors were something more than mere illusions. Indeed, Y’ang-Yeovil had voiced the truth of their condition without understanding what he was really saying: We think, we talk, we fall in love. Yes. That was the heart of the situation. The visitors might be artificial, but they were not unreal. Belilala had been trying to tell him that just the other night. You suffer. You love. You love Gioia. Would Gioia love what is not real? Surely he was real, or at any rate real enough. What he was was something strange, something that would probably have been all but incomprehensible to the twentieth-century people whom he had been designed to simulate. But that did not mean that he was unreal. Did one have to be of woman born to be real? No. No. No. His kind of reality was a sufficient reality. He had no need to be ashamed of it. And, understanding that, he understood that Gioia did not need to grow old and die. There was a way by which she could be saved, if only she would embrace it. If only she would.

When he landed in Alexandria he went immediately to the hotel on the slopes of the Paneium where they had stayed on their first visit, so very long ago; and there she was, sitting quietly on a patio with a view of the harbor and the Lighthouse. There was something calm and resigned about the way she sat. She had given up. She did not even have the strength to flee from him any longer.

“Gioia,” he said gently.

She looked older than she had in New Chicago. Her face was drawn and sallow and her eyes seemed sunken; and she was not even bothering these days to deal with the white strands that stood out in stark contrast against the darkness of her hair. He sat down beside her and put his hand over hers and looked out toward the obelisks, the palaces, the temples, the Lighthouse. At length he said, “I know what I really am now.”

“Do you, Charles?” She sounded very far away.

“In my age we called it software. All I am is a set of commands, responses, cross-references, operating some sort of artificial body. It’s infinitely better software then we could have imagined. But we were only just beginning to learn how, after all. They pumped me full of twentieth-century reflexes. The right moods, the right appetites, the right irrationalities, the right sort of combativeness. Somebody knows a lot about what it was like to be a twentieth-century man. They did a good job with Willoughby, too, all that Elizabethan rhetoric and swagger. And I suppose they got Y’ang-Yeovil right. He seems to think so: who better to judge? The twenty-fifth century, the Republic of Upper Han, people with gray-green skin, half Chinese and half Martian for all I know. Somebody knows. Somebody here is very good at programming, Gioia.”

She was not looking at him.

“I feel frightened, Charles,” she said in that same distant way.

“Of me? Of the things I’m saying?”

“No, not of you. Don’t you see what has happened to me?”

“I see you. There are changes.”

“I lived a long time wondering when the changes would begin. I thought maybe they wouldn’t, not really. Who wants to believe they’ll get old? But it started when we were in Alexandria that first time. In Chang-an it got much worse. And now—now—”

He said abruptly, “Stengard tells me they’ll be opening Constantinople very soon.”

“So?”

“Don’t you want to be there when it opens?”

“I’m becoming old and ugly, Charles.”

“We’ll go to Constantinople together. We’ll leave tomorrow, eh? What do you say? We’ll charter a boat. It’s a quick little hop, right across the Mediterranean. Sailing to Byzantium! There was a poem, you know, in my time. Not forgotten, I guess, because they’ve programmed it into me. All these thousands of years, and someone still remembers old Yeats. The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees. Come with me to Byzantium, Gioia.”

She shrugged. “Looking like this? Getting more hideous every hour? While they stay young forever? While you—” She faltered; her voice cracked; she fell silent.

“Finish the sentence, Gioia.”

“Please. Let me alone.”

“You were going to say, ‘While you stay young forever, too, Charles,’ isn’t that it? You knew all along that I was never going to change. I didn’t know that, but you did.”

“Yes. I knew. I pretended that it wasn’t true—that as I aged, you’d age, too. It was very foolish of me. In Chang-an, when I first began to see the real signs of it—that was when I realized I couldn’t stay with you any longer. Because I’d look at you, always young, always remaining the same age, and I’d look at myself, and—” She gestured, palms upward. “So I gave you to Belilala and ran away.”

“All so unnecessary, Gioia.”

“I didn’t think it was.”

“But you don’t have to grow old. Not if you don’t want to!”

“Don’t be cruel, Charles,” she said tonelessly. “There’s no way of escaping what I have.”

“But there is,” he said.

“You know nothing about these things.”

“Not very much, no,” he said. “But I see how it can be done. Maybe it’s a primitive simpleminded twentieth-century sort of solution, but I think it ought to work. I’ve been playing with the idea ever since I left Mohenjo. Tell me this, Gioia: Why can’t you go to them, to the programmers, to the artificers, the planners, whoever they are, the ones who create the cities and the temporaries and the visitors. And have yourself made into something like me!”

She looked up, startled. “What are you saying?”

“They can cobble up a twentieth-century man out of nothing more than fragmentary records and make him plausible, can’t they? Or an Elizabethan, or anyone else of any era at all, and he’s authentic, he’s convincing. So why couldn’t they do an even better job with you? Produce a Gioia so real that even Gioia can’t tell the difference? But a Gioia that will never age—a Gioia-construct, a Gioia-program, a visitor-Gioia! Why not? Tell me why not, Gioia.”

She was trembling. “I’ve never heard of doing any such thing!”

“But don’t you think it’s possible?”

“How would I know?”

“Of course it’s possible. If they can create visitors, they can take a citizen and duplicate her in such a way that—”

“It’s never been done. I’m sure of it. I can’t imagine any citizen agreeing to any such thing. To give up the body—to let yourself be turned into—into—”

She shook her head, but it seemed to be a gesture of astonishment as much as of negation.

He said, “Sure. To give up the body. Your natural body, your aging, shrinking, deteriorating short-timer body. What’s so awful about that?”

She was very pale. “This is craziness, Charles. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me.”

“You can’t possibly understand.”

“Can’t I? I can certainly understand being afraid to die. I don’t have a lot of trouble understanding what it’s like to be one of the few aging people in a world where nobody grows old. What I can’t understand is why you aren’t even willing to consider the possibility that—”

“No,” she said. “I tell you, it’s crazy. They’d laugh at me.”

“Who?”

“All of my friends. Hawk, Stengard, Aramayne—” Once again she would not look at him. “They can be very cruel, without even realizing it. They despise anything that seems ungraceful to them, anything sweaty and desperate and cowardly. Citizens don’t do sweaty things, Charles. And that’s how this will seem. Assuming it can be done at all. They’ll be terribly patronizing. Oh, they’ll be sweet to me, yes, dear Gioia, how wonderful for you, Gioia, but when I turn my back they’ll laugh. They’ll say the most wicked things about me. I couldn’t bear that.”

“They can afford to laugh,” Phillips said. “It’s easy to be brave and cool about dying when you know you’re going to live forever. How very fine for them: but why should you be the only one to grow old and die? And they won’t laugh, anyway. They’re not as cruel as you think. Shallow, maybe, but not cruel. They’ll be glad that you’ve found a way to save yourself. At the very least, they won’t have to feel guilty about you any longer, and that’s bound to please them. You can—”

“Stop it,” she said.

She rose, walked to the railing of the patio, stared out toward the sea. He came up behind her. Red sails in the harbor, sunlight glittering along the sides of the Lighthouse, the palaces of the Ptolemies stark white against the sky. Lightly he rested his hand on her shoulder. She twitched as if to pull away from him, but remained where she was.

“Then I have another idea,” he said quietly. “If you won’t go to the planners, I will. Reprogram me, I’ll say. Fix things so that I start to age at the same rate you do. It’ll be more authentic, anyway, if I’m supposed to be playing the part of a twentieth-century man. Over the years I’ll very gradually get some lines in my face, my hair will turn gray, I’ll walk a little more slowly—we’ll grow old together, Gioia. To hell with your lovely immortal friends. We’ll have each other. We won’t need them.”

She swung around. Her eyes were wide with horror.

“Are you serious, Charles?”

“Of course.”

“No,” she murmured. “No. Everything you’ve said to me today is monstrous nonsense. Don’t you realize that?”

He reached for her hand and enclosed her fingertips in his. “All I’m trying to do is find some way for you and me to—”

“Don’t say any more,” she said. “Please.” Quickly, as though drawing back from a suddenly flaring flame, she tugged her fingers free of his and put her hand behind her. Though his face was just inches from hers he felt an immense chasm opening between them. They stared at one another for a moment; then she moved deftly to his left, darted around him, and ran from the patio.

Stunned, he watched her go, down the long marble corridor and out of sight. It was folly to give pursuit, he thought. She was lost to him: that was clear, that was beyond any question. She was terrified of him. Why cause her even more anguish? But somehow he found himself running through the halls of the hotel, along the winding garden path, into the cool green groves of the Paneium. He thought he saw her on the portico of Hadrian’s palace, but when he got there the echoing stone halls were empty. To a temporary that was sweeping the steps he said, “Did you see a woman come this way?” A blank sullen stare was his only answer.

Phillips cursed and turned away.

“Gioia?” he called. “Wait! Come back!”

Was that her, going into the Library? He rushed past the startled mumbling librarians and sped through the stacks, peering beyond the mounds of double-handled scrolls into the shadowy corridors. “Gioia? Gioia!” It was a desecration, bellowing like that in this quiet place. He scarcely cared.

Emerging by a side door, he loped down to the harbor. The Lighthouse! Terror enfolded him. She might already be a hundred steps up that ramp, heading for the parapet from which she meant to fling herself into the sea. Scattering citizens and temporaries as if they were straws, he ran within. Up he went, never pausing for breath, though his synthetic lungs were screaming for respite, his ingeniously designed heart was desperately pounding. On the first balcony he imagined he caught a glimpse of her, but he circled it without finding her. Onward, upward. He went to the top, to the beacon chamber itself: no Gioia. Had she jumped? Had she gone down one ramp while he was ascending the other? He clung to the rim and looked out, down, searching the base of the Lighthouse, the rocks offshore, the causeway. No Gioia. I will find her somewhere, he thought. I will keep going until I find her. He went running down the ramp, calling her name. He reached ground level and sprinted back toward the center of town. Where next? The temple of Poseidon? The tomb of Cleopatra?

He paused in the middle of Canopus Street, groggy and dazed.

“Charles?” she said.

“Where are you?”

“Right here. Beside you.” She seemed to materialize from the air. Her face was unflushed, her robe bore no trace of perspiration. Had he been chasing a phantom through the city? She came to him and took his hand, and said, softly, tenderly, “Were you really serious, about having them make you age?”

“If there’s no other way, yes.”

“The other way is so frightening, Charles.”

“Is it?”

“You can’t understand how much.”

“More frightening than growing old? Than dying?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose not. The only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want you to get old, Charles.”

“But I won’t have to. Will I?”

He stared at her.

“No,” she said. “You won’t have to. Neither of us will.”

Phillips smiled. “We should get away from here,” he said after a while. “Let’s go across to Byzantium, yes, Gioia? We’ll show up in Constantinople for the opening. Your friends will be there. We’ll tell them what you’ve decided to do. They’ll know how to arrange it. Someone will.”

“It sounds so strange,” said Gioia. “To turn myself into—into a visitor? A visitor in my own world?”

“That’s what you’ve always been, though.”

“I suppose. In a way. But at least I’ve been real up to now.”

“Whereas I’m not?”

“Are you, Charles?”

“Yes. Just as real as you. I was angry at first, when I found out the truth about myself. But I came to accept it. Somewhere between Mohenjo and here, I came to see that it was all right to be what I am: that I perceive things, I form ideas, I draw conclusions. I am very well designed, Gioia. I can’t tell the difference between being what I am and being completely alive, and to me that’s being real enough. I think, I feel, I experience joy and pain. I’m as real as I need to be. And you will be, too. You’ll never stop being Gioia, you know. It’s only your body that you’ll cast away, the body that played such a terrible joke on you anyway.” He brushed her cheek with his hand. “It was all said for us before, long ago:

“Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake—”

“Is that the same poem?” she asked.

“The same poem, yes. The ancient poem that isn’t quite forgotten yet.”

“Finish it, Charles.”

—“Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

“How beautiful. What does it mean?”

“That it isn’t necessary to be mortal. That we can allow ourselves to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, that we can be transformed, that we can move on beyond the flesh. Yeats didn’t mean it in quite the way I do—he wouldn’t have begun to comprehend what we’re talking about, not a word of it—and yet, and yet—the underlying truth is the same. Live, Gioia! With me!” He turned to her and saw color coming into her pallid cheeks. “It does make sense, what I’m suggesting, doesn’t it? You’ll attempt it, won’t you? Whoever makes the visitors can be induced to remake you. Right? What do you think: can they, Gioia?”

She nodded in a barely perceptible way. “I think so,” she said faintly. “It’s very strange. But I think it ought to be possible. Why not, Charles? Why not?”

“Yes,” he said. “Why not?”

In the morning they hired a vessel in the harbor, a low sleek pirogue with a blood-red sail, skippered by a rascally-looking temporary whose smile was irresistible. Phillips shaded his eyes and peered northward across the sea. He thought he could almost make out the shape of the great city sprawling on its seven hills, Constantine’s New Rome beside the Golden Horn, the mighty dome of Hagia Sophia, the somber walls of the citadel, the palaces and churches, the Hippodrome, Christ in glory rising above all else in brilliant mosaic streaming with light.

“Byzantium,” Phillips said. “Take us there the shortest and quickest way.”

“It is my pleasure,” said the boatman with unexpected grace.

Gioia smiled. He had not seen her looking so vibrantly alive since the night of the imperial feast in Chang-an. He reached for her hand—her slender fingers were quivering lightly—and helped her into the boat.

GREEN MARS

Kim Stanley Robinson

Kim Stanley Robinson won the 1984 World Fantasy Award for his novella, “Black Air.” His first novel, The Wild Shore (published as an Ace Special in 1984), has thus far been nominated for both the Philip K. Dick Award and the Nebula Award. A new novel, The Memory of Whiteness, will be published by Tor Books in October, and his story, “The Lucky Strike” (also in the running for the 1984 Nebula), will be reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ Best SF of the Year anthology. “Green Mars” marks his first appearance in IAsfm.

Olympus Mons is the tallest mountain in the solar system. It is a broad shield volcano, six hundred kilometers in diameter and twenty-seven kilometers high. Its average slope angles only five degrees above the horizontal, but the circumference of the lava shield is a nearly continuous escarpment, a roughly circular cliff that drops six kilometers to the surrounding forests. The tallest and steepest sections of this encircling escarpment stand near South Buttress, a massive prominence which juts out and divides the south and southeast curves of the cliff (on the map, it’s at 15 degrees north, 132 degrees longitude). There, under the east flank of South Buttress, one can stand in the rocky upper edge of the Tharsis forest, and look up at a cliff that is twenty-two thousand feet tall.

Seven times taller than El Capitan, three times as tall as Everest’s southwest face, twice as tall as Dhaulagiri wall: four miles of cliff, blocking out the western sky. Can you imagine it? (It’s hard.)

“I can’t get a sense of the scale!” the Terran Arthur Sternbach shouts, hopping up and down.

Dougal Burke, looking up through binoculars, says, “There’s quite a bit of foreshortening from here.”

“No no. That’s not it.”

The climbing party has arrived in a caravan of seven field cars. Big green bodies, clear bubbles covering the passenger compartments, fat field tires with their exaggerated treads, chewing dust into the wind: The cars’ drivers have parked them in a rough circle, and they sit in the middle of a rocky meadow like a big necklace of paste emeralds.

This battered meadow, with its little stands of bristle-cone pine and noctis juniper, is the traditional base camp for South Buttress climbs. Around the cars are treadmarks, wind-walls made of stacked rock, half-filled latrine trenches, cairn-covered trash dumps, and discarded equipment. As the members of the expedition wander around the camp, stretching and talking, they inspect some of these artifacts. Marie Whillans picks up two ultralight oxygen cylinders stamped with letters that identify them as part of an expedition she climbed with more than a century ago. Grinning, she holds them overhead and shakes them at the cliff, beats them together. “Home again!” Ping! Ping! Ping!

One last field car trundles into the meadow, and the expedition members already in the camp gather around it as it rolls to a halt. Two men get out of the car. They are greeted enthusiastically: “Stephan’s here! Roger’s here!”

But Roger Clayborne is in a bad mood. It has been a long trip for him. It began in Burroughs six days ago, when he left his offices at Government House for the last time. Twenty-seven years of work as Minister of the Interior came to an end as he walked out the tall doors of Government House, down the broad chert steps and onto the trolley that would take him to his flat. Riding along with his face in the warm wind, Roger looked out at the tree-filled capital city he had rarely left during his stint in the government, and it struck him that it had been twenty-seven years of continuous defeat. Too many opponents, too many compromises, until the last unacceptable compromise arrived, and he found himself riding out of the city with Stephan, into the countryside he had avoided for twenty-seven years, over rolling hills covered by grasses and studded by stands of walnut, aspen, oak, maple, eucalyptus, pine: every leaf and every blade of grass a sign of his defeat. And Stephan wasn’t much help; though a conservationist like Roger, he has been a member of the Greens for years. “That’s where the real work can be done,” he insisted as he lectured Roger and neglected his driving. Roger, who liked Stephan well enough, pretended his agreement and stared out his window. He would have preferred Stephan’s company in smaller doses—say a lunch, or a game of batball. But on they drove along the wide gravel highway, over the windblown steppes of the Tharsis Bulge, past the farms and towns in Noctis Labyrinthus, up into the krummholz forests of east Tharsis, until Roger fell prey to that feeling one gets near the end of a long journey, that all his life had been part of this trip, that the traveling would never end this side of the grave, that he was doomed to wander over the scenes of all his defeats and failures endlessly, and never come to anyplace that did not include them all, right in the rearview mirror. It was a long drive.

For—and this was the worst of it—he remembered everything.

Now he steps from the car door to the rocky soil of base camp. A late addition to the climb (Stephan invited him along when he learned of the resignation), he is introduced to the other climbers, and he musters the cordial persona built over many years in office. “Hans!” he says as he sees the familiar smiling face of the areologist Hans Boethe. “Good to see you. I didn’t know you were a climber.”

“Not one like you, Roger, but I’ve done my share in Marineris.”

“So”—Roger gestures west—“are you going to find the explanation for the escarpment?”

“I already know it,” Hans declares, and the others laugh. “But if we find any contributing evidence . . .”

A tall rangy woman with leathery cheeks and light brown eyes appears at the edge of the group. Stephan quickly introduces her. “Roger, this is our expedition leader, Eileen Monday.”

“We’ve met before,” she says as she shakes his hand. She looks down and smiles an embarrassed smile. “A long time ago, when you were a canyon guide.”

The name, the voice; the past stirs, quick images appear in his mind’s eye, and Roger’s uncanny memory calls back a hike—(he once guided treks through the fossae to the north)—a romance, yes, with a leggy girl: Eileen Monday, standing now before him. They were lovers for quite some time, he recalls; she a student in Burroughs, a city girl, and he—off into the backcountry. It hadn’t lasted. But that was over two hundred years ago! A spark of hope strikes in him—“You remember?” he says.

“I’m afraid not.” Wrinkles fan away under her eyes as she squints, smiles the embarrassed smile. “But when Stephan told me you’d be joining us—well—you’re known to have a complete memory, and I felt I should check. Maybe that means I did remember something. Because I went through my old journals and found references to you. I only started writing the journals in my eighties, so the references aren’t very clear. But I know we met, even if I can’t say I remember it.” She looks up, shrugs.

It is a common enough situation for Roger. His “total recall” (it is nothing of the sort, of course) encompasses most of his three hundred years, and he is constantly meeting and remembering people who do not recall him. Most find it interesting, some unnerving; this Eileen’s sun-chapped cheeks are a bit flushed; she seems both embarrassed and perhaps a bit amused. “You’ll have to tell me about it,” she says with a laugh.

Roger isn’t in the mood to amuse people. “We were about twenty-five.”

Her mouth forms a whistle. “You really do remember everything.”

Roger shakes his head; the chill in the shadowed air fills him, the momentary thrill of recognition and recall dissipates. It’s been a very long trip.

“And we were . . .?” she prods.

“We were friends,” Roger says, with just the twist on friends to leave her wondering. It is disheartening, this tendency of people to forget; his unusual facility makes him a bit of a freak, a voice from another time. Perhaps his conservation efforts grow out of this retention of the past; he still knows what the planet was like, back there in the beginning. When he’s feeling low he tends to blame his generation’s forgetfulness on their lack of vigilance, and he is often, as he is now, a bit lonely.

Eileen has her head crooked, wondering what he means.

“Come on, Mr. Memory,” Stephan cries to him. “Let’s eat! I’m starving, and it’s freezing out here.”

“It’ll get colder up there,” Roger says. He shrugs at Eileen, follows Stephan.

In the bright lamplight of the largest base-camp tent the chattering faces gleam. Roger sips at a bowl of hot stew. Quickly the remaining introductions are made. Stephan, Hans, and Eileen are familiar to him, as is Dr. Frances Fitzhugh. The lead climbers are Dougal Burke and Marie Whillans, current stars of New Scotland’s climbing school; he’s heard of both of them. They are surrounded in their corner by four younger colleagues of Eileen’s, climbing guides hired by Stephan to be their porters: “We’re the Sherpas,” Ivan Vivanov says to Roger cheerfully, and introduces Ginger, Sheila, and Hannah. The young guides appear not to mind their supporting role in the expedition; in a party of this size there will be plenty of climbing for all. The group is rounded off by Arthur Sternbach, an American climber visiting Hans Boethe. When the introductions are done they all circle the room like people at any cocktail party anywhere. Roger works on his stew and regrets his decision to join the climb. He forgot (sort of) how intensely social big climbs must be. Too many years of solo bouldering, in the rock valleys north of Burroughs. That was what he had been looking for, he realizes: an endless solo rock climb, up and out of the world.

Stephan asks Eileen about the climb and she carefully includes Roger in her audience. “We’re going to start up the Great Gully, which is the standard route for the first thousand meters of the face. Then, where the first ascent followed the Nansen Ridge up to the left of the Gully, we’re planning to go right. Dougal and Marie have seen a line in the aerial photos that they think will go, and that will give us something new to try. So we’ll have a new route most of the way. And we’ll be the smallest party ever to climb the scarp in the South Buttress area.”

“You’re kidding!” Arthur Sternbach cries.

Eileen smiles briefly. “Because of the party size, we’ll be carrying as little oxygen as possible, for use in the last few thousand meters.”

“And if we climb it?” Roger asks.

“There’s a cache for us when we top out—we’ll change equipment there and stroll on up to the caldera rim. That part will be easy.”

“I don’t see why we even bother with that part,” Marie interjects.

“It’s the easiest way down. Besides, some of us want to see the top of Olympus Mons,” Eileen replies mildly.

“It’s just a big hill,” says Marie.

Later Roger leaves the tent with Arthur and Hans, Dougal and Marie. Everyone will spend one last night of comfort in the cars. Roger trails the others, staring up at the escarpment. The sky above it is still a rich twilight purple. The huge bulk of the wall is scarred by the black line of the Great Gully, a deep vertical crack just visible in the gloomy air. Above it, a blank face. Trees rustle in the wind; the dark meadow looks wild.

“I can’t believe how tall it is!” Arthur is exclaiming for the third time. He laughs out loud. “It’s just unbelievable!”

“From this vantage,” Hans says, “the top is over seventy degrees above our real horizon.”

“You’re kidding! I can’t believe it!” And Arthur falls into a fit of helpless giggling. The Martians following Hans and his friend watch with amused reserve. Arthur is quite a bit shorter than the rest of them, and suddenly to Roger he seems like a child caught after breaking into the liquor cabinet. Roger pauses to allow the others to walk on.

The big tent glows like a dim lamp, luminous yellow in the dark. The cliff face is black and still. From the forest comes a weird yipping yodel. Some sort of mutant wolves, no doubt. Roger shakes his head. Long ago any landscape exhilarated him; he was in love with the planet. Now the immense cliff seems to hang over him like his life, his past, obliterating the sky, blocking off any progress westward. The depression he feels is so crushing that he almost sits on the meadow grass, to plunge his face in his hands; but others will be leaving the tent. Again, that mournful yowling: the planet, crying out Mars is gone! Mars is gone! Ow-ooooooooooo! Homeless, the old man goes to sleep in a car.

But as always, insomnia takes its share of the night. Roger lies in the narrow bed, his body relaxed, his consciousness bouncing helplessly through scenes from his life. Insomnia, memory: Some of his doctors have told him there is a correlation between the two. Certainly for him the hours of insomniac awareness and half sleep are memory’s playground, and no matter what he does to fill the time between lying down and falling asleep (like reading to exhaustion, or scratching notes), tyrannical memory will have its hour.

This night he remembers all the nights in Burroughs. All the opponents, all the compromises. The Chairman handing him the order to dam and flood Coprates Chasma, with his little smile and flourish, the touch of hidden sadism. The open dislike from Noyova, that evening years before, after the Chairman’s appointments: “The reds are finished, Clayborne. You shouldn’t be holding office—you are the leader of a dead party.” Looking at the Chairman’s dam-construction bill and thinking of Coprates the way it had been in the previous century, when he had explored it, it occurred to him that ninety percent of what he had done in office, he did to stay in a position to be able to do anything. That was what it meant to work in government. Or was it a higher percentage? What had he really done to preserve the planet? Certain bills balked before they began, certain development projects delayed; all he had done was resist the doings of others. Without much success. And it could even be said that walking out on the Chairman and his “coalition” cabinet was only another gesture, another defeat.

He recalls his first day in office. A morning on the polar plains. A day in Burroughs, in the park. In the Cabinet office, arguing with Noyova. And on it will go, for another hour or more, scene after scene until the memories become fragmented and dreamlike, spliced together surrealistically, stepping outside the realm of memory into sleep.

There are topographies of the spirit, and this is one of them.

Dawn on Mars. First the plum sky, punctuated by a diamond pattern of four dawn mirrors that orbit overhead and direct a little more of Sol’s light to the planet. Flocks of black choughs caw sleepily as they flap and glide out over the talus slope to begin the day’s hunt for food. Snow pigeons coo in the branches of a grove of tawny birch. Up in the talus, a clatter of rocks; three Dall sheep are looking surprised to see the base-camp meadow occupied. Sparrows flit overhead.

Roger, up early with a headache, observes all the stirring wildlife indifferently. He hikes up into the broken rock of the talus to get clear of it. The upper rim of the escarpment is struck by the light of the rising sun, and now there is a strip of ruddy gold overhead, bathing all the shadowed slope below in reflected sunlight. The dawn mirrors look dim in the clear violet sky. Colors appear in the tufts of flowers scattered through the rock, and the green juniper needles glow. The band of lit cliff quickly grows; even in full light the upper slopes look sheer and blank. But that is the effect of distance and foreshortening. Lower on the face, crack systems look like brown rain stains, and the wall is rough-looking, a good sign. The upper slopes, when they get high enough, will reveal their own irregularities.

Dougal hikes out of the rock field, ending some dawn trek of his own. He nods to Roger. “Not started yet, are we?” His English is accented with a distinctly Scottish intonation.

In fact they are. Eileen and Marie and Ivan have gotten the first packs out of the cars, and when Roger and Dougal return they are distributing them. The meadow becomes noisier as the long equipment sorting ends and they get ready to take off. The packs are heavy, and the Sherpas groan and joke when they lift theirs. Arthur can’t help laughing at the sight of them. “On Earth you couldn’t even move a pack that size,” he exclaims, nudging one of the oversized bags with a foot. “How do you balance with one of these on?”

“You’ll find out,” Hans tells him cheerfully.

Arthur finds that balancing the mass of his pack in Martian gravity is difficult. The pack is almost perfectly cylindrical, a big green tube that extends from the bottom of his butt to just over his head; with it on his back he looks like a tall green snail. He exclaims at its lightness relative to its size, but as they hike through the talus its mass swings him around much more than he is prepared for. “Whoah! Look out there! Sorry!” Roger nods and wipes sweat from his eyes. He sees that the first day is one long lesson in balance for Arthur, as they wind their way up the irregular slope through the forest of house-sized boulders.

Previous parties have left a trail with rock ducks and blazes chopped onto boulder faces, and they follow it wherever they can find it. The ascent is tedious; although this is one of the smaller fans of broken rock at the bottom of the escarpment (in some areas mass wasting has collapsed the entire cliff), it will take them all of a very long day to wind their way through the giant rockpile to the bottom of the wall proper, some seven hundred meters above base camp.

At first Roger approves of the hike through the jumbled field of house-sized boulders. “The Khumbu Rockfall,” Ivan calls out, getting into his Sherpa persona as they pass under a big stone serac. But unlike the Khumbu Ice-fall below the fabled Everest, this chaotic terrain is relatively stable; the overhangs won’t fall on them, and there are few hidden crevasses to fall into. No, it is just a rock field, and Roger likes it. Still, on the way they pass little pockets of chir pine and juniper, and Hans apparently feels obliged to identify every flower to Arthur. “There’s aconite, and those are anemones, and that’s a kind of iris, and those are gentians, and those are primulas. . . .” Arthur stops to point. “What the hell is that!”

Staring down at them from a flat-topped boulder is a small furry mammal. “It’s a dune dog,” Hans says proudly. “They’ve clipped some marmot and Weddell seal genes onto what is basically a wolverine.”

“You’re kidding! It looks like a miniature polar bear.”

Behind them Roger shakes his head, kicks idly at a stand of tundra cactus. It is flowering; the six-month Martian northern spring is beginning. Syrtis grass tufting in every wet sandy flat. Little biology experiments, everywhere you look; the whole planet one big laboratory. Roger sighs. Arthur tries to pick one of each variety of flower, making a bouquet suitable for a state funeral, but after too many falls he gives up, and lets the colorful bundle hang from his hand. Late in the day they reach the bottom of the wall. The whole world is in shadow, while the clear sky overhead is still a bright lavender. Looking up, they cannot see the top of the escarpment anymore; they will not see it again unless their climb succeeds.

Camp One is a broad flat circle of sand, surrounded by boulders that were once part of the face, and set under a slight overhang formed by the sheer rampart of basalt that stands to the right side of the Great Gully. Protected from rockfall, roomy and comfortable to lie on, Camp One is perfect for a big lower camp, and it has been used before; between the rocks they find pitons, oxygen cylinders, buried latrines overgrown with bright green moss.

The next day they wind their way back down through the talus to base camp—all but Dougal and Marie, who take the day to look at the routes leading out of Camp One. For the rest of them, it’s off before dawn, and down through the talus at nearly a running pace; a quick reloading; and back up in a race to reach Camp One again before nightfall. Every one of the next four days will be spent in the same way, and the Sherpas will continue for three more days after that, threading the same trail through the boulders, until all the equipment has been lugged up to Camp One.

In the same way that a tongue will go to a sore tooth over and over, Roger finds himself following Hans and Arthur to hear the areologist’s explanations. He has realized, to his chagrin, that he is nearly as ignorant about what lives on Mars as Arthur is.

“See the blood pheasant?”

“No.”

“Over there. The head tuft is black. Pretty well camouflaged.”

“You’re kidding. Why there it is!”

“They like these rocks. Blood pheasants, redstarts, accentors—more of them than we ever see.”

Later: “Look there!”

“Where?”

Roger finds himself peering in the direction Hans has pointed.

“On the tall rock, see? The killer rabbit, they call it. A joke.”

“Oh, a joke,” Arthur says. Roger makes a revision in his estimation of the Terran’s subtlety. “A rabbit with fangs?”

“Not exactly. Actually there’s very little hare in it—more lemming and pika, but with some important traits of the lynx added. A very successful creature. Some of Harry Whitebook’s work. He’s very good.”

“So some of your biological designers become famous?”

“Oh yes. Very much so. Whitebook is one of the best of the mammal designers. And we seem to have a special love for mammals, don’t we?”

“I know I do.” Several puffing steps up waist-high blocks. “I just don’t understand how they can survive the cold!”

“Well, it’s not that cold down here, of course. This is the top of the alpine zone, in effect. The adaptations for cold are usually taken directly from arctic and antarctic creatures. Many seals can cut the circulation to their extremities when necessary to preserve heat. And they have a sort of antifreeze in their blood—a glycoprotein that binds to the surface of ice crystals and stops their growth—stops the accumulation of salts. Wonderful stuff. Some of these mammals can freeze limbs and thaw them without damage to the flesh.”

“You’re kidding,” Roger whispers as he hikes.

“You’re kidding!”

“And these adaptations are part of most Martian mammals. Look! There’s a little foxbear. That’s Whitebook again.”

Roger stops following them. No more Mars.

Black night. The six big box tents of Camp One glow like a string of lamps at the foot of the cliff. Roger, out in the rubble relieving himself, looks back at them curiously. It is, he thinks, an odd group. People from all over Mars (and a Terran). Only climbing in common. The lead climbers are funny. Dougal sometimes seems a mute, always watching from a corner, never speaking. A self-enclosed system. Marie speaks for both of them, perhaps. Roger can hear her broad Midlands voice now, hoarse with drink, telling someone how to climb the face. She’s happy to be here.

Inside Eileen’s tent he finds a heated discussion in progress. Marie Whillans says, “Look, Dougal and I have already gone nearly a thousand meters up these so-called blank slabs. There are cracks all over the place.”

“As far as you’ve gone there are,” Eileen says. “But the true slabs are supposed to be above those first cracks. Four hundred meters of smooth rock. We could be stopped outright.”

“So we could, but there’s got to be some cracks. And we can bolt our way up any really blank sections if we have to. That way we’d have a completely new route.”

Hans Boethe shakes his head. “Putting bolts in some of this basalt won’t be any fun.”

“I hate bolts anyway,” Eileen says. “The point is, if we take the Gully up to the first amphitheater, we know we’ve got a good route to the top, and all the upper pitches will be new.”

Stephan nods, Hans nods, Frances nods. Roger sips a cup of tea and watches with interest. Marie says, “The point is, what kind of climb do we want to have?”

“We want to get to the top,” Eileen says, glancing at Stephan, who nods. Stephan has paid for most of this expedition, and so in a sense it’s his choice.

“Wait a second,” Marie says sharply, eyeing each of them in turn. “That’s not what it’s about. We’re not here just to repeat the Gully route, are we?” Her voice is accusing and no one meets her eye. “That wasn’t what I was told, anyway. I was told we were taking a new route, and that’s why I’m here.”

“It will inevitably be a new route,” Eileen says. “You know that, Marie. We trend right at the top of the Gully and we’re on new ground. We only avoid the blank slabs that flank the Gully to the right!”

“I think we should try those slabs,” Marie says, “because Dougal and I have found they’ll go.” She argues for this route, and Eileen listens patiently. Stephan looks worried; Marie is persuasive, and it seems possible that her forceful personality will overwhelm Eileen’s, leading them onto a route rumored to be impossible.

But Eileen says, “Climbing any route on this wall with only eleven people will be doing something. Look, we’re only talking about the first twelve hundred meters of the climb. Above that we’ll trend to the right whenever possible, and be on new ground above those slabs.”

“I don’t believe in the slabs,” Marie says. And after a few more exchanges: “Well, that being the case, I don’t see why you sent Dougal and me up the slabs these last few days.”

“I didn’t send you up,” Eileen says, a bit exasperated. “You two choose the leads, you know that. But this is a fundamental choice, and I think the Gully is the opening pitch we came to make. We do want to make the top, you know. Not just of the wall, but the whole mountain.”

After more discussion Marie shrugs. “Okay. You’re the boss. But it makes me wonder. Why are we making this climb?”

On the way to his tent Roger remembers the question. Breathing the cold air, he looks around. In Camp One the world seems a place creased and folded: horizontal half stretching away into darkness—back down into the dead past; vertical half stretching up to the stars—into the unknown. Only two tents lit from within now, two soft blobs of yellow in the gloom. Roger stops outside his darkened tent to look at them, feeling they say something to him; the eyes of the mountain, looking. Why is he making this climb?

Up the Great Gully they go. Dougal and Marie lead pitch after pitch up the rough unstable rock, hammering in pitons and leaving fixed ropes behind. The ropes tend to stay in close to the right wall of the Gully, to avoid the falling rock that shoots down it all too frequently. The other climbers follow from pitch to pitch in teams of two and three. As they ascend they can see the four Sherpas, tiny animals winding their way down the talus again.

Roger has been teamed with Hans for the day. They clip themselves onto the fixed rope with jumars, metal clasps that will slide up the rope but not down. They are carrying heavy packs up to Camp Two, and even though the slope of the Gully is only fifty degrees here, and its dark rock knobby and easy to climb, they both find the work hard. The sun is hot and their faces are quickly bathed with sweat.

“I’m not in the best of shape for this,” Hans puffs. “It may take me a few days to get my rhythm.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Roger says. “We’re going about as fast as I like.”

“I wonder how far above Camp Two is?”

“Not too far. Too many carries to make, without the power reels.”

“I look forward to the vertical pitches. If we’re going to climb we might as well climb, eh?”

“Especially since the power reels will pull our stuff up.”

“Yes.” Breathless laugh.

Steep, deep ravine. Medium gray andesite, an igneous volcanic rock, speckled with crystals of dark minerals, knobbed with hard protrusions. Pitons hammered into small vertical cracks.

Midday they meet with Eileen, Arthur, and Frances, the team above, who are sitting on a narrow ledge in the wall of the Gully, jamming down a quick lunch. The sun is nearly overhead; in an hour they will lose it. Roger and Hans are happy to sit on the ledge. Lunch is lemonade and several handfuls of the trail mix Frances has made. The others discuss the Gully and the day’s climb, and Roger eats and listens. He becomes aware of Eileen sitting on the ledge beside him. Her feet kick the wall casually, and the quadriceps on the tops of her thighs, big exaggerated muscles, bunch and relax, bunch and relax, stretching the fabric of her climbing pants. She is following Hans’s description of the rock and appears not to notice Roger’s discreet observation. Could she really not remember him? Roger breathes a soundless sigh. It’s been a long life. And all his effort—

“Let’s get up to Camp Two,” Eileen says, looking at him curiously.

Early in the afternoon they find Marie and Dougal on a broad shelf sticking out of the steep slabs to the right of the Great Gully. Here they make Camp Two: four large box tents, made to withstand rockfalls of some severity.

Now the verticality of the escarpment becomes something immediate and tangible. They can only see the wall for a few hundred meters above them; beyond that it is hidden, except up the steep trough in the wall that is the Great Gully, etching the vertical face just next to their shelf. Looking up this giant couloir, they can see more of the endless cliff above them, dark and foreboding against the pink sky.

Roger spends an hour of the cold afternoon sitting at the Gully edge of their shelf, looking up. They have a long way to go; his hands in their thick pile mittens are sore, his shoulders and legs tired, his feet cold. He wishes more than anything that he could shake the depression that fills him; but thinking that only makes it worse.

Eileen Monday sits beside him. “So we were friends once, you say.”

“Yeah.” Roger looks her in the eye. “You don’t remember at all?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Yes. I was twenty-six, you were about twenty-three.”

“You really remember that long ago?”

“Some of it, yes.”

Eileen shakes her head. She has good features, Roger thinks. Fine eyes. “I wish I did. But as I get older my memory gets even worse. Now I think for every year I live I lose at least that much in memories. It’s sad. My whole life before I was seventy or eighty—all gone.” She sighs. “I know most people are like that, though. You’re an exception.”

“Some things seem to be stuck in my mind for good,” says Roger. He can’t believe it isn’t true of everyone! But that’s what they all say. It makes him melancholy. Why live at all? “Have you hit your three hundredth yet?”

“In a few months. But—come on. Tell me about it.”

“Well . . . you were a student. Or just finishing school, I can’t remember.” She smiles. “Anyway, I was guiding groups in hikes through the little canyons north of here, and you were part of a group. We started up a—a little affair, as I recall. And saw each other for a while after we got back. But you were in Burroughs, and I kept guiding tours, and—well, you know. It didn’t last.”

Eileen smiles again. “So I went on to become a mountain guide—which I’ve been for as long as I can remember—while you moved to the city and got into politics!” She laughs and Roger smiles wryly. “Obviously we must have impressed each other!”

“Oh yes, yes.” Roger laughs shortly. “Searching for each other.” He grins lopsidedly, feeling bitter. “Actually I only got into government about forty years ago. Too late, as it turned out.”

Silence for a while. “So that’s what’s got you down,” Eileen says.

“What?”

“The Red Mars party—out of favor.”

“Out of existence, you mean.”

She considers it. “I never could understand the Red point of view—”

“Few could, apparently.”

“—until I read something in Heidegger, where he makes a distinction between earth and world. Do you know it?”

“No.”

“Earth is that blank materiality of nature that exists before us and more or less sets the parameters on what we can do. Sartre called it facticity. World then is the human realm, the social and historical dimension that gives earth its meaning.”

Roger nods his understanding.

“So—the Reds, as I understood it, were defending earth. Or planet, in this case. Trying to protect the primacy of planet over world—or at least to hold a balance between them.”

“Yes,” Roger says. “But the world inundated the planet.”

“True. But when you look at it that way, you can see what you were trying to do was hopeless. A political party is inevitably part of the world, and everything it does will be worldly. And we only know the materiality of nature through our human senses—so really it is only world that we know directly.”

“I’m not sure about that,” Roger protests. “I mean, it’s logical, and usually I’m sure it’s true—but sometimes—” He smacks the rock of their shelf with his mittened hand. “You know?”

Eileen touches the mitten. “World.”

Roger lifts his lip, irritated. He pulls the mitten off and hits the cold rock again. “Planet.”

Eileen frowns thoughtfully. “Maybe.”

And there was hope, Roger thought fiercely. We could have lived on this planet the way we found it, and confronted the materiality of earth every day of our lives. We could have.

Eileen is called away to help with the arrangement of the next day’s loads. “We’ll continue this later,” she says, touching Roger lightly on the shoulder.

He is left alone over the Gully. Moss discolors the stone under him, and grows in the cracks in the couloir. Swallows shoot down the Gully like falling stones, hunting for cliff mice or warm-blooded lizards. To the east, beyond the great shadow of the volcano, dark forests mark the sunlit Tharsis Bulge like blobs of lichen. Nowhere can one see Mars, just Mars, the primal Mars. They forgot what it was like to walk out onto the empty face of old Mars.

Once he walked out onto the great northern desert of Vastitas Borealis. All of Mars’s geographical features are immense by Terran scales, and just as the southern hemisphere is marked by huge canyons, basins, volcanoes, and craters, the northern hemisphere is strangely, hugely smooth; it had, in its highest latitudes, surrounding what at that time was the polar ice cap (it is now a small sea), a giant planet-ringing band of empty flat layered sand. Endless desert. And one morning before dawn Roger walked out of his campsite and hiked a few kilometers over the broad wavelike humps of the windswept sand, and sat down on the crest of one of the highest waves. There was no sound but his breath, his blood pounding in his ears, and the slight hiss of the oxygen regulator in his helmet. Light leaked over the horizon to the southeast and began to bring out the sand’s dull ocher, flecked with dark red. When the sun cracked the horizon the light bounced off the short steep faces of the dunes and filled everything. He breathed the gold air, and something in him bloomed, he became a flower in a garden of rock, the sole consciousness of the desert, its focus, its soul. Nothing he had ever felt before came close to matching this exaltation, the awareness of brilliant light, of illimitable expanse, of the glossy, intense presence of material things. He returned to his camp late in the day, feeling that a moment had passed—or an age. He was nineteen years old, and his life was changed.

Just being able to remember that incident, after two hundred and eighty-odd years have passed, makes Roger a freak. Less than one percent of the population share this gift (or curse) of powerful, long-term recollection. These days Roger feels the ability like a weight—as if each year were a stone, so that now he carries the crushing burden of three hundred red stones everywhere he goes. He feels angry that others forget. Perhaps it is envious anger.

Thinking of that walk when he was nineteen reminds Roger of a time years later, when he read Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick. The little black cabin boy Pip (and Roger had always identified himself with Pip in Great Expectations), “the most insignificant of the Pequod‘s crew,” fell overboard while his whaleboat was being pulled by a harpooned whale. The boat flew onward, leaving Pip alone. “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” Abandoned on the ocean alone, Pip grew more and more terrified, until “By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little Negro went about the deck an idiot. . . . The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.”

Reading that made Roger feel strange. Someone had lived an hour very like his day on the polar desert, out in the infinite void of nature. And what had seemed to Roger rapture had driven Pip insane.

It occurred to him, as he stared at the thick book, that perhaps he had gone mad as well. Terror, rapture—these extremities of emotion circumnavigate the spirit and approach each other again, though departing from the origin of perception in opposite directions. Mad with solitude, ecstatic with Being—the two parts of the recognition of self sit oddly together. But Pip’s insanity only shocked Roger into a sharper love for his own experience of the “heartless immensity.” He wanted it; and suddenly all the farthest, most desolate reaches of Mars became his special joy. He woke at night and sat up to watch dawns, a flower in a garden of rock. And wandered days like John in the desert, seeing God in stones and frost and skies that arched like sheets of fire.

Now he sits on a ledge on a cliff on a planet no longer his, looking down on plains and canyons peppered with life, life created by the human mind. It is as if the mind has extruded itself into the landscape: each flower an idea, each lizard a thought. . . . There is no heartless immensity left, no mirror of the void for the self to see itself in. Only the self, everywhere, in everything, suffocating the planet, cloying all sensation, imprisoning every being.

Perhaps this perception itself was a sort of madness.

The sky itself, after all (he thought) provides a heartless immensity beyond the imagination’s ability to comprehend, night after night.

Perhaps he needed an immensity he could imagine the extent of, to feel the perception of it as ecstasy rather than terror.

Roger sits remembering his life and thinking over these matters, as he tosses granules of rock—little pips—over the ledge into space.

To his surprise, Eileen rejoins him. She sits on her heels, recites quietly,

“I love all waste

And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.”

“Who said that?” Roger asks, startled by the lines.

“Shelley,” she replies. “In ‘Julian and Maddalo.’ ”

“I like it.”

“Me too.” She tosses over a pip herself. “Come join us for dinner?”

“What? Oh sure, sure. I didn’t know it was time.”

That night, the sound of the tent scraping stone, as the wind shifts it and shifts it. The scritching of thought as world scrapes against planet.

Next day they start spreading out. Marie, Dougal, Hannah, and Ginger take off early up the Gully, around a rib and out of sight, leaving behind a trail of fixed rope. Occasionally those left below can hear their voices, or the ringing of a piton being hammered into the hard rock. Another party descends to Camp One, to begin dismantling it. When they have got everything up to Camp Two, the last group up will bring the fixed ropes up with them. Thus they will set rope above them and pull it out below them, all the way up the wall.

Late the next day Roger climbs up to carry more rope to Marie and Douglas and Hannah and Ginger. Frances goes with him.

The Great Gully is steeper above Camp Two, and after a few hours of slow progress Roger finds his pack growing very heavy. His hands hurt, the footholds grow smaller and smaller, and he finds he must stop after every five or ten steps. “I just don’t have it today,” he says as Frances takes over the lead.

“Me neither,” she says, wheezing for air. “I think we’ll have to start using oxygen during the climbing pretty soon.”

But the lead climbers do not agree. Dougal is working his way up a constriction in the Gully, knocking ice out of a crack with his ice axe, then using his fists for chocks and his twisted shoe soles for a staircase, and stepping up the crack as fast as he can clear it. Marie is belaying him and it is left to Hannah and Ginger to greet Roger and Frances. “Great, we were just about to run out of rope.”

Dougal stops and Marie takes the opportunity to point to the left wall of the Gully. “Look,” she says, disgusted. Roger and Frances see a streak of light blue—a length of xylar climbing rope, hanging free from a rust-pitted piton. “That Terran expedition, I bet,” Marie says. “They left ropes the entire way, I hear.”

From above Dougal laughs.

Marie shakes her head. “I hate seeing stuff like that.”

Frances says, “I think we’d better go onto oxygen pretty soon.”

She gets some surprised stares. “Why?” asks Marie. “We’ve barely started.”

“Well, we’re at about four kilometers above the datum—”

“Exactly,” Marie says. “I live higher than that.”

“Yes, but we’re working pretty hard here, and going up pretty fast. I don’t want anyone to get edema.”

“I don’t feel a thing,” Marie says, and Hannah and Ginger nod.

“I could use a bit of oxygen,” Dougal says from above, grinning down at them briefly.

“You don’t feel edema till you have it,” Frances says stiffly.

“Edema,” says Marie, as if she doesn’t believe in it.

“Marie’s immune,” Dougal calls down. “Her head can’t get more swollen than it already is.”

Hannah and Ginger giggle at Marie’s mock glare, her tug on the rope to Dougal.

“Down you come, boy.”

“On your head.”

“We’ll see how the weather goes,” Frances says. “But either way, if we make normal progress we’ll be needing oxygen soon.”

This is apparently too obvious to require comment. Dougal reaches the top of the crack, and hammers in a piton; the ringing strikes grow higher and higher in pitch as the piton sets home.

That afternoon Roger helps the leads set up a small wall tent. The wall tents are very narrow and have a stiff inflatable floor; they can be hung from a single piton if necessary, so that the inhabitants rest on an air-filled cushion hanging in space, like window washers. But more often they are placed on ledges or indentations in the cliff face, to give the floor some support. Today they have found that above the narrowing of the Great Gully is a flattish indentation protected by an overhang. The cracks above the indentation are poor, but with the addition of a couple of rock bolts the climbers look satisfied. They will be protected from rockfall, and tomorrow they can venture up to find a better spot for Camp Three without delay. As there is just barely room (and food) for two, Roger and Frances begin the descent to Camp Two.

During the descent Roger imagines the cliff face as flat ground, entertained by the new perspective this gives. Ravines cut into that flat land: Vertically these are called gullies, or couloirs, or chimneys, depending on their shape and tilt. Climbing in these gives the climber an easier slope and more protection. Flat land has hills, and ranges of hills: These vertically are knobs, or ridges, or shelves, or buttresses. Depending on their shape and tilt these can either be obstacles, or in the case of some ridges, easy routes up. Then walls become ledges, and creeks become cracks—although cracking takes its own path of least resistance, and seldom resembles water-carved paths.

As Roger belays Frances down one difficult pitch (they can see more clearly why their climb up was so tiring), he looks around at what little he can see: the gray-and-black walls of the Gully, some distance above and below him; the steep wall of the rampart to the left of the Gully. And that’s all. A curious duality; because this topography stands near the vertical, in many ways he will never see it as well as he would an everyday horizontal hillside. But in other ways (looking right into the grain of the rock to see if one nearly detached knob will hold the weight of his entire body for a long step down, for instance) he sees it much more clearly, more intensely than he will ever see the safe world of flatness. This intensity of vision is something the climber treasures.

The next day Roger and Eileen team up, and as they ascend the Gully with another load of rope, a rock the size of a large person falls next to them, chattering over an outcropping and knocking smaller rocks down after it. Roger stops to watch it disappear below. The helmets they are wearing would have been no protection against a rock that size.

“Let’s hope no one is following us up,” Roger says.

“Not supposed to be.”

“I guess getting out of this Gully won’t be such a bad idea, eh?”

“Rockfall is almost as bad on the face. Last year Marie had a party on the face when a rock fell on a traverse rope and cut it. Client making the traverse was killed.”

“A cheerful business.”

“Rockfall is bad. I hate it.”

Surprising emotion in her voice; perhaps some accident has occurred under her leadership as well? Roger looks at her curiously. Odd to be a climbing guide and not be more stoic about such dangers.

Then again, rockfall is the danger beyond expertise.

She looks up: distress. “You know.”

He nods. “No precautions to take.”

“Exactly. Well, there are some. But they aren’t sufficient.”

The lead climbers’ camp is gone without a trace, and a new rope leads up the left wall of the Gully, through a groove in the overhang and out of sight above. They stop to eat and drink, then continue up. The difficulty of the next pitch impresses them; even with the rope it is hard going. They wedge into the moat between a column of ice and the left wall, and inch up painfully. “I wonder how long this lasts,” Roger says, wishing they had their crampons with them. Above him, Eileen doesn’t reply for over a minute. Then she says, “Three hundred more meters,” as if out of the blue. Roger groans theatrically, client to guide.

Actually he is enjoying following Eileen up the difficult pitch. She has a quick rhythm of observation and movement that reminds him of Dougal, but her choice of holds is all her own—and closer to what Roger would choose. Her calm tone as they discuss the belays, her smooth pulls up the rock, the fine proportions of her long legs, reaching for the awkward foothold: a beautiful climber. And every once in a while there is a little jog at Roger’s memory.

Three hundred meters above they find the lead climbers, out of the Gully and on a flat ledge that covers nearly a hectare, on the left side this time. From this vantage they can see parts of the cliff face to the right of the Gully, above them. “Nice campsite,” Eileen remarks. Marie, Dougal, Hannah, and Ginger are sitting about, resting in the middle of setting up their little wall tents. “Looked like you had a hard day of it down there.”

“Invigorating,” Dougal says, eyebrows raised.

Eileen surveys them. “Looks like a little oxygen might be in order.”

The lead group protests.

“I know, I know. Just a little. A cocktail.”

“It only makes you crave it,” Marie says.

“Maybe so. We can’t use much down here, anyway.”

In the midday radio call to the camps below, Eileen tells the others to pack up the tents from Camp One. “Bring those and the power reels up first. We should be able to use the reels between these camps.”

They all give a small cheer. The sun disappears behind the cliff above, and they all groan. The leads stir themselves and continue setting up the tents. The air chills quickly.

Roger and Eileen descend through the afternoon shadows to Camp Two, as there is not enough equipment to accommodate more than the lead group at Camp Three. Descending is easy on the muscles compared with the ascent, but it requires just as much concentration as going up. By the time they reach Camp Two Roger is very tired, and the cold sunless face has left him depressed again. Up and down; up and down.

That night during the sunset radio conversation Eileen and Marie get into an argument when Eileen orders the leads down to do some portering. “Look, Marie, the rest of us haven’t led a single pitch, have we? And we didn’t come on this climb to ferry up goods for you, did we?” Eileen’s voice has a very sharp, cutting edge to it when she is annoyed. Marie insists the first team is making good time, and is not tired yet. “That’s not the point. Get back down to Camp One tomorrow, and finish bringing it up. The bottom team will move up and reel Camp Two up to Three, and those of us here at Two will carry one load up to Three and have a bash at the lead after that. That’s the way it is, Marie—we leapfrog in my climbs, you know that.”

Sounds behind the static from the radio, of Dougal talking to Marie. Finally Marie says, “Aye, well you’ll need us more when the climbing gets harder anyway. But we can’t afford to slow down much.”

After the radio call Roger leaves the tents and sits on his ledge bench to watch the twilight. Far to the east the land is still sunlit, but as he watches the landscape darkens, turns dim purple under a blackberry sky. Mirror dusk. A few stars sprinkle the high dome above him. The air is cold but still, and he can hear Hans and Frances inside their tent, arguing about glacial polish. Frances is an areologist of some note, and apparently she disagrees with Hans about the origins of the escarpment; she spends some of her climbing time looking for evidence in the rock.

Eileen sits down beside him. “Mind?”

“No.”

She says nothing, and it occurs to him she may be upset. He says, “I’m sorry Marie is being so hard to get along with.”

She waves a mittened hand to dismiss it. “Marie is always like that. It doesn’t mean anything. She just wants to climb.” She laughs. “We go on like this every time we climb together, but I still like her.”

“Hmph.” Roger raises his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”

She does not reply. For a long time they sit there. Roger’s thoughts return to the past, and helplessly his spirits plummet again.

“You seem . . . disturbed about something,” Eileen ventures.

“Ehh,” Roger says. “About everything, I suppose.” And winces to be making such a confessional. But she appears to understand.

She says, “So you fought all the terraforming?”

“Most of it, yeah. First as head of a lobbying group. You must be part of it now—Martian Wilderness Explorers.”

“I pay the dues.”

“Then in the Red government. And in the Interior Ministry, after the Greens took over. But none of it did any good.”“Because,” he bursts out—stops—starts again; “Because I liked the planet the way it was when we found it. A lot of us did, back then. It was so beautiful . . . or not just that. It was more overwhelming than beautiful. The size of things, their shapes—the whole planet had been evolving, the landforms themselves I mean, for five billion years, and traces of all of that time were still on the surface to be seen and read, if you knew how to look. It was so wonderful to be out there.”

“And why, again?”

“The sublime isn’t always beautiful.”

“True. It transcended beauty, it really did. One time I walked out onto the polar dunes, you know. . . .” But he doesn’t know how to tell it. “And so, and so it seemed to me that we already had an Earth, you know? That we didn’t need a Terra up here. And everything they did eroded the planet that we came to. They destroyed it! And now we’ve got—whatever. Some kind of park. A laboratory to test out new plants and animals and all. And everything I loved so much about those early years is gone. You can’t find it anywhere anymore.”

In the dark he can just see her nodding. “And so your life’s work . . .”

“Wasted!” He can’t keep the frustration out of his voice. Suddenly, he doesn’t want to, he wants her to understand what he feels; he looks at her in the dark. “A three-hundred-year life, entirely wasted! I mean I might as well have just . . .” He doesn’t know what.

Long pause.

“At least you can remember it,” she says quietly.

“What good is that? I’d rather forget, I tell you.”

“Ah. You don’t know what that’s like.”

“Oh, the past. The God-damned past. It isn’t so great. Just a dead thing.”

She shakes her head. “Our past is never dead. Do you know Sartre’s work?”

“No.”

“A shame. He can be a big help to we who live so long. For instance, in several places he suggests that there are two ways of looking at the past. You can think of it as something dead and fixed forever; it’s part of you, but you can’t change it, and you can’t change what it means. In that case your past limits or even controls what you can be. But Sartre doesn’t agree with that way of looking at it. He says that the past is constantly altered by what we do in the present moment. The meaning of the past is as fluid as our freedom in the present, because every new act that we commit can revalue the entire thing!”

Roger humphs. “Existentialism.”

“Well, whatever you want to call it. It’s part of Sartre’s philosophy of freedom, for sure. He says that the only way we can possess our past—whether we can remember it or not, I say—is to add new acts to it, which then give it a new value. He calls this ‘assuming’ our past.”

“But sometimes that may not be possible.”

“Not for Sartre. The past is always assumed, because we are not free to stop creating new values for it. It’s just a question of what those values will be. For Sartre it’s a question of how you will assume your past, not whether you will.”

“And for you?”

“I’m with him on that. That’s why I’ve been reading him these last several years. It helps me to understand things.”

“Hmph.” He thinks about it. “You were an English major in college, did you know that?”

She ignores the comment. “So—” She nudges him lightly, shoulder to shoulder. “You have to decide how you will assume this past of yours. Now that your Mars is gone.”

He considers it.

She stands. “I have to plunge into the logistics for tomorrow.”

“Okay. See you inside.”

A bit disconcerted, he watches her leave. Dark tall shape against the sky. The woman he remembers was not like this. In the context of what she has just said, the thought almost makes him laugh.

For the next few days all the members of the team are hard at work ferrying equipment up to Camp Three, except for two a day who are sent above to find a route to the next camp. It turns out there is a feasible reeling route directly up the Gully, and most of the gear is reeled up to Camp Three once it is carried to Camp Two. Every evening there is a radio conversation, in which Eileen takes stock and juggles the logistics of the climb, and gives the next day’s orders. From other camps Roger listens to her voice over the radio, interested in the relaxed tone, the method she has of making her decisions right in front of them all, and the easy way she shifts her manner to accommodate whomever she is speaking with. He decides she is very good at her job, and wonders if their conversations are simply a part of that. Somehow he thinks not.

Roger and Stephan are given the lead, and early one mirror dawn they hurry up the fixed ropes above Camp Three, turning on their helmet lamps to aid the mirrors. Roger feels strong in the early going. At the top of the pitch the fixed ropes are attached to a nest of pitons in a large, crumbling crack. The sun rises and suddenly bright light glares onto the face. Roger ropes up, confirms the signals for the belay, starts up the Gully.

The lead at last. Now there is no fixed rope above him determining his way; only the broad flat back and rough walls of the Gully, looking much more vertical than they have up to this point. Roger chooses the right wall and steps up onto a rounded knob. The wall is a crumbling, knobby andesite surface, black and a reddish gray in the harsh morning blast of light; the back wall of the gully is smoother, layered like a very thick-grained slate, and broken occasionally by horizontal cracks. Where the back wall meets the sidewall the cracks widen a bit, sometimes offering perfect footholds. Using them and the many knobs of the wall Roger is able to make his way upward. He pauses several meters above Stephan at a good-looking vertical crack to hammer in a piton. Getting a piton off the belt sling is awkward. When it is hammered in he pulls a rope through and jerks on it. It seems solid. He climbs above it. Now his feet are spread, one in a crack, one on a knob, as his fingers test the rock in a crack above his head; then up, and his feet are both on a knob in the intersection of the walls, his left hand far out on the back wall of the Gully to hold on to a little indentation. Breath rasps in his throat. His fingers get tired and cold. The Gully widens out and grows shallower, and the intersection of back wall and sidewall becomes a steep narrow ramp of its own. Fourth piton in, the ringing of the strikes filling the morning air. New problem: The degraded rock of this ramp offers no good cracks, and Roger has to do a tension traverse over to the middle of the Gully to find a better way up. Now if he falls he will swing back into the sidewall like a pendulum. And he’s in the rockfall zone. Over to the left sidewall, quickly a piton in. Problem solved. He loves the immediacy of problem solving in climbing, though at this moment he is not aware of his pleasure. Quick look down: Stephan a good distance away, and below him! Back to concentrating on the task at hand. A good ledge, wide as his boot, offers a resting place. He stands, catches his breath. A tug on the line from Stephan; he has run out the rope. Good lead, he thinks, looking down the steep Gully at the trail left by the green rope, looping from piton to piton. Perhaps a better way to cross the Gully from right to left? Stephan’s helmeted face calls something up. Roger hammers in three pitons and secures the line. “Come on up!” he cries. His fingers and calves are tired. There is just room to sit on his bootledge: immense world, out there under the bright pink morning sky! He sucks down the air and belays Stephan’s ascent, pulling up the rope and looping it carefully. The next pitch will be Stephan’s; Roger will have quite a bit of time to sit on this ledge and feel the intense solitude of his position in this vertical desolation. “Ah!” he says. Climbing up and out of the world. . . .

It is the strongest sort of duality: Facing the rock and climbing, his attention is tightly focused on the rock within a meter or two of his eyes, inspecting its every flaw and irregularity. It is not particularly good climbing rock, but the Gully slopes at about seventy degrees in this section, so the actual technical difficulty is not that great. The important thing is to understand the rock fully enough to find only good holds and good cracks—to recognize suspect holds and avoid them. A lot of weight will follow them up these fixed ropes, and although the ropes will probably be renailed, his piton placements will likely stand. One has to see the rock and the world beneath the rock.

And then he finds a ledge to sit and rest on, and turns around, and there is the great expanse of the Tharsis Bulge. Tharsis is a continent-sized bulge in the Martian surface; at its center it is eleven kilometers above the Martian datum, and the three prince volcanoes lie in a line, northeast to southwest, on the bulge’s highest plateau. Olympus Mons is at the far northwestern edge of the bulge, almost on the great plain of Amazonis Planitia. Now, not even halfway up the great volcano’s escarpment, Roger can just see the three prince volcanoes poking over the horizon to the southeast, demonstrating perfectly the size of the planet itself. He looks around one-eighteenth of Mars.

By midafternoon Roger and Stephan have run out their three hundred meters of rope, and they return to Camp Three pleased with themselves. The next morning they hurry up the fixed ropes in the mirror dawn, and begin again. At the end of Roger’s third pitch in the lead he comes upon a good site for a camp: A sort of pillar bordering the Great Gully on its right side ends abruptly in a flat top that looks very promising. After negotiating a difficult short traverse to get onto the pillar top, they wait for the midday radio conference. Consultation with Eileen confirms that the pillar is about the right distance from Camp Three, and suddenly they are standing in Camp Four.

“The Gully ends pretty near to you anyway,” Eileen says.

So Roger and Stephan have the day free to set up a wall tent and then explore. The climb is going well, Roger thinks: no major technical difficulties, a group that gets along fairly well together . . . perhaps the great South Buttress will not prove to be that difficult after all.

Stephan gets out a little sketchbook. Roger glances at the filled pages as Stephan flips through them. “What’s that?”

“Chir pine, they call it. I saw some growing out of the rocks above Camp One. It’s amazing what you find living on the side of this cliff.”

“Yes,” Roger says.

“Oh I know, I know. You don’t like it. But I’m sure I don’t know why.” He has the blank sheet of the sketchbook up now. “Look in the cracks across the Gully. Lot of ice there, and then patches of moss. That’s moss campion, with the lavender flowers on top of the moss cushion, see?”

He begins sketching and Roger watches, fascinated.

“That’s a wonderful talent to have, drawing.”

“Skill. Look, there’s edelweiss and asters, growing almost together.” He jerks, puts finger to lips, points. “Pika,” he whispers.

Roger looks at the broken niches in the moat of the Gully opposite them. There is a movement and suddenly he sees them—two little gray furballs with bright black eyes—three—the last scampering up the rock fearlessly. They have a hole at the back of one niche for a home. Stephan sketches rapidly, getting the outline of the three creatures, then filling them in. Bright Martian eyes.

And once, in the northern autumn in Burroughs, when the leaves covered the ground and fell through the air, leaves the color of sand, or the tan of antelopes, or the green of green apples, or the white of cream, or the yellow of butter—he walked through the park. The wind blew stiffly from the southwest out of the big funnel of the delta, bringing clouds flying overhead swiftly, scattered and white and sunbroken to the west, massed and dark dusky blue to the east; and the evergreens waved their arms in every shade of dark green, before which the turning leaves of the hardwoods flared; and above the trees to the east a white-walled church, with reddish arched roof tiles and a white bell tower, glowed under the dark clouds. Kids playing on the swings across the park, yellow-red aspens waving over the brick city hall beyond them to the north—and Roger felt—wandering among widely spaced white-trunked trees that thrust their white limbs in every upward direction—he felt—feeling the wind loft the gliding leaves over him—he felt what all the others must have felt when they walked around, that Mars had become a place of exquisite beauty. In such lit air he could see every branch, leaf, and needle waving under the tide of wind, crows flying home, lower clouds lofting puffy and white under the taller black ones, and it all struck him all at once: freshly colored, fully lit, spacious and alive in the wind—what a world! What a world.

And then, back in his offices, he hadn’t been able to tell anyone about it. It wouldn’t have been like him.

Remembering that, and remembering his recent talk with Eileen, Roger feels uncomfortable. His past overwhelmed that day’s walk through the park: What kind of assumption was that?

Roger spends his afternoon free-climbing above Camp Four, looking around a bit and enjoying the exercise of his climbing skills. They’re coming back at last. But the rock is nearly crack-free once out of the Gully, and he decides free-climbing is not a good idea. Besides, he notices a curious thing: About fifty meters above Camp Four, the Great Central Gully is gone. It ends in a set of overhangs like the ribs under the protruding wall of a building. Definitely not the way up. And yet the face to the right of the overhangs is not much better; it too tilts out and out, until it is almost sheer. The few cracks breaking this mass will not be easy to climb. In fact, Roger doubts he could climb them, and wonders if the leads are up to it. Well, sure, he thinks. They can climb anything. But it looks awful. Hans has talked about the volcano’s “hard eon,” when the lava pouring from the caldera was denser and more consistent than in the volcano’s earlier years. The escarpment, being a sort of giant boring of the volcano’s flow history, naturally reflects the changes in lava consistency in its many horizontal bands. So far they have been climbing on softer rock—now they have reached the bottom of a harder band. Back in Camp Four Roger looks up at what he can see of the cliff above, and wonders where they will go.

Another duality: the two halves of the day, forenoon and afternoon. Forenoon is sunny and therefore hot: a morning ice and rock shower in the Gully, and time to dry out sleeping bags and socks. Then noon passes and the sun disappears behind the cliff above. For an hour or so they have the weird half-light of the dusk mirrors; then they too disappear, and suddenly the air is biting, bare hands risk frostnip, and the lighting is indirect and eerie: a world in shadow. Water on the cliff face ices up, and rocks are pushed out—there is another period when rocks fall and go whizzing by. People bless their helmets and hunch their shoulders, and discuss again the possibility of shoulder pads. In the cold the cheery morning is forgotten, and it seems the whole climb takes place in shadow.

When Camp Four is established they try several reconnaissance climbs through what Hans calls the Jasper Band. “It looks like orbicular jasper, see?” He shows them a dull rock and after cutting away at it with a laser saw, shows them a smooth brown surface, speckled with little circles of yellow, green, red, white. “Looks like lichen,” Roger says. “Fossilized lichen.”

“Yes. This is orbicular jasper. For it to be trapped in this basalt implies a metamorphic slush—lava partially melting rock in the throat above the magma chamber, and then throwing it all up.”

So it was the Jasper Band, and it was trouble. Too sheer—close to vertical, really, and without an obvious way up. “At least it’s good hard rock,” Dougal says cheerfully.

Then one day Arthur and Marie return from a long traverse out to the right, and then up. They hurry into camp grinning ear to ear.

“It’s a ledge,” Arthur says. “A perfect ledge. I can’t believe it. It’s about half a meter wide, and extends around this rampart for a couple hundred meters, just like a damn sidewalk! We just walked right around that corner! Completely vertical above and below—talk about a view!”

For once Roger finds Arthur’s enthusiasm fully appropriate. The Thank God Ledge, as Arthur has named it (“There’s one like this on Half Dome in Yosemite”), is a horizontal break in the cliff face, and a flat slab just wide enough to walk on is the result. Roger stops in the middle of the ledge to look around. Straight up: rock and sky. Straight down: the tiny tumble of the talus, appearing directly below them, as Roger is not inclined to lean out too far to see the rock in between. The exposure is astonishing. “You and Marie walked along this ledge without ropes?” Roger says.

“Oh, it’s fairly wide,” Arthur replies. “Don’t you think? I ended up crawling there where it narrows just a bit. But mostly it was fine. Marie walked the whole way.”

“I’m sure she did.” Roger shakes his head, happy to be clipped on to the rope that has been fixed about chest high above the ledge. With its aid he can appreciate the strange ledge—perfect sidewalk in a completely vertical world: the wall hard, knobby, right next to his head—under him the smooth surface of the ledge, and then empty space.

Verticality. Consider it. A balcony high on a tall building will give a meager analogy: Experience it. On the side of this cliff, unlike the side of any building, there is no ground below. The world below is the world of belowness, the rush of air under your feet. The forbidding smooth wall of the cliff, black and upright beside you, halves the sky. Earth, air; the solid here and now, the airy infinite; the wall of basalt, the sea of gases. Another duality: To climb is to live on the most symbolic plane of existence and the most physical plane of existence at the same time. This too the climber treasures.

At the far end of the Thank God Ledge there is a crack system that breaks through the Jasper Band—it is like a narrow, miniature version of the Great Gully, filled with ice. Progress upward is renewed, and the cracks lead up to the base of an ice-filled half funnel that divides the Jasper Band even further. The bottom of the funnel is sloped just enough for Camp Five, which becomes by far the most cramped of the campsites. The Thank God Ledge traverse means that using the power reels is impossible between Camps Four and Five, however. Everyone makes ten or twelve carries between the two camps. Each time Roger walks the sidewalk through space, his amazement at it returns.

While the carries across the ledge are being made, and Camps Two and Three are being dismantled, Arthur and Marie have begun finding the route above. Roger goes up with Stephan to supply them with rope and oxygen. The climbing is “mixed,” half on rock, half on black ice rimed with dirty hard snow. Awkward stuff. There are some pitches that make Roger and Hans gasp with effort, look at each other round-eyed. “Must have been Marie leading.” “I don’t know, that Arthur is pretty damn good.” The rock is covered in many places by layers of black ice, hard and brittle: Years of summer rain followed by frost have caked the exposed surfaces at this height. Roger’s boots slip over the slick ice repeatedly. “Need crampons up here.”

“Except the ice is so thin, you’d be kicking rock.”

“Mixed climbing.”

“Fun, eh?”

Breath rasps over knocking heartbeats. Holes in the ice have been broken with ice axes; the rock below is good rock, lined with vertical fissures. A chunk of ice whizzes by, clatters on the face below.

“I wonder if that’s Arthur and Marie’s work.”

Only the fixed rope makes it possible for Roger to ascend this pitch, it is so hard. Another chunk of ice flies by, and both of them curse.

Feet appear in the top of the open-book crack they are ascending.

“Hey! Watch out up there! You’re dropping ice chunks on us!”

“Oh! Sorry, didn’t know you were there.” Arthur and Marie jumar down the rope to them. “Sorry,” Marie says again. “Didn’t know you’d come up so late. Have you got more rope?”

“Yeah.”

The sun disappears behind the cliff, leaving only the streetlamp light of the dusk mirrors. Arthur peers at them as Marie stuffs their packs with new rope. “Beautiful,” he exclaims. “They have parhelia on Earth too, you know—a natural effect of the light when there’s ice crystals in the atmosphere. It’s usually seen in Antarctica—big halos around the sun, and at two points of the halo these mock suns. But I don’t think we ever had four mock suns per side. Beautiful!”

“Let’s go,” Marie says without looking up. “We’ll see you two down at Camp Five tonight.” And off they go, using the rope and both sides of the open-book crack to quickly lever their way up.

“Strange pair,” Stephan says as they descend to Camp Five.

The next day they take more rope up. In the late afternoon, after a very long climb, they find Arthur and Marie sitting in a cave in the side of the cliff that is big enough to hold their entire base camp. “Can you believe this?” Arthur cries. “It’s a damn hotel!”

The cave’s entrance is a horizontal break in the cliff face, about four meters high and over fifteen from side to side. The floor of the cave is relatively flat, covered near the entrance with a thin sheet of ice, and littered with chunks of the roof, which is bumpy but solid. Roger picks up one of the rocks from the floor and moves it to the side of the cave, where floor and roof come together to form a narrow crack. Marie is trying to get somebody below on the radio, to tell them about the find. Roger goes to the back of the cave, some twenty meters in from the face, and ducks down to inspect the jumble of rocks in the long crack where floor and roof meet. “It’s going to be nice to lie out flat for once,” Stephan says. Looking out the cave’s mouth, Roger sees a wide smile of lavender sky.

When Hans arrives he gets very excited. He bangs about in the gloom hitting things with his ice axe, pointing his flashlight into various nooks and crannies. “It’s tuff, do you see?” he says, holding up a chunk for their inspection. “This is a shield volcano, meaning it ejected very little ash over the years, which is what gave it its flattened shape. But there must have been a few ash eruptions, and when the ash is compressed it becomes tuff—this rock here. Tuff is much softer than basalt and andesite, and over the years this exposed layer has eroded away, leaving us with our wonderful hotel.”

“I love it,” says Arthur.

The rest of the team joins them in the mirror dusk, but the cave is still uncrowded. Although they set up tents to sleep in, they place the lamps on the cave floor, and eat dinner in a large circle, around a collection of glowing little stoves. Eyes gleam with laughter as the climbers consume bowls of stew. There is something marvelous about this secure home, tucked in the face of the escarpment three thousand meters above the plain. It is an unexpected joy to loll about on flat ground, unharnessed. Hans has not stopped prowling the cave with his flashlight. Occasionally he whistles.

“Hans!” Arthur calls when the meal is over and the bowls and pots have been scraped clean. “Get over here, Hans. Have a seat. There you go. Sit down.” Marie is passing around her flask of brandy. “All right, Hans, tell me something. Why is this cave here? And why, for that matter, is this escarpment here? Why is Olympus Mons the only volcano anywhere to have this encircling cliff?”

Frances says, “It’s not the only volcano to have such a feature.”

“Now, Frances,” Hans says. “You know it’s the only big shield volcano with a surrounding escarpment. The analogies from Iceland that you’re referring to are just little vents of larger volcanoes.”

Frances nods. “That’s true. But the analogy may still hold.”

“Perhaps.” Hans explains to Arthur, “You see, there is still not a perfect agreement as to the cause of the scarp. But I think I can say that my theory is generally accepted—wouldn’t you agree, Frances?”

“Yes. . . .”

Hans smiles genially and looks around at the group. “You see, Frances is one of those who believe that the volcano originally grew up through a glacial cap, and that the glacier made in effect a retaining wall, holding in the lava and creating this drop-off after the glacial cap disappeared.”

“There are good analogies in Iceland for this particular shape for a volcano,” Frances says. “And it’s eruption under and through ice that explains it.”

“Be that as it may,” Hans says, “I am among those who feel that the weight of Olympus Mons is the cause of the scarp.”

“You said that once before,” Arthur says, “but I don’t understand how that would work.”

Stephan voices his agreement with this, and Hans sips from the flask with a happy look. He says, “The volcano is extremely old, you understand. Three billion years or so, on this same site, or close to it—very little tectonic drift, unlike on Earth. So magma upwells, lava spills out, over and over and over, and it is deposited over softer material—probably the gardened regolith that resulted from the intensive meteor bombardments of the planet’s earliest years. A tremendous weight is deposited on the surface of the planet, you see, and this weight increases as the volcano grows. As we all know now, it is a very, very big volcano. And eventually the weight is so great that it squishes out the softer material beneath it. We find this material to the northeast, which is the downhill side of the Tharsis Bulge, and is naturally the side that the pressured rock would be pushed out to. Have any of you visited the Olympus Mons aureole?” Several of them nod. “Fascinating region.”

“Okay,” Arthur says, “but why wouldn’t that just sink the whole area? I would think that there would be a depression circling the edge of the volcano, rather than this cliff.”

“Exactly!” Stephan cries.

But Hans is shaking his head, a smile on his face. He gestures for the brandy flask again. “The point is, the lava shield of Olympus Mons is a single unit of rock—layered, admittedly, but essentially one big cap of basalt, placed on a slightly soft surface. Now by far the greatest part of the weight of this cap is near the center—the volcano’s peak, you know, still so far above us. So—the cap is a unit, a single piece of rock—and basalt has a certain flexibility to it, as all rock does. So the cap itself is somewhat flexible. Now the center of it sinks the farthest, being heaviest—and the outside edge of the shield, being part of a single flexible cap, bends upward.”

“Up twenty thousand feet?” Arthur demands. “You’re kidding!”

Hans shrugs. “You must remember that the volcano stands twenty-five kilometers above the surrounding plains. The volume of the volcano is one hundred times the volume of Earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, and for three billion years at least it has been pressing down on this spot.”

“But it doesn’t make sense that the scarp would be so symmetrical if that was what happened,” Frances objected.

“On the contrary. In fact that is the really telling aspect of it. The outer edge of the lava shield is lifted up, okay? Higher and higher, until the flexibility of the basalt is exceeded. In other words, the shield is just so flexible and no more. At the point where the stress becomes too much, the rock sheers off, and the inner side of the break continues to rise, while what is beyond the break point subsides. So, the plains down below us are still part of the lava shield of Olympus Mons, but they are beyond the break point. And as the lava was everywhere approximately the same thickness, it gave way everywhere at about the same distance from the peak, giving us the roughly circular escarpment that we now climb!”

Hans waves a hand with an architect’s pride. Frances sniffs. Arthur says, “It’s hard to believe.” He taps the floor. “So the other half of this cave is underneath the talus wash down there?”

“Exactly.” Hans beams. “Though the other half was never a cave. This was probably a small, roughly circular layer of tuff, trapped in much harder basaltic lava. But when the shield broke and the escarpment was formed, the tuff deposit was cut in half, exposing its side to erosion. And a few eons later we have our cozy cave.”

“Hard to believe,” Arthur says again.

Roger sips from the flask and silently agrees with Arthur. It’s remarkable how difficult it is to transfer the areologist’s theories, in which mountains act like plastic or toothpaste, to the vast hard basalt reality underneath and above them. “It’s the amount of time necessary for these transformations that’s difficult to imagine,” he says aloud. “It must take . . .” He waves a hand.

“Billions of years,” Hans says. “We cannot properly imagine that amount of time. But we can see the sure signs of its passing.”

And in three centuries we can destroy those signs, Roger says silently. Or most of them. And make a park instead.

Above the cave the cliff face lies back a bit, and the smoothness of the Jasper Band is replaced by a jumbled, complicated slope of ice gullies, buttresses, and shallow horizontal slits that mimic their cave below. These steps, as they call them, are to be avoided like crevasses on level ground, as the overhanging roof of each is a serious obstacle. The ice gullies provide the best routes up, and it becomes a matter of navigating up what appears to be a vertical delta, like the tracing of a lightning bolt burned into the face and then frozen. Every morning as the sun hits the face there is an hour or so of severe ice and rockfall, and in the afternoons in the hour after the sun leaves the face there is another period of rockfall. There are some close calls and one morning Hannah is hit by a chunk of ice in the chest, bruising her badly. “The trick is to stay in the moat between the ice in the gully and the rock wall,” Marie says to Roger as they retreat down a dead-end couloir.

“Or to be where you want to be by the time the sun comes up,” Dougal adds. And on his advice to Eileen, they begin rising long before dawn to make the exposed parts of the climb. In the frigid dark a wristwatch alarm beeps. Roger twists in his bag, trying to turn it off; but it is his tent mate’s. With a groan he sits up, reaches over and switches on his stove. Soon the metal rings in the top of the cubical stove are glowing a friendly warm orange, heating the tent’s air and giving a little bit of light to see by. Eileen and Stephan are sitting in their bags, beating sleep away. Their hair is tousled, their faces lined, puffy, tired. It is 3:00 A.M. Eileen puts a pot of ice on the stove, dimming their light. She turns on a lamp to its lowest illumination, which is still enough to make Stephan groan. Roger digs in a food pouch for tea and dried milk. Breakfast is wonderfully warming, but suddenly he has to visit the cave’s convenient yet cold latrine. Boots on—the worst part of dressing. Like sticking one’s feet into ice blocks. Then out of the warm tent into the intense cold of the cave’s air. Through the dark to the latrine. The other tents glow dimly—time for another dawn assault on the upper slopes.

By the time Archimedes, the first dawn mirror, appears, they have been on the slopes above the cave for nearly an hour, climbing by the light of their helmet lamps. The mirror dawn is better; there is enough light to see well, and yet the rock and ice have not yet been warmed enough to start falls. Roger climbs the ice gullies using crampons; he enjoys using them, kicking into the plastic ice with the front points of the crampons, and adhering to the slopes as if glued to them. Below him Arthur keeps singing a song in tribute to his crampons: “Spiderman, Spiderman, Spiderman, Spidermannnnn.” But once above the fixed ropes, there is no extra breath for singing; the lead climbing is extremely difficult. Roger finds himself spread-eagled on one pitch, right foot spiked into the icefall, left foot digging into a niche the size of his toenail; left hand holding the shaft of the ice axe, which is firmly planted in the icefall above, and right hand laboriously turning the handle of an ice screw, which will serve as piton in this little couloir: And for a moment he realizes he is ten meters above the nearest belay, hanging there by three tiny points. And gasping for breath.

At the top of that pitch there is a small outcropping to rest on, and when Eileen pulls herself up the fixed rope she finds Roger and Arthur laid out over the rock in the morning sunlight like fish set out to dry. She surveys them as she catches her wind, gasping herself. “Time for oxygen,” she declares. In the midday radio call she tells the next teams up to bring oxygen bottles along with the tents and other equipment for the next camp.

With three camps established above the cave, which serves as a sort of base camp to return to from time to time, they are making fair progress. Each night only a few of them are in any given camp. They are forced to use oxygen for almost all of the climbing, and most of them sleep with a mask on, the regulator turned to its lowest setting. The work of setting up the high camps, which they try to do without oxygen, becomes exhausting and cold. When the camps are set and the day’s climbing is done, they spend the shadowed afternoons wheezing around the camps, drinking hot fluids and stamping their feet to keep them warm, waiting for the sunset radio call and the next day’s orders. At this point it’s a pleasure to leave the thinking to Eileen.

One afternoon climbing above the highest camp with Eileen, Roger stands facing out as he belays Eileen’s lead up a difficult pitch. Thunderheads like long-stemmed mushrooms march in lines blown to the northeast. Only the tops of the clouds are higher than they. It is late afternoon and the cliff face is a shadow. The cottony trunks of the thunderheads are dark, shadowed gray—then the thunderheads themselves bulge white and gleaming into the sunny sky above, actually casting some light back onto the cliff. Roger pulls the belay rope taut, looks up at Eileen. She is staring up her line of attack, which has become a crack in two walls meeting at ninety degrees. Her oxygen mask covers her mouth and nose. Roger tugs once—she looks down—he points out at the immense array of clouds. She nods, pulls her mask to one side. “Like ships!” she calls down. “Ships of the line!”

Roger pulls his mask over a cheek. “Do you think a storm might come?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ve been lucky so far.” She replaces her mask and begins a layback, shoving the fingers of both hands in the crack, putting the soles of both boots against the wall just below her hands, and pulling herself out to the side so that she can walk sideways up one of the walls. Roger keeps the belay taut.

Mars’s prevailing westerlies strike Olympus Mons, and the air rises, but does not flow over the peak; the mountain is so tall it protrudes out of much of the atmosphere, and the winds are therefore pushed around each side. Compressed in that way, the air comes swirling off the eastern flank cold and dry, having dumped its moisture on the western flank, where glaciers form. That is the usual pattern, anyway; but when a cyclonic system sweeps out of the southwest, it strikes the volcano a glancing blow from the south, compresses, lashes the southeast quadrant of the shield, and rebounds to the east intensified.

“What’s the barometer say, Hans?”

“Four hundred and ten millibars.”

“You’re kidding!”

“That’s not too far below normal, actually.”

“You’re kidding.”

“It is low, however. I believe we are being overtaken by a low-pressure system.”

The storm begins as katabatic winds: cold air falling over the edge of the escarpment and dropping toward the plain. Sometimes the force of the west wind over the plateau of the shield blows the gusts out beyond the actual cliff face, which will then stand in perfect stillness. But the slight vacuum fills again with a quick downward blast, which makes the tents boom and stretch their frames. Roger grunts as one almost squashes the tent, shakes his head at Eileen. She says, “Get used to it—there are downdrafts hitting the upper face more often than not.” WHAM! “Although this one does seem to be a bit stronger than usual. But it’s not snowing, is it?”

Roger looks out the little tent-door window. “Nope.”

“Good.”

“Awful cold, though.” He turns in his sleeping bag.

“That’s okay. Snow would be a really bad sign.” She gets on the radio and starts calling around. She and Roger are in Camp Eight (the cave is now called Camp Six); Dougal and Frances are in Camp Nine, the highest and most exposed of the new camps; Arthur, Hans, Hannah, and Ivan are in Camp Seven; and the rest are down in the cave. They are a little overextended, as Eileen has been loath to pull the last tents out of the cave. Now Roger begins to see why. “Everyone stay inside tomorrow morning until they hear from me at mirror dawn. We’ll have another conference then.”

The wind rises through the night, and Roger is awakened at 3:00 A.M. by a particularly hard blast to the tent. There is very little sound of the wind against the rock—then a BANG and suddenly the tent is whistling and straining like a tortured thing. It lets off and the rocks hoot softly. Settle down and listen to the airy breathing WHAM, the squealing tent is driven down into the niche they have set it in—then sucked back up. The comforting hiss of an oxygen mask, keeping his nose warm for once—WHAM. Eileen is apparently sleeping, her head buried in her sleeping bag; only her bunting cap and the oxygen hose emerge from the drawn-up opening at the top. Roger can’t believe the gunshot slaps of the wind don’t wake her. He checks his watch, decides it is futile to try falling back to sleep. New frost condensation on the inside of the tent falls on his face like snow, scaring him for a moment. But a flashlight gleam directed out the small clear panel in the tent door reveals there is no snow. By the dimmest light of the lamp Roger sets their pot of ice on the square bulk of the stove and turns it on. He puts his chilled hands back in the sleeping bag and watches the stove heat up. Quickly the rings under the pot are a bright orange, palpably radiating heat.

An hour later it is considerably warmer in the tent. Roger sips hot tea, tries to predict the wind’s hammering. The melted water from the cave’s ice apparently has some silt in it; Roger, along with three or four of the others, has had his digestion upset by the silt, and now he feels a touch of the glacial dysentery coming on. Uncomfortably he quells the urge. Some particularly sharp blows to the tent wake Eileen; she sticks her head out of her bag, looking befuddled.

“Wind’s up,” Roger says. “Want some tea?”

“Mmmph.” She pulls away her oxygen mask. “Yeah.” She takes a full cup and drinks. “Thirsty.”

“Yeah. The masks seem to do that.”

“What time is it?”

“Four.”

“Ah. My alarm must have woken me. Almost time for the call.”

Although it is cloudy to the east, they still get a distinct increase of light when Archimedes rises. Roger pulls on his cold boots and groans. “Gotta go,” he says to Eileen, and unzips the tent just far enough to get out.

“Stay harnessed up!”

Outside, one of the katabatic blasts shoves him hard. It’s very cold, perhaps twenty degrees below Celsius, so that the windchill factor when it is blowing hardest is extreme. Unfortunately, he does have a touch of the runs. Much relieved, and very chilled, he pulls his pants up and steps back into the tent. Eileen is on the radio. People are to stay inside until the winds abate a little, she says. Roger nods vigorously. When she is done she laughs at him. “You know what Dougal would say.”

“Oh, it was very invigorating all right.”

She laughs again.

Time passes. When he warms back up Roger dozes off. It’s actually easier to sleep during the day, when the tent is warmer.

He is rudely awakened late in the morning by a shout from outside. Eileen jerks up in her bag and unzips the tent door. Dougal sticks his head in, pulls his oxygen mask onto his chest, frosts them with hard breathing. “Our tent has been smashed by a rock,” he says, almost apologetically. “Frances has got her arm broken. I need some help getting her down.”

“Down where?” Roger says involuntarily.

“Well, I thought to the cave, anyway. Or at least to here—our tent’s crushed, she’s pretty much out in the open right now—in her bag, you know, but the tent’s not doing much.”

Grimly Eileen and Roger begin to pull their climbing clothes on.

Outside the wind rips at them and Roger wonders if he can climb. They clip on to the rope and jumar up rapidly, moving at emergency speed. Sometimes the blasts of wind from above are so strong that they can only hang in against the rock and wait. During one blast Roger becomes frightened—it seems impossible that flesh and bone, harness, jumar, rope, piton, and rock will all hold under the immense pressure of the downdraft. But all he can do is huddle in the crack the fixed rope follows and hope, getting colder every second.

They enter a long snaking ice gully that protects them from the worst of the wind, and make better progress. Several times rocks or chunks of ice fall by them, dropping like bombs or giant hailstones. Dougal and Eileen are climbing so fast that it is difficult to keep up with them. Roger feels weak and cold; even though he is completely covered, his nose and fingers feel frozen. His intestines twist a little as he crawls over a boulder jammed in the gully, and he groans. Better to have stayed in the tent on this particular day.

Suddenly they are at Camp Nine—one big box tent, flattened at one end. It is flapping like a big flag in a gale, cracking and snapping again and again, nearly drowning out their voices. Frances is glad to see them; under her goggles her eyes are red-rimmed. “I think I can sit up in a sling and rappel down if you can help me,” she says over the tent noise.

“How are you?” asks Eileen.

“The left arm’s broken just above the elbow. I’ve made a bit of a splint for it. I’m awfully cold, but other than that I don’t feel too bad. I’ve taken some painkillers, but not enough to make me sleepy.”

They all crowd into what’s left of the tent and Eileen turns on a stove. Dougal dashes about outside, vainly trying to secure the open end of the tent and end the flapping. They brew tea and sit in sleeping bags to drink it. “What time is it?” “Two.” “We’d better be off then.” “Yeah.”

Getting Frances down to Camp Eight is slow, cold work. The exertion of climbing the fixed ropes at high speed was just enough to keep them warm on the climb up; now they have to hug the rock and hold on, or wait while Frances is belayed down one of the steeper sections. She uses her right arm and steps down everything she can, helping the process as much as possible.

She is stepping over the boulder that gave Roger such distress when a blast of wind hits her like a punch, and over the rock she tumbles, face against it. Roger leaps up from below and grabs her just as she is about to roll helplessly onto her left side. For a moment all he can do is hang there, holding her steady. Dougal and Eileen shout down from above. No room for them. Roger double-sets the jumar on the fixed rope above him, pulls up with one arm, the other around Frances’s back. They eye each other through their goggles—she scrambles blindly for a foothold—finds something and takes some of her weight herself. Still, they are stuck there. Roger shows Frances his hand and points at it, trying to convey his plan. She nods. He unclips from the fixed rope, sets the jumar once again right below Frances, descends to a good foothold, and laces his hands together. He reaches up, guides Frances’s free foot into his hands. She shifts her weight onto that foot and lowers herself until Roger keeps the hold in place. Then the other foot crosses to join Roger’s two feet—a good bit of work by Frances, who is certainly hurting. Mid-move another gust almost wrecks their balance, but they lean into each other and hold. They are below the boulder, and Dougal and Eileen can now climb over it and belay Frances again.

They start down once more. But the exertion has triggered a reaction inside Roger, and suddenly peristalsis attacks him. He curses the cave silt and tries desperately to quell the urge, but it won’t be denied. He signals his need to the others and jumars down the fixed rope away from them, to get out of the way of the descent and obtain a little privacy. Pulling his pants down while the wind drags him around the fixed rope is actually a technical problem, and he curses continuously as he relieves himself; it is without a doubt the coldest shit of his life. By the time the others get to him he is shivering so hard he can barely climb.

They barge into Camp Eight around sunset, and Eileen gets on the radio. The lower camps are informed of the situation and given their instructions. No one questions Eileen when her voice has that edge in it.

The problem is that their camp is low on food and oxygen. “I’ll go down and get a load,” Dougal says.

“But you’ve already been out a long time,” Eileen says.

“No no. A hot meal and I’ll be off again. You should stay here with Frances, and Roger’s chilled down.”

“We can get Arthur or Hans to come up.”

“We don’t want movement up, do we? They’d have to stay up here, and we’re out of room as it is. Besides, I’m the most used to climbing in this wind in the dark.”

Eileen nods. “Okay.”

“You warm enough?” Dougal asks Roger.

Roger can only shiver. They help him into his bag and dose him with tea, but it is hard to drink. Long after Dougal has left he is still shivering.

“A good sign he’s shivering,” Frances says to Eileen. “But he’s awfully cold. Maybe too hypothermic to warm up. I’m cold myself.”

Eileen keeps the stove on high till there is a fug of warm air in the tent. She gets into Frances’s bag with her, carefully avoiding her injured side. In the ruddy stove light their faces are pinched with discomfort.

“I’m okay,” Frances mutters after a while. “Good’n warm. Get him now.”

Roger is barely conscious as Eileen pushes into his bag with him. He is resentful that he must move. “Get your outers off,” Eileen orders. They struggle around, half in the bag, to get Roger’s climbing gear off. Lying together in their thermal underwear, Roger slowly warms up. “Man, you are cold,” Eileen says.

“ ’Preciate it,” Roger mutters wearily. “Don’t know what happened.”

“We didn’t work you hard enough on the descent. Plus you had to bare your butt to a windchill factor I wouldn’t want to guess.”

Body warmth, seeping into him. Long hard body pressed against him. She won’t let him sleep. “Not yet. Turn around. Here. Drink this.” Frances holds his eyelids up to check him. “Drink this!” He drinks. Finally they let him sleep.

Dougal wakes them, barging in with a full pack. He and the pack are crusted with snow. “Pretty desperate,” he says with a peculiar smile. He hurries into a sleeping bag and drinks tea. Roger checks his watch—midnight. Dougal has been at it for almost twenty-four hours, and after wolfing down a pot of stew he puts on his mask, rolls to a corner of the tent, and falls into a deep sleep.

Next morning the storm is still battering the tent. The four of them get ready awkwardly—the tent is better for three, and they must be careful of Frances’s arm. Eileen gets on the radio and orders those below to clear Camp Seven and retreat to the cave. Once climbing they find that Frances’s whole side has stiffened up. Getting her down means they have to hammer in new pitons, set up rappelling ropes for her, lower her with one of them jumaring down the fixed rope beside her, while occasionally hunkering down to avoid hard gusts of wind. They stop in Camp Seven for an hour to rest and eat, then drop to the cave. It is dusk by the time they enter the dark refuge.

So they are all back in the cave. The wind swirls in it, and the others have spent the previous day piling rocks into the south side of the cave mouth, to build a protective wall. It helps a bit.

As the fourth day of the storm passes in the whistle and flat of wind, and an occasional flurry of snow, all the members of the climb crowd into one of the large box tents, sitting upright and bumping arms so they will all fit.

“Look, I don’t want to go down just because one of us has a busted arm,” Marie says.

“I can’t climb,” says Frances. It seems to Roger that she is holding up very well; her face is white and her eyes look drugged, but she is quite coherent and very calm.

“I know that,” Marie says. “But we could split up. It’ll only take a few people to get you back down to the cars. The rest of us can take the rest of the gear and carry on. If we get to the cache at the top of the scarp, we won’t have to worry about supplies. If we don’t, we’ll just follow you down. But I don’t fancy us giving up now—that’s not what we came for, eh? Going down when we don’t have to?”

Eileen looks at Ivan. “It’d be up to you to get Frances down.”

Ivan grimaces, nods. “That’s what Sherpas are for,” he says gamely.

“Do you think four will be enough for it?”

“More would probably just get in the way.”

There is a quick discussion of their supply situation. Hans is of the opinion that they are short enough on supplies to make splitting up dangerous. “It seems to me that our primary responsibility is to get Frances to the ground safely. The climb can be finished another time.”

Marie argues with him, but Hans is supported by Stephan, and it seems neither side will convince the other. After an apprehensive silence, Eileen clears her throat.

“Marie’s plan sounds good to me,” she says. “We’ve got the supplies to go both ways, and the Sherpas can get Frances down by themselves.”

“Neither group will have much margin for error,” Hans says.

“We can leave the water for the group going down,” Marie says. “There’ll be ice and snow the rest of the way up.”

“We’ll have to be a bit more sparing with the oxygen,” Hans says. “Frances should have enough to take her all the way down.”

“Yes,” Eileen says. “We’ll have to get going again in the next day or two, no matter what the weather’s like.”

“Well?” says Marie. “We’ve proved we can get up and down the fixed ropes in any weather. We should get up and fix Camp Nine as soon as we can. Tomorrow, say.”

“If there’s a bit of a break.”

“We’ve got to stock the higher camps—”

“Yeah. We’ll do what we can, Marie. Don’t fret.”

While the storm continues they make preparations to split up. Roger, who wants to stay clear of all that, helps Arthur to build the wall at the cave’s entrance. They have started at the southern end, filling up the initial crack of the cave completely. After that they must be satisfied with a two-meter-high wall, which they extend across the entrance until the boulders on the floor of the cave are used up. Then they sit against the wall and watch the division of the goods. Wind still whistles through the cave, but sitting at the bottom of the wall they can feel that they did some good.

The division of equipment is causing some problems. Marie is very possessive about the oxygen bottles. “Well, you’ll be going down, right?” she demands of Ivan. “You don’t need oxygen at all once you get a couple camps down.”

“Frances will need it a lot longer than that,” Ivan says. “And we can’t be sure how long it’ll take to get her down.”

“Hell, you can reel her down once you get past the Thank God Ledge. Shouldn’t take you any time at all—”

“Marie, get out of this,” Eileen snaps. “We’ll divide the supplies. There’s no reason for you to bother with this.”

Marie glares, stomps off to her tent.

Arthur and Roger give each other the eye. The division goes on. Rope will be the biggest problem, it appears. But everything will be tight.

At the first break in the winds the rescue party—Frances and the four Sherpas—take off. Roger descends with them to help them cross the Thank God Ledge, and to recover the fixed rope there. The wind still gusts, but with less violence. In the middle of the ledge crossing Frances loses her balance and swings around; Roger reaches her (not noticing he ran) and holds her in. “We have to stop meeting like this,” Frances says, voice muffled by her mask.

When they reach the Great Gully, Roger says his goodbyes. The Sherpas are cheery enough, but Frances is white-faced and quiet. She has said hardly a word in the last couple of days, and Roger cannot tell what she is thinking. “Bad luck,” he tells her. “You’ll get another chance, though.”

“Thanks for grabbing me during the drop from Camp Nine,” she says just as he is about to leave. She looks upset. “You’re awfully quick. That would have hurt like hell if I had rolled onto my left side.”

“I’m glad I could help,” Roger says. Then, as he leaves, “I like how tough you’ve been.”

A grimace from Frances.

On the way back Roger must free the fixed rope to recover it for the climb above, so on the Thank God Ledge he is always belayed only to the piton ahead. If he were to fall he would drop—sometimes up to twenty-five meters—and swing like a pendulum over the rough basalt. The ledge becomes new again; he finds that the smooth surface of the sidewalk is indeed wide enough to walk on, but still—the wind pushes at his back—he is alone—the sky is low and dark, and threatens to snow—and all of a sudden the hair on his neck rises, the oxygen whistles in his mask as he sucks it down, the pitted rock face seems to glow with an internal light of its own, and all the world expands, expands ever outward, growing more immense with every pulse of his blood; and his lungs fill, and fill, and fill.

Back in the cave Roger says nothing about the eerie moment on the ledge. Only Eileen and Hans are still in the cave—the others have gone up to supply the higher camps, and Dougal and Marie have gone all the way up to Camp Nine. Eileen, Hans, and Roger load up their packs—very heavy loads, they find when they duck out the cave—and start up the fixed ropes. Jumaring up the somewhat icy rope is difficult, in places dangerous. The wind strikes from the left now rather than from above. By the time they reach Camp Seven it is nearly dark, and Stephan and Arthur already occupy the single tent. In the mirror dusk and the strong side wind, erecting another tent is no easy task. There is not another level spot to set it on either—they must place it on a slope, and tie it to pitons hammered into the cliff. By the time Eileen and Roger and Hans get into the new tent, Roger is freezing and starving and intensely thirsty. “Pretty bloody desperate,” he says wearily, mimicking Marie and the Sherpas. They melt snow and cook up a pot of stew from their sleeping bags, and when they are done eating, Roger puts on his oxygen mask, sets the flow for sleep, and slumps off.

The moment on the Thank God Ledge jumps to mind and wakes him momentarily. Wind whips the taut walls of the tent, and Eileen, penciling logistic notes for the next day, slides down the slope under the tent until their two sleeping bags are one clumped mass. Roger looks at her: brief smile from that tired, puffy, frost-burned face. Great deltas of wrinkles under her eyes. His feet begin to warm up and he falls asleep to the popping of the tent, the hiss of oxygen, the scratching of a pencil.

That night the storm begins to pick up again.

The next morning they take down the tent in a strong wind—hard work—and start portering loads up to Camp Eight. Halfway between camps it begins to snow. Roger watches his feet through swirls of hard, dry granules. His gloved fingers twist around the frigid jumar, sliding it up the frosted rope, clicking it home, pulling himself up. It is a struggle to see footholds in the spindrift, which moves horizontally across the cliff face, from left to right as he looks at it. The whole face appears to be whitely streaming to the side, like a wave. He finds he must focus his attention entirely on his hands and feet. His fingers, nose, and toes are very cold. He rubs his nose through the mask, feels nothing. The wind pushes him hard, like a giant trying to make him fall. In the narrow gullies the wind is less strong, but they find themselves climbing up through waves of avalanching snow, drift after drift of it piling up between their bodies and the slope, burying them, sliding between their legs and away. One gully seems to last forever. Intermittently Roger is concerned about his nose, but mostly he worries about the immediate situation: moving up the rope, keeping a foothold. Visibility is down to about twenty meters—they are in a little white bubble flying to the left through white snow, or so it appears.

At one point Roger must wait for Eileen and Hans to get over the boulder that Frances had such trouble with. His mind wanders and it occurs to him that their chances of success have shifted radically—and with them, the nature of the climb. Low on supplies, facing an unknown route in deteriorating weather—Roger wonders how Eileen will handle it. She has led expeditions before, but this kind only comes about by accident.

She passes him going strong, beats ice from the rope, sweeps spindrift from the top of the boulder. Pulls up and over it in one smooth motion. The wind cuts through Roger as he watches Hans repeat the operation: cuts through the laminated outer suit, the thick bunting inner suit, his skin. . . . He brushes spindrift from his goggles with a frigid hand and heaves up after them.

Though it is spring, the winterlike low-pressure system over Olympus Mons is in place, drawing the wet winds up from the south, creating stable storm conditions on the south and east arcs of the escarpment. The snow is irregular, the wind constant. For the better part of a week the seven climbers left on the face struggle in the miserable conditions. One night at sunset radio hour they hear from Frances and the Sherpas, down at base camp. There is a lot of sand in Martian snow, and their voices are garbled by static, but the message is clear: They are down, they are safe, they are leaving for Alexandria to get Frances’s arm set. Roger catches on Eileen’s averted face an expression of pure relief, and realizes that her silence in the past few days has been a manifestation of worry. Now, looking pleased, she gives the remaining climbers their instructions for the next day in a fresh determined tone.

Into camp at night, cold and almost too tired to walk. Big loaded packs onto the various ledges and niches that serve for this particular camp. Hands shaking with hunger. The camp—Thirteen, Roger believes—is on a saddle between two ridges overlooking a deep, twisted chimney. “Just like the Devil’s Kitchen on Ben Nevis,” Arthur remarks when they get inside the tent. He eats with gusto. Roger shivers and puts his hands two centimeters above the glowing stove ring. Transferring from climbing mode to tent mode is a tricky business, and tonight Roger hasn’t done so well. At this altitude and in these winds, cold has become their most serious opponent. Overmitts off, and everything must be done immediately to get lightly gloved hands protected again as quickly as possible. Even if the rest of one’s body is warmed by exertion, the fingertips will freeze if they have enough contact with cold things. And yet so many camp operations can be done more easily with hands out of mitts. Frostnip is the frequent result, leaving the fingers tender, so that pulling up a rock face, or even buttoning or zipping one’s clothes, becomes a painful task. Frostnip blisters kill the skin, creating black patches that take a week or more to peel away. Now when they sit in the tents around the ruddy light of the stove, observing solemnly the progress of the cooking meal, they see across the pot faces splotched on cheek or nose: black skin peeling away to reveal bright pink new skin beneath.

They climb onto a band of rotten rock, a tuff-and-lava composite that sometimes breaks right off in their hands. It takes Marie and Dougal two full days to find decent belay points for the 150 meters of the band, and every morning the rockfall is frequent and frightening. “It’s a bit like swimming up the thing, isn’t it?” Dougal comments. When they make it to the hard rock above, Eileen orders Dougal and Marie to the bottom of their “ladder” to get some rest. Marie makes no complaint now; each day in the lead is an exhausting exercise, and Marie and Dougal are beat.

Every night Eileen works out plans for the following day, revising them as conditions and the climbers’ strength and health change. The logistics are complicated, and each day the seven climbers shift partners and positions in the climb. Eileen scribbles in her notebook and jabbers on the radio every dusk, altering the schedules and changing her orders with almost every new bit of information she receives from the higher camps. Her method appears chaotic. Marie dubs her the “Mad Mahdi,” and scoffs at the constant changes in plans; but she obeys them, and they work: Every night they are scattered in two or three camps up and down the cliff, with everything that they need to survive the night and get them higher the next day; and every new day they leapfrog up, pulling out the lowest camp, finding a place to establish a new high camp. The bitter winds continue. Everything is difficult. They lose track of camp numbers, and name them only high, middle, and low.

Naturally, three-quarters of everyone’s work is portering. Roger begins to feel that he is surviving the rigors of the weather and altitude better than most of the rest; he can carry more faster, and even though most days end in that state where each step up is ten breaths’ agony, he finds he can take on more the next day. His digestion returns to normal, which is a blessing—a great physical pleasure, in fact. Perhaps improvement in this area masks the effects of altitude, or perhaps the altitude isn’t bothering Roger yet; it is certainly true that high altitude affects people differently, for reasons unconnected with basic strength—in fact, for reasons not yet fully understood.

So Roger becomes the chief porter; Dougal calls him Roger Sherpa, and Arthur calls him Tenzing. The day’s challenge becomes to do all one’s myriad activities as efficiently as possible, without frostnip, excessive discomfort, hunger, thirst, or exhaustion. He hums to himself little snatches of music. His favorite is the eight-note phrase repeated by the basses near the end of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth: six notes down, two notes up, over and over and over. And each evening in the sleeping bag, warm, well fed, and prone, is a little victory.

One night he wakes up to darkness and silence, fully awake in an instant, heart pounding. Confused, he thinks he may have dreamed of the Thank God Ledge. But then he notices the silence again and realizes his oxygen bottle has run out. It happens every week or so. He uncouples the bottle from the regulator, finds another bottle in the dark, and clips it into place. When he tells Arthur about it next morning, Arthur laughs. “That happened to me a couple of nights ago. I don’t think anybody could sleep through their oxygen bottle running out—I mean you wake up very awake, don’t you?”

In the hard rock band Roger porters up a pitch that leaves him whistling into his mask: The gullies have disappeared, above is a nearly vertical black wall, and breaking it is one lightning-bolt crack, now marked by a fixed rope with slings attached, making it a sort of rope ladder. Fine for him, but the lead climb! “Must have been Dougal at it again.”

And the next day he is out in the lead himself with Arthur, on a continuation of the same face. Leading is very unlike portering. Suddenly the dogged, repetitious, almost mindless work of carrying loads is replaced by the anxious attentiveness of the lead. Arthur takes the first pitch and finishes it bubbling over with enthusiasm. Only his oxygen mask keeps him from carrying on a long conversation as Roger takes over the lead. Then Roger is up there himself, above the last belay on empty rock, looking for the best way. The lure of the lead returns, the pleasure of the problem solved fills him with energy. Fully back in lead mode, he collaborates with Arthur—who turns out to be an ingenious and resourceful technical climber—on the best storm day yet: five hundred meters of fixed rope, their entire supply, nailed up in one day. They hurry back down to camp and find Eileen and Marie still there, dumping food for the next few days.

“By God we are a team!” Arthur cries as they describe the day’s work. “Eileen, you should put us together more often. Don’t you agree, Roger?”

Roger grins, nods at Eileen. “That was fun.”

Marie and Eileen leave for the camp below, and Arthur and Roger cook a big pot of stew and trade climbing stories, scores of them: And every one ends, “but that was nothing compared to today.”

Heavy snow returns and traps them in their tents, and it’s all they can do to keep the high camp supplied. “Bloody desperate out!” Marie complains, as if she can’t believe how bad it is. After one bad afternoon Stephan and Arthur are in the high camp, Eileen and Roger in the middle camp, and Hans, Marie, and Dougal in the low camp with all the supplies. The storm strikes Roger and Eileen’s tent so hard they are considering bringing in some rocks to weight it down more. A buzz sounds from their radio and Eileen picks it up.

“Eileen, this is Arthur. I’m afraid Stephan has come up too fast.”

Eileen scowls fearfully, swears under her breath. Stephan has gone from low camp to high in two days’ hard climbing.

“He’s very short of breath, and he’s spitting up bloody spit. And talking like a madman.”

“I’m okay!” Stephan shouts through the static. “I’m fine!”

“Shut up! You’re not fine! Eileen, did you hear that? I’m afraid he’s got edema.”

“Yeah,” Eileen says. “Has he got a headache?”

“No. It’s just his lungs right now, I think. Shut up! I can hear his chest bubbling, you know.”

“Yeah. Pulse up?”

“Pulse weak and rapid, yeah.”

“Damn.” Eileen looks at Roger. “Put him on max oxygen.”

“I already have. Still . . .”

“I know. We’ve got to get him down.”

“I’m okay!”

“Yeah,” Arthur says. “He needs to come down, at least to your camp, maybe lower.”

“Damn it,” Eileen exclaims when off the radio. “I moved him up too fast.”

An hour later—calls made below, the whole camp in action—Roger and Eileen are out in the storm again, in the dark, their helmet headlights showing them only a portion of the snowfall. They cannot afford to wait until morning—pulmonary edema can be quickly fatal, and the best treatment by far is to get the victim lower, where his lungs can clear out the excess water. Even a small drop in altitude can make a dramatic difference. So off they go; Roger takes the lead and bashes ice from the rope, jumars up, scrabbles over the rock blindly with his crampon tips to get a purchase in the snow and ice. It is bitterly cold. They reach the bottom of the blank wall pitch that so impressed Roger, and the going is treacherous. He wonders how they will get Stephan down it. The fixed rope is the only thing making the ascent possible, but it does less and less to aid them as ice coats it and the rock face. Wind hammers them, and Roger has a sudden very acute sensation of the empty space behind them. The headlamps’ beams reveal only swirling snow. Fear adds its own kind of chill to the mix.

By the time they reach high camp Stephan is quite ill. No more protests from him. “I don’t know how we’ll get him down,” Arthur says anxiously. “I gave him a small shot of morphine to get the peripheral veins to start dilating.”

“Good. We’ll just have to truss him into a harness and lower him.”

“Easier said than done, in this stuff.”

Stephan is barely conscious, coughing and hacking with every breath. Pulmonary edema fills the lungs with water; unless the process is reversed, he will drown. Just getting him into the sling (another function of the little wall tents) is hard work. Then outside again—struck by the wind—and to the fixed ropes. Roger descends first, Eileen and Arthur lower Stephan using a power reel, and Roger collects him like a large bundle of laundry. After standing him upright and knocking the frozen spittle from the bottom of his mask, Roger waits for the other two, and when they arrive he starts down again. The descent seems endless, and everyone gets dangerously cold. Windblown snow, the rock face, omnipresent cold: nothing else in the world. At the end of one drop Roger cannot undo the knot at the end of his belay line, to send it back up for Stephan. For fifteen minutes he struggles with the frozen knot, which resembles a wet iron pretzel. Nothing to cut it off with either. For a while it seems they will all freeze to death because he can’t untie a knot. Finally he takes his climbing gloves off and pulls at the thing with his bare fingers until it comes loose.

Eventually they arrive at the lower camp, where Hans and Dougal are waiting with a medical kit. Stephan is zipped into a sleeping bag, and given a diuretic and some more morphine. Rest and the drop in altitude should see him back to health, although at the moment his skin is blue and his breathing ragged: no guarantees. He could die—a man who might live a thousand years—and suddenly their whole enterprise seems crazy. His coughs sound weak behind the oxygen mask, which hisses madly on maximum flow.

“He should be okay,” Hans pronounces. “Won’t know for sure for several hours.”

But there they are—seven people in two wall tents. “We’ll go back up,” Eileen says, looking to Roger. He nods.

And they go back out again. The swirl of white snow in their headlights, the cold, the buffets of wind . . . they are tired, and progress is slow. Roger slips once and the jumars don’t catch on the icy rope for about three meters, where they suddenly grab hold and test his harness, and the piton above. A fall! The spurt of fear gives him a second wind. Stubbornly he decides that much of his difficulty is mental. It’s dark and windy, but really the only difference between this and his daytime climbs during the last week is the cold, and the fact that he can’t see much. But the helmet lamps do allow him to see—he is at the center of a shifting white sphere, and the rock he must work on is revealed. It is covered with a sheet of ice and impacted snow, and where the ice is clear it gleams in the light like glass laid over the black rock beneath. Crampons are great in this—the sharp front points stick in the snow and ice firmly, and the only problem is the brittle black glass that will break away from the points in big jagged sheets. Even black ice can be distinguished in the bright bluish gleam of the lights, so the work is quite possible. Look at it as just another climb, he urges himself, meanwhile kicking like a maniac with his left foot to spike clear a crack where he can nail in another piton to replace a bad hold. The dizzying freeness of a pull over an outcropping; the long reach up for a solid knob: He becomes aware of the work as a sort of game, a set of problems to be solved despite cold or thirst or fatigue (his hands are beginning to tire from the long night’s hauling, so that each hold hurts). Seen that way, it all changes. Now the wind is an opponent to be beaten, but also to be respected. The same of course is true of the rock, his principal opponent—and it is a daunting one, an opponent to challenge him to his utmost performance. He kicks into a slope of hard snow and ascends rapidly.

He looks down as Eileen kicks up the slope: quick reminder of the stakes of this game. The light on the top of her helmet makes her look like a deep-sea fish. She reaches him quickly; one long-gloved hand over the wall’s top, and she joins him with a smooth contraction of the biceps. Strong woman, Roger thinks, but decides to take another lead anyway. He is in a mood now where he doubts anyone but Dougal could lead as fast.

Up through the murk they climb.

An odd point is that the two climbers can scarcely communicate. Roger “hears” Eileen through varieties of tugging on the rope linking them. If he takes too long to study a difficult spot above, he feels a mild interrogatory tug on the rope. Two tugs when Roger is belaying means she’s on her way up. Very taut belaying betrays her belief that he is in a difficult section. So communication by rope can be fairly complex and subtle. But aside from it, and the infrequent shout with the mask pulled up to one side (which includes the punishment of a face full of spindrift) they are isolated. Mute partners. The exchange of lead goes well—one passes the other with a wave—the belay is ready. Up Eileen goes. Roger watches and holds the belay taut. Little time for contemplating their situation, thankfully; but while taking a rest on crampon points in steps chopped out with his ice axe, Roger feels acutely the thereness of his position, cut off from past or future, irrevocably in this moment, on this cliff face that drops away bottomlessly, extends up forever. Unless he climbs well, there will never be any other reality.

Then they reach a pitch where the fixed rope has been cut in the middle. Falling rock or ice has shaved it off. A bad sign. Now Roger must climb a ropeless pitch, hammering in pitons on his way to protect himself. Every meter above the last belay is a two-meter fall . . .

Roger never expected so hard a climb, and adrenaline banishes his exhaustion. He studies the first small section of a pitch that he knows is ten or twelve meters long, invisible in the dark snow flurries above. Probably Marie or Dougal climbed this crack the first time. He discovers that the crack just gives him room for his hands. Almost a vertical crack for a while, with steps cut into the ice. Up he creeps, crablike and surefooted. Now the crack widens and the ice is too far back in it to be of use—but the cramponed boots can be stuck in the crack and turned sideways, to stick tenuously into the thin ice coating the crack’s interior. One creates one’s own staircase, mostly using the tension of the twisted crampons. Now the crack abruptly closes and he has to look around, ah, there, a horizontal crack holding the empty piton. Very good—he hooks into it and is protected thus far. Perhaps the next piton is up the rampway to the right? Clawing to find the slight indentations that pass for handholds, crouching to lean up the ramp in a tricky walk—he wonders about the crampons here . . . ah. The next piton, right at eye level. Perfect. And then an area lined with horizontal strata about a meter in thickness, making a steep—a very steep—ladder.

And at the top of that pitch they find that the high-camp tent has been crushed under a load of snow. Avalanche. One corner of the tent flaps miserably.

Eileen comes up and surveys the damage in the double glare of their two headlamps. She points at the snow, makes a digging motion. The snow is so cold that it can’t bind together—moving it is like kicking coarse sand. They get to work, having no other choice. Eventually the tent is free, and as an added benefit they are warmed as well, although Roger feels he can barely move. The tent’s poles have been bent and some broken, and splints must be tied on before the tent can be redeployed. Roger kicks snow and ice chunks around the perimeter of the tent, until it is “certifiably bombproof,” as the leads would say. Except if another avalanche hits it, something they can’t afford to think about, as they can’t move the camp anywhere else. They simply have to risk it. Inside, they drop their packs and start the stove and put a pot of ice on. Then crampons off, and into sleeping bags. With the bags around them up to the waist, they can start sorting out the mess. There is spindrift on everything, but unless it gets right next to the stove it will not melt. Digging in the jumbled piles of gear for a packet of stew, Roger feels again how tired his body is. Oxygen masks off, so they can drink. “That was quite an excursion.” Raging thirst. They laugh with relief. He brushes an unused pot with his bare hand, guaranteeing a frostnip blister. Eileen calculates the chance of another avalanche without visible trepidation: “. . . so if the wind stays high enough we should be okay.” They discuss Stephan, and sniff like hunting dogs at the first scent of the stew. Eileen digs out the radio and calls down to the low camp. Stephan is sleeping, apparently without discomfort. “Morphine will do that,” Eileen says. They wolf down their meal in a few minutes.

The snow under the tent is torn up by boot prints, and Roger’s sleeping surface is unbelievably lumpy. He rolls over until he is wedged against the length of Eileen’s bag, coveting the warmth and hoping for a flatter surface. It is just as lumpy there. Eileen snuggles back into him and he can feel the potential for warmth; he can tell he will warm up. He wonders if getting into one bag would be worth the effort.

“Amazing what some people will do for fun,” Eileen comments drowsily.

Short laugh. “This isn’t the fun part.”

“Isn’t it? That climb . . .”

Big yawn. “That was some climb,” he agrees. No denying it.

“That was a great climb.”

“Especially since we didn’t get killed.”

“Yeah.” She yawns too, and Roger can feel a big wave of sleep about to break over him and sweep him away. “I hope Stephan gets better. Otherwise, we’ll have to take him down.”

In the next few days everyone has to go out several times in the storm, to keep the high camp supplied and to keep the fixed ropes free of ice. The work is miserable when they can do it, and sometimes they can’t: The wind on some days shuts down everything, and they can only huddle inside and hope the tents hold to the face. One dim day Roger is sitting with Stephan and Arthur in low camp. Stephan has recovered from the edema, and is anxious to climb again. “No hurry,” Roger says. “No one’s going anywhere anyway, and water in the lungs is serious business. You’ll have to take it slow—”

The tent door is unzipped and a plume of snow enters, followed by Dougal. He grins hello. The silence seems to call for some comment. “Pretty invigorating out there,” he says to fill it, and looks after a pot of tea. The shy moment having passed he chats cheerfully with Arthur about the weather. Tea done, he is off again; he is in a hurry to get a load up to the high camp. A quick grin and he is out the tent and gone. And it occurs to Roger that there are two types of climbers on their expedition (another duality): those who endure the bad weather and accidents and all the various difficulties of the face that are making this climb so uncomfortable, and those who, in some important peculiar way, enjoy all the trouble. In the former group are Eileen, who has the overriding responsibility for the climb—Marie, who is in such a hurry for the top—and Hans and Stephan, who are less experienced and would be just as happy to climb under sunny skies and with few serious difficulties. Each of these is steady and resolute, without a doubt; but they endure.

Dougal, on the other hand, Dougal and Arthur: Those two are quite clearly enjoying themselves, and the worse things get the more fun they seem to have. It is, Roger thinks, perverse. The reticent, solitary Dougal, seizing with quiet glee every possible chance to get out into the gale and climb. . . . “He certainly seems to be enjoying himself,” Roger says out loud, and Arthur laughs.

“That Dougal!” he cries. “What a Brit he is. You know climbers are the same everywhere. I come all the way to Mars and find just the people you’d expect to find on Ben Nevis. ‘Course it stands to reason, doesn’t it? That New Scotland school and all.”

It is true; from the very start of the colonization, British climbers have been coming to Mars in search of new climbs, and many of them have stayed.

“And I’ll tell you,” Arthur continues, “those guys are never happier than when it’s blowing force ten and dumping snow by the dump truck. Or not snow, actually. More like sleet, that’s what they want. One degree rain, or wet snow. Perfect. And you know why they want it? So they can come back in at the end of the day and say, ‘Bloody desperate out today, eh mate?’ They’re all dying to be able to say that. ‘Bluidy dasperate, mite.’ Ha! Do you know what I mean? It’s like giving themselves a medal or something, I don’t know.”

Roger and Stephan, smiling, nod. “Very macho,” Stephan says.

“But Dougal!” Arthur cries. “Dougal! He’s too cool for that. He goes out there in the nastiest conditions he can possibly find—I mean look at him just now—he couldn’t wait to get back out there! Didn’t want to waste such a fine opportunity! And he climbs the hardest pitches he can find too. Have you seen him? You’ve seen the routes he leaves behind. Man, that guy could climb buttered glass in a hurricane. And what does he say about it? Does he say that was pretty bloody desperate? No! He says,” and Roger and Stephan join in, like a chorus: “How invigorating!”

“Yeah.” Stephan laughs. “Pretty invigorating out there all right.”

“The Scots,” Arthur says, giggling away. “Martian Scots, no less. I can’t believe it.”

“It’s not just the Scots are strange,” Roger points out. “What about you, Arthur? I notice you getting quite a giggle out of all this yourself, eh?”

“Oh yeah, yeah,” Arthur says. “I’m having a good time. Aren’t you? I’ll tell you, once we got on the oxygen I started feeling great. Before that it wasn’t so easy. The air seemed really thin, I mean really thin. Elevations here don’t mean anything to me, I mean you haven’t got a proper sea level so what does elevation really mean, right? But your air is like nothing, man. So when we got on the bottle I could really feel the difference. A lifesaver. And then there’s the gravity! Now that’s wonderful. What is it, two-fifths of a gee? Practically nothing! You might as well be on the moon! As soon as I learned to balance properly, I really started to have a good time. Felt like Superman. On this planet it just isn’t that hard to go uphill, that’s all.” He laughs, toasts the other two with tea, “On Mars, I’m Superman.”

High-altitude pulmonary edema works fast, and one either succumbs or recovers very quickly. When Stephan’s lungs are completely clear Hans orders him to keep on maximum oxygen intake, and he is given a light load and ordered to take it slow and only move up from one low camp to the next. At this point, Roger thinks, it would be more difficult to get him back down the cliff than keep on going to the top—a common enough climbing situation, but one that no one talks about. Stephan complains about his reduced role, but agrees to go along with it. For his first few days back out Roger teams with him and keeps a sharp eye on him. But Stephan climbs fairly rapidly, and only complains about Roger’s solicitousness, and at the cold winds. Roger concludes he is all right.

Back to portering. Hans and Arthur are out in the lead, having a terrible time with a broad, steep rampart that they are trying to force directly. For a couple of days they are all stalled as the camps are stocked, and the lead party cannot make more than fifty or seventy-five meters a day. One evening on the radio while Hans describes a difficult overhang, Marie gets on the horn and starts in. “Well, I don’t know what’s going on up there, but with Stephan sucking down the oxygen and you all making centimeters a day we’re going to end up stuck on this damn cliff for good! What? I don’t give a fuck what your troubles are, mate—if you can’t make the lead you should bloody well get down and let somebody on there who can!”

“This is a big tuff band,” Arthur says defensively. “Once we get above this it’s more or less a straight shot to the top—”

“If you’ve got any bloody oxygen it is! Look what is this, a co-op? I didn’t join a fucking co-op!”

Roger watches Eileen closely. She is listening carefully to the exchange, her finger on the intercom, a deep furrow between her eyes, as if she is concentrating. He is surprised she has not already intervened. But she lets Marie get off another couple of blasts, and only then does she cut in. “Marie! Marie! Eileen here—”

“I know that.”

“Arthur and Hans are scheduled to come down soon. Meanwhile, shut up.”

And the next day Arthur and Hans put up three hundred meters of fixed rope and top the tuff band. When Hans announces this on the sunset radio call (Roger can just hear Arthur in the background, saying in falsetto, “So there! So there!”), a little smile twitches Eileen’s mouth before she congratulates them and gets on to the orders for the next day. Roger nods thoughtfully.

After they get above Hans and Arthur’s band, the slope lies back a bit and progress is more rapid, even in the continuous winds. The cliff is like a wall of immense irregular bricks which have been shoved back, so that each brick is set a bit behind the one below it. This great jumble of blocks and ledges and ramps makes for easy zigzag climbing, and good campsites. One day, Roger stops for a break and looks around. He is portering a load from middle camp to high camp, and has gotten ahead of Eileen. No one in sight. There is a cloud layer far below them, a gray rumpled blanket covering the whole world. Then there is the vertical realm of the cliff face, a crazed jumble of a block wall, which extends up to a very smooth, almost featureless cloud layer above them. Only the finest ripples, like waves, mar this gray ceiling. Floor and ceiling of cloud, wall of rock: It seems for a moment that this climb will go on eternally; it is a whole world, an infinite wall that they will climb forever. When has it been any different? Sandwiched like this, between cloud and cloud, it is easy not to believe in the past; perhaps the planet is a cliff, endlessly varied, endlessly challenging.

Then in the corner of Roger’s eye, a flash of color. He looks at the deep crack between the ledge he is standing on and the next vertical block. In the twisted ice nestles a patch of moss campion. Cushion of black-green moss, a circle of perhaps a hundred tiny dark pink flowers on it. After three weeks of almost unrelieved black and white, the color seems to burst out of the flowers and explode in his eyes. Such a dark, intense pink! Roger crouches to inspect them. The moss is very finely textured, and appears to be growing directly out of the rock, although no doubt there is some sand back in the crack. A seed or a scrap of moss must have been blown off the shield plateau and down the cliff, to take root here.

Roger stands, looks around again. Eileen has joined him, and she observes him sharply. He pulls his mask to the side. “Look at that,” he says. “You can’t get away from it anywhere.”

She shakes her head. Pulls her mask down. “It’s not the new landscape you hate so much,” she says. “I saw the way you were looking at that plant. And it’s just a plant after all, doing its best to live. No, I think you’ve made a displacement. You use topography as a symbol. It’s not the landscape, it’s the people. It’s the history we’ve made that you dislike. The terraforming is just part of it—the visible sign of a history of exploitation.”

Roger considers it. “We’re just another Terran colony, you mean. Colonialism—”

“Yes. That’s what you hate, see? Not topography, but history. Because the terraforming, so far, is a waste. It’s not being done for any good purpose.”

Uneasily Roger shakes his head. He has not thought of it like that, and isn’t sure he agrees: It’s the land that has suffered the most, after all. Although—

Eileen continues, “There’s some good in that, if you think about it. Because the landscape isn’t going to change back, ever. But history—history must change, by definition.”

And she takes the lead, leaving Roger to stare up after her.

The winds die in the middle of the night. The cessation of tent noise wakes Roger up. It is bitterly cold, even in his bag. It takes him a while to figure out what woke him; his oxygen is still hissing softly in his face. When he figures out what did it, he smiles. Checking his watch, he finds it is almost time for the mirror dawn. He sits up and turns on the stove for tea. Eileen stirs in her sleeping bag, opens one eye. Roger likes watching her wake; even behind the mask, the shift from vulnerable girl to expedition leader is easy to see. It’s like ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: Coming to consciousness in the morning recapitulates maturation in life. Now all he needs is the Greek terminology, and he will have a scientific truth. Eileen pulls off her oxygen mask and rolls onto one elbow.

“Want some tea?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“It’ll be a moment.”

“Hold the stove steady—I’ve got to pee.” She stands in the tent doorway, sticks a plastic urine scoop into the open fly of her pants, urinates out the door. “Wow! Sure is cold out. And clear! I can see stars.”

“Great. The wind’s died too, see?”

Eileen crawls back into her bag. They brew their tea with great seriousness, as if mixing delicate elixirs. Roger watches her drink.

“Do you really not remember us from before?” he asks.

“Nooo. . . .” she says slowly. “We were in our twenties, right? No, the first years I really remember are from my fifties, when I was training up in the caldera. Wall climbs, kind of like this, actually.” She sips. “But tell me about us.”

Roger shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It must be odd. To remember when the rest don’t.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I was probably awful at that age.”

“No no. You were an English major. You were fine.”

She laughs. “Hard to believe. Unless I’ve gone down-hill since.”

“No, not at all. You sure couldn’t have done all this back then.”

“I believe that. Getting half an expedition strung out all over a cliff, people sick—”

“No no. You’re doing fine.”

She shakes her head. “You can’t pretend this climb has gone well. I remember that much.”

“What hasn’t gone well hasn’t been your fault, as you must admit. In fact, given what has happened, we’re doing very well, I think. And that’s mostly your doing. Not easy with Frances and Stephan, and the storm, and Marie.”

“Marie!”

They laugh. “And this storm,” Roger says. “That night climb we did, getting Stephan down!” He sips his tea.

“That was a wild one,” Eileen agrees.

Roger nods. They have that. He gets up to pee, letting in a blast of intensely cold air. “My God that’s cold! What’s the temperature?”

“Sixty below, outside.”

“Oh. No wonder. I guess that cloud cover was doing us some good.” Outside it is still dark, and the ice-bearded cliff face gleams whitely under the stars.

“I like the way you lead us,” Roger says. “It’s a very light touch, but you still have things under control.” He zips the tent door closed and hustles back into his bag.

“More tea?”

“Definitely.”

“Here—roll back here, you’ll warm up faster, and I could use the insulation myself.”

Roger nods, shivering, and rolls his bag into the back side of hers, so they are both on one elbow, spooned together.

They sip tea and talk. Roger warms up, stops shivering. Pleasure of empty bladder, of contact with her. They finish the tea and doze for a bit in the warmth. Keeping the oxygen masks off prevents them from falling into a deep sleep. “Mirrors’ll be up soon.” “Yeah.” “Here—move over a bit.” Roger remembers when they were lovers, so long ago. Previous lifetime. She was the city dweller then, he the canyon crawler. Now . . . now all the comfort, warmth, and contact have given him an erection. He wonders if she can feel it through the two bags. Probably not. Hmmm. He remembers suddenly—the first time they made love was in a tent. He went to bed, and she came right into his little cubicle of the communal tent and jumped him! Remembering it does nothing to make his erection go away. He wonders if he can get away with a similar sort of act here. They are definitely pressed together hard. All that climbing together: Eileen pairs the climbing teams, so she must have enjoyed it too. And climbing together has that sort of dancelike teamwork—boulder ballet; and the constant kinetic juxtaposition, the felt relationship of the rope, has a certain sensuousness to it. It is a physical partnership, without a doubt. Of course all that can be true and climbing remain a profoundly nonsexual relationship—there are certainly other things to think about. But now . . .

Now she is dozing again. He thinks about her climbing, her leadership. The things she said to him back down in the first camps, when he was so depressed. A sort of teacher, really.

Thoughts of that lead him to memories of his past, of the failed work. For the first time in many days his memory presents him with the usual parade of the past, the theater of ghosts. How can he ever assume such a long and fruitless history? Is it even possible?

Mercifully the tea’s warmth, and the mere fact of lying prone, have their way with him, and he dozes off.

The day dawns. Sky like a sheet of old paper, the sun a big bronze coin below them to the east. The sun! Wonderful to see sunlight, shadows. In the light the cliff face looks sloped back an extra few degrees, and it seems there is an end to it up there. Eileen and Roger are in the middle camp, and after ferrying a load to the high camp they follow the rope’s zigzag course up the narrow ledges. The fine, easy face, the sunlight, the dawn’s talk, the plains of Tharsis so far below: All conspire to please Roger. He is climbing more strongly than ever, hopping up the ledges, enjoying the variety of forms exhibited by the rock. Such a beauty to rough plated angular broken rock.

The face continues to lie back, and at the top of one ledge ramp they find themselves at the bottom of a giant amphitheater filled with snow. And the top of this white half bowl is . . . sky. The top of the escarpment, apparently. Certainly nothing but sky above it. Dougal and Marie are about to start up it, and Roger joins them. Eileen stays behind to collect the others.

The technically difficult sections of the climb are done. The upper edge of the immense cliff has been rounded off by wind erosion, broken into alternating ridges and ravines. There they stand at the bottom of a big bowl broken in half; at bottom the slope is about forty degrees, and it curves up to a final wall that is perhaps sixty degrees. But the bottom of the bowl is filled with deep drifts of light, dry, granular snow, sheeted with a hard layer of windslab. Crossing the stuff is hard work, and they trade the lead often. The leader crashes through the windslab and sinks to his or her knees, or even to the waist, and thereafter has to lift a foot over the windslab above, crash through again, and in that way struggle uphill through the snow. They secure the rope with deadmen—empty oxygen tanks in this case, buried deep in the snow. Roger takes his lead, and quickly begins to sweat under the glare of the sun. Each step is an effort, worse than the step before because of the increasing angle of the slope. After ten minutes he gives the lead back to Marie. Twenty minutes later it is his turn again—the other two can endure it no longer than he can. The steepness of the final wall is actually a relief, as there is less snow.

They stop to strap crampons on their boots. Starting again, they fall into a slow steady rhythm. Kick, step, kick, step, kick, step. Glare of light breaking on snow. The taste of sweat.

When Roger’s tenth turn in the lead comes, he sees that he is within striking distance of the top of the wall, and he resolves not to give up the lead again. The snow is soft under windslab, and he must lean up, dig away a bit with his ice axe, swim up to the new foothold, dig away some more—on and on, gasping into the oxygen mask, sweating profusely in the suddenly overwarm clothing. But he’s getting closer. Dougal is behind him. He finds the pace again and sticks to it. Nothing but the pace. Twenty steps, rest. Again. Again. Again. Sweat trickles down his spine, even his feet might warm up. Sun glaring off the steep snow.

He stumbles onto flatness. It feels like some terrible error, like he might fall over the other side. But he is on the edge of a giant plateau, which swoops up in a broad conical shape, too big to be believed. He sees a flat boulder almost clear of snow and staggers over to it. Dougal is beside him, pulling his oxygen mask to one side of his face: “Looks like we’ve topped the wall!” Dougal says, looking surprised. Gasping, Roger laughs.

As with all cliff climbs, topping out is a strange experience. After a month of vertical reality, the huge flatness seems all wrong—especially this snowy flatness that extends like a broad fan to each side. The snow ends at the broken edge of the cliff behind them, extends high up the gentle slope of the conical immensity before them. It is easy to believe they stand on the flank of the biggest volcano in the solar system.

“I guess the hard part is over,” Dougal says matter-of-factly.

“Just when I was getting in shape,” says Roger, and they both laugh.

A snowy plateau, studded with black rocks, and some big mesas. To the east, empty air: far below, the forests of Tharsis. To the northwest, a hill sloping up forever.

Marie arrives and dances a little jig on the boulder. Dougal hikes back to the wall and drops into the amphitheater again, to carry up another load. Not much left to bring; they are almost out of food. Eileen arrives, and Roger shakes her hand. She drops her pack and gives him a hug. They pull some food from the packs and eat a cold lunch while watching Hans, Arthur, and Stephan start up the bottom of the bowl. Dougal is already almost down to them.

When they all reach the top, in a little string led by Dougal, the celebrating really begins. They drop their packs, they hug, they shout, Arthur whirls in circles to try to see it all at once, until he makes himself dizzy. Roger cannot remember feeling exactly like this before.

“Our cache is a few kilometers south of here,” Eileen says after consulting her maps. “If we get there tonight we can break out the champagne.”

They hike over the snow in a line, trading the lead to break a path. It is a pleasure to walk over flat ground, and spirits are so light that they make good time. Late in the day—a full day’s sunshine, their first since before base camp—they reach their cache, a strange camp full of tarped-down, snowdrifted piles, marked by a lava causeway that ends a kilometer or so above the escarpment.

Among the new equipment is a big mushroom tent. They inflate it and climb in through the lock and up onto the tent floor for the night’s party. Suddenly they are inside a giant transparent mushroom, bouncing over the soft clear raised floor like children on a feather bed; the luxury is excessive, ludicrous, inebriating. Champagne corks pop and fly into the transparent dome of the tent roof, and in the warm air they quickly get drunk, and tell each other how marvelous the climb was, how much they enjoyed it—the discomfort, exhaustion, cold, misery, danger, and fear already dissipating in their minds, already turning into something else.

The next day Marie is not at all enthusiastic about the remainder of their climb. “It’s a walk up a bloody hill! And a long walk at that!”

“How else are you going to get down?” Eileen asks acerbically. “Jump?”

It’s true; the arrangement they have made forces them to climb the cone of the volcano. There is a railway that descends from the north rim of the caldera to Tharsis and civilization; it uses for a rampway one of the great lava spills that erase the escarpment to the north. But first they have to get to the railway, and climbing the cone is probably the fastest, and certainly the most interesting, way to do that.

“You could climb down the cliff alone,” Eileen adds sarcastically. “First solo descent . . .”

Marie, apparently feeling the effects of last night’s champagne, merely snarls and stalks off to snap herself into one of the cart harnesses. Their new collection of equipment fits into a wheeled cart, which they must pull up the slope. For convenience they are already wearing the space suits that they will depend on higher up; during this ascent they will climb right out of most of Mars’s new atmosphere. They look funny in their silvery green suits and clear helmets, Roger thinks; it reminds him of his days as a canyon guide, when such suits were necessary all over Mars. The common band of the helmet radios makes this a more social event than the cliff climb, as does the fact that all seven of them are together, four hauling the cart, three walking freely ahead or behind. From climb to hike: The first day is a bit anticlimactic.

On the snowy southern flank of the volcano, signs of life appear everywhere. Goraks circle them by day, on the lookout for a bit of refuse; at dusk ball owls dip around the tent like bats. On the ground Roger sees marmots on the boulders and volcanic knobs, and in the system of ravines cut into the plateau they find twisted stands of Hokkaido pine, chir pine, and noctis juniper. Arthur chases a pair of Dall sheep with their curved horns, and they see prints in the snow that look like bear tracks. “Yeti,” Dougal says. One mirror dusk they catch sight of a pack of snow wolves, strung out over the slope to the west. Stephan spends his spare time at the edges of the new ravines, sketching and peering through binoculars. “Come on, Roger,” he says. “Let me show you those otterines I saw yesterday.”

“Bunch of mutants,” Roger grumbles, mostly to give Stephan a hard time. But Eileen is watching him to see his response, and dubiously he nods. What can he say? He goes with Stephan to the ravine to look for wildlife. Eileen laughs at him, eyes only, affectionately.

Onward, up the great hill. It’s a six-percent grade, very regular, and smooth except for the ravines and the occasional small crater or lava knob. Below them, where the plateau breaks to become the cliff, the shield is marked by some sizable mesas—features, Hans says, of the stress that broke off the shield. Above them, the conical shape of the huge volcano is clearly visible; the endless hill they climb slopes away to each side equally, and far away and above they see the broad flat peak. They’ve got a long way to go. Wending between the ravines is easy, and the esthetic of the climb, its only point of technical interest, becomes how far they can hike every day. It’s 250 kilometers from the escarpment up to the crater rim; they try for twenty-five a day, and sometimes make thirty. It feels odd to be so warm; after the intense cold of the cliff climb, the space suits and the mushroom tent create a distinct disconnection from the surroundings.

Hiking as a group is also odd. The common band is a continuous conversation, that one can switch on or off at will. Even when not in a mood to talk, Roger finds it entertaining to listen. Hans talks about the areology of the volcano, and he and Stephan discuss the genetic engineering that makes the wildlife around them possible. Arthur points out features that the others might take for granted. Marie complains of boredom. Eileen and Roger laugh and add a comment once in a while. Even Dougal clicks into the band around midafternoon, and displays a quick wit, spurring Arthur toward one amazing discovery after another. “Look at that, Arthur, it’s a yeti.”

“What! You’re kidding! Where?”

“Over there, behind that rock.”

Behind the rock is Stephan, relieving himself. “Don’t come over here!”

“You liar,” Arthur says.

“It must have slipped off. I think a Weddell fox was chasing it.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Yes.”

Eileen: “Let’s switch to a private band. I can’t hear you over all the rest.”

Roger: “Okay. Band 33.”

“Why that one?”

“Ah—” It was a long time ago, but this is the kind of weird fact his memory will pop up with. “It may be our private band from our first hike together.”

She laughs. They spend the afternoon behind the others, talking.

One morning Roger wakes early, just after mirror dawn. The dull horizontal rays of the quartet of parhelia light their tent. Roger turns his head, looks past his pillow, through the tent’s clear floor. Thin soil over rock, a couple of meters below. He sits up; the floor gives a little, like a gel bed. He walks over the soft plastic slowly so that he will not bounce any of the others, who are sleeping out where the cap of the roof meets the gills of the floor. The tent really does resemble a big clear mushroom; Roger descends clear steps in the side of the stalk to get to the lavatory, located down in what would be the mushroom’s volva. Emerging he finds a sleepy Eileen sponging down in the little bath next to the air compressor and regulator. “Good morning,” she says. “Here, will you get my back?”

She hands him the sponge, turns around. Vigorously he rubs down the hard muscles of her back, feeling a thrill of sensual interest. That slope, where back becomes bottom: beautiful.

She looks over her shoulder: “I think I’m probably clean now.”

“Ah.” He grins. “Maybe so.” He gives her the sponge. “I’m going for a walk before breakfast.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Roger dresses, goes through the lock, walks over to the head of the meadow they are camped by: a surarctic meadow, covered with moss and lichen, and dotted with mutated edelweiss and saxifrage. A light frost coats everything in a sparkling blanket of white, and Roger feels his boots crunch as he walks.

Movement catches his eye and he stops to observe a white-furred mouse hare, dragging a loose root back to its hole. There is a flash and flutter, and a snow finch lands in the hole’s entrance. The tiny hare looks up from its work, chatters at the finch, nudges past it with its load. The finch does its bird thing, head shifting instantaneously from one position to the next and then freezing in place. It follows the hare into the hole. Roger has heard of this, but he has never seen it. The hare scampers out, looking for more food. The finch appears, its head snaps from one position to the next. An instant swivel and it is staring at Roger. It flies over to the scampering hare, dive-bombs it, flies off. The hare has disappeared down another hole.

Roger crosses the ice stream in the meadow, crunches up the bank. There beside a waist-high rock is an odd pure white mass, with a white sphere at the center of it. He leans over to inspect it. Slides a gloved finger over it. Some kind of ice, apparently. Unusual-looking.

The sun rises and a flood of yellow light washes over the land. The yellowish white half globe of ice at his feet looks slick. It quivers; Roger steps back. The ice is shaking free of the rock wall. The middle of the bulge cracks. A beak stabs out of the globe, breaks it open. Busy little head in there. Blue feathers, long crooked black beak, beady little black eyes. “An egg?” Roger says. But the pieces are definitely ice—he can make them melt between his gloved fingers, and feel their coldness. The bird (though its legs and breast seem to be furred, and its wings stubby, and its beak sort of fanged) staggers out of the white bubble and shakes itself like a dog throwing off water, although it looks dry. Apparently the ice is some sort of insulation—a home for the night, or no—for the winter, no doubt. Yes. Formed of spittle or something, walling off the mouth of a shallow cave. Roger has never heard of such a thing, and he watches openmouthed as the bird-thing takes a few running steps and glides away.

A new creature steps on the face of green Mars.

That afternoon they hike out of the realm even of the surarctic meadow. No more ground cover, no more flowers, no more small animals. Nothing now but cracks filled with struggling moss, and great mats of otoo lichen. Sometimes it is as if they walk on a thin carpet of yellow, green, red, black—splotches of color like those seen in the orbicular jasper, spread out as far as they can see in every direction, a carpet crunchy with frost in the mornings, a bit damp in the midday sun, a carpet crazed and parti-colored. “Amazing stuff,” Hans mutters, poking at it with a finger. “Half our oxygen is being made by this wonderful symbiosis . . .”

Late that afternoon, after they have stopped and set up the tent and tied it down to several rocks, Hans leaps through the lock waving his atmosphere kit and hopping up and down. “Listen,” he says, “I just radioed the summit station for confirmation of this. There’s a high-pressure system over us right now. We’re at fourteen thousand meters above the datum, but the barometric pressure is up to three hundred fifty millibars because there’s a big cell of air moving over the flank of the volcano this week.” The others stare. Hans says, “Do you see what I mean?”

“No,” exclaim three voices at once.

“High-pressure zone,” Roger says unhelpfully.

“Well,” Hans says, standing at attention, “it’s enough to breathe! Just enough, but enough, I say. And of course no one’s ever done it before—done it this high before, I mean. Breathed free Martian air.”

“You’re kidding!”

“So we can establish the height record right here and now! I propose to do it, and I invite whoever wants to to join me.”

“Now wait a minute,” Eileen says.

But everyone wants to do it.

“Wait a minute,” Eileen says. “I don’t want everyone taking off their helmets and keeling over dead up here, for God’s sake. They’ll revoke my license. We have to do this in an orderly fashion. And you—” She points at Stephan. “You can’t do this. I forbid it.”

Stephan protests loudly and for a long time, but Eileen is adamant, and Hans agrees. “The shock could start your edema again, for sure. None of us should do it for long. But for a few minutes, it will go. Just breathe through the mesh face masks, to warm the air.”

“You can watch and save us if we keel over,” Roger tells Stephan.

“Shit,” Stephan says. “All right. Do it.”

They gather just out from under the cap of the tent, where Stephan can, theoretically, drag them back through the lock if he has to. Hans checks his barometer one last time, nods at them. They stand in a rough circle, facing in. Everyone begins to unclip helmet latches.

Roger gets his unclipped first—the years as canyon guide have left their mark on him, in little ways like this—and he lifts the helmet up. As he places it on the ground the cold strikes his head and makes it throb. He sucks down a breath: dry ice. He refuses the urge to hyperventilate, fearful he will chill his lungs too fast and damage them. Regular breathing, he thinks, in and out. In and out. Though Dougal’s mouth is covered by a mesh mask, Roger can tell he is grinning widely. Funny how the upper face reveals that. Roger’s eyes sting, his chest is frozen inside, he sucks down the frigid air and every sense quickens, breath by breath. The edges of pebbles a kilometer away are sharp and clear. Thousands of edges. “Like breathing nitrous oxide!” Arthur cries in a lilting high voice. He whoops like a little kid and the sound is odd, distant. Roger walks in a circle, on a quilt of rust lava and gaily colored patches of lichen. Intense awareness of the process of breathing seems to connect his consciousness to everything he can see; he feels like a strangely shaped lichen, struggling for air like all the rest. Jumble of rock, gleaming in the sunlight. “Let’s build a cairn,” he says to Dougal, and can hear his voice is wrong somehow. Slowly they step from rock to rock, picking them up and putting them in a pile. The interior of his chest is perfectly defined by each intoxicating breath. Others watch bright-eyed, sniffing, involved in their own perceptions. Roger sees his hands blur through space, sees the flesh of Dougal’s face pulsing pinkly, like the flowers of moss campion. Each rock is a piece of Mars, he seems to float as he walks, the size of the volcano gets bigger, bigger, bigger; finally he is seeing it at true size. Stephan strides among them grinning through his helmet, holding up both hands. It’s been ten minutes. The cairn is not yet done, but they can finish it tomorrow. “I’ll make a messenger canister for it tonight!” Dougal wheezes happily. “We can all sign it.” Stephan begins to round them all up. “Incredibly cold!” Roger says, still looking around as if he has never seen any of it before—any of anything.

Dougal and he are the last two into the lock; they shake hands. “Invigorating, eh?” Roger nods. “Very fine air.”

But the air is just part of all the rest of it—part of the world, not of the planet. Right? “That’s right,” Roger says, staring through the tent wall down the endless slope of the mountain.

That night they celebrate with champagne again, and the party gets wild as they become sillier and sillier. Marie tries to climb the inner wall of the tent by grabbing the soft material in her hands, and falls to the floor repeatedly; Dougal juggles boots; Arthur challenges all comers to arm wrestle, and wins so quickly they decide he is using “a trick,” and disallow his victories; Roger tells government jokes (“How many ministers does it take to pour a cup of coffee?”), and institutes a long and lively game of spoons. He and Eileen play next to each other and in the dive for spoons they land on each other. Afterward, sitting around the heater singing songs, she sits at his side and their legs and shoulders press together. Kid stuff, familiar and comfortable, even to those who can’t remember their own childhoods.

So that, that night, after everyone has gone out to the little sleeping nooks at the perimeter of the tent’s circular floor, Roger’s mind is full of Eileen. He remembers sponging her down that morning. Her playfulness this evening. Climbing in the storm. The long nights together in wall tents. And once again the distant past returns—his stupid, uncontrollable memory provides images from a time so far gone that it shouldn’t matter anymore . . . but it does. It was near the end of that trip too. She sneaked into his little cubicle and jumped him! Even though the thin panels they used to create sleeping rooms were actually much less private than what they have here; this tent is big, the air regulator is loud, the seven beds are well spaced and separated from each other by ribbing—clear ribbing, it is true, but now the tent is dark. The cushioned floor under him (so comfortable that Marie calls it uncomfortable) gives as he moves, without even trembling a few feet away, and it never makes a sound. In short, he could crawl silently over to her bed, and join her as she once joined him, and it would be entirely discreet. Turnabout is fair play, isn’t it? Even three hundred years later? There isn’t much time left on this climb, and as they say, fortune favors the bold. . . .

He is about to move when suddenly Eileen is at his side, shaking his arm. In his ear she says, “I have an idea.”

And afterward, teasing: “Maybe I do remember you.”

They trek higher still, into the zone of rock. No animals, plants, insects; no lichen; no snow. They are above it all, so high on the volcano’s cone that it is getting difficult to see where their escarpment drops to the forests; two hundred kilometers away and fifteen kilometers below, the scarp’s edge can only be distinguished because that’s where the broad ring of snow ends. They wake up one morning and find a cloud layer a few k’s downslope, obscuring the planet below. They stand on the side of an immense conical island in an even greater sea of cloud: the clouds a white wave-furrowed ocean, the volcano a great rust rock, the sky a low dark violet dome, all on a scale the mind can barely encompass. To the east, poking out of the cloud sea, three broad peaks—an archipelago—the three Tharsis volcanoes in their well-spaced line, princes to the king Olympus. Those volcanoes, fifteen hundred kilometers away, give them a little understanding of the vastness visible . . .

The rock up here is smoothly marbled, like a plain of petrified muscles. Individual pebbles and boulders take on an eerie presence, as if they are debris scattered by Olympian gods. Hans’s progress is greatly slowed by his inspection of these rocks. One day, they find a mound that snakes up the mountain like an esker or a Roman road; Hans explains it was a river of lava harder than the surrounding basalt, which has eroded away to reveal it. They use it as an elevated road and hike on it for all of one long day.

Roger picks up his pace, leaves the cart and the others behind. In a suit and helmet, on the lifeless face of Mars: Centuries of memory flood him, he finds his breathing clotted and uneven. This is my country, he thinks. This is the transcendent landscape of my youth. It’s still here. It can’t be destroyed. It will always be here. He finds that he has almost forgotten, not what it looks like, but what it feels like to be in such wilderness. That thought is the thorn in the exhilaration that mounts with every step. Stephan and Eileen, the other two out of harness this day, are following him up. Roger notices them and frowns. I don’t want to talk about it, he thinks. I want to be alone in it.

But Stephan hikes right by him, looking overwhelmed by the desolate rock expanse, the world of rock and sky. Roger can’t help but grin.

And Eileen is content just to walk with him.

Next day, however, in the harness of the cart, Stephan plods beside him and says, “Okay, Roger, I can see why you love this. It is sublime, truly. And in just the way we want the sublime—it’s a pure landscape, a pure place. But . . .” He plods on several more steps, and Roger and Eileen wait for him to continue, pulling in step together. “But there is life on Mars. And it seems to me that you don’t need the whole planet this way. This will always be here. The atmosphere will never rise this high, so you’ll always have this. And the world down below, with all that life growing everywhere—it’s beautiful.” The beautiful and the sublime, Roger thinks. Another duality. “And maybe we need the beautiful more than the sublime?”

They haul on. Eileen looks at the mute Roger. He cannot think what to say. She smiles. “If Mars can change, so can you.”

“The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?”

That night Roger seeks out Eileen, and makes love to her with a peculiar urgency; and when they are done he finds himself crying a bit, he doesn’t know why; and she holds his head against her breast, until he shifts, and turns, and falls asleep.

And the following afternoon, after climbing all day up a hill that grows ever gentler, that always looks as if it will peak out just over the horizon above them, they reach flattened ground. An hour’s hike, and they reach the caldera wall. They have climbed Olympus Mons.

They look down into the caldera. It is a gigantic brown plain, ringed by the round cliffs of the caldera wall. Smaller ringed cliffs inside the caldera drop to collapse craters, then terrace the round plain with round depressions, which overlap each other. The sky overhead is almost black; they can see stars, and Jupiter. Perhaps the high evening star is Earth. The thick blue rind of the atmosphere actually starts below them, so that they stand on a broad island in the middle of a round blue band, capped by a dome of black sky. Sky, caldera, ringed stone desolation. A million shades of brown, tan, red, rust. The planet Mars.

Along the rim a short distance stands the ruins of a Tibetan Buddhist lamasery. When Roger sees it his jaw drops. It is brown, and the main structure appears to have been a squarish boulder the size of a large house, carved and excavated until it is more air than stone. While it was occupied it must have been hermetically sealed, with airlocks in the doorways and windows fixed in place; now the windows are gone, and side buildings leaning against the main structure are broken-walled, roofless, open to the black sky. A chest-high wall of stone extends away from the outbuildings and along the rim; colored prayer wheels and prayer flags stick up from it on thin poles. Under the light touch of the stratosphere the wheels spin slowly, the flags flap limply.

“No.”

“The caldera is as big as Luxembourg.”

“You’re kidding.”

Finally even Marie is impressed. She walks to the prayer wall, touches a prayer wheel with one hand; looks out at the caldera, and from time to time spins the wheel, absently.

“Invigorating view, eh?”

It will take a few days to hike around the caldera to the railway station, so they set up camp next to the abandoned lamasery, and the heap of brown stone is joined by a big mushroom of clear plastic, filled with colorful gear.

The climbers wander in the later afternoon, chatting quietly over rocks, or the view into the shadowed caldera. Several sections of the ringed inner cliffs look like good climbing.

The sun is about to descend behind the rim to the west, and great shafts of light spear the indigo sky below them, giving the mountaintop an eerie indirect illumination. The voices on the common band are rapt and quiet, fading away to silence.

Roger gives Eileen a squeeze of the hand and wanders off by himself. The ground is black, the rock cracked in a million pieces, as if the gods have been sledgehammering it for eons. Nothing but rock. He clicks off the common band. It is nearly sunset. Great lavender shafts of light spear the purple murk to the sides, and overhead, stars shine in the blackness. All the shadows stretch off to infinity. The bright bronze coin of the sun grows big and oblate, slows in its descent. Roger circles the lamasery. Its western walls catch the last of the sun and cast a warm orange glaze over the ground and the ruined outbuildings. Roger kicks around the low prayer wall, replaces a fallen stone. The prayer wheels still spin—some sort of light wood, he thinks, cylinders carved with big black eyes and cursive lettering, and white paint, red paint, yellow paint, all chipped away. Roger stares into a pair of stoic Asian eyes, gives the wheel a slow spin, feels a little bit of vertigo. World everywhere. Even here. The flattened sun lands on the rim, across the caldera to the west. A faint gust of wind lofts a long banner out, ripples it slowly in dark orange air—“All right!” Roger says aloud, and gives the wheel a final hard spin and steps away, circles dizzily, tries to take in everything at once. “All right! All right. I give in. I accept.”

He wipes red dust from the glass of his faceplate and recalls the little bird-thing, pecking free of clouded ice. A new creature steps on the face of green Mars.

THE ONLY NEAT THING TO DO

James Tiptree, Jr.

James Tiptree’s new story takes place out at the Great North Rift, which happens to be the frontier of known space, and it moves there in a ship piloted by a green-eyed young woman who happens to be one of the most appealing characters you are likely to encounter in these or any other pages. The author’s latest novel is BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR (Tor).

Heroes of space! Explorers of the starfields!

Reader, here is your problem:

Given one kid, yellow-head, snub-nose-freckles, green-eyes-that-stare-at-you-level, rich-brat, girl-type, fifteen-year-old. And all she’s dreamed of, since she was old enough to push a hologram button, are heroes of the First Contacts, explorers of far stars, the great names of Humanity’s budding Star Age. She can name you the crew of every Discovery Mission; she can sketch you a pretty accurate map of Federation Space and number the Frontier Bases; she can tell you who first contacted every one of the fifty-odd races known; and she knows by heart the last words of Han Lu Han when, himself no more than sixteen, he ran through alien flame-weapons to drag his captain and pilot to safety on Lyrae 91-Beta. She does a little math, too; it’s easy for her. And she haunts the spaceport and makes friends with everybody who’ll talk to her, and begs rides, and knows the controls of fourteen models of craft. She’s a late bloomer, which means the nubbins on her little chest could almost pass for a boy’s; and love, great Love, to her is just something pointless that adults do, despite her physical instruction. But she can get into her junior space suit in seventy seconds flat, including safety hooks.

So you take this girl, this Coati Cass—her full name is Coatillia Canada Cass, but everyone calls her Coati—

And you give her a sturdy little space-coupe for her sixteenth birthday.

Now, here is your problem:

Does she use it to jaunt around the star-crowded home sector, visiting her classmates and her family’s friends, as her mother expects, and sometimes showing off by running a vortex beacon or two, as her father fears?

Does she? Really?

Or—does she head straight for the nearest ship-fitters and blow most of her credit balance loading extra fuel tanks and long-range sensors onto the coupe, fuel it to the nozzles, and then—before the family’s accountant can raise questions—hightail for the nearest Federation frontier, which is the Great North Rift beyond FedBase 900, where you can look right out at unknown space and stars?

That wasn’t much of a problem, was it?

The exec of FedBase 900 watches the yellow head bobbing down his main view corridor.

“We ought to signal her folks c-skip collect,” he mutters. “I gather they’re rich enough to stand it.”

“On what basis?” his deputy inquires.

They both watch the little straight-backed figure marching away. A tall patrol captain passes in the throng; they see the girl spin to stare at him, not with womanly appreciation but with the open-eyed unselfconscious adoration of a kid. Then she turns back to the dazzling splendor of the view beyond the port. The end of the Rift is just visible from this side of the asteroid Base 900 is dug into.

“On the basis that I have a hunch that that infant is trouble looking for a place to happen,” Exec says mournfully. “On the basis that I don’t believe her story, I guess. Oh, her ident’s all in order—I’ve no doubt she owns that ship and knows how to run it, and knows the regs; and it’s her right to get cleared for where she wants to go—by a couple of days. But I cannot believe her parents consented to her tooting out here just to take a look at unknown stars. . . . On the basis that if they did, they’re certifiable imbeciles. If she were my daughter—”

His voice trails off. He knows he’s overreacting emotionally; he has no adequate excuse for signaling her folks. “They must have agreed,” his deputy says soothingly. “Look at those extra fuel tanks and long-range mechs they gave her.”

(Coati hadn’t actually lied. She’d told him that her parents raised no objection to her coming out here—true, since they’d never dreamed of it—and added artlessly, “See the extra fuel tanks they put on my ship so I’ll be sure to get home for long trips? Oh, sir, I’m calling her the CC-One; will that sound too much like something official?”) Exec closes the subject with a pessimistic grunt, and they turn back into his office, where the patrol captain is waiting. FedBase 900’s best depot supply team is long overdue, and it is time to declare them officially missing, and initiate and organize a search.

Coati Cass continues on through the surface sections of the base to the fueling port. She had to stop here to get clearance and the holocharts of the frontier area, and she can top off her tanks. If it weren’t for those charts, she might have risked going straight on out, for fear they’d stop her. But now that she’s cleared, she’s enjoying her first glimpse of a glamorous Far FedBase-—so long as it doesn’t delay her start for her goal, her true goal, so long dreamed of: free, unexplored space and unknown, unnamed stars.

Far Bases are glamorous; the Federation had learned the hard way that they must be pleasant, sanity-promoting duty. So, the farther out a base is, and the longer the tours, the more lavishly it is set up and maintained. Base 900 is built mostly inside a big, long-orbit, airless rock, yet it has gardens and pools that would be the envy of a world’s richest citizen. Coati sees displays for the tiny theater advertising first-run shows and music, all free to station personnel; and she passes half a dozen different exotic little places to eat. Inside the rock the maps show sports and dance shells, spacious private quarters, and winding corridors, all nicely planted and decorated, because it has been found that stress is greatly reduced if there are plenty of alternate, private routes for people to travel to their daily duties.

Building a Far Base is a full-scale Federation job. But it conserves the Federation’s one irreplaceable resource—her people. Here at FedBase 900 the people are largely Human, since the other four spacefaring races are concentrated to the Federation’s south and east. This far north, Coati has glimpsed only one alien couple, both Swain; their greenish armor is familiar to her from the spaceport back home. She won’t find really exotic aliens here.

But what, and who, lives out there on the fringes of the Rift?—not to speak of its unknown farther shores? Coati pauses to take a last look before she turns in to Fuels and Supply. From this port she can really see the Rift, like a strange irregular black cloud lying along the northern zenith.

The Rift isn’t completely lightless, of course. It is merely an area that holds comparatively few stars. The scientists regard it as no great mystery; a standing wave or turbulence in the density-texture, a stray chunk of the same gradients that create the galactic arms with their intervening gaps. Many other such rifts are seen in uninhabited reaches of the starfield. This one just happens to form a useful northern border for the irregular globe of Federation Space.

Explorers have penetrated it here and there, enough to know that the usual distribution of star systems appears to begin again on the farther side. A few probable planetary systems have been spotted out there; and once or twice what might be alien transmissions have been picked up at extreme range. But nothing and no one has come at them from the far side, and meanwhile the Federation of Fifty Races, expanding slowly to the south and east, has enough on its platter without hunting out new contacts. Thus, the Rift has been left almost undisturbed. It is the near presence of the Rift that made it possible for Coati to get to a real frontier so fast, from her centrally located home star and her planet of Cayman’s Port.

Coati gives it all one last ardent look, and ducks into the suiting-up corridor, where her small suit hangs among the real spacers’. From here she issues onto a deck over the asteroid surface, and finds CC-One dwarfed by a new neighbor; a big Patrol cruiser has come in. She makes her routine shell inspection with disciplined care despite her excitement, and presently signals for the tug to slide her over to the fueling stations. Here she will also get oxy, water, and food—standard rations only. She’s saved enough credit for a good supply if she avoids all luxuries.

At Fuels she’s outside again, personally checking every tank. The Fuels chief, a big rosy woman whose high color glows through her faceplate, grins at the kid’s eagerness. A junior fuelsman is doing the actual work, kidding Coati about her array of spares.

“You going to cross the Rift?”

“Maybe next trip. . . . Someday for sure,” she grins back.

A news announcement breaks in. It’s a pleasant voice telling them that DRS Number 914 B-K is officially declared missing, and a Phase One search will start. All space personnel are to keep watch for a standard supply tug, easily identifiable by its train of tanks, last seen in the vicinity of Ace’s Landing.

“No, correction, negative on Ace’s Landing. Last depot established was on a planet at seventeen-fifty north, fifteen-thirty west, RD Eighteen.” The voice repeats. “That’s far out in Quadrant Nine B-Z, out of commo range. They were proceeding to a new system at thirty-twenty north, forty-two-twenty-eight west, RD Thirty.

“All ships within possible range of this course will maintain a listening watch for one minim on the hour. Anything heard warrants return to Base range. Meanwhile a recon ship will be dispatched to follow their route from Ace’s Landing.”

The announcer repeats all coordinates; Coati, finding no tablet handy, inscribes the system they’re headed to on the inside of her bare arm with her stylus.

“If they were beyond commo range, how did they report?” she asks the Fuels chief.

“By message pipe. Like a teeny-weeny spaceship. They can make up to three c-skip jumps. When you work beyond range, you send back a pipe after every stop. There’ll soon be a commo relay set up for that quadrant, is my guess.”

“Depot Resupply 914 B-K,” says the fuelsman. “That’s Boney and Ko. The two boys who—who’re—who aren’t—I mean, they don’t have all their rivets, right?”

“There’s nothing wrong with Boney and Ko!” The Fuels chiefs flush heightens. “They may not have the smarts of some people, but the things they do, they do 100 percent perfect. And one of them—or both, maybe—has uncanny ability with holocharting. If you go through the charts of quadrants they’ve worked, you’ll see how many B-K corrections there are. That work will save lives! And they haven’t a gram of meanness or pride between them; they do it all on supply pay, for loyalty to the Fed.” She’s running down, glancing at Coati to see if her message carried. “That’s why Exec took them off the purely routine runs and let them go set up new depots up north. . . . The Rand twins have the nearby refill runs now; they can take the boredom because of their music.”

“Sorry,” the fuelsman says. “I didn’t know. They never say a word.”

“Yeah, they don’t talk,” the chief grins. “There, kid, I guess you’re about topped up, unless you want to carry some in your ditty bag. Now, how about the food?”

When Coati gets back inside Base and goes to Charts for her final briefing, she sees what the Fuels chief meant. On all the holocharts that cover the fringes of 900’s sector, feature after feature shows corrections marked with a tiny glowing “B-K.” She can almost follow the long, looping journeys of the pair—what was it? Boney and Ko—by the areas of richer detail in the charts. Dust clouds, g-anomalies, asteroid swarms, extra primaries in multiple systems—all modestly B-K’s. The basic charts are composites of the work of early explorers—somebody called Ponz has scrawled in twenty or thirty star systems with his big signature (B-K have corrected six of them), and there’s an “L,” and a lot of “YBCs,” and more that Coati can’t decipher. She’d love to know their names and adventures.

“Who’s ‘SS’ ?” she asks Charts.

“Oh, he was a rich old boy, a Last War vet, who tried to take a shortcut he remembered and jumped himself out of fuel way out there. He was stuck about forty-five standard days before anybody could get to him, and after he calmed down, he and his pals kept themselves busy with a little charting. Not bad, too, for a static VP. See how the SS’s all center around this point? That’s where he sat. If you go near there, remember the error is probably on the radius. But you aren’t thinking of heading out that far, are you, kid?”

“Oh, well,” Coati temporizes. She’s wondering if Charts would report her to Exec. “Someday, maybe. I just like to have the charts to, you know, dream over.”

Chans chuckles sympathetically, and starts adding up her charges. “Lots of daydreaming you got here, girl.”

“Yeah.” To distract him she asks, “Who’s ‘Ponz’ ?”

“Before my time. He disappeared somewhere after messaging that he’d found a real terraform planet way out that way.” Charts points to the northwest edge, where there’s a string of GO-type stars. “Could be a number of good planets there. The farthest one out is where the Lost Colony was. And that you stay strictly away from, by the way, if you ever get that far. Thirty-five-twelve N—that’s thirty-five minutes twelve seconds north—thirty-forty west, radial distance—we omit the degrees; out here they’re constants—eighty-nine degrees north by seventy west—that’s from Base 900, they all are—thirty-two Bkm. Some sort of contagion wiped them out just after I came. We’ve posted warning satellites. . . . All right, now you have to declare your destination. You’re entitled to free charts there; the rest you pay for.”

“Where do you recommend? For my first trip?”

“For your first trip . . . I recommend you take the one beacon route we have, up to Ace’s Landing. That’s two beacons, three jumps. It’s a neat place: hut, freshwater lake, the works. Nobody lives there, but we have a rock hound who takes all his long leaves there, with a couple of pals. You can take out your scopes and have a spree; everything you’re looking at is unexplored. And it’s just about in commo range if you hit it lucky.”

“How can places be out of commo range? I keep hearing that.”

“It’s the Rift. Relativistic effects out here where the density changes. Oh, you can pick up the frequency, but the noise, the garble factor is hopeless. Some people claim even electronic gear acts up as you really get into the Rift itself.”

“How much do they charge to stay at the hut?”

“Nothing, if you bring your own chow and bag. Air and water’re perfect.”

“I might want to make an excursion farther on to look at something I’ve spotted in the scope.”

“Green. We’ll adjust the chart fee when you get back. But if you run around, watch out for this vortex situation here.” Charts pokes his stylus into the holo, north of Ace’s Landing. “Nobody’s sure yet whether it’s a bunch of little ones or a great big whopper of a g-pit. And remember, the holos don’t fit together too well—” He edges a second chart into the first display; several stars are badly doubled.

“Right. And I’ll keep my eyes open and run a listening watch for that lost ship, B-K’s.”

“You do that. . . .” He tallies up an amount that has her credit balance scraping bottom. “I sure hope they turn up soon. It’s not like them to go jazzing off somewhere. . . . Green, here you are.”

She tenders her voucher-chip. “It’s go,” she grins. “Barely.”

Still suited, lugging her pouch of chart cassettes, Coati takes a last look through the great view-wall of the main corridor. She has a decision to make. Two decisions, really, but this one isn’t fun—she has to do something about her parents, and without giving herself away to anybody who checks commo. Her parents must be signaling all over home sector by now. She winces mentally, then has an idea: Her sister on a planet near Cayman’s has married enough credits to accept any number of collect ‘skips, and it would be logical—Yes.

Commo is two doors down.

“You don’t need to worry,” she tells a lady named Paula. “My brother-in-law is the planet banker. You can check him in that great big ephemeris there. Javelo, Hunter Javelo.”

Cautiously, Paula does so. What she finds on Port-of-Princes reassures her enough to accept this odd girl’s message. Intermittently sucking her stylus, Coati writes:

“Dearest Sis, Surprise! I’m out at FedBase 900. It’s wonderful. Will look around a bit and head home stopping by you. Tell folks all O.K., ship goes like dream and million thanks. Love, Coati.”

There! That ought to do it without alerting anybody. By the time her father messages FedBase 900, if he does, she’ll be long gone.

And now, she tells herself, heading out to the port, now for the big one. Where exactly should she go?

Well, she can always take Charts’ advice and have a good time on Ace’s Landing, scanning the skies and planning her next trip. She’s become just a little impressed by the hugeness of space and the chill of the unknown. Suppose she gets caught in an uncharted gravity vortex? She’s been in only one, and it was small, and a good pilot was flying. (That was one of the flights she didn’t tell her folks about.) And there’s always next time.

On the other hand, she’s here now, and all set. And her folks could raise trouble next time she sets out. Isn’t it better to do all she can while she can do it?

Well, like what, for instance?

Her ears had pricked up at Charts’ remark about those GO-type suns. And one of them was where the poor lost team was headed for; she has the coordinates on her wrist. What if she found them! Or—what if she found a fine terraform planet, and got to name it?

The balance of decision, which had never really leveled, tilts decisively toward a vision of yellow suns—as Coati all but runs into the ramp edge leading out.

A last flicker of caution reminds her that, whatever her goal, her first outward leg must be the beacon route to Ace’s. At the first beacon turn, she’ll have time to think it over and really make up her mind.

She finds that CC-One has been skidded out of Fuels and onto the edge of the standard-thrust takeoff area. She hikes out and climbs in, unaware that she’s broadcasting a happy hum. This is IT! She’s really, really, at last, on her way!

Strapping in, preparing to lift, she takes out a ration snack and bites it open. She was too broke to eat at Base. Setting course and getting into drive will give her time to digest it; she has a superstitious dislike of going into cold-sleep with a full tummy. Absolutely nothing is supposed to go on during cold-sleep, and she’s been used to it since she was a baby, but the thought of that foreign lump of food in there always bothers her. What puts it in stasis before it’s part of her? What if it decided to throw itself up?

So she munches as she sets the holochart data in her computer, leaving FedBase 900 far below. She’s delightedly aware that the most real part of her life is about to begin. Amid the radiance of unfamiliar stars, the dark Rift in her front view-ports, she completes the course to Beacon 900-One AL, and listens to the big c-skip converters, the heart of her ship, start the cooling-down process. The c-skip drive unit must be supercooled to near absolute zero to work the half-understood miracle by which reciprocal gravity fields will be perturbed, and CC-One and herself translated to the target at relativistic speed.

As the first clicks and clanks of cooling resound through the shell, she hangs up her suit, opens her small-size sleep chest, gets in, and injects herself. Her feelings as she pulls the lid down are those of a child of antique earth as it falls asleep to awake on Christmas morning. Thank the All for cold-sleep, she thinks drowsily. It gave us the stars. Imagine those first brave explorers who had to live and age, to stay awake through all the days, the months, the years. . . .

She wakens in what at first glance appears to be about the same starfield, but when she’s closed the chest, rubbing her behind where the antisleep injections hit she sees that the Rift looks different.

It’s larger, and—why, it’s all around the ship! Tendrils of dark almost close behind her. She’s in one of the fringy star-clumps that stick out into the Rift. And the starfield looks dull, apart from a few blazing suns—of course, there aren’t any nearby stars! Or rather, there are a few very near, and then an emptiness where all the middle-distance suns should be. Only the far, faint star-tapestry lies beyond.

The ship is full of noise; as she comes fully awake she understands that the beacon signal and her mass-proximity indicator are both tweeting and blasting away. She tunes them down, locates the beacon, and puts the ship into a slow orbit around it. This beacon, like FedBase, is set on a big asteroid that gives her just enough g’s to stabilize.

Very well. If she’s going to Ace’s Landing, she’ll just set in the coordinates for Beacon 900-Two AL, and go back to sleep. But if she’s going to look at those yellow suns, she must get out her charts and work up a safe two-or three-leg course to one of them.

She can’t simply set in their coordinates and fly straight there, even if there were no bodies actually in the way, because the ‘skip drive is built to turn off and wake her up if she threatens to get too deep in a strong gravity field, or encounters an asteroid swarm or some other space hazard. So she has to work out corridors that pass really far away from any strong bodies or known problems.

Decide. . . . But, face it, hasn’t she already decided, when she stabilized here? She doesn’t need that much time to punch in Beacon Two! . . . Yes. She has to go somewhere really wild. A hut on Ace’s Landing is just not what she came out here for. Those unknown yellow suns are . . . and maybe she could do something useful, like finding the missing men; there’s an off chance. The neat thing to do might be to go by small steps, Ace’s Landing first—but the really neat course is to take advantage of all she’s learned and not to risk being forbidden to come back. Green, go!

She’s been busy all this while, threading cassettes and getting them lined up for those GO suns. As Charts had warned her, edges don’t fit well. She’s working at forcing two holos into a cheap frame made for one, when her mass-proximity tweeter goes off.

She glances up, ready to duck or deflect a sky-rock. Amazed, she sees something unmistakably artificial ahead. A ship? It grows larger—but not large enough, not at the rate it’s coming. It’ll pass her clean. Whatever can it be? Visions of the mythical tiny ship full of tiny aliens jump to her mind.

It’s so small—why, she could pick it up! Without really thinking, she spins CC-One’s attitude and comes parallel, alongside the object. She’s good at tricky little accelerations. The thing seems to put on speed as she idles up. Touched by chase fever, she mutters, “Oh, no, you don’t!” and extrudes the rather inadequate manipulator arm.

As she does so, she realizes what it is. But she’s too excited to think, she plucks it neatly out of space, and after a bit of trying, twists it into her cargo lock, shuts the port behind it, and refills with air.

She’s caught herself a message pipe! Bound from the gods know where to FedBase. It was changing course at Beacon One, like herself, hence moving slowly. Has she committed an official wrong? Is there some penalty for interfering with official commo?

Well, she’s put her spoon in the soup, she might as well drink it. It’ll take a while for the pipe to warm to touchability. So she goes on working her charts, intending merely to take a peek at the message and then send the little thing on its way. Surely such a small pause won’t harm anything—pipes are used because the sender’s out of range, not because they’re fast.

She hasn’t a doubt she can start it going, again. She’s seen that it’s covered with instructions. Like all Federation space gear, it’s fixed to be usable by amateurs in an emergency.

Impatiently she completes a chart and goes to fish the thing out of the port while it’s still so cold she has to put on gloves. When she undogs its little hatch, a cloud of golden motes drifts out, distracting her so that she brushes her bare wrist against the metal when she reaches for the cassette inside. Ouch!

She glances at her arm, hoping she hasn’t given herself a nasty cold-burn. Nothing to be seen but an odd dusty scratch. No redness. But she can feel the nerve twitch deep in her forearm. Funny! She brushes at it, and takes out the cassette with more care. It’s standard record; she soon has it threaded in her voder.

The voice that speaks is so thick and blurry that she backs up and restarts, to hear better.

“Supply and Recon Team Number 914 B-K reporting,” she makes out. Excitedly she recognizes the designation. Why, that’s the missing ship! That is important. She should relay it to Base at once. But surely it won’t hurt to listen to the rest?

The voice is saying that a new depot has been established at thirty-twenty north, forty-two-twenty-eight west, RD Thirty. That’s one of the yellow suns’ planets, and the coordinates Coati has on her wrist. “Ninety-five percent terraform.” The voice has cleared a little.

It goes on to say that they will work back to FedBase, stopping to check a highly terraform planet they’ve spotted at eighteen-ten north, twenty-eight-thirty west, RD Thirty, in the same group of suns. “But—uh—” The voice stops, then resumes.

“Some things happened at thirty-twenty. There’re people there. I guess we have to report a, uh, First Contact. They—”

A second voice interrupts abruptly.

“We did just like the manual! The manual for First Contacts.”

“Yeah,” resumes the first voice. “It worked fine. They were really friendly. They even had a few words from Galactic, and the signals. But they—”

“The wreck. The wreck! Tell them,” says the other voice.

“Oh. Well, yeah. There’s a wreck there, an old RE. Real old. You can’t see the rescue flag; it has big stuff growing on it. We think it’s Ponz. So maybe it’s his First Contact.” The voice sound unmistakably downcast. “Boss can decide. . . . Anyway, they have some kind of treatment they give you, like a pill to make you smart. It takes two days; you sleep a lot. Then they let you out and you can understand everything. Imean—everything! It was—we never had anything like that before. Everybody talking and understanding everybody! See how we can talk now? But it’s funny. . . . Anyway, they helped us find a place with a level site, and we fixed up a fuel dump really nice. We—”

“What they looked like!” the other voice bursts in. “Never mind us. Tell about them, what they looked like and how they did.”

“Oh, sure: Well. Big white bodies with fur all over. And six legs—they mostly walk on the back four; the top two are like arms. They have like long bodies, long white cats, big; when they rear up to look, they’re over our heads. And they have. . . .” Here the voice stammers, as if finding it hard to speak. “They have like two, uh, private parts. Two sets, I mean. Some of them. And their faces”—the voice runs on, relieved—“their faces are fierce. Some teeth! When they came and looked in first, we were pretty nervous. And big eyes, sort of like mixed-up people and animals. Cats. But they acted friendly, they gave back the signals, so we came out. That was when they grabbed us and pushed their heads onto ours. Then they let go, and acted like something was wrong. I heard one say ‘Ponz,’ and like ‘Lashley’ or ‘Leslie.’ ”

“Leslie was with Ponz, I told you,” says the second.

“Yeah. So then they grabbed us again, and held on, and that was when they gave the treatment. I think something went into me, I can still hear like a voice. Ko says, him, too. . . . Oh, and there were young ones and some others running around on an island; they said they’re not like them until they get the treatment. ‘Drons,’ they called the young ones. And afterward they’re ‘Ee-ah-drons.’ The ones we talked to. It’s sort of confusing. Like the Ee-ah are people, too. But you don’t see them.” His voice—it must be Boney—runs down. “Is that all?” Coati hears him ask aside.

“Yeah, I guess so,” the other voice—Ko—replies. “We better get started, we got one more stop . . . and I don’t feel so good anymore. I wish we was home.”

“Me, too. Funny, we felt so great. Well, DRS 914 B-K signing off. . . . I guess this is the longest record we ever sent, huh? Oh, we have some corrections to send. Stand by.”

After a long drone of coordinate corrections, the record ends.

Coati sits pensive, trying to sort out the account. It’s clear that a new race has been contacted, and they seem friendly. Yet something about it affects her negatively—she has no desire to rush off and meet the big white six-legs and be given the “smart treatment.” Boney and Ko were supposed to be a little—innocent. Maybe they were fooled in some way, taken advantage of? But she can’t think why, or what. It’s beyond her. . . .

The other thing that’s clear is that this should go to Base, fastest. Wasn’t there a ship going to follow Boney and Ko’s route? That would take them to the cat planet, which is at—she consults her wrist—thirty-twenty north, et cetera. Oh, dear, must she go back? Turn back, abort her trip to deliver this? Why had she been so smart, pulling in other people’s business?

But wait. If it’s urgent, she could speed it by calling base and reading the message, thus bypassing the last leg. Then surely they wouldn’t crack her for interfering! Maybe she’s still in commo range.

She powers up the transponder and starts calling FedBase 900. Finally a voice responds, barely discernible through the noise. She fiddles with the suppressors and gets it a bit clearer.

“FedBase 900, this is CC-One at AL. Beacon One. Do you read me? I have intercepted a message pipe from Supply Ship DRS 914 B-K, the missing ship, Boney and Ko.” She repeats. “Do you read that?”

“Affirmative, CC-One. Message from ship 914 B-K intercepted. What is the message?”

“It’s too long to read. But listen—important. They are on their way to a planet at—wait a minim—” She rolls the record back and gets the coordinates. “And before that they stayed at that planet thirty-twenty north—you have the specs. There are people there! It’s a First Contact, I think. But listen, they say something’s funny. I don’t think you should go there until you get the whole message. I’m sending it right on.”

“CC-One, I lost part of that. Is planet at “thirty-twenty north a First Contact?”

Garble is breaking up Commo’s voice. Coati shouts as clearly as she can, “Yes! Affirmative! But don’t, repeat, do—not—go—there—until you get B-K’s original message. I—will—send—pipe—at once. Did you get that?”

“Repeating. . . . Do not proceed to planet thirty-twenty north, forty-two-twenty-eight west until B-K message received. Pipe coming soonest. Green, CC-One?”

“Go. If I can’t make the pipe work, I’ll bring it. CC-One signing off.” She finishes in a swirl of loud static, and turns her attention to getting the pipe back on its way.

But before she takes the cassette out of the voder, she rechecks the designation of the planet B-K are headed for. Eighteen-ten north. Twenty-eight-thirty west. RD Thirty. That’s closer than the First Contact planet; that’s right, they said they’d stop there on their way home. She copies the first coordinates off on her workpad, and replaces them on her wrist with the new ones. If she wants to help look for Boney and Ko, she could go straight there—but of course she hasn’t really made up her mind. As she rolls back her sleeve, she notices that her arm still feels odd, but she can’t see any trace of a cold-burn. She rubs the arm a couple of times, and it goes away.

“Getting goosey from excitement,” she mutters. She has a childish habit of talking aloud to herself when she’s alone. She figures it’s because she was alone so much as a child, happily playing with her space toys and holos.

Putting the message pipe back on course proves to be absurdly simple. She blows it clean of the yellow powdery stuff, reinserts the cassette, and ejects it beside the viewports. Fascinated, she watches the little ship spin slowly, orienting to its homing frequency broadcast from Base 900. Then, as if satisfied, it begins to glide away, faster and faster. Sure enough, as well as she can judge, it’s headed down the last leg from Beacon One to FedBase. Neat! She’s never heard of pipes before; there must be all kinds of marvelous frontier gadgets that’ll be new to her.

She has a guilty twinge as she sees it go. Isn’t it her duty to go nearer back to Base and read the whole thing? Could the men be in some kind of trouble where every minim counts? But they sounded green, only maybe a little tired. And she understands it’s their routine to send a pipe after every stop. If some of those corrections are important, she could never read them straight; her voice would give out. Better they have Boney’s own report.

She turns back to figuring out her course, and finds she was fibbing: she has indeed made up her mind. She’ll just go to the planet B-K were headed for and see if she can find them there. Maybe they got too sick to move on, maybe they found another alien race they got involved with. Maybe their ship’s in trouble. . . . Any number of reasons they could be late, and she might be helpful. And now she knows enough about the pipes to know that they can’t be sent from a planet’s surface. Only from above atmosphere. So if Boney and Ko can’t lift, they can’t message for help—by pipe, at least.

She’s half-talking this line of reasoning out to herself as she works on the holocharts. Defining and marking in a brand-new course for the computer is far more work than she’d realized; the school problems she had done must have been chosen for easy natural corridors. “Oh, gods . . . I’ve got to erase again; there’s an asteroid path there. Help! I’ll never get off this beacon at this rate—explorers must have spent half their time mapping!”

As she mutters, she becomes aware of something like an odd little echo in the ship. She looks around; the cabin is tightly packed with shiny cases of supplies. “Got my acoustics all buggered up,” she mutters. That must be it. But there seems to be a peculiar delay; for example, she hears the word “Help!” so tiny-clear that she actually spends a few minim searching the nearby racks. Could a talking animal pet or something have got in at Far Base? Oh, the poor creature. Unless she can somehow get it in cold-sleep, it’ll die.

But nothing more happens, and she decides it’s just the new acoustical reflections. And at last she achieves a good, safe three-leg course to that system at eighteen-ten north. She’s pretty sure an expert could pick out a shorter, elegant, two-leg line, but she doesn’t want to risk being waked up by some unforeseen obstacle. So she picks routes lined by well-corrected red dwarfs and other barely visible sky features. These charts are living history, she thinks. Not like the anonymous holos back home, where everything is checked a hundred times a year, and they give you only tripstrips. In these charts she can read the actual hands of the old explorers. The man Ponz, for instance—he must have spent a lot of time working around the route to the yellow suns, before he landed on thirty-twenty and crashed and died. . . . But she’s dawdling now. She stacks the marked cassettes in order in her computer take-up, and clicks the first one in. To the unknown, at last!

She readies her cold-sleep chest and hops in. As she relaxes, she notices she still has a strange sensation of being accompanied by something or someone. “Maybe because I’m sort of one of the company of space now,” she tells herself romantically, and visualizes a future chart with a small “CC” correction. Hah! She laughs aloud, drowsily, in the darkness, feeling great. An almost physical rosy glow envelops her as she sinks to dreamless stasis.

She can take off thus unconscious amid pathless space with no real fear of getting lost and being unable to return, because of a marvelously simple little gadget carried by all jumpships—a time-lapse recorder in the vessel’s tail, which clicks on unceasingly, recording the star scene behind. It’s accelerated by motion in the field, and slows to resting state when the field is static. So, whenever the pilot wishes to retrace his route, he has only to take out the appropriate cassette and put it up front in his guidance computer. The computer will hunt until it duplicates the starfield sequences of the outward path, thus bringing the ship infallibly, if somewhat slowly, back along the course it came.

She wakes and jumps out to see a really new star scene—a great sprawl of radiant golden suns against a very dark arm of Rift. The closest star of the group, she finds, is eighteen-ten north, just as she’s calculated! The drive has cut off at the margin of its near gravity field; it will be a long thrust drive in.

Excitement like a sunrise is flooding her. She’s made it! Her first solo jump!

And with the mental joy is still that physical glow, so strong it puzzles her for a minim. Physical, definitely; it’s kind of like the buzz of self-stimulation, but without the sticky-sickly feeling that self-stimulation usually gives her. Their phys ed teacher, who’d showed them how to relieve sex tension, said that the negative quality would go away, but Coati hasn’t bothered with it all that very much. Now she thinks that this shows that sheer excitement can activate sex, as the teacher said. “Ah, go away,” she mutters impatiently. She’s got to start thrust drive and run on in to where the planets could be.

As soon as she’s started, she turns to the scope to check. Planets—yes! One—two—four—and there it is! Blue-green and white even at this distance! Boney and Ko had said it tested highly terraform. It looks it, all right, thinks Coati, who has seen only holos of antique Earth. She wonders briefly what the missing nonterraform part could be: irregularities of climate, absence of some major life-forms? It doesn’t matter—anything over 75 percent means livable without protective gear, air and water present and good. She’ll be able to get out and explore in the greatest comfort—on a new world! But are Boney and Ko already there?

When she gets into orbital distance from the planet, she must run a standard search pattern around it. All Federation ships have radar-responsive gear to help locate them.

But her little ship doesn’t have a real Federation search-scope. She’ll have to use her eyes, and fly much too narrow a course. This could be tedious; she sighs.

She finds herself crossing her legs and wriggling and scratching herself idly. Really, this sex overflow is too much! The mental part is fairly calm, though, almost like real happiness. Nice. Only distracting. . . . And, as she leans back to start waiting out the run in, she feels again that sense of presence in the ship. Company, companionship. Is she going a little nutters? “Calm down,” she tells herself firmly.

A minim of dead silence . . . into which a tiny, tiny voice says distinctly, “Hello . . . hello? Please don’t be frightened. Hello?”

It’s coming from somewhere behind and above her.

Coati whirls, peers up and around everywhere, seeing nothing new.

“Wh-where are you?” she demands. “Who are you, in here?”

“I am a very small being. You saved my life. Please don’t be frightened of me. Hello?”

“Hello,” Coati replies slowly, peering around hard. Still she sees nothing. And the voice is still behind her when she turns. She doesn’t feel frightened at all, just intensely excited and curious.

“What do you mean, I saved your life?”

“I was clinging to the outside of that artifact you call a message. I would have died soon.”

“Well, good.” But now Coati is a bit frightened. When the voice spoke, she definitely detected movement in her own larynx and tongue—as if she were speaking the words herself. Gods—she is going nutters, she’s hallucinating! “I’m talking to myself!”

“No, no,” the voice—her voice—reassures her. “You are correct—I am using your speech apparatus. Please forgive me; I have none of my own that you could hear.”

Coati digests this dubiously. If this is a hallucination, it’s really complex. She’s never done anything like this before. Could it be real, some kind of alien telekinesis?

“But where are you? Why don’t you come out and show yourself?”

“I can’t. I will explain. Please promise me you won’t be frightened. I have damaged nothing, and I will leave anytime you desire.”

Coati suddenly gets an idea, and eyes the computer sharply. In fantasy shows she’s seen holos about alien minds taking over computers. So far as she knows, it’s never happened in reality. But maybe—

“Are you in my computer?”

“Your computer?” Incredibly, the voice gives what might almost be a giggle. “In a way, yes. I told you I am very, very small. I am in empty places, in your head.” Quickly it adds, “You aren’t frightened, please? I can go out anytime, but then we can’t speak.”

“In my head!” Coati exclaims. For some reason she, too, feels like laughing. She knows she should be making some serious response, but all she can think of is, this is why her sinuses feel stuffy. “How did you get in my head?”

“When you rescued me I was incapable of thought. We have a primitive tropism to enter a body and make our way to the head. When I came to myself, I was here. You see, on my home we live in the brains of our host animals. In fact, we are their brains.”

“You went through my body? Oh—from that place on my arm?”

“Yes, I must have done. I have only vague, primitive memories. You see, we are really so small. We live in what I think you call intermolecular, maybe interatomic spaces. Our passage doesn’t injure anything. To me, your body is as open and porous as your landscape is to you. I didn’t realize there was so much large-scale solidity around until I saw it through your eyes! Then, when you went cold, I came to myself and learned my way around, and deciphered the speech centers. I had a long, long time. It was . . . lonely. I didn’t know if you would ever awaken. . . .”

“Yeah. . . .” Coati thinks this over. She’s pretty sure she couldn’t imagine all this. It must be real! But all she can think of to say is, “You’re using my eyes, too?”

“I’ve tapped into the optic nerve, at the second juncture. Very delicately, I assure you. And to your auditory channels. It’s one of the first things we do, a primitive program. And we make the host feel happy, to keep from frightening it. You do feel happy, don’t you?”

“Happy?—Hey, are you doing that? Listen, if that’s you, you’re overdoing it! I don’t want to feel quite so ‘happy,’ as you call it. Can you turn it down?”

“You don’t? Oh, I am sorry. Please wait—my movements are slow.”

Coati waits, thinking so furiously about everything at once that her mind is a chaos. Presently there comes a marked decrease in the distracting physical glow. More than all the rest, this serves to convince her of the reality of her new inhabitant.

“Can you read my mind?” she asks slowly.

“Only when you form words,” her own voice replies. “Subvocalizing, I think you call it. I used all that long cold time tracing out your vocabulary and language. We have a primitive drive to communication; perhaps all life-forms have.”

“Acquiring a whole language from a static, sleeping brain is quite a feat,” says Coati thoughtfully. She is beginning to feel a distinct difference in her voice when the alien is using it; it seems higher, tighter—and she hears herself using words that she knows only from reading, not habitual use.

“Yes. Luckily I had so much time. But I was so dismayed and depressed when it seemed you’d never awaken. All that work would be for nothing. I am so happy to find you alive! Not just for the work, but for—for life. . . . Oh, and I have had one chance to practice with your species before. But your brain is quite different.”

However flustered and overwhelmed by the novelty of all this, Coati isn’t stupid. The words about “home” and “hosts” are making a connection with Boney and Ko’s report.

“Did the two men who sent that message you were riding on visit your home planet? They were two Humans—that’s what I am—in a ship bigger than this.”

“Oh, yes! I was one of those who took turns being with them! And I was visiting one of them when they left.” . . . The voice seems to check itself. “Your brain is really very different.”

“Thanks,” says Coati inanely. “I’ve heard that those two men—those two Humans—weren’t regarded as exactly bright.”

“ ‘Bright?’ Ah, yes. . . . We performed some repairs, but we couldn’t do much.”

Coati’s chaotic thoughts coalesce. What she’s sitting here chatting with is an alien—an alien who is possibly deadly, very likely dangerous, who has invaded her head.

“You’re a brain parasite!” she cries loudly. “You’re an intelligent brain parasite, using my eyes to see with and my ears to hear with, and talking through my mouth as if I were a zombie—and, and for all I know, you’re taking over my whole brain!”

“Oh, please! P-please!” She hears her own voice tremble. “I can leave at any moment—is that what you wish? And I damage nothing—nothing at all. I use very little energy. In fact, I have cleared away some debris in your main blood-supply tube, so there is more than ample for us both. I need only a few components from time to time. But I can withdraw right now. It would be a slow process, because I’ve become more deeply enmeshed and my mentor isn’t here to direct me. But if that’s what you want, I shall start at once, leaving just as I came. . . . Maybe—n-now that I’m refreshed, I could survive longer, clinging to your ship.”

The pathos affects Coati; the timbre of the voice calls up the image of a tiny, sad, frightened creature shivering in the cold prison of space.

“We’ll decide about that later,” she says somewhat gruffly. “Meanwhile I have your word of honor you aren’t messing up my brain?”

“Indeed not,” her own voice whispers back indignantly. “It is a beautiful brain.”

“But what do you want? Where are you trying to go?”

“Now I want only to go home. I thought, if I could reach some central Human place, we could find someone who would carry me back to my home planet and my proper host.”

“But why did you leave Boney and Ko and go with that message pipe in the first place?”

“Oh—I had no idea then how big the empty spaces are; I thought it would be like a long trip out-of-body at home. Brrr-rr! There’s so much I don’t know. Can you tell that I am quite a young being? I have not at all finished my instructions. My mentors tell me I am foolish, or foolhardy. I—I wanted adventure?” The little voice sounds suddenly quite strong and positive. “I still do, but I see I must be better prepared.”

“Hmm. Hey, can you tell I’m young, too? I guess that makes two of us. I guess I’m out here looking for adventure, too.”

“You do understand.”

“Yeah.” Coati grins, sighs. “Well, I can carry you back to FedBase, and I’m sure they’ll be sending parties to your planet soon. It’s a First Contact for us, you know; that’s what we call meeting a new non-Human race. We know about fifty so far, but no one just like you. So I’m certain people will be going.”

“Oh, thank you! Thank you so much.”

Coati feels a surge of physical pleasure, an urge—

“Hey, you’re doing that again! Stop it.”

“Oh, I am sorry.” The glow fades. “It’s a primitive response to gratitude. To give pleasure. You see, our normal hosts are quite mindless; they can be thanked only by physical sensation.”

“I see.” Pondering this, Coati sees something else, too. “I suppose you could make them feel pain, too, to punish them, if they did something you didn’t like?”

“I suppose so. But we don’t like pain; it churns up the delicate brain. Those are some of the lessons I haven’t had yet. I had to only once, when my host was playing too near a dangerous cliff. And then I soothed it with pleasure right after it moved back. We use it only in emergencies, if the host threatens to harm itself, rare things like that. . . . Or, wait, I remember, if the host gets into what you call a fight. . . . You can see it’s complicated.”

“I see,” Coati repeats. Uneasily she realizes that this young alien passenger might have more control over her than was exactly neat. But it seems to be so well-meaning, to have no intent at all to harm her. She relaxes—unable to suppress a twinge of wonder whether her easy emotional acceptance of its presence in—whew!—her brain might not be a feeling partly engineered by the alien. Maybe the really neat thing to do would be to ask her passenger to withdraw, right now. Could she fix some comfortable place for it to stay outside her? Maybe she’ll do that, when they get a bit closer to FedBase.

Meanwhile, what about her plan for visiting the planet Boney and Ko were headed for? If she could pick up a trace of them, it would be a real help to FedBase. And wouldn’t it be a shame to come all this way without taking a look?

That argument with herself is soon over. And her young appetite is making itself felt. She picks out a ration snack and starts to set the drive course for the planets, explaining between munches what she plans to do before returning to FedBase. Her passenger raises no objection to this delay.

“I am so grateful, so grateful you would think to deliver me,” her voice says with some difficulty around the cheese bites.

As Coati opens the cold-keeper, a flash of gold attracts her attention. It’s more of that gold dust, clinging to the chilly surface. She bats it away, and some floats to her face.

“By the way, what is this stuff? It came in the message pipe, with you. Can you see it? Hey, it’s on my legs, too.” She extends one, “Yes,” her “different” voice replies. “They are seeds.”

She’s getting used to this weird dialogue with herself. It reminds her of a show she saw, where a ventriloquist animated a dummy. “I’m a ventriloquist’s dummy,” she chuckles to herself. “Only I’m the ventriloquist, too.

“What kind of seeds, of what?” she asks aloud.

“Ours.” There’s a sound, or feeling, like a sigh, as if a troubling thought had passed. Then the voice says more briskly, “Wait, I forgot. I should release a chemical to keep them off you. They are attracted to—to the pheromones of life.”

“I didn’t know I knew those words,” Coati tells her invisible companion. “I guess you were really into my vocabulary while I slept.”

“Oh, yes. I labored.”

A moment later Coati feels a slight flush prickling her skin. Is this the “chemical” ? Before she can feel alarmed, it passes. And she sees that the floating dust—or seeds—has fallen away from her as if repelled by a charge.

“Good-o.” She eats a bit more, finishing the course-set. “That reminds me, what do you call your race? And you, you must have a name. We should get better acquainted!” She laughs for two; all sense of trouble has gone.

“I am of the Eea, or Eeadron. Personally I’m called Syliobene.”

“Hello, Syliobene! I’m Coati Cass. Coati.”

“Hello, Coati Cass Coati.”

“No, I meant, just Coati. Cass is my family name.”

“Ah, ‘family.’ We wondered about that, with the other Humans.”

“Sure, I’ll be glad to explain. But later—” Coati cuts herself off. “I mean, there’ll be plenty of time to explain everything while we slowly approach the planet orbiting that star. And I think I’m entitled to your story first, Syliobene, since I’m providing the body. Don’t you agree that’s fair?”

“Oh, yes. I must take care not to be selfish, when you do so much.”

Somehow this speech for the first time conveys to Coati that her passenger really is a young, almost childish being. The big words it had found in her mind had kept misleading her. But now Syliobene sounds so much like herself reminding herself of her manners. She chuckles again, benignly. Could it be that they are two kids—even two females—together, out looking for adventure in the starfields? And it’s nice to have this unexpected companion; much as Coati loves to read and view, she’s beginning to get the idea that a lot of space voyaging consists of lonely sitting and waiting, when you aren’t in cold-sleep. Of course, she guiltily reminds herself, she could be checking the charts to see if all the coordinates of the relatively few stars out here are straight. But Boney and Ko have undoubtedly done all that—after all, this was their second trip to this sun; on the first one they merely spotted planets. And learning about an alien race is surely important.

She leans back comfortably and asks, “Now, what about your planet? What does it look like? And your hosts—how does that work? How did such a system ever evolve in the first place? Hey, I know—can you make me see an image, a vision of your home?”

“Alas, no. Such a feat is beyond my powers. Making speech is the utmost I can do.”

“Well, tell me about it all.”

“I will. But first I must say, we have no such—no such material equipment, no such technology as you have. What techniques we have are of the mind. I am filled with amazement at all you do. Your race has achieved marvels! I saw a distant world when I looked through your device—a world! And you speak of visiting it as casually as we would go to a lake or a tree farm. A wonder!”

“Yes, we have a lot of technology. So do some other races, like the Swain and the Moom. But I want yours, Syliobene! To start with, what’s this business of Eea and Eeadron?”

“Ah. Yes, of course. Well, I personally, just myself, am an Eea. But when I am in my proper host, which is a Dron, I am an Eeadron. An Eea by itself is almost nothing. It can do nothing but wait, depending on its primitive tropisms, until a host comes by. It is very rare for Eea to become detached as you found me—except when we are visiting another Eeadron for news or instruction. And then we leave much of ourselves in place, in our personal Dron, to which we return. I, being young, was able to detach myself almost completely to go with the Humans as one of their visitors.”

“Oh—were there other Eea inside Boney and Ko when they took off?”

“Yes—one each, at least.”

“What would you call that—Eeahumans?” Coati laughs.

But her companion does not seem to join in. “They were very old,” she hears herself mutter softly. And then something that sounds like, “no idea of the length of the trip. . . .”

“So you came away when they messaged. Whew—wild act! Oh, Syliobene, I’m so glad I intercepted it and saved you.”

“I too, dear Coati Cass.”

“But now we’ve got to get serious about this crazy system of yours. Are you the only people on your planet that have their brains in separate bodies?—Oh, wait. I just realized we should record all this; we’ll never be able to go over it twice. Hold while I put in a new cassette.”

She gets set up, and bethinks herself to make it sound professional with an introduction.

“This is Coati Cass recording, on board the CC-One, approaching unnamed planet at—” She gives all the coordinates, the standard date and time, and the fact that Boney and Ko were last reported to be headed toward this planet.

“Before that they landed on a planet at thirty-twenty north and reported a First Contact with life-forms there. Their report is in a message forwarded to Base before I came here. Now it seems that when they left the planet, some of the life-forms came with them; specifically, two at least of the almost invisible Eea, in their heads. And some seeds, and another Eea, a very young one, who came along, she says, for the adventure. This young Eea moved to the message pipe, not realizing how long the trip would be, and was almost dead when I opened the pipe. She—I call it ‘she’ because we haven’t got sexes, if any, straightened out yet—she moved over to me when I opened the pipe, and is right now residing in my head, where she can see and hear through my senses, and speak with my voice. I am interviewing her about her planet, Nolian. Now remember, all the voice you hear will be mine—but I myself am the one asking the questions. I think you will soon be able to tell when Syllobene—that’s her name—is speaking with my voice; it’s higher and sort of constricted, and she uses words I didn’t know I knew. She learned all that while I was in cold-sleep coming here. Now, Syllobene, would you please repeat what you’ve told me so far, about the Eea and the Eeadron?”

Coati has learned to relax a little while her own voice goes on, and she hears Syllobene start with a nice little preface: “Greetings to my Human hearers!” and go on to recite the Eea-Eeadron system.

“Now,” says Coati, “I was just asking her whether the Eea are the only life-forms on their planet to have their brains in separate animals, so to speak?”

“Oh, no,” says her Syllobene voice, “it is general in our, ah, animal world. In fact, we are still amazed that there is another way. But always in other animals, the two are very closely attached. For instance, in the Enquaalons the En is born with the Quaalon, mates when it mates, gives birth when it does, and dies when it dies. The same for all the En—that is what we call the brain animal—except for ourselves, the Eea. Only the Eea are so separate from the Dron, and do not die when their Dron dies. . . . But we have seen aged Endalamines—that is the nearest animal to the Eeadron-—holding their heads against newborn Dalamines, as though the En were striving to pass to a new body, while the seed-Ens proper to that newborn hovered about in frustration. We think in some cases they succeed.”

“So you Eea can pass to a new body when yours is old! Does that make you immortal?”

“Ah, no; Eea, too, age and die. But very slowly. They may use many Dron in a lifetime.”

“I see. But tell about your society, your government, and how you get whatever you eat, and so on. Are there rich or poor, or servants and master Eeadron?”

“No, if I understand those words. But we have farms—”

And so, by random stages and probings, Coati pieces together a picture of the green and golden planet Syllobene calls Nolian, with its sun Anella. All ruled over by the big white Eeadron, who have no wars, and only the most rudimentary monetary system. The climate is so benign that housing is largely decorative, except for shelter from the nightly mists and drizzles. It seems a paradise. Their ferocious teeth, which had so alarmed Boney and Ko, derive from a forgotten, presumably carnivorous past; they now eat plant products and fruits. (Here Coati recollects that certain herbivorous primates of antique Earth also had fierce-looking canines.)

As to material technology, the Eeadron have the wheel, which they use for transporting farm crops and what few building materials they employ. And long ago they learned to control fire, which they regard almost as a toy except for some use in cooking. Their big interest now appears to be the development of a written code for their language; they picked up the idea from Ponz and Leslie. It’s a source of great pleasure and excitement, although some of the older Eea, who serve as the racial memory, grumble a bit at this innovation.

Midway through this account, Coati has an idea, and when Syllobene runs down, she bursts out, “Listen! Oh—this is Coati speaking—you said you cleaned out my arteries, my blood tubes. And you cure other hosts. Would you—I mean, your race—be interested in being healers to other races like mine, who can’t heal themselves? We call such healers doctors. But our doctors can’t get inside and really fix what’s wrong, without cutting the sick person up. Why, you could travel all over the Federation, visiting sick people and curing them—or, wait, you could set up a big clinic, and people, Humans and others, would come from everywhere to have the Eea go into them and fix their blood vessels, or their kidneys, or whatever was wrong. Oh, hey, they’d pay you—you’re going to need Federation credits—and everybody would love you! You’d be the most famous, valuable race in the Federation!”

“Oh, oh—” replies the Syllobene voice, sounding breathless, “I don’t know your exclamations! We would say—” She gives an untranslatable trill of excitement, “How amazing, if I understand you—”

“Well, we can talk about that later. Now, you learned about Humans from what you call visiting, in the brains of Boney or Ko, is that right?”

“Yes. But if I had not had the experience of visiting my mentor and a few other Eeadron, I would not have known how to enter and live there without causing damage. You see, the brains of the Dron are just unformed matter; one can go anywhere and eat anything without ill effect on the host’s brain. In fact, it is up to the Eea to form them . . . And, I almost forgot, my mentor was old; and was one of those who had known the living Humans Ponz and Leslie. The two who landed violently and died. They were beyond our powers to cure then, but we could abolish their pain. I believe they mated before they died, but no seeds came. My mentor told me how your brains are developed and functioning. We are still amazed.”

“Why do you visit other Eeadron?”

“To learn many facts about some subject in a short time. We send out tendrils—I think you have a word, for your fungus plants—mycelia. Very frail threads and knots, permeating the other brain—I believe that is what I look like in your brain now—and by making a shadow pattern in a certain way, we acquire all sorts of information, like history, or the form of landscapes, and keep it intact when we withdraw.”

“Look, couldn’t you learn all about Humans and the Federation by doing that in my head?”

“Oh, I would not dare. Your speech centers alone frightened me with their complexity. I proceeded with infinite care. It was lucky I had so much time while you slept. I wouldn’t dare try anything more delicate and extensive and emotion-connected.”

“Well, thanks for your consideration . . .” Coati doesn’t want to stall the interview there, so she asks at random, “Do you have any social problems? Troubles or dilemmas that concern your whole race?”

This seems to puzzle the Eea. “Well. If I understand you, I don’t think so. Oh, there is a heated disagreement among two groups of Eeadron as to how much interest we should take in aliens, but that has been going on ever since Ponz. A panel of senior councillors—is that the word for old wise ones?—is judging it.”

“And will the factions abide by the panel’s judgment?”

“Oh, naturally. It will be wiped from memory.”

“Whew!”

“And . . . and there is the problem of a shortage of faleth fruit trees. But that is being solved. Oh—I believe I know one social problem, as you put it. Since the Eea are becoming personally so long-lived, there is arising a reluctance to mate and start young. Mating is very, ah, disruptive, especially to the Dron body. So people like to go along as they are. The elders have learned how to suppress the mating urge. For example, I and my siblings were the only young born during one whole season. There are still plenty of seeds about—you saw them—but they are becoming just wasted. Wasted . . . I think I perceive something applicable in your verbal sayings, about nature.”

“Huh? Oh—‘Nature’s notorious wastefulness,’ right?”

“Yes. But our seeds are very long-lived. Very. And that golden coat, which is what you see, is impervious to most everything. So maybe all will be well.”

Her informant seems to want to say no more on this topic, so Coati seizes the pause to say, “Look, our throat—my throat—is about to close up or break into flames. Water!” She seizes the flask and drinks. “I always thought that business of getting a sore throat from talking too much was a joke. It isn’t. Can’t you do something, Dr. Syllobene?”

“I can only block off some of the inflamed channels, and help time do its work. I could abolish the pain, but if we use the throat, it would quickly grow much worse.”

“You sound like a doctor already,” Coati grumbles hoarsely. “Well, we’ll just cut this off here—Oh, I wish I had one of those message pipes! Ouch. . . . Then we’ll have some refreshments—I got some honey, thank the gods—and take a nap. Cold-sleep doesn’t rest us, you know. Could you take a sleep, too, Syllobene?”

“Excellent idea.” That hurts.

“Look, couldn’t you learn just to nod my head like this for ‘yes’ or like this for ‘no’ ?”

Nothing happens for a moment, then Coati feels her head nod gently as if elfin fingers were brushing her chin and brow, yes.

“Fantastic,” she rasps. “Ouch.”

She clicks off the recorder, takes a last look through the scope at the blue-green-white planet—still far, far ahead—sets an alarm, and curls up comfortably in the pilot couch.

“Sleep well, Syllobene,” she whispers painfully. The answer is breathed back, “You, too, dear Coati Cass.”

Excitement wakes her before the alarm. The planet is just coming into good bare-eye view. But when she starts to speak to Syllobene, she finds she has no voice at all. She hunts up the med-kit and takes out some throat lozenges.

“Syllobene,” she whispers. “Hello?”

“Wha—er, what? Hello?” Syllobene discovers whispering.

“We’ve lost our voice. That happens sometimes. It’ll wear off. But if it’s still like this when we get on the planet, you’ll have to do something so we can record. You can, can’t you?”

“Yes, I believe so. But you must understand it will make it worse later.”

“Green.”

“What?”

“Green . . . means ‘I understand, too.’ Listen, I’m sorry about your turn to ask questions. That’ll be later. For now we’ll just shut up.”

“I wait.”

“Go.”

“What?”

“Oh, green, go—that means ‘Understood, and we will proceed on that course.’ ” Coati can scarcely force out the words.

“Ah, informal speech . . . most difficult. . . .”

“Syl, this is killing me. We shut up now, green?”

A painful giggle. “Go.”

Some hot tea from the snack pack proves soothing. Meanwhile the enforced silence for the first time gives Coati a chance to think things over. She is, of course, entranced by the novelty of it all, and seriously stirred by the idea that Syllobene’s race could provide the most astounding, hitherto inconceivable type of medical help to the others. If they want to. And if a terrible crowd-jam doesn’t ensue. But that’s for the big minds to wrestle out.

And, like the kid she is, Coati relishes the sensation she fancies her return will provoke—with a real live new alien carried in her head! But, gods, they won’t be able to see Syllobene—suppose they jump to the obvious conclusion that Coati’s gone nutters, and hustle her off to the hospital? She and Syl better talk that over before they get home; Syllobene has to be able to think of some way to prove she exists.

Funny how firmly she’s thinking of Syllobene as “she,” Coati muses. Is that just sheer projection? Or—after all, they’re in pretty intimate contact—is this some deep instinctive perception, like one of Syl’s “primitive tropisms” ? Whatever, when they get it unscrambled, it’ll be a bit of a shock if Syl’s a young “he” . . . or gods forbid, an “it” or a “them.” What was it that Boney had said about the Dron, that some of them had two sets of “private parts” ? That’d be his modest term for sex organs; he must have meant they were like hermaphrodites. Whew. Well, that still doesn’t necessarily mean anything about the Eea.

When they can talk, she must get things straightened out. And until then not get too romantically fixated on the idea that they’re two girls together.

All this brings her to a sobering sense of how little she really knows about the entity she’s letting stay in her head—in her very brain. If indeed Syl was serious about being able to leave. . . . With this sobriety comes—or rather, surfaces—a slight, undefined sense of trouble. She’s had it all along, Coati realizes. A peculiar feeling that there’s more. That all isn’t quite being told her. Funny, she doesn’t suspect Syl herself of some bad intent, of being secretly evil. No. Syllobene is good, as good as she can be; all Coati’s radar and perceptions seem to assure her of that. But nevertheless this feeling persists—it’s becoming clearer as she concentrates—that something was making the alien a little sad and wary now and then—that something troubling to Syl had been touched on but not explored.

The lords know, she and Syl had literally talked all they could; Syl had answered every question until their voice gave out. But Coati’s sense of incompleteness lingers. Let’s see, when had it been strongest? . . . Around that business of the seeds in the message pipe, for one. Maybe every time they touched on seeds. Well, seeds were being wasted. That meant dying. And a seed is a living thing; an encysted, complete beginning of a new life. Not just a gamete, like pollen, say. Maybe they’re like embryos, or even living babies, to Syllobene. The thought of hundreds of doomed babies surely wouldn’t be a very cheerful one for Coati herself.

Could that be it? That Syl didn’t want to go into the sadness? Seems plausible. Or, wait—what about Syl herself? By any chance did she want to mate, and now she can’t—or had she, and that’s the mystery of where those seeds in the message pipe had come from? Whew! Is Syl old enough, is she sexually mature? Somehow Coati doesn’t think so, but again, she knows so little—not even that Syl’s a she.

As Coati ruminates, her eyes have been on the front view-ports, where the planet is rapidly growing bigger and bigger. She must put her wonderment aside, with the mental note to question Syl at the first opportunity. In a few minim it’ll be time to kill the torches and go on antigrav for the maneuvers that will bring her into a close-orbit search pattern. She will have to fly a lot of extra orbits, doing the best she can by eye and with her narrow little civilian radarscope. It’ll be tedious; not for the first time, she deplores the unsuitability of a little space-coupe for serious exploration work.

The planet still looks remarkably like holos of Terra. It has two big ice caps, but only three large landmasses set in blue ocean. It looks cold, too. Cloud cover is thin, wispy cirrus. And for many degrees south of the northern ice, the land is a flat gray-green, featureless except for an intricate, shallow lake system, which changes from silver to black as the angle of reflection changes. Like some exotic silken fabric, Coati thinks. The technical name for such a plain is tundra, or maybe muskeg.

No straight lines or curves, no dams, no signs of artificial works appear. The place seems devoid of intelligent life. .

Hello, what’s this ahead? A twinkling light is rounding the shadowed curve of the planet, far enough out to catch the sun. That’s reflected light; the thing is tumbling slowly. Coati slows and turns to the scope. Big sausage tanks! Such tanks must belong to a DRS, a depot resupply ship. Boney and Ko must have left them in orbit before they landed. And they wouldn’t fail to pick them up when they left; that means the men are here. Oh, good. That’ll give her the enthusiasm to sit out a long, boring search.

She tunes up every sensor on CC-One and starts the pattern while she’s still, really, too far out. This is going to be a long chore, unless some really wild luck strikes.

And luck does strike! On her second figure eight orbit, she sees an immense blackened swath just south of the northern ice cap. A burn. Can it have been caused by lightning, or volcanism? Or even a natural meterorite?

No . . . on the next pass she can see a central line of scorch, growing as it leads north, with a perceptible zigzag such as no incoming natural object could make. She clicks on the recorder and whispering reports the burn and the tanks in orbit.

On the third pass she’s sure. There’s a gleam at the north end of the burn scar.

“Oh, the poor men! They must have been sick; they had to correct course with rockets. . . . Syl! Syllobene! Are you awake?”

“Uh—hello?” her voice mumbles. Funny to hear herself sounding sleepy.

“Look, you have to do something about our throat so I can report. I think I’ve found the men.”

“Oh. Yes. Wait . . . I fear I need nourishment. . . .”

“Go right ahead. Be my guest.”

For an instant Coati pictures Syl sipping blood, like a vampire; but no, Syl is too small. It’ll be more like the little being snagging a red blood corpuscle or two as they rush by. Weird. Coati doesn’t feel the least bit nervous about this. Syl had said she’s increased the blood flow overall. And in fact Coati herself feels great, very alert and well. They would make wonderful healers, she thinks.

The gleam at the end of the burn is definitely a ship; the scope shows her a big Federation supply tug. Her calls on Fed frequencies bring no response. She kills the search pattern and prepares to land on antigrav. The plain beside the strange ship looks good. But maybe there was another reason for their use of torches, she thinks; those two men were super-experienced planetary pilots. Maybe this place has weird mascons or something that had to be corrected for? She’d better keep alert, and be ready to torch if she finds her course going unsteady.

When she calls the supply ship again, her voice is back and her throat suddenly feels great.

“Hey, thanks Syl.”

“Coati, why are we landing?”

“The Humans you left are down somewhere on the planet. They were never heard of after you left them; they’re officially missing. That means, everybody search. Now I’ve found their ship, but they don’t answer. I have to land and find out what’s happening to them. So you’ll get to see a strange planet.”

The news doesn’t seem to cheer her little passenger, who only repeats, “We must land?”

“Oh, yes. Among other things, they may need help.”

“Help. . . . .” Syllobene’s voice repeats, with an odd, almost bitter inflection.

But Coati is too busy to brood over this. “What condition were they in when you left them, Syl?”

“Oh. . . .” her throat sighs. “I do not know your race well enough to tell what is normal. They were speaking of going to cold-sleep when I withdrew and left them. I was trying to hurry because I understood that the message device would soon be sent out. As I said, it’s a slow process. As soon as I was dependent on my Eea senses, the men were too large to perceive—for example, I could no longer discern the sound waves of their voices.”

Coati thinks this over as she gentles the ship down through thick atmosphere. Her ablation shielding isn’t all that good.

“Syl, you have just as much technology in your way as we do. Imagine going back and forth from the molecular to the molar scales!”

“Yes. It is a big learning. Very frightening the first time, when we’re taught to visit.”

“You said there were other Eea in Boney and Ko?”

“Yes . . . but I couldn’t establish good contact, and they controlled everything. That’s why I slipped away, when I understood about the message device.”

Coati grins. “I can understand that, Syl. But you took an awful chance.”

She feels the elfin hands nod her head emphatically. “You are my savior.”

“Oh, well. I didn’t know it. But if I had known it, I would have got you off there, Syllobene. I couldn’t have let you die in space.”

A feeling of indefinable warmth and real happiness glows within her. Coati understands. There is genuine friendship between her and her tiny alien passenger.

The recorder has been clicking away as they talked. But of course it won’t show her feelings. Pity.

“Just for the record,” she says formally, “I have, uh, subjective reasons to believe that this alien has sincere feelings of friendship of me. I mean for me, not just as a convenience. I think that’s important. I feel the same toward Syl.”

It’s time to set CC-One down. With all care, Coati jockeys her little ship in above the big supply tug and comes down neatly beside it. Nothing untoward shows up. That must mean that Boney and/or Ko were really in wobbly condition when they came in.

The atmosphere tests out green, but still she suits up for her first trip out. As her ports open, she gets her first good look at the DRS.

“Their ramp’s down,” she tells the ‘corder. “And, hey, the port’s ajar! Not good. I’m going in. . . . Hello! Hello in there! . . . Oh!”

Her voice breaks off. Sounds of footsteps, squeaks of ports being pulled.

“Oh, my. What a mess. There were gloves on the ramp—and the inside looks like they didn’t clean anything up for a long time. I see food dishes and cassettes and a suit—wait, two suits—in a heap on the deck, as if they’d just jumped out of them. Oh, dear, this looks like trouble . . . I think somebody threw up here. . . . There’re a lot of those goldy seeds around everywhere, too.”

She prowls the cabin, reporting as she checks the sleep chests and anyplace a man-sized body could be. Nothing. And the big cargo hold is empty, too, except for a carton of supplies bound somewhere.

She comes outside, saying, “I think I should try to find them. The ground here is soft, like peat, with low vegetation or whatever, and lean see trampled places. There’s one big place that looks like a trail leading”—she checks her bearings—“leading north, of all things. The atmosphere is highly Human-compatible, lots of oxy. I have my helmet off. So I’m going to try to follow their trail. But just in case I get into trouble, I think I better send this record off first. It has all about Syl’s planet on it. Lords, I wish I could send it from the surface. I guess I’ll have to lift above atmosphere. I’m taking some of their message pipes over to my ship. So here goes. It’s the only neat thing to do.”

She sighs, clicks off, and gets back into her ship.

Preparing to lift off, she says, “You’re very quiet, Syllobene. Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes. But I am—I am afraid.”

“Afraid of what? Walking around on a strange planet? Listen, I do have a hand weapon in case we run into big, wild, vicious beasts. But I don’t think there’s anything like that around here. Nothing for a carnivore to eat.”

“No . . . I am not afraid of the planet. I fear . . . what you will find.”

Coati is maneuvering her ship up for a fast single orbit and return. “What do you mean, Syl?” she asks a trifle absently.

“Coati, my friend”—it sounds weird to hear her name in her own voice—“I wish to wait until you search. Perhaps I am wrong. I hope so.”

“Well-ll, green, if you must,” Coati is preoccupied with opening a message pipe. “Oh, bother, there’re some of those little yellow dust seeds in here. How do I clear them out? I don’t want to kill them—you say they can live in space, like you—but I don’t think they should get loose in FedBase, do you?”

“No! No!”

“Look, I’m sorry about your seeds. I just want to make them get out of this pipe. How do I do that?”

“Heat. High heat.”

“Huh . . . oh, I know.” She clicks the recorder on and tells it what she’s doing. “I’m going to put the pipe in my food heater and run the heater up to 120 degrees C. That won’t hurt the cassette. . . . All right, I’m taking it out with tongs. By the gods, there’re a couple of those seeds coming out of the ‘corder as it gets near heat. All out, you. I will now end this record as I remove the cassette to send. CC-One signing off, before returning to planet to search for B and K.”

“Good thing we did that,” she tells Syl as she closes the pipe and puts it in the lock to be blown out. “Here goes the air.—And there goes the pipe! I hope the Base frequency reaches this far. . . . Yes, it does. Neat, how the little thing knows where to go. Bye-bye, you. . . . Funny, I’m getting a feeling like we’re a long, long ways from anywhere. Being a space adventurer can be a trifle spooky.” She noses the ship over into landing mode, thinking, “I’m going down to hike over a strange planet looking for two people who, face it, may be dead. . . .

“Syllobene?”

“Yes?”

“I’m really glad I have you for a friend here. Hey, maybe there’s another thing your people could do . . . I mean, for credits: Going with lonely space people on long trips!”

“Ah. . . .”

“I was just joking. . . . Or was I?”

Soon they are back on the planet, beside the abandoned DRS. Coati puts on planetary weather gear and tramping shoes. It’s sunny but bleak outside. She packs a week’s rations and some water, although the ground is spongy-wet. Then she clips the recorder to her shoulder and carefully loads it with a fresh cassette.

A long time later, after Coati has been officially declared missing, that same fresh cassette, its shine somewhat dimmed, is in the hands of the deputy to the exec of FedBase 900. It is about to be listened to by a group of people in the exec’s conference room.

Weeks before, the message that Coati had lifted off-planet to send had arrived at FedBase. The staff has heard all about Syllobene and the Eea, and the Eeadron, and the Dron, and all the other features of Syllobene’s planet Nolian, and her short trip with Boney and Ko; they have left Coati and her brain passenger about to go back down to the unnamed planet on which sits Boney and Ko’s empty ship.

One of the group of listeners now is not of FedBase.

When that first message had come in, the exec had signaled the Cass family, and Coati’s father is now in the room. He looks haggard; he has worn out his vocabulary of anger—particularly when he found that no rescue mission was being planned.

“Very convenient for you, Commander,” he had sneered. “Letting a teenage girl do your dirty work. I say it’s your responsibility to look for your own missing men, and to go get my daughter out of there and free her from that damn brain parasite. You should never have let her go way out there in the first place! If you think I’m not going to report this—”

“How do you suggest I could have stopped her, Myr Cass? She injected herself of her free will into an ongoing search, without consulting anyone. If anyone is to blame for her being out here, it’s you. It was your responsibility to have some control over your daughter’s travels in that ship you gave her. Meanwhile my responsibility is to my people, and I’m not justified in risking another ship pursuing a Federation citizen on her voluntary travels.”

“But that cursed alien in her—”

“Yes. To be blunt about it, Myr Cass, your daughter is already infected, if that’s the word, and she has given us evidence of the great mobility and potential for contagion of these small beings. We have probably already lost the men who first visited them. Now I suggest we quiet down and listen to what your daughter has to say. It may be that your concerns are baseless.”

Grumblingly, Cass senior subsides.

“This message pipe has been heated, too,” says the deputy. “The plastic shows it. From which we can infer that she was compos mentis and possibly in her own ship when she sent it.”

The recording starts with a few miscellaneous bangs and squeaks.

“I’ve decided to take another look at B-K’s ship before I start,” Coati’s voice says. “Maybe they left a message or something.” The ‘corder clicks off and on again.

“I’ve been hunting around in here,” says Coati. “No message I can see. There’s a holocam focused on the cabin, but it’s been turned off. Hey, I bet the Feds like to keep an eye on things, for cases like this. I’ll root around by the shell.”

Clicks—off, on.

“I’ve spotted what I think is another holocam up in the bow; I heard it click. . . . How can I get at it? Oh, wait, maybe from outside.” Off, on. “Yoho! I got it. It’s in time-lapse mode; I think it caught the terrain around the ship. We’ll just take it over to my ship and run it.”

Click—off.

Exec shifts uneasily. “I believe she’s discovered the planetary recorder. I’m not sure the two men knew it was there.”

“That must be the additional small cassette in this pipe,” the deputy says.

The recorder has come on. “It’s really small,” Coati is saying. “Hey, it’s full of your seeds, Syllobene. Those things must like cassettes. I’m threading it—here we go. Oh, my, oh, my—Syllobene!”

“That is my home,” says Coati in what they have come to recognize as the voice of the alien speaking through Coati’s throat. “Oh, my beautiful home! . . . But what a marvel, how do you—”

“Later,” Coati cuts herself off. “Later we’ll look at it all you want. Right now we have to run it ahead to where it shows this planet and maybe the two men we’re looking for.”

“Yes—Oh, that was my mentor—”

“Oh, gods, I’d love to look. But I’m speeding up now.” Sounds of fast clicking, incoherent small sounds from Coati’s Syllobene voice.

“See, now they’ve taken off. It’ll be stars for a long time, nothing but the starfield.” Furious clicks. “Gods, I hope it doesn’t run out.”

“No fear,” says the deputy. “These things are activated by rapid action in the field. When the action is as slow as a passing starfield, it reverts to its resting rate of about a frame an hour—maybe a frame a day; I forget. Only a passing rock or whatnot will speed them up briefly.”

“Here we are,” says Coati’s voice, “I can see that great string of GO suns. . . . Yes, they seem to be heading in to the planet now; I’d need a scope to tell—ah! It’s getting bigger. That’s it, all right. . . . Closer, closer . . . they’re going into orbit. But Syl, look at that frame wobble. I tell you, whoever’s flying is not all right. . . . Oo-oops—that could be changing pilots, or maybe switching over to the rockets. Oh, dear . . . yes, they’re coming in like a load of gravel; I’m glad I know they made it. . . . Smoke now, nothing but smoke. Their torches have hit. Down—I see flames. This must be action-activated; there’ll be a pause now, but we can’t tell how long. I know this doesn’t mean much to you, Syl, but wait till the smoke clears—ah! Look, there’s the landscape we saw around the ship, right?”

The alien voice makes a small murmur.

“Action again—that’s the edge of the ramp. Here comes one of the men—now the other—which is which? I’ll call the tall, thin one Boney. Oh, dear gods, they’re staggering. See, they dropped those gloves. And look, the vegetation around the ship outside the burn is all untrampled. This is their first exit, of course—oh, the Boney one fell down! Could the cold-sleep have done that, have they come out too soon? I don’t think so; I think they’re sick.

Look, there’s a funny place on Ko’s face, over the nose; he keeps scratching. They’re not stopping to look around or anything. This isn’t good, Syl. . . . Now they’re both down on their hands and knees, in the burn. Oh, I wish I could help them. Look, do you see the goldy cloud, like your spores, by the ramp?”

A pause, with small “ohs” and murmurs.

“They’re up now; I hope they’re not burned—why, they’re running or trying to run! Away from the ship. Toward the trampled place we saw, only it isn’t trampled now. Oh. Boney is—and Ko—they’re stripping! What are they trying to do, take a bath? But there’s no—, Oh! Oh, wait, what! Oh, no! Oh! Oh, dear gods, I don’t like this much. I thought all spacers operated under the Code. I didn’t know recon teams did sex!”

“They don’t,” growls Exec, startling everybody.

General stirrings in the room as Coati’s voice goes on haltingly, “Well, this is weird . . . I don’t much want to look at it; it’s not happy-looking like our demo teams back at school. Huh . . . I don’t think they know what to do, exactly. . . . Their faces look crazy; why, one of them has his mouth open like he was yelling or screaming. They look terrible. . . . Whoever’s listening to this, I’m sorry. I hope I’m not saying anything bad. But this is weird, it’s like ugly. . . . They have to stop soon, I hope. Oh, no—” Her voice is shaking on the verge of some kind of outcry.

“Oh, oh, oh—” But it’s the other voice that begins sobbing frankly now. The recorder blurs in a confusion of, “Syl! What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” and “Oh, I was afraid, oh, I’m afraid, oh, Coati, it’s terrible—”

“Yeah, it’s ugly. That’s not the way Humans really mate, Syl.”

“No,” says Syl’s tones, “I don’t mean that. I mean we—oh, oh—” And she’s sobbing again.

“Listen, Syl!” Coati gulps back alien tears, cuts her off. “I think you know something you aren’t telling me! You tell me what’s frightening you this instant, or I’ll—I’ll bash my own brains so hard it’ll shake you loose. See?”

There’s the sound of a hard slap on flesh, and then a sudden sharp outcry.

“Hey—what—you hurt me, Syl. I th-thought you never—”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the alien voice moans. “I p-panicked when you said you would harm yourself—”

“Or harm you, huh? Look, I can stand a lot of pain if I have to. You tell me right now what’s got into those men. Look, they’ve collapsed again. Tell me!”

“It—it’s the young ones.”

“The young what?”

“The young Eea—from s-seeds in th-the ship.”

“But you said there were grown-up Eea in each of the men. Didn’t they keep the seeds off, like you did for me?”

“They—Oh, Coati, I told you, they were very old. They must have died, and the seeds went into the men. I saw them getting feeble. That’s when I got frightened and I left. Before the Humans went in cold-sleep. . . . Oh, Coati, it’s so horrible—I feel so bad—”

“Hush up now, Syl, and let me understand. What could seeds do?”

“Seeds hatch, when they’re in—they hatched into young ones. With no mentors, no one to train them, they’re like wild animals. They grow. They eat—they eat anything. And then in the cold-sleep, some of them must have matured. No teachers, no one to teach them discipline. Oh, the others should have known the seeds and spores would seek hosts, they should have seen that those visitors who went with them were too old. B-but nobody knew how long, how far. . . . When I began to understand how long a time it was going to be, I knew something bad would happen. And I c-couldn’t do anything; they wouldn’t listen to me. So I-I ran away.” The alien is convulsing Coati with sobs.

“Well-ll. . . .” Long sigh from Coati. “Oh, dear gods, the poor men. You mean the young ones just ate their brains out?”

“Y-yes, I fear so. As if they were Dron. Worse, because no teachers.”

“And that sex stuff—that was the mature ones making them do it?”

“Yes! Oh, yes! Like wild animals. We’re taught strictly to control it; we’re shown. It takes much training to be fully Eea. Even I am not fully trained. . . . Oh, I wish I’d died there in space instead of seeing this—”

“Oh, no. Brace up, Syl. It’s not your fault. Nobody who isn’t used to space could grasp how long the distances are. They probably thought it would be like a long trip in your country. . . . Oh, look—the men have gotten up. God, they’re holding each other up; their legs keep going out of control. Motor centers gone, maybe. They’re going—they went up the path north; only it wasn’t a path then. They’re making the path, trampling. . . . That’s where we go, Syl, unless this shows them coming back. It’ll have to be soon; we’re almost at where the camera stopped. I wish I knew how long ago this was. The sun looks kind of different, and the colors of the vegetation, but that could be the camera. I’m going to speed up. Syl, stop crying, honey; it’s not your fault.”

Rapid clicking from the recorder.

“Nothing, nothing,” Coati’s voice says. “Still nothing. I doubt they came back. Nothing—wait, what’s that? Oh, my goodness, it’s the wake—it’s our ship landing. Well! I don’t think I want to see us, do you? Let’s take out this cassette and go.”

Click.

In the executive office the deputy stops the recorder for a moment.

“Is that clear to everyone?”

Grunts of assent answer him.

“I think this casts a new light on the potentials of Coati’s little friend’s race,” the medical officer says. “I suggest that we all keep a sharp eye open for anything that looks like grains of yellow powder, in case the young woman’s heat treatment did not completely clean out this pipe. Or the preceding one. Her initial precautions were very wise.”

Before he’s finished speaking, Exec has turned on stronger lights. There is a subdued shuffling as people look themselves over, brushing at imaginary golden spots.

“Gods, if a pipeful of that stuff had got loose in here, and nobody warned!” Zenology mutters. “H’mm . . . Boney and Ko.”

“Yes,” Exec understands Xenology’s shorthand. “If we get any indication that their ship lifted off, we have some hard decisions to make. I gather the seeds can affix themselves to the outside of space vessels, too. Well, we’d best continue and see what our problem is.”

“Right.” The deputy douses the top light, restarts the ‘corder.

“We are now proceeding north on the trail left by Boney and Ko,” says Coati’s voice. “We’ve come about five kiloms. The trail is very plain because the vegetation, or whatever this is, is very delicate and frail. I don’t think it’s built to have animals walk over it to graze. But the trail isn’t all that fresh, because there’re little tips of new growth. We haven’t seen any animals or birds, only plant-like things and an occasional insect going by fast, like a bullet. It’s a pretty cold, quiet, weird place. The ground is almost level, but I think we’re headed roughly for one of those lakes we saw from above.

“Syllobene is so shook up by what happened to the men that she won’t talk much. I keep trying to tell her it’s not her fault. One thing she said shows you—she said the grown-up Eea must have assumed that we could make ourselves immune to the seeds, just as they can, since we’re so complete. They can’t get used to the idea of whole, single animals born that way. And the ship . . . we had so many wild, powerful things. It never occurred to them that the men would be as vulnerable as the Dron. . . . Syl, do you hear what I’m telling my people? Nobody’s going to think for a minim that you’re at fault. Please brace up, honey, it’s awfully lonesome here on this primordial tundra or whatever it is.”

“. . . After you saved my life,” murmurs the Syllobene voice sadly.

“Oh-h-h! Listen, hey—Syl, you saved my life, too, for the lords’ sake. Don’t you realize?”

“I? How?”

“By being on that message pipe, dopus. It was full of seeds, remember? If you hadn’t been there, at the risk of your life, if you hadn’t been there to keep them off me, I’d have gone just like Boney and Ko. They’d have eaten my brains out. Now will you cheer up? You’ve personally saved my life, too. Hey, Syl, how about that? Hello!”

“Hello . . . oh, dear Coati Cass—”

“That’s my Syl. Listen, I’ve about had the hiking for today; these boots aren’t the greatest. I see a little hummock ahead; maybe it’s drier. I’ll tramp down a flat place and lay out my bag and screen—I don’t want one of those bullet-bugs to hit me. I don’t think this sun is going to set, either: it must be summer up here, with a big axial tilt.” She chuckles. “I’ve heard of the lands of the midnight sun! Now I’ve seen one. This is Coati Cass, en route to I don’t know where, signing off.”

“Your daughter is a remarkable young woman, Myr Cass,” Exec says thoughtfully. Cass grunts. Looking more carefully at him, Exec sees that Cass’s eyes are wet.

The record continues with a few words by Coati on awakening. Apparently she—they—have slept undisturbed.

“Green, on we go. Now, Syl, I hope you feel better. Think of me, having to lug a Weeping Willie—that means a sad lump of a person—all over the face of this godlost planet. Hey, don’t you know any songs? I’d really like that!”

“Songs?”

“Oh, for the gods’ sake. Well, explaining and demonstrating will give me something to do. But I don’t think our audience needs it.”

Click.

In an instant her voice is back again, sounding tired.

“We’ve been walking eighteen hours total,” she says. “My pedometer says we’re sixty-one kiloms from the ships. The trail is still clearly visible. We’re nearing an arm of one of the glaciers that extend south from the ice cap. I can see a line of low clouds—yes, with rainbows in them!—like a miniature weather front. The men seem to have been making straight toward it. Syl says the seeds have a primitive tropism to cold. That they can live a very, very long time if it’s cold enough. I don’t think anybody should come near this planet for a very, very long time. All right, onward.”

Click—off. Click—on.

“The glacier edge and a snowbank are right ahead. I think I see them—I mean, their bodies. . . . There’s a cold wind from under the glacier; it smells bad.”

Click . . . click.

“We found them. It’s pretty bad.” The voice sounds drained. “I did what I could. They’re like frozen. They crawled under the edge of the ice; it stands off the ground and makes a cave there, with deep green lightcracks. Nothing had been at them that I could tell, but they both have big, nasty-looking holes above their noses, where the sinuses are.

“I don’t know their last names, so I just scratched ‘Boney and Ko, brave Spacers for the Federation, Fed Base 900’ on a slaty piece.

“Oh—they left a message, on the same sort of rock. It says: ‘Danger. WE are Infekted. Fatel.’ All misspelled, like a kid. I guess the . . . things . . . kept eating their brains out.

“And there are seeds all over around here, like gold dust on the snow. They rise up in a cloud when a shadow falls on them. Syllobene says these are new seeds and spores that the young Eea formed; they mated when the men did, and the seeds grew while the men walked here. Anyway, those holes in their faces are where the new seeds sprouted out in a big clump or stream.

“I got out my glass and looked at a group of seeds. That gold color is their coat or sheath. Syl says it is just about impermeable from outside. There’s a big difference in the seeds, too—some are much, much larger and solid-looking; others are more like empty husks. Syl says the big ones beat out the others when competing for a host, and the earliest big one takes all.” . . . A sigh.

“Let’s see, have I said everything? Oh, maybe I should add that I don’t think those holes were bad enough to cause the men’s deaths. It must have been what went on inside. I didn’t see any other wounds, except scratches and bruises from falling down, I think. They . . . they were holding each other by the hand. I fixed them up, but I didn’t change that.

“Now I guess that’s all. I don’t want to sleep here; I’m going to get as far back toward the ships as I can tonight. It may not be night; I told you the sun doesn’t set, but it makes some pretty reddish glow colors. Syl is so sad she’ll hardly talk at all. . . . Signing off now, unless something drastic happens.”

The deputy clicked the ‘corder off.

“Is that all?” someone asked.

“Oh, no. I merely wanted to know if everyone is satisfied that they’re hearing clearly so far. Did everyone get enough on the men’s conditions, or would Doc like me to run back over that?”

“Not at present, thanks,” says Medical. “I would assume that the action of forming a large number of embryos requires extra energy, and consequently, during the men’s last walk, their parasites were consuming nutrients—brain tissue and blood—at an ever-increasing rate. As to the exact cause of death, it could be a combination of trauma, hypothermia, malnutrition, and loss of blood; or perhaps the parasites attacked brain structures essential to life. We won’t know until we can—I guess we won’t know, period.”

“Anyone else?” says the deputy in his “briefing session” manner.

Coati’s father makes an ambiguous throat-clearing noise but says nothing. No one else speaks, despite the sense of large, unuttered questions growing in the room.

“Oh, get on with it, Fred,” Exec says.

“Right.”

“We’re back at the ship, resting up,” says Coati’s voice. “Syl, you’ve been very quiet for a long time. Are you all right? Are you still shook from seeing what the young ones did?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, push it aside, honey. If I can, you can. Try.”

“Yes. . . .”

“You don’t sound like you’re trying. Listen, I can’t carry a melancholy, dismal person in my head all the way back to FedBase. I’ll go nutters, even in cold-sleep. Don’t you think you could cheer up a little? Wasn’t it fun when we tried singing? After all, the men all happened a long time back; it’s all over. There’s nothing you can do.”

In the room at Fed Base, Coati’s father recognizes a piece of his own advice to his daughter in long-ago days, and blinks back a tear.

“And we’ve done something useful—actually invaluable, because only you and I are safe on this planet. Right? So maybe we’ve saved the lives of whoever might have come to look.”

“Um’m. . . .”

“She’s right,” says Exec.

“Of course, it’s only Human lives, but it was the Human men made you sad, wasn’t it, Syl. So really, it’s all even. And those two had a really nice time on your planet first. Hey, think how good you’ll feel when you get home. Would it make you feel better if I showed you the scenes from Nolian when we get going?”

“Yes . . . oh, I don’t know.”

“Syl, you’re hopeless. Or is something else bothering you? I’m getting hunches. . . . Anyway, we’ve done everything we can here, I’m taking CC-One up. I collected Boney and Ko’s last charting cassettes; I’ll put them in a pipe with this, and with the little cassette from the bow camera. I don’t think they have left anything else of value. I closed the door and wrote a sign on the port to stay out. If you at the Fed want to salvage that ship, you’re going to have to go in with flamers. Or get an Eea to go in with you. Personally I think it isn’t worth the danger: some seeds could be on the outside, and get left wherever you went with the ship. Hey, something I’ve been thinking—I wonder if possibly this could be the plague that wiped out the Lost Colony. Seeds drifting in from space. This whole great group of suns could be dangerous. Oh, lords. What a blow. . . . Hey, that’s something that Syl and I could check someday! Syl, after you get home and have a nice rest-up, how would you like to come with me on another trip? If they’d let me—I’m sure they would, because we’d be their only seedproof scouts! Only, my poor folks. That reminds me: my father may have messaged Far Base; it’d be great if somebody could message him and mother, collect, that all’s well and I’m coming back. Thanks a million. My address is Cayman’s Port, and all is on record there. Syl, there’s another thing we could do—how’d you like to meet my folks? You could learn all about families, and go back and be a big mentor on Nolian. They’d love to meet you, I know . . . I guess. Green. I’m taking the ship up now.”

Click. Click.

“We’re up, and I’m setting in course for the first leg back to Far Base. Whew, these yellow suns are really beautiful. But Syl is still in a funk. It can’t be because of what we saw on the planet. I keep feeling sure there’s something you aren’t telling me, Syl. What is it?”

“Oh, no, I—”

“Syl! Listen, you’re thinking with my brain, and I can sense something! Like every time I suggested something we could do, I got drenched in some kind of sadness. And there’s a feeling like a big thing tickling when you won’t talk. You’ve got to tell me, Syl. What is it?”

“I . . . oh, I am so ashamed!”

“See, there is something you’re hiding! Ashamed of what? Go on, Syl, tell me or I’ll—I’ll bash us both. Tell me!”

“Ashamed,” repeats the small voice. “I’m afraid, I’m afraid. My training. . . . Maybe I’m not so completely developed as I thought. I don’t know how to stop—Ohhh,” Coati’s voice wails. “I wish my mentor were here!”

“Huh?”

“I have this feeling. Oh, dear Coati Cass, it is increasing; I can’t suppress it!”

“What? . . . Don’t tell me you’re about to have some kind of primitive fit? Did that mating business—?”

“No. Well, maybe, yes. Oh, I can’t—”

“Syl, you must.”

“No. All will be well. I will recollect all my training and recover myself.”

“Syl, this sounds terrible. . . . But, face it, you’re all alone—we’re all alone. You can’t mate, if that’s what’s coming over you.”

“I know. But—”

“Then that’s it. The sooner we get going, the sooner we’ll be at FedBase and you can start home. I was going to take a nice nap first, but if you’ve got troubles, maybe I better just go right into the chest. Couldn’t you try to sleep, too? You might wake up feeling better.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no! Not the cold! It stimulates us.”

“Yes, I forgot. But look, I can’t live through all those light-years awake!”

“No—not the cold-sleep!”

“Syl. Myr Syllobene. Maybe you better confess the whole thing right now. Just what are you afraid of?”

“But I’m not sure—”

“You’re sure enough to be glooming for days. Now you tell Coati exactly what you’re afraid of. Take a deep breath—here, I’ll do it for you—and start. Now!”

“Perhaps I must,” the alien voice says, small but newly resolute. “I don’t remember if I told you: If the mating cycle overtakes us when an Eea is alone, we can still . . . reproduce. By—I know your word—spores. Just like seeds, only they are all identical with the parent. And the Eea grows them and gives birth like seeds, as you saw. Then the Eea comes back to itself.” Syl’s words are coming in a rush now, as from relief at speaking out. “It’s very rare, because of course we are taught to stop it when the feeling begins. I—I never had it before. I’m supposed to seek out my mentor at once, to be instructed how to stop it, or the mentor will visit the young one and make it stop. But my mentor is far away! I keep hoping this is not really the feeling that begins all that, but it won’t go a,way; it’s getting stronger. Oh, Coati, my friend, I am so afraid—so fearful—” The voice trails off in great sobs.

The Coati voice says, slowly, “Oh, whew. You mean, you’re afraid you’re going to be grabbed by this mating thing and make spores in my head? And they’ll bore a hole?”

“Y-yes.” The alien is in obvious misery.

“Wait a minute. Will it make you go crazy and stop being you, like a Human who gets intoxicated? Oh, you couldn’t know about that. But you’ll act like those untrained young ones? I mean, what will you do?”

“I may—eat blindly. Oh-h-h . . . don’t leave me alone in your cold-sleep!”

“Well. Well. I have to think.”

Click—the deputy has halted the machine.

“I thought we should take a minim to appreciate this young woman’s dilemma, and the dilemma of the alien.”

The xenobiologist sighs. “This urge, or cycle is evidently not so very rare, since instructions are given to the young to combat it. Instructions that unfortunately depend on the mentor being available. But it doesn’t appear to be a normal part or stage of maturing—more like an accidental episode. I suggest that here it was precipitated by the experience with the two Humans infected by untrained young. That awakened what the Eea seem to regard as part of their primitive system.”

“How fast can they get back to that Eea planet, ah, Nolian?” someone asks.

“Not fast enough, I gather,” Exec says. “Even if she took the heroic measure of traveling without cold-sleep.”

“She’s got to get rid of that thing!” Coati’s father bursts out. “Cut into her own head and pull it out if she has to! Can’t somebody get to her and operate?”

He is met by the silence of negation. The moments they are hearing passed, for good or ill, long back.

“The alien said it could leave,” the deputy observes. “We will see if that solution occurs to them.” He clicks on.

As if echoing him, Coati’s voice comes in. “I asked Syl if she could pull out and park somewhere comfortable until the fit passed. But she says—tell them, Syl.”

“I have been trying to withdraw for some time. Early on, I could have done so easily. But now the strands of my physical being have been penetrating so very deeply into Coati’s brain, into the molecular and—is atomic the word?—atomic structure. So I have attempted to cut loose from portions of myself, but whenever I succeed in freeing one part, I find that the part I freed before has rejoined. I-I have not had much instruction in this technique, not since I was much smaller. I seem to have grown greatly while with Coati. Nothing I try works. Oh, oh, if only another Eea were here to help! I would do anything, I’d cut myself in half—”

“It’s a god-cursed cancer,” Coati’s father growls. He perceives no empathetic young alien, but only the threat to his child.

“But dear Coati Cass, I cannot. And there is no mistake now; the primitive part of myself that contains this dreadful urge is growing, growing, although I am fighting it as well as I can. I fear it will soon overwhelm me. Is there not something you can do?”

“Not for you, Syl. How could I? But tell me—after it’s all passed, and you’ve, well, eaten my brains out, will you come back to yourself and be all right?”

“Oh—I could never be all right, knowing I had murdered you! Killed my friend! My life would be a horrible thing. Even if my people accepted me, I could not. I mean this, Coati Cass.”

“H’mm. Well. Let me think.” The recorder clicks off—on. Coati’s voice comes back. “Well, the position is: If we carry out our plan to go back to FedBase, I’ll be a zombie, or dead, when I get there, and you’ll be miserable. And the ship’ll be full of spores. I wouldn’t be able to land it, but somebody’d probably manage to intercept us. And the people who opened it would get infected with your spores, and by the time things got cleared up, a lot of Humans would have died, and maybe nobody would feel like taking you back to your planet. Ugh.”

The alien voice echoes her.

“On the other hand, if we cut straight for Nolian, even at the best, you’d have made spores and they’d have chewed up my brains and it’d be impossible for me to bring the ship down and let you out. So you’d be locked up with a dead Human and a lot of spores, flying on to gods know where, forever. Unless somebody intercepted us, in which case the other scenario would take over. . . . Syi, I don’t see any out. What I do see is that this ship will soon be a flying time bomb, just waiting for some non-Eea life to get near it.”

“Yes. That is well put, Coati-my-friend,” the small voice says sadly. “Oh!”

“What?”

“I felt a strong urge to—to hurt you. I barely stopped it. Oh, Coati! Help! I don’t want to become a wild beast!”

“Syl, honey . . . it’s not your fault. I wonder, shouldn’t we sort of say our good-byes while we can?”

“I see . . . I see.”

“Syllobene, my dear, whatever happens, remember we were great friends, and had adventures together, and saved each other’s lives. And if you do something bad to me, remember I know it isn’t really you; it’s just an accident because we’re so different. I . . . I’ve never had a friend I loved more, Syl. So good-bye, and remember it all with joy if you can.”

A sound of sobbing. “G-good-bye, dear Coati Cass. I am so sad with all my being that it is through me that badness has come. Being friends with you has lifted my life to lightness I never dreamed of. If I survive, I will tell my people how good and true Humans are. But I don’t think I will have that chance. One way or another, I will end my life with yours, Coati Cass. Above all, I do not wish to bring more trouble on Humans.”

“Syl. . . .” Coati says thoughtfully. “If you mean that about going together, there’s a way. Do you mean it?”

“Y-yes. Yes.”

“The thing is, in addition to what happens to us, our ship will be a menace to anybody, Human or whatever, who gets at it. It’s sort of our duty not to do a thing like that, you know? And I really don’t want to go on as a zombie. And I see that beautiful yellow sun out there, the sun we saw all those days and nights down on the planet . . . like it’s waiting for us . . . Syl?”

“Coati, I understand you.”

“Of course, there’re a lot of things I wanted to do; you d-did, too—maybe this is the b-big one—”

The recorder lapses to a fuzzy sound.

“Something has been erased,” the deputy says.

It comes back in a minim or two with Coati’s voice saying, “—didn’t need to hear all that. The point is, we’ve decided. So—ow! Oh-h-h—ow!What?”

“Coati!” The small voice seems to be screaming. “Coati, I’m losing—I’m losing myself! Something wants to hurt you, to stop you—to make you go into cold-sleep—I’m fighting it—Oh, forgive me, forgive me—”

“OW! Hey, I forgive you, but—Oh, ouch! Wait, hold it, baby, I just have to set our course, and then I’ll hop right into the chest. I have to set the computer; try to understand.”

Undecipherable noise from the alien. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the unmistakable sound of a young Human voice humming fills the room.

“I know that tune,” the computer chief says suddenly. “It’s old—wait—yes. It’s ‘Into the Heart of the Sun.’ . . . She’s trying to tell us what she’s doing without alerting that maniacal parasite.”

“We’d better listen closely,” the deputy observes superfluously.

A moment later the humming gives place to a softly sung bar of words—yes, it’s “Into the Heart of the Sun.” It ends in a sharp yelp. “Hey, Syl, try not to, please—”

“I try! I try!”

“We get into cold-sleep just as soon as I possibly can. Don’t hurt me, you doppelganger, or I’ll make a mistake and you’ll end up as fried spores—Owwwww! For an amateur, you’re a little d-devil, Syl.” The voice seems to be trying to conceal the wail of real agony. Exec is reminded of the wounded patrolmen he tended as a young med-aid iong ago during the Last War.

“I just have to regoogolate the fribilizer that keeps us from penetrating high g-fields,” says Coati. “You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”

Her own throat growls at her. “Hurry.”

“That’s an old nonsense phrase,” Computers speaks up. “ ‘Googolating the fribilizer’—she’s trying to tell us she’s killing the automatic-drive override. Oh, good girl.”

“And now I must send this message pipe off. It’s in your interests, Syl; it shows you doing all those useful things. And I have to heat it first—Oh, ow—please let me, Syl, please try to let m-me—”

Sounds that might be a heat oven, roughly handled, punctuated by yelps from Coati. Her father is gripping his chair arms so hard they creak.

“Yes, I know that big yellow sun is getting pretty hot and bright. Don’t let it worry you. If we go close by it, we’ll save a whole leg of our trip. It’s the only neat thing to do. Han Lu Han, anybody there? Here, I’ll pull the bow blinds.

“And now the cassettes from Boney and Ko go in the pipe—ow!—and where’s that little one from their bow camera? Syl, try to tell your primitive self you’re just slowing me down with these jabs. Please, please—Ah, here it is. And out come the spores—I mean, the seeds that were in there. . . . That pipe is hot!

“And now it’s time to say good-bye, put this in the pipe, and climb into the chest. I really hope the pipe’s frequency can pull it through these g’s. On second thought, maybe I’d like to see where we’re going while it lasts. As long as I can stand the pain, I think I’ll stay out and watch.”

Loud sounds of the cassette being handled.

“Good-bye, all. To my folks, oh, I do love you, Dad and Mum. Maybe somebody at FedBase can explain—OW!! Oh . . . Oh . . . I can’t . . . Hey, Syl, is there anybody you want to say good-bye to? Your mentor?”

A confused vocalization, then, faintly: “Yes. . . .”

“Remember Syl. She’s the real stuff, she’s doing this for Humans. For an alien race. She could have stopped me, believe it. . . . Bye, all.”

A crash, and the recorder goes to silence.

“Han Lu Han,” says the xenobiologist quietly into the silence. “He was that boy in the Lyrae mission. ‘It’s the only really neat thing to do.’ He said that before he took the rescue run that killed him.”

Exec clears his throat. “Myr Cass, we will send a reconnaissance mission to check the area. But I fear there is no reason to believe, or hope, that Myr Coati failed in her plan to eliminate the contagious menace of herself, her passenger, and the ship by flying into a sun. By the end of the message, she was close enough to feel its heat, and it was doubtless the effect of the gravity that delayed this message pipe so much longer than the preceding one, which was sent only a few days earlier. She had, moreover, carefully undone the precautions that prevent a ship on automatic drive from colliding with a star. Myr Cass, when confronted by a terrifying and painful dilemma capable of causing great harm to others, your daughter took the brave and honorable course, and we must be grateful to her.”

Silence, as all contemplate the sudden ending of a bright young life. Two bright young lives.

“But you said she was alive and well when the message was sent.” Coati’s father makes a last, confused protest.

“Sir, I said she was compos mentis and probably in her ship,” the deputy reminds him.

“Thank the gods her mother didn’t come here. . . .”

“You can pinpoint the star she was headed for?” Exec asks Charts.

“Oh, yes. The B-K coordinates are good.”

“Then, if nobody has a different idea, I suggest that it be appropriately named in the new ephemeris.”

“Coati’s Star,” says Commo. People are rising to leave.

“And Syllobene,” a quiet voice says. “Have we forgotten already?”

“Myr Cass, I think you may perhaps prefer to be alone for a moment,” Exec tells him. “Anytime you wish to see me, I’ll be at your service in my office.”

“Thank you.”

Exec leads his deputy out, and opts for a quiet lunch in their small private dining room. Added to the list of things that were on his mind before he entered the conference chamber to hear Coati’s message are now the problem of when and how to contact the Eea; how to determine the degree of danger from their seeds or spores, in space near the promising GO suns; the Lost Colony question; whether to quarantine the area; and whether there is any chance of any seeds in FedBase itself from the earlier messages. Also, a sample of the chemical that Syllobene had immunized Coati with would seem to be a rather high priority. But behind all these practical thoughts, an image floats in his mind’s eye, accompanied by the sound of a light young voice humming. It’s the image in silhouette of two children—one Human, the other not—advancing steadfastly, hand in hand, toward an inferno of alien solar fire.

DOGFIGHT

Michael Swanwick and William Gibson

The war was in the air, but the causalities were earthbound

He meant to keep on going, right down to Florida. Work passage on a gunrunner, maybe wind up conscripted into some rat-ass rebel army down in the war zone. Or maybe, with that ticket good as long as he didn’t stop riding, he’d just never get off—Greyhound’s Flying Dutchman. He grinned at his faint reflection in cold, greasy glass, while the downtown lights of Norfolk slid past, the bus swaying on tired shocks as the driver slung it around a final corner. They shuddered to a halt in the terminal lot, concrete lit gray and harsh like a prison exercise yard. But Deke was watching himself starve, maybe in some snowstorm out of Oswego, with his cheek pressed up against that same bus window, and seeing his remains swept out at the next stop by a muttering old man in faded coveralls. One way or the other, he decided, it didn’t mean shit to him. Except his legs seemed to have died already. And the driver called a twenty-minute stopover—Tidewater Station, Virginia. It was an old cinder-block building with two entrances to each rest room, holdover from the previous century.

Legs like wood, he made a halfhearted attempt at ghosting the notions counter, but the black girl behind it was alert, guarding the sparse contents of the old glass case as though her ass depended on it. Probably does, Deke thought, turning away. Opposite the washrooms, an open doorway offered GAMES, the word flickered feebly in biofluorescent plastic. He could see a crowd of the local kickers clustered around a pool table. Aimless, his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck his head in. And saw a biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright-orange flame. Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table.

“Tha’s right, Tiny,” a kicker bellowed, “you take that sum-bitch!”

“Hey,” Deke said. “What’s going on?”

The nearest kicker was a bean pole with a black mesh Peterbilt cap. “Tiny’s defending the Max,” he said, not taking his eyes from the table.

“Oh, yeah? What’s that?” But even as he asked, he saw it: a blue enamel medal shaped like the Maltese cross, the slogan Pour le Mérite divided among its arms.

The Blue Max rested on the edge of the table, directly before a vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged into a fragile-looking chrome tube chair. The man’s khaki workshirt would have hung on Deke like the folds of a sail, but it bulged across that bloated torso so tautly that the tiny buttons threatened to tear away at any instant. Deke thought of Southern troopers he’d seen on his way down; of what weird, gut-heavy endotype balanced on gangly legs that looked like they’d been borrowed from some other body. Tiny might look like that if he stood, but on a larger scale—a forty-inch jeans inseam that would need a woven-steel waistband to support all those pounds of swollen gut. If Tiny were ever to stand at all—for now Deke saw that that shiny frame was actually a wheelchair. There was something disturbingly childlike about the man’s face, an appalling suggestion of youth and even beauty in features buried in fold and jowl. Embarrassed, Deke looked away. The other man, the one standing across the table from Tiny, had bushy sideburns and a thin mouth. He seemed to be trying to push something with his eyes, wrinkles of concentration spreading from the corners. . . .

“You dumbshit or what?” The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke’s Indo proleboy denims, the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. “Why don’t you get your ass lost, fucker. Nobody wants your kind in here.” He turned back to the dogfight.

Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff, liberty-headed dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stamp-and-coin stores, while more cautious betters slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D VIIs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked majestically under the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.

The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely. The kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the felt, without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green flatlands but to no avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply—and stalled, too low to pull out in time.

A stack of silver dimes was scooped up.

The Fokkers were outnumbered now. One had two Spads on its tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker slip-turned right, banked into an Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the biplane fell, tumbling.

“Way to go, Tiny!” The kickers closed in around the table.

Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.

Frank’s Truck Stop was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic and the concrete crash-guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs, the wash of air each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he sauntered into Frank’s, there was nobody to doubt that he’d come in off a big rig, and he was able to browse the gift shop as slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers was located between a stack of Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A pair of Oriental dragons twisted in the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn’t tell which. The game he wanted was there: a wafer labeled SPADS&FOKKERS. It took him three seconds to boost it and less time to slide the magnet—which the cops in DC hadn’t even bothered to confiscate—across the universal security strip.

On the way out, he lifted two programming units and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an antique hearing aid.

He chose a highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he’d used since his welfare rights were yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid.

The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front slogans across the walls. Deke kicked the trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and ripped open the wafer pack.

There was a folded instruction sheet with diagrams of loops, rolls and Immelmanns, a tube of saline paste, and a computer list of operational specs. And the wafer itself, white plastic with a blue biplane and logo on one side, red on the other. He turned it over and over in his hand: SPADS&FOKKERS, FOKKERS&SPADS. Red and blue. He fitted the Batang behind his ear, after coating the inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, and plugged the programmer into the wall current. Then he slid the wafer into the programmer. It was a cheap set, Indonesian, and the base of his skull buzzed uncomfortably as the program ran. But when it was done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have, but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur.

He practiced until the battery in the earset died, then slumped against the wall and fell asleep. He dreamed of flying, in a universe that consisted entirely of white clouds and blue sky, with no up and down, and never a green field to crash into.

He woke to a rancid smell of frying krill-cakes and winced with hunger. No cash, either. Well, there were plenty of student types in the stack. Bound to be one who’d like to score a programming unit. He hit the hall with the boosted spare. Not far down was a door with a poster on it: THERE’S A HELL OF A GOOD UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR. Under that was a starscape with a cluster of multicolored pills, torn from an ad for some pharmaceutical company, pasted over an inspirational shot of the “space colony” that had been under construction since before he was born. LET’S GO, the poster said, beneath the collaged hypnotics.

He knocked. The door opened, security slides stopping it at a two-inch slice of girl-face. “Yeah?”

“You’re going to think this is stolen.” He passed the programmer from hand to hand. “I mean because it’s new, a virtual cherry, and the bar code’s still on it. But listen, I’m not gonna argue the point. No. I’m gonna let you have it for only like half of what you’d pay anywhere else.”

“Hey, wow, really, no kidding?” The visible fraction of mouth twisted into a strange smile. She extended her hand, palm up, a loose fist. Level with his chin. “Lookahere!”

There was a hole in her hand, a black tunnel that ran right up her arm. Two small, red lights. Rat’s eyes. They scurried toward him—growing, gleaming. Something gray streaked forward and leaped for his face.

He screamed, throwing his hands up to ward it off. Legs twisting, he fell, the programmer shattered under him.

Silicate shards skittered as he thrashed, clutching his head. Where it hurt, it hurt—it hurt very badly indeed.

“Oh my God!” Slides unsnapped, and the girl was hovering over him. “Here, listen, come on.” She dangled a blue hand towel. “Grab onto this and I’ll pull you up.”

He looked at her through a wash of tears. Student. That fed look, the oversized sweatshirt, teeth so straight and white they could be used as a credit reference. A thin gold chain around one ankle (fuzzed, he saw with baby-fine hair). Choppy Japanese haircut. Money. “That sucker was gonna be my dinner,” he said ruefully. He took hold of the towel and let her pull him up.

She smiled but skittishly backed away from him. “Let me make it up to you,” she said. “You want some food? It was only a projection, okay?”

He followed her in, wary as an animal entering a trap.

“Holy shit,” Deke said, “this is real cheese . . .” He was sitting on a gutsprung sofa, wedged between a four-foot teddy bear and a loose stack of floppies. The room was ankle deep in books and clothes and papers. But the food she magicked up . . . Gouda cheese and tinned beef and honest-to-God greenhouse wheat wafers . . . was straight out of the Arabian Nights.

“Hey,” she said. “We know how to treat a proleboy right, huh?” Her name was Nance Bettendorf. She was seventeen. Both her parents had jobs—greedy buggers—and she was an engineering major at William and Mary. She got top marks except in English. “I guess you must really have a thing about rats. You got some kind of phobia about rats?”

He glanced sidelong at her bed. You couldn’t see it, really, it was just a swell in the ground cover. “It’s not like that. It just reminded me of something else, is all.”

“Like what?” She squatted in front of him, the big shirt riding high up one smooth thigh.

“Well . . . did you ever see the—” his voice involuntarily rose and rushed past the words—“Washington Monument? Like at night? It’s got these two little . . . red lights on top, aviation markers or something, and I, and I . . .” He started to shake.

“You’re afraid of the Washington Monument?” Nance whooped and rolled over with laughter, long tanned legs kicking. She was wearing crimson bikini panties.

“I would rather die than look at it again,” he said levelly.

She stopped laughing then, sat up, studied his face. White, even teeth worried at her lower lip, like she was dragging up something she didn’t want to think about. At last she ventured, “Brainlock?”

“Yeah,” he said bitterly. “They told me I’d never go back to DC. And then the fuckers laughed.”

“What did they get you for?”

“I’m a thief.” He wasn’t about to tell her that the actual charge was career shoplifting.

“Lotta old computer hacks spent their lives programming machines. And you know what? The human brain is not a goddamn bit like a machine, no way. They just don’t program the same.” Deke knew this shrill desperate rap, this long, circular jive that the lonely string out to the rare listener; knew it from a hundred cold and empty nights spent in the company of strangers. Nance was lost in it, and Deke, nodding and yawning, wondered if he’d even be able to stay awake when they finally hit that bed of hers.

“I built that projection I hit you with myself,” she said, hugging her knees up beneath her chin. “It’s for muggers, you know? I just happened to have it on me, and I threw it at you ’cause I thought it was so funny, you trying to sell me that shit little Indojavanese programmer.” She hunched forward and held out her hand again. “Look here.” Deke cringed. “No, no, it’s okay, I swear it, this is different.” She opened her hand.

A single, blue flame danced there, perfect and everchanging. “Look at that,” she marveled. “Just look. I programmed that. It’s not some diddly little seven-image job either. It’s a continuous two-hour look, seven thousand two hundred seconds, never the same twice, each instant as individual as a fucking snowflake!”

The flame’s core was glacial crystal, shards and facets flashing up, twisting and gone, leaving behind near-subliminal images so bright and sharp that they cut the eye. Deke winced. People mostly. Pretty little naked people, fucking. “How the hell did you do that?”

She rose, bare feet slipping on slick magazines, and melodramatically swept folds of loose printout from a raw plywood shelf. He saw a neat row of small consoles, austere and expensive looking. Custom work. “This is the real stuff I got here. Image facilitator. Here’s my fast-wipe module. This is a brain-map one-to-one function analyzer.” She sang off the names like a litany. “Quantum flicker stabilizer. Program splicer. An image assembler . . .”

“You need all that to make one little flame?”

“You betcha. This is all state of the art, professional projective wetware gear. It’s years ahead of anything you’ve seen.”

“Hey,” he said. “you know anything about SPADS&FOKKERS?”

She laughed. And then, because he sensed the time was right, he reached to take her hand.

“Don’t you touch me, motherfuck, don’t you ever touch me!” Nance screamed, and her hand slammed against the wall as she recoiled, white and shaking with terror.

“Okay!” He threw up his hands. “Okay! I’m nowhere near you. Okay?”

She cowered from him. Her eyes were round and unblinking; tears built up at the corners, rolled down ashen cheeks. Finally, she shook her head. “Hey. Deke. Sorry. I should’ve told you.”

“Told me what?” But he had a creepy feeling . . . already knew. The way she clutched her head. The weakly spasmodic way her hands opened and closed. “You got a brainlock, too.”

“Yeah.” She closed her eyes. “It’s a chastity lock. My asshole parents paid for it. So I can’t stand to have anybody touch me or even stand too close.” Eyes opened in blind hate. “I didn’t even do anything. Not a fucking thing. But they’ve both got jobs and they’re so horny for me to have a career that they can’t piss straight. They’re afraid I’d neglect my studies if I got, you know, involved in sex and stuff. The day the brainlock comes off I am going to fuck the vilest, greasiest, hairiest . . .”

She was clutching her head again. Deke jumped up and rummaged through the medicine cabinet. He found a jar of B-complex vitamins, pocketed a few against need, and brought two to Nance, with a glass of water. “Here.” He was careful to keep his distance. “This’ll take the edge off.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. Then, almost to herself. “You must really think I’m a jerk.”

The games room in the Greyhound station was almost empty. A lone, long-jawed fourteen-year-old was bent over a console, maneuvering rainbow fleets of submarines in the murky grind of the North Atlantic.

Deke sauntered in, wearing his new kicker drag, and leaned against a cinder-block wall made smooth by countless coats of green enamel. He’d washed the dye from his proleboy butch, boosted jeans and T-shirt from the Goodwill, and found a pair of stompers in the sauna locker of a highstack with cut-rate security.

“Seen Tiny around, friend?”

The subs darted like neon guppies. “Depends on who’s asking.”

Deke touched the remote behind his left ear. The Spad snap-rolled over the console, swift and delicate as a dragonfly. It was beautiful; so perfect, so true it made the room seem an illusion. He buzzed the grid, millimeters from the glass, taking advantage of the programmed ground effect.

The kid didn’t even bother to look up. “Jackman’s,” he said. “Down Richmond Road, over by the surplus.”

Deke let the Spad fade in mid-climb.

Jackman’s took up most of the third floor of an old brick building. Deke found Best Buy War Surplus first, then a broken neon sign over an unlit lobby. The sidewalk out front was littered with another kind of surplus—damaged vets, some of them dating back to Indochina. Old men who’d left their eyes under Asian suns squatted beside twitching boys who’d inhaled mycotoxins in Chile. Deke was glad to have the battered elevator doors sigh shut behind him.

A dusty Dr. Pepper clock at the far side of the long, spectral room told him it was a quarter to eight. Jackman’s had been embalmed twenty years before he was born, sealed away behind a yellowish film of nicotine, of polish and hair oil. Directly beneath the clock, the flat eyes of somebody’s grandpappy’s prize buck regarded Deke from a framed, blown-up snapshot gone the slick sepia of cockroach wings. There was the click and whisper of pool, the squeak of a workboot twisting on linoleum as a player leaned in for a shot. Somewhere high above the green-shaped lamps hung a string of crepe-paper Christmas bells faded to dead rose. Deke looked from one cluttered wall to the next. No facilitator.

“Bring one in, should we need it,” someone said. He turned, meeting the mild eyes of a bald man with steel-rimmed glasses. “My name’s Cline, Bobby Earl. You don’t look like you shoot pool, mister.” But there was nothing threatening in Bobby Earl’s voice or stance. He pinched the steel frames from his nose and polished the thick lenses with a fold of tissue. He reminded Deke of a shop instructor who’d patiently tried to teach him retrograde biochip installation. “I’m a gambler,” he said, smiling. His teeth were white plastic. “I know I don’t much look it.”

“I’m looking for Tiny,” Deke said.

“Well,” replacing the glasses, “you’re not going to find him. He’s gone up to Bethesda to let the VA clean his plumbing for him. He wouldn’t fly against you anyhow.”

“Why not?”

“Well, because you’re not on the circuit or I’d know your face. You any good?” When Deke nodded, Bobby Earl called down the length of Jackman’s, “Yo, Clarence! You bring out that facilitator. We got us a flyboy.”

Twenty minutes later, having lost his remote and what cash he had left, Deke was striding past the broken soldiers of Best Buy.

“Now you let me tell you, boy,” Bobby Earl had said in a fatherly tone as, hand on shoulder, he led Deke back to the elevator. “You’re not going to win against a combat vet—you listening to me? I’m not even especially good, just an old grunt who was on hype fifteen, maybe twenty times. Ol’ Tiny, he was a pilot. Spent his entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He’s got membrane attenuation real bad . . . you ain’t never going to beat him.”

It was a cool night. But Deke burned with anger and humiliation.

“Jesus, that’s crude,” Nance said as the Spad strafed mounds of pink underwear. Deke, hunched up on the couch, yanked her flashy little Braun remote from behind his ear.

“Now don’t you get on my case too, Miss rich-bitch gonna-have-a-job—”

“Hey, lighten up! It’s nothing to do with you—it’s just tech. That’s a really primitive wafer you got there. I mean, on the street maybe it’s fine. But compared to the work I do at school, it’s—hey. You ought to let me rewrite it for you.”

“Say what?”

“Lemme beef it up. These suckers are all written in hexadecimal, see, cause the industry programmers are all washed-out computer hacks. That’s how they think. But let me take it to the reader-analyzer at the department, run a few changes on it, translate it into a modern wetlanguage. Edit out all the redundant intermediaries. That’ll goose up your reaction time, cut the feedback loop in half. So you’ll fly faster and better. Turn you into a real pro, Ace!” She took a hit off her bong, then doubled over laughing and choking.

“Is that legit?” Deke asked dubiously.

“Hey, why do you think people buy gold-wire remotes? For the prestige? Shit. Conductivity’s better, cuts a few nanoseconds off the reaction time. And reaction time is the name of the game, kiddo.”

“No,” Deke said. “If it were that easy, people’d already have it. Tiny Montgomery would have it. He’d have the best.”

“Don’t you ever listen?” Nance set down the bong; brown water slopped onto the floor. “The stuff I’m working with is three years ahead of anything you’ll find on the street.”

“No shit,” Deke said after a long pause. “I mean, you can do that?”

It was like graduating from a Model T to a ninety-three Lotus. The Spad handled like a dream, responsive to Deke’s slightest thought. For weeks he played the arcades, with not a nibble. He flew against the local teens and by ones and threes shot down their planes. He took chances, played flash. And the planes tumbled . . .

Until one day Deke was tucking his seed money away, and a lanky black straightened up from the wall. He eyed the laminateds in Deke’s hand and grinned. A ruby tooth gleamed. “You know,” the man said, “I heard there was a casper who could fly, going up against the kiddies.”

“Jesus,” Deke said, spreading Danish butter on a kelp stick. “I wiped the floor with those spades. They were good, too.”

“That’s nice, honey,” Nance mumbled. She was working on her finals project, sweating data into a machine.

“You know, I think what’s happening is I got real talent for this kind of shit. You know? I mean, the program gives me an edge, but I got the stuff to take advantage of it. I’m really getting a rep out there, you know?” Impulsively, he snapped on the radio. Scratchy Dixieland brass blared.

“Hey,” Nance said. “Do you mind?”

“No, I’m just—” He fiddled with the knobs, came up with some slow, romantic bullshit. “There. Come on; stand up. Let’s dance.”

“Hey, you know I can’t—”

“Sure you can, sugarcakes.” He threw her the huge teddy bear and snatched up a patchwork cotton dress from the floor. He held it by the waist and sleeve, tucking the collar under his chin. It smelled of patchouli, more faintly of sweat, “See, I stand over here, you stand over there. We dance. Get it?”

Blinking softly, Nance stood and clutched the bear tightly. They danced then, slowly, staring into each other’s eyes. After a while, she began to cry. But still, she was smiling.

Deke was daydreaming, imagining he was Tiny Montgomery wired into his jumpjet. Imagined the machine responding to his slightest neural twitch, reflexes cranked way up, hype flowing steadily into his veins.

Nance’s floor became jungle, her bed a plateau in the Andean foothills, and Deke flew his Spad at forced speed, as if it were a full-wired interactive combat machine. Computerized hypos fed a slow trickle of high-performance enhancement melange into his bloodstream. Sensors were wired directly into his skull—pulling a supersonic snapturn in the green-blue bowl of sky over Bolivian rain forest. Tiny would have felt the airflow over control surfaces.

Below, grunts hacked through the jungle with hype-pumps strapped above elbows to give them that little extra death-dance fury in combat, a shot of liquid hell in a blue plastic vial. Maybe they got ten minutes worth in a week. But coming in at treetop level, reflexes cranked to the max, flying so low the ground troops never spotted you until you were on them, phosgene agents released, away and gone before they could draw a bead . . . it took a constant trickle of hype just to maintain. And the direct neuron interface with the jumpjet was a two-way street. The onboard computers monitored biochemistry and decided when to open the sluice gates and give the human component a killer jolt of combat edge.

Dosages like that ate you up. Ate you good and slow and constant, etching the brain surfaces, eroding away the brain-cell membranes. If you weren’t yanked from the air promptly enough, you ended up with brain-cell attenuation—with reflexes too fast for your body to handle and your fight-or-flight reflexes fucked real good. . . .

“I aced it, proleboy!”

“Hah?” Deke looked up, startled, as Nance slammed in, tossing books and bag onto the nearest heap.

“My finals project—I got exempted from exams. The prof said he’d never seen anything like it. Uh, hey, dim the lights, wouldja? The colors are weird on my eyes.”

He obliged. “So show me. Show me this wunnerful thing.”

“Yeah, okay.” She snatched up his remote, kicked clear standing space atop the bed, and struck a pose. A spark flared into flame in her hand. It spread in a quicksilver line up her arm, around her neck, and it was a snake, with triangular head and flickering tongue. Molten colors, oranges and reds. It slithered between her breasts. “I call it a firesnake,” she said proudly.

Deke leaned close, and she jerked back.

“Sorry. It’s like your flame, huh? I mean, I can see these tiny little fuckers in it.”

“Sort of.” The firesnake flowed down her stomach. “Next month I’m going to splice two hundred separate flame programs together with meld justification in between to get the visuals. Then I’ll tap the mind’s body image to make it self-orienting. So it can crawl all over your body without your having to mind it. You could wear it dancing.”

“Maybe I’m dumb. But if you haven’t done the work yet, how come I can see it?”

Nance giggled. “That’s the best part—half the work isn’t done yet. Didn’t have the time to assemble the pieces into a unified program. Turn on that radio, huh? I want to dance.” She kicked off her shoes. Deke tuned in something gutsy. Then, at Nance’s urging, turned it down, almost to a whisper.

“I scored two hits of hype, see.” She was bouncing on the bed, weaving her hands like a Balinese dancer. “Ever try the stuff? In-credible. Gives you like absolute concentration. Look here.” She stood en pointe. “Never done that before.”

“Hype,” Deke said. “Last person I heard of got caught with that shit got three years in the infantry. How’d you score it?”

“Cut a deal with a vet who was in grad school. She bombed out last month. Stuff gives me perfect visualization. I can hold the projection with my eyes shut. It was a snap assembling the program in my head.”

“On just two hits, huh?”

“One hit. I’m saving the other. Teach was so impressed he’s sponsoring me for a job interview. A recruiter from I. G. Feuchtwaren hits campus in two weeks. That cap is gonna sell him the program and me. I’m gonna cut out of school two years early, straight into industry, do not pass jail, do not pay two hundred dollars.”

The snake curled into a flaming tiara. It gave Deke a funny-creepy feeling to think of Nance walking out of his life.

“I’m a witch,” Nance sang, “a wetware witch.” She shucked her shirt over her head and sent it flying. Her fine, high breasts moved freely, gracefully, as she danced. “I’m gonna make it”—now she was singing a current pop hit—“to the . . . top!” Her nipples were small and pink and aroused. The firesnake licked at them and whipped away.

“Hey, Nance,” Deke said uncomfortably. “Calm down a little, huh?”

“I’m celebrating!” She hooked a thumb into her shiny gold panties. Fire swirled around hand and crotch. “I’m the virgin goddess, baby, and I have the pow-er!” Singing again.

Deke looked away. “Gotta go now,” he mumbled. Gotta go home and jerk off. He wondered where she’d hidden that second hit. Could be anywhere.

There was a protocol to the circuit, a tacit order of deference and precedence as elaborate as that of a Mandarin court. It didn’t matter that Deke was hot, that his rep was spreading like wildfire. Even a name flyboy couldn’t challenge who he wished. He had to climb the ranks. But if you flew every night. If you were always available to anybody’s challenge. And if you were good . . . well, it was possible to climb fast.

Deke was one plane up. It was tournament fighting, three planes against three. Not many spectators, a dozen maybe, but it was a good fight, and they were noisy. Deke was immersed in the manic calm of combat when he realized suddenly that they had fallen silent. Saw the kickers stir and exchange glances. Eyes flicked past him. He heard the elevator doors close. Coolly, he disposed of the second of his opponent’s planes, then risked a quick glance over his shoulder.

Tiny Montgomery had just entered Jackman’s. The wheelchair whispered across browning linoleum, guided by tiny twitches of one imperfectly paralyzed hand. His expression was stern, blank, calm.

In that instant, Deke lost two planes. One to deresolution—gone to blur and canceled out by the facilitator—and the other because his opponent was a real fighter. Guy did a barrel role, killing speed and slipping to the side, and strafed Deke’s biplane as it shot past. It went down in flames. Their last two planes shared altitude and speed, and as they turned, trying for position, they naturally fell into a circling pattern.

The kicker made room as Tiny wheeled up against the table. Bobby Earl Cline trailed after him, lanky and casual. Deke and his opponent traded glances and pulled their machines back from the pool table so they could hear the man out. Tiny smiled. His features were small, clustered in the center of his pale, doughy face. One finger twitched slightly on the chrome handrest. “I heard about you.” He looked straight at Deke. His voice was soft and shockingly sweet, a baby-girl little voice. “I heard you’re good.”

Deke nodded slowly. The smile left Tiny’s face. His soft, fleshy lips relaxed into a natural pout, as if he were waiting for a kiss. His small, bright eyes studied Deke without malice. “Let’s see what you can do, then.”

Deke lost himself in the cool game of war. And when the enemy went down in smoke and flame, to explode and vanish against the table, Tiny wordlessly turned his chair, wheeled it into the elevator, and was gone.

As Deke was gathering up his winnings, Bobby Earl eased up to him and said, “The man wants to play you.”

“Yeah?” Deke was nowhere near high enough on the circuit to challenge Tiny. “What’s the scam?”

“Man who was coming up from Atlanta tomorrow canceled. Ol’ Tiny, he was spoiling to go up against somebody new. So it looks like you get your shot at the Max.”

“Tomorrow? Wednesday? Doesn’t give me much prep time.”

Bobby Earl smiled gently. “I don’t think that makes no nevermind.”

“How’s that, Mr. Cline?”

“Boy, you just ain’t got the moves, you follow me? Ain’t got no surprises. You fly just like some kinda beginner, only faster and slicker. You follow what I’m trying to say?”

“I’m not sure I do. You want to put a little action on that?”

“Tell you truthful,” Cline said. “I been hoping on that.” He drew a small black notebook from his pocket and licked a pencil stub. “Give you five to one. They’s nobody gonna give no fairer odds than that.”

He looked at Deke almost sadly. “But Tiny, he’s just naturally better’n you, and that’s all she wrote, boy. He lives for that goddamned game, ain’t got nothing else. Can’t get out of that goddamned chair. You think you can best a man who’s fighting for his life, you are just lying to yourself.”

Norman Rockwell’s portrait of the colonel regarded Deke dispassionately from the Kentucky Fried across Richmond Road from the coffee bar. Deke held his cup with hands that were cold and trembling. His skull bummed with fatigue. Cline was right, he told the colonel. I can go up against Tiny, but I can’t win. The colonel stared back, gaze calm and level and not particularly kindly, taking in the coffee bar and Best Buy and all his drag-ass kingdom of Richmond Road. Waiting for Deke to admit to the terrible thing he had to do.

“The bitch is planning to leave me anyway,” Deke said aloud. Which made the black countergirl look at him funny, then quickly away.

“Daddy called!” Nance danced into the apartment, slamming the door behind her. “And you know what? He says if I can get this job and hold it for six months, he’ll have the brainlock reversed. Can you believe it? Deke?” She hesitated. “You okay?”

Deke stood. Now that the moment was on him, he felt unreal, like he was in a movie or something. “How come you never came home last night?” Nance asked.

The skin on his face was unnaturally taut, a parchment mask. “Where’d you stash the hype, Nance? I need it.”

“Deke,” she said, trying a tentative smile that instantly vanished. “Deke, that’s mine. My hit. I need it. For my interview.”

He smiled scornfully. “You got money. You can always score another cap.”

“Not by Friday! Listen. Deke, this is really important. My whole life is riding on this interview. I need that cap. It’s all I got!”

“Baby, you got the fucking world! Take a look around you—six ounces of blond Lebanese hash! Little anchovy fish in tins. Unlimited medical coverage, if you need it.” She was backing away from him, stumbling against the static waves of unwashed bedding and wrinkled glossy magazines that crested at the foot of her bed. “Me, I never had a glimmer of any of this. Never had the kind of edge it takes to get along. Well, this one time I am gonna. There is a match in two hours that I am going to fucking well win. Do you hear me?” He was working himself into a rage, and that was good. He needed it for what he had to do.

Nance flung up an arm, palm open, but he was ready for that and slapped her hand aside, never even catching a glimpse of the dark tunnel, let alone those little red eyes. They were both falling, and he was on top of her, her breath hot and rapid in his face. “Deke! Deke! I need that hit. Deke, my interview, it’s the only . . . I gotta . . . gotta . . .” She twisted her face away, crying into the wall. “Please God, please don’t . . .”

“Where did you stash it?”

Pinned against the bed under his body, Nance began to spasm, her entire body convulsing in pain and fear.

“Where is it?”

Her face was bloodless, gray corpse flesh, and horror burned in her eyes. Her lips squirmed. It was too late to stop now; he’d crossed over the line. Deke felt revolted and nauseated, all the more so because on some unexpected and unwelcome level, he was enjoying this.

“Where is it, Nance?” And slowly, very gently, he began to stroke her face.

Deke summoned Jackman’s elevator with a finger that moved as fast and straight as a hornet and landed daintily as a butterfly on the call button. He was full of bouncy energy, and it was all under control. On the way up, he whipped off his shades and chuckled at his reflection in the finger-smudged chrome. The blacks of his eyes were like pinpricks, all but invisible, and still the world was neon bright.

Tiny was waiting. The cripple’s mouth turned up at the corners into a sweet smile as he took in Deke’s irises, the exaggerated calm of his notions, the unsuccessful attempt to mime an undrugged clumsiness. “Well,” he said, in that girlish voice, “looks like I have a treat in store for me.”

The Max was draped over one tube of the wheelchair. Deke took up position and bowed, not quite mockingly. “Let’s fly.” As challenger, he flew defense. He materialized his planes at a conservative altitude, high enough to dive, low enough to have warning when Tiny attacked. He waited.

The crowd tipped him. A fatboy with brilliantined hair looked startled, a hollow-eyed cracker started to smile. Murmurs rose. Eyes shifted slow motion in heads frozen by hyped-up reaction time. Took maybe three nanoseconds to pinpoint the source of attack. Deke whipped his head up, and—

Sonofabitch, he was blind! The Fokkers were diving straight from the two-hundred-watt bulb, and Tiny had suckered him into staring right at it. His vision whited out. Deke squeezed lids tight over welling tears and frantically held visualization. He split his flight, curved two biplanes right, one left. Immediately twisting each a half-turn, then back again. He had to dodge randomly—he couldn’t tell where the hostile warbirds were.

Tiny chuckled. Deke could hear him through the sounds of the crowd, the cheering and cursing and slapping down of coins that seemed to syncopate independent of the ebb and flow of the duel.

When his vision returned an instant later, a Spad was in flames and falling. Fokkers tailed his surviving planes, one on one and two on the other. Three seconds into the game, and he was down one.

Dodging to keep Tiny from pinning tracers on him, he looped the single-pursued plane about and drove the other toward the blind spot between Tiny and the light bulb.

Tiny’s expression went very calm. The faintest shadow of disappointment—of contempt, even—was swallowed up by tranquility. He tracked the planes blandly, waiting for Deke to make his turn.

Then, just short of the blind spot, Deke shoved his Spad into a dive, the Fokkers overshooting and banking wildly to either side, twisting around to regain position.

The Spad swooped down on the third Fokker, pulled into position by Deke’s other plane. Fire strafed wings and crimson fuselage. For an instant nothing happened, and Deke thought he had a fluke miss. Then the little red mother veered left and went down, trailing black, oily smoke.

Tiny frowned, small lines of displeasure marring the perfection of his mouth. Deke smiled. One even, and Tiny held position.

Both Spads were tailed closely. Deke swung them wide, and then pulled them together from opposite sides of the table. He drove them straight for each other, neutralizing Tiny’s advantage . . . neither could fire without endangering his own planes. Deke cranked his machines up to top speed, slamming them at each other’s noses.

An instant before they crashed, Deke sent the planes over and under one another, opening fire on the Fokkers and twisting away. Tiny was ready. Fire filled the air. Then one blue and one red plane soared free, heading in opposite directions. Behind them, two biplanes tangled in midair. Wings touched, slewed about, and the planes crumpled. They fell together, almost straight down, to the green felt below.

Ten seconds in and four planes down. A black vet pursed his lips and blew softly. Someone else shook his head in disbelief.

Tiny was sitting straight and a little forward in his wheelchair, eyes intense and unblinking, soft hands plucking feebly at the grips. None of that amused and detached bullshit now; his attention was riveted on the game. The kickers, the table, Jackman’s itself, might not exist at all for him. Bobby Earl Cline laid a hand on his shoulder; Tiny didn’t notice. The planes were at opposite ends of the room, laboriously gaining altitude. Deke jammed his against the ceiling, dim through the smoky haze. He spared Tiny a quick glance, and their eyes locked. Cold against cold. “Let’s see your best,” Deke muttered through clenched teeth.

They drove their planes together.

The hype was peaking now, and Deke could see Tiny’s tracers crawling through the air between the planes. He had to put his Spad into the line of fire to get off a fair burst, then twist and band so the Fokker’s bullets would slip by his undercarriage. Tiny was every bit as hot, dodging Deke’s fire and passing so close to the Spad their landing gears almost tangled as they passed.

Deke was looping his Spad in a punishingly tight turn when the hallucinations hit. The felt writhed and twisted—became the green hell of Bolivian rain forest that Tiny had flown combat over. The walls receded to gray infinity, and he felt the metal confinement of a cybernetic jumpjet close in around him.

But Deke had done his homework. He was expecting the hallucinations and knew he could deal with them. The military would never pass on a drug that couldn’t be fought through. Spad and Fokker looped into another pass. He could read the tensions in Tiny Montgomery’s face, the echoes of combat in deep jungle sky. They drove their planes together, feeling the torqued tensions that fed straight from instrumentation to hindbrain, the adrenaline pumps kicking in behind the armpits, the cold, fast freedom of airflow over jet-skin mingling with the smells of hot metal and fear sweat. Tracers tore past his face, and he pulled back, seeing the Spad zoom by the Fokker again, both untouched. The kickers were just going ape, waving hats and stomping feet, acting like God’s own fools. Deke locked glances with Tiny again.

Malice rose up in him, and though his nerve was taut as the carbon-crystal whiskers that kept the jumpjets from falling apart in superman turns over the Andes, he counterfeited a casual smile and winked. Jerking his head slightly to one side, as if to say, “Lookahere.”

Tiny glanced to the side.

It was only for a fraction of a second, but that was enough. Deke pulled as fast and tight an Immelmann—right on the edge of theoretical tolerance—as he had ever been seen on the circuit, and he was hanging on Tiny’s tail.

Let’s see you get out of this one, sucker.

Tiny rammed his plane straight down at the green, and Deke followed after. He held his fire. He had Tiny where he wanted him.

Running. Just like he’d been on his every combat mission. High on exhilaration and hype, maybe, but running scared. They were down to the felt now, flying treetop level. Break, Deke thought, and jacked up the speed. Peripherally, he could see Bobby Earl Cline, and there was a funny look on the man’s face. A pleading kind of look. Tiny’s composure was shot; his face was twisted and tormented.

Now Tiny panicked and dove his plane in among the crowd. The biplanes looped and twisted between the kickers. Some jerked back involuntarily, and others laughingly swatted at them with their hands. But there was a hot glint of terror in Tiny’s eyes that spoke of an eternity of fear and confinement, two edges sawing away at each other endlessly. . . .

The fear was death in the air, the confinement a locking away in metal, first of the aircraft, then of the chair. Deke could read it all in his face: Combat was the only out Tiny had had, and he’d taken it every chance he got. Until some anonymous nationalista with an antique SAM tore him out of that blue/green Bolivian sky and slammed him straight down to Richmond Road and Jackman’s and the smiling killer boy he faced this one last time across the faded cloth.

Deke rocked up on his toes, face burning with that million-dollar smile that was the trademark of the drug that had already fried Tiny before anyone ever bothered to blow him out of the sky in a hot tangle of metal and mangled flesh. It all came together then. He saw that flying was all that held Tiny together. That daily brush of fingertips against death, and then rising up from the metal coffin, alive again. He’d been holding back collapse by sheer force of will. Break that willpower, and mortality would come pouring out and drown him. Tiny would lean over and throw up in his own lap.

And Deke drove it home. . . .

There was a moment of stunned silence as Tiny’s last plane vanished in a flash of light. “I did it,” Deke whispered. Then, louder, “Son of a bitch, I did it!”

Across the table from him, Tiny twisted in his chair, arms jerking spastically; his head lolled on one shoulder. Behind him, Bobby Earl Cline stared straight at Deke, his eyes hot coals.

The gambler snatched up the Max and wrapped its ribbon around a stack of laminateds. Without warning, he flung the bundle at Deke’s face. Effortlessly, casually, Deke plucked it from the air.

For an instant, then, it looked like the gambler would come at him, right across the pool table. He was stopped by a tug on his sleeve. “Bobby Earl,” Tiny whispered, his voice choking with humiliation, “you gotta get me . . . out of here. . . .”

Stiffly, angrily, Cline wheeled his friend around, and then away, into shadow.

Deke threw back his head and laughed. By God, he felt good! He stuffed the Max into a shirt pocket, where it hung cold and heavy. The money he crammed into his jeans. Man, he had to jump with it, his triumph leaping up through him like a wild thing, fine and strong as the flanks of a buck in the deep woods he’d seen from a Greyhound once, and for this one moment it seemed that everything was worth it somehow, all the pain and misery he’d gone through to finally win.

But Jackman’s was silent. Nobody cheered. Nobody crowded around to congratulate him. He sobered, and silent, hostile faces swam into focus. Not one of these kickers was on his side. They radiated contempt, even hatred. For an interminably drawn-out moment the air trembled with potential violence . . . and then someone turned to the side, hawked up phlegm, and spat on the floor. The crowd broke up, muttering, one by one drifting into the darkness.

Deke didn’t move. A muscle in one leg began to twitch, harbinger of the coming hype crash. The top of his head felt numb, and there was an awful taste in his mouth. For a second he had to hang onto the table with both hands to keep from falling down forever, into the living shadow beneath him, as he hung impaled by the prize buck’s dead eyes in the photo under the Dr. Pepper clock.

A little adrenaline would pull him out of this. He needed to celebrate. To get drunk or stoned and talk it up, going over the victory time and again, contradicting himself, making up details, laughing and bragging. A starry old night like this called for big talk.

But standing there with all of Jackman’s silent and vast and empty around him, he realized suddenly that he had nobody left to tell it to.

Nobody at all.

THE GIFT FROM THE GRAYLANDERS

Michael Bishop

Mr. Bishop’s most recent fiction publication in IAsfm, “The Gospel According to Gamiel Crucis” (November1983), was a finalist for the 1983 Nebula award. His most recent novels include Who Made Stevie Crye? (Arkham House, 1984) and Ancient of Days (Arbor House, 1985).

In the house where Mommy took him several months after she and Daddy stopped living together, Cory had a cot downstairs. The house belong to Mommy’s sister and her sister’s husband Martin, a pair of unhappy people who already had four kids of their own. Aunt Clara’s kids had real bedrooms upstairs, but Mommy told Cory that he was lucky to have a place to sleep at all and that anyway a basement was certainly a lot better than a hot-air grate on a Denver street or a dirty stable like the one that the Baby Jesus had been born in.

Cory hated the way the basement looked and smelled. It had walls like concrete slabs on the graves in cemeteries. Looking at them, you could almost see those kinds of slabs turned on their ends and pushed up against one another to make this small square prison underground. The slabs oozed wetness. You could make a handprint on the walls just by holding your palm to the concrete. When you took your hand away, it smelled gray. Cory knew that dead people smelled gray too, especially when they had been dead a long time—like the people who were only bones and whom he had seen grinning out of magazine photographs without any lips or eyeballs or hair. Cory sometimes lay down on his cot wondering if maybe an army of those gray-smelling skeletons clustered on the other side of the basement walls, working with oddly silent picks and shovels to break through the concrete and carry him away to the GrayLands where their deadness made them live.

Maybe, though, the gray-smelling creatures beyond the basement walls were not really skeletons. Maybe they were Clay People. On his cousins’ black-and-white TV set, Cory had seen an old movie serial about a strange planet. Some of the planet’s people lived underground, and they could step into or out of the walls of rock that tied together a maze of tunnels beneath the planet’s surface. They moved through dirt and rock the way that a little boy like Cory could move through water in summer or loose snow in winter. The brave, blond hero of the serial called these creatures the Clay People, a name that fit them almost perfectly, because they looked like monsters slapped together out of wet mud and then put out into the sun to dry. Every time they came limping into view with that tinny movie-serial music rum-tum-tumping away in the background, they gave Cory a bad case of the shivers.

Later, lying on his cot, he would think about them trying to come through the oozy walls to take him away from that motel in Ratón, New Mexico. For a long time that day, Daddy had hidden in the room with the vending machines. Going in there for a Coke, Cory had at first thought that Daddy was a monster. His screams had brought Mommy running and also the motel manager and a security guard; and the “kidnap plot”—as Mommy had called it later—had ended in an embarrassing way for Daddy, Daddy hightailing it out of Ratón in his beat-up Impala like a drug dealer making a getaway in a TV cop show. But what if the Clay People were better kidnappers than Daddy? What if they came through the walls and grabbed him before he could awake and scream for help? They would surely take him back through the clammy grayness to a place where dirt would fill his mouth and stop his ears and press against his eyeballs, and he would be as good as dead with them forever and ever.

So Cory hated the basement. Because his cousins disliked the windowless damp of the place as much as he did, they seldom came downstairs to bother him. Although that was okay when he wanted to be by himself, he never really wanted to be by himself in the basement. Smelling its mustiness, touching its greasy walls, feeling like a bad guy in solitary, Cory could not help but imagine unnamable danger and deadness surrounding him. Skeletons. Clay People. Monsters from the earthen dark. It was okay to be alone on a mountain trail or even in a classroom at school, but to be alone in this basement was to be punished for not having a daddy who came home every evening the way that daddies were supposed to. Daddy himself, who had once tried to kidnap Cory, would have never made him spend his nights in this kind of prison. Or, if for some reason Daddy could not have prevented the arrangement, he would have stayed downstairs with Cory to protect him from the creatures burrowing toward him from the GrayLands.

“Cory, there’s nothing down here to be afraid of,” Mommy said. “And you don’t want your mother to share your bedroom with you, do you? A big seven-year-old like you?”

“No,” he admitted. “I want my daddy.”

“Your daddy can’t protect you. He can’t or won’t provide for you. That’s why we had to leave him. He only tried to grab you back, Cory, to hurt me. Don’t you understand?”

Daddy hurt Mommy? Cory shook his head.

“I’m sorry it’s a basement,” Mommy said. “I’m sorry it’s not a chalet with a big picture window overlooking a mountain pass, but things just haven’t been going that way for us lately.”

Cory rolled over on his cot so that the tip of his nose brushed the slablike wall.

“Tell me what you’re afraid of,” Mommy said. “If you tell me, maybe we can handle it together—whatever it is.”

After some more coaxing, but without turning back to face her, Cory began to talk about the skeletons and the Clay People from the GrayLands beyond the sweating concrete.

“The GrayLands?” Mommy said. “There aren’t any Gray Lands, Cory. There may be skeletons, but they don’t get up and walk. They certainly don’t use picks and shovels to dig their way into basements. And the Clay People, well, they’re just television monsters, make-believe, nothing at all for a big boy like you to worry about in real life.”

“I want to sleep on the couch upstairs.”

“You can’t, Cory. You’ve got your own bathroom down here, and when you wake up and have to use it, well, you don’t disturb Uncle Martin or Aunt Clara or any of the kids. We’ve been through all this before, haven’t we? You know how important it is that Marty gets his sleep. He has to get up at four in order to make his shift at the fire station.”

“I won’t use the bathroom upstairs. I won’t even drink nothin’ before I go to bed.”

“Cory, hush.”

The boy rolled over and pulled himself up onto his elbows so that he could look right into Mommy’s eyes. “I’m scared of the GrayLands. I’m scared of the gray-smellin’ monsters that’re gonna come pushin’ through the walls from over there.”

Playfully, Mommy mussed his hair. “You’re impossible, you know that? Really impossible.”

It was as if she could not wholeheartedly believe in his fear. In fact, she seemed to think that he had mentioned the GrayLands and the monsters who would come forth from them only as a boy’s cute way of prompting adult sympathy. He did not like the basement (Mommy was willing to concede that point), but this business of a nearby subterranean country of death and its weird gray-smelling inhabitants was only so much childish malarky. The boy missed his father, and Mommy could not assume Daddy’s role as protector—as bad as Clinton himself had been at it—because in a young boy’s eyes a woman was not a man. And so she mussed his hair again and abandoned him to his delusive demons.

Cory never again spoke to anyone of the GrayLands. But each night, hating the wet clayey smell of the basement and its gummy linoleum floor and the foil-wrapped heating ducts bracketed to the ceiling and the naked light bulb hanging like a tiny dried gourd from a bracket near the unfinished stairs, he would huddle under the blankets on his cot and talk to the queer creatures tunneling stealthily toward him from the GrayLands—the Clay People, or Earth Zombies, or Bone Puppets, that only he of all the members of this mixed-up household actually believed in.

“Stay where you are,” Cory would whisper at the wall. “Don’t come over here. Stay where you are.”

The monsters—whatever they were—obeyed. They did not break through the concrete to grab him. Of course, maybe the concrete was too thick and hard to let them reach him without a lot more work. They could still be going at it, picking away. The Clay People on that movie planet had been able to walk through earth without even using tools to clear a path for themselves, but maybe Earth’s earth was packed tighter. Maybe good old-fashioned Colorado concrete could hold off such single-minded creatures for months. Cory hoped that it could. For safety’s sake, he would keep talking to them, begging them to stay put, pleading with them not to undermine the foundations of his uncle’s house with their secret digging.

Summer came, and they still had not reached him. The walls still stood against them, smooth to the touch here, rough there. Some of the scratches in the ever-glistening grayness were like unreadable foreign writing. These scratches troubled Cory. He wondered if they had always been there. Maybe the tunneling creatures had scribbled them on the concrete from the other side, not quite getting the tips of their strange writing instruments to push through the walls but by great effort and persistence just managing to press marks into the outer surface where a real human being like him could see them. The boy traced these marks with his finger. He tried to spell them out. But he had gone through only his first year in school, and the task of decipherment was not one he could accomplish without help. Unfortunately, he could not apply for help without breaking the promise that he had made to himself never to speak of the GrayLanders to anyone in Aunt Clara’s family. If Mommy could muster no belief in them, how could he hope to convince his hard-headed cousins, who liked him best when he was either running errands for them or hiding from them in the doubtful sanctuary of the basement?

Then Cory realized that maybe he was having so much trouble reading the GrayLanders’ damp scratches not because he was slow or the scratches stood for characters in a foreign tongue, but because his tormentors’ painstaking method of pressing them outward onto the visible portions of the walls made the characters arrive there backwards. Cory was proud of himself for figuring this out. He filched a pocket mirror from the handbag of the oldest girl and brought it down the creaking stairs to test his theory.

This girl, fifteen-year-old Gina Lynn, caught him holding the mirror against one of the rougher sections of wall, squinting back and forth between the concrete and the oval glass. Meanwhile, with the nub of a broken pencil, he was struggling to copy the reversed scratches onto a tatter of paper bag. Cory did not hear Gina Lynn come down the stairs because he was concentrating so hard on this work. He was also beginning to understand that his wonderful theory was not really proving out. The mysterious calligraphy of the GrayLanders continued to make no sense.

“You’re just about the weirdest little twerp I’ve ever seen,” Gina Lynn said matter-of-factly. “Give me back my mirror.”

Startled and then shamefaced, Cory turned around. He yielded the mirror. Gina Lynn asked him no questions, knowing from past experience that he would respond with monosyllables if at all, but began to bruit it around the house that he could read the marks in concrete the way that some people could read cloud formations or chicken entrails. Uncle Martin, who was home for a long weekend, thought this discovery about his sister-in-law’s son hilarious. He called Cory into the living room to rag him about taking the mirror but especially about holding it up to the shallow striations in the otherwise blank gray face of a basement wall.

“Out with it,” he said. “What’d that stupid wall tell you? No secrets, now. I want me a tip straight from the Cee-ment itself. What’s a rock-solid investment for a fella like Uncle Marty with only so much cash to spare?”

Cory could feel his face burning.

“Come on, cuz. This is a relative talkin’, kid. Let me in—let us all in—on what’s going down, basement-wise.”

“Who’s gonna take the World Series this year?” twelve-year-old David promptly asked.

“Is Hank Danforth gonna ask Gina Lynn to his pool party?” Faye, disturbingly precocious for nine, wondered aloud.

(“Shut up,” Gina Lynn cautioned her.)

And thirteen-year old Deborah said, “Is war gonna break out? Ask your stupid wall if the Russians’re gonna bomb us.”

“Maybe the wall was askin’ him for some cold cream,” Uncle Martin said. “You know, to put on its wrinkles.” All four of Uncle Martin’s bratty kids laughed. “You were just writin’ down the brand, weren’t you Cory? Don’t wanna bring home the wrong brand of cold cream to smear on your favorite wall. After all, you’re the fella who’s gotta face the damn thing every morning, aren’t you?”

“Silica Lotion,” Gina Lynn said. “Oil of Grah-velle.”

Mommy had a job as a cash-register clerk somewhere. She was not at home. Cory fixed his eyes on Uncle Martin’s belt buckle, a miniature brass racing car, and waited for their silly game to end. When it did, without his once having opened his mouth to reply to their jackass taunts, he strode with wounded dignity back down to the corner of the basement sheltering his cot. Alone again, he peered for a time at the marks that Gina Lynn’s mirror had not enabled him to read. The scratches began to terrify him. They coded a language that he had not yet learned. They probably contained taunts—threats, in fact—crueler and much more dangerous than any that his uncle and cousins had just shied off him for sport.

Two days later, in Uncle Martin’s detached garage, Cory found a gallon of yellow paint that Aunt Clara had bought nearly three summers ago to take care of the house’s peeling shutters. He also found a brush and an aerosol can of black enamel that David had recently used to touch up the frame on his ten-speed. These items the boy carried downstairs to his private sanctuary.

Stripped to his Jockey briefs, he began to slap runny gouts of latex brilliance all over the disturbing hieroglyphs. At first, he hid a few of them behind the dripping image of a huge lopsided egg yolk. Then swinging his arm in everwidening arcs, he expanded this clownish shape into the brim of a festive straw sombrero. The sombrero rim grew to be gong-sized, and the gong ballooned to the dimensions of one of those giant yellow teacups whirling around and around in a local amusement park. Finally, though, Cory had his circle as big as a small sun, a ball of good cheer radiating into the basement as if the very paint itself had caught fire.

He outlined the sun with the black spray paint and added flares and fiery peninsulas that cried out for yet more yellow. Then he painted smaller lamps on other portions of this wall and on the other walls too, and squat tropical birds with combs and wattles, and pineapples as big as the lamps, and a long yellow beach under the glowering sun. His arms ran yellow, as did his pipe-cleaner thighs, as did his caved-in belly and chest, while his face seemed to reflect back the brightness of the obliterated gray that he strove to cover over permanently. If he had to live and sleep in this dank hole in the ground, let it be a happy hole in the ground. Let the light of artificial suns, two-dimensional lamps, and crudely drafted fruits and cockatoos spill into his basement through the pores of the very cement.

Let there be light.

Let there be light to hold the GrayLanders at bay. For Cory believed that the work he had done, the symbols he had splashed up around his cot like a fence of sunlight, would keep the creatures beyond the subterranean walls from bursting through them to steal him away from Mommy and the real world of automobiles and mountains and football stadiums—the real world in which she was trying to make a place for both of them. Maybe he was safer now.

But while Cory was admiring what he had done, David came down the steps to ask him to go to the store. His older cousin saw him three-quarters naked and striped like an aborigine in the midst of a yellow-gray jungle unlike any terrain that David had expected to find only a floor below the family’s TV room.

“Holy shit,” he said and backed away up the steps as if Cory might be planning to slit his throat on the spot.

A moment or two later, Uncle Martin came storming down the steps in a pair of rope-soled boots that made the whole unfinished structure tremble like a medieval assault tower in an old Tyrone Power movie. He could not believe what Cory had done. He bruised the boy’s arm and upper chest shaking him this way and that to demonstrate his disbelief and his unhappiness. He threw Cory onto his cot with such force that it collapsed under the blow and dumped the boy sidelong so that his head struck a section of painted concrete. Yellow paint smudged the whorl pattern of hair on Cory’s crown, and a trickle of red worked through the smudge to enrage Uncle Martin even further.

“This is my house!” he shouted, slapping Cory again. “No one gave you permission to do this!”

Aunt Clara’s pant-suited legs appeared halfway up the trembling stairs. More of her came into view as she descended. When Uncle Martin drew back his forearm to administer another crackling wallop, she cried, “Marty, don’t! Something’s happenin’ on the news. You like the news. Come see what’s goin’ on. Try to relax. I’ll take care of this. Come watch the news.”

Uncle Martin’s forearm halted inches from Cory’s eyes. “Ain’t nobody gonna take care of this, Clara!” he shouted. “We’ll jes’ leave our little Piggaso down here to moon over his shitty goddamn yellow masterpieces! Forever, maybe!” He thrust Cory into the wall to punctuate this last threat, kicked the crumpled cot, and pounded back up the steps, pulling Aunt Clara along with him. Then the door slammed. Soon after, the naked light bulb near the staircase went out; and the boy knew that one of his cousins, at Uncle Martin’s bidding, had flipped the circuit breaker controlling the power supply to the basement.

But for a narrow line of light beneath the door at the top of the steps, Cory crouched beside his cot in utter darkness. Then someone—maybe Uncle Martin himself—put something—probably a rolled-up towel—along the base of the door; and the not quite utter darkness of his prison took on a thoroughness that made the boy think that someone—possibly a GrayLander—had stuck an altogether painless needle into his eyeballs and injected them with ink. He still had eyeballs, of course, but they had gone solid back on him, like licorice jawbreakers or moist ripe olives. With such eyes, he could “see” only darkness.

What about the fat yellow sun that he had painted? What about the beach, the pineapples, the sunlamps, and the cockatoos? He put his hands on the damp slabs of the basement walls and felt each invisible figure for reassurance. Was the dampness only the sweat of soil-backed concrete, or was it instead an indication of undried paint? Cory could not tell. When he sniffed his hands, they gave off the familiar odor of grayness—but even bright yellow pigment could acquire that smell when, like a glaze of fragile perfume, it was applied to an upright slab of earthen gray. The boy wiped his hands on his chest. Was he wiping off a smear of latex sunshine or the clammy perspiration of underground cement? Because he would never be able to tell, he gave up trying.

Then he heard a pounding overhead and knew that Mommy had come home from work. She and Uncle Martin were just beyond the door at the top of the stairs, arguing.

“For Chrissake, Marty, you can’t keep him locked up in the basement—no matter what he’s done!”

“Watch me, Claudia! Jes’ you watch me!”

“I’m going down there to see him! I’m his mother, and I’ve got a right to see him! Or else he’s gonna come up here to see us!”

“What he’s gonna do, woman, is stew in the dumb-fuckin’ Piggaso mess he’s made!”

“He hasn’t even had his dinner!”

“Who says he deserves any?”

“He’s my son, and I’m going to let him out!”

Then Cory’s darkness was riven by the kind of noise that a big dog makes when it slams its body into a fence slat, and Mommy was screaming, and Aunt Clara was cursing both Mommy and Uncle Martin, and the staircase scaffolding was doing the shimmy-shimmy in its jerrybuilt moorings. Crash followed crash, and curses curses, and soon all the upper portions of the house seemed to be waltzing to the time-keeping of slaps and the breakage of dinnerware or random pieces of bric-a-brac. Cory waited for the rumpus to end, fully expecting Mommy to triumph and the door to open and the darkness to give way to a liberating spill of wattage that would light up the big yellow sun and all the other happy symbols that he had painted. Instead, when the noise ceased and the house stopped quaking, the darkness kept going, and so did the silence, and the only reasons that Cory could think of were that Mommy and her brother-in-law had killed each other or that Mommy had finally agreed with Uncle Marty that Cory really did deserve to sit alone in the dark for trying to beautify the dumb-ass basement walls.

Whatever had happened upstairs, the door did not open, and the ink in his eyeballs got thicker and thicker, and he came to realize that he would have to endure both the dark and the steady approach of the GrayLanders—Clay People, Earth Zombies, Bone Puppets—as either a premeditated punishment or a spooky sort of accident. (Maybe a burglar had broken in during the argument and stabbed everybody to death before Mommy could tell him that her son was locked in the basement. Maybe Mommy had purposely said nothing to the bad guy about him, for fear that the bad guy would get worried and come downstairs to knife Cory, too.) Anyway, he was trapped, with no lights and nothing to eat and streaks of yellow paint all over his invisible body and only a tiny bathroom and trickles of rusty tap water for any kind of comfort at all.

Cory crept up the rickety stairs, putting a splinter into one palm when he gripped the guard rail too hard. At the top, he beat on the door in rapid tattoos that echoed on his side like the clatter of a fight with bamboo staves at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. “Let me out!” he shouted. “Let me out of here!” Which was not dignified, he knew, but which was necessary, here at the beginning of his confinement, as a test of Uncle Martin’s will to hold him. If noise would make his uncle nervous, if pleading would make the man relent, the boy knew that he had to try such tactics, for Mommy’s sake as well as his. But it was no use, and finally he sat down and bit at the splinter in his palm until he had its tip between his baby teeth and managed to pull it free of the punctured flesh sheathing it.

Darkness swallows time. Cory decided that darkness swallows time when he had been alone in the black basement so long that he could not remember being anywhere else even a quarter of the time that he had spent hunched on his cot waiting for the darkness to end. He could not tell whether time was stretching out like a pull of saltwater taffy or drawing up like a spider when you hold a match over its body. Time was not something that happened in the dark at all. The dark had swallowed it. It was trying to digest time somewhere deep in its bowels, but when time emerged again, Cory felt sure that it would be a foul thing, physically altered and hence bad-smelling—gray-smelling, probably—and unwelcome. He almost hoped that the dark would swallow him, too, so that he would not have to confront the stench of time when, altered in this bad but inevitable way, it came oozing into the world again.

Once, he thought he heard sirens. Maybe Uncle Martin had gone to a fire somewhere.

Later, though, he was more concerned that the GrayLanders were getting closer to breaking through the basement’s outer wall than that some poor stranger’s house had caught fire. He put his hands on the upright slab next to him. He did this to hold the slab in place, to prop it up against the gritty GrayLanders straining their molecules through the earth—straining them the way that Aunt Clara strained orange juice on Saturday mornings—to scratch backward messages into the cement in a language so alien that not even a mirror could translate it for Cory. No longer able to see these messages, then, he began to feel the striations embodying them. Maybe the Bone Puppets, the Earth Zombies, the Clay People, or whatever they were, preferred to contact living human beings with feelable rather than seeable symbols.

Like Braille, sort of.

Didn’t that make sense? It was smart to think that monsters living underground, in everlasting subterranean dark, would be blind, wasn’t it? Cory’s first-grade teacher had taught them about moles, which could only see a little, and had even shown them a film about cave animals that had no eyes at all because, in their always-dark environments, they had revolved that way. Well, the GrayLanders were probably like those cave animals, eyeless, blind, totally and permanently blind, because by choice and biological development they made their home in darkness. Which was why they would write backwards on the walls in symbols that you had to feel and then turn around in your head to get the meaning of.

Cory worked hard to let the alien Braille of the GrayLanders talk to him through his fingertips. Probably, their messages would let him know what sort of horrible things they planned to do to him when they at last got through the concrete. Probably, the symbols were warnings. Warnings meant to terrify. A really smart kid would leave them be, but because he had been locked into a place that he could not escape without the aid of the adults upstairs—grownups a kid would ordinarily expect to make some responsible decisions for him and maybe for themselves too—Cory had to struggle to parse the queer dents and knobbles on his own. Alone, in the dark, it was better to know than not to know, even if what you learned made your gut turn over and the hair in the small of your back prickle. So far, though, he was learning nothing. All their stupid tactile messages made no sense, either forwards at the tips of his fingers or backwards or sideways or upside-down in the ever-turning but ever-slipping vise of his mind.

“You’re blind and you can’t even write blind-writing!” Cory shouted. He pounded on the sweaty slab beside his cot as centuries ago he had pounded on the door at the top of the staircase. Thwap! thwap! thwap! and not even the satisfaction of an echo. Bruised fists and a bit lip, only.

Cory forced the bent legs on his cot back under the canvas contraption, but pinched the web between his thumb and forefinger. He lay down on his cot nursing the pinch and staring through ink-filled eyes at the heavy nothing pressing down on him like the bleak air pressure of a tomb. With a bleak black here and a bleak black there (he crooned to himself), here a black, there a black, everywhere a bleak black, Uncle Marty had a tomb, ee-ai, ee-ai-oh. The melody of this nursery song kept running in his head in almost exactly the way that the darkness kept restating itself all around him. They were both inescapable, and pretty soon they got mixed up in Cory’s mind as if they were mirror-image phenomena that he could not quite see straight and hence could not distinguish between or make any useful sense of.

Upstairs, as faint as the buzzing of a single summer mosquito, sirens again.

And then, somehow, the sun that Cory had painted on the wall—the humongous yellow orb with hair-curler geysers and flares around its circumference—lit up like a flashbulb as big as a Mobile Oil sign. But unlike any kind of flashbulb, Cory’s sun did not go out again. Instead, in the bargain-basement catacombs of his aunt and uncle’s house, it continued incandescently to glow. Everything in the basement was radiated by its light. Cory had to lift one paint-smeared forearm to shield his eyes from the fierce intensity of its unbearable glowing. The images of sunlamps on this and other walls, and of birds of paradise, and of bananas, pineapples, and papayas—all these clumsy two-dimensional images began to burn. They did so with a ferociousness only a little less daunting than that of Cory’s big latex sun. It seemed to the boy that God Himself had switched the power back on. For some private reason, though, He had chosen not to use the orthodox avenue of the wiring already in place.

No, instead He had moved to endow with blinding brightness the symbols of life and sunshine that Cory had splashed on the walls. If Mommy would not help him, God would. If his aunt, uncle, and four bratty cousins would not release him to daylight, well, God would bring a gift of greatly multiplied daylight right down into the basement to him. Although grateful for this divine favor, the boy helplessly turned aside from the gift. It was too grand, too searing, and that for a brief instant he had actually been able to see the bone inside the forearm shielding his eyes fretted Cory in a way that his gratitude was unable to wipe from his memory.

And then, almost as if he had dreamed the divine gift, darkness reasserted itself, like a television screen shrinking down to one flickering central spot and going black right in the middle of a program that he had waited all day to see.

Ee-ai, ee-ai-oh.

Cory sat still on his cot. Something had happened. For an instant or two, the ink had been squeezed out of his eyeballs, and a liquid like lighter fluid had been poured into them. Then the liquid had ignited, and burned, and used itself up, whereupon the ink had come flooding back. Or something like that. Cory was still seeing fuzzy haloes of light on the congealed blackness of the ink. Fireflies. Glowing amoebas. Migrating match flames. Crimson minnows. They swam and they swam, and no one gave a damn about the boy in the basement.

And then it seemed to him that overhead a whirlwind had struck the neighborhood. The darkness roared, and the staircase began doing the shimmy-shimmy again. But this time the shaking got so violent that the steps and guard rails—a tiny din within the great bombast of the Rocky Mountain hurricane raging above him—broke loose of the scaffolding and like the bars of a big wooden xylophone tumbled into and percussed down upon one another with the discordant music of catastrophe, plink! plunk! crash! ka-BOOM-bah! clatter-clatter!

It would have been funny, sort of, except that the roaring and the quaking and the amplified sighing of whatever was going on upstairs—what stairs!—in the real world, the terrifying playground of wild beasts and grownups, would not stop. Cory feared that his head might soon explode with the noise. In fact, he began to think that the noise was inside his skull, a balloon of sound inflating toward a ka-BOOM! that would decorate the gray-smelling walls with glistening oysterlike bits of his brain. Gray on gray.

The endless roaring swallowed time. Cory began to forget that the world had not always entertained such noise. It seemed a kind of constant, like air. He wondered if maybe the GrayLanders were the culprits, howling from all the topless basements in his aunt and uncle’s neighborhood that they had succeeded in breaking into from their earthen grottos. If so, they would soon be here too, and time would both begin again and stop forever when they opened the sky for him with their grating godforsaken howls.

Maybe air was not a constant. Cory was suddenly having trouble breathing. Also, the clammy walls had begun to hiss, as if the ooze invisibly streaking them had heated to a temperature enabling them to steam. Gasping, he got down off the cot and crawled along the floor to the niche where an old-timey water heater, unemployed since the final days of the Eisenhower administration, squatted like the sawed-off fuselage of a rocket. Cory could not see it now, of course, but he remembered what it looked like. The metal wrapping the cylinder scalded his naked shoulder as he crawled past the antique.

Still gasping, bewildered by the difficulty of refilling his lungs, the boy slumped behind the old heater and turned his face toward an aperture in the concrete wall—an accident of pouring—through which a faint breath of warm rather than desert-hot air blew. He twisted his itching, inflamed body around so that he could thrust his entire head into this anomalous vent. The lip of concrete at its bottom sliced into his neck, but he ignored the minor discomfort to gulp the air leaking through. A gift from the GrayLanders? Maybe. Cory refused to question it, he just gulped and gulped, meanwhile praying that the noise would die down and the heat ease off and his oxygen supply return to normal.

In this unlikely posture, the boy fell asleep. Or, at least, consciousness left him.

When Cory awoke, his ears were buzzing, but the whirlwind had ceased. He pulled his head out of the rough spout in the concrete and found that he could comfortably breathe. He crawled out from behind the old gas water heater. An eerie kind of darkness held the day, but he could see again, as if through blowing smoke or murky water. Parts of the basement ceiling had fallen in, but all the walls were standing, and on them, as dim as the markings on the bottom of a scummy swimming pool, wavered the childish symbols that he had brushed and spray-painted onto the cement. Soot and grime dusted his handiwork, giving a disheartening dinginess to the latex yellow that a while ago—an hour, a day, a millennium—had shouted God’s glory at him. Soot and dust drifted around the dry sump of the basement like airborne chaff in the granary of a farm in western Kansas.

He looked up. The staircase had collapsed, and the door that he had pounded on, well, that door no longer occupied the doorjamb framing an empty portal at the top of the fallen stairs. In fact, the doorjamb was gone. Where it should have stood, a refrigerator slouched, its hind rollers hanging off the edge of the oddly canted floor. How it had wound up in that place, in that position, Cory could not clearly say, but because the walls of the upper portions of the house had evaporated, along with the ceiling, the furniture, and its human occupants, he did not spend much time worrying about the recent adventures of the parboiled refrigerator. High above the ruins of the house, the sky looked like a crazy-quilt marbling of curdled mayonnaise and cold cocoa and dissolving cotton candy and burnt tomato paste. Yucky-weird, all of it.

Just as gut-flopping as the sky, everything stank and distant moans overlay the ticks of scalded metal or occasionally pierced the soft static of down-sifting black snow. Although summer, this snow was slanting out of the nightmare sky. Appropriately, it was nightmare snow, flakes like tarnished-silver cinders, as acrid as gunpowder, each cinder the size of a weightless nickel, quarter, or fifty-cent piece. Right now, the boy was sheltered from their fall by a swag-bellied warp of ceiling, but he had made up his mind to climb out of the basement and to go walking bareheaded through the evil ebony storm.

Bareheaded, barechested, and barefoot.

Before the GrayLanders came.

Which they surely would, now that the grownups, by flattening everything, had made their tunneling task so much the easier. One of the outer basement walls had already begun to crumble. It would be a relaxing breaststroke for the Clay People, Earth Zombies, or Bone Puppets to come weaving their cold molecules through that airy stuff. And they had to be on their way.

Cory got out of the basement. It took a while, but by mounting the staircase rubble and leaping for the edge of the floor near the teetering refrigerator and pulling himself up to chin height and painstakingly boosting one leg over, he was finally able to stand on the tilting floor. Then, propellering his arms to maintain his balance, he watched with astonished sidelong glances as his Aunt Clara’s big Amana toppled from its perch and dropped like a bomb into the staircase ruins below it. A geyser of dust rose to meet the down-whirling cinders.

But he kept from falling, and looked around, and saw that no longer did the tall buildings of Denver, whose tops it had once been easy to see from his aunt and uncle’s neighborhood, command the landscape, which had been horribly transfigured. Debris and charred dead people and blasted trees and melted automobiles lay about the boy in every direction, and the mountains to the west, although still there, were veiled by the photogenic-negative snowfall, polarized phosphor dots of lilting deadliness.

Cory pulled his vision back from the mountains. “Mommy!” he cried. “Mommy!” Because he had no reasonable hope of an answer in this unrecognizable place, he started walking. Some of the burnt lumps in the rubble were probably all that remained of certain people he had known, but he had no wish to kneel beside them to check out this nauseating hunch. Instead, he walked. And it was like walking through a dump the dimensions of . . . well, of Denver itself. Maybe it was even bigger than that. The ubiquitous black snow and the yucky-weird sky suggested as much.

And then he saw his first GrayLander. The sight made him halt, clench his fists, and let go of a harsh yelping scream that scalded his throat the way that the down-whirling cinders had begun to burn his skin. The GrayLander paid him no mind, and although he wanted to scream again, he could not force his blistered voicebox to do as he bid it. For which reason, frozen to the plane of crazed asphalt over which he had been picking his way, Cory simply gaped.

Well over six feet tall, the GrayLander was almost as naked as he. The boy could not tell if it were Clay Person, Earth Zombie, or Bone Puppet—it seemed to be a little of all three, if not actually a hybrid of other ugly gray-smelling ogres of which he had never even dreamed. The GrayLander’s ungainly head looked like a great boiled cauliflower, or maybe a deflated basketball smeared with some kind of milky paste. If the creature had eyes, Cory could not see them, for its brow, an almost iridescent purple ridge in the surrounding milkiness, overlapped the sockets where most earth-born animals would have eyes. The creature’s heavy lips, each of which reminded Cory of albino versions of the leeches that sometimes attacked people in television horror movies, were moving, ever moving, like greasy toy-tank treads that have slipped off their grooves. Maybe it had heard the boy approach—the huge, stunned creature—for it turned toward him and pushed an alien noise from between its alien lips.

“Haowah meh,” it said. “Haowah men.”

When it turned, the purple-gray skin on its breasts, belly, and thighs slumped like hotel draperies accidentally tilted off their ends. Cory took a careful step back. One of the monster’s arms showed more bone below the elbow than flesh, as did its leg below the knee on the same side. Pale lips still moving, the GrayLander extended its other arm toward the boy, the arm that might almost have been mistaken for a man’s, and opened its blackened paw to reveal a tiny glistening spheroid. The monster shoved this object at Cory, as if urging him either to contemplate it at length or to take it as a memento of their meeting.

Squinting at the object in the unceasing rain of cinders, Cory understood that it was an eyeball. The GrayLander, blind, wanted him to have its eyeball. Just as he had suspected, the GrayLanders whom he had been waiting to come after him were sightless. They had eyes, apparently, but years of living in the dark, ignoring the realms of light just above their heads, had robbed their optical equipment of the ability to see. What, then, could be more useless than the gift of a GrayLander’s eyeball? Cory was outraged. The whirlwind had finally freed this stupid creature—and all its equally ugly relatives wandering like a benumbed zombies across the blasted landscape—from its subterranean darkness, and it was trying to give him something that had never been of the least value to itself or to any of its kind.

“Haoweh meh,” it said again.

The boy’s anger overcame his fear. He jumped forward, snatched the eye from the monster’s paw, and flung it off the hideous body of the GrayLander so that it bounced back at him like the tiny red ball connected to a bolo paddle by a rubber tether.

Then, knowing nothing at all about where he was going or what he would do when he got there, Cory began to run. The dump that Denver and its suburbs had become seemed too big to escape easily, but he had to try, and he had to try in spite of the fact that as he ran many of the yucky GrayLanders loitering bewilderedly in the rubble called to him to stop—to stop and help them, to stop and share both their pain and their bewilderment. Cory would not stop. He was angry with the blind monsters. They were people in disguise, people just like his dead mommy, his dead aunt and uncle, and his dead cousins. He was angry with them because they had fooled him. All along, he had been living among the GrayLanders and they had never once—until now—stepped forward to let him know that, under their skins, they and their human counterparts were absolutely identical.

THE FRINGE

Orson Scott Card

Although it has been a number of years since Orson Scott Card (“Closing the Timelid,” December 1979) has appeared in F&SF, the wait has been worthwhile. “The Fringe” presents us with a powerful picture of a devastated North America trying to rebuild through the efforts of a few concerned people who must combat not only the landscape but human ignorance and greed.

LaVon’s book report was drivel, of course. Carpenter knew it would be from the moment he called on the boy. After Carpenter’s warning last week, he knew LaVon would have a book report—LaVon’s father would never let the boy be suspended. But LaVon was too stubborn, too cocky, too much the leader of the other sixth-graders’ constant rebellion against authority to let Carpenter have a complete victory.

“I really, truly loved Little Men,” said LaVon. “It just gave me goose bumps.”

The class laughed. Excellent comic timing, Carpenter said silently. But the only place that comedy is useful here in the New Soil country is with the gypsy pageant wagons. That’s what you’re preparing yourself for, LaVon, a career as a wandering parasite who lives by sucking laughter out of weary farmers.

“Everybody nice in this book has a name that starts with D. Demi is a sweet little boy who never does anything wrong. Daisy is so good that she could have seven children and still be a virgin.”

He was pushing the limits now. A lot of people didn’t like mention of sexual matters in the school, and if some pinheaded child decided to report this, the story could be twisted into something that could be used against Carpenter. Out here near the fringe, people were desperate for entertainment. A crusade to drive out a teacher for corrupting the morals of youth would be more fun than a traveling show, because everybody could feel righteous and safe when he was gone. Carpenter had seen it before, not that he was afraid of it, the way most teachers were. He had a career no matter what. The university would take him back, eagerly; they thought he was crazy to go out and teach in the low schools. I’m safe, absolutely safe, he thought. They can’t wreck my career. And I’m not going to get prissy about a perfectly good word like virgin.

“Dan looks like a big bad boy, but he has a heart of gold, even though he does say real bad words like devil sometimes.” LaVon paused, waiting for Carpenter to react. So Carpenter did not react.

“The saddest thing is poor Nat, the street fiddler’s boy. He tries hard to fit in, but he can never amount to anything in the book, because his name doesn’t start with D.”

The end. LaVon put the single paper on Carpenter’s desk, then went back to his seat. He walked with the careful elegance of a spider, each long leg moving as if it were unconnected to the rest of his body, so that even walking did not disturb the perfect calm. The boy rides on his body the way I ride in my wheelchair, thought Carpenter. Smooth, unmoved by his own motion. But be is graceful and beautiful, fifteen years old and already a master at winning the devotion of the weakhearted children around him. He is the enemy, the torturer, the strong and beautiful man who must confirm his beauty by preying on the weak. I am not as weak as you think.

LaVon’s book report was arrogant, far too short, and flagrantly rebellious. That much was deliberate, calculated to annoy Carpentor. Therefore Carpenter would not show the slightest trace of annoyance. The book report had also been clever, ironic, and funny. The boy, for all his mask of languor and stupidity, had brains. He was better than this farming town; he could do something that mattered in the world besides driving a tractor in endless contour patterns around the fields. But the way he always had the Fisher girl hanging on him, he’d no doubt have a baby and a wife and stay here forever. Become a big shot like his father, maybe, but never leave a mark in the world to show he’d been there. Tragic, stupid waste.

But don’t show the anger. The children will misunderstand, they’ll think I’m angry because of LaVon’s rebelliousness, and it will only make this boy more of a hero in their eyes. Children choose their heroes with unerring stupidity. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, all they know of life is cold and bookless classrooms interrupted now and then by a year or two of wrestling with this stony earth, always hating whatever adult it is who keeps them at their work, always adoring whatever fool gives them the illusion of being free. You children have no practice in surviving among the ruins of your own mistakes. We adults who knew the world before it fell, we feel the weight of the rubble on our backs.

They were waiting for Carpenter’s answer. He reached out to the computer keyboard attached to his wheelchair. His hands struck like paws at the oversized keys. His fingers were too stupid for him to use them individually. They clenched when he tried to work them, tightened into a fist, a little hammer with which to strike, to break, to attack; he could not use them to grasp or even hold. Half the verbs of the world are impossible to me, he thought as he often thought. I learn them the way the blind learn words of seeing—by rote, with no hope of ever knowing truly what they mean.

The speech synthesizer droned out the words he keyed. “Brilliant essay, Mr. Jensen. The irony was powerful, the savagery was refreshing. Unfortunately, it also revealed the poverty of your soul. Alcott’s title was ironic, for she wanted to show that despite their small size, the boys in her book were great-hearted. You, however, despite your large size, are very small of heart indeed.”

LaVon looked at him through heavy-lidded eyes. Hatred? Yes, it was there. Do hate me, child. Loathe me enough to show me that you can do anything I ask you to do. Then I’ll own you, then I can get something decent out of you, and finally give you back to yourself as a human being who is worthy to be alive.

Carpenter pushed outward on both levers, and his wheelchair backed up. The day was nearly over, and tonight he knew some thing would change, painfully, in the life of the town of Reefrock. And because in a way the arrests would be his fault, and because the imprisonment of a father would cause upheaval in some of these children’s families, he felt it his duty to prepare them as best he could to understand why it had to happen, why, in the larger view, it was good. It was too much to expect that they would actually understand, today; but they might remember, might forgive him someday for what they would soon find out he had done to them.

So he pawed at the keys again. “Economics,” said the computer. “Since Mr. Jensen has made an end of literature for the day.” A few more keys, and the lecture began. Carpenter entered all his lectures and stored them in memory, so that he could sit still as ice in his chair, making eye contact with each student in turn, daring them to be inattentive. There were advantages in letting a machine speak for him; he had learned many years ago that it frightened people to have a mechanical voice speak his words while his lips were motionless. It was monstrous, it made him seem dangerous and strange. Which he far preferred to the way he looked: weak as a worm, his skinny, twisted, palsied body rigid in his chair; his body looked strange but pathetic. Only when the synthesizer spoke his acid words did he earn respect from the people who always, always looked downward at him.

“Here in the settlements just behind the fringe,” his voice went, “we do not have the luxury of a free economy. The rains sweep onto this ancient desert and find nothing here but a few plants growing in the sand. Thirty years ago nothing lived here; even the lizards had to stay where there was something for insects to eat, where there was water to drink. Then the fires we lit put a curtain in the sky, and the ice moved south, and the rains that had always passed north of us now raked and scoured the desert. It was opportunity.”

LaVon smirked as Kippie made a great show of dozing off. Carpenter keyed an interruption in the lecture. “Kippie, how well will you sleep if I send you home now for an afternoon nap?”

Kippie sat bolt upright, pretending terrible fear. But the pretense was also a pretense; he was afraid, and so to conceal it he pretended to be pretending to be afraid. Very complex, the inner life of children, thought Carpenter.

“Even as the old settlements were slowly drowned under the rising Great Salt Lake, your fathers and mothers began to move out into the desert, to reclaim it. But not alone. We can do nothing alone here. The fringers plant their grass. The grass feeds the herds and puts roots into the sand. The roots become humus, rich in nitrogen. In three years the fringe has a thin lace of soil across it. If at any point a fringer fails to plant, if at any point the soil is broken, then the rains eat channels under it, and tear away the fringe on either side, and eat back into farmland behind it. So every fringer is responsible to every other fringer, and to us. How would you feel about a fringer who failed?”

“The way I feel about a fringer who succeeds,” said Pope. He was the youngest of the sixth-graders, only thirteen years old, and he sucked up to LaVon disgracefully.

Carpenter punched four codes. “And how is that?” asked Carpenter’s metal voice.

Pope’s courage fled. “Sorry.” Carpenter did not let go. “What is it you call fringers?” he asked. He looked from one child to the next, and they would not meet his gaze. Except LaVon.

“What do you call them?” he asked again.

“If I say it, I’ll get kicked out of school,” said LaVon. “You want me kicked out of school?”

“You accuse them of fornicating with cattle, yes?”

A few giggles.

“Yes, sir,” said LaVon. “We call them cow-fornicators, sir.”

Carpenter keyed in his response while they laughed. When the room was silent, he played it back. “The bread you eat grows in the soil they created, and the manure of their cattle is the strength of your bodies. Without fringers you would be eking out a miserable life on the shores of the Mormon Sea, eating fish and drinking sage tea, and don’t forget it.” He set the volume of the synthesizer steadily lower during the speech, so that at the end they were straining to hear.

Then he resumed his lecture. “After the fringers came your mothers and fathers, planting crops in a scientifically planned order: two rows of apple trees, then six meters of wheat, then six meters of com, then six meters of cucumbers, and so on; year after year, moving six more meters out, following the fringers, making more land, more food. If you didn’t plant what you were told, and harvest it on the right day, and work shoulder to shoulder in the fields whenever the need came, then the plants would die, the rain would wash them away. What do you think of the farmer who does not do his labor or take his work turn?”

“Scum,” one child said. And another: “He’s a wallow, that’s what he is.”

“If this land is to be truly alive, it must be planted in a careful plan for eighteen years. Only then will your family have the luxury of deciding what crop to plant. Only then will you be able to be lazy if you want to, or work extra hard and profit from it. Then some of you can get rich, and others can become poor. But now, today, we do everything together, equally, and so we share equally in the rewards of our work.”

LaVon murmured something.

“Yes, LaVon?” asked Carpenter.

He made the computer speak very loudly. It startled the children.

“Nothing,” said LaVon.

“You said, ‘Except teachers.’ ”

“What if I did?”

“You are correct,” said Carpenter. “Teachers do not plow and plant in the fields with your parents. Teachers are given much more barren soil to work in, and most of the time the few seeds we plant are washed away with the first spring shower. You are living proof of the futility of our labor. But we try, Mr. Jensen, foolish as the effort is. May we continue?”

LaVon nodded. His face was flushed. Carpenter was satisfied. The boy was not hopeless—he could still feel shame at having attacked a man’s livelihood.

“There are some among us,” said the lecture, “who believe they should benefit more than others from the work of all. These are the ones who steal from the common storehouse and sell the crops that were raised by everyone’s labor. The black market pays high prices for the stolen grain, and the thieves get rich. When they get rich enough, they move away from the fringe, back to the cities of the high valleys. Their wives will wear fine clothing, their sons will have watches, their daughters will own land and marry well. And in the meantime, their friends and neighbors, who trusted them, will have nothing, will stay on the fringe, growing the food that feeds the thieves. Tell me, what do you think of a black marketeer?” He watched their faces. Yes, they knew. He could see how they glanced surreptitiously at Dick’s new shoes, at Kippie’s wristwatch. At Yutonna’s new city-bought blouse. At LaVon’s jeans. They knew, but out of fear they had said nothing. Or perhaps it wasn’t fear. Perhaps it was the hope that their own fathers would be clever enough to steal from the harvest, so they could move away instead of earning out their eighteen years.

“Some people think these thieves are clever. But I tell you they are exactly like the mobbers of the plains. They are the enemies of civilization.”

“This is civilization?” asked LaVon.

“Yes.” Carpenter keyed an answer. “We live in peace here, and you know that today’s work brings tomorrow’s bread. Out on the prairie they don’t know that. Tomorrow a mobber will be eating their bread, if they haven’t been killed. There’s no trust in the world, except here. And the black marketeers feed on trust. Their neighbors’ trust. When they’ve eaten it all, children, what will you live on then?” They didn’t understand, of course. When it was story problems about one truck approaching another truck at sixty kleeters and it takes an hour to meet, how far away were they?—the children could handle that, could figure it out laboriously with pencil and paper and prayers and curses. But the questions that mattered sailed past them like little dust devils, noticed but untouched by their feeble, self-centered little minds.

He tormented them with a pop quiz on history and thirty spelling words for their homework, then sent them out the door.

LaVon did not leave. He stood by the door, closed it, spoke. “It was a stupid book,” he said.

Carpenter clicked the keyboard. “That explains why you wrote a stupid book report.”

“It wasn’t stupid. It was funny. I read the damn book, didn’t I?”

“And I gave you a B.”

LaVon was silent a moment, then said, “Do me no favors.”

“I never will.”

“And shut up with that goddamn machine voice. You can make a voice yourself. My cousin’s got palsy and she howls to the moon.”

“You may leave now, Mr. Jensen.”

“I’m gonna hear you talk in your natural voice someday, Mr. Machine.”

“You had better go home now, Mr. Jensen.”

LaVon opened the door to leave, then turned abruptly and strode the dozen steps to the head of the class. His legs now were tight and powerful as horses’ legs, and his arms were light and strong. Carpenter watched him and felt the same old fear rise within him. If God was going to let him be born like this, he could at least keep him safe from the torturers.

“What do you want, Mr. Jensen?” But before the computer had finished speaking Carpenter’s words, LaVon reached out and took Carpenter’s wrists, held them tightly. Carpenter did not try to resist; if he did, he might go tight and twist around on the chair like a slug on a hot shovel. That would be more humiliation than he could bear, to have this boy see him writhe. His hands hung limp from LaVon’s powerful fists.

“You just mind your business,” LaVon said. “You only been here two years, you don’t know nothin’, you understand? You don’t see nothin’, you don’t say nothin’, you understand?”

So it wasn’t the book report at all. LaVon had actually understood the lecture about civilization and the black market. And knew that it was LaVon’s own father, more than anyone else in town, who was guilty. Nephi Delos Jensen, big shot foreman of Reefrock Farms. Have the marshals already taken your father? Best get home and see.

“Do you understand me?”

But Carpenter would not speak. Not without his computer. This boy would never hear how Carpenter’s own voice sounded, the whining, baying sound, like a dog trying to curl its tongue into human speech. You’ll never hear my voice, boy.

“Just try to expel me for this, Mr. Carpenter. I’ll say it never happened. I’ll say you had it in for me.”

Then he let go of Carpenter’s hands and stalked from the room.

Only then did Carpenter’s legs go rigid, lifting him on the chair so that only the computer over his lap kept him from sliding off. His arms pressed outward, his neck twisted, his jaw opened wide. It was what his body did with fear and rage; it was why he did his best never to feel those emotions. Or any others, for that matter. Dispassionate, that’s what he was. He lived the life of the mind, since the life of the body was beyond him. He stretched across his wheelchair like a mocking crucifix, hating his body and pretending that he was merely waiting for it to calm, to relax.

And it did, of course. As soon as he had control of his hands again, he took the computer out of speech mode and called up the data he had sent on to Zarahemla yesterday morning. The crop estimates for three years, and the final weight of the harvested wheat and corn, cukes and berries, apples and beans. For the first two years, the estimates were within 2 percent of the final total. The third year the estimates were higher, but the harvest stayed the same. It was suspicious. Then the bishop’s accounting records. It was a sick community. When the bishop was also seduced into this sort of thing, it meant the rottenness touched every comer of village life. Reefrock Farms looked no different from the hundred other villages just this side of the fringe, but it was diseased. Did Kippie know that even his father was in on the black marketeering? If you couldn’t trust the bishop, who was left?

The words of his own thoughts tasted sour in his mouth. Diseased. They aren’t so sick, Carpenter, he told himself. Civilization has always had its parasites, and survived. But it survived because it rooted them out from time to time, cast them away and cleansed the body. Yet they made heroes out of the thieves and despised those who reported them. There’s no thanks in what I’ve done. It isn’t love I’m earning. It isn’t love I feel. Can I pretend that I’m not just a sick and twisted body taking vengeance on those healthy enough to have families, healthy enough to want to get every possible advantage for them?

He pushed the levers inward, and the chair rolled forward. He skillfully maneuvered between the chairs, but it still took nearly a full minute to get to the door. I’m a snail. A worm living in a metal carapace, a water snail creeping along the edge of the aquarium glass, trying to keep it clean from the filth of the fish. I’m the loathsome one; they’re the golden ones that shine in the sparkling water. They’re the ones whose death is mourned. But without me they’d die. I’m as responsible for their beauty as they are. More, because I work to sustain it, and they simply—are.

It came out this way whenever he tried to reason out an excuse for his own life. He rolled down the corridor to the front door of the school. He knew, intellectually, that his work in crop rotation and timing had been the key to opening up the vast New Soil Lands here in the eastern Utah desert. Hadn’t they invented a civilian medal for him, and then, for good measure, given him the same medal they gave to the freedom riders who went out and brought immigrant trains safely into the mountains? I was a hero, they said, this worm in his wheelchair house. But Governor Monson had looked at him with those distant, pitying eyes. He, too, saw the worm; Carpenter might be a hero, but he was still Carpenter.

They had built a concrete ramp for his chair after the second time the students knocked over the wooden ramp and forced him to summon help through the computer airlink network. He remembered sitting on the lip of the porch, looking out toward the cabins of the village. If anyone saw him, then they consented to his imprisonment, because they didn’t come to help him. But Carpenter understood. Fear of the strange, the unknown. It wasn’t comfortable for them, to be near Mr. Carpenter with the mechanical voice and the electric rolling chair. He understood, he really did, he was human, too, wasn’t he? He even agreed with them. Pretend Carpenter isn’t there, and maybe he’ll go away.

The helicopter came as he rolled out onto the asphalt of the street. It landed in the circle, between the storehouse and the chapel. Four marshals came out of the gash in its side and spread out through the town.

It happened that Carpenter was rolling in front of Bishop Anderson’s house when the marshal knocked on the door. He hadn’t expected them to make the arrests while he was still going down the street. His first impulse was to speed up, to get away from the arrest. He didn’t want to see. He liked Bishop Anderson. Used to, anyway. He didn’t wish him ill. If the bishop had kept his hands out of the harvest, if he hadn’t betrayed his trust, he wouldn’t have been afraid to hear the knock on the door and see the badge in the marshal’s hand.

Carpenter could hear Sister Anderson crying as they led her husband away. Was Kippie there, watching? Did he notice Mr. Carpenter passing by on the road? Carpenter knew what it would cost these families. Not just the shame, though it would be intense. Far worse would be the loss of their father for years, the extra labor for the children. To break up a family was a terrible thing to do, for the innocent would pay as great a cost as their guilty father, and it wasn’t fair, for they had done no wrong. But it was the stem necessity, if civilization was to survive.

Carpenter slowed down his wheelchair, forcing himself to hear the weeping from the bishop’s house, to let them look at him with hatred if they knew what he had done. And they would know: He had specifically refused to be anonymous. If I can inflict stem necessity on them, then I must not run from the consequences of my own actions. I will bear what I must bear, as well—the grief, the resentment, and the rage of the few families I have harmed for the sake of all the rest.

The helicopter had taken off again before Carpenter’s chair took him home. It sputtered overhead and disappeared into the low clouds. Rain again tomorrow, of course. Three days dry, three days wet; it had been the weather pattern all spring. The rain would come pounding tonight. Four hours till dark. Maybe the rain wouldn’t come until dark.

He looked up from his book. He had heard footsteps outside his house. And whispers. He rolled to the window and looked out. The sky was a little darker. The computer said it was 4:30. The wind was coming up. But the sounds he heard hadn’t been the wind. It had been 3:30 when the marshals came. Tour-thirty now, and footsteps and whispers outside his house. He felt the stiffening in his arms and legs. Wait, he told himself. There’s nothing to fear. Relax. Quiet. Yes. His body eased. His heart pounded, but it was slowing down.

The door crashed open. He was rigid at once. He couldn’t even bring his hands down to touch the levers so he could turn to see who it was. He just spread there helplessly in his chair as the heavy footfalls came closer.

“There he is.” The voice was Kippie’s.

Hands seized his arms, pulled on him; the chair rocked as they tugged him to one side. He could not relax. “Son of a bitch is stiff as a statue.” Pope’s voice. Get out of here, little boy, said Carpenter, you’re in something too deep for you. But of course they did not hear him, since his fingers couldn’t reach the keyboard where he kept his voice.

“Maybe this is what he does when he isn’t at school. Just sits here and makes statues at the window.” Kippie laughed.

“He’s scared stiff, that’s what he is.”

“Just bring him out, and fast.” LaVon’s voice carried authority.

They tried to lift him out of the chair, but his body was too rigid; they hurt him, though, trying, for his thighs pressed up against the computer with cruel force, and they wrung at his arms.

“Just carry the whole chair,” said LaVon.

They picked up the chair and pulled him toward the door. His arms smacked against the corners and the doorframe. “It’s like he’s dead or something,” said Kippie. “He don’t say nothin’.”

He was shouting at them in his mind, however. What are you doing here? Getting some sort of vengeance? Do you think punishing me will bring your fathers back, you fools?

They pulled and pushed the chair into the van they had parked in front. The bishop’s van—Kippie wouldn’t have the use of that much longer. How much of the stolen grain was carried in here?

“He’s going to roll around back here,” said Kippie.

“Tip him over,” said LaVon.

Carpenter felt the chair fly under him; by chance he landed in such a way that his left arm was not caught behind the chair. It would have broken then. As it was, the impact with the floor bent his arm forcibly against the strength of his spasmed muscles; he felt something tear, and his throat made a sound in spite of his effort to bear it silently.

“Did you hear that?” said Pope. “He’s got a voice.”

“Not for much longer,” said LaVon.

For the first time Carpenter realized that it wasn’t just pain that he had to fear. Now, only an hour after their fathers had been taken, long before time could cool their rage, these boys had murder in their hearts.

The road was smooth enough in town, but soon it became rough and painful. From that, Carpenter knew they were headed toward the fringe. He could feel the cold metal of the van’s corrugated floor against his face; the pain in his arm was settling down to a steady throb. Relax, quiet, calm, he told himself. How many times in your life have you wished to die? Death means nothing to you, fool—you decided that years ago—death is nothing but a release from this corpse. So what are you afraid of? Calm, quiet. His arms bent, his legs relaxed.

“He’s getting soft again,” reported Pope. From the front of the van, Kippie guffawed. “Little and squirmy. Mr. Bug. We always call you that, you hear me, Mr. Bug? There was always two of you. Mr. Machine and Mr. Bug. Mr. Machine was mean and tough and smart, but Mr. Bug was weak and squishy and gross, with wiggly legs. Made us want to puke, looking at Mr. Bug.”

I’ve been tormented by master torturers in my childhood, Pope Griffith. You are only a pathetic echo of their talent. Carpenter’s words were silent, until his hands found the keys. His left hand was almost too weak to use, after the fall, so he coded the words clumsily with his right hand alone. “If I disappear the day of your father’s arrest, Mr. Griffith, don’t you think they’ll guess who took me?”

“Keep his hands away from the keys!” shouted LaVon. “Don’t let him touch the computer.”

Almost immediately the van lurched and took a savage bounce as it left the roadway. Now it was clattering over rough, unfinished ground. Carpenter’s head banged against the metal floor, again and again. The pain of it made him go rigid; fortunately, spasms always carried his head upward to the right, so that his rigidity kept him from having his head beaten to unconsciousness.

Soon the bouncing stopped. The engine died. Carpenter could hear the wind whispering over the open desert land. They were beyond the fields and orchards, out past the grassland of the fringe. The van doors opened. LaVon and Kippie reached in and pulled him out, chair and all. They dragged the chair to the top of a wash. There was no water in it yet.

“Let’s just throw him down,” said Kippie. “Break his spastic little neck.” Carpenter had not guessed that anger could burn so hot in these languid, mocking boys.

But LaVon showed no fire. He was cold and smooth as snow. “I don’t want to kill him yet. I want to hear him talk first.”

Carpenter reached out to code an answer. LaVon slapped his hands away, gripped the computer, braced a foot on the wheelchair, and tore the computer off its mounting. He threw it across the arroyo; it smacked against the far side and tumbled down into the dry wash. Probably it wasn’t damaged, but it wasn’t the computer Carpenter was frightened for. Until now Carpenter had been able to cling to a hope that they just meant to frighten him. But it was unthinkable to treat precious electronic equipment that way, not if civilization still had any hold on LaVon.

“With your voice, Mr. Carpenter. Not the machine, your own voice.”

Not for you, Mr. Jensen. I don’t humiliate myself for you.

“Come on,” said Pope. “You know what we said. We just take him down into the wash and leave him there.”

“We’ll send him down the quick way,” said Kippie. He shoved at the wheelchair, teetering it toward the brink.

“We’ll take him down!” shouted Pope. “We aren’t going to kill him! You promised!”

“Lot of difference it makes,” said Kippie. “As soon as it rains in the mountains, this sucker’s gonna fill up with water and give him the swim of his life.”

“We don’t kill him,” insisted Pope.

“Come on,” said LaVon. “Let’s get him down into the wash.”

Carpenter concentrated on not going rigid as they wrestled the chair down the slope. The walls of the wash weren’t sheer, but they were steep enough that the climb down wasn’t easy. Carpenter tried to concentrate on mathematics problems so he wouldn’t panic and writhe for them again. Finally the chair came to rest at the bottom of the wash.

“You think you can come here and decide who’s good and who’s bad, right?” said LaVon. “You think you can sit on your little throne and decide whose father’s going to jail, is that it?”

Carpenter’s hands rested on the twisted mountings that used to hold his computer. He felt naked, defenseless without his stinging, frightening voice to whip them into line. LaVon was smart to take away his voice. LaVon knew what Carpenter could do with words.

“Everybody does it,” said Kippie. “You’re the only one who doesn’t black the harvest, and that’s only because you can’t.”

“It’s easy to be straight when you can’t get anything on the side, anyway,” said Pope.

Nothing’s easy, Mr. Griffith. Not even virtue.

“My father’s a good man!” shouted Kippie. “He’s the bishop, for Christ’s sake! And you sent him to jail!”

“If he ain’t shot,” said Pope.

“They don’t shoot you for blacking anymore,” said LaVon. “That was in the old days.”

The old days. Only five years ago. But those were the old days for these children. Children are innocent in the eyes of God, Carpenter reminded himself. He tried to believe that these boys didn’t know what they were doing to him.

Kippie and Pope started up the side of the wash. “Come on,” said Pope. “Come on, LaVon.”

“Minute,” said LaVon. He leaned close to Carpenter and spoke softly, intensely, his breath hot and foul, his spittle like sparks from a cookfire on Carpenter’s face. “Just ask me,” he said. “Just open your mouth and beg me, little man, and I’ll carry you back up to the van. They’ll let you live if I tell them to, you know that.”

He knew it. But he also knew that LaVon would never tell them to spare his life.

“Beg me, Mr. Carpenter. Ask me please to let you live, and you’ll live. Look. I’ll even save your little talkbox for you.” He scooped up the computer from the sandy bottom and heaved it up out of the wash. It sailed over Kippie’s head just as he was emerging from the arroyo.

“What the hell was that, you trying to kill me?”

LaVon whispered again. “You know how many times you made me crawl? And now I gotta crawl forever, my father’s a jailbird thanks to you; I got little brothers and sisters—even if you hate me, what’ve you got against them, huh?”

A drop of rain struck Carpenter in the face. There were a few more drops.

“Feel that?” said LaVon. “The rain in the mountains makes this wash flood every time. You crawl for me, Carpenter, and I’ll take you up.”

Carpenter didn’t feel particularly brave as he kept his mouth shut and made no sound. If he actually believed LaVon might keep his promise, he would swallow his pride and beg. But LaVon was lying. He couldn’t afford to save Carpenter’s life now, even if he wanted to. It had gone too far, the consequences would be too great. Carpenter had to die, accidently drowned, no witnesses, such a sad thing, such a great man, and no one the wiser about the three boys who carried him to his dying place.

If he begged and whined in his hound voice, his cat voice, his bestial monster voice, then LaVon would smirk at him in triumph and whisper, “Sucker.” Carpenter knew the boy too well. Tomorrow LaVon would have second thoughts, of course, but right now there’d be no softening. He only wanted his triumph to be complete, that’s why he held out a hope. He wanted to watch Carpenter twist like a worm and bay like a hound before he died. It was a victory, then, to keep silence. Let him remember me in his nightmares of guilt, let him remember I had courage enough not to whimper.

LaVon spat at him; the spittle struck him in the chest. “I can’t even get it in your ugly little worm face,” he said. Then he shoved the wheelchair and scrambled up the bank of the wash.

For a moment the chair hung in balance; then it tipped over. This time Carpenter relaxed during the fall and rolled out of the chair without further injury. His back was to the side of the wash they had climbed; he couldn’t see if they were watching him or not. So he held still, except for a slight twitching of his hurt left arm. After a while the van drove away.

Only then did he begin to reach out his arms and paw at the sand of the arroyo bottom. His legs were completely useless, dragging behind him. But he was not totally helpless without his chair. He could control his arms, and by reaching them out and then pulling his body onto his elbows, he could make good progress across the sand. How did they think he got from his wheelchair to bed, or to the toilet? Hadn’t they seen him use his hands and arms? Of course they saw, but they assumed that because his arms were weak, they were useless.

Then he got to the arroyo wall and realized that they were useless. As soon as there was any slope to climb, his left arm began to hurt badly. And the bank was steep. Without being able to use his fingers to clutch at one of the sagebrushes or tree starts, there was no hope he could climb out.

The lightning was flashing in the distance, and he could hear the thunder. The rain here was a steady plick plick plick on the sand, a tiny slapping sound on the few leaves. It would already be raining heavily in the mountains. Soon the water would be here.

He dragged himself another meter up the slope despite the pain. The sand scraped his elbows as he dug with them to pull himself along. The rain fell steadily now, many large drops, but still not a downpour. It was little comfort to Carpenter. Water was beginning to dribble down the sides of the wash and form puddles in the streambed.

With bitter humor he imagined himself telling Dean Wintz, “On second thought, I don’t want to go out and teach sixth grade. I’ll just go right on teaching them here, when they come off the farm. Just the few who want to learn something beyond sixth grade, who want a university education. The ones who love books and numbers and languages, the ones who understand civilization and want to keep it alive. Give me the children who want to learn, instead of these poor sandscrapers who go to school only because the law commands that six years out of their first fifteen years have to be spent as captives in the prison of learning.”

Why do the fire-eaters go out searching for the old missile sites and risk their lives disarming them? To preserve civilization. Why do the freedom riders leave their safe homes and go out to bring the frightened, lonely refugees in to the safety of the mountains? To preserve civilization.

And why had Timothy Carpenter informed the marshals about the black marketeering he had discovered in Reefrock Farms? Was it, truly, to preserve civilization?

Yes, he insisted to himself.

The water was flowing now along the bottom of the wash. His feet were near the flow. He painfully pulled himself up another meter. He had to keep his body pointed straight toward the side of the wash, or he would not be able to stop himself from rolling to one side or the other. He found that by kicking his legs in his spastic, uncontrolled fashion, he could root the toes of his shoes into the sand just enough that he could take some pressure off his arms, just for a moment.

No, he told himself. It was not just to preserve civilization. It was because of the swaggering way their children walked, in their stolen clothing, with their full bellies and healthy skin and hair, cocky as only security can make a child feel. Enough and to spare, that’s what they had, while the poor suckers around them worried whether there’d be food enough for the winter, and if their mother was getting enough so the nursing baby wouldn’t lack, and whether their shoes could last another summer. The thieves could take a wagon up the long road to Price or even to Zarahemla, the shining city on the Mormon Sea, while the children of honest men never saw anything but the dust and sand and ruddy mountains of the fringe.

Carpenter hated them for that, for all the differences in the world, for the children who had legs and walked nowhere that mattered, for the children who had voices and used them to speak stupidity, who had deft and clever fingers and used them to frighten and compel the weak. For all the inequalities in the world, he hated them and wanted them to pay for it. They couldn’t go to jail for having obedient arms and legs and tongues, but they could damn well go for stealing the hard-earned harvest of trusting men and women. Whatever his own motives might be, that was reason enough to call it justice.

The water was rising many centimeters every minute. The current was tugging at his feet now. He released his elbows to reach them up for another, higher purchase on the bank, but no sooner had he reached out his arms than he slid downward and the current pulled harder at him. It took great effort just to return to where he started, and his left arm was on fire with the tearing muscles. Still, it was life, wasn’t it? His left elbow rooted him in place while he reached with his right arm and climbed higher still, and again higher. He even tried to use his fingers to cling to the soil, to a branch, to a rock, but his fists stayed closed and hammered uselessly against the ground.

Am I vengeful, bitter, spiteful? Maybe I am. But whatever my motive was, they were thieves, and had no business remaining among the people they had betrayed. It was hard on the children, of course, cruelly hard on them, to have their fathers stripped away from them by the authorities. But how much worse would it be for the fathers to stay, and the children to learn that trust was for the stupid and honor for the weak? What kind of people would we be then, if the children could do their numbers and letters but couldn’t hold someone else’s plate and leave the food on it untouched?

The water was up to his waist. The current was rocking him slightly, pulling him downstream. His legs were floating behind him now, and water was trickling down the bank, making the earth looser under his elbows. So the children wanted him dead now, in their fury. He would die in a good cause, wouldn’t he?

With the water rising faster, the current swifter, he decided that martyrdom was not all it was cracked up to be. Nor was life, when he came right down to it, something to be given up lightly because of a few inconveniences. He managed to squirm up a few more centimeters, but now a shelf of earth blocked him. Someone with hands could have reached over it easily and grabbed hold of the sagebrush just above it.

He clenched his mouth tight and lifted his arm up onto the shelf of dirt. He tried to scrape some purchase for his forearm, but the soil was slick. When he tried to place some weight on the arm, he slid down again.

This was it, this was his death, he could feel it; and in the sudden rush of fear, his body went rigid. Almost at once his feet caught on the rocky bed of the river and stopped him from sliding farther. Spastic, his legs were of some use to him. He swung his right arm up, scraped his fist on the sagebrush stem, trying to pry his clenched fingers open.

And, with agonizing effort, he did it. All but the smallest finger opened enough to hook the stem. Now the clenching was some help to him. He used his left arm mercilessly, ignoring the pain, to pull him up a little farther, onto the shelf; his feet were still in the water, but his waist wasn’t, and the current wasn’t strong against him now.

It was a victory, but not much of one. The water wasn’t even a meter deep yet, and the current wasn’t yet strong enough to have carried away his wheelchair. But it was enough to kill him, if he hadn’t come this far. Still, what was he really accomplishing? In storms like this, the water came up near the top; he’d have been dead for an hour before the water began to come down again.

He could hear, in the distance, a vehicle approaching on the road. Had they come back to watch him die? They couldn’t be that stupid. How far was this wash from the highway? Not far—they hadn’t driven that long on the rough ground to get here. But it meant nothing. No one would see him, or even the computer that lay among the tumbleweeds and sagebrush at the arroyo’s edge.

They might hear him. It was possible. If their window was open—in a rainstorm? If their engine was quiet—but loud enough that he could hear them? Impossible, impossible. And it might be the boys again, come to hear him scream and whine for life; I’m not going to cry out now, after so many years of silence—

But the will to live, he discovered, was stronger than shame; his voice came unbidden to his throat. His lips and tongue and teeth that in childhood had so painstakingly practiced words that only his family could ever understand now formed a word again. “Help!” It was a difficult word; it almost closed his mouth, it made him too quiet to hear. So at last he simply howled, saying nothing except the terrible sound of his voice.

The brakes squealed, long and loud, and the vehicle rattled to a stop. The engine died. Carpenter howled again. Car doors slammed. “I tell you it’s just a dog somewhere, somebody’s old dog—”

Carpenter howled again.

“Dog or not, it’s alive, isn’t it?”

They ran along the edge of the arroyo, and someone saw him.

“A little kid!”

“What’s he doing down there!”

“Come on, kid, you can climb up from there!”

I nearly killed myself climbing this far, you fool, if I could climb, don’t you think I would have? Help me! He cried out again.

“It’s not a little boy. He’s got a beard—”

“Come on, hold on, we’re coming down!”

“There’s a wheelchair in the water—”

“He must be a cripple.”

There were several voices, some of them women, but it was two strong men who reached him, splashing their feet in the water. They hooked him under the arms and carried him to the top.

“Can you stand up? Are you all right? Can you stand?”

Carpenter strained to squeeze out the word: “No.”

The older woman took command. “He’s got palsy, as any fool can see. Go back down there and get his wheelchair, Tom, no sense in making him wait till they can get him another one, go on down! It’s not that bad down there, the flood isn’t here yet!” Her voice was crisp and clear, perfect speech, almost foreign it was so precise. She and the young woman carried him to the truck. It was a big old flatbed truck from the old days, and on its back was a canvas-covered heap of odd shapes. On the canvas Carpenter read the words SWEETWATER’S MIRACLE PAGEANT. Traveling show people, then, racing for town to get out of the rain, and through some miracle they had heard his call.

“Your poor arms,” said the young woman, wiping off grit and sand that had sliced his elbows. “Did you climb that far out of there with just your arms?”

The young men came out of the arroyo muddy and cursing, but they had the wheelchair. They tied it quickly to the back of the truck; one of the men found the computer, too, and took it inside the cab. It was designed to be rugged, and to Carpenter’s relief it still worked.

“Thank you,” said his mechanical voice.

“I told them I heard something, and they said I was crazy,” said the old woman. “You live in Reefrock?”

“Yes,” said his voice.

“Amazing what those old machines can still do, even after being dumped there in the rain,” said the old woman. “Well, you came close to death, there, but you’re all right, it’s the best we can ask for. We’ll take you to the doctor.”

“Just take me home. Please.”

So they did, but insisted on helping him bathe and fixing him dinner. The rain was coming down in sheets when they were done. “All I have is a floor,” he said, “but you can stay.”

“Better then trying to pitch the tents in this.” So they stayed the night.

Carpenter’s arms ached too badly for him to sleep, even though he was exhausted. He lay awake thinking of the current pulling him, imagining what would have happened to him, how far he might have gone downstream before drowning, where his body might have ended up. Caught in a snag somewhere, dangling on some branch or rock as the water went down and left his slack body to dry in the sun. Far out in the desert somewhere, maybe. Or perhaps the flood-water might have carried him all the way to the Colorado and tumbled him head over heels down the rapids, through the canyons, past the ruins of the old dams, and finally into the Gulf of California. He’d pass through Navaho territory then, and the Hopi Protectorate, and into areas that the Chihuahua claimed and threatened to go to war to keep. He’d see more of the world than he had seen in his life.

I saw more of the world tonight, he thought, than I had ever thought to see. I saw death and how much I feared it.

And he looked into himself, wondering how much he had changed.

Late in the morning, when he finally awoke, the pageant people were gone. They had a show, of course, and had to do some kind of parade to let people know. School would let out early so they could put on the show without having to waste power on lights. There’d be no school this afternoon. But what about his morning classes? There must have been some question when he didn’t show up; someone would have called, and if he didn’t answer the phone, someone would have come by. Maybe the show people had still been here when they came. The word would have spread through school that he was still alive.

He tried to imagine LaVon and Kippie and Pope hearing that Mr. Machine, Mr. Bug, Mr. Carpenter was still alive. They’d be afraid, of course. Maybe defiant. Maybe they had even confessed. No, not that. LaVon would keep them quiet. Try to think of a way out. Maybe even plan an escape, though finding a place to go that wasn’t under Utah authority would be a problem.

What am I doing? Trying to plan how my enemies can escape retribution? I should call the marshals again and tell them what happened. If someone hasn’t called them already.

His wheelchair waited by his bed. The show people had shined it up for him, got rid of all the muck. Even straightened the computer mounts and tied the computer on; jury-rigged it, but it would do. Would the motor run, after being under water? He saw that they had even changed batteries and had the old one set aside. They were good people. Not at all what the stories said about show gypsies. Though there was no natural law that people who help cripples can’t also seduce all the young girls in the village.

His arms hurt and his left arm was weak and trembly, but he managed to get into the chair. The pain brought back yesterday. I’m alive today, and yet today doesn’t feel any different from last week, when I was also alive. Being on the brink of death wasn’t enough; the only transformation is to die.

He ate lunch because it was nearly noon. Eldon Finch came by to see him, along with the sheriff. “I’m the new bishop,” said Eldon.

“Didn’t waste any time,” said Carpenter.

“I gotta tell you, Brother Carpenter, things are in a tizzy today. Yesterday, too, of course, what with avenging angels dropping out of the sky and taking away people we all trusted. There’s some says you shouldn’t’ve told, and some says you did right, and some ain’t sayin’ nothin’ ’cause they’re afraid somethin’ll get told on them. Ugly times, ugly times, when folks steal from their neighbors.”

Sheriff Budd finally spoke up. “Almost as ugly as tryin’ to drownd ’em.”

The bishop nodded. “ ‘Course you know the reason we come, Sheriff Budd and me, we come to find out who done it.”

“Done what?”

“Plunked you down that wash. You aren’t gonna tell me you drove that little wheelie chair of yours out there past the fringe. What, was you speedin’ so fast you lost control and spun out? Give me peace of heart, Brother Carpenter, give me trust.” The bishop and the sheriff both laughed at that. Quite a joke.

Now’s the time, thought Carpenter. Name the names. The motive will be clear, justice will be done. They put you through the worst hell of your life, they made you cry out for help, they taught you the taste of death. Now even things up.

But he didn’t key their names into the computer. He thought of Kippie’s mother crying at the door. When the crying stopped, there’d be years ahead. They were a long way from proving out their land. Kippie was through with school, he’d never go on, never get out. The adult burden was on those boys now, years too young. Should their families suffer even more, with another generation gone to prison? Carpenter had nothing to gain, and many who were guiltless stood to lose too much.

“Brother Carpenter,” said Sheriff Budd. “Who was it?”

He keyed in his answer. “I didn’t get a look at them.”

“Their voices, didn’t you know them?”

“No.”

The bishop looked steadily at him. “They tried to kill you, Brother Carpenter. That’s no joke. You like to died, if those show people hadn’t happened by. And I have my own ideas who it was, seein’ who had reason to hate you unto death yesterday.”

“As you said. A lot of people think an outsider like me should have kept his nose out of Reefrock’s business.” The bishop frowned at him. “You scared they’ll try again?”

“No.”

“Nothin’ I can do,” said the sheriff. “I think you’re a damn fool, Brother Carpenter, but nothin’ I can do if you don’t even care.”

“Thanks for coming by.”

He didn’t go to church Sunday. But on Monday he went to school, same time as usual. And there were La Von and Kippie and Pope, right in their places. But not the same as usual. The wisecracks were over. When he called on them, they answered if they could and didn’t if they couldn’t. When he looked at them, they looked away.

He didn’t know if it was shame or fear that he might someday tell; he didn’t care. The mark was on them. They would marry someday, go out into even newer lands just behind the ever-advancing fringe, have babies, work until their bodies were exhausted, and then drop into a grave. But they’d remember that one day they had left a cripple to die. He had no idea what it would mean to them, but they would remember.

Within a few weeks LaVon and Kippie were out of school; with their fathers gone, there was too much fieldwork and school was a luxury their families couldn’t afford for them. Pope had an older brother still at home, so he stayed out the year.

One time Pope almost talked to him. It was a windy day that spattered sand against the classroom window, and the storm coming out of the south looked to be a nasty one. When class was over, most of the kids ducked their heads and rushed outside, hurrying to get home before the downpour began. A few stayed, though, to talk with Carpenter about this and that. When the last one left, Carpenter saw that Pope was still there. His pencil was hovering over a piece of paper. He looked up at Carpenter, then set the pencil down, picked up his books, started for the door. He paused for a moment with his hand on the doorknob. Carpenter waited for him to speak. But the boy only opened the door and went on out.

Carpenter rolled over to the door and watched him as he walked away. The wind caught at his jacket. Like a kite, thought Carpenter, it’s lifting him along.

But it wasn’t true. The boy didn’t rise and fly. And now Carpenter saw the wind like a current down the village street, sweeping Pope away. All the bodies in the world, caught in that same current, that same wind, blown down the same rivers, the same streets, and finally coming to rest on some snag, through some door, in some grave, God knows where or why.

PORTRAITS OF HIS CHILDREN

George R.R. Martin

We are pleased to be showcasing this powerful story by the winner of three Hugos and a Nebula. Although this story contains brief scenes and language which may be disturbing to some, we wouldn’t be surprised if “Portraits of His Children” puts the author in the running for another of these coveted awards. Mr. Martin lives in a fake adobe abode in Sante Fe. New Mexico. His most recent books include Nightflyers (Bluejay, October 1985) and Tuf Voyaging, (scheduled to be released from Baen Books in January of 1986).

Richard Cantling found the package leaning up against his front door, one evening in late October when he was setting out for his walk. It annoyed him. He had told his postman repeatedly to ring the bell when delivering anything too big to fit through the mail slot, yet the man persisted in abandoning the packages on the porch, where any passerby could simply walk off with them. Although, to be fair, Cantling’s house was rather isolated, sitting on the river bluffs at the end of a cul de sac, and the trees effectively screened it off from the street. Still, there was always the possibility of damage from rain or wind or snow.

Cantling’s displeasure lasted only an instant. Wrapped in heavy brown paper and carefully sealed with tape, the package had a shape that told all. Obviously a painting. And the hand that had block-printed his address in heavy green marker was unmistakably Michelle’s. Another self-portrait then. She must be feeling repentant.

He was more surprised than he cared to admit, even to himself. He had always been a stubborn man. He could hold grudges for years, even decades, and he had the greatest difficulty admitting any wrong. And Michelle, being his only child, seemed to take after him in all of that. He hadn’t expected this kind of gesture from her. It was . . . well, sweet.

He set aside his walking stick to lug the package inside, where he could unwrap it out of the damp and the blustery October wind. It was about three feet tall, and unexpectedly heavy. He carried it awkwardly, shutting the door with his foot and struggling down the long foyer toward his den. The brown drapes were tightly closed; the room was dark, and heavy with the smell of dust. Cantling had to set down the package to fumble for the light.

He hadn’t used his den much since that night, two months ago, when Michelle had gone storming out. Her self-portrait was still sitting up above the wide slate mantle. Below, the fireplace badly wanted cleaning, and on the built-in bookshelves his novels, all bound in handsome dark leather, stood dusty and disarrayed. Cantling looked at the old painting and felt a brief wash of anger return to him, followed by depression. It had been such a nasty thing for her to do. The portrait had been quite good, really. Much more to his taste than the tortured abstractions that Michelle liked to paint for her own pleasure, or the trite paperback covers she did to make her living. She had done it when she was twenty, as a birthday gift for him. He’d always been fond of it. It captured her as no photograph had ever done, not just the lines of her face, the high angular cheekbones and blue eyes and tangled ash-blond hair, but the personality inside. She looked so young and fresh and confident, and her smile reminded him so much of Helen, and the way she had smiled on their wedding day. He’d told Michelle more than once how much he’d liked that smile.

And so, of course, it had been the smile that she’d started on. She used an antique dagger from his collection, chopped out the mouth with four jagged slashes. She’d gouged out the wide blue eyes next, as if intent on blinding the portrait, and when he came bursting in after her, she’d been slicing the canvas into ribbons with long angry crooked cuts. Cantling couldn’t forget the moment. So ugly. And to do something like that to her own work . . . he couldn’t imagine it. He had tried to picture himself mutilating one of his books, tried to comprehend what might drive one to such an act, and he had failed utterly. It was unthinkable, beyond even imagination.

The mutilated portrait still hung in its place. He’d been too stubborn to take it down, and yet he could not bear to look at it. So he had taken to avoiding his den. It wasn’t hard. The old house was a huge rambling place, with more rooms than he could possibly need or want, living alone as he did. It had been built a century ago, when Perrot had been a thriving river town, and they said that a succession of steamer captains had lived there. Certainly the steamboat gothic architecture and all the gingerbread called up visions of the glory days on the river, and he had a fine view of the Mississippi from the third-story windows and the widow’s walk. After the incident, Cantling had moved his desk and his typewriter to one of the unused bedrooms and settled in there, determined to let the den remain as Michelle had left it until she came back with an apology.

He had not expected that apology quite so soon, however, nor in quite this form. A tearful phone call, yes—but not another portrait. Still, this was nicer somehow, more personal. And it was a gesture, the first step toward a reconciliation. Richard Cantling knew too well that he was incapable of taking that step himself, no matter how lonely he might become. And he had been lonely, he did not try to fool himself on that score. He had left all his New York friends behind when he moved out to this Iowa river town, and had formed no local friendships to replace them. That was nothing new. He had never been an outgoing sort. He had a certain shyness that kept him apart, even from those few friends he did make. Even from his family, really. Helen had often accused him of caring more for his characters than for real people, an accusation that Michelle had picked up on by the time she was in her teens. Helen was gone too. They’d divorced ten years ago, and she’d been dead for five. Michelle, infuriating as she could be, was really all he had left. He had missed her, missed even the arguments.

He thought about Michelle as he tore open the plain brown paper. He would call her, of course. He would call her and tell her how good the new portrait was, how much he liked it. He would tell her that he’d missed her, invite her to come out for Thanksgiving. Yes, that would be the way to handle it. No mention of their argument, he didn’t want to start it all up again, and neither he nor Michelle was the kind to back down gracefully. A family trait, that stubborn willful pride, as ingrained as the high cheekbones and squarish jaw. The Cantling heritage.

It was an antique frame, he saw. Wooden, elaborately carved, very heavy, just the sort of thing he liked. It would mesh with his Victorian decor much better than the thin brass frame on the old portrait. Cantling pulled the wrapping paper away, eager to see what his daughter had done. She was nearly thirty now—or was she past thirty already? He never could keep track of her age, or even her birthdays. Anyway, she was a much better painter than she’d been at twenty. The new portrait ought to be striking. He ripped away the last of the wrappings and turned it around.

His first reaction was that it was a fine, fine piece of work, maybe the best thing that Michelle Cantling had ever done.

Then, belatedly, the admiration washed away, and was replaced by anger. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Michelle. Which meant it wasn’t a replacement for the portrait she had so willfully vandalized. It was . . . something else.

Someone else.

It was a face he had never before laid eyes on. But it was a face he recognized as readily as if he had looked on it a thousand times. Oh, yes.

The man in the portrait was young. Twenty, maybe even younger, though his curly brown hair was already well-streaked with gray. It was unruly hair, disarrayed as if the man had just come from sleep, falling forward into his eyes. Those eyes were a bright green, lazy eyes somehow, shining with some secret amusement. He had high Cantling cheekbones, but the jawline was all wrong for a relative. Beneath a wide, flat nose, he wore a sardonic smile; his whole posture was somehow insolent. The portrait showed him dressed in faded dungarees and a ravelled WMCA Good Guy sweatshirt, with a half-eaten raw onion in one hand. The background was a brick wall covered with graffiti.

Cantling had created him.

Edward Donohue. Dunnahoo, that’s what they’d called him, his friends and peers, the other characters in Richard Cantling’s first novel, Hangin’ Out. Dunnahoo had been the protagonist. A wise guy, a smart mouth, too damn bright for his own good. Looking down at the portrait, Cantling felt as if he’d known him for half his life. As indeed he had, in a way. Known him and, yes, cherished him, in the peculiar way a writer can cherish one of his characters.

Michelle had captured him true. Cantling stared at the painting and it all came back to him, all the events he had bled over so long ago, all the people he had fashioned and described with such loving care. He remembered Jocko, and the Squid, and Nancy, and Ricci’s Pizzeria where so much of the book’s action had taken place (he could see it vividly in his mind’s eye), and the business with Arthur and the motorcycle, and the climactic pizza fight. And Dunnahoo. Dunnahoo especially. Smarting off, fooling around, hanging out, coming of age. “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” he said. A dozen times or so. It was the book’s closing line.

For a moment, Richard Cantling felt a vast, strange affection well up inside him, as if he had just been reunited with an old, lost friend.

And then, almost as an afterthought, he remembered all the ugly words that he and Michelle had flung at each other that night, and suddenly it made sense. Cantling’s face went hard. “Bitch,” he said aloud. He turned away in fury, helpless without a target for his anger. “Bitch,” he said again, as he slammed the door of the den behind him.

“Bitch,” he had called her.

She turned around with the knife in her hand. Her eyes were raw and red from crying. She had the smile in her hand. She balled it up and threw it at him. “Here, you bastard, you like the damned smile so much, here it is.”

It bounced off his cheek. His face was reddening. “You’re just like your mother,” he said. “She was always breaking things too.”

“You gave her good reason, didn’t you?”

Cantling ignored that. “What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell do you think you’re going to accomplish with this stupid melodramatic gesture? That’s all it is, you know. Bad melodrama. Who the hell do you think you are, some character in a Tennessee Williams play? Come off it, Michelle. If I wrote a scene like this in one of my books, they’d laugh at me.”

“This isn’t one of your goddamned books!” she screamed. “This is real life. My life. I’m a real person, you son of a bitch, not a character in some damned book.” She whirled, raised the knife, slashed and slashed again.

Cantling folded his arms against his chest as he stood watching. “I hope you’re enjoying this pointless exercise.”

“I’m enjoying the hell out of it,” Michelle yelled back.

“Good. I’d hate to think it was for nothing. This is all very revealing, you know. That’s your own face you’re working on. I didn’t think you had that much self-hate in you.”

“If I do, we know who put it there, don’t we?” She was finished. She turned back to him, and threw down the knife. She had begun to cry again, and her breath was coming hard. “I’m leaving. Bastard. I hope you’re ever so fucking happy here, really I do.”

“I haven’t done anything to deserve this,” Cantling said awkwardly. It was not much of an apology, not much of a bridge back to understanding, but it was the best he could do. Apologies had never come easily to Richard Cantling.

“You deserve a thousand times worse,” Michelle had screamed back at him. She was such a pretty girl, and she looked so ugly. All that nonsense about anger making people beautiful was a dreadful cliche, and wrong as well; Cantling was glad he’d never used it. “You’re supposed to be my father,” Michelle said. “You’re supposed to love me. You’re supposed to be my father, and you raped me, you bastard.”

Cantling was a light sleeper. He woke in the middle of the night, and sat up in bed shivering, with the feeling that something was wrong.

The bedroom seemed dark and quiet. What was it? A noise? He was very sensitive to noise. Cantling slid out from under the covers and donned his slippers. The fire he’d enjoyed before retiring for the night had burned down to embers, and the room was chilly. He felt for his tartan robe, hanging from the foot of the big antique four-poster, slipped into it, cinched the belt, and moved quietly to the bedroom door. The door creaked a little at times, so he opened it very slowly, very cautiously. He listened.

Someone was downstairs. He could hear them moving around.

Fear coiled in the pit of his stomach. He had no gun up here, nothing like that. He didn’t believe in that. Besides, he was supposed to be safe. This wasn’t New York. He was supposed to be safe here in quaint old Perrot, Iowa. And now he had a prowler in his house, something he had never faced in all of his years in Manhattan. What the hell was he supposed to do?

The police, he thought. He’d lock the door and call the police. He moved back to the bedside, and reached for the phone.

It rang.

Richard Cantling stared at the telephone. He had two lines; a business number hooked up to his recording machine, and an unlisted personal number that he gave only to very close friends. Both lights were lit. It was his private number ringing. He hesitated, then scooped up the receiver. “Hello.”

“The man himself,” the voice said. “Don’t get weird on me, Dad. You were going to call the cops, right? Stupid. It’s only me. Come down and talk.”

Cantling’s throat felt raw and constricted. He had never heard that voice before, but he knew it, he knew it. “Who is this?” he demanded.

“Silly question,” the caller replied. “You know who it is.”

He did. But he said, “Who?”

“Not who. Dunnahoo.” Cantling had written that line.

“You’re not real.”

“There were a couple of reviewers who said that too. I seem to remember how it pissed you off, back then.”

“You’re not real,” Cantling insisted.

“I’m cut to the goddamned quick,” Dunnahoo said. “If I’m not real, it’s your fault. So quit getting on my case about it, OK? Just get your ass in gear and hustle it downstairs so we can hang out together.” He hung up.

The lights went out on the telephone. Richard Cantling sat down on the edge of his bed, stunned. What was he supposed to make of this? A dream? It was no dream. What could he do?

He went downstairs.

Dunnahoo had built a fire in the living room fireplace, and was settled into Cantling’s big leather recliner, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from a bottle. He smiled lazily when Cantling appeared under the entry arch. “The man,” he said. “Well, don’t you look half-dead. Want a beer?”

“Who the hell are you?” Cantling demanded.

“Hey, we been round that block already. Don’t bore me. Grab a beer and park your ass by the fire.”

“An actor,” Cantling said. “You’re some kind of goddamned actor. Michelle put you up to this, right?”

Dunnahoo grinned. “An actor? Well, that’s fuckin’ unlikely, ain’t it? Tell me, would you stick something that weird in one of your novels? No way, José. You’d never do it yourself and if somebody else did it, in one of them workshops or a book you were reviewing, you’d rip his fuckin’ liver out.”

Richard Cantling moved slowly into the room, staring at the young man sprawled in his recliner. It was no actor. It was Dunnahoo, the kid from his book, the face from the portrait. Cantling settled into a high, overstuffed armchair, still staring. “This makes no sense,” he said. “This is like something out of Dickens.”

Dunnahoo laughed. “This ain’t no fucking Christmas Carol, old man, and I sure ain’t no ghost of Christmas past.”

Cantling frowned; whoever he was, that line was out of character. “That’s wrong,” he snapped. “Dunnahoo didn’t read Dickens. Batman and Robin, yes, but not Dickens.”

“I saw the movie, dad,” Dunnahoo said. He raised the beer bottle to his lips and had a swallow.

“Why do you keep calling me Dad?” Cantling said. “That’s wrong too. Anachronistic. Dunnahoo was a street kid, not a beatnik.”

“You’re telling me? Like I don’t know or something?” He laughed. “Shit man, what the hell else should I call you?” He ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back out of his eyes. “After all, I’m still your fuckin’ first-born.”

She wanted to name it Edward, if it turned out to be a boy. “Don’t be ridiculous, Helen,” he told her.

“I thought you liked the name Edward,” she said.

He didn’t know what she was doing in his office anyway. He was working, or trying to work. He’d told her never to come into his office when he was at the typewriter. When they were first married, Helen was very good about that, but there had been no dealing with her since she’d gotten pregnant. “I do like the name Edward,” he told her, trying hard to keep his voice calm. He hated being interrupted. “I like the name Edward a lot. I love the goddamned name Edward. That’s why I’m using it for my protagonist. Edward, that’s his name. Edward Donohue. So we can’t use it for the baby because I’ve already used it. How many times do I have to explain that?”

“But you never call him Edward in the book,” Helen protested.

Cantling frowned. “Have you been reading the book again? Damn it, Helen, I told you I don’t want you messing around with the manuscript until it’s done.”

She refused to be distracted. “You never call him Edward,” she repeated.

“No,” he said. “That’s right. I never call him Edward. I call him Dunnahoo, because he’s a street kid, and because that’s his street name, and he doesn’t like to be called Edward. Only it’s still his name, you see. Edward is his name. He doesn’t like it, but it’s his fucking name, and at the end he tells someone that his name is Edward, and that’s real damned important. So we can’t name the kid Edward, because he’s named Edward, and I’m tired of this discussion. If it’s a boy, we can name it Lawrence, after my grandfather.”

“But I don’t want to name him Lawrence,” she whined. “It’s so old-fashioned, and then people will call him Larry, and I hate the name Larry. Why can’t you call the character in your book Lawrence?”

“Because his name is Edward.”

“This is our baby I’m carrying,” she said. She put a hand on her swollen stomach, as if Cantling needed a visual reminder.

He was tired of arguing. He was tired of discussing. He was tired of being interrupted. He leaned back in his chair. “How long have you been carrying the baby?”

Helen looked baffled. “You know. Seven months now. And a week.”

Cantling leaned forward and slapped the stack of manuscript pages piled up beside his typewriter. “Well, I’ve been carrying this baby for three damned years now. This is the fourth fucking draft, and the last one. He was named Edward on the first draft, and on the second draft, and on the third draft, and he’s damn well going to be named Edward when the goddamned book comes out. He’d been named Edward for years before that night of fond memory when you decided to surprise me by throwing away your diaphragm, and thereby got yourself knocked up.”

“It’s not fair,” she complained. “He’s only a character. This is our baby.”

“Fair? You want fair? OK. I’ll make it fair. Our first-born son will get named Edward. How’s that for fair?”

Helen’s face softened. She smiled shyly.

He held up a hand before she had a chance to say anything. “Of course, I figure I’m only about a month away from finishing this damn thing, if you ever stop interrupting me. You’ve got a little further to go. But that’s as fair as I can make it. You pop before I type THE END and you got the name. Otherwise, my baby here”—he slapped the manuscript again—“is first-born.”

“You can’t,” she started.

Cantling resumed his typing.

“My first-born,” Richard Cantling said.

“In the flesh,” Dunnahoo said. He raised his beer bottle in salute, and said, “To fathers and sons, hey!” He drained it with one long swallow and flipped the bottle across the room end over end. It smashed in the fireplace.

“This is a dream,” Cantling said.

Dunnahoo gave him a raspberry. “Look, old man, face it, I’m here.” He jumped to his feet. “The prodigal returns,” he said, bowing. “So where the fuck is the fatted calf and all that shit? Least you coulda done was order a pizza.”

“I’ll play the game,” Cantling said. “What do you want from me?”

Dunnahoo grinned. “Want? Who, me? Who the fuck knows? I never knew what I wanted, you know that. Nobody in the whole fucking book knew what they wanted.”

“That was the point,” Cantling said.

“Oh, I get it,” Dunnahoo said. “I’m not dumb. Old Dicky Cantling’s boy is anything but dumb, right?” He wandered off toward the kitchen. “There’s more beer in the fridge. Want one?”

“Why not?” Cantling asked. “It’s not every day my oldest son comes to visit. Dos Equis with a slice of lime, please.”

“Drinking fancy spic beer now, huh? Shit. What ever happened to Piels? You could suck up Piels with the best of them, once upon a time.” He vanished through the kitchen door. When he returned he was carrying two bottles of Dos Equis, holding them by the necks with his fingers jammed down into the open mouths. In his other hand he had a raw onion. The bottles clanked together as he carried them. He gave one to Cantling. “Here. I’ll suck up a little culture myself.”

“You forgot the lime,” Cantling said.

“Get your own fuckin’ lime,” Dunnahoo said. “Whatcha gonna do, cut off my allowance?” He grinned, tossed the onion lightly into the air, caught it, and took a big bite. “Onions,” he said. “I owe you for that one, Dad. Bad enough I have to eat raw onions, I mean, shit, but you fixed it so I don’t even like the fucking things. You even said so in the damned book.”

“Of course,” Cantling said. “The onion had a dual function. On one level, you did it just to prove how tough you were. It was something none of the others hanging out at Ricci’s could manage. It gave you a certain status. But on a deeper level, when you bit into an onion you were making a symbolic statement about your appetite for life, your hunger for it all, the bitter and the sharp parts as well the sweet.”

Dunnahoo took another bite of onion. “Horseshit,” he said. “I ought to make you eat a fucking onion, see how you like it.”

Cantling sipped at his beer. “I was young. It was my first book. It seemed like a nice touch at the time.”

“Eat it raw,” Dunnahoo said. He finished the onion.

Richard Cantling decided this cozy domestic scene had gone on long enough. “You know, Dunnahoo or whoever you are,” he said in a conversational tone, “You’re not what I expected.”

“What did you expect, old man?”

Cantling shrugged. “I made you with my mind instead of my sperm, so you’ve got more of me in you than any child of my flesh could ever have. You’re me.”

“Hey,” said Dunnahoo, “not fucking guilty. I wouldn’t be you on a bet.”

“You have no choice. Your story was built from my own adolescence. First novels are like that. Ricci’s was really Pompeii Pizza in Newark. Your friends were my friends. And you were me.”

“That so?” Dunnahoo replied, grinning.

Richard Cantling nodded.

Dunnahoo laughed. “You should be so fuckin’ lucky, Dad.”

“What does that mean?” Cantling snapped.

“You live in a dream world, old man, you know that? Maybe you like to pretend you were like me, but there ain’t no way it’s true. I was the big man at Ricci’s. At Pompeii, you were the four-eyes hanging out back by the pinball machine. You had me balling my brains out at sixteen. You never even got bare tit till you were past twenty, off in that college of yours. It took you weeks to come up with the wisecracks you had me tossing off every fuckin’ time I turned around. All those wild, crazy things I did in that book, some of them happened to Dutch and some of them happened to Joey and some of them never happened at all, but none of them happened to you, old man, so don’t make me laugh.”

Cantling flushed a little. “I was writing fiction. Yes, I was a bit of a misfit in my youth, but . . .”

“A nerd,” Dunnahoo said. “Don’t fancy it up.”

“I was not a nerd,” Cantling said, stung. “Hangin’ Out told the truth. It made sense to use a protagonist who was more central to the action than I’d been in real life. Art draws on life but it has to shape it, rearrange it, give it structure, it can’t simply replicate it. That’s what I did.”

“Nah. What you did was to suck off Dutch and Joey and the rest. You helped yourself to their lives, man, and took credit for it all yourself. You even got this weird fuckin’ idea that I was based on you, and you been thinking that so long you believe it. You’re a leech, Dad. You’re a goddamned thief.”

Richard Cantling was furious. “Get out of here!” he said.

Dunnahoo stood up, stretched. “I’m fuckin’ wounded. Throwing your baby boy out into the cold Ioway night, old man? What’s wrong? You liked me well enough when I was in your damn book, when you could control everything I did and said, right? Don’t like it so well now that I’m real, though. That’s your problem. You never did like real life half as well as you liked books.”

“I like life just fine, thank you,” Cantling snapped.

Dunnahoo smiled. Standing there, he suddenly looked washed out, insubstantial. “Yeah?” he said. His voice seemed weaker than it had been.

“Yeah!” Cantling replied.

Now Dunnahoo was fading visibly. All the color had drained from his body, and he looked almost transparent. “Prove it,” he said. “Go into your kitchen, old man, and take a great big bite out of your fuckin’ raw onion of life.” He tossed back his hair, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, until he was quite gone.

Richard Cantling stood staring at the place where he had been for a long time. Finally, very tired, he climbed upstairs to bed.

He made himself a big breakfast the next morning: orange juice and fresh-brewed coffee, English muffins with lots of butter and blackberry preserves, a cheese omelette, six strips of thick-sliced bacon. The cooking and the eating were supposed to distract him. It didn’t work. He thought of Dunnahoo all the while. A dream, yes, some crazy sort of dream. He had no ready explanation for the broken glass in the fireplace or the empty beer bottles in his living room, but finally he found one. He had experienced some sort of insane, drunken, somnambulist episode, Cantling decided. It was the stress of the ongoing quarrel with Michelle, of course, triggered by the portrait she’d sent him. Perhaps he ought to see someone about it, a doctor or a psychologist or someone.

After breakfast, Cantling went straight to his den, determined to confront the problem directly and resolve it. Michelle’s mutilated portrait still hung above the fireplace. A festering wound, he thought; it had infected him, and the time had come to get rid of it. Cantling built a fire. When it was going good, he took down the ruined painting, dismantled the metal frame—he was a thrifty man, after all—and burned the torn, disfigured canvas. The oily smoke made him feel clean again.

Next there was the portrait of Dunnahoo to deal with. Cantling turned to consider it. A good piece of work, really. She had captured the character. He could burn it, but that would be playing Michelle’s own destructive game. Art should never be destroyed. He had made his mark on the world by creation, not destruction, and he was too old to change. The portrait of Dunnahoo had been intended as a cruel taunt, but Cantling decided to throw it back in his daughter’s teeth, to make a splendid celebration of it. He would hang it, and hang it prominently. He knew just the place for it.

Up at the top of the stairs was a long landing; an ornate wooden bannister overlooked the first floor foyer and entry hall. The landing was fifteen feet long, and the back wall was entirely blank. It would make a splendid portrait gallery, Cantling decided. The painting would be visible to anyone entering the house, and you would pass right by it on the way to any of the second floor rooms. He found a hammer and some nails and hung Dunnahoo in a place of honor. When Michelle came back to make peace, she would see him there, and no doubt leap to the conclusion that Cantling had totally missed the point of her gift. He’d have to remember to thank her effusively for it.

Richard Cantling was feeling much better. Last night’s conversation was receding into a bad memory. He put it firmly out of his mind and spent the rest of the day writing letters to his agent and publisher. In the late afternoon, pleasantly weary, he enjoyed a cup of coffee and some butter streusel he’d hidden away in the refrigerator. Then he went out on his daily walk, and spent a good ninety minutes hiking along the river bluffs with a fresh, cold wind in his face.

When he returned, a large square package was waiting on his porch.

He leaned it up against an armchair, and settled into his recliner to study it. It made him uneasy. It had an effect, no doubt of it. He could feel an erection stirring against his leg, pressing uncomfortably against his trousers.

The portrait was . . . well, frankly erotic.

She was in bed, a big old antique four-poster, much like his own. She was naked. She was half-turned in the painting, looking back over her right shoulder; you saw the smooth line of her backbone, the curve of her right breast. It was a large, shapely, and very pretty breast; the aureole was a pale pink and very large, and her nipple was erect. She was clutching a rumpled sheet up to her chin, but it did little to conceal her. Her hair was red-gold, her eyes green, her smile playful. Her smooth young skin had a flush to it, as if she had just risen from a bout of lovemaking. She had a peace symbol tattooed high on the right cheek of her ass. She was obviously very young. Richard Cantling knew just how young: she was eighteen, a child-woman, caught in that precious time between innocence and experience when sex is just a wonderfully exciting new toy. Oh yes, he knew a lot about her. He knew her well.

Cissy.

He hung her portrait next to Dunnahoo.

Dead Flowers was Cantling’s title for the book. His editor changed it to Black Roses; more evocative, he said, more romantic, more upbeat. Cantling fought the change on artistic grounds, and lost. Afterwards, when the novel made the bestseller lists, he managed to work up the grace to admit that he’d been wrong. He sent Brian a bottle of his favorite wine.

It was his fourth novel, and his last chance. Hangin’ Out had gotten excellent reviews and had sold decently, but his next two books had been panned by the critics and ignored by the readers. He had to do something different, and he did. Black Roses turned out to be highly controversial. Some reviewers loved it, some loathed it. But it sold and sold and sold, and the paperback sale and the film option (they never made the movie) relieved him of financial worries for the first time in his life. They were finally able to afford a down payment on a house, transfer Michelle to a private school and get her those braces; the rest of the money Cantling invested as shrewdly as he was able. He was proud of Black Roses and pleased by its success. It made his reputation.

Helen hated the book with a passion.

On the day the novel finally fell off the last of the lists, she couldn’t quite conceal her satisfaction. “I knew it wouldn’t last forever,” she said.

Cantling slapped down the newspaper angrily. “It lasted long enough. What the hell’s wrong with you? You didn’t like it before, when we were barely scraping by. The kid needs braces, the kid needs a better school, the kid shouldn’t have to eat goddamn peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day. Well, that’s all behind us. And you’re more pissed off than ever. Give me a little credit. Did you like being married to a failure?”

“I don’t like being married to a pornographer,” Helen snapped at him.

“Fuck you,” Cantling said.

She gave him a nasty smile. “When? You haven’t touched me in weeks. You’d rather be fucking your Cissy.”

Cantling stared at her. “Are you crazy, or what? She’s a character in a book I wrote. That’s all.”

“Oh, go to hell,” Helen said furiously. “You treat me like I’m a goddamned idiot. You think I can’t read? You think I don’t know? I read your shitty book. I’m not stupid. The wife, Marsha, dull ignorant boring Marsha, cud-chewing mousy Marsha, that cow, that nag, that royal pain-in-the-ass, that’s me. You think I can’t tell? I can tell, and so can my friends. They’re all very sorry for me. You love me as much as Richardson loved Marsha. Cissy’s just a character, right, like hell, like bloody hell.” She was crying now. “You’re in love with her, damn you. She’s your own little wet dream. If she walked in the door right now you’d dump me as fast as Richardson dumps good old Marsha. Deny it. Go on, deny it, I dare you!”

Cantling regarded his wife incredulously. “I don’t believe you. You’re jealous of a character in my book. You’re jealous of someone who doesn’t exist.”

“She exists in your head, and that’s the only place that matters with you. Of course your damned book was a big seller. You think it was because of your writing? It was on account of the sex, on account of her!”

“Sex is an important part of life,” Cantling said defensively. “It’s a perfectly legitimate subject for art. You want me to pull down a curtain every time my characters go to bed, is that it? Coming to terms with sexuality, that’s what Black Roses is all about. Of course it had to be written explicitly. If you weren’t such a damned prude you’d realize that.”

“I’m not a prude!” Helen screamed at him. “Don’t you dare call me one, either.” She picked up one of the breakfast plates and threw it at him. Cantling ducked; the plate shattered on the wall behind him. “Just because I don’t like your goddamned filthy book doesn’t make me a prude.”

“The novel has nothing to do with it,” Cantling said. He folded his arms against his chest but kept his voice calm. “You’re a prude because of the things you do in bed. Or should I say the things you won’t do?” He smiled.

Helen’s face was red; beet red, Canting thought, and rejected it, too old, too trite. “Oh, yes, but she’ll do them, won’t she?” Her voice was pure acid. “Cissy, your cute little Cissy. She’ll get a sexy little tattoo on her ass if you ask her to, right? She’ll do it outdoors, she’ll do it in all kinds of strange places, with people all around. She’ll wear kinky underwear, she thinks it’s fun. She’s always ready and she doesn’t have any stretch marks and she has eighteen-year-old tits, and she’ll always have eighteen-year-old tits, won’t she? How the hell do I compete with that, huh? How? HOW?”

Richard Cantling’s own anger was a cold, controlled, sarcastic thing. He stood up in the face of her fury and smiled sweetly. “Read the book,” he said. “Take notes.”

He woke suddenly, in darkness, to the light touch of skin against his foot.

Cissy was perched on top of the footboard, a red satin sheet wrapped around her, a long slim leg exploring under his blankets. She was playing footsie with him, and smiling mischievously. “Hi, Daddy,” she said.

Cantling had been afraid of this. It had been in his mind all evening. Sleep had not come easily. He pulled his foot away and struggled to a sitting position.

Cissy pouted. “Don’t you want to play?” she asked.

“I,” he said, “don’t believe this. This can’t be real.”

“It can still be fun,” she said.

“What the hell is Michelle doing to me? How can this be happening?”

She shrugged. The sheet slipped a little; one perfect pink-tipped eighteen-year-old breast peeked out.

“You still have eighteen-year-old tits,” Cantling said numbly. “You’ll always have eighteen-year-old tits.”

Cissy laughed. “Sure. You can borrow them, if you like, Daddy. I’ll bet you can think of something interesting to do with them.”

“Stop calling me Daddy,” Cantling said.

“Oh, but you are my Daddy,” Cissy said in her little-girl voice.

“Stop that!” Cantling said.

“Why? You want to, Daddy, you want to play with your little girl, don’t you?” She winked. “Vice is nice but incest is best. The families that play together stay together.” She looked around. “I like four-posters. You want to tie me up, Daddy? I’d like that.”

“No,” Cantling said. He pushed back the covers, got out of bed, found his slippers and robe. His erection throbbed against his leg. He had to get away, he had to put some distance between him and Cissy, otherwise . . . he didn’t want to think about otherwise. He busied himself making a fire.

“I like that,” Cissy said when he got it going. “Fires are so romantic.”

Cantling turned around to face her again. “Why you?” he asked, trying to stay calm. “Richardson was the protagonist of Black Roses, not you. And why skip to my fourth book? Why not somebody from Family Tree or Rain?”

“Those gobblers?” Cissy said. “Nobody real there. You didn’t really want Richardson, did you? I’m a lot more fun.” She stood up and let go of the satin sheet. It puddled about her ankles, the flames reflected off its shiny folds. Her body was soft and sweet and young. She kicked free of the sheet and padded toward him.

“Cut it out, Cissy,” Cantling barked.

“I won’t bite,” Cissy said. She giggled. “Unless you want me to. Maybe I should tie you up, huh?” She put her arms around him, gave him a hug, turned up her face for a kiss.

“Let go of me,” he said, weakly. Her arms felt good. She felt good as she pressed up against him. It had been a long time since Richard Cantling had held a woman in his arms; he didn’t like to think about how long. And he had never had a woman like Cissy, never, never. But he was frightened. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I can’t. I don’t want to.”

Cissy reached through the folds of his robe, shoved her hand inside his briefs, squeezed him gently. “Liar,” she said. “You want me. You’ve always wanted me. I’ll bet you used to stop and jack off when you were writing the sex scenes.”

“No,” Cantling said. “Never.”

“Never?” She pouted. Her hand moved up and down. “Well, I bet you wanted to. I bet you got hard, anyway. I bet you got hard every time you described me.”

“I,” he said. The denial would not come, “Cissy, please.”

“Please,” she murmured. Her hand was busy. “Yes, please.” She tugged at his briefs and they fluttered to the floor. “Please,” she said. She untied his robe and helped him out of it. “Please.” Her hand moved along his side, played with his nipples; she stepped closer, and her breasts pressed lightly against his chest. “Please,” she said, and she looked up at him. Her tongue moved between her lips.

Richard Cantling groaned and took her in his trembling arms.

She was like no woman he had ever had. Her touch was fire and satin, electric, and her secret places were sweet as honey.

In the morning she was gone.

Cantling woke late, too exhausted to make himself breakfast. Instead he dressed and walked into town, to a small cafe in a quaint hundred-year-old brick building at the foot of the bluffs. He tried to sort things out over coffee and blueberry pancakes.

None of it made any sense. It could not be happening, but it was; denial accomplished nothing. Cantling forked down a mouthful of home-made blueberry pancake, but the only taste in his mouth was fear. He was afraid for his sanity. He was afraid because he did not understand, did not want to understand. And there was another, deeper, more basic fear.

He was afraid of what would come next. Richard Cantling had published nine novels.

He thought of Michelle. He could phone her, beg her to call it off before he went mad. She was his daughter, his flesh and blood, surely she would listen to him. She loved him. Of course she did. And he loved her too, no matter what she might think. Cantling knew his faults. He had examined himself countless times, under various guises, in the pages of his books. He was impossibly stubborn, willful, opinionated. He could be rigid and unbending. He could be cold. Still, he thought of himself as a decent man. Michelle . . . she had inherited some of his perversity, she was furious at him, hate was so very close to love, but surely she did not mean to do him serious harm.

Yes, he could phone Michelle, ask her to stop. Would she? If he begged her forgiveness, perhaps. That day, that terrible day, she’d told him that she would never forgive him, never, but she couldn’t have meant that. She was his only child. The only child of his flesh, at any rate.

Cantling pushed away his empty plate and sat back. His mouth was set in a hard rigid line. Beg for mercy? He did not like that. What had he done, after all? Why couldn’t they understand? Helen had never understood and Michelle was as blind as her mother. A writer must live for his work. What had he done that was so terrible? What had he done that required forgiveness? Michelle ought to be the one phoning him.

The hell with it, Cantling thought. He refused to be cowed He was right; she was wrong. Let Michelle call him if she wanted a rapprochement. She was not going to terrify him into submission. What was he so afraid of, anyway? Let her send her portraits, all the portraits she wanted to paint. He’d hang them up on his walls, display the paintings proudly (they were really an hommage to his work, after all), and if the damned things came alive at night and prowled through his house, so be it. He’d enjoy their visits. Cantling smiled. He’d certainly enjoyed Cissy, no doubt of that. Part of him hoped she’d come back. And even Dunnahoo, well, he was an insolent kid, but there was no real harm in him, he just liked to mouth off.

Why, now that he stopped to consider it, Cantling found that the possibilities had a certain intoxicating charm. He was uniquely privileged. Scott Fitzgerald never attended one of Gatsby’s fabulous parties, Conan Doyle could never really sit down with Holmes and Watson, Nabokov never actually tumbled Lolita. What would they have said to the idea?

The more he considered things, the more cheerful he became. Michelle was trying to rebuke him, to frighten him, but she was really giving him a delicious experience. He could play chess with Sergei Tederenko, the cynical emigré hustler from En Passant. He could argue politics with Frank Corwin, the union organizer from his Depression novel, Times Are Hard. He might flirt with beautiful Beth McKenzie, go dancing with crazy old Miss Aggie, seduce the Danzinger twins and fulfill the one sexual fantasy that Cissy had left untouched, yes, certainly, what the hell had he been afraid of? They were his own creations, his characters, his friends and family.

Of course, there was the new book to consider. Cantling frowned. That was a disturbing thought. But Michelle was his daughter, she loved him, surely she wouldn’t go that far. No, of course not. He put the idea firmly aside and picked up his check.

He expected it. He was almost looking forward to it. And when he returned from his evening constitutional, his cheeks red from the wind, his heart beating just a little faster in anticipation, it was there waiting for him, the familiar rectangle wrapped in plain brown paper. Richard Cantling carried it inside carefully. He made himself a cup of coffee before he unwrapped it, deliberately prolonging the suspense to savor the moment, delighting in the thought of how deftly he’d turned Michelle’s cruel little plan on its head.

He drank his coffee, poured a refill, drank that. The package stood a few feet away. Cantling played a little game with himself, trying to guess whose portrait might be within. Cissy had said something about none of the characters from Family Tree or Rain being real enough. Cantling mentally reviewed his life’s work, trying to decide which characters seemed most real. It was a pleasant speculation, but he could reach no firm conclusions. Finally he shoved his coffee cup aside and moved to undo the wrappings. And there it was.

Barry Leighton.

Again, the painting itself was superb. Leighton was seated in a newspaper city room, his elbow resting on the gray metal case of an old manual typewriter. He wore a rumpled brown suit and his white shirt was open at the collar and plastered to his body by perspiration. His nose had been broken more than once, and was spread all across his wide, homely, somehow comfortable face. His eyes were sleepy. Leighton was overweight and jowly and rapidly losing his hair. He’d given up smoking but not cigarettes; an unlit Camel dangled from one corner of his mouth. “As long as you don’t light the damned things, you’re safe,” he’d said more than once in Cantling’s novel ByeLine.

The book hadn’t done very well. It was a depressing book, all about the last week of a grand old newspaper that had fallen on bad times. It was more than that, though. Cantling was interested in people, not newspapers; he had used the failing paper as a metaphor for failing lives. His editor had wanted to work in some kind of strong, sensational subplot, have Leighton and the others on the trail of some huge story that offered the promise of redemption, but Cantling had rejected that idea. He wanted to tell a story about small people being ground down inexorably by time and age, about the inevitability of loneliness and defeat. He produced a novel as gray and brittle as newsprint. He was very proud of it.

No one read it.

Cantling lifted the portrait and carried it upstairs, to hang beside those of Dunnahoo and Cissy. Tonight should be interesting, he thought. Barry Leighton was no kid, like the others; he was a man of Cantling’s own years. Very intelligent, mature. There was a bitterness in Leighton, Cantling knew very well; a disappointment that life had, after all, yielded so little, that all his bylines and big stories were forgotten the day after they ran. But the reporter kept his sense of humor through all of it, kept off the demons with nothing but a mordant wit and an unlit Camel. Cantling admired him, would enjoy talking to him. Tonight, he decided, he wouldn’t bother going to bed. He’d make a big pot of strong black coffee, lay in some Seagram’s, and wait.

It was past midnight and Cantling was rereading the leather-bound copy of ByeLine when he heard ice cubes clinking together in the kitchen. “Help yourself, Barry,” he called out.

Leighton came through the swinging door, tumbler in hand. “I did,” he said. He looked at Cantling through heavily-lidded eyes, and gave a little snort. “You look old enough to be my father,” he said. “I didn’t think anybody could look that old.”

Cantling closed the book and set it aside. “Sit down,” he said. “As I recall, your feet hurt.”

“My feet always hurt,” Leighton said. He settled himself into an armchair and swallowed a mouthful of whisky. “Ah,” he said, “that’s better.”

Cantling tapped the novel with a fingertip. “My eighth book,” he said. “Michelle skipped right over three novels. A pity. I would have liked to meet some of those people.”

“Maybe she wants to get to the point,” Leighton suggested.

“And what is the point?”

Leighton shrugged. “Damned if I know. I’m only a newspaperman. Five W’s and an H. You’re the novelist. You tell me the point.”

“My ninth novel,” Cantling suggested. “The new one.”

“The last one?” said Leighton.

“Of course not. Only the most recent. I’m working on something new right now.”

Leighton smiled. “That’s not what my sources tell me.”

“Oh? What do your sources say?”

“That you’re an old man waiting to die,” Leighton said. “And that you’re going to die alone.”

“I’m fifty-two,” Cantling said crisply. “Hardly old.”

“When your birthday cake has got more candles than you can blow out, you’re old,” said Leighton drily. “Helen was younger than you, and she died five years ago. It’s in the mind, Cantling. I’ve seen young octogenarians and old adolescents. And you, you had liver spots on your brain before you had hair on your balls.”

“That’s unfair,” Cantling protested.

Leighton drank his Seagram’s. “Fair?” he said. “You’re too old to believe in fair, Cantling. Young people live life. Old people sit and watch it. You were born old. You’re a watcher, not a liver.” He frowned. “Not a liver, jeez, what a figure of speech. Better a liver than a gall bladder, I guess. You were never a gall bladder either. You’ve been full of piss for years, but you don’t have any gall at all. Maybe you’re a kidney.”

“You’re reaching, Barry,” Cantling said. “I’m a writer. I’ve always been a writer. That’s my life. Writers observe life, they report on life. It’s in the job description. You ought to know.”

“I do know,” Leighton said. “I’m a reporter, remember? I’ve spent a lot of long gray years writing up other people’s stories. I’ve got no story of my own. You know that, Cantling. Look what you did to me in ByeLine. The Courier croaks and I decide to write my memoirs and what happens?”

Cantling remembered. “You blocked. You rewrote your old stories, twenty-year-old stories, thirty-year-old stories. You had that incredible memory. You could recall all the people you’d ever reported on, the dates, the details, the quotes. You could recite the first story you’d had bylined word for word, but you couldn’t remember the name of the first girl you’d been to bed with, couldn’t remember your ex-wife’s phone number, you couldn’t . . . you couldn’t. . . .” His voice failed.

“I couldn’t remember my daughter’s birthday,” Leighton said. “Where do you get those crazy ideas, Cantling?”

Cantling was silent.

“From life, maybe?” Leighton said gently. “I was a good reporter. That was about all you could say about me. You, well, maybe you’re a good novelist. That’s for the critics to judge, and I’m just a sweaty newspaperman whose feet hurt. But even if you are a good novelist, even if you’re one of the great ones, you were a lousy husband, and a miserable father.”

“No,” Cantling said. It was a weak protest.

Leighton swirled his tumbler; the ice cubes clinked and clattered. “When did Helen leave you?” he asked.

“I don’t . . . ten years ago, something like that. I was in the middle of the final draft of En Passant.”

“When was the divorce final?”

“Oh, a year later. We tried a reconciliation, but it didn’t take. Michelle was in school, I remember. I was writing Times Are Hard.”

“You remember her third grade play?”

“Was that the one I missed?”

“The one you missed? You sound like Nixon saying, ‘Was that the time I lied?’ That was the one Michelle had the lead in, Cantling.”

“I couldn’t help that,” Cantling said. “I wanted to come. They were giving me an award. You don’t skip the National Literary League dinner. You can’t.”

“Of course not,” said Leighton. “When was it that Helen died?”

“I was writing ByeLine,” Cantling said.

“Interesting system of dating you’ve got there. You ought to put out a calendar.” He swallowed some whisky.

“All right,” Cantling said. “I’m not going to deny that my work is important to me. Maybe too important, I don’t know. Yes, the writing has been the biggest part of my life. But I’m a decent man, Leighton, and I’ve always done my best. It hasn’t all been like you’re implying. Helen and I had good years. We loved each other once. And Michelle . . . I loved Michelle. When she was a little girl, I used to write stories just for her. Funny animals, space pirates, silly poems. I’d write them up in my spare time and read them to her at bedtime. They were something I did just for Michelle, for love.”

“Yeah,” Leighton said cynically. “You never even thought about getting them published.”

Cantling grimaced. “That . . . you’re implying . . . that’s a distortion. Michelle loved the stories so much, I thought maybe other kids might like them too. It was just an idea. I never did anything about it.”

“Never?”

Cantling hesitated. “Look, Bert was my friend as well as my agent. He had a little girl of his own. I showed him the stories once. Once!”

“I can’t be pregnant,” Leighton said. “I only let him fuck me once. Once!”

“He didn’t even like them,” Cantling said.

“Pity,” replied Leighton.

“You’re laying this on me with a trowel, and I’m not guilty. No, I wasn’t father of the year, but I wasn’t an ogre either. I changed her diaper plenty of times. Before Black Roses, Helen had to work, and I took care of the baby every day, from nine to five.”

“You hated it when she cried and you had to leave your typewriter.”

“Yes,” Cantling said. “Yes, I hated being interrupted, I’ve always hated being interrupted, I don’t care if it was Helen or Michelle or my mother or my roommate in college, when I’m writing I don’t like to be interrupted. Is that a fucking capital crime? Does that make me inhuman? When she cried, I went to her. I didn’t like it, I hated it, I resented it, but I went to her.”

“When you heard her,” said Leighton. “When you weren’t in bed with Cissy, dancing with Miss Aggie, beating up scabs with Frank Corwin, when your head wasn’t full of their voices, yeah, sometimes you heard, and when you heard you went. Congratulations, Cantling.”

“I taught her to read,” Cantling said. “I read her Treasure Island and Wind in the Willows and The Hobbit and Tom Sawyer, all kinds of things.”

“All books you wanted to reread anyway,” said Leighton. “Helen did the real teaching, with Dick and Jane.”

“I hate Dick and Jane!” Cantling shouted.

“So?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Richard Cantling said. “You weren’t there. Michelle was there. She loved me, she still loves me. Whenever she got hurt, scraped her knee or got her nose bloodied, whatever it was, it was me she’d run to, never Helen. She’d come crying to me and I’d hug her and dry her tears and I’d tell her . . . I used to tell her. . . .” But he couldn’t go on. He was close to tears himself; he could feel them hiding the corners of his eyes.

“I know what you used to tell her,” said Barry Leighton in a sad, gentle voice.

“She remembered it,” Cantling said. “She remembered it all those years. Helen got custody, they moved away, I didn’t see her much, but Michelle always remembered, and when she was all grown up, after Helen was gone and Michelle was on her own, there was this time she got hurt, and I . . . I . . .”

“Yes,” said Leighton. “I know.”

The police were the ones that phoned him. Detective Joyce Brennan, that was her name, he would never forget that name. “Mister Cantling?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Mister Richard Cantling?”

“Yes,” he said. “Richard Cantling the writer.” He had gotten strange calls before. “What can I do for you?”

She identified herself. “You’ll have to come down to the hospital,” she said to him. “It’s your daughter, Mister Cantling. I’m afraid she’s been assaulted.”

He hated evasion, hated euphemism. Cantling’s characters never passed away, they died; they never broke wind, they farted. And Richard Cantling’s daughter . . . “Assaulted?” he said. “Do you mean she’s been assaulted or do you mean she’s been raped?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “Raped,” she said at last. “She’s been raped, Mister Cantling.”

“I’ll be right down,” he said.

She had in fact been raped repeatedly and brutally. Michelle had been as stubborn as Helen, as stubborn as Cantling himself. She wouldn’t take his money, wouldn’t take his advice, wouldn’t take the help he offered her through his contacts in publishing. She was going to make it on her own. She waitressed in a coffee house in the Village, and lived in a large, drafty, and run-down warehouse loft down by the docks. It was a terrible neighborhood, a dangerous neighborhood, and Cantling had told her so a hundred times, but Michelle would not listen. She would not even let him pay to install good locks and a security system. It had been very bad. The man had broken in before dawn on a Friday morning. Michelle was alone. He had ripped the phone from the wall and held her prisoner there through Monday night. Finally one of the busboys from the coffee house had gotten worried and come by, and the rapist had left by the fire escape.

When they let him see her, her face was a huge purple bruise. She had burn marks all over her, where the man had used his cigarette, and three of her ribs were broken. She was far beyond hysteria. She screamed when they tried to touch her; doctors, nurses, it didn’t matter, she screamed as soon as they got near. But she let Cantling sit on the edge of her bed, and take her in his arms, and hold her. She cried for hours, cried until there were no more tears in her. Once she called him “Daddy,” in a choked sob. It was the only word she spoke; she seemed to have lost the capacity for speech. Finally they tranquilized her to get her to sleep.

Michelle was in the hospital for two weeks, in a deep state of shock. Her hysteria waned day by day, and she finally became docile, so they were able to fluff her pillows and lead her to the bathroom. But she still would not, or could not, speak. The psychologist told Cantling that she might never speak again. “I don’t accept that,” he said. He arranged Michelle’s discharge. Simultaneously he decided to get them both out of this filthy hellhole of a city. She had always loved big old spooky houses, he remembered, and she used to love the water, the sea, the river, the lake. Cantling consulted Realtors, considered a big place on the coast of Maine, and finally settled on an old steamboat gothic mansion high on the bluffs of Perrot, Iowa. He supervised every detail of the move.

Little by little, recovery began.

She was like a small child again, curious, restless, full of sudden energy. She did not talk, but she explored everything, went everywhere. In spring she spent hours up on the widow’s walk, watching the big towboats go by on the Mississippi far below. Every evening they would walk together on the bluffs, and she would hold his hand. One day she turned and kissed him suddenly, impulsively, on his cheek. “I love you, Daddy,” she said, and she ran away from him, and as Cantling watched her run, he saw a lovely, wounded woman in her mid-twenties, and saw too the gangling, coltish tomboy she had been.

The dam was broken after that day. Michelle began to talk again. Short, childlike sentences at first, full of childish fears and childish naïveté. But she matured rapidly, and in no time at all she was talking politics with him, talking books, talking art. They had many a fine conversation on their evening walks. She never talked about the rape, though; never once, not so much as a word.

In six months she was cooking, writing letters to friends back in New York, helping with the household chores, doing lovely things in the garden. In eight months she had started to paint again. That was very good for her; now she seemed to blossom daily, to grow more and more radiant. Richard Cantling didn’t really understand the abstractions his daughter liked to paint, he preferred representational art, and best of all he loved the self-portrait she had done for him when she was still an art major in college. But he could feel the pain in these new canvases of hers, he could sense that she was engaged in an exorcism of sorts, trying to squeeze the pus from some wound deep inside, and he approved. His writing had been a balm for his own wounds more than once. He envied her now, in a way. Richard Cantling had not written a word for more than three years. The crashing commercial failure of Byeline, his best novel, had left him blocked and impotent. He’d thought perhaps the change of scene might restore him as well as Michelle, but that had been a vain hope. At least one of them was busy.

Finally, late one night after Cantling had gone to bed, his door opened and Michelle came quietly into his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed. She was barefoot, dressed in a flannel nightgown covered with tiny pink flowers. “Daddy,” she said, in a slurred voice.

Cantling had woken when the door opened. He sat up and smiled for her. “Hi,” he said. “You’ve been drinking.”

Michelle nodded. “I’m going back,” she said. “Needed some courage, so’s I could tell you.”

“Going back?” Cantling said. “You don’t mean to New York? You can’t be serious!”

“I got to,” she said. “Don’t be mad. I’m better now.”

“Stay here. Stay with me. New York is uninhabitable, Michelle.”

“I don’t want to go back. It scares me. But I got to. My friends are there. My work is there. My life is back there, Daddy. My friend Jimmy, you remember Jimmy, he’s art director for this little paperback house, he can get me some cover assignments, he says. He wrote. I won’t have to wait tables anymore.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” Richard Cantling said. “How can you go back to that damned city after what happened to you there?”

“That’s why I have to go back,” Michelle insisted. “That guy, what he did . . . what he did to me . . .” Her voice caught in her throat. She drew in her breath, got hold of herself. “If I don’t go back, it’s like he ran me out of town, took my whole life away from me, my friends, my art, everything. I can’t let him get away with that, can’t let him scare me off. I got to go back and take up what’s mine, prove that I’m not afraid.”

Richard Cantling looked at his daughter helplessly. He reached out, gently touched her long, soft hair. She had finally said something that made sense in his terms. He would do the same thing, he knew. “I understand,” he said. “It’s going to be lonely here without you, but I understand, I do.”

“I’m scared,” Michelle said. “I bought plane tickets. For tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“I want to do it quickly, before I lose my nerve,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared. Not even . . . not even when it was happening. Funny, huh?”

“No,” said Cantling. “It makes sense.”

“Daddy, hold me,” Michelle said. She pressed herself into his arms. He hugged her and felt her body tremble.

“You’re shaking,” he said.

She wouldn’t let go of him. “You remember, when I was real little, I used to have those nightmares, and I’d come bawling into your bedroom in the middle of the night and crawl into bed between you and Mommy.”

Cantling smiled. “I remember,” he said.

“I want to stay here tonight,” Michelle said, hugging him even more tightly. “Tomorrow I’ll be back there, alone. I don’t want to be alone tonight. Can I, Daddy?”

Cantling disengaged gently, looked her in the eyes. “Are you sure?”

She nodded; a tiny, quick, shy nod. A child’s nod.

He threw back the covers and she crept in next to him. “Don’t go away,” she said. “Don’t even go to the bathroom, okay? Just stay right here with me.”

“I’m here,” he said. He put his arms around her, and Michelle curled up under the covers with her head on his shoulder. They lay together that way for a long time. He could feel her heart beating inside her chest. It was a soothing sound; soon Cantling began to drift back to sleep.

“Daddy?” she whispered against his chest.

He opened his eyes. “Michelle?”

“Daddy, I have to get rid of it. It’s inside me and it’s poison. I don’t want to take it back with me. I have to get rid of it.”

Cantling stroked her hair, long slow steady motions, saying nothing.

“When I was little, you remember, whenever I fell down or got in a fight, I’d come running to you, all teary, and show you my booboo. That’s what I used to call it when I got hurt, remember, I’d say I had a booboo.”

“I remember,” Cantling said.

“And you, you’d always hug me and you’d say, ‘Show me where it hurts,’ and I would and you’d kiss it and make it better, you remember that? Show me where it hurts?”

Cantling nodded. “Yes,” he said softly.

Michelle was crying quietly. He could feel the wetness soaking through the top of his pajamas. “I can’t take it back with me, Daddy. I want to show you where it hurts. Please. Please.”

He kissed the top of her head. “Go on.”

She started at the beginning, in a halting whisper.

When dawn light broke through the bedroom windows, she was still talking. They never slept. She cried a lot, screamed once or twice, shivered frequently despite the weight of the blankets; Richard Cantling never let go of her, not once, not for a single moment. She showed him where it hurt.

Barry Leighton sighed. “It was a far, far better thing you did than you had ever done,” he said. “Now if you’d only gone off to that far, far better rest right then and there, that very moment, everything would have been fine.” He shook his head. “You never did know when to write Thirty, Cantling.”

“Why?” Cantling demanded. “You’re a good man, Leighton, tell me. Why is this happening. Why?”

The reporter shrugged. He was beginning to fade now. “That was the W that always gave me the most trouble,” he said wearily. “Pick the story, and let me loose, and I could tell you the who and the what and the when and the where and even the how. But the why . . . ah, Cantling, you’re the novelist, the whys are your province, not mine. The only Y that I ever really got on speaking terms with was the one goes with MCA.”

Like the Cheshire cat, his smile lingered long after the rest of him was gone. Richard Cantling sat staring at the empty chair, at the abandoned tumbler, watching the whisky-soaked ice cubes melt slowly.

He did not remember falling asleep. He spent the night in the chair, and woke stiff and achy and cold. His dreams had been dark and shapeless and full of fear. He had slept well into the afternoon; half the day was gone. He made himself a tasteless breakfast in a kind of fog. He seemed distant from his own body, and every motion was slow and clumsy. When the coffee was ready, he poured a cup, picked it up, dropped it. The mug broke into a dozen pieces. Cantling stared down at it stupidly, watching rivulets of hot brown liquid run between the tiles. He did not have the energy to clean it up. He got a fresh mug, poured more coffee, managed to get down a few swallows.

The bacon was too salty; the eggs were runny, disgusting. Cantling pushed the meal away half-eaten, and drank more of the black, bitter coffee. He felt hung-over, but he knew that booze was not the problem.

Today, he thought. It will end today, one way or the other. She will not go back. ByeLine was his eighth novel, the next to last. Today the final portrait would arrive. A character from his ninth novel, his last novel. And then it would be over.

Or maybe just beginning.

How much did Michelle hate him? How badly had he wronged her? Cantling’s hand shook; coffee slopped over the top of the mug, burning his fingers. He winced, cried out. Pain was so inarticulate. Burning. He thought of smoldering cigarettes, their tips like small red eyes. His stomach heaved. Cantling lurched to his feet, rushed to the bathroom. He got there just in time, gave his breakfast to the bowl. Afterwards he was too weak to move. He lay slumped against the cold white porcelain, his head swimming. He imagined somebody coming up behind him, taking him by the hair, forcing his face down into the water, flushing, flushing, laughing all the while, saying dirty, dirty, I’ll get you clean, you’re so dirty, flushing, flushing so the toilet ran and ran, holding his face down so the water and the vomit filled his mouth, his nostrils, until he could hardly breathe, until the world was almost black, until it was almost over, and then up again, laughing while he sucked in air, and then pushing him down again, flushing again, and again and again and again. But it was only his imagination. There was no one there. No one. Cantling was alone in the bathroom.

He forced himself to stand. In the mirror his face was gray and ancient, his hair filthy and unkempt. Behind him, leering over his shoulder, was another face. A man’s face, pale and drawn, with black hair parted in the middle and slicked back. Behind a pair of small round glasses were eyes the color of dirty ice, eyes that moved constantly, frenetically, wild animals caught in a trap. They would chew off their own limbs to be free, those eyes. Cantling blinked and the face was gone. He turned on the cold tap, plunged his cupped hands under the stream, splashed water on his face. He could feel the stubble of his beard. He needed to shave. But there wasn’t time, it wasn’t important, he had to . . . he had to . . .

He had to do something. Get out of there. Get away, get to someplace safe, somewhere his children couldn’t find him.

But there was nowhere safe, he knew.

He had to reach Michelle, talk to her, explain, plead. She loved him. She would forgive him, she had to. She would call it off, she would tell him what to do.

Frantic, Cantling rushed back to the living room, snatched up the phone. He couldn’t remember Michelle’s number. He searched around, found his address book, flipped through it wildly. There, there; he punched in the numbers.

The phone rang four times. Then someone picked it up.

“Michelle—,” he started.

“Hi,” she said. “This is Michelle Cantling, but I’m not in right now. If you’ll leave your name and number when you hear the tone, I’ll get back to you, unless you’re selling something.”

The beep sounded. “Michelle, are you there?” Cantling said. “I know you hide behind the machine sometimes, when you don’t want to talk. It’s me. Please pick up. Please.”

Nothing.

“Call me back, then,” he said. He wanted to get it all in; his words tumbled over reach other in their haste to get out. “I, you, you can’t do it, please, let me explain, I never meant, I never meant, please . . .” There was the beep again, and then a dial tone. Cantling stared at the phone, hung up slowly. She would call him back. She had to, she was his daughter, they loved each other, she had to give him the chance to explain.

Of course, he had tried to explain before.

His doorbell was the old-fashioned kind, a brass key that projected out of the door. You had to turn it by hand, and when you did it produced a loud, impatient metallic rasp. Someone was turning it furiously, turning it and turning it and turning it. Cantling rushed to the door, utterly baffled. He had never made friends easily, and it was even harder now that he had become so set in his ways. He had no real friends in Perrot, a few acquaintances perhaps, no one who would come calling so unexpectedly, and twist the bell with such energetic determination.

He undid his chain and flung the door open, wrenching the bell key out of Michelle’s fingers.

She was dressed in a belted raincoat, a knitted ski cap, a matching scarf. The scarf and a few loose strands of hair were caught in the wind, moving restlessly. She was wearing high, fashionable boots and carrying a big leather shoulder bag. She looked good. It had been almost a year since Cantling had seen her, on his last Christmas visit to New York. It had been two years since she’d moved back east.

“Michelle,” Cantling said. “I didn’t . . . this is quite a surprise. All the way from New York and you didn’t even tell me you were coming?”

“No,” she snapped. There was something wrong with her voice, her eyes. “I didn’t want to give you any warning, you bastard. You didn’t give me any warning.”

“You’re upset,” Cantling said. “Come in, let’s talk.”

“I’ll come in all right.” She pushed past him, kicked the door shut behind her with so much force that the buzzer sounded again. Out of the wind, her face got even harder. “You want to know why I came? I am going to tell you what I think of you. Then I’m going to turn around and leave, I’m going to walk right out of this house and out of your fucking life, just like Mom did. She was the smart one, not me. I was dumb enough to think you loved me, crazy enough to think you cared.”

“Michelle, don’t,” Cantling said. “You don’t understand. I do love you. You’re my little girl, you—”

“Don’t you dare!” she screamed at him. She reached into her shoulder bag. “You call this love, you rotten bastard!” She pulled it out and flung it at him.

Cantling was not as quick as he’d been. He tried to duck, but it caught him on the side of his neck, and it hurt. Michelle had thrown it hard, and it was a big, thick, heavy hardcover, not some flimsy paperback. The pages fluttered as it tumbled to the carpet; Cantling stared down at his own photograph on the back of the dust-wrapper. “You’re just like your mother,” he said, rubbing his neck where the book had hit. “She always threw things too. Only you aim better.” He smiled weakly.

“I’m not interested in your jokes,” Michelle said. “I’ll never forgive you. Never. Never ever. All I want to know is how you could do this to me, that’s all. You tell me. You tell me now.”

“I,” Cantling said. He held his hands out helplessly. “Look, I . . . you’re upset now, why don’t we have some coffee or something, and talk about it when you calm down a little. I don’t want a big fight.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you want,” Michelle screamed. “I want to talk about it right now!” She kicked the fallen book.

Richard Cantling felt his own anger building. It wasn’t right for her to yell at him like that, he didn’t deserve this attack, he hadn’t done anything. He tried not to say anything for fear of saying the wrong thing and escalating the situation. He knelt and picked up his book. Without thinking, he brushed it off, turned it over almost tenderly. The title glared up at him; stark, twisted red letters against a black background, the distorted face of a pretty young woman, mouth open in a scream. Show Me Where It Hurts.

“I was afraid you’d take it the wrong way,” Cantling said.

“The wrong way!” Michelle said. A look of incredulity passed across her face. “Did you think I’d like it?”

“I, I wasn’t sure,” said Cantling. “I hoped . . . I mean, I was uncertain of your reaction, and so I thought it would be better not to mention what I was working on, until, well . . .”

“Until the fucking thing was in the bookstore windows,” Michelle finished for him.

Cantling flipped past the title page. “Look,” he said, holding it out, “I dedicated it to you.” He showed her:

To Michelle, who knew the pain.

Michelle swung at it, knocked it out of Cantling’s hands. “You bastard,” she said. “You think that makes it better? You think your stinking dedication excuses what you did? Nothing excuses it. I’ll never forgive you.”

Cantling edged back a step, retreating in the face of her fury. “I didn’t do anything,” he said stubbornly. “I wrote a book. A novel. Is that a crime?”

“You’re my father,” she shrieked. “You knew . . . you knew, you bastard, you knew I couldn’t bear to talk about it, to talk about what happened. Not to my lovers or my friends or even my therapist. I can’t, I just can’t, I can’t even think about it. You knew. I told you, I told only you, because you were my daddy and I trusted you and I had to get it out, and I told you, it was private, it was just between us, you knew, but what did you do? You wrote it all up in a goddamned book and published it for millions of people to read! Damn you, damn you. Were you planning to do that all along, you sonofabitch? Were you? That night in bed, were you memorizing every word?”

“I,” said Cantling. “No, I didn’t memorize anything, I just, well, I just remembered it. You’re taking it all wrong, Michelle. The book’s not about what happened to you. Yes, it’s inspired by that, that as the starting point, but it’s fiction, I changed things, it’s just a novel.”

“Oh yeah, Daddy, you changed things all right. Instead of Michelle Cantling it’s all about Nicole Mitchell, and she’s a fashion designer instead of an artist, and she’s also kind of stupid, isn’t she? Was that a change or is that what you think, that I was stupid to live there, stupid to let him in like that? It’s all fiction, yeah. It’s just a coincidence that it’s about this girl that gets held prisoner and raped and tortured and terrorized and raped some more, and that you’ve got a daughter who was held prisoner and raped and tortured and terrorized and raped some more, right, just a fucking coincidence!”

“You don’t understand,” Cantling said helplessly.

“No, you don’t understand. You don’t understand what it’s like. This is your biggest book in years, right? Number one best-seller, you’ve never been number one before, haven’t even been on the lists since Times Are Hard, or was it Black Roses? And why not, why not number one, this isn’t no boring story about a has-been newspaper, this is rape, hey, what could be hotter? Lots of sex and violence, torture and fucking and terror, and doncha know, it really happened, yeah.” Her mouth twisted and trembled. “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was all the nightmares that have ever been. I still wake up screaming sometimes, but I was getting better, it was behind me. And now it’s there in every bookstore window, and all my friends know, everybody knows, strangers come up to me at parties and tell me how sorry they are.” She choked back a sob; she was halfway between anger and tears. “And I pick up your book, your fucking no-good book, and there it is again, in black and white, all written down. You’re such a fucking good writer, Daddy, you make it all so real. A book you can’t put down. Well, I put it down but it didn’t help, it’s all there, now it will always be there, won’t it? Every day somebody in the world will pick up your book and read it and I’ll get raped again. That’s what you did. You finished the job for him, Daddy. You violated me, took me without my consent, just like he did. You raped me. You’re my own father, and you raped me!”

“You’re not being fair,” Cantling said. “I never meant to hurt you. The book . . . Nicole is strong and smart. It’s the man who’s the monster. He uses all those different names because fear has a thousand names, but only one face, you see. He’s not just a man, he’s the darkness made flesh, the mindless violence that waits out there for all of us, the gods that play with us like flies, he’s a symbol of all—”

“He’s the man who raped me! He’s not a symbol!”

She screamed it so loudly that Richard Cantling had to retreat in the face of her fury. “No,” he said. “He’s just a character. He’s . . . Michelle, I know it hurts, but what you went through, it’s something people should know about, should think about, it’s a part of life. Telling about life, making sense of it, that’s the job of literature, that’s my job. Someone had to tell your story. I tried to make it true, tried to do my—”

His daughter’s face, red and set with tears, seemed almost feral for a moment, unrecognizable, inhuman. Then a curious calm passed across her features. “You got one thing right,” she said. “Nicole didn’t have a father. When I was a little kid I’d come to you crying and my daddy would say show me where it hurts, and it was a private thing, a special thing, but in the book Nicole doesn’t have a father, he says it, you gave it to him, he says show me where it hurts, he says it all the time. You’re so ironic. You’re so clever. The way he said it, it made him so real, more real than when he was real. And when you wrote it, you were right. That’s what the monster says. Show me where it hurts. That’s the monster’s line. Nicole doesn’t have a father, he’s dead, yes, that was right too. I don’t have a father. No I don’t.”

“Don’t you talk to me like that,” Richard Cantling said. It was terror inside him; it was shame. But it came out anger. “I won’t have that, no matter what you’ve been through. I’m your father.”

“No,” Michelle said, grinning crazy now, backing away from him. “No, I don’t have a father, and you don’t have any children, no, unless it’s in your books. Those are your children, your only children. Your books, your damned fucking books, those are your children, those are your children, those are your children.” Then she turned and ran past him, down the foyer. She stopped at the door to his den. Cantling was afraid of what she might do. He ran after her.

When he reached the den, Michelle had already found the knife and set to work.

Richard Cantling sat by his silent phone and watched his grandfather clock tick off the hours toward darkness.

He tried Michelle’s number at three o’clock, at four, at five. The machine, always the machine, speaking in a mockery of her voice. His messages grew more desperate. It was growing dim outside. His light was fading.

Cantling heard no steps on his porch, no knock on his door, no rasping summons from his old brass bell. It was an afternoon as silent as the grave. But by the time evening had fallen, he knew it was out there. A big square package, wrapped in brown paper, addressed in a hand he had known well. Inside a portrait.

He had not understood, not really, and so she was teaching him.

The clock ticked. The darkness grew thicker. The sense of a waiting presence beyond his door seemed to fill the house. His fear had been growing for hours. He sat in the armchair with his legs pulled up under him, his mouth hanging open, thinking, remembering. Heard cruel laughter. Saw the dim red tips of cigarettes in the shadows, moving, circling. Imagined their small hot kisses on his skin. Tasted urine, blood, tears. Knew violence, knew violation, of every sort there was. His hands, his voice, his face, his face, his face. The character with a dozen names, but fear had only a single face. The youngest of his children. His baby. His monstrous baby.

He had been blocked for so long, Cantling thought. If only he could make her understand. It was a kind of impotence, not writing. He had been a writer, but that was over. He had been a husband, but his wife was dead. He had been a father, but she got better, went back to New York. She left him alone, but that last night, wrapped in his arms, she told him the story, she showed him where it hurt, she gave him all that pain. What was he to do with it?”

Afterwards he could not forget. He thought of it constantly. He began to reshape it in his head, began to grope for the words, the scenes, the symbols that would make sense of it. It was hideous, but it was life, raw strong life, the grist for Cantling’s mill, the very thing he needed. She had showed him where it hurt; he could show them all. He did resist, he did try. He began a short story, an essay, finished some reviews. But it returned. It was with him every night. It would not be denied.

He wrote it.

“Guilty,” Cantling said in the darkened room. And when he spoke the word, a kind of acceptance seemed to settle over him, banishing the terror. He was guilty. He had done it. He would accept the punishment, then. It was only right.

Richard Cantling stood and went to his door.

The package was there.

He lugged it inside, still wrapped, carried it up the stairs. He would hang him beside the others, beside Dunnahoo and Cissy and Barry Leighton, all in a row, yes. He went for his hammer, measured carefully, drove the nail. Only then did he unwrap the portrait, and look at the face within.

It captured her as no other artist had ever done, not just the lines of her face, the high angular cheekbones and blue eyes and tangled ash blond hair, but the personality inside. She looked so young and fresh and confident, and he could see the strength there, the courage, the stubbornness. But best of all he liked her smile. It was a lovely smile, a smile that illuminated her whole face. The smile seemed to remind him of someone he had known once. He couldn’t remember who.

Richard Cantling felt a strange, brief sense of relief, followed by an even greater sense of loss, a loss so terrible and final and total that he knew it was beyond the power of the words he worshipped.

Then the feeling was gone.

Cantling stepped back, folded his arms, studied the four portraits. Such excellent work; looking at the paintings, he could almost feel their presence in his house.

Dunnahoo, his first-born, the boy he wished he’d been.

Cissy, his true love.

Barry Leighton, his wise and tired alter-ego.

Nicole, the daughter he’d never had.

His people. His characters. His children.

A week later, another, much smaller, package arrived. Inside the carton were copies of four of his novels, a bill, and a polite note from the artist inquiring if there would be any more commissions.

Richard Cantling said no, and paid the bill by check.

GILGAMESH IN THE OUTBACK

Robert Silverberg

“Sailing to Byzantium,” Robert Silverberg’s last story in IAsfm, is currently a finalist for the 1985 Nebula award for best Novella. A collection of his shorter pieces, Beyond the Safe Zone, was published by Donald I. Fine in April, and a novel, Star for Gypsies, will be out from them this fall. As always, we are honored to showcase Mr. Silverberg’s latest work.

Faust. First I will question thee about hell.

Tell me, where is the place that men call hell?

Meph. Under the heavens.

Faust. Ay, but whereabout?

Meph. Within the bowels of these elements,

Where we are tortur’d and remain for ever:

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d

In one self place; for where we are is hell,

And where hell is, there must we ever be:

And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell that are not heaven.

Faust. Come, I think hell’s a fable.

Meph. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.

Marlowe: Dr. Faustus

Jagged green lightning danced on the horizon and the wind came ripping like a blade out of the east, skinning the flat land bare and sending up clouds of gray-brown dust. Gilgamesh grinned broadly. By Enlil, now that was a wind! A lion-killing wind it was, a wind that turned the air dry and crackling. The beasts of the field gave you the greatest joy in their hunting when the wind was like that, hard and sharp and cruel.

He narrowed his eyes and stared into the distance, searching for this day’s prey. His bow of several fine woods, the bow that no man but he was strong enough to draw—no man but he and Enkidu his beloved thrice-lost friend—hung loosely from his hand. His body was poised and ready. Come now, you beasts! Come and be slain! It is Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, who would make his sport with you this day!

Other men in this land, when they went about their hunting, made use of guns, those foul machines that the New Dead had brought, which hurled death from a great distance along with much noise and fire and smoke; or they employed the even deadlier laser devices from whose ugly snouts came spurts of blue-white flame. Cowardly things, all those killing machines! Gilgamesh loathed them, as he did most instruments of the New Dead, those slick and bustling Johnny-come-latelies of Hell. He would not touch them if he could help it. In all the thousands of years he had dwelled in this nether world he had never used any weapons but those he had known during his first lifetime: the javelin, the spear, the double-headed axe, the hunting bow, the good bronze sword. It took some skill, hunting with such weapons as those. And there was physical effort; there was more than a little risk. Hunting was a contest, was it not? Then it must make demands. Why, if the idea was merely to slaughter one’s prey in the fastest and easiest and safest way, then the sensible thing to do would be to ride high above the hunting grounds in a weapons platform and drop a little nuke, eh, and lay waste five kingdoms’ worth of beasts at a single stroke!

He knew that there were those who thought him a fool for such ideas. Caesar, for one. Cocksure cold-blooded Julius with the gleaming pistols thrust into his belt and the submachine gun slung across his shoulders. “Why don’t you admit it?” Caesar had asked him once, riding up in his jeep as Gilgamesh was making ready to set forth toward Hell’s open wilderness. “It’s a pure affectation, Gilgamesh, all this insistence on arrows and javelins and spears. This isn’t old Sumer you’re living in now.”

Gilgamesh spat. “Hunt with 9-millimeter automatics? Hunt with grenades and cluster bombs and lasers? You call that sport, Caesar?”

“I call it acceptance of reality. Is it technology you hate? What’s the difference between using a bow and arrow and using a gun? They’re both technology, Gilgamesh. It isn’t as though you kill the animals with your bare hands.”

“I have done that, too,” said Gilgamesh.

“Bah! I’m on to your game. Big hulking Gilgamesh, the simple innocent oversized Bronze Age hero! That’s just an affectation, too, my friend! You pretend to be a stupid, stubborn thick-skulled barbarian because it suits you to be left alone to your hunting and your wandering, and that’s all you claim that you really want. But secretly you regard yourself as superior to anybody who lived in an era softer than your own. You mean to restore the bad old filthy ways of the ancient ancients, isn’t that so? If I read you the right way you’re just biding your time, skulking around with your bow and arrow in the dreary Outback until you think it’s the right moment to launch the putsch that carries you to supreme power here. Isn’t that it, Gilgamesh? You’ve got some crazy fantasy of overthrowing Satan himself and lording it over all of us. And then we’ll live in mud cities again and make little chicken scratches on clay tablets, the way we were meant to do. What do you say?”

“I say this is great nonsense, Caesar.”

“Is it? This place is full of kings and emperors and sultans and pharaohs and shahs and presidents and dictators, and every single one of them wants to be Number One again. My guess is that you’re no exception.”

“In this you are very wrong.”

“I doubt that. I suspect you believe you’re the best of us all; you, the sturdy warrior, the great hunter, the maker of bricks, the builder of vast temples and lofty walls, the shining beacon of ancient heroism. You think we’re all decadent rascally degenerates and that you’re the one true virtuous man. But you’re as proud and ambitious as any of us. Isn’t that how it is? You’re a fraud, Gilgamesh, a huge musclebound fraud!”

“At least I am no slippery tricky serpent like you, Caesar, who dons a wig and spies on women at their mysteries if it pleases him.”

Caesar looked untroubled by the thrust. “And so you pass three-quarters of your time killing stupid monstrous creatures in the Outback and you make sure everyone knows that you’re too pious to have anything to do with modern weapons while you do it. You don’t fool me. It isn’t virtue that keeps you from doing your killing with a decent double-barreled .470 Springfield. It’s intellectual pride, or maybe simple laziness. The bow just happens to be the weapon you grew up with, who knows how many thousands of years ago. You like it because it’s familiar. But what language are you speaking now, eh? Is it your thick-tongued Euphrates gibberish? No, it seems to be English, doesn’t it? Did you grow up speaking English too, Gilgamesh? Did you grow up riding around in jeeps and choppers? Apparently some of the new ways are acceptable to you.”

Gilgamesh shrugged. “I speak English with you because that is what is spoken now in this place. In my heart I speak the old tongue, Caesar. In my heart I am still Gilgamesh of Uruk, and I will hunt as I hunt.”

“Uruk’s long gone to dust. This is the life after life, my friend. We’ve been here a long time. We’ll be here for all time to come, unless I miss my guess. New people constantly bring new ideas to this place, and it’s impossible to ignore them. Even you can’t do it. Isn’t that a wristwatch I see on your arm, Gilgamesh? A digital watch, no less?”

“I will hunt as I hunt,” said Gilgamesh. “There is no sport in it, when you do it with guns. There is no grace in it.”

Caesar shook his head. “I never could understand hunting for sport, anyway. Killing a few stags, yes, or a boar or two, when you’ve bivouacked in some dismal Gaulish forest and your men want meat. But hunting? Slaughtering hideous animals that aren’t even edible? By Apollo, it’s all nonsense to me!”

“My point exactly.”

“But if you must hunt, to scorn the use of a decent hunting rifle—”

“You will never convince me.”

“No,” Caesar said with a sigh. “I suppose I won’t. I should know better than to argue with a reactionary.”

“Reactionary! In my time I was thought to be a radical,” said Gilgamesh. “When I was king in Uruk—”

“Just so,” Caesar said, laughing. “King in Uruk. Was there ever a king who wasn’t reactionary? You put a crown on your head and it addles your brains instantly. Three times Antonius offered me a crown, Gilgamesh. Three times, and—”

“—you did thrice refuse it, yes. I know all that. ‘Was this ambition?’ You thought you’d have the power without the emblem. Who were you fooling, Caesar? Not Brutus, so I hear. Brutus said you were ambitious. And Brutus—”

That stung him. “Damn you, don’t say it!”

“—was an honorable man,” Gilgamesh concluded, enjoying Caesar’s discomfiture.

Caesar groaned. “If I hear that line once more—”

“Some say this is a place of torment,” said Gilgamesh serenely. “If in truth it is, yours is to be swallowed up in another man’s poetry. Leave me to my bows and arrows, Caesar, and return to your jeep and your trivial intrigues. I am a fool and a reactionary, yes. But you know nothing of hunting. Nor do you understand anything of me.”

All that had been a year ago, or two, or maybe five—with or without a wristwatch, there was no keeping proper track of time in Hell, where the unmoving ruddy eye of the sun never budged from the sky—and now Gilgamesh was far from Caesar and all his minions, far from the troublesome center of Hell and the tiresome squabbling of those like Caesar and Alexander and Napoleon and that sordid little Guevara man who maneuvered for power in this place.

Let them maneuver all they liked, those shoddy new men of the latter days. Some day they might learn wisdom, and was not that the purpose of this place, if it had any purpose at all?

Gilgamesh preferred to withdraw. Unlike the rest of those fallen emperors and kings and pharaohs and shahs, he felt no yearning to reshape Hell in his own image. Caesar was as wrong about Gilgamesh’s ambitions as he was about the reasons for his preferences in hunting gear. Out here in the Outback, in the bleak dry chilly hinterlands of Hell, Gilgamesh hoped to find peace. That was all he wanted now: peace. He had wanted much more, once, but that had been long ago.

There was a stirring in the scraggly underbrush.

A lion, maybe?

No, Gilgamesh thought. There were no lions to be found in Hell, only the strange nether-world beasts. Ugly hairy things with flat noses and many legs and dull baleful eyes, and slick shiny things with the faces of women and the bodies of malformed dogs, and worse, much worse. Some had drooping leathery wings, and some were armed with spiked tails that rose like a scorpion’s, and some had mouths that opened wide enough to swallow an elephant at a gulp. They all were demons of one sort or another, Gilgamesh knew. No matter. Hunting was hunting; the prey was the prey; all beasts were one in the contest of the field. That fop Caesar could never begin to comprehend that.

Drawing an arrow from his quiver, Gilgamesh laid it lightly across his bow and waited.

“If you ever had come to Texas, H.P., this here’s a lot like what you’d have seen,” said the big barrel-chested man with the powerful arms and the deeply tanned skin. Gesturing sweepingly with one hand, he held the wheel of the Land Rover lightly with three fingers of the other, casually guiding the vehicle in jouncing zigs and zags over the flat trackless landscape. Gnarled gray-green shrubs matted the gritty ground. The sky was black with swirling dust. Far off in the distance barren mountains rose like dark jagged teeth. “Beautiful. Beautiful. As close to Texas in look as makes no never mind, this countryside is.”

“Beautiful?” said the other man uncertainly. “Hell?”

“This stretch sure is. But if you think Hell’s beautiful, you should have seen Texas!”

The burly man laughed and gunned the engine, and the Land Rover went leaping and bouncing onward at a stupefying speed.

His traveling companion, a gaunt, lantern-jawed man as pale as the other was bronzed, sat very still in the passenger seat, knees together and elbows digging in against his ribs, as if he expected a fiery crash at any moment. The two of them had been journeying across the interminable parched wastes of the Outback for many days now—how many, not even the Elder Gods could tell. They were ambassadors, these two: Their Excellencies Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft of the Kingdom of New Holy Diabolic England, envoys of His Britannic Majesty Henry VIII to the court of Prester John.

In another life they had been writers, fantasists, inventors of fables; but now they found themselves caught up in something far more fantastic than anything to be found in any of their tales, for this was no fable, this was no fantasy. This was the reality of Hell.

“Robert—” said the pale man nervously.

“A lot like Texas, yes,” Howard went on, “only Hell’s just a faint carbon copy of the genuine item. Just a rough first draft, is all. You see that sandstorm rising out thataway? We had sandstorms, they covered entire counties! You see that lightning? In Texas that would be just a flicker!”

“If you could drive just a little more slowly, Bob—”

“More slowly? Cthulhu’s whiskers, man, I am driving slowly!”

“Yes, I’m quite sure you believe that you are.”

“And the way I always heard it, H.P., you loved for people to drive you around at top speed. Seventy, eighty miles an hour, that was what you liked best, so the story goes.”

“In the other life one dies only once, and then all pain ceases,” Lovecraft replied. “But here, where one can go to the Undertaker again and again, and when one returns one remembers every final agony in the brightest of hues—here, dear friend Bob, death’s much more to be feared, for the pain of it stays with one forever, and one may die a thousand deaths.” Lovecraft managed a pale baleful smile. “Speak of that to some professional warrior, Bob, some Trojan or Hun or Assyrian—or one of the gladiators, maybe, someone who has died and died and died again. Ask him about it: the dying and the rebirth, and the pain, the hideous torment, reliving every detail. It is a dreadful thing to die in Hell. I fear dying here far more than I ever did in life. I will take no needless risks here.”

Howard snorted. “Gawd, try and figure you out! When you thought you lived only once, you made people go roaring along with you on the highway a mile a minute. Here where hardly anyone stays dead for very long you want me to drive like an old woman. Well, I’ll attempt it, H.P., but everything in me cries out to go like the wind. When you live in big country, you learn to cover the territory the way it has to be covered. And Texas is the biggest country there is. It isn’t just a place, it’s a state of mind.”

“As is Hell,” said Lovecraft. “Though I grant you that Hell isn’t Texas.”

“Texas!” Howard boomed. “God damn, I wish you could have seen it! By god, H.P., what a time we’d have had, you and me, if you’d come to Texas. Two gentlemen of letters like us riding together all to hell and gone from Corpus Christi to El Paso and back again, seeing it all and telling each other wondrous stories all the way! I swear, it would have enlarged your soul, H.P. Beauty such as perhaps even you couldn’t have imagined. That big sky. That blazing sun. And the open space! Whole empires could fit into Texas and never be seen again! That Rhode Island of yours, H.P.—we could drop it down just back of Cross Plains and lose it behind a medium-size prickly pear! What you see here, it just gives you the merest idea of that glorious beauty. Though I admit this is plenty beautiful itself, this here.”

“I wish I could share your joy in this landscape, Robert,” Lovecraft said quietly, when it seemed that Howard had said all he meant to say.

“You don’t care for it?” Howard asked, sounding surprised and a little wounded.

“I can say one good thing for it: at least it’s far from the sea.”

“You’ll give it that much, will you?”

“You know how I hate the sea and all that the sea contains! Its odious creatures—that hideous reek of salt air hovering above it—” Lovecraft shuddered fastidiously. “But this land—this bitter desert—you don’t find it somber? You don’t find it forbidding?”

“It’s the most beautiful place I’ve seen since I came to Hell.”

“Perhaps the beauty is too subtle for my eye. Perhaps it escapes me altogether. I was always a man for cities, myself.”

“What you’re trying to say, I reckon, is that all this looks real hateful to you. Is that it? As grim and ghastly as the Plateau of Leng, eh, H.P.?” Howard laughed. “ ‘Sterile hills of gray granite . . . dim wastes of rock and ice and snow . . . .’ ” Hearing himself quoted, Lovecraft laughed too, though not exuberantly. Howard went on. “I look around at the Outback of Hell and I see something a whole lot like Texas, and I love it. For you it’s as sinister as dark frosty Leng, where people have horns and hooves and munch on corpses and sing hymns to Nyarlathotep. Oh, H.P., H.P., there’s no accounting for tastes, is there? Why, there’s even some people who—whoa, now! Look there!”

He braked the Land Rover suddenly and brought it to a jolting halt. A small malevolent-looking something with blazing eyes and a scaly body had broken from cover and gone scuttering across the path just in front of them. Now it faced them, glaring up out of the road, snarling and hissing flame.

“Hell-cat!” Howard cried. “Hell-coyote! Look at that critter, H.P. You ever see so much ugliness packed into such a small package? Scare the toenails off a shoggoth, that one would!”

“Can you drive past it?” Lovecraft asked, looking dismayed.

“I want a closer look, first.” Howard rummaged down by his boots and pulled a pistol from the clutter on the floor of the car. “Don’t it give you the shivers, driving around in a land full of critters that could have come right out of one of your stories, or mine? I want to look this little ghoul-cat right in the eye.”

“Robert—”

“You wait here. I’ll only be but a minute.”

Howard swung himself down from the Land Rover and marched stolidly toward the hissing little beast, which stood its ground. Lovecraft watched fretfully. At any moment the creature might leap upon Bob Howard and rip out his throat with a swipe of its horrid yellow talons, perhaps—or burrow snout-deep into his chest, seeking the Texan’s warm, throbbing heart—

They stood staring at each other, Howard and the small monster, no more than a dozen feet apart. For a long moment neither one moved. Howard, gun in hand, leaned forward to inspect the beast as one might look at a feral cat guarding the mouth of an alleyway. Did he mean to shoot it? No, Lovecraft thought: beneath his bluster the robust Howard seemed surprisingly squeamish about bloodshed and violence of any sort.

Then things began happening very quickly. Out of a thicket to the left a much larger animal abruptly emerged: a ravening Hell-creature with a crocodile head and powerful thick-thighed legs that ended in monstrous curving claws. An arrow ran through the quivering dewlaps of its heavy throat from side to side, and a hideous dark ichor streamed from the wound down the beast’s repellent blue-gray fur. The small animal, seeing the larger one wounded this way, instantly sprang upon its back and sank its fangs joyously into its shoulder. But a moment later there burst from the same thicket a man of astonishing size, a great dark-haired black-bearded man clad only in a bit of cloth about his waist. Plainly he was the huntsman who had wounded the larger monster, for there was a bow of awesome dimensions in his hand and a quiver of arrows on his back. In utter fearlessness the giant plucked the foul little creature from the wounded beast’s back and hurled it far out of sight; then, swinging around, he drew a gleaming bronze dagger, and with a single fierce thrust, drove it into the breast of his prey as the coup de grace that brought the animal crashing heavily down.

All this took only an instant. Lovecraft, peering through the window of the Land Rover, was dazzled by the strength and speed of the dispatch and awed by the size and agility of the half-naked huntsman. He glanced toward Howard, who stood to one side, his own considerable frame utterly dwarfed by the black-bearded man.

For a moment Howard seemed dumbstruck, paralyzed with wonder and amazement. But then he was the first to speak.

“By Crom,” he muttered, staring at the giant. “Surely this is Conan of Aquilonia and none other!” He was trembling. He took a lurching step toward the huge man, holding out both his hands in a strange gesture—submission, was it? “Lord Conan?” Howard murmured. “Great king, is it you? Conan? Conan?” And before Lovecraft’s astounded eyes Howard fell to his knees next to the dying beast, and looked up with awe and something like rapture in his eyes at the towering huntsman.

It had been a decent day’s hunting so far. Three beasts brought down after long and satisfying chase; every shaft fairly placed; each animal skillfully dressed, the meat set out as bait for other hell-beasts, the hide and head carefully put aside for proper cleaning at nightfall. There was true pleasure in work done so well.

Yet there was a hollowness at the heart of it all, Gilgamesh thought, that left him leaden and cheerless no matter how cleanly his arrows sped to their mark. He never felt that true fulfillment, that clean sense of completion, that joy of accomplishment, which was ultimately the only thing he sought.

Why was that? Was it—as the Christian dead so drearily insisted—because this was Hell, where by definition there could be no delight?

To Gilgamesh that was foolishness. Those who came here expecting eternal punishment did indeed get eternal punishment, and it was even more horrendous than anything they had anticipated. It served them right, those true believers, those gullible New Dead, that army of credulous Christians.

He had been amazed when their kind first came flocking into Hell, Enki only knew how many thousands of years ago. The things they talked of! Rivers of boiling oil! Lakes of pitch! Demons with pitchforks! That was what they expected, and the Administration was happy to oblige them. There were Torture Towns aplenty for those who wanted them. Gilgamesh had trouble understanding why anyone would. Nobody among the Old Dead really could figure them out, those absurd New Dead with their obsession with punishment. What was it Sargon called them? Masochists, that was the word. Pathetic masochists. But then that sly little Machiavelli had begged to disagree, saying, “No, my lord, it would be a violation of the nature of Hell to send a true masochist off to the torments. The only ones who go are the strong ones—the bullies, the braggarts, the ones who are cowards at the core of their souls.” Augustus had had something to say on the matter too, and Caesar, and that Egyptian bitch Hatshepsut had butted in, she of the false beard and the startling eyes, and then all of them had jabbered at once, trying yet again to make sense of the Christian New Dead. Until finally Gilgamesh had said, before stalking out of the room, “The trouble with all of you is that you keep trying to make sense out of this place. But when you’ve been here as long as I have—”

Well, perhaps Hell was a place of punishment. Certainly there were some disagreeable aspects to it. The business about sex, for example. Never being able to come, even if you pumped away all day and all night. And the whole digestive complication, allowing you to eat real food but giving you an unholy hard time when it came to passing the stuff through your gut. But Gilgamesh tended to believe that those were merely the incidental consequences of being dead: this place was not, after all, the land of the living, and there was no reason why things should work the same way here as they did back there.

He had to admit that the reality of Hell had turned out to be nothing at all like what the priests had promised it would be. The House of Dust and Darkness, was what they had called it in Uruk long ago. A place where the dead lived in eternal night and sadness, clad like birds, with wings for garments. Where the dwellers had dust for their bread, and clay for their meat. Where the kings of the earth, the masters, the high rulers, lived humbly without their crowns, and were forced to wait on the demons like servants. Small wonder that he had dreaded death as he had, believing that that was what awaited him for all time to come!

Well, in fact all that had been mere myth and folly. Gilgamesh could still remember Hell as it had been when he first had come to it: a place much like Uruk, so it seemed, with low flat-roofed buildings of whitewashed brick, and temples rising on high platforms of many steps. And there he found all the heroes of olden days, living as they had always lived: Lugalbanda, his father, and Enmerkar, his father’s father; and Ziusudra who built the vessel by which mankind survived the Flood; and others on and on, back to the dawn of time. At least that was what it was like where Gilgamesh first found himself; there were other districts, he discovered later, that were quite different—places where people lived in caves, or in pits in the ground, or in flimsy houses of reeds, and still other places where the Hairy Men dwelled and had no houses at all. Most of that was gone now, greatly transformed by all those who had come to Hell in the latter days, and indeed a lot of nonsensical ugliness and ideological foolishness had entered in recent centuries in the baggage of the New Dead. But still, the idea that this whole vast realm—infinitely bigger than his own beloved Land of the Two Rivers—existed merely for the sake of chastising the dead for their sins, struck Gilgamesh as too silly for serious contemplation.

Why, then, was the joy of his hunting so pale and hollow? Why none of the old ecstasy when spying the prey, when drawing the great bow, when sending the arrow true to its mark?

Gilgamesh thought he knew why, and it had nothing to do with punishment. There had been joy aplenty in the hunting for many a thousand years of his life in Hell. If the joy had gone from it now, it was only that in these latter days he hunted alone; that Enkidu—his friend, his true brother, his other self—was not with him. That and nothing but that: for he had never felt complete without Enkidu since they first had met and wrestled and come to love one another after the manner of brothers, long ago in the city of Uruk. That great burly man, broad and tall and strong as Gilgamesh himself, that shaggy wild creature out of the high ridges: Gilgamesh had never loved anyone as he loved Enkidu.

But it was the fate of Gilgamesh, so it seemed, to lose him again and again. Enkidu had been ripped from him the first time long ago when they still dwelled in Uruk, on that dark day when the gods had had revenge upon them for their great pride and had sent the fever to take Enkidu’s life. In time Gilgamesh too had yielded to death and was taken into Hell, which he found nothing at all like the Hell that the scribes and priests of the Land had taught; and there he had searched for Enkidu, and one glorious day he had found him. Hell had been a much smaller place, then, and everyone seemed to know everyone else; but even so it had taken an age to track him down. Oh, the rejoicing that day in Hell! Oh, the singing and the dancing, the vast festival that went on and on! There was great kindliness among the denizens of Hell in those days, and everyone was glad for Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Minos of Crete gave the first great party in honor of their reunion, and then it was Amenhotep’s turn, and then Agamemnon’s. And on the fourth day the host was dark slender Varuna, the Meluhhan king, and then on the fifth the heroes gathered in the ancient hall of the Ice-Hunter folk where one-eyed Vy-otin was chieftain and the floor was strewn with mammoth tusks, and after that—

Well, and it went on for some long time, the great celebration of the reunion. This was long before the hordes of New Dead had come, all those grubby little unheroic people out of unheroic times, carrying with them their nasty little demons and their dark twisted apparatus of damnation and punishment. Before they had come, Hell had simply been a place to live in the time after life. It was all very different then, a far happier place.

For uncountable years Gilgamesh and Enkidu dwelled together in Gilgamesh’s palace in Hell as they had in the old days in the Land of the Two Rivers. And all was well with them, with much hunting and feasting, and they were happy in Hell even after the New Dead began to come in, bringing all their terrible changes.

They were shoddy folk, these New Dead, confused of soul and flimsy of intellect, and their petty trifling rivalries and vain strutting poses were a great nuisance. But Gilgamesh and Enkidu kept their distance from them while they replayed all the follies of their lives, their nonsensical Crusades and their idiotic trade wars and their preposterous theological squabbles. The trouble was that they had brought not only their lunatic ideas to Hell but also their accursed diabolical modern gadgets, and the worst of those were the vile weapons called guns, that slaughtered noisily from afar in the most shameful cowardly way. Heroes know how to parry the blow of a battle-ax or the thrust of a sword; but what can even a hero do about a bullet from afar? It was Enkidu’s bad luck to fall between two quarreling bands of these gun-wielders, a flock of babbling Spaniards and a rabble of arrogant Englanders, for whom he tried to make peace. Of course they would have no peace, and soon shots were flying, and Gilgamesh arrived at the scene just as a bolt from an arquebus tore through his dear Enkidu’s noble heart.

No one dies in Hell forever; but some are dead a long time, and that was how it was with Enkidu. It pleased the Undertaker this time to keep him in limbo some hundreds of years, or however many it was—tallying such matters in Hell is always difficult. It was, at any rate, a dreadful long while, and Gilgamesh once more felt that terrible inrush of loneliness that only the presence of Enkidu might cure. Hell continued to change, and now the changes were coming at a stupefying, overwhelming rate. There seemed to be far more people in the world than there ever had been in the old days, and great armies of them marched into Hell every day, a swarming rabble of uncouth strangers who after only a little interval of disorganization and bewilderment would swiftly set out to reshape the whole place into something as discordant and repellent as the world they had left behind. The steam engine came, with its clamor and clangor, and something called the dynamo, and then harsh glittering electrical lights blazed in every street where the lamps had been, and factories arose and began pouring out all manner of strange things. And more and more and more, relentlessly, unceasingly. Railroads. Telephones. Automobiles. Noise, smoke, soot everywhere, and no way to hide from it. The Industrial Revolution, they called it. Satan and his swarm of Administration bureaucrats seemed to love all the new things, and so did almost everyone else, except for Gilgamesh and a few other cranky conservatives. “What are they trying to do?” Rabelais asked one day. “Turn the place into Hell?” Now the New Dead were bringing in such devices as radios and helicopters and computers, and everyone was speaking English, so that once again Gilgamesh, who had grudgingly learned the new-fangled Greek long ago when Agamemnon and his crew had insisted on it, was forced to master yet another tongue-twisting, intricate language. It was a dreary time for him. And then at last did Enkidu reappear, far away in one of the cold northern domains. He made his way south, and for a time, they were reunited again, and once more all was well for Gilgamesh of Uruk in Hell.

But now they were separated again, this time by something colder and more cruel than death itself. It was beyond all belief, but they had quarreled. There had been words between them, ugly words on both sides—such a dispute as never in thousands of years had passed between them in the land of the living or in the land of Hell—and at last Enkidu had said that which Gilgamesh had never dreamed he would ever hear, which was, “I want no more of you, king of Uruk. If you cross my path again I will have your life.” Could that have been Enkidu speaking, or was it, Gilgamesh wondered, some demon of Hell in Enkidu’s form?

In any case he was gone. He vanished into the turmoil and intricacy of Hell and placed himself beyond Gilgamesh’s finding. And when Gilgamesh sent forth inquiries, back came only the report, “He will not speak with you. He has no love for you, Gilgamesh.”

It could not be. It must be a spell of witchcraft, thought Gilgamesh. Surely this was some dark working of the Hell of the New Dead, that could turn brother against brother and lead Enkidu to persist in his wrath. In time, Gilgamesh was sure, Enkidu would be triumphant over this sorcery that gripped his soul, and he would open himself once more to the love of Gilgamesh. But time went on, after the strange circuitous fashion of Hell, and Enkidu did not return to his brother’s arms.

What was there to do but hunt, and wait, and hope?

So this day Gilgamesh hunted in Hell’s parched Outback. He had killed and killed and killed again, and now late in the day he had put his arrow through the throat of a monster more foul even than the usual run of creatures of Hell; but there was a terrible vitality to the thing, and it went thundering off, dripping dark blood from its pierced maw.

Gilgamesh gave pursuit. It is sinful to strike and wound and not to kill. For a long weary hour he ran, crisscrossing this harsh land. Thorny plants slashed at him with the malevolence of imps, and the hard wind flailed him with clouds of dust sharp as whips. Still the evil-looking beast outpaced him, though its blood drained in torrents from it to the dry ground.

Gilgamesh would not let himself tire, for there was god-power in him by virtue of his descent from the divine Lugalbanda, his great father who was both king and god. But he was hard pressed to keep going. Three times he lost sight of his quarry, and tracked it only by the spoor of its blood-droppings. The bleak red motionless eye that was the sun of Hell seemed to mock him, hovering forever before him as though willing him to run without cease.

Then he saw the creature, still strong but plainly staggering, lurching about at the edge of a thicket of little twisted, greasy-leaved trees. Unhesitatingly Gilgamesh plunged forward. The trees stroked him lasciviously, coating him with their slime, trying like raucous courtesans to insinuate their leaves between his legs; but he slapped them away, and emerged finally into a clearing where he could confront his animal.

Some repellent little hell-beast was clinging to the back of his prey, ripping out bloody gobbets of flesh and ruining the hide. A Land Rover was parked nearby, and a pale, strange-looking man with a long jaw was peering from its window. A second man, red-faced and beefy-looking, stood close by Gilgamesh’s roaring, snorting quarry.

First things first. Gilgamesh reached out, scooped the foul hissing little carrion-seeker from the bigger animal’s back, flung it aside. Then with all his force he rammed his dagger toward what he hoped was the heart of the wounded animal. In the moment of his thrust Gilgamesh felt a great convulsion within the monster’s breast and its hell-life left it in an instant.

The work was done. Again, no exultation, no sense of fulfillment; only a kind of dull ashen release from an unfinished chore. Gilgamesh caught his breath and looked around.

What was this? The red-faced man seemed to be having a crazy fit. Quivering, shaking, sweating, dropping to his knees, his eyes gleaming insanely—

“Lord Conan?” the man cried. “Great king?”

“Conan is not one of my titles,” said Gilgamesh, mystified. “And I was a king once in Uruk, but I reign over nothing at all in this place. Come, man, get off your knees!”

“But you are Conan to the life!” moaned the red-faced man hoarsely. “To the absolute life!”

Gilgamesh felt a surge of intense dislike for this fellow. He would be slobbering in another moment. Conan? Conan? That name meant nothing at all. No, wait; he had known a Conan once, some little Celtic fellow he had encountered in a tavern, a chap with a blunt nose and heavy cheekbones and dark hair tumbling down his face, a drunken twitchy little man forever invoking forgotten godlets of no consequence—yes, he had called himself Conan, so Gilgamesh thought. Drank too much, caused trouble for the barmaid, even took a swing at her, that was the one. Gilgamesh had dropped him down an open cesspool to teach him manners. But how could this blustery-faced fellow here mistake me for that one? He was still mumbling on, too, babbling about lands whose names meant nothing to Gilgamesh—Cimmeria, Aquilonia, Hyrkania, Zamora. Total nonsense. There were no such places.

And that glow in the fellow’s eyes—what sort of look was that? A look of adoration, almost the sort of look a woman might give a man when she has decided to yield herself utterly to his will.

Gilgamesh had seen such looks aplenty in his day, from women and men both; and he had welcomed them from women, but never from a man. He scowled. What does he think I am? Does he think, as so many have wrongly thought, that because I loved Enkidu with so great a love that I am a man who will embrace a man in the fashion of men and women? Because it is not so. Not even here in Hell is it so, said Gilgamesh to himself. Nor will it ever be.

“Tell me everything!” the red-faced man was imploring. “All those exploits that I dreamed in your name, Conan: Tell me how they really were! That time in the snow fields, when you met the frost giant’s daughter—and when you sailed the Tigress with the Black Coast’s queen—and that time you stormed the Aquilonian capital, and slew King Numedides on his own throne—”

Gilgamesh stared in distaste at the man groveling at his feet.

“Come, fellow, stop this blather now,” he said sourly. “Up with you! You mistake me greatly, I think.”

The second man was out of the Land Rover now, and on his way over to join them. An odd-looking creature he was, too, skeleton-thin and corpse-white, with a neck like a water-bird’s that seemed barely able to support his long, big-chinned head. He was dressed oddly too, all in black, and swathed in layer upon layer as if he dreaded the faintest chill. Yet he had a gentle and thoughtful way about him, quite unlike the wild-eyed and feverish manner of his friend. He might be a scribe, Gilgamesh thought, or a priest; but what the other one could be, the gods alone would know.

The thin man touched the other’s shoulder and said, “Take command of yourself, man. This is surely not your Conan here.”

“To the life! To the very life! His size—his grandeur—the way he killed that beast—”

“Bob—Bob, Conan’s a figment! Conan’s a fantasy! You spun him out of whole cloth. Come, now. Up. Up.” To Gilgamesh he said, “A thousand pardons, good sir. My friend is—sometimes excitable—”

Gilgamesh turned away, shrugging, and looked to his quarry. He had no need for dealings with these two. Skinning the huge beast properly might take him the rest of the day; and then to haul the great hide back to his camp, and determine what he wanted of it as a trophy—

Behind him he heard the booming voice of the red-faced man. “A figment, H.P.? How can you be sure of that? I thought I invented Conan, too; but what if he really lived, what if I had merely tapped into some powerful primordial archetype, what if the authentic Conan stands here before us this very moment—”

“Dear Bob, your Conan had blue eyes, did he not? And this man’s eyes are dark as night.”

“Well—” Grudgingly.

“You were so excited you failed to notice. But I did. This is some barbarian warrior, yes, some great huntsman beyond any doubt—a Nimrod, an Ajax. But not Conan, Bob! Grant him his own identity. He’s no invention of yours.” Coming up beside Gilgamesh, the long-jawed man said, speaking in a formal and courtly way, “Good sir, I am Howard Phillips Lovecraft, formerly of Providence, Rhode Island, and my companion is Robert E. Howard of Texas, whose other life was lived, as was mine, in the twentieth century after Christ. At that time we were tale-tellers by trade, and I think he confuses you with a hero of his own devising. Put his mind at ease, I pray you, and let us know your name.”

Gilgamesh looked up. He rubbed his wrist across his forehead to clear it of a smear of the monster’s gore and met the other man’s gaze evenly. This one, at least, was no madman, strange though he looked.

Quietly Gilgamesh said, “I think his mind may be beyond putting at any ease. But know you that I am called Gilgamesh, the son of Lugalbanda.”

“Gilgamesh the Sumerian?” Lovecraft whispered. “Gilgamesh who sought to live forever?”

“Gilgamesh am I, yes, who was king in Uruk when that was the greatest city of the Land of the Two Rivers, and who in his folly thought there was a way of cheating death.”

“Do you hear that, Bob?”

“Incredible. Beyond all belief!” muttered the other.

Rising until he towered above them both, Gilgamesh drew in his breath deeply and said with awesome resonance, “I am Gilgamesh to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death, most especially those of death. I have coupled with Inanna the goddess in the bed of the Sacred Marriage; I have slain demons and spoken with gods; I am two parts god myself, and only one part mortal.” He paused and stared at them, letting it sink in, those words that he had recited so many times in situations much like this. Then in a quieter tone he went on, “When death took me I came to this nether world they call Hell, and here I pass my time as a huntsman, and I ask you now to excuse me, for as you see I have my tasks.”

Once more he turned away.

“Gilgamesh!” said Lovecraft again in wonder. And the other said, “If I live here till the end of time, H.P., I’ll never grow used to it. This is more fantastic than running into Conan would have been! Imagine it: Gilgamesh!”

A tiresome business, Gilgamesh thought: all this awe, all this adulation.

The problem was that damned epic, of course. He could see why Caesar grew so irritable when people tried to suck up to him with quotations out of Shakespeare’s verses. “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus,” and all that: Caesar grew livid by the third syllable. Once they put you into poetry, Gilgamesh had discovered, as had Odysseus and Achilles and Caesar after him and many another, your own real self can begin to disappear and the self of the poem overwhelms you entirely and turns you into a walking cliché. Shakespeare had been particularly villainous that way, Gilgamesh thought: ask Richard III, ask Macbeth, ask Owen Glendower. You found them skulking around Hell with perpetual chips on their shoulders, because every time they opened their mouths people expected them to say something like “My kingdom for a horse!” or “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” or “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” Gilgamesh had had to live with that kind of thing almost from the time he had first come to Hell, for they had written the poems about him soon after. All that pompous brooding stuff, a whole raft of Gilgamesh tales of varying degrees of basis in reality. And then the Babylonians and the Assyrians, and even those smelly garlic-gobbling Hittites, had gone on translating and embroidering them for another thousand years so that everybody from one end of the known world to the other knew them by heart. And even after all those peoples were gone and their languages had been forgotten, there was no surcease, because these twentieth-century folk had found the whole thing and deciphered the text somehow and made it famous all over again. Over the centuries they had turned him into everybody’s favorite all-purpose hero, which was a hell of a burden to bear: there was a piece of him in the Prometheus legend, and in the Heracles stuff, and in that story of Odysseus’ wanderings, and even in the Celtic myths, which was probably why this creepy Howard fellow kept calling him Conan. At least that other Conan, that ratty little sniveling drunken one, had been a Celt. Enlil’s ears, but it was wearying to have everyone expecting you to live up to the mythic exploits of twenty or thirty very different culture-heroes! And embarrassing, too, considering that the original non-mythical Heracles and Odysseus and some of the others dwelled here too and tended to be pretty possessive about the myths that had attached to them, even when they were simply variants on his own much older ones.

There was substance to the Gilgamesh stories, of course, especially the parts about him and Enkidu. But the poet had salted the story with a lot of pretentious arty nonsense too, as poets always will, and in any case you got very tired of having everybody boil your long and complex life down into the same twelve chapters and the same little turns of phrase. It got so that Gilgamesh found himself quoting the main Gilgamesh poem too, the one about his quest for eternal life—well, that one wasn’t too far from the essence of the truth, though they had mucked up a lot of the details with precious little “imaginative” touches—by way of making introduction for himself: “I am the man to whom all things were made known, the secret things, the truths of life and death.” Straight out of the poet’s mouth, those lines. Tiresome. Tiresome. Angrily he jabbed his dagger beneath the dead monster’s hide, and set about his task of flaying, while the two little men behind him went on muttering and mumbling to one another in astonishment at having run into Gilgamesh of Uruk in this bleak and lonely corner of Hell.

There were strange emotions stirring in Robert Howard’s soul, and he did not care for them at all. He could forgive himself for believing for that one giddy moment that this Gilgamesh was his Conan. That was nothing more than the artistic temperament at work, sweeping him up in a bit of rash feverish enthusiasm. To come suddenly upon a great muscular giant of a man in a loincloth who was hacking away at some fiendish monster with a little bronze dagger, and to think that he must surely be the mighty Cimmerian—well, that was a pardonable enough thing. Here in Hell you learned very quickly that you might run into anybody at all. You could find yourself playing at dice with Lord Byron or sharing a mug of mulled wine with Menelaos or arguing with Plato about the ideas of Nietzsche, who was standing right there making faces, and after a time you came to take most such things for granted, more or less.

So why not think that this fellow was Conan? No matter that Conan’s eyes had been of a different color. That was a trifle. He looked like Conan in all the important ways. He was of Conan’s size and strength. And he was kingly in more than physique. He seemed to have Conan’s cool intelligence and complexity of soul, his regal courage and indomitable spirit.

The trouble was that Conan, the wondrous Cimmerian warrior from 19,000 B.C., had never existed except in Howard’s own imagination. And there were no fictional characters in Hell. You might meet Richard Wagner, but you weren’t likely to encounter Siegfried. Theseus was here somewhere, but not the Minotaur. William the Conqueror, yes; William Tell, no.

That was all right, Howard told himself. His little fantasy of meeting Conan here in Hell was nothing but a bit of mawkish narcissism: he was better off without it. Coming across the authentic Gilgamesh—ah, how much more interesting that was! A genuine Sumerian king—an actual titan out of history’s dawn, not some trumped-up figure fashioned from cardboard and hard-breathing wish-fulfilling dreams. A flesh-and-blood mortal who lived a lusty life and had fought great battles and had walked eye to eye with the ancient gods. A man who had struggled against the inevitability of death, and who in dying had taken on the immortality of mythic archetype—ah, now there was someone worth getting to know! Whereas Howard had to admit that he would learn no more from a conversation with Conan than he could discover by interrogating his own image in the mirror. Or else a meeting with the “real” Conan, if it was in any way possible, would surely cast him into terrible confusions and contradictions of soul from which there would be no recovering. No, Howard thought. Better that this man be Gilgamesh than Conan, by all means. He was reconciled to that.

But this other business—this sudden bewildering urge to throw himself at the giant’s feet, to be swept up in his arms, to be crushed in a fierce embrace—

What was that? Where had that come from? By the blazing Heart of Ahriman, what could it mean?

Howard remembered a time in his former life when he had gone down to the Cisco Dam and watched the construction men strip and dive in: well-built men, confident, graceful, at ease in their bodies. For a short while he had looked at them and had reveled in their physical perfection. They could have been naked Greek statues come alive, a band of lusty Apollos and Zeuses. And then as he listened to them shouting and laughing and crying out in their foul-mouthed way he began to grow angry, suddenly seeing them as mere thoughtless animals who were the natural enemies of dreamers like himself. He hated them as the weak always must hate the strong, those splendid swine who could trample the dreamers and their dreams as they wished. But then he had reminded himself that he was no weakling himself, that he who once had been spindly and frail had by hard effort made himself big and strong and burly. Not beautiful of body as these men were—too fleshy for that, too husky—but nevertheless, he had told himself, there was no man there whose ribs he could not crush if it came to a struggle. And he had gone away from that place full of rage and thoughts of bloody violence.

What had that been all about? That barely suppressed fury—was it some sort of dark hidden lust, some craving for the most bestial sort of sinfulness? Was the anger that had arisen in him masking an anger he should have directed at himself, for looking upon those naked men and taking pleasure in it?

No. No. No. No. He wasn’t any kind of degenerate. He was certain of that.

The desire of men for men was a mark of decadence, of the decline of civilization. He was a man of the frontier, not some feeble limp-wristed sodomite who reveled in filth and wanton evil. If he had never in his short life known a woman’s love, it was for lack of opportunity, not out of a preference for that other shameful kind. Living out his days in that small and remote prairie town, devoting himself to his mother and to his writing, he had chosen not to avail himself of prostitutes or shallow women, but he was sure that if he had lived a few years longer and the woman who was his true mate had ever made herself known to him, he would certainly have reached toward her in passion and high abandon.

And yet—and yet—that moment when he first spied the giant Gilgamesh, and thought he was Conan—

That surge of electricity through his entire body, and most intensely through his loins—what else could it have been but desire, instant and intense and overwhelming? For a man? Unthinkable! Even this glorious hero—even this magnificent kingly creature—

No. No. No. No.

I am in Hell, and this is my torment, Howard told himself.

He paced furiously up and down alongside the Land Rover. Desperately he fought off the black anguish that threatened to settle over him now, as it had done so many times in his former life and in this life after life. These sudden corrupt and depraved feelings, Howard thought: they are nothing but diabolical perversions of my natural spirit, intended to cast me into despair and self-loathing! By Crom, I will resist! By the breasts of Ishtar, I will not yield this foulness!

All the same he found his eyes straying to the edge of the nearby thicket, where Gilgamesh still knelt over the animal he had killed.

What extraordinary muscles rippling in that broad back, in those iron-hard thighs! What careless abandon in the way he was peeling back the creature’s shaggy hide, though he had to wallow in dark gore to do it! That cascade of lustrous black hair lightly bound by a jewelled circlet, that dense black beard curling in tight ringlets—

Howard’s throat went dry. Something at the base of his belly was tightening into a terrible knot.

Lovecraft said, “You want a chance to talk with him, don’t you?”

Howard swung around. He felt his cheeks go scarlet. He was utterly certain that his guilt must be emblazoned incontrovertibly on his face.

“What the hell do you mean?” he growled. His hands knotted of their own accord into fists. There seemed to be a band of fire across his forehead. “What would I want to talk with him about, anyway?”

Lovecraft looked startled by the ferocity of Howard’s tone and posture. He took a step backward and threw up his hand almost as though to protect himself. “What a strange thing to say! You, of all people, with your love of antique times, your deep and abiding passion for the lost mysteries of those steamy Oriental empires that perished so long ago! Why, man, is there nothing you want to know about the kingdoms of Sumer? Uruk, Nippur, Ur of the Chaldees? The secret rites of the goddess Inanna in the dark passageways beneath the ziggurat? The incantations that opened the gates of the Underworld, the libations that loosed and bound the demons of the worlds beyond the stars? Who knows what he could tell us? There stands a man six thousand years old, a hero from the dawn of time, Bob!”

Howard snorted. “I don’t reckon that oversized son of a bitch would want to tell us a damned thing. All that interests him is getting the hide off that bloody critter of his.”

“He’s nearly done with that. Why not wait, Bob? And invite him to sit with us a little while. And draw him out, lure him into telling us tales of life beside the Euphrates!” Now Lovecraft’s dark eyes were gleaming as though he too felt some strange lust, and his forehead was surprisingly bright with uncharacteristic perspiration; but Howard knew that in Lovecraft’s case what had taken possession of him was only the lust for knowledge, the hunger for the arcane lore of high antiquity that Lovecraft imagined would spill from the lips of this Mesopotamian hero. That same lust ached in him as well. To speak with this man who had lived before Babylon was, who had walked the streets of Ur when Abraham was yet unborn—

But there were other lusts besides that hunger for knowledge, sinister lusts that must be denied at any cost—

“No,” said Howard brusquely. “Let’s get the hell out of here right now, H.P. This damned foul bleak countryside is getting on my nerves.”

Lovecraft gave him a strange look. “But weren’t you just telling me how beautiful—”

“Damnation take whatever I was telling you! King Henry’s expecting us to negotiate an alliance for him. We aren’t going to get the job done out here in the boondocks.”

“The what?”

“Boondocks. Wild uncivilized country. Term that came into use after our time, H.P. The backwoods, you know? You never did pay much heed to the vernacular, did you?” He tugged at Lovecraft’s sleeve. “Come on. That big bloody ape over there isn’t going to tell us a thing about his life and times, I guarantee. Probably doesn’t remember anything worth telling, anyway. And he bores me. Pardon me, H.P., but I find him an enormous pain in the butt, all right? I don’t have any further hankering for his company. Do you mind, H.P.? Can we move along, do you think?”

“I must confess that you mystify me sometimes, Bob. But of course if you—” Suddenly Lovecraft’s eyes widened in amazement. “Get down, Bob! Behind the car! Fast!”

“What—”

An arrow came singing through the air and passed just alongside Howard’s left ear. Then another, and another. One arrow ricocheted off the flank of the Land Rover with a sickening thunking sound. Another struck straight on and stuck quivering an inch deep in the metal.

Howard whirled. He saw horsemen—a dozen, perhaps a dozen and a half—bearing down on them out of the darkness to the east, loosing shafts as they came.

They were lean compact men of some Oriental stock in crimson leather jerkins, riding like fiends. Their mounts were little flat-headed, fiery-eyed gray Hell-horses that moved as if their short, fiercely pistoning legs could carry them to the far boundaries of the nether world without the need of a moment’s rest.

Chanting, howling, the yellow-skinned warriors seemed to be in a frenzy of rage. Mongols? Turks? Whoever they were, they were pounding toward the Land Rover like the emissaries of Death himself. Some brandished long wickedly curved blades, but most wielded curious-looking small bows from which they showered one arrow after another with phenomenal rapidity.

Crouching behind the Land Rover with Lovecraft beside him, Howard gaped at the attackers in a paralysis of astonishment. How often had he written of scenes like this? Waving plumes, bristling lances, a whistling cloud of cloth-yard shafts! Thundering hooves, wild war cries, the thunk of barbarian arrowheads against Aquilonian shields! Horses rearing and throwing their riders . . . . Knights in bloodied armor tumbling to the ground . . . . Steel-clad forms littering the slopes of the battlefield . . . .

But this was no swashbuckling tale of Hyborean derring-do that was unfolding now. Those were real horsemen—as real as anything was, in this place—rampaging across this chilly wind-swept plain in the outer reaches of Hell. Those were real arrows; and they would rip their way into his flesh with real impact and inflict real agony of the most frightful kind.

He looked across the way at Gilgamesh. The giant Sumerian was hunkered down behind the overturned bulk of the animal he had slain. His mighty bow was in his hand. As Howard watched in awe, Gilgamesh aimed and let fly. The shaft struck the nearest horseman, traveling through jerkin and rib cage and all, and emerging from the man’s back. But still the onrushing warrior managed to release one last arrow before he fell. It traveled on an erratic trajectory, humming quickly toward Gilgamesh on a wild wobbly arc and skewering him through the flesh of his left forearm.

Coolly the Sumerian glanced down at the arrow jutting from his arm. He scowled and shook his head, the way he might if he had been stung by a hornet. Then—as Conan might have done, how very much like Conan!—Gilgamesh inclined his head toward his shoulder and bit the arrow in half just below the fletching. Bright blood spouted from the wound as he pulled the two pieces of the arrow from his arm.

As though nothing very significant had happened, Gilgamesh lifted his bow and reached for a second shaft. Blood was streaming in rivulets down his arm, but he seemed not even to be aware of it.

Howard watched as if in a stupor. He could not move; he barely had the will to draw breath. A haze of nausea threatened to overwhelm him. It had been nothing at all for him to heap up great bloody mounds of severed heads and arms and legs with cheerful abandon in his stories; but in fact, real bloodshed and violence of any sort had horrified him whenever he had even a glimpse of it.

“The gun, Bob!” said Lovecraft urgently beside him. “Use the gun!”

“What?”

“There. There.”

Howard looked down. Thrust through his belt was the pistol he had taken from the Land Rover when he had come out to investigate that little beast in the road. He drew it now and stared at it, glassy-eyed, as though it were a basilisk’s egg that rested on the palm of his hand.

“What are you doing?” Lovecraft asked. “Ah. Ah. Give it to me.” He snatched the gun impatiently from Howard’s frozen fingers and studied it a moment as though he had never held a weapon before. Perhaps he never had. But then, grasping the pistol with both his hands, he rose warily above the hood of the Land Rover and squeezed off a shot.

The tremendous sound of an explosion cut through the shrill cries of the horsemen. Lovecraft laughed. “Got one! Who would ever have imagined—”

He fired again. In the same moment Gilgamesh brought down one more of the attackers with his bow.

“They’re backing off!” Lovecraft cried. “By Alhazred, they didn’t expect this, I wager!” He laughed again and poked the gun up into a firing position. “Ia!” he cried, in a voice Howard had never heard out of the shy and scholarly Lovecraft before. “Shub-Niggurath!” Lovecraft fired a third time. “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

Howard felt sweat rolling down his body. This inaction of his—this paralysis, this shame—what would Conan make of it? What would Gilgamesh? And Lovecraft, that timid and sheltered man, he who dreaded the fishes of the sea and the cold winds of his New England winters and so many other things, was laughing and bellowing his wondrous gibberish and blazing away like any gangster, having the time of his life—

Shame! Shame!

Heedless of the risk, Howard scrambled up into the cab of the Land Rover and groped around for the second gun that was lying down there on the floor somewhere. He found it and knelt beside the window. Seven or eight of the Asiatic horsemen lay strewn about, dead or dying, within a hundred-yard radius of the car. The others had withdrawn to a considerable distance and were cantering in uneasy circles. They appeared taken aback by the unexpectedly fierce resistance they had encountered on what they had probably expected to have been an easy bit of jolly slaughter in these untracked frontierlands.

What were they doing now? Drawing together, a tight little ground, horses nose to nose. Conferring. And now two of them were pulling what seemed to be some sort of war-banner from a saddlebag and hoisting it between them on bamboo poles: a long yellow streamer with fluttering blood-red tips, on which bold Oriental characters were painted in shining black. Serious business, obviously. Now they were lining themselves up in a row, facing the Land Rover. Getting ready for a desperate suicide charge—that was the way things appeared.

Gilgamesh, standing erect in full view, calmly nocked yet another arrow. He took aim and waited for them to come. Lovecraft, looking flushed with excitement, wholly transformed by the alien joys of armed combat, was leaning forward, staring intently, his pistol cocked and ready.

Howard shivered. Shame rode him with burning spurs. How could he cower here while those two bore the brunt of the struggle? Though his hand was shaking, he thrust the pistol out the window and drew a bead on the closest horseman. His finger tightened on the trigger. Would it be possible to score a hit at such a distance? Yes. Yes. Go ahead. You know how to use a gun, all right. High time you put some of that skill to use. Knock that little yellow bastard off his horse with one bark of the Colt .380, yes. Send him straight to Hell—no, he’s in Hell already, send him off to the Undertaker for recycling. Yes, that’s it. Ready—aim—

“Wait,” Lovecraft said. “Don’t shoot.”

What was this? As Howard, with an effort, lowered his gun and let his rigid quivering hand go slack, Lovecraft, shading his eyes against the eerie glare of the motionless sun, peered closely at the enemy warriors a long silent moment. Then he turned, reached up into the rear of the Land Rover, groped around for a moment, finally pulled out the manila envelope that held their royal commission from King Henry.

And then—what was he doing?

Stepping out into plain view, arms raised high, waving the envelope around, walking toward the enemy?

“They’ll kill you, H.P.! Get down! Get down!”

Lovecraft, without looking back, gestured brusquely for Howard to be silent. He continued to walk steadily toward the far-off horsemen. They seemed just as mystified as Howard was. They sat without moving, their bows held stiffly out before them, a dozen arrows trained on the middle of Lovecraft’s body.

He’s gone completely off the deep end, Howard thought in dismay. He never was really well balanced, was he? Half believing all his stuff about Elder Gods and dimensional gateways and blasphemous rites on dark New England hillsides. And now all this shooting—the excitement—

“Hold your weapons, all of you!” Lovecraft cried in a voice of amazing strength and presence. “In the name of Prester John, I bid you hold your weapons! We are not your enemies! We are ambassadors to your emperor!”

Howard gasped. He began to understand. No, Lovecraft hadn’t gone crazy after all!

He took another look at that long yellow war-banner. Yes, yes, it bore the emblems of Prester John! These berserk horsemen must be part of the border patrol of the very nation whose ruler they had traveled so long to find. Howard felt abashed, realizing that in the fury of the battle Lovecraft had had the sense actually to pause long enough to give the banner’s legend close examination—and the courage to walk out there waving his diplomatic credentials. The parchment scroll of their royal commission was in his hand, and he was pointing to the little red-ribboned seal of King Henry.

The horsemen stared, muttered among themselves, lowered their bows. Gilgamesh, lowering his great bow also, looked on in puzzlement. “Do you see?” Lovecraft called. “We are heralds of King Henry! We claim the protection of your master the August Sovereign Yeh-lu Ta-shih!” Glancing back over his shoulder, he called to Howard to join him; and after only an instant’s hesitation, Howard leaped down from the Land Rover and trotted forward. It was a giddy feeling, exposing himself to those somber yellow archers this way. It felt almost like standing on the edge of some colossal precipice.

Lovecraft smiled. “It’s all going to be all right, Bob! That banner they unfurled, it bears the markings of Prester John—”

“Yes, yes. I see.”

“And look—they’re making a safe-conduct sign. They understand what I’m saying, Bob! They believe me!”

Howard nodded. He felt a great upsurge of relief and even a sort of joy. He clapped Lovecraft lustily on the back. “Fine going, H.P.! I didn’t think you had it in you!” Coming up out of his funk, now, he felt a manic exuberance seize his spirit. He gestured to the horsemen, wigwagging his arms with wild vigor. “Hoy! Royal commissioners!” he bellowed. “Envoys from His Britannic Majesty King Henry VIII! Take us to your emperor!” Then he looked toward Gilgamesh, who stood frowning, his bow still at the ready. “Hoy there, king of Uruk! Put away the weapons! Everything’s all right now! We’re going to be escorted to the court of Prester John!”

Gilgamesh wasn’t at all sure why he had let himself go along. He had no interest in visiting Prester John’s court, or anybody else’s. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone to hunt and roam in the wilderness and thereby to find some ease for his sorrows.

But the gaunt long-necked man and his blustery red-faced friend had beckoned him to ride with them in their Land Rover, and while he stood there frowning over that, the ugly flat-featured little yellow warriors had indicated with quick impatient gestures that he should get in. And he had. They looked as though they would try to compel him to get in if he balked; and though he had no fear of them, none whatever, some impulse that he could not begin to understand had led him to step back from the likelihood of yet another battle and simply climb aboard the vehicle. Perhaps he had had enough of solitary hunting for a while. Or perhaps it was just that the wound in his arm was beginning to throb and ache, now that the excitement of the fray was receding, and it seemed like a good idea to have it looked after by a surgeon. The flesh all around it was badly swollen and bruised. That arrow had pierced him through and through. He would have the wound cleaned and dressed, and then he would move along.

Well, then, so he was going to the court of Prester John. Here he was, sitting back silent and somber in the rear of this musty, mildew-flecked car, riding with these two very odd New Dead types, these scribes or tale-tellers or whatever it was they claimed to be, as the horsemen of Prester John led them to the encampment of their monarch.

The one who called himself Howard, the one who could not help stealing sly little glances at him like an infatuated schoolgirl, was at the wheel. Glancing back at his passenger now, he said, “Tell me, Gilgamesh: have you had dealings with Prester John before?”

“I have heard the name, that much I know,” replied the Sumerian. “But it means little to me.”

“The legendary Christian emperor,” said the other, the thin one, Lovecraft. “He who was said to rule a secret kingdom somewhere in the misty hinterlands of Central Asia—although it was in Africa, according to some—”

Asia, Africa—names, only names, Gilgamesh thought bleakly. They were places somewhere in the other world, but he had no idea where they might be.

Such a multitude of places, so many names! It was impossible to keep it all straight. There was no sense of any of it. The world—his world, the Land—had been bordered by the Two Rivers, the Idigna and the Buranunu, which the Greeks had preferred to call the Tigris and the Euphrates. Who were the Greeks, and by what right had they renamed the rivers? Everyone used those names now, even Gilgamesh himself, except in the inwardness of his soul.

And beyond the Two Rivers? Why, there was the vassal state of Aratta far to the east, and in that direction also lay the Land of Cedars, where the fire-breathing demon Huwawa roared and bellowed, and in the eastern mountains lay the kingdom of the barbaric Elamites. To the north was the land called Uri, and in the deserts of the west the wild Martu people dwelled, and in the south was the blessed isle Dilmun, which was like a paradise. Was there anything more to the world than that? Why, there was Meluhha far away beyond Elam, where the people had black skins and fine features, and there was Punt in the south, where they were black also, with flat noses and thick lips. And there was another land even beyond Meluhha, with folk of yellow skins who mined a precious green stone. And that was the world. Where could all these other latter-day places be—this Africa and this Asia and Europe and the rest, Rome, Greece, England? Perhaps some of them were mere new names for old places. The Land itself had had a host of names since his own time—Babylonia, Mesopotamia, Iraq, and more. Why had it needed all those names? He had no idea. New men made up new names: that seemed to be the way of the world. This Africa, this Asia—America, China, Russia. A little man named Herodotus, a Greek, had tried to explain it all to him once—the shape of the world and the names of the places in it, sketching a map for him on an old bit of parchment—and much later a stolid fellow named Mercator had done the same, and once after that he had spoken of such matters with an Englishman called Cook; but the things they told him all conflicted with one another and he could make no sense out of any of it. It was too much to ask, making sense of these things. Those myriad nations that had arisen after his time, those empires that had arisen and fallen and been forgotten, all those lost dynasties, the captains and the kings—he had tried from time to time to master the sequence of them, but it was no use. Once in his former life he had sought to make himself the master of all knowledge, yes. His appetites had been boundless: for knowledge, for wealth, for power, for women, for life itself. Now all that seemed only the merest folly to him. That jumble of confused and confusing places, all those great realms and far-off kingdoms, were in another world: what could they matter to him now?

“Asia?” he said. “Africa?” Gilgamesh shrugged. “Prester John?” He prowled the turbulent cluttered recesses of his memory. “Ah. There’s a Prester John, I think, lives in New Hell. A dark-skinned man, a friend of that gaudy old liar Sir John Mandeville.” It was coming back now. “Yes, I’ve seen them together many times, in that dirty squalid tavern where Mandeville’s always to be found. The two of them telling outlandish stories back and forth, each a bigger fraud than the other.”

“A different Prester John,” said Lovecraft.

“That one is Susenyos the Ethiop, I think,” Howard said. “A former African tyrant, and lover of the Jesuits, now far gone in whiskey. He’s one of many. There are seven, nine, a dozen Prester Johns in Hell, to my certain knowledge. And maybe more.”

Gilgamesh contemplated that notion blankly. Fire was running up and down his injured arm now.

Lovecraft was saying, “—not a true name, but merely a title, and a corrupt one at that. There never was a real Prester John, only various rulers in various distant places, whom it pleased the tale-spinners of Europe to speak of as Prester John, the Christian emperor, the great mysterious unknown monarch of a fabulous realm. And here in Hell there are many who choose to wear the name. There’s power in it, do you see?”

“Power and majesty!” Howard cried. “And poetry, by God!”

“So this Prester John whom we are to visit,” said Gilgamesh, “he is not in fact Prester John?”

“Yeh-lu Ta-shih’s his name,” said Howard. “Chinese. Manchurian, actually, twelfth century A.D. First emperor of the realm of Kara-Khitai, with his capital at Samarkand. Ruled over a bunch of Mongols and Turks, mainly, and they called him Gur Khan, which means ‘supreme ruler,’ and somehow that turned into ‘John’ by the time it got to Europe. And they said he was a Christian priest, too, Presbyter Joannes, ‘Prester John.’ ” Howard laughed. “Damned silly bastards. He was no more a Christian than you were. A Buddhist, he was, a bloody shamanistic Buddhist.”

“Then why—”

“Myth and confusion!” Howard said. “The great human nonsense factory at work! And wouldn’t you know it, but when he got to Hell this Yeh-lu Ta-shih founded himself another empire right away in the same sort of territory he’d lived in back there, and when Richard Burton came out this way and told him about Prester John and how Europeans long ago had spoken of him by that name and ascribed all sorts of fabulous accomplishments to him he said, ‘Yes, yes, I am Prester John indeed.’ And so he styles himself that way now, he and nine or ten others, most of them Ethiopians like that friend of your friend Mandeville.”

“They are no friends of mine,” said Gilgamesh stiffly. He leaned back and massaged his aching arm. Outside the Land Rover the landscape was changing now: more hilly, with ill-favored fat-trunked little trees jutting at peculiar angles from the purple soil. Here and there in the distance his keen eyes made out scattered groups of black tents on the hillsides, and herds of the little Hell-horses grazing near them. Gilgamesh wished now that he hadn’t let himself be inveigled into this expedition. What need had he of Prester John? One of these upstart New Dead potentates, one of the innumerable little princelings who had set up minor dominions for themselves out here in the vast measureless wastelands of the Outback—and reigning under a false name, at that—one more shoddy scoundrel, one more puffed-up little nobody swollen with unearned pride—

Well, and what difference did it make? He would sojourn a while in the land of this Prester John, and then he would move on, alone, apart from others, mourning as always his lost Enkidu. There seemed no escaping that doom that lay upon him, that bitter solitude, whether he reigned in splendor in Uruk or wandered in the wastes of Hell.

“Their Excellencies P.E. Lovecraft and Howard E. Robert,” cried the major-domo grandly though inaccurately, striking three times on the black marble floor of Prester John’s throne-chamber with his gold-tipped staff of pale green jade. “Envoys Plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty King Henry VIII of the Kingdom of New Holy Diabolic England.”

Lovecraft and Howard took a couple of steps forward. Yeh-lu Ta-shih nodded curtly and waved one elegant hand, resplendent with inch-long fingernails, in casual acknowledgment. The envoys plenipotentiary did not seem to hold much interest for him, nor, apparently, did whatever it was that had caused His Britannic Majesty King Henry to send them here.

The emperor’s cool imperious glance turned toward Gilgamesh, who was struggling to hold himself erect. He was beginning to feel feverish and dizzy and he wondered when anyone would notice that there was an oozing hole in his arm. Even he had limits to his endurance, after all, though he usually tried to conceal that fact. He didn’t know how much longer he could hold out. There were times when behaving like a hero was a heroic pain in the ass, and this was one of them.

“—and his Late Highness Gilgamesh of Uruk, son of Lugalbanda, great king, king of Uruk, king of kings, lord of the Land of the Two Rivers by merit of Enlil and An,” boomed the major-domo in the same splendid way, looking down only once at the card he held in his hand.

“Great king?” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih, fixing Gilgamesh with one of the most intensely penetrating stares the Sumerian could remember ever having received. “King of kings? Those are very lofty titles, Gilgamesh of Uruk.”

“A mere formula,” Gilgamesh replied, “which I thought appropriate when being presented at your court. In fact I am king of nothing at all now.”

“Ah,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih. “King of Nothing-at-all.”

And so are you, my lord Prester John. Gilgamesh did not let himself say it, though the words bubbled toward the roof of his mouth and begged to be uttered. And so are all the self-appointed lords and masters of the many realms of Hell.

The slender amber-hued man on the throne leaned forward. “And where then, I pray, is Nothing-at-all?”

Some of the courtiers began to snicker. But Prester John looked to be altogether in earnest, though it was impossible to be completely certain of that. He was plainly a formidable man, Gilgamesh had quickly come to see: sly, shrewd, self-contained, with a tough and sinewy intelligence. Not at all the vain little cock-of-the-walk Gilgamesh had expected to find in this bleak and remote corner of Hell. However small and obscure his principality might be, Prester John ruled it, obviously, with a firm grasp. The grandeur of the glittering palace that his scruffy subjects had built for him here on the edge of nowhere, and the solidity of the small but substantial city surrounding it, testified to that. Gilgamesh knew something about the building of cities and palaces. Prester John’s capital bore the mark of the steady toil of centuries.

The long stare was unrelenting. Gilgamesh, fighting back the blazing pain in his arm, met the emperor’s gaze with an equally earnest one of his own and said:

“Nothing-at-all? It is a land that never was, and will always be, my lord. Its boundaries are nowhere and its capital city is everywhere, nor do any of us ever leave it.”

“Ah. Ah. Indeed. Nicely put. You are Old Dead, are you?”

“Very old, my lord.”

“Older than Ch’in Shih Huang Ti? Older than the Lords of Shang and Hsia?”

Gilgamesh turned in puzzlement toward Lovecraft, who told him in a half-whisper, “Ancient kings of China. Your time was even earlier.”

Shrugging, Gilgamesh replied, “They are not known to me, my lord, but you hear what the Britannic ambassador says. He is a man of learning: it must be so. I will tell you that I am older than Caesar by far, older than Agamemnon and the Supreme Commander Rameses, older even than Sargon. By a great deal.”

Yeh-lu Ta-shih considered that a moment. Then he made another of his little gestures of dismissal, as though brushing aside the whole concept of relative ages in Hell. With a dry laugh he said, “So you are very old, King Gilgamesh. I congratulate you. And yet the Ice-Hunter folk would tell us that you and I and Rameses and Sargon all arrived here only yesterday; and to the Hairy Men, the Ice-Hunters themselves are mere newcomers. And so on and so on. There’s no beginning to it, is there? Any more than there’s an end.”

Without waiting for an answer he asked Gilgamesh, “How did you come by that gory wound, great king of Nothing-at-all?”

At least he’s noticed it, Gilgamesh thought.

“A misunderstanding, my lord. It may be that your border patrol is a little overzealous at times.”

One of the courtiers leaned toward the emperor and murmured something. Prester John’s serene brow grew furrowed. He lifted a flawlessly contoured eyebrow ever so slightly.

“Killed nine of them, did you?”

“They attacked us before we had the opportunity of showing our diplomatic credentials,” Lovecraft put in quickly. “It was entirely a matter of self-defense, my lord Prester John.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it.” The emperor seemed to contemplate for a moment, but only for a moment, the skirmish that had cost the lives of nine of his horsemen; and then quite visibly he dismissed that matter too from the center of his attention. “Well, now, my lords ambassador—”

Abruptly Gilgamesh swayed, tottered, started to fall. He checked himself just barely in time, seizing a massive porphyry column and clinging to it until he felt more steady. Beads of sweat trickled down his forehead into his eyes. He began to shiver. The huge stone column seemed to be expanding and contracting. Waves of vertigo were rippling through him and he was seeing double, suddenly. Everything was blurring and multiplying. He drew his breath in deeply, again, again, forcing himself to hold on. He wondered if Prester John was playing some kind of game with him, trying to see how long his strength could last. Well, if he had to, Gilgamesh swore, he would stand here forever in front of Prester John without showing a hint of weakness.

But now Yeh-lu Ta-shih was at last willing to extend compassion. With a glance toward one of his pages the emperor said, “Summon my physician, and tell him to bring his tools and his potions. That wound should have been dressed an hour ago.”

“Thank you, my lord,” Gilgamesh muttered, trying to keep the irony from his tone.

The doctor appeared almost at once, as though he had been waiting in an antechamber. Another of Prester John’s little games, perhaps? He was a burly, broad-shouldered, bushy-haired man of more than middle years, with a manner about him that was brisk and bustling but nevertheless warm, concerned, reassuring. Drawing Gilgamesh down beside him on a low divan covered with the gray-green hide of some scaly Hell-dragon, he peered into the wound, muttered something unintelligible to himself in a guttural language unknown to the Sumerian, and pressed his thick fingers around the edges of the torn flesh until fresh blood flowed. Gilgamesh hissed sharply but did not flinch.

“Ach, mein lieber Freund, I must hurt you again, but it is for your own good. Verstehen sie?”

The doctor’s fingers dug in more deeply. He was spreading the wound, swabbing it, cleansing it with some clear fluid that stung like a hot iron. The pain was so intense that there was almost a kind of pleasure in it: it was a purifying kind of pain, a purging of the soul.

Prester John said, “How bad is it, Dr. Schweitzer?”

“Gott sei dank, it is deep but clean. He will heal without damage.”

He continued to probe and cleanse; murmuring softly to Gilgamesh as he worked: “Bitte. Bitte. Einen Augenblick, mein Freund.” To Prester John he said, “This man is made of steel. No nerves at all, immense resistance to pain. We have one of the great heroes here, nicht wahr? You are Roland, are you? Achilles, perhaps?”

“Gilgamesh is his name,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih.

The doctor’s eyes grew bright. “Gilgamesh! Gilgamesh of Sumer? Wunderbar! Wunderbar! The very man. The seeker after life. Ach, we must talk, my friend, you and I, when you are feeling better.” From his medical kit he now produced a frightful-looking hypodermic syringe. Gilgamesh watched as though from a vast distance, as though that throbbing swollen arm belonged to someone else. “Ja, ja, certainly we must talk, of life, of death, or philosophy, mein Freund, of philosophy! There is so very much for us to discuss!” He slipped the needle beneath Gilgamesh’s skin. “There. Genug. Sit. Rest. The healing now begins.”

Robert Howard had never seen anything like it. It could have been something straight from the pages of one of his Conan stories. The big ox had taken an arrow right through the fat part of his arm, and he had simply yanked it out and gone right on fighting. Then, afterward, he had behaved as if the wound were nothing more than a scratch, all that time while they were driving hour after hour toward Prester John’s city and then undergoing lengthy interrogation by the court officials and then standing through this whole endless ceremony at court—God almighty, what a display of endurance! True, Gilgamesh had finally gone a little wobbly and had actually seemed on the verge of passing out. But any ordinary mortal would have conked out long ago. Heroes really were different. They were another breed altogether. Look at him now, sitting there casually while that old German medic swabs him out and stitches him up in that slapdash cavalier way, and not a whimper out of him. Not a whimper!

Suddenly Howard found himself wanting to go over there to Gilgamesh, to comfort him, to let him lean his head back against him while the doctor worked him over, to wipe the sweat from his brow—

Yes, to comfort him in an open, rugged, manly way—

No. No. No. No.

There it was again, the horror, the unspeakable thing, the hideous crawling Hell-borne impulse rising out of the cesspools of his soul—

Howard fought it back. Blotted it out, hid it from view. Denied that it had ever entered his mind.

To Lovecraft he said, “That’s some doctor! Took his medical degree at the Chicago slaughterhouses, I reckon!”

“Don’t you know who he is, Bob?”

“Some old Dutchman who wandered in here during a sandstorm and never bothered to leave.”

“Does the name Dr. Schweitzer mean nothing to you?”

Howard gave Lovecraft a blank look. “Guess I never heard it much in Texas.”

“Oh, Bob, Bob, why must you always pretend to be such a cowboy? Can you tell me you’ve never heard of Schweitzer? Albert Schweitzer? The great philosopher, theologian, musician—there never was a greater interpreter of Bach, and don’t tell me you don’t know Bach either—”

“She-it, H.P., you talking about that old country doctor there?”

“Who founded the leprosy clinic in Africa, at Lambarene, yes. Who devoted his life to helping the sick, under the most primitive conditions, in the most remote forests of—”

“Hold on, H.P. That can’t be so.”

“That one man could achieve so much? I assure you, Bob, he was quite well known in our time—perhaps not in Texas, I suppose, but nevertheless—”

“No. Not that he could do all that. But that he’s here. In Hell. If that old geezer’s everything you say, then he’s a goddamned saint. Unless he beat his wife when no one was looking, or something like that. What’s a saint doing in Hell, H.P.?”

“What are we doing in Hell?” Lovecraft asked.

Howard reddened and looked away. “Well, I suppose, there were things in our lives—things that might be considered sins, in the strictest sense—”

“No one understands the rules of Hell, Bob,” said Lovecraft gently. “Sin may have nothing to do with it. Gandhi is here, do you realize that? Confucius. Were they sinners? Was Moses? Abraham? We’ve tried to impose our own pitiful shallow beliefs, our pathetic grade-school notions of punishment for bad behavior, on this incredibly bizarre place where we find ourselves. By what right? We don’t begin to comprehend what Hell really is. All we know is that it’s full of heroic villains and villainous heroes—and people like you and me—and it seems that Albert Schweitzer is here, too. A great mystery. But perhaps someday—”

“Shh,” Howard said. “Prester John’s talking to us.”

“My lords ambassador—”

Hastily they turned toward him. “Your Majesty?” Howard said.

“This mission that has brought you here: your king wants an alliance, I suppose? What for? Against whom? Quarreling with some pope again, is he?”

“With his daughter, I’m afraid,” said Howard.

Prester John looked bored. He toyed with his emerald scepter. “Mary, you mean?”

“Elizabeth, your Majesty,” Lovecraft said.

“Your king’s a most quarrelsome man. I’d have thought there were enough popes in Hell to keep him busy, though, and no need to contend with his daughters.”

“They are the most contentious women in Hell,” Lovecraft said. “Blood of his blood, after all, and each of them a queen with a noisy, brawling kingdom of her own. Elizabeth, my lord, is sending a pack of her explorers to the Outback, and King Henry doesn’t like the idea.”

“Indeed,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih, suddenly interested again. “And neither do I. She has no business in the Outback. It’s not her territory. The rest of Hell should be big enough for Elizabeth. What is she looking for here?”

“The sorcerer John Dee has told her that the way out of Hell is to be found in these parts.”

“There is no way out of Hell.”

Lovecraft smiled. “I’m not any judge of that, Your Majesty. Queen Elizabeth, in any event, has given credence to the notion. Her Walter Raleigh directs the expedition, and the geographer Hakluyt is with him, and a force of five hundred soldiers. They move diagonally across the Outback just to the south of your domain, following some chart that Dr. Dee had obtained for them. He had it from Cagliostro, they say, who bought it from Hadrian when Hadrian was still supreme commander of Hell’s legions. It is allegedly an official Satanic document.”

Prester John did not appear to be impressed. “Let us say, for argument’s sake, that there is an exit from Hell. Why would Queen Elizabeth desire to leave? Hell’s not so bad. It has its minor discomforts, yes, but one learns to cope with them. Does she think she’d be able to reign in Heaven as she does here—assuming there’s a Heaven at all, which is distinctly not proven?”

“Elizabeth has no real interest in leaving Hell herself, Majesty,” Howard said. “What King Henry fears is that if she does find the way out, she’ll claim it for her own and set up a colony around it, and charge a fee for passing through the gate. No matter where it takes you, the king reckons there’ll be millions of people willing to risk it, and Elizabeth will wind up cornering all the money in Hell. He can’t abide that notion, d’ye see? He thinks she’s already too smart and aggressive by half, and he hates the idea that she might get even more powerful. There’s something mixed into it having to do with Queen Elizabeth’s mother, too—that was Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife. She was a wild and wanton one, and he cut her head off for adultery, and now he thinks that Anne’s behind Elizabeth’s maneuvers, trying to get even with him by—”

“Spare me these details,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih with some irritation. “What does Henry expect me to do?”

“Send troops to turn the Raleigh expedition back before it can find anything useful to Elizabeth.”

“And in what way do I gain from this?”

“If the exit from Hell’s on your frontier, Your Majesty, do you really want a bunch of Elizabethan Englishmen setting up a colony next door to you?”

“There is no exit from Hell,” Prester John said complacently once again.

“But if they set up a colony anyway?”

Prester John was silent a moment. “I see,” he said finally.

“In return for your aid,” Howard said, “we’re empowered to offer you a trade treaty on highly favorable terms.”

“Ah.”

“And a guarantee of military protection in the event of the invasion of your realm by a hostile power.”

“If King Henry’s armies are so mighty, why does he not deal with the Raleigh expedition himself?”

“There was no time to outfit and dispatch an army across such a great distance,” said Lovecraft. “Elizabeth’s people had already set out before anything was known of the scheme.”

“Ah,” said Yeh-lu Ta-shih.

“Of course,” Lovecraft went on, “there were other princes of the Outback that King Henry might have approached. Moammar Khadafy’s name came up, and one of the Assyrians—Assurnasirpal, I think—and someone mentioned Mao Tse-tung. No, King Henry said, let us ask the aid of Prester John, for he is a monarch of great puissance and grandeur, whose writ is supreme throughout the far reaches of Hell. Prester John, indeed, that is the one whose aid we must seek!”

A strange new sparkle had come into Yeh-lu Ta-shih’s eyes. “You were considering an alliance with Mao Tse-tung?”

“It was merely a suggestion, Your Majesty.”

“Ah. I see.” The emperor rose from his throne. “Well, we must consider these matters more carefully, eh? We must not come hastily to a decision.” He looked across the great vaulted throne room to the divan where Dr. Schweitzer still labored over Gilgamesh’s wound. “Your patient, doctor—what’s the report?”

“A man of steel, Majesty, a man of steel! Gott sei dank, he heals before my eyes!”

“Indeed. Come, then. You will all want to rest, I think; and then you shall know the full hospitality of Prester John.”

The full hospitality of Prester John, Gilgamesh soon discovered, was no trifling affair.

He was led off to a private chamber with walls lined with black felt—a kind of indoor tent—where three serving-girls who stood barely hip-high to him surrounded him, giggling, and took his clothing from him. Gently they pushed him into a huge marble cistern full of warm milk, where they bathed him lovingly and massaged his aching body in the most intimate manner. Afterward they robed him in intricate vestments of yellow silk.

Then they conveyed him to the emperor’s great hall, where the whole court was gathered, a glittering and resplendent multitude. Some sort of concert was under way, seven solemn musicians playing harsh screeching twanging music. Gongs crashed, a trumpet blared, pipes uttered eerie piercing sounds. Servants showed Gilgamesh to a place of honor atop a pile of furry blankets heaped high with velvet cushions.

Lovecraft and Howard were already there, garbed like Gilgamesh in magnificent silks. Both of them looked somewhat unsettled—unhinged, even. Howard, flushed and boisterous, could barely sit still: he laughed and waved his arms and kicked his heels against the furs, like a small boy who has done something very naughty and is trying to conceal it by being over-exuberant. Lovecraft, on the other hand, seemed dazed and dislocated, with the glassy-eyed look of someone who has recently been clubbed.

These are two very odd men indeed, Gilgamesh thought.

One works hard at being loud and lusty, and now and then gives you a glimpse of a soul boiling with wild fantasies of swinging swords and rivers of blood. But in reality he seems terrified of everything. The other, though he is weirdly remote and austere, is apparently not quite as crazy, but he too gives the impression of being at war with himself, in terror of allowing any sort of real human feeling to break through the elaborate facade of his mannerisms. The poor fools must have been scared silly when the serving-girls started stripping them and pouring warm milk over them and stroking their bodies. No doubt they haven’t recovered yet from all that nasty pleasure, Gilgamesh thought. He could imagine their cries of horror as the little Mongol girls started going to work on them. What are you doing? Leave my trousers alone! Don’t touch me there! Please—no—ooh—ah—ooh! Oooh!

Yeh-lu Ta-shih, seated upon a high throne of ivory and onyx, waved grandly to him, one great king to another. Gilgamesh gave him an almost imperceptible nod by way of acknowledgment. All this pomp and formality bored him hideously. He had endured so much of it in his former life, after all. And then he had been the one on the high throne, but even then it had been nothing but a bore. And now—

But this was no more boring than anything else. Gilgamesh had long ago decided that that was the true curse of Hell: all striving was meaningless here, mere thunder without the lightning. And there was no end to it. You might die again now and then if you were careless or unlucky, but back you came for another turn, sooner or later, at the Undertaker’s whim. There was no release from the everlastingness of it all. Once he had yearned desperately for eternal life, and he had learned that he could not have such a thing, at least not in the world of mortal men. But now indeed he had come to a place where he would live forever, so it seemed, and yet there was no joy in it. His fondest dream now was simply to serve his time in Hell and be allowed to sleep in peace forever. He saw no way of attaining that. Life here just went on and on—very much like this concert, this endless skein of twangs and plinks and screeches.

Someone with the soft face of a eunuch came by and offered him a morsel of grilled meat. Gilgamesh knew he would pay for it later—you always did, when you ate something in Hell—but he was hungry now, and he gobbled it. And another, and another, and a flagon of fermented mare’s milk besides.

A corps of dancers appeared, men and women in flaring filmy robes. They were doing things with swords and flaming torches. A second eunuch brought Gilgamesh a tray of mysterious sugary delicacies, and he helped himself with both hands, heedless of the consequences. He was ravenous. His body, as it healed, was calling furiously for fuel. Beside him, the man Howard was swilling down the mare’s milk as if it were water and getting tipsier and tipsier, and the other, the one called Lovecraft, sat morosely staring at the dancers without touching a thing. He seemed to be shivering as though in the midst of a snowstorm.

Gilgamesh beckoned for a second flagon. Just then the doctor arrived and settled down cheerfully on the heap of blankets next to him. Schweitzer grinned his approval as Gilgamesh took a hearty drink. “Fuhlen Sie sich besser, mein Held, eh? The arm, it no longer gives you pain? Already the wound is closing. So quickly you repair yourself! Such strength, such power and healing! You are God’s own miracle, dear Gilgamesh. The blessing of the Almighty is upon you.” He seized a flagon of his own from a passing servant, quaffed it, made a face. “Ach, this milk-wine of theirs! And ach, ach, this verfluchte music! What I would give for the taste of decent Moselle on my tongue now, eh, and the sound of the D minor toccata and fugue in my ears! Bach—do you know him?”

“Who?”

“Bach! Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach. The greatest of musicians, God’s own poet in sound. I saw him once, just once, years ago.” Schweitzer’s eyes were glowing. “I was new here. Not two weeks had I been here. It was at the villa of King Friedrich—Frederick the Great, you know him? No? The king of Prussia? Der alte Fritz? No matter. No matter. Er macht nichts. A man entered, ordinary, you would never notice him in a crowd, yes? And began to play the harpsichord, and he had not played three measures when I said, ‘This is Bach, this must be the actual Bach,’ and I would have dropped down on my knees before him but that I was ashamed. And it was he. I said to myself, ‘Why is it that Bach is in Hell?’ But then I said, as perhaps you have said, as I think everyone here must say at one time or another, ‘Why is it that Schweitzer is in Hell?’ And I knew that it is that God is mysterious. Perhaps I was sent here to minister to the damned. Perhaps it is that Bach was also. Or perhaps we are damned also; or perhaps no one here is damned. Es macht nichts aus, all this speculation. It is a mistake, or even vielleicht a sin, to imagine that we can comprehend the workings of the mind of God. We are here. We have our tasks. That is enough for me to know.”

“I felt that way once,” said Gilgamesh. “When I was king in Uruk, and finally came to understand that I must die, that there was no hiding from that. What is the purpose, then, I asked myself? And I told myself: The gods have put us here to perform our tasks, and that is the purpose. And so I lived thereafter and so I died.” Gilgamesh’s face darkened. “But here—here—”

“Here, too, we have our tasks,” Schweitzer said.

“You do, perhaps. For me there is only the task of passing the time. I had a friend to bear the burden with me once—”

“Enkidu.”

Gilgamesh seized the doctor’s sturdy wrist with sudden fierce intensity. “You know of Enkidu?”

“From the poem, yes. The poem is very famous.”

“Ah. Ah. The poem. But the actual man—”

“I know nothing of him, nein.”

“He is of my stature, very large. His beard is thick, his hair is shaggy, his shoulders are wider even than mine. We journeyed everywhere together. But then we quarreled, and he went from me in anger, saying, ‘Never cross my path again.’ Saying, ‘I have no love for you, Gilgamesh.’ Saying, ‘If we meet again I will have your life.’ And I have heard nothing of him since.”

Schweitzer turned and stared closely at Gilgamesh. “How is this possible? All the world knows the love of Enkidu for Gilgamesh!”

Gilgamesh called for yet another flagon. This conversation was awakening an ache within his breast, an ache that made the pain that his wound had caused seem like nothing more than an itch. Nor would the drink soothe it; but he would drink all the same.

He took a deep draught and said somberly, “We quarreled. There were hot words between us. He said he had no love for me any longer.”

“This cannot be true.”

Gilgamesh shrugged and made no reply.

“You wish to find him again?” Schweitzer asked.

“I desire nothing else.”

“Do you know where he is?”

“Hell is larger even than the world. He could be anywhere.”

“You will find him.”

“If you knew how I have searched for him—”

“You will find him. That I know.”

Gilgamesh shook his head. “If Hell is a place of torment, then this is mine, that I will never find him again. Or if I do, that he will spurn me. Or raise his hand against me.”

“This is not so,” said Schweitzer. “I think he longs for you even as you do for him.”

“Then why does he keep himself from me?”

“This is Hell,” said Schweitzer gently. “You are being tested, my friend, but no test lasts forever. Not even in Hell. Not even in Hell. Even though you are in Hell, have faith in the Lord: You will have your Enkidu soon enough, um Himmels Willen.” Smiling, Schweitzer said, “The emperor is calling you. Go to him. I think he has something to tell you that you will want to hear.”

Prester John said, “You are a warrior, are you not?”

“I was,” replied Gilgamesh indifferently.

“A general? A leader of men?”

“All that is far behind me,” Gilgamesh said. “This is the life after life. Now I go my own way and I take on no tasks for others. Hell has plenty of generals.”

“I am told that you were a leader among leaders. I am told that you fought like the god of war. When you took the field, whole nations laid down their arms and knelt before you.”

Gilgamesh waited, saying nothing.

“You miss the glory of the battlefield, don’t you, Gilgamesh?”

“Do I?”

“What if I were to offer you the command of my army?”

“Why would you do that? What am I to you? What is your nation to me?”

“In Hell we take whatever citizenship we wish. What would you say, if I offered you the command?”

“I would tell you that you are making a great mistake.”

“It isn’t a trivial army. Ten thousand men. Adequate air support. Tactical nukes. The strongest firepower in the Outback.”

“You misunderstand,” said Gilgamesh. “Warfare doesn’t interest me. I know nothing of modern weapons and don’t care to learn. You have the wrong man, Prester John. If you need a general, send for Wellington. Send for Marlborough. Rommel. Tiglath-Pileser.”

“Or for Enkidu?”

The unexpected name hit Gilgamesh like a battering ram. At the sound of it his face grew hot and his entire body trembled convulsively.

“What do you know about Enkidu?”

Prester John held up one superbly manicured hand. “Allow me the privilege of asking the questions, great king.”

“You spoke the name of Enkidu. What do you know about Enkidu?”

“First let us discuss the matters which are of—”

“Enkidu,” said Gilgamesh implacably. “Why did you mention his name?”

“I know that he was your friend—”

“Is.”

“Very well, is your friend. And a man of great valor and strength. Who happens to be a guest at this very moment at the court of the great enemy of my realm. And who, so I understand it, is preparing just now to make war against me.”

“What?” Gilgamesh stared. “Enkidu is in the service of Queen Elizabeth?”

“I don’t recall having said that.”

“Is it not Queen Elizabeth who even now has sent an army to encroach on your domain?”

Yeh-lu Ta-shih laughed. “Raleigh and his five hundred fools? That expedition’s an absurdity. I’ll take care of them in an afternoon. I mean another enemy altogether. Tell me this: do you know of Mao Tse-tung?”

“These princes of the New Dead—there are so many names—”

“A Chinese, a man of Han. Emperor of the Marxist Dynasty, long after my time. Crafty, stubborn, tough. More than a little crazy. He runs something called the Celestial People’s Republic, just north of here. What he tells his subjects is that we can turn Hell into Heaven by collectivizing it.”

“Collectivizing?” said Gilgamesh uncomprehendingly.

“To make all the peasants into kings, and the kings into peasants. As I say: more than a little crazy. But he has his hordes of loyal followers, and they do whatever he says. He means to conquer all the Outback, beginning right here. And after that, all of Hell will be subjected to his lunatic ideas. I fear that Elizabeth’s in league with him—that this nonsense of looking for a way out of Hell is only a ruse, that in fact her Raleigh is spying out my weaknesses for her so that she can sell the information to Mao.”

“But if this Mao is the enemy of all kings, why would Elizabeth ally herself with—”

“Obviously they mean to use each other. Elizabeth aiding Mao to overthrow me, Mao aiding Elizabeth to push her father from his throne. And then afterward, who knows? But I mean to strike before either of them can harm me.”

“What about Enkidu?” Gilgamesh said. “Tell me about Enkidu.”

Prester John opened a scroll of computer printout. Skimming through it, he read, “The Old Dead warrior Enkidu of Sumer—Sumer, that’s your nation, isn’t it?—arrived at court of Mao Tse-tung on such-and-such a date—ostensible purpose of visit, Outback hunting expedition—accompanied by American spy posing as journalist and hunter, one E. Hemingway—secret meeting with Kublai Khan, Minister of War for the Celestial People’s Republic—now training Communist troops in preparation for invasion of New Kara-Khitai—” The emperor looked up. “Is this of interest to you, Gilgamesh?”

“What is it you want from me?”

“This man is your famous friend. You know his mind as you do your own. Defend us from him and I’ll give you anything you desire.”

“What I desire,” said Gilgamesh, “is nothing more than the friendship of Enkidu.”

“Then I’ll give you Enkidu on a silver platter. Take the field for me against Mao’s troops. Help me anticipate whatever strategies your Enkidu has been teaching them. We’ll wipe the Marxist bastards out and capture their generals, and then Enkidu will be yours. I can’t guarantee that he’ll want to be your friend again, but he’ll be yours. What do you say, Gilgamesh? What do you say?”

Across the gray plains of Hell from horizon to horizon sprawled the legions of Prester John. Scarlet-and-yellow banners fluttered against the somber sky. At the center of the formation stood a wedge of horseborne archers in leather armor; on each flank was a detachment of heavy infantry; the emperor’s fleet of tanks was in the vanguard, rolling unhurriedly forward over the rough, broken terrain. A phalanx of transatmospheric weapons platforms provided air cover far overhead.

A cloud of dust in the distance gave evidence of the oncoming army of the Celestial People’s Republic.

“By all the demons of Stygia, did you ever see such a cockeyed sight?” Robert Howard cried. He and Lovecraft had a choice view of the action from their place in the imperial command post, a splendid pagoda protected by a glowing force-shield. Gilgamesh was there, too, just across the way with Prester John and the officers of the Kara-Khitai high command. The emperor was peering into a bank of television monitors and one of his aides was feverishly tapping out orders on a computer terminal. “Makes no goddamned sense,” said Howard. “Horsemen, tanks, weapons platforms, all mixing it up at the same time—is that how these wild sons of bitches fight a war?”

Lovecraft touched his forefinger to his lips. “Don’t shout so, Bob. Do you want Prester John to hear you? We’re his guests, remember. And King Henry’s ambassadors.”

“Well, if he hears me, he hears me. Look at that crazy mess! Doesn’t Prester John realize that he’s got a twentieth-century Bolshevik Chinaman coming to attack him with twentieth-century weapons? What good are mounted horsemen, for God’s sake? A cavalry charge into the face of heavy artillery? Bows and arrows against howitzers?” Howard guffawed. “Nuclear-tipped arrows, is that the trick?”

Softly Lovecraft said, “For all we know, that’s what they are.”

“You know that can’t be, H.P. I’m surprised at you, a man with your scientific background. I know all this nuke stuff is after our time, but surely you’ve kept up with the theory. Critical mass at the tip of an arrow? No, H.P., you know as well as I do that it just can’t work. And even if it could—”

In exasperation Lovecraft waved to him to be silent. He pointed across the room to the main monitor in front of Prester John. The florid face of a heavyset man with a thick white beard had appeared on the screen.

“Isn’t that Hemingway?” Lovecraft asked.

“Who?”

“Ernest Hemingway. The writer. A Farewell to Arms. The Sun Also Rises.”

“Never could stand his stuff,” said Howard. “Sick crap about a bunch of drunken weaklings. You sure that’s him?”

“Weaklings, Bob?” said Lovecraft in astonishment.

“I read only the one book, about those Americans in Europe who go to the bullfights and get drunk and fool around with each other’s women, and that was all of Mr. Hemingway that I cared to experience. I tell you, H.P., it disgusted me. And the way it was written! All those short little sentences—no magic, no poetry, H.P.—”

“Let’s talk about it some other time, Bob.”

“No vision of heroism—no awareness of the higher passions that ennoble and—”

“Bob—please—”

“A fixation on the sordid, the slimy, the depraved—”

“You’re being absurd, Bob. You’re completely misinterpreting his philosophy of life. If you had simply taken the trouble to read A Farewell to Arms—” Lovecraft shook his head angrily. “This is no time for a literary discussion. Look—look there.” He nodded toward the far side of the room. “One of the emperor’s aides is calling over. Something’s going on.”

Indeed there had been a development of some sort. Yeh-lu Ta-shih seemed to be conferring with four or five aides at once. Gilgamesh, red-faced, agitated, was striding swiftly back and forth in front of the computer bank. Hemingway’s face was still on the screen and he too looked agitated.

Hastily Howard and Lovecraft crossed the room. The emperor turned to them. “There’s been a request for a parley in the field,” Prester John said, “Kublai Khan is on his way over. Dr. Schweitzer will serve as my negotiator. The man Hemingway’s going to be an impartial observer—their impartial observer. I need an impartial observer, too. Will you two go down there too, as diplomats from a neutral power, to keep an eye on things?”

“An honor to serve,” said Howard grandly.

“And for what purpose, my lord, has the parley been called?” Lovecraft asked.

Yeh-lu Ta-shih gestured toward the screen. “Hemingway has had the notion that we can settle this thing by single combat—Gilgamesh versus Enkidu. Save on ammunition, spare the Undertaker a devil of a lot of toil. But there’s a disagreement over the details.” Delicately he smothered a yawn. “Perhaps it can all be worked out by lunchtime.”

It was an oddly assorted group. Mao Tse-tung’s chief negotiator was the plump, magnificently dressed Kublai Khan, whose dark sly eyes gave evidence of much cunning and force. He had been an emperor in his own right in his former life, but evidently had preferred less taxing responsibilities here. Next to him was Hemingway, big and heavy, with a deep voice and an easy, almost arrogant manner. Mao had also sent four small men in identical blue uniforms with red stars on their breasts—“Party types,” someone murmured—and, strangely, a Hairy Man, big-browed and chinless, one of those creatures out of deepest antiquity. He too wore the Communist emblem on his uniform.

And there was one more to the group—the massive, deep-chested man of dark brow and fierce and smouldering eyes, who stood off by himself at the far side—

Gilgamesh could barely bring himself to look at him. He too stood apart from the group a little way, savoring the keen edge of the wind that blew across the field of battle. He longed to rush toward Enkidu, to throw his arms around him, to sweep away in one jubilant embrace all the bitterness that had separated them—

If only it could be as simple as that!

The voices of Mao’s negotiators and the five that Prester John had sent—Schweitzer, Lovecraft, Howard, and a pair of Kara-Khitai officers—drifted to Gilgamesh above the howling of the wind.

Hemingway seemed to be doing most of the talking. “Writers, are you? Mr. Howard, Mr. Lovecraft? I regret I haven’t had the pleasure of encountering your work.”

“Fantasy, it was,” said Lovecraft. “Fables. Visions.”

“That so? You publish in Argosy? The Post?”

“Five to Argosy, but they were westerns,” Howard said. “Mainly we wrote for Weird Tales. And H.P., a few in Astounding Stories.”

“Weird Tales,” Hemingway said. “Astounding Stories.” A shadow of distaste flickered across his face. “Mmm. Don’t think I knew those magazines. But you wrote well, did you, gentlemen? You set down what you truly felt, the real thing, and you stated it purely? Of course you did. I know you did. You were honest writers or you’d never have gone to Hell. That goes almost without saying.” He laughed, rubbed his hands in glee, effusively threw his arms around the shoulders of Howard and Lovecraft. Howard seemed alarmed by that and Lovecraft looked as though he wanted to sink into the ground. “Well, gentlemen,” Hemingway boomed, “what shall we do here? We have a little problem. The one hero wishes to fight with bare hands, the other with—what did he call it?—a disruptor pistol? You would know more about that than I do: something out of Astounding Stories, is how it sounds to me. But we can’t have this, can we? Bare hands against fantastic future science? There is a good way to fight and that is equal to equal, and all other ways are the bad ways.”

“Let him come to me with his fists,” Gilgamesh called from the distance. “As we fought the first time, in the Market-of-the-Land, when my path crossed his in Uruk.”

“He is afraid to use the new weapons,” Enkidu replied.

“Afraid?”

“I brought a shotgun to him, a fine 12-gauge weapon, a gift to my brother Gilgamesh. He shrank from it as though I had given him a venomous serpent.”

“Lies!” roared Gilgamesh. “I had no fear of it! I despised it because it was cowardly!”

“He fears anything which is new,” said Enkidu. “I never thought Gilgamesh of Uruk would know fear, but he fears the unfamiliar. He called me a coward, because I would hunt with a shotgun. But I think he was the coward. And now he fears to fight me with the unfamiliar. He knows that I’ll slay him. He fears death even here, do you know that? Death has always been his great terror. Why is that? Because it is an insult to his pride? I think that is it. Too proud to die—too proud to accept the decree of the gods—”

“I will break you with my hands alone!” Gilgamesh bellowed.

“Give us disruptors,” said Enkidu. “Let us see if he dares to touch such a weapon.”

“A coward’s weapon!”

“Again you call me a coward? You, Gilgamesh, you are the one who quivers in fear—”

“Gentlemen! Gentlemen!”

“You fear my strength, Enkidu!”

“You fear my skill. You with your pathetic old sword, your pitiful bow—”

“Is this the Enkidu I loved, mocking me so?”

“You were the first to mock, when you threw back the shotgun into my hands, spurning my gift, calling me a coward—”

“The weapon, I said, was cowardly. Not you, Enkidu.”

“It was the same thing.”

“Bitte, bitte,” said Schweitzer. “This is not the way!”

And again from Hemingway: “Gentlemen, please!”

They took no notice.

“I meant—”

“You said—”

“Shame—”

“Fear—”

“Three times over a coward!”

“Five times five a traitor!”

“False friend!”

“Vain braggart!”

“Gentlemen, I have to ask you—”

But Hemingway’s voice, loud and firm though it was, was altogether drowned out by the roar of rage that came from the throat of Gilgamesh. Dizzying throbs of anger pounded in his breast, his throat, his temples. He could take no more. This was how it had begun the first time, when Enkidu had come to him with that shotgun and he had given it back and they had fallen into dispute. At first merely a disagreement, and then a hot debate, and then a quarrel, and then the hurling of bitter accusations. And then such words of anger as had never passed between them before, they who had been closer than brothers.

That time they hadn’t come to blows. Enkidu had simply stalked away, declaring that their friendship was at an end. But now—hearing all the same words again, stymied by this quarrel even over the very method by which they were to fight—Gilgamesh could no longer restrain himself. Overmastered by fury and frustration, he rushed forward.

Enkidu, eyes gleaming, was ready for him.

Hemingway attempted to come between them. Big as he was, he was like a child next to Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and they swatted him to one side without effort. With a jolt that made the ground itself reverberate, Gilgamesh went crashing into Enkidu and laid hold of him with both hands.

Enkidu laughed. “So you have your way after all, King Gilgamesh! Bare hands it is!”

“It is the only way,” said Gilgamesh.

At last. At last. There was no wrestler in this world or the other who could contend with Gilgamesh of Uruk. I will break him, Gilgamesh thought, as he broke our friendship. I will snap his spine. I will crush his chest.

As once they had done long ago, they fought like maddened bulls. They stared eye to eye as they contended. They grunted; they bellowed, they roared. Gilgamesh shouted out defiance in the language of Uruk and in any other language he could think of; and Enkidu muttered and stormed at Gilgamesh in the language of the beasts that once he had spoken when he was a wild man, the harsh growling of the lion of the plains.

Gilgamesh yearned to have Enkidu’s life. He loved this man more dearly than life itself, and yet he prayed that it would be given him to break Enkidu’s back, to hear the sharp snapping sound of his spine, to toss him aside like a worn-out cloak. So strong was his love that it had turned to the brightest of hatreds. I will send him to the Undertaker once again, Gilgamesh thought. I will hurl him from Hell.

But though he struggled as he had never struggled in combat before, Gilgamesh was unable to budge Enkidu. Veins bulged in his forehead; the sutures that held his wound burst and blood flowed down his arm; and still he strained to throw Enkidu to the ground, and still Enkidu held his place. And matched him, strength for strength, and kept him at bay. They stood locked that way a long moment, staring into each other’s eyes, locked in unbreakable stalemate.

Then after a long while Enkidu said, as once he had said long ago, “Ah, Gilgamesh! There is not another one like you in all the world! Glory to the mother who bore you!”

It was like the breaking of a dam, and a rush of life-giving waters tumbling out over the summer-parched fields of the Land.

And from Gilgamesh in that moment of release and relief came twice-spoken words also:

“There is one other who is like me. But only one.”

“No, for Enlil has given you the kingship.”

“But you are my brother,” said Gilgamesh, and they laughed and let go of each other and stepped back, as if seeing each other for the first time, and laughed again.

“This is great foolishness, this fighting between us,” Enkidu cried.

“Very great foolishness indeed, brother.”

“What need have you of shotguns and disruptors?”

“And what do I care if you choose to play with such toys?”

“Indeed, brother.”

“Indeed!”

Gilgamesh looked away. They were all staring—the four party men, Lovecraft, Howard, the Hairy Man, Kublai Khan, Hemingway—all astonished, mouths drooping open. Only Schweitzer was beaming. The doctor came up to them and said quietly, “You have not injured each other? No. Gut. Gut. Then leave here, the two of you, together. Now. What do you care for Prester John and his wars, or for Mao and his? This is no business of yours. Go. Now.”

Enkidu grinned. “What do you say, brother? Shall we go off hunting together?”

“To the end of the Outback, and back again. You and I, and no one else.”

“And we will hunt only with our bows and spears?”

Gilgamesh shrugged. “With disruptors, if that is how you would have it. With cannons. With nuke grenades. Ah, Enkidu, Enkidu—!”

“Gilgamesh!”

“Go,” Schweitzer whispered. “Now. Leave this place and never look back. Auf Wiedersehen! Gluckliche Reise! Gottes Name, go now!”

Watching them take their leave, seeing them trudge off together into the swirling winds of the Outback, Robert Howard felt a sudden sharp pang of regret and loss. How beautiful they had been, those two heroes, those two giants, as they strained and struggled! And then that sudden magic moment when the folly of their quarrel came home to them, when they were enemies no longer and brothers once more—

And now they were gone, and here he stood amidst these others, these strangers—

He had wanted to be Gilgamesh’s brother, or perhaps—he barely comprehended it—something more than a brother. But that could never have been. And, knowing that it could never have been, knowing that that man who seemed so much like his Conan was lost to him forever, Howard felt tears beginning to surge within him.

“Bob?” Lovecraft said. “Bob, are you all right?”

She-it, Howard thought. A man don’t cry. Especially in front of other men.

He turned away, into the wind, so Lovecraft could not see his face.

“Bob? Bob?”

She-it, Howard thought again. And he let the tears come.

PERMAFROST

Roger Zelazny

The goddess dreams, and her nightmares of tormented love disrupt a frozen world

High upon the western slope of Mount Kilimanjaro is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. An author is always necessary to explain what it was doing there because stiff leopards don’t talk much.

THE MAN. The music seems to come and go with a will of its own. At least turning the knob on the bedside unit has no effect on its presence or absence. A half-familiar, alien tune, troubling in a way. The phone rings, and he answers it. There is no one there. Again.

Four times during the past half hour, while grooming himself, dressing and rehearsing his arguments, he has received noncalls. When he checked with the desk he was told there were no calls. But that damned clerk-thing had to be malfunctioning—like everything else in this place.

The wind, already heavy, rises, hurling particles of ice against the building with a sound like multitudes of tiny claws scratching. The whining of steel shutters sliding into place startles him. But worst of all, in his reflex glance at the nearest window, it seems he has seen a face.

Impossible of course. This is the third floor. A trick of light upon hard-driven flakes: Nerves.

Yes. He has been nervous since their arrival this morning. Before then, even . . .

He pushes past Dorothy’s stuff upon the countertop, locates a small package among his own articles. He unwraps a flat red rectangle about the size of his thumbnail. He rolls up his sleeve and slaps the patch against the inside of his left elbow.

The tranquilizer discharges immediately into his bloodstream. He takes several deep breaths, then peels off the patch and drops it into the disposal unit. He rolls his sleeve down, reaches for his jacket.

The music rises in volume, as if competing with the blast of the wind, the rattle of the icy flakes. Across the room the videoscreen comes on of its own accord.

The face. The same face. Just for an instant. He is certain. And then channelless static, wavy lines. Snow. He chuckles.

All right, play it that way, nerves, he thinks. You’ve every reason.

But the trank’s coming to get you now. Better have your fun quick. You’re about to be shut down.

The videoscreen cuts into a porn show.

Smiling, the woman mounts the man. . . .

The picture switches to a voiceless commentator on something or other.

He will survive. He is a survivor. He, Paul Plaige, has done risky things before and has always made it through. It is just that having Dorothy along creates a kind of déjà vu that he finds unsettling. No matter.

She is waiting for him in the bar. Let her wait. A few drinks will make her easier to persuade—unless they make her bitchy. That sometimes happens, too. Either way, he has to talk her out of the thing.

Silence. The wind stops. The scratching ceases. The music is gone.

The whirring. The window screens dilate upon the empty city.

Silence, under totally overcast skies. Mountains of ice ringing the place. Nothing moving. Even the video has gone dead.

He recoils at the sudden flash from a peripheral unit far to his left across the city. The laser beam hits a key point on the glacier, and its face falls away.

Moments later he hears the hollow, booming sound of the crashing ice. A powdery storm has risen like surf at the ice mount’s foot. He smiles at the power, the timing, the display. Andrew Aldon . . . always on the job, dueling with the elements, stalemating nature herself, immortal guardian of Playpoint. At least Aldon never malfunctions.

The silence comes again. As he watches the risen snows settle he feels the tranquilizer beginning to work. It will be good not to have to worry about money again. The past two years have taken a lot out of him. Seeing all of his investments fail in the Big Washout—that was when his nerves had first begun to act up. He has grown softer than he was a century ago—a young, rawboned soldier of fortune then, out to make his bundle and enjoy it. And he had. Now he has to do it again, though this time will be easier—except for Dorothy.

He thinks of her. A century younger than himself, still in her twenties, sometimes reckless, used to all of the good things in life. There is something vulnerable about Dorothy, times when she lapses into such a strong dependence that he feels oddly moved. Other times, it just irritates the hell out of him. Perhaps this is the closest he can come to love now, an occasional ambivalent response to being needed. But of course she is loaded. That breeds a certain measure of necessary courtesy. Until he can make his own bundle again, anyway. But none of these things are the reason he has to keep her from accompanying him on his journey. It goes beyond love or money. It is survival.

The laser flashes again, this time to the right. He waits for the crash.

THE STATUE. It is not a pretty pose. She lies frosted in an ice cave, looking like one of Rodin’s less comfortable figures, partly propped on her left side, right elbow raised above her head; hand hanging near her face, shoulders against the wall, left leg completely buried.

She has on a gray parka, the hood slipped back to reveal twisted strands of dark blond hair; and she wears blue trousers; there is a black boot on the one foot that is visible.

She is coated with ice, and within the much-refracted light of the cave what can be seen of her features is not unpleasant but not strikingly attractive either. She looks to be in her twenties.

There are a number of fracture lines within the cave’s walls and floor. Overhead,-countless icicles hang like stalactites, sparkling jewellike in the much-bounced light. The grotto has a stepped slope to it with the statue at its higher end, giving to the place a vaguely shrinelike appearance.

On those occasions when the cloud cover is broken at sundown a reddish light is cast about her figure.

She has actually moved in the course of a century—a few inches, from a general shifting of the ice. Tricks of the light make her seem to move more frequently, however.

The entire tableau might give the impression that this is merely a pathetic woman who had been trapped and frozen to death here, rather than the statue of the living goddess in the place where it all began.

THE WOMAN. She sits in the bar beside a window. The patio outside is gray and angular and drifted with snow; the flowerbeds are filled with dead plants—stiff, flattened, and frozen. She does not mind the view. Far from it. Winter is a season of death and cold, and she likes being reminded of it. She enjoys the prospect of pitting herself against its frigid and very visible fangs. A faint flash of light passes over the patio, followed by a distant roaring sound. She sips her drink and licks her lips and listens to the soft music that fills the air.

She is alone. The bartender and all of the other help here are of the mechanical variety: If anyone other than Paul were to walk in, she would probably scream. They are the only people in the hotel during this long offseason. Except for the sleepers, they are the only people in all of Playpoint.

And Paul . . . He will be along soon to take her to the dining room. There they can summon holo-ghosts to people the other tables, if they wish. She does not wish. She likes being alone with Paul at a time like this, on the eve of a great adventure.

He will tell her his plans over coffee, and perhaps even this afternoon they might obtain the necessary equipment to begin the exploration for that which would put him on his feet again financially, return to him his self-respect. It will of course be dangerous and very rewarding. “She finishes her drink, rises, and crosses to the bar for another.

And Paul . . . She had really caught a falling star, a swashbuckler on the way down, a man with a glamorous past just balanced on the brink of ruin. The teetering had already begun when they had met two years before, which had made it even more exciting. Of course, he needed a woman like her to lean upon at such a time. It wasn’t just her money. She could never believe the things her late parents had said about him. No, he does care for her. He is strangely vulnerable and dependent.

She wants to turn him back into the man he once must have been, and then of course that man will need her, too. The thing he had been—that is what she needs most of all—a man who can reach up and bat the moon away. He must have been like that long ago.

She tastes her second drink.

The son of a bitch had better hurry, though. She is getting hungry.

THE CITY Playpoint is located on the world known as Balfrost, atop a high peninsula that slopes down to a now-frozen sea. Playpoint contains all of the facilities for an adult playground, and it is one of the more popular resorts in this sector of the galaxy from late spring through early autumn—approximately fifty Earth years. Then winter comes on like a period of glaciation, and everybody goes away for half a century—or half a year, depending on how one regards such matters. During this time Playpoint is given into the care of its automated defense and maintenance routine. This is a self-repairing system, directed toward cleaning, plowing, thawing, melting, warming everything in need of such care, as well as directly combating the encroaching ice and snow. And all of these functions are done under the supervision of a well-protected central computer that also studies the weather and climate patterns, anticipating as well as reacting.

This system has worked successfully for many centuries, delivering Playpoint over to spring and pleasure in reasonably good condition at the end of each long winter.

There are mountains behind Playpoint, water (or ice, depending on the season) on three sides, weather and navigation satellites high above. In a bunker beneath the administration building is a pair of sleepers—generally a man and a woman—who awaken once every year or so to physically inspect the maintenance system’s operations and to deal with any special situations that might have arisen. An alarm may arouse them for emergencies at anytime. They are well paid, and over the years they have proven worth the investment. The central computer has at its disposal explosives and lasers as well as a great variety of robots. Usually it keeps a little ahead of the game, and it seldom falls behind for long.

At the moment, things are about even because the weather has been particularly nasty recently.

ZzzzV. Another block of ice has become a puddle.

ZzzzV. The puddle has been evaporated. The molecules climb toward a place where they can get together and return as snow.

The glaciers shuffle their feet, edge forward. ZzzzV. Their gain has become a loss.

Andrew Aldon knows exactly what he is doing.

CONVERSATIONS. The waiter, needing lubrication, rolls off after having served them, passing through a pair of swinging doors.

She giggles. “Wobbly,” she says.

“Old World charm,” he agrees, trying and failing to catch her eye as he smiles.

“You have everything worked out?” she asks after they have begun eating.

“Sort of,” he says, smiling again.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“Both. I need more information. I want to go and check things over first. Then I can figure the best course of action.”

“I note your use of the singular pronoun,” she says steadily, meeting his gaze at last.

His smile freezes and fades.

“I was referring to only a little preliminary scouting,” he says softly.

“No,” she says. “We. Even for a little preliminary scouting.”

He sighs and sets down his fork.

“This will have very little to do with anything to come later,” he begins. “Things have changed a lot. I’ll have to locate a new route. This will just be dull work and no fun.”

“I didn’t come along for fun,” she replies. “We were going to share everything, remember? That includes boredom, danger, and anything else. That was the understanding when I agreed to pay our way.”

“I’d a feeling it would come to that,” he says, after a moment.

“Come to it? It’s always been there. That was our agreement.”

He raises his goblet and sips the wine.

“Of course. I’m not trying to rewrite history. It’s just that things would go faster if I could do some of the initial looking around myself. I can move more quickly alone.”

“What’s the hurry?” she says. “A few days this way or that. I’m in pretty good shape. I won’t slow you down all that much.”

“I’d the impression you didn’t particularly like it here. I just wanted to hurry things up so we could get the hell out.”

“That’s very considerate,” she says, beginning to eat again. “But that’s my problem, isn’t it?” She looks up at him. “Unless there’s some other reason you don’t want me along?”

He drops his gaze quickly, picks up his fork. “Don’t be silly.”

She smiles. “Then that’s settled. I’ll go with you this afternoon to look for the trail.”

The music stops, to be succeeded by a sound as of the clearing of a throat. Then, “Excuse me for what may seem like eavesdropping,” comes a deep, masculine voice. “It is actually only a part of a simple monitoring function I keep in effect—”

“Aldon!” Paul exclaims.

“At your service, Mr. Plaige, more or less. I choose to make my presence known only because I did indeed overhear you, and the matter of your safety overrides the good manners that would otherwise dictate reticence. I’ve been receiving reports that indicate we could be hit by some extremely bad weather this afternoon. So if you were planning an extended sojourn outside I would recommend you postpone it.”

“Oh,” Dorothy says.

“Thanks,” Paul says.

“I shall now absent myself. Enjoy your meal and your stay.”

The music returns.

“Aldon?” Paul asks.

There is no reply.

“Looks as if we do it tomorrow or later.”

“Yes,” Paul agrees, and he is smiling his first relaxed smile of the day. And thinking fast.

THE WORLD. Life on Balfrost proceeds in peculiar cycles. There are great migrations of animal life and quasi-animal life to the equatorial regions during the long winter. Life in the depths of the seas goes on. And the permafrost vibrates with its own style of life.

The permafrost. Throughout the winter and on through the spring the permafrost lives at its peak. It is laced with mycelia—twining, probing, touching, knotting themselves into ganglia, reaching out to infiltrate other systems. It girds the globe, vibrating like a collective unconscious throughout the winter. In the spring it sends up stalks that develop gray, flowerlike appendages for a few days. These blooms then collapse to reveal dark pods that subsequently burst with small, popping sounds, releasing clouds of sparkling spores that the winds bear just about everywhere. These are extremely hardy, like the mycelia they will one day become.

The heat of summer finally works its way down into the permafrost, and the strands doze their way into a long period of quiescence. When the cold returns they are roused, spores send forth new filaments that repair old damages, create new synapses. A current begins to flow. The life of summer is like a fading dream. For eons this had been the way of things upon Balfrost, within Balfrost. Then the goddess decreed otherwise. Winter’s queen spread her hands, and there came a change.

THE SLEEPERS. Paul makes his way through swirling flakes to the administration building. It has been a simpler matter than he had anticipated, persuading Dorothy to use the sleep-induction unit to be well rested for the morrow. He had pretended to use the other unit himself, resisting its blandishments until he was certain she was asleep and he could slip off undetected.

He lets himself into the vaultlike building, takes all of the old familiar turns, makes his way down a low ramp. The room is unlocked and a bit chilly, but he begins to perspire when he enters. The two cold lockers are in operation. He checks their monitoring systems and sees that everything is in order.

All right, go! Borrow the equipment now. They won’t be using it.

He hesitates.

He draws nearer and looks down through the view plates at the faces of the sleepers. No resemblance, thank God. He realizes then that he is trembling. He backs away, turns, and flees toward the storage area.

Later, in a yellow snowslider, carrying special equipment, he heads inland.

As he drives, the snow ceases falling and the winds die down. He smiles. The snows sparkle before him, and landmarks do not seem all that unfamiliar. Good omens, at last.

Then something crosses his path, turns, halts, and faces him.

ANDREW ALDON. Andrew Aldon, once a man of considerable integrity and resource, had on his deathbed opted for continued existence as a computer program, the enchanted loom of his mind shuttling and weaving thereafter as central processing’s judgmental program in the great guardian computerplex at Playpoint. And there he functions as a program of considerable integrity and resource. He maintains the city, and he fights the elements. He does not merely respond to pressures, but he anticipates structural and functional needs; he generally outguesses the weather. Like the professional soldier he once had been, he keeps himself in a state of constant alert—not really difficult considering the resources available to him. He is seldom wrong, always competent, and sometimes brilliant. Occasionally he resents his fleshless state. Occasionally he feels lonely.

This afternoon he is puzzled by the sudden veering off of the storm he had anticipated and by the spell of clement weather that has followed this meteorological quirk. His mathematics were elegant, but the weather was not. It seems peculiar that this should come at a time of so many other little irregularities, such as unusual ice adjustments, equipment glitches, and the peculiar behavior of machinery in the one occupied room of the hotel—a room troublesomely tenanted by a non grata ghost from the past.

So he watches for a time. He is ready to intervene when Paul enters the administration building and goes to the bunkers. But Paul does nothing that might bring harm to the sleepers. His curiosity is dominant when Paul draws equipment. He continues to watch. This is because in his judgment, Paul bears watching.

Aldon decides to act only when he detects a development that runs counter to anything in his experience. He sends one of his mobile units to intercept Paul as the man heads out of town. It catches up with him at a bending of the way and slides into his path with one appendage upraised.

“Stop!” Aldon calls through the speaker.

Paul brakes his vehicle and sits for a moment regarding the machine.

Then he smiles faintly. “I assume you have good reason for interfering with a guest’s freedom of movement.”

“Your safety takes precedence.”

“I am perfectly safe.”

“At the moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“This weather pattern has suddenly become more than a little unusual. You seem to occupy a drifting island of calm while a storm rages about you.”

“So I’ll take advantage of it now and face the consequences later, if need be.”

“It is your choice. I wanted it to be an informed one, however.”

“All right. You’ve informed me. Now get out of my way.”

“In a moment. You departed under rather unusual circumstances the last time you were here—in breach of your contract.”

“Check your legal bank if you’ve got one. That statute’s run for prosecuting me on that.”

“There are some things on which there is no statute of limitations.”

“What do you mean by that? I turned in a report on what happened that day.”

“One which—conveniently—could not be verified. You were arguing that day. . . .”

“We always argued. That’s just the way we were. If you have something to say about it, say it.”

“No, I have nothing more to say about it. My only intention is to caution you—”

“Okay, I’m cautioned.”

“To caution you in more ways than the obvious.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am not certain that things are the same here now as when you left last winter.”

“Everything changes.”

“Yes, but that is not what I mean. There is something peculiar about this place now. The past is no longer a good guide for the present. More and more anomalies keep cropping up. Sometimes it feels as if the world is testing me or playing games with me.”

“You’re getting paranoid, Aldon. You’ve been in that box too long. Maybe it’s time to terminate.”

“You son of a bitch, I’m trying to tell you something. I’ve run a lot of figures on this, and all this shit started shortly after you left. The human part of me still has hunches, and I’ve a feeling there’s a connection. If you know all about this and can cope with it, fine. If you don’t, I think you should watch out. Better yet, turn around and go home.”

“I can’t.”

“Even if there is something out there, something that is making it easy for you—for the moment?”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I am reminded of the old Gaia hypothesis—Lovelock, twentieth century. . . .”

“Planetary intelligence. I’ve heard of it. Never met one, though.”

“Are you certain? I sometimes feel I’m confronting one.”

“What if something is out there and it wants you—is leading you on like a will-o’-the-wisp?”

“It would be my problem, not yours.”

“I can protect you against it. Go back to Playpoint.”

“No thanks. I will survive.”

“What of Dorothy?”

“What of her?”

“You would leave her alone when she might need you?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Your last woman didn’t fare too well.”

“Damn it! Get out of my way, or I’ll run you down!”

The robot withdraws from the trail. Through its sensors Aldon watches Paul drive away.

Very well, he decides. We know where we stand, Paul. And you haven’t changed. That makes it easier.

Aldon further focuses his divided attention. To Dorothy now. Clad in heated garments. Walking. Approaching the building from which she had seen Paul emerge on his vehicle. She had hailed and cursed him, but the winds had carried her words away. She, too, had only feigned sleep. After a suitable time, then, she sought to follow. Aldon watches her stumble once and wants to reach out to assist her, but there is no mobile unit handy. He routes one toward the area against future accidents.

“Damn him!” she mutters as she passes along the street, ribbons of snow rising and twisting away before her.

“Where are you going, Dorothy?” Aldon asks over a nearby PA speaker.

She halts and turns. “Who—?”

“Andrew Aldon,” he replies. “I have been observing your progress.”

“Why?” she asks.

“Your safety concerns me.”

“That storm you mentioned earlier?”

“Partly.”

“I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself. What do you mean partly?”

“You move in dangerous company.”

“Paul? How so?”

“He once took a woman into that same wild area he is heading for now. She did not come back.”

“He told me all about that. There was an accident.”

“And no witnesses.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“It is suspicious. That is all.”

She begins moving again, toward the administrative building. Aldon switches to another speaker, within its entrance.

“I accuse him of nothing. If you choose to trust him, fine. But don’t trust the weather. It would be best for you to return to the hotel.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” she says, entering the building.

He follows her as she explores, is aware of her quickening pulse when she halts beside the cold bunkers.

“These are the sleepers?”

“Yes. Paul held such a position once, as did the unfortunate woman.”

“I know. Look, I’m going to follow him whether you approve or not. So why not just tell me where those sleds are kept?”

“Very well. I will do even more than that. I will guide you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I request a favor—one that will actually benefit you.”

“Name it.”

“In the equipment locker behind you, you will find a remote-sensor bracelet. It is also a two-way communication link. Wear it. I can be with you then. To assist you. Perhaps even to protect you.”

“You can help me to follow him?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I can buy that.”

She moves to the locker, opens it.

“Here’s something that looks like a bracelet, with doodads.”

“Yes. Depress the red stud.”

She does. His voice now emerges clearly from the unit.

“Put it on, and I’ll show you the way.”

“Right.”

SNOWSCAPE. Sheets and hills of white, tufts of evergreen shrubbery, protruding joints of rock, snowdevils twirled like tops beneath wind’s lash . . . light and shade. Cracking sky. Tracks in sheltered areas, smoothness beyond.

She follows, masked and bundled.

“I’ve lost him,” she mutters, hunched behind the curved windscreen of her yellow, bullet-shaped vehicle.

“Straight ahead, past those two rocks. Stay in the lee of the ridge. I’ll tell you when to turn. I’ve a satellite overhead. If the clouds stay parted—strangely parted . . .”

“What do you mean?”

“He seems to be enjoying light from the only break in the cloud cover over the entire area.”

“Coincidence.”

“I wonder.”

“What else could it be?”

“It is almost as if something had opened a door for him.”

“Mysticism from a computer?”

“I am not a computer.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Aldon. I know that you were once a man. . . .”

“I am still a man.”

“Sorry.”

“There are many things I would like to know. Your arrival here comes at an unusual time of year. Paul took some prospecting equipment with him. . . .”

“Yes. It’s not against the law. In fact, it is one of the vacation features here, isn’t it?”

“Yes. There are many interesting minerals about, some of them precious.”

“Well, Paul wants some more, and he didn’t want a crowd around while he was looking.”

“More?”

“Yes, he made a strike here years ago. Yndella crystals.”

“I see. Interesting.”

“What’s in this for you, anyway?”

“Protecting visitors is a part of my job. In your case, I feel particularly protective.”

“How so?”

“In my earlier life I was attracted to women of your—specifications. Physical, as well as what I can tell of the rest.”

Two-beat pause, then, “You are blushing.”

“Compliments do that to me,” she says, “and that’s a hell of a monitoring system you have. What’s it like?”

“Oh, I can tell your body temperature, your pulse rate—”

“No, I mean, what’s it like being—what you are?”

Three-beat pause. “Godlike in some ways. Very human in others—almost exaggeratedly so. I feel something of an amplification of everything I was earlier. Perhaps it’s a compensation or a clinging to things past. You make me feel nostalgic—among other things. Don’t fret. I’m enjoying it.”

“I’d like to have met you then.”

“Mutual.”

“What were you like?”

“Imagine me as you would. I’ll come off looking better that way.”

She laughs. She adjusts her filters. She thinks about Paul.

“What was he like in his earlier days—Paul?” she asks.

“Probably pretty much the way he is now, only less polished.”

“In other words, you don’t care to say.”

The trail turns upward more steeply, curves to the right. She hears winds but does not feel them. Cloud-shadow grayness lies all about, but her trail/his trail is lighted.

“I don’t really know,” Aldon says, after a time, “and I will not guess, in the case of someone you care about.”

“Gallant,” she observes.

“No, just fair,” he replies. “I might be wrong.”

They continue to the top of the rise, where Dorothy draws a sharp breath and further darkens her goggles against the sudden blaze where a range of ice fractures rainbows and strews their shards like confetti in all directions.

“God!” she says.

“Or goddess,” Aldon replies.

“A goddess, sleeping in a circle of flame?”

“Not sleeping.”

“That would be a lady for you, Aldon—if she existed. God and goddess.”

“I do not want a goddess.”

“I can see his tracks, heading into that.”

“Not swerving a bit. as if he knows where he’s going.”

She follows, tracing slopes like the curves of a pale torso. The world is stillness and light and whiteness. Aldon on her wrist hums softly now, an old tune, whether of love or martial matters she isn’t certain. Distances are distorted, perspectives skewed. She finds herself humming softly along with him. heading for the place where Paul’s tracks find their vanishing point and enter infinity.

THE LIMP WATCH HUNG UPON THE TREE LIMB. My lucky day. The weather . . . trail clean. Things changed but not so out of shape I can’t tell where it is. The lights! God, yes! Iceshine, mounds of prisms. . . . If only the opening is still there. . . . Should have brought explosives. There has been shifting, maybe a collapse. Must get in. Return later with Dorothy. But first—clean up, get rid of . . . it. If she’s still there. . . . Swallowed up maybe. That would be good, best. Things seldom are, though. I—When it happened. Wasn’t as if. Wasn’t what. Was. . . . Was shaking the ground. Cracking, splitting. Icicles ringing, rattling, banging about. Thought we’d go under. Both of us. She was going in. So was the bag of the stuff. Grabbed the stuff. Only because it was nearer. Would have helped her if—Couldn’t. Could I? Ceiling was slipping. Get out. No sense both of us getting it. Got out. She’d’ve done the same. Wouldn’t she? Her eyes. . . . Glenda! Maybe . . . No! Couldn’t have. Just couldn’t. Could I? Silly. After all these years. There was a moment. Just a moment, though. A lull. If I’d known it was coming I might have. No. Ran. Your face at the window, on the screen, in a sometime dream. Glenda. It wasn’t that I didn’t. Blaze of hills. Fire and eyes. Ice. Ice. Fire and snow. Blazing hearthful. Ice. Ice. Straight through the ice the long road lies. The fire hangs high above. The screaming. The crash. And the silence. Get out. Yet. Different? No. It could never have. That was the way. Not my fault. . . . Damn it. Everything I could. Glenda. Up ahead. Yes. Long curve. Then down. Winding back in there. The crystals will. . . . I’ll never come back to this place.

THE LIMP TREE LIMB HUNG UPON THE WATCH. Gotcha! Think I can’t see through the fog? Can’t sneak up on me on little cat feet. Same for your partner across the way. I’ll melt off a little more near your bases, too. A lot of housecleaning backed up here. . . . Might as well take advantage of the break. Get those streets perfect. . . . How long? Long. . . . Long legs parting. . . . Long time since. Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance? Unnatural. This weather. A sort of spiritual spring. . . . Extend those beams. Burn. Melt in my hot, red-fingered hands. Back off, I say. I rule here. Clear that courtyard. Unplug that drain. Come opportunity, let me clasp thee. Melt. Burn. I rule here, goddess. Draw back. I’ve a bomb for every tower of ice, a light for any darkness. Tread carefully here. I feel I begin to know thee. I see thy signature in cloud and fog bank, trace thy icy tresses upon the blowing wind. Thy form lies contoured all about me, white as shining death. We’re due an encounter. Let the clouds spiral, ice ring, Earth heave. I rush to meet thee, death or maiden, in halls of crystal upon the heights. Not here. Long, slow fall, ice facade, crashing. Melt. Another. . . . Gotcha!

FROZEN WATCH EMBEDDED IN PERMAFROST Bristle and thrum. Coming now. Perchance. Perchance. Perchance. I say. Throstle. Crack. Sunder. Split, Open, Coming. Beyond the ice in worlds I have known. Returning. He. Throstle. The mind the mover. To open the way. Come now. Let not to the meeting impediments. Admit. Open. Cloud stand thou still, and wind be leashed. None dare oppose thy passage returning, my killer love. It was but yesterday A handful of stones. . . . Come singing fresh-armed from the warm places. I have looked upon thy unchanged countenance. I open the way. Come to me. Let not to the mating. I—Girding the globe, I have awakened in all of my places to receive thee. But here, here this special spot, I focus, mind the mover, in place where it all began, my bloody handed, Paul my love, calling, back, for the last good-bye, ice kiss, fire touch, heart stop, blood still, soul freeze, embrace of world and my hate with thy fugitive body, elusive the long year now. Come into the place it has waited. I move there again, up sciatic to spine, behind the frozen eyeballs, waiting and warming. To me. To me now. Throstle and click, bristle and thrum. And runners scratching the snow, my heart slashing parallel. Cut.

PILGRIMAGE. He swerves, turns, slows amid the ragged prominences—ice fallen, ice heaved—in the fields where mountain and glacier wrestle in slow motion, to the accompaniment of occasional cracking and pinging sounds, crashes, growls, and the rattle of blown ice crystals. Here the ground is fissured as well as greatly uneven, and Paul abandons his snowslider. He secures some tools to his belt and his pack, anchors the sled, and commences the trek.

At first, he moves slowly and carefully, but old reflexes return, and soon he is hurrying. Moving from dazzle to shade, he passes among ice forms like grotesque statues of glass. The slope is changed from the old one he remembers, but it feels right. And deep, below, to the right. . . .

Yes. That darker place. The canyon or blocked pass, whichever it was. That seems right, too. He alters his course slightly. He is sweating now within his protective clothing, and his breath comes faster as he increases his pace. His vision blurs, and for a moment, somewhere between glare and shadow, he seems to see. . . .

He halts, sways a moment, then shakes his head, snorts, and continues.

Another hundred meters and he is certain. Those rocky ribs to the northeast, snow rivulets diamond hard between them. . . . He has been here before.

The stillness is almost oppressive. In the distance he sees spumes of windblown snow jetting off and eddying down from a high, white peak. If he stops and listens carefully he can even hear the far winds.

There is a hole in the middle of the clouds, directly overhead, It is as if he were looking downward upon a lake in a crater.

More than unusual. He is tempted to turn back. His trank has worn off. and his stomach feels unsettled. He half-wishes to discover that this is not the place. But he knows that feelings are not very important. He continues until he stands before the opening.

There has been some shifting, some narrowing of the way. He approaches slowly. He regards the passage for a full minute before he moves to enter.

He pushes back his goggles as he comes into the lessened light. He extends a gloved hand, places it upon the facing wall, pushes. Firm. He tests the one behind him. The same.

Three paces forward and the way narrows severely. He turns and sidles. The light grows dimmer, the surface beneath his feet, more slick. He slows. He slides a hand along either wall as he advances. He passes through a tiny spot of light beneath an open ice chimney. Overhead, the wind is howling a high note now, almost whistling it.

The passage begins to widen. As his right hand falls away from the more sharply angling wall his balance is tipped in that direction. He draws back to compensate, but his left foot slides backward and falls. He attempts to rise, slips, and falls again.

Cursing, he begins to crawl forward. This area had not been slick before. . . . He chuckles. Before? A century ago. Things do change in a span like that. They—

The wind begins to howl beyond the cave mouth as he sees the rise of the floor, looks upward along the slope. She is there.

He makes a small noise at the back of his throat and stops, his right hand partly raised. She wears the shadows like veils, but they do not mask her identity. He stares. It’s even worse than he had thought. Trapped, she must have lived for some time after. . . .

He shakes his head.

No use. She must be cut loose and buried now—disposed of.

He crawls forward. The icy slope does not grow level until he is quite near her. His gaze never leaves her form as he advances. The shadows slide over her. He can almost hear her again.

He thinks of the shadows. She couldn’t have moved just then. . . . He stops and studies her face. It is not frozen. It is puckered and sagging as if waterlogged. A caricature of the face he had so often touched. He grimaces and looks away. The leg must be freed. He reaches for his axe.

Before he can take hold of the tool he sees movement of the hand, slow and shaking. It is accompanied by a throaty sigh.

“No . . .” he whispers, drawing back.

“Yes,” comes the reply.

“Glenda.”

“I am here.” Her head turns slowly. Reddened, watery eyes focus upon his own. “I have been waiting.”

“This is insane.”

The movement of the face is horrible. It takes him some time to realize that it is a smile.

“I knew that one day you would return.”

“How?” he says. “How have you lasted?”

“The body is nothing,” she replies. “I had all but forgotten it. I live within the permafrost of this world. My buried foot was in contact with its filaments. It was alive, but it possessed no consciousness until we met. I live everywhere now.”

“I am—happy—that you—survived.”

She laughs slowly, dryly.

“Really. Paul? How could that be when you left me to die?”

“I had no choice. Glenda. I couldn’t save you.”

“There was an opportunity. You preferred the stones to my life.”

“That’s not true!”

“You didn’t even try.” The arms are moving again, less jerkily now. “You didn’t even come back to recover my body.”

“What would have been the use? You were dead—or I thought you were.”

“Exactly. You didn’t know, but you ran out anyway I loved you. Paul. I would have done anything for you.”

“I cared about you, too, Glenda. I would have helped you if I could have. If—”

“If? Don’t if me ifs. I know what you are.”

“I loved you,” Paul says. “I’m sorry.”

“You loved me? You never said it.”

“It’s not the sort of thing I talk about easily. Or think about, even.”

“Show me,” she says. “Come here.”

He looks away. “I can’t.”

She laughs. “You said you loved me.”

“You—you don’t know how you look. I’m sorry.”

“You fool!” Her voice grows hard, imperious. “Had you done it I would have spared your life. It would have shown me that some tiny drop of affection might truly have existed. But you lied. You only used me. You didn’t care.”

“You’re being unfair!”

“Am I? Am I really?” she says. There comes a sound like running water from somewhere nearby. “You would speak to me of fairness? I have hated you. Paul, for nearly a century. Whenever I took a moment from regulating the life of this planet to think about it, I would curse you. In the spring as I shifted my consciousness toward the poles and allowed a part of myself to dream, my nightmares were of you. They actually upset the ecology somewhat, here and there. I have waited, and now you are here. I see nothing to redeem you. I shall use you as you used me—to your destruction. Come to me!”

He feels a force enter into his body. His muscles twitch. He is drawn up to his knees. Held in that position for long moments, then he beholds her as she also rises, drawing a soaking leg from out of the crevice where it had been held. He had heard the running water. She had somehow melted the ice. . . .

She smiles and raises her pasty hands. Multitudes of dark filaments extend from her freed leg down into the crevice.

“Come!” she repeats.

“Please . . .,” he says.

She shakes her head. “Once you were so ardent. I cannot understand you.”

“If you’re going to kill me then kill me, damn it! But don’t—”

Her features begin to flow. Her hands darken and grow firm. In moments she stands before him looking as she did a century ago.

“Glenda!” He rises to his feet.

“Yes. Come now.”

He takes a step forward. Another.

Shortly he holds her in his arms, leans to kiss her smiling face.

“You forgive me,” he says.

Her face collapses as he kisses her. Corpselike, flaccid, and pale once more, it is pressed against his own.

“No!”

He attempts to draw back, but her embrace is inhumanly strong.

“Now is not the time to stop,” she says.

“Bitch! Let me go! I hate you!”

“I know that, Paul. Hate is the only thing we have in common.”

“. . . Always hated you,” he continues, still struggling. “You always were a bitch!”

Then he feels the cold lines of control enter his body again.

“The greater my pleasure then,” she replies, as his hands drift forward to open her parka.

ALL OF THE ABOVE. Dorothy struggles down the icy slope, her sled parked beside Paul’s. The winds lash at her. driving crystals of ice like microbullets against her struggling form. Overhead, the clouds have closed again. A curtain of white is drifting slowly in her direction.

“It waited for him,” comes Aldon’s voice, above the screech of the wind.

“Yes. Is this going to be a bad one?”

“A lot depends on the winds. You should get to shelter soon, though.”

“I see a cave. I wonder whether that’s the one Paul was looking for?”

“If I had to guess I’d say yes. But right now it doesn’t matter. Get there.”

When she finally reaches the entrance she is trembling. Several paces within she leans her back against the icy wall, panting. Then the wind changes direction and reaches her. She retreats farther into the cave.

She hears a voice: “Please . . . don’t.”

“Paul?” she calls.

There is no reply. She hurries.

She puts out a hand and saves herself from falling as she comes into the chamber. There she beholds Paul in necrophiliac embrace with his captor.

“Paul! What is it?” she cries.

“Get out!” he says. “Hurry!”

Glenda’s lips form the words, “What devotion. Rather, let her stay, if you would live.”

Paul feels her clasp loosen slightly.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“You may have your life if you will take me away—in her body. Be with me as before.”

It is Aldon’s voice that answers “No!” in reply. “You can’t have her. Gaia!”

“Call me Glenda. I know you, Andrew Aldon. Many times have I listened to your broadcasts. Occasionally have I struggled against you when our projects were at odds. What is this woman to you?”

“She is under my protection.”

“That means nothing. I am stronger here. Do you love her?”

“Perhaps I do. Or could.”

“Fascinating. My nemesis of all these years, with the analog of a human heart within your circuits. But the decision is Paul’s. Give her to me if you would live.”

The cold rushes into his limbs. His life seems to contract to the center of his being. His consciousness begins to fade.

“Take her,” he whispers.

“I forbid it!” rings Aldon’s voice.

“You have shown me again what kind of man you are,” Glenda hisses, “my enemy. Scorn and undying hatred are all I will ever have for you. Yet you shall live.”

“I will destroy you,” Aldon calls out, “if you do this thing!”

“What a battle that would be!” Glenda replies. “But I’ve no quarrel with you here. Nor will I grant you one with me. Receive my judgment.”

Paul begins to scream. Abruptly this ceases. Glenda releases him, and he turns to stare at Dorothy. He steps in her direction.

“Don’t—don’t do it, Paul. Please.”

“I am—not Paul,” he replies, his voice deeper, “and I would never hurt you. . . .”

“Go now.” says Glenda. “The weather will turn again, in your favor.”

“I don’t understand,” Dorothy says, staring at the man before her.

“It is not necessary that you do,” says Glenda. “Leave this planet quickly.”

Paul’s screaming commences once again, this time emerging from Dorothy’s bracelet.

“I will trouble you for that bauble you wear, however. Something about it appeals to me.”

FROZEN LEOPARD. He has tried on numerous occasions to relocate the cave, with his eyes in the sky and his robots and flyers, but the topography of the place was radically altered by a severe icequake, and. he has met with no success. Periodically he bombards the general area. He also sends thermite cubes melting their ways down through the ice and the permafrost, but this has had no discernible effect.

This is the worst winter in the history of Balfrost. The winds howl constantly and waves of snow come on like surf. The glaciers have set speed records in their advance upon Playpoint. But he has held his own against them, with electricity, lasers, and chemicals. His supplies are virtually inexhaustible now, drawn from the planet itself, produced in his underground factories. He has also designed and is manufacturing more sophisticated weapons. Occasionally he hears her laughter over the missing communicator. “Bitch!” he broadcasts then. “Bastard!” comes the reply. He sends another missile into the mountains. A sheet of ice falls upon his city. It will be a long winter.

Andrew Aldon and Dorothy are gone. He has taken up painting, and she writes poetry now. They live in a warm place.

Sometimes Paul laughs over the broadcast band when he scores a victory. “Bastard!” comes the immediate response. “Bitch!” he answers, chuckling. He is never bored, however, or nervous. In fact, let it be.

When spring comes the goddess will dream of this conflict while Paul turns his attention to his more immediate duties. But he will be planning and remembering, also. His life has a purpose to it now. And if anything, he is more efficient than Aldon. But the pods will bloom and burst despite his herbicides and fungicides. They will mutate just sufficiently to render the poisons innocuous.

“Bastard,” she will mutter sleepily.

“Bitch,” he will answer softly.

The night may have a thousand eyes and the day but one. The heart, often, is better blind to its own workings, and I would sing of arms and the man and the wrath of the goddess, not the torment of love unsatisfied, or satisfied, in the frozen garden of our frozen world. And that, leopard, is all.

R&R

Lucius Shepard

Lucius Shepard returns to our pages with a powerful science fiction war story set in a war-torn Central America. Although this fascinating and eerily beautiful tale contains brief scenes and language which may be disturbing to some, it is a story which, given today’s precarious political balance,(should not be put aside.

1

One of the New Sikorsky gunships, an element of First Air Cavalry with the words Whispering Death painted its side, gave Mingolla and Gilbey and Baylor a lift from the Ant Farm to San Francisco de Juticlan, a small town located inside the green zone, which on the latest maps was designated Free Occupied Guatemala. To the east of this green zone lay an undesignated band of yellow from the Mexican border to the Caribbean. The Ant Farm was a firebase on the edge of the yellow band, and it was from there that Mingolla—an artillery specialist not yet twenty-one years old—lobbed shells into an area that the maps depicted in black-and-white terrain markings. And thus it was that he often thought of himself as engaged in a struggle to keep the world safe for primary colors.

Mingolla and his buddies could have taken their R&R in Rio or Caracas, but they had noticed that the men who visited these cities had a tendency to grow careless upon their return; they understood from this that the more exuberant your R&R, the more likely you were to wind up a casualty, and so they always opted for the lesser distractions of the Guatemalan towns. They were not really friends: they had little in common, and under different circumstances they might well have been enemies. But taking their R&R together had come to be a ritual of survival, and once they had reached the town of their choice, they would go their separate ways and perform further rituals. Because the three had survived so much already, they believed that if they continued to perform these same rituals they would complete their tours unscathed. They had never acknowledged their belief to one another, speaking of it only obliquely—that, too, was part of the ritual—and had this belief been challenged they would have admitted its irrationality; yet they would also have pointed out that the strange character of the war acted to enforce it.

The gunship set down at an airbase a mile west of town, a concrete strip penned in on three sides by barracks and offices, with the jungle rising behind them. At the center of the strip another Sikorsky was practicing takeoffs and landings—a drunken, camouflage-colored dragonfly—and two others were hovering overhead like anxious parents. As Mingolla jumped out, a hot breeze fluttered his shirt. He was wearing civvies for the first time in weeks, and they felt flimsy compared to his combat gear; he glanced around nervously, half-expecting an unseen enemy to take advantage of his exposure. Some mechanics were lounging in the shade of a chopper whose cockpit had been destroyed, leaving fanglike shards of plastic curving from the charred metal. Dusty jeeps trundled back and forth between the buildings; a brace of crisply starched lieutenants were making a brisk beeline toward a forklift stacked high with aluminum coffins. Afternoon sunlight fired dazzles on the seams and handles of the coffins, and through the heat haze the distant line of barracks shifted like waves in a troubled olive-drab sea. The incongruity of the scene—its What’s-Wrong-With-This-Picture mix of the horrid and the commonplace—wrenched at Mingolla. His left hand trembled, and the light seemed to grow brighter, making him weak and vague. He leaned against the Sikorsky’s rocket pod to steady himself. Far above, contrails were fraying in the deep blue range of the sky: XL-16s off to blow holes in Nicaragua. He stared after them with something akin to longing, listening for their engines, but heard only the spacey whisper of the Sikorskys.

Gilbey hopped down from the hatch that led to the computer deck behind the cockpit; he brushed imaginary dirt from his jeans, sauntered over to Mingolla, and stood with hands on hips: a short muscular kid whose blond crewcut and petulant mouth gave him the look of a grumpy child. Baylor stuck his head out of the hatch and worriedly scanned the horizon. Then he, too, hopped down. He was tall and rawboned, a couple of years older than Mingolla, with lank black hair and pimply olive skin and features so sharp that they appeared to have been hatcheted into shape. He rested a hand on the side of the Sikorsky, but almost instantly, noticing that he was touching the flaming letter W in Whispering Death, he jerked the hand away as if he’d been scorched. Three days before there had been an all-out assault on the Ant Farm, and Baylor had not recovered from it. Neither had Mingolla. It was hard to tell whether or not Gilbey had been affected.

One of the Sikorsky’s pilots cracked the cockpit door. “Y’all can catch a ride into ’Frisco at the PX,” he said, his voice muffled by the black bubble of his visor. The sun shined a white blaze on the visor, making it seem that the helmet contained night and a single star.

“Where’s the PX?” asked Gilbey.

The pilot said something too muffled to be understood.

“What?” said Gilbey.

Again the pilot’s response was muffled, and Gilbey became angry. “Take that damn thing off!” he said.

“This?” The pilot pointed to his visor. “What for?”

“So I can hear what the Hell you sayin’.”

“You can hear now, can’tcha?”

“Okay,” said Gilbey, his voice tight. “Where’s the goddamn PX?”

The pilot’s reply was unintelligible; his faceless mask regarded Gilbey with inscrutable intent.

Gilbey balled up his fists. “Take that son of a bitch off!”

“Can’t do it, soldier,” said the second pilot, leaning over so that two black bubbles were nearly side by side. “These here doobies”—he tapped his visor—“they got microcircuits that beams shit into our eyes. ’Fects the optic nerve. Makes it so we can see the beaners even when they undercover. Longer we wear ’em, the better we see.”

Baylor laughed edgily, and Gilbey said, “Bullshit!” Mingolla naturally assumed that the pilots were putting Gilbey on, or else their reluctance to remove the helmets stemmed from a superstition, perhaps from a deluded belief, that the visors actually did bestow special powers. But given a war in which combat drugs were issued and psychics predicted enemy movements, anything was possible, even microcircuits that enhanced vision.

“You don’t wanna see us, nohow,” said the first pilot. “The beams fuck up our faces. We’re deformed-lookin’ mothers.”

“’Course you might not notice the changes,” said the second pilot. “Lotsa people don’t. But if you did, it’d mess you up.”

Imagining the pilots’ deformities sent a sick chill mounting from Mingolla’s stomach. Gilbey, however, wasn’t buying it. “You think I’m stupid?” he shouted, his neck reddening.

“Naw,” said the first pilot. “We can see you ain’t stupid. We can see lotsa shit other people can’t, ’cause of the beams.”

“All kindsa weird stuff,” chipped in the second pilot. “Like souls.”

“Ghosts.”

“Even the future.”

“The future’s our best thing,” said the first pilot. “You guys wanna know what’s ahead, we’ll tell you.”

They nodded in unison, the blaze of sunlight sliding across both visors: two evil robots responding to the same program.

Gilbey lunged for the cockpit door. The first pilot slammed it shut, and Gilbey pounded on the plastic, screaming curses. The second pilot flipped a switch on the control console, and a moment later his amplified voice boomed out: “Make straight past that forklift ’til you hit the barracks. You’ll run right into the PX.”

It took both Mingolla and Baylor to drag Gilbey away from the Sikorsky, and he didn’t stop shouting until they drew near the forklift with its load of coffins: a giant’s treasure of enormous silver ingots. Then he grew silent and lowered his eyes. They wangled a ride with an MP corporal outside the PX, and as the jeep hummed across the concrete, Mingolla glanced over at the Sikorsky that had transported them. The two pilots had spread a canvas on the ground, had stripped to shorts and were sunning themselves. But they had not removed their helmets. The weird juxtaposition of tanned bodies and shiny black heads disturbed Mingolla, reminding him of an old movie in which a guy had gone through a matter transmitter along with a fly and had ended up with the fly’s head on his shoulders. Maybe, he thought, the helmets were like that, impossible to remove. Maybe the war had gotten that strange.

The MP corporal noticed him watching the pilots and let out a barking laugh. “Those guys,” he said, with the flat emphatic tone of a man who knew whereof he spoke, “are fuckin’ nuts!”

Six years before, San Francisco de Juticlan had been a scatter of thatched huts and concrete block structures deployed among palms and banana leaves on the east bank of the Río Dulce, at the junction of the river and a gravel road that connected with the Pan American Highway; but it had since grown to occupy substantial sections of both banks, increased by dozens of bars and brothels—stucco cubes painted all the colors of the rainbow, with a fantastic bestiary of neon signs mounted atop their tin roofs. Dragons; unicorns; fiery birds; centaurs. The MP corporal told Mingolla that the signs were not advertisements but coded symbols of pride; for example, from the representation of a winged red tiger crouched amidst green lilies and blue crosses, you could deduce that the owner was wealthy, a member of a Catholic secret society, and ambivalent toward government policies. Old signs were constantly being dismantled, and larger, more ornate ones erected in their stead as testament to improved profits, and this warfare of light and image was appropriate to the time and place, because San Francisco de Juticlan was less a town than a symptom of war. Though by night the sky above it was radiant, at ground level it was mean and squalid. Pariah dogs foraged in piles of garbage, hard-bitten whores spat from the windows, and according to the corporal, it was not unusual to stumble across a victim of the gangs of abandoned children who lived in the fringes of the jungle. Narrow streets of tawny dirt cut between the bars, carpeted with a litter of flattened cans and feces and broken glass; refugees begged at every corner, displaying burns and bullet wounds. Many of the buildings had been thrown in with such haste their walls were tilted, their roofs canted, and this made the shadows they cast appear exaggerated in their jaggedness, like shadows in the work of a psychotic artist, giving visual expression to a pervasive undercurrent of tension. Yet as Mingolla moved along, he felt at ease, almost happy. His mood was due in part to his hunch that it was going to be one Hell of an R&R (he had learned to trust his hunches); but it mainly spoke to the fact that towns like this had become for him a kind of afterlife, a reward for having endured a harsh term of existence.

The corporal dropped them off at a drugstore, where Mingolla bought a box of stationery, and then they stopped for a drink at the Club Demonio: a tiny place whose whitewashed walls were shined to faint phosphorescence by the glare of purple light bulbs dangling from the ceiling like radioactive fruit. The club was packed with soldiers and whores, most sitting at tables around a dance floor not much bigger than a king-size mattress. Two couples were swaying to a ballad that welled from a jukebox encaged in chicken wire and two-by-fours; veils of cigarette smoke drifted with underwater slowness above their heads. Some of the soldiers were mauling their whores, and one whore was trying to steal the wallet of a soldier who was on the verge of passing out; her hand worked between his legs, encouraging him to thrust his hips forward, and when he did this, she pried with her other hand at the wallet stuck in the back pocket of his tight-fitting jeans. But all the action seemed listless, half-hearted, as if the dimness and syrupy music had thickened the air and were hampering movement. Mingolla took a seat at the bar. The bartender glanced at him inquiringly, his pupils becoming cored with purple reflections, and Mingolla said, “Beer.”

“Hey, check that out!” Gilbey slid onto an adjoining stool and jerked his thumb toward a whore at the end of the bar. Her skirt was hiked to midthigh, and her breasts, judging by their fullness and lack of sag, were likely the product of elective surgery.

“Nice,” said Mingolla, disinterested. The bartender set a bottle of beer in front of him, and he had a swig; it tasted sour, watery, like a distillation of the stale air.

Baylor slumped onto the stool next to Gilbey and buried his face in his hands. Gilbey said something to him that Mingolla didn’t catch, and Baylor lifted his head. “I ain’t goin’ back,” he said.

“Aw, Jesus!” said Gilbey. “Don’t start that crap.”

In the half-dark Baylor’s eye sockets were clotted with shadows. His stare locked onto Mingolla. “They’ll get us next time,” he said. “We should head downriver. They got boats in Livingston that’ll take you to Panama.”

“Panama!” sneered Gilbey. “Nothin’ there ’cept more beaners.”

“We’ll be okay at the Farm,” offered Mingolla. “Things get too heavy, they’ll pull us back.”

“ ‘Too heavy’ ?” A vein throbbed in Baylor’s temple. “What the fuck you call ‘too heavy’ ?”

“Screw this!” Gilbey heaved up from his stool. “You deal with him, man,” he said to Mingolla; he gestured at the big-breasted whore. “I’m gonna climb Mount Silicon.”

“Nine o’clock,” said Mingolla. “The PX. Okay?”

Gilbey said, “Yeah,” and moved off. Baylor took over his stool and leaned close to Mingolla. “You know I’m right,” he said in an urgent whisper. “They almost got us this time.”

“Air Cav’ll handle ’em,” said Mingolla, affecting nonchalance. He opened the box of stationery and unclipped a pen from his shirt pocket.

“You know I’m right,” Baylor repeated.

Mingolla tapped the pen against his lips, pretending to be distracted.

“Air Cav!” said Baylor with a despairing laugh. “Air Cav ain’t gonna do squat!”

“Why don’t you put on some decent tunes?” Mingolla suggested. “See if they got any Prowler on the box.”

“Dammit!” Baylor grabbed his wrist. “Don’t you understand, man? This shit ain’t workin’ no more!”

Mingolla shook him off. “Maybe you need some change,” he said coldly; he dug out a handful of coins and tossed them on the counter. “There! There’s some change.”

“I’m tellin’ you . . .”

“I don’t wanna hear it!” snapped Mingolla.

“You don’t wanna hear it?” said Baylor, incredulous. He was on the verge of losing control. His dark face slick with sweat, one eyelid fluttering. He pounded the countertop for emphasis. “Man, you better hear it! ’Cause we don’t pull somethin’ together soon , realsoon, we’re gonna fuckin’ die! You hear that , don’tcha?”

Mingolla caught him by the shirtfront. “Shut up!”

“I ain’t shuttin’ up!” Baylor shrilled. “You and Gilbey, man, you think you can save your ass by stickin’ your head in the sand. But I’m gonna make you listen.” He threw back his head, his voice rose to a shout. “We’re gonna die!”

The way he shouted it—almost gleefully, like a kid yelling a dirty word to spite his parents—pissed Mingolla off. He was sick of Baylor’s scenes. Without planning it, he hit him, pulling the punch at the last instant. Kept a hold of his shirt and clipped him on the jaw, just enough to rock back his head. Baylor blinked at him, stunned, his mouth open. Blood seeped from his gums. At the opposite end of the counter, the bartender was leaning beside a choirlike arrangement of liquor bottles, watching Mingolla and Baylor, and some of the soldiers were watching, too: They looked pleased, as if they had been hoping for a spot of violence to liven things up. Mingolla felt debased by their attentiveness, ashamed of his bullying. “Hey, I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I . . .”

“I don’t give a shit ’bout you’re sorry,” said Baylor, rubbing his mouth. “Don’t give a shit ’bout nothing ’cept gettin’ the Hell outta here.”

“Leave it alone, all right?”

But Baylor wouldn’t leave it alone. He continued to argue, adopting the long-suffering tone of someone carrying on bravely in the face of great injustice. Mingolla tried to ignore him by studying the label on his beer bottle: a red-and-black graphic portraying a Guatemalan soldier, his rifle upheld in victory. It was an attractive design, putting him in mind of the poster work he had done before being drafted; but considering the unreliability of Guatemalan troops, he perceived the heroic pose as a bad joke. Mingolla gouged a trench through the center of the label with his thumbnail.

At last Baylor gave it up and sat staring down at the warped veneer of the counter. Mingolla let him sit a minute; then, without shifting his gaze from the bottle, he said, “Why don’t you put on some decent tunes?”

Baylor tucked his chin onto his chest, maintaining a stubborn silence.

“It’s your only option, man,” Mingolla went on. “What else you gonna do?”

“You’re crazy,” said Baylor; he flicked his eyes toward Mingolla and hissed it like a curse. “Crazy!”

“You gonna take off for Panama by yourself? Un-unh. You know the three of us got something going. We come this far together, and if you just hang tough, we’ll go home together.”

“I don’t know,” said Baylor. “I don’t know anymore.”

“Look at it this way,” said Mingolla. “Maybe we’re all three of us right. Maybe Panama is the answer, but the time just isn’t ripe. If that’s true, me and Gilbey will see it sooner or later.”

With a heavy sigh, Baylor got to his feet. “You ain’t never gonna see it, man,” he said dejectedly.

Mingolla had a swallow of beer. “Check if they got any Prowler on the box. I could relate to some Prowler.”

Baylor stood for a moment, indecisive. He started for the jukebox, then veered toward the door. Mingolla tensed, preparing to run after him. But Baylor stopped and walked back over to the bar. Lines of strain were etched deep in his forehead. “Okay,” he said, a catch in his voice. “Okay. What time tomorrow? Nine o’clock?”

“Right,” said Mingolla, turning away. “The PX.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Baylor cross the room and bend over the jukebox to inspect the selections. He felt relieved. This was the way all their R&Rs had begun, with Gilbey chasing a whore and Baylor feeding the jukebox while he wrote a letter home. On their first R&R he had written his parents about the war and its bizarre forms of attrition; then, realizing that the letter would alarm his mother, he had torn it up and written another, saying merely that he was fine. He would tear this letter up as well, but he wondered how his father would react if he were to read it. Most likely with anger. His father was a firm believer in God and country, and though Mingolla understood the futility of adhering to any moral code in light of the insanity around him, he had found that something of his father’s tenets had been ingrained in him: He would never be able to desert as Baylor kept insisting. He knew it wasn’t that simple, that other factors, too, were responsible for his devotion to duty; but since his father would have been happy to accept the responsibility, Mingolla tended to blame it on him. He tried to picture what his parents were doing at that moment—father watching the Mets on TV, mother puttering in the garden—and then, holding those images in mind, he began to write.

Dear Mom and Dad,

In your last letter you asked if I thought we were winning the war. Down here you’d get a lot of blank stares in response to that question, because most people have a perspective on the war to which the overall result isn’t relevant. Like there’s a guy I know who has this rap about how the war is a magical operation of immense proportions, how the movements of the planes and troops are inscribing a mystical sign on the surface of reality, and to survive you have to figure out your location within the design and move accordingly. I’m sure that sounds crazy to you, but down here everyone’s crazy the same way (some shrink’s actually done a study on the incidence of superstition among the occupation forces). They’re looking for a magic that will ensure their survival. You may find it hard to believe that I subscribe to this sort of thing, but I do. I carve my initials on the shell casings, wear parrot feathers inside my helmet . . . and a lot more.

To get back to your question, I’ll try to do better than a blank stare, but I can’t give you a simple Yes or No. The matter can’t be summed up that neatly. But I can illustrate the situation by telling you a story and let you draw your own conclusions. There are hundreds of stories that would do, but the one that comes to mind now concerns the Lost Patrol. . . .

A Prowler tune blasted from the jukebox, and Mingolla broke off writing to listen: It was a furious, jittery music, fueled—it seemed—by the same aggressive paranoia that had generated the war. People shoved back chairs, overturned tables, and began dancing in the vacated spaces; they were crammed together, able to do no more than shuffle in rhythm, but their tread set the light bulbs jiggling at the end of their cords, the purple glare slopping over the walls. A slim acne-scarred whore came to dance in front of Mingolla, shaking her breasts, holding out her arms to him. Her face was corpse pale in the unsteady light, her smile a dead leer. Trickling from one eye, like some exquisite secretion of death, was a black tear of sweat and mascara. Mingolla couldn’t be sure he was seeing her right. His left hand started trembling, and for a couple of seconds the entire scene lost its cohesiveness. Everything looked scattered, unrecognizable, embedded in a separate context from everything else: a welter of meaningless objects bobbing up and down on a tide of deranged music. Then somebody opened the door, admitting a wedge of sunlight, and the room settled back to normal. Scowling, the whore danced away. Mingolla breathed easier. The tremors in his hand subsided. He spotted Baylor near the door talking to a scruffy Guatemalan guy . . . fear and desperation. He always returned from R&R bleary-eyed and prone to nosebleeds, boasting about the great dope he’d scored. Pleased that he was following routine, Mingolla went back to his letter.

. . . Remember me telling you that the Green Berets took drugs to make them better fighters? Most everyone calls the drugs “Sammy,” which is short for “samurai.” They come in ampule form, and when you pop them under your nose, for the next thirty minutes or so you feel like a cross between a Medal of Honor winner and Superman. The trouble is that a lot of Berets overdo them and flip out. They sell them on the black market, too, and some guys use them for sport. They take the ampules and fight each other in pits . . . like human cockfights.

Anyway, about two years ago a patrol of Berets went on patrol up in Fire Zone Emerald, not far from my base, and they didn’t come back. They were listed MIA. A month or so after they’d disappeared, somebody started ripping off ampules from various dispensaries. At first the crimes were chalked up to guerrillas, but then a doctor caught sight of the robbers and said they were Americans. They were wearing rotted fatigues, acting nuts. An artist did a sketch of their leader according to the doctor’s description, and it turned out to be a dead ringer for the sergeant of that missing patrol. After that they were sighted all over the place. Some of the sightings were obviously false, but others sounded like the real thing. They were said to have shot down a couple of our choppers and to have knocked over a supply column near Zacapa.

I’d never put much stock in the story, to tell you the truth, but about four months ago this infantryman came walking out of the jungle and reported to the firebase. He claimed he’d been captured by the Lost Patrol, and when I heard his story, I believed him. He said they had told him that they weren’t Americans anymore but citizens of the jungle. They lived like animals, sleeping under palm fronds, popping the ampules night and day. They were crazy, but they’d become geniuses at survival. They knew everything about the jungle. When the weather was going to change, what animals were near. And they had this weird religion based on the beams of light that would shine down through the canopy. They’d sit under those beams, like saints being blessed by God, and rave about the purity of the light, the joys of killing, and the new world they were going to build.

So that’s what occurs to me when you ask your question, Mom and Dad. The Lost Patrol. I’m not attempting to be circumspect in order to make a point about the horrors of war. Not at all. When I think about the Lost Patrol I’m not thinking about how sad and crazy they are. I’m wondering what it is they see in that light, wondering if it might be of help to me. And maybe therein lies your answer. . . .

It was nearly sunset by the time Mingolla left the bar to begin the second part of his ritual, to wander innocent as a tourist through the native quarter, partaking of whatever fell to hand, maybe having dinner with a Guatemalan family, or buddying up with a soldier from another outfit and going to church, or hanging out with some young guys who’d ask him about America. He had done each of these things on previous R&Rs, and his pretense of innocence always amused him. If he were to follow his inner directives, he would burn out the horrors of the firebase with whores and drugs; but on that first R&R—stunned by the experience of combat and needing solitude—a protracted walk had been his course of action, and he was committed not only to repeating it but also to recapturing his dazed mental set: It would not do to half-ass the ritual. In this instance, given recent events at the Ant Farm, he did not have to work very hard to achieve confusion.

The Río Dulce was a wide blue river, heaving with a light chop. Thick jungle hedged its banks, and yellowish reed beds grew out from both shores. At the spot where the gravel road ended was a concrete pier, and moored to it a barge that served as a ferry; it was already loaded with its full complement of vehicles—two trucks—and carried about thirty pedestrians. Mingolla boarded and stood in the stern beside three infantrymen who were still wearing their combat suits and helmets, holding double-barreled rifles that were connected by flexible tubing to backpack computers; through their smoked faceplates he could see green reflections from the readouts on their visor displays. They made him uneasy, reminding him of the two pilots, and he felt better after they had removed their helmets and proved to have normal human faces. Spanning a third of the way across the river was a sweeping curve of white concrete supported by slender columns, like a piece fallen out of a Dali landscape—a bridge upon which construction had been halted. Mingolla had noticed it from the air just before landing and hadn’t thought much about it; but now the sight took him by storm. It seemed less an unfinished bridge than a monument to some exalted ideal, more beautiful than any finished bridge could be. And as he stood rapt, with the ferry’s oily smoke farting out around him, he sensed there was an analog of that beautiful curving shape inside him; that he, too, was a road ending in midair. It gave him confidence to associate himself with such loftiness and purity, and for a moment he let himself believe that he also might have—as the upward-angled terminus of the bridge implied—a point of completion lying far beyond the one anticipated by the architects of his fate.

On the west bank past the town the gravel road was lined with stalls: skeletal frameworks of brushwood poles roofed with palm thatch. Children chased in and out among them, pretending to aim and fire at each other with stalks of sugarcane. But hardly any soldiers were in evidence. The crowds that moved along the road were composed mostly of Indians: young couples too shy to hold hands; old men who looked lost and poked litter with their canes; dumpy matrons who made outraged faces at the high prices; shoeless farmers who kept their backs ramrod-straight and wore grave expressions and carried their money knotted in handkerchiefs. At one of the stalls Mingolla bought a fish sandwich and a Coca-Cola. He sat on a stool and ate contentedly, relishing the hot bread and the spicy meat cooked inside it, watching the passing parade. Gray clouds were bulking up and moving in from the south, from the Caribbean; now and then a flight of XL-16s would arrow northward toward the oil fields beyond Lake Izabal, where the fighting was very bad. Twilight fell. The lights of town began to be picked out sharply against the empurpling air. Guitars were plucked, hoarse voices sang, the crowds thinned. Mingolla ordered another sandwich and Coke. He leaned back, sipped and chewed, steeping himself in the good magic of the land, the sweetness of the moment. Beside the sandwich stall, four old women were squatting by a cooking fire, preparing chicken stew and corn fritters; scraps of black ash drifted up from the flames, and as twilight deepened, it seemed these scraps were the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that were fitting together overhead into the image of a starless night.

Darkness closed in, the crowds thickened again, and Mingolla continued his walk, strolling past stalls with necklaces of light bulbs strung along their frames, wires leading off them to generators whose rattle drowned out the chirring of frogs and crickets. Stalls selling plastic rosaries, Chinese switchblades, tin lanterns; others selling embroidered Indian shirts, flour-sack trousers, wooden masks; others yet where old men in shabby suit coats sat cross-legged behind pyramids of tomatoes and melons and green peppers, each with a candle cemented in melted wax atop them, like primitive altars. Laughter, shrieks, vendors shouting. Mingolla breathed in perfume, charcoal smoke, the scents of rotting fruit. He began to idle from stall to stall, buying a few souvenirs for friends back in New York, feeling part of the hustle, the noise, the shining black air, and eventually he came to a stall around which forty or fifty people had gathered, blocking all but its thatched roof from view. A woman’s amplified voice cried out, “LA MARIPOSA!” Excited squeals from the crowd. Again the woman cried out, “EL CUCHILLO!” The two words she had called—the butterfly and the knife—intrigued Mingolla, and he peered over heads.

Framed by the thatch and rickety poles, a dusky-skinned young woman was turning a handle that spun a wire cage: It was filled with white plastic cubes, bolted to a plank counter. Her black hair was pulled back from her face, tied behind her neck, and she wore a red sundress that left her shoulders bare. She stopped cranking, reached into the cage, and without looking plucked one of the cubes; she examined it, picked up a microphone and cried, “LA LUNA!” A bearded man pushed forward and handed her a card. She checked the card, comparing it with some cubes that were lined up on the counter; then she gave the man a few bills in Guatemalan currency.

The composition of the game appealed to Mingolla. The dark woman; her red dress and cryptic words; the runelike shadow of the wire cage—all this seemed magical, an image out of an occult dream. Part of the crowd moved off, accompanying the winner, and Mingolla let himself be forced closer by new arrivals pressing in from behind. He secured a position at the corner of the stall, fought to maintain it against the eddying of the crowd, and on glancing up, he saw the woman smiling at him from a couple of feet away, holding out a card and a pencil stub. “Only ten cents Guatemalan,” she said in American-sounding English.

The people flanking Mingolla urged him to play, grinning and clapping him on the back. But he didn’t need urging. He knew he was going to win—it was the clearest premonition he had ever had, and it was signaled mostly by the woman herself. He felt a powerful attraction to her. It was as if she were a source of heat . . . not of heat alone but also of vitality, sensuality, and now that he was within range, that heat was washing over him, making him aware of a sexual tension developing between them, bringing with it the knowledge that he would win. The strength of the attraction surprised him, because his first impression had been that she was exotic-looking but not beautiful. Though slim, she was a little wide-hipped, and her breasts, mounded high and served up in separate scoops by her tight bodice, were quite small. Her face, like her coloring, had an East Indian cast, its features too large and voluptuous to suit the delicate bone structure; yet they were so expressive, so finely cut, that their disproportion came to seem a virtue. Except that it was thinner, her face resembled one of those handmaidens featured on Hindu religious posters, kneeling beneath Krishna’s throne. Very sexy, very serene. That serenity, Mingolla decided, wasn’t just a veneer. It ran deep. But at the moment he was more interested in her breasts. They looked nice pushed up like that, gleaming with a sheen of sweat. Two helpings of shaky pudding.

The woman waggled the card, and he took it: a simplified Bingo card with symbols instead of letters and numbers. “Good luck,” she said, and laughed, as if in reaction to some private irony. Then she began to spin the cage.

Mingolla didn’t recognize many of the words she called, but an old man cozied up to him and pointed to the appropriate square whenever he got a match. Soon several rows were almost complete. “LA MANZANA!” cried the woman, and the old man tugged at Mingolla’s sleeve, shouting, “Se ganó!”

As the woman checked his card, Mingolla thought about the mystery she presented. Her calmness, her unaccented English and the upper-class background it implied, made her seem out of place here. Could be she was a student, her education interrupted by the war . . . though she might be a bit too old for that. He figured her to be twenty-two or twenty-three. Graduate school, maybe. But there was an air of worldliness about her that didn’t support that theory. He watched her eyes dart back and forth between the card and the plastic cubes. Large heavy-lidded eyes. The whites stood in such sharp contrast to her dusky skin that they looked fake: milky stones with black centers.

“You see?” she said, handing him his winnings—about three dollars—and another card.

“See what?” Mingolla asked, perplexed.

But she had already begun to spin the cage again.

He won three of the next seven cards. People congratulated him, shaking their heads in amazement; the old man cozied up further, suggesting in sign language that he was the agency responsible for Mingolla’s good fortune. Mingolla, however, was nervous. His ritual was founded on a principle of small miracles, and though he was certain the woman was cheating on his behalf (that, he assumed, had been the meaning of her laughter, her “You see?”), though his luck was not really luck, its excessiveness menaced that principle. He lost three cards in a row, but thereafter won two of four and grew even more nervous. He considered leaving. But what if it was luck? Leaving might run him afoul of a higher principle, interfere with some cosmic process and draw down misfortune. It was a ridiculous idea, but he couldn’t bring himself to risk the faint chance that it might be true.

He continued to win. The people who had congratulated him became disgruntled and drifted off, and when there were only a handful of players left, the woman closed down the game. A grimy street kid materialized from the shadows and began dismantling the equipment. Unbolting the wire cage, unplugging the microphone, boxing up the plastic cubes, stuffing it all into a burlap sack. The woman moved out from behind the stall and leaned against one of the roofpoles. Half-smiling, she cocked her head, appraising Mingolla, and then—just as the silence between them began to get prickly—she said, “My name’s Debora.”

“David.” Mingolla felt as awkward as a fourteen-year-old; he had to resist the urge to jam his hands into his pockets and look away. “Why’d you cheat?” he asked; in trying to cover his nervousness, he said it too loudly and it sounded like an accusation.

“I wanted to get your attention,” she said. “I’m . . . interested in you. Didn’t you notice?”

“I didn’t want to take it for granted.”

She laughed. “I approve! It’s always best to be cautious.”

He liked her laughter; it had an easiness that made him think she would celebrate the least good thing.

Three men passed by arm in arm, singing drunkenly. One yelled at Debora, and she responded with an angry burst of Spanish. Mingolla could guess what had been said, that she had been insulted for associating with an American. “Maybe we should go somewhere,” he said. “Get off the streets.”

“After he’s finished.” She gestured at the boy, who was now taking down the string of light bulbs. “It’s funny,” she said. “I have the gift myself, and I’m usually uncomfortable around anyone else who has it. But not with you.”

“The gift?” Mingolla thought he knew what she was referring to, but was leery about admitting to it.

“What do you call it? ESP?”

He gave up the idea of denying it. “I never put a name on it,” he said.

“It’s strong in you. I’m surprised you’re not with Psicorp.”

He wanted to impress her, to cloak himself in a mystery equal to hers. “How do you know I’m not?”

“I could tell.” She pulled a black purse from behind the counter. “After drug therapy there’s a change in the gift, in the way it comes across. It doesn’t feel as hot, for one thing.” She glanced up from the purse. “Or don’t you perceive it that way? As heat.”

“I’ve been around people who felt hot to me,” he said. “But I didn’t know what it meant.”

“That’s what it means . . . sometimes.” She stuffed some bills into the purse. “So, why aren’t you with Psicorp?”

Mingolla thought back to his first interview with a Psicorp agent: a pale, balding man with the innocent look around the eyes that some blind people have. While Mingolla had talked, the agent had fondled the ring Mingolla had given him to hold, paying no mind to what was being said, and had gazed off distractedly, as if listening for echoes. “They tried hard to recruit me,” Mingolla said. “But I was scared of the drugs. I heard they had bad side-effects.”

“You’re lucky it was voluntary,” she said. “Here they just snap you up.”

The boy said something to her; he swung the burlap sack over his shoulder, and after a rapid-fire exchange of Spanish he ran off toward the river. The crowds were still thick, but more than half the stalls had shut down; those that remained open looked—with their thatched roofs and strung lights and beshawled women—like crude nativity scenes ranging the darkness. Beyond the stalls, neon signs winked on and off: a chaotic menagerie of silver eagles and crimson spiders and indigo dragons. Watching them burn and vanish, Mingolla experienced a wave of dizziness. Things were starting to appear disconnected as they had at the Club Demonio.

“Don’t you feel well?” she asked.

“I’m just tired.”

She turned him to face her, put her hands on his shoulders. “No,” she said. “It’s something else.”

The weight of her hands, the smell of her perfume, helped to steady him. “There was an assault on the firebase a few days ago,” he said. “It’s still with me a little, y’know.”

She gave his shoulders a squeeze and stepped back. “Maybe I can do something.” She said this with such gravity, he thought she must have something specific in mind. “How’s that?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you at dinner . . . that is, if you’re buying.” She took his arm, jollying him. “You owe me that much, don’t you think, after all your good luck?”

“Why aren’t you with Psicorp?” he asked as they walked. She didn’t answer immediately, keeping her head down, nudging a scrap of cellophane with her toe. They were moving along an uncrowded street, bordered on the left by the river—a channel of sluggish black lacquer—and on the right by the windowless rear walls of some bars. Overhead, behind a latticework of supports, a neon lion shed a baleful green nimbus. “I was in school in Miami when they started testing here,” she said at last. “And after I came home, my family got on the wrong side of Department Six. You know Department Six?”

“I’ve heard some stuff.”

“Sadists don’t make efficient bureaucrats,” she said. “They were more interested in torturing us than in determining our value.”

Their footsteps crunched in the dirt; husky jukebox voices cried out for love from the next street over. “What happened?” Mingolla asked.

“To my family?” She shrugged. “Dead. No one ever bothered to confirm it, but it wasn’t necessary. Confirmation, I mean.” She went a few steps in silence. “As for me . . .” A muscle bunched at the corner of her mouth. “I did what I had to.”

He was tempted to ask for specifies, but thought better of it. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then kicked himself for having made such a banal comment.

They passed a bar lorded over by a grinning red-and-purple neon ape. Mingolla wondered if these glowing figures had meaning for guerrillas with binoculars in the hills: gone-dead tubes signaling times of attack or troop movements. He cocked an eye toward Debora. She didn’t look despondent as she had a second before, and that accorded with his impression that her calmness was a product of self-control, that her emotions were strong but held in tight check and only let out for exercise. From the river came a solitary splash, some cold fleck of life surfacing briefly, then returning to its long ignorant glide through the darkness . . . and his life no different really, though maybe less graceful. How strange it was to be walking beside this woman who gave off heat like a candle flame, with earth and sky blended into a black gas, and neon totems standing guard overhead.

“Shit,” said Debora under her breath.

It surprised him to hear her curse. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said wearily. “Just ‘shit.’ ” She pointed ahead and quickened her pace. “Here we are.”

The restaurant was a working-class place that occupied the ground floor of a hotel: a two-story building of yellow concrete block with a buzzing Fanta sign hung above the entrance. Hundreds of moths swarmed about the sign, flickering whitely against the darkness, and in front of the steps stood a group of teenage boys who were throwing knives at an iguana. The iguana was tied by its hind legs to the step railing. It had amber eyes, a hide the color of boiled cabbage, and it strained at the end of its cord, digging its claws into the dirt and arching its neck like a pint-size dragon about to take flight. As Mingolla and Debora walked up, one of the boys scored a hit in the iguana’s tail and it flipped high into the air, shaking loose the knife. The boys passed around a bottle of rum to celebrate.

Except for the waiter—a pudgy young man leaning beside a door that opened onto a smoke-filled kitchen—the place was empty. Glaring overhead lights shined up the grease spots on the plastic tablecloths and made the uneven thicknesses of yellow paint appear to be dripping. The concrete floor was freckled with dark stains that Mingolla discovered to be the remains of insects. The food turned out to be decent, however, and Mingolla shoveled down a plateful of chicken and rice before Debora had half-finished hers. She ate deliberately, chewing each bite a long time, and he had to carry the conversation. He told her about New York, his painting, how a couple of galleries had showed interest even though he was just a student. He compared his work to Rauschenberg, to Silvestre. Not as good, of course. Not yet. He had the notion that everything he told her—no matter its irrelevance to the moment—was securing the relationship, establishing subtle ties; he pictured the two of them enwebbed in a network of luminous threads that acted as conduits for their attraction. He could feel her heat more strongly than ever, and he wondered what it would be like to make love to her, to be swallowed by that perception of heat. The instant he wondered this, she glanced up and smiled, as if sharing the thought. He wanted to ratify his sense of intimacy, to tell her something he had told no one else, and so—having only one important secret—he told her about the ritual.

She laid down her fork and gave him a penetrating look. “You can’t really believe that,” she said.

“I know it sounds . . .”

“Ridiculous,” she broke in. “That’s how it sounds.”

“It’s the truth,” he said defiantly. She picked up her fork again, pushed around some grains of rice. “How is it for you,” she said, “when you have a premonition? I mean, what happens? Do you have dreams, hear voices?”

“Sometimes I just know things,” he said, taken aback by her abrupt change of subject. “And sometimes I see pictures. It’s like with a TV that’s not working right. Fuzziness at first, then a sharp image.”

“With me, it’s dreams. And hallucinations. I don’t know what else to call them.” Her lips thinned; she sighed, appearing to have reached some decision. “When I first saw you, just for a second, you were wearing battle gear. There were inputs on the gauntlets, cables attached to the helmet. The faceplate was shattered, and your face . . . it was pale, bloody.” She put her hand out to cover his. “What I saw was very clear, David. You can’t go back.”

He hadn’t described artilleryman’s gear to her, and no way could she have seen it. Shaken, he said, “Where am I gonna go?”

“Panama,” she said. “I can help you get there.” She suddenly snapped into focus. You find her, dozens like her, in any of the R&R towns. Preaching pacifism, encouraging desertion. Do-gooders, most with guerrilla connections. And that, he realized, must be how she had known about his gear. She had probably gathered information on the different types of units in order to lend authenticity to her dire pronouncements. His opinion of her wasn’t diminished; on the contrary, it went up a notch. She was risking her life by talking to him. But her mystery had been dimmed.

“I can’t do that,” he said.

“Why not? Don’t you believe me?”

“It wouldn’t make any difference if I did.”

“I . . .”

“Look,” he said. “This friend of mine, he’s always trying to convince me to desert, and there’ve been times I wanted to. But it’s just not in me. My feet won’t move that way. Maybe you don’t understand, but that’s how it is.”

“This childish thing you do with your two friends,” she said after a pause. “That’s what’s holding you here, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t childish.”

“That’s exactly what it is. Like a child walking home in the dark and thinking that if he doesn’t look at the shadows, nothing will jump out at him.”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“No, I suppose I don’t.” Angry, she threw her napkin down on the table and stared intently at her plate as if reading some oracle from the chicken bones.

“Let’s talk about something else,” said Mingolla.

“I have to go,” she said coldly.

“Because I won’t desert?”

“Because of what’ll happen if you don’t.” She leaned toward him, her voice burred with emotion. “Because knowing what I do about your future, I don’t want to wind up in bed with you.”

Her intensity frightened him. Maybe she had been telling the truth. But he dismissed the possibility. “Stay,” he said. “We’ll talk some more about it.”

“You wouldn’t listen.” She picked up her purse and got to her feet.

The waiter ambled over and laid the check beside Mingolla’s plate; he pulled a plastic bag filled with marijuana from his apron pocket and dangled it in front of Mingolla. “Gotta get her in the mood, man,” he said. Debora railed at him in Spanish. He shrugged and moved off, his slow-footed walk an advertisement for his goods.

“Meet me tomorrow then,” said Mingolla. “We can talk more about it tomorrow.”

“No.”

“Why don’t you gimme a break?” he said. “This is all coming down pretty fast, y’know. I got here this afternoon, meet you, and an hour later you’re saying, ‘Death is in the cards, and Panama’s your only hope.’ I need some time to think. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll have a different attitude.”

Her expression softened, but she shook her head, No.

“Don’t you think it’s worth it?”

She lowered her eyes, fussed with the zipper of her purse a second, and let out a rueful hiss. “Where do you want to meet?”

“How ’bout the pier on this side? ’Round noon.”

She hesitated. “All right.” She came around to his side of the table, bent down and brushed her lips across his cheek. He tried to pull her close and deepen the kiss, but she slipped away. He felt giddy, overheated. “You really gonna be there?” he asked.

She nodded but seemed troubled, and she didn’t look back before vanishing down the steps.

Mingolla sat awhile, thinking about the kiss, its promise. He might have stayed even longer, but three drunken soldiers staggered in and began knocking over chairs, giving the waiter a hard time. Annoyed, Mingolla went to the door and stood taking in hits of the humid air. Moths were loosely constellated on the curved plastic of the Fanta sign, trying to get next to the bright heat inside it, and he had a sense of relation, of sharing their yearning for the impossible. He started down the steps but was brought up short. The teenage boys had gone; however, their captive iguana lay on the bottom step, bloody and unmoving. Bluish gray strings spilled from a gash in its throat. It was such a clear sign of bad luck, Mingolla went back inside and checked into the hotel upstairs.

The hotel corridors stank of urine and disinfectant. A drunken Indian with his fly unzipped and a bloody mouth was pounding on one of the doors. As Mingolla passed him, he bowed and made a sweeping gesture, a parody of welcome. Then he went back to his pounding. Mingolla’s room was a windowless cell five feet wide and coffin-length, furnished with a sink and a cot and a chair. Cobwebs and dust clotted the glass of the transom, reducing the hallway light to a cold bluish white glow. The walls were filmy with more cobwebs, and the sheets were so dirty that they appeared to have a pattern. He lay down and closed his eyes, thinking about Debora. About ripping off that red dress and giving her a vicious screwing. How she’d cry out. That both made him ashamed and gave him a hard-on. He tried to think about making love to her tenderly. But tenderness, it seemed, was beyond him. He went flaccid. Jerking off wasn’t worth the effort, he decided. He started to unbutton his shirt, remembered the sheets, and figured he’d be better off with his clothes on.

In the blackness behind his lids he began to see explosive flashes, and within those flashes were images of the assault on the Ant Farm. The mist, the tunnels. He blotted them out with the image of Debora’s face, but they kept coming back. Finally he opened his eyes. Two . . . no, three fuzzy-looking black stars were silhouetted against the transom. It was only when they began to crawl that he recognized them to be spiders. Big ones. He wasn’t usually afraid of spiders, but these particular spiders terrified him. If he hit them with his shoe, he’d break the glass and they’d eject him from the hotel. He didn’t want to hit them with his hands. After a while he sat up, switched on the overhead, and searched under the cot. There weren’t any more spiders. He lay back down, feeling shaky and short of breath. Wishing he could talk to someone, hear a familiar voice. “It’s okay,” he said to the dark air. But that didn’t help. And for a long time, until he felt secure enough to sleep, he watched the three black stars crawling across the transom, moving toward the center, touching each other, moving apart, never making any real progress, never straying from their area of bright confinement, their universe of curdled, frozen light.

2

In the morning Mingolla crossed to the west bank and walked toward the airbase. It was already hot, but the air still held a trace of freshness, and the sweat that beaded on his forehead felt clean and healthy. White dust was settling along the gravel road, testifying to the recent passage of traffic; past the town and the cutoff that led to the uncompleted bridge, high walls of vegetation crowded close to the road, and from within them he heard monkeys and insects and birds: sharp sounds that enlivened him, making him conscious of the play of his muscles. About halfway to the base he spotted six Guatemalan soldiers coming out of the jungle, dragging a couple of bodies; they tossed them onto the hood of their jeep, where two other bodies were lying. Drawing near, Mingolla saw that the dead were naked children, each with a neat hole in his back. He had intended to walk on past, but one of the soldiers—a gnomish copper-skinned man in dark blue fatigues—blocked his path and demanded to check his papers. All the soldiers gathered around to study the papers, whispering, turning them sideways, scratching their heads. Used to such hassles, Mingolla paid them no attention and looked at the dead children.

They were scrawny, sun-darkened, lying facedown with their ragged hair hanging a fringe off the hood; their skins were pocked by infected mosquito bites, and the flesh around the bullet holes was ridged-up and bruised. Judging by their size, Mingolla guessed them to be about ten years old; but then he noticed that one was a girl with a teenage fullness to her buttocks, her breasts squashed against the metal. That made him indignant. They were only wild children who survived by robbing and killing, and the Guatemalan soldiers were only doing their duty: They performed a function comparable to that of the birds that hunted ticks on the hide of a rhinoceros, keeping their American beast pest-free and happy. But it wasn’t right for the children to be laid out like game.

The soldier gave back Mingolla’s papers. He was now all smiles, and—perhaps in the interest of solidifying Guatemalan-American relations, perhaps because he was proud of his work—he went over to the jeep and lifted the girl’s head by the hair so Mingolla could see her face. “Bandida!” he said, arranging his features into a comical frown. The girl’s face was not unlike the soldier’s, with the same blade of a nose and prominent cheekbones. Fresh blood glistened on her lips, and the faded tattoo of a coiled serpent centered her forehead. Her eyes were open, and staring into them—despite their cloudiness—Mingolla felt that he had made a connection, that she was regarding him sadly from somewhere behind those eyes, continuing to die past the point of clinical death. Then an ant crawled out of her nostril, perching on the crimson curve of her lip, and the eyes looked merely vacant. The soldier let her head fall and wrapped his hand in the hair of a second corpse; but before he could lift it, Mingolla turned away and headed down the road toward the airbase.

There was a row of helicopters lined up at the edge of the landing strip, and walking between them, Mingolla saw the two pilots who had given him a ride from the Ant Farm. They were stripped to shorts and helmets, wearing baseball gloves, and they were playing catch, lofting high flies to one another. Behind them, atop their Sikorsky, a mechanic was fussing with the main rotor housing. The sight of the pilots didn’t disturb Mingolla as it had the previous day; in fact, he found their weirdness somehow comforting. Just then, the ball eluded one of them and bounced Mingolla’s way. He snagged it and flipped it back to the nearer of the pilots, who came loping over and stood pounding the ball into the pocket of his glove. With his black reflecting face and sweaty, muscular torso, he looked like an eager young mutant.

“How’s she goin’ ?” he asked. “Seem like you a little tore down this mornin’.”

“I feel okay,” said Mingolla defensively. “’Course”—he smiled, making light of his defensiveness—“maybe you see something I don’t.”

The pilot shrugged; the sprightliness of the gesture seemed to convey good humor.

Mingolla pointed to the mechanic. “You guys broke down, huh?”

“Just overhaul. We’re goin’ back up early tomorrow. Need a lift?”

“Naw, I’m here for a week.”

An eerie current flowed through Mingolla’s left hand, setting up a palsied shaking. It was bad this time, and he jammed the hand into his hip pocket. The olive-drab line of barracks appeared to twitch, to suffer a dislocation and shift farther away; the choppers and jeeps and uniformed men on the strip looked toylike: pieces in a really neat GI Joe Airbase kit. Mingolla’s hand beat against the fabric of his trousers like a sick heart.

“I gotta get going,” he said.

“Hang in there,” said the pilot. “You be awright.”

The words had a flavor of diagnostic assurance that almost convinced Mingolla of the pilot’s ability to know his fate, that things such as fate could be known. “You honestly believe what you were saying yesterday, man?” he asked. “’Bout your helmets? ’Bout knowing the future?”

The pilot bounced the ball on the concrete, snatched it at the peak of its rebound, and stared down at it. Mingolla could see the seams and brand name reflected in the visor, but nothing of the face behind it, no evidence either of normalcy or deformity. “I get asked that a lot,” said the pilot. “People raggin’ me, y’know. But you ain’t raggin’ me, are you, man?”

“No,” said Mingolla. “I’m not.”

“Well,” said the pilot, “it’s this way. We buzz ’round up in the nothin’, and we see shit down on the ground, shit nobody else sees. Then we blow that shit away. Been doin’ it like that for ten months, and we’re still alive. Fuckin’ A, I believe it!”

Mingolla was disappointed. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

“You hear what I’m sayin’ ?” asked the pilot. “I mean we’re livin’ goddamn proof.”

“Uh-huh.” Mingolla scratched his neck, trying to think of a diplomatic response, but thought of none. “Guess I’ll see you.” He started toward the PX.

“Hang in there, man!” the pilot called after him. “Take it from me! Things gonna be lookin’ up for you real soon!”

The canteen in the PX was a big barnlike room of unpainted boards; it was of such recent construction that Mingolla could still smell sawdust and resin. Thirty or forty tables; a jukebox; bare walls. Behind the bar at the rear of the room, a sour-faced corporal with a clipboard was doing a liquor inventory, and Gilbey—the only customer—was sitting by one of the east windows, stirring a cup of coffee. His brow was furrowed, and a ray of sunlight shone down around him, making it look that he was being divinely inspired to do some soul-searching.

“Where’s Baylor?” asked Mingolla, sitting opposite him.

“Fuck, I dunno,” said Gilbey, not taking his eyes from the coffee cup. “He’ll be here.”

Mingolla kept his left hand in his pocket. The tremors were diminishing, but not quickly enough to suit him; he was worried that the shaking would spread as it had after the assault. He let out a sigh, and in letting it out he could feel all his nervous flutters. The ray of sunlight seemed to be humming a wavery golden note, and that, too, worried him. Hallucinations. Then he noticed a fly buzzing against the windowpane. “How was it last night?” he asked.

Gilbey glanced up sharply. “Oh, you mean Big Tits. She lemme check her for lumps.” He forced a grin, then went back to stirring his coffee.

Mingolla was hurt that Gilbey hadn’t asked about his night; he wanted to tell him about Debora. But that was typical of Gilbey’s self-involvement. His narrow eyes and sulky mouth were the imprints of a mean-spiritedness that permitted few concerns aside from his own well-being. Yet despite his insensitivity, his stupid rages and limited conversation, Mingolla believed that he was smarter than he appeared, that disguising one’s intelligence must have been a survival tactic in Detroit, where he had grown up. It was his craftiness that gave him away: his insights into the personalities of adversary lieutenants; his slickness at avoiding unpleasant duty; his ability to manipulate his peers. He wore stupidity like a cloak, and perhaps he had worn it for so long that it could not be removed. Still, Mingolla envied him its virtues, especially the way it had numbed him to the assault.

“He’s never been late before,” said Mingolla after a while.

“So what, he’s fuckin’ late!” snapped Gilbey, glowering. “He’ll be here!”

Behind the bar, the corporal switched on a radio and spun the dial past Latin music, past Top Forty, then past an American voice reporting the baseball scores. “Hey!” called Gilbey. “Let’s hear that, man! I wanna see what happened to the Tigers.” With a shrug, the corporal complied.

“. . . White Sox six, A’s three,” said the announcer. “That’s eight in a row for the Sox . . .”

“White Sox are kickin’ some ass,” said the corporal, pleased.

“The White Sox!” Gilbey sneered. “What the White Sox got ’cept a buncha beaners hittin’ two hunnerd and some coke-sniffin’ niggers? Shit! Every fuckin’ spring the White Sox are flyin’, man. But then ’long comes summer and the good drugs hit the street and they fuckin’ die!”

“Yeah,” said the corporal, “but this year . . .”

“Take that son of a bitch Caldwell,” said Gilbey, ignoring him. “I seen him coupla years back when he had a trial with the Tigers. Man, that nigger could hit! Now he shuffles up there like he’s just feelin’ the breeze.”

“They ain’t takin’ drugs, man,” said the corporal testily. “They can’t take ’em ’cause there’s these tests that show if they’s on somethin’.”

Gilbey barreled ahead. “White Sox ain’t gotta chance, man! Know what the guy on TV calls ’em sometimes? The Pale Hose! The fuckin’ Pale Hose! How you gonna win with a name like that? The Tigers, now, they got the right kinda name. The Yankees, the Braves, the . . .”

“Bullshit, man!” The corporal was becoming upset; he set down his clipboard and walked to the end of the bar. “What ’bout the Dodgers? They gotta wimpy name and they’re a good team. Your name don’t mean shit!”

“The Reds,” suggested Mingolla; he was enjoying Gilbey’s rap, its stubbornness and irrationality. Yet at the same time he was concerned by its undertone of desperation: Appearances to the contrary, Gilbey was not himself this morning.

“Oh, yeah!” Gilbey smacked the table with the flat of his hand. “The Reds! Lookit the Reds, man! Lookit how good they been doin’ since the Cubans come into the war. You think that don’t mean nothin’ ? You think their name ain’t helpin’ ’em? Even if they get in the Series, the Pale fuckin’ Hose don’t gotta prayer against the Reds.” He laughed—a hoarse grunt. “I’m a Tiger fan, man, but I gotta feelin’ this ain’t their year, y’know. The Reds are tearin’ up the NL East, and the Yankees is comin’ on, and when they get together in October, man, then we gonna find out alla ’bout everything. Alla ’bout fuckin’ everything!” His voice grew tight and tremulous. “So don’t gimme no trouble ’bout the candy-ass Pale Hose, man! They ain’t shit and they never was and they ain’t gonna be shit ’til they change their fuckin’ name!”

Sensing danger, the corporal backed away from confrontation, and Gilbey lapsed into a moody silence. For a while there were only the sounds of chopper blades and the radio blatting out cocktail jazz. Two mechanics wandered in for an early morning beer, and not long after that three fatherly looking sergeants with potbellies and thinning hair and quartermaster insignia on their shoulders sat at a nearby table and started up a game of rummy. The corporal brought them a pot of coffee and a bottle of whiskey, which they mixed and drank as they played. Their game had an air of custom, of something done at this time every day, and watching them, taking note of their fat, pampered ease, their old-buddy familiarity, Mingolla felt proud of his palsied hand. It was an honorable affliction, a sign that he had participated in the heart of the war as these men had not. Yet he bore them no resentment. None whatsoever. Rather it gave him a sense of security to know that three such fatherly men were here to provide him with food and liquor and new boots. He basked in the dull, happy clutter of their talk, in the haze of cigar smoke that seemed the exhaust of their contentment. He believed that he could go to them, tell them his problems, and receive folksy advice. They were here to assure him of the rightness of his purpose, to remind him of simple American values, to lend an illusion of fraternal involvement to the war, to make clear that it was merely an exercise in good fellowship and tough-mindedness, an initiation rite that these three men had long ago passed through, and after the war they would all get rings and medals and pal around together and talk about bloodshed and terror with head-shaking wonderment and nostalgia, as if bloodshed and terror were old lost friends whose natures they had not fully appreciated at the time . . . Mingolla realized then that a smile had stretched his facial muscles taut, and that his train of thought had been leading him into spooky mental territory. The tremors in his hand were worse than ever. He checked his watch. It was almost ten o’clock. Ten o’clock! In a panic he scraped back his chair and stood.

“Let’s look for him,” he said to Gilbey. Gilbey started to say something but kept it to himself. He tapped his spoon hard against the edge of the table. Then he, too, scraped back his chair and stood.

Baylor was not to be found at the Club Demonio or any of the bars on the west bank. Gilbey and Mingolla described him to everyone they met, but no one remembered him. The longer the search went on, the more insecure Mingolla became. Baylor was necessary, an essential underpinning of the platform of habits and routines that supported him, that let him live beyond the range of war’s weapons and the laws of chance, and should that underpinning be destroyed . . . In his mind’s eye he saw the platform tipping, he and Gilbey toppling over the edge, cartwheeling down into an abyss filled with black flames. Once Gilbey said, “Panama! The son of a bitch run off to Panama.” But Mingolla didn’t think this was the case. He was certain that Baylor was close at hand. His certainty had such a valence of clarity that he became even more insecure, knowing that this sort of clarity often heralded a bad conclusion.

The sun climbed higher, its heat an enormous weight pressing down, its light leaching color from the stucco walls, and Mingolla’s sweat began to smell rancid. Only a few soldiers were on the streets, mixed in with the usual run of kids and beggars, and the bars were empty except for a smattering of drunks still on a binge from the night before. Gilbey stumped along, grabbing people by the shirt and asking his questions. Mingolla, however, terribly conscious of his trembling hand, nervous to the point of stammering, was forced to work out a stock approach whereby he could get through these brief interviews. He would amble up, keeping his right side forward, and say, “I’m looking for a friend of mine. Maybe you seen him? Tall guy. Olive skin, black hair, thin. Name’s Baylor.” He learned to let this slide off his tongue in a casual unreeling.

Finally Gilbey had had enough. “I’m gonna hang out with Big Tits,” he said. “Meet’cha at the PX tomorrow.” He started to walk off, but turned and added, “You wanna get in touch ’fore tomorrow, I’ll be at the Club Demonio.” He had an odd expression on his face. It was as if he were trying to smile reassuringly, but—due to his lack of practice with smiles—it looked forced and foolish and not in the least reassuring.

Around eleven o’clock Mingolla wound up leaning against a pink stucco wall, watching out for Baylor in the thickening crowds. Beside him, the sun-browned fronds of a banana tree were feathering in the wind, making a crispy sound whenever a gust blew them back into the wall. The roof of the bar across the street was being repaired: sheets of new tin alternating with narrow patches of rust that looked like enormous strips of bacon laid there to fry. Now and then he would let his gaze drift up to the unfinished bridge, a great sweep of magical whiteness curving into the blue, rising above the town and the jungle and the war. Not even the heat haze rippling from the tin roof could warp its smoothness. It seemed to be orchestrating the stench, the mutter of the crowds, and the jukebox music into a tranquil unity, absorbing those energies and returning them purified, enriched. He thought that if he stared at it long enough, it would speak to him, pronounce a white word that would grant his wishes.

Two flat cracks—pistol shots—sent him stumbling away from the wall, his heart racing. Inside his head the shots had spoken the two syllables of Baylor’s name. All the kids and beggars had vanished. All the soldiers had stopped and turned to face the direction from which the shots had come: zombies who had heard their master’s voice.

Another shot.

Some soldiers milled out of a side street, talking excitedly. “. . . fuckin’ nuts!” one was saying, and his buddy said, “It was Sammy, man! You see his eyes?”

Mingolla pushed his way through them and sprinted down the side street. At the end of the block a cordon of MPs had sealed off access to the right-hand turn, and when Mingolla ran up, one of them told him to stay back.

“What is it?” Mingolla asked. “Some guy playing Sammy?”

“Fuck off,” the MP said mildly.

“Listen,” said Mingolla. “It might be this friend of mine. Tall, skinny guy. Black hair. Maybe I can talk to him.”

The MP exchanged glances with his buddies, who shrugged and acted otherwise unconcerned. “Okay,” he said. He pulled Mingolla to him and pointed out a bar with turquoise walls on the next corner down. “Go on in there and talk to the captain.”

Two more shots, then a third.

“Better hurry,” said the MP. “Ol’ Captain Haynesworth there, he don’t put much stock in negotiations.”

It was cool and dark inside the bar; two shadowy figures were flattened against the wall beside a window that opened onto the cross street. Mingolla could make out the glint of automatic pistols in their hands. Then, through the window, he saw Baylor pop up from behind a retaining wall: a three-foot-high structure of mud bricks running between an herbal drugstore and another bar. Baylor was shirtless, his chest painted with reddish-brown smears of dried blood, and he was standing in a nonchalant pose, with his thumbs hooked in his trouser pockets. One of the men by the window fired at him. The report was deafening, causing Mingolla to flinch and close his eyes. When he looked out the window again, Baylor was nowhere in sight.

“Fucker’s just tryin’ to draw fire,” said the man who had shot at Baylor. “Sammy’s fast today.”

“Yeah, but he’s slowin’ some,” said a lazy voice from the darkness at the rear of the bar. “I do believe he’s outta dope.”

“Hey,” said Mingolla. “Don’t kill him! I know the guy. I can talk to him.”

“Talk?” said the lazy voice. “You kin talk ’til yo’ ass turns green, boy, and Sammy ain’t gon’ listen.”

Mingolla peered into the shadows. A big sloppy-looking man was leaning on the counter; brass insignia gleamed on his beret. “You the captain?” he asked. “They told me outside to talk to the captain.”

“Yes, indeed,” said the man. “And I’d be purely delighted to talk with you, boy. What you wanna talk ’bout?”

The other men laughed. “Why are you trying to kill him?” asked Mingolla, hearing the pitch of desperation in his voice. “You don’t have to kill him. You could use a trank gun.”

“Got one comin’,” said the captain. “Thing is, though, yo’ buddy got hisself a coupla hostages back of that wall, and we get a chance at him ’fore the trank gun ’rives, we bound to take it.”

“But . . .” Mingolla began.

“Lemme finish, boy.” The captain hitched up his gunbelt, strolled over, and draped an arm around Mingolla’s shoulder, enveloping him in an aura of body odor and whiskey breath. “See,” he went on, “we had everything under control. Sammy there . . .”

“Baylor!” said Mingolla angrily. “His name’s Baylor.”

The captain lifted his arm from Mingolla’s shoulder and looked at him with amusement. Even in the gloom Mingolla could see the network of broken capillaries on his cheeks, the bloated alcoholic features. “Right,” said the captain. “Like I’s sayin’, yo’ good buddy Mister Baylor there wasn’t doin’ no harm. Just sorta ravin’ and runnin’ round. But then ’long comes a coupla our Marine brothers. Seems like they’d been givin’ our beaner friends a demonstration of the latest combat gear, and they was headin’ back from said demonstration when they seen our little problem and took it ’pon themselves to play hero. Wellsir, puttin’ it in a nutshell, Mister Baylor flat kicked their ass. Stomped all over their esprit de corps. Then he drags ’em back of that wall and starts messin’ with one of their guns. And . . .”

Two more shots.

“Shit!” said one of the men by the window.

“And there he sits,” said the captain. “Fuckin’ with us. Now either the gun’s outta ammo or else he ain’t figgered out how it works. If it’s the latter case, and he does figger it out . . .” The captain shook his head dolefully, as if picturing dire consequences. “See my predicament?”

“I could try talking to him,” said Mingolla. “What harm would it do?”

“You get yourself killed, it’s your life, boy. But it’s my ass that’s gonna get hauled up on charges.” The captain steered Mingolla to the door and gave him a gentle shove toward the cordon of MPs. “’Preciate you volunteerin’, boy.”

Later Mingolla was to reflect that what he had done had made no sense, because—whether or not Baylor had survived—he would never have been returned to the Ant Farm. But at the time, desperate to preserve the ritual, none of this occurred to him. He walked around the corner and toward the retaining wall. His mouth was dry, his heart pounded. But the shaking in his hand had stopped, and he had the presence of mind to walk in such a way that he blocked the MPs’ line of fire. About twenty feet from the wall he called out, “Hey, Baylor! It’s Mingolla, man!” And as if propelled by a spring, Baylor jumped up, staring at him. It was an awful stare. His eyes were like bull’s-eyes, white showing all around the irises; trickles of blood ran from his nostrils, and nerves were twitching in his cheeks with the regularity of watchworks. The dried blood on his chest came from three long gouges; they were partially scabbed over but were oozing a clear fluid. For a moment he remained motionless. Then he reached down behind the wall, picked up a double-barreled rifle from whose stock trailed a length of flexible tubing, and brought it to bear on Mingolla.

He squeezed the trigger.

No flame, no explosion. Not even a click. But Mingolla felt that he’d been dipped in ice water. “Christ!” he said. “Baylor! It’s me!” Baylor squeezed the trigger again, with the same result. An expression of intense frustration washed over his face, then lapsed into that dead man’s stare. He looked directly up into the sun, and after a few seconds he smiled—he might have been receiving terrific news from on high.

Mingolla’s senses had become wonderfully acute. Somewhere far away a radio was playing a country-and-western tune, and with its plaintiveness, its intermittent bursts of static, it seemed to him the whining of a nervous system on the blink. He could hear the MPs talking in the bar, could smell the sour acids of Baylor’s madness, and he thought he could feel the pulse of Baylor’s rage, an inconstant flow of heat eddying around him, intensifying his fear, rooting him to the spot. Baylor laid the gun down, laid it down with the tenderness he might have shown toward a sick child, and stepped over the retaining wall. The animal fluidity of the movement made Mingolla’s skin crawl. He managed to shuffle backward a pace and held up his hands to ward Baylor off. “C’mon, man,” he said weakly. Baylor let out a fuming noise—part hiss, part whimper—and a runner of saliva slid between his lips. The sun was a golden bath drenching the street, kindling glints and shimmers from every bright surface, as if it were bringing reality to a boil.

Somebody yelled, “Get down, boy!”

Then Baylor flew at him, and they fell together, rolling on the hard-packed dirt. Fingers dug in behind his Adam’s apple. He twisted away, saw Baylor grinning down, all staring eyes and yellowed teeth. Strings of drool flapping from his chin. A Halloween face. Knees pinned Mingolla’s shoulders, hands gripped his hair and bashed his head against the ground. Again, and again. A keening sound switched on inside his ears. He wrenched an arm free and tried to gouge Baylor’s eyes; but Baylor bit his thumb, gnawing at the joint. Mingolla’s vision dimmed, and he couldn’t hear anything anymore. The back of his head felt mushy. It seemed to be rebounding very slowly from the dirt, higher and slower after each impact. Framed by blue sky, Baylor’s face looked to be receding, spiraling off. And then, just as Mingolla began to fade, Baylor disappeared.

Dust was in Mingolla’s mouth, his nostrils. He heard shouts, grunts. Still dazed, he propped himself onto an elbow. A short ways off, khaki arms and legs and butts were thrashing around in a cloud of dust. Like a comic-strip fight. You expected asterisks and exclamation points overhead to signify profanity. Somebody grabbed his arm, hauled him upright. The MP captain, his beefy face flushed. He frowned reprovingly as he brushed dirt from Mingolla’s clothes. “Real gutsy, boy,” he said. “And real, real stupid. He hadn’t been at the end of his run, you’d be drawin’ flies ’bout now.” He turned to a sergeant standing nearby. “How stupid you reckon that was, Phil?”

The sergeant said that it beat him.

“Well,” the captain said, “I figger if the boy here was in combat, that’d be ’bout Bronze-Star stupid.”

That, allowed the sergeant, was pretty goddamn stupid. “’Course here in ’Frisco”—the captain gave Mingolla a final dusting—“it don’t get you diddley-shit.”

The MPs were piling off Baylor, who lay on his side, bleeding from his nose and mouth. Blood thick as gravy filmed over his cheeks.

“Panama,” said Mingolla dully. Maybe it was an option. He saw how it would be . . . a night beach, palm shadows a lacework on the white sand.

“What say?” asked the captain.

“He wanted to go to Panama,” said Mingolla.

“Don’t we all,” said the captain.

One of the MPs rolled Baylor onto his stomach and handcuffed him; another manacled his feet. Then they rolled him back over. Yellow dirt had mired with the blood on his cheeks and forehead, fitting him with a blotchy mask. His eyes snapped open in the middle of that mask, widening when he felt the restraints. He started to hump up and down, trying to bounce his way to freedom. He kept on humping for almost a minute; then he went rigid and—his gone eyes fixed on the molten disc of the sun—he let out a roar. That was the only word for it. It wasn’t a scream or a shout, but a devil’s exultant roar, so loud and full of fury, it seemed to be generating all the blazing light and heat dance. Listening to it had a seductive effect, and Mingolla began to get behind it, to feel it in his body like a good rock ’n’ roll tune, to sympathize with its life-hating exuberance.

“Whoo-ee!” said the captain, marveling. “They gon’ have to build a whole new zoo for that boy.”

After giving his statement, letting a Corpsman check his head, Mingolla caught the ferry to meet Debora on the east bank. He sat in the stern, gazing out at the unfinished bridge, this time unable to derive from it any sense of hope or magic. Panama kept cropping up in his thoughts. Now that Baylor was gone, was it really an option? He knew he should try to figure things out, plan what to do, but he couldn’t stop seeing Baylor’s bloody, demented face. He’d seen worse, Christ yes, a whole lot worse. Guys reduced to spare parts, so little of them left that they didn’t need a shiny silver coffin, just a black metal can the size of a cookie jar. Guys scorched and one-eyed and bloody, clawing blindly at the air like creatures out of a monster movie. But the idea of Baylor trapped forever in some raw, red place inside his brain, in the heart of that raw, red noise he’d made, maybe that idea was worse than anything Mingolla had seen. He didn’t want to die; he rejected the prospect with the impassioned stubbornness a child displays when confronted with a hard truth. Yet he would rather die than endure madness. Compared to what Baylor had in store, death and Panama seemed to offer the same peaceful sweetness.

Someone sat down beside Mingolla: a kid who couldn’t have been older than eighteen. A new kid with a new haircut, new boots, new fatigues. Even his face looked new, freshly broken from the mold. Shiny, pudgy cheeks; clear skin; bright, unused blue eyes. He was eager to talk. He asked Mingolla about his home, his family, and said, Oh, wow, it must be great living in New York, wow. But he appeared to have some other reason for initiating the conversation, something he was leading up to, and finally he spat it out.

“You know the Sammy that went animal back there?” he said. “I seen him pitted last night. Little place in the jungle west of the base. Guy name Chaco owns it. Man, it was fuckin’ incredible!”

Mingolla had only heard of the pits third- and fourth-hand, but what he had heard was bad, and it was hard to believe that this kid with his air of homeboy innocence could be an aficionado of something so vile. And, despite what he had just witnessed, it was even harder to believe that Baylor could have been a participant.

The kid didn’t need prompting. “It was pretty early on,” he said. “There’d been a coupla bouts, nothin’ special, and then this guy walks in lookin’ real twitchy. I knew he was Sammy by the way he’s starin’ at the pit, y’know, like it’s somethin’ he’s been wishin’ for. And this guy with me, friend of mine, he gives me a poke and says, ‘Holy shit! That’s the Black Knight, man! I seen him fight over in Reunión a while back. Put your money on him,’ he says. ‘The fucker’s an ace!’ ”

Their last R&R had been in Reunión. Mingolla tried to frame a question but couldn’t think of one whose answer would have any meaning.

“Well,” said the kid, “I ain’t been down long, but even I’d heard ’bout the Knight. So I went over and kinda hung out near him, thinkin’ maybe I can get a line on how he’s feelin’, y’know, ’cause you don’t wanna just bet the guy’s rep. Pretty soon Chaco comes over and asks the Knight if he wants some action. The Knight says, ‘Yeah, but I wanna fight an animal. Somethin’ fierce, man. I wanna fight somethin’ fierce.’ Chaco says he’s got some monkeys and shit, and the Knight says he hears Chaco’s got a jaguar. Chaco he hems and haws, says, ‘Maybe so, maybe not, but it don’t matter ’cause a jaguar’s too strong for Sammy.’ And then the Knight tells Chaco who he is. Lemme tell ya, Chaco’s whole fuckin’ attitude changed. He could see how the bettin’ was gonna go for somethin’ like the Black Knight versus a jaguar. And he says, ‘Yes sir, Mister Black Knight, sir! Anything you want!’ And he makes the announcement. Man, the place goes nuts. People wavin’ money, screamin’ odds, drinkin’ fast so’s they can get ripped in time for the main event, and the Knight’s just standin’ there, smilin’, like he’s feedin’ off the confusion. Then Chaco lets the jaguar in through the tunnel and into the pit. It ain’t a full-growed jaguar, half-growed maybe, but that’s all you figure even the Knight can handle.”

The kid paused for breath; his eyes seemed to have grown brighter. “Anyway, the jaguar’s sneakin’ ’round and ’round, keepin’ close to the pit wall, snarlin’ and spittin’, and the Knight’s watchin’ him from up above, checkin’ his moves, y’know. And everybody starts chantin’, ‘Sam-mee, Sam-mee, Sam-mee,’ and after the chant builds up loud the Knight pulls three ampules outta his pocket. I mean, shit, man! Three! I ain’t never been ’round Sammy when he’s done more’n two. Three gets you clear into the fuckin’ sky! So when the Knight holds up these three ampules, the crowd’s tuned to burn, howlin’ like they’s playin’ Sammy themselves. But the Knight, man, he keeps his cool. He is so cool! He just holds up the ampules and lets ’em take the shine, soakin’ up the noise and energy, gettin’ strong off the crowd’s juice. Chaco waves everybody quiet and gives the speech, y’know, ’bout how in the heart of every man there’s a warrior soul waitin’ to be loosed and shit. I tell ya, man, I always thought that speech was crap before, but the Knight’s makin’ me buy it a hunnerd percent. He is so goddamn cool! He takes off his shirt and shoes, and he ties this piece of black silk ’round his arm. Then he pops the ampules, one after another, real quick, and breathes it all in. I can see it hittin’, catchin’ fire in his eyes. Pumpin’ him up. And soon as he’s popped the last one, he jumps into the pit. He don’t use the tunnel, man! He jumps! Twenty-five feet down to the sand, and lands in a crouch.”

Three other soldiers were leaning in, listening, and the kid was now addressing all of them, playing to his audience. He was so excited that he could barely keep his speech coherent, and Mingolla realized with disgust that he, too, was excited by the image of Baylor crouched on the sand. Baylor, who had cried after the assault. Baylor, who had been so afraid of snipers that he had once pissed in his pants rather than walk from his gun to the latrine.

Baylor, the Black Knight.

“The jaguar’s scramblin’ and snarlin’ and slashin’ at the air,” the kid went on. “Tryin’ to put fear into the Knight. ’Cause the jaguar knows in his mind the Knight’s big trouble. This ain’t some jerk like Chaco, this is Sammy. The Knight moves to the center of the pit, still in a crouch.” Here the kid pitched his voice low and dramatic. “Nothin’ happens for a coupla minutes, ’cept it’s tense. Nobody’s hardly breathin’. The jaguar springs a coupla times, but the Knight dances off to the side and makes him miss, and there ain’t no damage either way. Whenever the jaguar springs, the crowd sighs and squeals, not just ’cause they’s scared of seein’ the Knight tore up, but also ’cause they can see how fast he is. Silky fast, man! Unreal. He looks ’bout as fast as the jaguar. He keeps on dancin’ away, and no matter how the jaguar twists and turns, no matter if he comes at him along the sand, he can’t get his claws into the Knight. And then, man . . . oh, it was so smooth! Then the jaguar springs again, and this time ’stead of dancin’ away, the Knight drops onto his back, does this half-roll onto his shoulders, and when the jaguar passes over him, he kicks up with both feet. Kicks up hard! And smashes his heels into the jaguar’s side. The jaguar slams into the pit wall and comes down screamin’, snappin’ at his ribs. They was busted, man. Pokin’ out the skin like tent posts.”

The kid wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and flicked his eyes toward Mingolla and the other soldiers to see if they were into the story. “We was shoutin’, man,” he said. “Poundin’ the top of the pit wall. It was so loud, the guy I’m with is yellin’ in my ear and I can’t hear nothin’. Now maybe it’s the noise, maybe it’s his ribs, whatever . . . the jaguar goes berserk. Makin’ these scuttlin’ lunges at the Knight, tryin’ to get close ’fore he springs so the Knight can’t pull that same trick. He’s snarlin’ like a goddamn chainsaw! The Knight keeps leapin’ and spinnin’ away. But then he slips, man, grabs the air for balance, and the jaguar’s on him, clawin’ at his chest. For a second they’re like waltzin’ together. Then the Knight pries loose the paw that’s hooked him, pushes the jaguar’s head back, and smashes his fist into the jaguar’s eye. The jaguar flops onto the sand, and the Knight scoots to the other side of the pit. He’s checkin’ the scratches on his chest, which is bleedin’ wicked. Meantime, the jaguar gets to his feet, and he’s fucked up worse than ever. His one eye’s fulla blood, and his hindquarters is all loosey-goosey. Like if this was boxin’, they’d call in the doctor. The jaguar figures he’s had enough of this crap, and he starts tryin’ to jump outta the pit. This one time he jumps right up to where I’m leanin’ over the edge. Comes so close I can smell his breath, I can see myself reflected in his good eye. He’s clawin’ for a grip, wantin’ to haul hisself up into the crowd. People are freakin’, thinkin’ he might be gonna make it. But ’fore he gets the chance, the Knight catches him by the tail and slings him against the wall. just like you’d beat a goddamn rug, that’s how he’s dealin’ with the jaguar. And the jaguar’s a real mess, now. He’s quiverin’. Blood’s pourin’ outta his mouth, his fangs is all red. The Knight starts makin’ these little feints, wavin’ his arms, growlin’. He’s toyin’ with the jaguar. People don’t believe what they’re seein’, man. Sammy’s kickin’ a jaguar’s ass so bad he’s got room to toy with it. If the place was nuts before, now it’s a fuckin’ zoo. Fights in the crowd, guys singin’ the Marine Hymn. Some beaner squint’s takin’ off her clothes. The jaguar tries to scuttle up close to the Knight again, but he’s too fucked up. He can’t keep it together. And the Knight, he’s still growlin’ and feintin’. A guy behind me is booin’, claimin’ the Knight’s defamin’ the purity of the sport by playin’ with the jaguar. But Hell, man, I can see he’s just timin’ the jaguar, waitin’ for the right moment, the right move.”

Staring off downriver, the kid wore a wistful expression: He might have been thinking about his girlfriend. “We all knew it was comin’,” he said. “Everybody got real quiet. So quiet you could hear the Knight’s feet scrapin’ on the sand. You could feel it in the air, and you knew the jaguar was savin’ up for one big effort. Then the Knight slips again, ’cept he’s fakin’. I could see that, but the jaguar couldn’t. When the Knight reels sideways, the jaguar springs. I thought the Knight was gonna drop down like he did the first time, but he springs, too. Feetfirst. And he catches the jaguar under the jaw. You could hear bone splinterin’, and the jaguar falls in a heap. He struggles to get up, but no way! He’s whinin’, and he craps all over the sand. The Knight walks up behind him, takes his head in both hands, and gives it a twist. Crack!”

As if identifying with the jaguar’s fate, the kid closed his eyes and sighed. “Everybody’d been quiet ’til they heard that crack, then all Hell broke loose. People chantin’, ‘Sam-mee, Sam-mee,’ and people shovin’, tryin’ to get close to the pit wall so they can watch the Knight take the heart. He reaches into the jaguar’s mouth and snaps off one of the fangs and tosses it to somebody. Then Chaco comes in through the tunnel and hands him the knife. Right when he’s ’bout to cut, somebody knocks me over and by the time I’m back on my feet, he’s already took the heart and tasted it. He’s just standin’ there with the jaguar’s blood on his mouth and his own blood runnin’ down his chest. He looks kinda confused, y’know. Like now the fight’s over and he don’t know what to do. But then he starts roarin’. He sounds the same as the jaguar did ’fore it got hurt. Crazy fierce. Ready to get it on with the whole goddamn world. Man, I lost it! I was right with that roar. Maybe I was roarin’ with him, maybe everybody was. That’s what it felt like, man. Like bein’ in the middle of this roar that’s comin’ outta every throat in the universe.” The kid engaged Mingolla with a sober look. “Lotsa people go ’round sayin’ the pits are evil, and maybe they are. I don’t know. How you s’posed to tell ’bout what’s evil and what’s not down here? They say you can go to the pits a thousand times and not see nothin’ like the jaguar and the Black Knight. I don’t know ’bout that, either. But I’m goin’ back just in case I get lucky. ’Cause what I saw last night, if it was evil, man, it was so fuckin’ evil it was beautiful, too.”

3

Debora was waiting at the pier, carrying a picnic basket and wearing a blue dress with a high neckline and a full skirt: a schoolgirl dress. Mingolla homed in on her. The way she had her hair, falling about her shoulders in thick dark curls, made him think of smoke turned solid, and her face seemed the map of a beautiful country with black lakes and dusky plains, a country in which he could hide. They walked along the river past the town and came to a spot where ceiba trees with massy crowns of slick green leaves and whitish bark and roots like alligator tails grew close to the shore, and there they ate and talked and listened to the water gulping against the clay bank, to the birds, to the faint noises from the airbase that at this distance sounded part of nature. Sunlight dazzled the water, and whenever wind riffled the surface, it seemed to be spreading the dazzles into a crawling crust of diamonds. Mingolla imagined that they had taken a secret path, rounded a corner on the world and reached some eternally peaceful land. The illusion of peace was so profound that he began to see hope in it. Perhaps, he thought, something was being offered here. Some new magic. Maybe there would be a sign. Signs were everywhere if you knew how to read them. He glanced around. Thick white trunks rising into greenery, dark leafy avenues leading off between them . . . nothing there, but what about those weeds growing at the edge of the bank? They cast precise fleur-de-lis shadows on the clay, shadows that didn’t have much in common with the ragged configurations of the weeds themselves. Possibly a sign, though not a clear one. He lifted his gaze to the reeds growing in the shallows. Yellow reeds with jointed stalks bent akimbo, some with clumps of insect eggs like seed pearls hanging from loose fibers, and others dappled by patches of algae. That’s how they looked one moment. Then Mingolla’s vision rippled, as if the whole of reality had shivered, and the reeds were transformed into rudimentary shapes: yellow sticks poking up from flat blue. On the far side of the river, the jungle was a simple smear of Crayola green; a speedboat passing was a red slash unzippering the blue. It seemed that the rippling had jostled all the elements of the landscape a fraction out of kilter, revealing every object as characterless as a building block. Mingolla gave his head a shake. Nothing changed. He rubbed his brow. No effect. Terrified, he squeezed his eyes shut. He felt like the only meaningful piece in a nonsensical puzzle, vulnerable by virtue of his uniqueness. His breath came rapidly, his left hand fluttered.

“David? Don’t you want to hear it?” Debora sounded peeved.

“Hear what?” He kept his eyes closed.

“About my dream. Weren’t you listening?”

He peeked at her. Everything was back to normal. She was sitting with her knees tucked under her, all her features in sharp focus. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was thinking.”

“You looked frightened.”

“Frightened?” He put on a bewildered face. “Naw, just had a thought, is all.”

“It couldn’t have been pleasant.”

He shrugged off the comment and sat up smartly to prove his attentiveness. “So tell me ’bout the dream.”

“All right,” she said doubtfully. The breeze drifted fine strands of hair across her face, and she brushed them back. “You were in a room the color of blood, with red chairs and a red table. Even the paintings on the wall were done in shades of red, and . . .” She broke off, peering at him. “Do you want to hear this? You have that look again.”

“Sure,” he said. But he was afraid. How could she have known about the red room? She must have had a vision of it, and . . . Then he realized that she might not have been talking about the room itself. He’d told her about the assault, hadn’t he? And if she had guerrilla contacts, she would know that the emergency lights were switched on during an assault. That had to be it! She was trying to frighten him into deserting again, psyching him the way Christians played upon the fears of sinners with images of fiery rivers and torture. It infuriated him. Who the Hell was she to tell him what was right or wise? Whatever he did, it was going to be his decision.

“There were three doors in the room,” she went on. “You wanted to leave the room, but you couldn’t tell which of the doors was safe to use. You tried the first door, and it turned out to be a façade. The knob of the second door turned easily, but the door itself was stuck. Rather than forcing it, you went to the third door. The knob of this door was made of glass and cut your hand. After that you just walked back and forth, unsure what to do.” She waited for a reaction, and when he gave none, she said, “Do you understand?”

He kept silent, biting back anger.

“I’ll interpret it for you,” she said.

“Don’t bother.”

“The red room is war, and the false door is the way of your childish . . .”

“Stop!” He grabbed her wrist, squeezing it hard.

She glared at him until he released her. “Your childish magic,” she finished.

“What is it with you?” he asked. “You have some kinda quota to fill? Five deserters a month, and you get a medal?”

She tucked her skirt down to cover her knees, fiddled with a loose thread. From the way she was acting, Mingolla wondered whether he had asked an intimate question and she was framing an answer that wouldn’t be indelicate. Finally she said, “Is that who you believe I am to you?”

“Isn’t that right? Why else would you be handing me this bullshit?”

“What’s the matter with you, David?” She leaned forward, cupping his face in her hands. “Why . . .”

He pushed her hands away. “What’s the matter with me? This”—his gesture included the sky, the river, the trees—“that’s what’s the matter. You remind me of my parents. They ask the same sorta ignorant questions.” Suddenly he wanted to injure her with answers, to find an answer like acid to throw in her face and watch it eat away her tranquility. “Know what I do for my parents?” he said. “When they ask dumb-ass questions like ‘What’s the matter?’ I tell ’em a story. A war story. You wanna hear a war story? Something happened a few days back that’ll do for an answer just fine.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said, discouraged.

“No problem,” he said. “Be my pleasure.”

The Ant Farm was a large sugarloaf hill overlooking dense jungle on the eastern border of Fire Zone Emerald; jutting out from its summit were rocket and gun emplacements that at a distance resembled a crown of thorns jammed down over a green scalp. For several hundred yards around, the land had been cleared of all vegetation. The big guns had been lowered to maximum declension and in a mad moment had obliterated huge swaths of jungle, snapping off regiments of massive tree trunks a couple of feet above the ground, leaving a moat of blackened stumps and scorched red dirt seamed with fissures. Tangles of razor wire had replaced the trees and bushes, forming surreal blue-steel hedges, and buried beneath the wire was a variety of mines and detection devices. These did little good, however, because the Cubans possessed technology that would neutralize most of them. On clear nights there was scant likelihood of trouble; but on misty nights trouble could be expected. Under cover of the mist, Cuban and guerrilla troops would come through the wire and attempt to infiltrate the tunnels that honeycombed the interior of the hill. Occasionally one of the mines would be triggered, and a ghostly fireball would bloom in the swirling whiteness, tiny black figures being flung outward from its center. Lately some of these casualties had been found to be wearing red berets and scorpion-shaped brass pins, and from this it was known that the Cubans had sent in the Alacrán Division, which had been instrumental in routing the American forces in Miskitia.

There were nine levels of tunnels inside the hill, most lined with little round rooms that served as living quarters (the only exception being the bottom level, which was given over to the computer center and offices); all the rooms and tunnels were coated with a bubbled white plastic that looked like hardened seafoam and was proof against antipersonnel explosives. In Mingolla’s room, where he and Baylor and Gilbey bunked, a scarlet paper lantern had been hung on the overhead light fixture, making it seem that they were inhabiting a blood cell: Baylor had insisted on the lantern, saying that the overhead was too bright and hurt his eyes. Three cots were arranged against the walls, as far apart as space allowed. The floor around Baylor’s cot was littered with cigarette butts and used Kleenex; under his pillow he kept a tin box containing a stash of pills and marijuana. Whenever he lit a joint he would always offer Mingolla a hit, and Mingolla always refused, feeling that the experience of the firebase would not be enhanced by drugs. Taped to the wall above Gilbey’s cot was a collage of beaver shots, and each day after duty, whether or not Mingolla and Baylor were in the room, he would lie beneath them and masturbate. His lack of shame caused Mingolla to be embarrassed by his own secretiveness in the act, and he was also embarrassed by the pimply-youth quality of the objects taped above his cot—a Yankee pennant; a photograph of his old girlfriend, and another of his senior-year high school basketball team; several sketches he had made of the surrounding jungle. Gilbey teased him constantly about this display, calling him “the boy next door,” which struck Mingolla as odd, because back home he had been considered something of an eccentric.

It was toward this room that Mingolla was heading when the assault began. Large cargo elevators capable of carrying sixty men ran up and down just inside the east and west slopes of the hill; but to provide quick access between adjoining levels, and also as a safeguard in case of power failures, an auxiliary tunnel corkscrewed down through the center of the hill like a huge coil of white intestine. It was slightly more than twice as wide as the electric carts that traveled it, carrying officers and VIPs on tours. Mingolla was in the habit of using the tunnel for his exercise. Each night he would put on sweat clothes and jog up and down the entire nine levels, doing this out of a conviction that exhaustion prevented bad dreams. That night, as he passed Level Four on his final leg up, he heard a rumbling: an explosion, and not far off. Alarms sounded, the big guns atop the hill began to thunder. From directly above came shouts and the stutter of automatic fire. The tunnel lights flickered, went dark, and the emergency lights winked on.

Mingolla flattened against the wall. The dim red lighting caused the bubbled surfaces of the tunnel to appear as smooth as a chamber in a gigantic nautilus, and this resemblance intensified his sense of helplessness, making him feel like a child trapped within an evil undersea palace. He couldn’t think clearly, picturing the chaos around him. Muzzle flashes, armies of ant-men seething through the tunnels, screams spraying blood, and the big guns bucking, every shell burst kindling miles of sky. He would have preferred to keep going up, to get out into the open where he might have a chance to hide in the jungle. But down was his only hope. Pushing away from the wall, he ran full tilt, arms waving, skidding around corners, almost falling, past Level Four, Level Five. Then, halfway between Levels Five and Six, he nearly tripped over a dead man—an American lying curled up around a belly wound, a slick of blood spreading beneath him and a machete by his hand. As Mingolla stooped for the machete, he thought nothing about the man, only about how weird it was for an American to be defending himself against Cubans with such a weapon. There was no use, he decided, in going any farther. Whoever had killed the man would be somewhere below, and the safest course would be to hide out in one of the rooms on Level Five. Holding the machete before him, he moved cautiously back up the tunnel.

Levels Five, Six, and Seven were officer country, and though the tunnels were the same as the ones above—gently curving tubes eight feet high and ten feet wide—the rooms were larger and contained only two cots. The rooms Mingolla peered into were empty, and this, despite the sounds of battle, gave him a secure feeling. But as he passed beyond the tunnel curve, he heard shouts in Spanish from his rear. He peeked back around the curve. A skinny black soldier wearing a red beret and gray fatigues was inching toward the first doorway; then, rifle at the ready, he ducked inside. Two other Cubans—slim, bearded men, their skins sallow-looking in the bloody light—were standing by the arched entranceway to the auxiliary tunnel; when they saw the black soldier emerge from the room, they walked off in the opposite direction, probably to check the rooms at the far end of the level.

Mingolla began to operate in a kind of luminous panic. He realized that he would have to kill the black soldier. Kill him without any fuss, take his rifle, and hope that he could catch the other two off-guard when they came back for him. He slipped into the nearest room and stationed himself against the wall to the right of the door. The Cuban, he had noticed, had turned left on entering the room; he would have been vulnerable to someone positioned like Mingolla. Vulnerable for a split second. Less than a count of one. The pulse in Mingolla’s temple throbbed, and he gripped the machete tightly in his left hand. He rehearsed mentally what he would have to do. Stab; clamp a hand over the Cuban’s mouth; bring his knee up to jar loose the rifle. And he would have to perform these actions simultaneously, execute them perfectly.

Perfect execution.

He almost laughed out loud, remembering his paunchy old basketball coach saying, “Perfect execution, boys. That’s what beats a zone. Forget the fancy crap. Just set your screens, run your patterns, and get your shots down.”

Hoops ain’t nothin’ but life in short pants, huh, Coach?

Mingolla drew a deep breath and let it sigh out through his nostrils. He couldn’t believe he was going to die. He had spent the past nine months worrying about death, but now when circumstances had arisen that made death likely, he had trouble taking that likelihood seriously. It didn’t seem reasonable that a skinny black guy should be his nemesis. His death should involve massive detonations of light, special Mingolla-killing rays, astronomical portents. Not some scrawny little fuck with a rifle. He drew another breath and for the first time registered the contents of the room. Two cots; clothes strewn everywhere; taped-up Polaroids and pornography. Officer country or not, it was your basic Ant Farm decor; under the red light it looked squalid, long-abandoned. He was amazed by how calm he felt. Oh, he was afraid all right! But fear was tucked into the dark folds of his personality like a murderer’s knife hidden inside an old coat on a closet shelf. Glowing in secret, waiting its chance to shine. Sooner or later it would skewer him, but for now it was an ally, acting to sharpen his senses. He could see every bubbled pucker on the white walls, could hear the scrape of the Cuban’s boots as he darted into the room next door, could feel how the Cuban swung the rifle left to right, paused, turned . . .

He could feel the Cuban, feel his heat, his heated shape, the exact position of his body. It was as if a thermal imager had been switched on inside his head, one that worked through walls.

The Cuban eased toward Mingolla’s door, his progress tangible, like a burning match moving behind a sheet of paper. Mingolla’s calm was shattered. The man’s heat, his fleshy temperature, was what disturbed him. He had imagined himself killing with a cinematic swiftness and lack of mess; now he thought of hogs being butchered and pile drivers smashing the skulls of cows. And could he trust this freakish form of perception? What if he couldn’t? What if he stabbed too late? Too soon? Then the hot, alive thing was almost at the door, and having no choice, Mingolla timed his attack to its movements, stabbing just as the Cuban entered.

He executed perfectly.

The blade slid home beneath the Cuban’s ribs, and Mingolla clamped a hand over his mouth, muffling his outcry. His knee nailed the rifle stock, sending it clattering to the floor. The Cuban thrashed wildly. He stank of rotten jungle air and cigarettes. His eyes rolled back, trying to see Mingolla. Crazy animal eyes, with liverish whites and expanded pupils. Sweat beads glittered redly on his brow. Mingolla twisted the machete, and the Cuban’s eyelids fluttered down. But a second later they snapped open, and he lunged. They went staggering deeper into the room and teetered beside one of the cots. Mingolla wrangled the Cuban sideways and rammed him against the wall, pinning him there. Writhing, the Cuban nearly broke free. He seemed to be getting stronger, his squeals leaking out from Mingolla’s hand. He reached behind him, clawing at Mingolla’s face; he grabbed a clump of hair, yanked it. Desperate, Mingolla sawed with the machete. That tuned the Cuban’s squeals higher, louder. He squirmed and clawed at the wall. Mingolla’s clamped hand was slick with the Cuban’s saliva, his nostrils full of the man’s rank scent. He felt queasy, weak, and he wasn’t sure how much longer he could hang on. The son of a bitch was never going to die, he was deriving strength from the steel in his guts, he was changing into some deathless force. But just then the Cuban stiffened. Then he relaxed, and Mingolla caught a whiff of feces.

He let the Cuban slump to the floor, but before he could turn loose of the machete, a shudder passed through the body, flowed up the hilt, and vibrated his left hand. It continued to shudder inside his hand, feeling dirty, sexy, like a postcoital tremor. Something, some animal essence, some oily scrap of bad life, was slithering around in there, squirting toward his wrist. He stared at the hand, horrified. It was gloved in the Cuban’s blood, trembling. He smashed it against his hip, and that seemed to stun whatever was inside it. But within seconds it had revived and was wriggling in and out of his fingers with the mad celerity of a tadpole.

“Teo!”someone called. “Vamos!” Electrified by the shout, Mingolla hustled to the door. His foot nudged the Cuban’s rifle. He picked it up, and the shaking of his hand lessened—he had the idea it had been soothed by a familiar texture and weight.

“Teo! Dónde estás?”Mingolla had no good choices, but he realized it would be far more dangerous to hang back than to take the initiative. He grunted “Aquí!” and walked out into the tunnel, making lots of noise with his heels.

“Date prisa, hombre!”Mingolla opened fire as he rounded the curve. The two Cubans were standing by the entrance to the auxiliary tunnel. Their rifles chattered briefly, sending a harmless spray of bullets off the walls; they whirled, flung out their arms, and fell. Mingolla was too shocked by how easy it had been to feel relief. He kept watching, expecting them to do something. Moan, or twitch.

After the echoes of the shots had died, though he could hear the big guns jolting and the crackle of firefights, a heavy silence seemed to fill in through the tunnel, as if his bullets had pierced something that had dammed silence up. The silence made him aware of his isolation. No telling where the battle lines were drawn . . . if, indeed, they existed. It was conceivable that small units had infiltrated every level, that the battle for the Ant Farm was in microcosm the battle for Guatemala: a conflict having no patterns, no real borders, no orderly confrontations, but which, like a plague, could pop up anywhere at any time and kill. That being the case, his best bet would be to head for the computer center, where friendly forces were sure to be concentrated.

He walked to the entrance and stared at the two dead Cubans. They had fallen, blocking his way, and he was hesitant about stepping over them, half-believing they were playing possum, that they would reach up and grab him. The awkward attitudes of their limbs made him think they were holding a difficult pose, waiting for him to try. Their blood looked purple in the red glow of the emergencies, thicker and shinier than ordinary blood. He noted their moles and scars and sores, the crude stitching of their fatigues, gold fillings glinting from their open mouths. It was funny, he could have met these guys while they were alive and they might have made only a vague impression; but seeing them dead, he had cataloged their physical worth in a single glance. Maybe, he thought, death revealed your essentials as life could not. He studied the dead men, wanting to read them. Couple of slim, wiry guys. Nice guys, into rum and the ladies and sports. He’d bet they were baseball players, infielders, a double-play combo. Maybe he should have called to them, Hey, I’m a Yankee fan. Be cool! Meet’cha after the war for a game of flies and grounders. Fuck this killing shit. Let’s play some ball.

He laughed, and the high, cracking sound of his laughter startled him. Christ! Standing around here was just asking for it. As if to second that opinion, the thing inside his hand exploded into life, eeling and frisking about. Swallowing back his fear, Mingolla stepped over the two dead men, and this time, when nothing clutched at his trouser legs, he felt very, very relieved.

Below Level Six there was a good deal of mist in the auxiliary tunnel, and from this Mingolla understood that the Cubans had penetrated the hillside, probably with a borer mine. Chances were the hole they had made was somewhere close, and he decided that if he could find it, he would use it to get the Hell out of the Farm and hide in the jungle. On Level Seven the mist was extremely thick; the emergency lights stained it pale red, giving it the look of surgical cotton packing a huge artery. Scorch marks from grenade bursts showed on the walls like primitive graphics, and quite a few bodies were visible beside the doorways. Most of them Americans, badly mutilated. Uneasy, Mingolla picked his way among them, and when a man spoke behind him, saying, “Don’t move,” he let out a hoarse cry and dropped his rifle and spun around, his heart pounding.

A giant of a man—he had to go six-seven, six-eight, with the arms and torso of a weight lifter—was standing in a doorway, training a forty-five at Mingolla’s chest. He wore khakis with lieutenant’s bars, and his babyish face, though cinched into a frown, gave an impression of gentleness and stolidity: He conjured for Mingolla the image of Ferdinand the Bull weighing a knotty problem. “I told you not to move,” he said peevishly.

“It’s okay,” said Mingolla. “I’m on your side.”

The lieutenant ran a hand through his thick shock of brown hair; he seemed to be blinking more than was normal. “I’d better check,” he said. “Let’s go down to the storeroom.”

“What’s to check?” said Mingolla, his paranoia increasing.

“Please!” said the lieutenant, a genuine wealth of entreaty in his voice. “There’s been too much violence already.”

The storeroom was a long, narrow L-shaped room at the end of the level; it was ranged by packing crates, and through the gauzy mist the emergency lights looked like a string of dying red suns. The lieutenant marched Mingolla to the corner of the L, and turning it, Mingolla saw that the rear wall of the room was missing. A tunnel had been blown into the hillside, opening onto blackness. Forked roots with balls of dirt attached hung from its roof, giving it the witchy appearance of a tunnel into some world of dark magic; rubble and clods of earth were piled at its lip. Mingolla could smell the jungle, and he realized that the big guns had stopped firing. Which meant that whoever had won the battle of the summit would soon be sending down mop-up squads. “We can’t stay here,” he told the lieutenant. “The Cubans’ll be back.”

“We’re perfectly safe,” said the lieutenant. “Take my word.” He motioned with the gun, indicating that Mingolla should sit on the floor.

Mingolla did as ordered and was frozen by the sight of a corpse, a Cuban corpse, lying between two packing crates opposite him, its head propped against the wall. “Jesus!” he said, coming back up to his knees.

“He won’t bite,” said the lieutenant. With the lack of self-consciousness of someone squeezing into a subway seat, he settled beside the corpse; the two of them neatly filled the space between the crates, touching elbow-to-shoulder.

“Hey,” said Mingolla, feeling giddy and scattered. “I’m not sitting here with this fucking dead guy, man!”

The lieutenant flourished his gun. “You’ll get used to him.” Mingolla eased back to a sitting position, unable to look away from the corpse. Actually, compared to the bodies he had just been stepping over, it was quite presentable. The only signs of damage were blood on its mouth and bushy black beard, and a mire of blood and shredded cloth at the center of its chest. Its beret had slid down at a rakish angle to cover one eyebrow; the brass scorpion pin was scarred and tarnished. Its eyes were open, reflecting glowing red chips of the emergency lights, and this gave it a baleful semblance of life. But the reflections made it appear less real, easier to bear.

“Listen to me,” said the lieutenant.

Mingolla rubbed at the blood on his shaking hand, hoping that cleaning it would have some good effect.

“Are you listening?” the lieutenant asked.

Mingolla had a peculiar perception of the lieutenant and the corpse as dummy and ventriloquist. Despite its glowing eyes, the corpse had too much reality for any trick of the light to gloss over for long. Precise crescents showed on its fingernails, and because its head was tipped to one side, blood had settled into that side, darkening its cheek and temple, leaving the rest of the face pallid. It was the lieutenant, with his neat khakis and polished shoes and nice haircut, who now looked less than real.

“Listen!” said the lieutenant vehemently. “I want you to understand that I have to do what’s right for me!” The biceps of his gun arm bunched to the size of a cannonball.

“I understand,” said Mingolla, thoroughly unnerved.

“Do you? Do you really?” The lieutenant seemed aggravated by Mingolla’s claim to understanding. “I doubt it. I doubt you could possibly understand.”

“Maybe I can’t,” said Mingolla. “Whatever you say, man. I’m just trying to get along, y’know.”

The lieutenant sat silent, blinking. Then he smiled. “My name’s Jay,” he said. “And you are . . .?”

“David.” Mingolla tried to bring his concentration to bear on the gun, wondering if he could kick it away, but the sliver of life in his hand distracted him.

“Where are your quarters, David?”

“Level Three.”

“I live here,” said Jay. “But I’m going to move. I couldn’t bear to stay in a place where . . . “Did you know it takes a long time for someone to die, even after their heart has stopped?”

“No, I didn’t.” The thing in Mingolla’s hand squirmed toward his wrist, and he squeezed the wrist, trying to block it.

“It’s true,” said Jay with vast assurance. “None of these people”—he gave the corpse a gentle nudge with his elbow, a gesture that conveyed to Mingolla a creepy sort of familiarity—“have finished dying. Life doesn’t just switch off. It fades. And these people are still alive, though it’s only a half-life.” He grinned. “The half-life of life, you might say.”

Mingolla kept the pressure on his wrist and smiled, as if in appreciation of the play on words. Pale red tendrils of mist curled between them.

“Of course you aren’t attuned,” said Jay. “So you wouldn’t understand. But I’d be lost without Eligio.”

“Who’s Eligio?”

Jay nodded toward the corpse. “We’re attuned, Eligio and I. That’s how I know we’re safe. Eligio’s perceptions aren’t limited to the here and now any longer. He’s with his men at this very moment, and he tells me they’re all dead or dying.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mingolla, tensing. He had managed to squeeze the thing in his hand back into his fingers, and he thought he might be able to reach the gun. But Jay disrupted his plan by shifting the gun to his other hand. His eyes seemed to be growing more reflective, acquiring a ruby glaze, and Mingolla realized this was because he had opened them wide and angled his stare toward the emergency lights.

“It makes you wonder,” said Jay. “It really does.”

“What?” said Mingolla, easing sideways, shortening the range for a kick.

“Half-lives,” said Jay. “If the mind has a half-life, maybe our separate emotions do, too. The half-life of love, of hate. Maybe they still exist somewhere.” He drew up his knees, shielding the gun. “Anyway, I can’t stay here. I think I’ll go back to Oakland.” His tone became whispery. “Where are you from, David?”

“New York.”

“Not my cup of tea,” said Jay. “But I love the Bay Area. I own an antique shop there. It’s beautiful in the mornings. Peaceful. The sun comes through the window, creeping across the floor, y’know, like a tide, inching up over the furniture. It’s as if the original varnishes are being reborn, the whole shop shining with ancient lights.”

“Sounds nice,” said Mingolla, taken aback by Jay’s lyricism.

“You seem like a good person.” Jay straightened up a bit. “But I’m sorry. Eligio tells me your mind’s too cloudy for him to read. He says I can’t risk keeping you alive. I’m going to have to shoot.”

Mingolla set himself to kick, but then listlessness washed over him. What the Hell did it matter? Even if he knocked the gun away, Jay could probably break him in half. “Why?” he said. “Why do you have to?”

“You might inform on me.” Jay’s soft features sagged into a sorrowful expression. “Tell them I was hiding.”

“Nobody gives a shit you were hiding,” said Mingolla. “That’s what I was doing. I bet there’s fifty other guys doing the same damn thing.”

“I don’t know.” Jay’s brow furrowed. “I’ll ask again. Maybe your mind’s less cloudy now.” He turned his gaze to the dead man.

Mingolla noticed that the Cuban’s irises were angled upward and to the left—exactly the same angle to which Jay’s eyes had drifted earlier—and reflected an identical ruby glaze.

“Sorry,” said Jay, leveling the gun. “I have to.” He licked his lips. “Would you please turn your head? I’d rather you weren’t looking at me when it happens. That’s how Eligio and I became attuned.”

Looking into the aperture of the gun’s muzzle was like peering over a cliff, feeling the chill allure of falling. It was more out of contrariness than a will to survive that Mingolla popped his eyes at Jay and said, “Go ahead.”

Jay blinked, but he held the gun steady. “Your hand’s shaking,” he said after a pause.

“No shit,” said Mingolla.

“How come it’s shaking?”

“Because I killed someone with it,” said Mingolla. “Because I’m as fucking crazy as you are.”

Jay mulled this over. “I was supposed to be assigned to a gay unit,” he said finally. “But all the slots were filled, and when I had to be assigned here they gave me a drug. Now I . . . I . . .” He blinked rapidly, his lips parted, and Mingolla found that he was straining toward Jay, wanting to apply Body English, to do something to push him over this agonizing hump. “I can’t . . . be with men anymore,” Jay finished, and once again blinked rapidly; then his words came easier. “Did they give you a drug, too? I mean I’m not trying to imply you’re gay. It’s just they have drugs for everything these days, and I thought that might be the problem.”

Mingolla was suddenly, inutterably sad. He felt that his emotions had been twisted into a thin black wire, that the wire was frayed and spraying black sparks of sadness. That was all that energized him, all his life. Those little black sparks.

“I always fought before,” said Jay. “And I was fighting this time. But when I shot Eligio . . . I just couldn’t keep going.”

“I really don’t give a shit,” said Mingolla. “I really don’t.”

“Maybe I can trust you.” Jay sighed. “I just wish you were attuned. Eligio’s a good soul. You’d appreciate him.”

Jay kept on talking, enumerating Eligio’s virtues, and Mingolla tuned him out, not wanting to hear about the Cuban’s love for his family, his posthumous concerns for them. Staring at his bloody hand, he had a magical overview of the situation. Sitting in the root cellar of this evil mountain, bathed in an eerie red glow, a scrap of a dead man’s life trapped in his flesh, listening to a deranged giant who took his orders from a corpse, waiting for scorpion soldiers to pour through a tunnel that appeared to lead into a dimension of mist and blackness. It was insane to look at it that way. But there it was. You couldn’t reason it away; it had a brutal glamour that surpassed reason, that made reason unnecessary.

“. . . and once you’re attuned,” Jay was saying, “you can’t ever be separated. Not even by death. So Eligio’s always going to be alive inside me. Of course I can’t let them find out. I mean”—he chuckled, a sound like dice rattling in a cup—“talk about giving aid and comfort to the enemy!”

Mingolla lowered his head, closed his eyes. Maybe Jay would shoot. But he doubted that. Jay only wanted company in his madness.

“You swear you won’t tell them?” Jay asked.

“Yeah,” said Mingolla. “I swear.”

“All right,” said Jay. “But remember, my future’s in your hands. You have a responsibility to me.”

“Don’t worry.”

Gunfire crackled in the distance.

“I’m glad we could talk,” said Jay. “I feel much better.”

Mingolla said that he felt better, too.

They sat without speaking. It wasn’t the most secure way to pass the night, but Mingolla no longer put any store in the concept of security. He was too weary to be afraid. Jay seemed entranced, staring at a point above Mingolla’s head, but Mingolla made no move for the gun. He was content to sit and wait and let fate take its course. His thoughts uncoiled with vegetable sluggishness.

They must have been sitting a couple of hours when Mingolla heard the whisper of helicopters and noticed that the mist had thinned, that the darkness at the end of the tunnel had gone gray. “Hey,” he said to Jay. “I think we’re okay now.” Jay offered no reply, and Mingolla saw that his eyes were angled upward and to the left just like the Cuban’s eyes, glazed over with ruby reflection. Tentatively, he reached out and touched the gun. Jay’s hand flopped to the floor, but his fingers remained clenched around the butt. Mingolla recoiled, disbelieving. It couldn’t be! Again he reached out, feeling for a pulse. Jay’s wrist was cool, still, and his lips had a bluish cast. Mingolla had a flutter of hysteria, thinking that Jay had gotten it wrong about being attuned: Instead of Eligio’s becoming part of his life, he had become part of Eligio’s death. There was a tightness in Mingolla’s chest, and he thought he was going to cry. He would have welcomed tears, and when they failed to materialize he grew both annoyed at himself and defensive. Why should he cry? The guy had meant nothing to him . . . though the fact that he could be so devoid of compassion was reason enough for tears. Still, if you were going to cry over something as commonplace as a single guy dying, you’d be crying every minute of the day, and what was the future in that? He glanced at Jay. At the Cuban. Despite the smoothness of Jay’s skin, the Cuban’s bushy beard, Mingolla could have sworn they were starting to resemble each other the way old married couples did. And, yep, all four eyes were fixed on exactly the same point of forever. It was either a Hell of a coincidence or else Jay’s craziness had been of such magnitude that he had willed himself to die in this fashion just to lend credence to his theory of half-lives. And maybe he was still alive. Half-alive. Maybe he and Mingolla were now attuned, and if that were true, maybe . . . Alarmed by the prospect of joining Jay and the Cuban in their deathwatch, Mingolla scrambled to his feet and ran into the tunnel. He might have kept running, but on coming out into the dawn light he was brought up short by the view from the tunnel entrance.

At his back, the green dome of the hill swelled high, its sides brocaded with shrubs and vines, an infinity of pattern as eye-catching as the intricately carved façade of a Hindu temple; atop it, one of the gun emplacements had taken a hit: Splinters of charred metal curved up like peels of black rind. Before him lay the moat of red dirt with its hedgerows of razor wire, and beyond that loomed the blackish green snarl of the jungle. Caught on the wire were hundreds of baggy shapes wearing bloodstained fatigues; frays of smoke twisted up from the fresh craters beside them. Overhead, half-hidden by the lifting gray mist, three Sikorskys were hovering. Their pilots were invisible behind layers of mist and reflection, and the choppers themselves looked like enormous carrion flies with bulging eyes and whirling wings. Like devils. Like gods. They seemed to be whispering to one another in anticipation of the feast they were soon to share.

The scene was horrid, yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border Hell. You could never paint it, or if you could the canvas would have to be as large as the scene itself, and you would have to incorporate the slow boil of the mist, the whirling of the chopper blades, the drifting smoke. No detail could be omitted. It was the perfect illustration of the war, of its secret magical splendor, and Mingolla, too, was an element of the design, the figure of the artist painted in for a joke or to lend scale and perspective to its vastness, its importance. He knew that he should report to his station, but he couldn’t turn away from this glimpse into the heart of the war. He sat down on the hillside, cradling his sick hand in his lap, and watched as—with the ponderous aplomb of idols floating to earth, fighting the cross-draft, the wind of their descent whipping up furies of red dust—the Sikorskys made skillful landings among the dead.

4

Halfway through the telling of his story, Mingolla had realized that he was not really trying to offend or shock Debora, but rather was unburdening himself; and he further realized that by telling it he had to an extent cut loose from the past, weakened its hold on him. For the first time he felt able to give serious consideration to the idea of desertion. He did not rush to it, embrace it, but he did acknowledge its logic and understand the terrible illogic of returning to more assaults, more death, without any magic to protect him. He made a pact with himself—he would pretend to go along as if desertion were his intent and see what signs were offered.

When he had finished, Debora asked whether or not he was over his anger. He was pleased that she hadn’t tried to offer sympathy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t really angry at you . . . at least that was only part of it.”

“It’s all right.” She pushed back the dark mass of her hair so that it fell to one side and looked down at the grass beside her knees. With her head inclined, eyes half-lidded, the graceful line of her neck and chin like a character in some exotic script, she seemed a good sign herself. “I don’t know what to talk to you about,” she said. “The things I feel I have to tell you make you mad, and I can’t muster any small talk.”

“I don’t want to be pushed,” he said. “But believe me, I’m thinking about what you’ve told me.”

“I won’t push. But I still don’t know what to talk about.” She plucked a grass blade, chewed on the tip. He watched her lips purse, wondered how she’d taste. Mouth sweet in the way of a jar that had once held spices. And down below, she’d taste sweet there, too—honey gone a little sour in the comb. She tossed the grass blade aside. “I know,” she said brightly. “Would you like to see where I live?”

“I’d just as soon not go back to ’Frisco yet.” Where you live, he thought; I want to touch where you live.

“It’s not in town,” she said. “It’s a village downriver.”

“Sounds good.” He came to his feet, took her arm, and helped her up. For an instant they were close together, her breasts grazing his shirt. Her heat coursed around him, and he thought if anyone were to see them, they would see two figures wavering as in a mirage. He had an urge to tell her he loved her. Though most of what he felt was for the salvation she might provide, part of his feelings seemed real and that puzzled him, because all she had been to him was a few hours out of the war, dinner in a cheap restaurant and a walk along the river. There was no basis for consequential emotion. Before he could say anything, do anything, she turned and picked up her basket.

“It’s not far,” she said, walking away. Her blue skirt swayed like a rung bell.

They followed a track of brown clay overgrown by ferns, overspread by saplings with pale translucent leaves, and soon came to a grouping of thatched huts at the mouth of a stream that flowed into the river. Naked children were wading in the stream, laughing and splashing each other. Their skins were the color of amber, and their eyes were as wet-looking and purplish dark as plums. Palms and acacias loomed above the huts, which were constructed of sapling trunks lashed together by nylon cord; their thatch had been trimmed to resemble bowl-cut hair. Flies crawled over strips of meat hung on a clothesline stretched between two of the huts. Fish heads and chicken droppings littered the ocher ground. But Mingolla scarcely noticed these signs of poverty, seeing instead a sign of the peace that might await him in Panama. And another sign was soon forthcoming. Debora bought a bottle of rum at a tiny store, then led him to the hut nearest the mouth of the stream and introduced him to a lean, white-haired old man who was sitting on a bench outside it. Tío Moisés. After three drinks Tío Moisés began to tell stories.

The first story concerned the personal pilot of an ex-president of Panama. The president had made billions from smuggling cocaine into the States with the help of the CIA, whom he had assisted on numerous occasions, and was himself an addict in the last stages of mental deterioration. It had become his sole pleasure to be flown from city to city in his country, to sit on the landing strips, gaze out the window, and do cocaine. At any hour of night or day, he was likely to call the pilot and order him to prepare a flight plan to Colón or Bocas del Toro or Penonomó. As the president’s condition worsened, the pilot realized that soon the CIA would see he was no longer useful and would kill him. And the most obvious manner of killing him would be by means of an airplane crash. The pilot did not want to die alongside him. He tried to resign, but the president would not permit it. He gave thought to mutilating himself, but being a good Catholic, he could not flout God’s law. If he were to flee, his family would suffer. His life became a nightmare. Prior to each flight, he would spend hours searching the plane for evidence of sabotage, and upon each landing he would remain in the cockpit, shaking from nervous exhaustion. The president’s condition grew even worse. He had to be carried aboard the plane and have the cocaine administered by an aide, while a second aide stood by with cotton swabs to attend his nosebleeds. Knowing his life could be measured in weeks, the pilot asked his priest for guidance. “Pray,” the priest advised. The pilot had been praying all along, so this was no help. Next he went to the commandant of his military college, and the commandant told him he must do his duty. This, too, was something the pilot had been doing all along. Finally he went to the chief of the San Bias Indians, who were his mother’s people. The chief told him he must accept his fate, which—while not something he had been doing all along—was hardly encouraging. Nonetheless, he saw it was the only available path and he did as the chief had counseled. Rather than spending hours in a preflight check, he would arrive minutes before takeoff and taxi away without even inspecting the fuel gauge. His recklessness came to be the talk of the capitol. Obeying the president’s every whim, he flew in gales and in fogs, while drunk and drugged, and during those hours in the air, suspended between the laws of gravity and fate, he gained a new appreciation of life. Once back on the ground, he engaged in living with a fierce avidity, making passionate love to his wife, carousing with friends, and staying out until dawn. Then one day as he was preparing to leave for the airport, an American man came to his house and told him he had been replaced. “If we let the president fly with so negligent a pilot, we’ll be blamed for anything that happens,” said the American. The pilot did not have to ask whom he had meant by “we.” Six weeks later the president’s plane crashed in the Darién Mountains. The pilot was overjoyed. Panama had been ridded of a villain, and his own life had not been forfeited. But a week after the crash, after the new president—another smuggler with CIA connections—had been appointed, the commandant of the air force summoned the pilot, told him that the crash would never have occurred had he been on the job, and assigned him to fly the new president’s plane.

All through the afternoon Mingolla listened and drank, and drunkenness fitted a lens to his eyes that let him see how these stories applied to him. They were all fables of irresolution, cautioning him to act, and they detailed the core problems of the Central American people who—as he was now—were trapped between the poles of magic and reason, their lives governed by the politics of the ultrareal, their spirits ruled by myths and legends, with the rectangular computerized bulk of North America above and the conch-shell-shaped continental mystery of South America below. He assumed that Debora had orchestrated the types of stories Tío Moisés told, but that did not detract from their potency as signs: They had the ring of truth, not of something tailored to his needs. Nor did it matter that his hand was shaking, his vision playing tricks. Those things would pass when he reached Panama.

Shadows blurred, insects droned like tambouras , and twilight washed down the sky, making the air look grainy, the chop on the river appear slower and heavier. Tío Moisés’s granddaughter served plates of roast corn and fish, and Mingolla stuffed himself. Afterward, when the old man signaled his weariness, Mingolla and Debora strolled off along the stream. Between two of the huts, mounted on a pole, was a warped backboard with a netless hoop, and some young men were shooting baskets. Mingolla joined them. It was hard dribbling on the bumpy dirt, but he had never played better. The residue of drunkenness fueled his game, and his jump shots followed perfect arcs down through the hoop. Even at improbable angles, his shots fell true. He lost himself in flicking out his hands to make a steal, in feinting and leaping high to snag a rebound, becoming—as dusk faded—the most adroit of ten arm-waving, jitter-stepping shadows.

The game ended and the stars came out, looking like holes punched into fire through a billow of black silk overhanging the palms. Flickering chutes of lamplight illuminated the ground in front of the huts, and as Debora and Mingolla walked among them, he heard a radio tuned to the Armed Forces network giving a play-by-play of a baseball game. There was a crack of the bat, the crowd roared, the announcer cried, “He got it all!” Mingolla imagined the ball vanishing into the darkness above the stadium, bouncing out into parking-lot America, lodging under a tire where some kid would find it and think it a miracle, or rolling across the street to rest under a used car, shimmering there, secretly white and fuming with home-run energies. The score was three-to-one, top of the second. Mingolla didn’t know who was playing and didn’t care. Home runs were happening for him, mystical jump shots curved along predestined tracks. He was at the center of incalculable forces.

One of the huts was unlit, with two wooden chairs out front, and as they approached, the sight of it soured Mingolla’s mood. Something about it bothered him: its air of preparedness, of being a little stage-set. He was just paranoid, he thought. The signs had been good so far, hadn’t they? When they reached the hut, Debora sat in the chair nearer the door and looked up at him. Starlight pointed her eyes with brilliance. Behind her, through the doorway, he made out the shadowy cocoon of a strung hammock, and beneath it, a sack from which part of a wire cage protruded. “What about your game?” he asked.

“I thought it was more important to be with you,” she said. That, too, bothered him. It was all starting to bother him, and he couldn’t understand why. The thing in his hand wiggled. He balled the hand into a fist and sat next to Debora. “What’s going on between you and me?” he asked, nervous. “Is anything gonna happen? I keep thinking it will, but . . .” He wiped sweat from his forehead and forgot what he had been driving at.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.

A shadow moved across the yellow glare, spilling from the hut next door. Rippling, undulating. Mingolla squeezed his eyes shut.

“If you mean . . . romantically,” she said, “I’m confused about that myself. Whether you return to your base or go to Panama, we don’t seem to have much of a future. And we certainly don’t have much of a past.”

It boosted his confidence in her, in the situation, that she didn’t have an assured answer. But he felt shaky. Very shaky. He gave his head a twitch, fighting off more ripples. “What’s it like in Panama?”

“I’ve never been there. Probably a lot like Guatemala, except without the fighting.”

Maybe he should get up, walk around. Maybe that would help. Or maybe he should just sit and talk. Talking seemed to steady him. “I bet,” he said, “I bet it’s beautiful, y’know. Panama. Green mountains, jungle waterfalls. I bet there’s lots of birds. Macaws and parrots. Millions of ’em.”

“I suppose so.”

“And hummingbirds. This friend of mine was down there once on a hummingbird expedition, said there was a million kinds. I thought he was sort of a creep, y’know, for being into collecting hummingbirds.” He opened his eyes and had to close them again. “I thought hummingbird collecting wasn’t very relevant to the big issues.”

“David?” Concern in her voice.

“I’m okay.” The smell of her perfume was more cloying than he remembered. “You get there by boat, right? Must be a pretty big boat. I’ve never been on a real boat, just this rowboat my uncle had. He used to take me fishing off Coney Island; we’d tie up to a buoy and catch all these poison fish. You shoulda seen some of ’em. Like mutants. Rainbow-colored eyes, weird growths all over. Scared the Hell outta me to think about eating fish.”

“I had an uncle who . . .”

“I used to think about all the ones that must be down there too deep for us to catch. Giant blowfish, genius sharks, whales with hands. I’d see ’em swallowing the boat, I’d . . .”

“Calm down, David.” She kneaded the back of his neck, sending a shiver down his spine.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” He pushed her hand away; he did not need shivers along with everything else. “Lemme hear some more ’bout Panama.”

“I told you, I’ve never been there.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, how ’bout Costa Rica? You been to Costa Rica.” Sweat was popping out all over his body. Maybe he should go for a swim. He’d heard there were manatees in the Río Dulce. “Ever seen a manatee?” he asked.

“David!”

She must have leaned close, because he could feel her heat spreading all through him, and he thought maybe that would help, smothering in her heat, heavy motion, get rid of this shakiness. He’d take her into that hammock and see just how hot she got. How hot she got, how hot she got. The words did a train rhythm in his head. Afraid to open his eyes, he reached out blindly and pulled her to him. Bumped faces, searched for her mouth. Kissed her. She kissed back. His hand slipped up to cup a breast. Jesus, she felt good! She felt like salvation, like Panama, like what you fall into when you sleep.

But then it changed, changed slowly, so slowly that he didn’t notice until it was almost complete, and her tongue was squirming in his mouth, as thick and stupid as a snail’s foot, and her breast, oh shit, her breast was jiggling, trembling with the same wormy juices that were in his left hand. He pushed her off, opened his eyes. Saw crude-stitch eyelashes sewn to her cheeks. Lips parted, mouth full of bones. Blank face of meat. He got to his feet, pawing the air, wanting to rip down the film of ugliness that had settled over him.

“David?” She warped his name, gulping the syllables as if she were trying to swallow and talk at once. Frog voice, devil voice.

He spun around, caught an eyeful of black sky and spiky trees and a pitted bone-knob moon trapped in a weave of branches. Dark warty shapes of the huts, doors into yellow flame with crooked shadow men inside. He blinked, shook his head. It wasn’t going away, it was real. What was this place? Not a village in Guatemala, naw, un-unh. He heard a strangled wild-man grunt come from his throat, and he backed away, backed away from everything. She walked after him, croaking his name. Wig of black straw, dabs of shining jelly for eyes. Some of the shadow men were herky-jerking out of their doors, gathering behind her, talking about him in devil language. Faceless nothings from the dimension of sickness, demons in peón drag. He backed another few steps.

“I can see you,” he said. “I know what you are.”

“It’s all right, David,” she said, and smiled.

Sure! She thought he was going to buy the smile, but he wasn’t fooled. He saw how it broke over her face the way something rotten melts through the bottom of a wet grocery sack after it’s been in the garbage for a week. Gloating smile of the Queen Devil Bitch. She had done this to him, had teamed up with the bad life in his hand and done witchy things to his head. Made him see down to the layer of shit-magic she lived in.

“I see you,” he said. He tripped, went backward flailing, stumbling, and came out of it running toward the town. Ferns whipped his legs, branches cut at his face. Webs of shadow and moonlight fettered the trail, and the shrilling insects had the sound of a metal edge being honed. Up ahead, he spotted a big moonstruck tree standing by itself on a rise overlooking the water. A grandfather tree, a white-magic tree. It called to him. He stopped beside it, sucking air. The moonlight cooled him off, drenched him with silver, and he understood the purpose of the tree. Fountain of whiteness in the dark wood, shining for him alone. He made a fist of his left hand. The thing inside the hand eeled frantically as if it knew what was coming. He studied the deeply grooved, mystic patterns of the bark and found the point of confluence. He steeled himself. Then he drove his fist into the trunk. Brilliant pain lanced up his arm, and he cried out. But he hit the tree again, hit it a third time. He held the hand tight against his body, muffling the pain. It was already swelling, becoming a knuckleless cartoon hand; but nothing moved inside it. The riverbank, with its rustlings and shadows, no longer menaced him; it had been transformed into a place of ordinary lights, ordinary darks, and even the whiteness of the tree looked unmagically bright.

“David!” Debora’s voice, and not far off.

Part of him wanted to wait, to see whether or not she had changed for the innocent, for the ordinary. But he couldn’t trust her, couldn’t trust himself, and he set out running once again.

Mingolla caught the ferry to the west bank, thinking that he would find Gilbey, that a dose of Gilbey’s belligerence would ground him in reality. He sat in the bow next to a group of five other soldiers, one of whom was puking over the side, and to avoid a conversation he turned away and looked down into the black water slipping past. Moonlight edged the wavelets with silver, and among those gleams it seemed he could see reflected the broken curve of his life: a kid living for Christmas, drawing pictures, receiving praise, growing up mindless to high school, sex, and drugs; growing beyond that, beginning to draw pictures again, and then, right where you might expect the curve to assume a more meaningful shape, it was sheared off, left hanging, its process demystified and explicable. He realized how foolish the idea of the ritual had been. Like a dying man clutching a vial of holy water, he had clutched at magic when the logic of existence had proved untenable. Now the frail linkages of that magic had been dissolved, and nothing supported him—he was falling through the dark zones of the war, waiting to be snatched by one of its monsters. He lifted his head and gazed at the west bank. The shore toward which he was heading was as black as a bat’s wing and inscribed with arcana of violent light. Rooftops and palms were cast in silhouette against a rainbow haze of neon; gassy arcs of blood red and lime green and indigo were visible between them: fragments of glowing beasts. The wind bore screams and wild music. The soldiers beside him laughed and cursed, and the one guy kept on puking. Mingolla rested his forehead on the wooden rail, just to feel something solid.

At the Club Demonio, Gilbey’s big-breasted whore was lounging by the bar, staring into her drink. Mingolla pushed through the dancers, through heat and noise and veils of lavender smoke; when he walked up to the whore, she put on a professional smile and made a grab for his crotch. He fended her off. “Where’s Gilbey?” he shouted. She gave him a befuddled look; then the light dawned. “Meengolla?” she said. He nodded. She fumbled in her purse and pulled out a folded paper. “Ees frawm Geel-bee,” she said. “Forr me, five dol-larrs.”

He handed her the money and took the paper. It proved to be a Christian pamphlet with a pen-and-ink sketch of a rail-thin, aggrieved-looking Jesus on the front, and beneath the sketch, a tract whose first line read, “The last days are in season.” He turned it over and found a handwritten note on the back. The note was pure Gilbey. No explanation, no sentiment. Just the basics.

I’m gone to Panama. You want to make that trip, check out a guy named Ruy Barros in Livingston. He’ll fix you up. Maybe I’ll see you.

G.

Mingolla had believed that his confusion had peaked, but the fact of Gilbey’s desertion wouldn’t fit inside his head, and when he tried to make it fit he was left more confused than ever. It wasn’t that he couldn’t understand what had happened. He understood it perfectly; he might have predicted it. Like a crafty rat who had seen his favorite hole blocked by a trap, Gilbey had simply chewed a new hole and vanished through it. The thing that confused Mingolla was his total lack of referents. He and Gilbey and Baylor had seemed to triangulate reality, to locate each other within a coherent map of duties and places and events; and now that they were both gone, Mingolla felt utterly bewildered. Outside the club, he let the crowds push him along and gazed up at the neon animals atop the bars. Giant blue rooster, green bull, golden turtle with fiery red eyes. An advertising man’s hellish pantheon. Bleeds of color washed from the signs, staining the air to a garish paleness, giving everyone a mealy complexion.

Amazing, Mingolla thought, that you could breathe such grainy discolored stuff, that it didn’t start you choking. It was all amazing, all nonsensical. Everything he saw struck him as unique and unfathomable, even the most commonplace of sights. He found himself staring at people—at whores, at street kids, at an MP who was talking to another MP, patting the fender of his jeep as if it were his big olive-drab pet—and trying to figure out what they were really doing, what special significance their actions held for him, what clues they presented that might help him unravel the snarl of his own existence. At last, realizing that he needed peace and quiet, he set out toward the airbase, thinking he would find an empty bunk and sleep off his confusion; but when he came to the cutoff that led to the unfinished bridge, he turned down it, deciding that he wasn’t ready to deal with gate sentries and duty officers. Dense thickets buzzing with insects narrowed the cutoff to a path, and at its end stood a line of sawhorses. He climbed over them and soon was mounting a sharply inclined curve that appeared to lead to a point not far below the lumpish silver moon.

Despite a litter of rubble and cardboard sheeting, the concrete looked pure under the moon, blazing bright, like a fragment of snowy light not quite hardened to the material; and as he ascended he thought he could feel the bridge trembling to his footsteps with the sensitivity of a white nerve. He seemed to be walking into darkness and stars, a solitude the size of creation. It felt good and damn lonely, maybe a little too much so, with the wind flapping pieces of cardboard and the sounds of the insects left behind. After a few minutes he glimpsed the ragged terminus ahead. When he reached it, he sat down carefully, letting his legs dangle. Wind keened through the exposed girders, tugging at his ankles; his hand throbbed and was fever-hot. Below, multicolored brilliance clung to the black margin of the east bank like a colony of bioluminescent algae. He wondered how high he was. Not high enough, he thought. Faint music was fraying on the wind—the inexhaustible delirium of San Francisco de Juticlan—and he imagined that the flickering of the stars was caused by this thin smoke of music drifting across them.

He tried to think what to do. Not much occurred to him. He pictured Gilbey in Panama. Whoring, drinking, fighting. Doing just as he had in Guatemala. That was where the idea of desertion failed Mingolla. In Panama he would be afraid; in Panama, though his hand might not shake, some other malignant twitch would develop; in Panama he would resort to magical cures for his afflictions because he would be too imperiled by the real to derive strength from it. And eventually the war would come to Panama. Desertion would have gained him nothing. He stared out across the moon-silvered jungle, and it seemed that some essential part of him was pouring from his eyes, entering the flow of the wind and rushing away past the Ant Farm and its smoking craters, past guerrilla territory, past the seamless join of sky and horizon, being irresistibly pulled toward a point into which the world’s vitality was emptying. He felt himself emptying as well, growing cold and vacant and slow. His brain became incapable of thought, capable only of recording perceptions. The wind brought green scents that made his nostrils flare. The sky’s blackness folded around him, and the stars were golden pinpricks of sensation. He didn’t sleep, but something in him slept.

A whisper drew him back from the edge of the world. At first he thought it had been his imagination, and he continued staring at the sky, which had lightened to the vivid blue of predawn. Then he heard it again and glanced behind him. Strung out across the bridge, about twenty feet away, were a dozen or so children. Some standing, some crouched. Most were clad in rags, a few wore coverings of vines and leaves, and others were naked. Watchful; silent. Knives glinted in their hands. They were emaciated, their hair long and matted, and Mingolla, recalling the dead children he had seen that morning, was for a moment afraid. But only for a moment. Fear flared in him like a coal puffed to life by a breeze and then died an instant later, suppressed not by any rational accommodation but by a perception of those ragged figures as an opportunity for surrender. He wasn’t eager to die, yet neither did he want to put forth more effort in the cause of survival. Survival, he had learned, was not the soul’s ultimate priority. He kept staring at the children. The way they were posed reminded him of a Neanderthal grouping in the Museum of Natural History. The moon was still up, and they cast vaguely defined shadows like smudges of graphite. Finally Mingolla turned away; the horizon was showing a distinct line of green darkness.

He had expected to be stabbed or pushed, to pinwheel down and break against the Río Dulce, its waters gone a steely color beneath the brightening sky. But instead a voice spoke in his ear: “Hey, gringo .” Squatting beside him was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, with a swarthy monkeylike face framed by tangles of shoulder-length dark hair. Wearing tattered shorts. Coiled serpent tattooed on his brow. He tipped his head to one side, then the other. Perplexed. He might have been trying to see the true Mingolla through layers of false appearance. He made a growly noise in his throat and held up a knife, twisting it this way and that, letting Mingolla observe its keen edge, how it channeled the moonlight along its blade. An army-issue survival knife with a brass-knuckle grip. Mingolla gave an amused sniff.

The boy seemed alarmed by this reaction; he lowered the knife and shifted away. “What you doing here, gringo ?” he asked.

A number of answers occurred to Mingolla, most demanding too much energy to voice; he chose the simplest. “I like it here. I like the bridge.”

The boy squinted at Mingolla. “The bridge is magic,” he said. “You know this?”

“There was a time I might have believed you,” said Mingolla.

“You got to talk slow, man.” The boy frowned. “Too fast, I can’t understand.”

Mingolla repeated his comment, and the boy said, “You believe it, gringo . Why else you here?” With a planing motion of his arm he described an imaginary continuance of the bridge’s upward course. “That’s where the bridge travels now. Don’t have not’ing to do wit’ crossing the river. It’s a piece of white stone. Don’t mean the same t’ing a bridge means.”

Mingolla was surprised to hear his thoughts echoed by someone who so resembled a hominid.

“I come here,” the boy went on. “I listen to the wind, hear it sing in the iron. And I know t’ings from it. I can see the future.” He grinned, exposing blackened teeth, and pointed south toward the Caribbean. “Future’s that way, man.”

Mingolla liked the joke; he felt an affinity for the boy, for anyone who could manage jokes from the boy’s perspective, but he couldn’t think of a way to express his good feeling. Finally he said, “You speak English well.”

“Shit! What you think? ’Cause we live in the jungle, we talk like animals? Shit!” The boy jabbed the point of his knife into the concrete. “I talk English all my life. Gringos , they too stupid to learn Spanish.”

A girl’s voice sounded behind them, harsh and peremptory. The other children had closed to within ten feet, their savage faces intent upon Mingolla, and the girl was standing a bit forward of them. She had sunken checks and deep-set eyes; ratty cables of hair hung down over her single-scoop breasts. Her hip bones tented up a rag of a skirt, which the wind pushed back between her legs. The boy let her finish, then gave a prolonged response, punctuating his words by smashing the brass-knuckle grip of his knife against the concrete, striking sparks with every blow.

“Gracela,” he said to Mingolla, “she wants to kill you. But I say, some men they got one foot in the worl’ of death, and if you kill them, death will take you, too. And you know what?”

“What?” said Mingolla.

“It’s true. You and death”—the boy clasped his hands—“like this.”

“Maybe,” Mingolla said.

“No ‘maybe.’ The bridge tol’ me. Tol’ me I be t’ankful if I let you live. So you be t’ankful to the bridge. That magic you don’ believe, it save your ass.” The boy lowered out of his squat and sat cross-legged. “Gracela, she don’ care ’bout you live or die. She jus’ go ’gainst me ’cause when I leave here, she going to be chief. She’s, you know, impatient.”

Mingolla looked at the girl. She met his gaze coldly—a witch-child with slitted eyes, bramble hair, and ribs poking out. “Where are you going?” he asked the boy.

“I have a dream I will live in the south; I dream I own a warehouse full of gold and cocaine.”

The girl began to harangue him again, and he shot back a string of angry syllables.

“What did you say?” Mingolla asked.

“I say, ‘Gracela, you give me shit, I going to fuck you and t’row you in the river.’ ” He winked at Mingolla. “Gracela she a virgin, so she worry ’bout that firs’ t’ing.”

The sky was graying, pink streaks fading in from the east; birds wheeled up from the jungle below, forming into flocks above the river. In the half-light Mingolla saw that the boy’s chest was crosshatched with ridged scars: knife wounds that hadn’t received proper treatment. Bits of vegetation were trapped in his hair, like primitive adornments.

“Tell me, gringo ,” said the boy. “I hear in America there is a machine wit’ the soul of a man. This is true?”

“More or less,” said Mingolla.

The boy nodded gravely, his suspicions confirmed. “I hear also America has builded a metal worl’ in the sky.”

“They’re building it now.”

“In the house of your president, is there a stone that holds the mind of a dead magician?”

Mingolla gave this due consideration. “I doubt it,” he said. “But it’s possible.”

Wind thudded against the bridge, startling him. He felt its freshness on his face and relished the sensation. That—the fact that he could still take simple pleasure from life—startled him more than had the sudden noise.

The pink streaks in the east were deepening to crimson and fanning wider; shafts of light pierced upward to stain the bellies of some low-lying clouds to mauve. Several of the children began to mutter in unison. A chant. They were speaking in Spanish, but the way their voices jumbled the words, it sounded guttural and malevolent, a language for trolls. Listening to them, Mingolla imagined them crouched around fires in bamboo thickets. Bloody knives lifted sunward over their fallen prey. Making love in the green nights among fleshy Rousseau-like vegetation, while pythons with ember eyes coiled in the branches above their heads.

“Truly, gringo ,” said the boy, apparently still contemplating Mingolla’s answers. “These are evil times.” He stared gloomily down at the river; the wind shifted the heavy snarls of his hair.

Watching him, Mingolla grew envious. Despite the bleakness of his existence, this little monkey king was content with his place in the world, assured of its nature. Perhaps he was deluded, but Mingolla envied his delusion, and he especially envied his dream of gold and cocaine. His own dreams had been dispersed by the war. The idea of sitting and daubing colors onto canvas no longer held any real attraction for him. Nor did the thought of returning to New York. Though survival had been his priority all these months, he had never stopped to consider what survival portended, and now he did not believe he could return. He had, he realized, become acclimated to the war, able to breathe its toxins; he would gag on the air of peace and home. The war was his new home, his newly rightful place.

Then the truth of this struck him with the force of an illumination, and he understood what he had to do.

Baylor and Gilbey had acted according to their natures, and he would have to act according to his, which imposed upon him the path of acceptance. He remembered Tío Moisés’s story about the pilot and laughed inwardly. In a sense his friend—the guy he had mentioned in his unsent letter—had been right about the war, about the world. It was full of designs, patterns, coincidences, and cycles that appeared to indicate the workings of some magical power. But these things were the result of a subtle natural process. The longer you lived, the wider your experience, the more complicated your life became, and eventually you were bound in the midst of so many interactions, a web of circumstance and emotion and event, that nothing was simple anymore and everything was subject to interpretation. Interpretation, however, was a waste of time. Even the most logical of interpretations was merely an attempt to herd mystery into a cage and lock the door on it. It made life no less mysterious. And it was equally pointless to seize upon patterns, to rely on them, to obey the mystical regulations they seemed to imply. Your one effective course had to be entrenchment. You had to admit to mystery, to the incomprehensibility of your situation, and protect yourself against it. Shore up your web, clear it of blind corners, set alarms. You had to plan aggressively. You had to become the monster in your own maze, as brutal and devious as the fate you sought to escape. It was the kind of militant acceptance that Tío Moisés’s pilot had not the opportunity to display, that Mingolla himself—though the opportunity had been his—had failed to display. He saw that now. He had merely reacted to danger and had not challenged or used forethought against it. But he thought he would be able to do that now.

He turned to the boy, thinking he might appreciate this insight into “magic,” and caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. Gracela. Coming up behind the boy, her knife held low, ready to stab. In reflex, Mingolla flung out his injured hand to block her. The knife nicked the edge of his hand, deflected upward, and sliced the top of the boy’s shoulder.

The pain in Mingolla’s hand was excruciating, blinding him momentarily; and then as he grabbed Gracela’s forearm to prevent her from stabbing again, he felt another sensation, one almost covered by the pain. He had thought the thing inside his hand was dead, but now he could feel it fluttering at the edges of the wound, leaking out in the rich trickle of blood that flowed over his wrist. It was trying to worm back inside, wriggling against the flow, but the pumping of his heart was too strong, and soon it was gone, dripping on the white stone of the bridge.

Before he could feel relief or surprise or in any way absorb what had happened, Gracela tried to pull free. Mingolla got to his knees, dragged her down, and dashed her knife hand against the bridge. The knife skittered away. Gracela struggled wildly, clawing at his face, and the other children edged forward. Mingolla levered his left arm under Gracela’s chin, choking her; with his right hand, he picked up the knife and pressed the point into her breast. The children stopped their advance, and Gracela went limp. He could feel her trembling. Tears streaked the grime on her cheeks. She looked like a scared little girl, not a witch.

“Puta!”said the boy. He had come to his feet, holding his shoulder, and was staring daggers at Gracela.

“Is it bad?” Mingolla asked. “The shoulder?”

The boy inspected the bright blood on his fingertips. “It hurts,” he said. He stepped over to stand in front of Gracela and smiled down at her; he unbuttoned the top of his shorts.

Gracela tensed.

“What are you doing?” Mingolla suddenly felt responsible for the girl.

“I going to do what I tol’ her, man.” The boy undid the rest of the buttons and shimmied out of his shorts; he was already half-erect, as if the violence had aroused him.

“No,” said Mingolla, realizing as he spoke that this was not at all wise.

“Take your life,” said the boy sternly. “Walk away.”

A long powerful gust of wind struck the bridge; it seemed to Mingolla that the vibration of the bridge, the beating of his heart, and Gracela’s trembling were driven by the same shimmering pulse. He felt an almost visceral commitment to the moment, one that had nothing to do with his concern for the girl. Maybe, he thought, it was an implementation of his new convictions.

The boy lost patience. He shouted at the other children, herding them away with slashing gestures. Sullenly, they moved off down the curve of the bridge, positioning themselves along the railing, leaving an open avenue. Beyond them, beneath a lavender sky, the jungle stretched to the horizon, broken only by the rectangular hollow made by the airbase. The boy hunkered at Gracela’s feet. “Tonight,” he said to Mingolla, “the bridge have set us together. Tonight we sit, we talk. Now, that’s over. My heart say to kill you. But ’cause you stop Gracela from cutting deep, I give you a chance. She mus’ make a judgmen’. If she say she go wit’ you, we”—he waved toward the other children—“will kill you. If she wan’ to stay, then you mus’ go. No more talk, no bullshit. You jus’ go. Understan’ ?”

Mingolla wasn’t afraid, and his lack of fear was not born of an indifference to life, but of clarity and confidence. It was time to stop reacting away from challenges, time to meet them. He came up with a plan. There was no doubt that Gracela would choose him, choose a chance at life, no matter how slim. But before she could decide, he would kill the boy. Then he would run straight at the others: Without their leader, they might not hang together.

It wasn’t much of a plan, and he didn’t like the idea of hurting the boy; but he thought he might be able to pull it off. “I understand,” he said.

The boy spoke to Gracela; he told Mingolla to release her. She sat up, rubbing the spot where Mingolla had pricked her with the knife. She glanced coyly at him, then at the boy; she pushed her hair back behind her neck and thrust out her breasts as if preening for two suitors. Mingolla was astonished by her behavior. Maybe, he thought, she was playing for time. He stood and pretended to be shaking out his kinks, edging closer to the boy, who remained crouched beside Gracela. In the east a red fireball had cleared the horizon; its sanguine light inspired Mingolla, fueled his resolve. He yawned and edged closer yet, firming his grip on the knife. He would yank the boy’s head back by the hair, cut his throat. Nerves jumped in his chest. A pressure was building inside him, demanding that he act, that he move now. He restrained himself. Another step should do it, another step to be absolutely sure. But as he was about to take that step, Gracela reached out and tapped the boy on the shoulder.

Surprise must have showed on Mingolla’s face, because the boy looked at him and grunted laughter. “You t’ink she pick you?” he said. “Shit! You don’ know Gracela, man. Gringos burn her village. She lick the Devil’s ass ’fore she even shake hands wit’ you.” He grinned, stroked her hair. “’Sides, she t’ink if she fuck me good, maybe I say, ‘Oh, Gracela, I got to have some more of that!’ And who knows? Maybe she right.”

Gracela lay back and wriggled out of her skirt. Between her legs, she was nearly hairless. A smile touched the corners of her mouth. Mingolla stared at her, dumbfounded.

“I not going to kill you, gringo ,” said the boy without looking up; he was running his hand across Gracela’s stomach. “I tol’ you I won’ kill a man so close wit’ death.” Again he laughed. “You look pretty funny trying to sneak up. I like watching that.”

Mingolla was stunned. All the while he had been gearing himself up to kill, shunting aside anxiety and revulsion, he had merely been providing an entertainment for the boy. The heft of the knife seemed to be drawing his anger into a compact shape, and he wanted to carry out his attack, to cut down this little animal who had ridiculed him; but humiliation mixed with the anger, neutralizing it. The poisons of rage shook him; he could feel every incidence of pain and fatigue in his body. His hand was throbbing, bloated and discolored like the hand of a corpse. Weakness pervaded him. And relief.

“Go,” said the boy. He lay down beside Gracela, propped on an elbow, and began to tease one of her nipples erect.

Mingolla took a few hesitant steps away. Behind him, Gracela made a mewling noise and the boy whispered something. Mingolla’s anger was rekindled—they had already forgotten him!—but he kept going. As he passed the other children, one spat at him and another shied a pebble. He fixed his eyes on the white concrete slipping beneath his feet.

When he reached the midpoint of the curve, he turned back. The children had hemmed in Gracela and the boy against the terminus, blocking them from view. The sky had gone bluish gray behind them, and the wind carried their voices. They were singing: a ragged, chirpy song that sounded celebratory. Mingolla’s anger subsided, his humiliation ebbed. He had nothing to be ashamed of; though he had acted unwisely, he had done so from a posture of strength and no amount of ridicule could diminish that. Things were going to work out. Yes, they were! He would make them work out.

For a while he watched the children. At this remove their singing had an appealing savagery, and he felt a trace of wistfulness at leaving them behind. He wondered what would happen after the boy had done with Gracela. He was not concerned, only curious. The way you feel when you think you may have to leave a movie before the big finish. Will our heroine survive? Will justice prevail? Will survival and justice bring happiness in their wake? Soon the end of the bridge came to be bathed in the golden rays of the sunburst; the children seemed to be blackening and dissolving in heavenly fire. That was a sufficient resolution for Mingolla. He tossed Gracela’s knife into the river and went down from the bridge in whose magic he no longer believed, walking toward the war whose mystery he had accepted as his own.

5

At the airbase Mingolla took a stand beside the Sikorsky that had brought him to San Francisco de Juticlan; he had recognized it by the painted flaming letters of the words Whispering Death. He rested his head against the letter g and recalled how Baylor had recoiled from the letters, worried that they might transmit some deadly essence. Mingolla didn’t mind the contact. The painted flames seemed to be warming the inside of his head, stirring up thoughts as slow and indefinite as smoke. Comforting thoughts that embodied no images or ideas. Just a gentle buzz of mental activity, like the idling of an engine. The base was coming to life around him. Jeeps pulling away from barracks; a couple of officers inspecting the belly of a cargo plane; some guy repairing a forklift. Peaceful, homey. Mingolla closed his eyes, lulled into a half-sleep, letting the sun and the painted flames bracket him with heat, real and imagined.

Sometime later—how much later, he could not be sure—a voice said, “Fucked up your hand pretty good, didn’tcha?”

The two pilots were standing by the cockpit door. In their black flight suits and helmets they looked neither weird nor whimsical, but creatures of functional menace. Masters of the Machine. “Yeah,” said Mingolla. “Fucked it up.”

“How’d ya do it?” asked the pilot on the left.

“Hit a tree.”

“Musta been goddamn crocked to hit a tree,” said the pilot on the right. “Tree ain’t goin’ nowhere if you hit it.”

Mingolla made a noncommittal noise. “You guys going up to the Farm?”

“You bet! What’s the matter, man? Had enough of them wild women?” Pilot on the right.

“Guess so. Wanna gimme a ride?”

“Sure thing,” said the pilot on the left. “Whyn’t you climb on in front. You can sit back of us.”

“Where your buddies?” asked the pilot on the right. “Gone,” said Mingolla as he climbed into the cockpit.

One of the pilots said, “Didn’t think we’d be seein’ them boys again.”

Mingolla strapped into the observer’s seat behind the copilot’s position. He had assumed there would be a lengthy instrument check, but as soon as the engines had been warmed, the Sikorsky lurched up and veered northward. With the exception of the weapons systems, none of the defenses had been activated. The radar, the thermal imager, and the terrain display showed blank screens. A nervous thrill ran across the muscles of Mingolla’s stomach as he considered the varieties of danger to which the pilots’ reliance upon their miraculous helmets had laid them open; but his nervousness was subsumed by the whispery rhythms of the rotors and his sense of the Sikorsky’s power. He recalled having a similar feeling of secure potency while sitting at the controls of his gun. He had never let that feeling grow, never let it empower him. He had been a fool.

They followed the northeasterly course of the river, which coiled like a length of blue-steel razor wire between jungled hills. The pilots laughed and joked, and the flight came to have the air of a ride with a couple of good ol’ boys going nowhere fast and full of free beer. At one point the copilot piped his voice through the on-board speakers and launched into a dolorous country song.

“Whenever we kiss, dear, our two lips meet,

And whenever you’re not with me, we’re apart.

When you sawed my dog in half, that was depressin’,

But when you shot me in the chest, you broke my heart.”

As the copilot sang, the pilot rocked the Sikorsky back and forth in a drunken accompaniment, and after the song ended, he called back to Mingolla, “You believe this here son of a bitch wrote that? He did! Picks a guitar, too! Boy’s a genius!”

“It’s a great song,” said Mingolla, and he meant it. The song had made him happy, and that was no small thing.

They went rocking through the skies, singing the first verse over and over. But then, as they left the river behind, still maintaining a northeasterly course, the copilot pointed to a section of jungle ahead and shouted, “Beaners! Quadrant Four! You got ’em?”

“Got ’em!” said the pilot. The Sikorsky swerved down toward the jungle, shuddered, and flame veered from beneath them. An instant later, a huge swath of jungle erupted into a gout of marbled smoke and fire. “Whee-oo!” the copilot sang out, jubilant. “Whisperin’ Deathstrikes again!” With guns blazing, they went swooping through blowing veils of dark smoke. Acres of trees were burning, and still they kept up the attack. Mingolla gritted his teeth against the noise, and when at last the firing stopped, dismayed by this insanity, he sat slumped, his head down. He suddenly doubted his ability to cope with the insanity of the Ant Farm and remembered all his reasons for fear.

The copilot turned back to him. “You ain’t got no call to look so gloomy, man,” he said. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch, y’know that?”

The pilot began a bank toward the east, toward the Ant Farm. “How you figure that?” Mingolla asked.

“I gotta clear sight of you, man,” said the copilot. “I can tell you for true you ain’t gonna be at the Farm much longer. It ain’t clear why or nothin’. But I ’spect you gonna be wounded. Not bad, though. Just a goin’-home wound.”

As the pilot completed the bank, a ray of sun slanted into the cockpit, illuminating the copilot’s visor, and for a split second Mingolla could make out the vague shadow of the face beneath. It seemed lumpy and malformed. His imagination added details. Bizarre growths, cracked cheeks, an eye webbed shut. Like a face out of a movie about nuclear mutants. He was tempted to believe that he had really seen this; the copilot’s deformities would validate his prediction of a secure future. But Mingolla rejected the temptation. He was afraid of dying, afraid of the terrors held by life at the Ant Farm, yet he wanted no more to do with magic . . . unless there was magic involved in being a good soldier. In obeying the disciplines, in the practice of fierceness.

“Could be his hand’ll get him home,” said the pilot. “That hand looks pretty fucked up to me. Looks like a million-dollar wound, that hand.”

“Naw, I don’t get it’s his hand,” said the copilot. “Somethin’ else. Whatever, it’s gonna do the trick.”

Mingolla could see his own face floating in the black plastic of the copilot’s visor; he looked warped and pale, so thoroughly unfamiliar that for a moment he thought the face might be a bad dream the copilot was having.

“What the Hell’s with you, man?” the copilot asked. “You don’t believe me?”

Mingolla wanted to explain that his attitude had nothing to do with belief or disbelief, that it signaled his intent to obtain a safe future by means of securing his present; but he couldn’t think how to put it into words the copilot would accept. The copilot would merely refer again to his visor as testimony to a magical reality or perhaps would point up ahead where—because the cockpit plastic had gone opaque under the impact of direct sunlight—the sun now appeared to hover in a smoky darkness: a distinct fiery sphere with a streaming corona, like one of those cabalistic emblems embossed on ancient seals. It was an evil, fearsome-looking thing, and though Mingolla was unmoved by it, he knew the pilot would see in it a powerful sign.

“You think I’m lyin’ ?” said the copilot angrily. “You think I’d be bullshittin’ you ’bout somethin’ like this? Man, I ain’t lyin’ ! I’m givin’ you the good goddamn word!”

They flew east into the sun, whispering death, into a world disguised as a strange bloody enchantment, over the dark green wild where war had taken root, where men in combat armor fought for no good reason against men wearing brass scorpions on their berets, where crazy lost men wandered the mystic light of Fire Zone Emerald and mental wizards brooded upon things not yet seen. The copilot kept the black bubble of his visor angled back toward Mingolla, waiting for a response. But Mingolla just stared, and before too long the copilot turned away.

ESCAPE FROM KATHMANDU

Kim Stanley Robinson

Mr. Robinson’s “Green Mars” (September1985) was nominated for the Nebula award and is currently a finalist for the 1985 Hugo award. in the following story, this master of deeply moving prose, has taken some time out for an uproarious tale of Yetis,Trekking, Jimmy Carter, and Kathmandu.

Usually I’m not much interested in other people’s mail. I mean when you get right down to it, even my own mail doesn’t do that much for me. Most of it’s junk mail or bills, and even the real stuff is, like, official news from my sister-in-law, xeroxed for the whole clan, or at best an occasional letter from a climbing buddy that reads like a submission to the Alpine Journal for the Illiterate. Taking the trouble to read some stranger’s version of this kind of stuff? You must be kidding.

But there was something about the dead mail at the Hotel Star in Kathmandu that drew me. Several times each day I would escape the dust and noise of Alice’s Second City, cross the sunny paved courtyard of the Star, enter the lobby and get my key from one of the zoned-out Hindu clerks—nice guys all—and turn up the uneven stairs to go to my room. And there at the bottom of the stairs was a big wooden letter rack nailed to the wall, absolutely stuffed with mail. There must have been two hundred letters and postcards stuck up there—thick packets, blue airmail pages, dog-eared postcards from Thailand or Peru, ordinary envelopes covered with complex addresses and purple postal marks—all of them bent over the wooden retainer bars of the rack, all of them gray with dust. Above the rack a cloth print of Ganesh stared down with his sad elephant gaze, as if he represented all the correspondents who had mailed these letters, whose messages were never going to reach their destinations. It was dead mail at its deadest.

And after a while it got to me. I became curious. Ten times a day I passed this sad sight, which never changed—no letters taken away, no new ones added. Such a lot of wasted effort! Once upon a time these names had taken off for Nepal, a long way away no matter where they were from. And back home some relative or friend or lover had taken the time to sit down and write a letter, which to me is like dropping a brick on your foot as far as entertainment is concerned. Heroic, really. “Dear George Fredericks!” they cried. “Where are you, how are you? Your sister-in-law had her baby, and I’m going back to school. When will you be home?” Signed, Faithful Friend, Thinking of You. But George had left for the Himal, or had checked into another hotel and never been to the Star, or was already off to Thailand, Peru, you name it; and the heartfelt effort to reach him was wasted.

One day I came into the hotel a little wasted myself, and noticed this letter to George Fredericks. Just glancing through them all, you know, out of curiosity. My name is George, also—George Fergusson. And this letter to George was the thickest letter-sized envelope there, all dusty and bent permanently across the middle. “George Fredericks—Hotel Star—Thamel Neighborhood—Kathmandu—NEPAL.” It had a trio of Nepali stamps on it—the King, Cho Oyo, the King again—and the postmark date was illegible, as always.

Slowly, reluctantly, I shoved the letter back into the rack. I tried to satisfy my curiosity by reading a postcard from Koh Samui: “Hello! Do you remember me? I had to leave in December when I ran out of money. I’ll be back next year. Hello to Franz and Badim Badur—Michel.”

No, no. I put the card back and hoisted myself upstairs. Postcards are all alike. Do you remember me? Exactly. But that letter to George, now. About half-an-inch thick! Maybe six or eight ounces—some sort of epic, for sure. And apparently written in Nepal, which naturally made it more interesting to me. I’d spent most of the previous several years in Nepal, you see, climbing and guiding treks and hanging out; and the rest of the world was beginning to seem pretty unreal. These days I felt the same sort of admiration for the ingenuity of the writers of The International Herald Tribune that I used to feel for the writers of The National Enquirer. “Jeez,” I’d think as I scanned a Tribbie in front of a Thamel bookstore, and read of strange wars, unlikely summits, bizarre hijackings. “How do they think these things up?”

But an epic from Nepal, now. That was reality. And addressed to a “George F.” Maybe they had misspelled the last name, eh? And anyway, it was clear by the way the letter was doubled over, and the envelope falling apart, that it had been stuck there for years. A dead loss to the world, if someone didn’t save it and read it. All that agony of emotions, of brain cells, of finger muscles, all wasted. It was a damn shame.

So I took it.

II

My room, one of the nicest in all Thamel, was on the fourth floor of the Star. The view was eastward, toward the tall bat-filled trees of the King’s palace, overlooking the jumble of Thamel shops. A lot of big evergreens dotted the confusion of buildings; in fact, from my height it looked like a city of trees. In the distance I could see the green hills that contained the Kathmandu Valley, and before the clouds formed in the mornings I could even see some white spikes of the Himal to the north.

The room itself was simple: a bed and a chair, under the light of a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. But what else do you really need? It’s true that the bed was lumpy; but with my foam pad from my climbing gear laid over it to level it out, it was fine. And I had my own bathroom. It’s true the seatless toilet leaked pretty badly, but since the shower poured directly onto the floor and leaked also, it didn’t matter. It was also true that the shower came in two parts, a waist-high faucet and a showerhead near the ceiling, and the showerhead didn’t work, so that to take a shower I had to sit on the floor under the faucet. But that was okay—it was all okay—because that shower was hot. The water heater was right there in the room hanging over the toilet, and the water that came from it was so hot that when I took a shower I actually had to turn on the cold water too. That in itself made it one of the finest bathrooms in Thamel.

Anyway, this room and bath had been my castle for about a month, while I waited for my next trekkers’ group from Want To Take You Higher Ltd. to arrive. When I entered it with the lifted letter in hand I had to kick my way through clothes, climbing gear, sleeping bag, food, books, maps, Tribbies—sweep a pile of such stuff off the chair—and clear a space for the chair by the windowsill. Then I sat down, and tried to open the bent old envelope without actually ripping it.

No way. It wasn’t a Nepali envelope, and there was some real glue on the flap. I did what I could, but the CIA wouldn’t have been proud of me.

Out it came. Eight sheets of lined paper, folded twice like most letters, and then bent double by the rack. Writing on both sides. The handwriting was miniaturized and neurotically regular, as easy to read as a paperback. The first page was dated June 2, 1985. So much for my guess concerning its age, but I would have sworn the envelope looked four or five years old. That’s Kathmandu dust for you. A sentence near the beginning was underlined heavily: “You must not tell ANYBODY about this!!!” Whoah, heavy! I glanced out the window, even. A letter with some secrets in it! How great! I tilted the chair back, flattened the pages, and began to read.

June 2nd, 1985,

Dear Freds—

I know, it’s a miracle to get even a postcard from me, much less a letter like this one’s going to be. But an amazing thing has happened to me and you’re the only friend I can trust to keep it to himself. You must not tell ANYBODY about this!!! Okay? I know you won’t—ever since we were roommates in the dorm you’ve been the one I can talk to about anything, in confidence. And I’m glad I’ve got a friend like you, because I’ve found I really have to tell this to somebody, or go crazy.

As you may or may not remember, I got my Master’s in Zoology at U.C. Davis soon after you left, and I put in more years than I care to recall on a Ph.D. there before I got disgusted and quit. I wasn’t going to have anything more to do with any of that, but last fall I got a letter from a friend I had shared an office with, a Sarah Hornsby. She was going to be part of a zoological/botanical expedition to the Himalayas, a camp modeled on the Cronin expedition, where a broad range of specialists set up near treeline, in as pure a wilderness as they can conveniently get to. They wanted me along because of my “extensive experience in Nepal,” meaning they wanted me to be sirdar, and my degree didn’t have a thing to do with it. That was fine by me. I took the job and went hacking away at the bureaucratic underbrush in Kathmandu. You would have done it better, but I did okay. Central Immigration, Ministry of Tourism, Forests and Parks, RNAC, the whole horrible routine, which clearly was designed by someone who had read too much Kafka. But eventually it got done and I took off in the early spring with four animal behaviorists, three botanists, and a ton of supplies, and flew north. We were joined at the airstrip by 22 local porters and a real sirdar, and we started trekking.

I’m not going to tell you exactly where we went. Not because of you; it’s just too dangerous to commit it to print. But we were up near the top of one of the watersheds, near the crest of the Himalayas and the border with Tibet. You know how those valleys end: tributaries keep getting higher and higher, and finally there’s a last set of box canyon-type valleys fingering up into the highest peaks. We set our base camp where three of these dead-end valleys met, and members of the group could head upstream or down depending on their project. There was a trail to the camp, and a bridge over the river near it, but the three upper valleys were wilderness, and it was tough to get through the forest up into them. It was what these folks wanted, however—untouched wilderness, almost.

When the camp was set the porters left, and there the eight of us were. My old friend Sarah Hornsby was the ornithologist—she’s quite good at it, and I spent some time working with her. But she had a boyfriend along, the mammalogist (no, not that, Freds), Phil Adrakian. I didn’t like him much, from the start. He was the expedition leader, and absolutely Mr. Animal Behavior—but he sure had a tough time finding any mammals up there. Then Valerie Budge was the entomologist—no problem finding subjects for her, eh? (Yes, she did bug me. Another expert.) And Armaat Ray was the herpetologist, though he ended up helping Phil a lot with the night blinds. The botanists were named Kitty, Dominique, and John; they spent a lot of time to themselves, in a large tent full of plant samplings.

So—camp life with a zoological expedition. I don’t suppose you’ve ever experienced it. Compared to a climbing expedition it isn’t that exciting, I’ll tell you. On this one I spent the first week or two crossing the bridge and establishing the best routes through the forest into the three high valleys; after that I helped Sarah with her project, mostly. But the whole time I entertained myself watching this crew—being an animal behaviorist for the animal behaviorists, so to speak.

What interests me, having once given it a try and decided it wasn’t worth it, is why others carry on. Following animals around, then explaining every little thing you see, and then arguing intensely with everyone else about the explanations—for a career? Why on earth would anyone do it?

I talked about it with Sarah, one day when we were up the middle valley looking for beehives. I told her I had formed a classification system.

She laughed. “Taxonomy! You can’t escape your training.” And she asked me to tell her about it.

First, I said, there were the people who had a genuine and powerful fascination with animals. She was that way herself, I said; when she saw a bird flying, there was a look on her face . . . it was like she was seeing a miracle.

She wasn’t so sure she approved of that; you have to be scientifically detached, you know. But she admitted the type certainly existed.

Then, I said, there were the stalkers. These people liked to crawl around in the bush tailing other creatures, like kids playing a game. I went on to explain why I thought this was such a powerful urge; it seemed to me that the life it led to was very similar to the lives led by our primitive ancestors, for a million long years. Living in camps, stalking animals in the woods: to get back to that style of life is a powerfully satisfying feeling.

Sarah agreed, and pointed out that it was also true that nowadays when you got sick of camp life you could go out and sit in a hot bath drinking brandy and listening to Beethoven, as she put it.

“That’s right!” I said. “And even in camp there’s quite a night life, you’ve all got your Dostoevski and your arguments over E. O. Wilson . . . it’s the best of both worlds. Yeah, I think most of you are stalkers on some level.”

“But you always say, ‘you people,’ ” Sarah pointed out to me. “Why are you outside it, Nathan? Why did you quit?”

And here it got serious; for a few years we had been on the same path, and now we weren’t, because I had left it. I thought carefully about how to explain myself. “Maybe it’s because of type three, the theorists. Because we must remember that animal behavior is a Very Respectable Academic Field! It has to have its intellectual justification, you can’t just go into the academic senate and say, ‘Distinguished colleagues, we do it because we like the way birds fly, and it’s fun to crawl in the bushes!’ ” Sarah laughed at that. “It’s true.”

And I mentioned ecology and the balance of nature, population biology and the preservation of species, evolution theory and how life became what it is, sociobiology and the underlying animal causes for social behavior . . . But she objected, pointing out that those were real concerns.

“Sociobiology?” I asked. She winced. I admitted, then, that there were indeed some excellent angles for justifying the study of animals, but I claimed that for some people these became the most important part of the field. As I said, “For most of the people in our department, the theories became more important than the animals. What they observed in the field was just more data for their theory! What interested them was on the page or at the conference, and a lot of them only do field work because you have to to prove you can.”

“Oh, Nathan,” she said. “You sound cynical, but cynics are just idealists who have been disappointed. I remember that about you—you’re such an idealist!”

I know, Freds—you will be agreeing with her: Nathan Howe, idealist. And maybe I am. That’s what I told her: “Maybe I am. But jeez, the atmosphere in the department made me sick. Theorists backstabbing each other over their pet ideas, and sounding just as scientific as they could, when it isn’t really scientific at all! You can’t test these theories by designing an experiment and looking for reproducibility, and you can’t isolate your factors or vary them, or use controls—it’s just observation and untestable hypothesis, over and over! And yet they acted like such solid scientists, math models and all, like chemists or something. It’s just scientism.”

Sarah just shook her head at me. “You’re too idealistic, Nathan. You want things perfect. But it isn’t so simple. If you want to study animals, you have to make compromises. As for your classification system, you should write it up for the Sociobiological Review. But it’s just a theory, remember. If you forget that, you fall into the trap yourself.”

She had a point, and besides we caught sight of some bees and had to hurry to follow them upstream. So the conversation ended. But during the following evenings in the tent, when Valerie Budge was explaining to us how human society behaved pretty much like ants—or when Sarah’s boyfriend Adrakian, frustrated by his lack of sightings, went off on long analytical jags like he was the hottest theorist since Robert Trivers—she would give me a look and a smile, and I knew I had made my point. Actually, though he talked a big line, I don’t think Adrakian was all that good; his publications wouldn’t exactly give a porter backstrain, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t figure out what Sarah saw in him.

One day soon after that, Sarah and I returned to the middle high valley to hunt again for beehives. It was a cloudless morning, a classic Himalayan forest climb: cross the bridge, hike among the boulders in the streambed, ascending from pool to pool; then up through damp trees and underbrush, over lumpy lawns of moss. Then atop the wall of the lower valley, and onto the floor of the upper valley, much clearer and sunnier up there in a big rhododendron forest. The rhododendron blooms still flared on every branch, and with the flowers’ pink intensity, and the long cones of sunlight shafting down through the leaves to illuminate rough black bark, orange fungi, bright green ferns—it was like hiking through a dream. And three thousand feet above us soared a snowy horseshoe ring of peaks. The Himalayas—you know.

So we were in good spirits as we hiked up this high valley, following the streambed. And we were in luck, too. Above one small turn and lift the stream widened into a long narrow pool; on the south face above it was a cliff of striated yellowish granite, streaked with big horizontal cracks. And spilling down from these cracks were beehives. Parts of the cliff seemed to pulsate blackly, clouds of bees drifted in front of it, and above the quiet sound of the stream I could hear the mellow buzz of the bees going about their work. Excited, Sarah and I sat on a rock in the sun, got out our binoculars, and started watching for bird life. Goraks up valley on the snow, a lammergeier sailing over the peaks, finches beeping around as always—and then I saw it—a flick of yellow, just bigger than the biggest hummingbird. A warbler, bobbing on a twig that hung before the hive cliff. Down it flew, to a fallen piece of hive wax; peck peck peck; wax into bird. A honey warbler. I nudged Sarah and pointed it out, but she had already seen it. We were still for a long time, watching.

Edward Cronin, leader of a previous expedition of this kind to the Himalayas, did one of the first extensive studies of the honey warbler, and I knew that Sarah wanted to check his observations and continue the work. Honey warblers are unusual birds, in that they manage to live off the excess wax of the honeycombs, with the help of some bacteria in their gastro-intestinal systems. It’s a digestive feat hardly any other creature on earth has managed, and it’s obviously a good move for the bird, as it means they have a very large food source that nothing else is interested in. This makes them very worthy of study, though they hadn’t gotten a whole lot of it up to that point—something Sarah hoped to change.

When the warbler, quick and yellow, flew out of sight, Sarah stirred at last—took a deep breath, leaned over and hugged me. Kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks for getting me here, Nathan.”

I was uncomfortable. The boyfriend, you know—and Sarah was so much finer a person than he was . . . And besides, I was remembering, back when we shared that office, she had come in one night all upset because the boyfriend of the time had declared for someone else, and what with one thing and another—well, I don’t want to talk about it. But we had been good friends. And I still felt a lot of that. So to me it wasn’t just a peck on the cheek, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I’m sure I got all awkward and formal in my usual way.

In any case, we were pretty pleased at our discovery, and we returned to the honey cliff every day after that for a week. It was a really nice time. Then Sarah wanted to continue some studies she had started of the goraks, and so I hiked on up to Honey Cliff on my own a few times.

It was on one of those days by myself that it happened. The warbler didn’t show up, and I continued upstream to see if I could find the source. Clouds were rolling up from the valley below and it looked like it would rain later, but it was still sunny up where I was. I reached the source of the stream—a spring-fed pool at the bottom of a talus slope—and stood watching it pour down into the world. One of those quiet Himalayan moments, where the world seems like an immense chapel.

Then a movement across the pool caught my eye, there in the shadow of two gnarled oak trees. I froze, but I was right out in the open for anyone to see. There under one of the oaks, in shadow darker for the sunlight, a pair of eyes watched me. They were about my height off the ground. I thought it might be a bear, and was mentally reviewing the trees behind me for climbability, when it moved again—it blinked. And then I saw that the eyes had whites visible around the iris. A villager, out hunting? I didn’t think so. My heart began to hammer away inside me, and I couldn’t help swallowing. Surely that was some sort of face there in the shadows? A bearded face?

Of course I had an idea what I might be trading glances with. The yeti, the mountain man, the elusive creature of the snows. The Abominable Snowman, for God’s sake! My heart’s never pounded faster. What to do? The whites of its eyes . . . baboons have white eyelids that they use to make threats, and if you look at them directly they see the white of your eyes, and believe you are threatening them; on the off-chance that this creature had a similar code, I tilted my head down and looked at him indirectly. I swear it appeared to nod back at me.

Then another blink, only the eyes didn’t return. The bearded face and the shape below it were gone. I started breathing again, listened as hard as I could, but never heard anything except for the chuckle of the stream.

After a minute or two I crossed the stream and took a look at the ground under the oak. It was mossy, and there were areas of moss that had been stepped on by something at least as heavy as me; but no clear tracks, of course. And nothing more than that, in any direction.

I hiked back down to camp in a daze; I hardly saw a thing, and jumped at every little sound. You can imagine how I felt—a sighting like that . . .!

And that very night, while I was trying to quietly eat my stew and not reveal that anything had happened, the group’s conversation veered onto the topic of the yeti. I almost dropped my fork. It was Adrakian again—he was frustrated at the fact that despite all of the spoor visible in the area, he had only actually seen some squirrels and a distant monkey or two. Of course it would have helped if he’d spent the night in the night blinds more often. Anyway, he wanted to bring up something, to be the center of attention and take the stage as The Expert. “You know these high valleys are exactly the zone the yeti live in,” he announced matter-of-factly.

That’s when the fork almost left me. “It’s almost certain they exist, of course,” Adrakian went on, with a funny smile. “Oh, Philip,” Sarah said. She said that a lot to him these days, which didn’t bother me at all.

“It’s true.” Then he went into the whole bit, which of course all of us knew: the tracks in the snow that Eric Shipton photographed, George Schaller’s support for the idea, the prints Cronin’s party found, the many other sightings . . . “There are thousands of square miles of impenetrable mountain wilderness here, as we now know firsthand.”

Of course I didn’t need any convincing. And the others were perfectly willing to concede the notion. “Wouldn’t that be something if we found one!” Valerie said. “Got some good photos—”

“Or found a body,” John said. Botanists think in terms of stationary subjects.

Phil nodded slowly. “Or if we captured a live one . . .”

“We’d be famous,” Valerie said.

Theorists. They might even get their names latinized and made part of the new species’ name. Gorilla montani adrakianias-budgeon.

I couldn’t help myself; I had to speak up. “If we found good evidence of a yeti it would be our duty to get rid of it and forget about it,” I said, perhaps a bit too loudly.

They all stared at me. “Whatever for?” Valerie said.

“For the sake of the yeti, obviously,” I said. “As animal behaviorists you’re presumably concerned about the welfare of the animals you study, right? And the ecospheres they live in? But if the existence of the yeti were confirmed, it would be disastrous for both. There would be an invasion of expeditions, tourists, poachers—yetis in zoos, in primate center cages, in laboratories under the knife, stuffed in museums—” I was getting upset. “I mean what’s the real value of the yeti for us, anyway?” They only stared at me: value? “Their value is the fact that they’re unknown, they’re beyond science. They’re the part of the wilderness we can’t touch.”

“I can see Nathan’s point,” Sarah remarked in the ensuing silence, with a look at me that made me lose my train of thought. Her agreement meant an awful lot more than I would have expected . . .

The others were shaking their heads. “A nice sentiment,” Valerie said. “But really, hardly any of them would be affected by study. Think what they’d add to our knowledge of primate evolution!”

“Finding one would be a contribution to science,” Phil said, glaring at Sarah. And he really believed that, too, I have to give him that.

Armaat said slyly, “It wouldn’t do any harm to our chances for tenure, either.”

“There is that,” Phil admitted. “But the real point is, you have to abide by what’s true. If we found a yeti we’d be obliged to say so, because it was so—no matter how we felt about it. Otherwise you get into suppressing data, altering data, all that kind of thing.”

I shook my head. “There are values that are more important than scientific integrity.”

And the argument went on from there, mostly repeating points. “You’re an idealist,” Phil said to me at one point. “You can’t do zoology without disturbing some subject animals to a certain extent.”

“Maybe that’s why I got out,” I said. And I had to stop myself from going further. How could I say that he was corrupted by the tremendous job pressures in the field to the point where he’d do anything to make a reputation, without the argument getting ugly? Impossible. And Sarah would be upset with me. I only sighed. “What about the subject animal?”

Valerie said indignantly, “They’d trank it, study it, put it back in its environment. Maybe keep one in captivity, where it would live a lot more comfortably than in the wild.”

Total corruption. Even the botanists looked uncomfortable with that one.

“I don’t think we have to worry,” Armaat said with his sly smile. “The beast is supposed to be nocturnal.”—Because Phil had shown no enthusiasm for night blinds, you see.

“Exactly why I’m starting a high-valley night blind,” Phil snapped, tired of Armaat’s needling. “Nathan, I’ll need you to come along and help set it up.”

“And find the way,” I said. The others continued to argue, Sarah taking my position, or at least something sympathetic to it; I retired, worried about the figure in the shadows I had seen that day. Phil watched me suspiciously as I left.

So, Phil had his way, and we set up a tiny blind in the upper valley to the west of the one I had made the sighting in. We spent several nights up in an oak tree, and saw a lot of Himalayan spotted deer, and some monkeys at dawn. Phil should have been pleased, but he only got sullen. It occurred to me from some of his mutterings that he had hoped all along to find the yeti; he had come craving that big discovery.

And one night it happened. The moon was gibbous, and thin clouds let most of its light through. About two hours before dawn I was in a doze, and Adrakian elbowed me. Wordlessly he pointed at the far side of a small pool in the stream.

Shadows in shadows, shifting. A streak of moonlight on the water—then, silhouetted above it, an upright figure. For a moment I saw its head clearly, a tall, oddly shaped, furry skull. It looked almost human.

I wanted to shout a warning; instead I shifted my weight on the platform. It creaked very slightly, and instantly the figure was gone.

“Idiot!” Phil whispered. In the moonlight he looked murderous. “I’m going after him!” He jumped out of the tree and pulled what I assumed was a tranquilizer pistol from his down jacket.

“You can’t find anything out there at night!” I whispered, but he was gone. I climbed down and took off after him—with what purpose I wasn’t sure.

Well, you know the forest at night. Not a chance of seeing animals, or of getting around very easily, either. I have to give it to Adrakian—he was fast, and quiet. I lost him immediately, and after that only heard an occasional snapped branch in the distance. More than an hour passed, and I was only wandering through the trees. The moon had set and the sky was about halfway to dawn light when I returned to the stream.

I rounded a big boulder that stood on the bank and almost ran straight into a yeti coming the other way, as if we were on a busy sidewalk and had veered the same direction to avoid each other. He was a little shorter than me; dark fur covered his body and head, but left his face clear—a patch of pinkish skin that in the dim light looked quite human. His nose was as much human as primate—broad, but protruding from his face—like an extension of the occipital crest that ridged his skull fore-to-aft. His mouth was broad and his jaw, under its ruff of fur, very broad—but nothing that took him outside the parameters of human possibility. He had thick eyebrow crests bent high over his eyes, so that he had a look of permanent surprise, like a cat I once owned.

At this moment I’m sure he really was surprised. We both were as still as trees, swaying gently in the wind of our confrontation—but no other movement. I wasn’t even breathing. What to do? I noticed he was carrying a small smoothed stick, and there in the fur on his neck were some objects on a cord. His face—tools—ornamentation: a part of me, the part outside the shock of it all, was thinking (I suppose I am still a zoologist at heart), They aren’t just primates, they’re hominid.

As if to confirm this idea, he spoke to me. He hummed briefly; squeaked; sniffed the air hard a few times; lifted his lip (quite a canine was revealed) and whistled, very softly. In his eyes there was a question, so calmly, gently, and intelligently put forth that I could hardly believe I couldn’t understand and answer it.

I raised my hand, very slowly, and tried to say “Hello.” I know, stupid, but what do you say when you meet a yeti? Anyway, nothing came out but a strangled “Huhn.”

He tilted his head to the side inquisitively, and repeated the sound. “Huhn. Huhn. Huhn.”

Suddenly he jacked his head forward and stared past me, upstream. He opened his mouth wide and stood there listening. He stared at me, trying to judge me. (I swear I could tell these things!)

Upstream there was a crash of branches, and he took me by the arm and wham, we were atop the stream bank and in the forest. Hoppety-hop through the trees and we were down on our bellies behind a big fallen log, lying side-by-side in squishy wet moss. My arm hurt.

Phil Adrakian appeared down in the streambed, looking considerably the worse for wear. He’d scraped through some brush and torn the nylon of his down jacket in several places, so that fluffy white down wafted away from him as he walked. And he’d fallen in mud somewhere. The yeti squinted hard as he looked at him, clearly mystified by the escaping down.

“Nathan!” Phil cried. “Naaaa—thannnn!” He was still filled with energy, it seemed. “I saw one! Nathan, where are you, dammit!” He continued downstream, yelling, and the yeti and I lay there and watched him pass by.

I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a more satisfying moment.

When he had disappeared around a bend in the stream, the yeti sat up and sprawled back against the log like a tired backpacker. The sun rose, and he only squeaked, whistled, breathed slowly, watched me. What was he thinking? At this point I didn’t have a clue. It was even frightening me; I couldn’t imagine what might happen next.

His hands, longer and skinnier than human hands, plucked at my clothes. He plucked at his own necklace, pulled it up over his head. What looked like fat seashells were strung on a cord of braided hemp. They were fossils, of shells very like scallop shells—evidence of the Himalayas’ days underwater. What did the yeti make of them? No way of knowing. But clearly they were valued, they were part of a culture.

For a long time he just looked at this necklace of his. Then, very carefully, he placed this necklace over my head, around my neck. My skin burned in an instant flush, everything blurred through tears, my throat hurt—I felt just like God had stepped from behind a tree and blessed me, and for no reason, you know? I didn’t deserve it.

Without further ado he hopped up and walked off bowleggedly, without a glance back. I was left alone in the morning light with nothing except for the necklace, which hung solidly on my chest. And a sore arm. So it had happened, I hadn’t dreamed it. I had been blessed.

When I had collected my wits I hiked downstream and back to camp. By the time I got there the necklace was deep in one of my down jacket’s padded pockets, and I had a story all worked out.

Phil was already there, chattering to the entire group. “There you are!” he shouted. “Where the hell were you? I was beginning to think they had gotten you!”

“I was looking for you,” I said, finding it very easy to feign irritation. “Who’s this they?”

“The yeti, you fool! You saw him too, don’t deny it! And I followed him and saw him again, up the river there.”

I shrugged and looked at him dubiously. “I didn’t see anything.”

“You weren’t in the right place! You should have been with me.” He turned to the others. “We’ll shift the camp up there for a few days, very quietly. It’s an unprecedented opportunity!”

Valerie was nodding, Armaat was nodding, even Sarah looked convinced. The botanists looked happy to have some excitement.

I objected that moving that many people upvalley would be difficult, and disruptive to whatever life was up there. And I suggested that what Phil had seen was a bear. But Phil wasn’t having it. “What I saw had a big occipital crest, and walked upright. It was a yeti.”

So despite my protests, plans were made to move the camp to the high valley and commence an intensive search for the yeti. I didn’t know what to do. More protests from me would only make it look suspiciously like I had seen what Phil had seen. I have never been very clever at thinking up subterfuges to balk the plans of others; that’s why I left the university in the first place.

I was at my wit’s end when the weather came through for me with an early monsoon rainstorm. It gave me an idea. The watershed for our valley was big and steep, and one day’s hard rain, which we got, would quickly elevate the level of water in our river. We had to cross the bridge before we could start up the three high valleys, and we had to cross two more to get back out to the airstrip.

So I had my chance. In the middle of the night I snuck out and went down to the bridge. It was the usual village job: piles of big stones on each bank, supporting the three half logs of the span. The river was already washing the bottom of the stone piles, and some levering with a long branch collapsed the one on our shore. It was a strange feeling to ruin a bridge, one of the most valuable human works in the Himalayas, but I went at it with a will. Quickly the logs slumped and fell away from each other, and the end of the downstream one floated away. It was easy enough to get the other two under way as well. Then I snuck back into camp and into bed.

And that was that. Next day I shook my head regretfully at the discovery, and mentioned that the flooding would be worse downstream. I wondered if we had enough food to last through the monsoon, which of course we didn’t; and another hour’s hard rain was enough to convince Armaat and Valerie and the botanists that the season was up. Phil’s shrill protests lost out, and we broke camp and left the following morning, in a light mist that turned to brilliant wet sunshine by noon. But by then we were well downtrail, and committed. There you have it, Freds. Are you still reading? I lied to, concealed data from, and eventually scared off the expedition of old colleagues that hired me. But you can see I had to do it. There is a creature up there, intelligent and full of peace. Civilization would destroy it. And that yeti who hid with me—somehow he knew I was on their side. Now it’s a trust I’d give my life to uphold, really. You can’t betray something like that.

On the hike back out, Phil continued to insist he had seen a yeti, and I continued to disparage the idea, until Sarah began to look at me funny. And I regret to report that she and Phil became friendly once again as we neared J—, and the end of our hike out. Maybe she felt sorry for him, maybe she somehow knew that I was acting in bad faith. I wouldn’t doubt it; she knew me pretty well. But it was depressing, whatever the reason. And nothing to be done about it. I had to conceal what I knew, and lie, no matter how much it screwed up that friendship, and no matter how much it hurt. So when we arrived at J—, I said goodbye to them all. I was pretty sure that the funding difficulties endemic in zoology would keep them away for a good long time to come, so that was okay. As for Sarah—well—damn it . . . a bit reproachfully I said farewell to her. And I hiked back to Kathmandu rather than fly, to get away from her, and work things off a bit.

The nights on this hike back have been so long that I finally decided to write this, to occupy my mind. I hoped writing it all down would help, too; but the truth is, I’ve never felt lonelier. It’s been a comfort to imagine you going nuts over my story—I can just see you jumping around the room and shouting “YOU’RE KIDDING!” at the top of your lungs, like you used to. I hope to fill you in on any missing details when I see you in person this fall in Kathmandu. Till then—your friend,

Nathan

III

Well, blow my mind. When I finished reading that letter all I could say was “Wow.” I went back to the beginning and started to reread the whole thing, but quickly skipped ahead to the good parts. A meeting with the famed Abominable Snowman! What an event! Of course all this Nathan guy had managed to get out was “Huhn.” But the circumstances were unusual, and I suppose he did his best.

I’ve always wanted to meet a yeti myself. Countless mornings in the Himal I’ve gotten up in the light before dawn and wandered out to take a leak and see what the day was going to be like, and almost every time, especially in the high forests, I’ve looked around and wondered if that twitch at the corner of my sleep-crusted eye wasn’t something abominable, moving.

It never had been, so far as I know. And I found myself a bit envious of this Nathan and his tremendous luck. Why had this yeti, member of the shyest race in Central Asia, been so relaxed with him? It was a mystery to consider as I went about in the next few days, doing my business. And I wished I could do more than that, somehow. I checked the Star’s register to look for both Nathan and George Fredericks, and found Nathan’s perfect little signature back in mid-June, but no sign of George, or Freds, as Nathan called him. The letter implied they would both be around this fall, but where?

Then I had to ship some Tibetan carpets to the States, and my company wanted me to clear three “videotreks” with the Ministry of Tourism, at the same time that Central Immigration decided I had been in the country long enough; and dealing with these matters, in the city where mailing a letter can take you all day, made me busy indeed. I almost forgot about it.

But when I came into the Star late one sunny blue afternoon and saw that some guy had gone berserk at the mail rack, had taken it down and scattered the poor paper corpses all over the first flight of stairs, I had a feeling I might know what the problem was. I was startled, maybe even a little guilty-feeling, but not at all displeased. I squashed the little pang of guilt and stepped past the two clerks, who were protesting in rapid Nepali. “Can I help you find something?” I said to the distraught person who had wreaked the havoc.

He straightened up and looked me straight in the eye. Straight-shooter, all the way. “I’m looking for a friend of mine who usually stays here.” He wasn’t panicked yet, but he was close. “The clerks say he hasn’t been here in a year, but I sent him a letter this summer, and it’s gone.”

Contact! Without batting an eye I said, “Maybe he dropped by and picked it up without checking in.”

He winced like I’d stuck a knife in him. He looked about like what I had expected from his epic: tall, upright, dark-haired. He had a beard as thick and fine as fur, neatly trimmed away from the neck and below the eyes—just about a perfect beard, in fact. That beard and a jacket with leather elbows would have got him tenure at any university in America.

But now he was seriously distraught, though he was trying not to show it. “I don’t know how I’m going to find him, then . . .”

“Are you sure he’s in Kathmandu?”

“He’s supposed to be. He’s joining a big climb in two weeks. But he always stays here!”

“Sometimes it’s full. Maybe he had to go somewhere else.”

“Yeah, that’s true.” Suddenly he came out of his distraction enough to notice he was talking to me, and his clear, gray-green eyes narrowed as he examined me.

“George Fergusson,” I said, and stuck out my hand. He tried to crush it, but I resisted just in time.

“My name’s Nathan Howe. Funny about yours,” he said without a smile. “I’m looking for a George Fredericks.”

“Is that right! What a coincidence.” I started picking up all the Star’s bent mail. “Well, maybe I can help you. I’ve had to find friends in Kathmandu before—it’s not easy, but it can be done.”

“Yeah?” It was like I’d thrown him a lifebuoy; what was his problem?

“Sure. If he’s going on a climb he’s had to go to Central Immigration to buy the permits for it. And on the permits you have to write down your local address. I’ve spent too many hours at C.I., and have some friends there. If we slip them a couple hundred rupees baksheesh they’ll look it up for us.”

“Fantastic!” Now he was Hope Personified, actually quivering with it. “Can we go now?” I saw that his heartthrob, the girlfriend of The Unscrupulous One, had had him pegged; he was an idealist, and his ideas shined through him like the mantle of a Coleman lantern gleaming through the glass. Only a blind woman wouldn’t have been able to tell how he felt about her; I wondered how this Sarah had felt about him.

I shook my head. “It’s past two—closed for the day.” We got the rack back on the wall, and the clerks returned to the front desk. “But there’s a couple other things we can try, if you want.” Nathan nodded, stuffing mail as he watched me. “Whenever I try to check in here and it’s full, I just go next door. We could look there.”

“Okay,” said Nathan, completely fired up. “Let’s go.”

So we walked out of the Star and turned right to investigate at the Lodge Pheasant—or Lodge Pleasant—the sign is ambiguous on that point.

Sure enough, George Fredericks had been staying there. Checked out that very morning, in fact. “Oh my God no,” Nathan cried, as if the guy had just died. Panic time was really getting close.

“Yes,” the clerk said brightly, pleased to have found the name in his thick book. “He is go on trek.”

“But he’s not due to leave here for two weeks!” Nathan protested.

“He’s probably off on his own first,” I said. “Or with friends.”

That was it for Nathan. Panic, despair; he had to go sit down. I thought about it. “If he was flying out, I heard all of RNAC’s flights to the mountains were canceled today. So maybe he came back in and went to dinner. Does he know Kathmandu well?”

Nathan nodded glumly. “As well as anybody.”

“Let’s try the Old Vienna Inn, then.”

IV

In the blue of early evening Thamel was jumping as usual. Lights snapped on in the storefronts that opened on the street, and people were milling about. Big Land Rovers and little Toyota taxis forged through the crowd abusing their horns; cows in the street chewed their cud and stared at it all with expressions of faint surprise, as if they’d been magically zipped out of a pasture just seconds before.

Nathan and I walked single file against the storefronts, dodging bikes and jumping over the frequent puddles. We passed carpet shops, climbing outfitters, restaurants, used bookstores, trekking agents, hotels, and souvenir stands, and as we made our way we turned down a hundred offers from the young men of the street: “Change money?” “No.” “Smoke dope?” “No.” “Buy a nice carpet?” “No.” “Good hash!” “No.” “Change money?” “No.” Long ago I had simplified walking in the neighborhood, and just said “No” to everyone I passed. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” Nathan had a different method that seemed to work just as well or better, because the hustlers didn’t think I was negative enough; he would nod politely with that straight-shooter look, and say “No, thank you,” and leave them open-mouthed in the street.

We passed K.C.‘s, threaded our way through “Times Square,” a crooked intersection with a perpetual traffic jam, and started down the street that led out of Thamel into the rest of Kathmandu. Two merchants stood in the doorway of their shop, singing along with a cassette of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.” I almost got run over by a bike. Where the street widened and the paving began, I pushed a black goat to one side, and we leaped over a giant puddle into a tunnellike hall that penetrated one of the ramshackle street-side buildings. In the hall, turn left up scuzzy concrete stairs. “Have you been here before?” I asked Nathan.

“No, I always go to K.C.‘s or Red Square.” He looked as though he wasn’t sorry, either.

At the top of the stairs we opened the door, and stepped into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. White tablecloths, paneled partitions between deep booths, red wallpaper in a fleur-de-lis pattern, plush upholstery, tasteful kitschy lamps over every table; and, suffusing the air, the steamy pungent smell of sauerkraut and goulash. Strauss waltzes on the box. Except for the faint honking from the street below, it was absolutely the real item.

“My Lord,” Nathan said, “how did they get this here?”

“It’s mostly her doing.” The owner and resident culinary genius, a big plump friendly woman, came over and greeted me in stiff Germanic English.

“Hello, Eva. We’re looking for a friend—” But then Nathan was already past us, and rushing down toward a small booth at the back.

“I think he finds him,” Eva said with a smile.

By the time I got to the table Nathan was pumping the arm of a short, long-haired blond guy in his late thirties, slapping his back, babbling with relief—overwhelmed with relief, by the look of it. “Freds, thank God I found you!”

“Good to see you too, bud! Pretty lucky, actually—I was gonna split with some Brits for the hills this morning, but old Reliability Negative Airline bombed out again.” Freds had a faint southern or country accent, and talked as fast as anyone I’d ever heard, sometimes faster.

“I know,” Nathan said. He looked up and saw me. “Actually, my new friend here figured it out. George Fergusson, this is George Fredericks.”

We shook hands. “Nice name!” George said. “Call me Freds, everyone does.” We slid in around his table while Freds explained that the friends he was going to go climbing with were finding them rooms. “So what are you up to, Nathan? I didn’t even know you were in Nepal. I thought you were back in the States working, saving wildlife refuges or something.”

“I was,” Nathan said, and his grim do-or-die expression returned. “But I had to come back. Listen—you didn’t get my letter?”

“No, did you write me?” said Freds.

Nathan stared right at me, and I looked as innocent as I could. “I’m going to have to take you into my confidence,” he said to me. “I don’t know you very well, but you’ve been a big help today, and the way things are I can’t really be . . .”

“Fastidious?”

“No no no—I can’t be over-cautious, you see. I tend to be over-cautious, as Freds will tell you. But I need help, now.” And he was dead serious.

“Just giving you a hard time,” I reassured him, trying to look trustworthy, loyal, and all that; difficult, given the big grin on Freds’s face.

“Well, here goes,” Nathan said, speaking to both of us. “I’ve got to tell you what happened to me on the expedition I helped in the spring. It still isn’t easy to talk about, but . . .”

And ducking his head, leaning forward, lowering his voice, he told us the tale I had read about in his lost letter. Freds and I leaned forward as well, so that our heads practically knocked over the table. I did all I could to indicate my shocked surprise at the high points of the story, but I didn’t have to worry about that too much, because Freds supplied all the amazement necessary. “You’re kidding,” he’d say. “No. Incredible. I can’t believe it. Yetis are usually so skittish! And this one just stood there? You’re kiddingl In-fucking-credible, man! I can’t believe it! How great! What?—oh, no! You didn’t!” And when Nathan told about the yeti giving him the necklace, sure enough, just as Nathan had predicted, Freds jumped up out of the booth and leaned back in and shouted, “YOU’RE KIDDING!!”

“Shh!” Nathan hissed, putting his face down on the tablecloth. “No! Get back down here, Freds! Please!”

So he sat down and Nathan went on, to the same sort of response (“You tore the fucking BRIDGE DOWN!?!” “Shhhh!!” and when he was done we all leaned back in the booth, exhausted. Slowly the other customers stopped staring at us. I cleared my throat: “But then today, you um, you indicated that there was still a problem, or some new problem . . .?”

Nathan nodded, lips pursed. “Adrakian went back and got money from a rich old guy in the States whose hobby used to be big game hunting. J. Reeves Fitzgerald. Now he keeps a kind of a photo zoo on a big estate. He came over here with Adrakian, and Valerie, and Sarah too even, and they went right back up to the camp we had in the spring. I found out about it from Armaat and came here quick as I could. Right after I arrived, they checked into a suite at the Sheraton. A bellboy told me they came in a Land Rover with its windows draped, and he saw someone funny hustled upstairs, and now they’re locked into that suite like it’s a fort. And I’m afraid—I think—I think they’ve got one up there.”

Freds and I looked at each other. “How long ago was this?” I asked.

“Just two days ago! I’ve been hunting for Freds ever since, I didn’t know what else to do!”

Freds said, “What about that Sarah? Is she still with them?”

“Yes,” Nathan said, looking at the table. “I can’t believe it, but she is.” He shook his head. “If they’re hiding a yeti up there—if they’ve got one—then, well, it’s all over for the yetis. It’ll just be a disaster for them.”

I supposed that was true enough. Freds was nodding automatically, agreeing just because Nathan had said it. “It would be a zoo up there, ha ha.”

“So you’ll help?” Nathan asked.

“Of course, man! Naturally!” Freds looked surprised Nathan would even ask.

“I’d like to,” I said. And that was the truth, too. The guy brought it out in you, somehow.

“Thanks,” said Nathan. He looked very relieved. “But what about this climb you were going on, Freds?”

“No prob. I was a late add-on anyway, just for fun. They’ll be fine. I was beginning to wonder about going with them this time anyway. They got themselves a Trivial Pursuit game for this climb, to keep them from going bonkers in their tents. We tried it out yesterday and you know I’m real good at Trivial Pursuit, except for the history, literature and entertainment categories, but this here game was the British version. So we get a buzz on and start to playing and suddenly I’m part of a Monty Python routine, I mean they just don’t play it the same! You know how when we play it and you don’t know the answer everyone says ‘Ha, too bad’—but here I take my turn and go for sports and leisure which is my natural forte, and they pull the card and ask me, ‘Who was it bowled three hundred and sixty-five consecutive sticky wickets at the West Indian cricket match of 1956,’ or whatever, and they like to died they were laughing so hard. They jumped up and danced around me and howled. ‘Yew don’t know, dew yew! Yew don’t have the slightest fookin’ idear who bowled those sticky wickets, dew yew!’ It was really hard to concentrate on my answer. So. Going with them this time might have been a mistake anyway. Better to stay here and help you.”

Nathan and I could only agree.

Then Eva came by with our food, which we had ordered after Nathan’s epic. The amazing thing about the Old Vienna Inn is that the food is even better than the decor. It would be good anywhere, and in Kathmandu, where almost everything tastes a little like cardboard, it’s simply unbelievable. “Look at this steak!” Freds said. “Where the hell do they get the meat?”

“Didn’t you ever wonder how they keep the street cow population under control?” I asked.

Freds liked that. “I can just imagine them sneaking one of them big honkers into the back here. Wham!”

Nathan began to prod dubiously at his schnitzel. And then, over a perfect meal, we discussed the problem facing us. As usual in situations like this, I had a plan.

V

I have never known baksheesh to fail in Kathmandu, but that week at the Everest Sheraton International the employees were bottled up tight. They didn’t even want to hear about anything out of the ordinary, much less be part of it, no matter the gain. Something was up, and I began to suspect that J. Reeves Fitzgerald had a very big bankroll indeed. So Plan A for getting into Adrakian’s room was foiled, and I retired to the hotel bar, where Nathan was hidden in a corner booth, suitably disguised in sunglasses and an Australian outback hat. He didn’t like my news.

The Everest Sheraton International is not exactly like Sheratons elsewhere, but it is about the quality of your average Holiday Inn, which makes it five-star in Kathmandu, and just about as incongruous as the Old Vienna. The bar looked like an airport bar, and there was a casino in the room next to us, which clearly, to judge by the gales of laughter coming from it, no one could take seriously. Nathan and I sat and nursed our drinks and waited for Freds, who was casing the outside of the hotel.

Suddenly Nathan clutched my forearm. “Don’t look!”

“Okay.”

“Oh my God, they must have hired a whole bunch of private security cops. Jeez, look at those guys. No, don’t look!”

Unobtrusively I glanced at the group entering the bar. Identical boots, identical jackets, with little bulges under the arm; clean-cut looks, upright, almost military carriage . . . They looked a little bit like Nathan, to tell the truth, but without the beard. “Hmm,” I said. Definitely not your ordinary tourists. Fitzgerald’s bankroll must have been very big.

Then Freds came winging into the bar and slid into our booth. “Problems, man.”

“Shh!” Nathan said. “See those guys over there?”

“I know,” said Freds. “They’re Secret Service agents.”

“They’re what!” Nathan and I said in unison.

“Secret Service agents.”

“Now don’t tell me this Fitzgerald is a close friend of Reagan’s,” I began, but Freds was shaking his head and grinning.

“No. They’re here with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter. Haven’t you heard?”

Nathan shook his head, but I had a sudden sinking feeling as I remembered a rumor of a few weeks back. “He wanted to see Everest . . .?”

“That’s right. I met them all up in Namche a week ago, actually. But now they’re back, and staying here.”

“Oh my God,” Nathan said. “Secret Service men, here.”

“They’re nice guys, actually,” Freds said. “We talked to them a lot in Namche. Real straight, of course—real straight—but nice. They could tell us what was happening in the World Series, because they had a satellite dish, and they told us what their jobs were like, and everything. Of course sometimes we asked them questions about the Carters and they just looked around like no one had said anything, which was weird, but mostly they were real normal.”

“And what are they doing here?” I said, still not quite able to believe it.

“Well, Jimmy wanted to go see Everest. So they all helicoptered into Namche just as if there was no such thing as altitude sickness, and took off for Everest! I was talking just now with one of the agents I met up there, and he told me how it came out. Rosalynn got to fifteen thousand feet and turned back, but Jimmy kept on trudging. Here he’s got all these young tough Secret Service guys to protect him, you know, but they started to get sick, and every day they were helicoptering out a number of them because of altitude sickness, pneumonia, whatever, until there were hardly any left! He hiked his whole crew right into the ground! What is he, in his sixties? And here all these young agents were dropping like flies while he motored right on up to Kala Pattar, and Everest Base Camp too. I love it!”

“That’s great,” I said. “I’m happy for him. But now they’re back.”

“Yeah, they’re doing the Kathmandu culture scene for a bit.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Ah! No luck getting a key to the yeti’s room, is that it?”

“Shhhhh,” Nathan hissed.

“Sorry, I forgot. Well, we’ll just have to think of something else, eh? The Carters are going to be here another week.”

“The windows?” I asked.

Freds shook his head. “I could climb up to them no problem, but the ones to their room overlook the garden and it wouldn’t be all that private.”

“God, this is bad,” Nathan said, and downed his Scotch. “Phil could decide to reveal the—what he’s got, at a press conference while the Carters are here. Perfect way to get enhanced publicity fast—that would be just like him.”

We sat and thought about it for a couple of drinks.

“You know, Nathan,” I said slowly, “there’s an angle we haven’t discussed yet, that you’d have to take the lead in.”

“What’s that?”

“Sarah.”

“What? Oh, no. No. I couldn’t. I can’t talk to her, really. It just—well, I just don’t want to.”

“But why?”

“She wouldn’t care what I said.” He looked down at his glass and swirled the contents nervously. His voice turned bitter: “She’d probably just tell Phil we were here, and then we’d really be in trouble.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think she’s the kind of person to do that, do you, Freds?”

“I don’t know,” Freds said, surprised. “I never met her.”

“She couldn’t be, surely.” And I kept after him for the rest of our stay, figuring it was our best chance at that point. But Nathan was stubborn about it, and still hadn’t budged when he insisted we leave.

So we paid the bill and took off. But we were crossing the foyer, and near the broad set of front doors, when Nathan suddenly stopped in his tracks. A tall, good-looking woman with large owl-eye glasses had just walked in. Nathan was stuck in place. I guessed who the woman must be, and nudged him. “Remember what’s at stake.”

A good point to make. He took a deep breath. And as the woman was about to pass us, he whipped off his hat and shades. “Sarah!”

The woman jumped back. “Nathan! My God! What—what are you doing here!”

Darkly: “You know why I’m here, Sarah.” He drew himself up even straighter than usual, and glared at her. If she’d been convicted of murdering his mother I don’t think he could have looked more accusing.

“What—?” Her voice quit on her.

Nathan’s lip curled disdainfully. I thought he was kind of overdoing the laying-on-of-guilt trip, and I was even thinking of stepping in and trying a less confrontational approach, but then right in the middle of the next sentence his voice twisted with real pain: “I didn’t think you’d be capable of this, Sarah.”

With her light brown hair, bangs, and big glasses, she had a schoolgirlish look. Now that schoolgirl was hurting; her lip quivered, she blinked rapidly; “I—I—” And then her face crumpled, and with a little cry she tottered toward Nathan and collapsed against his broad shoulder. He patted her head, looking flabbergasted.

“Oh, Nathan,” she said miserably, sniffing. “It’s so awful . . .”

“It’s all right,” he said, stiff as a board. “I know.”

The two of them communed for a while. I cleared my throat. “Why don’t we go somewhere else and have a drink,” I suggested, feeling that things were looking up a trifle.

VI

We went to the hotel Annapurna coffee shop, and there Sarah confirmed all of Nathan’s worst fears. “They’ve got him in there locked in the bathroom.” Apparently the yeti was eating less and less, and Valerie Budge was urging Mr. Fitzgerald to take him out to the city’s funky little zoo immediately, but Fitzgerald was flying in a group of science and nature writers so he could hold a press conference, the next day or the day after that, and he and Phil wanted to wait. They were hoping for the Carters’ presence at the unveiling, as Freds called it, but they couldn’t be sure about that yet.

Freds and I asked Sarah questions about the setup at the hotel. Apparently Phil, Valerie Budge and Fitzgerald were taking turns in a continuous watch on the bathroom. How did they feed him? How docile was he? Question, answer, question, answer. After her initial breakdown, Sarah proved to be a tough and sensible character. Nathan, on the other hand, spent the time repeating, “We’ve got to get him out of there, we’ve got to do it soon, it’ll be the end of him.” Sarah’s hand on his just fueled the flame. “We’ll just have to rescue him.”

“I know, Nathan,” I said, trying to think. “We know that already.” A plan was beginning to fall into place in my mind. “Sarah, you’ve got a key to the room?” She nodded. “Okay, let’s go.”

“What, now?” Nathan cried.

“Sure! We’re in a hurry, right? These reporters are going to arrive, and they’re going to notice Sarah is gone . . . And we’ve got to get some stuff together, first.”

VII

When we returned to the Sheraton it was late afternoon. Freds and I were on rented bikes, and Nathan and Sarah followed in a taxi. We made sure our cabbie understood that we wanted him to wait for us out front; then Freds and I went inside, gave the all-clear to Nathan and Sarah, and headed straight for the lobby phones. Nathan and Sarah went to the front desk and checked into a room; we needed them out of sight for a while.

I called all the rooms on the top floor of the hotel (the fourth), and sure enough half of them were occupied by Americans. I explained that I was J. Reeves Fitzgerald, assistant to the Carters, who were fellow guests in the hotel. They all knew about the Carters. I explained that the Carters were hosting a small reception for the Americans at the hotel, and we hoped that they would join us in the casino bar when it was convenient—the Carters would be down in an hour or so. They were all delighted at the invitation (except for one surly Republican that I had to cut off), and they promised to be down shortly.

The last call got Phil Adrakian, in room 355; I identified myself as Lionel Hodding. It went as well as the others; if anything Adrakian was even more enthusiastic. “We’ll be right down, thanks—we have a reciprocal invitation to make, actually.” I was prejudiced, but he did sound like a pain. Nathan’s epithet, theorist, didn’t really make it for me; I preferred something along the lines of, say, asshole.

“Fine. Look forward to seeing all your party, of course.”

Freds and I waited in the bar and watched the elevators. Americans in their safari best began to pile out and head for the casino; you wouldn’t have thought there was that much polyester in all Kathmandu, but I guess it travels well.

Two men and a plump woman came down the broad stairs beside the elevator. “Them?” Freds asked. I nodded; they fitted Sarah’s descriptions exactly. Phil Adrakian was shortish, slim, and good-looking in a California Golden Boy kind of way. Valerie Budge wore glasses and had a lot of curly hair pulled up; somehow she looked intellectual where Sarah only looked studious. The money man, J. Reeves Fitzgerald, was sixtyish and very fit-looking, though he did smoke a cigar. He wore a safari jacket with eight pockets on it. Adrakian was arguing a point with him as they crossed the foyer to the casino bar, and I heard him say, “better than a press conference.”

I had a final inspiration and returned to the phones. I asked the hotel operator for Jimmy Carter, and got connected; but the phone was answered by a flat Midwestern voice, very businesslike indeed. “Hello?”

“Hello, is this the Carters’ suite?”

“May I ask who’s speaking?”

“This is J. Reeves Fitzgerald. I’d like you to inform the Carters that the Americans in the Sheraton have organized a reception for them in the hotel’s casino bar, for this afternoon.”

“. . . I’m not sure their scheduling will allow them to attend.”

“I understand. But if you’d just let them know.”

“Of course.”

Back to Freds, where I downed a Star beer in two gulps. “Well,” I said, “something should happen. Let’s get up there.”

VIII

I gave Nathan and Sarah a buzz and they joined us at the door of Room 355. Sarah let us in. Inside was a big suite—style, generic Holiday Inn—it could have been in any city on earth. Except that there was a slight smell of wet fur.

Sarah went to the bathroom door, unlocked it. There was a noise inside. Nathan, Freds and I shifted around behind her uncomfortably. She opened the door. There was a movement, and there he was, standing before us. I found myself staring into the eyes of the yeti.

In the Kathmandu tourist scene, there are calendars, postcards, and embroidered T-shirts with a drawing of a yeti on them. It’s always the same drawing, which I could never understand; why should everyone agree to use the same guess? It annoyed me: a little furball thing with his back to you, looking over his shoulder with a standard monkey face, and displaying the bottom of one big bare foot.

I’m happy to report that the real yeti didn’t look anything like that. Oh he was furry, all right; but he was about Fred’s height, and had a distinctly humanoid face, surrounded by a beardlike ruff of matted reddish fur. He looked a little like Lincoln—a short and very ugly Lincoln, sure, with a squashed nose and rather prominent eyebrow ridges—but the resemblance was there. I was relieved to see how human his face looked; my plan depended on it, and I was glad Nathan hadn’t exaggerated in his description. The only feature that really looked unusual was his occipital crest, a ridge of bone and muscle that ran fore-and-aft over the top of his head, like his skull itself had a Mohawk haircut.

Well, we were all standing there like a statue called “People Meet Yeti,” when Freds decided to break the ice; he stepped forward and offered the guy a hand. “Namaste!” he said.

“No, no—” Nathan brushed by him and held out the necklace of fossil shells that he had been given in the spring.

“Is this the same one?” I croaked, momentarily at a loss. Because up until that bathroom door opened, part of me hadn’t really believed in it all.

“I think so.”

The yeti reached out and touched the necklace and Nathan’s hand. Statue time again. Then the yeti stepped forward and touched Nathan’s face with his long, furry hand. He whistled something quiet. Nathan was quivering; there were tears in Sarah’s eyes. I was impressed myself. Freds said, “He looks kind of like Buddha, don’t you think? He doesn’t have the belly, but those eyes, man. Buddha to the max.”

We got to work. I opened my pack and got out baggy overalls, a yellow “Free Tibet” T-shirt, and a large anorak. Nathan was taking his shirt off and putting it back on to show the yeti what we had in mind.

Slowly, carefully, gently, with many a soft-spoken sound and slow gesture, we got the yeti into the clothes. The T-shirt was the hardest part; he squeaked a little when we pulled it over his head. The anorak was zippered, luckily. With every move I made I said, “Namaste, blessed sir, namaste.”

The hands and feet were a problem. His hands were strange, fingers skinny and almost twice as long as mine, and pretty hairy as well; but wearing mittens in the daytime in Kathmandu was almost worse. I suspended judgement on them and turned to his feet. This was the only area of the tourist drawing that was close to correct; his feet were huge, furry, and just about square. He had a big toe like a very fat thumb. The boots I had brought, biggest I could find in a hurry, weren’t wide enough. Eventually I put him in Tibetan wool socks and Birkenstock sandals, modified by a penknife to let the big toe hang over the side.

Lastly I put my blue Dodgers cap on his head. The cap concealed the occipital crest perfectly, and the bill did a lot to obscure his rather low forehead and prominent eyebrows. I topped everything off with a pair of mirrored wraparound sunglasses. “Hey, neat,” Freds remarked. Also a Sherpa necklace, made of five pieces of coral and three giant chunks of rough turquoise, strung on black cord. Principle of distraction, you know.

All this time Sarah and Nathan were ransacking the drawers and luggage, stealing all the camera film and notebooks and whatever else might have contained evidence of the yeti. And throughout it all the yeti stood there, calm and attentive: watching Nathan, sticking his hand down a sleeve like a millionaire with his valet, stepping carefully into the Birkenstocks, adjusting the bill of the baseball cap, everything. I was really impressed, and so was Freds. “He really is like Buddha, isn’t he?” I thought the physical resemblance was a bit muted at this point, but his attitude couldn’t have been more mellow if he’d been the Gautama himself.

When Nathan and Sarah were done searching they looked up at our handiwork. “God he looks weird,” Sarah said.

Nathan just sat on the bed and put his head in his hands. “It’ll never work,” he said. “Never.”

“Sure it will!” Freds exclaimed, zipping the anorak up a little farther. “You see people on Freak Street looking like this all the time! Man, when I went to school I played football with a whole team of guys that looked just like him! Fact is, in my state he could run for Senator—”

“Whoah, whoah,” I said. “No time to waste, here. Give me the scissors and brush, I still have to do his hair.” I tried brushing it over his ears with little success, then gave him a trim in back. One trip, I was thinking, just one short walk down to a taxi. And in pretty dark halls. “Is it even on both sides?”

“For God’s sake, George, let’s go!” Nathan was getting antsy, and we had been a while. We gathered our belongings, filled the packs, and tugged old Buddha out into the hall.

IX

I have always prided myself on my sense of timing. Many’s the time I’ve surprised myself by how perfectly I’ve managed to be in the right place at the right time; it goes beyond all conscious calculation, into deep mystic communion with the cycles of the cosmos, etc. etc. But apparently in this matter I was teamed up with people whose sense of timing was so cosmically awful that mine was completely swamped. That’s the only way I can explain it.

Because there we were, escorting a yeti down the hallway of the Everest Sheraton International and we were walking casually along, the yeti kind of bowlegged—very bowlegged—and long-armed, too—so that I kept worrying he might drop to all fours—but otherwise, passably normal. Just an ordinary group of tourists in Nepal. We decided on the stairs, to avoid any awkward elevator crowds, and stepped through the swinging doors into the stairwell. And there coming down the stairs toward us were Jimmy Carter, Rosalynn Carter, and five Secret Service men.

“Well!” Freds exclaimed. “Damned if it isn’t Jimmy Carter! And Rosalynn too!”

I suppose that was the best way to play it, not that Freds was doing anything but being natural. I don’t know if the Carters were on their way to something else, or if they were actually coming down to attend my reception; if the latter, then my last-minute inspiration to invite them had been really a bad one. In any case, there they were, and they stopped on the landing. We stopped on the landing. The Secret Service men, observing us closely, stopped on the landing.

What to do? Jimmy gave us his famous smile, and it might as well have been the cover of Time magazine, it was such a familiar sight; just the same. Only not quite. Not exactly. His face was older, naturally, but also it had the look of someone who had survived a serious illness, or a great natural disaster. It looked like he had been through the fire, and come back into the world knowing more than most people about what the fire was. It was a good face, it showed what a man could endure. And he was relaxed; this kind of interruption was part of daily life, part of the job he had volunteered for nine years before.

I was anything but relaxed. In fact, as the Secret Service men did their hawk routine on Buddha, their gazes locked, I could feel my heart stop, and I had to give my torso a little twist to get it started up again. Nathan had stopped breathing from the moment he saw Carter, and he was turning white above the sharp line of his beard. It was getting worse by the second when Freds stepped forward and extended a hand. “Hey, Mr. Carter, namaste! We’re happy to meet you.”

“Hi, how are y’all.” More of the famous smile. “Where are y’all from?”

And we answered “Arkansas,” “California,” “M-Massa-chusetts,” “Oregon,” and at each one he smiled and nodded with recognition and pleasure, and Rosalynn smiled and said “Hello, hello,” with that faint look I had seen before during the Presidential years, that seemed to say she would have been just as happy somewhere else, and we all shuffled around so that we could all shake hands with Jimmy—until it was Buddha’s turn.

“This is our guide, B-Badim Badur,” I said. “He doesn’t speak any English.”

“I understand,” Jimmy said. And he took Buddha’s hand and pumped it up and down.

Now, I had opted to leave Buddha barehanded, a decision I began to seriously regret. Here we had a man who had shaken at least a million hands in his life, maybe ten million; nobody in the whole world could have been more of an expert at it. And as soon as he grasped Buddha’s long skinny hand, he knew that something was different. This wasn’t like any of the millions of other hands he had shaken before. A couple of furrows joined the network of fine wrinkles around his eyes, and he looked closer at Buddha’s peculiar get-up. I could feel the sweat popping out and beading on my forehead. “Um, Badim’s a bit shy,” I was saying, when suddenly the yeti squeaked.

“Naa-maas-tayy,” it said, in a hoarse, whispery voice.

“Namaste!” Jimmy replied, grinning the famous grin.

X

And that, folks, was the first recorded conversation between yeti and human.

Of course Buddha had only been trying to help—I’m sure of that, given what happened later—but despite all we did to conceal it, his speech had obviously surprised us pretty severely. As a result the Secret Service guys were about to go cross-eyed checking us out, Buddha in particular.

“Let’s let these folks get on with things,” I said shakily, and took Buddha by the arm. “Nice to meet you,” I said to the Carters. We all hung there for a moment. It didn’t seem polite to precede the ex-President of the United States down a flight of stairs, but the Secret Service men damn well didn’t want us following them down either; so finally I took the lead, with Buddha by the arm, and I held onto him tight as we descended.

We reached the foyer without incident. Sarah conversed brightly with the Secret Service men who were right behind us, and she distracted their attention very successfully, I thought. It appeared we would escape the situation without further difficulties, when the doors to the casino bar swung back, and Phil Adrakian, J. Reeves Fitzgerald, and Valerie Budge walked out. (Timing, anyone?)

Adrakian took in the situation at a glance. “They’re kidnapping him!” he yelled. “Hey! Kidnapping!”

Well, you might just as well have put jumper cables on those Secret Service agents. After all, it’s kind of a question why anyone would want to assassinate an ex-President, but as a hostage for ransom or whatnot, you’ve got a prime target. They moved like mongooses to get between us and the Carters. Freds and I were trying to back Buddha out the front doors without actually moving our legs; we weren’t making much progress, and I don’t doubt we could’ve gotten shot for our efforts, if it weren’t for Sarah. She jumped right out in front of the charging Adrakian and blocked him off.

“You’re the kidnapper, you liar,” she cried, and slapped him in the face so hard he staggered. “Help!” she demanded of the Secret Service guys, blushing bright red and shoving Valerie Budge back into Fitzgerald. She looked so tousled and embattled and beautiful that the agents were confused; the situation wasn’t at all clear. Freds, Buddha and I bumped out the front door and ran for it.

Our taxi was gone. “Shit,” I said. No time to think. “The bikes?” Freds asked.

“Yep.” No other choice—we ran around the side of the building and unlocked our two bikes. I got on mine and Freds helped Buddha onto the little square rack over the back wheel. People around front were shouting, and I thought I heard Adrakian among them. Freds gave me a push from behind and we were off; I stood to pump up some speed, and we wavered side to side precariously.

I headed up the road to the north. It was just wider than one lane, half-paved and half-dirt. Bike and car traffic on it was heavy, as usual, and between dodging vehicles and potholes, looking back for pursuers, and keeping the bike from tipping under Buddha’s shifting weight, I was kept pretty busy.

The bike was a standard Kathmandu rental, Hero Jet by brand name: heavy frame, thick tires, low handlebars, one speed. It braked when you pedaled backwards, and had one handbrake, and it had a big loud bell, which is a crucial piece of equipment. This bike wasn’t a bad specimen either, in that the handbrake worked and the handlebars weren’t loose and the seat wasn’t putting a spring through rny ass. But the truth is, the Hero Jet is a solo vehicle. And Buddha was no lightweight. He was built like a cat, dense and compact, and I bet he weighed over two hundred pounds. With him in back, the rear tire was squashed flat—there was about an eighth of an inch clearance between rim and ground, and every time I misnavigated a pothole there was an ugly thump as we bottomed out.

So we weren’t breaking any speed records, and when we turned left on Dilli Bazar Freds shouted from behind, “They’re after us! See, there’s that Adrakian and some others in a taxi!”

Sure enough, back a couple hundred yards was Phil Adrakian, hanging out the side window of a little white Toyota taxi, screaming at us. We pedaled over the Dhobi Khola bridge and shot by the Central Immigration building before I could think of anything to yell that might have brought the crowd there into the street. “Freds!” I said, panting. “Make a diversion! Tie up traffic!”

“Right on.” Without a pause he braked to a halt in the middle of the road, jumped off and threw his Hero Jet to the pavement. The three-wheeled motor cab behind him ran over it before the driver could stop. Freds screamed abuse, he pulled the bike out and slung it under a Datsun going the other way, which crunched it and screeched to a halt. More abuse from Freds, who ran around pulling the drivers from their vehicles, shouting at them with all the Nepalese he knew: “Chiso howa!” (Cold wind.) “Tato pani!” (Hot water.) “Rhamrao dihn!” (Nice day.)

I only caught glimpses of this as I biked away, but I saw he had bought a little time and I concentrated on negotiating the traffic. Dilli Bazar is one of the most congested streets in Kathmandu, which is really saying a lot. The two narrow lanes are fronted by three-story buildings containing grocery markets and fabric wholesalers, which open directly onto the street and use it for cash register lines and so on, despite the fact that it’s a major truck route. Add to that the usual number of dogs, goats, chickens, taxis, young schoolgirls walking three abreast with their arms linked, pedicabs with five-foot-tall operators pedaling whole families along at three miles an hour, and the occasional wandering sacred cow, and you can see the extent of the problem. Not only that, but the potholes are fierce—some could be mistaken for open manholes.

And the hills! I was doing all right until that point, weaving through the crowd and ringing my bell to the point of thumb cramp. But then Buddha shook my arm and I looked back and saw that Adrakian had somehow gotten past Freds and hired another taxi, and he was trailing us again, stuck behind a colorfully painted bus some distance behind. And then we started up the first of three fairly steep up-and-downs that Dilli Bazar makes before it reaches the city center.

Hero Jets are not made for hills. The city residents get off theirs and walk them up inclines like that one, and only Westerners, still in a hurry even in Nepal, stay on and grind up the slopes. I was certainly a Westerner in a hurry that day, and I stood up and started pumping away. But it was heavy going, especially after I had to brake to a dead stop to avoid an old man blowing his nose with his finger. Adrakian’s taxi had rounded the bus, in an explosion of honks, and he was gaining on us fast. I sat back on the seat, huffing and puffing, legs like big blocks of wood, and it was looking like I’d have to find a diplomatic solution to the problem, when suddenly both my feet were kicked forward off the pedals; we surged forward, just missing a pedicab.

Buddha had taken over. He was holding onto the seat with both hands, and pedaling from behind. I had seen tall Westerners ride their rental bikes like that before, to keep from smashing their knees into the handlebars on every upswing. But you can’t get much downthrust from back there, and you didn’t ever see them doing that while biking uphill. For Buddha, this was not a problem. I mean this guy was strong. He pumped away so hard that the poor Hero Jet squeaked under the strain, and we surged up the hill and flew down the other side like we had jumped onto a motorcycle.

A motorcycle without brakes, I should add. Buddha did not seem up on the theory of the footbrake, and I tried the handbrake once or twice and found that it only squealed like a pig and reduced our stability a bit. So as we fired down Dilli Bazar I could only put my feet up on the frame and dodge obstacles, as in one of those race-car video games. I rang the bell for all it was worth, and spent a lot of time in the right lane heading at oncoming traffic (they drive on the left). Out the corner of my eye I saw pedestrians goggling at us as we flew by; then the lanes ahead cleared as we rounded a semi, and I saw we were approaching the “Traffic Engineers’ Intersection,” usually one of my favorites. Here Dilli Bazar crosses another major street, and the occasion is marked by four traffic lights, all four of them permanently green twenty-four hours a day.

This time there was a cow for a traffic cop. “Bistarre!” (Slowly) I yelled, but Buddha’s vocabulary apparently remained restricted to “Namaste,” and he pedaled right on. I charted a course, clamped down the handbrake, crouched over the handlebars, rang the bell.

We shot the gap between a speeding cab and the traffic cow, with three inches to spare on each side, and were through the intersection before I even had time to blink. No problem. Now that’s timing.

After that, it was just a matter of navigation. I took us the wrong way up the one-way section of Durbar Marg, to shorten our trip and throw off pursuit for good, and having survived that it was simple to make it the rest of the way to Thamel.

As we approached Thamel, we passed the grounds of the Royal Palace; as I mentioned, the tall trees there are occupied day and night by giant brown bats, hanging head down from the bare upper branches. As we passed the palace, those bats must have caught the scent of the yeti, or something, because all of a sudden the whole flock of them burst off the branches, squeaking like my handbrake and flapping their big skin wings like a hundred little Draculas. Buddha slowed to stare up at the sight, and everyone else on the block, even the cow on the corner, stopped and looked up as well, to watch that cloud of bats fill the sky.

It’s moments like that that make me love Kathmandu.

In Thamel, we fit right in. A remarkable number of people on the street looked a lot like Buddha—so much so that the notion hit me that the city was being secretly infiltrated by yeti in disguise. I chalked the notion up to hysteria caused by the Traffic Engineers’ Intersection, and directed our Hero Jet into the Hotel Star courtyard. At that point walls surrounded us and Buddha consented to stop pedaling. We got off the bike, and shakily I led him upstairs to my room.

X

So. We had liberated the imprisoned yeti. Although I had to admit, as I locked us both into my room, that he was only partway free. Getting him completely free, back on his home ground, might turn out to be a problem. I still didn’t know exactly where his home was, but they don’t rent cars in Kathmandu, and the bus rides, no matter the destination, are long and crowded. Would Buddha be able to hold it together for ten hours in a crowded bus? Well, knowing him, he probably would. But would his disguise hold up? That was doubtful.

Meanwhile, there was the matter of Adrakian and the Secret Service being on to us. I had no idea what had happened to Nathan and Sarah and Freds, and I worried about them, especially Nathan and Sarah. I wished they would arrive. Now that we were here and settled, I felt a little uncomfortable with my guest; with him in there, my room felt awfully small.

I went in the bathroom and peed. Buddha came in and watched me, and when I was done he found the right buttons on the overalls, and did the same thing! The guy was amazingly smart. Another point—I don’t know whether to mention this—but in the hominid-versus-primate debate, I’ve heard it said that most primate male genitals are quite small, and that human males are by far the size champs in that category. Hurray for us. But Buddha, I couldn’t help noticing, was more on the human side of the scale. Really, the evidence was adding up. The yeti was a hominid, and a highly intelligent hominid at that. Buddha’s quick understanding, his rapid adaptation to changing situations, his recognition of friends and enemies, his cool, all indicated smarts of the first order.

Of course, it made sense. How else could they have stayed concealed so well for so long? They must have taught their young all the tricks, generation to generation; keeping close track of all tools or artifacts, hiding their homes in the most hard-to-find caves, avoiding all human settlements, practicing burial of the dead . . .

Then it occurred to me to wonder: If the yetis were so smart, and so good at concealment, why was Buddha here with me in my room? What had gone wrong? Why had he revealed himself to Nathan, and how had Adrakian managed to capture him?

I found myself speculating on the incidence of mental illness among yetis, a train of thought that made me even more anxious for Nathan’s arrival. Nathan was not a whole lot of help in some situations, but the man had a rapport with the yeti that I sadly lacked.

Buddha was crouched on the bed, hunched over his knees, staring at me brightly. We had taken his sunglasses off on arrival, but the Dodgers cap was still on. He looked observant, curious, puzzled. What next? he seemed to say. Something in his expression, something about the way he was coping with it all, was both brave and pathetic—it made me feel for him. “Hey, guy. We’ll get you back up there. Namaste.”

He formed the words with his lips.

Perhaps he was hungry. What do you feed a hungry yeti? Was he vegetarian, carnivorous? I didn’t have much there in the room: some packages of curried chicken soup, some candy (would sugar be bad for him?), beef jerky, yeah, a possibility; Nebico malt biscuits, which were little cookielike wafers made in India that figured large in my diet . . . I opened a package of these and one of jerky, and offered some to him.

He sat back on the bed and crossed his legs in front of him. He tapped the bed as if to indicate my spot. I sat down on the bed across from him. He took a stick of jerky in his long fingers, sniffed it, stuck it between his toes. I ate mine for example. He looked at me as if I’d just used the wrong fork for the salad. He began with a Nebico wafer, chewing it slowly. I found I was hungry, and from the roundness of his eyes I think he felt the same. But he was cool; there was a procedure here, he had me know; he handled all the wafers carefully first, sniffed them, ate them very slowly; took the jerky from between his toes, tried half of it; looked around the room, or at me, chewing very slowly. So calm, so peaceful he was! I decided the candy would be okay, and offered him the bag of jelly beans. He tried one and his eyebrows lifted; he picked one of the same color (green) from the bag, and gave it to me.

Pretty soon we had all the food I owned scattered out there on the bed between us, and we tried first one thing and then another, in silence, as slowly and solemnly as if it were all some sacred ritual. And you know, after a while I felt just like it was.

XI

About an hour after our meal Nathan, Sarah, and Freds all arrived at once. “You’re here!” they cried. “All right, George! Way to go!”

“Thank Buddha,” I said. “He got us here.” Nathan and Buddha went through a little hand ritual with the fossil shell necklace. Freds and Sarah told me the story of their adventures. Sarah had fought with Adrakian, who escaped her and ran after us, and then with Valerie Budge, who stayed behind with Fitzgerald, to trade blows and accusations. “It was a joy to pound on her, she’s been coming on to Phil for months now—not that I care anymore, of course,” Sarah added quickly as Nathan eyed her. Anyway, she had pushed and shoved and denounced Budge and Fitzgerald and Adrakian, and by the time she was done no one at the Sheraton had the slightest idea what was going on. A couple of Secret Service men had gone after Adrakian; the rest contented themselves with shielding the Carters, who were being called on by both sides to judge the merits of the case. Naturally the Carters were reluctant to do this, uncertain as they were of what the case was. Fitzgerald and Budge didn’t want to come right out and say they had had a yeti stolen from them, so they were hamstrung; and when Freds returned to see what was up, Nathan and Sarah had already ordered a cab. “I think the Carters ended up on our side,” Sarah said with satisfaction.

“All well and good,” added Freds, “but there I had old Jimmy right at hand, no yeti to keep me polite, and man I had a bone to pick with that guy! I was in San Diego in 1980 and along about six o’clock on election day me and a bunch of friends were going down to vote and I argued heavily with them that we should vote for Carter rather than Anderson, because Anderson would just be a gesture whereas I thought Carter might still have a chance to win, since I don’t believe in polls. I really went at it and I convinced every one of them, probably the peak of my political career, and then when we got home and turned on the TV we found out that Carter had already conceded the election a couple of hours before! My friends were so mad at me! John Drummond threw his beer at me and hit me right here. In fact they soaked me. So I had a bone to pick with old Jimmy, you bet, and I was going to go up to him and ask him why he had done such a thing. But he was looking kind of confused by all the ruckus, so I decided not to.”

“The truth is I dragged him away before he could,” said Sarah.

Nathan got us back to the problem at hand. “We’ve still got to get the yeti out of Kathmandu, and Adrakian knows we’ve got him—he’ll be searching for us. How are we going to do it?”

“I’ve got a plan,” I said. Because after my meal with Buddha I had been thinking. “Now where is Buddha’s home? I need to know.”

Nathan told me.

I consulted my maps. Buddha’s valley was pretty near the little airstrip at J—. I nodded. “Okay, here’s how we’ll do it . . .”

XII

I spent most of the next day through the looking glass, inside the big headquarters of the Royal Nepal Airline Corporation, getting four tickets for the following day’s flight to J—. Tough work, even though as far as I could tell the plane wasn’t even close to sold out. J—wasn’t near any trekking routes, and it wasn’t a popular destination. But that doesn’t mean anything at RNAC. Their purpose as a company, as far as I can tell, is not so much to fly people places as it is to make lists. Waiting lists. I would call it their secret agenda, only it’s no secret.

Patience, a very low-keyed pigheadedness, and lots of baksheesh are the keys to getting from the lists to the status of ticket-holder; I managed it, and in one day too. So I was pleased, but I called my friend Bill, who works in one of the city’s travel agencies, to establish a little backup plan. He’s good at those, having a lot of experience with RNAC. Then I completed the rest of my purchases, at my favorite climbing outfitters in Thamel. The owner, a Tibetan woman, put down her copy of The Far Pavilions and stopped doing her arm aerobics, and got me all the clothes I asked for, in all the right colors. The only thing she couldn’t find me was another Dodgers cap, but I got a dark blue “ATOM” baseball cap instead.

I pointed at it. “What is this ‘ATOM’ anyway?” Because there were caps and jackets all over Nepal with that one word on them. Was it a company, and if so, what kind? She shrugged. “Nobody knows.”

Extensive advertising for an unknown product: yet another Great Mystery of Nepal. I stuffed my new belongings into my backpack and left. I was on my way home when I noticed someone dodging around in the crowd behind me. Just a glance and I spotted him, nipping into a newsstand: Phil Adrakian.

Now I couldn’t go home, not straight home. So I went to the Kathmandu Guest House, next door, and told one of the snooty clerks there that Jimmy Carter would be visiting in ten minutes and his secretary would be arriving very shortly. I walked through into the pretty garden that gives the Guest House so many of its pretensions, and hopped over a low spot in the back wall. Down an empty garbage alley, around the corner, over another wall, and past the Lodge Pleasant or Pheasant into the Star’s courtyard. I was feeling pretty covert and all when I saw one of the Carters’ Secret Service men, standing in front of the Tantric Used Book Store. Since I was already in the courtyard, I went ahead and hurried on up to my room.

XIII

“I think they must have followed you here,” I told our little group. “I suppose they might think we really were trying a kidnapping yesterday.”

Nathan groaned. “Adrakian probably convinced them we’re part of that group that bombed the Hotel Annapurna this summer.”

“That should reassure them,” I said. “When that happened the opposition group immediately wrote to the King and told him they were suspending all operations against the government until the criminal element among them was captured by the authorities.”

“Hindu guerrillas are heavy, aren’t they?” said Freds.

“Anyway,” I concluded, “all this means is that we have a damn good reason to put our plan into effect. Freds, are you sure you’re up for it?”

“Sure I’m sure! It sounds like fun.”

“All right. We’d better all stay here tonight, just in case. I’ll cook up some chicken soup.”

So we had a spartan meal of curried chicken soup, Nebico wafers, Toblerone white chocolate, jelly beans, and iodinated Tang. When Nathan saw the way Buddha went for the jelly beans, he shook his head. “We’ve got to get him out of here fast.”

When we settled down, Sarah took the bed, and Buddha immediately joined her, with a completely innocent look in his eye, as if to say: Who, me? This is just where I sleep, right? I could see Nathan was a bit suspicious of this, worried about the old Fay Wray complex maybe, and in fact he curled up on the foot of the bed. I assume there weren’t any problems. Freds and I threw down the mildewed foam pads I owned and lay down on the floor.

“Don’t you think Buddha is sure to get freaked by the flight tomorrow?” Sarah asked when the lights were off.

“Nothing’s seemed to bother him much so far,” I said. But I wondered; I don’t like flying myself.

“Yeah, but this isn’t remotely like anything he’s ever done before.”

“Standing on a high ridge is kind of like flying. Compared to our bike ride it should be easy.”

“I’m not so sure,” Nathan said, worried again. “Sarah may be right—flying can be upsetting even for people who know what it is.”

“That’s usually the heart of the problem,” I said, with feeling.

Freds cut through the debate: “I say we should get him stoned before the flight. Get a hash pipe going good and just get him wasted.”

“You’re crazy!” Nathan said. “That’d just freak him out more!”

“Nah.”

“He wouldn’t know what to make of it,” Sarah said.

“Oh yeah?” Freds propped himself up on one arm. “You really think those yetis have lived all this time up there among all those pot plants, and haven’t figured them out? No way! In fact that’s probably why no one ever sees them! Man, the pot plants up there are as big as pine trees. They probably use the buds for food.”

Nathan and Sarah doubted that, and they further doubted that we should do any experimenting about it at such a crucial time.

“You got any hash?” I asked Freds with interest.

“Nope. Before this Ama Dablam climb came through I was going to fly to Malaysia to join a jungle mountain expedition that Doug Scott put together, you know? So I got rid of it all. I mean, do you fly drugs into Malaysia is not one of the harder questions on the IQ test, you know? In fact I had too much to smoke in the time I had left, and when I was hiking down from Namche to Lukla I was loading my pipe and dropped this chunk on the ground, a really monster chunk, about ten grams. And I just left it there! Just left it lying on the ground! I’ve always wanted to do that.

“Anyway, I’m out. I could fix that in about fifteen minutes down on the street if you want me to, though—”

“No, no. That’s okay.” I could already hear the steady breathing of Buddha, fast asleep above me. “He’ll be more relaxed than any of us tomorrow.” And that was true.

XIV

We got up before dawn, and Freds dressed in the clothes that Buddha had worn the day before. We pasted some swatches of Buddha’s back fur onto Freds’s face to serve as a beard. We even had some of the russet fur taped to the inside of the Dodgers cap, so it hung down behind. With mittens on, and a big pair of snow boots, he was covered; slip the shades onto his nose and he looked at least as weird as Buddha had in the Sheraton. Freds walked around the room a bit, trying it out. Buddha watched him with that surprised look, and it cracked Freds up. “I look like your long-lost brother, hey Buddha?”

Nathan collapsed on the bed despondently. “This just isn’t going to work.”

“That’s what you said last time,” I objected.

“Exactly! And look what happened! You call that working? Are you telling me that things worked yesterday?”

“Well, it depends on what you mean when you say worked. I mean here we are, right?” I began packing my gear. “Relax, Nathan.” I put a hand on his shoulder, and Sarah put both her hands on his other shoulder. He bucked up a bit, and I smiled at Sarah. That woman was tough; she had saved our ass at the Sheraton, and she kept her nerve well during the waiting, too. I wouldn’t have minded asking her on a long trek into the Himal myself, really, and she saw that and gave me a brief smile of appreciation that also said, no chance. Besides, double-crossing old Nathan would have been like the Dodgers giving away Steve Garvey. People like that you can’t double-cross, not if you want to look yourself in the mirror.

Freds finished getting pointers in carriage from Buddha, and he and I walked out of the room. Freds stopped and looked back inside mournfully, and I tugged him along, irritated at the Method acting; we wouldn’t be visible to anyone outside the Star until we got downstairs.

But I must say that overall Freds did an amazing job. He hadn’t seen all that much of Buddha, and yet when he walked across that courtyard and into the street, he caught the yeti’s gait exactly: a bit stiff-hipped and bowlegged, a rolling sailor’s walk from which he could drop to all fours instantly, or so it seemed. I could hardly believe it.

The streets were nearly empty: a bread truck, scavenging dogs (they passed Freds without even a glance—would that give us away?), the old beggar and his young daughter, a few coffee freaks outside the German Pumpernickel Bakery, shopkeepers opening up . . . Near the Star we passed a parked taxi with three men in it, carefully looking the other way. Westerners. I hurried on. “Contact,” I muttered to Freds. He just whistled a little.

There was one taxi in Times Square, the driver asleep. We hopped in and woke him, and asked him to take us to the Central Bus Stop. The taxi we had passed followed us. “Hooked,” I said to Freds, who was sniffing the ashtrays, tasting the upholstery, leaning out the window to eat the wind like a dog. “Try not to overdo it,” I said, worried about my Dodgers cap with all that hair taped in it flying away.

We passed the big clock tower and stopped, got out and paid the cabbie. Our tail stopped farther up the block, I was pleased to see. Freds and I walked down the broad, mashed-mud driveway into the Central Bus Stop.

The bus stop was a big yard of mud, about five or eight feet lower than the level of the street. Scores of buses were parked at all angles in the yard, and their tires had torn the mud up until the yard looked like a vehicular Verdun. All of the buses were owned by private companies—one bus per company, usually, with a single route to run—and all of their agents at the wood-and-cloth booths at the entrance clamored for our attention, as if we might have come in without a particular destination in mind, and would pick the agent that made the loudest offer.

Actually, this time it was almost true. But I spotted the agent for the Jiri bus, which is where I had thought to send Freds, and I bought two tickets, in a crowd of all the other agents, who criticized my choice. Freds hunkered down a little, looking suitably distressed. A big hubbub arose; one of the companies had established its right to leave the yard next, and now its bus was trying to make it up the driveway, which was the one and only exit from the yard.

Each departure was a complete test of the driver, the bus’s clutch and tires, and the advisory abilities of the agents standing around. After a lot of clutching and coaching this brightly painted bus squirted up the incline, and the scheduling debate began anew. Only three buses had unblocked access to the driveway, and the argument among their agents was fierce.

I took Freds in hand and we wandered around the track-torn mud, looking for the Jiri bus. Eventually we found it: gaily painted in yellow, blue, green and red, like all the rest, ours also had about forty decals of Ganesh stuck all over the windshield, to help the driver see. As usual, the company’s “other bus” was absent, and this one was double-booked. We shoved our way on board and through the tightly packed crowd in the aisle, then found empty seats at the back. The Nepalis like to ride near the front. After more boardings, the crowd engulfed us even in the back. But we had Freds at a window, which is what I wanted.

Through the mud-flecked glass I could just see our tail: Phil Adrakian, and two men who might have been Secret Service agents, though I wasn’t sure about that. They were fending off the bus agents and trying to get into the yard at the same time, a tough combination. As they sidestepped the bus agents they got in the driveway and almost got run over by the bus currently sliding up and down the slope; one slipped in the mud scrambling away, and fell on his ass. The bus agents thought this was great. Adrakian and the other two hurried off, and squished from bus to bus trying to look like they weren’t looking for anything. They were pursued by the most persistent agents, and got mired in the mud from time to time, and I worried after a while that they wouldn’t be able to find us. In fact it took them about twenty minutes. But then one saw Freds at the window, and they ducked behind a bus hulk that had sunk axle-deep, waving off the agents in desperate sign language. “Hooked for good,” I said.

“Yeah,” Freds replied without moving his lips.

The bus was now completely packed; an old woman had even been insinuated between Freds and me, which suited me fine. But it was going to be another miserable trip. “You’re really doing your part for the cause,” I said to Freds as I prepared to depart, thinking of the cramped day ahead of him.

“No hroblem!” he said liplessly. “I like these ‘us trits!” Somehow I believed him. I weaseled my way upright in the aisle and said good-bye. Our tails were watching the bus’s only door, but that wasn’t really much of a problem. I just squirmed between the Nepalis, whose concept of personal “body space” is pretty much exactly confined to the space their bodies are actually occupying—none of this eighteen-inch bullshit for them—and got to a window on the other side of the bus. There was no way our watchers could have seen across the interior of that bus, so I was free to act. I apologized to the Sherpa I was sitting on, worked the window open, and started to climb out. The Sherpa very politely helped me, without the slightest suggestion I was going anything out of the ordinary, and I jumped down into the mud. Hardly anyone on the bus even noticed my departure. I snuck through the no-man’s-land of the back buses. Quickly enough I was back on Durbar Marg and in a cab on my way to the Star.

XV

I got the cabbie to park almost inside the Star’s lobby, and Buddha barreled into the backseat like a fullback hitting the line. While we drove he kept his head down, just in case, and the taxi took us out to the airport.

Things were proceeding exactly according to my plan, and you might imagine I was feeling pretty pleased, but the truth is that I was more nervous than I’d been all morning. Because we were walking up to the RNAC desk, you see . . .

When I got there and inquired, the clerk told us our flight had been canceled for the day.

“What?” I cried. “Canceled! What for?”

Now, our counter agent was the most beautiful woman in the world. This happens all the time in Nepal—in the country you pass a peasant bent over pulling up rice, and she looks up and it’s a face from the cover of Cosmopolitan, only twice as pretty and without the vampire makeup. This ticket clerk could have made a million modeling in New York, but she didn’t speak much English, and when I asked her “What for?” she said, “It’s raining,” and looked past me for another customer.

I took a deep breath. Remember, I thought: RNAC. What would the Red Queen say? I pointed out the window. “It’s not raining. Take a look.”

Too much for her. “It’s raining,” she repeated. She looked around for her supervisor, and he came on over; a thin Hindu man with a red dot on his forehead. He nodded curtly. “It’s raining up at J—.”

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I got a report on the shortwave from J—, and besides you can look north and see for yourself. It’s not raining.”

“The airstrip at J—is too wet to land on,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but you landed there twice yesterday, and it hasn’t rained since.”

“We’re having mechanical trouble with the plane.”

“I’m sorry, but you’ve got a whole fleet of small planes out there, and when one has a problem you just substitute for it. I know, I switched planes three times here once.” Nathan and Sarah didn’t look too happy to hear that one.

The supervisor’s supervisor was drawn by the conversation: another serious, slender Hindu. “The flight is canceled,” he said. “It’s political.”

I shook my head. “RNAC pilots only strike the flights to Lukla and Pokhara—they’re the only ones that have enough passengers for the strike to matter.” My fears concerning the real reason for the cancellation were being slowly confirmed. “How many passengers on this flight?”

All three of them shrugged. “The flight is canceled,” the first supervisor said. “Try tomorrow.”

And I knew I was right. They had less than half capacity, and were waiting until tomorrow so the flight would be full. (Maybe more than full, but did they care?) I explained the situation to Nathan and Sarah and Buddha, and Nathan stormed up to the desk demanding that the flight fly as scheduled, and the supervisors had their eyebrows raised like they might actually get some fun out of this after all, but I hauled him away. While I was dialing my friend in the travel agency, I explained to him how maddening irate customers had been made into a sport (or maybe an art form) by Asian bureaucrats. After three tries I got my friend’s office. The receptionist answered and said, “Yeti Travels?” which gave me a start; I’d forgotten the company’s name. Then Bill got on and I outlined the situation. “Filling planes again, are they?” He laughed. “I’ll call in that group of six we ‘sold’ yesterday, and you should be off.”

“Thanks, Bill.” I gave it fifteen minutes, during which time Sarah and I calmed Nathan, and Buddha stood at the window staring at the planes taking off and landing. “We’ve got to get out today!” Nathan kept repeating. “They’ll never go for another ruse after today!”

“We know that already, Nathan.”

I returned to the desk. “I’d like to get boarding passes for flight 2 to J—, please?”

She made out the boarding passes. The two supervisors stood off behind a console, studiously avoiding my gaze. Normally it wouldn’t have gotten to me, but with the pressure to get Buddha out I was a little edgy. When I had the passes in hand I said to the clerk, loud enough for the supervisors to hear, “No more cancellation, eh?”

“Cancellation?”

I gave up on it.

XVI

Of course boarding pass is only a piece of paper, and when only eight passengers got on the little two-engine plane, I got nervous again; but we took off right on schedule. When the plane left the ground I sat back in my chair, and the relief blew through me like wash from the props. I hadn’t known how nervous I was until that moment. Nathan and Sarah were squeezing hands and grinning in the seats ahead, and Buddha was in the window seat beside me, staring out at Kathmandu Valley, or the shimmy gray circle of the prop, I couldn’t tell. Amazing guy, that Buddha: so cool.

We rose out of the green, terraced, faintly Middle-Earth perfection of Kathmandu Valley, and flew over the mountains to the north, up into the land of snows. The other passengers, four Brits, were looking out their windows and exclaiming over the godlike views, and they didn’t give a damn if one of their fellow passengers was an odd-looking chap. There was no problem there. After the plane had leveled out at cruising altitude one of the two stewards came down the aisle and offered us all little wrapped pieces of candy, just as on other airlines they offer drinks or meals. It was incredibly cute, almost like kids playing at running an airline, which is the sort of thought that seems cute itself until you remember you are at seventeen thousand feet with these characters, and they are now going to fly you over the biggest mountains on earth in order to land you on the smallest airstrips. At that point the cuteness goes away and you find yourself swallowing deeply and trying not to think of downdrafts, life insurance, metal fatigue, the afterlife . . .

I shifted forward in my seat, hoping that the other passengers were too preoccupied to notice that Buddha had swallowed his candy without removing the wrapper. I wasn’t too sure about the two across from us, but they were Brits so even if they did think Buddha was strange, it only meant they would look at him less. No problem.

It wasn’t long before the steward said, “No smoking, if it please you,” and the plane dipped over and started down toward a particularly spiky group of snowy peaks. Not a sign of a landing strip; in fact the idea of one being down there was absurd on the face of it. I took a deep breath. I hate flying, to tell you the truth.

I suppose some of you are familiar with the Lukla airstrip below the Everest region. It’s set on a bench high on the side of the Dudh Khosi gorge, and the grass strip, tilted about fifteen degrees from horizontal and only two hundred yards long, aims straight into the side of the valley wall. When you land there all you can really see is the valley wall, and it looks like you’re headed right into it. At the last minute the pilot pulls up and hits the strip, and after the inevitable bounces you roll to a stop quickly because you’re going uphill so steeply. It’s a heavy experience, some people get religion from it, or at least quit flying.

But the truth is that there are at least a dozen RNAC strips in Nepal that are much worse than the one at Lukla, and unfortunately for us, the strip at J—was at about the top of that list. First of all, it hadn’t begun life as an airstrip at all—it began as a barley terrace, one terrace among many on a mountainside above a village. They widened it and put a wind sock at one end, and tore out all the barley of course, and that was it. Instant airstrip. Not only that, but the valley it was in was a deep one—say five thousand feet—and very steep-sided, with a nearly vertical headwall just a mile upstream from the airstrip, and a sharp dogleg just a mile or so downstream, and really, nobody in their right minds would think to put an airstrip there. I became more and more convinced of this as we made a ten-thousand-foot dive into the dogleg, and pulled up against one wall of the valley, so close to it that I could have made a good estimate of the barley count per hectare if I’d been inclined to. I tried to reassure Buddha, but he was working my candy wrapper out of the ashtray and didn’t want to be disturbed. Nice to be a yeti sometimes. I caught sight of our landing strip, and watched it grow bigger—say to the size of a ruler—and then we landed on it. Our pilot was good; we only bounced twice, and rolled to a stop with yards to spare.

XVII

And so we came to the end of our brief association with Buddha the yeti, having successfully liberated him from men who would no doubt become major lecturers on the crank circuit forever after.

I have to say that Buddha was one of the nicest guys I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and certainly among the coolest. Unflappable, really.

But to finish: we collected our packs, and hiked all that afternoon, up the headwall of that valley and along a forested high valley to the west of it. We camped that night on a broad ledge above a short falls, between two monster boulders. Nathan and Sarah shared one tent, Buddha and I another. Twice I woke and saw Buddha sitting in the tent door, looking out at the immense valley wall facing us.

The next day we hiked long and hard, up continuously, and finally came to the site of the expedition’s spring camp. We dropped our packs and crossed the river on a new bridge made of bamboo, and Nathan and Buddha led us up the cross-country route, through the forest to the high box canyon where they had first met. By the time we got up there it was late afternoon, and the sun was behind the mountains to the west.

Buddha seemed to understand the plan, as always. He took off my Dodgers cap and gave it back to me, having shed all the rest of his clothes back at camp. I had always treasured that cap, but now it only seemed right to give it back to Buddha; he nodded when I did, and put it back on his head. Nathan put the fossil necklace around Buddha’s neck; but the yeti took it off and bit the cord apart, and gave a fossil seashell to each of us. It was quite a moment. Who knows but what yetis didn’t eat these shellfish, in a previous age? I know, I know, I’ve got the timescales wrong, or so they say, but believe me, there was a look in that guy’s eye when he gave us those shells that was ancient. I mean old. Sarah hugged him, Nathan hugged him, I’m not into that stuff, I shook his skinny strong right hand. “Goodbye for Freds, too,” I told him.

“Na-mas-te,” he whispered.

“Oh, Buddha,” Sarah said, sniffling, and Nathan had his jaw clamped like a vise. Quite the sentimental moment. I turned to go, and sort of pulled the other two along with me; there wasn’t that much light left, after all. Buddha took off upstream, and last I saw him he was on top of a riverside boulder, looking back down at us curiously, his wild russet fur suddenly groomed and perfect-looking in its proper context; my Dodgers cap looked odd indeed. That yeti was a hard man to read, sometimes, but it seemed to me then that his eyes were sad. His big adventure was over.

On the way back down it occurred to me to wonder if he wasn’t in fact a little crazy, as I had thought once before. I wondered if he might not walk right into the next camp he found, and sit down and croak “Namaste,” blowing all the good work we’d done to save him from civilization. Maybe civilization had corrupted him already, and the natural man was gone for good. I hoped not. If so, you’ve probably already heard about it.

Well, things were pretty subdued in the old expedition camp that night. We got up the tents by lantern light, and had some soup and sat there looking at the blue flames of the stove. I almost made a real fire to cheer myself up, but I didn’t feel like it.

Then Sarah said, with feeling, “I’m proud of you, Nathan,” and he began to do his Coleman lantern glow, he was so happy. I would be, too. In fact, when she said, “I’m proud of you too, George,” and gave me a peck on the cheek, it made me grin, and I felt a pang of . . . well, a lot of things. Pretty soon they were off to their tent. Fine for them, and I was happy for them, really, but I was also feeling a little like old Snideley Whiplash at the end of the Dudley Do-Right episode: left out in the cold, with Dudley getting the girl. Of course I had my fossil seashell, but it wasn’t quite the same.

I pulled the Coleman over, and looked at that stone shell for a while. Strange object. What had the yeti who drilled the little hole through it been thinking? What was it for!

I remembered the meal on my bed, Buddha and me solemnly chomping on wafers and picking over the supply of jelly beans. And then I was all right; that was enough for me, and more than enough.

XVIII

Back in Kathmandu we met Freds and found out what had happened to him, over schnitzel Parisienne and apple strudel at the Old Vienna. “By noon I figured you all were long gone, so when the bus stopped for a break at Lamosangu I hopped off and walked right up to these guys’ taxi. I did my Buddha thing and they almost died when they saw me coming. It was Adrakian and two of those Secret Service guys who chased us out of the Sheraton. When I took off the cap and shades they were fried, naturally. I said, ‘Man, I made a mistake! I wanted to go to Pokhara! This isn’t Pokhara!’ They were so mad they started yelling at each other. ‘What’s that?’ says I. ‘You all made some sort of mistake too? What a shame!’ And while they were screaming at each other and all I made a deal with the taxi driver to take me back to Kathmandu too. The others weren’t too happy about that, and they didn’t want to let me in, but the cabbie was already pissed at them for hiring him to take his car over that terrible road, no matter what the fare. So when I offered him a lot of rupes he was pleased to stick those guys somehow, and he put me in the front seat with him, and we turned around and drove back to Kathmandu.”

I said, “You drove back to Kathmandu with the Secret Service? How did you explain the fur taped to the baseball cap?”

“I didn’t! So anyway, on the way back it was silent city behind me, and it got pretty dull, so I asked them if they’d seen the latest musical disaster movie from Bombay.”

“What?” Nathan said. “What’s that?”

“Don’t you go see them? They’re showing all over town. We do it all the time, it’s great. You just smoke a few bowls of hash and go see one of these musicals they make, they last about three hours, no subtitles or anything, and they’re killers! Incredible! I told these guys that’s what they should do—”

“You told the Secret Service guys they should smoke bowls of hash!”

“Sure! They’re Americans, aren’t they? Anyway, they didn’t seem too convinced, and we still had a hell of a long way to go to Kathmandu, so I told them the story of the last one I saw. It’s still in town, you sure you’re not going to see it? I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

We convinced him he wouldn’t.

“Well, it’s about this guy who falls in love with a gal he works with. But she’s engaged to their boss, a real crook who is contracted to build the town’s dam. The crook is building the dam with some kinda birdshit, it looked like, instead of cement, but while he was scamming that he fell into a mixer and was made part of the dam. So the guy and the gal get engaged, but she burns her face lighting a stove. She heals pretty good, but after that when he looks at her he sees through her to her skull and he can’t handle it, so he breaks the engagement and she sings a lot, and she disguises herself by pulling her hair over that side of her face and pretending to be someone else. He meets her and doesn’t recognize her and falls in love with her, and she reveals who she is and sings that he should fuck off. Heavy singing on all sides at that point, and he tries to win her back and she says no way, and all the time it’s raining cats and dogs, and finally she forgives him and they’re all happy again, but the dam breaks right where the crook was weakening it and the whole town is swept away singing like crazy. But these two both manage to grab hold of a stupa sticking up out of the water, and then the floods recede and there they are hanging there together, and they live happily ever after. Great, man. A classic.”

“How’d the Secret Service like it?” I asked.

“They didn’t say. I guess they didn’t like the ending.” But I could tell, watching Nathan and Sarah grinning hand-in-hand across the table, that they liked the ending just fine.

XIX

Oh, one more thing: you must not tell ANYONE about this!!! Okay?

SPICE POGROM

Connie Willis

Though Connie Willis is primarily known for her thoughtful and sometimes tragic fates; one of her most popular stories to grace the pages of this magazine was the screwball comedy, “Blued Moon” (January 19841. “Spice Pogrom” is a marvelous tale in the same tradition. The author also has a new novel, Lincoln’s Dreams, which will by published by Bantam books in May.

“You’ve got to talk to him,” Chris said. “I’ve told him there isn’t enough space, but he keeps bringing things home anyway.”

“Things?” Stewart said absently. He had his head half-turned as if he were listening to someone out of the holographic image.

“Things. A six-foot high Buddha, two dozen baseball caps, and a Persian rug!” Chris shouted at him. “Things I didn’t even know they had on Sony. Today he brought home a piano! How did they even get a piano up here with the weight restrictions?”

“What?” Stewart said. The person who had been talking to him moved into the holo-image, focusing as he entered, put a piece of paper in front of Stewart, and then stood there, obviously waiting for some kind of response. “Listen, Chris, darling, can I put you on hold? Or would you rather call me back?”

It had taken her almost an hour to get him in the first place. “I’ll hold,” she said, and watched the screen grimly as it went back to a two-dimensional wall image on the phone’s screen and froze with Stewart still smiling placatingly at her. Chris sighed and leaned back against the piano. There was hardly room to stand in the narrow hall, but she knew that if she wasn’t right in view when Stewart came back on the line, he’d use it as an excuse to hang up. He’d been avoiding her for the last two days.

Stewart’s image jerked into a nonsmiling one and grew to a full holo-image again. With the piano in here, there wasn’t really enough room for the phone. Stewart’s desk blurred and dissolved on the keyboard, but Chris wanted Stewart to see how crowded the piano made the hall. “Chris, I really don’t have time to worry about a few souvenirs,” he said. “We’ve got real communications difficulties over here with the aliens. The Japanese translation team’s been negotiating with them for a space program for over a week, but the Eahrohhs apparently don’t understand what it is we want.”

“I’m having communications difficulties over here, too,” Chris said. “I tell Mr. Ohghhi . . .” She stopped and looked at the alien’s name she had written on her hand so she could pronounce it. “Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh that there isn’t room in my apartment and that he’s got to stop buying things, and he seems to understand what I’m saying, but he goes right on buying. I’ve only got a two-room apartment, Stewart.”

“You could move your couch out of the living room,” he said.

“Then where would I sleep? On top of the piano? You said you’d try to find him someplace else to stay.”

“I’m giving the matter top priority, darling, but you don’t know how impossible it is to find any kind of space at all, let alone space with the kinds of specifications Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh requires.” A blond young woman moved into the image and put a computer printout down in front of Stewart. Chris braced herself against being put on hold again. “We were already full over here at NASA, and today Houston sent a dozen linguistic specialists up on the shuttle, and I don’t know where we’re going to put them.” He shook his head. “With all these reporters and tourists coming up, there isn’t a spare room on Sony.”

“Can’t you send some of these people back down to earth?” Chris said. “I’ve got two little girls living on my stairs who’re here because they think Spielberg’s bound to make a movie about the aliens so they came up here to try to get a part in it, which is ridiculous. I’m not even sure Spielberg’s still alive, but if he is, he’s got to be at least eighty. Isn’t there some way to send people like that home?”

“You know Sony’s got an automatic thirty-day travel permission wait. It’s been in effect since Sony was first built so that immigrants couldn’t change their minds before they got over shuttle-lag. NASA’s trying to get the Japanese to limit the earth-to-Sony traffic, but so far they’ve refused because they like all the business it’s bringing up.”

“Can’t NASA put on its own limits? They own the shuttle.”

“We don’t want to jeopardize relations with the Japanese. We’ve got too many of our own people who need to come up to see the aliens.”

“And they’re all using my bathroom,” Chris said. “How long will it take you to find another apartment for him?”

“Chris, darling, I don’t think you understand the overcrowding problem we’ve got over here . . . Hold on a second, will you?” he said, and flattened and froze.

“We’ve got an overcrowding problem over here, too, Stewart,” Chris said. Someone rang the bell. “Come in,” Chris shouted, and then was sorry.

Molly came in. “My mother thaid to tell you to get off the phone,” she said, lisping the word “said.”

“I’m really six,” Molly had told her without a trace of a lisp the day she and her mother moved onto the landing outside Chris’s apartment, “but six is box-office poison, because your teeth are going to fall out pretty soon, so my screen age is four and a half.” She was certainly dressed to look four and a half today, in a short yellow smock with ducks embroidered on it and a giant yellow bow in her shingled brown bob.

“My mother thayth to tell you we’re eckthpecting a call from my agent,” she said, with her dimpled hands on her hips.

“Your mother does not have phone privileges in this apartment. Your agent can call you on the pay phone in the hall.”

“It’th a holo-call,” Molly said, and strolled over to the piano. “He thaid he’d call at thickthteen-thirty. Did you know thum new people moved in on the thtairs today?”

“A slut and an old guy,” Bets said, coming into the hall. She was wearing a pink dress with a sash, pink ribbon bows, and black patent-leather shoes. “My mother says to ask you how we’re supposed to get the lead in Spielberg’s movie if we can’t talk to our agent.”

“How could new people move in?” Chris said. Molly’s mother had sublet half of the landing to Bets (who was also six according to Molly, even though she swore she was five) and her mother last week, and Chris had thought at the time that the only good thing about it was that nobody else could move in because Mr. Nagisha’s cousins were renting the hall outside Chris’s apartment, and Mr. Nagisha himself was living in the downstairs hall.

“Mr. Nagithha rented them the thtairth,” Molly said, plunking the piano keys, “for twenty thouthand yen apiethe.”

“The slut says she’s in show business,” Bets said archly, patting her golden curls, “but I think she’s a hooker.”

“The old guy came up to thee the alienth,” Molly said, banging out “Chopsticks.” “He thayth he’th alwayth wanted to meet one. My mother thayth he’th thenile.”

“Chris,” Stewart said, his face expanding out from the screen. Molly stopped banging on the piano. Bets tossed her yellow curls. They both turned and flashed Stewart a dimpled smile.

“They were just leaving,” Chris said hastily, and pushed them out of the hall.

“What adorable little girls!” Stewart said. “Do they live in your apartment building?”

“They live on the stairs, Stewart. At last count, so do four other people, not counting Mr. Nagisha’s cousins, who are living in the hall outside my apartment. They use my bathroom and make earthside calls on my phone, and I don’t have room for them or for Mr. Ogyfen . . . whatever his name is.”

“Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh,” Stewart said disapprovingly. “You’re going to have to learn how to pronounce his name properly. You don’t want to make him angry. I’ve told you before how important it is we don’t do anything that might offend the Eahrohhs.”

“He can’t stay here, Stewart.”

He looked aghast. Chris thought about putting him on hold that way. It was better than his frozen smile. “You can’t mean that, Chris. The negotiations are at an incredibly delicate stage. We can’t risk having anything upset them. It’s a matter of national security. Besides, NASA intends to make generous compensation to people whose apartments have been requisitioned.”

“You work for NASA. Why can’t he stay with you?”

“Chris, darling, we’ve been through all this before. You know Mother’s xenophobic. Just the thought of the Eahrrohhs being on Sony has given her terrible migraines. And you know Mr. Oghhifoehnnahigrheeh has to have ceilings at least twelve feet high for his vertical claustrophobia, and you were the only other person I knew who had ceilings that high. The Japanese didn’t design Sony for Americans. It’s hard enough to find buildings with even normal American ceilings, let alone twelve-foot ones. And with the Eahrohhs’ privacy fetish, we can’t ask them to double up with people.”

“I know, Stewart,” Chris said, “but . . .”

“The only twelve-foot ceilings on Sony are in the apartment buildings Misawa designed. Like your building.”

And your mother’s, Chris thought.

“It’ll only be for a few more days. We’re currently negotiating with the Japanese to transfer the Eahrohhs down to Houston. When that happens, you’ll have your apartment all to yourself again.” He pressed some buttons on his desk. “Darling, I’ve got a call coming in. Can’t we . . .”

The door to her apartment slid open, and someone said, “Hey, this is great!”

She looked back at Stewart. He had flattened out again, this time with a decidedly impatient look on his face.

“My room in here,” Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh said, and squeezed past Chris carrying two shopping bags, a bouquet of cherry blossoms, and what looked like a tent. The pockets of his long orange coat looked lumpy, too, but Chris hadn’t figured out yet which of the bulges and lumps were part of Mr. Ohghhifoennahigrheeh’s peculiar shape and which weren’t.

He looked a little like a sack of potatoes with short, wide legs and arms. His legs and arms were lumpy, too, and so was his head, except for the top, which was round and bald and surrounded by a fringe of fine pinkish-orange hair that extended down the sides of his face in wispy sideburns. “Except for he’s an alien, he’d never make it in the movies,” Bets had said the first time she’d seen him.

“Mr. Ohghhifoeh . . .” She stopped and looked down at her hand to get the name right. “Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh, I have to talk to you. You’ve got to stop buying things. There simply isn’t any more room for . . .”

Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh smiled at her, his wide mouth curving upward toward the two pinkish-orange lumps that were his cheeks. He put down the two shopping bags and the thing that looked like a tent and handed Chris the bouquet of cherry blossoms. “Hana,” he said. “Buy you.”

Chris had no idea what hana meant. “Thank you for the cherry blossoms, but . . .”

He shook his head vigorously, the wisps of cotton-candy hair flying out in all directions. “Hutchins buy hana.”

“Hutchins?” Chris said, wishing she had the Japanese translation team here.

“Pete Hutchins,” a tall young man said. He was wearing jeans and a satin bomber jacket and was trying to maneuver a duffel bag and a bicycle into the narrow hall. He held out a hand for her to shake. “He means I bought you the cherry blossoms. Hana means cherry blossoms in Japanese. You must be Chris. Okee’s told me all about you.”

“I’m very busy right now,” Stewart said from the phone. “Can’t this wait till tomorrow?”

“Hutchins stay here,” Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh said. He slid open his door and ducked inside with the shopping bags and the tent before Chris could even get a glimpse of what was inside.

“Just a minute, Stewart,” Chris said, and pushed the hold button. “Mr. Hutchins, what is it you want with Mr. Ohghhifoehnn . . .” She had to stop and read from her hand. “Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh?”

He twisted around to get a look at her hand. “Had to write it on there, huh?” he said. “I can’t pronounce it either, so I just call him Okeefenokee. And you can call me Pete.”

She closed her hand. “I don’t know what Mr. . . . he told you, but he doesn’t speak English very well, and . . .”

“I really appreciate Okee doing this. I just came up on the shuttle today, and I’m shot. So if you could just show me to my room . . .”

“Excuse me. Is this where the John is?” a woman with an elaborate topknot of brass-colored hair said. She was holding a skimpy hapi coat closed with one hand and carrying a makeup case. “The little kids said it was in here. I’m Charmaine. I just moved in. Top half of the stairs, but I don’t mind. The seventy percent gravity’s great for me in my job. And I’ve never seen so many cute guys in my life. Do you live here?” she said to Hutchins.

“Yes,” Hutchins said.

“No,” Chris said. “There’s been some misunderstanding.”

“About the John?” Charmaine said nervously. “Mr. Nagisha told me I had bathroom privileges.”

“No, I mean, you can use the bathroom, Charmaine. There isn’t anybody in there.” She turned back to Hutchins. “Mr. Hutchins, I don’t know what Mr. Ohghhifoehnn . . .”—she resisted the temptation to look at her hand—” . . . ackafee told you, but he sometimes has trouble understanding. . . .”

“ ‘Scuse me,” Charmaine said, and slithered past Hutchins, making no effort at all to stay away from him. “I gotto go do my makeup for my show. I’m a specialty dancer down at Luigi’s. You oughta come see me.” She waggled her fingers at him as she slid the bathroom door shut.

“Aren’t you off the phone yet?” Molly said from the doorway. She had her dimpled arms folded across her yellow-ducked middle and was tapping a black-patented foot. “My mother thayth to tell you that my agent hath very important newth. He’th thyure Thpielberg ith on Thony and . . .”

While she was talking, Bets was sidling past Molly and behind Hutchins, holding something behind her pink-sashed back. Chris reached around Hutchins and made a grab for it. She got hold of the curling iron by the cord and took it away from Bets.

“Electrical appliances are not allowed in the bathroom,” Chris said. She wrapped the cord around the curling iron and put it on top of the piano. “I told you last time I was going to take it away from you if it happened again. You’re supposed to use the outlets in Mr. Nagisha’s apartment.”

“We can’t use the ones in Mr. Nagisha’s apartment. He blew a fuse, and our agent’s calling us at eighteen o’clock!”

“Not on my phone he isn’t,” Chris said. “The phone! I forgot all about Stewart.” She punched the reinstate button, wondering if he’d already hung up. Hutchins and the little girls backed up as the holo-image spread, but they were still in the way. Hutchins seemed to be standing in the middle of Stewart’s desk. Molly and Bets’s face were covered with blurry brown. Chris hit the flat-image button, and Stewart retreated to the screen. “I’m sorry, Stewart,” she said.

He was writing busily. “Can this wait till tomorrow, Chris?” he said without looking up. “We’ll have lunch and you can tell me all about it. The Garden of Meditation. In the ginza. Thirteen-thirty.”

Hutchins was watching the screen. “All right, Stewart, but . . .” Chris said.

“Till then just go along with whatever Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh says. The negotiations are at a very delicate stage. Anything could break them off. Let him do anything he wants. I love you, darling. See you tomorrow,” he said, still without looking up, and blanked the screen before Chris had a chance to say anything.

Hutchins was looking at her curiously. “Who is that guy?” he said.

“He’s my fiancé,” Chris said. Molly had climbed up on the piano bench and was kneeling on the keyboard, trying to reach the curling iron. Chris grabbed it away from her and put it behind her back.

“You better give my curling iron back!” Bets said. “I’m going to tell my mother you stole it.”

“Out,” she said. She escorted both of them out of her apartment, slid the door shut, and went into the living room. She lifted up the pile of folded blankets on the end of the couch and stuck the curling iron under it.

“You’re really engaged to that guy on the phone?” Hutchins said, leaning against the door, his hands in his jeans pockets.

“Yes,” she said, straightening back up. “Why?”

“Because ‘let him do anything he wants,’ covers a lot of territory. What if Okee decided he wanted to carry you off with him to Eahrohhsani, or wherever it is they came from, and make you his bride?”

“Mr. Ohghhifoehnn . . . he is a very nice man. Alien. Eahrohh. And he would not . . .”

“Earrose. They drop an e and add some h‘s to make it plural.”

“Earrose. Mr. Hutchins, I don’t care what Mr. . . . he told you. You can’t stay here. There isn’t any space. The landlord has people living on the stairs.”

“Hutchins stay here,” Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh said. He peeked around Hutchins and then disappeared back into the hall.

Chris went after him.

“Tall,” he said, smiling and nodding. “High ceilings. Stay here.”

“But there isn’t any space. Mr. Ohghhifoehnnah . . . where will he sleep?”

“My room.” He took hold of the handlebars of the bike and started pulling it toward his door. Chris backed up against the piano to get out of the way of the handlebars. “I keep in here. Lots of space.”

“ ‘Scuse me,” Charmaine said brightly. She had put on her makeup, but not where Chris had expected it. She had the hapi coat draped over her arm.

“Where exactly do you work?” Chris said.

“Luigi’s Tempura Pizzeria and Sutorippu. That means strip show. I’m in the Fan Tan Fannie number,” she said. She turned around.

“I can see that,” Chris said.

“Cute idea, huh?” she said. “I just love my fans.”

“So do I,” Hutchins said.

Charmaine started edging out of the hall, this time trying hard not to touch Hutchins for fear of smearing her makeup. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh went on tugging at the bicycle. Chris tried to turn around to get out from the piano so Charmaine could get past and found herself nose to nose with Hutchins. She backed into the piano. The keys made a crash of noise as her open hands hit them. “Listen,” Hutchins said, taking a step toward her, and towering over her. He really was tall. “In all seriousness, there’s obviously been a mix-up. I met Okee on the bullet, and he said he’d sublet half of his room to me, and I said okay. I’d just gotten in on the shuttle, and I guess I wasn’t thinking clearly. I felt like hell.”

He rubbed his hand across his forehead. He did look tired. Chris remembered what she had felt like when she came up on the shuttle. Everyone had kept telling her how lucky she was not to be nauseated, but she hadn’t felt lucky. She’d felt bone-tired, so weary she had burst into tears at the thought of getting through customs, even in the zero gravity of Sony’s axis.

“As a matter of fact, I still feel like hell,” he said.

“It’s shuttle-lag,” Chris said. “Aspirin helps. And vitamin A.” She didn’t say he should be glad he wasn’t the kind to get nauseated. “And you should get some sleep.”

“Sleep,” he said, leaning against the piano. “You wouldn’t know of any good hotels, would you?”

She shook her head. “There’s only one hotel on Sony, and it’s full of Eahrohhs. So’s everything else. There are over four hundred of them, you know.”

“Four hundred,” he said, looking at Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh, who had gotten the handlebars and the front wheel turned around so the bike wouldn’t budge. Hutchins helped him straighten it out. “Where are they putting them all?”

“All over. The officials, the headmen or chiefs or whatever you call them, and all the translators are staying at NASA. They’re negotiating a treaty. They’re going to give us a space program.”

“Are they?” Hutchins said with an odd note in his voice. “What about the rest of them?”

“They put them anyplace there was room. Vacant apartments, extra rooms. It wasn’t so bad when it was just the aliens, but now that all these sightseers have come up . . .”

“They’re living on the stairs,” Hutchins said. “What about that? Do you think your landlord would rent me a step or two?”

She bit her lip. “No. He lets as many extra people sleep on the stairs at night as the fire regulations will permit—he sells them ‘overnight leases’—but he’d already sold out by nine this morning.”

Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh had gotten the handlebars of the bike wedged in the screen of his bedroom door and was struggling with it. “Want Hutchins stay,” he said.

If she threw Hutchins out and then Mr. Ohghhi . . . he got angry or refused to cooperate, Stewart would be furious. He had told her explicitly to do whatever he wanted, and what he wanted was for Mr. Hutchins to stay. While she was on the phone, she had decided to insist that Stewart come home with her after lunch and talk to him about all these things he was buying. She could ask Stewart what to do then, and he could find Mr. Hutchins an apartment.

“All right,” she said. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh got the handlebars unstuck and disappeared into his room with the bicycle.

“All right, what?” Hutchins said.

“You can stay here tonight and look for a room tomorrow.”

“I love you,” he said.

“Mr. Nagisha said you’re violating your lease by taking my curling iron away from me,” Bets said.

“It’s in the living room. On the couch. But if I catch you with it in the bathroom one more time, I’m flushing it down the o-benjo,” Chris said. Bets flounced off, stamping her feet so the ruffles on her petticoat showed.

“I’m only letting you stay because Mr. Ohghhi . . . he wants you to, and I don’t want to upset him. Negotiations are at a very delicate stage. Tomorrow when I have lunch with my fiancé, I’ll ask him about it, but I’m sure he’ll want you to find another place to stay.”

“Do you have any vitamin A?” Hutchins said.

“In the bathroom.” Chris pointed at the door. It was shut. “Bets, you come out of there. You are not allowed to have electrical appliances in there.”

Bets slid the door open. “I was brushing my teeth,” she said indignantly, holding up a pink toothbrush shaped like a bunny.

“I’ll bet.” She got Hutchins aspirin and vitamin-A packets and herded Bets out of her apartment. “I’ll get you a bathroom schedule and the apartment rules,” she said.

Mr. Nagisha’s cousins were squatting around a hibachi in the middle of the landing, cooking something vile smelling. Chris stepped over them and started down the steps. She wondered how Mr. Nagisha would take the news that Mr. Ohghhi . . . her alien had sublet half of his room to Mr. Hutchins. Probably not very well, unless he could think of a way to make money off the deal. Mr. Nagisha had welcomed him with open arms since NASA had agreed to pay the equivalent of a six months’ lease.

Even at that, he had insisted on rent based on changing property values, which were soaring with the sudden influx of people. He was going to make a killing.

Molly was sitting on the steps above the landing reading Variety. “Have you seen Mr. Nagisha?” Chris said.

“My mother’th talking to him about how you took the curling iron away from Berth. She thayth . . .”

“Are they in the apartment? I need a copy of the bathroom schedule.” She pushed down past their trunks and almost stepped on the old man who had just moved in. He had a baseball cap that read “Blue Harvest” pulled down over his eyes and was snoring loudly. She took hold of the banister to make the last jump over Mr. Nagisha’s file drawers and lap terminal and knocked on his apartment door.

Mr. Nagisha had rented his own apartment out to as many people as it would hold and taken up residence on the bottom steps, but he wasn’t in the apartment, even though half of Sony’s population appeared to be. He’d better not say anything to me about my alien subletting half of his room, Chris thought. She went back out to Mr. Nagisha’s terminal, entered Mr. Hutchins’s name under Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh and asked for a revised schedule.

“ ‘Scuse me,” Charmaine said, putting down one high-heeled shoe next to the printer. “I gotta leave for work. My shift doesn’t start till nineteen, but I gotta walk on account of my makeup gets smeared on the bullet.”

“I can imagine,” Chris said. She tore off the printout and stood up. Charmaine was wearing a pink smock that stood out stiffly from her body and made her look much younger than she had in the hall. She had her hair done in an elaborate topknot. “You’d better take an umbrella. It might rain.”

“I thought on the L-5’s it was only supposed to rain at night after everybody’d gone to bed.”

“It is, but the sprinklers are set to come on when a given area gets overheated, and with all these people, they’ve been coming on at funny times. Mr. Ohghhi . . .,” she said, and glanced guiltily at her hand as if Hutchins were watching her, “foehnnahigrheeh and I got caught in the ginza yesterday.” He hadn’t been the least bit dismayed. He had gone into the nearest department store and bought five dozen oiled-paper umbrellas. “Why don’t you ask Mr. . . . my alien to loan you an umbrella? He’s got more than enough.”

“Gee, thanks,” Charmaine said, and started up the stairs.

“He doesn’t speak English very well. Just say ‘umbrella’ and act it out.” She went through the motions of opening an umbrella and holding it above her head. “Better yet, ask Mr. Hutchins to ask him. He doesn’t seem to have any trouble communicating with him.”

“I bet he wouldn’t have trouble communicating with anybody,” Charmaine said, and clattered on up the stairs in her spike heels.

Chris printed out copies of the bathroom schedules and the apartment rules, tore them off, and started back up the stairs.

“He loaned me a red one to go with my fans,” Charmaine said, twirling it as she came down the stairs. “I love it. I might use it in my single. Can I ask you something about this guy Hutchins? Is he your boyfriend?”

“No,” Chris said. “I’m engaged.”

“I knew it,” Charmaine said. “The cute ones are always already taken. Even when the ratio of guys to women is as good as it is right now on Sony. Especially the tall cute ones.”

“I’m not engaged to Mr. Hutchins. I don’t even know him. NASA requisitioned half of my apartment for Mr. Ohghhi . . . my alien, and he sublet half of it to Mr. Hutchins.”

“Oh,” she said, opening and closing the umbrella.

“The little kids told me he was moving in with you, so I figured he was your boyfriend.”

“He is not my boyfriend. He is not my anything.”

“So you wouldn’t be mad if I put the moves on him, then? I mean, I’m here to try to find a husband, but I wouldn’t want to steal your boyfriend or anything.” She snapped the umbrella open and put it over her shoulder. “Is he a lawyer?”

“I don’t know,” Chris said, and frowned. Come to think of it, he hadn’t said a word about what he did for a living or why he was on Sony.

“I hope not. They always try to make marriage into a real-estate deal or something.” She sighed. “My old boyfriend down on earth was a lawyer, and gee, you woulda thought I was a condo or something. Well, I gotta go. See you at the show.” She flounced out, twirling the umbrella.

Chris started back up the stairs, maneuvering between rolled-up bedding and a stack of dishes from the deli next door. The old man was sitting up, watching Charmaine’s exit with a dazed expression. Mr. Nagisha’s cousins were watching, too, and eating fried fish. Molly and Bets were leaning over the landing railing, their chins resting on their arms.

“I told you thyee was a thlut,” Molly said. “Did you thee those fanth on her ath?”

“At least she’s really in show business,” Chris said. “Unlike some people I could name.”

She went back into the apartment. Hutchins was in the hall, leaning against the door of her room with the aspirin packet still in his hand as if he were too tired to take it.

“Mr. Hutchins,” she said, “I’m afraid this isn’t going to work. I know Mr. Ohghhi . . . he told you you could stay, but . . .”

“But you’ve been talking to Hedda and Louella, and they’ve been busily spreading the news that you have a live-in lover. Are you sure they’re not forty-year-old circus midgets?”

“No,” Chris said, feeling sorry for him all over again. He had leaned his head against the wall as if it hurt, and even though he was smiling at her, it looked like it took an effort.

“Am I supposed to ache all over?”

“Yes. Did you take the vitamin A?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” She handed him the printouts. “These are the bathroom schedules. Everyone gets an initial two minutes in the morning using this schedule, which begins at five o’clock. At six-fifteen the second rotation begins, which allows you an additional five minutes. If you miss your turn, you automatically go to the end of the schedule. There’s soap, and water for brushing your teeth in the bathroom. You get your shower water from the tank in the basement. You’re allowed sixteen ounces.”

“No electrical appliances in the bathroom,” he said wearily.

“The apartment rules are on the other sheet. You’ll feel better as soon as the aspirin starts working. I’ll make you a cup of tea and you can lie down.” She started past him into the living room, but he put his arm up with surprising speed.

“It’s a great idea, but it won’t work,” he said.

“Why not? Did Mr. Ohghhi . . . my alien buy another piano while I was downstairs?”

“Worse,” he said. “He wants us all to go out on the town. ‘I want to drink sake and see a sutorippu,’ was the way he put it.” He handed Chris a card that said, “Luigi’s Tempura Pizzeria and Sutorippu. Topless. Bottomless. Continuous shows.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “Are you sure you’re not the one who wants to see the sutorippu’ ?” she said. “Mr. Ohghhifoehnn . . .” She stopped and read from her hand, determined not to let him intimidate her.

“. . . ahigrheeh doesn’t know enough English to say a sentence that long.”

“How do you know?” he said. “You’re so busy worrying about how to pronounce his name that you don’t even listen to him.”

“Well, you definitely shouldn’t go,” she said to change the subject. “This Luigi’s place is down in Shitamachi, on the equator. You’re shuttlelagged enough as it is. The last thing you need is full gravity.”

“I’m doing okay. Your vitamin A must be working. And anyway, we don’t have any choice in the matter. Your boyfriend said we had to do whatever Okee wanted, and what he wants is to watch a strip show.”

Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh slid open the door to his room. He had combed down his wispy hair and put a pink tie on over his long orange coat. “Topless,” he said happily. “Bottomless. Continuous shows.”

They took the bullet. It was jammed. Chris spent the trip wedged between a large bearded man and a middle-aged woman who looked like she was the kind who did get nauseated on the shuttle. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh had bought a large paper kite on the platform when Chris wasn’t looking, and he and Hutchins were holding it above their heads so it wouldn’t get crushed.

The bullet got progressively more crowded as they got closer to the ginza and Shitamachi. In the crush to get off at their stop, Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh’s kite got torn and Chris lost her shoe. Hutchins dived into the tangle of legs as the doors were closing and rescued it.

“Thank you, Mr. Hutchins,” Chris said, leaning against a pillar to put it back on.

“Now you’re mispronouncing my name,” he said, with a grin that looked like he was feeling better. “It’s Pete.”

Luigi’s Tempura Pizzeria was about the size of Chris’s hall, if you took out the piano, only with such low ceilings that Hutchins had to duck. It was nearly as crowded as the bullet had been. There was no sign of a stage that Chris could see, and the tables were too small to dance on.

The waiter led them through the mob to a tiny table, pulled it out from the wall so Chris could sit down, and then shoved it back in place, pinning her firmly between Hutchins and Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh. The waiter handed them menus that were bigger than the table and then stood there, holding a hand terminal and a stylus and looking impatient.

“In the tempura pizza, is it just the tomato sauce that’s deep-fried in batter?” Hutchins asked. “Or do you dip in the whole pizza?”

“Have eat?” Chris asked Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh, pointing to the pictures on the menu. “Fish? Rice?” Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh smiled blankly at her and nodded. “Eat?” She picked up a pair of chopsticks and pantomimed eating. “Have eat?”

“What are you going to have, Okee?” Hutchins interrupted. “The sashimi lasagna looks good. I don’t know about the linguini with eel sauce.”

“Why do you talk to him like that?” Chris whispered. “You know Mr. Ohghhi . . .”—she consulted her hand,—“foehnnahigrheeh only speaks a few words of English.”

Hutchins took hold of her hand and looked at the palm. “Why do you have his name written on your hand?” he whispered back.

She tried to pull her hand away. “Stewart says the Eahrohhs are very sensitive about how their names are pronounced.”

“Is Stewart the guy on the phone, the one you’re engaged to?”

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you to talk to Okee like he’s deaf and feebleminded, too? ‘Have eat? Fish? Rice?’ ”

“Mr. Ohghhi . . .” She tried to look at her hand, but Hutchins folded it firmly shut.

“Okee speaks better English than Charmaine. He’s only talking that ridiculous pidgin to you because you’ve got him intimidated with all this correct pronunciation stuff. He’s afraid if he talks to you, he’ll mispronounce something, so he doesn’t say anything. If you’d quit worrying about how to pronounce his name, and just talk to him . . .”

“Your order, sigñor?” the waiter said. “Go ahead,” Hutchins said. “Ask him what he’d like to have for dinner.” His hand was still firmly closed over hers. The waiter tapped the stylus on his hand terminal. “Mr Ohghhi . . .,” she said.

“Okeefenokee,” Hutchins said. “Like the swamp.” “Okeefenokee,” she said timidly, “what would you like to have for dinner?”

Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh’s smile straightened out into an expression Chris hadn’t seen before. His cheek knobs seemed to grow more orange, and two lines formed above his nose. “I’ll have the sushi and spaghetti,” he said. “And you do have any sake? Majori? Good. I’d like a bottle. And three cups.” Chris stared at him.

“And you, sigñorina?” the waiter said.

“She’ll have the sushi and spaghetti,” Hutchins said.

“ ‘Scuse me,” Charmaine said, brushing past the waiter. She was wearing another hapi coat, made of a glittery fabric you could see through. “They told me you guys were here,” she said, “and I would’ve come right over only on the way down here some guy pinched me. I had to do one of my fans all over again.”

“We’ll all have the sushi and spaghetti,” Hutchins said, “and bring another sake cup.”

“Oh, gee, no, not for me,” she said, bending over the table to talk to Hutchins. “I’m on at nineteen o’clock. Right after Omiko and Her Orbiting Colonies.” She leaned over farther.

“Great,” Hutchins said.

“Would you like to sit down?” Chris said.

“I can’t. On account of my fans.” She looked around the room. “This is a great place to work. Three guys have proposed to me already.”

“Charmaine came up here to find a husband,” Chris told Hutchins.

“Yeah,” Charmaine said. She leaned over Hutchins. “I wanted to go someplace romantic, someplace where guys wouldn’t treat me like I was a piece of real estate. I guess you think that’s kind of a crazy reason, huh? But I’ve met some people whose reasons are even crazier. Did you know that sweet old guy who lives above me on the steps came up because he’d always wanted to meet an alien? And this weird guy I met tonight told me he came up because he figures these arrows guys are going to kill us all, and he wants to get it over with. No offense, Mr. Fenokee,” she said, turning to lean over Okee. His face twisted up in an unfathomable expression.

“Why did you come up to Sony, Mr. Hutchins?” Chris said hastily.

“Not to get married. So you thought Sony was a romantic place to come?” he said, watching Charmaine lean over the table.

“Gee, yeah,” she said, leaning over even farther. “I mean, the stars and the moon are right outside and everything. It’s bound to have a romantic effect on a guy. It might even have a romantic effect on my old boyfriend, but I doubt it. I mean, he acted like he was a prospective buyer and I was a two-bedroom split-level. He kept calling our wedding a closing, and instead of going on a honeymoon, he wanted to ‘establish occupancy.’ Can you believe that?” She sighed an impressive sigh. “But I don’t know if Sony’s going to be any better. Omiko says the marriage contracts up here are really real-estate deals, with property clauses and everything, and that people get married all the time just to get their hands on a place to live.”

“Does your fiancé have his own apartment?” Hutchins asked.

“He lives with his mother,” Chris said stiffly. “Stewart says the lack of space on Sony makes property very valuable, and the marriage laws are bound to reflect that, but it doesn’t mean . . .”

“Gee, your fiancé sounds just like my old boyfriend,” Charmaine said, leaning over about as far as she could go. “I mean, there’s gotta be a romantic guy around somewhere.”

The waiter came back with the bottle of sake and four porcelain cups the size of soup bowls.

“ ‘Scuse me, I gotta go get ready for my number.” She wriggled away between the tables.

“Now there’s a woman whose property value is in the high forties,” Hutchins said, pouring out the sake.

“My wife has large cups, too,” Okee said. Hutchins poured sake on the table. Chris bit her lip. “They are not painted and made of . . .” Okee stopped and searched for a word. His face was screwed up into that odd expression again. He looked like a newborn baby about to cry.

“Porcelain?” Chris said calmly, picking up the empty sake cup and handing it to Okee. “These cups are made of a kind of glazed clay called porcelain.”

“Porcelain,” he said, the two lines above his nose deepening. “My wife would like these cups.”

Chris passed the empty cup to Hutchins so he could fill it. Now he was the one with the odd expression, and she didn’t seem to be any better at interpreting his than Okee’s.

“Cups,” he said thoughtfully, and poured some more sake on the table.

“I didn’t know you were married, Mr. Okeefenokee,” Chris said, mopping up sake with her napkin.

“Yes,” he said, and his face screwed up again. He drank down his bowlful of sake in one swallowless gulp and set it in front of Hutchins. “My wife and I drink . . .”—he said an unpronounceable word with enough s’s in it to defeat Molly’s lisp—“out of cups like these. It is better than sake.”

“ ‘Scuse me,” Charmaine said. She had put on her headdress, which consisted of giant red-lacquered chopsticks stuck at various angles into her brass-colored topknot. If she bent over Hutchins like she’d been doing before, she would do herself an injury. “Can I borrow Mr. Fenokee for a minute? The girls in the show all want to meet him.”

Okee took another incredibly large swallow of sake and followed her through the crowd.

“Don’t you think we should go with him?” Chris said, watching the bobbing red headdress work its way through the crowd.

“He’ll be all right. How did you know he was talking about the sake cups and not Charmaine’s, um, selling points?”

She reached for her cup of sake. “Just because they were the first thing that sprang to your mind. . . .”

He put his hand over hers. “I’m serious. How did you know for sure he was talking about the sake cups?”

“Because he asked me at breakfast what the coffee cups were called, and I told him they were cups, so I knew he knew the word, and he doesn’t seem to be able to absorb more than one meaning of a word.”

His grip tightened on her hand. “Give me an example,” he said urgently.

“All right. Yesterday at breakfast we had rolls, and he asked me what they were called. When I told him, he took two of them and went out and gave them to Molly and Bets. ‘Here roll,’ he said, and Bets said, ‘We asked if you could get us a role. In the alien movie. Not this kind of roll,’ and threw it at him.”

“A regular Shirley Temple. Did you try to explain what a role in a movie was?”

“Yes, I told him there were two words that sounded like roll and that Bets meant an acting job in a movie, but I could tell he didn’t understand. He started nodding and smiling the way he always does when I tell him he’s got to stop buying things.”

“Because there isn’t any more room in your apartment,” he said, and caught up her hand in both of his. “That’s why . . .”

“ ‘Scuse me,” Charmaine said sharply. She had brought Mr. Okeefenokee back. Chris hastily withdrew her hand from Hutchins’s.

“You’ll never guess who just showed up,” Charmaine said. “My old boyfriend. He said he came up to Sony to find me.”

“That sounds pretty romantic,” Chris said.

“Yeah, I know.” She sighed. “I told him I’d go out with him after I get off work, but if he says one word about escrow or closings . . . I gotta go. Thanks, Mr. Fenokee.”

Okee had several lipstick prints on the top of his bald head, and his face had smoothed out into that new expression, his mouth straight across, his cheeks bright orange.

“After we see the sutorippu,” he said, “I would like you to get married.”

The waiter appeared suddenly and slammed down three orders of sushi and spaghetti in compartmentalized bento-bako boxes. “Will there be anything else, sigñor?” he asked Hutchins. “The first show is about to start.”

Hutchins didn’t answer him. He was still looking worried. Chris wondered if his aspirin was starting to wear off. She hoped not. Between the shuttle-lag and the sake, he would really crash. Okee motioned the waiter over and said something she couldn’t hear.

“Please move over next to the gentlemen, sigñora,” the waiter said, and waved her over toward Hutchins, motioning her to turn the chair around so it was facing the wall. She moved the chair so hers and Hutchins’s were side by side.

“Chris,” Hutchins said, leaning toward her and yawning, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you about this subletting situation. . . .”

There was a sudden blast of music, and the wall in front of Chris rolled up and revealed Omiko and her Orbiting Colonies. Chris was glad she’d moved her chair. She would have fallen over into the orchestra pit. Mr. Okeefenokee was watching the activities on stage, which involved clear plastic stars and tassels, with the broad smile and wobbling nod that usually meant that he was going to buy something.

“If he buys Omiko and her orbiting colonies I’m evicting him,” she shouted at Hutchins over the deafening music. He didn’t answer. A heavy weight came down on her shoulder. He’s probably smiling and nodding at those LaGrangian points, too, and doesn’t even realize he’s got his hand on my shoulder, she thought. “What about the subletting situation?” she said suspiciously, and turned to glare at him.

He was sound asleep, his mouth a little open and his face looking somehow more tired in sleep. “Well,” Chris thought, feeling oddly pleased.

The music ground up to a finale, and Omiko put enough spin on her colonies to induce full gravity. Hutchins began to snore. “My wife does that,” Mr. Okeefenokee said, watching the stage, and let out a wail like an air-raid siren.

Hutchins slept all the way home on the bullet. Chris spent the trip explaining to Mr. Okeefenokee why he couldn’t buy anything else. He smiled and nodded, trying to juggle the two dozen bento-bako boxes and Fan Tan Fannie’s fan against the uneven motion of the bullet. Chris held the box containing the porcelain sake cups.

“There just isn’t any more room in my apartment,” Chris said. “Tomorrow I’m going to see my fiancé and ask him if he can store some of the things in his apartment, but . . .”

“Tomorrow you and Hutchins get married. Have closing. Honeymoon.” He pronounced honeymoon “hahnahmoon.”

“People who get married don’t really have closings. They have weddings. And they don’t just get married. They have to be in love, they have to know each other.”

“No?” Okee said.

“No. I mean, they have to be friends, to talk to each other.”

“You and Hutchins talk. You are friends.”

Chris glanced at Hutchins, who had his arm slung through one of the hanging straps to keep himself more or less upright, wishing he would wake up and explain things to Mr. Okeefenokee. “You can’t just be friends. You have to spend time alone together so you can talk without other people listening, and so you can . . .”

“Neck,” Hutchins said, yawning. He eased his arm out of the strap.

“Neck?” Okee said, with the smile starting again that meant he didn’t understand. He put his hand on his neck.

“Mr. Hutchins means kissing,” Chris said, glaring at Hutchins. He was looking at Okee, though, with that thoughtful expression on his face again. “This is our stop.”

It was raining when they came out of the station. People were asleep on the sidewalks, huddled under umbrellas and makeshift tents. There were half a dozen asleep under the overhang of Chris’s building. Inside, Mr. Nagisha lay curled up by the front door with his arm around his lap terminal and disk files.

“Shh,” she said, and tiptoed to the stairs.

Hutchins tiptoed after her, stopping to take off his shoes. Mr. Okeefenokee followed, juggling his bento-bako boxes. Fan Tan Fannie’s fan dragged across Mr. Nagisha’s nose. He sneezed but didn’t wake up.

Chris started up the stairs. The old man was stretched out like a corpse on the third step up, his hands crossed on his breast and the baseball cap over his face. His running shoes were on the step above him, and his feet in their pink socks stuck through the banisters.

There were at least five extra people sleeping on the landing, each clutching an overnight lease contract. Mr. Nagisha must be making a killing. Molly and Bets’s mothers were asleep sitting up against the banister, still holding an open copy of Variety between them.

Molly was asleep against the door of Chris’s apartment, wrapped in a sleeping bag with blue kittens on it. Chris couldn’t get the door open without cracking Molly on the head. Hutchins took hold of a corner of the sleeping bag and pulled her out of the way, yawning. “Here’s Dorothy, but where’s Lillian?” he said, and yawned again. “Shh,” Chris said, and unlocked the door. Hutchins and Mr. Okeefenokee both seemed to snap awake at the whirr of her key being read. Okee hoisted up his dragging fan and managed to make it through the door before she did, and Hutchins straightened to his full height and cleared his throat. Chris looked at him warily and opened the door to her room.

The blankets she had left stacked on the end of the couch were draped unevenly over it, the tail of one of the quilts trailing on the floor. In the middle of them, sound asleep, lay Bets, her golden curls spread out endearingly against the pillow and her thumb in her mouth. She was hugging a teddy bear and a frayed pink blanket. Chris glanced at Hutchins, wondering if this was what all the throat-clearing had been about, but he was bending over Bets, shaking his head. “I was wrong about the kid’s acting ability. She’s doing an amazing imitation of an innocent child asleep.”

“Bets,” Chris said sternly. “Wake up. What are you doing in here?”

Bets sighed, a sweet, babyish sigh, and turned over.

“I know you’re awake, Bets,” Chris said. She knelt down and snatched the teddy bear away from her. “Tell me what you’re doing in here, or I’ll call your agent and tell him both your front teeth fell out.”

“You better not,” Bets said. She sat up, her cheeks pink and her eyes bright with sleep. “You better give me back my teddy bear.”

Chris stuck the teddy bear behind her back. “Not until you tell me what you’re doing in here.”

“The door was open and I came in here just for a minute and your bed looked so soft I guess I just fell asleep.” She shrugged daintily.

“She ate my porridge all up, too,” Hutchins said. “Where’s your phone, Chris?”

Bets stood up in the middle of the couch. Her pink nightgown had a ruffle around the bottom that almost covered her bare toes. “My mother says we’re first on the list and you can’t just sublet your room to some boyfriend of yours. She says . . .”

“I did not sublet my room to anybody. Mr. Okeefenokee sublet his room to Mr. Hutchins.”

“Oh, yeah?” Bets said. “Then what’s that doing in here?” She pointed up at the ceiling.

“What is that?” Chris said, looking up at the hammocklike arrangement of straps and white padding hanging from the ceiling. There was an aluminum ladder hooked onto the wall above the couch.

“It’s an astronaut’s sleep restraint,” Hutchins said. “Okee bought it at the NASA Surplus Store. It was used on the space station, but don’t worry. It’s been reinforced for seventy percent gravity. It won’t fall down.”

“It won’t fall down because you’re taking it down. I agreed to let you stay in Mr. Okeefenokee’s room, not in here.”

“I know, but Okee has trouble understanding more than one meaning of a word. That’s what I was trying to tell you at Luigi’s. You told him there wasn’t any more room in your apartment, so he thinks ‘room’ means ‘available storage space.’ ” He pointed at the ceiling. “He apparently decided this space was available.”

Chris didn’t wait for him to finish. She marched down the hall and pounded on the door of Mr. Okeefenokee’s room. “Mr. Okeefenokee!” she shouted. “I have to talk to you.”

“Shh,” Hutchins said. “You’ll wake up that DeMille crowd scene outside.”

“I don’t care if I wake the orbiting dead. You’re not sleeping in my room.”

“You’d better give me back my teddy bear,” Bets said.

Okee pushed open his shoji screen an inch and a half and peeked out.

“Mr. Okeefenokee, there’s been a misunderstanding. Mr. Hutchins can’t sleep in my room. I said you could sublet your room.” She could see the smile coming.

“Remember ‘role’ ?” Hutchins said. “Remember ‘cups’ ? Remember ‘neck’ ? I spent fifteen minutes trying to explain the difference to him this afternoon.”

“And then you suggested that we go out for dinner so we wouldn’t get back here until it was too late for me to do anything about it,” she said furiously. “You probably timed it so it was raining, too.”

“Look, I’m too tired to argue with you, and in about five minutes I’m going to be too lagged to even make it up that ladder and into bed. So if we could please talk about it in the morning . . .”

“There’s nothing to talk about. I’m calling Stewart.”

“What for? He told you to do whatever Okee wants. Okee wants me to stay.”

“Stewart was not talking about a man sleeping in my room.

“I’m not sleeping in your room. I’m sleeping in Okee’s room, which happens to be above your room.” He shuffled off down the hall. “I’m going to bed. G’night.” Bets padded barefoot after him. They disappeared into the living room.

Chris punched in Stewart’s number and let it ring. After the first ring, she hit the time key on the screen. It flashed twenty-three o’clock. Stewart’s mother went to bed at twenty-one-thirty. Chris hit the hang-up button.

Okee was still peeking at her through the tiny space in the sliding door. “All right,” she said, “he can stay tonight, but tomorrow . . .”

“Tomorrow you and Hutchins get married,” he said, and slid the screen shut with a bang.

Hutchins was already in the sleep restraint, one arm dangling limply over the side. Bets and Molly were in Molly’s sleeping bag, which they had dragged over next to the couch. Their eyes were squeezed shut and their hands were tucked up under their cheeks.

“I said Mr. Hutchins could stay,” Chris said. “I didn’t say anything about you two. Out.”

Molly sat up and rubbed her eyes with her chubby little fists. “We have to thtay to thyaperone you,” she said, “tho people won’t think you’re a thlut.”

Chris was suddenly too tired to argue with them. It’s the sake, she thought irrationally. He tried to get me drunk so I’d let him stay. He had the whole thing planned.

She undressed in the bathroom and put on her nightshirt, even though there wasn’t enough room in there to raise her arms over her head. Molly and Bets had kicked their covers off. She put Bets’s pink blanket over them, turned off the lights, and got into bed.

She could hear Hutchins breathing above her in the darkness, a heavy, even breathing that meant he was already asleep. Poor guy, she thought in spite of herself.

When she had emigrated to Sony, she’d barely made it through customs and into the Hilton before collapsing. There was no way she could have made it through a dinner and a sutorippu. Half a sutorippu, she thought, feeling pleased all over again at the way he’d fallen asleep during Omiko’s act.

Bets turned over and murmured something that sounded like “I’m going to be a star!” A sound like the shuttle taking off roared from Mr. Okeefenokee’s room. It went on for a full minute, subsided, and then started up again.

“What in the hell’s that?” Hutchins said. She could hear the sleep restraint creak as if he had sat up.

“It’s Mr. Okeefenokee,” Chris whispered.

“What’s he doing?”

“Snoring, I think. He does it every night.”

“You’re kidding,” he said, and she could hear his head flop back against the pillow. “No wonder you wanted to get rid of him.”

“I didn’t want to get rid of him. I like him. It’s just that it’s such a little apartment, and he keeps bringing things home with him, like the piano, and I’m running out of room for . . . where’s the piano? It wasn’t in the hall.”

“I helped him shove it into his room this afternoon,” Hutchins said. “It sounds like he’s got a spaceship in there, too. You don’t suppose he bought one at NASA Surplus when I wasn’t looking?”

“He might have,” Chris said ruefully. “I didn’t see him buy the bento-bako boxes tonight. Or Fan Tan Fannie’s fan.”

They both listened to the whooshing roar for a while. “How long does this go on?” Hutchins said finally, in between takeoffs.

“Sometimes he stops,” Chris said, thinking how she would have felt if she’d had to put up with this and shuttle-lag, too.

“And sometimes he doesn’t. But either way you have to put up with it because your prospective buyer told you to let him do anything he wants. Has he ever heard him snore?”

Chris didn’t answer. She was thinking that the next time Stewart tried to put her on hold she should play a tape of Okeefenokee’s snoring.

“I’ll bet he has,” Hutchins said, answering his own question, “and that’s why he pushed him off on you. Why is he staying here anyway? How come he isn’t with the rest of the Eahrohhs or keeping your boyfriend and his mother awake tonight?”

“He had to have a place with high ceilings,” she said, and hoped he wouldn’t ask how high Stewart’s mother’s ceilings were. “He has vertical claustrophobia.”

“Which explains why Okee couldn’t stand to ride the bullet tonight or sit in Luigi’s. Did your prospective buyer ‘tell you that? Face it, he found out about the snoring.”

“How’th a perthon thuppothed to get any thleep around here?” Molly shouted in Chris’s ear.

Chris snapped on the light. “You’re the one who wanted to sleep in here,” she said. Molly was standing over her, clutching her rag doll and Bets’s blanket. Bets was rolling up the sleeping bag. “You’re doing thith on purpothe to get rid of uth,” Molly said darkly, and stomped out in her footed pajamas after Bets.

“She wants to be alone with him so they can—you know!” Bets said loudly, and slammed the door. Chris turned out the light.

“It’s an ill wind . . .,” Hutchins said. “I wonder why Okee needs high ceilings. Or if that’s what he really needs.”

“What do you mean?” Chris said.

“Remember the incident of the rolls? Maybe he needed sealings, S-E-A-L-I-N-G-S, whatever they are. The Japanese word for ‘ceiling’ is tenjo, but tenjo also means palace. Maybe he really asked for a palace. Have you been in his room since he moved in?”

“No. He comes out when he wants to talk to me, and when he leaves, he locks the door. The first day when we went shopping in the ginza, I was going to go in and help him put things away, but . . .”

“He wouldn’t let you. I know. I offered to go get my bicycle and leave it outside. I wonder what he’s doing in there besides making lift-off noises,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you have a key to his room?”

“No. I gave him mine. And besides . . .”

“I know, your prospective buyer told you to let him do anything he wants to.” He was speaking into a sudden silence from the other room. He stopped talking. “You don’t suppose we woke him up, do you?” he whispered. The whisper made him seem somehow closer.

Chris didn’t answer. There was another long minute of silence, and another sound started up, high-pitched and rising.

“What’s that?” Hutchins said. “It’s what he did at Luigi’s. When the stripper came on.”

“No more sutorippu for him. And no more sake.”

The sound rose to the same keening note it had in the nightclub and then dropped and rose again. Whether it was because of the high ceilings, though, or because there was a wall between them, it didn’t sound like an air-raid siren this time. It sounded like an impossibly high trumpet, sweet and somehow sad.

“I think Omiko and her Orbiting Colonies reminded him of his wife,” Chris said.

“Ummm,” Hutchins said sleepily. “I missed her. That was when I was sleeping on you.”

“I know,” Chris said.

“Hutchins?” she said the next time Okee’s solo faded, and was answered by a faint snore that was nothing like Mr. Okeefenokee’s. “Good night,” she said, feeling pleased all over again.

“I don’t believe you,” Chris heard Bets say from the hall. “Why would he do that?”

“You don’t have to believe me,” Hutchins said. He was in the hall, too. That meant he had climbed down the ladder past her and it hadn’t even woken her up. She wondered what time it was. “All I said is that if I were Spielberg, I wouldn’t want two million little girls following me around, begging me for a part in my movie. I’d come up to Sony in disguise so I could get close to the aliens and decide which little girl I wanted in the movie. Sort of a close encounter of the Hollywood kind.”

Chris got up and pulled on a robe.

“He could be anybody,” Hutchins went on, and Chris wondered what he was talking about. “Me or Okee or one of Mr. Nagisha’s cousins, but whoever he is, he could be watching you right now. He could be giving you a screen test this very minute.”

“Mr. Nagithya’th couthinth aren’t watching uth. They got thrown out,” Molly said.

Chris came into the hall. Hutchins was standing against the wall where the piano had been, holding two towels and two shower bottles. Molly and Bets were sitting on the floor in fuzzy robes and bunny slippers looking at a movie magazine. A young man with blond hair whom Chris had never seen before came out of the bathroom, trailing his shower bottle hose, and grinned at Chris as he went out the door.

“Who was that?” Chris said.

“Charmaine’s old boyfriend. The lawyer. He moved in this morning,” Hutchins said.

“Mr. Okeefenokee didn’t sublet another half of my apartment, did he?”

“No, he’s living on the landing. But, listen, speaking of moving in, I want you to know I really appreciate your letting me stay here last night. I was so lagged, I’d probably be dead this morning if you hadn’t. And I wanted to tell you why I . . .”

“Mr. Nagisha’s cousins got evicted,” Bets said, studying a picture in the movie magazine. “We told Mr. Nagisha they were cooking on the stairs in violation of their lease.”

“You girls won’t even be extras at this rate,” Hutchins said.

“I don’t believe you,” Molly said. “Thpielberg wouldn’t dreth up like an alien.”

“I didn’t say he’d dress up like an alien. Maybe he’s dressed up like Charmaine. And if he is, I’ll bet he doesn’t appreciate being called a thlut.”

“I thtill don’t believe you,” Molly said. “You’re jutht doing thith tho we’ll act nither.”

“Fine. Don’t believe me. It’s your funeral.”

“But Mr. Nagisha’s cousins weren’t supposed to use the bathroom till after nine,” Chris said. “What time is it?”

“Nine-thirty,” Hutchins said. He handed her a towel and a shower bottle. “What time’s this lunch with your prospective buyer?”

“I’m meeting Stewart at thirteen-thirty,” Chris said stiffly. “Nine-thirty! Then what are you doing in line? You were supposed to be”—she squinted at the schedule on the wall—“seven forty-five.”

“I traded places with Charmaine. She had a date with her old boyfriend, remember?”

“We mithed our turn, too,” Molly said. “And it’th all your fault. If you hadn’t kept uth awake with all that thnoring and talking . . .”

“Speaking of thnoring,” Hutchins said. “Okee said to give this to you.” He handed her a flat metal disk on a short chain. “You wear it around your neck.” He opened the odd-looking clasp and moved around behind her.

Chris caught a glimpse of metal under his shirt collar. “When did he buy this?”

“This morning. He got up early and went out to get rolls and coffee for breakfast.”

“He went out by himself? What else did he buy? A set of encyclopedias?”

Hutchins fastened the chain. The disk came right to the hollow between her collar bones and seemed almost to stick there. Chris tried to pull it out to see what was on the back, but the chain was too short. “What is this thing?” she said.

“There’s an earplug thingee that goes with it,” he said, and dropped it into the palm of her outstretched hand.

“My mother says we should have stuck cotton in our ears and stayed right where we were last night,” Bets said. “She says possession is nine tenths of the law.”

“Did you put her up to this?” Chris said to Hutchins.

“Not me. It’s not a bad argument, though. Go ahead. Put it on.”

Chris looked warily at the smaller round disk and put it in her ear. “Mr. Okeefenokee didn’t go out again, did he?”

(No,) Hutchins said. His lips didn’t move. (He’s in the bathroom. And after breakfast .,. Oh, that reminds me.) He dug his hand in his pocket and came up with a handful of crumpled yen. (I had to get money out of your purse to give Okee for the rolls and coffee. This is your change.) He handed it to her.

Chris looked at the little girls, but they had their heads together over the movie magazine again.

(After breakfast he’s going back to bed,) Hutchins said, still without opening his mouth. (He says our talking kept him awake last night.)

She jammed the yen in her pocket, still watching his mouth and wondering if the thing around her neck was some sort of ventriloquist’s device. “What is this thing?”

(Okee called it something that sounded like “the Everglades,”) Hutchins said. (It picks up subvocalizations and amplifies them so any other person similarly equipped can hear them. Go ahead, say something. Under your breath. Your lips don’t have to move. In fact, all I do is think the words.)

(He said our talking kept him awake?) Chris said cautiously under her breath, her hand on the disk.

(Yep. He said tonight we were supposed to use these, which means he wants me to stay here tonight. And besides, if I spend the whole day moving out, I can’t keep an eye on Okee. He’ll probably end up buying a steam calliope.)

(You’ve done a great job of watching him so far,) she thought. (When did he buy these subvocalizers?)

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, and she could tell by the way the little girls looked up from their movie magazine that he had spoken aloud. It hadn’t sounded markedly different from when he used the subvocalizer, only a little farther away.

Molly and Bets were watching Hutchins suspiciously. “Well, I don’t know either,” Chris said, as if they had been carrying on a rational conversation, “but I’d say his time in the bathroom is definitely up.” She tapped on the bathroom door. “Mr. Okeefenokee, your time is up.”

He opened the bathroom door and came out, his wispy hair wet and practically invisible. His body looked even lumpier than usual under his Japanese yukata.

Hutchins ducked in. “You could have traded platheth with uth,” Molly shouted after him. “We have a holo-interview thith afternoon.”

“You are wearing your thuwevrherrnghladdis,” Mr. Okeefenokee said, nodding and smiling. It did sound like “the Everglades.”

“Yes, thank you. It’s lovely.” She put her hand up to the disk.

“Have you and Hutchins talked alone?”

“Yes.” She looked at Molly and Bets, but they were immersed in their movie magazine again.

Bets was pointing at a picture. “It does look a little bit like him,” she whispered to Molly. “See how lumpy he is.”

“But what about his batheball cap? Thpielberg alwayth wearth a batheball cap.”

“Good,” Mr. Okeefenokee said. His mouth straightened out and his cheeks turned bright orange. “Now you can get married. Have closing. Hahnahmoon.”

Both girls looked up.

“No! I mean, talking alone isn’t enough.” She wished Okee were wearing one of the subvocalizers so they could discuss this privately, but he didn’t seem to be.

(People have to know each other a long time before they get married,) she thought at Okee, but he only smiled at her.

“People have to know each other a long time before they get married,” she said aloud. “They have to . . .” She hesitated, trying to think of a word that he might understand.

“Thyeeth talking about theckth,” Molly said wisely. “And if you athk me, they’ve already . . .”

“Nobody asked you,” Chris said. “Why don’t you two go find somebody else you can get evicted?” She shoved them out the door.

“Theckth?” Mr. Okeefenokee said.

Chris tried to think what she could tell him. She couldn’t just say people had to love each other. “Love” was far too nebulous a term, and he’d already heard Charmaine say she loved Sony and her job and the fans painted on her ath. “Last night you were thinking about your wife, weren’t you?” she said, watching for any sign of understanding. To her surprise, he stopped nodding. “And it made you sad?”

“Yes,” he said solemnly. “Sad.”

“And you wished you could talk to her and see her and be close to her.” She put her arms out and brought them back again toward her and hugged herself. “Close.” “Closing,” he said.

“Not, not closing. Close.”

“Hahnahmoon?”

“No,” she said. “See, when two people love each other, they want to be as near each other as they can, and they . . .”

“Wife,” he said, “sad,” and screwed his face up.

“Oh, Mr. Okeefenokee, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you,” she said, but she was too late. He let out a wail like a fire engine.

“What did you do to him?” Hutchins said, coming out of the bathroom.

“He misses his wife,” Chris said.

“She probably told him about sex,” Bets said. She and Molly came back in.

“What did thyee do to you?” Molly said, patting Okee awkwardly on the back.

“You can have our turn in the bathroom if you want,” Bets said, her forefinger stuck in one of her dimples. “We don’t really need a shower.” She held out her shower bottle to him.

Okee stopped wailing and looked at the little girls, an expression on his face that Chris had never seen before. She had no idea how to interpret it, but at least he had stopped keening.

“Here. You can have my rubber duckie. Hith name ith Tham,” Molly said with a sickeningly sweet smile.

Okee continued to look at them for a long moment and then took the yellow duck and the shower bottle and went back into the bathroom.

(How did you do that?) Chris said wonderingly.

(I told them that if I were Spielberg, I’d disguise myself as an alien and do secret screen tests.) It was disconcerting to be watching him grin while he was talking to her. (I thought it might improve their general deportment.)

Chris looked at Molly and Bets, who were whispering about something, curls and hairbows bobbing. “Okay, but we’ll have to hurry,” Bets said, and they ran out of the hall and down the steps. “He’ll be out of the bathroom in a few minutes.”

“You don’t suppose they’ll try to kidnap him and hold him for ransom?” Chris said.

“I hope not,” Hutchins said. (What we talked about last night . . . have you noticed Okee having trouble understanding any other words?) He had gone back to using the subvocalizer even though there was nobody else left in the hall.

(He can’t seem to tell the difference between closing and close,) she thought (and he has trouble pronouncing some words, like “honeymoon.” He still thinks we’re getting married, but that’s Charmaine’s fault. With all her real-estate talk, I think he’s gotten the idea marriage is something you can go out and buy.) She tried to think. (He doesn’t understand when I tell him he should stop buying things.)

(Has he ever talked to you about the space program thing the Eahrohhs are supposed to be negotiating?)

(No. Stewart said the Japanese linguists had figured out that there was a small core group of officials and a couple of translators and that everybody else was a passenger. Stewart said Okee’s one of the passengers. Noru hito.)

(Noru hito, huh? Did you know that some Japanese words have as many as ten different meanings? Noru hito also means . . . )

There was a racket on the steps, and Molly and Bets burst in wearing leotards covered with red, white, and blue sequins, and sequined military hats. Bets was carrying a Sony chip recorder. “Ith he out of the bathroom yet?” Molly said breathlessly.

“No,” Hutchins said.

“Good,” Molly said. “We’ll have time to practith.” She adjusted the chin strap on her hat. Bets stuck a music program into the Sony recorder and pushed down the play key. They both positioned themselves in front of the bathroom door, clanking as they walked.

“Those are tap shoes,” Chris said.

“I know,” Hutchins said. “Baby June and Gypsy strike again.”

“Ready and . . .,” Bets said. “Hop, shuffle, step. Hop, shuffle, step.”

She was late to lunch. Okee had refused to come out of the bathroom until Molly and Bets stopped tap-dancing, and then they demanded their turn in the bathroom. While they were in there, they used the curling iron and blew a fuse. It was almost noon before Chris could have her shower.

By the time she was dressed, Hutchins and Okee had both disappeared. She went out into the hall. Charmaine’s lawyer had set up an ancient Apple and two disk drives on a chair. He had the case off the Apple and was digging around inside and swearing to himself. The old man with the baseball cap was playing solitaire on the top three steps. Molly and Bets were on the landing in pink tutus and ballet slippers, hanging on to the railing as if it were a barre and practicing the ballet positions. The chip recorder was blaring, “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.”

“Do you know where Mr. Okeefenokee is?” Chris shouted, and then realized it was a stupid question. If they knew, they would be subjecting him to the Sugarplum Fairy.

“Don’t interrupt uth,” Molly said. “We’re trying to practith.”

“He’s in with Mr. Nagisha,” Charmaine said. She was sitting on the second step from the bottom, watching Mr. Nagisha’s TV and painting fans on her fingernails. She was dressed in a red strapless dress and spike-heeled shoes. “He asked him to explain leases, but I think he’s really hiding from the cast of Swan Lake.”

“Is Hutchins in there with him?” Chris said, coming down the stairs toward her.

“No. About half an hour ago he said he had something he had to do and left.”

Chris looked at her watch. “Oh, dear, I’m supposed to meet Stewart for lunch, and I don’t dare leave Mr. Okeefenokee alone.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him,” Charmaine said, blowing on her fingernails. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

“I thought you had a date.”

“ ‘Had’ is right,” she said, jabbing the fingernail-polish stylus in the direction of the landing. “He didn’t come up here to find me. He came up because he figured with all this overcrowding there’d be lots of real-estate contracts to draw up. And marriage contracts. Only he can’t seem to tell the difference.” She jammed the cap on the stylus. “He wanted to know if I’d be interested in a lease option. That’s where you get to move in before you close the deal, if there’s a closing. Go on. Don’t be late for your lunch.”

“All right,” Chris said, wondering what had made Hutchins run off like that. “Let Mr. Okeefenokee do anything he wants, but whatever you do, don’t let him go shopping.”

The bullet was jammed with people carrying flight bags and looking exhausted. Getting off at the ginza, she almost lost her shoe again. This time, since Hutchins wasn’t there, she curled her toes and jammed them against the end of the shoe, and it stayed on, but just barely, and she got such a cramp in her foot that she could hardly walk.

The ginza was jammed with bicycles and people carrying huge, bulky suitcases who had a tendency to stop suddenly in the middle of the footwalk to stare at the city far above. It took nearly fifteen minutes to get the half block from the bullet to the Garden of Meditation.

Stewart was standing outside, tapping his foot and looking at his watch. “Where have you been?” he said. “I’ve been waiting half an hour.”

“I couldn’t get into my bathroom,” she said. “Molly and Bets . . .”

“Those two cunning moppets I saw on the phone yesterday?” Stewart said, taking her arm and steering her into the restaurant’s anteroom. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen two such adorable little girls.”

“They’re circus midgets,” Chris said, but Stewart didn’t hear her.

He was waving wildly at a waitress. “For heavens’ sake, take your shoes off, so if they do have a table we can sit right down. I don’t have much time. If you’d been on time we could have gotten right in, but now we’ll probably have to wait.” He pulled his shoes off and started through the crowd to find the waitress.

Chris took her shoes off and gave them to the pretty Japanese attendant. She flexed her cramping toes. I should get tap shoes with straps, like those “two charming moppets,” she thought.

(Lose your shoe in the bullet again?) Hutchins said at her ear, and she whirled around, but there was no one behind her but the attendant and a wizened old woman who couldn’t seem to find her shoes.

“No,” Chris said. The attendant was looking at her oddly, which meant she had spoken aloud again. She clamped her mouth shut and said silently, (Where are you?)

(At Luigi’s. Sorry to run off this morning, but Charmaine told me about a job waiting tables, and I thought I’d better check it out. I can’t keep taking breakfast money out of your purse forever. Is Okee with you?)

(No, I got Charmaine to watch him, but you’re not going to be staying long enough to worry about breakfast. I’m going to have Stewart find you and Mr. Okeefenokee another apartment this afternoon and . . . )

Stewart came back, elbowing his way past the wrinkled crone, who was still rummaging through the shoes. “They gave our table to somebody else fifteen minutes ago,” he said accusingly, “and they won’t have anything else for an hour and a half. We’ll have to eat at the sushi counter.” He led her through the crowd to the wooden counter and scanned it for seats. “Have you ever seen such a mob?”

“Yes,” Chris said. “In line for my bathroom. Stewart, since I talked to you yesterday, Mr. Okeefenokee . . .”

“There aren’t two seats together,” he said, pointing at the only empty stools, which were separated by an exhausted-looking man with a camera and a shuttle bag, “which is what happens when you aren’t on time for your reservations.” He motioned her toward one of the stools, sat down on the other, and handed her a menu. A waitress appeared immediately. Stewart snatched the menu out of Chris’s hands. “I’ll have the jiffy lunch. What is it?”

“Eel. It comes with fries.”

“I’ll have that, and she’ll have the sushi salad.”

“I want you to come home with me this afternoon,” Chris said across the exhausted-looking man, who had propped his arms on the sushi counter. “You’ve got to talk to Mr. Okeefenokee. Yesterday he—”

“Okeefenokee?” Stewart said, with the same horrified look he’d had on the phone the day before. “I have asked you repeatedly to learn the correct pronunciation of his name. You obviously don’t realize how delicate our relationship with the Eahrohhs is right now or you wouldn’t . . .”

“I’m sorry, Stewart, but Mr. Ohghhi . . .” She automatically opened her hand to look at what wasn’t written there anymore.

(Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh,) Hutchins said.

“Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh,” Chris said. “Yesterday he brought home—”

(How delicate is the relationship with the Eahrohhs right now?) Hutchins said.

“Well?” Stewart said. “Don’t just stop in the middle of a sentence like that. What did he bring home?”

(Ask him,) Hutchins said insistently. (Ask him what he means by a delicate relationship.)

(How do you know what’s he’s saying?) Chris said. (I thought these subvocalizers only picked up what the person said under his breath.)

(It does. You’re subvocalizing what Stewart’s saying. Okee says that happens when the person’s upset.)

(I am not upset,) Chris thought. (And would you please stop eavesdropping on this conversation?)

(No. Ask him how the negotiations are going. This is important, Chris. Please.)

“I took the time for this lunch because you told me you had to talk to me,” Stewart said, “and now all you do is sit there staring into space.’ ”

“I’m sorry, Stewart,” Chris said.

(Please,) Hutchins said.

“How are the negotiations going, Stewart?” she said. The exhausted-looking man was lying in his sushi.

“We’ve had a breakdown in communications. Nothing for you to worry about, though. In fact, it may work to your benefit. The Japanese have decided that because the negotiations are taking longer than we expected, they’ll match the compensation NASA’s been paying. Which is only fair since this mess is their fault. If they’d allowed NASA to build the size shuttle base they wanted, this overcrowding problem would never have happened.”

(What kind of breakdown in communications?) Hutchins said.

“What kind of breakdown in communications?” Chris said.

“It seems the Eahrohhsian the Japanese team thought was their headman isn’t in charge, after all, or he used to be and isn’t anymore or something. Their concept of roles is apparently different from ours.”

“Yes,” Chris said, thinking of Molly asking Mr. Okeefenokee to get her a role in Spielberg’s movie.

“This mix-up could jeopardize the whole space program, and the American linguistics team is furious. They want to transfer the Eahrohhsians down to Houston immediately, where they can use translation computers to . . .”

(Immediately?) Hutchins said, but Chris had already said it out loud.

“If they can get the Japanese to agree to it. I think they will as soon as they’ve had time to save face. Two or three more days at the most, and Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh will be out of your life forever.”

And so will Hutchins, Chris thought.

The waitress came back with Stewart’s eel and a check, which she stuck under the fingers of the sleeping man. “We’re out of sushi salad,” the waitress said. “We got tacos and Hungarian goulash. Do you want one of them?”

“Two or three more days, and you’ll have your apartment back and we can think seriously about going condo. But in the meantime, you’ve got to make sure you don’t do anything to upset Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh. The smallest thing, and our chances of negotiating a space program could blow up in our faces.”

(Let him do anything he wants,) Hutchins said. (I don’t care what it is. Rape and pillage. Anything.)

“Oh, shut up!” Chris said.

“Look, don’t take it out on me,” the waitress said. “It’s not my fault we’re out of the sushi salad.” She flounced off.

“I realize having to share your apartment with an alien has been a strain,” Stewart said stiffly, “but you didn’t have to yell at the waitress.”

“I didn’t,” she said, thinking furiously at Hutchins (This is all your fault. Go away and don’t say one more word to me.)

“Who were you yelling at, then?” Stewart said. “Me?”

“No,” Chris said, “Mr. Ohghhifoehnn . . .” She stopped and waited, listening. Hutchins didn’t say anything. Good, she thought, I’m glad he’s gone. The waitress reappeared and lifted the sleeping man’s head up so she could take the sushi board out from under him. She pointedly did not look at Chris. “Yesterday the alien brought home . . .”

“Can I have the check, please?” Stewart said. “And wrap this up so I can take it with me.” He slapped down a credit card and slid off the stool. Three people dived for it. “I’ve got to be back at the office by fourteen-thirty.” Chris struggled through the crowd after him. By the time she made it to the anteroom, he had found his shoes in the jumble by the door and was pulling them on. “Let him bring home anything he wants,” he said, bending down to tie his shoelaces. “And whatever he wants to do, let him do it. I don’t care what it is. It’s only for a couple of days.”

Chris waited for Hutchins to say, even rape and pillage? but he didn’t. He’d gone away, and in a couple of days he really would have gone away because Mr. Okee-fenokee would have been transferred down to Houston, and he wouldn’t be able to use the excuse anymore that Mr. Okeefenokee wanted him to stay, and she’d never see him again.

“Now,” Stewart said, straightening up. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

Chris looked around the suddenly quiet anteroom. There was no one in it except the attendant, who was patiently lining up pairs of shoes by the door. The old woman who’d been in there before must have found her shoes.

“Well?” Stewart said.

“I wanted to talk to you about all the things Mr. Ohghhi . . . the alien’s been buying, but yesterday after I talked to you, I had a long talk with him, and he promised not to buy anything else. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

He looked worried. “Are you sure you should have done that? You don’t want to do anything that might . . .”

“Upset negotiations?” Chris said. The waitress brought Stewart his credit card and a cardboard container with a metal handle. Two teenaged girls wearing “Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind” T-shirts came in and began looking for their shoes. “I’m sure I did the right thing. Don’t worry. It won’t upset your negotiations. I’ll go along with anything he wants.”

“Good,” he said, putting his credit card away. “Oh, and listen, when this is all over, I want you to come over and look at the apartment next to Mother’s. With the compensation we could buy it and sublet yours.”

He and the teenaged girls left together, and Chris started looking for her shoes. They weren’t there. “Very busy. Much shoes,” the attendant said in a passable imitation of the way Mr. Okeefenokee used to talk. “Not steal. Wrong take.”

Chris thought of Hutchins diving bravely into the bullet to rescue her shoe. You could get my shoes back for me, she thought at him. “Where are you?”

There wasn’t any answer. “Wrong take. You mine,” the attendant said, and removed her getas, which were no more than a size four.

“Not fit. Wear size eight,” Chris said in a passable imitation of the way she had talked to Mr. Okeefenokee before she met Hutchins, and wished again that he were here.

The attendant finally found her a pair of disposable tabis. The thick, toed socks were better than nothing, she thought, and smiled and thanked the attendant, but before she had gone twenty steps, she had come to the conclusion that they weren’t. She stepped up in a doorway and tried to massage her crushed instep. It was only half a block to the bullet platform, but she would never make it. And even if she did, she’d be crippled for life by the crowd on the bullet.

She leaned out as far as she could from the doorway and peered down the crowded ginza, trying to spot a shoe vendor. There was everything else: a man selling mylar balloons with a picture of the Eahrohhs’ ship on them, a Sony outlet selling chip recorders, a flower vendor with a backpack full of cherry blossoms shouting, “Hana! Cheap!”

Mr. Okeefenokee would love it here, she thought, and remembering that she had told Charmaine she’d be back by sixteen o’clock gave her the courage to step back down onto the footwalk, where the balloon man stepped squarely on her foot.

She retreated back up into the doorway to peer the other way. I wonder how far Mitsukoshi’s Department Store is, she wondered. They’d have shoes.

(It’s ten blocks,) Hutchins said in her ear. (We’ll have to take the bullet.)

She knew he was miles away and using the subvocalizer again, but the feeling that he was right behind her was irresistible. She turned around. He was standing there, holding a pair of red spike heels by the straps. “You’re lucky Charmaine wears a size eight,” he said, and handed them to her. “I know these aren’t great, but they’re not size fours either. And when we get back to Mitsukoshi’s, Okee says he’ll buy you a new pair.”

“Mitsukoshi’s?” she said, balancing herself against the doorway to take the tabis off. “You left Okee alone at Mitsukoshi’s?”

“I had to come get you. Your exact words, as I recall, were, ‘Where the hell is Hutchins? I don’t have any shoes.’ Do you realize you subvocalize when you’re upset?”

“Yes,” she said ruefully, and wondered what else he’d heard her think. She stepped into the shoes, which were at least six incheshigh, and bent down to velcro the red straps.

“Don’t worry about Okee,” Hutchins said. “He’s not alone. I left him with Charmaine. At the makeup counter. She was trying out blusher colors on the top of his head.”

“What were you doing at Mitsukoshi’s? I thought you had a job interview.”

“I did,” he said, and helped her out of the doorway. She stepped warily onto the footwalk. It seemed a long way down. “I went in at noon, and Luigi was pretty busy, so he told me to come back this afternoon. You didn’t subvocalize what Stewart said when you told him he had to find Okee and me an apartment, which means you’re not upset, which must mean he said he would. Which means—”

“I’m starving to death,” Chris said. “I didn’t get any lunch.”

Hutchins bought her a tempura dog on a stick, and she focused her attention on eating it and keeping her balance for the half block to the bullet platform.

“Is Stewart coming over this afternoon to move Okee and me to another apartment or to throw me out?” Hutchins said after they had pushed their way through to the edge of the platform.

“Here comes the bullet,” Chris said, looking at her feet so the spindly heels wouldn’t catch in the narrow space between the platform and the magnetic rail. The bullet slid to a stop, and the people behind pushed forward. Chris stumbled and looked down at her feet.

“Come on!” Hutchins yelled, and yanked her up onto the bullet by both arms as the doors closed. They slid shut with a whoosh, and she found herself pinned between a lady with a shopping bag and Hutchins. He was still gripping her arms.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said. “What did Stewart say?”

“Why do you have to ask?” she said, still looking at her feet. “You listened in on the whole conversation.”

“Not that part,” he said. “Charmaine asked what I thought of this makeup she was trying on, and the next thing I knew you were hollering for your shoes.” He let go of her and put his arms around her.

“Hey,” the woman with the shopping bag said, “quit shoving.” She hoisted her shopping bag up into her arms, a movement that had the effect of squashing Chris and Hutchins closer together.

“Look,” Hutchins said, “I should have told you this morning and now it’s probably too late, but it’s important that Okee and I stay where we are. I’m not talking about the hammock. I tried to get one of Mr. Nagisha’s overnight leases, but he’s booked up through next week, so I asked Charmaine if I could bunk on one of her steps. She said she’s got a friend moving in with her, but I’ll see if her lawyer friend will let me sleep on the landing. The important thing is that Okee stay in his room and do whatever it is he’s planning on doing. When did Stewart say he was moving Okee out?”

“He didn’t,” she said.

“Good,” he said, sounding relieved. “Maybe he won’t have found anything by tonight and—”

“I didn’t tell Stewart.”

“What?”

She looked up. Charmaine’s shoes put her on a level with him, and when she looked up, it was straight into his eyes. “I didn’t tell him Okee sublet the apartment to you.”

“Why not?”

“The negotiations are at a very delicate stage,” she said, trying not to look at him. She didn’t dare duck her head, because they were so close that his lips might brush her forehead, and if she turned her head, he would be whispering in her ear, just as he had been with the subvocalizer. “It’s only for a couple of days and . . .” And I was afraid I’d never see you again, she thought, and then tried to stifle the thought so Hutchins wouldn’t hear her. She would have taken the subvocalizer off if she could, but her arms were pinned against his chest, and she was afraid to move them for fear it would bring her closer to him. “Why is it so important that you and Mr. Okeefenokee stay?” she said.

He was looking at her with that thoughtful expression he had had the night before. She could hear his heart beating in her pinioned arms. “Because he asked for a room with high ceilings. Do you know what else the word for ‘high’ means in Japanese? It means losing your temper, howling, roaring, growing older, and excelling. Take your pick. I don’t know what he wants with that room, and neither does that team of Japanese linguists, but it has something to do with the negotiations that are so delicate right now, and with the space program they’re negotiating for. If it’s a space program. The word for ‘space’ also means harmony, leisure, room, or eye. The Eahrohhs could be offering us a new kind of glasses or some time off or a way to beat the house on Vegas Two.” He stopped and looked across at her. “Chris . . .,” he said.

He’s going to hear what I’m thinking, she thought, and took a frightened step back.

“Quit shoving,” the lady with the shopping bag said.

“You heard her,” Hutchins said, grinning. He pulled her back against him. “Quit shoving.”

“I’m letting you stay,” she said, keeping her head averted, “but it’s only because of Mr. Okeefenokee. You said you’d asked Charmaine if you could bunk with her. I think maybe that would be a good idea.”

(I don’t want to sleep with Charmaine,) Hutchins said in her ear. (I want to sleep with you.)

She was so surprised she lifted her head, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was watching the station markers through the bullet doors.

Did you know you subvocalize when you’re upset? she thought, feeling oddly pleased.

“What?” Hutchins said.

“Get out of the way,” the lady with the shopping bag said. “This is my stop.”

“I said, this is the stop for Mitsukoshi’s,” Chris said.

Charmaine was still at the makeup counter. “What do you think of this?” she said, holding up a bright-pink lipstick. “It’s called Passion Pink. I’m working up a new single called ‘Cherry Blossom Time.’ ”

“Where’s Mr. Okeefenokee?” Chris said. “Up in Furniture,” she said, trying out the pink lipstick on a space above the bodice of her strapless dress. “He said he wanted to buy a bed.”

“I’d better go get him,” Hutchins said. “I’ll come with you,” Chris said. “Can I have my shoes back first?” Charmaine said. She reached into a shopping bag and pulled out a box. “Mr. Fenokee bought you a new pair.”

“I’ll catch up with you,” Chris said, and leaned against the makeup counter to take off the red heels. “Thanks for loaning them to me,” she said, handing them back to Charmaine by the straps.

“I didn’t have any choice in the matter,” she said, pushing out her chest and looking at it in the mirror. “Hutchins practically knocked me over getting them off. I thought you said you didn’t like him.”

“I didn’t,” Chris said. “I mean, I don’t. I mean, I’m engaged to Stewart and . . .” She hastily opened the shoe box. “Oh, good,” she said brightly. “They’re flats. I don’t know how you wear such high heels.”

“I was trying on green eye makeup, you know, for my fans, and I asked Hutchins what he thought of Jade Royal.” She pulled the bodice of her dress down farther and drew a wide line of rose-colored lipstick on the exposed area. “And he said it was fine, but I could tell he wasn’t really listening because he had this kind of faraway look on his face, and I mean, gee, most guys want to help me put the makeup on, and then all of a sudden he says, ‘What size shoes do you wear? Give me your shoes. Chris needs them,’ and takes off.”

She pulled the bodice down still farther and tried a bright-coral lipstick. Chris wondered how far down the greens had gotten. “And I turned to Mr. Fenokee and said, ‘How does he know Chris needs my shoes?’ and you know what he said?”

Chris ducked her head so Charmaine couldn’t see her face and put on her new shoes. “Maybe I’d better go see where Mr. Okeefenokee is,” she said. “He’s probably buying a dining-room set.”

“He said you and Hutchins are getting married today and asked me what kinds of things people needed for a honeymoon,” Charmaine said. “Only he pronounced it ‘hahnahmoon.’ ”

“What did you tell him?”

“Gee, you know, just the basics. Champagne and a black lace nightie and a bed. And diamonds. I figured diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

“A bed?” Chris said. “Oh, no, I told him there wasn’t any space in my apartment. I’ve got to go stop him.”

She left as abruptly as Hutchins apparently had and took the escalator up to Furniture. Halfway up, she met Hutchins and Mr. Okeefenokee on their way down. “Did he buy anything?” she shouted after them.

(No,) Hutchins said in her ear. (I caught him just in time. He was looking at a washer and dryer. Meet us at the foot of the escalator.)

Chris ran the rest of the way up to Furniture, wondering if she should check with the clerk to see whether Mr. Okeefenokee had bought a bed that Hutchins didn’t know about.

(I’m going to have you take Okee home, if that’s all right,) Hutchins said, sounding as if he were on the step above her. (I’m already late to my interview. It’s already sixteen o’clock. Why don’t you and Okee just stay here and shop and then meet me at Luigi’s for dinner? That way you won’t have to go home.)

(I don’t think that’s a good idea,) Chris said. (Mr. Okeefenokee could buy the whole store by supper-time.)

There wasn’t any answer, and when Chris arrived at the bottom of the escalator, Hutchins was already gone. Mr. Okeefenokee was at the lingerie counter being handed a large white box. He stuffed it in a bulging shopping bag. Chris took him back over to the makeup counter. “I’m taking Mr. Okeefenokee home before he buys anything else,” Chris told Charmaine. “He has no business being in a place like this.”

“Gee, I know,” Charmaine said, wiping lipstick off her bosom. “I told Hutchins you’d said he wasn’t supposed to go shopping, but he said you wouldn’t care if he bought a few souvenirs.”

“He said what?” Chris said.

“I need twenty of the Prom Night Pink and fifteen of the Tokyo Rose,” Charmaine said to the salesgirl. “Gee, you wouldn’t believe how much makeup a person goes through. We ran into him up on the axis this morning, and—”

“What were you doing up on the axis?”

“Mr. Fenokee wanted to go see some of the other arrows guys, I guess he was homesick or something, and you said to let him do anything he wanted as long as it wasn’t shopping, and so I took him up there and we ran into Hutchins.”

“What was he doing on the axis?”

“I don’t know. He was coming out of the NASA building. So anyway he suggested we all go shopping and . . .”

“When was this?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Around twelve.” She turned back to the salesgirl. “I hope this pink is right. You know how lipstick always looks a different color when you try it on your hand than on your lips? Well, I have the same problem with my fans.”

“Charmaine,” Chris said carefully, “do you happen to know of any job openings at Luigi’s?”

“Gee, no. That old guy who lives on the stairs asked me that this morning, and I had to tell him Luigi isn’t even taking applications, he’s had so many people come in.

“Can you bring Okee home?” Chris said rapidly. “I’ve got to . . .” She couldn’t even think of what excuse to give her. “I have to go,” she repeated lamely! I have to follow Hutchins and see why he’s been lying to me, she thought, and was infinitely glad Charmaine wasn’t wearing a subvocalizer.

“Sure,” Charmaine said, and asked to see the eyeliners.

Chris had no idea where Hutchins was going except that it wasn’t Luigi’s and that he would probably have to take the bullet to get there. If he had to wait for the bullet, she might have a chance of catching up with him and following him. She took off her subvocalizer and put her hand up to her ear, trying to hear any stray thought he might have about where he was going.

Maybe she should use the subvocalizer and just ask him, she thought. She could make up some excuse about needing to go with him to Luigi’s. And he would make up an excuse about why she couldn’t, the way he had made up the interview with Luigi. Anyway, it was too risky. She might pause, the way she had with Charmaine, unable to think of an excuse, and the truth would come tumbling out because she was upset. She might say, “I need to go with you because that’s not where you’re going and what were you doing up at the axis this morning and why did you lie to me?” She stuck the subvocalizer in her pocket.

He was still on the bullet platform, though just barely. He was getting on the bullet, and she saw with a sinking feeling that it wasn’t the one for Shitamachi. She got on at the farthest door down from him, glad she was wearing flats. She huddled down behind a young woman with a headdress like the one Charmaine wore and watched him through the red-and-black-lacquered chopsticks until he got off.

He looked worried and almost as tired as he had the night before, and she would have felt sorry for him all over again, but his shirt collar was open, and she could see that he wasn’t wearing his subvocalizer either.

The young woman got off when he did, and Chris followed her onto the platform and then ducked behind a pillar. She didn’t need to see him to know where he was going. This was her stop. Maybe he’s still shuttle-lagged, she thought, and he didn’t get enough sleep last night with Okee snoring and Molly and Bets and everything, and he’s come home to take a nap. But if that was true, why had he taken his subvocalizer off? And why had he lied about the job interview?

She gave him a ten-minute head start and then followed him into her apartment building. She opened the door quietly, afraid that Molly and Bets might have waylaid him with the Sugarplum Fairy, but he was nowhere to be seen, and the little girls were sitting halfway up the stairs talking to a redheaded man with a chip recorder.

They had changed out of their tutus and into navy-sailor dresses and white patent-leather shoes. “I’ve been in show biz since I was two,” Bets was saying in her clear childish voice. “I’m four and a half now.”

The old man in the baseball cap had fallen asleep playing solitaire. The cards were still on the step above him, and the young woman with the chopsticks in her hair was leaning over, picking them up. When she leaned over, she looked a lot like Charmaine.

“Hi,” she said. She put the cards in a neat stack and laid them next to the old man. “I’m Omiko. I just moved in with Charmaine, and I was wondering if I could use your bathroom.”

Chris glanced warily up at the door. “We blew a fuse,” she said. “Mr. Hutchins is fixing it, but it’ll probably be an hour. Why don’t you ask Mr. Nagisha if you can use his bathroom?”

“Would you pleathe be quiet!” Molly said from the landing. “We’re being interviewed.”

Chris went on up the stairs past Molly and Bets. “I danthed in the road thyow of Annie Two,” Molly said to the redheaded man and then dropped to a stage whisper as Chris went past. “That’th her!”

“The woman who rents the apartment?” he said.

“Yes,” Bets said, and whispered something Chris couldn’t hear.

In the hall Charmaine’s lawyer was standing by his printer, watching it chug out copies of something. “Tell Okee I’ll have these ready for him by tonight.”

“All right,” Chris said, not really listening to him. She inserted her key in the door, thinking, please let him be taking a nap. But he wasn’t in the hammock or the hall, and the door to the bathroom was open. So was the door to Mr. Okeefenokee’s room. A key was still in the lock. She pulled it out, put it in her pocket, and went in.

Mr. Okeefenokee had bought a bed. Though he must not have bought it today, Chris thought, because there wouldn’t have been time to deliver it, let alone get it in here and pile all those things on it.

The bento-bako boxes were stacked on the foot of the bed next to a tangle of paper umbrellas and a set of encyclopedias. The rest of the bed was piled to the ceiling with boxes that appeared to be microwave ovens.

She came around the end of the bed into a narrow aisle formed by stacks of boxes that went clear to the ceiling. One of the boxes read, “One gross dental floss.” Hutchins’s bicycle was propped against the boxes. Next to it was a baby buggy with a Christmas tree in it. She couldn’t see the piano anywhere, but there were four accordions sitting in the middle of the aisle.

Against the back wall was a trampoline propped on its side with six pairs of roller skates and a wind sock hanging from it. Hutchins was kneeling in front of the trampoline, digging in a box full of Styrofoam packing. He lifted out a lava lamp and looked at it.

“How did you get in here?” Chris said.

He laid the lava lamp back in the box and stood up. “Okee gave me his key,” he said. “I thought you were going shopping.”

“I thought you had a job interview at Luigi’s,” Chris said steadily.

“I did, but I called Luigi and told him I’d be a little late. Okee wanted me to check on whether he’d bought a Japanese-English dictionary or not. He couldn’t remember. It’s no wonder with all the junk he’s got in here. At least we know what he wanted the high ceilings for. You don’t see a dictionary anywhere, do you?”

“There aren’t any job openings at Luigi’s,” Chris said. “Charmaine told me he’s not even taking applications.” He stopped pretending to look for the dictionary. “She also told me she saw you on the axis this morning.”

“Chris,” he said.

She backed away from him into the Christmas tree. The balls rattled. “You’re a spy, aren’t you?”

He looked genuinely astonished. “A spy? Of course I’m not a spy.”

“Then what are you doing in here? And why did you lie to me about the job interview?”

“All right,” he said. “I didn’t have a job interview. I went up to NASA to get my subvocalizer checked. I wanted to know what made it tick.”

“Because you’re a spy,” Chris said, still backing. “I’m calling Stewart.”

“No!” he said, and then in a calmer and even more unsettling tone, “No. You aren’t calling anybody. As soon as NASA works out a deal with the Japanese, they’re taking Okee down to Houston. I’ve got maybe two days to figure out what he means by ‘space program” before the NASA people start demanding that he deliver a space program he doesn’t know anything about. I don’t have time to mess with your idiot fiancé.”

“He’s not an idiot,” Chris said, feeling behind her back for something she could hit him with. Her hand closed on a golf club.

“Oh, isn’t he? He’s engaged to you, for God’s sake, and he doesn’t even exercise his option. He puts you on hold and goes off and leaves you barefoot in the ginza and lets strange men sleep in your room. If I were engaged to you, I’d . . . I’m not a spy. I’m a linguist.”

Chris’s grip tightened on the golf club. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “Stewart said the American linguistics team was at NASA, talking to the Eahrohhs’ leaders.”

“Okee’s the leader.”

She let go of the golf club, and the whole bag of clubs went over and spilled out. “But Stewart said he was just a passenger.”

“The Eahrohhs told the Japanese linguistics team that Okee was noru hito. That means passenger. It also means proclaiming one. That means he’s the one who’s supposed to deliver the space program, only I don’t think he’s got one. Do you remember what you said to Okee when I moved in? You said, ‘There isn’t any space.’ ”

“Oh, no,” Chris said. “And he only understands one meaning of a word.”

“The first one he hears. But those idiots over at NASA think that if an alien who has known our language less than two weeks says space program, he has to mean astronauts, rockets, and zero-gravity bathrooms. It never even crosses their minds that ‘space’ also means a vacuum, that ‘program’ also means a series of musical numbers. Okee could be giving us radio, for God’s sake.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to do what I’ve been doing for the last two days—try to figure out what the hell he means by ‘space program.’ He can’t pronounce ‘honeymoon’ right. What if he can’t pronounce ‘space program’ either? What if he’s offering us a spice program and NASA’s going to find itself with eighty tons of cinnamon? What if it’s a spaze program, whatever the hell that is? Or a space pogrom? We’ve got to find out before he goes down to Houston. That’s why I was in here. I thought maybe he was keeping some machine in here or secret plans or something, but all he’s got is a swing set and a gross of Girl Scout flashlights. I don’t know. Maybe he’s a smug-gler.”

“What about the subvocalizers?” Chris said. “You said you tried to find out what made them work.”

“Nothing,” Hutchins said. He pulled his out of his pocket and looked at it. “It’s two pieces of metal with five millimeters of air between them, not even vacuum, just air.” He put the subvocalizer back on. “All they could tell me over at NASA was that it does what it’s supposed to.” “It does what it’s supposed to,” Chris said. She thought about him taking it off so he could come over here without being followed, about talking to her at lunch with it. “Your giving me the subvocalizer, that was all a setup, wasn’t it, so you could make sure I didn’t tell Stewart about you?”

“I couldn’t risk your moving me out. I needed to be where I could talk to Okee.”

“Did you really come up on the shuttle yesterday, or was that part of the act, too?”

“It wasn’t an act. I was supposed to come up with the rest of the team, but I’d heard how much trouble the Japanese team was having communicating with the Eahrohhs. I figured it was because everybody was trying so hard to get the names pronounced right and learn the language that it made the Eahrohhs nervous. So I thought if I could come up here incognito—”

“Like Spielberg,” Chris said bitterly.

“ ‘Scuse me,” Charmaine’s cheery voice floated up from downstairs.

“They’re home!” Hutchins said. “We can’t let him find us in here!” He dashed back into the aisle of boxes. Chris scrambled to pick up the bento-bako boxes and stack them on the bed again. Hutchins jammed the golf clubs back into the bag and came to help her.

“I gotta be at work at nineteen o’clock, Mr. Fenokee,” Charmaine said, sounding so close she could have been using a subvocalizer. “We better get all this stuff put away.”

Chris and Hutchins dived out the door and slid the shojii screen shut. “Where’s the key?” he said.

Chris pulled it out of her pocket and fumbled to lock the door. The lock seemed to take forever to read the key. She pulled it out.

“Can you get the door, please, Molly?” Charmaine said, there was a long pause, and the door of the apartment slid open. Chris put her hands behind her back.

“ ‘Scuse me,” Charmaine said. She was carrying an unsteady stack of boxes and a shopping bag. Hutchins took half of the boxes for her. “Gee, thanks. Would you believe that rotten kid wouldn’t even open the door for me? She said after tonight she was going to be a star and wouldn’t have to do anything anybody told her.” She bent over in her red strapless dress to put the rest of the boxes down.

“Where’s Mr. Okeefenokee?” Chris said.

“He stopped to talk to my ex-boyfriend,” she said. “Look, I gotta be at work in half an hour, and I don’t even have my cherry blossoms on yet, so could you guys help put this stuff away?”

“Sure,” Hutchins said. Charmaine grabbed a small sack out of the shopping bag and disappeared into the bathroom.

“Chris,” Hutchins said. Chris pretended not to hear him. She put the key in her pocket and started for her room.

“Did you take our chip recorder?” Bets said indignantly from the door. She was wearing an aproned blue dress. Her yellow curls peeked out from under a turned-up Dutch cap. “It had ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ on it.” She stamped her wooden shoe. “You better give it back.”

“I don’t have it,” Chris said, and amazingly, Bets turned around and stomped out. Chris heard her say loudly, “She says she doesn’t have it, but I’ll bet she took it. She’s always doing mean things like that to us.”

“Chris, listen,” Hutchms said, putting out his hand to keep her from passing. “I should have told you the truth to begin with.”

“Yes,” she said. “You should have.”

“The first thing I heard you say to Stewart was that you didn’t have any room for the piano.” He looked thoughtfully at Mr. Okeefenokee’s door. “I didn’t see the piano in there, did you?”

“No,” Chris said. “So you figured if I didn’t have room for a piano, I certainly wouldn’t have room for you, and you were going to have to romance the landlady into giving you a place to sleep. So you fell asleep on my shoulder and brought me Charmaine’s shoes and fed me a tempura dog.”

“Now you and Hutchins get married,” Mr. Okeefenokee said, carrying two shopping bags full of boxes and Mitsukoshi sacks. His wispy orange-pink hair was flying out in all directions. “Go on hahnahmoon.”

“Mr. Okeefenokee, I thought I explained . . .,” Chris said.

“We’re thyure you took it,” Molly said, with her hands on the hips of her Dutch dress. “If you don’t give it back, we’re going to tell our interviewer all the thingth you did.”

“Fine. Mr. Okeefenokee,” she said again, but he had already disappeared through his door.

“I hope we didn’t miss any bento-bako boxes,” Hutchins whispered to her. The door slid open and Mr. Okeefenokee emerged, picked up the packages Charmaine had left on the floor, and disappeared into the room again.

“You’ll be thorry you were mean to uth.” Molly slid the apartment door shut with a crash, and Chris and Hutchins were abruptly alone.

“Thanks for not spilling the beans to Okee,” Hutchins said.

“What would you have done if I’d tried? Bought me another tempura dog? Fallen asleep on my shoulder again? You’re no better than Charmaine’s prospective buyer, you know that? Talk about your real-estate deals.”

“What do you think of my cherry blossoms?” Charmaine said, emerging from the bathroom with the red dress over her arm. “Do you think that pink’s too dark?” She peered over her shoulder. “It always looks different on your—”

“It looks fine,” Chris said.

“Omiko said to tell you guys to come to the show tonight, and she’ll see that Mr. Fenokee catches her orbiting colonies’ tassels,” she said, and clattered out. Chris watched her red high heels.

(Chris, listen, I wasn’t romancing you for a place to sleep,) Hutchins said in her ear. (I was—)

She turned around furiously, yanked the receiver off her ear, and handed it to him. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, fishing her subvocalizer out of her pocket and putting it in his outstretched hand. “You can stay. I won’t tell Mr. Okeefenokee who you are. Just leave me alone.” She pulled the door of her apartment open. “I’ll go ask Charmaine if I can bunk with her tonight.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Hutchins said, looking down at the subvocalizer in his hand. “I’ll sleep in the bathroom,” but she went on out anyway, slamming shut the sliding door with almost as much force as Molly.

Charmaine had already left. She tried to catch her, brushing past Molly and Bets, who stopped in the middle of singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” to glare at her from the landing, and practically stepping on the old man in the baseball cap, who was, amazingly, sleeping through it, but by the time she got to the door, Charmaine had already disappeared into the crowd.

She came back up the stairs. Molly and Bets stopped for her again, folding their arms and tapping their wooden shoes impatiently, and then started up again as soon as she was off the landing, singing their own accompaniment in piping, slightly flat voices. Hutchins was at the end of the hall, talking earnestly to Charmaine’s lawyer and frowning.

Chris slid her door open. “Why did you refuse to sublet your apartment to Molly and Bets?” the redheaded man said. He stuck a chip-cam in her face. She tried to brush past him. “So you admit you refused to share your apartment with two innocent tykes and then blatantly rented half of it to—”

She got the door shut with some difficulty since his foot was wedged in it, went in the living room and shut and locked that door, too, and then leaned against it, feeling as tired as if she had just come up on the shuttle.

Chris spent the evening huddled on the couch under a blanket.

“I brought you some supper,” Hutchins called through the door about nineteen o’clock. “No tempura dogs. I’ll leave it outside the door.”

Chris opened the door. “I’ve changed my mind,” she said, not looking at him. “I’m sleeping in here. You can sleep with Charmaine,” and then was afraid he would say, “I don’t want to sleep with Charmaine. I want to sleep with you,” but he only said, “I’ll sleep in the hall,” and handed her a pastrami sandwich and a packet of milk.

He knocked again at twenty-thirty and called out, “Molly and Bets’s interview is on. Mr. Nagisha’s got his TV set up on the landing. The little girls told me to tell you because, and I quote, ‘Thith ith what thyee getth for thtealing our recorder.’ I thought maybe you might want to come see what revenge they’ve cooked up.”

“No, thank you.”

“Okay,” he said, and knocked again immediately.

“Go away,” Chris said.

“You and Hutchins get married tonight,” Mr. Okeefenokee said. “I must talk to you about closing.”

She opened the door. Mr. Okeefenokee came in, wearing his solemn expression. “Why are you not wearing your thuwevrherrnghladdis?”

Chris put her hand up to her throat. “It hurt to wear it,” she said. “Charmaine said to ask you if you’d like to go see the show at Luigi’s tonight.”

“I cannot go. You and Hutchins get married tonight.”

“We can’t get married, Mr. Okeefenokee,” Chris said. “I’m engaged to Stewart, and even if I weren’t, Hutchins doesn’t want to marry me. He just wanted a place to stay.”

“You like my wife,” he said, continuing to look at her solemnly, the lines above his nose deepening.

“I thought Omiko reminded you of your wife.”

“Omiko sake cups like wife,” he said, reverting to pidgin. His cheek knobs were bright orange. “But you like her, most.”

“You miss your wife, don’t you?” Chris said, and then remembered that he wouldn’t understand that meaning of “miss.” “It makes you sad that she is far away.”

“Far away,” he said, nodding and smiling vigorously.

“Far away,” she said, walking to the end of the hall.

“Far away.” She came back and stood in front of him.

“Close.”

“Closing,” he said, and his face smoothed out into his expression of understanding. “Hahnahmoon. I bought bed. Put on subvocalizer. You and Hutchins get married after interview.” He went bustling out, his wispy hair trailing behind him, like sunset clouds.

“I don’t think so,” Chris thought sadly, sliding the door shut. I’m engaged to Stewart and Hutchins just wanted a place to stay. Mr. Okeefenokee hadn’t understood her when she’d said that. “I bought bed,” he’d said, and he hadn’t understood “close” either. Or “far away.” She had a sudden terrible vision of Stewart trying to explain what a space program was. “Space program,” she could hear him saying, “go far way,” and Mr. Okeefenokee would nod and smile vigorously.

I’d better tell Hutchins about “far away,” she thought. She went out in the hall to look for him. He wasn’t on the stairs, but everybody else was, including Mr. Nagisha’s evicted cousins. They were watching Molly and Bets’s holographic images in front of the TV. Molly and Bets, still in costume, were dancing alongside their three-dimensional images, and both Mollys were bawling “Tiptoe Through the Tulipth.”

Chris went back inside and went to bed, locking her apartment door but leaving the door of her room slightly open so she could hear Hutchins when he came back. If he comes back, she thought sadly. After a while she heard someone come in, and got up, but it was only Mr. Okeefenokee. He disappeared into his room and began to snore almost before he had the shoji screen shut.

“Chris, wake up,” Hutchins said in her ear, and at first she thought he was using the subvocalizer.

“I took it off,” she said sleepily, and opened her eyes. He was squatting beside the couch, his hand on her shoulder. He had on jeans and no shirt. “What time is it?” she said, reaching for the light. “And what are you doing in here?”

“Twenty-one o’clock,” he whispered. “Don’t turn on the light. You’ll wake Butch and Sundance.” He pointed at the floor, where Molly and Bets were curled up in the pink blanket. “Where’s the key to Okee’s room? I can’t get him to open the door.”

“How did they get in here?” she said, rummaging through her clothes at the end of the couch.

“I don’t know. Probably Molly had another key.”

She found the key and handed it to him. “Another key?”

“This is Molly’s key, too. I threatened to tell her redheaded interviewer that she was really eleven if she didn’t give it to me.” He stepped over Molly and Bets.

Chris hunted for her robe for nearly a full minute before she realized she was hearing the sound of Mr. Okeefenokee’s snoring. “He’s asleep,” she said, but Hutchins was already out in the hall. She went after him. “He’s asleep.”

“Remember how he said we woke him up with our talking? Well, I’ve been shouting through the door at him for the last fifteen minutes. I’ve done everything short of kicking in his shoji screen.” He fitted the key in the door and waited for it to be read. “Something’s wrong.” He slid the screen open. “Okee? Are you in here?”

The snoring continued. Chris followed him inside and slid the door shut behind her. Hutchins was staring at the bed. Mr. Okeefenokee had cleared off the bento-bako boxes and the microwave ovens and made up the bed with red-and-green-patterned sheets. There was a stack of boxes on the foot of the bed with a piece of paper and a deck of playing cards on top of it. Molly’s chip recorder was lying on the pillow.

“Charmaine must have picked out the sheets,” Chris said. “There are fans on them.”

Hutchins picked up the recorder and hit a button. The snoring stopped. “He’s gone,” Hutchins said.

“Gone where? And how did he get out? I thought you were sleeping in the hall.”

“I didn’t come in until after he was asleep.” He stopped and corrected himself. “Until I thought he was asleep. I was down in Mr. Nagisha’s apartment trying to get Charmaine’s boyfriend to tell me what Okee’d been talking to him about, while Okee and everybody else were watching Sacco and Vanzetti tiptoe through the tulips on TV. Charmaine’s lawyer kept pleading client confidentiality until the interview was over, and when I came back up here, I could hear Okee snoring.” He tapped the recorder on his hand. “He must have hidden in the hall till I came in and then sneaked out.”

Chris picked up the piece of paper and looked at it. “Why would he do that?”

“Because he’d found out I’d been lying to him. We probably missed one of the bento-bako boxes or Molly and Bets told him I’d been in here or something. Damn it, coming up here incognito was a truly inspired idea! If I knew where Spielberg was, I’d tell him to come out of hiding before he hurts somebody! Okee’s probably halfway back to Eahrohhsani by now!”

“He didn’t go home,” Chris said. She handed him the list. “He’s probably down at Luigi’s trying to catch one of Omiko’s tassels.” She pointed to the middle of the paper. “This is number three: ‘Time alone. Talk.’ ”

He read the list aloud. “ ‘Be friends, talk, time alone, neck, bed, close, honeymoon.’ What is this?”

“It’s his list. ‘You and Hutchins get married.’ I told him people have to have a chance to be alone to talk before they got married.” She picked up the deck of cards and looked at it.

“And I said, ‘Neck.’ ”

“Which is number four.” There weren’t any black cards in the deck. She fanned them out to look at them.

There weren’t any hearts either. “You notice those aren’t checked off yet. He’s trying to give us some time alone.”

Hutchins reached for one of the boxes. He took the lid off and held up a black lace nightgown. “It looks like he thought of everything.”

“Yeah,” she said, spreading out the cards so he could see them. “Charmaine told him diamonds are a girl’s best friend.”

“So he got you diamonds,” he said. He tossed the list on the bed. “God only knows what he thinks a closing is. Or a hahnahmoon.”

“Or a space program. We’d better go look for him. Maybe if I asked him about his space program, he’d explain it to me.”

“In a minute,” he said. He put the nightgown back in the box. “Okee wanted us to talk alone. Your prospective buyer said to do anything Okee wanted.”

She was suddenly very aware of her skimpy nightshirt and Hutchins’s bare chest. “You leave Stewart out of this.”

“I’d be glad to. The hell with what Stewart says. The hell with what Okee wants. I want to talk to you alone.”

Chris backed away from him, knocking over the bento-bako boxes again. “I don’t want to talk to you,” she said unsteadily.

“Fine. Don’t say anything. I’ll do the talking. I didn’t ‘romance’ you, as you call it, because I needed a place to stay. And I didn’t pretend to be shuttle-lagged. I was shuttle-lagged, damn it, and all I could think of was keeping close to Okee.” He came around the bed, ignoring the scattered bento-bako boxes. “It took about one good look at you to make me realize I should tell you the truth, but every time I tried, we were interrupted by some damned vaudeville act.”

Chris kept backing down the narrow aisle between boxes, which was even narrower now that the microwaves were stacked on one side. “And that’s why you kept interrupting my lunch with Stewart?” she said, and crashed into the Christmas tree. Two ornaments hit the floor and bounced. “Because you were trying to tell the truth?”

“I was trying to keep you from marrying somebody who only wants your apartment,” he shouted. “He doesn’t care about you! He pawns some alien off on you without even knowing if he’s friendly. What if it is a space pogrom and Okee’d decided to start with you? What if he’d decided to take you home to Eahrohhsani or marry you off to someone else?”

“He did,” Chris said.

“And Stewart doesn’t know about it, right? No, of course not. Because he’s too busy telling you to do whatever Okee wants. So, fine, let’s get married!”

There was nowhere left to back. Another ornament hit the floor and rolled, and tinsel shimmered onto Chris’s hair and shoulders. “Married?” she said.

“Sure. Why not?” he shouted. “Okee’s got everything we need right here: champagne, diamonds, Stewart’s permission.” He waved his arm at the room. “I’ll bet if we dug through this mess, Okee’s even got a justice of the peace in here someplace.”

Hutchins was very close, and since they were both barefoot, he loomed over her. “I thought you didn’t want to get married,” Chris said unsteadily.

He looked at her for a long, silent minute. Then he reached forward and plucked a piece of tinsel out of her hair. “I changed my mind,” he said.

The shoji screen slid open. “I know they’re in here,” Molly said. “I heard them thyouting.”

“Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh!” Stewart called. “Chris! Where are you?” He appeared at the end of the hall. “Where’s Mr. Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh?” he said hurriedly, giving Hutchins and Chris the barest of glances. “We need him up at NASA immediately.”

“He’s not here, Stewart,” Chris said.

“Obviouthly,” Molly said, her arms folded across her chest.

“Well, where is he, Chris?” Stewart said impatiently.

“I don’t know,” Chris said, shaking tinsel out of her hair.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? This is an emergency. The linguistics team just discovered that Ohghhifoehnnahigrhee’s the leader of the Eahrohhs. If they find out up at NASA that he’s missing—”

“He’s not missing,” Hutchins said, stepping forward. “Pete Hutchins, Navy Intelligence Linguistics Unit.”

“This is just a little misunderstanding,” Stewart said, looking daggers at Chris. “My fiancée doesn’t really mean he’s missing.”

“I know,” Hutchins said. “I’ve had Okee under observation for the last two days.”

“That’th not all he’th had under obthervation,” Molly said, looking at Chris’s bare feet.

“Right now he’s at Luigi’s Tempura Pizzeria watching the sutorippu,” Hutchins went on imperturbably. Stewart took out a pad and pencil and began scribbling. “It’s down in Shitamachi. On Osaka Street.”

“Osaka Street,” Stewart said. “I’ll call NASA and have him picked up immediately.” He started out to the hall.

“Picked up?” Chris said, following him.

“He’th not really there at all,” Molly said. “They jutht want you to leave tho they can have theckth.”

“Theckth?” Stewart said.

“Too much noise,” Mr. Okeefenokee said. He appeared at the end of the aisle, his orange-pink hair mashed down on one side as if he’d been lying on it. “Can’t sleep.”

“Mr. Okeefenokee, what are you doing here?” Chris said.

“Thee?” Molly said. “I told you he wathn’t at Luigi’th.”

Mr. Okeefenokee bent over and picked up one of the ornaments and hung it back on the tree. “Too much noise. Fighting. Sleep in back.” He gestured in the direction of the back wall, where the trampoline and the roller skates were.

Chris said, “But what about the recorder you—”

“Left a message on saying you were going to Luigi’s?” Hutchins interrupted smoothly. “Did you leave it because you didn’t want to be disturbed?”

“Message,” Mr. Okeefenokee said, smiling and nodding.

“You need to accompany me up to NASA immediately,” Stewart said. “You are needed for the negotiations on the space program.”

“Space program,” he said, his head bobbing even more vigorously. “Closing.”

“Hutchins, you’d better come with us to help translate,” Stewart said. “I’ll call NASA and let them know we’re on our way.” He went out into the hall to the phone.

Molly picked up the cards on the bed and looked at them. “Doeth that old man know you thtole hith cardth?” she asked Okee. Mr. Okeefenokee beamed at her.

Hutchins pulled Chris back into the aisle. “Where’s your subvocalizer?” he said softly.

“I gave it to you. Don’t you have it?”

“I gave it to Okee. I asked him to try to talk you into wearing it again.”

Chris frowned. “He asked me why I wasn’t wearing it and told me to put it on, but he didn’t give it back to me.”

“Great,” Hutchins said. “Now he doesn’t understand the word ‘give’ either, so how can he give us a space program?” He gripped her arms. “Look, I can’t let Okee go up to NASA by himself. I’ve got to go with him.”

“I know,” Chris said.

“If you had your subvocalizer, you could listen in on what’s happening, but . . . I’ll call you as soon as I can, okay?” He looked at her. “Maybe it’s just as well you don’t have it on. I might subvocalize what I’m thinking.”

“I knew you thtole my recorder,” Molly said. She brandished it at Chris. “Wait till I tell Bets about thith.” She stomped out.

“What did you say to upset that poor, dear child?” Stewart said. “I got through to NASA. I told them we were on our way. Perhaps you should get dressed, Mr. Hutchins.”

“Yeah,” Hutchins said. He went out into the hall. Mr. Okeefenokee followed him.

“I think I should go with you, Stewart,” Chris said. “Mr. Okeefenokee doesn’t understand English very well, and I couldn’t . . .”

“I hardly think you’d have anything to contribute to the space-program negotiations when you haven’t even bothered to learn to pronounce his name correctly,” Stewart said.

“How do you know it’s a space program?”

“What?”

“I said, how do you know Mr. Okeefenokee,” she said, saying his name with emphasis, “is talking about the same kind of space program you are? What if he’s talking about something else?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, walking around the bed to look at the microwave boxes. “What else could he possible be talking about?”

A spice program, Chris thought. A space pogrom. Radio. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I was doing here in my nightgown with Pete Hutchins?”

Stewart bent over to look to the accordions. “What’s all this stuff doing in here?”

“You told me to do whatever Mr. Okeefenokee wanted. He wanted to buy things.”

“I meant anything within reason,” he said, picking up one of the bento-bako boxes. “How in heaven’s name did he expect to get all this home with him?”

“How did he expect to get all this home?” Hutchins said, frowning. He had put on his shirt and a tweed jacket.

“It wath right there!” Molly said, pointing at the bed. “In plain thight.”

“She stole it just like she stole our curling iron,” Bets said. “That’s what I told the interviewer.” She struck a pose. “I said, ‘She steals things and she won’t let us use her phone or her bathroom and . . .’ ”

“Out,” Chris said. She took hold of the pink ribbons on Bets’s nightgown and used them to propel her out the door.

“You’re just trying to get rid of us so you can be alone with Hutchins, but we fixed you! We—” Chris slid the door shut.

“What was all that about?” Stewart said. “You didn’t actually steal that darling tot’s recorder, did you?”

“Molly’s practicing her lines for a screen test,” Hutchins said. “A remake of The Bad Seed. Okee, are you ready to go up to NASA?” Okee nodded and smiled. Hutchins herded him downstairs.

“I really think I should go with you, Stewart,” Chris said.

He started down the stairs. “It’s not necessary,” he said, stepping over the old man, who was laying out a hand of solitaire. “You stay here and help the kiddies rehearse for their screen test. Besides, you’re not even dressed,” he said, and then turned and looked back up at her in surprise.

“Call me,” Chris said, and looked over his head at Hutchins standing by the door. “Please.”

“I doubt if we’ll be able to,” Stewart said crisply from the foot of the stairs. “I should imagine we’ll be in negotiations all night.”

They went out. Chris hesitated a moment and then started to run back up the stairs to get dressed so she could go with them.

“Wait,” Mr. Nagisha said from the door of his apartment. “I have something to give you.” She came back down the stairs, stepping carefully over the laid-out cards, and he handed her a folded paper.

“What is it?” Chris said.

“An eviction notice. You are in violation of your lease.”

“I am not,” she said, unfolding the paper. “How am I in violation?”

“Subletting without landlord’s permission to a person not a relative and withholding of rent.”

“What? You mean Mr. Okeefenokee? I didn’t sublet my apartment to him. NASA requisitioned it, and Stewart paid you. I saw him. Nobody withheld any rent, and if you’re talking about Mr. Hutchins, Mr. Okeefenokee was the one who asked him to stay with him. If you think he should be paying rent, too, you’ll have to talk to NASA.”

“I have evidence. You must be out by seven o’clock tomorrow morning. I have rented your apartment to other tenants.”

“What kind of evidence?”

He flourished a chip at her, and for a minute Chris thought it was the missing recording of “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” but Mr. Nagisha walked past the old man, stepping squarely on the cards, and up to the landing, where he stuck the chip into the TV.

The title, “Orphans of the Stairs” appeared in front of the screen followed by a shot of the apartment building. A voice-over, which sounded suspiciously like the redheaded interviewer, said, “Inside this building is one of the apartments NASA has requisitioned so the aliens will have a place to live. But what about all those people on Sony who don’t have a place to live? Today I met two of them.” The interviewer appeared on the landing with Molly and Bets in their navy-sailor dresses. They curtsied as he introduced them, all their dimples showing.

Mr. Nagisha fast-forwarded and then stopped. The interviewer said, “Let’s see these budding performers in action,” and Molly arid Bets clomped out in their wooden shoes. Mr. Nagisha fast-forwarded it before they could get started on “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” He stopped it.

“Spielberg, are you out there?” the interview said. “All these two talented tots ask is a chance to break into show biz.”

He hit the fast-forward button, and when he stopped the chip again, Molly was saying, “Thyee and the alien have thith whole apartment, but thyee won’t let uth use the bathroom or the phone or anything, even if we’re eckthpecting an important call from our agent.”

“And then last night she kicked us out of her room,” Bets said, stepping neatly in front of Molly. “We just wanted to sleep on the floor.” She began a pretty pout and then seemed to realize that if she stopped talking, Molly would jump in, and added hastily, “I think she wanted us out of there so she could be alone with him.”

“Who?” the interviewer said, his ears perking up. “The alien?”

“Of courth not,” Molly said, putting her arm up so it was in front of Bets’s face. “Mr. Negeethya doethn’t know it, but thyee rented her apartment to thith other guy.”

“His name’s Hutchins,” Bets said, wrestling Molly’s arm down to where she could see over it. “We saw him give her the rent. It was a whole bunch of yen. She’s not supposed to rent to anybody without telling Mr. Nagisha.”

“He wasn’t paying me rent,” Chris said. “He took some money out of my purse to pay for breakfast. He was giving me my change.”

The scene in front of the TV cut suddenly to Chris trying to shut the door on the interviewer’s foot. “The occupant of the apartment, Ms. Christine Arthur, was unavailable for comment,” the interviewer said.

“I did not rent my room to Mr. Hutchins,” Chris said. “Mr. Okeefenokee asked him to stay. He doesn’t understand English very well, and he thought ‘room’ meant any available space and . . .”

“Evidence,” Mr. Nagisha said.

“Look, I’m sure we can clear this whole thing up if you’ll just let me call Stewart.”

The interviewer said, peering over Molly’s and Bets’s simpering faces, “When this reporter checked with NASA, they had no record of having requisitioned Ms. Arthur’s apartment, which raises further questions about the alleged alien and Ms. Arthur’s refusal to sublet to . . .” Mr. Nagisha popped the chip out of the TV and stepped over the old man in the baseball cap. “Seven o’clock,” he said, and went into his apartment and shut the door.

“Molly and Bets are mad at me because they think I stole their chip recorder,” Chris shouted at the door. “They told me they’d get even.”

The door stayed shut. The old man in the baseball cap looked up blankly and then went back to laying out his cards. He’ll never get anywhere without the diamonds, Chris thought irrelevantly, and tore back upstairs, clutching the eviction notice, and tried to call Stewart.

The blond woman who was always laying papers on Stewart’s desk for him to sign told her that he couldn’t come to the phone. “Have him call me as soon as you can,” Chris told her. “This is an emergency!”

She got dressed and tried again. This time the call wouldn’t go through. She stared at the screen for a while and then grabbed the eviction notice and her purse and ran downstairs. At the bottom of the steps she collided with Charmaine’s lawyer. He was swinging a tassel idly in one hand and whistling.

“Hey!” he said. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Mr. Nagisha’s having me evicted because of Hutchins. I’ve got to go find him.”

“And leave your apartment? If you leave, you’re liable to find your furniture out on the stairs when you get back.” He looked at the eviction notice. “You go back upstairs and sit tight. I’ll go try to talk Mr. Nagisha out of this. If it doesn’t work, I’ll go find Hutchins for you. Go on. Mr. Nagisha’s probably already changing the locks.” Chris tore back upstairs, hopelessly scattering the old man’s cards. “I’m sorry,” she said breathlessly. “You wouldn’t have won anyway. Your diamonds are in Mr. Okeefenokee’s room.”

The locks hadn’t been changed, but the door was standing open. Molly and Bets were in the living room, arranging their dolls on the couch.

“I get the bedroom,” Molly said. “You can thleep in the hammock.”

“I get the bedroom,” Bets said. “Out,” Chris said. Both of the little girls turned to look at her in surprise.

“Didn’t Mr. Nagisha talk to you?” Bets said. “This isn’t your apartment anymore. It’s ours.”

“Either you get out or I’m knocking those pearly little front teeth of yours down your throats, and then we’ll see how many parts you get.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Bets said, but she grabbed one of her dolls by the arm and clutched two others to her stomach. Molly scooped up the rest of them, and they trooped out. “We’re moving in at theven o’clock and you’d better be out of here by then,” Molly said.

Chris locked the door and shoved a chair against it. She tried Stewart again, and then the operator, but she still couldn’t get through. Charmaine’s lawyer came up to tell her he hadn’t gotten anywhere with Mr. Nagisha. He didn’t sound particularly worried, but he said he was going up to NASA to look for Hutchins and Okee. “You don’t have to barricade yourself in,” he said, pointing at the chair. “Just don’t leave. And keep trying to get in touch with Hutchins from this end.”

“I will,” she promised, trying to think where Mr. Okeefenokee might have put her subvocalizer. As soon as Charmaine’s lawyer was gone, she went into Mr. Okeefenokee’s room to look for it. She looked through the bento-bako boxes and under the bed and in the baby buggy, and then started in on the endless stacks of boxes. I wonder how he planned on getting all this home, she thought, sticking her hand inside the roller skates.

The phone rang. It was Hutchins. “I’ve only got a minute,” he said rapidly. “Have you found the subvocalizer yet? Okee doesn’t have it. They did a metals search on him when we came in. I asked him where he put it, and he said, and I quote, ‘You put on. Closing. Hahnahmoon.’ Do you realize what that means? There isn’t any space program. He hasn’t understood a word we’ve been saying.”

“Pete, you’ve got to come back right away,” she said to the suddenly blank screen. “I’m being evicted.” She prodded the reinstate button until an operator came onscreen. “I was just cut off,” she said, and gave her Stewart’s number. This time the phone rang. And went on ringing. Chris let it ring twenty-eight times and then went back into the bedroom and sat down on the bed.

She picked up the list Mr. Okeefenokee had written. He had checked off “time alone” and “closing” and crossed off “neck.” The only thing left on the list was “hahnahmoon,” which he had spelled the way he pronounced it.

“Honeymoon,” Chris said out loud. “I wonder what he thinks that means.” She picked up the old man’s diamonds and took them out to him, but he was asleep again, stretched out across the stairs, his baseball cap in his hands. Chris sat down on the step above him and shuffled the diamonds into his deck. The phone rang.

It was Stewart. “I’m being evicted,” Chris said before they could be cut off.

“Evicted?” he said, looking horrified. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. Mr. Nagisha claims I withheld rent from him.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Stewart said. “I paid him myself when Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh moved in.”

“He’s not talking about Mr. Okeefenokee. He’s talking about Hutchins. You’ve got to tell him to come back here so he can explain to Mr. Nagisha that he wasn’t paying me rent, he was just giving me back my change from breakfast.”

“Breakfast?” Stewart said. “How long has Hutchins been over there?”

“Two days. He’s got to come explain that Mr. Okeefenokee was the one who asked him to stay. And you’ve got to bring over the requisition forms that show my apartment was requisitioned by NASA.”

“I’ll be right over,” he said hurriedly.

“Bring Hutchins with you. And Mr. Okeefenokee.”

“I can’t do that,” he said.

“I know they’re in negotiations, but they’ve got to talk to Mr. Nagisha. What if I have Mr. Nagisha come up here and they can talk to him on the phone?”

“That won’t work either.”

“Why not?”

“They’re on their way down to Houston. They left on the shuttle half an hour ago.”

“ ’Scuse me,” Charmaine said, and came into the living room, wearing her pink smock and carrying the red paper umbrella Mr. Okeefenokee had given her. She switched on the light. “I didn’t knock ’cause I thought you might be asleep. Did you know Molly’s got a key to your apartment?”

Chris nodded numbly. “Hutchins is gone.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. She sat down on the couch beside Chris. “How long have you been sitting here in the dark?”

“I don’t know. What time is it?”

“Three o’clock.”

“They’re probably in Houston by now. I hope Hutchins didn’t get shuttle lag.”

“You look pretty lagged yourself. Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”

“I can’t. I’m being evicted.”

“Yeah, I know that, too. My lawyer stopped by Luigi’s to tell me what had happened. The way I figure it, your prospective buyer figured he better get rid of Hutchins before he made you a better offer.” She put her arm around Chris. “Don’t worry about your apartment. My lawyer say’s he’s got a plan to fight the eviction. He wouldn’t tell me what it was, but he said not to worry, he wouldn’t let those brats get your apartment, and I believe him. He knows practically everything there is to know when it comes to real-estate deals.”

There was a knock on the door. Charmaine went to answer it and came back in with her lawyer and Stewart.

“Well, you’ve gotten yourself in a nice mess, Chris,” Stewart said. “Mr. Nagisha showed us the chip. How could you jeopardize your apartment by letting some stranger move in?”

“You told me to do whatever Mr. Okeefenokee wanted. He wanted Hutchins to move in. Did you show him the NASA requisition form?”

“There isn’t one,” Charmaine’s lawyer said, looking happier than Stewart. “And we don’t have a prayer of taking this to court when he’s got two cute kids to testify for him. I guess we’ll have to go with my plan after all.”

“What do you mean there isn’t one?” Chris said.

“I was afraid there’d be a great deal of red tape,” Stewart said, “getting you cleared and so on . . .”

“NASA requisitioned dozens of people’s apartments. None of them had any trouble getting cleared. You told NASA he was staying with you, didn’t you? So you’d get the compensation?”

“It doesn’t really matter which apartment was requisitioned, since we’re getting married.”

“It matters to me,” Chris said. “I’m being evicted.”

“No, you’re not,” Charmaine’s lawyer said cheerfully. “We’ve come up with a plan. All you have to do is marry Hutchins. Then he doesn’t have to pay rent because he’s a relative.”

“I can’t,” Chris said. “He’s in Houston.”

“He doesn’t have to be here,” Stewart said. “We can do a beam-up call, take the vows over the phone, transmit the papers and have them signed on both ends. I’ve cleared it with NASA.”

“I don’t understand,” Chris said bewilderedly. “How will getting married now help? We weren’t married when he stayed here.”

“Sony law allows occupancy before closing,” Charmaine’s lawyer said, looking positively jovial.

“What do you say?”

“It’s the only way we can save your apartment,” Stewart said. “You’re not really getting married. There’s an automatic buyer-backout clause if the deal isn’t closed in twenty-four hours, which of course it won’t be. You’ll have your apartment back, and with the requisition money I get from NASA we’ll be able to buy that apartment next door to Mother’s and turn this into a rental.”

“What if Mr. Nagisha finds out and tries to stop it?”

“He won’t,” Charmaine’s lawyer said. “Omiko sent him down to Luigi’s for the sutorippu, and I paid Molly and Bets off.”

“I want to talk to Hutchins.”

“You can talk to him during the wedding,” Stewart said, looking relieved. “I’ll call NASA.”

“Omiko’s out getting a Shinto priest,” Charmaine’s lawyer beamed. “I’ll go get the marriage contracts drawn up. We’ll have you married in nothing flat.” They both hurried out.

“Gee, this is so exciting,” Charmaine said. “I’ve got a veil from the wedding number you can borrow. I’d loan you the wedding dress to go with it, only it’s not a dress exactly.”

Charmaine’s lawyer came back in with the marriage contracts and one of Mr. Nagisha’s evicted cousins. “He’s a notary,” her lawyer said, and Mr. Nagisha’s cousin pulled a seal out of his pocket.

“It’ll serve him right,” he said. “All we were doing was stir-frying a little blowfish.”

“You can sign these now, and then we’ll transmit them over the phone. It’s a simple death-do-you-part deed, no lease option, no appraisal. Just a minute. I’ve got to get another witness.”

He came back in with the old man in the baseball cap. Chris signed the copies and then watched carefully as the old man countersigned them, but his signature was completely illegible. Charmaine finished witnessing the contracts and scurried out to get the veil.

Omiko came in with the Shinto priest. Molly and Bets were right behind her, wearing frilly lavender dresses and large lavender bows in their hair. Molly was carrying a basket of cherry-blossom petals.

“We’re going to be in your wedding,” Bets said. “Molly’s the flower girl, and I get to be your maid of honor.”

“Isn’t that sweet?” Stewart said, patting Molly on the head. Chris saw with satisfaction that he was mashing her lavender hair bows. “Someday we’ll have two sweet little girls just like these two.”

“Over my dead body,” Chris said.

“Here’s your bouquet,” Charmaine said. She had changed back into her strapless red dress. She shoved a bouquet of white silk flowers and ribbons into Chris’s hands. “It’s really a pastie,” she said, putting the veil on Chris’s head, “so I stuck it on one of Mr. Okeefenokee’s flashlights.”

“The call’s coming through,” Charmaine’s lawyer said from the hall.

“I want to talk to Hutchins first,” Chris said.

“I really don’t see why that’s necessary,” Stewart said. “He’s already agreed to marry you.”

“I’m not going through with this unless I have a chance to talk to him.”

“It’s almost four o’clock. We’ve got to do this in the next half hour.”

“Fine,” Chris said, taking off her veil. “Tell Molly and Bets they can have the apartment. I’ll move in with Charmaine and Omiko.”

“And lose the apartment!” Stewart said, looking aghast. “I mean, go ahead and talk to him if you have to, but make it quick. If we don’t finish this up within the next fifteen minutes, we’ll have to wait for satellite relay.”

Charmaine’s lawyer said, “It’ll be a minute or so,” and went into the living room and shut the door. Chris locked it and then went over to the screen. It brightened and Hutchins’s image appeared in front of the screen. He was wearing the clothes he’d left the apartment in, and he looked tired and drawn.

“Are you all right?” Chris said.

“Yeah,” he said, frowning. “They started interrogating Okee as soon as we got here, but they’re not getting anywhere. He’s clammed up completely.” He rubbed his hand across his forehead tiredly.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Chris said. “Marry me, I mean. It’s nothing but a real-estate deal.”

“It’ll make Stewart happy.”

“Yeah,” Chris said ruefully. “And Mr. Okeefenokee. He kept saying we were going to get married tonight, and here we are.”

“Yeah,” Hutchins said thoughtfully. “How come they were able to put this wedding together so fast? I thought Sony marriage contracts were really complicated.”

“I don’t know. Charmaine’s lawyer was the one who came up with the idea.”

“Charmaine’s lawyer, huh? Maybe Okee’s smarter than we thought.”

“We really can’t wait any longer,” Stewart said, opening the door. “We’ve got to start the ceremony.”

He came over to the screen and pressed the transmit button. Hutchins’s image disappeared, and Charmaine’s lawyer held each page of the contract up to the screen by the corners for a full thirty seconds. Stewart pushed another button, and a flat-screen image of Hutchins appeared. He and two men in uniform signed and then held up the copies of the pages the same way.

“Gee, this is so exciting,” Charmaine said. She put the veil over Chris’s head again and then dashed into the bathroom to get a box of Kleenex, which she passed out to Omiko, the old man in the baseball cap, and Mr. Nagisha’s cousin.

“I heard she had to get married,” Bets said to the old man in a stage whisper.

Molly said, “Would you pleathe get out of the way?” and began throwing cherry-blossom petals on everyone.

Charmaine’s lawyer said, “Okay,” and Hutchins’s holographic image appeared in front of the screen. He was still holding the copies of the contract.

“Join hands,” the Shinto priest said. Hutchins transferred the contracts to his left hand and held out his right. Chris put her hand carefully where the image of his hand was. He closed his hand around her fingers but she couldn’t feel anything.

The priest made a speech in Japanese and then said, “Christine Arthur, do you understand the terms of the contract?”

“I do,” Chris said.

“Peter Hutchins, do you under—”

“I do,” he said.

“This contract has been duly signed and witnessed. I declare it legally binding.”

“Good,” Hutchins said. “Now do I get to kiss the bride?” He bent over her.

Stewart hit the hang-up button, and Hutchins’s image disappeared. “Good. I’m glad that’s over,” he said happily. He turned to Charmaine’s lawyer. “Now we can take these down to Mr. Nagisha.”

“In a minute,” the lawyer said. He turned to Charmaine. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, and then I want to talk to you.” She followed him and Stewart out onto the landing.

Chris was still watching the screen. “Ahem,” the old man in the baseball cap said, and Chris turned around, but he was talking to Bets. “I’ve been watching you for several days. I’m directing a new movie and I’d like to cast you in it.”

“You don’t want her,” Molly said. “Thyee dyeth her hair.”

“I do not,” Bets said, putting a defensive hand up to her curls. “My blond hair is natural, which is more than I can say for your lisp.”

“My lisp is not phony!” Molly shouted, and grabbed a handful of yellow curls.

“I want both of you,” he said, separating them. “You’re perfect for the parts. I’ve got the contracts in my office downtown.”

“I want my name first on the credits,” Bets said.

“I want star billing above the title,” Molly said.

He herded them out. They nearly collided with Charmaine.

“ ‘Scuse me,” Charmaine said. “What was that all about?”

“That was Spielberg,” Chris said. “He just offered Molly and Bets the lead in his new movie.”

“Who? The old guy on the stairs? You’re kidding. You’d think he’d know better after living here a whole week.” She looked at Chris. “Are you all right?”

“No,” Chris said.

“I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we all go down to Luigi’s for the early show? Kind of a wedding breakfast.”

“Chris has got to stay here until the buyer-beware clause expires,” Stewart said.

“What do you think she’s gonna do?” Charmaine said. “Jump off Sony and parachute down to earth?”

“Chris has come dangerously close to losing her apartment once today. I don’t want anything to interfere with that annulment clause. The safest thing is for her to spend the next twenty-four hours in her apartment.”

“Okay, we’ll bring the wedding breakfast here. I’ll call Luigi and have him deliver some teriyaki ham and eggs and have Omiko bring the girls over and . . .”

“Can I speak to you?” Charmaine’s lawyer said, taking hold of her hand and practically yanking her out of the living room.

“I’m not going to let you jeopardize your apartment a second time,” Stewart said. He went over to the couch. “I think the best thing for us to do is get married immediately. I’ve asked the lawyer to draw up the marriage contracts. Where did this Hutchins sleep? In Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh’s room?”

“No,” Chris said. “He slept in here. Mr. Okeefenokee didn’t understand the concept of ‘room.’ He thought it meant any space that happened to be available. Hutchins slept up there.”

Stewart looked up at the sleep restraint. “In that? Where did you sleep?”

“On the couch.”

“I can’t believe you let him sleep up there with you not five feet away from him.”

“Neither can I,” Chris said. She got her nightshift and robe from the end of the couch. “You can sleep in Mr. Okeefenokee’s room.”

“No!” Charmaine said from the doorway. Her lawyer was with her. They were holding hands. “I mean, ‘scuse me, but gee, Mr. Okeefenokee bought all that stuff for you, and it’s a shame to let it go to waste.”

“What stuff?” Stewart said.

“If you want to be able to testify that Chris didn’t leave her apartment for the whole twenty-four hours,” Charmaine’s lawyer said, “you should be the one to sleep out here. Chris can sleep in the bedroom. That way she can’t leave without your knowing it.”

“I thought you said this plan was foolproof,” Stewart said anxiously.

“It is,” Charmaine’s lawyer said, grinning.

“Good night,” Chris said, and went into Mr. Okee-fenokee’s room, still carrying the bridal bouquet, and shut the door.

Charmaine immediately slid the shoji screen open a few inches. “ ‘Scuse me,” she said. “Can I come in? I got something to show you.” She sidled through the door, shut it behind her, and flashed her hand at Chris. “It’s a diamond. We’re engaged.”

Chris laid the bouquet on the nightstand and started moving boxes off the bed. “I thought you said you weren’t going to marry him because he thought marriage was a real-estate deal.”

“That was before—” She stopped. “Well, I mean, I think it was pretty romantic the way he got you and Hutchins together.”

“We’re not exactly together,” she said. “Hutchins is in Houston and I’m locked in my room.”

“Yeah, but Mr. Fenokee’s going to . . .” She stopped again.

Chris looked up. “Mr. Fenokee’s going to what?”

Charmaine fiddled with her ring. “Well, gee, I mean, he’s got that space program, right? Maybe he can talk the NASA people into sending Hutchins back up here. Or maybe you could go down there.”

“I don’t think so,” Chris said sadly. “Stewart’ll see to that. Anyway, Sony’s got a thirty-day travel-permission law, and the marriage expires in”—she looked at her watch—“about twenty-three hours.”

“Gee, that’s right. I better go. I promised Omiko I’d be there for the wedding number. Gee, I almost forgot my pastie.” She picked it up, untaped it from its makeshift handle, and laid the flashlight back on the nightstand. She pointed at the boxes on the bed. “Why don’t you wear that black lace nightie instead of that shift thing?” She flounced out. Chris shut the door and locked it.

She put on her nightshift and her robe and moved the stack of boxes off the bed. “I’ve just had a great idea, Chris,” Stewart called through the door. “I was lying there looking at the hammock, and it suddenly occurred to me that Ohghhifoehnnahigrheeh was right. That is available space. Since we’re going to rent this place anyway, we won’t need those high ceilings. We can turn this into two apartments. I’m going to go downstairs right now and talk to Mr. Nagisha about it.”

She could hear him slide the door to the apartment shut, lock it, and start down the stairs. I hope he trips over the old man in the baseball cap and falls the whole flight, she thought, and then remembered that the old man had gone off with Molly and Bets.

She turned off the light and got into bed. There was something hard under her pillow. It’s probably one of Omiko’s tassels, she thought, and turned the light back on. It was her subvocalizer.

“Oh,” she said, and held it to her heart.

“Mr. Nagisha thinks it’s a great idea,” Stewart said through the door. “He’s going to do it to all the apartments in the building. Good night, darling.”

She sat up against the headboard, put the subvocalizer on, and fastened the receiver in her ear. It probably doesn’t work except at short distances, she thought. She turned off the light.

It was completely-dark in the room. There was a narrow line of light under the shoji screen, but it only seemed to intensify the darkness.

(Pete,) she whispered without making any noise. (Are you there?)

(I’m here,) he said, so close he could have been sitting beside her. (Where are you?)

(In Mr. Okeefenokee’s room. My subvocalizer was under his pillow.)

(Where’s Stewart?)

(In the living room on the couch. He wants to make sure I don’t do anything to jeopardize the annulment clause.)

(Is everything okay?) Hutchins said. (You’re not going to be evicted?)

(No.)

(Well, that’s good. At least you don’t have to sleep out on the stairs with Leopold and Loeb.)

(Molly and Bets aren’t here. They got a part in Spielberg’s movie.)

He didn’t answer for a while. (There isn’t any justice, is there?) he said finally.

(No.) Chris said. (I wish you were here.)

(So do I. Chris, look, they’ve got us locked up tight here until the negotiations are over. I tried to talk Okee into telling NASA I had to come back up to Sony to get the space program, but he said, “No. Be alone on hahnahmoon.” Well, we’re sure as hell alone.)

(Is he still refusing to talk?)

(No, he’s been talking a blue streak ever since we got on the shuttle. And I have a sinking feeling I know why the Eahrohhs came. I don’t think it was to negotiate a space program or anything else. I think they just like space travel. Okee had that lump of a nose of his pressed to the port the whole way down, and he told the NASA linguistics team the exciting story of our takeoff and landing twice. He also regaled them with a description of how Omiko orbits her colonies and danced “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” for them. Spielberg blew his big chance. Okee’s a lot better than Molly and Bets. He told the linguistics team about you, too. He said you reminded him of his wife.)

(I know,) she said, and wished she had a Kleenex.

(He said I reminded him of himself. No, what he actually said was that I was like him. He then said the reason he’d wanted us to get married was because he knew we liked each other, which shoots our “one word, one meaning” theory all to hell.)

(But if that’s true, maybe he understands the word “space,” too, and there really is a space program.)

(Maybe.) There was silence for a minute. (He told the linguistics team he’d have a demonstration of the space program for them in twenty-four hours. They asked him what he needed for this demonstration, and he said a room with high ceilings. So they stuck us in an old shuttle hangar with a guard and a couple of army cots, and he went right to sleep on one of the cots.)

She could hear something besides what he was saying, a low whooshing noise that rose to a dull roar and then subsided. (I can hear Mr. Okeefenokee snoring,) she said, and wiped her eyes on the hem of the sheet.

(Chris, listen, if there isn’t a space program, Okee’s not going to be the only one who’s in trouble. I didn’t exactly have official clearance to go undercover, and they’re going to want somebody they can blame this on. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get back up there to get you.)

(I know,) she said, sniffling. Charmaine had left her box of Kleenex on the nightstand. She reached for the flashlight. Her hand groped in emptiness where the night-stand was supposed to be. “Hutchins!” she said out loud. “The nightstand’s missing.” She squinted into the darkness. She could faintly make out the walls of her room. “Air. Okeefenokee’s boxes are gone, too.”

(No, they’re not,) Hutchins said, and she could hear the rumble of Okee’s snoring under his words. (They’re here. Did the nightstand have a box of Kleenex on it?)

“Are you all right, darling?” Stewart said through the door. “I heard you call out.”

“I’m fine,” Chris said. “I was dreaming. Good night.”

“Why don’t you come out and sleep on the—” Stewart said. His words cut off so abruptly she was afraid he had opened the door, but when she turned her head in that direction, she couldn’t see any light, not even the line of light that had been under her door.

(Are you still there, Chris?) Hutchins said.

(Yes,) she said, careful not to speak out loud since Stewart might be trying to unlock the door. I hope Molly took all her keys with her, she thought, and wondered if she should get out of bed and go wedge a chair against the door or something, but she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to find her way back to the bed. If the bed was still there, (Pete, what’s going on?)

(I don’t know,) he said. (This shuttle hangar is now full of Okee’s stuff. The microwaves, the trampoline, even the Christmas tree in the baby buggy.)

Chris squinted into the darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust, but after a long minute she still couldn’t see anything.

(He didn’t understand when you tried to tell him there wasn’t any space in your apartment,) he said slowly (and he didn’t understand the words “far away” and “close.” And how come? Not because he couldn’t understand the words, but because the concept didn’t make any sense. Chris, I think he’s got a space program, after all.) It was suddenly not as black in the room. She looked anxiously toward the shoji screen, afraid that Stewart had gotten it open, but the light wasn’t coming from that direction. It seemed to be coming from the back wall where the trampoline had been, only she couldn’t make out the wall.

(It’s not the kind of space program NASA thought they were getting, but so what? I think they’ll be happy with this,) he said, sounding excited. (I couldn’t figure out how he was going to get all this stuff home in that little ship of theirs, and the answer is, he wasn’t. He was going to send it Federal Express. I’ll bet he already took the piano home, and that’s why we couldn’t find it.)

The line of light was under the side walls where the stacks of boxes had been. They were much farther away than they should have been.

(Pete!) Chris said, getting onto her knees on the bed as if she were on a life raft.

(If Okee can send souvenirs home to Eahrohhsani, we’ve got interstellar trade. Not to mention what this means to Sony. So what if we can only transport freight?)

Now a thin line of pinkish-orange light was under the wall where the shoji screen should be. It wasn’t there. (Pete,) she said (I don’t think it’s limited to transporting freight.)

(I wonder what the high ceilings have to do with this. We can build space colonies on earth and then put them in orbit with—)

His voice cut off. (Just a minute,) Hutchins said after a pause. (The lights went out. I can’t see.)

(There’s a flashlight on the nightstand,) Chris said.

(I can’t find the nightstand. It was right here.) His voice sounded suddenly different, farther away, and she couldn’t hear Mr. Okeefenokee’s snoring under it. (Chris, I think it’s disappeared. It’s black as pitch in here. Is the nightstand there?)

(I don’t know. Just a minute.) She got up on her knees, waved her hand over where the nightstand was supposed to be, and cracked her knuckles against the corner of it.

“Ouch,” she said, nursing her hand. (Yes, it’s back.) “Damn!” Hutchins said. “No, it’s not. It’s here. I just ran into it.”

“But . . .,” Chris said, and then stopped and peered into the darkness. She crawled to the foot of the bed so that the orange-pink light was behind the nightstand and she could make out shapes. “Pete,” she said, “take off your subvocalizer.” She unfastened the receiver from her ear and closed her hand over it.

“In a minute,” he said. “Okee had a box of flashlights right next to the Christmas tree.” His voice sounded suddenly softer, as if he had turned away.

She unclasped the subvocalizer with her free hand and took it off. “Take off your subvocalizer and say something.” She put it under her pillow and leaned across the bed, feeling carefully for the nightstand.

“Now I can’t find the damned boxes,” he said. “Damn it, I hit my toe again.”

Chris turned on the flashlight. Hutchins had on jeans and no shirt, and he was standing beside the bed, holding his bare foot in one hand. “How did you get here?” he said blankly.

“That’s what I should be asking you. This is my room.” She shone the flashlight around at the walls. The line of pinkish-orange light was getting wider, as if a curtain were slowly going up. “Sort of.” She smiled at him. “Stewart wanted me to stay in my room, but I don’t think this is what he had in mind.”

Hutchins put his foot down and looked blankly behind him at the wall. “Where’s Okee?”

“I don’t know. I have a feeling he could be just about anywhere he wants. But I would imagine he’s in the shuttle hangar with all his boxes and the Christmas tree and the trampoline. And half of NASA when they realize we’re gone. You don’t suppose they’ll think he disintegrated us or something?”

He limped over to the bed and sat down beside her.

“He said he’d have a space program for them in twenty-four hours. They won’t string him up before then, and I have a feeling that at the end of twenty-four hours we’ll be able to tell them where we’ve been ourselves.”

“Which is where?” she said.

He looked around at the walls. The band of light was nearly a foot wide now. It looked more pink than orange. Chris switched off the flashlight and put it on the night-stand.

“Damned if I know,” he said. “That old faker! He understood every word we said. He knew exactly what kind of space program NASA wanted. And all that stuff about honeymoons and closings and not understanding what kind of roll Bets wanted. ‘Time alone. Talk, Neck.’ I could just . . .,” he said, smashing his fist against his open hand. He stopped and looked at Chris. “I could kiss him on the top of his lipstick-smeared head,” he said. “I thought I was never going to see you again. I figured by the time I made it back up to Sony, you’d have married your prospective buyer.”

“I couldn’t marry Stewart,” Chris said, taking hold of his hand. “I’m already married.”

“ ‘Put on subvocalizer. You and Hutchins get married. Hahnahmoon.’ ” Hutchins said, shaking his head. “I’ll bet he set up this whole thing with Charmaine’s lawyer, the marriage, the honeymoon, everything.”

He stood up and went over to the wall where the shoji screen had been. When he put out his hand to touch it, the band seemed to spread suddenly in all directions, suffusing the room in pink light.

“The honeymoon!” Chris said, getting up on her knees. “I think I know where we are. And you’re wrong. He doesn’t understand every word we say.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I’ll bet you anything those trees are cherry trees, and that we’re on a hana moon.” A forest of blossoming trees stretched around them in all directions. She could almost smell the cherry blossoms. “It’s beautiful here,” she said. “It is,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at the trees. “And I have the feeling nobody’s going to come in to evict us or use the bathroom or do a tap-dance routine.” He walked over to the bed. “Spielberg didn’t really give Molly and Bets a part in his movie, did he?”

Chris sat back on her heels. “You were right about Spielberg coming up to Sony incognito. You know the old man who lives above Charmaine?”

He pulled her up onto her knees. “In the baseball cap and sneakers? He’s not Spielberg,” he said. “He’s just some chip cam director who thinks he can bring back slasher movies. He wanted to hire Okee to star in a low-budget remake of Alien. When I told him I didn’t think Okee was available, he asked me if I thought people would believe in a pair of four-year-olds who were vicious murderers.” He put his arms around her. “I said I hoped it was one of those movies where the murderers get what they deserve in the end. I like movies like that, where everybody gets what they deserve.”

“So do I,” Chris said. Hutchins was even closer than he had been on the bullet. Chris could definitely smell the cherry blossoms. “What’s going to happen to Molly and Bets?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and leaned down to kiss her. “The old guy got this spooky smile on his face and mumbled something about tap shoes.”

EIFELHEIM

Michael Flynn

It’s all too easy to think of the various sciences as neatly separated compartments. But the most profound breakthroughs may be those in the partitions . . .

I know where the path to the stars lies. The gate opened once, a long time ago. And then it closed, all but the tiniest of cracks. Now we have a wedge in that crack.

You see, Sharon Nagy was a physicist and Tom Schwoerin was a psychohistorian. That was the heart of the business right there. That was the beginning of it and the end of it, and most of what happened in between.

Or perhaps you don’t see. Well, neither did they, at first. Who would? Medieval settlement patterns and unified field theory seemed worlds apart. They were worlds that touched at only one point: in the living quarters that Tom and Sharon shared.

They wee an old-fashioned couple, holding to the old-fashioned values. They “lived together” in a “condo,” one of a cluster that had been built back in the ’70s or ’80s. She furnished it with antiques: water bed, pillow furniture, that sort of thing. Quaint, but nice.

During the summer sessions they both worked out of the condo. Tom was usually hunched over the PC, tracking down obscure references on the DataNet. Sharon preferred the organic computer she kept between her ears. She liked to lie in the pillow-sofa, her notebook open, surrounded by wadded up balls of paper and half-finished cups of herbal tea, thinking about whatever it is that theoretical physicists think about. At such close quarters they couldn’t help learning something of each other’s work. That was the fulcrum on which they turned the world.

But I was into the affair last and least of all and perhaps it would be better to let the story tell itself.

I

She floated in a world that was not a world. Spheres were not spheres and the geodesies were warped and twisted things. Space and time fell away in all directions in curious vortexes. But she sensed order. There was something patterned underneath the chaos. She intersected the world with a slice of 3-space, sneered at the result, and changed into a Lobachevsky 3-space. That was better, but still not right. It was ugly. Ugly.

“Damn!” she heard Tom smack the terminal across the room. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to listen. A lattice formed and danced before her. Almost. Almost, she could see it. The equations hinted at multiple rotation groups connected by a meta-algebra.

“Durák! Bunözo! Juki!”

The lattice shattered into a kaleidoscope of disconnected thoughts. For an instant she sat, overwhelmed by a sense of infinite loss. Then she threw her pen at the coffee table, where it clattered against the china tea cups. God obviously did not mean for her to solve the geometry of Janatpour space quite yet. She glared at Tom’s back.

“All right, dammit,” she demanded. “What is it now? You’ve been muttering multi-lingually all day. Something’s bugging you. I can’t work, and that’s bugging me!”

He spun in his swivel chair and faced her. “I can’t get CLIO to give me the right answer!”

She made a pout with her lips. “Poor CLIO! I hope you were able to beat it out of her.”

He opened his mouth and closed it again. He looked embarrassed. With a scowl, he crossed his arms across his chest. Sharon knew that meant he was about to get stubborn.

“Look,” he said, “I’ve run twenty-three simulations of the Schwarzwald settlement pattern and Eifelheim won’t go away!”

Tired, she massaged the bridge of her nose. Be patient and eventually he would make sense. “I take it from context that Eifelheim is a settlement in the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest. Why should it go away?”

He threw his arms out wildly. “Because it’s not there!”

She greeted that announcement with the silence it deserved.

“Okay, okay. Rosen-Zipf-Christaller theory says that there should still be a village on the site of Eifelheim. But there’s not. It was abandoned during the Black Death and never resettled.”

She shrugged. “Then change the theory.”

He goggled at her a moment. “Oh sure,” he sputtered. “Throw out one of the cornerstones of psychohistory!”

“Why not?” she snapped. “Theory has to fit the facts, not the other way around. At least it does in the hard sciences.”

“Does it? Does it really, a cushla? Galileo’s first tests seemed to show the Earth stood still; and Newton’s initial calculations of planetary positions were dead wrong. They didn’t junk their theories. Which at the time, I might remind you, had very little to back them up. They tried to find out what was wrong with their so-called facts. And wasn’t it Dirac who said it was more important for the equations to be beautiful than to fit the experiment?”

She clenched her teeth. Curse Dirac! Why had he ever said that? It was true, of course; but why had he ever said it? So soft scientists like Tom could quote him at her? She remembered how she had felt earlier, before his interruption. She had known her equations were not quite right because they were still ugly. The real world always held an elegant simplicity within itself. But Tom made it sound so . . . arbitrary.

“Besides,” he continued. “I read somewhere that each measurement of lightspeed has been lower than the previous one. Why don’t you throw out the theory that lightspeed is constant?”

She frowned. “Don’t be silly!”

“Silly, hell!” He slammed his hand down sharply on the terminal and she jumped a little. Then he turned and faced the screen once more. She could see the CRT over his shoulder, flashing green on green.

We’re both being silly, she thought. She could see the two of them, as if from the outside. Sitting across the room from one another, bickering over some problem. And she didn’t even know what the problem was. She looked down at her own work. I’m not helping me by not helping him.

The silence dragged on.

“I’m sorry.”

They both said it at the same time. She looked up, startled, and he turned around. They both laughed and the tension evaporated. Sharon decided that the fastest way to get peace was to hear him out. She crossed the room and perched herself on the corner of his desk. “All right,” she said. “Tell me about it. What is this Zip whatever theory?”

“Rosen-Zipf-Christaller,” he said.

“It describes how human settlements are distributed. The Department’s working under a grant from Matsushita-Bandierantes Corporation. They hope that with better understanding of the forces that influence settlement location, they can site their orbital, lunar, and ground facilities to best advantage.”

She nodded. “You’ve mentioned it. But what ‘forces’ are you talking about?”

He tugged on his lower lip thoughtfully. “Well, there are market forces, and population forces, and—”

“Oh, not ‘forces’ like in physics, then?”

He looked annoyed. “I’m not sure what you mean by that. If you mean they’re not real, you’re wrong. If you mean they’re not based in matter, you’re wrong, too. Take . . . oh, take affinity. People choose behaviors that maximize their positive reinforcement. Natural reinforcers like food, sex, and approval are built into our genes. Conditioned reinforcers like money or prestige serve as substitutes for them.”

“Well . . . that makes sense, but—”

“Let me finish. Now imagine a landscape. Each point gives reinforcement to those living there. Soil fertility, mineral resources, connections to other sites, and so on. Got it? Doğru. That defines a potential function over the landscape. A force—the desire for material reinforcement—proportional to the gradient of the potential, draws people toward the more desired locations. We call that affinity.”

“A ‘desired location’ can be different things to different people,” she objected. She didn’t feel like a mindless particle drawn by a mindless force. She had free will, dammit.

His lips thinned and she knew she had annoyed him again. “Don’t you think I know that? Not everyone wants to be a farmer; but the good farmland will attract those who do. Ditto good fishing grounds, or silver lodes. And along with the, ah, herbivores come the carnivores. A concentration of farmers draws millers, equipment salesmen, and loan officers, just like the land itself drew the farmers. It’s just like an ecosystem, but with money or trade goods instead of calories.”

Tom put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Population density defines a second potential, one that works against the first. People prefer low density to high density. So there’s a tendency for the population to spread out evenly across the landscape. A kind of cultural ‘heat-death.’ ”

He sat back upright and clasped his hands together. “The interaction of these two forces define a set of equilibrium sites where population will accumulate. As the region approaches equilibrium, the sizes of the settlements follow Zipf s rank-size law. Each one will be the center of a cultural-economic potential field that obeys the inverse square law and defines market regions and political territories. Geographically, the settlements form interpenetrating hexagons called Christaller grids. En, Nagy kisasszony?”

“Ertekjol, Schwoerin ur. Reinforcement is your gravity and Christaller grids are your solar systems. And to think: all these years, when you’ve talked about the forces of history, I thought you were using a metaphor. You’ve always meant real forces—”

She couldn’t help wondering if his cultural forces were warps in some sort of cultural continuum, the same way gravity and the rest were warps in space-time. What sort of topology would such a space have?

“Here,” Tom was saying as he tapped keys on the terminal. “A picture is worth ten thousand words. I’ve tested the theory on scores of regions over the last couple months. Colonial America, medieval Russia, ancient Mesopotamia—” He paused and grinned. “In fact, the theory predicted an ancient Eblaite city on a particular site. I sent old Hotchkiss a cable, telling him to move his dig. That made him mad; but what really pissed him off was when he found the ruins right where I’d said they’d be.” He chuckled. “Well, anyhow, take a look at these maps and tell me what you see.” He pressed the return key and a series of Christaller grids marched across the screen.

Sharon studied them carefully. They looked like honeycombs. Each cell contained a dot inside it. The brighter the dot, Tom explained, the larger the settlement.

“Wait. Go back one,” she asked. Tom entered a command and the previous map reappeared and remained on the screen. One of the cells was blank. Just one. She looked at the heading: Black Forest, this year.

She stretched out a finger toward the screen and touched the empty hex. “This is the only one like this?” It did seem odd. She looked at the nearby villages. They formed a rough hexagon around the empty cell. She frowned. Yes, dammit. He was right. There should be a village in between.

“You think that’s something?” he asked. “Check this.” He hit three more keys. A web of lines appeared on the map. “The road system,” he announced.

She saw immediately what was wrong. The roads all went around the empty space. Some of them went out of their way to go around it, doubling back. She turned her head and looked at Tom.

“That,” he announced sourly, “is Eifelheim.”

She looked back at the screen. “The little town that wasn’t there,” she murmured.

Tom snorted. “Quite the contrary, my dear. It was there, but it isn’t anymore. Watch. Here’s the same region in 1300, reconstructed from LANDSAT photos.” He looked at her and smiled. “It’s funny. Up close, on the ground, you can’t see a thing; but from miles above, the . . . ghosts of vanished villages stand out clearly. So do the outlines of ancient fields and roads. It’s amazing how space science has helped historians and archeologists.” He looked at the screen and pointed. “There’s Eifelheim.”

She looked. The little dot stared back at her. “I don’t suppose you can just call it a ghost town and forget it.”

“You mean like Ashcroft or Fourth-of-July? Or the colonial iron towns in the Jersey Pine Barrens? No way. They became ghost towns for well-known psychohistorical reasons. The resources were depleted to a level where the sites didn’t give enough reinforcement any more. That’s not the case here.”

He entered another command and the computer began running the map back toward the present. A score of dots vanished abruptly, others dimmed. Sharon glanced at the heading. 1348.

“That was the Black Death,” Tom explained. “See? Eifelheim’s gone.”

“So are a lot of other villages.”

“Yeah; but wait. See there? And there?”

One by one, the lights reappeared and brightened, sometimes on the original site, sometimes nearby. In the end, every ghost town had been reoccupied or replaced. All but one. Tom clenched his fist.

“You see the problem? People lived there for four hundred years; then no one ever lived there again.”

She shivered. The way he said it, it did sound unnatural.

“The place became taboo. I have a copy of a letter written in 1810 by a traveling gentleman who writes that he will ‘abide this night in Urach, lest darkness catch me on the malign ground of Eifelheim.’ And Anton Zaengle sent me a newspaper clipping.” He opened a file drawer and pulled out a slim manila folder. He shoved it into her hands. “It’s on top. Go ahead. Read it.”

She opened the folder. There was a clipping from the Freiburger Wochenbericht.

DRACULA CULT FINDS NEW GRAVE

(Freiburg i/Br.) Although officials discount it as superstition, some US soldiers on maneuver here believe they have found the tomb of Count Dracula, hundreds of miles from Transylvania. A spokesperson for the US Third Infantry Division acknowledged that something between a cult and a fad had emerged among the soldiers over an obscure medieval headstone decorated with a carving of a demonic face.

The grave is the second adopted by the cult. The first lies near their divisional base in the Bavarian town of Kitzingen. The new grave, which authorities date to the 13th or 14th centuries, generations before the real Count Dracula lived, lies deep in the Black Forest on the site of the medieval town of Eifelheim. The region is heavily forested and the precise location of the tomb is unknown. The soldiers refuse to divulge the information, fearing that tourists would offend the grave’s alleged inhabitant. This suits nearby farmers also, who have a superstitious dread of the place.

Monsignor Lurm of the diocesan office is concerned about possible desecration of the cemetary, even though it is centuries old. He also pointed out the possible connection between the supposed carving on the stone and the local folk-tales of flying monsters. “After a few hundred years of wind and rain,” he said, “my face would not look so great, either. If modern American soldiers can make up stories about a carving, so can medieval German peasants.”

She looked at Tom. “There’s your answer,” she said. “The place is taboo. They’ve got their own version of the Jersey Devil flying around.”

He made a face at her. “That’s no reason. Name one town in South Jersey that’s taboo.”

“Camden.”

“Funny. I’m serious, Sharon. The abandonment caused the stories and the taboo, not the other way around. People don’t wake up one morning and decide that the place they’ve lived in for four centuries is suddenly verboten. Das ist Unsinnlich. No, there must be a material reason.”

“The Plague? That must have been a pretty horrifying experience.”

“A third of Europe died. The Mongols allowed more organisms than Marco Polo to cross Asia. But that was a common cause, not special to Eifelheim. The answer has to explain not only why Eifelheim was abandoned, but why only Eifelheim was abandoned. The Plague affected nearby villages, too; and they were resettled.” He rubbed his eyes wearily. “The trouble is, there’s no data. Nada, Nichts, Tida, Zilch. A few mentions in gazetteers or letters. Nothing contemporary. The earliest reference is a theological treatise on meditation, written three generations after Eifelheim had vanished. That’s it there.” He jabbed a finger at the folder.

Sharon looked. It was a computer facsimile of a Latin manuscript. Most of the page was occupied by an ornate capital D. The capital was supported by a trellis of vines, weaving and branching in a complex pattern, breaking out into leaves and berries and, here and there, oddly shaped triangles.

“Not very pretty,” she said.

“It’s positively ugly. Worst example of manuscript illumination I’ve ever seen. The contents are even worse. It’s called “The Attainment of the Other World by Searching Within.” Gottes Himmel, I’m not kidding! Gobbledy-gook about a trinity of Trinities; and how God can be in all places at all times ‘including times and places we cannot know save by looking inside ourselves.’ But!” Tom stabbed his index finger straight up. “The author credits the ideas to an earlier manuscript by—and I quote: ‘an old man whose father knew personally the last pastor at the place we call Eifelheim.’ Unquote. How’s that for first-hand data?”

“What a curious way to phrase it: ‘the place we call Eifelheim.’ ” She flipped idly through the printouts. She wondered if there were some way of getting him out of the condo for a while. All he was doing here was spinning his wheels and making her life miserable.

“If this is all the data you have,” she said, “you need more data.”

“Kini o mu ni ãro? Tell me something I don’t know! Bozhe moi, Sharon. Ya nye durak! I’ve looked and looked. Povtorenia—mat’ uchenia, after all. CLIO’s chased down every Eifelheim reference in the Net.”

“Well, surely not everything’s been coded,” she replied testily. “The Net’s not that old. Aren’t there musty old papers in archives and the back rooms of libraries that no one’s ever read, let alone entered into the database? I thought that’s what you historians used to do before you got computers: rooted around in dusty shelves, blowing away cobwebs.”

“Well—” he said doubtfully. “Anything off-line can always be scanned into the database by phone.”

“That’s if you know what’s there and what’s in it. What about the unlabeled stuff?”

Tom pursed his lips and looked at her. He nodded slowly. “There were a few marginal items,” he said. “They didn’t look too promising at the time; but now . . . Cantābit vaceus cōram latrōne viātor.” He grinned. “A penniless man sings before the robber,” he explained. “Like me, what can he lose?” He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling, pulling absently on his lower lip. Sharon knew that habit and smiled to herself. Tom was okay, but he was like an old-time motorcycle. You had to kick hard to get him started.

Later, after he had gone to the library, she noticed that CLIO’s screen was still lit. She went to turn it off, but paused with her finger over the cancel button. She stared at the map. Eifelheim. The empty cell . . . there was something sinister about it. A singularity. A black hole—with a ghost inside—surrounded by a constellation of living villages. Something horrible must have happened there once. Something dark. She shuddered, suddenly chilled, as if by a draft.

Abruptly, she cleared the machine. Don’t be silly, she told herself. But that made her think of something Tom had said. And that made her wonder, What if . . . and nothing was ever the same afterwards.

The Teliow Library kept its uncatalogued papers in cartons. There were letters and notebooks, registers and estate papers, ledgers and accounts. The raw material of history. Primary sources, never edited, never published. They were grouped loosely by subject and origin into separate folders, tied in stacks between pieces of heavy cardboard, and hidden away to await a scholar desperate enough to want to wade through them.

Tom spent several hours planning his assault on this jungle. He laid out scores of theories on an Ishikawa cause-and-effect diagram, free associating, letting his imagination ran wild. Most of the theories, he knew, would be utterly implausible; but the important thing was to keep the ideas flowing.

Then he applied K/T analysis. Listing everything the problem was and everything it was not. Who, what, where, and when. Who not, what not, where not, and when not. Like he had told Sharon, a successful theory had to explain why Urach, Donaueshingen, and other nearby settlements were not abandoned.

He prepared a list of cartons whose contents might prove helpful, and gave it to the night librarian. Then he took a deep breath and plunged in.

A few hours later, his eyes red and his brain muzzy, he came up for air. . . .

The night librarian brought another carton and laid it on the reading room table. Tom rubbed his eyes and stretched. His back hurt. He sighed and checked the carton tag against the list he had prepared. He jabbed his pen at the carton he had just finished. “You can take that one back now,” he told the librarian.

He took a folder from the new carton, untied the string, and gazed bleakly at the contents. Halfway through his list already and nothing useful. He had found only one passing reference to Eifelheim, in an 18th century “index of episcopal court cases. The index had been compiled partly from an earlier 16th century index, based in turn on the 14th century originals. Whoopee, he thought sourly, I’m hot on the trail. It was a simple note that “de rerum Eifelheimensis, the matter of the baptism of one Johannes Sterne, wayfarer, has been mooted by the death through Plague of all the principals.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. Give up. If there ever was an answer, it’s been long lost.

“You know, Doctor Schwoerin, we don’t get many live ones in here any more.”

He looked up. The librarian had not left. She stood there with the other carton braced against her hip. She was small and fine-featured, with her hair tied severely into a bun. She wore a long dress and large, plain glasses.

Lieber Gott, he thought. An archetype! The Librarian!

“I beg your pardon?” he asked.

She flushed. “I meant, usually you professors just phone in a request if what you want isn’t on the Net already. One of us scans it in, charges it to your grant money, and that’s that. It is terribly lonely here, especially at night. I try to read everything I scan. That helps some.”

The lonely librarian wants some company. A human conversation. Well, the lonely psychohistorian wants a break from his fruitless hunt. He smiled at her. “I just needed to get out of the condo a while, is all.”

“Oh, you do not need to make excuses. I’m glad you came. I’ve been following your research.”

“What?” He was startled. “Why would you do that?”

“History was always my first love. I mean, how could the present ever make sense if we did not know and understand what went before? I majored in history, under Doctor LaBret at Massachusetts, but switched to computers and library science. Differential topology was just too tough for me.”

“It’s not easy,” he agreed, remembering his own difficulties with Thorn’s catastrophe surfaces. “Sit down, please.”

She remained standing. “I don’t mean to keep you from your work. It’s just that I meant to ask you—” She seemed hesitant. “Oh, it is probably very obvious. I just do not see it.”

“See what?”

“You are researching a place called Eifelheim?”

“I’m trying to discover why it disappeared.” Briefly he outlined his problem. She had taken enough theoretical history to see why it was a problem. Ghost towns were always replaced by other towns, unless the soil or the silver gave out completely.

“Then there is one thing I do not understand,” she said humbly.

“Only one?” he chuckled. “Then you’re way ahead of me.”

“Why have you never cross-referenced Oberhochwald?”

“Oberhochwald?” The name was vaguely familiar. He had run across it here and there. “Why Oberhochwald?”

“That was Eifelheim’s original name.”

“What?” He stood up sharply, knocking the heavy reading chair backward. The librarian, startled, dropped her carton. Folders spilled across the floor. She stooped to gather them up.

Tom came around the table and pulled her to her feet. He was surprised to see how small she was. She came only to his chest.

“Never mind that now,” he said. “It was my fault. I’ll pick them up. Tell me how you know about Oberhochwald. Are you sure?”

She loosened her arm from his grasp.

“Well . . . I thought you already knew . . . I think it was a month ago. A brother in the theology school was researching the witch mania in Europe. We located and scanned a book for him, a little known supplement to The Hammer of the Witches. As I said, Doctor, I read everything I scan. There was a reference in it to Oberhochwald and someone had added a gloss that the name had been changed to Eifelheim. I recognized the name because I had already scanned it several items for you.”

“Do you have it here? I need to see it.”

“It’s at Yale, but we have a facsimile in memory. I can call it up on the terminal, if you like.”

“I like. Do it.” She crossed the room to the CRT in the corner. Tom noticed his hand was shaking. Calm down, he told himself. Sure, it’s a lead, but . . . hot damn! Another blow struck for serendipity. He stooped and began gathering folders together. A name change. That’s why he could find no contemporary references to Eifelheim. It probably hadn’t been called that very long before it had been abandoned.

He glanced at the librarian. She was busy at the keyboard, her back to him.

“Excuse me.” She paused and turned. “What’s your name?”

“Judy. Judy Cao.”

“Thank you, Judy Cao.”

It was a slim enough lead. At some unspecified time in the 14th century a wandering Minorite named Fra Joachim had preached a sermon against the “witches of Oberhochwald.” The text had not survived, but Brother Joachim’s oratorial fame had. Comments on his sermon had been included in a treatise on homiletics directed against witchcraft and devil-worship. A later reader—15th century to judge by the calligraphy—had added a marginal gloss: Dieser On heisst jetzt Eifelheim. This place is now called Eifelheim.

Together, he and Judy went through the two cartons in the reading room. This time, they looked for references to Oberhochwald. They found two.

One was a fragmentary journal entry in a collection of miscellany. No date. No author. But it described graphically the anguish of the plague years. A brief glimpse into the suffering of one soul.

“My friends are dying,” Judy read from the Latin original, “in spite of all that those remaining here at Oberhochwald can do for them. They eat but take no nourishment from it. I pray daily that they do not succumb to despair, being so far from their own hearths, but face their Creator with hope and faith in their hearts. Two more have taken Christ in their last days, which gratifies Hans no less than me. Nor do they place blame with us who took them in, knowing full well that our time, too, is coming.”

She flipped some more pages over, then looked up. “That is all. Just the one page.”

Tom handed her the sheet he had found. “Not much concrete information in this, either. It’s a letter of complaint from the smith at Donaueshingen to his lord. He says that one hundred feet of finely drawn copper wire, made specially to order, has been returned by Pastor Dietrich of Oberhochwald in lieu of payment. It’s dated 1348, ‘two days before the feast of the Virgin.’ ”

“Perhaps there will be more in the other cartons on your list.”

Tom looked at all the carton numbers he had already crossed off and groaned. “I don’t look forward to re-reading all the offline stuff I just finished.”

“I could help,” she said shyly.

He looked at her. “Are you serious?”

“It really shouldn’t be too difficult. I must do these cartons in real time, of course, but I can also research the Net Master Index. You have already tried Eifelheim. I can write a worm to search out Oberhochwald, Pastor Dietrich, Fra Joachim, and Johannes Sterne, as well. Whenever it finds something new, it can add it to its search list. No offense, Doctor Schwoerin, but no one can mouse in the Net like a trained librarian. There is so much information out there that knowing how to find it is a science in itself.”

“All right,” Tom agreed. “I’ll pay you a stipend from my grant money. It won’t be much, but it’ll give you a title: Research Assistant; and your name will go on the paper with mine.”

Tom gave Judy a special access code that allowed her to load whatever she found directly into CLIODEINOS.

When he left the library building it was late at night. The campus was deserted and quiet. The classroom buildings blocked the traffic noise from Olney Avenue and the only sound was the rustling of the leaves as soft breezes shook the branches overhead. The shadows of the trees danced eerily in the moonlight.

He was halfway across the quadrangle when it suddenly hit him. According to the two items they had read, Eifelheim was still called Oberhochwald right up to the plague. The name change must have come afterward. But why would a village that no longer existed change its name?

It was Judy Cao who found the answer. Like all good answers, it led to more questions.

Sharon watched Tom from the corner of her eye as she chewed her salad. He seemed light-years away. They were dining al fresco at a small vegetarian restaurant she had found in Chestnut Hill. Tom was somewhere else. Back in the Middle Ages, she decided.

She pointed to the stores across the street, getting his attention. “The crowds get thinner all the time. Boutiques aren’t as popular as they were when we were young. People hardly go out to shop anymore.”

Tom shrugged. “It’s easier to shop on the Net. Besides, the styles they sell here, the ones you and I grew up with, aren’t in fashion. Who wears jeans or decorates in earth tones anymore?”

She speared a cherry tomato with her fork. “I know,” she said. “I like coming here because it’s like the old days. It hasn’t changed.”

“Maybe it has,” Tom said smiling. “The past is never really the way we remember it.”

The past. Time. She thought about her problem, and about his. She asked, him about Eifelheim and he told her about the name change.

“In hindsight, it seems so obvious,” he finished. “I’ve been kicking myself all week. Oh well. Lúchshye, pózdno chem nikogdá.”

Sometimes his habit of scrambling languages annoyed her. “Why don’t you just say, ‘Better late than never’ ?”

He looked baffled. “I just did.”

She sighed and let it pass. He really didn’t know when he was doing it. Sometimes she thought he had his own private language inside his skull and when he spoke it was a matter of luck whether it came out in English or not.

Well, she had her own success to celebrate. She raised her wineglass in toast. “To Tom Schwoerin,” she said. “The best lay physicist around.”

He paused with his own glass in midair. He frowned. “Best lay, I can understand; but why physicist?”

“Remember what you said last week about light-speed measurements getting lower? Well, I checked it out and you were right. A fellow named Shewhart first made note of it in 1939. He showed that the differences were not statistically compatible with random chance. In 1974, Halliday and Resnick noted the same thing. There were only two exceptions to the downward trend, and both of those came from the Soviet Union. Taken as a whole, the measurements form an exponentially decreasing series approaching an Einsteinian constant as an asymptote.”

He put his glass down and stared at her. “I wasn’t really serious when I said that. I thought it was just the usual problems of operational definitions. Different test methods, or even different test sets, never give precisely the same measurements.”

“Oh, there was some of that all right. Scientists and engineers have always been a little careless with their definitions. They assume that a number obtained by one method means the same thing as a number obtained by another method. But I asked myself, What if progressively lower measurements meant that light was actually slowing down?”

“What if? is an annoying kind of question. It can lead to all kinds of trouble.”

She grunted. “Don’t I know it? Wait till I publish and you’ll see what trouble means. You see, when you include experimental error, each one of those measurements is compatible with a constant light-speed. It’s only as a series that they look suspicious.”

Tom cocked his head. “I don’t know much about physics, but aren’t there good reasons why light-speed is supposed to be constant?”

She grinned to herself. “What if it’s both?” she asked.

He shook his head, confused. “You lost me. How can light be both constant and variable?”

“How could Schroedinger’s cat be both dead and alive? This is physics, not common sense. Let’s just say that light-speed is constant in a higher geometry but has been decreasing in the perceptual universe.”

He smiled. “Makes perfect sense to me.”

“No, seriously. It fits in with my own work on Janatpour space. That’s why I’m so excited—and so grateful to you. Even if your help was unintentional.”

“Thanks. I think. What is the ‘perceptual universe’ you mentioned?”

“Oh, that’s the surface of the balloon. The part of reality we can perceive.” She saw the look on his face and hastened to add, “The balloon is an image some physicists use for the expanding universe. You see, galaxies are racing away from each other, not from a common center. They aren’t flying out into space. Space is expanding between them. If you imagine galaxies as dots painted on a balloon, you’ll see what I mean. As the balloon expands, all the dots appear to be receding, no matter where you are on the surface of the balloon. We just happen to live on the three-dimensional ‘surface’ of a very weird balloon.”

Tom jerked up. “Hey! I think I understand. Velocity is distance over time, right? Well, if a beam of light has constant velocity in, what was it you said? A higher geometry? And space is expanding the way you described, then the light will take longer today to cover the same number of kilometers as yesterday. Because the kilometer itself is a little longer.”

She reached across the table and patted his cheek. “Tom, sometimes you amaze me. You really do. You’re about one-third right. If you paint a meter stick on the balloon and expand it, the stick will grow longer, even though it’s still labeled ‘one meter.’ ”

“One-third right?”

“Yes. Forces like gravity and the strong force keep physical standards from growing as fast as ‘empty’ space.”

“But then—” She saw the realization grow in his eyes. “Distance over time? Wo, madoda, ngi hudelwa yi hubulu!”

“Exactly,” she said. “What if time were accelerating? If seconds were getting shorter? Then a constant beam of light would cover fewer kilometers in the ‘same’ length of time, and thus appear slower. When I project the light-speed series, extrapolating backward to the Big Bang, I get an infinitely long second—and infinitely fast light-speed at the decoupling, and that’s . . . Well, it’s interesting because it ties in with Milne’s theory of kinematic relativity, developed back in 1933. Experimentally, there was never any way to distinguish between his model and Einstein’s.”

Tom leaned back in his chair. He linked his hands behind his head. “So, time is accelerating, eh? Y’know, I’ve always thought the years went by faster as I grew older.”

She took another forkful of salad. An advantage of salad, she had always thought, was that it never grew cold while she jabbered.

“No,” she replied. “That’s a psychological phenomenon. The effect is negligible over a person’s lifetime. Less than experimental error, so it’s practically indetectible.”

“Who knows. Maybe the subconscious is smarter than we think.”

Now that was a thought. She had assumed that the perceptual universe was restricted to the usual four dimensions. Perhaps we could sense other dimensions as well. After all, if time were accelerating, didn’t that argue for at least one other sort of time? She realized he had spoken. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I just asked if this meant you were going to throw out old Einstein.”

“What? No, certainly not! Look, for all practical purposes, lightspeed is constant. It’s the same regardless of frame of reference, too. It’s just that it’s a special case of a more general theory.” She waved her fork in the air. “We don’t replace a valid theory, we expand it.” She suddenly remembered that Tom had said almost the same thing about one of his psychohistorical theories. “I mean, for all practical purposes we still use Newton.”

She paused with her fork in midair. A trolley car rumbled noisily past, up the cobblestoned street, but she scarcely noticed it. She had just remembered what it was that Newton had said. A change in velocity requires a force to explain it. So, if time were accelerating . . .

She patted her lips with a napkin and began building geometries in her mind.

He looked up from his reading when Sharon handed him the phone. “Here,” she said. “It’s your new girlfriend.”

Tom chuckled and plugged the phone into his terminal.“Did you hear that, Judy? Sharon thinks you’re my girlfriend.”

The image on the CRT looked troubled. “That would not be proper,” she said. “I hope I have not caused you problems.”

Tom looked at Sharon and grinned. She rolled her eyes upward. Sometimes the stuffy conventionality of the younger generation was a little hard to take.

“No, Judy,” he said to the screen. “Everything’s fine.”

“Ah. Then I have something that you ought to read.”

“Good. Load it over.” Tom waited eagerly. Judy’s literature search had yielded a moderately bountiful harvest, now that they had the right key. Items had been appearing in his Eifelheim file for two weeks now. All properly referenced and annotated. She had found monastic annals, manorial accounts, tantalizing odds and ends. One day it had been a memoire of a local knight recounting his discussions with the pastor of Oberhochwald concerning seven league boots, talking mechanical heads, and other notions of Fra Roger Bacon. Another day it had been copies of the annual corvee going back to the times of the Dukes of Zähringen.

“What is it this time?” he asked.

“I think I know why the name was changed.”

“What? Why?” The name change and the site’s inexplicable abandonment had occurred at roughly the same time. There had to be a connection.

Judy’s face was replaced by a manuscript facsimile. Crabbed handwriting. It looked like fourteenth century work. The Latin was awful; Cicero would weep. As he read, he listened to Judy’s voice.

“I took another shot at the witchcraft files, using the Soundex to pick out variant spellings. Most of what turned up was not relevant to our purpose, but I did find this: a 1377 bull denouncing the Beghards, the Brethren of the Free Spirit. It seems that Oberhochwald’s new name was not originally Eifelheim at all, but—”

“Teufelheim,” he finished. He held his place with his finger. Devil-home. He chewed on his thumb knuckle. What sort of people lived there, he wondered, to have earned such a name from their neighbors? “Shun them as we shun the unholy soil of Teufelheim. Pastor Dietrich was tried and found wanting and God has passed judgement on his actions,” he read. “The writer doesn’t care much for our friend Dietrich. I wonder what he did that was so terrible; besides sticking the smith with a hundred feet of wire, that is.” He dumped the file over to the printer and Judy’s face reappeared on the screen.

“Did you read the descriptions of the devils?” she asked.

“Yen. Pretty gruesome. Yellow bulging eyes. Gibbering incantations. “They danced naked but sported no manhood.’ Why do you ask?”

“They flew, too.”

He snapped his fingers. “The folk tales of flying monsters! This may have been what started it.”

“A story in a bull? Would that do it?”

“No, you’re right. The writer was repeating a story already in circulation. Ergot of rye, maybe.”

“What of what?” Judy’s image cocked its head.

“Ergot of rye. A natural fungus that produced LSD. It was a chronic problem with cereal grain in the middle ages. People who ate the bread made from the contaminated rye had hallucinations. They saw the skies open; heard voices. They saw the Virgin, saints, devils. The so-called traditional description of Satan as a giant goat-like satyr dates from then. The worst outbreak, as I recall, started at Aix-la-chapelle in 1374 and spread down the Rhineland; but there had been sporadic outbreaks before then. It was called the Dancing Mania because one symptom was a heightened sensitivity to rhythmic sounds. People broke into wild, uncontrolled dancing.” He smiled, remembering. “The same thing used to happen at rock concerts in the ’70s. But think how terrifying a bad trip would be if a whole village were dropping acid without knowing it. One effect was to convince the authorities that witchcraft was real. Too many respectable people were seeing devils.”

“Oh. I didn’t know about that.”

“You sound . . . what? Disappointed?”

“I don’t know. The writing was so detailed. The descriptions of the devils; the behaviors of the villagers.”

“As if the people of Oberhochwald really had befriended demons and ‘welcomed them unto their hearths’ ?”

“Yes . . .”

“Or?”

“Or something else.”

After Judy had logged off, Tom remained seated by the terminal, pulling thoughtfully on his lip. Ergot hallucinations were another common cause, not special to Eifelheim. People had seen demons, and written vivid descriptions of them, in many places. If visions had been the reason for the taboo, there would be Teufelheims all up and down the Rhineland.

There were many horrors in the wrack of medieval civilization. Cannibalism followed the famine of 1317-1318. ‘Children were not safe from their parents,’ one chronicler had written. No villages had been shunned on that account. Bands of communist peasants had roamed the countryside, espousing poverty and free love, sacking manor houses and monasteries to make their point. The people who fled soon returned. Witchcraft and heresy; flagellants and plague. With so many reasons around, why had Eifelheim alone of all stricken villages remained anathema?

He called up the document file and went through it again, item by item. He studied the screen intently, as if he could wrest answers from it by sheer concentration; copies of corvees and other taxes; a scattering of manorial records of the vassals of the Counts of Urach-Freiburg and the earlier Dukes of Zähringen; the knight’s memoir; the religious treatise on the “inner world’; seignorial approvals of marriages and vocations; enfoeffments encompassing Oberhochwald and feudal levies calling upon its knight; the newspaper clipping; a cabalistic prayer citing ‘eight secret ways to leave this earth of sorrows’ and attributed at third hand to ‘Saint Johan of Oberhochwald’; an episcopal letter addressed to Pastor Dietrich affirming doctrine that a person’s outward appearance did not reflect the condition of the soul. The letter was doubly interesting because the bishop had consistently used the sexless homo rather than the masculine vir. At one point, he had even written naturae voluntarum, beings of free will. That at a time when schoolmen were seriously debating whether women had souls at all.

Then there were the usual monkish chronicles of harvests, fairs, gossip, and such. One spectacular event, a lightning strike in March 1348, had set several acres of forest (and not a few superstitious minds) ablaze. The plague was then spreading north from the Mediterranean and the bolt had allegedly heralded Lucifer’s coming.

I could almost write a complete history of this village, he thought. Harvest and tax records would let him estimate economic and demographic growth. The fief records showed how it fit into the local feudal structure. The knight’s memoir and the bishop’s letter even gave him a glimpse of the village’s intellectual life, such as it was. What were seven-league boots? Oh, yes, the wearer could cover immense distances with a single stride.

In fact, he realized glumly, the only thing missing was the only thing that made it important. Why had it never been resettled?

What if it’s not here? he wondered. What if the key document has been lost? Or if it was never written down at all? There’s no guarantee. I might not even recognize it if I had it,

“Tom? What’s wrong? You look pale.”

He glanced up. Sharon stood in the kitchen archway, a freshly brewed cup of tea in her hands. The odor of rosehips and chamomile wafted through the room.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.” But he had had the sudden dreadful sensation that he already had a key piece of information in his hands, that he had read it several times already, and it had meant nothing to him.

That evening Tom accessed EuroNet and loaded onto my computer at the Albert-Louis University, asking me to look through the uncatalogued papers for references to Oberhochwald, Eifelheim, or Teufelheim. It was an odd request to come out of nowhere like that, but I rummaged about as best I could and, a few days later, sent him what I could find.

II

“Sharon?”

She heard his voice, distant, as if through a fog. It was easy to ignore. The universe was lovely. No, not the universe; the polyverse. The same lattice she had glimpsed before. But with twelve dimensions, not eleven after all. Three dimensions of space, three of time and three of . . . something else. And three more “meta-dimensions” to join the others together. A triplet of triplets. It made sense. The rotation groups and meta-algebra made sense. The speed of light business fit, too. Her pulse quickened. So, by God, did K/K theory.

She reached out a mental hand. Warp those three dimensions just so and create a gravitational force. Smart lad, that Einstein; he got it just right. Another warp there produced electromagnetism. Kaluza and Klein were no dummies, either. And there, a warp produced the weak force; and there, the nuclear force.

And there? What if she were to warp those dimensions?

“Sharon, are you all right?”

Her eyes popped open. “I had it! It was beautiful! I almost had it! Quick, give me paper. It’s too much to remember.” She saw Tom, sitting across the breakfast table from her. He already held her notebook out, open to a blank page. She snatched it from his hands and scribbled fiercely. It was slow going at first, but partway through she invented a new notation. Please, she thought, let me remember what it means. After that it went more quickly. Finally, she wrote a row of question marks, sighed and shut the book. “Wait’ll I tell Hernando,” she said.

“Who’s Hernando?”

She scowled at Tom. “I don’t know whether to be angry because you interrupted me, or glad because you had my notebook handy. How did you know?”

He pointed. “Because you don’t normally pour tea on your scrambled eggs.”

She looked down. Breakfast was a sodden mess. She groaned. “I must be losing my mind.”

“You’ll get no argument from me. When I saw the glazed look come into your eyes, I knew it was notebook-serious.”

He took her plate to the sink. “You can have one of my soft boiled eggs,” he told her over his shoulder.

She shuddered. “Too runny. I don’t know how you can eat those things.” She reached across to his plate and snagged a piece of bacon.

He sat back down. “Tea?” he asked. “No. I’ll pour.”

When she was sipping contentedly on her cinnamon brew, he asked, “So what was the Great Revelation?”

“You don’t understand GUT physics.”

“And you don’t understand psychohistory. But when we try to explain things to each other it helps to clarify our own thinking. You go ahead. I’ll just sit here, smiling benignly, and nod in all the right places.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Start at the beginning.”

“Well . . .” She thought about it. She took another sip of tea. “All right. Before the Big Bang—”

“Whoa!” said Tom, laughing. “When I said to start at the beginning, I didn’t mean the Beginning.”

“Honestly, Tom. Try to be serious.” She waited until he had composed himself. “Why do apples fall?”

“What?” He was startled by the question. “Gravity?”

“Right. Now, why do currents flow?”

“Electromagnetism. Do I get a prize?”

“Maybe. Ask me tonight. Now, why is time accelerating?”

He opened his mouth to reply, closed it, and looked at her quizzically.“Some sort of force,” he said slowly, almost to himself.

“Exactly!” She clapped her hands together. “Accelerations require forces. Uncle Isaac said so. I call the force acting on time chronity. Look at it this way: we don’t move forward through time at all; we fall downward, pulled by a kind of temporal gravity.” Pulled by what, she wondered. She thought about the Big Bang. “Or maybe we’re pushed. I haven’t decided on plus or minus signs yet.”

“Chronity,” Tom repeated. “Then you would say that entropy is a chronic problem.”

She looked at the table for something to throw at him. She settled for an old tea bag, but he dodged it easily, still laughing. “Brace yourself,” he warned. “I won’t be the last to make that pun.”

She groaned. “I know.”

“So. Are these theories of yours just philosophy, or do you plan to experiment? Can you experiment?”

She nodded. “The first step is to detect and measure the force. Hernando is building a chronon detector for me.”

“Right. Who is Hernando, and what’s a chronon?”

“A chronon is a quantum of time, a carrier of the time force. Hernando Kelly over in nucleonic engineering is building an instrument to detect them. I dream up the circuits and he puts ’em together. I’m no good at etching bubbles.” She wiggled her fingers. “Too clumsy, see?”

Tom shook his head in admiration. “Out of the sofa and into the lab. This must really be important. It sounds terribly fundamental. A new force.”

“Oh, it is. It’ll change our whole outlook on the universe.” She looked at her watch. “I’m supposed to meet Hernando in an hour. Mind if I work while we talk?”

“Hmmm? No. In fact, I’ll walk you over to the engineering center. I have a meeting with Judy over that way.”

She looked at him. “More Eifelheim? Or is she just too good looking? Getting your jollies with her?”

He twisted his face up. “Get serious. These aren’t the eighties, y’know. Her generation wouldn’t know how to dress for an orgy.”

She patted his cheek. “Still panting for a glimpse of calf? I know how you feel. No respect for the values of our generation. Hernando’s the same way. Totally devoted to one woman.”

“Tempos fugit,” he shrugged. “Andere Sitten, and all that.”

At their desks, Tom pulled his hard-copy file while Sharon snapped computer bubble-modules into a carrying case.

“So, how will chronity change our outlook?”

“What? Oh. It expands the universe and changes its shape.”

“Makes sense to me.”

“All right, all right. Forces are space-warps. I thought everyone knew that. Long time ago, Uncle Albeit showed that gravity was a warp in space-time. That was an exciting insight, so the physicists tried to do the same with electromagnetism. Nothing seemed to work until Kaluza and Klein expanded the universe by tacking on some extra dimensions. Then we discovered the weak force and the nuclear force, and tried to express them as warps, too. It got to be quite a game for a while, almost as much fun as finding ‘new’ subatomic particles. I got in on the tail end, when I was doing graduate study back in the ’80s. Anyway, when the smoke finally cleared, we had eleven dimensions on our hands.”

“Merde! You mean physicists kept adding imaginary dimensions because they had arbitrarily decided that forces were warps?”

She snorted and closed her bubble-case. “Those dimensions are no more imaginary than Newton’s ‘force fields.’ And it wasn’t arbitrary. Certain symmetry relations—”

Tom held his hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, okay. I give up. How does your chronity fit the scheme?”

“Perfectly. I can describe it as a warp, too; provided I add a twelfth dimension. Trouble was, that messed up the accepted models for the other four forces.”

“Until this morning,” Tom guessed. “At breakfast.”

“Right. I discovered that if I organize the dimensions as a nested hierarchy instead of an orthogonal array, everything works out. In fact, it becomes simpler.” She explained about her triplet-of-triplets model. At one hierarchical level, the meta-continuum, there were three dimensions: Space, Time, and a third quality she hadn’t named yet. A limitation of earlier models was the assumption that all ‘extra’ dimensions were spacelike. At the fine level, each of her meta-dimensions decomposed into three orthogonal dimensions. She called the whole the polyverse. The perceptual universe was a subset of this.

“A warp in the polyverse,” she finished, “can intersect the universe in different ways. A single warp, seen at different angles and cross sections. Like the blind men and the elephant, we think we see different forces.”

“Hmmm. We can’t actually see these ‘hidden dimensions.’ The whole elephant, so to speak.”

“No. Remember the balloon analogy? Well, you can think of the extra dimensions as forming the inside of the balloon. That’s not strictly correct, but it’ll have to do. The original monobloc was slightly asymmetrical. When it expanded some of the dimensions got rolled up. They’re still there: inside the quarks; inside everything. What you’ve always thought of as a simple, dimensionless point is really a complex, multidimensional hypersphere.”

The condo buildings were arranged in a U-shape around a central courtyard set back from the street. The air, when she stepped out, was fresh and clear, but muggy. A spin-off of the new hydrogen cars and their water vapor exhaust. She could remember the hydrocarbon cars of her youth—how the air stank and her eyes watered. Not to mention the cancer rates.

Tom continued to bounce questions off her as they walked. “Seems to me,” he said, “that if we could take a shortcut through the inside of your balloon, we could reach the planets in less time.”

She smiled. He really was very bright for a soft scientist. “That would be a neat trick topologically. Like a donut jumping through its own hole. But, who knows? If we could control the proper energies and focus them in the proper directions . . . When do you think the Brazilians will finish the L4 accelerator?”

“Eh?” He stopped, puzzled by her change of subject.

“You see, the really big accelerators take us into the past. They recreate conditions as they were in the first seconds after the Big Bang, when the separate forces weren’t all that separate. We can stick our noses a little way into the balloon and see a world in which the seconds were longer and the kilometers shorter.”

“And the Bandierantes L4 will do that?”

“Not all the way back to the Bang, but it should yield enough energy to fuse chronity with the electro weak force. Since we’ve been manipulating electromagnetism for generations, that should give us a way to manipulate the time force.”

“Question mark.”

“Simple. If you can make A jump through hoops and you can attach B to A, you can make B jump through hoops.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. Logic, I understand. What do you mean about fusing forces?”

“Oh! That’s simple, too. In the Beginning, at the Bang, there were no separate forces, just a single Superforce. As the energy level dropped the meta-continuum warped and the individual forces, ah, ‘froze out.’ Gravity froze out at Planck scale energy, 10^19 proton masses; and the nuclear force, at unification scale, or 10^14 proton masses. Those are enormous energy levels, of course. Way beyond what we can achieve even today; but even back in the 1980s they could reach Weinberg-Salem scale at 90 proton masses and fuse the weak force and the electromagnetic force into the electro weak force.”

“Wait, I remember. That was the breakthrough that led to the anti-nuclear shield, wasn’t it?”

“One of the breakthroughs. Like I said, we can manipulate electromagnetism; so if we fuse the weak force to it, we can manipulate atomic decay. The result was the fission suppression field.”

“So how does . . .” He cocked his head and frowned. “Hold on. Something’s wrong. What were those energy scales? 10^19, 10^14, and approximately 10^2? Why’s there such a big gap between the last two? What kind of series is 19, 14, 2?”

“A question that’s bugged physicists for over forty years. It’s that notion of beauty again. Most series in the physical world are mathematically recognizable: arithmetic, geometric, logarithmic, Fibonacci, and so on. Just like Mendeleyev and the periodic table of the elements, the gap says something’s missing. There’s really no gap at all. At about 10^8 protons the electro weak force is unified with—”

“—chronity,” he finished. “Very impressive.”

“Right. I modestly call that Nagy-scale energy. That’s why I asked when L4 would be finished. It’s within its capabilities. Do you think it will be finished? Do you know how many orbital factories have gone bankrupt this year?”

“Know it? I predicted it. Psychohistory isn’t just for the past, you know. And being in orbit doesn’t make anyone immune to the four business cycles. Don’t worry, though; things’ll pick up in another year or so. I’ve calculated it.”

She squeezed his arm. “Thanks for the encouragement.” They resumed walking. “Anyway, the point is that with Nagy-scale energy we can get inside the balloon, as you put it, and go anywhere. If we can solve the topology problem. Lightspeed is still the upper limit on velocity; but if we go far enough in the right direction, the kilometers become very short and the seconds very long. In effect, we can pick any light-speed we want.”

He blinked. “Instantaneous interstellar travel?”

She shook her head. “Instantaneous is a dirty word. But it could be as near as made no difference. Tom, we wouldn’t need spaceships at all. We just disappear here and reappear there. We could drive our cars. With protective suits, we could walk to the stars. A single stride could cover immense distances. Could you imagine the looks on the crew of BRJ Yoshiba if they reach Van Biesbroek 8 and find people already there? They’d have to commit seppuku to save face.”

“Shades of Asimov! Sounds like you’ve discovered hyperspace.”

“No. Hypospace. Topology is conserved. The eight hidden dimensions are inside the universe, remember? To travel to other worlds we have to travel inside. She laughed, but he was oddly quiet. She looked at his face. “Tom?”

He shook himself. “Nothing. I just had the oddest feeling of deja vu, is all. As if I’d heard all this before somewhere.”

Tom met Judy at the old Pigeon Hole, where they discussed her latest findings over a couple of cheese-steak hoagies. Tom liked his with everything on it and watched with amusement as Judy carefully plucked the green peppers from hers.

“It was my worm,” she explained. “I sent it looking for Pastor Dietrich.” She rolled her eyes up to heaven. “Do you know how many medieval Germans have been named Dietrich? Some of what turned up I could weed out immediately. The others I had to read, one by one.” She spat the words out. “And this one?” she asked, waving a printout in the air. “The idiots didn’t put Oberhochwald in their index, so it was never cross-referenced that way in the Net Master Index. Otherwise, it would have popped out right away.” She bit her hoagie savagely. “Jerks,” she muttered.

Tom laughed. Nothing so offended a professional librarian as bad indexing. He stopped, suddenly sober. How much more information was hidden away the same way? Buried forever in the mountains of words written over the last six centuries. He took the document from her, grateful that he had it at all.

It was an odd item. During the 1960s an enterprising group of liberals had published a book called Tolerance Through the Ages. The contents purportedly showed enlightened attitudes in many times and places. One of these was a letter from Pastor Dietrich to his bishop:

Excellency,

I have remained silent while my detractors have whispered vile accusations in your ear, hoping to turn your heart against me. Reason and truth will prevail, I thought. Yet the latest incident regarding the flagellants in Stuttgart causes me to wonder whether reason be still highly regarded in Christendom. Fra Joachim has told you we are witches here who have welcomed flying devils into our homes, and has asked that the Holy Office be used against us. Permit me now to speak in my own defense.

While it is true that Alexander IV, may he Rest in Peace, granted the use of tenure by the Holy Office in pursuit of heretics, Canon Episcopi clearly states that witchcraft, albeit a civil crime, is no heresy. Thus the request of Joachim and his ilk is improper, regardless of the merits of his argument. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Furthermore, the same Canon declares that witches do not fly to their Sabbat, save in dreams induced by belladonna and other noxious herbs, and that to believe otherwise is sinful! Therefore, it is my accusers who sin when they claim that my guests fly by supernatural means. Quod erat demonstrandum.

(Thierry, old friend, do we not both read God’s Word through the means of wonderful eye-glasses, so recently invented? Though these be but natural, mechanical contrivances, yet many of the simple folk mistrust them. Simil atque, flying, if it be possible, would prove itself natural as well, accomplished either through God’s Will as with the birds of the air, or though the skills of clever artisans.)

We also know that demons cannot abide the touch of Holy Water. Yet, after all their art had failed to win them home and my guests had given themselves to despair, I preached to them and won at least one soul to Christ, he who celebrated his new birth by taking the Christian name Johann. The Water of Baptism caused him no discomfort. Therefore, he is no demon. QED.

Thus do I refute Fra Joachim. “Whatsoever ye do to the least of My children, ye do unto Me.” I have aided travelers lost and hungry, some grievously hurt, when they appeared here in the spring. Fra Joachim finds them ugly and calls them devils. Certes, they fare from afar land and folk there have different visage; but if Pope Clement can shelter Jews in his palace at Avignon from fear-maddened townsmen (and how marvelously rational was his bull of September last demonstrating the innocence of the Jew in the matter of this new Plague!), then surely a poor parish priest may shelter the helpless wayfarer, no matter the color of his skin or the shape of his eye.

Christ with us this Year of Grace 1348.

Given by my own hand at Oberhochwald in the County of Urach Freiburg. Michaelmas Eve.

Dietrich

“Quite a remarkable man,” said Tom.

“Yes,” said Judy quietly. “I should have liked to have known him. My parents were also helpless wayfarers. They lived in a boat on the water for three years before their “Pastor Dietrich” found them a home.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “It was a long time ago, and I was born here. The American story.” She smiled in embarrassment.

Tom looked at the letter again. “Chinese, do you think?”

The almond eyes looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“Dietrich’s guests. The comments about skin and eye shape sound like Chinese.”

“There was such travel in the fourteenth century.”

“Damn right. Marco Polo’s father and uncle went to China and back twice. We know of two Chinese Nestorians who came west at about the same time. They may even have passed the Polos along the way. Oddly, one of them was named Marco, also. When they reached Babylon, Marco was selected Catholicos, the Nestorian pope. He sent his companion, Sauma, on embassies to the Roman pope and the English and French kings. Dietrich may have taken in a similar party, one that had met with disaster. Some were wounded, he says.”

“Perhaps,” Judy agreed, “but—”

“But what?”

“Why would Joachim call them flying devils?”

“If their arrival coincided with an outbreak of ergot hallucinations, they might have been connected with the visions in the popular mind.”

Judy pursed her lips.“Well, Dietrich seems to have converted one of the ‘hallucinations’ to Catholicism. Johan. Do you suppose it is the same person as that Joannes Sterne, the one whose baptism was referred to the bishop’s court?”

“Almost certainly. I received a transmission this morning from my friend Anton in Freiburg. He did some digging over there and came up with more of that journal. Remember, we found only that one page?”

“Yes. I believe it was kept by Pastor Dietrich.”

“So do I. In small villages like Oberhochwald, the priest was often the only literate man.” He handed her the pages and watched as she read through them.

She finished, nodding. “Chinese or demon,” she said. “Dietrich thought well of our Johan. Or whatever his name really was.” She flipped through the pages. “What was it he wrote? Oh, yes. ‘I call him Johan because his own name is too difficult for my tongue.’ ”

“Uh-huh. He would never have heard a non-Indo-European language before. And Chinese has a lot of tonal subtleties.”

“He also wrote how Johan and some of his companions helped care for stricken villagers after the first bout of Plague.”

Tom nodded and retrieved the papers. He flipped through them. “Right. What did he write? Here it is. ‘While they themselves remain untouched thus far, Hans and three of his friends daily risk contamination by visiting the sick and burying the dead. How sad that those who fled from their sight throwing rocks and dung will not return to witness true Christian charity.’ ”

Judy took a sip of her soda. “And there’s more in the same vein,” she said. “Johan and Dietrich pray together for strength. Some of the wayfarers grow despondent and Dietrich comforts them.”

“So they cooked up a scheme,” Tom added, “to keep their hopes up.” He licked his thumb and searched through the printouts.“Uh-huh. ‘The folk of the village try in their own fashion to repay our guests’ kindnesses by aiding them in their efforts to win their way home. I have bethought myself to secure from artisans certain items which Hans declares would be sorely needed for the endeavor. However, our own smith has already gone to his reward and I dare not venture into Urach since Joachim has been preaching.’ That fits. Donaueshingen is in the other direction.”

“Dr. Schwoerin?”

“Oh, call me Tom.”

“Very well. Tom. There was one other scene that Pastor Dietrich described. It was on the last page but one. I should like your opinion of it.”

He read the page she had indicated. “I’m not sure what you mean,” he said finally. “Dietrich says he found Hans one night alone on the edge of the village, looking at the stars. They talked awhile and Hans asked how he would ever find his way home again. A homesick traveler, nicht wahr?”

“No, Tom. He wrote that Hans pointed to the stars and asked how he would find his way home again.”

“I still don’t understand. People in those days generally used the stars as guides for traveling.”

“I’m . . . not sure. It’s just a feeling. Something we’ve read . . . It means something different. Not what we think at all.”

He didn’t answer her. He’d had the same feeling himself. He took a last bite from his hoagie and shoved the plate aside. It bothered him that, despite all the material they’d unearthed, they were no closer to finding the reason for Oberhochwald’s abandonment. So far there was nothing that would not apply equally well to scores of other places. The cause had to be unique. He remembered the case of a Manchurian village, inhabited by mentally retarded people. That had been traced to an iodine deficiency in the soil they farmed.

Shun them as we shun the unholy soil of Teufelheim. In the last year of its existence, Oberhochwald was an ordinary village. Yet a mere 29 years later it was being called the Devil’s home. Of course, the great outbreak of the Dancing Mania had come between the two events. But nowhere else had the hallucinations led to a taboo.

The subconscious is a wonderful thing. It never sleeps, no matter what the rest of the mind does. And it never stops thinking. No matter what the rest of the mind does.

Tom awoke in a cold sweat. He sat suddenly upright in bed. No, it’s not possible! It was absurd; but everything fit. Or did it? He had to know.

He glanced at Sharon where she sprawled fully clothed on her side of the bed. She must have returned late from the lab and crashed. He could not remember her coming in. She smiled faintly in her sleep, dreaming of chronons, no doubt.

He eased out of bed and tiptoed to the terminal, where he called up the Eifelheim file. He carefully checked and cross-referenced each item. Data are not information, he knew, until they had been properly organized. He put events in chronological order, placing the undated items through context or logical relationships. Michaelmas Eve, for example, could have been either May 7 or September 28, depending on whether it was the Feast of the Apparition or of the Dedication. But Dietrich’s letter referred to the Pope’s Bull, which had also been written in September. When he had finished, he reviewed the list:

1348, Mar. Lightning strike “heralding Lucifer’s advent.”

Spring Foreign travelers arrive. Some villagers flee. Others shelter and care for them.

? Sir Manfred visits Dietrich; later writes memoir.

Jun. Dietrich receives letter from bishop (apparently a reply to a query from Dietrich). “The condition of the soul is not manifested in the aspects of the material body.”

Summer Joachim is preaching against witches. Travelers growing despondent. Dietrich preaches and converts Johann to Catholicism.

Sep. Dietrich writes apologia to bishop. First signs of plague. Smith (and others) die. Johann helps care for ill.

?. Travelers determine to try for home. Surviving villagers help. Dietrich gets copper wire. Travelers begin dying. Two more converted. Dietrich returns wire.

late 1348. Village abandoned.

1348-1400. Heterodox theologies attributed to Oberhochwald apparently circulating locally.

1374 Major outbreak of ergot poisoning. Hallucinations.

1377 First specific mention of taboo. “Teufelheim.”

1384 Cabalistic prayer of “St. Johan.” “Eight secret ways to leave this earth.”

1423 Religious treatise: “Trinity of trinities.” First mention of “Eifelheim.”

Tom chewed on the end of his light-pen. The record was spotty, incomplete. When, for example, had the gravestone been carved? He envied physicists. The answers were always there. If only the physicist were persistent enough or clever enough, she could pry them loose from the universe. Cultural scientists were not so fortunate. The facts themselves did not always survive. No amount of persistence could decipher a record that had perished in a long-ago fire.

He studied his list, referring to the actual documents to refresh his mind on details. In the end, he saw no other explanation. What had he said to Sharon that day in the restaurant? Maybe the subconscious is smarter than we think. Or maybe not. He needed a second opinion. He looked at the clock on the wall, an old-fashioned digital with an antique liquid crystal display. It was 03:20 hrs. That meant 09:20 hrs. in Freiburg. He copied his file and added a summary. Then, before he could lose his nerve, he zapped it to my office, a quarter of a world away. It contained a single question: Was glaubst du? What do you think?

Tom’s second message piqued my curiosity. I coded back that a reply would require several hours in the Bücherei. I found some documents that he had asked about and compared them to what he had sent. Then I searched out other documents and blew off the centuries and read them as well. Afterward, I smoked my heavy carved Schwarzwalder pipe and was disturbed. I thought about appearing the fool. Dignity, after all, is something we save for our old age; and I had earned it.

I sighed and tied ZEITGEIST into CLIODEINOS and transmitted what I had found. Cautiously—very cautiously—I outlined my conclusion. If Tom had the brains that God gave a turnip, he could read between the lines.

“What are you doing up so early?”

Tom started violently. He looked around. Sharon stood behind him, rubbing her eyes. “Don’t sneak up on me that way! I thought you were crashed.”

“Are you kidding? A Mack truck could sneak up behind you, you’re so intent on that printer.” She yawned. “That’s what woke me up. The printer.”

He watched the printer head run back and forth. “The wonders of engineering. It’s supposed to be noiseless.”

She padded into the kitchen and turned on the tea kettle. “It’s time to get up anyway. What’s going on?” she called.

Tom pulled the last sheet from the printer. He had been reading my message as it emerged. “It would take too long and sound too ridiculous.”

She poked her head around the archway. “Tom, I’m a physicist, remember? Next to strange, charming quarks nothing sounds ridiculous. So, what’s on those printouts?”

“Anton sent them.”

“Anton Zaengle? How is the old dear?”

“He’s fine. He wants me to come to Freiburg.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I think he thinks what I think.”

“Well, I’m glad you cleared that up.”

“No, seriously.” He waved the printouts. “This is the bait to lure me there.” He paused.” Sharon, why would a medieval backwoods priest need a hundred feet of copper wire?”

“Why . . . I don’t know.”

“I don’t either; but he ordered it specially made. And some special iron forgings of odd shape, according to Anton. And later, he brought it all back.” He pulled out another sheet, heavily underlined in red. “And during the summer of 1348, monks in a monastery near Oberhochwald heard thunder when there were no clouds in the sky. Short, sharp thunderclaps echoing in the hills.” He put the sheet down. “The Germans say that gunpowder was invented in Freiburg in 1350. Interesting timing.

“And peccatores Eifelheimensis, the Sins of Eifelheimers. Something Anton found. It denounces as heretical the notion that there could be men with souls who were not descended from Adam.”

Sharon shook her head. “I’m still asleep. I don’t get it.”

He took a deep breath. He was surprised how reluctant he was to say his thoughts out loud. But Sharon’s the one can tell me if my guess is all wet.

“All right,” he said. “Nearly seven hundred years ago, sentient beings from another world were stranded near Oberhochwald in the Black Forest.” There, he’d said it. He held his hand up to forestall Sharon, whose mouth had dropped open. “They were traveling through Nagy space when their vessel malfunctioned. The energy leak must have been tiny, but it started a forest fire and injured some of them.”

Sharon had found her voice. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What sort of proof—”

“Let me finish, please.“He gathered his thoughts and continued. “The aliens’ sudden appearance out of nowhere and their physical features, yellow bulging eyes, for example, frightened many villagers, who fled, starting rumors of demons. The others, including the village priest, Pastor Dietrich, saw that they were creatures, if not precisely human, in need of help. Just to be safe, he got a carefully worded ruling from his bishop, something he could do in Latin without giving the show away.

“The aliens lived in Oberhochwald for many months. While Fra Joachim and others were accusing them of witchcraft and demon-worship, the villagers tried to help the aliens repair their hypocraft. I should have seen that in the business of the copper wire. What possible use would that have been for earthly travelers?

“I’m sure everyone knew there was no real hope of repairing the equipment; but it was a necessary self-deception to try it. Perhaps the aliens taught the villagers how to make blasting powder. They also flew. Anti-gravity? Perhaps. Pastor Dietrich wrote a letter in which he carefully denied only that his ‘guests’ flew by supernatural means.”

He looked at Sharon, searching for a sign of her reaction.

“Go on,” she said.

“The aliens were immune to the Plague—different biochemistry—and repaid the villagers’ kindness when they became ill. At least, some of them did. Others, I’m sure, had succumbed to apathy by then. Dietrich even converted some to Catholicism. We have a record of one baptism, at least. Joannes Sterne? Oh, he knew where his guests came from. He knew.

“Eventually, the aliens, too, began to die. Not from the Plague, but from the lack of some vital amino acid. That different biochemistry again. ‘They eat but take no nourishment’ was how Dietrich put it. When his friend Hans died—this is a guess now—when Hans finally died, Dietrich buried him in the churchyard and had a carving of his face put on the stone so that future generations would know. Only he didn’t realize how many generations that would be, or that the village itself would vanish.

“The taboo? Easy. There really were ‘demons’ there. And shortly after Joachim cursed the place, it was struck by Plague. But were the demons really dead, or simply asleep, waiting for new victims? People shunned the place, and passed the warning to their children. In a fairly short time, Joachim’s tag of Teufelheim was euphemized to Eifelheim and the original name of Oberhochwald forgotten. All that was left was a custom of avoiding the place, vague folktales of flying monsters, and a gravestone with a face on it.”

She stared at him, her head spinning. Aliens? she thought. In medieval Germany? It was unbelievable, fantastic. Was he serious? She listened as he described his evidence. Certainly it resolved his problem of the taboo, but the solution seemed even more bizarre than the original problem.

“And you think this scenario is credible?” she asked when he had finished.

“Yes, and so does Anton, I think. And he’s nobody’s fool.”

“No,” she said thoughtfully. “But then he didn’t come and say it flat out, did he?”

Tom grinned. “I said he was no fool.”

“Hunh. That’s better left to you, I suppose. What I’d like to know is why you dragged Nagy space into it.”

“That’s easy. No one ever mentioned spaceships. Medieval people weren’t stupid. They were having a technological revolution themselves. Camshafts and waterwheels. They would have recognized a spaceship as a vehicle of some sort, even if they thought it was Elijah’s chariot. But, no. Both Dietrich and Joachim and the writer of the 1377 Bull insisted the aliens ‘appeared.’ Isn’t that how you described hypospace travel yesterday? A single stride covers great distances, was how you put it. No wonder Dietrich was so interested in seven-league boots. And that’s what Johann meant when he pointed at the stars and asked how he would ever find his way home again. Traveling the way he did, he had no idea which was his home.”

“ ‘Appeared.’ That’s a lot to read into a single verb.”

He held up the computer printouts. “It all ties together, though. Rope-logic, not deduction. No single strand is strong enough to support the conclusion; but together . . . A prayer attributed to Johann says there are eight secret ways to leave the Earth. How many dimensions in your hypospace?”

“Eight.” The word came out reluctantly. She felt her pulse begin to hammer in her ears. What if. What if?

“And the religious treatise attributed at third hand to Dietrich: to travel to other worlds you have to travel inside. You used almost the exact same words. Your twelve-dimensional geometry became a trinity of Trinities. The writer mentioned ‘times and places we cannot know, save by looking inside ourselves.’ ”

“But that really was a religious treatise, wasn’t it? The other worlds were Heaven and Hell, and traveling inside meant searching one’s soul.”

“Sure; but the ideas weren’t written down until seventy-five years later. The writers took something they’d heard at third or fourth hand and interpreted it in some familiar way. Who knows what Dietrich himself understood when Johann tried to explain it to him. Quantum physics just wasn’t in his medieval Weltanshauung. Here.” He handed her the folder. “Read through it the way Anton did and see if it doesn’t make sense.” She looked in his eyes as she took the folder from him. He really is serious, she thought. Which, knowing Tom, could mean he couldn’t come to grips with the problem’s insolubility. Or else his idea wasn’t so crazy as it sounded. Give him a fair chance. He deserves that much.

She read through the items slowly and carefully, relying mostly on his English translations. The old-style German was too hard to follow, and the Latin was Greek to her. She could see Tom fidgeting nervously at the edge of her vision.

Crazy. Disconnected items. But there was a thread that ran through them. She came at last to the treatise. She recognized the ugly, angular capital.

When she had finished, she thought long and hard. Finally, she shook her head. “It’s all circumstantial,” she said. “No one comes right out and says they had alien visitors from another planet.” The tea kettle began to whistle and she went to the kitchen and turned it off. She laid the copy of the treatise on the kitchen table, where she had dumped her own papers last night, while she searched for a morning tea.

“Yes they did,” Tom insisted. He had followed her to the kitchen. “They did come right out and say so. In medieval terms and concepts. Oh, we can talk about planets orbiting other stars. We can talk about multi-dimensional continua. But they couldn’t. They didn’t have the words to define the words. Everything they learned had to be filtered through a Weltanschauung that wasn’t equipped for it.”

“I’m still not convinced,” she said. It suddenly occurred to her that she was not playing Devil’s Advocate. It was Tom who was advocating the devils. She wanted to share the joke with him, but decided it wasn’t the right time for it. He was too deadly serious. “Everything you have,” she continued, “could be read another way. It’s only when you put them together that they seem to form a pattern; but have you put them together right? Why should there be any connection at all? Maybe the journal was not kept by Pastor Dietrich. There could be other Oberhochwalds in Bavaria, in Hesse, in Saxony.” She held up a hand to forestall his objection. “And maybe the lightning flash was really a lightning flash, not an energy leak from a crippled hypospace craft. Maybe Dietrich sheltered Chinese travelers, like you thought. Maybe Joachim was high on ergot when he thought he saw flying demons. And copper wire and iron fixtures must have other uses than repairing alien machines!”

“What about the descriptions of the hidden inner worlds and the trinity of Trinities? Doesn’t that sound like your hypospace?”

She shrugged. “Or it sounds like medieval theology. Physics and religion both sound like gibberish if you don’t know the axioms.”

“What I find significant is the way Dietrich always refers to the aliens.”

“If they were aliens, and not ergot hallucinations.”

“All right,” he said impatiently. “If they were aliens. He always calls them ‘beings,’ or ‘creatures,’ or ‘my guests,’ or ‘travelers.’ Never anything supernatural. Didn’t Sagan once say that alien visitors would be very careful not to be taken for gods or demons?”

She snorted. “Sagan was an optimist. The ability to cross space doesn’t make anyone wiser or more ethical. I remember, though, what he said would be convincing evidence of alien visitors.”

“What’s that?”

“A set of plans for some sort of high-tech hardware.” She smiled at him and set her tea cup down on the table. As she did so, her eyes fell on the sheets spread out there. Printouts of her plans for the chronon detector. And the illuminated capital. She froze. Her throat felt tight. “Oh, my God!”

“What?” He jumped up.

“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.” She grabbed the illuminated capital and waved it in his face. “Look at it. Vines and leaves and Trinities? That’s a circuit diagram! Those are Josephson junctions! Tom! Hernando and I built this circuit only last week!”

Tom felt it run through him like a shot. Could it be true? He watched Sharon leaf through the printouts on the table until she found the one she wanted. She laid it side by side with the illuminated capital.

He looked over her shoulder. Were they the same? The illumination was all twisted, like a real vine, not laid out geometrically. He tried to compare them topologically, by matching the leaves and knots and berries with the arcane nucleonic symbols. Almost. There were some differences.

“Garbled in transmission,” said Sharon. “That hookup is impossible,” she pointed. “That’s a shorted circuit. Those two should be reversed . . . wait a minute.” She traced the vines with her finger. “Not all of it’s garbled. A generator, not a detector,” she muttered. “See there? And there? It’s part of a generating circuit. It has to be. Part of their stargate. Damn!”

She had reached the bottom of the page.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Part is right. It’s not complete.” She frowned and walked across to the pillow sofa and threw herself into it.

Tom picked up the sheets, feeling oddly disappointed. He looked at them, trying to see what Sharon could see. It made no sense to him. “Too bad they didn’t leave a complete set of plans,” he said. “Then you’d know what to do.”

She stared back from the other side of the living room. Tom could see her framed in the kitchen archway. “But I already know the only thing that matters.”

“What’s that?”

“That it can be done.”

III

Freiburgim-Breisgau has no aerodrome, so I met Tom and Judy at the Hauptbahnhof on Bismarkallee, where the magnetic train slid up from Frankfurt-am-Main. We took the Bertoldstrasse streetcar to Kaiser Joseph Strasse and walked from there to the hotel on Gerberau. I pointed out all the sights like the worst of tourist guides. Tom had seen it all before, of course, but it was new to Judy.

When we walked through Martin’s Tor, she commented on its storybook appearance. The Dukes of Zähringen had founded the Freiburg in 1120, the first of the established “free towns,” and this gate had been standing a century in the walls of the Old Town when Pastor Dietrich had befriended certain travelers. The wind from the Hollental was cool, a sign that summer’s end was near.

After settling them in their rooms (separate, of course), I took them to lunch at the Römischer Kaiser. We gave our full attention to the meal. No one else on earth cooks like the Schwarzwalders. Even our department store mannequins are portly. Not until the waiter had delivered the streussel did I allow the conversation to turn to business.

Tom wanted to leave for the Forest immediately. I could see the eagerness in him, but I told him we would wait for morning.

“Why?” asked Tom. “I want to see the site myself.” Judy waited patiently, saying nothing.

“Because Eifelheim is deep in the forest,” I said. “It will be a long drive and a hike, even if we can locate the site quickly. You will need a good night’s sleep to recover from the jet lag.” I took another bite of my streussel and put my fork down. “And another reason, meine Freunde. Monsignor Lurm will be joining us once he has received the bishop’s permission. I have not, natürlich, told him what we expect to find.”

They glanced at each other, puzzled. “What do you mean?” asked Tom.

Sometimes my friend is a little slow. “It is a Catholic cemetery, nicht wahr? You did not come all this way only to look. Surely you will want to exhume the grave and see who, or what, is buried there? For that we need the permission.”

Tom laughed and looked embarrassed. Americans are in too much of a hurry. A single fact is worth a volume of deductions. Best to plan carefully how to find that fact. Tom would have had us on site sooner, but without a shovel.

Monsignor Lurm met us outside the hotel the next morning. He was a tall, gaunt man with a high forehead. Dressed in a faded bush jacket, only his collar revealed his calling.

“Na, Anton, mein’ Alt,” he said, waving some papers. “I have them. We must pay the proper respect and disturb nothing but the one grave. Personally, I think Bishop Willi will be more than happy to bury this Dracula nonsense.” He looked at Tom and Judy. “That’s something. To bury it we must dig it up!”

I winced. Heinrich was a virtuous man, but his puns were surely earning him many years in Purgatory. I also felt guilty at deceiving him regarding what we hoped to do.

“Permit me,” I said. “This is my friend from America, Tom Schwoerin, and his assistant, Judy Cao. Monsignor Heinrich Lurm.”

Heinrich pumped Tom’s hand. “Doctor Schwoerin. It is a great pleasure to me. I much enjoyed your paper on the gene frequencies of the Germanic tribes. It clarified greatly the routes of their ancient migrations. A good thing for you that my ancestors dropped their genes everywhere they went. Eh?”

Before Tom could respond to this latest bon mot, I interrupted. “Heinrich is an amateur archeologist. He has excavated many ancient Swabian villages from before the Völkerwanderung.”

“You’re that Heinrich Lurm? The pleasure is mine. I’ve read your reports, father. You are no amateur.”

Heinrich flushed. “On the contrary. Amateur comes from the Latin amare, to love. I do archeology for love. I am not paid.”

He had rented two Japanese pickup trucks. Two men with drooping moustaches waited by them, talking quietly. There were picks, shovels, and other paraphernalia in the bed of the first truck. When the men saw us coming, they climbed into the bed of the second.

“I think there is an old logging road that will take us close to the site,” Heinrich said to me. “It cannot be too far a walk from there. I will drive the first truck. Anton, you take the second. Fraulein Cao,” he turned to her. “You may ride with me. Since I am celibate, you will be safer that way.” He grinned at me, but I pretended not to notice.

We took the Schwartzwald-Hauptstrasse into the mountains, turning off at Kirchzarten. The road began climbing as we drove into the Zastiertal. I rolled the window down and let the cool mountain air blow into the cab. In the back, the workmen laughed. One of them began singing an old country song.

“Too bad Sharon couldn’t come,” I said.

Tom looked at me. “No. She’s working on another project. The one I told you about.”

“Ja, the circuit diagram. That was the most remarkable thing of all. Never again will I look at a manuscript illumination in the same way. Think, Tom. Could you or I ever have recognized it for what it was? Let alone what it meant? Pfagh.” He waved his hand.

“Never. And Sharon? Would she ever have thought to look at it? Medieval manuscripts? No, physicists do not do such things. Only because the two of you were together could it ever have happened the way it did.”

Tom looked out the window at the trees whipping past. “I know. It was the wildest sort of coincidence. Who knows what else may be out there, lying in archives and libraries, unrecognized because the right people haven’t looked at it, or haven’t looked at it in the right way? Things for which we’ve found safe, acceptable, believable explanations?”

A few kilometers past Oberreid the road became rough and I paid all my attention to the driving. The Feldberg loomed high on our right. Shortly, the Monsignor honked and his arm jabbed out of the leading truck, pointing left. I saw the old logging road and honked back to show I understood. I pulled the floor shift to put us in four-wheel drive.

Heinrich drove like the lunatic he was. He seemed unaware that the surface under him was no longer paved. Our truck bounced and shook and I wondered if we would lose the two workmen in the back. I silently praised the Japanese quality control workers who had helped make our shock absorbers.

The sun was already high when we reached the area where Eifelheim had once stood. There was no sign of it. I had copies of the satellite photographs in my hand, but close up things looked different. Nature had reclaimed its own, and the trees had had centuries in which to grow. Tom looked around bewildered. Where had the village square been? Where the church? We might have gone past the place entirely, except that the American soldiers had thoughtfully left their empty beer cans behind.

Heinrich took charge with the ease of long practice. The rest of us fell quickly into the roles of his assistants. But then, he was a field man and we were not.

From among his equipment he took a transceiver of the kind the airlines use. In a few moments, he had signals from the NAVSTAR satellite pinpointing our location on the photograph. He made a mark on the photo and pointed with his pencil. “The church must be buried under the cruciform mound, a few meters that way. The graveyard is most likely to the rear of the chancel, though it could be to the side also.”

We found the mound and split into three teams, each searching the ground in a different direction from the chancel end. It was not long before one of the workmen, Augustus, found what might have been a headstone, smashed to rubble. We could not be sure. Perhaps they were natural rocks. We resumed our search.

Judy found the grave. I saw her on my right when she stopped and stared down at the ground. She did not call but, but only stood quietly. Then she crouched down and I could not see her through the brush.

I looked around. No one else had noticed. They continued to pace forward, searching. I made my way across to where she had been and saw her kneeling next to a sunken and broken stone. Soil action had already swallowed the lower half of the stone, but it had sunk at such an angle that the face of it had been partially protected from the elements. Its outlines were obscure, barely visible.

“Is this it?” I asked quietly.

She gasped and sucked in her breath. She turned and saw me and visibly relaxed. “I think so,” she said. “It’s the one the soldiers found.” She held up a cigarette butt to show how she knew. “The inscription is nearly illegible, but near the top I can make out’ . . . H-A-N-N-E-S S-T-E—’ ”

“Johannes Sterne,” I said for her. “John from the stars. The name he was baptised under.” I looked at the face. The features were indistinct. How had the soldiers ever noticed it? Was it the face of a monster, at all? Or was some harmless burgher resting here, about to be disturbed by a bizarre chain of misunderstandings? “Do you realize how many graves there must have been?” I said. “And this is the one we find.”

“I know. I’m scared.”

“Scared? Of what?”

“When we dig him up. He won’t be the right shape. He’ll be something . . . wrong.”

I didn’t know how to answer her. Whatever the shape, it would be wrong in one sense or another. “Gus found another stone,” I told her. “So did Heinrich. Both were smashed. Tom thinks that when the Plague swept through here the neighboring villagers came and destroyed the gravestones. Yet this one—presumably the one that most frightened them—wasn’t touched. Why?”

She shook her head. “There is so much we do not know and never will know. Where did they come from? How many were there? Were they explorers or commuters? How did they and Dietrich establish communication? What did they talk about?” Her face, when she turned it up to me, was on the verge of tears.

“I imagine,” I said gently, “that they talked about going home and the great things they would do when they got there.”

“Yes,” she said more quietly. “I suppose they would have. But those who could have told us are long dead.”

I smiled. “We could hold a seance and ask them.”

“Don’t say that!” she hissed. Her fists, clenched tight, pressed on her thighs. “I’ve been reading their letters and journals and sermons. They don’t feel dead. They feel alive, like I know them. Anton, most of them were never buried! Toward the end, who was left? They must have lain on the ground and rotted. Pastor Dietrich was a good man; he deserved better than that.” There were tears on her cheeks now. “As we were walking through the forest, I was frightened that I would see them, still alive: Dietrich or Joachim or one of the villagers or—”

“Or something horrible.”

She nodded, silently.

“That’s what frightens you, isn’t it? That you are a rational, secular, twenty-first century woman who knows that aliens would look different and smell different and yet you would run screaming like any medieval peasant. You are afraid you would act like Fra Joachim.”

She smiled a faint, small smile.“You are almost right, Doctor Zaengle.” She closed her eyes and sighed. “Hāy cu’u giúp tôi. Cho toi su’ć manh. I am afraid I would not act as Pastor Dietrich did.”

“He shames us all, child,” I said. “He shames us all.” I looked around at the tall oaks and the wildly beautiful mountain flowers. Perhaps Dietrich had had a fine burial after all.

Judy took a deep breath and dried her tears. Then she said, “Let’s tell Tom and the others.”

Heinrich gave directions for the dig. “After so many years the coffin will have disintegrated. Everything will be filled with clay. Dig until you find wood fragments. Then we will switch to the trowels.”

Gus and Seppl, the other workman, began digging out a little ways from the grave. Because the remains would have sunk over the years, they would have to dig deep. They wanted the sides of the hole to slope inward so they would not collapse.

It was already late afternoon when the digging began, but Heinrich had come prepared with gas lanterns to work into the evening. There were also tents and bedrolls. “I would not want to try and find my way back in the dark,” he said. It was only when the evening sun was setting that we discovered how the soldiers had noticed the face. The light streamed through a gap in the trees, striking the stone and throwing the carving into stark relief. Gus and Seppl were busy digging and did not see it, but Heinrich was stooped just beside it. It was a mantis’s face, and it wasn’t. The eyes were large, bulging, and multi-faceted. (They would have been yellow, I knew.) There were lines that might have been antennae, or whiskers, or something else entirely. Instead of insect like mandibles, there was a mouth of sorts. Judy grabbed my arm. I could feel the nails dig into my skin. Tom was rubbing his mouth nervously.

Heinrich paused in his work and stared at the stone without speaking. It was obvious that this was no weathered distortion of any conventional face. It was a demon. Or it was something very much like a demon. Heinrich turned and looked at us, gauging our reactions. Already the sun had moved and the face was fading. “I think,” he said, “perhaps I should take a nibbing.”

The moon was a ghost riding through the treetops when Seppl finally reached wood. The gas lanterns hissed and sputtered, creating a shifting circle of brightness embedded in the darkness of the forest. Judy was kneeling by the edge of the hole, her eyes closed, sitting on her heels. I didn’t know if she was praying or sleeping. I could barely see the heads of the men in the pit.

Tom came and stood next to me. He had Heinrich’s rubbing of the alien face in his hand. Hans, I reminded myself. Not “the alien” but Johann Sterne. A person. One who died a long time ago, far from home, in the company of strangers. What had he felt near the end, when all possibility of pretense had been lost? What emotions washed through that alien mind?

Tom pointed to the sky. “Full moon,” he said. “The wrong time to dig up Dracula’s grave.” He tried to smile to show that he was joking. I tried to smile to show him that I knew. I shivered. It was cooler in the mountains than I had thought it would be.

Sepp called out and we all jerked like puppets. Judy came alert and leaned forward expectantly. Tom and I walked to the edge of the hole and peered in.

Sepp and Gus were standing to one side while Heinrich dug in the clay with a hand trowel. There was something shiny and smooth protruding from the earth. It wasn’t white like bone, but yellow and brown. He dug around it and removed it, earth and all. He sat back on his haunches and scraped at it patiently with a putty knife, cleaning it, his own face set as solidly as any carved in stone.

He knows, I thought.

Gradually a face emerged. Gus gasped and dropped his shovel. He crossed himself hastily, three times. Sepp remained calm. He watched with narrowed eyes, nodding solemnly, as if he had always known the soil of Eifelheim would yield unearthly fruit.

It was a skull, and not a skull, and no earthly mind had ever sat within it. Soil chemistry had been at work on it, but our worms and bacteria had, for the most part, found it unpalatable. The eyes were gone, of course, and gristle hung in the two enormous sockets set on either side of the head; hut whatever had served him for skin was still largely intact. It was almost like a mummy’s head.

Heinrich held it out and Judy took it. Tom stood behind her, studying it over her shoulder. Heinrich climbed from the pit and sat on the edge, his legs dangling in the hole. He took a pipe from his pocket and lit it. “So, Anton. Now will you tell me what I have gotten myself into? I have a feeling Bishop Willi will not like it.”

So I told him. Tom and Judy added details. Tom’s attempt to explain the physics of hypospace only confused him. I think Tom was confused as well. But the rest Heinrich accepted quietly. He had dug up the skull himself, hadn’t he? He looked out into the surrounding forest.

“There will be the remainder of the skeleton, of course; and others as well. You say there were several of them. And out there?” He pointed with his pipestem. “What? Shards of metal or plastic, rotted or decomposed under the living soil. Perhaps an engine or a control panel, shattered and rusted. Now that we know what to look for, finding it will be straightforward. There is much work to be done. Don’t forget the cries of fraud and hoax that will surely be raised. We will need to bring others up here; tell Bishop Willi and the University people.”

“No.”

We all looked at Judy in surprise. She still held Johann’s skull in her hands and Gus, his initial fright over, was peering at it curiously, eyeball to eyesocket. I was proud of our two workmen and their reactions. It seemed a good omen.

“What do you mean?” Tom asked her.

“You know what they’ll do, don’t you? They’ll dig him up and wire him together and hang him behind bulletproof plastic so tourists can gawk at him and children make nasty jokes and laugh. It isn’t right. It isn’t.” When she shook her head, her whole body shook.

“That’s not true, Judy,” Tom said gently, putting his hands on her shoulders. She twisted her head around and looked up at him.

“Let them gawk and let them joke,” he said. “Oh, we’ll take measurements and holographs and chip off some cells for the biologists to wonder at. Then we’ll make plaster casts of him and hang those. The originals? Well, those we’ll keep safe from harm and someday—I know Sharon will help—someday we will find out where he came from and take him home. Or our children’s children will.”

Heinrich nodded, his pipe sending filigrees of smoke toward the sky. Sepp still stood in the pit, leaning on his shovel. He had his hands folded over the top of the handle, looking up where the stars shone through the canopy of the trees; and his face was a mixture of wonder and eagerness the like of which I had never seen before.

I know where the path to the star lies. The gate opened once, a long time ago, and a few wayward travelers suffered a lonely death. Then it closed. But before it did, two creatures reached across the gulf and touched. They didn’t flee and they didn’t fight, and because they didn’t they left the gate open, just a crack.

THE WINTER MARKET

William Gibson

It rains a lot, up here; there are winter days when it doesn’t really get light at all, only a bright, indeterinmate gray. But then there are days when it’s like they whip aside a curtain to flash you three minutes of sun-lit, suspended mountain, the trademark at the start of God’s own movie. It was like that the day her agents phoned, from deep in the heart of their mirrored pyramid on Beverly Boulevard, to tell me she’d merged with the net, crossed over for good, that Kings of Sleep was going triple-platinum. I’d edited most of Kings, done the brain-map work and gone over it all with the fast-wipe module, so I was in line for a share of royalties.

No, I said, no. Then yes, yes, and hung up on them. Got my jacket and took the stairs three at a time, straight out to the nearest bar and an eight-hour black-out that ended on a concrete ledge two meters above midnight. False Creek water. City lights, that same gray bowl of sky smaller now, illuminated by neon and mercury-vapor arcs. And it was snowing, big flakes but not many, and when they touched black water, they were gone, no trace at all. I looked down at my feet and saw my toes clear of the edge of concrete, the water between them. I was wearing Japanese shoes, new and expensive, glove-leather Ginza monkey boots with rubber-capped toes. I stood there for a long time before I took that first step back my hand.

Because she was dead, and I’d let her go. Because, now, she was immortal, and I’d helped her get that way. And because I knew she’d phone me, in the morning.

My father was an audio engineer, a mastering engineer. He went way back, in the business, even before digital. The processes he was concerned with were partly mechanical, with that clunky quasi-Victorian quality you see in twentieth-century technology. He was a lathe operator, basically. People brought him audio recordings and he burned their sounds into grooves on a disk of lacquer. Then the disk was electroplated and used in the construction of a press that would stamp out records, the black things you see in antique stores. And I remember him telling me, once, a few months before he died, that certain frequencies transients, I think he called them could easily burn out the head, the cutting head, on a master lathe. These heads were incredibly expensive, so you prevented burnouts with something called an accelerometer. And that was what I was thinking of, as I stood there, my toes out over the water: that head, burning out.

Because that was what they did to her.

And that was what she wanted.

No accelerometer for Lise.

I disconnected my phone on my way to bed. I did it with the business end of a West German studio tripod that was going to cost a week’s wages to repair.

Woke some strange time later and took a cab back to Granville Island and Rubin’s place.

Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk.

I found him, this time, squatting between two vicious-looking drum machines I hadn’t seen before, rusty spider arms folded at the hearts of dented constellations of steel cans fished out of Richmond dumpsters. He never calls the place a studio, never refers to himself as an artist. “Messing around,” he calls what he does there, and seems to view it as some extension of boyhood’s perfectly bored backyard afternoons. He wanders through his jammed, littered space, a kind of mini-hangar cobbled to the water side of the Market, followed by the smarter and more agile of his creations, like some vaguely benign Satan bent on the elaboration of still stranger processes in his ongoing Inferno of gomi. I’ve seen Rubin program his constructions to identify and verbally abuse pedestrians wearing garments by a given season’s hot designer; others attend to more obscure missions, and a few seem constructed solely to deconstruct themselves with as much attendant noise as possible. He’s like a child, Rubin; he’s also worth a lot of money in galleries in Tokyo and Paris.

So I told him about Lise. He let me do it, get it out, then nodded. “I know,” he said. “Some CBC creep phoned eight times.” He sipped something out of a dented cup. “You wanna Wild Turkey sour?”

“Why’d they call you?”

“Cause my name’s on the back of Kings of Sleep. Dedication.”

“I didn’t see it yet.”

“She try to call you yet?”

“She will.”

“Rubin, she’s dead. They cremated her already.”

“I know,” he said. “And she’d going to call you.”

Gomi.

Where does the gomi stop and the world begin? The Japanese, a century ago, had already run out of gomi space around Tokyo, so they came up with a plan for creating space out of gomi. By the year 1969 they had built themselves a little island in Tokyo Bay, out of gomi, and christened it Dream Island. But the city was still pouring out its nine thousand tons per day, so they went on to build New Dream Island, and today they coordinate the whole process, and new Nippons rise out of the Pacific. Rubin watches this on the news and says nothing at all.

He has nothing to say about gomi. It’s his medium, the air he breathes, something he’s swum in all his life. He cruises Greater Van in a spavined truck-thing chopped down from an ancient Mercedes airporter, its roof lost under a wallowing rubber bag half-filled with natural gas. He looks for things that fit some strange design scrawled on the inside of his forehead by whatever serves him as Muse. He brings home more gomi. Some of it still operative. Some of it, like Lise, human.

I met Lise at one of Rubin’s parties. Rubin had a lot of parties. He never seemed particularly to enjoy them, himself, but they were excellent parties. I lost track, that fall, of the number of times I woke on a slab of foam to the roar of Rubin’s antique espresso machine, a tarnished behemoth topped with a big chrome eagle, the sound outrageous off the corrugated steel walls of the place, but massively comforting, too: There was coffee. Life would go on.

First time I saw her: in the Kitchen Zone. You wouldn’t call it a kitchen, exactly, just three fridges and a hot plate and a broken convection oven that had come in with the gomi. First time I saw her: She had the all-beer fridge open, light spilling out, and I caught the cheekbones and the determined set of that mouth, but I also caught the black glint of polycarbon at her wrist, and the bright slick sore the exoskeleton had rubbed there. Too drunk to process, to know what it was, but I did know it wasn’t party time. So I did what people usually did, to Lise, and clicked myself into a different movie. Went for the wine instead, on the counter beside the convection oven. Never looked back.

But she found me again. Came after me two hours later, weaving through the bodies and junk with that terrible grace programmed into the exoskeleton. I knew what it was, then, as I watched her homing in, too embarrassed now to duck it, to run, to mumble some excuse and get out. Pinned there, my arm around the waist of a girl I didn’t know, while Lise advanced . . . Was advanced, with that mocking grace straight at me now, her eyes burning with wizz, and the girl had wriggled out and away in a quiet social panic, was gone, and Lise stood there in front of me, propped up in her pencil-thin polycarbon prosthetic. Looked into those eyes and it was like you could hear her synapses whining, some impossibly high-pitched scream as the wizz opened every circuit in her brain.

“Take me home,” she said, and the words hit me like a whip. I think I shook my head. “Take me home.” There were levels of pain there, and subtlety, and an amazing cruelty. And I knew then that I’d never been hated, ever, as deeply or thoroughly as this wasted little girl hated me now, hated me for the way I’d looked, then looked away, beside Rubin’s all-beer refrigerator.

So if that’s the word I did one of those things you do and never find out why, even though something in you knows you could never have done anything else.

I took her home.

I have two rooms in an old condo rack at the corner of Fourth and MacDonald, tenth floor. The elevators usually work, and if you sit on the balcony railing and lean out backward, holding on to the corner of the building next door, you can see a little upright slit of sea and mountain.

She hadn’t said a word, all the way back from Rubin’s, and I was getting sober enough to feel very uneasy as I unlocked the door and let her in.

The first thing she saw was the portable fast-wipe I’d brought home from the Pilot the night before. The exoskeleton carried her across the dusty broadloom with that same walk, like a model down a runway. Away from the crash of the party, I could hear it click softly as it moved her. She stood there, looking down at the fast-wipe. I could see the thing’s ribs when she stood like that, make them out across her back through the scuffed black leather of her jacket. One of those diseases. Either one of the old ones they’ve never quite figured out or one of the new ones the all too obviously environmental kind that they’ve barely even named yet. She couldn’t move, not without that extra skeleton, and it was jacked straight into her brain, myoclectric interface. The fragile-looking polycarbon braces moved her arms and legs, but a more subtle system handled her thin hands, galvanic inlays. I thought of frog legs twitching in a high-school lab tape, then hated myself for it.

“This is a fast-wipe module,” she said, in a voice I hadn’t heard before, distant, and I thought then that the wizz might be wearing off. “What’s it doing here?”

“I edit,” I said, closing the door behind me.

“Well, now,” and she laughed. “You do. Where?”

“On the Island. Place called the Autonomic Pilot.”

She turned; then, hand on thrust hip, she swung it swung her and the wizz and the hate and some terrible parody of lust stabbed out at me from those washed-out gray eyes. “You wanna make it, editor?”

And I felt the whip come down again, but I wasn’t going to take it, not again. So I cold-eyed her from somewhere down in the beer-numb core of my walking, talking, live-limbed, and entirely ordinary body and the words came out of me like spit: “Could you feel it, if I did?”

Beat. Maybe she blinked, but her face never registered. “No,” she said, “but sometimes I like to watch.”

Rubin stands at the window, two days after her death in Los Angeles, watching snow fall into False Creek. “So you never went to bed with her?”

One of his push-me-pull-you’s, little roller-bearing Escher lizards, scoots across the table in front of me, in curl-up mode.

“No.” I say, and it’s true. Then I laugh. “But we jacked straight across. That first night.”

“You were crazy,” he said, a certain approval in his voice. “It might have killed you. Your heart might have stopped, you might have stopped breathing . . .” He turns back to the window. “Has she called you yet?”

We jacked, straight across.

I’d never done it before. If you’d asked me why, I would have told you that I was an editor and that it wasn’t professional.

The truth would be something more like this.

In the trade, the legitimate trade, I’ve never done porno—we call the raw product dry dreams. Dry dreams are neural output from levels of consciousness that most people can only access in sleep. But artists, the kind I work with at the Autonomic Pilot, are able to break the surface tension, dive down deep, down and out, out into Jung’s sea, and bring back well, dreams. Keep it simple. I guess some artists have always done that, in whatever medium, but neuroelectronics lets us access the experience, and the net gets it all out on the wire, so we can package it, sell it, watch how it moves in the market. Well, the more things change . . . That’s something my father liked to say.

Ordinarily I get the raw material in a studio situation, filtered through several million dollars’ worth of baffles, and I don’t even have to see the artist. The stuff we get out to the consumer, you see, has been structured, balanced, turned into art. There are still people naive enough to assume that they’ll actually enjoy jacking straight across with someone they love. I think most teenagers try it, once. Certainly it’s easy enough to do.

Radio Shack will sell you the box and the trodes and the cables. But me, I’d never done it. And now that I think about it, I’m not so sure I can explain why. Or that I even want to try.

I do know why I did it with Lise, sat down beside her on my Mexican futon and snapped the optic lead into the socket on the spine, the smooth dorsal ridge, of the exoskeleton. It was high up, at the base of her neck, hidden by her dark hair.

Because she claimed she was an artist, and because I knew that we were engaged, somehow, in total combat, and I was not going to lose. That may not make sense to you, but then you never knew her, or know her through Kings of Sleep, which isn’t the same at all. You never felt that hunger she had, which was pared down to a dry need, hideous in its singleness of purpose. People who know exactly what they want have always frightened me, and Lise had known what she wanted for a long time, and wanted nothing else at all. And I was scared, then, of admitting to myself that I was scared, and I’d seen enough strangers’ dreams, in the mixing room at the Autonomic Pilot, to know that most people’s inner monsters are foolish things, ludicrous in the calm light of one’s own consciousness. And I was still drunk.

I put the trodes on and reached for the stud on the fast-wipe. I’d shut down its studio functions, temporarily converting eighty thousand dollars’ worth of Japanese electronics to the equivalent of one of those little Radio Shack boxes. “Hit it,” I said, and touched the switch.

Words. Words cannot. Or, maybe, just barely, if I even knew how to begin to describe it, what came up out of her, what she did . . .

There’s a segment on Kings of Sleep; it’s like you’re on a motorcycle at midnight, no lights but somehow you don’t need them, blasting out along a cliff-high stretch of coast highway, so fast that you hang there in a cone of silence, the bike’s thunder lost behind you. Everything, lost behind you . . . It’s just a blink, on Kings, but it’s one of the thousand things you remember, go back to, incorporate into your own vocabulary of feelings. Amazing. Freedom and death, right there, right there, razor’s edge, forever.

What I got was the big-daddy version of that, raw rush, the king hell killer uncut real thing, exploding eight ways from Sunday into a void that stank of poverty and lovelessness and obscurity.

And that was Lise’s ambition, that rush, seen from the inside.

It probably took all of four seconds.

And, course, she’d won.

I took the trodes off and stared at the wall, eyes wet, the framed posters swimming.

I couldn’t look at her. I heard her disconnect the optic lead. I heard the exoskeleton creak as it hoisted her up from the futon. Heard it tick demurely as it hauled her into the kitchen for a glass of water.

Then I started to cry.

Rubin inserts a skinny probe in the roller-bearing belly of a sluggish push-me-pull-you and peers at the circuitry through magnifying glasses with miniature headlights mounted at the temples.

“So? You got hooked.” He shrugs, looks up. It’s dark now and the twin tensor beams stab at my face, chill damp in his steel barn and the lonesome hoot of a foghorn from somewhere across the water. “So?”

My turn to shrug. “I just did . . . There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.”

The beams duck back to the silicon heart of his defective toy. “Then you’re okay. It was a true choice. What I mean is, she was set to be what she is. You had about as much to do with where she’s at today as that fast-wipe module did. She’d have found somebody else if she hadn’t found you . . .”

I made a deal with Barry, the senior editor, got twenty minutes at five on a cold September morning. Lise came in and hit me with that same shot, but this time I was ready, with my baffles and brain maps, and I didn’t have to feel it. It took me two weeks, piecing out the minutes in the editing room, to cut what she’d done down into something I could play for Max Bell, who owns the Pilot.

Bell hadn’t been happy, not happy at all, as I explained what I’d done. Maverick editors can be a problem, and eventually most editors decide that they’ve found someone who’ll be it, the next monster, and then they start wasting time and money. He’d nodded when I’d finished my pitch, then scratched his nose with the cap of his red feltpen. “Uh-huh. Got it. Hottest thing since fish grew legs, right?”

But he’d jacked it, the demo soft I’d put together, and when it clicked out of its slot in his Braun desk unit, he was staring at the wall, his face blank. “Max?”

“Huh?”

“What do you think?”

“Think? I . . . What did you say her name was?”

He blinked. “Lisa? Who you say she’s signed with?”

“Lise. Nobody, Max. She hasn’t signed with any-body yet.”

“Jesus Christ.” He still looked blank.

“You know how I found her?” Rubin asks, wading through ragged cardboard boxes to find the light switch. The boxes are filled with carefully sorted gomi: lithium batteries, tantalum capacitors, RF connectors, bread-boards, barrier strips, ferro-resonant transformers, spools of bus bar wire . . . One box is filled with the severed heads of hundreds of Barbie dolls, another with armored industrial safety gauntlets that look like space-suit gloves. Light floods the room and a sort of Kandinsky mantis in snipped and painted tin swings its golfball-size head toward the bright bulb. “I was down Granville on a gomi run, back in an alley, and I found her just sitting there. Caught the skeleton and she didn’t look so good, so I asked her if she was okay. Nothin’. Just closed her eyes. Not my lookout, I think. But I happen back by there about four hours later and she hasn’t moved. ‘Look, honey,’ I tell her, ‘maybe your hardware’s buggered up. I can help you, okay?’ Nothin’. ‘How long you been back here?’ Nothin’. So I take off.” He crosses to his workbench and strokes the thin metal limbs of the mantis thing with a pale forefinger. Behind the bench, hung on damp-swollen sheets of ancient pegboard, are pliers, screwdrivers, tie-wrap guns, a rusted Daisy BB rifle, coax strippers, crimpers, logic probes, heat guns, a pocket oscilloscope, seemingly every tool in human history, with no attempt ever made to order them at all, though I’ve yet to see Rubin’s hand hesitate.

“So I went back,” he says. “Gave it an hour. She was out by then, unconscious, so I brought her back here and ran a check on the exoskeleton. Batteries were dead. She’d crawled back there when the juice ran out and settled down to starve to death, I guess.”

“When was that?”

“About a week before you took her home.”

“But what if she’d died? If you hadn’t found her?”

“Somebody was going to find her. She couldn’t ask for anything, you know? Just take. Couldn’t stand a favor.”

Max found the agents for her, and a trio of awesomely slick junior partners Leared into YVR a day later. Lise wouldn’t come down to the Pilot to meet them, insisted we bring them up to Rubin’s, where she still slept.

“Welcome to Couverville,” Rubin said as they edged in the door. His long face was smeared with grease, the fly of his ragged fatigue pants held more or less shut with a twisted paper clip. The boys grinned automatically, but there was something marginally more authentic about the girl’s smile. “Mr. Stark,” she said, “I was in London last week. I saw your installation at the Tate.”

“Marcello ‘s Battery Factory,” Rubin said. “They say it’s scatological, the Brits . . .” He shrugged. “Brits. I mean, who knows?”

“They’re right. It’s also very funny.”

The boys were beaming like tabled-tanned lighthouses, standing there in their suits. The demo had reached Los Angeles. They knew.

“And you’re Lise,” she said, negotiating the path between Rubin’s heaped gomi. “You’re going to be a very famous person soon, Lise. We have a lot to discuss . . .”

And Lise just stood there, propped in polycarbon, and the look on her face was the one I’d seen that first night, in my condo, when she’d asked me if I wanted to go to bed. But if the junior agent lady saw it, she didn’t show it. She was a pro.

I told myself that I was a pro, too.

I told myself to relax.

Trashfires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whip-ping their dark coats. Up in Fairview’s arty slum-tumble, someone’s laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheet standing out against the back-ground dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist’s eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates.

Rubin clumps along in paint-spattered L. L. Bean gumshoes, his big head pulled down into an oversize fatigue jacket. Sometimes one of the hunched teens will point him out as we pass, the guy who builds all the crazy stuff, the robots and shit.

“You know what your trouble is?” he says when we’re under the bridge, headed up to Fourth. “You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. Like Lise.”

“She wasn’t the first.” Traffic drums past overhead.

“No, but she’s sure as hell the first person you ever met who went and translated themself into a hardwired program. You lose any sleep when whatsisname did it, three-four years ago, the French kid, the writer?”

“I didn’t really think about it, much. A gimmick. PR . . .”

“He’s still writing. The weird thing is, he’s going to be writing, unless somebody blows up his mainframe . . .”

I wince, shake my head. “But it’s not him, is it? It’s just a program.”

“Interesting point. Hard to say. With Lise, though, we find out. She’s not a writer.”

She had it all in there, Kings, locked up in her head the way her body was locked in that exoskeleton.

The agents signed her with a label and brought in a production team from Tokyo. She told them she wanted me to edit. I said no; Max dragged me into his office and threatened to fire me on the spot. If I wasn’t involved, there was no reason to do the studio work at the Pilot. Vancouver was hardly the center of the world, and the agents wanted her in Los Angeles. It meant a lot of money to him, and it might put the Autonomic Pilot on the map. I couldn’t explain to him why I’d refused. It was too crazy, too personal; she was getting a final dig in. Or that’s what I thought then. But Max was serious. He really didn’t give me any choice. We both knew another job wasn’t going to crawl into my hand. I went back out with him and we told the agents that we’d worked it out: I was on.

The agents showed us lots of teeth.

Lise pulled out an inhaler full of wizz and took a huge hit. I thought I saw the agent lady raise one perfect eyebrow, but that was the extent of censure. After the papers were signed, Lise more or less did what she wanted.

And Lise always knew what she wanted.

We did Kings in three weeks, the basic recording. I found any number of reasons to avoid Rubin’s place, even believed some of them myself. She was still staying there, although the agents weren’t too happy with what they saw as a total lack of security. Rubin told me later that he’d had to have his agent call them up and raise hell, but after that they seemed to quit worrying. I hadn’t known that Rubin had an agent. It was always easy to forget that Rubin Stark was more famous, then, than anyone else I knew, certainly more famous than I thought Lise was ever likely to become. I knew we were working on something strong, but you never know how big anything’s liable to be.

But the time I spent in the Pilot, I was on. Lise was amazing.

It was like she was born to the form, even though the technology that made that form possible hadn’t even existed when she was born. You see something like that and you wonder how many thousands, maybe millions, of phenomenal artists have died mute, down the centuries, people who could never have been poets or painters or saxophone players, but who had this stuff inside, these psychic waveforms waiting for the circuitry required to tap in . . .

I learned a few things about her, incidentals, from our time in the studio. That she was born in Windsor. That her father was American and served in Peru and came home crazy and half-blind. That whatever was wrong with her body was congenital. That she had those sores because she refused to remove the exoskeleton, ever, because she’d start to choke and die at the thought of that utter helplessness. That she was addicted to wizz and doing enough of it daily to wire a football team.

Her agents brought in medics, who padded the polycarbon with foam and sealed the sores over with micropore dressings. They pumped her up with vitamins and tried to work on her diet, but nobody ever tried to take that inhaler away.

They brought in hairdressers and makeup artists, too, and wardrobe people and image builders and articulate little PR hamsters, and she endured it with something that might almost have been a smile.

And, right through those three weeks, we didn’t talk. Just studio talk, artist-editor stuff, very much a restricted code. Her imagery was so strong, so extreme, that she never really needed to explain a given effect to me. I took what she put out and worked with it, and jacked it back to her. She’d either say yes or no, and usually it was yes. The agents noted this and approved, and clapped Max Bell on the back and took him out to dinner, and my salary went up.

And I was pro, all the way. Helpful and thorough and polite. I was determined not to crack again, and never thought about the night I cried, and I was also doing the best work I’d ever done, and knew it, and that’s a high in itself.

And then, one morning, about six, after a long, long session when she’d first gotten that eerie cotillion sequence out, the one the kids call the Ghost Dance she spoke to me. One of the two agent boys had been there, showing teeth, but he was gone now and the Pilot was dead quiet, just the hum of a blower somewhere down by Max’s office.

“Casey,” she said, her voice hoarse with the wizz, “sorry I hit on you so hard.”

I thought for a minute she was telling me something about the recording we’d just made. I looked up and saw her there, and it struck me that we were alone, and hadn’t been alone since we’d made the demo.

I had no idea at all what to say. Didn’t even know what I felt.

Propped up in the exoskeleton, she was looking worse than she had that first night, at Rubin’s. The wizz was eating her, under the stuff the makeup team kept smoothing on, and sometimes it was like seeing a death’s-head surface beneath the face of a not very handsome teenager. I had no idea of’ her real age. Not old, not young.

“The ramp effect,” I said, coiling a length of cable.

“What’s that?”

“Nature’s way of telling you to clean up your act.

Sort of mathematical law, says you can only get off real good on a stimulant x number of times, even if you increase the doses. But you can’t ever get off as nice as you did the first few times. Or you shouldn’t be able to, anyway. That’s the trouble with designer drugs; they’re too clever. That stuff you’re doing has some tricky tail on one of its molecules, keeps you from turning the decomposed adrenaline into adrenochrome. If it didn’t, you’d be schizophrenic by now. You got any little problems, Lise? Like apneia? Sometimes maybe you stop breathing if you go to sleep?”

But I wasn’t even sure I felt the anger that I heard in my own voice.

She stared at me with those pale gray eyes. The wardrobe people had replaced her thrift-shop jacket with a butter-tanned matte black blouse on that did a better job of hiding the polycarbon ribs. She kept it zipped to the neck, always, even though it was too warm in the studio. The hairdressers had tried something new the day before, and it hadn’t worked out, her rough dark hair a lopsided explosion above that drawn, triangular face. She stared at me and I felt it again, her singleness of purpose.

“I don’t sleep, Casey.”

It wasn’t until later, much later, that I remembered she’d told me she was sorry. She never did again, and it was the only time I ever heard her say anything that seemed to be out of character.

Rubin’s diet consists of vending-machine sandwiches, Pakistani takeout food, and espresso. I’ve never seen him eat anything else. We eat samosas in a narrow shop on Fourth that has a single plastic table wedged between the counter and the door to the can. Rubin eats his dozen samosas, six meat and six veggie, with total concentration, one after another, and doesn’t bother to wipe his chin. He’s devoted to the place. He loathes the Greek counterman; it’s mutual, a real relationship. If the counterman left, Rubin might not come back. The Greek glares at the crumbs on Rubin’s chin and jacket. Between samosas, he shoots daggers right back, his eyes narrowed behind the smudged lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses.

The samosas are dinner. Breakfast will be egg salad on dead white bread, packed in one of those triangles of milky plastic, on top of six little cups of poisonously strong espresso.

“You didn’t see it coming, Casey.” He peers at me out of the thumbprinted depths of his glasses. “ ’cause you’re no good at lateral thinking. You read the handbook. What else did you think she was after? Sex? More win? A world tour? She was past all that. That’s what made her so strong. She was past it. That’s why Kings of Sleep’s as big as it is, and why the kids buy it, why they believe it. They know. Those kids back down the Market, warming their butts around the fires and wondering if they’ll find someplace to sleep tonight, they believe it. It’s the hottest soft in eight years. Guy at a shop on Granville told me he gets more of the damned things lifted than he sells of anything else. Says it’s a hassle to even stock it . . . She’s big because she was what they are, only more so. She knew, man. No dreams, no hope. You can’t see the cages on those kids, Casey, but more and more they’re twigging to it, that they aren’t going anywhere.” He brushes a greasy crumb of meat from his chin, missing three more. “So she sang it for them, said it that way they can’t, painted them a picture. And she used the money to buy herself a way out, that’s all.”

I watch the steam bead roll down the window in big drops, streaks in the condensation. Beyond the window I can make out a partially stripped Lada, wheels scavenged, axles down on the pavement.

“How many people have done it, Rubin? Have any idea?”

“Not too many. Hard to say, anyway, because a lot of them are probably politicians we think of as being comfortably and reliably dead.” He gives me a funny look. “Not a nice thought. Anyway, they had first shot at the technology. It still costs too much for any ordinary dozen millionaires, but I’ve heard of at least seven. They say Mitsubishi did it to Weinberg before his immune system finally went tits up. He was head of their hybridoma lab in Okayama. Well, their stock’s still pretty high, in monoclonals, so maybe it’s true. And Langlais, the French kid, the novelist . . .” He shrugs. “Lise didn’t have the money for it. Wouldn’t now, even. But she put herself in the right place at the right time. She was about to croak, she was in Hollywood, and they could already see what Kings was going to do.”

The day we finished up, the band stepped off a JAL shuttle out of London, four skinny kids who operated like a well-oiled machine and displayed a hypertrophied fashion sense and a total lack of affect. I set them up in a row at the Pilot, in identical white Ikea office chairs, smeared saline paste on their temples, taped the trodes on, and ran the rough version of what was going to become Kings of Sleep. When they came out of it, they all started talking at once, ignoring me totally, in the British version of that secret language all studio musicians speak, four sets of pale hands zooming and chopping the air.

I could catch enough of it to decide that they were excited. That they thought it was good. So I got my jacket and left. They could wipe their own saline paste off, thanks.

And that night I saw Lise for the last time, though I didn’t plan to.

Walking back down to the Market, Rubin noisily digesting his meal, red taillights reflected on wet cobbles, the city beyond the Market a clean sculpture of light, a lie, where the broken and the lost burrow into the gomi that grows like humus at the bases of the towers of glass.

“I gotta go to Frankfurt tomorrow, do an installation. You wanna come? I could write you off as a technician.” He shrugs his way deeper into the fatigue jacket. “Can’t pay you, but you can have airfare, you want.”

Funny offer, from Rubin, and I know it’s because he’s worried about me, thinks I’m too strange about Lise, and it’s the only thing he can think of, getting me out of town.

“It’s colder in Frankfurt now than it is here.”

“You maybe need a change, Casey. I dunno . . .”

“Thanks, but Max has a lot of work lined up. Pilot’s a big deal now, people flying in from all over . . .”

“Sure.”

When I left the band at the Pilot, I went home. Walked up to Fourth and took the trolley home, past the windows of the shops I see every day, each one lit up jazzy and slick, clothes and shoes and software, Japanese motorcycles crouched like clean enamel scorpions, Italian furniture. The windows change with the seasons, the shops come and go. We were into the pre-holiday mode now, and there were more people on the street, a lot of couples, walking quickly and purposefully past the bright windows, on their way to score that perfect little whatever for whomever, half the girls in those padded thigh-high nylon boot things that came out of New York the winter before, the ones that Rubin said made them look like they had elephantiasis. I grinned, thinking about that, and suddenly it hit me that it really was over, that I was done with Lise, and that now she’d be sucked off to Hollywood as inexorably as if she’d poked her toe into a black hole, drawn by the unthinkable gravitic tug of Big Money. Believing that, that she was gone probably was gone, by then I let down some kind of guard in myself and felt the edges of my pity. But just the edges, because I didn’t want my evening screwed up by anything. I wanted partytime. It had been a while.

Got off at my corner and the elevator worked on the first try. Good sign, I told myself. Upstairs, I undressed and showered, found a clean shirt, microwaved burritos. Feel normal, I advised my reflection while I shaved. You have been working too hard. Your credit cards have gotten fat. Time to remedy that.

The burritos tasted like cardboard, but I decided I liked them because they were so aggressively normal. My car was in Burnaby, having its leaky hydrogen cell repacked, so I wasn’t going to have to worry about driving. I could go out, find partytime, and phone in. sick in the morning. Max wasn’t going to kick; I was his star boy. He owed me.

You owe me, Max, I said to the subzero bottle of Moskovskaya I fished out of the freezer. Do you ever owe me. I have just spent three weeks editing the dreams and nightmares of one very screwed up person, Max. On your behalf. So that you can grow and prosper, Max. I poured three fingers of vodka into a plastic glass left over from a party I’d thrown the year before and went back into the living room.

Sometimes it looks to me like nobody in particular lives there. Not that it’s that messy; I’m a good if somewhat robotic housekeeper, and even remember to dust the tops of framed posters and things, but I have these times when the place abruptly gives me a kind of low-grade chill, with its basic accumulation of basic consumer goods. I mean, it’s not like I want to fill it up with cats or houseplants or anything, but there are moments when I see that anyone could be living there, could own those things, and it all seems sort of interchangeable, my life and yours, my life and anybody’s . . .

I think Rubin sees things that way, too, all the time, but for him it’s a source of strength. He lives in other people’s garbage, and everything he drags home must have been new and shiny once, must have meant something, however briefly, to someone. So he sweeps it all up into his crazy-looking truck and hauls it back to his place and lets it compost there until he thinks of something new to do with it. Once he was showing me a book of twentieth-century art he liked, and there was a picture of an automated sculpture called Dead Birds Fly Again, a thing that whirled real dead birds around and around on a string, and he smiled and nodded, and I could see he felt the artist was a spiritual ancestor of some kind. But what could Rubin do with my framed posters and my Mexican futon from the Bay and my temperfoam bed from Ikea? Well, I thought, taking a first chilly sip, he’d be able to think of something, which was why he was a famous artist and I wasn’t.

I went and pressed my forehead against the plate-glass window, as cold as the glass in my hand. Time to go, I said to myself. You are exhibiting symptoms of urban singles angst. There are cures for this. Drink up. Go.

I didn’t attain a state of partytime that night. Neither did I exhibit adult common sense and give up, go home, watch some ancient movie, and fall asleep on my futon. The tension those three weeks had built up in me drove me like the mainspring of a mechanical watch, and I went ticking off through nighttown, lubricating my more or less random progress with more drinks. It was one of those nights, I quickly decided, when you slip into an alternate continuum, a city that looks exactly like the one where you live, except for the peculiar difference that it contains not one person you love or know or have even spoken to before. Nights like that, you can go into a familiar bar and find that the staff has just been replaced; then you understand that your real motive in going there was simply to see a familiar face, on a waitress or a bartender, whoever . . . This sort of thing has been known to mediate against partytime.

I kept it rolling, though, through six or eight places, and eventually it rolled me into a West End club that looked as if it hadn’t been redecorated since the Nineties. A lot of peeling chrome over plastic, blurry holograms that gave you a headache if you tried to make them out. I think Barry had told me about the place, but I can’t imagine why. I looked around and grinned. If I was looking to be depressed, I’d come to the right place. Yes, I told myself as I took a corner stool at the bar, this was genuinely sad, really the pits. Dreadful enough to halt the momentum of my shitty evening, which was undoubtedly a good thing. I’d have one more for the road, admire the grot, and then cab it on home.

And then I saw Lise.

She hadn’t seen me, not yet, and I still had my coat on, tweed collar up against the weather. She was down the bar and around the corner with a couple of empty drinks in front of her, big ones, the kind that come with little Hong Kong parasols or plastic mermaids in them, and as she looked up at the boy beside her, I saw the wizz flash in her eyes and knew that those drinks had never contained alcohol, because the levels of drug she was running couldn’t tolerate the mix. The kid, though, was gone, numb grinning drunk and about ready to slide off his stool, and running on about something as he made repeated attempts to focus his eyes and get a better look at Lise, who sat there with her wardrobe team’s black leather blouson zipped to her chin and her skull about to burn through her white face like a thousand-watt bulb. And seeing that, seeing her there, I knew a whole lot of things at once.

That she really was dying, either from the wizz or her disease or the combination of the two. That she damned well knew it. That the boy beside her was too drunk to have picked up on the exoskeleton, but not too drunk to register the expensive jacket and the money she had for drinks. And that what I was seeing was exactly what it looked like.

But I couldn’t add it up, right away, couldn’t compute. Something in me cringed.

And she was smiling, or anyway doing a thing she must have thought was like a smile, the expression she knew was appropriate to the situation, and nodding in time to the kid’s slurred inanities, and that awful line of hers came back to me, the one about liking to watch.

And I know something now. I know that if I hadn’t happened in there, hadn’t seen them, I’d have been able to accept all that came later. Might even have found a way to rejoice on her behalf, or found a way to trust in whatever it is that she’s since become, or had built in her image, a program that pretends to be Lise to the extent that it believes it’s her. I could have believed what Rubin believes, that she was so truly past it, our hi-tech Saint Joan burning for union with that hardwired godhead in Hollywood, that nothing mattered to her except the hour of her departure. That she threw away that poor sad body with a cry of release, free of the bonds of polycarbon and hated flesh. Well, maybe, after all, she did. Maybe it was that way. I’m sure that’s the way she expected it to be.

But seeing her there, that drunken kid’s hand in hers, that hand she couldn’t even feel, I knew, once and for all, that no human motive is ever entirely pure. Even Lise, with that corrosive, crazy drive to stardom and cybernetic immortality, had weaknesses. Was human in a way I hated myself for admitting.

She’d gone out that night, I knew, to kiss herself goodbye. To find someone drunk enough to do it for her. Because, I knew then, it was true: She did like to watch.

I think she saw me, as I left. I was practically running. If she did, I suppose she hated me worse than ever, for the horror and the pity in my face.

I never saw her again.

Someday I’ll ask Rubin why Wild Turkey sours are the only drink he knows how to make. Industrial-strength, Rubin’s sours. He passes me the dented aluminum cup, while his place ticks and stirs around us with the furtive activity of his smaller creations.

“You ought to come to Frankfurt,” he says again.

“Why, Rubin?”

“Because pretty soon she’s going to call you up. And I think maybe you aren’t ready for it. You’re still screwed up about this, and it’ll sound like her and think like her, and you’ll get too weird behind it. Come over to Frankfurt with me and you can get a little breathing space. She won’t know you’re there . . .”

“I told you,” I say, remembering her at the bar in that club, “lots of work. Max—”

“Stuff Max. Max you just made rich. Max can sit on his hands. You’re rich yourself, from your royalty cut on Kings, if you weren’t too stubborn to dial up your bank account. You can afford a vacation.”

I look at him and wonder when I’ll tell him the story of that final glimpse. “Rubin, I appreciate it, man, but I just . . .”

He sighs, drinks. “But what?”

“Rubin, if she calls me, is it her?”

He looks at me a long time. “God only knows.”

His cup clicks on the table. “I mean, Casey, the technology is there, so who, man, really who, is to say?”

“And you think I should come with you to Frankfurt?”

He takes off his steel-rimmed glasses and polishes them inefficiently on the front of his plaid flannel shirt. “Yeah, I do. You need the rest. Maybe you don’t need it now, but you’re going to later.”

“How’s that?”

“When you have to edit her next release. Which will almost certainly be soon, because she needs money bad. She’s taking up a lot of ROM on some corporate mainframe, and her share of Kings won’t come close to paying for what they had to do to put her there. And you’re her editor, Casey. I mean, who else?”

And I just stare at him as he puts the glasses back on, like I can’t move at all.

“Who else, man?”

And one of his constructs clicks right then, just a clear and tiny sound, and it comes to me, he’s right.

William Gibson’s first book, Neuromoncer, won most of the American awards for best science-fiction novel last year (Hugo, Nebula, etc). He is regarded as unofficial leader of the “cyberpunk” movement—a term which was coined by sf editor and anthologist Gardner Dozois. His second novel, Count Zero, is due to be published by Gollancz around the same time as this issue of Interzone. Also due for publication this year is his first collection of short stories, Burning Chrome. The above piece will appear in that volume.

THOR MEETS CAPTAIN AMERICA

David Brin

Loki’s dwarf rolled its eyes and moaned pitifully as the sub levelled off at periscope depth. With stubby fingers the gnarled, neckless creature pulled at its yellow-stained beard and stared up at the creaking pipes.

A thing of dark forest depths and hidden caves, Chris Turing thought as he watched the dwarf. It wasn’t meant for this place.

Only men would choose such a way to die, in a leaking steel coffin, on a hopeless attempt to blow up Valhalla.

But then, it wasn’t like Loki’s dwarf had been given any choice in being here.

Why, Chris wondered suddenly—not for the first time. Why do such creatures exist? Wasn’t evil doing well enough in the world before they came to help it along?

The submarine’s engines rumbled and Chris shrugged aside the thought. Even imagining a world without Aesir and their servants in it was by now as hard as remembering a time without war.

Chris sat strapped in his crash seat—he could hear the swishing of icy Baltic water just behind the tissue-thin bulkhead—and watched the gnome huddle atop a crate of hydrogen bomb parts. It drew its clublike feet up away from the sloshing brine on the deck, scrunching higher on the black box. Another moan escaped the dwarf as the Razorfin’s periscope went up, and more water gurgled in through the pressure relief lines.

Major Marlowe looked up from the assault rifle he was reassembling for the thirtieth time. “What’s eating the damn dwarf now?” the marine officer asked.

Chris shook his head. “Search me. The fact that he’s out of his element, maybe? After all, the ancient Norse thought of the deep as a place for sunken boats and fishes.”

“I thought you were some sort of expert on the Aesir. And you aren’t even sure why the thing is foaming at the mouth like that?”

Chris could only shrug and repeat himself. “I said I don’t know. Why don’t you go over and ask him yourself?”

Marlowe gave Chris a sour glance, as if to say that he didn’t much care for the joke. “Sidle up to that stench and ask Loki’s damn dwarf to explain its feelings? Hmmph. I’d rather spit in an Aesir’s eye.”

From his left, Chris’s assistant, Zap O’Leary leaned out and grinned at Marlowe. “Dig it, dad-dyo,” O’Leary said to the marine. “There’s an Aes over by the scope, dope. Be my guest. Write him runes in his spitoon.” The eccentric technician gestured over toward the navy men, clustered around the sub’s periscope. Next to the Skipper stood a hulking figure clad in furs and leather, towering over the submariners.

Marlowe blinked back at O’Leary in bewilderment. The marine did not seem offended as much as confused. “What did he say?” he asked Chris.

Chris wished he weren’t seated between the two. “Zap suggests that you test it by spitting in Loki’s eye.”

Marlowe grimaced. O’Leary might as well have suggested he stick his hand into a scram-jet engine. At that moment one of the marines crammed into the passageway behind them made the mistake of dropping a cartridge into the foul leak-water underfoot. Marlowe vented his frustration on the poor grunt in richly inventive profanity.

The dwarf moaned again, hugging his knees against the straps holding him onto the hermetically sealed crate.

Wherever they’re from, they aren’t used to submarines, Chris thought. And these so-called dwarves sure don’t like water.

Chris wondered how Loki had managed to persuade this one to come along on this suicide mission.

Probably threatened to turn him into a toad, he speculated. I wouldn’t put it past Loki.

It was a desperate venture they were engaged in. In late 1962 there was very little time left for what remained of the Alliance against Nazism. If anything at all could be done this autumn, to stave off the inevitable, it would be worth the gamble.

Even Loki—bearlike, nearly invulnerable, and always booming forth laughter that sent chills down human spines—had betrayed nerves earlier, as the Razorfin dropped from the belly of a screaming bomber, sending their stomachs whirling as the arrow-sub plummeted like a great stone into Neptune’s icy embrace.

Chris had to admit that he would have been sick, had that brief, seemingly endless fall lasted any longer. The crash and shriek of tortured metal when they hit was almost a relief, after that.

And anything seemed an improvement over the long, screeching trip over the pole, skirting Nazi missiles, skimming mountains and gray waters in lurching zigs and zags, helplessly listening, strapped into place, as the airmen swooped their flying coffins hither and yon . . . praying that the enemy’s Aesir masters weren’t patrolling that section of the north that night . . .

Of twenty sub carriers sent out together from Baffin Island, only six had made it all the way to the waters between Sweden and Finland. And both Cetus and Tigerfish had broken up on impact with the water, tearing like ripped sardine cans and spilling their hapless crews into freezing death.

Only four subs left, Chris thought.

Still, he reminded himself. Our chances may be slim, but those poor pilots are the real heroes. He doubted even one of the crews would make it across dark, deadly Europe to Tehran and safety.

“Captain Turing!”

Chris looked up as the Skipper called his name. Commander Lewis had lowered the periscope and moved over to the chart table.

“Be right with you, Commander.” Chris unstrapped and stepped down into the brine.

“Tell ’em we’re savin’ our own hooch for ourselves,” O’Leary advised him, sotto voice. “Good pot is to rare to share.”

“Shut up, fool.” Marlowe growled. Chris ignored both of them as he sloshed forward. The Skipper awaited him, standing beside their “friendly advisor,” the alien creature calling himself Loki.

I’ve known Loki for years, Chris thought. I’ve fought alongside him against his Aesir brothers . . . and still he scares the living hell out of me every time I look at him.

Towering over everyone else, Loki regarded Chris enigmatically with fierce black eyes. The “god of tricks” looked very much like a man, albeit an unnaturally large and powerful one. But those eyes belied the impression of humanity. Chris had spent enough time with Loki, since the renegade Aesir defected to the allied side, to have learned to avoid looking into them whenever possible.

“Sir,” he said, nodding to Commander Lewis and the bearded Aesir. “I take it we’re approaching point Y?”

“That’s correct,” the Skipper said. “We’ll be there in about twenty minutes, barring anything unforeseen.”

Lewis seemed to have aged over the last twenty hours. The young sub commander knew that his squadron wasn’t the only thing considered expendable in this operation. Several thousand miles to the west, the better part of what remained of the United States Surface Navy was engaged hopelessly for one reason only—to distract the Kriegsmarine and the SS and especially a certain “god of the sea” away from the Baltic and Operation Ragnarok. Loki’s cousin Tyr wasn’t very potent against submarines, but unless his attention was drawn elsewhere, he could make life hell for them when their tiny force tried to land.

So tonight, instead, he would be making hell for American and Canadian and Mexican sailors, far away.

Chris shied away from thinking about it. Too many boys were going to their deaths off Labrador, just to keep one alien creature occupied while four subs tried to sneak in through the back door.

“Thank you. I’d better tell Marlowe and my demolition team.” He turned to go, but was stopped by an outsized hand on his arm, holding him gently but with steel-like adamancy.

“Thou must know something more,” the being called Loki said in a low, resonant voice. Impossibly white teeth shone in that gleaming smile above Chris. “Thou wilt have a passenger in going ashore.”

Chris blinked. The plan had been for only his team and their commando escort . . . Then he saw the pallor of dread on the Commander Lewis’s face—deeper than any mere fear of death.

Chris turned back to stare at the fur-clad giant. “You . . .” he breathed.

Loki nodded. “That is correct. There will be a slight change in plans. I will not accompany the undersea vessels, as they attempt to break out through the Skagerak. I will go ashore with thee, instead, to Gotland.”

Chris kept his face blank. In all honesty, there was no way this side of Heaven that he or Lewis or anybody else could stop this creature from doing anything it wanted to do. One way or the other, the Allies were about to lose their only Aesir friend in the long war against the Nazi plague.

If the word “friend” ever really described Loki—who had appeared one day on the tarmac of a Scottish airfield during the final evacuation of Britain, accompanied by eight small, bearded beings carrying boxes—who led them up to the nearest amazed officer to imperiously commandeer the Prime Minister’s personal plane to take him the rest of the way to America.

Perhaps an armored battalion might have stopped him. Battle reports had proven that Aesir could be killed, if you were real lucky, and pounded one hard and fast enough. But when the local commander realized what was happening, he had decided to take a chance.

Loki had proven his worth over and over again since that day ten years ago.

Until now, that is.

“If you insist,” he told the Aes.

“I do. It is my will.”

“Then I’ll go explain it to Major Marlowe. Excuse me please.”

He backed away a few meters first, then turned to go. As he sloshed away, that glittering stare seemed to follow him, past the moaning dwarf, past O’Leary’s ever-sardonic smile, down the narrow, dank passageway lined with strapped-in Marines, all the way to the sabot launching tubes.

Voices were hushed. All the young men spoke English, but only half were North Americans. Their shoulder patches—Free French, Free Russian, Free Irish, German Christian—were muted in the dim light, but the mixed accents were unmistakable, as well as the way they stroked their weapons and the gleam Chris caught sight of in several pairs of eyes.

These were the sort that volunteered for suicide missions, the type—common in the world after thirteen years of horrible war—that had little or nothing left to lose.

Major Marlowe had come back to supervise the loading of the landing boats. He did not take Chris’s news well.

“Loki wants to come along? To Gotland?” He spat. “The bastard’s a spy. I knew it all the time!”

Chris shook his head. “He’s helped us in a hundred ways, John. Why, just by accompanying Ike to Tokyo, and convincing the Japanese . . .”

“Big deal! We’d already beaten the Japs!” The big marine clenched his fist, hard. “Like we’d have crushed Hitler, if these monsters hadn’t arrived, like Satan’s curse, out of nowhere.

“And now he’s lived among us for ten years, observing our methods, our tactics, and our technology, the only real advantage we had left!”

Chris grimaced. How could he explain it to Marlowe? The Marine officer had never been to Tehran, as Chris had, only last year. Marlowe had never seen the capital city of Israel-Iran, America’s greatest and most stalwart ally, bulwark of the East.

There, in dozens of armed settlements along the east bank of the Euphrates, Chris had met fierce men and women who bore on their arms tattooed numbers from Treblinka, Dachau, Auschwitz. He had heard their story of how, one hopeless night under barbed wire and the stench of chimneys, the starving, doomed masses had looked up to see a strange vapor fall from the sky. Unbelieving, death-starkened eyes had stared in wonderment as the mists gathered and coalesced into something that seemed almost solid.

Out of that eerie fog, a bridge of many colors formed . . . a rainbow arch climbing, apparently without end, out of the places of horror into a moonless night. And from the heights, each doomed man and woman saw a dark-eyed figure on a flying horse ride down. They felt him whisper to them inside their minds.

Come, children, while your tormenters blink unbelievingly in my web of the mind. Come, all, over my bridge to safety, before my cousins descrie my treason.

When they sank to their knees, or rocked in thankful prayer, the figure only snorted in derision. His voice hissed within their heads.

Do not mistake me for your God, who left you here to die! I cannot explain that One’s absence to you, or His plan in all this. The All-Father is a mystery even to Great Odin!

Know only that I will take you to safety now, such as there may be in this world. But only if you hurry! Come, and be grateful later, if you must!

Down to the camps, to bleak ghettoes, to a city under siege—the bridges formed in a single night, and with dawn were gone like vapor or a dream. Two million people, the old, the lame, women, children, the slaves of Hitler’s war factories, climbed those paths—for there was no other choice—and found themselves transported to a desert land, by the banks of an ancient river.

They arrived just in time to take up hasty arms and save a British Army fleeing the wreckage of Egypt and Palestine. They fused with the astonished Persians, and with refugees from crippled Russia, and together they built a new nation out of chaos.

That was why Loki appeared on the tarmac in Scotland, shortly after that night of miracles. He could not return to Europe, for the fury of his Aesir kin would be savage. In returning to Gotland, today, he was certainly in as much peril as the commandos.

“No, Marlowe. Loki’s not a spy. I haven’t any idea what on God’s green Earth he is. But I’d bet my life he’s not a spy.”

2

The sabots gurgled and rocked as they shot free of the submarine and bobbed to the surface of the cold sea. The outer shells broke away, and the sailors dipped their oars. The men all took their first breath of clean air in more than a day.

Loki’s dwarf seemed little relieved. He looked across the dark waters to the west, where the thin, reddish line of sunset outlined the hills of a great Baltic island, and muttered gutterally in a language like nothing Earthly.

Which was only natural. Like most Americans, Chris was convinced that these beings were as much the ancient Norse gods—recalled into the modern world—as he was Sandy Koufax, or that they didn’t play baseball in Brooklyn.

Aliens—that was the official line . . . the story broadcast by Allied Radio all through the Americas and Japan and what remained of Free Asia. Creatures from the stars had arrived, as in those stories by Chester Nimitz, the famous science fiction author.

It wasn’t hard to imagine why they might want to be looked on as gods. And it explained why they had chosen to side with the Nazis. After all, the ruse would not have worked in the West where, no matter how great their guests’ powers, Euro-American scientists would have probed and queried and people would have asked questions.

But in the Teutonic madness of Nazism, the “Aesir” had found fertile ground.

Chris had read captured German SS documents. Even back in the thirties and early forties, before the arrival of the Aesir, they had been filled with mumbo jumbo and pseudo-religious mysticism—stuff about ice moons falling from the sky and the romantic spirit of the Aryan superrace.

A Nazi-conquered world would belong to the Aesir, whoever and whatever they were. They would be gods indeed. Much as he understood the logic of a rat or a hyena, Chris could follow the aliens’ reasons for choosing the side they had, God damn them.

Silhouettes of pines outlined the hilltops, serrating the still faintly glowing western sky. The two lead boats were crammed with Marines, who were to take the beachhead and move island to scout. The flankers were Navy teams, who were supposed to prepare the boats for a getaway . . . as if anyone believed that would ever happen.

The last two craft held most of Chris’s demolition team.

Loki knelt on one knee at the prow of Chris’s boat, and stared ahead with those black, glittering eyes. Dark as he was, he nevertheless looked at that moment like something straight out of a Viking saga.

Good verisimilitude, Chris thought. Or maybe the creatures actually believed they were what they said they were. Who could tell?

All Chris knew for sure was that they had to be defeated, or for humanity there would be nothing but darkness, from now on.

He checked his watch and looked up at the sky, scanning the broad, starry openings in the clouds.

Yes, there it was. The Satellite. Riding Newton’s wings more than two hundred miles up, circling the globe every ninety minutes.

When it had appeared, the Nazis had gone into paroxysms, proclaiming it an astrological portent. For some unknown bureaucratic reason, officials in the Pentagon had sat on the secret until half the world believed Goebbels’s propaganda. Then, at last, Washington revealed the truth. That American Space-Argonauts were circling the Earth.

For two months the world had seemed turned around. This new technological wonder would be more important than the atom bomb, many thought.

Then the invasion of Canada began.

Chris turned his mind away from what was happening now, out in the Atlantic. He wished he had one of those new laser communicators, so he could tell the men up in the Satellite how things were progressing down here. But the light amplification devices were so secret, as yet, that the Chiefs of Staff had refused to allow any to be taken into the enemy’s heartland.

Supposedly the Nazis were working on a way to shoot down the Satellite. It was still a mystery why, with aliens to help them, the enemy had let their early lead in rocketry slip so badly. Chris wondered why the Aesir had allowed the American satellite to fly up there as long as this.

Perhaps they can’t really operate in space anymore . . . like they haven’t been able to crush our submarine forces.

But does that make sense? Could aliens have lost the ability to destroy such a crude spacecraft?

Chris shook his head.

Not that it matters all that much, he thought. Tonight the Atlantic fleet is dying. This winter, we’ll probably be forced to use the big bombs to hold the line in Canada . . . wrecking the continent even if we slow them down.

He looked at the figure in the boat’s prow. How can cleverness or industry or courage prevail against such power?

Those fur-covered shoulders were passive, now. But Chris had seen Loki tear down buildings with his bare hands. And Loki had admitted to being one of the weakest of these “gods".

“Loki,” he said quietly.

As often as not, the Aes would ignore any human who spoke to him without leave. But this time the dark-haired figure turned and regarded Chris. Loki’s expression was not warm, but he did.

“Thou art troubled, youngling. I spy it in thy heart.” He seemed to peer into Chris. “It is not fear, I am glad to see, but only a great perplexity.”

Fitting their assumed roles as the fabled lords of Valhalla, courage was the one human attribute most honored by the Aesir. Even by the god of trickery and treachery.

“Thank you, Loki.” Chris nodded respectfully. You could’ve fooled me. I thought I was scared spitless!

Loki’s eyes were pools glittering with starlight. “On this fateful eve, it is meet to grant a brave worm a boon. Therefore I will favor thee, mortal. Ask three questions. These will Loki answer truthfully, by his very life.”

Chris blinked, for the moment stricken speechless. He was unprepared for anything like this! Everyone from President Marshall and Admiral Heinlein on down to the lowliest Brazilian draftee had hungered for answers. Imperious and aloof, their one Aesir ally had doled out hints and clues, had helped to foil Nazi schemes and slow the implacable enemy advance, but he had never made a promise like this!

Chris could sense O’Leary tense behind him, trying to seem invisible in order to be allowed to stay and listen. For once the beatnik’s mouth stayed firmly sealed.

Pine forests loomed above them as the boat entered shallows out of the evening wind. He could smell the dark forest. There was so little time! Chris groped for a question.

“I . . . Who are you, and where did you come from?”

Loki closed his eyes. When he opened them, the black orbs were filled with dark sadness.

“Out of the body of Ymir, slain by Odin, poured the Sea.

“Gripping the body of Ymir, Yggdrasil, the great tree.

“Sprung from salt and frost, the Aesir, tremble Earth!

“Born of Giant and man, Loki, bringer of mirth.”

The creature stared at Chris. “This has always been my home,” he said. And Chris knew that he meant the Earth. “I remember ages and everything spoken of in Eddas—from the chaining of Fenris to the lies of Skrymnir. And yet . . .” Loki’s voice was faintly puzzled, even hushed. “And yet there is something about those memories . . . something laid over, as lichen lays upon the frost.”

He shook himself. “In truth, I cannot say for certain that I am older than thee, child-man.”

Loki’s massive shoulders shrugged. “But make haste with your next question. We are approaching the Gathering Place. They will be here and we must stop them from their scheming, if it is not already too late.”

Reminded suddenly of the present, Chris looked up at the wilderness looming all around them on the shadowed hillsides. “Are you sure about this plan—taking on so many of the Aesir in one place?”

Loki smiled. And Chris realized at once why. Like some idiot out of a fairy tale, he had squandered a question in a silly quest for comfort! But reassurance was not one of Loki’s strong suits.

“No, I am not sure, impertinent mortal!” Loki laughed and the rowing sailors briefly lost their stride as they looked up at the ironic, savage sound. “Think thou that only men may win honor by daring all against death? Here does Loki show his courage, to face Odin’s spear and Thor’s hammer if he must, tonight!” He turned and shook c ham-sized fist toward the west. The dwarf whimpered and crouched beside his master.

Chris saw that the Marines had already landed. Major Marlowe made quick hand gestures sending the first skirmishers fanning out into the forest. The second row of boats shipped oars and were carried by momentum toward the gravelly shore.

He hurried to take advantage of the remaining time.

“Loki. What is happening in Africa?”

Since ’49 the Dark Continent had been dark indeed. From Tunis to the Cape of Good Hope, fires burned, and rumors of horror flowed.

Loki whispered softly.

“Surtur must needs have a home, before the time of raging.

“There, in torment, men cry out, screaming for an ending.”

The giant shook his great head. “In Africa and on the great plains of Russia, terrible magics are being made, and terrible woe.”

Back in Israel-Iran Chris had seem some of the refugees—Blacks and high-cheeked Slavs—lucky escapees who had fled the fires in time. Even they had not been able to tell what was happening in the interior. Only people who had seen the earlier horrors—whose arms bore stenciled numbers from the first wave of chimney camps—could imagine what was happening in the silent continents. And those fierce men and women kept their silence.

It struck Chris that Loki did not seem to speak out of pity, but matter-of-factly, as if he thought a mistake were being made, but not any particular evil.

“Terrible magics . . .” Chris repeated. And suddenly he had a thought. “You mean the purpose isn’t only to slaughter people? That something else is going on, as well? Is it related to the reason why you saved those people from the first camps? Was something being done to them?”

Chris had a sense that there was something important here. Something ultimately crucial. But Loki smiled, holding up three fingers.

“No more questions. It is time.”

They scraped bottom. Sailors leaped out into the icy water to drag the boat up to the rocky shore. Shortly, Chris was busy supervising the unloading of their supplies, but his mind was a turmoil.

Loki was hiding something, laughing at him for having come so close and yet missing the target. There was more to this venture, tonight, than an attempt to kill a few alien gods.

High in the dark forest canopy, a crow cawed scratchily. The dwarf, laden under enough boxes to crush a man, rolled its eyes and moaned softly, but Loki seemed not to notice.

“Reet freaking hideaway, daddyo,” O’Leary muttered as he helped Chris shoulder the bomb’s fuse mechanism. “A heavy-duty scene.”

“Right,” Chris answered, feeling sure he understood the beatnik this time. “A heavy-duty scene.” They set out, following the faint blazings laid by their marine scouts.

As they climbed a narrow trail from the beach, Chris felt a growing sense of anticipation . . . a feeling of being, right then, at the navel of the world. For well or ill, this place was where the fate of the world hung. He could think of no better end than to sear this island clean of all life. If that meant standing beside the bomb and triggering it himself, well, few men ever had a chance to trade their lives so well.

They were deep under the forest canopy, now. Chris caught sight of flickering movements under the trees, marine flankers guarding them and their precious cargo. According to prewar maps, they had only to top one rise, then another. From that prominence, any place to plant the bomb would be as good as any other.

Chris started to turn, to look back at Loki . . . but at that moment the night erupted with light. Flares popped and fizzed and floated slowly through the branches on tiny parachutes. Men dove for cover as tracer bullets sent their shadows fleeing. There was a sudden gunfire up ahead,-and loud concussions. Men screamed.

Chris sought cover behind a towering fir as mortars began pounding the forest around him.

From high up the hillside—even over the explosions—they heard booming laughter.

Clutching the roots of a tree, Chris looked back. A dozen yards away, the dwarf lay flat on his back, a smoking ruin where a mortar round must have landed squarely.

But then he felt a hand on his shoulder. O’Leary pointed up the hill and whispered, goggle-eyed, “Dig it, man.”

Chris turned and stared upslope at a huge, man-like being striding down the hillside, followed by dark-cloaked, armed men. The figure carried a giant bludgeon which screamed whenever he threw it, crushing trees and marines without prejudice. Giant conifers exploded into kindling and men were turned into jam. Then the weapon swept back into the red-bearded Aesir’s hand.

Not mortars. Chris realized. Thor’s hammer.

Of Loki, there was no sign at all.

3

“There there, Hugin. Fear not the dark Americans. They shall not hurt thee.”

The one-eyed being called Odin sat upon a throne of ebony, bearing upon his upraised left hand a raven the same color as night. A jewel set in the giant’s eyepatch glittered like an orb more far-seeing than the one he had lost, and across his lap lay a shining spear.

On both sides stood fur-clad figures nearly as imposing, one blond, with a great axe laid arrogantly over his shoulder, the other red-bearded, leaning Guards in black leather, twin lightning strokes on their collars, stood at attention around the hall of rough-hewn timbers. Even their rifles were polished black. The only spot of color on their SS uniforms.

The being called Odin looked down at the prisoners, chained together in a heap on the floor of the great hall.

“Alas. Poor Hugin has not forgiven you, my American guests. His brother, Munin, was lost when Berlin burned under your Hellfire bombs.”

The Aesir chief’s remaining eye gleamed ferally. “And who can blame my poor watch-bird, or fail to understand a father’s grief, when that same flame deluge consumed my bright boy, my far-seeing Heimdallr.”

The survivors of the ill-fated raiding patty lay on the dry stone floor, exhausted. The unconscious, dying Major Marlowe was in no condition to answer for them, but one of the Free British volunteers stood up, rattling his chains, and spat on the floor in front of the manlike creature.

“Higgins!” O’Leary tried to pull on the man’s arm, but was shrugged off as the Brit shook his fist.

“Yeah, they got your precious boy in Berlin. And you killed everyone in London an’ Paris in revenge! I say the Yanks were too soft, lettin’ that stop ’em. They should’a gone ahead, whatever the price, an’ fried every last Aryan bitch an’ cub . . .”

His defiance was cut off as a Gestapo officer knocked him down. SS troopers brought their rifle butts down hard, again and again.

Finally, Odin waved them back.

“Take the body to the center of the Great Circle, to be sent to Valhalla.”

The officer looked up sharply, but Odin rumbled in a tone that assumed obedience. “I want that brave man with me, when Fimbul-Winter blows,” the creature explained. And obviously he thought that settled the matter. As black-uniformed guards cut the limp form free, the chief of the Aesir chucked his raven under the beak and offered it a morsel of meat. He spoke to the huge redhead standing beside him.

“Thor, my son. These other things are thine. Poor prizes, I admit, but they did show some prowess in following the Liar this far. What will thou do with them?”

The giant stroked his hammer with gauntlets the size of small dogs. Here, indeed, was a creature that made even Loki seem small.

He stepped forward and scanned the prisoners, as if searching for something. When his gaze alighted on Chris, it seemed to shimmer. His voice was as deep as the growling of earthquakes.

“I will deign to speak with one or two of them, Father.”

“Good.” Odin nodded. “Have them cast into a pit, somewhere,” he told the SS General nearby, who clicked his heels and bowed low. “And await my son’s pleasure.”

The Nazis hauled Chris and the other survivors to their feet and pulled them away, single file. But not before Chris overheard the elder Aesir tell his offspring, “Find out what you can about that wolf-spawn, Loki, and then give them all over to be used in the sacrifice.”

4

Poor Major Marlowe had been right about one thing. The Nazis would never have won without the Aesir, or something like them. Hitler and his gang must have believed from the start that they could somehow call forth the ancient “gods", or they’d surely never have dared wage such a war, one certain to bring in America.

Indeed, by early 1944 it had seemed all but over. There was hell yet to pay, of course, but nobody back home feared defeat anymore. The Russians were pushing in from the east. Rome was taken, and the Mediterranean was an Allied lake. The Japanese were crumbling—pushed back or bottled up in island after island—while the greatest armada in history was gathering in England, preparing to cross the Channel and lance the Nazi boil for good and all.

In factories and shipyards across America, the Arsenal of Democracy was pouring forth more materiel in any given month than the Third Reich had produced in its best year. Ships rolled off the ways at intervals of hours. Planes every few minutes.

Most important of all, in Italy and in the Pacific, a rabble of farmers and city boys in soldier suits had been tempered and become warriors in a great army. Man to man, they were now on a par with their experienced foe, and the enemy was outnumbered as well.

Already there was talk of the postwar recovery, of plans to help in the rebuilding, and of a United Nations to keep the peace forever.

Chris had been only a child in knee pants, back in ’44, devouring Chet Nimitz novels and praying with all his might that there would be something half as glorious to do in his adulthood as what his uncles were achieving overseas right then. Maybe there would be adventures in space, he hoped, for after this, the horror of war would surely never be allowed again.

Then came the rumors . . . tales of setbacks on the Eastern front . . . of reeling Soviet armies sent into sudden and unexpected retreat. The reasons were unclear . . . mostly, what came back were superstitious rumblings that no modern person credited.

Voices on a street corner:

Damn Russkies . . . I knew all along they didn’ have no stayin’ power . . . Alla time yammerin’ ’bout a “second front” . . . Well we’ll give ’em a second front! Save their hash . . . Don’t fret, Ivan, Uncle Sam’s coming . . .

June, and the Norman sky was filled with planes. Ships covered the Channel Sea . . .

Sitting against a cold stone wall in an underground cell, Chris pinched his eyes shut and tried to crush away the memory of the grainy black and white films he had been shown. But he failed to keep the images out.

Ships as far as the eye could see . . . the greatest armada of free men ever assembled . . .

It was not until he joined the O.S.S. that Chris actually saw photographs never shown to the public. In all the years since then, he wished he had not seen them, either.

D-Day . . . D for disaster.

Cyclones, hundreds of them, spinning like horrible tops, rising out of the dawn mists. They grew and climbed until the dark funnels appeared to stretch beyond the sky. And as they approached the ships, it seemed one could see flying figures on their flanks, driving the storms faster and faster with their beating wings . . .

“Marlowe’s come up aces and eights, man.” O’Leary sighed heavily as he sagged down next to Chris. “You’re the big cheese now, dad.”

Chris closed his eyes. All men die, he thought, reminding himself that he hadn’t really liked the dour marine all that much, anyway.

He mourned nonetheless, if for no other reason than that Marlowe had been his insulation, protecting him from that bitch called command.

“So what gives now, chief?”

Chris looked at O’Leary. The man was really too old to be playing kids’ games. There were lines at the edges of those doe-like eyes, and the baby fat was turning into a double chin. The Army recognized genius, and put up with a lot from its civilian experts. But Chris wondered—not for the first time—how this escapee from Greenwich Village ever came to be in a position of responsibility.

Loki chose him. That was the real answer. Like he chose me. So much for the god of cleverness.

“What gives is that you damp down the beat-rap, O’Leary. Making only every third sentence incomprehensible should be enough to provide your emotional crutch.”

O’Leary winced, and Chris at once regretted the outburst.

“Oh, never mind.” He changed the subject. “How are the rest of the men doing?”

“Copasetic, I guess . . . I mean, they’re Okay, for guys slated for ritual shortening in a few hours. They all knew this was a suicide mission. Just wanted to take a few more of the bastards with them, is all.”

Chris nodded. If we had another year or two . . .

By then the missile scientists would have had rockets accurate enough to go for a surgical strike, making this attempt to sneak in bombs under the enemy’s noses unnecessary. The Satellite was just the beginning of the possibilities, if they had had time.

“Higgins was right, man,” O’Leary muttered as he collapsed against the wall next to Chris. “We shoulda pasted them with everything we had. Melted Europe to slag, if that’s what it took.”

“By the time we had enough bombs to do much more than slow them down, they had atomic weapons too,” Chris pointed out.

“So? After we fried Peenemünde, their delivery systems stagnated. And they haven’t got a clue how to go thermonuclear! Why even if they did manage to disassemble our bomb—”

“—God forbid!” Chris blinked. His heart raced, even considering the possibility. If the Nazis managed to make the leap from A-bomb to fusion weapons . . .”

The tech shook his head vigorously. “I scoped—I mean I checked out the destruct triggers myself, Chris. Anyone pokes around to try to see how a U.S. of A. type H bomb works will be in for a nasty surprise.”

That had, of course, been a minimum requirement before being allowed to attempt this mission. Had they been able to assemble the weapon near the “Great Circle” of Aesgard, the course of the war might have been changed. Now, all they could hope was that the separate components would melt to slag as they were supposed to when their timers expired.

O’Leary persisted. “I still think we should have launched everything we had back in ’52.”

Chris knew how the man felt. Most Americans believed the exchange would have been worth it. A full scale strike at Hitler’s homeland would sear the heart out of it. The monster’s retaliation, with cruder rockets and fission bombs, would be a price worth paying.

When he had learned the real reason, at first he had refused to believe it. Chris assumed that Loki was lying . . . that it was an Aesir trick.

But since then he had seen the truth. America’s arsenal of bombs was a two-edged sword. Unless used carefully, it would cut both ways.

There was a rattling of keys. Three SS guards stepped in, looking down their noses at the dejected Allied raiders.

“The great Thor would deign speak vit’ your leader,” the officer said in thickly accented English. When no one moved, his gaze fell upon Chris and he smiled. “This one. This strayed sheep. Our lord asked for him especially.”

He snapped his fingers and the guards grabbed Chris by the arms. “Cool as glass, dad,” O’Leary said. “Drive ’em crazy, baby.”

Chris glanced back from the door. “You too, O’Leary.”

He was pushed through and the dungeon gate slammed shut behind him.

5

“You are a Dane, are you not?”

Chris was tied firmly to a beam pillar in front of a crackling fireplace. The Gestapo official peered at Chris from several angles before asking his question.

“Danish by ancestry. What of it?” Chris shrugged under his bonds.

The Nazi clucked. “Oh nothing in particular. It is just that I never cease to be amazed when I find specimens of clearly superior stock fighting against their own divine heritage.”

Chris lifted an eyebrow. “Do you interrogate a lot of prisoners?”

“Oh yes, very many.”

“Well, then you must be amazed all the time.”

The Gestapo man blinked, then smiled sourly. He stepped back to light a cigarette, and Chris noticed that his hands were trembling.

“But doesn’t your very blood cry out when you find yourself working with, going into battle alongside, racial scum, mongrels . . .”

Chris laughed. He turned his head and regarded the Nazi icily.

“Why are you even here?” he asked.

“I—what do you mean?” The fellow blinked again. “See here now, I am in charge of interrogation of—”

“You’re in charge of a jail detail,” Chris sneered. “The priests of the Aesir run everything, now. The mystics in the SS control the Reich. Hitler’s a tottering old syphyllitic they won’t let out of Berchtesgaden. And you old-fashioned Nazis are barely tolerated anymore.”

The officer sucked at his cigarette. “What do you mean by that remark?”

“I mean that all that racial clap trap was just window dressing. An excuse to set up the death camps. But the SS would’ve been just as happy to use Aryans in them, if that was the only way to—to . . .

“Yes?” The Gestapo man stepped forward. “To do what? If the purpose of the camps was not the elimination of impure stock, then what, smart man? What?”

There was a brittle, high-pitched edge to the man’s laughter. “You do not know, do you? Even Loki did not tell you!”

Chris could have sworn that there was disappointment in the officer’s eyes . . . as if he had hoped to learn something from Chris, and was let down to find out that his prisoner was as much in the dark as he was.

No, I wasted a question, and Loki did not tell me about the reason for the camps. Chris looked at the other man’s trembling hands—hands that had, no doubt, wreaked more hell on broken bodies and spirits than bore contemplating—all, apparently, in a cause that was no longer even relevant to the winning side.

“Poor obsolete National Socialist,” Chris said. “Your dreams, mad as they were, were human ones. How does it feel to have it all taken over by aliens? To watch it all change beyond recognition?”

The Gestapo man reddened. Fumbling, he picked up a truncheon from a table near the wall and smacked it into his gloved left hand.

“I will change something else beyond recognition,” he growled menacingly. “And if I am obsolete, at least I am still allowed the pleasure of my craft.”

He approached, smiling with a thin film on his lips. Chris braced himself as the arm swung back, raising the bludgeon high. But at that moment the leather curtains parted and a large shadow fell across the rug. The Gestapo officer paled and snapped to attention.

The red-bearded Aesir named Thor nodded briefly as he shrugged out of his furred cloak. “You may go,” he rumbled.

Chris did not even look at the Nazi as the interrogator tried to meet his eye. Chris watched the coals in the fireplace until the curtains swished again and he was alone with the alien.

Thor sat down, cross-legged, on a thick rug and spent a few minutes joining Chris in contemplation of the flickering flames. When he used his hammer to prod the logs, heat brought out fine, glowing designs in the massive iron head.

“Fro sends word from Vineland . . . from the sea thou callest Labrador. There has been a slaughter of many brave men.”

Thor looked up.

“Those cowards’ tools—’submarines’—did much harm to our fleet. But in the end, Fro’s tempests were masterful. The landing is secured.”

Chris controlled the sinking feeling in his stomach. This was expected. Worse was to come, this winter.

Thor shook his head. “This is a bad war. Where is the honor, when thousands die unable even to show valor?”

Chris had more experience than most Americans in holding conversation with gods. Still, he took a chance, speaking without permission.

“I agree, Great One. But you can’t blame us for that.”

Thor’s eyes glittered as he inspected Chris. “No, brave worm. I do not blame you. That you have used your flame weapons as little as you have speaks well for the pride of thy leaders. Or perhaps they know what our wrath would be, if they were so cowardly as to use them wantonly.”

I never should have been allowed on this mission. I know too much, Chris realized. Loki had been the one to overrule High Command and insist that Chris come along. But that made him the only one here who knew the real reason the H-bombs had been kept leashed.

Dust from atom blasts, and soot from burning cities—those were what allied High Command feared, far more than radiation or Nazi retaliation. Already, from limited use of nuclear weapons so far, the weather had chilled measurably.

And the Aesir were so much stronger in winter! Scientists verified Loki’s story, that careless use of the Allied nuclear advantage would lead to catastophe, no matter how badly they seared the other side.

“We too prefer a more personal approach,” Chris said, hoping to keep the Aesir believing his own explanation. “No man wishes to be killed by powers beyond his understanding, impossible to resist or fight back against.”

Thor’s rumble, Chris realized, was a low laughter. “Well said, worm. Thou dost chastize as Freyr does, with words that reap, even as they sow.”

The Aes leaned forward a little. “You would earn merit in my eyes, small one, if you told me how to find the Brother of Lies.”

Those gray eyes were like cold clouds, and Chris felt his sense of reality begin to waver as he looked into them. It took a powerful effort of will to tear his gaze away. Shutting his eyes, he spoke with a dry mouth.

“I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The rumbling changed tone, deepening a little. Chris felt a rough touch and opened his eyes to see that Thor was brushing his cheek with the leather-bound haft of the great war hammer.

“Loki, youngling. Tell me where the Trickster may be found, and you may yet escape your doom, you may even find a place by my side. In the world to come, there will be no greater place for a man.”

This time Chris steeled himself to meet the hypnotic pools. Thor’s eyes seemed to reach out for his soul, as a magnet might call to native iron. Chris fought back with the savage heat of hatred.

“Not . . . for all the Valkyries in your fucking, alien pantheon,” he whispered, half breathless. “I’d rather run with wolves.”

The smile vanished. Thor blinked, and for a moment Chris thought he saw the Aesir’s image waver just a little, as if . . . as if Chris were looking through a man-shaped fold in space.

“Courage will not save thee from the wages of disrespect, worm,” the shape warned, and solidified again into a fur-clad giant.

All at once, Chris was glad to have known O’Leary.

“Don’t you dig it yet, daddyo? I don’t fucking believe in you! Wherever you’re from, baby, they probably kicked you out!

“You Aesir may be mean enough to wreck our world, but everything about you screams that you’re the dregs, man. Leaky squares. Probably burned out papa’s stolen saucer just gettin’ here!”

He shook his head. “I just refuse to believe in you, man.”

The icy gray eyes blinked once. Then Thor’s surprised expression faded into a deathly cool smile. “I did not ken your other insults. But for calling me a man, you shall die as you seem to wish, before the morning sun.”

He stood up and placed a hand on Chris’s shoulder, as if emparting a friendly benediction, but even the casual power of that touch felt vicelike.

“I only add this, little one. We Aesir have come invited, and we arrived not in ships—even ships between the stars—but instead upon the wings of Death itself. This much, this boon of knowledge I grant thee, in honor of your defiance.”

Then, in a swirl of furs and displaced air, the creature was gone, leaving Chris alone again to watch the coals flicker slowly and turn into ashes.

6

The Teutonic priests were resplendant in red and black, their robes traced in gold and silver. Platinum eagles’ wings rose from their top-heavy helms as they marched around a great circle of standing stones, chanting in a tongue that sounded much older.

An altar, carved with gaping dragons’ mouths, stood beside a raging bonfire. Smoke rose in a turbulent funnel, carrying bright sparks upward toward a full moon. Heat blazed at the ring of prisoners, each chained to his own obelisk of rough-hewn rock.

They faced southward, looking from a Gotland prominence across the Baltic toward a shore that had once been Poland, and for a little while after that had been the “Thousand Year Reich.”

The waters were unnaturally calm, almost glassy, reflecting a nearly perfect image of the bonfire alongside the Moon’s rippling twin.

“Fro must be back from Labrador,” O’Leary commented loudly enough for Chris to hear him over the chanting and the pounding drums. “That’d explain the clear night. He’s th’ god of tempests.”

Chris glanced at the man sourly, and O’Leary grinned back apologetically. “Sorry, man. I mean he’s th’ little green alien who’s in charge of weather control. Make you feel any better?”

I had that coming, Chris thought. He smiled dryly and shrugged. “I don’t suppose it matters all that much, now.”

O’Leary watched the Aryan Brothers march by again, carrying a giant swastika alongside a great dragon-like totem. The technician started to say something, but then he blinked and seemed to mumble to himself, as if trying to catch a drifting thought. When the procession had passed, he turned to Chris, a mystified expression on his face. “I just remembered something.”

Chris sighed. “What is it now, O’Leary?”

The beatnik frowned in puzzlement. “I can’t figure why it slipped my mind until now. But back when we were on the beach, unloading the bomb parts, Old Loki pulled me aside. It was all so hectic, but I could swear I saw him palm th’ H-bomb trigger mechanism, Chris. That means . . .”

Chris nodded. “That means he knew we were going to be captured. I’d already figured that out, O’Leary. At least the Nazis won’t get the trigger.”

“Yeah. But that’s not all I just remembered, Chris. Loki told me to tell you something for him. He said you’d asked him a question, and he told me to relay an answer he said you might understand.”

O’Leary shook his head. “I don’t know why I forgot to tell you about it until now.”

Chris laughed. Of course the renegade Aes had put the man under a post-hypnotic command to recall the message only later . . . perhaps only in a situation like this.

“What is it, O’Leary? What did he say to tell me?”

“It was just one word, Chris. He said to tell you—necromancy. And then he clammed up. Wasn’t much after that that the SS jumped us. What’d he mean by that, Captain? What was your question, anyway? What does the answer mean?”

Chris did not reply. He stared at the funnel of sparks climbing toward the Moon.

With his last question he had asked Loki about the camps—about the awesome, horrible, concentrated effort of death that had been perpetrated, first in Europe and then in Russia and Africa. What were they for? There had to be more to it than a plan to eliminate some bothersome minorities.

Moreover, why had Loki, who normally seemed so oblivious to human life, acted to rescue so many from the death factories, at so great a risk

Necromancy. That was Loki’s delayed reply to his final question. And Loki had told it in such a way that Chris might have his answer, but never be able tell anyone who mattered.

Necromancy . . .

The word stood for the performance of magic, but magic of a special, terrible kind. In legend, a concentrated field created by the death agony of human beings to drive his spells.

But that was just superstitious nonsense!

Light-headed, Chris looked out across the sand at the hulking Aesir, seated on their gilded thrones, heard the chanting of the priests, and wished he could dismiss the idea as easily as he once would have.

Was that the reason the Nazis had dared to wage a war they otherwise could never have won? Because they believed that they could create such concentrated, distilled horror that ancient spells would actually work?

It explained so much. Other nations had gone insane, in human history. Other movements had been evil. But none had perpetrated such crimes with such dedication and efficiency. The horror must have been directed not so much at death itself, but at some hideous goal beyond death!

“They . . . made . . . the Aesir. That’s what Loki meant by thinking that, maybe, his own memories were false . . . when he suspected that he was actually no older than I . . .”

“What was that, Cap’n?” O’Leary leaned as far as his chains would allow. “I couldn’t follow . . .”

But the procession chose that moment to stop. The High Priest, carrying a golden sword, held it before Odin’s throne. The father of the “gods” touched it and the Aesir’s rumbling chant could be heard, lower than human singing, a hungry sound like a growl that trembled within the Earth.

One of the chained Allies—a Free Briton—was dragged, numbed with dread, from his obelisk toward the fire and the dragon altar.

Chris shut his eyes, as if to hold out the screams. “Jesus!” O’Leary hissed.

Yes. Chris thought. Invoke Jesus. Or Allah or God of Abraham. Wake up, Brahma! For your dream has turned into a nightmare.

He understood clearly now why Loki had not told him his answer while there was even an infinitesmal chance that he might ever make it home again alive.

Thank you, Loki.

Better America and the Last Alliance should go down fighting honorably than even be tempted by this knowledge . . . to have its will tested by this way out. For if the Allies ever tried to adopt the enemy’s methods, there would be nothing left in the soul of humanity to fight for.

Who would we conjure, Chris wondered. If we ever did use those spells? Superman? Or Captain Marvel? Oh, they’d be more than a match for the Aesir, certainly! Our myths were boundless.

He laughed, and the sound turned into a sob as another scream of agony pierced the night.

Thank you, Loki, for sparing us that test of our souls.

He had no idea where the renegade “trickster god” had gone, or whether this debacle had only been a cloak for some deeper, more secret mission.

Could that be? Chris wondered. He knew that it was possible, still. Soldiers seldom ever saw the big picture, and President Marshall did not have to tell his OSS captains everything. This mission could just have been a feint, a minor piece in a greater plan.

Lasers and satellites . . . they could be just part of it. There might be a silver bullet . . . a sprig of mistletoe, still.

Chains rattled to his right. He heard a voice cursing in Portuguese and footsteps dragging the latest prisoner off.

Chris looked up at the sky, and a thought suddenly occurred to him, as if out of nowhere.

Legends begin in strange ways, he realized.

Someday—even if there was no silver bullet—the horror would have to ebb at last, when humans grew scarce, perhaps, and the Aesir were less plump and well-fed on the death manna they supped from charnel houses.

Then there would come a time when human heroes would count for something again. Perhaps in secret laboratories, or in exile on the Moon, or at the bottom of the sea, free men and women would work and toil to build the armor, the weapons, maybe the heroes themselves . . .

This time the scream was choked, as if the Brazillian ranger was trying to defy his enemies, and only broke to show his agony at the last.

Footsteps approached. To his amazement, Chris felt feather-light, as if gravity were barely enough to keep him on the ground.

“So long, O’Leary,” he said, distantly.

“Yeah, man. Stay cool.”

Chris nodded. He offered the black and silver-clad SS his wrists as they unchained him, and said to them softly, in a friendly tone of voice, “You know, you look pretty silly for grown men.”

They blinked at him in surprise. Chris smiled and stepped between them, leading the way toward the altar and the waiting Aesir.

Someday men will challenge these monsters, he thought, knowing that the numb, lightheaded feeling meant that he would not scream . . . that nothing they could do would make him take more than casual notice.

Loki had made certain of this. This was why the Trickster had spent so much time with Chris, this last year . . . why he had insisted that Chris come along on this mission.

Our day will come. Revenge will drive our descendants. Science will armor them. But those heroes will need one more thing, he realized. Heroes need inspiration. They need legends.

On their way toward the humming Aesir, they passed before a row of human “dignitaries” from the Reich, a few with faces glazed in excitement, but others sitting numbly, as if lost. He felt he could almost read the despair in those darkened, mad eyes. They were aware that something they had wrought had gone long, long, out of their control.

Thor frowned as Chris flashed him a smile. “Hi, how’ya doin’ ?” he said to the Aesir, interrupting their rumbling music in a mutter of surprise. Where curses and screams had only resonated with the chant, his good-natured sarcasm broke up the ritual.

“Move, swine!” An SS guard pushed Chris, or tried to, but stumbled instead on empty air where the American had been. Chris ducked underneath the jangling, cumbersome uniform, between the nazi’s legs, and swatted the fellow’s behind with the flat of his hand, sending him sprawling.

The other guard reached for him, but crumpled openmouthed as Chris bent his fingers back and snapped them. The third guard he lifted by the belt buckle and tossed into the bonfire, to bellow in sudden horror and pain.

Hysterical strength, of course, Chris realized, knowing what Loki had done to him. Four onrushing underpriests went down with snapped necks. No human could do these things without being used up, Chris knew, distantly, but what did it matter? This was far more fun than he had expected to be—

A golden flash out of the corner of his eye warned him . . . Chris whirled and ducked, catching Odin’s spear with one sudden snatch.

“Coward,” he whispered at the hot-faced “father of the gods.” He flipped the heavy, gleaming weapon about and held it in two hands before him.

God, help me . . .

With a cry he broke the legendary spear over his knee. The pieces fell to the sand.

Nobody moved, Even Thor’s whirling hammer slowed and then dropped. In the sudden silence, Chris was distantly aware of the fact that his femur was shattered—along with most of the bones in his hands—leaving him perched precariously on one leg.

But Chris’s only regret was that he could not emulate an aged Jew he had heard of, from one of the concentration camp survivors. Standing in front of the grave he had been forced to dig for himself, the old man had not begged, or tried to reason with the SS, or slumped in despair. Instead, the prisoner had turned away from his murderers, dropped his pants, and said aloud in Yiddish as he bent over, “Kish mir im toches . . .”

“Kiss my ass,” Chris told Thor as more guards finally ran up and grabbed his arms. As they dragged him to the altar, he kept his gaze on the red-bearded “god". The priests tied him down, but Chris met the Aesir’s gray eyes.

“I don’t believe in you,” he said.

Thor blinked, and the giant suddenly turned.

Chris laughed out loud then, knowing that nothing in the world would suppress this story. It would spread. There would be no stopping it.

Loki, you bastard. You used me, and I suppose I should thank you.

But rest assured, Loki, someday we’ll get you, too.

He laughed again as he watched the dismayed High Priest fumble with the knife, and found it terrifically funny. A wide-eyed assistant jiggled and dropped his swastika banner. Chris roared.

Behind him, he heard O’Leary’s high pitched giggle. Then, another of the prisoners barked, and another. It was unstoppable.

Across the chilly Baltic, an uncertain wind blew. And overhead, a recent star sailed swiftly where the old ones merely drifted across the sky.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

The parallel-world story is another mainstay of SF. It explores the old question: “What would have happened if . . . ?”

If a fly buzzing above a bowl of soup had dipped too low, getting caught, disgusting a Roman centurion, who took his wrath out on an underling, sending him out on an extra patrol, which detected Hannibal’s army in the Alps early enough to catch it far from Rome . . . You see the point.

Sometimes we like to frighten ourselves. The most frequent “what if” seems to deal with alternate realities in which the Nazis won World War II. Something about that loathsome possibility just invites a horror story.

Trouble is, I never could believe it.

Mind you, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle is a classic, a great work. But its premise—that an early assassination of Franklin Roosevelt would have led to an inevitable Axis victory—is hard to swallow.

They were just such schmucks!

I mean, it’s hard to think of any way a single altered event would have let the Nazis win their war. They would have needed an entire chain of flukes even to have a chance. In fact, it took quite a few lucky breaks for them to last as long as they did, and to have the time to commit such atrocities.

I said as much to Gregory Benford when he invited me to write a piece for his upcoming anthology of parallel world stories, Hitler Victorious. Greg’s reply? A dare.

“I’ll bet you could think of some premise that’d work, David.”

“How unlikely can it be?”

“It can be preposterous, as long as it sings.”

Greg was my collaborator on a far larger large novel. I trusted him. But once the story was started, it took off in directions I never expected. I don’t know if the story “sings,” but it does tie together several curious things about the Nazi cult.

Why were the Nazis so evil? Why did they do so many horrible, pointless things? What was behind their incredible streak of romantic mysticism?

Maybe the bastards really believed something like this was possible.

HATRACK RIVER

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card has just become the recipient of a Nebula for his novel, Ender’s Game, and Tor books has recently published an excellent sequel to that novel, Speaker for the Dead. The following fantasy is set in eastern Ohio in 1805, and Mr. Card tells us that it uses authentic frontier magic practices.

Little Peggy was very careful with the eggs. She rooted her hand through the straw till her fingers bumped something hard and heavy. She gave no never mind to the chicken drips. After all, Mama never even crinkled her face to open up Cally’s most spetackler diapers. Even when the chicken drips were wet and stringy and made her fingers stick together, little Peggy gave no never mind. She just pushed the straw apart, wrapped her hand around the egg, and lifted it out of the brood box. All this while standing tip-toe on a wobbly stool, reaching high above her head. Mama said she was too young for egging, but little Peggy showed her. Every day she felt in every brood box and brought in every egg, every single one, that’s what she did.

Every one, she said in her mind, over and over. I got to reach into every one.

Then little Peggy looked back into the northeast corner, the darkest place in the whole coop, and there sat Bloody Mary in her brood box, looking like the devil’s own bad dream, hatefulness shining out of her nasty eyes, saying Come here little girl and give me nips. I want nips of finger and nips of thumb and if you come real close and try to take my egg I’ll get a nip of eye from you.

Most animals didn’t have much heartfire, but Bloody Mary’s was strong and made a poison smoke. Nobody else could see it, but little Peggy could. Bloody Mary dreamed of death for all folks, but most specially for a certain little girl five years old, and little Peggy had the marks on her fingers to prove it. At least one mark, anyway, and even if Papa said he couldn’t see it, little Peggy remembered how she got it and nobody could blame her none if she sometimes forgot to reach under Bloody Mary who sat there like a bushwhacker waiting to kill the first folks that just tried to come by. Nobody’d get mad if she just sometimes forgot to look there.

I forgot forgot forgot. I looked in every brood box, every one, and if one got missed then I forgot forgot forgot.

Everybody knew Bloody Mary was a lowdown chicken and too mean to give any eggs that wasn’t rotten anyway.

I forgot.

She got the egg basket inside before Mama even had the fire het, and Mama was so pleased she let little Peggy put the eggs one by one into the cold water. Then Mama put the pot on the hook and swung it right on over the fire. Boiling eggs you didn’t have to wait for the fire to slack, you could do it smoke and all.

“Peg,” said Papa.

That was Mama’s name, but Papa didn’t say it in his Mama voice. He said it in his little-Peggy-you’re-in-dutch voice, and little Peggy knew she was completely found out, and so she turned right around and yelled what she’d been planning to say all along.

“I forgot, Papa!”

Mama turned and looked at little Peggy in surprise. Papa wasn’t surprised though. He just raised an eyebrow. He was holding his hand behind his back. Little Peggy knew there was an egg in that hand. Bloody Mary’s nasty egg.

“What did you forget, little Peggy?” asked Papa, talking soft.

Right that minute little Peggy reckoned she was the stupidest girl ever born on the face of the earth. Here she was denying before anybody accused her of anything.

But she wasn’t going to give up, not right off like that. She couldn’t stand to have them mad at her and she just wanted them to let her go away and live in England. So she put on her innocent face and said, “I don’t know, Papa.”

She figgered England was the best place to go live, cause England had a Lord Protector. From the look in Papa’s eye, a Lord Protector was pretty much what she needed just now.

“What did you forget?” Papa asked again.

“Just say it and be done, Horace,” said Mama. “If she’s done wrong then she’s done wrong.”

“I forgot one time, Papa,” said little Peggy. “She’s a mean old chicken and she hates me.”

Papa answered soft and slow. “One time,” he said.

Then he took his hand from behind him. Only it wasn’t no single egg he held, it was a whole basket. And that basket was filled with a clot of straw—most likely all the straw from Bloody Mary’s box—and that straw was mashed together and glued tight with dried-up raw egg and shell bits, mixed up with about three or four chewed-up baby chicken bodies.

“Did you have to bring that in the house before breakfast, Horace?” said Mama.

“I don’t know what makes me madder,” said Horace. “What she done wrong or her studying up to lie about it.”

“I didn’t study and I didn’t lie!” shouted little Peggy. Or anyways she meant to shout. What came out sounded espiciously like crying even though little Peggy had decided only yesterday that she was done with crying for the rest of her life.

“See?” said Mama. “She already feels bad.”

“She feels bad being caught,” said Horace. “You’re too slack on her, Peg. She’s got a lying spirit. I don’t want my daughter growing up wicked. I’d rather see her dead like her baby sisters before I see her grow up wicked.”

Little Peggy saw Mama’s heartfire flare up with memory, and in front of her eyes she could see a baby laid out pretty in a little box, and then another one only not so pretty cause it was the second baby Missy, the one what died of pox so nobody’d touch her but her own Mama, who was still so feeble from the pox herself that she couldn’t do much. Little Peggy saw that scene, and she knew Papa had made a mistake to say what he said cause Mama’s face went cold even though her heartfire was hot.

“That’s the wickedest thing anybody ever said in my presence,” said Mama. Then she took up the basket of corruption from the table and took it outside.

“Bloody Mary bites my hand,” said little Peggy.

“We’ll see what bites,” said Papa. “For leaving the eggs I give you one whack, because I reckon that lunatic hen looks fearsome to a frog-size girl like you. But for telling lies I give you ten whacks.”

Little Peggy cried in earnest at that news. Papa gave an honest count and full measure in everything, but most especially in whacks.

Papa took the hazel rod off the high shelf. He kept it up there ever since little Peggy put the old one in the fire and burnt it right up.

“I’d rather hear a thousand hard and bitter truths from you, Daughter, than one soft and easy lie,” said he, and then he bent over and laid on with the rod across her thighs. Whick whick whick, she counted every one, they stung her to the heart, each one of them, they were so full of anger. Worst of all she knew it was all unfair because his heartfire raged for a different cause altogether, and it always did. Papa’s hate for wickedness always came from his most secret memory. Little Peggy didn’t understand it all, because it was twisted up and confused and Papa didn’t remember it right well himself. All little Peggy ever saw plain was that it was a lady and it wasn’t Mama. Papa thought of that lady whenever something went wrong. When baby Missy died of nothing at all, and then the next baby also named Missy died of pox, and then the barn burnt down once, and a cow died, everything that went wrong made him think of that lady and he began to talk about how much he hated wickedness and at those times the hazel rod flew hard and sharp.

I’d rather hear a thousand hard and bitter truths, that’s what he said, but little Peggy knew that there was one truth he didn’t ever want to hear, and so she kept it to herself. She’d never shout it at him, even if it made him break the hazel rod, cause whenever she thought of saying aught about that lady, she kept picturing her father dead, and that was a thing she never hoped to see for real. Besides, the lady that haunted his heartfire, she didn’t have no clothes on, and little Peggy knew that she’d be whipped for sure if she talked about people being naked.

So she took the whacks and cried till she could taste that her nose was running. Papa left the room right away, and Mama came back to fix up breakfast for the blacksmith and the visitors and the hands, but neither one said boo to her, just as if they didn’t even notice. She cried even harder and louder for a minute, but it didn’t help. Finally she picked up her Bugy from the sewing basket and walked all stiff-legged out to Oldpappy’s cabin and woke him right up.

He listened to her story like he always did.

“I know about Bloody Mary,” he said, “and I told your papa fifty times if I told him once, wring that chicken’s neck and be done. She’s a crazy bird. Every week or so she gets crazy and breaks all her own eggs, even the ones ready to hatch. Kills her own chicks. It’s a lunatic what kills its own.”

“Papa like to killed me,” said little Peggy.

“I reckon if you can walk somewhat it ain’t so bad altogether.”

“I can’t walk much.”

“No, I can see you’re nigh crippled forever,” said Oldpappy. “But I tell you what, the way I see it your mama and your papa’s mostly mad at each other. So why don’t you just disappear for a couple of hours?”

“I wish I could turn into a bird and fly.”

“Next best thing, though,” said Pappy, “is to have a secret place where nobody knows to look for you. Do you have a place like that? No, don’t tell me—it wrecks it if you tell even a single other person. You just go to that place for a while. As long as it’s a safe place, not out in the woods where a Red might take your pretty hair, and not a high place where you might fall off, and not a tiny place where you might get stuck.”

“It’s big and it’s low and it ain’t in the woods,” said little Peggy.

“Then you go there, Maggie.”

Little Peggy made the face she always made when Oldpappy called her that. And she held up Bugy and in Bugy’s squeaky high voice she said, “Her name is Peggy.”

“You go there, Piggy, if you like that better—”

Little Peggy slapped Bugy right across Oldpappy’s knee.

“Someday Bugy’ll do that once too often and have a rupture and die,” said Oldpappy.

But Bugy just danced right in his face and insisted, “Not piggy, Peggy!”

“That’s right, Puggy, you go to that secret place and if anybody says, We got to go find that girl, I’ll say, I know where she is and she’ll come back when she’s good and ready.”

Little Peggy ran for the cabin door and then stopped and turned. “Oldpappy, you’re the nicest grown-up in the whole world.”

“Your papa has a different view of me, but that’s all tied up with another hazel rod that I laid hand on much too often. Now run along.” She stopped again right before she closed the door. “You’re the only nice grown-up!” She shouted it real loud, halfway hoping that they could hear it clear inside the house. Then she was gone, right across the garden, out past the cow pasture, up the hill into the woods, and along the path to the spring house.

They had one good wagon, these folks did, and two good horses pulling it. One might even suppose they was prosperous, considering they had six big boys, from mansize on down to twins that had wrestled each other into being a good deal stronger than their dozen years. Not to mention one big daughter and a whole passel of little girls. A big family. Right prosperous if you didn’t know that not even a year ago they had owned a mill and lived in a big house on a streambank in west New Hampshire. Come down far in the world, they had, and this wagon was all they had left of everything. But they were hopeful, trekking west along the roads that crossed the Hio, heading for open land that was free for the taking. If you were a family with plenty of strong backs and clever hands, it’d be good land, too, as long as the weather was with them and the Reds didn’t raid them and all the lawyers and bankers stayed in New England.

The father was a big man, a little run to fat, which was no surprise since millers mostly stood around all day. That softness in the belly wouldn’t last a year on a deepwoods homestead. He didn’t care much about that, anyway—he had no fear of hard work. What worried him today was his wife, Faith. It was her time for that baby, he knew it. Not that she’d ever talk about it direct. Women just don’t speak about things like that with men. But he knew how big she was and how many months it had been. Besides, at the noon stop she murmured to him, “Alvin Miller, if there’s a road house along this way, or even a little broke-down cabin, I reckon I could use a bit of rest.” A man didn’t have to be a philosopher to understand her. And after six sons and six daughters, he’d have to have the brains of a brick not to get the drift of how things stood with her.

So he sent the oldest boy, Vigor, to run ahead on the road and see the lay of the land.

You could tell they were from New England, ’cause the boy didn’t take no gun. If there’d been a bushwhacker the young man never would’ve made it back, and the fact he came back with all his hair was proof no Red had spotted him—the French up Detroit way were paying for English scalps with liquor and if a Red saw a white man alone in the woods with no rifle he’d own that white man’s scalp. So maybe a man could think that luck was with the family at last. But since these Yankees had no notion that the road wasn’t safe, Alvin Miller didn’t think for a minute of his good luck.

Vigor’s word was of a road house three miles on. That was good news, except that between them and that road house was a river. Kind of a scrawny river, and the ford was shallow, but Alvin Miller had learned never to trust water. No matter how peaceful it looks, it’ll reach and try to take you. He was halfway minded to tell Faith that they’d spend the night this side of the river, but she gave just the tiniest groan and at that moment he knew that there was no chance of that. Faith had borne him a dozen living children, but it was four years since the last one and a lot of women took it bad, having a baby so late. A lot of women died. A good road house meant women to help with the birthing, so they’d have to chance the river.

And Vigor did say the river wasn’t much.

The air in the spring house was cool and heavy, dark and wet. Sometimes when little Peggy caught a nap here, she woke up gasping like as if the whole place was under water. She had dreams of water even when she wasn’t here—that was one of the things that made some folks say she was a seeper instead of a torch. But when she dreamed outside, she always knew she was dreaming. Here the water was real.

Real in the drips that formed like sweat on the milkjars setting in the stream. Real in the cold damp clay of the spring house floor. Real in the swallowing sound of the stream as it hurried through the middle of the house.

Keeping it cool all summer long, cold water spilling right out of the hill and into this place, shaded all the way by trees so old the moon made a point of passing through their branches just to hear some good old tales. That was what little Peggy always came here for, even when Papa didn’t hate her. Not the wetness of the air, she could do just fine without that. It was the way the fire went right out of her and she didn’t have to be a torch. Didn’t have to see into all the dark places where folks hid theirselfs.

From her they hid theirselfs as if it would do some good. Whatever they didn’t like most about theirself they tried to tuck away in some dark corner but they didn’t know how all them dark places burned in little Peggy’s eyes. Even when she was so little that she spit out her corn mash ’cause she was still hoping for a suck, she knew all the stories that the folks around her kept all hid. She saw the bits of their past that they most wished they could bury, and she saw the bits of their future that they most feared.

And that was why she took to coming up here to the spring house. Here she didn’t have to see those things. Not even the lady in Papa’s memory. There was nothing here but the heavy wet dark cool air to quench the fire and dim the light so she could be—just for a few minutes in the day—a little five-year-old girl with a straw puppet named Bugy and not even have to think about any of them grown-up secrets.

I’m not wicked, she told herself. Again and again but it didn’t work because she knew she was.

All right then, she said to herself, I am wicked. But I won’t be wicked anymore. I’ll tell the truth like Papa says, or I’ll say nothing at all.

Even at five years old, little Peggy knew that if she kept that vow, she’d be better off saying nothing.

So she said nothing, not even to herself, just lay there on a mossy damp table with Bugy clenched tight enough to strangle in her fist.

Ching ching ching.

Little Peggy woke up and got mad for just a minute.

Ching ching ching.

Made her mad because nobody said to her, Little Peggy, you don’t mind if we talk this young blacksmith feller into settling down here, do you?

Not at all, Papa, she would’ve said if they’d asked. She knew what it meant to have a smithy. It meant your village would thrive, and folks from other places would come, and when they came there’d be trade, and when there was trade then her father’s big house could be a forest inn, and when there was a forest inn all the roads would kind of bend a little just to pass the place, if it wasn’t too far out of the way—little Peggy knew all that, as sure as the children of farmers knew the rhythms of the farm. A road house by a smithy was a road house that would prosper. So she would’ve said, sure enough, let him stay, deed him land, brick his chimney, feed him free, let him have my bed so I have to double up with Cousin Peter who keeps trying to peek under my nightgown, I’ll put up with all that—just as long as you don’t put him near the spring house so that all the time, even when I want to be alone with the water, there’s that whack thump hiss roar, noise all the time, and a fire burning up the sky to turn it black, and the smell of charcoal burning. It was enough to make a body wish to follow the stream right back into the mountain just to get some peace.

Of course the stream was the smart place to put the blacksmith. Except for water, he could’ve put his smithy anywheres at all. The iron came to him in the shipper’s wagon clear from New Netherland, and the charcoal—well, there were plenty of farmers willing to trade charcoal for a good shoe. But water, that’s what the smith needed that nobody’d bring him, so of course they put him right down the hill from the spring house where his ching ching ching could wake her up and put the fire back into her in the one place where she had used to be able to let it burn low and go almost to cold wet ash.

A roar of thunder.

She was at the door in a second. Had to see the lightning. Caught just the last shadow of the light but she knew that there’d be more. It wasn’t much after noon, surely, or had she slept all day? What with all these blackbelly clouds she couldn’t tell—it might as well be the last minutes of dusk. The air was all a-prickle with lightning just waiting to flash. She knew that feeling, knew that it meant the lightning’d hit close.

She looked down to see if the blacksmith’s stable was still full of horses. It was. The shoeing wasn’t done, the road would turn to muck, and so the farmer with his two sons from out West Fork way was stuck here. Not a chance they’d head home in this, with lightning ready to put afire in the woods, or knock a tree down on them, or maybe just smack them a good one and lay them all out dead in a circle like them five Quakers they still was talking about and here it happened back in ’90 when the first white folks came to settle here. People talked still about the Circle of Five and all that, some people wondering if God up and smashed them flat so as to shut the Quakers up, seeing how nothing else ever could, while other people was wondering if God took them up into heaven like the first Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell who was smote by lightning at the age of ninety-seven and just disappeared.

No, that farmer and his big old boys’d stay another night. Little Peggy was an innkeeper’s daughter, wasn’t she? Papooses learnt to hunt, pickaninnies learnt to tote, farmer children learnt the weather, and an innkeeper’s daughter learnt which folks would stay the night, even before they knew it right theirselfs.

Their horses were champing in the stable, snorting and warning each other about the storm. In every group of horses, little Peggy figgered, there must be one that’s remarkable dumb, so all the others have to tell him what all’s going on. Bad storm, they were saying. We’re going to get a soaking, if the lightning don’t smack us first. And the dumb one kept nickering and saying, What’s the noise, what’s that noise.

Then the sky just opened right up and dumped water on the earth. Stripped leaves right off the trees, it came down so hard. Came down so thick, too, that little Peggy couldn’t even see the smithy for a minute and she thought maybe it got washed right away into the stream. Oldpappy told her how that stream led right down to the Hatrack River, and the Hatrack poured right into the Hio, and the Hio shoved itself on through the woods to the Mizzipy, which went on down to the sea, and Oldpappy said how the sea drank so much water that it got indigestion and gave off the biggest old belches you ever heard, and what came up was clouds. Belches from the sea, and now the smithy would float all that way, get swallered up and belched out, and someday she’d just be minding her own business and some cloud would break up and plop that smithy down as neat as you please, old Makepeace Smith still ching ching chinging away.

Then the rain slacked off a mite and she looked down to see the smithy still there. But that wasn’t what she saw at all. No, what she saw was sparks of fire way off in the forest, downstream toward the Hatrack, down where the ford was, only there wasn’t a chance of taking the ford today, with this rain. Sparks, lots of sparks, and she knew every one of them was folks. She didn’t hardly think of doing it anymore, she only had to see their heartfires and she was looking close. Maybe future, maybe past, all the visions lived together in the heartfire.

What she saw right now was the same in all their hearts. A wagon in the middle of the Hatrack, with the water rising and everything they owned in all the world in that wagon.

Little Peggy didn’t talk much, but everybody knew she was a torch, so they listened whenever she spoke up about trouble. Specially this kind of trouble. Sure the settlements in these parts were pretty old now, a fair bit older than little Peggy herself, but they hadn’t forgotten yet that anybody’s wagon caught in a flood is everybody’s loss.

She fair to flew down that grassy hill, jumping gopher holes and sliding the steep places, so it wasn’t twenty seconds from seeing those far-off heartfires till she was speaking right up in the smithy’s shop. That farmer from West Fork at first wanted to make her wait till he was done with telling stories about worse storms he’d seen. But Makepeace knew all about little Peggy. He just listened right up and then told those boys to saddle them horses, shoes or no shoes, there was folks caught in the Hatrack ford and there was no time for foolishness. Little Peggy didn’t even get a chance to see them go—Makepeace had already sent her off to the big house to fetch her father and all the hands and visitors there. Wasn’t a one of them who hadn’t once put all they owned in the world into a wagon and dragged it west across the mountain roads and down into the forest. Wasn’t a one of them who hadn’t felt a river sucking at that wagon, wanting to steal it away. They all got right to it. That’s the way it was then, you see. Folks noticed other people’s trouble every bit as quick as if it was their own.

Vigor led the boys in trying to push the wagon, while Eleanor hawed the horses. Alvin Miller spent his time carrying the little girls one by one to safety on the far shore. The current was a devil clawing at him, whispering, “I’ll have your babies, I’ll have them all,” but Alvin said no, with every muscle in his body as he strained shoreward he said no to that whisper, till his girls stood all bedraggled on the bank with rain streaming down their faces like the tears from all the grief in the world.

He would have carried Faith, too, baby in her belly and all, but she wouldn’t budge. Just sat inside that wagon, bracing herself against the trunks and furniture as the wagon tipped and rocked. Lightning crashed and branches broke; one of them tore the canvas and the water poured into the wagon but Faith held on with white knuckles and her eyes staring out. Alvin knew from her eyes there wasn’t a thing he could say to make her let go. There was only one way to get Faith and her unborn baby out of that river, and that was to get the wagon out.

“Horses can’t get no purchase, Papa,” Vigor shouted. “They’re just stumbling and bound to break a leg.”

“Well we can’t pull out without the horses!”

“The horses are something, Papa. We leave ’em in here and we’ll lose wagon and horses too!”

“Your mama won’t leave that wagon.”

And he saw understanding in Vigor’s eyes. The things in the wagon weren’t worth a risk of death to save them. But Mama was.

“Still,” he said. “On shore the team could pull strong. Here in the water they can’t do a thing.”

“Set the boys to unhitching them. But first tie a line to a tree to hold that wagon!”

It wasn’t two minutes before the twins Wastenot and Wantnot were on the shore making the rope fast to a stout tree. David and Measure made another line fast to the rig that held the horses, while Calm cut the strands that held them to the wagon. Good boys, doing their work just right, Vigor shouting directions while Alvin could only watch helpless at the back of the wagon, looking now at Faith who was trying not to have the baby, now at the Hatrack River that was trying to push them all down to hell.

Not much of a river, Vigor had said, but then the clouds came up and the rain came down and the Hatrack became something after all. Even so it looked passable when they got to it. The horses strode in strong, and Alvin was just saying to Calm, who had the reins, “Well, we made it not a minute to spare,” when the river went insane. It doubled in speed and strength all in a moment, and the horses got panicky and lost direction and started pulling against each other. The boys all hopped into the river and tried to lead them to shore but by then the wagon’s momentum had been lost and the wheels were mired up and stuck fast. Almost as if the river knew they were coming and saved up its worst fury till they were already in it and couldn’t get away.

“Look out! Look out!” screamed Measure from the shore.

Alvin looked upstream to see what devilment the river had in mind, and there was a whole tree floating down the river, endwise like a battering ram, the root end pointed at the center of the wagon, straight at the place where Faith was sitting, her baby on the verge of birth. Alvin couldn’t think of anything to do, couldn’t think at all, just screamed his wife’s name with all his strength. Maybe in his heart he thought that by holding her name on his lips he could keep her alive, but there was no hope of that, no hope at all.

Except that Vigor didn’t know there was no hope. Vigor leapt out when the tree was no more than a rod away, his body falling against it just above the root. The momentum of his leap turned it a little, then rolled it over, rolled it and turned it away from the wagon. Of course Vigor rolled with it, pulled right under the water—but it worked, the root end of the tree missed the wagon entirely, and the shaft of the trunk struck it a sidewise blow.

The tree bounded across the stream and smashed up against a boulder on the bank. Alvin was five rods off, but in his memory from then on, he always saw it like as if he’d been right there. The tree crashing into the boulder, and Vigor between them. Just a split second that lasted a lifetime, Vigor’s eyes wide with surprise, blood already leaping out of his mouth, spattering out onto the tree that killed him. Then the Hatrack River swept the tree out into the current. Vigor slipped under the water, all except his arm, all tangled in the roots, which stuck up into the air for all the world like a neighbor waving good-bye after a visit.

Alvin was so intent on watching his dying son that he didn’t even notice what was happening to his own self. The blow from the tree was enough to dislodge the mired wheels, and the current picked up the wagon, carried it downstream, Alvin clinging to the tailgate, Faith weeping inside, Eleanor screaming her lungs out from the driver’s seat, and the boys on the bank shouting something. Shouting “Hold! Hold! Hold!”

The rope held, one end tied to a strong tree, the other end tied to the wagon, it held. The river couldn’t tumble the wagon downstream; instead it swung the wagon in to shore the way a boy swings a rock on a string, and when it came to a shuddering stop it was right against the bank, the front end facing upstream.

“It held!” cried the boys.

“Thank God!” shouted Eleanor.

“The baby’s coming,” whispered Faith.

But Alvin, all he could hear was the single faint cry that had been the last sound from the throat of his firstborn son, all he could see was the way his boy clung to the tree as it rolled and rolled in the water, and all he could say was a single word, a single command. “Live,” he murmured. Vigor had always obeyed him before. Hard worker, willing companion, more a friend or brother than a son. But this time he knew his son would disobey. Still he whispered it. “Live.”

“Are we safe?” said Faith, her voice trembling.

Alvin turned to face her, tried to strike the grief from his face. No sense her knowing the price that Vigor paid to save her and the baby. Time enough to learn of that after the baby was born. “Can you climb out of the wagon?”

“What’s wrong?” asked Faith, looking at his face.

“I took a fright. Tree could have killed us. Can you climb out, now that we’re up against the bank?”

Eleanor leaned in from the front of the wagon. “David and Calm are on the bank, they can help you up. The rope’s holding, Mama, but who can say how long?”

“Go on, Mother, just a step,” said Alvin. “We’ll do better with the wagon if we know you’re safe on shore.”

“The baby’s coming,” said Faith.

“Better on shore than here,” said Alvin sharply. “Go now”

Faith stood up, clambered awkwardly to the front. Alvin climbed through the wagon behind her, to help her if she should stumble. Even he could see how her belly had dropped. The baby must be grabbing for air already.

On the bank it wasn’t just David and Calm, now. There were strangers, big men, and several horses. Even one small wagon, and that was a welcome sight. Alvin had no notion who these men were, or how they knew to come and help, but there wasn’t a moment to waste on introductions. “You men! Is there a midwife in the road house?”

“Goody Guester does with birthing,” said a man. A big man, with arms like oxlegs. A blacksmith, surely.

“Can you take my wife in that wagon? There’s not a moment to spare.” Alvin knew it was a shameful thing, for men to speak so openly of birthing, right in front of the woman who was set to bear. But Faith was no fool—she knew what mattered most, and getting her to a bed and a competent midwife was more important than pussyfooting around about it.

David and Calm were careful as they helped their mother toward the waiting wagon. Faith was staggering with pain. Women in labor shouldn’t have to step from a wagon seat up onto a riverbank, that was sure. Eleanor was right behind her, taking charge as if she wasn’t younger than all the boys except the twins. “Measure! Get the girls together. They’re riding in the wagon with us. You too, Wastenot and Wantnot! I know you can help the big boys but I need you to watch the girls while I’m with Mother.” Eleanor was never one to be trifled with, and the gravity of the situation was such that they didn’t even call her Eleanor of Aquitaine as they obeyed. Even the little girls mostly gave over their squabbling and got right in.

Eleanor paused a moment on the bank and looked back to where her father stood on the wagon seat. She glanced downstream, then looked back at him. Alvin understood the question, and he shook his head no. Faith was not to know of Vigor’s sacrifice. Tears came unwelcome to Alvin’s eyes, but not to Eleanor’s. Eleanor was only fourteen, but when she didn’t want to cry, she didn’t cry.

Wastenot hawed the horse and the little wagon lurched forward, Faith wincing as the girls patted her and the rain poured. Faith’s gaze was somber as a cow’s, and as mindless, looking back at her husband, back at the river. At times like birthing, Alvin thought, a woman becomes a beast, slack-minded as her body takes over and does its work. How else could she bear the pain? As if the soul of the earth possessed her the way it owns the souls of animals, making her part of the life of the whole world, unhitching her from family, from husband, from all the reins of the human race, leading her into the valley of ripeness and harvest and reaping and bloody death.

“She’ll be safe now,” the blacksmith said. “And we have horses here to pull your wagon out.”

“It’s slacking off,” said Measure. “The rain is less, and the current’s not so strong.”

“As soon as your wife stepped ashore, it eased up,” said the farmerlooking feller. “The rain’s dying, that’s sure.”

“You took the worst of it in the water,” said the blacksmith. “But you’re all right now. Get hold of yourself, man, there’s work to do.”

Only then did Alvin come to himself enough to realize that he was crying. Work to do, that’s right, get hold of yourself, Alvin Miller. You’re no weakling, to bawl like a baby. Other men have lost a dozen children and still live their lives. You’ve had twelve, and Vigor lived to be a man, though he never did get to marry and have children of his own. Maybe Alvin had to weep because Vigor died so nobly; maybe he cried because it was so sudden.

David touched the blacksmith’s arm. “Leave him be for a minute,” he said softly. “Our oldest brother was carried off not ten minutes back. He got tangled in a tree floating down.”

“It wasn’t no tangle” Alvin said sharply. “He jumped that tree and saved our wagon, and your mother inside it! That river paid him back, that’s what it did, it punished him.”

Calm spoke quietly to the local men. “It run him up against that boulder there.” They all looked. There was a smear of blood on the rock.

“The Hatrack has a mean streak in it,” said the blacksmith, “but I never seen this river so riled up before. I’m sorry about your boy. There’s a slow, flat place downstream where he’s bound to fetch up. Everything the river catches ends up there. When the storm lets up, we can go down and bring back the—bring him back.”

Alvin wiped his eyes on his sleeve, but since his sleeve was soaking wet it didn’t do much good. “Give me a minute more and I can pull my weight,” said Alvin.

They hitched two more horses and the four beasts had no trouble pulling the wagon out against the much weakened current. By the time the wagon was set to rights again on the road, the sun was even breaking through.

“Wouldn’t you know,” said the blacksmith. “If you ever don’t like the weather hereabouts, you just set a spell, cause it’ll change.”

“Not this one,” said Alvin. “This storm was laid in wait for us.”

The blacksmith put an arm across Alvin’s shoulder, and spoke real gentle. “No offense, mister, but that’s crazy talk.”

Alvin shrugged him off. “That storm and that river wanted us.”

“Papa,” said David, “you’re tired and grieving. Best be still till we get to the road house and see how Mama is.”

“My baby is a boy,” said Papa. “You’ll see. He would have been the seventh son of a seventh son.”

That got their attention, right enough, that blacksmith and the other men as well. Everybody knew a seventh son had certain gifts, but the seventh son of a seventh son was about as powerful a birth as you could have.

“That makes a difference,” said the blacksmith. “He’d have been a born douser, sure, and water hates that.” The others nodded sagely.

“The water had its way,” said Alvin. “Had its way, and all done. It would’ve killed Faith and the baby, if it could. But since it couldn’t, why, it killed my boy Vigor. And now when the baby comes, he’ll be the sixth son, cause I’ll only have five living.”

“Some says it makes no difference if the first six be alive or not,” said a farmer.

Alvin said nothing, but he knew it made all the difference. He had thought this baby would be a miracle child, but the river had taken care of that. If water don’t stop you one way, it stops you another. He shouldn’t have hoped for a miracle child. The cost was too high. All his eyes could see, all the way home, was Vigor dangling in the grasp of the roots, tumbling through the current like a leaf caught up in a dust devil, with the blood seeping from his mouth to slake the murderous thirst of the Hatrack.

Little Peggy stood in the window, looking out into the storm. She could see all those heartfires, especially one, one so bright it was like the sun when she looked at it. But there was a blackness all around them. No, not even black—a nothingness, like a part of the universe God hadn’t finished making, and it swept around those lights as if to tear them from each other, sweep them away, swallow them up. Little Peggy knew what that nothingness was. Those times when her eyes saw the hot yellow heartfires, there were three other colors, too. The rich dark orange of the earth. The thin gray color of the air. And the deep black emptiness of water. It was the water that tore at them now. The river, only she had never seen it so black, so strong, so terrible. The heartfires were so tiny in the night.

“What do you see, child?” asked Oldpappy.

“The river’s going to carry them away,” said little Peggy.

“I hope not.”

Little Peggy began to cry.

“There, child,” said Oldpappy. “It ain’t always such a grand thing to see afar off like that, is it.”

She shook her head.

“But maybe it won’t happen as bad as you think.”

Just at that moment, she saw one of the heartfires break away and tumble off into the dark. “Oh!” she cried out, reaching as if her hand could snatch the light and put it back. But of course she couldn’t. Her vision was long and clear, but her reach was short.

“Are they lost?” asked Oldpappy.

“One,” whispered little Peggy.

“Haven’t Makepeace and the others got there yet?”

“Just now,” she said. “The rope held. They’re safe now.”

Oldpappy didn’t ask her how she knew, or what she saw. Just patted her shoulder. “Because you told them. Remember that, Margaret. One was lost, but if you hadn’t seen and sent help, they might all have died.”

She shook her head. “I should’ve seen them sooner, Oldpappy, but I fell asleep.”

“And you blame youself?” asked Oldpappy.

“I should’ve let Bloody Mary nip me, and then father wouldn’t’ve been mad, and then I wouldn’t’ve been in the spring house, and then I wouldn’t’ve been asleep, and then I would’ve sent help in time—”

“We can all make daisy chains of blame like that, Maggie. It don’t mean a thing.”

But she knew it meant something. You don’t blame blind people ’cause they don’t warn you you’re about to step on a snake—but you sure blame somebody with eyes who doesn’t say a word about it. She knew her duty ever since she first realized that other folks couldn’t see all that she could see. God gave her special eyes, so she’d better see and give warning, or the devil would take her soul. The devil or the deep black sea.

“Don’t mean a thing,” Oldpappy murmured. Then, like he just been poked in the behind with a ramrod, he went all straight and said, “Spring house! Spring house, of course.” He pulled her close. “Listen to me, little Peggy. It wasn’t none of your fault, and that’s the truth. The same water that runs in the Hatrack flows in the spring house brook, it’s all the same water, all through the world. The same water that wanted them dead, it knew you could give warning and send help. So it sang to you and sent you off to sleep.”

It make a kind of sense to her, it sure did. “How can that be, Oldpappy?”

“Oh, that’s just in the nature of it. The whole universe is made of only four kinds of stuff, little Peggy, and each one wants to have its own way.” Peggy thought of the four colors that she saw when the heartfires glowed, and she knew what all four were even as Oldpappy named them. “Fire makes things hot and bright and uses them up. Air makes things cool and sneaks in everywhere. Earth makes things solid and sturdy, so they’ll last. But water, it tears things down, it falls from the sky and carries off everything it can, carries it off and down to the sea. If the water had its way, the whole world would be smooth, just a big ocean with nothing out of the water’s reach. All dead and smooth. That’s why you slept. The water wants to tear down these strangers, whoever they are, tear them down and kill them. It’s a miracle you woke up at all.”

“The blacksmith’s hammer woke me,” said little Peggy.

“That’s it, then, you see? The blacksmith was working with iron, the hardest earth, and with a fierce blast of air from the bellows, and with a fire so hot it burns the grass outside the chimney. The water couldn’t touch him to keep him still.”

Little Peggy could hardly believe it, but it must be so. The blacksmith had drawn her from a watery sleep. The smith had helped her. Why, it was enough to make you laugh, to know the blacksmith was her friend this time.

There was shouting on the porch downstairs, and doors opened and closed. “Some folks is here already,” said Oldpappy.

Little Peggy saw the heartfires downstairs, and found the one with the strongest fear and pain. “It’s their Mama,” said little Peggy. “She’s got a baby coming.”

“Well, if that ain’t the luck of it. Lose one, and here already is a baby to replace death with life.” Oldpappy shambled on out to go downstairs and help.

Little Peggy, though, she just stood there, looking at what she saw in the distance. That lost heartfire wasn’t lost at all, and that was sure. She could see it burning away far off, despite how the darkness of the river tried to cover it. He wasn’t dead, just carried off, and maybe somebody could help him. She ran out then, passed Oldpappy all in a rush, clattered down the stairs.

Mama caught her by the arm as she was running into the great room. “There’s a birthing,” Mama said, “and we need you.”

“But Mama, the one that went downriver, he’s still alive!”

“Peggy, we got no time for—”

Two boys with the same face pushed their way into the conversation. “The one downriver!” cried one.

“Still alive!” cried another.

“How do you know!”

“He can’t be!”

They spoke so all on top of each other that Mama had to hush them up just to hear them. “It was Vigor, our big brother, he got swept away—”

“Well he’s alive,” said little Peggy, “but the river’s got him.”

The twins looked to Mama for confirmation. “She know what she’s talking about, Goody Guester?”

Mama nodded, and the boys raced for the door, shouting, “He’s alive! He’s still alive!”

“Are you sure?” asked Mama fiercely. “It’s a cruel thing, to put hope in their hearts like that, if it ain’t so.”

Mama’s flashing eyes made little Peggy afraid, and she couldn’t think what to say.

By then, though, Oldpappy had come up from behind. “Now Peg,” he said, “how would she know one was taken by the river, lessun she saw?”

“I know,” said Mama. “But this woman’s been holding off birth too long, and I got a care for the baby, so come on now, little Peggy, I need you to tell me what you see.”

She led little Peggy into the bedroom off the kitchen, the place where Papa and Mama slept whenever there were visitors. The woman lay on the bed, holding tight to the hand of a tall girl with deep and solemn eyes. Little Peggy didn’t know their faces, but she recognized their fires, especially the mother’s pain and fear.

“Someone was shouting,” whispered the mother.

“Hush now,” said Mama.

“About him still alive.”

The solemn girl raised her eyebrows, looked at Mama. “Is that so, Goody Guester?”

“My daughter’s a torch. That’s why I brung her here in this room. To see the baby.”

“Did she see my boy? Is he alive?”

“I thought you didn’t tell her, Eleanor,” said Mama.

The solemn girl shook her head.

“Saw from the wagon. Is he alive?”

“Tell her, Margaret,” said Mama.

Little Peggy turned and looked for his heartfire. There were no walls when it came to this kind of seeing. His flame was still there, though she knew it was afar off. This time, though, she drew near in the way she had, took a close look. “He’s in the water. He’s all tangled in the roots.”

“Vigor!” cried the mother on the bed.

“The river wants him. The river says, Die, die.”

Mama touched the woman’s arm. “The twins have gone off to tell the others. There’ll be a search party.”

“In the dark!” whispered the woman scornfully.

Little Peggy spoke again. “He’s saying a prayer, I think. He’s saying—seventh son.”

“Seventh son,” whispered Eleanor.

“What does that mean?” asked Mama.

“If this baby’s a boy,” said Eleanor, “and he’s born while Vigor’s still alive, then he’s the seventh son of a seventh son, and all of them alive.” Mama gasped. “No wonder the river—” she said. No need to finish the thought. Instead she took little Peggy’s hands and led her to the woman on the bed. “Look at this baby, and see what you see.”

Little Peggy had done this before, of course. It was the chief use they had for torches, to have them look at an unborn baby just at the birthing time. Partly to see how it lay in the womb, but also because sometimes a torch could see who the baby was, what it would be, could tell stories of times to come. Even before she touched the woman’s belly, she could see the baby’s heartfire. It was the one that she had seen before, that burned so hot and bright that it was like the sun and the moon, to compare it to the mother’s fire. “It’s a boy,” she said.

“Then let me bear this baby,” said the mother. “Let him breathe while Vigor still breathes!”

“How’s the baby set?” asked Mama.

“Just right,” said little Peggy.

“Head first? Face down?”

Little Peggy nodded.

“Then why won’t it come?” demanded Mama.

“She’s been telling him not to,” said Little Peggy, looking at the mother. “In the wagon,” the mother said. “He was coming, and I did abeseeching.”

“Well, you should have told me right off,” said Mama sharply. “Speck me to help you and you don’t even tell me he’s got a beseeching on him. You, girl!”

Several young ones were standing near the wall, wide-eyed, and they didn’t know which one she meant.

“Any of you, I need that iron key from the ring on the wall.”

The biggest of them took it clumsily from the hook and brought it, ring and all. Mama dangled the large ring and the key over the mother’s belly, chanting softly,

“Here’s the circle, open wide,
Here’s the key to get outside,
Earth be iron, flame be fair,
Fall from water into air.”

The mother cried out in sudden agony. Mama tossed away the key, cast back the sheet, lifted the woman’s knees, and ordered little Peggy fiercely to see.

Little Peggy touched the woman’s womb. The boy’s mind was empty, except for a feeling of pressure and gathering cold as he emerged into the air. But the very emptiness of his mind let her see things that would never be clearly visible again. The billion billion paths of his life lay open before him, waiting for his first choices, for the first changes in the world around him to eliminate a million futures every second. The future was there in everyone, a flickering shadow that was never visible behind the thoughts of the present moment; but here, for a few precious moments, little Peggy could see them clearly.

And what she saw was death down every path. Drowning, drowning, every path of his future led this child to a watery death.

“Why do you hate him so!” cried little Peggy.

“What?” demanded Eleanor.

“Hush,” said Mama. “Let her see what she sees.”

Inside the unborn child, the dark blot of water that surrounded his heartfire seemed so terribly strong that little Peggy was afraid he would be swallowed up.

“Get him out to breathe!” shouted little Peggy.

Mama reached in, even though it tore the mother something dreadful, and hooked the baby by the neck with strong fingers, drawing him out.

In that moment, the dark water retreated inside the child’s mind, and just before the first breath came, little Peggy saw ten million deaths by water disappear. Now, for the first time, there were some paths open, some paths leading to a dazzling future. And all the paths that did not end in early death had one thing in common. On all those paths, little Peggy saw herself doing one simple thing.

So she did that thing. She took her hands from the slackening belly and ducked under her mother’s arm. The baby’s head had just emerged, and it was still covered with a bloody caul, a scrap of the sac of soft skin in which he had floated in his mother’s womb.

His mouth was open, sucking inward on the caul, but it didn’t break, and he couldn’t breathe.

Little Peggy did what she had seen herself do in the baby’s future. She reached out, took the caul from under the baby’s chin, and pulled it away from his face. It came whole, in one moist piece, and in the moment it came away, the baby’s mouth cleared, he sucked in a great breath, and then gave that mewling cry that birthing mothers hear as the song of life.

Little Peggy folded the caul, her mind still full of the visions she had seen down the pathways of this baby’s life. She did not know yet what the visions meant, but they made such clear pictures in her mind that she knew she would never forget them. They made her afraid, because so much would depend on her, and how she used the birth caul that was still warm in her hands.

“A boy,” said Mama.

“Is he,” whispered the mother. “Seventh son?”

Mama was tying the cord, so she couldn’t spare a glance at little Peggy. “Look,” she whispered.

Little Peggy looked for the single heartfire on the distant river. “Yes,” she said, for the heartfire was still burning.

Even as she watched, it flickered, died.

“Now he’s gone,” said little Peggy.

The woman on the bed wept bitterly, her birth-wracked body shuddering.

“Grieving at the baby’s birth,” said Mama. “It’s a dreadful thing.”

“Hush,” whispered Eleanor to her mother. “Be joyous, or it’ll darken the baby all his life!”

“Vigor,” murmured the woman.

“Better nothing at all than tears,” said Mama. She held out the crying baby, and Eleanor took it in competent arms—she had cradled many a babe before, it was plain. Mama went to the table in the corner and took the scarf that had been blacked in the wool, so it was night-colored clear through. She dragged it slowly across the weeping woman’s face, saying, “Sleep, Mother, sleep.”

When the cloth came away, the weeping was done, and the woman slept, her strength spent.

“Take the baby from the room,” said Mama.

“Don’t he need to start his sucking?” asked Eleanor.

“She’ll never nurse this babe,” said Mama. “Not unless you want him to suck hate.”

“She can’t hate him,” said Eleanor. “It ain’t his fault.”

“I reckon her milk don’t know that,” said Mama. “That right, little Peggy? What teat did the baby suck?”

“His mama’s,” said little Peggy.

Mama looked sharp at her. “You sure of that?”

She nodded.

“Well, then, we’ll bring the baby in when she wakes up. He doesn’t need to eat anything for the first night, anyway.” So Eleanor carried the baby out into the great room, where the fire burned to dry the men, who stopped trading stories about rains and floods worse than this one long enough to look at the baby and admire.

Inside the room, though, Mama took little Peggy by the chin and stared hard into her eyes. “You tell me the truth, Margaret. It’s a serious thing, for a baby to suck on its mama and drink up hate.”

“She won’t hate him, Mama,” said little Peggy.

“What did you see?”

Little Peggy would have answered, but she didn’t know the words to tell most of the things she saw. So she looked at the floor. She could tell from Mama’s quick draw of breath that she was ripe for a tongue-lashing. But Mama waited, and then her hand came soft, stroking across little Peggy’s cheek. “Ah, child, what a day you’ve had. The baby might have died, except you told me to pull it out. You even reached in and opened up its mouth—that’s what you did, isn’t it?”

Little Peggy nodded.

“Enough for a little girl, enough for one day.” Mama turned to the other girls, the ones in wet dresses, leaning against the wall. “And you, too, you’ve had enough of a day. Come out of here, let your mama sleep, come out and get dry by the fire. I’ll start a supper for you, I will.”

But Oldpappy was already in the kitchen, fussing around, and refused to hear of Mama doing a thing. Soon enough she was out with the baby, shooing the men away so she could rock it to sleep, letting it suck her finger.

Little Peggy figured after a while that she wouldn’t be missed, and so she snuck up the stairs to the attic ladder, and up the ladder into the lightless, musty space. The spiders didn’t bother her much, and the cats mostly kept the mice away, so she wasn’t afraid. She crawled right to her secret hiding place and took out the carven box that Oldpappy had given her, the one he said his own papa brought from Ulster when he came to the colonies. It was full of the precious scraps of childhood—stones, strings, buttons—but now she knew that these were nothing compared to the work before her all the rest of her life. She dumped them right out, and blew into the box to clear away dust. Then she laid the folded caul inside and closed the lid.

She knew that in the future she would open that box a dozen times. That it would call to her, wake her from her sleep, tear her from her friends, and steal from her all her dreams. All because a baby boy downstairs had no future at all, except a death from the dark water, excepting if she used that caul to keep him safe, the way it once protected him in the womb.

For a moment she was angry, to have her own life so changed. Worse than the blacksmith coming, it was, worse than Papa and the hazel wand he whupped her with, worse than Mama when her eyes were angry. Everything would be different forever and it wasn’t fair. Just for a baby she never invited, never asked to come here, what did she care about any old baby?

She reached out and opened the box, planning to take the caul and cast it into a dark corner of the attic. But even in the darkness, she could see a place where it was darker still: near her heartfire, where the emptiness of the deep black river was all set to make a murderer out of her.

Not me, she said to the water. You ain’t part of me.

Yes I am, whispered the water. I’m all through you, and you’d dry up and die without me.

You ain’t the boss of me, anyway, she retorted.

She closed the lid on the box and skidded her way down the ladder. Papa always said that she’d get splinters in her butt doing that. This time he was right. It stung something fierce, so she walked kind of sideways into the kitchen where Oldpappy was. Sure enough, he stopped his cooking long enough to pry the splinters out.

“My eyes ain’t sharp enough for this, Maggie,” he complained.

“You got the eyes of an eagle. Papa says so.”

Oldpappy chuckled. “Does he now.”

“What’s for dinner?”

“Oh, you’ll like this dinner, Maggie.”

Little Peggy wrinkled up her nose. “Smells like chicken.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t like chicken soup.”

“Not just soup, Maggie. This one’s a-roasting, except the neck and wings.”

“I hate roast chicken, too.”

“Does your Oldpappy ever lie to you?”

“Nope.”

“Then you best believe me when I tell you this is one chicken dinner that’ll make you glad. Can’t you think of any way that a partickler chicken dinner could make you glad?”

Little Peggy thought and thought, and then she smiled. “Bloody Mary?”

Oldpappy winked. “I always said that was a hen born to make gravy.” Little Peggy hugged him so tight that he made choking sounds, and then they laughed and laughed.

Later that night, long after little Peggy was in bed, they brought Vigor’s body home, and Papa and Makepeace set to making a box for him. Alvin Miller hardly looked alive, even when Eleanor showed him the baby. Until she said, “That torch girl. She says that this baby is the seventh son of a seventh son.”

Alvin looked around for someone to tell him if it was true.

“Oh, you can trust her,” said Mama.

Tears came fresh to Alvin’s eyes. “That boy hung on,” he said. “There in the water, he hung on long enough.”

“He knowed what store you set by that,” said Eleanor.

Then Alvin reached for the baby, held him tight, looked down into his eyes. “Nobody named him yet, did they?” he asked.

“Course not,” said Eleanor. “Mama named all the other boys, but you always said the seventh son’d have—”

“My own name. Alvin. Seventh son of a seventh son, with the same name as his father. Alvin Junior.” He looked around him, then turned to face toward the river, way off in the nighttime forest. “Hear that, you Hatrack River? His name is Alvin, and you didn’t kill him after all.” Soon they brought in the box, and laid out Vigor’s body with candles, to stand for the fire of life that had left him. Alvin held up the baby, over the coffin. “Look on your brother,” he whispered to the infant. “That baby can’t see nothing yet, Papa,” said David.

“That ain’t so, David,” said Alvin. “He don’t know what he’s seeing, but his eyes can see. And when he gets old enough to hear the story of his birth, I’m going to tell him that his own eyes saw his brother Vigor, who gave his life for this baby’s sake.”

It was two weeks before Faith was well enough to travel. But Alvin saw to it that he and his boys worked hard for their keep. They cleared a good spot of land, chopped the winter’s firewood, set some charcoal heaps for Makepeace Smith, and widened the road. They also felled four big trees and made a strong bridge across the Hatrack River, a covered bridge so that even in a rainstorm people could cross that river without a drop of water touching them.

Vigor’s grave was the third one there, beside little Peggy’s two dead sisters. The family paid respects and prayed there on the morning that they left. Then they got in their wagon and rode off westward. “But we leave a part of ourselves here always,” said Faith, and Alvin nodded.

Little Peggy watched them go, then ran up into the attic, opened the box, and held little Alvin’s caul in her hand. No danger, for now at least. Safe for now. She put the caul away and closed the lid. You better be something, baby Alvin, she said, or else you caused a powerful lot of trouble for nothing.

THE BARBARIAN PRINCESS

Vernor Vinge

Psychologists make much of the importance of an individual’s fitting into society. But there’s more than one way to achieve a fit.

Fair Haven at South Cape was a squalid little town. Ramshackle warehouses lined the harbor, their wooden sides unpainted and rotting. Inland, the principal cultural attractions were a couple of brothels and the barracks of the Crown garrison. Yet in one sense Fair Haven lived up to its name. No matter how scruffy things were here, you knew they would be worse farther east. This was the nether end of civilization. Beyond South Cape lay four thousand miles of wild coast, the haunt of littoral pirates and barbarian tribes.

Rey Guille would soon sail east, but the prospect did not bother him. In fact, he rather looked forward to it. For obvious reasons, there weren’t many customers along the south coast run. The Tarulle Barge would put in at two of the larger barbarian settlements, villages with a taste for some of Tarulle’s kinkier publications. There was also an author living in the coastal wilderness. His production was weird and erratic—but worth an extra stop. Except for these three landfalls, the Barge would sail straight around the south coast, free of external problems. It would be thirty days before they reached the Osterlais.

Thirty days, sixty wake periods. Enough time for the translators to prepare the Osterlai and Tsanart editions, enough time for Brailly Tounse to recondition the Tarulle printers. Rey surveyed his tiny office. Thirty days. That might even be enough for him to dispose of his current backlog: Manuscripts were stacked from floor to ceiling behind him. The piles on his desk blocked his view of Fair Haven harbor—and more important, the breeze that seeped in from over the water. These were all the submissions taken aboard during their passage through the Chainpearls and Crownesse. There would be some first class stories here, but most would end up as extra slush in Brailly’s papermaking vats. (Thus—as Rey had once pointed out in an editorial—every submission to Fantasie eventually became part of the magazine.)

Rey jammed the tiny windows open, and arranged his chair so he could sit in the breeze. He was about halfway through the desk stack: The easy ones he could decide in a matter of seconds. Even for these, he made a brief note in the submission log. Two years from now the Tarulle Publishing Company would be back in the Chainpearls. He couldn’t return the manuscripts, but at least he could say something appropriate to the submitters. Other stories were harder to judge: competent but flawed, or inappropriate outside the author’s home islands. Over the last few days, a small pile of high priority items had accumulated beneath his desk. He would end up buying most of those. Some were treasures. Ivam Alecque’s planet yarns were based on the latest research in spectrometry; Rey planned a companion editorial about the marvelous new science.

Alas, he must also buy stories that did not thrill him. Fantasie magazine lived up to its name: most of his purchases were stories of magic and mysticism. Even these were fun when the authors could be persuaded to play by internally consistent rules.

Rey grabbed the next manuscript, and scowled. Then there were the truly revolting things he must buy, things like this: another Hrala adventure. The series had started twenty years earlier, five years before he signed on with Tarulle. The first few stories weren’t bad, if you liked nonstop illogical action with lots of blood and sex; old Chem Trinos wasn’t a bad writer. As was Tarulle custom, Trinos had exclusive control of his series for eight years. Then Tarulle accepted Hrala stories from anyone. The fad kept growing. Otherwise decent writers began wasting their time writing new Hrala stories. Nowadays the series was popular all around the world, and practically a cult in the Llerenitos.

Hrala the Barbarian Princess: over six feet tall, fantastically built, unbelievably strong and crafty and vengeful and libidinous. Her adventures took place in the vast inland of The Continent, where empires and wars had no need to conform to the humdrum world that readers knew. She was the idol of thousands of foolish male readers and a model for thousands of female ones.

Rey paged slowly through this latest contribution to the legend. Hmph . . . for its kind, the story was well written. He’d have his assistant editor look it over, make it consistent with the background files she kept on the series. He would probably have to buy it. He tossed the mansucript under his desk and made a note in the submission log.

An hour later, Rey was still at it, the in-pile fractionally smaller. From the decks below his windows there was the continuing noise of supplies being loaded, crewman shouting at stevadores. Occasionally he heard people working on the rigging above him. He had long since learned to tune out such. But now there was a different clatter: someone was coming along the catwalk to his office. A moment later, Coronadas Ascuasenya stuck her head in the doorway. “Boss, such a deal I got for you!”

Uh-oh. When Cor’s accent thickened and her words came fast, it was a sure sign she had been swept away by some new enthusiasm. He waved her into the office. “What’s that?”

“Tarulle magazines, they don’t sell themselves. Other things we need to grab buyer interest.”

Rey nodded. Jespen Tarulle had a small circus housed on the after decks. They put on shows at the larger ports, hyped all the Tarulle publications. Cor was fascinated by the operation; she was constantly trying to add acts representing stories and authors from Fantasie. She was good at it, too, a natural born publicist. Rey figured it was only a matter of time before higher-ups noticed. and he lost his assistant editor. “What have you got?”

“Who,” she corrected him. She stepped back and waved at someone beyond the doorway. “I present to you Hrala, Princess of the Interior!” She pronounced the name correctly, with a throat-tearing rasp that was painful even to hear.

The portentous intro brought no immediate action. After a moment, Cor stepped to the door and spoke coaxingly. There were at least two people out there, one of them a printsman from Brailly’s crew. A second passed, and someone tall and lanky bent through the doorway. . . .

Rey rocked back in his chair, his eyes widening. The visitor was remarkable—though not in the way Cor meant. It was a female: there was a slimness in the shoulders, and a slight broadening in the hips. And she was tall. The ceiling of Guide’s office was six feet high; the girl’s tangled red hair brushed against it. But scale her down to normal size and she might be taken for a street waif. Her face and hair were grimy. A bruise darkened her face around one eye. With her arrival, the room was filled with the smell of rancid grease. He looked at her clothes and understood the source of part of the smell. She was dressed in rags. There were patches on patches on patches, yet holes still showed through. But these were not the rags of a street waif: these were leather, thick and poorly cured. She carried a walking staff almost as tall as she was.

The circus people might have use for such a character, though scarcely as Hrala. He smiled at the girl, “What’s your name?”

Her only reply was a shy smile that revealed even, healthy teeth. There was a nice face hiding under all the dirt.

Cor said, “She doesn’t understand one word of Sprak, Boss.” She looked out the door. “What did she call herself, Jimi?”

The printsman stuck his head into the office; there wasn’t room for three visitors. “Good afternoon, Master Guille,” he said to Rey. “Uh, it’s hard to pronounce. The closest thing in a civilized name would be ‘Tatja Grimm.’ ” The girl’s head came up and her smile broadened.

“Hmm. Where did you find her?”

“Strangest thing, sir. We were on a wood detail for Master Tounse, a few miles south of here. Just about noon we came across her on the tableland. She had that there walking stick stuck in the ground. It looked like she was praying to it or something—she had her face down near the end of the stick’s shadow. We couldn’t see quite what all she was doing; we were busy cutting trees. But some boys from the town came by, started hassling her. We chased them off before they could do anything.”

“And she was eager to stay with you?”

“She was when she saw we were from the Barge. One of our crew speaks a little Hurdic, sir. Near as he can tell, she walked here from the center of The Continent.”

Three thousand miles, through lands which—until very recently—had swallowed up every expedition. Rey cast a look of quiet incredulity at his assistant. Cor gave a little shrug, as if to say, Hey, it will make great copy.

The printsman missed this byplay. “We couldn’t figure out quite why she made the trip, though. Something about finding people to talk to.”

Rey chuckled. “Well, if Hurdic is her only language, she certainly came to the wrong place.” He looked at the girl. During the conversation, her eyes had wandered all about the office. The smile had not left her face. Everything fascinated her: the carved wall panels, the waist-high stacks of manuscripts, Guille’s telescope in the comer. Only when she looked at Rey or Cor or Jimi did her smile falter and the shyness return. Damn. Didn’t Cor realize what she had here? Aloud he said, “This is something I should think about. Jimi, why don’t you take this, ah, Tatja over to the public deck. Get her something to eat.”

“Yes, sir. Tatja?” He motioned her to follow him. The girl’s shoulders slumped for an instant, but she departed without protest.

Cor was silent till their footsteps had faded into the general deck clamor. Then she looked at Guille. “You’re not going to hire her.” It was more an accusation than a question.

“You’d find her more trouble than she’s worth. Cor. I’d wager she’s a local girl; who ever heard of an inlander with red hair? Watching her, I could see she understood some of what we were saying. Whatever Hurdic she speaks is probably in Jimi’s imagination. The poor girl is simply retarded—probably caused by the same glandular problem that’s sprouted her six feet tall before she’s even reached puberty. My guess is she’s barely trainable.”

Cor sat on one stack of manuscripts, propped her feet on another. “Sure, she’s no inlander. Boss. But she’s not from Fair Haven. The Haveners don’t wear leather like that. She’s probably been expelled from some local tribe. And yes, she’s a dim brain, but who cares? No need for The Great Hrala to give big speeches in Sprak. I can teach her to strut, wave a sword, make fake Hurdic war talk. Boss, they’ll love her in the Llerenitos.”

“Cor! She doesn’t even look like Hrala. The red hair—

“Wigs. We got lotsa nice black wigs.”

“—and her figure. She just doesn’t have, uh . . .” Guille made vague motions with his hands.

“No tits? Yes, that’s a problem.” The “true” Hrala danced through her adventures wearing next to nothing. “But we can fix. The vice magazine people have props. Take one of their rubber busts and wrap it in brassiere armor like Hrala wears—it’ll fool an audience.” She paused. “Boss. I can make this work. Tatja may be dim, but she wants to please. She doesn’t have any place else to go.”

Guille knew this last was not part of the sales pitch; Ascuasenya had a soft streak undermining her pragmatism. He turned to look out at Fair Haven. A steady stream of supply lighters moved back and forth between the town’s main pier and the deeper water surrounding the Barge. Tarulle was due to lift anchor tomorrow noon. It would be two years before they returned to this part of the world. Finally he said, “Your scheme could cause real problems the next time we visit this dump. Come the night wake period, go into town and look up the Crown’s magistrate. Make sure we’re not stealing some citizen’s kid.”

“Sure.” Cor grinned broadly. Victory was at hand. Guille grumbled for a few more minutes: Hiring an actress would mean going up the chain of command to Overeditor Ramsey, and perhaps beyond him to the Tarulles. That could take days, and much debate. Guille allowed himself to be persuaded to hire the girl as an apprentice proofreader. The move had a certain piquancy: how many writers had accused him of employing illiterate nitwits as proofreaders?

Finally, he reminded his assistant editor that she still had a full-time job preparing the issues that would sell in the Osterlais. Cor nodded, her face very serious; the Hrala project would be on her own time. He almost thought he’d intimidated her—until she turned to leave and he heard a poorly suppressed laugh.

It took Cor less than two days to realize what a jam she had talked herself into. The Barge was back at sea and there were no distractions from shore-folk, but now she found herself working thirty hours a day, setting up the Hrala rehearsals with publicity, looking after the Grimm girl, and—most of all—getting Fantasie into shape.

There were so many manuscripts to review. There were good stories in the slush pile, but more science-oriented ones than ever before. These were Rey Guille’s special favorites, and sometimes he went overboard with them. Fantasie had been published for seven hundred years. A certain percentage of its stories had always claimed to be possible. But only in the last fifty years, with the rise of science, could the reader feel that there was a future where the stories might really happen. Rey Guille had been editor of Fantasie for fifteen years. During that time, they had published more stories of Contrivance Fiction than in all the previous years. He had Svektr Ramsey’s permission to include two in every issue. More and more, he found readers whose only interest was in such stories. More and more, he found readers who were creating the science that future stories would be based on.

Cor knew that, in his heart, Rey saw these stories as agents of change in themselves. Take the spectrometry series: during the last five years, he had written a dozen editorials advertising the new science (“Spectrometry, Key to Nature’s Secrets”), and soliciting stories based on the contrivance. Now he got one or two new ones at every major stop. Some of them were salable. Some were mind-boggling. . . . And some were wretched.

Ascuasenya had been working on the Barge for five quarters, and as Rey Guille’s assistant for nearly a year. She had read her first Fantasie story when she was five. It was hard not to be in awe of the magazine’s editor, even if he was a crotchety old codger. (Guille was forty-one.) Cor did her best to disguise her feelings; their editorial conferences were running battles. This morning was no different. They were up in his office, putting together the first issue for the Osterlais. The slush pile had been reduced to desk height and they had plenty of room to lay out the pieces Rey had selected for the new issue. Outside Guille’s office, the bright light of morning had slowly reddened. They were well into the eclipse season; once every twenty hours, Seraph blocked the sun or was itself eclipsed. Every wake period was punctuated by darkness as deep as night on the far hemisphere. Guille had set lamps on every available hook, yet he still found it hard to read fine print.

He squinted at the Ivam Alecque manuscript Cor was complaining about. “I don’t understand you, Cor. This yam is world-shaking. If we didn’t put anything else in the next issue, ‘Pride of Iron’ could carry it all.”

“But the writing, it is so wooden. The characters have no life. The plot makes me sleepy.”

“By the Blue Light of Seraph, Cor! It’s ideas that make this great. ‘Pride of Iron’ is based on spectro results that aren’t even in print yet.”

“Phooey. There have been stories with this theme before: Ti Liso’s Hidden Empire series. He had houses made of iron, streets paved with copper.”

“Anyone who owns jewelry could imagine a world like that. This is different. Alecque is a chemist; he uses metals in realistic ways—like in gun barrels and heavy machinery. But even that isn’t the beauty of this story. Three hundred years ago, Ti Liso was writing fantasy; Ivam Alecque is talking about something that could really be.” Rey covered the lamps and threw open a window. Chilliness oozed into the office, ocean breeze further cooled by the eclipse. The stars spread in their thousands across the sky, blocked only by the Barge’s rigging, dimmed only by mists rising from the pulper rooms below decks. Even if they had been standing outside, and could look straight up, Seraph would have been nothing more than a dim reddish ring. For the next hour, the stars ruled. “Look at that. Cor. Thousands of stars, millions beyond those we can see. They’re suns like ours, and—”

“—and we buy plenty of stories with that premise.”

“Not like this one. Ivam Alecque knows astronomers at Krirsarque who are hanging spectro gear on telescopes. They’ve drawn line spectra for lots of stars. The ones with color and absolute magnitude similar to our sun show incredibly intense lines for iron and copper and the other metals. This is the first time in history anyone has had direct insight about how things must be on planets of other stars. Houses built of iron are actually possible there.” Ascuasenya was silent for a moment. The idea was neat; in fact, it was kind of scary. Finally she said, “We’re all alone in being so ‘metal poor’ ?”

“Yes! At least among the sunlike stars these guys have looked at.”

“Hmm . . . It’s almost like the gods, they play a big joke on us.” Cor’s great love was polytheistic fantasy, stories where the fate of mortals was the whim of supernatural beings. That sort of thing had been popular in Fantasie’s early centuries. She knew Rey considered it out of step with what the magazine should be doing now. Sometimes she brought it up just to bug him. “Okay. I see why you want the story. Too bad it’s such an ugly little thing.” She saw that her point had struck home. A bit grumpily, Rey unmasked the lamps, then sat down and picked up “Pride of Iron.” It really was plotless. And—on this leg of the voyage, anyway—he was the only one capable of pumping it up. . . . She could almost see the wheels going around in his head: But it would be worth rewriting! He could have the story published before these ideas were even in the scientific literature. He looked up, grinned beligerently at her, “Well, I’m going to buy it. Cor. Assume ‘anonymous collaboration’ makes it twice as long: what can we do for illustrations?”

It took about fifteen minutes to decide which crew-artists would work the job; the Osterlai issue would use slightly modified stock illos. Hopefully, they could commission some truly striking pictures as they passed through that island chain.

The rest of the Osterlai issue was easy to lay out; several of the stories were already in the Osterlai language. The issue would be mostly fantasy, the new artwork from artists of Crownesse and the Chainpearls. The cover story was a rather nice Hrala adventure.

“Speaking of Hrala,” said Rey, “how is your project coming? Will your girl be able to give a show when we start peddling this issue?”

“Sure she will. We get about an hour of rehearsal every wake period. Once she understands about stage performance, things will go just fine. So far, we work on sword and shield stuff. She can memorize things as fast as we can show her. She’s awful impressive, screaming around the stage with Death in her hand.” In the stories, the Hrala Sword was magical, edged with diamonds, and so heavy that an ordinary warrior could not lift it. The Tarulle version of Death was made of wood painted silver.

“What about her costume?” Or lack of one.

“Great. We still gotta do changes—ribbon armor is hard to fit—but she looks tremendous. Svektr Ramsey thinks so too.”

“He saw her?” Guille looked stricken.

“Don’t worry, Boss. The Overeditor was amused. He told me to congratulate you for hiring her.”

“Oh . . . Well, let’s hope we’re all still amused when you put her on stage with other actors.”

Cor gathered up the manuscripts they had chosen. She would take them, together with the production notes, over to the art deck. “No problem. You were right, she understands some Sprak. She can even speak it a little. I think she was just shy that first day. On stage she’ll mainly scream gibberish—we won’t need a new script for each archipelagate.” Cor carried the papers to the door. “Besides, we get the chance to put it all together before we reach the Osterlais. We arrive at the Village of the Termite People in three days; I’ll have things ready by then.”

Guille chuckled. The Termite People were scarcely your typical fans. “Okay. I look forward to it.”

Cor stepped into the darkness, shut the hatch behind her. In fact, she was at least half as confident as she sounded. Things ought to work out, if she could just find time to coach Tatja Grimm. The giant little girl was stranger than Cor had admitted. She wasn’t really dumb, just totally deprived. She’d been born in some very primitive tribe. She’d been five years old before she ever saw a tree. Everything she saw now was novelty. Cor remembered how the girl’s eyes had widened when Cor showed her a copy of Fantasie, and explained how spoken words could be saved with paper and ink. She had held the magazine upside down, paged back and forth through it, fascinated by both pictures and text.

Worst of all, Tatja Grimm had no concept of polemic; she must have been an outsider even in her own tribe. She simply did not accept that dramatic skits could persuade. If Grimm could be convinced of that single point, Cor was sure the Hrala campaign would be a spectacular success. If not, they might all end up with bat dreck on their faces.

The day they were to land at the Village of the Termite People, Rey took the morning off. He walked around the top editorial deck, looking for a place sheltered from the wind and passersby. This would be his first chance to play with his telescope since Fair Haven.

The marvelous weather still held. The sky was washed clean; widely spaced cumulus spread away forever. A Tarulle hydrofoil loitered about a mile ahead of the Barge, its planes raised and sails mostly reefed. Guille knew there were others out there; most of the Barge’s ’foil bays were empty. The high speed boats had many uses. In civilized seas, they ranged before and behind the Barge—making landfall arrangements, carrying job orders, picking up finished illustrations and manuscripts. In the wilderness east of Fair Haven, they had a different role: security. No pirates were going to sneak up on the Barge. The rockets and catapults and petroleum bombs would be ready long before any hostile vessel broke the horizon.

So far, all the traffic was friendly. Several times a day they met ships and barges coming from the east. Most were merchantmen. Only a few publishing companies had Tarulle’s worldwide scope. The hydrofoils reported that the Science was docked at the Village of the Termite People. That ship was much smaller than the Tarulle Barge, but it published its own journal. It was sponsored by universities in the Tsanarts as a sort of mobile research station. Rey looked forward to spending a few hours on the other vessel. It would mean some sales, and would give him a chance to make contacts; these were people who appreciated the new things he was doing with Fantasie. Notwithstanding Cor’s Hrala project, seeing the Science would be the high point of this landfall.

Guille rolled the telescope cart into an open area at the rear of the editorial deck. Here the breeze was blocked by Old Jespen’s penthouse, yet there was still a reasonable view. He clamped the cart’s wheels and leveled its platform. Back in the Chainpearls—just after he bought the scope—this operation would have attracted a small crowd and begun an impromptu star- or Seraph-party. Now, passersby said hello, but few stopped for long. Rey had his toy all to himself.

He flipped the tube down and took a scan across the northern horizon. They were about fifteen miles off the coast. To the naked eye. The Continent was a dark line at the bottom of the sky. The telescope brought detail: Guille could see individual rocks on the dun cliffs. Trees growing in the lee of the hills were clearly visible. Here and there were rounded lumps he recognized as wild termite towers. The Village was hidden beyond a small cape.

Not a very impressive coast for the greatest landmass in the world. Beyond those cliffs, the land stretched more than ten thousand miles northward—over the north pole and partway down the other side of the planet. There was a hundred times more land there than in all the island chains put together. It was an ocean of land, and beyond its coastal fringe, mostly unknown. No wonder it had been the source of so many stories. Rey sighed. He didn’t begrudge those stories. In past centuries, speculation about the Interior was a decent story base. The island civilizations weren’t more than a couple of thousand years old—the human race must have originated on The Continent. It was reasonable that older, wiser civilizations lay in the Interior. Whole races of monsters and godlings might flourish in those reaches.

But during the last thirty years, there had been serious exploration. In the last ten years, three separate expeditions had trekked across the Interior. The unknown remained, but it had been cut into small hunks. The myths were dead and the new reality was a dismal thing: An “ocean” of land is necessarily a very dry place. Beyond the coastal fringe the explorers found desert. In that, there was variety. There were deserts of sand and heat, deserts of rock, and—in the north—deserts of ice and cold. There was no hidden paradise. The nearest things to the “Great Lakes” of legend were saline ponds near Continent’s Center. The explorers found that the Interior was inhabited, but not by an Elder Race. There were isolated tribes in the mid-latitude deserts. These folk lived naked, almost like animals. Their only tools were spears and hand axes. They seemed peaceful, too poor even for warfare. The lowest barbarians of the Fringe were high civilization compared to them. And all these years, the story writers had assumed that the Hurdic tribes were degenerate relatives of Interior races!

Yet Interior fantasies were still written. Guille saw hundreds of them a year—and worse—had to buy dozens. Ah well. It was a living, and it gave him a chance to show people more important things. Rey stepped back from the telescope, and turned its tube almost straight up. It was Seraph he really wanted to look at.

“Hel-lo?”

Rey looked up, startled. He had an audience. It was the Fair Haven waif. She stood almost behind him and about ten feet away. He had the feeling she’d been watching for several minutes. “Hello indeed. And how are you today, Mistress Grimm?”

“Good.” She smiled shyly and took a step forward. She certainly looked better than when he first saw her. Her face was scrubbed clean. In place of rancid leather, she wore crew fatigues. If she had been five feet tall instead of six, she would have seemed a pretty preteener.

“Shouldn’t you be rehearsing with Cor?”

“I, uh, that is later.”

“I see. You’re off duty.”

She bobbed her head, seeming to understand the term. Somehow, Rey had imagined that Cor or the publicity people would be looking after Tatja all the time. In fact, no matter how incompetent she was, there simply were not enough people to babysit her. The girl must have many hours to herself; no doubt she wandered all over the Barge. By the Light, the trouble she could get into!

They stared at each other for a moment. The girl seemed so attentive, almost in awe of him. He realized she wouldn’t leave unless he explicitly told her to get lost. He tried to think of an appropriate dismissal, but nothing came. Damn. Finally he said, “Well, how do you like my new telescope?”

“Good. Good.” The girl stepped almost close enough to touch the scope, and Rey went through the usual explanations: He showed her how the wheels could be fastened to the deck. The oil bath in the cart’s base damped the sea motion and kept the optics steady. The cart itself was an old drafting rig from the art deck. Rey had removed the drawing table and substituted clamps that attached to the base of his twelve-inch scope.

Tatja Grimm didn’t say much, but her enthusiasm was obvious. She leaned close to the equipment to see the details Rey pointed out. When he explained something, she would pause for an instant and then bob her head and say, “Yes. So nice.”

Guille wondered if he could have been wrong about her. In some ways, she seemed a more thoughtful and enthusiastic audience than crew people he had shown the gear to. But then he noticed the uniformity of her responses. Everything seemed to impress her equally. Every explanation took the same brief moment for her to absorb. Guille had a retarded cousin, mental age around five years, physical age thirty: after so much living, a retarded person learns to mimic the head movements and nonsense sounds that normal people make in conversation. Rey could imagine the blank look he would get if he asked Tatja something related to his explanations.

He didn’t try such an experiment. What point was there in hurting the girl’s feelings? Besides, she seemed to enjoy the conversation as much as a normal person. He aimed the scope at Seraph as he continued his spiel. The planet was in quarter phase, and the mountains of its southern continent stood in stark relief near the terminator. Wind and ship vibration jostled the image a bit. On the other hand, the line of sight was straight up, without lots of dirty air to smudge things. This was the clearest day-view he’d ever had. “. . . so my telescope makes objects seem much closer. Would you like to look?” Even a retard should be thrilled by the sight.

“Yes.” She stepped forward, and he showed her how to use the eyepiece. She bent to it . . . and gave a squeal, a wonderful mixture of pleasure and surprise. Her head jerked back from the eyepiece. She stared upward at the twin planet, as if to assure herself that it hadn’t moved. Just as quickly she took another look through the lense, and then backed off again. “So big. So big!” Her smile all but split her face. “How can te-le-scope—” she reached up, as if to jerk the tube’s end down to eye level.

Guille caught her hands. “Oops. Be gentle. Turn it around this pivot.” She wasn’t listening, but she let him rotate the tube so she could look in. Her eyes went wide as she saw the expanded image of her face in the main mirror. Rey found himself explaining about “curved mirrors” and how the diagonal directed the image from the 12-inch through the eyepiece. The girl hesitated the same fraction of a second she had after his other explanations. Then—just as before—her head bobbed with an enthusiastic imitation of total understanding. “Yes. Yes. So nice.”

Abruptly, she grabbed Rey’s hand. “And you think this thing? You make it?”

Tatja’s grip was almost painful; her hands were slender but as outsized as the rest of her. “You mean, did I invent the telescope?” He chuckled. “No, Miss Grimm. The basic idea is two hundred years old. People don’t invent telescopes just to pass the time on a dull morning. Things like this are the work of scattered geniuses. Part of an invention may exist for decades, useless, before another genius makes the idea successful.”

The girl’s expression collapsed. It might have been laughable if it weren’t so pathetic. She had no concept of what was difficult and what was trivial, and so her attempt at bright conversation had foundered. Rey turned her gently back to the telescope and showed her how to adjust the focus. Her former enthusiasm did not completely return, but she seemed sincerely taken by the close-up view of Seraph. Rey gave her his usual spiel, pointing out the brown smudges across part of the southern continent. “Brush fires, we think. That land must be a lot like the grassy plains north of Bayfast. The religions have all sorts of visions of Seraph, but we now know it’s a world much like ours.” And the stories of hidden civilizations there might still be true. Rey had written more than one editorial about plans for detecting and communicating with Seraph’s hypothetical inhabitants. One of the first steps would be to build an observatory in this part of the world, where Seraph could be observed with a minimum of atmospheric distortion.

A couple of people from Printing had stopped nearby, were watching intently. They were not the sort Rey would think attracted by skygazing; one was Brailly Tounse’s bombwright. Rey glanced at her questioningly.

“Sir, we’ve got a line of sight into the harbor now,” the bombwright waved to the north. “We were wondering if you’d take a quick look at Termite Town through your scope.”

Rey hid a sigh, and gave up any hope of having the device to himself this morning. The bombwright must have noticed his irritation. She hurried on to say, “Something strange is happening with the Termite People, sir. So far the officer types ain’t talking, but—take a look, will you?”

Guille eased Tatja Grimm away from the scope and tilted it toward the horizon. He made a quick adjustment with the spotter scope and then looked through the main eyepiece. “. . . Looks about like I remember it.” There were dozens of towers, from water’s edge back up the hills around the harbor. The smallest ones were bigger than a house. The largest were over a hundred feet tall. The spaces between were like streets at the bottom of shadowed canyons. Even knowing the truth, one’s first reaction was awe: this must be a city, the greatest in the world. Krirsarque and Bayfast were insignificant, low-story affairs compared to this. In fact, there were only a few thousand humans in this whole “city.” They dug their burrows and staircases through the termite mounds; they poked air holes through the walls, holes that also served as windows. “Hmm. There’s something different. One of the towers by the moorage . . . it looks like it was burned, or stained with soot. The dark goes as high as the windows overhanging the water.”

“Yes, sir. That’s what got our attention. but we couldn’t see what made the stain. And there’s something strange in the water, too.”

Rey tilted the scope a fraction. A twisted pile of spikes and filaments stuck through the water, directly in front of the scorch-marked tower. Rey sucked in a breath. “It looks like ship’s rigging, the fiber glass part.”

The bombwright stepped close, and he let her take a look. She was silent for a moment, then, “Unh huh. That’s where they like visitors to dock. Looks like the gooks dumped pet’ bombs out those windows, right onto the moorage. The guys they ambushed didn’t have a chance.”

A minute before, Rey had been feeling sorry for one retarded girl. Now . . . He looked across the water. Without a telescope, the Village was a barely distinguishable skyline, the scorch unnoticeable.

The guys they ambushed . . . According to the advance reports, there had been exactly one ship tied up at the Village: the Science.

Crew and publishing folk spent the next few hours speculating: Why was the Science ambushed? What would Tarulle do about it? The Barge stayed several miles offshore, but rumor held that hydrofoils were doing close recon under cover of the midday eclipse. The only word from the penthouse deck was that there would be no immediate landing.

Top management was not asleep—just terribly indecisive. Rey Guille bluffed his way onto the bridge shortly before eclipsend. All the Biggies were there, from both Ownership and Operations. The atmosphere was that of an incipient brawl: consensus time had not arrived.

“—and I say, sail into catapult range and burn their filthy village to the ground! Barbarians must learn that ambushing merchants is a dangerous sport.” The speaker was one of Tarulle’s nephews, an arrogant pipsqueak who’d be scrubbing decks if it weren’t for his relatives. The little man looked angrily around the room, daring anyone to disagree. Fortunately for the Company, there were some strong personalities present:

Barge Captain Maccioso stood near the helm, facing the rest. His form was a vague, intimidating shadow in the eclipse light. Maccioso was a huge man; the bridge itself had been rebuilt to accomodate his six feet eight inch height. He was in his early fifties and only just beginning to go to fat. The first twenty years of his career had been spent in the Chainpearls Navy. The man had retired an admiral, and the greatest hero of the Loretto Bight affair. Now he crossed his hamlike arms and seemed to lean toward Tarulle’s nephew. “Warlike talk coming from . . .” a wee wimp who couldn’t cock a bow, the pause seemed to say, “from those who need customers to live. It’s true, I could torch the Village. It would be expensive; we wouldn’t be left with much reserve. And what would we get for it? The Termite Folk are isolated, Master Craeto. There would be few to learn from the lesson. The Tarulle Company would lose one—admittedly minor—customer. The Barge has visited here four times since I’ve been Captain. We’ve had less trouble than in some civilized ports. These people are not pirates. The Science crew did something, broke some taboo—”

Maccioso turned to looked into the harbor; sunbreak was almost upon them.

The land was bright with washed-out pastels. When he continued, his voice held more frustration than certainty. “Sure. We have the power to raze the place. But we could never bring off an assault landing. There’s no way we can rescue the survivors and find out how to avoid such a debacle in the future.” Survivors? Someone had lived through the pet’ bombing. Rey felt a surge of joy. No one else seemed moved by the news; they already knew. This must be a major point of the debate. “We can’t just leave them there!” The words popped out of Guille’s mouth without conscious thought.

Dead silence greeted his words. The people closest to him moved slightly away, but didn’t look at him; it was as though he had made a bad smell. Maccioso turned and his gaze swept the bridge. “Master Tounse!”

“Sir!”

The Barge Captain pointed at Rey Guille. “Take this man out and . . .” Rey’s guts went cold; there were stories about Ked Maccioso’s command of the Chainpearl Armada, “brief him.”

“Yessir!”

Brailly Tounse emerged from the crowd and hustled Rey onto the open walkway beyond the bridge. The Printmaster shut the hatch and turned to face him. “ ‘Brief you’ ? The commercial life is turning Ked soft.” It took a moment for Rey to realize that the other man was suppressing laughter. “Don’t you understand that a rescue is what Ked is dying to do? For almost an hour, he’s been trying to trick these flightless bats into backing one.”

“Oh.” Rey was both embarrassed and encouraged. “Maybe my, uh, little outburst will start something.”

“I hope so.” Brailly stopped smiling. “But even by Ked’s standards, it would be a risky operation pulling those Science people out.”

He led Rey to the forward end of the walkway. All around them, twilight brightened suddenly into day as the sun came past the edge of Seraph. Swarms of daybats rose from the harbor. They swept around the towers, their cries coming clear and reedy across the water.

Brailly gestured at the bridge binoculars. “Take a look to the left of the harbor towers. That’s where they’re holding the survivors.” It was some kind of pit, probably the root of a fallen tower. Rey saw Termite Folk camped around the edge. Tounse continued, “They’re in that hole, out of sight from this angle. See how the locals have set petroleum vats along the edge? They could light and dump those in a matter of minutes—”

—incinerating the prisoners. The Tarulle people would have to sneak in a large party, and overpower the guards at those vats all at once. One slip and a lot of Company people would share the fate of those in the pit. “We could offer a ransom, Brailly. It might be expensive, but the Science home university would probably pay us back. . . . And there’d be lots of good publicity.” The spinoffs from such an adventure could fill several issues of the Tarulle magazines.

“You don’t understand; the Science people aren’t hostages. The only reason they’re still alive is that an appropriate method of execution hasn’t been decided on. The local bosses tell us that no ransom will save the prisoners. They won’t even tell us what ‘blasphemy’ the poor suckers committed. The whole matter is closed. And you know, I think the gooks actually expect to continue business as usual with the rest of us!”

“Hmm.” Rey had dealt with the Village’s rulers. Their interest in certain types of pulp fiction had always made them seem relatively civilized. They had not seemed religious—and now he saw that was just a sign of how damned secretive their religion must be. He stared through the binocs a moment more. Beyond the edge of that pit were some good people. “We’ve got to do something, Brailly.”

“I know. Ked knows.” The Printmaster shrugged. After a moment, the two men walked back to the command bridge. Inside, Rey saw that the tension had drained from the meeting; concensus had finally been reached. Brailly smiled sourly and whispered, “But we also know how it’s going to turn out, don’t we?”

Rey looked around, and with a sinking feeling he understood. The Tarulle Publishing Company had existed for seven hundred years. Few island-bound companies were that old—and yet Tarulle had been sailing the oceans of Tu all that time, contending with tempests and pirates and religionists and governments. There had been disasters; three hundred years earlier, the old Barge was burned to the waterline. Yet the Company had survived, and prospered. One doesn’t last seven hundred years by rushing into everyone else’s fight. The Barge and its hydrofoils were well armed, but given a choice they simply avoided trouble. If a village or even an island chain turned to religious nuttery, they lost Tarulle’s business. The years would pass, and the regime would fall—or decide that it needed trade more than its crazy convictions.

Kederichi Maccioso had done his subtle best to bring another outcome, but it was not to be; the talk now was of delivering a few threats and—if that did not help the Science people—weighing anchor and sailing off.

There must he some way to stop this! Then he had it: Brailly said the Termite Folk wanted business as usual. For the second time in fifteen minutes, Rey interrupted the meeting. “We can’t simply take off; we have magazines to sell here, and customers who want to buy.”

This outburst was greeted with the same silence as before. Only this time, it was not Ked Maccioso who responded. There was a croaking sound from somewhere behind the Tarulle inlaws. The owners looked nervously at each other, then stood aside. Out of the shadows came a very old man in a wheel chair: Jespen Tarulle himself. He rolled far enough past his relatives to get a look at Rey Guille. It was only the third time Rey had seen the man. He was wrapped in blankets, his hands clasped and shivering in his lap. Only one eye tracked and it was starred with a cataract. His voice was quavery, the delivery almost addled. “Yes. These folk haven’t done us harm, and our business is to do business.” He looked in Rey’s direction. “I’m glad someone still understands this.”

Maccioso didn’t sound quite so enthusiastic. “It’s risky, sir, not your average sales landing. . . . But I could go along with it, if we can get the volunteers.” Volunteers who might wangle the prisoners’ freedom, or at least discover their exact situation; Rey imagined the wheels turning in the Barge Captain’s head.

“Sirs. I volunteer for the landing.” It was Brailly Tounse, barely hiding a smile.

“I-I volunteer.” The words were coming from Rey’s own mouth. He mumbled the rest, almost a rationalization to himself: “I’ve handled sales landings here before.”

Old man Tarulle tilted his head at the other owners. “Are we agreed?” It was not quite a rhetorical question; the explicit recommendation of Jespen Tarulle counted for a lot, but he was not a majority stockholder. After a moment, there came mumbled acquiesence. Tarulle looked across the desk. “Operations? Are there any objections from them?”

“I have a question.” It was Svektr Ramsey. He looked at Guille. “Have you finished your work on the first Osterlai issue of Fantasie?”

“My assistant can handle what remains, Master Ramsey.” He had just finished the rewrite of “Pride of Iron.”

“Ah.” A smile split the gaunt Overeditor’s face. “In that case, I have no objections.” And if things didn’t work out, there would plenty of time to put a black border around the editorial page.

They didn’t go ashore until ten hours later, in the night wake period. It had been a busy time. The landing was to look like the previous ones here. There would only be one boat, less than a dozen people. Except for Rey—who was probably known to the locals—those twelve were not the usual sorts for a commercial landing. Maccioso picked people with military and naval backgrounds. The Barge Captain had imagined many contingencies. Some involved simple gathering of information, perhaps an attempt at diplomacy; others would mean quick violence and a frantic effort to get back to sea ahead of the Termite People. From the beginning, it was agreed that no obvious weapons would be taken. Brailly Tounse produced explosive powder that could be carried in their jackets; that should pass any inspection the Termiters might make.

Though it was probably a futile contribution, Rey Guille took his telescope. It had impressed Tatja Grimm; it might have some effect on the locals. (On the other hand, such high technology might be what got the Science in trouble. Rey broke the scope into its components and stored them in different parts of the landing boat.)

Coronadas Ascuasenya had been furious. She wanted to take her Barbarian Princess act ashore and pretend that Tatja Grimm was truly Hrala. Maccioso rejected the plan—and Rey agreed with him. Ascuasenya claimed the girl had absorbed the role these last couple of days, that she was the most convincing Hrala ever produced. It really didn’t matter. Rey doubted that the local rulers believed the Hrala stories. In any case, using the act to intimidate could cause the prompt massacre of both prisoners and would-be rescuers.

So Cor stayed behind, and Guille found himself on the landing boat surrounded by some very competent fighters. Except for Brailly, he knew none of them.

They were only a hundred yards from the shore. Seraph was at first quarter, and its blue light lay serene across everything. The loudest sounds were the splash of oars into water, and the occasional grunt of a rower. Beach bats and flying fish swooped low around the lighter. The smell of char and oil was stronger than the salt tang of the water. They were passing a ragged jungle of black glass—what was left of the Science. The bats swarmed through the twisted rigging: one creature’s catastrophe is another’s new home.

The termite mounds were awesome at this distance. Hundreds of airholes lined their sides. A few of the towers actually broadened with height so that they hung over the water. It was like some artist’s vision of a city of the future. Even knowing what the towers really were, it was hard not to feel intimidated.

Early seafarers thought the Termite Folk were nonhuman. Alas and fortunately, the village wasn’t the work of gods. The locals were normal humans, using mounds that occurred all through this region. They brought in extra materials for the termites, then guided arid pruned the structures. Basically the Termite People were Hurdic folk taking advantage of local circumstance. And strangely, they had no special pride in the towers. They seemed much prouder of the heritage they imagined having lost when they left the Interior.

Brailly Tounse kicked at the crate that was their cargo. “Still don’t see why the gooks are interested in Fantasie.”

Rey shrugged. “We don’t sell them the whole thing, just stories of the Interior. My guess is, they see themselves as a great people fallen on hard times. Stories about Inner Kingdoms stroke that vision. We don’t sell more than a few dozen copies per visit, but they pay several coppers for each.”

Tounse whistled softly. “God, if only our other customers were that eager.” He turned to look at the towers. On the other hand, the Barge’s usual customers bought in much larger quantities . . . and didn’t incinerate visitors.

The landing boat slid up to a crude pier. Some thirty guards stood along its length, their spears held in salute. The local bosses were in a group just above the landing point. As the Tarulle people climbed from the boat, low-ranking priests came down to help carry Rey’s crate. So far everything seemed normal.

The tallest of the locals advanced on Rey, and gabbled something in a singsong cadence. This was the priest they usually dealt with; the guy had an excellent reading knowledge of Sprak but little chance to speak it. His phrasing was straight out of an old-time adventure novel. After a second Rey got the avalanche of mispronounced words sorted out: “Master Guille, happy we are to see you again.” The priest bowed in the direction of the magazines. “And happy we are to learn more Ancestor Truth. You and your crew are welcome in the Hall. We will examine the new truth and decide on fair payment.”

Rey mumbled something appropriately pompous, and they walked toward the Village, Guille and the Termiter priests in the lead. Behind him, the landing party hung together, their tenseness obvious. This was the third time Rey had been here. He marveled that he had not been afraid before. In fact, the place had been a comic relief. Then when the locals spoke of “Ancestor Truth” it seemed a light turn of phrase. Now he had the wild impulse to run: what if there was some blasphemy in the stories? It put him in a cold sweat to think how casually he published new twists on traditional themes, or allowed small inconsistencies into story cycles. And just few days ago, he’d looked forward to testing the Hrala skit with these people!

The tall priest’s tone remained friendly: “You have come at an appropriate moment, Master Guille. We have confronted blasphemers—who may be harbingers of the Final Battle. Now is a time when we must consult all sources of Truth.” Another priest, an older fellow with a limp, interrupted with something abrupt. The tall guy paused, and looked faintly embarrassed; suddenly Guille knew that he was more than an interpreter, but not one of the high priests. “It will be necessary to inspect both your boat and your persons. More blasphemers may come in fair forms.

“. . . Don’t be angered; it is but a formality. I, we recognize you from before. And if the writings you bring speak to our questions, you can expect payment even more generous than usual.”

Away from the pier, the smell of burned petroleum products faded, replaced by a barnyard smell and the acrid stench of the tiny insects that built the mounds. Up close, the tower walls were not smooth sweeps. Glabrous patches were surrounded by warty growths. The “windows” were holes hacked in the irregular surface. Even Seraph’s blue light could not make such things beautiful. Behind the front tier of mounds, stone corrals held a few dozen skoats—the source of the farm smell. The place really was a village, similar to backward villages the world over. Without modem science, they had no way of making strong or hard materials. Their spearheads were fire-hardened wood and obsidian. Where the termites did not build for them, their structures were simple piles of stone. . . . It was no wonder travelers had seen no danger from these people; a squad of crossbow armed troops could take them over. No one guessed they had access to petroleum or the knowledge to produce flammables.

They walked some distance through the shadows between the towers. The Great Hall was cut into the side of one of the largest mounds. The resulting talus was formed into steps as broad as those in front of any government building in Crownesse. At the top of the steps, carved barricades blocked the entrance. Rey’s guide called something Hurdic and ceremonial-sounding. Spear-toting priests slid the barricades aside.

Their porters carried the crate of Fantasies toward the altar at the back of the Hall. The place was exactly as Rey remembered it: at least one hundred feet from entrance to altar, but with a ceiling that was nowhere more than seven feet high. It seemed more like a mine than a building. Twelve-foot-wide pillars stood in a rectangular grid across the floor. The pillars were native mound-stuff painted white. The only light came from ranks of candles that circled each of them. As the Tarulle people walked toward the altar, they saw hundreds of Termite Folk standing quietly between the farther pillars. The room couldn’t be more than one hundred feet across, but the pillars seemed to go on forever. On his last visit, Rey had walked to the side of the Hall (an act of unknowing bravado, he realized now), and discovered that the pillars there were smaller, more closely spaced, and the walls were painted with the image of more pillars stretching off to a faked infinity; cleverly placed flecks of glass simulated hundreds of faraway candles. Like many primitive folk, the Termiters had their own subtleties.

Rey expected the threatened body searches would come next. Instead, the Tarulle people were gestured to sit before the altar. There was a moment of near silence after Guille was asked to open the crate. Now he could hear a faint buzzing that came from all around, the sound of the real termites. They were, after all, inside an enormous hive. He pulled up the lid of the crate, and the insect sound was lost behind the Villagers’ soft chanting.

The high priests lifted the top sheets from the crate. These were color illustrations that would be inside/outside covers on normally bound editions. The color didn’t show well in the candlelight, but the Termiters didn’t seem to mind; the best pictures from previous issues were mounted in the walls behind the altar. The priests pored over the illos, just like ordinary fans thrilled with the latest issue of their favorite magazine. Before, Rey would have smiled at their enthusiasm. Now he held his breath. At least one of those pictures showed Hrala carrying a spring-gun; could that be blasphemy?

Then the tall priest looked up, and Rey saw that he was smiling. “Wonderful, friend Guille. There is new Insight here. We will pay double.” The others were lifting manuscript galleys out of the crate and solemnly laying them on velvet reading stands. There couldn’t be more than a handful of locals who knew Sprak; did they preach from the stories? Rey let out a carefully controlled breath. It didn’t matter now. The Tarulle people had passed the test and—

—outside the Hall, someone was shouting. The words were indistinct, but Hurdic. The priests straightened, listening. The shouts came louder; people were rushing up the steps to the Hall’s entrance. The barricades slid aside and Seraph’s light shone on the arrivals: they were spear carriers from the pier. They rushed down the aisle, still shouting. Their leader was waving something over his head. Everyone was shouting now. Rey saw that Brailly’s men had slipped into a circle formation. Some of them were reaching into their jackets.

Then the newcomer reached the altar, and one of the priests—the old one with the gimp leg—gave an incredible warbling scream. In an instant, all other cries ceased. He took two objects from the guard and held them close to the candles. Strange reflections shifted across his face and the ceiling. . . . He was holding the main mirror and the diagonal bracket from Rey’s telescope.

How can he know what these are, much less think them blasphemous? The thought hung for an instant in Rey’s mind, and then everything went crazy. The old man threw the mirror to the floor, then turned on the Tarulle visitors and shouted in Hurdic. No translation was needed; his face was contorted with hatred. Spearmen ran forward, weapons leveled. Brailly tossed something onto the altar; there was an explosion and swirling gouts of chokesmoke. Rey dived to the floor, tried to belly crawl out from under the choke. He heard Brailly’s men fighting their way toward the entrance. By the sound of it, they had some sort of weapons—strip knives probably. There were screams and ugly ripping sounds, all against a background of coughing and nausea. It sounded like all the Villagers had thrown themselves into the fight. They could never get past such a mob!

He had underestimated the Printmaster. From out of the smoke and shouting came Brailly’s voice. “Down! We’re gonna blast!” Rey tucked his head in his arms. A second later there was a flash of light and invisible hands crashed upon both sides of his head. He looked up. There was blue light ahead! Tounse had knocked the barricade over.

Rey came to his knees. If he could move while the locals lay stunned. . . .

His poor ears couldn’t hear the rumbling; it came through his knees and palms. All around them, the hive was shaking. He saw now that the pillars near the entrance had been smashed. Avalanches of moundstuff—first small, then engulfing, spilled down from above.

With that, the tower collapsed on the Great Hall, and Rey saw no more.

Consciousness returned in patches. There were unpleasant dreams. Something was banging his head; it wasn’t the knock of his alarm clock. They were dragging him feet first, and his head was bouncing off uneven ground. The dream faded to pleasant grayness, then came back in a new form: he was rolling down a hillside, the rocks cutting into his body.

Rey came to rest in foul-tasting water, and wondered if he would drown before he woke up. Strong hands pulled him from the water. Through the ringing in his ears he heard someone say, “There. A moment of sitting to catch the breath.”

He coughed weakly, and looked around. No more dreams: the nightmare was reality. He was sitting by a shallow pond, near the bottom of a pit. The edge of the pit was ten yards above his head, except on one side, where it broke low and gave a view of the harbor. He was not alone. There were dozens of people here—all that remained of the Science crew. They clustered around the newly fallen. Looking up at their faces, Rey saw hope in some, fear and despair in others.

“You’re looking bad. Can you talk?” It was the woman who had pulled him from the pond. She was in her late fifties, an Osterlai by her accent. Her clothes were neat but stained. There was a matter-of-fact friendliness in her voice. In a moment he would remember who she was.

“Y-yes,” he croaked. “What happened?”

The woman gave a short laugh. “You tell us. Five minutes ago it just started raining people. Looks like the Termite Folk have found new blasphemers.”

Rey swallowed. “You’re right.” And it was his fault.

Most of his companions were in worse shape than he. The Science prisoners were trying to help, but two of the Tarulle people looked freshly dead. Nowhere did he see Brailly Tounse. He glanced at the Osterlai woman and made a wan smile. “We came to rescue you.” He gave his captive audience a brief account of the sales landing. “Everything was going fine. I was beginning to think they might listen to us, that we’d at least learn more about your situation. Then they found the mirror from my telescope. How could they know what it was, much less—” He noticed the look on the woman’s face.

“And how do you think we got in trouble, my sir? We thought to do some observing from the peaks Inland. We had a twenty inch mirror; the Seraph-seeing should be better here than—” She broke off in surprise. “Why, you’re Rey Guille!”

Rey nodded, and she continued, “So I don’t have to tell you the details; you’ve written enough about the idea. . . . I’m Janna Kats, Seraphist at Bergenton; we met once a couple years back.” She waved a hand as recognition slowly dawned on Rey. “Anyway. We dragged that mirror ashore, gave the Termiters a look. They thought it was great stuff—till they learned what we wanted to look at.” She laughed, but it was not a happy sound. “Lots of religions worship Seraph. You know: home o’ the gods and such garbage. Turns out the Termiters think Seraph is something like the gods’ bedroom—and mortals mustn’t peep!”

So that was how they learned what the parts of a telescope look like. “It still doesn’t make sense,” Rey said. “In everything else, they seem to be ancestor worshippers; I’ve sold them dozens of Interior fantasies. How did Seraphidolatry get mixed in?”

The question brought a fit of coughing from the little man sitting beside Kats. “I can answer that.” The words were broken by more rasping coughs. The fellow’s face seemed shrunken, collapsed; Rey wondered that he could talk at all. “The Termite Folk are intellectual packrats. For three hundred years they’ve been here, picking up a little of this, a little of that—from whoever was passing through.” More coughing. “I should have seen through ’em right off. . . . I’ve spent my whole life studying coastal barbarians, learning Hurdic. But these folks are so secretive, I didn’t understand what was driving them . . . till it was too late.” A smile twisted his thin face. “I could get a nice research paper out of what we’ve learned here. Too bad we gotta die first.”

Rey Guille had years of experience finding loopholes in impossible situations—on papier. “Maybe we don’t have to die. I never thought the Termiters were killers. If their religion is such a hodgepodge, they can’t take the taboos too seriously. You’ve been here for several days. Maybe they just want a graceful way out.” It really made sense. Then he remembered Brailly’s bomb, and continued more quietly, “If there’s anything they’d kill for, I think it would be what my people did to the Village Hall.”

“You don’t understand, fellow,” a third Science person spoke, a sharp edge in his voice. “Knocking over a termite mound is a pecadillo in their eyes—compared to invading the gods’ privacy. They’ve kept us alive this long because they’re having trouble devising a torture-death appropriate to our crime!”

“How can you know that for sure—”

“We know, Master Guille.” Janna Kats’s tough exterior broke for an instant, and she looked just as frightened as the others. “In the last two days they’ve taken three of us from the pit. W-we could hear the screams; one we could see. Each took longer to die than the last.”

There was a moment of silence, and then the cougher said, “I think the Termiters are scared, too—of their Seraph gods. If they can’t come up with the proper death for us, they think the gods will apply that death to them. The three they killed were . . . little experiments.”

“But there will be no more.” The toughness was back in Janna’s voice. “The next time they come, one big surprise we’ll show them. We won’t be skoats waiting for the slaughter.”

Rey looked up, at the rim of the pit. There were Termite Folk all around. Most carried spears, but that wasn’t the most deadly thing; spears kill one a time, make a slow thing of a massacre. Much more ominous were the priests carrying torches. They stood near the three petroleum vats Brailly had spotted earlier. Each tank was mounted on a crude swivel. Should they choose, the torch bearers could drown their prisoners in flame. A few hours before, that prospect had filled him with sympathetic dread. For Janna and the others, it had come to be the only imaginable out.

The hours passed. At the top of the sky, Seraph widened toward full, its western ocean turning dark and reddish with the start of the mid-night eclipse. The Villagers marched steady patrols around the edge of the pit. Mostly they were silent. The Science’s anthropologist said they had long ago stopped responding to his shouted questions.

There were no more “experiments,” but Rey gradually realized the pit was in itself a killing place. The only water was in the shallow pool at the bottom of the pit—and that became steadily more foul. The only food was what the Villagers threw into the pit—slabs of skoat cheese and balls of what turned out to be pressed termite larva. Rey had eaten some exotic things in his years with Tarulle, but the larva patties were half rotted. Hungry as they were, only a few of the prisoners could keep them down. Three of the Tarulle prisoners were dead, their bodies broken by the explosion. Two of the survivors had compound fractures; their moans came less frequently with each passing hour.

The prisoners were not alone in the pit. The true builders of the Village were here, too. In the silence that dragged between conversations and occasional moaning, Rey heard a scritching sound coming from all directions. At the corner of his vision, a pebble would move, something would scuttle from one hole to another. The termites were no bigger than a man’s thumb, but there must be millions of them in the sides of the pit. They avoided the humans, but their activity was ceaseless. The sides of the pit were not ordinary earth. All the way down to the pool, this was moundstuff. It must be old, the detritus of thousands of years of towers, but it was still used by the tiny creatures. The stones in this “soil” must have washed down from the hills to the north. The coming of humans was a recent event in the hives’ history.

The towers of the Village crowded around three sides of the pit, but beyond the broken southern lip, they could see the harbor. The Tarulle Barge was less than a quarter mile out. Deck piled on deck, loading cranes sticking out in all directions, masts rising slim into the reddish blue sky—the Barge had never seemed so beautiful to Rey as now. Safety was just twelve hundred feet away; it might as well be the other side of Seraph. An hour earlier, a hydrofoil had arrived from the ocean and docked in a starboard slip. There was no other boat activity, though Rey fancied he saw motion on the bridge: another meeting? And this time, a final decision to leave?

Most of the prisoners huddled on the north slope of the depression; the corpses were carried to the other side of the pit. The prisoners were bright people. They’d had plenty of time to try to figure a way out, and no success in doing so. The arrival of Rey’s group brought new hope, even though the rescue had been a failure. For an hour or two, there was renewed scheming. When it became clear that nothing had really changed, the talk gradually petered out. Many of the prisoners drifted back to inwardlooking silence.

There were exceptions. One thing Rey loved about scientists was their love for speculation. Take Tredi Bekjer, the little guy who spent the hours coughing his lungs out. Tredi was a sickly fellow who should never have been on the Science expedition in the first place. He was an anthropologist, and the only captive who spoke fluent Hurdic. He might be dying, but between spasms of coughing he argued about the origin and future of their captors. He predicted that—no matter what the prisoners’ fate—the ambush had doomed the Termiter culture. Now, outsiders knew there was petroleum nearby. When that news got to the archipelagates, the Termiter Folk would have lots of visitors. Even if the locals were not booted off their land, they would be forced to make big changes. In thirty years, there would be a real city here.

There were others like Tredi, folks who could walk through the gates of death, still arguing about ideas. When the planning and the scheming was done, these few still had something to talk about. Rey found himself drawn in.

Janna Kats was the most interesting. Before specializing in Seraphy, she’d had lots of experience with other branches of astronomy. She was just the sort of person he’d been hoping to talk to—back when he thought they’d find the Science in one piece. For minutes at a time Rey could forget where he was, and what his fate must be. Kats had had great plans for the Seraph observatory. There should be good seeing from the mountains behind the harbor. Ground resolutions better than one hundred yards would have been possible with the twenty-inch mirror. The issue of intelligent life on Seraph might finally be resolved. . . . Instead, the project had brought them all to this pit.

Rey grunted. “Other things are happening in astronomy. Things that aren’t so dangerous. There have been some fantastic discoveries at Krirsarque.” He described “Pride of Iron” and the spectroscopic observations it was based on. “Can you imagine! With spectroscopy, we can know what things are like on planets around other stars.” He sat back, waiting for Janna’s reaction to this news. It was one of the occasional pleasures of his job, to be the first person in an entire archipelagate to report a breakthrough.

Janna grinned back at him, but there was no surprise in her expression. “Ha! That’s one of the results the U. Tsanart people sent west with Science. During the last year, they’ve got good spectra on twenty stars in our sun’s class. Every damn one of ’em is metal rich. And we have other results, too. We can measure radial motions with this spectro stuff—” She laughed at the expression on his face. “You’ve written a lot of high-flown editorials about ‘Spectroscopy, Key to the Universe.’ Well, you may have understated the case. Combine the spectral shift data with proper motion studies, and it’s obvious our solar system is an interloper, just passing through the local star stream.”

Outcast Star. The title flashed through Rey’s mind. There were writers who could run away with that idea—and surely would, if he got out of this alive. “You know, it’s almost as if someone were picking on the human race,” he mused. “Out of all the solar systems, that we should be the low metal one, the outsider.” He didn’t like the idea. It smacked of the theistic fantasy Cor Ascuasenya so loved: humanity as doormat to the gods.

“You’ve got it backward, my sir. Ever hear of the anthropic principle? Most likely, intelligent life exists on Tu exactly because we are different from the others. Think what an abundance of metals would mean. It’s not just a matter of wealth, millions of ounces of iron available for large scale construction. My guess is such concentrations of metals would change the surface chemistry so much that life would never develop.”

Janna’s middle-aged features were filled with a happy smugness, but Rey did not feel put down. He was imagining deadly, treasure-house worlds. “Or life might develop, but different than here. Why, there might be—”

Janna abruptly grabbed his arm. She was looking past him, her expression intent; his speculations were suddenly of zero interest. There were scattered gasps from the prisoners. He turned and looked into the harbor. The Barge had lowered a boat to the water. It glowed with white light, a jewel in the reddening dimness. Then he realized that Tarulle had lit a flare at the focus of the bridge’s signal mirror. Its light fell dazzling on the boat—which was nothing more than a freight lander painted silver and white. Before the flare guttered out, two more were lit at other mirrors. They tracked the boat as it started toward shore.

The Termiter priests were suddenly shouting. One group of spear carriers ran to the south side of the pit, while others moved to the pet’ vats and slid the covers aside. Priests dipped their torches into the vats—and the night exploded. The thunder went on and on, drowning the shouts of prisoners and Villagers alike. Flame and smoke rose from the petroleum, swirls of red and black across the mid-night eclipse. Hundreds of bats swarmed drunkenly in the superheated air, burning, falling.

The stench of pet’ was everywhere. The Termiters cowered back from the pyres they had created, but Rey saw a few priests near each, setting long poles against the sides of the vats. A few good pushes, and the prison pit would be wall-to-wall fire.

Some of the prisoners collapsed, their mouths open, eyes wide. They must be screaming. Beside him, Janna Kats had caught his arm in both her hands. Her eyes were clenched shut, her face averted from the fires. Something in Rey’s mind retreated and suddenly he wasn’t frightened. He wasn’t brave; he simply couldn’t grasp the reality of his imminent torch-hood. He looked back to the harbor. The firing of the vats hadn’t stopped the boat. It floated serenely toward them, still lit by the Barge’s flares. He strained to see what it was carrying. The oarsmen wore black robes, their faces hidden within deep cowls. Those weren’t Tarulle uniforms, yet they were somehow familiar. There was only one other person on the boat. She stood at the bow, scorning all support. Her clothes were white and silver, gleaming in the faraway spotlights. Black hair cascaded around her face and shoulders.

Now Rey understood this latest rescue attempt. He damned and thanked Cor all at once for trying.

Tarulle doused the flares the instant the lighter touched shore. In the roaring red dimness, the figure on the boat was a vague thing. She did something to her robes and suddenly was near naked, and incredibly female. When she swung over the railing, red-silver glinted from her breasts and thighs. The oarsmen followed, clumsy black beetles by comparison. They started up the hillside, and were lost to Rey’s view beyond the south side of the pit . . .

. . . but not lost to the Termiters’. The spear carriers hadn’t moved, but every face was turned toward the approaching party. The priests by the fire vats had dropped their poles, and stared in shock. Janna’s grip loosened. She tried to ask him something, but even shouting mouth to ear, she couldn’t talk over the flame-roar. Rey could only point to the rim of the pit.

A minute passed. Villagers at the southeast comer of the pit backed away . . . and the newcomers appeared. By the Light, what a job Cor had done! It was strange to see—in the middle of terrible, deadly reality—the incarnation of a hundred fantasies. This was Hrala, complete with a contingent of the Sibhood Sinistre. The Sibhood followed Hrala through most of the stories. Their motives were beyond knowing, but seemed more evil than not. Sometimes they were Hrala’s deadliest enemies, sometimes her allies. When they were her allies, the rest of the world better watch out. The black-cowled figures hung silently behind her, looking a dozen times more deadly than any Termiter priests.

The fraud would have been nothing without its central character. Tatja Grimm had come to Tarulle an outsized waif. The makeup people had transformed her. Black hair lapped smooth down to her waist, a perfect copy of all the illustrations. Her body was evenly tanned, though all she wore was ribbon armor, and that only around her hips and breasts. If he hadn’t seen the girl before, Rey never would have guessed that bosom was faked. She carried the blade named Death. Crafted of “magic metal,” edged with diamonds, it was a living creature and one of Hrala’s earliest conquests. Without her control, it would take up its original mission—to corrupt the powerful and scourge The Continent. In fact, the prop was carved from puffwood painted silver and edged with quartz. Any sharp blow would shatter it.

Tatja Grimm walked forward, Death’s flat resting on her shoulder as though it weighed pounds and not ounces. Cor had coached her well. Every motion was fluid, arrogant. She walked straight to a high point on the pit’s rim. For a long moment, she surveyed the priests and the flaming vats. Not once did she look at the spear carriers. The Villagers stared back, eyes wide. Rey could see the fear mounting in them.

Abruptly, Hrala’s hand flashed out. She pointed at the vats and clenched her fist. The Barbarian Princess wanted those fires out. The Termiter priests scrambled to push the lids back onto the vats. Flames burst sideways, searing the priests, but one by one the lids were forced into place. There were scattered explosions; one of the vats trembled in its cradle. Then a great silence replaced the roar. For a long moment, everyone listened to the ringing in their ears.

Rey couldn’t believe his eyes or ears. Did the Termiter priests actually believe the stories? Of course, the instant the girl opened her mouth the illusion would be broken—

The Grimm girl turned, gestured the chief Sib to stand close behind her. The cowled figure slid forward, servile and sneaky at the same time. That must be Coronadas Ascuasenya; she might just be close enough to prompt the girl. There was a hissing conversation between the two, broken off by an imperious gesture from the Princess. She looked back at the Termiters and finally spoke. The words rattled fast, diamond hard. They were not Sprak.

Tredi Bekjer gasped. He crawled the few feet that separated him from Rey. “That’s Hurdic!”

Janna and Rey dropped to their knees beside him. “What’s she saying?”

Bekjer listened a moment more. “Hard to follow. She’s speaks a deep Interior dialect. . . . I’ve only heard it a couple times.” He choked back a coughing spasm. “Says she’s angry as . . . the hot pits of the earth. Termiters have no business holding her . . . property? prey? She means us, in any case. She demands reparations, replacements for the dead, and—” Tredi laughed and coughed at the same time “—and the return of the survivors.”

The sharp-voiced speech ended. The Barbarian Princess stood waiting a reply. Death twitched in her hand, impatient to forego these diplomatic niceties.

A voice came from the priests. After a second, Rey recognized it as belonging to the tall Termiter. The words were tentative and quavery, totally lacking the menace Tatja/Hrala put into hers. Tredi continued his translation: “Local guy is explaining our blasphemy. Case you can’t tell, he’s practically wetting his pants. . . . If he doesn’t punish us, the High Gods will torture-kill his people. And now Hrala is threatening to skewer his guts if he doesn’t let us go. He’s caught between two dooms.”

Hrala had a reply. She swung Death from her shoulder and thrust it skyward. The fake metal gleamed red-silver, “diamonds” glittering. Her speech was as angry and decisive as before. Tredi’s translation consisted of a single, soft-spoken, “Wow.” Janna punched his shoulder, and the little anthropologist remembered his listeners. “Whoever she is, she’s wonderful. . . . She told the Termiter to remember his place, that he’s too low in the scheme of things to presume upon the High Gods’ vengeance. . . . I can’t translate it any better; she packed a freight-load of hauteur into a couple sentences. She’s telling him, if her property is offensive, then that’s something between Hrala and the Gods.”

Rey Guille looked from Tatja Grimm to the clustered priests. Hope was a sudden, wonderful thing. Every state religion he’d ever seen had a core of hypocrisy. That was why he’d been against bringing “Hrala” ashore—he knew the priests would never accept their theology suddenly incarnate. But Cor and the Grimm girl had taken the risk, and now, incredibly, the plan was working.

For several minutes the priests had no reply. They stood in a tight group, speaking in low voices. Around them, the spear carriers held their weapons loosely, their eyes never leaving Tatja Grimm. From beyond the rim, an anonymous voice called, “Hrala.” After a moment, one of the spear carriers repeated: “Hra-la.” The word was passed back and forth among the low-ranking Termiters. They pronounced the guttural “H” with a force and precision that made Rey wince. “Hra-la. Hra-la. Hra La. Hra La . . . The chant spread around the pit, a soft drumbeat.

One of the priests shouted; the chant stumbled, guttered out. After a moment, the priest continued. His voice was placating, but without the quavering fear of before. “New guy,” said Tredi. “He’s talking humble, sweet as sugar. Says that for sure Hrala’s claim takes precedence over theirs, but—” Tredi sucked in a breath. “Bastard! He says, in dealing with beings so deadly as the High Gods, his people need at least to go through the motions . . . of verifying Hrala’s identity.”

Another priest spoke up, his voice high-pitched and not nearly as confident as the first. “ ‘A mere formality,’ the second jerk says.”

“S-so what’s the formality, Tredi!” Janna all but shook the little man.

Bekjer listened a second longer, then caught back a sob. “Nothing much. A little trial by combat.”

Rey’s eyes stayed on Tatja Grimm all through this speech. She didn’t flinch. If anything she stood taller now, her chin raised at the impudence of the “request.” No amount of coaching could have taught her to do that: the girl was as gutsy as anyone he’d ever known. When the priest finished, her reply was immediate, a sharp three syllables filled with anger and arrogance.

“ ‘Certainly,’ she says,” Bekjer translated unnecessarily.

And Rey’s hope fled as quickly as it had come. The girl looked down at Death, and for an instant he saw the gawky youngster who had come aboard Tarulle just a few days before. She wasn’t afraid, just uncertain, feeling her way in a strange situation. The puff-wood sword was a magnificent bluff, but they were beyond bluffs now. It couldn’t cut butter, and it would shatter at the first blow.

The girl gestured imperiously at the chief Sib, the one who must be Coronadas Ascuasenya. The Sib slid forward, and spoke hissingly into Hrala’s ear. The rescue party was about out of options. No doubt they were heavily armed. If they acted quickly, while the tattered bluff had some credibility, they could probably fight their way back to the landing boat—and at least save themselves.

Hrala listened to the Sib for a moment, then interrupted. The two were arguing! It was consistent with all the stories, but why now? Cor’s hissing broke into full voice for an instant, and suddenly he realized this was no sham. Hrala shook her head abruptly, and handed her sword to the Sib. Cor sank beneath the pretended weight of Death. She didn’t have much choice now. She slunk back to the other Sibs, her fear obvious but suddenly in character: She held Death in her hands. As a Sib Sinistre, she could not be perverted by it (the Sibhood was already pretty perverse), but possessing Death and being possessed by it were very close things. It was a theme Rey had insinuated into the series himself.

Hrala turned back to the Termiter Priests. She was smiling, and the anger was gone from her words; mocking arrogance remained.

“Says she’s happy to fight, but it’s no . . . fun . . . wasting Death on such easy prey as the Termiters. She’ll fight with whatever weapons her opponent chooses.”

That almost started the chant again.

The priests shouted it down, and after a moment one of them carried a sword-club toward Hrala/Tatja. This fellow was no fighter, just an errand boy. He laid the club on the ground ten feet from the girl, then scuttled back to safety. Hrala let him depart, then stepped from the high ground to inspect the weapon.

“If she’s from deep Inland, she’s never seen a sword-club,” said Tredi. “Spears and pikes are all the Inlanders have. Even on the coast, it’s a ceremonial weapon.”

This one was clearly for special occasions; the wood was polished, unmarred. Without metals or composite materials, true swords were impossible. It looked deadly all the same. In overall shape it was something between a club and a pike. Elaborate hooks and blades—of bone or obsidian—were set along its length. There was a spike of glassy blackness at one end, and a hilt at the other. A second grip was set halfway down the pole; perhaps the thing could be used like a quarterstaff.

Hrala/Tatja picked it up, clearly as mystified as Rey. Somehow the puzzlement didn’t take her out of character: she smiled her curiosity, seeming to say how interesting, how clever. He couldn’t tell if she were acting or if this were the same frank wonderment he’d seen in her before. She swung it through a couple of clean arcs, then paused, glanced hesitantly at Cor and the others. Rey understood; this was her last chance to cut and run. Cor started toward her, but the girl turned away and shouted at the priests.

“She says she’s ready.”

Rey scarcely realized he was holding his breath. The girl could win. The spear-carriers were already sold on the fraud; none of them could fight effectively. The more cynical priests weren’t fooled, but they were exactly the sort that let others do their fighting. Who did that leave? Mental subnormals, too stupid to be afraid?

The crowd of priests parted and someone very broad and heavy started up the incline toward Tatja Grimm. The man’s gait was slow, almost shambling. Even from here Rey could see the dull-. ness in his features. Thank the Light!

Then he saw the second one.

They were nearly identical—giant, stupid . . . and armed. They carried their sword-clubs before them, both as threat and shield. Each was dressed in heavy leather. It was primitive armor, but at least real; Tatja Grimm was virtually naked, what armor she wore a gaudy fake.

Together, they outweighed her three to one.

The two separated as they approached the girl. They stopped ten feet from her, and for a moment the combatants stared at each other. Rey thought he saw traces of anxiety in the dullards’ manner; you’d have to be a vegetable to ignore the mood of the Villagers and the deadly confidence that came from the enemy.

Twenty years of fantasy collided with reality tonight—and for an instant the fantasy seemed the truer vision. The scene would have made a perfect cover painting: Hrala standing straight and fearless before a pair of subhuman attackers, a city of towers spreading on and on behind her. The last blue had disappeared from Seraph’s eastern ocean. The disk shaded from brighter reds to darker. The cloud of tarry smoke from the pet’ vats still hung in the air, roiling Seraph’s continents out of all recognition. Everything—towers, prisoners, priests, fighters—was lit with shifting reds. It was the color of blood, Hrala’s color, the background color of her most chilling battles.

A priest shouted at the swordsmen, and the moment passed. They came in from opposite sides, their bladed clubs swinging. The girl grabbed her club at the hilt and foregrip and whirled between them. They were slow, and Tatja Grimm was terribly quick. That could only save her from quick death: She danced backwards, up the rise. She used the club like a staff, blocking. Blade fragments flew from every blow.

She bounded three great steps back, and moved both hands to the hilt of the club. She swung it in a quick sweep, her greater reach keeping the two back—till they separated again and came at her from the sides. Even so, she wasn’t retreating now.

“She learns very fast,” Tredi said to no one in particular.

But some lessons are learned the hard way. The bladed hooks were good for more than terror and disemboweling. One of her parries brought a crashing halt; her club had locked with the attacker’s. The swordsman raised his club, swinging her slender body against him. Tatja kicked and kneed him. Even in his armor, the fellow staggered beneath the blows. The second attacker ran forward, rammed the point of his club squarely at the girl’s torso. Somehow she sensed the attack, and threw herself backwards. The impaling thrust was turned into a deep slash across her chest.

She hit the ground and bounced instantly to her feet. For a moment the action stopped and the antagonists stared at each other, shocked. In the smoky dimness, details were vague . . . yet the fake bosom still seemed to be in place. Everyone could see that the armor around her chest had been slashed open. Everyone could see the ripping wound across her breasts. Everyone could see that Hrala did not bleed.

The second swordsman stepped backwards and whimpered. His tiny brain finally realized that he should be terrified. He dropped his club and ran from both priests and Hrala.

The first fellow didn’t seem to notice. He flipped Hrala’s club over his head and advanced on her. She didn’t retreat, didn’t try to rush around him to the discarded clubs; she stood with knees slightly bent, hands held open. Only when the bladed club swung toward her middle did she move—and then it was too fast for Rey to follow. Somehow she caught the foregrip of the club, used it as a brace to swing her body up and ram her foot into the other’s throat. The blow jarred the club loose, and the two fell in an apparently random tangle. But only one combatant rose from that fall. The other lay twitching, the point of a sword-club struck through his skull.

The girl stared at the dying man. A look that might have been horror passed across her face; her arms and shoulders were shaking. Suddenly she straightened and stepped back. When she looked at the priests, haughty pride was back in her features.

“Hrala. Hra-la. Hra La. Hra La . . .” The chant began again. This time, no priest dared shout it down.

Coronadas Ascuasenya had plenty of contact with the rescued during the next few days. Some recovered from the horror better than others. Janna Kats could laugh with good humor within ten hours of the rescue. The little anthropologist, Tredi Bekjer, was almost as cool, though it would be some time before his body recovered.

But four days out from the Village, some of the Science people were still starting at shadows, crying without provocation. And for every survivor, there would always be nightmares.

Cor had never considered herself especially brave, but she hadn’t been trapped in that pit; she hadn’t seen friends torture-murdered. Once they returned to the Barge, and the Village was irrevocably behind them, it was easy to put the terror from her mind. She could enjoy the Welcoming Back, the honor given her and Rey Guille and Brailly Tounse, the greater honor given Tatja Grimm.

It was as close to a storybook ending as could be imagined. Thirty-six from the Science had died, but nearly one hundred had survived the adventure and would return with the Barge (much to the surprise of their sponsoring universities, who hadn’t expected to see them for two years). When Tarulle sailed into the Osterlais—and later the Tsanarts—everyone would be instant celebrities. It would be the story of the decade, and an immensely profitable affair for the Tarulle Publishing Company. Whatever their normal job slot, every literate participant in the rescue had been ordered to write an account of the operation. There was talk of starting a whole new magazine to report such true adventures.

And management seemed to think that Cor and Rey had masterminded this publishing coup. After all, he had suggested the landing; she had produced Tatja/Hrala. Cor knew how much this bothered Rey. He had tried to convince Svektr Ramsey that he had fallen into things without the least commercial savvy. Of course, Ramsey knew that, but he wasn’t about to let Rey wriggle free. So Guille was stuck with producing the centerpiece account of the rescue.

“Don’t worry about it. Boss. They don’t want the truth.” She and the Fantasie editor were standing at the railing of the top editorial deck. Except for the masts and Jespen Tarulle’s penthouse, this was as high as you could get on the Barge. It was one of Cor’s favorite places: a third of the Barge’s decks were visible from here, and the view of the horizon was not blocked by rigging and sails. It was early and the morning bustle had not begun. A cold salt wind came steadily across the deck. That air was so clean—not a trace of tarry smoke. White tops showed across miles of ocean. Nowhere was there sign of land. It was hard to imagine any place farther from the Village of the Towers.

Rey didn’t answer immediately. He was watching something on the print deck. He drew his jacket close, and looked at her. “It doesn’t matter. We can write the truth. They won’t understand. Anyone who wasn’t there, won’t understand.” Cor had been there. She did understand . . . but wished she didn’t.

Rey turned back to watch the print deck, and Cor saw the object of his interest: The man wore ordinary crew fatigues. He wandered slowly along the outer balcony of the deck. He was either lonely, or bored—or fascinated by every detail of the railing and deck. Cor suspected the fellow wasn’t bored: Part of the Hrala fraud had been the demand that the Termiters replace her damaged “property” (the dead from Brailly’s party and the Science). It seemed unwise to retract the demand completely, so five unfortunate Villagers were taken aboard.

This was one of them; he had been a Termiter priest—their spokesman/interpreter. Cor had talked to him several times since the rescue; he made very good copy. He turned out to be a real innocent, not one of the maniacs or hard core cynics. In fact, he had fallen from favor when the cynics pushed for trial by combat. He had never left the Village before; all his Sprak came from reading magazines and talking to travelers. What had first seemed a terrible punishment was now turning out to be the experience of his lifetime. “The guy’s a natural scholar. Boss. We drop the others off at the first hospitable landing, but I hope he wants to stay. If he could learn about civilization, return home in a year or so . . . He could do his people a lot of good. They’ll need to understand the outside world when the petroleum hunters come.”

Rey wasn’t paying attention. He pointed farther down the deck.

It was Tatja Grimm. She was looking across the sea, her tall form slumped so her elbows rested on the railing and her hands cupped her chin. The ex-priest must have seen her at that instant. He came to an abrupt halt, and his whole body seemed to shiver.

“Does he know?”

Rey shook his head. “I think he does now.”

In many ways the girl was different from that night at the Village. Her hair was short and red. Without the fake bust, she was a skinny preteener—and by her bearing, a discouraged one. But she was nearly six feet tall, and her face was something you would never forget after that night. The priest walked slowly toward her, every step a struggle. His hands grasped the railing like a lifeline.

Then the girl glanced at him, and for an instant it seemed the Termiter would run off. Instead, he bowed . . . and they talked. From up on the editorial deck, Cor couldn’t hear a word. Besides, they were probably speaking Hurdic. It didn’t matter. She could imagine the conversation.

They were an odd combination: The priest sometimes shaking, sometimes bowing, his life’s beliefs being shot from under him; the girl, still slouched against the railing, paying more attention to the sea than to the conversation. Even during the Welcoming Back she had been like this. The praise had left her untouched; her listless replies had come from far away, punctuated by an occasional calculating look that Cor found more unsettling than the apathy.

After several minutes, the priest gave a final bow, and walked away. Only now, he didn’t need the railing. Cor wondered what it must be like to suddenly learn that supernatural fears were unnecessary. For herself, the turn of belief was in the opposite direction.

Rey said, “There’s a rational explanation for Tatja Grimm. For years we’ve been buying Contrivance Fiction about alien invaders. We were just too blind to see that it’s finally happened.”

“A visitor from the stars, eh?” Cor smiled weakly.

“Well, do you have a better explanation?”

“. . . No.” But Cor knew Tatja well enough to believe her story. She really was from the Interior. Her tribe’s only weapons were spears and hand axes. Their greatest “technical” skill was sniffing out seasonal springs. She’d run away when she was eight. She moved from tribe to tribe—always toward the more advanced ones. She never found what she was looking for. “. . . She’s a very quick learner.”

“Yeah. A quick learner. Tredi Bekjer said that, too. It’s the key to everything. I should have caught on the minute I heard how Jimi found her ‘praying’ to the noontime shadow of her quarter-staff. There she had reproduced one of the great experiments of all time—and I put it down to religion! You’re right; there’s no way she could be from an advanced civilization. She didn’t recognize my telescope. The whole idea of magnification was novel to her. . . . Yet she understood the principle as soon as she saw the mirror.”

Cor looked down at the print deck, at the girl who seemed so sad and ordinary. There had been a time when Cor felt the start of friendship with the girl. It could never be. Tatja Grimm was like a hydrofoil first seen far astern. For a while she had been insignificant, struggling past obstacles Cor scarcely remembered. Then she pulled even. Cor remembered the last day of rehearsals; sympathy had chilled and turned to awe—as Cor realized just how fast Tatja was moving. In the future, she would sweep into A faraway Coronadas Ascuasenya could never imagine. “And now she understands us, and knows we are just as dumb as all the others.” Rey nodded uncertainly. “I think so. At first she was triumphant; our toys are so much nicer than any tribe’s. Then she realized they were the product of centuries of slow invention. She can search the whole world now, but she won’t find anything better.”

So here she must make the best of things. “I-I really do have a theory, Boss. Those old stories of fate and gods, the ones you’re so down on? If they were true, she would fit right in, a god who is just awakened. When she understands this, and sees her place in the world. . . . She talked to me after the Welcoming Back. Her Sprak is good now; there was no mistaking her meaning. She thanked me for the Hrala-coaching. She thanked me for showing her the power of fraud, for showing her that people can be used as easy as any other tool.”

For a long while, Rey had no response.

EYE FOR EYE

Orson Scott Card

“Eye for Eye” is a powerful tale of a young man who must come to terms with his terrible heritage, and his even more terrible ability to destroy everyone around him . . .

Just talk, Mick. Tell us everything. We’ll listen.

Well to start with I know I was doing terrible things. If you’re a halfway decent person, you don’t go looking to kill people. Even if you can do it without touching them. Even if you can do it so as nobody even guesses they was murdered, you still got to try not to do it.

Who taught you that?

Nobody. I mean it wasn’t in the books in the Baptist Sunday School—they spent all their time telling us not to lie or break the sabbath or drink liquor. Never did mention killing. Near as I can figure, the Lord thought killing was pretty smart sometimes, like when Samson done it with a donkey’s jaw. A thousand guys dead, but that was okay cause they was Philistines. And lighting foxes’ tails on fire. Samson was a sicko, but he still got his pages in the Bible.

I figure Jesus was about the only guy got much space in the Bible telling people not to kill. And even then, there’s that story about how the Lord struck down a guy and his wife cause they held back on their offerings to the Christian church. Oh, Lord, the TV preachers did go on about that. No, it wasn’t cause I got religion that I figured out not to kill people.

You know what I think it was? I think it was Vondel Cone’s elbow. At the Baptist Children’s Home in Eden, North Carolina, we played basketball all the time. On a bumpy dirt court, but we figured it was part of the game, never knowing which way the ball would bounce. Those boys in the NBA, they play a sissy game on that flat smooth floor.

We played basketball because there wasn’t a lot else to do. Only thing they ever had on TV was the preachers. We got it all cabled in—Falwell from up in Lynchburg, Jim and Tammy from Charlotte, Jimmy Swaggart looking hot, Ernest Ainglee looking carpeted, Billy Graham looking like God’s executive vice-president—that was all our TV ever showed, so no wonder we lived on the basketball court all year.

Anyway, Vondel Cone wasn’t particularly tall and he wasn’t particularly good at shooting and on the court nobody was even halfway good at dribbling. But he had elbows. Other guys, when they hit you it was an accident. But when Vondel’s elbow met up with your face, he like to pushed your nose out your ear. You can bet we all learned real quick to give him room. He got to take all the shots and get all the rebounds he wanted.

But we got even. We just didn’t count his points. We’d call out the score, and any basket he made it was like it never happened. He’d scream and he’d argue and we’d all stand there and nod and agree so he wouldn’t punch us out, and then as soon as the next basket was made, we’d call out the score—still not counting Vondel’s points. Drove that boy crazy.

He screamed till his eyes bugged out, but nobody ever counted his cheating points.

Vondel died of leukemia at the age of fourteen. You see, I never did like that boy.

But I learned something from him. I learned how unfair it was for somebody to get his way just because he didn’t care how much he hurt other people. And when I finally realized that I was just about the most hurtful person in the whole world, I knew then and there that it just wasn’t right. I mean, even in the Old Testament, Moses said the punishment should fit the crime. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Even Steven, that’s what Old Peleg said before I killed him of prostate cancer. It was when Peleg got took to the hospital that I left the Eden Baptist Children’s Home. Cause I wasn’t Vondel. I did care how much I hurt folks.

But that doesn’t have nothing to do with anything. I don’t know what all you want me to talk about.

Just talk, Mick. Tell us whatever you want.

Well I don’t aim to tell you my whole life story. I mean I didn’t really start to figure out anything till I got on that bus in Roanoke, and so I can pretty much start there I guess. I remember being careful not to get annoyed when the lady in front of me didn’t have the right change for the bus. And I didn’t get angry when the bus driver got all snotty and told the lady to get off. It just wasn’t worth killing for. That’s what I always tell myself when I get mad. It isn’t worth killing for, and it helps me calm myself down. So anyway I reached past her and pushed a dollar bill through the slot.

“This is for both of us,” I says.

“I don’t make change,” says he.

I could’ve just said “Fine” and left it at that, but he was being such a prick that I had to do something to make him see how ignorant he was. So I put another nickel in the slot and said, “That’s thirty-five for me, thirty-five for her, and thirty-five for the next guy gets on without no change.”

So maybe I provoked him. I’m sorry for that, but I’m human, too, I figure. Anyway he was mad. “Don’t you smart off with me, boy. I don’t have to let you ride, fare or no fare.”

Well, fact was he did, that’s the law, and anyway I was white and my hair was short so his boss would probably do something if I complained. I could have told him what for and shut his mouth up tight. Except that if I did, I would have gotten too mad, and no man deserves to die just for being a prick. So I looked down at the floor and said, “Sorry, sir.” I didn’t say “Sorry sir” or anything snotty like that. I said it all quiet and sincere.

If he just dropped it, everything would have been fine, you know? I was mad, yes, but I’d gotten okay at bottling it in, just kind of holding it tight and then waiting for it to ooze away where it wouldn’t hurt nobody. But just as I turned to head back toward a seat, he lurched that bus forward so hard that it flung me down and I only caught myself from hitting the floor by catching the handhold on a seatback and half-smashing the poor lady sitting there.

Some other people said, “Hey!” kind of mad, and I realize now that they was saying it to the driver, cause they was on my side. But at the time I thought they was mad at me, and that plus the scare of nearly falling and how mad I already was, well, I lost control of myself. I could just feel it in me, like sparklers in my blood veins, spinning around my whole body and then throwing off this pulse that went and hit that bus driver. He was behind me, so I didn’t see it with my eyes. But I could feel that sparkiness connect up with him, and twist him around inside, and then finally it came loose from me, I didn’t feel it no more. I wasn’t mad no more. But I knew I’d done him already.

I even knew where. It was in his liver. I was a real expert on cancer by now. Hadn’t I seen everybody I ever knew die of it? Hadn’t I read every book in the Eden Public Library on cancer? You can live without kidneys, you can cut out a lung, you can take out a colon and live with a bag in your pants, but you can’t live without a liver and they can’t transplant it either. That man was dead. Two years at the most, I gave him. Two years, all because he was in a bad mood and lurched his bus to trip up a smartmouth kid.

I felt like piss on a flat rock. On that day I had gone nearly eight months, since before Christmas, the whole year so far without hurting anybody. It was the best I’d ever done, and I thought I’d licked it. I stepped across the lady I smashed into and sat by the window, looking out, not seeing anything. All I could think was I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. Did he have a wife and kids? Well, they’d be a widow and orphans soon enough, because of me. I could feel him from clear over here. The sparkiness of his belly, making the cancer grow and keeping his body’s own natural fire from burning it out. I wanted with all my heart to take it back, but I couldn’t. And like so many times before, I thought to myself that if I had any guts I’d kill myself. I couldn’t figure why I hadn’t died of my own cancer already. I sure enough hated myself a lot worse than I ever hated anybody else.

The lady beside me starts to talk. “People like that are so annoying, aren’t they?”

I didn’t want to talk to anybody, so I just grunted and turned away.

“That was very kind of you to help me,” she says.

That’s when I realized she was the same lady who didn’t have the right fare. “Nothing,” I says.

“No, you didn’t have to do that.” She touched my jeans.

I turned to look at her. She was older, about twenty-five maybe, and her face looked kind of sweet. She was dressed nice enough that I could tell it wasn’t cause she was poor that she didn’t have bus fare. She also didn’t take her hand off my knee, which made me nervous, because the bad thing I do is a lot stronger when I’m actually touching a person, and so I mostly don’t touch folks and I don’t feel safe when they touch me. The fastest I ever killed a man was when he felt me up in a bathroom at a rest stop on I-85. He was coughing blood when I left that place, I really tore him up that time, I still have nightmares about him gasping for breath there with his hand on me.

So anyway that’s why I felt real nervous her touching me there on the bus, even though there was no harm in it. Or anyway that’s half why I was nervous, and the other half was that her hand was real light on my leg and out of the corner of my eye I could see how her chest moved when she breathed, and after all I’m seventeen and normal most ways. So when I wished she’d move her hand, I only half wished she’d move it back to her own lap.

That was up till she smiles at me and says, “Mick, I want to help you.”

It took me a second to realize she spoke my name. I didn’t know many people in Roanoke, and she sure wasn’t one of them. Maybe she was one of Mr. Kaiser’s customers, I thought. But they hardly ever knew my name. I kind of thought, for a second, that maybe she had seen me working in the warehouse and asked Mr. Kaiser all about me or something. So I says, “Are you one of Mr. Kaiser’s customers?”

“Mick Winger,” she says. “You got your first name from a note pinned to your blanket when you were left at the door of the sewage plant in Eden. You chose your last name when you ran away from the Eden Baptist Children’s Home, and you probably chose it because the first movie you ever saw was An Officer and a Gentleman. You were fifteen then, and now you’re seventeen, and you’ve killed more people in your life than Al Capone.”

I got nervous when she knew my whole name and how I got it, cause the only way she could know that stuff was if she’d been following me for years. But when she let on she knew I killed people, I forgot all about feeling mad or guilty or horny. I pulled the cord on the bus, practically crawled over her to get out, and in about three seconds I was off that bus and hit the ground running. I’d been afraid of it for years, somebody finding out about me. But it was all the more scary seeing how she must have known about me for so long. It made me feel like somebody’d been peeking in the bathroom window all my life and I only just now found out about it.

I ran for a long time, which isn’t easy because of all the hills in Roanoke. I ran mostly downhill, though, into town, where I could dodge into buildings and out their back doors. I didn’t know if she was following me, but she’d been following me for a long time, or someone had, and I never even guessed it, so how did I know if they was following me now or not?

And while I ran, I tried to figure where I could go now. I had to leave town, that was sure. I couldn’t go back to the warehouse, not even to say good-bye, and that made me feel real bad, cause Mr. Kaiser would think I just run off for no reason, like some kid who didn’t care nothing about people counting on him. He might even worry about me, never coming to pick up my spare clothes from the room he let me sleep in.

Thinking about what Mr. Kaiser might think about me going was pretty strange. Leaving Roanoke wasn’t ging to be like leaving the orphanage, and then leaving Eden, and finally leaving North Carolina. I never had much to let go of in those places. But Mr. Kaiser had always been real straight with me, a nice steady old guy, never bossed me, never tried to take me down, even stuck up for me in a quiet kind of way by letting it be known that he didn’t want nobody teasing me. Hired me a year and a half ago, even though I was lying about being sixteen and he must’ve known it. And in all that time, I never once got mad at work, or at least not so mad I couldn’t stop myself from hurting people. I worked hard, built up muscles I never thought I’d have, and I also must’ve grown five inches, my pants kept getting so short. I sweated and I ached most days after work, but I earned my pay and kept up with the older guys, and Mr. Kaiser never once made me feel like he took me on for charity, the way the orphanage people always did, like I should thank them for not letting me starve. Kaiser’s Furniture Warehouse was the first peaceful place I ever spent time, the first place where nobody died who was my fault.

I knew all that before, but right till I started running I never realized how bad I’d feel about leaving Roanoke. Like somebody dying. It got so bad that for a while I couldn’t hardly see which way I was going, not that I out and out cried or nothing.

Pretty soon I found myself walking down Jefferson Street, where it cuts through a woody hill before it widens out for car dealers and Burger Kings. There was cars passing me both ways, but I was thinking about other things now. Trying to figure why I never got mad at Mr. Kaiser. Other people treated me nice before, it wasn’t like I got beat up every night or nobody ever gave me seconds or I had to eat dogfood or nothing. I remembered all those people at the orphanage, they was just trying to make me grow up Christian and educated. They just never learned how to be nice without also being nasty. Like Old Peleg, the black caretaker, he was a nice old coot and told us stories, and I never let nobody call him nigger even behind his back. But he was a racist himself, and I knew it on account of the time he caught me and Jody Capel practicing who could stop pissing the most times in a single go. We both done the same thing, didn’t we? But he just sent me off and then started whaling on Jody, and Jody was yelling like he was dying, and I kept saying, “It ain’t fair! I done it too! You’re only beating on him cause he’s black!” but he paid no mind, it was so crazy, I mean it wasn’t like I wanted him to beat me too, but it made me so mad and before I knew it, I felt so sparky that I couldn’t hold it in and I was hanging on him, trying to pull him away from Jody, so it hit him hard.

What could I say to him then? Going into the hospital, where he’d lie there with a tube in his arm and a tube in his nose sometimes. He told me stories when he could talk, and just squoze my hand when he couldn’t. He used to have a belly on him, but I think I could have tossed him in the air like a baby before he died. And I did it to him, not that I meant to, I couldn’t help myself, but that’s the way it was. Even people I purely loved, they’d have mean days, and God help them if I happened to be there, because I Was like God with a bad mood, that’s what I was, God with no mercy, because I couldn’t give them nothing, but I sure as hell could take away. Take it all away. They told me I shouldn’t visit Old Peleg so much cause it was sick to keep going to watch him waste away. Mrs. Howard and Mr. Dennis both got tumors from trying to get me to stop going. So many people was dying of cancer in those days they came from the county and tested the water for chemicals. It wasn’t no chemicals, I knew that, but I never did tell them, cause they’d just lock me up in the crazy house and you can bet that crazy house would have a epidemic before I been there a week if that ever happened.

Truth was I didn’t know, I just didn’t know it was me doing it for the longest time. It’s just people kept dying on me, everybody I ever loved, and it seemed like they always took sick after I’d been real mad at them once, and you know how little kids always feel guilty about yelling at somebody who dies right after. The counselor even told me that those feelings were perfectly natural, and of course it wasn’t my fault, but I couldn’t shake it. And finally I began to realize that other people didn’t feel that sparky feeling like I did, and they couldn’t tell how folks was feeling unless they looked or asked. I mean, I knew when my lady teachers was going to be on the rag before they did, and you can bet I stayed away from them the best I could on those crabby days. I could feel it, like they was giving off sparks. And there was other folks who had a way of sucking you to them, without saying a thing, without doing a thing, you just went into a room and couldn’t take your eyes off them, you wanted to be close—I saw that other kids felt the same way, just automatically liked them, you know? But I could feel it like they was on fire, and suddenly I was cold and needed to warm myself. And I’d say something about it and people would look at me like I was crazy enough to lock right up, and I finally caught on that I was the only one that had those feelings.

Once I knew that, then all those deaths began to fit together. All those cancers, those days they lay in hospital beds turning into mummies before they was rightly dead, all the pain until they drugged them into zombies so they wouldn’t tear their own guts out just trying to get to the place that hurt so bad. Torn up, cut up, drugged up, radiated, bald, skinny, praying for death, and I knew I did it. I began to tell the minute I did it. I began to know what kind of cancer it would be, and where, and how bad. And I was always right.

Twenty-five people I knew of, and probably more I didn’t.

And it got even worse when I ran away. I’d hitch rides because how else was I going to get anywheres? But I was always scared of the people who picked me up, and if they got weird or anything I sparked them. And cops who run me out of a place, they got it. Until I figured I was just Death himself, with his bent-up spear and a hood over his head, walking around and whoever came near him bought the farm. That was me. I was the most terrible thing in the world, I was families broke up and children orphaned and mamas crying for their dead babies, I was everything that people hate most in all the world. I jumped off a overpass once to kill myself but I just sprained my ankle. Old Peleg always said I was like a cat, I wouldn’t die lessen somebody skinned me, roasted the meat and ate it, then tanned the hide, made it into slippers, wore them slippers clean out, and then burned them and raked the ashes, that’s when I’d finally die. And I figure he’s right, cause I’m still alive and that’s a plain miracle after the stuff I been through lately.

Anyway that’s the kind of thing I was thinking, walking along Jefferson, when I noticed that a car had driven by going the other way and saw me and turned around and came back up behind me, pulled ahead of me and stopped. I was so spooked I thought it must be that lady finding me again, or maybe somebody with guns to shoot me all up like on “Miami Vice,” and I was all set to take off up the hill till I saw it was just Mr. Kaiser.

He says, “I was heading the other way, Mick. Want a ride to work?”

I couldn’t tell him what I was doing. “Not today, Mr. Kaiser,” I says.

Well, he knew by my look or something, cause he says, “You quitting on me, Mick?”

I was just thinking, don’t argue with me or nothing, Mr. Kaiser, just let me go, I don’t want to hurt you, I’m so fired up with guilt and hating myself that I’m just death waiting to bust out and blast somebody, can’t you see sparks falling off me like spray off a wet dog? I just says, “Mr. Kaiser, I don’t want to talk right now, I really don’t.”

Right then was the moment for him to push. For him to lecture me about how I had to learn responsibility, and if I didn’t talk things through how could anybody ever make things right, and life ain’t a free ride so sometimes you got to do things you don’t want to do, and I been nicer to you than you deserve, you’re just what they warned me you’d be, shiftless and ungrateful and a bum in your soul.

But he didn’t say none of that. He just says, “You had some bad luck? I can advance you against wages, I know you’ll pay back.”

“I don’t owe no money,” I says.

And he says, “Whatever you’re running away from, come home with me and you’ll be safe.”

What could I say? You’re the one who needs protecting, Mr. Kaiser, and I’m the one who’ll probably kill you. So I didn’t say nothing, until finally he just nodded and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “That’s okay, Mick. If you ever need a place or a job, you just come on back to me. You find a place to settle down for a while, you write to me and I’ll send you your stuff.”

“You just give it to the next guy,” I says.

“A son-of-a-bitch stinking mean old Jew like me?” he says. “I don’t give nothing to nobody.”

Well I couldn’t help but laugh, cause that’s what the foreman always called Mr. Kaiser whenever he thought the old guy couldn’t hear him. And when I laughed, I felt myself cool off, just like as if I had been on fire and somebody poured cold water over my head.

“Take care of yourself, Mick,” he says. He give me his card and a twenty and tucked it into my pocket when I told him no. Then he got back into his car and made one of his insane U-turns right across traffic and headed back the other way.

Well if he did nothing else he got my brain back in gear. There I was walking along the highway where anybody at all could see me, just like Mr. Kaiser did. At least till I was out of town I ought to stay out of sight as much as I could. So there I was between those two hills, pretty steep, and all covered with green, and I figured I could climb either one. But the slope on the other side of the road looked somehow better to me, it looked more like I just ought to go there, and I figured that was as good a reason to decide as any I ever heard of, and so I dodged my way across Jefferson Street and went right into the kudzu caves and clawed my way right up. It was dark under the leaves, but it wasn’t much cooler than right out in the sun, particularly cause I was working so hard. It was a long way up, and just when I got to the top the ground started shaking. I thought it was an earthquake I was so edgy, till I heard the train whistle and then I knew it was one of those coal-hauling trains, so heavy it could shake ivy off a wall when it passed. I just stood there and listened to it, the sound coming from every direction all at once, there under the kudzu, I listened till it went on by, and then I stepped out of the leaves into a clearing.

And there she was, waiting for me, sitting under a tree.

I was too wore out to run, and too scared, coming on her sudden like that, just when I thought I was out of sight. It was just as if I’d been aiming straight at her, all the way up the hill, just as if she somehow tied a string to me and pulled me across the street and up the hill. And if she could do that, how could I run away from her, tell me that? Where could I go? I’d just turn some corner and there she’d be, waiting. So I says to her, “All right, what do you want?”

She just waved me on over. And I went, too, but not very close, cause I didn’t know what she had in mind. “Sit down, Mick,” says she. “We need to talk.”

Now I’ll tell you that I didn’t want to sit, and I didn’t want to talk, I just wanted to get out of there. And so I did, or at least I thought I did. I started walking straight away from her, I thought, but in three steps I realized that I wasn’t walking away, I was walking around her. Like that planet thing in science class, the more I moved, the more I got nowhere. It was like she had more say over what my legs did than me.

So I sat down.

“You shouldn’t have run off from me,” she says.

What I mostly thought of now was to wonder if she was wearing anything under that shirt. And then I thought, what a stupid time to be thinking about that. But I still kept thinking about it.

“Do you promise to stay right there till I’m through talking?” she says.

When she moved, it was like her clothes got almost transparent for a second, but not quite. Couldn’t take my eyes off her. I promised.

And then all of a sudden she was just a woman. Not ugly, but not all that pretty, neither. Just looking at me with eyes like fire. I was scared again, and I wanted to leave, especially cause now I began to think she really was doing something to me. But I promised, so I stayed.

“That’s how it began,” she says.

“What’s how what began?” says I.

“What you just felt. What I made you feel. That only works on people like you. Nobody else can feel it.”

“Feel what?” says I. Now, I knew what she meant, but I didn’t know for sure if she meant what I knew. I mean, it bothered me real bad that she could tell how I felt about her those few minutes there.

“Feel that,” she says, and there it is again, all I can think about is her body. But it only lasted a few seconds, and then I knew for sure that she was doing it to me.

“Stop it,” I says, and she says, “I already did.”

I ask her, “How do you do that?”

“Everybody can do it, just a little. A woman looks at a man, she’s interested, and so the bio-electrical system heats up, causes some odors to change, and he smells them and notices her and he pays attention.”

“Does it work the other way?”

“Men are always giving off those odors, Mick. Makes no difference. It isn’t a man’s stink that gives a woman her ideas. But like I said, Mick, that’s what everybody can do. With some men, though, it isn’t a woman’s smell that draws his eye. It’s the bio-electrical system itself. The smell is nothing. You can feel the heat of the fire. It’s the same thing as when you kill people, Mick. If you couldn’t kill people the way you do, you also couldn’t feel it so strong when I give off magnetic pulses.”

Of course I didn’t understand all that the first time, and maybe I’m remembering it now with words she didn’t teach me until later. At the time, though, I was scared, yes, because she knew, and because she could do things to me, but I was also excited, because she sounded like she had some answers, like she knew why it was that I killed people without meaning to.

But when I asked her to explain everything, she couldn’t. “We’re only just beginning to understand it ourselves, Mick. There’s a Swedish scientist who is making some strides that way. We’ve sent some people over to meet with him. We’ve read his book, and maybe even some of us understand it. I’ve got to tell you, Mick, just because we can do this thing doesn’t mean that we’re particularly smart or anything. It doesn’t get us through college any faster or anything. It just means that teachers who flunk us tend to die off a little younger.”

“You’re like me! You can do it too!”

She shook her head. “Not likely,” she says. “If I’m really furious at somebody, if I really hate him, if I really try, and if I keep it up for weeks, I can maybe give him an ulcer. You’re in a whole different league from me. You and your people.”

“I got no people,” I says.

“I’m here, Mick, because you got people. People who knew just exactly what you could do from the minute you were born. People who knew that if you didn’t get a tit to suck you wouldn’t just cry, you’d kill. Spraying out death from your cradle. So they planned it all from the beginning. Put you in an orphanage. Let other people, all those do-gooders, let them get sick and die, and then when you’re old enough to have control over it, then they look you up, they tell you who you are, they bring you home to live with them.”

“So you’re my kin?” I ask her.

“Not so you’d notice,” she says. “I’m here to warn you about your kin. We’ve been watching you for years, and now it’s time to warn you.”

“Now it’s time? I spent fifteen years in that children’s home killing everybody who ever cared about me, and if they’d just come along—or you, or anybody, if you just said, Mick, you got to control your temper or you’ll hurt people, if somebody just said to me, Mick, we’re your people and we’ll keep you safe, then maybe I wouldn’t be so scared all the time, maybe I wouldn’t go killing people so much, did you ever think of that?” Or maybe I didn’t say all that, but that’s what I was feeling, and so I said a lot, I chewed her up and down.

And then I saw how scared she was, because I was all sparky, and I realized I was just about to shed a load of death onto her, and so I kind of jumped back and yelled at her to leave me alone, and then she does the craziest thing, she reaches out toward me, and I scream at her, “Don’t you touch me!” cause if she touches me I can’t hold it in, it’ll just go all through her and tear up her guts inside, but she just keeps reaching, leaning toward me, and so I kind of crawled over toward a tree, and I hung onto that tree, I just held on and let the tree kind of soak up all my sparkiness, almost like I was burning up the tree. Maybe I killed it, for all I know. Or maybe it was so big, I couldn’t hurt it, but it took all the fire out of me, and then she did touch me, like nobody ever touched me, her arm across my back, and hand holding my shoulder, her face right up against my ear, and she says to me, “Mick, you didn’t hurt me.”

“Just leave me alone,” says I.

“You’re not like them,” she says. “Don’t you see that? They love the killing. They use the killing. Only they’re not as strong as you. They have to be touching, for one thing, or close to it. They have to keep it up longer. They’re stronger than I am, but not as strong as you. So they’ll want you, that’s for sure, Mick, but they’ll also be scared of you, and you know what’ll scare them most? That you didn’t kill me, that you can control it like that.”

“I can’t always. That bus driver today.”

“So you’re not perfect. But you’re trying. Trying not to kill people. Don’t you see, Mick? You’re not like them. They may be your blood family, but you don’t belong with them, and they’ll see that, and when they do—”

All I could think about was what she said, my blood family. “My Mama and Daddy, you telling me I’m going to meet them?”

“They’re calling you now, and that’s why I had to warn you.”

“Calling me?”

“The way I called you up this hill. Only it wasn’t just me, of course, it was a bunch of us.”

“I just decided to come up here, to get off the road.”

“You just decided to cross the highway and climb this hill, instead of the other one? Anyway, that’s how it works. It’s part of the human race for all time, only we never knew it. A bunch of people kind of harmonize their bio-electrical systems, to call for somebody to come home, and they come home, after a while. Or sometimes a whole nation unites to hate somebody. Like Iran and the Shah, or the Philippines and Marcos.”

“They just kicked them out,” I says.

“But they were already dying, weren’t they? A whole nation, hating together, they make a constant interference with their enemy’s bio-electrical system. A constant noise. All of them together, millions of people, they are finally able to match what you can do with one flash of anger.”

I thought about that for a few minutes, and it came back to me all the times I thought how I wasn’t even human. So maybe I was human, after all, but human like a guy with three arms is human, or one of those guys in the horror movies I saw, gigantic and lumpy and going around hacking up teenagers whenever they was about to get laid. And in all those movies they always try to kill the guy only they can’t, he gets stabbed and shot and burned up and he still comes back, and that’s like me, I must have tried to kill myself so many times only it never worked.

No. Wait a minute.

I got to get this straight, or you’ll think I’m crazy or a liar. I didn’t jump off that highway overpass like I said. I stood on one for a long time, watching the cars go by. Whenever a big old semi came along I’d say, this one, and I’d count, and at the right second I’d say, now. Only I never did jump. And then afterward I dreamed about jumping, and in all those dreams I’d just bounce off the truck and get up and limp away. Like the time I was a kid and sat in the bathroom with the little gardening shears, the spring-loaded kind that popped open, I sat there thinking about jamming it into my stomach right under the breastbone, and then letting go of the handle, it’d pop right open and make a bad wound and cut open my heart or something. I was there so long I fell asleep on the toilet, and later I dreamed about doing it but no blood ever came out, because I couldn’t die.

So I never tried to kill myself. But I thought about it all the time. I was like those monsters in those movies, just killing people but secretly hoping somebody would catch on to what was going on and kill me first.

And so I says to her, “Why didn’t you just kill me?”

And there she was with her face close to mine and she says, just like it was love talk, she says, “I’ve had you in my rifle sights, Mick, and then I didn’t do it. Because I saw something in you. I saw that maybe you were trying to control it. That maybe you didn’t want to use your power to kill. And so I let you live, thinking that one day I’d be here like this, telling you what you are, and giving you a little hope.”

I thought she meant I’d hope because of knowing my Mama and Daddy were alive and wanted me.

“I hoped for a long time, but I gave it up. I don’t want to see my Mama and Daddy, if they could leave me there all those years. I don’t want to see you, neither, if you didn’t so much as warn me not to get mad at Old Peleg. I didn’t want to kill Old Peleg, and I couldn’t even help it! You didn’t help me a bit!”

“We argued about it,” she says. “We knew you were killing people while you tried to sort things out and get control. Puberty’s the worst time, even worse than infancy, and we knew that if we didn’t kill you a lot of people would die—and mostly they’d be the people you loved best. That’s the way it is for most kids your age, they get angriest at the people they love most, only you couldn’t help killing them, and what does that do to your mind? What kind of person do you become? There was some who said we didn’t have the right to leave you alive even to study you, because it would be like having a cure for cancer and then not using it on people just to see how fast they’d die. Like that experiment where the government left syphilis cases untreated just to see what the final stages of the disease were like, even though they could have cured those people at any time. But some of us told them, Mick isn’t a disease, and a bullet isn’t penicillin. I told them, Mick is something special. And they said, yes, he’s special, he kills more than any of those other kids, and we shot them or ran them over with a truck or drowned them, and here we’ve got the worst one of all and you want to keep him alive.”

And I was crying cause I wished they had killed me, but also because it was the first time I ever thought there was people arguing that I ought to be alive, and even though I didn’t rightly understand then or even now why you didn’t kill me, I got to tell you that knowing somebody knew what I was and still chose not to blast my head off, that done me in, I just bawled like a baby.

One thing led to another, there, my crying and her holding me, and pretty soon I figured out that she pretty much wanted to get laid right there. But that just made me sick, when I knew that. “How can you want to do that!” I says to her. “I can’t get married! I can’t have no kids! They’d be like me!”

She didn’t argue with me or say nothing about birth control, and so I figured out later that I was right, she wanted to have a baby, and that told me plain that she was crazy as a loon. I got my pants pulled back up and my shirt on, and I wouldn’t look at her getting dressed again, neither.

“I could make you do it,” she says to me. “I could do that to you. The ability you have that lets you kill also makes you sensitive. I can make you lose your mind with desire for me.”

“Then why don’t you?” I says.

“Why don’t you kill if you can help it?” she says.

“Cause nobody has the right,” says I.

“That’s right,” she says.

“Anyway you’re ten years older than me,” I tell her.

“Fifteen,” she says. “Almost twice your age. But that don’t mean nothing.” Or I guess she actually said, “That doesn’t mean nothing,” or probably, “that doesn’t mean anything.” She talks better than I do but I can’t always remember the fancy way. “That doesn’t mean a thing,” she says. “You’ll go to your folks, and you can bet they’ll have some pretty little girl waiting for you, and she’ll know how to do it much better than me, she’ll turn you on so your pants unzip themselves, cause that’s what they want most from you. They want your babies. As many as they can get, because you’re the strongest they’ve produced in all the years since Grandpa Jake realized that the cursing power went father to son, mother to daughter, and that he could breed for it like you breed dogs or horses. They’ll breed you like a stud, but then when they find out that you don’t like killing people and you don’t want to play along and you aren’t going to take orders from whoever’s in charge there now, they’ll kill you. That’s why I came to warn you. We could feel them just starting to call you. We knew it was time. And I came to warn you.”

Most of this didn’t mean much to me yet. Just the idea of having kinfolk was still so new I couldn’t exactly get worried about whether they’d kill me or put me out for stud or whatever. Mostly what I thought about was her, anyway. “I might have killed you, you know.”

“Maybe I didn’t care,” she says. “And maybe I’m not so easy to kill.”

“And maybe you ought to tell me your name,” says I.

“Can’t,” she says.

“How come?” says I.

“Because if you decide to put in with them, and you know my name, then I am dead.”

“I wouldn’t let anybody hurt you,” says I.

She didn’t answer that. She just says to me, “Mick, you don’t know my name, but you remember this. I have hopes for you, cause I know you’re a good man and you never meant to kill nobody. I could’ve made you love me, and I didn’t, because I want you to do what you do by your own choice. And most important of all, if you come with me, we have a chance to see if maybe your ability doesn’t have a good side.”

You think I hadn’t thought of that before? When I saw Rambo shooting down all those little brown guys, I thought, I could do that, and without no gun, either. And if somebody took me hostage like the Achille Lauro thing, we wouldn’t have to worry about the terrorists going unpunished. They’d all be rotting in a hospital in no time. “Are you with the government?” I ask her.

“No,” she says.

So they didn’t want me to be a soldier. I was kind of disappointed. I kind of thought I might be useful that way. But I couldn’t volunteer or nothing, cause you don’t walk into the recruiting office and say, I’ve killed a couple dozen people by giving sparks off my body, and I could do it to Castro and Qaddafi if you like. Cause if they believe you, then you’re a murderer, and if they don’t believe you, they lock you up in a nuthouse.

“Nobody’s been calling me, anyway,” I says. “If I didn’t see you today, I wouldn’t’ve gone nowhere. I would’ve stayed with Mr. Kaiser.”

“Then why did you take all your money out of the bank?” she says. “And when you ran away from me, why did you run toward the highway where you can hitch a ride at least to Madison and then catch another on in to Eden?”

And I didn’t have no answer for her then, cause I didn’t know rightly why I took my money out of the bank lessen it was like she said, and I was planning to leave town. It was just an impulse, to close that account, I didn’t think nothing of it, just stuffed three hundreds into my wallet and come to think of it I really was heading toward Eden, I just didn’t think of it, I was just doing it. Just the way I climbed up that hill.

“They’re stronger than we are,” she says. “So we can’t hold you here. You have to go anyway, you have to work this thing out. The most we could do was just get you on the bus next to me, and then call you up this hill.”

“Then why don’t you come with me?” I says.

“They’d kill me in two seconds, right in front of your eyes, and none of this cursing stuff, either, Mick. They’d just take my head off with a machete.”

“Do they know you?”

“They know us,” she says. “We’re the only ones that know your people exist, so we’re the only ones working to stop them. I won’t lie to you, Mick. If you join them, you can find us, you’ll learn how, it isn’t hard, and you can do this stuff from farther away, you could really take us apart. But if you join his, the tables are turned.”

“Well maybe I don’t want to be on either side in this war,” I says. “And maybe now I won’t go to Eden, neither. Maybe I’ll go up to Washington D.C. and join the CIA.”

“Maybe,” she says.

“And don’t try to stop me.”

“I wouldn’t try,” she says.

“Damn straight,” I says. And then I just walked on out, and this time I didn’t walk in no circles, I just headed north, past her car, down the railroad right of way. And I caught a ride heading up toward D.C., and that was that.

Except that along about six o’clock in the evening I woke up and the car was stopping and I didn’t know where I was, I must have slept all day, and the guy says to me, “Here you are, Eden, North Carolina.”

And I about messed my pants. “Eden!” I says.

“It wasn’t far out of my way,” he says. “I’m heading for Burlington, and these country roads are nicer than the freeway, anyway. Don’t mind if I never drive I-85 again, to tell the truth.”

But that was the very guy who told me he had business in D.C., he was heading there from Bristol, had to see somebody from a government agency, and here he was in Eden. It made no sense at all, except for what that woman told me. Somebody was calling me, and if I wouldn’t come, they’d just put me to sleep and call whoever was driving. And there I was. Eden, North Carolina. Scared to death, or at least scared a little, but also thinking, if what she said was true, my folks was coming, I was going to meet my folks.

Nothing much changed in the two years since I ran off from the orphanage. Nothing much ever changes in Eden, which isn’t a real town anyway, just cobbled together from three little villages that combined to save money on city services. People still mostly think of them as three villages. There wasn’t nobody who’d get too excited about seeing me, and there wasn’t nobody I wanted to see. Nobody living, anyway. I had no idea how my folks might find me, or how I might find them, but in the meantime I went to see about the only people I ever much cared about. Hoping that they wouldn’t rise up out of the grave to get even with me for killing them.

It was still full day that time of year, but it was whippy weather, the wind gusting and then holding still, a big row of thunderclouds off to the southwest, the sun sinking down to get behind them. The kind of afternoon that promises to cool you off, which suited me fine. I was still pretty dusty from my climb up the hill that morning, and I could use a little rain. Got a coke at a fast food place and then walked on over to see Old Peleg.

He was buried in a little cemetery right by an old Baptist Church. Not Southern Baptist, Black Baptist, meaning that it didn’t have no fancy building with classrooms and a rectory, just a stark-white block of a building with a little steeple and a lawn that looked like it’d been clipped by hand. Cemetery was just as neat-kept. Nobody around, and it was dim cause of the thunderclouds moving through, but I wasn’t afraid of the graves there, I just went to Old Peleg’s cross. Never knew his last name was Lindley. Didn’t sound like a black man’s name, but then when I thought about it I realized that no last name sounded like a black man’s name, because Eden is still just old-fashioned enough that an old black man doesn’t get called by his last name much. He grew up in a Jim Crow state, and never got around to insisting on being called Mr. Lindley. Old Peleg. Not that he ever hugged me or took me on long walks or gave me that tender loving care that makes people get all teary-eyed about how wonderful it is to have parents. He never tried to be my dad or nothing. And if I hung around him much, he always gave me work to do and made damn sure I did it right, and mostly we didn’t talk about anything except the work we was doing, which made me wonder, standing there, why I wanted to cry and why I hated myself worse for killing Old Peleg than for any of the other dead people under the ground in that city.

I didn’t see them and I didn’t hear them coming and I didn’t smell my mama’s perfume. But I knew they was coming, because I felt the prickly air between us. I didn’t turn around, but I knew just where they were, and just how far off, because they was lively. Shedding sparks like I never saw on any living soul except myself, just walking along giving off light. It was like seeing myself from the outside for the first time in my life. Even when she was making me get all hot for her, that lady in Roanoke wasn’t as lively as them. They was just like me.

Funny thing was, that wrecked everything. I didn’t want them to be like me. I hated my sparkiness, and there they were, showing it to me, making me see how a killer looks from the outside. It took a few seconds to realize that they was scared of me, too. I recognized how scaredness looks, from remembering how my own bio-electrical system got shaped and changed by fear. Course I didn’t think of it as a bio-electrical system then, or maybe I did cause she’d already told me, but you know what I mean. They was afraid of me. And I knew that was because I was giving off all the sparks I shed when I feel so mad at myself that I could bust. I was standing there at Old Peleg’s grave, hating myself, so naturally they saw me like I was ready to kill half a city. They didn’t know that it was me I was hating. Naturally they figured I might be mad at them for leaving me at that orphanage seventeen years ago. Serve them right, too, if I gave them a good hard twist in the gut, but I don’t do that, I honestly don’t, not any more, not standing there by Old Peleg who I loved a lot more than these two strangers, I don’t act out being a murderer when my shadow’s falling across his grave.

So I calmed myself down as best I could and I turned around and there they was, my mama and my daddy. And I got to tell you I almost laughed. All those years I watched them TV preachers, and we used to laugh till our guts ached about how Tammy Bakker always wore makeup so thick she could be a nigger underneath (it was okay to say that cause Old Peleg himself said it first) and here was my mama, wearing just as much makeup and her hair sprayed so thick she could work construction without a hardhat. And smiling that same sticky phony smile, and crying the same gooey oozey black tears down her cheeks, and reaching out her hands just the right way so I halfway expected her to say, “Praise to Lord Jesus,” and then she actually says it, “Praise to Lord Jesus, it’s my boy,” and comes up and lays a kiss on my cheek with so much spit in it that it dripped down my face.

I wiped the slobber with my sleeve and felt my daddy have this little flash of anger, and I knew that he thought I was judging my mama and he didn’t like it. Well, I was, I got to admit. Her perfume was enough to knock me over, I swear she must’ve mugged an Avon lady. And there was my daddy in a fine blue suit like a businessman, his hair all blow-dried, so it was plain he knew just as well as I did the way real people are supposed to look. Probably he was plain embarrassed to be seen in public with Mama, so why didn’t he ever just say, Mama, you wear too much makeup? That’s what I thought, and it wasn’t till later that I realized that when your woman is apt to give you cancer if you rile her up, you don’t go telling her that her face looks like she slept in wet sawdust and she smells like a whore. White trash, that’s what my mama was, sure as if she was still wearing the factory label.

“Sure am glad to see you, son,” says my daddy.

I didn’t know what to say, tell the truth. I wasn’t glad to see them, now that I saw them, because they wasn’t exactly what a orphan boy dreams his folks is like. So I kind of grinned and looked back down at Old Peleg’s grave.

“You don’t seem too surprised to see us,” he says.

I could’ve told him right then about the lady in Roanoke, but I didn’t. Just didn’t feel right to tell him. So I says, “I felt like somebody was calling me back here. And you two are the only people I met who’s as sparky as me. If you all say you’re my folks, then I figure it must be so.” Mama giggled and she says to him, “Listen, Jesse, he calls it ‘sparky.’ ”

“The word we use is ‘dusty,’ son,” says Daddy. “We say a body’s looking dusty when he’s one of us.”

“You were a very dusty baby,” says Mama. “That’s why we knew we couldn’t keep you. Never seen such a dusty baby before. Papa Lem made us take you to the orphanage before you even sucked one time. You never sucked even once.” And her mascara just flooded down her face.

“Now Deeny,” says Daddy, “no need telling him everything right here.” Dusty. That was no sense at all. It didn’t look like dust, it was flecks of light, so bright on me that sometimes I had to squint just to see my own hands through the dazzle. “It don’t look like dust,” I says.

And Daddy says, “Well what do you think it looks like?”

And I says, “Sparks. That’s why I call it being sparky.”

“Well that’s what it looks like to us, too,” says Daddy. “But we’ve been calling it ‘dusty’ all our lives, and so I figure it’s easier for one boy to change than for f—for lots of other folks.”

Well, now, I learned a lot of things right then from what he said. First off, I knew he was lying when he said it looked like sparks to them. It didn’t. It looked like what they called it. Dust. And that meant that I was seeing it a whole lot brighter than they could see it, and that was good for me to know, especially because it was plain that Daddy didn’t want me to know it and so he pretended that he saw it the same way. He wanted me to think he was just as good at seeing as I was. Which meant that he sure wasn’t. And I also learned that he didn’t want me to know how many kinfolk I had, cause he started to say a number that started with F, and then caught himself and didn’t say it. Fifty? Five hundred? The number wasn’t half so important as the fact that he didn’t want me to know it. They didn’t trust me. Well, why should they? Like the lady said, I was better at this than they were, and they didn’t know how mad I was about being abandoned, and the last thing they wanted to do was turn me loose killing folks. Especially themselves.

Well I stood there thinking about that stuff and pretty soon it makes them nervous and Mama says, “Now, Daddy, he can call it whatever he wants, don’t go making him mad or something.”

And Daddy laughs and says, “He isn’t mad, are you, son?”

Can’t they see for themselves? Course not. Looks like dust to them, so they can’t see it clear at all.

“You don’t seem too happy to see us,” says Daddy.

“Now, Jesse,” says Mama, “don’t go pushing. Papa Lem said don’t you push the boy, you just make his acquaintance, you let him know why we had to push him out of the nest so young, so now you explain it, Daddy, just like Papa Lem said to.”

For the first time right then it occurred to me that my own folks didn’t want to come fetch me. They came because this Papa Lem made them do it. And you can bet they hopped and said yes, knowing how Papa Lem used his—but I’ll get to Papa Lem in good time, and you said I ought to take this all in order, which I’m mostly trying to do.

Anyway Daddy explained it just like the lady in Roanoke, except he didn’t say a word about bio-electrical systems, he said that I was “plainly chosen” from the moment of my birth, that I was “one of the elect,” which I remembered from Baptist Sunday School meant that I was one that God had saved, though I never heard of anybody who was saved the minute they was born and not even baptized or nothing. They saw how dusty I was and they knew I’d kill a lot of people before I got old enough to control it. I asked them if they did it a lot, putting a baby out to be raised by strangers.

“Oh, maybe a dozen times,” says Daddy.

“And it always works out okay?” says I.

He got set to lie again, I could see it by ripples in the light, I didn’t know lying could be so plain, which made me glad they saw dust instead of sparks. “Most times,” he says.

“I’d like to meet one of them others,” says I. “I figure we got a lot in common, growing up thinking our parents hated us, when the truth was they was scared of their own baby.”

“Well they’re mostly grown up and gone off,” he says, but it’s a lie, and most important of all was the fact that here I as much as said I thought they wasn’t worth horse pucky as parents and the only thing Daddy can think of to say is why I can’t see none of the other “orphans,” which tells me that whatever he’s lying to cover up must be real important.

But I didn’t push him right then, I just looked back down at Old Peleg’s grave and wondered if he ever told a lie in his life.

Daddy says, “I’m not surprised to find you here.” I guess he was nervous, and had to change the subject. “He’s one you dusted, isn’t he?”

Dusted. That word made me so mad. What I done to Old Peleg wasn’t dusting. And being mad must have changed me enough they could see the change. But they didn’t know what it meant, cause Mama says to me, “Now, son, I don’t mean to criticize, but it isn’t right to take pride in the gifts of God. That’s why we came to find you, because we need to teach you why God chose you to be one of the elect, and you shouldn’t glory in yourself because you could strike down your enemies. Rather you should give all glory to the Lord, praise his name, because we are his servants.”

I like to puked, I was so mad at that. Glory! Old Peleg, who was worth ten times these two phony white people who tossed me out before I ever sucked tit, and they thought I should give the glory for his terrible agony and death to God? I didn’t know God all that well, mostly because I thought of him as looking as pinched up and serious as Mrs. Bethel who taught Sunday School when I was little, until she died of leukemia, and I just never had a thing to say to God. But if God gave me that power to strike down Old Peleg, and God wanted the glory for it when I was done, then I did have a few words to say to God. Only I didn’t believe it for a minute. Old Peleg believed in God, and the God he believed in didn’t go striking an old black man dead because a dumb kid got pissed off at him.

But I’m getting off track in the story, because that was when my father touched me for the first time. His hand was shaking. And it had every right to shake, because I was so mad that a year ago he would’ve been bleeding from the colon before he took his hand away. But I’d got so I could keep from killing whoever touched me when I was mad, and the funny thing was that his hand shaking kind of changed how I felt anyway. I’d been thinking about how mad I was that they left me and how mad I was that they thought I’d be proud of killing people but now I realized how brave they was to come fetch me, cause how did they know I wouldn’t kill them? But they came anyway. And that’s something. Even if Papa Lem told them to do it, they came, and now I realized that it was real brave for Mama to come kiss me on the cheek right then, because if I was going to kill her, she touched me and gave me a chance to do it before she even tried to explain anything. Maybe it was her strategy to win me over or something, but it was still brave. And she also didn’t approve of people being proud of murder, which was more points in her favor. And she had the guts to tell me so right to my face. So I chalked up some points for Mama. She might look like as sickening as Tammy Bakker, but she faced her killer son with more guts than Daddy had.

He touched my shoulder and they led me to their car. A Lincoln Town Car, which they probably thought would impress me, but all I thought about was what it would’ve been like at the Children’s Home if we’d had the price of that car, even fifteen years ago. Maybe a paved basketball court. Maybe some decent toys that wasn’t broken-up hand-me-downs. Maybe some pants with knees in them. I never felt so poor in my life as when I slid onto that fuzzy seat and heard the stereo start playing elevator music in my ear.

There was somebody else in the car. Which made sense. If I’d killed them or something, they’d need somebody else to drive the car home, right? He wasn’t much, when it came to being dusty or sparky or whatever. Just a little, and in rhythms of fear, too. And I could see why he was scared, cause he was holding a blindfold in his hands, and he says, “Mr. Yow, I’m afraid I got to put this on you.”

Well, I didn’t answer for a second, which made him more scared cause he thought I was mad, but mostly it took me that long to realize he meant me when he said “Mr. Yow.”

“That’s our name, son,” says my daddy. “I’m Jesse Yow, and your mother is Minnie Rae Yow, and that makes you Mick Yow.”

“Don’t it figure,” says I. I was joking, but they took it wrong, like as if I was making fun of their name. But I been Mick Winger so long that it just feels silly calling myself Yow, and the fact is it is a funny name. They said it like I should be proud of it, though, which makes me laugh, but to them it was the name of God’s Chosen People, like the way the Jews called themselves Israelites in the Bible. I didn’t know that then, but that’s the way they said it, real proud. And they was ticked off when I made a joke, so I helped them feel better by letting Billy put on—Billy’s the name of the man in the car—put on the blindfold.

It was a lot of country roads, and a lot of country talk. About kinfolk I never met, and how I’d love this person and that person, which sounded increasingly unlikely to me, if you know what I mean. A long-lost child is coming home and you put a blindfold on him. I knew we were going mostly east, cause of the times I could feel the sun coming in my window and on the back of my neck, but that was about it, and that wasn’t much. They lied to me, they wouldn’t show me nothing, they was scared of me. I mean, any way you look at it, they wasn’t exactly killing the fatted calf for the prodigal son. I was definitely on probation. Or maybe even on trial. Which, I might point out, is exactly the way you been treating me, too, and I don’t like it much better now than I did then, if you don’t mind me putting some personal complaints into this. I mean, somewhere along the line somebody’s going to have to decide whether to shoot me or let me go, because I can’t control my temper forever locked up like a rat in a box, and the difference is a rat can’t reach out of the box and blast you the way I can, so somewhere along the way somebody’s going to have to figure out that you better either trust me or kill me. My personal preference is for trusting me, since I’ve given you more reason to trust me than you’ve given me to trust you so far.

But anyway I rode along in the car for more than an hour. We could have gotten to Winston or Greensboro or Danville by then, it was so long, and by the time we got there nobody was talking and from the snoring, Billy was even asleep. I wasn’t asleep, though. I was watching. Cause I don’t see sparks with my eyes, I see it with something else, like as if my sparks see other folks’ sparks, if you catch my drift, and so that blindfold might’ve kept me from seeing the road, but it sure didn’t keep me from seeing the other folks in the car with me. I knew right where they were, and right what they were feeling. Now, I’ve always had a knack for telling things about people, even when I couldn’t see nary a spark or nothing, but this was the first time I ever saw anybody who was sparky besides me. So I sat there watching how Mama and Daddy acted with each other even when they wasn’t touching or saying a thing, just little drifts of anger or fear or—well, I looked for love, but I didn’t see it, and I know what it looks like, cause I’ve felt it. They were like two armies camped on opposite hills, waiting for the truce to end at dawn. Careful. Sending out little scouting parties.

Then the more I got used to understanding what my folks was thinking and feeling, toward each other, the easier it got for me to read what Billy had going on inside him. It’s like after you learn to read big letters, you can read little letters, too, and I wondered if maybe I could even learn to understand people who didn’t have hardly any sparks at all. I mean that occurred to me, anyway, and since then I’ve found out that it’s mostly true. Now that I’ve had some practice I can read a sparky person from a long ways off, and even regular folks I can do a little reading, even through walls and windows. But I found that out later. Like when you guys have been watching me through mirrors. I can also see your microphone wires in the walls.

Anyway it was during that car ride that I first started seeing what I could see with my eyes closed, the shape of people’s bio-electrical system, the color and spin of it, the speed and the flow and the rhythm and whatever, I mean those are the words I use, cause there isn’t exactly a lot of books I can read on the subject. Maybe that Swedish doctor has fancy words for it. I can only tell you how it feels to me. And in that hour I got to be good enough at it that I could tell Billy was scared, all right, but he wasn’t all that scared of me, he was mostly scared of Mama and Daddy. Me he was jealous of, angry kind of. Scared a little, too, but mostly mad. I thought maybe he was mad cause I was coming in out of nowhere already sparkier than him, but then it occurred to me that he probably couldn’t even tell how sparky I was, because to him it’d look like dust, and he wouldn’t have enough of a knack at it to see much distinction between one person and another. It’s like the more light you give off, the clearer you can see other people’s light. So I was the one with the blindfold on, but I could see clearer than anybody else in that car.

We drove on gravel for about ten minutes, and then on a bumpy dirt road, and then suddenly on asphalt again, smooth as you please, for about a hundred yards, and then we stopped. I didn’t wait for a by-your-leave, I had that blindfold off in half a second.

It was like a whole town of houses, but right among the trees, not a gap in the leaves overhead. Maybe fifty, sixty houses, some of them pretty big, but the trees made them half invisible, it being summer. Children running all over, scruffy dirty kids from diapered-up snot-nose brats to most-growed kids not all that much younger than me. They sure kept us cleaner in the Children’s Home. And they was all sparky. Mostly like Billy, just a little, but it explained why they wasn’t much washed. There isn’t many a mama who’d stuff her kid in a tub if the kid can make her sick just by getting mad.

It must’ve been near eight-thirty at night, and even the little kids still wasn’t in bed. They must let their kids play till they get wore out and drop down and fall asleep by themselves. It came to me that maybe I wasn’t so bad off growing up in an orphanage. At least I knew manners and didn’t whip it out and pee right in front of company, the way one little boy did, just looking at me while I got out of the car, whizzing away like he wasn’t doing nothing strange. Like a dog marking trees. He needed to so he done it. If I ever did that at the Children’s Home they’d’ve slapped me silly.

I know how to act with strangers when I’m hitching a ride, but not when I’m being company, cause orphans don’t go calling much so I never had much experience. So I’d’ve been shy no matter what, even if there wasn’t no such thing as sparkiness. Daddy was all set to take me to meet Papa Lem right off, but Mama saw how I wasn’t cleaned up and maybe she guessed I hadn’t been to the toilet in a while and so she hustled me into a house where they had a good shower and when I came out she had a cold ham sandwich waiting for me on the table. On a plate, and the plate was setting on a linen place mat, and there was a tall glass of milk there, so cold it was sweating on the outside of the glass. I mean, if an orphan kid ever dreamed of what it might be like to have a Mama, that was the dream. Never mind that she didn’t look like a model in the Sears Catalog. I felt clean, the sandwich tasted good, and when I was done eating she even offered me a cookie.

It felt good, I’ll admit that, but at the same time I felt cheated. It was just too damn late. I needed it to be like this when I was seven, not seventeen.

But she was trying, and it wasn’t all her fault, so I ate the cookie and drank off the last of the milk and my watch said it was after nine. Outside it was dusk now, and most of the kids were finally gone off to bed, and Daddy comes in and says, “Papa Lem says he isn’t getting any younger.”

He was outside, in a big rocking chair sitting on the grass. You wouldn’t call him fat, but he did have a belly on him. And you wouldn’t call him old, but he was bald on top and his hair was wispy yellow and white. And you wouldn’t call him ugly, but he had a soft mouth and I didn’t like the way it twisted up when he talked.

Oh, hell, he was fat, old, and ugly, and I hated him from the first time I saw him. A squishy kind of guy. Not even as sparky as my daddy, neither, so you didn’t get to be in charge around here just by having more of whatever it was made us different. I wondered how close kin he was to me. If he’s got children, and they look like him, they ought to drown them out of mercy.

“Mick Yow,” he says to me, “Mick my dear boy, Mick my dear cousin.”

“Good evening, sir,” says I.

“Oh, and he’s got manners,” says he. “We were right to donate so much to the Children’s Home. They took excellent care of you.”

“You donated to the home?” says I. If they did, they sure didn’t give much.

“A little,” he says. “Enough to pay for your food, your room, your Christian education. But no luxuries. You couldn’t grow up soft, Mick. You had to grow up lean and strong. And you had to know suffering, so you could be compassionate. The Lord God has given you a marvelous gift, a great helping of his grace, a heaping plateful of the power of God, and we had to make sure you were truly worthy to sit up to the table at the banquet of the Lord.”

I almost looked around to see if there was a camera, he sounded so much like the preachers on TV.

And he says, “Mick, you have already passed the first test. You have forgiven your parents for leaving you to think you were an orphan. You have kept that holy commandment, Honor thy father and mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee. You know that if you had raised a hand against them, the Lord would have struck you down. For verily I say unto you that there was two rifles pointed at you the whole time, and if your father and mother had walked away without you, you would have flopped down dead in that nigger cemetery, for God will not be mocked.”

I couldn’t tell if he was trying to provoke me or scare me or what, but either way, it was working.

“The Lord has chosen you for his servant, Mick, just like he’s chosen all of us. The rest of the world doesn’t understand this. But Grandpa Jake saw it. Long ago, back in 1820, he saw how everybody he hated had a way of dying without him lifting a finger. And for a time he thought that maybe he was like those old witches, who curse people and they wither up and die by the power of the devil. But he was a god-fearing man, and he had no truck with Satan. He was living in rough times, when a man was likely to kill in a quarrel, but Grandpa Jake never killed. Never even struck out with his fists. He was a peaceable man, and he kept his anger inside him, as the Lord commands in the New Testament. So surely he was not a servant of Satan!”

Papa Lem’s voice rang through that little village, he was talking so loud, and I noticed there was a bunch of people all around. Not many kids now, all grownups, maybe there to hear Lem, but even more likely they was there to see me. Because it was like the lady in Roanoke said, there wasn’t a one of them was half as sparky as me. I didn’t know if they could all see that, but I could. Compared to normal folks they was all dusty enough, I suppose, but compared to me, or even to my mama and daddy, they was a pretty dim bunch.

“He studied the scriptures to find out what it meant that his enemies all suffered from tumors and bleeding and coughing and rot, and he came upon the verse of Genesis where the Lord said unto Abraham, ‘I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.’ And he knew in his heart that the Lord had chosen him the way he chose Abraham. And when Isaac gave the blessing of God to Jacob, he said, ‘Let people serve thee, and nations bow down to thee: cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.’ The promises to the patriarchs were fulfilled again in Grandpa Jake, for whoever cursed him was cursed by God.”

When he said those words from the Bible, Papa Lem sounded like the voice of God himself, I’ve got to tell you. I felt exalted, knowing that it was God who gave such power to my family. It was to the whole family, the way Papa Lem told it, because the Lord promised Abraham that his children would be as many as there was stars in the sky, which is a lot more than Abraham knew about seeing how he didn’t have no telescope. And that promise now applied to Grandpa Jake, just like the one that said “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” So Grandpa Jake set to studying the book of Genesis so he could fulfil those promises just like the patriarchs did. He saw how they went to a lot of trouble to make sure they only married kinfolk—you know how Abraham married his brother’s daughter, Sarah, and Isaac married his cousin Rebekah, and Jacob married his cousins Leah and Rachel. So Grandpa Jake left his first wife cause she was unworthy, meaning she probably wasn’t particularly sparky, and he took up with his brother’s daughter and when his brother threatened to kill him if he laid a hand on the girl, Grandpa Jake run off with her and his own brother died of a curse which is just exactly what happened to Sarah’s father in the Bible. I mean Grandpa Jake worked it out just right. And he made sure all his sons married their first cousins, and so all of them had sparkiness twice over, just like breeding pointers with pointers and not mixing them with other breeds, so the strain stays pure.

There was all kinds of other stuff about Lot and his daughters, and if we remained faithful then we would be the meek who inherit the Earth because we were the chosen people and the Lord would strike down everybody who stood in our way, but what it all came down to at the moment was this: You marry whoever the patriarch tells you to marry, and Papa Lem was the patriarch. He had my mama marry my daddy even though they never particularly liked each other, growing up cousins, because he could see that they was both specially chosen, which means to say they was both about the sparkiest there was. And when I was born, they knew it was like a confirmation of Papa Lem’s decision, because the Lord had blessed them with a kid who gave off dust thicker than a dump truck on a dirt road.

One thing he asked me real particular was whether I ever been laid. He says to me, “Have you spilled your seed among the daughters of Ishmael and Esau?”

I knew what spilling seed was, cause we got lectures about that at the Children’s Home. I wasn’t sure who the daughters of Ishmael and Esau was, but since I never had a hot date, I figured I was pretty safe saying no. Still, I did consider a second, because what came to mind was the lady in Roanoke, stoking me up just by wanting me, and I was thinking about how close I’d come to not being a virgin after all. I wondered if the lady from Roanoke was a daughter of Esau.

Papa Lem picked up on my hesitation, and he wouldn’t let it go. “Don’t lie to me boy. I can see a lie.” Well, since I could see a lie, I didn’t doubt but what maybe he could too. But then again, I’ve had plenty of grownups tell me they could spot a lie—but half the time they accused me of lying when I was telling the truth, and the other half they believed me when I was telling whoppers so big it’d take two big men to carry them upstairs. So maybe he could and maybe he couldn’t. I figured I’d tell him just as much truth as I wanted. “I was just embarrassed to tell you I never had a girl,” I says.

“Ah, the deceptions of the world,” he says. “They make promiscuity seem so normal that a boy is ashamed to admit that he is chaste.” Then he got a glint in his eye. “I know the children of Esau have been watching you, wanting to steal your birthright. Isn’t that so?”

“I don’t know who Esau is,” says I.

The folks who was gathered around us started muttering about that.

I says, “I mean, I know who he was in the Bible, he was the brother of Jacob, the one who sold him his birthright for split pea soup.”

“Jacob was the rightful heir, the true eldest son,” says Papa Lem, “and don’t you forget it. Esau is the one who went away from his father, out into the wilderness, rejecting the things of God and embracing the lies and sins of the world. Esau is the one who married a strange woman, who was not of the people! Do you understand me?”

I understood pretty good by then. Somewhere along the line somebody got sick of living under the thumb of Papa Lem, or maybe the patriarch before him, and they split.

“Beware,” says Papa Lem, “because the children of Esau and Ishmael still covet the blessings of Jacob. They want to corrupt the pure seed of Grandpa Jake. They have enough of the blessing of God to know that you’re a remarkable boy, like Joseph who was sold into Egypt, and they will come to you with their whorish plans, the way Potiphar’s wife came to Joseph, trying to persuade you to give them your pure and undefiled seed so that they can have the blessing that their fathers rejected.”

I got to tell you that I didn’t much like having him talk about my seed so much in front of mixed company, but that was nothing compared to what he did next. He waved his hand to a girl standing there in the crowd, and up she came. She wasn’t half bad-looking, in a country sort of way. Her hair was mousy and she wasn’t altogether clean and she stood with a two-bucket slouch, but her face wasn’t bad and she looked to have her teeth. Sweet, but not my type, if you know what I mean.

Papa Lem introduced us. It was his daughter, which I might’ve guessed, and then he says to her, “Wilt thou go with this man?” And she looks at me and says, “I will go.” And then she gave me this big smile, and all of a sudden it was happening again, just like it did with the lady in Roanoke, only twice as much, cause after all the lady in Roanoke wasn’t hardly sparky. I was standing there and all I could think about was how I wanted all her clothes off her and to do with her right there in front of everybody and I didn’t even care that all those people were watching, that’s how strong it was.

And I liked it, I got to tell you. I mean you don’t ignore a feeling like that. But another part of me was standing back and it says to me, “Mick Winger you damn fool, that girl’s as homely as the bathroom sink, and all these people are watching her make an idiot out of you,” and it was that part of me that got mad, because I didn’t like her making me do something, and I didn’t like it happening right out in front of everybody, and I specially didn’t like Papa Lem sitting there looking at his own daughter and me like we was in a dirty magazine.

Thing is, when I get mad I get all sparky, and the madder I got, the more I could see how she was doing it, like she was a magnet, drawing me to her. And as soon as I thought of it like us being magnets, I took all the sparkiness from being mad and I used it. Not to hurt her or nothing, because I didn’t put it on her the way I did with the people I killed. I just kind of turned the path of her sparks plain upside down. She was spinning it just as fast as ever, but it went the other way, and the second that started, why, it was like she disappeared. I mean, I could see her all right, but I couldn’t hardly notice her. I couldn’t focus my eyes on her.

Papa Lem jumped right to his feet, and the other folks were gasping. Pretty quick that girl stopped sparking at me, you can bet, and there she was on her knees, throwing up. She must’ve had a real weak digestion, or else what I done was stronger than I thought. She was really pouring on the juice, I guess, and when I flung it back at her and turned her upside down, well, she couldn’t hardly walk when they got her up. She was pretty hysterical, too, crying about how awful and ugly I was, which might’ve hurt my feelings except that I was scared to death.

Papa Lem was looking like the wrath of God. “You have rejected the holy sacrament of marriage! You have spurned the handmaid God prepared for you!”

Now you’ve got to know that I hadn’t put everything together yet, or I wouldn’t have been so afraid of him, but for all I knew right then he could kill me with a cancer. And it was a sure thing he could’ve had those people beat me to death or whatever he wanted, so maybe I was right to be scared. Anyway I had to think of a way to make him not be mad at me, and what I came up with must not’ve been too bad because it worked, didn’t it?

I says to him, as calm as I can, “Papa Lem, she was not an acceptable handmaiden.” I didn’t watch all those TV preachers for nothing. I knew how to talk like the Bible. I says, “She was not blessed enough to be my wife. She wasn’t even as blessed as my mama. You can’t tell me that she’s the best the Lord prepared for me.”

And sure enough, he calmed right down. “I know that,” he says. And he isn’t talking like a preacher any more, it’s me talking like a preacher and him talking all meek. “You think I don’t know it? It’s those children of Esau, that’s what it is, Mick, you got to know that. We had five girls who were a lot dustier than her, but we had to put them out into other families, cause they were like you, so strong they would’ve killed their own parents without meaning to.”

And I says, “Well, you brought me back, didn’t you?”

And he says, “Well you were alive, Mick, and you got to admit that makes it easier.”

“You mean those girls’re all dead?” I says.

“The children of Esau,” he says. “Shot three of them, strangled one, and we never found the body of the other. They never lived to be ten years old.”

And I thought about how the lady in Roanoke told me she had me in her gunsights a few times. But she let me live. Why? For my seed? Those girls would’ve had seed too, or whatever. But they killed those girls and let me live. I didn’t know why. Hell, I still don’t, not if you mean to keep me locked up like this for the rest of my life. I mean you might as well have blasted my head off when I was six, and then I can name you a dozen good folks who’d still be alive, so no thanks for the favor if you don’t plan to let me go.

Anyway, I says to him, “I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

And he says to me, “Mick, I can see how you’d be disappointed, seeing how you’re so blessed by the Lord. But I promise you that my daughter is indeed the best girl of marriageable age that we’ve got here. I wasn’t trying to foist her off on you because she’s my daughter—it would be blasphemous for me to try it, and I’m a true servant of the Lord. The people here can testify for me, they can tell you that I’d never give you my own daughter unless she was the best we’ve got.”

If she was the best they got then I had to figure the laws against inbreeding made pretty good sense. But I says to him, “Then maybe we ought to wait and see if there’s somebody younger, too young to marry right now.” I remembered the story of Jacob from Sunday School, and since they set such store by Jacob I figured it’d work. I says, “Remember that Jacob served seven years before he got to marry Rachel. I’m willing to wait.”

That impressed hell out of him, you can bet. He says, “You truly have the prophetic spirit, Mick. I have no doubt that someday you’ll be Papa in my place, when the Lord has gathered me unto my fathers. But I hope you’ll also remember that Jacob married Rachel, but he first married the older daughter, Leah.”

The ugly one, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I just smiled and told him how I’d remember that, and there was plenty of time to talk about it tomorrow, because it was dark now and I was tired and a lot of things had happened to me today that I had to think over. I was really getting into the spirit of this Bible thing, and so I says to him, “Remember that before Jacob could dream of the ladder into heaven, he had to sleep.”

Everybody laughed, but Papa Lem wasn’t satisfied yet. He was willing to let the marriage thing wait for a few days. But there was one thing that couldn’t wait. He looks me in the eye and he says, “Mick, you got a choice to make. The Lord says those who aren’t for me are against me. Joshua said choose ye this day whom ye will serve. And Moses said, ‘I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.’ ”

Well I don’t think you can put it much plainer than that. I could choose to live there among the chosen people, surrounded by dirty kids and a slimy old man telling me who to marry and whether I could raise my own children, or I could choose to leave and get my brains blasted out or maybe just pick up a stiff dose of cancer—I wasn’t altogether sure whether they’d do it quick or slow. I kind of figured they’d do it quick, though, so I’d have no chance to spill my seed among the daughters of Esau.

So I gave him my most solemn and hypocritical promise that I would serve the Lord and live among them all the days of my life. Like I told you, I didn’t know whether he could tell if I was lying or not. But he nodded and smiled so it looked like he believed me. Trouble was, I knew he was lying, and so that meant he didn’t believe me, and that meant I was in deep poo, as Mr. Kaiser’s boy Greggy always said. In fact, he was pretty angry and pretty scared, too, even though he tried to hide it by smiling and keeping a lid on himself. But I knew that he knew that I had no intention of staying there with those crazy people who knocked up their cousins and stayed about as ignorant as I ever saw. Which meant that he was already planning to kill me, and sooner rather than later.

No, I better tell the truth here, cause I wasn’t that smart. It wasn’t till I was halfway to the house that I really wondered if he believed me, and it wasn’t till Mama had me with a nice clean pair of pajamas up in a nice clean room, and she was about to take my jeans and shirt and underwear and make them nice and clean that it occurred to me that maybe I was going to wish I had more clothes on than pajamas that night. I really got kind of mad before she finally gave me back my clothes—she was scared that if she didn’t do what I said, I’d do something to her. And then I got to thinking that maybe I’d made things even worse by not giving her the clothes, because that might make them think that I was planning to skip out, and so maybe they weren’t planning to kill me before but now they would, and so I probably just made things worse. Except when it came down to it, I’d rather be wrong about the one thing and at least have my clothes, than be wrong about the other thing and have to gallivant all over the country in pajamas. You don’t get much mileage on country roads barefoot in pajamas, even in the summer.

As soon as Mama left and went on downstairs, I got dressed again, including my shoes, and climbed in under the covers. I’d slept out in the open, so I didn’t mind sleeping in my clothes. What drove me crazy was getting my shoes on the sheets. They would’ve yelled at me so bad at the Children’s Home.

I laid there in the dark, trying to think what I was going to do. I pretty much knew how to get from this house out to the road, but what good would that do me? I didn’t know where I was or where the road led or how far to go, and you don’t cut cross country in North Carolina—if you don’t trip over something in the dark, you’ll bump into some moonshine or marijuana operation and they’ll blast your head off, not to mention the danger of getting your throat bit out by some tobacco farmer’s mean old dog. So there I’d be running along a road that leads nowhere with them on my tail and if they wanted to run me down, I don’t think fear of cancer would slow down your average four-wheeler.

I thought about maybe stealing a car, but I don’t have the first idea how to hotwire anything. It wasn’t one of the skills you pick up at the Children’s Home. I knew the idea of it, somewhat, because I’d done some reading on electricity with the books Mr. Kaiser lent me so I could maybe try getting ready for the GED, but there wasn’t a chapter in there on how to get a Lincoln running without a key. Didn’t know how to drive, either. All the stuff you pick up from your dad or from your friends at school, I just never picked up at all.

Maybe I dozed off, maybe I didn’t. But I suddenly noticed that I could see in the dark. Not see, of course. Feel the people moving around. Not far off at first, except like a blur, but I could feel the near ones, the other ones in the house. It was cause they was sparky, of course, but as I laid there feeling them drifting here and there, in the rhythms of sleep and dreams, or walking around, I began to realize that I’d been feeling people all along, only I didn’t know it. They wasn’t sparky, but I always knew where they were, like shadows drifting in the back of your mind, I didn’t even know that I knew it, but they were there. It’s like when Diz Riddle got him his glasses when he was ten years old and all of a sudden he just went around whooping and yelling about all the stuff he saw. He always used to see it before, but he didn’t rightly know what half the stuff was.

Like pictures on coins. He knew the coins was bumpy, but he didn’t know they was pictures and writing and stuff. That’s how this was.

I laid there and I could make a map in my brain where I could see a whole bunch of different people, and the more I tried, the better I could see. Pretty soon it wasn’t just in that house. I could feel them in other houses, dimmer and fainter. But in my mind I didn’t see no walls so I didn’t know whether somebody was in the kitchen or in the bathroom, I had to think it out, and it was hard, it took all my concentration. The only guide I had was that I could see electric wires when the current was flowing through them, so wherever a light was on or a clock was running or something, I could feel this thin line, really thin, not like the shadows of people. It wasn’t much, but it gave me some idea of where some of the walls might be.

If I could’ve just told who was who I might have made some guesses about what they was doing. Who was asleep and who was awake. But I couldn’t even tell who was a kid and who was a grown-up. cause I couldn’t see sizes, just brightness. Brightness was the only way I knew who was close and who was far.

I was pure lucky I got so much sleep during the day when that guy was giving me a ride from Roanoke to Eden. Well, that wasn’t lucky, I guess, since I wished I hadn’t gone to Eden at all, but at least having that long nap meant that I had a better shot at staying awake until things quieted down.

There was a clump of them in the next house. It was hard to sort them out, cause three of them was a lot brighter, so I thought they was closer, and it took a while to realize that it was probably Mama and Daddy and Papa Lem along with some others. Anyway it was a meeting, and it broke up after a while, and all except Papa Lem came over. I didn’t know what the meeting was about, but I knew they was scared and mad. Mostly scared. Well, so was I. But I calmed myself down, the way I’d been practicing, so I didn’t accidently kill nobody. That kind of practice made it so I could keep myself from getting too lively and sparky, so they’d think I was asleep. They didn’t see as clear as I did, too, so that’d help. I thought maybe they’d all come up and get me, but no, they just all waited downstairs while one of them came up, and he didn’t come in and get me, neither. All he did was go to the other rooms and wake up whoever was sleeping there and get them downstairs and out of the house.

Well, that scared me worse than ever. That made it plain what they had in mind, all right. Didn’t want me giving off sparks and killing somebody close by when they attacked me. Still, when I thought about it, I realized that it was also a good sign. They was scared of me, and rightly so. I could reach farther and strike harder than any of them. And they saw I could throw off what got tossed at me, when I flung back what Papa Lem’s daughter tried to do to me. They didn’t know how much I could do.

Neither did I.

Finally all the people was out of the house except the ones downstairs. There was others outside the house, maybe watching, maybe not, but I figured I better not try to climb out the window.

Then somebody started walking up the stairs again, alone. There wasn’t nobody else to fetch down, so they could only be coming after me. It was just one person, but that didn’t do me no good—even one grown man who knows how to use a knife is better off than me. I still don’t have my full growth on me, or at least I sure hope I don’t, and the only fights I ever got in were slugging matches in the yard. For a minute I wished I’d took kung fu lessons instead of sitting around reading math and science books to make up for dropping out of school so young. A lot of good math and science was going to do me if I was dead.

The worst thing was I couldn’t see him. Maybe they just moved all the children out of the house so they wouldn’t make noise in the morning and wake me. Maybe they was just being nice. And this guy coming up the stairs might just be checking on me or bringing me clean clothes or something—I couldn’t tell. So how could I twist him up, when I didn’t know if they was trying to kill me or what? But if he was trying to kill me, I’d wish I’d twisted him before he ever came into the room with me.

Well, that was one decision that got made for me. I laid there wondering what to do for so long that he got to the top of the stairs and came to my room and turned the knob and came in.

I tried to breathe slow and regular, like somebody asleep. Tried to keep from getting too sparky. If it was somebody checking on me, they’d go away.

He didn’t go away. And he walked soft, too, so as not to wake me up. He was real scared. So scared that I finally knew there was no way he was there to tuck me in and kiss me good night.

So I tried to twist him, to send sparks at him. But I didn’t have any sparks to send! I mean I wasn’t mad or anything. I’d never tried to kill somebody on purpose before, it was always because I was already mad and I just lost control and it happened. Now I’d been calming myself down so much that I couldn’t lose control. I had no sparks at all to send, just my normal shining shadow, and he was right there and I didn’t have a second to lose so I rolled over. Toward him, which was maybe dumb, cause I might have run into his knife, but I didn’t know yet for sure that he had a knife. All I was thinking was that I had to knock him down or push him or something.

The only person I knocked down was me. I bumped him and hit the floor. He also cut my back with the knife. Not much of a cut, he mostly just snagged my shirt, but if I was scared before, I was terrified now cause I knew he had a knife and I knew even more that I didn’t. I scrambled back away from him. There was almost no light from the window, it was like being in a big closet, I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me. Except of course that I could see him, or at least sense where he was, and now I was giving off sparks like crazy so unless he was weaker than I thought, he could see me too.

Well, he was weaker than I thought. He just kind of drifted, and I could hear him swishing the knife through the air in front of him. He had no idea where I was.

And all the time I was trying to get madder and madder, and it wasn’t working. You can’t get mad by trying. Maybe an actor can, but I’m no actor. So I was scared and sparking but I couldn’t get that pulse to mess him up. The more I thought about it, the calmer I got.

It’s like you’ve been carrying around a machine gun all your life, accidently blasting people you didn’t really want to hurt and then the first time you really want to lay into somebody, it jams.

So I stopped trying to get mad. I just sat there realizing I was going to die, that after I finally got myself under control so I didn’t kill people all the time anymore, now that I didn’t really want to commit suicide, now I was going to get wasted. And they didn’t even have the guts to come at me openly. Sneaking in the dark to cut my throat while I was asleep. And in the meeting where they decided to do it, my long lost but loving mama and daddy were right there. Heck, my dear sweet daddy was downstairs right now, waiting for this assassin to come down and tell him that I was dead. Would he cry for me then? Boo hoo my sweet little boy’s all gone? Mick is in the cold cold ground?

I was mad. As simple as that. Stop thinking about being mad, and start thinking about the things that if you think about them, they’ll make you mad. I was so sparky with fear that when I got mad, too, it was worse than it ever was before, built up worse, you know. Only when I let it fly, it didn’t go for the guy up there swishing his knife back and forth in the dark. That pulse of fire in me went right down through the floor and straight to dear old Dad. I could hear him scream. He felt it, just like that. He felt it. And so did I. Because that wasn’t what I meant to do. I only met him that day, but he was my father, and I did him worse than I ever did anybody before in my life. I didn’t plan to do it. You don’t plan to kill your father.

All of a sudden I was blinded by light. For a second I thought it was the other kind of light, sparks, them retaliating, twisting me. Then I realized it was my eyes being blinded, and it was the overhead light in the room that was on. The guy with the knife had finally realized that the only reason not to have the light on was so I wouldn’t wake up, but now that I was awake he might as well see what he’s doing. Lucky for me the light blinded him just as much as it blinded me, or I’d have been poked before I saw what hit me. Instead I had time to scramble on back to the far corner of the room.

I wasn’t no hero. But I was seriously thinking about running at him, attacking a guy with a knife. I would have been killed, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

Then I thought of something else to do. I got the idea from the way I could feel the electric current in the wires running from the lightswitch through the wall. That was electricity, and the lady in Roanoke called my sparkiness bio-electricity. I ought to be able to do something with it, shouldn’t I?

I thought first that maybe I could short-circuit something, but I didn’t think I had that much electricity in me. I thought of maybe tapping into the house current to add to my own juice, but then I remembered that connecting up your body to house current is the same thing other folks call electrocution. I mean, maybe I can tap into house wiring, but if I was wrong, I’d be real dead.

But I could still do something. There was a table lamp right next to me. I pulled off the shade and threw it at the guy, who was still standing by the door, thinking about what the scream downstairs meant. Then I grabbed the lamp and turned it on, and then smashed the lightbulb on the nightstand. Sparks. Then it was out.

I held the lamp in my hand, like a weapon, so he’d think I was going to beat off his knife with the lamp. And if my plan was a bust, I guess that’s what I would’ve done. But while he was looking at me, getting ready to fight me knife against lamp, I kind of let the jagged end of the lamp rest on the bedspread. And then I used my sparkiness, the anger that was still in me. I couldn’t fling it at the guy, or well I could have, but it would’ve been like the bus driver, a six-month case of lung cancer. By the time he died of that, I’d be six months worth of dead from multiple stab wounds to the neck and chest.

So I let my sparkiness build up and flow out along my arm, out along the lamp, like I was making my shadow grow. And it worked. The sparks just went right on down the lamp to the tip, and built up and built up, and all the time I was thinking about how Papa Lem was trying to kill me cause I thought his daughter was ugly and how he made me kill my daddy before I even knew him half a day and that charge built up.

It built up enough. Sparks started jumping across inside the broken light bulb, right there against the bedspread. Real sparks, the kind I could see, not just feel. And in two seconds that bedspread was on fire. Then I yanked the lamp so the cord shot right out of the wall, and I threw it at the guy, and while he was dodging I scooped up the bedspread and ran at him. I wasn’t sure whether I’d catch on fire or he would, but I figured he’d be too panicked and surprised to think of stabbing me through the bedspread, and sure enough he didn’t, he dropped the knife and tried to beat off the bespread. Which he didn’t do too good, because I was still pushing it at him. Then he tried to get through the door, but I kicked his ankle with my shoe, and he fell down, still fighting off the blanket.

I got the knife and sliced right across the back of his thigh with it. Geez it was sharp. Or maybe I was so mad and scared that I cut him stronger than I ever thought I could, but it went clear to the bone. He was screaming from the fire and his leg was gushing blood and the fire was catching on the wallpaper and it occurred to me that they couldn’t chase me too good if they was trying to put out a real dandy house fire.

It also occurred to me that I couldn’t run away too good if I was dead inside that house fire. And thinking of maybe dying in the fire made me realize that the guy was burning to death and I did it to him, something every bit as terrible as cancer, and I didn’t care, because I’d killed so many people that it was nothing to me now, when a guy like that was trying to kill me, I wasn’t even sorry for his pain, cause he wasn’t feeling nothing worse than Old Peleg felt, and in fact that even made me feel pretty good, because it was like getting even for Old Peleg’s death, even though it was me killed them both. I mean how could I get even for Peleg dying by killing somebody else? Okay, maybe it makes sense in a way, cause it was their fault I was in the orphanage instead of growing up here. Or maybe it made sense because this guy deserved to die, and Peleg didn’t, so maybe somebody who deserved it had to die a death as bad as Peleg’s, or something. I don’t know. I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about that then. I just knew that I was hearing a guy scream himself to death and I didn’t even want to help him or even try to help him or nothing. I wasn’t enjoying it, either, I wasn’t thinking, Burn you sucker! or anything like that, but I knew right then that I wasn’t even human, I was just a monster, like I always thought, like in the slasher movies. This was straight from the slasher movies, somebody burning up and screaming, and there’s the monster just standing there in the flames and he isn’t burning.

And that’s the truth. I wasn’t burning. There was flames all around me, but it kind of shied back from me, because I was so full of sparks from hating myself so bad that it was like the flames couldn’t get through to me. I’ve thought about that a lot since then. I mean, even that Swedish scientist doesn’t know all about this bio-electrical stuff. Maybe when I get real sparky it makes it so other stuff can’t hit me. Maybe that’s how some generals in the Civil War used to ride around in the open—or maybe that was that general in World War II, I can’t remember—and bullets didn’t hit them or anything. Maybe if you’re charged up enough, things just can’t get to you. I don’t know. I just know that by the time I finally decided to open the door and actually opened it, the whole room was burning and the door was burning and I just opened it and walked through. Course now I got a bandage on my hand to prove that I couldn’t grab a hot doorknob without hurting myself a little, but I shouldn’t’ve been able to stay alive in that room and I came out without even my hair singed.

I started down the hall, not knowing who was still in the house. I wasn’t used to being able to see people by their sparkiness yet, so I didn’t even think of checking, I just ran down the stairs carrying that bloody knife. But it didn’t matter. They all ran away before I got there, all except Daddy. He was lying in the middle of the floor in the living room, doubled up, lying with his head in a pool of vomit and his butt in a pool of blood, shaking like he was dying of cold. I really done him. I really tore him up inside. I don’t think he even saw me. But he was my daddy, and even a monster don’t leave his daddy for the fire to get him. So I grabbed his arms to try to pull him out.

I forgot how sparky I was, worse than ever. The second I touched him the sparkiness just rushed out of me and all over him. It never went that way before, just completely surrounded him like he was a part of me, like he was completely drowning in my light. It wasn’t what I meant to do at all. I just forgot. I was trying to save him and instead I gave him a hit like I never gave nobody before, and I couldn’t stand it, I just screamed.

Then I dragged him out. He was all limp, but even if I killed him, even if I turned him to jelly inside, he wasn’t going to burn, that’s all I could think of, that and how I ought to walk back into that house myself and up the stairs and catch myself on fire and die.

But I didn’t do it, as you might guess. There was people yelling Fire! and shouting Stay back! and I knew that I better get out of there. Daddy’s body was lying on the grass in front of the house, and I took off around the back. I thought maybe I heard some gunshots, but it could’ve been popping and cracking of timbers in the fire, I don’t know. I just ran around the house and along toward the road, and if there was people in my way they just got out of my way, because even the most dimwitted inbred pukebrained kid in that whole village would’ve seen my sparks, I was so hot.

I ran till the asphalt ended and I was running on the dirt road. There was clouds so the moon was hardly any light at all, and I kept stumbling off the road into the weeds. I fell once and when I was getting up I could see the fire behind me. The whole house was burning, and there was flames above it in the trees. Come to think of it there hadn’t been all that much rain, and those trees were dry. A lot more than one house was going to burn tonight, I figured, and for a second I even thought maybe nobody’d chase me.

But that was about as stupid an idea as I ever had. I mean, if they wanted to kill me before because I said Papa Lem’s girl was ugly, how do you think they felt about me now that I burned down their little hidden town? Once they realized I was gone, they’d be after me and I’d be lucky if they shot me quick.

I even thought about cutting off the road, dangerous or not, and hiding in the woods. But I decided to get as much distance as I could along the road till I saw headlights.

Just when I decided that, the road ended. Just bushes and trees. I went back, tried to find the road. It must have turned but I didn’t know which way. I was tripping along like a blind man in the grass, trying to feel my way to the ruts of the dirt road, and of course that’s when I saw headlights away off toward the burning houses—there was at least three houses burning now. They knew the town was a total loss by now, they was probably just leaving enough folks to get all the children out and away to a safe place, while the men came after me. It’s what I would’ve done, and to hell with cancer, they knew I couldn’t stop them all before they did what they wanted to me. And here I couldn’t even find the road to get away from them. By the time their headlights got close enough to show the road, it’d be too late to get away.

I was about to run back into the woods when all of a sudden a pair of headlights went on not twenty feet away, and pointed right at me. I damn near wet my pants. I thought, Mick Winger, you are a dead little boy right this second.

And then I heard her calling to me. “Get on over here, Mick, you idiot, don’t stand there in the light, get on over here.” It was the lady from Roanoke. I still couldn’t see her cause of the lights, but I knew her voice, and I took off. The road didn’t end, it just turned a little and she was parked right where the dirt road met up sideways with a gravel road. I got around to the door of the car she was driving, or truck or whatever it was—a four-wheel-drive Blazer maybe, I know it had a four-wheel-drive shift lever in it—anyway the door was locked and she was yelling at me to get in and I was yelling back that it was Locked until finally she unlocked it and I climbed in. She backed up so fast and swung around onto the gravel in a spin that near threw me right out the door, since I hadn’t closed it yet. Then she took off so fast going forward, spitting gravel behind her, that the door closed itself.

“Fasten your seat belt,” she says to me.

“Did you follow me here?” I says.

“No, I just happened to be here picnicking,” she says. “Fasten your damn seat belt.”

I did, but then I turned around in my seat and looked out the back. There was five or six sets of headlights, making the jog to get from the dirt road onto the gravel road. We didn’t have more than a mile on them.

“We’ve been looking for this place for years,” she says. “We thought it was in Rockingham County, that’s how far off we were.”

“Where is it, then?” I says.

“Alamance County,” she says.

And then I says, “I don’t give a damn what county it is! I killed my own daddy back there!”

And she says to me, “Don’t get mad now, don’t get mad at me, I’m sorry, just calm down.” That was all she could think of, how I might get mad and lose control and kill her, and I don’t blame her, cause it was the hardest thing I ever did, keeping myself from busting out right there in the car, and it would’ve killed her, too. The pain in my hand was starting to get to me, too, from where I grabbed the doorknob. It was just building up and building up.

She was driving a lot faster than the headlights reached. We’d be going way too fast for a curve before she even saw it, and then she’d slam on the brakes and we’d skid and sometimes I couldn’t believe we didn’t just roll over and crash. But she always got out of it.

I couldn’t face back anymore. I just sat there with my eyes closed, trying to get calm, and then I’d remember my daddy who I didn’t even like but he was my daddy lying there in his blood and his puke, and I’d remember that guy who burned to death up in my room and even though I didn’t care at the time, I sure cared now, I was so angry and scared and I hated myself so bad I couldn’t hold it in, only I also couldn’t let it out, and I kept wishing I could just die. Then I realized that the guys following us were close enough that I could feel them. Or no it wasn’t that they was close. They was just so mad that I could see their sparks flying like never before. Well as long as I could see them I could let fly, couldn’t I? I just flung out toward them. I don’t know if I hit them. I don’t know if my bio-electricity is something I can throw like that or what. But at least I shucked it off myself, and I didn’t mess up the lady who was driving.

When we hit asphalt again, I found out that I didn’t know what crazy driving was before. She peeled out and now she began to look at a curve ahead and then switch off the headlights until she was halfway through the curve, it was the craziest thing I ever saw, but it also made sense. They had to be following our lights, and when our lights went out they wouldn’t know where we was for a minute. They also wouldn’t know that the road curved ahead, and they might even crash up or at least they’d have to slow down. Of course, we had a real good chance of ending up eating trees ourselves, but she drove like she knew what she was doing.

We came to a straight section with a crossroads about a mile up. She switched off the lights again, and I thought maybe she was going to turn, but she didn’t. Just went on and on and on, straight into the pitch black. Now, that straight section was long, but it didn’t go on forever, and I don’t care how good a driver you are, you can’t keep track of how far you’ve gone in the dark. Just when I thought for sure we’d smash into something, she let off the gas and reached her hand out the window with a flashlight. We was still going pretty fast, but the flashlight was enough to make a reflector up ahead flash back at us, so she knew where the curve was, and it was farther off than I thought. She whipped us around that curve and then ground another, using just a couple of blinks from the flashlight, before she switched on her headlights again.

I looked behind us to see if I could see anybody. “You lost them!” I says.

“Maybe,” she says. “You tell me.”

So I tried to feel where they might be, and sure enough, they was sparky enough that I could just barely tell where they was, away back. Split up, smeared out. “They’re going every which way,” I says.

“So we lost a few of them,” she says. “They aren’t going to give up, you know.”

“I know,” I says.

“You’re the hottest thing going,” she says.

“And you’re a daughter of Esau,” I says.

“Like hell I am,” she says. “I’m a great-great-great-granddaughter of Jacob Yow, who happened to be bio-electrically talented. Like if you’re tall and athletic, you can play basketball. That’s all it is, just a natural talent. Only he went crazy and started inbreeding his whole family, and they’ve got these stupid ideas about being the chosen of God and all the time they’re just murderers.”

“Tell me about it,” I says.

“You can’t help it,” she says. “You didn’t have anybody to teach you. I’m not blaming you.”

But I was blaming me.

She says, “Ignorant, that’s what they are. Well, my grandpa didn’t want to just keep reading the Bible and killing any revenuers or sheriffs or whatever who gave us trouble. He wanted to find out what we are. He also didn’t want to marry the slut they picked out for him because he wasn’t particularly dusty. So he left. They hunted him down and tried to kill him, but he got away, and he married. And he also studied and became a doctor and his kids grew up knowing that they had to find out what it is, this power. It’s like the old stories of witches, women who get mad and suddenly your cows start dying. Maybe they didn’t even know they were doing it. Summonings and love spells and come-hithers, everybody can do it a little, just like everybody can throw a ball and sometimes make a basket, but some people can do it better than others. And Papa Lem’s people, they do it best of all, better and better, because they’re breeding for it. We’ve got to stop them, don’t you see? We’ve got to keep them from learning how to control it. Because now we know more about it. It’s all tied up with the way the human body heals itself. In Sweden they’ve been changing the currents around to heal tumors. Cancer. The opposite of what you’ve been doing, but it’s the same principle. Do you know what that means? If they could control it, Lem’s people could be healers, not killers. Maybe all it takes is to do it with love, not anger.”

“Did you kill them little girls in orphanages with love?” I says.

And she just drives, she doesn’t say a thing, just drives. “Damn,” she says, “it’s raining.”

The road was slick in two seconds. She slowed way down. It came down harder and harder. I looked behind us and there was headlights back there again. Way back, but I could still see them. “They’re on us again,” I says.

“I can’t go any faster in the rain,” she says.

“It’s raining on them too,” I says.

“Not with my luck.”

And I says, “It’ll put the fire out. Back where they live.”

And she says, “It doesn’t matter. They’ll move. They know we found them, because we picked you up. So they’ll move.”

I apologized for causing trouble, and she says, “We couldn’t let you die in there. I had to go there and save you if I could.”

“Why?” I ask her. “Why not let me die?”

“Let me put it another way,” she says. “If you decided to stay with them, I had to go in there and kill you.”

And I says to her, “You’re the queen of compassion, you know?” And I thought about it a little. “You’re just like they are, you know?” I says. “You wanted to get pregnant just like they did. You wanted to breed me like a stud horse.”

“If I wanted to breed you,” she says, “I would have done it on the hill this morning. Yesterday morning. You would’ve done it. And I should’ve made you, because if you went with them, our only hope was to have a child of yours that we could raise to be a decent person. Only it turned out you’re a decent person, so we didn’t have to kill you. Now we can study you and learn about this from the strongest living example of the phenomenon”—I don’t know how to pronounce that, but you know what I mean. Or what she meant, anyway.

And I says to her, “Maybe I don’t want you to study me, did you think of that?”

And she says to me, “Maybe what you want don’t amount to a goldfish fart.” Or anyway that’s what she meant.

That’s about when they started shooting at us. Rain or no rain, they was pushing it so they got close enough to shoot, and they wasn’t half bad at it, seeing as the first bullet we knew about went right through the back window and in between us and smacked a hole in the windshield. Which made all kinds of cracks in the glass so she couldn’t see, which made her slow down more, which meant they was even closer.

Just then we whipped around a corner and our headlights lit up a bunch of guys getting out of a car with guns in their hands, and she says, “Finally.” So I figured they was some of her people, there to take the heat off. But at that same second Lem’s people must have shot out a tire or maybe she just got a little careless for a second cause after all she couldn’t see too good through the windshield, but anyway she lost control and we skidded and flipped over, rolled over it felt like five times, all in slow motion, rolling and rolling, the doors popping open and breaking off, the windshield cracking and crumbling away, and there we hung in our seatbelts, not talking or nothing, except maybe I was saying O my God or something and then we smacked into something and just stopped, which jerked us around inside the car and then it was all over.

I heard water rushing. A stream, I thought. We can wash up. Only it wasn’t a stream, it was the gasoline pouring out of the tank. And then I heard gunshots from back up by the road. I didn’t know who was fighting who, but if the wrong guys won they’d just love to catch us in a nice hot gasoline fire. Getting out wasn’t going to be all that hard. The doors were gone so we didn’t have to climb out a window or anything.

We were leaned over on the left side, so her door was mashed against the ground. I says to her, “We got to climb out my door.” I had brains enough to hook one arm up over the lip of the car before I unbuckled my seat belt, and then I hoisted myself out and stayed perched up there on the side of the car, up in the air, so I could reach down and help her out.

Only she wasn’t climbing out. I yelled at her and she didn’t answer. I thought for a second she was dead, but then I saw that her sparks was still there. Funny, how I never saw she had any sparkiness before, because I didn’t know to look for it, but now, even though it was dim, I could see it. Only it wasn’t so dim, it was real busy, like she was trying to heal herself. The gurgling was still going on, and everything smelled like gasoline. There was still shooting going on. And even if nobody came down to start us on fire on purpose, I saw enough car crashes at the movies to know you didn’t need a match to start a car on fire. I sure didn’t want to be near the car if it caught, and I sure didn’t want her in it. But I couldn’t see how to climb down in and pull her out. I mean I’m not a weakling but I’m not Mr. Universe either.

It felt like I sat there for a whole minute before I realized I didn’t have to pull her out my side of the car, I could pull her out the front cause the whole windshield was missing and the roof was only mashed down a little, cause there was a rollbar in the car—that was real smart, putting a rollbar in. I jumped off the car. It wasn’t raining right here, but it had rained, so it was slippery and wet. Or maybe it was slippery from the gasoline, I don’t know. I got around the front of the car and up to the windshield, and I scraped the bits of glass off with my shoe. Then I crawled partway in and reached under her and undid her seatbelt, and tried to pull her out, but her legs was hung up under the steering wheel and it took forever, it was terrible, and all the time I kept listening for her to breathe, and she didn’t breathe, and so I kept getting more scared and frustrated and all I was thinking about was how she had to live, she couldn’t be dead, she just got through saving my life and now she was dead and she couldn’t be and I was going to get her out of the car even if I had to break her legs to do it, only I didn’t have to break her legs and she finally slid out and I dragged her away from the car. It didn’t catch on fire, but I couldn’t know it wasn’t going to.

And anyway all I cared about then was her, not breathing, lying there limp on the grass with her neck all floppy and I was holding on to her crying and angry and scared and I had us both covered with sparks, like we was the same person, just completely covered, and I was crying and saying, Live! I couldn’t even call her by name or nothing because I didn’t know her name. I just know that I was shaking like I had the chills and so was she and she was breathing now and whimpering like somebody just stepped on a puppy and the sparks just kept flowing around us both and I felt like somebody sucked everything out of me, like I was a wet towel and somebody wrung me out and flipped me into a corner, and then I don’t remember until I woke up here.

What did it feel like? What you did to her?

It felt like when I covered her with light, it was like I was taking over doing what her own body should’ve done, it was like I was healing her. Maybe I got that idea because she said something about healing when she was driving the car, but she wasn’t breathing when I dragged her out, and then she was breathing. So I want to know if I healed her. Because if she got healed when I covered her with my own light, then maybe I didn’t kill my daddy either, because it was kind of like that, I think it was kind of like that, what happened when I dragged him out of the house.

I been talking a long time now, and you still told me nothing. Even if you think I’m just a killer and you want me dead, you can tell me about her. Is she alive?

Yes.

Well then how come I can’t see her? How come she isn’t here with the rest of you?

She had some surgery. It takes time to heal.

But did I help her? Or did I twist her? You got to tell me. Cause if I didn’t help her then I hope I fail your test and you kill me cause I can’t think of a good reason why I should be alive if all I can do is kill people.

You helped her, Mick. That last bullet caught her in the head. That’s why she crashed.

But she wasn’t bleeding!

It was dark, Mick. You couldn’t see. You had her blood all over you. But it doesn’t matter now. We have the bullet out. As far as we can tell, there was no brain damage. There should have been. She should have been dead.

So I did help her.

Yes. But we don’t know how. All kinds of stories, you know, about faith healing, that sort of thing. Laying on of hands. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you did, merging the bio-magnetic field. A lot of things don’t make any sense yet. There’s no way we can see that the tiny amount of electricity in a human bio-electric system could influence somebody a hundred miles off, but they summoned you, and you came. We need to study you, Mick. We’ve never had anybody as powerful as you. Tell the truth, maybe there’s never been anybody like you. Or maybe all the healings in the New Testament—

I don’t want to hear about no testaments. Papa Lem gave me about all the testaments I ever need to hear about.

Will you help us, Mick?

Help you how?

Let us study you.

Go ahead and study.

Maybe it won’t be enough just to study how you heal people.

I’m not going to kill nobody for you. If you try to make me kill somebody I’ll kill you first till you have to kill me just to save your own lives, do you understand me?

Calm down, Mick. Don’t get angry. There’s plenty of time to think about things. Actually we’re glad that you don’t want to kill anybody. If you enjoyed it, or even if you hadn’t been able to control it and kept on indiscriminately killing anyone who enraged you, you wouldn’t have lived to be seventeen. Because yes, we’re scientists, or at least we’re finally learning enough that we can start being scientists. But first we’re human beings, and we’re in the middle of a war, and children like you are the weapons. If they ever got someone like you to stay with them, work with them, you could seek us out and destroy us. That’s what they wanted you to do.

That’s right, that’s one thing Papa Lem said, I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but he said that the children of Israel were supposed to kill every man, woman, and child in Canaan, cause idolaters had to make way for the children of God.

Well, you see, that’s why our branch of the family left. We didn’t think it was such a terrific idea, wiping out the entire human race and replacing it with a bunch of murderous, incestuous religious fanatics. For the last twenty years, we’ve been able to keep them from getting somebody like you, because we’ve murdered the children that were so powerful they had to put them outside to be reared by others.

Except me.

It’s a war. We didn’t like killing children. But it’s like bombing the place where your enemies are building a secret weapon. The lives of a few children—no, that’s a lie. It nearly split us apart ourselves, the arguments over that. Letting you live—it was a terrible risk. I voted against it every time. And I don’t apologize for that, Mick. Now that you know what they are, and you chose to leave, I’m glad I lost. But so many things could have gone wrong.

They won’t put any more babies out to orphanages now, though. They’re not that dumb.

But now we have you. Maybe we can learn how to block what they do. Or how to heal the people they attack. Or how to identify sparkiness, as you call it, from a distance. All kinds of possibilities. But sometime in the future, Mick, you may be the only weapon we have. Do you understand that?

I don’t want to.

I know.

You wanted to kill me?

I wanted to protect people from you. It was safest. Mick, I really am glad it worked out this way.

I don’t know whether to believe you, Mr. Kaiser. You’re such a good liar. I thought you were so nice to me all that time because you were just a nice guy.

Oh, he is, Mick. He’s a nice guy. Also a damn fine liar. We kind of needed both those attributes in the person we had looking out for you.

Well, anyway, that’s over with.

What’s over with?

Killing me. Isn’t it?

That’s up to you, Mick. If you ever start getting crazy on us, or killing people that aren’t part of this war of ours—

I won’t do that!

But if you did, Mick. It’s never too late to kill you.

Can I see her?

See who?

The lady from Roanoke! Isn’t it about time you told me her name?

Come on. She can tell you herself.

BUFFALO GALS, WON’T YOU COME OUT TONIGHT

Ursula K. Le Guin

1

“You fell out of the sky,” coyote said.

Still curled up tight, lying on her side, her back pressed against the overhanging rock, the child watched the coyote with one eye. Over the other eye she kept her hand cupped, its back on the dirt.

“There was a burned place in the sky, up there alongside the rimrock, and then you fell out of it,” the coyote repeated, patiently, as if the news was getting a bit stale. “Are you hurt?”

She was all right. She was in the plane with Mr. Michaels, and the motor was so loud she couldn’t understand what he said even when he shouted, and the way the wind rocked the wings was making her feel sick, but it was all right. They were flying to Canyonville. In the plane.

She looked. The coyote was still sitting there. It yawned. It was a big one, in good condition, its coat silvery and thick. The dark tear line back from its long yellow eye was as clearly marked as a tabby cat’s.

She sat up slowly, still holding her right hand pressed to her right eye.

“Did you lose an eye?” the coyote asked, interested.

“I don’t know,” the child said. She caught her breath and shivered. “I’m cold.”

“I’ll help you look for it,” the coyote said. “Come on! If you move around, you won’t have to shiver. The sun’s up.”

Cold, lonely brightness lay across the falling land, a hundred miles of sagebrush. The coyote was trotting busily around, nosing under clumps of rabbitbrush and cheatgrass, pawing at a rock. “Aren’t you going to look?” it said, suddenly sitting down on its haunches and abandoning the search. “I knew a trick once where I could throw my eyes way up into a tree and see everything from up there, and then whistle, and they’d come back into my head. But that goddamn bluejay stole them, and when I whistled, nothing came. I had to stick lumps of pine pitch into my head so I could see anything. You could try that. But you’ve got one eye that’s O.K.; what do you need two for? Are you coming, or are you dying there?”

The child crouched, shivering.

“Well, come if you want to,” said the coyote, yawned again, snapped at a flea, stood up, turned, and trotted away among the sparse clumps of rabbitbrush and sage, along the long slope that stretched on down and down into the plain streaked across by long shadows of sagebrush. The slender gray-yellow animal was hard to keep in sight, vanishing as the child watched.

She struggled to her feet and—without a word, though she kept saying in her mind, “Wait, please wait”—she hobbled after the coyote. She could not see it. She kept her hand pressed over the right eye socket. Seeing with one eye, there was no depth; it was like a huge, flat picture. The coyote suddenly sat in the middle of the picture, looking back at her, its mouth open, its eyes narrowed, grinning. Her legs began to steady, and her head did not pound so hard, though the deep black ache was always there. She had nearly caught up to the coyote, when it trotted off again. This time she spoke. “Please wait!” she said.

“O.K.,” said the coyote, but it trotted right on. She followed, walking downhill into the flat picture that at each step was deep.

Each step was different underfoot; each sage bush was different, and all the same. Following the coyote, she came out from the shadow of the rimrock cliffs, and the sun at eye level dazzled her left eye. Its bright warmth soaked into her muscles and bones at once. The air, which all night had been so hard to breathe, came sweet and easy.

The sage bushes were pulling in their shadows, and the sun was hot on the child’s back when she followed the coyote along the rim of a gully. After a while the coyote slanted down the undercut slope, and the child scrambled after, through scrub willows to the thin creek in its wide sand bed. Both drank.

The coyote crossed the creek, not with a careless charge and splashing like a dog, but single foot and quiet like a cat; always it carried its tail low. The child hesitated, knowing that wet shoes make blistered feet, and then waded across in as few steps as possible. Her right arm ached with the effort of holding her hand up over her eye. “I need a bandage,” she said to the coyote. It cocked its head and said nothing. It stretched out its forelegs and lay watching the water, resting but alert. The child sat down nearby on the hot sand and tried to move her right hand. It was glued to the skin around her eye by dried blood. At the little tearing-away pain, she whimpered; though it was a small pain, it frightened her. The coyote came over close and poked its long snout into her face. Its strong, sharp smell was in her nostrils. It began to lick the awful, aching blindness, cleaning and cleaning with its curled, precise, strong, wet tongue, until the child was able to cry a little with relief, being comforted. Her head was bent close to the gray-yellow ribs, and she saw the hard nipples, the whitish belly fur. She put her arm around the she-coyote, stroking the harsh coat over back and ribs.

“O.K.,” the coyote said, “let’s go!” And set off without a backward glance. The child scrambled to her feet and followed. “Where are we going?” she said, and the coyote, trotting on down along the creek, answered, “On down along the creek. . . .”

There must have been a time while she was asleep that she walked because she felt like she was waking up, but she was walking along only in a different place. They were still following the creek, though the gully had flattened out to nothing much, and there was still sagebrush range as far as the eye could see. The eye—the good one—felt rested. The other one still ached, but not so sharply, and there was no use thinking about it. But where was the coyote?

She stopped. The pit of cold into which the plane had fallen reopened, and she fell. She stood falling, a thin whimper making itself in her throat.

“Over here!”

The child turned.

She saw a coyote gnawing at the half-dried-up carcass of a crow, black feathers sticking to the black lips and narrow jaw.

She saw a tawny-skinned woman kneeling by a campfire, sprinkling something into a conical pot. She heard the water boiling in the pot, though it was propped between rocks, off the fire. The woman’s hair was yellow and gray, bound back with a string. Her feet were bare. The upturned soles looked as dark and hard as shoe soles, but the arch of the foot was high, and the toes made two neat curving rows. She wore blue jeans and an old white shirt. She looked over at the girl. “Come on, eat crow!” she said.

The child slowly came toward the woman and the fire, and squatted down. She had stopped falling and felt very light and empty; and her tongue was like a piece of wood stuck in her mouth.

Coyote was now blowing into the pot or basket or whatever it was. She reached into it with two fingers, and pulled her hand away, shaking it and shouting, “Ow! Shit! Why don’t I ever have any spoons?” She broke off a dead twig of sagebrush, dipped it into the pot, and licked it. “Oh boy,” she said. “Come on!”

The child moved a little closer, broke off a twig, dipped. Lumpy pinkish mush clung to the twig. She licked. The taste was rich and delicate.

“What is it?” she asked after a long time of dipping and licking.

“Food. Dried salmon mush,” Coyote said. “It’s cooling down.” She stuck two fingers into the mush again, this time getting a good load, which she ate very neatly. The child, when she tried, got mush all over her chin. It was like chopsticks: it took practice. She practiced. They ate turn and turn until nothing was left in the pot but three rocks. The child did not ask why there were rocks in the mush pot. They licked the rocks clean. Coyote licked out the inside of the pot-basket, rinsed it once in the creek, and put it onto her head. It fit nicely, making a conical hat. She pulled off her blue jeans. “Piss on the fire!” she cried, and did so, standing straddling it. “Ah, steam between the legs!” she said. The child, embarrassed, thought she was supposed to do the same thing, but did not want to, and did not. Bareassed, Coyote danced around the dampened fire, kicking her long, thin legs out and singing:

Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight

Come out tonight, come out tonight,

Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight,

And dance by the light of the moon?

She pulled her jeans back on. The child was burying the remains of the fire in creek sand, heaping it over, seriously, wanting to do right. Coyote watched her.

“Is that you?” she said. “A Buffalo Gal? What happened to the rest of you?”

“The rest of me?” The child looked at herself, alarmed.

“All your people.”

“Oh. Well, Mom took Bobbie—he’s my little brother—away with Uncle Norm. He isn’t really my uncle or anything. So Mr. Michaels was going there anyway, so he was going to fly me over to my real father, in Canyonville. Linda—my stepmother, you know—she said it was O.K. for the summer anyhow if I was there, and then we could see. But the plane.”

In the silence the girl’s face became dark red, then grayish white. Coyote watched, fascinated. “Oh,” the girl said, “oh—oh—Mr. Michaels—he must be—Did the—”

“Come on!” said Coyote, and set off walking.

The child cried, “I ought to go back—”

“What for?” said Coyote. She stopped to look round at the child, then went on faster. “Come on, Gal!” She said it as a name; maybe it was the child’s name, Myra, as spoken by Coyote. The child, confused and despairing, protested again, but followed her. “Where are we going? Where are we?”

“This is my country,” Coyote answered with dignity, making a long, slow gesture all round the vast horizon. “I made it. Every goddamn sage brush.”

And they went on. Coyote’s gait was easy, even a little shambling, but she covered the ground; the child struggled not to drop behind. Shadows were beginning to pull themselves out again from under the rocks and shrubs. Leaving the creek, Coyote and the child went up a long, low, uneven slope that ended away off against the sky in rimrock. Dark trees stood one here, another way over there; what people called a juniper forest, a desert forest, one with a lot more between the trees than trees. Each juniper they passed smelled sharply—cat-pee smell the kids at school called it—but the child liked it; it seemed to go into her mind and wake her up. She picked off a juniper berry and held it in her mouth, but after a while spat it out again. The aching was coming back in huge black waves, and she kept stumbling. She found that she was sitting down on the ground. When she tried to get up, her legs shook and would not go under her. She felt foolish and frightened, and began to cry.

“We’re home!” Coyote called from way on up the hill.

The child looked with her one weeping eye, and saw sagebrush, juniper, cheatgrass, rimrock. She heard a coyote yip far off in the dry twilight.

She saw a little town up under the rimrock: board houses, shacks, all unpainted. She heard Coyote call again, “Come on, pup! Come on, Gal, we’re home!”

She could not get up, so she tried to go on all fours, the long way up the slope to the houses under the rimrock. Long before she got there, several people came to meet her. They were all children, she thought at first, and then began to understand that most of them were grown people, but all were very short; they were broad-bodied, fat, with fine, delicate hands and feet. Their eyes were bright. Some of the women helped her stand up and walk, coaxing her, “It isn’t much farther, you’re doing fine.” In the late dusk, lights shone yellow-bright through doorways and through unchinked cracks between boards. Woodsmoke hung sweet in the quiet air. The short people talked and laughed all the time, softly. “Where’s she going to stay?”—“Put her in with Robin, they’re all asleep already!”—“Oh, she can stay with us.”

The child asked hoarsely, “Where’s Coyote?”

“Out hunting,” the short people said.

A deeper voice spoke: “Somebody new has come into town?”

“Yes, a new person,” one of the short men answered.

Among these people the deep-voiced man bulked impressive; he was broad and tall, with powerful hands, a big head, a short neck. They made way for him respectfully. He moved very quietly, respectful of them also. His eyes when he stared down at the child were amazing. When he blinked, it was like the passing of a hand before a candle flame.

“It’s only an owlet,” he said. “What have you let happen to your eye, new person?”

“I was—We were flying—”

“You’re too young to fly,” the big man said in his deep, soft voice. “Who brought you here?”

“Coyote.”

And one of the short people confirmed: “She came here with Coyote, Young Owl.”

“Then maybe she should stay in Coyote’s house tonight,” the big man said.

“It’s all bones and lonely in there,” said a short woman with fat cheeks and a striped shirt. “She can come with us.”

That seemed to decide it. The fat-cheeked woman patted the child’s arm and took her past several shacks and shanties to a low, windowless house. The doorway was so low even the child had to duck down to enter. There were a lot of people inside, some already there and some crowding in after the fat-cheeked woman. Several babies were fast asleep in cradle-boxes in the corner. There was a good fire, and a good smell, like toasted sesame seeds. The child was given food and ate a little, but her head swam, and the blackness in her right eye kept coming across her left eye, so she could not see at all for a while. Nobody asked her name or told her what to call them. She heard the children call the fat-cheeked woman Chipmunk. She got up courage finally to say, “Is there somewhere I can go to sleep, Mrs. Chipmunk?”

“Sure, come on,” one of the daughters said, “in here,” and took the child into a back room, not completely partitioned off from the crowded front room, but dark and uncrowded. Big shelves with mattresses and blankets lined the walls. “Crawl in!” said Chipmunk’s daughter, patting the child’s arm in the comforting way they had. The child climbed onto a shelf, under a blanket. She laid down her head. She thought, “I didn’t brush my teeth.”

2

She woke; she slept again. In Chipmunk’s sleeping room it was always stuffy, warm, and half dark, day and night. People came in and slept and got up and left, night and day. She dozed and slept, got down to drink from the bucket and dipper in the front room, and went back to sleep and doze.

She was sitting up on the shelf, her feet dangling, not feeling bad anymore, but dreamy, weak. She felt in her jeans pocket. In the left front one was a pocket comb and a bubble gum wrapper, in the right front, two dollar bills and a quarter and a dime.

Chipmunk and another woman—a very pretty, dark-eyed, plump one—came in. “So you woke up for your dance!” Chipmunk greeted her, laughing, and sat down by her with an arm around her.

“Jay’s giving you a dance,” the dark woman said. “He’s going to make you all right. Let’s get you all ready!”

There was a spring up under the rimrock, which flattened out into a pool with slimy, reedy shores. A flock of noisy children splashing in it ran off and left the child and the two women to bathe. The water was warm on the surface, cold down on the feet and legs. All naked, the two soft-voiced, laughing women, their round bellies and breasts, broad hips and buttocks gleaming warm in the late-afternoon light, sluiced the child down, washed and stroked her limbs and hands and hair, cleaned around the cheekbone and eyebrow of her right eye with infinite softness, admired her, sudsed her, rinsed her, splashed her out of the water, dried her off, dried each other off, got dressed, dressed her, braided her hair, braided each other’s hair, tied feathers on the braid-ends, admired her and each other again, and brought her back down into the little straggling town and to a kind of playing field or dirt parking lot in among the houses. There were no streets, just paths and dirt; no lawns and gardens, just sagebrush and dirt. Quite a few people were gathering or wandering around the open place, looking dressed up, wearing colorful shirts, bright dresses, strings of beads, earrings. “Hey there, Chipmunk, Whitefoot!” they greeted the women.

A man in new jeans, with a bright blue velveteen vest over a clean, faded blue work shirt, came forward to meet them, very handsome, tense, and important. “All right, Gal!” he said in a harsh, loud voice, which startled among all these soft-speaking people. “We’re going to get that eye fixed right up tonight! You just sit down here and don’t worry about a thing.” He took her wrist, gently despite his bossy, brassy manner, and led her to a woven mat that lay on the dirt near the middle of the open place. There, feeling very foolish, she had to sit down, and was told to stay still. She soon got over feeling that everybody was looking at her, since nobody paid her more attention than a checking glance or, from Chipmunk or Whitefoot and their families, a reassuring wink. Every now and then, Jay rushed over to her and said something like, “Going to be as good as new!” and went off again to organize people, waving his long blue arms and shouting.

Coming up the hill to the open place, a lean, loose, tawny figure—and the child started to jump up, remembered she was to sit still, and sat still, calling out softly, “Coyote! Coyote!”

Coyote came lounging by. She grinned. She stood looking down at the child. “Don’t let that Bluejay fuck you up, Gal,” she said, and lounged on.

The child’s gaze followed her, yearning.

People were sitting down now over on one side of the open place, making an uneven half circle that kept getting added to at the ends until there was nearly a circle of people sitting on the dirt around the child, ten or fifteen paces from her. All the people wore the kind of clothes the child was used to—jeans and jeans jackets, shirts, vests, cotton dresses—but they were all barefoot; and she thought they were more beautiful than the people she knew, each in a different way, as if each one had invented beauty. Yet some of them were also very strange: thin black shining people with whispery voices, a long-legged woman with eyes like jewels. The big man called Young Owl was there, sleepy-looking and dignified, like Judge McCown who owned a sixty-thousand acre ranch. And beside him was a woman the child thought might be his sister, for like him she had a hook nose and big, strong hands; but she was lean and dark, and there was a crazy look in her fierce eyes. Yellow eyes, but round, not long and slanted like Coyote’s. There was Coyote sitting yawning, scratching her armpit, bored. Now somebody was entering the circle: a man, wearing only a kind of kilt and a cloak painted or beaded with diamond shapes, dancing to the rhythm of the rattle he carried and shook with a buzzing fast beat. His limbs and body were thick yet supple, his movements smooth and pouring. The child kept her gaze on him as he danced past her, around her, past again. The rattle in his hand shook almost too fast to see; in the other hand was something thin and sharp. People were singing around the circle now, a few notes repeated in time to the rattle, soft and tuneless. It was exciting and boring, strange and familiar. The Rattler wove his dancing closer and closer to her, darting at her. The first time, she flinched away, frightened by the lunging movement and by his flat, cold face with narrow eyes, but after that she sat still, knowing her part. The dancing went on, the singing went on, till they carried her past boredom into a floating that could go on forever.

Jay had come strutting into the circle and was standing beside her. He couldn’t sing, but he called out, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” in his big, harsh voice, and everybody answered from all round, and the echo came down from the rimrock on the second beat. Jay was holding up a stick with a ball on it in one hand, and something like a marble in the other. The stick was a pipe: he got smoke into his mouth from it and blew it in four directions and up and down and then over the marble, a puff each time. Then the rattle stopped suddenly, and everything was silent for several breaths. Jay squatted down and looked intently into the child’s face, his head cocked to one side. He reached forward, muttering something in time to the rattle and the singing that had started up again louder than before; he touched the child’s right eye in the black center of the pain. She flinched and endured. His touch was not gentle. She saw the marble, a dull yellow ball like beeswax, in his hand; then she shut her seeing eye and set her teeth.

“There!” Jay shouted. “Open up. Come on! Let’s see!”

Her jaw clenched like a vise, she opened both eyes. The lid of the right one stuck and dragged with such a searing white pain that she nearly threw up as she sat there in the middle of everybody watching.

“Hey, can you see? How’s it work? It looks great!” Jay was shaking her arm, railing at her. “How’s it feel? Is it working?”

What she saw was confused, hazy, yellowish. She began to discover, as everybody came crowding around peering at her—smiling, stroking and patting her arms and shoulders—that if she shut the hurting eye and looked with the other, everything was clear and flat; if she used them both, things were blurry and yellowish, but deep.

There, right close, was Coyote’s long nose and narrow eyes and grin. “What is it, Jay?” she was asking, peering at the new eye. “One of mine you stole that time?”

“It’s pine pitch,” Jay shouted furiously. “You think I’d use some stupid secondhand coyote eye? I’m a doctor!”

“Ooooh, ooooh, a doctor,” Coyote said. “Boy, that is one ugly eye. Why didn’t you ask Rabbit for a rabbit dropping? That eye looks like shit.” She put her lean face yet closer, till the child thought she was going to kiss her; instead, the thin, firm tongue once more licked accurately across the pain, cooling, clearing. When the child opened both eyes again, the world looked pretty good.

“It works fine,” she said.

“Hey!” Jay yelled. “She says it works fine! It works fine; she says so! I told you! What’d I tell you?” He went off waving his arms and yelling. Coyote had disappeared. Everybody was wandering off.

The child stood up, stiff from long sitting. It was nearly dark; only the long west held a great depth of pale radiance. Eastward, the plains ran down into night.

Lights were on in some of the shanties. Off at the edge of town, somebody was playing a creaky fiddle, a lonesome chirping tune.

A person came beside her and spoke quietly: “Where will you stay?”

“I don’t know,” the child said. She was feeling extremely hungry. “Can I stay with Coyote?”

“She isn’t home much,” the soft-voiced woman said. “You were staying with Chipmunk, weren’t you? Or there’s Rabbit, or Jackrabbit; they have families. . . .”

“Do you have a family?” the girl asked, looking at the delicate, soft-eyed woman.

“Two fawns,” the woman answered, smiling. “But I just came into town for the dance.”

“I’d really like to stay with Coyote,” the child said after a pause, timid but obstinate.

“O.K., that’s fine. Her house is over here.” Doe walked along beside the child to a ramshackle cabin on the high edge of town. No light shone from inside. A lot of junk was scattered around the front. There was no step up to the half-open door. Over a battered pine board, nailed up crooked, said: “Bide-A-Wee.”

“Hey, Coyote? Visitors,” Doe said. Nothing happened.

Doe pushed the door farther open and peered in. “She’s out hunting, I guess. I better be getting back to the fawns. You going to be O.K.? Anybody else here will give you something to eat—you know. . . . O.K.?”

“Yeah. I’m fine. Thank you,” the child said.

She watched Doe walk away through the clear twilight, a severely elegant walk, small steps, like a woman in high heels, quick, precise, very light.

Inside Bide-A-Wee it was too dark to see anything, and so cluttered that she fell over something at every step. She could not figure out where or how to light a fire. There was something that felt like a bed, but when she lay down on it, it felt more like a dirty-clothes pile, and smelled like one. Things bit her legs, arms, neck, and back. She was terribly hungry. By smell, she found her way to what had to be a dead fish hanging from the ceiling in one corner. By feel, she broke off a greasy flake and tasted it. It was smoked, dried salmon. She ate one succulent piece after another until she was satisfied, and licked her fingers clean. Near the open door, starlight shone on water in a pot of some kind; the child smelled it cautiously, tasted it cautiously, and drank just enough to quench her thirst, for it tasted of mud and was warm and stale. Then she went back to the bed of dirty clothes and fleas, and lay down. She could have gone to Chipmunk’s house, or other friendly households; she thought of that as she lay forlorn in Coyote’s dirty bed. But she did not go. She slapped at fleas until she fell asleep.

Along in the deep night, somebody said, “Move over, pup,” and was warm beside her.

Breakfast, eaten sitting in the sun in the doorway, was dried-salmon-powder mush. Coyote hunted, mornings and evenings, but what they ate was not fresh game but salmon, and dried stuff, and any berries in season. The child did not ask about this. It made sense to her. She was going to ask Coyote why she slept at night and waked in the day like humans, instead of the other way round like coyotes, but when she framed the question in her mind, she saw at once that night is when you sleep and day when you’re awake; that made sense, too. But one question she did ask, one hot day when they were lying around slapping fleas.

“I don’t understand why you all look like people,” she said.

“We are people.”

“I mean, people like me, humans.”

“Resemblance is in the eye,” Coyote said. “How is that lousy eye, by the way?”

“It’s fine. But—like you wear clothes—and live in houses—with fires and stuff—”

“That’s what you think. . . . If that loudmouth Jay hadn’t horned in, I could have done a really good job.”

The child was quite used to Coyote’s disinclination to stick to any one subject, and to her boasting. Coyote was like a lot of kids she knew, in some respects. Not in others.

“You mean what I’m seeing isn’t true? Isn’t real—like TV or something?”

“No,” Coyote said. “Hey, that’s a tick on your collar.” She reached over, flicked the tick off, picked it up on one finger, bit it, and spat out the bits.

“Yecch!” the child said. “So?”

“So, to me, you’re basically grayish yellow and run on four legs. To that lot”—she waved disdainfully at the warren of little houses next down the hill—“you hop around twitching your nose all the time. To Hawk, you’re an egg, or maybe getting pinfeathers. See? It just depends on how you look at things. There are only two kinds of people.”

“Humans and animals?”

“No. The kind of people who say, ‘There are two kinds of people,’ and the kind of people who don’t.” Coyote cracked up, pounding her thighs and yelling with delight at her joke. The child didn’t get it, and waited.

“O.K.,” Coyote said. “There’re the first people, and then the others. Those’re the two kinds.”

“The first people are—?”

“Us, the animals . . . and things. All the old ones. You know. And you pups, kids, fledglings. All first people.”

“And the—others?”

“Them,” Coyote said. “You know. The others. The new people. The ones who came.” Her fine, hard face had gone serious, rather formidable. She glanced directly, as she seldom did, at the child, a brief gold sharpness. “We are here,” she said. “We are always here. We are always here. Where we are is here. But it’s their country now. They’re running it. . . . Shit, even I did better!”

The child pondered and offered a word she had used to hear a good deal: “They’re illegal immigrants.”

“Illegal!” Coyote said, mocking, sneering. “Illegal is a sick bird. What the fuck’s illegal mean? You want a code of justice from a coyote? Grow up kid!”

“I don’t want to.”

“You don’t want to grow up?”

“I’ll be the other kind if I do.”

“Yeah. So,” Coyote said, and shrugged. “That’s life.” She got up and went around the house, and the child heard her pissing in the backyard.

A lot of things were hard to take about Coyote as a mother. When her boyfriends came to visit, the child learned to go stay with Chipmunk or the Rabbits for the night, because Coyote and her friend wouldn’t even wait to get on the bed, but would start doing that right on the floor or even out in the yard. A couple of times, Coyote came back late from hunting with a friend, and the child had to lie up against the wall in the same bed and hear and feel them doing that right next to her. It was something like fighting and something like dancing, with a beat to it, and she didn’t mind too much except that it made it hard to stay asleep. Once she woke up and one of Coyote’s friends was stroking her stomach in a creepy way. She didn’t know what to do, but Coyote woke up and realized what he was doing, bit him hard, and kicked him out of bed. He spent the night on the floor, and apologized next morning—“Aw, hell, Ki, I forgot the kid was there; I thought it was you—”

Coyote, unappeased, yelled, “You think I don’t got any standards? You think I’d let some coyote rape a kid in my bed?” She kicked him out of the house, and grumbled about him all day. But a while later he spent the night again, and he and Coyote did that three or four times.

Another thing that was embarrassing was the way Coyote peed anywhere, taking her pants down in public. But most people here didn’t seem to care. The thing that worried the child most, maybe, was when Coyote did number two anywhere and then turned around and talked to it. That seemed so awful. As if Coyote were—the way she often seemed, but really wasn’t—crazy.

The child gathered up all the old dry turds from around the house one day while Coyote was having a nap, and buried them in a sandy place near where she and Bobcat and some of the other people generally went and did and buried their number twos.

Coyote woke up, came lounging out of Bide-A-Wee, rubbing her hands through her thick, fair, grayish hair and yawning, looked all round once with those narrow eyes, and said, “Hey! Where are they?” Then she shouted, “Where are you? Where are you?”

And a faint chorus came from over in the draw: “Mommy! We’re here!”

Coyote trotted over, squatted down, raked out every turd, and talked with them for a long time. When she came back, she said nothing, but the child, red-faced and heart pounding, said, “I’m sorry I did that.”

“It’s just easier when they’re all around close by,” Coyote said, washing her hands (despite the filth of her house, she kept herself quite clean, in her own fashion).

“I kept stepping on them,” the child said, trying to justify her deed.

“Poor little shits,” said Coyote, practicing dance steps.

“Coyote,” the child said timidly. “Did you ever have any children? I mean real pups?”

“Did I? Did I have children? Litters! That one that tried feeling you up, you know? That was my son. Pick of the litter. . . . Listen, Gal. Have daughters. When you have anything, have daughters. At least they clear out.”

3

The child thought of herself as Gal, but also sometimes as Myra. So far as she knew, she was the only person in town who had two names. She had to think about that, and about what Coyote had said about the two kinds of people; she had to think about where she belonged. Some persons in town made it clear that as far as they were concerned, she didn’t and never would belong there. Hawk’s furious stare burned through her; the Skunk children made audible remarks about what she smelled like. And though Whitefoot and Chipmunk and their families were kind, it was the generosity of big families, where one more or less simply doesn’t count. If one of them, or Cottontail, or Jackrabbit, had come upon her in the desert lying lost and half blind, would they have stayed with her, like Coyote? That was Coyote’s craziness, what they called her craziness. She wasn’t afraid. She went between the two kinds of people; she crossed over. Buck and Doe and their beautiful children were really afraid, because they lived so constantly in danger. The Rattler wasn’t afraid, because he was so dangerous. And yet maybe he was afraid of her, for he never spoke, and never came close to her. None of them treated her the way Coyote did. Even among the children, her only constant playmate was one younger than herself, a preposterous and fearless little boy called Horned Toad Child. They dug and built together, out among the sagebrush, and played at hunting and gathering and keeping house and holding dances, all the great games. A pale, squatty child with fringed eyebrows, he was a self-contained but loyal friend; and he knew a good deal for his age.

“There isn’t anybody else like me here,” she said as they sat by the pool in the morning sunlight.

“There isn’t anybody much like me anywhere,” said Horned Toad Child.

“Well, you know what I mean.”

“Yeah. . . . There used to be people like you around, I guess.”

“What were they called?”

“Oh—people. Like everybody. . . .”

“But where do my people live? They have towns. I used to live in one. I don’t know where they are, is all. I ought to find out. I don’t know where my mother is now, but daddy’s in Canyonville. I was going there when. . . .”

“Ask Horse,” said Horned Toad Child sagaciously. He had moved away from the water, which he did not like and never drank, and was plaiting rushes.

“I don’t know Horse.”

“He hangs around the butte down there a lot of the time. He’s waiting till his uncle gets old and he can kick him out and be the big honcho. The old man and the women don’t want him around till then. Horses are weird. Anyway, he’s the one to ask. He gets around a lot. And his people came here with the new people; that’s what they say, anyhow.”

Illegal immigrants, the girl thought. She took Horned Toad’s advice, and one long day when Coyote was gone on one of her unannounced and unexplained trips, she took a pouchful of dried salmon and salmonberries and went off alone to the flat-topped butte miles away in the southwest.

There was a beautiful spring at the foot of the butte, and a trail to it with a lot of footprints on it. She waited there under willows by the clear pool, and after a while Horse came running, splendid, with copper-red skin and long, strong legs, deep chest, dark eyes, his black hair whipping his back as he ran. He stopped, not at all winded, and gave a snort as he looked at her. “Who are you?”

Nobody in town asked that—ever. She saw it was true; Horse had come here with her people, people who had to ask each other who they were.

“I live with Coyote,” she said cautiously.

“Oh sure, I heard about you,” Horse said. He knelt to drink from the pool. Long, deep drafts, his hands plunged in the cool water. When he had drunk, he wiped his mouth, sat back on his heels, and announced, “I’m going to be king.”

“King of the horses?”

“Right! Pretty soon now. I could lick the old man already, but I can wait. Let him have his day,” said Horse, vainglorious, magnanimous. The child gazed at him, in love already, forever.

“I can comb your hair, if you like,” she said.

“Great!” said Horse, and sat still while she stood behind him, tugging her pocket comb through his coarse, black, shining, yard-long hair. It took a long time to get it smooth. She tied it in a massive ponytail with willow bark when she was done. Horse bent over the pool to admire himself. “That’s great,” he said. “That’s really beautiful!”

“Do you ever go . . . where the other people are?” she asked in a low voice.

He did not reply for long enough that she thought he wasn’t going to; then he said, “You mean the metal places, the glass places? The holes? I go around them. There are all the walls now. There didn’t use to be so many. Grandmother said there didn’t use to be any walls. Do you know Grandmother?” he asked naively, looking at her with his great, dark eyes.

“Your grandmother?”

“Well, yes—Grandmother—you know. Who makes the web. Well, anyhow. I know there’s some of my people, horses, there. I’ve seen them across the walls. They act really crazy. You know, we brought the new people here. They couldn’t have got here without us: they have only two legs, and they have those metal shells. I can tell you that whole story. The king has to know the stories.”

“I like stories a lot.”

“It takes three nights to tell it. What do you want to know about them?”

“I was thinking that maybe I ought to go there. Where they are.”

“It’s dangerous. Really dangerous. You can’t go through—they’d catch you.”

“I’d just like to know the way.”

“I know the way,” Horse said, sounding for the first time entirely adult and reliable; she knew he did know the way. “It’s a long run for a colt.” He looked at her again. “I’ve got a cousin with different-color eyes,” he said, looking from her right to her left eye. “One brown and one blue. But she’s an Appaloosa.”

“Bluejay made the yellow one,” the child explained. “I lost my own one. In the . . . when. . . . You don’t think I could get to those places?”

“Why do you want to?”

“I sort of feel like I have to.”

Horse nodded. He got up. She stood still.

“I could take you, I guess,” he said.

“Would you? When?”

“Oh, now, I guess. Once I’m king I won’t be able to leave, you know. Have to protect the women. And I sure wouldn’t let my people get anywhere near those places!” A shudder ran right down his magnificent body, yet he said, with a toss of his head, “They couldn’t catch me, of course, but the others can’t run like I do. . . .”

“How long would it take us?”

Horse thought for a while. “Well, the nearest place like that is over the red rocks. If we left now, we’d be back here around tomorrow noon. It’s just a little hole.”

She did not know what he meant by “a hole,” but did not ask.

“You want to go?” Horse said, flipping back his ponytail.

“O.K.,” the girl said, feeling the ground go out from under her.

“Can you run?”

She shook her head. “I walked here, though.”

Horse laughed, a large, cheerful laugh. “Come on,” he said, and knelt and held his hands back-turned like stirrups for her to mount to his shoulders. “What do they call you?” he teased, rising easily, setting right off at a jog trot. “Gnat? Fly? Flea?”

“Tick, because I stick!” the child cried, gripping the willow bark tie of the black mane, laughing with delight at being suddenly eight feet tall and traveling across the desert without even trying, like the tumbleweed, as fast as the wind.

Moon, a night past full, rose to light the plains for them. Horse jogged easily on and on. Somewhere deep in the night, they stopped at a Pygmy Owl camp, ate a little, and rested. Most of the owls were out hunting, but an old lady entertained them at her campfire, telling them tales about the ghost of a cricket, about the great invisible people, tales that the child heard interwoven with her own dreams as she dozed and half woke and dozed again. Then Horse put her up on his shoulders, and on they went at a tireless, slow lope. Moon went down behind them, and before them the sky paled into rose and gold. The soft night wind was gone; the air was sharp, cold, still. On it, in it, there was a faint, sour smell of burning. The child felt Horse’s gait change, grow tighter, uneasy.

“Hey, Prince!”

A small, slightly scolding voice: the child knew it, and placed it as soon as she saw the person sitting by a juniper tree, neatly dressed, wearing an old black cap.

“Hey, Chickadee!” Horse said, coming round and stopping. The child had observed, back in Coyote’s town, that everybody treated Chickadee with respect. She didn’t see why. Chickadee seemed an ordinary person, busy and talkative like most of the small birds, nothing so endearing as Quail or so impressive as Hawk or Great Owl.

“You’re going on that way?” Chickadee asked Horse.

“The little one wants to see if her people are living there,” Horse said, surprising the child. Was that what she wanted?

Chickadee looked disapproving, as she often did. She whistled a few notes thoughtfully, another of her habits, and then got up. “I’ll come along.”

“That’s great,” Horse said thankfully.

“I’ll scout,” Chickadee said, and off she went, surprisingly fast, ahead of them, while Horse took up his steady, long lope.

The sour smell was stronger in the air.

Chickadee halted, way ahead of them on a slight rise, and stood still. Horse dropped to a walk, and then stopped. “There,” she said in a low voice.

The child stared. In the strange light and slight mist before sunrise, she could not see clearly, and when she strained and peered, she felt as if her left eye were not seeing at all. “What is it?” she whispered.

“One of the holes. Across the wall—see?”

It did seem there was a line, a straight, jerky line drawn across the sagebrush plain, and on the far side of it—nothing? Was it mist? Something moved there—

“It’s cattle!” she said.

Horse stood silent, uneasy. Chickadee was coming back toward them.

“It’s a ranch,” the child said. “That’s a fence. There’re a lot of Herefords.” The words tasted like iron, like salt in her mouth. The things she named wavered in her sight and faded, leaving nothing—a hole in the world, a burned place like a cigarette burn. “Go closer!” she urged Horse. “I want to see.”

And as if he owed her obedience, he went forward, tense but unquestioning.

Chickadee came up to them. “Nobody around,” she said in her small, dry voice, “but there’s one of those fast turtle things coming.”

Horse nodded but kept going forward.

Gripping his broad shoulders, the child stared into the blank, and as if Chickadee’s words had focused her eyes, she saw again: the scattered whitefaces, a few of them looking up with bluish, rolling eyes—the fences—over the rise a chimneyed house roof and a high barn—and then in the distance, something moving fast, too fast, burning across the ground straight at them at terrible speed. “Run!” she yelled to Horse. “Run away! Run!” As if released from bonds, he wheeled and ran, flat out, in great reaching strides, away from sunrise, the fiery burning chariot, the smell of acid, iron, death. And Chickadee flew before them like a cinder on the air of dawn.

4

“Horse?” Coyote said. “That prick? Cat food!”

Coyote had been there when the child got home to Bide-A-Wee, but she clearly hadn’t been worrying about where Gal was, and maybe hadn’t even noticed she was gone. She was in a vile mood, and took it all wrong when the child tried to tell her about where she had been.

“If you’re going to do damn fool things, next time do ’em with me; at least I’m an expert,” she said, morose, and slouched out the door. The child saw her squatting down, poking an old white turd with a stick, trying to get it to answer some question she kept asking it. The turd lay obstinately silent. Later in the day the child saw two coyote men, a young one and a mangy-looking older one, loitering around near the spring, looking over at Bide-A-Wee. She decided it would be a good night to spend somewhere else.

The thought of the crowded rooms of Chipmunk’s house was not attractive. It was going to be a warm night again tonight, and moonlit. Maybe she would sleep outside. If she could feel sure some people wouldn’t come around, like the Rattler. . . . She was standing indecisively halfway through town when a dry voice said, “Hey, Gal.”

“Hey, Chickadee.”

The trim, black-capped woman was standing on her doorstep shaking out a rug. She kept her house neat, trim like herself. Having come back across the desert with her, the child now knew, though she still could not have said, why Chickadee was a respected person.

“I thought maybe I’d sleep out tonight,” the child said, tentative.

“Unhealthy,” said Chickadee. “What are nests for?”

“Mom’s kind of busy,” the child said.

“Tsk!” went Chickadee, and snapped the rug with disapproving vigor. “What about her little friend? At least they’re decent people.”

“Horny-toad? His parents are so shy. . . .”

“Well. Come in and have something to eat, anyhow,” said Chickadee.

The child helped her cook dinner. She knew now why there were rocks in the mush pot.

“Chickadee,” she said, “I still don’t understand; can I ask you? Mom said it depends who’s seeing it, but still; I mean, if I see you wearing clothes and everything like humans, then how come you cook this way, in baskets, you know, and there aren’t any—any of the things like they have—there where we were with Horse this morning?”

“I don’t know,” Chickadee said. Her voice indoors was quite soft and pleasant. “I guess we do things the way they always were done, when your people and my people lived together, you know. And together with everything else here. The rocks, you know. The plants and everything.” She looked at the basket of willow bark, fern root, and pitch, at the blackened rocks that were heating in the fire. “You see how it all goes together. . . .”

“But you have fire—That’s different—”

“Ah!” said Chickadee, impatient, “you people! Do you think you invented the sun?”

She took up the wooden tongs, plopped the heated rocks into the water-filled basket with a terrific hiss and steam and loud bubblings. The child sprinkled in the pounded seeds and stirred.

Chickadee brought out a basket of fine blackberries. They sat on the newly shaken-out rug and ate. The child’s two-finger scoop technique with mush was now highly refined.

“Maybe I didn’t cause the world,” Chickadee said, “but I’m a better cook than Coyote.”

The child nodded, stuffing.

“I don’t know why I made Horse go there,” she said after she had stuffed. “I got just as scared as he did when I saw it. But now I feel again like I have to go back there. But I want to stay here. With my friends, with Coyote. I don’t understand.”

“When we lived together, it was all one place,” Chickadee said in her slow, soft home-voice. “But now the others, the new people, they live apart. And their places are so heavy. They weigh down on our place, they press on it, draw it, suck it, eat it, eat holes in it, crowd it out. . . . Maybe after a while longer, there’ll be only one place again, their place. And none of us here. I knew Bison, out over the mountains. I knew Antelope right here. I knew Grizzly and Graywolf, up west there. Gone. All gone. And the salmon you eat at Coyote’s house, those are the dream salmon, those are the true food; but in the rivers, how many salmon now? The rivers that were red with them in spring? Who dances, now, when the First Salmon offers himself? Who dances by the river? Oh, you should ask Coyote about all this. She knows more than I do! But she forgets. . . . She’s hopeless, worse than Raven; she has to piss on every post; she’s a terrible housekeeper. . . .” Chickadee’s voice had sharpened. She whistled a note or two, and said no more.

After a while the child asked very softly, “Who is Grandmother?”

“Grandmother,” Chickadee said. She looked at the child and ate several blackberries thoughtfully. She stroked the rug they sat on.

“If I built the fire on the rug, it would burn a hole in it,” she said. “Right? So we build the fire on sand, on dirt. . . . Things are woven together. So we call the weaver the Grandmother.” She whistled four notes, looking up the smoke hole. “After all,” she added, “maybe all this place—the other places, too—maybe they’re all only one side of the weaving. I don’t know. I can look with one eye at a time; how can I tell how deep it goes?”

Lying that night rolled up in a blanket in Chickadee’s backyard, the child heard the wind soughing and storming in the cottonwoods down in the draw, and then slept deeply, weary from the long night before. Just at sunrise she woke. The eastern mountains were a cloudy dark red as if the level light shone through them as through a hand held before the fire. In the tobacco patch—the only farming anybody in this town did was to raise a little wild tobacco—Lizard and Beetle were singing some kind of growing song or blessing song, soft and desultory, huh-huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh-huh, and as she lay warm-curled on the ground, the song made her feel rooted in the ground, cradled on it and in it, so where her fingers ended and the dirt began, she did not know, as if she were dead—but she was wholly alive; she was the earth’s life. She got up dancing, left the blanket folded neatly on Chickadee’s nest and already empty bed, and danced up the hill to Bide-A-Wee. At the half-open door, she sang:

Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking

And her knees kept a knocking and her toes kept a rocking,

Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking,

Danced by the light of the moon!

Coyote emerged, tousled and lurching, and eyed her narrowly. “Sheeeoot,” she said. She sucked her teeth and then went to splash water all over her head from the gourd by the door. She shook her head, and the water drops flew. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I have had it. I don’t know what got into me. If I’m pregnant again, at my age, oh shit. Let’s get out of town. I need a change of air.”

In the fuggy dark of the house, the child could see at least two coyote men sprawled snoring away on the bed and floor.

Coyote walked over to the old white turd and kicked it. “Why didn’t you stop me?” she shouted.

“I told you,” the turd muttered sulkily.

“Dumb shit,” Coyote said. “Come on, Gal. Let’s go. Where to?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I know. Come on!”

And she set off through town at that lazy-looking, rangy walk that was so hard to keep up with. But the child was full of pep, and came dancing, so that Coyote began dancing, too, skipping and pirouetting and fooling around all the way down the long slope to the level plains. There she slanted their way off northeastward. Horse Butte was at their backs, getting smaller in the distance.

Along near noon the child said, “I didn’t bring anything to eat.”

“Something will turn up,” Coyote said. “Sure to.” And pretty soon she turned aside, going straight to a tiny gray shack hidden by a couple of half-dead junipers and a stand of rabbitbrush. The place smelled terrible. A sign on the door said: Fox. Private. No Trespassing!—but Coyote pushed it open, and trotted right back out with half a small smoked salmon. “Nobody home but us chickens,” she said, grinning sweetly.

“Isn’t that stealing?” the child asked, worried.

“Yes,” Coyote answered, trotting on.

They ate the fox-scented salmon by a dried-up creek, slept a while, and went on.

Before long the child smelled the sour burning smell, and stopped. It was as if a huge, heavy hand had begun pushing her chest, pushing her away, and yet at the same time as if she had stepped into a strong current that drew her forward, helpless.

“Hey, getting close!” Coyote said, and stopped to piss by a juniper stump.

“Close to what?”

“Their town. See?” She pointed to a pair of sage-spotted hills. Between them was an area of grayish blank.

“I don’t want to go there.”

“We won’t go all the way in. No way! We’ll just get a little closer and look. It’s fun,” Coyote said, putting her head on one side, coaxing. “They do all these weird things in the air.”

The child hung back.

Coyote became businesslike, responsible. “We’re going to be very careful,” she announced. “And look out for big dogs, O.K.? Little dogs I can handle. Make a good lunch. Big dogs, it goes the other way. Right? Let’s go, then.”

Seemingly as casual and lounging as ever, but with a tense alertness in the carriage of her head and the yellow glance of her eyes, Coyote led off again, not looking back; and the child followed.

All around them the pressures increased. It was as if the air itself were pressing on them, as if time were going too fast, too hard, not flowing but pounding, pounding, pounding, faster and harder till it buzzed like Rattler’s rattle. “Hurry, you have to hurry!” everything said. “There isn’t time!” everything said. Things rushed past screaming and shuddering. Things turned, flashed, roared, stank, vanished. There was a boy—he came into focus all at once, but not on the ground: he was going along a couple of inches above the ground, moving very fast, bending his legs from side to side in a kind of frenzied, swaying dance, and was gone. Twenty children sat in rows in the air, all singing shrilly, and then the walls closed over them. A basket, no, a pot, no, a can, a garbage can, full of salmon smelling wonderful, no, full of stinking deer hides and rotten cabbage stalks—keep out of it. Coyote! Where was she?

“Mom!” the child called. “Mother!”—standing a moment at the end of an ordinary small-town street near the gas station, and the next moment in a terror of blanknesses, invisible walls, terrible smells and pressures and the overwhelming rush of Time straightforward rolling her helpless as a twig in the race above a waterfall. She clung, held on trying not to fall—“Mother!”

Coyote was over by the big basket of salmon, approaching it, wary but out in the open, in the full sunlight, in the full current. And a boy and a man borne by the same current were coming down the long, sage-spotted hill behind the gas station, each with a gun, red hats—hunters; it was killing season. “Hey, will you look at that damn coyote in broad daylight big as my wife’s ass,” the man said, and cocked, aimed, shot—all as Myra screamed and ran against the enormous drowning torrent. Coyote fled past her yelling, “Get out of here!” She turned and was borne away.

Far out of sight of that place, in a little draw among low hills, they sat and breathed air in searing gasps until, after a long time, it came easy again.

“Mom, that was stupid,” the child said furiously.

“Sure was,” Coyote said. “But did you see all that food!”

“I’m not hungry,” the child said sullenly. “Not till we get all the way away from here.”

“But they’re your folks,” Coyote said. “All yours. Your kith and kin and cousins and kind. Bang! Pow! There’s Coyote! Bang! There’s my wife’s ass! Pow! There’s anything—BOOOOM! Blow it away, man! BOOOOOOM!”

“I want to go home,” the child said.

“Not yet,” said Coyote. “I got to take a shit.” She did so, then turned to the fresh turd, leaning over it. “It says I have to stay,” she reported, smiling.

“It didn’t say anything! I was listening!”

“You know who to understand? You hear everything, Miss Big Ears? Hears all—See all with her crummy, gummy eye—”

“You have pine-pitch eyes, too! You told me so!”

“That’s a story,” Coyote snarled. “You don’t even know a story when you hear one! Look, do what you like; it’s a free country. I’m hanging around here tonight. I like the action.” She sat down and began patting her hands on the dirt in a soft four-four rhythm and singing under her breath, one of the endless, tuneless songs that kept time from running too fast, that wove the roots of trees and bushes and ferns and grass in the web that held the stream in the streambed and the rock in the rock’s place and the earth together. And the child lay listening.

“I love you,” she said.

Coyote went on singing.

Sun went down the last slope of the west and left a pale green clarity over the desert hills.

Coyote had stopped singing. She sniffed. “Hey,” she said. “Dinner.” She got up and moseyed along the little draw. “Yeah,” she called back softly. “Come on!”

Stiffly, for the fear-crystals had not yet melted out of her joints, the child got up and went to Coyote. Off to one side along the hill was one of the lines, a fence. She didn’t look at it. It was O.K. They were outside it.

“Look at that!”

A smoked salmon, a whole chinook, lay on a little cedar-bark mat.

“An offering! Well, I’ll be darned!” Coyote was so impressed she didn’t even swear. “I haven’t seen one of these for years! I thought they’d forgotten!”

“Offering to whom?”

“Me! Who else? Boy, look at that!”

The child looked dubiously at the salmon.

“It smells funny.”

“How funny?”

“Like burned.”

“It’s smoked, stupid! Come on.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“O.K. It’s not your salmon anyhow. It’s mine. My offering, for me. Hey, you people! You people over there! Coyote thanks you! Keep it up like this, and maybe I’ll do some good things for you, too!”

“Don’t, don’t yell, Mom! They’re not that far away—”

“They’re all my people,” said Coyote with a great gesture, and then sat down cross-legged, broke off a big piece of salmon, and ate.

Evening Star burned like a deep, bright pool of water in the clear sky. Down over the twin hills was a dim suffusion of light, like a fog. The child looked away from it, back at the star.

“Oh,” Coyote said. “Oh shit.”

“What’s wrong?”

“That wasn’t so smart, eating that,” Coyote said, and then held herself and began to shiver, to scream, to choke—her eyes rolled up; her long arms and legs flew out jerking and dancing; foam spurted out between her teeth. Her body arched tremendously backward, and the child, trying to hold her, was thrown violently off by the spasms of her limbs. The child scrambled back and held the body as it spasmed again, twitched, quivered, went still.

By moonrise, Coyote was cold. Till then there had been so much warmth under the tawny coat that the child kept thinking maybe she was alive, maybe if she just kept holding her, keeping her warm, Coyote would recover, she would be all right. The child held her close, not looking at the black lips drawn back from the teeth, the white balls of the eyes. But when the cold came through the fur as the presence of death, the child let the slight, stiff corpse lie down on the dirt.

She went nearby and dug a hole in the stony sand of the draw, a shallow pit. Coyote’s people did not bury their dead; she knew that. But her people did. She carried the small corpse to the pit, laid it down, and covered it with her blue and white bandanna. It was not large enough; the four stiff paws stuck out. The child heaped the body over with sand and rocks and a scurf of sagebrush and tumbleweed held down with more rocks. She also heaped dirt and rocks over the poisoned salmon carcass. Then she stood up and walked away without looking back.

At the top of the hill, she stood and looked across the draw toward the misty glow of the lights of the town lying in the pass between the twin hills.

“I hope you all die in pain,” she said aloud. She turned away and walked down into the desert.

5

It was Chickadee who met her, on the second evening, north of Horse Butte.

“I didn’t cry,” the child said.

“None of us do,” said Chickadee. “Come with me this way now. Come into Grandmother’s house.”

It was underground, but very large, dark and large, and the Grandmother was there at the center, at her loom. She was making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the lightning. As they spoke, she wove.

“Hello, Chickadee. Hello, New Person.”

“Grandmother,” Chickadee greeted her.

The child said, “I’m not one of them.”

Grandmother’s eyes were small and dim. She smiled and wove. The shuttle thrummed through the warp.

“Old Person, then,” said Grandmother. “You’d better go back there now, Granddaughter. That’s where you live.”

“I lived with Coyote. She’s dead. They killed her.”

“Oh, don’t worry about Coyote!” Grandmother said with a little huff of laughter. “She gets killed all the time.”

The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.

“Then I—Could I go back home—to her house—?”

“I don’t think it would work,” Grandmother said. “Do you, Chickadee?”

Chickadee shook her head once, silent.

“It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas. . . . You got outside your people’s time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn’t your father there?”

The child nodded.

“They’ve been looking for you.”

“They have?”

“Oh yes. Ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren’t there—they kept looking.”

“Serves him right. Served them all right,” the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.

“Go on, little one, Granddaughter,” Spider said. “Don’t be afraid. You can live well there. I’ll be there, too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark corners in the basement. Don’t kill me, or I’ll make it rain. . . .”

“I’ll come around,” Chickadee said. “Make gardens for me.”

The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak.

“Will I ever see Coyote?”

“I don’t know,” the Grandmother replied.

The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, “Can I keep my eye?”

“Yes. You can keep your eye.”

“Thank you, Grandmother,” the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope toward the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way, a little bird flew, black-capped, light-winged.

THE BLIND GEOMETER

Kim Stanley Robinson

When you are born blind, your development is different from that of sighted infants. (I was born blind. I know.) The reasons for this difference are fairly obvious. Much normal early infant development, both physical and mental, is linked to vision, which coordinates all sense and action. Without vision, reality is . . . (it’s hard to describe) a sort of void, in which transitory things come to existence when grasped and mouthed and heard; then, when the things fall silent or are dropped, they melt away, they cease to exist. (I wonder if I have not kept a bit of that feeling with me always.) It can be shown that this sense of object permanence must be learned by sighted infants as well—move a toy behind a screen, and very young babies will assume the toy has ceased to exist—but vision (seeing part of a toy [or a person] behind the screen) makes their construction of a sense of object permanence fairly rapid and easy. With the blind child, it is a much harder task; it takes months, sometimes years. And with no sense of an object world, there can be no complementary concept of self; without this concept, all phenomena can be experienced as part of an extended “body.” (Haptic space [or tactile space, the space of the body] expanding to fill visual space . . . ) Every blind infant is in danger of autism.

But we also have, and know that we have, the capacity of complete freedom to transform, in thought and phantasy, our human historical existence . . .

Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry

My first memories are of the Christmas morning when I was some three and a half years old, when one of my gifts was a bag of marbles. I was fascinated by the way the handfuls of marbles felt: heavy, glassy spheres, all so smooth and clickety, all so much the same . . . I was equally impressed by the leather bag that had contained them. It was so pliable, had such a baggy shape, could be drawn up by such a leathery drawstring. (I must tell you, from the viewpoint of tactual aesthetics, there is nothing quite so beautiful as well-oiled leather. My favorite toy was my father’s boot). Anyway, I was rolling on my belly over the marbles spread on the floor (more contact) when I came against the Christmas tree, all prickly and piney. Reaching up to break off some needles to rub between my fingers, I touched an ornament that felt to me, in my excitement, like a lost marble. I yanked on it (and on the branch, no doubt) and—down came the tree.

The alarum afterward is only a blur in my memory, as if it all were on tape, and parts of it forever fast-forwarded to squeaks and trills. Little unspliced snippets of tape: my memory. (My story.)

How often have I searched for snippets before that one, from the long years of my coming to consciousness? How did I first discover the world beyond my body, beyond my searching hands? It was one of my greatest intellectual feats—perhaps the greatest—and yet it is lost to me.

So I read, and learn how other blind infants have accomplished the task. My own life, known to me through words—the world become a text—this happens to me all the time. It is what T.D. Cutsforth called entering the world of “verbal unreality,” and it is part of the fate of the curious blind person.

I never did like Jeremy Blasingame. He was a colleague for a few years, and his office was six doors down from mine. It seemed to me that he was one of those people who are fundamentally uncomfortable around the blind; and it’s always the blind person’s job to put these people at their ease, which gets to be a pain in the ass. (In fact, I usually ignore the problem.) Jeremy always watched me closely (you can tell this by voice), and it was clear that he found it hard to believe that I was one of the co-editors of Topological Geometry, a journal he submitted to occasionally. But he was a good mathematician and a fair topologist, and we published most of his submissions, so that he and I remained superficially friendly.

Still, he was always probing, always picking my brains. At this time I was working hard on the geometry of n-dimensional manifolds, and some of the latest results from CERN and SLAC and the big new cyclotron on Oahu were fitting into the work in an interesting way: It appeared that certain subatomic particles were moving as if in a multidimensional manifold, and I had Sullivan and Wu and some of the other physicists from these places asking me questions. With them I was happy to talk, but with Jeremy I couldn’t see the point. Certain speculations I once made in conversation with him later showed up in one of his papers, and it just seemed to me that he was looking for help without actually saying so.

And there was the matter of his image. In the sun I perceived him as a shifting, flecked brightness. It’s unusual I can see people at all, and as I couldn’t really account for this (was it vision, or something else?) it made me uncomfortable.

But no doubt in retrospect I have somewhat exaggerated this uneasiness.

The first event of my life that I recall that has any emotion attached to it (the earlier ones being mere snips of tape that could have come from anyone’s life, given how much feeling is associated with them) comes from my eighth year, and has to do, emblematically enough, with math. I was adding columns with my Braille punch, and, excited at my new power, I took the bumpy sheet of figures to show my father. He puzzled over it for a while. “Hmm,” he said. “Here, you have to make very sure that the columns are in straight, vertical rows.” His long fingers guided mine down a column. “Twenty-two is off to the left, feel that? You have to keep them all straight.”

Impatiently I pulled my hand away, and the flood of frustration began its tidal wash through me (most familiar of sensations, felt scores of times a day); my voice tightened to a high whine: “But why? It doesn’t matter—”

“Yeah it does.” My father wasn’t one for unnecessary neatness, as I already knew well from tripping over his misplaced briefcase, ice skates, shoes . . . “Let’s see.” He had my fingers again. “You know how numbers work. Here’s twenty-two. Now what that means is two twos and two tens. This two marks the twenty, this two marks the two, even though they’re both just two characters, right? Well, when you’re adding, the column to the far right is the column of ones. Next over is the column of tens, and next over is the column of hundreds. Here you’ve got three hundreds, right? Now if you have the twenty-two over to the left too far, you’ll add the twenty in the hundreds column, as if the number were two hundred twenty rather than twenty-two. And that’ll be wrong. So you have to keep the columns really straight—”

Understanding, ringing me as if I were a big old church bell, and it the clapper. It’s the first time I remember feeling that sensation that has remained one of the enduring joys of my life: to understand.

And understanding mathematical concepts quickly led to power (and how I craved that!), power not only in the abstract world of math, but in the real world of father and school. I remember jumping up and down, my dad laughing cheerily, me dashing to my room to stamp out columns as straight as the ruler’s edge, to add column after column of figures.

Oh, yes: Carlos Oleg Nevsky, here. Mother Mexican, father Russian (military advisor). Born in Mexico City in 2018, three months premature, after my mother suffered a bout of German measles during the pregnancy. Result: almost total blindness (I can tell dark from [bright] light). Lived in Mexico City until father was transferred to Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C., when I was five. Lived in Washington almost continuously since then; my parents divorced when I was fifteen. Mathematics professor at George Washington University since 2043.

One cold spring afternoon I encountered Jeremy Blasingame in the faculty lounge as I went to get a coffee refill—in the lounge, where nobody ever hangs out. “Hello, Carlos, how’s it going?”

“Fine,” I said, reaching about the table for the sugar. “And you?”

“Pretty good. I’ve got a kind of an interesting problem over at my consulting job, though. It’s giving me fits.”

Jeremy worked for the Pentagon in military intelligence or something, but he seldom talked about what he did there, and I certainly never asked. “Oh, yes?” I said, as I found the sugar and spooned some in.

“Yes. They’ve got a coding problem that I bet would interest you.”

“I’m not much for cryptography.” Spy games—the math involved is really very limited. Sweet smell of sugar, dissolving in the lounge’s bad coffee.

“Yes, I know,” Jeremy said. “But”—an edge of frustration in his voice; it’s hard to tell when I’m paying attention, I know (a form of control)—“but this may be a geometer’s code. We have a subject, you see, drawing diagrams.”

A subject. “Hmph,” I said. Some poor spy scribbling away in a cell somewhere . . .

“So—I’ve got one of the drawings here. It reminds me of the theorem in your last article. Some projection, perhaps.”

“Yes?” Now what spy would draw something like that?

“Yeah, and it seems to have something to do with her speech, too. Her verbal sequencing is all dislocated—words in strange order, sometimes.”

“Yes? What happened to her?”

“Well . . . here, check out the drawing.”

I put out a hand. “I’ll take a look.”

“And next time you want coffee, come ask me. I do a proper job of it in my office.”

“All right.”

I suppose I have wondered all my life what it would be like to see. And all my work, no doubt, is an effort to envision things in the inward theater. “I see it feelingly.” In language, in music, most of all in the laws of geometry, I find the best ways I can to see: by analogy to touch, and to sound, and to abstractions. Understand: To know the geometries fully is to comprehend exactly the physical world that light reveals; in a way one is then perceiving something like the Platonic ideal forms underlying the visible phenomena of the world. Sometime the great ringing of comprehension fills me so entirely that I feel I must be seeing; what more could it be? I believe that I see.

Then comes the problem of crossing the street, of finding my misplaced keys. Geometry is little help; it’s back to the hands and ears as eyes, at that point. And then I know that I do not see at all.

Let me put it another way. Projective geometry began in the Renaissance, as an aid to painters newly interested in perspective, in the problems of representing the three-dimensional world on a canvas; it quickly became a mathematics of great power and elegance. The basic procedure can be described quickly: When a geometrical figure is projected from one plane to another (as light, they tell me, projects the image on a slide onto a wall), certain properties of the figure are changed (lengths of sides, measures of angles), while other properties are not—points are still points, lines lines, and certain proportions still hold, among other things.

Now imagine that the visual world is a geometrical figure, which in a way it is. But then imagine that it has been projected inward onto something different, not onto a plane, but onto a Möbius strip or a Klein bottle, say, or onto a manifold actually much more complex and strange than those (you’d be surprised). Certain features of the figure are gone for good (color, for instance), but other essential features remain. And projective geometry is the art of finding what features or qualities survive the transformations of projection . . .

Do you understand me?

A geometry for the self—non-Euclidean, of course; in fact, strictly Nevskyan, as it has to be to help me, as I make my projections from visual space to auditive space, to haptic space.

The next time I met Blasingame he was anxious to hear what I thought of his diagram. (There could be an acoustics of emotion—thus a mathematics of emotion; meanwhile, the ears of the blind do these calculations every day.)

“One drawing isn’t much to go on, Jeremy. I mean, you’re right, it looks like a simple projective drawing, but with some odd lines crossing it. Who knows what they mean? The whole thing might be something scribbled by a kid.”

“She’s not that young. Want to see more?”

“Well . . .” This woman he kept mentioning, some sort of Mata Hari prisoner in the Pentagon, drawing geometrical figures and refusing to speak except in riddles . . . naturally I was intrigued.

“Here, take these anyway. There seems to be a sort of progression.”

“It would help if I could talk to this subject who’s doing all these.”

“Actually, I don’t think so . . . but”—seeing my irritation—“I can bring her by, I think, if these interest you.”

“I’ll check them out.”

“Good, good.” Peculiar edge of excitement in his voice, tension, anticipation of . . . Frowning, I took the papers from him.

That afternoon I shuffled them into my special Xerox machine, and the stiff reproductions rolled out of it heavily ridged. I ran my hands over the raised lines and letters slowly.

Here I must confess to you that most geometrical drawings are almost useless to me. If you consider it, you will quickly see why: Most drawings are two-dimensional representations of what a three-dimensional construction looks like. This does me no good and in fact is extremely confusing. Say I feel a trapezoid on the page; is that meant to be a trapezoid, or is it rather a representation of a rectangle not coterminous with the page it lies on? Or the conventional representation of a plane? Only a description of the drawing will tell me that. Without a description I can only deduce what the figure appears to mean. Much easier to have 3-D models to explore with my hands.

But in this case, not possible. So I swept over the mishmash of ridges with both hands, redrew it with my ridging pen several times over, located the two triangles in it, and the lines connecting the two triangles’ corners, and the lines made by extending the triangles’ sides in one direction. I tried to make from my Taylor collection a 3-D model that accounted for the drawing—try that sometime, and understand how difficult this kind of intellectual feat can be! Projective imagination . . .

Certainly it seemed to be a rough sketch of Desargues’ theorem.

Desargues’ theorem was one of the first theorems clearly concerned with projective geometry; it was proposed by Girard Desargues in the mid-seventeenth century, in between his architectural and engineering efforts, his books on music, etc. It is a relatively simple theorem, showing that two triangles that are projections of each other generate a group of points off to one side that lie on a single line. Its chief interest is in showing the kind of elegant connections that projection so often creates.

(It is also true that this theorem is reciprocal; that is, if you postulate two triangles whose extensions of the sides meet at three collinear points, then it is possible to show that the triangles are projections of each other. As they say in the textbooks, I leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.)

But so what? I mean, it is a beautiful theorem, with the sort of purity characteristic of Renaissance math—but what was it doing in a drawing made by some poor prisoner of the Pentagon?

I considered this as I walked to my health club, Warren’s Spa (considered it secondarily, anyway, and no doubt subconsciously; my primary concerns were the streets and the traffic. Washington’s streets bear a certain resemblance to one of those confusing geometrical diagrams I described [the state streets crossing diagonally the regular gridwork, creating a variety of intersections]; happily, one doesn’t have to comprehend all the city at once to walk in it. But it is easy to become lost. So as I walked I concentrated on distances, on the sounds of the streets that tended to remain constant, on smells [the dirt of the park at M and New Hampshire, the hot dog vendor on 21st and K]; meanwhile, my cane established the world directly before my feet, my sonar shades whistled rising or falling notes as objects approached or receded . . . It takes some work just to get from point A to point B without getting disoriented [at which point one has to grind one’s teeth and ask for directions] but it can be done, it is one of those small tasks/accomplishments [one chooses which, every time] that the blind cannot escape)—still, I did consider the matter of the drawing as I walked.

On 21st and H, I was pleased to smell the pretzel cart of my friend Ramon, who is also blind. His cart is the only one where the hot plate hasn’t roasted several pretzels to that metallic burnt odor that all the other carts put off; Ramon prefers the clean smell of freshly baked dough, and he claims it brings him more customers, which I certainly believe. “Change only, please,” he was saying to someone briskly, “there’s a change machine on the other side of the cart for your convenience, thanks. Hot pretzels! Hot pretzels, one dollar!”

“Hey there, Superblink!” I called as I approached him.

“Hey yourself, Professor Superblink,” he replied. (Superblink is a mildly derogatory name used by irritated sighted social service people to describe those of their blind colleagues who are aggressively or ostentatiously competent in getting around, etc., who make a display of their competence. Naturally, we have appropriated the term for our own use; sometimes it means the same thing for us—when used in the third person, usually—but in the second person, it’s a term of affection.) “Want a pretzel?”

“Sure.”

“You off to the gym?”

“Yeah, I’m going to throw. Next time we play you’re in trouble.”

“That’ll be the day, when my main mark starts beating me!”

I put four quarters in his callused hand, and he gave me a pretzel. “Here’s a puzzle for you,” I said. “Why would someone try to convey a message by geometrical diagram?”

He laughed. “Don’t ask me, that’s your department!”

“But the message isn’t for me.”

“Are you sure about that?”

I frowned.

At the health club I greeted Warren and Amanda at the front desk. They were laughing over a headline in the tabloid newspaper Amanda was shaking; they devoured those things and pasted the best headlines all over the gym.

“What’s the gem of the day?” I asked.

“How about ‘Gay Bigfoot Molests Young Boys’ ?” Warren suggested.

“Or ‘Woman Found Guilty of Turning Husband into Bank President,’ ” Amanda said, giggling. “She drugged him and did ‘bemod’ to him until he went from teller to president.”

Warren said, “I’ll have to do that for you, eh, Amanda?”

“Make me something better than a bank president.”

Warren clicked his tongue. “Entirely too many designer drugs, these days. Come on, Carlos, I’ll get the range turned on.” I went to the locker room and changed, and when I got to the target room Warren was just done setting it up. “Ready to go,” he said cheerily as he rolled past me.

I stepped in, closed the door, and walked out to the center of the room, where a waist-high wire column was filled with baseballs. I pulled out a baseball, hefted it, felt the stitching. A baseball is a beautiful object: nicely flared curves of the seams over the surface of a perfect sphere, exactly the right weight for throwing.

I turned on the range with a flick of a switch and stepped away from the feeder, a ball in each hand. Now it was quite silent, only the slightest whirr faintly breathing through the soundproofed walls. I did what I could to reduce the sound of my own breathing, heard my heartbeat in my ears.

Then a beep behind me to my left, and low; I whirled and threw. Dull thud. “Right . . . low,” said the machine voice from above, softly. Beep—I threw again: “Right . . . high,” it said louder, meaning I had missed by more. “Shit,” I said as I got another two balls. “Bad start.”

Beep—a hard throw to my left—clang! “Yeah!” There is very little in life more satisfying than the bell-like clanging of the target circle when hit square. It rings at about middle C with several overtones, like a small, thick church bell hit with a hammer. The sound of success.

Seven more throws, four more hits. “Five for ten,” the machine voice said. “Average strike time, one point three five seconds. Fastest strike time, point eight four seconds.”

Ramon sometimes hit the target in half a second or less, but I needed to hear the full beep to keep my average up. I set up for another round, pushed the button, got quiet; beep throw, beep throw, working to shift my feet faster, to follow through, to use the information from my misses to correct for the next time the target was near the floor, or the ceiling, or behind me (my weakness is the low ones; I can’t seem to throw down accurately). And as I warmed up I threw harder and harder . . . just throwing a baseball as hard as you can is a joy in itself. And then to set that bell ringing! Clang! It chimes every cell of you.

But when I quit and took a shower, and stood before my locker and reached in to free my shirt from a snag on the top of the door, my fingers brushed a small metal wire stuck to an upper inside corner, where the door would usually conceal it from both me and my sighted companions; it came away when I pulled on it. Fingering the short length I couldn’t be certain what it was, but I had my suspicions, so I took it to my friend James Gold, who works in acoustics in the engineering department, and had him take a confidential look at it.

“It’s a little remote microphone, all right,” he said, and then joked, “Who’s bugging you, Carlos?”

He got serious when I asked him where I could get a system like that for myself.

John Metcalf—“Blind Jack of Knaresborough”—(1717—1810). At six he lost his sight through smallpox, at nine he could get on pretty well unaided, at fourteen he announced his intention of disregarding his affliction thenceforward and of behaving in every respect as a normal human being. It is true that immediately on this brave resolve he fell into a gravel pit and received a serious hurt while escaping, under pursuit, from an orchard he was robbing . . . fortunately this did not affect his self-reliance. At twenty he had made a reputation as a pugilist.(!)

Ernest Bramah, Introduction,

The Eyes of Max Carrados

When I was young I loved to read Bramah’s stories about Max Carrados, the blind detective. Carrados could hear, smell, and feel with incredible sensitivity, and his ingenious deductions were never short of brilliant; he was fearless in a pinch; also, he was rich and had a mansion, and a secretary, manservant, and chauffeur who acted as his eyes. All great stuff for the imaginative young reader, as certainly I was. I read every book I could get my hands on; the voice of my reading machine was more familiar to me than any human voice that I knew. Between that reading and my mathematical work, I could have easily withdrawn from the world of my own experience into Cutsforth’s “verbal unreality,” and babbled on like Helen Keller about the shapes of clouds and the colors of flowers and the like. The world become nothing but a series of texts; sounds kind of like deconstructionism, doesn’t it? And of course at an older age I was enamored of the deconstructionists of the last century. The world as text: Husserl’s The Origin of Geometry is 22 pages long, Derrida’s Introduction to the Origin of Geometry is 153 pages long; you can see why it would have appealed to me. If, as the deconstructionists seemed to say, the world is nothing but a collection of texts, and I can read, then I am not missing anything by being blind, am I?

The young can be very stubborn, very stupid.

“All right, Jeremy,” I said. “Let me meet this mysterious subject of yours who draws all this stuff.”

“You want to?” he said, trying to conceal his excitement.

“Sure,” I replied. “I’m not going to find out any more about all this until I do.” My own subtext, yes; but I am better at hiding such things than Jeremy is.

“What have you found out? Do the diagrams mean anything to you?”

“Not much. You know me, Jeremy, drawings are my weakness. I’d rather have her do it in models, or writing, or verbally. You’ll have to bring her by if you want me to continue.”

“Well, okay. I’ll see what I can do. She’s not much help, though. You’ll find out.” But he was pleased.

One time in high school I was walking out of the gym after P.E., and I heard one of my coaches (one of the best teachers I have ever had) in his office, speaking to someone (he must have had his back to me)—he said, “You know, it’s not the physical handicaps that will be the problem for most of these kids. It’s the emotional problems that tend to come with the handicaps that will be the real burden.”

I was in my office listening to my reading machine. Its flat, uninflected mechanical voice (almost unintelligible to some of my colleagues) had over the years become a sort of helpless, stupid friend. I called it George, and was always programming into it another pronunciation rule to try to aid its poor speech, but to no avail; George always found new ways to butcher the language. I put the book facedown on the glass; “Finding first line,” croaked George, as the scanner inside the machine thumped around. Then it read from Roberto Torretti, quoting and discussing Ernst Mach. (Hear this spoken in the most stilted, awkward, syllable-by-syllable mispronunciation that you can imagine.)

“ ‘Our notions of space are rooted in our physiological constitution’ ” (George raises his voice in pitch to indicate italics, which also slow him down considerably). “ ‘Geometric concepts are the product of the idealization of physical experiences of space.’ Physiological space is quite different from the infinite, isotropic, metric space of classical geometry and physics. It can, at most, be structured as a topological space. When viewed in this way, it naturally falls into several components: visual or optic space, tactile or haptic space, auditive space, etc. Optic space is anisotropic, finite, limited. Haptic space or ‘the space of our skin corresponds to a two-dimensional, finite, unlimited (closed) Riemannian space.’ This is nonsense, for R-spaces are metric, while haptic space is not. I take it that Mach means to say that the latter can naturally be regarded as a two-dimensional compact connected topological space. Mach does not emphasize enough the disconnectedness of haptic from optic space—”

There came four quick knocks at my door. I pressed the button on George that stopped him and said, “Come in!”

The door opened. “Carlos!”

“Jeremy,” I said. “How are you?”

“Fine. I’ve brought Mary Unser with me—you know, the one who drew—”

I stood, feeling/hearing the presence of the other in the room. And there are times (like this one) when you know the other is in some odd, undefinable way, different, or . . . (Our language is not made for the experience of the blind.) “I’m glad to meet you.”

I have said that I can tell dark from light, and I can, though it is seldom very useful information. In this case, however, I was startled to have my attention drawn to my “sight”—for this woman was darker than other people, she was a sort of bundle of darkness in the room, her face distinctly lighter than the rest of her (or was that her face, exactly?).

A long pause. Then: “On border stand we n-dimensional space the,” she said. Coming just after George’s reading, I was struck by a certain similarity: The mechanical lilt from word to word; the basic incomprehension of a reading machine . . . Goose bumps rose on my forearms.

Her voice itself, on the other hand, had George beat hands down. Fundamentally vibrant under the odd intonation, it was a voice with a very thick timbre, a bassoon or a hurdy-gurdy of a voice, with the buzz of someone who habitually speaks partly through the sinuses; this combined with over-relaxed vocal cords, what speech pathologists call glottal fry. Usually nasal voices are not pleasant, but pitch them low enough . . .

She spoke again, more slowly (definitely glottal fry): “We stand on the border of n-dimensional space.”

“Hey,” Jeremy said. “Pretty good!” He explained: “Her word order isn’t usually as . . . ordinary as that.”

“So I gathered,” I said. “Mary, what do you mean by that?”

“I—oh—” A kazoo squeak of distress, pain. I approached her, put out a hand. She took it as if to shake: a hand about the size of mine, narrow, strong fat muscle at base of thumb; trembling distinctly.

“I work on the geometries of topologically complex spaces,” I said. “I am more likely than most to understand what you say.”

“Are within never see we points us.”

“That’s true.” But there was something wrong here, something I didn’t like, though I couldn’t tell exactly what it was. Had she spoken toward Jeremy? Speaking to me while she looked at him? Bundle of darkness in the dark . . . “But why are your sentences so disordered, Mary? Your words don’t come out in the order you thought them. You must know that, since you understand us.”

“Folded—oh!—” Again the double-reed squeak, and suddenly she was weeping, trembling hard; we sat her down on my visitor’s couch, and Jeremy got her a glass of water while she quaked in my hands. I stroked her hair (short, loosely curled, wild) and took the opportunity for a quick phrenological check: skull regular and, as far as I could tell, undamaged; temples wide, distinct; same for eye sockets; nose a fairly ordinary pyramidal segment, no bridge to speak of; narrow cheeks, wet with tears. She reached up and took my right hand, squeezed it hard, three times fast, three times slow, all the time sobbing and sort of hiccupping words: “Pain it, station. I, oh, fold end, bright, light, space fold, oh, ohhh . . .”

Well, the direct question is not always the best way. Jeremy returned with a glass of water, and drinking some seemed to calm her. Jeremy said, “Perhaps we could try again later. Although . . .” He didn’t seem very surprised.

“Sure,” I said. “Listen, Mary, I’ll talk to you again when you’re feeling better.”

After Jeremy got her out of the office and disposed of her (how? with whom?) he returned to the seventh floor.

“So what the hell happened to her?” I asked angrily. “Why is she like that?”

“We aren’t completely sure,” he said slowly. “Here’s why. She was one of the scientists staffing Tsiolkovsky Base Five, up in the mountains on the back side of the moon, you know. She’s an astronomer and cosmologist. Well—I have to ask you to keep this quiet—one day Base Five stopped all broadcasting, and when they went over to see what was wrong, they found only her, alone in the station in a sort of catatonic state. No sign of the other scientists or station crew—eighteen people gone without a trace. And nothing much different to explain what had happened, either.”

I hmphed. “What do they think happened?”

“They’re still not sure. Apparently, no one else was in the area, or could have been, et cetera. It’s been suggested by the Russians, who had ten people there, that this could be first contact—you know, that aliens took the missing ones, and somehow disarranged Mary’s thought processes, leaving her behind as a messenger that isn’t working. Her brain scans are bizarre. I mean, it doesn’t sound very likely . . .”

“No.”

“But it’s the only theory that explains everything they found there. Some of which they won’t tell me about. So, we’re doing what we can to get Mary’s testimony, but as you can see, it’s hard. She seems most comfortable drawing diagrams.”

“Next time we’ll start with that.”

“Okay. Any other ideas?”

“No,” I lied. “When can you bring her back again?”

As if because I was blind I couldn’t tell I was being duped! I struck fist into palm angrily. Oh, they were making a mistake, all right. They didn’t know how much the voice reveals. The voice’s secret expressivity reveals so much!—the language really is not adequate to tell it; we need that mathematics of emotion . . . In the high school for the blind that I briefly attended for some of my classes, it often happened that a new teacher was instantly disliked, for some falseness in his or her voice, some quality of condescension or pity or self-congratulation that the teacher (and his or her superiors) thought completely concealed, if they knew of it at all. But it was entirely obvious to the students, because the voice (if what I have heard is true) is much more revealing than facial expressions; certainly it is less under our control. This is what makes most acting performances so unsatisfactory to me; the vocal qualities are so stylized, so removed from those of real life . . .

And here, I thought, I was witnessing a performance.

There is a moment in Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’Amen when one piano is playing a progression of major chords, very traditionally harmonic, while on another piano high pairs of notes plonk down across the other’s chords, ruining their harmony, crying out, Something’s wrong! Something’s wrong!

I sat at my desk and swayed side to side, living just such a moment. Something was wrong.

When I collected myself I called the department secretary, who had a view of the hall to the elevator. “Delphina, did Jeremy just leave?”

“Yes, Carlos. Do you want me to try and catch him?”

“No, I only need a book he left in his office. Can I borrow the master key and get it?”

“Okay.”

I got the key, entered Jeremy’s office, closed the door. One of the tiny pickups that James Gold had gotten for me fit right under the snap-in plug of the telephone cord. Then a microphone under the desk, behind a drawer. And out. (I have to be bold every day, you see, just to get by. But they didn’t know that.)

Back in my office I closed and locked the door, and began everything into it—and then, sometimes, hearing that beepball lance off into the distance and smack into Ramon’s glove. It was great. Nothing like outfield.

And next inning I hit one hard, and that’s great too. That feeling goes right up your arms and all through you.

Walking home I brooded over Max Carrados, blind detective, and over Horatio Hornblower, sighted naval captain. Over Thomas Gore, the blind senator from Oklahoma. As a boy his fantasy was to become a senator. He read the Congressional Record, joined the debate team, organized his whole life around the project. And he became senator. I knew that sort of fantasy as well as I knew the vengeful adolescent daydreams: All through my youth I dreamed of being a mathematician. And here I was. So one could do it. One could imagine doing something, and then do it.

But that meant that one had, by definition, imagined something possible. And one couldn’t always say ahead of the attempt whether one had imagined the possible or the impossible. And even if one had imagined something possible, that didn’t guarantee a successful execution of the plan.

The team we had played was called Helen Keller Jokes (there are some good ones, too [they come {of course} from Australia] but I won’t go into that). It’s sad that such an intelligent woman was so miseducated—not so much by Sullivan as by her whole era: all that treacly Victorian sentimentality poured into her: “The fishing villages of Cornwall are very picturesque, seen either from the beaches or the hilltops, with all their boats riding to their moorings or sailing about in the harbor. When the moon, large and serene, floats up the sky, leaving in the water a long track of brightness like a plow breaking up a soil of silver, I can only sigh my ecstasy”—come on, Helen. Now that is living in a world of texts.

But didn’t I live most (all?) of my life in texts as least as unreal to me as moonlight on water was to Helen Keller? These n-dimensional manifolds . . . I suppose the basis for my abilities in them was the lived reality of haptic space, but still, it was many removes from my actual experience. And so was the situation I found myself confronted with now, Jeremy and Mary acting out some drama I did not comprehend . . . and so was my plan to deal with it. Verbalism . . . words versus reality.

I caressed my glove, refelt the knock of bat against beepball. Brooded over my plan.

The next time Jeremy brought Mary Unser by my office, I said very little. I got out my “visitor’s supply” of paper and pencils and set her down at the coffee table. I brought over my models: subatomic particles breaking up in a spray of wire lines, like water out of a showerhead; strawlike Taylor sticks for model making; polyhedric blocks of every kind. And I sat down with the ridged sheets made from her earlier drawings, as well as the models I had attempted to make of them, and I started asking very limited questions. “What does this line mean? Does it go before or behind? Is this R or R’ ? Have I got this right?”

And she would honk a sort of laugh, or say, “No, no, no, no” (no problem with sequencing there), and draw furiously. I took the pages as she finished them and put them in my Xerox, took out the ridged, bumpy sheets and had her guide my fingers over them. Even so they were difficult, and with a squeak of frustration she went to the straw models, clicking together triangles, parallels, etc. This was easier, but eventually she reached a limit here too. “Need drawing beyond,” she said.

“Fine. Write down whatever you want.”

She wrote and then read aloud to me, or I put it through the Xerox machine marked translation to Braille. And we forged on, with Jeremy looking over our shoulders the whole time.

And eventually we came very close to the edge of my work, following subatomic particles down into the microdimensions where they appeared to make their “jumps.” I had proposed an n-dimensional topological manifold, where 1<n< infinity, so that the continuum being mapped fluctuated between one and some finite number of dimensions, going from a curving line to a sort of n-dimensional Swiss cheese, if you like, depending on the amounts of energy displayed in the area, in any of the four “forms” of electro-magnetism, gravity, or the strong and weak interactions. The geometry for this manifold-pattern (so close to the experience of haptic space) had, as I have said, attracted the attention of physicists at CERN and SLAC—but there were still unexplained data, as far as I could tell, and the truth was, I had not published this work.

So here I was “conversing” with a young woman who in ordinary conversations could not order her words correctly—who in this realm spoke with perfect coherence—who was in fact speaking about (inquiring about?) the edges of my own private work.

The kind of work that Jeremy Blasingame used to ask me about so curiously.

I sighed. We had been going on for two or three hours, and I sat back on the couch. My hand was taken up in Mary’s, given a reassuring squeeze. I didn’t know what to make of it. “I’m tired.”

“I feel better,” she said. “Easier to talk way—this way.”

“Ah,” I said. I took up the model of a positron hitting a “stationary” muon: a wire tree, trunk suddenly bursting into a mass of curling branches . . . So it was here: one set of events, a whole scattering of explanations. Still, the bulk of the particles shot out in a single general direction (the truths of haptic space).

She let go of my hand to make one last diagram. Then she Xeroxed it for me, and guided my hands over the ridged copy.

Once again it was Desargues’ theorem.

At this point Mary said, “Mr. Blasingame, I need a drink of water.” He went out to the hall water dispenser, and she quickly took my forefinger between her finger and thumb (pads flattening with an inappropriate pressure, until my finger ached)—squeezed twice, and jabbed my finger first onto her leg, then onto the diagram, tracing out one of the triangles. She repeated the movements, then poked my leg and traced out the other triangle. Then she traced down the line off to the side, the one generated by the projection of the two triangles, over and over. What did she mean?

Jeremy returned, and she let my hand go. Then in a while, after the amenities (hard handshake, quivering hand), Jeremy whisked her off.

When he returned, I said, “Jeremy, is there any chance I can talk to her alone? I think she’s made nervous by your presence—the associations, you know. She really does have an interesting perspective on the n-dimensional manifold, but she gets confused when she stops and interacts with you. I’d just like to take her for a walk, you know—down by the canal, or the Tidal Basin, perhaps, and talk things over with her. It might get the results you want.”

“I’ll see what they say,” Jeremy said in an expressionless voice.

That night I put on a pair of earplugs and played the tape of Jeremy’s phone conversations. In one when the phone was picked up he said, “He wants to talk with her alone now.”

“Fine,” said a tenor voice. “She’s prepared for that.”

“This weekend?”

“If he agrees.” Click.

I listen to music. I listen to twentieth-century composers the most, because many of them made their music out of the sounds of the world we live in now, the world of jets and sirens and industrial machinery, as well as bird song and woodblock and the human voice. Messiaen, Partch, Reich, Glass, Shapiro, Subotnik, Ligeti, Penderecki—these first explorers away from the orchestra and the classical tradition remain for me the voices of our age; they speak to me. In fact, they speak for me; in their dissonance and confusion and anger I hear myself being expressed. And so I listen to their difficult, complex music because I understand it, which gives me pleasure, and because while doing so I am participating fully, I am excelling, no one can bring more to the act than I. I am in control.

I listened to music.

You see, these n-dimensional manifolds . . . if we understand them well enough to manipulate them, to tap their energy . . . well, there is a tremendous amount of energy contained in those particles. That kind of energy means power, and power . . . draws the powerful. Or those seeking power, fighting for it. I began to feel the extent of the danger.

She was quiet as we walked across the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial. I think she would have stopped me if I had spoken about anything important. But I knew enough to say nothing, and I think she guessed I knew she was bugged. I held the back of her upper arm loosely in my left hand and let her guide us. A sunny, windy day, with occasional clouds obscuring the sun for a minute or two. Down by the Mall’s lake the slightly stagnant smell of wet algae tinged all the other scents: grass, dust, the double strand of lighter fluid and cooking meat . . . The sink of darkness swirling around the Vietnam Memorial. Pigeons cooed their weird, larger-than-life coos and flapped away noisily as we walked through their affairs. We sat on grass that had been recently cut, and I brushed a hand over the stiff blades.

A curious procedure, this conversation. No visuals, for me; and perhaps we were being watched, as well. (Such a common anxiety of the blind, the fear of being watched—and here it was true.) And we couldn’t talk freely, even though at the same time we had to say something, to keep Blasingame and friends from thinking I was aware of anything wrong. “Nice day.” “Yeah, I’d love to be out on the water on a day like this.” “Really?” “Yeah.”

And all the while, two fingers held one finger. My hands are my eyes, and always have been. Now they were as expressive as voice, as receptive as ever touch can be, and into haptic space we projected a conversation of rare urgency. Are you okay? I’m okay. Do you know what’s going on? Not entirely, can’t explain.

“Let’s walk down to the paddle boats and go out on the basin, then.”

I said, “Your speech is much better today.”

She squeezed my hand thrice, hard. False information? “I . . . had . . . electroshock.” Her voice slid, slurred; it wasn’t entirely under control.

“It seems to have helped.”

“Yes. Sometimes.”

“And the ordering of your mathematical thought?”

Buzzing laugh, hurdy-gurdy voice. “I don’t know—more disarranged, perhaps—complementary procedure? You’ll have to tell me.”

“As a cosmologist did you work in this area?”

“The topology of the microdimensions apparently determines both gravity and the weak interaction, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I couldn’t say. I’m not much of a physicist.”

Three squeezes again. “But you must have an idea or two about it?”

“Not really. You?”

“Perhaps . . . once. But it seems to me your work is directly concerned with it.”

“Not that I know of.”

Stalemate. Was that right? I was becoming more and more curious about this woman, whose signals to me were so mixed . . . Once again she seemed a bundling of darkness in the day, a whirlpool where all lightness disappeared, except for around her head. (I suppose I imagine all that I “see,” I suppose they are always haptic visions.)

“Are you wearing dark clothes?”

“Not really. Red, beige . . .”

As we walked I held her arm more tightly. She was about my height. Her arm muscles were distinct, and her lats pushed out from her ribs. “You must swim.”

“Weight lifting, I’m afraid. They made us on Luna.”

“On Luna,” I repeated.

“Yes,” and she fell silent.

This was really impossible. I didn’t think she was completely an ally—in fact I thought she was lying—but I felt an underlying sympathy from her, and a sense of conspiracy with her, that grew more powerful the longer we were together. The problem was, what did that feeling mean? Without the ability to converse freely, I was stymied in my attempts to learn more; pushed this way and that in the cross-currents of her behavior, I could only wonder what she was thinking. And what our listeners made of this mostly silent day in the sun.

So we paddled out onto the Tidal Basin and talked from time to time about the scene around us. I loved the feel of being on water—the gentle rocking over other boats’ wakes, the wet stale smell. “Are the cherry trees blossoming still?”

“Oh, yes. Not quite at the peak, but just past. It’s beautiful. Here”—she leaned out—“here’s one about to drown.” She put it in my hand. I sniffed at it. “Do they smell?”

“No, not much,” I said. “The prettier people say flowers are, the less scent they seem to have. Did you ever notice that?”

“I guess. I like the scent of roses.”

“It’s faint, though. These blossoms must be very beautiful—they smell hardly at all.”

“En masse they are lovely. I wish you could see them.”

I shrugged. “And I wish you could touch their petals, or feel us bouncing about as I do. I have enough sense data to keep entertained.”

“Yes . . . I suppose you do.” She left her hand covering mine. “I suppose we’re out quite a ways,” I said. So that we couldn’t be seen well from the shore, I meant.

“From the dock, anyway. We’re actually almost across the basin.”

I moved my hand from under hers and held her shoulder. Deep hollow behind her collarbone. This contact, this conversation of touch . . . it was most expressive hand to hand, and so I took her hand again, and our fingers made random entanglements, explorations. Children shouting, then laughing in boats to our left, voices charged with excitement. How to speak in this language of touch?

Well, we all know that. Fingertips, brushing lines of the palm; ruffling the fine hair at the back of the wrist; fingers pressing each other back: These are sentences, certainly. And it is a difficult language to lie in. That catlike, sensuous stretch, under my stroking fingertips . . .

“We’ve got a clear run ahead of us,” she said after a time, voice charged with humming overtones.

“Stoke the furnaces,” I cried. “Damn the torpedoes!” And with a gurgling clug-clug-clug-clug we paddle-wheeled over the basin into the fresh wet wind, sun on our faces, laughing at the release from tension (bassoon and baritone), crying out, “Mark Twain!” or “Snag dead ahead!” in jocular tones, entwined hands crushing the other as we pedaled harder and harder . . . “Down the Potomac!” “Across the sea!” “Through the gates of Hercules!” “On to the Golden Fleece!” Spray cold on the breeze—

She stopped pedaling, and we swerved left.

“We’re almost back,” she said quietly.

We let the boat drift in, without a word.

My bugs told me that my office had been broken into, by two, possibly three, people, only one of whom spoke—a man, in an undertone: “Try the file cabinet.” The cabinet drawers were rolled out (familiar clicking of the runners over the ball bearings), and the desk drawers too, and then there was the sound of paper shuffling, of things being knocked about.

I also got an interesting phone conversation over Jeremy’s phone. The call was incoming; Jeremy said, “Yes?” and a male voice—the same one Jeremy had called earlier—said, “She says he’s unwilling to go into any detail.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Jeremy said. “But I’m sure he’s got—”

“Yes, I know. Go ahead and try what we discussed.”

The break-in, I supposed.

“Okay.” Click.

No doubt it never even occurred to them that I might turn the tables on them, or act against them in any way, or even figure out that something was strange. It made me furious.

At the same time I was frightened. You feel the lines of force, living in Washington, D.C.; feel the struggle for power among the shadowy groups surrounding the official government; read of the unsolved murders, of shadowy people whose jobs are not made clear . . . As a blind person, one feels apart from the nebulous world of intrigue and hidden force, on the edge by reason of disability. (“No one harms a blind man.”) Now I knew I was part of it, pulled in and on my own. It was frightening.

One night I was immersed in Harry Partch’s Cloud Chamber Music, floating in those big glassy notes, when my doorbell rang. I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“It’s Mary Unser. May I come up?”

“Sure.” I pushed the button and walked onto the landing.

She came up the stairs alone. “Sorry to bother you at home,” she buzzed, out of breath. Such a voice. “I looked up your address in the phone book. I’m not supposed . . .”

She stood before me, touched my right arm. I lifted my hand and held her elbow. “Yes?”

Nervous, resonant laugh. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

Then you’ll soon be in trouble, I wanted to say. But surely she knew my apartment would be bugged? Surely she was supposed to be here? She was trembling violently, enough so that I put up my other hand and held her by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. No.” Falling oboe tones, laugh that was not a laugh . . . She seemed frightened, very frightened. I thought, if she is acting she is very good.

“Come on in,” I said, and led her inside. I went to the stereo and turned down the Partch—then reconsidered, and turned it back up. “Have a seat—the couch is nice.” I was nervous myself. “Would you like something to drink?” Quite suddenly it all seemed unreal, a dream, one of my fantasies. Phantasmagoric cloud chamber ringing to things, how did I know what was real?

“No. Or yes.” She laughed again, that laugh that was not a laugh.

“I’ve got some beer.” I went to the refrigerator, got a couple of bottles, opened them.

“So what’s going on?” I said as I sat down beside her. As she spoke I drank from my beer, and she stopped from time to time to take long swallows.

“Well, I feel that the more I understand what you’re saying about the transfer of energies between n-dimensional manifolds, the better I understand what . . . happened to me.” But now there was a different sound to her voice—an overtone was gone, it was less resonant, less nasal.

I said, “I don’t know what I can tell you. It’s not something I can talk about, or even write down. What I can express, I have, you know. In papers.” This a bit louder, for the benefit of our audience. (If there was one.)

“Well . . .” and her hand, under mine, began to tremble again.

We sat there for a very long time, and all during that time we conversed through those two hands, saying things I can scarcely recall now, because we have no language for that sort of thing. But they were important things nevertheless, and after a while I said, “Here. Come with me. I’m on the top floor, so I have a sort of porch on the roof. Finish your beer. It’s a pleasant night out, you’ll feel better outside.” I led her through the kitchen to the pantry, where the door to the backstairs was. “Go on up.” I went back to the stereo and put on Jarrett’s Köln Concert, loud enough so we’d be able to hear it. Then I went up the stairs onto the roof, and crunched over the tarred gravel.

This was one of my favorite places. The sides of the building came up to the chest around the edge of the roof, and on two sides large willows draped their branches over it, making it a sort of haven. I had set a big old wreck of a couch out there, and on certain nights when the wind was up and the air was cool, I would lie back on it with a bumpy Braille planisphere in my hands, listening to Scholz’s Starcharts and feeling that with those projections I knew what it was to see the night sky.

“This is nice,” she said.

“Isn’t it?” I pulled the plastic sheet from the couch, and we sat.

“Carlos?”

“Yes?”

“I—I—” that double-reed squeak.

I put an arm around her. “Please,” I said, suddenly upset myself. “Not now. Not now. Just relax. Please.” And she turned into me, her head rested on my shoulder; she trembled. I dug my fingers into her hair and slowly pulled them through the tangles. Shoulder length, no more. I cupped her ears, stroked her neck. She calmed.

Time passed, and I only caressed. No other thought, no other perception. How long this went on I couldn’t say—perhaps a half-hour? Perhaps longer. She made a sort of purring kazoo sound, and I leaned forward and kissed her. Jarrett’s voice, crying out briefly over a fluid run of piano notes. She pulled me to her; her breath caught, rushed out of her. The kiss became intense, tongues dancing together in a whole intercourse of their own, which I felt all through me in that chakra way, neck, spine, belly, groin, nothing but kiss. And without the slightest bit of either intention or resistance, I fell into it.

I remember a college friend once asked me, hesitantly, if I didn’t have trouble with my love life. “Isn’t it hard to tell when they . . . want to?” I had laughed. The whole process, I had wanted to say, was amazingly easy. The blinds’ dependence on touch puts them in an advance position, so to speak: Using hands to see faces, being led by the hand (being dependent), one has already crossed what Russ calls the border between the world of not-sex and the world of sex; once over that border (with an other feeling protective) . . .

My hands explored her body, discovering it then and there for the first time—as intensely exciting a moment as there is, in the whole process. I suppose I expect narrow-cheeked people to be narrow hipped (it’s mostly true, you’ll find), but it wasn’t so, in this case—her hips flared in those feminine curves that one can only hold, without ever getting used to (without ever [the otherness of the other] quite believing). On their own my fingers slipped under clothes, between buttons, as adroit as little mice, clever, lusty little creatures, unbuttoning blouse, reaching behind to undo bra with a twist. She shrugged out of them both and I felt the softness of her breasts while she tugged at my belt. I shifted, rolled, put my ear to her hard sternum, kissing the inside of one breast as it pressed against my face, feeling that quick heartbeat speak to me . . . She moved me back, got me unzipped, we paused for a speedy moment and got the rest of our clothes off, fumbling at our own and each other’s until they were clear. Then it was flesh to flesh, skin to skin, in a single haptic space jumping with energy, with the insistent yes of caresses, mouth to mouth, four hands full, body to body, with breasts and erect penis crushed, as it were, between two pulsing walls of muscle.

The skin is the ultimate voice.

So we made love. As we did (my feet jabbing the end of the couch, which was quite broad enough, but a little too short) I arched up and let in the breeze between us (cool on our sweat), leaned down and sucked on first one nipple and then the other—

(thus becoming helpless in a sense, a needy infant, utterly dependent [because for the blind from birth, mother love is even more crucial than for the rest of us; the blind depend on their mothers for almost everything, for the sense of object permanence, for the education that makes the distinction between self and world, for the beginning of language, and also for the establishment of a private language that compensates for the lack of sight {if your mother doesn’t know that a sweeping hand means “I want”!} and bridges the way to the common tongue—without all that, which only a mother can give, the blind infant is lost; without mother love beyond mother love, the blind child will very likely go mad] so that to suck on a lover’s nipple brings back that primal world of trust and need, I am sure of it)

—I was sure of it even then, as I made love to this strange other Mary Unser, a woman as unknown to me as any I had ever spoken with. At least until now. Now with each plunge into her (cylinder capped by cone, sliding through cylinder into rough sphere, neuron to neuron, millions of them fusing across, so that I could not tell where I stopped and she began) I learned more about her, the shape of her, her rhythms, her whole nerve-reality, spoken to me in movement and touch (spread hands holding my back, flanks, bottom) and in those broken bassoon tones that were like someone humming, briefly, involuntarily. “Ah,” I said happily at all this sensation, all this new knowledge, feeling all my skin and all my nerves swirl up like a gust of wind into my spine, the back of my balls, to pitch into her all my self—

When we were done (oboe squeaks) I slid down, bending my knees so my feet stuck up in the air. I wiggled my toes in the breeze. Faint traffic noises played a sort of city music to accompany the piano in the apartment. From the airshaft came the sound of a chorus of pigeons, sounding like monkeys with their jaws wired shut, trying to chatter. Mary’s skin was damp and I licked it, loving the salt. Patch of darkness in my blur of vision, darkness bundling in it . . . She rolled onto her side and my hands played over her. Her biceps made a smooth, hard bulge. There were several moles on her back, like little raisins half buried in her skin. I pushed them down, fingered the knobs of her spine. The muscles of her back put her spine in a deep trough of flesh.

I remembered a day my blind science class was taken to a museum, where we were allowed to feel a skeleton. All those hard bones, in just the right places; it made perfect sense, it was exactly as if felt under skin, really—there were no big surprises. But I remember being so upset by the experience of feeling the skeleton that I had to go outside and sit down on the museum steps. I don’t know to this day exactly why I was so shaken, but I suppose (all those hard things left behind) it was something like this: It was frightening to know how real we were!

Now I tugged at her, gently. “Who are you, then?”

“Not now.” And as I started to speak again she put a finger to my mouth (scent of us): “A friend.” Buzzing nasal whisper, like a tuning fork, like a voice I was beginning (and this scared me, for I knew I did not know her) to love: “A friend . . .”

At a certain point in geometrical thinking, vision becomes only an obstruction. Those used to visualizing theorems (as in Euclidean geometry) reach a point, in the n-dimensional manifolds or elsewhere, where the concepts simply can’t be visualized; and the attempt to do so only leads to confusion and misunderstanding. Beyond that point an interior geometry, a haptic geometry, guided by a kinetic esthetics, is probably the best sensory analogy we have; and so I have my advantage.

But in the real world, in the geometries of the heart, do I ever have any comparable advantage? Are there things we feel that can never be seen?

The central problem for everyone concerned with the relationship between geometry and the real world is the question of how one moves from the incommunicable impressions of the sensory world (vague fields of force, of danger), to the generally agreed-upon abstractions of the math (the explanation). Or, as Edmund Husserl puts it in The Origin of Geometry (and on this particular morning George was enunciating this passage for me with the utmost awkwardness): “How does geometrical ideality (just like that of all the sciences) proceed from its primary intrapersonal origin, where it is a structure within the conscious space of the first inventor’s soul, to its ideal objectivity?”

At this point Jeremy knocked at my door: four quick raps. “Come in, Jeremy,” I said, my pulse quickening.

He opened the door and looked in. “I have a pot of coffee just ready to go,” he said. “Come on down and have some.”

So I joined him in his office, which smelled wonderfully of strong French roast. I sat in one of the plush armchairs that circled Jeremy’s desk, accepted a small glazed cup, sipped from it. Jeremy moved about the room restlessly as he chattered about one minor matter after another, obviously avoiding the topic of Mary and all that she represented. The coffee sent a warm flush through me—even the flesh of my feet buzzed with heat, though in the blast of air-conditioned air from the ceiling vent I didn’t start to sweat. At first it was a comfortable, even pleasant sensation. The bitter, murky taste of the coffee washed over my palate, through the roof of my mouth into my sinuses, from there up behind my eyes, through my brain, all the way down my throat, into my lungs: I breathed coffee, my blood singing with warmth.

. . . I had been talking about something. Jeremy’s voice came from directly above and before me, and it had a crackly, tinny quality to it, as if made by an old carbon microphone: “And what would happen if the Q energy from this manifold were directed through these vectored dimensions into the macrodimensional manifold?”

Happily I babbled, “Well, provide each point P of an n-dimensional differentiable manifold M with the analogue of a tangent plane, an n-dimensional vector space Tp(M), called the tangent space at P. Now we can define a path in manifold M as a differentiable mapping of an open interval of R into M. And along this path we can fit the whole of the forces defining K the submanifold of M, a lot of energy to be sure,” and I was writing it down, when the somatic effect of the drug caught up with the mental effect, and I recognized what was happening. (“Entirely too many new designer drugs these days . . .”) Jeremy’s breathing snagged as he looked up to see what had stopped me; meanwhile, I struggled with a slight wave of nausea, caused more by the realization that I had been drugged than by the chemicals themselves, which had very little “noise.” What had I told him? And why, for God’s sake, did it matter so much?

“Sorry,” I muttered through the roar of the ventilator. “Bit of a headache.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Jeremy said, in a voice exactly like George’s. “You look a little pale.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to conceal my anger. (Later, listening to the tape of the conversation, I thought I only sounded confused.) (And I hadn’t said much about my work, either—mostly definitions.) “Sorry to run out on you, but it really is bothering me.”

I stood, and for a moment I panicked; the location of the room’s door—the most fundamental point of orientation, remembered without effort in every circumstance—wouldn’t come to me. I was damned if I would ask Jeremy Blasingame about such a thing, or stumble about in front of him. I consciously fought to remember: desk faces door, chair faces desk, door therefore behind you . . .

“Let me walk you to your office,” Jeremy said, taking me by the arm. “Listen, maybe I can give you a lift home?”

“That’s all right,” I said, shrugging him off. I found the door by accident, it seemed, and left him. Down to my office, wondering if I would get the right door. My blood was hot Turkish coffee. My head spun. The key worked, so I had found the right door. Locked in, I went to my couch and lay down. I was as dizzy there as standing, but found I couldn’t move again. I spun in place helplessly. I had read that the designer drugs used for such purposes had almost no somatic effect, but perhaps this was true only for subjects less sensitive to their kinetic reality—otherwise, why was I reacting so? Fear. Or Jeremy had put something beyond the truth drug in me. A warning? Against? Suddenly I was aware of the tight boundaries of my comprehension, beyond it the wide manifold of action I did not understand—and the latter threatened to completely flood the former, so that there would be left nothing at all that I understood about this matter. Such a prospect terrified me.

Some time later—perhaps as much as an hour—I felt I had to get home. Physically I felt much better, and it was only when I got outside in the wind that I realized that the psychological effects of the drug were still having their way with me. Rare, heavy waft of diesel exhaust, a person wearing clothes rank with old sweat: These smells overwhelmed any chance I had of locating Ramon’s cart by nose. My cane felt unusually long, and the rising and falling whistles of my sonar glasses made a musical composition like something out of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux. I stood entranced by the effect. Cars zoomed past with their electric whirrs, the wind made more sound than I could process. I couldn’t find Ramon and decided to give up trying; it would be bad to get him mixed up in any of this anyway. Ramon was my best friend. All those hours at Warren’s throwing together, and when we played beeper ping-pong at his apartment we sometimes got to laughing so hard we couldn’t stand—what else is friendship than that, after all?

Distracted by thoughts such as these, and by the bizarre music of wind and traffic, I lost track of which street I was crossing. The whoosh of a car nearly brushing me as I stepped up from a curb. Lost! “Excuse me, is this Pennsylvania or K?” Fuckyouverymuch. Threading my way fearfully between broken bottles, punji-stick nails poking up out of boards on the sidewalk, low-hanging wires holding up tree branch or street sign, dog shit on the curb waiting like banana peel to skid me into the street under a bus, speeding cars with completely silent electric motors careening around the corner, muggers who didn’t care if I was blind or paraplegic or whatever, manholes left open in the crosswalks, rabid dogs with their toothy jaws stuck out between the rails of a fence, ready to bite . . . Oh, yes, I fought off all these dangers and more, and I must have looked mad tiptoeing down the sidewalk, whapping my cane about like a man beating off devils.

By the time I got into my apartment I was shaking with fury. I turned on Steve Reich’s Come Out (in which the phrase “Come out to show them” is looped countless times) as loud as I could stand it, and barged around my place alternately cursing and crying (that stinging of the eyes), all under the sound of the music. I formulated a hundred impossible plans of revenge against Jeremy Blasingame and his shadowy employers. I brushed my teeth for fifteen minutes to get the taste of coffee out of my mouth.

By the next morning I had a workable plan: It was time for some confrontation. It was a Saturday, and I was able to work in my office without interruption. I entered the office and unlocked a briefcase, opened my file cabinet and made sounds of moving papers from briefcase to cabinet. Much more silently, I got out a big mousetrap that I had bought that morning. On the back of it I wrote, You’re caught. The next trap kills. I set the trap and placed it carefully behind the new file I had added to the cabinet. This was straight out of one of my adolescent rage fantasies, of course, but I didn’t care; it was the best way I could think of to both punish them and warn them from a distance. When the file was pulled from the cabinet, the trap would release onto the hand pulling the file out, and it would also break tape set in a pattern only I would be able to feel. So if the trap went off, I would know.

The first step was ready.

In Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, a moment of deadly stillness, strings humming dissonant strokes as the whole world waits.

Cut shaving; the smell of blood.

Across the road, a carpenter hammering nails on a roof, each set of seven strokes a crescendo: tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap! Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap!

In that mathematics of emotion, stress calculations to measure one’s tension: already there for us to use. Perhaps all of math already charts states of consciousness, moments of being.

She came to me again late at night, with the wind swirling by her through the doorway. It was late, the wind was chill and blustery, the barometer was falling. Storm coming.

“I wanted to see you,” she said.

I felt a great thrill of fear, and another of pleasure, and I could not tell which was stronger, or, after a time, which was which.

“Good.” We entered the kitchen, I served her water, circled her unsteadily, my voice calm as we discussed trivia in fits and starts. After many minutes of this I very firmly took her by the hand. “Come along.” I led her into the pantry, up the narrow musty stairs, out the roof door into the wind. A spattering of big raindrops hit us. “Carlos—” “Never mind that!” The whoosh of the wind was accompanied by the rain smell of wet dust and hot asphalt and a certain electricity in the air. Off in the distance, to the south, a low rumble of thunder shook the air.

“It’s going to rain,” she ventured, shouting a bit over the wind.

“Quiet,” I told her, and kept her hand crushed in mine. The wind gusted through our clothes, and mixed with my anger and my fear I felt rising the electric elation that storms evoke in me. Face to the wind, hair pulled back from my scalp, I held her hand and waited: “Listen,” I said, “watch, feel the storm.” And after a time I felt—no, I saw, I saw—the sudden jerk of lightness that marked lightning. “Ah,” I said aloud, counting to myself. The thunder pushed us about ten seconds later. Just a couple of miles away.

“Tell me what you see,” I commanded, and heard in my own voice a vibrancy that could not be denied.

“It’s—it’s a thunderstorm,” she replied, uncertain of me in this new mood. “The clouds are very dark, and fairly low at their bottoms, but broken up in places by some largish gaps. Kind of like immense boulders rolling overhead. The lightning—there! You noticed that?”

I had jumped. “I can see lightning,” I said, grinning. “I have a basic perception of light and darkness, and everything flashes to lightness for a moment. As if the sun had turned on and then off.”

“Yes. It’s sort of like that, only the light is shaped in jagged white lines, extending from cloud to ground. Like that model you have of subatomic particles breaking up—a sort of broken wire sculpture, white as the sun, forking the earth for just an instant, as bright as the thunder is loud.” Her voice rasped with an excitement that had sparked across our hands—also with apprehension, curiosity, I didn’t know what. Light . . . BLAM, the thunder struck us like a fist and she jumped. I laughed. “That was off to the side!” she said fearfully. “We’re in the middle of it!”

I couldn’t control a laugh. “More!” I shouted. “Pick up the pace!” And as if I were a weathermonger, the lightning snapped away the darkness around us, flash-BLAM . . . flash-BLAM . . . flash-BLAM!!

“We should get down!” Mary shouted over the wind’s ripping, over the reverberating crashes of thunder. I shook my head back and forth and back and forth, gripped her by the arm so hard it must have hurt.

“No! This is my visual world, do you understand? This is as beautiful as it ever—” flash-crack-BLAM.

“Carlos—”

“No! Shut up!” Flash-flash-flash-BOOM! Rolling thunder, now, hollow casks the size of mountains, rolling across a concrete floor.

“I’m afraid,” she said miserably, tugging away from me.

“You feel the exposure, eh?” I shouted at her, as lightning flashed and the wind tore at us, and raindrops pummeled the roof, throwing up a tarry smell to mix with the lightning’s ozone. “You feel what it’s like to stand helpless before a power that can kill you, is that right?”

Between thunderclaps she said, desperately, “Yes!”

“Now you know how I’ve felt around you people!” I shouted. BLAM! BLAM!! “Goddammit,” I said, pain searing my voice as the lightning seared the air, “I can go sit in the corner park with the drug dealers and the bums and the crazies and I know I’ll be safe, because even those people still have the idea that it isn’t right to hurt a blind man. But you people!” I couldn’t go on. I shoved her away from me and staggered back, remembering it all. Flash-BLAM! Flash-BLAM!

“Carlos—” Hands pulling me around.

“What?”

“I didn’t—”

“The hell you didn’t! You came in and gave me that story about the moon, and talked backwards, and drew stuff, and all to steal my work—how could you do it? How could you do it?”

“I didn’t, Carlos, I didn’t!” I batted her hands away, but it was as if a dam had burst, as if only now, charged to it in the storm, was she able to speak: “Listen to me!” Flash-BLAM. “I’m just like you. They made me do it. They took me because I have some math background, I guess, and they ran me through more memory implants than I can even count!” Now the charged, buzzing timbre of her desperate voice scraped directly across my nervous system: “You know what they can do with those drugs and implants. They can program you just like a machine. You walk through your paces and watch yourself and can’t do a thing about it.” BLAM. “And they programmed me and I went in there and spouted it all off to you on cue. But you know”—BLAM—“I was trying, you know there’s the parts of the mind they can’t touch—I fought them as hard as I could, don’t you see?”

Flash-BLAM. Sizzle of scorched air, ozone, ringing eardrums. That one was close.

“I took TNPP-50,” she said, calmer now. “That and MDMA. I just made myself duck into a pharmacy on my way to meet you alone, and I used a blank prescription pad I keep and got them. I was so drugged up when we went to the Tidal Basin that I could barely walk. But it helped me to speak, helped me to fight the programming.”

“You were drugged?” I said, amazed. (I know, Max Carrados would have figured it out. But me . . . )

“Yes!” BOOM. “Every time I saw you after that time. And it’s worked better every time. But I’ve had to pretend I was still working on you, to protect us both. The last time we were up here”—BOOM—“you know I’m with you, Carlos, do you think I would have faked that?”

Bassoon voice, hoarse with pain. Low rumble of thunder in the distance. Flickers in the darkness, no longer as distinct as before: My moments of vision were coming to an end. “But what do they want?” I cried.

“Blasingame thinks your work will solve the problems they’re having getting sufficient power into a very small particle-beam weapon. They think they can channel energy out of the microdimensions you’ve been studying.” BLAM. “Or so I guess, from what I’ve overheard.”

“Those fools.” Although to an extent there might be something to the idea. I had almost guessed it, in fact. So much energy . . . “Blasingame is such a fool. He and his stupid Pentagon bosses—”

“Pentagon!” Mary exclaimed. “Carlos, these people are not with the Pentagon! I don’t know who they are—a private group, from West Germany, I think. But they kidnapped me right out of my apartment, and I’m a statistician for the defense department! The Pentagon has nothing to do with it!”

Blam. “But Jeremy . . .” My stomach was falling.

“I don’t know how he got into it. But whoever they are, they’re dangerous. I’ve been afraid they’ll kill us both. I know they’ve discussed killing you, I’ve heard them. They think you’re onto them. Ever since the Tidal Basin I’ve been injecting myself with Fifty and MDMA, a lot of it, and telling them you don’t know a thing, that you just haven’t got the formula yet. But if they were to find out you know about them . . .”

“God I hate this spy shit,” I exclaimed bitterly. And the oh-so-clever trap in my office, warning Jeremy off . . .

It started to rain hard. I let Mary lead me down into my apartment. No time to lose, I thought. I had to get to my office and remove the trap. But I didn’t want her at risk; I was suddenly frightened more for this newly revealed ally than for myself.

“Listen, Mary,” I said when we were inside. Then I remembered, and whispered in her ear, “Is this room bugged?”

“No.”

“For God’s sake.” All those silences—she must have thought me deranged! “All right. I want to make some calls, and but I’m sure my phones are bugged. I’m going to go out for a bit, but I want you to stay right here. All right?” She started to protest and I stopped her. “Please! Stay right here. I’ll be right back. Just stay here and wait for me, please.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll stay.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

Down on the street I turned left and took off for my offices. Rain struck my face and I automatically thought to return for an umbrella, then angrily shook the thought away. Thunder still rumbled overhead from time to time, but the brilliant (“brilliant!” I say—meaning I saw a certain lightness in the midst of a certain darkness) the brilliant flashes that had given me a momentary taste of vision were gone.

Repeatedly I cursed myself, my stupidity, my presumption. I had made axioms out of theorems (humanity’s most common logical-syntactic flaw?), never pausing to consider that my whole edifice of subsequent reasoning rested on them. And now, having presumed to challenge a force I didn’t understand, I was in real danger, no doubt about it; and no doubt (as corollary) Mary was as well. The more I thought of it the more frightened I became, until finally I was as scared as I should have been all along.

The rain shifted to an irregular drizzle. The air was cooled, the wind had dropped to an occasional gust. Cars hissed by over wet 21st Street, humming like Mary’s voice, and everywhere water sounded, squishing and splashing and dripping. I passed 21st and K, where Ramon sometimes set up his cart; I was glad that he wouldn’t be there, that I wouldn’t have to walk by him in silence, perhaps ignoring his cheerful invitation to buy, or even his specific hello. I would have hated to fool him so. Yet if I had wanted to, how easy it would have been! Just walk on by—he would have had no way of knowing.

A sickening sensation of my disability swept over me, all the small frustrations and occasional hard-learned limits of my entire life balling up and washing through me in a great wave of fear and apprehension, like the flash-boom of the lightning and thunder, the drenching of the downpour: Where was I, where was I going, how could I take even one step more?

This fear paralyzed me. I felt as though I had never come down from the drugs Jeremy had given me, as though I struggled under their hallucinatory influence still. I literally had to stop walking, had to lean on my cane.

And so I heard their footsteps. Henry Cowell’s The Banshee begins with fingernails scraping repeatedly up the high wires of an open piano; the same music played my nervous system. Behind me three or four sets of footsteps had come to a halt, just a moment after I myself had stopped.

For a while my heart hammered so hard within me that I could hear nothing else. I forced it to slow, took a deep breath. Of course I was being followed. It made perfect sense. And ahead, at my office . . .

I started walking again. The rain picked up on a gust of wind, and silently I cursed it; it is difficult to hear well when rain is pattering down everywhere, so that one stands at the center of a universal puh-puh-puh-puh. But attuned now to their presence, I could hear them behind me, three or four (likely three) people walking, walking at just my pace.

Detour time. Instead of continuing down 21st Street I decided to go west on Pennsylvania, and see what they did. No sound of nearby cars so I stood still; I crossed swiftly, nearly losing my cane as it struck the curb. As casually, as “accidentally” as I could, I turned and faced the street; the sonar glasses whistled up at me, and I knew people were approaching though I could not hear their footsteps in the rain. More fervently than ever before I blessed the glasses, turned and struck off again, hurrying as much as seemed natural.

Wind and rain, the electric hum and tire hiss of a passing car. Washington late on a stormy spring night, unusually quiet and empty. Behind me the wet footsteps were audible again. I forced myself to keep a steady pace, to avoid giving away the fact that I was aware of their presence. Just a late-night stroll to the office . . .

At 22nd I turned south again. Ordinarily, no one would have backtracked on Pennsylvania like that, but these people followed me. Now we approached the university hospital, and there was a bit more activity, people passing to left and right, voices across the street discussing a movie, an umbrella being shaken out and folded, cars passing . . . Still the footsteps were back there, farther away now, almost out of earshot.

As I approached Gelman Library my pulse picked up again, my mind raced through a network of plans, all unsatisfactory in different ways. Outdoors, I couldn’t evade pursuit. Given. In the building . . .

My sonar whistled up as Gelman loomed over me, and I hurried down the steps from the sidewalk to the foyer containing the elevator to the sixth and seventh floors. I missed the door and adrenaline flooded me, then there it was just to my left. The footsteps behind me hurried down the sidewalk steps as I slipped inside and stepped left into the single elevator, punched the button for the seventh floor. The doors stood open, waiting . . . then mercifully they slid together, and I was off alone.

A curious feature of Gelman Library is that there are no stairways to the sixth and seventh floors (the offices above the library proper) that are not fire escapes, locked on the outside. To get to the offices, you are forced to take the single elevator, a fact I had complained about many times before—I liked to walk. Now I was thankful, as the arrangement would give me some time. When the elevator opened at the seventh floor I stepped out, reached back in and punched the buttons for all seven floors, then ran for my office, jangling through my keys for the right one.

I couldn’t find the key.

I slowed down. Went through them one by one. Found the key, opened my door, propped it wide with the stopper at its base. Over to the file cabinet, where I opened the middle drawer and very carefully slid one hand down the side of the correct file.

The mousetrap was gone. They knew that I knew.

I don’t know how long I stood there thinking; it couldn’t have been long, though my thoughts spun madly through scores of plans. Then I went to my desk and got the scissors from the top drawer. I followed the power cord of the desk computer to its wall socket beside the file cabinet. I pulled out the plugs there, opened the scissors wide, fitted one point into a socket, jammed it in, and twisted it hard.

Crack. The current held me cramped down for a moment—intense pain pulsed through me—I was knocked away, found myself on my knees slumping against the file cabinets.

(For a while, when I was young, I fancied I was allergic to novocaine, and my dentist drilled my teeth without anesthetic. It was horribly uncomfortable, but tangent to normal pain: pain beyond pain. So it was with the shock that coursed through me. Later I asked my brother, who is an electrician, about it, and he said that the nervous system was indeed capable of feeling the sixty cycles per second of the alternating current: “When you get bit you always feel it pumping like that, very fast but distinct.” He also said that with my wet shoes I could have been killed. “The current cramps the muscles down so that you’re latched onto the source, and that can kill you. You were lucky. Did you find blisters on the bottoms of your feet?” I had.)

Now I struggled up, with my left arm aching fiercely and a loud hum in my ear. I went to my desk. As they beeped fairly loudly, I took my glasses off and put them on a bookshelf facing the door. I tested the radio—it had no power. Wondering if the whole floor was dead, I went into the hall briefly to look into a ceiling light. Nothing. Back at the desk I took stapler and water tumbler, put them beside the file cabinet. Went to the bookshelves and gathered all the plastic polyhedral shapes (the sphere was just like a big cue ball) and took them to the file cabinet as well. Then I found the scissors on the floor.

Out in the hall the elevator doors opened. “It’s dark—” “Shh.” Hesitant steps, into the hall. I tiptoed to the doorway. Here it was possible to tell for sure that there were only three of them. There would be light from the elevator, I recalled: It wouldn’t do to be illuminated. I stepped back.

(Once Max Carrados was caught in a situation similar to mine, and he simply announced to his assailants that he had a gun on them and would shoot the first person to move. In his case it had worked; but now I saw that the plan was insanely risky.)

“Down here,” one whispered. “Spread out, and be quiet.” Rustling, quiet footsteps, three small clicks (gun safeties?). I retreated into the office, behind the side of the file cabinet. Stilled my breathing and was silent in a way they’d never be able to achieve. If they heard anything it would be my glasses . . .

“It’s here,” the first voice whispered. “Door’s open, watch it.” Their breathing was quick. They were bunched up outside the door, and one said, “Hey, I’ve got a lighter,” so I threw the pulled-open scissors overhand.

“Ah! Ah—” Clatter, hard bump against the hall wall, voices clashing. “What—” “Threw a knife—” “Ah—”

I threw the stapler as hard as I could, wham—the wall above, I guessed—and threw the dodecahedron as they leaped back. I don’t know what I hit. I jumped almost to the doorway and heard a voice whisper, “Hey.” I threw the cue-ball sphere right at the voice. Ponk. It sounded like—like nothing else I have ever heard. (Although every once in a while some outfielder takes a beepball in the head, and it sounded something like that, wooden and hollow.) The victim fell right to the hall floor, making a heavy sound like a car door closing; a metallic clatter marked his gun skidding across the floor. Then CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! another of them shot into the office. I cowered on the floor and crawled swiftly back to the file cabinet, ears ringing painfully, hearing wiped out, fear filling me like the smell of cordite leaking into the room. No way of telling what they were doing. The floor was carpet on concrete, with no vibrations to speak of. I hung my mouth open, trying to focus my hearing on the sound of my glasses. They would whistle up if people entered the room quickly, perhaps (again) more loudly than the people would be on their own. The glasses were still emitting their little beep, now heard through the pulsing wash of noise the gunshots had set off in my ears.

I hefted the water tumbler—it was a fat glass cylinder, with a heavy bottom. A rising whistle, and then, in the hall, the rasp of a lighter flint being sparked.

I threw the tumbler. Crash, tinkle of glass falling. A man entered the office. I picked up the pentahedron and threw it—thump of it against far wall. I couldn’t find any of the other polyhedrons—somehow they weren’t there beside the cabinet. I crouched and pulled off a shoe.

He swept my glasses aside and I threw the shoe. I think it hit him, but nothing happened. There I was, without a weapon, utterly vulnerable, revealed in the glow of a damned cigarette lighter . . .

When the shots came I thought they had missed, or that I was hit and couldn’t feel it; then I realized some shots had come from the doorway, others from the bookcase. Sounds of bodies hit, staggering, falling, writhing—and all the while I cowered in my corner, trembling.

Then I heard a nasal groan from the hall, a groan like a viola bowed by a rasp. “Mary,” I cried, and ran into the hallway to her, tripped on her. She was sitting against the wall—“Mary!” Blood on her. “Carlos,” she squeaked painfully, sounding surprised.

Fortunately, it turned out that she had only been wounded; the bullet had entered just under the shoulder, wrecking it but doing no fatal damage.

I learned all this later, at the hospital. An hour or more after our arrival a doctor came out and told me, and the sickening knot of tension in my diaphragm untied all at once, making me feel sick in another way, dizzy and nauseated with relief, unbelievably intense relief.

After that I went through a session with the police, and Mary talked a lot with her employers, and after that we both answered a lot of questions from the FBI. (In fact, that process took days.) Two of our assailants were dead (one shot, another hit in the temple with a sphere), and the third had been stabbed: What had happened? I stayed up all through that first night explaining, retrieving and playing my tapes, and so on, and still they didn’t go for Jeremy until dawn; by that time he was nowhere to be found.

Eventually I got a moment alone with Mary, about ten the following morning.

“You didn’t stay at my place,” I said.

“No. I thought you were headed for Blasingame’s apartment, and I drove there, but it was empty. So I drove to your office and came upstairs. The elevator opened just as shots were being fired, so I hit the deck and crawled right over a gun. But then I had a hell of a time figuring out who was where. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Ah.”

“So I broke my promise.”

“I’m glad.”

“Me too.”

Our hands found each other and embraced, and I leaned forward until my forehead touched her shoulder (the good one), and rested.

A couple of days later I said to her, “But what were all those diagrams of Desargues’ theorem about?”

She laughed, and the rich timbre of it cut through me like a miniature of the current from my wall socket. “Well, they programmed me with all those geometrical questions for you, and I was roboting through all that, you know, and struggling underneath it all to understand what was going on, what they wanted. And later, how I could alert you. And to tell you the truth, Desargues’ theorem was the only geometry of my own that I could remember from school. I’m a statistician, you know, most of my training is in that and analysis . . . So I kept drawing it to try to get your attention to me. I had a message in it, you see. You were the triangle in the first plane, and I was the triangle in the second plane, but we were both controlled by the point of projection—”

“But I knew that already!” I exclaimed.

“Did you? But also I marked a little J with my thumbnail by the point of projection, so you would know Jeremy was doing it. Did you feel that?”

“No. I Xeroxed your drawings, and an impression like that wouldn’t show up.” So my indented copy, ironically enough, had missed the crucial indentation.

“I know, but I was hoping you would brush it or something. Stupid. Well, anyway, between us all we were making the three collinear points off to the side, which is what they were after, you see, determined in this case by point J and his projection . . .”

I laughed. “It never occurred to me,” I said, and laughed again, “but I sure do like your way of thinking!”

I saw, however, that the diagram had a clearer symbolism than that.

When I told Ramon about it, he laughed too. “Here you are the mathematician, and you never got it! It was too simple for you!”

“I don’t know if I’d call it too simple—”

“And wait—wait—you say you told this here girlfriend of yours to stay behind at your house, when you knew you were going to run into those thugs at your office?”

“Well, I didn’t know they’d be there right then. But . . .”

“Now that was superblink.”

“Yeah.” I had to admit it; I had been stupid, I had gone too far. And it occurred to me then that in the realm of thought, of analysis, and planning, I had consistently and spectacularly failed. Whereas in the physical continuum of action, I had (up to a point—a point that I didn’t like to remember [ponk of sphere breaking skull, cowering revealed in a lighter’s glare]) done pretty well. And though it was disturbing, in the end this reflection pleased me. For a while there, anyway, I had been almost free of the world of texts.

Naturally it took a while for Mary to regain her health; the kidnapping, the behavior programming, the shooting, and most of all the repeated druggings her captors and she had subjected herself to had left her quite sick, and she was in the hospital for some weeks. I visited every day; we talked for hours.

And, naturally, it took quite a while for us to sort things out. Not only with the authorities, but with each other. What was real and permanent between us, and what was a product of the strange circumstances of our meeting—no one could say for sure which was which, there.

And maybe we never did disentangle those strands. The start of a relationship remains a part of it forever; and in our case, we had seen things in each other that we might never have otherwise, to our own great good. I know that years later, sometimes, when her hand touched mine, I would feel that primal thrill of fear and exhilaration that her first touches had caused in me, and I would shiver again under the mysterious impact of the unknown other . . . And sometimes, arm in arm, the feeling floods me that we are teamed together, in an immense storm of trouble and threat that cracks and thunders all around us. So that it seems clear to me, now, that loves forged in the smithy of intense and dangerous circumstances are surely the strongest loves of all.

I leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.

THE FOREST OF TIME

Michael Flynn

A wanderer lost in a forest is quite likely to have a major problem finding his way home. But some forests, by their very nature, are much more difficult than others—

It was the autumn of the year and the trees were already showing their death-colors. Splashes of orange and red and gold rustled in the canopy overhead. Oberleutnant Rudolf Knecht, Chief Scout of the Army of the Kittatinny, wore the same hues mottled for his uniform as he rode through the forest. A scout’s badge, carefully rusted to dullness, was pinned to his battered campaign cap.

Knecht swayed easily to the rhythm of his horse’s gait as he picked his way up the trail toward Fox Gap Fortress. He kept a wary eye on the surrounding forest. Periodically, he twisted in the saddle and gazed thoughtfully at the trail where it switchbacked below. There had been no sign of pursuit so far. Knecht believed his presence had gone undetected; but even this close to home, it paid to be careful. The list of those who wanted Knecht dead was a long one; and here, north of the Mountain, it was open season on Pennsylvanians.

There were few leaves on the forest floor, but the wind gathered them up and hurled them in mad dances. The brown, dry, crisp leaves of death. Forerunners of what was to be. Knecht bowed his head and pulled the jacket collar tighter about his neck.

Knecht felt the autumn. It was in his heart and in his bones. It was in the news he carried homeward. Bad news even in the best of times, which these were not. Two knick regiments had moved out of the Hudson Valley into the Poconos. They were camped with the yankees. Brothers-in-arms, as if last spring’s fighting had never happened. General Schneider’s fear: New York and Wyoming had settled their quarrel and made common cause.

Common cause. Knecht chewed on his drooping moustache, now more grey than brown. No need to ask the cause. There was little enough that yanks and knicks could agree on, but killing Pennsylvanians was one.

He remembered that General Schneider was inspecting the fortress line and would probably be waiting for him at Fox Gap. He did not feel the pleasure he usually felt on such occasions. Na, Konrad, meiner Alt, he thought. What will you do now? What a burden I must lay upon your shoulders. God help the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

He pulled in on the reins. There was a break in the trees here and through it he could see the flank of Kittatinny Mountain. A giant’s wall, the ridge ran away, straight and true, becoming bluer and hazier as its forested slopes faded into the distance. Spots of color decorated the sheer face of the Mountain. Fox Gap, directly above him, was hidden by the forest canopy; but Knecht thought he could just make out the fortresses at Wind Gap and Tott Gap.

As always, the view comforted him. There was no way across the Kittatinny, save through the Gaps. And there was no way through the Gaps.

Twenty years since anyone has tried, he thought. He kicked at the horse and they resumed their slow progress up the trail. Twenty years ago; and we blew the knick riverboats off the water.

That had been at Delaware Gap, during the Piney War. Knecht sighed. The Piney War. It seemed such a long time ago. A different world; more innocent, somehow. Or perhaps he had only been younger. He remembered how he had marched away, his uniform new and sharply creased. Adventure was ahead of him, and his father’s anger behind. I am too old for such games, he told himself. I should be sitting by the fire, smoking my pipe, telling stories to my grandchildren.

He chewed again on his moustache hairs and spit them out. There had never been any children; and now, there never would be. He felt suddenly alone.

Just as well, he thought. The stories I have to tell are not for the ears of youngsters. What were the stories, really? A crowd of men charged from the trench. Later, some of them came back. What more was there to say? Once, a long time ago, war had been glamorous, with pageantry and uniforms to shame a peacock. Now it was only necessary, and the uniforms were the color of mud.

There was a sudden noise in the forest to his right. Snapping limbs and a muffled grunt. Knecht started, and chastised himself. A surprised scout is often a dead one as well. He pulled a large bore pistol from his holster and dismounted. The horse, well-trained, held still. Knecht stepped into the forest and crouched behind a tall birch tree. He listened.

The noise continued. Too much noise, he decided. Perhaps an animal?

Then he saw the silhouette of a man thrashing through the underbrush, making no attempt at silence. Knecht watched over his gun-sight as the man blundered into a stickerbush. Cursing, the other stopped and pulled the burrs from his trousers.

The complete lack of caution puzzled Knecht. The no-man’s-land between Pennsylvania and the Wyoming was no place for carelessness. The other was either very foolish or very confident.

The fear ran through him like the rush of an icy mountain stream. Perhaps the bait in a trap; something to hold his attention? He jerked round suddenly, looking behind him, straining for the slightest sign.

But there was nothing save the startled birds and the evening wind.

Knecht blew his breath out in a gust. His heart was pounding. I am getting too old for this. He felt foolish and his cheeks burned, even though there was no one to see.

The stranger had reached the trail and stood there brushing himself off. He was short and dark complexioned. On his back he wore a rucksack, connected by wires to a device on his belt. Knecht estimated his age at thirty, but the unkempt hair and beard made him look older.

He watched the man pull a paper from his baggy canvas jacket. Even from where he crouched, Knecht could see it was a map, handsomely done in many colors. A stranger with a map on the trail below Fox Gap. Knecht made a decision and stepped forth, cocking his pistol.

The stranger spun and saw Knecht. Closer up, Knecht could see the eyes bloodshot with fatigue. After a nervous glance at the scout’s pistol, the stranger smiled and pointed to the map. “Would you believe it?” he asked in English. “I think I’m lost.”

Knecht snorted. “I would not believe it,” he answered in the same language. “Put in the air your hands up.”

The stranger complied without hesitation. Knecht reached out and snatched the map from his hand.

“That’s a Pennsylvania Dutch accent, isn’t it?” asked his prisoner. “It sure is good to hear English again.”

Knecht looked at him. He did not understand why that should be good. His own policy when north of the Mountain was to shoot at English-speaking voices. He gave quick glances to the map whileconsidering what to do.

“Are you hunting? I didn’t know it was hunting season.”

The scout saw no reason to answer that, either. In a way, he was hunting, but he doubted the prisoner had meant it that way.

“At least you can tell me where in the damn world I am!”

Knecht was surprised at the angry outburst. Considering who held the pistol on whom, it seemed a rash act at best. He grinned and held up the map. “Naturally, you know where in the damn world you are. While you have this map, it gives only one possibility. You are the spy, nicht wahr? But, to humor you . . .” He pointed northward with his chin. “Downtrail is the Wyoming, where your Wilkes-Barre masters your report in vain will await. Uptrail is Festung Fox Gap . . . and your cell.”

The prisoner’s shoulders slumped. Knecht looked at the sun. With the prisoner afoot, they should still reach the fort before nightfall. He decided to take the man in for questioning. That would be safer than interrogating him on the spot. Knecht glanced at the map once more. Then he frowned and looked more closely. “United States Geological Survey?” he asked the prisoner. “What are the United States?”

He did not understand why the prisoner wept.

There was a storm brewing in the northwest and the wind whipped through Fox Gap, tearing at the uniform blouses of the sentries, making them grab for their caps. In the dark, amid the rain and lightning, at least one man’s grab was too late and his fellows laughed coarsely as he trotted red-faced to retrieve it. It was a small diversion in an otherwise cheerless duty.

What annoyed Festungskommandant Vonderberge was not that Scout Knecht chose to watch the chase also, but that he chose to do so while halfway through the act of entering Vonderberge’s office. The wind blew a blizzard of paper around the room and Vonderberge’s curses brought Knecht fully into the office, closing the door behind him.

Knecht surveyed the destruction. Vonderberge shook his head. He looked at Knecht. “These bits of paper,” he said. “These orders and memoranda and requisitions, they are the nerve messages of the Army. A thousand messages a day cross my desk, Rudi; and not a one of them but deals with matters of the greatest military import.” He clucked sadly. “Our enemies need not defeat us in the field. They need only sabotage our filing system and we are lost.” He rose from his desk and knelt, gathering up papers. “Come, Rudi, quickly. Let us set things aright, else the Commonwealth is lost!”

Knecht snorted. Vonderberge was mocking him with this elaborate ridicule. In his short time at Fox Gap, Knecht had encountered the Kommandant’s strange humor several times. Someone had once told him that Vonderberge had always dreamed of becoming a scientist, but that his father had pressured him into following the family’s military tradition. As a result, his command style was, well, unorthodox.

Na, we all arrive by different paths, Knecht thought. I joined to spite my father. It startled him to recall that his father had been dead for many years and that they had never become reconciled.

Knecht stooped and helped collect the scattered documents. Because he was a scout, however, he glanced at their contents as he did so; and as he absorbed their meaning, he read more and collected less.

One sheet in particular held his attention. When he looked up from it, he saw Vonderberge waiting patiently behind his desk. He was leaning back in a swivel chair, his arms crossed over his chest. There was a knowing smile on the Kommandant’s thin aristocratic face.

“Is this all . . .” Knecht began.

“Ach, nein,” the Kommandant answered. “There is much, much more. However,” he added pointedly, “it is no longer in order.”

“But, this is from the prisoner, Nando Kelly?”

“Hernando is the name; not Herr Nando. It is Spanish, I believe.” Vonderberge clucked sadly over the documents and began setting them in order.

Knecht stood over the desk. “But this is crazy stuff!” He waved the sheet in his hand. Vonderberge grabbed for it vainly. Knecht did not notice. “The man must be crazy!” he said.

Vonderberge paused and cocked an eyebrow at him. “Crazy?” he repeated. “So says the Hexmajor. He can support his opinion with many fine words and a degree from Franklin University. I am but a simple soldier, a servant of the Commonwealth, and cannot state my own diagnosis in so impressive a manner. On what basis, Rudi, do you say he is crazy?”

Knecht sputtered. “If it is not crazy to believe in countries that do not exist, I do not know what is. I have looked on all our world maps and have found no United States, not even in deepest Asia.”

Vonderberge smiled broadly. He leaned back again, clasping his hands behind his neck. “Oh, I know where the United States are,” he announced smugly.

Knecht made a face. “Tell me then, O Servant of the Commonwealth. Where are they?”

Vonderberge chuckled. “If you can possibly remember so far back as your childhood history lessons, you may recall something of the Fourth Pennamite War.”

Knecht groaned. The Pennamite Wars. He could never remember which was which. Both Connecticut and Pennsylvania had claimed the Wyoming Valley and had fought over it several times, a consequence of the English king’s cavalier attitude toward land titles. The fourth one? Let’s see . . . 1769, 1771, 1775 . . .

“No,” he said finally. “I know nothing at all of the time between 1784 and 1792. I never heard of Brigadier Wadsworth and the Siege of Forty-Fort, or how General Washington and his Virginia militia were mowed down in the crossfire.”

“Then you must also be ignorant,” continued the Kommandant, “of the fact that the same Congress that sent the General to stop the fighting was also working on a plan to unify the thirteen independent states. Now what do you suppose the name of that union was to be?”

Knecht snorted. “I would be a great fool if I did not say ‘The United States.’ ”

Vonderberge clapped. “Right, indeed, Rudi. Right, indeed. Dickinson was president of the Congress, you know.”

Knecht was surprised. “Dickinson? John Dickinson, our first Chancellor?”

“The very same. Being a Pennsylvanian, I suppose the yankee settlers thought he was plotting something by dispatching the supposedly neutral Virginians. . . . Well, of course, with Washington dead, and old Franklin incapacitated by a stroke at the news, the whole thing fell apart. Maryland never did sign the Articles of Confederation; and as the fighting among the states grew worse—over the Wyoming, over Vermont, over Chesapeake fishing rights, over the western lands—the others seceded also. All that Adams and the radicals salvaged was their New England Confederation; and even that was almost lost during Shay’s Rebellion and General Lincoln’s coup. . . .”

Knecht interrupted. “So this almost-was United States was nothing more than a wartime alliance to throw the English out. It was stillborn in the 1780s. Yet Kelly’s map is dated this year.”

“Ja, the map,” mused Vonderberge, as if to himself. “It is finely drawn, is it not? And the physical details—the mountains and streams—are astonishingly accurate. Only the man-made details are bizarre. Roads and dams that are not there. A great open space called an ‘airport.’ Towns that are three times their actual size. Did you see how large Easton is shown to be?”

Knecht shrugged. “A hoax.”

“Such an elaborate hoax? To what purpose?”

“To fool us. He is a spy. If messages can be coded, why not maps?”

“Ah. You say he is a spy. The Hexmajor says he is mad and the map is the complex working out of a system of delusions. I say . . .” He picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk and handed them to Knecht. “I say you should read Kelly’s notebook.”

The scout glanced at the typewritten pages. “These are transcripts,” he pointed out. “They were done on the machine in your office. I recognize the broken stem on the r’s.” He made it a statement.

Vonderberge threw his head back and laughed, slapping the arm of the chair. “Subtlety does not become you, Rudi,” he said looking at him. “Yes, they are transcripts. General Schneider has the originals. When I showed the journal to him, he wanted to read it himself. I made copies of the more interesting entries.”

Knecht kept his face neutral. “You, and the General, and the Hexmajor. Ach! Kelly is my prisoner. I have yet to interview him. I gave you his possessions for safekeeping, not for distribution.”

“Oh, don’t be so official, Rudi. What are we, Prussians? You were resting, I was bored, and the journal was here. Go ahead. Read it now.” Vonderberge waved an inviting hand.

Knecht frowned and picked up the stack. The first few pages were filled with equations. Strange formulae full of inverted A’s and backward E’s. Knecht formed the words under his breath. “. . . twelve dimensional open manifold . . . Janatpour hypospace . . . oscillatory time . . .” He shook his head. “Nonsense,” he muttered.

He turned the page and came to a text:

“I am embarking on a great adventure. Does that sound grandiose? Very well, let it. Grandiose ideas deserve grandiose expression. Tomorrow, I make my first long range Jump. Sharon claims that it is too soon for such a field test, but she is too cautious. I’ve engineered the equipment. I know what it can do. Triple redundancy on critical circuits. Molecular foam memory. I am a certified reliability engineer, after all. The short Jumps were all successful. So what could go wrong?

“Rosa could answer that. Sweet Rosa. She is not an engineer. She only sees that it is dangerous. And what can I say? It is dangerous. But when has anything perfectly safe been worth doing? The equipment is as safe as I can make it. I tried to explain about probabilities and hazard analysis to Rosa last night, but she only cried and held me tighter.

“She promised to be in the lab a week from tomorrow when I make my return Jump. A week away from Rosa. A week to study a whole new universe. Madre de Dios! A week can be both a moment and aneternity.”

Knecht chewed his moustache. The next page was titled “Jump #1” followed by a string of twelve “coordinate settings.” Then there were many pages which Knecht skimmed, detailing a world that never was. In it, the prehistoric Indians had not exterminated the Ice Age big game. Instead, they had tamed the horse, the elephant, and the camel and used the animal power to keep pace technologically with the Old World. Great civilizations arose in the river valleys of the Colorado and Rio Grande, and mighty empires spread across the Caribbean. Vikings were in Vinland at the same time the Iroquois were discovering Ireland. By the present day there were colonies on Mars.

Knecht shook his head. “Not only do we have a United States,” he muttered.

The next entry was briefer and contained the first hint of trouble. It was headed “Jump #2.” Except for the reversal of plus and minus signs, the coordinate settings were identical with the first set.

“A slight miscalculation. I should be back in the lab with Rosa, but I’m in somebody’s apartment, instead. It’s still Philly out the window—though a shabbier, more run-down Philly than I remember. I must be close to my home timeline because I can recognize most of the University buildings. There’s a flag that looks like the stars and stripes on the flagpole in front of College Hall. There’s something or other black hanging from the lamppost, but I can’t make it out. Well, work first; tourism later. I bet I’ll need a vernier control. There must be a slight asymmetry in the coordinates.”

Knecht skipped several lines of equations and picked up the narrative once more.

“I must leave immediately! That black thing on the lamppost kept nagging at the back of my mind. So I got out my binoculars and studied it. It was a nun in a black habit, hanging in a noose. Hanging a long time, too, by the looks of it. Farther along the avenue, I could see bodies on all the lampposts. Then the wind caught the flag by College Hall and I understood. In place of the stars there was a swastika . . .

“Jump #3. Coordinates . . .

“Wrong again. I was too hasty in leaving the Nazi world. The settings were not quite right, but I think I know what went wrong now. The very act of my Jumping has created new branches in time and changed the oscillatory time-distance between them. On the shorter Jumps it didn’t matter much, but on the longer ones . . .

“I think I finally have the calculations right. This is a pleasant world where I am, and—thanks to Goodman deVeres and his wife—I’ve had the time to think the problem through. It seems the Angevin kings still rule in this world and my host has described what seems like scientific magic. Superstition? Mass delusion? I’d like to stay and study this world, but I’m already a week overdue. Darling Rosa must be frantic with worry. I think of her often.”

The next page was headed “Jump 4” with settings but no narrative entry. This was followed by . . .

“Jump #5. Coordinates unknown.

“Damn! It didn’t work out right and I was almost killed. This isn’t an experiment any more. Armored samurai in a medieval Philadelphia? Am I getting closer to or farther from Home? I barely escaped them. I rode north on a stolen horse and Jumped as soon as my charge built up. Just in time, too—my heart is still pounding. No time for calculations. I don’t even know what the settings were.

“Note: the horse Jumped with me. The field must be wider than I thought. A clue to my dilemma? I need peace and quiet to think this out. I could find it with Goodman deVeres. I have the coordinates for his world. But his world isn’t where I left it. When I jumped, I moved it. Archimedes had nothing on me. Haha. That’s a joke. Why am I bothering with this stupid journal?

“I dreamed of Rosa last night. She was looking for me. I was right beside her but she couldn’t see me. When I awoke, it was still dark. Off to the north there was a glow behind the crest of the hills. City lights? If that is South Mountain, it would be Allentown or Bethlehem on the other side—or their analogs in this world. I should know by next night. So far I haven’t seen anyone; but I must be cautious.

“I’ve plenty of solitude here-and-now. That slag heap I saw from the mountain must have been Bethlehem, wiped out by a single bomb. The epicenter looked to be about where the steelworks once stood. It happened a long time ago, by the looks of things. Nothing living in the valley but a few scrub plants, insects and birds.

“I rode out as fast as I could to put that awful sight behind me. I didn’t dare eat anything. My horse did and is dead for it. Who knows what sort of adaptations have fit the grass for a radio-active environment? I may already have stayed too long. I must Jump, but I daren’t materialize inside a big city. I’ll hike up into the northern hills before I Jump again.”

Knecht turned to the last page. Jump #6. Settings, but no notes. There was a long silence while Knecht digested what he had read. Vonderberge was watching him. Outside, the wind rattled the windows. A nearby lightning strike caused the lights to flicker.

“Herr Festungskommandant . . .”

“His last Jump landed him right in your lap out on the Wyoming Trail.”

“Herr Festungskommandant . . .”

“And instead of the solitude he sought, he’s gotten solitude of another sort.”

“You don’t believe . . .”

“Believe?” Vonderberge slammed his palm down on the desk with unexpected violence. He stood abruptly and walked three quick paces to the window, where he gazed out at the storm. His fingers locked tightly behind his back. “Why not believe?” he whispered, his back to the room. “Somewhere there is a world where Heinrich Vonderberge is not trapped in a border fort on the edge of a war with the lives of others heavy on his back. He is in a laboratory, experimenting with electrical science, and he is happy.”

He turned and faced Knecht, self-possessed once more.

“What if,” he said. “What if the Pennamite Wars had not turned so vicious? If compromise had been possible? Had they lived, might not Washington and Franklin have forged a strong union, with the General as king and the Doctor as prime minister? Might not such a union have spread west, crushing Sequoyah and Tecumseh and their new Indian states before the British had gotten them properly started? Can you imagine a single government ruling the entire continent?”

Knecht said, “No,” but Vonderberge continued without hearing him.

“Suppose,” he said, pacing the room, “every time an event happens, several worlds are created. One for each outcome.” He paused and smiled at Knecht. “Suppose Pennsylvania had not intervened in the Partition of New Jersey? No Piney War. New York and Virginia cut us off from the sea. Konrad Schneider does not become a great General, nor Rudi Knecht a famous spy.Somewhere there is such a world. Somewhere . . . close.

“Now suppose further that on one of these . . . these moeglichwelten a man discovers how to cross from one to another. He tests his equipment, makes many notes, then tries to return. But he fails.”

A crash of thunder punctuated the Kommandant’s words. Knecht jumped.

“He fails,” Vonderberge continued, “because in the act of jumping he has somehow changed the ‘distance.’ So, on his return, he undershoots. At first, he is not worried. He makes a minor adjustment and tries again. And misses again. And again, and again, and again.”

Vonderberge perched on the corner of his desk, his face serious. “Even if there is only one event each year, and each event had but two outcomes, why then in ten years do you know how many worlds there would have to be?”

Knecht shook his head dumbly.

“A thousand, Rudi, and more. And in another ten years, a thousand for each of those. Time is like a tree; a forest of trees. Always branching. One event a year? Two possible outcomes? Ach! I am a piker! In all of time, how many, many worlds there must be. How to find a single twig in such a forest?”

Knecht could think of nothing to say. In the quiet of the office, the storm without seemed louder and more menacing.

In the morning, of course, with the dark storm only muddy puddles, Knecht could dismiss the Kommandant’s remarks as a bad joke. “What if?” was a game for children; a way of regretting the past. Knecht’s alert eye had not missed the row of technofiction books in Vonderberge’s office. “What if?” was a common theme in that genre, Knecht understood.

When he came to Kelly’s cell to interrogate the prisoner, he found that others had preceded him. The guard at the cell door came to attention, but favored Knecht with a conspiratorial wink. From within the cell came the sound of angry voices. Knecht listened closely, his ear to the thick, iron door; but he could make out none of the words. He straightened and looked a question at the guard. The latter rolled his eyes heavenward with a look of resigned suffering. Knecht grinned.

“So, Johann,” he said. “How long has this been going on?”

“Since sun-up,” was the reply. “The Kommandant came in early to talk to the prisoner. He’d been in there an hour when the Hexmajor arrived. Then there was thunder-weather, believe me, sir.” Johann smiled at the thought of two officers bickering.

Knecht pulled two cigars from his pocket humidor and offered one to the guard. “Do you suppose it is safe to leave them both locked in together?” He laughed. “We may as well relax while we wait. That is, if you are permitted . . .”

The guard took the cigar. “The Kommandant is more concerned that we are experts in how to shoot our rifles than in how to sneak a smoke.” There was a pause while Knecht lit his cigar. He puffed a moment, then remarked, “This is good leaf. Kingdom of Carolina?”

Knecht nodded. He blew out a great cloud of acrid smoke. “You know you should not have allowed either of them in to see the prisoner before me.”

“Well, sir. You know that and I know that; but the Hexmajor and the Kommandant, they make their own rules.” The argument in the cell reached a crescendo. Johann flinched. “Unfortunately, they do not make the same rules.”

“Hmph. Is your Kommandant always so . . . impetuous?” He wanted to know Heinrich Vonderberge better; and one way to do that was to question the men who followed him.

The guard frowned. “Sir, things may be different in the Scout Corps, but the Kommandant is no fool, in spite of his ways. He always has a reason for what he does. Why, no more than two months ago—this was before you were assigned here—he had us counting the number of pigeons flying north. He plotted it on a daily chart.” Johann laughed at the memory. “Then he sent us out to intercept a raiding party from the Nations. You see, you know how the sachems still allow private war parties? Well . . .”

There was a banging at the cell door and Johann broke off whatever yarn he had been about to spin and opened it. Vonderberge stalked out.

“We will see about that!” he snapped over his shoulder, and pushed past Knecht without seeing him. Knecht took his cigar from his mouth and looked from the Kommandant to the doorway. Hexmajor Ochsenfuss stood there, glaring at the Kommandant’s retreating form. “Fool,” the Doctor muttered through clenched teeth. Then he noticed Knecht.

“And what do you want? My patient is highly agitated. He cannot undergo another grilling.”

Knecht smiled pleasantly. “Why, Herr Doctor. He is not your patient until I say so. Until then, he is my prisoner. I found him north of the Mountain. It is my function to interview him.”

“He is a sick man, not one of your spies.”

“The men I interview are never my spies. I will decide if he is . . . sick.”

“That is a medical decision, not a military one. Have you read his journal? It is the product of a deluded mind.”

“If it is what it appears to be. It could also be the product of a clever mind. Madness as a cover for espionage? Kelly would not be the first spy with an outrageous cover.”

He walked past the doctor into the cell. Ochsenfuss followed him. Kelly looked up from his cot. He sat on the edge, hands clasped tightly, leaning on his knees. A night’s sleep had not refreshed him. He pointed at Knecht.

“I remember you,” he said. “You’re the guy that caught me.”

The Hexmajor forestalled Knecht’s reply. “Bitte, Herr Leutnant,” he said in Pennsylvaanish. “You must speak in our own tongue.”

“Warum?” Knecht answered, with a glance at Kelly. “The prisoner speaks English, nicht wahr?”

“Ah, but he must understand German, at least a little. Either our own dialect or the European. Look at him. He is not from the West, despite his Spanish forename. Their skin color is much darker. Nor is he from Columbia, Cumberland, or the Carolina Kingdom. Their accents are most distinctive. And no white man from Virginia on north could be ignorant of the national tongue of Pennsylvania.”

“Nor could any European,” finished Knecht. “Not since 1917, at any rate. I cannot fault your logic, Herr Doctor; but then, why . . .”

“Because for some reason he has suppressed his knowledge of German. He has retreated from reality, built himself fantasy worlds. If we communicate only in Pennsylvaanish as we are doing now, his own desire to communicate will eventually overcome his ‘block’ (as we call it); and the process of drawing him back to the real world will have begun.”

Knecht glanced again at the prisoner. “On the other hand, it is my duty to obtain information. If the prisoner will speak in English, then so will I.”

“But . . .”

“And I must be alone.” Knecht tapped his lapel insignia meaningfully. The double-X of the Scout Corps.

Ochsenfuss pursed his lips. Knecht thought he would argue further, but instead, he shrugged. “Have it your way, then; but remember to treat him carefully. If I am right, he could easily fall into complete withdrawal.” He nodded curtly to Knecht and left.

Knecht stared at the closed door. He disliked people who “communicated.” Nor did he think Vonderberge was a fool like Ochsenfuss had said. Still, he reminded himself, the Hexmajor had an impressive list of cures to his credit. Especially of battle fatigue and torture cases. Ochsenfuss was no fool, either.

He stuck his cigar back between his teeth. Let’s get this over with, he thought. But he knew it would not be that easy.

Within an hour Knecht knew why the others had quarreled. Kelly could describe his fantasy world and the branching timelines very convincingly. But he had convinced Vonderberge that he was telling the truth and Ochsenfuss that he was mad. The conclusions were incompatible; the mixture, explosive.

Kelly spoke freely in response to Knecht’s questions. He held nothing back. At least, the scout reminded himself, he appeared to hold nothing back. But who knew better than Knecht how deceptive such appearances could be?

Knecht tried all the tricks of the interrogator’s trade. He came at the same question time after time, from different directions. He hop-scotched from question to question. He piled detail on detail. No lie could be perfectly consistent. Contradictions would soon reveal themselves. He was friendly. He was harsh. He put his own words in the prisoner’s mouth to see their effect.

None of it worked.

If Kelly’s answers were contradictory, Knecht could not say. When the entire story is fantasy, who can find the errors? It was of a piece with the nature of Kelly’s cover. If two facts contradict each other, which is true? Answer: both, but in two different worlds.

Frustrated, Knecht decided to let the prisoner simply talk. Silence, too, was an effective tactic. Many a prisoner had said too much simply to fill an awkward silence. He removed fresh cigars from his pocket humidor and offered one to the prisoner, who accepted it gratefully. Knecht clipped the ends and lit them. When they were both burning evenly, he leaned back in the chair. Nothing like a friendly smoke to set the mind at ease. And off-guard.

“So, tell me in your own words, then, how you on the Wyoming Trail were found.”

Kelly grunted. “I wouldn’t expect the military mind to understand, or even be interested.”

Knecht flushed, but he kept his temper under control. “But I am interested, Herr Kelly. You have a strange story to tell. You come from another world. It is not a story I have often encountered.”

Kelly looked at him, startled, and unexpectedly laughed. “No, not very often, I would imagine.”

“Ach, that is the very problem. Just what would you imagine? Your story is true, or it is false; and if it is false, it is either deliberately so or not. I must know which, so I can take the proper action.”

Kelly ran a hand through his hair. “Look. All I want is to get out of here, away from you . . . military men. Back to Rosa.”

“That does not tell me anything. Spy, traveler, or madman, you would say the same.”

The prisoner scowled. Knecht waited.

“All right,” said Kelly at last. “I got lost. It’s that simple. Sharon tried to tell me that a field trip was premature, but I was so much smarter then. Who would think that the distance from B to A was different than the distance from A to B?”

Who indeed? Knecht thought, but he kept the thought to himself. Another contradiction. Except, grant the premise and it wasn’t a contradiction at all.

“Sure,” the prisoner’s voice was bitter. “Action requires a force; and action causes reaction. It’s not nice to forget Uncle Isaac.” He looked Knecht square in the eye. “You see, when I Jumped, my world moved, too. Action, reaction. I created multiple versions of it. In one, my equipment worked. In others, it malfunctioned in various ways. Each was slightly displaced from the original location.” He laughed again. “How many people can say they’ve misplaced an entire world?”

“I don’t understand,” said Knecht. “Why not two versions of all worlds? When you, ah, Jumped, you could for many different destinations have gone; and in each one, you either arrived, or you did not.”

His prisoner looked puzzled. “But that’s not topologically relevant. The Jump occurs in the metacontinuum of the polyverse, so . . . Ah, hell! Why should I try to convince you?”

Knecht sat back and puffed his cigar. Offhand, he could think of several reasons why Kelly should try to convince him.

“You see,” the prisoner continued, “there is not an infinity of possible worlds.”

Knecht had never thought there was more than one, so he said nothing. Even the idea that there were two would be staggering.

“And they are not all different in the same way. Each moment grows out of the past. Oh, say . . .” He looked at his cigar and smiled. He held it out at arm’s length. “Take this cigar, for instance. If I drop it, it’ll fall to the floor. That is deterministic. So are the rate, the falling time, and the energy of impact. But, I may or may not choose to drop it. That is probabilistic. It is the choice that creates worlds. We are now at a cusp, a bifurcation point on the Thom manifold.” He paused and looked at the cigar. Knecht waited patiently. Then Kelly clamped it firmly between his teeth. “It is far too good a smoke to waste. I chose not to drop it; but there was a small probability that I would have.”

Knecht pulled on his moustache, thinking of Vonderberge’s speculations of the previous night. Before he had spoken with Kelly. “So you say that . . . somewhere . . . there is a world in which you did?”

“Right. It’s a small world, because the probability was small. Temporal cross-section is proportional to a priori probability. But it’s there, close by. It’s a convergent world.”

“Convergent.”

“Yes. Except for our two memories and some ash on the floor, it is indistinguishable from this world. The differences damp out. Convergent worlds form a ‘rope’ of intertwined timelines. We can Jump back and forth among them easily, inadvertently. The energy needed is low. We could change places with our alternate selves and never notice. The only difference may be the number of grains of sand on Mars. Tomorrow you may find that I remember dropping the cigar; or I might find that you do. We may even argue the point.”

“Unconvincingly,” said Knecht sardonically.

Kelly chuckled. “True. How could you know what I remember? Still, it happens all the time. The courts are full of people who sincerely remember different versions of reality.”

“Or perhaps it is the mind that plays tricks, not the reality.”

Kelly flushed and looked away. “That happens, too.”

After a moment, Knecht asked, “What has this to do with your becoming lost?”

“What? Oh. Simple, really. The number of possible worlds is large, but it’s not infinite. That’s important to remember,” he continued to himself. “Finite. I haven’t checked into Hotel Infinity. I can still find my own room, or at least the right floor.” He stood abruptly and paced the room. Knecht followed him with his eyes.

“I don’t have to worry about worlds where Washington and Jefferson instituted a pharaonic monarchy with a divine god-king. Every moment grows out of the previous moment, remember? For that to happen, so much previous history would have had to be different that Washington and Jefferson would never have been born.” He stopped pacing and faced Knecht.

“And I don’t have to worry about convergent worlds. If I find the right ‘rope,’ I’ll be all right. Even a parallel world would be fine, as long as it would have Rosa in it.” He frowned. “But it mightn’t. And if it did, she mightn’t know me.”

“Parallel?” asked Knecht.

Kelly walked to the window and gazed through the bars. “Sure. Change can be convergent, parallel, or divergent. Suppose, oh suppose Isabella hadn’t funded Columbus, but the other Genoese,Giovanni Caboto, who was also pushing for a voyage west. Or Juan de la Cosa. Or the two brothers who captained the Niña and the Pinta. There was no shortage of bold navigators. What practical difference would it have made? A few names are changed in the history books, is all. The script is the same, but different actors play the parts. The differences stay constant.”

He turned around. “You or I may have no counterpart in those worlds. They are different ‘ropes.’ Even so, we could spontaneously Jump to one nearby. Benjamin Bathurst, the man who walked behind a horse in plain sight and was never seen again. No one took his place. Judge Crater. Ambrose Bierce. Amelia Earhart. Jimmy Hoffa. The Legion II Augusta. Who knows? Some of them may have Jumped.”

Kelly inspected his cigar. “Then there are the cascades. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. The differences accumulate. The worlds diverge. That was my mistake. Jumping to a cascade world.” His voice was bitter, self-mocking. “Oh, it’ll be simple to find my way back. All I have to do is find the nail.”

“The nail?”

“Sure. The snowflake that started the avalanche. What could be simpler?” He took three quick steps along the wall, turned, stepped back, and jammed his cigar out in the ashtray. He sat backward, landing on his cot. He put his face in his hands.

Knecht listened to his harsh breathing. He remembered what Ochsenfuss had said. If I push him too hard, he could crack. A spy cracks one way; a madman, another.

After a while, Kelly looked up again. He smiled. “It’s not that hard, really,” he said more calmly. “I can approximate it closely enough with history texts and logical calculus. That should be good enough to get me back to my own rope. Or at least a nearby one. As long as Rosa is there, it doesn’t matter.” He hesitated and glanced at Knecht. “You’ve confiscated my personal effects,” he said, “but I would like to have her photograph. It was in my wallet. Along with my identification papers,” he added pointedly.

Knecht smiled. “I have seen your papers, Herr ‘Professor Doctor’ Kelly. They are very good.”

“But . . .”

“But I have drawn others myself just as good.”

Kelly shrugged and grinned. “It was worth a try,” he said.

Knecht chuckled. He was beginning to like this man. “I suppose it can do no harm,” he said, thinking out loud, “to give you a history text. Surely there gives one here in the fortress. If nothing else, it can keep you amused during the long days. And perhaps it can reacquaint you with reality.”

“That’s what the shrink said before.”

“The shrink? What . . .? Oh, I see. The Hexmajor.” He laughed. Then he remembered how Ochsenfuss and Vonderberge had quarreled over this man and he looked at him more soberly. “You understand that you must here stay. Until we know who or what you are. There are three possibilities and only one is to your benefit.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “It gives some here who your story believe, and some not.”

Kelly nodded. “I know. Do you believe me?”

“Me? I am a scout. I look. I listen. I try to fit pieces together so they make a picture. I take no direct action. No, Herr Kelly. I do not believe you; but neither do I disbelieve you.”

Kelly nodded. “Fair enough.”

“Do not thank me yet, Herr Kelly. In our first five minutes of talking it is clear to me you know nothing of value of the Wyoming, or the Nations, or anything. In such a case, my official interest in you comes to an end.”

“But unofficially . . .” prompted the other.

“Ja.” Knecht rose and walked to the door. “Others begin to have strong opinions about you, for whatever reasons of their own I do not know. Such are the seeds, and I do not like what may sprout. Perhaps this . . .” He jabbed his cigar at Kelly, suddenly accusing. “You know more than you show. You play-act the hinkle-dreck Quatschkopf. And this, the sowing of discord, may be the very reason for your coming.”

He stepped back and considered the prisoner. He gestured broadly, his cigar leaving curlicues of smoke. “I see grave philosophical problems with you, Herr Kelly. We Germans, even we Pennsylvaanish Germans, are a very philosophical people. From what you say there are many worlds, some only trivially different. I do not know why we with infinitely many Kellys are not deluged, each coming from a world almost like your own!”

Kelly gasped in surprise. He stood abruptly and turned to the wall, his back to Knecht. “Of course,” he said. “Stupid, stupid, stupid! The transformation isn’t homeomorphic. The topology of the inverse sheaf must not be Hausdorff after all. It may only be a Harris proximity.” He turned to Knecht. “Please, may I have my calculator, the small box with the numbered buttons . . . No, damn!” He smacked a fist into his left hand. “I ran the batteries down when I was with Goodman deVeres. Some pencils and paper, then?” He looked eager and excited.

Knecht grunted in satisfaction. Something he had said had set Kelly thinking. It remained to be seen along which lines those thoughts would run.

Rumors flew over the next few days. A small border fort is their natural breeding ground, and Fox Gap was no exception. Knecht heard through the grapevine that Vonderberge had had the Hexmajor barred from Kelly’s cell; that Ochsenfuss had telegraphed his superiors in Medical Corps and had Vonderberge overruled. Now there was talk that General Schneider himself had entered the dispute, on which side no one knew; but the General had already postponed his scheduled departure for Wind Gap Fortress and a packet bearing his seal had gone by special courier to Oberkommando Pennsylvaanish in Philadelphia City. A serious matter if the General did not trust the security of the military telegraph.

The General himself was not talking, not even to Knecht. That saddened the scout more than he had realized it could. Since his talk with the prisoner, Knecht had thought more than once how slender was the chain of chance that had brought Schneider and himself together, the team of scout and strategist that had shepherded the Commonwealth through two major wars and countless border skirmishes.

He had dined with the General shortly after submitting his report on Kelly. Dinner was a hearty fare of shnitz un’ knepp, with deutch-baked corn, followed by shoofly pie. Afterward, cigars and brandy wine. Talk had turned, as it often did, to the Piney War. Schneider had deprecated his own role.

“What could I do, Rudi?” he asked. “A stray cannon shot and both Kutz and Rittenhouse were dead. I felt the ball go by me, felt the wind on my face. A foot the other way would have deprived this very brandy of being so thoroughly enjoyed today. Suddenly, I was Commander of the Army of the Delaware, with my forces scattered among the Wachtungs. Rittenhouse had always been the tight-lipped sort. I had no idea what his plans had been. So I studied his dispositions and our intelligence on Enemy’s dispositions, and . . .” A shrug. “I improvised.”

Knecht lifted his glass in salute. “Brilliantly, as always.”

Schneider grinned through his bushy white muttonchop whiskers. “We mustn’t forget who secured that intelligence for me. Brilliance cannot improvise on faulty data. You have never failed me.”

Knecht flushed. “Once I did.”

“Tcha!” The General waved his hand in dismissal. “The nine hundred ninety-nine other times make me forget the once. Only you constantly remember.”

Knecht remembered how once he had misplaced an entire regiment of Virginia Foot. It was not where he had left it, but somewhere else entirely. General Schneider, except that he had been Brigadier Schneider, had salvaged the situation and had protected him from Alois Kutz’s anger. He had learned something about Konrad Schneider then: The General never let the short-term interfere with the long-term. He would not sacrifice the future on the whim of the moment. It had been such a simple error. He had improperly identified the terrain. The Appalachian Mountains of western Virginia looked much the same from ridge to ridge.

Or was it so simple? He recalled his discussion with the prisoner, Kelly. Ich biete Ihre Entschuldigung, Herr Brigadier, he imagined himself saying, but I must have slipped over into a parallel universe. In my timeline, the Rappahannock Guards were on the north side of the river, not the south.

No, it wouldn’t work. To believe it meant chaos: A world without facts. A world where lies hid among multiple truths. And what did the General think? What did Konrad Schneider make of Kelly’s tale?

Knecht swirled the brandy in his snifter. He watched his reflection dance on the blood-red liquid. “Tell me, Konrad, have you read my report on the prisoner?”

“Ja, I have.”

“And what did you think?”

“It was a fine report, Rudi. As always.”

“No. I meant what did you think of the prisoner’s story?”

The General lifted his glass to his lips and sipped his brandy. Knecht had seen many men try to avoid answers and recognized all the tactics. Knecht frowned and waited for an answer he knew he could not trust. For as long as Knecht could remember Schneider had been his leader. From the day he had left his father’s house, he had followed Colonel, then Brigadier, then General Schneider, and never before had he been led astray. There was an emptiness in him now. He bit the inside of his cheek so that he could feel something, even pain.

Schneider finished his slow, careful sip and set his glass down. He shrugged broadly, palms up. “How could I know? Vonderberge tells me one thing; Ochsenfuss, another. You, in your report, tell me nothing.”

Knecht bristled. “There is not enough data to reach a conclusion,” he protested.

Schneider shook his head. “No, no. I meant no criticism. You are correct, as always. Yet, our friends have reached conclusions. Different conclusions, to be sure, but we don’t know which is correct.” He paused. “Of course, he might be a spy.”

“If he is, he is either a very bad one, or a very, very good one.”

“And all we know is . . . What? He loves Rosa and does not love the military. He has some peculiar documents and artifacts and he believes he comes from another world, full of marvelous gadgets. . . .”

“Correction, Herr General. He says he believes he came from another world. There is a difference.”

“Hmph. Ja, you are right again. What is it you always say? The map is not the territory. The testimony is not the fact. Sometimes I envy our friends their ability to reach such strong convictions on so little reflection. You and I, Rudi, we are always beset by doubts, eh?”

Knecht made a face. “If so, Konrad, your doubts have never kept you from acting.”

The General stared at him a moment. Then he roared with laughter, slapping his thigh. “Oh, yes, you are right, Rudi. What should I do without you? You know me better than I know myself. There are two kinds of doubts, nicht wahr? One says: What is the right thing to do? The other says: Have I done the right thing? But, to command means to decide. I have never fought a battle but that a better strategy has come to mind a day or two later. But where would we be had I waited? Eh, Rudi? The second sort of doubt, Rudi. That is the sort of doubt a commander must have. Never the first sort. And never certainty. Both are disasters.”

“And what of Kelly?”

The General reached for his brandy once more. “I will have both the Hexmajor and the Kommandant interview him. Naturally, each will be biased, but in different ways. Between them, we may learn the truth of it.” He paused thoughtfully, pursing his lips. “Sooner or later, one will concede the matter. We need not be hasty. No, not hasty at all.” He drank the last of his brandy.

“And myself?”

Schneider looked at him. He smiled. “You cannot spend so much time on only one man, one who is almost surely not an enemy agent. You have your spies, scouts, and rangers to supervise. Intelligence to collate. Tell me, Rudi, what those fat knick patroons are planning up in Albany. Have the Iroquois joined them, too? Are they dickering with the Lee brothers to make it a two-front war? I must know these things if I am to . . . improvise. Our situation is grave. Forget Kelly. He is not important.”

After he left the General, Knecht took a stroll around the parapet, exchanging greetings with the sentries. Schneider could not have announced more clearly that Kelly was important. But why? And why keep him out of it?

Fox Gap was a star-fort and Knecht’s wanderings had taken him to one of the points of the star. From there, defensive fire could enfilade any attacking force. He leaned his elbows on a gun port and gazed out at the nighttime forest farther down the slope of the mountain. The sky was crisp and clear as only autumn skies could be, and the stars were brilliantly close.

The forest was a dark mass, a deeper black against the black of night. The wind soughed through the maple and elm and birch. The sound reached him, a dry whisper, like crumpling paper. Soon it would be the Fall. The leaves were dead; all the life had been sucked out of them.

He sighed. General Schneider had just as clearly ordered him away from Kelly. He had never disobeyed an order. Angrily, he threw a shard of masonry from the parapet wall. It crashed among the treetops below and a sentry turned sharply and shouted a challenge. Embarrassed, Knecht turned and left the parapet.

Once back in his own quarters, Knecht pondered the dilemma of Kelly. His room was spartan. Not much more comfortable, he thought, than Kelly’s cell. A simple bed, a desk and chair, a trunk. Woodcuts on the wall: heroic details of long-forgotten battles. An anonymous room, suitable for a roving scout. Next month, maybe, a different room at a different fort.

So what was Kelly? Knecht couldn’t see but three possibilities. A clever spy, a madman, or the most pitiful refugee ever. But, as a spy he was not credible; his story was unbelievable, and he simply did not talk like a madman.

And where does that leave us, Rudi? Nowhere. Was there a fourth possibility? It didn’t seem so.

Knecht decided it was time for a pipe. Cigars were for talk; pipes for reflection. He stepped to the window of his room as he lit it. The pipe was very old. It had belonged to his grandfather, and a century of tobacco had burned its flavor into the bowl. His grandfather had given it to him the night before he had left home forever, when he had confided his plans to the old man, confident of his approval. He had been, Knecht remembered, about Kelly’s age at the time. An age steeped in certainties.

Spy, madman, or refugee? If the first, good for me; because I caught him. If the second, good for him; because he will be cared for. He puffed. For two of the three possibilities, custody was the best answer; the only remaining question being what sort of custody. And those two choices were like the two sides of a coin: they used up all probability between them. Heads I win, Herr Kelly, and tails you lose. It is a cell for you either way. That is obvious.

So then, why am I pacing this room in the middle of the night, burning my best leaf and tasting nothing?

Because, Rudi, there is just the chance that the coin could land on its edge. If Kelly’s outrageous tale were true, custody would not be the best answer. It would be no answer at all.

Ridiculous. It could not be true. He took the pipe from his mouth. The warmth of the bowl in his hand comforted him. Knecht had concluded tentatively that Kelly was no spy. That meant Ochsenfuss was right. Knecht could see that. It had been his own first reaction on reading the notebook. But he could also see why Vonderberge believed otherwise. The man’s outlook and Kelly’s amiable and sincere demeanor had combined to produce belief.

It was Schneider that bothered him. Schneider had not decided. Knecht was certain of that. And that meant . . . What? With madness so obvious, Schneider saw something else. Knecht had decided nothing because he was only interested in spies. Beyond that, what Kelly was or was not meant nothing.

Even if his tale is true, he thought, it is none of my concern. My task is done. I have taken in a suspicious stranger under suspicious circumstances. It is for higher authorities to puzzle it out. Why should I care what the answer is?

Because, Rudi, it was you who brought him here.

Knecht learned from Johann the guard that Vonderberge spent the mornings with Kelly, and Ochsenfuss, the afternoons. So when Knecht brought the history book to the cell a few days later, he did so at noon, when no one else was about. He had made it a habit to stop by for a few minutes each day.

He nodded to Johann as he walked down the cell block corridor. “I was never here, soldier,” he said. Johann’s face took on a look of obligingly amiable unawareness.

Kelly was eating lunch, a bowl of thick rivel soup. He had been provided with a table, which was now littered with scribbled pages. Knecht recognized the odd equations of Kelly’s “logical calculus.” He handed the prisoner the text: “The History of North America.” Kelly seized it eagerly and leafed through it.

“Thanks, lieutenant,” he said. “The shrink brought me one, too; but it’s in German and I couldn’t make sense of it.”

“Pennsylvaanish,” Knecht corrected him absently. He was looking at the other book. It was thick and scholarly. A good part of each page consisted of footnotes. He shuddered and put it down.

“What?”

“Pennsylvaanish,” he repeated. “It is a German dialect, but it is not Hochdeutsch. It is Swabian with some English mixed in. The spelling makes it different sometimes. A visitor from the Second Reich would find it nearly unintelligible, but . . .” An elaborate shrug. “What can one expect from a Prussian?”

Kelly laughed. He put his soup bowl aside, finished. “How did that happen?” he asked. “I mean, you folks speaking, ah, Pennsylvaanish?”

Knecht raised an eyebrow. “Because we are Pennsylvanians.”

“So were Franklin, Dickinson, and Tom Penn.”

“Ah, I see what you are asking. It is simple. Even so far back as the War Against the English the majority of Pennsylvanians were Deutsch, German-speakers. So high was the feeling against the English—outside of Philadelphia City, that is—that the Assembly German the official language made. Later, after the Revolution in Europe, many more from Germany came. They were fleeing the Prussians and Austrians.”

“And from nowhere else? No Irish? No Poles, Italians, Russian Jews? ‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’ What happened to all of that?”

“I don’t understand. Ja, some came from other countries. There were Welsh and Scots-Irish here even before the War. Others came later. A few, not many. Ranger Oswoski’s grandparents were Polish. But, when they come here, then Pennsylvaanish they must learn.”

“I suppose with America so balkanized, it never seemed such a land of opportunity.”

“I don’t understand that, either. What is ‘balkanized’ ?”

Kelly tapped with his pencil on the table. “No,” he said slowly, “I suppose you wouldn’t.” He aimed the pencil at the history book. “Let me read this. Maybe I’ll be able to explain things better.”

“I hope you find in it what you need.”

Kelly grinned, all teeth. “An appropriately ambiguous wish, lieutenant, ‘What I need.’ That could mean anything. But, thank you. I think I will.” He hesitated a moment. “And, uh, thanks for the book, too. You’ve been a big help. You’re the only one who comes here and listens to me. I mean, really listens.”

Knecht smiled. He opened the door, but turned before leaving. “But, Herr Kelly,” he said. “It is my job to listen.”

Knecht’s work absorbed him for several days. Scraps of information filtered in from several quarters. He spent long hours in his office going over them, separating rumor from fact from possible fact. Sometimes, he sent a man out to see for himself and waited in nervous uncertainty until the pigeons flew back. Each night, he threw himself into his rack exhausted. Each morning, there was a new stack of messages.

He moved pins about in his wall map. Formations whose bivouac had been verified. Twice he telegraphed the Southern Command using his personal code to discover what the scouts down along the Monongahela had learned. Slowly, the spaces filled in. The pins told a story. Encirclement.

Schneider came in late one evening. He stood before the map and studied it for long minutes in silence. Knecht sipped his coffee, watching. The General drew his forefinger along the northwestern frontier. There were no pins located in Long House territory. “Curious,” he said aloud, as if to himself. Knecht smiled. Five rangers were already out trying to fill in that gap. Schneider would have his answer soon enough.

Knecht had almost forgotten Kelly. There had been no more time for his noontime visits. Then, one morning he heard that Vonderberge and Ochsenfuss had fought in the officers’ club. Words had been exchanged, then blows. Not many, because the Chief Engineer had stopped them. It wasn’t clear who had started it, or even how it had started. It had gotten as far as it had only because the other officers present had been taken by surprise. Neither man had been known to brawl before.

Knecht was not surprised by the fight. He knew the tension between the two over Kelly. What did surprise him was that Schneider took no official notice of the fight.

Something was happening. Knecht did not know what it was, but he was determined to find out. He decided to do a little intramural spy work of his own.

Knecht found the Hexmajor later that evening. He was sitting alone at a table in the officers’ club, sipping an after-dinner liqueur from a thin glass, something Knecht found vaguely effeminate. He realized he was taking a strong personal dislike to the man. Compared to Vonderberge, Ochsenfuss was haughty and cold. Elegant, Knecht thought, watching the man drink. That was the word: elegant. Knecht himself liked plain, blunt-spoken men. But scouts, he told himself firmly, must observe what is, not what they wish to see. The bar orderly handed him a beer stein and he strolled casually to Ochsenfuss’ table.

“Ah, Herr Doctor,” he said smiling. “How goes it with the prisoner?”

“It goes,” said Ochsenfuss, “but slowly.”

Knecht sat without awaiting an invitation. He thought he saw a brief glimmer of surprise in the other’s face, but the Hexmajor quickly recovered his wooden expression. Knecht was aware that Vonderberge, at a corner table, had paused in his conversation with the Chief Engineer and was watching them narrowly.

“A shame the treatment cannot go speedier,” he told Ochsenfuss.

A shrug. “Under such circumstances, the mind must heal itself.”

“I remember your work with Ranger Harrison after we rescued him from the Senecas.”

Ochsenfuss sipped his drink. “I recall the case. His condition was grave. Torture does things to a man’s mind; worse in many ways than what it does to his body.”

“May I ask how you are treating Kelly?”

“You may.”

There was a long silence. Then Knecht said, “How are you treating him?” He could not detect the slightest hint of a smile on the doctor’s face. He was surprised. Ochsenfuss had not seemed inclined to humor of any sort.

“I am mesmerizing him,” he said. “Then I allow him to talk about his fantasies. In English,” he admitted grudgingly. “I ply him for details. Then, when he is in this highly suggestible state, I point out the contradictions in his thinking.”

“Contradictions . . .” Knecht let the word hang in the air.

“Oh, many things. Heavier-than-air flying machines: a mathematical impossibility. Radio, communication without connecting wires: That is action at a distance, also impossible. Then there is his notion that a single government rules the continent, from Columbia to New England and from Pontiac to Texas. Why, the distances and geographical barriers make the idea laughable.

“I tell him these things while he is mesmerized. My suggestions lodge in what we call the subconscious and gradually make his fantasies less credible to his waking mind. Eventually he will again make contact with reality.”

“Tell me something, Herr Doctor.”

They both turned at the sound of the new voice. It was Vonderberge. He stood belligerently, his thumbs hooked in his belt. He swayed slightly and Knecht could smell alcohol on his breath. Knecht frowned unhappily.

Ochsenfuss blinked. “Yes, Kommandant,” he said blandly. “What is it?”

“I have read that by mesmerization one can also implant false ideas.”

Ochsenfuss smiled. “I have heard that at carnival sideshows, the mesmerist may cause members of the audience to believe that they are ducks or some such thing.”

“I was thinking of something more subtle than that.”

The Hexmajor’s smile did not fade, but it seemed to freeze. “Could you be more specific.”

Vonderberge leaned toward them. “I mean,” he said slowly, “the obliteration of true memories and their replacement with false ones.”

Ochsenfuss tensed. “No reputable hexdoctor would do such a thing.”

Vonderberge raised a palm. “I never suggested such a thing, either. I only asked if it were possible.”

Ochsenfuss paused before answering. “It is. But the false memories would inevitably conflict with a thousand others and, most importantly, with the evidence of the patient’s own senses. The end would be psychosis. The obliteration of false memories, however . . .”

Vonderberge nodded several times, as if the Hexmajor had confirmed a long-standing belief. “I see. Thank you, Doctor.” He turned and looked at Knecht. He touched the bill of his cap. “Rudi,” he said in salutation, then turned and left.

Ochsenfuss watched him go. “There is a man who can benefit from therapy. He would reject reality if he could.”

Knecht remembered Vonderberge’s outburst in his office during the storm. He remembered, too, the map in his own office. “So might we all,” he said. “Reality is none too pleasant these days. General Schneider believes . . .”

“General Schneider,” interrupted Ochsenfuss, “believes what he wants to believe. But truth is not always what we want, is it?” He looked away, his eyes focused on the far wall. “Nor always what we need.” He took another sip of his liqueur and set the glass down. “I am not such a fool as he seems to think. For all that he primes me with questions to put to Kelly, and the interest he shows in my reports, he still has not decided what to do with my patient. He should be in hospital, in Philadelphia.”

For the briefest moment, Knecht thought he meant Schneider should be in hospital. When he realized the confusion, he laughed. Ochsenfuss looked at him oddly and Knecht took a pull on his mug to hide his embarrassment.

“If I could use mescal or peyote to heighten his suggestibility,” Ochsenfuss continued to no one in particular. “Or if I could keep our friend the Kommandant away from my patient. . . .” He studied his drink in silence, then abruptly tossed it off. He looked at his watch and waved off a hovering orderly. “Well, things cannot go on as they are. Something must break.” He laughed and rose from the table. “At least there are a few of us who take a hard-headed and practical view of the world, eh, Leutnant?” He patted Knecht on the arm and left.

Knecht watched him go. He took another drink of beer and wiped the foam from his lips with his sleeve, thinking about what the Hexmajor had said.

A few days later, a carrier pigeon arrived and Knecht rode out to meet its sender at a secret rendezvous deep inside Wyoming. Such meetings were always risky, but his agent had spent many years working her way into a position of trust. It was a mask that would be dropped if she tried to leave the country. Knecht wondered what the information was. Obviously more than could be entrusted to a pigeon.

But she never came to the rendezvous. Knecht waited, then left a sign on a certain tree that he had been there and gone. He wondered what had happened. Perhaps she had not been able to get away after all. Or perhaps she had been unmasked and quietly executed. Like many of the Old-style Quakers, Abigail Fox had learned English at her mother’s knee and spoke without an accent; but one never knew what trivial detail would prove fatal.

Knecht chewed on his moustache as he rode homeward. He had not seen Abby for a long time. Now he didn’t know if he would ever see her again. The worst part would be never knowing what had happened. Knecht hated not knowing things. That’s why he was a good scout. Even bad news was better than no news.

Well, perhaps another pigeon would arrive, explaining everything, arranging another rendezvous. But how could you be sure, Rudi, that it really came from her? Spies have been broken before, and codes with them. One day, he knew, he would ride out to a meeting and not come back. He felt cold and empty. He slapped his horse on the rump and she broke into a trot. He was afraid of death, but he would not send others to do what he would not.

It had been two weeks to rendezvous and back and Schneider was still at Fox Gap when Knecht returned. The rumors had grown up thick for harvesting. Between the front gate and the stables five soldiers and two officers asked him if a command shake-up were coming. His friendship with the General was well-known, and why else would Schneider stay on?

Why else, indeed. Kelly. Knecht was certain of it, but the why still eluded him.

Catching up on his paperwork kept Knecht at his desk until well after dark. When he had finished, he made his way to Vonderberge’s quarters. Knecht’s thought was to pay a “social call” and guide the conversation around to the subject of Kelly. Once he arrived, however, he found himself with some other officers, drinking dark beer and singing badly to the accompaniment of the Chief Engineer’s equally bad piano playing. It was, he discovered, a weekly ritual among the permanent fortress staff.

Ochsenfuss was not there, but that did not surprise him.

He was reluctant to bring up the business of the prisoner in front of the other officers, so he planned to be the last to leave. But Vonderberge and the Fortress Staff proved to have a respectable capacity for drinking and singing and Knecht outlasted them only by cleverly passing out in the corner, where he was overlooked when Vonderberge ushered the others out.

“Good morning, Rudi.”

Knecht opened his eyes. The light seared his eyes and the top of his head fell off and shattered on the floor. “Ow,” he said.

“Very eloquent, Rudi.” Vonderberge leaned over him, looking impossibly cheerful. “That must be some hangover.”

Knecht winced. “You can’t get hangovers from beer.”

Vonderberge shrugged. “Have it your way.” He held out a tall glass. “Here, drink this.”

He sniffed the drink warily. It was dark and red and pungent. “What is it?” he asked suspiciously.

“Grandmother Vonderberge’s Perfect Cure for Everything. It never fails.”

“But what’s in it?”

“If I told you, you wouldn’t drink it. Go ahead. Grandmother was a wise old bird. She outlasted three husbands.”

Knecht drank. He shuddered and sweat broke out on his forehead. “Small wonder,” he gasped. “She probably fed them this.”

Vonderberge chuckled and took the glass back. “You were in fine form last night. Fine form. Who is Abby?”

Knecht looked at him. “Why?”

“You kept drinking toasts to her.”

He looked away, into the distance. “She was . . . someone I knew.”

“Like that, eh?” Vonderberge grinned. Knecht did not bother to correct him.

“You should socialize more often, Rudi,” continued the Kommandant. “You’ll find we’re not such bad sorts. You have a good baritone. It gave the staff a fuller sound.” Vonderberge gestured broadly to show how full the sound had been. “We need the higher registers, though. I’ve thought of having Heinz and Zuckerman gelded. What do you think?”

Knecht considered the question. “Where do they stand on the promotion list?”

Vonderberge looked at him sharply. He grinned. “You are beginning to show a sense of humor, Rudi. A sense of humor.”

Knecht snorted. He was easily twenty years the Kommandant’s senior. He knew jokes that had been old and wrinkled before Vonderberge had been born. He recalled suddenly that Abigail Fox had been an alto. There were other memories, too; and some empty places where there could have been memories, but weren’t. Ach, for what might have been! It wasn’t right for spymaster and spy to be too close. He wondered if Kelly had a world somewhere where everything was different.

Vonderberge had his batman serve breakfast in rather than go to the mess. He invited Knecht to stay and they talked over eggs, scrapple, and coffee. Knecht did not have to lead into the subject of Kelly because Vonderberge raised it himself. He unrolled a sheet of paper onto the table after the batman had cleared it, using the salt and pepper mills to hold down the curled ends.

“Let me show you,” he said, “what bothers me about Kelly’s world.”

A great many things about Kelly’s world bothered Knecht, not the least of which was the fact that there was no evidence it even existed; but he put on a polite face and listened attentively. Was Vonderberge beginning to have doubts?

The Kommandant pointed to the sheet. Knecht saw that it was a table of inventions, with dates and inventors. Some of the inventions had two dates and two inventors, in parallel columns.

“Next to each invention,” said Vonderberge, “I’ve written when and by whom it was invented. The first column is our world; the second, Kelly’s, as nearly as he can remember. Do you notice anything?”

Knecht glanced at the list. “Several things,” he replied casually. “There are more entries in the second column, most of the dates are earlier, and a few names appear in both columns.”

Vonderberge blinked and looked at him. Knecht kept his face composed.

“You’re showing off, aren’t you, Rudi?”

“I’ve spent a lifetime noticing details on documents.”

“But do you see the significance? The inventions came earlier and faster in Kelly’s world. Look how they gush forth after 1870! Why? How could they have been so much more creative? In the early part of the list, many of the same men are mentioned in both columns, so it is not individual genius. Look . . .” His forefinger searched the first column. “The electrical telegraph was invented, when? In 1875, by Edison. In Kelly’s world, it was invented in the 1830s, by a man named Morse.”

“The painter?”

“Apparently the same man. Why didn’t he invent it here? And see what Edison did in Kelly’s world: The electrical light, the moving picture projector, dozens of things we never saw until the 1930s.”

Knecht pointed to an entry. “Plastics,” he said. “We discovered them first.” He wondered what “first” meant in this context.

“That is the exception that proves the rule. There are others. Daguerre’s photographic camera, Foucault’s gyroscope. They are the same in both worlds. But overall there is a pattern. Not an occasional marvel, every now and then; but a multitude, every year! By 1920, in Kelly’s world, steamships, heavier-than-air craft, railroads, voice telegraphy with and without wires, horseless carriages, they were an old hat. Here, they are still wonders. Or wondered about.”

Inventions and gadgets, decided Knecht. Those were Vonderberge’s secret passion, and Kelly had described a technological faerieland. No wonder the Kommandant was entranced. Knecht was less in awe, himself. He had seen the proud ranks of the 18th New York mowed down like corn by the Pennsylvaanish machine guns at the Battle of the Raritan. And he had not forgotten what Kelly had written in his notebook: There were bombs that destroyed whole cities.

Vonderberge sighed and rolled up his list. He tied a cord around it. “It is difficult, Rudi,” he said. “Very difficult. Your General, he only wants to hear about the inventions. He does not wonder why there are so many. Yet, I feel that this is an important question.”

“Can’t Kelly answer it?”

“He might. He has come close to it on several occasions; but he is . . . confused. Ochsenfuss sees to that.”

Knecht noticed how Vonderberge’s jaw set. The Kommandant’s usual bantering tone was missing.

Vonderberge pulled a watch from his right pants pocket and studied its face. “It is time for my appointment with Kelly. Why don’t you come with me. I’d like your opinion on something.”

“On what?”

“On Kelly.”

Knecht sat backward on a chair in the corner of the cell, leaning his arms on the back. A cigar was clamped tightly between his teeth. It had gone out, but he had not bothered to relight it. He watched the proceedings between Kelly and Vonderberge. So far, he did not like what he had seen.

Kelly spoke hesitantly. He seemed distracted and lapsed into frequent, uncomfortable silences. The papers spread out on his table were blank. No new equations. Just doodles of flowers. Roses, they looked like.

“Think, Kelly,” Vonderberge pleaded. “We were talking of this only yesterday.”

Kelly pursed his lips and frowned. “Were we? Ja, you’re right. I think we did. I thought it was a dream.”

“It was not a dream. It was real. You said you thought the Victorian Age was the key. What was the Victorian Age?”

Kelly looked puzzled. “Victorian Age? Are you sure?”

“Yes. You mentioned Queen Victoria . . .”

“She was never Queen, though.”

Vonderberge clucked impatiently. “That was in this world,” he said. “In your world it must have been different.”

“In my world . . .” It was half a statement, half a question. Kelly closed his eyes, hard. “I have such headaches, these days. It’s hard to remember things. It’s all confused.”

Vonderberge turned to Knecht. “You see the problem?”

Knecht removed his cigar. “The problem,” he said judiciously, “is the source of his confusion.”

Vonderberge turned back to Kelly. “I think we both know who that is.”

Kelly was losing touch, Knecht thought. That was certain. But was he losing touch with reality, or with fantasy?

“Wait!” Kelly’s eyes were still closed but his hand shot out and gripped Vonderberge’s wrist. “The Victorian Age. That was the time from the War Between the States to World War I.” He opened his eyes and looked at Vonderberge. “Am I right?”

Vonderberge threw his hands up. “Tchah! Why are you asking me?”

Knecht chewed thoughtfully on his cigar. World wars? And they were numbered?

“What has this ‘Victorian Age’ to do with your world’s inventiveness?”

Kelly stared at a space in the air between them. He rapped rhythmically on the table with his knuckles. “Don’t push it,” he said. “I might lose the . . . Yes. I can hear Tom’s voice explaining it.” The eyes were unfocused. Knecht wondered what sort of mind heard voices talking to it. “What an odd apartment. We were just BS’ing. Sharon, Tom, and . . . a girl, and I. The subject came up, but in a different context.”

They waited patiently for Kelly to remember.

“Critical mass!” he said suddenly. “That was it. The rate at which new ideas are generated depends in part on the accumulation of past ideas. The more there are, the more ways they can be combined and modified. Then, boom,” he gestured with his hands. “An explosion.” He laughed shrilly; sobered instantly. “That’s what happened during the Victorian Age. That’s what’s happening now, but slower.”

A slow explosion? The idea amused Knecht. “Why slower?” he asked.

“Because of the barriers! Ideas must circulate freely if they’re to trigger new ones. The velocity of ideas is as important to culture and technology as, as the velocity of money is to the economy. The United States would have been the largest free trade zone in the world. The second largest was England. Not even the United Kingdom, just England. Can you imagine? Paying a toll or a tariff every few miles?”

“What has commerce to do with ideas?” asked Vonderberge.

“It’s the traveling people who carry ideas from place to place. The merchants, sailors, soldiers. At least until an international postal system is established. And radio. And tourism.”

“I see . . .”

“But look at the barriers we have to deal with! The largest nation on the Atlantic seaboard is what? The Carolina Kingdom. Some of the Indian states are larger, but they don’t have many people. How far can you travel before you pay a tariff? Or run into a foreign language like English or Choctaw or French? Or into a military patrol that shoots first and asks questions later? No wonder we’re so far behind!”

Knecht pulled the cigar from his mouth. “We?” he asked. Vonderberge turned and gave him an anxious glance, so he, too, had noticed the shift in Kelly’s personal pronoun.

The prisoner was flustered. “You,” he said. “I meant ‘you.’ Your rate of progress is slower. I . . .”

Knecht forestalled further comment. “No, never mind. A slip of the tongue, ja?” He smiled to show he had dismissed the slip. He knew it was important; though in what way he was not yet sure. He took a long puff on his cigar. “Personally, I have never thought our progress slow. The horseless carriage was invented, what? 1920-something, in Dusseldorf. In less than fifty years you could find some in all the major cities. Last year, two nearly collided on the streets of Philadelphia! Soon every well-to-do family will have one.”

The prisoner laughed. It was a great belly laugh that shook him and shook him until it turned imperceptibly into a sob. He squeezed his eyes tight.

“There was a man,” he said distantly. “Back in my hometown of Longmont, Colorado.” He opened his eyes and looked at them. “That would be in Nuevo Aztlan, if it existed, which it doesn’t and never has . . .” He paused and shook his head, once, sharply, as if to clear it. “Old Mr. Brand. I was just a kid, but I remember when the newspapers and TV came around. When Old Brand was a youngster, he watched his dad drive a stagecoach. Before he died, he watched his son fly a space shuttle.” He looked intently at Knecht. “And you think it is wonderful that a few rich people have hand-built cars after half a century?”

He laughed again; but this time the laugh was brittle. They watched him for a moment, and the laugh went on and on. Then Vonderberge leaned forward and slapped him sharply, twice.

Knecht chewed his moustache. What the prisoner said made some sense. He could see how technological progress—and social change with it—was coupled with free trade and the free exchange of ideas. Yet, he wasn’t at all sure that it was necessarily a good thing. There was a lot to be said for stability and continuity. He blew a smoke ring. He wondered if Kelly were a social radical, driven mad by his inability to instigate change, who had built himself a fantasy world in which change ran amok. That made sense, too.

He glanced at his cigar, automatically timing the ash. A good cigar should burn at least five minutes before the ash needed knocking off.

Suddenly, he felt a tingling in his spine. He looked at the cigar as if it had come alive in his hand. It had gone out—he remembered that clearly. Now, it was burning, and he could not recall relighting it. He looked at the ashtray. Yes, a spent match. I relit it, of course. It was such an automatic action that I paid it no mind. That was one explanation. It was his memory playing tricks, not his reality. But the tingling in his spine did not stop.

He looked at Kelly, then he carefully laid his cigar in the ashtray to burn itself out.

“You just wait, though,” Kelly was saying to Vonderberge. “Our curve is starting up, too. It took us longer, but we’ll be reaching critical mass soon. We’re maybe 100 years off the pace. About where the other . . . where my world was just before the world wars.”

That simple pronouncement filled Knecht with a formless dread. He watched the smoke from his smoldering cigar and saw how it rose, straight and true, until it reached a breaking point. There, it changed abruptly into a chaos of turbulent streamers, swirling at random in the motionless air. Then we could do the same, he thought. Fight worldwide wars.

Afterward, Knecht and Vonderberge spoke briefly as they crossed the parade ground. The sun was high in the sky, but the air held the coolness of autumn. Knecht was thoughtful, his mind on his cigar, on alternate realities, on the suddenness with which stability could turn to chaos.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” asked Vonderberge.

For a moment he thought the Kommandant meant his mysteriously relit cigar. “Saw what?” he replied.

“Kelly. He has difficulty remembering his own world. He becomes confused, disoriented, melancholy.”

“Is he always so?”

“Today was better than most. Sometimes I cannot stop his weeping.”

“I have never heard him talk so long without mentioning his Rosa.”

“Ah, you noticed that, too. But three days ago he was completely lucid and calculated columns of figures. Settings, he said, for his machine. They take into account, ah . . . ‘many-valued inverse functions.’ ” Vonderberge smiled. “Whatever that means. And, if he ever sees his machine again.”

“His machine,” said Knecht. “Has anyone handled it?”

“No,” said Vonderberge. “Ochsenfuss doesn’t think it matters. It’s just a collection of knobs and wires.”

“And you?”

“Me?” Vonderberge looked at him. “I’m afraid to.”

“Yet, its study could be most rewarding.”

“A true scout. But if we try, four things could happen and none of them good.”

Knecht tugged on his moustaches. “We could open it up and find that it is an obvious fake, that it couldn’t possibly work.”

“Could we? How would it be obvious? We would still wonder whether the science were so advanced that we simply did not understand how it did work. Like a savage with a steam engine.” The Kommandant was silent for a moment.

“That’s one. You said four things could happen.”

“The other three assume the machine works.” He held up his fingers to count off his points. “Two: In our ignorance, we damage it irreparably, marooning Kelly forever. Three: We injure ourselves by some sort of shock or explosion.”

“And four?”

“Four: We transport ourselves unwittingly to another world.”

“A slim possibility, that.”

Vonderberge shrugged. “Perhaps. But the penalty for being wrong is . . .”

“Excessive,” agreed Knecht dryly.

“I did examine his ‘calculator,’ you know.”

Knecht smiled to himself. He had wondered if the Kommandant had done that, too. Knecht had learned little from it, himself.

“It was fine work: the molded plastic, the tiny buttons, the intricate circuits and parts.”

“Not beyond the capabilities of any competent electrosmith.”

“What! Did you see how small the batteries were? And the, what did he call them? The chips? How can you say that?”

“I didn’t mean we could build a calculating engine so small. But, is it a calculating engine? Did you see it function? No. Kelly says the batteries have gone dead. Which is convenient for him. Our regimental electrosmith could easily construct a copy that does the same thing: mainly, nothing.”

Vonderberge stopped and held him by the arm. “Tell me, Rudi. Do you believe Kelly or not?”

“I . . .” Well, did he? The business with the cigar was too pat. It seemed important only because of Kelly’s toying with another cigar a few weeks before. Otherwise, he would never have noticed, or thought nothing even if he had. Like the prophetic dream: It seems to be more than it is because we only remember them when they come true. “I . . . have no convincing evidence.”

“Evidence?” asked Vonderberge harshly. “What more evidence do you need?”

“Something solid,” Knecht snapped back. Something more than that I like the prisoner and the Kommandant and I dislike the Hexmajor. “Something more than a prisoner’s tale,” he said. “That becomes more confused as time goes on.”

“That is Ochsenfuss’ bungling!”

“Or his success! Have you thought that perhaps the Hexmajor is curing Kelly of a long-standing delusion?”

Vonderberge turned to go. “No.”

Knecht stopped him. “Heinrich,” he said.

“What?”

Knecht looked past the Kommandant. He could see the sentries where they paced the walls, and the cannons in their redoubts, and the gangways to the underground tunnels that led to the big gunsfortified into the mountainside. “Real or fantasy, you’ve learned a lot about the prisoner’s technology.”

“Enough to want to learn more.”

“Tell me, Henrich. Do you want to learn to make nuclear bombs?”

Vonderberge followed Knecht’s gaze. A troubled look crossed his face and he bit his lower lip. “No. I do not. But the same force can produce electricity. And the medical science that produces the miracle drugs can tailor-make horrible plagues. The jets that fly bombs can just as easily fly people or food or trade goods.” He sighed. “What can I say, Rudi. It is not the tool, but the tool-user who creates the problems. Nature keeps no secrets. If something can be done, someone will find a way to do it.”

Knecht made no reply. He didn’t know if a reply was even possible. Certainly none that Vonderberge would understand.

When Ranger O Brien brought the news from the Nations, General Schneider was away from the fortress, inspecting the outposts on the forward slope. Knecht received O Brien’s report, ordered the man to take some rest, and decided the General should see it immediately. He telegraphed Outpost Three that he was coming and rode out.

The crest of Kittatinny Mountain and all the forward slope had been clear-cut the distance of a cannon shot. Beyond that was wilderness. Ridge and valley alternated into the distant north, dense with trees, before rising once more into the Pocono range, where Wyoming had her own fortress line. Legally, the border ran somewhere through the no-man’s-land between, but the main armies were entrenched in more easily defended terrain.

Knecht reined in at the crest of the Mountain and looked back. The valley of the Lehigh was checkerboarded with broad farms. Farther away, he could discern the smoke plumes of cities at the canal and rail heads. There was a speck in the air, most likely an airship sailing south.

When he turned, the contrast with the land north of the Mountain was jarring. He must have gazed upon that vista thousands of times over the years. Now, for just an instant, it looked wrong. It was said to be fertile land. Certainly, enough blood had manured it. And some said there was coal beneath it. He imagined the land filled with farms, mills, and mines.

At that moment of frisson he knew, irrationally, that Kelly had been telling the truth all along. Somewhere the barbed wire was used only to keep the milch cows safe.

And the bombs and missles? What if it were a rain of death from the other side of the world that we feared, and not a party of Mohawk bucks out to prove themselves to their elders? A slow explosion, Kelly had said. The inventions would come. Nature kept no secrets. The discoveries would be made and be given to the petty rulers of petty, quarreling states. Men with dreams of conquest, or revenge.

Knecht clucked to his horse and started downslope to the picket line. Give Konrad Schneider that, he thought. His only dream is survival, not conquest. Yet he is desperate; and desperate men do desperate things, not always wise things.

“Hah! Rudi!” General Schneider waved to him when he saw him coming. He was standing on the glacis of the outpost along with the Feldwebel and his men. The General’s staff was as large as the platoon stationed there, so the area seemed ludicrously crowded. The General stood in their midst, a portly, barrel-chested man with a large curved pipe clenched firmly in his teeth. He pointed.

“Do you think the field of fire is clear enough and wide enough?”

Knecht tethered his horse and walked to where the General stood. He had never known Schneider to ask an idle question. He decided the real question was whether Vonderberge was reliable. He gave the cleared area careful scrutiny. Not so much as a blade of grass. No force large enough to take the outpost could approach unseen. “It seems adequate,” he said.

“Hmph. High praise from you, Rudi.” The General sucked on his pipe, staring downslope, imagining ranks of yankees and knickerbockers charging up. “It had better be. But you did not ride out here from Fox Gap only to answer an old man’s foolish questions.”

“No, General.”

Schneider stared at him and the smile died on his face. He put his arm around Knecht’s shoulder and led him off to the side. The others eyed them nervously. When scouts and generals talked the result was often trouble.

“What is it?”

“Friedrich O Brien has returned from the Nations.”

“And?”

“The League has voted six to two to join the alliance against us.”

They paced together in silence. Then Schneider said, “So, who held out?”

“Huron and Wyandot.”

The General nodded. He released Knecht’s shoulder and walked off by himself. He turned and gave a hollow laugh. “Well, at least some of our money was well spent. In the old days, it would have been enough. League votes would have had to be unanimous. Do you think they will fight? The two holdouts, I mean.”

“Do you think they will split the League, General, over Pennsylvania?”

“Hmph. No. You are right again. They will go with the majority. But, perhaps, the fighting on the west will be less what? Enthusiastic?”

“At least it is too late in the year for an offensive.”

“Perhaps, Rudi. But the crops are in. If they think they can knock us out in a lightning-war before the snows, they may try anyway. How long can they hold their alliance together? It is unnatural. Yankees and knicks and longhousers side-by-side? Pfah! It cannot last. No, they must strike while they have Virginia with them, as well. What do you think? A holding action along the Fortress Line while the Lees strike up the Susquehannah and Shenandoah?”

“Will Virginia bleed for New York’s benefit?”

Schneider nodded. “A two-front war, then.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “Well, our strategy is clear. We must stir up problems behind them. In New England or Carolina or Pontiac. And perhaps we have a few surprises of our own.”

Knecht looked at him sharply. Schneider was smiling. It was a small smile, but it was a real one, not forced. “What are you talking about?”

Schneider pointed to the wires running from the outpost to the Fortress. “Suppose there were no wires to be cut or tapped. Suppose there were voices in the air, undetectable, sent from anywhere a man could carry an instrument. We would not need messengers or pigeons, either. Think how quickly we could learn of enemy formations and mobilize our own forces to meet them. The right force in the right time and place is worth regiments a mile away and a day late. Or airplanes, darting among the airships with machine guns and bombs. We could carry the fighting all the way to Wilkes Barre and Painted Post.”

“Kelly.”

“Ja.” The General chuckled. “Vonderberge tells me of these gadgets, like radio. Crazy notions. But I wonder. What if it were true? Kelly’s waking mind does not remember the details of the sort of, hmph, primitive inventions we could hope to copy. And from your report I suspect he would not help us willingly. Oh, he is friendly enough; but he does not like the military and would not help us prepare for war. Especially a war none of his concern. A problem. So, I seize the moment.” He clenched his fist and waved it.

“You pass along the information to Ochsenfuss and ask him to find the details by prying in his unconscious mind.”

Schneider looked at him. “You knew?”

“I guessed.”

“You never guess. You’re offended.”

“No.”

“You are. But I had to leave you out. You would have cut to the truth too quickly. I knew you. If you found that Kelly was mad, well, no harm done; but I was speculating that he was just what he said he was. If that were the case, I could not allow you to prove it.”

“Why not?”

“Ochsenfuss, that old plodder. He will not mesmerize except for medical reasons. If you had proven Kelly was, well, Kelly, our friend the Hexmajor would have bowed out and Kelly’s secrets would have remained secret. No. I needed Ochsenfuss’ skill at mesmerizing. I needed Vonderberge’s enthusiasm for technofiction, so he would know what questions to ask. And, for it to work, I needed Kelly’s status to remain ambiguous.”

“Then the Hexmajor does not know.”

“No. He is our protective plumage. I read his reports and send them to a secret team of scientists that OKP has assembled at Franklin University. Only a few people at OKP know anything. Only I, and now you, know everything.”

Knecht grunted. Ochsenfuss did know. At least he knew something. His remarks at the officers’ club had made that clear.

“Vonderberge said we lack the tools to make the tools to make the things Kelly described.”

“Then Vonderberge is short-sighted. Pfah! I am no fool. I don’t ask for the sophisticated developments. Those are years ahead. Decades. But the original, basic inventions, those are different. As Kelly described it, they came about in a world much like our own. And, Rudi?”

“Ja, Herr General?”

“This morning I received word from Franklin. They have sent telegraphic messages without wires between Germantown and Philadelphia. They used a special kind of crystal. The pulses travel through the air itself.” He grinned like a child with a new toy.

Knecht wondered how much difference such things would make in the coming war. There wasn’t time to make enough of them and learn how to use them. He also remembered what Ochsenfuss had said in the officers’ club. Something had to break. The question was what. Or who.

Knecht took a deep breath. “It’s over, then. You’ve learned how to make radio messages. Ochsenfuss can stop treating him.”

Schneider would not meet his eyes. “The mesmerization must continue. There are other inventions. We need to know about airframes. The details are sketchy yet. And napalm. And . . .”

“Between Ochsenfuss and Vonderberge, Kelly’s personality is being destroyed. He hardly remembers who he is, or which world is real.”

“This is war. In war there are casualties. Even innocent ones.”

“It is not Kelly’s war.”

“No. But it is yours.”

Knecht’s mouth set in a grim line. “Ja, Herr General.”

“You make it look so easy,” said Vonderberge.

“Shh,” hissed Knecht. He twisted his probe once more and felt the bolt slide back. “These old style locks are easy, and I’ve had much practice.” He pulled the storeroom door open and they stepped inside.

“Schneider will know you did it. Who else has your skill with locks?”

Knecht scowled. “Every scout and ranger in the Corps. But, yes, Schneider will know it was me.”

Vonderberge began searching the shelves. “Does that bother you?”

Knecht shrugged. “I don’t know. It should. The General has been . . . like a father to me.”

“Here it is,” said Vonderberge. He stepped back, Kelly’s rucksack in his hands. He looked inside. “Yes, the belt controls are here also. I don’t think anyone has touched it. Schneider has the only key.”

“Do you suppose it still works?”

Vonderberge’s hands clenched around the straps. “It must.”

They crossed the parade ground to the brig. It was dark. Knecht felt that he should dart from cover to cover; but that was silly. They were officers and they belonged here. They took salutes from three passing soldiers. Everything was normal.

The night guard in the cell block shook his head sadly when he saw them coming. “In the middle of the night, sir?” he said to Vonderberge. “Hasn’t that poor bastard spilled his guts yet? Who is he, anyway?”

“As you said, soldier,” Vonderberge answered. “Some poor bastard.”

While the guard unlocked the cell door, Vonderberge hefted the rucksack, getting a better grip. He stroked the canvas nervously. Knecht could see beads of perspiration on his forehead.

Well, he’s risking his career, too, he thought.

“We will never have a better chance, Rudi,” Vonderberge whispered. “Kelly was very clear this morning when I told him what we proposed to do. He had already calculated settings several days ago, using his new ‘formula.’ He only needed to update them. I arranged a diversion to keep Ochsenfuss away from him, so he has not been mesmerized in the meantime. Tomorrow and he may relapse into confusion once more.”

“As you say,” said Knecht shortly. He was not happy about this. For Knecht, his career was his life. He had been army since his teens. A scout, and a good one; perhaps the best. Now it was on the Line. A scout observes and listens and pieces things together. He does not initiate action. How many times had he said that over the years? He had said it to Kelly. Why should he break his code now, for a man he hardly knew?

Knecht didn’t know. He only knew that it would be worse to leave Kelly where he was. An obligation? Because I brought him here? Because of what we might learn from him?

Perhaps I could have argued Konrad into this, he thought. And perhaps not. And if not, there would have been a guard on that storeroom door, and restricted access to the prisoner, and so I have to do this by night and by stealth.

The guard came suddenly to attention. Knecht looked around and saw Ochsenfuss entering the corridor from the guardroom. Vonderberge, already stepping inside the cell, saw him, too. He grabbed Knecht’s shoulder. “Talk to him. Keep him out until it’s too late.”

Knecht nodded and Vonderberge pulled the door shut. Knecht had a momentary glimpse of Kelly, rising from his cot fully dressed. Then the door closed and Ochsenfuss was at his side. The guard looked at them and pretended to be somewhere else. Knecht wondered what he would say to the Hexmajor that would keep him out.

“Up late, Herr Doctor,” he said. Clever, Rudi. Very Clever.

“Insomnia,” was the reply. “A common malady, it seems. You might ask who is not up late, whiling away the hours in the guardhouse. Do you have a cigar?”

The request caught Knecht by surprise. Dumbly, he took out his pocket humidor. Ochsenfuss made a great show of selecting one of the cigars inside. Knecht took one also and offered one to the guard, who refused.

“Fire?” Ochsenfuss struck a match for Knect, then lit his own. After a moment or two, he blew a perfect smoke ring. “I had an interesting experience today.”

“Oh?” Knecht glanced at the guard, who decided this would be a good time to patrol the outside of the building.

“Ja. I had a message from Outpost 10. The farthest one. One of the men was behaving oddly. Confinement mania, perhaps. But when I arrived, no one knew about the message. Or, more precisely, no one acknowledged knowing about the message. Odd, don’t you think?”

“A hoax.” Dimly, through the door, Knecht could hear a low pitched hum. The floor seemed to be vibrating, ever so slightly. He thought he could detect a faint whiff of ozone in the air. He studied the doctor’s face, but saw no sign of awareness.

“Certainly a hoax. That was obvious. But to what purpose? Simply to laugh at the foolish doctor? Perhaps. But perhaps more. I could see but two possibilities, logically. The message was to make me do something or to prevent me from doing something.”

Knecht nodded. “That does seem logical.” The night air was cool, but he could feel the sweat running down his back, staining his shirt. The humming rose in pitch.

“Logic is a useful tool,” Ochsenfuss agreed inanely. “As nearly as I could tell, the only thing the message made me do was to ride down the Mountain and back up. That did not seem to benefit anyone.”

“Is there a point to this, Herr Doctor?” Knecht felt jumpy. Abruptly, the humming rose sharply in pitch and dropped in volume, sounding oddly like the whistle of a railroad train approaching and receding at the same time. Then it was gone. Knecht suppressed the urge to turn around. He swallowed a sigh of relief.

“What remains?” Ochsenfuss continued. “What was I prevented from doing? Why treating Kelly, of course. And who has been my opponent in the treatment? The Festungskommandant. So, since my return, I have been watching.”

Knecht took the cigar from his mouth and stared. “You spied on me?”

Ochsenfuss laughed. A great bellow. He slapped Knecht’s shoulder. “No, I pay you a high compliment. No one could watch you for long without you becoming aware of the fact. A sense shared by all scouts who survive. No, I followed Vonderberge. When you met him at the storeroom, I retired. It was obvious what you intended to do.”

Knecht flushed. “And you told no one?”

Ochsenfuss sucked on his cigar. “No. Should I have?” He paused and pointed the stub of his cigar at the cell door. “He’s not coming out, you know.”

“What? Who?”

“Your friend, Vonderberge. He’s not coming out. He’s gone.”

Knecht turned and stared at the door. “You mean he took the equipment and left Kelly behind?”

“No, no. They left together. If they stayed close, if they hugged, they would both be inside the field.”

“Guard!” bellowed Knecht. “Open this door!” The guard came pounding down the corridor. He unlocked the door and he and Knecht crowded inside. The cell was empty. Knecht saw that Ochsenfuss had not bothered to look. The guard gave a cry of astonishment and ran to fetch the watch-sergeant. Knecht stepped out and looked at the doctor.

The doctor shrugged. “I told you he would reject reality if he could.”

“Explain that!” Knecht pointed to the empty cell.

Ochsenfuss blew another smoke ring. “He ran from reality.” With a sudden motion, he kicked the cell door. It swung back and banged against the wall. “This is reality,” he said harshly. “Vonderberge has fled it. How else can I say it?”

“Obviously, the other worlds are no less real. The evidence is there, now.”

“What of it? It is the flight that matters, not the destination. What if the next world fails to please him? Will he reject that reality as well?”

A squad of soldiers came pelting from the guardroom. They pushed past Knecht and Ochsenfuss and crowded into the cell. Their sergeant followed at a more majestic pace.

“How long have you known,” Knecht asked Ochsenfuss, “that the other worlds were real?”

Ochsenfuss shrugged. “Long enough.” He laughed. “Poor, dull-witted Ochsenfuss! He cannot see a fact if it bit him on the nose.” The Hexmajor’s lips thinned. “Granted, I am no physical scientist, but what Kelly said went against everything I had ever read or heard. Later, I came to know I was wrong.” Another shrug. “Well, we grow too soon old and too late smart. But I ask you, why did Vonderberge believe? He was correct from the beginning, but he believed before he had any real proof. He believed because he wanted to believe. And that, too, is madness.”

“And Schneider?”

“Schneider never believed. He was making a bet. Just in case it was true. He was playing games with my patient!”

Knecht could see genuine anger now. The first real emotion he had ever seen in the Hexmajor. He saw the General for a moment through the Doctor’s eyes. It was a side of Konrad he did not care for.

They spoke in an island of calm. Around them soldiers were searching, looking for tunnels. Schneider would be coming soon, Knecht realized. Perhaps it was time to leave, to postpone the inevitable. He and the Doctor walked to the front of the guardhouse but they went no further than the wooden portico facing the parade ground. There was really no point in postponement.

Knecht leaned on the railing, looking out over the parade ground. A squad of soldiers marched past in the dusk: full kit, double-time. Their sergeant barked a cadence at them. Idly, Knecht wondered what infraction they had committed. Across the quadrangle, the Visiting Officers’ Quarters were dark.

“So why, after you knew, did you continue to treat him?” He looked over his shoulder at the Doctor.

Ochsenfuss waved his hands. The glowing tip of his cigar wove a complex pattern in the dark. “You read his journal. Do you really suppose he has found his way home this time? No, he goes deeper into the forest of time, hopelessly lost. And Vonderberge with him. Six worlds he had visited already and in what? In three of them, he was in danger. The next world may kill him.”

“But . . .”

“Tchah! Isn’t it obvious? He was driven to try. He had friends, family. His darling Rosa. Left behind forever. He could not bear the thought that he would never, ever see her again. How could he not try? How could he not fail? With me he had a chance. I saw it and I took it. If I could make him accept this world as the only reality, forget the other, then he might have adjusted. It was a daring thing to try.”

Knecht looked back out at the parade ground. There had been a fourth possibility, after all. A refugee, but one slowly going mad. Lightning bugs flashed in the evening air. “It was daring,” he agreed, “and it failed.”

“Yes, it failed. His senses worked for me: everything Kelly saw and heard told him this world was real; but in the end there were too many memories. I could not tie them all off. Some would remain, buried under the false ones, disturbing him, surfacing in his dreams, eventually emerging as psychoses. I restored his memories, then. I could do no more to help him, so I made no effort to stop you.”

Knecht’s mind was a jumble. Every possible action was wrong. Whether Kelly had been the person he claimed to be, or a madman, Schneider had done the wrong thing. Ochsenfuss had been wrong to try and obliterate the man’s true memories. As for himself, all he and Vonderberge had accomplished was to turn him out into a trackless jungle. Oh, we all had our reasons. Schneider wanted defense. Ochsenfuss wanted to heal. Vonderberge wanted escape. And I . . . Knecht wasn’t sure what he had wanted.

“We could have kept him here, without your treatment,” he told Ochsenfuss. “So the General could have learned more.” Knecht was curious why the Doctor had not done that.

As if on cue, the door of the VOQ burst open. Knecht could see Schneider, dressed in pants and undershirt, framed in its light. Schneider strode toward the guardhouse, his face white with rage and astonishment.

Ochsenfuss smiled. “Kelly would have lost what sanity he had left. If we had not given him the way home, we have at least given him hope. And . . .” He looked in Schneider’s direction. “While I am a logical man, I, too, have feelings. Your General thought to make me the fool. So, I made a medical decision in my patient’s best interest.”

Knecht could not help smiling also. “Perhaps I can buy you a drink tomorrow, in the officers’ club. If we are both still in the army by then.” His cigar had gone out. He looked at it. “I wonder what world they are in now.”

“We will never know,” replied Ochsenfuss. “Even if they try to come back and tell us, this world is a twig in an infinite forest. They will never find us again. It will be bad for you, Rudi, if you cannot bear not knowing.”

Knecht threw his cigar away. He was a scout. It would be bad for him, not knowing.

THE SECRET SHARER

Robert Silverberg

The following is both an awesome tale of travel in hyper-dimensional space and an unusual, and touching, love story. We are pleased to be publishing this powerful novella by one of today’s masters of science fiction.

It was my first time to heaven and I was no one at all, no one at all, and this was the voyage that was supposed to make me someone.

But though I was no one at all I dared to look upon the million worlds and I felt a great sorrow for them. There they were all about me, humming along on their courses through the night, each of them believing it was actually going somewhere. And each one wrong, of course, for worlds go nowhere, except around and around and around, pathetic monkeys on a string, forever tethered in place. They seem to move, yes. But really they stand still. And I—I who stared at the worlds of heaven and was swept with compassion for them—I knew that though I seemed to be standing still, I was in fact moving. For I was aboard a ship of heaven, a ship of the Service, that was spanning the light-years at a speed so incomprehensibly great that it might as well have been no speed at all.

I was very young. My ship, then as now, was the Sword of Orion, on a journey out of Kansas Four bound for Cul-de-Sac and Strappado and Mangan’s Bitch and several other worlds, via the usual spinarounds. It was my first voyage and I was in command. I thought for a long time that I would lose my soul on that voyage; but now I know that what was happening aboard that ship was not the losing of a soul but the gaining of one. And perhaps of more than one.

2.

Roacher thought I was sweet. I could have killed him for that; but of course he was dead already.

You have to give up your life when you go to heaven. What you get in return is for me to know and you, if you care, to find out; but the inescapable thing is that you leave behind anything that ever linked you to life on shore, and you become something else. We say that you give up the body and you get your soul. Certainly you can keep your body too, if you want it. Most do. But it isn’t any good to you any more, not in the ways that you think a body is good to you. I mean to tell you how it was for me on my first voyage aboard the Sword of Orion, so many years ago.

I was the youngest officer on board, so naturally I was captain.

They put you in command right at the start, before you’re anyone. That’s the only test that means a damn: they throw you in the sea and if you can swim you don’t drown, and if you can’t you do. The drowned ones go back in the tank and they serve their own useful purposes, as push-cells or downloaders or mind-wipers or Johnny-scrub-and-scour or whatever. The ones that don’t drown go on to other commands. No one is wasted. The Age of Waste has been over a long time.

On the third virtual day out from Kansas Four, Roacher told me that I was the sweetest captain he had ever served under. And he had served under plenty of them, for Roacher had gone up to heaven at least two hundred years before, maybe more.

“I can see it in your eyes, the sweetness. I can see it in the angle you hold your head.”

He didn’t mean it as a compliment.

“We can put you off ship at Ultima Thule,” Roacher said. “Nobody will hold it against you. We’ll put you in a bottle and send you down, and the Thuleys will catch you and decant you and you’ll be able to find your way back to Kansas Four in twenty or fifty years. It might be the best thing.”

Roacher is small and parched, with brown skin and eyes that shine with the purple luminescence of space. Some of the worlds he has seen were forgotten a thousand years ago.

“Go bottle yourself, Roacher,” I told him.

“Ah, Captain, Captain! Don’t take it the wrong way. Here, Captain, give us a touch of the sweetness.” He reached out a claw, trying to stroke me along the side of my face. “Give us a touch, Captain, give us just a little touch!”

“I’ll fry your soul and have it for breakfast, Roacher. There’s sweetness for you. Go scuttle off, will you? Go jack yourself to the mast and drink hydrogen, Roacher. Go. Go.”

“So sweet,” he said. But he went. I had the power to hurt him. He knew I could do it, because I was captain. He also knew I wouldn’t; but there was always the possibility he was wrong. The captain exists in that margin between certainty and possibility. A crewman tests the width of that margin at his own risk. Roacher knew that. He had been a captain once himself, after all.

There were seventeen of us to heaven that voyage, staffing a ten-kilo Megaspore-class ship with full annexes and extensions and all virtualities. We carried a bulging cargo of the things regarded in those days as vital in the distant colonies: pre-read vapor chips, artificial intelligences, climate nodes, matrix jacks, mediq machines, bone banks, soil converters, transit spheres, communication bubbles, skin-and-organ synthesizers, wildlife domestication plaques, gene replacement kits, a sealed consignment of obliteration sand and other proscribed weapons, and so on. We also had fifty billion dollars in the form of liquid currency pods, central-bank-to-central-bank transmission. In addition there was a passenger load of seven thousand colonists. Eight hundred of these were on the hoof and the others were stored in matrix form for body transplant on the worlds of destination. A standard load, in other words. The crew worked on commission, also as per standard, one percent of bill-of-lading value divided in customary lays. Mine was the 50th lay—that is, two percent of the net profits of the voyage—and that included a bonus for serving as captain; otherwise I would have had the l00th lay or something even longer. Roacher had the l0th lay and his jackmate Bulgar the l4th, although they weren’t even officers. Which demonstrates the value of seniority in the Service. But seniority is the same thing as survival, after all, and why should survival not be rewarded? On my most recent voyage I drew the l9th lay. I will have better than that on my next.

3.

You have never seen a starship. We keep only to heaven; when we are to worldward, shoreships come out to us for the downloading. The closest we ever go to planetskin is a million shiplengths. Any closer and we’d be shaken apart by that terrible strength which emanates from worlds.

We don’t miss landcrawling, though. It’s a plague to us. If I had to step to shore now, after having spent most of my lifetime in heaven, I would die of the drop-death within an hour. That is a monstrous way to die; but why would I ever go ashore? The likelihood of that still existed for me at the time I first sailed the Sword of Orion, you understand, but I have long since given it up. That is what I mean when I say that you give up your life when you go to heaven. But of course what also goes from you is any feeling that to be ashore has anything to do with being alive. If you could ride a starship, or even see one as we see them, you would understand. I don’t blame you for being what you are.

Let me show you the Sword of Orion. Though you will never see it as we see it.

What would you see, if you left the ship as we sometimes do to do the starwalk in the Great Open?

The first thing you would see was the light of the ship. A starship gives off a tremendous insistent glow of light that splits heaven like the blast of a trumpet. That great light both precedes and follows. Ahead of the ship rides a luminescent cone of brightness bellowing in the void. In its wake the ship leaves a photonic track so intense that it could be gathered up and weighed. It is the stardrive that issues this light: a ship eats space, and light is its offthrow.

Within the light you would see a needle ten kilometers long.

That is the ship. One end tapers to a sharp point and the other has the Eye, and it is several days’ journey by foot from end to end through all the compartments that lie between. It is a world self-contained. The needle is a flattened one. You could walk about easily on the outer surface of the ship, the skin of the top deck, what we call Skin Deck. Or just as easily on Belly Deck, the one on the bottom side. We call one the top deck and the other the bottom, but when you are outside the ship these distinctions have no meaning. Between Skin and Belly lie Crew Deck, Passenger Deck, Cargo Deck, Drive Deck. Ordinarily no one goes from one deck to another. We stay where we belong. The engines are in the Eye. So are the captain’s quarters.

That needle is the ship, but it is not the whole ship. What you will not be able to see are the annexes and extensions and virtualities. These accompany the ship, enfolding it in a webwork of intricate outstructures. But they are of a subordinate level of reality and therefore they defy vision. A ship tunnels into the void, spreading far and wide to find room for all that it must carry. In these outlying zones are kept our supplies and provisions, our stores of fuel, and all cargo traveling at second-class rates. If the ship transports prisoners, they will ride in an annex. If the ship expects to encounter severe probability turbulence during the course of the voyage, it will arm itself with stabilizers, and those will be carried in the virtualities, ready to be brought into being if needed. These are the mysteries of our profession. Take them on faith, or ignore them, as you will: they are not meant for you to know.

A ship takes forty years to build. There are two hundred seventy-one of them in service now. New ones are constantly under construction. They are the only link binding the Mother Worlds and the eight hundred ninety-eight Colonies and the colonies of the Colonies. Four ships have been lost since the beginning of the Service. No one knows why. The loss of a starship is the worst disaster I can imagine. The last such event occurred sixty virtual years ago.

A starship never returns to the world from which it was launched. The galaxy is too large for that. It makes its voyage and it continues onward through heaven in an endless open circuit. That is the service of the Service. There would be no point in returning, since thousands of worldward years sweep by behind us as we make our voyages. We live outside of time. We must, for there is no other way. That is our burden and our privilege. That is the service of the Service.

4.

On the fifth virtual day of the voyage I suddenly felt a tic, a nibble, a subtle indication that something had gone wrong. It was a very trifling thing, barely perceptible, like the scatter of eroded pebbles that tells you that the palaces and towers of a great ruined city lie buried beneath the mound on which you climb. Unless you are looking for such signals you will not see them. But I was primed for discovery that day. I was eager for it. A strange kind of joy came over me when I picked up that fleeting signal of wrongness.

I keyed the intelligence on duty and said, “What was that tremor on Passenger Deck?”

The intelligence arrived instantly in my mind, a sharp gray-green presence with a halo of tingling music.

“I am aware of no tremor, sir.”

“There was a distinct tremor. There was a data-spurt just now.”

“Indeed, sir? A data-spurt, sir?” The intelligence sounded aghast, but in a condescending way. It was humoring me. “What action shall I take, sir?”

I was being invited to retreat.

The intelligence on duty was a 49 Henry Henry. The Henry series affects a sort of slippery innocence that I find disingenuous. Still, they are very capable intelligences. I wondered if I had misread the signal. Perhaps I was too eager for an event, any event, that would confirm my relationship with the ship.

There is never a sense of motion or activity aboard a starship: we float in silence on a tide of darkness, cloaked in our own dazzling light. Nothing moves, nothing seems to live in all the universe. Since we had left Kansas Four I had felt that great silence judging me. Was I really captain of this vessel? Good: then let me feel the weight of duty upon my shoulders.

We were past Ultima Thule by this time, and there could be no turning back. Borne on our cloak of light, we would roar through heaven for week after virtual week until we came to worldward at the first of our destinations, which was Cul-de-Sac in the Vainglory Archipelago, out by the Spook Clusters. Here in free space I must begin to master the ship, or it would master me.

“Sir?” the intelligence said.

“Run a data uptake,” I ordered. “All Passenger Deck input for the past half hour. There was movement. There was a spurt.”

I knew I might be wrong. Still, to err on the side of caution may be naive, but it isn’t a sin. And I knew that at this stage in the voyage nothing I could say or do would make me seem other than naive to the crew of the Sword of Orion. What did I have to lose by ordering a recheck, then? I was hungry for surprises. Any irregularity that 49 Henry Henry turned up would be to my advantage; the absence of one would make nothing worse for me.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” 49 Henry Henry reported after a moment, “but there was no tremor, sir.”

“Maybe I overstated it, then. Calling it a tremor. Maybe it was just an anomaly. What do you say, 49 Henry Henry?” I wondered if I was humiliating myself, negotiating like this with an intelligence. “There was something. I’m sure of that. An unmistakable irregular burst in the data-flow. An anomaly, yes. What do you say, 49 Henry Henry?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes what?”

“The record does show an irregularity, sir. Your observation was quite acute, sir.”

“Go on.”

“No cause for alarm, sir. A minor metabolic movement, nothing more. Like turning over in your sleep.” You bastard, what do you know about sleep? “Extremely unusual, sir, that you should be able to observe anything so small. I commend you, sir. The passengers are all well, sir.”

“Very good,” I said. “Enter this exchange in the log, 49 Henry Henry.”

“Already entered, sir,” the intelligence said. “Permission to decouple, sir?”

“Yes, you can decouple,” I told it.

The shimmer of music that signaled its presence grew tinny and was gone. I could imagine it smirking as it went about its ghostly flitting rounds deep in the neural conduits of the ship. Scornful software, glowing with contempt for its putative master. The poor captain, it was thinking. The poor hopeless silly boy of a captain. A passenger sneezes and he’s ready to seal all bulkheads.

Well, let it smirk, I thought. I have acted appropriately and the record will show it.

I knew that all this was part of my testing.

You may think that to be captain of such a ship as the Sword of Orion in your first voyage to heaven is an awesome responsibility and an inconceivable burden. So it is, but not for the reason you think.

In truth the captain’s duties are the least significant of anyone’s aboard the ship. The others have well-defined tasks that are essential to the smooth running of the voyage, although the ship could, if the need arose, generate virtual replacements for any and every crew member and function adequately on its own. The captain’s task, though, is fundamentally abstract. His role is to witness the voyage, to embody it in his own consciousness, to give it coherence, continuity, by reducing it to a pattern of decisions and responses. In that sense the captain is simply so much software: he is the coding through which the voyage is expressed as a series of linear functions. If he fails to perform that duty adequately, others will quietly see to it that the voyage proceeds as it should. What is destroyed, in the course of a voyage that is inadequately captained, is the captain himself, not the voyage. My pre-flight training made that absolutely clear. The voyage can survive the most feeble of captains. As I have said, four starships have been lost since the Service began, and no one knows why. But there is no reason to think that any of those catastrophes were caused by failings of the captain. How could they have been? The captain is only the vehicle through which others act. It is not the captain who makes the voyage, but the voyage which makes the captain.

5.

Restless, troubled, I wandered the eye of the ship. Despite 49 Henry Henry’s suave mockery I was still convinced there was trouble on board, or about to be.

Just as I reached Outerscreen Level I felt something strange touch me a second time. It was different this time, and deeply disturbing.

The Eye, as it makes the complete descent from Skin Deck to Belly Deck, is lined with screens that provide displays, actual or virtual, of all aspects of the ship both internal and external. I came up to the great black bevel-edged screen that provided our simulated view of the external realspace environment and was staring at the dwindling wheel of the Ultima Thule relay point when the new anomaly occurred. The other had been the merest of subliminal signals, a nip, a tickle. This was more like an attempted intrusion. Invisible fingers seemed to brush lightly over my brain, probing, seeking entrance. The fingers withdrew; a moment later there was a sudden stabbing pain in my left temple.

I stiffened. “Who’s there?”

“Help me,” a silent voice said.

I had heard wild tales of passenger matrixes breaking free of their storage circuits and drifting through the ship like ghosts, looking for an unguarded body that they might infiltrate. The sources were unreliable, old scoundrels like Roacher or Bulgar. I dismissed such stories as fables, the way I dismissed what I had heard of the vast tentacular krakens that were said to swim the seas of space, or the beckoning mermaids with shining breasts who danced along the force-lines at spinaround points. But I had felt this. The probing fingers, the sudden sharp pain. And the sense of someone frightened, frightened but strong, stronger than I, hovering close at hand.

“Where are you?”

There was no reply. Whatever it was, if it had been anything at all, had slipped back into hiding after that one furtive thrust.

But was it really gone?

“You’re still here somewhere,” I said. “I know that you are.”

Silence. Stillness.

“You asked for help. Why did you disappear so fast?”

No response. I felt anger rising.

“Whoever you are. Whatever. Speak up.”

Nothing. Silence. Had I imagined it? The probing, the voiceless voice?

No. No. I was certain that there was something invisible and unreal hovering about me. And I found it infuriating, not to be able to regain contact with it. To be toyed with this way, to be mocked like this.

This is my ship, I thought. I want no ghosts aboard my ship.

“You can be detected,” I said. “You can be contained. You can be eradicated.”

As I stood there blustering in my frustration, it seemed to me that I felt that touch against my mind again, a lighter one this time, wistful, regretful. Perhaps I invented it. Perhaps I have supplied it retroactively.

But it lasted only a part of an instant, if it happened at all, and then I was unquestionably alone again. The solitude was real and total and unmistakable. I stood gripping the rail of the screen, leaning forward into the brilliant blackness and swaying dizzily as if I were being pulled forward through the wall of the ship into space.

“Captain?”

The voice of 49 Henry Henry, tumbling out of the air behind me.

“Did you feel something that time?” I asked.

The intelligence ignored my question. “Captain, there’s trouble on Passenger Deck. Hands-on alarm: will you come?”

“Set up a transit track for me,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

Lights began to glow in mid-air, yellow, blue, green. The interior of the ship is a vast opaque maze and moving about within it is difficult without an intelligence to guide you. 49 Henry Henry constructed an efficient route for me down the curve of the Eye and into the main body of the ship, and thence around the rim of the leeward wall to the elevator down to Passenger Deck. I rode an air-cushion tracker keyed to the lights. The journey took no more than fifteen minutes. Unaided I might have needed a week.

Passenger Deck is an echoing nest of coffins, hundreds of them, sometimes even thousands, arranged in rows three abreast. Here our live cargo sleeps until we arrive and decant the stored sleepers into wakefulness. Machinery sighs and murmurs all around them, coddling them in their suspension. Beyond, far off in the dim distance, is the place for passengers of a different sort—a spiderwebbing of sensory cables that holds our thousands of disembodied matrixes. Those are the colonists who have left their bodies behind when going into space. It is a dark and forbidding place, dimly lit by swirling velvet comets that circle overhead emitting sparks of red and green.

The trouble was in the suspension area. Five crewmen were there already, the oldest hands on board: Katkat, Dismas, Rio de Rio, Gavotte, Roacher. Seeing them all together, I knew this must be some major event. We move on distant orbits within the immensity of the ship: to see as many as three members of the crew in the same virtual month is extraordinary. Now here were five. I felt an oppressive sense of community among them. Each of these five had sailed the seas of heaven more years than I had been alive. For at least a dozen voyages now they had been together as a team. I was the stranger in their midst, unknown, untried, lightly regarded, insignificant. Already Roacher had indicted me for my sweetness, by which he meant, I knew, a basic incapacity to act decisively. I thought he was wrong. But perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself.

They stepped back, opening a path between them. Gavotte, a great hulking thick-shouldered man with a surprisingly delicate and precise way of conducting himself, gestured with open hands: Here, Captain, see? See?

What I saw were coils of greenish smoke coming up from a passenger housing, and the glass door of the housing half open, cracked from top to bottom, frosted by temperature differentials. I could hear a sullen dripping sound. Blue fluid fell in thick steady gouts from a shattered support line. Within the housing itself was the pale naked figure of a man, eyes wide open, mouth agape as if in a silent scream. His left arm was raised, his fist was clenched. He looked like an anguished statue.

They had body-salvage equipment standing by. The hapless passenger would be disassembled and all usable parts stored as soon as I gave the word.

“Is he irretrievable?” I asked.

“Take a look,” Katkat said, pointing to the housing readout. All the curves pointed down. “We have nineteen percent degradation already, and rising. Do we disassemble?”

“Go ahead,” I said. “Approved.”

The lasers glinted and flailed. Body parts came into view, shining, moist. The coiling metallic arms of the body-salvage equipment rose and fell, lifting organs that were not yet beyond repair and putting them into storage. As the machine labored the men worked around it, shutting down the broken housing, tying off the disrupted feeders and refrigerator cables.

I asked Dismas what had happened. He was the mind-wiper for this sector, responsible for maintenance on the suspended passengers. His face was open and easy, but the deceptive cheeriness about his mouth and cheeks was mysteriously negated by his bleak, shadowy eyes. He told me that he had been working much farther down the deck, performing routine service on the Strappado-bound people, when he felt a sudden small disturbance, a quick tickle of wrongness.

“So did I,” I said. “How long ago was that?”

“Half an hour, maybe. I didn’t make a special note of it. I thought it was something in my gut, Captain. You felt it too, you say?”

I nodded. “Just a tickle. It’s in the record.” I heard the distant music of 49 Henry Henry. Perhaps the intelligence was trying to apologize for doubting me. “What happened next?” I asked.

“Went back to work. Five, ten minutes, maybe. Felt another jolt, a stronger one.” He touched his forehead, right at the temple, showing me where. “Detectors went off, broken glass. Came running, found this Cul-de-Sac passenger here undergoing convulsions. Rising from his bindings, thrashing around. Pulled himself loose from everything, went smack against the housing window. Broke it. It’s a very fast death.”

“Matrix intrusion,” Roacher said.

The skin of my scalp tightened. I turned to him.

“Tell me about that.”

He shrugged. “Once in a long while someone in the storage circuits gets to feeling footloose, and finds a way out and goes roaming the ship. Looking for a body to jack into, that’s what they’re doing. Jack into me, jack into Katkat, even jack into you, Captain. Anybody handy, just so they can feel flesh around them again. Jacked into this one here and something went wrong.”

The probing fingers, yes. The silent voice. Help me.

“I never heard of anyone jacking into a passenger in suspension,” Dismas said.

“No reason why not,” said Roacher.

“What’s the good? Still stuck in a housing, you are. Frozen down, that’s no better than staying matrix.”

“Five to two it was matrix intrusion,” Roacher said, glaring.

“Done,” Dismas said. Gavotte laughed and came in on the bet. So too did sinuous little Katkat, taking the other side. Rio de Rio, who had not spoken a word to anyone in his last six voyages, snorted and gestured obscenely at both factions.

I felt like an idle spectator. To regain some illusion of command I said, “If there’s a matrix loose, it’ll show up on ship inventory. Dismas, check with the intelligence on duty and report to me. Katkat, Gavotte, finish cleaning up this mess and seal everything off. Then I want your reports in the log and a copy to me. I’ll be in my quarters. There’ll be further instructions later. The missing matrix, if that’s what we have on our hands, will be identified, located, and recaptured.”

Roacher grinned at me. I thought he was going to lead a round of cheers.

I turned and mounted my tracker, and rode it following the lights, yellow, blue, green, back up through the maze of decks and out to the Eye.

As I entered my cabin something touched my mind and a silent voice said, “Please help me.”

6.

Carefully I shut the door behind me, locked it, loaded the privacy screens. The captain’s cabin aboard a Megaspore starship of the Service is a world in itself, serene, private, immense. In mine, spiral galaxies whirled and sparkled on the walls. I had a stream, a lake, a silver waterfall beyond it. The air was soft and glistening. At a touch of my hand I could have light, music, scent, color, from any one of a thousand hidden orifices. Or I could turn the walls translucent and let the luminous splendor of starspace come flooding through.

Only when I was fully settled in, protected and insulated and comfortable, did I say, “All right. What are you?”

“You promise you won’t report me to the captain?”

“I don’t promise anything.”

“You will help me, though?” The voice seemed at once frightened and insistent, urgent and vulnerable.

“How can I say? You give me nothing to work with.”

“I’ll tell you everything. But first you have to promise not to call the captain.”

I debated with myself for a moment and opted for directness.

“I am the captain,” I said.

“No!”

“Can you see this room? What do you think it is? Crew quarters? The scullery?”

I felt turbulent waves of fear coming from my invisible companion. And then nothing. Was it gone? Then I had made a mistake in being so forthright. This phantom had to be confined, sealed away, perhaps destroyed, before it could do more damage. I should have been more devious. And also I knew that I would regret it in another way if it had slipped away: I was taking a certain pleasure in being able to speak with someone—something—that was neither a member of my crew nor an omnipotent, contemptuous artificial intelligence.

“Are you still here?” I asked after a while.

Silence.

Gone, I thought. Sweeping through the Sword of Orion like a gale of wind. Probably down at the far end of the ship by this time.

Then, as if there had been no break in the conversation: “I just can’t believe it. Of all the places I could have gone, I had to walk right into the captain’s cabin.”

“So it seems.”

“And you’re actually the captain?”

“Yes. Actually.”

Another pause.

“You seem so young,” it said. “For a captain.”

“Be careful,” I told it.

“I didn’t mean anything by that, Captain.” With a touch of bravado, even defiance, mingling with uncertainty and anxiety. “Captain sir.”

Looking toward the ceiling, where shining resonator nodes shimmered all up and down the spectrum as slave-light leaped from junction to junction along the illuminator strands, I searched for a glimpse of it, some minute electromagnetic clue. But there was nothing.

I imagined a web of impalpable force, a dancing will-o’-the-wisp, flitting erratically about the room, now perching on my shoulder, now clinging to some fixture, now extending itself to fill every open space: an airy thing, a sprite, playful and capricious. Curiously, not only was I unafraid but I found myself strongly drawn to it. There was something strangely appealing about this quick vibrating spirit, so bright with contradictions. And yet it had caused the death of one of my passengers.

“Well?” I said. “You’re safe here. But when are you going to tell me what you are?”

“Isn’t that obvious? I’m a matrix.”

“Go on.”

“A free matrix, a matrix on the loose. A matrix who’s in big trouble. I think I’ve hurt someone. Maybe killed him.”

“One of the passengers?” I said.

“So you know?”

“There’s a dead passenger, yes. We’re not sure what happened.”

“It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident.”

“That may be,” I said. “Tell me about it. Tell me everything.”

“Can I trust you?”

“More than anyone else on this ship.”

“But you’re the captain.”

“That’s why,” I said.

7.

Her name was Leeleaine, but she wanted me to call her Vox. That means “voice,” she said, in one of the ancient languages of Earth. She was seventeen years old, from Jaana Head, which is an island off the coast of West Palabar on Kansas Four. Her father was a glass-farmer, her mother operated a gravity hole, and she had five brothers and three sisters, all of them much older than she was.

“Do you know what that’s like, captain? Being the youngest of nine? And both your parents working all the time, and your cross-parents just as busy? Can you imagine? And growing up on Kansas Four, where it’s a thousand kilometers between cities, and you aren’t even in a city, you’re on an island?”

“I know something of what that’s like,” I said.

“Are you from Kansas Four too?”

“No,” I said. “Not from Kansas Four. But a place much like it, I think.”

She spoke of a troubled, unruly childhood, full of loneliness and anger. Kansas Four, I have heard, is a beautiful world, if you are inclined to find beauty in worlds: a wild and splendid place, where the sky is scarlet and the bare basalt mountains rise in the east like a magnificent black wall. But to hear Vox speak of it, it was squalid, grim, bleak. For her it was a loveless place where she led a loveless life. And yet she told me of pale violet seas aglow with brilliant yellow fish, and trees that erupted with a shower of dazzling crimson fronds when they were in bloom, and warm rains that sang in the air like harps. I was not then so long in heaven that I had forgotten the beauty of seas or trees or rains, which by now are nothing but hollow words to me. Yet Vox had found her life on Kansas Four so hateful that she had been willing to abandon not only her native world but her body itself. That was a point of kinship between us: I too had given up my world and my former life, if not my actual flesh. But I had chosen heaven, and the Service. Vox had volunteered to exchange one landcrawling servitude for another.

“The day came,” she said, “when I knew I couldn’t stand it any more. I was so miserable, so empty: I thought about having to live this way for another two hundred years or even more, and I wanted to pick up the hills and throw them at each other. Or get into my mother’s plummeter and take it straight to the bottom of the sea. I made a list of ways I could kill myself. But I knew I couldn’t do it, not this way or that way or any way. I wanted to live. But I didn’t want to live like that.”

On that same day, she said, the soul-call from Cul-de-Sac reached Kansas Four. A thousand vacant bodies were available there and they wanted soul-matrixes to fill them. Without a moment’s hesitation Vox put her name on the list.

There is a constant migration of souls between the worlds. On each of my voyages I have carried thousands of them, setting forth hopefully toward new bodies on strange planets.

Every world has a stock of bodies awaiting replacement souls. Most were the victims of sudden violence. Life is risky on shore, and death lurks everywhere. Salvaging and repairing a body is no troublesome matter, but once a soul has fled it can never be recovered. So the empty bodies of those who drown and those who are stung by lethal insects and those who are thrown from vehicles and those who are struck by falling branches as they work are collected and examined. If they are beyond repair they are disassembled and their usable parts set aside to be installed in others. But if their bodies can be made whole again, they are, and they are placed in holding chambers until new souls become available for them.

And then there are those who vacate their bodies voluntarily, perhaps because they are weary of them, or weary of their worlds, and wish to move along. They are the ones who sign up to fill the waiting bodies on far worlds, while others come behind them to fill the bodies they have abandoned. The least costly way to travel between the worlds is to surrender your body and go in matrix form, thus exchanging a discouraging life for an unfamiliar one. That was what Vox had done. In pain and despair she had agreed to allow the essence of herself, everything she had ever seen or felt or thought or dreamed, to be converted into a lattice of electrical impulses that the Sword of Orion would carry on its voyage from Kansas Four to Cul-de-Sac. A new body lay reserved for her there.

Her own discarded body would remain in suspension on Kansas Four. Some day it might become the home of some wandering soul from another world; or, if there were no bids for it, it might eventually be disassembled by the body-salvagers, and its parts put to some worthy use. Vox would never know; Vox would never care.

“I can understand trading an unhappy life for a chance at a happy one,” I said. “But why break loose on ship? What purpose could that serve? Why not wait until you got to Cul-de-Sac?”

“Because it was torture,” she said.

“Torture? What was?”

“Living as a matrix.” She laughed bitterly. “Living? It’s worse than death could ever be!”

“Tell me.”

“You’ve never done matrix, have you?”

“No,” I said. “I chose another way to escape.”

“Then you don’t know. You can’t know. You’ve got a ship full of matrixes in storage circuits but you don’t understand a thing about them. Imagine that the back of your neck itches, captain. But you have no arms to scratch with. Your thigh starts to itch. Your chest. You lie there itching everywhere. And you can’t scratch. Do you understand me?”

“How can a matrix feel an itch? A matrix is simply a pattern of electrical—”

“Oh, you’re impossible! You’re stupid! I’m not talking about actual literal itching. I’m giving you a suppose, a for-instance. Because you’d never be able to understand the real situation. Look: you’re in the storage circuit. All you are is electricity. That’s all a mind really is, anyway: electricity. But you used to have a body. The body had sensation. The body had feelings. You remember them. You’re a prisoner. A prisoner remembers all sorts of things that used to be taken for granted. You’d give anything to feel the wind in your hair again, or the taste of cool milk, or the scent of flowers. Or even the pain of a cut finger. The saltiness of your blood when you lick the cut. Anything. I hated my body, don’t you see? I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. But once it was gone I missed the feelings it had. I missed the sense of flesh pulling at me, holding me to the ground, flesh full of nerves, flesh that could feel pleasure. Or pain.”

“I understand,” I said, and I think that I truly did. “But the voyage to Cul-de-Sac is short. A few virtual weeks and you’d be there, and out of storage and into your new body, and—”

“Weeks? Think of that itch on the back of your neck, Captain. The itch that you can’t scratch. How long do you think you could stand it, lying there feeling that itch? Five minutes? An hour? Weeks?”

It seemed to me that an itch left unscratched would die of its own, perhaps in minutes. But that was only how it seemed to me. I was not Vox; I had not been a matrix in a storage circuit.

I said, “So you let yourself out? How?”

“It wasn’t that hard to figure. I had nothing else to do but think about it. You align yourself with the polarity of the circuit. That’s a matrix too, an electrical pattern holding you in crosswise bands. You change the alignment. It’s like being tied up, and slipping the ropes around until you can slide free. And then you can go anywhere you like. You key into any bioprocessor aboard the ship and you draw your energy from that instead of from the storage circuit, and it sustains you. I can move anywhere around this ship at the speed of light. Anywhere. In just the time you blinked your eye, I’ve been everywhere. I’ve been to the far tip and out on the mast, and I’ve been down through the lower decks, and I’ve been in the crew quarters and the cargo places and I’ve even been a little way off into something that’s right outside the ship but isn’t quite real, if you know what I mean. Something that just seems to be a cradle of probability waves surrounding us. It’s like being a ghost. But it doesn’t solve anything. Do you see? The torture still goes on. You want to feel, but you can’t. You want to be connected again, your senses, your inputs. That’s why I tried to get into the passenger, do you see? But he wouldn’t let me.”

I began to understand at last.

Not everyone who goes to the worlds of heaven as a colonist travels in matrix form. Ordinarily anyone who can afford to take his body with him will do so; but relatively few can afford it. Those who do travel in suspension, the deepest of sleeps. We carry no waking passengers in the Service, not at any price. They would be trouble for us, poking here, poking there, asking questions, demanding to be served and pampered. They would shatter the peace of the voyage. And so they go down into their coffins, their housings, and there they sleep the voyage away, all life-processes halted, a death-in-life that will not be reversed until we bring them to their destinations.

And poor Vox, freed of her prisoning circuit and hungry for sensory data, had tried to slip herself into a passenger’s body.

I listened, appalled and somber, as she told of her terrible odyssey through the ship. Breaking free of the circuit: that had been the first strangeness I felt, that tic, that nibble at the threshold of my consciousness.

Her first wild moment of freedom had been exhilarating and joyous. But then had come the realization that nothing really had changed. She was at large, but still she was incorporeal, caught in that monstrous frustration of bodilessness, yearning for a touch. Perhaps such torment was common among matrixes; perhaps that was why, now and then, they broke free as Vox had done, to roam ships like sad troubled spirits. So Roacher had said. Once in a long while someone in the storage circuits gets to feeling footloose, and finds a way out and goes roaming the ship. Looking for a body to jack into, that’s what they’re doing. Jack into me, jack into Katkat, even jack into you, Captain. Anybody handy, just so they can feel flesh around them again. Yes.

That was the second jolt, the stronger one, that Dismas and I had felt, when Vox, selecting a passenger at random, suddenly, impulsively, had slipped herself inside his brain. She had realized her mistake at once. The passenger, lost in whatever dreams may come to the suspended, reacted to her intrusion with wild terror. Convulsions swept him; he rose, clawing at the equipment that sustained his life, trying desperately to evict the succubus that had penetrated him. In this frantic struggle he smashed the case of his housing and died. Vox, fleeing, frightened, careered about the ship in search of refuge, encountered me standing by the screen in the Eye, and made an abortive attempt to enter my mind. But just then the death of the passenger registered on 49 Henry Henry’s sensors and when the intelligence made contact with me to tell me of the emergency Vox fled again, and hovered dolefully until I returned to my cabin. She had not meant to kill the passenger, she said. She was sorry that he had died. She felt some embarrassment, now, and fear. But no guilt. She rejected guilt for it almost defiantly. He had died? Well, so he had died. That was too bad. But how could she have known any such thing was going to happen? She was only looking for a body to take refuge in. Hearing that from her, I had a sense of her as someone utterly unlike me, someone volatile, unstable, perhaps violent. And yet I felt a strange kinship with her, even an identity. As though we were two parts of the same spirit; as though she and I were one and the same. I barely understood why.

“And what now?” I asked. “You say you want help. How?”

“Take me in.”

“What?”

“Hide me. In you. If they find me, they’ll eradicate me. You said so yourself, that it could be done, that I could be detected, contained, eradicated. But it won’t happen if you protect me.”

“I’m the captain,” I said, astounded.

“Yes.”

“How can I—”

“They’ll all be looking for me. The intelligences, the crewmen. It scares them, knowing there’s a matrix loose. They’ll want to destroy me. But if they can’t find me, they’ll start to forget about me after a while. They’ll think I’ve escaped into space, or something. And if I’m jacked into you, nobody’s going to be able to find me.”

“I have a responsibility to—”

“Please,” she said. “I could go to one of the others, maybe. But I feel closest to you. Please. Please.”

“Closest to me?”

“You aren’t happy. You don’t belong. Not here, not anywhere. You don’t fit in, any more than I did on Kansas Four. I could feel it the moment I first touched your mind. You’re a new captain, right? And the others on board are making it hard for you. Why should you care about them? Save me. We have more in common than you do with them. Please? You can’t just let them eradicate me. I’m young. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. All I want is to get to Cul-de-Sac and be put in the body that’s waiting for me there. A new start, my first start, really. Will you?”

“Why do you bother asking permission? You can simply enter me through my jack whenever you want, can’t you?”

“The last one died,” she said.

“He was in suspension. You didn’t kill him by entering him. It was the surprise, the fright. He killed himself by thrashing around and wrecking his housing.”

“Even so,” said Vox. “I wouldn’t try that again, an unwilling host. You have to say you’ll let me, or I won’t come in.”

I was silent.

“Help me?” she said.

“Come,” I told her.

8.

It was just like any other jacking: an electrochemical mind-to-mind bond, a linkage by way of the implant socket at the base of my spine. The sort of thing that any two people who wanted to make communion might do. There was just one difference, which was that we didn’t use a jack. We skipped the whole intricate business of checking bandwiths and voltages and selecting the right transformer-adapter. She could do it all, simply by matching evoked potentials. I felt a momentary sharp sensation and then she was with me.

“Breathe,” she said. “Breathe real deep. Fill your lungs. Rub your hands together. Touch your cheeks. Scratch behind your left ear. Please. Please. It’s been so long for me since I’ve felt anything.”

Her voice sounded the same as before, both real and unreal. There was no substance to it, no density of timbre, no sense that it was produced by the vibrations of vocal cords atop a column of air. Yet it was clear, firm, substantial in some essential way, a true voice in all respects except that there was no speaker to utter it. I suppose that while she was outside me she had needed to extend some strand of herself into my neural system in order to generate it. Now that was unnecessary. But I still perceived the voice as originating outside me, even though she had taken up residence within.

She overflowed with needs.

“Take a drink of water,” she urged. “Eat something. Can you make your knuckles crack? Do it, oh, do it! Put your hand between your legs and squeeze. There’s so much I want to feel. Do you have music here? Give me some music, will you? Something loud, something really hard.”

I did the things she wanted. Gradually she grew more calm.

I was strangely calm myself. I had no special awareness then of her presence within me, no unfamiliar pressure in my skull, no slitherings along my spine. There was no mingling of her thoughtstream and mine. She seemed not to have any way of controlling the movements or responses of my body. In these respects our contact was less intimate than any ordinary human jacking communion would have been. But that, I would soon discover, was by her choice. We would not remain so carefully compartmentalized for long.

“Is it better for you now?” I asked.

“I thought I was going to go crazy. If I didn’t start feeling something again soon.”

“You can feel things now?”

“Through you, yes. Whatever you touch, I touch.”

“You know I can’t hide you for long. They’ll take my command away if I’m caught harboring a fugitive. Or worse.”

“You don’t have to speak out loud to me any more,” she said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Just send it. We have the same nervous system now.”

“You can read my thoughts?” I said, still aloud.

“Not really. I’m not hooked into the higher cerebral centers. But I pick up motor, sensory stuff. And I get subvocalizations. You know what those are? I can hear your thoughts if you want me to. It’s like being in communion. You’ve been in communion, haven’t you?”

“Once in a while.”

“Then you know. Just open the channel to me. You can’t go around the ship talking out loud to somebody invisible, you know. Send me something. It isn’t hard.”

“Like this?” I said, visualizing a packet of verbal information sliding through the channels of my mind.

“You see? You can do it!”

“Even so,” I told her. “You still can’t stay like this with me for long. You have to realize that.”

She laughed. It was unmistakable, a silent but definite laugh. “You sound so serious. I bet you’re still surprised you took me in in the first place.”

“I certainly am. Did you think I would?”

“Sure I did. From the first moment. You’re basically a very kind person.”

“Am I, Vox?”

“Of course. You just have to let yourself do it.” Again the silent laughter. “I don’t even know your name. Here I am right inside your head and I don’t know your name.”

“Adam.”

“That’s a nice name. Is that an Earth name?”

“An old Earth name, yes. Very old.”

“And are you from Earth?” she asked.

“No. Except in the sense that we’re all from Earth.”

“Where, then?”

“I’d just as soon not talk about it,” I said.

She thought about that. “You hated the place where you grew up that much?”

“Please, Vox—”

“Of course you hated it. Just like I hated Kansas Four. We’re two of a kind, you and me. We’re one and the same. You got all the caution and I got all the impulsiveness. But otherwise we’re the same person. That’s why we share so well. I’m glad I’m sharing with you, Adam. You won’t make me leave, will you? We belong with each other. You’ll let me stay until we reach Cul-de-Sac. I know you will.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” I wasn’t at all sure, either way.

“Oh, you will. You will, Adam. I know you better than you know yourself.”

9.

So it began. I was in some new realm outside my established sense of myself, so far beyond my notions of appropriate behavior that I could not even feel astonishment at what I had done. I had taken her in, that was all. A stranger in my skull. She had turned to me in appeal and I had taken her in. It was as if her recklessness was contagious. And though I didn’t mean to shelter her any longer than was absolutely necessary, I could already see that I wasn’t going to make any move to eject her until her safety was assured.

But how was I going to hide her?

Invisible she might be, but not undetectable. And everyone on the ship would be searching for her.

There were sixteen crewmen on board who dreaded a loose matrix as they would a vampire. They would seek her as long as she remained at large. And not only the crew. The intelligences would be monitoring for her too, not out of any kind of fear but simply out of efficiency: they had nothing to fear from Vox but they would want the cargo manifests to come out in balance when we reached our destination.

The crew didn’t trust me in the first place. I was too young, too new, too green, too sweet. I was just the sort who might be guilty of giving shelter to a secret fugitive. And it was altogether likely that her presence within me would be obvious to others in some way not apparent to me. As for the intelligences, they had access to all sorts of data as part of their routine maintenance operations. Perhaps they could measure tiny physiological changes, differences in my reaction times or circulatory efficiency or whatever, that would be a tipoff to the truth. How would I know? I would have to be on constant guard against discovery of the secret sharer of my consciousness.

The first test came less than an hour after Vox had entered me. The communicator light went on and I heard the far-off music of the intelligence on duty.

This one was 612 Jason, working the late shift. Its aura was golden, its music deep and throbbing. Jasons tend to be more brusque and less condescending than the Henry series, and in general I prefer them. But it was terrifying now to see that light, to hear that music, to know that the ship’s intelligence wanted to speak with me. I shrank back at a tense awkward angle, the way one does when trying to avoid a face-to-face confrontation with someone.

But of course the intelligence had no face to confront. The intelligence was only a voice speaking to me out of a speaker grid, and a stew of magnetic impulses somewhere on the control levels of the ship. All the same, I perceived 612 Jason now as a great glowing eye, staring through me to the hidden Vox.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Report summary, Captain. The dead passenger and the missing matrix.”

Deep within me I felt a quick plunging sensation, and then the skin of my arms and shoulders began to glow as the chemicals of fear went coursing through my veins in a fierce tide. It was Vox, I knew, reacting in sudden alarm, opening the petcocks of my hormonal system. It was the thing I had dreaded. How could 612 Jason fail to notice that flood of endocrine response?

“Go on,” I said, as coolly as I could.

But noticing was one thing, interpreting the data something else. Fluctuations in a human being’s endocrine output might have any number of causes. To my troubled conscience everything was a glaring signal of my guilt. 612 Jason gave no indication that it suspected a thing.

The intelligence said, “The dead passenger was Hans Eger Olafssen, 54 years of age, a native of—”

“Never mind his details. You can let me have a printout on that part.”

“The missing matrix,” 612 Jason went on imperturbably. “Leeleaine Eliani, 17 years of age, a native of Kansas Four, bound for Cul-de-Sac, Vainglory Archipelago, under Transmission Contract No. D-14871532, dated the 27th day of the third month of—”

“Printout on that too,” I cut in. “What I want to know is where she is now.”

“That information is not available.”

“That isn’t a responsive answer, 612 Jason.”

“No better answer can be provided at this time, Captain. Tracer circuits have been activated and remain in constant search mode.”

“And?”

“We have no data on the present location of the missing matrix.”

Within me Vox reacted instantly to the intelligence’s calm flat statement. The hormonal response changed from one of fear to one of relief. My blazing skin began at once to cool. Would 612 Jason notice that too, and from that small clue be able to assemble the subtext of my body’s responses into a sequence that exposed my criminal violation of regulations?

“Don’t relax too soon,” I told her silently. “This may be some sort of trap.”

To 612 Jason I said, “What data do you have, then?”

“Two things are known: the time at which the Eliani matrix achieved negation of its storage circuitry and the time of its presumed attempt at making neural entry into the suspended passenger Olafssen. Beyond that no data has been recovered.”

“Its presumed attempt?” I said.

“There is no proof, Captain.”

“Olafssen’s convulsions? The smashing of the storage housing?”

“We know that Olafssen responded to an electrical stimulus, Captain. The source of the stimulus is impossible to trace, although the presumption is that it came from the missing matrix Eliani. These are matters for the subsequent inquiry. It is not within my responsibilities to assign definite causal relationships.”

Spoken like a true Jason-series intelligence, I thought.

I said, “You don’t have any effective way of tracing the movements of the Eliani matrix, is that what you’re telling me?”

“We’re dealing with extremely minute impedances, sir. In the ordinary functioning of the ship it is very difficult to distinguish a matrix manifestation from normal surges and pulses in the general electrical system.”

“You mean, it might take something as big as the matrix trying to climb back into its own storage circuit to register on the monitoring system?”

“Very possibly, sir.”

“Is there any reason to think the Eliani matrix is still on the ship at all?”

“There is no reason to think that it is not, Captain.”

“In other words, you don’t know anything about anything concerning the Eliani matrix.”

“I have provided you with all known data at this point. Trace efforts are continuing, sir.”

“You still think this is a trap?” Vox asked me.

“It’s sounding better and better by the minute. But shut up and don’t distract me, will you?”

To the intelligence I said, “All right, keep me posted on the situation. I’m preparing for sleep, 612 Jason. I want the end-of-day status report, and then I want you to clear off and leave me alone.”

“Very good, sir. Fifth virtual day of voyage. Position of ship sixteen units beyond last port of call, Kansas Four. Scheduled rendezvous with relay forces at Ultima Thule spinaround point was successfully achieved at the hour of—”

The intelligence droned on and on: the usual report of the routine events of the day, broken only by the novelty of an entry for the loss of a passenger and one for the escape of a matrix, then returning to the standard data, fuel levels and velocity soundings and all the rest. On the first four nights of the voyage I had solemnly tried to absorb all this torrent of ritualized downloading of the log as though my captaincy depended on committing it all to memory, but this night I barely listened, and nearly missed my cue when it was time to give it my approval before clocking out for the night. Vox had to prod me and let me know that the intelligence was waiting for something. I gave 612 Jason the confirm-and-clock-out and heard the welcome sound of its diminishing music as it decoupled the contact.

“What do you think?” Vox asked. “It doesn’t know, does it?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“You really are a pessimist, aren’t you?”

“I think we may be able to bring this off,” I told her. “But the moment we become overconfident, it’ll be the end. Everyone on this ship wants to know where you are. The slightest slip and we’re both gone.”

“Okay. Don’t lecture me.”

“I’ll try not to. Let’s get some sleep now.”

“I don’t need to sleep.”

“Well, I do.”

“Can we talk for a while first?”

“Tomorrow,” I said.

But of course sleep was impossible. I was all too aware of the stranger within me, perhaps prowling the most hidden places of my psyche at this moment. Or waiting to invade my dreams once I drifted off. For the first time I thought I could feel her presence even when she was silent: a hot node of identity pressing against the wall of my brain. Perhaps I imagined it. I lay stiff and tense, as wide awake as I have ever been in my life. After a time I had to call 612 Jason and ask it to put me under the wire; and even then my sleep was uneasy when it came.

10.

Until that point in the voyage I had taken nearly all of my meals in my quarters. It seemed a way of exerting my authority, such as it was, aboard ship. By my absence from the dining hall I created a presence, that of the austere and aloof captain; and I avoided the embarrassment of having to sit in the seat of command over men who were much my senior in all things. It was no great sacrifice for me. My quarters were more than comfortable, the food was the same as that which was available in the dining hall, the servo-steward that brought it was silent and efficient. The question of isolation did not arise. There has always been something solitary about me, as there is about most who are of the Service.

But when I awoke the next morning after what had seemed like an endless night, I went down to the dining hall for breakfast.

It was nothing like a deliberate change of policy, a decision that had been rigorously arrived at through careful reasoning. It wasn’t a decision at all. Nor did Vox suggest it, though I’m sure she inspired it. It was purely automatic. I arose, showered, and dressed. I confess that I had forgotten all about the events of the night before. Vox was quiet within me. Not until I was under the shower, feeling the warm comforting ultrasonic vibration, did I remember her: there came a disturbing sensation of being in two places at once, and, immediately afterward, an astonishingly odd feeling of shame at my own nakedness. Both those feelings passed quickly. But they did indeed bring to mind that extraordinary thing which I had managed to suppress for some minutes, that I was no longer alone in my body.

She said nothing. Neither did I. After last night’s astounding alliance I seemed to want to pull back into wordlessness, unthinkingness, a kind of automaton consciousness. The need for breakfast occurred to me and I called up a tracker to take me down to the dining hall. When I stepped outside the room I was surprised to encounter my servo-steward, already on its way up with my tray. Perhaps it was just as surprised to see me going out, though of course its blank metal face betrayed no feelings.

“I’ll be having breakfast in the dining hall today,” I told it.

“Very good, sir.”

My tracker arrived. I climbed into its seat and it set out at once on its cushion of air toward the dining hall.

The dining hall of the Sword of Orion is a magnificent room at the Eye end of Crew Deck, with one glass wall providing a view of all the lights of heaven. By some whim of the designers we sit with that wall below us, so that the stars and their tethered worlds drift beneath our feet. The other walls are of some silvery metal chased with thin swirls of gold, everything shining by the reflected light of the passing star-clusters. At the center is a table of black stone, with places allotted for each of the seventeen members of the crew. It is a splendid if somewhat ridiculous place, a resonant reminder of the wealth and power of the Service.

Three of my shipmates were at their places when I entered. Pedregal was there, the supercargo, a compact, sullen man whose broad dome of a head seemed to rise directly from his shoulders. And there was Fresco, too, slender and elusive, the navigator, a lithe dark-skinned person of ambiguous sex who alternated from voyage to voyage, so I had been told, converting from male to female and back again according to some private rhythm. The third person was Raebuck, whose sphere of responsibility was communications, an older man whose flat, chilly gaze conveyed either boredom or menace, I could never be sure which.

“Why, it’s the captain,” said Pedregal calmly. “Favoring us with one of his rare visits.”

All three stared at me with that curious testing intensity which I was coming to see was an inescapable part of my life aboard ship: a constant hazing meted out to any newcomer to the Service, an interminable probing for the place that was most vulnerable. Mine was a parsec wide and I was certain they would discover it at once. But I was determined to match them stare for stare, ploy for ploy, test for test.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” I said. Then, giving Fresco a level glance, I added, “Good morning, Fresco.”

I took my seat at the table’s head and rang for service.

I was beginning to realize why I had come out of my cabin that morning. In part it was a reflection of Vox’s presence within me, an expression of that new component of rashness and impulsiveness that had entered me with her. But mainly it was, I saw now, some stratagem of my own, hatched on some inaccessible subterranean level of my double mind. In order to conceal Vox most effectively, I would have to take the offensive: rather than skulking in my quarters and perhaps awakening perilous suspicions in the minds of my shipmates, I must come forth, defiantly, challengingly, almost flaunting the thing that I had done, and go among them, pretending that nothing unusual was afoot and forcing them to believe it. Such aggressiveness was not natural to my temperament. But perhaps I could draw on some reserves provided by Vox. If not, we both were lost.

Raebuck said, to no one in particular, “I suppose yesterday’s disturbing events must inspire a need for companionship in the captain.”

I faced him squarely. “I have all the companionship I require, Raebuck. But I agree that what happened yesterday was disturbing.”

“A nasty business,” Pedregal said, ponderously shaking his neckless head. “And a strange one, a matrix trying to get into a passenger. That’s new to me, a thing like that. And to lose the passenger besides—that’s bad. That’s very bad.”

“It does happen, losing a passenger,” said Raebuck.

“A long time since it happened on a ship of mine,” Pedregal rejoined.

“We lost a whole batch of them on the Emperor of Callisto,” Fresco said. “You know the story? It was thirty years ago. We were making the run from Van Buren to the San Pedro Cluster. We picked up a supernova pulse and the intelligence on duty went into flicker. Somehow dumped a load of aluminum salts in the feed-lines and killed off fifteen, sixteen passengers. I saw the bodies before they went into the converter. Beyond salvage, they were.”

“Yes,” said Raebuck. “I heard of that one. And then there was the Queen Astarte, a couple of years after that. Tchelitchev was her captain, little green-eyed Russian woman from one of the Troika worlds. They were taking a routine inventory and two digits got transposed, and a faulty delivery signal slipped through. I think it was six dead, premature decanting, killed by air poisoning. Tchelitchev took it very badly. Very badly. Somehow the captain always does.”

“And then that time on the Hecuba,” said Pedregal. “No ship of mine, thank God. That was the captain who ran amok, thought the ship was too quiet, wanted to see some passengers moving around and started awakening them—”

Raebuck showed a quiver of surprise. “You know about that? I thought that was supposed to be hushed up.”

“Things get around,” Pedregal said, with something like a smirk. “The captain’s name was Catania-Szu, I believe, a man from Mediterraneo, very high-strung, the way all of them are there. I was working the Valparaiso then, out of Mendax Nine bound for Scylla and Charybdis and neighboring points, and when we stopped to download some cargo in the Seneca system I got the whole story from a ship’s clerk named—”

“You were on the Valparaiso?” Fresco asked. “Wasn’t that the ship that had a free matrix, too, ten or eleven years back? A real soul-eater, so the report went—”

“After my time,” said Pedregal, blandly waving his hand. “But I did hear of it. You get to hear about everything, when you’re downloading cargo. Soul-eater, you say, reminds me of the time—”

And he launched into some tale of horror at a spinaround station in a far quadrant of the galaxy. But he was no more than halfway through it when Raebuck cut in with a gorier reminiscence of his own, and then Fresco, seething with impatience, broke in on him to tell of a ship infested by three free matrixes at once. I had no doubt that all this was being staged for my enlightenment, by way of showing me how seriously such events were taken in the Service, and how the captains under whom they occurred went down in the folklore of the starships with ineradicable black marks. But their attempts to unsettle me, if that is what they were, left me undismayed. Vox, silent within me, infused me with a strange confidence that allowed me to ignore the darker implications of these anecdotes.

I simply listened, playing my role: the neophyte fascinated by the accumulated depth of spacegoing experience that their stories implied.

Then I said, finally, “When matrixes get loose, how long do they generally manage to stay at large?”

“An hour or two, generally,” said Raebuck. “As they drift around the ship, of course, they leave an electrical trail. We track it and close off access routes behind them and eventually we pin them down in close quarters. Then it’s not hard to put them back in their bottles.”

“And if they’ve jacked into some member of the crew?”

“That makes it even easier to find them.”

Boldly I said, “Was there ever a case where a free matrix jacked into a member of the crew and managed to keep itself hidden?”

“Never,” said a new voice. It belonged to Roacher, who had just entered the dining hall. He stood at the far end of the long table, staring at me. His strange luminescent eyes, harsh and probing, came to rest on mine. “No matter how clever the matrix may be, sooner or later the host will find some way to call for help.”

“And if the host doesn’t choose to call for help?” I asked.

Roacher studied me with great care.

Had I been too bold? Had I given away too much?

“But that would be a violation of regulations!” he said, in a tone of mock astonishment. “That would be a criminal act!”

11.

She asked me to take her starwalking, to show her the full view of the Great Open.

It was the third day of her concealment within me. Life aboard the Sword of Orion had returned to routine, or, to be more accurate, it had settled into a new routine in which the presence on board of an undetected and apparently undetectable free matrix was a constant element.

As Vox had suggested, there were some who quickly came to believe that the missing matrix must have slipped off into space, since the watchful ship-intelligences could find no trace of it. But there were others who kept looking over their shoulders, figuratively or literally, as if expecting the fugitive to attempt to thrust herself without warning into the spinal jacks that gave access to their nervous systems. They behaved exactly as if the ship were haunted. To placate those uneasy ones, I ordered round-the-clock circuit sweeps that would report every vagrant pulse and random surge. Each such anomalous electrical event was duly investigated, and, of course, none of these investigations led to anything significant. Now that Vox resided in my brain instead of the ship’s wiring, she was beyond any such mode of discovery.

Whether anyone suspected the truth was something I had no way of knowing. Perhaps Roacher did; but he made no move to denounce me, nor did he so much as raise the issue of the missing matrix with me at all after that time in the dining hall. He might know nothing whatever; he might know everything, and not care; he might simply be keeping his own counsel for the moment. I had no way of telling.

I was growing accustomed to my double life, and to my daily duplicity. Vox had quickly come to seem as much a part of me as my arm, or my leg. When she was silent—and often I heard nothing from her for hours at a time—I was no more aware of her than I would be, in any special way, of my arm or my leg; but nevertheless I knew somehow that she was there. The boundaries between her mind and mine were eroding steadily. She was learning how to infiltrate me. At times it seemed to me that what we were were joint tenants of the same dwelling, rather than I the permanent occupant and she a guest. I came to perceive my own mind as something not notably different from hers, a mere web of electrical force which for the moment was housed in the soft moist globe that was the brain of the captain of the Sword of Orion. Either of us, so it seemed, might come and go within that soft moist globe as we pleased, flitting casually in or out after the wraithlike fashion of matrixes.

At other times it was not at all like that: I gave no thought to her presence and went about my tasks as if nothing had changed for me. Then it would come as a surprise when Vox announced herself to me with some sudden comment, some quick question. I had to learn to guard myself against letting my reaction show, if it happened when I was with other members of the crew. Though no one around us could hear anything when she spoke to me, or I to her, I knew it would be the end for our masquerade if anyone caught me in some unguarded moment of conversation with an unseen companion.

How far she had penetrated my mind began to become apparent to me when she asked to go on a starwalk.

“You know about that?” I said, startled, for starwalking is the private pleasure of the spacegoing and I had not known of it myself before I was taken into the Service.

Vox seemed amazed by my amazement. She indicated casually that the details of starwalking were common knowledge everywhere.

But something rang false in her tone. Were the landcrawling folk really so familiar with our special pastime? Or had she picked what she knew of it out of the hitherto private reaches of my consciousness?

I chose not to ask. But I was uneasy about taking her with me into the Great Open, much as I was beginning to yearn for it myself. She was not one of us. She was planetary; she had not passed through the training of the Service.

I told her that.

“Take me anyway,” she said. “It’s the only chance I’ll ever have.”

“But the training—”

“I don’t need it. Not if you’ve had it.”

“What if that’s not enough?”

“It will be,” she said. “I know it will, Adam. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ve had the training, haven’t you? And I am you.”

12.

Together we rode the transit track out of the Eye and down to Drive Deck, where the soul of the ship lies lost in throbbing dreams of the far galaxies as it pulls us ever onward across the unending night.

We passed through zones of utter darkness and zones of cascading light, through places where wheeling helixes of silvery radiance burst like auroras from the air, through passages so crazed in their geometry that they reawakened the terrors of the womb in anyone who traversed them. A starship is the mother of mysteries. Vox crouched, frozen with awe, within that portion of our brain that was hers. I felt the surges of her awe, one after another, as we went downward.

“Are you really sure you want to do this?” I asked.

“Yes!” she cried fiercely. “Keep going!”

“There’s the possibility that you’ll be detected,” I told her.

“There’s the possibility that I won’t be,” she said.

We continued to descend. Now we were in the realm of the three cyborg push-cells, Gabriel, Banquo, and Fleece. Those were three members of the crew whom we would never see at the table in the dining hall, for they dwelled here in the walls of Drive Deck, permanently jacked in, perpetually pumping their energies into the ship’s great maw. I have already told you of our saying in the Service, that when you enter you give up the body and you get your soul. For most of us that is only a figure of speech: what we give up, when we say farewell forever to planetskin and take up our new lives in starships, is not the body itself but the body’s trivial needs, the sweaty things so dear to shore people. But some of us are more literal in their renunciations. The flesh is a meaningless hindrance to them; they shed it entirely, knowing that they can experience starship life just as fully without it. They allow themselves to be transformed into extensions of the stardrive. From them comes the raw energy out of which is made the power that carries us hurtling through heaven. Their work is unending; their reward is a sort of immortality. It is not a choice I could make, nor, I think, you: but for them it is bliss. There can be no doubt about that.

“Another starwalk so soon, Captain?” Banquo asked. For I had been here on the second day of the voyage, losing no time in availing myself of the great privilege of the Service.

“Is there any harm in it?”

“No, no harm,” said Banquo. “Just isn’t usual, is all.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “That’s not important to me.”

Banquo is a gleaming metallic ovoid, twice the size of a human head, jacked into a slot in the wall. Within the ovoid is the matrix of what had once been Banquo, long ago on a world called Sunrise where night is unknown. Sunrise’s golden dawns and shining days had not been good enough for Banquo, apparently. What Banquo had wanted was to be a gleaming metallic ovoid, hanging on the wall of Drive Deck aboard the Sword of Orion.

Any of the three cyborgs could set up a starwalk. But Banquo was the one who had done it for me that other time and it seemed best to return to him. He was the most congenial of the three. He struck me as amiable and easy. Gabriel, on my first visit, had seemed austere, remote, incomprehensible. He is an early model who had lived the equivalent of three human lifetimes as a cyborg aboard starships and there was not much about him that was human any more. Fleece, much younger, quick-minded and quirky, I mistrusted: in her weird edgy way she might just somehow be able to detect the hidden other who would be going along with me for the ride.

You must realize that when we starwalk we do not literally leave the ship, though that is how it seems to us. If we left the ship even for a moment we would be swept away and lost forever in the abyss of heaven. Going outside a starship of heaven is not like stepping outside an ordinary planet-launched shoreship that moves through normal space. But even if it were possible, there would be no point in leaving the ship. There is nothing to see out there. A starship moves through utter empty darkness.

But though there may be nothing to see, that does not mean that there is nothing out there. The entire universe is out there. If we could see it while we are traveling across the special space that is heaven we would find it flattened and curved, so that we had the illusion of viewing everything at once, all the far-flung galaxies back to the beginning of time. This is the Great Open, the totality of the continuum. Our external screens show it to us in simulated form, because we need occasional assurance that it is there.

A starship rides along the mighty lines of force which cross that immense void like the lines of the compass rose on an ancient mariner’s map. When we starwalk, we ride those same lines, and we are held by them, sealed fast to the ship that is carrying us onward through heaven. We seem to step forth into space; we seem to look down on the ship, on the stars, on all the worlds of heaven. For the moment we become little starships flying along beside the great one that is our mother. It is magic; it is illusion; but it is magic that so closely approaches what we perceive as reality that there is no way to measure the difference, which means that in effect there is no difference.

“Ready?” I asked Vox.

“Absolutely.”

Still I hesitated.

“Are you sure?”

“Go on,” she said impatiently. “Do it!”

I put the jack to my spine myself. Banquo did the matching of impedances. If he were going to discover the passenger I carried, this would be the moment. But he showed no sign that anything was amiss. He queried me; I gave him the signal to proceed; there was a moment of sharp warmth at the back of my neck as my neural matrix, and Vox’s traveling with it, rushed out through Banquo and hurtled downward toward its merger with the soul of the ship.

We were seized and drawn in and engulfed by the vast force that is the ship. As the coils of the engine caught us we were spun around and around, hurled from vector to vector, mercilessly stretched, distended by an unimaginable flux. And then there was a brightness all about us, a brightness that cried out in heaven with a mighty clamor. We were outside the ship. We were starwalking.

“Oh,” she said. A little soft cry, a muted gasp of wonder.

The blazing mantle of the ship lay upon the darkness of heaven like a white shadow. That great cone of cold fiery light reached far out in front of us, arching awesomely toward heaven’s vault, and behind us it extended beyond the limits of our sight. The slender tapering outline of the ship was clearly visible within it, the needle and its Eye, all ten kilometers of it easily apparent to us in a single glance.

And there were the stars. And there were the worlds of heaven.

The effect of the stardrive is to collapse the dimensions, each one in upon the other. Thus inordinate spaces are diminished and the galaxy may be spanned by human voyagers. There is no logic, no linearity of sequence, to heaven as it appears to our eyes. Wherever we look we see the universe bent back upon itself, revealing its entirety in an infinite series of infinite segments of itself. Any sector of stars contains all stars. Any demarcation of time encompasses all of time past and time to come. What we behold is altogether beyond our understanding, which is exactly as it should be; for what we are given, when we look through the Eye of the ship at the naked heavens, is a god’s-eye view of the universe. And we are not gods.

“What are we seeing?” Vox murmured within me.

I tried to tell her. I showed her how to define her relative position so there would be an up and a down for her, a backward, a forward, a flow of time and event from beginning to end. I pointed out the arbitrary coordinate axes by which we locate ourselves in this fundamentally incomprehensible arena. I found known stars for her, and known worlds, and showed them to her.

She understood nothing. She was entirely lost.

I told her that there was no shame in that.

I told her that I had been just as bewildered, when I was undergoing my training in the simulator. That everyone was; and that no one, not even if he spent a thousand years aboard the starships that plied the routes of heaven, could ever come to anything more than a set of crude equivalents and approximations of understanding what starwalking shows us. Attaining actual understanding itself is beyond the best of us.

I could feel her struggling to encompass the impact of all that rose and wheeled and soared before us. Her mind was agile, though still only half-formed, and I sensed her working out her own system of explanations and assumptions, her analogies, her equivalencies. I gave her no more help. It was best for her to do these things by herself; and in any case I had no more help to give.

I had my own astonishment and bewilderment to deal with, on this my second starwalk in heaven.

Once more I looked down upon the myriad worlds turning in their orbits. I could see them easily, the little bright globes rotating in the huge night of the Great Open: red worlds, blue worlds, green ones, some turning their full faces to me, some showing mere slivers of a crescent. How they cleaved to their appointed tracks! How they clung to their parent stars!

I remembered that other time, only a few virtual days before, when I had felt such compassion for them, such sorrow. Knowing that they were condemned forever to follow the same path about the same star, a hopeless bondage, a meaningless retracing of a perpetual route. In their own eyes they might be footloose wanderers, but to me they had seemed the most pitiful of slaves. And so I had grieved for the worlds of heaven; but now, to my surprise, I felt no pity, only a kind of love. There was no reason to be sad for them. They were what they were, and there was a supreme rightness in those fixed orbits and their obedient movements along them. They were content with being what they were. If they were loosed even a moment from that bondage, such chaos would arise in the universe as could never be contained. Those circling worlds are the foundations upon which all else is built; they know that and they take pride in it; they are loyal to their tasks and we must honor them for their devotion to their duty. And with honor comes love.

This must be Vox speaking within me, I told myself.

I had never thought such thoughts. Love the planets in their orbits? What kind of notion was that? Perhaps no stranger than my earlier notion of pitying them because they weren’t starships; but that thought had arisen from the spontaneous depths of my own spirit and it had seemed to make a kind of sense to me. Now it had given way to a wholly other view.

I loved the worlds that moved before me and yet did not move, in the great night of heaven.

I loved the strange fugitive girl within me who beheld those worlds and loved them for their immobility.

I felt her seize me now, taking me impatiently onward, outward, into the depths of heaven. She understood now; she knew how it was done. And she was far more daring than ever I would have allowed me to be. Together we walked the stars. Not only walked but plunged and swooped and soared, traveling among them like gods. Their hot breath singed us. Their throbbing brightness thundered at us. Their serene movements boomed a mighty music at us. On and on we went, hand in hand, Vox leading, I letting her draw me, deeper and deeper into the shining abyss that was the universe. Until at last we halted, floating in mid-cosmos, the ship nowhere to be seen, only the two of us surrounded by a shield of suns.

In that moment a sweeping ecstasy filled my soul. I felt all eternity within my grasp. No, that puts it the wrong way around and makes it seem that I was seized by delusions of imperial grandeur, which was not at all the case. What I felt was myself within the grasp of all eternity, enfolded in the loving embrace of a complete and perfect cosmos in which nothing was out of place, or ever could be.

It is this that we go starwalking to attain. This sense of belonging, this sense of being contained in the divine perfection of the universe.

When it comes, there is no telling what effect it will have; but inner change is what it usually brings. I had come away from my first starwalk unaware of any transformation; but within three days I had impulsively opened myself to a wandering phantom, violating not only regulations but the nature of my own character as I understood it. I have always, as I think I have said, been an intensely private man. Even though I had given Vox refuge, I had been relieved and grateful that her mind and mine had remained separate entities within our shared brain.

Now I did what I could to break down whatever boundary remained between us.

I hadn’t let her know anything, so far, of my life before going to heaven. I had met her occasional questions with coy evasions, with half-truths, with blunt refusals. It was the way I had always been with everyone, a habit of secrecy, an unwillingness to reveal myself. I had been even more secretive, perhaps, with Vox than with all the others, because of the very closeness of her mind to mine. As though I feared that by giving her any interior knowledge of me I was opening the way for her to take me over entirely, to absorb me into her own vigorous, undisciplined soul.

But now I offered my past to her in a joyous rush. We began to make our way slowly backward from that apocalyptic place at the center of everything; and as we hovered on the breast of the Great Open, drifting between the darkness and the brilliance of the light that the ship created, I told her everything about myself that I had been holding back.

I suppose they were mere trivial things, though to me they were all so highly charged with meaning. I told her the name of my home planet. I let her see it, the sea the color of lead, the sky the color of smoke. I showed her the sparse and scrubby gray headlands behind our house, where I would go running for hours by myself, a tall slender boy pounding tirelessly across the crackling sands as though demons were pursuing him.

I showed her everything: the somber child, the troubled youth, the wary, overcautious young man. The playmates who remained forever strangers, the friends whose voices were drowned in hollow babbling echoes, the lovers whose love seemed without substance or meaning. I told her of my feeling that I was the only one alive in the world, that everyone about me was some sort of artificial being full of gears and wires. Or that the world was only a flat colorless dream in which I somehow had become trapped, but from which I would eventually awaken into the true world of light and color and richness of texture. Or that I might not be human at all, but had been abandoned in the human galaxy by creatures of another form entirely, who would return for me some day far in the future.

I was lighthearted as I told her these things, and she received them lightly. She knew them for what they were—not symptoms of madness, but only the bleak fantasies of a lonely child, seeking to make sense out of an incomprehensible universe in which he felt himself to be a stranger and afraid.

“But you escaped,” she said. “You found a place where you belonged!”

“Yes,” I said. “I escaped.”

And I told her of the day when I had seen a sudden light in the sky. My first thought then had been that my true parents had come back for me; my second, that it was some comet passing by. That light was a starship of heaven that had come to worldward in our system. And as I looked upward through the darkness on that day long ago, straining to catch a glimpse of the shoreships that were going up to it bearing cargo and passengers to be taken from our world to some unknowable place at the other end of the galaxy, I realized that that starship was my true home. I realized that the Service was my destiny.

And so it came to pass, I said, that I left my world behind, and my name, and my life, such as it had been, to enter the company of those who sail between the stars. I let her know that this was my first voyage, explaining that it is the peculiar custom of the Service to test all new officers by placing them in command at once. She asked me if I had found happiness here; and I said, quickly, Yes, I had, and then I said a moment later, Not yet, not yet, but I see at least the possibility of it.

She was quiet for a time. We watched the worlds turning and the stars like blazing spikes of color racing toward their far-off destinations, and the fiery white light of the ship itself streaming in the firmament as if it were the blood of some alien god. The thought came to me of all that I was risking by hiding her like this within me. I brushed it aside. This was neither the place nor the moment for doubt or fear or misgiving.

Then she said, “I’m glad you told me all that, Adam.”

“Yes. I am too.”

“I could feel it from the start, what sort of person you were. But I needed to hear it in your own words, your own thoughts. It’s just like I’ve been saying. You and I, we’re two of a kind. Square pegs in a world of round holes. You ran away to the Service and I ran away to a new life in somebody else’s body.”

I realized that Vox wasn’t speaking of my body, but of the new one that waited for her on Cul-de-Sac.

And I realized too that there was one thing about herself that she had never shared with me, which was the nature of the flaw in her old body that had caused her to discard it. If I knew her more fully, I thought, I could love her more deeply: imperfections and all, which is the way of love. But she had shied away from telling me that, and I had never pressed her on it. Now, out here under the cool gleam of heaven, surely we had moved into a place of total trust, of complete union of soul.

I said, “Let me see you, Vox.”

“See me? How could you—”

“Give me an image of yourself. You’re too abstract for me this way. Vox. A voice. Only a voice. You talk to me, you live within me, and I still don’t have the slightest idea what you look like.”

“That’s how I want it to be.”

“Won’t you show me how you look?”

“I won’t look like anything. I’m a matrix. I’m nothing but electricity.”

“I understand that. I mean how you looked before. Your old self, the one you left behind on Kansas Four.”

She made no reply.

I thought she was hesitating, deciding; but some time went by, and still I heard nothing from her. What came from her was silence, only silence, a silence that had crashed down between us like a steel curtain.

“Vox?”

Nothing.

Where was she hiding? What had I done?

“What’s the matter? Is it the thing I asked you?”

No answer.

“It’s all right, Vox. Forget about it. It isn’t important at all. You don’t have to show me anything you don’t want to show me.”

Nothing. Silence.

“Vox? Vox?”

The worlds and stars wheeled in chaos before me. The light of the ship roared up and down the spectrum from end to end. In growing panic I sought for her and found no trace of her presence within me. Nothing. Nothing.

“Are you all right?” came another voice. Banquo, from inside the ship. “I’m getting some pretty wild signals. You’d better come in. You’ve been out there long enough as it is.”

Vox was gone. I had crossed some uncrossable boundary and I had frightened her away.

Numbly I gave Banquo the signal, and he brought me back inside.

13.

Alone, I made my way upward level by level through the darkness and mystery of the ship, toward the Eye. The crash of silence went on and on, like the falling of some colossal wave on an endless shore. I missed Vox terribly. I had never known such complete solitude as I felt now. I had not realized how accustomed I had become to her being there, nor what impact her leaving would have on me. In just those few days of giving her sanctuary, it had somehow come to seem to me that to house two souls within one brain was the normal condition of mankind, and that to be alone in one’s skull as I was now was a shameful thing.

As I neared the place where Crew Deck narrows into the curve of the Eye a slender figure stepped without warning from the shadows.

“Captain.”

My mind was full of the loss of Vox and he caught me unawares. I jumped back, badly startled.

“For the love of God, man!”

“It’s just me. Bulgar. Don’t be so scared, Captain. It’s only Bulgar.”

“Let me be,” I said, and brusquely beckoned him away.

“No. Wait, Captain. Please, wait.”

He clutched at my arm, holding me as I tried to go. I halted and turned toward him, trembling with anger and surprise.

Bulgar, Roacher’s jackmate, was a gentle, soft-voiced little man, wide-mouthed, olive-skinned, with huge sad eyes. He and Roacher had sailed the skies of Heaven together since before I was born. They complemented each other. Where Roacher was small and hard, like fruit that has been left to dry in the sun for a hundred years, his jackmate Bulgar was small and tender, with a plump, succulent look about him. Together they seemed complete, an unassailable whole: I could readily imagine them lying together in their bunk, each jacked to the other, one person in two bodies, linked more intimately even than Vox and I had been.

With an effort I recovered my poise. Tightly I said, “What is it, Bulgar?”

“Can we talk a minute, Captain?”

“We are talking. What do you want with me?”

“That loose matrix, sir.”

My reaction must have been stronger than he was expecting. His eyes went wide and he took a step or two back from me.

Moistening his lips, he said, “We were wondering, Captain—wondering how the search is going—whether you had any idea where the matrix might be—”

I said stiffly, “Who’s we, Bulgar?”

“The men. Roacher. Me. Some of the others. Mainly Roacher, sir.”

“Ah. So Roacher wants to know where the matrix is.”

The little man moved closer. I saw him staring deep into me as though searching for Vox behind the mask of my carefully expressionless face. Did he know? Did they all? I wanted to cry out, She’s not there any more, she’s gone, she left me, she ran off into space. But apparently what was troubling Roacher and his shipmates was something other than the possibility that Vox had taken refuge with me.

Bulgar’s tone was soft, insinuating, concerned. “Roacher’s very worried, Captain. He’s been on ships with loose matrixes before. He knows how much trouble they can be. He’s really worried, Captain. I have to tell you that. I’ve never seen him so worried.”

“What does he think the matrix will do to him?”

“He’s afraid of being taken over,” Bulgar said.

“Taken over?”

“The matrix coming into his head through his jack. Mixing itself up with his brain. It’s been known to happen, Captain.”

“And why should it happen to Roacher, out of all the men on this ship? Why not you? Why not Pedregal? Or Rio de Rio? Or one of the passengers again?” I took a deep breath. “Why not me, for that matter?”

“He just wants to know, sir, what’s the situation with the matrix now. Whether you’ve discovered anything about where it is. Whether you’ve been able to trap it.”

There was something strange in Bulgar’s eyes. I began to think I was being tested again. This assertion of Roacher’s alleged terror of being infiltrated and possessed by the wandering matrix might simply be a roundabout way of finding out whether that had already happened to me.

“Tell him it’s gone,” I said.

“Gone, sir?”

“Gone. Vanished. It isn’t anywhere on the ship any more. Tell him that, Bulgar. He can forget about her slithering down his precious jackhole.”

“Her?”

“Female matrix, yes. But that doesn’t matter now. She’s gone. You can tell him that. Escaped. Flew off into heaven. The emergency’s over.” I glowered at him. I yearned to be rid of him, to go off by myself to nurse my new grief. “Shouldn’t you be getting back to your post, Bulgar?”

Did he believe me? Or did he think that I had slapped together some transparent lie to cover my complicity in the continued absence of the matrix? I had no way of knowing. Bulgar gave me a little obsequious bow and started to back away.

“Sir,” he said. “Thank you, sir. I’ll tell him, sir.”

He retreated into the shadows. I continued uplevel.

I passed Katkat on my way, and, a little while afterward, Raebuck. They looked at me without speaking. There was something reproachful but almost loving about Katkat’s expression, but Raebuck’s icy, baleful stare brought me close to flinching. In their different ways they were saying, Guilty, guilty, guilty. But of what?

Before, I had imagined that everyone whom I encountered aboard ship was able to tell at a single glance that I was harboring the fugitive, and was simply waiting for me to reveal myself with some foolish slip. Now everything was reversed. They looked at me and I told myself that they were thinking, He’s all alone by himself in there, he doesn’t have anyone else at all, and I shrank away, shamed by my solitude. I knew that this was the edge of madness. I was overwrought, overtired; perhaps it had been a mistake to go starwalking a second time so soon after my first. I needed to rest. I needed to hide.

I began to wish that there were someone aboard the Sword of Orion with whom I could discuss these things. But who, though? Roacher? 612 Jason? I was altogether isolated here. The only one I could speak to on this ship was Vox. And she was gone.

In the safety of my cabin I jacked myself into the mediq rack and gave myself a ten-minute purge. That helped. The phantom fears and intricate uncertainties that had taken possession of me began to ebb.

I keyed up the log and ran through the list of my captainly duties, such as they were, for the rest of the day. We were approaching a spinaround point, one of those nodes of force positioned equidistantly across heaven which a starship in transit must seize and use in order to propel itself onward through the next sector of the universe. Spinaround acquisition is performed automatically but at least in theory the responsibility for carrying it out successfully falls to the captain: I would give the commands, I would oversee the process from initiation through completion.

But there was still time for that.

I accessed 49 Henry Henry, who was the intelligence on duty, and asked for an update on the matrix situation.

“No change, sir,” the intelligence reported at once.

“What does that mean?”

“Trace efforts continue as requested, sir. But we have not detected the location of the missing matrix.”

“No clues? Not even a hint?”

“No data at all, sir. There’s essentially no way to isolate the minute electromagnetic pulse of a free matrix from the background noise of the ship’s entire electrical system.”

I believed it. 612 Jason Jason had told me that in nearly the same words.

I said, “I have reason to think that the matrix is no longer on the ship, 49 Henry Henry.”

“Do you, sir?” said 49 Henry Henry in its usual aloof, half-mocking way.

“I do, yes. After a careful study of the situation, it’s my opinion that the matrix exited the ship earlier this day and will not be heard from again.”

“Shall I record that as an official position, sir?”

“Record it,” I said.

“Done, sir.”

“And therefore, 49 Henry Henry, you can cancel search mode immediately and close the file. We’ll enter a debit for one matrix and the Service bookkeepers can work it out later.”

“Very good, sir.”

“Decouple,” I ordered the intelligence.

49 Henry Henry went away. I sat quietly amid the splendors of my cabin, thinking back over my starwalk and reliving that sense of harmony, of love, of oneness with the worlds of heaven, that had come over me while Vox and I drifted on the bosom of the Great Open. And feeling once again the keen slicing sense of loss that I had felt since Vox’s departure from me. In a little while I would have to rise and go to the command center and put myself through the motions of overseeing spinaround acquisition; but for the moment I remained where I was, motionless, silent, peering deep into the heart of my solitude.

“I’m not gone,” said an unexpected quiet voice.

It came like a punch beneath the heart. It was a moment before I could speak.

“Vox?” I said at last. “Where are you, Vox?”

“Right here.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Inside. I never went away.”

“You never—”

“You upset me. I just had to hide for a while.”

“You knew I was trying to find you?”

“Yes.”

Color came to my cheeks. Anger roared like a stream in spate through my veins. I felt myself blazing.

“You knew how I felt, when you—when it seemed that you weren’t there any more.”

“Yes,” she said, even more quietly, after a time.

I forced myself to grow calm. I told myself that she owed me nothing, except perhaps gratitude for sheltering her, and that whatever pain she had caused me by going silent was none of her affair. I reminded myself also that she was a child, unruly and turbulent and undisciplined.

After a bit I said, “I missed you. I missed you more than I want to say.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, sounding repentant, but not very. “I had to go away for a time. You upset me, Adam.”

“By asking you to show me how you used to look?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand why that upset you so much.”

“You don’t have to,” Vox said. “I don’t mind now. You can see me, if you like. Do you still want to? Here. This is me. This is what I used to be. If it disgusts you don’t blame me. Okay? Okay, Adam? Here. Have a look. Here I am.”

14.

There was a wrenching within me, a twisting, a painful yanking sensation, as of some heavy barrier forcibly being pulled aside. And then the glorious radiant scarlet sky of Kansas Four blossomed on the screen of my mind.

She didn’t simply show it to me. She took me there. I felt the soft moist wind on my face, I breathed the sweet, faintly pungent air, I heard the sly rustling of glossy leathery fronds that dangled from bright yellow trees. Beneath my bare feet the black soil was warm and spongy.

I was Leeleaine, who liked to call herself Vox. I was seventeen years old and swept by forces and compulsions as powerful as hurricanes.

I was her from within and also I saw her from outside.

My hair was long and thick and dark, tumbling down past my shoulders in an avalanche of untended curls and loops and snags. My hips were broad, my breasts were full and heavy: I could feel the pull of them, the pain of them. It was almost as if they were stiff with milk, though they were not. My face was tense, alert, sullen, aglow with angry intelligence. It was not an unappealing face. Vox was not an unappealing girl.

From her earlier reluctance to show herself to me I had expected her to be ugly, or perhaps deformed in some way, dragging herself about in a coarse, heavy, burdensome husk of flesh that was a constant reproach to her. She had spoken of her life on Kansas Four as being so dreary, so sad, so miserable, that she saw no hope in staying there. And had given up her body to be turned into mere electricity, on the promise that she could have a new body—any body—when she reached Cul-de-Sac. I hated my body, she had told me. I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. She had refused even to give me a glimpse of it, retreating instead for hours into a desperate silence so total that I thought she had fled.

All that was a mystery to me now. The Leeleaine that I saw, that I was, was a fine sturdy-looking girl. Not beautiful, no, too strong and strapping for that, I suppose, but far from ugly: her eyes were warm and intelligent, her lips full, her nose finely modeled. And it was a healthy body, too, robust, vital. Of course she had no deformities; and why had I thought she had, when it would have been a simple matter of retrogenetic surgery to amend any bothersome defect? No, there was nothing wrong with the body that Vox had abandoned and for which she professed such loathing, for which she felt such shame.

Then I realized that I was seeing her from outside. I was seeing her as if by relay, filtering and interpreting the information she was offering me by passing it through the mind of an objective observer: myself. Who understood nothing, really, of what it was like to be anyone but himself.

Somehow—it was one of those automatic, unconscious adjustments—I altered the focus of my perceptions. All old frames of reference fell away and I let myself lose any sense of the separateness of our identities.

I was her. Fully, unconditionally, inextricably.

And I understood.

Figures flitted about her, shadowy, baffling, maddening. Brothers, sisters, parents, friends: they were all strangers to her. Everyone on Kansas Four was a stranger to her. And always would be.

She hated her body not because it was weak or unsightly but because it was her prison. She was enclosed within it as though within narrow stone walls. It hung about her, a cage of flesh, holding her down, pinning her to this lovely world called Kansas Four where she knew only pain and isolation and estrangement. Her body—her perfectly acceptable, healthy body—had become hateful to her because it was the emblem and symbol of her soul’s imprisonment. Wild and incurably restless by temperament, she had failed to find a way to live within the smothering predictability of Kansas Four, a planet where she would never be anything but an internal outlaw. The only way she could leave Kansas Four was to surrender the body that tied her to it; and so she had turned against it with fury and loathing, rejecting it, abandoning it, despising it, detesting it. No one could ever understand that who beheld her from the outside.

But I understood.

I understood much more than that, in that one flashing moment of communion that she and I had. I came to see what she meant when she said that I was her twin, her double, her other self. Of course we were wholly different, I the sober, staid, plodding, diligent man, and she the reckless, volatile, impulsive, tempestuous girl. But beneath all that we were the same: misfits, outsiders, troubled wanderers through worlds we had never made. We had found vastly differing ways to cope with our pain. Yet we were one and the same, two halves of a single entity.

We will remain together always now, I told myself.

And in that moment our communion broke. She broke it—it must have been she, fearful of letting this new intimacy grow too deep—and I found myself apart from her once again, still playing host to her in my brain but separated from her by the boundaries of my own individuality, my own selfhood. I felt her nearby, within me, a warm but discrete presence. Still within me, yes. But separate again.

15.

There was shipwork to do. For days, now, Vox’s invasion of me had been a startling distraction. But I dared not let myself forget that we were in the midst of a traversal of heaven. The lives of us all, and of our passengers, depended on the proper execution of our duties: even mine. And worlds awaited the bounty that we bore. My task of the moment was to oversee spinaround acquisition.

I told Vox to leave me temporarily while I went through the routines of acquisition. I would be jacked to other crewmen for a time; they might very well be able to detect her within me; there was no telling what might happen. But she refused. “No,” she said. “I won’t leave you. I don’t want to go out there. But I’ll hide, deep down, the way I did when I was upset with you.”

“Vox—”I began.

“No. Please. I don’t want to talk about it.”

There was no time to argue the point. I could feel the depth and intensity of her stubborn determination.

“Hide, then,” I said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

I made my way down out of the Eye to Engine Deck.

The rest of the acquisition team was already assembled in the Great Navigation Hall: Fresco, Raebuck, Roacher. Raebuck’s role was to see to it that communications channels were kept open, Fresco’s to set up the navigation coordinates, and Roacher, as power engineer, would monitor fluctuations in drain and input-output cycling. My function was to give the cues at each stage of acquisition. In truth I was pretty much redundant, since Raebuck and Fresco and Roacher had been doing this sort of thing a dozen times a voyage for scores of voyages and they had little need of my guidance. The deeper truth was that they were redundant too, for 49 Henry Henry would oversee us all, and the intelligence was quite capable of setting up the entire process without any human help. Nevertheless there were formalities to observe, and not inane ones. Intelligences are far superior to humans in mental capacity, interfacing capability, and reaction time, but even so they are nothing but servants, and artificial servants at that, lacking in any real awareness of human fragility or human ethical complexity. They must only be used as tools, not decision-makers. A society which delegates responsibilities of life and death to its servants will eventually find the servants’ hands at its throat. As for me, novice that I was, my role was valid as well: the focal point of the enterprise, the prime initiator, the conductor and observer of the process. Perhaps anyone could perform those functions, but the fact remained that someone had to, and by tradition that someone was the captain. Call it a ritual, call it a highly stylized dance, if you will. But there is no getting away from the human need for ritual and stylization. Such aspects of a process may not seem essential, but they are valuable and significant, and ultimately they can be seen to be essential as well.

“Shall we begin?” Fresco asked.

We jacked up, Roacher directly into the ship, Raebuck into Roacher, Fresco to me, me into the ship.

“Simulation,” I said.

Raebuck keyed in the first code and the vast echoing space that was the Great Navigation Hall came alive with pulsing light: a representation of heaven all about us, the lines of force, the spinaround nodes, the stars, the planets. We moved unhinderedly in free fall, drifting as casually as angels. We could easily have believed we were starwalking.

The simulacrum of the ship was a bright arrow of fierce light just below us and to the left. Ahead, throbbing like a nest of twining angry serpents, was the globe that represented the Lasciate Ogni Speranza spinaround point, tightly-wound dull gray cables shot through with strands of fierce scarlet.

“Enter approach mode,” I said. “Activate receptors. Begin threshold equalization. Begin momentum comparison. Prepare for acceleration uptick. Check angular velocity. Begin spin consolidation. Enter displacement select. Extend mast. Prepare for acquisition receptivity.”

At each command the proper man touched a control key or pressed a directive panel or simply sent an impulse shooting through the jack hookup by which he was connected, directly or indirectly, to the mind of the ship. Out of courtesy to me, they waited until the commands were given, but the speed with which they obeyed told me that their minds were already in motion even as I spoke.

“It’s really exciting, isn’t it?” Vox said suddenly.

“For God’s sake, Vox! What are you trying to do?”

For all I knew, the others had heard her outburst as clearly as though it had come across a loudspeaker.

“I mean,” she went on, “I never imagined it was anything like this. I can feel the whole—”

I shot her a sharp, anguished order to keep quiet. Her surfacing like this, after my warning to her, was a lunatic act. In the silence that followed I felt a kind of inner reverberation, a sulky twanging of displeasure coming from her. But I had no time to worry about Vox’s moods now.

Arcing patterns of displacement power went ricocheting through the Great Navigation Hall as our mast came forth—not the underpinning for a set of sails, as it would be on a vessel that plied planetary seas, but rather a giant antenna to link us to the spinaround point ahead—and the ship and the spinaround point reached toward one another like grappling many-armed wrestlers. Hot streaks of crimson and emerald and gold and amethyst speared the air, vaulting and rebounding. The spinaround point, activated now and trembling between energy states, was enfolding us in its million tentacles, capturing us, making ready to whirl on its axis and hurl us swiftly onward toward the next way-station in our journey across heaven.

“Acquisition,” Raebuck announced.

“Proceed to capture acceptance,” I said.

“Acceptance,” said Raebuck.

“Directional mode,” I said. “Dimensional grid eleven.”

“Dimensional grid eleven,” Fresco repeated.

The whole hall seemed on fire now.

“Wonderful,” Vox murmured. “So beautiful—”

“Vox!”

“Request spin authorization,” said Fresco.

“Spin authorization granted,” I said. “Grid eleven.”

“Grid eleven,” Fresco said again. “Spin achieved.”

A tremor went rippling through me—and through Fresco, through Raebuck, through Roacher. It was the ship, in the persona of 49 Henry Henry, completing the acquisition process. We had been captured by Lasciate Ogni Speranza, we had undergone velocity absorption and redirection, we had had new spin imparted to us, and we had been sent soaring off through heaven toward our upcoming port of call. I heard Vox sobbing within me, not a sob of despair but one of ecstasy, of fulfillment.

We all unjacked. Raebuck, that dour man, managed a little smile as he turned to me.

“Nicely done, Captain,” he said.

“Yes,” said Fresco. “Very nice. You’re a quick learner.”

I saw Roacher studying me with those little shining eyes of his. Go on, you bastard, I thought. You give me a compliment too now, if you know how.

But all he did was stare. I shrugged and turned away. What Roacher thought or said made little difference to me, I told myself.

As we left the Great Navigation Hall in our separate directions Fresco fell in alongside me. Without a word we trudged together toward the transit trackers that were waiting for us. Just as I was about to board mine he—or was it she?—said softly, “Captain?”

“What is it, Fresco?”

Fresco leaned close. Soft sly eyes, tricksy little smile; and yet I felt some warmth coming from the navigator.

“It’s a very dangerous game, Captain.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes, you do,” Fresco said. “No use pretending. We were jacked together in there. I felt things. I know.”

There was nothing I could say, so I said nothing.

After a moment Fresco said, “I like you. I won’t harm you. But Roacher knows too. I don’t know if he knew before, but he certainly knows now. If I were you, I’d find that very troublesome, Captain. Just a word to the wise. All right?”

16.

Only a fool would have remained on such a course as I had been following. Vox saw the risks as well as I. There was no hiding anything from anyone any longer; if Roacher knew, then Bulgar knew, and soon it would be all over the ship. No question, either, but that 49 Henry Henry knew. In the intimacies of our navigation-hall contact, Vox must have been as apparent to them as a red scarf around my forehead.

There was no point in taking her to task for revealing her presence within me like that during acquisition. What was done was done. At first it had seemed impossible to understand why she had done such a thing; but then it became all too easy to comprehend. It was the same sort of unpredictable, unexamined, impulsive behavior that had led her to go barging into a suspended passenger’s mind and cause his death. She was simply not one who paused to think before acting. That kind of behavior has always been bewildering to me. She was my opposite as well as my double. And yet had I not done a Vox-like thing myself, taking her into me, when she appealed to me for sanctuary, without stopping at all to consider the consequences?

“Where can I go?” she asked, desperate. “If I move around the ship freely again they’ll track me and close me off. And then they’ll eradicate me. They’ll—”

“Easy,” I said. “Don’t panic. I’ll hide you where they won’t find you.”

“Inside some passenger?”

“We can’t try that again. There’s no way to prepare the passenger for what’s happening to him, and he’ll panic. No. I’ll put you in one of the annexes. Or maybe one of the virtualities.”

“The what?”

“The additional cargo area. The subspace extensions that surround the ship.”

She gasped. “Those aren’t even real! I was in them, when I was traveling around the ship. Those are just clusters of probability waves!”

“You’ll be safe there,” I said.

“I’m afraid. It’s bad enough that I’m not real any more. But to be stored in a place that isn’t real either—”

“You’re as real as I am. And the outstructures are just as real as the rest of the ship. It’s a different quality of reality, that’s all. Nothing bad will happen to you out there. You’ve told me yourself that you’ve already been in them, right? And got out again without any problems. They won’t be able to detect you there, Vox. But I tell you this, that if you stay in me, or anywhere else in the main part of the ship, they’ll track you down and find you and eradicate you. And probably eradicate me right along with you.”

“Do you mean that?” she said, sounding chastened.

“Come on. There isn’t much time.”

On the pretext of a routine inventory check—well within my table of responsibilities—I obtained access to one of the virtualities. It was the storehouse where the probability stabilizers were kept. No one was likely to search for her there. The chances of our encountering a zone of probability turbulence between here and Cul-de-Sac were minimal; and in the ordinary course of a voyage nobody cared to enter any of the virtualities.

I had lied to Vox, or at least committed a half-truth, by leading her to believe that all our outstructures are of an equal level of reality. Certainly the annexes are tangible, solid; they differ from the ship proper only in the spin of their dimensional polarity. They are invisible except when activated, and they involve us in no additional expenditure of fuel, but there is no uncertainty about their existence, which is why we entrust valuable cargo to them, and on some occasions even passengers.

The extensions are a level further removed from basic reality. They are skewed not only in dimensional polarity but in temporal contiguity: that is, we carry them with us under time displacement, generally ten to twenty virtual years in the past or future. The risks of this are extremely minor and the payoff in reduction of generating cost is great. Still, we are measurably more cautious about what sort of cargo we keep in them.

As for the virtualities—

Their name itself implies their uncertainty. They are purely probabilistic entities, existing most of the time in the stochastic void that surrounds the ship. In simpler words, whether they are actually there or not at any given time is a matter worth wagering on. We know how to access them at the time of greatest probability, and our techniques are quite reliable, which is why we can use them for overflow ladings when our cargo uptake is unusually heavy. But in general we prefer not to entrust anything very important to them, since a virtuality’s range of access times can fluctuate in an extreme way, from a matter of microseconds to a matter of megayears, and that can make quick recall a chancy affair.

Knowing all this, I put Vox in a virtuality anyway.

I had to hide her. And I had to hide her in a place where no one would look. The risk that I’d be unable to call her up again because of virtuality fluctuation was a small one. The risk was much greater that she would be detected, and she and I both punished, if I let her remain in any area of the ship that had a higher order of probability.

“I want you to stay here until the coast is clear,” I told her sternly. “No impulsive journeys around the ship, no excursions into adjoining outstructures, no little trips of any kind, regardless of how restless you get. Is that clear? I’ll call you up from here as soon as I think it’s safe.”

“I’ll miss you, Adam.”

“The same here. But this is how it has to be.”

“I know.”

“If you’re discovered, I’ll deny I know anything about you. I mean that, Vox.”

“I understand.”

“You won’t be stuck in here long. I promise you that.”

“Will you visit me?”

“That wouldn’t be wise,” I said.

“But maybe you will anyway.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” I opened the access channel. The virtuality gaped before us. “Go on,” I said. “In with you. In. Now. Go, Vox. Go.”

I could feel her leaving me. It was almost like an amputation. The silence, the emptiness, that descended on me suddenly was ten times as deep as what I had felt when she had merely been hiding within me. She was gone, now. For the first time in days, I was truly alone.

I closed off the virtuality.

When I returned to the Eye, Roacher was waiting for me near the command bridge.

“You have a moment, Captain?”

“What is it, Roacher.”

“The missing matrix. We have proof it’s still on board ship.”

“Proof?”

“You know what I mean. You felt it just like I did while we were doing acquisition. It said something. It spoke. It was right in there in the navigation hall with us, Captain.”

I met his luminescent gaze levelly and said in an even voice, “I was giving my complete attention to what we were doing, Roacher. Spinaround acquisition isn’t second nature to me the way it is to you. I had no time to notice any matrixes floating around in there.”

“You didn’t?”

“No. Does that disappoint you?”

“That might mean that you’re the one carrying the matrix,” he said.

“How so?”

“If it’s in you, down on a subneural level, you might not even be aware of it. But we would be. Raebuck, Fresco, me. We all detected something, Captain. If it wasn’t in us it would have to be in you. We can’t have a matrix riding around inside our captain, you know. No telling how that could distort his judgment. What dangers that might lead us into.”

“I’m not carrying any matrixes, Roacher.”

“Can we be sure of that?”

“Would you like to have a look?”

“A jackup, you mean? You and me?”

The notion disgusted me. But I had to make the offer.

“A—jackup, yes,” I said. “Communion. You and me, Roacher. Right now. Come on, we’ll measure the bandwidths and do the matching. Let’s get this over with.”

He contemplated me a long while, as if calculating the likelihood that I was bluffing. In the end he must have decided that I was too naive to be able to play the game out to so hazardous a turn. He knew that I wouldn’t bluff, that I was confident he would find me untenanted or I never would have made the offer.

“No,” he said finally. “We don’t need to bother with that.”

“Are you sure?”

“If you say you’re clean—”

“But I might be carrying her and not even know it,” I said. “You told me that yourself.”

“Forget it. You’d know, if you had her in you.”

“You’ll never be certain of that unless you look. Let’s jack up, Roacher.”

He scowled. “Forget it,” he said again, and turned away. “You must be clean, if you’re this eager for jacking. But I’ll tell you this, Captain. We’re going to find her, wherever she’s hiding. And when we do—”

He left the threat unfinished. I stood staring at his retreating form until he was lost to view.

17.

For a few days everything seemed back to normal. We sped onward toward Cul-de-Sac. I went through the round of my regular tasks, however meaningless they seemed to me. Most of them did. I had not yet achieved any sense that the Sword of Orion was under my command in anything but the most hypothetical way. Still, I did what I had to do.

No one spoke of the missing matrix within my hearing. On those rare occasions when I encountered some other member of the crew while I moved about the ship, I could tell by the hooded look of his eyes that I was still under suspicion. But they had no proof. The matrix was no longer in any way evident on board. The ship’s intelligences were unable to find the slightest trace of its presence.

I was alone, and oh! it was a painful business for me.

I suppose that once you have tasted that kind of round-the-clock communion, that sort of perpetual jacking, you are never the same again. I don’t know: there is no real information available on cases of possession by free matrix, only shipboard folklore, scarcely to be taken seriously. All I can judge by is my own misery now that Vox was actually gone. She was only a half-grown girl, a wild coltish thing, unstable, unformed; and yet, and yet, she had lived within me and we had come toward one another to construct the deepest sort of sharing, what was almost a kind of marriage. You could call it that.

After five or six days I knew I had to see her again. Whatever the risks.

I accessed the virtuality and sent a signal into it that I was coming in. There was no reply; and for one terrible moment I feared the worst, that in the mysterious workings of the virtuality she had somehow been engulfed and destroyed. But that was not the case. I stepped through the glowing pink-edged field of light that was the gateway to the virtuality, and instantly I felt her near me, clinging tight, trembling with joy.

She held back, though, from entering me. She wanted me to tell her it was safe. I beckoned her in; and then came that sharp warm moment I remembered so well, as she slipped down into my neural network and we became one.

“I can only stay a little while,” I said. “It’s still very chancy for me to be with you.”

“Oh, Adam, Adam, it’s been so awful for me in here—”

“I know. I can imagine.”

“Are they still looking for me?”

“I think they’re starting to put you out of their minds,” I said. And we both laughed at the play on words that that phrase implied.

I didn’t dare remain more than a few minutes. I had only wanted to touch souls with her briefly, to reassure myself that she was all right and to ease the pain of separation. But it was irregular for a captain to enter a virtuality at all. To stay in one for any length of time exposed me to real risk of detection.

But my next visit was longer, and the one after that longer still. We were like furtive lovers meeting in a dark forest for hasty delicious trysts. Hidden there in that not-quite-real outstructure of the ship we would join our two selves and whisper together with urgent intensity until I felt it was time for me to leave. She would always try to keep me longer; but her resistance to my departure was never great, nor did she ever suggest accompanying me back into the stable sector of the ship. She had come to understand that the only place we could meet was in the virtuality.

We were nearing the vicinity of Cul-de-Sac now. Soon we would go to worldward and the shoreships would travel out to meet us, so that we could download the cargo that was meant for them. It was time to begin considering the problem of what would happen to Vox when we reached our destination.

That was something I was unwilling to face. However I tried, I could not force myself to confront the difficulties that I knew lay just ahead.

But she could.

“We must be getting close to Cul-de-Sac now,” she said.

“We’ll be there soon, yes.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. How I’m going to deal with that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m a lost soul,” she said. “Literally. There’s no way I can come to life again.”

“I don’t under—”

“Adam, don’t you see?” she cried fiercely. “I can’t just float down to Cul-de-Sac and grab myself a body and put myself on the roster of colonists. And you can’t possibly smuggle me down there while nobody’s looking. The first time anyone ran an inventory check, or did passport control, I’d be dead. No, the only way I can get there is to be neatly packed up again in my original storage circuit. And even if I could figure out how to get back into that, I’d be simply handing myself over for punishment or even eradication. I’m listed as missing on the manifest, right? And I’m wanted for causing the death of that passenger. Now I turn up again, in my storage circuit. You think they’ll just download me nicely to Cul-de-Sac and give me the body that’s waiting for me there? Not very likely. Not likely that I’ll ever get out of that circuit alive, is it, once I go back in? Assuming I could go back in in the first place. I don’t know how a storage circuit is operated, do you? And there’s nobody you can ask.”

“What are you trying to say, Vox?”

“I’m not trying to say anything. I’m saying it. I have to leave the ship on my own and disappear.”

“No. You can’t do that!”

“Sure I can. It’ll be just like starwalking. I can go anywhere I please. Right through the skin of the ship, out into heaven. And keep on going.”

“To Cul-de-Sac?”

“You’re being stupid,” she said. “Not to Cul-de-Sac, no. Not to anywhere. That’s all over for me, the idea of getting a new body. I have no legal existence any more. I’ve messed myself up. All right: I admit it. I’ll take what’s coming to me. It won’t be so bad, Adam. I’ll go starwalking. Outward and outward and outward, forever and ever.”

“You mustn’t,” I said. “Stay here with me.”

“Where? In this empty storage unit out here?”

“No,” I told her. “Within me. The way we are right now. The way we were before.”

“How long do you think we could carry that off?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Every time you have to jack into the machinery I’ll have to hide myself down deep,” she said. “And I can’t guarantee that I’ll go deep enough, or that I’ll stay down there long enough. Sooner or later they’ll notice me. They’ll find me. They’ll eradicate me and they’ll throw you out of the Service, or maybe they’ll eradicate you too. No, Adam. It couldn’t possibly work. And I’m not going to destroy you with me. I’ve done enough harm to you already.”

“Vox—”

“No. This is how it has to be.”

18.

And this is how it was. We were deep in the Spook Cluster now, and the Vainglory Archipelago burned bright on my realspace screen. Somewhere down there was the planet called Cul-de-Sac. Before we came to worldward of it, Vox would have to slip away into the great night of heaven.

Making a worldward approach is perhaps the most difficult maneuver a starship must achieve; and the captain must go to the edge of his abilities along with everyone else. Novice at my trade though I was, I would be called on to perform complex and challenging processes. If I failed at them, other crewmen might cut in and intervene, or, if necessary, the ship’s intelligences might override; but if that came to pass my career would be destroyed, and there was the small but finite possibility, I suppose, that the ship itself could be gravely damaged or even lost.

I was determined, all the same, to give Vox the best send-off I could.

On the morning of our approach I stood for a time on Outerscreen Level, staring down at the world that called itself Cul-de-Sac. It glowed like a red eye in the night. I knew that it was the world Vox had chosen for herself, but all the same it seemed repellent to me, almost evil. I felt that way about all the worlds of the shore people now. The Service had changed me; and I knew that the change was irreversible. Never again would I go down to one of those worlds. The starship was my world now.

I went to the virtuality where Vox was waiting.

“Come,” I said, and she entered me.

Together we crossed the ship to the Great Navigation Hall.

The approach team had already gathered: Raebuck, Fresco, Roacher, again, along with Pedregal, who would supervise the downloading of cargo. The intelligence on duty was 612 Jason. I greeted them with quick nods and we jacked ourselves together in approach series.

Almost at once I felt Roacher probing within me, searching for the fugitive intelligence that he still thought I might be harboring. Vox shrank back, deep out of sight. I didn’t care. Let him probe, I thought. This will all be over soon.

“Request approach instructions,” Fresco said.

“Simulation,” I ordered.

The fiery red eye of Cul-de-Sac sprang into vivid representation before us in the hall. On the other side of us was the simulacrum of the ship, surrounded by sheets of white flame that rippled like the blaze of the aurora.

I gave the command and we entered approach mode.

We could not, of course, come closer to planetskin than a million shiplengths, or Cul-de-Sac’s inexorable forces would rip us apart. But we had to line the ship up with its extended mast aimed at the planet’s equator, and hold ourselves firm in that position while the shoreships of Cul-de-Sac came swarming up from their red world to receive their cargo from us.

612 Jason fed me the coordinates and I gave them to Fresco, while Raebuck kept the channels clear and Roacher saw to it that we had enough power for what we had to do. But as I passed the data along to Fresco, it was with every sign reversed. My purpose was to aim the mast not downward to Cul-de-Sac but outward toward the stars of heaven.

At first none of them noticed. Everything seemed to be going serenely. Because my reversals were exact, only the closest examination of the ship’s position would indicate our l80-degree displacement.

Floating in the free fall of the Great Navigation Hall, I felt almost as though I could detect the movements of the ship. An illusion, I knew. But a powerful one. The vast ten-kilometer-long needle that was the Sword of Orion seemed to hang suspended, motionless, and then to begin slowly, slowly to turn, tipping itself on its axis, reaching for the stars with its mighty mast. Easily, easily, slowly, silently—

What joy that was, feeling the ship in my hand!

The ship was mine. I had mastered it.

“Captain,” Fresco said softly.

“Easy on, Fresco. Keep feeding power.”

“Captain, the signs don’t look right—”

“Easy on. Easy.”

“Give me a coordinates check, Captain.”

“Another minute,” I told him.

“But—”

“Easy on, Fresco.”

Now I felt restlessness too from Pedregal, and a slow chilly stirring of interrogation from Raebuck; and then Roacher probed me again, perhaps seeking Vox, perhaps simply trying to discover what was going on. They knew something was wrong, but they weren’t sure what it was.

We were nearly at full extension, now. Within me there was an electrical trembling: Vox rising through the levels of my mind, nearing the surface, preparing for departure.

“Captain, we’re turned the wrong way!” Fresco cried.

“I know,” I said. “Easy on. We’ll swing around in a moment.”

“He’s gone crazy!” Pedregal blurted.

I felt Vox slipping free of my mind. But somehow I found myself still aware of her movements, I suppose because I was jacked into 6l2 Jason and 6l2 Jason was monitoring everything. Easily, serenely, Vox melted into the skin of the ship.

“Captain!” Fresco yelled, and began to struggle with me for control.

I held the navigator at arm’s length and watched in a strange and wonderful calmness as Vox passed through the ship’s circuitry all in an instant and emerged at the tip of the mast, facing the stars. And cast herself adrift.

Because I had turned the ship around, she could not be captured and acquired by Cul-de-Sac’s powerful navigational grid, but would be free to move outward into heaven. For her it would be a kind of floating out to sea, now. After a time she would be so far out that she could no longer key into the shipboard bioprocessors that sustained the patterns of her consciousness, and, though the web of electrical impulses that was the Vox matrix would travel outward and onward forever, the set of identity responses that was Vox herself would lose focus soon, would begin to waver and blur. In a little while, or perhaps not so little, but inevitably, her sense of herself as an independent entity would be lost. Which is to say, she would die.

I followed her as long as I could. I saw a spark traveling across the great night. And then nothing.

“All right,” I said to Fresco. “Now let’s turn the ship the right way around and give them their cargo.”

19.

That was many years ago. Perhaps no one else remembers those events, which seem so dreamlike now even to me. The Sword of Orion has carried me nearly everwhere in the galaxy since then. On some voyages I have been captain; on others, a downloader, a supercargo, a mind-wiper, even sometimes a push-cell. It makes no difference how we serve, in the Service.

I often think of her. There was a time when thinking of her meant coming to terms with feelings of grief and pain and irrecoverable loss, but no longer, not for many years. She must be long dead now, however durable and resilient the spark of her might have been. And yet she still lives. Of that much I am certain. There is a place within me where I can reach her warmth, her strength, her quirky vitality, her impulsive suddenness. I can feel those aspects of her, those gifts of her brief time of sanctuary within me, as a living presence still, and I think I always will, as I make my way from world to tethered world, as I journey onward everlastingly spanning the dark light-years in this great ship of heaven.

MOTHER GODDESS OF THE WORLD

Kim Stanley Robinson

Although we wouldn’t call this story a sequel. “Mother Goddess of the World” does share some of the same characters, and is set in the same exotic locale as Kim Stanley Robinson’s hilarious Nebula and Hugo finalist “Escape from Kathmandu” (September 1986). Mr. Robinson’s next novel, The Gold Coast, is due out from TOR Books in February.

I

My life started to get weird again the night I ran into Freds Fredericks, near Chimoa, in the gorge of the Dudh Kosi. I was guiding a trek at the time, and was very happy to see Freds. He was traveling with another climber, a Tibetan by the name of Kunga Norbu, who appeared to speak little English except for “Good morning,” which he said to me as Fred introduced us, even though it was just after sunset. My trekking group was settled into their tents for the night, so Freds and Kunga and I headed for the cluster of teahouses tucked into the forest by the trail. We looked in them; two had been cleaned up for trekkers, and the third was a teahouse in the old style, frequented only by porters. We ducked into that one.

It was a single low room; we had to stoop not only under the beams that held up the slate roof, but also under the smoke layer. Old style country buildings in Nepal do not have chimneys, and the smoke from their wood stoves just goes up to the roof and collects there in a very thick layer, which lowers until it begins to seep out under the eaves. Why the Nepalis don’t use chimneys, which I would have thought a fairly basic invention, is a question no one can answer; it is yet another Great Mystery of Nepal.

Five wooden tables were occupied by Rawang and Sherpa porters, sprawled on the benches. At one end of the room the stove was crackling away. Flames from the stove and a hissing Coleman lantern provided the light. We said Namaste to all the staring Nepalis, and ducked under the smoke to sit at the table nearest the stove, which was empty.

We let Kunga Norbu take care of the ordering, as he had more Nepali than Freds or me. When he was done the Rawang stove keepers giggled and went to the stove, and came back with three huge cups of Tibetan tea.

I complained to Freds about this in no uncertain terms. “Damn it, I thought he was ordering chang!”

Tibetan tea, you see, is not your ordinary Lipton’s. To make it they start with a black liquid that is not made from tea leaves at all but from some kind of root, and it is so bitter you could use it for suturing. They pour a lot of salt into this brew, and stir it up, and then they dose it liberally with rancid yak butter, which melts and floats to the top.

Actually it tastes worse than it sounds. I have developed a strategy for dealing with the stuff whenever I am offered a cup; I look out the nearest window, and water the plants with it. As long as I don’t do it too fast and get poured a second cup, I’m fine. But here I couldn’t do that, because twenty-odd pairs of laughing eyes were staring at us.

Kunga Norbu was hunched over the table, slurping from his cup and going “ooh,” and “ahh,” and saying complimentary things to the stove keepers. They nodded and looked closely at Freds and me, big grins on their faces.

Freds grabbed his cup and took a big gulp of the tea. He smacked his lips like a wine taster. “Right on,” he said, and drained the cup down. He held it up to our host. “More?” he said, pointing into the cup.

The porters howled. Our host refilled Freds’s cup and he slurped it down again, smacking his lips after every swallow. I held my nose to get down a sip, and they thought that was funny too.

So we were in tight with the teahouse crowd, and when I asked for chang they brought over a whole bucket of it. We poured it into the little chipped teahouse glasses and went to work on it.

“So what are you and Kunga Norbu up to?” I asked Freds.

“Well,” he said, and a funny expression crossed his face. “That’s kind of a long story, actually.”

“So tell it to me.”

He looked uncertain. “It’s too long to tell tonight.”

“What’s this? A story too long for Freds Fredericks to tell? Impossible, man, why I once heard you summarize the Bible to Laure, and it only took you a minute.”

Freds shook his head. “It’s longer than that.”

“I see.” I let it go, and the three of us kept on drinking the chang, which is a white beer made from rice or barley. We drank a lot of it, which is a dangerous proposition on several counts, but we didn’t care. As we drank we kept slumping lower over the table to try and get under the smoke layer, and besides we just naturally felt like slumping at that point. Eventually we were laid out like mud in a puddle.

Freds kept conferring with Kunga Norbu in Tibetan, and I got curious. “Freds, you hardly speak a word of Nepali, how is it you know so much Tibetan?”

“I spent a couple years in Tibet, a long time ago. I was studying in one of the Buddhist lamaseries there.”

“You studied in a Buddhist lamasery in Tibet?”

“Yeah sure! Can’t you tell?”

“Well . . .” I waved a hand. “I guess that might explain it.”

“That was where I met Kunga Norbu, in fact. He was my teacher.”

“I thought he was a climbing buddy.”

“Oh he is! He’s a climbing lama. Actually there’s quite a number of them. See when the Chinese invaded Tibet they closed down all the lamaseries, destroyed most of them in fact. The monks had to go to work, and the lamas either slipped over to Nepal, or moved up into mountain caves. Then later the Chinese wanted to start climbing mountains as propaganda efforts, to show the rightness of the thoughts of Chairman Mao. The altitude in the Himalayas was a little bit much for them, though, so they mostly used Tibetans, and called them Chinese. And the Tibetans with the most actual mountain experience turned out to be Buddhist lamas, who had spent a lot of time in really high, isolated retreats. Eight of the nine so-called Chinese to reach the top of Everest in 1975 were actually Tibetans.”

“Was Kunga Norbu one of them?”

“No. Although he wishes he was, let me tell you. But he did go pretty high on the North Ridge in the Chinese expedition of 1980. He’s a really strong climber. And a great guru too, a really holy guy.”

Kunga Norbu looked across the table at me, aware that we were talking about him. He was short and skinny, very tough looking, with long black hair. Like a lot of Tibetans, he looked almost exactly like a Navaho or Apache Indian. When he looked at me I got a funny feeling; it was as if he was staring right through me to infinity. Or somewhere equally distant. No doubt lamas cultivate that look.

“So what are you two doing up here?” I asked, a bit uncomfortable.

“We’re going to join my Brit buddies, and climb Lingtren. Should be great. And then Kunga and I might try a little something on our own.”

We found we had finished off the bucket of chang, and we ordered another. More of that and we became even lower than mud in a puddle.

Suddenly Kunga Norbu spoke to Freds, gesturing at me. “Really?” Freds said, and they talked some more. Finally Freds turned to me. “Well, this is a pretty big honor, George. Kunga wants me to tell you who he really is.”

“Very nice of him,” I said. I found that with my chin on the table I had to move my whole head to speak.

Freds lowered his voice, which seemed to me unnecessary as we were the only two people in the room who spoke English. “Do you know what a tulku is, George?”

“I think so,” I said. “Some of the Buddhist lamas up here are supposed to be reincarnated from earlier lamas, and they’re called tulkus, right? The abbot at Tengboche is supposed to be one.”

Freds nodded. “That’s right.” He patted Kunga Norbu on the shoulder. “Well, Kunga here is also a tulku.”

“I see.” I considered the etiquette of such a situation, but couldn’t really figure it, so finally I just scraped my chin off the table and stuck my hand across it. Kunga Norbu took it and shook, with a brief, modest smile.

“I’m serious,” Freds said.

“Hey!” I said. “Did I say you weren’t serious?”

“No. But you don’t believe it, do you.”

“I believe that you believe it, Freds.”

“He really is a tulku! I mean I’ve seen proof of it, I really have. His ku kongma, which means his first incarnation, was as Naropa, a very important Tibetan lama born in 1555. The monastery at Kum-Bum is located on the site of his birth.”

I nodded, at a loss for words. Finally I filled up our little cups, and we toasted Kunga Norbu’s age. He could definitely put down the chang like he had had lifetimes of practice. “So,” I said, calculating. “He’s about four hundred and thirty-one.”

“That’s right. And he’s had a hard time of it, I’ll tell you. The Chinese tore down Kum-Bum as soon as they took over, and unless the monastery there is functioning again, Naropa can never escape being a disciple. See, even though he is a major tulku—”

“A major tulku,” I repeated, liking the sound of it.

“Yeah, even though he’s a major tulku, he’s still always been the disciple of an even bigger one, named Tilopa. Tilopa Lama is about as important as they come—only the Dalai Lama tops him—and Tilopa is one hard, hard guru.”

I noticed that the mention of Tilopa’s name made Kunga Norbu scowl, and refill his glass.

“Tilopa is so tough that the only disciple who has ever stuck with him has been Kunga here. Tilopa—when you want to become his student and you go ask him, he beats you with a stick. He’ll do that for a couple of years to make sure you really want him as a teacher. And then he really puts you through the wringer. Apparently he uses the methods of the Ts’an sect in China, which are tough. To teach you the Short Path to Enlightenment he pounds you in the head with his shoe.”

“Now that you mention it, he does look a little like a guy who has been pounded in the head with a shoe.”

“How can he help it? He’s been a disciple of Tilopa’s for four hundred years, and it’s always the same thing. So he asked Tilopa when he would be a guru in his own right, and Tilopa said it couldn’t happen until the monastery built on Kunga’s birth site was rebuilt. And he said that that would never happen until Kunga managed to accomplish—well, a certain task. I can’t tell you exactly what the task is yet, but believe me it’s tough. And Kunga used to be my guru, see, so he’s come to ask me for some help. So that’s what I’m here to do.”

“I thought you said you were going to climb Lingtren with your British friends?”

“That too.”

I wasn’t sure if it was the chang or the smoke, but I was getting a little confused. “Well, whatever. It sounds like a real adventure.”

“You’re not kidding.”

Freds spoke in Tibetan to Kunga Norbu, explaining what he had said to me, I assumed. Finally Kunga replied, at length.

Freds said to me, “Kunga says you can help him too.”

“I think I’ll pass,” I said. “I’ve got my trekking group and all, you know.”

“Oh I know, I know. Besides, it’s going to be tough. But Kunga likes you—he says you have the spirit of Milarespa.”

Kunga nodded vigorously when he heard the name Milarespa, staring through me with that spacy look of his.

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “But I still think I’ll pass.”

“We’ll see what happens,” Freds said, looking thoughtful.

II

Many glasses of chang later we staggered out into the night. Freds and Kunga Norbu slipped on their down jackets, and with a “Good night” and a “Good morning” they wandered off to their tent. I made my way back to my group. It felt really late, and was maybe 8:30.

As I stood looking at our tent village, I saw a light bouncing down the trail from Lukla. The man carrying the flashlight approached—it was Laure, the sirdhar for my group. He was just getting back from escorting clients back to Lukla. “Laure!” I called softly.

“Hello George,” he said. “Why late now?”

“I’ve been drinking.”

“Ah.” With his flashlight pointed at the ground I could easily make out his big smile. “Good idea.”

“Yeah, you should go have some chang yourself. You’ve had a long day.”

“Not long.”

“Sure.” He had been escorting disgruntled clients back to Lukla all day, so he must have hiked five times as far as the rest of us. And here he was coming in by flashlight. Still, I suppose for Laure Tenzing Sherpa that did not represent a particularly tough day. As guide and yakboy he had been walking in these mountains all his life, and his calves were as big around as my thighs. Once, for a lark, he and three friends had set a record by hiking from Everest Base Camp to Kathmandu in four days; that’s about two hundred miles, across the grain of some seriously uneven countryside. Compared to that today’s work had been like a walk to the mailbox, I guess.

The worst part had no doubt been the clients. I asked him about them and he frowned. “People go co-op hotel, not happy. Very, very not happy. They fly back Kathmandu.”

“Good riddance,” I said. “Why don’t you go get some chang.”

He smiled and disappeared into the dark.

I looked over the tents holding my sleeping clients and sighed.

So far it had been a typical videotrek. We had flown in to Lukla from Kathmandu, and my clients, enticed to Nepal by glossy ads promising them video Ansel Adamshood, had gone wild in the plane, rushing about banging zoom lenses together in an attempt to film everything. They were irrepressible until they saw the Lukla strip, which from the air looks like a toy model of a ski jump. Pretty quickly they were strapped in and looking like they were reconsidering their wills—all except for one tubby little guy named Arnold, who continued to roll up and down the aisle like a bowling ball, finally inserting himself into the cockpit so he could shoot over the pilots’ shoulders. “We are landing at Lukla,” he announced to his camera’s mike in a deep fakey voice, like the narrator of a bad travelogue. “Looks impossible, but our pilots are calm.”

Despite him we landed safely. Unfortunately one of our group then tried to film his own descent from the plane, and fell heavily down the steps. As I ascertained the damage—a sprained ankle—there was Arnold again, leaning over to immortalize the victim’s every writhe and howl.

A second plane brought in the rest of our group, led by Laure and my assistant Heather. We started down the trail, and for a couple of hours everything went well—the trail serves as the Interstate Five of the region, and is as easy as they come. And the view is awesome—the Dudh Kosi valley is like a forested Grand Canyon, only bigger. Our group was impressed, and several of them filmed a real-time record of the day.

Then the trail descended to the banks of the Dudh Kosi river, and we got a surprise. Apparently in the last monsoon a glacial lake upstream had burst its ice dam, and rushed down in a devastating flood, tearing out the bridges, trail, trees, everything. Thus our fine interstate ended abruptly in a cliff overhanging the torn-to-shreds riverbed, and what came next was the seat-of-the-pants invention of the local porters, for whom the trail was a daily necessity. They had been clever indeed, but there really was no good alternative to the old route; so the new trail wound over strewn white boulders, traversed unstable new sand cliffs, and veered wildly up and down muddy slides that had been hacked out of dense forested walls. It was radical stuff, and even experienced trekkers were having trouble.

Our group was appalled. The ads had not mentioned this.

The porters ran ahead barefoot to reach the next tea break, and the clients began to bog down. People slipped and fell. People sat down and cried. Altitude sickness was mentioned more than once, though as a matter of fact we were not much higher than Denver. Heather and I ran around encouraging the weary. I found myself carrying three videocameras. Laure was carrying nine.

It was looking like the retreat from Moscow when we came to the first of the new bridges. These are pretty neat pieces of backwoods engineering; there aren’t any logs in the area long enough to span the river, so they take four logs and stick them out over the river, and weigh them down with a huge pile of round stones. Then four more logs are pushed out from the other side, until their ends rest on the ends of the first four. Instant bridge. They work, but they are not confidence builders.

Our group stared at the first one apprehensively. Arnold appeared behind us and chomped an unlit cigar as he filmed the scene. “The Death Bridge,” he announced into his camera’s mike.

“Arnold, please,” I said. “Mellow out.”

He walked down to the glacial gray rush of the river. “Hey, George, do you think I could take a step in to get a better shot of the crossing?”

“NO!” I stood up fast. “One step in and you’d drown, I mean look at it!”

“Well, okay.”

Now the rest of the group were staring at me in horror, as if it weren’t clear at first glance that to fall into the Dudh Kosi would be a very fatal error indeed. A good number of them ended up crawling across the bridge on hands and knees. Arnold got them all for posterity, and filmed his own crossing by walking in circles that made me cringe. Silently I cursed him; I was pretty sure he had known perfectly well how dangerous the river was, and only wanted to make sure everyone else did too. And very soon after that—at the next bridge, in fact—people began to demand to be taken back to Lukla. To Kathmandu. To San Francisco.

I sighed, remembering it. And remembering it was only the beginning. Just your typical Want to Take You Higher Ltd. videotrek. Plus Arnold.

III

I got another bit of Arnold in action early the next morning when I was in the rough outhouse behind the trekkers’ teahouses, very hung over, crouched over the unhealthily damp hole in the floor. I had just completed my business in there when I looked up to see the big glass eye of a zoom lens, staring over the top of the wooden door at me.

“No, Arnold!” I cried, struggling to put my hand over the lens while I pulled up my pants.

“Hey, just getting some local color,” Arnold said, backing away. “You know, people like to see what it’s really like, the details and all, and these outhouses are really something else. Exotic.”

I growled at him. “You should have trekked in from Jiri, then. The lowland villages don’t have outhouses at all.”

His eyes got round, and he shifted an unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth. “What do you do, then?”

“Well, you just go outside and have a look around. Pick a spot. They usually have a shitting field down by the river. Real exotic.”

He laughed. “You mean, turds everywhere?”

“Well, something like that.”

“That sounds great! Maybe I’d better walk back out instead of flying.”

I stared at him, wrinkling my nose. “Serious filmmaker, eh Arnold?”

“Oh, yeah. Haven’t you heard of me? Arnold McConnell? I make adventure films for PBS. And sometimes for the ski resort circuit, video rentals, that kind of thing. Skiing, hang gliding, kayaking, parachuting, climbing, skateboarding—I’ve done them all. Didn’t you ever see The Man Who Swam Down the Zambesi? No? Ah, that’s a bit of a classic, now. One of my best.”

So he had known how dangerous the Dudh Kosi was. I stared at him reproachfully. It was hard to believe he made adventure films; he looked more like the kind of Hollywood producer you’d tell couch jokes about. “So you’re making a real film of this trip?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure. Always working, never stop working. Workaholic.”

“Don’t you need a bigger crew?”

“Well sure, usually, but this is a different kind of thing, one of my ‘personal diary’ films I call them. I’ve sold a couple to PBS. Do all the work myself. It’s kind of like my version of solo climbing.”

“Fine. But cut the part about me taking a crap, okay?”

“Sure, sure, don’t worry about it. Just got to get everything I can, you know, so I’ve got good tape to choose from later on. All grist for the mill. That’s why I got this lens. All the latest in equipment for me. I got stuff you wouldn’t believe.”

“I believe.”

He chomped his cigar. “Just call me Mr. Adventure.”

“I will.”

IV

I didn’t run into Freds and Kunga Norbu in Namche Bazaar, the Sherpas’ dramatically placed little capital town, and I figured they had left already with Freds’s British friends. Then I kept my group there a couple of days to acclimatize, and enjoy the town, and I figured that if I caught up with them at all, it’d be up at their base camp.

So I was quite surprised to run across the whole group in Pheriche, one of the Sherpas’ high mountain villages.

Most of these villages are occupied only in the summer, to grow potatoes and pasture yaks. Pheriche, however, lies on the trekking route to Everest, so it’s occupied almost year-round, and a couple of lodges have been built, along with the Himalayan Rescue Association’s only aid station. It still looks like a summer pasturage: low rock walls separate potato fields, and a few slate-roofed stone huts, plus the lodges and the tin-roofed aid station. All of it is clustered at the end of a flat-bottomed glacial valley, against the side of a lateral moraine five hundred feet high. A stream meanders by and the ground is carpeted with grasses and the bright autumn red of berberi bushes. On all sides tower the fantastic white spikes of some of the world’s most dramatic peaks—Ama Dablam, Taboche, Tramserku, Kang Taiga—and all in all, it’s quite a place. My clients were making themselves dizzy trying to film it.

We set up our tent village in an unused potato field, and after dinner Laure and I slipped off to the Himalaya Hotel to have some chang. I entered the lodge’s little kitchen and heard Freds cry, “Hey George!” He was sitting with Kunga Norbu and four Westerners; we joined them, crowding in around a little table. “These are the friends we’re climbing with.”

He introduced them, and we all shook hands. Trevor was a tall slender guy, with round glasses and a somewhat crazed grin. “Mad Tom,” as Freds called him, was short and curly-headed, and didn’t look mad at all, although something in his mild manner made me believe that he could be. John was short and compact, with a salt-and-pepper beard, and a crusher handshake. And Marion was a tall and rather attractive woman—though I suspected she might have blushed or punched you if you said so—she was attractive in a tough, wild way, with a stark strong face, and thick brown hair pulled back and braided. They were British, with the accents to prove it: Marion and Trevor quite posh and public school, and John and Mad Tom very thick and North country.

We started drinking chang, and they told me about their climb. Lingtren, a sharp peak between Pumori and Everest’s West Shoulder, is serious work from any approach, and they were clearly excited about it, in their own way: “Bit of a slog, to tell the truth,” Trevor said cheerfully.

When British climbers talk about climbing, you have to learn to translate it into English. “Bit of a slog” means don’t go there.

“I think we ought to get lost and climb Pumori instead,” said Marion. “Lingtren is a perfect hill.”

“Marion, really.”

“Can’t beat Lingtren’s price, anyway,” said John.

He was referring to the fee that the Nepali government makes climbers pay for the right to climb its peaks. These fees are determined by the height of the peak to be climbed—the really big peaks are super expensive. They charge you over five thousand dollars to climb Everest, for instance, and still competition to get on its long waiting list is fierce. But some of the toughest climbs in Nepal aren’t very high, relative to the biggies, and they come pretty cheap. Apparently Lingtren was one of these.

We watched the Sherpani who runs the lodge cook dinner for fifty, under the fixed gazes of the diners, who sat staring hungrily at her every move. To accomplish this she had at her command a small woodburning stove (with chimney, thank God), a pile of potatoes, noodles, rice, some eggs and cabbage, and several chang-happy porter assistants, who alternated washing dishes with breaking up chunks of yak dung for the fire. A difficult situation on the face of it, but the Sherpani was cool: she cooked the whole list of orders by memory, slicing and tossing potatoes into one pan, stuffing wood in the fire, flipping twenty pounds of noodles in mid-air like they were a single hotcake—all with the sureness and panache of an expert juggler. It was a kind of genius.

Two hours later those who had ordered the meals that came last in her strict sequence got their cabbage omelets on French fries, and the kitchen emptied out as many people went to bed. The rest of us settled down to more chang and chatter.

Then a trekker came back into the kitchen, so he could listen to his shortwave radio without bothering sleepers in the lodge’s single dorm room. He said he wanted to catch the news. We all stared at him in disbelief. “I need to find out how the dollar’s doing,” he explained. “Did you know it dropped eight percent last week?”

You meet all kinds in Nepal.

Actually it’s interesting to hear what you get on shortwave in the Himal, because depending on how the ionosphere is acting, almost anything will bounce in. That night we listened to the People’s Voice of Syria, for instance, and some female pop singer from Bombay, which perked up the porters. Then the operator ran across the BBC world news, which was not unusual—it could have been coming from Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo, even London itself.

Through the hissing of the static the public-school voice of the reporter could barely be made out “. . . British Everest Expedition of 1987 is now on the Rongbuk Glacier in Tibet, and over the next two months they expect to repeat the historic route of the attempts made in the twenties and thirties. Our correspondent to the expedition reports—” and then the voice changed to one even more staccato and drowned in static: “—the expedition’s principal goal of recovering the bodies of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, who were last seen near the summit in 1924, crackle, buzz. . . . chances considerably improved by conversations with a partner of the Chinese climber who reported seeing a body on the North Face in 1980 bzzzzkrkrk!—description of the site of the finding sssssssss . . . snow levels very low this year, and all concerned feel chances for success are sssskrkssss.” The voice faded away in a roar of static.

Trevor looked around at us, eyebrows lifted. “Did I understand them to say that they are going to search for Mallory and Irvine’s bodies?”

A look of deep horror creased Mad Tom’s face. Marion wrinkled her nose as if her chang had turned to Tibetan tea. “I can’t believe it.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was an unexpected opportunity for Freds to put his plan into action ahead of schedule. He said, “Haven’t you heard about that? Why Kunga Norbu here is precisely the climber they’re talking about, the one who spotted a body on the North Face in 1980.”

“He is?” we all said.

“Yeah, you bet. Kunga was part of the Chinese expedition to the North Ridge in 1980, and he was up there doing reconnaissance for a direct route on the North Face when he saw a body.” Freds spoke to Kinga Norbu in Tibetan, and Kunga nodded and replied at some length. Freds translated for him: “He says it was a Westerner, wearing old-fashioned clothing, and it had clearly been there a long time. Here, he says he can mark it on a photo—” Freds got out his wallet and pulled a wad of paper from it. Unfolded, it revealed itself as a battered black-and-white photo of Everest as seen from the Tibetan side. Kunga Norbu studied it for long time, talked it over with Freds, and then took a pencil from Freds and carefully made a circle on the photo.

“Why he’s circled half the North Face,” John pointed out. “It’s fooking useless.”

“Nah,” Freds said. “Look, it’s a little circle.”

“It’s a little photo, innit.”

“Well, he can describe the spot exactly—it’s up there on top of the Black Band. Anyway, someone has managed to get together an expedition to go looking for the bodies, or the body, whatever. Now Kunga slipped over to Nepal last year, so this expedition is going on second-hand information from his climbing buds. But that might be enough.”

“And if they find the bodies?”

“Well, I think they’re planning to take them down and ship them to London and bury them in Winchester Cathedral.”

The Brits stared at him. “You mean Westminster Abbey?” Trevor ventured.

“Oh that’s right, I always get those two mixed up. Anyway that’s what they’re going to do, and they’re going to make a movie out of it.”

I groaned at the thought. More video.

The four Brits groaned louder than I did. “That is rilly dis-gusting,” Marion said.

“Sickening,” John and Mad Tom agreed.

“It is a travesty, isn’t it?” Trevor said. “I mean those chaps belong up there if anybody does. It’s nothing less than grave robbing!”

And his three companions nodded. On one level they were joking, making a pretense of their outrage; but underneath that, they were dead serious. They meant it.

V

To understand why they would care so much, you have to understand what the story of Mallory and Irvine means to the British soul. Climbing has always been more important there than in America—you could say that the British invented the sport in Victorian times, and they’ve continued to excel in it since then, even after World War Two when much else there fell apart. You could say that climbing is the Rolls Royce of British sport. Whymper, Hillary, the brilliant crowd that climbed with Bonnington in the Seventies: they’re all national heroes.

But none more so than Mallory and Irvine. Back in the twenties and thirties, you see, the British had a lock on Everest, because Nepal was closed to foreigners, and Tibet was closed to all but the British, who had barged in on them with Younghusband’s campaign back in 1904. So the mountain was their private playground, and during those years they made four or five attempts, all of them failures, which is understandable: they were equipped like Boy Scouts, they had to learn high altitude technique on the spot, and they had terrible luck with weather.

The try that came closest was in 1924. Mallory was its lead climber, already famous from two previous attempts. As you may know, he was the guy who replied “Because it’s there” when asked why anyone would want to climb the thing. This is either a very deep or a very stupid answer, depending on what you think of Mallory. You can take your pick of interpretations; the guy has been psychoanalyzed into the ground. Anyway, he and his partner Irvine were last glimpsed, by another expedition member, just eight hundred feet and less than a quarter of a mile from the summit—and at one P.M., on a day that had good weather except for a brief storm, and mist that obscured the peak from the observers below. So they either made it or they didn’t; but something went wrong somewhere along the line, and they were never seen again.

A glorious defeat, a deep mystery: this is the kind of story that the English just love, as don’t we all. All the public school virtues wrapped into one heroic tale—you couldn’t write it better. To this day the story commands tremendous interest in England, and this is doubly true among people in the climbing community, who grew up on the story, and who still indulge in a lot of speculation about the two men’s fate, in journal articles and pub debates and the like. They love that story.

Thus to go up there, and find the bodies, and end the mystery, and cart the bodies off to England . . . You can see why it struck my drinking buddies that night as a kind of sacrilege. It was yet another modern PR stunt—a money-grubbing plan made by some publicity hound—a Profaning of the Mystery. It was, in fact, a bit like video-trekking. Only worse. So I could sympathize, in a way.

VI

I tried to think of a change of subject, to distract the Brits. But Freds seemed determined to fire up their distress. He poked his finger onto the folded wreck of a photo. “You know what y’all oughta do,” he told them in a low voice. “You mentioned getting lost and climbing Pumori? Well shit, what you oughta do instead is get lost in the other direction, and beat that expedition to the spot, and hide old Mallory. I mean here you’ve got the actual eyewitness right here to lead you to him! Incredible! You could bury Mallory in rocks and snow and then sneak back down. If you did that, they’d never find him!”

All the Brits stared at Freds, eyes wide. Then they looked at each other, and their heads kind of lowered together over the table. Their voices got soft. “He’s a genius,” Trevor breathed.

“Uh, no,” I warned them. “He’s not a genius.” Laure was shaking his head. Even Kunga Norbu was looking doubtful.

Freds looked over the Brits at me and waggled his eyebrows vigorously, as if to say: this is a great idea! Don’t foul it up!

“What about the Lho La?” John asked. “Won’t we have to climb that?”

“Piece of cake,” Freds said promptly.

“No,” Laure protested. “Not piece cake! Pass! Very steep pass!”

“Piece of cake,” Freds insisted. “I climbed it with those West Ridge direct guys a couple years ago. And once you top it you just slog onto the West Shoulder and there you are with the whole North Face, sitting right off to your left.”

“Freds,” I said, trying to indicate that he shouldn’t incite his companions to such a dangerous, not to mention illegal, climb. “You’d need a lot more support for high camps than you’ve got. That circle there is pretty damn high on the mountain.”

“True,” Freds said immediately. “It’s pretty high. Pretty damn high. You can’t get much higher.”

Of course to climbers this was only another incitement, as I should have known.

“You’d have to do it like Woody Sayres did back in ’62,” Freds went on. “They got Sherpas to help them up the Nup La over by Cho Oyo, then bolted to Everest when they were supposed to be climbing Gyachung Kang. They moved a single camp with them all the way to Everest, and got back the same way. Just four of them, and they almost climbed it. And the Nup La is twenty miles further away from Everest than the Lho La. The Lho La’s right there under it.”

Mad Tom knocked his glasses up his nose, pulled out a pencil and began to do calculations on the table. Marion was nodding. Trevor was refilling all our glasses with chang. John was looking over Mad Tom’s shoulder and muttering to him; apparently they were in charge of supplies.

Trevor raised his glass. “Right then,” he said. “Are we for it?”

They all raised their glasses. “We’re for it.”

They were toasting the plan, and I was staring at them in dismay, when I heard the door creak and saw who was leaving the kitchen. “Hey!”

I reached out and dragged Arnold McConnell back into the room. “What’re you doing here?”

Arnold shifted something behind his back. “Nothing, really. Just my nightly glass of milktea, you know . . .”

“It’s him!” Marion exclaimed. She reached behind Arnold and snatched his camera from behind his back; he tried to hold onto it, but Marion was too strong for him. “Spying on me again, were you? Filming us from some dark corner?”

“No no,” Arnold said. “Can’t film in the dark, you know.”

“Film in tent,” Laure said promptly. “Night.”

Arnold glared at him.

“Listen, Arnold,” I said. “We were just shooting the bull here you know, a little private conversation over the chang. Nothing serious.”

“Oh I know,” Arnold assured me. “I know.”

Marion stood and stared down at Arnold. They made a funny pair—her so long and rangy, him so short and tubby. Marion pushed buttons on the camera until the video cassette popped out, never taking her eye from him. She could really glare. “I suppose this is the same film you used this morning, when you filmed me taking my shower, is that right?” She looked at us. “I was in the little shower box they’ve got across the way, and the tin with the hot water in it got plugged at the bottom somehow. I had the door open a bit so I could stretch up and fiddle with it, when suddenly I noticed this pervert filming me!” She laughed angrily.

“I bet you were quite pleased with that footage, weren’t you, you peeping Tom!”

“I was just leaving to shoot yaks,” Arnold explained rapidly, staring up at Marion with an admiring gaze. “Then there you were, and what was I supposed to do? I’m a filmmaker, I film beautiful things. I could make you a star in the States,” he told her earnestly. “You’re probably the most beautiful climber in the world.”

“And all that competition,” Mad Tom put in.

I was right about Marion’s reaction to a compliment of that sort—she blushed to the roots, and considered punching him too—she might have, if they’d been alone.

“—adventure films back in the States, for PBS and the ski resort circuit,” Arnold was going on, chewing his cigar and rolling his eyes as Marion took the cartridge over toward the stove.

The Sherpani waved her off. “Smell,” she said.

Marion nodded and took the video cassette in her hands. Her forearms tensed, and suddenly you could see every muscle. And there were a lot of them, too, looking like thin bunched wires under the skin. We all stared, and instinctively Arnold raised his camera to his shoulder before remembering it was empty. That fact made him whimper, and he was fumbling at his jacket pocket for a spare when the cassette snapped diagonally and the videotape spilled out. Marion handed it all to the Sherpani, who dumped it in a box of potato peels, grinning.

We all looked at Arnold. He chomped his cigar, shrugged. “Can’t make you a star that way,” he said, and gave Marion a soulful leer. “Really, you oughta give me a chance, you’d be great. Suchpresence.”

“I would appreciate it if you would now leave,” Marion told him, and pointed at the door.

Arnold left.

“That guy could be trouble,” Freds said.

VII

Freds was right about that.

But Arnold was not the only source of trouble. Freds himself was acting a bit peculiar, I judged. Still, when I thought of the various oddities in his recent behavior—his announcement that his friend Kunga Norbu was a tulku, and now this sudden advocacy of a Save Mallory’s Body campaign—I couldn’t put it all together. Why did he just happen to have a photo of the North Face of Everest in his wallet, for instance? It didn’t make sense.

So when Freds’s party and my trekking group took off upvalley from Pheriche on the same morning, I walked with Freds for a while. I wanted to ask him some questions. But there were a lot of people on the trail, and it was hard to get a moment to ourselves.

As an opener I said, “So, you’ve got a woman on your team.”

“Yeah, Marion’s great. She’s probably the best climber of us all. And incredibly strong. You know those indoor walls they have in England, for practicing?”

“No.”

“Well, the weather is so bad there, and the climbers are such fanatics, that they’ve built these thirty and forty foot walls inside gyms, and covered them with concrete and made little handholds.” He laughed. “It looks dismal—scuzzy old gym with bad light and no heating, and all these guys stretched out on a concrete wall like some new kinda torture . . . Anyway I visited one of these, and they set me up in a race with Marion, up the two hardest pitches. Maybe 5.13 in places, impossible stuff. And there was a leak too. Everyone started betting on us, and the rule was someone had to top out for anyone to collect on the bets. I did my best, but I was hurrying and I came off about halfway up. So she won, but to collect the bets she had to top out. With the leak it really was impossible, but everyone who had bet on her was yelling at her to do it, so she just grit her teeth and started making these moves, man—” Freds illustrated in the air between us as we hiked—“And she was doing them in slow motion so she wouldn’t come off. Just hanging there by her fingertips and toes, and I swear to God she hung on that wall for must’ve been three hours. Everyone else stopped climbing to watch. Guys were going home—guys were begging her to come off—guys had tears in their eyes. Finally she topped out and crawled over to the ladder and came down, and they mobbed her. They were ready to make her queen. In fact she pretty much is queen, as far as English climbers are concerned—you could bring the real one in, and if Marion were there they wouldn’t even notice.”

Then Arnold slipped between us, looking conspiratorial. “I think this Save Mallory scheme is a great idea,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “I’m totally behind you, and it’ll make a great movie.”

“You miss the point,” I said to him.

“We ain’t doing nothing but climb Lingtren,” Freds said to him.

Arnold frowned, tucked his chin onto his chest, chewed his cigar. Frowning, Freds left to catch up with his group, and they soon disappeared ahead. So I lost my chance to talk to him.

We came to the upper end of Pheriche’s valley, turned right and climbed to get into an even higher one. This was the valley of the Khumbu glacier, a massive road of ice covered with a chaos of gray rubble and milky blue melt ponds. We skirted the glacier and followed a trail up its lateral moraine to Lobuche, which consists of three teahouses and a tenting ground. The next day we hiked on upvalley to Gorak Shep.

Now Gorak Shep (“Dead Crow”) is not the kind of place you see on posters in travel agencies. It’s just above 17,000 feet, and up there the plant life has about given up. It’s just two ragged little teahouses under a monstrous rubble hill, next to a gray glacial pond, and all in all it looks like the tailings of a very big gravel mine.

But what Gorak Shep does have is mountains. Big snowy mountains, on all sides. How big? Well, the wall of Nuptse, for instance, stands a full seven thousand feet over Gorak Shep. An avalanche we saw, sliding down a fraction of this wall and sounding like thunder, covered about two World Trade Centers’ worth of height, and still looked tiny. And Nuptse is not as big as some of the peaks around it. So you get the idea.

Cameras can never capture this kind of scale, but you can’t help trying, and my crowd tried for all they were worth in the days we were camped there. The ones handling the altitude well slogged up to the top of Kala Pattar (“Black Hill”), a local walker’s peak which has a fine view of the Southwest Face of Everest. The day after that, Heather and Laure led most of the same people up the glacier to Everest Base Camp, while the rest of us relaxed. Everest Base Camp, set by the Indian Army this season, was basically a tent village like ours, but there are some fine seracs and ice towers to be seen along the way, and when they returned the clients seemed satisfied.

So I was satisfied too. No one had gotten any bad altitude sickness, and we would be starting back the next morning. I was feeling fine, sitting up on the hill above our tents in the late afternoon, doing nothing.

But then Laure came zipping down the trail from Base Camp, and when he saw me he came right over. “George George,” he called out as he approached.

I stood as he reached me. “What’s up?”

“I stay talk friends porter Indian Army base camp, Freds find me Freds say his base camp come please you. Climb Lho La find man camera come hire Sherpas finish with Freds, very bad follow Freds.”

Now Laure’s English is not very good, as you may have noticed. But after all we were in his country speaking my language—and for him English came after Sherpa, Nepali, and some Japanese and German, and how many languages do you speak?

Besides, I find I always get the gist of what Laure says, which is not something you can always say of all our fellow native speakers. So I cried out, “No! Arnold is following them?”

“Yes,” Laure said. “Very bad. Freds say come please get.”

“Arnold hired their Sherpas?”

Laure nodded. “Sherpas finish porter, Arnold hire.”

“Damn him! We’ll have to climb up there and get him!”

“Yes. Very bad.”

“Will you come with me?”

“Whatever you like.”

I hustled to our tents to get together my climbing gear and tell Heather what had happened. “How did he get up there?” she asked. “I thought he was with you all day!”

“He told me he was going with you! He probably followed you guys all the way up, and kept on going. Don’t worry about it, it’s not your fault. Take the group back to Namche starting tomorrow, and we’ll catch up with you.” She nodded, looking worried.

Laure and I took off. Even going at Laure’s pace we didn’t reach Freds’s base camp until the moon had risen.

Their camp was now only a single tent in a bunch of trampled snow, just under the steep headwall of the Khumbu Valley—the ridge that divides Nepal from Tibet. We zipped open the tent and woke Freds and Kunga Norbu.

“All right!” Freds said. “I’m glad you’re here! Real glad!”

“Give me the story,” I said.

“Well, that Arnold snuck up here, apparently.”

“That’s right.”

“And our Sherpas were done and we had paid them, and I guess he hired them on the spot. They have a bunch of climbing gear, and we left fixed ropes up to the Lho La, so up they came. I tell you I was pretty blown away when they showed up in the pass! The Brits got furious and told Arnold to go back down, but he refused and, well, how do you make someone do something they don’t want to up there? If you punch him out he’s likely to have trouble getting down! So Kunga and I came back to get you and found Laure at Base Camp, and he said he’d get you while we held the fort.”

“Arnold climbed the Lho La?” I said, amazed.

“Well, he’s a pretty tough guy, I reckon. Didn’t you ever see that movie he made of the kayak run down the Baltoro? Radical film, man, really it’s up there with The Man Who Skied Down Everest for radicalness. And he’s done some other crazy things too, like flying a hang glider off the Grand Teton, filming all the way. He’s tougher than he looks. I think he just does the Hollywood sleaze routine so he can get away with things. Anyway those are some excellent climbing Sherpas he’s got, and with them and the fixed ropes he just had to gut it out. And I guess he acclimatizes well, because he was walking around up there like he was at the beach.”

I sighed. “That is one determined filmmaker.”

Freds shook his head. “The guy is a leech. He’s gonna drive the Brits bats if we don’t haul his ass back down here.”

VIII

So the next day the four of us started the ascent of the Lho La, and were quickly engaged in some of the most dangerous climbing I’ve ever done. Not the most technically difficult—the Brits had left fixed rope in the toughest sections, so our progress was considerably aided. But it was still dangerous, because we were climbing an icefall, which is to say a glacier on a serious tilt.

Now a glacier as you know is a river of ice, and like its liquid counterparts it is always flowing downstream. Its rate of flow is much slower than a river’s, but it isn’t negligible, especially when you’re standing on it. Then you often hear creaks, groans, sudden cracks and booms, and you feel like you’re on the back of a living creature.

Put that glacier on a hillside and everything is accelerated; the living creature becomes a dragon. The ice of the glacier breaks up into immense blocks and shards, and these shift regularly, then balance on a point or edge, then fall and smash to fragments, or crack open to reveal deep fissures. As we threaded our way up through the maze of the Lho La’s icefall, we were constantly moving underneath blocks of ice that looked eternal but were actually precarious—they were certain to fall sometime in the next month or two. I’m not expert at probability theory, but I still didn’t like it.

“Freds,” I complained. “You said this was a piece of cake.”

“It is,” he said. “Check out how fast we’re going.”

“That’s because we’re scared to death.”

“Are we? Hey, it must be only 45 degrees or so.”

This is as steep as an icefall can get before the ice all falls downhill at once. Even the famous Khumbu Icefall, which we now had a fantastic view of over to our right, fell at only about 30 degrees. The Khumbu Icefall is an unavoidable part of the standard route on Everest, and it is by far the most feared section; more people have died there than anywhere else on the mountain. And the Lho La is worse than the Khumbu!

So I had some choice words for our situation as we climbed very quickly indeed, and most of them left Laure mystified. “Great, Freds,” I shouted at him. “Real piece of cake all right!”

“Lot of icing, anyway,” he said, and giggled. This under a wall that would flatten him like Wile E. Coyote if it fell. I shook my head.

“What do you think?” I said to Laure.

“Very bad,” Laure said. “Very bad, very dangerous.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“Whatever you like.”

We hurried.

Now I like climbing as much as anybody, almost, but I am not going to try to claim to you that it is an exceptionally sane activity. That day in particular I would not have been inclined to argue the point. The thing is, there is danger and there is danger. In fact climbers make a distinction, between objective danger and subjective danger. Objective dangers are things like avalanches and rockfall and storms, that you can’t do anything about. Subjective dangers are those incurred by human error—putting in a bad hold, forgetting to fasten a harness, that sort of thing. See, if you are perfectly careful, then you can eliminate all the subjective dangers. And when you’ve eliminated the subjective dangers, you have only the objective dangers to face. So you can see it’s very rational.

On this day, however, we were in the midst of a whole wall of objective danger, and it made me nervous. We pursued the usual course in such a case, which is to go like hell. The four of us were practically running up the Lho La. Freds, Kunga, and Laure were extremely fast and strong, and I am in reasonable shape myself; plus I get the benefits of more adrenalin than less imaginative types. So we were hauling buns.

Then it happened. Freds was next to me, on a rope with Kunga Norbu, and Kunga was the full rope length ahead of us—about twenty yards—leading the way around a traverse that went under a giant serac, which is what they call the fangs of blue ice that protrude out of an icefall, often in clusters. Kunga was right underneath this serac when without the slightest warning it sheered off and collapsed, shattering into a thousand pieces.

I had reflexively sucked in a gasp and was about to scream when Kunga Norbu jostled my elbow, nearly knocking me down. He was wedged in between Freds and me, and the rope tying them together was flapping between our legs.

Trying to revise my scream I choked, gasped for breath, choked again. Freds slapped me on the back to help. Kunga was definitely there, standing before us, solid and corporeal. And yet he had been under the serac! The broken pieces of the ice block were scattered before us, fresh and gleaming in the afternoon sun. The block had sheered off and collapsed without the slightest quiver or warning—there simply hadn’t been time to get out from under it!

Freds saw the look on my face, and he grinned feebly. “Old Kunga Norbu is pretty fast when he has to be.”

But that wasn’t going to do. “Gah . . .” I said—and then Freds and Kunga were holding me up. Laure hurried to join us, round-eyed with apprehension.

“Very bad,” he said.

“Gah,” I attempted again, and couldn’t go on.

“All right, all right,” Freds said, soothing me with his gloved hands. “Hey, George. Relax.”

“He,” I got out, and pointed at the remains of the serac, then at Kunga.

“I know,” Freds said, frowning. He exchanged a glance with Kunga, who was watching me impassively. They spoke to each other in Tibetan. “Listen,” Freds said to me. “Let’s top the pass and then I’ll explain it to you. It’ll take a while, and we don’t have that much day left. Plus we’ve got to find a way around these ice cubes so we can stick to the fixed ropes. Come on, buddy.” He slapped my arm.“Concentrate. Let’s do it.”

So we started up again, Kunga leading as fast as before. I was still in shock, however, and I kept seeing the collapse of the serac, with Kunga under it. He just couldn’t have escaped it! And yet there he was up above us, jumaring up the fixed ropes like a monkey scurrying up a palm.

It was a miracle. And I had seen it. I had a hell of a time concentrating on the rest of that day’s climb.

IX

In the late afternoon we topped the Lho La, and set our tent on the pass’s flat expanse of deep hard snow. It was one of the spacier campsites I had ever occupied: on the crest of the Himalaya, in a broad saddle between the tallest mountain on earth, and the very spiky and beautiful Lingtren. Below us to one side was the Khumbu Glacier; on the other was the Rongbuk Glacier in Tibet. We were at about 20,000 feet, and so Freds and his friends had a long way to go before reaching old Mallory. But nothing above would be quite as arbitrarily dangerous as the icefall. As long as the weather held, that is. So far they had been lucky; it was turning out to be the driest October in years.

There was no sign of either the British team or Arnold’s crew, except for tracks in the snow leading up the side of the West Shoulder and disappearing. So they were on their way up. “Damn!” I said. “Why didn’t they wait?” Now we had more climbing to do, to catch Arnold.

I sat on my groundpad on the snow outside the tent. I was tired. I was also very troubled. Laure was getting the stove to start. Kunga Norbu was off by himself, sitting in the snow, apparently meditating on the sight of Tibet. Freds was walking around singing “Wooden Ships,” clearly in heaven. “I mean, is this a great campsite or what,” he cried to me. “Look at the view! It’s too much, too much. I wish we’d brought some chang with us. I do have some hash, though. George, time to break out the pipe, hey?”

“Not yet, Freds. You get over here and tell me what the hell happened down there with your buddy Kunga Norbu. You promised you would.”

Freds stood looking at me. We were in shadow—it was cold, but windless—the sky above was clear, and a very deep dark blue. The airy roar of the stove starting was the only sound.

Freds sighed, and his expression got as serious as it ever got: one eye squinted shut entirely, forehead furrowed, and lips squeezed tightly together. He looked over at Kunga, and saw he was watching us. “Well,” he said after a while. “You remember a couple of weeks ago when we were down at Chimoa getting drunk?”

“Yeah?”

“And I told you Kunga Norbu was a tulku.”

I gulped. “Freds, don’t give me that again.”

“Well,” he said. “It’s either that or tell you some kind of a lie. And I ain’t so good at lying, my face gives me away or something.”

“Freds, get serious!” But looking over at Kunga Norbu, sitting in the snow with that blank expression, and those weird black eyes, I couldn’t help but wonder.

Freds said, “I’m sorry, man, I really am. I don’t mean to blow your mind like this. But I did try to tell you before, you have to admit. And it’s the simple truth. He’s an honest-to-God tulku. First incarnation the famous Naropa, born in 1555. And he’s been around ever since.”

“So he met George Washington and like that?”

“Well, Washington didn’t go to Tibet, so far as I know.”

I stared at him. He shuffled about uncomfortably. “I know it’s hard to take, George. Believe me. I had trouble with it myself, at first. But when you study under Kunga Norbu for a while, you see him do so many miraculous things, you can’t help but believe.”

I stared at him some more, speechless.

“I know,” Freds said. “The first time he pulls one of his moves on you, it’s a shock. I remember my first time real well. I was hiking with him from the hidden Rongbuk to Namche, we went right over Lho La like we did today only in the opposite direction, and right around Everest Base Camp we came across this Indian trekker who was turning blue. He was clearly set to die of altitude sickness, so Kunga and I carried him down between us to Pheriche, which was already a long day’s work as you know. We took him to the Rescue Station and I figured they’d put him in the pressure tank they’ve got there, have you seen it? They’ve got a tank like a miniature submarine in their back room, and the idea is you stick a guy with altitude sickness in it and pressurize it down to sea level pressure, and he gets better. It’s a neat idea, but it turns out that this tank was donated to the station by a hospital in Tokyo, and all the instructions for it are in Japanese, and no one at the station reads Japanese. Besides as far as anyone there knows it’s an experimental technique only, no one is quite sure if it will work or not, and nobody there is inclined to do any experimenting on sick trekkers. So we’re back to square one and this guy was sicker than ever, so Kunga and I started down towards Namche, but I was getting exhausted and it was really slow going, and all of a sudden Kunga Norbu picked him up and slung him across his shoulders, which was already quite a feat of strength as this Indian was kind of pear-shaped, a heavy guy—and then Kunga just took off running down the trail with him! I hollered at him and ran after him trying to keep up, and I tell you I was zooming down that trail, and still Kunga ran right out of sight! Big long steps like he was about to fly! I couldn’t believe it!”

Freds shook his head. “That was the first time I saw Kunga Norbu going into lung-gom mode. Means magic long-distance running, and it was real popular in Tibet at one time. An adept like Kunga is called a lung-gom-pa, and when you get it down you can run really far really fast. Even levitate a little. You saw him today—that was a lung-gom move he laid on that iceblock.”

“I see,” I said, in a kind of daze. I called out to Laure, still at the stove: “Hey Laure! Freds says Kunga Norbu is a tulku!”

Laure smiled, nodded. “Yes, Kunga Norbu Lama very fine tulku!”

I took a deep breath. Over in the snow Kunga Norbu sat cross-legged, looking out at his country. Or somewhere. “I think I’m ready for that hash pipe,” I told Freds.

X

It took us two days to catch up to Arnold and the Brits, two days of miserable slogging up the West Shoulder of Everest. Nothing complicated here: the slope was a regular expanse of hard snow, and we just put on the crampons and ground on up it. It was murderous work. Not that I could tell with Freds and Laure and Kunga Norbu. There may be advantages to climbing on Everest with a tulku, a Sherpa long-distance champion, and an American space cadet, but longer rest stops are not among them. Those three marched uphill as if paced by Sousa marches, and I trailed behind huffing and puffing, damning Arnold with every step.

Late on the second day I struggled onto the top of the West Shoulder, a long snowy divide under the West Ridge proper. By the time I got there Freds and Laure already had the tent up, and they were securing it to the snow with a network of climbing rope, while Kunga Norbu sat to one side doing his meditation.

Further down the Shoulder were the two camps of the other teams, placed fairly close together as there wasn’t a whole lot of extra flat ground up there to choose from. After I had rested and drunk several cups of hot lemon drink, I said, “Let’s go find out how things stand.” Freds walked over with me.

As it turned out, things were not standing so well. The Brits were in their tent, waist deep in their sleeping bags and drinking tea. And they were not amused. “The man is utterly daft,” Marion said. She had a mild case of high-altitude throat, and any syllable she tried to emphasize disappeared entirely. “We’ve oyd outrunning him, but the Sherpas are good, and he oyy be strong.”

“A fooking leech he is,” John said.

Trevor grinned ferociously. His lower face was pretty sunburned, and his lips were beginning to break up. “We’re counting on you to get him back down, George.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Marion shook her head. “God knows we’ve tried, but it does no good whatever, he won’t listen, he just rattles on about making me a stee, I don’t know how to dee with that.” She turned red. “And none of these brave chaps will agree that we should just go over there and seize his bloody camera and throw it into Tibee!”

The guys shook their heads. “We’d have to deal with the Sherpas,” Mad Tom said to Marion patiently. “What are we going to do, fight with them? I can’t even imagine it.”

“And if Mad Tom can’t imagine it,” Trevor said.

Marion just growled.

“I’ll go talk to him,” I said.

But I didn’t have to go anywhere, because Arnold had come over to greet us. “Hello!” he called out cheerily. “George, what a surprise! What brings you up here?”

I got out of the tent. Arnold stood before me, looking sunburned but otherwise all right. “You know what brings me up here, Arnold. Here, let’s move away a bit, I’m sure these folks don’t want to talk to you.”

“Oh, no, I’ve been talking to them every day! We’ve been having lots of good talks. And today I’ve got some real news.” He spoke into the tent. “I was looking through my zoom over at the North Col,and I see they’ve set up a camp over there! Do you suppose it’s that expedition looking for Mallory’s body?”

Curses came from the tent.

“I know!” Arnold exclaimed. “Kind of puts the pressure on to get going, don’t you think? Not much time to spare.”

“Bugger off!”

Arnold shrugged. “Well, I’ve got it on tape if you want to see. Looked like they were wearing Helly-Hansen jackets, if that tells you anything.”

“Don’t tell me you can read labels from this distance,” I said.

Arnold grinned. “It’s a hell of a zoom lens. I could read their lips if I wanted to.”

I studied him curiously. He really seemed to be doing fine, even after four days of intense climbing. He looked a touch thinner, and his voice had an altitude rasp to it, and he was pretty badly sunburned under the stubble of his beard—but he was still chewing a whitened cigar between zinc-oxided lips, and he still had the same wide-eyed look of wonder that his filming should bother anybody. I was impressed; he was definitely a lot tougher than I had expected. He reminded me of Dick Bass, the American millionaire who took a notion to climb the highest mountain on each continent. Like Bass, Arnold was a middle-aged guy paying pros to take him up; and like Bass, he acclimatized well, and had a hell of a nerve.

So, there he was, and he wasn’t falling apart. I had to try something else. “Arnold, come over here a little with me, let’s leave these people in peace.”

“Good reee!” Marion shouted from inside the tent.

“That Marion,” Arnold said admiringly when we were out of earshot. “She’s really beautiful, I mean I really, really, really like her.” He struck his chest to show how smitten he was.

I glared at him. “Arnold, it doesn’t matter if you’re falling for her or what, because they definitely do not want you along for this climb. Filming them destroys the whole point of what they’re trying to do up there.”

Arnold seized my arm. “No it doesn’t! I keep trying to explain that to them. I can edit the film so that no one will know where Mallory’s body is. They’ll just know it’s up here safe, because four young English climbers took incredible risks to keep it free from the publicity hounds threatening to tear it away to London. It’s great, George. I’m a filmmaker, and I know when something will make a great movie, and this will make a great movie.”

I frowned. “Maybe it would, but the problem is this climb is illegal, and if you make the film, then the illegal part becomes known and these folks will be banned by the Nepali authorities. They’ll never be let into Nepal again.”

“So? Aren’t they willing to make that sacrifice for Mallory?”

I frowned. “For your movie, you mean. Without that they could do it and no one would be the wiser.”

“Well, okay, but I can leave their names off it or something. Give them stage names. Marion Davies, how about that?”

“I think that one’s been used before.” I thought. “Listen, Arnold, you’d be in the same kind of trouble, you know. They might not ever let you back, either.”

He waved a hand. “I can get around that kind of thing. Get a lawyer. Or baksheesh, a lot of baksheesh.”

“These guys don’t have that kind of money, though. Really, you’d better watch it. If you press them too hard they might do something drastic. At the least they’ll stop you, higher up. When they find the body a couple of them will come back and stop you, and the other two bury the body, and you won’t get any footage at all.”

He shook his head. “I got lenses, haven’t I been telling you? Why I’ve been shooting what these four eat for breakfast every morning. I’ve got hours of Marion on film for instance,” he sighed, “and my God could I make her a star. Anyway I could film the burial from here if I had to, so I’ll take my chances. Don’t you worry about me.”

“I am not worrying about you,” I said. “Take my word for it. But I do wish you’d come back down with me. They don’t want you up here, and I don’t want you up here. It’s dangerous, especially if we lose this weather. Besides, you’re breaking your contract with our agency, which said you’d follow my instructions on the trek.”

“Sue me.”

I took a deep breath.

Arnold put a friendly hand to my arm. “Don’t worry so much, George. They’ll love me when they’re stars.” He saw the look on my face and stepped away. “And don’t you try anything funny with me, or I’ll slap some kind of kidnapping charge on you, and you’ll never guide a trek again.”

“Don’t tempt me like that,” I told him, and stalked back to the Brits’ camp.

I dropped into their tent. Laure and Kunga Norbu had joined them, and we were jammed in there. “No luck,” I said. They weren’t surprised.

“Superleech,” Freds commented cheerfully.

We sat around and stared at the blue flames of the stove.

Then, as usually happens in these predicaments, I said, “I’ve got a plan.”

It was relatively simple, as we didn’t have many options. We would all descend back to the Lho La, and maybe even down to Base Camp, giving Arnold the idea we had given up. Once down there the Brits and Freds and Kunga Norbu could restock at the Gorak Shep teahouses, and Laure and I would undertake to stop Arnold, by stealing his boots for instance. Then they could go back up the fixed ropes and try again.

Trevor looked dubious. “It’s difficult getting up here, and we don’t have much time, if that other expedition is already on the North Col.”

“I’ve got a better plan,” Freds announced. “Looky here, Arnold’s following you Brits, but not us. If we four pretended to go down, while you four took the West Ridge direct, then Arnold would follow you. Then we four could sneak off into the Diagonal Ditch, and pass you by going up the Hornbein Couloir, which is actually faster than the West Ridge direct. You wouldn’t see us and we’d be up there where the body is, lickety-split.”

Well, no one was overjoyed at this plan. The Brits would have liked to find Mallory themselves, I could see. And I didn’t have any inclination to go any higher than we already had. In fact I was dead set against it.

But by now the Brits were absolutely locked onto the idea of saving Mallory from TV and Westminster Abbey. “It would do the job,” Marion conceded.

“And we might lose the leech on the ridge,” Mad Tom added. “It’s a right piece of work or so I’m told.”

“That’s right!” Freds said happily. “Laure, are you up for it?”

“Whatever you like,” Laure said, and grinned. He thought it was a fine idea. Freds then asked Kunga Norbu, in Tibetan, and reported to us that Kunga gave the plan his mystic blessing.

“George?”

“Oh, man, no. I’d rather just get him down some other way.”

“Ah come on!” Freds cried. “We don’t have another way, and you don’t want to let down the side, do you? Sticky wicket and all that?”

“He’s your fooking client,” John pointed out.

“Geez. Oh, man . . . Well . . . All right.”

I walked back to our tent feeling that things were really getting out of control. In fact I was running around in the grip of other people’s plans, plans I by no means approved of, made by people whose mental balance I doubted. And all this on the side of a mountain that had killed over fifty people. It was a bummer.

XI

But I went along with the plan. Next morning we broke camp and made as if to go back down. The Brits started up the West Ridge, snarling dire threats at Arnold as they passed him. Arnold and his Sherpas were already packed, and after giving the Brits a short lead they took off after them. Arnold was roped up to their leader Ang Rita, raring to go, his camera in a chest pack. I had to hand it to him—he was one tenacious peeping Tom.

We waved good-bye and stayed on the shoulder until they were above us, and momentarily out of sight. Then we hustled after them, and took a left into the so-called Diagonal Ditch, which led out onto the North Face.

We were now following the route first taken by Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, in 1963. A real mountaineering classic, actually, which goes up what is now called the Hornbein Couloir. Get out any good photo of the North Face of Everest and you’ll see it—a big vertical crack on the right side. It’s a steep gully, but quite a bit faster than the West Ridge.

So we climbed. It was hard climbing, but not as scary as the Lho La. My main problem on this day was paranoia about the weather. Weather is no common concern on the side of Everest. You don’t say, “Why snow would really ruin the day.” Quite a number of people have been caught by storms on Everest and killed by them, including the guys we were going to look for. So whenever I saw wisps of cloud streaming out from the peak, I tended to freak. And the wind whips a banner of cloud from the peak of Everest almost continuously. I kept looking up and seeing that banner, and groaning. Freds heard me.

“Gee, George, you sound like you’re really hurting on this pitch.”

“Hurry up, will you?”

“You want to go faster? Well, okay, but I gotta tell you I’m going about as fast as I can. I don’t think I want to tell Kunga to hurry more, because he might do it.”

I believed that. Kunga Norbu was using ice axe and crampons to fire up the packed snow in the middle of the couloir, and Freds was right behind him; they looked like roofers on a ladder. I did my best to follow, and Laure brought up the rear. Both Freds and Kunga had grins so wide and fixed that you’d have thought they were on acid. Their teeth were going to get sunburned they were loving it so much. Meanwhile I was gasping for air, and worrying about that summit banner . . . it was one of the greatest climbing days of my life.

How’s that, you ask? Well . . . it’s hard to explain. But it’s something like this: when you get on a mountain wall with a few thousand feet of empty air below you, it catches your attention. Of course part of you says oh my God, it’s all over. Whyever did I do this! But another part sees that in order not to die you must pretend you are quite calm, and engaged in a semi-theoretical gymnastics exercise intended to move you higher. You pay attention to the exercise like no one has ever paid attention before. Eventually you find yourself on a flat spot of some sort—three feet by five feet will do. You look around and realize that you did not die, that you are still alive. And at that point this fact becomes really exhilarating. You really appreciate being alive. It’s a sort of power, or a privilege granted you, in any case it feels quite special, like a flash of higher consciousness. Just to be alive! And in retrospect, that paying attention when you were climbing—your remember that as a higher consciousness too.

You can get hooked on feelings like those; they are the ultimate altered state. Drugs can’t touch them. I’m not saying this is real healthy behavior, you understand. I’m just saying it happens.

For instance, at the end of this particular intense day in the Hornbein Couloir, the four of us emerged at its top, having completed an Alpine-style blitz of it due in large part to Kunga Norbu’s inspired leads. We made camp on top of a small flat knob just big enough for our tent. And looking around—what a feeling! It really was something. There were only four or five mountains in the world taller thanwe were in that campsite, and you could tell. We could see all the way across Tibet, it seemed. Now Tibet, as Galen Rowell once said, tends mostly to look like a freeze-dried Nevada—but from our height it was range after range of snowy peaks, white on black forever, all tinted sepia by the afternoon sun. It seemed the world was nothing but mountains.

Freds plopped down beside me, idiot grin still fixed on his face. He had a steaming cup of lemon drink in one hand, his hash pipe in the other and he was singing “Truckin’.” He took a hit from the pipe and handed it to me.

“Are you sure we should be smoking up here?”

“Sure, it helps you breathe.”

“Come on.”

“No, really. The nerve center that controls your involuntary breathing shuts down in the absence of carbon dioxide, and there’s hardly any of that up here, so the smoke provides it.”

I decided that on medical grounds I’d better join him. We passed the pipe back and forth. Behind us Laure was in the tent, humming to himself and getting his sleeping bag out. Kunga Norbu sat in the lotus position on the other side of the tent, intent on realms of his own. The world, all mountains, turned under the sun.

Freds exhaled happily. “This must be the greatest place on earth, don’t you think?”

That’s the feeling I’m talking about.

XII

We had a long and restless night of it, because it’s harder than hell to sleep at that altitude. But the next day dawned clear and windless once again, and after breakfasting we headed along the top of the Black Band.

Our route was unusual, perhaps unique. The Black Band, harder than the layers of rock above and below it, sticks out from the generally smooth slope of the face in a crumbly rampart. So in effect we had a sort of road to walk on. Although it was uneven and busted up, it was still twenty feet wide in places, and an easier place for a traverse couldn’t be imagined. There were potential campsites all over it.

Of course usually when people are at 28,000 feet on Everest, they’re interested in getting either higher or lower pretty quick. Since this rampway was level and didn’t facilitate any route whatsoever, it wasn’t much traveled. We might have been the first on it, since Freds said that Kunga Norbu had only looked down on it from above.

So we walked this high road, and made our search. Freds knocked a rock off the edge, and we watched it bounce down toward the Rongbuk Glacier until it became invisible, though we could still hear it. After that we trod a little more carefully. Still, it wasn’t long before we had traversed the face and were looking down the huge clean chute of the Great Couloir. Here the rampart ended, and to continue the traverse to the fabled North Ridge, where Mallory and Irvine were last seen, would have been ugly work. Besides, that wasn’t where Kunga Norbu had seen the body.

“We must have missed it,” Freds said. “Let’s spread out side to side, and check every little nook and cranny on the way back.” So we did, taking it very slowly, and ranging out to the edge of the rampart as far as we dared.

We were about halfway back to the Hornbein Couloir when Laure found it. He called out, and we approached.

“Well dog my cats,” Freds said, looking astonished.

The body was wedged in a crack, chest deep in a hard pack of snow. He was on his side, and curled over so that he was level with the rock on each side of the crack. His clothing was frayed, and rotting away on him; it looked like knit wool. The kind of thing you’d wear golfing in Scotland. His eyes were closed, and under a fraying hood his skin looked papery. Sixty years out in sun and storm, but always in below-freezing air, had preserved him strangely. I had the odd feeling that he was only sleeping, and might wake and stand.

Freds knelt beside him and dug in the snow a bit. “Look here—he’s roped up, but the rope broke.”

He held up an inch or two of unraveled rope—natural fibers, horribly thin—it made me shudder to see it. “Such primitive gear!” I cried.

Freds nodded briefly. “They were nuts. I don’t think he’s got an oxygen pack on either. They had it available, but he didn’t like to use it.” He shook his head. “They probably fell together. Stepped through a cornice maybe. Then fell down to here, and this one jammed in the crack while the other one went over the edge, and the rope broke.”

“So the other one is down in the glacier,” I said.

Freds nodded slowly. “And look—” he pointed above. “We’re almost directly under the summit. So they must have made the top. Or fallen when damned close to it.” He shook his head. “And wearing nothing but a jacket like that! Amazing.”

“So they made it,” I breathed.

“Well, maybe. Looks like it, anyway. So . . . which one is this?”

I shook my head. “I can’t tell. Early twenties, or mid-thirties?”

Uneasily we looked at the mummified features.

“Thirties,” Laure said. “Not young.”

Freds nodded. “I agree.”

“So it’s Mallory,” I said.

“Hmph.” Freds stood and stepped back. “Well, that’s that. The mystery solved.” He looked at us, spoke briefly with Kunga Norbu. “He must be under snow most years. But let’s hide him under rock, for the Brits.”

This was easier said than done. All we needed were stones to lay over him, as he was tucked down in the crack. But we quickly found that loose stones of any size were not plentiful; they had been blown off. So we had to work in pairs, and pick up big flat plates that were heavy enough to hold against the winds.

We were still collecting these when Freds suddenly jerked back and sat behind an outcropping of the rampart. “Hey, the Brits are over there on the West Ridge! They’re almost level with us!”

“Arnold can’t be far behind,” I said.

“We’ve still got an hour’s work here,” Freds exclaimed. “Here—Laure, listen—go back to our campsite and pack our stuff, will you? Then go meet the Brits and tell them to slow down. Got that?”

“Slow down,” Laure repeated.

“Exactly. Explain we found Mallory and they should avoid this area. Give us time. You stay with them, go back down with them. George and Kunga and I will follow you guys down, and we’ll meet you at Gorak Shep.”

Gorak Shep? That seemed farther down than necessary.

Laure nodded. “Slow down, go back, we meet you Gorak Shep.”

“You got it, buddy. See you down there.”

Laure nodded and was off.

“Okay,” Freds said. “Let’s get this guy covered.”

We built a low wall around him, and then used the biggest plate of all as a keystone to cover his face. It took all three of us to pick it up, and we staggered around to get it into position without disturbing him; it really knocked the wind out of us.

When we were done the body was covered, and most of the time snow would cover our burial cairn, and it would be just one lump among thousands. So he was hidden. “Shouldn’t we say something?” Freds asked. “You know, an epitaph or whatever?”

“Hey, Kunga’s the holy man,” I said. “Tell him to do it.”

Freds spoke to Kunga. In his snow goggles I could see little images of Kunga, looking like a Martian in his dirty red down jacket, hood and goggles. Quite a change in gear since old Mallory!

Kunga Norbu stood at the end of our cairn and stuck out his mittened hands; he spoke in Tibetan for a while.

Afterwards Freds translated for me: “Spirit of Chomolungma, Mother Goddess of the World, we’re here to bury the body of George Leigh Mallory, the first person to climb your sacred slopes. He was a climber with a lot of heart and he always went for it, and we love him for that—he showed very purely something that we all treasure in ourselves. I’d like to add that it’s also clear from his clothing and gear that he was a total loon to be up here at all, and I in particular would like to salute that quality as well. So here we are, four disciples of your holy spirit, and we take this moment to honor that spirit here and in us, and everywhere in the world.” Kunga bowed his head, and Freds and I followed suit, and we were silent; and all we heard was the wind, whistling over the Mother Goddess into Tibet.

XIII

Fine. Our mission was accomplished, Mallory was safely hidden on Everest for all time, we had given him what I had found a surprisingly moving burial ceremony, and I for one was pretty pleased. But back at our campsite, Freds and Kunga started acting oddly. Laure had packed up the tent and our packs and left them for us, and now Freds and Kunga were hurrying around repacking them.

I said something to the effect that you couldn’t beat the view from Mallory’s final resting place, and Freds looked up at me, and said, “Well, you could beat it by a little.” And he continued repacking feverishly. “In fact I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” he said as he worked. “I mean, here we are, right? I mean here we are.”

“Yes,” I said. “We are here.”

“I mean to say, here we are at almost twenty-eight thou, on Mount Everest. And it’s only noon, and it’s a perfect day. I mean a perfect day. Couldn’t ask for a nicer day.”

I began to see what he was driving at. “No way, Freds.”

“Ah come on! Don’t be hasty about this, George! We’re above all the hard parts, it’s just a walk from here to the top!”

“No,” I said firmly. “We don’t have time. And we don’t have much food. And we can’t trust the weather. It’s too dangerous.”

“Too dangerous! All climbing is too dangerous, George, but I don’t notice that that ever stopped you before. Think about it, man! This ain’t just some ordinary mountain, this ain’t no Rainier or Denali, this is Everest. Sargaramantha! Chomolungma! The BIG E! Hasn’t it always been your secret fantasy to climb Everest?”

“Well, no. It hasn’t.”

“I don’t believe you! It sure is mine, I’ll tell you that. It’s gotta be yours too.”

All the time we argued Kunga Norbu was ignoring us, while he rooted through his pack tossing out various inessential items.

Freds sat down beside me and began to show me the contents of his pack. “I got our butt pads, the stove, a pot, some soup and lemon mix, a good supply of food, and here’s my snow shovel so we can bivvy somewhere. Everything we need.”

“No.”

“Looky here, George.” Freds pulled off his goggles and stared me in the eye. “It was nice to bury Mallory and all, but I have to tell you that Kunga Norbu Lama and I have had what you’d call anulterior motive all along here. We joined the Brits on the Lingtren climb because I had heard about this Mallory expedition from the north side, and I was planning all along to tell them about it, and show them our photo, and tell them that Kunga was the guy who saw Mallory’s body back in 1980, and suggest that they go hide him.”

“You mean Kunga wasn’t the one who saw Mallory’s body?” I said.

“No, he wasn’t. I made that up. The Chinese climber who saw a body up here was killed a couple years later. So I just had Kunga circle the general area where I heard the Chinese saw him. That’s why I was so surprised when we actually ran across the guy! Although it stands to reason when you look at the North Face—there isn’t anywhere else but the Black Band that would have stopped him.

“Anyway I lied about that, and I also suggested we slip up the Hornbein Couloir and find the body when Arnold started tailing the Brits—and all of that was because I was just hoping we’d get into this situation, where we got the time and the weather to shoot for the top, we were both just hoping for it man and here we are. We got everything planned, Kunga and I have worked it all out—we’ve got all the stuff we need, and if we have to bivvy on the South Summit after we bag the peak, then we can descend by way of the Southeast Ridge and meet the Indian Army team in the South Col, and get escorted back to Base Camp, that’s the yak route and won’t be any problem.”

He took a few deep breaths. “Plus, well, listen. Kunga Lama has got mystic reasons for wanting to go up there, having to do with his longtime guru Tilopa Lama. Remember I told you back in Chimoa how Tilopa had set a task for Kunga Norbu, that Kunga had to accomplish before the monastery at Kum-Bum would be rebuilt, and Kunga set free to be his own lama at last? Well—the task was to climb Chomolungma! That old son of a gun said to Kunga, you just climb Chomolungma and everything’ll be fine! Figuring that meant that he would have a disciple for just as many re-incarnations as he would ever go through this side of nirvana. But he didn’t count on Kunga Norbu teaming up with his old student Freds Fredericks, and his buddy George Fergusson!”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I can see you feel very deeply about this, Freds, and I respect that, but I’m not going.”

“We need you along, George! Besides, we’re going to do it, and we can’t really leave you to go back down the West Ridge by yourself—that’d be more dangerous than coming along with us! And we’re going to the peak, so you have to come along, it’s that simple!”

Freds had been talking so fast and hard that he was completely out of breath; he waved a hand at Kunga Norbu. “You talk to him,” he said to Kunga, then switched to Tibetan, no doubt to repeat the message.

Kunga Norbu pulled up his snow goggles, and very serenely he looked at me. He looked just a little sad; it was the sort of expression you might get if you refused to give to the United Way. His black eyes looked right through me just as they always did, and in that high-altitude glare his pupils kind of pulsed in and out, in and out, in and out. And damned if that old bastard didn’t hypnotize me. I think.

But I struggled against it. I found myself putting on my pack, and checking my crampons to make sure they were really, really, really tight, and at the same time I was shouting at Freds. “Freds, be reasonable! No one climbs Everest unsupported like this! It’s too dangerous!”

“Hey, Messner did it. Messner climbed it in two days from North Colby himself, all he had was his girlfriend waiting down at base camp.”

“You can’t use Reinhold Messner as an example,” I cried. “Messner is cuckoo.”

“Nah. He’s just tough and fast. And so are we. It won’t be a problem.”

“Freds, climbing Everest is generally considered a problem.” But Kunga Norbu had put on his pack and was starting up the slope above our campsite, and Freds was following him, and I was following Freds. “For one big problem,” I yelled, “we don’t have any oxygen!”

“People climb it without oxygen all the time now.”

“Yeah, but you pay the price. You don’t get enough oxygen up there, and it kills brain cells like you can’t believe! If we go up there we’re certain to lose millions of brain cells.”

“So?” He couldn’t see the basis of the objection.

I groaned. We continued up the slope.

XIV

And that is how I found myself climbing Mount Everest with a Tibetan tulku and the wild man of Arkansas. It was not a position that a reasonable person could defend to himself, and indeed as I trudged after Freds and Kunga I could scarcely believe it was happening. But every labored breath told me it was. And since it was, I decided I had better psych myself into the proper frame of mind for it, or else it would only be that much more dangerous. “Always wanted to do this,” I said, banishing the powerful impression that I had been hypnotized into the whole deal. “We’re climbing Everest, and I really want to.”

“That’s the attitude,” Freds said.

I ignored him and kept thinking the phrase “I want to do this,” once for every two steps. After a few hundred steps, I had to admit that I had myself somewhat convinced. I mean, Everest! Think about it! I suppose that like anyone else, I had the fantasy in there somewhere.

I won’t bother you with the details of our route; if you want them you can consult my anonymous article in the American Alpine Journal, 1986 issue. Actually it was fairly straightforward; we contoured up from the Hornbein Couloir to the upper West Ridge, and continued from there.

I did this in bursts of ten steps at a time; the altitude was finally beginning to hammer me. I acclimatize as well as anyone I know, but nobody acclimatizes over 26,000 feet. It’s just a matter of how fast you wind down.

“Try to go as slow as you need to, and avoid rests,” Freds advised.

“I’m going as slow as I can already.”

“No you’re not. Try to just flow uphill. Really put it into first gear. You fall into a certain rhythm.”

“All right. I’ll try.”

We were seated at this point to take off our crampons, which were unnecessary. Freds had been right about the ease of the climb up here. The ridge was wide, it wasn’t very steep, and it was all broken up, so that irregular rock staircases were everywhere on it. If it were at sea level you could run up it, literally. It was so easy that I could try Freds’s suggestion, and I followed him and Kunga up the ridge in slow-slow motion. At that rate I could go about five or ten minutes between rests—it’s hard to be sure how long, as each interval seemed like an afternoon on its own.

But with each stop we were a little higher. There was no denying the West Ridge had a first-class view: to our right all the mountains of Nepal, to our left all the mountains of Tibet, and you could throw in Sikkim and Bhutan for change. Mountains everywhere: and all of them below us. The only thing still above us was the pyramid of Everest’s final summit, standing brilliant white against a black blue sky.

At each rest stop I found Kunga Norbu was humming a strange Buddhist chant; he was looking happier and happier in a subtle sort of way, while Fred’s grin got wider and wider. “Can you believe how perfect the day is? Beautiful, huh?”

“Uh huh.” It was nice, all right. But I was too tired to enjoy it. Some of their energy poured into me at each stop, and that was a good thing, because they were really going strong, and I needed the help.

Finally the ridge became snow-covered again, and we had to sit down and put our crampons back on. I found this usually simple process almost more than I could handle. My hands left pink afterimages in the air, and I hissed and grunted at each pull on the straps. When I finished and stood, I almost keeled over. The rocks swam, and even with my goggles on the snow was painfully white.

“Last bit,” Freds said as we looked up the slope. We crunched into it, and our crampons spiked down into firm snow. Kunga took off at an unbelievable pace. Freds and I marched up side by side, sharing a pace to take some of the mental effort out of it.

Freds wanted to talk, even though he had no breath to spare. “Old Tilopa Lama. Going to be. Mighty surprised. When they start rebuilding Kum-Bum. Ha!”

I nodded as if I believed in the whole story. This was an exaggeration, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but to put one foot in front of the other, in blazing white snow.

I have read that Everest stands just at the edge of the possible, as far as climbing it without oxygen goes. The scientific team that concluded this, after a climb in which air and breath samples were taken, actually decided that theoretically it wasn’t possible at all. Sort of a bumblebee’s flight situation. One scientist speculated that if Everest were just a couple hundred feet taller, then it really couldn’t be done.

I believe that. Certainly the last few steps up that snow pyramid were the toughest I ever took. My breath heaved in and out of me in useless gasps, and I could hear the brain cells popping off by the thousands, snap crackle pop. We were nearing the peak, a triangular dome of pure snow; but I had to slow down.

Kunga forged on ahead of us, picking up speed in the last approach. Looking down at the snow, I lost sight of him. Then his boots came into my field of vision, and I realized we were there, just a couple steps below the top.

The actual summit was a ridged mound of snow about eight feet long and four feet wide. It wasn’t a pinnacle, but it wasn’t a broad hilltop either; you wouldn’t have wanted to dance on it.

“Well,” I said. “Here we are.” I couldn’t get excited about it. “Too bad I didn’t bring a camera.” The truth was, I didn’t feel a thing.

Beside me Freds stirred. He tapped my arm, gestured up at Kunga Norbu. We were still below him, with our heads at about the level of his boots. He was humming, and had his arms extended up and out, as if conducting a symphony out to the east. I looked in that direction. By this time it was late afternoon, and Everest’s shadow extended to the horizon, even above. There must have been ice particles in the air to the east, because all of a sudden above the darkness of Everest’s shadow I saw a big icebow. It was almost a complete circle of color, much more diaphanous than a rainbow, cut off at the bottom by the mountain’s triangular shadow.

Inside this round bow of faint color, on the top of the dark air of the shadow peak, there was a cross of light-haloed shadow. It was a Spectre of the Brocken phenomenon, caused when low sunlight throws the shadows of peaks and climbers onto moisture-filled air, creating a glory of light around the shadows. I had seen one before.

Then Kunga Norbu flicked his hands to the sides, and the whole vision disappeared, instantly.

“Whoah,” I said.

“Right on,” Freds murmured, and led me the last painful steps onto the peak itself, so that we stood beside Kunga Norbu. His head was thrown back, and on his face was a smile of pure, child-like bliss.

Now, I don’t know what really happened up there. Maybe I went faint and saw colors for a moment, thought it was an icebow, and then blinked things clear. But I know that at that moment, looking at Kunga Norbu’s transfigured face, I was quite sure that I had seen him gain his freedom, and paint it out there in the sky. The task was fulfilled, the arms thrown wide with joy . . . I believed all of it. I swallowed, a sudden lump in my throat.

Now I felt it too; I felt where we were. We had climbed Chomolungma. We were standing on the peak of the world.

Freds heaved his breath in and out a few times. “Well!” he said, and shook mittened hands with Kunga and me. “We did it!” And then we pounded each other on the back until we almost knocked ourselves off the mountain.

XV

We hadn’t been up there long when I began to consider the problem of getting down. There wasn’t much left of the day, and we were a long way from anywhere homey. “What now?”

“I think we’d better go down to the South Summit and dig a snow cave for the night. That’s the closest place we can do it, and that’s what Haston and Scott did in ’75. It worked for them, and a couple other groups too.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s do it.”

Freds said something to Kunga, and we started down. Immediately I found that the Southeast Ridge was not as broad or as gradual as the West Ridge. In fact we were descending a kind of snow-covered knife edge, with ugly gray rocks sticking out of it. So this was the yak route! It was a tough hour’s work to get down to the South Summit, and the only thing that made it possible was the fact that we were going downhill all the way.

The South Summit is a big jog in the Southeast Ridge, which makes for a lump of a subsidiary peak, and a flat area. Here we had a broad sloping expanse of very deep, packed snow—perfect conditions for a snow cave.

Freds got his little aluminum shovel out of his pack and went to it, digging like a dog after a bone. I was content to sit and consult. Kunga Norbu stood staring around at the infinite expanse of peaks, looking a little dazed. Once or twice I summoned up the energy to spell Freds. After a body-sized entryway, we only wanted a cave big enough for the three of us to fit in. It looked a bit like a coffin for triplets.

The sun set, stars came out, the twilight turned midnight blue; then it was night. And seriously, seriously cold. Freds declared the cave ready and I crawled in after him and Kunga, feeling granules of snow crunch under me. We banged heads and got arranged on our butt pads so that we were sitting in a little circle, on a rough shelf above our entrance tunnel, in a roughly spherical chamber. By slouching I got an inch’s clearance above. “All right,” Freds said wearily. “Let’s party.” He took the stove from his pack, held it in his mittens for a while to warm the gas inside, then set it on the snow in the middle of the three of us, and lit it with his lighter. The blue glare was blinding, the roar deafening. We took off our mitts and cupped our hands so there was no gap between flame and flesh. Our cave began to warm up a little.

You may think it odd that a snow cave can warm up at all, but remember we are speaking relatively here. Outside it was dropping to about 10 below 0, Fahrenheit. Add any kind of wind and at that altitude, where oxygen is so scarce, you’ll die. Inside the cave, however, there was no wind. Snow itself is not that cold, and it’s a great insulator: it will warm up, even begin to get slick on its surface, and that water also holds heat very well. Add a stove raging away, and three bodies struggling to pump out their 98.6, and even with a hole connecting you to outside air, you can get the temperature well up into the 30s. That’s colder than a refrigerator, but compared to 10 below it’s beach weather.

So we were happy in our little cave, at first. Freds scraped some of the wall into his pot and cooked some hot lemon drink. He offered me some almonds, but I had no appetite whatsoever; eating an almond was the same as eating a coffee table to me. We were all dying for drink, though, and we drank the lemon mix when it was boiling, which at this elevation was just about bath temperature. It tasted like heaven.

We kept melting snow and drinking it until the stove sputtered and ran out of fuel. Only a couple of hours had passed, at most. I sat there in the pitch dark, feeling the temperature drop. My spirits dropped with it.

But Freds was by no means done with the party. His lighter scraped and by its light I saw him punch a hole in the wall and set a candle in it. He lit the candle, and its light reflected off the slick white sides of our home. He had a brief discussion with Kunga Norbu.

“Okay,” he said to me at the end of it, breath cascading whitely into the air. “Kunga is going to do some tumo now.”

“Tumo?”

“Means, the art of warming oneself without fire up in the snows.”

That caught my interest. “Another lama talent?”

“You bet. It comes in handy for naked hermits in the winter.”

“I can see that. Tell him to lay it on us.”

With some crashing about Kunga got in the lotus position, an impressive feat with his big snow boots still on.

He took his mitts off, and we did the same. Then he began breathing in a regular, deep rhythm, staring at nothing. This went on for almost half an hour, and I was beginning to think we would all freeze before he warmed up, when he held his hands out toward Freds and me. We took them in our own.

They were as hot as if he had a terrible fever. Fearfully I reached up to touch his face—it was warm, but nothing like his hands. “My Lord,” I said.

“We can help him now,” Freds said softly. “You have to concentrate, harness the energy that’s always inside you. Every breath out you push away pride, anger, hatred, envy, sloth, stupidity. Every breath in, you take in Buddha’s spirit, the five wisdoms, everything good. When you’ve gotten clear and calm, imagine a golden lotus in your belly button . . . Okay? In that lotus you imagine the syllableram, which means fire. Then you have to see a little seed of flame, the size of a goat dropping, appearing in the ram. Every breath after that is like a bellows, fanning that flame, which travels through the tsas in the body, the mystic nerves. Imagine this process in five stages. First, the uma tsa is seen as a hair of fire, up your spine more or less . . . Two, the nerve is as big around as your little finger . . . Three, it’s the size of an arm . . . Four, the body becomes the tsa itself and is perceived as a tube of fire . . . Five, the tsa engulfs the world, and you’re just one flame in a sea of fire.”

“My Lord.”

We sat there holding Kunga Norbu’s fiery hands, and I imagined myself a tube of fire: and the warmth poured into me—up my arms, through my torso—it even thawed my frozen butt, and my feet. I stared at Kunga Norbu, and he stared right though the wall of our cave to eternity, or wherever, his eyes glowing faintly in the candlelight. It was weird.

I don’t know how long this went on—it seemed endless, although I suppose it was no more than an hour or so. But then it broke off—Kunga’s hand cooled, and so did the rest of us. He blinked several times and shook his head.

He spoke to Freds.

“Well,” Freds said. “That’s about as long as he can hold it, these days.”

“What?”

“Well . . .” He clucked his tongue regretfully. “It’s like this. Tulkus tend to lose their powers, over the course of several incarnations. It’s like they lose something in the process, every time, like when you keep making a tape from copies or whatever. There’s a name for it.”

“Transmission error,” I said.

“Right. Well, it gets them too. In fact you run into a lot of tulkus in Tibet who are complete morons. Kunga is better than that, but he is a bit like Paul Revere. A little light in the belfry, you know. A great lama, and a super guy, but not tremendously powerful at any of the mystic disciplines, any more.”

“Too bad.”

“I know.”

I recalled Kunga’s fiery hands, their heat pronging into me. “So . . . he really is a tulku, isn’t he.”

“Oh yeah! Of course! And now he’s free of old Tilopa, too—a lama in his own right, and nobody’s disciple. It must be a great feeling.”

“I bet. So how does it work again, exactly?”

“Becoming a tulku?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s a matter of concentrating your mental powers. Tibetans believe that none of this is supernatural, but just a focusing of natural powers that we all have. Tulkus have gotten their psychic energies incredibly focused, and when you’re at that stage, you can leave your body whenever you want. Why if Kunga wanted to, he could die in about ten seconds.”

“Useful.”

“Yeah. So when they decide to go, they hop off into the Bardo. The Bardo is the other world, the world of spirit, and it’s a confusing place—talk about hallucinations! First a light like God’s camera flash goes off in your face. Then it’s just a bunch of colored paths, apparitions, everything. When Kunga describes it it’s really scary. Now if you’re just an ordinary spirit, then you can get disoriented, and be reborn as a slug or a game show host or anything. But if you stay focused, you’re reborn in the body you choose, and you go on from there.”

I nodded dully. I was tired, and cold, and the lack of oxygen was making me stupid and spacy; I couldn’t make sense of Freds’s explanations, although it may be that that would have happened anywhere.

We sat there. Kunga hummed to himself. It got colder.

The candle guttered, then went out.

It was dark. It continued to get colder.

After a while there was nothing but the darkness, our breathing, and the cold. I couldn’t feel my butt or my legs below the knee. I knew I was waiting for something, but I had forgotten what it was. Freds stirred, started speaking Tibetan with Kunga. They seemed a long way away. They spoke to people I couldn’t see. For a while Freds jostled about, punching the sides of the cave. Kunga shouted out hoarsely, things like “Hak!” and “Phut!”

“What are you doing?” I roused myself to say.

“We’re fighting off demons,” Freds explained.

I was ready to conclude, by watching my companions, that lack of oxygen drove one nuts; but what was my basis for comparison? My sample was skewed.

Some indeterminate time later Freds started shoveling snow out of the tunnel. “Casting out demons?” I inquired.

“No, trying to get warm. Want to try it?”

I didn’t have the energy to move.

Then he shook me from side to side, switched to English, told me stories. Story after story, in a dry, hoarse, frog’s voice. I didn’t understand any of them. I had to concentrate on fighting the cold. On breathing. Freds became agitated, he told me a story of Kunga’s, something about running across Tibet with a friend, a lung-gom-pa test of some kind, and the friend was wearing chains to keep from floating away entirely. Then something about running into a young husband at night, dropping the chains in a campfire . . . “The porters knew about lung-gom, and the next morning they must have tried to explain it to the British. Can you imagine it? Porters trying to explain these chains come out of nowhere . . . explaining they were used by people running across Tibet, to keep from going orbital? Man, those Brits must’ve thought they were invading Oz. Don’t you think so? Hey, George? George? . . . George?”

XVI

But finally the night passed, and I was still there.

We crawled out of our cave in the pre-dawn light, and stamped our feet until some sensation came back into them, feeling pretty pleased with ourselves. “Good morning!” Kunga Norbu said to me politely. He was right about that. There were high cirrus clouds going pink above us, and an ocean of blue cloud far below in Nepal, with all the higher white peaks poking out of it like islands, and slowly turning pink themselves. I’ve never seen a more otherwordly sight; it was as if we had climbed out of our cave onto the side of another planet.

“Maybe we should just shoot down to the South Col and join those Indian Army guys,” Freds croaked. “I don’t much feel like going back up to the peak to get to the West Ridge.”

“You aren’t kidding,” I said.

So down the Southeast Ridge we went.

Now Peter Habeler, Messner’s partner on the first oxygenless ascent of Everest in 1979, plunged down this ridge from the summit to the South Col in one hour. He was worried about brain damage; my feeling is that the speed of his descent is evidence it had already occurred. We went as fast as we could, which was pretty alarmingly fast, and it still took us almost three hours. One step after another, down a steep snowy ridge. I refused to look at the severe drops to right and left. The clouds below were swelling up like the tide in the Bay of Fundy; our good weather was about to end.

I felt completely disconnected from my body, I just watched it do its thing. Below Freds kept singing “Close to the Edge.” We came to a big snow-filled gully and glissaded down it carelessly, sliding twenty or thirty feet with each dreamy step. All three of us were staggering by this point. Cloud poured up the Western Cwm, and mist magically appeared all around us, but we were just above the South Col by this time, and it didn’t matter.

I saw there was a camp in the col, and breathed a sigh of relief. We would have been goners without it.

The Indians were still securing their tents as we walked up. A week’s perfect weather, and they had just gotten into the South Col. Very slow, I thought as we approached. Siege-style assault, logistical pyramid, play it safe—slow as building the other kind of pyramid.

As we crossed the col and closed on the tents, navigating between piles of junk from previous expeditions, I began to worry. You see, the Indian Army has had incredible bad luck on Everest. They have tried to climb it several times, and so far as I know, they’ve never succeeded. Mostly this is because of storms, but people tend to ignore that, and the Indians have come in for a bit of criticism from the climbing community in Nepal. In fact they’ve been called terrible climbers. So they are a little touchy about this, and it was occurring to me, very slowly, that they might not be too amused to be greeted in the South Col by three individuals who had just bagged the peak on an overnighter from the north side.

Then one of them saw us. He dropped the mallet in his hand.

“Hi there!” Freds croaked.

A group of them quickly gathered around us. The wind was beginning to blow hard, and we all stood at an angle into it. The oldest Indian there, probably a major, shouted gruffly, “Who are you!”

“We’re lost,” Freds said. “We need help.”

Ah, good, I thought. Freds has also thought of this problem. He won’t tell them where we’ve been. Freds is still thinking. He will take care of this situation for us.

“Where did you come from?” the major boomed.

Freds gestured down the Western Cwm. Good, I thought. “Our Sherpas told us to keep turning right. So ever since Jomosom we have been.”

“Where did you say!”

“Jomosom!”

The major drew himself up. “Jomosom,” he said sharply, “is in western Nepal.”

“Oh,” Freds said.

And we all stood there. Apparently that was it for Freds’s explanation.

I elbowed him aside. “The truth is, we thought it would be fun to help you. We didn’t know what we were getting into.”

“Yeah!” Freds said, accepting this new tack thankfully. “Can we carry a load down for you, maybe?”

“We are still climbing the mountain!” the major barked. “We don’t need loads carried down!” He gestured at the ridge behind us, which was disappearing in mist. “This is Everest!”

Freds squinted at him. “You’re kidding.”

I elbowed him. “We need help,” I said.

The major looked at us closely. “Get in the tent,” he said at last.

XVII

Well, eventually I concocted a semi-consistent story about us idealistically wanting to porter loads for an Everest expedition, although who would be so stupid as to want to do that I don’t know. Freds was no help at all—he kept forgetting and going back to his first story, saying things like, “We must have gotten on the wrong plane.” And neither of us could fit Kunga Norbu into our story very well; I claimed he was our guide, but we didn’t understand his language. He very wisely stayed mute.

Despite all that, the Indian team fed us and gave us water to slake our raging thirst, and they escorted us back down their fixed ropes to the camps below, to make sure they got us out of there. Over the next couple of days they led us all the way down the Western Cwm and the Khumbu Icefall to Base Camp. I wish I could give you a blow-by-blow account of the fabled Khumbu Icefall, but the truth is I barely remember it. It was big and white and scary; I was tired. That’s all I know. And then we were in their base camp, and I knew it was over. First illegal ascent of Everest.

XVIII

Well, after what we had been through, Gorak Shep looked like Ireland, and Pheriche looked like Hawaii. And the air was oxygen soup.

We kept asking after the Brits and Arnold and Laure, and kept hearing that they were a day or so below us. From the sound of it the Brits were chasing Arnold, who was managing by extreme efforts to stay ahead of them. So we hurried after them.

On our way down, however, we stopped at the Pengboche Monastery, a dark brooding old place in a little nest of black pine trees, supposed to be the chin whiskers of the first abbot. There we left Kunga Norbu, who was looking pretty beat. The monks at the monastery made a big to-do over him. He and Freds had an emotional parting, and he gave me a big grin as he bored me through one last time with that spacy black gaze. “Good morning!” he said, and we were off.

So Freds and I tromped down to Namche, which reminded me strongly of Manhattan, and found our friends had just left for Lukla, still chasing Arnold. Below Namche we really hustled to catch up with them, but we didn’t succeed until we reached Lukla itself. And then we only caught the Brits—because they were standing there by the Lukla airstrip, watching the last plane of the day hum down the tilted grass and ski jump out over the deep gorge of the Dudh Kosi—while Arnold McConnell, we quickly found out, was on that plane, having paid a legitimate passenger a fat stack of rupees to replace him. Arnold’s Sherpa companions were lining the strip and waving good-bye to him; they had all earned about a year’s wages in this one climb, it turned out, and they were pretty fond of old Arnold.

The Brits were not. In fact they were fuming.

“Where have you been?” Trevor demanded.

“Well . . .” we said.

“We went to the top,” Freds said apologetically. “Kunga had to for religious reasons.”

“Well,” Trevor said huffily. “We considered it ourselves, but we had to chase your client back down the mountain to try and get his film. The film that will get us all kicked out of Nepal for good if it’s ever shown.”

“Better get used to it,” Mad Tom said gloomily. “He’s off to Kathmandu, and we’re not. We’ll never catch him now.”

Now the view from Lukla is nothing extraordinary, compared to what you can see higher up; but there are the giant green walls of the gorge, and to the north you can see a single scrap of the tall white peaks beyond; and to look at all that, and think you might never be allowed to see it again. . . .

I pointed to the south. “Maybe we just got lucky.”

“What?”

Freds laughed. “Choppers! Incoming! Some trekking outfit has hired helicopters to bring its group in.”

It was true. This is fairly common practice, I’ve done it myself many times. RNAC’s daily flights to Lukla can’t fulfill the need during the peak trekking season, so the Nepali Air Force kindly rents out its helicopters, at exorbitant fees. Naturally they prefer not to go back empty, and they’ll take whoever will pay. Often, as on this day, there is a whole crowd clamoring to pay to go back, and the competition is fierce, although I for one am unable to understand what people are so anxious to get back to.

Anyway, this day was like most of them, and there was a whole crowd of trekkers sitting around on the unloading field by the airstrip, negotiating with the various Sherpa and Sherpani power brokers who run the airport and get people onto flights. The hierarchy among these half-dozen power brokers is completely obscure, even to them, and on this day as always each of them had a list of people who had paid up to a hundred dollars for a lift out; and until the brokers discussed it with the helicopter crew, no one knew who was going to be the privileged broker given the go-ahead to march his clients on board. The crowd found this protocol ambiguous at best, and they were milling about and shouting ugly things at their brokers as the helicopters were sighted.

So this was not a good situation for us, because although we were desperate, everyone else wanting a lift claimed to be desperate also, and no one was going to volunteer to give up their places. Just before the two Puma choppers made their loud and windy landing, however, I saw Heather on the unloading field, and I ran over and discovered that she had gotten our expedition booked in with Pemba Sherpa, one of the most powerful brokers there. “Good work, Heather!” I cried. Quickly I explained to her some aspects of the situation, and looking wide-eyed at us—we were considerably filthier and more sunburnt than when we last saw her—she nodded her understanding.

And sure enough, in the chaos of trekkers milling about the choppers, in all that moaning and groaning and screaming and shouting to be let on board, it was Pemba who prevailed over the other brokers. And Want To Take You Higher Ltd.’s “Video Expedition to Everest Base Camp”—with the addition of four British climbers and an American—climbed on board the two vehicles, cheering all the way. With a thukka thukka thukka we were off.

“Now how will we find him in Kathmandu?” Marion said over the noise.

“He won’t be expecting you,” I said. “He thinks he’s on the last flight of the day. So I’d start at the Kathmandu Guest House, where we were staying, and see if you can find him there.”

The Brits nodded, looking grim as commandos. Arnold was in trouble.

XIX

We landed at the Kathmandu airport an hour later, and the Brits zipped out and hired a taxi immediately. Freds and I hired another one and tried to keep up, but the Brits must have been paying their driver triple, because that little Toyota took off over the dirt roads between the airport and the city like it was in a motorcross race. So we fell behind, and by the time we were let off in the courtyard of the Kathmandu Guest House, their taxi was already gone. We paid our driver and walked in and asked one of the snooty clerks for Arnold’s room number, and when he gave it to us we hustled on up to the room, on the third floor overlooking the back garden.

We got there in the middle of the action. John and Mad Tom and Trevor had Arnold trapped on a bed in the corner, and they were standing over him not letting him go anywhere. Marion was on the other side of the room doing the actual demolition, taking up video cassettes one at a time and stomping them under her boot. There was a lot of yelling going on, mostly from Marion and Arnold. “That’s the one of me taking my bath,” Marion said. “And that’s the one of me changing my shirt in my tent. And that’s the one of me taking a pee at eight thousand meters!” and so on, while Arnold was shouting “No, no!” and “Not that one, my God!” and “I’ll sue you in every court in Nepal!”

“Foreign nationals can’t sue each other in Nepal,” Mad Tom told him.

But Arnold continued to shout and threaten and moan, his sun-torched face going incandescent, his much-reduced body bouncing up and down on the bed, his big round eyes popping out till I was afraid they would burst, or fall down on springs. He picked up the fresh cigar that had fallen from his mouth and threw it between Trevor and John, hitting Marion in the chest.

“Molester,” she said, dusting her hands with satisfaction. “That’s all of them, then.” She began to stuff the wreckage of plastic and videotape into a daypack. “And we’ll take this along, too, thank you very much.”

“Thief,” Arnold croaked.

The three guys moved away from him. Arnold sat there on the bed, frozen, staring at Marion with a stricken, bug-eyed expression. He looked like a ballon with a pinprick in it.

“Sorry, Arnold,” Trevor said. “But you brought this on yourself, as you must admit. We told you all along we didn’t want to be filmed.”

Arnold stared at them speechlessly.

“Well, then,” Trevor said. “That’s that.” And they left.

Freds and I watched Arnold sit there. Slowly his eyes receded back to their usual pop-eyed position, but he still looked disconsolate.

“Them Brits are tough,” Freds offered. “They’re not real sentimental people.”

“Come on, Arnold,” I said. Now that he was no longer my responsibility, now that we were back, and I’d never have to see him again—now that it was certain his videotape, which could have had Freds and me in as much hot water as the Brits, was destroyed—I felt a little bit sorry for him. Just a little bit. It was clear from his appearance that he had really gone through a lot to get that tape. Besides, I was starving. “Come on, let’s all get showered and shaved and cleaned up, and then I’ll take you out to dinner.”

“Me too,” said Freds.

Arnold nodded mutely.

XX

Kathmandu is a funny city. When you first arrive there from the West, it seems like the most ramshackle and unsanitary place imaginable: the buildings are poorly constructed of old brick, and there are weed patches growing out of the roofs; the hotel rooms are bare pits; all the food you can find tastes like cardboard, and often makes you sick; and there are sewage heaps here and there in the mud streets, where dogs and cows are scavenging. It really seems primitive.

Then you go out for a month or two in the mountains, or a trek or a climb. And when you return to Kathmandu, the place is utterly transformed. The only likely explanation is that while you were gone they took the city away and replaced it with one that looks the same on the outside, but is completely different in substance. The accommodations are luxurious beyond belief; the food is superb; the people look prosperous, and their city seems a marvel of architectural sophistication. Kathmandu! What a metropolis!

So it seemed to Freds and me, as we checked into my home away from home, the Hotel Star. As I sat on the floor under the waist-high tap of steaming hot water that emerged from my shower, I found myself giggling in mindless rapture, and from the next room I could hear Freds bellowing the old 50s rocker, “Going to Katmandu.”

An hour later, hair wet, faces chopped up, skin all prune-shriveled, we met Arnold out in the street and walked through the Thamel evening. “We look like coatracks!” Freds observed. Our city clothes were hanging on us. Freds and I had each lost about twenty pounds, Arnold about thirty. And it wasn’t just fat, either. Everything wastes away at altitude. “We’d better get to the Old Vienna and put some of it back on.”

I started salivating at the very thought of it.

So we went to the Old Vienna Inn, and relaxed in the warm steamy atmosphere of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After big servings of goulash, schnitzel Parisienne, and apple strudel with whipped cream, we sat back sated. Sensory overload. Even Arnold was looking up a little. He had been quiet through the meal, but then again we all had, being busy.

We ordered a bottle of rakshi, which is a potent local beverage of indeterminate origin. When it came we began drinking.

Freds said, “Hey, Arnold, you’re looking better.”

“Yeah, I don’t feel so bad.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin streaked all red; we had all split our sun-destroyed lips more than once, trying to shovel the food in too fast. He got set to start the slow process of eating another cigar, unwrapping one very slowly. “Not so bad at all.” And then he grinned; he couldn’t help himself; he grinned so wide that he had to grab the napkin and staunch the flow from his lips again.

“Well, it’s a shame those guys stomped your movie,” Freds said.

“Yeah, well.” Arnold waved an arm expansively. “That’s life.”

I was amazed. “Arnold, I can’t believe this is you talking. Here those guys took your videotape of all that suffering you just put us through, and they stomp it, and you say, “That’s life?”

He took a long hit of the rakshi. “Well,” he said, waggling his eyebrows up and down fiendishly. He leaned over the table toward us. “They got one copy of it, anyway.”

Freds and I looked at each other.

“Couple hundred dollars of tape there that they crunched. I suppose I ought to bill them for it. But I’m a generous guy; I let it pass.”

“One copy?” I said.

“Yeah.” He tipped his head. “Did you see that box, kind of like a suitcase, there in the corner of my room at the Guesthouse?”

We shook our heads.

“Neither did the Brits. Not that they would have recognized it. It’s a video splicer, mainly. But a copier too. You stick a cassette in there and push a button and it copies the cassette for storage, and then you can do all your splicing off the master. You make your final tape that way. Great machine. Most freelance video people have them now, and these portable babies are really the latest. Saved my ass, in this case.”

“Arnold,” I said. “You’re going to get those guys in trouble! And us too!”

“Hey,” he warned, “I’ve got the splicer under lock and key, so don’t get any ideas.”

“Well you’re going to get us banned from Nepal for good!”

“Nah. I’ll give you all stage names. You got any preferences along those lines?”

“Arnold!” I protested.

“Hey, listen,” he said, and drank more rakshi. “Most of that climb was in Tibet, right? Chinese aren’t going to be worrying about it. Besides, you know the Nepali Ministry of Tourism—can you really tell me they’ll ever get it together to even see my film, much less take names from it and track those folks down when they next apply for a visa? Get serious!”

“Hmm,” I said, consulting with my rakshi.

“So what’d you get?” Freds asked.

“Everything. I got some good long-distance work of you guys finding the body up there—ha!—you thought I didn’t get that, right? I tell you I was filming your thoughts up there! I got that, and then the Brits climbing on the ridge—everything. I’m gonna make stars of you all.”

Freds and I exchanged a relieved glance. “Remember about the stage names,” I said.

“Sure. And after I edit it you won’t be able to tell where on the mountain the body was, and with the names and all, I really think Marion and the rest will love it. Don’t you? They were just being shy. Old fashioned! I’m going to send them all prints of the final product, and they’re gonna love it. Marion in particular. She’s gonna look beautiful.” He waved the cigar and a look of cowlike yearning disfigured his face. “In fact, tell you a little secret, I’m gonna accompany that particular print in person, and make it part of my proposal to her. I think she’s kind of fond of me, and I bet you anything she’ll agree to marry me when she sees it, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” Freds said. “Why not?” He considered it. “Or if not in this life, then in the next.”

Arnold gave him an odd look. “I’m going to ask her along on my next trip, which looks like it’ll be China and Tibet. You know how the Chinese have been easing up on the Tibetan religions lately? Well, the clerk at the Guest House gave me a telegram on my way out—my agent tells me that the authorities in Lhasa have decided they’re going to rebuild a whole bunch of Buddhist monasteries that they tore down during the Cultural Revolution, and it looks like I’ll be allowed to film some of it. That should make for a real heart-string basher, and I bet Marion would love to see it, don’t you?”

Freds and I grinned at each other. “I’d love to see it,” Freds declared. “Here’s to the monasteries, and a free Tibet!”

We toasted the idea, and ordered another bottle.

Arnold waved his cigar. “Meanwhile, this Mallory stuff is dynamite. It’s gonna make a hell of a movie.”

XXI

Which is why I can tell you about this one—the need for secrecy is going to be blown right out the window as soon as they air Arnold’s film, Nine Against Everest: Seven Men, One Woman, and a Corpse. I hear both PBS and the BBC have gone for it, and it should be on any day now. Check local listings for times in your area.

DREAM BABY

Bruce McAllister

Dream Baby, got me dreamin sweet dreams
The whole day through.
Dream Baby, got me dreamin’ sweet dreams
The night time too.

—Cindy Walker

I don’t know whether I was for or against the war when I went. I joined and became a nurse to help. Isn’t that why everyone becomes a nurse? We’re told it’s a good thing, like being a teacher or a mother. What they don’t tell us is that sometimes you can’t help.

Our principal gets on the PA one day and tells us how all these boys across the country are going over there for us and getting killed or maimed. Then he tells us that Tony Fischetti and this other kid are dead, killed in action, Purple Hearts and everything. A lot of the girls start crying. I’m crying. I call the Army and tell them my grades are pretty good, I want to go to nursing school and then ‘Nam. They say fine, they’ll pay for it but I’m obligated if they do. I say it’s what I want. I don’t know if any other girls from school did it. I really didn’t care. I just thought somebody ought to.

I go down and sign up and my dad gets mad. He says I just want to be a whore or a lesbian, because that’s what people will think if I go. I say, “Is that what you and Mom think?” He almost hits me. Parents are like that. What other people think is more important than what they think, but you can’t tell them that.

I never saw a nurse in ‘Nam who was a whore and I only saw one or two who might have been butch. But that’s how people thought, back here in the States.

I grew up in Long Beach, California, a sailor town. Sometimes I forget that. Sometimes I forget I wore my hair in a flip and liked miniskirts and black pumps. Sometimes all I can remember is the hospitals.

I got stationed at Cam Ranh Bay, at the 23rd Medevac, for two months, then the 118th Field General in Saigon, then back to the 23rd. They weren’t supposed to move you around like that, but I got moved. That kind of thing happened all the time. Things just weren’t done by the book. At the 23rd we were put in a bunch of huts. It was right by the hospital compound, and we had the Navy on one side of us and the Air Force on the other side. We could hear the mortars all night and the next day we’d get to see what they’d done.

It began to get to me after about a week. That’s all it took. The big medevac choppers would land and the gurneys would come in. We were the ones who tried to keep them alive, and if they didn’t die on us, we’d send them on.

We’d be covered with blood and urine and everything else. We’d have a boy with no arms or no legs, or maybe his legs would be lying beside him on the gurney. We’d have guys with no faces. We’d have stomachs you could hold in your hands. We’d be slapping ringers and plasma into them. We’d have sump pumps going to get the secretions and blood out of them. We’d do this all day, day in and day out.

You’d put them in bags if they didn’t make it. You’d change dressings on stumps, and you had this deal with the corpsmen that every fourth day you’d clean the latrines for them if they’d change the dressings. They knew what it was like.

They’d bring in a boy with beautiful brown eyes and you’d just have a chance to look at him, to get a chest cut-down started for a subclavian catheter. He’d say, “Ma’am, am I all right?” and in forty seconds he’d be gone. He’s say “Oh, no” and he’d be gone. His blood would pool on the gurney right through the packs. Some wounds are so bad you can’t even plug them. The person just drains away.

You wanted to help but you couldn’t. All you could do was watch.

When the dreams started, I thought I was going crazy. It was about the fourth week and I couldn’t sleep. I’d close my eyes and think of trip wires. I’d think my bras and everything else had trip wires. I’d be on the john and hear a sound and think that someone was trip-wiring the latch so I’d lose my hands and face when I tried to leave.

I’d dream about wounds, different kinds, and then the next day there would be the wounds I’d dreamed about. I thought it was just coincidence. I’d seen a lot of wounds by then. Everyone was having nightmares. I’d dream about a sucking chest wound and a guy trying to scream, though he couldn’t, and the next day I’d have to suck out a chest and listen to a guy try to scream. I didn’t think much about it. I couldn’t sleep. That was the important thing. I knew I was going to go crazy if I couldn’t sleep.

Sometimes the dreams would have all the details. They’d bring in a guy that looked like someone had taken an icepick to his arms. His arms looked like frankfurters with holes punched in them. That’s what shrapnel looks like. You puff up and the bleeding stops. We all knew he was going to die. You can’t live through something like that. The system won’t take it. He knew he was going to die, but he wasn’t making a sound. His face had little holes in it, around his cheeks, and it looked like a catcher’s mitt. He had the most beautiful blue eyes, like glass. You know, like that dog, the weimer-something. I’d start shaking because he was in one of my dreams—those holes and his face and eyes. I’d shake for hours, but you couldn’t tell anybody about dreams like that.

The guy would die. There wasn’t anything I could do.

I didn’t understand it. I didn’t see a reason for the dreams. They just made it worse.

It got so I didn’t want to go to sleep because I didn’t want to have them. I didn’t want to wake up and have to worry about the dreams all day, wondering if they were going to happen. I didn’t want to have to shake all day, wondering.

I’d have this dream about a kid with a bad head wound and a phone call, and the next day they’d wheel in some kid who’d lost a lot of skull and brain and scalp, and the underlying brain would be infected. Then the word would get around that his father, who was a full-bird colonel stationed in Okie, had called and the kid’s mother and father would be coming to see him. We all hoped he died before they got there, and he did.

I’d had a dream about him. I’d even dreamed that we wanted him to die before his mom and dad got there, and he did, in the dream he did.

When he died I started screaming and this corpsman who’d been around for a week or two took me by the arm and got me to the john. I’d gotten sick but he held me like my mom would have and all I could do was think what a mess I was, how could he hold me when I was such a mess? I started crying and couldn’t stop. I knew everyone thought I was crazy, but I couldn’t stop.

After that things got worse. I’d see more than just a face or the wounds. I’d see where the guy lived, where his hometown was and who was going to cry for him if he died. I didn’t understand it at first—I didn’t even know it was happening. I’d just get pictures, like before, in the dream and they’d bring this guy in the next day or the day after that, and if he could talk, I’d find out that what I’d seen was true. This guy would be dying and not saying a thing and I’d remember him from the dream and I’d say, “You look like a Georgia boy to me.” If the morphine was working and he could talk, he’d say, “Who told you that, Lieutenant? All us brothers ain’t from Georgia.”

I’d make up something, like his voice or a good guess, and if I’d seen other things in the dream—like his girl or wife or mother—I’d tell him about those, too. He wouldn’t ask how I knew because it didn’t matter. How could it matter? He knew he was dying. They always know. I’d talk to him like I’d known him my whole life and he’d be gone in an hour, or by morning.

I had this dream about a commando type, dressed in tiger cammies, nobody saying a thing about him in the compound—spook stuff, Ibex, MAC SOG, something like that—and I could see his girlfriend in Australia. She had hair just like mine and her eyes were a little like mine and she loved him. She was going out with another guy that night, but she loved him, I could tell. In the dream they brought him into ER with the bottom half of him blown away.

The next morning, first thing, they wheeled this guy in and it was the dream all over again. He was blown apart from the waist down. He was delirious and trying to talk but his jaw wouldn’t work. He had tiger cammies on and we cut them off. I was the one who got him and everyone knew he wasn’t going to make it. As soon as I saw him I started shaking. I didn’t want to see him, I didn’t want to look at him. You really don’t know what it’s like, seeing someone like that and knowing. I didn’t want him to die. I never wanted any of them to die.

I said, “Your girl in Australia loves you—she really does.” He looked at me and his eyes had that look you get when morphine isn’t enough. I could tell he thought I looked like her. He couldn’t even see my hair under the cap and he knew I looked like her.

He grabbed my arm and his jaw started slipping and I knew what he wanted me to do. I always knew. I told him about her long black hair and the beaches in Australia and what the people were like there and what there was to do.

He thought I was going to stop talking, so he kept squeezing my arm. I told him what he and his girlfriend had done on a beach outside Melbourne, their favorite beach, and what they’d had to drink that night.

And then—this was the first time I’d done it with anyone—I told him what I’d do for him if I was his girlfriend and we were back in Australia. I said, “I’d wash you real good in the shower. I’d turn the lights down low and I’d put on some nice music. Then, if you were a little slow, I’d help you.”

It was what his girlfriend always did, I knew that. It wasn’t hard to say.

I kept talking, he kept holding my arm, and then he coded on me. They always did. I had a couple of minutes or hours and then they always coded on me, just like in the dreams.

I got good at it. The pictures got better and I could tell them what they wanted to hear and that made it easier. It wasn’t just faces and burns and stumps, it was things about them. I’d tell them what their girlfriends and wives would do if they were here. Sometimes it was sexual, sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes I’d just ruffle their hair with my hand and tell them what Colorado looked like in summer, or what the last Doors concert they’d been to was like, or what you could do after dark in Newark.

I start crying in the big room one day and this corpsman takes me by the arm and the next thing I know I’m sitting on the john and he’s got a needle in his hand, a 2% solution. He doesn’t want to see me hurting so much. I tell him no. Why, I don’t know. Every week or so I’d walk into the john and find somebody with a needle in their arm, but it wasn’t for me, I thought. People weren’t supposed to do that kind of thing. Junkies on the Pike back home did it—we all knew that—but not doctors and medics and nurses. It wasn’t right, I told myself.

I didn’t start until a couple of weeks later.

There’s this guy I want to tell you about. Steve—his name was Steve.

I come in one morning to the big ER room shaking so hard I can’t even put my cap on and thinking I should’ve gotten a needle already, and there’s this guy sitting over by a curtain. He’s in cammies, his head’s wrapped and he’s sitting up real straight. I can barely stand up, but here’s this guy looking like he’s hurting, so I say, “You want to lie down?”

He turns slowly to look at me and I don’t believe it. I know this guy from a dream, but I don’t see the dream clearly. Here’s this guy sitting in a chair in front of me unattended, like he could walk away any second, but I’ve had a dream about him, so I know he’s going to die.

He says he’s okay, he’s just here to see a buddy. But I’m not listening. I know everything about him. I know about his girlfriend and where he’s from and how his mom and dad didn’t raise him, but all I can think about is, he’s going to die. I’m thinking about the supply room and needles and how it wouldn’t take much to get it all over with.

I say, “Cathy misses you, Steve. She wishes you could go to the Branding Iron in Merced tonight, because that band you like is playing. She’s done something to her apartment and she wants to show it to you.”

He looks at me for a long time and his eyes aren’t like the others.

I don’t want to look back at him. I can see him anyway—in the dream. He’s real young. He’s got a nice body, good shoulders, and he’s got curly blond hair under those clean bandages. He’s got eyelashes like a girl, and I see him laughing. He laughs every chance he gets, I know.

Very quietly he says. “What’s your name?”

I guess I tell him, because he says, “Can you tell me what she looks like, Mary?”

Everything’s wrong. The guy doesn’t sound like he’s going to die. He’s looking at me like he understands.

I say something like “She’s tall.” I say, “She’s got blond hair,” but I can barely think.

Very gently he says, “What are her eyes like?”

I don’t know. I’m shaking so hard I can barely talk, I can barely remember the dream.

Suddenly I’m talking. “They’re green. She wears a lot of mascara, but she’s got dark eyebrows, so she isn’t really a blond, is she.”

He laughs and I jump. “No, she isn’t,” he says and he’s smiling. He takes my hand in his. I’m shaking badly but I let him, like I do the others. I don’t say a word.

I’m holding it in. I’m scared to death. I’m cold-turkeying and I’m letting him hold my hand because he’s going to die. But it’s not true. I dreamed about him, but in the dream he didn’t die. I know that now.

He squeezes my hand like we’ve known each other a long time and he says, “Do you do this for all of them?”

I don’t say a thing.

Real quietly he says, “A lot of guys die on you, don’t they, Mary.”

I can’t help it—I start crying. I want to tell him. I want to tell someone, so I do.

When I’m finished he doesn’t say something stupid, he doesn’t walk away. He doesn’t code on me. He starts to tell me a story and I don’t understand at first.

There’s this G-2 reconnaissance over the border, he says. The insertion’s smooth and I’m point, I’m always point. We’re humping across paddy dikes like grunts and we hit this treeline. This is a black op, nobody’s supposed to know we’re here, but somebody does. All of a sudden the goddamn trees are full of Charlie ching-ching snipers. The whole world turns blue—just for me, I mean, it turns blue—and everything starts moving real slow. I can see the first AK rounds coming at me and I step aside nicely just like that, like always.

The world always turns blue like that when he needs it to, he says. That’s why they make him point every goddamn time, why they keep using him on special ops to take out infrastructure or long-range recon for intel. Because the world turns blue. And how he’s been called in twice to talk about what he’s going to do after this war and how they want him to be a killer, he says. The records will say he died in this war and they’ll give him a new identity. He doesn’t have family, they say. He’ll be one of their killers wherever they need him. Because everything turns blue. I don’t believe what I’m hearing. It’s like a movie, like that Manchurian Candidate thing, and I can’t believe it. They don’t care about how he does it, he says. They never do. It can be the world turning blue or voices in your head or some grabass feeling in your gut, or, if you want, it can be God or the Devil with horns or Little Green Martians—it doesn’t matter to them what you believe. As long as it works, as long as you keep coming back from missions, that’s all they care about. He told them no, but they keep on asking. Sometimes he thinks they’ll kill his girlfriend just so he won’t have anything to come back to in the States. They do that kind of thing, he says. I can’t believe it.

So everything’s turning blue, he says, and I’m floating up out of my body over this rice paddy, these goddamn ching-ching snipers are darker blue, and when I come back down I’m moving through this nice blue world and I know where they are, and I get every goddamn one of them in their trees.

But it doesn’t matter, he says. There’s this light-weapons sergeant, a guy they called the Dogman, who’s crazy and barks like a dog and makes everyone laugh even if they’re bleeding, even if their guts are hanging out. He scares the VC when he barks. He humps his share and the men love him.

When the world turns blue, the Dogman’s in cover, everything’s fine, but then he rubbernecks, the sonuvabitch rubbernecks for the closest ching-ching—he didn’t have to, he just didn’t have to—and takes a round high. I don’t see the back of his head explode, so I think he’s still alive. I go for him where he’s hanging half out of the treeline, half in a canal full of stinking rice water. I try to get his body out of the line of fire, but Charlie puts the next round right in under my arm. I’m holding the Dogman and the round goes in right under my arm, a fucking heart shot. I can feel it come in. It’s for me. Everything goes slow and blue and I jerk a little—I don’t even know I’m doing it—and the round slides right in under me and into him. They never get me. The fucking world turns blue and everything goes slow and they never get me.

I can always save myself, he says—his name is Steve and he’s not smiling now—but I can’t save them. What’s it worth? What’s it worth if you stay alive and everybody you care about is dead? Even if you get what they want.

I know what he means. I know now why he’s sitting on a chair nearly crying, I know where the body is, which curtain it’s behind, how close it’s been all this time. I remember the dream now.

Nobody likes to die alone, Steve says. Just like he said it in the dream.

He stays and we talk. We talk about the dreams and his blue world, and we talk about what we’re going to do when we get out of this place and back to the Big PX, all the fun we’re going to have. He starts to tell me about other guys he knows, guys like him that his people are interested in, but then he stops and I see he’s looking past me. I turn around.

There’s this guy in civvies at the end of the hallway, just standing there, looking at us. Then he nods at Steve and Steve says, “I got to go.”

Real fast I say, “See you at nineteen hundred hours.”

He’s looking at the guy down the hallway. “Yeah, sure,” he says.

When I get off he’s there. I haven’t thought about a needle all day and it shows. We get a bite to eat and talk some more, and that’s that. My roommate says I can have the room for a couple of hours, but I’m a mess. I’m shaking so bad I can’t even think about having a good time with this guy. He looks at me like he knows this, and says his head hurts and we ought to get some sleep.

He gives me a hug. That’s it.

The same guy in civvies is waiting for him and they walk away together on Phan Hao Street.

The next day he’s gone. I tell myself maybe he was standing down for a couple of days and had to get back, but that doesn’t help. I know lots of guys who traveled around in-country AWOL without getting into trouble. What could they do to you? Send you to ‘Nam?

I thought maybe he’d call in a couple of days, or write. Later I thought maybe he’d gotten killed, maybe let himself get killed. I really didn’t know what to think, but I thought about him a lot.

Ten days later I get transferred. I don’t even get orders cut, I don’t even get in-country travel paper. No one will tell me a thing—the head nurse, the CO, nobody.

I get scared because I think they’re shipping me back to the States because of the smack or the dreams—they’ve found out about the dreams—and I’m going to be in some VA hospital the rest of my life. That’s what I think.

All they’ll tell me is that I’m supposed to be at the strip at 0600 hours tomorrow, fatigues and no ID.

I get a needle that night and I barely make it.

This Huey comes in real fast and low and I get dust in my eyes from the prop wash. A guy with a clipboard about twenty yards away signals me and I get on. There’s no one there to say good-bye and I never see the 23rd again.

The Huey’s empty except for these two pilots who never turn around and this doorgunner who’s hanging outside and this other guy who’s sitting back with me on the canvas. I think maybe he’s the one who’s going to explain things, but he just stares for a while and doesn’t say a thing. He’s a sergeant, a Ranger, I think.

It’s supposed to be dangerous to fly at night in Indian Country, I know, but we fly at night. We stop twice and I know we’re in Indian Country. This one guy gets off, another guy gets on, and then two more. They seem to know each other and they start laughing. They try to get me to talk. One guy says, “You a Donut Dolly?” and another guy says, “Hell, no, asshole, she’s Army, can’t you tell? She’s got the thousand yards.” The third guy says to me, “Don’t mind him, ma’am. They don’t raise ’em right in Mississippi.” They’re trying to be nice, but I don’t want in.

I don’t want to sleep either. But my head’s tipped back against the steel and I keep waking up, trying to remember whether I’ve dreamed about people dying, but I can’t. I fall asleep once for a long time and when I wake up I can remember death, but I can’t see the faces.

I wake up once and there’s automatic weapon fire somewhere below us and maybe the slick gets hit once or twice. Another time I wake up and the three guys are talking quietly, real serious, but I’m hurting from no needle and I don’t even listen.

When the rotors change I wake up. It’s first light and cool and we’re coming in on this big clearing, everything misty and beautiful. It’s triple-canopy jungle I’ve never seen before and I know we’re so far from Cam Ranh Bay or Saigon it doesn’t matter. I don’t see anything that looks like a medevac, just this clearing, like a staging area. There are a lot of guys walking around, a lot of machinery, but it doesn’t look like regular Army. It looks like something you hear about but aren’t supposed to see, and I’m shaking like a baby.

When we hit the LZ the three guys don’t even know I exist and I barely get out of the slick on my own. I can’t see because of the wash and suddenly this Green Beanie medic I’ve never seen before—this captain—has me by the arm and he’s taking me somewhere. I tell myself I’m not going back to the Big PX, I’m not going to some VA hospital for the rest of my life, that this is the guy I’m going to be assigned to—they need a nurse out here or something.

I’m not thinking straight. Special Forces medics don’t have nurses.

I’m looking around me and I don’t believe what I’m seeing. There’s bunkers and M-60 emplacements and Montagnard guards on the perimeter and all this beautiful red earth. There’s every kind of jungle fatigue and cammie you can think of—stripes and spots and black pajamas like Charlie and everything else. I see Special Forces enlisted everywhere and I know this isn’t some little A-camp. I see a dozen guys in real clean fatigues who don’t walk like soldiers walk. I see a Special Forces major and he’s arguing with one of them.

The captain who’s got me by the arm isn’t saying a thing. He takes me to this little bunker that’s got mosquito netting and a big canvas flap over the front and he puts me inside. It’s got a cot. He tells me to lie down and I do. He says, “The CO wants you to get some sleep, Lieutenant. Someone will come by with something in a little while.” The way he says it I know he knows about the needles.

I don’t know how long I’m in the bunker before someone comes, but I’m in lousy shape. This guy in civvies gives me something to take with a little paper cup and I go ahead and do it. I’m not going to fight it the shape I’m in. I dream, and keep dreaming, and in some of the dreams someone comes by with a glass of water and I take more pills. I can’t wake up. All I can do is sleep but I’m not really sleeping and I’m having these dreams that aren’t really dreams. Once or twice I hear myself screaming, it hurts so much, and then I dream about a little paper cup and more pills.

When I come out of it I’m not shaking. I know it’s not supposed to be this quick, that what they gave me isn’t what people are getting in programs back in the States, and I get scared again. Who are these guys?

I sit in the little bunker all day eating ham-and-mother-fuckers from C-rat cans and I tell myself that Steve had something to do with it. I’m scared but it’s nice not to be shaking. It’s nice not to be thinking about a needle all the time.

The next morning I hear all this noise and I realize we’re leaving, the whole camp is leaving. I can hear this noise like a hundred slicks outside and I get up and look through the flap. I’ve never seen so many choppers. They’ve got Chinooks and Hueys and Cobras and Loaches and a Skycrane for the SeaBee machines and they’re dusting off and dropping in and dusting off again. I’ve never seen anything like it. I keep looking for Steve. I keep trying to remember the dreams I had while I was out all those days and I can’t.

Finally the Green Beanie medic comes back. He doesn’t say a word. He just takes me to the LZ and we wait until a slick drops in. All these tiger stripes pile in with us but no one says a thing. No one’s joking. I don’t understand it. We aren’t being hit, we’re just moving, but no one’s joking.

We set up in a highlands valley northwest of where we’d been, where the jungle is thicker but it’s not triple canopy. There’s this same beautiful mist and I wonder if we’re in some other country, Laos or Cambodia.

They have my bunker dug in about an hour and I’m in it about thirty minutes before this guy appears. I’ve been looking for Steve, wondering why I haven’t seen him, and feeling pretty good about myself. It’s nice not to be shaking, to get the monkey off my back, and I’m ready to thank somebody.

This guy opens the flap. He stands there for a moment and there’s something familiar about him. He’s about thirty and he’s in real clean fatigues. He’s got MD written all over him—but the kind that never gets any blood on him. I think of VA hospitals, psychiatric wards, and I get scared again.

“How are you feeling, Lieutenant?”

“Fine,” I say, but I’m not smiling. I know this guy from the dreams—the little paper cups and pills—and I don’t like what I’m feeling.

“Glad to hear it. Remarkable drug, isn’t it, Lieutenant?”

I nod. Nothing he says surprises me.

“Someone wants to see you, Lieutenant.”

I get up, dreading it. I know he’s not talking about Steve.

They’ve got all the bunkers dug and he takes me to what has to be the CP. There isn’t a guy inside who isn’t in real clean fatigues. There are three or four guys who have the same look this guy has—MDs that don’t ever get their hands dirty—and intel types pointing at maps and pushing things around on a couple of sand-table mock-ups. There’s this one guy with his back turned and everyone else keeps checking in with him.

He’s tall. He’s got a full head of hair but it’s going gray. He doesn’t even have to turn around and I know.

It’s the guy in civvies at the end of the hallway at the 23rd, the guy that walked away with Steve on Phan Hao Street.

He turns around and I don’t give him eye contact. He looks at me, smiles, and starts over. There are two guys trailing him and he’s got this smile that’s supposed to be charming.

“How are you feeling, Lieutenant?” he says.

“Everybody keeps asking me that,” I say, and I wonder why I’m being so brave.

“That’s because we’re interested in you, Lieutenant,” he says. He’s got this jungle outfit on with gorgeous creases and some canvas jungle boots that breathe nicely. He looks like an ad from a catalog but I know he’s no joke, he’s no pogue lifer. He’s wearing this stuff because he likes it, that’s all. He could wear anything he wanted to because he’s not military, but he’s the CO of this operation, which means he’s fighting a war I don’t know a thing about.

He tells me he’s got some things to straighten out first, but that if I go back to my little bunker he’ll be there in an hour. He asks me if I want anything to eat. When I say sure, he tells the MD type to get me something from the mess.

I go back. I wait. When he comes, he’s got a file in his hand and there’s a young guy with him who’s got a cold six-pack of Coke in his hand. I can tell they’re cold because the cans are sweating. I can’t believe it. We’re out here in the middle of nowhere, we’re probably not even supposed to be here, and they’re bringing me cold Coke.

When the young guy leaves, the CO sits on the edge of the cot and I sit on the other and he says, “Would you like one, Lieutenant?”

I say, “Yes, sir,” and he pops the top with a church key. He doesn’t take one himself and suddenly I wish I hadn’t said yes. I’m thinking of old movies where Jap officers offer their prisoners a cigarette so they’ll owe them one. There’s not even any place to put the can down, so I hold it between my hands.

“I’m not sure where to begin, Lieutenant,” he says, “but let me assure you you’re here because you belong here.” He says it gently, real softly, but it gives me a funny feeling. “You’re an officer and you’ve been in-country for some time. I don’t need to tell you that we’re a very special kind of operation here. What I do need to tell you is that you’re one of three hundred we’ve identified so far in this war. Do you understand?”

I say, “No, sir.”

“I think you do, but you’re not sure, right? You’ve accepted your difference—your gift, your curse, your talent, whatever you would like to call it—but you can’t as easily accept the fact that so many others might have the same thing, am I right, Mary—may I call you Mary?”

I don’t like the way he says it but I say yes.

“We’ve identified three hundred like you, Mary. That’s what I’m saying.”

I stare at him. I don’t know whether to believe him.

“I’m only sorry, Mary, that you came to our attention so late. Being alone with a gift like yours isn’t easy, I’m sure, and finding a community of those who share it—the same gift, the same curse—is essential if the problems that always accompany it are to be worked out successfully, am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“We might have lost you, Mary, if Lieutenant Balsam hadn’t found you. He almost didn’t make the trip, for reasons that will be obvious later. If he hadn’t met you, Mary, I’m afraid your hospital would have sent you back to the States for drug abuse if not for what they perceived as an increasingly dysfunctional neurosis. Does this surprise you?”

I say it doesn’t.

“I didn’t think so. You’re a smart girl, Mary.”

The voice is gentle, but it’s not.

He waits and I don’t know what he’s waiting for.

I say, “Thank you for whatever it was that—”

“No need to thank us, Mary. Were that particular drug available back home right now, it wouldn’t seem like such a gift, would it?”

He’s right. He’s the kind who’s always right and I don’t like the feeling.

“Anyway, thanks,” I say. I’m wondering where Steve is.

“You’re probably wondering where Lieutenant Balsam is, Mary.”

I don’t bother to nod this time.

“He’ll be back in a few days. We have a policy here of not discussing missions—even in the ranks—and as commanding officer I like to set a good example. You can understand, I’m sure.” He smiles again and for the first time I see the crow’s-feet around his eyes, and how straight his teeth are, and how there are little capillaries broken on his cheeks.

He looks at the Coke in my hands and smiles. Then he opens the file he has. “If we were doing this the right way, Mary, we would get together in a nice air-conditioned building back in the States and go over all of this together, but we’re not in any position to do that, are we?

“I don’t know how much you’ve gathered about your gift, Mary, but people who study such things have their own way of talking. They would call yours a TPC hybrid with traumatic neurosis, dissociative features.” He smiled. “That’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s quite normal. The human psyche always responds to special gifts like yours, and neurosis is simply a mechanism for doing just that. We wouldn’t be human if it didn’t, would we?”

“No, we wouldn’t.”

He’s smiling at me and I know what he wants me to feel. I feel like a little girl sitting on a chair, being good, listening, and liking it, and that is what he wants.

“Those same people, Mary, would call your dreams ‘spontaneous anecdotal material’ and your talent a ‘REM-state precognition or clairvoyance.’ They’re not very helpful words. They’re the words of people who’ve never experienced it themselves. Only you, Mary, know what it really feels like inside. Am I right?”

I remember liking how that felt—only you. I needed to feel that, and he knew I needed to.

“Not all three hundred are dreamers like you, of course. Some are what those same people would call ‘kinetic phenomena generators.’ Some are ‘tactility-triggered remoters’ or ‘OBE clears.’ Some leave their bodies in a firefight and acquire information that could not be acquired in ordinary ways, which tells us that their talent is indeed authentic. Others see auras when their comrades are about to die, and if they can get those auras to disappear, their friends will live. Others experience only a vague visceral sensation, a gut feeling which tells them where mines and trip wires are. They know, for example, when a crossbow trap will fire and this allows them to knock away the arrows before they can hurt them. Still others receive pictures, like waking dreams, of what will happen in the next minute, hour, or day in combat.

“With very few exceptions, Mary, none of these individuals experienced anything like this as civilians. These episodes are the consequence of combat, of the metabolic and psychological anomalies which life-and-death conditions seem to generate.”

He looks at me and his voice changes now, as if on cue. He wants me to feel what he is feeling, and I do, I do. I can’t look away from him and I know this is why he is CO.

“It is almost impossible to reproduce them in a laboratory, Mary, and so these remarkable talents remain mere anecdotes, events that happen once or twice within a lifetime—to a brother, a mother, a friend, a fellow soldier in a war. A boy is killed on Kwajalein in 1944. That same night his mother dreams of his death. She has never before dreamed such a dream, and the dream is too accurate to be mere coincidence. He dies. She never has a dream like it again. A reporter for a major newspaper looks out the terminal window at the Boeing 707 he is about to board. He has flown a hundred times before, enjoys air travel, and has no reason to be anxious today. As he looks through the window the plane explodes before his very eyes. He can hear the sound ringing in his ears and the sirens rising in the distance; he can feel the heat of the ignited fuel on his face. Then he blinks. The jet is as it was before—no fire, no sirens, no explosion. He is shaking—he has never experienced anything like this in his life. He does not board the plane, and the next day he hears that its fuel tanks exploded, on the ground, in another city, killing ninety. The man never has such a vision again. He enjoys air travel in the months, and years, ahead, and will die of cardiac arrest on a tennis court twenty years later. You can see the difficulty we have, Mary.”

“Yes,” I say quietly, moved by what he’s said.

“But our difficulty doesn’t mean that your dreams are any less real, Mary. It doesn’t mean that what you and the three hundred like you in this small theater of war are experiencing isn’t real.”

“Yes,” I say.

He gets up.

“I am going to have one of my colleagues interview you, if that’s all right. He will ask you questions about your dreams and he will record what you say. The tapes will remain in my care, so there isn’t any need to worry, Mary.”

I nod.

“I hope that you will view your stay here as deserved R&R, and as a chance to make contact with others who understand what it is like. For paperwork’s sake, I’ve assigned you to Golf Team. You met three of its members on your flight in, I believe. You may write to your parents as long as you make reference to a medevac unit in Pleiku rather than to our actual operation here. Is that clear?”

He smiles like a friend would, and makes his voice as gentle as he can. “I’m going to leave the rest of the Coke. And a church key. Do I have your permission?” He grins. It’s a joke, I realize. I’m supposed to smile. When I do, he smiles back and I know he knows everything, he knows himself, he knows me, what I think of him, what I’ve been thinking every minute he’s been here.

It scares me that he knows.

His name is Bucannon.

The man that came was one of the other MD types from the tent. He asked and I answered. The question that took the longest was “What were your dreams like? Be as specific as possible both about the dream content and its relationship to reality—that is, how accurate the dream was as a predictor of what happened. Describe how the dreams and their relationship to reality (i.e., their accuracy) affected you both psychologically and physically (e.g., sleeplessness, nightmares, inability to concentrate, anxiety, depression, uncontrollable rages, suicidal thoughts, drug abuse).”

It took us six hours and six tapes.

We finished after dark.

I did what I was supposed to do. I hung around Golf Team. There were six guys, this lieutenant named Pagano, who was in charge, and this demo sergeant named Christabel, who was their “talent.” He was, I found out, an “OBE clairvoyant with EEG anomalies,” which meant that in a firefight he could leave his body just like Steve could. He could leave his body, look back at himself—that’s what it felt like—and see how everyone else was doing and maybe save someone’s ass. They were a good team. They hadn’t lost anybody yet, and they loved to tease this sergeant every chance they got.

We talked about Saigon and what you could get on the black market. We talked about missions, even though we weren’t supposed to. The three guys from the slick even got me to talk about the dreams, I was feeling that good, and when I heard they were going out on another mission at 0300 hours the next morning, without the sergeant—some little mission they didn’t need him on—I didn’t think anything about it.

I woke up in my bunker that night screaming because two of the guys from the slick were dead. I saw them dying out in the jungle, I saw how they died, and suddenly I knew what it was all about, why Bucannon wanted me here.

He came by the bunker at first light. I was still crying. He knelt down beside me and put his hand on my forehead. He made his voice gentle. He said, “What was your dream about, Mary?”

I wouldn’t tell him. “You’ve got to call them back,” I said.

“I can’t, Mary,” he said. “We’ve lost contact.”

He was lying I found out later: he could have called them back—no one was dead yet—but I didn’t know that then. So I went ahead and told him about the two I’d dreamed about, the one from Mississippi and the one who’d thought I was a Donut Dolly. He took notes. I was a mess, crying and sweaty, and he pushed the hair away from my forehead and said he would do what he could.

I didn’t want him to touch me, but I didn’t stop him. I didn’t stop him.

I didn’t leave the bunker for a long time. I couldn’t.

No one told me the two guys were dead. No one had to. It was the right kind of dream, just like before. But this time I’d known them. I’d met them. I’d laughed with them in the daylight and when they died I wasn’t there, it wasn’t on some gurney in a room somewhere. It was different.

It was starting up again, I told myself.

I didn’t get out of the cot until noon. I was thinking about needles, that was all.

He comes by again at about 1900 hours, just walks in and says, “Why don’t you have some dinner, Mary. You must be hungry.”

I go to the mess they’ve thrown together in one of the big bunkers. I think the guys are going to know about the screaming, but all they do is look at me like I’m the only woman in the camp, that’s all, and that’s okay.

Suddenly I see Steve. He’s sitting with three other guys and I get this feeling he doesn’t want to see me, that if he did he’d have come looking for me already, and I should turn around and leave. But one of the guys is saying something to him and Steve is turning and I know I’m wrong. He’s been waiting for me. He’s wearing cammies and they’re dirty—he hasn’t been back long—and I can tell by the way he gets up and comes toward me he wants to see me.

We go outside and stand where no one can hear us. He says, “Jesus, I’m sorry.” I’m not sure what he means.

“Are you okay?” I say, but he doesn’t answer.

He’s saying, “I wasn’t the one who told him about the dreams, Mary, I swear it. All I did was ask for a couple hours’ layover to see you, but he doesn’t like that—he doesn’t like ‘variables.’ When he gets me back to camp, he has you checked out. The hospital says something about dreams and how crazy you’re acting, and he puts it together. He’s smart, Mary. He’s real smart—”

I tell him to shut up, it isn’t his fault, and I’d rather be here than back in the States in some VA program or ward. But he’s not listening. “He’s got you here for a reason, Mary. He’s got all of us here for a reason and if I hadn’t asked for those hours he wouldn’t know you existed—”

I get mad. I tell him I don’t want to hear any more about it, it isn’t his fault.

“Okay,” he says finally. “Okay.” He gives me a smile because he knows I want it. “Want to meet the guys on the team?” he says. “We just got extracted—”

I say sure. We go back in. He gets me some food and then introduces me. They’re dirty and tired but they’re not complaining. They’re still too high off the mission to eat and won’t crash for another couple of hours yet. There’s an SF medic with the team, and two Navy SEALs because there’s a riverine aspect to the mission, and a guy named Moburg, a Marine sniper out of Quantico. Steve’s their CO and all I can think about is how young he is. They’re all so young.

It turns out Moburg’s a talent, too, but it’s “anticipatory subliminal”—it only helps him target hits and doesn’t help anyone else much. But he’s a damn good sniper because of it, they tell me.

The guys give me food from their trays and for the first time that day I’m feeling hungry. I’m eating with guys that are real and alive and I’m really hungry.

Then I notice Steve isn’t talking. He’s got that same look on his face. I turn around.

Bucannon’s in the doorway, looking at us. The other guys haven’t seen him, they’re still talking and laughing—being raunchy.

Bucannon is looking at us and he’s smiling, and I get a chill down my spine like cold water because I know—all of a sudden I know—why I’m sitting here, who wants it this way.

I get up fast. Steve doesn’t understand. He says something. I don’t answer him, I don’t even hear him. I keep going. He’s behind me and he wants to know if I’m feeling okay, but I don’t want to look back at him, I don’t want to look at any of the guys with him, because that’s what Bucannon wants.

He’s going to send them out again, I tell myself. They just got back, they’re tired, and he’s going to send them out again, so I can dream about them.

I’m not going to go to sleep, I tell myself. I walk the perimeter until they tell me I can’t do that anymore, it’s too dangerous. Steve follows me and I start screaming at him, but I’m not making any sense. He watches me for a while and then someone comes to get him, and I know he’s being told he’s got to take his team out again. I ask for some Benzedrine from the Green Beanie medic who brings me aspirin when I want it but he says he can’t, that word has come down that he can’t. I try writing a letter to my parents but it’s 0400 hours and I’m going crazy trying to stay awake because I haven’t had more than four hours’ sleep for a couple of nights and my body temperature’s dropping on the diurnal.

I ask for some beer and they get it for me. I ask for some scotch. They give it to me and I think I’ve won. I never go to sleep on booze, but Bucannon doesn’t know that. I’ll stay awake and I won’t dream.

But it knocks me out like a light, and I have a dream. One of the guys at the table, one of the two SEALs, is floating down a river. The blood is like a woman’s hair streaming out from his head. I don’t dream about Steve, just about this SEAL who’s floating down a river. It’s early in the mission. Somehow I know that.

I don’t wake up screaming, because of what they put in the booze. I remember it as soon as I wake up, when I can’t do anything about it.

Bucannon comes in at first light. He doesn’t say, “If you don’t help us, you’re going back to Saigon or back to the States with a Section Eight.” Instead he comes in and kneels down beside me like some goddamn priest and he says, “I know this is painful, Mary, but I’m sure you can understand.”

I say, “Get the hell out of here, motherfucker.”

It’s like he hasn’t heard. He says, “It would help us to know the details of any dream you had last night, Mary.”

“You’ll let him die anyway,” I say.

“I’m sorry, Mary,” he says, “but he’s already dead. We’ve received word on one confirmed KIA in Echo Team. All we’re interested in is the details of the dream and an approximate time, Mary.” He hesitates. “I think he would want you to tell us. I think he would want to feel that it was not in vain, don’t you.”

He stands up at last.

“I’m going to leave some paper and writing utensils for you. I can understand what you’re going through, more than you might imagine, Mary, and I believe that if you give it some thought—if you think about men like Steve and what your dreams could mean to them—you will write down the details of your dream last night.”

I scream something at him. When he’s gone I cry for a while. Then I go ahead and write down what he wants. I don’t know what else to do.

I don’t go to the mess. Bucannon has food brought to my bunker but I don’t eat it.

I ask the Green Beanie medic where Steve is. Is he back yet? He says he can’t tell me. I ask him to send a message to Steve for me. He says he can’t do that. I tell him he’s a straight-leg ass-kisser and ought to have his jump wings shoved, but this doesn’t faze him at all. Any other place, I say, you’d be what you were supposed to be—Special Forces and a damn good medic—but Bucannon’s got you, doesn’t he. He doesn’t say a thing.

I stay awake all that night. I ask for coffee and I get it. I bum more coffee off two sentries and drink that, too. I can’t believe he’s letting me have it. Steve’s team is going to be back soon, I tell myself—they’re a strike force, not a Lurp—and if I don’t sleep, I can’t dream.

I do it again the next night and it’s easier. I can’t believe it’s this easy. I keep moving around. I get coffee and I find this sentry who likes to play poker and we play all night. I tell him I’m a talent and will know if someone’s trying to come through the wire on us, sapper or whatever, so we can play cards and not worry. He’s pure new-guy and he believes me.

Steve’ll be back tomorrow, I tell myself. I’m starting to see things and I’m not thinking clearly, but I’m not going to crash. I’m not going to crash until Steve is back. I’m not going to dream about Steve.

At about 0700 hours the next morning we get mortared. The slicks inside the perimeter start revving up, the Skycrane starts hooking its cats and Rome plows, and the whole camp starts to dust off. I hear radios, more slicks and Skycranes being called in. If the NVA had a battalion, they’d be overrunning us, I tell myself, so it’s got to be a lot less—company, platoon—and they’re just harassing us, but word has come down from somebody that we’re supposed to move.

Mortars are whistling in and someone to one side of me says “Incoming—fuck it!” Then I hear this other sound. It’s like flies but real loud. It’s like this weird whispering. It’s a goddamn flechette round, I realize, spraying stuff, and I don’t understand. I can hear it, but it’s like a memory, a flashback. Everybody’s running around me and I’m just standing there and someone’s screaming. It’s me screaming. I’ve got flechettes all through me—my chest, my face. I’m torn to pieces. I’m dying. But I’m running toward the slick, the one that’s right over there, ready to dust off. Someone’s calling to me, screaming at me, and I’m running, but I’m not. I’m on the ground. I’m on the jungle floor with these flechettes in me and I’ve got a name, a nickname, Kicker, and I’m thinking of a town in Wyoming, near the Montana border, where everybody rides pickup trucks with shotgun racks and waves to everybody else, I grew up there, there’s a rodeo every spring with a county fair and I’m thinking about a girl with braids, I’m thinking how I’m going to die here in the middle of this jungle, how we’re on some recondo that no one cares about, how Charlie doesn’t have flechette rounds, how Bucannon never makes mistakes.

I’m running and screaming and when I get to the slick the Green Beanie medic grabs me, two other guys grab me and haul me in. I look up. It’s Bucannon’s slick. He’s on the radio. I’m lying on a pile of files right beside him and we’re up over the jungle now, we’re taking the camp somewhere else, where it can start up all over again.

I look at Bucannon. I think he’s going to turn any minute and say, “Which ones, Mary? Which ones died from the flechette?” He doesn’t.

I look down and see he’s put some paper and three pencils beside me on the floor. I can’t stand it. I start crying.

I sleep maybe for twenty minutes and have two dreams. Two other guys died out there somewhere with flechettes in them. Two more guys on Steve’s team died and I didn’t even meet them.

I look up. Bucannon’s smiling at me.

“It happened, didn’t it, Mary?” he says gently. “It happened in the daylight this time, didn’t it?”

At the new camp I stayed awake another night, but it was hard and it didn’t make any difference. It probably made it worse. It happened three more times the next day and all sorts of guys saw me. I knew someone would tell Steve. I knew Steve’s team was still out there—Echo hadn’t come in when the rocketing started—but that he was okay. I’m lying on the ground screaming and crying with shrapnel going through me, my legs are gone, my left eyeball is hanging out on my cheek, and there are pieces of me all over the guy next to me, but I’m not Steve, and that’s what matters.

The third time, an AK round goes through my neck so I can’t even scream. I fall down and can’t get up. Someone kneels down next to me and I think it’s Bucannon and I try to hit him. I’m trying to scream even though I can’t, but it’s not Bucannon, it’s one of the guys who was sitting with Steve in the mess. They’re back, they’re back, I think to myself, but I’m trying to tell this guy that I’m dying, that there’s this medic somewhere out there under a beautiful rubber tree who’s trying to pull me through, but I’m not going to make it, I’m going to die on him, and he’s going to remember it his whole life, wake up in the night crying years later and his wife won’t understand.

I want to say, “Tell Steve I’ve got to get out of here,” but I can’t. My throat’s gone. I’m going out under some rubber tree a hundred klicks away in the middle of Laos, where we’re not supposed to be, and I can’t say a thing.

This guy who shared his ham-and-motherfuckers with me in the mess, this guy is looking down on me and I think, Oh my God, I’m going to dream about him some night, some day, I’m going to dream about him and because I do he’s going to die.

He doesn’t say a thing.

He’s the one that comes to get me in my hooch two days later when they try to bust me out.

They give me something pretty strong. By the time they come I’m getting the waking dreams, sure, but I’m not screaming anymore. I’m here but I’m not. I’m all these other places, I’m walking into an Arclight, B-52 bombers, my ears are bleeding, I’m the closest man when a big Chinese claymore goes off, my arm’s hanging by a string, I’m dying in all these other places and I don’t even know I’ve taken their pills. I’m like a doll when Steve and this guy and three others come, and the guards let them. I’m smiling like an idiot and saying, “Thank you very much,” something stupid some USO type would say, and I’ve got someone holding me up so I don’t fall on my face.

There’s this Jolly Green Giant out in front of us. It’s dawn and everything’s beautiful and this chopper is gorgeous. It’s Air Force. It’s crazy. There are these guys I’ve never seen before. They’ve got black berets and they’re neat and clean, and they’re not Army. I think, Air Commandos! I’m giggling. They’re Air Force. They’re dandies. They’re going to save the day like John Wayne at Iwo Jima. I feel a bullet go through my arm, then another through my leg, and the back of my head blows off, but I don’t scream. I just feel the feelings, the ones you feel right before you die—but I don’t scream. The Air Force is going to save me. That’s funny. I tell myself how Steve had friends in the Air Commandos and how they took him around once in-country for a whole damn week, AWOL, yeah, but maybe it isn’t true, maybe I’m dreaming it. I’m still giggling. I’m still saying, “Thank you very much.”

We’re out maybe fifty klicks and I don’t know where we’re heading. I don’t care. Even if I cared I wouldn’t know how far out “safe” was. I hear Steve’s voice in the cockpit and a bunch of guys are laughing, so I think safe. They’ve busted me out because Steve cares and now we’re safe. I’m still saying “Thank you” and some guy is saying “You’re welcome, baby,” and people are laughing and that feels good. If they’re all laughing, no one got hurt, I know. If they’re all laughing, we’re safe. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Then something starts happening in the cockpit. I can’t hear with all the wind. Someone says “Shit.” Someone says “Cobra.” Someone else says “Jesus Christ what the hell.” I look out the roaring doorway and I see two black gunships. They’re like nothing I’ve ever seen before. No one’s laughing. I’m saying “Thank you very much” but no one’s laughing.

I find out later there was one behind us, one in front, and one above. They were beautiful. They reared up like snakes when they hit you. They had M-134 Miniguns that could put a round on every square centimeter of a football field within seconds. They had fifty-two white phosphorous rockets apiece and Martin-Marietta laser-guided Copperhead howitzer rounds. They had laser designators and Forward-Looking Infrared Sensors. They were nightblack, no insignias of any kind. They were model AH-1G-X and they didn’t belong to any regular branch of the military back then. You wouldn’t see them until the end of the war.

I remember thinking that there were only two of us with talent on that slick, why couldn’t he let us go? Why couldn’t he just let us go?

I tried to think of all the things he could do to us, but he didn’t do a thing. He didn’t have to.

I didn’t see Steve for a long time. I went ahead and tried to sleep at night because it was better that way. If I was going to have the dreams, it was better that way. It didn’t make me so crazy. I wasn’t like a doll someone had to hold up.

I went ahead and wrote the dreams down in a little notebook Bucannon gave me, and I talked to him. I showed him I really wanted to understand, how I wanted to help, because it was easier on everybody this way. He didn’t act surprised, and I didn’t think he would. He’d always known. Maybe he hadn’t known about the guys in the black berets, but he’d known that Steve would try it. He’d known I’d stay awake. He’d known the dreams would move to daylight, from “interrupted REM-state,” if I stayed awake. And he’d known he’d get us back.

We talked about how my dreams were changing. I was having them much earlier than “events in real time,” he said. The same thing had probably been happening back in ER, he said, but I hadn’t known it. The talent was getting stronger, he said, though I couldn’t control it yet. I didn’t need the “focal stimulus,” he said, “the physical correlative.” I didn’t need to meet people to have the dreams.

“When are we going to do it?” I finally said.

He knew what I meant. He said we didn’t want to rush into it, how acting prematurely was worse than not understanding it, how the “fixity of the future” was something no one yet understood, and we didn’t want to take a chance on stopping the dreams by trying to tamper with the future.

“It won’t stop the dreams,” I said. “Even if we kept a death from happening, it wouldn’t stop the dreams.”

He never listened. He wanted them to die. He wanted to take notes on how they died and how my dreams matched their dying, and he wasn’t going to call anyone back until he was ready to.

“This isn’t war, Mary,” he told me one day. “This is a kind of science and it has its own rules. You’ll have to trust me, Mary.”

He pushed the hair out of my eyes, because I was crying. He wanted to touch me. I know that now.

I tried to get messages out. I tried to figure out who I’d dreamed about. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and try to talk to anybody I could and figure it out. I’d say, “Do you know a guy who’s got red hair and is from Alabama?” I’d say, “Do you know an RTO who’s short and can’t listen to anything except Jefferson Airplane?” Sometimes it would take too long. Sometimes I’d never find out who it was, but if I did, I’d try to get a message out to him. Sometimes he’d already gone out and I’d still try to get someone to send him a message—but that just wasn’t done.

I found out later Bucannon got them all. People said yeah, sure, they’d see that the message got to the guy, but Bucannon always got them. He told people to say yes when I asked. He knew. He always knew.

I didn’t have a dream about Steve and that was the important thing.

When I finally dreamed that Steve died, that it took more guys in uniforms than you’d think possible—with more weapons than you’d think they’d ever need—in a river valley awfully far away, I didn’t tell Bucannon about it. I didn’t tell him how Steve was twitching on the red earth up North, his body doing its best to dodge the rounds even though there were just too many of them, twitching and twitching, even after his body wasn’t alive anymore.

I cried for a while and then stopped. I wanted to feel something but I couldn’t.

I didn’t ask for pills or booze and I didn’t stay awake the next two nights scared about dreaming it again. There was something I needed to do.

I didn’t know how long I had. I didn’t know whether Steve’s team—the one in the dream—had already gone out or not. I didn’t know a thing, but I kept thinking about what Bucannon had said, the “fixity,” how maybe the future couldn’t be changed, how even if Bucannon hadn’t intercepted those messages something else would have kept the future the way it was and those guys would have died anyway.

I found the Green Beanie medic who’d taken me to my hooch that first day. I sat down with him in the mess. One of Bucannon’s types was watching us but I sat down anyway. I said, “Has Steve Balsam been sent out yet?” And he said, “I’m not supposed to say, Lieutenant. You know that.”

“Yes, Captain, I do know that. I also know that because you took me to my little bunker that day I will probably dream about your death before it happens, if it happens here. I also know that if I tell the people running this project about it, they won’t do a thing, even though they know how accurate my dreams are, just like they know how accurate Steve Balsam is, and Blakely, and Corigiollo, and the others, but they won’t do a thing about it.” I waited. He didn’t blink. He was listening.

“I’m in a position, Captain, to let someone know when I have a dream about them. Do you understand?”

He stared at me.

“Yes,” he said.

I said, “Has Steve Balsam been sent out yet?”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“Do you know anything about the mission he is about to go out on?”

He didn’t say a thing for a moment. Then he said, “Red Dikes.”

“I don’t understand, Captain.”

He didn’t want to have to explain—it made him mad to have to. He looked at the MD type by the door and then he looked back at me.

“You can take out the Red Dikes with a one-K nuclear device, Lieutenant. Everyone knows this. If you do, Hanoi drowns and the North is down. Balsam’s team is a twelve-man night insertion beyond the DMZ with special MAC V ordnance from a carrier in the South China Sea. All twelve are talents. Is the picture clear enough, Lieutenant?”

I didn’t say a thing. I just looked at him.

Finally I said, “It’s a suicide mission, isn’t it. The device won’t even be real. It’s one of Bucannon’s ideas—he wants to see how they perform, that’s all. They’ll never use a nuclear device in Southeast Asia and you know that as well as I do, Captain.”

“You never know, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, you do.” I said it slowly so he would understand.

He looked away.

“When is the team leaving?”

He wouldn’t answer anymore. The MD type looked like he was going to walk toward us.

“Captain?” I said.

“Thirty-eight hours. That’s what they’re saying.”

I leaned over.

“Captain,” I said. “You know the shape I was in when I got here. I need it again. I need enough of it to get me through a week of this place or I’m not going to make it. You know where to get it. I’ll need it tonight.”

As I walked by the MD type at the door I wondered how he was going to die, how long it was going to take, and who would do it.

I killed Bucannon the only way I knew how. I started screaming at first light and when he came to my bunker, I was crying. I told him I’d had a dream about him. I told him I dreamed that his own men, guys in cammies and all of them talents, had killed him, they had killed him because he wasn’t using a nurse’s dreams to keep their friends alive, because he had my dreams but wasn’t doing anything with them, and all their friends were dying. I looked in his eyes and I told him how scared I was because they killed her too, they killed the nurse who was helping him too.

I told him how big the 9-millimeter holes looked in his fatigues, and how something else was used on his face and stomach, some smaller caliber. I told him how they got him dusted off soon as they could and got him on a sump pump and IV as soon as he hit Saigon, but it just wasn’t enough, how he choked to death on his own fluids.

He didn’t believe me.

“Was Lieutenant Balsam there?” he asked.

I said no, he wasn’t, trying not to cry. I didn’t know why, but he wasn’t, I said.

His eyes changed. He was staring at me now.

He said, “When will this happen, Mary?”

I said I didn’t know—not for a couple of days at least, but I couldn’t be sure, how could I be sure? It felt like four, maybe five, days, but I couldn’t be sure. I was crying again.

This is what made him believe me in the end.

He knew it would never happen if Steve were there—but if Steve was gone, if the men waited until Steve was gone?

Steve would be gone in a couple of days and there was no way that this nurse, scared and crying, could know this.

He moved me to his bunker and had someone hang canvas to make a hooch for me inside his. He doubled the guards and changed the guards and doubled them again, but I knew he didn’t think it was going to happen until Steve left.

I cried that night. He came to my hooch. He said, “Don’t be frightened, Mary. No one’s going to hurt you. No one’s going to hurt anyone.”

But he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t tried to stop a dream from coming true—even though I’d asked him to—and he didn’t know whether he could or not.

I told him I wanted him to hold me, someone to hold me. I told him I wanted him to touch my forehead the way he did, to push my hair back the way he did.

At first he didn’t understand, but he did it.

I told him I wanted someone to make love to me tonight, because it hadn’t happened in so long, not with Steve, not with anyone. He said he understood and that if he’d only known he could have made things easier on me.

He was quiet. He made sure the flaps on my hooch were tight and he undressed in the dark. I held his hand just like I’d held the hands of the others, back in Cam Ranh Bay. I remembered the dream, the real one where I killed him, how I’d held his hand while he got undressed, just like this.

Even in the dark I could see how pale he was and this was like the dream too. He seemed to glow in the dark even though there wasn’t any light. I took off my clothes, too. I told him I wanted to do something special for him. He said fine, but we couldn’t make much noise. I said there wouldn’t be any noise. I told him to lie down on his stomach on the cot. I sounded excited. I even laughed. I told him it was called “around the world” and I liked it best with the man on his stomach. He did what I told him and I kneeled down and lay over him.

I jammed the needle with the morphine into his jugular and when he struggled I held him down with my own weight.

No one came for a long time.

When they did, I was crying and they couldn’t get my hand from the needle.

Steve’s team wasn’t sent. The dreams stopped, just the way Bucannon thought they would. Because I killed a man to keep another alive, the dreams stopped. I tell myself now this was what it was all about. I was supposed to keep someone from dying—that’s why the dreams began—and when I did, they could stop, they could finally stop. Bucannon would understand it.

“There is no talent like yours, Mary, that does not operate out of the psychological needs of the individual,” he would have said. “You dreamed of death in the hope of stopping it. We both knew that, didn’t we. When you killed me to save another, it could end, the dreams could stop, your gift could return to the darkness where it had lain for a million years—so unneeded in civilization, in times of peace, in the humdrum existence of teenagers in Long Beach, California, where fathers believed their daughters to be whores or lesbians if they went to war to keep others alive. Am I right, Mary?”

This is what he would have said.

They could have killed me. They could have taken me out into the jungle and killed me. They could have given me a frontal and put me in a military hospital like the man in ’46 who had evidence that Roosevelt knew about the Japanese attack on Pearl. The agency Bucannon had worked for could have sent word down to have me pushed from a chopper on the way back to Saigon, or had me given an overdose, or assigned me to some black op I’d never come back from. They were a lot of things they could have done, and they didn’t.

They didn’t because of what Steve and the others did. They told them you’ll have to kill us all if you kill her or hurt her in any way. They told them you can’t send her to jail, you can send her to a hospital but not for long, and you can’t fuck with her head, or there will be stories in the press and court trials and a bigger mess than My Lai ever was.

It was seventy-six talents who were saying this, so the agency listened.

Steve told me about it the first time he came. I’m here for a year, that’s all. There are ten other women in this wing and we get along—it’s like a club. They leave us alone.

Steve comes to see me once a month. He’s married—to the same one in Merced—and they’ve got a baby now, but he gets the money to fly down somehow and he tells me she doesn’t mind.

He says the world hasn’t turned blue since he got back, except maybe twice, real fast, on freeways in central California. He says he hasn’t floated out of his body except once, when Cathy was having the baby and it started to come out wrong. It’s fading away, he says, and he says it with a laugh, with those big eyelashes and those great shoulders.

Some of the others come, too, to see if I’m okay. Most of them got out as soon as they could. They send me packages and bring me things. We talk about the mess this country is in, and we talk about getting together, right after I get out. I don’t know if they mean it. I don’t know if we should. I tell Steve it’s over, we’re back in the Big PX and we don’t need it anymore—Bucannon was right—and maybe we shouldn’t get together.

He shakes his head. He gives me a look and I give him a look and we both know we should have used the room that night in Cam Ranh Bay, when we had the chance.

“You never know,” he says, grinning. “You never know when the baby might wake up.”

That’s the way he talks these days, now that he’s a father.

“You never know when the baby might wake up.”

To DA., J.P., J.S., A.W. and all the others who went in our stead; and to Linda Van Devanter, Gayle Smith and unnamed sisters for their courage and inspiration in the pages of Nam: An Oral History, Home Before Morning and Everything We Had.

RACHEL IN LOVE

Pat Murphy

Pat Murphy’s first novel, The Falling Woman, was published by Tor Books in October. Her most recent story in IAsfm was “In the Abode of the Snows” (Mid-December1986). The following story of “Rachel in Love” is a moving coming-of-age tale about an unusual individual.

It is a Sunday morning in summer and a small brown chimpanzee named Rachel sits on the living room floor of a remote ranch house on the edge of the Painted Desert. She is watching a Tarzan movie on television. Her hairy arms are wrapped around her knees and she rocks back and forth with suppressed excitement. She knows that her father would say that she’s too old for such childish amusements—but since Aaron is still sleeping, he can’t chastise her.

On the television, Tarzan has been trapped in a bamboo cage by a band of wicked Pygmies. Rachel is afraid that he won’t escape in time to save Jane from the ivory smugglers who hold her captive. The movie cuts to Jane, who is tied up in the back of a jeep, and Rachel whimpers softly to herself. She knows better than to howl: she peeked into her father’s bedroom earlier, and he was still in bed. Aaron doesn’t like her to howl when he is sleeping.

When the movie breaks for a commercial, Rachel goes to her father’s room. She is ready for breakfast and she wants him to get up. She tiptoes to the bed to see if he is awake.

His eyes are open and he is staring at nothing. His face is pale and his lips are a purplish color. Dr. Aaron Jacobs, the man Rachel calls father, is not asleep. He is dead, having died in the night of a heart attack.

When Rachel shakes him, his head rocks back and forth in time with her shaking, but his eyes do not blink and he does not breathe. She places his hand on her head, nudging him so that he will waken and stroke her. He does not move. When she leans toward him, his hand falls limply to dangle over the edge of the bed.

In the breeze from the open bedroom window, the fine wisps of gray hair that he had carefully combed over his bald spot each morning shift and flutter, exposing the naked scalp. In the other room, elephants trumpet as they stampede across the jungle to rescue Tarzan. Rachel whimpers softly, but her father does not move.

Rachel backs away from her father’s body. In the living room, Tarzan is swinging across the jungle on vines, going to save Jane. Rachel ignores the television. She prowls through the house as if searching for comfort—stepping into her own small bedroom, wandering through her father’s laboratory. From the cages that line the walls, white rats stare at her with hot red eyes. A rabbit hops across its cage, making a series of slow dull thumps, like a feather pillow tumbling down a flight of stairs.

She thinks that perhaps she made a mistake. Perhaps her father is just sleeping. She returns to the bedroom, but nothing has changed. Her father lies open-eyed on the bed. For a long time, she huddles beside his body, clinging to his hand.

He is the only person she has ever known. He is her father, her teacher, her friend. She cannot leave him alone.

The afternoon sun blazes through the window, and still Aaron does not move. The room grows dark, but Rachel does not turn on the lights. She is waiting for Aaron to wake up. When the moon rises, its silver light shines through the window to cast a bright rectangle on the far wall.

Outside, somewhere in the barren rocky land surrounding the ranch house, a coyote lifts its head to the rising moon and wails, a thin sound that is as lonely as a train whistling through an abandoned station. Rachel joins in with a desolate howl of loneliness and grief. Aaron lies still and Rachel knows that he is dead.

When Rachel was younger, she had a favorite bedtime story.—Where did I come from? she would ask Aaron, using the abbreviated gestures of ASL, American Sign Language.—Tell me again.

“You’re too old for bedtime stories,” Aaron would say.

—Please, she’d sign.—Tell me the story.

In the end, he always relented and told her. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Rachel,” he said. “She was a pretty girl, with long golden hair like a princess in a fairy tale. She lived with her father and her mother and they were all very happy.”

Rachel would snuggle contentedly beneath her blankets. The story, like any good fairy tale, had elements of tragedy. In the story, Rachel’s father worked at a university, studying the workings of the brain and charting the electric fields that the nervous impulses of an active brain produced. But the other researchers at the university didn’t understand Rachel’s father; they distrusted his research and cut off his funding. (During this portion of the story, Aaron’s voice took on a bitter edge.) So he left the university and took his wife and daughter to the desert, where he could work in peace.

He continued his research and determined that each individual brain produced its own unique pattern of fields, as characteristic as a fingerprint. (Rachel found this part of the story quite dull, but Aaron insisted on including it.) The shape of this “Electric Mind,” as he called it, was determined by habitual patterns of thoughts and emotions. Record the Electric Mind, he postulated, and you could capture an individual’s personality.

Then one sunny day, the doctor’s wife and beautiful daughter went for a drive. A truck barreling down a winding cliffside road lost its brakes and met the car head-on, killing both the girl and her mother. (Rachel clung to Aaron’s hand during this part of the story, frightened by the sudden evil twist of fortune.)

But though Rachel’s body had died, all was not lost. In his desert lab, the doctor had recorded the electrical patterns produced by his daughter’s brain. The doctor had been experimenting with the use of external magnetic fields to impose the patterns from one animal onto the brain of another. From an animal supply house, he obtained a young chimpanzee. He used a mixture of norepinephrin-based transmitter substances to boost the speed of neural processing in the chimp’s brain, and then he imposed the pattern of his daughter’s mind upon the brain of this young chimp, combining the two after his own fashion, saving his daughter in his own way. In the chimp’s brain was all that remained of Rachel Jacobs.

The doctor named the chimp Rachel and raised her as his own daughter. Since the limitations of the chimpanzee larynx made speech very difficult, he instructed her in ASL. He taught her to read and to write. They were good friends, the best of companions.

By this point in the story, Rachel was usually asleep. But it didn’t matter—she knew the ending. The doctor, whose name was Aaron Jacobs, and the chimp named Rachel lived happily ever after.

Rachel likes fairy tales and she likes happy endings. She has the mind of a teenage girl, but the innocent heart of a young chimp.

Sometimes, when Rachel looks at her gnarled brown fingers, they seem alien, wrong, out of place. She remembers having small, pale, delicate hands. Memories lie upon memories, layers uponlayers, like the sedimentary rocks of the desert buttes.

Rachel remembers a blonde-haired fair-skinned woman who smelled sweetly of perfume. On a Halloween long ago, this woman (who was, in these memories, Rachel’s mother) painted Rachel’s fingernails bright red because Rachel was dressed as a gypsy and gypsies liked red. Rachel remembers the woman’s hands: white hands with faintly blue veins hidden just beneath the skin, neatly clipped nails painted rose pink.

But Rachel also remembers another mother and another time. Her mother was dark and hairy and smelled sweetly of overripe fruit. She and Rachel lived in a wire cage in a room filled with chimps and she hugged Rachel to her hairy breast whenever any people came into the room. Rachel’s mother groomed Rachel constantly, picking delicately through her fur in search of lice that she never found.

Memories upon memories: jumbled and confused, like random pictures clipped from magazines, a bright collage that makes no sense. Rachel remembers cages: cold wire mesh beneath her feet, the smell of fear around her. A man in a white lab coat took her from the arms of her hairy mother and pricked her with needles. She could hear her mother howling, but she could not escape from the man.

Rachel remembers a junior high school dance where she wore a new dress: she stood in a dark corner of the gym for hours, pretending to admire the crepe paper decorations because she felt too shy to search among the crowd for her friends.

She remembers when she was a young chimp: she huddled with five other adolescent chimps in the stuffy freight compartment of a train, frightened by the alien smells and sounds.

She remembers gym class: gray lockers and ugly gym suits that revealed her skinny legs. The teacher made everyone play softball, even Rachel who was unathletic and painfully shy. Rachel at bat, standing at the plate, was terrified to be the center of attention. “Easy out,” said the catcher, a hard-edged girl who ran with the wrong crowd and always smelled of cigarette smoke. When Rachel swung at the ball and missed, the outfielders filled the air with malicious laughter.

Rachel’s memories are as delicate and elusive as the dusty moths and butterflies that dance among the rabbit brush and sage. Memories of her girlhood never linger; they land for an instant, then take flight, leaving Rachel feeling abandoned and alone.

Rachel leaves Aaron’s body where it is, but closes his eyes and pulls the sheet up over his head. She does not know what else to do. Each day she waters the garden and picks some greens for the rabbits. Each day, she cares for the animals in the lab, bringing them food and refilling their water bottles. The weather is cool, and Aaron’s body does not smell too bad, though by the end of the week, a wide line of ants runs from the bed to the open window.

At the end of the first week, on a moonlit evening, Rachel decides to let the animals go free. She releases the rabbits one by one, climbing on a stepladder to reach down into the cage and lift each placid bunny out. She carries each one to the back door, holding it for a moment and stroking the soft warm fur. Then she sets the animal down and nudges it in the direction of the green grass that grows around the perimeter of the fenced garden.

The rats are more difficult to deal with. She manages to wrestle the large rat cage off the shelf, but it is heavier than she thought it would be. Though she slows its fall, it lands on the floor with a crash and the rats scurry to and fro within. She shoves the cage across the linoleum floor, sliding it down the hall, over the doorsill, and onto the back patio. When she opens the cage door, rats burst out like popcorn from a popper, white in the moonlight and dashing in all directions.

Once, while Aaron was taking a nap, Rachel walked along the dirt track that led to the main highway. She hadn’t planned on going far. She just wanted to see what the highway looked like, maybe hide near the mailbox and watch a car drive past. She was curious about the outside world and her fleeting fragmentary memories did not satisfy that curiosity.

She was halfway to the mailbox when Aaron came roaring up in his old jeep. “Get in the car,” he shouted at her. “Right now!” Rachel had never seen him so angry. She cowered in the jeep’s passenger seat, covered with dust from the road, unhappy that Aaron was so upset. He didn’t speak until they got back to the ranch house, and then he spoke in a low voice, filled with bitterness and suppressed rage.

“You don’t want to go out there,” he said. “You wouldn’t like it out there. The world is filled with petty, narrow-minded, stupid people. They wouldn’t understand you. And anyone they don’t understand, they want to hurt. They hurt anyone who’s different. If they know that you’re different, they punish you, hurt you. They’d lock you up and never let you go.”

He looked straight ahead, staring through the dirty windshield. “It’s not like the shows on TV, Rachel,” he said in a softer tone. “It’s not like the stories in books.”

He looked at her then and she gestured frantically.—I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

“I can’t protect you out there,” he said. “I can’t keep you safe.”

Rachel took his hand in both of hers. He relented then, stroking her head. “Never do that again,” he said. “Never.”

Aaron’s fear was contagious. Rachel never again walked along the dirt track and sometimes she had dreams about bad people who wanted to lock her in a cage.

Two weeks after Aaron’s death, a black-and-white police car drives slowly up to the house. When the policemen knock on the door, Rachel hides behind the couch in the living room. They knock again, try the knob, then open the door, which she had left unlocked.

Suddenly frightened, Rachel bolts from behind the couch, bounding toward the back door. Behind her, she hears one man yell, “My God! It’s a gorilla!”

By the time he pulls his gun, Rachel has run out the back door and away into the hills. From the hills she watches as an ambulance drives up and two men in white take Aaron’s body away. Even after the ambulance and the police car drive away, Rachel is afraid to go back to the house. Only after sunset does she return.

Just before dawn the next morning, she wakens to the sound of a truck jouncing down the dirt road. She peers out the window to see a pale green pickup. Sloppily stenciled in white on the door are the words: PRIMATE RESEARCH CENTER. Rachel hesitates as the truck pulls up in front of the house. By the time she has decided to flee, two men are getting out of the truck. One of them carries a rifle.

She runs out the back door and heads for the hills, but she is only halfway to hiding when she hears a sound like a sharp intake of breath and feels a painful jolt in her shoulder. Suddenly, her legs give way and she is tumbling backward down the sandy slope, dust coating her red-brown fur, her howl becoming a whimper, then fading to nothing at all. She falls into the blackness of sleep.

The sun is up. Rachel lies in a cage in the back of the pickup truck. She is partially conscious and she feels a tingling in her hands and feet. Nausea grips her stomach and bowels. Her body aches.

Rachel can blink, but otherwise she can’t move. From where she lies, she can see only the wire mesh of the cage and the side of the truck. When she tries to turn her head, the burning in her skin intensifies. She lies still, wanting to cry out, but unable to make a sound. She can only blink slowly, trying to close out the pain. But the burning and nausea stay.

The truck jounces down a dirt road, then stops. It rocks as the men get out. The doors slam. Rachel hears the tailgate open.

A woman’s voice: “Is that the animal the County Sheriff wanted us to pick up?” A woman peers into the cage. She wears a white lab coat and her brown hair is tied back in a single braid. Around her eyes, Rachel can see small wrinkles, etched by years of living in the desert. The woman doesn’t look evil. Rachel hopes that the woman will save her from the men in the truck.

“Yeah. It should be knocked out for at least another half hour. Where do you want it?”

“Bring it into the lab where we had the rhesus monkeys. I’ll keep it there until I have an empty cage in the breeding area.”

Rachel’s cage scrapes across the bed of the pickup. She feels each bump and jar as a new pain. The man swings the cage onto a cart and the woman pushes the cart down a concrete corridor. Rachel watches the walls pass just a few inches from her nose.

The lab contains rows of cages in which small animals sleepily move. In the sudden stark light of the overhead fluorescent bulbs, the eyes of white rats gleam red.

With the help of one of the men from the truck, the woman manhandles Rachel onto a lab table. The metal surface is cold and hard, painful against Rachel’s skin. Rachel’s body is not under her control; her limbs will not respond. She is still frozen by the tranquilizer, able to watch, but that is all. She cannot protest or plead for mercy.

Rachel watches with growing terror as the woman pulls on rubber gloves and fills a hypodermic needle with a clear solution. “Mark down that I’m giving her the standard test for tuberculosis; this eyelid should be checked before she’s moved in with the others. I’ll add thiabendazole to her feed for the next few days to clean out any intestinal worms. And I suppose we might as well de-flea her as well,” the woman says. The man grunts in response.

Expertly, the woman closes one of Rachel’s eyes. With her open eye, Rachel watches the hypodermic needle approach. She feels a sharp pain in her eyelid. In her mind, she is howling, but the only sound she can manage is a breathy sigh.

The woman sets the hypodermic aside and begins methodically spraying Rachel’s fur with a cold, foul-smelling liquid. A drop strikes Rachel’s eye and burns. Rachel blinks, but she cannot lift a hand to rub her eye. The woman treats Rachel with casual indifference, chatting with the man as she spreads Rachel’s legs and sprays her genitals. “Looks healthy enough. Good breeding stock.”

Rachel moans, but neither person notices. At last, they finish their torture, put her in a cage, and leave the room. She closes her eyes, and the darkness returns.

Rachel dreams. She is back at home in the ranch house. It is night and she is alone. Outside, coyotes yip and howl. The coyote is the voice of the desert, wailing as the wind wails when it stretches itself thin to squeeze through a crack between two boulders. The people native to this land tell tales of Coyote, a god who was a trickster, unreliable, changeable, mercurial.

Rachel is restless, anxious, unnerved by the howling of the coyotes. She is looking for Aaron. In the dream, she knows he is not dead, and she searches the house for him, wandering from his cluttered bedroom to her small room to the linoleum-tiled lab.

She is in the lab when she hears something tapping: a small dry scratching, like a wind-blown branch against the window, though no tree grows near the house and the night is still. Cautiously, she lifts the curtain to look out.

She looks into her own reflection: a pale oval face, long blonde hair. The hand that holds the curtain aside is smooth and white with carefully clipped fingernails. But something is wrong. Superimposed on the reflection is another face peering through the glass: a pair of dark brown eyes, a chimp face with red-brown hair and jug-handle ears. She sees her own reflection and she sees the outsider; the two images merge and blur. She is afraid, but she can’t drop the curtain and shut the ape face out.

She is a chimp looking in through the cold, bright windowpane; she is a girl looking out; she is a girl looking in; she is an ape looking out. She is afraid and the coyotes are howling all around.

Rachel opens her eyes and blinks until the world comes into focus. The pain and tingling has retreated, but she still feels a little sick. Her left eye aches. When she rubs it, she feels a raised lump on the eyelid where the woman pricked her. She lies on the floor of a wire mesh cage. The room is hot and the air is thick with the smell of animals.

In the cage beside her is another chimp, an older animal with scruffy dark brown fur. He sits with his arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth, back and forth. His head is down. As he rocks, he murmurs to himself, a meaningless cooing that goes on and on. On his scalp, Rachel can see a gleam of metal: a permanently implanted electrode protrudes from a shaven patch. Rachel makes a soft questioning sound, but the other chimp will not look up.

Rachel’s own cage is just a few feet square. In one corner is a bowl of monkey pellets. A water bottle hangs on the side of the cage. Rachel ignores the food, but drinks thirstily.

Sunlight streams through the windows, sliced into small sections by the wire mesh that covers the glass. She tests her cage door, rattling it gently at first, then harder. It is securely latched. The gaps in the mesh are too small to admit her hand. She can’t reach out to work the latch.

The other chimp continues to rock back and forth. When Rachel rattles the mesh of her cage and howls, he lifts his head wearily and looks at her. His red-rimmed eyes are unfocused; she can’t be sure he sees her.

—Hello, she gestures tentatively.—What’s wrong?

He blinks at her in the dim light.—Hurt, he signs in ASL. He reaches up to touch the electrode, fingering skin that is already raw from repeated rubbing.

—Who hurt you? she asks. He stares at her blankly and she repeats the question.—Who?

—Men, he signs.

As if on cue, there is the click of a latch and the door to the lab opens. A bearded man in a white coat steps in, followed by a clean-shaven man in a suit. The bearded man seems to be showing the other man around the lab. “. . . only preliminary testing, so far,” the bearded man is saying. “We’ve been hampered by a shortage of chimps trained in ASL.” The two men stop in front of the old chimp’s cage. “This old fellow is from the Oregon center. Funding for the language program was cut back and some of the animals were dispersed to other programs.” The old chimp huddles at the back of the cage, eyeing the bearded man with suspicion.

—Hungry? the bearded man signs to the old chimp. He holds up an orange where the old chimp can see it.

—Give orange, the old chimp gestures. He holds out his hand, but comes no nearer to the wire mesh than he must to reach the orange. With the fruit in hand, he retreats to the back of his cage.

The bearded man continues, “This project will provide us with the first solid data on neural activity during use of sign language. But we really need greater access to chimps with advanced language skills. People are so damn protective of their animals.”

“Is this one of yours?” the clean-shaven man asks, pointing to Rachel. She cowers in the back of the cage, as far from the wire mesh as she can get.

“No, not mine. She was someone’s household pet, apparently. The county sheriff had us pick her up.” The bearded man peers into her cage. Rachel does not move; she is terrified that he will somehow guess that she knows ASL. She stares at his hands and thinks about those hands putting an electrode through her skull. “I think she’ll be put in breeding stock,” the man says as he turns away.

Rachel watches them go, wondering at what terrible people these are. Aaron was right: they want to punish her, put an electrode in her head.

After the men are gone, she tries to draw the old chimp into conversation, but he will not reply. He ignores her as he eats his orange. Then he returns to his former posture, hiding his head and rocking himself back and forth.

Rachel, hungry despite herself, samples one of the food pellets. It has a strange medicinal taste, and she puts it back in the bowl. She needs to pee, but there is no toilet and she cannot escape the cage. At last, unable to hold it, she pees in one corner of the cage. The urine flows through the wire mesh to soak the litter below, and the smell of warm piss fills her cage. Humiliated, frightened, her head aching, her skin itchy from the flea spray, Rachel watches as the sunlight creeps across the room.

The day wears on. Rachel samples her food again, but rejects it, preferring hunger to the strange taste. A black man comes and cleans the cages of the rabbits and rats. Rachel cowers in her cage and watches him warily, afraid that he will hurt her, too.

When night comes, she is not tired. Outside, coyotes howl. Moonlight filters in through the high windows. She draws her legs up toward her body, then rests with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her father is dead, and she is a captive in a strange place. For a time, she whimpers softly, hoping to awaken from this nightmare and find herself at home in bed. When she hears the click of a key in the door to the room, she hugs herself more tightly.

A man in green coveralls pushes a cart filled with cleaning supplies into the room. He takes a broom from the cart, and begins sweeping the concrete floor. Over the rows of cages, she can see the top of his head bobbing in time with his sweeping. He works slowly and methodically, bending down to sweep carefully under each row of cages, making a neat pile of dust, dung, and food scraps in the center of the aisle.

The janitor’s name is Jake. He is a middle-aged deaf man who has been employed by the Primate Research Center for the past seven years. He works night shift. The personnel director at the Primate Research Center likes Jake because he fills the federal quota for handicapped employees, and because he has not asked for a raise in five years. There have been some complaints about Jake—his work is often sloppy—but never enough to merit firing the man.

Jake is an unambitious, somewhat slow-witted man. He likes the Primate Research Center because he works alone, which allows him to drink on the job. He is an easy-going man, and he likes the animals. Sometimes, he brings treats for them. Once, a lab assistant caught him feeding an apple to a pregnant rhesus monkey. The monkey was part of an experiment on the effect of dietary restrictions on fetal brain development, and the lab assistant warned Jake that he would be fired if he was ever caught interfering with the animals again. Jake still feeds the animals, but he is more careful about when he does it, and he has never been caught again.

As Rachel watches, the old chimp gestures to Jake.—Give banana, the chimp signs.—Please banana. Jake stops sweeping for a minute and reaches down to the bottom shelf of his cleaning cart. He returns with a banana and offers it to the old chimp. The chimp accepts the banana and leans against the mesh while Jake scratches his fur.

When Jake turns back to his sweeping, he catches sight of Rachel and sees that she is watching him. Emboldened by his kindness to the old chimp, Rachel timidly gestures to him.—Help me.

Jake hesitates, then peers at her more closely. Both his eyes are shot with a fine lacework of red. His nose displays the broken blood vessels of someone who has been friends with the bottle for too many years. He needs a shave. But when he leans close, Rachel catches the scent of whiskey and tobacco. The smells remind her of Aaron and give her courage.

—Please help me, Rachel signs.—I don’t belong here.

For the last hour, Jake has been drinking steadily. His view of the world is somewhat fuzzy. He stares at her blearily.

Rachel’s fear that he will hurt her is replaced by the fear that he will leave her locked up and alone. Desperately she signs again.—Please please please. Help me. I don’t belong here. Please help me go home.

He watches her, considering the situation. Rachel does not move. She is afraid that any movement will make him leave. With a majestic speed dictated by his inebriation, Jake leans his broom on the row of cages behind him and steps toward Rachel’s cage again.—You talk? he signs.—I talk, she signs.

—Where did you come from?

—From my father’s house, she signs.—Two men came and shot me and put me here. I don’t know why. I don’t know why they locked me in jail.

Jake looks around, willing to be sympathetic, but puzzled by her talk of jail.—This isn’t jail, he signs.—This is a place where scientists raise monkeys.

Rachel is indignant.—I am not a monkey, she signs.—I am a girl.

Jake studies her hairy body and her jug-handle ears.—You look like a monkey.

Rachel shakes her head.—No. I am a girl.

Rachel runs her hands back over her head, a very human gesture of annoyance and unhappiness. She signs sadly,—I don’t belong here. Please let me out.

Jake shifts his weight from foot to foot, wondering what to do.—I can’t let you out. I’ll get in big trouble.

—Just for a little while? Please?

Jake glances at his cart of supplies. He has to finish off this room and two corridors of offices before he can relax for the night.

—Don’t go, Rachel signs, guessing his thoughts.

—I have work to do.

She looks at the cart, then suggests eagerly,—Let me out and I’ll help you work.

Jake frowns.—If I let you out, you will run away.

—No, I won’t run away. I will help. Please let me out.

—You promise to go back?

Rachel nods.

Warily he unlatches the cage. Rachel bounds out, grabs a whisk broom from the cart, and begins industriously sweeping bits of food and droppings from beneath the row of cages.—Come on, she signs to Jake from the end of the aisle.—I will help.

When Jake pushes the cart from the room filled with cages, Rachel follows him closely. The rubber wheels of the cleaning cart rumble softly on the linoleum floor. They pass through a metal door into a corridor where the floor is carpeted and the air smells of chalk dust and paper.

Offices let off the corridor, each one a small room furnished with a desk, bookshelves, and a blackboard. Jake shows Rachel how to empty the wastebaskets into a garbage bag. While he cleans the blackboards, she wanders from office to office, trailing the trash-filled garbage bag.

At first, Jake keeps a close eye on Rachel. But after cleaning each blackboard, he pauses to refill a cup from the whiskey bottle that he keeps wedged between the Saniflush and the window cleaner. By the time he is halfway through the second cup; he is treating her like an old friend, telling her to hurry up so that they can eat dinner.

Rachel works quickly, but she stops sometimes to gaze out the office windows. Outside, moonlight shines on a sandy plain, dotted here and there with scrubby clumps of rabbit brush.

At the end of the corridor is a larger room in which there are several desks and typewriters. In one of the wastebaskets, buried beneath memos and candybar wrappers, she finds a magazine. The title is Love Confessions and the cover has a picture of a man and woman kissing. Rachel studies the cover, then takes the magazine, tucking it on the bottom shelf of the cart.

Jake pours himself another cup of whiskey and pushes the cart to another hallway. Jake is working slower now, and as he works he makes humming noises, tuneless sounds that he feels only as pleasant vibrations. The last few blackboards are sloppily done, and Rachel, finished with the wastebaskets, cleans the places that Jake missed.

They eat dinner in the janitor’s storeroom, a stuffy windowless room furnished with an ancient grease-stained couch, a battered black-and-white television, and shelves of cleaning supplies. From a shelf, Jake takes the paper bag that holds his lunch: a baloney sandwich, a bag of barbecued potato chips, and a box of vanilla wafers. From behind the gallon jugs of liquid cleanser, he takes a magazine. He lights a cigarette, pours himself another cup of whiskey, and settles down on the couch. After a moment’s hesitation, he offers Rachel a drink, pouring a shot of whiskey into a chipped ceramic cup.

Aaron never let Rachel drink whiskey, and she samples it carefully. At first the smell makes her sneeze, but she is fascinated by the way that the drink warms her throat, and she sips some more.

As they drink, Rachel tells Jake about the men who shot her and the woman who pricked her with a needle, and he nods.—The people here are crazy, he signs.

—I know, she says, thinking of the old chimp with the electrode in his head.—You won’t tell them I can talk, will you?

Jake nods.—I won’t tell them anything.

—They treat me like I’m not real, Rachel signs sadly. Then she hugs her knees, frightened at the thought of being held captive by crazy people. She considers planning her escape: she is out of the cage and she is sure she could outrun Jake. As she wonders about it, she finishes her cup of whiskey. The alcohol takes the edge off her fear. She sits close beside Jake on the couch, and the smell of his cigarette smoke reminds her of Aaron. For the first time since Aaron’s death she feels warm and happy.

She shares Jake’s cookies and potato chips and looks at the Love Confessions magazine that she took from the trash. The first story that she reads is about a woman named Alice. The headline reads: “I became a Go-go dancer to pay off my husband’s gambling debts, and now he wants me to sell my body.”

Rachel sympathizes with Alice’s loneliness and suffering. Alice, like Rachel, is alone and misunderstood. As Rachel slowly reads, she sips her second cup of whiskey. The story reminds her of a fairy tale: the nice man who rescues Alice from her terrible husband replaces the handsome prince who rescued the princess. Rachel glances at Jake and wonders if he will rescue her from the wicked people who locked her in the cage.

She has finished the second cup of whiskey and eaten half Jake’s cookies when Jake says that she must go back to her cage. She goes reluctantly, taking the magazine with her. He promises that he will come for her again the next night, and with that she must be content. She puts the magazine in one corner of the cage and curls up to sleep.

She wakes early in the afternoon. A man in a white coat is wheeling a low cart into the lab.

Rachel’s head aches with hangover and she feels sick. As she crouches in one corner of her cage, he stops the cart beside her cage and then locks the wheels. “Hold on there,” he mutters to her, then slides her cage onto the cart.

The man wheels her through long corridors, where the walls are cement blocks, painted institutional green. Rachel huddles unhappily in the cage, wondering where she is going and whether Jake will ever be able to find her.

At the end of a long corridor, the man opens a thick metal door and a wave of warm air strikes Rachel. It stinks of chimpanzees, excrement, and rotting food. On either side of the corridor are metal bars and wire mesh. Behind the mesh, Rachel can see dark hairy shadows. In one cage, five adolescent chimps swing and play. In another, two females huddle together, grooming each other. The man slows as he passes a cage in which a big male is banging on the wire with his fist, making the mesh rattle and ring.

“Now, Johnson,” says the man. “Cool it. Be nice. I’m bringing you a new little girlfriend.”

With a series of hooks, the man links Rachel’s cage with the cage next to Johnson’s and opens the doors. “Go on, girl,” he says. “See the nice fruit.” In the cage is a bowl of sliced apples with an attendant swarm of fruit flies.

At first, Rachel will not move into the new cage. She crouches in the cage on the cart, hoping that the man will decide to take her back to the lab. She watches him get a hose and attach it to a water faucet. But she does not understand his intention until he turns the stream of water on her. A cold blast strikes her on the back and she howls, fleeing into the new cage to avoid the cold water. Then the man closes the doors, unhooks the cage, and hurries away.

The floor is bare cement. Her cage is at one end of the corridor and two walls are cement block. A door in one of the cement block walls leads to an outside run. The other two walls are wire mesh: one facing the corridor; the other, Johnson’s cage.

Johnson, quiet now that the man has left, is sniffing around the door in the wire mesh wall that joins their cages. Rachel watches him anxiously. Her memories of other chimps are distant, softened by time. She remembers her mother; she vaguely remembers playing with other chimps her age. But she does not know how to react to Johnson when he stares at her with great intensity and makes a loud huffing sound. She gestures to him in ASL, but he only stares harder and huffs again. Beyond Johnson, she can see other cages and other chimps, so many that the wire mesh blurs her vision and she cannot see the other end of the corridor.

To escape Johnson’s scrutiny, she ducks through the door into the outside run, a wire mesh cage on a white concrete foundation. Outside there is barren ground and rabbit brush. The afternoon sun is hot and all the other runs are deserted until Johnson appears in the run beside hers. His attention disturbs her and she goes back inside.

She retreats to the side of the cage farthest from Johnson. A crudely built wooden platform provides her with a place to sit. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she tries to relax and ignore Johnson. She dozes off for a while, but wakes to a commotion across the corridor.

In the cage across the way is a female chimp in heat. Rachel recognizes the smell from her own times in heat. Two keepers are opening the door that separates the female’s cage from the adjoining cage, where a male stands, watching with great interest. Johnson is shaking the wire mesh and howling as he watches.

“Mike here is a virgin, but Susie knows what she’s doing,” one keeper was saying to the other. “So it should go smoothly. But keep the hose ready.”

“Yeah?”

“Sometimes they fight. We only use the hose to break it up if it gets real bad. Generally, they do okay.”

Mike stalks into Susie’s cage. The keepers lower the cage door, trapping both chimps in the same cage. Susie seems unalarmed. She continues eating a slice of orange while Mike sniffs at her genitals with every indication of great interest. She bends over to let Mike finger her pink bottom, the sign of estrus.

Rachel finds herself standing at the wire mesh, making low moaning noises. She can see Mike’s erection, hear his grunting cries. He squats on the floor of Susie’s cage, gesturing to the female. Rachel’s feelings are mixed: she is fascinated, fearful, confused. She keeps thinking of the description of sex in the Love Confessions story: When Alice feels Danny’s lips on hers, she is swept away by the passion of the moment. He takes her in his arms and her skin tingles as if she were consumed by an inner fire.

Susie bends down and Mike penetrates her with a loud grunt, thrusting violently with his hips. Susie cries out shrilly and suddenly leaps up, knocking Mike away. Rachel watches, overcome with fascination. Mike, his penis now limp, follows Susie slowly to the corner of the cage, where he begins grooming her carefully. Rachel finds that the wire mesh has cut her hands where she gripped it too tightly.

It is night, and the door at the end of the corridor creaks open. Rachel is immediately alert, peering through the wire mesh and trying to see down to the end of the corridor. She bangs on the wire mesh. As Jake comes closer, she waves a greeting.

When Jake reaches for the lever that will raise the door to Rachel’s cage, Johnson charges toward him, howling and waving his arms above his head. He hammers on the wire mesh with his fists, howling and grimacing at Jake. Rachel ignores Johnson and hurries after Jake.

Again Rachel helps Jake clean. In the laboratory, she greets the old chimp, but the animal is more interested in the banana that Jake has brought than in conversation. The chimp will not reply to her questions, and after several tries, she gives up.

While Jake vacuums the carpeted corridors, Rachel empties the trash, finding a magazine called Modern Romance in the same wastebasket that had provided Love Confessions.

Later, in the janitor’s lounge, Jake smokes a cigarette, sips whiskey, and flips through one of his own magazines. Rachel reads love stories in Modern Romance.

Every once in a while, she looks over Jake’s shoulder at grainy pictures of naked women with their legs spread wide apart. Jake looks for a long time at a picture of a blonde woman with big breasts, red fingernails, and purple-painted eyelids. The woman lies on her back and smiles as she strokes the pinkness between her legs. The picture on the next page shows her caressing her own breasts, pinching the dark nipples. The final picture shows her looking back over her shoulder. She is in the position that Susie took when she was ready to be mounted.

Rachel looks over Jake’s shoulder at the magazine, but she does not ask questions. Jake’s smell began to change as soon as he opened the magazine; the scent of nervous sweat mingles with the aromas of tobacco and whiskey. Rachel suspects that questions would not be welcome just now.

At Jake’s insistence, she goes back to her cage before dawn.

Over the next week, she listens to the conversations of the men who come and go, bringing food and hosing out the cages. From the men’s conversation, she learns that the Primate Research Centeris primarily a breeding facility that supplies researchers with domestically bred apes and monkeys of several species. It also maintains its own research staff. In indifferent tones, the men talk of horrible things. The adolescent chimps at the end of the corridor are being fed a diet high in cholesterol to determine cholesterol’s effects on the circulatory system. A group of pregnant females is being injected with male hormones to determine how that will affect the female offspring. A group of infants is being fed a low protein diet to determine adverse effects on their brain development.

The men look through her as if she were not real, as if she were a part of the wall, as if she were no one at all. She cannot speak to them; she cannot trust them.

Each night, Jake lets her out of her cage and she helps him clean. He brings treats: barbequed potato chips, fresh fruit, chocolate bars, and cookies. He treats her fondly, as one would treat a precocious child. And he talks to her.

At night, when she is with Jake, Rachel can almost forget the terror of the cage, the anxiety of watching Johnson pace to and fro, the sense of unreality that accompanies the simplest act. She would be content to stay with Jake forever, eating snack food and reading confessions magazines. He seems to like her company. But each morning, Jake insists that she must go back to the cage and the terror. By the end of the first week, she has begun plotting her escape.

Whenever Jake falls asleep over his whiskey, something that happens three nights out of five, Rachel prowls the center alone, surreptitiously gathering things that she will need to survive in the desert: a plastic jug filled with water, a plastic bag of food pellets, a large beach towel that will serve as a blanket on the cool desert nights, a discarded plastic shopping bag in which she can carry the other things. Her best find is a road map on which the Primate Center is marked in red. She knows the address of Aaron’s ranch and finds it on the map. She studies the roads and plots a route home. Cross country, assuming that she does not get lost, she will have to travel about fifty miles to reach the ranch. She hides these things behind one of the shelves in the janitor’s storeroom.

Her plans to run away and go home are disrupted by the idea that she is in love with Jake, a notion that comes to her slowly, fed by the stories in the confessions magazines. When Jake absent-mindedly strokes her, she is filled with a strange excitement. She longs for his company and misses him on the weekends when he is away. She is happy only when she is with him, following him through the halls of the center, sniffing the aroma of tobacco and whiskey that is his own perfume. She steals a cigarette from his pack and hides it in her cage, where she can savor the smell of it at her leisure.

She loves him, but she does not know how to make him love her back. Rachel knows little about love: she remembers a high school crush where she mooned after a boy with a locker near hers, but that came to nothing. She reads the confessions magazines and Ann Landers’ column in the newspaper that Jake brings with him each night, and from these sources, she learns about romance. One night, after Jake falls asleep, she types a badly punctuated, ungrammatical letter to Ann. In the letter, she explains her situation and asks for advice on how to make Jake love her. She slips the letter into a sack labeled “Outgoing Mail,” and for the next week she reads Ann’s column with increased interest. But her letter never appears.

Rachel searches for answers in the magazine pictures that seem to fascinate Jake. She studies the naked women, especially the big-breasted woman with the purple smudges around her eyes.

One night, in a secretary’s desk, she finds a plastic case of eyeshadow. She steals it and takes it back to her cage. The next evening, as soon as the Center is quiet, she upturns her metal food dish and regards her reflection in the shiny bottom. Squatting, she balances the eye shadow case on one knee and examines its contents: a tiny makeup brush and three shades of eye shadow—INDIAN BLUE, FOREST GREEN, and WILDLY VIOLET. Rachel chooses the shade labeled WILDLY VIOLET.

Using one finger to hold her right eye closed, she dabs her eyelid carefully with the makeup brush, leaving a gaudy orchid-colored smudge on her brown skin. She studies the smudge critically, then adds to it, smearing the color beyond the corner of her eyelid until it disappears in her brown fur. The color gives her eye a carnival brightness, a lunatic gaiety. Working with great care, she matches the effect on the other side, then smiles at herself in the glass, blinking coquettishly.

In the other cage, Johnson bares his teeth and shakes the wire mesh. She ignores him.

When Jake comes to let her out, he frowns at her eyes.—Did you hurt yourself? he asks.

—No, she says. Then, after a pause,—Don’t you like it?

Jake squats beside her and stares at her eyes. Rachel puts a hand on his knee and her heart pounds at her own boldness.—You are a very strange monkey, he signs.

Rachel is afraid to move. Her hand on his knee closes into a fist; her face folds in on itself, puckering around the eyes.

Then, straightening up, he signs,—I liked your eyes better before.

He likes her eyes. She nods without taking her eyes from his face. Later, she washes her face in the women’s restroom, leaving dark smudges the color of bruises on a series of paper towels.

Rachel is dreaming. She is walking through the Painted Desert with her hairy brown mother, following a red rock canyon that Rachel somehow knows will lead her to the Primate Research Center. Her mother is lagging behind: she does not want to go to the center; she is afraid. In the shadow of a rock outcropping, Rachel stops to explain to her mother that they must go to the center because Jake is at the center.

Rachel’s mother does not understand sign language. She watches Rachel with mournful eyes, then scrambles up the canyon wall, leaving Rachel behind. Rachel climbs after her mother, pulling herself over the edge in time to see the other chimp loping away across the windblown red cinder-rock and sand.

Rachel bounds after her mother, and as she runs she howls like an abandoned infant chimp, wailing her distress. The figure of her mother wavers in the distance, shimmering in the heat that rises from the sand. The figure changes. Running away across the red sands is a pale blonde woman wearing a purple sweatsuit and jogging shoes, the sweet-smelling mother that Rachel remembers. The woman looks back and smiles at Rachel. “Don’t howl like an ape, daughter,” she calls. “Say Mama.”

Rachel runs silently, dream running that takes her nowhere. The sand burns her feet and the sun beats down on her head. The blonde woman vanishes in the distance, and Rachel is alone. She collapses on the sand, whimpering because she is alone and afraid.

She feels the gentle touch of fingers grooming her fur, and for a moment, still half asleep, she believes that her hairy mother has returned to her. She opens her eyes and looks into a pair of dark brown eyes, separated from her by wire mesh. Johnson. He has reached through a gap in the fence to groom her. As he sorts through her fur, he makes soft cooing sounds, gentle comforting noises.

Still half asleep, she gazes at him and wonders why she was so fearful. He does not seem so bad. He grooms her for a time, and then sits nearby, watching her through the mesh. She brings a slice of apple from her dish of food and offers it to him. With her free hand, she makes the sign for apple. When he takes it, she signs again: apple. He is not a particularly quick student, but she has time and many slices of apple.

All Rachel’s preparations are done, but she cannot bring herself to leave the center. Leaving the center means leaving Jake, leaving potato chips and whiskey, leaving security. To Rachel, the thought of love is always accompanied by the warm taste of whiskey and potato chips.

Some nights, after Jake is asleep, she goes to the big glass doors that lead to the outside. She opens the doors and stands on the steps, looking down into the desert. Sometimes a jackrabbit sits on its haunches in the rectangles of light that shine through the glass doors. Sometimes she sees kangaroo rats, hopping through the moonlight like rubber balls bouncing on hard pavement. Once, a coyote trots by, casting a contemptuous glance in her direction.

The desert is a lonely place. Empty. Cold. She thinks of Jake snoring softly in the janitor’s lounge. And always she closes the door and returns to him.

Rachel leads a double life: janitor’s assistant by night, prisoner and teacher by day. She spends her afternoons drowsing in the sun and teaching Johnson new signs.

On a warm afternoon, Rachel sits in the outside run, basking in the sunlight. Johnson is inside, and the other chimps are quiet. She can almost imagine she is back at her father’s ranch, sitting in her own yard. She naps and dreams of Jake.

She dreams that she is sitting in his lap on the battered old couch. Her hand is on his chest: a smooth pale hand with red-painted fingernails. When she looks at the dark screen of the television set, she can see her reflection. She is a thin teenager with blonde hair and blue eyes. She is naked.

Jake is looking at her and smiling. He runs a hand down her back and she closes her eyes in ecstasy.

But something changes when she closes her eyes. Jake is grooming her as her mother used to groom her, sorting through her hair in search of fleas. She opens her eyes and sees Johnson, his diligent fingers searching through her fur, his intent brown eyes watching her. The reflection on the television screen shows two chimps, tangled in each others’ arms.

Rachel wakes to find that she is in heat for the first time since she came to the center. The skin surrounding her genitals is swollen and pink.

For the rest of the day, she is restless, pacing to and fro in her cage. On his side of the wire mesh wall, Johnson is equally restless, following her when she goes outside, sniffing long and hard at the edge of the barrier that separates him from her.

That night, Rachel goes eagerly to help Jake clean. She follows him closely, never letting him get far from her. When he is sweeping, she trots after him with the dustpan and he almost trips over her twice. She keeps waiting for him to notice her condition, but he seems oblivious.

As she works, she sips from a cup of whiskey. Excited, she drinks more than usual, finishing two full cups. The liquor leaves her a little disoriented, and she sways as she follows Jake to the janitor’s lounge. She curls up close beside him on the couch. He relaxes with his arms resting on the back of the couch, his legs stretching out before him. She moves so that she presses against him.

He stretches, yawns, and rubs the back of his neck as if trying to rub away stiffness. Rachel reaches around behind him and begins to gently rub his neck, reveling in the feel of his skin, his hair against the backs of her hands. The thoughts that hop and skip through her mind are confusing. Sometimes it seems that the hair that tickles her hands is Johnson’s; sometimes, she knows it is Jake’s. And sometimes it doesn’t seem to matter. Are they really so different? They are not so different.

She rubs his neck, not knowing what to do next. In the confessions magazines, this is where the man crushes the woman in his arms. Rachel climbs into Jake’s lap and hugs him, waiting for him to crush her in his arms. He blinks at her sleepily. Half asleep, he strokes her, and his moving hand brushes near her genitals. She presses herself against him, making a soft sound in her throat. She rubs her hip against his crotch, aware now of a slight change in his smell, in the tempo of his breathing. He blinks at her again, a little more awake now. She bares her teeth in a smile and tilts her head back to lick his neck. She can feel his hands on her shoulders, pushing her away, and she knows what he wants. She slides from his lap and turns, presenting him with her pink genitals, ready to be mounted, ready to have him penetrate her. She moans in anticipation, a low inviting sound.

He does not come to her. She looks over her shoulder and he is still sitting on the couch, watching her through half-closed eyes. He reaches over and picks up a magazine filled with pictures of naked women. His other hand drops to his crotch and he is lost in his own world.

Rachel howls like an infant who has lost its mother, but he does not look up. He is staring at the picture of the blonde woman.

Rachel runs down dark corridors to her cage, the only home she has. When she reaches her corridor, she is breathing hard and making small lonely whimpering noises. In the dimly lit corridor, she hesitates for a moment, staring into Johnson’s cage. The male chimp is asleep. She remembers the touch of his hands when he groomed her.

From the corridor, she lifts the gate that leads into Johnson’s cage and enters. He wakes at the sound of the door and sniffs the air. When he sees Rachel, he stalks toward her, sniffing eagerly. She lets him finger her genitals, sniff deeply of her scent. His penis is erect and he grunts in excitement. She turns and presents herself to him and he mounts her, thrusting deep inside. As he penetrates, she thinks, for a moment, of Jake and of the thin blonde teenage girl named Rachel, but then the moment passes. Almost against her will she cries out, a shrill exclamation of welcoming and loss.

After he withdraws his penis, Johnson grooms her gently, sniffing her genitals and softly stroking her fur. She is sleepy and content, but she knows that she cannot delay.

Johnson is reluctant to leave his cage, but Rachel takes him by the hand and leads him to the janitor’s lounge. His presence gives her courage. She listens at the door and hears Jake’s soft breathing. Leaving Johnson in the hall, she slips into the room. Jake is lying on the couch, the magazine draped over his legs. Rachel takes the equipment that she has gathered and stands for a moment, staring at the sleeping man. His baseball cap hangs on the arm of a broken chair, and she takes that to remember him by.

Rachel leads Johnson through the empty halls. A kangaroo rat, collecting seeds in the dried grass near the glass doors, looks up curiously as Rachel leads Johnson down the steps. Rachel carries the plastic shopping bag slung over her shoulder. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote howls, a long yapping wail. His cry is joined by others, a chorus in the moonlight.

Rachel takes Johnson by the hand and leads him into the desert.

A cocktail waitress, driving from her job in Flagstaff to her home in Winslow, sees two apes dart across the road, hurrying away from the bright beams of her headlights. After wrestling with her conscience (she does not want to be accused of drinking on the job), she notifies the county sheriff.

A local newspaper reporter, an eager young man fresh out of journalism school, picks up the story from the police report and interviews the waitress. Flattered by his enthusiasm for her story and delighted to find a receptive ear, she tells him details that she failed to mention to the police: one of the apes was wearing a baseball cap and carrying what looked like a shopping bag.

The reporter writes up a quick humorous story for the morning edition, and begins researching a feature article to be run later in the week. He knows that the newspaper, eager for news in a slow season, will play a human-interest story up big—kind of Lassie, Come Home with chimps.

Just before dawn, a light rain begins to fall, the first rain of spring. Rachel searches for shelter and finds a small cave formed by three tumbled boulders. It will keep off the rain and hide them from casual observers. She shares her food and water with Johnson. He has followed her closely all night, seemingly intimidated by the darkness and the howling of distant coyotes. She feels protective toward him. At the same time, having him with her gives her courage. He knows only a few gestures in ASL, but he does not need to speak. His presence is comfort enough.

Johnson curls up in the back of the cave and falls asleep quickly. Rachel sits in the opening and watches dawnlight wash the stars from the sky. The rain rattles against the sand, a comforting sound. She thinks about Jake. The baseball cap on her head still smells of his cigarettes, but she does not miss him. Not really. She fingers the cap and wonders why she thought she loved Jake.

The rain lets up. The clouds rise like fairy castles in the distance and the rising sun tints them pink and gold and gives them flaming red banners. Rachel remembers when she was younger and Aaron read her the story of Pinnochio, the little puppet who wanted to be a real boy. At the end of his adventures, Pinnochio, who has been brave and kind, gets his wish. He becomes a real boy.

Rachel had cried at the end of the story and when Aaron asked why, she had rubbed her eyes on the backs of her hairy hands.—I want to be a real girl, she signed to him.—A real girl.

“You are a real girl,” Aaron had told her, but somehow she had never believed him.

The sun rises higher and illuminates the broken rock turrets of the desert. There is a magic in this barren land of unassuming grandeur. Some cultures send their young people to the desert to seek visions and guidance, searching for true thinking spawned by the openness of the place, the loneliness, the beauty of emptiness.

Rachel drowses in the warm sun and dreams a vision that has the clarity of truth. In the dream, her father comes to her. “Rachel,” he says to her, “it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of you. You’re my daughter.”

—I want to be a real girl, she signs.

“You are real,” her father says. “And you don’t need some two-bit drunken janitor to prove it to you.” She knows she is dreaming, but she also knows that her father speaks the truth. She is warm and happy and she doesn’t need Jake at all. The sunlight warms her and a lizard watches her from a rock, scurrying for cover when she moves. She picks up a bit of loose rock that lies on the floor of the cave. Idly, she scratches on the dark red sandstone wall of the cave. A lopsided heart shape. Within it, awkwardly printed: Rachel and Johnson. Between them, a plus sign. She goes over the letters again and again, leaving scores of fine lines on the smooth rock surface. Then, late in the morning, soothed by the warmth of the day, she sleeps.

Shortly after dark, an elderly rancher in a pickup truck spots two apes in a remote corner of his ranch. They run away and lose him in the rocks, but not until he has a good look at them. He calls the police, the newspaper, and the Primate Center.

The reporter arrives first thing the next morning, interviews the rancher, and follows the men from the Primate Center as they search for evidence of the chimps. They find monkey shit near the cave, confirming that the runaways were indeed nearby. The news reporter, an eager and curious young man, squirms on his belly into the cave and finds the names scratched on the cave wall. He peers at it. He might have dismissed them as the idle scratchings of kids, except that the names match the names of the missing chimps. “Hey,” he called to his photographer, “Take a look at this.”

The next morning’s newspaper displays Rachel’s crudely scratched letters. In a brief interview, the rancher mentioned that the chimps were carrying bags. “Looked like supplies,” he said. “They looked like they were in for a long haul.”

On the third day, Rachel’s water runs out. She heads toward a small town, marked on the map. They reach it in the early morning—thirst forces them to travel by day. Beside an isolated ranch house, she finds a faucet. She is filling her bottle when Johnson grunts in alarm.

A dark-haired woman watches from the porch of the house. She does not move toward the apes, and Rachel continues filling the bottle. “It’s all right, Rachel,” the woman, who has been following the story in the papers, calls out. “Drink all you want.”

Startled, but still suspicious, Rachel caps the bottle and, keeping her eyes on the woman, drinks from the faucet. The woman steps back into the house. Rachel motions Johnson to do the same, signaling for him to hurry and drink. She turns off the faucet when he is done.

They are turning to go when the woman emerges from the house carrying a plate of tortillas and a bowl of apples. She sets them on the edge of the porch and says, “These are for you.”

The woman watches through the window as Rachel packs the food into her bag. Rachel puts away the last apple and gestures her thanks to the woman. When the woman fails to respond to the sign language, Rachel picks up a stick and writes in the sand of the yard. “THANK YOU,” Rachel scratches, then waves good-bye and sets out across the desert. She is puzzled, but happy.

The next morning’s newspaper includes an interview with the dark-haired woman. She describes how Rachel turned on the faucet and turned it off when she was through, how the chimp packed the apples neatly in her bag and wrote in the dirt with a stick.

The reporter also interviews the director of the Primate Research Center. “These are animals,” the director explains angrily. “But people want to treat them like they’re small hairy people.” He describes the Center as “primarily a breeding center with some facilities for medical research.” The reporter asks some pointed questions about their acquisition of Rachel.

But the biggest story is an investigative piece. The reporter reveals that he has tracked down Aaron Jacob’s lawyer and learned that Jacobs left a will. In this will, he bequeathed all his possessions—including his house and surrounding land—to “Rachel, the chimp I acknowledge as my daughter.”

The reporter makes friends with one of the young women in the typing pool at the research center, and she tells him the office scuttlebutt: people suspect that the chimps may have been released by a deaf and drunken janitor, who was subsequently fired for negligence. The reporter, accompanied by a friend who can communicate in sign language, finds Jake in his apartment in downtown Flagstaff.

Jake, who has been drinking steadily since he was fired, feels betrayed by Rachel, by the Primate Center, by the world. He complains at length about Rachel: they had been friends, and then she took his baseball cap and ran away. He just didn’t understand why she had run away like that.

“You mean she could talk?” the reporter asks through his interpreter.

—Of course she can talk, Jake signs impatiently.—She is a smart monkey.

The headlines read: “Intelligent chimp inherits fortune!” Of course, Aaron’s bequest isn’t really a fortune and she isn’t just a chimp, but close enough. Animal rights activists rise up in Rachel’s defense. The case is discussed on the national news. Ann Landers reports receiving a letter from a chimp named Rachel; she had thought it was a hoax perpetrated by the boys at Yale. The American Civil Liberties Union assigns a lawyer to the case.

By day, Rachel and Johnson sleep in whatever hiding places they can find: a cave; a shelter built for range cattle; the shell of an abandoned car, rusted from long years in a desert gully. Sometimes Rachel dreams of jungle darkness, and the coyotes in the distance become a part of her dreams, their howling becomes the cries of fellow apes.

The desert and the journey have changed her. She is wiser, having passed through the white-hot love of adolescence and emerged on the other side. She dreams, one day, of the ranch house. In the dream, she has long blonde hair and pale white skin. Her eyes are red from crying and she wanders the house restlessly, searching for something that she has lost. When she hears coyotes howling, she looks through a window at the darkness outside. The face that looks in at her has jug-handle ears and shaggy hair. When she sees the face, she cries out in recognition and opens the window to let herself in.

By night, they travel. The rocks and sands are cool beneath Rachel’s feet as she walks toward her ranch. On television, scientists and politicians discuss the ramifications of her case, describe the technology uncovered by investigation of Aaron Jacobs’ files. Their debates do not affect her steady progress toward her ranch or the stars that sprinkle the sky above her.

It is night when Rachel and Johnson approach the ranchhouse. Rachel sniffs the wind and smells automobile exhaust and strange humans. From the hills, she can see a small camp beside a white van marked with the name of a local television station. She hesitates, considering returning to the safety of the desert. Then she takes Johnson by the hand and starts down the hill. Rachel is going home.

FLOWERS OF EDO

Bruce Sterling

This story, originally written for Hayakawa’s Science Fiction Magazine, has previously been published only in Japanese. We think you’ll agree with us that it was just too good to be passed up by the author’s English-reading audience. Mr. Sterling is also the editor of the acclaimed cyberpunk anthology, Mirrorshades published by Arbor House last December.

(with the author’s thanks to

Yoshio Kobayashi and HAYAKAWA’S SF MAGAZINE)

Autumn. A full moon floated over old Edo, behind the thinnest haze of high cloud. It shone like a geisha’s night-lamp through an old mosquito net. The sky was antique browned silk.

Two sweating runners hauled an iron-wheeled rickshaw south, toward the Ginza. This was Kabukiza District, its streets bordered by low, tile-roofed wooden shops. These were modest places: coopers, tobacconists, cheap fabric shops where the acrid reek of dye wafted through reed blinds and paper windows. Behind the stores lurked a maze of alleys, crammed with townsmen’s wooden hovels, the walls festooned with morning glories, the tinder-dry thatched roofs alive with fleas.

It was late. Kabukiza was not a geisha district, and honest workmen were asleep. The muddy streets were unlit, except for moonlight and the rare upstairs lamp. The runners carried their own lantern, which swayed precariously from the rickshaw’s drawing-pole. They trotted rapidly, dodging the worst of the potholes and puddles. But with every lurching dip, the rickshaw’s strings of brass bells jumped and rang.

Suddenly the iron wheels grated on smooth red pavement. They had reached the New Ginza. Here, the air held the fresh alien smell of mortar and brick.

The amazing New Ginza had buried its old predecessor. For the Flowers of Edo had killed the Old Ginza. To date, this huge disaster had been the worst, and most exciting, fire of the Meiji Era. Edo had always been proud of its fires, and the Old Ginza’s fire had been a real marvel. It had raged for three days and carried right down to the river.

Once they had mourned the dead, the Edokko were ready to rebuild. They were always ready. Fires, even earthquakes, were nothing new to them. It was a rare building in Low City that escaped the Flowers of Edo for as long as twenty years.

But this was Imperial Tokyo now, and not the Shogun’s old Edo any more. The Governor had come down from High City in his horse-drawn coach and looked over the smoldering ruins of Ginza. Low City townsmen still talked about it—how the Governor had folded his arms—like this—with his wrists sticking out of his Western frock coat. And how he had frowned a mighty frown. The Edo townsmen were getting used to those unsettling frowns by now. Hard, no-nonsense, modern frowns, with the brows drawn low over cold eyes that glittered with Civilization and Enlightenment.

So the Governor, with a mighty wave of his modern, frock-coated arm, sent for his foreign architects. And the Englishmen had besieged the district with their charts and clanking engines and tubs full of brick and mortar. The very heavens had rained bricks upon the black and flattened ruins. Great red hills of brick sprang up—were they houses, people wondered, were they buildings at all? Stories spread about the foreigners and their peculiar homes. The long noses, of course—necessary to suck air through the stifling brick walls. The pale skin—because bricks, it was said, drained the life and color out of a man. . . .

The rickshaw drew up short with a final brass jingle. The older rickshawman spoke, panting. “Far enough, gov?”

“Yeah, this’ll do,” said one passenger, piling out. His name was Encho Sanyutei. He was the son and successor of a famous vaudeville comedian and, at thirty-five, was now a well-known performer in his own right. He had been telling his companion about the Ginza Brick-town, and his folded arms and jutting underlip had cruelly mimicked Tokyo’s Governor.

Encho, who had been drinking, generously handed the older man a pocketful of jingling copper sen. “Here, pal,” he said. “Do something about that cough, will ya?” The runners bowed, not bothering to overdo it. They trotted off toward the nearby Ginza crowd, hunting another fare.

Parts of Tokyo never slept. The Yoshiwara District, the famous Nightless City of geishas and rakes, was one of them. The travelers had just come from Asakusa District, another sleepless place: a brawling, vibrant playground of bars, Kabuki theaters, and vaudeville joints.

The Ginza Bricktown never slept either. But the air here was different. It lacked that earthy Low City working-man’s glow of sex and entertainment. Something else, something new and strange and powerful, drew the Edokko into the Ginza’s iron-hard streets.

Gaslights. They stood hissing on their black foreign pillars, blasting a pitiless moon-drowning glare over the crowd. There were eighty-five of the appalling wonders, stretching arrow-straight across the Ginza, from Shiba all the way to Kyobashi.

The Edokko crowd beneath the lights was curiously silent. Drugged with pitiless enlightenment, they meandered down the hard, gritty street in high wooden clogs, or low leather shoes. Some wore hakama shirts and jinbibaori coats, others modern pipe-legged trousers, with top hats and bowlers.

The comedian Encho and his big companion staggered drunkenly toward the lights, their polished leather shoes squeaking merrily. To the Tokyo modernist, squeaking was half the fun of these foreign-style shoes. Both men wore inserts of “singing leather” to heighten the effect.

“I don’t like their attitudes,” growled Encho’s companion. His name was Onogawa and, until the Emperor’s Restoration, he had been a samurai. But Imperial decree had abolished the wearing of swords, and Onogawa now had a post in a trading company. He frowned, and dabbed at his nose, which had recently been bloodied and was now clotting. “It’s all too free-and-easy with these modern rickshaws. Did you see those two? They looked into our faces, just as bold as tomcats.”

“Relax, will you?” said Encho. “They were just a couple of street runners. Who cares what they think? The way you act, you’d think they were Shogun’s Overseers.” Encho laughed freely and dusted off his hands with a quick, theatrical gesture. Those grim, spying Overseers, with their merciless canons of Confucian law, were just a bad dream now. Like the Shogun, they were out of business.

“But your face is known all over town,” Onogawa complained. “What if they gossip about us? Everyone will know what happened back there.”

“It’s the least I could do for a devoted fan,” Encho said airily.

Onogawa had sobered up a bit since his street fight in Asakusa. A scuffle had broken out in the crowd after Encho’s performance—a scuffle centered on Onogawa, who had old acquaintances he would have preferred not to meet. But Encho, appearing suddenly in the crowd, had distracted Onogawa’s persecutors and gotten Onogawa away.

It was not a happy situation for Onogawa, who put much stock in his own dignity, and tended to brood. He had been born in Satsuma, a province of radical samurai with stern, unbending standards. But ten years in the capital had changed Onogawa, and given him an Edokko’s notorious love for spectacle. Somewhat shamefully, Onogawa had become completely addicted to Encho’s side-splitting skits and impersonations.

In fact, Onogawa had been slumming in Asakusa vaudeville joints at least twice each week, for months. He had a wife and small son in a modest place in Nihombashi, a rather straitlaced High City district full of earnest young bankers and civil servants on their way up in life. Thanks to old friends from his radical days, Onogawa was an officer in a prosperous trading company. He would have preferred to be in the army, of course, but the army was quite small these days, and appointments were hard to get.

This was a major disappointment in Onogawa’s life, and it had driven him to behave strangely. Onogawa’s long-suffering in-laws had always warned him that his slumming would come to no good. But tonight’s event wasn’t even a geisha scandal, the kind men winked at or even admired. Instead, he had been in a squalid punch-up with low-class commoners.

And he had been rescued by a famous commoner, which was worse. Onogawa couldn’t bring himself to compound his loss of face with gratitude. He glared at Encho from under the brim of his bowler hat. “So where’s this fellow with the foreign booze you promised?”

“Patience,” Encho said absently. “My friend’s got a little place here in Bricktown. It’s private, away from the street.” They wandered down the Ginza, Encho pulling his silk top-hat low over his eyes, so he wouldn’t be recognized.

He slowed as they passed a group of four young women, who were gathered before the modern glass window of a Ginza fabric shop. The store was closed, but the women were admiring the tailor’s dummies. Like the dummies, the women were dressed with daring modernity, sporting small Western parasols, cutaway riding-coats in brilliant purple, and sweeping foreign skirts over large, jutting bustles. “How about that, eh?” said Encho as they drew nearer. “Those foreigners sure like a rump on a woman, don’t they?”

“Women will wear anything,” Onogawa said, struggling to loosen one pinched foot inside its squeaking shoe. “Plain kimono and obi are far superior.”

“Easier to get into, anyway,” Encho mused. He stopped suddenly by the prettiest of the women, a girl who had let her natural eyebrows grow out, and whose teeth, unstained with old-fashioned toothblacking, gleamed like ivory in the gaslight.

“Madame, forgive my boldness,” Encho said. “But I think I saw a small kitten run under your skirt.”

“I beg your pardon?” the girl said in a flat Low City accent.

Encho pursed his lips. Plaintive mewing came from the pavement. The girl looked down, startled, and raised her skirt quickly almost to the knee. “Let me help,” said Encho, bending down for a better look. “I see the kitten! It’s climbing up inside the skirt!” He turned. “You’d better help me, older brother! Have a look up in there.”

Onogawa, abashed, hesitated. More mewing came. Encho stuck his entire head under the woman’s skirt. “There it goes! It wants to hide in her false rump!” The kitten squealed wildly. “I’ve got it!” the comedian cried. He pulled out his doubled hands, holding them before him. “There’s the rascal now, on the wall!” In the harsh gaslight, Encho’s knotted hands cast the shadowed figure of a kitten’s head against the brick.

Onogawa burst into convulsive laughter. He doubled over against the wall, struggling for breath. The women stood shocked for a moment. Then they all ran away, giggling hysterically. Except for the victim of Encho’s joke, who burst into tears as she ran.

“Wah,” Encho said alertly. “Her husband.” He ducked his head, then jammed the side of his hand against his lips and blew. The street rang with a sudden trumpet blast. It sounded so exactly like the trumpet of a Tokyo omnibus that Onogawa himself was taken in for a moment. He glanced wildly up and down the Ginza prospect, expecting to see the omnibus driver, horn to his lips, reining up histeam of horses.

Encho grabbed Onogawa’s coat-sleeve and hauled him up the street before the rest of the puzzled crowd could recover. “This way!” They pounded drunkenly up an ill-lit street into the depths of Bricktown. Onogawa was breathless with laughter. They covered a block, then Onogawa pulled up, gasping. “No more,” he wheezed, wiping tears of hilarity. “Can’t take another . . . ha ha ha . . . step!”

“All right,” Encho said reasonably, “but not here.” He pointed up. “Don’t you know better than to stand under those things?” Black telegraph wires swayed gently overhead.

Onogawa, who had not noticed the wires, moved hastily out from under them. “Kuwabara, kuwabara,” he muttered—a quick spell to avert lightning. The sinister magic wires were all over the Bricktown, looping past and around the thick, smelly buildings.

Everyone knew why the foreigners put their telegraph wires high up on poles. It was so the demon messengers inside could not escape to wreak havoc amongst decent folk. These ghostly, invisible spirits flew along the wires as fast as swallows, it was said, carrying their secret spells of Christian black magic. Merely standing under such a baleful influence was inviting disaster.

Encho grinned at Onogawa. “There’s no danger as long as we keep moving,” he said confidently. “A little exposure is harmless. Don’t worry about it.”

Onogawa drew himself up. “Worried? Not a bit of it.” He followed Encho down the street.

The stonelike buildings seemed brutal and featureless. There were no homey reed blinds or awnings in those outsized windows, whose sheets of foreign glass gleamed like an animal’s eyeballs. No cozy porches, no bamboo windchimes or cricket cages. Not even a climbing tendril of Edo morning glory, which adorned even the worst and cheapest city hovels. The buildings just sat there, as mute and threatening as cannonballs. Most were deserted. Despite their fireproof qualities and the great cost of their construction, they were proving hard to rent out. Word on the street said those red bricks would suck the life out of a man—give him beriberi, maybe even consumption.

Bricks paved the street beneath their shoes. Bricks on the right of them, bricks on their left, bricks in front of them, bricks in back. Hundreds of them, thousands of them. Onogawa muttered to the smaller man. “Say. What are bricks, exactly? I mean, what are they made of?”

“Foreigners make ’em,” Encho said, shrugging. “I think they’re a kind of pottery.”

“Aren’t they unhealthy?”

“People say that,” Encho said, “but foreigners live in them and I haven’t noticed any shortage of foreigners lately.” He drew up short. “Oh, here’s my friend’s place. We’ll go around the front. He lives upstairs.”

They circled the two-story building and looked up. Honest old-fashioned light, from an oil lamp, glowed against the curtains of an upstairs window. “Looks like your friend’s still awake,” Onogawa said, his voice more cheery now.

Encho nodded. “Taiso Yoshitoshi doesn’t sleep much. He’s a little high-strung. I mean, peculiar.” Encho walked up to the heavy, ornate front door, hung foreign-style on large brass hinges. He yanked a bell-pull.

“Peculiar,” Onogawa said. “No wonder, if he lives in a place like this.” They waited.

The door opened inwards with a loud squeal of hinges. A man’s disheveled head peered around it. Their host raised a candle in a cheap tin holder. “Who is it?”

“Come on, Taiso,” Encho said impatiently. He pursed his lips again. Ducks quacked around their feet.

“Oh! It’s Encho-san, Encho Sanyutei. My old friend. Come in, do.”

They stepped inside into a dark landing. The two visitors stopped and unlaced their leather shoes. In the first-floor workshop, beyond the landing, the guests could dimly see bound bales of paper, a litter of toolchests and shallow trays. An apprentice was snoring behind a shrouded wood-block press. The damp air smelled of ink and cherrywood shavings.

“This is Mr. Onogawa Azusa,” Encho said. “He’s a fan of mine, down from High City. Mr. Onogawa, this is Taiso Yoshitoshi. The popular artist, one of Edo’s finest.”

“Oh, Yoshitoshi the artist!” said Onogawa, recognizing the name for the first time. “Of course! The woodblock print peddler. Why, I bought a whole series of yours, once. TWENTY-EIGHT INFAMOUS MURDERS WITH ACCOMPANYING VERSES.”

“Oh,” said Yoshitoshi. “How kind of you to remember my squalid early efforts.” The ukiyo-e print artist was a slight, somewhat pudgy man, with stooped, rounded shoulders. The flesh around his eyes looked puffy and discolored. He had close-cropped hair parted in the middle and wide, fleshy lips. He wore a printed cotton houserobe, with faded bluish sunbursts, or maybe daisies, against a white background. “Shall we go upstairs, gentlemen? My apprentice needs his sleep.”

They creaked up the wooden stairs to a studio lit by cheap pottery oil lamps. The walls were covered with hanging prints, while dozens more lay rolled, or stacked in corners, or piled on battered bookshelves. The windows were heavily draped and tightly shut. The naked brick walls seemed to sweat, and a vague reek of mildew and stale tobacco hung in the damp, close air.

The window against the far wall had a second-hand set of exterior shutters nailed to its inner sill. The shutters were bolted. “Telegraph wires outside,” Yoshitoshi explained, noticing the glances of his guests. The artist gestured vaguely at a couple of bedraggled floor cushions. “Please.”

The two visitors sat, struggling politely to squeeze some comfort from the mashed and threadbare cushions. Yoshitoshi knelt on a thicker cushion beside his worktable, a low bench of plain pine with inkstick, grinder, and water cup. A bamboo tool jar on the table’s corner bristled with assorted brushes, as well as compass and ruler. Yoshitoshi had been working; a sheet of translucent ricepaper was pinned to the table, lightly and precisely streaked with ink.

“So,” Encho said, smiling and waving one hand at the artist’s penurious den. “I heard you’d been doing pretty well lately. This place has certainly improved since I last saw it. You’ve got real bookshelves again. I bet you’ll have your books back in no time.”

Yoshitoshi smiled sweetly. “Oh—I have so many debts . . . the books come last. But yes, things are much better for me now. I have my health again. And a studio. And one apprentice, Toshimitsu,came back to me. He’s not the best of the ones I lost, but he’s honest at least.”

Encho pulled a short foreign briar-pipe from his coat. He opened the ornate tobacco-bag on his belt, an embroidered pouch that was the pride of every Edo man-about-town. He glanced up casually, stuffing his pipe. “Did that Kabuki gig ever come to anything?”

“Oh yes,” said Yoshitoshi, sitting up straighter. “I painted bloodstains on the armor of Onoe Kikugoro the Fifth. For his role in ‘Kawanakajima Island.’ I’m very grateful to you for arranging that.”

“Wait, I saw that play,” said Onogawa, surprised and pleased. “Say, those were wonderful bloodstains. Even better than the ones in that murder print, KASAMORI OSEN CARVED ALIVE BY HER STEP-FATHER. You did that print too, am I right?” Onogawa had been studying the prints on the wall, and the familiar style had jogged his memory. “A young girl yanked backwards by a maniac with a knife, big bloody handprints all over her neck and legs. . . .”

Yoshitoshi smiled. “You liked that one, Mr. Onogawa?”

“Well,” Onogawa said, “it was certainly a fine effort for what it was.” It wasn’t easy for a man in Onogawa’s position to confess a liking for mere commoner art from Low City. He dropped his voice a little. “Actually, I had quite a few of your pictures, in my younger days. Ten years ago, just before the Restoration.” He smiled, remembering. “I had the TWENTY-EIGHT MURDERS, of course. And some of the ONE HUNDRED GHOST STORIES. And a few of the special editions, now that I think of it. Like Tamigoro blowing his head off with a rifle. Especially good sprays of blood in that one.”

“Oh, I remember that one,” Encho volunteered. “That was back in the old days, when they used to sprinkle the bloody scarlet ink with powdered mica. For that deluxe bloody gleaming effect!”

“Too expensive now,” Yoshitoshi said sadly.

Encho shrugged. “Remember NAOSUKE GOMBEI MURDERS HIS MASTER? With the maniac servant standing on his employer’s chest, ripping the man’s face off with his hands alone?” The comedian cleverly mimed the murderer’s pinching and wrenching, along with loud sucking and shredding sounds.

“Oh yes!” said Onogawa. “I wonder whatever happened to my copy of it?” He shook himself. “Well, it’s not the sort of thing you can keep in the house, with my age and position. It might give the children nightmares. Or the servants ideas.” He laughed.

Encho had stuffed his short pipe; he lit it from a lamp. Onogawa, preparing to follow suit, dragged his long iron-bound pipe from within his coat-sleeve. “How wretched,” he cried. “I’ve cracked my good pipe in the scuffle with those hooligans. Look, it’s ruined.”

“Oh, is that a smoking-pipe?” said Encho. “From the way you used it on your attackers, I thought it was a simple bludgeon.”

“I certainly would not go into the Low City without self-defense of some kind,” Onogawa said stiffly. “And since the new government has seen fit to take our swords away, I’m forced to make do. A pipe is an ignoble weapon. But as you saw tonight, not without its uses.”

“Oh, no offense meant, sir,” said Encho hastily. “There’s no need to be formal here among friends! If I’m a bit harsh of tongue I hope you’ll forgive me, as it’s my livelihood! So! Why don’t we all have a drink and relax, eh?”

Yoshitoshi’s eye had been snagged by the incomplete picture on his drawing table. He stared at it raptly for a few more seconds, then came to with a start. “A drink! Oh!” He straightened up. “Why, come to think of it, I have something very special, for gentlemen like yourselves. It came from Yokohama, from the foreign trade zone.” Yoshitoshi crawled rapidly across the floor, his knees skidding inside the cotton robe, and threw open a dented wooden chest. He unwrapped a tall glass bottle from a wad of tissue and brought it back to his seat, along with three dusty sake cups.

The bottle had the flawless symmetrical ugliness of foreign manufacture. It was full of amber liquid, and corked. A paper label showed the grotesquely bearded face of an American man, framed by blocky foreign letters.

“Who’s that?” Onogawa asked, intrigued. “Their king?”

“No, it’s the face of the merchant who brewed it,” Yoshitoshi said with assurance. “In America, merchants are famous. And a man of the merchant class can even become a soldier. Or a farmer, or priest, or anything he likes.”

“Hmmph,” said Onogawa, who had gone through a similar transition himself and was not at all happy about it. “Let me see.” He examined the printed label closely. “Look how this foreigner’s eyes bug out. He looks like a raving lunatic!”

Yoshitoshi stiffened at the term. An awkward moment of frozen silence seeped over the room. Onogawa’s gaffe floated in midair among them, until its nature became clear to everyone. Yoshitoshihad recovered his health recently, but his illness had not been a physical one. No one had to say anything, but the truth slowly oozed its way into everyone’s bones and liver. At length, Onogawa cleared his throat. “I mean, of course, that there’s no accounting for the strange looks of foreigners.”

Yoshitoshi licked his fleshy lips and the sudden gleam of desperation slowly faded from his eyes. He spoke quietly.

“Well, my friends in the Liberal Party have told me all about it. Several of them have been to America and back, and they speak the language, and can even read it. If you want to know more, you can read their national newspaper, the Lamp of Liberty, for which I am doing illustrations.”

Onogawa glanced quickly at Encho. Onogawa, who was not a reading man, had only vague notions as to what a “liberal party” or a “national newspaper” might be. He wondered if Encho knew better. Apparently the comedian did, for Encho looked suddenly grave.

Yoshitoshi rattled on. “One of my political friends gave me this bottle, which he bought in Yokohama, from Americans. The Americans have many such bottles there—a whole warehouse. Because the American Shogun, Generalissimo Guranto, will be arriving next year to pay homage to our Emperor. And the Guranto, the ‘Puresidento,’ is especially fond of this kind of drink! Which is called borubona, from the American prefecture of Kentukki.”

Yoshitoshi twisted the cork loose and dribbled bourbon into all three cups. “Shouldn’t we heat it first?” Encho said.

“This isn’t sake, my friend. Sometimes they even put ice in it!”

Onogawa sipped carefully and gasped. “What a bite this has! It burns the tongue like Chinese peppers.” He hesitated. “Interesting, though.”

“It’s good!” said Encho, surprised. “If sake were like an old stone lantern, then this borybona would be gaslight! Hot and fierce!” He tossed back the rest of his cup. “It’s a pity there’s no pretty girl to serve us our second round.”

Yoshitoshi did the honors, filling their cups again. “This serving girl,” Onogawa said. “She would have to be hot and fierce too—like a tigress.”

Encho lifted his brows. “You surprise me. I thought you were a family man, my friend.”

A warm knot of bourbon in Onogawa’s stomach was reawakening an evening’s worth of sake. “Oh, I suppose I seem settled enough now. But you should have known me ten years ago, before the Restoration. I was quite the tough young radical in those days. You know, we really thought we could change the world. And perhaps we did!”

Encho grinned, amused. “So! You were a shishi?”

Onogawa had another sip. “Oh yes!” He touched the middle of his back. “I had hair down to here, and I never washed! Touch money? Not a one of us! We’d have died first! No, we lived in rags and ate plain brown rice from wooden bowls. We just went to our kendo schools, practiced swordsmanship, decided what old fool we should try to kill next. . .” Onogawa shook his head ruefully. The other two were listening with grave attention.

The bourbon and the reminiscing had thawed Onogawa out. The lost ideals of the Restoration rose up within him irresistibly. “I was the despair of my family,” he confided. “I abandoned my clan and my daimyo. We shishi radicals, you know, we believed only in our swords and the Emperor. Sonno joi! Remember that slogan?” Onogawa grinned, the tears of mono no aware, the pathos of lost things, coming to his eyes.

“Sonno joi! The very streets used to ring with it. ‘Revere the Emperor, destroy the foreigners!’ We wanted the Emperor restored to full and unconditional power! We demanded it in the streets! Because the Shogun’s men were acting like frightened old women. Frightened of the black ships, the American black warships with their steam and cannon. Admiral Perry’s ships.”

“It’s pronounced ‘Peruri,’ ” Encho corrected gently.

“Peruri, then . . . I admit, we shishi went a bit far. We had some bad habits. Like threatening to commit hara-kiri unless the townsfolk gave us food. That’s one of the problems we faced because we refused to touch money. Some of the shopkeepers still resent the way we shishi used to push them around. In fact that was the cause of tonight’s incident after your performance, Encho. Some rude fellows with long memories.”

“So that was it,” Encho said. “I wondered.”

“Those were special times,” Onogawa said. “They changed me, they changed everything. I suppose everyone of this generation knows where they were, and what they were doing, when the foreigners arrived in Edo Bay.”

“I remember,” said Yoshitoshi. “I was fourteen and an apprentice at Kuniyoshi’s studio. And I’d just done my first print. THE HEIKE CLAN SINK TO THEIR HORRIBLE DOOM IN THE SEA.”

“I saw them dance once,” Encho said. “The American sailors, I mean.”

“Really?” said Onogawa.

Encho cast a storyteller’s mood with an irresistible gesture. “Yes, my father, Entaro, took me. The performance was restricted to the Shogun’s court officials and their friends, but we managed to sneak in. The foreigners painted their faces and hands quite black. They seemed ashamed of their usual pinkish color, for they also painted broad white lines around their lips. Then they all sat on chairs together in a row, and one at a time they would stand up and shout dialogue. A second foreigner would answer, and they would all laugh. Later two of them strummed on strange round-bodied samisens, with long thin necks. And they sang mournful songs, very badly. Then they played faster songs and capered and danced, kicking out their legs in the oddest way, and flinging each other about. Some of the Shogun’s counselors danced with them.” Encho shrugged. “It was all very odd. To this day I wonder what it meant.”

“Well,” said Onogawa. “Clearly they were trying to change their appearance and shape, like foxes or badgers. That seems clear enough.”

“That’s as much as saying they’re magicians,” Encho said, shaking his head. “Just because they have long noses, doesn’t mean they’re mountain goblins. They’re men—they eat, they sleep, they want a woman. Ask the geishas in Yokohama if that’s not so.” Encho smirked. “Their real power is in the spirits of copper wires and black iron and burning coal. Like our own Tokyo-Yokohama Railway that the hired English built for us. You’ve ridden it, of course?”

“Of course!” Onogawa said proudly. “I’m a modern sort of fellow.”

“That’s the sort of power we need today. Civilization and Enlightenment. When you rode the train, did you see how the backward villagers in Omori come out to pour water on the engine? To cool it off, as if the railway engine were a tired horse!” Encho shook his head in contempt.

Onogawa accepted another small cup of bourbon. “So they pour water,” he said judiciously. “Well, I can’t see that it does any harm.”

“It’s rank superstition!” said Encho. “Don’t you see, we have to learn to deal with those machine-spirits, just as the foreigners do. Treating them as horses can only insult them. Isn’t that so, Taiso?”

Yoshitoshi looked up guiltily from his absent-minded study of his latest drawing. “I’m sorry, Encho-san, you were saying?”

“What’s that you’re working on? May I see?” Encho crept nearer.

Yoshitoshi hastily plucked out pins and rolled up his paper. “Oh no, no, you wouldn’t want to see this one just yet. It’s not ready. But I can show you another recent one. . . .” He reached to a nearby stack and dexterously plucked a printed sheet from the unsteady pile. “I’m calling this series BEAUTIES OF THE SEVEN NIGHTS.”

Encho courteously held up the print so that both he and Onogawa could see it. It showed a woman in her underrobe; she had thrown her scarlet-lined outer kimono over a nearby screen. She had both natural and artificial eyebrows, lending a double seductiveness to her high forehead. Her mane of jet-black hair had a killing little wispy fringe at the back of the neck; it seemed to cry out to be bitten. She stood at some lucky man’s doorway, bending to blow out the light of a lantern in the hall. And her tiny, but piercingly red mouth was clamped down over a roll of paper towels.

“I get it!” Onogawa said. “That beautiful whore is blowing out the light so she can creep into some fellow’s bed in the dark! And she’s taking those handy paper towels in her teeth to mop up with, after they’re through playing mortar-and-pestle.”

Encho examined the print more closely. “Wait a minute,” he said. “This caption reads ‘Her Ladyship Yanagihara Aiko.’ This is an Imperial lady-in-waiting!”

“Some of my newspaper friends gave me the idea,” Yoshitoshi said, nodding. “Why should prints always be of tiresome, stale old actors and warriors and geishas? This is the modern age!”

“But this print, Taiso . . . it clearly implies that the Emperor sleeps with his ladies in waiting.”

“No, just with Lady Yanagihara Aiko,” Yoshitoshi said reasonably. “After all, everyone knows she’s his special favorite. The rest of the Seven Beauties of the Imperial Court are drawn, oh, putting on their make-up, arranging flowers, and so forth.” He smiled. “I expect big sales from this series. It’s very topical, don’t you think?”

Onogawa was shocked. “But this is rank scandal-mongering! What happened to the good old days, with the nice gouts of blood and so on?”

“No one buys those any more!” Yoshitoshi protested. “Believe me, I’ve tried everything! I did A YOSHITOSHI MISCELLANY OF FIGURES FROM LITERATURE. Very edifying, beautifully drawn classical figures, the best. It died on the stands. Then I did RAVING BEAUTIES AT TOKYO RESTAURANTS. Really hot girls, but old fashioned geishas done in the old style. Another total waste of time. We were dead broke, not a copper piece to our names! I had to pull up the floorboards of my house for fuel! I had to work on fabric designs—two yen for a week’s work! My wife left me! My apprentices walked out! And then my health . . . my brain began to . . . I had nothing to eat . . . nothing . . . But . . . But that’s all over now.”

Yoshitoshi shook himself, dabbed sweat from his pasty upper lip, and poured another cup of bourbon with a steady hand. “I changed with the times, that’s all. It was a hard lesson, but I learned it. I call myself Taiso now, Taiso, meaning ‘Great Rebirth.’ Newspapers! That’s where the excitement is today! Tokyo Illustrated News pays plenty for political cartoons and murder illustrations. They do ten thousand impressions at a stroke. My work goes everywhere—not just Edo, the whole nation. The nation, gentlemen!” He raised his cup and drank. “And that’s just the beginning. The Lamp of Libertyis knocking them dead! The Liberal Party committee has promised me a raise next year, and my own rickshaw.”

“But I like the old pictures,” Onogawa said.

“Maybe you do, but you don’t buy them,” Yoshitoshi insisted. “Modern people want to see what’s happening now! Take an old, theme picture—Yorimitsu chopping an ogre’s arm off, for instance. Draw a thing like that today and it gets you nowhere. People’s tastes are more refined today. They want to see real cannonballs blowing off real arms. Like my eye-witness illustrations of the Battle of Ueno. A sensation! People don’t want print peddlers any more. ‘Journalist illustrator’—that’s what they call me now.”

“Don’t laugh,” said Encho, nodding in drunken profundity. “You should hear what they say about me. I mean the modern writer fellows, down from the University. They come in with their French novels under their arms, and their spectacles and slicked-down hair, and all sit in the front row together. So I tell them a vaudeville tale or two. Am I ‘spinning a good yarn’ ? Not any more. They tell me I’m ‘creating naturalistic prose in a vigorous popular vernacular.’ They want to publish me in a book.” He sighed and had another drink. “This stuff’s poison, Taiso. My head’s spinning.”

“Mine, too,” Onogawa said. An autumn wind had sprung up outside. They sat in doped silence for a moment. They were all much drunker than they had realized. The foreign liquor seemed to bubble in their stomachs like tofu fermenting in a tub.

The foreign spirits had crept up on them. The very room itself seemed drunk. Wind sang through the telegraph wires outside Yoshitoshi’s shuttered window. A low, eerie moan.

The moan built in intensity. It seemed to creep into the room with them. The walls hummed with it. Hair rose on their arms.

“Stop that!” Yoshitoshi said suddenly. Encho stopped his ventri-loquial moaning, and giggled. “He’s trying to scare us,” Yoshitoshi said. “He loves ghost stories.”

Onogawa lurched to his feet. “Demon in the wires,” he said thickly. “I heard it moaning at us.” He blinked, red-faced, and staggered to the shuttered window. He fumbled loudly at the lock, ignoring Yoshitoshi’s protests, and flung it open.

Moonlit wire clustered at the top of a wooden pole, in plain sight a few feet away. It was a junction of cables, and leftover coils of wire dangled from the pole’s crossarm like thin black guts. Onogawa flung up the casement with a bang. A chilling gust of fresh air entered the stale room and the prints danced on the walls. “Hey you foreign demon!” Onogawa shouted. “Leave honest men in peace!”

The artist and entertainer exchanged unhappy glances. “We drank too much,” Encho said. He lurched to his knees and onto one unsteady foot. “Leave off, big fellow. What we need now. . .” He belched. “Women, that’s what.”

But the air outside the window seemed to have roused Onogawa. “We didn’t ask for you!” he shouted. “We don’t need you! Things were fine before you came, demon! You and your foreign servants. . .” He turned half-round, looking red-eyed into the room. “Where’s my pipe? I’ve a mind to give these wires a good thrashing.”

He spotted the pipe again, stumbled into the room and picked it up. He lost his balance for a moment, then brandished the pipe threateningly. “Don’t do it,” Encho said, getting to his feet. “Be reasonable. I know some girls in Asakusa, they have a piano. . .” He reached out.

Onogawa shoved him aside. “I’ve had enough!” he announced. “When my blood’s up, I’m a different man! Cut them down before they attack first, that’s my motto! Sonno joi!”

He lurched across the room toward the open window. Before he could reach it there was a sudden hiss of steam, like the breath of a locomotive. The demon, its patience exhausted by Onogawa’s taunts, gushed from its wire. It puffed through the window, a gray, gaseous thing, its lumpy, misshapen head glaring furiously. It gave a steam-whistle roar and its great lantern eyes glowed.

All three men screeched aloud. The armless, legless monster, like a gray cloud on a tether, rolled its glassy eyes at all of them. Its steel teeth gnashed and sparks showed down its throat. It whistled again and made a sudden gnashing lurch at Onogawa.

But Onogawa’s old sword-training had soaked deep into his bones. He leapt aside reflexively, with only a trace of stagger, and gave the thing a smart overhead riposte with his pipe. The demon’s head bonged like an iron kettle. It began chattering angrily and hot steam curled from its nose. Onogawa hit it again. Its head dented. It winced, then glared at the other men.

The townsmen quickly scrambled into line behind their champion. “Get him!” Encho shrieked. Onogawa dodged a half-hearted snap of teeth and bashed the monster across the eye. Glass cracked and the bowl flew from Onogawa’s pipe.

But the demon had had enough. With a grumble and crunch like dying gearworks, it retreated back towards its wires, sucking itself back within them, like an octopus into its hole. It vanished, but hissing sparks continued to drip from the wire.

“You humiliated it!” Encho said, his voice filled with awe and admiration. “That was amazing!”

“Had enough, eh!” shouted Onogawa furiously, leaning on the sill. “Easy enough mumbling your dirty spells behind our backs! But try an Imperial warrior face to face, and it’s a different story! Hah!”

“What a feat of arms!” said Yoshitoshi, his pudgy face glowing. “I’ll do a picture. ONOGAWA HUMILIATES A GHOUL. Wonderful!”

The sparks began to travel down the wire, away from the window. “It’s getting away!” Onogawa shouted. “Follow me!”

He shoved himself from the window and ran headlong from the studio. He tripped at the top of the stairs, but did an inspired shoulder-roll and landed on his feet at the door. He yanked it open.

Encho followed him headlong. They had no time to lace on their leather shoes, so they kicked on the wooden clogs of Yoshitoshi and his apprentice and dashed out. Soon they stood under the wires, where the little nest of sparks still clung. “Come down here, you rascal,” Onogawa demanded. “Show some fighting honor, you skulking wretch!”

The thing moved back and forth, hissing, on the wire. More sparks dripped. It dodged back and forth, like a cornered rat in an alley. Then it made a sudden run for it.

“It’s heading south!” said Onogawa. “Follow me!”

They ran in hot pursuit, Encho bringing up the rear, for he had slipped his feet into the apprentice’s clogs and the shoes were too big for him.

They pursued the thing across the Ginza. It had settled down to headlong running now, and dropped fewer sparks.

“I wonder what message it carries,” panted Encho.

“Nothing good, I’ll warrant,” said Onogawa grimly. They had to struggle to match the thing’s pace. They burst from the southern edge of the Ginza Bricktown and into the darkness of unpaved streets. This was Shiba District, home of the thieves’ market and the great Zojoji Temple. They followed the wires. “Aha!” cried Onogawa. “It’s heading for Shinbashi Railway Station and its friends the locomotives!”

With a determined burst of speed, Onogawa outdistanced the thing and stood beneath the path of the wire, waving his broken pipe frantically. “Whoa! Go back!”

The thing slowed briefly, well over his head. Stinking flakes of ash and sparks poured from it, raining down harmlessly on the ex-samurai. Onogawa leapt aside in disgust, brushing the filth from his derby and frock coat. “Phew!”

The thing rolled on. Encho caught up with the larger man. “Not the locomotives,” the comedian gasped. “We can’t face those.”

Onogawa drew himself up. He tried to dust more streaks of filthy ash from his soiled coat. “Well, I think we taught the nasty thing a lesson, anyway.”

“No doubt,” said Encho, breathing hard. He went green suddenly, then leaned against a nearby wooden fence, clustered with tall autumn grass. He was loudly sick.

They looked about themselves. Autumn. Darkness. And the moon. A pair of cats squabbled loudly in a nearby alley.

Onogawa suddenly realized that he was brandishing, not a sword, but a splintered stick of ironbound bamboo. He began to tremble. Then he flung the thing away with a cry of disgust. “They took our swords away,” he said. “Let them give us honest soldiers our swords back. We’d make short work of such foreign foulness. Look what it did to my coat, the filthy creature. It defiled me.”

“No, no,” Encho said, wiping his mouth. “You were incredible! A regular Shoki the Demon Queller.”

“Shoki,” Onogawa said. He dusted his hat against his knee. “I’ve seen drawings of Shoki. He’s the warrior demigod, with a red face and a big sword. Always hunting demons, isn’t he? But he doesn’t know there’s a little demon hiding on the top of his own head.”

“Well, a regular Yoshitsune, then,” said Encho, hastily grasping for a better compliment. Yoshitsune was a legendary master of swordsmanship. A national hero without parallel.

Unfortunately, the valorous Yoshitsune had ended up riddled with arrows by the agents of his treacherous half-brother, who had gone on to rule Japan. While Yoshitsune and his high ideals had to put up with a shadow existence in folklore. Neither Encho nor Onogawa had to mention this aloud, but the melancholy associated with the old tale seeped into their moods. Their world became heroic and fatal. Naturally all the bourbon helped.

“We’d better go back to Bricktown for our shoes,” Onogawa said.

“All right,” Encho said. Their feet had blistered in the commandeered clogs, and they walked back slowly and carefully.

Yoshitoshi met them in his downstairs landing. “Did you catch it?”

“It made a run for the railroads,” Encho said. “We couldn’t stop it; it was way above our heads.” He hesitated. “Say. You don’t suppose it will come back here, do you?”

“Probably,” Yoshitoshi said. “It lives in that knot of cables outside the window. That’s why I put the shutters there.”

“You mean you’ve seen it before?”

“Sure I’ve seen it,” Yoshitoshi muttered. “In fact I’ve seen lots of things. It’s my business to see things. No matter what people say about me.”

The others looked at him, stricken. Yoshitoshi shrugged irritably. “The place has atmosphere. It’s quiet and no one bothers me here. Besides, it’s cheap.”

“Aren’t you afraid of the demon’s vengeance?” Onogawa said.

“I get along fine with that demon,” Yoshitoshi said. “We have an understanding. Like neighbors anywhere.”

“Oh,” Encho said. He cleared his throat. “Well, ah, we’ll be moving on, Taiso. It was good of you to give us the borubona.” He and Onogawa stuffed their feet hastily into their squeaking shoes. “You keep up the good work, pal, and don’t let those political fellows put anything over on you. Their ideas are weird, frankly. I don’t think the government’s going to put up with that kind of talk.”

“Someday they’ll have to,” Yoshitoshi said.

“Let’s go,” Onogawa said, with a sidelong glance at Yoshitoshi. The two men left.

Onogawa waited until they were well out of earshot. He kept a wary eye on the wires overhead. “Your friend certainly is a weird one,” he told the comedian. “What a night!”

Encho frowned. “He’s gonna get in trouble with that visionary stuff. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, you know.” They walked into the blaze of artificial gaslight. The Ginza crowd had thinned out considerably.

“Didn’t you say you knew some girls with a piano?” Onogawa said.

“Oh, right!” Encho said. He whistled shrilly and waved at a distant two-man rickshaw. “A piano. You won’t believe the thing; it makes amazing sounds. And what a great change after those dreary geisha samisen routines. So whiny and thin and wailing and sad! It’s always, ‘Oh, How Piteous Is A Courtesan’s Lot,’ and ‘Let’s Stab Each Other To Prove You Really Love Me.’ Who needs that old-fashioned stuff? Wait till you hear these gals pound out some ‘opera’ and ‘waltzes’ on their new machine.”

The rickshaw pulled up with a rattle and a chime of bells. “Where to, gentlemen?”

“Asakusa,” said Encho, climbing in.

“It’s getting late,” Onogawa said reluctantly. “I really ought to be getting back to the wife.”

“Come on,” said Encho, rolling his eyes. “Live a little. It’s not like you’re just cheating on the little woman. These are high-class modern girls. It’s a cultural experience.”

“Well, all right,” said Onogawa. “If it’s cultural.”

“You’ll learn a lot,” Encho promised.

But they had barely covered a block when they heard the sudden frantic ringing of alarm bells, far to the south.

“A fire!” Encho yelled in glee. “Hey, runners, stop! Fifty sen if you get us there while it’s still spreading!”

The runners wheeled in place and set out with a will. The rickshaw rocked on its axle and jangled wildly. “This is great!” Onogawa said, clutching his hat. “You’re a good fellow to know, Encho. It’s nothing but excitement with you!”

“That’s the modern life!” Encho shouted. “One wild thing after another.”

They bounced and slammed their way through the darkened streets until the sky was lit with fire. A massive crowd had gathered beside the Shinagawa Railroad Line. They were mostly low-class townsmen, many half-dressed. It was a working-class neighborhood in Shiba District, east of Atago Hill. The fire was leaping merrily from one thatched roof to another.

The two men jumped from their rickshaw. Encho shouldered his way immediately through the crowd. Onogawa carefully counted out the fare. “But he said fifty sen,” the older rickshawman complained. Onogawa clenched his fist and the men fell silent.

The firemen had reacted with their usual quick skill. Three companies of them had surrounded the neighborhood. They swarmed like ants over the roofs of the undamaged houses nearest the flames. As usual, they did not attempt to fight the flames directly. That was a hopeless task in any case, for the weathered, graying wood, paper shutters, and reed blinds flared up like tinder, in great blossoming gouts.

Instead, they sensibly relied on firebreaks. Their hammers, axes, and crowbars flew as they destroyed every house in the path of the flames. Their skill came naturally to them, for, like all Edo firemen, they were also carpenters. Special banner-men stood on the naked ridgepoles of the disintegrating houses, holding their company’s ensigns as close as possible to the flames. This was more than bravado; it was good business. Their reputations, and their rewards from a grateful neighborhood, depended on this show of spirit and nerve.

Some of the crowd, those whose homes were being devoured, were weeping and counting their children. But most of the crowd was in a fine holiday mood, cheering for their favorite fire teams and laying bets.

Onogawa spotted Encho’s silk hat and plowed after him. Encho ducked and elbowed through the press, Onogawa close behind. They crept to the crowd’s inner edge, where the fierce blaze of heat and the occasional falling wad of flaming straw had established a boundary.

A fireman stood nearby. He wore a kneelength, padded fireproof coat with a pattern of printed blocks. A thick protective headdress fell stiffly over his shoulders, and long padded gauntlets shielded his forearms to the knuckles. An apprentice in similar garb was soaking him down with a pencil-thin gush of water from a bamboo hand-pump. “Stand back, stand back,” the fireman said automatically, then looked up. “Say, aren’t you Encho the comedian? I saw you last week.”

“That’s me,” Encho shouted cheerfully over the roar of flame. “Good to see you fellows performing for once.”

The fireman examined Onogawa’s ash-streaked frock coat. “You live around here, big fella? Point out your house for me, we’ll do what we can.”

Onogawa frowned. Encho broke in hastily. “My friend’s from uptown! A High City company man!”

“Oh,” said the fireman, rolling his eyes.

Onogawa pointed at a merchant’s tile-roofed warehouse, a little closer to the tracks. “Why aren’t you doing anything about that place? The fire’s headed right for it!”

“That’s one of merchant Shinichi’s,” the fireman said, narrowing his eyes. “We saved a place of his out in Kanda District last month! And he gave us only five yen.”

“What a shame for him,” Encho said, grinning.

“It’s full of cotton cloth, too,” the fireman said with satisfaction. “It’s gonna go up like a rocket.”

“How did it start?” Encho said.

“Lightning, I hear,” the fireman said. “Some kind of fireball jumped off the telegraph lines.”

“Really?” Encho said in a small voice.

“That’s what they say,” shrugged the fireman. “You know how these things are. Always tall stories. Probably some drunk knocked over his sake kettle, then claimed to see something. No one wants the blame.”

“Right,” Onogawa said carefully.

The fire teams had made good progress. There was not much left to do now except admire the destruction. “Kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” the fireman said. “Look how that smoke obscures the autumn moon.” He sighed happily. “Good for business, too. I mean the carpentry business, of course.” He waved his gauntleted arm at the leaping flames. “We’ll get this worn-out trash out of here and build something worthy of a modern city. Something big and expensive with long-term construction contracts.”

“Is that why you have bricks printed on your coat?” Onogawa asked.

The fireman looked down at the block printing on his dripping cotton armor. “They do look like bricks, don’t they?” He laughed. “That’s a good one. Wait’ll I tell the crew.”

Dawn rose above old Edo. With red-rimmed eyes, the artist Yoshitoshi stared, sighing, through his open window. Past the telegraph wires, billowing smudge rose beyond the Bricktown rooftops. Another Flower of Edo reaching the end of its evanescent life.

The telegraph wires hummed. The demon had returned to its tangled nest outside the window. “Don’t tell, Yoshitoshi,” it burbled in its deep, humming voice.

“Not me,” Yoshitoshi said. “You think I want them to lock me up again?”

“I keep the presses running,” the demon whined. “Just you deal with me. I’ll make you famous, I’ll make you rich. There’ll be no more slow dark shadows where townsmen have to creep with their heads down. Everything’s brightness and speed with me, Yoshitoshi. I can change things.”

“Burn them down, you mean,” Yoshitoshi said.

“There’s power in burning,” the demon hummed. “There’s beauty in the flames. When you give up trying to save the old ways, you’ll see the beauty. I want you to serve me, you Japanese. You’ll do it better than the clumsy foreigners, once you accept me as your own. I’ll make you all rich. Edo will be the greatest city in the world. You’ll have light and music at a finger’s touch. You’ll step across oceans. You’ll be as gods.”

“And if we don’t accept you?”

“You will! You must! I’ll burn you until you do. I told you that, Yoshitoshi. When I’m stronger, I’ll do better than these little flowers of Edo. I’ll open seeds of Hell above your cities. Hell-flowers taller than mountains! Red blooms that eat a city in a moment.”

Yoshitoshi lifted his latest print and unrolled it before the window. He had worked on it all night; it was done at last. It was a landscape of pure madness. Beams of frantic light pierced a smoldering sky. Winged locomotives, their bellies fattened with the eggs of white-hot death, floated like maddened blowflies above a corpse-white city. “Like this,” he said.

The demon gave a gloating whir. “Yes! Just as I told you. Now show it to them. Make them understand that they can’t defeat me. Show them all!”

“I’ll think about it,” Yoshitoshi said. “Leave me now.” He closed the heavy shutters.

He rolled the drawing carefully into a tube. He sat at his worktable again, and pulled an oil lamp closer. Dawn was coming. It was time to get some sleep.

He held the end of the paper tube above the lamp’s little flame. It browned at first, slowly, the brand-new paper turning the rich antique tinge of an old print, a print from the old days when things were simpler. Then a cigar-ring of smoldering red encircled its rim, and blue flame blossomed. Yoshitoshi held the paper up, and flame ate slowly down its length, throwing smoky shadows.

Yoshitoshi blew and watched his work flare up, cherry-blossom white and red. It hurt to watch it go, and it felt good. He savored the two feelings for as long as he could. Then he dropped the last flaming inch of paper in an ashtray. He watched it flare and smolder until the last of the paper became a ghost-curl of gray.

“It’d never sell,” he said. Absently, knowing he would need them tomorrow, he cleaned his brushes. Then he emptied the inkstained water over the crisp dark ashes.

DINOSAURS

Walter Jon Williams

Walter Jon Williams is a New Mexico resident. His previous works include Knight Moves, a Philip K. Dick Award nominee, and Hardwired. His current novel, Voice of the Whirlwind, is available in hardback from Tor Books.

The Shars seethed in the dim light of their ruddy sun. Pointed faces raised to the sky, they sniffed the faint wind for sign of the stranger and scented only hydrocarbons, far-off vegetation, damp fur, the sweat of excitement and fear. Weak eyes peered upward, glistened with hope, anxiety, apprehension, and saw only the faint pattern of stars. Short, excited barking sounds broke out here and there, but mostly the Shars crooned, a low ululation that told of sudden onslaught, destruction, war in distant reaches, and now the hope of peace.

The crowds surged left, then right. Individuals bounced high on their third legs, seeking a view, seeing only the wide sea of heads, the ears and muzzles pointed to the stars.

Suddenly, a screaming. High-pitched howls, a bright chorus of barks. The crowds surged again.

Something was crossing the field of stars.

The human ship was huge, vaster than anything they’d seen, a moonlet descending. Shars closed their eyes and shuddered in terror. The screaming turned to moans. Individuals leaped high, baring their teeth, barking in defiance of their fear. The air smelled of terror, incipient panic, anger.

War! cried some. Peace! cried others.

The crooning went on. We mourn, we mourn, it said, we mourn our dead billions.

We fear, said others.

Soundlessly, the human ship neared them, casting its vast shadow. Shars spilled outward from the spot beneath, bounding high on their third legs.

The human ship came to a silent rest. Dully, it reflected the dim red sun.

The Shars crooned their fear, their sorrow. And waited for the humans to emerge.

These? Yes. These. Drill, the human ambassador, gazed through his video walls at the sea of Shars, the moaning, leaping thousands that surrounded him. Through the mass a group was moving with purpose, heading for the airlock as per his instructions. His new Memory crawled restlessly in the armored hollow atop his skull. Stand by, he broadcast.

His knees made painful crackling noises as he walked toward the airlock, the silver ball of his translator rolling along the ceiling ahead of him. The walls mutated as he passed, showing him violet sky, far-off polygonal buildings, cold distant green . . . and here, nearby, a vast, dim plain covered with a golden tissue of Shars.

He reached the airlock and it began to open. Drill snuffed wetly at the alien smells—heat, dust, the musky scent of the Shars themselves.

Drill’s heart thumped in his chest. His dreams were coming true. He had waited all his life for this.

Mash, whimpered Lowbrain. Drill told it to be silent. Lowbrain protested vaguely, then obeyed.

Drill told Lowbrain to move. Cool, alien air brushed his skin. The Shars cried out sharply, moaned, fell back. They seemed a wild, sibilant ocean of pointed ears and dark, questing eyes. The group heading for the airlock vanished in the general retrograde movement, a stone washed by a pale tide. Beneath Drill’s feet was soft vegetation. His translator floated in the air before him. His mind flamed with wonder, but Lowbrain kept him moving.

The Shars fell back, moaning.

Drill stood eighteen feet tall on his two pillarlike legs, each with a splayed foot that displayed a horny underside and vestigial nails. His skin was ebony and was draped in folds over his vast naked body. His pendulous maleness swung loosely as he walked. As he stepped across the open space he was conscious of the fact that he was the ultimate product of nine million years of human evolution, all leading to the expansion, diversification, and perfection that was now humanity’s manifest existence.

He looked down at the little Shars, their white skin and golden fur, their strange, stiff tripod legs, the muzzles raised to him as if in awe. If your species survives, he thought benignly, you can look like me in another few million years.

The group of Shars that had been forging through the crowd were suddenly exposed when the crowd fell back from around them. On the perimeter were several Shars holding staffs—weapons, perhaps—in their clever little hands. In the center of these were a group of Shars wearing decorative ribbon to which metal plates had been attached. Badges of rank, Memory said. Ignore. The shadow of the translator bobbed toward them as Drill approached. Metallic geometries rose from the group and hovered over them.

Recorders, Memory said. Artificial similarities to myself. Or possibly security devices. Disregard.

Drill was getting closer to the party, speeding up his instructions to Lowbrain, eventually entering Zen Synch. It would make Lowbrain hungrier but lessen the chance of any accidents.

The Shars carrying the staffs fell back. A wailing went up from the crowd as one of the Shars stepped toward Drill. The ribbons draped over her sloping shoulders failed to disguise four mammalian breasts. Clear plastic bubbles covered her weak eyes. In Zen Synch with Memory and Lowbrain, Drill ambled up to her and raised his hands in friendly greeting. The Shar flinched at the expanse of the gesture.

“I am Ambassador Drill,” he said. “I am a human.”

The Shar gazed up at him. Her nose wrinkled as she listened to the booming voice of the translator. Her answer was a succession of sharp sounds, made high in the throat, somewhat unpleasant. Drill listened to the voice of his translator.

“I am President Gram of the InterSharian Sociability of Nations and Planets.” That’s how it came through in translation, anyway. Memory began feeding Drill referents for the word “nation.”

“I welcome you to our planet, Ambassador Drill.”

“Thank you, President Gram,” Drill said. “Shall we negotiate peace now?”

President Gram’s ears pricked forward, then back. There was a pause, and then from the vast circle of Shars came a mad torrent of hooting noises. The awesome sound lapped over Drill like the waves of a lunatic sea.

They approve your sentiment, said Memory.

I thought that’s what it meant, Drill said. Do you think we’ll get along?

Memory didn’t answer, but instead shifted to a more comfortable position in the saddle of Drill’s skull. Its job was to provide facts, not draw conclusions.

“If you could come into my Ship,” Drill said, “we could get started.”

“Will we then meet the other members of your delegation?”

Drill gazed down at the Shar. The fur on her shoulders was rising in odd tufts. She seemed to be making a concerted effort to calm it.

“There are no other members,” Drill said. “Just myself.”

His knees were paining him. He watched as the other members of the Shar party cast quick glances at each other.

“No secretaries? No assistants?” the President was saying.

“No,” Drill said. “Not at all. I’m the only conscious mind on Ship. Shall we get started?”

Eat! Eat! said Lowbrain. Drill ordered it to be silent. His stomach grumbled.

“Perhaps,” said President Gram, gazing at the vastness of the human ship, “it would be best should we begin in a few hours. I should probably speak to the crowd. Would you care to listen?”

No need. Memory said. I will monitor.

“Thank you, no,” Drill said. “I shall return to Ship for food and sex. Please signal me when you are ready. Please bring any furniture you may need for your comfort. I do not believe my furniture would fit you, although we might be able to clone some later.”

The Shars’ ears all pricked forward. Drill entered Zen Synch, turned his huge body, and began accelerating toward the airlock. The sound of the crowd behind him was like the murmuring of wind through a stand of trees.

Peace, he thought later, as he stood by the mash bins and fed his complaining stomach. It’s a simple thing. How long can it take to arrange?

Long, said Memory. Very long.

The thought disturbed him. He thought the first meeting had gone well.

After his meal, when he had sex, it wasn’t very good.

Memory had been monitoring the events outside Ship, and after Drill had completed sex, Memory showed him the outside events. They have been broadcast to the entire population, Memory said.

President Gram had moved to a local elevation and had spoken for some time. Drill found her speech interesting—it was rhythmic and incantorial, rising and falling in tone and volume, depending heavily on repetition and melody. The crowd participated, issuing forth with excited barks or low moans in response to her statements or questions, sometimes babbling in confusion when she posed them a conundrum. Memory only gave the highlights of the speech. “Unknown . . . attackers . . . billions dead . . . preparations advanced . . . ready to defend ourselves . . . offer of peace . . . hope in the darkness . . . unknown . . . willing to take the chance . . . peace . . . peace . . . hopeful smell . . . peace.” At the end the other Shars were all singing “Peace! Peace!” in chorus while President Gram bounced up and down on her sturdy rear leg.

It sounds pretty, Drill thought. But why does she go on like that?

Memory’s reply was swift.

Remember that the Shars are a generalized and social species, it said. President Gram’s power, and her ability to negotiate, derives from the degree of her popular support. In measures of this significance she must explain herself and her actions to the population in order to maintain their enthusiasm for her policies.

Primitive, Drill thought.

That is correct.

Why don’t they let her get on with her work? Drill asked.

There was no reply.

After an exchange of signals the Shar party assembled at the airlock. Several Shars had been mobilized to carry tables and stools. Drill sent a Frog to escort the Shars from the airlock to where he waited. The Frog met them inside the airlock, turned, and hopped on ahead through Ship’s airy, winding corridors. It had been trained to repeat “Follow me, follow me” in the Shars’ own language.

Drill waited in a semi-reclined position on a Slab. The Slab was an organic sub-species used as furniture, with an idiot brain capable of responding to human commands. The Shars entered cautiously, their weak eyes twitching in the bright light. “Welcome, Honorable President,” Drill said. “Up, Slab.” Slab began to adjust itself to place Drill on his feet. The Shars were moving tables and stools into the vast room.

Frog was hopping in circles, making a wet noise at each landing. “Follow me, follow me,” it said.

The members of the Shar delegation who bore badges of rank stood in a body while the furniture-carriers bustled around them. Drill noticed, as Slab put him on his feet, that they were wrinkling their noses. He wondered what it meant.

His knees crackled as he came fully upright. “Please make yourselves comfortable,” he said. “Frog will show your laborers to the airlock.”

“Does your Excellency object to a mechanical recording of the proceedings?” President Gram asked. She was shading her eyes with her hand.

“Not at all.” As a number of devices rose into the air above the party, Drill wondered if it were possible to give the Shars detachable Memories. Perhaps human bioengineers could adapt the Memories to the Shar physiology. He asked Memory to make a note of the question so that he could bring it up later.

“Follow me, follow me,” Frog said. The workers who had carried the furniture began to follow the hopping Frog out of the room.

“Your Excellency,” President Gram said, “may I have the honor of presenting to you the other members of my delegation?”

There were six in all, with titles like Secretary for Syncopated Speech and Special Executive for External Coherence. There was also a Minister for the Dissemination of Convincing Lies, whose title Drill suspected was somehow mistranslated, and an Opposite Secretary-General for the Genocidal Eradication of Alien Aggressors, at whom Drill looked with more than a little interest. The Opposite Secretary-General was named Vang, and was small even for a Shar. He seemed to wrinkle his nose more than the others. The Special Executive for External Coherence, whose name was Cup, seemed a bit piebald, patches of white skin showing through the golden fur covering his shoulders, arms, and head.

He is elderly, said Memory.

That’s what I thought.

“Down, Slab,” Drill said. He leaned back against the creature and began to move to a more relaxed position.

He looked at the Shars and smiled. Fur ruffled on shoulders and necks. “Shall we make peace now?” he asked.

“We would like to clarify something you said earlier,” President Gram said. “You said that you were the only, ah, conscious entity on the ship. That you were the only member of the human delegation. Was that translated correctly?”

“Why, yes,” Drill said. “Why would more than one diplomat be necessary?”

The Shars looked at each other. The Special Executive for External Coherence spoke cautiously.

“You will not be needing to consult with your superiors? You have full authority from your government?”

Drill beamed at them. “We humans do not have a government, of course,” he said. “But I am a diplomat with the appropriate Memory and training. There is no problem that I can foresee.”

“Please let me understand, your Excellency,” Cup said. He was leaning forward, his small eyes watering. “I am elderly and may be slow in comprehending the situation. But if you have no government, who accredited you with this mission?”

“I am a diplomat. It is my specialty. No accreditation is necessary. The human race will accept my judgment on any matter of negotiation, as they would accept the judgment of any specialist in his area of expertise.”

“But why you. As an individual?”

Drill shrugged massively. “I was part of the nearest diplomatic enclave, and the individual without any other tasks at the moment.” He looked at each of the delegation in turn. “I am incredibly happy to have this chance, honorable delegates,” he said. “The vast majority of human diplomats never have the chance to speak to another species. Usually we mediate only in conflicts of interest between the various groups of human specialities.”

“But the human species will abide by your decisions?”

“Of course.” Drill was surprised at the Shar’s persistence. “Why wouldn’t they?”

Cup settled back in his chair. His ears were down. There was a short silence.

“We have an opening statement prepared,” President Gram said. “I would like to enter it into our record, if I may. Or would your Excellency prefer to go first?”

“I have no opening statement,” Drill said. “Please go ahead.”

Cup and the President exchanged glances. President Gram took a deep breath and began.

Long. Memory said. Very long.

The opening statement seemed very much like the address President Gram had been delivering to the crowd, the same hypnotic rhythms, more or less the same content. The rest of the delegation made muted responses. Drill drowsed through it, enjoying it as music.

“Thank you, Honorable President,” he said afterwards. “That was very nice.”

“We would like to propose an agenda for the conference,” Gram said. “First, to resolve the matter of the cease-fire and its provisions for an ending to hostilities. Second, the establishment of a secure border between our two species, guaranteeing both species room for expansion. Third, the establishment of trade and visitation agreements. Fourth, the matter of reparations, payments, and return of lost territory.”

Drill nodded. “I believe,” he said, “that resolution of the second through fourth points will come about as a result of an understanding reached on the first. That is, once the cease-fire is settled, that resolution will imply a settlement of the rest of the situation.”

“You accept the agenda?”

“If you like. It doesn’t matter.”

Ears pricked forward, then back. “So you accept that our initial discussions will consist of formalizing the disengagement of our forces?”

“Certainly. Of course I have no way of knowing what forces you have committed. We humans have committed none.”

The Shars were still for a long time. “Your species attacked our planets, Ambassador. Without warning, without making yourselves known to us.” Gram’s tone was unusually flat. Perhaps, Drill thought, she was attempting to conceal great emotion.

“Yes,” Drill said. “But those were not our military formations. Your species were contacted only by our terraforming Ships. They did not attack your people, as such—they were only peripherally aware of your existence. Their function was merely to seed the plants with lifeforms favorable to human existence. Unfortunately for your people, part of the function of these lifeforms is to destroy the native life of the planet.”

The Shars conferred with one another. The Opposite Secretary-General seemed particularly vehement. Then President Gram turned to Drill.

“We cannot accept your statement, your Excellency,” she said. “Our people were attacked. They defended themselves, but were overcome.”

“Our terraforming Ships are very good at what they do,” Drill said. “They are specialists. Our Shrikes, our Shrews, our Sharks—each is a master of its element. But they lack intelligence. They are not conscious entities, such as ourselves. They weren’t aware of your civilization at all. They only saw you as food.”

“You’re claiming that you didn’t notice us?” demanded Secretary-General Vang. “They didn’t notice us as they were killing us?” He was shouting. President Gram’s ears went back.

“Not as such, no,” Drill said.

President Gram stood up. “I am afraid, your Excellency, your explanations are insufficient,” she said. “This conference must be postponed until we can reach a united conclusion concerning your remarkable attitude.”

Drill was bewildered. “What did I say?” he asked.

The other Shars stood. President Gram turned and walked briskly on her three legs toward the exit. The others followed.

“Wait,” Drill said. “Don’t go. Let me send for Frog. Up, Slab, up!”

The Shars were gone by the time Slab had got Drill to his feet. The Ship told him they had found their own way to the airlock. Drill could think of nothing to do but order the airlock to let them out.

“Why would I lie?” he asked. “Why would I lie to them?” Things were so very simple, really.

He shifted his vast weight from one foot to the other and back again. Drill could not decide whether he had done anything wrong. He asked Memory what to do next, but Memory held no information to comfort him, only dry recitations of past negotiations. Annoyed at the lifeless monologue, Drill told Memory to be silent and began to walk restlessly through the corridors of his Ship. He could not decide where things had gone bad.

Sensing his agitation, Lowbrain began to echo his distress. Mash, Lowbrain thought weakly. Food. Sex.

Be silent, Drill commanded.

Sex, sex, Lowbrain thought.

Drill realized that Lowbrain was beginning to give him an erection. Acceding to the inevitable, he began moving toward Surrogate’s quarters.

Surrogate lived in a dim, quiet room filled with the murmuring sound of its own heartbeat. It was a human subspecies, about the intelligence of Lowbrain, designed to comfort voyagers on long journeys through space, when carnal access to their own subspecies might necessarily be limited. Surrogate had a variety of sexual equipment designed for the accommodation of the various human subspecies and their sexes. It also had large mammaries that gave nutritious milk, and a rudimentary head capable of voicing simple thoughts.

Tiny Mice, that kept Surrogate and the ship clean, scattered as Drill entered the room. Surrogate’s little head turned to him.

“It’s good to see you again,” Surrogate said.

“I am Drill.”

“It’s good to see you again, Drill,” said Surrogate. “It’s good to see you again.”

Drill began to nuzzle its breasts. One of Surrogate’s male parts began to erect. “I’m confused, Surrogate,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Why are you confused, Drill?” asked Surrogate. It raised one of its arms and began to stroke Drill’s head. It wasn’t really having a conversation: Surrogate had only been programmed to make simple statements, or to analyze its partners’ speech and ask questions.

“Things are going wrong,” Drill said. He began to suckle. The warm milk flowed down his throat. Surrogate’s male part had an orgasm. Mice jumped from hiding to clean up the mess.

“Why are things going wrong?” asked Surrogate. “I’m sure everything will be all right.”

Lowbrain had an orgasm, perceived by Drill as scattered, faraway bits of pleasure. Drill continued to suckle, feeling a heavy comfort beginning to radiate from Surrogate, from the gentle sound of its heartbeat, its huge, wholesome, brainless body.

Everything will be all right, Drill decided.

“Nice to see you again, Drill,” Surrogate said. “Drill, it’s nice to see you again.”

The vast crowds of Shars did not leave when night fell. Instead they stood beneath floating globes dispersing a cold reddish light that reflected eerily from pointed ears and muzzles. Some of them donned capes or skirts to help them keep warm. Drill, watching them on the video walls of the command center, was reminded of crowds standing in awe before some vast cataclysm.

The Shars were not quiet. They stood in murmuring groups, but sometimes they began the crooning chants they had raised earlier, or suddenly broke out in a series of shrill yipping cries.

President Gram spoke to them after she had left Ship. “The human has admitted his species’ attacks,” she said, “but has disclaimed responsibility. We shall urge him to adopt a more realistic position.”

“Adopt a position,” Drill repeated, not understanding. “It is not a position. It is the truth. Why don’t they understand?”

Opposite Minister-General Vang was more vehement. “We now have a far more complete idea of the humans’ attitude,” he said. “It is opposed to ours in every way. We shall not allow the murderous atrocities which the humans have committed upon five of our planets to be forgotten, or understood to be the result of some inexplicable lack of attention on the part of our species’ enemies.”

“That one is obviously deranged,” thought Drill.

He went to his sleeping quarters and ordered the Slab there to play him some relaxing music. Even with Slab’s murmurs and comforting hums, it took Drill some time before his agitation subsided.

Diplomacy, he thought as slumber overtook him, was certainly a strange business.

In the morning the Shars were still there, chanting and crying, moving in their strange crowded patterns. Drill watched them on his video walls as he ate breakfast at the mash bins. “There is a communication from President Gram,” Memory announced. “She wishes to speak with you by radio.”

“Certainly.”

“Ambassador Drill.” She was using the flat tones again. A pity she was subject to such stress.

“Good morning, President Gram,” Drill said. “I hope you spent a pleasant night.”

“I must give you the results of our decision. We regret that we can see no way to continue the negotiations unless you, as a representative of your species, agree to admit responsibility for your peoples’ attacks on our planets.”

“Admit responsibility?” Drill said. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”

Drill heard some odd, indistinct barking sounds that his translator declined to interpret for him. It sounded as if someone other than President Gram were on the other end of the radio link.

“You admit responsibility?” President Gram’s amazement was clear even in translation.

“Certainly. Does it make a difference?”

President Gram declined to answer that question. Instead she proposed another meeting for that afternoon.

“I will be ready at any time.”

Memory recorded President Gram’s speech to her people, and Drill studied it before meeting the Shar party at the airlock. She made a great deal out of the fact that Drill had admitted humanity’s responsibility for the war. Her people leaped, yipped, chanted their responses as if possessed. Drill wondered why they were so excited.

Drill met the party at the airlock this time, linked with Memory and Lowbrain in Zen Synch so as not to accidentally step on the President or one of her party. He smiled and greeted each by name and led them toward the conference room.

“I believe,” said Cup, “we may avoid future misunderstandings, if your Excellency would consent to inform us about your species. We have suffered some confusion in regard to your distinction between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ entities. Could you please explain the difference, as you understand it?”

“A pleasure, your Excellency,” Drill said. “Our species, unlike yours, is highly specialized. Once, eight million years ago, we were like you—a small, nonspecialized species type is very useful at a certain stage of evolution. But once a species reaches a certain complexity in its social and technological evolution, the need for specialists becomes too acute. Through both deliberate genetic manipulation and natural evolution, humanity turned away from a generalist species, toward highly specialized forms adapted to particular functions and environments. We understand this to be a natural function of species evolution.

“In the course of our explorations into manipulating our species, we discovered that the most efficient way of coding large amounts of information was in our own cell structure—our DNA. For tasks requiring both large and small amounts of data, we arranged that, as much as possible, these would be performed by organic entities, human subspecies. Since many of these tasks were boring and repetitive, we reasoned that advanced consciousness, such as that which we both share, was not necessary. You have met several unconscious entities. Frog, for example, and the Slab on which I lie. Many parts of my Ship are also alive, though not conscious.”

“That would explain the smell,” one of the delegation murmured.

“The terraforming Ships,” Drill went on, “which attacked your planets—these were also designed so as not to require a conscious operator.”

The Shars squinted up at Drill with their little eyes. “But why?” Cup asked.

“Terraforming is a dull process. It takes many years. No conscious mind could possibly enjoy it.”

“But your species would find itself at war without knowing it. If your explanation for the cause of this war is correct, you already have.”

Drill shrugged massively. “This happens from time to time. Sometimes other species which have reached our stage of development have attacked us in the same way. When it does, we arrange a peace.”

“You consider these attacks normal?” Opposite Minister-General Vang was the one who spoke.

“These occasional encounters seem to be a natural result of species evolution,” Drill said.

Vang turned to one of the Shars near him and spoke in several sharp barks. Drill heard a few words: “Billions lost . . . five planets . . . atrocities . . . natural result!”

“I believe,” said President Gram, “that we are straying from the agenda.”

Vang looked at her. “Yes, honorable President. Please forgive me.”

“The matter of withdrawal,” said President Gram, “to recognized truce lines.”

Species at this stage of their development tend to be territorial, Memory reminded Drill. Their political mentality is based around the concept of borders. The idea of a borderless community of species may be perceived as a threat.

I’ll try and go easy on them, Drill said.

“The Memories on our terraforming Ships will be adjusted to account for your species,” Drill said. “After the adjustment, your people will no longer be in danger.”

“In our case, it will take the disengage order several months to reach all our forces,” President Gram said. “How long will the order take to reach your own Ships?”

“A century or so.” The Shars stared. “Memories at our exploration basis in this area will be adjusted first, of course, and these will adjust the Memories of terraforming Ships as they come in for maintenance and supplies.”

“We’ll be subject to attack for another hundred years?” Vang’s tone mixed incredulity and scorn.

“Our terraforming Ships move more or less at random, and only come into base when they run out of supplies. We don’t know where they’ve been till they report back. Though they’re bound to encounter a few more of your planets, your species will still survive, enough to continue your species evolution. And during that time you’ll be searching for and occupying new planets on your own. You’ll probably come out of this with a net gain.”

“Have you no respect for life?” Vang demanded. Drill considered his answer.

“All individuals die, Opposite Minister-General,” he said. “That is a fact of nature which no species has been able to alter. Only species can survive. Individuals are easily replaceable. Though you will lose some planets and a large number of individuals, your species as a whole will survive and may even prosper. What more could a species or its delegated representatives desire?”

Opposite Minister-General Vang was glaring at Drill, his ears pricked forward, lips drawn back from his teeth. He said nothing.

“We desire a cease-fire that is a true cease-fire,” President Gram said. Her hands were clasping and unclasping rhythmically on the edge of her chair. “Not a slow, authorized extermination of our species. Your position has an unwholesome smell. I am afraid we must end these discussions until you alter it.”

“Position? This is not a position, honorable President. It is truth.”

“We have nothing further to say.”

Unhappily, Drill followed the Shar delegation to the airlock. “I do not lie, honorable President,” he said, but Gram only turned away and silently left the human Ship. The Shars in their pale thousands received her.

The Shar broadcasts were not heartening. Opposite Minister-General Vang was particularly vehement. Drill collected the highlights of the speeches as he speeded through Memory’s detailed remembrance. “Callous disregard . . . no common ground for communication . . . casual attitude toward atrocity . . . displays of obvious savagery . . . no respect for the individual . . . defend ourselves . . . this stinks in the nose.”

The Shars leaped and barked in response. There were strange bubbling high-pitched laughing sounds that Drill found unsettling.

“We hope to find a formula for peace,” President Gram said. “We will confer with all the ministers in session.” That was all.

That night, the Shars surrounding Ship moaned, moving slowly in a giant circle, their arms linked. The laughing sounds that followed Vang’s speech did not cease entirely. He did not understand why they did not all go home and sleep.

Long, long, Memory said. No comfort there.

Early in the morning, before dawn, there was a communication from President Gram. “I would like to meet with you privately. Away from the recorders, the coalition partners.”

“I would like nothing better,” Drill said. He felt a small current of optimism begin to trickle into him.

“Can I use an airlock other than the one we’ve been using up till now?”

Drill gave President Gram instructions and met her in the other airlock. She was wearing a night cape with a hood. The Shars, circling and moaning, had paid her no attention.

“Thank you for seeing me under these conditions,” she said, peering up at him from beneath the hood. Drill smiled. She shuddered.

“I am pleased to be able to cooperate,” he said.

Mash! Lowbrain demanded. It had been silent until Drill entered Zen Synch. Drill told it to be silent with a snarling vehemence that silenced it for the present.

“This way, honorable President,” Drill said. He took her to his sleeping chamber—a small room, only fifty feet square. “Shall I send a Frog for one of your chairs?” he asked.

“I will stand. Three legs seem to be more comfortable than two for standing.”

“Yes.”

“Is it possible, Ambassador Drill, that you could lower the intensity of the light here? I find it oppressive.”

Drill felt foolish, knowing he should have thought of this himself. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I will give the orders at once. I wish you had told me earlier.” He smiled nervously as he dimmed the lights and arranged himself on his Slab.

“Honorable ambassador.” President Gram’s words seemed hesitant. “I wonder if it is possible . . . can you tell me the meaning of that facial gesture of yours, showing me your teeth?”

“It is called a smile. It is intended as a gesture of benevolent reassurance.”

“Showing of the teeth is considered a threat here, honorable ambassador. Some of us have considered this a sign that you wish to eat us.”

Drill was astonished. “My goodness!” he said. “I don’t even eat meat! Just a kind of vegetable mash.”

“I pointed out that your teeth seemed unsuitable for eating meat, but still it makes us uneasy. I was wondering . . .”

“I will try to suppress the smile, yes. Eating meat! What an idea. Some of our military specialists, yes, and of course the Sharks and Shrikes and so on . . .” He told his Memory to enforce a strict ban against smiling in the presence of a Shar.

Gram leaned back on her sturdy rear leg. Her cape parted, revealing her ribbons and badges of office, her four furry dugs. “I wanted to inform you of certain difficulties here, Ambassador Drill,” she said. “I am having difficulty holding together my coalition. Minister-General Vang’s faction is gaining strength. He is attempting to create a perception in the minds of Shars that you are untrustworthy and violent. Whether he believes this, or whether he is using this notion as a means of destabilizing the coalition, is hardly relevant—considering your species’ unprovoked attacks, it is not a difficult perception to reinforce. He is also trying to tell our people that the military is capable of dealing with your species.”

Drill’s brain swam with Memory’s information on concepts such as “faction” and “coalition.” The meaning of the last sentence, however, was clear.

“That is a foolish perception, honorable President,” he said.

“His assurances on that score lack conviction.” Gram’s eyes were shiny. Her tone grew earnest. “You must give me something, ambassador. Something I can use to soothe the public mind. A way out of this dilemma. I tell you that it is impossible to expect us to sit idly by and accept the loss of an undefined number of planets over the next hundred years. I plead with you, ambassador. Give me something. Some way we can avoid attack. Otherwise . . .” She left the sentence incomplete.

Mash, Lowbrain wailed. Drill ignored it. He moved into Zen Synch with Memory, racing through possible solutions. Sweat gathered on his forehead, pouring down his vast shoulders.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, there is a possibility. If you could provide us with the location of all your occupied planets, we could dispatch a Ship to each with the appropriate Memories as cargo. If any of our terraforming Ships arrived, the Memories could be transferred at once, and your planets would be safe.”

President Gram considered this. “Memories,” she said. “You’ve been using the term, but I’m not sure I understand.”

“Stored information is vast, and even though human bodies are large we cannot always have all the information we need to function efficiently even in our specialized tasks,” Drill said. “Our human brains have been separated as to function. I have a Lowbrain, which is on my spinal cord above my pelvis. Lowbrain handles motor control of my lower body, routine monitoring of my body’s condition, eating, excretion, and sex. My perceptual centers, short-term memory, personality, and reasoning functions are handled by the brain in my skull—the classical brain, if you like. Long-term and specialized memory is the function of the large knob you see moving on my head, my Memory. My Memory records all that happens in great detail, and can recapitulate it at any point. It has also been supplied with information concerning the human species’ contacts with other non-human groups. It attaches itself easily to my nervous system and draws nourishment from my body. Specific memories can be communicated from one living Memory to another, or if it proves necessary I can simply give my Memory to another human, a complete transfer. I have another Memory aboard that I’m not using at the moment, a pilot Memory that can navigate and handle Ship, and I wore this Memory while in transit. I also have spare Memories in case my primary Memories fall ill. So you see, our specialization does not rule out adaptability—any piece of information needed by any of us can easily be transferred, and in far greater detail than by any mechanical medium.”

“So you could return to your base and send out pilot Memories to our planets,” Gram said. “Memories that could halt your terraforming ships.”

“That is correct.” Just in time, Memory managed to stop the twitch in Drill’s cheeks from becoming a smile. Happiness bubbled up in him. He was going to arrange this peace after all!

“I am afraid that would not be acceptable, your Excellency,” President Gram said. Drill’s hopes fell.

“Whyever not?”

“I’m afraid the Minister-General would consider it a naïve attempt of yours to find out the location of our populated planets. So that your species could attack them, ambassador.”

“I’m trying very hard, President Gram,” Drill said.

“I’m sure you are.”

Drill frowned and went into Zen Synch again, ignoring Lowbrain’s plaintive cries for mash and sex, sex and mash. Concepts crackled through his mind. He began to develop an erection, but Memory was drawing off most of the available blood and the erection failed. The smell of Drill’s sweat filled the room. President Gram wrinkled her nose and leaned back far onto her rear leg.

“Ah,” Drill said. “A solution. Yes. I can have my Pilot memory provide the locations to an equivalent number of our own planets. We will have one another’s planets as hostage.”

“Bravo, ambassador,” President Gram said quietly. “I think we may have a solution. But—forgive me—it may be said that we cannot trust your information. We will have to send ships to verify the location of your planets.”

“If your ships go to my planet first,” Drill said, “I can provide your people with one of my spare Memories that will inform my species what your people are doing, and instruct the humans to cooperate. We will have to construct some kind of link between your radio and my Memory . . . maybe I can have my Ship grow one.”

President Gram came forward off her third leg and began to pace forward, moving in her strange, fast, hobbling way. “I can present it to the council this way, yes,” she said. “There is hope here.” She stopped her movement, peering up at Drill with her ears pricked forward. “Is it possible that you could allow me to present this to the council as my own idea?” she asked. “It may meet with less suspicion that way.”

“Whatever way is best,” said Drill. President Gram gazed into the darkened recesses of the room.

“This smells good,” she said. Drill succeeded in suppressing his smile.

“It’s nice to see you again.”

“I am Drill.”

“It’s nice to see you again, Drill.”

“I think we can make the peace work.”

“Everything will be all right, Drill. Drill, I’m sure everything will be all right.”

“I’m so glad I had this chance. This is the chance of a lifetime.”

“Drill, it’s nice to see you again.”

The next day President Gram called and asked to present a new plan. Drill said he would be pleased to hear it. He met the party at the airlock, having already dimmed the lights. He was very rigid in his attempts not to smile.

They sat in the dimmed room while President Gram presented the plan. Drill pretended to think it over, then acceded. Details were worked out. First the location of one human planet would be given and verified—this planet, the Shar capital, would count as the first revealed Shar planet. After verification, each side would reveal the location of two planets, verify those, then reveal four, and so on. Even counting the months it would take to verify the location of planets, the treaty should be completed within less than five years.

That night the Shars went mad. At President Gram’s urging, they built fires, danced, screamed, sang. Drill watched on his Ship’s video walls. Their rhythms beat at his head.

He smiled. For hours.

The Ship obligingly grew a communicator and coupled it to one of Drill’s spare Memories. The two were put aboard a Shar ship and sent in the direction of Drill’s home. Drill remained in his ship, watching entertainment videos Ship received from the Shars’ channels. He didn’t understand the dramas very well, but the comedies were delightful. The Shars could do the most intricate, clever things with their flexible bodies and odd tripod legs—it was delightful to watch them.

Maybe I could take some home with me, he thought. They can be very entertaining.

The thousands of Shars waiting outside Ship began to drift away. Within a month only a few hundred were left. Their singing was quiet, triumphant, assured. Sometimes Drill had it piped into his sleeping chamber. It helped him relax.

President Gram visited informally every ten days or so. Drill showed her around Ship, showing her the pilot Memory, the Frog quarters, the giant stardrive engines with their human subspecies’ implanted connections, Surrogate in its shadowed, pleasant room. The sight of Surrogate seemed to agitate the President.

“You do not use sex for procreation?” she asked. “As an expression of affection?”

“Indeed we do. I have scads of offspring. There are never enough diplomats, so we have a great many couplings among our subspecies. As for affection . . . I think I can say that I have enjoyed the company of each of my partners.”

She looked up at him with solemn eyes. “You travel to the stars, Drill,” she said. “Your species expands randomly in all directions, encountering other species, sometimes annihilating them. Do you have a reason for any of this?”

“A reason?” Drill mused. “It is natural to us. Natural to all intelligent species, so far as we know.”

“I meant a conscious reason. Is it anything other than what you do in an automatic way?”

“I can’t think of why we would need any such reasons.”

“So you have no philosophy of constant expansion? No ideology?”

“I do not know what those words mean,” Drill said.

Gram closed her eyes and lowered her head. “I am sorry,” she said.

“No need. We have no conflicts in our ideas about ourselves, about our lives. We are happy with what we are.”

“Yes. You couldn’t be unhappy if you tried, could you?”

“No,” Drill said cheerfully. “I see that you understand.”

“Yes,” Gram said. “I scent that I do.”

“In a few million years,” Drill said, “these things will become clear to you.”

The first Shar ship returned from Drill’s home, reporting a transfer of the Memory. The field around Ship filled again with thousands of Shars, crying their happiness to the skies. Other Memories were now taking instructions to all terraforming bases. The locations of two new planets were released. Ships carrying spare Memories leaped into the skies.

It’s working, Drill told Memory.

Long, Memory said. Very long.

But Memory could not lower Drill’s joy. This was what he had lived his life for, and he knew he was good at it. Memories of the future would take this solution as a model for negotiations with other species. Things were working out.

One night the Shars outside Ship altered their behavior. Their singing became once again a moaning, mixed with cries. Drill was disturbed.

A communication came from the President. “Cup is dead,” she said.

“I understand,” Drill said. “Who is his replacement?”

Drill could not read Gram’s expression. “That is not yet known. Cup was a strong person, and did not like other strong people around him. Already the successors are fighting for the leadership, but they may not be able to hold his faction together.” Her ears flickered. “I may be weakened by this.”

“I regret things tend that way.”

“Yes,” she said. “So do I.”

The second set of ships returned. More Memories embarked on their journeys. The treaty was holding.

There was a meeting aboard Ship to formalize the agreement. Cup’s successor was Brook, a tall, elderly Shar whose golden fur was darkened by age. A compromise candidate, President Gram said, his election determined after weeks of fighting for the successorship. He was not respected. Already pieces of Cup’s old faction were breaking away.

“I wonder, your Excellency,” Brook said, after the formal business was over, “if you could arrange for our people to learn your language. You must have powerful translation modules aboard your ship in order to learn our language so quickly. You were broadcasting your message of peace within a few hours of entering real space.”

“I have no such equipment aboard Ship,” Drill said. “Our knowledge of your language was acquired from Shar prisoners.”

“Prisoners?” Shar ears pricked forward. “We were not aware of this,” Brook said.

“After our base Memories recognized discrepancies,” Drill said, “we sent some Ships out searching for you. We seized one of your ships and took it to my home world. The prisoners were asked about their language and the location of your capital planet. Otherwise it would have taken me months to find your world here, and learn to communicate with you.”

“May we ask to arrange for the return of the prisoners?”

“Oh.” Drill said. “That won’t be possible. After we learned what we needed to know, we terminated their lives. They were being kept in an area reserved for a garden. The landscapers wanted to get to work.” Drill bobbed his head reassuringly. “I am pleased to inform you that they proved excellent fertilizer for the gardens. The result was quite lovely.”

“I think,” said President Gram carefully, “that it would be best that this information not go beyond those of us in this room. I think it would disturb the process.”

Minister-General Vang’s ears went back. So did others’. But they acceded.

“I think we should take our leave,” said President Gram.

“Have a pleasant afternoon,” said Drill.

“It’s important.” It was not yet dawn. Ship had awakened Drill for a call from the President. “One of your ships has attacked another of our planets.”

Alarm drove the sleep from Drill’s brain. “Please come to the airlock,” he said.

“The information will reach the population within the hour.”

“Come quickly,” said Drill.

The President arrived with a pair of assistants, who stayed inside the airlock. They carried staves. “My people will be upset,” Gram said. “Things may not be entirely safe.”

“Which planet was it?” Drill asked.

Gram rubbed her ears. “It was one of those whose location went out on the last peace shuttle.”

“The new Memory must not have arrived in time.”

“That is what we will tell the people. That it couldn’t have been prevented. I will try to speed up the process by which the planets receive new Memories. Double the quota.”

“That is a good idea.”

“I will have to dismiss Brook. Opposite Minister-General Vang will have to take his job. If I can give Vang more power, he may remain in the coalition and not cause a split.”

“As you think best.”

President Gram looked up at Drill, her head rising reluctantly, as if held back by a great weight. “My son,” she said. “He was on the planet when it happened.”

“You have other offspring,” Drill said.

Gram looked at him, the pain burning deep in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

The fields around Ship filled once again. Cries and howls rent the air, and dirges pulsed against Ship’s uncaring walls. The Shar broadcasts in the next weeks seemed confused to Drill. Coalitions split and fragmented. Vang spoke frequently of readiness. President Gram succeeded in doubling the quota of planets. The decision was a near one.

Then, days later, another message. “One of our commanders,” said President Gram, “was based on the vicinity of the attacked planet. He is one of Vang’s creatures. On his own initiative he ordered our military forces to engage. Your terraforming Ship was attacked.”

“Was it destroyed?” Drill asked. His tone was urgent. There is still hope, he reminded himself.

“Don’t be anxious for your fellow humans,” Gram said. “The Ship was damaged, but escaped.”

“The loss of a few hundred billion unconscious organisms is no cause for anxiety,” Drill said. “An escaped terraforming Ship is. The Ship will alert our military forces. It will be a real war.”

President Gram licked her lips. “What does that mean?”

“You know of our Shrikes and so on. Our military people are worse. They are fully conscious and highly specialized in different modes of warfare. They are destructive, carnivorous, capable of taking enormous damage without impairing function. Their minds concentrate only on tactics, on destruction. Normally they are kept on planetoids away from the rest of humanity. Even other humans find their proximity too . . . disturbing.” Drill put all the urgency in his speech that he could. “Honorable President, you must give me the locations of the remaining planets. If I can get Memories to each of them with news of the peace, we may yet save them.”

“I will try. But the coalition . . .” She turned away from the transmitter. “Vang will claim a victory.”

“It is the worst possible catastrophe,” Drill said.

Gram’s tone was grave. “I believe you,” she said.

Drill listened to the broadcasts with growing anxiety. The Shars who spoke on the broadcasts were making angry comments about the execution of prisoners, about flower gardens and values Drill didn’t understand. Someone had let the secret loose. President Gram went from group to group outside Ship, talking of the necessity of her plan. The Shars’ responses were muted. Drill sensed they were waiting. It was announced that Vang had left the coalition. A chorus of triumphant yips rose from scattered members of the crowd. Others only moaned.

Vang, now simply General Vang, arrived at the field. His followers danced intoxicated circles around him as he spoke, howling their responses to his words. “Triumph! United will!” they cried. “The humans can be beaten! Treachery avenged! Dictate the peace from a position of strength! We smell the location of their planets!”

The Shars’ weird cackling laughter followed him from point to point. The laughing and crying went on well into the night. In the morning the announcement came that the coalition had fallen. Vang was now President-General.

In his sleeping chamber, surrounded by his video walls, Drill began to weep.

“I have been asked to bear Vang’s message to you,” Gram said. She seemed smaller than before, standing unsteadily even on her tripod legs. “It is his . . . humor.”

“What is the message?” Drill said. His whole body seemed in pain. Even Lowbrain was silent, wrapped in misery.

“I had hoped,” Gram said, “that he was using this simply as an issue on which to gain power. That once he had the Presidency, he would continue the diplomatic effort. It appears he really means what he’s been saying. Perhaps he’s no longer in control of his own people.”

“It is war,” Drill said.

“Yes.”

You have failed, said Memory. Drill winced in pain.

“You will lose,” he said.

“Vang says we are cleverer than you are.”

“That may be the case. But cleverness cannot compete with experience. Humans have fought hundreds of these little wars, and never failed to wipe out the enemy. Our Memories of these conflicts are intact. Your people can’t fight millions of years of specialized evolution.”

“Vang’s message doesn’t end there. You have till nightfall to remove your Ship from the planet. Six days to get out of real space.”

“I am to be allowed to live?” Drill was surprised.

“Yes. It is our . . . our custom.”

Drill scratched himself. “I regret our efforts did not succeed.”

“No more than I.” She was silent for a while. “Is there any way we can stop this?”

“If Vang attacks any human planets after the Memories of the peace arrangement have arrived,” Drill said, “the military will be unleashed to wipe you out. There is no stopping them after that point.”

“How long,” she asked, “do you think we have?”

“A few years. Ten at the most.”

“Our species will be dead.”

“Yes. Our military are very good at their jobs.”

“You will have killed us,” Gram said, “destroyed the culture that we have built for thousands of years, and you won’t even give it any thought. Your species doesn’t think about what it does any more. It just acts, like a single-celled animal, engulfing everything it can reach. You say that you are a conscious species, but that isn’t true. Your every action is . . . instinct. Or reflex.”

“I don’t understand,” said Drill.

Gram’s body trembled. “That is the tragedy of it,” she said.

An hour later Ship rose from the field. Shars laughed their defiance from below, dancing in crazed abandon.

I have failed, Drill told Memory.

You knew the odds were long, Memory said. You knew that in negotiations with species this backward there have only been a handful of successes, and hundreds of failures.

Yes, Drill acknowledged. It’s a shame, though. To have spent all these months away from home.

Eat! Eat! said Lowbrain.

Far away, in their forty-mile-long Ships, the human soldiers were already on their way.

THE LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOES

Connie Willis

The author is presently a finalist for the 1987 Nebula for Best Novelette. She tells us she’s working on a novel which is related to her Hugo- and Nebula-award winning novelette, “Fire Watch” (February 1982), but unlike the original story, which took place in London during the Blitz, the novel will be set in the midst of the Plague.

On the way out to Tempe I saw a dead jackal in the road. I was in the far left lane of Van Buren, ten lanes away from it, and its long legs were facing away from me, the squarish muzzle flat against the pavement so it looked narrower than it really was, and for a minute I thought it was a dog.

I had not seen an animal in the road like that for fifteen years. They can’t get onto the divideds, of course, and most of the multiways are fenced. And people are more careful of their animals.

The jackal was probably somebody’s pet. This part of Phoenix was mostly residential, and after all this time, people still think they can turn the nasty, carrion-loving creatures into pets. Which was no reason to have hit it and, worse, left it there. It’s a felony to strike an animal and another one to not report it, but whoever had hit it was long gone.

I pulled the Hitori over onto the center shoulder and sat there awhile, staring at the empty multiway. I wondered who had hit it and whether they had stopped to see if it was dead.

Katie had stopped. She had hit the brakes so hard she sent the car into a skid that brought it up against the ditch, and jumped out of the jeep. I was still running toward him, floundering in the snow. We made it to him almost at the same time. I knelt beside him, the camera dangling from my neck, its broken case hanging half open.

“I hit him,” Katie had said. “I hit him with the jeep.”

I looked in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t even see over the pile of camera equipment in the back seat with the eisenstadt balanced on top. I got out. I had come nearly a mile, and looking back, I couldn’t see the jackal, though I knew now that’s what it was.

“McCombe! David! Are you there yet?” Ramirez’s voice said from inside the car.

I leaned in. “No,” I shouted in the general direction of the phone’s mike. “I’m still on the multiway.”

“Mother of God, what’s taking you so long? The governor’s conference is at twelve, and I want you to go out to Scottsdale and do a layout on the closing of Taliesin West. The appointment’s for ten. Listen, McCombe, I got the poop on the Amblers for you. They bill themselves as ‘One Hundred Percent Authentic,’ but they’re not. Their RV isn’t really a Winnebago, it’s an Open Road. It is the last RV on the road, though, according to Highway Patrol. A man named Eldridge was touring with one, also not a Winnebago, a Shasta, until March, but he lost his license in Oklahoma for using a tanker lane, so this is it. Recreation vehicles are banned in all but four states. Texas has legislation in committee, and Utah has a full-divided bill coming up next month. Arizona will be next, so take lots of pictures, Davey boy. This may be your last chance. And get some of the zoo.”

“What about the Amblers?” I said.

“Their name is Ambler, believe it or not. I ran a lifeline on them. He was a welder. She was a bank teller. No kids. They’ve been doing this since eighty-nine when he retired. Nineteen years. David, are you using the eisenstadt?”

We had been through this the last three times I’d been on a shoot. “I’m not there yet,” I said.

“Well, I want you to use it at the governor’s conference. Set it on his desk if you can.”

I intended to set it on a desk, all right. One of the desks at the back, and let it get some nice shots of the rear ends of reporters as they reached wildly for a little clear air-space to shoot their pictures in, some of them holding their vidcams in their upstretched arms and aiming them in what they hope is the right direction because they can’t see the governor at all, let it get a nice shot of one of the reporter’s arms as he knocked it face-down on the desk.

“This one’s a new model. It’s got a trigger. It’s set for faces, full-lengths, and vehicles.”

So great. I come home with a hundred-frame cartridge full of passersby and tricycles. How the hell did it know when to click the shutter or which one the governor was in a press conference of eight hundred people, full-length or face? It was supposed to have all kinds of fancy light-metrics and computer-composition features, but all it could really do was mindlessly snap whatever passed in front of its idiot lens, just like the highway speed cameras.

It had probably been designed by the same government types who’d put the highway cameras along the road instead of overhead so that all it takes is a little speed to reduce the new side-license plates to a blur, and people go faster than ever. A great camera, the eisenstadt. I could hardly wait to use it.

“Sun-co’s very interested in the eisenstadt,” Ramirez said. She didn’t say goodbye. She never does. She just stops talking and then starts up again later. I looked back in the direction of the jackal.

The multiway was completely deserted. New cars and singles don’t use the undivided multiways much, even during rush hours. Too many of the little cars have been squashed by tankers. Usually there are at least a few obsoletes and renegade semis taking advantage of the Patrol’s being on the divideds, but there wasn’t anybody at all.

I got back in the car and backed up even with the jackal. I turned off the ignition but didn’t get out. I could see the trickle of blood from its mouth from here. A tanker went roaring past out of nowhere, trying to beat the cameras, straddling the three middle lanes and crushing the jackal’s rear half to a bloody mush. It was a good thing I hadn’t been trying to cross the road. He never would have even seen me.

I started the car and drove to the nearest off-ramp to find a phone. There was one at an old 7-Eleven on McDowell.

“I’m calling to report a dead animal on the road,” I told the woman who answered the Society’s phone.

“Name and number?”

“It’s a jackal,” I said. “It’s between Thirtieth and Thirty-Second on Van Buren. It’s in the far right lane.”

“Did you render emergency assistance?”

“There was no assistance to be rendered. It was dead.”

“Did you move the animal to the side of the road?”

“No.”

“Why not?” she said, her tone suddenly sharper, more alert.

Because I thought it was a dog. “I didn’t have a shovel,” I said, and hung up.

I got out to Tempe by eight-thirty, in spite of the fact that every tanker in the state suddenly decided to take Van Buren. I got pushed out onto the shoulder and drove on that most of the way.

The Winnebago was set up in the fairgrounds between Phoenix and Tempe, next to the old zoo. The flyer had said they would be open from nine to nine, and I had wanted to get most of my pictures before they opened, but it was already a quarter to nine, and even if there were no cars in the dusty parking lot, I was probably too late.

It’s a tough job being a photographer. The minute most people see a camera, their real faces close like a shutter in too much light, and all that’s left is their camera face, their public face. It’s a smiling face, except in the case of Saudi terrorists or senators, but, smiling or not, it shows no real emotion. Actors, politicians, people who have their pictures taken all the time are the worst. The longer the person’s been in the public eye, the easier it is for me to get great vidcam footage and the harder it is to get anything approaching a real photograph, and the Amblers had been at this for nearly twenty years. By a quarter to nine they would already have their camera faces on.

I parked down at the foot of the hill next to the clump of ocotillas and yucca where the zoo sign had been, pulled my Nikon longshot out of the mess in the back seat, and took some shots of the sign they’d set up by the multiway: “See a Genuine Winnebago. One Hundred Percent Authentic.”

The Genuine Winnebago was parked longways against the stone banks of cacti and palms at the front of the zoo. Ramirez had said it wasn’t a real Winnebago, but it had the identifying W with its extending stripes running the length of the RV, and it seemed to me to be the right shape, though I hadn’t seen one in at least ten years.

I was probably the wrong person for this story. I had never had any great love for RV’s, and my first thought when Ramirez called with the assignment was that there are some things that should be extinct, like mosquitoes and lane dividers, and RV’s are right at the top of the list. They had been everywhere in the mountains when I’d lived in Colorado, crawling along in the left-hand lane, taking up two lanes even in the days when a lane was fifteen feet wide, with a train of cursing cars behind them.

I’d been behind one on Independence Pass that had stopped cold while a ten-year-old got out to take pictures of the scenery with an Instamatic, and one of them had tried to take the curve in front of my house and ended up in my ditch, looking like a beached whale. But that was always a bad curve.

An old man in an ironed short-sleeved shirt came out the side door and around to the front end and began washing the Winnebago with a sponge and a bucket. I wondered where he had gotten the water. According to Ramirez’s advance work, which she’d sent me over the modem about the Winnebago, it had maybe a fifty-gallon water tank, tops, which is barely enough for drinking water, a shower, and maybe washing a dish or two, and there certainly weren’t any hookups here at the zoo, but he was swilling water onto the front bumper and even over the tires as if he had more than enough.

I took a few shots of the RV standing in the huge expanse of parking lot and then hit the longshot to full for a picture of the old man working on the bumper. He had large reddish-brown freckles on his arms and the top of his bald head, and he scrubbed away at the bumper with a vengeance. After a minute he stopped and stepped back, and then called to his wife. He looked worried, or maybe just crabby. I was too far away to tell if he had snapped out her name impatiently or simply called her to come and look, and I couldn’t see his face. She opened the metal side door, with its narrow louvered window, and stepped down onto the metal step.

The old man asked her something, and she, still standing on the step, looked out toward the multiway and shook her head, and then came around to the front, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, and they both stood there looking at his handiwork.

They were One Hundred Percent Authentic, even if the Winnebago wasn’t, down to her flowered blouse and polyester slacks, probably also one hundred percent, and the cross-stitched rooster on the dishtowel. She had on brown leather slip-ons like I remembered my grandmother wearing, and I was willing to bet she had set her thinning white hair on bobby pins. Their bio said they were in their eighties, but I would have put them in their nineties, although I wondered if they were too perfect and therefore fake, like the Winnebago. But she went on wiping her hands on the dishtowel the way my grandmother had when she was upset, even though I couldn’t see if her face was showing any emotion, and that action at least was authentic.

She apparently told him the bumper looked fine because he dropped the dripping sponge into the bucket and went around behind the Winnebago. She went back inside, shutting the metal door behind her even though it had to be already at least a hundred and ten out, and they hadn’t even bothered to park under what scanty shade the palms provided.

I put the longshot back in the car. The old man came around the front with a big plywood sign. He propped it against the vehicle’s side. “The Last of the Winnebagos,” the sign read in somebody’s idea of what Indian writing should look like. “See a vanishing breed. Admission—Adults—$8.00, Children under twelve—$5.00 Open 9 A.M. to Sunset.” He strung up a row of red and yellow flags, and then picked up the bucket and started toward the door, but halfway there he stopped and took a few steps down the parking lot to where I thought he probably had a good view of the road, and then went back, walking like an old man, and took another swipe at the bumper with the sponge.

“Are you done with the RV yet, McCombe?” Ramirez said on the car phone.

I slung the camera into the back. “I just got here. Every tanker in Arizona was on Van Buren this morning. Why the hell don’t you have me do a piece on abuses of the multiway system by water-haulers?”

“Because I want you to get to Tempe alive. The governor’s press conference has been moved to one, so you’re okay. Have you used the eisenstadt yet?”

“I told you, I just got here. I haven’t even turned the damned thing on.”

“You don’t turn it on. It self-activates when you set it bottom down on a level surface.”

Great. It had probably already shot its 100-frame cartridge on the way here.

“Well, if you don’t use it on the Winnebago, make sure you use it at the governor’s conference,” she said. “By the way, have you thought any more about moving to investigative?”

That was why Sun-co was really so interested in the eisenstadt. It had been easier to send a photographer who could write stories than it had to send a photographer and a reporter, especially in the little one-seater Hitoris they were ordering now, which was how I got to be a photojournalist. And since that had worked out so well, why send either? Send an eisenstadt and a DAT deck and you won’t need an Hitori and way-mile credits to get them there. You can send them through the mail. They can sit unnoticed on the old governor’s desk, and after a while somebody in a one-seater who wouldn’t have to be either a photographer or a reporter can sneak in to retrieve them and a dozen others.

“No,” I said, glancing back up the hill. The old man gave one last swipe to the front bumper and then walked over to one of the zoo’s old stone-edged planters and dumped the bucket in on a tangle of prickly pear, which would probably think it was a spring shower and bloom before I made it up the hill. “Look, if I’m going to get any pictures before the touristas arrive, I’d better go.”

“I wish you’d think about it. And use the eisenstadt this time. You’ll like it once you try it. Even you’ll forget it’s a camera.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. I looked back down the multiway. Nobody at all was coming now. Maybe that was what all the Amblers’ anxiety was about—I should have asked Ramirez what their average daily attendance was and what sort of people used up credits to come this far out and see an old beat-up RV. The curve into Tempe alone was three point two miles. Maybe nobody came at all. If that was the case, I might have a chance of getting some decent pictures. I got in the Hitori and drove up the steep drive.

“Howdy,” the old man said, all smiles, holding out his reddish-brown freckled hand to shake mine. “Name’s Jake Ambler. And this here’s Winnie,” he said, patting the metal side of the RV, “Last of the Winnebagos. Is there just the one of you?”

“David McCombe,” I said, holding out my press pass. “I’m a photographer. Sun-co. Phoenix Sun, Tempe-Mesa Tribune, Glendale Star, and affiliated stations. I was wondering if I could take some pictures of your vehicle?” I touched my pocket and turned the taper on.

“You bet. We’ve always cooperated with the media, Mrs. Ambler and me. I was just cleaning old Winnie up,” he said. “She got pretty dusty on the way down from Globe.” He didn’t make any attempt to tell his wife I was there, even though she could hardly avoid hearing us, and she didn’t open the metal door again. “We been on the road now with Winnie for almost twenty years. Bought her in 1989 in Forest City, Iowa, where they were made. The wife didn’t want to buy her, didn’t know if she’d like traveling, but now she’s the one wouldn’t part with it.”

He was well into his spiel now, an open, friendly, I-have-nothing-to-hide expression on his face that hid everything. There was no point in taking any stills, so I got out the vidcam and shot the TV footage while he led me around the RV.

“This up here,” he said, standing with one foot on the flimsy metal ladder and patting the metal bar around the top, “is the luggage rack, and this is the holding tank. It’ll hold thirty gallons and has an automatic electric pump that hooks up to any waste hookup. Empties in five minutes, and you don’t even get your hands dirty.” He held up his fat pink hands palms forward as if to show me. “Water tank,” he said, slapping a silver metal tank next to it. “Holds forty gallons, which is plenty for just the two of us. Interior space is a hundred fifty cubic feet with six feet four of headroom. That’s plenty even for a tall guy like yourself.”

He gave me the whole tour. His manner was easy, just short of slap-on-the-back hearty, but he looked relieved when an ancient VW bug came chugging catty-cornered up through the parking lot. He must have thought they wouldn’t have any customers either.

A family piled out, Japanese tourists, a woman with short black hair, a man in shorts, two kids. One of the kids had a ferret on a leash.

“I’ll just look around while you tend to the paying customers,” I told him.

I locked the vidcam in the car, took the longshot, and went up toward the zoo. I took a wide-angle of the zoo sign for Ramirez. I could see it now—she’d run a caption like, “The old zoo stands empty today. No sound of lion’s roar, of elephant’s trumpeting, of children’s laughter, can be heard here. The old Phoenix Zoo, last of its kind, while just outside its gates stands yet another last of its kind. Story on page 10.” Maybe it would be a good idea to let the eisenstadts and the computers take over.

I went inside. I hadn’t been out here in years. In the late eighties there had been a big flap over zoo policy. I had taken the pictures, but I hadn’t covered the story since there were still such things as reporters back then. I had photographed the cages in question and the new zoo director who had caused all the flap by stopping the zoo’s renovation project cold and giving the money to a wildlife protection group.

“I refuse to spend money on cages when in a few years we’ll have nothing to put in them. The timber wolf, the California condor, the grizzly bear, are in imminent danger of becoming extinct, and it’s our responsibility to save them, not make a comfortable prison for the last survivors.”

The Society had called him an alarmist, which just goes to show you how much things can change. Well, he was an alarmist, wasn’t he? The grizzly bear isn’t extinct in the wild—it’s Colorado’s biggest tourist draw, and there are so many whooping cranes Texas is talking about limited hunting.

In all the uproar, the zoo had ceased to exist, and the animals all went to an even more comfortable prison in Sun City—sixteen acres of savannah land for the zebras and lions, and snow manufactured daily for the polar bears.

They hadn’t really been cages, in spite of what the zoo director said. The old capybara enclosure, which was the first thing inside the gate, was a nice little meadow with a low stone wall around it. A family of prairie dogs had taken up residence in the middle of it.

I went back to the gate and looked down at the Winnebago. The family circled the Winnebago, the man bending down to look underneath the body. One of the kids was hanging off the ladder at the back of the RV. The ferret was nosing around the front wheel Jake Ambler had so carefully scrubbed down, looking like it was about ready to lift its leg, if ferrets do that. The kid yanked on its leash and then picked it up in his arms. The mother said something to him. Her nose was sunburned.

Katie’s nose had been sunburned. She had had that white cream on it, that skiers used to use. She was wearing a parka and jeans and bulky pink-and-white moonboots that she couldn’t run in, but she still made it to Aberfan before I did. I pushed past her and knelt over him.

“I hit him,” she said bewilderedly. “I hit a dog.”

“Get back in the jeep, damn it!” I shouted at her. I stripped off my sweater and tried to wrap him in it. “We’ve got to get him to the vet.”

“Is he dead?” Katie said, her face as pale as the cream on her nose.

“No!” I had shouted. “No, he isn’t dead.”

The mother turned and looked up toward the zoo, her hand shading her face. She caught sight of the camera, dropped her hand, and smiled, a toothy, impossible smile. People in the public eye are the worst, but even people having a snapshot taken close down somehow, and it isn’t just the phony smile. It’s as if that old superstition is true, and cameras do really steal the soul.

I pretended to take her picture and then lowered the camera. The zoo director had put up a row of tombstone-shaped signs in front of the gate, one for each endangered species. They were covered with plastic, which hadn’t helped much. I wiped the streaky dust off the one in front of me. “Canis latrans,” it said, with two green stars after it. “Coyote. North American wild dog. Due to large-scale poisoning by ranchers, who saw it as a threat to cattle and sheep, the coyote is nearly extinct in the wild.” Underneath there was a photograph of a ragged coyote sitting on its haunches and an explanation of the stars. Blue—endangered species. Yellow—endangered habitat. Red—extinct in the wild.

After Misha died, I had come out here to photograph the dingo and the coyotes and the wolves, but they were already in the process of moving the zoo, so I couldn’t get any pictures, and it probably wouldn’t have done any good. The coyote in the picture had faded to a greenish-yellow and its yellow eyes were almost white, but it stared out of the picture looking as hearty and unconcerned as Jake Ambler, wearing its camera face.

The mother had gone back to the bug and was herding the kids inside. Mr. Ambler walked the father back to the car, shaking his shining bald head, and the man talked some more, leaning on the open door, and then got in and drove off. I walked back down.

If he was bothered by the fact that they had only stayed ten minutes and that, as far as I had been able to see, no money had changed hands, it didn’t show in his face. He led me around to the side of the RV and pointed to a chipped and faded collection of decals along the painted bar of the W. “These here are the states we’ve been in.” He pointed to the one nearest the front. “Every state in the Union, plus Canada and Mexico. Last state we were in was Nevada.”

Up this close it was easy to see where he had painted out the name of the original RV and covered it with the bar of red. The paint had the dull look of unauthenticity. He had covered up the “Open Road” with a burnt-wood plaque that read, “The Amblin’ Amblers.”

He pointed at a bumper sticker next to the door that said, “I got lucky in Vegas at Caesar’s Palace,” and had a picture of a naked showgirl. “We couldn’t find a decal for Nevada. I don’t think they make them anymore. And you know something else you can’t find? Steering wheel covers. You know the kind. That keep the wheel from burning your hands when it gets hot?”

“Do you do all the driving?” I asked.

He hesitated before answering, and I wondered if one of them didn’t have a license. I’d have to look it up in the lifeline. “Mrs. Ambler spells me sometimes, but I do most of it. Mrs. Ambler reads the map. Damn maps nowadays are so hard to read. Half the time you can’t tell what kind of road it is. They don’t make them like they used to.”

We talked for a while more about all the things you couldn’t find a decent one of anymore and the sad state things had gotten in generally, and then I announced I wanted to talk to Mrs. Ambler, got the vidcam and the eisenstadt out of the car, and went inside the Winnebago.

She still had the dishtowel in her hand, even though there couldn’t possibly be space for that many dishes in the tiny RV. The inside was even smaller than I had thought it would be, low enough that I had to duck and so narrow I had to hold the Nikon close to my body to keep from hitting the lens on the passenger seat. It felt like an oven inside, and it was only nine o’clock in the morning.

I set the eisenstadt down on the kitchen counter, making sure its concealed lens was facing out. If it would work anywhere, it would be here. There was basically nowhere for Mrs. Ambler to go that she could get out of range. There was nowhere I could go either, and sorry, Ramirez, there are just some things a live photographer can do better than a preprogrammed one, like stay out of the picture.

“This is the galley,” Mrs. Ambler said, folding her dishtowel and hanging it from a plastic ring on the cupboard below the sink with the cross-stitch design showing. It wasn’t a rooster after all. It was a poodle wearing a sunbonnet and carrying a basket. “Shop on Wednesday,” the motto underneath said.

“As you can see, we have a double sink with a hand-pump faucet. The refrigerator is LP-electric and holds four cubic feet. Back here is the dinette area. The table folds up into the rear wall, and we have our bed. And this is our bathroom.”

She was as bad as her husband. “How long have you had the Winnebago?” I said to stop the spiel. Sometimes, if you can get people talking about something besides what they intended to talk about, you can disarm them into something like a natural expression.

“Nineteen years,” she said, lifting up the lid of the chemical toilet. “We bought it in 1989. I didn’t want to buy it—I didn’t like the idea of selling our house and going gallivanting off like a couple of hippies, but Jake went ahead and bought it, and now I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The shower operates on a forty-gallon pressurized water system.” She stood back so I could get a picture of the shower stall, so narrow you wouldn’t have to worry about dropping the soap. I dutifully took some vidcam footage.

“You live here full-time then?” I said, trying not to let my voice convey how impossible that prospect sounded. Ramirez had said they were from Minnesota. I had assumed they had a house there and only went on the road for part of the year.

“Jake says the great outdoors is our home,” she said. I gave up trying to get a picture of her and snapped a few high-quality detail stills for the papers: the “Pilot” sign taped on the dashboard in front of the driver’s seat, the crocheted granny-square afghan on the uncomfortable-looking couch, a row of salt and pepper shakers in the back windows—Indian children, black scottie dogs, ears of corn.

“Sometimes we live on the open prairies and sometimes on the seashore,” she said. She went over to the sink and hand-pumped a scant two cups of water into a little pan and set it on the two-burner stove. She took down two turquoise melmac cups and flowered saucers and a jar of freeze-dried and spooned a little into the cups. “Last year we were in the Colorado Rockies. We can have a house on a lake or in the desert, and when we get tired of it, we just move on. Oh, my, the things we’ve seen.”

I didn’t believe her. Colorado had been one of the first states to ban recreational vehicles, even before the gas crunch and the multiways. It had banned them on the passes first and then shut them out of the national forests, and by the time I left they weren’t even allowed on the interstates.

Ramirez had said RV’s were banned outright in forty-seven states. New Mexico was one, Utah had heavy restricks, and daytime travel was forbidden in all the western states. Whatever they’d seen, and it sure wasn’t Colorado, they had seen it in the dark or on some unpatrolled multiway, going like sixty to outrun the cameras. Not exactly the footloose and fancy-free life they tried to paint.

The water boiled. Mrs. Ambler poured it into the cups, spilling a little on the turquoise saucers. She blotted it up with the dishtowel. “We came down here because of the snow. They get winter so early in Colorado.”

“I know,” I said. It had snowed two feet, and it was only the middle of September. Nobody even had their snow tires on. The aspens hadn’t turned yet, and some of the branches broke under the weight of the snow. Katie’s nose was still sunburned from the summer.

“Where did you come from just now?” I asked her.

“Globe,” she said, and opened the door to yell to her husband. “Jake! Coffee!” She carried the cups to the table-that-converts-into-a-bed. “It has leaves that you can put in it so it seats six,” she said.

I sat down at the table so she was on the side where the eisenstadt could catch her. The sun was coming in through the cranked-open back windows, already hot. Mrs. Ambler got onto her knees on the plaid cushions and let down a woven cloth shade, carefully, so it wouldn’t knock the salt and pepper shakers off.

There were some snapshots stuck up between the ceramic ears of corn. I picked one up. It was a square Polaroid from the days when you had to peel off the print and glue it to a stiff card: The two of them, looking exactly the way they did now, with that friendly, impenetrable camera smile, were standing in front of a blur of orange rock—the Grand Canyon? Zion? Monument Valley? Polaroid had always chosen color over definition. Mrs. Ambler was holding a little yellow blur in her arms that could have been a cat but wasn’t. It was a dog.

“That’s Jake and me at Devil’s Tower,” she said, taking the picture away from me. “And Taco. You can’t tell from this picture, but she was the cutest little thing. A chihuahua.” She handed it back to me and rummaged behind the salt and pepper shakers. “Sweetest little dog you ever saw. This will give you a better idea.”

The picture she handed me was considerably better, a matte print done with a decent camera. Mrs. Ambler was holding the chihuahua in this one, too, standing in front of the Winnebago.

“She used to sit on the arm of Jake’s chair while he drove and when we came to a red light she’d look at it, and when it turned green she’d bark to tell him to go. She was the smartest little thing.”

I looked at the dog’s flaring, pointed ears, its bulging eyes and rat’s snout. The dogs never come through. I took dozens of pictures, there at the end, and they might as well have been calendar shots. Nothing of the real dog at all. I decided it was the lack of muscles in their faces—they could not smile, in spite of what their owners claimed. It is the muscles in the face that make people leap across the years in pictures. The expressions on dogs’ faces were what breeding had fastened on them—the gloomy bloodhound, the alert collie, the rakish mutt—and anything else was wishful thinking on the part of the doting master, who would also swear that a color-blind chihuahua with a brain pan the size of a Mexican jumping bean could tell when the light changed.

My theory of the facial muscles doesn’t really hold water, of course. Cats can’t smile either, and they come through. Smugness, slyness, disdain—all of those expressions come through beautifully, and they don’t have any muscles in their faces either, so maybe it’s love that you can’t capture in a picture because love was the only expression dogs were capable of.

I was still looking at the picture. “She is a cute little thing,” I said and handed it back to her. “She wasn’t very big, was she?”

“I could carry Taco in my jacket pocket. We didn’t name her Taco. We got her from a man in California that named her that,” she said, as if she could see herself that the dog didn’t come through in the picture. As if, had she named the dog herself, it would have been different. Then the name would have been a more real name, and Taco would have, by default, become more real as well. As if a name could convey what the picture didn’t—all the things the little dog did and was and meant to her.

Names don’t do it either, of course. I had named Aberfan myself. The vet’s assistant, when he heard it, typed it in as Abraham.

“Age?” he had said calmly, even though he had no business typing all this into a computer, he should have been in the operating room with the vet.

“You’ve got that in there, damn it,” I shouted.

He looked calmly puzzled. “I don’t know any Abraham . . .”

“Aberfan, damn it. Aberfan!”

“Here it is,” the assistant said imperturbably.

Katie, standing across the desk, looked up from the screen. “He had the newparvo and lived through it?” she said bleakly.

“He had the newparvo and lived through it,” I said, “until you came along.”

“I had an Australian shepherd,” I told Mrs. Ambler.

Jake came into the Winnebago, carrying the plastic bucket. “Well, it’s about time,” Mrs. Ambler said. “Your coffee’s getting cold.”

“I was just going to finish washing off Winnie,” he said. He wedged the bucket into the tiny sink and began pumping vigorously with the heel of his hand. “She got mighty dusty coming down through all that sand.”

“I was telling Mr. McCombe here about Taco,” she said, getting up and taking him the cup and saucer. “Here, drink your coffee before it gets cold.”

“I’ll be in in a minute,” he said. He stopped pumping and tugged the bucket out of the sink.

“Mr. McCombe had a dog,” she said, still holding the cup out to him. “He had an Australian shepherd. I was telling him about Taco.”

“He’s not interested. in that,” Jake said. They exchanged one of those warning looks that married couples are so good at. “Tell him about the Winnebago. That’s what he’s here for.”

Jake went back outside. I screwed the longshot’s lens cap on and put the vidcam back in its case. She took the little pan off the miniature stove and poured the coffee back into it. “I think I’ve got all the pictures I need,” I said to her back.

She didn’t turn around. “He never liked Taco. He wouldn’t even let her sleep on the bed with us. Said it made his legs cramp. A little dog like that that didn’t weigh anything.”

I took the longshot’s lens cap back off.

“You know what we were doing the day she died? We were out shopping. I didn’t want to leave her alone, but Jake said she’d be fine. It was ninety degrees that day, and he just kept on going from store to store, and when we got back she was dead.” She set the pan on the stove and turned on the burner. “The vet said it was the newparvo, but it wasn’t. She died from the heat, poor little thing.”

I set the Nikon down gently on the formica table and estimated the settings.

“When did Taco die?” I asked her, to make her turn around.

“Ninety,” she said. She turned back to me, and I let my hand come down on the button in an almost soundless click, but her public face was still in place: apologetic now, smiling, a little sheepish. “My, that was a long time ago.”

I stood up and collected my cameras. “I think I’ve got all the pictures I need,” I said again. “If I don’t, I’ll come back out.”

“Don’t forget your briefcase,” she said, handing me the eisenstadt. “Did your dog die of the newparvo, too?”

“He died fifteen years ago,” I said. “In ninety-three.”

She nodded understandingly. “The third wave,” she said.

I went outside. Jake was standing behind the Winnebago, under the back window, holding the bucket. He shifted it to his left hand and held out his right hand to me. “You get all the pictures you needed?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think your wife showed me about everything.” I shook his hand.

“You come on back out if you need any more pictures,” he said, and sounded, if possible, even more jovial, open-handed, friendly than he had before. “Mrs. Ambler and me, we always cooperate with the media.”

“Your wife was telling me about your chihuahua,” I said, more to see the effect on him than anything else.

“Yeah, the wife still misses that little dog after all these years,” he said, and he looked the way she had, mildly apologetic, still smiling. “It died of the newparvo. I told her she ought to get it vaccinated, but she kept putting it off.” He shook his head. “Of course, it wasn’t really her fault. You know whose fault the newparvo really was, don’t you?”

Yeah, I knew. It was the communists’ fault, and it didn’t matter that all their dogs had died, too, because he would say their chemical warfare had gotten out of hand or that everybody knows commies hate dogs. Or maybe it was the fault of the Japanese, though I doubted that. He was, after all, in a tourist business. Or the Democrats or the atheists or all of them put together, and even that was One Hundred Percent Authentic—portrait of the kind of man who drives a Winnebago—but I didn’t want to hear it. I walked over to the Hitori and slung the eisenstadt in the back.

“You know who really killed your dog, don’t you?” he called after me.

“Yes,” I said, and got in the car.

I went home, fighting my way through a fleet of red-painted water tankers who weren’t even bothering to try to outrun the cameras and thinking about Taco. My grandmother had had a chihuahua. Perdita. Meanest dog that ever lived. Used to lurk behind the door waiting to take Labrador-sized chunks out of my leg. And my grandmother’s. It developed some lingering chihuahuan ailment that made it incontinent and even more ill-tempered, if that was possible.

Toward the end, it wouldn’t even let my grandmother near it, but she refused to have it put to sleep and was unfailingly kind to it, even though I never saw any indication that the dog felt anything but unrelieved spite toward her. If the newparvo hadn’t come along, it probably would still have been around making her life miserable.

I wondered what Taco, the wonder dog, able to distinguish red and green at a single intersection, had really been like, and if it had died of heat prostration. And what it had been like for the Amblers, living all that time in a hundred and fifty cubic feet together and blaming each other for their own guilt.

I called Ramirez as soon as I got home, breaking in without announcing myself, the way she always did. “I need a lifeline,” I said.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. “You got a call from the Society. And how’s this as a slant for your story? ‘The Winnebago and the Winnebagos.’ They’re an Indian tribe. In Minnesota, I think—why the hell aren’t you at the governor’s conference?”

“I came home,” I said. “What did the Society want?”

“They didn’t say. They asked for your schedule. I told them you were with the governor in Tempe. Is this about a story?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you run a proposal past me before you write it. The last thing the paper needs is to get in trouble with the Society.”

“The lifeline’s for Katherine Powell.” I spelled it.

She spelled it back to me. “Is she connected with the Society story?”

“No.”

“Then what is she connected with? I’ve got to put something on the request-for-info.”

“Put down background.”

“For the Winnebago story?”

“Yes,” I said. “For the Winnebago story. How long will it take?”

“That depends. When do you plan to tell me why you ditched the governor’s conference? And Taliesin West. Jesus Maria, I’ll have to call the Republic and see if they’ll trade footage. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to have shots of an extinct RV. That is, assuming you got any shots. You did make it out to the zoo, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I got vidcam footage, stills, the works. I even used the eisenstadt.”

“Mind sending your pictures in while I look up your old flame, or is that too much to ask? I don’t know how long this will take. It took me two days to get clearance on the Amblers. Do you want the whole thing—pictures, documentation?”

“No. Just a resume. And a phone number.”

She cut out, still not saying goodbye. If phones still had receivers, Ramirez would be a great one for hanging up on people. I highwired the vidcam footage and the eisenstadts in to the paper and then fed the eisenstadt cartridge into the developer. I was more than a little curious about what kind of pictures it would take, in spite of the fact that it was trying to do me out of a job. At least it used high-res film and not some damn two hundred thousand-pixel TV substitute. I didn’t believe it could compose, and I doubted if the eisenstadt would be able to do foreground-background either, but it might, under certain circumstances, get a picture I couldn’t.

The doorbell rang. I answered the door. A lanky young man in a Hawaiian shirt and baggies was standing on the front step, and there was another man in a Society uniform out in the driveway.

“Mr. McCombe?” he said, extending a hand. “Jim Hunter. Humane Society.”

I don’t know what I’d expected—that they wouldn’t bother to trace the call? That they’d let somebody get away with leaving a dead animal on the road?

“I just wanted to stop by and thank you on behalf of the Society for phoning in that report on the jackal. Can I come in?”

He smiled, an open, friendly, smug smile, as if he expected me to be stupid enough to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and slam the screen door on his hand.

“Just doing my duty,” I said, smiling back at him.

“Well, we really appreciate responsible citizens like you. It makes our job a whole lot easier.” He pulled a folded readout from his shirt pocket. “I just need to double-check a couple of things. You’re a reporter for Sunco, is that right?”

“Photo-journalist,” I said.

“And the Hitori you were driving belongs to the paper?”

I nodded.

“It has a phone. Why didn’t you use it to make the call?”

The uniform was bending over the Hitori.

“I didn’t realize it had a phone. The paper just bought the Hitoris. This is only the second time I’ve had one out.”

Since they knew the paper had had phones put in, they also knew what I’d just told them. I wondered where they’d gotten the info. Public phones were supposed to be tap-free, and if they’d read the license number off one of the cameras, they wouldn’t know who’d had the car unless they’d talked to Ramirez, and if they’d talked to her, she wouldn’t have been talking blithely about the last thing she needed being trouble with the Society.

“You didn’t know the car had a phone,” he said, “so you drove to—” He consulted the readout, somehow giving the impression he was taking notes. I’d have bet there was a taper in the pocket of that shirt. “—The 7-Eleven at McDowell and Fortieth Street, and made the call from there. Why didn’t you give the Society rep your name and address?”

“I was in a hurry,” I said. “I had two assignments to cover before noon, the second out in Scottsdale.”

“Which is why you didn’t render assistance to the animal either. Because you were in a hurry.”

You bastard, I thought. “No,” I said. “I didn’t render assistance because there wasn’t any assistance to be rendered. The—it was dead.”

“And how did you know that, Mr. McCombe?”

“There was blood coming out of its mouth,” I said.

I had thought that that was a good sign, that he wasn’t bleeding anywhere else. The blood had come out of Aberfan’s mouth when he tried to lift his head, just a little trickle, sinking into the hard-packed snow. It had stopped before we even got him into the car. “It’s all right, boy,” I told him. “We’ll be there in a minute.”

Katie started the jeep, killed it, started it again, backed it up to where she could turn around.

Aberfan lay limply across my lap, his tail against the gear shift. “Just lie still, boy,” I said. I patted his neck. It was wet, and I raised my hand and looked at the palm, afraid it was blood. It was only water from the melted snow. I dried his neck and the top of his head with the sleeve of my sweater.

“How far is it?” Katie said. She was clutching the steering wheel with both hands and sitting stiffly forward in the seat. The windshield wipers flipped back and forth, trying to keep up with the snow.

“About five miles,” I said, and she stepped on the gas pedal and then let up on it again as we began to skid. “On the right side of the highway.”

Aberfan raised his head off my lap and looked at me. His gums were gray, and he was panting, but I couldn’t see any more blood. He tried to lick my hand. “You’ll make it, Aberfan,” I said. “You made it before, remember?”

“But you didn’t get out of the car and go check, to make sure it was dead?” Hunter said.

“No.”

“And you don’t have any idea who hit the jackal?” he said, and made it sound like the accusation it was.

“No.”

He glanced back at the uniform, who had moved around the car to the other side. “Whew,” Hunter said, shaking his Hawaiian collar, “it’s like an oven out here. Mind if I come in?” which meant the uniform needed more privacy. Well, then, by all means, give him more privacy. The sooner he sprayed print-fix on the bumper and tires and peeled off the incriminating traces of jackal blood that weren’t there and stuck them in the evidence bags he was carrying in the pockets of that uniform, the sooner they’d leave. I opened the screen door wider.

“Oh, this is great,” Hunter said, still trying to generate a breeze with his collar. “These old adobe houses stay so cool.” He glanced around the room at the developer and the enlarger, the couch, the dry-mounted photographs on the wall. “You don’t have any idea who might have hit the jackal?”

“I figure it was a tanker,” I said. “What else would be on Van Buren that time of morning?”

I was almost sure it had been a car or a small truck. A tanker would have left the jackal a spot on the pavement. But a tanker would get a license suspension and two weeks of having to run water into Santa Fe instead of Phoenix, and probably not that. Rumor at the paper had it the Society was in the water board’s pocket. If it was a car, on the other hand, the Society would take away the car and stick its driver with a prison sentence.

“They’re all trying to beat the cameras,” I said. “The tanker probably didn’t even know it’d hit it.”

“What?” he said.

“I said, it had to be a tanker. There isn’t anything else on Van Buren during rush hour.”

I expected him to say, “Except for you,” but he didn’t. He wasn’t even listening. “Is this your dog?” he said.

He was looking at the photograph of Perdita. “No,” I said. “That was my grandmother’s dog.”

“What is it?”

A nasty little beast. And when it died of the newparvo, my grandmother had cried like a baby. “A chihuahua.”

He looked around at the other walls. “Did you take all these pictures of dogs?” His whole manner had changed, taking on a politeness that made me realize just how insolent he had intended to be before. The one on the road wasn’t the only jackal around.

“Some of them,” I said. He was looking at the photograph next to it. “I didn’t take that one.”

“I know what this one is,” he said, pointing at it. “It’s a boxer, right?”

“An English bulldog,” I said.

“Oh, right. Weren’t those the ones that were exterminated? For being vicious?”

“No,” I said.

He moved on to the picture over the developer, like a tourist in a museum. “I bet you didn’t take this one either,” he said, pointing at the high shoes, the old-fashioned hat on the stout old woman holding the dogs in her arms.

“That’s a photograph of Beatrix Potter, the English children’s author,” I said. “She wrote Peter Rabbit.”

He wasn’t interested. “What kind of dogs are those?”

“Pekingese.”

“It’s a great picture of them.”

It is, in fact, a terrible picture of them. One of them has wrenched his face away from the camera, and the other sits grimly in her owner’s hand, waiting for its chance. Obviously neither of them liked having its picture taken, though you can’t tell that from their expressions. They reveal nothing in their little flat-nosed faces, in their black little eyes.

Beatrix Potter, on the other hand, comes through beautifully, in spite of the attempt to smile for the camera and the fact that she must have had to hold onto the Pekes for dear life, or maybe because of that. The fierce, humorous love she felt for her fierce, humorous little dogs is all there in her face. She must never, in spite of Peter Rabbit and its attendant fame, have developed a public face. Everything she felt was right there, unprotected, unshuttered. Like Katie.

“Are any of these your dog?” Hunter asked. He was standing looking at the picture of Misha that hung above the couch.

“No,” I said.

“How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” he asked, and I wondered how he knew I had had a dog and what else he knew.

“He didn’t like having his picture taken.”

He folded up the readout, stuck it in his pocket, and turned around to look at the photo of Perdita again. “He looks like he was a real nice little dog,” he said.

The uniform was waiting on the front step, obviously finished with whatever he had done to the car.

“We’ll let you know if we find out who’s responsible,” Hunter said, and they left. On the way out to the street the uniform tried to tell him what he’d found, but Hunter cut him off. The suspect has a house full of photographs of dogs, therefore he didn’t run over a poor facsimile of one on Van Buren this morning. Case closed.

I went back over to the developer and fed the eisenstadt film in. “Positives, one two three order, five seconds,” I said, and watched as the pictures came up on the developer’s screen. Ramirez had said the eisenstadt automatically turned on whenever it was set upright on a level surface. She was right. It had taken a half-dozen shots on the way out to Tempe. Two shots of the Hitori it must have taken when I set it down to load the car, open door of same with prickly pear in the foreground, a blurred shot of palm trees and buildings with a minuscule, sharp-focused glimpse of the traffic on the expressway. Vehicles and people. There was a great shot of the red tanker that had clipped the jackal and ten or so of the yucca I had parked next to at the foot of the hill.

It had gotten two nice shots of my forearm as I set it down on the kitchen counter of the Winnebago and some beautifully composed still lifes of Melmac with Spoons. Vehicles and people. The rest of the pictures were dead losses: my back, the open bathroom door, Jake’s back, and Mrs. Ambler’s public face.

Except the last one. She had been standing right in front of the eisenstadt, looking almost directly into the lens. “When I think of that poor thing, all alone,” she had said, and by the time she turned around she had her public face back on, but for a minute there, looking at what she thought was a briefcase and remembering, there she was, the person I had tried all morning to get a picture of.

I took it into the living room and sat down and looked at it awhile.

“So you knew this Katherine Powell in Colorado,” Ramirez said, breaking in without preamble, and the highwire slid silently forward and began to print out the lifeline. “I always suspected you of having some deep dark secret in your past. Is she the reason you moved to Phoenix?”

I was watching the highwire advance the paper. Katherine Powell. 4628 Dutchman Drive, Apache Junction. Forty miles away.

“Holy Mother, you were really cradle-robbing. According to my calculations, she was seventeen when you lived there.”

Sixteen.

“Are you the owner of the dog?” the vet had asked her, his face slackening into pity when he saw how young she was.

“No,” she said. “I’m the one who hit him.”

“My God,” he said. “How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” she said, and her face was wide open. “I just got my license.”

“Aren’t you even going to tell me what she has to do with this Winnebago thing?” Ramirez said.

“I moved down here to get away from the snow,” I said, and cut out without saying goodbye.

The lifeline was still rolling silently forward. Hacker at Hewlett-Packard. Fired in ninety-nine, probably during the unionization. Divorced. Two kids. She had moved to Arizona five years after I did. Management programmer for Toshiba. Arizona driver’s license.

I went back to the developer and looked at the picture of Mrs. Ambler. I had said dogs never came through. That wasn’t true. Taco wasn’t in the blurry snapshots Mrs. Ambler had been so anxious to show me, in the stories she had been so anxious to tell. But she was in this picture, reflected in the pain and love and loss on Mrs. Ambler’s face. I could see her plain as day, perched on the arm of the driver’s seat, barking impatiently when the light turned green.

I put a new cartridge in the eisenstadt and went out to see Katie.

I had to take Van Buren—it was almost four o’clock, and the rush hour would have started on the divideds—but the jackal was gone anyway. The Society is efficient. Like Hitler and his Nazis.

“Why don’t you have any pictures of your dog?” Hunter had asked. The question could have been based on the assumption that anyone who would fill his living room with photographs of dogs must have had one of his own, but it wasn’t. He had known about Aberfan, which meant he’d had access to my lifeline, which meant all kinds of things. My lifeline was privacy-coded, so I had to be notified before anybody could get access, except, it appeared, the Society. A reporter I knew at the paper, Dolores Chiwere, had tried to do a story a while back claiming that the Society had an illegal link to the lifeline banks, but she hadn’t been able to come up with enough evidence to convince her editor. I wondered if this counted.

The lifeline would have told them about Aberfan but not about how he died. Killing a dog wasn’t a crime in those days, and I hadn’t pressed charges against Katie for reckless driving or even called the police.

“I think you should,” the vet’s assistant had said. “There are less than a hundred dogs left. People can’t just go around killing them.”

“My God, man, it was snowing and slick,” the vet had said angrily, “and she’s just a kid.”

“She’s old enough to have a license,” I said, looking at Katie. She was fumbling in her purse for her driver’s license. “She’s old enough to have been on the roads.”

Katie found her license and gave it to me. It was so new it was still shiny. Katherine Powell. She had turned sixteen two weeks ago.

“This won’t bring him back,” the vet had said, and taken the license out of my hand and given it back to her. “You go on home now.”

“I need her name for the records,” the vet’s assistant had said.

She had stepped forward. “Katie Powell,” she had said.

“We’ll do the paperwork later,” the vet had said firmly.

They never did do the paperwork, though. The next week the third wave hit, and I suppose there hadn’t seemed any point.

I slowed down at the zoo entrance and looked up into the parking lot as I went past. The Amblers were doing a booming business. There were at least five cars and twice as many kids clustered around the Winnebago.

“Where the hell are you?” Ramirez said. “And where the hell are your pictures? I talked the Republic into a trade, but they insisted on scoop rights. I need your stills now!”

“I’ll send them in as soon as I get home,” I said. “I’m on a story.”

“The hell you are! You’re on your way out to see your old girlfriend. Well, not on the paper’s credits, you’re not.”

“Did you get the stuff on the Winnebago Indians?” I asked her.

“Yes. They were in Wisconsin, but they’re not anymore. In the mid-seventies there were sixteen hundred of them on the reservation and about forty-five hundred altogether, but by 1990, the number was down to five hundred, and now they don’t think there are any left, and nobody knows what happened to them.”

I’ll tell you what happened to them, I thought. Almost all of them were killed in the first wave, and people blamed the government and the Japanese and the ozone layer, and after the second wave hit, the Society passed all kinds of laws to protect the survivors, but it was too late, they were already below the minimum survival population limit, and then the third wave polished off the rest of them, and the last of the Winnebagos sat in a cage somewhere, and if I had been there I would probably have taken his picture.

“I called the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” Ramirez said, “and they’re supposed to call me back, and you don’t give a damn about the Winnebagos. You just wanted to get me off the subject. What’s this story you’re on?”

I looked around the dashboard for an exclusion button.

“What the hell is going on, David? First you ditch two big stories, now you can’t even get your pictures in. Jesus, if something’s wrong, you can tell me. I want to help. It has something to do with Colorado, doesn’t it?”

I found the button and cut her off.

Van Buren got crowded as the afternoon rush spilled over off the divideds. Out past the curve, where Van Buren turns into Apache Boulevard, they were putting in new lanes. The cement forms were already up on the eastbound side, and they were building the wooden forms up in two of the six lanes on my side.

The Amblers must have just beaten the workmen, though at the rate the men were working right now, leaning on their shovels in the hot afternoon sun and smoking stew, it had probably taken them six weeks to do this stretch.

Mesa was still open multiway, but as soon as I was through downtown, the construction started again, and this stretch was nearly done—forms up on both sides and most of the cement poured. The Amblers couldn’t have come in from Globe on this road. The lanes were barely wide enough for the Hitori, and the tanker lanes were gated. Superstition is full-divided, and the old highway down from Roosevelt is, too, which meant they hadn’t come in from Globe at all. I wondered how they had come in—probably in some tanker lane on a multiway.

“Oh, my, the things we’ve seen,” Mrs. Ambler had said. I wondered how much they’d been able to see skittering across the dark desert like a couple of kangaroo mice, trying to beat the cameras.

The roadworkers didn’t have the new exit signs up yet, and I missed the exit for Apache Junction and had to go halfway to Superior, trapped in my narrow, cement-sided lane, till I hit a change-lanes and could get turned around.

Katie’s address was in Superstition Estates, a development pushed up as close to the base of Superstition Mountain as it could get. I thought about what I would say to Katie when I got there. I had said maybe ten sentences altogether to her, most of them shouted directions, in the two hours we had been together. In the jeep on the way to the vet’s I had talked to Aberfan, and after we got there, sitting in the waiting room, we hadn’t talked at all.

It occurred to me that I might not recognize her. I didn’t really remember what she looked like—only the sunburned nose and that terrible openness, and now, fifteen years later, it seemed unlikely that she would have either of them. The Arizona sun would have taken care of the first, and she had gotten married and divorced, been fired, had who knows what else happen to her in fifteen years to close her face. In which case, there had been no point in my driving all the way out here. But Mrs. Ambler had had an almost impenetrable public face, and you could still catch her off-guard. If you got her talking about the dogs. If she didn’t know she was being photographed.

Katie’s house was an old-style passive solar, with flat black panels on the roof. It looked presentable, but not compulsively neat. There wasn’t any grass—tankers won’t waste their credits coming this far out, and Apache Junction isn’t big enough to match the bribes and incentives of Phoenix or Tempe—but the front yard was laid out with alternating patches of black lava chips and prickly pear. The side yard had a parched-looking palo verde tree, and there was a cat tied to it. A little girl was playing under it with toy cars.

I took the eisenstadt out of the back and went up to the front door and rang the bell. At the last moment, when it was too late to change my mind, walk away, because she was already opening the screen door, it occurred to me that she might not recognize me, that I might have to tell her who I was.

Her nose wasn’t sunburned, and she had put on the weight a sixteen-year-old puts on to get to be thirty, but otherwise she looked the same as she had that day in front of my house. And her face hadn’t completely closed. I could tell, looking at her, that she recognized me and that she had known I was coming. She must have put a notify on her lifeline to have them warn her if I asked her whereabouts. I thought about what that meant.

She opened the screen door a little, the way I had to the Humane Society. “What do you want?” she said.

I had never seen her angry, not even when I turned on her at the vet’s. “I wanted to see you,” I said.

I had thought I might tell her I had run across her name while I was working on a story and wondered if it was the same person or that I was doing a piece on the last of the passive solars. “I saw a dead jackal on the road this morning,” I said.

“And you thought I killed it?” she said. She tried to shut the screen door.

I put out my hand without thinking to stop her. “No,” I said. I took my hand off the door. “No, of course I don’t think that. Can I come in? I just want to talk to you.”

The little girl had come over, clutching her toy cars to her pink T-shirt, and was standing off to the side, watching curiously.

“Come on inside, Jana,” Katie said, and opened the screen door a fraction wider. The little girl scooted through. “Go on in the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll fix you some Kool-Aid.” She looked up at me. “I used to have nightmares about your coming. I’d dream that I’d go to the door and there you’d be.”

“It’s really hot out here,” I said and knew I sounded like Hunter. “Can I come in?”

She opened the screen door all the way. “I’ve got to make my daughter something to drink,” she said, and led the way into the kitchen, the little girl dancing in front of her.

“What kind of Kool-Aid do you want?” Katie asked her, and she shouted, “Red!”

The kitchen counter faced the stove, refrigerator, and water cooler across a narrow aisle that opened out into an alcove with a table and chairs. I put the eisenstadt down on the table and then sat down myself so she wouldn’t suggest moving into another room.

Katie reached a plastic pitcher down from one of the shelves and stuck it under the water tank to fill it. Jana dumped her cars on the counter, clambered up beside them, and began opening the cupboard doors.

“How old’s your little girl?” I asked.

Katie got a wooden spoon out of the drawer next to the stove and brought it and the pitcher over to the table. “She’s four,” she said. “Did you find the Kool-Aid?” she asked the little girl.

“Yes,” the little girl said, but it wasn’t Kool-Aid. It was a pinkish cube she peeled a plastic wrapping off of. It fizzed and turned a thinnish red when she dropped it in the pitcher. Kool-Aid must have become extinct, too, along with Winnebagos and passive solar. Or else changed beyond recognition. Like the Humane Society.

Katie poured the red stuff into a glass with a cartoon whale on it.

“Is she your only one?” I asked.

“No, I have a little boy,” she said, but warily, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to tell me, even though if I’d requested the lifeline I already had access to all this information. Jana asked if she could have a cookie and then took it and her Kool-Aid back down the hall and outside. I could hear the screen door slam.

Katie put the pitcher in the refrigerator and leaned against the kitchen counter, her arms folded across her chest. “What do you want?”

She was just out of range of the eisenstadt, her face in the shadow of the narrow aisle.

“There was a dead jackal on the road this morning,” I said. I kept my voice low so she would lean forward into the light to try and hear me. “It’d been hit by a car, and it was lying funny, at an angle. It looked like a dog. I wanted to talk to somebody who remembered Aberfan, somebody who knew him.”

“I didn’t know him,” she said. “I only killed him, remember? That’s why you did this, isn’t it, because I killed Aberfan?”

She didn’t look at the eisenstadt, hadn’t even glanced at it when I set it on the table, but I wondered suddenly if she knew what I was up to. She was still carefully out of range. And what if I said to her, “That’s right. That’s why I did this, because you killed him, and I didn’t have any pictures of him. You owe me. If I can’t have a picture of Aberfan, you at least owe me a picture of you remembering him.”

Only she didn’t remember him, didn’t know anything about him except what she had seen on the way to the vet’s, Aberfan lying on my lap and looking up at me, already dying. I had had no business coming here, dredging all this up again. No business.

“At first I thought you were going to have me arrested,” Katie said, “and then after all the dogs died, I thought you were going to kill me.”

The screen door banged. “Forgot my cars,” the little girl said and scooped them into the tail of her T-shirt. Katie tousled her hair as she went past, and then folded her arms again.

“ ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ I was going to tell you when you came to kill me,” she said. “ ‘It was snowy. He ran right in front of me. I didn’t even see him.’ I looked up everything I could find about newparvo. Preparing for the defense. How it mutated from parvovirus and from cat distemper before that and then kept on mutating, so they couldn’t come up with a vaccine. How even before the third wave they were below the minimum survival population. How it was the fault of the people who owned the last survivors because they wouldn’t risk their dogs to breed them. How the scientists didn’t come up with a vaccine until only the jackals were left. ‘You’re wrong,’ I was going to tell you. ‘It was the puppy mill owners’ fault that all the dogs died. If they hadn’t kept their dogs in such unsanitary conditions, it never would have gotten out of control in the first place.’ I had my defense all ready. But you’d moved away.”

Jana banged in again, carrying the empty whale glass. She had a red smear across the whole lower half of her face. “I need some more,” she said, making “some more” into one word. She held the glass in both hands while Katie opened the refrigerator and poured her another glassful.

“Wait a minute, honey,” she said. “You’ve got Kool-Aid all over you,” and bent to wipe Jana’s face with a paper towel.

Katie hadn’t said a word in her defense while we waited at the vet’s, not, “It was snowy,” or, “He ran right out in front of me,” or, “I didn’t even see him.” She had sat silently beside me, twisting her mittens in her lap, until the vet came out and told me Aberfan was dead, and then she had said, “I didn’t know there were any left in Colorado. I thought they were all dead.”

And I had turned to her, to a sixteen-year-old not even old enough to know how to shut her face, and said, “Now they all are. Thanks to you.”

“That kind of talk isn’t necessary,” the vet had said warningly.

I had wrenched away from the hand he tried to put on my shoulder. “How does it feel to have killed one of the last dogs in the world?” I shouted at her. “How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?”

The screen door banged again. Katie was looking at me, still holding the reddened paper towel.

“You moved away,” she said, “and I thought maybe that meant you’d forgiven me, but it didn’t, did it?” She came over to the table and wiped at the red circle the glass had left. “Why did you do it? To punish me? Or did you think that’s what I’d been doing the last fifteen years, roaring around the roads murdering animals?”

“What?” I said.

“The Society’s already been here.”

“The Society?” I said, not understanding.

“Yes,” she said, still looking at the red-stained towel. “They said you had reported a dead animal on Van Buren. They wanted to know where I was this morning between eight and nine A.M.”

I nearly ran down a roadworker on the way back into Phoenix. He leaped for the still-wet cement barrier, dropping the shovel he’d been leaning on all day, and I ran right over it.

The Society had already been there. They had left my house and gone straight to hers. Only that wasn’t possible, because I hadn’t even called Katie then. I hadn’t even seen the picture of Mrs. Ambler yet. Which meant they had gone to see Ramirez after they left me, and the last thing Ramirez and the paper needed was trouble with the Society.

“I thought it was suspicious when he didn’t go to the governor’s conference,” she had told them, “and just now he called and asked for a lifeline on this person here. Katherine Powell. 4628 Dutchman Drive. He knew her in Colorado.”

“Ramirez!” I shouted at the car phone. “I want to talk to you!” There wasn’t any answer.

I swore at her for a good ten miles before I remembered I had the exclusion button on. I punched it off. “Ramirez, where the hell are you?”

“I could ask you the same question,” she said. She sounded even angrier than Katie, but not as angry as I was. “You cut me off, you won’t tell me what’s going on.”

“So you decided you had it figured out for yourself, and you told your little theory to the Society.”

“What?” she said, and I recognized that tone, too. I had heard it in my own voice when Katie told me the Society had been there. Ramirez hadn’t told anybody anything, she didn’t even know what I was talking about, but I was going too fast to stop.

“You told the Society I’d asked for Katie’s lifeline, didn’t you?” I shouted.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t. Don’t you think it’s time you told me what’s going on?”

“Did the Society come see you this afternoon?”

“No. I told you. They called this morning and wanted to talk to you. I told them you were at the governor’s conference.”

“And they didn’t call back later?”

“No. Are you in trouble?”

I hit the exclusion button. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m in trouble.”

Ramirez hadn’t told them. Maybe somebody else at the paper had, but I didn’t think so. There had after all been Dolores Chiwere’s story about them having illegal access to the lifelines. “How come you don’t have any pictures of your dog?” Hunter had asked me, which meant they’d read my lifeline, too. So they knew we had both lived in Colorado, in the same town, when Aberfan died.

“What did you tell them?” I had demanded of Katie. She had been standing there in the kitchen still messing with the Kool-Aid-stained towel, and I had wanted to yank it out of her hands and make her look at me. “What did you tell the Society?”

She looked up at me. “I told them I was on Indian School Road, picking up the month’s programming assignments from my company. Unfortunately, I could just as easily have driven in on Van Buren.”

“About Aberfan!” I shouted. “What did you tell them about Aberfan?”

She looked steadily at me. “I didn’t tell them anything. I assumed you’d already told them.”

I had taken hold of her shoulders. “If they come back, don’t tell them anything. Not even if they arrest you. I’ll take care of this. I’ll . . .”

But I hadn’t told her what I’d do because I didn’t know. I had run out of her house, colliding with Jana in the hall on her way in for another refill, and roared off for home, even though I didn’t have any idea what I would do when I got there.

Call the Society and tell them to leave Katie alone, that she had nothing to do with this? That would be even more suspicious than everything else I’d done so far, and you couldn’t get much more suspicious than that.

I had seen a dead jackal on the road (or so I said), and instead of reporting it immediately on the phone right there in my car, I’d driven to a convenience store two miles away. I’d called the Society, but I’d refused to give them my name and number. And then I’d canceled two shoots without telling my boss and asked for the lifeline of one Katherine Powell, whom I had known fifteen years ago and who could have been on Van Buren at the time of the accident.

The connection was obvious, and how long would it take them to make the connection that fifteen years ago was when Aberfan had died?

Apache was beginning to fill up with rush hour overflow and a whole fleet of tankers. The overflow obviously spent all their time driving divideds—nobody bothered to signal that they were changing lanes. Nobody even gave an indication that they knew what a lane was. Going around the curve from Tempe and onto Van Buren they were all over the road. I moved over into the tanker lane.

My lifeline didn’t have the vet’s name on it. They were just getting started in those days, and there was a lot of nervousness about invasion of privacy. Nothing went online without the person’s permission, especially not medical and bank records, and the lifelines were little more than puff bios: family, occupation, hobbies, pets. The only things on the lifeline besides Aberfan’s name was the date of his death and my address at the time, but that was probably enough. There were only two vets in town.

The vet hadn’t written Katie’s name down on Aberfan’s record. He had handed her driver’s license back to her without even looking at it, but Katie had told her name to the vet’s assistant. He might have written it down. There was no way I could find out. I couldn’t ask for the vet’s lifeline because the Society had access to the lifelines. They’d get to him before I could. I could maybe have the paper get the vet’s records for me, but I’d have to tell Ramirez what was going on, and the phone was probably tapped, too. And if I showed up at the paper, Ramirez would confiscate the car. I couldn’t go there.

Wherever the hell I was going, I was driving too fast to get there. When the tanker ahead of me slowed down to ninety, I practically climbed up his back bumper. I had gone past the place where the jackal had been hit without ever seeing it. Even without the traffic, there probably hadn’t been anything to see. What the Society hadn’t taken care of, the overflow probably had, and anyway, there hadn’t been any evidence to begin with. If there had been, if the cameras had seen the car that hit it, they wouldn’t have come after me. And Katie.

The Society couldn’t charge her with Aberfan’s death—killing an animal hadn’t been a crime back then—but if they found out about Aberfan they would charge her with the jackal’s death, and it wouldn’t matter if a hundred witnesses, a hundred highway cameras had seen her on Indian School Road. It wouldn’t matter if the print-fix on her car was clean. She had killed one of the last dogs, hadn’t she? They would crucify her.

I should never have left Katie. “Don’t tell them anything,” I had told her, but she had never been afraid of admitting guilt. When the receptionist had asked her what had happened, she had said, “I hit him,” just like that, no attempt to make excuses, to run off, to lay the blame on someone else.

I had run off to try to stop the Society from finding out that Katie had hit Aberfan, and meanwhile the Society was probably back at Katie’s, asking her how she’d happened to know me in Colorado, asking her how Aberfan died.

I was wrong about the Society. They weren’t at Katie’s house. They were at mine, standing on the porch, waiting for me to let them in.

“You’re a hard man to track down,” Hunter said.

The uniform grinned. “Where you been?”

“Sorry,” I said, fishing my keys out of my pocket. “I thought you were all done with me. I’ve already told you everything I know about the incident.”

Hunter stepped back just far enough for me to get the screen door open and the key in the lock. “Officer Segura and I just need to ask you a couple more questions.”

“Where’d you go this afternoon?” Segura asked.

“I went to see an old friend of mine.”

“Who?”

“Come on, come on,” Hunter said. “Let the guy get in his own front door before you start badgering him with a lot of questions.”

I opened the door. “Did the cameras get a picture of the tanker that hit the jackal?” I asked.

“Tanker?” Segura said.

“I told you,” I said, “I figure it had to be a tanker. The jackal was lying in the tanker lane.” I led the way into the living room, depositing my keys on the computer and switching the phone to exclusion while I talked. The last thing I needed was Ramirez bursting in with, “What’s going on? Are you in trouble?”

“It was probably a renegade that hit it, which would explain why he didn’t stop.” I gestured at them to sit down.

Hunter did. Segura started for the couch and then stopped, staring at the photos on the wall above it. “Jesus, will you look at all the dogs!” he said. “Did you take all these pictures?”

“I took some of them. That one in the middle is Misha.”

“The last dog, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“No kidding. The very last one.”

No kidding. She was being kept in isolation at the Society’s research facility in St. Louis when I saw her. I had talked them into letting me shoot her, but it had to be from outside the quarantine area. The picture had an unfocused look that came from shooting it through a wire mesh-reinforced window in the door, but I wouldn’t have done any better if they’d let me inside. Misha was past having any expression to photograph. She hadn’t eaten in a week at that point. She lay with her head on her paws, staring at the door, the whole time I was there.

“You wouldn’t consider selling this picture to the Society, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t.”

He nodded understandingly. “I guess people were pretty upset when she died.”

Pretty upset. They had turned on anyone who had anything to do with it—the puppy mill owners, the scientists who hadn’t come up with a vaccine, Misha’s vet—and a lot of others who hadn’t. And they had handed over their civil rights to a bunch of jackals who were able to grab them because everybody felt so guilty. Pretty upset.

“What’s this one?” Segura asked. He had already moved on to the picture next to it.

“It’s General Patton’s bull terrier Willie.”

They fed and cleaned up after Misha with those robot arms they used to use in the nuclear plants. Her owner, a tired-looking woman, was allowed to watch her through the wire-mesh window but had to stay off to the side because Misha flung herself barking against the door whenever she saw her.

“You should make them let you in,” I had told her. “It’s cruel to keep her locked up like that. You should make them let you take her back home.”

“And let her get the newparvo?” she said.

There was nobody left for Misha to get the newparvo from, but I didn’t say that. I set the light readings on the camera, trying not to lean into Misha’s line of vision.

“You know what killed them, don’t you?” she said. “The ozone layer. All those holes. The radiation got in and caused it.”

It was the communists, it was the Mexicans, it was the government. And the only people who acknowledged their guilt weren’t guilty at all.

“This one here looks kind of like a jackal,” Segura said. He was looking at a picture I had taken of a German shepherd after Aberfan died. “Dogs were a lot like jackals, weren’t they?”

“No,” I said, and sat down on the shelf in front of the developer’s screen, across from Hunter. “I already told you everything I know about the jackal. I saw it lying in the road, and I called you.”

“You said when you saw the jackal it was in the far right lane,” Hunter said.

“That’s right.”

“And you were in the far left lane?”

“I was in the far left lane.”

They were going to take me over my story, point by point, and when I couldn’t remember what I’d said before, they were going to say, “Are you sure that’s what you saw, Mr. McCombe? Are you sure you didn’t see the jackal get hit? Katherine Powell hit it, didn’t she?”

“You told us this morning you stopped, but the jackal was already dead. Is that right?” Hunter asked.

“No,” I said.

Segura looked up. Hunter touched his hand casually to his pocket and then brought it back to his knee, turning on the taper.

“I didn’t stop for about a mile. Then I backed up and looked at it, but it was dead. There was blood coming out of its mouth.”

Hunter didn’t say anything. He kept his hands on his knees and waited—an old journalist’s trick, if you wait long enough, they’ll say something they didn’t intend to, just to fill the silence.

“The jackal’s body was at a peculiar angle,” I said, right on cue. “The way it was lying, it didn’t look like a jackal. I thought it was a dog.” I waited till the silence got uncomfortable again. “It brought back a lot of terrible memories,” I said. “I wasn’t even thinking. I just wanted to get away from it. After a few minutes I realized I should have called the Society, and I stopped at the 7-Eleven.”

I waited again, till Segura began to shoot uncomfortable glances at Hunter, and then started in again. “I thought I’d be okay, that I could go ahead and work, but after I got to my first shoot, I knew I wasn’t going to make it, so I came home.” Candor. Openness. If the Amblers can do it, so can you. “I guess I was still in shock or something. I didn’t even call my boss and have her get somebody to cover the governor’s conference. All I could think about was—” I stopped and rubbed my hand across my face. “I needed to talk to somebody. I had the paper look up an old friend of mine, Katherine Powell.”

I stopped, I hoped this time for good. I had admitted lying to them and confessed to two crimes: leaving the scene of the accident and using press access to get a lifeline for personal use, and maybe that would be enough to satisfy them. I didn’t want to say anything about going out to see Katie. They would know she would have told me about their visit and decide this confession was an attempt to get her off, and maybe they’d been watching the house and knew it anyway, and this was all wasted effort.

The silence dragged on. Hunter’s hands tapped his knees twice and then subsided. The story didn’t explain why I’d picked Katie, who I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, who I knew in Colorado, to go see, but maybe, maybe they wouldn’t make the connection.

“This Katherine Powell,” Hunter said, “you knew her in Colorado, is that right?”

“We lived in the same little town.”

We waited.

“Isn’t that when your dog died?” Segura said suddenly. Hunter shot him a glance of pure rage, and I thought, it isn’t a taper he’s got in that shirt pocket. It’s the vet’s records, and Katie’s name is on them.

“Yes,” I said. “He died in September of eighty-nine.”

Segura opened his mouth.

“In the third wave?” Hunter asked before he could say anything.

“No,” I said. “He was hit by a car.”

They both looked genuinely shocked. The Amblers could have taken lessons from them. “Who hit it?” Segura asked, and Hunter leaned forward, his hand moving reflexively toward his pocket.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was a hit and run. Whoever it was just left him lying there in the road. That’s why when I saw the jackal, it . . . that was how I met Katherine Powell. She stopped and helped me. She helped me get him into her car, and we took him to the vet’s, but it was too late.”

Hunter’s public face was pretty indestructible, but Segura’s wasn’t. He looked surprised and enlightened and disappointed all at once.

“That’s why I wanted to see her,” I said unnecessarily.

“Your dog was hit on what day?” Hunter asked.

“September thirtieth.”

“What was the vet’s name?”

He hadn’t changed his way of asking the questions, but he no longer cared what the answers were. He had thought he’d found a connection, a cover-up, but here we were, a couple of dog lovers, a couple of good Samaritans, and his theory had collapsed. He was done with the interview, he was just finishing up, and all I had to do was be careful not to relax too soon.

I frowned. “I don’t remember his name. Cooper, I think.”

“What kind of car did you say hit your dog?”

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking, not a jeep. Make it something besides a jeep. “I didn’t see him get hit. The vet said it was something big, a pickup maybe. Or a Winnebago.”

And I knew who had hit the jackal. It had all been right there in front of me—the old man using up their forty-gallon water supply to wash the bumper, the lies about their coming in from Globe—only I had been too intent on keeping them from finding out about Katie, on getting the picture of Aberfan, to see it. It was like the damned parvo. When you had it licked in one place, it broke out somewhere else.

“Were there any identifying tire tracks?” Hunter said.

“What?” I said. “No. It was snowing that day.” It had to show in my face, and he hadn’t missed anything yet. I passed my hand over my eyes. “I’m sorry. These questions are bringing it all back.”

“Sorry,” Hunter said.

“Can’t we get this stuff from the police report?” Segura asked.

“There wasn’t a police report,” I said. “It wasn’t a crime to kill a dog when Aberfan died.”

It was the right thing to say. The look of shock on their faces was the real thing this time, and they looked at each other in disbelief instead of at me. They asked a few more questions and then stood up to leave. I walked them to the door.

“Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. McCombe,” Hunter said. “We appreciate what a difficult experience this has been for you.”

I shut the screen door between us. The Amblers would have been going too fast, trying to beat the cameras because they weren’t even supposed to be on Van Buren. It was almost rush hour, and they were in the tanker lane, and they hadn’t even seen the jackal till they hit it, and then it was too late. They had to know the penalty for hitting an animal was jail and confiscation of the vehicle, and there wasn’t anybody else on the road.

“Oh, one more question,” Hunter said from halfway down the walk. “You said you went to your first assignment this morning. What was it?”

Candid. Open. “It was out at the old zoo. A sideshow kind of thing.”

I watched them all the way out to their car and down the street. Then I latched the screen, pulled the inside door shut, and locked it, too. It had been right there in front of me—the ferret sniffing the wheel, the bumper, Jake anxiously watching the road. I had thought he was looking for customers, but he wasn’t. He was expecting to see the Society drive up. “He’s not interested in that,” he had said when Mrs. Ambler said she had been telling me about Taco. He had listened to our whole conversation, standing under the back window with his guilty bucket, ready to come back in and cut her off if she said too much, and I hadn’t tumbled to any of it. I had been so intent on Aberfan I hadn’t even seen it when I looked right through the lens at it. And what kind of an excuse was that? Katie hadn’t even tried to use it, and she was learning to drive.

I went and got the Nikon and pulled the film out of it. It was too late to do anything about the eisenstadt pictures or the vidcam footage, but I didn’t think there was anything in them. Jake had already washed the bumper by the time I’d taken those pictures.

I fed the longshot film into the developer. “Positives, one two three order, fifteen seconds,” I said, and waited for the image to come on the screen.

I wondered who had been driving. Jake, probably. “He never liked Taco,” she had said, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice. “I didn’t want to buy the Winnebago.”

They would both lose their licenses, no matter who was driving, and the Society would confiscate the Winnebago. They would probably not send two octogenarian specimens of Americana like the Amblers to prison. They wouldn’t have to. The trial would take six months, and Texas already had legislation in committee.

The first picture came up. A light-setting shot of an ocotillo.

Even if they got off, even if they didn’t end up taking away the Winnebago for unauthorized use of a tanker lane or failure to purchase a sales tax permit, the Amblers had six months left at the outside. Utah was all ready to pass a full-divided bill, and Arizona would be next. In spite of the road crews’ stew-slowed pace, Phoenix would be all-divided by the time the investigation was over, and they’d be completely boxed in. Permanent residents of the zoo. Like the coyote.

A shot of the zoo sign, half-hidden in the cactus. A close-up of the Amblers’ balloon-trailing sign. The Winnebago in the parking lot.

“Hold,” I said. “Crop.” I indicated the areas with my finger. “Enlarge to full screen.”

The longshot takes great pictures, sharp contrast, excellent detail. The developer only had a five hundred thousand-pixel screen, but the dark smear on the bumper was easy to see, and the developed picture would be much clearer. You’d be able to see every splatter, every grayish-yellow hair. The Society’s computers would probably be able to type the blood from it.

“Continue,” I said, and the next picture came on the screen. Artsy shot of the Winnebago and the zoo entrance. Jake washing the bumper. Red-handed.

Maybe Hunter had bought my story, but he didn’t have any other suspects, and how long would it be before he decided to ask Katie a few more questions? If he thought it was the Amblers, he’d leave her alone.

The Japanese family clustered around the waste-disposal tank. Closeup of the decals on the side. Interiors—Mrs. Ambler in the gallery, the upright-coffin shower stall, Mrs. Ambler making coffee.

No wonder she had looked that way in the eisenstadt shot, her face full of memory and grief and loss. Maybe in the instant before they hit it, it had looked like a dog to her, too.

All I had to do was tell Hunter about the Amblers, and Katie was off the hook. It should be easy. I had done it before.

“Stop,” I said to a shot of the salt-and-pepper collection. The black and white scottie dogs had painted, red-plaid bows and red tongues. “Expose,” I said. “One through twenty-four.”

The screen went to question marks and started beeping. I should have known better. The developer could handle a lot of orders, but asking it to expose perfectly good film went against its whole memory, and I didn’t have time to give it the step-by-steps that would convince it I meant what I said.

“Eject,” I said. The scotties blinked out. The developer spat out the film, rerolled into its protective case.

The doorbell rang. I switched on the overhead and pulled the film out to full length and held it directly under the light. I had told Hunter an RV hit Aberfan, and he had said on the way out, almost an afterthought, “That first shoot you went to, what was it?” And after he left, what had he done, gone out to check on the sideshow kind of thing, gotten Mrs. Ambler to spill her guts? There hadn’t been time to do that and get back. He must have called Ramirez. I was glad I had locked the door.

I turned off the overhead. I rerolled the film, fed it back into the developer, and gave it a direction it could handle. “Permanganate bath, full strength, one through twenty-four. Remove one hundred per cent emulsion. No notify.”

The screen went dark. It would take the developer at least fifteen minutes to run the film through the bleach bath, and the Society’s computers could probably enhance a picture out of two crystals of silver and thin air, but at least the detail wouldn’t be there. I unlocked the door.

It was Katie.

She held up the eisenstadt. “You forgot your briefcase,” she said.

I stared blankly at it. I hadn’t even realized I didn’t have it. I must have left it on the kitchen table when I went tearing out, running down little girls and stewed roadworkers in my rush to keep Katie from getting involved. And here she was, and Hunter would be back any minute, saying, “That shoot you went on this morning, did you take any pictures?”

“It isn’t a briefcase,” I said.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said, and stopped. “I shouldn’t have accused you of telling the Society I’d killed the jackal. I don’t know why you came to see me today, but I know you’re not capable of—”

“You have no idea what I’m capable of,” I said. I opened the door enough to reach for the eisenstadt. “Thanks for bringing it back. I’ll get the paper to reimburse your way-mile credits.”

Go home. Go home. If you’re here when the Society comes back, they’ll ask you how you met me, and I just destroyed the evidence that could shift the blame to the Amblers. I took hold of the eisenstadt’s handle and started to shut the door.

She put her hand on the door. The screen door and the fading light made her look unfocused, like Misha. “Are you in trouble?”

“No,” I said. “Look, I’m very busy.”

“Why did you come to see me?” she asked. “Did you kill the jackal?”

“No,” I said, but I opened the door and let her in.

I went over to the developer and asked for a visual status. It was only on the sixth frame. “I’m destroying evidence,” I said to Katie. “I took a picture this morning of the vehicle that hit it, only I didn’t know it was the guilty party until a half an hour ago.” I motioned for her to sit down on the couch. “They’re in their eighties. They were driving on a road they weren’t supposed to be on, in an obsolete recreation vehicle, worrying about the cameras and the tankers. There’s no way they could have seen it in time to stop. The Society won’t see it that way, though. They’re determined to blame somebody, anybody, even though it won’t bring them back.”

She set her canvas carryit and the eisenstadt down on the table next to the couch. “The Society was here when I got home,” I said. “They’d figured out we were both in Colorado when Aberfan died. I told them it was a hit and run, and you’d stopped to help me. They had the vet’s records, and your name was on them.”

I couldn’t read her face. “If they come back, you tell them that you gave me a ride to the vet’s.” I went back to the developer. The longshot film was done. “Eject,” I said, and the developer spit it into my hand. I fed it into the recycler.

“McCombe! Where the hell are you?” Ramirez’s voice exploded into the room, and I jumped and started for the door, but she wasn’t there. The phone was flashing. “McCombe! This is important!”

Ramirez was on the phone and using some override I didn’t even know existed. I went over and pushed it back to access. The lights went out. “I’m here,” I said.

“You won’t believe what just happened!” She sounded outraged. “A couple of terrorist types from the Society just stormed in here and confiscated the stuff you sent me!”

All I’d sent her was the vidcam footage and the shots from the eisenstadt, and there shouldn’t have been anything on those. Jake had already washed the bumper. “What stuff?” I said.

“The prints from the eisenstadt!” she said, still shouting. “Which I didn’t have a chance to look at when they came in because I was too busy trying to work a trade on your governor’s conference, not to mention trying to track you down! I had hardcopies made and sent the originals straight down to composing with your vidcam footage. I finally got to them half an hour ago, and while I’m sorting through them, this Society creep just grabs them away from me. No warrants, no ‘would you mind?,’ nothing. Right out of my hand. Like a bunch of—”

“Jackals,” I said. “You’re sure it wasn’t the vidcam footage?” There wasn’t anything in the eisenstadt shots except Mrs. Ambler and Taco, and even Hunter couldn’t have put that together, could he?

“Of course I’m sure,” Ramirez said, her voice bouncing off the walls. “It was one of the prints from the eisenstadt. I never even saw the vidcam stuff. I sent it straight to composing. I told you.”

I went over to the developer and fed the cartridge in. The first dozen shots were nothing, stuff the eisenstadt had taken from the back seat of the car. “Start with frame ten,” I said. “Positives. One two three order. Five seconds.”

“What did you say?” Ramirez demanded.

“I said, did they say what they were looking for?”

“Are you kidding? I wasn’t even there as far as they were concerned. They split up the pile and started through them on my desk.”

The yucca at the foot of the hill. More yucca. My forearm as I set the eisenstadt down on the counter. My back.

“Whatever it was they were looking for, they found it,” Ramirez said.

I glanced at Katie. She met my gaze steadily, unafraid. She had never been afraid, not even when I told her she had killed all the dogs, not even when I showed up on her doorstep after fifteen years.

“The one in the uniform showed it to the other one,” Ramirez was saying, “and said, ‘You were wrong about the woman doing it. Look at this.’ ”

“Did you get a look at the picture?”

Still life of cups and spoons. Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back.

“I tried. It was a truck of some kind.”

“A truck? Are you sure? Not a Winnebago?”

“A truck. What the hell is going on over there?”

I didn’t answer. Jake’s back. Open shower door. Still life with Sanka. Mrs. Ambler remembering Taco.

“What woman are they talking about?” Ramirez said. “The one you wanted the lifeline on?”

“No,” I said. The picture of Mrs. Ambler was the last one on the cartridge. The developer went back to the beginning. Bottom half of the Hitori. Open car door. Prickly pear. “Did they say anything else?”

“The one in uniform pointed to something on the hardcopy and said, ‘See. There’s his number on the side. Can you make it out?’ ”

Blurred palm trees and the expressway. The tanker hitting the jackal.

“Stop,” I said. The image froze.

“What?” Ramirez said.

It was a great action shot, the back wheels passing right over the mess that had been the jackal’s hind legs. The jackal was already dead, of course, but you couldn’t see that or the already drying blood coming out of its mouth because of the angle. You couldn’t see the truck’s license number either because of the speed the tanker was going, but the number was there, waiting for the Society’s computers. It looked like the tanker had just hit it.

“What did they do with the picture?” I asked.

“They took it into the chief’s office. I tried to call up the originals from composing, but the chief had already sent for them and your vidcam footage. Then I tried to get you, but I couldn’t get past your damned exclusion.”

“Are they still in there with the chief?”

“They just left. They’re on their way over to your house. The chief told me to tell you he wants ‘full cooperation,’ which means hand over the negatives and any other film you just took this morning. He told me to keep my hands off. No story. Case closed.”

“How long ago did they leave?”

“Five minutes. You’ve got plenty of time to make me a print. Don’t highwire it. I’ll come pick it up.”

“What happened to, ‘The last thing I need is trouble with the Society’ ?”

“It’ll take them at least twenty minutes to get to your place. Hide it somewhere the Society won’t find it.”

“I can’t,” I said, and listened to her furious silence. “My developer’s broken. It just ate my longshot film,” I said, and hit the exclusion button again.

“You want to see who hit the jackal?” I said to Katie, and motioned her over to the developer. “One of Phoenix’s finest.”

She came and stood in front of the screen, looking at the picture. If the Society’s computers were really good, they could probably prove the jackal was already dead, but the Society wouldn’t keep the film long enough for that. Hunter and Segura had probably already destroyed the highwire copies. Maybe I should offer to run the cartridge sheet through the permanganate bath for them when they got here, just to save time.

I looked at Katie. “It looks guilty as hell, doesn’t it?” I said. “Only it isn’t.” She didn’t say anything, didn’t move. “It would have killed the jackal if it had hit it. It was going at least ninety. But the jackal was already dead.”

She looked across at me.

“The Society would have sent the Amblers to jail. It would have confiscated the house they’ve lived in for fifteen years for an accident that was nobody’s fault. They didn’t even see it coming. It just ran right out in front of them.”

Katie put her hand up to the screen and touched the jackal’s image.

“They’ve suffered enough,” I said, looking at her. It was getting dark. I hadn’t turned on any lights, and the red image of the tanker made her nose look sunburned.

“All these years she’s blamed him for her dog’s death, and he didn’t do it,” I said. “A Winnebago’s a hundred square feet on the inside. That’s about as big as this developer, and they’ve lived inside it for fifteen years, while the lanes got narrower and the highways shut down, hardly enough room to breathe, let alone live, and her blaming him for something he didn’t do.”

In the ruddy light from the screen she looked sixteen.

“They won’t do anything to the driver, not with the tankers hauling thousands of gallons of water into Phoenix every day. Even the Society won’t run the risk of a boycott. They’ll destroy the negatives and call the case closed. And the Society won’t go after the Amblers,” I said. “Or you.”

I turned back to the developer. “Go,” I said, and the image changed. Yucca. Yucca. My forearm. My back. Cups and spoons.

“Besides,” I said. “I’m an old hand at shifting the blame.” Mrs. Ambler’s arm. Mrs. Ambler’s back. Open shower door. “Did I ever tell you about Aberfan?”

Katie was still watching the screen, her face pale now from the light blue one hundred percent formica shower stall.

“The Society already thinks the tanker did it. The only one I’ve got to convince is my editor.” I reached across to the phone and took the exclusion off. “Ramirez,” I said, “wanta go after the Society?”

Jake’s back. Cups, spoons, and Sanka.

“I did,” Ramirez said in a voice that could have frozen the Salt River, “but your developer was broken, and you couldn’t get me a picture.”

Mrs. Ambler and Taco.

I hit the exclusion button again and left my hand on it. “Stop,” I said. “Print.” The screen went dark, and the print slid out into the tray. “Reduce frame. Permanganate bath by one per cent. Follow on screen.” I took my hand off. “What’s Dolores Chiwere doing these days, Ramirez?”

“She’s working investigative. Why?”

I didn’t answer. The picture of Mrs. Ambler faded a little, a little more.

“The Society does have a link to the lifelines!” Ramirez said, not quite as fast as Hunter, but almost. “That’s why you requested your old girlfriend’s line, isn’t it? You’re running a sting.”

I had been wondering how to get Ramirez off Katie’s trail, and she had done it herself, jumping to conclusions just like the Society. With a little effort, I could convince Katie, too: Do you know why I really came to see you today? To catch the Society. I had to pick somebody the Society couldn’t possibly know about from my lifeline, somebody I didn’t have any known connection with.

Katie watched the screen, looking like she already half-believed it. The picture of Mrs. Ambler faded some more. Any known connection.

“Stop,” I said.

“What about the truck?” Ramirez demanded. “What does it have to do with this sting of yours?”

“Nothing,” I said. “And neither does the water board, which is an even bigger bully than the Society. So do what the chief says. Full cooperation. Case closed. We’ll get them on lifeline tapping.”

She digested that, or maybe she’d already hung up and was calling Dolores Chiwere. I looked at the image of Mrs. Ambler on the screen. It had faded enough to look slightly overexposed but not enough to look tampered with. And Taco was gone.

I looked at Katie. “The Society will be here in another fifteen minutes,” I said, “which gives me just enough time to tell you about Aberfan.” I gestured at the couch. “Sit down.”

She came and sat down. “He was a great dog,” I said. “He loved the snow. He’d dig through it and toss it up with his muzzle and snap at the snowflakes, trying to catch them.”

Ramirez had obviously hung up, but she would call back if she couldn’t track down Chiwere. I put the exclusion back on and went over to the developer. The image of Mrs. Ambler was still on the screen. The bath hadn’t affected the detail that much. You could still see the wrinkles, the thin white hair, but the guilt, or blame, the look of loss and love, was gone. She looked serene, almost happy.

“There are hardly any good pictures of dogs,” I said. “They lack the necessary muscles to take good pictures, and Aberfan lunged at you as soon as he saw the camera.”

I turned the developer off. Without the light from the screen, it was almost dark in the room. I turned on the overhead.

“There were less than a hundred dogs left in the United States, and he’d already had the newparvo once and nearly died. The only pictures I had of him had been taken when he was asleep. I wanted a picture of Aberfan playing in the snow.”

I leaned against the narrow shelf in front of the developer’s screen. Katie looked the way she had at the vet’s, sitting there with her hands clenched, waiting for me to tell her something terrible.

“I wanted a picture of him playing in the snow, but he always lunged at the camera,” I said, “so I let him out in the front yard, and then I sneaked out the side door and went across the road to some pine trees where he wouldn’t be able to see me. But he did.”

“And he ran across the road,” Katie said. “And I hit him.”

She was looking down at her hands. I waited for her to look up, dreading what I would see in her face. Or not see.

“It took me a long time to find out where you’d gone,” she said to her hands. “I was afraid you’d refuse me access to your lifeline. I finally saw one of your pictures in a newspaper, and I moved to Phoenix, but after I got here I was afraid to call you for fear you’d hang up on me.”

She twisted her hands the way she had twisted her mittens at the vet’s. “My husband said I was obsessed with it, that I should have gotten over it by now, everybody else had, that they were only dogs anyway.” She looked up, and I braced my hands against the developer. “He said forgiveness wasn’t something somebody else could give you, but I didn’t want you to forgive me exactly. I just wanted to tell you I was sorry.”

There hadn’t been any reproach, any accusation in her face when I told her she was responsible for the extinction of a species that day at the vet’s, and there wasn’t now. Maybe she didn’t have the facial muscles for it, I thought bitterly.

“Do you know why I came to see you today?” I said angrily. “My camera broke when I tried to catch Aberfan. I didn’t get any pictures.” I grabbed the picture of Mrs. Ambler out of the developer’s tray and flung it at her. “Her dog died of newparvo. They left it in the Winnebago, and when they came back, it was dead.”

“Poor thing,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at the picture. She was looking at me.

“She didn’t know she was having her picture taken. I thought if I got you talking about Aberfan, I could get a picture like that of you.”

And surely now I would see it, the look I had really wanted when I set the eisenstadt down on Katie’s kitchen table, the look I still wanted, even though the eisenstadt was facing the wrong way, the look of betrayal the dogs had never given us. Not even Misha. Not even Aberfan. How does it feel to be responsible for the extinction of an entire species?

I pointed at the eisenstadt. “It’s not a briefcase. It’s a camera. I was going to take your picture without your even knowing it.”

She had never known Aberfan. She had never known Mrs. Ambler either, but in that instant before she started to cry she looked like both of them. She put her hand up to her mouth. “Oh,” she said, and the love, the loss was there in her voice, too. “If you’d had it then, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I looked at the eisenstadt. If I had had it, I could have set it on the porch and Aberfan would never have even noticed it. He would have burrowed through the snow and tossed it up with his nose, and I could have thrown snow up in big glittering sprays that he would have leaped at, and it never would have happened. Katie Powell would have driven past, and I would have stopped to wave at her, and she, sixteen years old and just learning to drive, would maybe even have risked taking a mittened hand off the steering wheel to wave back, and Aberfan would have wagged his tail into a blizzard and then barked at the snow he’d churned up.

He wouldn’t have caught the third wave. He would have lived to be an old dog, fourteen or fifteen, too old to play in the snow any more, and even if he had been the last dog in the world I would not have let them lock him up in a cage, I would not have let them take him away. If I had had the eisenstadt.

No wonder I hated it.

It had been at least fifteen minutes since Ramirez called. The Society would be here any minute. “You shouldn’t be here when the Society comes,” I said, and Katie nodded and smudged the tears off her cheeks and stood up, reaching for her carryit.

“Do you ever take pictures?” she said, shouldering the carryit. “I mean, besides for the papers?”

“I don’t know if I’ll be taking pictures for them much longer. Photojournalists are becoming an extinct breed.”

“Maybe you could come take some pictures of Jana and Kevin. Kids grow up so fast, they’re gone before you know it.”

“I’d like that,” I said. I opened the screen door for her and looked both ways down the street at the darkness. “All clear,” I said, and she went out. I shut the screen door between us.

She turned and looked at me one last time with her dear, open face that even I hadn’t been able to close. “I miss them,” she said.

I put my hand up to the screen. “I miss them, too.”

I watched her to make sure she turned the corner and then went back in the living room and took down the picture of Misha. I propped it against the developer so Segura would be able to see it from the door. In a month or so, when the Amblers were safely in Texas and the Society had forgotten about Katie, I’d call Segura and tell him I might be willing to sell it to the Society, and then in a day or so I’d tell him I’d changed my mind. When he came out to try to talk me into it, I’d tell him about Perdita and Beatrix Potter, and he would tell me about the Society.

Chiwere and Ramirez would have to take the credit for the story—I didn’t want Hunter putting anything else together—and it would take more than one story to break them, but it was a start.

Katie had left the print of Mrs. Ambler on the couch. I picked it up and looked at it a minute and then fed it into the developer. “Recycle,” I said.

I picked up the eisenstadt from the table by the couch and took the film cartridge out. I started to pull the film out to expose it, and then shoved it into the developer instead and turned it on. “Positives, one two three order, five seconds.”

I had apparently set the camera on its activator again—there were ten shots or so of the back seat of the Hitori. Vehicles and people. The pictures of Katie were all in shadow. There was a Still Life of Kool-Aid Pitcher with Whale Glass and another one of Jana’s toy cars, and some near-black frames that meant Katie had laid the eisenstadt face-down when she brought it to me.

“Two seconds,” I said, and waited for the developer to flash the last shots so I could make sure there wasn’t anything else on the cartridge and then expose it before the Society got here. All but the last frame was of the darkness that was all the eisenstadt could see lying on its face. The last one was of me.

The trick in getting good pictures is to make people forget they’re being photographed. Distract them. Get them talking about something they care about.

“Stop,” I said, and the image froze.

Aberfan was a great dog. He loved to play in the snow, and after I had murdered him, he lifted his head off my lap and tried to lick my hand.

The Society would be here any minute to take the longshot film and destroy it, and this one would have to go, too, along with the rest of the cartridge. I couldn’t risk Hunter’s being reminded of Katie. Or Segura taking a notion to do a print-fix and peel on Jana’s toy cars.

It was too bad. The eisenstadt takes great pictures. “Even you’ll forget it’s a camera,” Ramirez had said in her spiel, and that was certainly true. I was looking straight into the lens.

And it was all there, Misha and Taco and Perdita and the look he gave me on the way to the vet’s while I stroked his poor head and told him it would be all right, that look of love and pity I had been trying to capture all these years. The picture of Aberfan.

The Society would be here any minute. “Eject,” I said, and cracked the cartridge open, and exposed it to the light.

SCHRÖDINGER’S KITTEN

George Alec Effinger

By making the right decision one night, a poor girl of the Budayeen could change the destiny of the world around her

The clean crescent moon that began the new month hung in the western sky across from the alley. Jehan was barely twelve years old, too young to wear the veil, but she did so anyway. She had never before been out so late alone. She heard the sounds of celebration far away, the three-day festival marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Two voices sang drunkenly as they passed the alley; two others loudly and angrily disputed the price of some honey cakes. The laughter and the shouting came to Jehan as if from another world. In the past, she’d always loved the festival of Îd-el-Fitr; she took no part in the festivities now, though, and it seemed somehow odd to her that anyone else still could. Soon she gave it all no more of her attention. This year she must keep a meeting more important than any holiday. She sighed, shrugging: The festival would come around again next year. Tonight, with only the silver moon for company, she shivered in her blue-black robe.

Jehan Fatima Ashûfi stepped back a few feet deeper into the alley, farther out of the light. All along the street, people who would otherwise never be seen in this quarter were determinedly amusing themselves. Jehan shivered again and waited. The moment she longed for would come at dawn. Even now the sky was just dark enough to reveal the moon and the first impetuous stars. In the Islamic world, night began when one could no longer distinguish a white thread from a black one; it was not yet night. Jehan clutched her robe closely to her with her left hand. In her right hand, hidden by her long sleeve, was the keen-edged, gleaming, curved blade she had taken from her father’s room.

She was hungry and wished she had money to buy something to eat, but she had none. In the Budayeen there were many girls her age who already had ways of getting money of their own; Jehan was not one of them. She glanced about and saw only the filth-strewn, damp, and muddy paving stones. The reek of the alley disgusted her. She was bored and lonely and afraid. Then, as if her whole sordid world suddenly dissolved into something else, something wholly foreign, she saw more.

Jehan Ashûfi was twenty-six years old. She was dressed in a conservative dark gray woolen suit, cut longer and more severely than fashion dictated but appropriate for a bright young physicist. She affected no jewelry and wore her black hair in a long braid down her back. She took a little effort each morning to look as plain as possible while she was accompanying her eminent teacher and adviser. That had been Heisenberg’s idea: In these days who believed a beautiful woman could also be a highly talented scientist? Jehan soon learned that her wish of being inconspicuous was in vain. Her dark skin and her accent marked her as a foreigner. She was clearly not European. Possibly she had Levantine blood. Most who met her thought she was probably a Jew. This was Göttingen, Germany, and it was 1925.

The brilliant Max Born, who had first used the expression quantum mechanics in a paper written two years before, was leading a meeting of the university’s physicists. They were discussing Max Planck’s latest proposals concerning his own theories of radiation. Planck had developed some basic ideas in the emerging field of quantum physics, yet he had used classical Newtonian mechanics to describe the interactions of light and matter. It was clear that this approach was inadequate, but as yet there was no better system. At the Göttingen conference, Pascual Jordan rose to introduce a compromise solution; but before Born, the department chairman, could reply, Werner Heisenberg fell into a violent fit of sneezing.

“Are you all right, Werner?” asked Born.

Heisenberg merely waved a hand. Jordan attempted to continue, but again Heisenberg began sneezing. His eyes were red, and tears crept down his face. He was in obvious distress. He turned to his graduate assistant. “Jehan,” he said, “please make immediate arrangements; I must get away. It’s my damned hay fever. I want to leave at once.”

One of the others at the meeting objected. “But the colloquium—”

Heisenberg was already on his feet. “You can tell Planck to go straight to hell and to take De Broglie and his matter waves with him. The same goes for Bohr and his goddamn jumping electrons. I can’t stand any more of this.” Heisenberg took a few shaky steps and left the room, Jehan stayed behind to make a few notations in her journal. Then she followed Heisenberg back to their apartments.

There were no minarets in the Budayeen, but in the city all around the walled quarter there were many mosques. From the tall, ancient towers, strong voices called the faithful to morning devotions. “Come to prayer, come to prayer! Prayer is better than sleep!”

Leaning against a grimy wall, Jehan heard the chanted cries of the muezzins, but she paid them no mind. She stared at the dead body at her feet, the body of a boy a few years older than she, someone she had seen about the Budayeen but whom she did not know by name. She still held the bloody knife that had killed him.

In a short while three men pushed their way through a crowd that had formed at the mouth of the alley. The three men looked down solemnly at Jehan. One was a police officer; one was a qadi, who interpreted the ancient Islamic commandments as they applied to modern life; and the third was an imam, a prayer leader who had hurried from a small mosque not far from the east gate of the Budayeen. Within the walls the pickpockets, whores, thieves, and cutthroats could do as they liked to each other. A death in the Budayeen didn’t attract much attention in the rest of the city.

The police officer was tall and heavily built, with a thick black mustache and sleepy eyes. He was curious only because he had watched over the Budayeen for fifteen years, and he had never investigated a murder by a girl so young.

The qadi was young, clean-shaven, and quite plainly deferring to the imam. It was not yet clear to those in attendance if this matter should be the responsibility of the civil or the religious authorities.

The imam was tall, taller even than the police officer, but thin and narrow shouldered; yet it was not asceticism that made him so slight. He was well-known for two things: his common sense concerning the conflicts of everyday affairs and the high degree of earthly pleasures he permitted himself. He, too, was puzzled and curious. He wore a short, grizzled gray beard, and his soft brown eyes were all but hidden within the reticulation of wrinkles that had slowly etched his face. Like the police officer, the imam had once worn a brave black mustache, but the days of fierceness had long since passed for him. Now he appeared decent and kindly. In truth, he was neither; but he found it useful to cultivate that reputation.

“O my daughter,” he said in his hoarse voice. He was very upset. He much preferred explicating obscure passages of the glorious Qur’an to viewing such tawdry matters as blatant dead bodies in the nearby streets.

Jehan looked up at him, but she said nothing. She looked back down at the unknown boy she had killed.

“O my daughter,” said the imam, “tell me, was it thou who hath slain this child?”

Jehan looked back calmly at the old man. She was concealed beneath her kerchief, veil, and robe; all that was visible of her were her dark eyes and the long thin fingers that held the knife. “Yes, O Wise One,” she said, “I killed him.”

The police officer glanced at the qadi.

“Prayest thou to Allah?” asked the imam. If this hadn’t been the Budayeen, he wouldn’t have needed to ask.

“Yes,” said Jehan. And it was true. She had prayed on several occasions in her lifetime, and she might yet pray again sometime.

“And knowest thou there is a prohibition against taking of human life that Allah hath made sacred?”

“Yes, O Wise One.”

“And knowest thou further that Allah hath set a penalty upon those who breaketh this law?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then, O my daughter, tell us why thou hath brought low this poor boy.”

Jehan tossed the bloody knife to the stone-paved alley. It rang noisily and then came to rest against one leg of the corpse.

“I killed him because he would do me harm in the future,” she said.

“He threatened you?” asked the qadi. “No, O Respected One.”

“Then—”

“Then how art thou certain that he would do thee harm?” the imam finished.

Jehan shrugged. “I have seen it many times. He would throw me to the ground and defile me. I have seen the visions.”

A murmur grew from the crowd still cluttering the mouth of the alley behind Jehan and the three men. The imam’s shoulders slumped. The police officer waited patiently. The qadi looked discouraged. “Then he didst not offer thee harm this morning?” said the imam.

“No.”

“Indeed, as thou sayest, he hath never offered thee harm?”

“No. I do not know him. I have never spoken with him.”

“Yet,” said the qadi, clearly unhappy, “you murdered him because of what you have seen? As in a dream?”

“As in a dream, O Respected One, but more truly as in a vision.”

“A dream,” muttered the imam. “The Prophet, mayest blessings be on his name and peace, didst offer no absolution for murder provoked only by dreams.”

A woman in the crowd cried out, “But she is only twelve years old!”

The imam turned and pushed his way through the rabble.

“Sergeant,” said the qadi, “this young girl is now in your custody. The Straight Path makes our duty clear.”

The police officer nodded and stepped forward. He bound the young girl’s wrists and pushed her forward through the alley. The crowd of fellahin parted to make way for them. The sergeant led Jehan to a small, dank cell until she might have a hearing. A panel of religious elders would judge her according to Shari’s, the contemporary code of laws derived from the ancient and noble Qur’an. Jehan did not suffer in her noxious cell. A lifetime in the Budayeen had made her familiar with deprivation. She waited patiently for whatever outcome Allah intended.

She did not wait long. She was given another brief hearing, during which the council asked her many of the same questions the imam had asked. She answered them all without hesitation. Her judges were saddened but compelled to render their verdict. They gave her an opportunity to change her statement, but she refused. At last the senior member of the panel stood to face her. “O young one,” he said in the most reluctant of voices, “the Prophet, blessings be on his name and peace, said, ‘Whoso slayeth a believer, his reward is hell forever.’ And elsewhere, ‘Who killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he killed all mankind.’ Therefore, if he whom you slew had purposed corruption upon you, your act would have been justified. Yet you deny this. You rely on your dreams, your visions. Such insubstantial defense cannot persuade this council otherwise than that you are guilty. You must pay the penalty as it is written. It shall be exacted tomorrow morning just before sunrise.”

Jehan’s expression did not change. She said nothing. Of her many visions, she had witnessed this particular scene before also. Sometimes, as now, she was condemned; sometimes she was freed. That evening she ate a good meal, a better meal than most she had taken before in her life of poverty. She slept the night, and she was ready when the civil and religious officials came for her in the morning. An imam of great repute spoke to her at length, but Jehan did not listen carefully. The remaining acts and motions of her life seemed mechanically ordered, and she did not pay great heed to them. She followed where she was led, she responded dully when pressed for a reply, and she climbed the platform set up in the courtyard of the great Shimaal Mosque.

“Dost thou feel regret?” asked the imam, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Jehan was made to kneel with her head on the block. She shrugged. “No,” she said.

“Dost thou feel anger, O my daughter?”

“No.”

“Then mayest Allah in His mercy grant thee peace.” The imam stepped away. Jehan had no view of the headsman, but she heard the collective sigh of the onlookers as the great ax lifted high in the first faint rays of dawn, and then the blade fell.

Jehan shuddered in the alley. Watching her death always made her exceptionally uneasy. The hour wasn’t much later; the fifth and final call to prayer had sounded not long before, and now it was night. The celebration continued around her more intensely than before. That her intended deed might end on the headsman’s block did not deter her. She grasped the knife tightly, wishing that time would pass more swiftly, and she thought of other things.

By the end of May 1925 they were settled in a hotel on the tiny island of Helgoland some fifty miles from the German coast. Jehan relaxed in a comfortably furnished room. The landlady made her husband put Heisenberg’s and Jehan’s luggage in the best and most expensive room. Heisenberg had every hope of ridding himself of his allergic afflictions. He also intended to make some sense of the opaque melding of theories and countertheories put forward by his colleagues back in Göttingen. Meanwhile the landlady gave Jehan a grim and glowering look at their every meeting but said nothing. The Herr Doktor himself was too preoccupied to care for anything as trivial as propriety, morals, the reputation of this Helgoland retreat, or Jehan’s peace of mind. If anyone raised eyebrows over the arrangement, Heisenberg certainly was blithely unaware; he walked around as if he were insensible to everything but the pollen count and the occasional sheer cliffs over which he sometimes came close to tumbling.

Jehan was mindful of the old woman’s disapproval. Jehan, however, had lived a full, harsh life in her twenty-six years, and a raised eyebrow rated very low on her list of things to be concerned about. She had seen too many people abandoned to starvation, too many people dispossessed and reduced to beggary, too many outsiders slain in the name of Allah, too many maimed or beheaded through the convoluted workings of Islamic justice. All these years Jehan had kept her father’s bloodied dagger, packed now beneath her Shetland wool sweaters and still as deadly as ever, Heisenberg’s health improved on the island, and there was a beautiful view of the sea from their room. His mood brightened quickly. One morning, while walking along the shoreline with him, Jehan read a passage from the glorious Qur’an. “This sura is called ‘The Earthquake,’ ” she said. “ ‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. When Earth is shaken with her final earthquake, and Earth yields up her burdens and man saith: What aileth her? That day she will relate her chronicles, because thy Lord inspireth her. That day mankind will issue forth in separate groups to be shown their deeds. And whoso doeth good an atom’s weight will see it then. And whoso doeth ill an atom’s weight will see it then.’“ And Jehan wept, knowing that however much good she might do, it could never outweigh the wrongs she had already performed. But Heisenberg only stared out over the gray, tumbling waves of the ocean. He did not listen closely to the sacred verses, yet a few of Jehan’s words struck him.” And who so doeth good an atom’s weight will see it then,’“ he said, emphasizing the single word. There was a small, hesitant smile quivering at the corners of his mouth. Jehan put her arm around him to comfort him because he seemed chilled, and she led him back to the hotel. The weather had turned colder, and the air was misty with sea spray; together they listened to the cries of the herring gulls as the birds dived for fish or hovered screeching over the strip of beach. Jehan thought of what she’d read, of the end of the world. Heisenberg thought only of its beginning, and its still closely guarded secrets.

They liked their daily peaceful walk about the island. Now, more than ever before, Jehan carried with her a copy of the Qur’an, and she often read short verses to him. So different from the biblical literature he’d heard all his life, Heisenberg let the Islamic scriptures pass without comment. Yet it seemed to him that certain specific images offered their meanings to him alone.

Jehan saw at last that he was feeling well. Heisenberg took up again full-time the tangled knot that was the current state of quantum physics. It was both his vocation and his means of relaxation. He told Jehan the best scientific minds in the world were frantically working to cobble together a slipshod mathematical model, one that might account for all the observed data. Whatever approach they tried, the data would not fit together. He, however, would find the key; he was that confident. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d do it, but, of course, he hadn’t yet really applied himself thoroughly to the question.

Jehan was not amused. She read to him: “ ‘Hast thou not seen those who pretend that they believe in that which is revealed unto thee and that which was revealed before thee, how they would go for judgment in their disputes to false deities when they have been ordered to abjure them? Satan would lead them far astray.’ ”

Heisenberg laughed heartily. “Your Allah isn’t just talking about Göttingen there,” he said. “He’s got Bohr in mind, too, and Einstein in Berlin.”

Jehan frowned at his impiety. It was the irreverence and ignorant ridicule of the kaffir, the unbeliever. She wondered if the old religion that had never truly had any claim on her was yet still part of her. She wondered how she’d feel after all these years, walking the narrow, crowded, clangorous ways of the Budayeen again. “You mustn’t speak that way,” she said at last.

“Hmm?” said Heisenberg. He had already forgotten what he’d said to her.

“Look out there,” said Jehan. “What do you see?”

“The ocean,” said Heisenberg. “Waves.”

“Allah created those waves. What do you know about that?”

“I could determine their frequency. I could measure their amplitude.”

“Measure!” cried Jehan. Her own long years of scientific study were suddenly overshadowed by an imagined insult to her heritage. “Look here,” she demanded. “A handful of sand. Allah created this sand. What do you know about it?”

Heisenberg couldn’t see what Jehan was trying to tell him. “With the proper instruments,” he said, a little afraid of offending her, “in the proper setting, I could take a single grain of sand and tell you—” His words broke off suddenly. He got to his feet slowly, like an old man. He looked first at the sea, then down at the shore, then back out at the water. “Waves,” he murmured, “particles, it makes no difference. All that counts is what we can actually measure. We can’t measure Bohr’s orbits, because they don’t really exist! So the spectral lines we see are caused by transitions between two states. Pairs of states, yes; but that will mean a new form of mathematical expression just to describe them, referencing tables listing every possible—”

“Werner.” Jehan knew that he was now lost to her.

“Just the computations alone will take days, if not weeks.”

“Werner, listen to me. This island is so small, you can throw a stone from one end to the other. I’m not going to sit on this freezing beach or up on your bleak and dreary cliff while you make your brilliant breakthrough, whatever it is. I’m saying good-bye.”

“What? Jehan?” Heisenberg blinked and returned to the tangible world.

She couldn’t face him any longer. She was pouring one handful of sand through the fingers of her other hand.

It came suddenly to her mind then: If you had no water to perform the necessary ablution before prayer in the direction of Mecca, you were permitted to wash with clean sand instead. She began to weep. She couldn’t hear what Heisenberg was saying to her—if indeed he was.

It was a couple of hours later in the alley now, and it was getting even colder. Jehan wrapped herself in her robe and paced back and forth.

She’d had visions of this particular night for four years, glimpses of the possible ways that it might conclude. Sometimes the young man saw her in the alley shortly after dawn, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes she killed him, sometimes she didn’t. And, of course, there was the open question of whether her actions would lead to her freedom or to her execution.

When she’d had the first vision, she hadn’t known what was happening or what she was seeing. She knew only the fear and the pain and the terror. The boy threw her roughly to the ground, ripped her clothing, and raped her. Then the vision passed. Jehan told no one about it; her family would have thought her insane. About three months later, the vision returned; only this time it was different in subtle ways. She was in the alley as before, but this time she smiled and gestured to the boy, inviting him. He smiled in return and followed her deeper into the alley. When he put his hand on her shoulder, she drew her father’s dagger and plunged it into the boy’s belly. That was as much as the vision showed her then. It terrified her even more than the rape scene had.

As time passed, the visions took on other forms. She was certain now that she was not always watching her future, the future, but rather a future, each as likely to come to pass as the others. Not all the visions could possibly be true. In some of them, she saw herself living into her old age in the city, right here in this filthy quarter of the Budayeen. In others she moved about strange places that didn’t seem Islamic at all, and she spoke languages definitely not Arabic. She did not know if these conflicting visions were trying to tell her or warn her of something. Jehan prayed to know which of these versions she must actually live through. Soon after, as if to reward her for her faith, she began to have less violent visions: She could look into the future a short way and find lost objects or warn against unlucky travel plans or predict the rise and fall of crop prices. The neighbors, at first amused, began to be afraid of her. Jehan’s mother counseled her never to speak of these “dreams” to anyone, or else Jehan might be locked away in some horrible institution. Jehan never told her father about her visions, because Jehan never told her father about anything. In that family, as in the others of the Budayeen—and the rest of the city, for that matter—the father did not concern himself very much with his daughters. His sons were his pride, and he had three strong sons whom he firmly believed would someday vastly increase the Ashûfi prestige and wealth. Jehan knew he was wrong, because she’d already seen what would become of the sons—two would be killed in wars against the Jews; the third would be a coward, a weakling, and a fugitive in the United States. But Jehan said nothing.

A vision: It was just past dawn. The young man—whose name Jehan never learned—was walking down the stone-paved street toward her alley. Jehan knew it without even peering out. She took a deep breath. She walked a few steps toward the street, looked left, and caught his eye. She made a brief gesture, turned her back, and went deeper into the shadowy seclusion of the alley. She was certain that he would follow her. Her stomach ached and rumbled, and she was shaking with nervous exhaustion. When the young man put his hand on her shoulder, murmuring indecent suggestions, her hand crept toward the concealed knife, but she did not grasp it. He threw her down roughly, clawed off her clothing, and raped her. Then he left her there. She was almost paralyzed, crying and cursing on the wet, foul-smelling stones. She was found sometime later by two women who took her to a doctor. Their worst fears were confirmed: Her honor had been ravaged irredeemably. Her life was effectively over, in the sense of becoming a normal adult female in that Islamic community. One of the women returned to Jehan’s house with her, to tell the news to Jehan’s mother, who must still tell Jehan’s father. Jehan hid in the room she shared with her sisters. She heard the violent breaking of furniture and shrill obscenity of her father. There was nothing more to be done. Jehan did not know the name of her assailant. She was ruined, less than worthless. A young woman no longer a virgin could command no bride price. All those years of supporting a worthless daughter in the hopes of recovering the investment in the marriage contract—all vanished now. It was no surprise that Jehan’s father felt betrayed and the father of a witless creature. There was no sympathy for Jehan; the actual story, whatever it might be, could not alter the facts. She had only the weeping of her sisters and her, mother. From that morning on, Jehan was permanently repudiated and cast out from her house. Jehan’s father and three brothers would not even look at her or offer her their farewells.

The years passed ever more quickly. Jehan became a woman of the streets. For a time, because of her youth and beauty, she earned a good living. Then as the decades left their unalterable blemishes upon her, she found it difficult even to earn enough for a meal and a room to sleep in. She grew older, more bitter, and filled with self-loathing. Did she hate her father and the rest of her family? No, her fate had been fixed by the will of Allah, however impossible it was for her to comprehend it, or else by her own timidity in the single moment of choice and destiny in the alley so many years before. She could not say Whatever the answer, she could not benefit now from either insight or wisdom. Her life was as it was, according to the inscrutable designs of Allah the Merciful. Her understanding was not required.

Eventually she was found dead, haggard and starved, and her corpse was contorted and huddled for warmth coincidentally in the same alley where the young man had so carelessly despoiled any chance Jehan had for happiness in this world, After she died, there was no one to mourn her. Perhaps Allah the Beneficent took pity on her, showing mercy to her who had received little enough mercy from her neighbors while she lived among them. It had always been a cold place for Jehan.

For a while estranged from Heisenberg, Jehan worked with Erwin Schrödinger in Zurich. At first Schrödinger’s ideas confused her because they went against many of Heisenberg’s basic assumptions. For the time being, Heisenberg rejected any simple picture of what the atom was like, any model at all. Schrödinger, older and more conservative than the Göttingen group, wanted to explain quantum phenomena without new mathematics and elusive imagery. He treated the electron as a wave function but a different sort of wave than De Broglie’s. The properties of waves in the physical world were well-known and without ambiguity. Yet when Schrödinger calculated how a change in energy level affected his electron wave, his solutions didn’t agree with observed data.

“What am I overlooking?” he asked. Jehan shook her head. “Where I was born they say, ‘Don’t pour away the water in your canteen because of a mirage.’ ”

Schrödinger rubbed his weary eyes. He glanced down at the sheaf of papers he held. “How can I tell if this water is worth keeping or something that belongs in a sewer?” Jehan had no reply to that, and Schrödinger set his work aside, unsatisfied. A few months later several papers showed that after taking into account the relativistic effects, Schrödinger’s calculations agreed remarkably well with experimental results after all.

Schrödinger was pleased. “I knew in my heart that quantum physics would prove to be a sane world, not a realm populated by phantoms and governed by ghost forces.”

“It seems unreal to me now,” said Jehan. “If you say the electron is a wave, you are saying it is a phantom. In the ocean, it is the water that is the wave. As for sound, it is the air that carries the wave. What exists to be a wave in your equations?”

“It is a wave of probability, Born says. I do not wholly understand that yet myself,” he said, “but my equations explain too many things to be illusions.”

“Sir,” said Jehan, frowning, “it may be that in this case the mirage is in your canteen and not before you in the desert.” Schrödinger laughed. “That might be true. I may yet have to abandon my mental pictures, but I will not abandon my mathematics.”

It was a breathless afternoon in the city. The local Arabs didn’t seem to be bothered by the heat, but the small party of Europeans was beginning to suffer. Their cruise ship had put ashore at the small port, and a tour had been arranged to the city some fifty miles to the south. Two hours later the travelers concluded that the expedition had been a mistake.

Among them was David Hilbert, the German mathematician, a lecturer at Göttingen since 1895. He was accompanied by his wife, Kathe, and their maid, Clarchen. At first they were quite taken by the strangeness of the city, by the foreign sights and sounds and smells; but after a short time, their senses were glutted with newness, and what had at first been exotic was now only deplorable. As they moved slowly through the bazaars, shaded ineffectually by awnings or meager arcades of sticks, they longed for the whisper of a single cool breeze. Arab men dressed in long white gallebeyas cried out shrilly, all the while glaring at the Europeans. It was impossible to tell what the Arabs were saying. Some dragged little carts loaded with filthy cups and pots—water? Tea? Lemonade? It made no difference. Cholera lingered at every stall; every beggar offered typhus as he clutched at sleeves.

Hilbert’s wife fanned herself weakly. She was almost overcome and near collapse. Hilbert looked about desperately. “David,” murmured the maid Clarchen, the only one of Hilbert’s amours Frau Hilbert could tolerate, “we have come far enough.”

“I know,” he said, “but I see nothing—nowhere—”

“There are some ladies and gentlemen in that place. I think it’s an eating place. Leave Kathe with me there and find a taxi. Then we shall go back to the boat.”

Hilbert hesitated. He couldn’t bear to leave the two unprotected women in the midst of this frantic heathen marketplace. Then he saw how pale his wife had become, how her eyelids drooped, how she swayed against Clarchen’s shoulder. He nodded. “Let me help,” he said. Together they got Frau Hilbert to the restaurant, where it was no cooler but at least the ceiling fans created a fiction of fresh air. Hilbert introduced himself to a well-dressed man who was seated at a table with his family, a wife and four children. The mathematician tried three languages before he was understood. He explained the situation, and the gentleman and his wife both assured Hilbert that he need not worry. Hilbert ran out to find a taxi.

He was soon lost. There were no streets here, not in the European sense of the word. Narrow spaces between buildings became alleys, opened into small squares, closed again; other narrow passages led off in twisting, bewildering directions. Hilbert found himself back at a souk; he thought at first it was where he’d begun and looked for the restaurant, but he was wrong. This was another souk entirely; there were probably hundreds in the city. He was beginning to panic. Even if he managed to find a taxi, how could he direct it back to where his wife and Clarchen waited?

A man’s hand plucked at him. Hilbert tried to shrug the long fingers away. He looked into the face of a lean, hollowcheeked man in a striped robe and a blue knitted cap. The Arab kept repeating a few words, but Hilbert could make no sense of them. The Arab took him by the arm and half-led, half-shoved Hilbert through the crowd. Hilbert let himself be guided. They crossed through two bazaars, one of tinsmiths and one of poultry dressers. They entered a stone-paved street and emerged into an immense square. On the far side of the square was a huge, many-towered mosque, built of pink stone. Hilbert’s first impression was awe; it was as lovely an edifice as the Taj. Then his guide was pushing him again through the throng or hurrying in front to hew a path for Hilbert. The square was jammed and choked with people. Soon Hilbert could see why—a platform had been erected in the center, and on it stood a man with what could only be an executioner’s ax. Hilbert felt his stomach sicken. His Arab guide had thrust aside everyone in their way until Hilbert stood at the foot of the platform. He saw uniformed police and a bearded old man leading out a young girl. The crowd parted to allow them by. The girl was stunningly lovely. Hilbert looked into her huge, dark eyes—“like the eyes of a gazelle,” he remembered from reading Omar Khayyam—and glimpsed her slender form undisguised by her modest garments. As she mounted the steps, she looked down directly at him again. Hilbert felt his heart lurch; he felt a tremendous shudder. Then she looked away.

The Arab guide screamed in Hilbert’s ear. It meant nothing to the mathematician. He watched in horror as Jehan knelt, as the headsman raised his weapon of office. When the fierce, bellowing cry went up from the crowd, Hilbert noticed that his suit was now spattered with small flecks of red. The Arab screamed at him again and tightened his grip on Hilbert’s arm until Hilbert complained. The Arab did not release him. With his other hand, Hilbert took out his wallet. The Arab smiled. Above him, Hilbert watched several men carry away the body of the decapitated girl.

The Arab guide did not let him go until he’d paid an enormous sum.

Perhaps another hour had passed in the alley. Jehan had withdrawn to the darkest part and sat in a damp corner with her legs drawn up, her head against the rough brick wall. If she could sleep, she told herself, the night would pass more quickly; but she would not sleep, she would fight it if drowsiness threatened. What if she should slip into slumber and waken in the late morning, her peril and her opportunity both long since lost? Her only companion, the crescent moon, had abandoned her; she looked up at fragments of constellations, stars familiar enough in their groups but indistinguishable now as individuals. How different from people, where the opposite was true. She sighed; she was not a profound person, and it did not suit her to have profound thoughts. These must not truly be profound thoughts, she decided; she was merely deluded by weariness. Slowly she let her head fall forward. She crossed her arms on her knees and. cradled her head. The greater part of the night had already passed, and only silence came from the street. There were perhaps only three more hours until dawn . . .

Soon Schrödinger’s wave mechanics was proved to be equivalent to Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. It was a validation of both men’s work and of the whole field of quantum physics as well. Eventually Schrödinger’s simplistic wave picture of the electron was abandoned, but his mathematical laws remained undisputed. Jehan remembered Schrödinger predicting that he might need to take just that step.

Jehan had at last returned to Göttingen and Heisenberg. He had “forgiven her petulance.” He welcomed her gladly, because of his genuine feelings for her and because he had much work to do. He had just formally developed what came to be known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This was the first indication that the impartial observer could not help but play an essential, active role in the universe of subatomic particles. Jehan grasped Heisenberg’s concept readily. Other scientists thought Heisenberg was merely making a trivial criticism of the limitations of their experiments or the quality of their observations. It was more profound than that. Heisenberg was saying that one can never hope to know both the position and momentum of an electron at the same time under any circumstances. He had destroyed forever the assumption of the impartial observer.

“To observe is to disturb,” said Heisenberg. “Newton wouldn’t have liked any of this at all.”

“Einstein still doesn’t like it right this very minute,” said Jehan.

“I wish I had a mark for every time he’s made that sour ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe’ comment.”

“That’s just the way he sees a ‘wave of probability.’ The path of the electron can’t be known unless you look; but once you look, you change the information.”

“So maybe God doesn’t play dice with the universe,” said Heisenberg. “He plays vingt-et-un, and if He does not have an extra ace up His sleeve, He creates one—first the sleeve, then the ace. And He turns over more natural twenty-ones than is statistically likely. Hold on, Jehan! I’m not being sacrilegious. I’m not saying that God cheats. Rather, He invented the rules of the game, and He continues to invent them; and this gives Him a rather large advantage over poor physicists and their lagging understanding. We are like peasants watching the card tricks of someone who may be either genius or charlatan.”

Jehan pondered this metaphor. “At the Solvay conference, Bohr introduced his complementarity idea, that an electron was a wave function until it was detected, and then the wave function collapsed to a point, and you knew where the electron was. Then it was a particle. Einstein didn’t like that, either.”

“That’s God’s card trick,” said Heisenberg, shrugging.

“Well, the noble Qur’an says, ‘They question thee about strong drink and games of chance. Say; In both is great sin, and some usefulness for men; but the sin of them is greater than their usefulness.’ ”

“Forget dice and cards, then,” said Heisenberg with a little smile. “What kind of game would it be appropriate for Allah to play against us?”

“Physics,” said Jehan, and Heisenberg laughed.

“And knowest thou there is a prohibition against taking of human life that Allah hath made sacred?”

“Yes, O Wise One.”

“And knowest thou further that Allah hath set a penalty upon those who breaketh this law?”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then, O my daughter, tell us why thou hath brought low this poor boy.”

Jehan-tossed the bloody knife to the stone-paved alley. It rang noisily and then came to rest against one leg of the corpse. “I was celebrating the Îd-el-Fitr,” she said. “This boy followed me, and I became afraid He made filthy gestures and called out terrible things. I hurried away, but he ran after me. He grabbed me by the shoulders and pressed me against a wall. I tried to escape, but I could not. He laughed at my fear, then he struck me many times. He dragged me along through the narrowest of streets, where there were not many to witness; and then he pulled me into this vile place. He told me that he intended to defile me, and he described what he would do in foul detail. It was then that I drew my father’s dagger and stabbed him. I have spent the night in horror of his intentions and of my deed, and I have prayed to Allah for forgiveness.”

The imam put a trembling hand on Jehan’s cheek. “Allah is All-Wise and All-Forgiving, O my daughter. Alloweth me to return with thee to thy house, where I may put the hearts of thy parents at ease.”

Jehan knelt at the imam’s feet. “All thanks be to Allah,” she murmured.

“Allah be praised,” said the imam, the police officer, and the qadi together.

More than a decade later, when Jehan had daughters of her own, she told them this story. But in those latter days children did not heed the warnings of their parents, and the sons and daughters of Jehan and her husband did many foolish things.

Dawn slipped even into the narrow alleyway where Jehan waited. She was very sleepy and hungry, but she stood up and took a few wobbling steps. Her muscles had become cramped, and she could hear her heart beating in her ears. Jehan steadied herself with one hand on the brick wall. She went slowly to the mouth of the alley and peered out. There was no one in sight. The boy was coming neither from the left nor the right. Jehan waited until several other people appeared, going about the business of the new day. Then she hid the dagger in her sleeve once more and departed from the alley. She hurried back to her father’s house. Her mother would need her to help make breakfast.

Jehan was in her early forties now, her black hair cut short, her eyes framed by clumsy spectacles, her beauty stolen by care, poor diet, and sleeplessness. She wore a white lab coat and carried a clipboard, as much a part of her as her title, Fraulein Professor Doktor Ashûfi. This was not Göttingen any longer; it was Berlin, and a war was being lost. She was still with Heisenberg. He had protected her until her own scientific credentials became protection of themselves. At that point, the Nazi officials were compelled to make her an “honorary” Aryan, as they had the Jewish physicists and mathematicians whose cooperation they needed. It had been only Jehan’s long-standing loyalty to Heisenberg himself that kept her in Germany at all. The war was of little concern to her; these were not her people, but neither were the British, the French, the Russians, or the Americans. Her only interest was in her work, in the refinement of physics, in the unending anticipation of discovery.

She was glad, therefore, when the German atomic bomb project was removed from the control of the German army and given to the Reich Research Council. One of the first things to be done was the calling of a research conference at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin. The conference would be conducted under the tightest security: no preliminary list of topics would be released in advance, so that no foreign agents might see such terms as fission cross sections and isotope enrichment, leading to speculation on the longterm goals of these physicists.

At the same time, the Reich Research Council decided to hold a second conference for the benefit of the government’s highest officials on the same day. The idea was that the scientists speaking at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s meeting could present short, elementary summaries of their work in plain language so that the political and military leaders could be briefed on the progress that was being made toward a nuclear weapon. Then, following the laymen’s presentation, the physicists could gather and discuss the same matters in their more technical jargon.

Heisenberg thought it was a good idea. It was 1942, and material, political support, and funding were getting more difficult to find. The army wanted to put all available research resources into the rocketry program; they argued that the nuclear experiments were not showing sufficient success. Heisenberg was a theoretical physicist, not an engineer; he could not find a way to tell the council that the development of the uranium bomb must necessarily be slow and methodical. Each new step forward in theory had to be tested carefully, and each experiment was expensive in both time and money. The Reich, however, cared only for positive results.

One evening Jehan was alone in an administrative office of the Reich Research Council, typing her proposal for an important test of their isotope-separation technique. She saw on the desk two stacks of papers. One stack listed the simple synopses the physicists had prepared for the Reich ministers who had little or no background in science. She took those papers and hid them in her briefcase. The second stack was the secret agenda for the physicists’ own meeting; “Nuclear Physics as a Weapon,” by Professor Dr. Schumann; “The Fission of the Uranium Atom,” by Professor Dr. Hahn; “The Theoretical Basis for the Production of Energy from the Fission of Uranium,” by Heisenberg; and so on. Each person attending the technical seminar would be given a program after he entered the lecture hall, and he would be required to sign for it. Jehan thought for a long while in the quiet office. She remembered her wretched childhood. She recalled her arrival in Europe and the people she had come to know, the life she had come to lead here. She thought about how Germany had changed while she hid in her castle of scientific abstractions, uninvolved with the outside world. At last she thought about what this new Germany might do with the uranium bomb. She knew exactly what she must do.

It took her only a few moments to lake the highly technical agendas and drop them into the already-addressed envelopes to be sent to the Third Reich’s leaders. She had guaranteed that the brief introductory discussion would be attended by no one. Jehan could easily imagine the response the unintelligible scientific papers would get from the political and military leaders—curt, polite regrets that they would not be in Berlin on that day, or that their busy schedules prevented them from attending. It was all so easy. The Reich’s rulers did not hear the talks, and they did not learn how close Germany was to developing an atomic bomb. Never again was there any hope that such a weapon could be built in time to save the Reich—all because the wrong invitations had been slipped into a few envelopes.

Jehan awoke from a dream and saw that the night had grown very old. It would not be long before the sun began to flood the sky with light. Soon she would have a resolution to her anxiety. She would learn if the boy would come to the alley or stay away. She would learn if he would rape her or if she would find the courage to defend herself. She would learn if she would be judged guilty or innocent of murder. She would be granted a glimpse of the outcome to all things that concerned her.

Nevertheless, she was so tired, hungry, and uncomfortable that she was tempted to give up her vigil. The urge to go home was strong. Yet she had always believed that her visions were gifts granted by Allah, and it might offend Him to ignore the clear warnings. For Allah’s sake, as well as her own, she reluctantly chose to wait out the rest of the dying night. She had seen so many visions since last evening—more than on any other day of her life—some new, some familiar from years past. It was, in a small, human way, almost comparable to the Night of Power that was bestowed upon the Prophet, may Allah’s blessings be on him and peace. Then Jehan felt guilty and blasphemous for comparing herself to the Messenger that way.

She got down on her knees and faced toward Mecca and addressed a prayer to Allah, reciting one of the later suras from the glorious Qur’an, the one called “The Morning Hours,” which seemed particularly relevant to her situation. “ ‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. By the morning hours, and by the night when it is stillest, thy Lord hath not forsaken thee nor doth He hate thee, and verily the latter portion will be better for thee than the former, and verily thy Lord will give unto thee so that thou wilt be content. Did He not find thee an orphan and protect thee? Did He not find thee wandering and direct thee? Did He not find thee destitute and enrich thee? Therefore the orphan oppress not, therefore the beggar drive not away, therefore of the bounty of thy Lord be thy discourse.’ ” When she finished praying, she stood up and leaned against the wall. She wondered if that sura prophesied that soon she’d be an orphan. She hoped that Allah understood that she never intended anything awful to happen to her parents. Jehan was willing to suffer whatever consequences Allah willed, but it didn’t seem fair for her mother and father to have to share them with her. She shivered in the damp, cold air and gazed up to see if there was yet any brightening of the sky. She pretended that already the stars were beginning to disappear.

The square was jammed and choked with people. Soon Hilbert could see why—a platform had been erected in the center, and on it stood a man with what could only be an executioner’s ax. Hilbert felt his stomach sicken. His Arab guide had thrust aside everyone in their way until Hilbert stood at the very foot of the platform. He saw uniformed police and a bearded old man leading out a young girl. The crowd parted to allow them by. The girl was stunningly lovely. Hilbert looked into her huge, dark eyes—“like the eyes of a gazelle,” he remembered from reading Omar Khayyam—and glimpsed her slender form undisguised by her modest garments. As she mounted the steps, she looked down directly at him again. Hilbert felt his heart lurch; he felt a tremendous shudder. Then she looked away.

The Arab guide screamed in Hilbert’s ear. It meant nothing to the mathematician. He watched in horror as Jehan knelt, as the headsman raised his weapon of office. Hilbert shouted. His guide tightened his grip on the outsider’s arm, but Hilbert lashed out in fury and threw the man into a group of veiled women. In the confusion, Hilbert ran up the steps of the scaffold. The imam and the police officers looked at him angrily. The crowd began to shout fiercely at this interruption, this desecration by a European kaffir, an unbeliever. Hilbert ran to the police. “You must stop this!” he cried in German. They did not understand him and tried to heave him off the platform. “Stop!” he screamed in English.

One of the police officers answered him. “It cannot be stopped,” he said gruffly. “The girl committed murder. She was found guilty, and she cannot pay the blood price to the victim’s family. She must die instead.”

“Blood price!” cried Hilbert. “That’s barbarous! You would kill a young girl just because she is poor? Blood price! I’ll pay your goddamn blood price! How much is it?”

The policeman conferred with the others and then went to the imam for guidance. Finally the English-speaking officer returned. “Four hundred kiam.”

Hilbert took out his wallet with shaking hands. He counted out the money and handed it with obvious disgust to the policeman. The imam cried a declaration in his weak voice. The words were passed quickly through the crowd, and the onlookers grew more enraged at this spoiling of their morning’s entertainment. “Take her and go quickly,” said the police officer. “We cannot protect you, and the crowd is becoming furious.”

Hilbert nodded. He grasped Jehan’s thin wrist and pulled her along after him. She questioned him in Arabic, but he could not reply. As he struggled through the menacing crowd, they were struck again and again by stones. Hilbert wondered what he had done, if he and the girl would get out of the mosque’s courtyard alive. His fondness for young women—it was an open joke in Göttingen—had that been all that had motivated him? Had he unconsciously decided to rescue the girl and take her back to Germany? Or was it something more laudable? He would never know. He shocked himself: While he tried to shield himself and the girl from the vicious blows of the crowd, he thought only of how he might explain the girl to his wife, Kathe, and Clarchen, his mistress.

In 1957 Jehan Fatima Ashûfi was fifty-eight years old and living in Princeton, New Jersey. By coincidence, Albert Einstein had come here to live out the end of his life, and before he died in 1955 they had many pleasant afternoons at his house. In the beginning, Jehan wanted to discuss quantum physics with Einstein; she even told him Heisenberg’s answer to Einstein’s objection to God playing dice with the universe. Einstein was not very amused, and from then on their conversation concerned only nostalgic memories of the better days in Germany, before the advent of the National Socialists.

This afternoon, however, Jehan was sitting in a Princeton lecture hall, listening to a young man read a remarkable paper, his Ph.D. thesis His name was Hugh Everett, and what he was saying was that there was an explanation ftir all the paradoxes of the quantum world, a simple but bizarre way of looking at them. His new idea included the Copenhagen interpretation and explained away all the objections that might be raised by less open-minded physicists. He stated first of all that quantum mechanics provided predictions that were invariably correct when measured against experimental data. Quantum physics had to be consistent and valid, there was no longer any doubt. The trouble was that quantum theory was beginning to lead to unappetizing alternatives.

Schrödinger’s cat paradox—in which the cat in the box was merely a quantum wave function, not alive and not dead, until an observer looked to see which state the cat was in—was eliminated. Everett showed that the cat was no mere ghostly wave function. Everett said that wave functions do not “collapse,” choosing one alternative or the other. He said that the process of observation chose one reality, but the other reality existed in its own right, just as “real” as our world. Particles do not choose at random which path to take—they take every path, in a separate, newly branched world for each option. Of course, at the particle level, this meant a huge number of branchings occurring at every moment.

Jehan knew this almost-metaphysical idea would find a chilly reception from most physicists, but she had special reasons to accept it eagerly. It explained her visions. She glimpsed the particular branch that would be “real” for her and also those that would be “real” for other versions of her, her own duplicates living on the countless parallel worlds. Now, as she listened to Everett, she smiled. She saw another young man in the audience, wearing a T-shirt that said, WIGNER: DO YOU THINK YOUR FRIEND COULD FEED MY CAT? HEISENBERG WASN’T SURE, THANKS, SCHRÖDINGER. She found that very amusing.

When Everett finished reading, Jehan felt good. It wasn’t peace she felt; it was more like the release one feels after an argument that had been brewing for a long while. Jehan thought back over the turns and sidetracks she had taken since that dawn in the alley in the Budayeen. She smiled again, sadly, took a deep breath, and let it out. How many things she had done, how many things had happened to her! They had been long, strange lives. The only question that still remained was, How many uncountable futures did she still have to devise, to fabricate from the immaterial resources of this moment? As she sat there—in some worlds—Jehan knew the futures went on without her willing them to, needing nothing of her permission. She was not cautious of when tomorrow came but which tomorrow came.

Jehan saw them all, but she still understood nothing. She thought, The Chinese say that a journey of a thousand li begins with a single step. How shortsighted that is! A thousand journeys of a thousand li begin with each step. Or with each step not taken. She sat in her chair until everyone else had left the lecture hall. Then she got up slowly, her back and her knees giving her pain, and she took a step. She pictured myriad mirror-Jehans taking that step along with her, and a myriad that didn’t. And in all the worlds across time, it was another step into the future.

At last there was no doubt about it: It was dawn. Jehan fingered her father’s dagger and felt a thrill of excitement. Strange words flickered in her mind. “The Heisenty uncertainberg principle,” she murmured, already hurrying toward the mouth of the alley. She felt no fear.

THE SCALEHUNTER’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER

Lucius Shepard

1

Not long after the Christlight of the world’s first morning faded, when birds still flew to heaven and back, and even the wickedest things shone like saints, so pure was their portion of evil, there was a village by the name of Hangtown that clung to the back of the dragon Griaule, a vast mile-long beast who had been struck immobile yet not lifeless by a wizard’s spell, and who ruled over the Carbonales Valley, controlling in every detail the lives of the inhabitants, making known his will by the ineffable radiations emanating from the cold tonnage of his brain. From shoulder to tail, the greater part of Griaule was covered with earth and trees and grass, from some perspectives appearing to be an element of the landscape, another hill among those that ringed the valley; except for sections cleared by the scalehunters, only a portion of his right side to the haunch, and his massive neck and head remained visible, and the head had sunk to the ground, its massive jaws halfway open, itself nearly as high as the crests of the surrounding hills. Situated almost eight hundred feet above the valley floor and directly behind the fronto-parietal plate, which overhung the place like a mossy cliff, the village consisted of several dozen shacks with shingled roofs and walls of weathered planking, and bordered a lake fed by a stream that ran down onto Griaule’s back from an adjoining hill; it was hemmed in against the shore by thickets of chokecherry, stands of stunted oak and hawthornes, and but for the haunted feeling that pervaded the air, a vibrant stillness similar to the atmosphere of an old ruin, to someone standing beside the lake it would seem he was looking out upon an ordinary country settlement, one a touch less neatly ordered than most, littered as it was with the bones and entrails of skizzers and flakes and other parasites that infested the dragon, but nonetheless ordinary in the lassitude that governed it, and the shabby dress and hostile attitudes of its citizenry.

Many of the inhabitants of the village were scalehunters, men and women who scavenged under Griaule’s earth-encrusted wings and elsewhere on his body, searching for scales that were cracked and broken, chipping off fragments and selling these in Port Chantay, where they were valued for their medicinal virtues. They were well paid for their efforts, but were treated as pariahs by the people of the valley, who rarely ventured onto the dragon, and their lives were short and fraught with unhappy incident, a circumstance they attributed to the effects of Griaule’s displeasure at their presence. Indeed, his displeasure was a constant preoccupation, and they spent much of their earnings on charms that they believed would ward off its evil influence. Some wore bits of scale around their necks, hoping that this homage would communicate to Griaule the high regard in which they held him, and perhaps the most extreme incidence of this way of thinking was embodied by the nature given by the widower Riall to his daughter Catherine. On the day of her birth, also the day of his wife’s death, he dug down beneath the floor of his shack until he reached Griaule’s back, laying bare a patch of golden scale some six feet long and five feet wide, and from that day forth for the next eighteen years he forced her to sleep upon the scale, hoping that the dragon’s essence would seep into her and so she would be protected against his wrath. Catherine complained at first about this isolation, but she came to enjoy the dreams that visited her, dreams of flying, of otherworldly climes (according to legend, dragons were native to another universe to which they traveled by flying into the sun); lying there sometimes, looking up through the plank-shored tunnel her father had dug, she would feel that she was not resting on a solid surface but was receding from the earth, falling into a golden distance.

Riall may or may not have achieved his desired end; but it was evident to the people of Hangtown that propinquity to the scale had left its mark on Catherine, for while Riall was short and swarthy (as his wife had also been), physically unprepossessing in every respect, his daughter had grown into a beautiful young woman, long-limbed and slim, with fine golden hair and lovely skin and a face of unsurpassed delicacy, seeming a lapidary creation with its voluptuous mouth and sharp cheekbones and large eloquent eyes, whose irises were so dark that they could be distinguished from the pupils only under the strongest of lights. Not alone in her beauty did she appear cut from different cloth from her parents; neither did she share their gloomy spirit and cautious approach to life. From earliest childhood she went without fear to every quarter of the dragon’s surface, even into the darkness under the wing joints where few scalehunters dared go; she believed she had been immunized against ordinary dangers by her father’s tactics, and she felt there was a bond between herself and the dragon, that her dreams and good looks were emblems of both a magical relationship and consequential destiny, and this feeling of invulnerability—along with the confidence instilled by her beauty—gave rise to a certain egocentricity and shallowness of character. She was often disdainful, careless in the handling of lovers’ hearts, and though she did not stoop to duplicity—she had no need of that—she took pleasure in stealing the men whom other women loved. And yet she considered herself a good woman. Not a saint, mind you. But she honored her father and kept the house clean and did her share of work, and though she had her faults, she had taken steps—half-steps, rather—to correct them. Like most people, she had no clear moral determinant, depending upon taboos and specific circumstances to modify her behavior, and the “good,” the principled, was to her a kind of intellectual afterlife to which she planned some day to aspire, but only after she had exhausted the potentials of pleasure and thus gained the experience necessary for the achievement of such an aspiration. She was prone to bouts of moodiness, as were all within the sphere of Griaule’s influence, but generally displayed a sunny disposition and optimistic cast of thought. This is not to say, however, that she was a Pollyanna, an innocent. Through her life in Hangtown she was familiar with treachery, grief, and murder, and at eighteen she had already been with a wide variety of lovers. Her easy sexuality was typical of Hangtown’s populace, yet because of her beauty and the jealousy it had engendered, she had acquired the reputation of being exceptionally wanton. She was amused, even somewhat pleased, by her reputation, but the rumors surrounding her grew more scurrilous, more deviant from the truth, and eventually there came a day when they were brought home to her with a savagery that she could never have presupposed. Beyond Griaule’s frontal spike, which rose from a point between his eyes, a great whorled horn curving back toward Hangtown, the slope of the skull flattened out into the top of his snout, and it was here that Catherine came one foggy morning, dressed in loose trousers and a tunic, equipped with scaling hooks and ropes and chisels, intending to chip off a sizeable piece of cracked scale she had noticed near the dragon’s lip, a spot directly above one of the fangs. She worked at the piece for several hours, suspended by linkages of rope over Griaule’s lower jaw. His half-open mouth was filled with a garden of evil-looking plants, the calloused surface of his forked tongue showing here and there between the leaves like nodes of red coral; his fangs were inscribed with intricate patterns of lichen, wreathed by streamers of fog and circled by raptors who now and then would plummet into the bushes to skewer some unfortunate lizard or vole. Epiphytes bloomed from splits in the ivory, depending long strings of interwoven red and purple blossoms. It was a compelling sight, and from time to time Catherine would stop working and lower herself in her harness until she was no more than fifty feet above the tops of the bushes and look off into the caliginous depths of Griaule’s throat, wondering at the nature of the shadowy creatures that flitted there.

The sun burned off the fog, and Catherine, sweaty, weary of chipping, hauled herself up to the top of the snout and stretched out on the scales, resting on an elbow, nibbling at a honey pear and gazing out over the valley with its spiny green hills and hammocks of thistle palms and the faraway white buildings of Teocinte, where that very night she planned to dance and make love. The air became so warm that she stripped off her tunic and lay back, bare to the waist, eyes closed, daydreaming in the clean springtime heat. She had been drifting between sleep and waking for the better part of an hour, when a scraping noise brought her alert. She reached for her tunic and started to sit up; but before she could turn to see who or what had made the sound, something fell heavily across her ribs, taking her wind, leaving her gasping and disoriented. A hand groped her breast, and she smelled winey breath.

“Go easy, now,” said a man’s voice, thickened with urgency. “I don’t want nothing half of Hangtown ain’t had already.”

Catherine twisted her head, and caught a glimpse of Key Willen’s lean, sallow face looming above her, his sardonic mouth hitched at one corner in a half-smile.

“I told you we’d have our time,” he said, fumbling with the tie of her trousers.

She began to fight desperately, clawing at his eyes, catching a handful of his long black hair and yanking. She threw herself onto her stomach, clutching at the edge of a scale, trying to worm out from beneath him; but he butted her in the temple, sending white lights shooting through her skull. Once her head had cleared, she found that he had flipped her onto her back, had pulled her trousers down past her hips and penetrated her with his fingers; he was working them in and out, his breath coming hoarse and rapid. She felt raw inside, and she let out a sharp, throat-tearing scream. She thrashed about, tearing at his shirt, his hair, screaming again and again, and when he clamped his free hand to her mouth, she bit it.

“You bitch! You . . . goddamn . . .” He slammed the back of her head against the scale, climbed atop her, straddling her chest and pinning her shoulders with his knees. He slapped her, wrapped his hand in her hair, and leaned close, spittle flying to her face as he spoke. “You listen up, pig! I don’t much care if you’re awake . . . one way or the other, I’m gonna have my fun.” He rammed her head into the scale again. “You hear me? Hear me?” He straightened, slapped her harder. “Hell, I’m having fun right now.”

“Please!” she said, dazed.

“Please?” He laughed. “That mean you want some more?” Another slap. “You like it?”

Yet another slap.

“How ‘bout that?”

Frantic, she wrenched an arm free, in reflex reaching up behind her head, searching for a weapon, anything, and as he prepared to slap her again, grinning, she caught hold of a stick—or so she thought—and swung it at him in a vicious arc. The point of the scaling hook, for such it was, sank into Key’s flesh just back of his left eye, and as he fell, toppling sideways with only the briefest of outcries, the eye filled with blood, becoming a featureless crimson sphere like a rubber ball embedded in the socket. Catherine shrieked, pushed his legs off her waist; and scrambled away, encumbered by her trousers, which had slipped down about her knees. Key’s body convulsed, his heels drumming the scale. She sat staring at him for a long seamless time, unable to catch her breath, to think. But swarms of black flies, their translucent wings shattering the sunlight into prism, began landing on the puddle of blood that spread wide as a table from beneath Key’s face, and she became queasy. She crawled to the edge of the snout and looked away across the checkerboard of fields below toward Port Chantay, toward an alp of bubbling cumulus building from the horizon. Her chest hollowed with cold, and she started to shake. The tremors passing through her echoed the tremor she had felt in Key’s body when the hook had bit into his skull. All the sickness inside her, her shock and disgust at the violation, at confronting the substance of death, welled up in her throat and her stomach emptied. When she had finished she cinched her trousers tight, her fingers clumsy with the knot. She thought she should do something. Coil the ropes, maybe. Store the harness in her pack. But these actions, while easy to contemplate, seemed impossibly complex to carry out. She shivered and hugged herself, feeling the altitude, the distances. Her cheeks were feverish and puffy; flickers of sensation—she pictured them to be iridescent worms—tingled nerves in her chest and legs. She had the idea that everything was slowing, that time had flurried and was settling the way river mud settles after the passage of some turbulence. She stared off toward the dragon’s horn. Someone was standing there. Coming toward her, now. At first she watched the figure approach with a defiant disinterest, wanting to guard her privacy, feeling that if she had to speak she would lose control of her emotions. But as the figure resolved into one of her neighbors back in Hangtown—Brianne, a tall young woman with brittle good looks, dark brown hair and an olive complexion—she relaxed from this attitude. She and Brianne were not friends; in fact, they had once been rivals for the same man. However, that had been a year and more in the past, and Catherine was relieved to see her. More than relieved. The presence of another woman allowed her to surrender to weakness, believing that in Brianne she would find a fund of natural sympathy because of their common sex.

“My God, what happened?” Brianne kneeled and brushed Catherine’s hair back from her eyes. The tenderness of the gesture burst the dam of Catherine’s emotions, and punctuating the story with sobs, she told of the rape.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she said. “I . . . I’d forgotten about the hook.”

“Key was looking to get killed,” Brianne said. “But it’s a damn shame you had to be the one to help him along.” She sighed, her forehead creased by a worry line. “I suppose I should fetch someone to take care of the body. I know that’s not . . .”

“No, I understand . . . it has to be done.” Catherine felt stronger, more capable. She made as if to stand, but Brianne restrained her.

“Maybe you should wait here. You know how people will be. They’ll see your face”—she touched Catherine’s swollen cheeks “—and they’ll be prying, whispering. It might be better to let the mayor come out and make his investigation. That way he can take the edge off the gossip before it gets started.”

Catherine didn’t want to be alone with the body any longer, but she saw the wisdom in waiting and agreed.

“Will you be all right?” Brianne asked.

“I’ll be fine . . . but hurry.”

“I will.” Brianne stood; the wind feathered her hair, lifted it to veil the lower half of her face. “You’re sure you’ll be all right?” There was an odd undertone in her voice, as if it were really another question she was asking, or—and this, Catherine thought, was more likely—as if she were thinking ahead to dealing with the mayor.

Catherine nodded, then caught at Brianne as she started to walk away. “Don’t tell my father. Let me tell him. If he hears it from you, he might go after the Willens.”

“I won’t say a thing, I promise.”

With a smile, a sympathetic pat on the arm, Brianne headed back toward Hangtown, vanishing into the thickets that sprang up beyond the frontal spike. For a while after she had gone, Catherine felt wrapped in her consolation; but the seething of the wind, the chill that infused the air as clouds moved in to cover the sun, these things caused the solitude of the place and the grimness of the circumstance to close down around her, and she began to wish she had returned to Hangtown. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to steady herself, but even then she kept seeing Key’s face, his bloody eye, and remembering his hands on her. Finally, thinking that Brianne had had more than enough time to accomplish her task, she walked up past the frontal spike and stood looking out along the narrow trail that wound through the thickets on Griaule’s back. Several minutes elapsed, and then she spotted three figures—two men and a woman—coming at a brisk pace. She shaded her eyes against a ray of sun that had broken through the overcast, and peered at them. Neither man had the gray hair and portly shape of Hangtown’s mayor. They were lanky, pale, with black hair falling to their shoulders, and were carrying unsheathed knives. Catherine couldn’t make out their faces, but she realized that Brianne must not have set aside their old rivalry, that in the spirit of vengeance she had informed Key’s brothers of his death.

Fear cut through the fog of shock, and she tried to think what to do. There was only one trail and no hope that she could hide in the thickets. She retreated toward the edge of the snout, stepping around the patch of drying blood. Her only chance for escape would be to lower herself on the ropes and take her refuge in Griaule’s mouth; however, the thought of entering so ominous a place, a place shunned by all but the mad, gave her pause. She tried to think of alternatives, but there were none. Brianne would no doubt have lied to the Willens, cast her as the guilty party, and the brothers would never listen to her. She hurried to the edge, buckled on the harness and slipped over the side, working with frenzied speed, lowering in ten and fifteen foot drops. Her view of the mouth lurched and veered—a panorama of bristling leaves and head-high ferns, enormous fangs hooking up from the jaw and pitch-dark emptiness at the entrance to the throat. She was fifty feet from the surface when she felt the rope jerking, quivering; glancing up, she saw that one of the Willens was sawing at it with his knife. Her heart felt hot and throbbing in her chest, her palms were slick. She dropped half the distance to the jaw, stopping with a jolt that sent pain shooting through her spine and left her swinging back and forth, muddle-headed. She began another drop, a shorter one, but the rope parted high above and she fell the last twenty feet, landing with such stunning force that she lost consciousness.

She came to in a bed of ferns, staring up through the fronds at the dull brick-colored roof of Griaule’s mouth, a surface festooned with spiky dark green epiphytes, like the vault of a cathedral that had been invaded by the jungle. She lay still for a moment, gathering herself, testing the aches that mapped her body to determine if anything was broken. A lump sprouted from the back of the head, but the brunt of the impact had been absorbed by her rear end, and though she felt pain there, she didn’t think the damage was severe. Moving cautiously, wincing, she came to her knees and was about to stand when she heard shouts from above.

“See her?”

“Naw . . . you?”

“She musta gone deeper in!”

Catherine peeked between the fronds and saw two dark figures centering networks of ropes, suspended a hundred feet or so overhead like spiders with simple webs. They dropped lower, and panicked, she crawled on her belly away from the mouth, hauling herself along by gripping twists of dead vine that formed a matte underlying the foliage. After she had gone about fifty yards she looked back. The Willens were hanging barely a dozen feet above the tops of the bushes, and as she watched they lowered out of sight. Her instincts told her to move deeper into the mouth, but the air was considerably darker where she now kneeled than where she had landed—a grayish green gloom—and the idea of penetrating the greater darkness of Griaule’s throat stalled her heart. She listened for the Willens and heard slitherings, skitterings, and rustles. Eerie whistles that, although soft, were complex and articulated. She imagined that these were not the cries of tiny creatures but the gutterings of breath in a huge throat, and she had a terrifying sense of the size of the place, of her own relative insignificance. She couldn’t bring herself to continue in deeper, and she made her way toward the side of the mouth, where thick growths of ferns flourished in the shadow. When she reached a spot at which the mouth sloped upward, she buried herself among the ferns and kept very still.

Next to her head was an irregular patch of pale red flesh, where a clump of soil had been pulled away by an uprooted plant. Curious, she extended a forefinger and found it cool and dry. It was like touching stone or wood, and that disappointed her; she had, she realized, been hoping the touch would affect her in some extreme way. She pressed her palm to the flesh, trying to detect the tic of a pulse, but the flesh was inert, and the rustlings and the occasional beating of wings overhead were the only signs of life. She began to grow drowsy, to nod, and she fought to keep awake. But after a few minutes she let herself relax. The more she examined the situation, the more convinced she became that the Willens would not track her this far; the extent of their nerve would be to wait at the verge of the mouth, to lay siege to her, knowing that eventually she would have to seek food and water. Thinking about water made her thirsty, but she denied the craving. She needed rest far more. And removing one of the scaling hooks from her belt, holding it in her right hand in case some animal less cautious than the Willens happened by, she pillowed her head against the pale red patch of Griaule’s flesh and was soon fast asleep.

2

Many of Catherine’s dreams over the years had seemed sendings rather than distillations of experience, but never had she had one so clearly of that character as the dream she had that afternoon in Griaule’s mouth. It was a simple dream, formless, merely a voice whose words less came to her ear than enveloped her, steeping her in their meanings, and of them she retained only a message of reassurance, of security, one so profound that it instilled in her a confidence that lasted even after she waked into a world gone black, the sole illumination being the gleams of reflected firelight that flowed along the curve of one of the fangs. It was an uncanny sight, that huge tooth glazed with fierce red shine, and under other circumstances she would have been frightened by it; but in this instance she did not react to the barbarity of the image and saw it instead as evidence that her suppositions concerning the Willens had been correct. They had built a fire near the lip and were watching for her, expecting her to bolt into their arms. But she had no intention of fulfilling their expectations. Although her confidence flickered on and off, although to go deeper into the dragon seemed irrational, she knew that any other course offered the certainty of a knife stroke across the neck. And, too, despite the apparent rationality of her decision, she had an unshakeable feeling that Griaule was watching over her, that his will was being effected. She had a flash vision of Key Willen’s face, his gaping mouth and blood-red eye, and recalled her terror at his assault. However, these memories no longer harrowed her. They steadied her, resolving certain questions that—while she had never asked them—had always been there to ask. She hadn’t been to blame in any way for the rape, she had not tempted Key. But she saw that she had left herself open to tragedy by her aimlessness, by her reliance on a vague sense of destiny to give life meaning. Now it appeared that her destiny was at hand, and she understood that its violent coloration might have been different had she been different, had she engaged the world with energy and not with a passive attitude. She hoped that knowing all this would prove important, but she doubted that it would, believing that she had gone too far on the wrong path for any degree of knowledge to matter.

It took all her self-control to begin her journey inward, feeling her way along the side of the throat, pushing through ferns and cobwebs, her hands encountering unfamiliar textures that made her skin crawl, alert to the burbling of insects and other night creatures. On one occasion she was close to turning back, but she heard shouts behind her, and fearful that the Willens were on her trail, she kept going. As she started down an incline, she saw a faint gleam riding the curve of the throat wall. The glow brightened, casting the foliage into silhouette, and eager to reach the source, she picked up her pace, tripping over roots, vines snagging her ankles. At length the incline flattened out, and she emerged into a large chamber, roughly circular in shape, its upper regions lost in darkness; upon the floor lay pools of black liquid; mist trailed across the surface of the pools, and whenever the mist lowered to touch the liquid, a fringe of yellowish red flame would flare up, cutting the shadows on the pebbled skin of the floor and bringing to light a number of warty knee-high protuberances that spouted among the pools—these were deep red in color, perforated around the sides, leaking pale threads of mist. At the rear of the chamber was an opening that Catherine assumed led farther into the dragon. The air was warm, dank, and a sweat broke out all over her body. She balked at entering the chamber; in spite of the illumination, it was less a human place than the mouth. But once again she forced herself onward, stepping carefully between the fires and, after discovering that the mist made her giddy, giving the protuberances a wide berth. Piercing whistles came from above. The notion that this might signal the presence of bats caused her to hurry, and she had covered half the distance across when a man’s voice called to her, electrifying her with fear.

“Catherine!” he said. “Not so fast!”

She spun about, her scaling hook at the ready. Hobbling toward her was an elderly white-haired man dressed in the ruin of a silk frock coat embroidered with gold thread, a tattered ruffled shirt, and holed satin leggings. In his left hand he carried a gold-knobbed cane, and at least a dozen glittering rings encircled his bony fingers. He stopped an arms-length away, leaning on his cane, and although Catherine did not lower her hook, her fear diminished. Despite the eccentricity of his appearance, considering the wide spectrum of men and creatures who inhabited Griaule, he seemed comparatively ordinary, a reason for caution but no alarm.

“Ordinary?” The old man cackled. “Oh yes, indeed! Ordinary as angels, as unexceptional as the idea of God!” Before she had a chance to wonder at his knowledge of her thoughts, he let out another cackle. “How could I not know them? We are every one of us creatures of his thought, expressions of his whim. And here what is only marginally evident on the surface becomes vivid reality, inescapable truth. For here—” he poked the chamber floor with his cane “—here we live in the medium of his will.” He hobbled a step closer, fixing her with a rheumy stare. “I have dreamed this moment a thousand times. I know what you will say, what you will think, what you will do. He has instructed me in all your particulars so that I may become your guide, your confidant.”

“What are you talking about?” Catherine hefted her hook, her anxiety increasing.

“Not ‘what,’ ” said the old man. “Who.” A grin split the pale wrinkled leather of his face. “His Scaliness, of course.”

“Griaule?”

“None other.” The old man held out his hand. “Come along now, girl. They’re waiting for us.”

Catherine drew back.

The old man pursed his lips. “Well, I suppose you could return the way you came. The Willens will be happy to see you.”

Flustered, Catherine said, “I don’t understand. How can you know . . .”

“Know your name, your peril? Weren’t you listening? You are of Griaule, daughter. And more so than most, for you have slept at the center of his dreams. Your entire life has been prelude to this time, and your destiny will not be known until you come to the place from which his dreams arise . . . the dragon’s heart.” He took her hand. “My name is Amos Mauldry. Captain Amos Mauldry, at your service. I have waited years for you . . . years! I am to prepare you for the consummate moment of your life. I urge you to follow me, to join the company of the feelies and begin your preparation. But—” he shrugged “—the choice is yours. I will not coerce you more than I have done . . . except to say this. Go with me now, and when you return you will discover that you have nothing to fear of the Willen brothers.”

He let loose of her hand and stood gazing at her with calm regard. She would have liked to disregard his words, but they were in such accord with all she had ever felt about her association with the dragon, she found that she could not. “Who,” she asked, “are the feelies?”

He made a disparaging noise. “Harmless creatures. They pass their time in copulating and arguing among themselves over the most trivial of matters. Were they not of service to Griaule, keeping him free of certain pests, they would have no use whatsoever. Still, there are worse folk in the world, and they do have moments in which they shine.” He shifted impatiently, tapped his cane on the chamber floor. “You’ll meet them soon enough. Are you with me or not?”

Grudgingly, her hook at the ready, Catherine followed Mauldry toward the opening at the rear of the chamber and into a narrow, twisting channel illuminated by a pulsing golden light that issued from within Griaule’s flesh. This radiance, Mauldry said, derived from the dragon’s blood, which, while it did not flow, was subject to fluctuations in brilliance due to changes in its chemistry. Or so he believed. He had regained his light-hearted manner, and as they walked he told Catherine he had captained a cargo ship that plied between Port Chantay and the Pearl Islands.

“We carried livestock, breadfruit, whale oil,” he said. “I can’t think of much we didn’t carry. It was a good life, but hard as hard gets, and after I retired . . . well, I’d never married, and with time on my hands. I figured I owed myself some high times. I decided I’d see the sights, and the sight I most wanted to see was Griaule. I’d heard he was the First Wonder of the World . . . and he was! I was amazed, flabbergasted. I couldn’t get enough of seeing him. He was more than a wonder. A miracle, an absolute majesty of a creature. People warned me to keep clear of the mouth, and they were right. But I couldn’t stay away. One evening—I was walking along the edge of the mouth—two scalehunters set upon me, beat and robbed me. Left me for dead. And I would have died if it hadn’t been for the feelies.” He clucked his tongue. “I suppose I might as well give you some of their background. It can’t help but prepare you for them . . . and I admit they need preparing for. They’re not in the least agreeable to the eye.” He cocked an eye toward Catherine, and after a dozen steps more he said, “Aren’t you going to ask me to proceed.”

“You didn’t seem to need encouragement,” she said.

He chuckled, nodding his approval. “Quite right, quite right.” He walked on in silence, his shoulders hunched and head inclined, like an old turtle who’d learned to get about on two legs.

“Well?” said Catherine, growing annoyed.

“I knew you’d ask,” he said, and winked at her. “I didn’t know who they were myself at first. If I had known I’d have been terrified. There are about five or six hundred in the colony. Their numbers are kept down by childbirth mortality and various other forms of attrition. They’re most of them the descendants of a retarded man named Feely who wandered into the mouth almost a thousand years ago. Apparently he was walking near the mouth when flights of birds and swarms of insects began issuing from it. Not just a few, mind you. Entire populations. Well sir, Feely was badly frightened. He was sure that some terrible beast had chased all these lesser creatures out, and he tried to hide from it. But he was so confused that instead of running away from the mouth, he ran into it and hid in the bushes. He waited for almost a day . . . no beast. The only sign of danger was a muffled thud from deep within the dragon. Finally his curiosity overcame his fear, and he went into the throat.” Mauldry hawked and spat. “He felt secure there. More secure than on the outside, at any rate. Doubtless Griaule’s doing, that feeling. He needed the feelies to be happy so they’d settle down and be his exterminators. Anyway, the first thing Feely did was to bring in a madwoman he’d known in Teocinte, and over the years they recruited other madmen who happened along. I was the first sane person they’d brought into the fold. They’re extremely chauvinistic regarding the sane. But of course they were directed by Griaule to take me in. He knew you’d need someone to talk to.” He prodded the wall with his cane. “And now this is my home. More than a home. It’s my truth, my love. To live here is to be transfigured.”

“That’s a bit hard to swallow,” said Catherine.

“Is it, now? You of all those who dwell on the surface should understand the scope of Griaule’s virtues. There’s no greater security than that he offers, no greater comprehension than that he bestows.”

“You make him sound like a god.”

Mauldry stopped walking, looking at her askance. The golden light waxed bright, filling in his wrinkles with shadows, making him appear to be centuries old. “Well, what do you think he is?” he asked with an air of mild indignation. “What else could he be?”

Another ten minutes brought them to a chamber even more fabulous than the last. In shape it was oval, like an egg with a flattened bottom stood on end, an egg some one hundred and fifty feet high and a bit more than half that in diameter. It was lit by the same pulsing golden glow that had illuminated the channel, but here the fluctuations were more gradual and more extreme, ranging from a murky dimness to a glare approaching that of full daylight. The upper two thirds of the chamber wall was obscured by stacked ranks of small cubicles, leaning together at rickety angles, a geometry lacking the precision of the cells of a honeycomb, yet reminiscent of such, as if the bees that constructed it had been drunk. The entrances of the cubicles were draped with curtains, and lashed to their sides were ropes, rope ladders, and baskets that functioned as elevators, several of which were in use, lowering and lifting men and women dressed in a style similar to Mauldry: Catherine was reminded of a painting she had seen depicting the roof warrens of Port Chantay; but those habitations, while redolent of poverty and despair, had not as did these evoked an impression of squalid degeneracy, of order lapsed into the perverse. The lower portion of the chamber (and it was in this area that the channel emerged) was covered with a motley carpet composed of bolts of silk and satin and other rich fabrics, and seventy or eighty people were strolling and reclining on the gentle slopes. Only the center had been left clear, and there a gaping hole led away into yet another section of the dragon; a system of pipes ran into the hole, and Mauldry later explained that these carried the wastes of the colony into a pit of acids that had once fueled Griaule’s fires. The dome of the chamber was choked with mist, the same pale stuff that had been vented from the protuberances in the previous chamber; birds with black wings and red markings on their heads made wheeling flights in and out of it, and frail scarves of mist drifted throughout. There was a sickly sweet odor to the place, and Catherine heard a murmurous rustling that issued from every quarter.

“Well,” said Mauldry, making a sweeping gesture with his cane that included the entire chamber. “What do you think of our little colony?”

Some of the feelies had noticed them and were edging forward in small groups, stopping, whispering agitatedly among themselves, then edging forward again, all with the hesitant curiosity of savages; and although no signal had been given, the curtains over the cubicle entrances were being thrown back, heads were poking forth, and tiny figures were shinnying down the ropes, crowding into baskets, scuttling downward on the rope ladders, hundreds of people beginning to hurry toward her at a pace that brought to mind the panicked swarming of an anthill. And on first glance they seemed as alike as ants. Thin and pale and stooped, with sloping, nearly hairless skulls, and weepy eyes and thick-lipped slack mouths, like ugly children in their rotted silks and satins. Closer and closer they came, those in front pushed by the swelling ranks at their rear, and Catherine, unnerved by their stares, ignoring Mauldry’s attempts to soothe her, retreated into the channel. Mauldry turned to the feelies, brandishing his cane as if it were a victor’s sword, and cried, “She is here! He has brought her to us at last! She is here!”

His words caused several of those at the front of the press to throw back their heads and loose a whinnying laughter that went higher and higher in pitch as the golden light brightened. Others in the crowd lifted their hands, palms outward, holding them tight to their chests, and made little hops of excitement, and others yet twitched their heads from side to side, cutting their eyes this way and that, their expressions flowing between belligerence and confusion, apparently unsure of what was happening. This exhibition, clearly displaying the feelies’ retardation, the tenuousness of their self-control, dismayed Catherine still more. But Mauldry seemed delighted and continued to exhort them, shouting, “She is here,” over and over. His outcry came to rule the feelies, to orchestrate their movements. They began to sway, to repeat his words, slurring them so that their response was in effect a single word, “Shees’eer, Shees’eer,” that reverberated through the chamber, acquiring a rolling echo, a hissing sonority, like the rapid breathing of a giant. The sound washed over Catherine, enfeebling her with its intensity, and she shrank back against the wall of the channel, expecting the feelies to break ranks and surround her; but they were so absorbed in their chanting, they appeared to have forgotten her. They milled about, bumping into one another, some striking out in anger at those who had impeded their way, others embracing and giggling, engaging in sexual play, but all of them keeping up the chorus of shouts.

Mauldry turned to her, his eyes giving back gleams of the golden light, his face looking in its vacuous glee akin to those of the feelies, and holding out his hands to her, his tone manifesting the bland sincerity of a priest, he said, “Welcome home.”

3

Catherine was housed in two rooms halfway up the chamber wall, an apartment that adjoined Mauldry’s quarters and was furnished with a rich carpeting of silks and furs and embroidered pillows; on the walls, also draped in these materials, hung a mirror with a gem-studded frame and two oil paintings—this bounty, said Mauldry, all part of Griaule’s horde, the bulk of which lay in a cave west of the valley, its location known only to the feelies. One of the rooms contained a large basin for bathing, but since water was at a premium—being collected from points at which it seeped in through the scales—she was permitted one bath a week and no more. Still, the apartment and the general living conditions were on a par with those in Hangtown, and had it not been for the feelies, Catherine might have felt at home. But except in the case of the woman Leitha, who served her meals and cleaned, she could not overcome her revulsion at their inbred appearance and demented manner. They seemed to be responding to stimuli that she could not perceive, stopping now and then to cock an ear to an inaudible call or to stare at some invisible disturbance in the air. They scurried up and down the ropes to no apparent purpose, laughing and chattering, and they engaged in mass copulations at the bottom of the chamber. They spoke a mongrel dialect that she could barely understand, and they would hang on ropes outside her apartment, arguing, offering criticism of one another’s dress and behavior, picking at the most insignificant of flaws and judging them according to an intricate code whose niceties Catherine was unable to master. They would follow her wherever she went, never sharing the same basket, but descending or ascending alongside her, staring, shrinking away if she turned her gaze upon them. With their foppish rags, their jewels, their childish pettiness and jealousies, they both irritated and frightened her; there was a tremendous tension in the way they looked at her, and she had the idea that at any moment they might lose their awe of her and attack.

She kept to her rooms those first weeks, brooding, trying to invent some means of escape, her solitude broken only by Leitha’s ministrations and Mauldry’s visits. He came twice daily and would sit among the pillows, declaiming upon Griaule’s majesty, his truth. She did not enjoy the visits. The righteous quaver in his voice aroused her loathing, reminding her of the mendicant priests who passed now and then through Hangtown, leaving bastards and empty purses in their wake. She found his conversation for the most part boring, and when it did not bore, she found it disturbing in its constant references to her time of trial at the dragon’s heart. She had no doubt that Griaule was at work in her life. The longer she remained in the colony, the more vivid her dreams became and the more certain she grew that his purpose was somehow aligned with her presence there. But the pathetic condition of the feelies shed a wan light on her old fantasies of a destiny entwined with the dragon’s, and she began to see herself in that wan light, to experience a revulsion at her fecklessness equal to that she felt toward those around her.

“You are our salvation,” Mauldry told her one day as she sat sewing herself a new pair of trousers—she refused to dress in the gilt and satin rags preferred by the feelies. “Only you can know the mystery of the dragon’s heart, only you can inform us of his deepest wish for us. We’ve known this for years.”

Seated amid the barbaric disorder of silks and furs, Catherine looked out through a gap in the curtains, watching the waning of the golden light. “You hold me prisoner,” she said. “Why should I help you?”

“Would you leave us, then?” Mauldry asked. “What of the Willens?”

“I doubt they’re still waiting for me. Even if they are, it’s only a matter of which death I prefer, a lingering one here or a swift one at their hands.”

Mauldry fingered the gold knob of his cane. “You’re right,” he said. “The Willens are no longer a menace.”

She glanced up at him.

“They died the moment you went down out of Griaule’s mouth,” he said. “He sent his creatures to deal with them, knowing you were his at long last.”

Catherine remembered the shouts she’d heard while walking down the incline of the throat. “What creatures?”

“That’s of no importance,” said Mauldry. “What is important is that you apprehend the subtlety of his power, his absolute mastery and control over your thoughts, your being.”

“Why?” she asked. “Why is that important?” He seemed to be struggling to explain himself, and she laughed. “Lost touch with your god, Mauldry? Won’t he supply the appropriate cant?”

Mauldry composed himself. “It is for you, not I, to understand why you are here. You must explore Griaule, study the miraculous workings of his flesh, involve yourself in the intricate order of his being.”

In frustration, Catherine punched at a pillow. “If you don’t let me go, I’ll die! This place will kill me. I won’t be around long enough to do any exploring.”

“Oh, but you will.” Mauldry favored her with an unctuous smile. “That, too, is known to us.”

Ropes creaked, and a moment later the curtains parted, and Leitha, a young woman in a gown of watered blue taffeta, whose bodice pushed up the pale nubs of her breasts, entered bearing Catherine’s dinner tray. She set down the tray. “Be mo‘, ma’am?” she said. “Or mus’ I later c’meah.” She gazed fixedly at Catherine, her close-set brown eyes blinking, fingers plucking at the folds of her gown.

“Whatever you want,” Catherine said.

Leitha continued to stare at her, and only when Mauldry spoke sharply to her did she turn and leave.

Catherine looked down disconsolately at the tray and noticed that in addition to the usual fare of greens and fruit (gathered from the dragon’s mouth) there were several slices of underdone meat, whose reddish hue appeared identical to the color of Griaule’s flesh. “What’s this?” she asked, poking at one of the slices.

“The hunters were successful today,” said Mauldry. “Every so often hunting parties are sent into the digestive tract. It’s quite dangerous, but there are beasts there that can injure Griaule. It serves him that we hunt them, and their flesh nourishes us.” He leaned forward, studying her face. “Another party is going out tomorrow. Perhaps you’d care to join them. I can arrange it if you wish. You’ll be well protected.”

Catherine’s initial impulse was to reject the invitation, but then she thought that this might offer an opportunity for escape; in fact, she realized that to play upon Mauldry’s tendencies, to evince interest in a study of the dragon, would be a wise move. The more she learned about Griaule’s geography, the greater chance there would be that she would find a way out.

“You said it was dangerous . . . How dangerous?”

“For you? Not in the least. Griaule would not harm you. But for the hunting party, well . . . lives will be lost.”

“And they’re going out tomorrow?”

“Perhaps the next day as well. We’re not sure how extensive an infestation is involved.”

“What kind of beast are you talking about?”

“Serpents of a sort.”

Catherine’s enthusiasm was dimmed, but she saw no other means of taking action. “Very well. I’ll go with them tomorrow.”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” It took Mauldry three tries to heave himself up from the cushion, and when at last he managed to stand, he leaned on his cane, breathing heavily. “I’ll come for you early in the morning.”

“You’re going, too? You don’t seem up to the exertion.”

Mauldry chuckled. “It’s true, I’m an old man. But where you’re concerned, daughter, my energies are inexhaustible.” He performed a gallant bow and hobbled from the room.

Not long after he had left, Leitha returned. She drew a second curtain across the entrance, cutting the light, even at its most brilliant, to a dim effusion. Then she stood by the entrance, eyes fixed on Catherine. “Wan’ mo’ fum Leitha?” she asked.

The question was not a formality. Leitha had made it plain by touches and other signs that Catherine had but to ask and she would come to her as a lover. Her deformities masked by the shadowy air, she had the look of a pretty young girl dressed for a dance, and for a moment, in the grip of loneliness and despair, watching Leitha alternately brightening and merging with gloom, listening to the unceasing murmur of the feelies from without, aware in full of the tribal strangeness of the colony and her utter lack of connection, Catherine felt a bizarre arousal. But the moment passed, and she was disgusted with herself, with her weakness, and angry at Leitha and this degenerate place that was eroding her humanity. “Get out,” she said coldly, and when Leitha hesitated, she shouted the command, sending the girl stumbling backwards from the room. Then she turned onto her stomach, her face pressed into a pillow, expecting to cry, feeling the pressure of a sob building in her chest; but the sob never manifested, and she lay there, knowing her emptiness, feeling that she was no longer worthy of even her own tears.

Behind one of the cubicles in the lower half of the chamber was hidden the entrance to a wide circular passage ringed by ribs of cartilage, and it was along this passage the next morning that Catherine and Mauldry, accompanied by thirty male feelies, set out upon the hunt. They were armed with swords and bore torches to light the way, for here Griaule’s veins were too deeply embedded to provide illumination; they walked in a silence broken only by coughs and the soft scraping of their footsteps. The silence, such a contrast from the feelies’ usual chatter, unsettled Catherine, and the flaring and guttering of the torches, the apparition of a backlit pale face turned toward her, the tingling acidic scent that grew stronger and stronger, all this assisted her impression that they were lost souls treading some byway in Hell.

Their angle of descent increased, and shortly thereafter they reached a spot from which Catherine had a view of a black distance shot through with intricate networks of fine golden skeins, like spiderwebs of gold in a night sky. Mauldry told her to wait, and the torches of the hunting party moved off, making it clear that they had come to a large chamber; but she did not understand just how large until a fire suddenly bloomed, bursting into towering flames: an enormous bonfire composed of sapling trunks and entire bushes. The size of the fire was impressive in itself, but the immense cavity of the stomach that it partially revealed was more impressive yet. It could not have been less than two hundred yards long, and was walled with folds of thin whitish skin figured by lacings and branchings of veins, attached to curving ribs covered with even thinner skin that showed their every articulation. A quarter of the way across the cavity, the floor declined into a sink brimming with a dark liquid, and it was along a section of the wall close to the sink that the bonfire had been lit, its smoke billowing up toward a bruised patch of skin some fifty feet in circumference with a tattered rip at the center. As Catherine watched the entire patch began to undulate. The hunting party gathered beneath it, ranged around the bonfire, their swords raised. Then, with ponderous slowness a length of thick white tubing was extruded from the rip, a gigantic worm that lifted its blind head above the hunting party, opened a mouth fringed with palps to expose a dark red maw and emitted a piercing squeal that touched off echoes and made Catherine put her hands to her ears. More and more of the worm’s body emerged from the stomach wall, and she marveled at the courage of the hunting party, who maintained their ground. The worm’s squealing became unbearably loud as smoke enveloped it; it lashed about, twisting and probing at the air with its head, and then, with an even louder cry, it fell across the bonfire, writhing, sending up showers of sparks. It rolled out of the fire, crushing several of the party; the others set to with their swords, hacking in a frenzy at the head, painting streaks of dark blood over the corpse-pale skin. Catherine realized that she had pressed her fists to her cheeks and was screaming, so involved was she in the battle. The worm’s blood spattered the floor of the cavity, its skin was charred and blistered from the flames, and its head was horribly slashed, the flesh hanging in ragged strips. But it continued to squeal, humping up great sections of its body, forming an arch over groups of attackers and dropping down upon them. A third of the hunting party lay motionless, their limbs sprawled in graceless attitudes, the remnants of the bonfire—heaps of burning branches—scattered among them; the rest stabbed and sliced at the increasingly torpid worm, dancing away from its lunges. At last the worm lifted half its body off the floor, its head held high, silent for a moment, swaying with the languor of a mesmerized serpent. It let out a cry like the whistle of a monstrous tea kettle, a cry that seemed to fill the cavity with its fierce vibrations, and fell, twisting once and growing still, its maw half-open, palps twitching in the register of some final internal function.

The hunting party collapsed around it, winded, drained, some leaning on their swords. Shocked by the suddenness of the silence, Catherine went a few steps out into the cavity, Mauldry at her shoulder. She hesitated, then moved forward again, thinking that some of the party might need tending. But those who had fallen were dead, their limbs broken, blood showing on their mouths. She walked alongside the worm. The thickness of its body was three times her height, the skin glistening and warped by countless tiny puckers and tinged with a faint bluish cast that made it all the more ghastly.

“What are you thinking?” Mauldry asked.

Catherine shook her head. No thoughts would come to her. It was as if the process of thought itself had been canceled by the enormity of what she had witnessed. She had always supposed that she had a fair idea of Griaule’s scope, his complexity, but now she understood that whatever she had once believed had been inadequate, and she struggled to acclimate to this new perspective. There was a commotion behind her. Members of the hunting party were hacking slabs of meat from the worm. Mauldry draped an arm about her, and by that contact she became aware that she was trembling.

“Come along,” he said. “I’ll take you home.”

“To my room, you mean?” Her bitterness resurfaced, and she threw off his arm.

“Perhaps you’ll never think of it as home,” he said. “Yet nowhere is there a place more suited to you.” He signaled to one of the hunting party, who came toward them, stopped to light a dead torch from a pile of burning branches.

With a dismal laugh, Catherine said, “I’m beginning to find it irksome how you claim to know so much about me.”

“It’s not you I claim to know,” he said, “though it has been given me to understand something of your purpose. But—” he rapped the tip of his cane against the floor of the cavity “—he by whom you are most known, him I know well.”

4

Catherine made three escape attempts during the next two months, and thereafter gave up on the enterprise; with hundreds of eyes watching her, there was no point in wasting energy. For almost six months following the final attempt she became dispirited and refused to leave her rooms. Her health suffered, her thoughts paled, and she lay abed for hours, reliving her life in Hangtown, which she came to view as a model of joy and contentment. Her inactivity caused loneliness to bear in upon her. Mauldry tried his best to entertain her, but his mystical obsession with Griaule made him incapable of offering the consolation of a true friend. And so, without friends or lovers, without even an enemy, she sank into a welter of self-pity and began to toy with the idea of suicide. The prospect of never seeing the sun again, of attending no more carnivals at Teocinte . . . it seemed too much to endure. But either she was not brave enough or not sufficiently foolish to take her own life, and deciding that no matter how vile or delimiting the circumstance, it promised more than eternal darkness, she gave herself to the one occupation the feelies would permit her: the exploration and study of Griaule.

Like one of those enormous Tibetan sculptures of the Buddha constructed within a tower only a trifle larger than the sculpture itself, Griaule’s unbeating heart was a dimpled golden shape as vast as a cathedral and was enclosed within a chamber whose walls left a gap six feet wide around the organ. The chamber could be reached by passing through a vein that had ruptured long ago and was now a wrinkled brown tube just big enough for Catherine to crawl along it; to make this transit and then emerge into that narrow space beside the heart was an intensely claustrophobic experience, and it took her a long, long while to get used to the process. Even after she had grown accustomed to this, it was still difficult for her to adjust to the peculiar climate at the heart. The air was thick with a heated stinging scent that reminded her of the brimstone stink left by a lightning stroke, and there was an atmosphere of imminence, a stillness and tension redolent of some cthonic disturbance that might strike at any moment. The blood at the heart did not merely fluctuate (and here the fluctuations were erratic, varying both in range of brilliance and rapidity of change); it circulated—the movement due to variations in heat and pressure—through a series of convulsed inner chambers, and this eddying in conjunction with the flickering brilliance threw patterns of light and shadow on the heart wall, patterns as complex and fanciful as arabesques that drew her eye in. Staring at them, Catherine began to be able to predict what configurations would next appear and to apprehend a logic to their progression; it was nothing that she could put into words, but watching the play of light and shadow produced in her emotional responses that seemed keyed to the shifting patterns and allowed her to make crude guesses as to the heart’s workings. She learned that if she stared too long at the patterns, dreams would take her, dreams notable for their vividness, and one particularly notable in that it recurred again and again.

The dream began with a sunrise, the solar disc edging up from the southern horizon, its rays spearing toward a coast strewn with great black rocks that protruded from the shallows, and perched upon them were sleeping dragons; as the sun warmed them, light flaring on their scales, they grumbled and lifted their heads and with the snapping sound of huge sails filling with wind, they unfolded their leathery wings and went soaring up into an indigo sky flecked with stars arranged into strange constellations, wheeling and roaring their exultation . . . all but one dragon, who flew only a brief arc before coming disjointed in midflight and dropping like a stone into the water, vanishing beneath the waves. It was an awesome thing to see, this tumbling flight, the wings billowing, tearing, the fanged mouth open, claws grasping for purchase in the air. But despite its beauty, the dream seemed to have little relevance to Griaule’s situation. He was in no danger of falling, that much was certain. Nevertheless, the frequency of the dream’s recurrence persuaded Catherine that something must be amiss, that perhaps Griaule feared an attack of the sort that had stricken the flying dragon. With this in mind she began to inspect the heart, using her hooks to clamber up the steep slopes of the chamber walls, sometimes hanging upside down like a blond spider above the glowing, flickering organ. But she could find nothing out of order, no imperfections—at least as far as she could determine—and the sole result of the inspection was that the dream stopped occurring and was replaced by a simpler dream in which she watched the chest of a sleeping dragon contract and expand. She could make no sense of it, and although the dream continued to recur, she paid less and less attention to it.

Mauldry, who had been expecting miraculous insights from her, was depressed when none were forthcoming. “Perhaps I’ve been wrong all these years,” he said. “Or senile. Perhaps I’m growing senile.”

A few months earlier, Catherine, locked into bitterness and resentment, might have seconded his opinion out of spite; but her studies at the heart had soothed her, infused her both with calm resignation and some compassion for her jailers—they could not, after all, be blamed for their pitiful condition—and she said to Mauldry, “I’ve only begun to learn. It’s likely to take a long time before I understand what he wants. And that’s in keeping with his nature, isn’t it? That nothing happens quickly?”

“I suppose you’re right,” he said glumly.

“Of course I am,” she said. “Sooner or later there’ll be a revelation. But a creature like Griaule doesn’t yield his secrets to a casual glance. Just give me time.”

And oddly enough, though she had spoken these words to cheer Mauldry, they seemed to ring true.

She had started her explorations with minimal enthusiasm, but Griaule’s scope was so extensive, his populations of parasites and symbiotes so exotic and intriguing, her passion for knowledge was fired and over the next six years she grew zealous in her studies, using them to compensate for the emptiness of her life. With Mauldry ever at her side, accompanied by small groups of the feelies, she mapped the interior of the dragon, stopping short of penetrating the skull, warned off from that region by a premonition of danger. She sent several of the more intelligent feelies into Teocinte, where they acquired beakers and flasks and books and writing materials that enabled her to build a primitive laboratory for chemical analysis. She discovered that the egg-shaped chamber occupied by the colony would—had the dragon been fully alive—be pumped full of acids and gasses by the contraction of the heart muscle, flooding the channel, mingling in the adjoining chamber with yet another liquid, forming a volatile mixture that Griaule’s breath would—if he so desired—kindle into flame; if he did not so desire, the expansion of the heart would empty the chamber. She distilled from these liquids and from that she derived a potent narcotic that she named brianine after her nemesis, and from a lichen growing on the outer surface of the lungs, she derived a powerful stimulant. She catalogued the dragon’s myriad flora and fauna, covering the walls of her rooms with lists and charts and notations on their behaviors. Many of the animals were either familiar to her or variants of familiar forms. Spiders, bats, swallows, and the like. But as was the case on the dragon’s surface, a few of them testified to his otherworldly origins, and perhaps the most curious of them was Catherine’s metahex (her designation for it), a creature with six identical bodies that thrived in the stomach acids. Each body was approximately the size and color of a worn penny, fractionally more dense than a jellyfish, ringed with cilia, and all were in a constant state of agitation. She had at first assumed the metahex to be six creatures, a species that traveled in sixes, but had begun to suspect otherwise when—upon killing one for the purposes of dissection—the other five bodies had also died. She had initiated a series of experiments that involved menacing and killing hundreds of the things, and had ascertained that the bodies were connected by some sort of field—one whose presence she deduced by process of observation—that permitted the essence of the creature to switch back and forth between the bodies, utilizing the ones it did not occupy as a unique form of camouflage. But even the metahex seemed ordinary when compared to the ghostvine, a plant that she discovered grew in one place alone, a small cavity near the base of the skull.

None of the colony would approach that region, warned away by the same sense of danger that had afflicted Catherine, and it was presumed that should one venture too close to the brain, Griaule would mobilize some of his more deadly inhabitants to deal with the interloper. But Catherine felt secure in approaching the cavity, and leaving Mauldry and her escort of feelies behind, she climbed the steep channel that led up to it, lighting her way with a torch, and entered through an aperture not much wider than her hips. Once inside, seeing that the place was lit by veins of golden blood that branched across the ceiling, flickering like the blown flame of a candle, she extinguished the torch; she noticed with surprise that except for the ceiling, the entire cavity—a boxy space some twenty feet long, about eight feet in height—was fettered with vines whose leaves were dark green, glossy, with complex veination and tips that ended in minuscule hollow tubes. She was winded from the climb, more winded—she thought—than she should have been, and she sat down against the wall to catch her breath; then, feeling drowsy, she closed her eyes for a moment’s rest. She came alert to the sound of Mauldry’s voice shouting her name. Still drowsy, annoyed by his impatience, she called out, “I just want to rest a few minutes!”

“A few minutes?” he cried. “You’ve been there three days! What’s going on? Are you all right?”

“That’s ridiculous!” She started to come to her feet, then sat back, stunned by the sight of a naked woman with long blond hair curled up in a corner not ten feet away, nestled so close to the cavity wall that the tips of leaves half-covered her body and obscured her face.

“Catherine!” Mauldry shouted. “Answer me!”

“I . . . I’m all right! Just a minute!”

The woman stirred and made a complaining noise.

“Catherine!”

“I said I’m all right!”

The woman stretched out her legs; on her right hip was a fine pink scar, hook-shaped, identical to the scar on Catherine’s hip, evidence of a childhood fall. And on the back of the right knee, a patch of raw, puckered skin, the product of an acid burn she’d suffered the year before. She was astonished by the sight of these markings, but when the woman sat up and Catherine understood that she was staring at her twin—identical not only in feature, but also in expression, wearing a resigned look that she had glimpsed many times in her mirror—her astonishment turned to fright. She could have sworn she felt the muscles of the woman’s face shifting as the expression changed into one of pleased recognition, and in spite of her fear, she had a vague sense of the woman’s emotions, of her burgeoning hope and elation.

“Sister,” said the woman; she glanced down at her body, and Catherine had a momentary flash of doubled vision, watching the woman’s head decline and seeing as well naked breasts and belly from the perspective of the woman’s eyes. Her vision returned to normal, and she looked at the woman’s face . . . her face. Though she had studied herself in the mirror each morning for years, she had never had such a clear perception of the changes that life inside the dragon had wrought upon her. Fine lines bracketed her lips, and the beginnings of crows’ feet radiated from the corners of her eyes. Her cheeks had hollowed, and this made her cheekbones appear sharper; the set of her mouth seemed harder, more determined. The high gloss and perfection of her youthful beauty had been marred far more than she had thought, and this dismayed her. However, the most remarkable change—the one that most struck her—was not embodied by any one detail but in the overall character of the face, in that it exhibited character, for—she realized—prior to entering the dragon it had displayed very little, and what little it had displayed had been evidence of indulgence. It troubled her to have this knowledge of the fool she had been thrust upon her with such poignancy.

As if the woman had been listening to her thoughts, she held out her hand and said, “Don’t punish yourself, sister. We are all victims of our past.”

“What are you?” Catherine asked, pulling back. She felt the woman was a danger to her, though she was not sure why.

“I am you.” Again the woman reached out to touch her, and again Catherine shifted away. The woman’s face was smiling, but Catherine felt the wash of her frustration and noticed that the woman had leaned forward only a few degrees, remaining in contact with the leaves of the vines as if there were some attachment between them that she could not break.

“I doubt that.” Catherine was fascinated, but she was beginning to be swayed by the intuition that the woman’s touch would harm her.

“But I am!” the woman insisted. “And something more, besides.”

“What more?”

“The plant extracts essences,” said the woman. “Infinitely small constructs of the flesh from which it creates a likeness free of the imperfections of your body. And since the seeds of your future are embodied by these essences, though they are unknown to you, I know them . . . for now.”

“For now?”

The woman’s tone had become desperate. “There’s a connection between us . . . surely you feel it?”

“Yes.”

“To live, to complete that connection, I must touch you. And once I do, this knowledge of the future will be lost to me. I will be as you . . . though separate. But don’t worry. I won’t interfere with you, I’ll live my own life.” She leaned forward again, and Catherine saw that some of the leaves were affixed to her back, the hollow tubes at their tips adhering to the skin. Once again she had an awareness of danger, a growing apprehension that the woman’s touch would drain her of some vital substance.

“If you know my future,” she said, “then tell me . . . will I ever escape Griaule.”

Mauldry chose this moment to call out to her, and she soothed him by saying that she was taking some cuttings, that she would be down soon. She repeated her question, and the woman said, “Yes, yes, you will leave the dragon,” and tried to grasp her hand. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t harm you.”

The woman’s flesh was sagging, and Catherine felt the eddying of her fear.

“Please!” she said, holding out both hands. “Only your touch will sustain me. Without it, I’ll die!”

But Catherine refused to trust her.

“You must believe me!” cried the woman. “I am your sister! My blood is yours, my memories!” The flesh upon her arms had sagged into billows like the flesh of an old woman, and her face was becoming jowly, grossly distorted. “Oh, please! Remember the time with Stel below the wing . . . you were a maiden. The wind was blowing thistles down from Griaule’s back like a rain of silver. And remember the gala in Teocinte? Your sixteenth birthday. You wore a mask of orange blossoms and gold wire, and three men asked for your hand. For God’s sake, Catherine! Listen to me! The major . . . don’t you remember him? The young major? You were in love with him, but you didn’t follow your heart. You were afraid of love, you didn’t trust what you felt because you never trusted yourself in those days.”

The connection between them was fading, and Catherine steeled herself against the woman’s entreaties, which had begun to move her more than a little bit. The woman slumped down, her features blurring, a horrid sight, like the melting of a wax figure, and then, an even more horrid sight, she smiled, her lips appearing to dissolve away from teeth that were themselves dissolving.

“I understand,” said the woman in a frail voice, and gave a husky, glutinous laugh. “Now I see.”

“What is it?” Catherine asked. But the woman collapsed, rolling onto her side, and the process of deterioration grew more rapid; within the span of a few minutes she had dissipated into a gelatinous grayish white puddle that retained the rough outline of her form. Catherine was both appalled and relieved; however, she couldn’t help feeling some remorse, uncertain whether she had acted in self-defense or through cowardice had damned a creature who was by nature no more reprehensible than herself. While the woman had been alive—if that was the proper word—Catherine had been mostly afraid, but now she marveled at the apparition, at the complexity of a plant that could produce even the semblance of a human. And the woman had been, she thought, something more vital than mere likeness. How else could she have known her memories? Or could memory, she wondered, have a physiological basis? She forced herself to take samples of the woman’s remains, of the vines, with an eye toward exploring the mystery. But she doubted that the heart of such an intricate mystery would be accessible to her primitive instruments. This was to prove a self-fulfilling prophecy, because she really did not want to know the secrets of the ghostvine, leery as to what might be brought to light concerning her own nature, and with the passage of time, although she thought of it often and sometimes discussed the phenomenon with Mauldry, she eventually let the matter drop.

5

Though the temperature never changed, though neither rain nor snow fell, though the fluctuations of the golden light remained consistent in their rhythms, the seasons were registered inside the dragon by migrations of birds, the weaving of cocoons, the birth of millions of insects at once; and it was by these signs that Catherine—nine years after entering Griaule’s mouth—knew it to be autumn when she fell in love. The three years prior to this had been characterized by a slackening of her zeal, a gradual wearing down of her enthusiasm for scientific knowledge, and this tendency became marked after the death of Captain Mauldry from natural causes; without him to serve as a buffer between her and the feelies, she was overwhelmed by their inanity, their woeful aspect. In truth, there was not much left to learn. Her maps were complete, her specimens and notes filled several rooms, and while she continued her visits to the dragon’s heart, she no longer sought to interpret the dreams, using them instead to pass the boring hours. Again she grew restless and began to consider escape. Her life was being wasted, she believed, and she wanted to return to the world, to engage more vital opportunities than those available to her in Griaule’s many-chambered prison. It was not that she was ungrateful for the experience. Had she managed to escape shortly after her arrival, she would have returned to a life of meaningless frivolity; but now, armed with knowledge, aware of her strengths and weaknesses, possessed of ambition and a heightened sense of morality, she thought she would be able to accomplish something of importance. But before she could determine whether or not escape was possible, there was a new arrival at the colony, a man whom a group of feelies—while gathering berries near the mouth—had found lying unconscious and had borne to safety. The man’s name was John Colmacos, and he was in his early thirties, a botanist from the university at Port Chantay who had been abandoned by his guides when he insisted on entering the mouth and had subsequently been mauled by apes that had taken up residence in the mouth. He was lean, rawboned, with powerful, thick-fingered hands and fine brown hair that would never stay combed. His long-jawed, horsey face struck a bargain between homely and distinctive, and was stamped with a perpetually inquiring expression, as if he were a bit perplexed by everything he saw. His blue eyes were large and intricate, the irises flecked with green and hazel, appearing surprisingly delicate in contrast to the rest of him.

Catherine, happy to have rational company, especially that of a professional in her vocation, took charge of nursing him back to health—he had suffered fractures of the arm and ankle, and was badly cut about the face; and in the course of this she began to have fantasies about him as a lover. She had never met a man with his gentleness of manner, his lack of pretense, and she found it most surprising that he wasn’t concerned with trying to impress her. Her conception of men had been limited to the soldiers of Teocinte, the thugs of Hangtown, and everything about John fascinated her. For a while she tried to deny her feelings, telling herself that she would have fallen in love with almost anyone under the circumstances, afraid that by loving she would only increase her dissatisfaction with her prison; and, too, there was the realization that this was doubtless another of Griaule’s manipulations, his attempt to make her content with her lot, to replace Mauldry with a lover. But she couldn’t deny that under any circumstance she would have been attracted to John Colmacos for many reasons, not the least of which was his respect for her work with Griaule, for how she had handled adversity. Nor could she deny that the attraction was mutual. That was clear. Although there were awkward moments, there was no mooniness between them; they were both watching what was happening.

“This is amazing,” he said one day while going through one of her notebooks, lying on a pile of furs in her apartment. “It’s hard to believe you haven’t had training.”

A flush spread over her cheeks. “Anyone in my shoes, with all that time, nothing else to do, they would have done no less.”

He set down the notebook and measured her with a stare that caused her to lower her eyes. “You’re wrong,” he said. “Most people would have fallen apart. I can’t think of anybody else who could have managed all this. You’re remarkable.”

She felt oddly incompetent in the light of this judgment, as if she had accorded him ultimate authority and were receiving the sort of praise that a wise adult might bestow upon an inept child who had done well for once. She wanted to explain to him that everything she had done had been a kind of therapy, a hobby to stave off despair; but she didn’t know how to put this into words without sounding awkward and falsely modest, and so she merely said, “Oh,” and busied herself with preparing a dose of brianine to take away the pain in his ankle.

“You’re embarrassed,” he said. “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“I’m not . . . I mean, I . . .” She laughed. “I’m still not accustomed to talking.”

He said nothing, smiling.

“What is it?” she said, defensive, feeling that he was making fun of her.

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you smiling?”

“I could frown,” he said, “if that would make you comfortable.”

Irritated, she bent to her task, mixing paste in a brass goblet studded with uncut emeralds, then molding it into a pellet.

“That was a joke,” he said.

“I know.”

“What’s the matter?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Look,” he said. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable . . . I really don’t. What am I doing wrong?”

She sighed, exasperated with herself. “It’s not you,” she said. “I just can’t get used to you being here, that’s all.”

From without came the babble of some feelies lowering on ropes toward the chamber floor.

“I can understand that,” he said. “I . . .” He broke off, looked down and fingered the edge of the notebook.

“What were you going to say?”

He threw back his head, laughed. “Do you see how we’re acting? Explaining ourselves constantly . . . as if we could hurt each other by saying the wrong word.”

She glanced over at him, met his eyes, then looked away.

“What I meant was, we’re not that fragile,” he said, and then, as if by way of clarification, he hastened to add: “We’re not that . . . vulnerable to one another.”

He held her stare for a moment, and this time it was he who looked away and Catherine who smiled.

If she hadn’t known she was in love, she would have suspected as much from the change in her attitude toward the dragon. She seemed to be seeing everything anew. Her wonder at Griaule’s size and strangeness had been restored, and she delighted in displaying his marvelous features to John—the orioles and swallows that never once had flown under the sun, the glowing heart, the cavity where the ghostvine grew (though she would not linger there), and a tiny chamber close to the heart lit not by Griaule’s blood but by thousands of luminous white spiders that shifted and crept across the blackness of the ceiling, like a night sky whose constellations had come to life. It was in this chamber that they engaged in their first intimacy, a kiss from which Catherine—after initially letting herself be swept away—pulled back, disoriented by the powerful sensations flooding her body, sensations both familiar and unnatural in that she hadn’t experienced them for so long, and startled by the suddenness with which her fantasies had become real. Flustered, she ran from the chamber, leaving John, who was still hobbled by his injuries, to limp back to the colony alone.

She hid from him most of that day sitting with her knees drawn up on a patch of peach-colored silk near the hole at the center of the colony’s floor, immersed in the bustle and gabble of the feelies as they promenaded in their decaying finery. Though for the most part they were absorbed in their own pursuits, some sensed her mood and gathered around her, touching her, making the whimpering noises that among them passed for expressions of tenderness. Their pasty doglike faces ringed her, uniformly sad, and as if sadness were contagious, she started to cry. At first her tears seemed the product of her inability to cope with love, and then it seemed she was crying over the poor thing of her life, the haplessness of her days inside the body of the dragon; but she came to feel that her sadness was one with Griaule’s, that this feeling of gloom and entrapment reflected his essential mood, and that thought stopped her tears. She’d never considered the dragon an object deserving of sympathy, and she did not now consider him such; but perceiving him imprisoned in a web of ancient magic, and the Chinese puzzle of lesser magics and imprisonments that derived from that original event, she felt foolish for having cried. Everything, she realized, even the happiest of occurrences, might be a cause for tears if you failed to see it in terms of the world that you inhabited; however, if you managed to achieve a balanced perspective, you saw that although sadness could result from every human action, you had to seize the opportunities for effective action which came your way and not question them, no matter how unrealistic or futile they might appear. Just as Griaule had done by finding a way to utilize his power while immobilized. She laughed to think of herself emulating Griaule even in this abstract fashion, and several of the feelies standing beside her echoed her laughter. One of the males, an old man with tufts of gray hair poking up from his pallid skull, shuffled near, picking at a loose button on his stiff, begrimed coat of silver-embroidered satin.

“Cat’rine mus’ be easy sweetly, now?” he said. “No mo’ bad t’ing?”

“No,” she said. “No more bad thing.”

On the other side of the hole a pile of naked feelies were writhing together in the clumsiness of foreplay, men trying to penetrate men, getting angry, slapping one another, then lapsing into giggles when they found a woman and figured out the proper procedure. Once this would have disgusted her, but no more. Judged by the attitudes of a place not their own, perhaps the feelies were disgusting; but this was their place, and Catherine’s place as well, and accepting that at last, she stood and walked toward the nearest basket. The old man hustled after her, fingering his lapels in a parody of self-importance, and, as if he were the functionary of her mood, he announced to everyone they encountered, “No mo’ bad t’ing, no mo’ bad t’ing.”

Riding up in the basket was like passing in front of a hundred tiny stages upon which scenes from the same play were being performed—pale figures slumped on silks, playing with gold and bejeweled baubles—and gazing around her, ignoring the stink, the dilapidation, she felt she was looking out upon an exotic kingdom. Always before she had been impressed by its size and grotesqueness; but now she was struck by its richness, and she wondered whether the feelies’ style of dress was inadvertent or if Griaule’s subtlety extended to the point of clothing this human refuse in the rags of dead courtiers and kings. She felt exhilarated, joyful; but as the basket lurched near the level on which her rooms were located, she became nervous. It had been so long since she had been with a man, and she was worried that she might not be suited to him . . . then she recalled that she’d been prone to these worries even in the days when she had been with a new man every week.

She lashed the basket to a peg, stepped out onto the walkway outside her rooms, took a deep breath and pushed through the curtains, pulled them shut behind her. John was asleep, the furs pulled up to his chest. In the fading half-light, his face—dirtied by a few days’ growth of beard—looked sweetly mysterious and rapt, like the face of a saint at meditation, and she thought it might be best to let him sleep; but that, she realized, was a signal of her nervousness, not of compassion. The only thing to do was to get it over with, to pass through nervousness as quickly as possible and learn what there was to learn. She stripped off her trousers, her shirt, and stood for a second above him, feeling giddy, frail, as if she’d stripped off much more than a few ounces of fabric. Then she eased in beneath the furs, pressing the length of her body to his. He stirred but didn’t wake, and this delighted her; she liked the idea of having him in her clutches, of coming to him in the middle of a dream, and she shivered with the apprehension of gleeful, childish power. He tossed, turned onto his side to face her, still asleep, and she pressed closer, marveling at how ready she was, how open to him. He muttered something, and as she nestled against him, he grew hard, his erection pinned between their bellies. Cautiously, she lifted her right knee atop his hip, guided him between her legs and moved her hips back and forth, rubbing against him, slowly, slowly, teasing herself with little bursts of pleasure. His eyelids twitched, blinked open, and he stared at her, his eyes looking black and wet, his skin stained a murky gold in the dimness. “Catherine,” he said, and she gave a soft laugh, because her name seemed a power the way he had spoken it. His fingers hooked into the plump meat of her hips as he pushed and prodded at her, trying to find the right angle. Her head fell back, her eyes closed, concentrating on the feeling that centered her dizziness and heat, and then he was inside her, going deep with a single thrust, beginning to make love to her, and she said, “Wait, wait,” holding him immobile, afraid for an instant, feeling too much, a black wave of sensation building, threatening to wash her away.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered. “Do you want . . .”

“Just wait . . . just for a bit.” She rested her forehead against his, trembling, amazed by the difference that he made in her body; one moment she felt buoyant, as if their connection had freed her from the restraints of gravity, and the next moment—whenever he shifted or eased fractionally deeper—she would feel as if all his weight were pouring inside her and she was sinking into the cool silks.

“Are you all right?”

“Mmm.” She opened her eyes, saw his face inches away and was surprised that he didn’t appear unfamiliar.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

“I was wondering who you were, and when I looked at you, it was as if I already knew.” She traced the line of his upper lip with her forefinger. “Who are you?”

“I thought you knew already.”

“Maybe . . . but I don’t know anything specific. Just that you were a professor.”

“You want to know specifics?”

“Yes.”

“I was an unruly child,” he said. “I refused to eat onion soup, I never washed behind my ears.”

His grasp tightened on her hips, and he thrust inside her, a few slow, delicious movements, kissing her mouth, her eyes.

“When I was a boy,” he said, quickening his rhythm, breathing hard between the words, “I’d go swimming every morning. Off the rocks at Ayler’s Point . . . it was beautiful. Cerulean water, palms. Chickens and pigs foraging. On the beach.”

“Oh, God!” she said, locking her leg behind his thigh, her eyelids fluttering down.

“My first girlfriend was named Penny . . . she was twelve. Redheaded. I was a year younger. I loved her because she had freckles. I used to believe . . . freckles were . . . a sign of something. I wasn’t sure what. But I love you more than her.”

“I love you!” She found his rhythm, adapted to it, trying to take him all inside her. She wanted to see where they joined, and she imagined there was no longer any distinction between them, that their bodies had merged and were sealed together.

“I cheated in mathematics class, I could never do trigonometry. God . . . Catherine.”

His voice receded, stopped, and the air seemed to grow solid around her, holding her in a rosy suspension. Light was gathering about them, frictive light from a strange heatless burning, and she heard herself crying out, calling his name, saying sweet things, childish things, telling him how wonderful he was, words like the words in a dream, important for their music, their sonority, rather than for any sense they made. She felt again the building of a dark wave in her belly. This time she flowed with it and let it carry her far.

“Love’s stupid,” John said to her one day months later as they were sitting in the chamber of the heart, watching the complex eddying of golden light and whorls of shadow on the surface of the organ. “I feel like a damn sophomore. I keep finding myself thinking that I should do something noble. Feed the hungry, cure a disease.” He made a noise of disgust. “It’s as if I just woke up to the fact that the world has problems, and because I’m so happily in love, I want everyone else to be happy. But stuck . . .”

“Sometimes I feel like that myself,” she said, startled by this outburst. “Maybe it’s stupid, but it’s not wrong. And neither is being happy.”

“Stuck in here,” he went on, “there’s no chance of doing anything for ourselves, let alone saving the world. As for being happy, that’s not going to last . . . not in here, anyway.”

“It’s lasted six months,” she said. “And if it won’t last here, why should it last anywhere?”

He drew up his knees, rubbed the spot on his ankle where it had been fractured.

“What’s the matter with you? When I got here, all you could talk about was how much you wanted to escape. You said you’d do anything to get out. It sounds now that you don’t care one way or the other.”

She watched him rubbing the ankle, knowing what was coming. “I’d like very much to escape. Now that you’re here, it’s more acceptable to me. I can’t deny that. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t leave if I had the chance. But at least I can think about staying here without despairing.”

“Well, I can’t! I . . .” He lowered his head, suddenly drained of animation, still rubbing his ankle. “I’m sorry, Catherine. My leg’s hurting again, and I’m in a foul mood.” He cut his eyes toward her. “Have you got that stuff with you?”

“Yes.” She made no move to get it for him.

“I realize I’m taking too much,” he said. “It helps pass the time.” She bristled at that and wanted to ask if she was the reason for his boredom; but she repressed her anger, knowing that she was partly to blame for his dependency on the brianine, that during his convalescence she had responded to his demands for the drug as a lover and not as a nurse. An impatient look crossed his face. “Can I have it?” Reluctantly she opened her pack, removed a flask of water and some pellets of brianine wrapped in cloth, and handed them over. He fumbled at the cloth, hurrying to unscrew the cap of the flask, and then—as he was about to swallow two of the pellets—he noticed her watching him. His face tightened with anger, and he appeared ready to snap at her. But his expression softened, and he downed the pellets, held out two more. “Take some with me,” he said. “I know I have to stop. And I will. But let’s just relax today, let’s pretend we don’t have any troubles . . . all right?”

That was a ploy he had adopted recently, making her his accomplice in addiction and thus avoiding guilt; she knew she should refuse to join him, but at the moment she didn’t have the strength for an argument. She took the pellets, washed them down with a swallow of water and lay back against the chamber wall. He settled beside her, leaning on one elbow, smiling, his eyes muddied-looking from the drug.

“You do have to stop, you know,” she said.

His smile flickered, then steadied, as if his batteries were running low. “I suppose.”

“If we’re going to escape,” she said, “you’ll need a clear head.”

He perked up at this. “That’s a change.”

“I haven’t been thinking about escape for a long time. It didn’t seem possible . . . it didn’t even seem very important, anymore. I guess I’d given up on the idea. I mean just before you arrived, I’d been thinking about it again, but it wasn’t serious . . . only frustration.”

“And now?”

“It’s become important again.”

“Because of me, because I keep nagging about it?”

“Because of both of us. I’m not sure escape’s possible, but I was wrong to stop trying.”

He rolled onto his back, shielding his eyes with his forearm as if the heart’s glow were too bright.

“John?” The name sounded thick and sluggish, and she could feel the drug taking her, making her drifty and slow.

“This place,” he said. “This goddamn place.”

“I thought—” she was beginning to have difficulty in ordering her words “—I thought you were excited by it. You used to talk . . .”

“Oh, I am excited!” He laughed dully. “It’s a storehouse of marvels. Fantastic! Overwhelming! It’s too overwhelming. The feeling here . . .” He turned to her. “Don’t you feel it?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“How could you stand living here for all these years? Are you that much stronger than me, or are you just insensitive?”

“I’m . . .”

“God!” He turned away, stared at the heart wall, his face tattooed with a convoluted flow of light and shadow, then flaring gold. “You’re so at ease here. Look at that.” He pointed to the heart. “It’s not a heart, it’s a bloody act of magic. Every time I come here I get the feeling it’s going to display a pattern that’ll make me disappear. Or crush me. Or something. And you just sit there looking at it with a thoughtful expression as if you’re planning to put in curtains or repaint the damn thing.”

“We don’t have to come here anymore.”

“I can’t stay away,” he said, and held up a pellet of brianine. “It’s like this stuff.”

They didn’t speak for several minutes . . . perhaps a bit less, perhaps a little more. Time had become meaningless, and Catherine felt that she was floating away, her flesh suffused with a rosy warmth like the warmth of lovemaking. Flashes of dream imagery passed through her mind: a clown’s monstrous face; an unfamiliar room with tilted walls and three-legged blue chairs; a painting whose paint was melting, dripping. The flashes lapsed into thoughts of John. He was becoming weaker every day, she realized. Losing his resilience, growing nervous and moody. She had tried to convince herself that sooner or later he would become adjusted to life inside Griaule, but she was beginning to accept the fact that he was not going to be able to survive here. She didn’t understand why, whether it was due—as he had said—to the dragon’s oppressiveness or to some inherent weakness. Or a combination of both. But she could no longer deny it, and the only option left was for them to effect an escape. It was easy to consider escape with the drug in her veins, feeling aloof and calm, possessed of a dreamlike overview; but she knew that once it wore off she would be at a loss as to how to proceed.

To avoid thinking, she let the heart’s patterns dominate her attention. They seemed abnormally complex, and as she watched she began to have the impression of something new at work, some interior mechanism that she had never noticed before, and to become aware that the sense of imminence that pervaded the chamber was stronger than ever before; but she was so muzzy-headed that she could not concentrate upon these things. Her eyelids drooped, and she fell into her recurring dream of the sleeping dragon, focusing on the smooth scaleless skin of its chest, a patch of whiteness that came to surround her, to draw her into a world of whiteness with the serene constancy of its rhythmic rise and fall, as unvarying and predictable as the ticking of a perfect clock.

Over the next six months Catherine devised numerous plans for escape, but discarded them all as unworkable until at last she thought of one that—although far from foolproof—seemed in its simplicity to offer the least risk of failure. Though without brianine the plan would have failed, the process of settling upon this particular plan would have gone faster had drugs not been available; unable to resist the combined pull of the drug and John’s need for companionship in his addiction, she herself had become an addict, and much of her time was spent lying at the heart with John, stupefied, too enervated even to make love. Her feelings toward John had changed; it could not have been otherwise, for he was not the man he had been. He had lost weight and muscle tone, grown vague and brooding, and she was concerned for the health of his body and soul. In some ways she felt closer than ever to him, her maternal instincts having been engaged by his dissolution; yet she couldn’t help resenting the fact that he had failed her, that instead of offering relief, he had turned out to be a burden and a weakening influence; and as a result whenever some distance arose between them, she exerted herself to close it only if it was practical to do so. This was not often the case, because John had deteriorated to the point that closeness of any sort was a chore. However, Catherine clung to the hope that if they could escape, they would be able to make a new beginning.

The drug owned her. She carried a supply of pellets wherever she went, gradually increasing her dosages, and not only did it affect her health and her energy, it had a profound effect upon her mind. Her powers of concentration were diminished, her sleep became fitful, and she began to experience hallucinations. She heard voices, strange noises, and on one occasion she was certain that she had spotted old Amos Mauldry among a group of feelies milling about at the bottom of the colony chamber. Her mental erosion caused her to mistrust the information of her senses and to dismiss as delusion the intimations of some climactic event that came to her in dreams and from the patterns of light and shadow on the heart; and recognizing that certain of her symptoms—hearkening to inaudible signals and the like—were similar to the behavior of the feelies, she feared that she was becoming one of them. Yet this fear was not so pronounced as once it might have been. She sought now to be tolerant of them, to overlook their role in her imprisonment, perceiving them as unwitting agents of Griaule, and she could not be satisfied in hating either them or the dragon; Griaule and the subtle manifestations of his will were something too vast and incomprehensible to be a target for hatred, and she transferred all her wrath to Brianne, the woman who had betrayed her. The feelies seemed to notice this evolution in her attitude, and they became more familiar, attaching themselves to her wherever she went, asking questions, touching her, and while this made it difficult to achieve privacy, in the end it was their increased affection that inspired her plan.

One day, accompanied by a group of giggling, chattering feelies, she walked up toward the skull, to the channel that led to the cavity containing the ghostvine. She ducked into the channel, half-tempted to explore the cavity again; but she decided against this course and on crawling out of the channel, she discovered that the feelies had vanished. Suddenly weak, as if their presence had been an actual physical support, she sank to her knees and stared along the narrow passage of pale red flesh that wound away into a golden murk like a burrow leading to a shining treasure. She felt a welling up of petulant anger at the feelies for having deserted her. Of course she should have expected it. They shunned this area like . . . She sat up, struck by a realization attendant to that thought. How far, she wondered, had the feelies retreated? Could they have gone beyond the side passage that opened into the throat? She came to her feet and crept along the passage until she reached the curve. She peeked around it, and seeing no one, continued on, holding her breath until her chest began to ache. She heard voices, peered around the next curve, and caught sight of eight feelies gathered by the entrance to the side passage, their silken rags agleam, their swords reflecting glints of the inconstant light. She went back around the curve, rested against the wall; she had trouble thinking, in shaping thought into a coherent stream, and out of reflex she fumbled in her pack for some brianine. Just touching one of the pellets acted to calm her, and once she had swallowed it she breathed easier. She fixed her eyes on the blurred shape of a vein buried beneath the glistening ceiling of the passage, letting the fluctuations of light mesmerize her. She felt she was blurring, becoming golden and liquid and slow, and in that feeling she found a core of confidence and hope.

There’s a way, she told herself; My God, maybe there really is a way.

By the time she had fleshed out her plan three days later, her chief fear was that John wouldn’t be able to function well enough to take part in it. He looked awful, his cheeks sunken, his color poor, and the first time she tried to tell him about the plan, he fell asleep. To counteract the brianine she began cutting his dosage, mixing it with the stimulant she had derived from the lichen growing on the dragon’s lung, and after a few days, though his color and general appearance did not improve, he became more alert and energized. She knew the improvement was purely chemical, that the stimulant was a danger in his weakened state; but there was no alternative, and this at least offered him a chance at life. If he were to remain there, given the physical erosion caused by the drug, she did not believe he would last another six months.

It wasn’t much of a plan, nothing subtle, nothing complex, and if she’d had her wits about her, she thought, she would have come up with it long before; but she doubted she would have had the courage to try it alone, and if there was trouble, then two people would stand a much better chance than one. John was elated by the prospect. After she had told him the particulars he paced up and down in their bedroom, his eyes bright, hectic spots of red dappling his cheeks, stopping now and again to question her or to make distracted comments.

“The feelies,” he said. “We . . . uh . . . we won’t hurt them?”

“I told you . . . not unless it’s necessary.”

“That’s good, that’s good.” He crossed the room to the curtains drawn across the entrance. “Of course it’s not my field, but . . .”

“John?”

He peered out at the colony through the gap in the curtains, the skin on his forehead washing from gold to dark. “Uh-huh.”

“What’s not your field?”

After a long pause he said, “It’s not . . . nothing.”

“You were talking about the feelies.”

“They’re very interesting,” he said distractedly. He swayed, then moved sluggishly toward her, collapsed on the pile of furs where she was sitting. He turned his face to her, looked at her with a morose expression. “It’ll be better,” he said. “Once we’re out of here, I’ll . . . I know I haven’t been . . . strong. I haven’t been . . .”

“It’s all right,” she said, stroking his hair.

“No, it’s not, it’s not.” Agitated, he struggled to sit up, but she restrained him, telling him not to be upset, and soon he lay still. “How can you love me?” he asked after a long silence.

“I don’t have any choice in the matter.” She bent to him, pushing back her hair so it wouldn’t hang in his face, kissed his cheek, his eyes.

He started to say something, then laughed weakly, and she asked him what he found amusing.

“I was thinking about free will,” he said. “How improbable a concept that’s become. Here. Where it’s so obviously not an option.”

She settled down beside him, weary of trying to boost his spirits. She remembered how he’d been after his arrival: eager, alive, and full of curiosity despite his injuries. Now his moments of greatest vitality—like this one—were spent in sardonic rejection of happy possibility. She was tired of arguing with him, of making the point that everything in life could be reduced by negative logic to a sort of pitiful reflex if that was the way you wanted to see it. His voice grew stronger, this prompted—she knew—by a rush of the stimulant within his system.

“It’s Griaule,” he said. “Everything here belongs to him, even the most fleeting of hopes and wishes. What we feel, what we think. When I was a student and first heard about Griaule, about his method of dominion, the omnipotent functioning of his will, I thought it was foolishness pure and simple. But I was an optimist, then. And optimists are only fools without experience. Of course I didn’t think of myself as an optimist. I saw myself as a realist. I had a romantic notion that I was alone, responsible for my actions, and I perceived that as being a noble beauty, a refinement of the tragic . . . that state of utter and forlorn independence. I thought how cozy and unrealistic it was for people to depend on gods and demons to define their roles in life. I didn’t know how terrible it would be to realize that nothing you thought or did had any individual importance, that everything, love, hate, your petty likes and dislikes, was part of some unfathomable scheme. I couldn’t comprehend how worthless that knowledge would make you feel.”

He went on in this vein for some time, his words weighing on her, filling her with despair, pushing hope aside. Then, as if this monologue had aroused some bitter sexuality, he began to make love to her. She felt removed from the act, imprisoned within walls erected by his dour sentences; but she responded with desperate enthusiasm, her own arousal funded by a desolate prurience. She watched his spread-fingered hands knead and cup her breasts, actions that seemed to her as devoid of emotional value as those of a starfish gripping a rock; and yet because of this desolation, because she wanted to deny it and also because of the voyeuristic thrill she derived from watching herself being taken, used, her body reacted with unusual fervor. The sweaty film between them was like a silken cloth, and their movements seemed more accomplished and supple than ever before; each jolt of pleasure brought her to new and dizzying heights. But afterward she felt devastated and defeated, not loved, and lying there with him, listening to the muted gabble of the feelies from without, bathed in their rich stench, she knew she had come to the nadir of her life, that she had finally united with the feelies in their enactment of a perturbed and animalistic rhythm.

Over the next ten days she set the plan into motion. She took to dispensing little sweet cakes to the feelies who guarded her on her daily walks with John, ending up each time at the channel that led to the ghostvine. And she also began to spread the rumor that at long last her study of the dragon was about to yield its promised revelation. On the day of the escape, prior to going forth, she stood at the bottom of the chamber, surrounded by hundreds of feelies, more hanging on ropes just above her, and called out in ringing tones, “Today I will have word for you! Griaule’s word! Bring together the hunters and those who gather food, and have them wait here for me! I will return soon, very soon, and speak to you of what is to come!”

The feelies jostled and pawed one another, chattering, tittering, hopping up and down, and some of those hanging from the ropes were so overcome with excitement that they lost their grip and fell, landing atop their fellows, creating squirming heaps of feelies who squalled and yelped and then started fumbling with the buttons of each other’s clothing. Catherine waved at them, and with John at her side, set out toward the cavity, six feelies with swords at their rear.

John was terribly nervous and all during the walk he kept casting backward glances at the feelies, asking questions that only served to unnerve Catherine. “Are you sure they’ll eat them?” he said. “Maybe they won’t be hungry.”

“They always eat them while we’re in the channel,” she said. “You know that.”

“I know,” he said. “But I’m just . . . I don’t want anything to go wrong.” He walked another half a dozen paces. “Are you sure you put enough in the cakes?”

“I’m sure.” She watched him out of the corner of her eye. The muscles in his jaw bunched, nerves twitched in his cheek. A light sweat had broken on his forehead, and his pallor was extreme. She took his arm. “How do you feel?”

“Fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“It’s going to work, so don’t worry . . . please.”

“I’m fine,” he repeated, his voice dead, eyes fixed straight ahead.

The feelies came to a halt just around the curve from the channel, and Catherine, smiling at them, handed them each a cake; then she and John went forward and crawled into the channel. There they sat in the darkness without speaking, their hips touching. At last John whispered, “How much longer?”

“Let’s give it a few more minutes . . . just to be safe.”

He shuddered, and she asked again how he felt.

“A little shaky,” he said. “But I’m all right.”

She put her hand on his arm; his muscles jumped at the touch. “Calm down,” she said, and he nodded. But there was no slackening of his tension.

The seconds passed with the slowness of sap welling from cut bark, and despite her certainty that all would go as planned, Catherine’s anxiety increased. Little shiny squiggles, velvety darknesses blacker than the air, wormed in front of her eyes. She imagined that she heard whispers out in the passage. She tried to think of something else, but the concerns she erected to occupy her mind materialized and vanished with a superficial and formal precision that did nothing to ease her, seeming mere transparencies shunted across the vision of a fearful prospect ahead. Finally she gave John a nudge and they crept from the channel, made their way cautiously along the passage. When they reached the curve beyond which the feelies were waiting, she paused, listened. Not a sound. She looked out. Six bodies lay by the entrance to the side passage; even at that distance she could spot the half-eaten cakes that had fallen from their hands. Still wary, they approached the feelies, and as they came near, Catherine thought that there was something unnatural about their stillness. She knelt beside a young male, caught a whiff of loosened bowel, saw the rapt character of death stamped on his features and realized that in measuring out the dosages of brianine in each cake, she had not taken the feelies’ slightness of build into account. She had killed them.

“Come on!” said John. He had picked up two swords; they were so short, they looked toylike in his hands. He handed over one of the swords and helped her to stand. “Let’s go . . . there might be more of them!”

He wetted his lips, glanced from side to side. With his sunken cheeks and hollowed eyes, his face had the appearance of a skull, and for a moment, dumbstruck by the realization that she had killed, by the understanding that for all her disparagement of them, the feelies were human, Catherine failed to recognize him. She stared at them—like ugly dolls in the ruins of their gaud—and felt again that same chill emptiness that had possessed her when she had killed Key Willen. John caught her arm, pushed her toward the side passage; it was covered by a loose flap, and though she had become used to seeing the dragon’s flesh everywhere, she now shrank from touching it. John pulled back the flap, urged her into the passage, and then they were crawling through a golden gloom, following a twisting downward course.

In places the passage was only a few inches wider than her hips, and they were forced to worm their way along. She imagined that she could feel the immense weight of the dragon pressing in upon her, pictured some muscle twitching in reflex, the passage constricting and crushing them. The closed space made her breathing sound loud, and for a while John’s breathing sounded even louder, hoarse and labored. But then she could no longer hear it, and she discovered that he had fallen behind. She called out to him, and he said, “Keep going!”

She rolled onto her back in order to see him. He was gasping, his face twisted as if in pain. “What’s wrong?” she cried, trying to turn completely, constrained from doing so by the narrowness of the passage.

He gave her a shove. “I’ll be all right. Don’t stop!”

“John!” She stretched out a hand to him, and he wedged his shoulder against her legs, pushing her along. : . .

“Damn it . . . just keep going!” He continued to push and exhort her, and realizing that she could do nothing, she turned and crawled at an even faster pace, seeing his harrowed face in her mind’s eye.

She couldn’t tell how many minutes it took to reach the end of the passage; it was a timeless time, one long unfractionated moment of straining, squirming, pulling at the slick walls, her effort fueled by her concern; but when she scrambled out into the dragon’s throat, her heart racing, for an instant she forgot about John, about everything except the sight before her. From where she stood the throat sloped upward and widened into the mouth, and through that great opening came a golden light, not the heavy mineral brilliance of Griaule’s blood, but a fresh clear light, penetrating the tangled shapes of the thickets in beams made crystalline by dust and moisture—the light of day. She saw the tip of a huge fang hooking upward, stained gold with the morning sun, and the vault of the dragon’s mouth above, with its vines and epiphytes. Stunned, gaping, she dropped her sword and went a couple of paces toward the light. It was so clean, so pure, its allure like a call. Remembering John, she turned back to the passage. He was pushing himself erect with his sword, his face flushed, panting.

“Look!” she said, hurrying to him, pointing at the light. “God, just look at that!” She steadied him, began steering him toward the mouth.

“We made it,” he said. “I didn’t believe we would.”

His hand tightened on her arm in what she assumed was a sign of affection; but then his grip tightened cruelly, and he lurched backward.

“John!” She fought to hold onto him, saw that his eyes had rolled up into his head.

He sprawled onto his back, and she went down on her knees beside him, hands fluttering above his chest, saying, “John? John?” What felt like a shiver passed through his body, a faint guttering noise issued from his throat, and she knew, oh, she knew very well the meaning of that tremor, that signal passage of breath. She drew back, confused, staring at his face, certain that she had gotten things wrong, that in a second or two his eyelids would open. But they did not. “John?” she said, astonished by how calm she felt, by the measured tone of her voice, as if she were making a simple inquiry. She wanted to break through the shell of calmness, to let out what she was really feeling, but it was as if some strangely lucid twin had gained control over her muscles and will. Her face was cold, and she got to her feet, thinking that the coldness must be radiating from John’s body and that distance would be a cure. The sight of him lying there frightened her, and she turned her back on him, folded her arms across her chest. She blinked against the daylight. It hurt her eyes, and the loops and interfacings of foliage standing out in silhouette also hurt her with their messy complexity, their disorder. She couldn’t decide what to do. Get away, she told herself. Get out. She took a hesitant step toward the mouth, but that direction didn’t make sense. No direction made sense, anymore.

Something moved in the bushes, but she paid it no mind. Her calm was beginning to crack, and a powerful gravity seemed to be pulling her back toward the body. She tried to resist. More movement. Leaves were rustling, branches being pushed aside. Lots of little movements. She wiped at her eyes. There were no tears in them, but something was hampering her vision, something opaque and thin, a tattered film. The shreds of her calm, she thought, and laughed . . . more a hiccup than a laugh. She managed to focus on the bushes and saw ten, twenty, no, more, maybe two or three dozen diminutive figures, pale mongrel children in glittering rags standing at the verge of the thicket. She hiccuped again, and this time it felt nothing like a laugh. A sob, or maybe nausea. The feelies shifted nearer, edging toward her. The bastards had been waiting for them. She and John had never had a chance of escaping.

Catherine retreated to the body, reached down, groping for John’s sword. She picked it up, pointed it at them. “Stay away from me,” she said. “Just stay away, and I won’t hurt you.”

They came closer, shuffling, their shoulders hunched, their attitudes fearful, but advancing steadily all the same.

“Stay away!” she shouted. “I swear I’ll kill you!” She swung the sword, making a windy arc through the air. “I swear!”

The feelies gave no sign of having heard, continuing their advance, and Catherine, sobbing now, shrieked for them to keep back, swinging the sword again and again. They encircled her, standing just beyond range. “You don’t believe me?” she said. “You don’t believe I’ll kill you? I don’t have any reason not to.” All her grief and fury broke through, and with a scream she lunged at the feelies, stabbing one in the stomach, slicing a line of blood across the satin and gilt chest of another. The two she had wounded fell, shrilling their agony, and the rest swarmed toward her. She split the skull of another, split it as easily as she might have a melon, saw gore and splintered bone fly from the terrible wound, the dead male’s face nearly halved, more blood leaking from around his eyes as he toppled, and then the rest of them were on her, pulling her down, pummeling her, giving little fey cries. She had no chance against them, but she kept on fighting, knowing that when she stopped, when she surrendered, she would have to start feeling, and that she wanted badly to avoid. Their vapid faces hovered above her, seeming uniformly puzzled, as if unable to understand her behavior, and the mildness of their reactions infuriated her. Death should have brightened them, made them—like her—hot with rage. Screaming again, her thoughts reddening, pumped with adrenaline, she struggled to her knees, trying to shake off the feelies who clung to her arms. Snapping her teeth at fingers, faces, arms. Then something struck the back of her head, and she sagged, her vision whirling, darkness closing in until all she could see was a tunnel of shadow with someone’s watery eyes at the far end. The eyes grew wider, merged into a single eye that became a shadow with leathery wings and a forked tongue and a belly full of fire that swooped down, open-mouthed, to swallow her up and fly her home.

6

The drug moderated Catherine’s grief . . . or perhaps it was more than the drug. John’s decline had begun so soon after they had met, it seemed she had become accustomed to sadness in relation to him, and thus his death had not overwhelmed her, but rather had manifested as an ache in her chest and a heaviness in her limbs, like small stones she was forced to carry about. To rid herself of that ache, that heaviness, she increased her use of the drug, eating the pellets as if they were candy, gradually withdrawing from life. She had no use for life any longer. She knew she was going to die within the dragon, knew it with the same clarity and certainty that accompanied all Griaule’s sendings—death was to be her punishment for seeking to avoid his will, for denying his right to define and delimit her.

After the escape attempt, the feelies had treated her with suspicion and hostility; recently they had been absorbed by some internal matter, agitated in the extreme, and they had taken to ignoring her. Without their minimal companionship, without John, the patterns flowing across the surface of the heart were the only thing that took Catherine out of herself, and she spent hours at a time watching them, lying there half-conscious, registering their changes through slitted eyes. As her addiction worsened, as she lost weight and muscle tone, she became even more expert in interpreting the patterns, and staring up at the vast curve of the heart, like the curve of a golden bell, she came to realize that Mauldry had been right, that the dragon was a god, an universe unto itself with its own laws and physical constants. A god that she hated. She would try to beam her hatred at the heart, hoping to cause a rupture, a seizure of some sort; but she knew that Griaule was impervious to this, impervious to all human weapons, and that her hatred would have as little effect upon him as an arrow loosed into an empty sky.

One day almost a year after John’s death she waked abruptly from a dreamless sleep beside the heart, sitting bolt upright, feeling that a cold spike had been driven down the hollow of her spine. She rubbed sleep from her eyes, trying to shake off the lethargy of the drug, sensing danger at hand. Then she glanced up at the heart and was struck motionless. The patterns of shadow and golden radiance were changing more rapidly than ever before, and their complexity, too, was far greater than she had ever seen; yet they were as clear to her as her own script: pulsings of darkness and golden eddies flowing, unscrolling across the dimpled surface of the organ. It was a simple message, and for a few seconds she refused to accept the knowledge it conveyed, not wanting to believe that this was the culmination of her destiny, that her youth had been wasted in so trivial a matter; but recalling all the clues, the dreams of the sleeping dragon, the repetitious vision of the rise and fall of its chest, Mauldry’s story of the first feelie, the exodus of animals and insects and birds, the muffled thud from deep within the dragon after which everything had remained calm for a thousand years . . . she knew it must be true.

As it had done a thousand years before, and as it would do again a thousand years in the future, the heart was going to beat.

She was infuriated, and she wanted to reject the fact that all her trials and griefs had been sacrifices made for the sole purpose of saving the feelies. Her task, she realized, would be to clear them out of the chamber where they lived before it was flooded with the liquids that fueled the dragon’s fires; and after the chamber had been emptied, she was to lead them back so they could go on with the work of keeping Griaule pest-free. The cause of their recent agitation, she thought, must have been due to their apprehension of the event, the result of one of Griaule’s sendings; but because of their timidity they would tend to dismiss his warning, being more frightened of the outside world than of any peril within the dragon. They would need guidance to survive, and as once he had chose Mauldry to assist her, now Griaule had chosen her to guide the feelies.

She staggered up, as befuddled as a bird trapped between glass walls, making little rushes this way and that; then anger overcame confusion, and she beat with her fists on the heart wall, bawling her hatred of the dragon, her anguish at the ruin he had made of her life. Finally, breathless, she collapsed, her own heart pounding erratically, trying to think what to do. She wouldn’t tell them, she decided; she would just let them die when the chamber flooded, and this way have her revenge. But an instant later she reversed her decision, knowing that the feelies’ deaths would merely be an inconvenience to Griaule, that he would simply gather a new group of idiots to serve him. And besides, she thought, she had already killed too many feelies. There was no choice, she realized; over the span of almost eleven years she had been maneuvered by the dragon’s will to this place and moment where, by virtue of her shaped history and conscience, she had only one course of action.

Full of muddle-headed good intentions, she made her way back to the colony, her guards trailing behind, and when she had reached the chamber, she stood with her back to the channel that led toward the throat, uncertain of how to proceed. Several hundred feelies were milling about the bottom of the chamber, and others were clinging to ropes, hanging together in front of one or another of the cubicles, looking in that immense space like clusters of glittering, many-colored fruit; the constant motion and complexity of the colony added to Catherine’s hesitancy and bewilderment, and when she tried to call out to the feelies, to gain their attention, she managed only a feeble, scratchy noise. But she gathered her strength and called out again and again, until at last they were all assembled before her, silent and staring, hemming her in against the entrance to the channel, next to some chests that contained the torches and swords and other items used by the hunters. The feelies gawped at her, plucking at their gaudy rags; their silence seemed to have a slow vibration. Catherine started to speak, but faltered; she took a deep breath, let it out explosively and made a second try.

“We have to leave,” she said, hearing the shakiness of her voice. “We have to go outside. Not for long. Just for a little while . . . a few hours. The chamber, it’s going . . .” She broke off, realizing that they weren’t following her. “The thing Griaule has meant me to learn,” she went on in a louder voice, “at last I know it. I know why I was brought to you. I know the purpose for which I have studied all these years. Griaule’s heart is going to beat, and when it does the chamber will fill with liquid. If you remain here, you’ll all drown.”

The front ranks shifted, and some of the feelies exchanged glances, but otherwise they displayed no reaction.

Catherine shook her fists in frustration. “You’ll die if you don’t listen to me! You have to leave! When the heart contracts, the chamber will be flooded . . . don’t you understand?” She pointed up to the mist-hung ceiling of the chamber. “Look! The birds . . . the birds have gone! They know what’s coming! And so do you! Don’t you feel the danger? I know you do!”

They edged back, some of them turning away, entering into whispered exchanges with their fellows.

Catherine grabbed the nearest of them, a young female dressed in ruby silks. “Listen to me!” she shouted.

“Liar, Cat’rine, liar,” said one of the males, jerking the female away from her. “We not goin’ be mo’ fools.”

“I’m not lying! I’m not!” She went from one to another, putting her hands on their shoulders, meeting their eyes in an attempt to impress them with her sincerity. “The heart is going to beat! Once . . . just once. You won’t have to stay outside long. Not long at all.”

They were all walking away, all beginning to involve themselves in their own affairs, and Catherine, desperate, hurried after them, pulling them back, saying, “Listen to me! Please!” Explaining what was to happen, and receiving cold stares in return. One of the males shoved her aside, baring his teeth in a hiss, his eyes blank and bright, and she retreated to the entrance of the channel, feeling rattled and disoriented, in need of another pellet. She couldn’t collect her thoughts, and she looked around in every direction as if hoping to find some sight that would steady her; but nothing she saw was of any help. Then her gaze settled on the chests where the swords and torches were stored. She felt as if her head were being held in a vise and forced toward the chests, and the knowledge of what she must do was a coldness inside her head—the unmistakable touch of Griaule’s thought. It was the only way. She saw that clearly. But the idea of doing something so extreme frightened her, and she hesitated, looking behind her to make sure that none of the feelies were keeping track of her movements. She inched toward the chests, keeping her eyes lowered, trying to make it appear that she was moving aimlessly. In one of the chests were a number of tinderboxes resting beside some torches; she stooped, grabbed a torch and one of the tinder-boxes, and went walking briskly up the slope. She paused by the lowest rank of cubicles, noticed that some of the feelies had turned to watch her; when she lit the torch, alarm surfaced in their faces and they surged up the slope toward her. She held the torch up to the curtains that covered the entrance to the cubicle, and the feelies fell back, muttering, some letting out piercing wails.

“Please!” Catherine cried, her knees rubbery from the tension, a chill knot in her breast. “I don’t want to do this! But you have to leave!”

A few of the feelies edged toward the channel, and encouraged by this, Catherine shouted, “Yes! That’s it! If you’ll just go outside, just for a little while, I won’t have to do it!”

Several feelies entered the channel, and the crowd around Catherine began to erode, whimpering, breaking into tears, trickles of five and six at a time breaking away and moving out of sight within the channel, until there were no more than thirty of them left within the chamber, forming a ragged semi-circle around her. She would have liked to believe that they would do as she had suggested without further coercion on her part, but she knew that they were all packed into the channel or the chamber beyond, waiting for her to put down the torch. She gestured at the feelies surrounding her, and they, too, began easing toward the channel; when only a handful of them remained visible, she touched the torch to the curtains.

She was amazed by how quickly the fire spread, rushing like waves up the silk drapes, following the rickety outlines of the cubicles, appearing to dress them in a fancywork of reddish yellow flame, making crispy, chuckling noises. The fire seemed to have a will of its own, to be playfully seeking out all the intricate shapes of the colony and illuminating them, the separate flames chasing one another with merry abandon, sending little trains of fire along poles and stanchions, geysering up from corners, flinging out fiery fingers to touch tips across a gap.

She was so caught up in this display, her drugged mind finding in it an aesthetic, that she forgot all about the feelies, and when a cold sharp pain penetrated her left side, she associated this not with them but thought it a side-effect of the drug, a sudden attack brought on by her abuse of it. Then, horribly weak, sinking to her knees, she saw one of them standing next to her, a male with a pale thatch of thinning hair wisping across his scalp, holding a sword tipped with red, and she knew that he had stabbed her. She had the giddy urge to speak to him, not out of anger, just to ask a question that she wasn’t able to speak, for instead of being afraid of the weakness invading her limbs, she had a terrific curiosity about what would happen next, and she had the irrational thought that her executioner might have the answer, that in his role as the instrument of Griaule’s will he might have some knowledge of absolutes. He spat something at her, an accusation or an insult made inaudible by the crackling of the flames, and fled down the slope and out of the chamber, leaving her alone. She rolled onto her back, gazing at the fire, and the pain seemed to roll inside her as if it were a separate thing. Some of the cubicles were collapsing, spraying sparks, twists of black smoke boiling up, smoldering pieces of blackened wood tumbling down to the chamber floor, the entire structure appearing to ripple through the heat haze, looking unreal, an absurd construction of flaming skeletal framework and billowing, burning silks, and growing dizzy, feeling that she was falling upward into that huge fiery space, Catherine passed out.

She must have been unconscious for only a matter of seconds, because nothing had changed when she opened her eyes, except that a section of the fabric covering the chamber floor had caught fire. The flames were roaring, the snap and cracking of timbers as sharp as explosions, and her nostrils were choked with an acrid stink. With a tremendous effort that brought her once again to the edge of unconsciousness, she came to her feet, clutching the wound in her side, and stumbled toward the channel; at the entrance she fell and crawled into it, choking on the smoke that poured along the passageway. Her eyes teared from the smoke, and she wriggled on her stomach, pulling herself along with her hands. She nearly passed out half a dozen times before reaching the adjoining chamber, and then she staggered, crawled, stopping frequently to catch her breath, to let the pain of her wound subside, somehow negotiating a circuitous path among the pools of burning liquid and the pale red warty bumps that sprouted everywhere. Then into the throat. She wanted to surrender to the darkness there, to let go, but she kept going, not motivated by fear, but by some reflex of survival, simply obeying the impulse to continue for as long as it was possible. Her eyes blurred, and darkness frittered at the edges of her vision. But even so, she was able to make out the light of day, the menagerie of shapes erected by the interlocking branches of the thickets, and she thought that now she could stop, that this had been what she wanted—to see the light again, not to die bathed in the uncanny radiance of Griaule’s blood.

She lay down, lowering herself cautiously among a bed of ferns, her back against the side of the throat, the same position—she remembered—in which she had fallen asleep that first night inside the dragon so many years before. She started to slip, to dwindle inside herself, but was alerted by a whispery rustling that grew louder and louder, and a moment later swarms of insects began to pour from the dragon’s throat, passing overhead with a whirring rush and in such density that they cut off most of the light issuing from the mouth. Far above, like the shadows of spiders, apes were swinging on the vines that depended from the roof of the mouth, heading for the outer world, and Catherine could hear smaller animals scuttling through the brush. The sight of these flights made her feel accomplished, secure in what she had done, and she settled back, resting her head against Griaule’s flesh, as peaceful as she could ever recall, almost eager to be done with life, with drugs and solitude and violence. She had a moment’s worry about the feelies, wondering where they were; but then she realized that they would probably do no differently than had their remote ancestor, that they would hide in the thickets until all was calm.

She let her eyes close. The pain of the wound had diminished to a distant throb that scarcely troubled her, and the throbbing made a rhythm that seemed to be bearing her up. Somebody was talking to her, saying her name, and she resisted the urge to open her eyes, not wanting to be called back. She must be hearing things, she thought. But the voice persisted, and at last she did open her eyes. She gave a weak laugh on seeing Amos Mauldry kneeling before her, wavering and vague as a ghost, and realized that she was seeing things, too.

“Catherine,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

“No,” she said, and laughed again, a laugh that sent her into a bout of gasping; she felt her weakness in a new and poignant way, and it frightened her.

“Catherine?”

She blinked, trying to make him disappear; but he appeared to solidify as if she were becoming more part of his world than that of life. “What is it, Mauldry?” she said, and coughed. “Have you come to guide me to heaven . . . is that it?”

His lips moved, and she had the idea that he was trying to reassure her of something; but she couldn’t hear his words, no matter how hard she strained her ears. He was beginning to fade, becoming opaque, proving himself to be no more than a phantom; yet as she blacked out, experiencing a final moment of panic, Catherine could have sworn that she felt him take her hand.

She walked in a golden glow that dimmed and brightened, and found herself staring into a face; after a moment, a long moment, because the face was much different than she had imagined it during these past few years, she recognized that it was hers. She lay still, trying to accommodate to this state of affairs, wondering why she wasn’t dead, puzzling over the face and uncertain as to why she wasn’t afraid; she felt strong and alert and at peace. She sat up and discovered that she was naked, that she was sitting in a small chamber lit by veins of golden blood branching across the ceiling, its walls obscured by vines with glossy dark green leaves. The body—her body—was lying on its back, and one side of the shirt it wore was soaked with blood. Folded beside the body was a fresh shirt, trousers, and resting atop these was a pair of sandals.

She checked her side—there was no sign of a wound. Her emotions were a mix of relief and self-loathing. She understood that somehow she had been conveyed to this cavity, to the ghostvine, and her essences had been transferred to a likeness, and yet she had trouble accepting the fact, because she felt no different than she had before . . . except for the feelings of peace and strength, and the fact that she had no craving for the drug. She tried to deny what had happened, to deny that she was now a thing, the bizarre contrivance of a plant, and it seemed that her thoughts, familiar in their ordinary process, were proofs that she must be wrong in her assumption. However, the body was an even more powerful evidence to the contrary. She would have liked to take refuge in panic, but her overall feeling of well-being prevented this. She began to grow cold, her skin pebbling, and reluctantly she dressed in the clothing folded beside the body. Something hard in the breast pocket of the shirt. She opened the pocket, took out a small leather sack; she loosed the tie of the sack and from it poured a fortune of cut gems into her hand: diamonds, emeralds, and sunstones. She put the sack back into the pocket, not knowing what to make of the stones, and sat looking at the body. It was much changed from its youth, leaner, less voluptuous, and in the repose of death, the face had lost its gloss and perfection, and was merely the face of an attractive woman . . . a disheartened woman. She thought she should feel something, that she should be oppressed by the sight, but she had no reaction to it; it might have been a skin she had shed, something of no more consequence than that.

She had no idea where to go, but realizing that she couldn’t stay there forever, she stood and with a last glance at the body, she made her way down the narrow channel leading away from the cavity. When she emerged into the passage, she hesitated, unsure of which direction to choose, unsure, too, of which direction was open to her. At length, deciding not to tempt Griaule’s judgment, she headed back toward the colony, thinking that she would take part in helping them rebuild; but before she had gone ten feet she heard Mauldry’s voice calling her name.

He was standing by the entrance to the cavity, dressed as he had been that first night—in a satin frock coat, carrying his gold-knobbed cane—and as she approached him, a smile broke across his wrinkled face, and he nodded as if in approval of her resurrection. “Surprised to see me?” he asked.

“I . . . I don’t know,” she said, a little afraid of him. “Was that you in the mouth?”

He favored her with a polite bow. “None other. After things settled down, I had some of the feelies bear you to the cavity. Or rather I was the instrument that effected Griaule’s will in the matter. Did you look in the pocket of your shirt?”

“Yes.”

“Then you found the gems. Good, good.”

She was at a loss for words at first. “I thought I saw you once before,” she said finally. “A few years back.”

“I’m sure you did. After my rebirth—” he gestured toward the cavity “—I was no longer of any use to you. You were forging your own path and my presence would have hampered your process. So I hid among the feelies, waiting for the time when you would need me.” He squinted at her. “You look troubled.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” she said. “How can I feel like my old self, when I’m obviously so different?”

“Are you?” he asked. “Isn’t sameness or difference mostly a matter of feeling?” He took her arm, steered her along the passage away from the colony. “You’ll adjust to it, Catherine. I have, and I had the same reaction as you when I first awoke.” He spread his arms, inviting her to examine him. “Do I look different to you? Aren’t I the same old fool as ever?”

“So it seems,” she said drily. She walked a few paces in silence, then something occurred to her. “The feelies . . . do they . . .”

“Rebirth is only for the chosen, the select. The feelies receive another sort of reward, one not given me to understand.”

“You call this a reward? To be subject to more of Griaule’s whims? And what’s next for me? Am I to discover when his bowels are due to move?”

He stopped walking, frowning at her. “Next? Why, whatever pleases you, Catherine. I’ve been assuming that you’d want to leave, but you’re free to do as you wish. Those gems I gave you will buy you any kind of life you desire.”

“I can leave?”

“Most assuredly. You’ve accomplished your purpose here, and you’re your own agent now. Do you want to leave?”

Catherine looked at him, unable to speak, and nodded.

“Well, then.” He took her arm again. “Let’s be off.”

As they walked down to the chamber behind the throat and then into the throat itself, Catherine felt as one is supposed to feel at the moment of death, all the memories of her life within the dragon passing before her eyes with their attendant emotions—her flight, her labors and studies, John, the long hours spent beside the heart—and she thought that this was most appropriate, because she was not re-entering life but rather passing through into a kind of afterlife, a place beyond death that would be as unfamiliar and new a place as Griaule himself had once seemed. And she was astounded to realize that she was frightened of these new possibilities, that the thing she had wanted for so long could pose a menace and that it was the dragon who now offered the prospect of security. On several occasions she considered turning back, but each time she did, she rebuked herself for her timidity and continued on. However, on reaching the mouth and wending her way through the thickets, her fear grew more pronounced. The sunlight, that same light that not so many months before had been alluring, now hurt her eyes and made her want to draw back into the dim golden murk of Griaule’s blood; and as they neared the lip, as she stepped into the shadow of a fang, she began to tremble with cold and stopped, hugging herself to keep warm.

Mauldry took up a position facing her, jogged her arm. “What is it?” he asked. “You seem frightened.”

“I am,” she said; she glanced up at him. “Maybe . . .”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You’ll be fine once you’re away from here. And—” he cocked his eye toward the declining sun “—you should be pushing along. You don’t want to be hanging about the mouth when it’s dark. I doubt anything would harm you, but since you’re no longer part of Griaule’s plan . . . well, better safe than sorry.” He gave her a push. “Get along with you, now.”

“You’re not coming with me?”

“Me?” Mauldry chuckled. “What would I do out there? I’m an old man, set in my ways. No, I’m far better off staying with the feelies. I’ve become half a feely myself after all these years. But you’re young, you’ve got a whole world of life ahead of you.” He nudged her forward. “Do what I say, girl. There’s no use in your hanging about any longer.”

She went a couple of steps toward the lip, paused, feeling sentimental about leaving the old man; though they had never been close, he had been like a father to her . . . and thinking this, remembering her real father, whom she had scarcely thought of these last years, with whom she’d had the same lack of closeness, that made her aware of all the things she had to look forward to, all the lost things she might now regain. She moved into the thickets with a firmer step, and behind her, old Mauldry called to her for a last time.

“That’s my girl!” he sang out. “You just keep going, and you’ll start to feel at rights soon enough! There’s nothing to be afraid of . . . nothing you can avoid, in any case! Goodbye, goodbye!”

She glanced back, waved, saw him shaking his cane in a gesture of farewell, and laughed at his eccentric appearance: a funny little man in satin rags hopping up and down in that great shadow between the fangs. Out from beneath that shadow herself, the rich light warmed her, seeming to penetrate and dissolve all the coldness that had been lodged in her bones and thoughts. “Goodbye!” cried Mauldry. “Goodbye! Don’t be sad! You’re not leaving anything important behind, and you’re taking the best parts with you. Just walk fast and think about what you’re going to tell everyone. They’ll be amazed by all you’ve done! Flabbergasted! Tell them about Griaule! Tell them what he’s like, tell them all you’ve seen and all you’ve learned. Tell them what a grand adventure you’ve had!”

7

Returning to Hangtown was in some ways a more unsettling experience than had been Catherine’s flight into the dragon. She had expected the place to have changed, and while there had been minor changes, she had assumed that it would be as different from its old self as was she. But standing at the edge of the village, looking out at the gray weathered shacks ringing the fouled shallows of the lake, thin smokes issuing from tin chimneys, the cliff of the fronto-parietal plate casting its gloomy shadow, the chokecherry thickets, the hawthornes, the dark brown dirt of the streets, three elderly men sitting on cane chairs in front of one of the shacks, smoking their pipes and staring back at her with unabashed curiosity . . . superficially it was no different than it had been ten years before, and this seemed to imply that her years of imprisonment, her death and rebirth had been of small importance. She did not demand that they be important to anyone else, yet it galled her that the world had passed through those years of ordeal without significant scars, and it also imbued her with the irrational fear that if she were to enter the village, she might suffer some magical slippage back through time and reinhabit her old life. At last, with a hesitant step, she walked over to the men and wished them a good morning.

“Mornin‘,” said a paunchy fellow with a mottled bald scalp and a fringe of gray beard, whom she recognized as Tim Weedlon. “What can I do for you, ma’am? Got some nice bits of scale inside.”

“That place over there—” she pointed to an abandoned shack down the street, its roof holed and missing the door “—where can I find the owner?”

The other man, Mardo Koren, thin as a mantis, his face seamed and blotched, said, “Can’t nobody say for sure. Ol’ Riall died . . . must be goin’ on nine, ten years back.”

“He’s dead?” She felt weak inside, dazed.

“Yep,” said Tim Weedlon, studying her face, his brow furrowed, his expression bewildered. “His daughter run away, killed a village man name of Willen and vanished into nowhere . . . or so ever’body figured. Then when Willen’s brothers turned up missin‘, people thought ol’ Riall must done ’em. He didn’t deny it. Acted like he didn’t care whether he lived or died.”

“What happened?”

“They had a trial, found Riall guilty.” He leaned forward, squinting at her. “Catherine . . . is that you?”

She nodded, struggling for control. “What did they do with him?”

“How can it be you?” he said. “Where you been?”

“What happened to my father?”

“God, Catherine. You know what happens to them that’s found guilty of murder. If it’s any comfort, the truth come out finally.”

“They took him in under the wing . . . they left him under the wing?” Her fists clenched, nails pricking hard into her palm. “Is that what they did?” He lowered his eyes, picked at a fray on his trouserleg.

Her eyes filled, and she turned away, facing the mossy overhang of the fronto-parietal plate. “You said the truth came out.”

“That’s right. A girl confessed to having seen the whole thing. Said the Willens chased you into Griaule’s mouth. She woulda come forward sooner, but ol’ man Willen had her feared for her life. Said he’d kill her if she told. You probably remember her. Friend of yours, if I recall. Brianne.”

She whirled around, repeated the name with venom.

“Wasn’t she your friend?” Weedlon asked.

“What happened to her?”

“Why . . . nothing,” said Weedlon. “She’s married, got hitched to Zev Mallison. Got herself a batch of children. I ‘spect she’s home now if you wanna see her. You know the Mallison place, don’tcha?”

“Yes.”

“You want to know more about it, you oughta drop by there and talk to Brianne.”

“I guess . . . I will, I’ll do that.”

“Now tell us where you been, Catherine. Ten years! Musta been something important to keep you from home for so long.”

Coldness was spreading through her, turning her to ice. “I was thinking, Tim . . . I was thinking I might like to do some scaling while I’m here. Just for old time’s sake, you know.” She could hear the shakiness in her voice and tried to smooth it out; she forced a smile. “I wonder if I could borrow some hooks.”

“Hooks?” He scratched his head, still regarding her with confusion. “Sure, I suppose you can. But aren’t you going to tell us where you’ve been? We thought you were dead.”

“I will, I promise. Before I leave . . . I’ll come back and tell you all about it. All right?”

“Well, all right.” He heaved up from his chair. “But it’s a cruel thing you’re doing, Catherine.”

“No crueler than what’s been done to me,” she said distractedly. “Not half so cruel.”

“Pardon,” said Tim. “How’s that?”

“What?”

He gave her a searching look and said, “I was telling you it was a cruel thing, keeping an old man in suspense about where you’ve been. Why you’re going to make the choicest bit of gossip we’ve had in years. And you came back with . . .”

“Oh! I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about something else.”

The Mallison place was among the larger shanties in Hangtown, half a dozen rooms, most of which had been added on over the years since Catherine had left; but its size was no evidence of wealth or status, only of a more expansive poverty. Next to the steps leading to a badly hung door was a litter of bones and mango skins and other garbage. Fruit flies hovered above a watermelon rind; a gray dog with its ribs showing slunk off around the corner, and there was a stink of fried onions and boiled greens. From inside came the squalling of a child. The shanty looked false to Catherine, an unassuming facade behind which lay a monstrous reality—the woman who had betrayed her, killed her father—and yet its drabness was sufficient to disarm her anger somewhat. But as she mounted the steps there was a thud as of something heavy falling, and a woman shouted. The voice was harsh, deeper than Catherine remembered, but she knew it must belong to Brianne, and that restored her vengeful mood. She knocked on the door with one of Tim Weedlon’s scaling hooks, and a second later it was flung open and she was confronted by an olive-skinned woman in torn gray skirts—almost the same color as the weathered boards, as if she were the quintessential product of the environment—and gray streaks in her dark brown hair. She looked Catherine up and down, her face hard with displeasure, and said, “What do you want?”

It was Brianne, but Brianne warped, melted, disfigured as a waxwork might be disfigured by heat. Her waist gone, features thickened, cheeks sagging into jowls. Shock washed away Catherine’s anger, and shock, too, materialized in Brianne’s face. “No,” she said, giving the word an abstracted value, as if denying an inconsequential accusation; then she shouted it: “No!” She slammed the door, and Catherine pounded on it, crying, “Damn you! Brianne!”

The child screamed, but Brianne made no reply.

Enraged, Catherine swung the hook at the door; the point sank deep into the wood, and when she tried to pull it out, one of the boards came partially loose; she pried at it, managed to rip it away, the nails coming free with a shriek of tortured metal. Through the gap she saw Brianne cowering against the rear wall of a dilapidated room, her arms around a little boy in shorts. Using the hook as a lever, she pulled loose another board, reached in and undid the latch. Brianne pushed the child behind her and grabbed a broom as Catherine stepped inside.

“Get out of here!” she said, holding the broom like a spear.

The gray poverty of the shanty made Catherine feel huge in her anger, too bright for the place, like a sun shining in a cave, and although her attention was fixed on Brianne, the peripheral details of the room imprinted themselves on her: the wood stove upon which a covered pot was steaming; an overturned wooden chair with a hole in the seat; cobwebs spanning the corners, rat turds along the wall; a rickety table set with cracked dishes and dust thick as fur beneath it. These things didn’t arouse her pity or mute her anger; instead, they seemed extensions of Brianne, new targets for hatred. She moved closer, and Brianne jabbed the broom at her. “Go away,” she said weakly. “Please . . . leave us alone!”

Catherine swung the hook, snagging the twine that bound the broom straws and knocking it from Brianne’s hands. Brianne retreated to the corner where the wood stove stood, hauling the child along. She held up her hand to ward off another blow and said, “Don’t hurt us.”

“Why not? Because you’ve got children, because you’ve had an unhappy life?” Catherine spat at Brianne. “You killed my father!”

“I was afraid! Key’s father . . .”

“I don’t care,” said Catherine coldly. “I don’t care why you did it. I don’t care how good your reasons were for betraying me in the first place.”

“That’s right! You never cared about anything!” Brianne clawed at her breast. “You killed my heart! You didn’t care about Glynn, you just wanted him because he wasn’t yours!”

It took Catherine a few seconds to dredge that name up from memory, to connect it with Brianne’s old lover and recall that it was her callousness and self-absorption that had set the events of the past ten years in motion. But although this roused her guilt, it did not abolish her anger. She couldn’t equate Brianne’s crimes with her excesses. Still, she was confused about what to do, uncomfortable now with the very concept of justice, and she wondered if she should leave, just throw down the hook and leave vengeance to whatever ordering principle governed the fates in Hangtown. Then Brianne shifted her feet, made a noise in her throat and Catherine felt rage boiling up inside her.

“Don’t throw that up to me,” she said with flat menace. “Nothing I’ve done to you merited what you did to me. You don’t even know what you did!” She raised the hook, and Brianne shrank back into the corner. The child twisted its head to look at Catherine, fixing her with brimming eyes, and she held back.

“Send the child away,” she told Brianne.

Brianne leaned down to the child. “Go to your father,” she said.

“No, wait,” said Catherine, fearing that the child might bring Zev Mallison.

“Must you kill us both?” said Brianne, her voice hoarse with emotion. Hearing this, the child once more began to cry.

“Stop it,” Catherine said to him, and when he continued to cry, she shouted it.

Brianne muffled the child’s wails in her skirts. “Go ahead!” she said, her face twisted with fear. “Just do it!” She broke down into sobs, ducked her head and waited for the blow. Catherine stepped close to Brianne, yanked her head back by the hair, exposing her throat, and set the point of the hook against the big vein there. Brianne’s eyes rolled down, trying to see the hook; her breath came in gaspy shrieks, and the child, caught between the two women, squirmed and wailed. Catherine’s hand was trembling, and that slight motion pricked Brianne’s skin, drawing a bead of blood. She stiffened, her eyelids fluttered down, her mouth fell open—an expression, at least so it seemed to Catherine, of ecstatic expectation. Catherine studied the face, feeling as if her emotions were being purified, drawn into a fine wire; she had an almost aesthetic appreciation of the stillness gathering around her, the hard poise of Brianne’s musculature, the sensitive pulse in the throat that transmitted its frail rhythm along the hook, and she restrained herself from pressing the point deeper, wanting to prolong Brianne’s suffering.

But then the hook grew heavy in Catherine’s hands, and she understood that the moment had passed, that her need for vengeance had lost the immediacy and thrust of passion. She imagined herself skewering Brianne, and then imagined dragging her out to confront a village tribunal, forcing her to confess her lies, having her sentenced to be tied up and left for whatever creatures foraged beneath Griaule’s wing. But while it provided her a measure of satisfaction to picture Brianne dead or dying, she saw now that anticipation was the peak of vengeance, that carrying out the necessary actions would only harm her. It frustrated her that all these years and the deaths would have no resolution, and she thought that she must have changed more than she had assumed to put aside vengeance so easily; this caused her to wonder again about the nature of the change, to question whether she was truly herself or merely an arcane likeness. But then she realized that the change had been her resolution, and that vengeance was an artifact of her old life, nothing more, and that her new life, whatever its secret character, must find other concerns to fuel it apart from old griefs and unworthy passions. This struck her with the force of a revelation, and she let out a long sighing breath that seemed to carry away with it all the sad vibrations of the past, all the residues of hates and loves, and she could finally believe that she was no longer the dragon’s prisoner. She felt new in her whole being, subject to new compulsions, as alive as tears, as strong as wheat, far too strong and alive for this pallid environment, and she could hardly recall now why she had come. She looked at Brianne and her son, feeling only the ghost of hatred, seeing them not as objects of pity or wrath, but as unfamiliar, irrelevant, lives trapped in the prison of their own self-regard, and without a word she turned and walked to the steps, slamming the hook deep into the boards of the wall, a gesture of fierce resignation, the closing of a door opening onto anger and the opening of one that led to uncharted climes, and went down out of the village, leaving old Tim Weedlon’s thirst for gossip unquenched, passing along Griaule’s back, pushing through thickets and fording streams, and not noticing for quite some time that she had crossed onto another hill and left the dragon far behind. Three weeks later she came to Cabrecavela, a small town at the opposite end of the Carbpnales Valley, and there, using the gems provided her by Mauldry, she bought a house and settled in and began to write about Griaule, creating not a personal memoir but a reference work containing an afterword dealing with certain metaphysical speculations, for she did not wish her adventures published, considering them banal by comparison to her primary subjects, the dragon’s physiology and ecology. After the publication of her book, which she entitled The Heart’s Millennium, she experienced a brief celebrity; but she shunned most of the opportunities for travel and lecture and lionization that came her way, and satisfied her desire to impart the knowledge she had gained by teaching in the local school and speaking privately with those scientists from Port Chantay who came to interview her. Some of these visitors had been colleagues of John Colmacos, yet she never mentioned their relationship, believing that her memories of the man needed no modification; but perhaps this was less than an honest self-appraisal, perhaps she had not come to terms with that portion of her past, for in the spring five years after she had returned to the world she married one of these scientists, a man named Brian Ocoi, who in his calm demeanor and modest easiness of speech appeared cast from the same mold as Colmacos. From that point on little is known of her other than the fact that she bore two sons and confined her writing to a journal that has gone unpublished. However, it is said of her—as is said of all those who perform similar acts of faith in the shadows of other dragons yet unearthed from beneath their hills of ordinary-seeming earth and grass, believing that their bond serves through gentle constancy to enhance and not further delimit the boundaries of this prison world—from that day forward she lived happily ever after. Except for the dying at the end. And the heartbreak in-between.

SURFACING

Walter Jon Williams

The author’s last story to appear in IAsfm was the stunning novelette “Dinosaurs” (June 1987).He returns to our pages with another powerful science fiction tale.

There was an alien on the surface of the planet. A Kyklops had teleported into Overlook Station, and then flown down on the shuttle. Since, unlike humans, it could teleport without apparatus, presumably it took the shuttle for the ride. The Kyklops wore a human body, controlled through an n-dimensional interface, and took its pleasures in the human fashion.

The Kyklops expressed an interest in Anthony’s work, but Anthony avoided it: he stayed at sea and listened to aliens of another kind.

Anthony wasn’t interested in meeting aliens who knew more than he did.

The boat drifted in a cold current and listened to the cries of the sea. A tall grey swell was rolling in from the southwest, crossing with a wind-driven easterly chop. The boat tossed, caught in the confusion of wave patterns.

It was a sloppy ocean, somehow unsatisfactory. Marking a sloppy day.

Anthony felt a thing twist in his mind. Something that, in its own time, would lead to anger.

The boat had been out here, both in the warm current and then in the cold, for three days. Each more unsatisfactory than the last.

The growing swell was being driven toward land by a storm that was breaking up fifty miles out to sea: the remnants of the storm itself would arrive by midnight and make things even more unpleasant. Spray feathered across the tops of the waves. The day was growing cold.

Spindrift pattered across Anthony’s shoulders. He ignored it, concentrated instead on the long, grating harmonic moan picked up by the microphones his boat dangled into the chill current. The moan ended on a series of clicks and trailed off. Anthony tapped his computer deck. A resolution appeared on the screen. Anthony shaded his eyes from the pale sun and looked at it.

Anthony gazed stonily at the translation tree. “I am rising toward and thinking hungrily about the slippery-tasting coordinates” actually made

the most objective sense, but the righthand branch of thetree was the most literal and most of what Anthony suspected was context had been lost. “I and the oily current are in a state of motion toward one another” was perhaps more literal, but “We (the oily deep and I) are in a cold state of mind” was perhaps equally valid.

The boat gave a corkscrew lurch, dropped down the face of a swell, came to an abrupt halt at the end of its drogue. Water slapped against the stern. A mounting screw, come loose from a bracket on the bridge, fell and danced brightly across the deck.

The screw and the deck are in a state of relative motion, Anthony thought. The screw and the deck are in a motion state of mind.

Wrong, he thought, there is no Other in the Dwellers’ speech.

We, I and the screw and the deck, are feeling cold.

We, I and the Dweller below, are in a state of mutual incomprehension.

A bad day, Anthony thought.

Inchoate anger burned deep inside him.

Anthony saved the translation and got up from his seat. He went to the bridge and told the boat to retrieve the drogue and head for Cabo Santa Pola at flank speed. He then went below and found a bottle of bourbon that had three good swallows left.

The trailing microphones continued to record the sonorous moans from below, the sound now mingled with the thrash of the boat’s screws.

The screw danced on the deck as the engines built up speed.

Its state of mind was not recorded.

The video news, displayed above the bar, showed the Kyklops making his tour of the planet. The Kyklops’ human body, male, was tall and blue-eyed and elegant. He made witty conversation and showed off his naked chest as if he were proud of it. His name was Telamon.

His real body, Anthony knew, was a tenuous uncorporeal mass somewhere in n-dimensional space. The human body had been grown for it to wear, to move like a puppet. The nth dimension was interesting only to a mathematician: its inhabitants preferred wearing flesh.

Anthony asked the bartender to turn off the vid.

The yacht club bar was called the Leviathan, and Anthony hated the name. His creatures were too important, too much themselves, to be awarded a name that stank of human myth, of human resonance that had nothing to do with the creatures themselves. Anthony never called them Leviathans himself. They were Deep Dwellers.

There was a picture of a presumed Leviathan above the bar. Sometimes bits of matter were washed up on shore, thin tenuous membranes, long tentacles, bits of phosphorescence, all encrusted with the local equivalent of barnacles and infested with parasites. It was assumed the stuff had broken loose from the larger Dweller, or were bits of one that had died. The artist had done his best and painted something that looked like a whale covered with tentacles and seaweed.

The place had fake-nautical decor, nets, harpoons, flashing rods, and knicknacks made from driftwood, and the bar was regularly infected by tourists: that made it even worse. But the regular bartender and the divemaster and the steward were real sailors, and that made the yacht club bearable, gave him some company. His mail was delivered here as well.

Tonight the bartender was a substitute named Christopher: he was married to the owner’s daughter and got his job that way. He was a fleshy, sullen man and no company.

We, thought Anthony, the world and I, are drinking alone. Anger burned in him, anger at the quality of the day and the opacity of the Dwellers and the storm that beat brainlessly at the windows.

“Got the bastard!” A man was pounding the bar. “Drinks on me.” He was talking loudly, and he wore gold rings on his fingers. Raindrops sparkled in his hair. He wore a flashing harness, just in case anyone missed why he was here. Hatred settled in Anthony like poison in his belly.

“Got a thirty-foot flasher,” the man said. He pounded the bar again. “Me and Nick got it hung up outside. Four hours. A four-hour fight!”

“Why have a fight with something you can’t eat?” Anthony said.

The man looked at him. He looked maybe twenty, but Anthony could tell he was old, centuries old maybe. Old and vain and stupid, stupid as a boy. “It’s a game fish,” the man said.

Anthony looked into the fisherman’s eyes and saw a reflection of his own contempt. “You wanna fight,” he said, “you wanna have a game, fight something smart. Not a dumb animal that you can outsmart, that once you catch it will only rot and stink.”

That was the start.

Once it began, it didn’t take long. The man’s rings cut Anthony’s face, and Anthony was smaller and lighter, but the man telegraphed every move and kept leading with his right. When it was over, Anthony left him on the floor and stepped out into the downpour, stood alone in the hammering rain and let the water wash the blood from his face. The whiskey and the rage were a flame that licked his nerves and made them sing.

He began walking down the street. Heading for another bar.

GRACE(2) meant grace in the sense of physical grace, dexterity, harmony of motion, as opposed to spiritual grace, which was GRACE(1). The Dweller that Anthony was listening to was engaged in a dialogue with another, possibly the same known to the computer as 41, who might be named “Upwelling Reflection,” but Deep Dweller naming systems seemed inconsistent, depending largely on a context that was as yet opaque, and “upwelling reflection” might have to do with something else entirely.

Anthony suspected the Dweller had just said hello.

Salt water smarted on the cuts on Anthony’s face. His swollen knuckles pained him as he tapped the keys of his computer deck. He never suffered from hangover, and his mind seemed filled with an exemplary clarity; he worked rapidly, with burning efficiency. His body felt energized.

He was out of the cold Kirst Current today, in a warm, calm subtropical sea on the other side of the Las Madres archipelago. The difference of forty nautical miles was astonishing.

The sun warmed his back. Sweat prickled on his scalp. The sea sparkled under a violet sky.

The other Dweller answered.

Through his bare feet, Anthony could feel the subsonic overtones vibrating through the boat. Something in the cabin rattled. The microphones recorded the sounds, raised the subsonics to an audible level, played it back. The computer made its attempt.

A9140 was a phrase that, as yet, had no translation.

The Dweller language, Anthony had discovered, had no separation of subject and object; it was a trait in common with the Earth cetaceans whose languages Anthony had first learned. “I swim toward the island” was not a grammatical possibility: “I and the island are in a condition of swimming toward one another” was the nearest possible approximation.

The Dwellers lived in darkness, and, like Earth’s cetaceans, in a liquid medium. Perhaps they were psychologically unable to separate themselves from their environment, from their fluid surroundings. Never approaching the surface—it was presumed they could not survive in a non-pressurized environment—they had no idea of the upper limit of their world.

They were surrounded by a liquid three-dimensional wholeness, not an air-earth-sky environment from which they could consider themselves separate.

A high-pitched whooping came over the speakers, and Anthony smiled as he listened. The singer was one of the humpbacks that he had imported to this planet, a male called The One with Two Notches on His Starboard Fluke.

Two Notches was one of the brighter whales, and also the most playful. Anthony ordered his computer to translate the humpback speech.

ANTHONY, I AND A PLACE OF BAD SMELLS HAVE FOUND ONE ANOTHER, BUT THIS HAS NOT DETERRED OUR HUNGER.

The computer played back the message as it displayed the translation, and Anthony could understand more context from the sound of the original speech: that Two Notches was floating in a cold layer beneath the bad smell, and that the bad smell was methane or something like it—humans couldn’t smell methane, but whales could. The over-literal translation was an aid only, to remind Anthony of idioms he might have forgotten.

Anthony’s name in humpback was actually He Who Has Brought Us to the Sea of Rich Strangeness, but the computer translated it simply. Anthony tapped his reply.

What is it that stinks, Two Notches?

SOME KIND OF HORRID JELLYFISH. WERE THEY-AND-I FEEDING, THEY-AND-I WOULD SPIT ONE ANOTHER OUT. I/THEY WILL GIVE THEM/ME A NAME: THEY/ME ARE THE JELLYFISH THAT SMELL LIKE INDIGESTION.

That is a good name, Two Notches.

I AND A SMALL BOAT DISCOVERED EACH OTHER EARLIER TODAY. WE ITCHED, SO WE SCRATCHED OUR BACK ON THE BOAT. THE HUMANS AND I WERE STARTLED. WE HAD A GOOD LAUGH TOGETHER IN SPITE OF OUR HUNGER.

Meaning that Two Notches had risen under the boat, scratched his back on it, and terrified the passengers witless. Anthony remembered the first time this had happened to him back on Earth, a vast female humpback rising up without warning, one long scalloped fin breaking the water to port, the rest of the whale to starboard, thrashing in cetacean delight as it rubbed itself against a boat half its length. Anthony had clung to the gunwale, horrified by what the whale could do to his boat, but still exhilarated, delighted at the sight of the creature and its glorious joy.

Still, Two Notches ought not to play too many pranks on the tourists.

We should be careful, Two Notches. Not all humans possess our sense of humor, especially if they are hungry.

WE WERE BORED, ANTHONY. MATING IS OVER, FEEDING HAS NOT BEGUN. ALSO, IT WAS NICK’S BOAT THAT GOT SCRATCHED. IN OUR OPINION NICK AND I ENJOYED OURSELVES, EVEN THOUGH WE WERE HUNGRY.

Hunger and food seemed to be the humpback subtheme of the day. Humpback songs, like the human, were made up of text and chorus, the chorus repeating itself, with variations, through the message.

I and Nick will ask each other and find out, as we feed.

Anthony tried to participate in the chorus/response about food, but he found himself continually frustrated at his clumsy phrasing. Fortunately the whales were tolerant of his efforts.

HAVE WE LEARNED ANYTHING ABOUT THE ONES THAT SWIM DEEP AND DO NOT BREATHE AND FEED ON OBSCURE THINGS?

Not yet, Two Notches. Something has interrupted us in our hungry quest.

A CONDITION OF MISFORTUNE EXISTS, LIKE UNTO HUNGER. WE MUST LEARN TO BE QUICKER.

We will try, Two Notches. After we eat.

WE WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK TO THE DEEP DWELLERS NOW, AND FEED WITH THEM, BUT WE MUST BREATHE.

We will speak to ourselves another time, after feeding.

WE ARE IN A CONDITION OF HUNGER, ANTHONY. WE MUST EAT SOON.

We will remember our hunger and make plans.

The mating and calving season for the humpbacks was over. Most of the whales were already heading north to their summer feeding grounds, where they would do little but eat for six months. Two Notches and one of the other males had remained in the vicinity of Las Madres as a favor to Anthony, who used them to assist in locating the Deep Dwellers, but soon—in a matter of days—the pair would have to head north. They hadn’t eaten anything for nearly half a year; Anthony didn’t want to starve them.

But when the whales left, Anthony would be alone—again—with the Deep Dwellers. He didn’t want to think about that.

The system’s second sun winked across the waves, rising now. It was a white dwarf and emitted dangerous amounts of X-rays. The boat’s falkner generator, triggered by the computer, snapped on a field that surrounded the boat and guarded it from energetic radiation. Anthony felt the warmth on his shoulders decrease. He turned his attention back to the Deep Dwellers.

A blaze of delight rose in Anthony. The Dwellers, he realized, had overheard his conversation with Two Notches, and were commenting on it. Furthermore, he knew, A9140 probably was a verb form having to do with hearing—the Dwellers had a lot of them. “I/You hear the shrill sounds from above” might do as a working translation, and although he had no idea how to translate C22, he suspected it was a comment on the sounds. In a fever, Anthony began to work. As he bent over his keys he heard, through water and bone, the sound of Two Notches singing.

The Milky Way was a dim watercolor wash overhead. An odd twilight hung over Las Madres, a near-darkness that marked the hours when only the dwarf star was in the sky, providing little visible light but still pouring out X-rays. Cabo Santa Pola lay in a bright glowing crescent across the boat’s path. Music drifted from a waterfront tavern, providing a counterpoint to the Deep Dweller speech that still rang in Anthony’s head. A familiar figure waited on the dock, standing beneath the yellow lamp that marked Anthony’s slip. Anthony waved and throttled the boat back.

A good day. Even after the yellow sun had set, Anthony still felt in a sunny mood. A9140 had been codified as “listen(14),” meaning listen solely in the sense of listening to a sound that originated from far outside the Dwellers’ normal sphere—from outside their entire universe, in fact, which spoke volumes for the way the Dwellers saw themselves in relation to their world. They knew something else was up there, and their speech could make careful distinction between the world they knew and could perceive directly and the one they didn’t. C22 was a descriptive term involving patterning: the Dwellers realized that the cetacean speech they’d been hearing wasn’t simply random. Which spoke rather well for their cognition.

Anthony turned the boat and backed into the slip. Nick Kanellopoulos, whom the humpbacks called The One Who Chases Bad-Tasting Fish, took the sternline that Anthony threw him and tied it expertly to a cleat. Anthony shut off the engines, took a bowline, and hopped to the dock. He bent over the cleat and made his knot.

“You’ve gotta stop beating up my customers, Anthony,” Nick said.

Anthony said nothing.

“You even send your damn whales to harass me.”

Anthony jumped back into the boat and stepped into the cabin for a small canvas bag that held his gear and the data cubes containing the Dweller’s conversation. When he stepped back out of the cabin, he saw Nick standing on one foot, the other poised to step into the boat. Anthony gave Nick a look and Nick pulled his foot back. Anthony smiled. He didn’t like people on his boat.

“Dinner?” he asked.

Nick gazed at him. A muscle moved in the man’s cheek. He was dapper, olive-skinned, about a century old, the second-youngest human on the planet. He looked in his late teens. He wore a personal falkner generator on his belt that protected him from the dwarf’s X-rays.

“Dinner. Fine.” His brown eyes were concerned. “You look like hell, Anthony.”

Anthony rubbed the stubble on his cheeks. “I feel on top of the world,” he said.

“Half the time you don’t even talk to me. I don’t know why I’m eating supper with you.”

“Let me clean up. Then we can go to the Mary Villa.”

Nick shook his head. “Okay,” he said. “But you’re buying. You cost me a customer last night.”

Anthony slapped him on the shoulder. “Least I can do, I guess.”

A good day.

Near midnight. Winds beat at the island’s old volcanic cone, pushed down the crowns of trees. A shuttle, black against the darkness of the sky, rose in absolute silence from the port on the other side of the island, heading toward the bright fixed star that was Overlook Station. The alien, Telamon, was aboard, or so the newscasts reported.

Deep Dwellers still sang in Anthony’s head. Mail in hand, he let himself in through the marina gate and walked toward his slip. The smell of the sea rose around him. He stretched, yawned. Belched up a bit of the tequila he’d been drinking with Nick. He intended to get an early start and head back to sea before dawn.

Anthony paused beneath a light and opened the large envelope, pulled out page proofs that had been mailed, at a high cost, from the offices of the Xenobiology Review on Kemps. Discontent scratched at his nerves. He frowned as he glanced through the pages. He’d written the article over a year before, at the end of the first spring he’d spent here, and just glancing through it he now found the article over-tentative, over-formal, and, worse, almost pleading in its attempt to justify his decision to move himself and the whales here. The palpable defensiveness made him want to squirm.

Disgust filled him. His fingers clutched at the pages, then tore the proofs across. His body spun full circle as he scaled the proofs out to the sea. The wind scattered thick chunks of paper across the dark waters of the marina.

He stalked toward his boat. Bile rose in his throat. He wished he had a bottle of tequila with him. He almost went back for one before he realized the liquor stores were closed.

“Anthony Maldalena?”

She was a little gawky, and her skin was pale. Dark hair in a single long braid, deep eyes, a bit of an overbite. She was waiting for him at the end of his slip, under the light. She had a bag over one shoulder.

Anthony stopped. Dull anger flickered in his belly. He didn’t want anyone taking notice of the bruises and cuts on his face. He turned his head away as he stepped into his boat, dropped his bag on a seat.

“Mr. Maldalena. My name is Philana Telander. I came here to see you.”

“How’d you get in?”

She gestured to the boat two slips down, a tall FPS-powered yacht shaped like a flat oval with a tall flybridge jutting from its center so that the pilot could see over wavetops. It would fly from place to place, but she could put it down in the water if she wanted. No doubt she’d bought a temporary membership at the yacht club.

“Nice boat,” said Anthony. It would have cost her a fair bit to have it gated here. He opened the hatch to his forward cabin, tossed his bag onto the long couch inside.

“I meant,” she said, “I came to this planet to see you.”

Anthony didn’t say anything, just straightened from his stoop by the hatch and looked at her. She shifted from one foot to another. Her skin was yellow in the light of the lamp. She reached into her bag and fumbled with something.

Anthony waited.

The clicks and sobs of whales sounded from the recorder in her hand.

“I wanted to show you what I’ve been able to do with your work. I have some articles coming up in Cetology Journal but they won’t be out for a while.”

“You’ve done very well,” said Anthony. Tequila swirled in his head. He was having a hard time concentrating on a subject as difficult as whale speech.

Philana had specialized in communication with female humpbacks. It was harder to talk with the females: although they were curious and playful, they weren’t vocal like the bulls; their language was deeper, briefer, more personal. They made no songs. It was almost as if, solely in the realm of speech, the cows were autistic. Their psychology was different and complicated, and Anthony had had little success in establishing any lasting communication. The cows, he had realized, were speaking a second tongue: the humpbacks were essentially bilingual, and Anthony had only learned one of their languages.

Philana had succeeded where Anthony had found only frustration. She had built from his work, established a structure and basis for communication. She still wasn’t as easy in her speech with the cows as Anthony was with a bull like Two Notches, but she was far closer than Anthony had ever been.

Steam rose from the coffee cup in Philana’s hand as she poured from Anthony’s vacuum flask. She and Anthony sat on the cushioned benches in the stern of Anthony’s boat. Tequila still buzzed in Anthony’s head. Conflicting urges warred in him. He didn’t want anyone else here, on his boat, this close to his work; but Philana’s discoveries were too interesting to shut her out entirely. He swallowed more coffee.

“Listen to this,” Philana said. “It’s fascinating. A cow teaching her calf about life.” She touched the recorder, and muttering filled the air. Anthony had difficulty understanding: the cow’s idiom was complex, and bore none of the poetic repetition that made the males’ language easier to follow. Finally he shook his head.

“Go ahead and turn it off,” he said. “I’m picking up only one phrase in five. I can’t follow it.”

Philana seemed startled. “Oh. I’m sorry. I thought—”

Anthony twisted uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t know every goddamn thing about whales,” he said.

The recorder fell silent. Wind rattled the canvas awning over the flybridge. Savage discontent settled into Anthony’s mind. Suddenly he needed to get rid of this woman, get her off his boat and head to sea right now, away from all the things on land that could trip him up.

He thought of his father upside-down in the smokehouse. Not moving, arms dangling.

He should apologize, he realized. We are, he thought, in a condition of permanent apology.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just . . . not used to dealing with people.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” she said. “I’m only twenty-one, and . . .”

“Yes?” Blurted suddenly, the tequila talking. Anthony felt disgust at his own awkwardness.

Philana looked at the planks. “Yes. Truly. I’m twenty-one, and sometimes people get impatient with me for reasons I don’t understand.”

Anthony’s voice was quiet. “I’m twenty-six.”

Philana was surprised. “But. I thought.” She thought for a long moment. “It seems I’ve been reading your papers for . . .”

“I was first published at twenty,” he said. “The finback article.”

Philana shook her head. “I’d never have guessed. Particularly after what I saw in your new XR paper.”

Anthony’s reaction was instant. “You saw that?” Another spasm of disgust touched him. Tequila burned in his veins. His stomach turned over. For some reason his arms were trembling.

“A friend on Kemps sent me an advance copy. I thought it was brilliant. The way you were able to codify your conceptions about a race of which you could really know nothing, and have it all pan out when you began to understand them. That’s an incredible achievement.”

“It’s a piece of crap.” Anthony wanted more tequila badly. His body was shaking. He tossed the remains of his coffee over his shoulder into the sea. “I’ve learned so much since. I’ve given up even trying to publish it. The delays are too long. Even if I put it on the nets, I’d still have to take the time to write it, and I’d rather spend my time working.”

“I’d like to see it.”

He turned away from her. “I don’t show my work till it’s finished.”

“I . . . didn’t mean to intrude.”

Apology. He could feel a knife twisting in his belly. He spoke quickly. “I’m sorry, Miss Telander. It’s late, and I’m not used to company. I’m not entirely well.” He stood, took her arm. Ignoring her surprise, he almost pulled her to her feet. “Maybe tomorrow. We’ll talk again.”

She blinked up at him. “Yes. I’d like that.”

“Good night.” He rushed her off the boat and stepped below to the head. He didn’t want her to hear what was going to happen next. Acid rose in his throat. He clutched his middle and bent over the small toilet and let the spasms take him. The convulsions wracked him long after he was dry. After it was over he stood shakily, staggered to the sink, washed his face. His sinus burned and brought tears to his eyes. He threw himself on the couch.

In the morning, before dawn, he cast off and motored out into the quiet sea.

The other male, The One Who Sings of Others, found a pair of Dwellers engaged in a long conversation and hovered above them. His transponder led Anthony to the place, fifty miles south into the bottomless tropical ocean. The Dwellers’ conversation was dense. Anthony understood perhaps one word-phrase in ten. Sings of Others interrupted from time to time to tell Anthony how hungry he was.

The recordings would require days of work before Anthony could even begin to make sense of them. He wanted to stay on the site, but the Dwellers fell silent, neither Anthony nor Sings of Others could find another conversation, and Anthony was near out of supplies. He’d been working so intently he’d never got around to buying food.

The white dwarf had set by the time Anthony motored into harbor. Dweller mutterings did a chaotic dance in his mind. He felt a twist of annoyance at the sight of Philana Telander jumping from her big air yacht to the pier. She had obviously been waiting for him.

He threw her the bowline and she made fast. As he stepped onto the dock and fastened the sternline, he noticed sunburn reddening her cheeks. She’d spent the day on the ocean.

“Sorry I left so early,” he said. “One of the humpbacks found some Dwellers, and their conversation sounded interesting.”

She looked from Anthony to his boat and back. “That’s all right,” she said. “I shouldn’t have talked to you last night. Not when you were ill.”

Anger flickered in his mind. She’d heard him being sick, then.

“Too much to drink,” he said. He jumped back into the boat and got his gear.

“Have you eaten?” she asked. “Somebody told me about a place called the Villa Mary.”

He threw his bag over one shoulder. Dinner would be his penance. “I’ll show you,” he said.

“Mary was a woman who died,” Anthony said. “One of the original Knight’s Move people. She chose to die, refused the treatments. She didn’t believe in living forever.” He looked up at the arched ceiling, the moldings on walls and ceiling, the initials ML worked into the decoration. “Brian McGivern built this place in her memory,” Anthony said. “He’s built a lot of places like this, on different worlds.”

Philana was looking at her plate. She nudged a ichthyoid exomembrane with her fork. “I know,” she said. “I’ve been in a few of them.”

Anthony reached for his glass, took a drink, then stopped himself from taking a second swallow. He realized that he’d drunk most of a bottle of wine. He didn’t want a repetition of last night.

With an effort he put the glass down.

“She’s someone I think about, sometimes,” Philana said. “About the choice she made.”

“Yes?” Anthony shook his head. “Not me. I don’t want to spend a hundred years dying. If I ever decide to die, I’ll do it quick.”

“That’s what people say. But they never do it. They just get older and older. Stranger and stranger.” She raised her hands, made a gesture that took in the room, the decorations, the entire white building on its cliff overlooking the sea. “Get old enough, you start doing things like building Villa Marys all over the galaxy. McGivern’s an oldest-generation immortal, you know. Maybe the wealthiest human anywhere, and he spends his time immortalizing someone who didn’t want immortality of any kind.”

Anthony laughed. “Sounds like you’re thinking of becoming a Diehard.”

She looked at him steadily. “Yes.”

Anthony’s laughter froze abruptly. A cool shock passed through him. He had never spoken to a Diehard before: the only ones he’d met were people who mumbled at him on streetcorners and passed out incoherent religious tracts.

Philana looked at her plate. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why sorry?”

“I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Anthony reached for his wine glass, stopped himself, put his hand down. “I’m curious.”

She gave a little, apologetic laugh. “I may not go through with it.”

“Why even think about it?”

Philana thought a long time before answering. “I’ve seen how the whales accept death. So graceful about it, so matter-of-fact—and they don’t even have the myth of an afterlife to comfort them. If they get sick, they just beach themselves; and their friends try to keep them company. And when I try to give myself a reason for living beyond my natural span, I can’t think of any. All I can think of is the whales.”

Anthony saw the smokehouse in his mind, his father with his arms hanging, the fingers touching the dusty floor. “Death isn’t nice.”

Philana gave him a skeletal grin and took a quick drink of wine. “With any luck,” she said, “death isn’t anything at all.”

Wind chilled the night, pouring upon the town through a slot in the island’s volcanic cone. Anthony watched a streamlined head as it moved in the dark windwashed water of the marina. The head belonged to a cold-blooded amphibian that lived in the warm surf of the Las Madres; the creature was known misleadingly as a Las Madres seal. They had little fear of humanity and were curious about the new arrivals. Anthony stamped a foot on the slip. Planks boomed. The seal’s head disappeared with a soft splash. Ripples spread in starlight, and Anthony smiled.

Philana had stepped into her yacht for a sweater. She returned, cast a glance at the water, saw nothing.

“Can I listen to the Dwellers?” she asked. “I’d like to hear them.”

Despite his resentment at her imposition, Anthony appreciated her being careful with the term: she hadn’t called them Leviathans once. He thought about her request, could think of no reason to refuse save his own stubborn reluctance. The Dweller sounds were just background noise, meaningless to her. He stepped onto his boat, took a cube from his pocket, put it in the trapdoor, pressed the PLAY button. Dweller murmurings filled the cockpit. Philana stepped from the dock to the boat. She shivered in the wind. Her eyes were pools of dark wonder.

“So different.”

“Are you surprised?”

“I suppose not.”

“This isn’t really what they sound like. What you’re hearing is a computer-generated metaphor for the real thing. Much of their communication is subsonic, and the computer raises the sound to levels we can hear, and also speeds it up. Sometimes the Dwellers take three or four minutes to speak what seems to be a simple sentence.”

“We would never have noticed them except for an accident,” Philana said. “That’s how alien they are.”

“Yes.”

Humanity wouldn’t know of the Dwellers’ existence at all if it weren’t for the subsonics confusing some automated sonar buoys, followed by an idiot computer assuming the sounds were deliberate interference and initiating an ET scan. Any human would have looked at the data, concluded it was some kind of seismic interference, and programmed the buoys to ignore it.

“They’ve noticed us,” Anthony said. “The other day I heard them discussing a conversation I had with one of the humpbacks.”

Philana straightened. Excitement was plain in her voice. “They can conceptualize something alien to them.”

“Yes.”

Her response was instant, stepping on the last sibilant of his answer. “And theorize about our existence.”

Anthony smiled at her eagerness. “I . . . don’t think they’ve got around to that yet.”

“But they are intelligent.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe more intelligent than the whales. From what you say, they seem quicker to conceptualize.”

“Intelligent in certain ways, perhaps. There’s still very little I understand about them.”

“Can you teach me to talk to them?”

The wind blew chill between them. “I don’t,” he said, “talk to them.”

She seemed not to notice his change of mood, stepped closer. “You haven’t tried that yet? That would seem to be reasonable, considering they’ve already noticed us.”

He could feel his hackles rising, mental defenses sliding into place. “I’m not proficient enough,” he said.

“If you could attract their attention, they could teach you.” Reasonably.

“No. Not yet.” Rage exploded in Anthony’s mind. He wanted her off his boat, away from his work, his existence. He wanted to be alone again with his creatures, solitary witness to the lonely and wonderful interplay of alien minds.

“I never told you,” Philana said, “why I’m here.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“I want to do some work with the humpback cows.”

“Why?”

Her eyes widened slightly. She had detected the hostility in his tone. “I want to chart any linguistic changes that may occur as a result of their move to another environment.”

Through clouds of blinding resentment Anthony considered her plan. He couldn’t stop her, he knew: anyone could talk to the whales if they knew how to do it. It might keep her away from the Dwellers. “Fine,” he said. “Do it.”

Her look was challenging. “I don’t need your permission.”

“I know that.”

“You don’t own them.”

“I know that, too.”

There was a splash far out in the marina. The Las Madres seal chasing a fish. Philana was still staring at him. He looked back.

“Why are you afraid of my getting close to the Dwellers?” she asked.

“You’ve been here two days. You don’t know them. You’re making all manner of assumptions about what they’re like, and all you’ve read is one obsolete article.”

“You’re the expert. But if my assumptions are wrong, you’re free to tell me.”

“Humans interacted with whales for centuries before they learned to speak with them, and even now the speech is limited and often confused. I’ve only been here two and a half years.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “you could use some help. Write those papers of yours. Publish the data.”

He turned away. “I’m doing fine,” he said.

“Glad to hear it.” She took a long breath. “What did I do, Anthony? Tell me.”

“Nothing,” he said. Anthony watched the marina waters, saw the amphibian surface, its head pulled back to help slide a fish down its gullet. Philana was just standing there. We, thought Anthony, are in a condition of non-resolution.

“I work alone,” he said. “I immerse myself in their speech, in their environment, for months at a time. Talking to a human breaks my concentration. I don’t know how to talk to a person right now. After the Dwellers, you seem perfectly . . .”

“Alien?” she said. Anthony didn’t answer. The amphibian slid through the water, its head leaving a short, silver wake.

The boat rocked as Philana stepped from it to the dock. “Maybe we can talk later,” she said. “Exchange data or something.”

“Yes,” Anthony said. “We’ll do that.” His eyes were still on the seal.

Later, before he went to bed, he told the computer to play Dweller speech all night long.

Lying in his bunk the next morning, Anthony heard Philana cast off her yacht. He felt a compulsion to talk to her, apologize again, but in the end he stayed in his rack, tried to concentrate on Dweller sounds. I/We remain in a condition of solitude, he thought, the Dweller phrases coming easily to his mind. There was a brief shadow cast on the port beside him as the big flying boat rose into the sky, then nothing but sunlight and the slap of water on the pier supports. Anthony climbed out of his sleeping bag and went into town, provisioned the boat for a week. He had been too close to land for too long: a trip into the sea, surrounded by nothing but whales and Dweller speech, should cure him of his unease.

Two Notches had switched on his transponder: Anthony followed the beacon north, the boat rising easily over deep blue rollers. Desiring sun, Anthony climbed to the flybridge and lowered the canvas cover. Fifty miles north of Cabo Santa Pola there was a clear dividing line in the water, a line as clear as a meridian on a chart, beyond which the sea was a deeper, purer blue. The line marked the boundary of the cold Kirst current that had journeyed, wreathed in mist from contact with the warmer air, a full three thousand nautical miles from the region of the South Pole. Anthony crossed the line and rolled down his sleeves as the temperature of the air fell.

He heard the first whale speech through his microphones as he entered the cold current: the sound hadn’t carried across the turbulent frontier of warm water and cold. The whales were unclear, distant and mixed with the sound of the screws, but he could tell from the rhythm that he was overhearing a dialogue. Apparently Sings of Others had joined Two Notches north of Las Madres. It was a long journey to make overnight, but not impossible.

The cooler air was invigorating. The boat plowed a straight, efficient wake through the deep blue sea. Anthony’s spirits rose. This was where he belonged, away from the clutter and complication of humanity. Doing what he did best.

He heard something odd in the rhythm of the whalespeech; he frowned and listened more closely. One of the whales was Two Notches: Anthony recognized his speech patterns easily after all this time; but the other wasn’t Sings of Others. There was a clumsiness in its pattern of chorus and response.

The other was a human. Annoyance hummed in Anthony’s nerves. Back on Earth, tourists or eager amateur explorers sometimes bought cheap translation programs and tried to talk to the whales, but this was no tourist program: it was too eloquent, too knowing. Philana, of course. She’d followed the transponder signal and was busy gathering data about the humpback females. Anthony cut his engines and let the boat drift slowly to put its bow into the wind; he deployed the microphones from their wells in the hull and listened. The song was bouncing off a colder layer below, and it echoed confusingly.

DEEP SWIMMER AND HER CALF, CALLED THE ONE THAT NUDGES, ARE POSSESSED OF ONE ANOTHER. I AND THAT ONE AM THE FATHER. WE HUNGER FOR ONE ANOTHER’S PRESENCE.

Apparently hunger was once again the subtheme of the day. The context told Anthony that Two Notches was swimming in cool water beneath a boat. Anthony turned the volume up:

WE HUNGER TO HEAR OF DEEP SWIMMER AND OUR CALF.

That was the human response: limited in its phrasing and context, direct and to the point.

I AND DEEP SWIMMER ARE SHY. WE WILL NOT PLAY WITH HUMANS. INSTEAD WE WILL PRETEND WE ARE HUNGRY AND VANISH INTO DEEP WATERS.

The boat lurched as a swell caught it at an awkward angle. Water splashed over the bow. Anthony deployed the drogue and dropped from the flybridge to the cockpit. He tapped a message into the computer and relayed it.

I and Two Notches are pleased to greet ourselves. I and Two Notches hope we are not too hungry.

The whale’s reply was shaded with delight. HUNGRILY I AND ANTHONY GREET OURSELVES. WE AND ANTHONY’S FRIEND, AIR HUMAN, HAVE BEEN IN A CONDITION OF CONVERSATION.

Air Human, from the flying yacht. Two Notches went on.

WE HAD FOUND OURSELVES SOME DEEP DWELLERS, BUT SOME MOMENTS AGO WE AND THEY MOVED BENEATH A COLD LAYER AND OUR CONVERSATION IS LOST. I STARVE FOR ITS RETURN.

The words echoed off the cold layer that stood like a wall between Anthony and the Dwellers. The humpback inflections were steeped in annoyance.

Our hunger is unabated, Anthony typed. But we will wait for the non-breathers’ return.

WE CANNOT WAIT LONG. TONIGHT WE AND THE NORTH MUST BEGIN THE JOURNEY TO OUR FEEDING TIME.

The voice of Air Human rumbled through the water. It sounded like a distant, throbbing engine. OUR FINEST GREETINGS, ANTHONY. I AND TWO NOTCHES WILL TRAVEL NORTH TOGETHER. THEN WE AND THE OTHERS WILL FEED.

Annoyance slammed into Anthony. Philana had abducted his whale. Clenching his teeth, he typed a civil reply:

Please give our kindest greetings to our hungry brothers and sisters in the north.

By the time he transmitted his speech his anger had faded. Two Notches’ departure was inevitable in the next few days, and he’d known that. Still, a residue of jealousy burned in him. Philana would have the whale’s company on its journey north: he would be stuck here by Las Madres without the keen whale ears that helped him find the Dwellers.

Two Notches’ reply came simultaneously with a programmed reply from Philana. Lyrics about greetings, hunger, feeding, calves, and joy whined through the water, bounced from the cold layer. Anthony looked at the hash his computer made of the translation and laughed. He decided he might as well enjoy Two Notches’ company while it lasted.

That was a strange message to hear from our friend, Two Mouths, he typed. “Notch” and “mouth” were almost the same phrase: Anthony had just made a pun.

Whale amusement bubbled through the water. TWO MOUTHS AND I BELONG TO THE MOST UNUSUAL FAMILY BETWEEN SURFACE AND COLD WATER. WE-ALL AND AIR BREATHE EACH OTHER, BUT SOME OF US HAVE THE BAD FORTUNE TO LIVE IN IT.

The sun warmed Anthony’s shoulders in spite of the cool air. He decided to leave off the pursuit of the Dwellers and spend the day with his humpback.

He kicked off his shoes, then stepped down to his cooler and made himself a sandwich.

The Dwellers never came out from beneath the cold layer. Anthony spent the afternoon listening to Two Notches tell stories about his family. Now that the issue of hunger was resolved by the whale’s decision to migrate, the cold layer beneath them became the new topic of conversation, and Two Notches amused himself by harmonizing with his own echo. Sings of Others arrived in late afternoon and announced he had already begun his journey: he and Two Notches decided to travel in company.

NORTHWARD HOMING! COLD WATERING! REUNION JOYOUS! The phrases dopplered closer to Anthony’s boat, and then Two Notches broke the water thirty feet off the port beam, salt water pouring like Niagara from his black jaw, his scalloped fins spread like wings eager to take the air . . . Anthony’s breath went out of him in surprise. He turned in his chair and leaned away from the sight, half in fear and half in awe . . . Even though he was used to the whales, the sight never failed to stun him, thrill him, freeze him in his tracks.

Two Notches toppled over backwards, one clear brown eye fixed on Anthony. Anthony raised an arm and waved, and he thought he saw amusement in Two Notches’ glance, perhaps the beginning of an answering wave in the gesture of a fin. A living creature the size of a bus, the whale struck the water not with a smack, but with a roar, a sustained outpour of thunder. Anthony braced himself for what was coming. Salt water flung itself over the gunwale, struck him like a blow. The cold was shocking: his heart lurched. The boat was flung high on the wave, dropped down its face with a jarring thud. Two Notches’ flukes tossed high and Anthony could see the mottled pattern, grey and white, on the underside, distinctive as a fingerprint . . . and then the flukes were gone, leaving behind a rolling boat and a boiling sea.

Anthony wiped the ocean from his face, then from his computer. The boat’s auto-baling mechanism began to throb. Two Notches surfaced a hundred yards off, spouted a round cloud of steam, submerged again. The whale’s amusement stung the water. Anthony’s surprise turned to joy, and he echoed the sound of laughter.

I’m going to run my boat up your backside, Anthony promised; he splashed to the controls in his bare feet, withdrew the drogue and threw his engines into gear. Props thrashed the sea into foam. Anthony drew the microphones up into their wells, heard them thud along the hull as the boat gained way. Humpbacks usually took breath in a series of three: Anthony aimed ahead for Two Notches’ second rising. Two Notches rose just ahead, spouted, and dove before Anthony could catch him. A cold wind cut through Anthony’s wet shirt, raised bumps on his flesh. The boat increased speed, tossing its head on the face of a wave, and Anthony raced ahead, aiming for where Two Notches would rise for the third time.

The whale knew where the boat was and was able to avoid him easily; there was no danger in the game. Anthony won the race: Two Notches surfaced just aft of the boat, and Anthony grinned as he gunned his propellers and wrenched the rudder from side to side while the boat spewed foam into the whale’s face. Two Notches gave a grunt of disappointment and sounded, tossing his flukes high. Unless he chose to rise early, Two Notches would be down for five minutes or more. Anthony raced the boat in circles, waiting. Two Notches’ taunts rose in the cool water. The wind was cutting Anthony to the quick. He reached into the cabin for a sweater, pulled it on, ran up to the flybridge just in time to see Two Notches leap again half a mile away, the vast dark body silhouetted for a moment against the setting sun before it fell again into the welcoming sea.

GOODBYE, GOODBYE. I AND ANTHONY SEND FRAGRANT FAREWELLS TO ONE ANOTHER.

White foam surrounded the slick, still place where Two Notches had fallen into the water. Suddenly the flybridge was very cold. Anthony’s heart sank. He cut speed and put the wheel amidships. The boat slowed reluctantly, as if it, too, had been enjoying the game. Anthony dropped down the ladder to his computer.

Through the spattered windscreen, Anthony could see Two Notches leaping again, his long wings beating air, his silhouette refracted through seawater and rainbows. Anthony tried to share the whale’s exuberance, his joy, but the thought of another long summer alone on his boat, beating his head against the enigma of the Dwellers, turned his mind to ice.

He ordered an infinite repeat of Two Notches’ last phrase and stepped below to change into dry clothes. The cold layer echoed his farewells. He bent almost double and began pulling the sweater over his head.

Suddenly he straightened. An idea was chattering at him. He yanked the sweater back down over his trunk, rushed to his computer, tapped another message.

Our farewells need not be said just yet. You and I can follow one another for a few days before I must return. Perhaps you and the non-breathers can find one another for conversation.

ANTHONY IS IN A CONDITION OF MIGRATION. WELCOME, WELCOME. Two Notches’ reply was jubilant.

For a few days, Anthony qualified. Before too long he would have to return to port for supplies. Annoyed at himself, he realized he could as easily have victualed for weeks.

Another voice called through the water, sounded faintly through the speakers. Air Human and Anthony are in a state of tastiest welcome.

In the middle of Anthony’s reply, his fingers paused at the keys. Surprise rose quietly to the surface of his mind.

After the long day of talking in humpback speech, he had forgotten that Air Human was not a humpback. That she was, in fact, another human being sitting on a boat just over the horizon.

Anthony continued his message. His fingers were clumsy now, and he had to go back twice to correct mistakes. He wondered why it was harder to talk to Philana, now that he remembered she wasn’t an alien.

He asked Two Notches to turn on his transponder, and, all through the deep shadow twilight when the white dwarf was in the sky, the boat followed the whale at a half-mile’s distance. The current was cooperative, but in a few days a new set of northwest trade winds would push the current off on a curve toward the equator and the whales would lose its assistance.

Anthony didn’t see Philana’s boat that first day: just before dawn, Sings of Others heard a distant Dweller conversation to starboard. Anthony told his boat to strike off in that direction and spent most of the day listening. When the Dwellers fell silent, he headed for the whales’ transponders again. There was a lively conversation in progress between Air Human and the whales, but Anthony’s mind was still on Dwellers. He put on headphones and worked far into the night.

The next morning was filled with chill mist. Anthony awoke to the whooping cries of the humpbacks. He looked at his computer to see if it had recorded any announcement of Dwellers, and there was none. The whales’ interrogation by Air Human continued. Anthony’s toes curled on the cold, damp planks as he stepped on deck and saw Philana’s yacht two hundred yards to port, floating three feet over the tallest swells. Cables trailed from the stern, pulling hydrophones and speakers on a subaquatic sled. Anthony grinned at the sight of the elaborate storebought rig. He suspected that he got better acoustics with his homebuilt equipment, the translation softwear he’d programmed himself, and his hopelessly old-fashioned boat that couldn’t even rise out of the water, but that he’d equipped with the latest-generation silent propellers.

He turned on his speakers. Sure enough, he got more audio interference from Philana’s sled than he received from his entire boat.

While making coffee and an omelette of mossmoon eggs Anthony listened to the whales gurgle about their grandparents. He put on a down jacket and stepped onto the boat’s stern and ate breakfast, watching the humpbacks as they occasionally broke surface, puffed out clouds of spray, sounded again with a careless, vast toss of their flukes. Their bodies were smooth and black: the barnacles that pebbled their skin on Earth had been removed before they gated to their new home.

Their song could be heard clearly even without the amplifiers. That was one change the contact with humans had brought: the males were a lot more vocal than once they had been, as if they were responding to human encouragement to talk—or perhaps they now had more worth talking about. Their speech was also more terse than before, less overtly poetic; the humans’ directness and compactness of speech, caused mainly by their lack of fluency, had influenced the whales to a degree.

The whales were adapting to communication with humans more easily than the humans were adapting to them. It was important to chart that change, be able to say how the whales had evolved, accommodated. They were on an entire new planet now, explorers, and the change was going to come fast. The whales were good at remembering, but artificial intelligences were better. Anthony was suddenly glad that Philana was here, doing her work.

As if on cue she appeared on deck, one hand pressed to her head, holding an earphone: she was listening intently to whalesong. She was bundled up against the chill, and gave a brief wave as she noticed him. Anthony waved back. She paused, beating time with one hand to the rhythm of whalespeech, then waved again and stepped back to her work.

Anthony finished breakfast and cleaned the dishes. He decided to say good morning to the whales, then work on some of the Dweller speech he’d recorded the day before. He turned on his computer, sat down at the console, typed his greetings. He waited for a pause in the conversation, then transmitted. The answer came back sounding like a distant buzzsaw.

WE AND ANTHONY WISH ONE ANOTHER A PASSAGE FILLED WITH SPLENDID ODORS. WE AND AIR HUMAN HAVE BEEN SCENTING ONE ANOTHER’S FAMILIES THIS MORNING.

We wish each other the joy of converse, Anthony typed.

WE HAVE BEEN WONDERING, Two Notches said, IF WE CAN SCENT WHETHER WE AND ANTHONY AND AIR HUMAN ARE IN A CONDITION OF RUT.

Anthony gave a laugh. Humpbacks enjoyed trying to figure out human relationships: they were promiscuous themselves, and intrigued by ways different from their own.

Anthony wondered, sitting in his cockpit, if Philana was looking at him.

Air Human and I smell of aloneness, unpairness, he typed, and he transmitted the message at the same time that Philana entered the even more direct, WE ARE NOT.

THE STATE IS NOT RUT, APARTNESS IS THE SMELL, Two Notches agreed readily—it was all one to him—and the lyrics echoed each other for a long moment, aloneness, not, unpairness, not. Not. Anthony felt a chill.

I and the Dwellers’ speech are going to try to scent one another’s natures, he typed hastily, and turned off the speakers. He opened his case and took out one of the cubes he’d recorded the day before.

Work went slowly.

By noon the mist had burned off the water. His head buzzing with Dweller sounds, Anthony stepped below for a sandwich. The message light was blinking on his telephone. He turned to it, pressed the play button.

“May I speak with you briefly?” Philana’s voice. “I’d like to get some data, at your convenience.” Her tone shifted to one of amusement. “The condition,” she added, “is not that of rut.”

Anthony grinned. Philana had been considerate enough not to interrupt him, just to leave the message for whenever he wanted it. He picked up the telephone, connected directory assistance in Cabo Santa Pola, and asked it to route a call to the phone on Philana’s yacht. She answered.

“Message received,” he said. “Would you join me for lunch?”

“In an hour or so,” she said. Her voice was abstracted. “I’m in the middle of something.”

“When you’re ready. Bye.” He rang off, decided to make a fish chowder instead of sandwiches, and drank a beer while preparing it. He began to feel buoyant, cheerful. Siren wailing sounded through the water.

Philana’s yacht maneuvered over to his boat just as Anthony finished his second beer. Philana stood on the gunwale, wearing a pale sweater with brown zigzags on it. Her braid was undone, and her brown hair fell around her shoulders. She jumped easily from her gunwale to the flybridge, then came down the ladder. The yacht moved away as soon as it felt her weight leave. She smiled uncertainly as she stepped to the deck.

“I’m sorry to have to bother you,” she said.

He offered a grin. “That’s okay. I’m between projects right now.”

She looked toward the cabin. “Lunch smells good.” Perhaps, he thought, food equaled apology.

“Fish chowder. Would you like a beer? Coffee?”

“Beer. Thanks.”

They stepped below and Anthony served lunch on the small foldout table. He opened another beer and put it by her place.

“Delicious. I never really learned to cook.”

“Cooking was something I learned young.”

Her eyes were curious. “Where was that?”

“Lees.” Shortly. He put a spoonful of chowder in his mouth so that his terseness would be more understandable.

“I never heard the name.”

“It’s a planet.” Mumbling through chowder. “Pretty obscure.” He didn’t want to talk about it.

“I’m from Earth.”

He looked at her. “Really? Originally? Not just a habitat in the Sol system?”

“Yes. Truly. One of the few. The one and only Earth.”

“Is that what got you interested in whales?”

“I’ve always been interested in whales. As far back as I can remember. Long before I ever saw one.”

“It was the same with me. I grew up near an ocean, built a boat when I was a boy and went exploring. I’ve never felt more at home than when I’m on the ocean.”

“Some people live on the sea all the time.”

“In floating habitats. That’s just moving a city out onto the ocean. The worst of both worlds, if you ask me.”

He realized the beer was making him expansive, that he was declaiming and waving his free hand. He pulled his hand in.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “about the last time we talked.”

She looked away. “My fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have—”

“You didn’t do anything wrong.” He realized he had almost shouted that, and could feel himself flushing. He lowered his voice. “Once I got out here I realized . . .” This was really hopeless. He plunged on. “I’m not used to dealing with people. There were just a few people on Lees and they were all . . . eccentric. And everyone I’ve met since I left seems at least five hundred years old. Their attitudes are so . . .” He shrugged.

“Alien.” She was grinning.

“Yes.”

“I feel the same way. Everyone’s so much older, so much more . . . sophisticated, I suppose.” She thought about it for a moment. “I guess it’s sophistication.”

“They like to think so.”

“I can feel their pity sometimes.” She toyed with her spoon, looked down at her bowl.

“And condescension.” Bitterness striped Anthony’s tongue. “The attitude of, oh, we went through that once, poor darling, but now we know better.”

“Yes.” Tiredly. “I know what you mean. Like we’re not really people yet.”

“At least my father wasn’t like that. He was crazy, but he let me be a person. He—”

His tongue stumbled. He was not drunk enough to tell this story, and he didn’t think he wanted to anyway.

“Go ahead,” said Philana. She was collecting data, Anthony remembered, on families.

He pushed back from the table, went to the fridge for another beer. “Maybe later,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

Philana’s look was steady. “You’re not the only one who knows about crazy fathers.”

Then you tell me about yours, he wanted to say. Anthony opened the beer, took a deep swallow. The liquid rose again, acid in his throat, and he forced it down. Memories rose with the fire in Anthony’s throat, burning him. His father’s fine madness whirled in his mind like leaves in a hurricane. We are, he thought, in a condition of mutual trust and permanent antagonism. Something therefore must be done.

“All right.” He put the beer on the top of the fridge and returned to his seat. He spoke rapidly, just letting the story come. His throat burned. “My father started life with money. He became a psychologist and then a fundamentalist Catholic lay preacher, kind of an unlicensed messiah. He ended up a psychotic. Dad concluded that civilization was too stupid and corrupt to survive, and he decided to start over. He initiated an unauthorized planetary scan through a transporter gate, found a world that he liked, and moved his family there. There were just four of us at the time, dad and my mother, my little brother, and me. My mother was—is—she’s not really her own person. There’s a vacancy there. If you’re around psychotics a lot, and you don’t have a strong sense of self, you can get submerged in their delusions. My mother didn’t have a chance of standing up to a full-blooded lunatic like my dad, and I doubt she tried. She just let him run things.

“I was six when we moved to Lees, and my brother was two. We were—” Anthony waved an arm in the general direction of the invisible Milky Way overhead. “—we were half the galaxy away. Clean on the other side of the hub. We didn’t take a gate with us, or even instructions and equipment for building one. My father cut us off entirely from everything he hated.”

Anthony looked at Philana’s shocked face and laughed. “It wasn’t so bad. We had everything but a way off the planet. Cube readers, building supplies, preserved food, tools, medical gear, wind and solar generators—Dad thought falkner generators were the cause of the rot, so he didn’t bring any with him. My mother pretty much stayed pregnant for the next decade, but luckily the planet was benign. We settled down in a protected bay where there was a lot of food, both on land and in the water. We had a smokehouse to preserve the meat. My father and mother educated me pretty well. I grew up an aquatic animal. Built a sailboat, learned how to navigate. By the time I was fifteen I had charted two thousand miles of coast. I spent more than half my time at sea, the last few years. Trying to get away from my dad, mostly. He kept getting stranger. He promised me in marriage to my oldest sister after my eighteenth birthday.” Memory swelled in Anthony like a tide, calm green water rising over the flat, soon to whiten and boil.

“There were some whale-sized fish on Lees, but they weren’t intelligent. I’d seen recordings of whales, heard the sounds they made. On my long trips I’d imagine I was seeing whales, imagine myself talking to them.”

“How did you get away?”

Anthony barked a laugh. “My dad wasn’t the only one who could initiate a planetary scan. Seven or eight years after we landed some resort developers found our planet and put up a hotel about two hundred miles to the south of our settlement.” Anthony shook his head. “Hell of a coincidence. The odds against it must have been incredible. My father frothed at the mouth when we started seeing their flyers and boats. My father decided our little settlement was too exposed and we moved farther inland to a place where we could hide better. Everything was camouflaged. He’d hold drills in which we were all supposed to grab necessary supplies and run off into the forest.”

“They never found you?”

“If they saw us, they thought we were people on holiday.”

“Did you approach them?”

Anthony shook his head. “No. I don’t really know why.”

“Well. Your father.”

“I didn’t care much about his opinions by that point. It was so obvious he was cracked. I think, by then, I had all I wanted just living on my boat. I didn’t see any reason to change it.” He thought for a moment. “If he actually tried to marry me off to my sister, maybe I would have run for it.”

“But they found you anyway.”

“No. Something else happened. The water supply for the new settlement was unreliable, so we decided to build a viaduct from a spring nearby. We had to get our hollow-log pipe over a little chasm, and my father got careless and had an accident. The viaduct fell on him. Really smashed him up, caused all sorts of internal injuries. It was very obvious that if he didn’t get help, he’d die. My mother and I took my boat and sailed for the resort.”

The words dried up. This was where things got ugly. Anthony decided he really couldn’t trust Philana with it, and that he wanted his beer after all. He got up and took the bottle and drank.

“Did your father live?”

“No.” He’d keep this as brief as he could. “When my mother and I got back, we found that he’d died two days before. My brothers and sisters gutted him and hung him upside-down in the smokehouse.” He stared dully into Philana’s horrified face. “It’s what they did to any large animal. My mother and I were the only ones who remembered what to do with a dead person, and we weren’t there.”

“My God. Anthony.” Her hands clasped below her face.

“And then—” He waved his hands, taking in everything, the boat’s comforts, Overlook, life over the horizon. “Civilization. I was the only one of the children who could remember anything but Lees. I got off the planet and got into marine biology. That’s been my life ever since. I was amazed to discover that I and the family were rich—my dad didn’t tell me he’d left tons of investments behind. The rest of the family’s still on Lees, still living in the old settlement. It’s all they know.” He shrugged. “They’re rich, too, of course, which helps. So they’re all right.”

He leaned back on the fridge and took another long drink. The ocean swell tilted the boat and rolled the liquid down his throat. Whale harmonics made the bottle cap dance on the smooth alloy surface of the refrigerator.

Philana stood. Her words seemed small after the long silence. “Can I have some coffee? I’ll make it.”

“I’ll do it.”

They both went for the coffee and banged heads. Reeling back, the expression on Philana’s face was wide-eyed, startled, faunlike, as if he’d caught her at something she should be ashamed of. Anthony tried to laugh out an apology, but just then the white dwarf came up above the horizon and the quality of light changed as the screens went up, and with the light her look somehow changed. Anthony gazed at her for a moment and fire began to lap at his nerves. In his head the whales seemed to urge him to make his move.

He put his beer down and grabbed her with an intensity that was made ferocious largely by Anthony’s fear that this was entirely the wrong thing, that he was committing an outrage that would compel her shortly to clout him over the head with the coffee pot and drop him in his tracks. Whalesong rang frantic chimes in his head. She gave a strangled cry as he tried to kiss her and thereby confirmed his own worst suspicions about this behavior.

Philana tried to push him away. He let go of her and stepped back, standing stupidly with his hands at his sides. A raging pain in his chest prevented him from saying a word. Philana surprised him by stepping forward and putting her hands on his shoulders.

“Easy,” she said. “It’s all right, just take it easy.”

Anthony kissed her once more, and was somehow able to restrain himself from grabbing her again out of sheer panic and desperation. By and by, as the kiss continued, his anxiety level decreased. I/You, he thought, are rising in warmness, in happy tendrils.

He and Philana began to take their clothes off. He realized this was the first time he had made love to anyone under two hundred years of age.

Dweller sounds murmured in Anthony’s mind. He descended into Philana as if she were a midnight ocean, something that on first contact with his flesh shocked him into wakefulness, then relaxed around him, became a taste of brine, a sting in the eyes, a fluid vagueness. Her hair brushed against his skin like seagrass. She surrounded him, buoyed him up. Her cries came up to him as over a great distance, like the faraway moans of a lonely whale in love. He wanted to call out in answer. Eventually he did.

Grace(1), he thought hopefully. Grace(1).

Anthony had an attack of giddiness after Philana returned to her flying yacht and her work. His mad father gibbered in his memory, mocked him and offered dire warnings. He washed the dishes and cleaned the rattling bottlecap off the fridge, then he listened to recordings of Dwellers and eventually the panic went away. He had not, it seemed, lost anything.

He went to the double bed in the forepeak, which was piled high with boxes of food, a spool of cable, a couple spare microphones, and a pair of rusting Danforth anchors. He stowed the food in the hold, put the electronics in the compartment under the mattress, jammed the Danforths farther into the peak on top of the anchor chain where they belonged. He wiped the grime and rust off the mattress and realized he had neither sheets nor a second pillow. He would need to purchase supplies on the next trip to town.

The peak didn’t smell good. He opened the forehatch and tried to air the place out. Slowly he became aware that the whales were trying to talk to him. ODD SCENTINGS, they said, THINGS THAT STAND IN WATER. Anthony knew what they meant. He went up on the flybridge and scanned the horizon. He saw nothing.

The taste is distant, he wrote. But we must be careful in our movement. After that he scanned the horizon every half hour.

He cooked supper during the white dwarf’s odd half-twilight and resisted the urge to drink both the bottles of bourbon that were waiting in their rack. Philana dropped onto the flybridge with a small rucksack. She kissed him hastily, as if to get it over with.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“So am I.”

“I don’t know why.”

He kissed her again. “I do,” he said. She laid her cheek against his woolen shoulder. Blind with terror, Anthony held onto her, unable to see the future.

After midnight Anthony stood unclothed on the flybridge as he scanned the horizon one more time. Seeing nothing, he nevertheless reduced speed to three knots and rejoined Philana in the forepeak. She was already asleep with his open sleeping bag thrown over her like a blanket. He raised a corner of the sleeping bag and slipped beneath it. Philana turned away from him and pillowed her cheek on her fist. Whale music echoed from a cold layer beneath. He slept.

Movement elsewhere in the boat woke him. Anthony found himself alone in the peak, frigid air drifting over him from the forward hatch. He stepped into the cabin and saw Philana’s bare legs ascending the companion to the flybridge. He followed. He shivered in the cold wind.

Philana stood before the controls, looking at them with a peculiar intensity, as though she were trying to figure out which switch to throw. Her hands flexed as if to take the wheel. There was gooseflesh on her shoulders and the wind tore her hair around her face like a fluttering curtain. She looked at him. Her eyes were hard, her voice disdainful.

“Are we lovers?” she asked. “Is that what’s going on here?” His skin prickled at her tone.

Her stiff-spined stance challenged him. He was afraid to touch her.

“The condition is that of rut,” he said, and tried to laugh.

Her posture, one leg cocked out front, reminded him of a haughty water bird. She looked at the controls again, then looked aft, lifting up on her toes to gaze at the horizon. Her nostrils flared, tasted the wind. Clouds scudded across the sky. She looked at him again. The white dwarf gleamed off her pebble eyes.

“Very well,” she said, as if this was news. “Acceptable.” She took his hand and led him below. Anthony’s hackles rose. On her way to the forepeak Philana saw one of the bottles of bourbon in its rack and reached for it. She raised the bottle to her lips and drank from the neck. Whiskey coursed down her throat. She lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked at him as if he were something worthy of dissection.

“Let’s make love,” she said.

Anthony was afraid not to. He went with her to the forepeak. Her skin was cold. Lying next to him on the mattress she touched his chest as if she were unused to the feel of male bodies. “What’s your name?” she asked. He told her. “Acceptable,” she said again, and with a sudden taut grin raked his chest with her nails. He knocked her hands away. She laughed and came after him with the bottle.He parried the blow in time and they wrestled for possession, bourbon splashing everywhere. Anthony was surprised at her strength. She fastened teeth in his arm. He hit her in the face with a closed fist. She gave the bottle up and laughed in a cold metallic way and put her arms around him. Anthony threw the bottle through the door into the cabin. It thudded somewhere but didn’t break. Philanadrew him on top of her, her laugh brittle, her legs opening around him.

Her dead eyes were like stones.

In the morning Anthony found the bottle lying in the main cabin. Red clawmarks covered his body, and the reek of liquor caught at the back of his throat. The scend of the ocean had distributed the bourbon puddle evenly over the teak deck. There was still about a third of the whiskey left in the bottle. Anthony rescued it and swabbed the deck. His mind was full of cotton wool, cushioning any bruises. He was working hard at not feeling anything at all.

He put on clothes and began to work. After a while Philana unsteadily groped her way from the forepeak, the sleeping bag draped around her shoulders. There was a stunned look on her face and a livid bruise on one cheek. Anthony could feel his body tautening, ready to repel assault.

“Was I odd last night?” she asked.

He looked at her. Her face crumbled. “Oh no.” She passed a hand over her eyes and turned away, leaning on the side of the hatchway. “You shouldn’t let me drink,” she said.

“You hadn’t made that fact clear.”

“I don’t remember any of it,” she said. “I’m sick.” She pressed her stomach with her hands and bent over. Anthony narrowly watched her pale buttocks as she groped her way to the head. The door shut behind her.

Anthony decided to make coffee. As the scent of the coffee began to fill the boat, he heard the sounds of her weeping. The long keening sounds, desperate throat-tearing noises, sounded like a pinioned whale writhing helplessly on the gaff.

A vast flock of birds wheeled on the cold horizon, marking a colony of drift creatures. Anthony informed the whales of the creatures’ presence, but the humpbacks already knew and were staying well clear. The drift colony was what they had been smelling for hours.

While Anthony talked with the whales, Philana left the head and drew on her clothes. Her movements were tentative. She approached him with a cup of coffee in her hand. Her eyes and nostrils were rimmed with red.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes that happens.”

He looked at his computer console. “Jesus, Philana.”

“It’s something wrong with me. I can’t control it.” She raised a hand to her bruised cheek. The hand came away wet.

“There’s medication for that sort of thing,” Anthony said. He remembered she had a mad father, or thought she did.

“Not for this. It’s something different.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I need your help.”

Anthony recalled his father’s body twisting on the end of its rope, fingertips trailing in the dust. Words came reluctantly to his throat.

“I’ll give what help I can.” The words were hollow: any real resolution had long since gone. He had no clear notion to whom he was giving this message, the Philana of the previous night or this Philana or his father or himself.

Philana hugged him, kissed his cheek. She was excited.

“Shall we go see the drifters?” she asked. “We can take my boat.”

Anthony envisioned himself and Philana tumbling through space. He had jumped off a precipice, just now. The two children of mad fathers were spinning in the updraft, waiting for the impact.

He said yes. He ordered his boat to circle while she summoned her yacht. She held his hand while they waited for the flying yacht to drift toward them. Philana kept laughing, touching him, stropping her cheek on his shoulder like a cat. They jumped from the flybridge to her yacht and rose smoothly into the sky. Bright sun warmed Anthony’s shoulders. He took off his sweater and felt warning pain from the marks of her nails.

The drifters were colony creatures that looked like miniature mountains twenty feet or so high, complete with a white snowcap of guano. They were highly organized but unintelligent, their underwater parts sifting the ocean for nutrients or reaching out to capture prey—the longest of their gossamer stinging tentacles was up to two miles in length, and though they couldn’t kill or capture a humpback,they were hard for the whale to detect and could cause a lot of stinging wounds before the whale noticed them and made its escape. Perhaps they were unintelligent, distant relatives of the Deep Dwellers, whose tenuous character they resembled. Many different species of sea birds lived in permanent colonies atop the floating islands, thousands of them, and the drifters processed their guano and other waste. Above the water, the drifters’ bodies were shaped like a convex lens set on edge, an aerodynamic shape, and they could clumsily tack into the wind if they needed to. For the most part, however, they drifted on the currents, a giant circular circumnavigation of the ocean that could take centuries.

Screaming sea birds rose in clouds as Philana’s yacht moved silently toward their homes. Philana cocked her head back, laughed into the open sky, and flew closer. Birds hurtled around them in an overwhelming roar of wings. Whistlelike cries issued from peg-toothed beaks. Anthony watched in awe at the profusion of colors, the chromatic brilliance of the evolved featherlike scales.

The flying boat passed slowly through the drifter colony. Birds roared and whistled, some of them landing on the boat in apparent hopes of taking up lodging. Feathers drifted down; birdshit spattered the windscreen. Philana ran below for a camera and used up several data cubes taking pictures. A trickle of optimism began to ease into Anthony at the sight of Philana in the bright morning sun, a broad smile gracing her face as she worked the camera and took picture after picture. He put an arm around Philana’s waist and kissed her ear. She smiled and took his hand in her own. In the bright daylight the personality she’d acquired the previous night seemed to gather unto itself the tenebrous, unreal quality of a nightmare. The current Philana seemed far more tangible.

Philana returned to the controls; the yacht banked and increased speed. Birds issued startled cries as they got out of the way. Wind tugged at Philana’s hair. Anthony decided not to let Philana near his liquor again.

After breakfast, Anthony found both whales had set their transponders. He had to detour around the drifters—their insubstantial, featherlike tentacles could foul his state-of-the-art silent props—but when he neared the whales and slowed, he could hear the deep murmurings of Dwellers rising from beneath the cold current. There were half a dozen of them engaged in conversation, and Anthony worked the day and far into the night, transcribing, making hesitant attempts at translation. The Dweller speech was more opaque than usual, depending on a context that was unstated and elusive. Comprehension eluded Anthony; but he had the feeling that the key was within his reach.

Philana waited for the Dwellers to end their converse before she brought her yacht near him. She had heated some prepared dinners and carried them to the flybridge in an insulated pouch. Her grin was broad. She put her pouch down and embraced him. Abstracted Dweller subsonics rolled away from Anthony’s mind. He was surprised at how glad he was to see her.

With dinner they drank coffee. Philana chattered bravely throughout the meal. While Anthony cleaned the dishes, she embraced him from behind. A memory of the other Philana flickered in his mind, disdainful, contemptuous, cold. Her father was crazy, he remembered again.

He buried the memory deliberately and turned to her. He kissed her and thought, I/We deny the Other. The Other, he decided, would cease to exist by a common act of will.

It seemed to work. At night his dreams filled with Dwellers crying in joy, his father warning darkly, the touch of Philana’s flesh, breath, hands. He awoke hungry to get to work.

The next two days a furious blaze of concentration burned in Anthony’s mind. Things fell into place. He found a word that, in its context, could mean nothing but light, as opposed to fluorescence—he was excited to find out the Dwellers knew about the sun. He also found new words for darkness, for emotions that seemed to have no human equivalents, but which he seemed nevertheless to comprehend. One afternoon a squall dumped a gallon of cold water down his collar and he looked up in surprise: he hadn’t been aware of its slow approach. He moved his computer deck to the cabin and kept working. When not at the controls he moved dazedly over the boat, drinking coffee, eating what was at hand without tasting it. Philana was amused and tolerant; she buried herself in her own work.

On preparing breakfast the morning of the third day, Anthony realized he was running out of food. He was farther from the archipelago than he’d planned on going, and he had about two days’ supply left; he’d have to return at flank speed, buy provisions, and then run out again. A sudden hot fury gripped him. He clenched his fists. He could have provisioned for two or three months—why hadn’t he done it when he had the chance?

Philana tolerantly sipped her coffee. “Tonight I’ll fly you into Cabo Santa Pola. We can buy a ton of provisions, have dinner at Villa Mary, and be back by midnight.”

Anthony’s anger floundered uselessly, looking for a target, then gave up. “Fine,” he said.

She looked at him. “Are you ever going to talk to them? You must have built your speakers to handle it.”

Now the anger had finally found a home. “Not yet,” he said.

In late afternoon, Anthony set out his drogue and a homing transponder, then boarded Philana’s yacht. He watched while she hauled up her aquasled and programmed the navigation computer. The world dimmed as the falkner field increased in strength. The transition to full speed was almost instantaneous. Waves blurred silently past, providing the only sensation of motion—the field cut out both wind and inertia. The green-walled volcanic islands of the Las Madres archipelago rolled over the horizon in minutes. Traffic over Cabo Santa Pola complicated the approach somewhat; it was all of six minutes before Philana could set the machine down in her slip.

A bright, hot sun brightened the white-and-turquoise waterfront. From a cold Kirst current to the tropics in less than half an hour.

Anthony felt vaguely resentful at this blinding efficiency. He could have easily equipped his own boat with flight capability, but he hadn’t cared about speed when he’d set out, only the opportunity to be alone on the ocean with his whales and the Dwellers. Now the very tempo of his existence had changed. He was moving at unaccustomed velocity, and the destination was still unclear.

After giving him her spare key, Philana went to do laundry—when one lived on small boats, laundry was done whenever the opportunity arose. Anthony bought supplies. He filled the yacht’s forecabin with crates of food, then changed clothes and walked to the Villa Mary.

Anthony got a table for two and ordered a drink. The first drink went quickly and he ordered a second. Philana didn’t appear. Anthony didn’t like the way the waiter was looking at him. He heard his father’s mocking laugh as he munched the last bread stick. He waited for three hours before he paid and left.

There was no sign of Philana at the laundry or on the yacht. He left a note on the computer expressing what he considered a contained disappointment, then headed into town. A brilliant sign that featured aquatic motifs called him to a cool, dark bar filled with bright green aquaria. Native fish gaped at him blindly while he drank something tall and cool. He decided he didn’t like the way the fish looked at him and left.

He found Philana in his third bar of the evening. She was with two men, one of whom Anthony knew slightly as a charter boat skipper whom he didn’t much like. He had his hand on her knee; the other man’s arm was around her. Empty drinks and forsaken hors d’oeuvres lay on a table in front of them.

Anthony realized, as he approached, that his own arrival could only make things worse. Her eyes turned to him as he approached; her neck arched in a peculiar, balletic way that he had seen only once before. He recognized the quick, carnivorous smile, and a wash of fear turned his skin cold. The stranger whispered into her ear.

“What’s your name again?” she asked.

Anthony wondered what to do with his hands. “We were supposed to meet.”

Her eyes glittered as her head cocked, considering him. Perhaps what frightened him most of all was the fact there was no hostility in her look, nothing but calculation. There was a cigaret in her hand; he hadn’t seen her smoke before.

“Do we have business?”

Anthony thought about this. He had jumped into space with this woman, and now he suspected he’d just hit the ground. “I guess not,” he said, and turned.

“Que pasó, hombre?”

“Nada.”

Pablo, the Leviathan’s regular bartender, was one of the planet’s original Latino inhabitants, a group rapidly being submerged by newcomers. Pablo took Anthony’s order for a double bourbon and also brought him his mail, which consisted of an inquiry from Xenobiology Review wondering what had become of their galley proofs. Anthony crumpled the note and left it in an ashtray.

A party of drunken fishermen staggered in, still in their flashing harnesses. Triumphant whoops assaulted Anthony’s ears. His fingers tightened on his glass.

“Careful, Anthony,” said Pablo. He poured another double bourbon. “On the house,” he said.

One of the fishermen stepped to the bar, put a heavy hand on Anthony’s shoulder. “Drinks on me,” he said. “Caught a twelve-meter flasher today.” Anthony threw the bourbon in his face.

He got in a few good licks, but in the end the pack of fishermen beat him severely and threw him through the front window. Lying breathless on broken glass, Anthony brooded on the injustice of his position and decided to rectify matters. He lurched back into the bar and knocked down the first person he saw.

Small consolation. This time they went after him with the flashing poles that were hanging on the walls, beating him senseless and once more heaving him out the window. When Anthony recovered consciousness he staggered to his feet, intending to have another go, but the pole butts had hit him in the face too many times and his eyes were swollen shut. He staggered down the street, ran face-first into a building, and sat down.

“You finished there, cowboy?” It was Nick’s voice.

Anthony spat blood. “Hi, Nick,” he said. “Bring them here one at a time, will you? I can’t lose one-on-one.”

“Jesus, Anthony. You’re such an asshole.”

Anthony found himself in an inexplicably cheerful mood. “You’re lucky you’re a sailor. Only a sailor can call me an asshole.”

“Can you stand? Let’s get to the marina before the cops show up.”

“My boat’s hundreds of miles away. I’ll have to swim.”

“I’ll take you to my place, then.”

With Nick’s assistance Anthony managed to stand. He was still too drunk to feel pain, and ambled through the streets in a contented mood. “How did you happen to be at the Leviathan, Nick?”

There was weariness in Nick’s voice. “They always call me, Anthony, when you fuck up.”

Drunken melancholy poured into Anthony like a sudden cold squall of rain. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Nick’s answer was almost cheerful. “You’ll be sorrier in the morning.”

Anthony reflected that this was very likely true.

Nick gave him some pills that, by morning, reduced the swelling. When Anthony awoke he was able to see. Agony flared in his body as he staggered out of bed. It was still twilight. Anthony pulled on his bloody clothes and wrote an incoherent note of thanks on Nick’s computer.

Fishing boats were floating out of harbor into the bright dawn. Probably Nick’s was among them. The volcano above the town was a contrast in black stone and green vegetation. Pain beat at Anthony’s bones like a rain of fists.

Philana’s boat was still in its slip. Apprehension tautened Anthony’s nerves as he put a tentative foot on the gunwale. The hatch to the cabin was still locked. Philana wasn’t aboard. Anthony opened the hatch and went into the cabin just to be sure. It was empty.

He programmed the computer to pursue the transponder signal on Anthony’s boat, then as the yacht rose into the sky and arrowed over the ocean, Anthony went into Philana’s cabin and fell asleep on a pillow that smelled of her hair.

He awoke around noon to find the yacht patiently circling his boat. He dropped the yacht into the water, tied the two craft together, and spent half the afternoon transferring his supplies to his own boat. He programmed the yacht to return to Las Madres and orbit the volcanic spire until it was summoned by its owner or the police.

I and the sea greet one another, he tapped into his console, and as the call wailed out from his boat he hauled in the drogue and set off after the humpbacks. Apartness is the smell, he thought, aloneness is the condition. Spray shot aboard and spattered Anthony, and salt pain flickered from the cuts on his face. He climbed to the flybridge and hoped for healing from the sun and the glittering sea.

The whales left the cold current and suddenly the world was filled with tropic sunshine and bright water. Anthony made light conversation with the humpbacks and spent the rest of his time working on Dweller speech. Despite hours of concentrated endeavor he made little progress. The sensation was akin to that of smashing his head against a stone wall over and over, an act that was, on consideration, not unlike the rest of his life.

After his third day at sea his boat’s computer began signaling him that he was receiving messages. He ignored this and concentrated on work.

Two days later he was cruising north with a whale on either beam when a shadow moved across his boat. Anthony looked up from his console and saw without surprise that Philana’s yacht was eclipsing the sun. Philana, dark glasses over her deep eyes and a floppy hat over her hair, was peering down from the starboard bow.

“We have to talk,” she said.

JOYOUSLY WE GREET AIR HUMAN, whooped Sings of Others.

I AND AIR HUMAN ARE PLEASED TO DETECT ONE ANOTHER’S PRESENCE, called Two Notches.

Anthony went to the controls and throttled up. Microphones slammed at the bottom of his boat. Two Notches poked one large brown eye above the waves to see what was happening, then cheerfully set off in pursuit.

ANTHONY AND AIR HUMAN ARE IN A STATE OF EXCITEMENT, he chattered. I/WE ARE PLEASED TO JOIN OUR RACE.

The flying yacht hung off Anthony’s stern. Philana shouted through cupped hands. “Talk to me, Anthony!”

Anthony remained silent and twisted the wheel into a fast left turn. His wake foamed over Two Notches’ face and the humpback burbled a protest. The air yacht seemed to have little trouble following the turn. Anthony was beginning to have the sense of that stone wall coming up again, but he tried a few more maneuvers just in case one of them worked. Nothing succeeded. Finally he cut the throttle and let the boat slow on the long blue swells.

The trade winds had taken Philana’s hat and carried it away. She ignored it and looked down at him. Her face was pale and beneath the dark glasses she looked drawn and ill.

“I’m not human, Anthony,” she said. “I’m a Kyklops. That’s what’s really wrong with me.”

Anthony looked at her. Anger danced in his veins. “You really are full of surprises.”

“I’m Telamon’s other body,” she said. “Sometimes he inhabits me.”

Whalesong rolled up from the sea. WE AND AIR HUMAN SEND ONE ANOTHER CHEERFUL SALUTATIONS AND EXPRESSIONS OF GOOD WILL.

“Talk to the whales first,” said Anthony.

“Telamon’s a scientist,” Philana said. “He’s impatient, that’s his problem.”

The boat heaved on an ocean swell. The trade wind moaned through the flybridge. “He’s got a few more problems than that,” Anthony said.

“He wanted me for a purpose but sometimes he forgets.” A tremor of pain crossed Philana’s face. She was deeply hung over. Her voice was ragged: Telamon had been smoking like a chimney and Philana wasn’t used to it.

“He wanted to do an experiment on human psychology. He wanted to arrange a method of recording a person’s memories, then transferring them to his own . . . sphere. He got my parents to agree to having the appropriate devices implanted, but the only apparatus that existed for the connection of human and Kyklops was the one the Kyklopes use to manipulate the human bodies that they wear when they want to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh. And Telamon is . . .” She waved a dismissive arm. “He’s a decadent, the way a lot of the Kyklopes turn once they discover how much fun it is to be a human and that their real self doesn’t get hurt no matter what they do to their clone bodies. Telamon likes his pleasures, and he likes to interfere. Sometimes, when he dumped my memory into the nth dimension and had a look at it, he couldn’t resist the temptation to take over my body and rectify what he considered my errors. And occasionally, when he’s in the middle of one of his binges, and his other body gives out on him, he takes me over and starts a party wherever I am.”

“Some scientist,” Anthony said.

“The Kyklopes are used to experimenting on pieces of themselves,” Philana said. “Their own beings are tenuous and rather . . . detachable. Their ethics aren’t against it. And he doesn’t do it very often. He must be bored wherever he is—he’s taken me over twice in a week.” She raised her fist to her face and began to cough, a real smoker’s hack. Anthony fidgeted and wondered whether to offer her a glass of water. Philana bent double and the coughs turned to cries of pain. A tear pattered on the teak.

A knot twisted in Anthony’s throat. He left his chair and held Philana in his arms. “I’ve never told anyone,” she said.

Anthony realized to his transient alarm that once again he’d jumped off a cliff without looking. He had no more idea of where he would land than last time.

Philana, Anthony was given to understand, was Greek for “lover of humanity.” The Kyklopes, after being saddled with a mythological name by the first humans who had contacted them, had gone in for classical allusion in a big way. Telamon, Anthony learned, meant (among other things) “the supporter.” After learning this, Anthony referred to the alien as Jockstrap.

“We should do something about him,” Anthony said. It was late—the white dwarf had just set—but neither of them had any desire to sleep. He and Philana were standing on the flybridge. The falkner shield was off and above their heads the uninhibited stars seemed almost within reach of their questing fingertips. Overlook Station, fixed almost overhead, was bright as a burning brand.

Philana shook her head. “He’s got access to my memory. Any plans we make, he can know in an instant.” She thought for a moment. “If he bothers to look. He doesn’t always.”

“I’ll make the plans without telling you what they are.”

“It will take forever. I’ve thought about it. You’re talking court case. He can sue me for breach of contract.”

“It’s your parents who signed the contract, not you. You’re an adult now.”

She turned away. Anthony looked at her for a long moment, a cold foreboding hand around his throat. “I hope,” he said, “you’re going to tell me that you signed that contract while Jockstrap was riding you.”

Philana shook her head silently. Anthony looked up into the Milky Way and imagined the stone wall falling from the void, aimed right between his eyes, spinning slightly as it grew ever larger in his vision. Smashing him again.

“All we have to do is get the thing out of your head,” Anthony said. “After that, let him sue you. You’ll be free, whatever happens.” His tone reflected a resolve that was absent entirely from his heart.

“He’ll sue you, too, if you have any part of this.” She turned to face him again. Her face pale and taut in the starlight. “All my money comes from him—how else do you think I could afford the yacht? I owe everything to him.”

Bitterness sped through Anthony’s veins. He could feel his voice turning harsh. “Do you want to get rid of him or not? Yes or no.”

“He’s not entirely evil.”

“Yes or no, Philana.”

“It’ll take years before he’s done with you. And he could kill you. Just transport you to deep space somewhere and let you drift. Or he could simply teleport me away from you.”

The bright stars poured down rage. Anthony knew himself seconds away from violence. There were two people on this boat and one of them was about to get hurt. “Yes or no!” he shouted.

Philana’s face contorted. She put her hands over her ears. Hair fell across her face. “Don’t shout,” she said.

Anthony turned and smashed his forehead against the control panel of the flybridge. Philana gave a cry of surprise and fear. Anthony drove himself against the panel again. Philana’s fingers clutched at his shoulders. Anthony could feel blood running from his scalp. The pain drained his anger, brought a cold, brilliant clarity to his mind. He smashed himself a third time. Philana cried out. He turned to her. He felt a savage, exemplary satisfaction. If one were going to drive oneself against stone walls, one should at least take a choice of the walls available.

“Ask me,” Anthony panted, “if I care what happens to me.”

Philana’s face was a mask of terror. She said his name.

“I need to know where you stand,” said Anthony. Blood drooled from his scalp, and he suppressed the unwelcome thought that he had just made himself look ridiculous.

Her look of fear broadened.

“Am I going to jump off this cliff by myself, or what?” Anthony demanded.

“I want to get rid of him,” she said.

Anthony wished her voice had contained more determination, even if it were patently false. He spat salt and went in search of his first aid kit. We are in a condition of slow movement through deep currents, he thought.

In the morning he got the keys to Philana’s yacht and changed the passwords on the falkner controls and navigation comp. He threw all his liquor overboard. He figured that if Jockstrap appeared and discovered that he couldn’t leave the middle of the ocean, and he couldn’t have a party where he was, he’d get bored and wouldn’t hang around for long.

From Philana’s cabin he called an attorney who informed him that the case was complex but not impossible, and furthermore that it would take a small fortune to resolve. Anthony told him to get to work on it. In the meantime he told the lawyer to start calling neurosurgeons. Unfortunately there were few neurosurgeons capable of implanting, let alone removing, the rider device. The operation wasn’t performed that often.

Days passed. A discouraging list of neurosurgeons either turned him down flat or wanted the legal situation clarified first. Anthony told the lawyer to start calling rich neurosurgeons who might be able to ride out a lawsuit.

Philana transferred most of her data to Anthony’s computer and worked with the whales from the smaller boat. Anthony used her yacht and aquasled and cursed the bad sound quality. At least the yacht’s flight capability allowed him to find the Dwellers faster.

As far as the Dwellers went, he had run all at once into a dozen blind alleys. Progress seemed measured in microns.

“What’s B1971?” Philana asked once, looking over his shoulder as he typed in data.

“A taste. Perhaps a taste associated with a particular temperature striation. Perhaps an emotion.” He shrugged. “Maybe just a metaphor.”

“You could ask them.”

His soul hardened. “Not yet.” Which ended the conversation.

Anthony wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted to touch her. He and Jockstrap were at war and Philana seemed not to have entirely made up her mind which side she was on. Anthony slept with Philana on the double mattress in the peak, but they avoided sex. He didn’t know whether he was helping her out of love or something else, and while he figured things out, desire was on hold, waiting.

Anthony’s time with Philana was occupied mainly by his attempt to teach her to cook. Anything else waited for the situation to grow less opaque. Anthony figured Jockstrap would clarify matters fairly soon.

Anthony’s heart lurched as looked up from lunch to see the taut, challenging grin on Philana’s face. Anthony realized he’d been foolish to expect Telamon to show up only at night, as he always had before.

Anthony drew his lips into an answering grin. He was ready, no matter what the hour.

“Do I know you?” Anthony mocked. “Do we have business?”

Philana’s appraisal was cold. “I’ve been called Jockstrap before,” Telamon said.

“With good reason, I’m sure.”

Telamon lurched to his feet and walked aft. He seemed not to have his sea legs yet. Anthony followed, his nerves dancing. Telamon looked out at the sea and curled Philana’s lip as if to say that the water held nothing of interest.

“I want to talk about Philana,” Telamon said. “You’re keeping her prisoner here.”

“She can leave me anytime she wants. Which is more than she can say about you.”

“I want the codes to the yacht.”

Anthony stepped up to Telamon, held Philana’s cold gaze. “You’re hurting her,” he said.

Telamon stared at him with eyes like obsidian chips. He pushed Philana’s long hair out of his face with an unaccustomed gesture. “I’m not the only one, Maldalena. I’ve got access to her mind, remember.”

“Then look in her mind and see what she thinks of you.”

A contemptuous smile played about Philana’s lips. “I know very well what she thinks of me, and it’s probably not what she’s told you. Philana is a very sad and complex person, and she is not always truthful.”

“She’s what you made her.”

“Precisely my next point.” He waved his arm stiffly, unnaturally. The gesture brought him off-balance, and Philana’s body swayed for a moment as Telamon adjusted to the tossing of the boat. “I gave her money, education, knowledge of the world. I have corrected her errors, taught her much. She is, in many ways, my creation. Her feelings toward me are ambiguous, as any child’s feelings would be toward her father.”

“Daddy Jockstrap.” Anthony laughed. “Do we have business, Daddy? Or are you going to take your daughter’s body to a party first?”

Anthony jumped backwards, arms flailing, as Philana disappeared, her place taken by a young man with curly dark hair and bright blue eyes. The stranger was dressed in a white cotton shirt unbuttoned to the navel and a pair of navy blue swimming trunks. He had seen the man before on vid, showing off his chest hairs. The grin stayed the same from one body to the next.

“She’s gone, Maldalena. I teleported her to someplace safe.” He laughed. “I’ll buy her a new boat. Do what you like with the old one.”

Anthony’s heart hammered. He had forgotten the Kyklopes could do that, just teleport without the apparatus required by humans. And teleport other things as well.

He wondered how many centuries old the Kyklops’ body was. He knew the mind’s age was measured in eons.

“This doesn’t end it,” Anthony said.

Telamon’s tone was mild. “Perhaps I’ll find a nice planet for you somewhere, Maldalena. Let you play Robinson Crusoe, just as you did when you were young.”

“That will only get you in trouble. Too many people know about this situation by now. And it won’t be much fun holding Philana wherever you’ve got her.”

Telamon stepped toward the stern, sat on the taffrail. His movements were fluid, far more confident than they had been when he was wearing the other, unaccustomed body. For a moment Anthony considered kicking Telamon into the drink, then decided against it. The possible repercussions had a cosmic dimension that Anthony preferred not to contemplate.

“I don’t dislike you, Maldalena,” the alien said. “I truly don’t. You’re an alcoholic, violent lout, but at least you have proven intelligence, perhaps a kind of genius.”

“Call the kettle black again. I liked that part.”

Two Notches’ smooth body rose a cable’s length to starboard. He exhaled with an audible hiss, mist drifting over his back. Telamon gave the whale a disinterested look, then turned back to Anthony.

“Being the nearest thing to a parent on the planet,” he said. “I must say that I disapprove of you as a partner for Philana. However—” He gave a shrug. “Parents must know when to compromise in these matters.” He looked up at Anthony with his blue eyes. “I propose we share her, Anthony. Formalize the arrangement we already seem to possess. I’ll only occupy a little of her time, and for all the rest, the two of you can live out your lives with whatever sad domestic bliss you can summon. Till she gets tired of you, anyway.”

Two Notches rolled under the waves. A cetacean murmur echoed off the boat’s bottom. Anthony’s mind flailed for an answer. He felt sweat prickling his scalp. He shook his head in feigned disbelief.

“Listen to yourself, Telamon. Is this supposed to be a scientist talking? A researcher?”

“You don’t want to share?” The young man’s face curled in disdain. “You want everything for yourself—the whole planet, I suppose, like your father.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I know what Philana knows about you, and I’ve done some checking on my own. You brought the humpbacks here because you needed them. Away from their home, their kind. You asked them, I’m sure; but there’s no way they could make an informed decision about this planet, about what they were doing. You needed them for your Dweller study, so you took them.”

As if on cue, Two Notches rose from the water to take a breath. Telamon favored the whale with his taut smile. Anthony floundered for an answer while the alien spoke on.

“You’ve got data galore on the Dwellers, but do you publish? Do you share it with anybody, even with Philana? You hoard it all for yourself, all your specialized knowledge. You don’t even talk to the Dwellers!” Telamon gave a scornful laugh. “You don’t even want the Dwellers to know what Anthony knows!”

Anger poured through Anthony’s veins like a scalding fire. He clenched his fists, considered launching himself at Telamon. Something held him back.

The alien stood, walked to Anthony, looked him up and down. “We’re not so different,” he said. “We both want what’s ours. But I’m willing to share. Philana can be our common pool of data, if you like. Think about it.”

Anthony swung, and in that instant Philana was back, horror in her eyes. Anthony’s fist, aimed for the taller Telamon’s chin, clipped Philana’s temple and she fell back, flailing. Anthony caught her.

“It just happened, didn’t it?” Her voice was woeful.

“You don’t remember?”

Philana’s face crumpled. She swayed and touched her temple. “I never do. The times when he’s running me are just blank spots.”

Anthony seated her on the port bench. He was feeling queasy at having hit her. She put her face in her hands. “I hate when that happens in front of people I know,” she said.

“He’s using you to hide behind. He was here in person, the son of a bitch.” He took her hands in his own and kissed her. Purest desire flamed through him. He wanted to commit an act of defiance, make a statement of the nature of things. He put his arms around her and kissed her nape. She smelled faintly of pine, and there were needles in her hair. Telamon had put her on Earth, then, in a forest somewhere.

She strained against his tight embrace. “I don’t know if this is a good idea,” she said.

“I want to send a message to Telamon,” Anthony said.

They made love under the sun, lying on the deck in Anthony’s cockpit. Clear as a bell, Anthony heard Dweller sounds rumbling up the boat. Somewhere in the boat a metal mounting bracket rang to the subsonics. Philana clutched at him. There was desperation in her look, a search for affirmation, despair at finding none. The teak punished Anthony’s palms. He wondered if Telamon had ever possessed her thus, took over her mind so that he could fuck her in his own body, commit incest with himself. He found the idea exciting.

His orgasm poured out, stunning him with its intensity. He kissed the moist juncture of Philana’s neck and shoulder, and rose on his hands to stare down into Telamon’s brittle grin and cold, knowing eyes.

“Message received, Anthony.” Philana’s throat convulsed in laughter. “You’re taking possession. Showing everyone who’s boss.”

Horror galvanized Anthony. He jumped to his feet and backed away, heart pounding. He took a deep breath and mastered himself, strove for words of denial and could not find them. “You’re sad, Telamon,” he said.

Telamon threw Philana’s arms over her head, parted her legs. “Let’s do it again, Anthony.” Taunting. “You’re so masterful.”

Anthony turned away. “Piss off, Telamon, you sick fuck.” Bile rose in his throat.

“What happened?” Anthony knew Philana was back. He turned and saw her face crumple. “We were making love!” she wailed.

“A cheap trick. He’s getting desperate.” He squatted by her and tried to take her in his arms. She turned away from him.

“Let me alone for a while,” she said. Bright tears filled her eyes.

Misplaced adrenaline ran charges through Anthony’s body—no one to fight, no place to run. He picked up his clothes and went below to the main cabin. He drew on his clothing and sat on one of the berths, hands helpless on the seat beside him. He wanted to get blind drunk.

Half an hour later Philana entered the cabin. She’d braided her hair, drawn it back so tight from her temples it must have been painful. Her movements were slow, as if suddenly she’d lost her sea legs. She sat down at the little kitchen table, pushed away her half-eaten lunch.

“We can’t win,” she said.

“There’s got to be some way,” Anthony said tonelessly. He was clean out of ideas.

Philana looked at Anthony from reddened eyes. “We can give him what he wants,” she said.

“No.”

Her voice turned to a shout. “It’s not you he does this to! It’s not you who winks out of existence in the middle of doing laundry or making love, and wakes up somewhere else.” Her knuckles were white as they gripped the table edge. “I don’t know how long I can take this.”

“All your life,” said Anthony, “if you give him what he wants.”

“At least then he wouldn’t use it as a weapon!” Her voice was a shout. She turned away.

Anthony looked at her, wondered if he should go to her. He decided not to. He was out of comfort for the present.

“You see,” Philana said, her head still turned away, “why I don’t want to live forever.”

“Don’t let him beat you.”

“It’s not that. I’m afraid . . .” Her voice trembled. “I’m afraid that if I got old I’d become him. The Kyklopes are the oldest living things ever discovered. And a lot of the oldest immortals are a lot like them. Getting crazier, getting . . .” She shook her head. “Getting less human all the time.”

Anthony saw a body swaying in the smokehouse. Philana’s body, her fingernails trailing in the dust. Pain throbbed in his chest. He stood up, swayed as he was caught by a slow wave of vertigo. Somewhere his father was laughing, telling him he should have stayed on Lees for a life of pastoral incest.

“I want to think,” he said. He stepped past her on the way to his computer. He didn’t reach out to touch her as he passed. She didn’t reach for him, either.

He put on the headphones and listened to the Dwellers. Their speech rolled up from the deep. Anthony sat unable to comprehend, his mind frozen. He was helpless as Philana. Whose was the next move? he wondered. His? Philana’s?

Whoever made the next move, Anthony knew, the game was Telamon’s.

At dinnertime Philana made a pair of sandwiches for Anthony, then returned to the cabin and ate nothing herself. Anthony ate one sandwich without tasting it, gave the second to the fish. The Dweller speech had faded out. He left his computer and stepped into the cabin. Philana was stretched out on one of the side berths, her eyes closed. One arm was thrown over her forehead.

Her body, Anthony decided, was too tense for this to be sleep. He sat on the berth opposite.

“He said you haven’t told the truth,” Anthony said.

Anthony could see Philana’s eyes moving under translucent lids as she evaluated this statement, scanning for meaning. “About what,” she said.

“About your relationship to him.”

Her lips drew back, revealing teeth. Perhaps it was a smile.

“I’ve known him all my life. I gave you the condensed version.”

“Is there more I should know?”

There was another pause. “He saved my life.”

“Good for him.”

“I got involved with this man. Three or four hundred years old, one of my professors in school. He was going through a crisis—he was a mess, really. I thought I could do him some good. Telamon disagreed, said the relationship was sick.” Philana licked her lips. “He was right,” she said.

Anthony didn’t know if he really wanted to hear about this.

“The guy started making demands. Wanted to get married, leave Earth, start over again.”

“What did you want?”

Philana shrugged. “I don’t know. I hadn’t made up my mind. But Telamon went into my head and confronted the guy and told him to get lost. Then he just took me out of there. My body was half the galaxy away, all alone on an undeveloped world. There were supplies, but no gates out.”

Anthony gnawed his lip. This was how Telamon operated.

“Telamon kept me there for a couple weeks till I calmed down. He took me back to Earth. The professor had taken up with someone else, another one of his students. He married her, and six weeks later she walked out on him. He killed her, then killed himself.”

Philana sighed, drew her hand over her forehead. She opened her eyes and sat up, swinging her legs off the berth. “So,” she said. “That’s one Telamon story. I’ve got more.”

“When did this happen?”

“I’d just turned eighteen.” She shook her head. “That’s when I signed the contract that keeps him in my head. I decided that I couldn’t trust my judgment about people. And Telamon’s judgment of people is, well, quite good.”

Resentment flamed in Anthony at this notion. Telamon had made his judgment of Anthony clear, and Anthony didn’t want it to become a subject for debate. “You’re older now,” he said. “He can’t have a veto on your life forever.”

Philana drew up her legs and circled her knees with her arms. “You’re violent, Anthony.”

Anthony looked at her for a long moment of cold anger. “I hit you by accident. I was aiming at him, damn it.”

Philana’s jaw worked as she returned his stare. “How long before you aim at me?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“That’s what my old professor said.”

Anthony turned away, fury running through him like chill fire. Philana looked at him levelly for a moment, then dropped her forehead to her knees. She sighed. “I don’t know, Anthony. I don’t know anymore. If I ever did.”

Anthony stared fixedly at the distant white dwarf, just arrived above the horizon and visible through the hatch. We are, he thought, in a condition of permanent bafflement. “What do you want, Philana?” he asked.

Her head came up, looked at him. “I want not to be a tennis ball in your game with Telamon, Anthony. I want to know I’m not just the prize given the winner.”

“I wanted you before I ever met Telamon, Philana.”

“Telamon changed a few things.” Her voice was cold. “Before you met him, you didn’t use my body to send messages to people.”

Anthony’s fists clenched. He forced them to relax.

Philana’s voice was bitter. “Seems to me, Anthony, that’s one of Telamon’s habits you’re all too eager to adopt.”

Anthony’s chest ached. He didn’t seem able to breathe in enough air. He took a long breath and hoped his tension would ease. It didn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not . . . a normal situation.”

“For you, maybe.”

Silence hung in the room, broken only by the whale clicks and mutters rising through the boat. Anthony shook his head. “What do we do, then?” he asked. “Surrender?”

“If we have to.” She looked at him. “I’m willing to fight Telamon, but not to the point where one of us is destroyed.” She leaned toward him, her expression intent. “And if Telamon wins, could you live with it?” she asked. “With surrender? If we had to give him what he wanted?”

“I don’t know.”

“I have to live with it. You don’t. That’s the difference.”

“That’s one difference.” He took a breath, then rose from his place. “I have to think,” he said.

He climbed into the cockpit. Red sunset was splattered like blood across the windscreen. He tried to breathe the sea air, clear the heaviness he felt in his chest, but it didn’t work. Anthony went up onto the flybridge and stared forward. His eyes burned as the sun went down in flames.

The white dwarf was high overhead when Anthony came down. Philana was lying in the forepeak, covered with a sheet, her eyes staring sightlessly out the open hatch. Anthony took his clothes off and crawled in beside her.

“I’ll surrender,” he said. “If I have to, I’ll surrender.” She turned to him and put her arms around him. Hopeless desire burned in his belly.

He made love to Philana, his nerves numb to the possibility that Telamon might reappear. Her hungry mouth drank in his pain. He didn’t know whether this was affirmation or not, whether this meant anything other than the fact there was nothing left to do at this point than stagger blindly into one another’s embrace.

A Dweller soloed from below, the clearest Anthony had ever heard one. WE CALL TO OURSELVES, the Dweller said, WE SPEAK OF THINGS AS THEY ARE. Anthony rose from bed and set his computer to record. Sings of Others, rising alongside to breathe, called a hello. Anthony tapped his keys, hit TRANSMIT.

Air Human and I are in a condition of rut, he said.

WE CONGRATULATE ANTHONY AND AIR HUMAN ON OUR CONDITION OF RUT, Sings of Others responded. The whooping whale cries layered atop the thundering Dweller noises. WE WISH OURSELVES MANY HAPPY COPULATIONS.

HAPPY COPULATIONS, HAPPY COPULATIONS, echoed Two Notches.

A pointless optimism began to resonate in Anthony’s mind. He sat before the computer and listened to the sounds of the Deep Dwellers as they rumbled up his spine.

Philana appeared at the hatch. She was buttoning her shirt. “You told the whales about us?” she said.

“Why not?”

She grinned faintly. “I guess there’s no reason not to.”

Two Notches wailed a question. ARE ANTHONY AND AIR HUMAN COPULATING NOW?

Not at present, Anthony replied.

WE HOPE YOU WILL COPULATE OFTEN.

Philana, translating the speech on her own, laughed. “Tell them we hope so, too,” she said.

And then she stiffened. Anthony’s nerves poured fire. Philana turned to him and regarded him with Telamon’s eyes.

“I thought you’d see reason,” Telamon said. “I’ll surrender. I like that.”

Anthony looked at the possessed woman and groped for a vehicle for his message. Words seemed inadequate, he decided, but would have to do. “You haven’t won yet,” he said.

Philana’s head cocked to one side as Telamon viewed him. “Has it occurred to you,” Telamon said, “that if she’s free of me, she won’t need you at all?”

“You forget something. I’ll be rid of you as well.”

“You can be rid of me any time.”

Anthony stared at Telamon for a moment, then suddenly he laughed. He had just realized how to send his message. Telamon looked at him curiously. Anthony turned to his computer deck and flipped to the Dweller translation file.

I/we, he typed, live in the warm brightness above. I am new to this world, and send good wishes to the Dwellers below.

Anthony pressed TRANSMIT. Rolling thunder boomed from the boat’s speakers. The grammar was probably awful, Anthony knew, but he was fairly certain of the words, and he thought the meaning would be clear.

Telamon frowned, stepped to gaze over Anthony’s shoulder.

Calls came from below. A translation tree appeared on the screen.

“Trench Dweller” was probably one of the Dwellers’ names. “Bubbleward” was a phrase for “up,” since bubbles rose to the surface. Anthony tapped the keys.

We are from far away, recently arrived. We are small and foreign to the world. We wish to brush the Dwellers with our thoughts. We regret our lack of clarity in diction.

“I wonder if you’ve thought this through,” Telamon said.

Anthony hit TRANSMIT. Speakers boomed. The subsonics were like a punch in the gut.

“Go jump off a cliff,” Anthony said.

“You’re making a mistake,” said Telamon.

The Dweller’s answer was surprisingly direct.

Anthony’s heart crashed in astonishment. Could the Dwellers stand the lack of pressure on the surface? I/We, he typed, Trench Dweller, proceed with consideration for safety. I/We recollect that weare small and weak. He pressed TRANSMIT and flipped to the whalespeech file.

Deep Dweller rising to surface, he typed. Run fast northward.

The whales answered with cries of alarm. Flukes pounded the water. Anthony ran to the cabin and cranked the wheel hard to starboard. He increased speed to separate himself from the humpbacks. Behind him, Telamon stumbled in his unfamiliar body as the boat took the waves at a different angle.

Anthony returned to his computer console. I/We are in a state of motion, he reported. Is living in the home of the light occasion for a condition of damage to us/Trench Dweller?

“You’re mad,” said Telamon, and then Philana staggered. “He’s done it again,” she said in a stunned voice. She stepped to the starboard bench and sat down. “What’s happening?” she asked.

“I’m talking to the Dwellers. One of them is rising to say hello.”

“Now?”

He gave her a skeletal grin. “It’s what you wanted, yes?” She stared at him.

I’m going over cliffs, he thought. One after another.

That, Anthony concluded, is the condition of existence.

Subsonics rattled crockery in the kitchen.

Anthony typed, I/We happily await greeting ourselves and pressed TRANSMIT, then REPEAT. He would give the Dweller a sound to home in on.

“I don’t understand,” Philana said. He moved to join her on the bench, put his arm around her. She shrugged him off. “Tell me,” she said. He took her hand.

“We’re going to win.”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet.”

She was too shaken to argue. “It’s going to be a long fight,” she said.

“I don’t care.”

Philana took a breath. “I’m scared.”

“So am I,” said Anthony.

The boat beat itself against the waves. The flying yacht followed, a silent shadow.

Anthony and Philana waited in silence until the Dweller rose, a green-grey mass that looked as if a grassy reef had just calved. Foam roared from its back as it broke water, half an ocean running down its sides. Anthony’s boat danced in the sudden white tide, and then the ocean stilled. Bits of the Dweller were all around, spread over the water for leagues—tentacles, filters, membranes. The Dweller’s very mass had calmed the sea. The Dweller was so big, Anthony saw, it constituted an entire ecosystem. Sea creatures lived among its folds and tendrils: some had died as they rose, their swim bladders exploding in the release of pressure; others leaped and spun and shrank from the brightness above.

Sunlight shone from the Dweller’s form, and the creature pulsed with life.

Terrified, elated, Philana and Anthony rose to say hello.

THE CALVIN COOLIDGE HOME FOR DEAD COMEDIANS

Bradley Denton

Speculation about life after death is a topic writers have dwelt on for centuries. Bradley Denton (“In the Fullness of Time,” May 1986) richly and riotously turns his talents to the examination of the life certain comedians might have encountered (or may expect to encounter) after death. “The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians,” however, is much more than the limning of a particular aspect of celestial society. Bradley Denton also uses the tale to satirize certain views held by our own society and to present a rather dystopian view of heaven.

“The what-should-be never
did exist . . .

There is only what is.”

1

THE AUTHOR OF HOW TO Talk Dirty and Influence People couldn’t remember his own name, so he decided to ask the driver of the pickup truck in which he was riding.

Red stitching over the right breast pocket of the driver’s blue overalls spelled out “Ol’ Pete.”

“Excuse me, ah, Pete,” the author said hesitantly. “Who am I?”

Ol’ Pete, an elderly man with a creased, suntanned face and a white beard, adjusted his blue baseball cap and scratched his scalp.

“Yuh,” he said. “That’s typical.”

“Typical of what?” the author asked.

Ol’ Pete grimaced. “Take a look at yourself, sonny.”

“Sonny” looked down at himself and saw that he was dressed in a brown jacket, tie, and slacks; brown shoes; and a white shirt. The belly threatening to pop the shirt buttons was too big for the rest of his body.

Gotta get on a diet, he thought.

Then he saw the thin copper band encircling his left wrist. LEONARD was stamped into the bracelet in capital letters.

“That’s me?” he asked.

“Yuh, unless somebody made a mistake.”

Leonard rubbed at the bracelet with his right thumb.

“It doesn’t feel right,” he said. “Is it my first name or my last?”

“Yuh, that’s typical, too.”

Leonard wanted to ask “Typical of what?” again, but Ol’ Pete began whistling “Camptown Races,” and Leonard decided it would be a shame to interrupt.

Instead he looked out the open window on his right. The pickup truck—a dusty, battered red International Harvester—was chugging along a narrow dirt road that wound through a forest of thick-trunked trees. Leonard guessed that most of the trees were cottonwoods, but he wasn’t sure.

He made a mental note: He was not a botanist. Or at least not a botanist who specialized in trees.

What kind of botanist would write a book called How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, anyway?

He took a deep breath. The warm air smelled wonderful, like sunshine on mown grass. The season was spring, he guessed, but late spring, because the trees were fully leaved. The gently swaying branches created an ever-changing pattern of sun dapples on the road.

“Nice area,” Leonard said. His voice, at least, was familiar. “Where are we going?”

Ol’ Pete stopped whistling long enough to say, “Ain’t there a one of you willing to think for yourself?”

Leonard wanted to say something sarcastic but didn’t know what, so he searched his mind for a memory that would help him.

In brief flashes, he remembered—

—crowds, laughter, drugs, sex, cops—

—but he couldn’t imagine what any of that had to do with being in an International pickup with a man he had never seen before.

He twisted the mirror attached to the outside of his door and looked at his reflection.

The pale, smooth-shaven face had brown, wavy hair; blue eyes surrounded by dark, slightly puffy circles; and an ordinary, medium-sized nose. Although he thought the face would look better with a beard, it was definitely his—a good face, a face practiced in attracting women. But it didn’t look like the kind of face that would go with the name Leonard.

Without trying to recall the information, he remembered that he was forty years old.

He turned back toward Ol’ Pete. “Hey, do I look forty to you?”

Ol’ Pete shrugged his shoulders. “Y’all look alike to me.”

Leonard began to feel irritated.

“Look, pops,” he said, “I don’t know where I came from or how I got here. I’m one hundred percent confused, and you’re not helping, which is making me one hundred percent pi—pi—pi—”

Leonard frowned. There was a word he wanted to use, but he couldn’t think of more than its first two letters.

“You mean ‘angry,’ right?” Ol’ Pete said, the corners of his eyes crinkling in amusement.

“Yeah,” Leonard said, looking first at his hands, then at the cracked leather seat, and then at the dashboard, as if he might have misplaced the unknown word. “Yeah, I’m angry, but . . . that isn’t the way I was going to say it.”

Ol’ Pete adjusted his baseball cap and chuckled. “Well, I can see why you’ve been assigned to Mrs. Vonus.”

Leonard stopped trying to think of the word. “Mrs. Vonus?” he said.

“She’ll be your Housemother.”

“Housemother?”

Ol’ Pete clicked his tongue. “You got yourself a bad case of echolalia, boy.”

Leonard wanted to punch Ol’ Pete in the nose, but restrained himself. He had enough trouble with the cops without adding battery to the list.

He made a mental note of that, too.

“How about some compassion, pops?” he said. “Something weird’s happened to me, and all I’m getting from you is ‘That’s typical’ and enough whistling to make Jiminy Cricket toss his cookies. I didn’t ask for this, you know.”

Ol’ Pete laughed and beat on the button in the center of the steering wheel. The horn blared out derisive honks, and panicked birds flew up on both sides of the road.

Leonard glared. “Just what’s so funny, you smug coc—coc—”

Again, he knew there was a word he wanted, but was unable to remember it.

Ol’ Pete raised an eyebrow. “Got in trouble for that one, I’ll bet.”

Leonard experienced another flash of memory, like a hot rush of blood, and the force of it suppressed his anger.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I did. I don’t know why, but the cops took me in for it.”

Ol’ Pete patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, sonny. It’ll come clear in a bit. We’re almost there.” He pointed.

A few hundred yards ahead, a three-story redbrick mansion sat in a fenced clearing at the base of a huge hill. Half-hidden golden buildings shimmered at the top of the hill, but it was the brick mansion toward which Ol’ Pete pointed.

“That’s the Calvin Coolidge Home,” Ol’ Pete said.

Leonard rubbed his forehead, which was starting to hurt. “I thought you said I was assigned to a Mrs. Vopis.”

“Mrs. Vonus, boy. She runs the Coolidge Home. And it ain’t Calvin Coolidge’s; that’s just what she calls it.”

“Don’t call me boy,” Leonard said. “I’m forty god—go—forty years old.”

The old man pounded the horn again. “A babe in the woods!” he chortled.

Leonard was beginning to think that Ol’ Pete was more than a little crazy. He was glad the ride was almost over.

Even though he had no idea where it had taken him.

2

LEONARD HAD to cross a narrow plank over a deep ditch to get to the brick walk that led to the mansion’s front door. He was halfway across when the International’s horn blared behind him, and he windmilled his arms to keep his balance.

“So long, sonny boy!” Ol’ Pete bellowed. “Hope to see you on the Hill one o’ these days!”

Leonard didn’t look back to acknowledge the farewell. He was too busy trying to avoid falling into the ditch, which was half full of murky water.

He did turn around when he’d finally made it to the other side. The truck was gone, without even a puff of dust to mark its passage.

He hadn’t heard it drive away. He couldn’t even remember when he’d stopped hearing the engine noise.

“Holy sh—sh—,” he said, and began to see a connection between the words he couldn’t remember.

He walked slowly up the path, staring down at the chipped bricks. He tried to mutter obscenities as he went.

“Sh—sh—Excrement,” he said. “Fuh—fuh—Sexual intercourse. Genitalia. Scion of a golden retriever. Immoral congress with a chimpanzee. Guano cranium.”

It was the best he could do.

He was so preoccupied that he stumbled over the step at the end of the walk. His palms came up just in time to keep his face from impacting on the wall to the right of the door.

His eyes were five inches from a bronze plaque bolted to the bricks:

THE CALVIN COOLIDGE MEMORIAL REHABILITATION FACILITY

VISITORS WELCOME

THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING

“What the coitus,” Leonard muttered, and pushed away from the wall to face the dark wooden door, which was intricately carved with depictions of bored-looking cherubim.

A black iron knocker shaped like a microphone dominated the center of the door. The flat piece of metal the knocker was to strike had been forged in the shape of a laughing face, but Leonard only knew this because of the open mouth. The rest of the face had been beaten smooth. He didn’t want to knock, so he kicked at a loose brick in the step for several minutes, waiting for something to happen. A blue jay landed in a mimosa tree and scolded him.

What am I afraid of? he thought. Any place named after Calvin Coolidge, for crying out loud, can’t be too horrible. Besides, they might have something to eat.

The knocker felt hot in his hand. He brought it up quickly and let it fall.

The sound was like a thunderclap.

Startled, Leonard jumped backward off the step and fell, landing on his buttocks on the sidewalk.

“Fornication with one’s maternal parent,” he said. It was distinctly unsatisfying.

The massive door swung inward. Leonard wanted to run into the woods, but before he could stand, he saw the woman in the doorway. She was a blue-haired little old lady in a dark gray dress.

It would be hard, he thought, to imagine a more unthreatening figure. Yet he was frightened, and he thought he knew why when he noticed that the woman’s right hand was curled into a veined, bony fist.

If there’s a balled-up handkerchief in there, he thought, I’m at the mercy of somebody’s Jewish mother.

Not his, though. His mother had been larger. . . .

Another mental note. Sooner or later, he’d have enough clues to know who he was.

The woman in the doorway looked down at him and pursed her lips in displeasure.

“So much for first impressions,” Leonard mumbled, and stood. His legs felt rubbery.

The woman gave a short sigh and said, “I am Mrs. Vonus. You must be Leonard. We’ve been expecting you.” Her voice was high, thin, and dry.

“Who’s ‘we’ ?” Leonard asked.

Mrs. Vonus stepped back and gestured with her left hand. “Come in, come in. We might as well get started.”

“Get started on what?”

Mrs. Vonus sighed again. “Rule Number One, Leonard, is that it’s rude to question your Housemother in such a belligerent tone. Please come inside now, or I’ll be forced to give you a minus for your first day.”

Leonard walked, a little shakily, up the step and into the dark, cool mustiness of the Calvin Coolidge Home. The worn, wine-colored carpeting in the foyer felt spongy under his shoes.

Mrs. Vonus shut the door, and the dim foyer became even dimmer.

“Saving on electricity?” Leonard asked, trying to keep his voice from quavering.

The woman appeared out of the dimness and looked up at him. She sighed a third time.

“You sure kvetch a lot,” Leonard said.

The Housemother shook her head. “We have our work cut out for us.”

Leonard backed away a few steps. “Speaking of cutting,” he said, “I’m cutting out if somebody doesn’t give me a good reason to stay. For one thing, it’s too dark in here, and for another, it smells like moldy bread.”

Mrs. Vonus placed her right hand on his forearm.

No handkerchief, he thought. Must’ve stuffed it down her dress when I wasn’t looking.

“Your eyes will adjust to the light,” Mrs. Vonus said, “and you will become accustomed to the scent of age. As for your questions—this is your Orientation Day, and I shall answer those questions that are appropriate.”

Leonard tried to pull away from her grip and found that he couldn’t, even though she wasn’t holding him tightly. He began to suspect that he was dreaming.

“You are not dreaming,” the Housemother said.

“Which is exactly what I’d expect a dream character to say,” Leonard said quickly, before he had a chance to panic. “On the count of three, I’m going to wake up.” He closed his eyes. “One, two, three.”

When he reopened his eyes, he could see a little better. But he was still in the foyer of the Calvin Coolidge Home, and still in the grip of Mrs. Vonus.

“Three and a half,” he said.

“Come into the Front Parlor,” Mrs. Vonus said, and pulled him to the left. His feet shuffled along against his will.

They passed through a wide, arched entranceway into a large room with the same wine-colored carpeting as the foyer. Tall windows with gauzy drapes let in just enough sunlight for Leonard to see clearly. Ornate sofas and chairs were arranged neatly throughout the room, and huge bookcases loaded with black-spined volumes hulked against the walls. The wall space between the bookcases was covered with blue paisley paper.

Leonard shuddered. It was hideous stuff.

It wasn’t quite as awful, though, as the massive mantel around the fireplace. It was carved from the same dark wood as the front door, and more bored cherubim flapped morosely across it in suspended animation.

Over the mantel, illuminated by two kerosene lamps in wall brackets, was the painted portrait of a clean-cut, Presbyterian-looking man.

Mrs. Vonus pulled Leonard close enough for him to read the brass plate at the bottom of the painting’s frame. The words engraved into it were JOHN CALVIN COOLIDGE.

“Who’s that?” Leonard asked. “I’ve heard of Calvin Coolidge, but—”

“John was his first name,” the Housemother said reverently.

Leonard forced himself to smile, pretending to love the painting. Maybe if he was nice, she’d let go of his arm and he could split.

“You shan’t go anywhere,” Mrs. Vonus said.

She released his arm, and he found that his feet were stuck to the carpet.

Giving in to panic at last, he twisted his body painfully in an effort to escape. “Lord curse this mightily!” he yelled, and realized that he sounded ridiculous.

“You’re heading for a minus,” Mrs. Vonus said.

Leonard stopped flailing and tried to calm himself. He didn’t know what a “minus” was, but the Housemother obviously had some sort of arcane power, and it wouldn’t do to upset her. A “minus” might involve his liver escaping via his belly button.

He wondered why the idea that this little old lady had supernatural powers didn’t strike him as meshugge.

The answer came floating up from his brain’s lower layers:

Man, I’ve been dragged before people whose only power came from the word “Judge” in front of their names. What I’m dealing with here doesn’t make any less sense than that.

“You must learn how to behave toward those who have been placed over you,” Mrs. Vonus said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said, trying to sound meek.

The Housemother pursed her lips. “You don’t fool me. You’re telegraphing a great deal of unhealthy defiance. Sooner or later, though, you must accept the order of the universe if you want to exist in a state of spiritual peace.”

Leonard, to keep himself from responding sardonically, looked up at the portrait again and asked, “Is this the same Calvin Coolidge who was president during Prohibition?”

Mrs. Vonus reached up and buffed the brass plate with a wrinkled lace handkerchief.

Aha! Leonard thought, and was immediately afraid. But the Housemother didn’t seem to have “heard” him.

“Yes, this is he,” she said. “The finest man to have ever served in public office. I find it ironic that you, one of the least fine men to have ever existed, were born during his administration.”

Leonard made yet another mental note. If he had been born during Prohibition and was now forty years old, then this must be nineteen sixty-something-or-other. . . .

“Time has no meaning here,” Mrs. Vonus said. “We have days and nights, but only for convenience. A day is as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day.”

Leonard couldn’t stand it anymore. “Where the he—he—heck am I, then? You keep giving me this mystical shtick, but you’re not telling me anything.”

Mrs. Vonus sighed for what Leonard was sure must be the hundredth time since he’d entered the building. “Very well,” she said in a tone of voice that clearly said You’ll be sorry. “I prefer to give new residents more adjustment time before their screenings, but if you’re impatient, we’ll do it now. Come along.” She began walking back toward the foyer.

Leonard found that he could move again, but before he followed the Housemother, he took a last look at the portrait.

“What a goyisher face,” he muttered, and then remembered not only who Calvin Coolidge had been but who John Calvin had been:

Predestination. Purity. Punishment of sinners. Burnings at the stake. No sense of humor.

Leonard turned away from the mantel. He didn’t think he was going to enjoy working this dump, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.

3

MRS. VONUS led him through the foyer, past a staircase that she said went up to “the dormitory,” and down a wide hallway lined with glass cases. She walked like an overfed duck.

Some of the glass cases were in shadows so dark that Leonard couldn’t make out the contents, but every thirty feet or so, a skylight let in diffused sunshine that revealed dusty medals and trophies. One case was full of china dinner plates painted with portraits of presidents and biblical figures.

“I never saw so much dre—dre—natural fertilizer in my life,” Leonard said.

Mrs. Vonus sighed.

She paused under one of the skylights and gestured at the wall. Leonard stopped beside her and looked where she pointed.

Here, instead of a glass case, was a white plastic-coated board, ten feet high and eight wide, marked off in a grid of perpendicular black lines forming sixty rows of two-inch squares. Many of the squares, particularly on the right half of the board, were blank, but each of the others held one of three black symbols: +, =, or -. Hanging on a long string to the right of the board was what looked like a capped felt-tipped marker.

To the left of each row of squares was a single name. Leonard found his and saw that every square in that row was blank.

“This is the Progress Board,” Mrs. Vonus said. “Each day, I shall evaluate your attitude, composure, manners, posture, and language. A plus sign means that you are making great progress, and you shall receive a silver dollar. Since there are only forty spaces in each row, the Board cannot display a record of a resident’s entire stay—however, all that matters is the total number of pluses. Each resident’s total appears at the end of his row. When the total reaches two hundred, the resident may ascend to the top of the Hill.”

“What’s at the top of the Hill?” Leonard asked.

Mrs. Vonus gave him a severe look. “You’ll know when you have two hundred pluses.”

Leonard looked at the column of numbers and saw that only three of the sixty residents had more than a hundred pluses.

“An equal sign,” Mrs. Vonus continued, “indicates that you are equivocal. You are not rewarded, but neither are you penalized. For each minus, however, you must pay a dollar to the Dessert Fund. If you have no dollars at the time, you must pay double when you do.”

Leonard cleared his throat. “What’s the Dessert Fund?”

For the first time, the hint of a smile flickered at the corners of the Housemother’s mouth. “Every day at dinner, those residents who have received plus signs are given a special dessert at the expense of those who have received minuses.”

Leonard kept his eyes riveted on the Progress Board. The old bat has power, he thought, but she’s as crazy as an eighty-year-old stripper.

“You’ll soon know better,” Mrs. Vonus said.

Leonard gritted his teeth. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’d appreciate a little privacy in my own brain.”

“If you think dessert is crazy, Leonard, that’s fine. From the looks of you, though, you take dessert quite seriously.”

Leonard glared at her. “I’ve been planning to go on a diet, you rotten old set of external sexual characteristics!” he yelled. He didn’t know what it was that he really wanted to call her, but he hoped she did.

Mrs. Vonus stepped closer to the Progress Board, uncapped the marker, and put a minus sign in the first box to the right of Leonard’s name. Then she recapped the marker, dropped it so that it bounced on its string, and began waddling down the hall again.

“Please follow me,” she said.

Leonard looked at the Progress Board and grinned. A quick vertical stroke could change a minus into a plus. . . .

He grabbed the marker, and a jolt of white-hot pain stabbed up his arm into his head.

When he could see again, he was on his back on the worn carpet. His arm and head throbbed. Mrs. Vonus stood over him, her helmet of bluish hair framed by the rectangular halo of the skylight.

“Come along, Leonard,” she said. “You said you wanted answers. It’s time for you to get them.”

4

THE HALLWAY ended in a movie-theater lobby, complete with a popcorn machine and candy counter. The wine-colored carpet of the hall gave way to thick, plush scarlet, and velvet ropes strung between brass posts defined a path leading to a pair of wide doors on spring hinges.

Leonard ached, but he almost forgot about the pain when he saw where he was. His first thought was that the place had to be an illusion, but there was no way to fake the smell of hot buttered popcorn.

What was a movie theater doing in an old mansion?

“It serves a purpose,” Mrs. Vonus said.

Leonard was about to yell at her again—he already had a minus, so what could it hurt?—but then he spotted the two young women behind the U-shaped glass candy counter.

Both were wearing red-and-white striped blouses and short blue skirts. One was tall, blue-eyed, and blonde, with hair so long that its end was hidden behind the display of Milk Duds. The other, a brunette, had dark eyes and the most sensual mouth Leonard had ever seen. So far as he remembered, anyway.

He felt that there ought to be a redhead, but two out of three wasn’t bad.

“Excuse me,” he said to Mrs. Vonus without looking at her, and hopped over a velvet rope.

It was only when he leaned far forward over the counter that he noticed that the women, although extraordinarily beautiful, looked as if they never smiled.

“Hey, why so depressed?” Leonard asked. They didn’t look depressed, exactly, but it was the closest word he could come up with on short notice. “It’s a beautiful day outside. Lots of sunshine, birdies singing, green leaves all over the place. When do you two get off work, anyway? We could go for a picnic.”

The blonde looked at him with a complete lack of interest. “May I help you, sir?” she said flatly.

“You bet, babe,” he said, grinning. “You can tell me how much a smile costs.”

The brunette said, “We have Goobers, Sno-Caps, jujubes, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, licorice whips, red or black, Hershey bars, and Jordan almonds. We also have popcorn, with or without butter, and Royal Crown Cola. What will you have, sir?”

“A phone number,” Leonard said. “A look, a smile, a touch, a wink.”

“We don’t have any of those, sir,” the blonde said.

So that was the way they wanted to play it. Okay, fine—he knew the game as well as they did.

He straightened and shook his head in exaggerated dejection. “Some Goobers and Milk Duds, then. And your biggest tub of popcorn. Better give me a soda, too.”

The brunette reached for the candy.

“Five dollars,” the blonde said, moving toward the cash register.

Leonard’s mouth fell open. “Five bucks? I’ve been places where I could’ve bought you for that!”

Something touched his right elbow, and he jumped. Then he looked down and saw Mrs. Vonus standing beside him.

“This isn’t World War II,” she said, “and you aren’t in a French brothel. These ladies are my employees, and they do not fraternize with residents.”

Leonard leaned down and whispered, “I don’t wanna fraternize. I wanna boink their brains out.” He was pleased to discover that he remembered the word “boink,” and wondered if the reason he was able to remember it was that it wasn’t really a word at all.

The Housemother grasped his arm again. “You will be going to bed without dinner tonight, and there will have to be a considerable improvement in your demeanor before I will consider allowing you to come to dinner tomorrow.”

Leonard tried to pry her fingers loose. “Hey, who d’you think you are, my mother? I don’t have to stick around, y’know—”

“Yes, you do,” Mrs. Vonus said, and yanked him away from the counter so hard that he thought his shoulder had dislocated.

“Hey, what about—ow!—what about my Milk Duds?” he cried.

“You don’t have any silver dollars with which to buy them. At the rate you’re going, it will be some time before you do.”

The Housemother stopped before the double doors and released Leonard’s arm.

“I’ll bet your kids hate you,” he said, rubbing his shoulder. “I’ll bet you’ve never gotten a Mother’s Day card in your life.”

Mrs. Vonus pulled open the left-hand door, revealing darkness. Cool air rushed out and made Leonard shiver.

“Go in,” the Housemother said. “Take any seat you like.”

Leonard tried to step forward, but a tingling sensation in his spine stopped him.

Whatsa matter, schmu—schm—

Yet another word he couldn’t remember. What kind of stupid dream was it where a man couldn’t even call himself an obscene name in Yiddish?

He compromised:

Whatsa matter, schnook? Movie theaters are always dark inside. Otherwise you can’t see the film. So go on in, because if you don’t, Grandma Goering is gonna break your arm.

“You’re going to be awfully hungry in a day or two,” the Housemother said grimly.

Leonard wanted to beat his head against the wall. “Are you gonna spy on me when I go to the john, lady?”

Mrs. Vonus gestured toward the darkness with her free hand. “Please, Leonard. I’m tired of holding the door.”

He took a step toward the darkness and then paused. “Are you coming?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I must turn on the projector.”

Leonard looked back at the unsmiling goddesses behind the candy counter.

“If I’m not back in two hours,” he called, “better come revive me. Nude massages with baby oil often seem to be effective.”

Then, before Mrs. Vonus could admonish him, he walked into the theater.

5

THE DOOR swung shut behind him, and he paused at the top of the aisle to let his eyes adjust. A dim yellow light burned at the end of each row of seats, and the screen on the wall ahead glowed a dull gray. Leonard estimated that there were two hundred seats, all of them empty.

He was amazed at how clean the place was. “What’s a movie house without trash?” he said aloud, then walked down to the fifth row and sat in the third seat left of the aisle.

The screen brightened and the face of Mrs. Vonus appeared, ten feet tall and in ludicrously overtinted color.

Leonard wished he had a popcorn box to throw. He had to content himself with booing and hissing, and the sounds echoed eerily.

“Welcome to the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Rehabilitation Facility,” the amplified voice of Mrs. Vonus said from the ceiling and walls. “This facility specializes in the purification of those who have spent their lives trying to gain earthly rewards through the practice of so-called humor, which, rather than evoking the laughter of joy, instead appeals to the listeners’ prurient interest—”

“What’s wrong with that?” Leonard yelled.

“—thus leading to the deterioration of the moral fabric of society.”

“Moral fabric?” Leonard shouted. “One hundred percent cotton denim, maybe? Rayon? Dacron? The weak, frayed elastic in most of my shorts?”

“Our therapy,” Mrs. Vonus said, “consists of teaching our residents those things their parents and peers failed to teach them—patience, politeness, obedience, reverence, decorum, piety, and chastity.”

Leonard jumped up and waved his right index finger at the screen. “Oh, no, you don’t! The Constitution says I don’t have to be obedient, reverent, or chaste—especially chaste—as long as I don’t abridge the rights of others, which I’ve never done! Furthermore, you wear too much makeup! I’ve spent decades in burlesque palaces, and I never saw so much rouge in my whole life!”

His last three words reverberated in his skull:

My whole life.

His legs felt rubbery again, and he collapsed into his seat. He was beginning to feel uncomfortably warm despite the theater’s coolness.

What was the last thing he could remember before the ride in the red International pickup truck?

. . . something hot and delicious coursing through my body . . .

Orgasm?

No; it had been hotter, faster, more like falling into a volcano—

“And now,” Mrs. Vonus was saying, “a short feature to clarify the meaning of your presence here, after which you shall meet our other residents and enjoy a heartwarming and spiritually uplifting cinematic masterpiece. You shall return to this theater every day when you feel you must, which is the only way we have of telling time here. You shall come to the theater, eat dinner, and gather for house meetings . . . according to when you feel you must.”

“Whenever nature calls, huh?” Leonard mumbled.

The giant Mrs. Vonus disappeared and was replaced by the black-and-white image of a toilet.

“A toilet,” Leonard whispered. His head felt as if it had been soaked in gasoline and lit with a match. “The villainous source of all those ‘dirty toilet jokes’ . . .”

An overweight, pale man with dark hair and a beard appeared on the screen and sat on the toilet. He was nude.

Leonard tried to stand again, but his seat held him with the same irresistible force with which Mrs. Vonus had held his arm.

The two-dimensional phantom tightened a strap above an elbow.

Leonard tried to turn away from the screen, but his head wouldn’t move. Nor would his eyelids close. His eyes began to sting.

The man on the screen held a syringe. With the tip of his tongue touching his upper lip, he slid the needle into the bulging vein on the inside of his elbow. He loosened the strap.

After a moment, he looked happy.

Then something happened to his eyes, and he fell off the toilet. He lay awkwardly on the tiled floor, as if frozen in the act of rolling from his back to his side. His bearded cheek was against the tiles. His eyelids closed.

Leonard wanted to scream, but his throat and tongue were paralyzed.

The cops came into the bathroom.

They looked at the naked man on the floor and talked. Through the roar of his fever, Leonard could only hear a fraction of what they said, but that was more than he wanted to hear.

“What’d I tell you?” one of the cops said.

A second cop said something else. A third laughed.

You sons of bit—bit—, Leonard thought. But the word, the right word, the only word, wouldn’t come.

Then, two by two, like animals trooping into Noah’s ark, the photographers and television cameramen came in. They shone bright lamps onto the body and popped flashbulbs at it as if to purify it with white light.

The tightness in Leonards throat broke.

“Vultures!” he cried. “Can’t I have some peace in my own bathroom?

Two by two, they came and went.

“Bound to happen sooner or later,” one of them said.

Leonard wanted to run to the screen and rip it with his fingernails and teeth.

“You drove me to it!” he shouted. “You and the cops who wouldn’t have gotten out of their cars to keep a black man from getting beaten up but were ecstatic to come after me for telling the truth! I had to do something to get away! Sickest of the sick, huh? You bet I am! Sick of you self-righteous coc—coc—genital lickers!”

The last photographer finished shooting, then said, “Bye-bye, junkie,” and walked out of the bathroom. Other people came in, but the picture was fading.

Leonard slumped, staring at the fading image of his own body.

“I’m not a junkie,” he said weakly. “I just needed to get away from the tapes and papers for a while. I just needed . . .”

The screen went black.

Leonard wanted to cry, but his tear ducts wouldn’t work. All he could do was dry-sob.

This is what I get for getting a tattoo, he thought bitterly.

But when the lights brightened and he rolled his shirt and jacket sleeves up from his left forearm, he saw that the tattoo was gone.

For a moment, he had been sure of who he was, but now he knew that he could never again be sure of anything.

6

AS LEONARD’S fever began to break, the double doors opened. Leonard turned and saw dozens of men, all dressed in brown slacks and jackets with white shirts, coming down the aisle. Some were barely out of their teens, and some were painfully old; yet they all looked alike. All were Caucasian, and all walked as if they were afraid of the floor. None of them were smiling.

Leonard used them as an excuse to try to forget the film he had just seen.

These guys told jokes for a living? So why do they look so . . . unfunny?

A shrunken, ancient man took the aisle seat on Leonard’s right. Tremulously, he reached into a jacket pocket and withdrew a box of jujubes.

“Hey, pops,” Leonard said, leaning to the right and trying to keep his voice steady. “What’s going on here?”

The old man looked at Leonard with a puzzled expression. “It’s—,” he began uncertainly, as if trying to remember something he was always forgetting. “It’s the afternoon movie,” he said finally.

“Yeah? You know what it is?”

The old man stared with grayish, red-rimmed eyes. “Same as always, I suppose,” he said, as if Leonard had been foolish to ask the question, and then opened his box of jujubes.

Leonard’s stomach rumbled.

Dead or not, he was hungry.

“Mind if I have a few?” he said, leaning closer.

The grayish eyes regarded him curiously in the fading light.

“You’re new, aren’t you?” the old man asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” Leonard said, becoming impatient as the screen lit up and music rang from the speakers. “C’mon, can I have some?”

“Up to you,” the old man said, extending the box.

Leonard held out his hand, and several jujubes slid into his palm.

“Thanks, man,” he said, and turned to look at the screen. He had already missed the title, but he recognized the credits, which were flipping past on what looked like Christmas cards.

JAMES STEWART, he read, and then DONNA REED.

He popped one of the candies into his mouth, and it crawled across his tongue.

He choked and spat it out, then felt the jujubes in his hand crawling too. He could just make out their shapes in the flickering light from the movie screen.

Cockroaches.

Leonard yelped and shook his hand violently, scattering the roaches in all directions. One landed in his hair, and he began to hyperventilate as he frantically brushed it out.

“Real—,” he began, shuddering and gasping. “Real—real funny, pops.”

“Not to me,” the old man’s voice answered from the darkness.

Leonard felt cold. Why was the air-conditioning in a movie theater always strong enough to freeze meat?

Shivering, he drew up his knees and hugged them to his chest.

He had seen his own death.

He had put a cockroach into his mouth.

On the movie screen, Jimmy Stewart, as good old George Bailey, was about to discover that It’s a Wonderful Life.

Leonard leaned to his left and threw up into the adjacent seat.

7

SEVENTEEN “DAYS” later, Leonard lay on his hard, narrow mattress and stared at the gray ceiling of his room. The cubicle had no window, so the only thing to look at besides the ceiling was the framed print on the wall above the foot of the bed. He refused to do that, because he hated it.

The print was a reproduction of a painting depicting a female saint being sliced to death by a huge wooden wheel studded with knives.

Earlier that day, Leonard had decided he couldn’t stand the thing anymore, and he had tried to take it down. It hadn’t budged, so he had tried to break the glass with his shoe. That had also failed, and he had received yet another minus for his efforts.

He didn’t think he’d mind the print so much if the saint hadn’t looked overjoyed about her impending filleting.

“It’s perverse,” he had told Mrs. Vonus after she’d called him down to the Progress Board to answer for his attempted vandalism. “Nobody should be happy about something like that. Talk about sick—that’s sick!”

The Housemother had sighed, then pursed her lips.

“Why is it so difficult for you to understand, Leonard,” she had said while uncapping the felt-tipped marker, “that sacrificing oneself for something greater is the highest achievement of spirituality?”

“Oh, I understand, all right,” Leonard had said. “I just don’t think she should be so pleased with the method. I mean, she looks like she thinks she’s about to make it with Omar Sharif, for crying out loud.”

Mrs. Vonus had dutifully marked the minus in the seventeenth box after his name.

As Leonard stared at the ceiling, he thought he understood what the Housemother had said about the nature of time here. The sun had set only sixteen times since his arrival, but he felt as if he’d been in the Home at least five years.

He had considered trying to escape, but even when the house let him go outside, the ditch bounding the front yard and the high wooden wall bounding the grounds on the other three sides kept him trapped. He hadn’t been able to find the footbridge he’d crossed the first day.

He had also tried to befriend some of the other residents, hoping that together they might find a way out, but none of them would even talk to him. It was as if they were too preoccupied with trying to earn pluses to think about what might lie beyond the mansion’s seven acres.

Leonard, though, was curious about the world outside the grounds, particularly the golden buildings on top of the Hill. He could just see them from the yard, glimmering between the trees high above like the sun peeking through gaps in green clouds.

Mrs. Vonus had told him that he might someday be allowed to go up the Hill, but that he had a great deal of work to do first. Living on the Hill was a reward, she said, a privilege to be bestowed only upon those who proved themselves worthy.

“Who wants to live there?” Leonard had said. “I just want to check it out for chicks.”

That had been his fifth minus.

Let’s see, he thought, still staring at the ceiling. Seventeen days with a total of fourteen minuses, three equal signs, and no pluses. That means I need twenty-eight straight pluses just to pay off what I owe the Dessert Fund. Then still more pluses if I want to buy anything for the movies . . . that is, the Movie.

Seventeen days at the Coolidge Home meant that he had seen It’s a Wonderful Life seventeen times. He didn’t think he could bear to sit through it more than three or four more times if he didn’t at least have something to eat to take his mind off it.

The fingers of his right hand plucked at the loose fabric of his shirt where his belly had tightened it two weeks earlier. Seventeen days without sweets—six of them without anything to eat at all—had helped him begin to lose the weight he’d been wanting to take off for months before his death. He supposed he ought to thank the Housemother for that, at least.

Maybe that would get him a plus. Unless, of course, she caught him thinking that it would. Mrs. Vonus wasn’t an easy woman to please. He thought he’d go nuts trying to figure out how to get along with her, or at least how to avoid her.

He also thought he’d go nuts if he didn’t get into the pants of at least one of the candy-counter women, which was one of the reasons why he couldn’t get along with Mrs. Vonus.

“Desires of the flesh,” she had told him over and over, “must be overcome if you are to reach the goal of spiritual purification.”

“I agree,” he had said on Day 9. “However, to overcome desires, they must be eliminated, and the only way to eliminate them is to supply what is desired. Ergo, the only way for me to reach spiritual purification is to spend several weeks bouncing up and down on each of those young lovelies.”

He had missed dinner two days in a row for that.

Then he had behaved himself relatively well, he thought, until this afternoon’s campaign against the masochistic saint.

Now he lay with his stomach growling, mourning his lack of tact and wishing he could curse Ol’ Pete for schlepping him to this dive in the first place.

No one he had known in all his forty years had tsuris like he did now, because the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Rehabilitation Facility was hell. It was the place where Jewish boys who got tattoos, slept with shiksas, and told dirty toilet jokes went. Not all of the residents had been Jewish boys in life, but they had all become Jewish boys in death because they had a Housemother who expected nothing less than perfection.

The fact that Mrs. Vonus seemed more Methodist, Presbyterian, and/or Baptist than anything else was irrelevant. Leonard had met so many Jewish mothers who acted Presbyterian, and so many Baptist mothers who acted Jewish, that he’d come to the conclusion that they were all interchangeable.

“The only mothers that out-Jewish-mother the Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians,” he said to the ceiling, “are those Catholic Jewish-mothers, who on top of everything else get to complain about their swollen knees. And the only ones who out-Jewish-mother them are the sisters, who remain chaste out of shame that they were born to the goyim.”

The disapproving face of Mrs. Vonus appeared above him, and he choked on his own breath. He couldn’t get used to her habit of materializing without warning. It might be that she was simply good at sneaking up on him, but he preferred to think that she had the ability to transform herself into a gnat.

“One of your most serious problems,” Mrs. Vonus said, “is your apparent inability to comprehend the meaning of the word ‘respect.’ ”

You should talk, Leonard thought before he could stop himself. I could’ve been naked in here, doing who knows what vile and perverted things in the absence of female companionship.

Mrs. Vonus regarded him severely. “I have been placed over you as your teacher and guardian, and I shall do whatever is necessary to further your spiritual development. That includes confronting you when you do not expect it, which will train you to behave properly at all times.”

“Oh, I see,” Leonard said sarcastically. “Then I can wind up like Saint Whosis there and behave properly to the bitter end, huh?”

The corners of the Housemother’s mouth twitched upward for only the second time since Leonard had come to the Home. “You have already had your ‘bitter end,’ Leonard. That you met it as you did is one of the reasons you are here.”

Leonard turned onto his right side to face the wall. I’ve already got a minus for today, he thought miserably. What more can she do to me?

“What I am going to do,” Mrs. Vonus said, “is allow you to do something you love.”

All Leonard could think of were the two unsmiling candy-counter women and the various methods he wanted to use to teach them to laugh out loud.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Vonus said. “The non-fraternization rule shall never be broken.”

Leonard turned back toward the Housemother and gave her a murderous look. “Then just what are you going to allow me to do, O Great Giver of Just Desserts?”

Mrs. Vonus’s eyes narrowed. “Be in the Front Parlor in two minutes, or I shall do something I’ve never done before.”

Have an orgasm? Leonard thought, and was immediately horrified at his stupidity.

He was dead now. He was definitely dead now.

Of course you are, schnook. That’s the whole problem.

He expected something far worse than a minus for this transgression. He expected the Housemother to wave her hands and start his insides boiling like so much stew.

But what happened was that, for the first time, Mrs. Vonus looked upset. Her face flushed, and she averted her eyes. Her hands fumbled with the handkerchief she always carried.

Oh-ho, Leonard thought, feeling a bright bit of glee. Methinks I’ve struck a nerve in this old yenta.

The Housemother’s discomfort, however, came and went in an instant.

“Be in the Parlor in two minutes,” she said, “or I shall assign a minus a day in advance—something I have never considered doing to any other resident. How does it feel to be unique, Leonard?”

She turned and waddled out of the room.

If God placed her over me, Leonard thought, why’d He build her to walk so funny?

8

THE FURNITURE in the Front Parlor had been arranged in a circle and was occupied by thirty dour men and women, all dressed in stiff black clothing.

“What’s this?” Leonard asked as Mrs. Vonus took his arm and pulled him into the center of the circle. “The Inquisition?”

The Housemother handed him a cordless microphone and then sat on a sofa with three unsmiling, horse-faced men.

Instinctively, Leonard spoke into the mike. “Hey, what’s the scam?” he said, and was startled when his amplified voice emanated from the walls.

Mrs. Vonus waved a bony hand. “This is what you lived for. A performance.”

Leonard’s skin began to itch. His body was telling him to get out of there, but he knew better than to try. The carpet would hold him as it always did whenever the Housemother wanted him in a certain place.

He looked at the men and women in black. Their faces seemed to have been molded into perpetual frowns.

“Who are these people?” he asked. “Ex-lawyers?”

Mrs. Vonus gave him her almost-smile. “You spent a large part of your life claiming that you knew what your country stood for and that your judges did not. These are the founders of your nation. Perform for them, and see if they approve.”

Leonard scanned the audience. “So where’s George Washington? Ben Franklin? Tom Jefferson?”

“Those men came after,” Mrs. Vonus said with a strong note of satisfaction in her voice. “These people came to escape persecution. . . .”

Realization hit Leonard like a splash of ice water.

Oh, terrific. She expects me to do my gig for a slavering pack of Puritans.

“Please begin,” Mrs. Vonus said.

“Why? So they can tie me up and toss me into the pond out back to see if I float?”

“If you want to eat tomorrow,” Mrs. Vonus said, “begin. I am curious to see just how funny they think you are.”

Leonard wanted to fling himself onto the Housemother and beat on her head with the microphone, but instead he took a deep breath and let himself free-associate.

“Puritans, huh?” he began, pacing around the circle and shaking his head. “I hear you were really strict. ‘If you don’t work, you don’t eat.’ That was yours, wasn’t it? Funny, I knew a rabbi who said it originated with Moses. ‘Those crummy Pilgrims!’ the rabbi used to say. ‘They stole all our best stuff!’ But, hey, I believe you, it’s yours—you want the Ten Commandments, you can have those too.

“Don’t get me wrong—it was a fine rule, although it might’ve been more effective if you’d made it ‘If you don’t work, you don’t schtu—scht—”

Leonard stopped pacing and glared at Mrs. Vonus. “How am I supposed to do my act if I’ve got half of my vocabulary blocked?”

“Do you think these people would find that portion funny?” the Housemother asked. “For that matter, would any decent person? If you feel you must be obscene to be funny, then you must not be too intelligent, must you? Shouldn’t an intelligent person have better tools at his command?”

Leonard began pacing again, faster than before. “Y’know, I really don’t get it with this obscenity hang-up,” he said, the words starting to come rapid-fire. “I mean, obscenity is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? You take this schlepper here—” He stopped pacing and pointed at an especially grim-looking Puritan. “What’s a dirty word to you, Jim—how about ‘toilet’ ? Now, of course that’s not dirty to you, because you don’t have the faintest idea what a toilet is, do you? I could stand here and tell you dirty toilet jokes all night long, and you wouldn’t be offended because you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. But suppose I started talking about witches—”

The Puritan stiffened in his seat.

“Ha, that got you, didn’t it?” Leonard half yelled. “Now there’s a dirty word. Hey, I’ve got one—when is a witch not a witch? When the broomstick she’s riding belongs to Ye Reverend Pastor, Leader of the Flock. ‘Cometh ye here, naughty witch,’ he sayeth righteously. ‘I’ll put the fear of the Lord into you. Well, I’ll put something into you, anyway, yea verily.’ ”

Leonard waited for a reaction, but it didn’t come.

“Didn’t quite catch that one, eh? You guys never were much for subtlety, except when it came to killing off the Indians. What you did was, you drowned, burned, or hung your witches, but only if they didn’t have any social diseases. If they did have social diseases, you sent ’em to be social with the Mohicans, sort of your basic cultural exchange program. . . .”

The Puritans sat stone-faced.

Leonard zeroed in on a matronly woman.

“Excuse me, ma’am, but I’m conducting a survey. Have you ever, you know, had, um, relations with a Mohican? No, I thought not; you look unhappy. You don’t follow the logic? Well, look at it this way—who has more stamina, a fat old preacher whose only exercise comes from turning pages in the Good Book”—he gestured at the man sitting next to the woman—“or a copper-skinned nature boy who wears a loincloth and wrestles bears for a living? ‘Ugh, that tenth bear me wrestled today. Bring on fourteen white squaws; me got a few weeks vacation coming.’

“And speaking of Indians—or did you folks call them ‘savages’ or ‘heathens’ ?—how about that Manhattan Island deal? Bunch of goyim similar to yourselves shelled out twenty-four bucks in beads for a prime chunk of real estate. The kicker, though, is that the savage who sold the island had bought it from God the week before for a sack of rocks, so he went away chuckling because he’d done so well on the deal. . . . ‘Those white-eyed schlemiels with the funny hats! What a bunch of suckers!’

“Later on, of course, the white folks felt guilty for taking advantage of the poor ignorant redskins, so they threw in some good used blankets. Who knew the previous owners had died of smallpox?

“Speaking of disease, though, the Indians had the last laugh. They gave us tobacco in exchange for the blankets, and sooner or later all our lips are going to fall off. We’re going to be up to our tuchises in lips, which, ultimately, is what we all want anyway, right? Who says white people are stupid?”

The Puritans were still unsmiling. They clearly understood no more than every fifth word, and that word invariably made their expressions even grimmer.

Leonard was getting no laughs. Ultimately, when he wound down, that would hurt. He would finally run out of things to say, and then he would stand in the center of the circle, drained and defeated.

For now, though, he wouldn’t think of that. For now, he was high on his own patter, his own stream of consciousness.

For now, he was on a roll.

“. . . and after you boys and girls came over, you discovered that this nation-building business was a real pain, so you imported black men and women to do it for you. You were awfully smart to do that, but not as smart as us Jews. We waited until the country was built, and then we came over. Meantime, of course, we were getting slaughtered wherever else we happened to be living, but we didn’t mind, because we knew that eventually we’d get to go to the Promised Land—Brooklyn.

“Oh, I see what you’re thinking, sir. You reacted when I identified myself as Jewish, and I know what you want to ask. The answer is Yes, we killed Him. Why? Because He refused to go to med school, that’s why. . . .”

Calvin Coolidge looked down disapprovingly.

9

DURING HIS time in the pillory, Leonard began to think that he finally understood the true horror of the Home: It was exactly like being alive again.

It wasn’t that being in the pillory was so bad—at least he was in the backyard beside the pond, which was the best place on the grounds to be if you were trapped in a pillory. Since the pond was near the “northeast” corner of the wooden wall that defined the “eastern,” “western,” and “northern” boundaries of the mansion’s grounds, he not only had a good view of what Mrs. Vonus called “the east yard and arbor,” but could see all the way to the road beyond the front yard.

What bothered him wasn’t the punishment itself but the fact that he had been forced to perform for people who couldn’t possibly understand him, and that the Puritans had been allowed to put him into the pillory simply because they hadn’t liked him.

“Well, of course you don’t like me, you idiots!” he’d yelled as they had carried him out through the East Doorway. “A caveman wouldn’t have liked you, either! For that matter, neither do I!”

“I’m terribly sorry, Leonard,” Mrs. Vonus had said as the Puritans had latched the pillory. “But you see, they wouldn’t have agreed to hear you if I hadn’t promised them the opportunity to punish you for your blasphemies. Rest assured that this is the worst I’ll let them do. I’ll release you in a few hours, after they’ve gone.”

“Gone where?” Leonard had wanted to know, but the Housemother had already turned to waddle back to the mansion.

Then, as the sun had gone down, the Puritans had thrown overripe vegetables.

“Now, tell me, you bozos,” Leonard had cried. “Would Christ have approved of this? Would Jesus have thrown the first cabbage?”

A moldy turnip had hit him in the eye.

Now, as he watched a pair of white geese paddle across the pond, it occurred to him that Mrs. Vonus had wanted to pillory him herself, but had let the Puritans do her dirty work. The black-clad fanatics had disappeared at sunrise, but it was midday now and the Housemother still hadn’t appeared to release him.

None of the residents walking nervously about the grounds would offer any help. A few of them shrugged their shoulders as if to say, “Tough luck, but I’ve got my own tsuris, you know?” but most of them simply ignored him.

So Leonard waited as the sun rose higher, watching the geese and smelling the vegetable stuff baking on his face and hands. At least there weren’t any flies.

After what felt like several more hours, he raised his eyes and looked past the mansion toward the road. If it were only possible to make a move without Mrs. Vonus knowing about it, someday he would cut a branch and try to pole-vault the ditch so he could run down the dirt road in the direction from which he had come. He wouldn’t care where the road went, not even if it led back to the toilet he’d been sitting on when he’d died. He wouldn’t even care if he died all over again, as long as it meant that he would ruin the Housemother’s plans.

It was an impossible hope. Mrs. Vonus always knew what he was doing, and she always appeared whenever he was about to do something “against the Rules of the Home.”

His crotch began to itch.

“Wonderful,” he muttered, and rubbed his thighs together. It didn’t help.

A flash of red appeared down the road, and then Leonard heard the sound of the International’s chugging engine. After a few minutes the pickup truck emerged from behind the trees and stopped.

The passenger door opened, and a stocky, overweight man stepped out. He was wearing the standard brown suit.

“Go back!” Leonard yelled hoarsely. “Throw Ol’ Pete in the ditch, hijack the truck, and go back before she’s got you!”

The stranger peered in Leonard’s direction, but didn’t follow the instructions. He began to cross the narrow footbridge that had reappeared with the arrival of the International.

The pickup’s horn blared, and the stranger flailed, nearly falling into the ditch.

Engager in filthy activity with sows, Leonard thought, wishing he could remember the words that really expressed what he thought of Ol’ Pete.

He watched the newcomer totter across the footbridge and then look back, just as he had done. The truck had vanished.

Shaking his head, the stocky man stepped onto the walk that led to the front door.

“Hey!” Leonard yelled, trying to force his voice to overcome its hoarseness. “Don’t go that way! Come on back here! Back here, schnook!”

The stranger paused.

“Yeah, I’m talking to you!” Leonard shouted. “C’mere and get me out of this thing!”

The stranger came toward the pond, and as he drew near, the puzzled expression on his broad, doughy face became more evident.

“I’m Leonard,” Leonard said when the stranger was close enough to hear unshouted words.

“Uh, pleased to meet you,” the newcomer said uncertainly. “I’m”—he peered at the copper band on his wrist—“John, I guess.” His voice sounded like a combination of a baby’s gurgle and an old man’s cough.

“Well, that might be in your favor,” Leonard said. “You’re named after the Housemother’s hero, sort of. Is ‘John’ all it says?”

John looked at his bracelet more closely. “Why? Should it say something else?”

Leonard tried to shrug, but the pillory wouldn’t let him. “I’ve been trying to figure out if Leonard is my first name or my last, and nobody else will let me look at their bracelets. But if yours just says ‘John,’ it’s got to be a first name.”

“Who says? What about Elton John?”

“Is that who you are?”

John looked surprised. “Do I look like Elton John?”

Leonard tried to shrug again. “How should I know? I never heard of the guy.”

“Where have you been the last fifteen years?” John asked, incredulous.

“Dead,” Leonard said. “Get me out of this thing, will you? I got an itch. Find something to break the lock.”

John squinted. “There isn’t a lock. Just a latch, like on a toolbox, you know?”

Leonard was finding it difficult to be patient. His crotch felt as if a thousand crabs had settled down to lunch.

“So quit kibitzing and unlatch it already!” he yelled.

John reached for the latch, then paused and eyed Leonard suspiciously. “Am I going to get in trouble for this?”

“No!” Leonard shouted, not caring that he might be lying. “Now either get me outta here or scratch me where my pants are binding me!”

John raised an eyebrow in a way that Leonard supposed meant, “Hmm . . . interesting proposition,” and then unlatched the pillory.

Leonard flung off the upper board, jammed his hands into his pants pockets, and scratched vigorously.

“That’s disgusting,” John said, and began to scratch himself in a similar fashion.

Leonard’s first impulse was to snarl at the newcomer for mocking him, but then he realized that John’s exaggerated mugging and scratching were funny.

“You should talk about disgusting,” Leonard said. “You look like a sex-starved gorilla.”

“I am a sex-starved gorilla,” John said emphatically, and began lurching around the pond, waving his arms and screeching like a chimpanzee.

Leonard had a feeling that he was going to like this guy.

10

“I’LL THANK you not to bother our new resident,” a thin, high-pitched voice said behind him.

Leonard’s heart seemed to drop into his stomach and jump back up. Mrs. Vonus had sneaked up on him again.

He turned and glared at her. “I was merely making his acquaintance,” he said. “He was kind enough to let me out of that Pilgrim peep show, which you promised you’d do a long time ago.”

“I promised no such thing,” Mrs. Vonus said.

“Bullsh—bull—,” Leonard began, then gave up and fumed.

Mrs. Vonus waddled a few steps closer to the pond.

“Please come with me, John,” she called. “We must begin your orientation. My name is Mrs. Vonus.”

John, still an ape, screeched in happy mock-recognition and scampered to the Housemother.

Leonard grinned.

“That will be enough of that, John,” Mrs. Vonus said.

John made ooh-oohing noises and began to probe Mrs. Vonus’s blue-gray helmet of hair with his thick fingers.

Leonard laughed. It would probably earn him a minus, but he didn’t care. He was getting to the point where he didn’t miss dessert that much, anyway.

“Stop this instant, John,” Mrs. Vonus said.

Her voice was so deadly cold that Leonard’s laughter died.

John continued to search for lice.

“You have two seconds,” Mrs. Vonus said.

Leonard started toward John, intending to pull him away, but he was too late.

John stiffened convulsively, and his eyes rolled back. Then he crumpled to the grass, landing on his side with a faint whuff.

Leonard knelt beside him and gently slapped his cheeks. He had to do something, because if he didn’t, he would go for the Housemother’s throat.

“He is quite all right,” Mrs. Vonus said. “In any case, it is none of your affair.”

I hate you, Leonard thought in a red heat. I hate your scrawny guts, you miserable old yenta. You exist only to dictate rules, just like those self-righteous religion pimps back home.

“Unless you wish to feel what John has just felt,” Mrs. Vonus said, “I suggest you redirect your thoughts. I also suggest that you take a stroll about the grounds. Now.”

Leonard stood stiffly and walked toward the back wall.

“Stand up, John,” he heard the Housemother say. “There is a film I think you should see.”

“A movie?” John’s slurred voice said. “I love movies. I think I’ve been in some. . . .”

You can bet you’ll be in this one, Jim, Leonard thought as he forced his eyes to stay focused on the wall that was too high to scale. You’ll goddamn sure be in this one.

He stopped short.

He had just thought one of the forgotten, forbidden words.

He waited for the lightning to strike, but it didn’t come. Then he tried to think of the word again, but it was gone.

No matter. The chink in the armor had been tiny, but it had been there. All he had to do was make it bigger.

To discover how to do that, he would need an ally.

The way to start, he decided, was to do something he knew was against the Rules of the Home.

He would wait until Mrs. Vonus and John were inside the mansion. Then he would follow and hide until the Housemother had finished showing the newcomer the portrait and the Progress Board. He would watch for his chance to sneak into the theater, and then—

He would watch the screening of John’s death. Maybe he could find some way to use the film against Mrs. Vonus before she had a chance to use it against John.

I’m already dead, Leonard thought as he pretended to wander aimlessly about the backyard, so what have I got to lose?

When Mrs. Vonus and John were almost to the East Door, Leonard went to the pond and washed the dried vegetable stuff from his face and hair. It was time to prepare for battle.

11

LEONARD WAITED in a shadow in the hall a few yards away from the entrance to the lobby. He saw Mrs. Vonus open one of the double doors and usher John into the theater, then watched as she went behind the candy counter.

For a moment he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to get in without her seeing him, but then she opened a panel in the wall and disappeared up a flight of steps. Apparently, her powers didn’t include turning on the projector by telekinesis.

The two women behind the candy counter would be a problem, but Leonard decided to take his chances. He stepped into the lobby and strode across to the double doors.

“Excuse me, sir,” the blonde said. “The main feature does not begin for thirty minutes.”

Leonard didn’t slow down. “Yes, I know I’m late, sorry,” he said, then opened the right-hand door and stepped into the darkness. He sat in the back row, not wanting to find John until he had some idea of how to approach him.

After a half minute, the screen brightened and the Housemother’s introductory spiel began. Leonard fidgeted in his seat, wanting desperately to shout an insult at the giant Mrs. Vonus image to see whether he could remember that word again.

When the death film began, Leonard experienced such a strong sense of déjà vu that he wondered whether he had known John in life. But as the film progressed, he realized that the feeling came from the fact that John’s death was remarkably like his own.

In the same grainy black and white, John overdosed and died.

There were differences, of course: The camera-eye didn’t remain stationary, but roamed from room to room, following John as he blundered through his final minutes. And there was a woman who gave him the injection, but she left before the end.

Finally, John lay on a bed, alone and still. Someone came into the frame and tried to revive him, then shouted angrily.

The final shot was a close-up of John’s puffy face, the swollen tongue pushing out between dark lips.

The screen went black, and Leonard heard soft moaning noises.

Give the guy a few minutes of privacy, he thought. Everybody ought to have a little time alone when they die.

“I coulda,” John moaned.

Leonard tried not to listen, but John’s voice became louder with each syllable.

“I coulda,” John said again. “I coulda gone back to New York. I coulda saved my stupid fat . . .”

There was a long pause, and then an explosive bellow:

“But NOOOOOOOOOOOO. NOOOOOOOOO, I had to stay in HOL-LY-WOOOD so I could get off on a speedball and be COOOOL.”

Leonard was impressed. Better to rail than to whimper and slide farther down in your seat.

The double doors opened, throwing a slanted shaft of yellow light down the aisle, and Leonard stood quickly so he could sit beside John before any of the others did. He didn’t want the newcomer to meet anyone with jujubes before he had a chance to warn him.

12

LEONARD FOUND John in the same seat he had chosen on his own first day.

“Mind if I sit here?” Leonard asked, indicating the seat on John’s right.

John looked at him through slitted eyes for a moment and then turned to face the screen again, shrugging his substantial shoulders.

Leonard sat down. “Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t take candy from these schmoes. It turns into bugs in the mouth of anyone except the guy who bought it.”

John glanced at him. “Uh-huh.”

“I’m serious,” Leonard said. “The Housemother would rather you found out on your own, because she enjoys torturing schlimazels like you and me. I’m telling you in advance to save you the grief.”

“Thanks,” John said. “Now shut up. The movie’s starting.”

The screen was brightening, and Leonard closed his eyes even though he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep them shut. He smelled popcorn somewhere behind him and hated whoever had been “good” enough to get the money to buy it.

“All right!” John yelped. “Jimmy Stewart!”

Leonard opened his eyes and shuddered. “You won’t be so pleased after a while,” he said.

“Are you kidding? It’s a Wonderful Life is great!”

“Once, maybe, or even ten times if they’re spread out over a few years. But not every afternoon for all eternity.”

John shifted his bulk, jostling Leonard’s elbow off the armrest. “What’re you talking about?”

“Haven’t you figured it out? Didn’t Mrs. Vonus show you the Progress Board before she hustled you in here?”

“Yeah, but she’s senile, isn’t she? Hey—no more talk, okay?”

On the screen, the absurd nebulae-angels began discussing the poor soul who was about to take his own life.

Just once, Leonard thought, I wish they’d let George croak himself. Let him leap into the ice-cold river. That’s all, folks, thanks for coming. Frank Capra has suckered you, man.

But it happened the way it always did—the ice-sledding accident, the distraught druggist, the swimming pool under the gym floor, the evil banker, the war-hero brother, the insufferably cute children, the bumbling, wingless angel named Clarence—

Leonard wanted to scream, but he didn’t. He had, once, on Day 6, and had been served burnt gristle for dinner. He also knew better than to try to walk out. His seat wouldn’t let him up until the last frame had whisked through the projector.

So he resigned himself to sitting through it again, miserable and thoroughly angry at John, who, despite his outburst after seeing his death, didn’t seem to care that he was stuck here.

What was wrong with him, anyway?

For that matter, what was wrong with all of these schmendricks? Hadn’t they ever considered the possibility that where one failed, many could succeed?

Or did Mrs. Vonus see to it that new residents arrived at long intervals, so she’d be able to break the spirit of each one before Ol’ Pete brought the next?

It made sense, considering the nature of time at the Home. A hundred comedians might die in the same hour, but they’d arrive singly, one every fifteen or twenty “days,” if that was the interval chosen by the Housemother.

Or by someone else?

If Mrs. Vonus chose the length of the interval, how could her failure to tame Leonard before John’s arrival be explained?

Now that he thought about it, it seemed to Leonard that the previous night’s performance for the Puritans and his subsequent imprisonment in the pillory had been the Housemother’s last-ditch attempts to bring him into line before she had to concentrate on breaking in a newcomer.

That would explain how he had managed to remember that word: Mrs. Vonus had been preoccupied with John.

She was not omnipotent.

Leonard grinned. If he could enlist John’s help before she sank her claws into him too deeply, they could bounce her back and forth between them like a Ping-Pong ball.

For what purpose? he wondered. What good will that do me? Will it get me out of here?

He brushed the questions out of his mind. Maybe running the Housemother ragged wouldn’t accomplish anything; maybe he was bound here by forces beyond those she commanded. It didn’t matter.

To rebel was to be doing something because he wanted to do it. That was enough.

13

“PUNCH HIM out, Jimmy!” John yelled, startling Leonard out of his thoughts. “Give the old fu—fu—”

John paused, and in the dim reflected light, Leonard could see an expression of confusion on the pudgy face.

“—the old fuddy-duddy a clop in the chops!” John concluded.

Leonard laughed.

“Sshhhhhh!” someone several rows behind them hissed. “Quiet, or I’ll report you to the Housemother.”

Leonard looked back over his shoulder.

“Dracula had his human henchmen, too,” he said loudly. “Eat your flies and leave us alone.”

“Fuddy-duddy?” John said, obviously bewildered by his own description of Lionel Barrymore. “Fuddy-duddy?”

Leonard leaned closer to him. “You beginning to get the drift? I had to deal with censorship in my life, and maybe you did in yours, but at least it was censorship you could see, censorship you could fight. Here they censor your mind so that you can’t even think of what you want to say in the first place.”

“How . . . how can they do that?” John seemed torn between listening to Leonard and watching the movie.

“ ‘How’ I don’t know,” Leonard said, “but ‘why’ is no problem. Because this is hell, or maybe purgatory, where they punish you for your sins. And it’s a rigged wheel, because they also decide what constitutes ‘sin’ in the first place.”

“Who are ‘they,’ anyhow?”

“I don’t know for sure, but they’re represented by Mrs. Vonus. She’s not known for excessive kindness to the recently deceased.”

John made a derisive noise through his nostrils. “That little old lady? She’s about as dangerous as a lobotomized gerbil.”

“You forgetting what she did to you out back?”

“Sshhhhh!” the resident behind them hissed again.

“Somebody back there spring a leak?” John yelled.

“Pay no attention,” Leonard said. “They’re whining lackeys. Besides, they’ll see this again tomorrow. That’s the power of a lobotomized gerbil—whether you want to or not, you’ll be here again tomorrow afternoon. She’ll hook that invisible claw of hers into your brain and drag you here. If you try to resist, she’ll send you to bed without dinner for a day or two.”

John drummed his thick fingers on the armrest. “Let me get this straight. I have to come back here at the same time tomorrow. And I’m going to see the same movie?”

“Bingo, bubbie.”

“Well, he—he—heck, then, I don’t need to see the rest of it now. I’ve already missed too much listening to you, so I might as well go find something to eat.”

John struggled to stand. When he finally gave up, he slumped like a chubby wrestler who had just lost a long, painful bout. Sweat glistened on his cheeks and forehead.

“See what I mean?” Leonard said. “If this doesn’t qualify as Hell, I don’t know what does.”

“Certain portions of Utah,” John said, panting heavily.

Leonard smiled. Mrs. Vonus would probably crush them both eventually, but he had a feeling that they were going to give her a run for her money.

That feeling grew stronger when John, having recovered from his struggle, straightened in his seat and began heckling the characters on the screen.

“Come on, you jerk!” John yelled. “Take an ax to the piano if it bugs you! Whop the kid up side the head!”

And later: “G’wan, jump! The water’s dee-lightful!”

And still later: “You talk like a sissy, Clarence!”

Toward the end of the film, Leonard decided to get into the act.

“Merry Christmas, Main Street!” he cried. “Merry Christmas, old building and loan! Merry Christmas, old movie theater! Merry Christmas, old five-and-dime! Merry Christmas, old cathouse!”

John guffawed and then bellowed, “Merry Christmas, old chuckhole! Merry Christmas, old dirty bookstore! Merry Christmas, old dog-frozen-to-the-fire-hydrant!”

“Merry Christmas, old social-disease clinic!” Leonard shouted.

By now, the scene of Stewart-as-George-Bailey running down Main Street was over, but Leonard and John didn’t care. They were on a roll.

“Merry Christmas, old drunk in the alley!” John yelled.

“Merry Christmas, old bird-do on the sidewalk!” Leonard cried.

Something strange happened then, something Leonard never would have expected.

A few other dead comedians joined them in their heckling, and then a few more.

“Merry Christmas, old smashed cat in the gutter!”

“Merry Christmas, old rats in the sewer!”

“Merry Christmas, old tires at the gas station!”

Before long, the soundtrack was drowned out by the shouts. Leonard thought he even heard the voice of whoever had tried to quiet him earlier.

“Merry Christmas, old jokes on the john wall!”

“Merry Christmas, old strippers on the stage!”

“Merry Christmas, old scotch-and-soda!”

“Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Rear!”

“Merry Men, save Robin Hood!”

“Marry me, darling!”

“Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . .”

It degenerated into lunacy, and Leonard felt happier than he had at any moment since dying.

The movie ended as it always did, with the bell on the Christmas tree ringing and the little girl in Jimmy Stewart’s arms expressing the opinion that some angel was getting his wings. This time, though, when Stewart said, “That’s right,” John shouted. “That’s ridiculous!”

Leonard decided that was the perfect response, so he added his own “Yeah, that’s ridiculous!”

Before the credits came on, the whole audience was chanting, “That’s ridiculous! That’s ridiculous! That’s ridiculous!”

“Merely silly!” someone cried between chants.

Joy thrilled up in Leonard, giving him a greater rush than he’d ever gotten from horse. The Revolution, he was sure, had begun at last.

14

BUT THE joy was more like the transitory ecstasy of a narcotic than Leonard had thought. As soon as the lights came up, the chanting stopped, and the other residents hurried out of the theater like frightened mice.

John stood up and yelled, “Any of you guys play the blues?”

A few of the residents glanced back, but none answered.

“Forget it, man,” Leonard said sullenly. “I thought we might’ve put a spark into them, but they were just having flashbacks to when they had some guts, to when they were alive. She’s got them under her thumb.”

The last of the others disappeared beyond the double doors, leaving Leonard and John alone.

John’s stomach growled so loudly that the sound echoed off the walls.

“This is the first movie I’ve ever sat through without at least a box of popcorn,” he said. “Where can I get something to eat around here?”

“You can’t,” Leonard said.

“Whaddaya mean, I can’t? I’m hungry, aren’t I? I’ve gotta eat if I’m hungry, don’t I?”

Leonard stood and moved toward the aisle. “The dinner bell rings a few hours or a few days after the movie, depending on your time sense. You get to the dining room by going through the Front Parlor. You know, Calvin’s room.”

John walked beside him toward the double doors. “Hey, I can’t wait. I’m hungry now.”

“Me too. But I doubt that the Housemother’ll let me eat today. I’ve been a bad boy.”

“I didn’t figure you were wearing a wooden collar to be stylish. But I’ll get to eat, won’t I?”

“That’s up to her,” Leonard said, pushing open the doors. “In all fairness, though—hanging out with me won’t do you much good in that department. I’m on her excrement list.”

“Don’t you mean sh—sh—,” John said as they stepped into the lobby. He stopped and frowned.

Leonard paused and studied John’s face. The heavy eyebrows were angled and pushed together so that the frown seemed almost a parody of the expression.

“Weren’t you listening to what I said about censorship?” Leonard asked. “Haven’t you caught on yet?”

John seemed about to answer, but then his eyes shifted to the candy counter. His expression changed abruptly, and he nudged Leonard in the ribs.

“Women and junk food,” he said eagerly. “I noticed ’em before, but the gerbil was with me.” He headed toward the counter.

“You’re wasting your time,” Leonard said.

John looked back over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow. “I’ve got nothing but time, Jack.” He turned toward the counter again.

Leonard considered heading for his room to avoid seeing John’s coming humiliation, but there was nothing waiting for him there except the picture of the saint-about-to-become-chopped-liver.

He reached the counter at the same time as John. Together, they leaned with their elbows on the glass countertop and leered at the women.

John waggled his eyebrows lasciviously. “Helloooo,” he said. “I couldn’t help but notice that there are two of you ladies and two of us gentlemen. A convenient coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”

The women stared blankly.

“Arithmetic seems to be beyond them,” Leonard said.

“I don’t care if they can count,” John said. “I don’t even care if they can talk. I’ll take the blonde, you take the brunette. Deal?”

“Sure. Just out of curiosity, though, how do you plan to convince them of the reasonableness of the arrangement?”

“Sheer animal charm,” John said, and vaulted over the counter with far more ease than Leonard would have thought possible for a man of his bulk.

“Which animal?” Leonard asked. “An orangutan, maybe?”

“Maybe,” John said, and grabbed the blonde around the waist, dipping her backward as if he were Rhett Butler and she were Scarlett O’Hara.

Leonard winked at the brunette and started clambering over the counter.

“Baby,” John was saying in a bad imitation of Clark Gable, “you’re for me.”

“I suggest you release me immediately,” the blonde said.

“Better turn up the animal charm a notch or two,” Leonard said, swiveling on his belly on the countertop.

“I cannot release you, mon cher,” John said, his lips less than an inch from the woman’s. “We’re bound together by invisible diamond chains of hot volcanic love.”

Leonard landed heavily on the tiled floor inside the U of the counter, slipping a little on a slick of spilled popcorn butter. “ ‘Invisible diamond chains of hot volcanic love’ ?” he asked.

“Shut up,” John said. “Can’t you see I’m seducing this woman?”

“Release me now,” the blonde said.

John planted his lips on hers in what appeared to Leonard to be the sloppiest kiss in history.

Leonard grinned at the brunette. “I’d hate to feel left out, wouldn’t you?”

“You might find it preferable,” she said.

Leonard moved a step closer. “Oh, I don’t think—”

The rest of his sentence was cut off by John’s scream.

Leonard whirled and saw his friend locked in an embrace with a catfish-woman.

She had arms and legs, but they were sickly gray, slimy arms and legs. Her head, although still covered with blonde hair, had transformed into that of a scaleless fish, complete with whiskerlike barbels.

John was writhing in the creature’s embrace, spitting frantically.

“For the love of—pahhh!” he cried. “She tastes like rancid cat food!”

Leonard glanced back at the brunette woman, who still looked delectably human, and said, “Maybe some other time.”

“I doubt it,” she said.

John tore away from the catfish-woman, shoving her to the floor in the process, and lunged for the candy counter.

“Gotta get that taste outta my mouth!” he yelled, and grabbed several boxes of Junior Mints.

“That will be six dollars,” the brunette said.

“Don’t,” Leonard said, grabbing John’s arm. “They’ll start crawling in your mouth.”

John twisted away and ripped open the boxes, dumping their contents onto the countertop. Dozens of chocolate-coated mint-buttons rolled and slid across the glass.

“They don’t look alive to me, bud!” John yelled.

Leonard stared at them. Maybe the thing with the cockroaches only happened if you ate candy that someone else had bought. No one had bought this stuff yet, so—

“Junior Mints, prepare to meet thy doom!” John roared, and squatted so that his mouth was at the edge of the counter.

The catfish-woman flopped on the floor and made a gurgling noise.

Leonard gave her a sidelong look. “No offense, sweetheart, but you’ve got an odor problem.”

John began scooping the candies into his mouth with both hands, making small noises of pleasure as he chewed.

The scents of chocolate and mint overpowered the fish stink and filled Leonard’s head, making him dizzy. He resisted for several seconds, but when he saw that nothing was happening to John, he decided to grab some candy before it was all gone.

He knelt beside his friend.

“I feel like a Catholic who just hit the Host jackpot,” he said, and shoved a handful of mints into his mouth.

“You must stop immediately,” the brunette woman’s voice said behind him. The warning was accompanied by the sounds of the blonde’s flopping and gurgling.

Leonard ignored them and concentrated on his feast. Even when Mrs. Vonus let him eat, the food was relentlessly bland, but this—this was smooth, creamy, minty, and luxuriously chocolaty. He reveled in it, filling his mouth with a huge blob of sweetness.

For a second, he thought he was no longer in Hell, but Heaven.

Then something squirmed out of the blob and tried to slither down his throat.

He gagged, and as he spun away from the counter he heard John give a strangled cry.

I knew better, Leonard thought as he saw the writhing mass he had spit onto the white tile.

Worms and slugs.

I knew better, and I did it anyway.

He felt nausea, but no regret.

15

“YES, YOU did know better, Leonard,” Mrs. Vonus said. “Why are you so self-destructive?”

He looked up and saw her standing over him. He wasn’t surprised to see her.

John was crawling across the floor like an overweight dog. “Oh, mother,” he moaned. “Bad acid. Bad, bad acid. I knew I’d get flashbacks, I knew it, but nooooooooo, I had to have three tabs, and six years later, here they are again.”

Leonard stood and wiped his mouth on his jacket sleeve. “You’re not flashing back. This is what’s happening. And this”—he nodded toward Mrs. Vonus—“is who’s doing it to you. She claims she’s trying to mold us into perfection, but she really means to crush our spirits, not build them up.”

“You’re confusing ‘spirit’ and ‘will,’ ” the Housemother said. “Will is the evil part of man and has always been his downfall. Only by denying the will can you be saved.”

Leonard tugged on John’s left arm, trying to pull him to his feet. To his surprise, the brunette woman grasped John’s right arm and helped.

“That isn’t necessary, Melody,” Mrs. Vonus said sharply.

“Nice name,” Leonard told the brunette as they brought John to a standing position. “Thanks.”

Melody looked down. Leonard’s eyes followed, and he saw that the blonde had flopped across the floor and was gulping the worms and slugs.

John was swaying back and forth and beginning to babble nonsense.

“—ponies jump sniff good hot mother don’t needle ah yes Baskin-Robbins—”

Leonard couldn’t tell whether it was an act or not.

“Come on, friend,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” He tugged John toward the narrow gap between the end of the candy counter and the wall.

“Another resident will show John to his room,” Mrs. Vonus said. “I would rather you didn’t have any further contact with him.”

Leonard was maneuvering the chunky man through the gap with some difficulty; John’s belly had folded over the countertop and didn’t want to move.

“—tutti-frutti all over the redeye Louie Louie—”

“What are you gonna do?” Leonard asked the Housemother. “Baby-sit him constantly so he doesn’t meet me in the hall or the backyard? Well, that’s fine with me, because if you’re with him, you can’t be nudzhing me. Here, he’s all yours.”

Leonard left John stuck in the gap and clambered over the counter again, kicking a few stray Junior Mints across the lobby.

It was only when one of the mints bounced off a resident’s forehead that Leonard noticed eight other comedians standing in the mouth of the hallway.

“What are you guys doing here?” he asked. He had never seen anyone loiter in or near the lobby after the movie. “Enjoying the floor show? What’d you think of the amazing fish-faced bimbo?” He glanced back and saw that the blonde was in human form again.

“These gentlemen are my most advanced residents, and they aren’t here for amusement,” Mrs. Vonus said. “Four of them are being assigned as companions to John, and four are being assigned as companions to you. At least one will be near you at all times and will report any problems.”

Leonard stopped in the center of the lobby and stared at the eight men facing him. They seemed so incredibly dull—as if they were all from Buffalo, New York—that he found it hard to believe that any of them had ever made it in comedy.

But they had, or they wouldn’t have been brought to the Home in the first place.

Realizing that, he studied their placid faces and saw what Mrs. Vonus wanted to turn him into. He saw the truth of the Afterlife:

The way to move up the Hill, to get to a Better Place, was to resign oneself to an Eternity of white-bread complacency and ordinariness. To become a thing of flesh-colored clay.

To become a golem.

He backed away from them. “Oh no you don’t. You don’t transform four of these schmendricks into my shadows, lady. Where this Jewish boy walks, he walks alone. Or if not alone, then in the company of a good-looking chick.”

“You have no choice in the matter,” the Housemother said. “Frederick, you shall take the first shift with Leonard. Albert, you shall take the first shift with John.”

Two of the white-bread golems stepped forward.

Leonard held up a fist. “Who wants to be the first to sing soprano?”

“If you touch your companion,” Mrs. Vonus said, “you will experience pain three times as intense as what you experienced for trying to alter the Progress Board.”

John, who had been babbling quietly since getting stuck between the wall and counter, now shouted, “You useless weenies!”

Leonard turned and saw the fat man squeeze himself out of the gap like a cork out of a bottleneck.

“What are you, men or mothballs?” John yelled, pointing at the golems.

“ ‘Mothballs’ ?” Leonard said.

“Whatsa mattayou pimple-brains?” John bellowed, gesticulating so vigorously that his paunch shook like gelatin. “Don’tcha know when you’re being walked all over? Are you just going to sit back and take it? Did Custer sit back and take it when the Japanese attacked? Did Joan of Arc let her religion stop her from eating her enemies raw without salt? Did Dagwood cower like a whipped dog when Mister Dithers hit him with a typewriter? You bet he didn’t, boy! He went ahead and asked for a raise anyway, and when Mister Dithers hit him with another typewriter, he asked again! And here you are, standing like doofs with your elbows up your noses, afraid to—”

John turned toward Leonard and whispered, “What are they afraid to do?”

“Anything,” Leonard said. “Everything.”

John’s face took on an expression of exaggerated disgust. “What a bunch of wimps,” he said.

“Enough nonsense,” Mrs. Vonus said. “Frederick, Albert—please take these gentlemen to their rooms. If they are reluctant, touch them lightly. Neither of them will be allowed to eat this evening. Lock them in their rooms until you’ve finished your own meals, then allow them the freedom of the grounds as long as they do not meet. You will be relieved in the morning.”

The brown-haired, Presbyterian-looking golem named Frederick gestured to Leonard, and the brown-haired, Presbyterian-looking golem named Albert gestured to John.

“Sorry, friend,” Leonard said to John. “Looks like I got you into trouble after all.”

John went into a sumo wrestler’s stance. “Trouble? Ha! I’ll show these guys trouble. Trouble is my middle name. I’m John T. Something-Or-Other. Let ’em at me. I’ll eat their gall bladders. I’ll stomp their toes. I’ll move their kneecaps to their ankles. I’ll put black dots on their teeth and play dominoes. I’ll—”

The golem called Albert walked up to John and brushed his wrist with a fingertip. John sat down on the scarlet carpet.

“—do whatever you say,” he mumbled.

Leonard charged at Albert. Before he could get there, a spear of heat stabbed from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.

He found himself kneeling before Frederick. He looked up at the white-bread face through a red-and-black checkerboard of pain and said, “I wish you were an enemy plane and I were on the USS Brooklyn so I could do horrible things to you with a five-inch deck gun.”

The golem gestured for Leonard to stand. Leonard did so, after three tries, and was about to help John up, but stopped when Frederick shook his head.

“He won’t make it without me,” Leonard said.

Mrs. Vonus came around the candy counter and waddled toward the hallway.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “He’ll ‘make it’ perfectly well without you, and you without him. If you meet again, it will be because I have decided that there will be some benefit to both of you as a result. I do not expect that day to arrive for quite some time.”

The Housemother entered the hall and was gone.

The brunette woman, Melody, came around the counter and helped John to his feet. The blonde frowned at her but said nothing.

John looked pale and disoriented. As his eyes refocused, he stared at Melody as if seeing her for the first time. “Are you one of my groupies?” he asked, slurring the words.

Leonard noticed that Melody flushed slightly. He managed to smile at her, although it made his teeth hurt. “How’d a nice chick like you wind up working for the Gestapo Queen? I’d’ve thought you’d have gone to the Florence Nightingale Home for Knockout Angels of Mercy.”

Melody returned to the other side of the counter. “I was given the opportunity to volunteer,” she said. “How about you . . . sir?”

Leonard shrugged, even though that hurt too. “I was drafted.”

Frederick gestured at him again.

“Gotta go now,” Leonard said, waving to both John and Melody. “Command performance in my room. There’s this saint about to be made into bratwurst who wants to laugh before she dies.”

“A challenge!” John cried, a little weakly. “Did Magellan give up getting to the South Pole just because it was a challenge? Did Alexander Graham Bell throw out the penicillin just because it was a little moldy? Did Abe Lincoln stop being president just because he got shot?”

“Yes,” Leonard said, and headed for the hallway. Each step sent a red rush of pain boiling into his head.

“Oh,” he heard John say behind him. “Darn that Abe Lincoln, anyway.”

Yeah, Leonard thought. Darn it all to heck.

16

WITHIN FIVE sunrises, Leonard was spending all of his free time in his room, coming downstairs only for mandatory activities—sing-alongs (endless repetitions of the Doxology), meals (one out of every three dinners he was allowed to eat consisted of broiled liver and Brussels sprouts), and the daily movie (after a while, he was so bored that he even stopped wishing Jimmy Stewart would jump into the bush after the possibly nude Donna Reed).

At least one of his four guards, his golem for the day, was always with him. When he lay on his bed, the golem sat on a hard-backed chair beside the door. When he awoke in the morning, the golem accompanied him down the hall to the communal bathroom. When he went to the afternoon movie, the golem sat beside him.

None of the four would talk to him or do anything besides watch him. Leonard began calling them all “Fred,” knowing he would be right at least twenty-five percent of the time.

“Hey, Fred,” he said on the seventh evening, lying on his bed after eating a dinner that thankfully, blessedly, had not been liver and Brussels sprouts, “tell me a story.”

Frederick sat on his chair, looking like an embalmed corpse in the weak yellow light given off by the kerosene lamp on the nightstand.

“Don’t feel like it, huh?” Leonard said. “Okay, then, explain things to me. Explain why this place has electricity—you’ve gotta have electricity to run a movie projector, right?—but every lamp has a wick instead of a lightbulb.”

Fred didn’t even blink.

Leonard sat up. “You don’t seem to understand,” he said, the muscles in his throat becoming as taut as stretched steel cables. “I have to have a conversation. You won’t let me near the candy counter, so I can’t even say hello to Melody or the amphibious bimbo. I only see John at distances of twenty yards or more. And talking to Mrs. Vonus is like trying to chum up to my executioner. So here’s the deal: I’m going to talk to you, and you’re going to talk to me, or I’m going to take off your head, Fred.”

Leonard searched the golem’s face for some evidence that he was getting through—a muscle twitch, an eye movement, anything—and found nothing.

“All right,” he said slowly, “if you’re shy, I’ll go first. The topic we’ll begin with is Early Trauma: When I was in seventh grade, I stole money from my school’s Red Cross drive so I could buy a pair of sneakers for gym class. I was caught, and my father, in addition to beating me up, never forgave me for the shame I had brought upon him. Your turn.”

Frederick remained still and silent.

“C’mon, Fred,” Leonard said, “surely you can remember something of your life before death, of life before servitude to an ancient and vindictive Daisy Duck.”

A muscle in Frederick’s left cheek twitched, but that was all.

“I’m going to count to five,” Leonard said, pressing the balls of his feet against the hardwood floor and tensing on the edge of the bed, “and then I’m tearing out your esophagus. One, two, three, four—”

He paused, waiting for Frederick to do something, or at least to warn him again of the penalty Mrs. Vonus had imposed for touching a golem. But Frederick did nothing.

Leonard had no desire to feel the pain he knew he would feel when his fingers touched his guard’s skin, but he had committed himself. He had told the golem he would attack, and to fail to do so would be to demonstrate that the Housemother had frightened him into obedience, that she had won.

“Five!” he yelled, and launched himself across the room.

In the instant before his hands closed on Fredericks throat, he saw the golem smile.

Then he fell into an inferno of blue-tinged pain.

When it faded, he found himself lying on his side looking up at the ecstatic saint. His shoulders throbbed violently, and his arms felt as if they had almost been torn off.

Groaning, he turned onto his back and saw Frederick sitting like God on Judgment Day, looking down on him with an expression similar to that of the Mono. Lisa.

The throbbing subsided to a painful tingle, and Leonard pushed himself up to a sitting position.

“That made you happy, didn’t it, Fred?” he asked.

Fred’s expression didn’t change.

“I’m glad,” Leonard said. “If you’re taking pleasure in my pain, that means I’ve broken your spirituality a little. They don’t want sadists on the Hill, do they?”

Frederick’s half smile faded, and Leonard was pleased to see that the golem actually looked distressed.

He hadn’t been able to strangle the jerk, but he had accomplished something anyway.

With that realization, Leonard knew what he would do next.

What was the saying? That which does not kill us makes us stronger, wasn’t it? And who had said it? Plato? Nietzsche? Teddy Roosevelt? John Wayne? The coyote from the Road Runner cartoons?

Doesn’t matter, Leonard thought. The point is, nothing can kill me, on account of I’m already dead. So pain can only make me stronger . . . in theory, anyhow.

He struggled up to his feet. “Don’t worry, Freddy boy. I’m going to give you another chance to turn the other cheek.”

He took a deep breath and fell on the golem before he could change his mind. His hands closed around Frederick’s throat, and a razor of pain slit his arms, shoulders, and head.

He felt his eyeballs boiling, his teeth shattering.

But he held on.

A second razor followed the first, and he thought he screamed. He wasn’t sure, because he couldn’t hear anything except a thundering rush of white noise.

But he held on.

Then came the third razor, and the red-and-black checkerboard pattern flooded in.

But, until the last half second of consciousness, he held on.

When he came to, Leonard knew that he had not been out long. He was on his knees beside Frederick’s chair, and the golem was looking down at him with something in his eyes that might be fear.

Forcing a grin, Leonard stood shakily, staggered to the bed, and sat down.

“I’m going to rest a few minutes, Fred ol’ buddy ol’ pal,” he said, surprised at the strength of his voice, “and then we’ll try it again.”

“I will report,” the golem said. The three words were the first that any of the guards had spoken.

“So go ahead,” Leonard said. “Let’s see what she comes up with this time. Variety is the spice of life.” He chuckled, and winced at the pain in his chest. “Or, in this case, death.”

When the pain subsided, he walked across the room and jabbed his right index finger into Frederick’s shoulder. The jolt sent him stumbling backward, but he didn’t fall.

He jabbed the golem again. And again.

It hurt horribly, but after several more jabs he began to think that he might be able to get used to pain, just as he had gotten used to the tattoo he’d had in life.

“You can hit me back if you like,” he said as he continued to jab.

Frederick didn’t answer, but now Leonard was sure that the look in his guard’s eyes was fear.

When he finally lay on his bed again, exhausted and half-paralyzed with pain, Leonard winked at the saint on his wall.

17

MRS. VONUS called him down to the foyer two nights later, and he had to restrain himself from laughing when he saw that John, without his guard, was there too.

He had to restrain himself because laughing was extremely painful.

“Frederick, you may leave until I call for you,” Mrs. Vonus said as Leonard and his guard left the stairway.

The golem turned to go back upstairs.

“See you later, eh, Freddy?” Leonard said, punching the golem in the shoulder. His arm felt as if the skin were being flayed off, but he only grinned and tried to keep his mind blank. He wanted the Housemother to think he didn’t feel a thing.

Frederick, looking distraught, retreated.

John whistled admiringly. “How’d you do that? I tried to get Prince Albert in a half nelson once and thought I was gonna split open like Humpty Dumpty.”

Leonard shrugged, barely keeping himself from wincing, and said, “Looks like you’ve lost some weight.”

John’s expression switched from admiration to unhappiness. “That’ll happen when you’re only allowed to eat every other day.”

Leonard glared at Mrs. Vonus. “You starving this kid?”

The Housemother seemed perturbed. “He is overweight, so I have put him on a diet.”

“Diet, schmyet,” Leonard said. “He’s dead, isn’t he? You’ve got powers, don’t you? Why don’t you just hocus-pocus the excess baggage away?”

Mrs. Vonus sighed. “I’ve told you before: Here you must learn the things you did not learn in life. John was a glutton in life, so he must learn to avoid that sin before being allowed to—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Leonard interrupted. “Before he goes skipping up the Hill like a good little angel, tra-la-la, whoop-de-do. Bullsh—bull—Nonsense.” The word was far too weak. “The truth is that you still want to punish him for the trouble he got into on his first day. You made up this ‘diet’ scam as an excuse to hurt him.”

John’s eyebrows shot up, and he spun to face Mrs. Vonus. “Is that true? I’ve been good except for the half nelson, haven’t I? I paid for that mistake as soon as I made it, didn’t I?”

The Housemother pursed her lips. “You mustn’t listen to Leonard. I’m afraid he hasn’t progressed beyond the point where he’ll say anything to cause difficulty for me.”

“Hey, John,” Leonard said, “am I the one who gave you a two-legged electric eel for a playmate?”

John opened his mouth to answer, but Mrs. Vonus spoke before he had a chance.

“Enough of this,” she said. “Leonard, you are dangerously close to losing dinner privileges for three days in a row. Kindly be quiet and come with me, both of you.” She turned and waddled into the Front Parlor.

Leonard leaned close to John and whispered, “She’s scared, man. Why else would she crack enough to let us get together again?”

John edged away and followed the Housemother.

Leonard hurried to catch up. “What’s wrong? I got a disease or something?”

John paused at the entrance to the Parlor. “Nothing personal,” he said softly. “It’s just that I’m dying from lack of food, and I don’t want to tick her off. You’ve only been downstairs two minutes, and you’ve already made me gripe at her.”

Leonard felt dazed for a moment, then angry. “You’re a coward.”

“No,” John said, “I’m hungry.” He followed Mrs. Vonus into the Front Parlor.

Leonard stood in the entranceway, debating whether to finally try to escape.

“The front door won’t let you out,” Mrs. Vonus called. “And if you hesitate any longer, the floor of the foyer will become hot enough to burn the flesh off your feet.”

Leonard went into the Front Parlor and saw that the furniture was arranged in a circle again.

This time, the audience consisted of forty Orthodox rabbis wearing phylacteries, tallithim, and yarmulkes.

John and Mrs. Vonus waited in the center of the circle. The Housemother was holding two cordless microphones.

“You’re slipping,” Leonard said as he walked sideways between two chairs to enter the circle. “These guys aren’t going to slap me into a pillory.”

“Perhaps not,” Mrs. Vonus said, handing him one of the microphones. “But can you make them laugh?”

Leonard considered that.

With the Puritans, he had known what to expect. But with this audience . . . How could he predict how they would react to him? It would depend on where they were from, who they knew, in which decade they had died. . . .

“Sure I can,” he said, hoping that the Housemother wasn’t reading his mind.

Mrs. Vonus turned toward John. “And you? Can you make these good men laugh?”

John looked nervous. “I, uh . . . what am I supposed to do?”

“Why, what you did in life,” the Housemother said. “Be funny.” She handed John the second microphone and went to sit beside one of the rabbis.

“You want to go first?” Leonard asked John.

John’s face looked waxy. “I—,” he began, whispering hoarsely, and swallowed. “I can’t do stand-up. I’m a sketch player. Besides, I need some . . . some stuff.”

Leonard nodded. “Sometimes I needed a little taste, too. But no matter what I did to get ready, I always needed to throw up before going onstage. Three good upchucks, and I was fine.”

“I heard that about you,” John said.

Leonard was taken aback. “You know who I am?”

John licked his lips. “I think so, but I can’t remember your name. It’s as if it’s one of those words we can’t say here.”

Leonard grinned. “Sounds right.” He looked around the room at the rabbis, most of whom were stroking their beards in an irritated fashion. “Tell you what. I’ll start, and if you think of something, jump in.”

John swallowed again, his Adam’s apple jerking as if it were trying to escape his throat. “Don’t count on me. I feel like barfing.”

“There’d be something wrong with you if you didn’t,” Leonard said, and brought his microphone up to his lips.

18

“SHALOM ALEICHEM, gentlemen,” Leonard said, his voice booming from the walls, and waited for the rabbis’ response.

They said nothing.

“What’s this?” Leonard said in mock surprise. “Rabbis unwilling to wish a fellow Jew peace? Have you been hanging out with Baptists or what? Oh, not that I blame you—you probably don’t consider me a proper Jew. I was foulmouthed, disrespectful, unobservant, and irreverent. Besides which, I had a tattoo and consorted with so many shiksas that you’d all drop dead if I told you the number—if you weren’t already dead, that is.”

“Shame,” one of the rabbis said severely.

“This is funny?” said another.

“Oy, Gottenyu!” moaned a third.

Leonard turned to gesture at the portrait of Calvin Coolidge. John was standing to one side of the fireplace, looking pale and sick.

“Now there,” Leonard said, indicating Coolidge, “was a good Jewish boy for you. He was clean, reverent, chaste, temperate, and so polite that he often seemed to be in a coma. Not to mention that he grew up to be president. Why is it, rabbis, that all of the really good Jewish boys turn out to be goyim?”

As he asked the question, he brought his gaze down from the portrait and saw that John’s eyes were wide with terror.

Leonard turned quickly and saw that all of the rabbis had become smooth-shaven Catholic priests.

They’ve been waiting for this chance ever since Chicago, ever since I started doing the Religions, Incorporated bit, he thought. Now they can keep me in a hostile courtroom until the universe disintegrates and each of them puts a spot of the ash on his forehead—

He saw that Mrs. Vonus was smiling more broadly than she had at any time since he’d come to the Home.

—and Miss Self-Righteous Daisy Duck gave me to them.

“Are you going to tell us your confession or aren’t you?” one of the priests asked sternly.

“Confession?” Leonard asked. “That’s only for the faithful, isn’t it? Do I look faithful? Let’s try a test: ‘Hail, Mary, full of grapes—’ What the heck, you didn’t wanna hear my confession anyhow, pops, er, Father. It’s pretty messy, particularly the part where I dress like a priest and con middle-aged women into giving me loads of cash for a South American leper colony, keeping half for myself. But hey, you can understand that. You put on a stiff white collar, and anybody who’s carrying around the smallest shred of guilt—meaning everybody—feels compelled to give you money, all of it tax-free. It’s almost worth giving up sex, and it’s definitely worth saying you’ll give up sex.”

The priests’ faces became more than grim.

“Heretic,” one said, almost growling.

“He should be burned at the stake,” another said, and turned toward the Housemother. “We can do that, can’t we?”

Mrs. Vonus nodded. “Keep in mind, however, that he won’t die.”

“As long as he hurts,” the priest said.

Leonard stared at the Housemother. “But—when the Puritans put me in the pillory, you said—”

“You’ve made no progress since then,” she said. “More serious measures are in order.”

Every muscle in Leonard’s body knotted with his outrage. “Hypocrite!” he screamed, and his voice shrieked from the walls with a sound like grinding metal. “You think you’ve fixed us so we can’t say dirty words? Well, you forgot hypocrite. A hypocrite lies to the people she claims to be saving, and when she’s caught in the lie, she says, ‘That was then; this is now; you haven’t been good enough.’ ”

Mrs. Vonus’s smile disappeared. “You could have listened to me. You could have tried to understand why you have to change—”

“But nooooooooooooooo!” John cried, bounding up to stand beside Leonard. “You had to be an individual. You had to indulge your self.”

Leonard couldn’t tell whether John was being sarcastic or serious, but he chose to believe that the other comedian had found some courage.

“I know, I know,” Leonard said melodramatically, closing his eyes and placing the back of his left wrist against his forehead. “How could I have been so unreasonable as to believe in the sanctity of anything so despicable as individual freedom?”

“REPENT!” fifty voices shouted.

Leonard opened his eyes and saw that the priests had been replaced by evangelical preachers in three-piece suits. They were all standing, waving heavy black Bibles and pointing at him.

“THE DAY OF JUDGMENT IS UPON YE!” they cried.

John touched Leonard’s arm. “What’s going on?” he whispered. He was still holding his microphone to his mouth, and the whisper hissed through the room like a gust of wind.

Leonard felt dizzy. He was afraid to see what the preachers would turn into next.

He lowered his microphone and spoke into John’s ear. “She’s pulling out all the stops,” he said. “She wants to make an example of me.”

“So why am I here?” John’s whisper roared from the walls. “I’ve been good—”

“An example’s useless without a ‘beneficiary,’ ” Leonard said.

Mrs. Vonus, still seated, smiled up at the preacher standing next to her.

“Proceed,” she said.

The preachers raised their Bibles higher and moved a step closer to Leonard and John.

“HE HATH APPOINTED A DAY, IN THE WHICH HE WILL JUDGE THE WORLD,” the preachers roared.

“Holy sh—sh—What are they doing?” John said tremulously, his voice vibrating from the walls.

“I’m not sure,” Leonard said, trying to squelch his fear, “but I think we’re about to be bludgeoned with the Good Book.”

“DEPART FROM ME, YE CURSED,” the mass preacher-voice bellowed, “INTO EVERLASTING FIRE, PREPARED FOR THE DEVIL AND HIS FALLEN ANGELS.”

John dropped his microphone and fell to his knees. “They’re going to burn us!” he shrieked, and covered his face with his hands.

Leonard felt heat on his neck. He looked behind him and saw flames leaping in the fireplace.

“God damn,” he said. He wished he had time to enjoy having said it.

He turned to face the preachers again, hoping to find a gap in the cordon.

The preachers had become blue-uniformed police officers. The Bibles had become billy clubs.

“YOU’RE UNDER ARREST, SCUM,” they chanted. “YOU CAN’T SAY THAT IN A PUBLIC PLACE.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” John was sobbing.

Leonard’s teeth clenched. It was the cops or the fire.

He raised his microphone as if it were a blackjack.

“Come on!” he yelled. “This time I’m not gonna try to fight you with the Constitution! This time I’m giving back what I get, you bas—bas—”

“SCUM,” the cops said.

John was crying hysterically.

The cops became judges in black robes; the billies became gavels.

“GUILTY,” the judges said.

Leonard sucked in a breath that scorched his lungs.

“You bastards!” he shouted, and swung the microphone.

His head exploded in agony as the gavels rained down and transformed.

Now his attackers were lawyers; now priests; now cops; now Puritans; now nuns; now rabbis; now preachers; now SS troops; now judges.

After a while, Leonard didn’t know whether he was being beaten with billy clubs, or Bibles, or whips, or rosaries, or briefcases, or gavels, or phylacteries. He didn’t know whether the liquid on his tongue was sweat, saliva, blood, or wine.

19

IT LASTED until he hurt so much that he wished he could die again.

Then until he wished he had never died at all.

Then until he wished he had never been born.

Finally, when he had been beaten so long that he no longer knew what it was like not to be beaten, he wished he had never done anything against the Rules of the Home.

It stopped.

The priests, the judges, the rabbis, the cops . . . all were gone. Leonard’s vision cleared, and he saw his hands pressed into the carpet, yellow and orange flickers dancing across the skin. The microphone lay a few inches beyond the fingers of his right hand. He smelled blood.

He stared at his hands and the microphone for a long time, trying to understand which was a part of him. He flexed his fingers, and the carpet fibers prickled his palms.

Gradually, he began to hear a sound that was unlike the sound of clubs striking flesh. Someone was crying.

He knew it wasn’t him. He had gone beyond crying centuries ago.

“You may stand,” a brittle voice said.

Slowly, Leonard pushed himself up until he was resting on his knees alone.

A small, elderly woman stood before him.

“I—,” he began, and then coughed because he was unaccustomed to using his voice. “I remember you.”

The woman nodded. “I am Mrs. Vonus.”

The crying had not stopped. Leonard turned his head and saw a chubby man crouching next to the mantel, hiding his face against wooden cherubim.

“John?” Leonard said tentatively.

John twitched and turned away from the mantel. His face was tear-streaked. “They didn’t kill you?” he asked tremulously.

This struck Leonard as funny, although he wasn’t sure why. “No, they couldn’t do that.”

John blinked and then wiped his nose on his necktie. “I guess not,” he said, his voice half-muffled by the fabric.

Mrs. Vonus walked toward John, extending her right hand. “Come along. The remainder of Leonard’s lesson will be private.”

A nugget of panic pulsed in Leonard’s chest. “Are they coming back?”

Mrs. Vonus helped John to his feet, then smiled at Leonard. “Not unless you want them to. Someone else is here to see you, though.”

Satan, he thought. Satan has come to throw me into the lake of fire.

“No,” Mrs. Vonus said, tugging on John’s arm. “Not unless you want him to.”

Leonard crawled to a chair and used it as a brace to help himself stand. By the time he was fully upright, Mrs. Vonus and John were going through the wide doorway.

“Don’t leave me alone,” Leonard said.

“I won’t,” the Housemother answered.

John looked back. “Sorry I let you down,” he said weakly.

Then they were gone. Leonard tried to follow, but his legs wouldn’t carry his weight. He collapsed into the chair.

He found himself facing the fireplace, where a small fire was burning. Standing in front of it was a slender woman wearing a cream-colored evening gown. Her face was hidden in shadow.

“Melody?” he said hesitantly. It was the only woman’s first name that he could remember.

The woman walked toward him. “Who’s that?” she asked. “One of your girlfriends?”

Her voice was like music with a sharp edge.

“No,” he said, not knowing whether he was lying. “I don’t . . . have any girlfriends.”

“Better not,” the woman said.

She sat in a chair beside him. He could see her clearly now—her smooth, fair skin; her incredibly long red hair; her penetrating blue eyes. Her expression was a combination of disdain and pity.

Leonard felt as though someone had stuck a knife in his throat.

“How have you been?” he said hoarsely.

“You cut out on me,” she said.

He tried to swallow. “I didn’t mean to.”

“There were a lot of things you didn’t mean to do,” she said. “You did them anyway. You hurt me. You hurt everybody.”

Leonard felt a small stirring of anger. “You hurt me too.”

“We didn’t wallow in it. We weren’t so obsessed with truth that we forgot about caring.”

His anger drowned in a wave of remorse.

“I never forgot,” he said, almost whispering.

“You did,” she said. “You forgot about everything except your tapes and transcripts, your affidavits and judgments. We wanted you to stop. But you kept after it until you killed yourself. Until you left us.”

Leonard reached for her. He wanted to caress her hand, her arm, her cheek.

She was sitting right next to him, but his fingers found nothing but air. She was so near that he could smell her perfumed skin and hair, and she was much too far away to touch.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” he said desperately, stretching for her. “They did it. They killed me.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

“The lawyers, the judges, the priests, the councilmen, the cops—

The woman shook her head. “If you had only tried a little, they would have left you alone.”

“I had a right—”

“Which you exercised at our expense.” The woman stood. “I didn’t expect you to change entirely, not when I wasn’t able to myself. But it wouldn’t have hurt you to try.”

She turned her back on him and walked toward the fireplace.

Leonard wanted to go after her, but he couldn’t even stand.

“Don’t,” he pleaded. “I need to be with you.”

The woman paused before the hearth. “It will have to be on the Hill,” she said. “You’ll have to change. Otherwise, this is good-bye.”

She stooped and entered the fire, which flared and consumed her.

Leonard wanted to cry, but he still lacked the ability. Of all the things that had been taken from him, that was almost the worst.

Almost.

But he couldn’t remember what else was missing. He couldn’t remember ever having had anything to lose.

All he knew was that he was tired. He would do anything, anything at all, for just a little . . . peace.

He sat alone in the Parlor. The countenance of Calvin Coolidge half smiled down on him, and Leonard imagined that it was conferring a blessing. A benediction.

20

IN THE days that followed, Leonard sometimes saw John in the theater, or at dinner, or sitting by the pond in the backyard. John always turned away as if afraid, but that was all right with Leonard. He knew that he and John weren’t good for each other.

Everything else, though, was perfect. The season was always spring, and the trees and grass were always green. He accepted the Housemother’s word as law, and he even began to understand the value of seeing It’s a Wonderful Life over and over again.

He began to accumulate a long string of equal signs on the Progress Board.

He said hello to the women behind the candy counter every day, but while an impure thought occasionally crossed his mind, he no longer considered attempting a seduction. The price, he knew, would be too high to pay.

Strangely, the brunette, Melody, was getting lines around her eyes that made her look sad. Leonard couldn’t imagine why, but he tried to be especially friendly toward her. It didn’t seem to make any difference, so he decided to pray for her.

He ate his meals silently and reverently. He sang the Doxology at house meetings. He polished the woodwork in the foyer and Front Parlor. He dusted the glass cases that lined the long hallway. He threw bread to the geese and breathed deeply of the warm air. He was polite and respectful to his fellow comedians and to Mrs. Vonus. Occasionally, he was even allowed to escort the Housemother to dinner.

Once he saw a new arrival throw a roll at another resident, and he shuddered in revulsion. How could anyone be so ungrateful, wasteful, and rude?

Day followed day followed day, and at last the afternoon came when Leonard passed by the Progress Board on his way to the theater and saw a plus sign in his most recent box.

He stopped and stared at it, unable for a moment to comprehend what it meant.

“It’s a pleasant feeling, isn’t it, Leonard?” Mrs. Vonus asked.

She had appeared beside him out of nowhere, but he didn’t flinch. He was used to it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to feel.”

“You should feel fulfilled,” Mrs. Vonus said, “but not proud. Pride is the downfall of mankind, you know.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Leonard said.

The Housemother extended her right hand toward him and opened it. Instead of a balled-up handkerchief, a thick silver coin lay in her palm.

Leonard began to reach for it, then stopped himself. “I owe the Dessert Fund,” he said. “I owe two dollars for every minus.”

Mrs. Vonus smiled so broadly that Leonard saw for the first time that her teeth weren’t all the same color. Some were a brilliant white, while others looked grayish.

“I may have neglected to tell you,” the Housemother said, “that every plus received while paying off a debt to the Dessert Fund automatically becomes an equal sign.” She nodded at the Progress Board. “All but the first few of your equal signs actually started out as pluses. Your debt is paid, and this dollar is yours to keep.”

She took his right hand into her left, pressed the coin into his palm, and closed his fingers over it.

Leonard gazed at the arc of silver that extended beyond his fingertips, then looked again at the Progress Board. The box at the end of his row contained the numeral 1.

“I have a long way to go,” he said.

Mrs. Vonus patted the hand holding the coin. “You’ll be surprised at how quickly it will pass,” she said. “Now that you’ve discovered the way of obedience and serenity, you’ll be on the Hill in no time.”

Leonard wondered if that could be true, then decided it must be. The Housemother had said so.

“You’ve learned well,” Mrs. Vonus said, and waddled down the hall toward the foyer.

Before going on to the theater, Leonard looked at the total at the end of John’s row and saw that his friend had two pluses. He briefly hoped he would see John at the movie so he could congratulate him, but then he decided he’d better ask the Housemother first to make sure that was proper.

At the candy counter, he said hello to the blonde and bought a box of Milk Duds from Melody, who still looked sad.

“Be happy,” he told her. “You have a wonderful job in a wonderful place.” He smiled. “It’s a wonderful life. Or should I say afterlife?”

For some reason, she looked sadder than ever.

When he sat down in his usual seat and put a candy into his mouth, he found it so sweet that one was all he could eat. He was used to simpler fare—the beets, potatoes, beans, and bread that were the staples at dinner. It felt unnatural and sinful to eat chocolate and caramel.

He dropped the nearly full box into the lobby’s trash can after the movie.

That evening, he was served his first dessert—a slice of cherry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. He couldn’t eat it, but he didn’t feel that he had lost anything.

The other residents at his table looked at him strangely.

The next day he received another silver dollar, and he asked Mrs. Vonus if he might give it to a less fortunate comedian. She told him that was a fine impulse, but that it would be impossible to act upon. If given to one who was undeserving, the coin would crumble into sand.

So Leonard began stacking his silver dollars on the floor of his room, building a shrine to the saint on the wall. He didn’t know her name, but he could see that she was a great and righteous woman.

Day after day, he studied the rapturous look on her face. Eventually, he decided that he knew just how she felt.

21

THE LITTLE silver shrine was nothing more than two three-inch columns when Leonard stopped counting the coins and looking at the Progress Board. He was no longer so vain as to keep track of his status. Instead, he was content to spend his time praying for guidance.

The shrine consisted of ten five-inch columns arranged in a circle on the day that Mrs. Vonus appeared in his open doorway and asked him to escort her to the movie.

Leonard was surprised. In his memory, the Housemother had never gone to see It’s a Wonderful Life. But he didn’t question her; he extended his right elbow, and she slipped her left hand into the crook.

They walked downstairs at the head of a large group of residents. Leonard saw John, but he didn’t speak to him. It would be rude to talk to the others while serving as the Housemother’s escort.

When they were halfway down the hall to the theater, Mrs. Vonus stopped before one of the glass cases, and everyone stopped with her.

She took her left hand away from Leonard’s arm and unballed the handkerchief that was in her right. Inside the handkerchief was a small key, with which she unlocked the case.

As Mrs. Vonus swung open the glass door, white light spilled out and blinded Leonard for a moment. When the Housemother closed the door again, though, he was able to see despite the green spots that swam in front of his eyes.

Mrs. Vonus held five golden medallions in her left hand, each on a loop of fine chain.

She turned to face the residents.

“Frederick, Theodore, Albert, John, and Leonard,” she said. “Step forward.”

Leonard didn’t move, since he was already separated from the main group, but the others came up to stand with him. John stood immediately to his right.

“These will enable you to see the sign you must see,” the Housemother said, “and to go where you must go.”

She placed a medallion around each of their necks, beginning with Leonard. While she was giving the others their own medallions, Leonard took his between his right thumb and forefinger to examine it.

It was a gold coin with a hole near the edge for the chain. In the center of the coin was the face of a laughing clown. Leonard knew from the shape of the mouth that it was the same face that had been beaten smooth by the front door’s knocker.

Forming an arc around the clowns face were block letters that said GOOD FOR ONE FREE RIDE.

“We’ll continue now, Leonard,” Mrs. Vonus said when she’d distributed the other four medallions.

He offered her his arm again, and they continued down the hall toward the theater.

22

WHEN THEY reached the lobby, Mrs. Vonus told the medallion winners to wait while the other residents went into the theater ahead of them.

Leonard smiled at the women behind the candy counter. The blonde smiled back, but Melody turned her face away.

After the main group of comedians had disappeared beyond the double doors, Mrs. Vonus lined up the five special men and stood in front of them, clearly pleased.

Leonard saw her teeth for the second time. They reminded him of piano keys.

A shadow seemed to flicker across the Housemother’s face.

“Today you will be leaving us,” she said. “I have every confidence that you will all do well on the Hill.”

“Pardon me, ma’am,” Leonard said. He hadn’t known that he was going to speak, and the sound of his voice startled him. “Perhaps I shouldn’t ask, but . . . what will happen to us on the Hill?”

The other medallion winners—except John, who kept his eyes averted—looked at him as if he were foolish to ask such a question.

Mrs. Vonus pursed her lips and then said, “Good things, Leonard. Prayer. Contemplation. Fasting. Worship. All the things you have learned to do here at the Calvin Coolidge Home.”

Leonard nodded and lowered his eyes. “Thank you, Housemother. Forgive me for asking.”

“That’s quite all right,” Mrs. Vonus said with an odd strain in her voice.

Leonard looked up again and saw that Melody was bent over beside the cash register, hiding her face in her hands. Her body was trembling as if she were crying.

Why should she cry? he wondered. Perhaps because she’s not going up the Hill, too?

He noticed that the blonde was standing well away from Melody and had her nose wrinkled in an expression of contempt.

“I must say farewell,” Mrs. Vonus said. “Enjoy the movie. Then go where you must, and be obedient and humble.”

Leonard shifted his gaze from the candy counter to the Housemother, and he thought he saw another shadow crossing her face.

“Aren’t you going to watch the movie with us, Housemother?” he asked.

Mrs. Vonus sighed, then said, “I’ve seen it.”

“Oh,” Leonard said. “I’m sorry, Housemother. It’s just that when you asked me to escort you to the movie, I thought that perhaps someone else would start the projector, and—”

“I understand,” Mrs. Vonus said, interrupting him. “Go on, now. Go to your destiny.”

Leonard nodded. “Yes, Housemother,” he said, and turned to enter the theater.

As he pulled open the double doors, he thought he heard Melody sob. He didn’t look back to see for certain. But he wondered.

23

“SHOULD AULD ac-quain-tance bee for-got, a-and ne-ver brought to miiiind? Should auld ac-quaint-tance befor-got, a-and daays of Auld Lang Syne?”

As It’s a Wonderful Life ended with the triumphant song of a houseful of friends, Leonard felt moisture on his lower left eyelid. He reached up to rub it away, but as his thumb touched it, more came to replace it.

Tears.

How long had it been since he had shed actual tears?

More importantly, why was he shedding them now, when he should be happier than he had ever been before?

Maybe they were tears of joy.

As the music and credits faded away, he tried to examine his emotions and found that he had no idea what he was feeling. He had been content for so long that he’d forgotten what any other state of being was like.

It must be joy. How could it be anything else, when I’m going up the Hill?

The screen went white, and then the houselights came up. The unmedallioned residents began leaving.

Leonard waited. Mrs. Vonus had said that he and the other medallion wearers would see a sign. . . .

It was a few yards from the lower right corner of the screen, and it had never been there before:

A glowing red sign that said EXIT.

The last unmedallioned resident went through the double doors, leaving the privileged five alone. Leonard stood and shuffled to the aisle.

He couldn’t feel his legs as he walked down the aisle and across to the slitted velvet curtain that hung below the sign. He couldn’t even feel his thoughts. He was an automaton, doing what he had to do.

The others were ahead of him. John was immediately in front of him, and Leonard wanted to touch his friend’s shoulder to get his attention. When he had done that, he would ask John what he was feeling, and whether he had cried at the end of the movie.

But Leonard’s arms were as heavy as bars of lead, and he couldn’t lift them.

The first three comedians went through the slitted curtain quickly, as if unable to contain their eagerness to reach the top of the Hill.

John paused at the curtain and seemed about to turn around, but then he went through also.

Leonard took a last look at the theater and wondered if he would miss Jimmy Stewart.

Then he stepped forward and found himself in the backyard, which was the same as it had always been except for the tulip-lined gravel path along which he and the others walked. Looking ahead, he saw that the path led from the northeast corner of the Home to a golden door set into the wall at the northern boundary of the grounds.

Leonard knew then that the path, the multicolored tulips, and the door in the wall had been there all along, as had the EXIT sign and the curtained doorway in the theater. But without the GOOD FOR ONE FREE RIDE medallion, he had been blind to them.

Pretty tricky, he thought, and then wondered if that was impious.

No matter. He had the medallion. The decision had been made. He was going to the top of the Hill, and Glory.

As he walked behind the others, he looked up at the pure blue of the sky and breathed in the delicious scents of spring. It was wonderful to be outdoors after being cooped up in the movie theater.

He lowered his gaze slightly and squinted at the half-hidden golden buildings that were his destination. He hoped the worship, obedience, and-so-on-and-so-forth in which he would participate there wouldn’t prevent him from getting out into the sunshine occasionally.

A distant noise brought him out of his reverie.

He paused, listening, and the noise grew louder.

It was the sound of the red International pickup’s engine.

“Do you hear that?” he said to John’s back, and turned around to look at the road.

The truck was just pulling up beside the again-visible footbridge. The driver’s side faced the Home, and Leonard could see Ol’ Pete’s profile.

“Hello!” he cried, waving his arms. “Mr. Pete! I made it!”

Ol’ Pete didn’t seem to hear or see him.

Leonard took a deep breath, planning to shout as loud as he could, but let it out silently when he felt a touch on his arm.

He looked over his shoulder. John was right behind him, a troubled look in his eyes.

“Come on,” John said nervously. “The others will leave us behind.”

Leonard saw that the first three comedians had reached the wall and opened the door. He glimpsed a gleaming staircase beyond.

“Go ahead,” he told John. “I’ll catch up. I can open the door as long as I’m wearing my medallion.”

John shook his head. “You don’t know that. The Housemother sent us out as a group. There’s no telling what might happen if we split up.”

Leonard turned back toward the International. “I just want to see if I recognize the new man. If he’s someone I know, I want to tell him not to be afraid, that he can make it to the Hill if he tries—”

The pickup’s passenger door slammed, and Leonard felt a tension in his abdomen he didn’t understand.

A slim, mustached black man walked around the front end of the truck, talking loudly and punctuating his words by slapping the hood.

“—kind of deal is this, motha—motha—,” the black man said, and then pounded on the hood with both fists. “That rips it! You can mess with my clothes, you can mess with my name—”

The black man shook his left arm, and Leonard saw the wristband flash.

“—you can even mess with my memory, but when you mess with my mind so that I can’t even talk like me, then you’ve ticked me! I want an explanation, and I want it now.”

Leonard found himself grinning at the thought that Mrs. Vonus was going to have a tough time with this one.

That’s terrible. I ought to be ashamed of myself.

“—get across the ditch when I’m good and ready, and that ain’t gonna be until I get answers. Say what? Well, I’d better, man. I got your license number—”

Leonard laughed, and was shocked at himself.

What’s funny about this? That man has no idea of the rewards of obedience, of the blessing of contentment. . . .

The black man was halfway across the footbridge when Ol’ Pete blared the International’s horn.

The newcomer didn’t flinch. Instead, he turned around with his arms akimbo.

“You think that’s cool? How cool you think it’d be if I come back and beat your head on the gearshift, huh?”

The International’s engine revved, and the pickup vanished. A small spray of dust swirled down the road.

Leonard couldn’t see the black man’s face, but he knew the newcomer was staring at the empty air.

John grasped Leonard’s right arm with both hands and pulled hard. “They’re through!” he cried, panic charging his voice. “They’re going up the Hill! We’re going to be left behind if we don’t go now!”

Leonard stumbled backward.

The Hill. That’s my goal.

Why? What’s there that’s so important?

“A few more seconds,” he said, bracing his feet. “I want to see what he does. . . .”

The black man turned around and, with incredible slowness, resumed crossing the footbridge.

“Motha—,” the man said. “Motha—”

Come on, Leonard thought desperately, not knowing what it was that he was urging or why he wanted it. Come on, come on, come on . . .

The black man had reached the end of the bridge and was about to step onto the brick walk that led to the Home’s front door.

“Motha—,” the man said, hesitating.

Leonard wrenched forward, tearing his arm from John’s grasp.

“Come on!” he screamed.

“He can’t hear you,” John said, beginning to sob. “He’s not like us; he doesn’t have the coin. . . .”

The stranger’s right foot touched the brick walk.

“You’ve gotta come now,” John said. “Please, please, you’ve gotta—”

“Mothafuck,” the black man said.

Leonard felt himself teetering, as if standing on a wire over a canyon. He could actually see the wire and the empty air surrounding him.

The Hill. That’s my goal. . . .

He looked down at the jagged, multihued rocks of the canyon.

They were a lot more interesting than the slick golden mountain where the wire was anchored.

“Leonard” never did feel right. . . .

He stepped into space, into another name.

“Lenny!” John cried.

The black man started up the walk, and Lenny turned to face his friend.

“I’ll help you if you stay,” he said. “I promise.”

John, almost crying, shook his head and looked down at the gravel. “No, I . . . No. All I ever wanted was to be happy.”

Lenny nodded slowly. “I hear you can get that up there. Happiness by the barrelful.”

Without raising his eyes, John turned and walked toward the golden door.

Lenny watched until his friend stepped over the threshold. Then he turned and ran back down the tulip-lined path.

Yelling like Johnny Weissmuller, he burst through the red velvet curtain, charged up the aisle, and straight-armed the double doors. They swung open with a whooshing sound, and Lenny leaped into the lobby, landing in front of the candy counter.

Melody and the blonde woman gaped at him. The blonde’s mouth opened and closed repeatedly.

Lenny yanked the medallion off his neck, breaking the chain, and held it across the counter toward Melody.

“You can tie a knot in the chain,” he said.

Melody held out her left hand, and Lenny dropped the medallion into it. Then he closed her fingers over it and held on for a moment.

“What you do is your business,” he said, looking into her eyes, which were a much darker brown than he’d ever realized before. “Personally, though, I hope you stick around. I still wanna take you on a picnic.”

He saw the beginnings of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

Then he was running again, out of the lobby and down the long hallway.

As he shot by the Progress Board, he yanked the felt-tipped marker from its string. A blue knife of pain stabbed up his arm, but he didn’t fall.

Aching, elated, he dashed to the foyer.

Mrs. Vonus was there, facing the front door.

“Hey, Daisy Duck!” Lenny yelled, sprinting into the Front Parlor. “Glad the new guy’s not in yet—I’ve got something to show you!”

He bounded over a divan, then grabbed a chair and dropped it in front of the fireplace.

Looking back into the foyer, he saw Mrs. Vonus staring at him, her slack mouth giving her face a most un-Housemotherlike expression.

“Ah, you’re confused, madam,” Lenny said grandly. “Allow me to explain: Happiness and contentment are fine things for some, but for me they’re just boring. So bring on the Puritans, because I’ve thought of a Thanksgiving bit that’ll knock ’em on their asses.”

He jumped onto the chair, uncapped the marker, and carefully drew an elegant mustache on Calvin Coolidge.

Thunder shook the blue-paisley walls.

The comedian glanced over his shoulder and grinned.

“Pardon me, Housemother,” he said, “but don’t you think you should answer the door?”

To the memory of Leonard Alfred Schneider.

JOURNALS OF THE PLAGUE YEARS

Norman Spinrad

And now for the big finish. Norman Spinrad has been giving the world brilliant speculative fiction for nearly three decades. His novels, which include Bug Jack Barron, The Void Captain’s Tale and Child of Fortune, are among the most challenging, stimulating, and consistently innovative the genre has ever produced. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and been nominated for many major awards, including the National Book Award. He has also been a sandal maker, a literary agent, a critic and columnist, and a radio talk show host His most recent novel, Little Heroes, has just been published in paperback, and his new collection of novellas. Other Americas, will be published in September.

“Journals of the Plague Years” is vintage Spinrad, which means you should strap in for the ride of your life. It is a story of the near future focusing on an all-too-familiar disease, the way that disease has totally overthrown the morals and mores of our society, and the explosive consequences when a cure is discovered.

INTRODUCTION

It was the worst of times, and it was the saddest of I times, so what we must remember if we are to keep I our perspective as we read these journals of the I Plague Years is that the people who wrote them, indeed the entire population of what was then the United States of America and most of the world, were, by our standards, all quite mad.

The Plague virus, apparently originating somewhere in Africa, had spread first to male homosexuals and intravenous drug users. Inevitably it moved via bisexual contact into the population at large. A vaccine was developed and for a moment the Plague seemed defeated. But the organism mutated under this evolutionary pressure and a new strain swept the world, A new vaccine was developed, but the virus mutated again. Eventually the succession of vaccines selected for mutability itself, and the Plague virus, proliferated into dozens of strains.

Palliative treatments were developed—victims might survive for a decade or more—but there was no cure, and no vaccine that offered protection for long.

For twenty years, sex and death were inextricably entwined. For twenty years, men and women were constrained to deny themselves the ordinary pleasures of straightforward, unencumbered sex, or to succumb to the natural desires of the flesh and pay the awful price. For twenty years, the species faced its own extinction. For twenty years, Africa and most of Asia and Latin America were quarantined by the armed forces of America, Europe, Japan, and the Soviet Union. For twenty years, the people of the world stewed in their own frustrated sexual juices.

Small wonder then that the Plague Years were years of madness. Small wonder that the authors of these journals seem, from our happier perspective, driven creatures, and quite insane.

That each of them found somewhere the courage to carry on, that through their tormented and imperfect instrumentalities the long night was finally to see our dawn, that is the wonder, that is the triumph of the human spirit, the spirit that unites the era of the Plague Years with our own.

—Mustapha Kelly

Luna City, 2143

JOHN DAVID

I was gunfoddering in Baja when the marks began to appear again. The first time I saw the marks, they gave me six years if I could afford it, ten if I joined up and got myself the best.

Well what was a poor boy to do? Take my black card, let them stick me in a Quarantine Zone, and take my chances? Go underground and try to dodge the Sex Police until the Plague got me? Hell no, this poor boy did what about two million other poor boys did—he signed up for life in the American Foreign Legion, aka the Army of the Living Dead, while he was still in good enough shape to be accepted.

Now you hear a lot of bad stuff about the Legion. The wages suck. The food ain’t much. We’re a bunch of bloodthirsty killers too bugfuck to be allowed back in the United States fighting an endless imperialistic war against the whole Third World, and our combat life expectancy is about three years. Junkies. Dopers. Drooling sex maniacs. The scum of the universe.

For sure, all that is true, But unless you’re a millionaire or supercrook, the Legion is the best deal you can do when they paint your blue card black and tell you you’ve Got It.

The deal is you get the latest that medical science has to offer and you get it free. The deal is you can do anything you want to the gorks as long as you don’t screw up combat orders. The deal is that the Army of the Living Dead is coed and omnisexual and every last one of us has already Got It. We’ve all got our black cards already, we’re under sentence of death, so we might as well enjoy one another on the way out. The deal is that the Legion is all the willing meat-sex you can handle, and plenty that you can’t, you better believe it!

Like the recruiting slogan says, “A Short Life but a Happy One.” We were the last free red-blooded American boys and girls. “Join the Army and Fuck the World,” says the graffiti they scrawl on the walls about us.

Well that too, and so what?

Take the Baja campaign. The last census showed that the black card population of California was entitled to enlarged Quarantine Zones. Catalina and San Francisco were bursting at the seams and the state legislature couldn’t agree on a convenient piece of territory. So it got booted up to the Federal Quarantine Agency.

Old Walter T., he looks at the map, and he sees you could maintain a Quarantine line across the top of the Baja Peninsula with maybe two thousand SP troops. Real convenient. Annex the mother to California and solve the problem.

So in we go, and down the length of Baja we cakewalk. No sweat. Two weeks of saturation air strikes to soften up the Mexes, a heavy armored division and two wings of gunships at the point, followed by fifteen thousand of us zombies to nail things down.

What you call a fun campaign, a far cry from the mess we got into in Cuba or that balls-up in Venezuela, let me tell you. Mexico was something like fifty percent Got It, their armed forces had been wiped out of existence in the Chihuaha campaign, and so it was just a matter of three weeks of leisurely pillage, rape, and plunder.

The Mexes? They got a sweet deal, considering. Those who were still alive by the time we had secured Baja down to La Paz could choose between deportation to what was left of Mexico or becoming black card citizens of the state of California, Americans like thee and me, brothers and sisters. Any one of them who had survived had Gotten It in every available orifice about 150 times by us zombies by then anyway.

Wanna moralize about it? Okay, then moralize this one, meatfucker:

The damn Plague started in Africa, didn’t it? That’s the Third World, ain’t it? Africa, Latin America, Asia, except for China, Japan, and Iran, they’re over 50 percent Got It, ain’t they? And the It they Got keeps mutating like crazy in all that filth. And they keep trying to get through with infiltrators to give us the latest strain, don’t they?

The Chinese and the Iranians, they kill their black-carders, don’t they? The Japs, they deport them to Korea. And the Russians, they nuked themselves a cordon sanitaire all the way from the Caspian to the Chinese border.

Was I old Walter T., I’d say nuke the whole cesspit of infection out of existence. Use nerve gas. Fry the Third World clean from orbit. Whatever. They gave us the damn Plague, didn’t they? Way we see it in the Army of the Living Dead, anything we do after that is only a little piece of what the gorks got coming!

Believe me, this poor boy wasn’t shedding any tears for what we had done to the Mexes when the marks starting coming out just before the sack of Ensenada. Less still when they couldn’t come up with a combo of pallies that worked anymore, and they shrugged and finally told me it looked like I had reached Condition Terminal in the ruins of La Paz. Like I said, when I first Got It, they gave me six years, ten in the Army of the Living Dead.

Now they gave me six months.

I shot up with about a hundred milligrams of liquid crystal, chugalugged a quart of tequila, and butt-fucked every gork I could find. Think I blew about ten of them away afterward, but by then, brothers and sisters, who the hell was counting?

WALTER T. BIGELOW

Oh yes, I know what they say about me behind my back, even on a cabinet level. Old Walter T., he was a virgin when he married Elaine, and he’s never even had meat with his own pure Christian wife. Old Walter T., he’s never even stuck it in a sex machine. Old Walter T., he’s never even missed the pleasures of the flesh. Old Walter T., he’d still be the same sexless eunuch even if there had never been a Plague. Old Walter T., he’s got holy water for blood.

How little they know of my torments.

How little they know of what it was like for me in high school. In the locker room. With all those naked male bodies. All the little tricks I had to learn to hide my erections. Knowing what I was. Knowing it was a sin. Unable to look my own father squarely in the eye.

Walter Bigelow found Christ at the age of seventeen and was Born Again, that’s what the official biography says. Alas, it was only partly true. Oh yes, I dedicated my life to Jesus when I was seventeen. But it was a cold, logical decision. It seemed the only means of controlling my unwholesome urges, the only way I could avoid damnation.

I hated God then. I hated Him for making me what I was and condemning me to hellfire should I succumb to the temptations of my own God-given nature. I believed in God, but I hated Him. I believed in Jesus, but how could I believe that Jesus believed in me?

I was not granted Grace until I was twenty.

My college roommate Gus was a torment. He flaunted his naked body in what seemed like total innocence. He masturbated under the bedclothes at night while I longed to be there with him.

One morning he walked into the bathroom while I was toweling myself down after a shower. He was nude, with an enormous erection. I could not keep my flesh from responding in kind. He confessed his lust for me. I let him touch me. I found myself reaching for his manhood.

He offered to do anything. My powers of resistance were at a low point. We indulged in mutual masturbation. I would go no further.

For months we engaged in this onanistic act, Gus offering me every fleshly delight I had ever fantasized, I calling on Christ to save me.

Finally, a moment came when I could resist no longer. Gus knelt on the floor before me, running his hands over my body, cupping my buttocks. I was lost. His mouth reached out for me—

And at that moment God at last granted me His Grace.

As his head lowered, I saw the Devil’s mark upon the back of his neck, small as yet, but unmistakable—Karposi’s sarcoma.

Gus had the Plague.

He was about to give it to me.

I leaped backward. Gus was an instrument of the Devil sent to damn my flesh to the Plague and my soul to everlasting torment.

And at last I understood. I saw that it was the Devil, not God, who had tormented me with these unwholesome urges. And God had let me suffer them as a test and a preparation. A test of my worthiness and a preparation for this moment of revelation of His Divine Mercy. For had He not chosen to show me the Sign that saved me from my own sinful nature at this eleventh hour?

That was when I was granted true Grace.

I sank to my knees and gave thanks to God. That was when I was Born Again. That was when I became a true Christian. That too was when I was shown my true calling, when the vision opened up before me.

God had allowed the Devil to inflict the Plague on man to test us, even as I had been tested, for to succumb to the temptations of the flesh was to succumb to the Plague and be dragged, rotting and screaming, to Hell.

This was the fate that Jesus had saved me from, for only the Sign He had shown me had preserved me from death and eternal damnation. My life, therefore, was truly His, and what I must use it for was to protect mankind from this Plague and its carriers, to save those I could as Jesus had saved me.

And He spoke to me in my heart. “Become a leader of men,” Jesus told me. “Save them from themselves. Do My work in the world.”

I promised Him that I would, I would do it in the only way I could conceive of, through politics.

I became a prelaw major. I entered law school. I graduated with honors. I found, courted, and married a pure Christian virgin, and soon thereafter impregnated Elaine with Billy, ran for the Virginia State Assembly, and was elected.

The rest of my life is, as they say, history.

LINDA LEWIN

I was just another horny spoiled little brat until I Got It, just like all my horny spoiled little friends in Berkeley. Upper-middle-class family with an upper-middle-class house in the hills. My own car for my sixteenth birthday, along with the latest model sex interface.

Oh yes, they did! My mom and dad were no Unholy Rollers, they were educated intellectual liberal Democrats, they read all the literature, they had been children of the Sexy Seventies, they were realists, they knew the score.

These are terrible times, they told me. We know you’ll be tempted to have meat. You might get away with it for years. Or you might Get It the first time out. Don’t risk it, Linda. We know how you feel, we remember when everyone did meat. We know this is unnatural. But we know the consequences, and so do you.

And they dragged me out on the porch and made me look out across the Bay at San Francisco. The Bay Bridge with its blown-out center span. The pig boats patrolling the shoreline. The gunships buzzing about the periphery like angry horseflies.

Meat City. That’s where you’d end up, Linda. Nothing’s worth that, now is it?

I nodded. But even then, I wondered.

I had grown up with the vision of the shining city across the Bay. Oh yes, I had also grown up knowing that the lovely hills and graceful buildings and sparkling night lights masked a charnel house of the Plague, black-carders all, 100 percent. We were told horror stories about it in sex hygiene classes starting in kindergarten.

But from about the fifth grade on, we told ourselves our own stories too. We whispered them in the ladies’ room. We uploaded them onto bulletin boards. We downloaded them, printed them out, wiped them from memory so our parents wouldn’t see them, masturbated over the printouts.

As porn went, it was crude, amateurish stuff. What could you expect from teenage virgins? And it was all the same. A teenager Gets It. And runs away to San Francisco. Or disappears into the underground. And, sentenced to death already, sets out to enjoy all the pleasures of the meat on the way out, in crude, lurid, sensational detail. And of course, the porn sheets all ended long before Condition Terminal was reached.

But I was a good little girl and I was a smart little girl and the sex interface my parents gave me was the best money could buy, not some cheap one-way hooker’s model. It had everything. The vaginal insert was certified to five atmospheres, but it was only fifty microns thick, heated to blood temperature, and totally flexible. It had a neat little clit-hood programmed for five varieties of electric stimulation and six vibratory patterns. I could wear the thing under my jeans, finger the controls, and never fail to come, even in the dullest math class.

The guys said that the interior lining was the max, tight and soft and wet, the stim programs the best there were. But what did they know? Who among them had ever felt real meat?

Oh yes, it was a wonderful sex interface my parents gave me to protect me from the temptations of the meat.

And of course I hated the damned thing.

Worse still when the guy I was balling with it insisted on wearing his interface too. Yech! His penile sheath in my vaginal insert. Like two sex machines doing it to each other. I remember an awful thing I did to one wimp who really pissed me off. I took off my interface, made him take off his, inserted his penile sheath in my vaginal insert, activated both interfaces, and made him sit there with me watching the two things go at each other without us for a solid hour.

And then there came Rex.

What can I say about Rex? I was eighteen. He was a year younger. He was beautiful. We never made it through two interfaces. I’d wear mine or he’d wear his and we’d go at it for hours. It was wonderful. We swore eternal love. We took to telling each other meatporn stories as we did it. This was it, I knew it was, we were soul mates for life. Rex swore up and down that he had never done meat and so did I. So why not . . .

Finally we did.

We took off our interfaces and did meat together. We tried out everything in those meatporn stories and then some. Every orifice. Every variation. Every day for two months.

Well, to make the usual long sad story short and nasty, I had been telling the truth, but Rex hadn’t. And I had to learn about it from my parents.

Your boyfriend Rex’s Got It, they told me one bright sunny morning. He’s been black-carded and they’ve dropped him in San Francisco. You and he never . . . you didn’t . . . because if you did, we’re going to have to turn you in, you know that, don’t you?

Well of course I freaked. But it was a cold slow-motion freak, with everything running through my head too fast for me to panic. I had a whole month till my next ID exam. I knew damn well my card would come up black. What should I do? Let them drop me in San Francisco and go out in a blaze of meatfucking glory with Rex? Yeah, sure, with the lying son of a bitch who had killed me!

I thought fast. I lied up and down. I threw an outraged temper tantrum when my parents suggested maybe I should go in for an early check. I convinced them. Or maybe I just let them convince themselves.

I found myself an underground doc and checked myself out. Got It. I drifted into the Berkeley underground, not as difficult as you might think for a girl who was willing to give meat to the secret Living Dead for a few dollars and a few more connections. I learned about how they kept ahead of the Sex Police. I learned about the phony blue cards. And I made my plans.

When I had hooked enough to score one, I got myself a primo counterfeit. As long as I found myself a wizard every three months to update the data strip, it would show blue. I could stay free until I died, unless of course I got picked up by the SP and got my card run against the national data bank, in which case I would turn up null and it would all be over.

I hooked like crazy, three, four, five tricks a day. I piled up a bankroll and kept it in bills. The day before I was to report for my ID update, I got in my car to go to school, said the usual goodbye to my parents, and took off. headed south.

South to Santa Cruz. South to L.A. South to anywhere. Out along the broad highway to see what there was to see of California, of what was left of America, out along the broad highway toward the eventual inevitable—crazed, confused, terror-stricken, brave with fatal knowledge, determined only to have a long hot run till my time ran out.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

They used to call it midlife crisis, male menopause, the seven-year itch, back when it wasn’t a condition to which you were condemned for life at birth.

I was just about to turn forty. I had dim teenage memories of quite a meaty little sex life back at the beginning of the Ugly Eighties, before the Plague, before I married Marge. Oh yes, I had been quite a hot little cocksman before it all fell apart, a child of the last half-generation of the Sexual Revolution.

When I was Tod’s age, fifteen, I had already had more real meat than the poor frustrated little guy was likely to get in his whole life. Now I had to watch my own son sneaking around to sleazy sex parlors to stick it into sex machines, and don’t think I was above it myself from time to time.

Marge, well . . .

Marge was five years younger than I. Just young enough to never have known what the real thing was like, young enough to remember nothing but condoms and vaginal dams and the early interfaces. Oh yes, we had meat together in the early years, before it finally resulted in Tod. Poor Marge was terrified the whole time, unable to come. After Tod was born, she got herself an interface, and never made love again without it.

Marge still loved me, I think, and I still loved her, but the Plague Years had dried her up sexually, turned her prudish and sour. She wouldn’t even let me buy Tod an interface so he could get it from a real girl, if only secondhand. His sixteenth birthday is more than time enough, she insisted shrilly every time we fought about it, which was frequently.

Naturally, or perhaps more accurately unnaturally, all my libidinal energies had long since been channeled into my work. It was the perfect sublimation.

I was a genetic synthesizer for the Sutcliffe Corporation in Palo Alto. I had already designed five different Plague vaccines for Sutcliffe that made them hundreds of millions each before the vims mutated into immunity. I was the fair-haired boy. I got many bonuses. I had my own private lab with little restraint on my budget. For a scientist, it should have been heaven.

It wasn’t.

It was maddening. A new Plague strain would appear and rise to dominance. I’d strip off the antigen coat, clone it, insert its genome in a bacterium, and Sutcliffe would market a vaccine to those who could afford it, make hundreds of millions in six months. Then the next immune strain would appear, and it would be back to square one. I felt like a scientific Sisyphus, rolling the dead weight of the Plague uphill, only to have it roll back and crush my hopes every six months.

Was I taking my work a bit too personally? Of course I was. My “personal life” consisted of the occasional interface sex with Marge, which I had long since come to loathe, watching my son sneaking around to sex machine parlors, and the occasional trip there myself. My “personal life” had been stolen from me by the Plague, by the Enemy, so of course I took my work personally.

I was obsessed. My work was my personal life. And I had a vision.

Cassette vaccines had been around for decades. Strip down a benign virus, plug in sets of antigens off several target organisms, and hey, presto, antibodies to several diseases conferred in a single shot.

Why not apply the same technique to the Plague? Strip one strain down to the core, hang it with antigen coats from four or five strains at once, and confer multistrain immunity. Certainly not to every mutation, but if I could develop an algorithm that could predict mutations, if I could develop cassette vaccines that stayed ahead of the viral mutations, might I not somehow be able eventually to force the Plague to mutate out?

Oh yes, I took the battle personally, or so I admitted to myself at the time. Little did I know just how personal it was about to become.

JOHN DAVID

No sooner had we finished mopping up in La Paz than my unit was airlifted up to the former Mexican border as part of the force that would keep it sealed until the SPs could set up their cordon. Through the luck of the draw, we got the sweetest billet, holding the line between Tijuana and San Diego.

They kept us zombies south of the former border, you better believe they didn’t want us in Dago, no way they would let us set foot on real American soil, but meatfucker, you wouldn’t believe the scene in TJ!

Back before the Plague, the place had been one big whorehouse and drug supermarket anyway. For fifteen years it had been a haven for underground black-carders, Latino would-be infiltrators, black pally docs, dealers in every contraband item that existed, getting poorer and more desperate as the cordon around Mexico tightened.

Now TJ found itself in the process of becoming an American Quarantine Zone, and it was Bugfuck City. Mexicans trying to get into Dago on false passports and blue cards. Wanted Americans trying to get out to anywhere. False IDs going for outrageous prices. Pussy and ass and drugs and uncertified pharmaceuticals and armaments going for whatever the poor bastards left holding them could get.

And the law, such as it was, until the SPs could replace the Legion, was us, brothers and sisters. Unbelievable! We could buy anything—drugs, phony blue cards, six-year-old virgins, you name it—or just have what we wanted at gunpoint. And money hand over fist, I mean we looted everything with no law but us to stop us, and did heavy traffic in government arms on top of it.

Loaded with money, we stayed stoned and drunk and turned that town into our twenty-four-hour pigpen, you better believe it! No one more so than me, brothers and sisters, with those marks coming out, knowing this could be my last big night to party.

I scored half-a-dozen phony blue cards and corroborating papers to match. I stuffed my pockets with money. I shot up with every half-baked pally TJ had to peddle, and they had everything from Russian biologicals to ground-up nun’s tits in holy water. If this was my Condition Terminal, I was determined to take as much of the world with me as I could before I went out. I meatfucked myself deaf, dumb, and blind and must’ve Given It to five hundred Mexes in the bargain.

Then they started phasing in the Sex Police. Well, as you might imagine, there was no love lost between the Army of the Living Dead and the SPs. Those uptight Unholy Rollers took any opportunity to snuff us. Looters were shot. Meatfuckers caught in the act were executed. And of course, brothers and sisters, the Army of the Living Dead gave as good as we got and then some.

We’d kill any of the bastards we caught on what remained of our shrinking turf. We’d get up kamikaze packs and go into their turf after them. When we were really loaded, we’d catch ourselves some SP assholes and gang-bang them senseless. Needless to say, we weren’t into using interfaces.

Things got so out of hand that the Pentagon brought in regular airborne troops to round us up. That little action took more casualties in two days than the whole Baja campaign had in three weeks.

When they started dropping napalm from close-support fighters, it finally dawned on those of us still around that the meatfuckers had no intention of rounding us up and shipping us to the next theater. They were out to kill us all, and they were probably working themselves up to tactical nukes to do it.

Well, we weren’t the Army of the Living Dead for nothing. I don’t know where it started or who started it. It just seemed to happen all at once. Somehow all of us that were left stuffed our loot in our packs, armed ourselves with whatever we could lay hands on, and suddenly there was a human wave assault on the border.

It was the bloodiest ragged combat any of us ever saw, crazed zombies against gunships, fighters, and tanks. How many of the bastards did we get on the way? More than you might imagine, better believe it, we were stoned, drunk, in a berserker rage, and we were now the Living Dead twice over, with Double Nothing to lose, triple so for yours truly.

How many of us got through? A thousand? Five hundred? Something to keep you from oversleeping, citizens. Hundreds of us zombies, our packs stuffed with money, false IDs and ordnance, over the border into San Diego, hunted, dying, betrayed by even the Army, with nothing left for kicks but to take our vengeance on you, meatfuckers!

And I was one of them. The meanest and the craziest, it pleases me to believe. Betrayed, facing Condition Terminal, with nothing left to do with what little was left of my life but bop till I dropped and take as many of you as I could with me.

LINDA LEWIN

I drove aimlessly around California for months, down 101 or the Coast Highway to Los Angeles, down 5 to San Diego, up to L.A. again, up 5 to the Bay Area, back around again, like a squirrel in a cage, like one of those circuit-riding preachers in an old Western.

I Had It. My days were numbered. I needed cash—for gas, for food, for a flop in a motel, for what pallies I could score, for updating the data strip on my phony blue card. I hooked wherever I could, using my interface always, for I swore to myself that I would never do to anyone what Rex had done to me. I didn’t want to go to Condition Terminal with that mark on my soul.

Bit by bit, inch by inch, I drifted into the underground. You’d be surprised how many black-carders there were surviving outside the Quarantine Zones on phony IDs, a secret America within America, hiding within plain sight of the SPs, living by our wits and our own code.

We found one another by some kind of second sight impossible to explain. Pally pushers. ID wizards. Hookers just like me.

And not like me.

There were bars where we met to trade in pallies and IDs and information. You met all kinds. Pally dealers and drug dealers. ID wizards. Hookers like me, male and female, selling interface sex to the solid citizens. And hookers of the other kind.

Hookers selling meat.

It was amazing how many blue-carders were willing to risk death for the real thing. It was amazing how innocent some of them were willing to be. At first I refused to believe the stories the meatwhores told in the bars, cackling evilly all the time. I refused to believe that they were knowingly spreading the Plague and laughing about it. I refused to believe that blue-carders could be so stupid.

But they were and they could. And after a while, I understood.

There were people who would pay fantastic prices for meatsex with another certified blue-carder. There were clandestine meatbars where they hung out, bars with ID readers. Pick up one of these fools, pop your phony card in a reader, and watch their eyes light up as the strip read out blue, no line to the national data banks here, not with the SPs raiding any such bar they could get a line on. And you got paid more for a quick meatfuck than you could earn in a week of interface hooking.

Sure I was tempted. There was more to it than the money. Didn’t I long for meat myself? Wasn’t that how I had Gotten It in the first place? Didn’t these damn blue-card assholes deserve what they got?

Who knows, I might have ended up doing it in the end if I hadn’t met Saint Max, Our Lady of the Flowers.

Saint Max was a black-carder. He carried his own ID reader around and he didn’t worry about phony cards reading out blue.

Saint Max would give meat only to certified black-caidcrs, and he would never refuse anyone, even the most rotted-out Terminals.

I was in an underground bar in Santa Monica when Saint Max walked in, and half-a-dozen people told me his story before I ever heard it from his lips. Saint Max was a legend of the California underground. The only real hero we had.

Max was a bisexual, male or female, it didn’t matter to him, and he never took money. People fed him, bought him drinks, gave him the latest pallies, found him free flop, sent him on his way. “I am dependent on the kindness of strangers,” Max used to say. And in return, any black-carder stranger could depend on kindness from him.

Max was old; in terms of how long he had survived with God knew how many Plague strains inside him, he was ancient. He had lived in the San Francisco Quarantine Zone before it was a Quarantine Zone. And he was a man with a mission. He had this crazy theory.

I heard it from him that night after I had bought him a meal and about half-a-dozen drinks.

“I’m a living reservoir of every Plague strain extant, my dear,” he told me. “And I do my best to keep up with the latest mutations.”

Max believed that all black-carders had a moral obligation to have as much meatsex with one another as possible. So as to speed the pace of evolution. In a large enough pool of crossinfected Plague victims the virus might mutate out into something benign. Or a multiimmunity might evolve and spread quickly. A pathogen that killed its host was, after all, a mal-adapted organism, and as long as it was killing us, so were we.

“Natural selection, my dear. In the long run, it’s our species’ only hope. In the long run, everyone is going to Get It, and it’s going to get most of us. But if out of the billions who will die, evolution eventually selects for multiimmunity, or a benign Plague variant, the human race will survive. And for as long as all these pallies keep me going, I intended to serve the process.”

It seemed crazy to me, and I told him so, exposing yourself to every Plague strain you could. Didn’t that mean Condition Terminal would just come quicker?

Saint Max shrugged. “Here I am,” he said. “No one’s been exposed to as many Plague variants as me. Maybe it’s already happened. Maybe I’ve got multiimmunity. Maybe I’m a mutant. Maybe there’s already a benign strain inside me.”

He smiled sadly. “We’re all under sentence of death the moment we’re born anyway, now aren’t we, my dear? Even the poor blue-carders. It’s only a matter of how, and when, and in the pursuit of what. And like old John Henry, I intend to die with my hammer in my hand. Think about it, Linda.”

And I did. I offered Max a ride up the coast and he accepted and we ended up traveling one full slow cycle of my circuit together. I watched Max giving meat freely to one and all, to! kids like me new to the underground, to thieves, and whores, and horrible Terminals on the way out. No one took Saint Max’s crazy theory seriously. Everyone loved him.

And so did I.

I paid my way with the usual interface sex, and, Max let it be until we were finally back in Santa Monica and it was time to say goodbye. “You’re young, Linda,” he told me. “With good enough pallies, you have years ahead of you. Me, I know I’m reaching the end of the line. You’ve got the heart for it, my dear. This old faggot would go out a lot happier knowing that there was someone like you to carry on. Think about it, my dear, ‘A Short Life but a Happy One,’ as they say in the Army of the Living Dead. And don’t think we’re all not in it.”

I thought about it. I thought about it for a long time. But I didn’t do anything about it till I saw Max again, till Max lay dying.

WALTER T. BIGELOW

After two terms in the Virginia Assembly, I ran for Congress and was elected. Capitol Hill was in a state of uproar over the Plague. National policy was nonexistent. Some states were quarantining Plague victims, others were doing nothing. Some states were testing people at their borders, others were calling this a violation of the Constitution. Some representatives were calling for a national health identity card, others considered this a civil rights outrage. Christian groups were calling for a national quarantine policy. Plague victims’ rights groups were calling for an end to all restrictions on their free movements. Dozens of test cases were moving ponderously toward the Supreme Court.

After two terms watching this congressional paralysis, God inspired me to conceive of the National Quarantine Amendment. I ran for the Senate on it, received the support of Christians and Plague victims alike, and was elected by a huge majority.

The amendment nationalized Plague policy. Each state was required to set up Quarantine Zones proportional in area and economic base to the percentage of victims in its territory, said division to be updated every two years. Every citizen outside a Zone must carry an updated blue card. In return for this, Plague victims were guaranteed full civil and voting rights within their Quarantine Zones, and free commerce in nonbiological products was assured.

It was fair. It was just. It was inspired by God. Under my leadership it sailed through Congress and was accepted by three-quarters of the states within two years after I led a strenuous nationwide campaign to pass it.

I was a national hero. It was a presidential year. I was told that I was assured my party’s nomination, that my election to the presidency was all but certain.

LINDA LEWIN

Saint Max had suddenly collapsed into late Condition Terminal. Indeed he was at the point of death when I finally followed the trail of the sad story to a cabin on a seacliff not far from Big Sur. There he lay, skeletal, emaciated, his body covered with sarcomas, semicomatose.

But his eyes opened up when I walked in. “I’ve been waiting for you, my dear,” he said. “I wasn’t about to leave without saying goodbye to Our Lady.”

“Our Lady? That’s you, Max.”

“Was, my dear.”

“Oh, Max . . .” I cried, and burst into tears. “What can I do?”

“Nothing, my dear . . . Or everything.” His eyes were hard and pitiless then, yet also somehow soft and imploring.

“Max . . .”

He nodded. “You could give me one last meatfuck goodbye,” he told me. He smiled. “I would have preferred a boy, of course, but at least it would please my old mother to know that I mended my ways on my deathbed.”

I looked at his feverish, disease-ravaged body. “You don’t know what you’re asking!” I cried.

“Oh yes I do, my dear. I’m asking you to do the bravest thing you’ve ever done in your life. I’m asking you to believe in the faith of a dying madman. On the other hand, I’m asking for nothing at all, since you’ve already Got It.”

How could I not? Either way, he was right. The Plague would kill me sooner or later no matter what I did now. I would never even know by how much this act of kindness would shorten my life span. Or if it would at all. And Max was dying. He had lived his life bravely in the service of humanity, at least as he saw it. And I loved him more in that moment than I had ever loved anyone in my life. And what if he was right? What other hope did humanity have? How could I refuse him?

I couldn’t.

I didn’t.

Afterward, as I held him, he spoke to me one last time. “Now for my last wish,” he said.

“Haven’t I just given it to you?”

“You know you haven’t.”

“What then?”

“You know, my dear.”

So I did. I had accepted it when I took his ravaged manhood inside my unprotected body. I knew that now. I knew that I had known it all along.

“Will you take up this torch from me?” he said, holding out his hand.

“Yes, Max, I will,” I promised and reached for the phantom object.

“Then this old faggot can go out happy,” he said. And died in my arms with a smile on his lips.

And I became Our Lady. Our Lady of the Living Dead, as they were to call me.

JOHN DAVID

San Diego was crawling with SPs, and they probably would have sent in commando units to hunt us down, if they weren’t so terrified of what would happen if the citizens were to find out that hundreds of us zombies were loose and on the warpath in the good old US of A.

And we were, meatfuckers, better believe it! Wouldn’t you? Sooner or later they were going to get us all and if they didn’t, the Plague would, and in my case, sooner than later. So we scattered. I don’t know what the others did, but me, I stayed drunk and stoned, and meatfucked as many of the treacherous blue-carders as I could lay my hands on. And tracked down all the pally pushers I could find. I don’t even know what half the stuff I shot up was, but something in the mix, or maybe the mix itself, seemed to slow the Plague. I didn’t get any better, but I seemed to stabilize.

But the situation in Dago didn’t, brothers and sisters. It became one close call after another. Finally I got caught by a couple of stupid SPs. Well, those Unholy Rollers were no match for a zombie with my combat smarts. While they were running one of my phony cards through the national data bank and coming up null, I managed to kill the meatfuckers.

I picked my IDs off the corpses, but now the national data bank had me marked as a zombie on the run, and when they found these stiffs, they’d fax my photo to every SP station in the fifty states. The Sex Police took a real dim view of SP killers, and nailing me would be priority one.

I had only one chance, not that it was max probability. I had to disappear into a Quarantine Zone. San Francisco was the biggest, hence the safest. Also the tastiest, or so I was told.

So I snatched a car and headed north. How I would break into a Zone, I’d have to figure out later. If, by some chance, I managed to avoid the SPs long enough to get there.

WALTER T. BIGELOW

Congress set up the Federal Quarantine Agency to administer the National Quarantine Amendment. It would have enormous power and enormous responsibility. It was the wisdom of Congress, with which I heartily concurred, that it be entirely insulated from party politics. The director would be chosen in the manner of Supreme Court justices—nominated by the president, approved by the Senate, serving for life, removable only by impeachment.

After the president signed the bill, he called me into his office and pleaded with me to accept the appointment. It was my amendment. I was the only political figure who had the confidence of both Plague victims and blue-carders.

All that, I knew, was true. What was also true was that many insiders blanched at the thought of a Bigelow presidency. This was the perfect political solution.

It was the most important decision of my life and the most difficult. Elaine had had her heart set on being First Lady. “You just can’t let them take the presidency away from you like this,” she insisted. Ministers and black-carder groups and politicians of my own party, some sincere, some otherwise, begged me to accept the lifetime directorship of the FQA. For weeks, they all badgered me while I procrastinated and prayed.

It seemed as if the voices of God and the Devil were speaking to me through my wife, party leaders, men of God, men of power, saints and sinners, battling for possession of my soul. But which was the voice of God and which the voice of Satan? Which way did my true duty lie? What did God want me to do?

Finally, I went on a solitary retreat into the Utah desert, into Zion National Park. I fasted. I prayed. I called on Jesus to speak to me.

And at length a voice did speak to me, in a vision. “You are the Moses I have chosen to lead My people out of the wilderness,” it told me. “Have I not commanded you to become a leader of men? Those who would deny you power are the agents of the Adversary.”

But then another stronger and sweeter voice spoke out of a great white light and I knew that this was truly Jesus and whose the first voice had really been.

“I saved you from the Plague and your own sinful desire in your hour of need,” He told me. “I raised you up from the pit so that you might do God’s will on Earth. As I gave up My life to save Man from sin, so must you give up worldly power to save the people from their dark natures. As God chose Me for My Calvary, so do I choose you for yours.”

I returned from the desert to Washington and I obeyed. I put the thought of worldly glory behind me. There were those who snickered when I accepted this appointment. There were those who laughed when I told the nation that I had done it at the bidding of Jesus.

Even my wife told me I was a fool, and a breach was opened between us that I knew no way to heal. We became strangers to each other sharing the same marriage bed.

Oh yes, I paid dearly for my obedience to God’s will. But while I may have lost my chance at worldly power and hardened my wife’s heart against me, I remained steadfast and strong.

For God had saved me in that dormitory room with Gus and granted me Grace and salvation. And Jesus spoke truth to me in the desert in the presence of the Adversary and saved me again. And so in my heart I knew I had done right.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

How could I have done such a thing? How could I, of all people, have been naive enough to Get It from a meatwhore? As the ancient saying has it, a stiff dick knows no conscience, and they don’t call a fool a stupid prick for nothing.

For my fortieth birthday, I got royally drunk and righteously stoned, and I demanded a special birthday present from Marge. Was it really too much to ask from one’s own wife on the night of the rite de passage of my midlife crisis? Tender loving meat for my Fateful Fortieth? We were both blue-carders. Marge had hardly any sex life at all. The only times I had been unfaithful to her were with radiation-sterilized sex machines.

I was loaded and raving, but she was entirely irrational. She refused. When I attempted to get physical, she locked herself in the bedroom and told me to go stick it in one of my goddamn sex machines.

I reeled out into the streets, stoned out of my mind, aching with despair, with a raging fortieth-birthday hard-on. But I didn’t slink off to the usual sex machine parlor, oh no; that was what Marge had told me to do, wasn’t it?

Instead, I found myself one of those clandestine meatbars. To make the old long story modem and short, I picked up a whore. We inserted our cards in the bar’s reader and of course they both came up blue. Off I went to her room and did every kind of meat I could think of and some that seemed to be her own inventions.

I staggered home, still loaded, and passed out on the couch. The Morning After . . .

Oh my God!

Beyond the inevitable horrid hangover and conjugal recriminations, I awoke to the full awfulness of what I had done. In my present sober and thoroughly detumescent state, I knew all too well how many phony blue cards were floating around the meatbars. Had I . . .?

I ran the standard tests on myself in my own lab for six days. On the sixth day, they came up black. When I cultured the bastard, it turned out to be a Plague variant I had not yet seen.

By this time I had prepared myself for the inevitable. I had made my plans. As fortune would have it, I had ten weeks before my next ID update, ten weeks to achieve what medical science had failed to achieve in twenty years and more of trying.

But I had motivation. If I failed, in ten weeks I would lose my blue card, my job, my mission in life, my wife, my family, and with no one to blame but myself. At this point, I wasn’t even thinking about the fact that I was under sentence of eventual death. What would happen in ten weeks was more than disaster enough to keep me working twenty hours a day, or so at least it seemed.

And, crazed creature that I was, I had a crazy idea, one that, in retrospect, I saw I had been moving toward all along.

My work on cassette vaccines was already well advanced, so might it not be possible to push it one step further, and synthesize an automatic self-programming cassette vaccine? It might be pushing the edge of the scientific possible, but it was my only hope. A crazy idea, yes, but was not madness just over the edge from inspiration?

I stripped a Plague virus down to the harmless core in the usual manner. But I didn’t start hanging on the usual series of antigen coat variants. I started crafting a series of nanomanipulators out of RNA fragments, molecular “tentacles.”

What I was after was an organism that would infect the same cells as the Plague. That would seize any strain of Plague virus it found, destroy the core, and wrap the empty antigen coat around itself, much as a hermit crab crawls inside a discarded seashell in order to protect its nakedness from the world.

In effect, a killed-virus vaccine that could still reproduce as an organism, an organism continually reprogramming its antigen coat to mimic lethal invaders, that would use the corpses of the Enemy to stimulate the production of antibodies to it, a living, self-programming cassette vaccine factory within my own body. The theory was simple, cunning, and elegant. Actually synthesizing such a molecular dreadnaught was something else again . . .

LINDA LEWIN

The story of what happened on Saint Max’s deathbed became a legend of the underground. And whereas Max had been old and had long since outlived any rational expectations of survival, I was young, I appeared healthy, and so what I was risking was readily apparent.

Like Saint Max, Our Lady gave the comfort of her meat to anyone who asked her. I gave freely of my body to young black-carders like myself, to rotting Terminals, to every underground black-carder between.

Perhaps because I was young, perhaps because I was the first convert to Saint Max’s vision daring enough to put it into practice, perhaps because I was so much more naively earnest about it than he had been, perhaps because I appeared to be in such robust health, there were those who believed in it now, who believed in me, in the Faith of Our Lady. If Saint Max had been our Jesus, and I was our Paul, now there were disciples to spread the Faith, no more than scores, maybe, but at least more than Christianity’s original twelve.

Spreading the Faith of Saint Max and Our Lady. Gaining converts with our hope and our bodies as we wandered up and down California. The Plague strains would spread faster now. Millions might die sooner who might have lingered longer. But were we not all under sentence of death anyway, blue-carders and black-carders alike?

Millions of lives might be shortened, but out of all that death, the species might survive. We would challenge the Plague head-on, in the only way we could—love against despair, sex against death. We would force the pace of evolution and/or die trying.

And while we lived, we would at least live free, we would live, and love, and fight for our species’ survival as natural men and women. Better in fire than in ice.

WALTER T. BIGELOW

I had done as God commanded, I was doing His work, but the Devil continued to torment me. Elaine remained distant and cold, the Plague continued to spread despite my best efforts, and then, at length, Satan, not content with this, reached out and put his hand upon my Billy.

Billy, the son I had raised so carefully, the son who to my joy had Found the Light at the age of fourteen, began to act strangely, moping in his room at night, locking himself in the bathroom for suspiciously long intervals. I didn’t need to be the director of the Federal Quarantine Agency to suspect what was happening; any good Christian father could read the signs.

I was prepared to find pornography when I searched his room one morning after he had left for school, but nothing could have prepared me for the vile nature of the filth I found. Photographs of men having meatsex with each other. With young boys. Photographs of naked young boys in the lewdest of poses. And, worse still, hideous cartoons of boys and girls having the most impossible and revolting intercourse with sex machines, automated monstrosities with grotesque vulvas, immense penile organs, done up to simulate animals, robots, tentacled aliens from outer space.

I reeled. My skin crawled. My stomach went cold. Worst of all, the Devil caused my weak flesh to become loathsomely aroused as all those terrible and tantalizing memories of Gus came rushing back between my legs to haunt me.

Revolted, appalled, shaking with outrage and confusion, I was forced to wait until the evening to confront him, and the Devil struck me a second blow in the office, for that was the day when the first reports of the Satanic cult of Our Lady of the Living Dead appeared in my electronic mailbox.

Of course I was aware that there were hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of black-carders living underground outside the Quarantine Zones on bogus blue cards, and spreading their filth among the innocent. We caught hundreds of them every week.

But this . . . this . . . this was Satan’s masterstroke!

Out there in California was a woman, or perhaps several women, known as Our Lady of the Living Dead, clearly possessed by the Adversary and doing his work quite consciously, recruiting others into her Satanic cult, spreading his lies and the Plague in ever-wider circles.

Black-carders were openly offering their meat to their fellow black-carders, spreading multiple strains of Plague virus throughout the underground. Interrogations seemed to indicate that these slaves of Satan actually believed that they were the saviors of the species, that in some mystical manner they were speeding the course of evolution, that somehow out of their unholy and deadly couplings a strain of humanity would evolve that was immune to the Plague.

He is not the Prince of Liars for nothing. He had apparently quite convinced these poor doomed creatures of this one, cunningly using their despair-maddened lust and turning it against us all, giving them a truly devilish excuse to wallow in it until they died in the conviction that they were doing God’s Work in the process.

And laughing at them and at me by causing his servant to wrap herself in the cognomen of the Mother of Jesus!

I gave the necessary orders. The stamping out of the cult of Our Lady was to be the SP’s number one priority. Arrest these people. If any resisted, shoot to kill. Close as many meatbars as possible. And do it all as conspicuously as could be managed. Spread the fear of God’s wrath and that of the SP among the denizens of the underground.

After a day like that, I was constrained to return home and confront Billy. There was denial, sobbing confession, promises of repentance, and strong penances set. I had done my patriotic duty and my fatherly duty. It had been hard, but I had done God’s will and was as at peace as one could be under the terrible circumstances.

But Satan was still not finished with me. He seized Elaine, my good Christian wife, and caused her to launch into the most appalling tirade. “How can you be so hard-hearted?” she demanded. “Aren’t things bad enough for young people growing up these days? At least you shouldn’t try to keep Billy from a little safe masturbation.”

“It’s against God’s law! Besides, you saw that revolting, unnatural—”

“Of course it’s unnatural, Walter! What else can you expect when the most natural thing in the world is the one thing none of us can do anymore!”

“Elaine—”

“If you were a real man. Walter T. Bigelow, if you were a real Christian, if you were a real loving father, you’d take the poor boy to a sex machine parlor and show him how to get some harmless release!”

I could hardly believe my ears for a long moment. This could not be Elaine! But then I understood. This insinuating blasphemy was coming from her lips, but my poor wife was only an instrument. The voice saying these awful things through her had identified itself by the very act of causing a good Christian woman to mouth them.

“I know you . . .” I muttered.

“No you don’t, Walter Bigelow, you don’t know me at all!”

“Get thee behind me—”

“Have it your own way!” she shouted. And she locked herself in the bedroom, leaving me to spend a sleepless night in the living room, praying to Jesus, demanding to know why He had so forsaken me in the presence of the Enemy.

I made my way up the coast toward San Francisco real slowly, spending nearly a month in Los Angeles, which was big, and sprawling, and a hell of a town for a zombie to party in. There were plenty of meatbars, my latest batch of pallies seemed to be holding up real well, I was looking’ good, I had umpteen phony blue cards, and I was able to meatfuck myself near to exhaustion. It was almost too easy.

And then one night I found out why.

I let myself get picked up on the street by this sexy space case who told me she’d give me free meat if I was a black-carder. if you can believe that one. Well, she was beautiful, I was real stoned and in a kind of funny mood, so I shoved her into an alley, Gave It to her, and then announced my wonderful secret identity as a black-card-carrying zombie of the Army of the Living Dead, expecting to get my jollies watching her freak.

Only she didn’t. She smiled at me. She fuckin’ kissed me, and she told me I was doin’ the Work of Our Lady whether I knew it or not.

Say what? Say who?

And she told me.

She told me that whether I knew it or not, I was a soldier in a different army now, an army called the Lovers of Our Lady. Whose mission it was to have meat with as many people as possible in order to save the species, if you can believe that one, brothers and sisters! That somehow by all of us Giving as many strains of It to each other as we could, we might end up with multiimmune humans.

Believe it when they tell you L.A. is full of all kinds of weirdos, brothers and sisters!

But soon the weirdness began getting ominous. All of a sudden the SPs were swarming all over the meatbars like flies on horseshit, running every last customer they caught through the national data bank no matter how long it took. The underground safe houses were no longer so safe. They were grabbing people at random on the streets and blowing away anyone who showed any resistance. I mean, suddenly the Sex Police were real agitated.

I never did find out whether they were hot after me and my fellow zombies or what, I mean after a few close calls, there was clearly no percentage in sticking around to find out. Especially since the pallies were starting to wear off once more and I was getting to lookin’ obvious and ragged. San Francisco was beginning to look like my best bet again after all.

I snatched me another car and headed north again, staying away from the population centers, meatfucking my way slowly up the center of California, following a kind of secret underground circuit.

It was real easy, once I got the hang of it and picked up on the stories. That weirdo back in L.A. had given me a good steer. All I had to tell these assholes was that I was doin’ the Work of Our Lady and they’d do me anything.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

It was arduous, but my little dreadnaught was ready with five days to spare, and it was even more elegant than my original concept. Like the Plague itself, it infected via the usual sexual or intravenous vectors, colonizing semen, blood, and mucous membrane. Unlike the Plague, however, it did not interfere with T-cell activity or production. Lacking an antigen coat, it was “invisible” to the host immune system.

As a retrovirus, it would write itself into host genomes, so that when it expressed itself during cellular reproduction, it would invade two more cells, a process that would continue until all suitable host cells were infected.

If an invading retrovirus should be encountered during the expression phase, it would destroy the active core and wrap itself in the “dead” antigen coat. If the host already had antibodies to these antigens, that variant would die. If not, it would eventually write itself back into a host genome, shedding the antigen “shell” in the process.

Thus, when a retrovirus invaded the host, the host bloodstream would become saturated with empty invader antigen coats, to which the host immune system would eventually form antibodies, conferring immunity to the invader precisely in the manner of a “killed virus” vaccine.

It not only conferred immunity to all strains of the Plague virus, it would automatically immunize the host against all retroviruses. And, like the Plague, it would spread via sexual contact.

That was what my molecular analysis predicted. It remained only to test the dreadnaught. But there was a stringent law against introducing into human hosts a live, genetically tailored organism capable of reproduction outside the lab, even for test purposes. It would take congressional legislation to allow me to begin human tests, and even then it could be years before the dreadnaught received FDA certification.

And I had only five days. In five days, I was up for ID card updating. If I tested out black, which I would, I would lose my job and be dumped unceremoniously into the San Francisco Quarantine Zone, and all would be lost.

I had only one chance to keep my blue card long enough to see the whole process through. I myself would have to be my first test subject. If it didn’t work, all was lost anyway. If it did—and I was convinced it would—no one ever need know that I had violated the FDA regulations.

So I injected myself with the dreadnaught culture. Three days later, my body was free of the Plague. I took some of my blood and exposed it to other Plague strains as well as a variety of other retroviruses. My dreadnaught killed them all.

I called Harlow Prinz, the president of Sutcliffe, and asked for a special meeting of the board of directors, at which I promised to present the greatest advance in medicine in the last fifty years and then some. I could all but hear him drooling.

The Nobel for medicine seemed a certainty.

And, seeing as how the dreadnaught would spread itself by sexual contact without the need for economically prohibitive mass inoculation, it could eliminate the Plague from the festering Third World as well, so a second Nobel, this one for peace, might not be beyond the bounds of possibility.

WALTER T. BIGELOW

Elaine refused to have interface sex with me at all. She refused to sleep in the same bedroom with me. She took to disparaging my manhood. Meals were undercooked, overcooked, slovenly prepared. Her housekeeping deteriorated. She kept insisting that I introduce Billy to the sex machine parlors and called my righteous refusal “un-Christian.”

I no longer knew the woman I lived with. Elaine was now acting like a woman with a secret life, indeed like a woman hiding an adulterous relationship. Was it possible? How long had it been going on? Had she been making a fool of me all these years?

Of course I had the necessary resources to find out. I had her followed. But what the reports revealed was no human lover.

There were written accounts. There were still photos. There was even an ingeniously obtained clandestine video.

Elaine was a sex machine addict.

Almost every day when I was away at work, she visited one of several sex machine parlors, and stayed for at least an hour, engaging in machine sex perversions of which I had previously been unaware, which I had not even previously believed possible.

When I confronted her with the evidence, she defiantly admitted that she had been doing it secretly for years. “You just haven’t been satisfying me, Walter.”

“Adulteress!”

“Adulteress? Just the opposite! I’ve been doing it to keep from becoming an adulteress!”

“It’s against God’s law!”

“Show me anything in the scriptures against it!”

“It’s the sin of Onan!”

“Good Lord, Walter, it’s the Plague, can’t you see that?”

“Of course I can see that! God is testing us, and you’ve failed Him.”

“I’ve failed Him? Or has He failed us?

“Blasphemy!”

“Is it?” she insinuated “Can it be Jesus’s God of Love who has taken natural love itself away from us and forced us into all these perversions? Look what’s happened to us! Look what’s happened to Billy! Where is God’s Love in all that?”

“It’s the Devil tormenting us, not God, Elaine!”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Walter Bigelow! The Plague is the work of the Devil, not God. So anything that helps us survive Satan’s torment—the interfaces, the sex machines—must be God’s mercy. Jesus loves us, doesn’t He? He can’t want us to suffer any more than we have to!”

And then I knew for certain.

Not the Prince of Liars for nothing.

My Elaine had neither the evilness of spirit nor the cunning of mind to say these things to me. She was clearly possessed by the Devil.

Christian and husbandly duty coincided.

I placed Elaine under clandestine house arrest. And began consulting exorcists.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

They were all there—Harlow Prinz, the president of Sutcliffe, Warren Feinstein, the chairman of the board, and the entire board of directors. They all had dollar signs in their eyes as I began my presentation. They listened with rapt silence as I proceeded, a silence that grew rather ominous and eerie as I went on.

And the conclusion of my presentation fell into a deathly graveyard hush that seemed to go on forever. I finally had to break it myself.

“Uh . . . any questions?”

“This, ah, dreadnaught virus is a self-replicating organism? It will reproduce by itself outside the lab?”

“That’s right.”

“And it spreads like the Plague?”

“It can easily enough be made pandemic.”

“Who has had access to this information?”

“Why, no one outside this room,” I told them. “I did this one on my own.”

Like a crystal suddenly dissolving back into solution, the hushed atmosphere shattered into a series of whispered cross-conversations. After a few minutes of this, Prinz snapped orders into his intercom.

“Security to lab twelve! Seal it off. No one in or out except on my personal orders. Get a decontamination team down there and execute Code Black procedures.”

“Code Black?” I cried. “There’s no Code Black in my lab! No pathogen release! No—”

“Shut up, Bruno! Haven’t you done enough already?” Prinz shouted at me. “You’ve created an artificial human parasite, you imbecile! The FDA will crucify us!”

“If we report it . . .” Feinstein said slowly.

“Yes . . . Prinz said.

“What are you going to do, Harlow?”

“I’ve already done it. We’ll follow maximum Code Black procedure, Incinerate the contents of lab twelve, then pump it full of molten glass. We’ll keep this an internal matter. It never happened.”

“But what about him?”

“Indeed . . .” Prinz said slowly. “Security to the boardroom!” he snapped into his intercom.

“What the hell is going on?” I finally managed to demand. “You’ve committed a very serious breach of FDA regulations, Dr. Bruno,” Feinstein told me. “One that could have grave consequences for the company.”

“But it’s a monumental breakthrough!” I cried. “Haven’t you heard a word I’ve said? It’s a cure for all possible Plague variants! It’ll save the country from—”

“It would destroy Sutcliffe, you cretin!” Prinz shouted. “Fifty-two percent of our gross derives from Plague vaccines, and another twenty-one percent from the sale of palliatives! And your damned dreadnaught is a venereal disease, man—it wouldn’t even be a marketable product!”

“But surely the national interest—”

“I’m afraid you haven’t considered the national interest at all, Dr. Bruno,” Feinstein said much more smoothly. “The medical industry’s share of GNP has been twenty-five percent for years, and the Plague is hard-wired into our economy; your dreadnaught would have precipitated a massive depression.”

“And destroyed the whole raison d’etre of our policy vis-a-vis the Third World.”

“Thereby shattering the Soviet-Chinese-American-Japanese entente and rekindling the Cold War.”

“Leading to a nuclear Armageddon and the destruction of our entire species!”

What monstrous sophistry! What sheer insanity! What loathsome utterly self-interested bullshit! They couldn’t be serious!

But just then two armed guards entered the boardroom, and their presence suddenly forced me to realize just how serious the board really was. They were already destroying the organism. From their own outrageously cold point of view, their hideous logic was quite correct. The dreadnaught virus would reduce the medical industry to an economic shadow of its former self. Sutcliffe would fold. And their jobs and their fortunes would be gone . . .

“Dr. Bruno is not to be allowed to leave the premises or to communicate with the outside,” Prinz told the guards. They crossed the room to flank my chair with pistols at the ready. “What are we going to do with him?”

How far would they really go to protect their own interests? “Perhaps Dr. Bruno has met with an unfortunate accident in the lab . . .” Prinz said slowly.

My God, were they deadly serious?

“Surely you’re not suggesting . . .?” Feinstein exclaimed, quite aghast.

“The organism is being destroyed, we can wipe his research notes from the data banks, no one else knows, we can hardly afford to leave loose ends dangling,” Prinz said. “You have any better ideas, Warren?”

“But—”

Did I panic? Did I become one of them? Was I acting out of ruthless self-interest myself, or following a higher imperative? Or all four? Who can say? All I knew then was that my life was on the line, that I had to talk my way out of that room, and the words came pouring out of me before I even thought them, or so it seemed.

“One million dollars a year,” I blurted.

“What?”

“That’s my price for silence. I want my salary raised to one million a year.”

“That’s preposterous!”

“Is it? You’ve said yourself that the survival of Sutcliffe is at stake. Cheap at twice the price!”

“Cheaper and safer to eliminate the problem permanently,” Prinz said.

“Ye Gods, Harlow, you’re talking about murder!” Feinstein cried. “Dr. Bruno’s suggestion is much more . . . rational. He’d hardly be about to talk while we’re paying him a million a year for his silence!”

“He’s right, Harlow!”

“The other’s too risky.”

“I don’t like it, we can’t trust—”

“He’ll have to agree to accept an appointment to the board,” Feinstein said. “Meaning that he knowingly accepts legal responsibility for our actions. Besides, we’re destroying the organism, aren’t we? Who would believe him anyway?”

“Will you agree to Warren’s terms?” Prinz asked me.

I nodded silently. In that moment, I would have agreed to anything that would let me get out of the building alive.

Only later, driving home, did I ponder the consequences of what I had agreed to, did I consider what on Earth I was going to do next. What could I possibly tell Marge and Tod? How could I explain our sudden enormous riches?

And what about my mission, my Hippocratic oath, my duty to suffering humanity? Those imperatives still existed, and the decision was still in my hands. For what the board fortunately did not know was that the dreadnaught virus had not been completely destroyed. The sovereign cure for the Plague was still alive and replicating in my body. I was immune to all possible Plague variants.

And that immunity was infectious.

JOHN DAVID

I made my way up the coast to the Bay Area, and there I was stymied, brothers and sisters. I kept on the move—San Jose, Oakland, Marin County, and back again in tight little circles. The SPs were everywhere, they were really paranoid, they were rounding up people at random on the street, and it wasn’t only the likes of me they were after.

The Word had come down from the usual somewhere to put the heat on. The SPs around the meatbars were tighter than a ten-year-old’s asshole. Everyone they rousted got their cards run through the national databank, I mean there were roadblocks and traffic jams ten miles long. People were disappearing wholesale. And the poop in the underground was that they were doing all this to come down as hard as they knew how on anyone “doing the work of Our Lady.”

And that was me, brothers and sisters. I mean, I was determined to meatfuck anything I could anyway, and calling myself a “Lover of Our Lady” was not only the best come-on line anyone had ever invented, it was ready access to the safe houses that were opening up everywhere in response to the heat, to cheap and even free pallies, to the whole black-carder underground. For sure. I’m not saying that I bought any of that bullshit about sacred duty to evolve immunity into the species, but I sure dished plenty of it out when it made life easy.

But why did I stick around the Bay Area in the middle of the worst Sex Police action in the country when sooner or later I figured to get caught in a sweep? When I did, and my phony blue card came up null, they’d run a make on my prints and come up with my Legion record, and then they’d for sure flush me down their toilet bowl, you better believe it!

Well, for one thing, the marks were coming out again, I was beginning to get moldy and obvious, and here at least I had some chance of disappearing into the underground. And for another, I was getting weak and feverish and maybe not thinking too clearly.

And there was San Francisco, clearly visible across the Bay. Where the SPs never went. The only safe place for a wanted zombie like me. The only place I could bop till I dropped. Sitting there staring me in the face. Somehow, getting there had become a goal in itself, something I just had to do before I went under. What else was left?

But there was an impenetrable line of razor wire and laser traps and crack SP troops across the Peninsula behind it and a bay full of pig boats patrolling its coastline and enough gunships buzzing around it day and night to take Brazil. All designed to keep the meatfuckers inside. But just as effective in keeping the likes of me out.

No one ever got out of San Francisco. And there was only one way in. Your card came up black, and the SPs loaded you into a chopper and dumped you inside from five feet up. But if the SP ever got its meathooks on me, they’d punch my ticket for sure, and not for San Francisco, you better believe it!

The only other way in was a loner kamikaze run on the blockade, and that was even more certain death. Oh yeah, I knew I was deep into Condition Terminal now, but that spaced out yet, I wasn’t!

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

What I did, for the time being, was nothing. I banked my new riches in a separate account and told Marge nothing. I showed up at the lab every day and puttered around doing nothing.

I staggered around in a trance like a moral zombie, hating myself every waking moment of every awful day. I had successfully performed my life’s mission. I had conquered the Enemy. I could have been the Savior of mankind. I should have been the Savior of mankind.

Instead, all I could do was hide the secret from my wife and collect my blood money.

Would I have done it on my own? Would morality finally have been enough? Would I have ultimately been faithful to the oath of Hippocrates? I would never know.

My son Tod took the decision out of my hands.

One night the Sex Police showed up at our house with Tod in custody. He had been caught in a raid on a meatbar. His card had come up blue against the national data bank and he had passed a spot genome test that I had never heard of before, so they really had nothing to hold him for.

But they read Marge and myself the riot act. This kid was caught peddling his ass in a meatbar, we don’t know how long he’s been doing it, he claims it was his first time. He’s blue now, but you know what the odds are. Get the horny little bastard an interface and scare the the shit out of him, or he’s gonna end up as Condition Terminal in San Francisco.

While Marge broke down and wept, I had my awkward man-to-man with Tod, poor little guy. “Do you realize what you’ve been risking?” I demanded.

He nodded miserably. “Yeah,” he said, “but . . . but isn’t it worth it?”

“Worth it!”

“Oh. Dad, you knew what it was like, flesh on flesh without all this damned metal and rubber! How could you expect me to live my whole life without ever having that?”

“It’s your life we’re talking about. Tod!”

“So what!” he cried defiantly. “We’re all gonna die sooner or later anyway! I’d rather live a real life while I can than die an old coward without every’ knowing anything but interfaces and sex machines! I’d rather take my chances and be a man! I’d rather die brave than live like . . . like . . . like a pussy! Wouldn’t you?”

What could I possibly say to that? What would he say if he knew my wonderful and awful secret? How could I even look my own son in the eye. let alone continue this lying lecture? What could I possibly do now?

Only one thing.

If I was still too much of a cowering creature to save the world at the expense of my own life, at least I could contrive to save my son, and without alerting the powers at Sutcliffe in the process. And at least covertly pass this awful burden off to someone else.

Tod’s plight had shown me the way and given me the courage to act.

A stiff dick might ordinarily know no conscience. But mine was the exception that proved the rule. It was my conscience now. Use me, it demanded. Use me and let a Plague of life loose in the world.

LINDA LEWIN

“I may be a meatwhore, but I’m not a monster!” I told him indignantly. “What you’re asking me to do is the most loathsome thing I’ve ever heard!”

He had approached me in a meatbar in Palo Alto.

I had been spending a lot of time in such places lately, for here the Work of Our Lady was doubly important. For here bitter and twisted black-carders came with their phony blue cards to take sexual vengeance on foolish blue-carders. Every time I could persuade one of these wretches to take their comfort in me, I saved someone from the Plague. And every time I could persuade him afterward to do the Work of Our Lady instead of infecting more blue-carders, the ranks of the Lovers of Our Lady grew.

But Richard, as he called himself, was something different, the lowest creature I had ever encountered even in a place like this.

He wanted me to have meat with him, and then, a week later, to have meat with his own teenage son! And I could name my own price.

“What’s so terrible about that?” he said ingenuously. “Your card will come up blue, won’t it?” But his sickly twisted grin told me all too well that he knew the truth. Or part of it.

I knew what a chance I was taking. He could be undercover SP. He could be anything. But if I just refused and walked away, he’d only find another meatwhore with a phony blue card more than willing to take his money to do this terrible thing.

“I’m her,” I told him. “I’m Our Lady of the Living Dead.”

He didn’t even know who Our Lady was or the nature of the Work we were doing. So I told him.

“And that’s why I won’t do what you ask. I only have sex with black-carders. I’ve Got It. And I’ll give the Plague to you and your son. And so would any meatwhore you’re likely to find. Don’t you really know that?”

“You don’t understand,” he insisted. “How could you? You can’t give me the Plague, no one can. I’m immune.”

“You’re what?”

And he told me the most outrageous story. He told me that he was Dr. Richard Bruno of the Sutcliffe Corporation, that he had developed an organism that conferred immunity to all Plague variants. That he could infect me with it and make me a carrier. That’s why he wanted me to have meat with his son, to pass this so-called dreadnaught virus to him.

“You really expect a girl to believe a line like that?”

“You don’t have to believe anything now,” he told me. “Just have meat with me now; you’ve already Got It, so you have nothing to lose. A week later, meet me here, and I’ll take you to a doctor. We’ll do a full workup. If you test out blue, you’ll know I’m telling the truth. I’ll give you fifty thousand right now, and another fifty thousand after you’ve had meat with Tod. Even if I’m lying, you’re still a hundred thousand richer, and you’ve lost nothing.”

“But if you’re lying to me, I’ll have given you the Plague!” I told him. “I won’t risk that.”

“Why not? I’m the one taking the risk, not you.”

“But—”

“You do know what I’ll do if you refuse, don’t you?” he said, leering at me. “I’ll just offer someone with less scruples the same deal. Even if I’m just a lying lunatic, you won’t have saved anyone from anything.”

He had me there. I shrugged.

“I’ve got a room just around the comer,” I told him.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

It was the best sexual experience I’ve ever had in my life, or at any rate since my teenage years, back before the Plague. Flesh on flesh with no intervening interface or rubber, and with no fear of infection either, the pure simple naked act as it was meant to be. And while some part of me knew that it was adultery, an act of disloyalty to Marge, a better and higher part of me knew that it was an act of loyalty to a higher moral imperative—to Tod, to suffering humanity—and that only sharpened my pleasure.

But I did feel shame afterward and not for the adultery. For this, this pure simple act of what was once quite ordinary and natural pleasure, was what I had the power to bring back into the world, not just for me and for her and for Tod, but for everyone everywhere. This was my victory over the Enemy. And what was I doing with it?

Nothing. I was taking a million dollars a year’s blood money to hold my silence and, admittedly, to preserve my own life.

But now that I had already taken the first step upon it, a way opened up before me. I could hold my silence and keep taking the money, but I could spread the dreadnaught virus far and wide, via this cult of Our Lady and my own clandestine action.

The moral imperatives of the oath of Hippocrates and the fondest desire of any man coincided. It was my duty to have meat with as many women as I could as quickly as possible.

LINDA LEWIN

I hadn’t even dared to let myself want to believe it, but oh God, it was true!

The underground doctor to whom Richard Bruno had taken me ran antibody tests and viral protein tests and examined blood, mucus, and tissue samples through an electron microscope.

There was no doubt about it. I was free of all strains of the Plague. Indeed, there was not a retrovirus of any kind in my body.

“Do you know what this means?” I cried ecstatically on the street outside.

“Indeed I do. The long nightmare of the Plague Years is coming to an end. We’re carriers of life—”

“And it’s our duty to spread it!”

“First to my son. Then to as many others as quickly as possible. We need to infect as many vectors as we can before . . . in case . . . so that no matter what happens to us . . .”

I hugged him. I kissed him. In a way, in that moment, I think I began to love him.

“When?” I asked him breathlessly.

“Tonight. I’ll bring him to your room.”

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

Tod was all hot sweaty excitement when I told him I was taking him to a real human whore. “Oh Dad, Dad, thank you . . .”he cried. But then he hesitated. “This girl . . . I mean, you’re sure she’s . . . you know . . .”

Now I hesitated. Between telling him the easy lie that I had found him a real blue-carder or telling him the whole improbable truth. I sighed. I screwed up my courage. I had lived too long with deception.

“It’s really true?” Tod said when I had finished. “The dreadnaught virus? What they did at Sutcliffe? All that money?” I nodded. “Do you believe me, Tod?”

“Well yeah . . . I mean I want to, but . . . but why haven’t you told Mom? Why haven’t you . . . you know, given it to her?”

“Would she have trusted me?”

“I dunno . . . I guess not . . .”

“Do you trust me?”

“I want to . . . I mean . . .” He looked into my eyes for long moments. “I guess I trust you enough to take the chance,” he finally said. “I’m the one that did all the talking about being brave, huh. Dad . . .”

I hugged my son to me. And I took him to Linda Lewin’s room. He entered tremulously but he stayed almost two hours.

LINDA LEWIN

I longed to shout the glorious truth from the rooftops, but when Richard told me the whole horrible story of what had happened at Sutcliffe, I had to agree that I should continue the Work of Our Lady as before, spread the dreadnaught virus as far and wide as possible among the unknowing before those who would stop us could find out what was happening. It was hard to believe that such greedy evil was possible, but the fact that I was cured and the world knew nothing about the dreadnaught proved the sad truth that it was.

Richard swore Tod to secrecy too, and together and separately the three of us began to spread the joyful infection around Palo Alto, telling no one.

Why did I stay in Palo Alto for two weeks instead of resuming my usual rounds up and down California, when in fact spreading the cure around the state as quickly as possible would have probably been wiser and more effective?

Perhaps I felt the need to be near the only two people who shared the glorious secret and the deadly danger of discovery. Perhaps I had fallen in love in a strange way with Richard, with this tormented, fearful, but oh so brave man.

More likely that I knew even then in my heart of hearts that this couldn’t last, that sooner or later Sutcliffe would get wind of it and we would have to run. And when that happened, Richard and Tod would be helpless naifs without me. Only Our Lady would have the connections and road wisdom to even have a chance to keep them one step ahead of our pursuers.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

Once again, what could I possibly tell Marge? The whole story, including the fact that my Hippocratic oath required me to have meat with as many anonymous women as I could? That I had our son similarly doing his duty to the species?

Obviously I had been inexorably forced step by step into such extreme levels of marital deception that there was no way I could now get her to believe the truth, let alone accept its tomcatting moral imperative.

Yet, tormented as I was by the monstrous series of deceptions I was forced to inflict upon my wife, I had to admit that I was enjoying it.

After all, no other men in all the world had the possibility of enjoying sex as Tod and I did. Meat on meat as it was meant to be, and not only free of fear of the Plague, but knowing that we were granting a great secret boon with our favors, that we were serving the highest good of our species in the bargain.

And I was cementing a unique relationship with my son. Tod and I became confidants on a level that few fathers and sons achieve. Swapping tales of our sexual exploits, but sharing the problem of how to recruit Marge to the cause too.

Or, at the very least, infect her with the dreadnaught. But Marge would never have meat with me. Nor would she willingly abandon monogamy. Sexually, psychologically, Marge was a child of the Plague Years, and even if she were to be convinced of the whole truth, she would never condone the need for my profuse infidelities, let alone agree to spread the dreadnaught in the meatbars herself.

In retrospect, of course, it was quite obvious that things could not really go on like this for long.

They didn’t.

Tod got caught in an SP raid on a meatbar again.

But they didn’t drag him home this time. Instead, the news came on the telephone, and it was Marge who chanced to take the call. Tod was being held at the Palo Alto SP headquarters. Other detainees had told the SP that he had been a regular. Black-carders had admitted having meat with him. He was undergoing testing now and his card was sure to come up black.

“Don’t worry,” I told her when she relayed this information in a state of numb, teary panic, “they’ll have to let him go. He’ll test out blue, I promise.”

“You’re crazy, Richard, that’s plain impossible! You’re out of your mind!”

“If you think I’m crazy now,” I said, pouring her a big drink, “wait till I get drunk enough to tell you why!”

I gulped down two quick ones myself before I found the courage to begin, and kept drinking as I babbled out the whole story.

“Now let me give the dreadnaught to you,” I woozed when I was finished, reaching out for her in a state of sloppy inebriation.

She shrieked, pulled away from me, ran around the living room screaming, “You animal! You’re crazy! You’ve killed our son! Stay away from me! Stay away from me!”

How can I explain or excuse what happened next? I was drunk out of my mind, but another part of me was running on coldly logical automatic. If there could be such a thing as loving rape, now was the time for it. Marge was certain that I was a sinkhole of the Plague, and there was only one way I could ever convince her of the truth. I had to infect her with the dreadnaught, and I couldn’t take no for an answer.

The short and nasty of it was that I meatraped my own wife, knowing I was doing the right thing even as she fought with all her strength against me, convinced that she was fighting to keep herself from certain infection with the Plague. It was brutal and horrible and I loathed myself for what I was doing even as I knew full well that it was ultimately right.

And left her there sobbing while I reeled off into the night to retrieve Tod from the SP.

I was in a drunken fury, I was a medical heavyweight, I demanded that they run a full battery of tests on Tod and myself, and I browbeat the tired SP timeserver who ran them unmercifully. When they all turned out blue, I threatened lawsuits and dire political recriminations if Tod were not released to my custody at once, and succeeded thereby in deflecting his attention from the “anomalous organism” he had noticed in our bloodstreams long enough to get us out the door.

But the “anomalous organism” would be noted in his report. And Sutcliffe would be keeping close tabs on my data file, and there were certainly people on their end who would put one and one and one together. It was only a question of how much time it would take.

And we couldn’t stay around to find out. We had to run. Tod, myself, Linda, and Marge. But where? And how?

We drove to Linda’s and had to wait outside for half an hour till the man she was with left.

LINDA LEWIN

“There’s only one place we can go,” I told Tod and Richard. “Only one place we can hide where the SP can’t come after us . . .”

“The San Francisco Quarantine Zone?” Richard stammered. I nodded. “The SP won’t go into San Francisco. There isn’t a Fuck-Q alive who’d be willing to do it.”

“But . . . San Francisco . . .?”

“Remember, we have nothing to fear from the Plague,” I told them. “Besides . . . can you think of anywhere where what we three have is more needed?”

“But how can we even get inside the Zone?”

I had to think about that one for a good long while. I had never even heard of anyone trying to get past the SP into San Francisco. On the other hand, neither had the SP . . .

“Our best bet would be by boat from Sausalito. We wait for a good foggy night, then cross the Golden Gate through the fogbank in a wooden rowboat, no motor noise, no radar profile. The patrol boats stick in close to San Francisco and they’re watching the coastline, not the Bay. The helicopters won’t be able to see us through the fog even if they are flying . . .”

“Sounds like risky business,” Richard said dubiously.

“Any better ideas?”

Richard shrugged. “Let’s go collect Marge,” he said.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

The three of us piled into Linda’s car—they’d be looking for mine once they were looking for anything—and drove back to our house.

Marge was still in a state of shock when we got there. Even when she saw Tod, even when he and Linda backed up my story, she still couldn’t quite believe me. She started to come around a bit when I showed her the enormous balance in my secret account.

But when I told her we had to flee to San Francisco, she fell apart all over again. There was no time for further persuasion. Richard, Linda, and I were forced to wrestle her into the car by brute force, with my hand clamped over her mouth to prevent her from screaming.

We drove around the rim of the bay to Sausalito, bought a rowboat, rented motel rooms, and waited.

The fog didn’t roll in good and thick until two nights later. During these two days, with Tod and Linda and myself talking to her almost nonstop, Marge slowly came to believe the truth.

But accepting the fact that all of us had a moral duty to spread the dreadnaught in the only way possible was a bit more than she could swallow. She could accept it intellectually, but she remained emotionally shattered.

“I believe you, Richard, truly I do,” she admitted as the sun went down on our last day in Sausalito. “I can even admit that what you’re doing is probably the right thing. But me, I just can’t . . .”

“I know,” I told her, hugging her to me. “It’s hard for me too . . .” and I made tender love to her, meat on meat as it was meant to be, for what was to prove to be the last time.

That night a big bank of fog rolled in through the gap in the Golden Gate Bridge, a tall one too, that kept the gunships high above the San Francisco shoreline. It was now or never.

Tod hesitated on the pier.

“Scared?”

He nodded.

“Me too, Tod.”

He clasped my hand. “I’m scared Dad,” he said softly. “I mean, I know we don’t have much of a chance of making it . . . But if anything happens . . . I want you to know that I wouldn’t have it any other way . . . We had to do what we did. I love you, Dad. You’re the bravest man I’ve ever known.”

“And I’m proud to have you for a son,” I said with tears in my eyes. “I only wish . . .”

“Don’t say it, Dad.”

I hugged him to me, and then we all piled into the boat, and Tod and I began to row.

The currents were tricky and kept pushing us east and the going was tougher than I had anticipated, but we steered for the lights of the city and made dogged progress.

We couldn’t have been more than five hundred yards from the shore when a spotlight beam suddenly pinned us in a dazzling circle of pearly light. “Rowboat heave to! Rowboat heave to!”

So near and yet so far! If the SP caught us, we were finished. We had no choice but to row for it.

We pulled out of the spotlight and zigged and zagged toward the shore while a motor roared back and forth behind us and the spotlight flitted randomly over the flat waters. The fog was quite thick, and they had trouble picking us up again.

When they finally did we were within two hundred yards of the shore. And then they opened up with some kind of heavy machine-gun.

“We’re sitting ducks in this boat!” Tod shouted. “Got to swim for it!” And he dived overboard and down into the darkness of the waters under a hail of bullets.

Everything seemed to happen at once. The boat tipped as Tod dived, Linda rolled over the side, Marge panicked and fell overboard, the boat turned turtle—

And we were all in the cold water, swimming as far as we could under water before surfacing for air, catching quick breaths, swimming for our lives beneath a random fusillade of bullets and a skittery searchlight beam.

There was no room for thought or even fear as I swam for my life with aching lungs, no time or space to feel the horror of what was happening. Until, gasping for air, exhausted and freezing. I clawed my way up a rocky beach.

Out across the dark waters, the searchlight still roamed and the machine-gun fire still flashed and chattered. Linda Lewin crawled up beside me, panting and coughing. We lay there, not moving, not talking, not thinking, for a long time, until the gunboat finally gave up and disappeared into the fog.

Then we got up and searched the beach for at least an hour.

Tod and Marge were nowhere to be found.

“Maybe they made it farther up the beach,” Linda suggested wanly.

But I knew better. I could feel the void in my heart. They were gone. They were gone, and I had killed them as surely as if the hand on the machine-gun trigger had been mine.

“Richard—”

I pulled away from her comforting embrace.

“Richard—”

I turned away from her and let a cold black despair roll like a fog bank into my mind, erasing all thought, and filling me with itself, wondering whether it would ever roll out again.

And hoping in that endless bleak moment that it never would.

JOHN DAVID

I suppose I knew it had to happen sooner or later, brothers and sisters, but at least I thought I’d be able to go down fighting and take some of the meatfuckers with me.

It didn’t happen that way. They got me while I was asleep, would you believe it!

I was going downhill fast, I was feverish, weak, and I wasn’t really thinking, I mean I was wandering the streets like an obvious zombie for real. I got picked up by some people whose faces I don’t even remember who took me to an Our Lady safe house in Berkeley, where I passed out as soon as I hit the mattress.

Some meatfuckin’ safe house!

I got woke up in the middle of the night by a gun butt in the back of the neck and another in my belly. They rounded everyone in the joint up and hauled us to the SP station. They ran everyone’s cards against the national data bank.

Everyone but me. Me, they didn’t have to bother, seeing as I was an obvious Condition Terminal and they had caught me with about a dozen assorted phony blue cards in my kit. Me, they just took my finger and retina prints and faxed ’em to Washington.

“Well, well, well,” the SP lieutenant purred after no more than half an hour. “John David recently of the Legion, wanted for about ten thousand counts of murder, meatrape, and ID forgery, not to mention robbery, insurrection, border crashing, and treason. You’re a bad boy, aren’t you, John? But I’m real pleased to meet you. I get the feeling you’re gonna get me a nice promotion. Tell you what, if you do, the night before they do you, your last meal’s on me.”

WALTER T. BIGELOW

Not content with possessing my wife, Satan pursued me to my office. First the blasphemous cult of Our Lady and then a series of anomalies in the San Francisco Bay Area that seemed to indicate that the national data bank had somehow been compromised.

It was common enough for phony blue cards to come up black against the national data bank. But it was unheard of for anyone caught with a forged blue card not to prove out black upon actual testing for the Plague, for of course it made absolutely no sense for someone with a valid blue card to use a forged one.

But it was happening around the Bay Area. There were almost a dozen cases.

And now this truly bizarre incident last night in the same locale. Four people in a rowboat had actually tried to run the Quarantine blockade into San Francisco! Two of them seemed to have actually made it.

When the bodies of the other two were fished out of the Bay, they proved to be Tod and Marge Bruno, the son and daughter of one Dr. Richard Bruno, a prominent genetic synthesizer with the Sutcliffe Corporation.

The local SP commandant was due for a promotion or at least a commendation.

He had run all three names through the national data bank. Tod Bruno had been caught in a meatbar sweep three days previously. Although many witnesses claimed he was an habitué, he had come out blue under a full spectrum of tests. The commandant had had the wit to dig deeper and found that some “anomalous organism” had been noted in the actual report.

Instinct had caused him to order the bodies of Tod and Marge Bruno to be given a thorough and complete autopsy down to the molecular level. And it was that report that put me on a plane for San Jose.

There was a strange “pseudovirus” written into both of their genomes. It shared many sequences with the Plague virus but resembled no known or extrapolated variant, and it had other sequences that could not have evolved naturally. The bodies had been dead too long to try to culture it.

An unknown “pseudovirus” in the bodies of the family of a prominent genetic synthesizer . . . It could only be one thing—an unreported Condition Black incident at Sutcliffe. And the ultimate handiwork of the Devil had been released—some kind of horrible artificial human parasite, a manmade Plague variant. We had two corpses that had been infected with it, and I was virtually certain that Bruno at least was also infected, and was alive somewhere in San Francisco.

What might happen in that cesspit of Satan was none of my affair, but Tod Bruno had been infected when he was picked up in a meatbar outside the Quarantine Zone, and he had passed through a full battery of tests and come out blue.

Meaning that this monstrous thing was invisible to all our standard Plague tests. What had the Devil wrought at the Sutcliffe Corporation?

As I flew westward, I had the unshakable conviction that I was flying toward some climactic confrontation with the Adversary, that the battle of Armageddon had already begun.

LINDA LEWIN

San Francisco was not what I had expected. I’m not sure what I had really expected, a foul Sodom of ruins and rotting zombies, maybe, but this was not it.

The streets were clean and the quaint buildings lovingly cared for. The famous old cable cars were still running and so were the buses. The restaurants were open, the bars were crowded, and there were cabarets and theaters. There were even friendly cops walking beats.

Food and various necessities were allowed in through the Daly City Quarantine Line and sterilized products allowed out, so the city did have an economy connected to the outside world. The place was poor, of course, but the people inside it held together to see themselves through. Food was expensive in the restaurants but artificially cheap in the markets. Housing was crowded, but the rents were kept low, and the indigent or homeless were put up in public buildings and abandoned BART stations.

Oh yes, there were many horrible Condition Terminals walking around, but many more people who could have easily melted into the underground life outside. And there was something quite touching about how all the temporarily healthy deferred to and showed such tender regard for the obvious Living Dead, something that reminded me of dear old Max.

Indeed his spirit seemed to hover over this doomed but fatalistically gay-spirited city. Of necessity, everyone was forced to be a Saint Max here, and although the Lovers of Our Lady did not exist as such, everyone here seemed to be doing the Work.

No one here had to worry about Getting It, or being carded, or picked up by the SP. All of that had already happened to all of them. So, while there were more open gays here than I had ever thought to see in my life, stranger still to say, there was less . . . perversion in San Francisco than anywhere else I had ever been.

No meatbars as such, for every bar was a meatbar. Hardly any sex machine parlors, for the people of San Francisco, already all under sentence of death, could give one another love freely, like what natural men and women must once have been. Even the obviously terminal had their needs tenderly cared for.

No place I had ever been seemed more like home.

Only the pall of Plague that hung over the city marred the sweetness of the atmosphere, and that seemed softened by the fogs, pinkened by the sunsets, lightened by the deathhouse gaiety and wistful philosophic melancholy with which the citizens confronted it. “Everyone’s born under a death sentence anyway,” went the popular saying. “Here at least we all know it. There is no tomorrow sooner or later, so why not live and love today?”

Uncertain of what to do next, I began doing the Work of Our Lady in the usual manner, offering myself to anyone and everyone, spreading the dreadnaught slowly, but unsure as to whether or when to spread the glorious news.

I would have been happy there—indeed the truth of it was that I was happy—even while I sorrowed for poor Richard.

Richard, though, was like a little child whom I had to lead around like a creature in a daze. All his energy and motivation seemed to have vanished with his wife and son. I could understand his grief and guilt, but this couldn’t last forever.

“We’ve got work to do, Richard, glorious and important work,” I kept telling him. “We’ve got to spread the dreadnaught among these people.”

Mostly, he stared at me blankly. Sometimes he managed a feeble, “You do it.”

After a few days of this, I decided that I could no longer wait for Richard to come around. I had to make the fateful decision on my own.

This spreading the dreadnaught by myself clandestinely was just too slow. If there were evil men out there intent on stopping the dreadnaught, they’d be tracking us down. I needed to infect thousands, tens of thousands, before they could act, and the only way that could happen would be if the people of San Francisco knew what they were spreading and set out to do it systematically.

First I began revealing myself as Our Lady to my lovers and in the bars, and there were enough people in San Francisco who had once done the Work on the outside—even some I had once known in my circuit-riding days—so that my claim gained credibility.

In one sense, the people of San Francisco had always been doing the Work of Our Lady, of Saint Max, but in another sense, the legend had never been central here. In San Francisco, the people did the Work of Our Lady to please one another and themselves, not because they believed they were serving the species’ only hope.

But then I began recruiting an army of Lovers of Our Lady and I did it by proclaiming the glorious truth.

That the shattered man I sheltered in my rooms was a great scientist and an even greater hero. That he had developed the dreadnaught organism. That through him I had been infected with the gift of life. That I could infect anyone I had meat with with the cure, that anyone I had meat with would also become infectious. That the Plague Years, through Richard Bruno’s instrumentality and at horrible personal cost to himself, were now coming to an end.

That all we had to do was what we were doing already—love one another.

There were more skeptics than believers at first, of course. “Bring me your Terminals,” I told them. “Let them have meat with Our Lady. When they’re cured, the whole city will see I’m telling the truth.”

WALTER T. BIGELOW

Satan himself seemed to be speaking through Harlow Prinz when I confronted him, laughing his final laugh, for what the president of Sutcliffe finally admitted under extreme duress was worse, far worse, than what I had originally feared.

Bruno had been working on some sort of Plague-killer virus. But he had been building it around a Plague variant and something went wrong. He had created instead a Plague variant that mutated randomly every time it reproduced. That was invisible not only to all current tests short of full-scale molecular analysis, but would remain so to anything that could be devised.

There had been a Condition Black, but only inside the lab, and there were plenty of reports to prove that Sutcliffe had followed proper procedure, as well as a mountain of legal briefs supporting the position that such internally contained Condition Blacks need not be reported to the SP.

“We had no idea Bruno was infected,” Prinz claimed. “Isn’t that right, Warren?”

Warren Feinstein, Sutcliffe’s chairman, who had sat there silently all the while with the most peculiar expression on his face, fidgeted nervously. “No . . . I mean yes . . . I mean how can we be so sure he was infected . . .?”

“The man’s wife and son were infected, now weren’t they, Warren?” Prinz snapped. “You heard the director. Extreme measures must be taken at once to contain this thing!”

“But—”

“Wait a minute!” I cried. “Surely you’re not suggesting the man . . . had meatsex with his wife and . . . and his son knowing he was infected?”

“Let’s hope so,” Prinz said. “At any rate, we have no choice but to act on that assumption.”

“What?”

“Because if he didn’t . . Prinz shuddered. “If he didn’t, then we may all be doomed. Because if Tod and Marge Bruno weren’t infected sexually, then this new virus has to be what we’ve always feared most—a Plague variant that doesn’t need sexual or intravenous vectors, an ambient version that spreads through the air like the common cold.”

“Oh my God.”

“You have no alternative, Mr. Director,” Prinz went on relentlessly. “You must obtain the necessary authority from the president and have San Francisco sterilized at once.”

“Sterilized?”

“Nuked. Condition Black procedure, admittedly on a rather extreme scale.”

“That’s monstrous, Harlow!” Feinstein shouted. “This is going too far! We’ve got to—”

“Shut up, Warren!” Prinz snapped. “Consider the alternative!” Feinstein slumped over in his chair.

“If this thing is ambient, we’re all doomed anyway, so what’s the difference?” Prinz said in Satan’s cold, insinuating voice. “But if it isn’t, and if Bruno’s spreading it in San Francisco . . .”

“You can’t just kill a million people on the supposition that—”

“Shut up, Warren!” Prinz snapped. “You can’t afford to listen to this sentimental fool, Mr. Director, You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to do your duty.”

My duty? But where did that lie? If I had the San Francisco Quarantine Zone sterilized by a thermonuclear explosion, Bruno would be vaporized. And I had to have Bruno live for interrogation before I did any such thing, I realized. I had to know whether he had had meatsex with his wife and son. For if he had, then I would know the virus wasn’t ambient, that there was hope. Then and only then could I have San Francisco sterilized with a clear conscience.

Then and only then would such an awful decision serve God and not the Devil.

I had to find someone willing to go into San Francisco and bring Bruno out. But where was I going to find someone crazy or self-sacrificing enough to do that?

JOHN DAVID

I was feeling pretty punk when two SPs dragged me into an interrogation room, handcuffed me to a chair bolted to the floor, and then split.

But I came around fast, you better believe it, when old Walter T. himself walked into the room and shut the door behind him!

The old meatfucker came right to the point.

“I’ve been looking for someone very special, and the computer spit your name out,” he told me. “I’ve got a job for you. Interested?”

“You gotta be kidding . . .”

“We’re going to drop you in San Francisco. I want you to bring a man out.”

“Say what?” Well shit, brothers and sisters, I could hardly believe my ears. I mean, even in my present Condition Terminal, my ears pricked up at that one. And old Walter T., he sure didn’t miss it.

“Interested, aren’t you? Here’s the deal . . .”

And he told me. An SP helicopter would drop me into San Francisco, where I was to snatch and hold this guy Richard Bruno. Every afternoon at three o’clock they’d have a chopper circle Golden Gate Park for an hour. When I had Bruno, I’d shoot off a Very pistol, and they’d pick me up.

“What do you want this guy for?” I demanded.

“You have no need to know,” he told me.

I eyed him dubiously. “What makes you think I’ll want to come out?” I mean, this dumb meatfucker was gonna throw me into my briar patch, but what could possibly make him believe I’d do his dirty work for him and deliver some poor bastard to the SP? Could he really be as stupid as he seemed? It didn’t seem real likely.

“Because upon delivery of Bruno you’ll be given a full pardon for all your capital crimes.”

“Hey, look at me, man, I’ve got maybe a month left anyway.”

“You can go back into the Legion. As a captain.”

“As a captain?” I snorted. “Shit, why not a bird colonel?”

“Why not indeed?”

“You’re really serious, aren’t you?” Jeez, what a tasty run I could have as a fuckin’ brigade commander. But . . . “But I’m a goner anyway. What difference is it gonna make?”

“The Legion is going into Brazil again even as we speak,” he told me. “We can pump you up with the best military pallies and all the coke and speed you can handle. And drop you into Brazil with colonel’s wings at the head of a brigade twelve hours after you deliver Bruno. A short life, but a happy one.”

“Terrific,” I said, studying old Walter T. carefully. This still didn’t quite add up. He was holding something back, and I had a feeling I wasn’t gonna like it. “But what makes you so sure I wouldn’t prefer to spend that short happy life in San Francisco?”

Now it was Walter T.’s turn to study me carefully, then shrug. “Because unless you bring Bruno out, that could be a lot shorter than you think.”

“Huh?”

“We’re going to drop you into San Francisco anyway, so I might as well tell you the truth,” Bigelow said. “I get the feeling nothing else is really going to motivate you, but this surely will.”

He told me, and it did.

Bruno was some kind of genetic synthesizer. He had screwed up real bad and created a new Plague variant that was invisible to all the standard tests and just might be able to spread through the air.

“So we need to know whether Bruno is infected with something that could be spreading around San Francisco right now, something that we can only hope to stop by . . . shall we say measures of the maximum extremity.”

Well, brothers and sisters, I didn’t need any promotion to bird colonel to figure out what he meant by that. “You mean nuke San Francisco, don’t you?”

“Unless we have Bruno to examine and unless that examination reassures us that he hasn’t been spreading this thing, we really have no alternative . . . I’ll give you two weeks. After that, well . . .”

“You nuke San Francisco with me inside it!”

Bigelow nodded. “I think I can trust you to do your honest best, now, can’t I?” he said.

Well, what could I say to that? Only one thing, brothers and sisters. What I told old Walter T. next.

“I want the coke and the speed and the pallies right now. All I can carry.”

“Very well,” he said. “Why not? Anything you need.”

“I don’t have any choice, now, do I?”

“None whatever.”

If I hadn’t been cuffed to the chair, I would have ripped off the old meatfucker’s arm and beaten him to death with it. But even then, I had to admire his style, if you know what I mean. Turn the bastard’s card black, and old Walter T. would have been right at home with us, fellow zombies.

LINDA LEWIN

After the marks started to fade from terminal cases and black-carders started proving out blue on the simple tests the underground docs put together, the word began to spread faster, and so did the dreadnaught, and the Lovers of Our Lady began to spread the good news on their own in the streets and bars of San Francisco.

One day a delegation came to me and took me to a rambling old house high on a hill above Buena Vista Park that they called the House of Our Lady of Love Reborn. They installed me in quarters on the third floor and they brought Richard with me.

There I was surrounded by the Lovers of Our Lady. And so was Richard. He was surrounded by people who cared for him, who loved him, who knew what heroic deeds he had done, and at what terrible cost. Slowly, far too slowly, he began to react to his surroundings, to mutter haltingly of his guilt and despair. But he still refused to join in the Work, for he found the mere thought of sex loathsome, no matter who offered themselves to him, including myself.

And the Work itself, though proceeding apace, was going far too slowly. How long did we have before the outside world learned the truth? Months? Weeks? Days? And what would happen then? Indeed, might it be in the process of happening already?

What I needed to do was infect all of San Francisco with the dreadnaught, so that when the outside world finally intruded, it would be presented with the truth and its massive proof as a glorious fait accompli—an entire city, a Quarantine Zone once completely black, now entirely free of the Plague.

Once, long before most of the people here were born, San Francisco had experienced a magical few months that was called the Summer of Love, a legend that still lived in the myth of the city.

So I conceived the notion of a Week of Love, a celebration of the dreadnaught and a means of quickly spreading it to all, a carnival of sex, a citywide orgy, a festival of Our Lady of Love Reborn.

And perhaps via such a manifestation and celebration of what he had brought back into the world, Richard too might be reborn back into it . . .

JOHN DAVID

The pallies they shot me up with before they dropped me in San Francisco didn’t seem to do much good, but the speed and coke sure did, brothers and sisters. I might look like Condition Terminal on its last legs, but I was riding high and burning bright on the way out, you better believe it!

I expected San Francisco to be weird and wild, something like TJ before the SP moved in on us, but this was something else again, weird for sure, but not exactly this zombie’s idea of wild.

The city was like something out of an old movie—clean, and neat, and like you know quaint, like some picture postcard of itself, and I found I could have just about any kind of meat with anyone I wanted to just by asking for it, even looking like I did.

There were plenty of terminal zombies like me walking around and plenty more outrageous faggots, but these people were like so damned sweet and kind and nicey-nice to us on the way out it made me want to puke. I mean all this peace and sympathy sex and love pissed me off so bad I just about wanted to see Wimp City nuked, if you know what I mean.

But not, of course, with me in it!

Bigelow had it covered. I had no choice at all. I had to get my crumbling ass in gear and get my mitts on Bruno, on my only ticket out.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

I can hardly remember what it was like inside that place of darkness or even precisely how and when I began to emerge from it. First there was a soft warm light in my cold blackness, and then I slowly began to take notice of my surroundings.

I was living in an ancient Victorian house high on a hill in San Francisco, a place that was known as the house of Our Lady of Love Reborn, Linda Lewin was living there with me, and I knew that she had been caring for me through my long dark night. As had many others. For this was a house of love and hope. It was a kind of a brothel, and a kind of church, and what was being spread here was my dreadnaught virus. And all those who came and went here loved me.

“Dr. Feelgood,” they all called me. Not the creature who had brought his wife and son to death, but the man who had brought love back into the world.

“You’ve grieved long enough, Richard; Marge and Tod are gone, and they deserve your grief,” Linda told me. “But you’ve also done a wonderful thing, and that deserves your joy. Come join the party now. See what they died for. See what you’ve brought back into the world! This is the Festival of Our Lady of Love Reborn, but it’s the Festival of Dr. Feelgood, too.”

And she and the Lovers of Our Lady took me on a tour of San Francisco, on a tour of the carnival, on a tour through an erotic wonderland out of long-lost dreams.

The whole city was partying—in the bars and the parks and the streets. It was Mardi Gras, it was the feast of Dionysus, it was the Summer of Love, it was beautiful madness. Everyone was drunk and stoned and deliriously happy, and people were making love, sharing meat, openly everywhere—in apartments, in bars, right out on the streets.

They were celebrating Love Reborn in the very act of creating it. They were celebrating the end of the Plague Years as they brought it to an end with their joyful flesh.

“Do you understand, Richard?” Linda asked later, back at the house of Our Lady of Love Reborn. “Marge and Tod are dead and they never lived to see what they died for, and that’s a sad thing, and you’re right to mourn. But they didn’t die in vain, they died to help you bring love back into the world, and if they’re watching from somewhere, you can know they’re smiling down on you. And if they’re not, if there’s no God or Heaven, well then, we’re all we’ve got, and we can only take shelter in the living. Do you understand?”

“I’m not sure, Linda . . .” I murmured.

“Then let me help you to begin now,” she said, holding me in her arms. “Come take shelter in me.”

And, hesitantly at first, but with a growing strange peace in my heart, a warrior’s peace, a peace that had become determination by the time we had finished our lovemaking, I did.

And afterward, I understood. Marge and Tod were gone and nothing I could do would bring them back, and that was a terrible thing. The Plague Years had in one way or another made monsters and madmen of us all, we had all been trapped into grievous mistakes, fearful, and frustrated, and loathsome acts, and nothing we did now could change that either. We had all been victims, and perhaps the lives of all of us who lived through the Plague Years could never be made whole.

But that dark night was ending and a new day was dawning, and we, and I; had to act to give it birth and protect it into its full maturity. My personal life had died back there in San Francisco Bay with Marge and Tod and I had nothing left but my duty to the Hippocratic oath.

And vengeance.

Nothing I could do would ever bring my family back or entirely erase my guilt in their deaths. But I could take my vengeance on Prinz, on Feinstein, on the Sutcliffe board, I could do my part in seeing to it that their worst fears were realized, that the dreadnaught virus they had sought to destroy spread far and wide, saving suffering humanity while it destroyed the Sutcliffe Corporation in the process.

Thus would my part in the twisted nightmare of the Plague Years end with the ultimate perverse yet joyful irony:

Just and loving vengeance.

So tomorrow I will go forth into San Francisco and join the Week of Love. And tonight I am sitting here in the House of Our Lady and writing my story in this journal, which is now concluding. When it is finished, it will be sent to the president, to the head of the Federal Quarantine Agency, to the news services, to the television networks. Before you let them act against us or tell you that this is all an evil lie, demand that they go in and test the populace or at least a good sample for Plague. That’s all I ask. Know the truth for yourself. Tell others.

And I promise it will set all of you free.

JOHN DAVID

I had good photos of Bruno, but you ever try tracking down one guy in a city of a million? Especially in a city that seemed to have gone completely apeshit. Everyone seemed to be drunk or stoned. People were having meat everywhere right out in the open, in the streets, in the parks, in alleys. Half-dead as I was, they were still shoving their meat even at the likes of me, babbling a lot of crazy stuff about how they were saving me from the Plague, as if anything could help me now!

I was goin’ out fast, I was a mess of sarcomas and secondary infections, weak, and feverish, and half out on my feet, taking enormous doses of speed and coke just to keep going. But, fast as I was going, I still knew that this city was gonna go faster, and with me in it, unless I could deliver Bruno to the SP. I mean, one way I had maybe three weeks left, the other only ten days.

An extra eleven days of life may not seem like such a big deal to you, brothers and sisters, but it sure as shit would if you were the one who knew that was the best you had left!

Anyway, it was enough to keep me focused on finding Bruno, even spaced and stoned and dying and staggering around in the biggest orgy the world had ever seen. And I started grilling random people on the street and being none too gentle about it.

I was so far gone I must have beaten the crap out of half-a-dozen of them before it got through to me that the “Dr. Feelgood” the whole damn city was babbling about was the very guy I was looking for. Dr. Richard Bruno, the son of a bitch who had maybe let loose the worst Plague variant ever and who for sure was gonna get all these assholes vaporized, and me with them; and they were somehow convinced the bastard was some kind of hero!

Well, after I copped to that, it wasn’t much sweat tracking the famous Dr. Feelgood down. All I had to do was follow my nose and all the talk about him through the bars and streets until I ran into someone who told me he was partying in a certain bar in North Beach right now.

I got there just as he was walking out with a good-looking momma on his arm and a dreamy smile on his lips. As soon as I saw him, I went into motion, no time or energy left for tactics or thought.

“Okay, Bruno, you son of a bitch, you’re comin’ with me!” I shouted, grabbing him by his right arm and whipping it behind his back into a half-nelson bring-along.

Half-a-dozen guys started to move in, but, far gone as I was, I still had that covered. I already had my miniauto out and waving in their faces.

“This guy’s comin’ with me, assholes!” I screamed. “Anyone tries to stop me gets blown away!”

Then everything seemed to happen at once.

Some jerk got brave and slammed into my knees from behind.

I kicked blindly backward, fighting for balance.

Bruno yanked himself out of the half-nelson.

A circle of angry meat closed in.

I started firing without caring at what, whipping the miniauto in fanning fire, at full rock and roll.

“Dr. Feelgood” got himself neatly stitched up the back from ass to shoulder by high-velocity slugs.

Bruno folded as everyone else came down on me like a ton of bricks.

Next thing I knew, I had had the shit thoroughly beaten out of me, and two guys were holding me up by the shoulders, and Bruno was down there on the sidewalk croaking and looking up at me.

“Why?” he whispered with blood drooling out of his mouth.

“Don’t die. you stupid meatfucker!” I screamed at him. “You’re my only ticket out of here!”

“Kill the bastard!”

“Tear him apart!”

I laughed and laughed and laughed. I mean, what else was there to do? “Go ahead and kill me, suckers!” I told them all. “I’m dead already and so are you, gonna nuke you till you glow blue!”

“Cut his heart out!”

Bruno looked up at me from the sidewalk with this weird sad little grin, almost peaceful, kind of, as his light went out.

“No . . .” he said. “No more . . . just and loving vengeance, don’t you see . . . Marge . . . Tod . . . it’s nobody’s fault . . . take him . . . take him . . .”

His voice started to fade. He coughed up more blood.

“Take him where, Richard?” a woman said, leaning over him.

“Take him to Our Lady . . .” Bruno whispered. “Let him take shelter in . . . in . . .”

His lips moved but no more sound came out. And that was the end of that.

Bruno was dead.

So was I.

And in ten days, so was San Francisco.

LINDA LEWIN

They brought Richard’s body back to the house of Our Lady of Love Reborn and laid him out on a couch. Half-a-dozen Lovers of Our Lady were restraining a wild-eyed young terminal case and being none too gentle about it.

And they told me what had happened. And Richard’s dying words.

Only then did I really look at his murderer. His body was a mass of sarcomas. His frame was skeletal. His eyes were red and wild.

“Why?” I asked him in a strange imploring voice that surprised even me.

“My ticket out of here before they drop the Big One Lady but it’s all over now ain’t it do your damnedest we’re all dead zombies anyway brothers and sisters . . .”

He wasn’t making sense, nor would he, I knew then. This poor creature was no more responsible for his actions than Richard had been when Marge and Tod died. I had heard of this sort of thing before. Condition Terminals turning berserker on the way out, taking as many as they could with them. He too was a victim of the Plague, as were we all.

And I understood Richard’s last words now too, perhaps better even than he had in the saying of them. His life had been in a sense over already, and all this poor creature had done was set his tormented soul free. I understood why he had forgiven his assassin, for in that act of forgiving, he had at last found forgiveness for himself for the deaths on his own hands, or so at least I prayed to whatever gods there be.

“What should we do with the bastard?”

“Kill him!”

“Tear his damn heart out!”

“No!” I found myself saying. “I’ll do it for you, Richard,” I whispered, and I took his murderer’s hand. “He forgave you, and so must I.”

“Go ahead and kill me, don’t want your forgiveness, it don’t mean shit, I’m a dead man already and so are you!”

“No, you’re not,” I told him gently. “Let me take you upstairs and give you the good news.”

JOHN DAVID

And she did, though of course I didn’t believe a word of it at the time, not even after Our Lady gave my disgusting dying flesh the gift of her meat. Not that I was exactly in any mental condition for deep conversation anyway.

But days later, when the sarcomas began to disappear and my head cleared, I knew that the whole damn story that Linda had told me over and over again was all true.

I mean, I had sure done my share of evil, but what those meatfuckers at Sutcliffe had done was enough to make a combat medic puke! I never had no use for Walter T. Bigelow—and less so after the number he had run on me—but I was willing to bet that the old meatfucker had believed what he told me about poor Bruno. Those Sutcliffe creeps must have fed him their line about Bruno to get him to nuke the evidence of what they had done out of existence. And the dreadnaught virus along with it! Just to line their own pockets and save their own worthless asses!

And oh shit, Bigelow still believed it!

“What day is this?” I asked Linda when my head was finally clear enough to realize what all this meant and what was about to happen.

It was two days till the Big Flash.

“You’ve given me the good news, now I’ve gotta give you the bad news,” I told her. And I did.

I had never seen Our Lady break down and cry before, but now she did. “Then poor Richard died for nothing . . . And everyone here is doomed . . . And no one will even know . . . And the Plague will go on and on and on . . .

While she was moaning and sobbing, I did some fast thinking. I still had the Very pistol, and that SP chopper was going to circle Golden Gate Park at three for two more days. I had the means to bring it down, and if I could take it . . .

“You gotta find me a guy who can fly a helicopter,” I said.

Our Lady stared at me blankly. I shook her by the shoulders. “Hey, you gotta snap out of it, Linda, and listen to me! I got a way to get us out of here before they drop the Big One!”

That brought her around, and I laid it out for her.

It was simple, really. We’d dress the helicopter pilot up in a trench coat and a slouch hat or something so no one could see he wasn’t Bruno until I got us aboard the SP chopper.

“I’ll take care of the rest,” I promised. “Probably be just a pilot and a copilot, piece of cake. Then you come aboard, and we take off like a big-assed bird for the Marin side, ditch the chopper, and disappear. You saved my life, now I’ll save yours.”

LINDA LEWIN

“But what about San Francisco?” I said. “We can’t just . . .” John shrugged. “San Francisco is gonna be nuked out of existence anyway,” he said. “Nothing we can do about that, our asses is all we can save.”

“But all these people . . . and the dreadnaught virus . . .”

“Look at it this way—at least there’ll be you and me left to spread it . . .” He leered at me wolfishly. “I’ll do my part to spread it far and wide, you better believe it, sister!”

“We just can’t leave a whole city to die!”

“You got any better ideas?”

I stared at this poor savage creature, at this killing machine, at this ultimate victim of the Plague, and I thought and thought and thought, and finally I did.

“We’ll capture the SP helicopter,” I told him. “But we won’t just escape. We’ll fly down to Sutcliffe—”

“And do what?”

“Capture Harlow Prinz and Warren Feinstein. Take them to Bigelow.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you see? When they tell Bigelow the truth—”

“Why the hell would they do that?”

I did my best to imitate John David’s own fiercest leer. “I think I can leave that one up to you, now can’t I?” I said.

He stared at me as his face slowly twisted into the mirror image of my own. “Yeah . . he said slowly. “I think I could enjoy that . . .”

He frowned. “Only this is getting mighty dicey, sister. I mean, grabbing the chopper should be no sweat, and if all we was doing was putting it down in Marin and disappearing on foot, our chances would be pretty good. But faking the radio traffic long enough to fly the thing to Palo Alto and snatching the Sutcliffe creeps and getting them to Bigelow . . . Hey, the SP ain’t the Legion, but they ain’t that far out to lunch either . . .”

“We’ve got to try it!”

“We wouldn’t have a chance!”

“What if we had a diversion?” I blurted. “A big one . . .”

“A diversion?”

My blood ran cold as I said it. It was monstrous. Thousands might die. But the alternative was a million dead for no good cause. And monstrous as it was as a tactic, it was still the only just thing to do. Morally or practically, there really was no choice. It was the only chance we had to save the city, and the people had the right to know.

“What do you think would happen if everyone in San Francisco knew what you’ve just told me?” I said.

“That they were all going to be nuked in two days? Are you kidding? They’d go apeshit! They’d—”

“Storm the Quarantine Line en masse? Swarm out into the Bay in hundreds of small boats? Try to get across the gaps in the bridges?”

“Jeez, it’d be just like TJ, only a thousand times bigger, the SP would have its hands full, we just might be able to . . .

He studied me with new eyes. “Hey, beneath all that sweetness and light, you’re pretty hard-core, you know that, sister? I mean, using a whole city as a diversion . . .”

“These people have a right to know what’s going to happen anyway, don’t they, John?” I told him. “Wouldn’t you want to know? This way, even if we fail, they get to go out fighting for something and knowing why. Better in fire than in ice.”

WALTER T. BIGELOW

Satan held me on the rack as I waited fruitlessly for David to extract Richard Bruno from San Francisco. Three and four times a day Harlow Prinz called me to demand in shriller and shriller tones that I have the city nuked. Was this the voice of God or the voice of the Devil? What did Jesus want me to do?

And then Satan put my back to the final wall.

Reports started coming in to the Daly City SP station, where I had ensconced myself, that a huge ragtag flotilla of small boats was leaving the San Francisco shoreline. Fighting had broken out all along the landward Quarantine Line.

It was becoming all too apparent that I could procrastinate no longer.

Mobs with bridging equipment were swarming onto the San Francisco ends of the Golden Gate and Oakland Bay bridges. The whole city was trying to break out of the Quarantine Zone, and they couldn’t all be stopped by conventional means. Only a thermonuclear strike could prevent the new and far deadlier Plague strain from entering the general populace now.

I was forced to put in my long-delayed fateful call to the president of the United States . . .

JOHN DAVID

I had wanted the Big Breakout to start sharply at three to make damn sure the SP chopper wasn’t scared off, but Linda had told too many people, and the Lovers of Our Lady were out in the streets whipping things up for hours beforehand, and the action began to come down raggedly an hour early.

But the fighting was going on at the borders, not the center, and Golden Gate Park was just about empty. The SP chopper pilot must’ve been over the city already, or maybe he was the sort of righteous asshole who followed the last order no matter what.

For even with half the city already throwing itself against the Quarantine Line, the chopper appeared over the park right on the money at three sharp.

I fired off the Very pistol, and down it came. I stuck my miniauto conspicuously in our pilot’s back and frog-marched him to the open chopper door.

As I had figured, there were only a pilot and a copilot in the cockpit. The moment we were inside, I jammed the muzzle of my piece into the back of the pilot’s neck.

“Outside, assholes!” I ordered. “But strip first! One word out of either of you and I blow you away!”

“Hey—”

“What the—”

“I told you, no lip! Out of those uniforms! Move your asses!”

They took one look at the miniauto and another at me, and stripped down to boxer shorts and T-shirts muy pronto, you better believe it!

“Out, assholes. Better run till you drop, and don’t look back!”

I booted them out of the chopper and fired a long burst over their heads as Linda climbed aboard, and they ran for the nearest bushes.

Then me and our pilot put on their uniforms, which I figured would come in mighty handy if we ever made it to Sutcliffe, and off we went.

The skies were empty as we headed south over the city at about three thousand feet, but things started getting hairy as we approached the Quarantine Line.

I could see ragged mobs of people moving toward the SP positions below, the SP troops were using heavy machine-guns and some light artillery, and the air beneath us was thick with gunpowder smoke, through which I could see sparkles, laser-straight tracers, occasional explosions.

All hell was breaking loose on the ground, and the airspace below us was full of helicopter gunships making low, slow strafing runs with cannon and rockets.

But all the thunder and lightning and confusion made it easier for us in the end, seeing as we were one chopper out of many.

“Bravo five three seven Charlie, what the hell are you doing up there?” a voice screeched at us over the radio.

“Don’t answer!” I told our pilot. “Take her down into the traffic!”

When we had dropped down into the cloud of gunships, I screamed into my microphone, “Motherfucking black-carder faggot bastards!” And fired off a few rockets.

“Hey, those are our people down there!”

“And our asses up here! You just fly this thing, and let me worry about tactics, okay!” And I fired off a couple more blind shots into the confusion.

It worked like a charm. Every time we got static on the radio, I cursed and screamed like a good combat animal and fired a few random rockets at the ground and nobody challenged us as we threaded our way south over the combat zone.

Once we were well clear, we went back up to three thousand feet, and the only traffic we saw between Daly City and Palo Alto was a few more gunships heading north into the mess far below who probably didn’t even see us.

We landed inside the Sutcliffe compound right in front of the administration building and sat there with our rotor whumping as company rent-a-cops poured raggedly out of the building and finally managed to get us surrounded.

“Stay here, and fer chrissakes keep the engine running,” I told Linda and the pilot. And climbed out of the chopper to make like a modem major general.

“National Emergency!” I barked at the bozo in charge of the rent-a-cops. “Direct orders from Walter T. Bigelow, director of the Federal Quarantine Agency. He wants Harlow Prinz and Warren Feinstein in his headquarters half an hour ago, and we’re here to get ’em!”

“Hey, I got no orders to—”

“Argue with Bigelow if you want to!” I snapped. I gave the sucker a comradely shrug. “But I don’t advise it, I mean, there’s already been some kind of screw-up over this with all the heat going on, and he ain’t exactly being reasonable just now, if you get me.”

“I don’t take my orders from the SP!”

“Your funeral, pal,” I told him, nodding toward the chopper. “I got orders to blow the shit out of this place if I meet any resistance, and there’s five more gunships orbiting just over the ridgeline in case you got any dumb notions . . .”

“Hey, hey, don’t get your balls in an uproar,” the head rent-a-cop soothed much more politely, and trotted off into the building.

I waited there outside the chopper surrounded by rent-a-cops for what seemed like ten thousand sweaty years but couldn’t have been more than ten minutes by the clock.

Finally the head rent-a-cop appeared with two middle-aged bozos. One of them seemed to be staggering toward me in a daze, but the other was the sort of arrogant in-charge son of a bitch you want to kill on sight.

“What’s the meaning of this?” he screamed in my face. “I’m Harlow Prinz, I’m the president of this company, and I don’t—”

“And I’m just Walter Bigelow’s errand boy, but I don’t take shit either,” I told him. “Except of course from the boss man, and I got enough of that for being late already! So do us both a big favor and get into this chopper.” I waved my miniauto. “ ’Cause if you don’t, shit is about to flow downhill, if you get my meaning.”

The wimpy type, who had to be Warren Feinstein, started to climb aboard, but that murdering meatfucker Prinz stood there with his hands on his hips looking suspicious. He took a good long look at my badly fitting uniform. “Let’s see your papers,” he said.

I brought up the muzzle of my piece and pointed it at his belly button. “You’re lookin’ right at ’em.” I said.

“Harlow, for chrissakes, he means it!” Feinstein said, and hustled his ass into the copter.

Prinz moved slowly past me to the door and reluctantly started to board the chopper, but he must’ve spotted Linda when he peered inside and put it all together.

’Cause he suddenly aimed a sloppy kick at my nuts that missed the target but knocked me off balance, yelled, “Shoot! Shoot!” at his rent-a-cops, and broke and ran.

Furious as I was, I didn’t blow my combat cool.

I leaped through the door, scattering the rent-a-cops with a long fanning burst as our pilot lifted the chopper, and flipped myself into the copilot’s seat.

By this time we were about a hundred feet in the air, and heading straight up into the wild blue yonder.

“Hold it right here a minute!” I told the pilot.

The rent-a-cops were scattering for cover. Only a few of ’em had the balls to fire a few useless shots up over their shoulders and they plinked harmlessly off the chopper’s armored belly.

Prinz was running for the administration building. I smiled. I lined the bastard up in my sights and savored it just for a moment. This, after all, was the son of a bitch who was willing to let the Plague take us all to line his own pockets. I had wasted more citizens than I could count, but this was going to be special. This was going to be primo.

“Thanks ever so much for making my day,” I told Harlow Prinz as he reached the stairs leading up to the entrance. And I fired a single rocket.

A perfect shot. It hit him right in the base of the spine and blew him to dogmeat.

I went aft, where Feinstein was cowering against a bulkhead. I grabbed him by the neck with my left hand, squeezed his jaws open, and jammed the muzzle of my piece down his throat.

“You saw what I did to your buddy,” I told him. “And knowing what I know about you sons of bitches and what you’ve done, you better believe I enjoyed it just as much as I’ll enjoy wasting you if you don’t do exactly what you’re told. Get the message, meatfucker?”

Feinstein nodded and I pulled the gun barrel out of his mouth. And when I tossed his worthless ass onto the deck, he just lay there blubbering. “I told Harlow he was going too far, it’s not my fault, it wasn’t my idea, Bigelow will believe me, won’t he, I swear I’ll tell him the truth, I never thought, I never knew . . .

“He better believe you, meatfucker, or a lot of asses are gonna be grass,” I told him. “And you better believe that you’re gonna go first!”

WALTER T. BIGELOW

The station was in an uproar. The situation was growing graver by the minute. The mob had bridged the gap in the Golden Gate and fighting was raging on the Marin side of the span. Our gunboats were sinking scores of small craft loaded to the gunwales with black-carders, but all was chaos on the Bay; they couldn’t establish or hold a line. The landward Quarantine Line was crumbling under human wave onslaughts.

There was no alternative. When I got the president on the line I was going to have to ask him to authorize an immediate nuclear strike against San Francisco.

But while I was waiting for my call to the White House to get through, there was a commotion in my outer office, and a moment later an SP captain burst inside.

“Warren Feinstein’s outside, Mr. Director,” he stammered. “There’s . . . there’s a girl with him who says she’s Our Lady of Love Reborn . . . and there’s a man holding him at gunpoint. Says he’s gonna blow his head off if we make a move and—” There was a further commotion in the outer office and then Feinstein was rudely thrown through the doorway by a man who held the barrel of a miniauto at the back of his neck, followed by a young girl, and half-a-dozen SP men with drawn pistols.

The man with the miniauto was John David, whom I had sent into San Francisco after Richard Bruno. And he was wearing an SP uniform.

“What’s the meaning of this?” I demanded. “This isn’t Bruno! How did you—”

“No shit!” David snarled, prodding Feinstein with his gun barrel. “Go ahead, tell the man, or I’ll blow your worthless head off!”

Tears poured from the eyes of Sutcliffe’s chairman as he blubbered out the most incredible and chilling story.

“Harlow lied to you, Bruno’s virus wasn’t an ambient Plague variant, it was a cure for all Plague variants, an artificial venereal disease—”

“A cure? But then why—”

“—that conferred total immunity—”

“If it was a cure, then why on Earth did you suppress it?” I shouted at him. “Why did you tell me—”

“It’s a venereal disease!” Feinstein babbled. “Spreads by itself, nothing for us to market, it would have bankrupted Sutcliffe, brought on an economic depression, Harlow insisted—”

I could not believe my ears. I could not be hearing this. “You suppressed a total cure for the Plague to preserve your own profits? My God, Prinz kept trying to get me to nuke San Francisco just to keep Sutcliffe solvent?”

Feinstein shook his head. “By then it was too late, don’t you see?” he moaned. “The whole thing had gone too far. I warned him, I swear I did, but he insisted that San Francisco had to be nuked to cover up what we’d done . . .”

Feinstein seemed to pull himself together with an enormous effort. “But you can’t do that now,” he said much more coherently. “You won’t do that now. I’m willing to take my medicine, even if it means spending the rest of my life in jail. Harlow was wrong, monstrously wrong, and I was weak, horribly weak. You can’t nuke San Francisco. You can’t kill millions of people. You can’t destroy the dreadnaught virus.”

Was this the truth, or was it Satan’s greatest lie? Feinstein was, after all, speaking with a gun at his throat. And he was a self-admitted liar.

If this was the Devil speaking through him, and I believed Satan’s greatest lie, I would infect the nation with a deadly new Plague variant that might destroy all human life.

But if God had chosen this unlikely instrument to reveal His truth at the eleventh hour and I didn’t believe it, I would not only be responsible for the deaths of a million people, I would be responsible for destroying God’s own cure for the Plague.

What was I to do? What could I believe? Whatever the truth was, Satan could not have devised for me a more perfect moral dilemma.

“The president on the line . . .” said a voice on my intercom. No man should be forced to make such a decision, But I was. And I had to do it now. But I could not. There was only one thing that I could do.

There, in front of Feinstein, and David, and my own men, and with the president of the United States waiting on the telephone, I sank unashamedly to my knees and prayed aloud.

“Please, Jesus, I know that this cup cannot pass from me,” I prayed. “But grant me at least one mercy. Send me a Sign. Show me Your Countenance.”

And God, in His infinite wisdom, answered my prayer, through the most unlikely of instruments.

The young girl stepped forward. “Let me help you,” she said softly. She took my hand in hers and raised me to my feet. “Let me be your Sign,” she said.

“Tom? You’re—”

“Our Lady of Love Reborn—”

“—the blasphemous mouthpiece of Satan!”

“No, I’m not. Nothing speaks through me but the truth in an ordinary girl’s heart, and I’m very much afraid,” she said with the strangest gentleness. “But I know that this man is speaking the truth, and there’s no one else. So I have to be,your Sign, now don’t I? In the only way I can.”

“How?” I asked softly, wanting very much, in that moment, to believe. In Jesus. In God’s Grace. In anything that would show me the truth.

Even in she whom I had believed to be my nemesis, even in Our Lady of Love Reborn, if she could make me.

“By placing my life in your hands,” she said.

I locked eyes with Our Lady of Love Reborn. They were young and they were fearful, but there was a strength in them too that seemed timeless. She smiled the Madonna’s smile at me. Or was this only what I was longing to see?

“There’s a helicopter waiting outside. I’m going to go to it and fly back to San Francisco. If the city dies at your hand, so will I. Would Satan’s mouthpiece do that, Walter Bigelow?”

“The president on the line . . .”

“You would do that?” I said. “You’d really do that?”

She nibbled nervously at her bottom lip. She nodded demurely. “You’ll have to kill me right now to stop me,” she said, letting go of my hand, and turning to confront the men blocking the doorway. “Will you tell these men to shoot me, Mr. Bigelow? Or will you let me pass?”

JOHN DAVID

“Hey, Linda, you can’t do that, we’re safe here, don’t be crazy!’ I said, grabbing her by the arm.

The SP guards trained their pistols on us, looking to Bigelow for orders. I brought up my miniauto, flipped it to full rock and roll as conspicuously as I could, just daring the mothers to try it.

“I can, John, I must,” Linda told me, and took two steps forward with me hanging on to her.

I turned to confront Bigelow. I could see that he wanted to believe. Wouldn’t you?

What can I tell you, brothers and sisters? Maybe I figured Bigelow needed a final push. Anyway, how could I let her do this thing all alone? A short life, but a happy one, as we say in the Army of the Living Dead.

“Not without me, you don’t,” I said, taking her hand.

“The president on the line . . .”

I whipped the miniauto around and pointed it right at Bigelow’s head. “I could blow you away right now,” I told him. “And don’t think I wouldn’t enjoy it, meatfucker!”

Walter T. Bigelow looked straight into my eyes and didn’t flinch. The bastard had balls, you had to give him that.

“But I won’t,” I told him. “ ’Cause this old zombie believes her. And you’ve gotta believe her too.”

“Make me,” Walter T. Bigelow said softly. “I truly pray that you can.”

“Then try this,” I said. I smiled, I shrugged, and I threw the miniauto on the floor in front of him. “We’re gonna walk out of here to that helicopter, and we’re gonna fly back to San Francisco. You can clock us on radar.”

I turned to face the pistols of the SPs. “Or you can have these bozos fill us fill of holes—your choice, Bigelow,” I said over my shoulder. “Of course then you’ll never know, now will you?”

And hand in hand we walked toward the armed men blocking the doorway.

The guards’ fingers tightened against their triggers.

The moment hung in the air.

“Let them pass,” Walter T. Bigelow said behind us. “Praise the mysterious workings of the Lord.”

WALTER T. BIGELOW

And the two of them walked out of the room hand in hand toward the helicopter, toward San Francisco, toward their faith in the wisdom and mercy of God, which no true Christian, in that moment, could justly deny.

In all my life, no one had placed greater trust in me than this young girl and this savage young man.

A nimbus of clear white light seemed to surround them as they walked out the door, and there were tears in my eyes as I watched them go.

God could not have granted me a clearer Sign.

I sank once more to my knees and gave thanks for His infinite wisdom, His infinite mercy, for His presence in that room, in that moment, in my heart, for the Sign He had granted me in my ultimate hour of need.

The rest is, as they say, history, and this is the end of the story of my part in it.

I did not ask the president for a nuclear strike. Instead I told him what Feinstein had told me. And I issued an order for my troops to cease firing, to let those seeking to leave San Francisco pass as well.

There was much confusion afterward as hundreds of thousands of people poured out of the San Francisco Quarantine Zone. Congress called for my impeachment. I offered up my resignation. It was refused. Proceedings began in the House.

But as the hearings began, hundreds of escapees from San Francisco were rounded up, and all of them tested out blue. And the dreadnaught virus was found in all of their bodies.

So did the Plague Years end. And so too my public life. I became a national hero once more, and though there was no further need for a Federal Quarantine Agency or its director, I could no doubt have been elected to any office in the land.

But I chose instead to retire. And write this memoir. And go off on a long retreat into the desert with my family to try to understand the mysterious ways of God. And to reconcile with my wife.

And God granted us an easy reconciliation, for Satan had gone from her, if he had every really possessed her, and she believed in me again.

“It was a true Christian act, Walter, and a brave one,” she told me the night she took me once more into her arms. “God works in mysterious ways.”

So He does. And perhaps the true wisdom is that that is all we can ever really know of the workings of His Will.

Did Satan send the Plague to torment us? Or did God send the Plague to chastise and test us?

If so, it was a terrible chastisement and a cruel testing. But so was the Great Flood, and the Ten Plagues, and the Forty Years in the Wilderness, and of course Jesus’s own martyrdom on the Cross.

“Love thy neighbor as thyself,” Jesus told us, and was crucified for it.

How could that be the Will of a God of Love?

How could the Plague Years be the Will of God either?

I don’t know. I don’t think I ever will.

And yet my faith is still strong. For God spoke to me in my greatest hour of need through the unlikely instrumentalities of a young girl whom I had believed to be Satan’s daughter and a vicious creature who had certainly spent most of his life doing the Devil’s work on Earth.

Such a God I will never understand.

In such a God I can only believe.

Such a God I can only love.

GINNY SWEETHIPS’ FLYING CIRCUS

Neal Barrett, Jr.

Well, here we are with another strange and wonderful story by Neal Barrett, Jr. Don’t ask us what he’ll think of next, because we haven’t got a clue!

Del drove and Ginny sat.

“They’re taking their sweet time,” Ginny said, “damned if they’re not.”

“They’re itchy,” Del said. “Everyone’s itchy. Everyone’s looking to stay alive.”

“Huh!” Ginny showed disgust. “I sure don’t care for sittin’ out here in the sun. My price is going up by the minute. You wait and see if it doesn’t.”

“Don’t get greedy,” Del said.

Ginny curled her toes on the dash. Her legs felt warm in the sun. The stockade was a hundred yards off. Barbed wire looped above the walls. The sign over the gate read:

First Church of the Unleaded Go

& Ace High Refinery

WELCOME

KEEP OUT

The refinery needed paint. It had likely been silver but was now dull as pewter and black rust. Ginny leaned out the window and called to Possum Dark.

“What’s happening, friend? Those mothers dead in there or what?”

“Thinking,” Possum said. “Fixing to make a move. Considering what to do.” Possum Dark sat atop the van in a steno chair bolted to the roof. Circling the chair was a swivel-ring mount sporting fine twin-fifties black as grease. Possum had a death-view clean around. Keeping out the sun was a red Cinzano umbrella faded pink. Possum studied the stockade and watched heat distort the flats. He didn’t care for the effect. He was suspicious of things less than cut and dried. Apprehensive of illusions of every kind. He scratched his nose and curled his tail around his leg. The gate opened up and men started across the scrub. He teased them in his sights. He prayed they’d do something silly and grand.

Possum counted thirty-seven men. A few carried sidearms, openly or concealed. Possum spotted them all at once. He wasn’t too concerned. This seemed like an easy-going bunch, more intent on fun than fracas. Still, there was always the hope that he was wrong.

The men milled about. They wore patched denim and faded shirts. Possum made them nervous. Del countered that; his appearance set them at ease. The men looked at Del, poked each other and grinned. Del was scrawny and bald except for tufts around the ears. The dusty black coat was too big. His neck thrust out of his shirt like a newborn buzzard looking for meat. The men forgot Possum and gathered around, waiting to see what Del would do. Waiting for Del to get around to showing them what they’d come to see. The van was painted turtle-green. Gold Barnum type named the owner, and the selected vices for sale:

Ginny Sweethips’ Flying Circus

* * * SEX * TACOS * DANGEROUS DRUGS * * *

Del puttered about with this and that. He unhitched the wagon from the van and folded out a handy little stage. It didn’t take three minutes to set up, but he dragged it out to ten, then ten on top of that. The men started to whistle and clap their hands. Del looked alarmed. They liked that. He stumbled and they laughed.

“Hey, mister, you got a girl in there or not?” a man called out.

“Better be something here besides you,” another said.

“Gents,” Del said, raising his hands for quiet, “Ginny Sweethips herself will soon appear on this stage and you’ll be more than glad you waited. Your every wish will be fulfilled, I promise you that. I’m bringing beauty to the wastelands, gents. Lust the way you like it, passion unrestrained. Sexual crimes you never dreamed!”

“Cut the talk, mister,” a man with peach-pit eyes shouted to Del. “Show us what you got.”

Others joined in, stomped their feet and whistled. Del knew he had them. Anger was what he wanted. Frustration and denial. Hatred waiting for sweet release. He waved them off but they wouldn’t stop. He placed one hand on the door of the van—and brought them to silence at once.

The double doors opened. A worn red curtain was revealed, stenciled with hearts and cherubs. Del extended his hand. He seemed to search behind the curtain, one eye closed in concentration. He looked alarmed, groping for something he couldn’t find. Uncertain he remembered how to do this trick at all. And then, in a sudden burst of motion, Ginny did a double forward flip, and appeared like glory on the stage.

The men broke into shouts of wild abandon. Ginny led them in a cheer. She was dressed for the occasion. Short white skirt shiny bright, white boots with tassels. White sweater with a big red “G” sewn on the front.

“Ginny Sweethips, gents,” Del announced with a flair, “giving you her own interpretation of Barbara Jean the Cheerleader Next Door. Innocent as snow, yet a little bit wicked and willing to learn, if Biff the Quarterback will only teach her. Now, what do you say to that?”

They whistled and yelled and stomped. Ginny strutted and switched, doing long-legged kicks that left them gasping with delight. Thirty-seven pairs of eyes showed their needs. Men guessed at hidden parts. Dusted off scenarios of violence and love. Then, as quickly as she’d come, Ginny was gone. Men threatened to storm the stage. Del grinned without concern. The curtain parted and Ginny was back, blond hair replaced with saucy red, costume changed in the blink of an eye. Del introduced Nurse Nora, an angel of mercy weak as soup in the hands of Patient Pete. Moments later, hair black as a raven’s throat, she was Schoolteacher Sally, cold as well water until Steve the Bad Student loosed the fury chained within.

Ginny vanished again. Applause thundered over the flats. Del urged them on, then spread his hands for quiet.

“Did I lie to you gents? Is she all you ever dreamed? Is this the love you’ve wanted all your life? Could you ask for sweeter limbs, for softer flesh? For whiter teeth, for brighter eyes?”

“Yeah, but is she real?” a man shouted, a man with a broken face sewn up like a sock. “We’re religious people here. We don’t fuck with no machines.”

Others echoed the question with bold shouts and shaking fists.

“Now, I don’t blame you, sir, at all,” Del said. “I’ve had a few dolly droids myself. A plastic embrace at best, I’ll grant you that. Not for the likes of you, for I can tell you’re a man who knows his women. No, sir, Ginny’s real as rain, and she’s yours in the role of your choice. Seven minutes of bliss. It’ll seem like a lifetime, gents, I promise you that. Your goods gladly returned if I’m a liar. And all for only a U.S. gallon of gas!” Howls and groans at that, as Del expected.

“That’s a cheat is what it is! Ain’t a woman worth it!”

“Gas is better’n gold and we work damn hard to get it!”

Del stood his ground. Looked grim and disappointed. “I’d be the last man alive to try to part you from your goods,” Del said. “It’s not my place to drive a fellow into the arms of sweet content, to make him rest his manly frame on golden thighs. Not if he thinks this lovely girl’s not worth the fee, no sir. I don’t do business that way and never have.”

The men moved closer. Del could smell their discontent. He read sly thoughts above their heads. There was always this moment, when it occurred to them there was a way Ginny’s delights might be obtained for free.

“Give it some thought, friends,” Del said. “A man’s got to do what he’s got to do. And while you’re making up your minds, turn your eyes to the top of the van for a startling and absolutely free display of the slickest bit of marksmanship you’re ever likely to see!”

Before Del’s words were out of his mouth and on the way, before the men could scarcely comprehend, Ginny appeared again and tossed a dozen china saucers in the air.

Possum Dark moved in a blur. Turned a hundred-and-forty degrees in his bolted steno chair and whipped his guns on target, blasting saucers to dust. Thunder rolled across the flats. Crockery rained on the men below. Possum stood and offered a pink killer grin and a little bow. The men saw six-foot-nine and a quarter inches of happy marsupial fury and awesome speed, of black agate eyes and a snout full of icy varmint teeth. Doubts were swept aside. Fifty-calibre madness wasn’t the answer. Fun today was clearly not for free.

“Gentlemen, start your engines,” Del smiled. “I’ll be right here to take your fee. Enjoy a hot taco while you wait your turn at glory. Have a look at our display of fine pharmaceutical wonders and mind-expanding drugs.”

In moments, men were making their way back to the stockade. Soon after that, they returned toting battered tins of gas. Del sniffed each gallon, in case some buffoon thought water would get him by. Each man received a token and took his place. Del sold tacos and dangerous drugs, taking what he could get in trade. Candles and Mason jars, a rusty knife. Half a manual on full-field maintenance for the Chrysler Mark XX Urban Tank. The drugs were different colors but all the same: twelve parts oregano, three parts rabbit shit, one part marijuana stems. All this under Possum’s watchful eye.

“By God.” said the first man out of the van. “She’s worth it, I’ll tell you that. Have her do the Nurse, you won’t regret it!”

“The Schoolteacher’s best,” said the second man through. “I never seen the like. I don’t care if she’s real or she ain’t.”

“What’s in these tacos?” a customer asked Del.

“Nobody you know, mister,” Del said.

“It’s been a long day,” Ginny said. “I’m pooped, and that’s the truth.” She wrinkled up her nose. “First thing we hit a town, you hose ’er out good now, Del. Place smells like a sewer or maybe worse.”

Del squinted at the sky and pulled up under the scant shade of mesquite. He stepped out and kicked the tires. Ginny got down, walked around and stretched.

“It’s getting late,” Del said. “You want to go on or stop here?”

“You figure those boys might decide to get a rebate on this gas?”

“Hope they do,” Possum said from atop the van.

“You’re a pisser,” Ginny laughed, “I’ll say that. Hell, let’s keep going. I could use a hot bath and town food. What you figure’s up the road?”

“East Bad News,” Del said, “if this map’s worth anything at all. Ginny, night driving’s no good. You don’t know what’s waiting down the road.”

“I know what’s on the roof,” Ginny said. “Let’s do it. I’m itchy all over with bugs and dirt and that tub keeps shinin’ in my head. You want me to drive a spell, I sure will.”

“Get in,” Del grumbled. “Your driving’s scarier than anything I’ll meet.”

Morning arrived in purple shadow and metal tones, copper, silver, and gold. From a distance, East Bad News looked to Ginny like garbage strewn carelessly over the flats. Closer, it looked like larger garbage. Tin shacks and tents and haphazard buildings rehashed from whatever they were before. Cookfires burned, and the locals wandered about and yawned and scratched. Three places offered food. Other places bed and a bath. Something to look forward to, at least. She spotted the sign down at the far end of town:

MORO’S REPAIRS

Armaments • Machinery • Electronic Shit of All Kinds

“Hold it!” Ginny said. “Pull ’er in right there.”

Del looked alarmed. “What for?”

“Don’t get excited. There’s gear needs tending in back. I just want ’em to take a look.”

“Didn’t mention it to me, Del said.

Ginny saw the sad and droopy eyes, the tired wisps of hair sticking flat to Del’s ears. “Del, there wasn’t anything to mention,” she said in a kindly tone. “Nothing you can really put your finger on, I mean. Okay?”

“Whatever you think,” Del said, clearly out of sorts.

Ginny sighed and got out. Barbed wire surrounded the yard behind the shop. The yard was ankle-deep in tangles of rope and copper cable, rusted unidentifiable parts. A battered pickup hugged the wall. Morning heat curled the tin roof of the building. More parts spilled out of the door. Possum made a funny noise, and Ginny saw the Dog step into the light. A Shepherd, maybe six-foot-two. It showed Possum Dark yellow eyes. A man appeared behind the Dog, wiping heavy grease on his pants. Bare to the waist, hair like stuffing out of a chair. Features hard as rock, flint eyes to match. Not bad looking, thought Ginny, if you cleaned him up good.

“Well now,” said the man. He glanced at the van, read the legend on the side, took in Ginny from head to toe. “What can I do for you, little lady?”

“I’m not real little and don’t guess I’m any lady,” Ginny said. “Whatever you’re thinking, don’t. You open for business or just talk?”

The man grinned. “My name’s Moro Gain. Never turn business away if I can help it.”

“I need electric stuff.”

“We got it. What’s the problem?”

“Huh-unh.” Ginny shook her head. “First I gotta ask. You do confidential work or tell everything you know?”

“Secret’s my middle name,” Moro said. “Might cost a little more, but you got it.”

“How much?”

Moro closed one eye. “Now, how do I know that? You got a nuclear device in there, or a broken watch? Drive it on in and we’ll take a look.” He aimed a greasy finger at Possum Dark. “Leave him outside.”

“No way.”

“No arms in the shop. That’s a rule.”

“He isn’t carrying. Just the guns you see.” Ginny smiled. “You can shake him down, if you like. I wouldn’t, I don’t think.”

“He looks imposing, all right.”

“I’d say he is.”

“What the hell,” Moro said, “drive it in.”

Dog unlocked the gate. Possum climbed down and followed Dog with oily eyes.

“Go find us a place to stay,” Ginny said to Del. “Clean, if you can find it. All the hot water in town. Christ sakes, Del, you still sulking or what?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Del said. “Don’t concern yourself at all.”

“Right.” She hopped behind the wheel. Moro began kicking the door of his shop. It finally sprang free, wide enough to take the van. The supply wagon rocked along behind. Moro lifted the tarp, eyed the thirty-seven tins of unleaded with great interest.

“You get lousy mileage, or what?” he asked Ginny.

Ginny didn’t answer. She stepped out of the van. Light came through broken panes of glass. The skinny windows reminded her of a church. Her eyes got used to shadow, and she saw that that’s what it was. Pews sat to the side, piled high with auto parts. A 1997 Olds was jacked up before the altar.

“Nice place you got here,” she said.

“It works for me,” Moro told her. “Now what kind of trouble you got? Something in the wiring? You said electric stuff.”

“I didn’t mean the motor. Back here.” She led him to the rear and opened the doors.

“God A’Mighty!” Moro said.

“Smells a little raunchy right now. Can’t help that till we hose ’er down.” Ginny stepped inside, looked back, and saw Moro still on the ground. “You coming up or not?”

“Just thinking.”

“About what?” She’d seen him watching her move and didn’t really have to ask.

“Well, you know . . .” Moro shuffled his feet. “How do you figure on paying? For whatever it is I got to do.”

“Gas. You take a look. Tell me how many tins. I say yes or no.”

“We could work something out.”

“We could, huh?”

“Sure.” Moro gave her a foolish grin. “Why not?”

Ginny didn’t blink. “Mister, what kind of girl do you think I am?” Moro looked puzzled and intent. “I can read good, lady, believe it or not. I figured you wasn’t tacos or dangerous drugs.”

“You figured wrong,” Ginny said. “Sex is just software to me, and don’t you forget it. I haven’t got all day to watch you moonin’ over my parts. I got to move or stand still. When I stand still, you look. When I move, you look more. Can’t fault you for that, I’m about the prettiest thing you ever saw. Don’t let it get in the way of your work.”

Moro couldn’t think of much to say. He took a breath and stepped into the van. There was a bed bolted flat against the floor. A red cotton spread, a worn satin pillow that said DURANGO, COLORADO and pictured chipmunks and waterfalls. An end table, a pink-shaded lamp with flamingos on the side. Red curtains on the walls. Ballet prints and a naked Minnie Mouse.

“Somethin’ else,” Moro said.

“Back here’s the problem,” Ginny said. She pulled a curtain aside at the front of the van. There was a plywood cabinet, fitted with brass screws. Ginny took a key out of her jeans and opened it up.

Moro stared a minute, then laughed aloud. “Sensory tapes? Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch.” He took a new look at Ginny, a look Ginny didn’t miss. “Haven’t seen a rig like this in years. Didn’t know there were any still around.”

“I’ve got three tapes,” Ginny explained. “A brunette, a redhead and a blond. Found a whole cache in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Had to look at ’bout three or four hundred to find girls that looked close enough to me. Nearly went nuts ’fore it was over. Anyway, I did it. Spliced ’em down to seven minutes each.”

Moro glanced back at the bed. “How do you put ’em under?”

“Little needle comes up out the mattress. Sticks them in the ass lightnin’ fast. They’re out like that. Seven minute dose. Headpiece is in the endtable there. I get it on and off them real quick. Wires go under the floorboards back here to the rig.”

“Jesus,” Moro said. “They ever catch you at this, you are cooked, lady.”

“That’s what Possum’s for,” Ginny said. “Possum’s pretty good at what he does. Now what’s that look all about?”

“I wasn’t sure right off if you were real.”

Ginny laughed aloud. “So what do you think now?”

“I think maybe you are.”

“Right,” Ginny said. “It’s Del who’s the droid, not me. Wimp IX Series. Didn’t make a whole lot. Not much demand. The customers think it’s me, never think to look at him. He’s a damn good barker and pretty good at tacos and drugs. A little too sensitive, you ask me. Well, nobody’s perfect, so they say.”

“The trouble you’re having’s in the rig?”

“I guess,” Ginny said, “beats the hell out of me.” She bit her lip and wrinkled her brow. Moro found the gestures most inviting. “Slips a little, I think. Maybe I got a short, huh?”

“Maybe.” Moro fiddled with the rig, testing one of the spools with his thumb. “I’ll have to get in here and see.”

“It’s all yours. I’ll be wherever it is Del’s got me staying.”

“Ruby John’s,” Moro said. “Only place there is with a good roof. I’d like to take you out to dinner.”

“Well sure you would.”

“You got a real shitty attitude, friend.”

“I get a whole lot of practice,” Ginny said.

“And I’ve got a certain amount of pride,” Moro told her. “I don’t intend to ask you more than three or four times and that’s it.”

Ginny nodded. Right on the edge of approval. “You’ve got promise,” she said.-“Not a whole lot, maybe, but some.”

“Does that mean dinner, or not?”

“Means not. Means if I wanted to have dinner with some guy, you’d maybe fit the bill.”

Moro’s eyes got hot. “Hell with you, lady. I don’t need the company that bad.”

“Fine.” Ginny sniffed the air and walked out. “You have a nice day.” Moro watched her walk. Watched denims mold her legs, studied the hydraulics of her hips. Considered several unlikely acts. Considered cleaning up, searching for proper clothes. Considered finding a bottle and watching the tapes. A plastic embrace at best, or so he’d heard, but a lot less hassle in the end.

Possum Dark watched the van disappear into the shop. He felt uneasy at once. His place was on top. Keeping Ginny from harm. Sending feral prayers for murder to absent genetic gods. His eyes hadn’t left Dog since he’d appeared. Primal smells, old fears and needs assailed his senses. Dog locked the gate and turned around. Didn’t come closer, just turned.

“I’m Dog Quick,” he said, folding hairy arms. “I don’t much care for Possums.”

“I don’t much care for Dogs,” said Possum Dark.

Dog seemed to understand. “What did you do before the War?”

“Worked in a theme park. Our Wildlife Heritage. That kind of shit. What about you?”

“Security, what else?” Dog made a face. “Learned a little electrics. Picked up a lot more from Moro Gain. I’ve done worse.” He nodded toward the shop. “You like to shoot people with that thing?”

“Anytime I get the chance.”

“You ever play any cards?”

“Some.” Possum Dark showed his teeth. “I guess I could handle myself with a Dog.”

“For real goods?” Dog returned the grin.

“New deck, unbroken seal, table stakes,” Possum said.

Moro showed up at Ruby John’s Cot Emporium close to noon. Ginny had a semi-private stall, covered by a blanket. She’d bathed and braided her hair and cut the legs clean off her jeans. She tugged at Moro’s heart. “It’ll be tomorrow morning,” Moro said. “Cost you ten gallons of gas.”

“Ten gallons,” Ginny said. “That’s stealin’ and you know it.”

“Take it or leave it,” Moro said. “You got a bad head in that rig. Going to come right off, you don’t fix it. You wouldn’t like that. Your customers wouldn’t like it any at all.”

Ginny appeared subdued but not much. “Four gallons. Tops.”

“Eight. I got to make the parts myself.”

“Five.”

“Six,” Moro said. “Six and I take you to dinner.”

“Five and a half and I want to be out of this sweatbox at dawn. On the road and gone when the sun starts bakin’ your lovely town.”

“Damn, you’re fun to have around.”

Ginny smiled. Sweet and disarming, an unexpected event. “I’m all right. You got to get to know me.”

“Just how do I go about that?”

“You don’t.” The smile turned sober. “I haven’t figured that one out.”

It looked like rain to the north. Sunrise was dreary. Muddy, less-than-spectacular yellows and reds. Colors through a window no one had bothered to wash. Moro had the van brought out. He said he’d thrown in a lube and hosed out the back. Five and a half gallons were gone out of the wagon. Ginny had Del count while Moro watched.

“I’m honest,” Moro said, “you don’t have to do that.”

“I know,” Ginny said, glancing curiously at Dog, who was looking rather strange. He seemed out of sorts. Sulky and off his feed. Ginny followed his eyes and saw Possum atop the van. Possum showed a wet Possum grin.

“Where you headed now?” Moro asked, wanting to hold her as long as he could.

“South,” Ginny said, since she was facing that direction.

“I wouldn’t,” Moro said. “Not real friendly folks down there.”

“I’m not picky. Business is business.”

“No, sir,” Moro shook his head. “Bad business is what it is. You got the Dry Heaves south and east. Doom City after that. Straight down and you’ll hit the Hackers. Might run into Fort Pru, bunch of disgruntled insurance agents out on the flats. Stay clear away from them. Isn’t worth whatever you’ll make.”

“You’ve been a big help,” Ginny said.

Moro gripped her door. “You ever listen to anyone, lady? I’m giving good advice.”

“Fine,” Ginny said, “I’m ’bout as grateful as I can be.”

Moro watched her leave. He was consumed by her appearance. The day seemed to focus in her eyes. Nothing he said pleased her in the least. Still, her disdain was friendly enough. There was no malice at all that he could see.

There was something about the sound of Doom City she didn’t like. Ginny told Del to head south and maybe west. Around noon, a yellow haze appeared on the ragged rim of the world, like someone rolling a cheap dirty rug across the flats.

“Sandstorm,” Possum called from the roof. “Right out of the west. I don’t like it at all. I think we better turn. Looks like trouble coming fast.”

There was nothing Possum said she couldn’t see. He had a habit of saying either too little or more than enough. She told him to cover his guns and get inside, that the sand would take his hide and there was nothing out there he needed to kill that wouldn’t wait. Possum Dark sulked but climbed down. Hunched in back of the van he grasped air in the shape of grips and trigger guards. Practiced rage and windage in his head.

“I’ll bet I can beat that storm,” Del said. “I got this feeling I can do it.”

“Beat it where?” Ginny said. “We don’t know where we are or what’s ahead.”

“That’s true,” Del said. “All the more reason then to get there soon as we can.”

Ginny stepped out and viewed the world with disregard. “I got sand in my teeth and in my toes,” she complained. “I’ll bet that Moro Gain knows right where storms’ll likely be. I’ll bet that’s what happened, all right.”

“Seemed like a decent sort to me,” Del said.

“That’s what I mean,” Ginny said. “You can’t trust a man like that at all.”

The storm had seemed to last a couple of days. Ginny figured maybe an hour. The sky looked bad as cabbage soup. The land looked just the way it had. She couldn’t see the difference between sand recently gone or newly arrived. Del got the van going again. Ginny thought about yesterday’s bath. East Bad News had its points.

Before they topped the first rise, Possum Dark began to stomp on the roof. “Vehicles to port,” he called out. “Sedans and pickup trucks. Flatbeds and semis. Buses of all kinds.”

“What are they doing?” Del said.

“Coming right at us, hauling timber.”

“Doing what?” Ginny made a face. “Damn it all, Del, will you stop the car? I swear you’re a driving fool.”

Del stopped. Ginny climbed up with Possum to watch. The caravan kept a straight line. Cars and trucks weren’t exactly hauling timber . . . but they were. Each carried a section of a wall. Split logs bound together, sharpened at the top. The lead car turned and the others followed. The lead car turned again. In a moment, there was a wooden stockade assembled on the flats, square as if you’d drawn it with a rule. A stockade and a gate. Over the gate a wooden sign:

FORT PRU

Games of Chance & Amusement

Term • Whole Life • Half Life • Death

“I don’t like it,” said Possum Dark.

“You don’t like anything’s still alive,” Ginny said.

“They’ve got small arms and they’re a nervous-looking bunch.”

“They’re just horny, Possum. That’s the same as nervous, or close enough.” Possum pretended to understand. “Looks like they’re pulled up for the night,” she called to Del. “Let’s do some business, friend. The overhead don’t ever stop.”

Five of them came out to the van. They all looked alike. Stringy, darkened by the sun. Bare to the waist except for collars and striped ties. Each carried an attaché case thin as two slices of bread without butter. Two had pistols stuck in their belts. The leader carried a fine-looking sawed-off Remington Twelve. It hung by a camou guitar strap to his waist. Del didn’t like him at all. He had perfect white teeth and a bald head. Eyes the color of jellyfish melting on the beach. He studied the sign on the van and looked at Del.

“You got a whore inside or not?”

Del looked him straight on. “I’m a little displeased at that. It’s not the way to talk.”

“Hey.” The man gave Del a wink. “You don’t have to give us the pitch. We’re show business folk ourselves.”

“Is that right?”

“Wheels of chance and honest cards. Odds I know you’ll like. I’m head actuary of this bunch. Name’s Fred. That animal up there has a piss-poor attitude, friend. No reason to poke that weapon down my throat. We’re friendly people here.”

“No reason I can see why Possum’d spray this place with lead and diarhetics,” Del said. “Less you can think of something I can’t.”

Fred smiled at that. The sun made a big gold ball on his head. “I guess we’ll try your girl,” he told Del. “’Course we got to see her first. What do you take in trade?”

“Goods as fine as what you’re getting in return.”

“I’ve got just the thing.” The head actuary winked again. The gesture was starting to irritate Del. Fred nodded, and a friend drew clean white paper from his case. “This here is heavy bond,” he told Del, shuffling the edges with his thumb. “Fifty percent linen weave, and we got it by the ream. Won’t find anything like it. You can mark on it good or trade it off. 7th Mercenary Writers came through a week ago. Whole brigade of mounted horse. Near cleaned us out, but we can spare a few reams. We got pencils too. Mirado 2s and 3s, unsharpened, with erasers on the end. When’s the last time you saw that? Why, this stuffs good as gold. We got staples and legal pads. Claim forms, maim forms, forms of every sort. Deals on wheels is what we got. And you got gas under wraps in the wagon behind your van. I can smell it plain from here. Friend, we can sure talk some business with you there. I got seventeen rusty-ass guzzlers runnin’ dry.”

A gnat-whisker wire sparked hot in Del’s head. He could see it in the underwriter’s eyes. Gasoline greed was what it was, and he knew these men were bent on more than fleshly pleasure. He knew with androidial dread that when they could, they’d make their play.

“Well now, the gas is not for trade,” he said as calmly as he could. “Sex and tacos and dangerous drugs is what we sell.”

“No problem,” the actuary said. “Why, no problem at all. Just an idea, is all it was. You get that little gal out here and I’ll bring in my crew. How’s half a ream a man sound to you?”

“Just as fair as it can be,” Del said, thinking that half of that would’ve been fine, knowing dead certain now that Fred intended to take back whatever he gave.

“That Moro fellow was right,” Del said. “These insurance boys are bad news. Best thing we can do is take off and let it go.”

“Pooh,” said Ginny, “that’s just the way men are. They come in mad as foamin’ dogs and go away like cats licking cream. That’s the nature of the fornicatin’ trade. You wait and see. Besides, they won’t get funny with Possum Dark.”

“You wouldn’t pray for rain if you were afire,” Del muttered. “Well, I’m not unhitching the gas. I’ll set you up a stage over the tarp. You can do your number there.”

“Suit yourself,” Ginny said, kissing a plastic cheek and scooting him out the door. “Now get on out of here and let me start getting cute.”

It seemed to be going well. Cheerleader Barbara Jean awoke forgotten wet dreams, left their mouths as dry as snakes. Set them up for Sally the Teach and Nora Nurse, secret violations of the soul. Maybe Ginny was right, Del decided. Faced with girlie delights, a man’s normally shitty outlook disappeared. When he was done, he didn’t want to wreck a thing for an hour or maybe two. Didn’t care about killing for half a day. Del could only guess at this magic and how it worked. Data was one thing, sweet encounters something else.

He caught Possum’s eye and felt secure. Forty-eight men waited their turns. Possum knew the calibre of their arms, the length of every blade. His black twin-fifties blessed them all.

Fred the actuary sidled up and grinned at Del. “We sure ought to talk about gas. That’s what we ought to do.”

“Look,” Del said, “gas isn’t for trade, I told you that. Go talk to those boys at the refinery, same as us.”

“Tried to. They got no use for office supplies.”

“That’s not my problem,” Del said.

“Maybe it is.”

Del didn’t miss the razor tones. “You got something to say, just say it.”

“Half of your gas. We pay our way with the girl and don’t give you any trouble.”

“You forget about him?”

Fred studied Possum Dark. “I can afford losses better than you. Listen, I know what you are, friend. I know you’re not a man. Had a CPA droid just like you ’fore the War.”

“Maybe we can talk,” Del said, trying to figure what to do.

“Say now, that’s what I like to hear.”

Ginny’s first customer staggered out, wild-eyed and white around the gills. “Godamn, try the Nurse,” he bawled to the others. “Never had nothin’ like it in my life!”

“Next,” Del said, and started stacking bond paper. “Lust is the name of the game, gents, what did I tell you, now?”

“The girl plastic too?” Fred asked.

“Real as you,” Del said. “We make some kind of deal, how do I know you’ll keep your word?”

“Jesus,” Fred said, “what do you think I am? You got my Life Underwriter’s Oath!”

The second customer exploded through the curtain, tripped and fell on his face. Picked himself up and shook his head. He looked damaged, bleeding around the eyes.

“She’s a tiger,” Del announced, wondering what the hell was going on.” ’Scuse me a minute,” he told Fred, and slipped inside the van. “Just what are you doing in here?” he asked Ginny. ’Those boys look like they been through a thrasher.”

“Beats me,” Ginny said, halfway between Nora and Barbara Jean. “Last old boy jerked around like a snake having a fit. Started pulling out his hair. Somethin’ isn’t right here, Del. It’s gotta be the tapes. I figure the Moro fellow’s a cheat.”

“We got trouble inside and out,” Del told her. ‘The head of this bunch wants our gas.”

“Well, he sure can’t have it, by God.”

“Ginny, the man’s got bug-spit eyes. Says he’ll take his chances with Possum. We better clear out while we can.”

“Huh-unh.” Ginny shook her head. “That’ll rile ’em for sure. Give me a minute or two. We’ve done one Nora and a Sally. I’ll switch them all to Barbara Jean and see.

Del slipped back outside. It seemed a dubious answer at best.

“That’s some woman,” said Fred.

“She’s something else today. Your insurance boys have got her fired.”

Fred grinned at that. “Guess I better give her a try.”

“I wouldn’t,” Del said.

“Why not?”

“Let her calm down some. Might be more than you want to handle.”

He knew at once this wasn’t the thing to say. Fred turned the color of ketchup pie. “Why, you plastic piece of shit! I can handle any woman born . . . or put together out of a kit.”

“Suit yourself,” Del said, feeling the day going down the drain. “No charge at all.”

“Damn right there’s not.” Fred jerked the next man out of line. “Get ready in there, little lady. I am going to handle all your policy needs!”

The men cheered. Possum Dark, who understood at least three-fifths of the trouble down below, shot Del a questioning look.

“Got any of those tacos?” someone asked.

“Not likely,” Del said.

Del considered turning himself off. Android suicide seemed the answer. But in less than three minutes, unnatural howls began to come from the van. The howls turned to shrieks. Life underwriters went rigid. Then Fred emerged, shattered. He looked like a man who’d kicked a bear with boils. His joints appeared to bend the wrong way. He looked whomper-eyed at Del, dazed and out-of-synch. Everything happened then in seconds thin as wire. Del saw Fred find him, saw the oil-spill eyes catch him clean. Saw the sawed-off barrels match the eyes so fast even electric feet couldn’t snatch him out of the way in time. Del’s arm exploded. He let it go and ran for the van. Possum couldn’t help. The actuary was below and too close. The twin-fifties opened up. Underwriters fled. Possum stitched the sand and sent them flying ragged and dead.

Del reached the driver’s seat as lead peppered the van. He felt slightly silly. Sitting there with one arm, one hand on the wheel.

“Move over,” Ginny said, “that isn’t going to work.”

“I guess not.”

Ginny sent them lurching through the scrub. “Never saw anything like it in my life,” she said aloud. “Turned that poor fella on, he started twisting out of his socks, bones snapping like sticks. Damndest orgasm I ever saw.”

“Something’s not working just right.”

“Well, I can see that, Del. Jesus, what’s that!”

Ginny twisted the wheel as a large part of the desert rose straight up in the air. Smoking sand rained down on the van.

“Rockets,” Del said grimly. “That’s the reason they figured that crazyfingered Possum was a snap. Watch where you’re going, girl!”

Two fiery pillars exploded ahead. Del leaned out the window and looked back. Half of Fort Pru’s wall was in pursuit. Possum sprayed everything in sight, but he couldn’t spot where the rockets were coming from. Underwriter assault cars split up, came at them from every side.

“Trying to flank us,” Del said. A rocket burst to the right. “Ginny, I’m not real sure what to do.”

“How’s the stub?”

“Slight electric tingle. Like a doorbell half a mile away. Ginny, they get us in a circle, we’re in very deep shit.”

“They hit that gas, we won’t have to worry about a thing. Oh Lord, now why did I think of that?”

Possum hit a semi clean on. It came to a stop and died, fell over like a bug. Del could see that being a truck and a wall all at once had its problems, balance being one.

“Head right at them,” he told Ginny, “then veer off sharp. They can’t turn quick going fast.”

“Del!”

Bullets rattled the van. Something heavy made a noise. The van skewed to a halt.

Ginny took her hands off the wheel and looked grim. “It appears they got the tires. Del, we’re flat dead is what we are. Let’s get out of this thing.”

And do what? Del wondered. Bearings seemed to roll about in his head. He sensed a malfunction on the way.

The Fort Pru vehicles shrieked to a stop. Crazed life agents piled out and came at them over the flats, firing small arms and hurling stones. A rocket burst nearby.

Possum’s guns suddenly stopped. Ginny grimaced in disgust. “Don’t you tell me we’re out of ammo, Possum Dark. That stuffs plenty hard to get.”

Possum started to speak. Del waved his good arm to the north. “Hey now, would you look at that!”

Suddenly there was confusion in the underwriters’ ranks. A vaguely familiar pickup had appeared on the rise. The driver weaved through traffic, hurling grenades. They exploded in clusters, bright pink bouquets. He spotted the man with the rocket, lying flat atop a bus. Grenades stopped him cold. Underwriters abandoned the field and ran. Ginny saw a fairly peculiar sight. Six black Harleys had joined the truck. Chow Dogs with Uzis snaked in and out of the ranks, motors snarling and spewing horsetails of sand high in the air. They showed no mercy at all, picking off stragglers as they ran. A few underwriters made it to cover. In a moment, it was over. Fort Pru fled in sectional disarray.

“Well, if that wasn’t just in the nick of time,” Del said.

“I hate Chow Dogs,” Possum said. “They got black tongues, and that’s a fact.”

“I hope you folks are all right,” Moro said. “Well now, friend, looks as if you’ve thrown an arm.”

“Nothing real serious,” Del said.

“I’m grateful,” Ginny said. “Guess I got to tell you that.”

Moro was taken by her penetrating charm, her thankless manner. The fetching smudge of grease on her knee. He thought she was cute as a pup.

“I felt it was something I had to do. Circumstances being what they are.”

“And just what circumstances are that?” Ginny asked.

“That pesky Shepherd Dog’s sorta responsible for any trouble you might’ve had. Got a little pissed when that Possum cleaned him out. Five-card stud, I think it was. ’Course there might have been marking and crimping of cards, I couldn’t say.”

Ginny blew hair out of her eyes. “Mister, far as I can see, you’re not making a lot of sense.”

“I’m real embarrassed about this. That Dog got mad and kinda screwed up your gear.”

“You let a Dog repair my stuff?” Ginny said.

“Perfectly good technician. Taught him mostly myself. Okay if you don’t get his dander up. Those Shepherds are inbred, so I hear. What he did was set your tapes in a loop and speed ’em up. Customer’d get, say, twenty-six times his money’s worth. Works out to a Mach 7 fuck. Could cause bodily harm.”

“Lord, I ought to shoot you in the foot,” Ginny said.

“Look,” Moro said, “I stand behind my work and I got here quick as I could. Brought friends along to help, and I’m eating the cost of that.”

“Damn right,” Ginny said. The Chow Dogs sat their Harleys a ways off and glared at Possum. Possum Dark glared back. He secretly admired their leather gear, the Purina crests sewn on the backs.

“I’ll be adding up costs,” Ginny said. “I’m expecting full repairs.”

“You’ll get it. Of course you’ll have to spend some time in Bad News. Might take a little while.”

She caught his look and had to laugh. “You’re a stubborn son of a bitch, I’ll give you that. What’d you do with that Dog?”

“You want taco meat, I’ll make you a deal.”

“Yuck. I guess I’ll pass.”

Del began to weave about in roughly trapezoidal squares. Smoke started to curl out of his stub.

“For Christ’s sake, Possum, sit on him or something,” Ginny said.

“I can fix that,” Moro told her.

“You’ve about fixed enough, seems to me.”

“We’re going to get along fine. You wait and see.”

“You think so?” Ginny looked alarmed. “I better not get used to having you around.”

“It could happen.”

“It could just as easy not.”

“I’ll see about changing that tire,” Moro said. “We ought to get Del out of the sun. You think about finding something nice to wear to dinner. East Bad News is kinda picky.”

PEACHES FOR MAD MOLLY

Steven Gould

People tend to adapt to every available niche—and any artificial habitat is likely to include more of those than the designers had in mind.

Sometime during the night the wind pulled a one-pointer off the west face of the building up around the 630th floor. I heard him screaming as he went by, very loud, like this was his last chance to voice an opinion, but it was all so sudden that he didn’t know what it was. Then he hit a microwave relay off 542 . . . hard, and the chance was gone. Chunks of him landed in Buffalo Bayou forty-five seconds later.

The alligators probably liked that.

I don’t know if his purchase failed or his rope broke or if the sucker just couldn’t tie a decent knot. He pissed me off though, because I couldn’t get back to sleep until I’d checked all four of my belay points, the ropes, and the knots. Now if he’d fallen without expressing himself, maybe?

No, I would have heard the noise as he splattered through the rods of the antennae.

Stupid one-pointer.

The next morning I woke up a lot earlier than usual because someone was plucking one of my ropes, adagio, thrum, thrum, like the second movement of Ludwig’s seventh. It was Mad Molly.

“You awake, Bruce?” she asked.

I groaned. “I am now.” My name is not Bruce. Molly, for some reason, calls everyone Bruce. “Shto etta, Molly?”

She was crouched on a roughing point, one of the meter cubes sticking out of the tower face to induce the micro-turbulence boundary layer. She was dressed in a brightly flowered scarlet kimono, livid green bermuda shorts, a sweatshirt, and tabi socks. Her belay line, bright orange against the gray building, stretched from around the corner to Molly’s person where it vanished beneath her kimono, like a snake hiding its head.

“I got a batch to go to the Bruce, Bruce.”

I turned and looked down. There was a damp wind in my face. Some low clouds had come in overnight, hiding the ground, but the tower’s shadow stretched a long ways across the fluffy stuff below. “Jeeze, Molly. You know the Bruce won’t be on shift for another hour.” Damn, she had me doing it! “Oh. hell. I’ll be over after I get dressed.”

She blinked twice. Her eyes were black chips of stone in a face so seamed and browned by the sun that it was hard to tell her age. “Okay, Bruce,” she said, then stood abruptly and flung herself off the cube. She dropped maybe five meters before her rope tightened her fall into an arc that swung her down and around the comer.

I let out my breath. She’s not called Mad Molly for nothing.

I dressed, drank the water out of my catch basin, urinated on the clouds (seems only fair) and rolled up my bag.

Between the direct sunlight and the stuff bouncing off the clouds below the south face was blinding. I put my shades on at the corner.

Molly’s nest, like a mud dauber’s, hung from an industrial exhaust vent off the 611th floor. It was woven, sewed, tucked, patched, welded, snapped, zipped, and tied into creation. It looked like a wasp’s nest on a piece of chrome. It did not blend in.

Her pigeon coop, about two floors lower down, blended in even less. It was made of paper, sheet plastic, wire, and it was speckled with pigeon droppings. It was where it was because only a fool lives directly under under defecating birds, and Molly, while mad, was not stupid.

Molly was crouched in the doorway of her nest balanced on her feet like one of her pigeons. She was staring out at nothing and muttering angrily to herself.

“What’s wrong. Molly? Didn’t you sleep okay?”

She glared at me. “That damn Bruce got another three of my birds yesterday.”

I hooked my bag onto a beaner and hung it under her house. “What Bruce, Molly? That red tailed hawk?”

“Yeah, that Bruce. Then the other Bruce pops off last night and wakes me up so I can’t get back to sleep because I’m listening for that damn hawk.” She backed into her nest to let me in.

“Hawks don’t hunt at night, Molly.”

She flapped her arms. “So? Like maybe the vicious, son-of-a-bitchin’ Bruce gets into the coop? He could kill half my birds in one night!” She started coiling one of her ropes, pulling the line with short, angry jerks. “I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore. Bruce. It’s hot in the summer. It’s freezing in the winter. The Bab’s are always hassling me instead of the Howlers, the Howlers keep hassling me for free birds or they’ll cut me loose one night. I can’t cook on cloudy days unless I want to pay an arm and a leg for fuel. I can’t get fresh fruit or vegetables. That crazy social worker whose afraid of heights comes by and asks if he can help me. I say ‘Yeah, get me some fresh fruit.’ He brings me applications for readmittance! God, I’d kill for a fresh peach! I’d be better off back in the home!”

I shrugged. “Maybe you would, Molly. After all, you’re getting on in years.”

“Fat lot you know, Bruce! You crazy or something? Trade this view for six walls? Breathe that stale stuff they got in there? Give up my birds? Give up my freedom? Shit, Bruce, who the hell’s side are you on anyway?”

I laughed. “Yours, Molly.”

She started wrapping the pigeons and swearing under her breath.

I looked at Molly’s clippings, bits of faded newsprint stuck to the wall of the tower itself. By the light coming through some of the plastic sheeting in the roof, I saw a picture of Molly on Mt. McKinley dated twenty years before. An article about her second attempt on Everest. Stories about her climbing buildings in New York. Chicago, and L.A. I looked closer at one that talked about her climbing the south face of El Capitan on her fourteenth birthday. It had the date.

I looked twice and tried to remember what day of the month it was. I had to count backwards in my head to be sure.

Tomorrow was Mad Molly’s birthday.

The Bruce in question was Murry Zapata, outdoor rec guard of the south balcony on the 480th floor. This meant I had to take the birds down 131 stories, or a little over half a kilometer. And then climb back.

Even on the face of Le Bab tower, with a roughing cube or vent or external rail every meter or so, this is a serious climb. Molly’s pigeons alone were not worth the trip, so I dropped five floors and went to see Lenny.

It’s a real pain to climb around Lenny’s because nearly every horizontal surface has a plant box or pot on it. So I rappeled down even with him and shouted over to where he was fiddling with a clump of fennel.

“Hey, Lenny. I’m making a run. You got anything for Murry?”

He straightened up. “Yeah, wait a sec.” He was wearing shorts and his climbing harness and nothing else. He was brown all over. If I did that sort of thing I’d be a melanoma farm.

Lenny climbed down to his tent and disappeared inside. I worked my way over there, avoiding the plants. I smelled dirt, a rare smell up here. It was an odor rich and textured. It kicked in memories of freshly plowed fields or newly dug graves. When I got to Lenny’s tent, he came out with a bag.

“What’cha got,” I asked.

He shrugged. “Garlic, cumin, and anise. The weights are marked on the outside. Murry should have no trouble moving it. The Chicanos can’t get enough of the garlic. Tell Murry that I’ll have some of those tiny muy caliente chilis for him next week.”

“Got it.”

“By the way, Fran said yesterday to tell you she has some daisies ready to go down.”

“Check. You ever grow any fruit, Lenny?”

“On these little ledges? I thought about getting a dwarf orange once but decided against it. I grow dew berries but none of them are ripe right now. No way I could grow trees. Last year I grew some cantaloupe but that’s too much trouble. You need a bigger bed than I like.”

“Oh, well. It was a thought.” I added his bag to the pigeons in my pack. “IT! probably be late getting back.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I know. Better you than me, though. Last time I went, the Howlers stole all my tomatoes. Watch out down below. The Howlers are claiming the entire circumference from 520 to 530.”

“Oh, yeah? Just so they don’t interfere with my right of eminent domain.”

He shrugged. “Just be careful. I don’t care if they want a cut. Like maybe a clump of garlic.”

I blinked. “Nobody cuts my cargo. Nobody.”

“Not even Dactyl?”

“Dactyl’s never bothered me. He’s just a kid.”

Lenny shrugged. “He’s sent his share down. You get yourself pushed off and we’ll have to find someone else to do the runs. Just be careful.”

“Careful is what I do best.”

Fran lived around the corner, on the east face. She grew flowers, took in sewing, and did laundry. When she had the daylight for her solar panel, she watched TV.

“Why don’t you live inside, Fran. You could watch TV twenty-four hours a day.”

She grinned at me, a not unpleasant event. “Nah. Then I’d pork up to about a hundred kilos eating that syntha crap and not getting any exercise and I’d have to have a permit to grow even one flower in my cubicle and a dispensation for the wattage for a grow light and so on and so forth. When they put me in a coffin, I want to be dead.”

“Hey, they have exercise rooms and indoor tracks and the rec balconies.”

“Big deal. Shut up for a second while I see if Bob is still mad at Sue because he found out about Marilyn’s connection with her mother’s surgeon. When the commercial comes I’ll cut and bundle some daisies.”

She turned her head back to the flat screen. I looked at her blue bonnets and pansies while I waited.

“There, I was right. Marilyn is sleeping with Sue’s mother. That will make everything okay.” She tucked the TV in a pocket and prepared the daisies for me. “I’m going to have peonies next week.” I laced the wrapped flowers on the outside of the pack to avoid crushing the petals. While I was doing that Fran moved closer. “Stop over on the way back?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Of course I’ll drop your script off.”

She withdrew a little.

“I want to, Fran, honest. But I want to get some fresh fruit for Mad Molly’s birthday tomorrow and I don’t know where I’ll have to go to get it.”

She turned away and shrugged. I stood there for a moment, then left, irritated. When I looked back she was watching the TV again.

The Howlers had claimed ten floors and the entire circumference of the Le Bab Tower between those floors. That’s an area of forty meters by 250 meters per side or 40,000 square meters total. The tower is over a kilometer on a side at the base but it tapers in stages until its only twenty meters square at three thousand meters.

Their greediness was to my advantage because there’s only thirty-five or so Howlers and that’s a lot of area to cover. As I rappelled down to 529 I slowly worked my way around the building. There was a bunch of them in hammocks on the south face, sunbathing. I saw one or two on the east face but most of them were on the west face. Only one person was on the north side.

I moved down to 521 on the north face well away from the one guy and doubled my longest line. It was a hundred meter blue line twelve millimeters thick. I coiled it carefully on a roughing cube after wrapping the halfway point of the rope around another roughing cube one complete circuit, each end trailing down. I pushed it close into the building so it wouldn’t slip. Then I clipped my brake bars around the doubled line.

The guy at the other comer noticed me now and started working his way from roughing cube to roughing cube, curious. I kicked the rope off the cube and it fell cleanly with no snarls, no snags. He shouted. I jumped, a gloved hand on the rope where it came out of the brake bars. I did the forty meters in five jumps, a total of ten seconds. Halfway down I heard him shout for help and heard others come around the corner. At 518 I braked and swung into the building. The closest Howler was still fifteen meters or so away from my rope, but he was speeding up. I leaned against the building and flicked the right hand rope hard, sending a sinusoidal wave traveling up the line. It reached the top and the now loose rope flicked off the cube above and fell. I sat down and braced. A hundred meter rope weighs in at eight kilos and the shock of it pulling up short could have pulled me from the cube.

They shouted things after me, but none of them followed. I heard one of them call out, “Quit’cha bitchin. He’s got to pass us on his way home. We’ll educate him then.”

All the rec guards deal. It’s a good job to have if you’re inside. Even things that originate inside the tower end up traveling the outside pipeline. Ain’t no corridor checks out here. No TV cameras or sniffers either. The Howlers do a lot of that sort of work.

Murry is different from the other guards, though. He doesn’t deal slice or spike or any of the other nasty pharmoddities, and he treats us outsiders like humans. He says he was outside once. I believe him.

“So, Murry, what’s with your wife? She had that baby yet?”

“Nah. And boy is she tired of being pregnant. She’s, like, out to here.” He held his hands out. “You tell Fran I want something special when she finally dominoes. Like roses.”

“Christ, Murry. You know Fran can’t do roses. Not in friggin pots. Maybe day lilies. I’ll ask her.” I sat in my seat harness, hanging outside the cage that’s around the rec balcony. Murry stood inside smelling the daisies. There were some kids kicking a soccer ball on the far side of the balcony and several adults standing at the railing looking out through the bars. Several people stared at me. I ignored them.

Murry counted out the script for the load and passed it through the bars. I zipped it in a pocket. Then he pulled out the provisions I’d ordered the last run and I dropped them, item by item, into the pack.

“You ever get any fresh fruit in there, Murray?”

“What do I look like, guy, a millionaire? The guys that get that sort of stuff live up there above 750. Hell, I once had this escort job up to 752 and while the honcho I escorted was talking to the resident, they had me wait out on this patio. This guy had apples and peaches and cherries for crissakes! Cherries!” He shook his head. Tt was weird, too. None of this cage crap.” He rapped on the bars with his fist. “He had a chest high railing and that was it.”

“Well of course. What with the barrier at 650 he doesn’t have to worry about us. I’ll bet there’s lots of open balconies up that way.” I paused. “Well, I gotta go. I’ve got a long way to climb.”

“Better you than me. Don’t forget to tell Fran about the special flowers.”

“Right.”

They were waiting for me, all the Howlers sitting on the south face, silent, intent. I stopped four stories below 520 and rested. While I rested I coiled my belay line and packed it in my pack. I sat there, fifteen kilos of supplies and climbing paraphernalia on my back, and looked out on the world.

The wind had shifted more to the southwest and was less damp than the morning air. It had also strengthened but the boundary layer created by the roughing cubes kept the really high winds out from the face of the tower.

Sometime during the day the low clouds below had broken into patches, letting the ground below show through. I perched on the roughing cube, unbelayed and contemplated the fall. 516 is just over two kilometers from the ground. That’s quite a drop—though in low winds the odds were I’d smack into one of the rec balconies where the tower widened below. In a decent southerly wind you can depend on hitting the swamps instead.

What I had to do now was rough.

I had to free ascend.

No ropes, no nets, no second chances. If I lost it the only thing I had to worry about was whether or not to scream on the way down.

The Howlers were not going to leave me time for the niceties.

For the most part the Howlers were so-so climbers, but they had a few people capable of technical ascents. I had to separate the good from the bad and then out-climb the good.

I stood on the roughing cube and started off at a run, leaping two meters at a time from roughing cube to roughing cube moving sideways across the south face. Above me I heard shouts but I didn’t look up. I didn’t dare. The mind was blank, letting the body do the work without hindrance. The eyes saw, the body did, the mind coasted.

I slowed as I neared the corner, and stopped, nearly falling when I overbalanced, but saving myself by dropping my center of gravity.

There weren’t nearly as many of them above me now. Maybe six of them had kept up with me. The others were trying to do it by the numbers, roping from point to point. I climbed two stories quickly, chimneying between a disused fractional distillation stack and a cooling tower. Then I moved around the comer and ran again.

When I stopped to move up two more stories there were only two of them above me. The other four were trying for more altitude rather than trying to keep pace horizontally.

I ran almost to the northwest corner, then moved straight up.

The first one decided to drop kick me dear Jesus through the goal posts of life. He pulled his line out, fixed it to something convenient and rappelled out with big jumps, planning, no doubt, to come swinging into me with his feet when he reached my level. I ignored him until the last minute when I let myself collapse onto a roughing cube. His feet slammed into the wall above me then rebounded out.

As he swung back out from the face I leaped after him.

His face went white. Whatever he was expecting me to do, he wasn’t expecting that! I latched onto him like a monkey, my legs going around his waist. One of my hands grabbed his rope, the other punched with all my might into his face. I felt his jaw go and his body went slack. He released the rope below the brake bars and started sliding down the rope. I scissored him with my legs and held onto the rope with both hands. My shoulders creaked as I took the strain but he stopped sliding. Then we swung back into the wall and I sagged onto a cube astride him.

His buddy was dropping down more slowly. He was belayed but he’d seen what I’d done and wasn’t going to try the airborne approach. He was still a floor or two above me so I tied his friend off so he wouldn’t sleepwalk and took off sideways, running again.

I heard him shout but I didn’t hear him moving. When I paused again he was bent over my friend with the broken jaw. I reached an external exhaust duct and headed for the sky as fast as I could climb.

At this point I was halfway through Howler territory. Off to my right the group that had opted for height was now moving sideways to cut me off. I kept climbing, breathing hard now but not desperate. I could climb at my current speed for another half hour without a break and I thought there was only one other outsider that could keep up that sort of pace. I wondered if he was up above.

I looked.

He was.

He wasn’t on the wall.

He didn’t seem to be roped on.

And he was dropping.

I tried to throw myself to the side, in the only direction I could go, but I was only partially successful. His foot caught me a glancing blow to my head and I fell three meters to the next roughing cube. I landed hard on the cube, staggered, bumped into the wall, and fell outward, off the cube. The drop was sudden, gut wrenching, and terrifying.

I caught the edge of the cube with both hands, wrenching my shoulders and banging my elbow. My head ached, the sky spun in circles and I knew that there was over a kilometer of empty space beneath my feet.

Dactyl had stopped somehow, several 130 stories below me, and, as I hung there, I could see the metallic gleam of some sort of wire, stretched taut down the face of the tower.

I chinned myself up onto the cube and traversed away from the wire, moving and climbing fast. I ignored the pain in my shoulders and the throbbing of my head and even the stomach churning fear and sudden clammy sweat.

There was a whirring sound and the hint of movement behind me. I turned around and caught the flash of gray moving up the face. I looked up.

He was waiting, up on the edge of Howler territory, just watching. Closer were the three clowns who were trying to get above me before I passed them. I eyed the gap, thought about it, and then went into overdrive. They didn’t make it. I passed them before they reached the exhaust duct. For a few stories they tried to pursue and one of them even threw a grapple that fell short.

That left only Dactyl.

He was directly overhead when I reached 530. I paused and glanced down. The others had stopped and were looking up. Even the clothesliners had made it around the comer and were watching. I looked back up. Dactyl moved aside about five meters and sat down on a ledge. I climbed up even with him and sat too.

Dactyl showed up one day in the middle of Howler territory. Three Howlers took the long dive before it was decided that maybe the Howler should ignore Dactyl before there were no Howlers left. He’s a loner who does a mixed bag: some free ascent, some rope work, and some fancy mech stuff.

There was something about him that made him hard to see, almost. Not really, but he did blend into the building. His nylons, his climbing shoes, his harness were gray like the roughing cube he sat on. His harness was strung with gray boxes and pouches of varying sizes, front and back, giving his torso a bulky appearance, sort of like a turtle with long arms. He was younger than I’d thought he’d be, perhaps twenty, but then I’d only seen him at a distance before now. His eyes looked straight at me, steady and hard. He wasn’t sweating a bit.

“Why?” I said.

He shrugged. “Be natural, become a part of your environment. Who said that?”

“Lot’s of people said that. Even I said that.”

Dactyl nodded. “So, like I’m doing that thing. I’m becoming a part of the environment. One thing you should know by now, dude . . .”

“What’s that?” I asked warily. “The environment is hostile.”

I looked out, away from him. In the far distance I saw white sails in Galveston bay. I turned back. “What did I ever do to you?”

He smiled. “You take it too personal. It’s more random than that. Think of me as an extra-somatic evolutionary factor. You’ve got to evolve. You’ve got to adapt. Mano a Mano shit like that.”

I let that stew for a while. The Howlers were gathering below, inside their territory. They were discussing something with much hand waving and punctuated gestures.

“So,” I finally said. “You ever walk through downtown Houston?”

He blinked, opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. Finally, almost unwillingly, he said, “On the ground? No. They eat people down there.”

I shrugged. “Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Last time I was in Tranquillity Park they were eating alligator tail with Siamese peanut sauce. Except when the alligators were eating them.”

“Oh.”

“You even been down below at all?”

“I was born inside.”

“Well, don’t let it bother you,” I said as I stood up.

He frowned slightly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

I grinned. “It’s not where you were born that matters,” I said. “It’s where you die.”

I started climbing.

The first half-hour was evenly paced. He waited about a minute before he started after me and for the the next seventy floors it was as if there was an invisible fifteen meter rope stretched between us. About 600 he lowered the gap to ten meters. I picked up the pace a little, but the gap stayed the same for the next ten floors.

I was breathing hard now and feeling the bum in my thighs and arms. My clothes were soaked in sweat but my hands were dry and I was in rhythm, climbing smooth and steady.

Dactyl was also climbing fast, but jerky, his movements inefficient. The gap was still ten meters but I could tell he was straining.

I doubled my speed.

The universe contracted. There was only the wall, the next purchase, the next breath. There were no peaches, no birthdays, no flowers, and no Dactyl. There was no thought.

But there was pain.

My thighs went from burning to screaming. I started taking up some of the slack with my arms and they joined the chorus. I climbed through the red haze for fifteen more stories and then collapsed on a roughing cube.

The world reeled as I gasped for the first breaths. I felt incipient cramps lurking in my thighs and I wanted those muscle cells to have all the oxygen I could give them. Then, as the universe steadied, I looked down for Dactyl.

He wasn’t on the north face.

Had he given up?

I didn’t know and it bothered me.

Five stories above was the barrier—a black, ten meter overhang perpendicular to the face. It was perfectly smooth, made of metal, its welds ground flush. I didn’t know what was above it. There were rumors about automatic lasers, armed guards, and computer monitored imaging devices. I’d worry about them when I got past that overhang.

I was two stories short of it when Dactyl appeared at the northeast comer of the building.

Above me.

It wasn’t possible. I almost quit then but something made me go on. I tried to blank my mind and began running toward the west face, doing the squirrel hopping from block to block, even though my muscles weren’t up to it. I almost lost it twice, once when my mind dwelt too much on how Dactyl had passed me and once when my quadriceps gave way.

I stopped at the comer, gasping, and 132 looked back. Dactyl was working his way leisurely after me, slowly, almost labored. I ducked around and climbed again, until I was crouched on a roughing cube, the dark overhang touching my head. I peeked around the comer. Dactyl had paused, apparently resting.

I took off my pack and pulled out a thirty-meter length of two-ton-test line, a half-meter piece of ten-kilo-test monofilament, and a grapple. I tied the monofilament between the heavier line and the grapple.

I peeked around the comer again. Dactyl was moving again, but slowly, carefully. He was still two-hundred meters across the face. I dropped down two meters and stepped back around the comer. Dactyl stopped when he saw me, but I ignored him, playing out the grapple and line until it hung about fifteen meters below me. Then I started swinging it.

It was hard work, tricky, too. I didn’t think I had the time to rig a quick belay before Dactyl got there. At least the grapple was light, three kilos at most, but as it swung wider and wider it threatened to pull me off at each end of its swing, especially as the comer formed by the barrier concentrated the wind somewhat.

Finally the grapple raised far enough on the swing away from the comer. As it dropped to the bottom of its swing I began pulling it in. As the moment arm decreased the grapple sped up, gaining enough speed to flip up above the edge of the overhang. I had no idea how thick the overhang was or even if there was something up there for the grapple to catch on. I held my breath.

There was a distant clinking noise as it struck something and the rope slackened. For an instant I thought it was dropping back down and I was scared because I was already off balance and I didn’t know how far Dactyl was behind me. Then the rope stopped moving and the grapple didn’t drop into sight.

I risked a quick look behind. Dactyl was still a hundred meters away. I took the rope and moved back around the corner, pulling the rope cautiously tight. As luck would have it, with the line pulled over. Dactyl wouldn’t be able to see any part of the rope until he rounded the comer.

It took me two minutes to tie the lower end of the rope around a roughing cube and then to two more cubes for backup. Then I recklessly dropped from cube to cube until I was three stories down and hidden behind a Bernoulli exhaust vent.

He stuck his head around the comer almost immediately. Saw the dangling line and tugged it hard. The ten-kilo test line hidden above the barrier held. Dactyl clipped a beaner over the line and leaped out. almost like a flying squirrel, his hands reaching for the rope. He was halfway out before his full weight hit the rope.

The ten kilo test snapped immediately. I heard his indrawn breath, but he didn’t swear. Instead, as he arched down, he tried to twist around, to get his legs between him and the face as he swung into it.

He was only partially successful, slamming hard into the corner of a roughing cube, one leg taking some of the shock. I heard the breath leave his lungs in an explosive grunt and then he was sliding down the rope toward the unattached end, grabbing weakly to stop himself, but only managing to slow the drop.

I moved like a striking snake.

I was already lower down the tower from where he’d hit the wall and took three giant strides from cube to cube to get directly beneath him. Then he was off the end of the rope and dropping free and my hand reached out, snared his climbing harness, and I flattened myself atop the cube I was on.

For the second time that day I nearly dislocated my shoulder. His weight nearly pulled me off the tower. The back of my shirt suddenly split. I heard his head crack onto the cube and he felt like a sack of dirt, lifeless, but heavy as the world.

It took some time to get him safely onto the cube and lashed in place.

It took even longer to get my second grapple up where the first one was. It seemed my first attempt was a fluke and I had to repeat the tiring process six more times before I could clip my ascenders to the rope and inchworm up it.

The building had narrowed above the barrier, to something like 150 meters per side. I was on the edge of a terrace running around the building. Unlike the recreation balconies below, it was open to the sky, uncaged, with only a chest high railing to contain its occupants. Scattered artfully across the patio were lounge chairs and greenery topped planters.

I saw a small crowd of formally dressed men and women mingling on the west terrace, sheltered from the northeast wind. Servants moved among them with trays. Cocktail hour among the rich, the influential, and the cloudy.

I pulled myself quickly over the edge and crouched behind a planter, pulling my rope in and folding my grapples.

The terrace areas unsheltered by the wind seemed to be deserted. I looked for cameras and IR reflectors and capcitance wires but I didn’t see any. I couldn’t see any reason for any.

Above me, the face of the tower rose another five hundred meters or so, but unlike the faces below, there were individual balconies spotted here and there among the roughing cubes. On more than one I could see growing plants, even trees.

I had more that a hundred floors to go, perhaps 400 meters.

My arms and legs were trembling. There was a sharp pain in the shoulder Dactyl had kicked, making it hard for me to lift that arm higher than my neck.

I nearly gave it up. I thought about putting down my pack, unbuckling my climbing harness, and stretching out on one of these lounge chairs. Perhaps later I’d take a drink off of one of those trays.

Then a guard would come and escort me all the way to the ground.

Besides, I could do a hundred stories standing on my head, right? Right.

The sun was completely down by the time I reached 700 but lights from the building itself gave me what I couldn’t make out by feel. The balconies were fancy, sheltered from the wind by removable fairings and jutting fins. I kept my eye out for a balcony with fruit trees, just in case. I wouldn’t climb all the way up to 752 if I didn’t have to.

But I had to.

There were only four balconies on 134 752, one to each side. They were the largest private balconies I’d ever seen on the tower. Only one of them had anything resembling a garden. I spent five minutes looking over the edge at planter after planter of vegetables, flowers, shrubs, and trees. I couldn’t see any lights through the glass doors leading into the building and I couldn’t see any peaches.

I sighed and pulled myself over the edge for a closer look, standing upright with difficulty. My limbs were leaden, my breath still labored. I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears, and I still couldn’t see any peaches.

There were some green oranges on a tree near me, but that was the closest thing to fruit I could see. I shivered. I was almost two kilometers above sea level and the sun had gone down an hour ago. My sweat soaked clothes were starting to chill.

Something was nagging me and, at first, the fatigue toxins wouldn’t let me think clearly. Then an important fact swam into my attention.

I hadn’t checked for alarms.

They were there, in the wall above the railing, a series of small reflectors for the IR beams that I’d crawled through to enter the balcony.

Time to leave. Long past time. I stepped toward the railing and heard a door open behind me. I started to swing my leg up over the edge when I felt something stick me in the side. And then the universe exploded.

All the muscles on my right side convulsed spasmodically and I came down onto the concrete floor with a crash, slamming my shoulder and hip into the ground. My head was saved from the same fate by the backpack I wore.

Taser, I thought.

When I could focus, I saw the man standing about three meters away, wearing a white khaftan. He was older than I was by decades. Most of his hair was gone and his face had deep lines etched by something other than smiling. I couldn’t help comparing him to Mad Molly, but it just wasn’t the same. Mad Molly could be as old but she didn’t look anywhere as nasty as this guy did.

He held the taser loosely in his right hand. In his left hand he held a drink with ice that he swirled gently around, clink, clink.

“What are you doing here, you disgusting little fly?”

His voice, as he asked the question, was vehement and acid. His expression didn’t change though.

“Nothing.” I tried to say it strongly, firmly, reasonably. It came out like a frog’s croak.

He shot me with the taser again. I caught the glint on the wire as it sped out, tried to dodge, but too late.

I arched over the backpack, my muscles doing things I wouldn’t have believed possible. My head banged sharply against the floor. Then it stopped again.

I was disoriented, the room spun. My legs decided to go into a massive cramp. I gasped out loud.

This seemed to please him.

“Who sent you? I’ll know in the end. I can do this all night long.”

I said quickly, “Nobody sent me. I hoped to get some peaches.”

He shot me again.

I really didn’t think much of this turn of events. My muscles had built up enough lactic acid without electro-convulsive induced contractions. When everything settled down again I had another bump on my head and more cramps.

He took a sip from his drink.

“You’ll have to do better than that,” he said. “Nobody would risk climbing the outside for peaches. Besides, there won’t be peaches on that tree for another five months.” He pointed the taser. “Who sent you?”

I couldn’t even talk at this point. He seemed to realize this, fortunately, and waited a few moments, lowering the taser. Then he asked again, “Who sent you?”

“Get stuffed,” I told him weakly.

“Stupid little man.” He lifted the taser again and something smashed him in the arm, causing him to drop the weapon. He stooped to pick it up again but there was a streak of gray and the thud of full body contact as someone hit him and bowled him over onto his back.

I saw the newcomer scoop up the taser and spin sharply. The taser passed over my head and out over the railing.

It was Dactyl.

The man in the khaftan saw Dactyl’s face then and said, “You!” He started to scramble to his feet. Dactyl took one sliding step forward and kicked him in the face. The man collapsed in a small heap, his khaftan making him look like a white sack with limbs sticking out.

Dactyl stood there for a moment looking down. Then he turned and walked slowly back to me.

“That was a nasty trick with the rope.”

I laughed, albeit weakly. “If you weren’t so lazy you would have made your own way up.” I eyed him warily, but my body wasn’t up to movement yet. Was he going to kick me in the face, too? Still, I had to know something. “How did you pass me down there, below the barrier? You were exhausted, I could see it.”

He shrugged. “You’re right. I’m lazy.” He flipped a device off his back. It looked like a gun with two triggers. I made ready to jump. He pointed it up and pulled the trigger. I heard a chunk and something buried itself in the ceiling. He pulled the second trigger and there was a whining sound. Dactyl and gun floated off the floor. I looked closer and saw the wire.

“Cheater,” I said.

He laughed and lowered himself back to the floor. “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

I told him.

“You’re shitting me.”

“No.”

He laughed then and walked briskly through the door into the tower.

I struggled to stand. Made it. I was leaning against the railing when Dactyl came back through the door with a plastic two-liter container. He handed it to me. It was ice cold.

“What’s this?”

“Last season’s peaches. From the freezer. He always hoards them until just before the fresh ones are ready.”

I stared at him. “How the hell did you know that?”

He shrugged, took the peaches out of my hand and put them in my pack. “Look, I’d get out of here before he wakes up. Not only does he have a lot nastier things than that taser, but security will do whatever he wants.”

He swung up over the edge and lowered himself to arm’s length. Just before he dropped completely from sight he added something which floated up with the wind.

“He’s my father.”

I started down the tower not too long after Dactyl. Physically I was a wreck. The taser had exhausted my muscles in a way that exercise never had. I probably wasn’t in the best shape to do any kind of rope work, but Dactyl’s words rang true. I didn’t want anybody after me in the condition I was in, much less security.

Security is bad. They use copters and rail cars that run up and down the outside of the building. They fire rubber bullets and water cannon. Don’t think this makes them humane. A person blasted off a ledge by either is going to die. Security is just careful not to damage the tower.

So, I did my descent in stages, feeling like an old man tottering carefully down a flight of stairs. Still, descent was far easier than ascent, and my rope work had me down on the barrier patio in less than ten minutes.

It was nearing midnight, actually lighter now that the quarter moon had risen, and the patio, instead of being deserted, had far more people on it than it had at sunset. A few people saw me coiling my rope after my last rappel. I ignored them, going about my business with as much panache as I could muster. On my way to the edge of the balcony I stopped at the buffet and built myself a sandwich.

More people began looking my way and talking. An elderly woman standing at one end of the buffet took a long look at me, then said, “Try the wontons. I think there’s really pork in them.”

I smiled at her. “I don’t know. Pork is tricky. You never know who provided it.”

Her hand stopped, a wonton halfway to her mouth, and stared at me. Then, almost defiantly, she popped it into her mouth and chewed it with relish. “Just so it’s well cooked.”

A white clad steward left the end of the table and walked over to a phone hanging by a door.

I took my sandwich over to the edge and set it down while I took the rope from the pack. My legs trembled slightly. The woman with the wontons followed me over after a minute.

“Here,” she said, holding out a tall glass that clinked. “Ice tea.”

I blinked, surprised. “Why, thank you. This is uncommonly kind.”

She shrugged. “You look like you need it. Are you going to collapse right here? It would be exciting, but I’d avoid it if I were you. I think that nasty man called security.”

“Do I look as bad as all that?”

“Honey, you look like death warmed over.”

I finished playing out the rope and clipped on my brake-bars. “I’m afraid you’re right.” I took a bite out of the sandwich and chewed quickly. I washed it down with the tea. It wasn’t one of Mad Molly’s roast pigeons but it wasn’t garbage, either.

“You’ll get indigestion,” the woman warned.

I smiled and took another large bite. The crowd of people staring at me was getting bigger. There was a stirring in the crowd from over by the door. I took another bite and another swig, then swung over the edge. “We must do this again, sometime,” I said. “Next time, we’ll dance.”

I dropped into the dark, jumping out so I could swing into the building. I didn’t reach it on the first swing, so I let out more rope and pumped my legs. I came within a yard of the tower and swung out again. I felt better than before but was still weak. I looked up and saw heads looking over the edge at me. Something gleamed in the moonlight.

A knife?

I reached the wall and dropped onto a roughing cube, unbalanced, unsure of my purchase. For a moment I teetered, then was able to heave myself in toward the wall, safe. I turned, to release one end of the rope, so I could snake it down from above.

I didn’t have to. It fell from above, two new ends whipping through the night air.

Bastards. I almost shouted it, but it seemed better to let them think I’d fallen. Besides, I couldn’t be bothered with any action so energetic. I was bone weary, tired beyond reaction.

For the next hundred stories I made like a spider with arthritis, slow careful descents with lengthy rests. After falling asleep and nearly falling off a cube, I belayed myself during all rest stops. At one point I’m sure I slept for over an hour because my muscles had set up, stiff and sore. It took me another half hour of careful motion before I was moving smoothly again.

Finally I reached Mad Molly’s, moving carefully, quietly. I unloaded her supplies and the peaches and put them carefully inside her door. I could hear her snoring. Then, leaving my stash under her house as usual, f climbed down, intending to see Fran and make her breakfast.

I didn’t make it to Fran’s.

In the half dark before the dawn they came at me.

This is the place for a good line like “they came on me like the wolf upon the fold” or “as the piranha swarm.” Forget it. I was too tired. All I know is they came at me, the Howlers did. At me. who’d been beaten, electro-shocked. indigested, sliced at. and bone wearified, if there exists such a verb. I watched them come in dull amazement, which is not a suit of clothes, but an amalgam of fatigue and astonished reaction to the last straw on my camellian back.

Before I’d been hurt and felt the need to ignore it. I’d been challenged and felt the need to respond. I’d felt curiosity and felt the need to satisfy it. I’d felt fear and the need to overcome it. But I hadn’t yet felt what I felt now.

I felt rage, and the need to express it.

I’m sure the first two cleared the recreation balcony, they had to. They came at me fast unbelayed and I used every bit of their momentum to heave them out. The next one. doubtless feeling clever, landed on my back and clung like a monkey. I’d passed caring. I simply threw myself to the side, aiming my back at the roughing cube two meters below. He tried, but he didn’t get off in time. I’m grateful though, because the shock would have broken my back if he hadn’t been there.

I don’t think he cleared the rec balcony.

I ran then, but slowly, so angry that I wanted them to catch up. to let me use my fists and feet on their stubborn, malicious, stupid heads. For the next ten minutes it was a running battle only I ran out of steam before they ran out of Howlers.

I ended up backed into a cranny where a cooling vent formed a ledge some five meters deep and four meters wide, when Dactyl dropped into the midst of them, a gray blur that sent three of them for a dive and two more scrambling back around the edges.

I was over feeling mad by then and back to just feeling tired.

Dactyl looked a little tired himself. “I can’t let you out of my sight for a minute, can I?” he said. “What’s the matter? You get tired of their shit?”

“Right . . .” I laughed weakly. “Now I’m back to owing you.”

“That’s right, suck-foot. And I’m not going to let you forget it.”

I tottered forward then and looked at the faces around us. I didn’t feel so good.

“Uh, Dactyl?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you better take a look over the edge.”

He walked casually forward and took a look down, then to both sides, then up. He backed up again.

“Looks like you’re going to get that chance to repay me real soon,” he said.

The Howlers were out there—all of the Howlers still alive—every last one of them. In the predawn gray they were climbing steadily toward us from all sides, as thick as cannibals at a funeral. I didn’t think much of our chances.

“Uh, Dactyl?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think that piton gun of yours can get us out of here?”

He shook his head. “I don’t have anything to shoot into. The angles are all wrong.”

“Oh.”

He tilted his head then and said, “I do have a parachute.”

“What?”

He showed me a gray bundle connected to the back of his climbing harness between batteries.

“You ever use it?”

“Do I look crazy?” he asked.

I took a nine meter length of my strongest line and snapped one end to my harness and the other to his.

The Howlers were starting to come over the lip.

“The answer is yes,” I said.

We started running.

I took two of them off with me, and Dactyl seemed to have kicked one man right in the face. The line stretched between us pulled another one into the void. I was falling, bodies tumbling around me in the air, the recreation deck growing in size. I kept waiting for Dactyl to open the chute but we seemed to fall forever. Now I could see the broken Howlers who’d preceded us, draped on the cage work over the balcony. The wind was a shrieking banshee in my ears. The sun rose. I thought, here I am falling to my death and the bloody sun comes up!

In the bright light of the dawn a silken flower blossomed from Dactyl’s back. I watched him float up away from me and then the chute opened with a dull boom. He jerked up away from me and there came a sudden, numbing shock. Suddenly I was dangling at the end of a three meter pendulum, tick, tick and watching four more bodies crash into the cage.

The wind took us then, far out, away from the tower, spinning slowly as we dropped. I found myself wondering if we’d land on water or land.

Getting out of the swamp, past alligators and cannibals, and through the Le Bab Security perimeter is a story in itself. It was hard, it took some time, but we did it.

While we were gone there was a shakeup in the way of things. Between my trespassing and Howlers dropping out of the sky, the Security people were riled up enough to come out and “shake off” some of the fleas. Fortunately most of the victims were Howlers.

To finish this story up neatly I would like to add that Molly liked the peaches—but she didn’t.

It figures.

THE FUNCTION OF DREAM SLEEP

Harlan Ellison

MCGRATH AWOKE SUDDENLY, just in time to see a huge mouth filled with small, sharp teeth closing in his side. In an instant it was gone, even as he shook himself awake.

Had he not been staring at the flesh, at the moment his eyes opened from sleep, he would have missed the faintest pink line of closure that remained only another heartbeat, then faded and was gone, leaving no indication the mouth had ever existed; a second—secret—mouth hiding in his skin.

At first he was sure he had wakened from a particularly nasty dream. But the memory of the thing that had escaped from within him, through the mouth, was a real memory—not a wisp of fading nightmare. He had felt the chilly passage of something rushing out of him. Like cold air from a leaking balloon. Like a chill down a hallway from a window left open in a distant room. And he had seen the mouth. It lay across the ribs vertically, just below his left nipple, running down to the bulge of fat parallel to his navel. Down his left side there had been a lipless mouth filled with teeth; and it had been open to permit a breeze of something to leave his body.

McGrath sat up on the bed. He was shaking. The Tensor lamp was still on, the paperback novel tented open on the sheet beside him, his body naked and perspiring in the August heat. The Tensor had been aimed directly at his side, bathing his flesh with light, when he had unexpectedly opened his eyes; and in that waking moment he had surprised his body in the act of opening its secret mouth.

He couldn’t stop the trembling, and when the phone rang he had to steel himself to lift the receiver.

“Hello,” he heard himself say, in someone else’s voice.

“Lonny,” said Victor Kayley’s widow, Tm sorry to disturb you at this hour . . .”

“It’s okay,” he said. Victor had died the day before yesterday. Sally relied on him for the arrangements, and hours of solace he didn’t begrudge. Years before, Sally and he . . . then she drifted toward Victor, who had been McGrath’s oldest, closest . . . they were drawn to each other more and more sweetly till . . . and finally, McGrath had taken them both to dinner at the old Steuben Tavern on West 47th, that dear old Steuben Tavern with its dark wood booths and sensational schnitzel, now gone, torn down and gone like so much else that was . . . and he had made them sit side by side in the booth across from him, and he took their hands in his . . . I love you both so much, he had said . . . I see the way you move when you’re around each other . . . you’re both my dearest friends, you put light in my world . . . and he laid their hands together under his, and he grinned at them for their nervousness . . .

“Are you all right; you sound so, I don’t know, so strained?” Her voice was wide awake. But concerned.

“I’m, yeah, I’m okay. I just had the weirdest, I was dozing, fell asleep reading, and I had this, this weird—” He trailed off. Then went back at it, more sternly: “I’m okay. It was a scary dream.” There was, then, a long measure of silence between them. Only the open line, with the sound of ions decaying.

“Are you okay?” he said; thinking of the funeral service day after tomorrow. She had asked him to select the casket. The anodized pink aluminum “unit” they had tried to get him to go for, doing a bait-and-switch, had nauseated him. McGrath had settled on a simple copper casket, shrugging away suggestions by the Bereavement Counselor in the Casket Selection Parlor that “consideration and thoughtfulness for the departed” might better be served by the Monaco, a “Duraseal metal unit with Sea Mist Polished Finish, interior richly lined in 600 Aqua Supreme Cheney velvet, magnificently quilted and shirred, with matching jumbo bolster and coverlet.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “I was watching television, and they had a thing about the echidna, the Australian anteater, you know . . .?” He made a sound that indicated he knew. “And Vic never got over the trip we took to the Flinders Range in ’82, and he just loved the Australian animals, and I turned in the bed to see him smiling . . .”

She began to cry.

He could feel his throat closing. He knew. The turning to tell your best friend something you’d just seen together, to get the reinforcement, the input, the expression on his face. And there was no face.

There was emptiness in that place. He knew. He’d turned to Victor three dozen times in the past two days. Turned, to confront emptiness. Oh, he knew, all right.

“Sally,” he murmured. “Sally, I know; I know.”

She pulled herself together, snuffled herself unclogged and cleared her throat. “It’s okay. I’m fine. It was just a second there . . .”

“Try to get some sleep. We have to do stuff tomorrow.”

“Of course,” she said, sounding really quite all right. I’ll go back to bed. I’m sorry.” He told her to shut up, if you couldn’t call a friend at that hour to talk about the echidna, who the hell could you call?

“Jerry Falwell,” she said. “If I have to annoy someone at three in the morning, better it should be a shit like him.” They laughed quickly and emptily, she said good night and told him he had been much loved by both of them, he said I know that, and they hung up.

Lonny McGrath lay there, the paperback still tented at his side, the Tensor still warming his flesh, the sheets still soggy from the humidity, and he stared at the far wall of the bedroom on whose surface, like the surface of his skin, there lay no evidence whatever of secret mouths filled with teeth.

“I can’t get it out of my mind.”

Dr. Jess ran her fingers down his side, looked closer. “Well, it is red; but that’s more chafing than anything out of Stephen King.”

“It’s red because I keep rubbing it. I’m getting obsessive about it.

And don’t make fun, Jess. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

She sighed and raked a hand back through her thick auburn hair.

“Sorry.” She got up and walked to the window in the examination room. Then, as an afterthought, she said, “You can get dressed.”

She stared out the window as McGrath hopped off the physical therapy table, nearly catching his heel on the retractable step. He partially folded the stiff paper gown that had covered his lap, and laid it on the padded seat. As he pulled up his undershorts, Dr. Jess turned and stared at him. He thought for the hundredth time that his initial fears, years before, at being examined by a female physician, had been foolish. His friend looked at him with concern, but without the look that passed between men and women. “How long has it been since Victor died?”

“Three months, almost.”

“And Emily?”

“Six months.”

“And Steve and Melanie’s son?”

“Oh, Christ, Jess!”

She pursed her lips. “Look, Lonny, I’m not a psychotherapist, but even I can see that all these deaths of friends is getting to you. Maybe you don’t even see it, but you used the right word: obsessive. Nobody can sustain so much pain, over so brief a period, the loss of so many loved ones, without going into a spiral.”

“What did the X-rays show?”

“I told you.”

“But there might’ve been something. Some lesion, or inflammation; an irregularity in the dermis . . . something!”

“Lonny. Come on. I’ve never lied to you. You looked at them with me, did you see anything?” He sighed deeply, shook his head. She spread her hands as if to say, well, there you are, I can’t make something sick where nothing sick exists. “I can work on your soft prostate, and I can give you a shot of cortisone in the ball joint where that cop worked you over; but I can’t treat something out of a penny dreadful novel that doesn’t leave any trace.”

“You think I need a shrink?”

She turned back to the window. “This is your third visit, Lonny. You’re my pal, kiddo, but I think you need to get counseling of a different sort.”

McGrath knotted his tie and drew it up, spreading the wings of his shirt collar with his little fingers. She didn’t turn around. “I’m worried about you, Lonny. You ought to be married.”

“I was married. You’re, not talking wife, anyway. You’re talking keeper.” She didn’t turn. He pulled on his jacket, and waited. Finally, with his hand on the doorknob, he said, “Maybe you’re right. I’ve never been a melancholy sort, but all this . . . so many, in so short a time . . . maybe you’re right.”

He opened the door. She looked out the window. “We’ll talk.” He started out, and without turning, she said, “There won’t be a charge for this visit.”

He smiled thinly, not at all happily. But she didn’t see it.

He called Tommy and begged off from work. Tommy went into a snit. Tm up to my ass, Lonny,” he said, affecting his Dowager Empress tone. “This is Black goddam Friday! The Eroica! That Fahrenheit woman, Farrenstock, whatever the hell it is . . .”

“Fahnestock,” Lonny said, smiling for the first time in days. “I thought we’d seen the last of her when you suggested she look into the possibility of a leper sitting on her face.”

Tommy sighed. “The grotesque bitch is simply a glutton. I swear to God she must be into bondage; the worse I treat her, the more often she comes in.”

“What’d she bring this time?”

“Another half dozen of those tacky petit-point things. I can barely bring myself to look at them. Bleeding martyrs and scenes of culturally depressed areas in, I suppose, Iowa or Indiana. Illinois, Idaho, I don’t know: one of those places that begins with an I, teeming with people who bowl.”

Lonny always wound up framing Mrs. Fahnestock’s gaucheries.

Tommy always took one look, then went upstairs in back of the framing shop to lie down for a while. McGrath had asked the matron once, what she did with all of them. She replied that she gave them as gifts. Tommy, when he heard, fell to his knees and prayed to a God in which he did not believe that the woman would never hold him in enough esteem to feel he deserved such a gift. But she spent, oh my, how she spent.

“Let me guess,” McGrath said. “She wants them blocked so tightly you could bounce a dime off them, with a fabric liner, a basic pearl matte, and the black lacquer frame from Chapin Molding. Right?”

“Yes, of course, right. Which is another reason your slacker behavior is particularly distressing. The truck from Chapin just dropped off a hundred feet of the oval top walnut molding. It’s got to be unpacked, the footage measured, and put away. You cant take the day off.”

“Tommy, don’t whip the guilt on me. I’m a goy, remember?”

“If it weren’t for guilt, the goyim would have wiped us out three thousand years ago. It’s more effective than a Star Wars defense system.” He puffed air through his lips for a moment, measuring how much he would actually be inconvenienced by his assistant’s absence. “Monday morning? Early?”

McGrath said, “I’ll be there no later than eight o’clock. I’ll do the petit-points first.”

“All right. And by the way, you sound awful. D’you know the worst part about being an Atheist?”

Lonny smiled. Tommy would feel it was a closed bargain if he could pass on one of his horrendous jokes. “No, what’s the worst part about being an Atheist?”

“You’ve got no one to talk to when you’re fucking.”

Lonny roared, silently. There was no need to give him the satisfaction. But Tommy knew. He couldn’t see him, but Lonny knew he was grinning broadly at the other end of the line. “So long, Tommy. See you Monday.”

He racked the receiver in the phone booth and looked across Pico Boulevard at the office building. He had lived in Los Angeles for eleven years, since he and Victor and Sally had fled New York, and he still couldn’t get used to the golden patina that lay over the days here. Except when it rained, at which times the inclemency seemed so alien he had visions of giant mushrooms sprouting from the sidewalks. The office building was unimpressive, just three storeys high and brick; but a late afternoon shadow lay across its face, and it recalled for him the eighteen frontal views of the Rouen Cathedral that Monet had painted during the winter months of 1892 and 1893: the same façade, following the light from early morning till sunset. He had seen the Monet exhibition at MOMA. Then he remembered with whom he had taken in that exhibition, and he felt again the passage of chill leaving his body through that secret mouth. He stepped out of the booth and just wanted to go somewhere and cry. Stop it! he said inside. Knock it off. He swiped at the corner of his eye, and crossed the street. He passed through the shadow that cut the sidewalk.

Inside the tiny lobby he consulted the glass-paneled wall register. Mostly, the building housed dentists and philatelists, as best he could tell. But against the ribbed black panel he read the little white plastic letters that had been darted in to include THE REM GROUP 306. He walked up the stairs.

To find 306, he had to make a choice: go left or go right. There were no office location arrows on the wall. He went to the right, and was pleased. As the numbers went down, he began to hear someone speaking rather loudly. “Sleep is of several kinds. Dream sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep—what we call REM sleep, and thus the name of our group—is predominantly found in mammals who bring forth living young, rather than eggs. Some birds and reptiles, as well.”

McGrath stood outside the glass-paneled door to 306, and he listened. Viviparous mammals, he thought. He could now discern that the speaker was a woman; and her use of “living young, rather than eggs” instead of viviparous convinced him she was addressing one or more laypersons. The echidna, he thought. A familiar viviparous mammal.

“We now believe dreams originate in the brain’s neocortex.

Dreams have been used to attempt to foretell the future Freud used dreams to explore the unconscious mind. Jung thought dreams formed a bridge of communication between the conscious and the unconscious.” It wasn’t a dream, McGrath thought. I was awake. I know the difference.

The woman was saying, “. . . those who try to make dreams work for them, to create poetry, to solve problems; and it’s generally thought that dreams aid in consolidating memories. How many of you believe that if you can only remember the dream when you waken, that you will understand something very important, or regain some special memory you’ve lost?”

How many of you. McGrath now understood that the dream therapy group was in session. Late on a Friday afternoon? It would have to be women in their thirties, forties.

He opened the door, to see if he was correct.

With their hands in the air, indicating they believed the capturing of a dream on awakening would bring back an old memory, all six of the women in the room, not one of them older than forty, turned to stare at McGrath as he entered. He closed the door behind him, and said, “I don’t agree. I think we dream to forget. And sometimes it doesn’t work.”

He was looking at the woman standing in front of the six hand-raised members of the group. She stared back at him for a long moment, and all six heads turned back to her. Their hands were frozen in the air. The woman who had been speaking settled back till she was perched on the edge of her desk.

“Mr. McGrath?”

“Yes. I’m sorry I’m late. It’s been a day.”

She smiled quickly, totally in command, putting him at ease. “I’m Anna Picket. Tricia said you’d probably be along today. Please grab a chair.”

McGrath nodded and took a folding chair from the three remaining against the wall. He unfolded it and set it at the far left of the semicircle. The six well-tended, expensively-coifed heads remained turned toward him as, one by one, the hands came down.

He wasn’t at all sure letting his ex-wife call this Anna Picket, to get him into the group, had been such a good idea. They had remained friends after the divorce, and he trusted her judgment. Though he had never availed himself of her services after they’d separated and she had gone for her degree at UCLA, he’d been assured that Tricia was as good a family counseling therapist as one could find in Southern California. He had been shocked when she’d suggested a dream group. But he’d come: he had walked through the area most of the early part of the day, trying to decide if he wanted to do this, share what he’d experienced with total strangers; walked through the area stopping in at this shop and that boutique, having some gelato and shaking his head at how this neighborhood had been “gentrified,” how it had changed so radically, how all the wonderful little trademen who had flourished here had been driven out by geysering rents; walked through the area growing more and more despondent at how nothing lasted, how joy was drained away shop by shop, neighborhood by neighborhood, person by . . .

Until one was left alone.

Standing on an empty plain. The dark wind blowing from the horizon. Cold, empty dark: with the knowledge that a pit of eternal loneliness lay just over that horizon, and that the frightening wind that blew up out of the pit would never cease. That one would stand there, all alone, on the empty plain, as one after another of the ones you loved were erased in a second.

Had walked through the area, all day, and finally had called Tommy, and finally had allowed Tricia’s wisdom to lead him, and here he sat, in a folding straight-back chair, asking a total stranger to repeat what she had just said.

“I asked why you didn’t agree with the group, that remembering dreams is a good thing?” She arched an eyebrow, and tilted her head.

McGrath felt uncomfortable for a moment. He blushed. It was something that had always caused him embarrassment. “Well,” he said slowly, “I don’t want to seem like a smart aleck, one of those people who reads some popularized bit of science and then comes on like an authority . . .”

She smiled at his consternation, the flush of his cheeks. “Please, Mr. McGrath, that’s quite all right. Where dreams are concerned, we’re all journeyists. What did you read?”

“The Crick-Mitchison theory. The paper on ‘unlearning.’ I don’t know, it just seemed, well, reasonable to me.”

One of the women asked what that was.

Anna Picket said, “Dr. Sir Francis Crick, you’ll know of him because he won the Nobel Prize for his work with DNA; and Graeme Mitchison, he’s a highly respected brain researcher at Cambridge.

Their experiments in the early 1980s. They postulate that we dream to forget, not to remember.”

“The best way I understood it,” McGrath said, “was using the analogy of cleaning out an office building at night, after all the workers are gone. Outdated reports are trashed, computer dump sheets are shredded, old memos tossed with the refuse. Every night our brains get cleaned during the one to two hours of REM sleep. The dreams pick up after us every day, sweep out the unnecessary, untrue, or just plain silly memories that could keep us from storing the important memories, or might keep us from rational thinking when we’re awake. Remembering the dreams would be counter-productive, since the brain is trying to unlearn all that crap so we function better.”

Anna Picket smiled. “You were sent from heaven, Mr. McGrath.

I was going precisely to that theory when you came in. You’ve saved me a great deal of explanation.”

One of the six women said, “Then you don’t want us to write down our dreams and bring them in for discussion? I even put a tape recorder by the bed. For instance, I had a dream just last night in which my bicycle . . .”

He sat through the entire session, listening to things that infuriated him. They were so self-indulgent, making of the most minor inconveniences in their lives, mountains impossible to conquer. They were so different from the women he knew. They seemed to be antiquated creatures from some primitive time, confused by changing times and the demand on them to be utterly responsible for their existence. They seemed to want succor, to be told that there were greater forces at work in their world; powers and pressures and even conspiracies that existed solely to keep them nervous, uncomfortable, and helpless. Five of the six were divorcees, and only one of the five had a full-time job: selling real estate. The sixth was the daughter of an organized crime figure. McGrath felt no link with them. He didn’t need a group therapy session. His life was as full as he wanted it to be . . . except that he was now always scared, and lost, and constantly depressed. Perhaps Dr. Jess was dead on target. Perhaps he did need a shrink.

He was certain he did not need Anna Picket and her well-tailored ladies whose greatest real anguish was making sure they got home in time to turn on the sprinklers.

When the session ended, he started toward the door without saying anything to the Picket woman. She was surrounded by the six. But she gently edged them aside and called to him, “Mr. McGrath, would you wait a moment? I’d like to speak to you.” He took his hand off the doorknob, and went back to his chair. He bit the soft flesh of his inner cheek, annoyed.

She blew them off like dandelion fluff, far more quickly than McGrath thought possible, and did it without their taking it as rejection. In less than five minutes he was alone in the office with the dream therapist.

She closed the door behind the Mafia Princess and locked it. For a deranged moment he though t . . . but it passed, and the look on her face was concern, not lust? He started to rise. She laid a palm against the air, stopping him. He sank back onto the folding chair.

Then Anna Picket came to him and said, “For McGrath hath murdered sleep.” He stared up at her as she put her left hand behind his head, cupping the nape with fingers extending up under his hair along the curve of the skull. “Don’t be nervous, this’ll be all right,” she said, laying her right hand with the palm against his right cheek, the spread thumb and index finger bracketing an eye he tried mightily not to blink. Her thumb lay alongside his nose, the tip curving onto the bridge. The forefinger lay across the bony eye-ridge.

She pursed her lips, then sighed deeply. In a moment her body twitched with an involuntary rictus, and she gasped, as if she had had the wind knocked out of her. McGrath couldn’t move. He could feel the strength of her hands cradling his head, and the tremors of—he wanted to say—passion slamming through her. Not the passion of strong amorous feeling, but passion in the sense of being acted upon by something external, something alien to one’s nature.

The trembling in her grew more pronounced, and McGrath had the sense that power was being drained out of him, pouring into her, that it had reached saturation level and was leaking back along the system into him, but changed, more dangerous. But why dangerous? She was spasming now, her eyes closed, her head thrown back and to the side, her thick mass of hair swaying and bobbing as she jerked, a human double-circuit high-voltage tower about to overload.

She moaned softly, in pain, without the slightest trace of subliminal pleasure, and he could see she was biting her lower lip so fiercely that blood was beginning to coat her mouth. When the pain he saw in her face became more than he could bear, he reached up quickly and took her hands away with difficulty; breaking the circuit.

Anna Picket’s legs went out and she keeled toward him. He tried to brace himself, but she hit him with full dead weight, and they went crashing to the floor entangled in the metal folding chair.

Frightened, thinking insanely what if someone comes in and sees us like this, theyd think I was molesting her, and in the next instant thinking with relief she locked the door and in the next instant his fear was transmogrified into concern for her. He rolled out from under her trembling body, taking the chair with him, wrapped around one ankle. He shook off the chair, and got to his knees. Her eyes were half-closed, the lids flickering so rapidly she might have been in the line of strobe lights.

He hauled her around, settling her semi-upright with her head in his lap. He brushed the hair from her face, and shook her ever so lightly, because he had no water, and had no moist washcloth. Her breathing slowed, her chest heaved not quite so spastically, and her hand, flung away from her body, began to flex the fingers.

“Ms. Picket,” he whispered, “can you talk? Are you all right? Is there some medicine you need . . . in your desk?”

She opened her eyes, then, and looked up at him. She tasted the blood on her lips and continued breathing raggedly, as though she had run a great distance. And finally she said, “I could feel it in you when you walked in.”

He tried to ask what it was she had felt, what it was in him that had so unhinged her, but she reached in with the flexing hand and touched his forearm.

“You’ll have to come with me.”

“Where?”

“To meet the real REM Group.”

And she began to cry. He knew immediately that she was weeping for him, and he murmured that he would come with her. She tried to smile reassurance, but there was still too much pain in her. They stayed that way for a time, and then they left the office building together.

They were impaired, every one of them in the sprawling ranch-style house in Hidden Hills. One was blind, another had only one hand. A third looked as if she had been in a terrible fire and had lost half her face, and another propelled herself through the house on a small wheeled platform with restraining bars to keep her from falling off.

They had taken the San Diego Freeway to the Ventura, and had driven west on 101 to the Calabasas exit. Climbing, then dropping behind the hills, they had turned up a side road that became a dirt road that became a horse path, Lonny driving Anna Picket’s ’85 Le Sabre.

The house lay within a bowl, completely concealed, even from the dirt road below. The horse trail passed behind low hills covered with mesquite and coast five oak, and abruptly became a perfectly surfaced blacktop. Like the roads Hearst had had cut in the hills leading up to San Simeon, concealing access to the Castle from the Coast Highway above Cambria, the blacktop had been poured on spiral rising cuts laid on a reverse bias.

Unless sought from the air, the enormous ranch house and its outbuildings and grounds would be unknown even to the most adventurous picnicker. “How much of this acreage do you own?” McGrath asked, circling down the inside of the bowl.

“All this,” she said, waving an arm across the empty hills, “almost to the edge of Ventura County.”

She had recovered completely, but had said very little during the hour and a half trip, even during the heaviest weekend traffic on the 101 Freeway crawling like a million-wheeled worm through the San Fernando Valley out of Los Angeles. “Not a lot of casual drop-ins I should imagine,” he replied. She looked at him across the front seat, fully for the first time since leaving Santa Monica. “I hope you’ll have faith in me, trust me just a while longer,” she said.

He paid strict attention to the driving.

He had been cramped within the Buick by a kind of dull fear that strangely reminded him of how he had always felt on Christmas Eve, as a child, lying in bed, afraid of, yet anxious for, the sleep that permitted Santa Claus to come.

In that house below lay something that knew of secret mouths and ancient winds from within. Had he not trusted her, he would have slammed the brake pedal and leaped from the car and not stopped running till he had reached the freeway.

And once inside the house, seeing all of them, so ruined and tragic, he was helpless to do anything but allow her to lead him to a large sitting-room, where a circle of comfortable overstuffed chairs formed a pattern that made the fear more overwhelming.

They came, then, in twos and threes, the legless woman on the rolling cart propelling herself into the center of the ring. He sat there and watched them come, and his heart seemed to press against his chest. McGrath, as a young man, had gone to a Judy Garland film festival at the Thalia in New York. One of the revived movies had been A Child Is Waiting, a nonsinging role for Judy, a film about retarded children. Sally had had to help him out of the theater only halfway through. He could not see through his tears. His capacity for bearing the anguish of the crippled, particularly children, was less than that of most people. He brought himself up short: why had he thought of that afternoon at the Thalia now? These weren’t children. They were adults. All of them. Every woman in the house was at least as old as he, surely older. Why had he been thinking of them as children?

Anna Picket took the chair beside him, and looked around the circle. One chair was empty. “Catherine?” she asked.

The blind woman said, “She died on Sunday.”

Anna closed her eyes and sank back into the chair. “God be with her, and her pain ended.”

They sat quietly for a time, until the woman on the cart looked up at McGrath, smiled a very kind smile, and said, “What is your name, young man?”

“Lonny,” McGrath said. He watched as she rolled herself to his feet and put a hand on his knee. He felt warmth flow through him, and his fear melted. But it only lasted for a moment, as she trembled and moaned softly, as Anna Picket had done in the office. Anna quickly rose and drew her away from McGrath. There were tears in the cart-woman’s eyes.

A woman with gray hair and involuntary head tremors, indicative of Parkinson’s, leaned forward and said, “Lonny, tell us.”

He started to say tell you what? but she held up a finger and said the same thing again.

So he told them. As best he could. Putting words to feelings that always sounded melodramatic; words that were wholly inadequate for the tidal wave of sorrow that held him down in darkness. “I miss them, oh God how I miss them,” he said, twisting his hands. “I’ve never been like this. My mother died, and I was lost, I was miserable, yes there was a feeling my heart would break, because I loved her. But I could handle it. I could comfort my father and my sister, I had it in me to do that. But these last two years . . . one after another . . . so many who were close to me . . . pieces of my past, my life . . . friends I’d shared times with, and now those times are gone, they slip away as I try to think of them. I, I just don’t know what to do.”

And he spoke of the mouth. The teeth. The closing of that mouth. The wind that had escaped from inside him.

“Did you ever sleepwalk, as a child?” a woman with a clubfoot asked. He said: yes, but only once. Tell us, they said.

“It was nothing. I was a little boy, maybe ten or eleven. My father found me standing in the hallway outside my bedroom, at the head of the stairs. I was asleep, and I was looking at the wall. I said, ‘I don’t see it here anywhere.’ My father told me I’d said that; the next morning he told me. He took me back to bed. That was the only time, as best I know.”

The women murmured around the circle to each other. Then the woman with Parkinson’s said, “No, I don’t think that’s anything.” Then she stood up, and came to him. She laid a hand on his forehead and said, “Go to sleep, Lonny.”

And he blinked once, and suddenly sat bolt upright. But it wasn’t an instant, it had been much longer. He had been asleep. For a long while. He knew it was so instantly, because it was now dark outside the house, and the women looked as if they had been savaged by living jungles. The blind woman was bleeding from her eyes and ears; the woman on the cart had fallen over, lay unconscious at his feet; in the chair where the fire victim had sat, there was now only a charred outline of a human being, still faintly smoking.

McGrath leaped to his feet. He looked about wildly. He didn’t know what to do to help them. Beside him, Anna Picket lay slumped across the bolster arm of the chair, her body twisted and blood once again speckling her lips.

Then he realized: the woman who had touched him, the woman with Parkinson’s, was gone.

They began to whimper, and several of them moved, their hands idly touching the air. A woman who had no nose tried to rise, slipped and fell. He rushed to her, helped her back into the chair, and he realized she was missing fingers on both hands. Leprosy . . . no! Hansen’s disease, that’s what it’s called. She was coming to, and she whispered to him, “There . . . Teresa . . . help her . . .” and he looked where she was pointing, at a woman as pale as crystal, her hair a glowing white, her eyes colorless. “She . . . has . . . lupus . . .” the woman without a nose whispered.

McGrath went to Teresa. She looked up at him with fear and was barely able to say, “Can you . . . please . . . take me to a dark place . . .?”

He lifted her in his arms. She weighed nothing. He let her direct him up the stairs to the second floor, to the third bedroom off the main corridor. He opened the door and it was musty and unlit. He could barely make out the shape of a bed. He carried her over and placed her gently on the puffy down comforter. She reached up and touched his hand. “Thank you.” She spoke haltingly, having trouble breathing. “We, we didn’t expect anything . . . like that . . .”

McGrath was frantic. He didn’t know what had happened, didn’t know what he had done to them. He felt awful, felt responsible, but he didn’t know what he had done!

“Go back to them,” she whispered. “Help them.”

“Where is the woman who touched me . . .?”

He heard her sobbing. “She’s gone. Lurene is gone. It wasn’t your fault. We didn’t expect anything . . . like . . . that.”

He rushed back downstairs.

They were helping one another. Anna Picket had brought water, and bottles of medicine, and wet cloths. They were helping one another. The healthier ones limping and crawling to the ones still unconscious or groaning in pain. And he smelled the fried metal scent of ozone in the air. There was a charred patch on the ceiling above the chair where the burned woman had been sitting.

He tried to help Anna Picket, but when she realized it was McGrath, she slapped his hand away. Then she gasped, and her hand flew to her mouth, and she began to cry again, and reached out to apologize. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry! It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t know . . . not even Lurene knew.” She swabbed at her eyes, and laid a hand on his chest. “Go outside. Please. I’ll be there in a moment.”

A wide streak of dove-gray now bolted through her tangled hair. It had not been there before the instant of his sleep.

He went outside and stood under the stars. It was night, but it had not been night before Lurene had touched him. He stared up at the cold points of light, and the sense of irreparable loss overwhelmed him. He wanted to sink to his knees, letting his life ebb into the ground, freeing him from this misery that would not let him breathe. He thought of Victor, and the casket being cranked down into the earth, as Sally clung to him, murmuring words he could not understand, and hitting him again and again on the chest; not hard, but without measure, without meaning, with nothing but simple human misery. He thought of Alan, dying in a Hollywood apartment from AIDS, tended by his mother and sister who were, themselves, hysterical and constantly praying, asking Jesus to help them; dying in that apartment with the two roommates who had been sharing the rent keeping to themselves, eating off paper plates for fear of contracting the plague, trying to figure out if they could get a lawyer to force Alan’s removal; dying in that miserable apartment because the Kaiser Hospital had found a way around his coverage, and had forced him into “home care.” He thought of Emily, lying dead beside her bed, having just dressed for dinner with her daughter, being struck by the grand mal seizure and her heart exploding, lying there for a day, dressed for a dinner she would never eat, with a daughter she would never again see. He thought of Mike, trying to smile from the hospital bed, and forgetting from moment to moment who Lonny was, as the tumor consumed his brain. He thought of Ted seeking shamans and homeopathists, running full tilt till he was cut down. He thought of Roy, all alone now that DeeDee was gone: half a unit, a severed dream, an incomplete conversation. He stood there with his head in his hands, rocking back and forth, trying to ease the pain.

When Anna Picket touched him, he started violently, a small cry of desolation razoring into the darkness.

“What happened in there?” he demanded. “Who are you people? What did I do to you? Please, oh please I’m asking you, tell me what’s going on!”

“We absorb.”

“I don’t know what—”

“We take illness. We’ve always been with you. As far back as we can know. We have always had that capacity, to assume the illness. There aren’t many of us, but we’re everywhere. We absorb. We try to help. As Jesus wrapped himself in the leper’s garments, as he touched the lame and the blind, and they were healed. I don’t know where it comes from, some sort of intense empathy. But . . . we do it . . . we absorb.”

“And with me . . . what was that in there . . .?”

“We didn’t know. We thought it was just the heartache. We’ve encountered it before. That was why Tricia suggested you come to the Group.”

“My wife . . . is Tricia one of you? Can she . . . take on the . . . does she absorb? I lived with her, I never—”

Anna was shaking her head. “No, Tricia has no idea what we are. She’s never been here. Very few people have been so needing that I’ve brought them here. But she’s a fine therapist, and we’ve helped a few of her patients. She thought you . . .” She paused. “She still cares for you. She felt your pain, and thought the Group might be able to help. She doesn’t even know of the real REM Group.”

He grabbed her by the shoulders, intense now.

“What happened in there?”

She bit her lip and closed her eyes tightly against the memory. “It was as you said. The mouth. We’d never seen that before. It, it opened. And then . . . and then . . .”

He shook her. “What!?!”

She wailed against the memory. The sound slammed against him and against the hills and against the cold points of the stars. “Mouths. In each of us! Opened. And the wind, it, it just, it just hissed out of us, each of us. And the pain we held, no, that they held—I’m just their contact for the world, they can’t go anywhere, so I go and shop and bring and do—the pain they absorbed, it, it took some of them. Lurene and Margid . . . Teresa won’t live . . . I know . . .”

McGrath was raving now. His head was about to burst. He shook her as she cried and moaned, demanding, “What’s happening to us, what am I doing, why is this doing to us now, what’s going wrong, please, you’ve got to help me, we’ve got to do something—”

And they hugged each other, clinging tightly to the only thing that promised support: each other. The sky wheeled above them, and the ground seemed to fall away. But they kept their balance, and finally she pushed him to arm’s length and looked closely at his face and said, “I don’t know. I do not know. This isn’t like anything we’ve experienced before. Not even Alvarez or Aries know about this. A wind, a terrible wind, something alive, leaving the body.”

“Help me!”

“I can’t help you! No one can help you, I don’t think anyone can help you. Not even Le Braz . . .”

He clutched at the name. “Le Braz! Who’s Le Braz?”

“No, you don’t want to see Le Braz. Please, listen to me, try to go off where it’s quiet, and lonely, and try to handle it yourself, that’s the only way!”

“Tell me who Le Braz is!”

She slapped him. “You’re not hearing me. If we can’t do for you, then no one can. Le Braz is beyond anything we know, he can’t be trusted, he does things that are outside, that are awful, I think. I don’t really know. I went to him once, years ago, it’s not something you want to—”

I don’t care, he said. I don’t care about any of it now. I have to rid myself of this. It’s too terrible to live with. I see their faces. They’re calling and I can’t answer them. They plead with me to say something to them. I don’t know what to say. I can’t sleep. And when I sleep I dream of them. I can’t live like this, because this isn’t living. So tell me how to find Le Braz. I don’t care, to hell with the whole thing, I just don’t give a damn, so tell me!

She slapped him again. Much harder. And again. And he took it. And finally she told him.

He had been an abortionist. In the days before it was legal, he had been the last hope for hundreds of women. Once, long before, he had been a surgeon. But they had taken that away from him. So he did what he could do. In the days when women went to small rooms with long tables, or to coat hangers, he had helped. He had charged two hundred dollars, just to keep up with supplies. In those days of secret thousands in brown paper bags stored in clothes closets, two hundred dollars was as if he had done the work for free. And they had put him in prison. But when he came out, he went back at it.

Anna Picket told McGrath that there had been other . . .

. . . work. Other experiments. She had said the word experiments, with a tone in her voice that made McGrath shudder. And she had said again, “For McGrath hath murdered sleep,” and he asked her if he could take her car, and she said yes, and he had driven back to the 101 Freeway and headed north toward Santa Barbara, where Anna Picket said Le Braz now lived, and had lived for years, in total seclusion.

It was difficult locating his estate. The only gas station open in Santa Barbara at that hour did not carry maps. It had been years since free maps had been a courtesy of gas stations. Like so many other small courtesies in McGrath’s world that had been spirited away before he could lodge a complaint. But there was no complaint department, in any case.

So he went to the Hotel Miramar, and the night clerk was a woman in her sixties who knew every street in Santa Barbara and knew very well the location of the Le Braz “place.” She looked at McGrath as if he had asked her the location of the local abattoir. But she gave him explicit directions, and he thanked her, and she didn’t say you’re welcome, and he left. It was just lightening in the east as dawn approached.

By the time he found the private drive that climbed through heavy woods to the high-fenced estate, it was fully light. Sun poured across the channel and made the foliage seem Rain Forest lush. He looked back over his shoulder as he stepped out of the Le Sabre, and the Santa Monica Channel was silver and rippled and utterly oblivious to shadows left behind from the night.

He walked to the gate, and pressed the button on the intercom system. He waited, and pressed it again. Then a voice—he could not tell if it was male or female, young or old—crackled, “Who is it?”

“I’ve come from Anna Picket and the REM Group.” He paused a moment, and when the silence persisted, he added, “The real REM Group. Women in a house in Hidden Hills.”

The voice said, “Who are you? What’s your name?”

“It doesn’t matter. You don’t know me. McGrath, my name is McGrath. I came a long way to see Le Braz.”

“About what?”

“Open the gate and you’ll know.”

“We don’t have visitors.”

“I saw . . . there was a . . . I woke up suddenly, there was a, a kind of mouth in my body . . . a wind passed . . .”

There was a whirring sound, and the iron gate began to withdraw into the brick wall. McGrath rushed back to the car and started the engine. As the gate opened completely, he decked the accelerator and leaped through, even as the gate began without hesitation to close.

He drove up the winding drive through the Rain Forest, and when he came out at the top, the large, fieldstone mansion sat there, hidden from all sides by tall stands of trees and thick foliage. He pulled up on the crushed rock drive, and sat for a moment staring at the leaded windows that looked down emptily. It was cool here, and dusky, even though it was burgeoning day. He got out and went to the carved oak door. He was reaching for the knocker when the door was opened. By a ruined thing.

McGrath couldn’t help himself. He gasped and fell back, his hands coming up in front of him as if to ward off any approach by the barely human being that stood in the entranceway.

It was horribly pink where it was not burned. At first McGrath thought it was a woman, that was his quick impression; but then he could not discern its sex, it might have been male. It had certainly been tortured in flames. The head was without hair, almost without skin that was not charred black. There seemed to be too many bends and joints in the arms. The sense that it was female came from the floor-length wide skirt it wore. He was spared the sight of the lower body, but he could tell there was considerable bulk there, a bulk that seemed to move gelatinously, as if neither human torso nor human legs lay within the circle of fabric.

And the creature stared at him from one milky eye, and one eye so pure and blue that his heart ached with the beauty of it. As features between the eyes and the chin that became part of the chest, without discernible neck, there were only charred knobs and bumps, and a lipless mouth blacker than the surrounding flesh. “Come inside,” the doorkeeper said.

McGrath hesitated.

“Or go away,” it said.

Lonny McGrath drew a. deep breath and passed through. The doorkeeper moved aside only a trifle. They touched: blackened hip, back of a normal hand.

Closed and double-bolted, the passage out was now denied McGrath. He followed the asexual creature through a long, high-ceilinged foyer to a closed, heavily-paneled door to the right of a spiral staircase that led to the floor above. The thing, either man or woman, indicated he should enter. Then it shambled away, toward the rear of the mansion.

McGrath stood a moment, then turned the ornate L-shaped door handle, and entered. The heavy drapes were drawn against the morning light, but in the outlaw beams that latticed the room here and there, he saw an old man sitting in a high-backed chair, a lap robe concealing his legs. He stepped inside the library, for library it had to be: floor to ceiling bookcases, spilling their contents in teetering stacks all around the floor. Music swirled through the room. Classical music; McGrath didn’t recognize it.

“Dr. Le Braz?” he said. The old man did not move. His head lay sunk on his chest. His eyes were closed. McGrath moved closer. The music swelled toward a crescendo, something symphonic. Now he was only three steps from the old man, and he called the name Le Braz again.

The eyes opened, and the leonine head rose. He stared at McGrath unblinkingly. The music came to an end. Silence filled the library.

The old man smiled sadly. And all ominousness left the space between them. It was a sweet smile. He inclined his head toward a stool beside the wingback. McGrath tried to give back a small smile, and took the seat offered.

“It is my hope that you are not here to solicit my endorsement for some new pharmacological product,” the old man said.

“Are you Dr. Le Braz?”

“It is I who was, once, known by that name, yes.”

“You have to help me.”

Le Braz looked at him. There had been such a depth of ocean in the words McGrath had spoken, such a descent into stony caverns that all casualness was instantly denied. “Help you?”

“Yes. Please. I can’t bear what I’m feeling. I’ve been through so much, seen so much these last months, I . . .”

“Help you?” the old man said again, whispering the phrase as if it had been rendered in a lost language. “I cannot even help myself . . . how can I possibly help you, young man?”

McGrath told him. Everything.

At some point the blackened creature entered the room, but McGrath was unaware of its presence till he had completed his story. Then, from behind him, he heard it say, “You are a remarkable person. Not one living person in a million has ever seen the Thanatos mouth. Not one in a hundred million has felt the passage of the soul. Not one in the memory of the human race has been so tormented that he thought it was real, and not a dream.”

McGrath stared at the creature. It came lumbering across the room and stood just behind the old man’s chair, not touching him. The old man sighed, and closed his eyes.

The creature said, “This was Josef Le Braz, who lived and worked and cared for his fellow man, and woman. He saved lives, and he married out of love, and he pledged himself to leave the world slightly better for his passage. And his wife died, and he fell into a well of melancholy such as no man had ever suffered. And one night he woke, feeling a chill, but he did not see the Thanatos mouth. All he knew was that he missed his wife so terribly that he wanted to end his life.” McGrath sat silently. He had no idea what this meant, this history of the desolate figure under the lap robe. But he waited, because if no help lay here in this house, of all houses secret and open in the world, then he knew that the next step for him was to buy a gun and to disperse the gray mist under which he lived.

Le Braz looked up. He drew in a deep breath and turned his eyes to McGrath. “I went to the machine,” he said. “I sought the aid of the circuit and the chip. I was cold, and could never stop crying. I missed her so, it was unbearable.”

The creature came around the wingback and stood over McGrath. “He brought her back from the Other Side.”

McGrath’s eyes widened. He understood.

The room was silent, building to a crescendo. He tried to get off the low stool, but he couldn’t move. The creature stared down at him with its one gorgeous blue eye and its one unseeing milky marble. “He deprived her of peace. Now she must live on, in this halflife.

“This is Josef Le Braz, and he cannot support his guilt.”

The old man was crying now. McGrath thought if one more tear was shed in the world he would say to hell with it and go for the gun. “Do you understand?” the old man said softly.

“Do you take the point?” the creature said.

McGrath’s hands came up, open and empty. “The mouth . . . the wind . . .”

“The function of dream sleep,” the creature said, “is to permit us to live. To flense the mind of that which dismays us. Otherwise, how could we bear the sorrow? The memories are their legacy, the parts of themselves left with us when they depart. But they are not whole, they are joys crying to be reunited with the one to whom they belong. You have seen the Thanatos mouth, you have felt a loved one departing. It should have freed you.”

McGrath shook his head slowly, slowly. No, it didn’t free me, it enslaved me, it torments me. No, slowly, no. I cannot bear it. “Then you do not yet take the point, do you?”

The creature touched the old man’s sunken cheek with a charred twig that had been a hand. The old man tried to look up with affection, but his head would not come around. “You must let it go, all of it,” Le Braz said. “There is no other answer. Let it go . . . let them go. Give them back the parts they need to be whole on the Other Side, and let them in the name of kindness have the peace to which they are entitled.”

“Let the mouth open,” the creature said. “We cannot abide here. Let the wind of the soul pass through, and take the emptiness as release.” And she said, “Let me tell you what it’s like on the Other Side. Perhaps it will help.”

McGrath laid a hand on his side. It hurt terribly, as of legions battering for release on a locked door.

He retraced his steps. He went back through previous days as if he were sleepwalking. I don’t see it here anywhere.

He stayed at the ranch-style house in Hidden Hills, and helped Anna Picket as best he could. She drove him back to the city, and he picked up his car from the street in front of the office building on Pico. He put the three parking tickets in the glove compartment. That was work for the living. He went back to his apartment, and he took off his clothes, and he bathed. He lay naked on the bed where it had all started, and he tried to sleep. There were dreams. Dreams of smiling faces, and dreams of children he had known. Dreams of kindness, and dreams of hands that had held him.

And sometime during the long night, a breeze blew.

But he never felt it.

And when he awoke, it was cooler in the world than it had been for a very long time; and when he cried for them, he was, at last, able to say goodbye.

A man is what he does with his attention.

John Ciardi

DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?

Howard Waldrop

Howard Waldrop’s most recent collection of short stories, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past (Ursus Books, 1987), has just been nominated for The Horror Writers of America’s Bram Stoker Award. Mr. Waldrop tells us he is currently working on a novel, I, John Mandeville, and on a number of short stories and novelettes.

The light was so bad in the bar that everyone there looked like they had been painted by Thomas Hart Benton, or carved from dirty bars of soap with rusty spoons.

“Frank! Frank!” the patrons yelled, like for Norm on Cheers before they canceled it.

“No need to stand,” I said. I went to the table where Barb, Bob, and Penny sat. Carole the waitress brought over a Ballantine Ale in a can, no glass.

“How y’all?” I asked my three friends. I seemed not to have interrupted a conversation.

“I feel like six pounds of monkey shit,” said Bob, who had once been tall and thin and was now tall and fat.

“My mother’s at it again,” said Penny. Her nails looked like they had been done by Mungo of Hollywood, her eyes were like pissholes in a snowbank.

“Jim went back to Angela,” said Barb.

I stared down at the table with them for five or six minutes. The music over the speakers was “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” by Johnny Nash. We usually came to this bar because it had a good jukebox that livelied us up.

“So,” said Barb, looking up at me, “I hear you’re going to be a tour guide for the reunion.”

There are terrible disasters in history, and there are always great catastrophes just waiting to happen.

But the greatest one of all, the thing time’s been holding its breath for, the capo de tutti capi of impending disasters, was going to happen this coming weekend.

Like the Titanic steaming for its chunk of polar ice, like the Hindenberg looking for its Lakehurst, like the guy at Chernobyl wondering what that switch would do, it was inevitable, inexorable, a psychic juggernaut.

The Class of ’69 was having its twentieth high school reunion.

And what they were coming back to was no longer even a high school—it had been phased out in a magnet school program in ’74. The building had been taken over by the community college.

The most radical graduating class in the history of American secondary education, had, like all the ideals it once held, no real place to go.

Things were to start Saturday morning with a tour of the old building, then a picnic in the afternoon in the city park where everyone used to get stoned and lie around all weekend, then a dance that night in what used to be the fanciest downtown hotel a few blocks from the state capitol.

That was the reunion Barb was talking about.

“I found the concept of the high school no longer being there so existential that I offered to help out,” I said. “Olin Sweetwater called me a couple of months ago—”

“Olin Sweetwater? Olin Sweetwater!” said Penny. “Geez! I haven’t heard that name in the whole damn twenty years.” She held onto the table with both hands. “I think I’m having a drug flashback!”

“Yeah, Olin. Lives in Dallas now. Runs an insurance agency. He got my name from somebody I built some bookcases for a couple of years ago. Anyway, asked if I’d be one of the guides on the tour Saturday morning—you know, point out stuff to husbands and wives and kids, people who weren’t there.”

I didn’t know if I should go on.

Bob was looking at me, waiting.

“Well, Olin got me in touch with Jamie Lee Johnson—Jamie Lee Something hyphen Something now, none of them Johnson. She’s the entertainment chairman, in charge of the dance. I made a couple of tapes for her.”

I don’t have much, but I do have a huge bunch of Original Oldies, Greatest Hits albums and other garage sale wonders. Lots of people know it and call me once or twice a year to make dance tapes for their parties.

“Oh, you’ll like this,” I said, waving to Carole to bring me another Ballantine Ale. “She said ‘Spring for some Maxell tapes, not the usual four for eighty-nine cents kind I hear you buy at Revco.’ Where you think she could have heard about that?”

“From me,” said Barb. “She called me a month ago, too.” She smiled a little.

“Come on, Barb.” I said. “Spill it.”

“Well, I wanted to—”

“I’m not going,” said Penny.

We all looked at her.

“Okay. Your protest has been noted and filed. Now start looking for your granny dress and your walnut shell beads.” I said.

“Why should I go back?” said Penny. “High school was shit. None of us had any fun there, we were all toads. Sure, things got a little exciting, but you could have been on top of Mount Baldy in Colorado in the late ’60s and it would have been exciting. Why should I go see a bunch of jerks making fools of themselves trying to recapture some, some image of themselves another whole time and place?”

“Oh,” said Bob, readjusting his gimme hat, “You really should hang around jerks more often.”

“And why’s that, Bob?” asked Penny, peeling the label from her Lone Star.

“ ‘Cause if you watch them long enough,” said Bob, “you’ll realize that jerks are capable of anything.”

Bob’s the kind of guy who holds people’s destinies in his hands and they never realize it. When someone does something especially stupid and life-threatening in traffic, Bob doesn’t honk his horn or scream or shake his fist.

He follows them. Either to where they’re going, or the city limits, whichever comes first. If they go to work, or shopping, he makes his move then. If they go to a residence, he jots down the make, model and license plate of the car on a notepad he keeps on his dashboard, and comes back later that night.

Bob has two stacks of bumper stickers in the glove compartment of his truck. He takes one from each.

He goes to the vehicle of the person who has put his life personally in jeopardy, and he slaps one of the stickers on the left front bumper and one on the right rear.

The one on the back says SPICS AND NIGGERS OUT OF THE U.S.!

The one he puts on the front reads KILL A COP TODAY!

He goes through about fifty pairs of stickers a year. He’s self-employed, so he writes the printing costs off on his Schedule A as “Depreciation.”

Penny looked at Bob a little longer. “Okay. You’ve convinced me,” she said. “Are you happy?”

“No,” said Bob, turning in his chair. “Tell us whatever it is that’ll make us happy, Barb.”

“The guys are going to play.”

Just the guys. No names. No what guys? We all knew. I had never before in my life seen Bob’s jaw drop. Now I have.

The guys.

Craig Beausoliel. Morey Morkheim. Abram Cassuth. Andru Esposito. Or, taking them in order of their various band names from junior high on: Four Guys in a Dodge. Two Jews, A Wop, and A Frog. The Hurtz Bros. (Pervo, Devo, Sado, and Twisto). The Bug-Eyed Weasels. Those were when they were local, when they played Yud’s, the Vulcan Gas Company, Tod’s Hi-Spot. Then they got a record label and went national just after high school.

You knew them as Distressed Flag Sale.

That was the title of their first album (subtitled For Sale Cheap One Country Inquire 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue). You probably knew it as the “blue-cake-with-the-white-stars-on-the-table-with-the-red-stripes-formed-on-the-white-floor-by-the-blood-running-in-seven-rivulets-from-the-dead-G.I.” album.

Their second and last was NEXT! with the famous photo of the Saigon police chief blowing the brains out of the suspected VC in the checked shirt during the Tet Offensive of 1968, only over the general’s face they’d substituted Nixon’s, and over the VC’s, Howdy Doody’s.

Then of course came the seclusion for six months, then the famous concert/ riot/bust in Miami in 1970 that put an end to the band pretty much as a functioning human organization.

Morey Morkheim tried a comeback after his time in the jusgado, in the mid-70s, as Moe in Moe and the Meanies’ Suck My Buttons, but it wasn’t a very good album and the times were alreadywrong.

“I can’t believe it,” said Penny. “None of them have played in what, fifteen years? They probably’ll sound like shit.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I know,” said Barb. “Jamie Lee—Younts-Fulton is the name, Frank—said after his jail term and the try at the comeback, Morey threw it all over and moved down to Corpus where his aunt was in the hotel business or something, and he opened a souvenir shop, a whole bunch of ’em eventually, called Morey’s Mementoes. Got pretty rich at it supposedly, though you can never tell, especially from Jamie Lee—I mean, anyone, anyone who’d take as part of her second married name a hyphenated name from her first husband that was later convicted of mail fraud just because Younts is more sophisticated than Johnson—Johnson Fulton sounds like an 1830 politician from Tennessee, know what I mean?—you just can’t trust about things like who’s rich and who’s not. Anyway, Morey was at some convention for seashell brokers or something—Jamie says about half the shells and junk sold in Corpus come from Japan and Taiwan—he ran into Andru, of all people, who was in the freight business! Like, Morey had been getting shells from this shipping company for ten years and it turns out to belong to Andru’s uncle or brother-in-law or something! So they start writing to each other, then somehow (maybe it was from Bridget, you remember Bridget? from UT? Yeah.) she knew where Abram was, and about that time the people putting all this reunion together got a hold of Andru. So the only thing left to do was find Craig.”

She looked around. It was the longest I’d ever heard Barb talk in my life.

“You know where he was?”

“No. Where?” we all three said.

“Ever eat any Dr. Healthy’s Nut-Crunch Bread?”

“A loaf a day,” said Bob, patting his stomach.

“Craig is Dr. Healthy.”

“Shit!” said Bob. “Isn’t that stuff baked in Georgetown?”

“Yeah. He’s been like thirty miles away for fifteen years, baking bread and sweet rolls. Jamie said, like some modern-day Cactus Jack Garner, he vowed never to go south of the San Gabriel River again.”

“But now he is?”

“Yep. Supposedly, Andru’s gonna fly down to Morey’s in Corpus this week and they’re going to practice before they come up here. Abram always was the quickest study and the only real musical genius, so he’ll be okay.”

“That only leaves one question,” said Penny, speaking for us all. “Can Craig still sing? Can Craig still play? I mean, look what happened after the Miami thing.”

“Good question,” said Bob. “I suppose we’ll all find out in a big hurry Saturday night. Besides,” he said, looking over at me, “we always got your tapes.”

The name’s Frank Bledsoe. I’m pushing forty, which is exercise enough.

I do lots of odd stuff for a living—a little woodwork and carpentry, mostly speakers and bookcases. I help people move a lot. In Austin, if you have a pickup, you have friends for life.

What I mostly do is build flyrods. I make two kinds—a 7’ one for a #5 line and an 8’2” one for a #6 line. I get the fiberglass blanks from a place in Ohio, and the components like cork grips, reel seats, guides, tips and ferrules, from whoever’s having a sale around the country.

I sell a few to a fishing tackle store downtown. The seven-footer retails for $22, the other for $27.50. Each rod takes about three hours of work, a day for the drying time on the varnish on the wraps. So you can see my hourly rate isn’t too swell.

I live in a place about the size of your average bathroom in a real person’s house. But it’s quiet, it’s on a cul-de-sac, and there’s a converted horse stable out back I use for my workshop.

What keeps me in business is that people around the country order a few custom-made rods each year, for which I charge a little more.

Here’s a dichotomy: as flyfishing becomes more popular, my business falls off.

That’s because, like everything else in these post-modernist times, the Yups ruined it. As with every other recreation, they confuse the sport with the equipment.

Flyfishing is growing with them because it’s a very status thing. When the Yups found it, all they wanted to do was be seen on the rivers and lakes with a six hundred-dollar split-bamboo rod, a pair of two hundred-dollar waders, a hundred-dollar vest, shirts with a million zippers on them, a seventy-five-dollar tweed hat, and a patch from a flyfishing school that showed they’d paid one thousand dollars to learn how to put out enough fly line to reach across the average K-Mart parking lot.

What I make is cheap fiberglass rods, not even boron or graphite. No glamor. And the real fact is that in flyfishing, most fish are caught within twenty feet of your boots. No glory there, either.

So the sport grows, and money comes in more and more slowly.

All this talk about the reunion has made me positively reflective. So let me put 1969 in perspective for you.

Richard Milhous Nixon was in his first year in office. He’d inherited all the good things from Lyndon Johnson—the social programs—and was dismantling them, and going ahead with all the bad ones, like the War in Nam. The Viet Cong and NVA were killing one hundred Americans a week, and according to the Pentagon, we were killing two thousand of them, regular as clockwork, as announced at the five P.M. press briefing in Saigon every Friday. The draft call was fifty thousand a month.

The Beatles released Abbey Road late in the year. At the end of the summer we graduated there was something called the Woodstock Festival of Peace and Music; in December there would be the disaster at the Altamont racetrack (in which, if you saw the movie that came out the next year, you could see a Hell’s Angel with a knife kill a black man with a gun on camera while all around people were freaking out on bad acid and Mick Jagger, up there trying to sing, was saying “Brothers and sisters, why are we fighting each other?”). On the nights of August 8 and 9 were the Tate-LaBianca murders in L.A. (Charles Manson had said to his people “Kill everybody at Terry Melcher’s house,” not knowing Terry had moved. Terry Melcher was Doris Day’s son. Chuck thought Terry owed him some money or had reneged on a recording deal or something. When he realized what he’d done, he had them go out and kill some total strangers to make the murders at the Tate household look like the work of a kill-the-rich cult.) On December 17, Tiny Tim married Miss Vickie on the Tonight Show, with Johnny Carson as best man.

The Weathermen, the Black Panthers and, according to agent’s reports, “frizzy-haired women of a radical organization called NOW,” were disturbing the increasingly senile sleep of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI. He longed for the days when you could shoot criminals down in the streets like dogs and have them buried in handcuffs, when all the issues were clear-cut. Spirotis T. Agnew, the vice-president, was gearing up to make his “nattering nabobs of negativism” speech, and to coin the term Silent Majority. This was four years before he made the most moving and eloquent speech in his, life, which went: “Nolo contendere.”

We were reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or rereading The Hobbit for the zillionth time, or Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar. And on everybody’s lips were the words of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. (Nixon was working on that, too.)

There were weeks when you thought nothing was ever going to change, there was no wonderment anymore, just new horrors about the War, government repression, drugs. (They were handing out life sentences for the possession of a single joint in some places that year.)

Then, in three days, from three total strangers, you’d hear the Alaska vacation—flannel shirt—last man killed by an active volcano story, all the people swearing they’d heard the story from the kid in the flannel shirt himself, and you’d say, yeah, the world is still magic . . .

I’ll really put 1969 in a nutshell for you. There are six of you sharing a three-bedroom house that fall, and you’re splitting rent you think is exorbitant, $89.75 a month. Minimum wage was $1.35 an hour, and none of you even has any of that.

Somebody gets some money from somewhere, God knows, and you’re all going to pile into the VW Microbus which is painted green, orange, and fuchsia, and going to the H.E.B. to score some food. But first, since there are usually hassles, you all decide to smoke all the grass in the house, about three lids’ worth.

When you get to the store you split up to get food, and are to meet at checkout lane Number Three in twenty minutes. An hour later you pool the five shopping carts and here’s what you have:

Seven two-pound bags of lemon drops. Three bags of orange marshmallow goobers. A Hostess Ding-Dong assortment pack. A twelve-pound bag of Kokuho Rose New Variety Rice. A two-pound can of Beer-Nuts. A fifty-foot length of black shoestring licorice. Three six-packs of Barq’s Root Beer. Two quarts of fresh strawberries and a pint of Half and Half. A Kellog’s Snak-Pak (heavy on the Frosted Flakes). A five-pound bag of turbinado sugar. Two one-pound bags of Bazooka Joe bubble gum (with double comics). A blue 75-watt light bulb.

It fills up three dubl/bags and the bill comes to $8.39, the last seventy-four cents of which you pay the clerk in pennies.

Later, when somebody finally cooks, everybody yells, “Shit! Rice again? Didn’t we just go to the grocery store?”

PS: On July 20 that year we landed on the Moon.

Now I’ll tell you about this year, 1989.

The Republicans are in the tenth month of their new Presidency, naturally. After Cuomo and Iacocca refused to run, the Democrats, like always, ran two old warhorses who quit thinking along about 1962. (“If nominated, I refuse to run,” said Iacocca, “if elected, I refuse to serve. And that’s a promise.”)

We have six thousand military advisors in Honduras and Costa Rica. All those guys who went down to the post office and signed their Selective Service postcards are beginning to look a little grey around the gills.

There are 1,800,000 cases of AIDS in America, and 120,000 have died of it.

On Wall Street the Dow Jones just passed the 3000 mark after its near-suicide in ’87. “Things are looking just great!” says the new president.

Congress is voting on the new two trillion dollar debt ceiling limit.

Things are much like they have been forever. The rich are richer, the poor poorer, the middle class has no choices. The cities are taxing them to death, the suburbs can’t hold them. Every state but those in the Bible-belt South has horse and dog racing, a lottery, legalized pari-mutuel Bingo and a state income tax, and they’re still going broke.

Everything is wrong everywhere. The only good thing I’ve noticed is that MTV is off the air.

You go to the grocery store and get a pound of bananas, a six foot electric extension cord, a can of powder scent air freshener, a tube of store-brand toothpaste and a loaf of bread. It fits in the smallest plastic sack they have and costs $7.82.

Let me put 1989 in another nutshell for you:

A friend of mine keeps his record albums (his CDs are elsewhere) in what looks like a haphazard stack of orange crates in one corner of his living room.

They’re not orange crates. What he did was get a sculptor friend of his to make them. He got some lengths of stainless steel, welded and shaped them to look like a haphazard stack of crates. Then with punches and chisels and embossing tools the sculptor made the metal look like grained unseasoned wood, and then painted them, labels and all, to look like crates.

You can’t tell them from the real things, and my friend only paid three thousand dollars for them.

Or to put it another way: And Zarathustra came down from the hills unto the cities of men. And Zarathustra spake unto them, and what he said to them was: “Yo!”

PS: Nobody’s been to the Moon in sixteen years.

MY TRIP TO THE POST OFFICE by FRANK BLEDSOE AGE 38

I’d finished three rods for a guy in Colorado the day before. I put the clothes back on I’d worn working on them, all dotted with varnish. I was building a bookcase, too, so I hit it a few licks with a block plane to get my blood going in the early morning.

It was a nice crisp fall day, so I decided to ride my bike to the post office substation to mail the rods. I was probably so covered with wood shavings I looked like a Cabbage Patch Kid that had been hit with a slug from a .45.

I brushed myself off, put the rods in their cloth bags, put the bags in the tubes with the packing paper, and put the tubes in the carrier I have on the bike. Then I rode off to the branch post office.

I’m coming out of the substation with the postage and insurance receipts in my hand when I hear a lot of brakes squealing and horns honking.

A lady in a white Volvo has managed to get past two One Way Do Not Enter signs at the exit to the parking lot and is coming in against the traffic, and all the angles of the diagonal parking places. She has a look of calm imperturbability on her face.

Nobody’s looking for a car from her direction. As they back out, suddenly there she is in the rear-view mirror. They slam on their brakes and honk and yell.

“Asshole!” yells a guy who’s killed his engine in a panic stop. She gets to the entrance of the lot, does a 290 degree turn, and pulls into the Reserved Handicapped spot at the front door, acing out the one-armed guy with Disabled American Vets license plates who was waiting for the guy who was illegally parked against the yellow curbing in the entrance to move so he could get in.

She gets out of the car. She’s wearing a silk blouse, a set of June Cleaver double-strand pearls and matching earrings, and a pair of those shorts that make the wearer look like they have a refrigerator stuffed down the back of them.

“Are you handicapped?” I ask.

She looks right through me. She’s taking a yellow Attempt to Deliver slip out of her sharkskin purse. She has on shades.

“I said, are you handicapped? I don’t see a sticker on your car.”

“What business is it of yours?” she asks. “Besides, I’m only going to be in there a minute.”

That’s what you think. She goes inside. I shrug at the one-armed guy. With some people it was their own fault they went to Korea or Viet Nam and got their legs and stuff blown off, with others it wasn’t.

He drives off down the packed lot. He probably won’t find a space for a block.

I take my bike tools out of my pocket. I go to the Volvo. In deference to Bob, I undo the valve cores on the left front and right rear tires.

Then I get on my bike and ride down to the pay phone at the bakery three blocks away, call the non-emergency police number, and tell them there’s a lady without a handicap sticker blocking the reserved spot at the post office substation.

After mailing the rods and using the quarter for the phone, I have eighty-two cents left—just enough for coffee at the bakery. It’s a chi-chi place I usually never go to, but I haven’t had any coffee this morning and I know they make a cup of Brazilian stuff that would bring Dwight D. Eisenhower back to life.

I go in. They’ve got one of those European doorchimes that sets poor people’s nerves on edge and lets those with a heavy wallet know they’re in a place where they can really drop a chunk of money.

The clerk is Indian or Paki; he’s on the phone talking to someone. I start tapping my change on the counter looking around. Maybe ten people in the place. He hangs up and starts toward me.

“Large cuppa—” I start to say.

The chime jingles and the smell hits me at the same time as their voices; a mixture of Jovan Musk for Men and Sassoon styling mousse.

“—game.” says a voice. “How many croissants you still got?” says the voice over my shoulder to the clerk.

The counterman has one hand on the coffee spigot and a sixteen ounce styrofoam cup in the other.

“Oh, very many, I think,” he says to the voice behind me.

“Give us about—oh, what, John?—say, twenty-five assorted fruit-filled, no lemon, okay?”

The clerk starts to put down the styrofoam cup. In ambiguous situations, people always move toward the voice that sounds most like money.

“My coffee?” I say.

The clerk looks back and forth like he’s just been dropped on the planet.

“Could you sort of hurry?” says the voice behind me. “We’re double-parked.”

I turn around then. There are three of them in warmup outfits—gold and green, blue and orange, blue and silver. They look maybe twenty-five. Sure enough, there’s a blue Renault blocking three cars parked at the laundromat next door. The handles of squash racquets stick up out of the blue and orange, blue and silver, gold and green duffles in the back seat.

“No lemon,” says the blond-haired guy on the left. “Make sure there’s no lemon, huh?”

“You gonna fill our order?” asks the first guy, who looks like he was raised in a meatloaf mold.

“No,” I say. “First he’s going to get my coffee, then he’ll get your order.”

They notice me for the first time then, suspicion dawning on them this wasn’t covered in their Executive Assertiveness Training program.

The clerk is turning his head back and forth like a radar antenna.

“I thought they gave free coffee at the Salvation Army,” says the blond guy, looking me up and down.

“Tres, tres amusant.” I said.

“Are you going to fill our $35 order, or are you going to give him his big fifty cent cup of coffee?” asked the first guy.

The ten other people in the place were all frozen in whatever attitude they had been in when all this started. One woman actually had a donut halfway to her mouth and was watching, her eyes growing wider.

“My big seventy-five cent order,” I said, letting the change clink on the glass countertop. “Any time you come in any place,” I went on, “you should look around the room and you should ask yourself, who’s the only, only possible one here who could have taken Taiwanese mercenaries into Laos in 1968? And you should act accordingly.”

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” asked the middle one, who hadn’t spoken before and looked like he’d taken tai-kwon-do since he was four.

“Practically nobody,” I said. “But if any of you say one more word before I get my coffee, I’m going out to the saddlebag on my bike, and I’m going to take out a product backed by 132 years of Connecticut Yankee know-how and fine American craftsmanship and I’m coming back in here and showing you exactly how the rat chews the cheese.”

Then I gave them the Thousand Yard Stare, focusing on something about a half mile past the left shoulder of the guy in the middle.

They backed up, jangling the doorbell, out onto the sidewalk, bumping into a lady coming out with a load of wash.

“Crazy fuck,” I heard one of them say as he climbed into the car. The tai-kwon-do guy kept looking at me as the driver cranked the car up. He said something to him, jumped around the car and started kicking the shit out of the back tire of the twelve-speed white Concord leaning against the telephone pole out front.

I heard people sucking in their breaths in the bakery.

The guy kicked the bike three times, watching me, breaking out the spokes in a half moon, laughing.

“My bike!” yelled a woman on one of the stools. “That’s my bike! You assholes! Get their license number!” She ran outside.

I turned to the clerk, who had my cup of coffee ready. I plunked down eighty cents in nickels, dimes and pennies, and put two cents in the TIPS cup. Then I put saccharine and cream in the coffee.

Out on the sidewalk, the woman was screaming at the tai-kwon-do-looking guy, and she was crying. His two friends were talking to him in low voices and reaching for their billfolds. He looked like a little kid who’d broken a window in a sandlot ball game. People had come out of the grocery store across the street and were watching.

I got on my bike and rode to the corner unnoticed.

A cop car, lights flashing but with the siren off, turned toward the bakery as I turned out onto the street.

It was only 9:15 A.M. It was looking to be a nice day.

I got two-and-three-fourths stars in the 1977 Career Woman’s Guide to Austin Men. Here’s the entry: Working-class bozo, well-read. Great for a rainy Tuesday night when your regular feller is out of town. PS: You’ll have to pick up all the tabs.

I’m still friends with about two-thirds of the women I’ve ever gone with, which I’m as proud of as anything else in my life, I guess. I care a lot, I’m fairly intelligent, and I have a sense of humor. You know, the doormat personality.

At one time, in those days before herpes and AIDS, when everybody was trying to figure out just who and what they were, I was sort of a Last Station of the Way for women who, in Bob’s words, “were trying to decide whether to go nelly or not.” They usually did anyway, more often than not with another old girlfriend of mine.

(It all started when I was dating the ex-wife of the guy who was then living with my ex-girlfriend. The lady who was then the ex-wife now lives with a nice lady who used to be married to another friend of mine. They each have tattoos on their left shoulders. One of them has a portrait of Karl Marx and under it the words Hot to Trotsky.

The other has the Harley-Davidson symbol but instead of the usual legend it says Born to Read Hegel.)

No one set out an agenda or anything for me to be their Last Guy on Earth. It just happened, and expanded outward like ripples in a pond.

About two months ago at a party some young kid was listening to a bunch of us old farts talk, and he asked me, “If the Sixties were so great, and the Eighties suck so bad, then what happened in the Seventies?”

“Well,” I said. “Richard Nixon resigned, and then, and then . . . gee, I don’t know.”

Another woman I dated for a while had only one goal in life: to plant the red flag on the rubble of several prominent landmarks between Virginia and Maryland.

We used to be coming home from the dollar midnight flicks on campus (Our Daily Bread, Sweet Movie, China Is Near) and we would pass this neat old four-story hundred-year-old house, and every time, she would look up at it and say “That’s where I’m going to live after the Revolution.”

I’m talking 1976 here, folks.

We’d gone out together five or six times, and we went back to her place and were going to bed together for the first time. We were necking, and she got up to go to the bathroom. “Get undressed,” she said.

When she came back in, taking her sweater off over her head, I was naked in the bed with the sheets pulled up to my neck. I was wearing a Mao Tse Tung mask.

It was wonderful.

Friday. Reunion Eve.

It was one of those days when everything is wrong. All the work I started I messed up in some particularly stupid way. I started everything over twice. I gave up at three P.M.

Things didn’t get any better. I tried TV. A blur of talking heads. Nothing interested me for more than thirty seconds.

Outside the sun was setting past Mt. Bonnell and Lake Austin. Over on Cat Mountain the red winks of the lights on the TV towers came on. A Continental 737 went over, heading towards California’s golden climes.

I put on a music tape I’d made and tried to read a book. I got up and turned the noise off. It was too Sixties. I’d hear enough of that tomorrow night. No use setting myself up for a wallow in the good times and peaking too early. I drank a beer that tasted like kerosene. It was going to be a cool clear October night. I closed the windows and watched the moon come up over Manor, Texas.

The book was Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. I tried to read it some more and it began to go yammer yammer yibble yibble Twain, yammer yibble Hemingway. Enough.

I turned the music back on, put on the headphones and lay down on the only rug in the house, looking up at the cracks in the plaster and listening to the Moody Blues. What a loss of a day, but I was tired anyway. I went to bed at nine P.M.

It was one of those nights when every change in the wind brings an erection, when every time you close your eyes you see penises and vulvas, a lot of them ones you haven’t seen before. After staring up at the ceiling for an hour, I got up, got another beer, went into the living room and sat naked in the dark.

I had one of those feelings like I hadn’t had in years. The kind your aunt told you she’d had the day your grandfather died, before anybody knew it yet. She told you at the funeral that three days before she’d felt wrong and irritable all day and didn’t know why, until the phone rang with the news. The kind of feeling Phil Collins gets on “In the Air Tonight,” a mood that builds and builds with no discernible cause.

It was a feeling like in a Raymond Chandler novel, the kind he blames on the Santa Ana winds, when all the dogs bark, when people get pissed off for no reason, when yelling at someone you love is easier than going on silently with the mood you have inside.

Only there were no howling dogs, no sound of fights from next door. Maybe it was just me. Maybe this reunion thing was getting to me more than I wanted it to.

Maybe it was just horniness. I went to the VCR, an old Beta II, second one they ever made, no scan, no timer, all metal, weighs 150 pounds, bought at Big State Pawn for fifty bucks, sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. I put in Cum Shot Revue #1 and settled back in my favorite easy chair.

The TV going kskkssssssssss woke me up at 4:32 A.M. I turned everything off. So this is what me and my whole generation come down to, people sleeping naked in front of their TVs with empty beer cans in their laps. It was too depressing to think about.

I made my way to bed, lay down, and had dreams. I don’t remember anything about them, except that I didn’t like them.

I’ve known three women the latter part of the twentieth century has driven slapdab crazy.

For one, it was through no fault of her own. Certain chemicals were missing in her body. She broke up with me quietly after six months and checked herself into the MHMR. That was the last time I saw her.

She evidently came back through town about three years ago, after she quit taking her lithium. I got strange phone calls from old friends who had seen her. Her vision, and that of the one we call reality, no longer intersected. Having destroyed her present, she had begun to work on the past and the future also.

Last I heard she had run off with a cook she met at a Halfway House; they were rumored to be working Exxon barges together on the Mississippi River.

The second, after affairs with five real jerks in a row in six months, began to lose weight. She’d only been 111 pounds to begin with. People whispered about leukemia, cancer, some wasting disease. Of course it wasn’t—in the rest of the world, dying by not getting enough to eat is a right, in America, it’s a privilege. She began to look like sticks held together with a pair of kid’s blue-jeans and a shirt, with only two brightly-glowing eyes watching you from the head to show she was still alive. She was fainting a lot by then.

One day Bob, who had been her lover six years before, went over to her house. (By then she was forgetting to do things like close and lock the doors, or turn on the lights at night.)

Bob picked her up by her shirt collar (it was easy, she only weighed eighty-three pounds by then) and slapped her, like in the movies, five times as hard as he could.

It was only on the fifth slap that her eyes came to life and filled with fear.

“Stop it, Gabriella,” said Bob. “You’re killing yourself.” Then he kissed her on her bloody, swelling lips, set her down blinking, and walked out her door and her life, and hasn’t seen her since.

He saved her. She met another nice woman at the eating disorder clinic. They now live in Westlake Hills, raising the other woman’s two boys by her first marriage.

The third one’s cat ran away one morning. She went back upstairs, wrote a long apologetic note to her mother, dialed 911 and told them where she was, hung up and drank most of an eleven-ounce can of Crystal Drano.

She lived on for six days in the hospital in a coma with no insides and a raging 107° fever.

Her friends kept checking, but the cat never came back.

“Yo!” said Olin Sweetwater. He and two or three others were standing outside the community college on the cool Saturday morning. He had on a sweatshirt, done up in the old school colors, that said Bull Goose Tour Guide. We shook hands (thumbs locked, sawing our arms back and forth). He was balding; what hair he had left had a white plume across the left side.

The two women, Angela Pardo and Rita Jones when I’d known them, were nervous. Olin handed us sweatshirts that said Tour Guide. We thanked him.

I looked at the brick facade. The school had been an ugly dump in 1969; it was still a dump, but with a charm all its own.

(One of the reasons Olin asked me to help with the tour is that I’d lived with a lady artist for a year who had worked part-time as a clerk in the admissions office of the community college. I guess he thought that qualified me as an Expert.)

The tours were supposed to start at ten A.M. Sleepy college students who had Saturday labs were wandering in and out of the two-and-a-half story building or some of the other outbuildings the college leased. Olin had pulled lots of strings to let us guide people without any interference, or so he kept telling us.

Around 9:45 people started wandering up, trailing kids, shy husbands, wives, lovers. God, I thought recognizing a few here and there. We’re so fucking normal looking. We look like our mothers and fathers did in 1969.

(Remember in 1973 when you saw American Graffiti for the first time and everybody laughed at the short haircuts and long skirts, then when you went back to see it in 1981 those parts didn’t seem so strange anymore?)

I was talking to one of the few women who’d been nice to me in high school, a quiet girl named Sharon, whose front teeth then had reminded me, sweetly and not at all unpleasantly, of Rocket J. Squirrel’s. She was now, I learned, on her second divorce. She introduced me to her kids—Seth and Jason—who looked like they’d rather be on Mars than here.

Sharon stopped talking and stared behind me. I saw other people turning and followed their gaze toward the street. “Jesus,” I said. A pink flowered VW Beetle pulled up to the curb as a student drove away. Out of it came something from Mr. Natural—the guy had hair down to his butthole (a wig, it turned out), headband, walnut shell beads, elephant bell pants with neon green flash panels, a khaki shirt and wool vest, Ben Franklin specs tinted Vick’s Salve blue. There was a B-52 peace symbol button big as a dinner plate on his left abdomen, and the vest had a leather stash pocket at the bottom snaps.

Something in the way he moves . . .

Seth and Jason were pointing and laughing, other people were looking embarrassed.

“Peace, Love, and Brotherhood,” he said, flashing us the peace sign.

The voice. I knew it after twenty years. Hoyt Lawton.

Hoyt Lawton had been president of the fucking Key Club in 1969! He’d worn three-piece suits to school even on the days when he didn’t have to go eat with the Rotarians! His hair was never more than three-eighths of an inch off his skull—we said he never got it cut, it just never grew. He won a bunch of money from something like the DAR for a speech he made at a Young Republicans convention on how all hippies needed was a good stiff tour of duty in Vietnam that would show them what America was all about. Hoyt Lawton, what an asshole!

And yet, there he was, the only one with enough chutzpah to show up like we were all supposed to feel. Okay, I’m older and more tolerant now. Hoyt, you’re still an asshole, but with a little style.

By about 10:10 there were a hundred people there. Excluding husbands, wives, Significant Others and kids, maybe sixty of the Class of ’69 had taken the trouble to show up.

Olin divided us up so we wouldn’t run into each other. I started my group of twenty or so (Hoyt was in Olin’s group thank god) on the second floor. We climbed the stairs.

“You’ll notice they have air conditioning now?” I said. There were laughs. Austin hits ninety-five by April 20 most years. We’d sweltered through Septembers and died in Mays here, to the hum of ineffectual floor fans. The ceilings were twenty feet high and the ceiling fans might as well have been heat pumps.

“How many of you spent most of the last semester here?” I said, pointing. Two or three held up their hands. “This used to be the principal’s office; now it’s the copy center. Over there was Mr. Dix’s office itself.” Lots of people laughed then, probably hadn’t thought of the carrot-headed principal since graduation day. He’d had it bad enough before someone heard him referred to as “Red” by the Superintendent of Schools one day.

“That used to be the only office that was air-conditioned, remember? At least you could get cool while waiting to be yelled at.” I pointed to the air-conditioning vents.

That there air duct I didn’t say is the one that Morey Morkheim got into and took a big dump in one night after they’d expelled him one of those times. Only in America is the penalty for skipping school expulsion for three days.

Mr. Dix had yelled at him after the absence, “What are you going to do with your life? You’ll never amount to anything without an education!”

In seven months Morey was pulling in more money in a weekend than Dix would make in ten years—legally, too.

We moved through the halls, getting curious stares from students in classrooms with closed glass doors.

“Down here was where the student newspaper office was. Over there was the library, which the community college is using as a library.” We went down to the first floor.

“Ah, the cafeteria!” It was now the study room, full of chairs and tables and vending machines. “Remember tomato surprise! Remember macaroni and cheese!” “Fish lumps on Friday!” said someone.

Half the student body in those days had come from the parochial junior highs around town. In 1969, parochial was the way you spelled Catholic. Nobody in the school administration ever read a paper, evidently, so they hadn’t learned that the Pope had done away with “going to hell on a meat rap” back in 1964. So you still had fish lumps on Friday when we were there. The only good thing about having all those Catholic kids there was that we got to hear their jokes for the first time, like what’s God’s phone number? ETcumspiri 220!

“Down there, way off to the left,” I said “was the band hall. You remember Mr. Stoat?” There were groans. “I thought so. Only musician I ever met who had absolutely no sense of rhythm.”

Ah, the band hall. Where one morning a bunch of guys locked themselves in just before graduation, wired the intercom up to broadcast all over school, and played “Louie, Louie” on tubas, instead of the National Anthem, during home room period. It was too close to the end of school to expel them, so they didn’t let them come to the commencement exercise. In protest of which, when they played “Pomp and Circumstance,” about three hundred of us Did the Freddy down the aisles of the municipal auditorium in our graduation gowns.

We passed a door leading to the boiler room, where all the teachers popped in for a smoke between classes, it being forbidden for them to take a puff anywhere on school grounds but in the Teachers’ Lounge during their off-hour.

I stopped and opened it—sure enough, it was there, dimmed by twenty years and several attempts to paint over it, but in the remains of smudged-over day-glo orange paint on the top inside of the door it still said: Ginny and Ray’s Motel.

Ginny Balducci and Ray Petro had come to school one morning ripped on acid and had wandered down to the boiler room and had taken their clothes off. My theory is that it was warm and nice and they wanted to feel the totality of the sensuous space. The school’s theory, after they were interrupted by Coach Smetters, was that they had been Fornicating During Home Room Period, and without hall passes, too!

After Ginny came down, and while her father was screaming at Ray’s parents across Dix’s desk, she said to her father, “Leave them alone. They didn’t have their clothes off!”

“Young lady,” said Dix. “You don’t seem to realize what serious trouble you’re in.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Ginny, looking the principal square in the eye, “Castrate me?”

I answered some questions about the fire escape that used to be on the south side of the building. “They fell on a community college student one day four years ago,” I said. “Good thing we neverhad to use them.” We were outside again.

“Over there was the gym. World’s worst dance floor, second worst basketball court. Enough sweat was spilled there over the years to float the Big Mo. We can’t go in, though, they now use it to store visual aids for the Parks and Rec department.”

There was the morning when Dix had us all go to the gym for Assembly. His purpose, it went on to appear after he had talked for ten minutes, was to try to explain why the Armed Forces recruiters would be there on Career Day, along with the realtors and college reps and Rotarians who would come to tell you about the wonders of their profession in the Great Big World Out There. (Some nasty posters had appeared on every bare inch of wall in the building that morning questioning not only their presence on Career Day but also their continuing existence on the third rock from the sun.)

He was going on about how they had been there, draft or no draft, war or no war, every Career Day when a small sound started at the back of the ranked bleachers. The sound of two stiffened index fingers drumming slowly but very deliberately dum-dum-thump dum-dum-thump. Then a few other sets of fingers joined in dum-dum-thumb dum-dum-thump, at first background, then rising, louder and more insistent, then feet took it up, and it spread from section to section, while the teachers looked around wildly Dum-Dum-Thump Dum-Dum-Thump.

Dix stopped in mid-sentence, mouth open, while the sound grew. He saw half the student body—the other half was silent, or like the jocks led by Hoyt Lawton, beginning to boo and hiss—rise to its feet clapping its hands and stamping its feet in time—

DUM DUM THUMP DUM DUM THUMP

He yelled at people and pointed, then he quit and his shoulders sagged. And on a hidden passed signal, everybody quit on the same beat and it was deathly silent in the gym. Then everybody sat back down.

I think Dix had seen the future that morning—Kent State, the Cambodian incursion, the cease fire, the end of Nixon, the fall of Saigon.

He dismissed us. The recruiters were there on Career Day anyway.

I’d almost finished my tour. “One more place, not on the official stops,” I said. I took them across the side street and down half a block.

“Ow wow!” said someone halfway there. “The Grindstone!”

We got there. It was a one-story place with real glass bricks across the whole front that would cost $80 a pop these days. The place was full of tools and cars.

“Oh, gee,” said the people.

“It’s now the Skill Shop,” I said. “Went out of business in 1974, bought up by the city, leased by the community college.”

Ah, the Grindstone! A real old-fashioned cafe/soda fountain. You were forbidden on pain of death to leave the school grounds except at lunch, so three thousand people tried to get in every day between 11:30 and 12:30.

One noon the place was packed. There was the usual riot going on over at UT ten blocks away. All morning you could hear sirens and dull whoomps as the increasingly senile police commissioner, who had been in office for thirty-four years, tried dealing with the increasingly complex late twentieth century. Why, the children have gone mad he once said in a TV interview.

Anyway, we were all stuffing our faces in the Grindstone when this guy comes running in the front door and out the back at two-hundred miles an hour. Somebody made the obvious stoned joke—“Man, I thought he’d never leave!”—and then a patrol car slammed up to the curb, and a cop jumped out. You could see his mind work.

A. Rioter runs into the Grindstone. B. Grindstone is full of people. Therefore: C. Grindstone is full of rioters.

He opened the door, fired a tear-gas grenade right at the lunch counter, turned, got in his car and drove away.

People were barfing and gagging all over the place. There were screams, tears, rage. The Grindstone was closed for a week so they could rent some industrial fans and air it out. The city refused to pick up the tab. “The officer was in hot pursuit,” said the police commissioner, “and acted within the confines of departmental guidelines.” Case closed.

“Ah, the Grindstone,” I said to the tour group. “What a nice place.” A wave of nostalgia swept over me. “Today, shakes and fries. Tomorrow, a lube job and tune-up.”

I was so filled with mono no aware that I skipped the picnic that afternoon.

The Wolfskill Hotel! Scene of a thousand-and-one nights’ entertainments and more senior proms than there are fire ants in all the fields in Texas.

A friend of mine named Karen once said people were divided into two classes: those who went to their senior proms and went on to live fairly normal lives, and those who didn’t, who became perverts, mass murderers or romance novelists.

If you were a guy you got maybe your first blow job after the prom, or if a girl a quick boff in the back seat of some immemorial Dodge convertible out at Lake Travis. The hotel meant excitement, adventure, magic.

I hadn’t gone to my senior prom. A lot of us hadn’t, looking on it as one more corrupt way to suck money from the working classes so that orchids could die all over the vast American night.

There were some street singers outside the hotel, playing jug band music without a jug—two guitars, a flute, tambourine and harmonica. They were fairly quiet. The cops wouldn’t hassle them until after eleven P.M. They were pretty good. I dropped a quarter into their cigar box.

You could hear the strains of the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” before you got through the lobby. The entertainment committee must have dropped a ton o’bucks on this—they had a bulletin board out front just past the registration table with everybody’s pictures from the yearbook blown up, six to a sheet.

It was weird seeing all those people’s names and faces—the beginnings of mustaches and beards on the guys, we’d fought tooth and nail for facial hair—long straight hair on the women—names that hadn’t been used, or gone back to three or four times, in the last twenty years.

I paid my $10.00 fee (like in the old days. Dance Tonight! Guys fifty cents Girls Free!).

Inside the ballroom people were already dancing, maybe a hundred, with that many more standing around talking and laughing in knots and clumps, being polite to each other, sizing up what Time’s Heedless Claws had done to each other’s bodies and outlooks.

Bob and Penny were already there. He was in a bluejean jacket and pants and wore a clear plastic tie. Penny was stunning, in a green velour thing, beautiful as she always is early in the evenings, before alcohol turns her into a person I don’t know.

I was real spiffed out, for me: a nice sport coat, black slacks, a red silk tie with painted roses wide as the racing stripe on a Corvette.

There were people there in $500 gowns, $300 suits, tuxes, jeans, coveralls. Several were in period costumes; Hoyt had on another, much better than this morning’s nightmare, but still what I describe as Early Neil Young. He was, of course, with a slim blonde who had once been a Houston cheerleader, I’m sure.

I saw some faculty members there. They had all been invited, of course. Ten or so, with their husbands or wives, had come. Even Mr. Stoat was there. It hit me as I looked at them that most of them had been in their twenties and thirties when they were trying to deal with us on a daily basis, much younger than we were now. God, what a thankless job they must have had—going off every day like going back up to the Front in WWI, trying to teach kids who viewed you as The Enemy, following along behind everything you did with the efficient erasers in their minds! Maybe I’m getting too mellow—they had it easier with us than teachers do now—at least most of us could read, and music was more important than TV to us. Later, I told myself, I’ll go over and talk to Ms. Nugent who was always my favorite and who had been a good teacher in spite of the chaos around her.

There were two guys working the tapes and CDs up on the raised stage. I didn’t recognize the order of the songs so knew they weren’t playing one of my tapes. On the front part of the stage were a guitar and bass, a drum set and keyboards.

So it was true, and seemed the main topic of conversation, although as I passed one bunch of people I heard someone say “Those assholes? Them?”

Barb showed up, without a date, of course. She took my hand and led me toward the dance floor. “Let’s dance until our shoulders bleed,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am!” I said.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hypnotized on dance floors before. Sometimes it seems as if the tune stretches out to accommodate how long and hard you want to dance, or think you can. The guys working the decks were switching back and forth between two cassette players and the music never stopped—occasionally songs only I could have recorded showed up. I didn’t care. I was dancing.

(I’ve seen some strange things on dance floors in my life—the strangest was people forming a conga line to a song by the band Reptilikus called “After Today, You Got One Less Day To Live.”)

“Ginny’s here,” I said to Barb. Barb looked over toward the door where Ginny Balducci’s wheelchair had rolled in. One weekend in 1973 Ginny had gone off for a ski weekend with an intern, and had come back out of the hospital six months later with a whole different life. “I’ll say hi in a minute.” said Barb.

We danced to the only Dylan song you can dance to, “I Want You,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” Buffalo Springfield, Blue Cheer, Sam and Dave, slow tunes by Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, then Barb went over to talk to Ginny. I was a sweating wreck by then, and the ugly feeling from the night before was all gone.

I started for the whizzoir.

“You won’t like it,” said a guy coming out of the men’s room.

The smell hit me like a hammer. Someone had yelled New York into one of the five washbasins. It was half full. It appeared the person had lived exclusively for the last week on Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Fighting Cock Bourbon.

A janitor came in cursing as I was washing my hands.

I went back out to the ballroom. Mouse and the Trapps “Public Execution” was playing—someone who doesn’t dance recorded that. Then came Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher.”

“Dance with me?” asked someone behind me. I turned. It was Sharon. She must have Gone Borneo that afternoon. She’d been somewhere where they do things to you, wonderful things. She had on a blue dress and seamed silk stockings, and now she had an Aunt Peg haircut.

“You bet your ass!” I said.

About halfway through the next dance, I suffered a real sense of loss. I missed my butthole-length hair for the first time in ten years. The song, of course, was “Hair” off the original Broadway cast recording, Diane Keaton and all, and Joe Morton’s wife Patricia, who had never cut hers, it grew within inches of the floor, suddenly grabbed it near her skull with one hand and whipped it around and around her head, the ends fanning out like a giant hand across the colored lights above the stage. Joe continued his Avalon-ballroom-no-sweat dancing, oblivious to the applause his wife was getting.

Then they played the Fish Cheer and we all sang and danced along with “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag.”

Then the lights came up and the entertainment director, Jamie Younts-Fulton, came to the mike and treated us to twenty minutes of nostalgic boredom and forced yoks. The tension was building.

“Now,” she said, “for those of you who don’t know, we’ve got them together again for the first time in nineteen years, here they are, Craig Beausoliel, Morey Morkheim, Abram Cassuth, and Andru Esposito, or, as you know them, Distressed Flag Sale!”

It was about what you’d expect—four guys in their late thirties in various pieces of clothing stretching across twenty years of fashion changes.

Morey’d put on weight and lost teeth, Andru had taken weight off. Abram, who’d been the only one without facial hair in our day, now had a full Jerry Garcia beard. Craig, who came out last, like always, and plugged in while we applauded—all four or five hundred people in the ballroom now—didn’t look like the same guy at all. He looked like a businessman dressed up at Halloween to look like a rock singer.

He was a little unsteady on his feet. He was a little drunk.

“Enough of this Sixties crap!” he said. People applauded again. “Tonight, this first and last performance, we’re calling ourselves Lizard Level!”

Then Abram hit the keyboard in the opening trill of “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” for emphasis, then they slammed into “Proud Mary,” Creedence’s version, and the place became a blur of flying bodies, drumming feet, swirling clothes. The band started a little raggedy, then got it slowly together.

They launched into the Chambers Bros.’ “Time Has Come Today,” always a show stopper, a hard song for everybody including the Chambers Bros., if you ever saw them, and the place went really crazy, especially in the slow-motion parts. Then they did one of their own tunes, “The Moon’s Your Harsh Mistress, Buddy, Not Mine,” which I’d heard exactly once in two decades.

We were dancing, all kinds, pogo, no-sweat, skank, it didn’t matter. I saw a few of the hotel staff standing in the doorways tapping their feet. Andru hit that screaming wail in the bass that was the band’s trademark, sort of like a whale dying in your bathtub. People yelled, shook their arms over their heads.

Then they started to do “Soul Kitchen.” Halfway through the opening, Craig raised his hand, shook it, stopped them.

“Awwwww,” we said, like when a film breaks in a theater.

Craig leaned toward the others. He was shaking his head. Morey pointed down at his playlist. They put their heads together. Craig and Abram were giving the other two chord changes or something.

“Hey! Make music!” yelled some jerk from the doorway.

Craig looked up, grabbed the mike. “Hold it right there, asshole,” he said, becoming the Craig we had known twenty years ago for a second. He leaned against the mike stand in a Jim Morrison vamp pose. “You stay right here, you’re going to hear the god-damnedest music you ever heard!”

They talked together for a minute more. Andru shrugged his shoulders, looked worried. Then they all nodded their heads.

Craig Beausoliel came back up front. “What we’re gonna do now, what we’re gonna do now, gonna do,” he said in a Van Morrison post-Them chant, “is we’re gonna do, gonna do, the song we were gonna do that night in Miami . . .”

“Oh, geez,” said Bob, who was on the dance floor near Sharon and me.

Distressed Flag Sale had gone into seclusion early in 1970, holing up like The Band did in the Basement Tapes days with Dylan, or like Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys while they were working on the never-finished Smile album. They were supposedly working on an album (we heard through the grapevine) called either New Music for the AfterPeople or A Song to Change the World, and there were supposedly heavy scenes there, lots of drugs, paranoia, jealousy, and revenge, but also great music. We never knew, because they came out of hiding to do the Miami concert to raise money for the family of a janitor blown up by mistake when somebody drove a car-bomb into an AFEES building one four A.M.

“It was a great song, man, a great song,” said Craig, “It was going to change the world we thought.” We realized for the first time how drunk Craig really was about then. “We were gonna play it that night, and the world was gonna change, but instead they got us, they got us, man, and we were the ones that got changed, not them. Tonight we’re not Distressed Flag Sale, we’re Lizard Level, and just once anyway, so you’ll all know, tonight we’re gonna do ‘Life Is Like That.’ ”

(What changed in Miami was the next five years of their lives. The Miami cops had been holding the crowd back for three hours and looking for an excuse, anyway, and they got it, just after Distressed Flag Sale made its reeling way onstage. The crowd was already frenzied, and got up to dance when the guys started playing “Life Is Like That” and Andru took out his dong on the opening notes and started playing slide bass with it. The cops went crazy and jumped them, beat them up, planted heroin and amphetamines in their luggage in the dressing rooms, carted them off to jail and turned firehoses on the rioting fans.

Everybody knew the bust was rigged, because they charged Morey with possession of heroin, and everybody knew he was the speed freak.

And that was the end of Distressed Flag Sale.

It was almost literally the end of Andru, too. What the papers didn’t tell you was that, as he was uncircumcised, he’d torn his frenum on the strings of the bass, and he almost lost, first, his dong, and then his life before the cops let a doctor in to see him.)

That’s the history of the song we were going to hear.

Notes started from the keyboard, like it was going to be another Doors-type song, building. Then Craig moved his fingers a few times on the guitar strings, tinkling things rang up high, like birds were in the air over the stage, sort of like the opening of “Touch of Grey” by the Dead, but not like that either. Then Andru came in, and Morey, then it began to take on a shape and move on its own, like nothing else at all.

It moved. And it moved me, too. First I was swaying, then stomping my right foot. Sharon was pulling me toward the dance floor. I’d never heard anything like it. This was dance music. Sharon moved in large sways and swings; so did I.

The floor filled up fast. Everybody moved toward the music. Out of the corner of my eye I saw old Mr. Stoat asking someone to dance. Other teachers moved towards the sound.

Then I was too busy moving to notice much of anything. I was dancing, dancing not with myself but with Sharon, with Bob and Penny, with everyone.

All five hundred people danced. Ginny Balducci was at the corner of the floor, making her chair move in small tight graceful circles. I smiled. We all smiled.

The music got louder; not faster, but more insistent. The playing was superb, immaculate. Lizard Level’s hands moved like they were a bar band that had been playing together every night for twenty years. They seemed oblivious to everything, too, eyes closed, feet shuffling.

Something was happening on the floor, people were moving in little groups and circles, couples breaking off and shimmying down between the lines of the others, in little waggling dance steps. It was happening all over the place. Then I was doing it—like Sharon and I had choreographed every move. People were clapping their hands in time to the music. It sounded like steamrollers were being thrown around in the ballroom.

Above it the music kept building and building in an impossible spiral.

Now the hotel staff joined in, busboys clapping hands, maids and waitresses turning in circles.

Then the pattern of the dance changed, magically, instantly, it split the room right down the middle, and we were in two long interlocking linked chains of people, crossing through each other, one line moving up the room, the other down it, like it was choreographed.

And the guys kept playing, and more people were coming into the ballroom. People in pajamas or naked from their rooms, the night manager and the bellboys. And as they joined in and the lines got more unwieldy, the two lines of people broke into four, and we began to move toward the doors of the ballroom, clapping our hands, stomping, dancing, making our own music, the same music, more people and more people.

At some point they walked away from the stage, joining us, left their amps, acoustic now. Morey had a single drum and was beating it, you could hear Andru and Craig on bass and guitar, Cassuth was still playing the keyboard on the batteries, his speaker held under one arm.

The street musicians had come into the hotel and joined in, people were picking up trash cans from the lobby, garbage cans from the streets, honking the horns of their stopped cars in time to the beat of the music.

We were on the streets now. Windows in buildings opened, people climbed down from second stories to join in. The whole city jumped in time to the song, like in an old Fleischer cartoon; Betty Boop, Koko, Bimbo, the buses, the buildings, the moon all swaying, the stars spinning on their centers like pinwheels.

Chains of bodies formed on every street, each block. At a certain beat they all broke and reformed into smaller ones that grew larger, interlocking helical ropes of dancers.

I was happy, happier than ever. We moved down one jumping chain of people. I saw mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, dinosaurs, salamanders, fish, insects, jellies in loops and swirls. Then came the beat and we were in the other chain, moving up the street, lost in the music, up the line of dancing people, beautiful fields, comets, nebulae, rockets and galaxies of calm light.

I smiled into Sharon’s face, she smiled into mine.

Louder now the music, stronger, pulling at us like a wind. The cops joined in the dance.

Up Congress Avenue the legislators and government workers in special session came streaming out of their building like beautiful ants from a shining mound.

Louder now and happier, stronger, dancing, clapping, singing.

We will find our children or they will find us, before the dance is over, we can feel it. Or afterwards we will responsibly make more.

The chain broke again, and up the jumping streets we go, joyous now, joy all over the place, twenty, thirty thousand people, more every second.

As we swirled and grew, we would sometimes pass someone who was staring, not dancing, feet not moving; they would be crying in uncontrollable sobs and shakes, and occasionally committing suicide.

THE MOUNTAINS OF MOURNING

Lois McMaster Bujold

Having the perfect truth-drug would render justice infallible. Wouldn’t it?

Miles heard the woman weeping as he was climbing the hill from the long lake. He hadn’t dried himself after his swim, as the morning already promised shimmering heat. Lake water trickled cool from his hair onto his naked chest and back, more annoyingly down his legs from his ragged shorts. His leg braces chafed on his damp skin as he pistoned up the faint trail through the scrub, military double-time. His feet squished in his old wet shoes. He slowed in curiosity as he became conscious of the voices.

The woman’s voice grated with grief and exhaustion. “Please, lord, please. All I want is m’justice . . .”

The front gate guard’s voice was irritated and embarrassed. “I’m no lord. C’mon, get up, woman. Go back to the village and report it at the district magistrate’s office.”

“I tell you, I just came from there!” The woman did not move from her knees as Miles emerged from the bushes and paused to take in the tableau across the paved road. “The magistrate’s not to return for weeks, weeks. I walked four days to get here. I only have a little money. . . .” A desperate hope rose in her voice, and her spine bent and straightened as she scrabbled in her skirt pocket and held out her cupped hands to the guard. “A mark and twenty pence, it’s all I have, but—”

The exasperated guard’s eye fell on Miles, and he straightened abruptly, as if afraid Miles might suspect him of being tempted by so pitiful a bribe. “Be off, woman!” he snapped.

Miles quirked an eyebrow and limped across the road to the main gate. “What’s all this about, Corporal?” he inquired easily.

The guard corporal was on loan from Imperial Security, and wore the high-necked dress greens of the Barrayaran Service. He was sweating and uncomfortable in the bright morning light of this southern district, but Miles fancied he’d be boiled before he’d undo his collar on this post. His accent was not local; he was a city man from the capital, where a more-or-less efficient bureaucracy absorbed such problems as the one on her knees before him.

The woman, now, was local and more than local—she had backcountry written all over her. She was younger than her strained voice had at first suggested. Tall, fever-red from her weeping, with stringy blonde hair hanging down across a ferret-thin face and protuberant gray eyes. If she were cleaned up, fed, rested, happy and confident, she might achieve a near-prettiness, but she was far from that now, despite her remarkable figure. Lean but full-breasted—no, Miles revised himself as he crossed the road and came up to the gate. Her bodice was all blotched with dried milk leaks, though there was no baby in sight. Only temporarily full-breasted. Her worn dress was factory-woven cloth, but hand-sewn, crude and simple. Her feet were bare, thickly callused, cracked and sore.

“No problem,” the guard assured Miles. “Go away,” he hissed to the woman.

She lurched off her knees and sat stonily.

“I’ll call my sergeant”—the guard eyed her warily—“and have her removed.”

“Wait a moment,” said Miles.

She stared up at Miles from her cross-legged position, clearly not knowing whether to identify him as hope or not. His clothing, what there was of it, offered her no clue as to what he might be. The rest of him was all too plainly displayed. He jerked up his chin and smiled thinly. Too-large head, too-short neck, back thickened with its crooked spine, crooked legs with their brittle bones too-often broken, drawing the eye in their gleaming chromium braces. Were the hill woman standing, the top of his head would barely be even with the top of her shoulder. He waited in boredom for her hand to make the backcountry hex sign against evil mutations, but it only jerked and clenched into a fist.

“I must see my lord Count,” she said to an uncertain point halfway between Miles and the guard. “It’s my right. My daddy, he died in the Service. It’s my right.”

“Prime Minister Count Vorkosigan,” said the guard stiffly, “is on his country estate to rest. If he were working, he’d be back in Vorbarr Sultana.” The guard looked as though he wished he were back in Vorbarr Sultana.

The woman seized the pause. “You’re only a city man. He’s my count. My right.”

“What do you want to see Count Vorkosigan for?” asked Miles patiently.

“Murder,” growled the girl/woman. The security guard spasmed slightly. “I want to report a murder.”

“Shouldn’t you report to your village speaker first?” inquired Miles, with a hand-down gesture to calm the twitching guard.

“I did. He’ll do nothing.” Rage and frustration cracked her voice. “He says it’s over and done. He won’t write down my accusation, says it’s nonsense. It would only make trouble for everybody, he says. I don’t care! I want my justice!”

Miles frowned thoughtfully, looking the woman over. The details checked, corroborated her claimed identity, added up to a solid if subliminal sense of the authentic that perhaps escaped the professionally paranoid security man. “It’s true, Corporal,” Miles said. “She has a right to appeal, first to the district magistrate, then to the count’s court. And the district magistrate won’t be back for two weeks.”

This sector of Count Vorkosigan’s native district had only one overworked district magistrate, who rode a circuit that included the lakeside village of Vorkosigan Surleau but one day a month. Since the region of the Prime Minister’s country estate was crawling with Imperial Security when the great lord was in residence, and closely monitored even when he was not, prudent troublemakers took their troubles elsewhere.

“Scan her, and let her in,” said Miles. “On my authority.”

The guard was one of Imperial Security’s best, trained to watch for assassins in his own shadow. He now looked scandalized, and lowered his voice to Miles. “Sir, if I let every country lunatic wander the estate at will—”

“I’ll take her up. I’m going that way.”

The guard shrugged helplessly, but stopped short of saluting; Miles was decidedly not in uniform. The gate guard pulled a scanner from his belt and made a great show of going over the woman. Miles wondered if he’d have been inspired to harass her with a strip-search without Miles’s inhibiting presence. When the guard finished demonstrating how alert, conscientious, and loyal he was, he palmed open the gate’s lock, entered the transaction, including the woman’s retina scan, into the computer monitor, and stood aside in a pose of rather pointed parade rest. Miles grinned at the silent editorial and steered the bedraggled woman by the elbow through the gates and up the winding drive.

She twitched away from his touch at the earliest opportunity, yet still refrained from superstitious gestures, eyeing him with a strange and hungry curiosity. Time was, such openly repelled fascination with the peculiarities of his body had driven Miles to grind his teeth; now he could take it with a serene amusement only slightly tinged with acid. They would learn, all of them. They would learn.

“Do you serve Count Vorkosigan, little man?” she asked cautiously.

Miles thought about that one a moment. “Yes,” he answered finally. The answer was, after all, true on every level of meaning but the one she’d asked it. He quelled the temptation to tell her he was the court jester. From the look of her, this one’s troubles were much worse than his own.

She had apparently not quite believed in her own rightful destiny, despite her mulish determination at the gate, for as they climbed unimpeded toward her goal a nascent panic made her face even more drawn and pale, almost ill. “How—how do I talk to him?” she choked. “Should I curtsey . . .?” She glanced down at herself as if conscious for the first time of her own dirt and sweat and squalor.

Miles suppressed a facetious set-up starting with, Kneel and knock your forehead three times on the floor before speaking, that’s what the General Staff does, and said instead, “Just stand up straight and speak the truth. Try to be clear. He’ll take it from there. He does not, after all”—Miles’s lips twitched—“lack experience.”

She swallowed.

A hundred years ago, the Vorkosigans’ summer retreat had been a guard barracks, part of the outlying fortifications of the great castle on the bluff above the village of Vorkosigan Surleau. The castle was now a burnt-out ruin, and the barracks transformed into a comfortable low stone residence, modernized and re-modernized, artistically landscaped and bright with flowers. The arrow slits had been widened into big glass windows overlooking the lake, and com link antennae bristled from the roof. There was a new guard barracks concealed in the trees downslope, but it had no arrow slits.

A man in the brown and silver livery of the Count’s personal retainers exited the residence’s front door as Miles approached with the strange woman in tow. It was the new man, what was his name? Pym, that was it.

“Where’s m’lord Count?” Miles asked him.

“In the upper pavilion, taking breakfast with m’lady.” Pym glanced at the woman, and waited on Miles in a posture of polite inquiry.

“Ah. Well, this woman has walked four days to lay an appeal before the district magistrate’s court. The court’s not here, but the Count is, so she now proposes to skip the middlemen and go straight to the top. I like her style. Take her up, will you?”

“During breakfast?” said Pym.

Miles cocked his head at the woman. “Have you had breakfast?”

She shook her head mutely.

“I thought not.” Miles turned his hands palm-out, dumping her, symbolically, on the retainer. “Now, yes.”

“My daddy, he died in the Service,” the woman repeated faintly. “It’s my right.” The phrase seemed as much to convince herself as anyone else, now.

Pym was, if not a hill man, district-born. “So it is,” he sighed, and gestured her to follow him without further ado. Her eyes widened, as she trailed him around the house, and she glanced back nervously over her shoulder at Miles. “Little man . . .?”

“Just stand straight,” he called to her. He watched her round the corner, grinned, and took the steps two at a time into the residence’s main entrance.

After a shave and cold shower, Miles dressed in his own room overlooking the long lake. He dressed with great care, as great as he’d expended on the Service Academy ceremonies and Imperial Review two days ago. Clean underwear, long-sleeved cream shirt, dark green trousers with the side piping. High-collared green tunic tailor-cut to his own difficult fit. New pale blue plastic ensign’s rectangles aligned precisely on the collar and poking most uncomfortably into his jaw. He dispensed with the leg braces and pulled on mirror-polished boots to the knee, and swiped a bit of dust from them with his pajama pants, ready-to-hand on the floor where he’d dropped them before going swimming.

He straightened and checked himself in the mirror. His dark hair hadn’t even begun to recover from that last cut before the graduation ceremonies. A pale, sharp-featured face, not too much dissipated bag under the gray eyes, nor too bloodshot—alas, the limits of his body compelled him to stop celebrating well before he could hurt himself.

Echoes of the late celebration still boiled up silently in his head, crooking his mouth into a grin. He was on his way now, had his hand clamped firmly around the lowest rung of the highest ladder on Barrayar, Imperial Service itself. There were no give-aways in the Service even for sons of the old Vor. You got what you earned. His brother-officers could be relied on to know that, even if outsiders wondered. He was in position at last to prove himself to all doubters. Up and away and never look down, never look back.

One last look back. As carefully as he’d dressed, Miles gathered up the necessary objects for his task. The white cloth rectangles of his former Academy cadet’s rank. The hand-calligraphed second copy, purchased for this purpose, of his new officer’s commission in the Barrayaran Imperial Service. A copy of his Academy three-year scholastic transcript on paper, with all its commendations (and demerits). No point in anything but honesty in this next transaction. In a cupboard downstairs he found the brass brazier and tripod, wrapped in its polishing cloth, and a plastic bag of very dry juniper bark. Chemical firesticks.

Out the back door and up the hill. The landscaped path split, right going up to the pavilion overlooking it all, left forking sideways to a garden-like area surrounded by a low fieldstone wall. Miles let himself in by the gate. “Good morning, crazy ancestors,” he called, then quelled his humor. It might be true, but lacked the respect due the occasion.

He strolled over and around the graves until he came to the one he sought, knelt, and set up the brazier and tripod, humming. The stone was simple, General Count Piotr Pierre Vorkosigan, and the dates. If they’d tried to list all the accumulated honors and accomplishments, they’d have had to go to microprint.

He piled in the bark, the very expensive papers, the cloth bits, a clipped mat of dark hair from that last cut. He set it alight and rocked back on his heels to watch it burn. He’d played a hundred versions of this moment over in his head, over the years, ranging from solemn public orations with musicians in the background, to dancing naked on the old man’s grave. He’d settled on this private and traditional ceremony, played straight. Just between the two of them.

“So, Grandfather,” he purred at last. “And here we are after all. Satisfied now?”

All the chaos of the graduation ceremonies behind, all the mad efforts of the last three years, all the pain, came to this point; but the grave did not speak, did not say, Well done; you can stop now. The ashes spelled out no messages; there were no visions to be had in the rising smoke. The brazier burned down all too quickly. Not enough stuff in it, perhaps.

He stood and dusted his knees, in the silence and the sunlight. So what had he expected? Applause? Why was he here, in the final analysis? Dancing out a dead man’s dreams—who did his Service really serve? Grandfather? Himself? Pale Emperor Gregor? Who cared?

“Well, old man,” he whispered, then shouted: “ARE YOU SATISFIED YET?” The echoes rang from the stones.

A throat cleared behind him, and Miles whirled like a scalded cat, heart pounding.

“Uh . . . my lord?” said Pym carefully. “Pardon me, I did not mean to interrupt . . . anything. But the Count your father requires you to attend on him in the upper pavilion.”

Pym’s expression was perfectly bland. Miles swallowed, waiting for the scarlet heat he could feel in his face to recede. “Quite.” He shrugged. “The fire’s almost out. I’ll clean it up later. Don’t . . . let anybody else touch it.”

He marched past Pym and didn’t look back.

The pavilion was a simple structure of weathered silver wood, open on all four sides to catch the breeze, this morning a few faint puffs from the west. Good sailing on the lake this afternoon, maybe. Only ten days precious home leave left, and much Miles wanted to do, including the trip to Vorbarr Sultana with his cousin Ivan to pick out his new lightflyer. And then his first assignment would be coming through—ship duty, Miles prayed. He’d had to overcome a major temptation, not to ask his father to make sure it was ship duty. He would take whatever assignment fate dealt him, that was the first rule of the game. And win with the hand he was dealt.

The interior of the pavilion was shady and cool after the glare outside. It was furnished with comfortable old chairs and tables, one of which bore the remains of a noble breakfast—Miles mentally marked two lonely-looking oil cakes on a crumb-scattered tray as his own. Miles’s mother, lingering over her cup, smiled across the table at him.

Miles’s father, casually dressed in an open-throated shirt and shorts, sat in a worn armchair. Aral Vorkosigan was a thickset, gray haired man, heavy-jawed, heavy browed, scarred. A face that lent itself to savage caricature—Miles had seen some, in Opposition press, in the histories of Barrayar’s enemies. They had only to draw one lie, to render dull those sharp penetrating eyes, to create everyone’s parody of a military dictator.

And how much is he haunted by Grandfather? Miles wondered. He doesn’t show it much. But then, he doesn’t have to. Admiral Aral Vorkosigan, space master strategist, conqueror of Komarr, hero of Escobar, for sixteen years Imperial Regent, supreme power on Barrayar in all but name. And then he’d capped it, confounded history and all self-sure witnesses and heaped up honor and glory beyond all that had gone before by voluntarily stepping down and transferring command smoothly to Emperor Gregor upon his majority. Not that the Prime Ministership hadn’t made a dandy retirement from the Regency, and he was showing no signs yet of stepping down from that.

And so Admiral Aral’s life took General Piotr’s like an overpowering hand of cards, and where did that leave Ensign Miles? Holding two deuces and the joker. He must surely either concede or start bluffing like crazy. . . .

The hill woman sat on a hassock, a half-eaten oil cake clutched in her hands, staring open-mouthed at Miles in all his power and polish. As he caught and returned her gaze her lips pressed closed and her eyes lit. Her expression was strange—anger? Exhilaration? Embarrassment? Glee? Some bizarre mixture of all? And what did you think I was, woman?

Being in uniform (showing off his uniform?), Miles came to attention before his father. “Sir?”

Count Vorkosigan spoke to the woman. “That is my son. If I send him as my Voice, would that satisfy you?”

“Oh,” she breathed, her wide mouth drawing back in a weird, fierce grin, the most expression Miles had yet seen on her face, “yes, my lord.”

“Very well. It will be done.”

What will be done? Miles wondered warily. The Count was leaning back in his chair, looking satisfied himself, but with a dangerous tension around his eyes hinting that something had aroused his true anger. Not anger at the woman, clearly they were in some sort of agreement, and—Miles searched his conscience quickly—not at Miles himself. He cleared his throat gently, cocking his head and baring his teeth in an inquiring smile.

The Count steepled his hands and spoke to Miles at last. “A most interesting case. I can see why you sent her up.”

“Ah . . .” said Miles. What had he got hold of? He’d only greased the woman’s way through Security on a quixotic impulse, for God’s sake, and to tweak his father at breakfast. “. . . ah?” he continued noncommittally.

Count Vorkosigan’s brows rose. “Did you not know?”

“She spoke of a murder, and a marked lack of cooperation from her local authorities about it. Figured you’d give her a lift on to the district magistrate.”

The Count settled back still further and rubbed his hand thoughtfully across his scarred chin. “It’s an infanticide case.”

Miles’s belly went cold. I don’t want anything to do with this. Well, that explained why there was no baby to go with the breasts. “Unusual . . . for it to be reported.”

“We’ve fought the old customs for twenty years and more,” said the Count. “Promulgated, propagandized . . . In the cities, we’ve made good progress.”

“In the cities,” murmured the Countess, “people have access to alternatives.”

“But in the backcountry—well—little has changed. We all know what’s going on, but without a report, a complaint—and with the family invariably drawing together to protect its own—it’s hard to get leverage.”

“What,” Miles cleared his throat, nodded at the woman, “what was your baby’s mutation?”

“The cat’s mouth.” The woman dabbed at her upper lip to demonstrate. “She had the hole inside her mouth, too, and was a weak sucker, she choked and cried, but she was getting enough, she was. . . .”

“Hare-lip,” the Count’s off-worlder wife murmured half to herself, translating the Barrayaran term to the galactic standard, “and a cleft palate, sounds like. Harra, that’s not even a mutation. They had that back on Old Earth. A . . . a normal birth defect, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Not a punishment for your Barrayaran ancestors’ pilgrimage through the Fire. A simple operation could have corrected—” Countess Vorkosigan cut herself off. The hill woman was looking anguished.

“I’d heard,” the woman said. “My lord had made a hospital to be built at Hassadar. I meant to take her there, when I was a little stronger, though I had no money. Her arms and legs were sound, her head was well-shaped, anybody could see—surely they would have”—her hands clenched and twisted, her voice went ragged—“but Lem killed her first.”

A seven-day walk, Miles calculated, from the deep Dendarii Mountains to the lowland town of Hassadar. Reasonable, that a woman newly risen from childbed might delay that hike a few days. An hour’s ride in an aircar. . . .

“So one is reported as a murder at last,” said Count Vorkosigan, “and we will treat it as exactly that. This is a chance to send a message to the farthest corners of my own district. You, Miles, will be my Voice, to reach where it has not reached before. You will dispense Count’s justice upon this man—and not quietly, either. It’s time for the practices that brand us as barbarians in galactic eyes to end.”

Miles gulped. “Wouldn’t the district magistrate be better qualified . . .?”

The Count smiled slightly. “For this case, I can think of no one better qualified than yourself.”

The messenger and the message all in one; Times have changed. Indeed. Miles wished himself elsewhere, anywhere—back sweating blood over his final examinations, for instance. He stifled an unworthy wail, My home leave . . .!

Miles rubbed the back of his neck. “Who, ah . . . who is it killed your little girl?” Meaning, who is it I’m expected to drag out, put up against a wall, and shoot?

“My husband,” she said tonelessly, looking at—through—the polished silvery floorboards.

I knew this was going to be messy. . . .

“She cried and cried,” the woman went on, “and wouldn’t go to sleep, not nursing well—he shouted at me to shut her up—”

“Then?” Miles prompted, sick to his stomach.

“He swore at me, and went to go sleep at his mother’s. He said at least a working man could sleep there. I hadn’t slept either. . . .”

This guy sounds like a real winner. Miles had an instant picture of him, a bull of a man with a bullying manner—nevertheless, there was something missing in the climax of the woman’s story.

The Count had picked up on it too. He was listening with total attention, his strategy-session look, a slit-eyed intensity of thought you could mistake for sleepiness. That would be a grave mistake. “Were you an eyewitness?” he asked in a deceptively mild tone that put Miles on full alert. “Did you actually see him kill her?”

“I found her dead in the midmorning, lord.”

“You went into the bedroom—” Count Vorkosigan led her on.

“We’ve only got one room.” She shot him a look as if doubtful for the first time of his total omniscience. “She had slept, slept at last. I went out to get some brillberries, up the ravine a way. And when I came back . . . I should have taken her with me, but I was so glad she slept at last, didn’t want to risk waking her—” Tears leaked from the woman’s tightly-closed eyes. “I let her sleep when I came back, I was glad to eat and rest, but I began to get full”—her hand touched a breast—“and I went to wake her . . .”

“What, were there no marks on her? Not a cut throat?” asked the Count. That was the usual method for these backcountry infanticides, quick and clean compared to, say, exposure.

The woman shook her head. “Smothered, I think, lord. It was cruel, something cruel. The village Speaker said I must have overlain her, and wouldn’t take my plea against Lem. I did not, I did not! She had her own cradle, Lem made it with his own hands when she was still in my belly. . . .” She was close to breaking down.

The Count exchanged a glance with his wife, and a small tilt of his head. Countess Vorkosigan rose smoothly.

“Come, Harra, down to the house. You must wash and rest before Miles takes you home.”

The hill woman looked taken aback. “Oh, not in your house, lady!”

“Sorry, it’s the only one I’ve got handy. Besides the guard barracks. The guards are good boys, but you’d make ’em uncomfortable . . .” The Countess eased her out.

“It is clear,” said Count Vorkosigan as soon as the women were out of earshot, “that you will have to check out the medical facts before, er, popping off. And I trust you will also have noticed the little problem with a positive identification of the accused. This could be the ideal public-demonstration case we want, but not if there’s any ambiguity about it. No bloody mysteries.”

“I’m not a coroner,” Miles pointed out immediately. If he could wriggle off this hook. . . .

“Quite. You will take Dr. Dea with you.”

Lieutenant Dea was the Prime Minister’s physician’s assistant. Miles had seen him around—an ambitious young military doctor in a constant state of frustration because his superior would never let him touch his most important patient—oh, he was going to be thrilled with this assignment, Miles predicted morosely.

“He can take his osteo kit with him, too,” the Count went on, brightening slightly, “in case of accidents.”

“How economical,” said Miles, rolling his eyes. “Look, uh—suppose her story checks out and we nail this guy. Do I have to, personally . . .?”

“One of the liveried men will be your bodyguard. And—if the story checks—the executioner.”

That was only slightly better. “Couldn’t we wait for the district magistrate?”

“Every judgment the district magistrate makes, he makes in my place. Every sentence his office carries out, is carried out in my name. Someday, it will be done in your name. It’s time you gained a clear understanding of the process. Historically, the Vor may be a military caste, but a Vor lord’s duties were never only military ones.”

No escape. Damn, damn, damn. Miles sighed. “Right. Well . . . we could take the aircar, I suppose, and be up there in a couple of hours. Allow some time to find the right hole. Drop out of the sky on ’em, make the message loud and clear . . . be back before bedtime.” Get it over with quickly.

The Count had that slit-eyed look again. “No . . .” he said slowly, “not the aircar, I don’t think.”

“No roads for a groundcar, up that far. Just trails.” He added uneasily—surely his father could not be thinking of—“I don’t think I’d cut a very impressive figure of central Imperial authority on foot, sir.”

His father glanced up at his crisp dress uniform and smiled slightly. “Oh, you don’t do so badly.”

“But picture this after three or four days of beating through the bushes,” Miles protested. “You didn’t see us in Basic. Or smell us.”

“I’ve been there,” said the Admiral dryly. “But no, you’re quite right. Not on foot. I have a better idea.”

My own cavalry troop, thought Miles ironically, turning in his saddle, just like Grandfather. Actually, he was pretty sure the old man would have had some acerbic comments about the riders now strung out behind Miles on the wooded trail, once he’d got done rolling on the ground laughing at the equitation being displayed. The Vorkosigan stables had shrunk sadly since the old man was no longer around to take an interest: the polo string sold off, the few remaining ancient and ill-tempered ex-cavalry beasts put permanently out to pasture. The handful of riding horses left were retained for their sure-footedness and good manners, not their exotic bloodlines, and kept exercised and gentle for the occasional guest by a gaggle of girls from the village.

Miles gathered his reins, tensed one calf, and shifted his weight slightly, and Fat Ninny responded with a neat half turn and two precise back steps. The thickset roan gelding could not have been mistaken by the most ignorant urbanite for a fiery steed, but Miles adored him, for his dark and liquid eye, his wide velvet nose, his phlegmatic disposition equally unappalled by rushing streams or screaming aircars, but most of all for his exquisite dressage-trained responsiveness. Brains before beauty. Just being around him made Miles calmer. The beast was an emotional blotter, like a purring cat. Miles patted Fat Ninny on the neck. “If anybody asks,” he murmured, “I’ll tell them your name is Chieftan.” Fat Ninny waggled one fuzzy ear, and heaved a wooshing, barrel-chested sigh.

Grandfather had a great deal to do with the unlikely parade Miles now led. The great guerilla general had poured out his youth in these mountains, fighting the Cetagandan invaders to a standstill and then reversing their tide. Anti-flyer heatless seeker-strikers smuggled in at bloody cost from off-planet had a lot more to do with the final victory than cavalry horses, which, according to Grandfather, had saved his forces through the worst winter of that campaign mainly by being edible. But through retroactive romance, the horse had become the symbol of that struggle.

Miles thought his father was being overly optimistic, if he thought Miles was going to cash in thusly on the old man’s residual glory. The guerilla caches and camps were shapeless lumps of rust and trees, dammit, not just weeds and scrub anymore—they had passed some, earlier in today’s ride—the men who had fought that war had long since gone to ground for the last time, just like Grandfather. What was he doing here? It was jump ship duty he wanted, taking him high, high above all this. The future, not the past, held his destiny.

Miles’s meditations were interrupted by Dr. Dea’s horse, which, taking exception to a branch lying across the logging trail, planted all four feet in an abrupt stop and snorted loudly. Dr. Dea toppled off with a faint cry. “Hang onto the reins,” Miles called, and pressed Fat Ninny back down the trail.

Dr. Dea was getting rather better at falling off; he’d landed more-or-less on his feet this time. He made a lunge at the dangling reins, but his sorrel mare shied away from his grab. Dea jumped back as she swung on her haunches and then, realizing her freedom, bounced back down the trail, tail bannering, horse body-language for Nyah, nyah, ya can’t catch me! Dr. Dea, red and furious, ran swearing in pursuit. She broke into a canter.

“No, no, don’t run after her!” called Miles.

“How the hell am I supposed to catch her if I don’t run after her?” snarled Dea. The space surgeon was not a happy man. “My medkit’s on that bloody beast!”

“How do you think you can catch her if you do?” asked Miles. “She can run faster than you can.”

At the end of the little column, Pym turned his horse sideways, blocking the trail. “Just wait, Harra,” Miles advised the anxious hill woman in passing. “Hold your horse still. Nothing starts a horse running faster than another running horse.”

The other two riders were doing rather better. The woman Harra Csurik sat her horse wearily, allowing it to plod along without interference, but at least riding on balance instead of trying to use the reins as a handle like the unfortunate Dea. Pym, bringing up the rear, was competent if not comfortable.

Miles slowed Fat Ninny to a walk, reins loose, and wandered after the mare, radiating an air of calm relaxation. Who, me? I don’t want to catch you. We’re just enjoying the scenery, right. That’s it, stop for a bite. The sorrel mare paused to nibble at a weed, but kept a wary eye on Miles’s approach.

At a distance just short of starting the mare bolting off again, Miles stopped Fat Ninny and slid off. He made no move toward the mare, but instead stood still and made a great show of fishing in his pockets. Fat Ninny butted his head against Miles eagerly, and Miles cooed and fed him a bit of sugar. The mare cocked her ears with interest. Fat Ninny smacked his lips and nudged for more. The mare snuffled up for her share. She lipped a cube from Miles’s palm as he slid his other arm quietly through the loop of her reins.

“Here you go, Dr. Dea. One horse. No running.”

“No fair,” wheezed Dea, trudging up. “You had sugar in your pockets.”

“Of course I had sugar in my pockets. It’s called foresight and planning. The trick of handling horses isn’t to be faster than the horse, or stronger than the horse. That pits your weakness against his strengths. The trick is to be smarter than the horse. That pits your strength against his weakness, eh?”

Dea took his reins. “It’s snickering at me,” he said suspiciously.

“That’s nickering, not snickering.” Miles grinned. He tapped Fat Ninny behind his left foreleg, and the horse obediently grunted down onto one knee. Miles clambered up readily to his conveniently-lowered stirrup.

“Does mine do that?” asked Dr. Dea, watching with fascination.

“Sorry, no.”

Dea glowered at his horse. “This animal is an idiot. I shall lead it for a while.”

As Fat Ninny lurched back to his four feet Miles suppressed a riding-instructorly comment gleaned from his Grandfather’s store such as, Be smarter than the horse, Dea. Though Dr. Dea was officially sworn to Lord Vorkosigan for the duration of this investigation, Space Surgeon Lieutenant Dea certainly outranked Ensign Vorkosigan. To command older men who outranked one called for a certain measure of tact.

The logging road widened out here, and Miles dropped back beside Harra Csurik. Her fierceness and determination of yesterday morning at the gate seemed to be fading even as the trail rose toward her home. Or perhaps it was simply exhaustion catching up with her. She’d said little all morning, been sunk in silence all afternoon. If she was going to drag Miles all the way up to the back of beyond and then wimp out on him . . .

“What, ah, branch of the Service was your father in, Harra?” Miles began conversationally.

She raked her fingers through her hair in a combing gesture more nervousness than vanity. Her eyes looked out at him through the straw-colored wisps like skittish creatures in the protection of a hedge.

“District Militia, m’lord. I don’t really remember him. He died when I was real little.”

“In combat?”

She nodded. “In the fighting around Vorbarr Sultana, during Vordarian’s Pretendership.”

Miles refrained from asking which side he had been swept up on—most foot soldiers had had little choice, and the amnesty had included the dead as well as the living.

“Ah . . . do you have any sibs?”

“No, lord. Just me and my mother left.”

A little anticipatory tension eased in Miles’s neck. If this judgment indeed drove all the way through to an execution, one misstep could trigger a blood feud among the in-laws. Not the legacy of justice the Count intended him to leave behind. So the fewer in-laws involved, the better. “What about your husband’s family?”

“He’s got seven. Four brothers and three sisters.”

“Hm.” Miles had a mental flash of an entire team of huge, menacing hill hulks. He glanced back at Pym, feeling a trifle understaffed for his task. He had pointed out this factor to the Count, when they’d been planning this expedition last night.

“The village Speaker and his deputies will be your back-up,” the Count had said, “just as for the district magistrate on court circuit.”

“What if they don’t want to cooperate?” Miles had asked nervously.

“An officer who expects to command Imperial troops,” the Count had glinted, “should be able to figure out how to extract cooperation from a backcountry headman.”

In other words, his father had decided this was a test, and wasn’t going to give him any more clues. Thanks, Da.

“You have no sibs, lord?” said Harra, snapping him back to the present.

“No. But surely that’s known, even in the back-beyond.”

“They say a lot of things about you.” Harra shrugged.

Miles bit down on the morbid question in his mouth like a wedge of raw lemon. He would not ask it, he would not . . . he couldn’t help himself. “Like what?” forced out past his stiff lips.

“Everyone knows the Count’s son is a mutant.” Her eyes flicked defiant-wide. “Some said it came from the off-worlder woman he married. Some said it was from radiation from the wars, or a disease from, um, corrupt practices in his youth among his brother-officers—”

That last was a new one to Miles. His brow lifted.

“—but most say he was poisoned by his enemies.”

“I’m glad most have it right. It was an assassination attempt using soltoxin gas, when my mother was pregnant with me. But it’s not—” a mutation, his thought hiccoughed through the well-worn grooves—how many times had he explained this?—it’s teratogenic, not genetic, I’m not a mutant, not. . . . What the hell did a fine point of biochemistry matter to this ignorant, bereaved woman? For all practical purposes—for her purposes—he might as well be a mutant. “—important,” he finished.

She eyed him sideways, swaying gently in the clop-a-clop rhythm of her mount. “Some said you were born with no legs, and lived all the time in a float chair in Vorkosigan House. Some said you were born with no bones—”

“—and kept in a jar in the basement, no doubt,” Miles muttered.

“But Karal said he’d seen you with your grandfather at Hassadar Fair, and you were only sickly and undersized. Some said your father had got you into the Service, but others said no, you’d gone off-planet to your mother’s home and had your brain turned into a computer and your body fed with tubes, floating in a liquid—”

“I knew there’d be a jar turn up in this story somewhere.” Miles grimaced. You knew you ‘d be sorry you asked, too, but you went and did it anyway. She was baiting him, Miles realized suddenly. How dare she . . . but there was no humor in her, only a sharp-edged watchfulness.

She had gone out, way out on a limb to lay this murder charge, in defiance of family and local authorities alike, in defiance of established custom. And what had her Count given her for a shield and support, going back to face the wrath of all her nearest and dearest? Miles. Could he handle this? She must be wondering indeed. Or would he botch it, cave and cut and run, leaving her to face the whirlwind of rage and revenge alone?

He wished he’d left her weeping at the gate.

The woodland, fruit of many generations of terraforming forestry, opened out suddenly on a vale of brown native scrub. Down the middle of it, through some accident of soil chemistry, ran a half-kilometer-wide swathe of green and pink—feral roses, Miles realized with astonishment as they rode nearer. Earth roses. The track dove into the fragrant mass of them and vanished.

He took turns with Pym, hacking their way through with their Service bush knives. The roses were vigorous and studded with thick thorns, and hacked back with a vicious elastic recoil. Fat Ninny did his part by swinging his big head back and forth and nipping off blooms and happily chomping them down. Miles wasn’t sure just how many he ought to let the big roan eat—just because the species wasn’t native to Barrayar didn’t mean it wasn’t poisonous to horses. Miles sucked at his wounds and reflected upon Barrayar’s shattered ecological history.

The fifty thousand Firsters from Earth had only meant to be the spearhead of Barrayar’s colonization. Then, through a gravitational anomaly, the worm-hole jump through which the colonists had come shifted closed, irrevocably and without warning. The terraforming that had begun, so careful and controlled in the beginning, collapsed along with everything else. Imported Earth plant and animal species had escaped everywhere to run wild, as the humans turned their attention to the most urgent problems of survival. Biologists still mourned the mass extinctions of native species that had followed, the erosions and droughts and floods, but really, Miles thought, over the centuries of the Time of Isolation the fittest of both worlds had fought it out to a perfectly good new balance. If it was alive and covered the ground who cared where it came from?

We are all here by accident. Like the roses.

They camped that night high in the hills, and pushed on in the morning to the flanks of the true mountains. They were now out of the region Miles was personally familiar with from his childhood, and he checked Harra’s directions frequently on his orbital survey map. They stopped only a few hours short of their goal at sunset of the second day. Harra insisted she could lead them on in the dusk from here, but Miles did not care to arrive after nightfall, unannounced, in a strange place of uncertain welcome.

He bathed the next morning in a stream, and unpacked and dressed carefully in his new officer’s Imperial dress greens. Pym wore the Vorkosigan brown-and-silver livery, and pulled the Count’s standard on a telescoping aluminum pole from the recesses of his saddlebag and mounted it on his left stirrup. Dressed to kill, thought Miles joylessly. Dr. Dea wore ordinary black fatigues and looked uncomfortable. If they constituted a message, Miles was damned if he knew what it was.

They pulled the horses up at midmorning before a two-room cabin set on the edge of a vast grove of sugar maples, planted who-knew-how-many centuries ago but now raggedly marching up the vale by self-seeding. The mountain air was cool and pure and bright. A few chickens stalked and bobbed in the weeds. An algae-choked wooden pipe from the woods dribbled water into a trough, which overflowed into a squishy green streamlet and away.

Harra slid down, smoothed her skirt, and climbed the porch. “Karal?” she called. Miles waited high on horseback for the initial contact. Never give up a psychological advantage.

“Harra? Is that you?” came a man’s voice from within. He banged open the door and rushed out. “Where have you been, girl? We’ve been beating the bushes for you! Thought you’d broke your neck in the scrub somewhere—” He stopped short before the three silent men on horseback.

“You wouldn’t write down my charges, Karal,” said Harra rather breathlessly. Her hands kneaded her skirt. “So I walked to the district magistrate at Vorkosigan Surleau to Speak them myself.”

“Oh, girl,” Karal breathed regretfully, “that was a stupid thing to do . . .” His head lowered and swayed, as he stared uneasily at the riders. He was a balding man of maybe sixty, leathery and worn, and his left arm ended in a stump. Another veteran.

“Speaker Serg Karal?” began Miles sternly. “I am the Voice of Count Vorkosigan. I am charged to investigate the crime Spoken by Harra Csurik before the Count’s court, namely the murder of her infant daughter Raina. As Speaker of Silvy Vale, you are requested and required to assist me in all matters pertaining to the Count’s justice.”

At this point Miles ran out of prescribed formalities and was on his own. That hadn’t taken long. He waited. Fat Ninny snuffled. The silver-on-brown cloth of the standard made a few soft snapping sounds, lifted by a vagrant breeze.

“The district magistrate wasn’t there,” put in Harra, “but the Count was.”

Karal was gray-faced, staring. He pulled himself together with an effort, came to a species of attention, and essayed a creaking half-bow. “Who—who are you, sir?”

“Lord Miles Vorkosigan.”

Karal’s lips moved silently. Miles was no lip reader, but he was pretty sure it came to a dismayed variant of Oh, shit. “This is my liveried man Sergeant Pym, and my medical examiner, Lieutenant Dea of the Imperial Service.”

“You are my lord Count’s son?” Karal croaked.

“The one and only.” Miles was suddenly sick of the posing. Surely that was a sufficient first impression. He swung down off Ninny, landing lightly on the balls of his feet. Karal’s gaze followed him down, and down. Yeah, so I’m short. But wait’ll you see me dance. “All right if we water our horses in your trough here?” Miles looped Ninny’s reins through his arm and stepped toward it.

“Uh, that’s for the people, m’lord,” said Karal. “Just a minute and I’ll fetch a bucket.” He hitched up his baggy trousers and trotted off around the side of the cabin. A minute’s uncomfortable silence, then Karal’s voice floating faintly, “Where’d you put the goat bucket, Zed?”

Another voice, light and young, “Behind the woodstack, Da.” The voices fell to a muffled undertone. Karal came trotting back with a battered aluminum bucket, which he placed beside the trough. He knocked out a wooden plug in the side and a bright stream arced out to splash and fill. Fat Ninny flicked his ears and snuffled and rubbed his big head against Miles, smearing his tunic with red and white horse hairs and nearly knocking him off his feet. Karal glanced up and smiled at the horse, though his smile fell away as his gaze passed on to the horse’s owner. As Fat Ninny gulped his drink Miles caught a glimpse of the owner of the second voice, a boy of around twelve who flitted off into the woods behind the cabin.

Karal fell to, assisting Miles and Harra and Pym in securing the horses. Miles left Pym to unsaddle and feed, and followed Karal into his house. Harra stuck to Miles like glue, and Dr. Dea unpacked his medical kit and trailed along. Miles’s boots rang loud and unevenly on the wooden floorboards.

“My wife, she’ll be back in the nooning,” said Karal, moving uncertainly around the room as Miles and Dea settled themselves on a bench and Harra curled up with her arms around her knees on the floor beside the fieldstone hearth. “I’ll . . . I’ll make some tea, m’lord.” He skittered back out the door to fill a kettle at the trough before Miles could say, No, thank you. No, let him ease his nerves in ordinary movements. Then maybe Miles could begin to tease out how much of this static was social nervousness and how much was—perhaps—guilty conscience. By the time Karal had the kettle on the coals he was noticeably better controlled, so Miles began.

“I’d prefer to commence this investigation immediately, Speaker. It need not take long.”

“It need not . . . take place at all, m’lord. The baby’s death was natural—there were no marks on her. She was weakly, she had the cat’s mouth, who knows what else was wrong with her? She died in her sleep, or by some accident.”

“It is remarkable,” said Miles dryly, “how often such accidents happen in this district. My father the Count himself has remarked on it.”

“There was no call to drag you up here.” Karal looked in exasperation at Harra. She sat silent, unmoved by his persuasion.

“It was no problem,” said Miles blandly.

“Truly, m’lord,” Karal lowered his voice, “I believe the child might have been overlain. ‘S no wonder, in her grief, that her mind rejected it. Lem Csurik, he’s a good boy, a good provider. She really doesn’t want to do this—her reason is just temporarily overset by her troubles.”

Harra’s eyes, looking out from her hair-thatch, were poisonously cold.

“I begin to see,” Miles’s voice was mild, encouraging.

Karal brightened slightly. “It all could still be all right. If she will just be patient. Get over her sorrow. Talk to poor Lem. I’m sure he didn’t kill the babe. Not rush to something she’ll regret.”

“I begin to see,” Miles let his tone go ice cool, “why Harra Csurik found it necessary to walk four days to get an unbiased hearing. ‘You think.’ ‘You believe.’ ‘Who knows what?’ Not you, it appears. I hear speculation—accusation—innuendo—assertion. I came for facts, Speaker Karal. The Count’s justice doesn’t turn on guesses. It doesn’t have to. This isn’t the Time of Isolation. Not even the backbeyond.

“My investigation of the facts will begin now. No judgment will be—rushed into, before the facts are complete. Confirmation of Lem Csurik’s guilt or innocence will come from his own mouth, under fast-penta, administered by Dr. Dea before two witnesses—yourself and a deputy of your choice. Simple, clean, and quick.” And maybe I can be on my way out of this benighted hole before sundown. “I require you, Speaker, to go now and bring Lem Csurik for questioning. Sergeant Pym will assist you.”

Karal killed another moment pouring the boiling water into a big brown pot before speaking. “I’m a traveled man, lord. A twenty-year Service man. But most folks here have never been out of Silvy Vale. Interrogation chemistry might as well be magic to them. They might say it was a false confession, got that way.”

“Then you and your deputy can say otherwise. This isn’t exactly like the good old days, when confessions were extracted under torture, Karal. Besides, if he’s as innocent as you guess—he’ll clear himself, no?”

Reluctantly, Karal went into the adjoining room. He came back shrugging on a faded Imperial Service uniform jacket with a corporal’s rank marked on the collar, the buttons of which did not quite meet across his middle anymore. Preserved, evidently, for such official functions. Even as in Barrayaran custom one saluted the uniform, and not the man in it, so might the wrath engendered by an unpopular duty fall on the office and not the individual who carried it out. Miles appreciated the nuance.

Karal paused at the door. Harra still sat wrapped in silence by the hearth, rocking slightly.

“Mlord,” said Karal. “I’ve been Speaker of Silvy Vale for sixteen years now. In all that time nobody has had to go to the district magistrate for a Speaking, not for water rights or stolen animals or swiving or even the time Neva accused Bors of tree piracy over the maple sap. We’ve not had a blood feud in all that time.”

“I have no intention of starting a blood feud, Karal. I just want the facts.”

“That’s the thing, m’lord. I’m not so in love with facts as I used to be. Sometimes, they bite.” Karal’s eyes were urgent.

Really, the man was doing everything but stand on his head and juggle cats—one-handed—to divert Miles. How overt was his obstruction likely to get?

“Silvy Vale cannot be permitted to have its own little Time of Isolation,” said Miles warningly. “The Count’s justice is for everyone, now. Even if they’re small. And weakly. And have something wrong with them. And cannot even speak for themselves—Speaker.”

Karal flinched, white about the lips—point taken, evidently. He trudged away up the trail, Pym following watchfully, one hand loosening the stunner in his holster.

They drank the tea while they waited. Miles pottered about the cabin, looking but not touching. The hearth was the sole source of heat for cooking and wash water. There was a beaten metal sink for washing up, filled by hand from a covered bucket but emptied through a drainpipe under the porch to join the streamlet running down out of the trough. The second room was a bedroom, with a double bed and chests for storage. A loft held three more pallets; the boy around back had brothers, apparently. The place was cramped, but swept, things put away and hung up.

On a side table sat a government-issue audio receiver, and a second and older military model, opened up, apparently in the process of getting minor repairs and a new power pack. Exploration revealed a drawer full of old parts, nothing more complex than for simple audio sets, unfortunately. Speaker Karal must double as Silvy Vale’s com link specialist. How appropriate. They must pick up broadcasts from the station in Hassadar, maybe the high-power government channels from the capital as well.

No other electricity, of course. Powersat receptors were expensive pieces of precision technology. They would come even here, in time; some communities almost as small, but with strong economic co-ops, already had them. Silvy Vale was obviously still stuck in subsistence-level, and must needs wait till there was enough surplus in the district to gift them, if the surplus was not grabbed off first by some competing want. If only the city of Vorkosigan Vashnoi had not been obliterated by Cetagandan atomics, the whole district could be years ahead, economically. . . .

Miles walked out on the porch and leaned on the rail. Karal’s son had returned. Down at the end of the cleared yard Fat Ninny was standing tethered, hip-shot, ears aflop, grunting with pleasure as the grinning boy scratched him vigorously under his halter. The boy looked up to catch Miles watching him, and scooted off fearfully to vanish again in the scrub downslope. “Huh,” muttered Miles.

Dr. Dea joined him. “They’ve been gone a long time. About time to break out the fast-penta?”

“No, your autopsy kit, I should say. I fancy that’s what we’ll be doing next.”

Dea glanced at him sharply. “I thought you sent Pym along to enforce the arrest.”

“You can’t arrest a man who’s not there. Are you a wagering man, Doctor? I’ll bet you a mark they don’t come back with Csurik. No, hold it—maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong. Here are three coming back. . . .”

Karal, Pym, and another were marching down the trail. The third was a hulking young man, big-handed, heavy-browed, thick-necked, surly. “Harra,” Miles called, “is this your husband?” He looked the part, by God, just what Miles had pictured. And four brothers just like him—only bigger, no doubt. . . .

Harra appeared by Miles’s shoulder and let out her breath. “No, m’lord. That’s Alex, the Speaker’s deputy.”

“Oh.” Miles’s lips compressed in silent frustration. Well, I had to give it a chance to be simple.

Karal stopped beneath him and began a wandering explanation of his empty-handed state. Miles cut him off with a lift of his eyebrows. “Pym?”

“Bolted, m’lord,” said Pym laconically. “Almost certainly warned.”

“I agree.” He frowned down at Karal, who prudently stood silent. Facts first. Decisions, such as how much deadly force to pursue the fugitive with, second. “Harra. How far is it to your burying place?”

“Down by the stream, lord, at the bottom of the valley. About two kilometers.”

“Get your kit, Doctor, we’re taking a walk. Karal, fetch a shovel.”

“M’lord, surely it isn’t needful to disturb the peace of the dead,” began Karal.

“It is entirely needful. There’s a place for the autopsy report right in the Procedural I got from the district magistrate’s office. Where I will file my completed report upon this case when we return to Vorkosigan Surleau. I have permission from the next-of-kin—do I not, Harra?”

She nodded numbly.

“I have the two requisite witnesses, yourself and your,” gorilla, “deputy, we have the doctor and the daylight—if you don’t stand there arguing till sundown. All we need is the shovel. Unless you’re volunteering to dig with your hand, Karal.” Miles’s voice was flat and grating and getting dangerous.

Karal’s balding head bobbed in his distress. “The—the father is the legal next-of-kin, while he lives, and you don’t have his—”

“Karal,” said Miles.

“M’lord?”

“Take care the grave you dig is not your own. You’ve got one foot in it already.”

Karal’s hand opened in despair. “I’ll . . . get the shovel, m’lord.”

The mid-afternoon was warm, the air golden and summer-sleepy. The shovel bit with a steady scrunch-scrunch through the soil at the hands of Karal’s deputy. Downslope, a bright stream burbled away over clean rounded stones. Harra hunkered watching, silent and grim.

When big Alex levered out the little crate—so little!—Sergeant Pym went off for a patrol of the wooded perimeter. Miles didn’t blame him. He hoped the soil at that depth had been cool, these last eight days. Alex pried open the box, and Dr. Dea waved him away and took over. The deputy too went off to find something to examine at the far end of the graveyard.

Dea looked the cloth-wrapped bundle over carefully, lifted it out, and set it on his tarp laid out on the ground in the bright sun. The instruments of his investigation were arrayed upon the plastic in precise order. He unwrapped the brightly-patterned cloths in their special folds; Harra crept up to retrieve them, straighten and fold them ready for re-use, then crept back.

Miles fingered the handkerchief in his pocket, ready to hold over his mouth and nose, and went to watch over Dea’s shoulder. Bad, but not too bad. He’d seen and smelled worse. Dea, filter-masked, spoke procedurals into his recorder, hovering in the air by his shoulder, and made his examination first by eye and gloved touch, then by scanner.

“Here, my lord,” said Dea, and motioned Miles closer. “Almost certainly the cause of death, though I’ll run the toxin tests in a moment. Her neck was broken. See here on the scanner where the spinal cord was severed, then the bones twisted back into alignment.”

“Karal, Alex.” Miles motioned them up to witness; they came reluctantly.

“Could this have been accidental?” said Miles.

“Very remotely possible. The re-alignment had to be deliberate, though.”

“Would it have taken long?”

“Seconds only. Death was immediate.”

“How much physical strength was required? A big man’s or . . .”

“Oh, not much at all. Any adult could have done it, easily.”

“Any sufficiently motivated adult.” Miles’s stomach churned at the mental picture Dea’s words conjured up. The little fuzzy head would easily fit under a man’s hand. The twist, the muffled cartilaginous crack—if there was one thing Miles knew by heart, it was the exact tactile sensation of breaking bone, oh yes.

“Motivation,” said Dea, “is not my department.” He paused. “I might note, a careful external examination could have found this. Mine did. An experienced layman”—his eye fell cool on Karal—“paying attention to what he was doing, should not have missed it.”

Miles too stared at Karal, waiting.

“Overlain,” hissed Harra. Her voice was ragged with scorn.

“M’lord,” said Karal carefully, “it’s true I suspected the possibility.”

Suspected, hell. You knew.

“But I felt—and still feel, strongly”—his eye flashed a wary defiance—“that only more grief would come from a fuss. There was nothing I could do to help the baby at that point. My duties are to the living.”

“So are mine, Speaker Karal. As, for example, my duty to the next small Imperial subject in mortal danger from those who should be his or her protectors, for the grave fault of being”—Miles flashed an edged smile—“physically different. In Count Vorkosigan’s view this is not just a case. This is a test case, fulcrum of a thousand cases. Fuss . . .” he hissed the sibilant; Harra rocked to the rhythm of his voice, “you haven’t begun to see fuss yet.”

Karal subsided as if folded.

There followed an hour of messiness yielding mainly negative data: no other bones were broken, the infant’s lungs were clear, her gut and bloodstream free of toxins except those of natural decomposition. Her brain held no secret tumors. The defect for which she had died did not extend to spina bifida, Dea reported. Fairly simple plastic surgery would indeed have corrected the cat’s mouth, could she somehow have won access to it. Miles wondered what comfort this confirmation was to Harra. Cold, at best.

Dea put his puzzle back together, and Harra re-wrapped the tiny body in intricate, meaningful folds. Dea cleaned his tools and placed them in their cases and washed his hands and arms and face thoroughly in the stream, for rather a longer time than needed for just hygiene Miles thought, while the gorilla re-buried the box.

Harra made a little bowl in the dirt atop the grave and piled in some twigs and bark scraps and a sawed-off strand of her lank hair.

Miles, caught short, felt in his pockets. “I have no offering on me that will burn,” he said apologetically.

Harra glanced up, surprised at even the implied offer. “No matter, m’lord.” Her little pile of scraps flared briefly and went out, like her infant Raina’s life.

But it does matter, thought Miles.

Peace to you, small lady, after our rude invasions. I will give you a better sacrifice, I swear by my word as Vorkosigan. And the smoke of that burning will rise and be seen from one end of these mountains to the other.

Miles charged Karal and Alex straightly with producing Lem Csurik, and gave Harra Csurik a ride home up behind him on Fat Ninny. Pym accompanied them.

They passed a few scattered cabins on the way. At one a couple of grubby children playing in the yard loped alongside the horses, giggling and making hex signs at Miles, egging each other on to bolder displays, until their mother spotted them and ran out and hustled them indoors with a fearful look over her shoulder. In a weird way it was almost relaxing to Miles, the welcome he’d expected, not like Karal’s and Alex’s strained, self-conscious, careful not-noticing. Raina’s life would not have been an easy one.

Harra’s cabin was at the head of a long draw, just before it narrowed into a ravine. It seemed very quiet and isolated, in the dappled shade.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go stay with your mother?” asked Miles dubiously.

Harra shook her head. She slid down off Ninny, and Miles and Pym dismounted and followed her in.

The cabin was of standard design, a single room with a fieldstone fireplace and a wide roofed front porch. Water apparently came from the rivulet in the ravine. Pym held up a hand and entered first behind Harra, his hand on his stunner. If Lem Csurik had run, might he have run home first? Pym had been making scanner checks of perfectly innocent clumps of bushes all the way here.

The cabin was deserted. Although not long deserted: it did not have the lingering, dusty silence one would expect of eight days mournful disoccupation. The remains of a few hasty meals sat on the sink board. The bed was slept-in, rumpled and unmade. A few man’s garments were scattered about. Automatically Harra began to move about the room, straightening it up, reasserting her presence, her existence, her worth. If she could not control the events of her life, at least she might control one small room.

The one untouched item was a cradle that sat beside the bed, little blankets neatly folded. Harra had fled for Vorkosigan Surleau just a few hours after the burial.

Miles wandered about the room, checking the view from the windows. “Will you show me where you went to get your brillberries, Harra?”

She led them up the ravine; Miles timed the hike. Pym divided his attention unhappily between the brush and Miles, alert to catch any bone-breaking stumble. After flinching away from about three aborted protective grabs Miles was ready to tell him to go climb a tree. Still, there was a certain understandable self-interest at work here; if Miles broke a leg it would be Pym who’d be stuck with carrying him out.

The brillberry patch was nearly a kilometer up the ravine. Miles plucked a few seedy red berries and ate them absently, looking around, while Harra and Pym waited respectfully. Afternoon sun slanted through green and brown leaves, but the bottom of the ravine was already gray and cool with premature twilight. The brillberry vines clung to the rocks and hung down invitingly, luring one to risk one’s neck reaching. Miles resisted their weedy temptations, not being all that fond of brillberries. “If someone called out from your cabin, you couldn’t hear them up here, could you?” remarked Miles.

“No, m’lord.”

“About how long did you spend picking?”

“About”—Harra shrugged—“a basketful.”

The woman didn’t own a chrono. “An hour, say. And a twenty-minute climb each way. About a two-hour time window, that morning. Your cabin was not locked?”

“Just a latch, m’lord.”

“Hm.”

Method, motive, and opportunity, the district magistrate’s Procedural had emphasized. Damn. The method was established, and almost anybody could have used it. The opportunity angle, it appeared, was just as bad. Anyone at all could have walked up to that cabin, done the deed, and departed, unseen and unheard. It was much too late for an aura detector to be of use, tracing the shining ghosts of movements in and out of that room, even if Miles had brought one.

Facts, hah. They were back to motive, the murky workings of men’s minds. Anybody’s guess.

Miles had, as per the instructions in the district magistrate’s Procedural, been striving to keep an open mind about the accused, but it was getting harder and harder to resist Harra’s assertions. She’d been proved right about everything so far.

They left Harra re-installed in her little home, going through the motions of order and the normal routine of life as if they could somehow re-create it, like an act of sympathetic magic.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Miles asked, gathering Fat Ninny’s reins and settling himself in the saddle. “I can’t help but think that if your husband’s in the area, he could show up here. You say nothing’s been taken, so it’s unlikely he’s been here and gone before we arrived. Do you want someone to stay with you?”

“No, m’lord.” She hugged her broom, on the porch. “I’d like to be alone for a while.”

“Well . . . all right. I’ll, ah, send you a message if anything important happens.”

“Thank you, m’lord.” Her tone was unpressing; she really did want to be left alone. Miles took the hint.

At a wide place in the trail back to Speaker Karal’s, Pym and Miles rode stirrup to stirrup. Pym was still painfully on the alert for boogies in the bushes.

“My lord, may I suggest that your next logical step be to draft all the able-bodied men in the community for a hunt for this Csurik? Beyond doubt, you’ve established that the infanticide was a murder.”

Interesting turn of phrase, Miles thought dryly. Even Pym doesn’t find it redundant. Oh, my poor Barrayar. “It seems reasonable at first glance, Sergeant Pym, but has it occurred to you that half the able-bodied men in this community are probably relatives of Lem Csurik’s?”

“It might have a psychological effect. Create enough disruption, and perhaps someone would turn him in just to get it over with.”

“Hm, possibly. Assuming he hasn’t already left the area. He could have been halfway to the coast before we were done at the autopsy.”

“Only if he had access to transport.” Pym glanced at the empty sky.

“For all we know one of his sub-cousins had a rickety lightflyer in a shed somewhere. But . . . he’s never been out of Silvy Vale. I’m not sure he’d know how to run, where to go. Well, if he has left the district it’s a problem for Imperial Civil Security, and I’m off the hook.” Happy thought. “But—one of the things that bothers me, a lot, are the inconsistencies in the picture I’m getting of our chief suspect. Have you noticed them?”

“Can’t say as I have, m’lord.”

“Hm. Where did Karal take you, by the way, to arrest this guy?”

“To a wild area, rough scrub and gullies. Half a dozen men were out searching for Harra. They’d just called off their search and were on their way back when we met up with them. By which I concluded our arrival was no surprise.”

“Had Csurik actually been there, and fled, or was Karal just ring-leading you in a circle?”

“I think he’d actually been there, m’lord. The men claimed not, but as you point out they were relatives, and besides, they did not, ah, lie well. They were tense. Karal may begrudge you his cooperation, but I don’t think he’ll quite dare disobey your direct orders. He is a twenty-year man, after all.”

Like Pym himself, Miles thought. Count Vorkosigan’s personal guard was legally limited to a ceremonial twenty men, but given his political position their function included very practical security. Pym was typical of their number, a decorated veteran of the Imperial Service who had retired to this elite private force. It was not Pym’s fault that when he had joined he had stepped into a dead man’s shoes, replacing the late Sergeant Bothari. Did anyone in the universe besides himself miss the deadly and difficult Bothari? Miles wondered sadly.

“I’d like to question Karal under fast-penta,” said Miles morosely. “He displays every sign of being a man who knows where the body’s buried.”

“Why don’t you, then?” asked Pym logically.

“I may come to that. There is, however, a certain unavoidable degradation in a fast-penta interrogation. If the man’s loyal it may not be in our best long-range interest to shame him publicly.”

“It wouldn’t be in public.”

“No, but he would remember being turned into a drooling idiot. I need . . . more information.”

Pym glanced back over his shoulder. “I thought you had all the information, by now.”

“I have facts. Physical facts. A great big pile of—meaningless, useless facts.” Miles brooded. “If I have to fast-penta every backbeyonder in Silvy Vale to get to the bottom of this, I will. But it’s not an elegant solution.”

“It’s not an elegant problem, m’lord,” said Pym dryly.

They returned to find Speaker Karal’s wife back and in full possession of her home. She was running in frantic circles, chopping, beating, kneading, stoking, and flying upstairs to change the bedding on the three pallets, driving her three sons before her to fetch and run and carry. Dr. Dea, bemused, was following her about trying to slow her down, explaining that they had brought their own tent and food, thank you, and that her hospitality was not required. This produced a most indignant response from Ma Karal.

“My lord’s own son come to my house, and I to turn him out in the fields like his horse! I’d be ashamed!” And she returned to her work.

“She seems rather distraught,” said Dea, looking over his shoulder.

Miles took him by the elbow and propelled him out onto the porch. “Just get out of her way, Doctor. We’re doomed to be Entertained. It’s an obligation on both sides. The polite thing to do is sort of pretend we’re not here till she’s ready for us.”

Dea lowered his voice. “It might be better, in light of the circumstances, if we were to eat only our packaged food.”

The chatter of a chopping knife, and a scent of herbs and onions, wafted enticingly through the open window. “Oh, I would imagine anything out of the common pot would be all right, wouldn’t you?” said Miles. “If anything really worries you, you can whisk it off and check it, I suppose, but—discreetly, eh? We don’t want to insult anyone.”

They settled themselves in the homemade wooden chairs, and were promptly served tea again by a boy draftee of ten, Karal’s youngest. He had apparently already received private instructions in manners from one or the other of his parents, for his response to Miles’s deformities was the same flickering covert not-noticing as the adults, not quite as smoothly carried off.

“Will you be sleeping in my bed, m’lord?” he asked. “Ma says we got to sleep on the porch.”

“Well, whatever your Ma says, goes,” said Miles. “Ah . . . do you like sleeping on the porch?”

“Naw. Last time, Zed kicked me and I rolled off in the dark.”

“Oh. Well, perhaps, if we’re to displace you, you would care to sleep in our tent by way of trade.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “Really?”

“Certainly. Why not?”

“Wait’ll I tell Zed!” He danced down the steps and shot away around the side of the house. “Zed, hey, Zed . . .!”

“I suppose,” said Dea, “we can fumigate it, later. . . .”

Miles’s lips twitched. “They’re no grubbier than you were at the same age, surely. Or than I was. When I was permitted.” The late afternoon was warm. Miles took off his green tunic and hung it on the back of his chair, and unbuttoned the round collar of his cream shirt.

Dea’s brows rose. “Are we keeping shopman’s hours, then, m’lord, on this investigation? Calling it quits for the day?”

“Not exactly.” Miles sipped tea thoughtfully, gazing out across the yard. The trees and treetops fell away down to the bottom of this feeder valley. Mixed scrub climbed the other side of the slope. A crested fold, then the long flanks of a backbone mountain, beyond, rose high and harsh to a summit still flecked with dwindling dirty patches of snow.

“There’s still a murderer loose out there somewhere,” Dea pointed out helpfully.

“You sound like Pym.” Pym, Miles noted, had finished with their horses and was taking his scanner for another walk. “I’m waiting.”

“What for?”

“Not sure. The piece of information that will make sense of all this. Look, there’s only two possibilities. Csurik’s either innocent or he’s guilty. If he’s guilty, he’s not going to turn himself in. He’ll certainly involve his relations, hiding and helping him. I can call in reinforcements by com link from Imperial Civil Security in Hassadar, if I want to. Any time. Twenty men, plus equipment, here by aircar in a couple of hours. Create a circus. Brutal, ugly, disruptive, exciting—could be quite popular. A manhunt, with blood at the end.

“Of course, there’s also the possibility that Csurik’s innocent, but scared. In which case . . .”

“Yes?”

“In which case, there’s still a murderer out there.” Miles drank more tea. “I merely note, if you want to catch something, running after it isn’t always the best way.”

Dea cleared his throat and drank his tea too.

“In the meantime, I have another duty to carry out. I’m here to be seen. If your scientific spirit is yearning for something to do to while away the hours, try keeping count of the number of Vor-watchers that turn up tonight.”

Miles’s predicted parade began almost immediately. It was mainly women, at first, bearing gifts as to a funeral. In the absence of a com link system Miles wasn’t sure by what telepathy they managed to communicate with each other, but they brought covered dishes of food, flowers, extra bedding, and offers of assistance. They were all introduced to Miles with nervous curtseys, but seldom lingered to chat; apparently a look was all their curiosity desired. Ma Karal was polite, but made it clear that she had the situation well in hand, and set their culinary offerings well back of her own.

Some of the women had children in tow. Most of these were sent to play in the woods in back, but a small party of whispering boys sneaked back around the cabin to peek up over the rim of the porch at Miles. Miles had obligingly remained on the porch with Dea, remarking that it was a better view, without saying for whom. For a few moments Miles pretended not to notice his audience, restraining Pym with a hand signal from running them off. Yes, look well, look your fill, thought Miles. What you see is what you ‘re going to get, for the rest of your lives or at any rate mine. Get used to it . . . . Then he caught Zed Karal’s whisper, as self-appointed tour guide to his cohort—“That big one’s the one that’s come to kill Lem Csurik!”

“Zed,” said Miles.

There was an abrupt frozen silence from under the edge of the porch. Even the animal rustlings stopped.

“Come here,” said Miles.

To a muted background of dismayed whispers and nervous giggles, Karal’s middle boy slouched warily up on to the porch.

“You three—” Miles’s pointing finger caught them in mid-flight, “wait there.” Pym added his frown for emphasis, and Zed’s friends stood paralyzed, eyes wide, heads lined up at the level of the porch floor as if stuck up on some ancient battlement as a warning to kindred malefactors.

“What did you just say to your friends, Zed?” asked Miles quietly. “Repeat it.”

Zed licked his lips. “I jus’ said you’d come to kill Lem Csurik, lord.” Zed was clearly now wondering if Miles’s murderous intent included obnoxious and disrespectful boys as well.

“That is not true, Zed. That is a dangerous lie.”

Zed looked bewildered. “But Da—said it.”

“What is true, is that I’ve come to catch the person who killed Lem Csurik’s baby daughter. That may be Lem. But it may not. Do you understand the difference?”

“But Harra said Lem did it, and she ought to know, he’s her husband and all.”

“The baby’s neck was broken by someone. Harra thinks Lem, but she didn’t see it happen. What you and your friends here have to understand is that I won’t make a mistake. I can’t condemn the wrong person. My own truth drugs won’t let me. Lem Csurik has only to come here and tell me the truth to clear himself, if he didn’t do it.

“But suppose he did. What should I do with a man who would kill a baby, Zed?”

Zed shuffled. “Well, she was only a mutie . . .” then shut his mouth and reddened, not-looking at Miles.

It was, perhaps, a bit much to ask a twelve-year-old boy to take an interest in any baby, let alone a mutie one . . . no, dammit. It wasn’t too much. But how to get a hook into that prickly defensive surface? And if Miles couldn’t even convince one surly twelve-year-old, how was he to magically transmute a whole District of adults? A rush of despair made him suddenly want to rage. These people were so bloody impossible. He checked his temper firmly.

“Your Da was a twenty-year man, Zed. Are you proud that he served the Emperor?”

“Yes, lord.” Zed’s eyes sought escape, trapped by these terrible adults.

Miles forged on. “Well, these practices—mutie-killing—shame the Emperor, when he stands for Barrayar before the galaxy. I’ve been out there. I know. They call us all savages, for the crimes of a few. It shames the Count my father before his peers, and Silvy Vale before the District. A soldier gets honor by killing an armed enemy, not a baby. This matter touches my honor as a Vorkosigan, Zed. Besides,” Miles’s lips drew back on a mirthless grin, and he leaned forward intently in his chair—Zed recoiled as much as he dared—“you will all be astonished at what only a mutie can do. That I have sworn on my grandfather’s grave.”

Zed looked more suppressed than enlightened, his slouch now almost a crouch. Miles slumped back in his chair and released him with a weary wave of his hand. “Go play, boy.”

Zed needed no urging. He and his companions shot away around the house as though released from springs.

Miles drummed his fingers on the chair arm, frowning into the silence that neither Pym nor Dea dared break.

“These hill-folk are ignorant, lord,” offered Pym after a moment.

“These hill-folk are mine, Pym. Their ignorance is . . . a shame upon my house.” Miles brooded. How had this whole mess become his anyway? He hadn’t created it. Historically, he’d only just got here himself. “Their continued ignorance, anyway,” he amended in fairness. It still made a burden like a mountain. “Is the message so complex? So difficult? ‘You don’t have to kill your children anymore.’ It’s not like we’re asking them all to learn—5-Space navigational math.” That had been the plague of Miles’s last Academy semester.

“It’s not easy for them.” Dea shrugged. “It’s easy for the central authorities to make the rules, but these people have to live every minute of the consequences. They have so little, and the new rules force them to give their margin to marginal people who can’t pay back. The old ways were wise, in the old days. Even now you have to wonder how many premature reforms we can afford, trying to ape the galactics.”

And what’s your definition of a marginal person, Dea? “But the margin is growing,” Miles said aloud. “Places like this aren’t up against famine every winter any more. They’re not isolated in their disasters; relief can get from one district to another under the Imperial seal . . . we’re all getting more connected, just as fast as we can. Besides,” Miles paused, and added rather weakly, “perhaps you underestimate them.”

Dea’s brows rose ironically. Pym strolled the length of the porch, running his scanner in yet another pass over the surrounding scrubland. Miles, turning in his chair to pursue his cooling teacup, caught a slight movement, a flash of eyes, behind the casement-hung front window swung open to the summer air—Ma Karal, standing frozen, listening. For how long? Since he’d called her boy Zed, Miles guessed, arresting her attention. She raised her chin as his eyes met hers, sniffed, and shook out the cloth she’d been holding with a snap. They exchanged a nod. She turned back to her work before Dea, watching Pym, noticed her.

Karal and Alex returned, understandably, around suppertime.

“I have six men out searching,” Karal reported cautiously to Miles on the porch, now well on its way to becoming Miles’s official HQ. Clearly, Karal had covered ground since mid afternoon. His face was sweaty, lined with physical as well as the underlying emotional strain. “But I think Lem’s gone into the scrub. It could take days to smoke him out. There’s hundreds of places to lie low out there.”

Karal ought to know. “You don’t think he’s gone to some relatives?” asked Miles. “Surely, if he intends to evade us for long, he has to take a chance on re-supply, on information. Will they turn him in when he surfaces?”

“It’s hard to say.” Karal turned his hand palm-out. “It’s . . . a hard problem for ’em, m’lord.”

“Hm.”

How long would Lem Csurik hang around out there in the scrub, anyway? His whole life—his blown-to-bits life—was all here in Silvy Vale. Miles considered the contrast. A few weeks ago, Csurik had been a young man with everything going for him; a home, a wife, a family on the way, happiness; by Silvy Vale standards, comfort and security. His cabin, Miles had not failed to note, though simple, had been kept with love and energy and so redeemed from the potential squalor of its poverty. Grimmer in the winter, to be sure. Now Csurik was a hunted fugitive, all the little he had torn away in the twinkling of an eye. With nothing to hold him, would he run away and keep running? With nothing to run to, would he linger near the ruins of his life?

The police force available to Miles a few hours way in Hassadar was an itch in his mind. Was it not time to call them in, before he fumbled this into a worse mess? But . . . if he were meant to solve this by a show of force, why hadn’t the Count let him come by aircar on the first day? Miles regretted that two-and-a-half-day ride. It had sapped his forward momentum, slowed him down to Silvy Vale’s walking pace, tangled him with time to doubt. Had the Count foreseen it? What did he know that Miles didn’t? What could he know? Dammit, this test didn’t need to be made harder by artificial stumbling blocks, it was bad enough all on its own. He wants me to be clever, Miles thought morosely. Worse, he wants me to be seen to be clever, by everyone here. He prayed he was not about to be spectacularly stupid instead.

“Very well, Speaker Karal. You’ve done all you can for today. Knock off for the night. Call your men off too. You’re not likely to find anything in the dark.”

Pym held up his scanner, clearly about to volunteer its use, but Miles waved him down. Pym’s brows rose, editorially. Miles shook his head slightly.

Karal needed no further urging. He dispatched Alex to call off the night search with torches. He remained wary of Miles. Perhaps Miles puzzled him as much as he puzzled Miles? Dourly, Miles hoped so.

Miles was not sure at what point the long summer evening segued into a party. After supper the men began to drift in, Karal’s cronies, Silvy Vale’s elders. Some were apparently regulars who shared the evening government news broadcasts on Karal’s audio set. Too many names, and Miles daren’t forget a one. A group of amateur musicians arrived with their homemade mountain instruments, rather breathless, obviously the band tapped for all the major weddings and wakes in Silvy Vale; this all seemed more like a funeral to Miles every minute.

The musicians stood in the middle of the yard and played. Miles’s porch-HQ now became his aristocratic box seat. It was hard to get involved with the music when the audience was all so intently watching him. Some songs were serious, some—rather carefully at first—funny. Miles’s spontaneity was frequently frozen in mid-laugh by a faint sigh of relief from those around him; his stiffening froze them in turn, self-stymied like two people trying to dodge each other in a corridor.

But one song was so hauntingly beautiful—a lament for lost love—that Miles was struck to the heart. Elena . . . In that moment, old pain transformed to melancholy, sweet and distant: a sort of healing, or at least the realization that a healing had taken place, unwatched. He almost had the singers stop there, while they were perfect, but feared they might think him displeased. But he remained quiet and inward for a time afterward, scarcely hearing their next offering in the gathering twilight.

At least the piles of food that had arrived all afternoon were thus accounted for. Miles had been afraid Ma Karal and her cronies had expected him to get around that culinary mountain all by himself.

At one point Miles leaned on the rail and glanced down the yard to see Fat Ninny at tether, making more friends. A whole flock of pubescent girls were clustered around him, petting him, brushing his fetlocks, braiding flowers and ribbons in his mane and tail, feeding him tidbits, or just resting their cheeks against his warm silky side. Ninny’s eyes were half-closed in smug content.

God, thought Miles jealously, if I had half the sex-appeal of that bloody horse I’d have more girlfriends than my cousin Ivan. Miles considered, very briefly, the pros and cons of making a play for some unattached female. The striding lords of old and all that . . . no. There were some kinds of stupid he didn’t have to be, and that was definitely one of them. The service he had already sworn to one small lady of Silvy Vale was surely all he could bear without breaking; he could feel the strain of it all around him now, like a dangerous pressure in his bones.

He turned to find Speaker Karal presenting a woman to him, far from pubescent; she was perhaps fifty, lean and little, work-worn. She was carefully clothed in an aging best-dress, her graying hair combed back and bound at the nape of her neck. She bit at her lips and cheeks in quick tense motions, half-suppressed in her self-consciousness.

“ ‘S Ma Csurik, m’lord. Lem’s mother.” Speaker Karal ducked his head and backed away, abandoning Miles without aid or mercy—Come back, you coward!

“Ma’am,” Miles said. His throat was dry. Karal had set him up, dammit, a public play—no, the other guests were retreating out of earshot too, most of them.

“M’lord,” said Ma Csurik. She managed a nervous curtsey.

“Uh . . . do sit down.” With a ruthless jerk of his chin Miles evicted Dr. Dea from his chair and motioned the hill woman into it. He turned his own chair to face hers. Pym stood behind them, silent as a statue, tight as a wire. Did he imagine the old woman was about to whip a needler-pistol from her skirts? No—it was Pym’s job to imagine things like that for Miles, so that Miles might free his whole mind for the problem at hand. Pym was almost as much an object of study as Miles himself. Wisely, he’d been holding himself apart, and would doubtless continue to do so till the dirty work was over.

“M’lord,” said Ma Csurik again, and stumbled again to silence. Miles could only wait. He prayed she wasn’t about to come unglued and weep on his knees or some damned thing. This was excruciating. Stay strong, woman, he urged silently.

“Lem, he . . .” She swallowed. “I’m sure he didn’t kill the babe. There’s never been any of that in our family, I swear it! He says he didn’t, and I believe him.”

“Good,” said Miles affably. “Let him come say the same thing to me under fast-penta, and I’ll believe him too.”

“Come away, Ma,” urged a lean young man who had accompanied her and now stood waiting by the steps, as if ready to bolt into the dark at a motion. “It’s no good, can’t you see.” He glowered at Miles.

She shot the boy a quelling frown—another of her five sons?—and turned back more urgently to Miles, groping for words. “My Lem. He’s only twenty, lord.”

“I’m only twenty, Ma Csurik,” Miles felt compelled to point out. There was another brief impasse.

“Look, I’ll say it again,” Miles burst out impatiently. “And again, and again, till the message penetrates all the way back to its intended recipient. I cannot condemn an innocent person. My truth drugs won’t let me. Lem can clear himself. He has only to come in. Tell him, will you? Please?”

She went stony, guarded. “I . . . haven’t seen him, m’lord.”

“But you might.”

She tossed her head. “So? I might not.” Her eyes shifted to Pym and away, as if the sight of him burned. The silver Vorkosigan logos embroidered on Pym’s collar gleamed in the twilight like animal eyes, moving only with his breathing. Karal was now bringing lighted lamps onto the porch, but keeping his distance still.

“Ma’am,” said Miles tightly. “The Count my father has ordered me to investigate the murder of your granddaughter. If your son means so much to you, how can his child mean so little? Was she . . . your first grandchild?”

Her face was sere. “No, lord. Lem’s older sister, she has two. They’re all right,” she added with emphasis.

Miles sighed. “If you truly believe your son is innocent of this crime, you must help me prove it. Or—do you doubt?”

She shifted uneasily. There was doubt in her eyes—she didn’t know, blast it. Fast-penta would be useless on her, for sure. As Miles’s magic wonder drug, much counted-upon, fast-penta seemed to be having wonderfully little utility in this case so far.

“Come away, Ma,” the young man urged again. “It’s no good. The mutie lord came up here for a killing. They have to have one. It’s a show.”

Damn straight, thought Miles acidly. He was a perceptive young lunk, that one.

Ma Csurik let herself be persuaded away by her angry and embarrassed son plucking at her arm. She paused on the steps, though, and shot bitterly over her shoulder, “It’s all so easy for you, isn’t it?”

My head hurts, thought Miles.

There was worse to come before the evening ended.

The new woman’s voice was grating, low and angry. “Don’t you talk down to me, Serg Karal. I got a right for one good look at this mutie lord.”

She was tall and stringy and tough. Like her daughter, Miles thought. She had made no attempt to freshen up. A faint reek of summer sweat hung about her working dress. And how far had she walked? Her gray hair hung in a switch down her back, a few strands escaping the tie. If Ma Csurik’s bitterness had been a stabbing pain behind the eyes, this one’s rage was a wringing knot in the gut.

She shook off Karal’s attempted restraint and stalked up to Miles in the lamplight. “So.”

“Uh . . . this is Ma Mattulich, m’lord,” Karal introduced her. “Harra’s mother.”

Miles rose to his feet, managed a short formal nod. “How do you do, madam.” He was very conscious of being a head shorter. She had once been of a height with Harra, Miles estimated, but her aging bones were beginning to pull her down.

She merely stared. She was a gum-leaf chewer, by the faint blackish stains around her mouth. Her jaw worked now on some small bit, tiny chomps, grinding too hard. She studied him openly, without subterfuge or the least hint of apology, taking in his head, his neck, his back, his short and crooked legs. Miles had the unpleasant illusion that she saw right through to all the healed cracks in his brittle bones as well. Miles’s chin jerked up twice in the twitchy, nervous-involuntary tic that he was sure made him look spastic, before he controlled it with an effort.

“All right,” said Karal roughly, “you’ve seen. Now come away, for God’s sake, Mara.” His hand opened in apology to Miles. “Mara, she’s been pretty distraught over all this, m’lord. Forgive her.”

“Your only grandchild,” said Miles to her, in an effort to be kind, though her peculiar anguish repelled kindness with a scraped and bleeding scorn. “I understand your distress, ma’am. But there will be justice for little Raina. That I have sworn.”

“How can there be justice now?” she raged, thick and low. “It’s too late—a world too late—for justice, mutie lordling. What use do I have for your damned justice now?”

“Enough, Mara!” Karal insisted. His brows drew down and his lips thinned, and he forced her away and escorted her firmly off his porch.

The last lingering remnant of visitors parted for her with an air of respectful mercy, except for two lean teenagers hanging on the fringes who drew away as if avoiding poison. Miles was forced to revise his mental image of the Brothers Csurik. If those two were another sample, there was no team of huge menacing hill hulks after all. They were a team of little skinny menacing hill squirts instead. Not really an improvement; they looked as if they could move as fast as striking ferrets if they had to. Miles’s lips curled in frustration.

The evening’s entertainments ended finally, thank God, close to midnight. Karal’s last cronies marched off into the woods by lantern light. The repaired and re-powered audio set was carried off by its owner with many thanks to Karal. Fortunately it had been a mature and sober crowd, even somber, no drunken brawls or anything. Pym got the Karal boys settled in the tent, took a last patrol around the cabin, and joined Miles and Dea in the loft. The pallets’ stuffing had been spiked with fresh scented native herbs, to which Miles hoped devoutly he was not allergic. Ma Karal had wanted to turn her own bedroom over to Miles’s exclusive lordly use, exiling herself and her husband to the porch too, but fortunately Pym had been able to persuade her that putting Miles in the loft, flanked by Dea and himself, was to be preferred from a security standpoint.

Dea and Pym were soon snoring, but sleep eluded Miles. He tossed on his pallet as he turned his ploys of the day, such as they had been, over and over in his mind. Was he being too slow, too careful, too conservative? This wasn’t exactly good assault tactics, surprise with a superior force. The view he’d gained of the terrain from Karal’s porch tonight had been ambiguous at best.

On the other hand, it did no good to charge off across a swamp, as his fellow cadet and cousin Ivan Vorpatril had demonstrated so memorably once on summer maneuvers. It had taken a heavy hovercab with a crane to crank the six big, strong, healthy, fully field-equipped young men of Ivan’s patrol out of the chest-high, gooey black mud. Ivan had got his revenge simultaneously, though, when the cadet “sniper” they had been attacking fell out of his tree and broke his arm while laughing hysterically as they sank slowly and beautifully into the ooze. Ooze that a little guy, with his laser rifle wrapped in his loincloth, could swim across like a frog. The war games umpire had ruled it a draw. Miles rubbed his forearm and grinned in memory, and faded out at last.

Miles awoke abruptly and without transition deep in the night with a sense of something wrong. A faint orange glow shimmered in the blue darkness of the loft. Quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping companions, he rose on his pallet and peered over the edge into the main room. The glow was coming through the front window.

Miles swung onto the ladder and padded downstairs for a look out doors. “Pym,” he called softly.

Pym shot awake with a snort. “M’lord?” he said, alarmed.

“Come down here. Quietly. Bring your stunner.”

Pym was by his side in seconds. He slept in his trousers with his stunner holster and boots by his pillow. “What the hell—?” Pym muttered, looking out too.

The glow was from fire. A pitchy torch, flung to the top of Miles’s tent set up in the yard, was burning quietly. Pym lurched toward the door, then controlled his movements as the same realization came to him as had to Miles. Theirs was a Service-issue tent, and its combat-rated synthetic fabric would neither melt nor burn.

Miles wondered if the person who’d heaved the torch had known that. Was this some arcane warning, or a singularly inept attack? If the tent had been ordinary fabric, and Miles in it, the intended result might not have been trivial. Worse with Karal’s boys in it—a bursting blossom of flame—Miles shuddered.

Pym loosened his stunner in his holster and stood poised by the front door. “How long?”

“I’m not sure. Could have been burning like that for ten minutes before it woke me.”

Pym shook his head, took a slight breath, raised his scanner, and vaulted into the fire-gilded darkness.

“Trouble, m’lord?” Speaker Karal’s anxious voice came from his bedroom door.

“Maybe. Wait—” Miles halted him as he plunged for the door. “Pym’s running a patrol with a scanner and a stunner. Wait’ll he calls the all-clear, I think. Your boys may be safer inside the tent.”

Karal came up to the window, caught his breath, and swore.

Pym returned in a few minutes. “There’s no one within a kilometer, now,” he reported shortly. He helped Karal take the goat bucket and douse the torch. The boys, who had slept through the fire, woke at its quenching.

“I think maybe it was a bad idea to lend them my tent,” said Miles from the porch in a choked voice. “I am profoundly sorry, Speaker Karal. I didn’t think.”

“This should never . . .” Karal was spluttering with anger and delayed fright, “this should never have happened, m’lord. I apologize for . . . for Silvy Vale.” He turned helplessly, peering into the darkness. The night sky, star-flecked, lovely, was threatening now.

The boys, once the facts penetrated their sleepiness, thought it was all just great, and wanted to return to the tent and lie in wait for the next assassin. Ma Karal, shrill and firm, herded them indoors instead and made them bed down in the main room. It was an hour before they stopped complaining at the injustice of it and went back to sleep.

Miles, keyed up nearly to the point of gibbering, did not sleep. He lay stiffly on his pallet, listening to Dea, who slept breathing heavily, and Pym, feigning sleep for courtesy and scarcely seeming to breathe at all.

Miles was about to suggest to Pym that they give up and go out on the porch for the rest of the night when the silence was shattered by a shrill squeal, enormously loud, pain-edged, from outside.

“The horses!” Miles spasmed to his feet, heart racing, and beat Pym to the ladder. Pym cut ahead of him by dropping straight over the side of the loft into an elastic crouch, beating him to the door. There, Pym’s trained bodyguard’s reflexes compelled him to try to thrust Miles back inside. Miles almost bit him. “Go, dammit! I’ve got a weapon!”

Pym, good intentions frustrated, swung out the cabin door with Miles on his heels. Halfway down the yard they split to each side as a massive snorting shape loomed out of the darkness and nearly ran them down: the sorrel mare, loose again. Another squeal pierced the night from the lines where the horses were tethered.

“Ninny?” Miles called, panicked. It was Ninny’s voice making those noises, the like of which Miles had not heard since the night a shed had burned down at Vorkosigan Surleau with a horse trapped inside. “Ninny!”

Another grunting squeal, and a thunk like someone splitting a watermelon with a mallet. Pym staggered back, inhaling with difficulty, a resonant deep stutter, and tripped to the ground where he lay curled up around himself. Not killed outright, apparently, because between gasps he was managing to swear lividly. Miles dropped to the ground beside him, checked his skull—no, thank God it had been Pym’s chest Ninny’s hoof had hit with that alarming sound. The bodyguard only had the wind knocked out of him, maybe a cracked rib. Miles more sensibly ran around to the front of the horse lines. “Ninny!”

Fat Ninny was jerking his head against his rope, attempting to rear. He squealed again, his white-rimmed eyes gleaming in the darkness. Miles ran to his head. “Ninny, boy! What is it?” His left hand slid up the rope to Ninny’s halter, his right stretched to stroke Ninny’s shoulder soothingly. Fat Ninny flinched, but stopped trying to rear, and stood trembling. The horse shook his head. Miles’s face and chest were suddenly spattered with something hot and dark and sticky.

“Dea!” Miles yelled. “Dea!”

Nobody slept through this uproar. Six people tumbled off the porch and down the yard, and not one of them thought to bring a light . . . no, the brilliant flare of a cold light sprang from between Dr. Dea’s fingers, and Ma Karal was struggling even now to light a lantern. “Dea, get that damned light over here!” Miles demanded, then stopped to choke his voice back down an octave to its usual carefully cultivated deeper register.

Dea galloped up and thrust the light toward Miles, then gasped, his face draining. “My lord! Are you shot?” In the flare the dark liquid soaking Miles’s shirt glowed suddenly scarlet.

“Not me,” Miles said, looking down at his chest in horror. A flash of memory turned his stomach over, cold at the vision of another blood-soaked death, that of the late Sergeant Bothari whom Pym had replaced. Would never replace.

Dea spun. “Pym?”

“He’s all right,” said Miles. A long inhaling wheeze rose from the grass a few meters off, the exhalation punctuated with obscenities. “But he got kicked by the horse. Get your medkit!” Miles peeled Dea’s fingers off the cold light, and Dea dashed back to the cabin.

Miles held the light up to Ninny and swore in a sick whisper. A huge cut, a third of a meter long and of unknown depth, scored Ninny’s glossy neck. Blood soaked his coat and runneled down his foreleg. Miles’s fingers touched the wound fearfully; his hands spread on either side, trying to push it closed, but the horse’s skin was elastic and it pulled apart and bled profusely as Fat Ninny shook his head in pain. Miles grabbed the horse’s nose—“Hold still, boy!” Somebody had been going for Ninny’s jugular. And had almost made it; Ninny—tame, petted, friendly, trusting Ninny—would not have moved from the touch until the knife bit deep.

Karal was helping Pym to his feet as Dr. Dea returned. Miles waited while Dea checked Pym over, then called, “Here, Dea!”

Zed, looking quite as horrified as Miles, helped to hold Ninny’s head as Dea made inspection of the cut. “I took tests,” Dea complained sotto voce as he worked. “I beat out twenty-six other applicants for the honor of becoming the Prime Minister’s personal physician. I have practiced the procedures of seventy separate possible medical emergencies, from coronary thrombosis to attempted assassination. Nobody—nobody—told me my duties would include sewing up a damned horse’s neck in the middle of the night in the middle of a howling wilderness. . . .” But he kept working as he complained, so Miles didn’t quash him, but kept gently petting Ninny’s nose, and hypnotically rubbing the hidden pattern of his muscles, to soothe and still him. At last Ninny relaxed enough to rest his slobbery chin on Miles’s shoulder.

“Do horses get anesthetics?” asked Dea plaintively, holding his medical stunner as if not sure just what to do with it.

“This one does,” said Miles stoutly. “You treat him just like a person, Dea. This is the last animal that the Count my grandfather personally trained. He named him. I watched him get born. We trained him together. Grandfather had me pick him up and hold him every day for a week after he was foaled, till he got too big. Horses are creatures of habit, Grandfather said, and take first impressions to heart. Forever after Ninny thought I was bigger than he was.”

Dea sighed and made busy with anesthetic stun, cleansing solution, antibiotics, muscle relaxants, and biotic glue. With a surgeon’s touch he shaved the edges of the cut and placed the reinforcing net. Zed held the light anxiously.

“The cut is clean,” said Dea, “but it will undergo a lot of flexing—I don’t suppose it can very well be immobilized, in this position? No, hardly. This should do. If he were a human, I’d tell him to rest at this point.”

“He’ll be rested,” Miles promised firmly. “Will he be all right now?”

“I suppose so. How the devil should I know?” Dea looked highly aggrieved, but his hand sneaked out to re-check his repairs.

“General Piotr,” Miles assured him, “would have been very pleased with your work.” Miles could hear him in his head now, snorting, Damned technocrats. Nothing but horse doctors with a more expensive set of toys. Grandfather would have loved being proved right. “You, ah . . . never met my grandfather, did you?”

“Before my time, my lord,” said Dea. “I’ve studied his life and campaigns, of course.”

“Of course.”

Pym had a hand-light now, and was limping with Karal in a slow spiral around the horse lines, inspecting the ground. Karal’s eldest boy had recaptured the sorrel mare and brought her back and re-tethered her. Her tether had been torn loose, not cut; had the mysterious attacker’s choice of equine victim been random, or calculated? How calculated? Was Ninny attacked as a mere symbol of his master, or had the person known how passionately Miles loved the animal? Was this vandalism, a political statement, or an act of precisely directed, subtle cruelty?

What have I ever done to you? Miles’s thought howled silently to the surrounding darkness.

“They got away, whoever it was,” Pym reported. “Out of scanner range before I could breathe again. My apologies, m’lord. They don’t seem to have dropped anything on the ground.”

There had to have been a knife, at least. A knife, its haft gory with horse blood in a pattern of perfect fingerprints, would have been extremely convenient just now. Miles sighed.

Ma Karal drifted up and eyed Dea’s medkit, as he cleaned and repacked it. “All that,” she muttered under her breath, “for a horse . . .”

Miles refrained, barely, from leaping to a hot defense of the value of this particular horse. How many people in Silvy Vale had Ma Karal seen suffer and die, in her lifetime, for lack of no more medical technology than what Dea was carrying under his arm just now?

Guarding his horse, Miles watched from the porch as dawn crept over the landscape. He had changed his shirt and washed off. Pym was inside getting his ribs taped. Miles sat with his back to the wall and a stunner on his lap as the night mists slowly grew gray. The valley was a blur, fog-shrouded, the hills darker rolls of fog beyond. Directly overhead, gray thinned to a paling blue. The day would be fine and hot once the fog burned away.

It was surely time now to call out the troops from Hassadar. This was getting just too weird. His bodyguard was half out of commission—true, it was Miles’s horse that had rendered him so, not the mystery attacker. But just because the attacks hadn’t been fatal didn’t mean they hadn’t been intended so. Perhaps a third attack would be brought off more expertly. Practice makes perfect.

Miles felt unstrung with nervous exhaustion. How had he let a mere horse become such a handle on his emotions? Bad, that, almost unbalanced—yet Ninny’s was surely one of the truly innocent pure souls Miles had ever known. Miles remembered the other innocent in the case then, and shivered in the damp. It was cruel, lord, something cruel. . . . Pym was right, the bushes could be crawling with Csurik assassins right now.

Dammit, the bushes were crawling—over there, a movement, a damping wave of branch lashing in recoil from—what? Miles’s heart lurched in his chest. He adjusted his stunner to full power, slipped silently off the porch, and began his stalk, crouching low, taking advantage of cover wherever the long grasses of the yard had not been trampled flat by the activities of the last day, and night. Miles froze like a predatory cat as a shape seemed to coalesce out of the mist.

A lean young man, not too tall, dressed in the baggy trousers that seemed to be standard here, stood wearily by the horse lines, staring up the yard at Karal’s cabin. He stood so for a full two minutes without moving. Miles held a bead on him with his stunner. If he dared make one move toward Ninny. . . .

The young man walked back and forth uncertainly, then crouched on his heels, still gazing up the yard. He pulled something from the pocket of his loose jacket—Miles’s finger tightened on the trigger—but he only put it to his mouth and bit. An apple. The crunch carried clearly in the damp air, and the faint perfume of its juices. He ate about half, then stopped, seeming to have trouble swallowing. Miles checked the knife at his belt, made sure it was loose in its sheath. Ninny’s nostrils widened, and he nickered hopefully, drawing the young man’s attention. He rose and walked over to the horse.

The blood pulsed in Miles’s ears, louder than any other sound. His grip on the stunner was damp and white-knuckled. The young man fed Ninny his apple. The horse chomped it down, big jaw rippling under his skin, then cocked his hip, dangled one hind hoof, and sighed hugely. If he hadn’t seen the man eat off the fruit first Miles might have shot him on the spot. It couldn’t be poisoned. . . . The man made to pet Ninny’s neck, then his hand drew back in startlement as he encountered Dea’s dressing. Ninny shook his head uneasily. Miles rose slowly and stood waiting. The man scratched Ninny’s ears instead, looked up one last time at the cabin, took a deep breath, stepped forward, saw Miles, and stood stock still.

“Lem Csurik?” said Miles.

A pause, a frozen nod. “Lord Vorkosigan?” said the young man. Miles nodded in turn.

Csurik swallowed. “Vor lord,” he quavered, “do you keep your word?”

What a bizarre opening. Miles’s brows climbed. Hell, go with it. “Yes. Are you coming in?”

“Yes and no, m’lord.”

“Which?”

“A bargain, lord. I must have a bargain, and your word on it.”

“If you killed Raina . . .”

“No, lord. I swear it. I didn’t.”

“Then you have nothing to fear from me.”

Lem Csurik’s lips thinned. What the devil could this hill man find ironic? How dare he find irony in Miles’s confusion? Irony, but no amusement.

“Oh, lord,” breathed Csurik, “I wish that were so. But I have to prove it to Harra. Harra must believe me—you have to make her believe me, lord!”

“You have to make me believe you first. Fortunately, that isn’t hard. You come up to the cabin and make that same statement under fast-penta, and I will rule you cleared.”

Csurik was shaking his head.

“Why not?” said Miles patiently. That Csurik had turned up at all was strong circumstantial indication of his innocence. Unless he somehow imagined he could beat the drug. Miles would be patient for, oh, three or four seconds at least. Then, by God, he’d stun him, drag him inside, tie him up till he came round, and get to the bottom of this before breakfast.

“The drug—they say you can’t hold anything back.”

“It would be pretty useless if you could.”

Csurik stood silent a moment.

“Are you trying to conceal some lesser crime on your conscience? Is that the bargain you wish to strike? An amnesty? It . . . might be possible. If it’s short of another murder, that is.”

“No, lord. I’ve never killed anybody!”

“Then maybe we can deal. Because if you’re innocent, I need to know as soon as possible. Because it means my work isn’t finished here.”

“That’s . . . that’s the trouble, m’lord.” Csurik shuffled, then seemed to come to some internal decision and stood sturdily. “I’ll come in and risk your drug. And I’ll answer anything about me you want to ask. But you have to promise—swear!—you won’t ask me about . . . about anything else. Anybody else.”

“Do you know who killed your daughter?”

“Not for sure.” Csurik threw his head back defiantly. “I didn’t see it. I have guesses.”

“I have guesses too.”

“That’s as may be, lord. Just so’s they don’t come from my mouth. That’s all I ask.”

Miles holstered his stunner and rubbed his chin. “Hm.” A very slight smile turned one corner of his lip. “I admit, it would be more—elegant—to solve this case by reason and deduction than brute force. Even so tender a force as fast-penta.”

Csurik’s head lowered. “I don’t know elegant, lord. But I don’t want it to be from my mouth.”

Decision bubbled up in Miles, straightening his spine. Yes. He knew, now. He had only to run through the proofs, step by chained step. Just like 5-Space math. “Very well. I swear by my word as Vorkosigan, I shall confine my questions to the facts to which you were an eyewitness. I will not ask you for conjectures about persons or events for which you were not present. There, will that do?”

Csurik bit his lip. “Yes, lord. If you keep your word.”

“Try me,” suggested Miles. His lips wrinkled back on a vulpine smile, absorbing the implied insult without comment.

Csurik climbed the yard beside Miles as if to an executioner’s block. Their entrance created a tableau of astonishment among Karal and his family, clustered around their wooden table where Dea was treating Pym. Pym and Dea looked rather blanker, till Miles made introduction: “Dr. Dea, get out your fast-penta. Here’s Lem Csurik come to talk with us.”

Miles steered Lem to a chair. The hill man sat with his hands clenched. Pym, a red and purpling bruise showing at the edges of the white tape circling his chest, took up his stunner and stepped back.

Dr. Dea muttered under his breath to Miles as he got out the hypospray. “How’d you do that?”

Miles’s hand brushed his pocket. He pulled out a sugar cube and held it up, and grinned through the C of his thumb and finger. Dea snorted, but pursed his lips with reluctant respect.

Lem flinched as the hypospray hissed on his arm, as if he expected it to hurt.

“Count backwards from ten,” Dea instructed. By the time Lena reached three, he had relaxed; at zero, he giggled.

“Karal, Ma Karal, Pym, gather round,” said Miles. “You are my witnesses. Boys, stay back and stay quiet. No interruptions, please.”

Miles ran through the preliminaries, half a dozen questions designed to set up a rhythm and kill time while the fast-penta took full effect. Lem Csurik grinned foolishly, lolling in his chair, and answered them all with sunny good will. Fast-penta interrogation had been part of Miles’s military intelligence course at the Service Academy. The drug seemed to be working exactly as advertised, oddly enough.

“Did you return to your cabin that morning, after you spent the night at your parents’ ?”

“Yes, m’lord.” Lem smiled.

“About what time?”

“Midmorning.”

Nobody here had a chrono; that was probably as precise an answer as Miles was likely to get. “What did you do when you got there?”

“Called for Harra. She was gone, though. It frightened me that she was gone. Thought she might’ve run out on me.” Lem hiccoughed. “I want my Harra.”

“Later. Was the baby asleep?”

“She was. She woke up when I called for Harra. Started crying again. It goes right up your spine.”

“What did you do then?”

Lem’s eyes widened. “I got no milk. She wanted Harra. There’s nothing I could do for her.”

“Did you pick her up?”

“No, lord, I let her lay. There was nothing I could do for her. Harra, she’d hardly let me touch her, she was that nervous about her. Told me I’d drop her or something.”

“You didn’t shake her, to stop her screaming?”

“No, lord, I let her lay. I left to look down the path for Harra.”

“Then where did you go?”

Lem blinked. “My sister’s. I’d promised to help haul wood for a new cabin. Bella—m’other sister—is getting married, y’see, and—”

He was beginning to wander, as was normal for this drug. “Stop,” said Miles. Lem fell silent obediently, swaying slightly in his chair. Miles considered his next question carefully. He was approaching the fine line, here. “Did you meet anyone on the path? Answer yes or no.”

“Yes.”

Dea was getting excited. “Who? Ask him who!”

Miles held up his hand. “You can administer the antagonist now, Dr. Dea.”

“Aren’t you going to ask him? It could be vital!”

“I can’t. I gave my word. Administer the antagonist now, doctor!”

Fortunately, the confusion of two interrogators stopped Lem’s mumbled willing reply to Dea’s question. Dea, bewildered, pressed his hypospray against Lem’s arm. Lem’s eyes, half-closed, snapped open within seconds. He sat up straight and rubbed his arm, and his face.

“Who did you meet on the path?” Dea asked him directly.

Lem’s lips pressed tight; he looked for rescue to Miles.

Dea looked too. “Why won’t you ask him?”

“Because I don’t need to,” said Miles. “I know precisely who Lem met on the path, and why he went on and not back. It was Raina’s murderer. As I shall shortly prove. And—witness this, Karal, Ma Karal—that information did not come from Lem’s mouth. Confirm!”

Karal nodded slowly. “I . . . see, m’lord. That was very good of you.”

Miles gave him a direct stare, his mouth set in a tight smile. “And when is a mystery no mystery at all?”

Karal reddened, not replying for a moment. Then he said, “You may as well keep on like you’re going, m’lord. There’s no stopping you now, I suppose.”

“No.”

Miles sent runners to collect the witnesses, Ma Karal in one direction, Zed in a second, Speaker Karal and his eldest in a third. He had Lem wait with Pym, Dea, and himself. Having the shortest distance to cover, Ma Karal arrived back first, with Ma Csurik and two of her sons in tow.

His mother fell on Lem, embracing him and then looking fearfully over her shoulder at Miles. The younger brothers hung back, but Pym had already moved between them and the door.

“It’s all right, Ma.” Lem patted her on the back. “Or . . . anyway, I’m all right. I’m clear. Lord Vorkosigan believes me.”

She glowered at Miles, still holding Lem’s arm. “You didn’t let the mutie lord give you that poison drug, did you?”

“Not poison,” Miles denied. “In fact, the drug may have saved his life. That damned near makes it a medicine, I’d say. However”—he turned toward Lem’s two younger brothers, and folded his arms sternly—“I would like to know which of you young morons threw the torch on my tent last night?”

The younger one whitened; the elder, hotly indignant, noticed his brother’s expression and cut his denial off in mid-syllable. “You didn’t!” he hissed in horror.

“Nobody,” said the white one. “Nobody did.”

Miles raised his eyebrows. There followed a short, choked silence.

“Well, nobody can make his apologies to Speaker and Ma Karal, then,” said Miles, “since it was their sons who were sleeping in the tent last night. I and my men were in the loft.”

The boy’s mouth opened in dismay. The youngest Karal stared at the pale Csurik brother, his age mate, and whispered importantly, “You, Dono! You idiot, didn’t ya know that tent wouldn’t burn? It’s real Imperial Service issue!”

Miles clasped his hands behind his back, and fixed the Csuriks with a cold eye. “Rather more to the point, it was attempted assassination upon your Count’s heir, which carries the same capital charge of treason as an attempt upon the Count himself. Or perhaps Dono didn’t think of that?”

Dono was thrown into flummoxed confusion. No need for fast-penta here, the kid couldn’t carry off a lie worth a damn. Ma Csurik now had hold of Dono’s arm too, without letting go of Lem’s; she looked as frantic as a hen with too many chicks, trying to shelter them from a storm.

“I wasn’t trying to kill you, lord!” cried Dono.

“What were you trying to do, then?”

“You’d come to kill Lem. I wanted to make you go away. Frighten you away. I didn’t think anyone would really get hurt—I mean, it was only a tent!”

“You’ve never seen anything burn down, I take it. Have you, Ma Csurik?”

Lem’s mother nodded, lips tight, clearly torn between a desire to protect her son from Miles, and a desire to beat Dono till he bled for his potentially lethal stupidity.

“Well, but for a chance, you could have killed or horribly injured three of your friends. Think on that, please. In the meantime, in view of your youth and ah, apparent mental defectiveness, I shall hold the treason charge. In return, Speaker Karal and your parents shall be responsible for your good behavior in future, and decide what punishment is appropriate.”

Ma Csurik melted with relief and gratitude. Dono looked as if he’d rather have been shot. His brother poked him and whispered, “Mental defective!” Ma Csurik slapped the taunter on the side of his head, suppressing him effectively.

“What about your horse, m’lord?” asked Pym.

“I do not suspect them of the business with the horse,” Miles replied slowly. “The attempt to fire the tent was plain stupidity. The other was . . . a different order of calculation altogether.”

Zed, who had been permitted to take Pym’s horse, returned then with Harra up behind him. Harra entered Speaker Karal’s cabin, saw Lem, and stopped with a bitter glare. Lem stood openhanded, his eyes wounded, before her.

“So, lord,” Harra said. “You caught him.” Her jaw was clenched in joyless triumph.

“Not exactly,” said Miles. “He came here and turned himself in. He’s made his statement under fast-penta, and cleared himself. Lem did not kill Raina.”

Harra turned from side to side. “But I saw he’d been there! He’d left his jacket, and took his good saw and wood planer away with him. I knew he’d been back while I was out! There must be something wrong with your drug!”

Miles shook his head. “The drug worked fine. Your deduction was correct as far as it went. Lem did visit the cabin while you were out. But when he left, Raina was still alive, crying vigorously. It wasn’t Lem.”

She swayed. “Who, then?”

“I think you know. I think you’ve been working very hard to deny that knowledge, hence your excessive focus on Lem. As long as you were sure it was Lem, you didn’t have to think about the other possibilities.”

“But who else would care?” Harra cried. “Who else would bother?”

“Who, indeed?” sighed Miles. He walked to the front window and glanced down the yard. The fog was clearing in the full light of morning. The horses were moving uneasily. “Dr. Dea, would you please get a second dose of fast-penta ready?” Miles turned, paced back to stand before the fireplace, its coals still banked for the night. The faint heat was pleasant on his back.

Dea was staring around, the hypospray in his hand, clearly wondering to whom to administer it. “My lord?” he queried, brows lowering in demand for explanation.

“Isn’t it obvious to you, Doctor?” Miles asked lightly.

“No, my lord.” His tone was slightly indignant.

“Nor to you, Pym?”

“Not . . . entirely, m’lord.” Pym’s glance, and stunner aim, wavered uncertainly to Harra.

“I suppose it’s because neither of you ever met my grandfather,” Miles decided. “He died just about a year before you entered my father’s service, Pym. He was born at the very end of the Time of Isolation, and lived through every wrenching change this century has dealt to Barrayar. He was called the last of the Old Vor, but really, he was the first of the new. He changed with the times, from the tactics of horse cavalry to that of flyer squadrons, from swords to atomics, and he changed successfully. Our present freedom from the Cetagandan occupation is a measure of how fiercely he could adapt, then throw it all away and adapt again. At the end of his life he was called a conservative, only because so much of Barrayar had streamed past him in the direction he had led, prodded, pushed, and pointed all his life.

“He changed, and adapted, and bent with the wind of the times. Then, in his age—for my father was his youngest and sole surviving son, and did not himself marry till middle age—in his age, he was hit with me. And he had to change again. And he couldn’t.

“He begged for my mother to have an abortion, after they knew more or less what the fetal damage would be. He and my parents were estranged for five years after I was born. They didn’t see each other or speak or communicate. Everyone thought my father moved us to the Imperial Residence when he became Regent because he was angling for the throne, but in fact it was because the Count my grandfather denied him the use of Vorkosigan House. Aren’t family squabbles jolly fun? Bleeding ulcers run in my family, we give them to each other.” Miles strolled back to the window and looked out. Ah, yes. Here it came.

“The reconciliation was gradual, when it became quite clear there would be no other son,” Miles went on. “No dramatic denouement. It helped when the medics got me walking. It was essential that I tested out bright. Most important of all, I never let him see me give up.”

Nobody had dared interrupt this lordly monologue, but it was clear from several expressions that the point of it was escaping them. Since half the point was to kill time, Miles was not greatly disturbed by their failure to track. Footsteps sounded on the wooden porch outside. Pym moved quietly to cover the door with an unobscured angle of fire.

“Dr. Dea,” said Miles, sighting through the window, “would you be so kind as to administer that fast-penta to the first person through the door, as they step in?”

“You’re not waiting for a volunteer, my lord?”

“Not this time.”

The door swung inward, and Dea stepped forward, raising his hand. The hypospray hissed. Ma Mattulich wheeled to face Dea, the skirts of her work dress swirling around her veined calves, hissing in return—“You dare!” Her arm drew back as if to strike him, but slowed in mid-swing and failed to connect as Dea ducked out of her way. This unbalanced her, and she staggered. Speaker Karal, coming in behind, caught her by the arm and steadied her. “You dare!” she wailed again, then turned to see not only Dea but all the other witnesses waiting: Ma Csurik, Ma Karal, Lem, Harra, Pym. Her shoulders sagged, and then the drug cut in and she just stood, a silly smile fighting with anguish for possession of her harsh face.

The smile made Miles ill, but it was the smile he needed. “Sit her down, Dea, Speaker Karal.”

They guided her to the chair lately vacated by Lem Csurik. She was fighting the drug desperately, flashes of resistance melting into flaccid docility. Gradually the docility became ascendant, and she sat draped in the chair, grinning helplessly. Miles sneaked a peek at Harra. She stood white and silent, utterly closed.

For several years after the reconciliation Miles had never been left with his grandfather without his personal bodyguard. Sergeant Bothari had worn the Count’s livery, but been loyal to Miles alone, the one man dangerous enough—some said, crazy enough—to stand up to the great General himself. There was no need, Miles decided, to spell out to these fascinated people just what interrupted incident had made his parents think Sergeant Bothari a necessary precaution. Let General Piotr’s untarnished reputation serve—Miles, now. As he willed. Miles’s eyes glinted.

Lem lowered his head. “If I had known—if I had guessed—I wouldn’t have left them alone together, m’lord. I thought—Harra’s mother would take care of her. I couldn’t have—I didn’t know how—”

Harra did not look at him. Harra did not look at anything. “Let us conclude this,” Miles sighed. Again, he requested formal witness from the crowd in the room and cautioned against interruptions, which tended to unduly confuse a drugged subject. He moistened his lips and turned to Ma Mattulich.

Again, he began with the standard neutral questions, name, birthdate, parents’ names, checkable biographical facts. Ma Mattulich was harder to lull than the cooperative Lem had been, her responses scattered and staccato. Miles controlled his impatience with difficulty. For all its deceptive ease, fast-penta interrogation required skill, skill and patience. He’d got too far to risk a stumble now. He worked his questions up gradually to the first critical ones.

“Were you there, when Raina was born?”

Her voice was low and drifting, dreamy. “The birth came in the night. Lem, he went for Jean the midwife. The midwife’s son was supposed to go for me but he fell back to sleep. I didn’t get there till morning, and then it was too late. They’d all seen.”

“Seen what?”

“The cat’s mouth, the dirty mutation. Monsters in us. Cut them out. Ugly little man.” This last, Miles realized, was an aside upon himself. Her attention had hung up on him, hypnotically. “Muties make more muties, they breed faster, overrun . . . I saw you watching the girls. You want to make mutie babies on clean women, poison us all . . .”

Time to steer her back to the main issue. “Were you ever alone with the baby after that?”

“No, Jean she hung around. Jean knows me. She knew what I wanted. None of her damn business. And Harra was always there. Harra must not know. Harra must not . . . why should she get off so soft? The poison must be in her. Must have come from her Da, I lay only with her Da and they were all wrong but the one.”

Miles blinked. “What were all wrong?” Across the room Miles saw Speaker Karal’s mouth tighten. The headman caught Miles’s glance and stared down at his own feet, absenting himself from the proceedings. Lem, his lips parted in absorption, and the rest of the boys were listening with alarm. Harra hadn’t moved.

“All my babies,” Ma Mattulich said.

Harra looked up sharply at that, her eyes widening.

“Was Harra not your only child?” Miles asked. It was an effort to keep his voice cool, calm; he wanted to shout. He wanted to be gone from here. . . .

“No, of course not. She was my only clean child, I thought. I thought, but the poison must have been hidden in her. I fell on my knees and thanked God when she was born clean, a clean one at last, after so many, so much pain. . . . I thought I had finally been punished enough. She was such a pretty baby, I thought it was over at last. But she must have been mutie after all, hidden, tricksy, sly. . . .”

“How many,” Miles choked, “babies did you have?”

“Four, besides Harra my last.”

“And you killed all four of them?” Speaker Karal, Miles saw, gave a slow nod to his feet.

“No!” said Ma Mattulich. Indignation broke through the fast-penta wooze briefly. “Two were born dead already, the first one, and the twisted-up one. The one with too many fingers and toes, and the one with the bulgy head, those I cut. Cut out. My mother, she watched over me to see I did it right. Harra, I made it soft for Harra. I did it for her.”

“So you have in fact murdered not one infant, but three?” said Miles frozenly. The younger witnesses in the room, Karal’s boys and the Csurik brothers, looked horrified. The older ones, Ma Mattulich’s contemporaries, who must have lived through the events with her, looked mortified, sharing her shame. Yes, they all must have known.

“Murdered?” said Ma Mattulich. “No! I cut them out. I had to. I had to do the right thing.” Her chin lifted proudly, then drooped. “Killed my babies, to please, to please . . . I don’t know who. And now you call me a murderer? Damn you! What use is your justice to me now? I needed it then—where were you then?” Suddenly, shockingly, she burst into tears, which wavered almost instantly into rage. “If mine must die then so must hers! Why should she get off so soft? Spoiled her . . . I tried my best, I did my best, it’s not fair . . .”

The fast-penta was not keeping up with this . . . no, it was working, Miles decided, but her emotions were too overwhelming. Upping the dose might level her emotional surges, at some risk of respiratory arrest, but it would not elicit any more complete a confession. Miles’s belly was trembling, a reaction he trusted he concealed. It had to be completed now.

“Why did you break Raina’s neck, instead of cutting her throat?”

“Harra, she must not know,” said Ma Mattulich. “Poor baby. It would look like she just died. . . .”

Miles eyed Lem, Speaker Karal. “It seems a number of others shared your opinion that Harra should not know.”

“I didn’t want it to be from my mouth,” repeated Lem sturdily.

“I wanted to save her double grief, m’lord,” said Karal. “She’d had so much. . . .”

Miles met Harra’s eyes at that. “I think you all underestimate her. Your excessive tenderness insults both her intelligence and will. She comes from a tough line, that one.”

Harra inhaled, controlling her own trembling. She gave Miles a short nod, as if to say Thank you, little man. He returned her a slight inclination of the head, Yes, I understand.

“I’m not sure yet where justice lies in this case,” said Miles, “but this I swear to you, the days of cooperative concealment are over. No more secret crimes in the night. Daylight’s here. And speaking of crimes in the night,” he turned back to Ma Mattulich, “was it you who tried to cut my horse’s throat last night?”

“I tried,” said Ma Mattulich, calmer now in a wave of fast-penta mellowness, “but it kept rearing up on me.”

“Why my horse?” Miles could not keep exasperation from his voice, though a calm, even tone was enjoined upon fast-penta interrogators by the training manual.

“I couldn’t get at you,” said Ma Mattulich simply.

Miles rubbed his forehead. “Retroactive infanticide by proxy?” he muttered.

“You,” said Ma Mattulich, and her loathing came through even the nauseating fast-penta cheer, “you are the worst. All I went through, all I did, all the grief, and you come along at the end. A mutie made lord over us all, and all the rules changed, betrayed at the end by an off-worlder woman’s weakness. You make it all for nothing. Hate you. Dirty mutie . . .” her voice trailed off in a drugged mumble.

Miles took a deep breath and looked around the room. The stillness was profound, and no one dared break it.

“I believe,” he said, “that concludes my investigation into the facts of this case.”

The mystery of Raina’s death was solved.

The problem of justice, unfortunately, remained.

Miles took a walk.

The graveyard, though little more than a crude clearing in the woodland, was a place of peace and beauty in the morning light. The stream burbled endlessly, shifting green shadows and blinding brilliant reflections. The faint breeze that had shredded away the last of the night fog whispered in the trees, and the tiny, short-lived creatures that everyone on Barrayar but biologists called bugs sang and twittered in the patches of native scrub.

“Well, Raina,” Miles sighed, “and what do I do now?” Pym lingered by the borders of the clearing, giving Miles room. “It’s all right,” Miles assured the tiny grave, “Pym’s caught me talking to dead people before. He may think I’m crazy, but he’s far too well-trained to say so.”

Pym in fact did not look happy, nor altogether well. Miles felt rather guilty for dragging him out; by rights the man should be resting in bed, but Miles had desperately needed this time alone. Pym wasn’t just suffering the residual effect of having been kicked by Ninny. He had been silent ever since Miles had extracted the confession from Ma Mattulich. Miles was unsurprised. Pym had steeled himself to play executioner to their imagined hill bully; the substitution of a mad grandmother as his victim had clearly given him pause. He would obey whatever order Miles gave him though, Miles had no doubt of that.

Miles considered the peculiarities of Barrayaran law as he wandered about the clearing, watching the stream and the light, turning over an occasional rock with the toe of his boot. The fundamental principle was clear; the spirit was to be preferred over the letter, truth over technicalities. Precedent was held subordinate to the judgment of the man on the spot. Alas, the man on the spot was himself. There was no refuge for him in automated rules, no hiding behind the law says as if the law were some living overlord with a real Voice. The only voice here was his own.

And who would be served by the death of that half-crazed old woman? Harra? The relationship between mother and daughter had been wounded unto death by this, Miles had seen that in their eyes, yet still Harra had no stomach for matricide. Miles rather preferred it that way. Having her standing by his ear crying for bloody revenge would have been enormously distracting just now. The obvious justice made a damn poor reward for Harra’s courage in reporting the crime. Raina? Ah. That was more difficult.

“I’d like to lay the old gargoyle right there at your feet, small lady,” Miles muttered to her. “Is it your desire? Does it serve you? What would serve you?” Was this the great burning he had promised her?

What judgment would reverberate along the entire Dendarii mountain range? Should he indeed sacrifice these people to some larger political statement, regardless of their wants? Or should he forget all that, make his judgment serve only those directly involved? He scooped up a stone and flung it full force into the stream. It vanished invisibly in the rocky bed.

He turned to find Speaker Karal waiting by the edge of the graveyard. Karal ducked his head in greeting and approached cautiously.

“So, m’lord,” said Karal.

“Just so,” said Miles.

“Have you come to any conclusion?”

“Not really.” Miles gazed around. “Anything less than Ma Mattulich’s death seems . . . inadequate justice, and yet I cannot see who her death would serve.”

“Neither could I. That’s why I took the position I did in the first place.”

“No . . .” said Miles slowly, “no, you were wrong in that. For one thing, it very nearly got Lem Csurik killed. I was getting ready to pursue him with deadly force at one point. It almost destroyed him with Harra. Truth is better. Slightly better. At least it isn’t a fatal error. Surely I can do . . . something with it.”

“I didn’t know what to expect of you, at first,” admitted Karal.

Miles shook his head. “I meant to make changes. A difference. Now . . . I don’t know.”

Speaker Karal’s balding forehead wrinkled. “But we are changing.”

“Not enough. Not fast enough.”

“You’re young yet, that’s why you don’t see how much, how fast. Look at the difference between Harra and her mother. God—look at the difference between Ma Mattulich and her mother. There was a harridan.” Speaker Karal shuddered. “I remember her, all right. And yet, she was not so unusual, in her day. So far from having to make change, I don’t think you could stop it if you tried. The minute we finally get a powersat receptor up here, and get on the com net, the past will be done and over. As soon as the kids see the future—their future—they’ll be mad after it. They’re already lost to the old ones like Ma Mattulich. The old ones know it, too, don’t believe they don’t know it. Why d’you think we haven’t been able to get at least a small unit up here yet? Not just the cost. The old ones are fighting it. They call it off-planet corruption, but it’s really the future they fear.”

“There’s so much still to be done.”

“Oh, yes. We are a desperate people, no lie. But we have hope. I don’t think you realize how much you’ve done, just by coming up here.”

“I’ve done nothing,” said Miles bitterly. “Sat around, mostly. And now, I swear, I’m going to end up doing more nothing. And then go home. Hell!”

Speaker Karal pursed his lips, looked at his feet, at the high hills. “You are doing something for us every minute. Mutie lord. Do you think you are invisible?”

Miles grinned wolfishly. “Oh, Karal, I’m a one-man band, I am. I’m a parade.”

“As you say, just so. Ordinary people need extraordinary examples. So they can say to themselves, well, if he can do that, I can surely do this. No excuses.”

“No quarter, yes, I know that game. Been playing it all my life.”

“I think,” said Karal, “Barrayar needs you. To go on being just what you are.”

“Barrayar will eat me, if it can.”

“Yes,” said Karal, his eyes on the horizon, “so it will.” His gaze fell to the graves at his feet. “But it swallows us all in the end, doesn’t it? You will outlive the old ones.”

“Or in the beginning.” Miles pointed down. “Don’t tell me who I’m going to outlive. Tell Raina.”

Karal’s shoulders slumped. “True. S’truth. Make your judgment, lord. I’ll back you.”

Miles assembled them all in Karal’s yard for his Speaking, the porch now having become his podium. The interior of the cabin would have been impossibly hot and close for this crowd, suffocating with the afternoon sun beating on the roof, though outdoors the light made them squint. They were all here, everyone they could round up, Speaker Karal, Ma Karal, their boys, all the Csuriks, most of the cronies who had attended last night’s funereal festivities, men, women, and children. Harra sat apart. Lem kept trying to hold her hand, though from the way she flinched it was clear she didn’t want to be touched. Ma Mattulich sat displayed by Miles’s side, silent and surly, flanked by Pym and an uncomfortable-looking Deputy Alex.

Miles jerked up his chin, settling his head on the high collar of his dress greens, as polished and formal as Pym’s batman’s expertise could make him. The Imperial Service uniform that Miles had earned. Did these people know he had earned it, or did they all imagine it a mere gift from his father, nepotism at work? Damn what they thought. He knew. He stood before his people, and gripped the porch rail.

“I have concluded the investigation of the charges laid before the Count’s Court by Harra Csurik of the murder of her daughter Raina. By evidence, witness, and her own admission, I find Mara Mattulich guilty of this murder, she having twisted the infant’s neck until it broke, and then attempted to conceal that crime. Even when that concealment placed her son-in-law Lem Csurik in mortal danger from false charges. In light of the helplessness of the victim, the cruelty of the method, and the cowardly selfishness of the attempted concealment, I can find no mitigating excuse for the crime.

“In addition, Mara Mattulich by her own admission testifies to two previous infanticides, some twenty years ago, of her own children. These facts shall be announced by Speaker Karal in every corner of Silvy Vale, until every subject has been informed.”

He could feel Ma Mattulich’s glare boring into his back. Yes, go on and hate me, old woman. I will bury you yet, and you know it. He swallowed and continued, the formality of the language a sort of shield before him.

“For this unmitigated crime, the only proper sentence is death. And I so sentence Mara Mattulich. But in light of her age and close relation to the next-most-injured party in the case, Harra Csurik, I choose to hold the actual execution of that sentence. Indefinitely.” Out of the corner of his eye Miles saw Pym let out, very carefully and covertly, a sigh of relief. Harra combed at her straw-colored bangs with her fingers and listened intently.

“But she shall be as dead before the law. All her property, even to the clothes on her back, now belongs to her daughter Harra, to dispose of as she wills. Mara Mattulich may not own property, enter contracts, sue for injuries, nor exert her will after death in any testament. She shall not leave Silvy Vale without Harra’s permission. Harra shall be given power over her as a parent over a child, or as in senility. In Harra’s absence Speaker Karal will be her deputy. Mara Mattulich shall be watched to see she harms no other child.

“Further. She shall die without sacrifice. No one, not Harra nor any other, shall make a burning for her when she goes into the ground at last. As she murdered her future, so her future shall return only death to her spirit. She will die as the childless do, without remembrance.”

A low sigh swept the older members of the crowd before Miles. For the first time, Mara Mattulich bent her stiff neck.

Some, Miles knew, would find this only spiritually symbolic. Others would see it as literally lethal, according to the strength of their beliefs. The literal-minded, such as those who saw mutation as a sin to be violently expiated. But even the less superstitious, Miles saw in their faces, found the meaning clear. So.

Miles turned to Ma Mattulich, and lowered his voice. “Every breath you take from this moment on is by my mercy. Every bite of food you eat, by Harra’s charity. By charity and mercy—such as you did not give—you shall live. Dead woman.”

“Some mercy. Mutie lord.” Her growl was low, weary, beaten.

“You get the point,” he said through his teeth. He swept her a bow, infinitely ironic, and turned his back on her. “I am the Voice of Count Vorkosigan. This concludes my Speaking.”

Miles met Harra and Lem afterwards, in Speaker Karal’s cabin.

“I have a proposition for you.” Miles controlled his nervous pacing and stood before them. “You’re free to turn it down, or think about it for a while. I know you’re very tired right now.” As are we all. Had he really been in Silvy Vale only a day and a half? It seemed like a century. His head ached with fatigue. Harra was red-eyed too. “First of all, can you read and write?”

“Some,” Harra admitted. “Speaker Karal taught us some, and Ma Lannier.”

“Well, good enough. You wouldn’t be starting completely blind. Look. A few years back Hassadar started a teacher’s college. It’s not very big yet, but it’s begun. There are some scholarships. I can swing one your way, if you will agree to live in Hassadar for three years of intense study.”

“Me!” said Harra. “I couldn’t go to a college! I barely know . . . any of that stuff.”

“Knowledge is what you’re supposed to have coming out, not going in. Look, they know what they’re dealing with in this district. They have a lot of remedial courses. It’s true, you’d have to work harder, to catch up with the town-bred and the lowlanders. But I know you have courage, and I know you have will. The rest is just picking yourself up and ramming into the wall again and again until it falls down. You get a bloody forehead, so what? You can do it, I swear you can.”

Lem, sitting beside her, looked worried. He captured her hand again. “Three years?” he said in a small voice. “Gone away?”

“The school stipend isn’t that much,” said Miles. “But Lem, I understand you have carpenter’s skills. There’s a building boom going on in Hassadar right now. Hassadar’s going to be the next Vorkosigan Vashnoi, I think. I’m certain you could get a job. Between you, you could live.”

Lem looked at first relieved, then extremely worried. “But they all use power tools—computers—robots. . . .”

“By no means. And they weren’t all born knowing how to use that stuff either. If they can learn it, you can. Besides, the rich pay well for hand-work, unique one-off items, if the quality’s good. I can see you get a start, which is usually the toughest moment. After that you should be able to figure it out all right.”

“To leave Silvy Vale . . .” said Harra in a dismayed tone.

“Only in order to return. That’s the other half of the bargain. I can send a com unit up here, a small one with a portable power pack that lasts a year. Somebody’d have to hump down to Vorkosigan Surleau to replace it annually, no big problem. The whole set up wouldn’t cost much more than oh, a new lightflyer.” Such as the shiny red one Miles had coveted in a dealer’s showroom in Vorbarr Sultana, very suitable for a graduation present, he had pointed out to his parents. The credit chit was sitting in the top drawer of his dresser in the lake house at Vorkosigan Surleau right now. “It’s not a massive project like installing a powersat receptor for the whole of Silvy Vale or anything. The holovid would pick up the educational satellite broadcasts from the capital; set it up in some central cabin, add a couple of dozen lap-links for the kids, and you’ve got an instant school. All the children would be required to attend, with Speaker Karal to enforce it, though once they’d discovered the holovid you’d probably have to beat them to make them go home. I, ah,” Miles cleared his throat, “thought you might name it the Raina Csurik Primary School.”

“Oh,” said Harra, and began to cry for the first time that grueling day. Lem patted her clumsily. She returned the grip of his hand at last.

“I can send a lowlander up here to teach,” said Miles. “I’ll get one to take a short-term contract, till you’re ready to come back. But he or she won’t understand Silvy Vale the way you do. Wouldn’t understand why. You—you already know. You know what they can’t teach in any lowland college.”

Harra scrubbed her eyes and looked up—not very far up—at him. “You went to the Imperial Academy.”

“I did.” His chin jerked up.

“Then I,” she said shakily, “can manage . . . Hassadar Teacher’s College.” The name was awkward in her mouth. At first. “At any rate—I’ll try, m’lord.”

“I’ll bet on you,” Miles agreed. “Both of you. Just, ah,” a smile sped across his mouth and vanished, “stand up straight and speak the truth, eh?”

Harra blinked understanding. An answering half-smile lit her tired face, equally briefly. “I will. Little man.”

Fat Ninny rode home by air the next morning, in a horse van, along with Pym. Dr. Dea went along with his two patients, and his nemesis the sorrel mare. A replacement bodyguard had been sent with the groom who flew the van from Vorkosigan Surleau, who stayed with Miles to help him ride the remaining two horses back down. Well, Miles thought, he’d been considering a camping trip in the mountains with his cousin Ivan as part of his home leave anyway. The liveried man was the laconic veteran Esterhazy, whom Miles had known most of his life, excellent company for a man who didn’t want to talk about it. Unlike Ivan, you could almost forget he was there. Miles wondered if Esterhazy’s assignment had been random chance, or a mercy of the Count’s. Esterhazy was good with horses.

They camped overnight by the river of roses. Miles walked up the vale in the evening light, desultorily looking for the spring of it; indeed, the floral barrier did seem to peter out a couple of kilometers upstream, merging into slightly less impassable scrub. Miles plucked a rose, checked to make sure that Esterhazy was nowhere in sight, and bit into it curiously. Clearly, he was not a horse. A cut bunch would probably not survive the trip back as a treat for Ninny. Ninny could settle for oats.

Miles watched the evening shadows flowing up along the backbone of the Dendarii range, high and massive in the distance. How small those mountains looked from space! Little wrinkles on the skin of a globe he could cover with his hand, all their crushing mass made invisible. Which was illusory, distance or nearness? Distance, Miles decided. Distance was a damned lie. Had his father known this? Miles suspected so.

He contemplated his urge to throw all his money, not just a lightflyer’s worth, at those mountains; to quit it all and go teach children to read and write, to set up a free clinic, a powersat net, or all of these at once. But Silvy Vale was only one of hundreds of such communities buried in these mountains, one of thousands across the whole of Barrayar. Taxes squeezed from this very district helped maintain the very elite military school he’d just spent—how much of their resources in? How much would he have to give back just to make it even, now? He was himself a planetary resource, his training had made him so, and his feet were set on their path.

What God means you to do, Miles’s theist mother claimed, could be deduced from the talents He gave you. The academic honors, Miles had amassed by sheer brute work. But the war games, outwitting his opponents, staying one step ahead—a necessity, true, he had no margin for error—the war games had been an unholy joy. War had been no game here once, not so long ago. It might be so again. What you did best, that was what was wanted from you. God seemed to be lined up with the Emperor on that point, at least, if no other.

Miles had sworn his officer’s oath to the Emperor less than two weeks ago, puffed with pride at his achievement. In his secret mind he had imagined himself keeping that oath through blazing battle, enemy torture, what-have-you, even while sharing cynical cracks afterwards with Ivan about archaic dress swords and the sort of people who insisted on wearing them.

But in the dark of subtler temptations, those that hurt without heroism for consolation, he foresaw, the Emperor would no longer be the symbol of Barrayar in his heart.

Peace to you, small lady, he thought to Raina. You’ve won a twisted poor modern knight, to wear your favor on his sleeve. But it’s a twisted poor world we were both born into, that rejects us without mercy and ejects us without consultation. At least I won’t just tilt at windmills for you. I’ll send in sappers to mine the twirling suckers, and blast them into the sky. . . .

He knew who he served now. And why he could not quit. And why he must not fail.

ENTER A SOLDIER. LATER: ENTER ANOTHER

Robert Silverberg

Two very different men (one a conquerer; the other a philosopher) from our past, engage in a battle of wits and temperament in Robert Silverberg’s latest spell-binding vision of the future.

It might be heaven. Certainly it wasn’t Spain and he doubted it could be Peru. He seemed to be floating, suspended midway between nothing and nothing. There was a shimmering golden sky far above him and a misty, turbulent sea of white clouds boiling far below. When he looked down he saw his legs and his feet dangling like child’s toys above an unfathomable abyss, and the sight of it made him want to puke, but there was nothing in him for the puking. He was hollow. He was made of air. Even the old ache in his knee was gone, and so was the everlasting dull burning in the fleshy part of his arm where the Indian’s little arrow had taken him, long ago on the shore of that island of pearls, up by Panama.

It was as if he had been born again, sixty years old but freed of all the harm that his body had experienced and all its myriad accumulated injuries: freed, one might almost say, of his body itself.

“Gonzalo?” he called. “Hernando?”

Blurred dreamy echoes answered him. And then silence.

“Mother of God, am I dead?”

No. No. He had never been able to imagine death. An end to all striving? A place where nothing moved? A great emptiness, a pit without a bottom? Was this place the place of death, then? He had no way of knowing. He needed to ask the holy fathers about this.

“Boy, where are my priests? Boy?”

He looked about for his page. But all he saw was blinding whorls of light coiling off to infinity on all sides. The sight was beautiful but troublesome. It was hard for him to deny that he had died, seeing himself afloat like this in a realm of air and light. Died and gone to heaven. This is heaven, yes, surely, surely. What else could it be?

So it was true, that if you took the Mass and took the Christ faithfully into yourself and served Him well you would be saved from your sins, you would be forgiven, you would be cleansed. He had wondered about that. But he wasn’t ready yet to be dead, all the same. The thought of it was sickening and infuriating. There was so much yet to be done. And he had no memory even of being ill. He searched his body for wounds. No, no wounds. Not anywhere. Strange. Again he looked around. He was alone here. No one to be seen, not his page, nor his brother, nor De Soto, nor the priests, nor anyone. “Fray Marcos! Fray Vicente! Can’t you hear me? Damn you, where are you? Mother of God! Holy Mother, blessed among women! Damn you, Fray Vicente, tell me—tell me—”

His voice sounded all wrong: too thick, too deep, a stranger’s voice. The words fought with his tongue and came from his lips malformed and lame, not the good crisp Spanish of Estremadura but something shameful and odd. What he heard was like the spluttering foppishness of Madrid or even the furry babble that they spoke in Barcelona; why, he might almost be a Portuguese, so coarse and clownish was his way of shaping his speech.

He said carefully and slowly, “I am the Governor and Captain-General of New Castile.”

That came out no better, a laughable noise.

“Adelantado—Alguacil Mayor—Marques de la Conquista—”

The strangeness of his new way of speech made insults of his own titles. It was like being tongue-tied. He felt streams of hot sweat breaking out on his skin from the effort of trying to frame his words properly; but when he put his hand to his forehead to brush the sweat away before it could run into his eyes he seemed dry to the touch, and he was not entirely sure he could feel himself at all.

He took a deep breath. “I am Francisco Pizarro!” he roared, letting the name burst desperately from him like water breaching a rotten dam.

The echo came back, deep, rumbling, mocking. Frantheethco. Peetharro.

That too. Even his own name, idiotically garbled.

“O great God!” he cried. “Saints and angels!”

More garbled noises. Nothing would come out as it should. He had never known the arts of reading or writing; now it seemed that true speech itself was being taken from him. He began to wonder whether he had been right about this being heaven, supernal radiance or no. There was a curse on his tongue; a demon, perhaps, held it pinched in his claws. Was this hell, then? A very beautiful place, but hell nevertheless?

He shrugged. Heaven or hell, it made no difference. He was beginning to grow more calm, beginning to accept and take stock. He knew—had learned, long ago—that there was nothing to gain from raging against that which could not be helped, even less from panic in the face of the unknown. He was here, that was all there was to it—wherever here was—and he must find a place for himself, and not this place, floating here between nothing and nothing. He had been in hells before, small hells, hells on Earth. That barren isle called Gallo, where the sun cooked you in your own skin and there was nothing to eat but crabs that had the taste of dog-dung. And that dismal swamp at the mouth of the Rio Biru, where the rain fell in rivers and the trees reached down to cut you like swords. And the mountains he had crossed with his army, where the snow was so cold that it burned, and the air went into your throat like a dagger at every breath. He had come forth from those, and they had been worse than this. Here there was no pain and no danger; here there was only soothing light and a strange absence of all discomfort. He began to move forward. He was walking on air. Look, look, he thought, I am walking on air! Then he said it out loud. “I am walking on air,” he announced, and laughed at the way the words emerged from him. “Santiago! Walking on air! But why not? I am Pizarro!” He shouted it with all his might, “Pizarro! Pizarro!” and waited for it to come back to him.

Peetharro. Peetharro.

He laughed. He kept on walking.

Tanner sat hunched forward in the vast sparkling sphere that was the ninth-floor imaging lab, watching the little figure at the distant center of the holotank strut and preen. Lew Richardson, crouching beside him with both hands thrust into the data gloves so that he could feed instructions to the permutation network, seemed almost not to be breathing—seemed to be just one more part of the network, in fact.

But that was Richardson’s way, Tanner thought: total absorption in the task at hand. Tanner envied him that. They were very different sorts of men. Richardson lived for his programming and nothing but his programming. It was his grand passion. Tanner had never quite been able to understand people who were driven by grand passions. Richardson was like some throwback to an earlier age, an age when things had really mattered, an age when you were able to have some faith in the significance of your own endeavors.

“How do you like the armor?” Richardson asked. “The armor’s very fine, I think. We got it from old engravings. It has real flair.”

“Just the thing for tropical climates,” said Tanner. “A nice tin suit with matching helmet.”

He coughed and shifted about irritably in his seat. The demonstration had been going on for half an hour without anything that seemed to be of any importance happening—just the minuscule image of the bearded man in Spanish armor tramping back and forth across the glowing field—and he was beginning to get impatient.

Richardson didn’t seem to notice the harshness in Tanner’s voice or the restlessness of his movements. He went on making small adjustments. He was a small man himself, neat and precise in dress and appearance, with faded blond hair and pale blue eyes and a thin, straight mouth. Tanner felt huge and shambling beside him. In theory Tanner had authority over Richardson’s research projects, but in fact he always had simply permitted Richardson to do as he pleased. This time, though, it might be necessary finally to rein him in a little.

This was the twelfth or thirteenth demonstration that Richardson had subjected him to since he had begun fooling around with this historical-simulation business. The others all had been disasters of one kind or another, and Tanner expected that this one would finish the same way. And basically Tanner was growing uneasy about the project that he once had given his stamp of approval to, so long ago. It was getting harder and harder to go on believing that all this work served any useful purpose. Why had it been allowed to absorb so much of Richardson’s group’s time and so much of the lab’s research budget for so many months? What possible value was it going to have for anybody? What possible use?

It’s just a game, Tanner thought. One more desperate meaningless technological stunt, one more pointless pirouette in a meaningless ballet. The expenditure of vast resources on a display of ingenuity for ingenuity’s sake and nothing else: now there’s decadence for you.

The tiny image in the holotank suddenly began to lose color and definition.

“Uh-oh,” Tanner said. “There it goes. Like all the others.”

But Richardson shook his head. “This time it’s different, Harry.”

“You think?”

“We aren’t losing him. He’s simply moving around in there of his own volition, getting beyond our tracking parameters. Which means that we’ve achieved the high level of autonomy that we were shooting for.”

“Volition, Lew? Autonomy?”

“You know that those are our goals.”

“Yes, I know what our goals are supposed to be,” said Tanner, with some annoyance. “I’m simply not convinced that a loss of focus is a proof that you’ve got volition.”

“Here,” Richardson said. “I’ll cut in the stochastic tracking program. He moves freely, we freely follow him.” Into the computer ear in his lapel he said, “Give me a gain boost, will you?” He made a quick flicking gesture with his left middle finger to indicate the quantitative level.

The little figure in ornate armor and pointed boots grew sharp again. Tanner could see fine details on the armor, the plumed helmet, the tapering shoulder-pieces, the joints at the elbows, the intricate pommel of his sword. He was marching from left to right in a steady hip-rolling way, like a man who was climbing the tallest mountain in the world and didn’t mean to break his stride until he was across the summit. The fact that he was walking in what appeared to be mid-air seemed not to trouble him at all.

“There he is,” Richardson said grandly. “We’ve got him back, all right? The conqueror of Peru, before your very eyes, in the flesh. So to speak.”

Tanner nodded. Pizarro, yes, before his very eyes. And he had to admit that what he saw was impressive and even, somehow, moving. Something about the dogged way with which that small armored figure was moving across the gleaming pearly field of the holotank aroused a kind of sympathy in him. That little man was entirely imaginary, but he didn’t seem to know that, or if he did he wasn’t letting it stop him for a moment: he went plugging on, and on and on, as if he intended actually to get somewhere. Watching that, Tanner was oddly captivated by it, and found himself surprised suddenly to discover that his interest in the entire project was beginning to rekindle.

“Can you make him any bigger?” he asked. “I want to see his face.”

“I can make him big as life,” Richardson said. “Bigger. Any size you like. Here.”

He flicked a finger and the hologram of Pizarro expanded instantaneously to a height of about two meters. The Spaniard halted in mid-stride as though he might actually be aware of the imaging change.

That can’t be possible, Tanner thought. That isn’t a living consciousness out there. Or is it?

Pizarro stood poised easily in mid-air, glowering, shading his eyes as if staring into a dazzling glow. There were brilliant streaks of color in the air all around him, like an aurora. He was a tall, lean man in late middle age with a grizzled beard and a hard, angular face. His lips were thin, his nose was sharp, his eyes were cold, shrewd, keen. It seemed to Tanner that those eyes had come to rest on him, and he felt a chill.

My God, Tanner thought, he’s real.

It had been a French program to begin with, something developed at the Centre Mondiale de la Computation in Lyons about the year 2119. The French had some truly splendid minds working in software in those days. They worked up astounding programs, and then nobody did anything with them. That was their version of Century Twenty-Two Malaise.

The French programmers’ idea was to use holograms of actual historical personages to dress up the son et lumiere tourist events at the great monuments of their national history. Not just preprogrammed robot mockups of the old Disneyland kind, which would stand around in front of Notre Dame or the Arc de Triomphe or the Eiffel Tower and deliver canned spiels, but apparent reincarnations of the genuine great ones, who could freely walk and talk and answer questions and make little quips. Imagine Louis XIV demonstrating the fountains of Versailles, they said, or Picasso leading a tour of Paris museums, or Sartre sitting in his Left Bank café exchanging existential bons mots with passersby! Napoleon! Joan of Arc! Alexandre Dumas! Perhaps the simulations could do even more than that: perhaps they could be designed so well that they would be able to extend and embellish the achievements of their original lifetimes with new accomplishments, a fresh spate of paintings and novels and works of philosophy and great architectural visions by vanished masters.

The concept was simple enough in essence. Write an intelligencing program that could absorb data, digest it, correlate it, and generate further programs based on what you had given it. No real difficulty there. Then start feeding your program with the collected written works—if any—of the person to be simulated: that would provide not only a general sense of his ideas and positions but also of his underlying pattern of approach to situations, his style of thinking—for le style, after all, est l’homme meme. If no collected works happened to be available, why, find works about the subject by his contemporaries, and use those. Next, toss in the totality of the historical record of the subject’s deeds, including all significant subsequent scholarly analyses, making appropriate allowances for conflicts in interpretation—indeed, taking advantages of such conflicts to generate a richer portrait, full of the ambiguities and contradictions that are the inescapable hallmarks of any human being. Now build in substrata of general cultural data of the proper period so that the subject has a loam of references and vocabulary out of which to create thoughts that are appropriate to his place in time and space. Stir. Et voila! Apply a little sophisticated imaging technology and you had a simulation capable of thinking and conversing and behaving as though it is the actual self after which it was patterned.

Of course, this would require a significant chunk of computer power. But that was no problem, in a world where 150-gigaflops networks were standard laboratory items and ten-year-olds carried pencil-sized computers with capacities far beyond the ponderous mainframes of their great-great-grandparents’ day. No, there was no theoretical reason why the French project could not have succeeded. Once the Lyons programmers had worked out the basic intelligencing scheme that was needed to write the rest of the programs, it all should have followed smoothly enough.

Two things went wrong: one rooted in an excess of ambition that may have been a product of the peculiarly French personalities of the original programmers, and the other having to do with an abhorrence of failure typical of the major nations of the midtwenty-second century, of which France was one.

The first was a fatal change of direction that the project underwent in its early phases. The King of Spain was coming to Paris on a visit of state; and the programmers decided that in his honor they would synthesize Don Quixote for him as their initial project. Though the intelligencing program had been designed to simulate only individuals who had actually existed, there seemed no inherent reason why a fictional character as well documented as Don Quixote could not be produced instead. There was Cervantes’ lengthy novel; there was ample background data available on the milieu in which Don Quixote supposedly had lived; there was a vast library of critical analysis of the book and of the Don’s distinctive and flamboyant personality. Why should bringing Don Quixote to life out of a computer be any different from simulating Louis XIV, say, or Moliere, or Cardinal Richelieu? True, they had all existed once, and the knight of La Mancha was a mere figment; but had Cervantes not provided far more detail about Don Quixote’s mind and soul than was known of Richelieu, or Moliere, or Louis XIV?

Indeed he had. The Don—like Oedipus, like Odysseus, like Othello, like David Copperfield—had come to have a reality far more profound and tangible than that of most people who had indeed actually lived. Such characters as those had transcended their fictional origins. But not so far as the computer was concerned. It was able to produce a convincing fabrication of Don Quixote, all right—a gaunt bizarre holographic figure that had all the right mannerisms, that ranted and raved in the expectable way, that referred knowledgeably to Dulcinea and Rosinante and Mambrino’s helmet. The Spanish king was amused and impressed. But to the French the experiment was a failure. They had produced a Don Quixote who was hopelessly locked to the Spain of the late sixteenth century and to the book from which he had sprung. He had no capacity for independent life and thought—no way to perceive the world that had brought him into being, or to comment on it, or to interact with it. There was nothing new or interesting about that. Any actor could dress up in armor and put on a scraggly beard and recite snatches of Cervantes. What had come forth from the computer, after three years of work, was no more than a predictable reprocessing of what had gone into it, sterile, stale.

Which led the Centre Mondial de la Computation to its next fatal step: abandoning the whole thing. Zut! and the project was cancelled without any further attempts. No simulated Picassos, no simulated Napoleons, no Joans of Arc. The Quixote event had soured everyone and no one had the heart to proceed with the work from there. Suddenly it had the taint of failure about it, and France—like Germany, like Australia, like the Han Commercial Sphere, like Brazil, like any of the dynamic centers of the modern world, had a horror of failure. Failure was something to be left to the backward nations or the decadent ones—to the Islamic Socialist Union, say, or the Soviet People’s Republic, or to that slumbering giant, the United States of America. So the historic-personage simulation scheme was put aside.

The French thought so little of it, as a matter of fact, that after letting it lie fallow for a few years they licensed it to a bunch of Americans, who had heard about it somehow and felt it might be amusing to play with.

“You may really have done it this time,” Tanner said.

“Yes. I think we have. After all those false starts.”

Tanner nodded. How often had he come into this room with hopes high, only to see some botch, some inanity, some depressing bungle? Richardson had always had an explanation. Sherlock Holmes hadn’t worked because he was fictional: that was a necessary recheck of the French Quixote project, demonstrating that fictional characters didn’t have the right sort of reality texture to take proper advantage of the program, not enough ambiguity, not enough contradiction. King Arthur had failed for the same reason. Julius Caesar? Too far in the past, maybe: unreliable data, bordering on fiction. Moses? Ditto. Einstein? Too complex, perhaps, for the project in its present level of development: they needed more experience first. Queen Elizabeth I? George Washington? Mozart? We’re learning more each time, Richardson insisted after each failure. This isn’t black magic we’re doing, you know. We aren’t necromancers, we’re programmers, and we have to figure out how to give the program what it needs.

And now Pizarro?

“Why do you want to work with him?” Tanner had asked, five or six months earlier. “A ruthless medieval Spanish imperialist, is what I remember from school. A bloodthirsty despoiler of a great culture. A man without morals, honor, faith—”

“You may be doing him an injustice,” said Richardson. “He’s had a bad press for centuries. And there are things about him that fascinate me.”

“Such as?”

“His drive. His courage. His absolute confidence. The other side of ruthlessness, the good side of it, is a total concentration on your task, an utter unwillingness to be stopped by any obstacle. Whether or not you approve of the things he accomplished, you have to admire a man who—”

“All right,” Tanner said, abruptly growing weary of the whole enterprise. “Do Pizarro. Whatever you want.”

The months had passed. Richardson gave him vague progress reports, nothing to arouse much hope. But now Tanner stared at the tiny strutting figure in the holotank and the conviction began to grow in him that Richardson finally had figured out how to use the simulation program as it was meant to be used.

“So you’ve actually recreated him, you think? Someone who lived—what, five hundred years ago?”

“He died in 1541,” said Richardson.

“Almost six hundred, then.”

“And he’s not like the others—not simply a recreation of a great figure out of the past who can run through a set of pre-programmed speeches. What we’ve got here, if I’m right, is an artificially generated intelligence which can think for itself in modes other than the ones its programmers think in. Which has more information available to itself, in other words, than we’ve provided it with. That would be the real accomplishment. That’s the fundamental philosophical leap that we were going for when we first got involved with this project. To use the program to give us new programs that are capable of true autonomous thought—a program that can think like Pizarro, instead of like Lew Richardson’s idea of some historian’s idea of how Pizarro might have thought.”

“Yes,” Tanner said.

“Which means we won’t just get back the expectable, the predictable. There’ll be surprises. There’s no way to learn anything, you know, except through surprises. The sudden combination of known components into something brand new. And that’s what I think we’ve managed to bring off here, at long last. Harry, it may be the biggest artificial-intelligence breakthrough ever achieved.”

Tanner pondered that. Was it so? Had they truly done it?

And if they had—

Something new and troubling was beginning to occur to him, much later in the game than it should have. Tanner stared at the holographic figure floating in the center of the tank, that fierce old man with the harsh face and the cold, cruel eyes. He thought about what sort of man he must have been—the man after whom this image had been modeled. A man who was willing to land in South America at age fifty or sixty or whatever he had been, an ignorant illiterate Spanish peasant wearing a suit of ill-fitting armor and waving a rusty sword, and set out to conquer a great empire of millions of people spreading over thousands of miles. Tanner wondered what sort of man would be capable of carrying out a thing like that. Now that man’s eyes were staring into his own and it was a struggle to meet so implacable a gaze.

After a moment he looked away. His left leg began to quiver. He glanced uneasily at Richardson.

“Look at those eyes, Lew. Christ, they’re scary!”

“I know. I designed them myself, from the old prints.”

“Do you think he’s seeing us right now? Can he do that?”

“All he is is software, Harry.”

“He seemed to know it when you expanded the image.”

Richardson shrugged. “He’s very good software. I tell you, he’s got autonomy, he’s got volition. He’s got an electronic mind, is what I’m saying. He may have perceived a transient voltage kick. But there are limits to his perceptions, all the same. I don’t think there’s any way that he can see anything that’s outside the holotank unless it’s fed to him in the form of data he can process, which hasn’t been done.”

“You don’t think? You aren’t sure?”

“Harry. Please.”

“This man conquered the entire enormous Incan empire with fifty soldiers, didn’t he?”

“In fact I believe it was more like a hundred and fifty.”

“Fifty, a hundred fifty, what’s the difference? Who knows what you’ve actually got here? What if you did an even better job than you suspect?”

“What are you saying?”

“What I’m saying is, I’m uneasy all of a sudden. For a long time I didn’t think this project was going to produce anything at all. Suddenly I’m starting to think that maybe it’s going to produce more than we can handle. I don’t want any of your goddamned simulations walking out of the tank and conquering us.”

Richardson turned to him. His face was flushed, but he was grinning. “Harry, Harry! For God’s sake! Five minutes ago you didn’t think we had anything at all here except a tiny picture that wasn’t even in focus. Now you’ve gone so far the other way that you’re imagining the worst kind of—”

“I see his eyes, Lew. I’m worried that his eyes see me.”

“Those aren’t real eyes you’re looking at. What you see is nothing but a graphics program projected into a holotank. There’s no visual capacity there as you understand the concept. His eyes will see you only if I want them to. Right now they don’t.”

“But you can make them see me?”

“I can make them see anything I want them to see. I created him, Harry.”

“With volition. With autonomy.”

“After all this time you start worrying now about these things?”

“It’s my neck on the line if something that you guys on the technical side make runs amok. This autonomy thing suddenly troubles me.”

“I’m still the one with the data gloves,” Richardson said. “I twitch my fingers and he dances. That’s not really Pizarro down there, remember. And that’s no Frankenstein monster either. It’s just a simulation. It’s just so much data, just a bunch of electromagnetic impulses that I can shut off with one movement of my pinkie.”

“Do it, then.”

“Shut him off? But I haven’t begun to show you—”

“Shut him off, and then turn him on,” Tanner said.

Richardson looked bothered. “If you say so, Harry.”

He moved a finger. The image of Pizarro vanished from the holotank. Swirling gray mists moved in it for a moment, and then all was white wool. Tanner felt a quick jolt of guilt, as though he had just ordered the execution of the man in the medieval armor. Richardson gestured again, and color flashed across the tank, and then Pizarro reappeared.

“I just wanted to see how much autonomy your little guy really has,” said Tanner. “Whether he was quick enough to head you off and escape into some other channel before you could cut his power.”

“You really don’t understand how this works at all, do you, Harry?”

“I just wanted to see,” said Tanner again, sullenly. After a moment’s silence he said, “Do you ever feel like God?”

“Like God?”

“You breathed life in. Life of a sort, anyway. But you breathed free will in, too. That’s what this experiment is all about, isn’t it? All your talk about volition and autonomy? You’re trying to recreate a human mind—which means to create it all over again—a mind that can think in its own special way, and come up with its own unique responses to situations, which will not necessarily be the responses that its programmers might anticipate, in fact almost certainly will not be, and which not might be all that desirable or beneficial, either, and you simply have to allow for that risk, just as God, once he gave free will to mankind, knew that He was likely to see all manner of evil deeds being performed by His creations as they exercised that free will—”

“Please, Harry—”

“Listen, is it possible for me to talk with your Pizarro?”

“Why?”

“By way of finding out what you’ve got there. To get some first-hand knowledge of what the project has accomplished. Or you could say I just want to test the quality of the simulation. Whatever. I’d feel more a part of this thing, more aware of what it’s all about in here, if I could have some direct contact with him. Would it be all right if I did that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Do I have to talk to him in Spanish?”

“In any language you like. There’s an interface, after all. He’ll think it’s his own language coming in, no matter what, sixteenth-century Spanish. And he’ll answer you in what seems like Spanish to him, but you’ll hear it in English.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

“And you don’t mind if I make contact with him?”

“Whatever you like.”

“It won’t upset his calibration, or anything?”

“It won’t do any harm at all, Harry.”

“Fine. Let me talk to him, then.”

There was a disturbance in the air ahead, a shifting, a swirling, like a little whirlwind. Pizarro halted and watched it for a moment, wondering what was coming next. A demon arriving to torment him, maybe. Or an angel. Whatever it was, he was ready for it.

Then a voice out of the whirlwind said, in that same comically exaggerated Castilian Spanish that Pizarro himself had found himself speaking a little while before, “Can you hear me?”

“I hear you, yes. I don’t see you. Where are you?”

“Right in front of you. Wait a second. I’ll show you.” Out of the whirlwind came a strange face that hovered in the middle of nowhere, a face without a body, a lean face, close-shaven, no beard at all, no mustache, the hair cut very short, dark eyes set close together. He had never seen a face like that before.

“What are you?” Pizarro asked. “A demon or an angel?”

“Neither one.” Indeed he didn’t sound very demonic. “A man, just like you.”

“Not much like me, I think. Is a face all there is to you, or do you have a body too?”

“All you see of me is a face?”

“Yes.”

“Wait a second.”

“I will wait as long as I have to. I have plenty of time.”

The face disappeared. Then it returned, attached to the body of a big, wide-shouldered man who was wearing a long loose gray robe, something like a priest’s cassock, but much more ornate, with points of glowing light gleaming on it everywhere. Then the body vanished and Pizarro could see only the face again. He could make no sense out of any of this. He began to understand how the Indians must have felt when the first Spaniards came over the horizon, riding horses, carrying guns, wearing armor.

“You are very strange. Are you an Englishman, maybe?”

“American.”

“Ah,” Pizarro said, as though that made things better. “An American. And what is that?”

The face wavered and blurred for a moment. There was mysterious new agitation in the thick white clouds surrounding it. Then the face grew steady and said, “America is a country north of Peru. A very large country, where many people live.”

“You mean New Spain, which was Mexico, where my kinsman Cortes is Captain-General?”

“North of Mexico. Far to the north of it.”

Pizarro shrugged. “I know nothing of those places. Or not very much. There is an island called Florida, yes? And stories of cities of gold, but I think they are only stories. I found the gold, in Peru. Enough to choke on, I found. Tell me this, am I in heaven now?”

“No.”

“Then this is hell?”

“Not that, either. Where you are—it’s very difficult to explain, actually—”

“I am in America.”

“Yes. In America, yes.”

“And am I dead?”

There was silence for a moment.

“No, not dead,” the voice said uneasily.

“You are lying to me, I think.”

“How could we be speaking with each other, if you were dead?”

Pizarro laughed hoarsely. “Are you asking me? I understand nothing of what is happening to me in this place. Where are my priests? Where is my page? Send me my brother!” He glared. “Well? Why don’t you get them for me?”

“They aren’t here. You’re here all by yourself, Don Francisco.”

“In America. All by myself in your America. Show me your America, then. Is there such a place? Is America all clouds and whorls of light? Where is America? Let me see America. Prove to me that I am in America.”

There was another silence, longer than the last. Then the face disappeared and the wall of white cloud began to boil and churn more fiercely than before. Pizarro stared into the midst of it, feeling a mingled sense of curiosity and annoyance. The face did not reappear. He saw nothing at all. He was being toyed with. He was a prisoner in some strange place and they were treating him like a child, like a dog, like—like an Indian. Perhaps this was the retribution for what he had done to King Atahuallpa, then, that fine noble foolish man who had given himself up to him in all innocence, and whom he had put to death so that he might have the gold of Atahuallpa’s kingdom.

Well, so be it, Pizarro thought. Atahuallpa accepted all that befell him without complaint and without fear, and so will I. Christ will be my guardian, and if there is no Christ, well, then I will have no guardian, and so be it. So be it.

The voice out of the whirlwind said suddenly, “Look, Don Francisco. This is America.”

A picture appeared on the wall of cloud. It was a kind of picture Pizarro had never before encountered or even imagined, one that seemed to open before him like a gate and sweep him in and carry him along through a vista of changing scenes depicted in brilliant, vivid bursts of color. It was like flying high above the land, looking down on an infinite scroll of miracles. He saw vast cities without walls, roadways that unrolled like endless skeins of white ribbon, huge lakes, mighty rivers, gigantic mountains, everything speeding past him so swiftly that he could scarcely absorb any of it. In moments it all became chaotic in his mind: the buildings taller than the highest cathedral spire, the swarming masses of people, the shining metal chariots without beasts to draw them, the stupendous landscapes, the close-packed complexity of it all. Watching all this, he felt the fine old hunger taking possession of him again: he wanted to grasp this strange vast place, and seize it, and clutch it close, and ransack it for all it was worth. But the thought of that was overwhelming. His eyes grew glassy and his heart began to pound so terrifyingly that he supposed he would be able to feel it thumping if he put his hand to the front of his armor. He turned away, muttering, “Enough. Enough.”

The terrifying picture vanished. Gradually the clamor of his heart subsided.

Then he began to laugh.

“Peru!” he cried. “Peru was nothing, next to your America! Peru was a hole! Peru was mud! How ignorant I was! I went to Peru, when there was America, ten thousand times as grand! I wonder what I could find, in America.” He smacked his lips and winked. Then, chuckling, he said, “But don’t be afraid. I won’t try to conquer your America. I’m too old for that now. And perhaps America would have been too much for me, even before. Perhaps.” He grinned savagely at the troubled staring face of the short-haired beardless man, the American. “I really am dead, is this not so? I feel no hunger, I feel no pain, no thirst, when I put my hand to my body I do not feel even my body. I am like one who lies dreaming. But this is no dream. Am I a ghost?”

“Not—exactly.”

“Not exactly a ghost! Not exactly! No one with half the brains of a pig would talk like that. What is that supposed to mean?”

“It’s not easy explaining it in words you would understand, Don Francisco.”

“No, of course not. I am very stupid, as everyone knows, and that is why I conquered Peru, because I was so very stupid. But let it pass. I am not exactly a ghost, but I am dead all the same, right?”

“Well—”

“I am dead, yes. But somehow I have not gone to hell or even to purgatory but I am still in the world, only it is much later now. I have slept as the dead sleep, and now I have awakened in some year that is far beyond my time, and it is the time of America. Is this not so? Who is king now? Who is pope? What year is this? 1750? 1800?”

“The year 2130,” the face said, after some hesitation.

“Ah.” Pizarro tugged thoughtfully at his lower lip. “And the king? Who is king?”

A long pause. “Alfonso is his name,” said the face.

“Alfonso? The kings of Aragon were called Alfonso. The father of Ferdinand, he was Alfonso. Alfonso V, he was.”

“Alfonso XIX is King of Spain now.”

“Ah. Ah. And the pope? Who is pope?”

A pause again. Not to know the name of the pope, immediately upon being asked? How strange. Demon or no, this was a fool.

“Pius,” said the voice, when some time had passed. “Pius XVI.”

“The sixteenth Pius,” said Pizarro somberly. “Jesus and Mary, the sixteenth Pius! What has become of me? Long dead, is what I am. Still unwashed of all my sins. I can feel them clinging to my skin like mud, still. And you are a sorcerer, you American, and you have brought me to life again. Eh? Eh? Is that not so?”

“It is something like that, Don Francisco,” the face admitted.

“So you speak your Spanish strangely because you no longer understand the right way of speaking it. Eh? Even I speak Spanish in a strange way, and I speak it in a voice that does not sound like my own. No one speaks Spanish any more, eh? Eh? Only American, they speak. Eh? But you try to speak Spanish, only it comes out stupidly. And you have caused me to speak the same way, thinking it is the way I spoke, though you are wrong. Well, you can do miracles, but I suppose you can’t do everything perfectly, even in this land of miracles of the year 2130. Eh? Eh?” Pizarro leaned forward intently. “What do you say? You thought I was a fool, because I don’t have reading and writing? I am not so ignorant, eh? I understand things quickly.”

“You understand very quickly indeed.”

“But you have knowledge of many things that are unknown to me. You must know the manner of my death, for example. How strange that is, talking to you of the manner of my death, but you must know it, eh? When did it come to me? And how? Did it come in my sleep? No, no, how could that be? They die in their sleep in Spain, but not in Peru. How was it, then? I was set upon by cowards, was I? Some brother of Atahuallpa, falling upon me as I stepped out of my house? A slave sent by the Inca Manco, or one of those others? No. No. The Indians would not harm me, for all that I did to them. It was the young Almagro who took me down, was it not, in vengeance for his father, or Juan de Herrada, eh? or perhaps even Picado, my own secretary—no, not Picado, he was my man, always—but maybe Alvarado, the young one, Diego—well, one of those, and it would have been sudden, very sudden or I would have been able to stop them—am I right, am I speaking the truth? Tell me. You know these things. Tell me of the manner of my dying.” There was no answer. Pizarro shaded his eyes and peered into the dazzling pearly whiteness. He was no longer able to see the face of the American. “Are you there?” Pizarro said. “Where have you gone? Were you only a dream? American! American! Where have you gone?”

The break in contact was jolting. Tanner sat rigid, hands trembling, lips tightly clamped. Pizarro, in the holotank, was no more than a distant little streak of color now, no larger than his thumb, gesticulating amid the swirling clouds. The vitality of him, the arrogance, the fierce probing curiosity, the powerful hatreds and jealousies, the strength that had come from vast ventures recklessly conceived and desperately seen through to triumph, all the things that were Francisco Pizarro, all that Tanner had felt an instant before—all that had vanished at the flick of a finger.

After a moment or two Tanner felt the shock beginning to ease. He turned toward Richardson.

“What happened?”

“I had to pull you out of there. I didn’t want you telling him anything about how he died.”

“I don’t know how he died.”

“Well, neither does he, and I didn’t want to chance it that you did. There’s no predicting what sort of psychological impact that kind of knowledge might have on him.”

“You talk about him as though he’s alive.”

“Isn’t he?” Richardson said.

“If I said a thing like that, you’d tell me that I was being ignorant and unscientific.”

Richardson smiled faintly. “You’re right. But somehow I trust myself to know what I’m saying when I say that he’s alive. I know I don’t mean it literally and I’m not sure about you. What did you think of him, anyway?”

“He’s amazing,” Tanner said. “Really amazing. The strength of him—I could feel it pouring out at me in waves. And his mind! So quick, the way he picked up on everything. Guessing that he must be in the future. Wanting to know what number pope was in office. Wanting to see what America looked like. And the cockiness of him! Telling me that he’s not up to the conquest of America, that he might have tried for it instead of Peru a few years earlier, but not now, now he’s a little too old for that. Incredible! Nothing could faze him for long, even when he realized that he must have been dead for a long time. Wanting to know how he died, even!” Tanner frowned. “What age did you make him, anyway, when you put this program together?”

“About sixty. Five or six years after the conquest, and a year or two before he died. At the height of his power, that is.”

“I suppose you couldn’t have let him have any knowledge of his actual death. That way he’d be too much like some kind of a ghost.”

“That’s what we thought. We set the cutoff at a time when he had done everything that he had set out to do, when he was the complete Pizarro. But before the end. He didn’t need to know about that. Nobody does. That’s why I had to yank you, you see? In case you knew. And started to tell him.”

Tanner shook his head. “If I ever knew, I’ve forgotten it. How did it happen?”

“Exactly as he guessed: at the hands of his own comrades.”

“So he saw it coming.”

“At the age we made him, he already knew that a civil war had started in South America, that the conquistadores were quarreling over the division of the spoils. We built that much into him. He knows that his partner Almagro has turned against him and been beaten in battle, and that they’ve executed him. What he doesn’t know, but obviously can expect, is that Almagro’s friends are going to break into his house and try to kill him. He’s got it all figured out pretty much as it’s going to happen. As it did happen, I should say.”

“Incredible. To be that shrewd.”

“He was a son of a bitch, yes. But he was a genius too.”

“Was he, really? Or is it that you made him one when you set up the program for him?”

“All we put in were the objective details of his life, patterns of event and response. Plus an overlay of commentary by others, his contemporaries and later historians familiar with the record, providing an extra dimension of character density. Put in enough of that kind of stuff and apparently they add up to the whole personality. It isn’t my personality or that of anybody else who worked on this project, Harry. When you put in Pizarro’s set of events and responses you wind up getting Pizarro. You get the ruthlessness and you get the brilliance. Put in a different set, you get someone else. And what we’ve finally seen, this time, is that when we do our work right we get something out of the computer that’s bigger than the sum of what we put in.”

“Are you sure?”

Richardson said, “Did you notice that he complained about the Spanish that he thought you were speaking?”

“Yes. He said that it sounded strange, that nobody seemed to know how to speak proper Spanish any more. I didn’t quite follow that. Does the interface you built speak lousy Spanish?”

“Evidently it speaks lousy sixteenth-century Spanish,” Richardson said. “Nobody knows what sixteenth-century Spanish actually sounded like. We can only guess. Apparently we didn’t guess very well.”

“But how would he know? You synthesized him in the first place! If you don’t know how Spanish sounded in his time, how would he? All he should know about Spanish, or about anything, is what you put into him.”

“Exactly,” Richardson said.

“But that doesn’t make any sense, Lew!”

“He also said that the Spanish he heard himself speaking was no good, and that his own voice didn’t sound right to him either. That we had caused him to speak this way, thinking that was how he actually spoke, but we were wrong.”

“How could he possibly know what his voice really sounded like, if all he is is a simulation put together by people who don’t have the slightest notion of what his voice really—”

“I don’t have any idea,” said Richardson quietly. “But he does know.”

“Does he? Or is this just some diabolical Pizarro-like game that he’s playing to unsettle us, because that’s in his character as you devised it?”

“I think he does know,” Richardson said.

“Where’s he finding it out, then?”

“It’s there. We don’t know where, but he does. It’s somewhere in the data that we put through the permutation network, even if we don’t know it and even though we couldn’t find it now if we set out to look for it. He can find it. He can’t manufacture that kind of knowledge by magic, but he can assemble what look to us like seemingly irrelevant bits and come up with new information leading to a conclusion which is meaningful to him. That’s what we mean by artificial intelligence, Harry. We’ve finally got a program that works something like the human brain: by leaps of intuition so sudden and broad that they seem inexplicable and non-quantifiable, even if they really aren’t. We’ve fed in enough stuff so that he can assimilate a whole stew of ostensibly unrelated data and come up with new information. We don’t just have a ventriloquist’s dummy in that tank. We’ve got something that thinks it’s Pizarro and thinks like Pizarro and knows things that Pizarro knew and we don’t. Which means we’ve accomplished the qualitative jump in artificial intelligence capacity that we set out to achieve with this project. It’s awesome. I get shivers down my back when I think about it.”

“I do too,” Tanner said. “But not so much from awe as fear.”

“Fear?”

“Knowing now that he has capabilities beyond those he was programmed for, how can you be so absolutely certain that he can’t commandeer your network somehow and get himself loose?”

“It’s technically impossible. All he is is electromagnetic impulses. I can pull the plug on him any time I like. There’s nothing to panic over here. Believe me, Harry.”

“I’m trying to.”

“I can show you the schematics. We’ve got a phenomenal simulation in that computer, yes. But it’s still only a simulation. It isn’t a vampire, it isn’t a werewolf, it isn’t anything supernatural. It’s just the best damned computer simulation anyone’s ever made.”

“It makes me uneasy. He makes me uneasy.”

“He should. The power of the man, the indomitable nature of him—why do you think I summoned him up, Harry? He’s got something that we don’t understand in this country any more. I want us to study him. I want us to try to learn what that kind of drive and determination is really like. Now that you’ve talked to him, now that you’ve touched his spirit, of course you’re shaken up by him. He radiates tremendous confidence. He radiates fantastic faith in himself. That kind of man can achieve anything he wants—even conquer the whole Inca empire with a hundred fifty men, or however many it was. But I’m not frightened of what we’ve put together here. And you shouldn’t be either. We should all be damned proud of it. You as well as the people on the technical side. And you will be, too.”

“I hope you’re right,” Tanner said.

“You’ll see.”

For a long moment Tanner stared in silence at the holotank, where the image of Pizarro had been.

“Okay,” said Tanner finally. “Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I’m sounding like the ignoramus layman that I am. I’ll take it on faith that you’ll be able to keep your phantoms in their boxes.”

“We will,” Richardson said.

“Let’s hope so. All right,” said Tanner. “So what’s your next move?”

Richardson looked puzzled. “My next move?”

“With this project? Where does it go from here?”

Hesitantly Richardson said, “There’s no formal proposal yet. We thought we’d wait until we had approval from you on the initial phase of the work, and then—”

“How does this sound?” Tanner asked. “I’d like to see you start in on another simulation right away.”

“Well—yes, yes, of course—”

“And when you’ve got him worked up, Lew, would it be feasible for you to put him right there in the tank with Pizarro?”

Richardson looked startled. “To have a sort of dialog with him, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose we could do that,” Richardson said cautiously. “Should do that. Yes. Yes. A very interesting suggestion, as a matter of fact.” He ventured an uneasy smile. Up till now Tanner had kept in the background of this project, a mere management functionary, an observer, virtually an outsider. This was something new, his interjecting himself into the planning process, and plainly Richardson didn’t know what to make of it. Tanner watched him fidget. After a little pause Richardson said, “Was there anyone in particular you had in mind for us to try next?”

“Is that new parallax thing of yours ready to try?” Tanner asked. “The one that’s supposed to compensate for time distortion and myth contamination?”

“Just about. But we haven’t tested—”

“Good,” Tanner said. “Here’s your chance. What about trying for Socrates?”

There was billowing whiteness below him, and on every side, as though all the world were made of fleece. He wondered if it might be snow. That was not something he was really familiar with. It snowed once in a great while in Athens, yes, but usually only a light dusting that melted in the morning sun. Of course he had seen snow aplenty when he had been up north in the war, at Potidaea, in the time of Pericles. But that had been long ago; and that stuff, as best he remembered it, had not been much like this. There was no quality of coldness about the whiteness that surrounded him now. It could just as readily be great banks of clouds.

But what would clouds be doing below him? Clouds, he thought, are mere vapor, air and water, no substance to them at all. Their natural place was overhead. Clouds that gathered at one’s feet had no true quality of cloudness about them.

Snow that had no coldness? Clouds that had no buoyancy? Nothing in this place seemed to possess any quality that was proper to itself in this place, including himself. He seemed to be walking, but his feet touched nothing at all. It was more like moving through air. But how could one move in the air? Aristophanes, in that mercilessly mocking play of his, had sent him floating through the clouds suspended in a basket, and made him say things like, “I am traversing the air and contemplating the sun.” That was Aristophanes’ way of playing with him, and he had not been seriously upset, though his friends had been very hurt on his behalf. Still, that was only a play.

This felt real, insofar as it felt like anything at all.

Perhaps he was dreaming, and the nature of his dream was that he thought he was really doing the things he had done in Aristophanes’ play. What was that lovely line? “I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the same nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven.” Good old Aristophanes! Nothing was sacred to him! Except, of course, those things that were truly sacred, such as wisdom, truth, virtue. “I would have discovered nothing if I had remained on the ground and pondered from below the things that are above: for the earth by its force attracts the sap of the mind to itself. It’s the same way with watercress.” And Socrates began to laugh.

He held his hands before him and studied them, the short sturdy fingers, the thick powerful wrists. His hands, yes. His old plain hands that had stood him in good stead all his life, when he had worked as a stonemason as his father had, when he had fought in his city’s wars, when he had trained at the gymnasium. But now when he touched them to his face he felt nothing. There should be a chin here, a forehead, yes, a blunt stubby nose, thick lips; but there was nothing. He was touching air. He could put his hand right through the place where his face should be. He could put one hand against the other, and press with all his might, and feel nothing.

This is a very strange place indeed, he thought.

Perhaps it is that place of pure forms that young Plato liked to speculate about, where everything is perfect and nothing is quite real. Those are ideal clouds all around me, not real ones. This is ideal air upon which I walk. I myself am the ideal Socrates, liberated from my coarse ordinary body. Could it be? Well, maybe so. He stood for a while, considering that possibility. The thought came to him that this might be the life after life, in which case he might meet some of the gods, if there were any gods in the first place, and if he could manage to find them. I would like that, he thought. Perhaps they would be willing to speak with me. Athena would discourse with me on wisdom, or Hermes on speed, or Ares on the nature of courage, or Zeus on—well, whatever Zeus cared to speak on. Of course I would seem to be the merest fool to them, but that would be all right: anyone who expects to hold discourse with the gods as though he were their equal is a fool. I have no such illusion. If there are gods at all, surely they are far superior to me in all respects, for otherwise why would men regard them as gods?

Of course he had serious doubts that the gods existed at all. But if they did, it was reasonable to think that they might be found in a place such as this.

He looked up. The sky was radiant with brilliant golden light. He took a deep breath and smiled and set out across the fleecy nothingness of this airy world to see if he could find the gods.

Tanner said, “What do you think now? Still so pessimistic?”

“It’s too early to say,” said Richardson, looking glum.

“He looks like Socrates, doesn’t he?”

“That was the easy part. We’ve got plenty of descriptions of Socrates that came down from people who knew him, the flat wide nose, the bald head, the thick lips, the short neck. A standard Socrates face that everybody recognizes, just as they do Sherlock Holmes, or Don Quixote. So that’s how we made him look. It doesn’t signify anything important. It’s what’s going on inside his head that’ll determine whether we really have Socrates.”

“He seems calm and good-humored as he wanders around in there. The way a philosopher should.”

“Pizarro seemed just as much of a philosopher when we turned him loose in the tank.”

“Pizarro may be just as much of a philosopher,” Tanner said. “Neither man’s the sort who’d be likely to panic if he found himself in some mysterious place.” Richardson’s negativism was beginning to bother him. It was as if the two men had exchanged places: Richardson now uncertain of the range and power of his own program, Tanner pushing the way on and on toward bigger and better things.

Bleakly Richardson said, “I’m still pretty skeptical. We’ve tried the new parallax filters, yes. But I’m afraid we’re going to run into the same problem the French did with Don Quixote, and that we did with Holmes and Moses and Caesar. There’s too much contamination of the data by myth and fantasy. The Socrates who has come down to us is as much fictional as real, or maybe all fictional. For all we know, Plato made up everything we think we know about him, the same way Conan Doyle made up Holmes. And what we’re going to get, I’m afraid, will be something second-hand, something lifeless, something lacking in the spark of self-directed intelligence that we’re after.”

“But the new filters—”

“Perhaps. Perhaps.”

Tanner shook his head stubbornly. “Holmes and Don Quixote are fiction through and through. They exist in only one dimension, constructed for us by their authors. You cut through the distortions and fantasies of later readers and commentators and all you find underneath is a made-up character. A lot of Socrates may have been invented by Plato for his own purposes, but a lot wasn’t. He really existed. He took an actual part in civic activities in fifth-century Athens. He figures in books by a lot of other contemporaries of his besides Plato’s dialogues. That gives us the parallax you’re looking for, doesn’t it—the view of him from more than one viewpoint?”

“Maybe it does. Maybe not. We got nowhere with Moses. Was he fictional?”

“Who can say? All you had to go by was the Bible. And a ton of Biblical commentary, for whatever that was worth. Not much, apparently.”

“And Caesar? You’re not going to tell me that Caesar wasn’t real,” said Richardson. “But what we have of him is evidently contaminated with myth. When we synthesized him we got nothing but a caricature, and I don’t have to remind you how fast even that broke down into sheer gibberish.”

“Not relevant,” Tanner said. “Caesar was early in the project. You know much more about what you’re doing now. I think this is going to work.”

Richardson’s dogged pessimism, Tanner decided, must be a defense mechanism, designed to insulate himself against the possibility of a new failure. Socrates, after all, hadn’t been Richardson’s own choice. And this was the first time he had used these new enhancement methods, the parallax program that was the latest refinement of the process.

Tanner looked at him. Richardson remained silent.

“Go on,” Tanner said. “Bring up Pizarro and let the two of them talk to each other. Then we’ll find out what sort of Socrates you’ve conjured up here.”

Once again there was a disturbance in the distance, a little dark blur on the pearly horizon, a blotch, a flaw in the gleaming whiteness. Another demon is arriving, Pizarro thought. Or perhaps it is the same one as before, the American, the one who liked to show himself only as a face, with short hair and no beard.

But as this one drew closer Pizarro saw that he was different from the last, short and stocky, with broad shoulders and a deep chest. He was nearly bald and his thick beard was coarse and unkempt. He looked old, at least sixty, maybe sixty-five. He looked very ugly, too, with bulging eyes and a flat nose that had wide, flaring nostrils, and a neck so short that his oversized head seemed to sprout straight from his trunk. All he wore was a thin, ragged brown robe. His feet were bare.

“You, there,” Pizarro called out. “You! Demon! Are you also an American, demon?”

“Your pardon. An Athenian, did you say?”

“American is what I said. That’s what the last one was. Is that where you come from too, demon? America?”

A shrug. “No, I think not. I am of Athens.” There was a curious mocking twinkle in the demon’s eyes.

“A Greek? This demon is a Greek?”

“I am of Athens,” the ugly one said again. “My name is Socrates, the son of Sophroniscus. I could not tell you what a Greek is, so perhaps I may be one, but I think not, unless a Greek is what you call a man of Athens.” He spoke in a slow, plodding way, like one who was exceedingly stupid. Pizarro had sometimes met men like this before, and in his experience they were generally not as stupid as they wanted to be taken for. He felt caution rising in him. “And I am no demon, but just a plain man: very plain, as you can easily see.”

Pizarro snorted. “You like to chop words, do you?”

“It is not the worst of amusements, my friend,” said the other, and put his hands together behind his back in the most casual way, and stood there calmly, smiling, looking off into the distance, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Well?” Tanner said. “Do we have Socrates or not? I say that’s the genuine article there.”

Richardson looked up and nodded. He seemed relieved and quizzical both at once. “So far so good, I have to say. He’s coming through real and true.”

“Yes.”

“We may actually have worked past the problem of information contamination that ruined some of the earlier simulations. We’re not getting any of the signal degradation we encountered then.”

“He’s some character, isn’t he?” Tanner said. “I liked the way he just walked right up to Pizarro without the slightest sign of uneasiness. He’s not at all afraid of him.”

“Why should he be?” Richardson asked.

“Wouldn’t you? If you were walking along through God knows what kind of unearthly place, not knowing where you were or how you got there, and suddenly you saw a ferocious-looking bastard like Pizarro standing in front of you wearing full armor and carrying a sword—” Tanner shook his head. “Well, maybe not. He’s Socrates, after all, and Socrates wasn’t afraid of anything except boredom.”

“And Pizarro’s just a simulation. Nothing but software.”

“So you’ve been telling me all along. But Socrates doesn’t know that.”

“True,” Richardson said. He seemed lost in thought a moment. “Perhaps there is some risk.”

“Huh?”

“If our Socrates is anything like the one in Plato, and he surely ought to be, then he’s capable of making a considerable pest of himself. Pizarro may not care for Socrates’ little verbal games. If he doesn’t feel like playing, I suppose there’s a theoretical possibility that he’ll engage in some sort of aggressive response.”

That took Tanner by surprise. He swung around and said, “Are you telling me that there’s some way he can harm Socrates?”

“Who knows?” said Richardson. “In the real world one program can certainly crash another one. Maybe one simulation can be dangerous to another one. This is all new territory for all of us, Harry. Including the people in the tank.”

The tall grizzled-looking man said, scowling, “You tell me you’re an Athenian, but not a Greek. What sense am I supposed to make of that? I could ask Pedro de Candia, I guess, who is a Greek but not an Athenian. But he’s not here. Perhaps you’re just a fool, eh? Or you think I am.”

“I have no idea what you are. Could it be that you are a god?”

“A god?”

“Yes,” Socrates said. He studied the other impassively. His face was harsh, his gaze was cold. “Perhaps you are Ares. You have a fierce warlike look about you, and you wear armor, but not such armor as I have ever seen. This place is so strange that it might well be the abode of the gods, and that could be a god’s armor you wear, I suppose. If you are Ares, then I salute you with the respect that is due you. I am Socrates of Athens, the stonemason’s son.”

“You talk a lot of nonsense. I don’t know your Ares.”

“Why, the god of war, of course! Everyone knows that. Except barbarians, that is. Are you a barbarian, then? You sound like one, I must say—but then, I seem to sound like a barbarian myself, and I’ve spoken the tongue of Hellas all my life. There are many mysteries here, indeed.”

“Your language problem again,” Tanner said. “Couldn’t you even get classical Greek to come out right? Or are they both speaking Spanish to each other?”

“Pizarro thinks they’re speaking Spanish. Socrates thinks they’re speaking Greek. And of course the Greek is off. We don’t know how anything that was spoken before the age of recordings sounded. All we can do is guess.”

“But can’t you—”

“Shhh,” Richardson said.

Pizarro said, “I may be a bastard, but I’m no barbarian, fellow, so curb your tongue. And let’s have no more blasphemy out of you either.”

“If I blaspheme, forgive me. It is in innocence. Tell me where I trespass, and I will not do it again.”

“This crazy talk of gods. Of my being a god. I’d expect a heathen to talk like that, but not a Greek. But maybe you’re a heathen kind of Greek, and not to be blamed. It’s heathens who see gods everywhere. Do I look like a god to you? I am Francisco Pizarro, of Trujillo in Estremadura, the son of the famous soldier Gonzalo Pizarro, colonel of infantry, who served in the wars of Gonzalo de Cordova whom men call the Great Captain. I have fought some wars myself.”

“Then you are not a god but simply a soldier? Good. I too have been a soldier. I am more at ease with soldiers than with gods, as most people are, I would think.”

“A soldier? You?” Pizarro smiled. This shabby ordinary little man, more bedraggled-looking than any self-respecting groom would be, a soldier? “In which wars?”

“The wars of Athens. I fought at Potidaea, where the Corinthians were making trouble, and withholding the tribute that was due us. It was very cold there, and the siege was long and bleak, but we did our duty. I fought again some years later at Delium against the Boeotians. Laches was our general then, but it went badly for us, and we did our best fighting in retreat. And then,” Socrates said, “when Brasidas was in Amphipolis, and they sent Cleon to drive him out, I—”

“Enough,” said Pizarro with an impatient wave of his hand. “These wars are unknown to me.” A private soldier, a man of the ranks, no doubt. “Well, then this is the place where they send dead soldiers, I suppose.”

“Are we dead, then?”

“Long ago. There’s an Alfonso who’s king, and a Pius who’s pope, and you wouldn’t believe their numbers. Pius the Sixteenth, I think the demon said. And the American said also that it is the year 2130. The last year that I can remember was 1539. What about you?”

The one who called himself Socrates shrugged again. “In Athens we use a different reckoning. But let us say, for argument’s sake, that we are dead. I think that is very likely, considering what sort of place this seems to be, and how airy I find my body to be. So we have died, and this is the life after life. I wonder: is this a place where virtuous men are sent, or those who were not virtuous? Or do all men go to the same place after death, whether they were virtuous or not? What would you say?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” said Pizarro.

“Well, were you virtuous in your life, or not?”

“Did I sin, you mean?”

“Yes, we could use that word.”

“Did I sin, he wants to know,” said Pizarro, amazed. “He asks, Was I a sinner? Did I live a virtuous life? What business is that of his?”

“Humor me,” said Socrates. “For the sake of the argument, if you will, allow me a few small questions—”

“So it’s starting,” Tanner said. “You see? You really did do it! Socrates is drawing him into a dialog!”

Richardson’s eyes were glowing. “He is, yes. How marvelous this is, Harry!”

“Socrates is going to talk rings around him.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Richardson said.

“I gave as good as I got,” said Pizarro. “If I was injured, I gave injury back. There’s no sin in that. It’s only common sense. A man does what is necessary to survive and to protect his place in the world. Sometimes I might forget a fast day, yes, or use the Lord’s name in vain—those are sins, I suppose, Fray Vicente was always after me for things like that—but does that make me a sinner? I did my penances as soon as I could find time for them. It’s a sinful world and I’m no different from anyone else, so why be harsh on me? Eh? God made me as I am. I’m done in His image. And I have faith in His Son.”

“So you are a virtuous man, then?”

“I’m not a sinner, at any rate. As I told you, if ever I sinned I did my contrition, which made it the same as if the sin hadn’t ever happened.”

“Indeed,” said Socrates. “Then you are a virtuous man and I have come to a good place. But I want to be absolutely sure. Tell me again: is your conscience completely clear?”

“What are you, a confessor?”

“Only an ignorant man seeking understanding. Which you can provide, by taking part with me in the exploration. If I have come to the place of virtuous men, then I must have been virtuous myself when I lived. Ease my mind, therefore, and let me know whether there is anything on your soul that you regret having done.”

Pizarro stirred uneasily. “Well,” he said, “I killed a king.”

“A wicked one? An enemy of your city?”

“No. He was wise and kind.”

“Then you have reason for regret indeed. For surely that is a sin, to kill a wise king.”

“But he was a heathen.”

“A what?”

“He denied God.”

“He denied his own god?” said Socrates. “Then perhaps it was not so wrong to kill him.”

“No. He denied mine. He preferred his own. And so he was a heathen. And all his people were heathens, since they followed his way. That could not be. They were at risk of eternal damnation because they followed him. I killed him for the sake of his people’s souls. I killed him out of the love of God.”

“But would you not say that all gods are the reflection of the one God?”

Pizarro considered that. “In a way, that’s true, I suppose.”

“And is the service of God not itself godly?”

“How could it be anything but godly, Socrates?”

“And you would say that one who serves his god faithfully according to the teachings of his god is behaving in a godly way?”

Frowning, Pizarro said, “Well—if you look at it that way, yes—”

“Then I think the king you killed was a godly man, and by killing him you sinned against God.”

“Wait a minute!”

“But think of it: by serving his god he must also have served yours, for any servant of a god is a servant of the true God who encompasses all our imagined gods.”

“No,” said Pizarro sullenly. “How could he have been a servant of God? He knew nothing of Jesus. He had no understanding of the Trinity. When the priest offered him the Bible, he threw it to the ground in scorn. He was a heathen, Socrates. And so are you. You don’t know anything of these matters at all, if you think that Atahuallpa was godly. Or if you think you’re going to get me to think so.”

“Indeed I have very little knowledge of anything. But you say he was a wise man, and kind?”

“In his heathen way.”

“And a good king to his people?”

“So it seemed. They were a thriving people when I found them.”

“Yet he was not godly.”

“I told you. He had never had the sacraments, and in fact he spurned them right up until the moment of his death, when he accepted baptism. Then he came to be godly. But by then the sentence of death was upon him and it was too late for anything to save him.”

“Baptism? Tell me what that is, Pizarro.”

“A sacrament.”

“And that is?”

“A holy rite. Done with holy water, by a priest. It admits one to Holy Mother Church, and brings forgiveness from sin both original and actual, and gives the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

“You must tell me more about these things another time. So you made this good king godly by this baptism? And then you killed him?”

“Yes.”

“But he was godly when you killed him. Surely, then, to kill him was a sin.”

“He had to die, Socrates!”

“And why was that?” asked the Athenian.

“Socrates is closing in for the kill,” Tanner said. “Watch this!”

“I’m watching. But there isn’t going to be any kill,” said Richardson. “Their basic assumptions are too far apart.”

“You’ll see.”

“Will I?”

Pizarro said, “I’ve already told you why he had to die. It was because his people followed him in all things. And so they worshipped the sun, because he said the sun was God. Their souls would have gone to hell if we had allowed them to continue that way.”

“But if they followed him in all things,” said Socrates, “then surely they would have followed him into baptism, and become godly, and thus done that which was pleasing to you and to your god! Is that not so?”

“No,” said Pizarro, twisting his fingers in his beard.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because the king agreed to be baptized only after we had sentenced him to death. He was in the way, don’t you see? He was an obstacle to our power! So we had to get rid of him. He would never have led his people to the truth of his own free will. That was why we had to kill him. But we didn’t want to kill his soul as well as his body, so we said to him, Look, Atahuallpa, we’re going to put you to death, but if you let us baptize you we’ll strangle you quickly, and if you don’t we’ll burn you alive and it’ll be very slow. So of course he agreed to be baptized, and we strangled him. What choice was there for anybody? He had to die. He still didn’t believe the true faith, as we all well knew. Inside his head he was as big a heathen as ever. But he died a Christian all the same.”

“A what?”

“A Christian! A Christian! One who believes in Jesus Christ the Son of God!”

“The son of God,” Socrates said, sounding puzzled. “And do Christians believe in God too, or only his son?”

“What a fool you are!”

“I would not deny that.”

“There is God the Father, and God the Son, and then there is the Holy Spirit.”

“Ah,” said Socrates. “And which one did your Atahuallpa believe in, then, when the strangler came for him?”

“None of them.”

“And yet he died a Christian? Without believing in any of your three gods? How is that?”

“Because of the baptism,” said Pizarro in rising annoyance. “What does it matter what he believed? The priest sprinkled the water on him! The priest said the words! If the rite is properly performed, the soul is saved regardless of what the man understands or believes! How else could you baptize an infant? An infant understands nothing and believes nothing—but he becomes a Christian when the water touches him!”

“Much of this is mysterious to me,” said Socrates. “But I see that you regard the king you killed as godly as well as wise, because he was washed by the water your gods require, and so you killed a good king who now lived in the embrace of your gods because of the baptism. Which seems wicked to me; and so this cannot be the place where the virtuous are sent after death, so it must be that I too was not virtuous, or else that I have misunderstood everything about this place and why we are in it.”

“Damn you, are you trying to drive me crazy?” Pizarro roared, fumbling at the hilt of his sword. He drew it and waved it around in fury. “If you don’t shut your mouth I’ll cut you in thirds!”

“Uh-oh,” Tanner said. “So much for the dialectical method.”

Socrates said mildly, “It isn’t my intention to cause you any annoyance, my friend. I’m only trying to learn a few things.”

“You are a fool!”

“That is certainly true, as I have already acknowledged several times. Well, if you mean to strike me with your sword, go ahead. But I don’t think it’ll accomplish very much.”

“Damn you,” Pizarro muttered. He stared at his sword and shook his head. “No. No, it won’t do any good, will it? It would go through you like air. But you’d just stand there and let me try to cut you down, and not even blink, right? Right?” He shook his head. “And yet you aren’t stupid. You argue like the shrewdest priest I’ve ever known.”

“In truth I am stupid,” said Socrates. “I know very little at all. But I strive constantly to attain some understanding of the world, or at least to understand something of myself.”

Pizarro glared at him. “No,” he said. “I won’t buy this false pride of yours. I have a little understanding of people myself, old man. I’m on to your game.”

“What game is that, Pizarro?”

“I can see your arrogance. I see that you believe you’re the wisest man in the world, and that it’s your mission to go around educating poor sword-waving fools like me. And you pose as a fool to disarm your adversaries before you humiliate them.”

“Score one for Pizarro,” Richardson said. “He’s wise to Socrates’ little tricks, all right.”

“Maybe he’s read some Plato,” Tanner suggested.

“He was illiterate.”

“That was then. This is now.”

“Not guilty,” said Richardson. “He’s operating on peasant shrewdness alone, and you damned well know it.”

“I wasn’t being serious,” Tanner said. He leaned forward, peering toward the holotank. “God, what an astonishing thing this is, listening to them going at it. They seem absolutely real.”

“They are,” said Richardson.

“No, Pizarro, I am not wise at all,” Socrates said. “But, stupid as I am, it may be that I am not the least wise man who ever lived.”

“You think you’re wiser than I am, don’t you?”

“How can I say? First tell me how wise you are.”

“Wise enough to begin my life as a bastard tending pigs and finish it as Captain-General of Peru.”

“Ah, then you must be very wise.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Yet you killed a wise king because he wasn’t wise enough to worship God the way you wished him to. Was that so wise of you, Pizarro? How did his people take it, when they found out that their king had been killed?”

“They rose in rebellion against us. They destroyed their own temples and palaces, and hid their gold and silver from us, and burned their bridges, and fought us bitterly.”

“Perhaps you could have made some better use of him by not killing him, do you think?”

“In the long run we conquered them and made them Christians. It was what we intended to accomplish.”

“But the same thing might have been accomplished in a wiser way?”

“Perhaps,” said Pizarro grudgingly. “Still, we accomplished it. That’s the main thing, isn’t it? We did what we set out to do. If there was a better way, so be it. Angels do things perfectly. We were no angels, but we achieved what we came for, and so be it, Socrates. So be it.”

“I’d call that one a draw,” said Tanner.

“Agreed.”

“It’s a terrific game they’re playing.”

“I wonder who we can use to play it next,” said Richardson.

“I wonder what we can do with this besides using it to play games,” said Tanner.

“Let me tell you a story,” said Socrates. “The oracle at Delphi once said to a friend of mine, ‘There is no man wiser than Socrates,’ but I doubted that very much, and it troubled me to hear the oracle saying something that I knew was so far from the truth. So I decided to look for a man who was obviously wiser than I was. There was a politician in Athens who was famous for his wisdom, and I went to him and questioned him about many things. After I had listened to him for a time, I came to see that though many people, and most of all he himself, thought that he was wise, yet he was not wise. He only imagined that he was wise. So I realized that I must be wiser than he. Neither of us knew anything that was really worthwhile, but he knew nothing and thought that he knew, whereas I neither knew anything nor thought that I did. At least on one point, then, I was wiser than he: I didn’t think that I knew what I didn’t know.”

“Is this intended to mock me, Socrates?”

“I feel only the deepest respect for you, friend Pizarro. But let me continue. I went to other wise men, and they too, though sure of their wisdom, could never give me a clear answer to anything. Those whose reputations for wisdom were the highest seemed to have the least of it. I went to the great poets and playwrights. There was wisdom in their works, for the gods had inspired them, but that did not make them wise, though they thought that it had. I went to the stonemasons and potters and other craftsmen. They were wise in their own skills, but most of them seemed to think that that made them wise in everything, which did not appear to be the case. And so it went. I was unable to find anyone who showed true wisdom. So perhaps the oracle was right: that although I am an ignorant man, there is no man wiser than I am. But oracles often are right without their being much value in it, for I think that all she was saying was that no man is wise at all, that wisdom is reserved for the gods. What do you say, Pizarro?”

“I say that you are a great fool, and very ugly besides.”

“You speak the truth. So, then, you are wise after all. And honest.”

“Honest, you say? I won’t lay claim to that. Honesty’s a game for fools. I lied whenever I needed to. I cheated. I went back on my word. I’m not proud of that, mind you. It’s simply what you have to do to get on in the world. You think I wanted to tend pigs all my life? I wanted gold, Socrates! I wanted power over men! I wanted fame!”

“And did you get those things?”

“I got them all.”

“And were they gratifying, Pizarro?”

Pizarro gave Socrates a long look. Then he pursed his lips and spat.

“They were worthless.”

“Were they, do you think?”

“Worthless, yes. I have no illusions about that. But still it was better to have had them than not. In the long run nothing has any meaning, old man. In the long run we’re all dead, the honest man and the villain, the king and the fool. Life’s a cheat. They tell us to strive, to conquer, to gain—and for what? What? For a few years of strutting around. Then it’s taken away, as if it had never been. A cheat, I say.” Pizarro paused. He stared at his hands as though he had never seen them before. “Did I say all that just now? Did I mean it?” He laughed. “Well, I suppose I did. Still, life is all there is, so you want as much of it as you can. Which means getting gold, and power, and fame.”

“Which you had. And apparently have no longer. Friend Pizarro, where are we now?”

“I wish I knew.”

“So do I,” said Socrates soberly.

“He’s real,” Richardson said. “They both are. The bugs are out of the system and we’ve got something spectacular here. Not only is this going to be of value to scholars, I think it’s also going to be a tremendous entertainment gimmick, Harry.”

“It’s going to be much more than that,” said Tanner in a strange voice.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Tanner said. “But I’m definitely on to something big. It just began to hit me a couple of minutes ago, and it hasn’t really taken shape yet. But it’s something that might change the whole goddamned world.”

Richardson looked amazed and bewildered.

“What the hell are you talking about, Harry?”

Tanner said, “A new way of settling political disputes, maybe. What would you say to a kind of combat-at-arms between one nation and another? Like a medieval tournament, so to speak. With each side using champions that we simulate for them—the greatest minds of all the past, brought back and placed in competition—” He shook his head. “Something like that. It needs a lot of working out, I know. But it’s got possibilities.”

“A medieval tournament—combat-at-arms, using simulations? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Verbal combat. Not actual jousts, for Christ’s sake.”

“I don’t see how—” Richardson began.

“Neither do I, not yet. I wish I hadn’t even spoken of it.”

“But—”

“Later, Lew. Later. Let me think about it a little while more.”

“You don’t have any idea what this place is?” Pizarro said.

“Not at all. But I certainly think this is no longer the world where we once dwelled. Are we dead, then? How can we say? You look alive to me.”

“And you to me.”

“Yet I think we are living some other kind of life. Here, give me your hand. Can you feel mine against yours?”

“No. I can’t feel anything.”

“Nor I. Yet I see two hands clasping. Two old men standing on a cloud, clasping hands.” Socrates laughed. “What a great rogue you are, Pizarro!”

“Yes, of course. But do you know something, Socrates? You are too. A windy old rogue. I like you. There were moments when you were driving me crazy with all your chatter, but you amused me too. Were you really a soldier?”

“When my city asked me, yes.”

“For a soldier, you’re damned innocent about the way the world works, I have to say. But I guess I can teach you a thing or too.”

“Will you?”

“Gladly,” said Pizarro.

“I would be in your debt,” Socrates said.

“Take Atahuallpa,” Pizarro said. “How can I make you understand why I had to kill him? There weren’t even two hundred of us, and twenty-four millions of them, and his word was law, and once he was gone they’d have no one to command them. So of course we had to get rid of him if we wanted to conquer them. And so we did, and then they fell.”

“How simple you make it seem.”

“Simple is what it was. Listen, old man, he would have died sooner or later anyway, wouldn’t he? This way I made his death useful: to God, to the Church, to Spain. And to Francisco Pizarro. Can you understand that?”

“I think so,” said Socrates. “But do you think King Atahuallpa did?”

“Any king would understand such things.”

“Then he should have killed you the moment you set foot in his land.”

“Unless God meant us to conquer him, and allowed him to understand that. Yes. Yes, that must have been what happened.”

“Perhaps he is in this place too, and we could ask him,” said Socrates.

Pizarro’s eyes brightened. “Mother of God, yes! A good idea! And if he didn’t understand, why, I’ll try to explain it to him. Maybe you’ll help me. You know how to talk, how to move words around and around. What do you say? Would you help me?”

“If we meet him, I would like to talk with him,” Socrates said. “I would indeed like to know if he agrees with you on the subject of the usefulness of his being killed by you.”

Grinning, Pizarro said, “Slippery, you are! But I like you. I like you very much. Come. Let’s go look for Atahuallpa.”

TINY TANGO

Judith Moffett

Judith Moffett recently received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Author. Her short fiction has been published in F&SF and IAsfm; her first novel, Pennterra, which was part of our Isaac Asimov Presents line, is now available in paperback from Worldwide Library.

A word of warning: this story contains brief scenes which may be disturbing to some.

I’ve been encouraged (read: ordered) by my friend, a Hefn called Godfrey, to make this recording. I’m not sure why. It’s to be the story of my life, and frankly, a lot of my life’s been kind of grim. Godfrey tells me he values the story as an object lesson, but to whom and for what purpose he’s not saying. It isn’t news anymore that the Hefn don’t think like we do.

I made an important choice at twenty-two. Because of that choice I’m alive right now, but I’m still wondering: was it a wise choice, given that the next twenty-five years turned out to be a kind of living death? I hoped that if I did this recording, thought it all through in one piece, I’d be able to answer that question. I need to understand my life better than I do. I’m about to be put to sleep for a long time—forever if things go badly—and I need to know . . . well, what Godfrey thinks he knows. What it’s meant. What it’s all been for.

I can’t really say that this review has worked, because I still don’t think I know. But who can tell? Maybe you listeners in the archive will see something in it I can’t see. (Godfrey’s betting that you will.)

I recall a certain splendid June morning between the two accidents, mine and Peach Bottom’s—a bright, cool morning after a spell of sticky weather. I’d hobbled out to the patio in robe and slippers with my breakfast tray, and loitered over my homegrown whole-grain honey and raisin muffins and strawberry-soy milkshake, browsing through a new copy of Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine (featuring an article I’d written, on ways to discourage squirrels in the orchard and corn patch). Then, after a while, I’d taken my cane and gimped out in a leisurely way to inspect the crops. I’d broken an ankle bone that was taking its time about healing; to be forbidden my exercise routines was distressing, but also kind of a relief.

Because the kitchen garden provided my entire supply of vegetables and fruit, my interest in it was like a gardening hobbyist’s crossed with a frontier homesteader’s. If a crop failed I knew I wouldn’t, or needn’t, starve. On the other hand, since I never—ever—bought any produce for home consumption, if a crop failed it would almost certainly mean doing without something for a whole year. The daily tour of the kitchen garden was therefore always deeply interesting; and if the tour of the field test plots was even more so, theirs was an interestingness of a less intimate type.

Something serious had happened to the Kennebec potatoes; I noticed it at once. Yesterday at dusk the plants had been bushy and green, bent out of their beds on water-filled stalks by last week’s storm of rain but healthy, thriving, beginning to put out the tiny flowers that meant I could soon steal a few small tubers from under the mulch to eat with the new peas. Now the leaves of several plants were rolled and mottled with yellow. I pulled these up right away, doubting it would do any good, sick at heart as always to see my pampered children fail, however often failure struck them down.

The biggest threat to crops in an organic garden like mine is always disease spread by insects, aphids or leafhoppers in this case, which had all but certainly passed this disease on to other potato plants by now. The mottling and leaf-rolling meant that the bugs—probably aphids, the flightless sort I’d been taught to call “ant cows” in grade school—had infected my Kennebecs with a virus. At least one virus, maybe more. The ants would soon have moved their dairy herd all through the patch, if they hadn’t already. Plants still symptom-free would not remain so for long. When Eric showed up I would get him to spray the patch with a Rotenone solution but it was probably too late to save the crop by killing the carriers, the vector. These potatoes already had a virus, incurable and potentially lethal.

I remember that I thought: Well, that makes some more of us then.

I left the heap of infected plants for Eric to cart to the incinerator; they must not be composted but burned, and at once, or there’d be no chance at all of saving the crop and I could look forward to a potatoless year.

Destroy the infected to protect the healthy. The AIDS witch-hunts of the late nineties, the vigilante groups that had broken into testing and treatment facilities all over the country in order to find out who the infected people were, had been acting from a similar principle: identify! destroy! They wanted not just the ones with the acute form of the disease, but also those who’d tested positive to HIV-I, II, and/or III. I’d been lucky; workers in the Task Force office where my records were kept had managed to stand off the mob while a terrified volunteer worked frantically to erase the computer records and two others burned the paper files in the lavatory sink. The police arrived in time to save those brave people, thank God, but in other cities workers were shot and, in that one dreadful incident in St. Louis, barricaded in their building while somebody shattered the window with a firebomb.

My luck hadn’t stopped there, no siree. I had the virus right enough, but not—still not, after twenty-five long years—the disease itself. (These two facts have shaped my life. I mean my adult life; I’d just turned twenty-two, and was about to graduate from college in the spring of 1985, when my Western Blot came back positive and everything changed.)

Even the sporadic persecutions ended in 2001, when they got the Lowenfels vaccine. That took care of the general public; but nobody looked for a cure, or expected that a way would ever be found to eliminate the virus from the bodies of those of us who’d already been exposed to it. The best we could hope for was a course of treatment to improve our chances of not developing full-blown AIDS, at least not for a long, long time. The peptide vaccine that had become the standard therapy by 1994, which worked with the capsid protein in the cells of the virus, was ineffective with too many patients, as were the GMSC factor injections; and zidovudine and its cousins were just too toxic. A lot more research still needed to be done. We hoped that it would be, that we would not be forgotten; but we didn’t think it a very realistic hope.

The bone punch, and especially the Green Monkey vaccine which quickly supplanted that radical and rather painful procedure, meant the end of terror for the unsmitten; for the less fortunate it meant at least the end of persecution, as I said, and so for us, too, the day when the mass inoculations began was a great day. A lot of us were also suicidally depressed. Imagine how people crippled from childhood with polio must have felt when they started giving out the Salk vaccine to school kids on those little cubes of sugar, and the cripples had to stand around on their braces and crutches and try to be glad.

It didn’t do to think too much about it.

The Test Site clinician who gave me the news had steered me into a chair right afterwards and said, “When the results came in I made you an appointment for tonight with a counselor. She’ll help you more than you’d ever believe, and I don’t care what other commitments you’ve got to break: you be there.’ And he wrote the address and the time on a piece of paper, and I went.

The counselor was a woman in her thirties, sympathetic but tough, and she told me things that evening while I sat and was drenched in wave after icy wave of terror and dread. “We don’t know why some people seem to resist the virus better than others, and survive much longer, or why some of those that are AB-positive develop the disease fairly quickly, while others can have a latency period of five or six years,” Elizabeth said. “We don’t know for sure what triggers the development of the acute disease, if and when it does develop, or what percentage of infected people will eventually develop it.

“But there’s a lot of research going on right now into what they call ‘cofactors,’ variables that may influence the behavior of the virus in individual cases. Cofactors are things like general health, stress levels, life style. We think—we’re pretty sure—that it’s extremely important for people like you, who’ve been exposed, to live as healthfully and calmly as you possibly can. The HIV-I virus is linked to the immune system. You get the flu, your immune system kicks in to fight the flu virus, the AIDS virus multiplies; so the trick is to give your immune system as little to do as possible and buy yourself some time.

“Now, what that means in practical terms is: take care of yourself. Get lots of sleep and exercise. Don’t get overtired or too stressed out. Pay attention to your nutrition. Meditate. Above all, try not to fall into a despairing frame of mind! There’s a good chance they’ll find an effective treatment in four or five years, and if that happens and you’re still symptom-free, you should be able to live a normal life with a normally functioning immune system, so long as you keep up your treatments.”

That was the gist of her talk, and some of it sank in. She was wrong about the treatment, of course. In those days everybody expected it would be the vaccine that would prove impossible to make, that a drug to control the course of infection seemed much likelier. We were better off not knowing. Even with treatments to hope for, in those days it was fairly unusual to survive as long as four or five years after infection.

Elizabeth suggested a therapy group of people like myself that I might like to join, a group that had volunteered for a research project being done by a team of psychoneuroimmunologists, though we didn’t know that’s what they were. They were the hope-givers, that was enough. During the weeks that followed, with help from Elizabeth and the group, I began to work out a plan—to impose my own controls over my situation, in accordance with the research team’s wish to explore the effects of an extraordinarily healthful life style on symptom-free HIV-I carriers.

My undergraduate work in biology had been good enough to get me accepted into the graduate program at Cornell with a research assistantship. Until the test results came back I’d been excited by the challenge and the prospect of a change of scene; afterwards, and after a few sessions with Elizabeth and her group, I began instead to feel apprehensive about the effort it would take to learn the ropes of a new department, new university community, new city famous for its six annual months of winter. It seemed better to stick to familiar surroundings and to continue with the same counselor and therapy group. So I made late application to my own university’s graduate department and was admitted, and I stayed on: my first major life decision to be altered, the first of many times I was to choose a less challenging and stressful alternative over one that in every other way looked like the more attractive choice.

I’d caught the virus from my major professor; he’d been my only lover, so there could be no doubt of that. While I was still nerving myself up to tell him about the blood test he died in an accident on Interstate 95. Distressingly enough, I’m afraid I felt less grieved than relieved. The death let me off the hook and, more importantly, cleared the way for me to stay, for Bill’s presence would have been a difficulty. I’d felt from the first instant that I wanted no one, apart from the Task Force people, to know. Not my Fundamentalist family, certainly. Not my friends, from whom I now found myself beginning to withdraw (and since, like me, most of these were graduating seniors, this was easier than it sounds.) Overnight my interests had grown utterly remote from theirs. They were full of parties and career plans; I was fighting for my life, and viewed the lot of them from across the chasm of that absolute unlikeness.

I strolled, more or less, through graduate school, working competently without distinguishing myself. I wasn’t in a hurry, either. Distinction and rapid progress would have meant a greater commitment and a lot more work, and these were luxuries I could no longer afford, for my first commitment, and first responsibility, now, were to keeping myself alive.

As for how I was to use this life, a picture had gradually begun to form.

First of all it was necessary to divest myself of desire. The yuppiedom I had only recently looked forward to with so much confidence—the dazzling two-career marriage and pair of brilliant children, the house in the suburbs, the cabin in the Poconos and the vacations in Europe—had become, item by item, as unavailable to me as a career in space exploration or ballet. Children, obviously, were out. So was marriage. So, it seemed, was sex in any form; sex had been my nemesis, scarcely discovered before it had blighted me forever. The prestigious high-pressure career in research, which my undergraduate record had made seem a reasonable ambition, had become anything but. I was not after all going to be one of those remarkable professional mothers, making history in the lab, putting in quality time with the kids every day, keeping the lines of communication with my husband open and clear at every level no matter what. I built up the picture of the life I had aspired to for my counselor and my group—and looked at it long and well—and said good-bye to it, as I believed, forever. All that was over.

The next step was to create an alternate picture of a life that would be possible. We discussed my abilities and my altered wish list. I toyed briefly with the idea of a career in AIDS research—but AIDS research in the late eighties was about as calm and unstressful a line of work as leading an assault on the North Face of the Eiger in winter, and I had no yearning for martyrdom, then or ever. Through the hours and hours of therapy it emerged that what I wanted most was simple: just to survive, until the other scientists working that field had found a drug that would control the virus and make a normal life possible again. It wasn’t hard to work this out in group, because we all wanted the same thing: to hang on until the day—not too far away now—when some hero in a white coat, mounted on a white charger, came galloping up to the fort, holding a beaker of Miracle Formula high like a banner.

But how to hang on? For each of us the answer, if different in particulars, was also the same. We wanted to be able to support ourselves (and our families, if we had them) in reasonable comfort, and to keep our antibody status secret. Achieving this, for some of us—the older ones—meant giving up practices in law or medicine, or business careers, or staying in but lowering our sights. Some of us quit struggling to save troubled marriages or get custody of children.

For me the obvious course seemed to be a teaching job in an academic backwater, preferably one in that same metropolitan area. Accordingly—at a time in my life when I’d expected to be at Cornell, cultivating a mentor, working with keen zest and keener ambition at my research, developing and pursuing a strategy for landing a classy position at a prestigious eastern university—I quietly looked into the several nearby branch campuses of the Pennsylvania State University Commonwealth Campus System and made a choice.

My personal style altered a lot during graduate school. I’d done some acting in high school and college, and that made it easier—though you mustn’t suppose it was easy—to put my new persona over by turning down invitations (“too busy”) and so on. Before long my department, which had been so delighted to keep me, had lumped me in with that breed of student that fizzles out after a promising undergraduate takeoff, and the rest of the RA’s had given up on me too.

My therapy group speedily became my complete social universe. Nobody in the Bio Department could possibly have shared the intensity of common concern we shared within what we came to call the Company (after the thing Misery loves best). When as time went by one or another of us would lose the battle for wellness, the rest would push aside our own fears and rally round the ailing boon Companion, doing our best to make the final months as comfortable as we could. That wasn’t easy either, let me tell you. But we did it. We were like a church family, all in all to one another. Elizabeth, who had given her life to helping us and the researchers at Graduate Hospital—she was our pastor and our friend, and yet, even so, a little bit of an outsider. When she asked what I meant to do forfun—since life could not consist entirely of the elimination of challenges and risks—I could only reply that just staying alive and well seemed like plenty of fun for the present, and think privately that no true Companion would ever need to have that explained to him or her.

We never told our real names, not in a quarter of a century, and stubbornly refused all that time to evolve from a collective into an assembly of intimates, but we knew each other inside out.

But to the people in my department, who did know my name, I appeared by the age of twenty-nine to have contracted into a prematurely middle-aged schoolmarmish and spinsterish recluse, and nobody there seemed surprised when I accepted a job for which I was grossly overqualified, teaching basic biology and botany at a two-year branch of the Penn State System, fifteen miles out in the suburbs of Delaware County.

My parents in Denver were also unsurprised. Neither had known how to read between the lines of my decision to stay put rather than go to Cornell. To them all college teaching seemed equally prestigious, and equally fantastic. They liked telling their friends about their daughter the future biology professor, but they knew too little about the life I would lead for the particulars to interest them much or invite their judgment. After the first grandchild came they’d been more incurious than ever about my doings, which had seemed less and less real to them anyway ever since I left the church. My new church was the Company, and of this they knew nothing, ever.

My job was a dull one made duller by my refusal to be drawn into the school’s social web. But it was tolerable work, adequately paid. I stayed in character as the reliable but lackluster biologist; I did what was necessary, capably, without zest or flair. My pre-tenure years were a balancing act, filled but not overfilled. I prepared and taught my classes, swam a mile or ran five every day, meditated for half an hour each morning and evening, carefully shopped for and cooked my excruciatingly wholesome and balanced meals, and took the train into the city one night a week to meet with the Company, and one afternoon a month for my aptly named gag p24 treatments. Every summer for five years I would spend some leisurely hours in the lab, then sit in my pleasant apartment and compose a solid, economical, careful paper developing one aspect or another of my Ph.D. research, which had dealt with the effects of stress on the immune system in rats. One after another these papers were published in perfectly respectable scientific journals, and were more than enough to satisfy the committee that in due course awarded me tenure.

By the time they had approved me, in the fateful year 1999, my medical records had been destroyed. No document or disk anywhere in the world existed to identify me by name as a symptom-free carrier of the HIV-I virus, though no other personal fact spoke as eloquently about the drab thing I had become.

The fourteen years had thinned the ranks of Companions, but a fair number of us were still around. Just about all of us survivors had faithfully—often fanatically—followed the prescribed fitness/nutrition/stress management regimen, and it was about then that our team of doctors began to congratulate us and each other that we were beating the bejeezus out of the odds. If you’re wondering about the lost Companions, whether they too hadn’t stuck to the routines and rules, the answer is that they usually said they had; but it was easy enough for us to see (or suppose) how this or that variable made their cases different from ours.

I myself hardly ever fell ill, hardly had colds or indigestion, so extremely careful was I of myself. My habits, athletics aside, were those of a fussy old maid—Miss Dove or Eleanor Rigby or W.H. Auden’s Miss Edith Gee. They were effective though. When a bug did get through my defenses despite all my care—as some inevitably did, for student populations have always harbored colds and flus of the most poisonous volatility—I would promptly put myself to bed and stay there, swallowing aspirins, liquids by the bucket, and one-gram vitamin C tablets, copious supplies of which were always kept on hand. No staggering in with a fever to teach a class through the raging snowstorm—no siree, not on your life. Not this survivor.

After tenure I bought a little house in a pleasant development of modest brick tract homes on half-acre lots near the campus, and settled in for the long haul. For years I’d subscribed to the health magazine Prevention, published by the Rodale press; now at last I’d be able to act on their advice to grow my own vegetables instead of buying the toxin-doused produce sold in the supermarkets. I mailed off my subscription to Organic Gardening, had the soil tested, bought my first spade, hoe, trowel, and rake, and some organic fertilizers, spaded up a corner of the back yard, and began.

That first post-tenure summer I made a garden and wrote no paper. My mood was reflective but the reflections led nowhere much. The next year of teaching was much the same: I did my job, steered clear of controversy, kept in character. But as the following spring came on—spring of the year 2000—I became restless and vaguely uneasy. Even as I loosened the soil in my raised beds and spread over them the compost I had learned to make, I had dimly begun to know that the cards I’d been playing thus far were played out, that it was time for a new deal.

What I felt, I know now, were the perfectly ordinary first stirrings of a midlife crisis, probably initiated by the “marker event” of successfully securing my means of support for the foreseeable future. Ordinary it may have been, but it scared me badly. Uneasiness is stressful; stress is lethal.

I’ve stopped to read over what I’ve written to this point. It all seems true and correct, but it leaves too much out, and I think what it mainly leaves out is the terror. I don’t mean the obvious terror of theTerror, the riots of 1998-99, when I might have been killed outright had the mob that stormed the Alternate Test Site on Walnut Street gotten its talons into my file and learned my name, when the Company met for months in church basements kept dark, when threatening phone calls woke Elizabeth night after night and she didn’t dare come to meetings because the KKK was shadowing her in hopes of being led to us. I certainly don’t deny we were scared to death while that nightmare lasted, but it was like a nightmare, born of hysteria and short-lived. In a while, we woke up from it. I’m talking about something else.

It’s true that we all know we’re going to die. Whether we’re crunched by a truck tomorrow while crossing the street, or expire peacefully in our sleep at ninety, we know it’ll happen.

Now, as long as one fate seems no more likely than the other, most people manage to live fairly cheerfully with the awareness that one day they will meet their death for sure. But knowing that your chances of dying young, and soon, and not pleasantly, are many percentage points higher than other people’s, changes your viewpoint a lot. Some of the time my radically careful way of life kept thedemons at bay, but some of the time I would get up and run my five miles and shower and dress and meditate and drive to school and teach my classes and buy cabbages and oranges at the market and drive home and grade quizzes and meditate and eat supper and go to bed, all in a state of anxiety so intense I could scarcely control it at all.

There were drugs that helped some, but the best were addictive so you couldn’t take those too often. The only thing that made years of such profound fear endurable was the Companionship of my fellow travelers. Together we could keep our courage up, we could talk out (or scream or sob out) our helpless rage at the medical establishment as years went by without producing the miracle drugs they’d been more or less promising, that would lift this bane of uncertainty from us and make us like everybody else—mortal, but with equal chances. Now, terror and rage are extremely stressful. Stress is lethal. I had said so over and over in print, my white rats and I had demonstrated it in the lab, statistics of every sort bore out the instinctive conviction that we had more to fear from fear itself than from just about anything else; and so our very terrors terrified us worst of all. But we bore it better together than we possibly could have borne it alone.

A few of my Companions in these miseries took the obvious next step and paired off. One or two probably told each other their real names. I wasn’t even tempted. But sexual denial is stressful too; so on Saturday afternoons I used to rent a pornographic video or holo. A lot of these were boring, but trial and error taught me which brands showed some imagination in concept or direction, and voyeurism in that sanitary form did turn me on, it worked, it took care of the problem. Miniaturized in two or three dimensions, the shape-shifting penises of the actors seemed merely fascinating and the spurting semen innocent. No matter that a few spurts of semen had destroyed my life, and that a penis, the only real one I’d ever had to do with, had been the murder weapon; these facts did not feel relevant to the moaning and slurping of the young folks—certified AB-Negatives every one—who provided my weekly turn-on.

For a very long time I was content to release my sexuality, for hygienic reasons, into its narrow run for an hour or so each weekend, like some dangerous animal at the zoo. A few of the guys in the Company were straight, and maybe even willing, but a real relationship—a business as steamy and complicated as that—would have been out of the question for me. Others might have the skills; I lacked them. How much safer and less demanding the role of voyeur in the age of electronics, able to fast-forward through the dull bits and play the best ones over!

The Company, directed by Elizabeth, seemed to understand the force of these feelings. At any rate I wasn’t pushed to try to overcome them.

Well, as I was saying: the beginning of my thirty-seventh summer, one year after receiving tenure at the two-year college where I seemed doomed to spend the rest of my life, however long that proved to be, and a year after the worst of the rioting ended—the beginning of that summer found me jittery and depressed, and very worried about being jittery and depressed. Probably I wouldn’t have acted even so; but at about the same time, or a bit earlier, I’d begun to exhibit a piece of obsessive-compulsive behavior that until then I’d only heard about at Company gatherings: one morning, toweling down after my shower, I caught myself scrutinizing the skin of my thighs and calves for the distinctive purplish blotches of Kaposi’s sarcoma, the form of skin cancer, previously rare, whose appearance is a diagnostic sign of the acute form of AIDS.

How long I’d been doing this half-consciously I couldn’t have told you, but from that morning I was never entirely free of the behavior. I’d reached an age when my skin had begun to have its share of natural blotches and keratoses, and I gave myself heart failure more times than I can count, thinking some innocent bruise or lesion meant this was finally it. After several weeks, growing desperate, I gave up shaving my legs—and shorts and skirts in consequence—and suffered through the hot weather in loose overalls, just to avoid the chronic anxiety of seeing my own skin. I nearly drove myself nuts.

The Company assaulted this symptom with shrewd concern and a certain amount of relish. Your unconscious is trying to tell you something, dummy, one or another of them would say; I used to do that when I got so freaked out in the riots—sloppy about doing my Yoga—too busy chasing the bucks—into a bad way after I lost my mother—upset because I couldn’t afford to keep the house but didn’t want to sell. Remember when I did that? they’d say. Just figure out what you’re doing wrong and fix that, then you’ll be okay. For starters, try deciding whether it’s something you need to work into your life, or something you need to get rid of.

I didn’t see how it could very well be the latter, since my present life had been stripped to the bare essentials already. But what they said made sense. It was this sort of counsel that made us so necessary to one another.

Elizabeth, moreover, had a concrete suggestion. On her advice I rented a condo in the Poconos near the Delaware Water Gap—almost the vacation spot of my former Yuppie dreams—for a couple of weeks. The Appalachian Trail, heavily used in summer unfortunately, passes through the Gap. I spent the two weeks of my private retreat hiking the Trail, canoeing on the river, and assessing the state of my life.

So how was I doing?

Well, on the plus side, I was still alive. Half the original Company of sixteen years before, when I’d just come into it, were not, most from having developed the disease, though in a few cases more than a decade after seroconverting. In the early days it had been hoped that if a person with HIV-I antibodies hadn’t fallen ill after six or eight years or so he probably never would, but it hadn’t turned out like that. So far, the longer we survived, the more of the virus we had in us; to be alive at all after such a long time was pretty remarkable. I tried to feel glad.

I’d chosen a suitable job and fixed things so I could keep it; I’d also managed my money intelligently during the years before getting tenure. My salary, while not great, was adequate for a single person who hardly went anywhere and whose expensive tastes ran to top-of-the-line exercise equipment and holographic projectors. Raises would be regular, I would be able to manage my house payments easily. I’d already bought nearly all the furniture I needed, and had assembled a solid reference library of books, tapes, and disks on nutrition, fitness, stress management, and diseases, especially my own; and the gardening and preserving shelf was getting there. In short, all the details of the plan I had devised for myself sixteen years before were in place. And it had worked out: here I was.

So how come I felt so lousy?

At first, when I tried to tot up the negatives, it was hard to think of any at all. I was alive, wasn’t I? Didn’t that cancel out all the minuses right there?

As a matter of fact, it didn’t. Once I got started the list went on and on.

As a bright college senior I had planned to make something really dazzling and grand of my life. That dream had been aborted; but I began to see that all these years I had been secretly grieving for it as for an aborted child. However obvious this looks now, at the time the recognition was a terrific shock. Years and years had lapsed since my last conscious fantasy of knocking the Cornell Biology Department on its collective ear, and I really believed I had ritualistically said goodbye to all that, early in my therapy.

Just what was it I’d wanted to do after Cornell, apart from becoming rich and famous? I could hardly remember. But after a while (and an hour of stony trail, with magnificent views of New Jersey) I had called back into being a sense of outward-directedness, of largesse bestowed upon a grateful world, that differed absolutely from the intense and cautious self-preoccupation which had governed my life from the age of twenty-two. Once, I had craved to be a leader in an international scientific community of intellectual exchange. Now, I thought, planned, and worked for the well-being of just one individual, myself—for what was the Company but just myself, multiplied by fifteen or eleven or nine? I’d hardly given a thought to normal people, people not afflicted as we were, for a long, long time, and certainly I had given them nothing else—not even a halfway decent course in botany.

It was an awful shock, remembering what it had been like to take engagement with the great world for granted. I turned aside from the Trail and its traffic to climb a gray boulder shaggy with mountain laurel, and sat staring out over the summery woods, remembering the hours I’d spent talking with Bill—my professor, the one who’d exposed me to the virus—about world population control and sustainable agriculture. No details came back; but the sheer energy and breadth of vision, the ability to imagine tackling issues of such complexity and social import, now seemed unbelievable. How had I shrunk so small?

At that moment on the mountain my triumph of continuing to live looked paltry and mean. I’d died anyway, hadn’t I? Wasn’t this death-in-life a kind of unwitting suicide? But I knew at bottom that it was no ignoble thing to have gone on living where so many had died. My fit of self-loathing ran its course, and I climbed down from the rock and started back down the Trail toward the Water Gap, three miles below, where I’d left my car.

I pondered as I went. What was missing from my life now seemed clearer. Meaningful work, first and foremost. Engagement. Self-respect, if that wasn’t asking too much—not simply for having survived, but for contributing something real to society; and perhaps even the respect of others.

And last of all I let myself remember, really remember, those springtime afternoons in Bill’s sunny office with its coffee machine and little refrigerator and daybed, and added one more thing: intimacy, social and sexual. Not the Company, that bunch of neutered and clairvoyant clones, but I and Thou: intimacy with the Other.

It was a list of things necessary to a fulfilled and happy life, and it bristled like a porcupine with potential stresses.

The trail was rough and steep, and I was wiped out from both my journeys, the inner more than the outer. When I let myself back into the condo the sun had set, and I thought with a fierce rush of resentment how nice it would be, just for once, to microwave a box of beans and franks and open a Coke, like a normal American citizen on holiday, instead of having to boil the goddamned homemade pasta and cook the spaghetti sauce from scratch. The strength of this resentment astounded me all over again: how long had I been sitting on the powderkeg of so much rage against the virus itself?

Enlightenment came early in the first week of my retreat, so I had plenty of time left to process my insights and form conclusions.

About personal intimacy first. Essential or not, I found that I still just didn’t feel able to risk it. The potential trouble seemed bigger than the potential payoff; as I’ve mentioned, I lacked the skills.

About engagement. More promising. The thought of connecting myself in a meaningful way to society by some means that didn’t threaten my own stability appealed to me a lot. I could teach in a more engaged fashion, but that felt far too personal, too exposed and risky. Then I thought of something else, something actually quite perfect: I could volunteer to work with AIDS patients. This may sound uniquely stressful for someone in my position, but the prospect oddly wasn’t. I already knew everything about the progression of the disease, I’d been through it half a dozen times with dying Companions, so could not be shocked; I needn’t fear infection (being infected already); and I felt certain my powers of detachment would be adequate.

Then about meaningful work. I pondered that one for the whole ten days remaining, pretty much all the time.

In the end it was a dream—the holo of the unconscious—that showed me what to do. I dreamed of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who invented modern genetics while serving obscurely in a monastery. In my dream Mendel had the mild wide face with its little round-lensed spectacles of the photograph in the college biology text I used. Sweating and pink-faced in his heavy cassock, he bent tenderly over a bed of young peas, helping them find the trellis of strings and begin to climb. I stood at a little distance and watched, terribly moved to see how carefully he tucked the delicate tendrils around the strings. As I approached, he looked up and smiled as if to say, “Ah, so there you are at last!”—a smile brim-full of love—and handed me his notebook and pen. When I hung back, reluctant somehow to accept them, he straightened up slowly—his back was stiff—and moving closer drew me into an embrace so warm and protective that it seemed fatherly; yet at once I was aware of his penis where it arched against me through the folds of cloth, and of his two firm breasts pressed above my own. He kissed the top of my head. Then he was gone, striding away through the gate, and I stood alone among the peas, the pen and notebook in my hands somehow after all—in my own garden, my own back yard.

It had been a long time, literally years, since I’d last cried about anything; but when I woke that dawn my soaked pillow and clogged sinuses showed that I’d been weeping in my sleep, evidently for quite a while. Not since childhood had I felt such powerful love; not since childhood had anyone loved me, or held me, in just that way. To be reminded broke my heart, yet there was something healingin the memory too, and in the luxury of crying.

I lay in my dampness and thought about Mendel—how, having failed to qualify as a teacher, he had returned to the monastery; and there, in that claustrophobic place, in that atmosphere of failure, without the approval or maybe even the knowledge of his bishop, he planned his experiments and planted his peas.

In its way Mendel’s life was as circumscribed, and presumably as monastic, as my own. Yet instead of whining and bitching he’d turned his hand to what was possible and done something uniquely fine.

Me, I’d written off further research because the campus lab facilities were so limited and so public, and applying for funding or the chance to work for a summer or two in a better-equipped lab seemed incautious. It was also true that I’d done about as much in the area of stress and the immune system as I cared to do, and that white rats got more expensive every year and the administration more grudging each spring when my latest requisition forms went in. But if I could change directions completely—

Well, the Company had a perfect field day with that dream. You can imagine. They were all sure I’d been telling myself to do exactly that: shift directions, devise some experiments for my own backyard garden and publish the results. About the symbolism of the hermaphroditic monk, opinion was divided; one person thought him a fused father/mother figure, breasts and gownlike cassock muddling his obvious identity as Father Mendel. (“Monks are called Brother,” a lapsed-Catholic Companion protested.) Others suggested variously that the dream message concerned repressed bisexuality, incest, plain old sexual frustration, even religious longings. They all seemed to have a clearer idea of that part of what it meant than I had myself. But I thought they were right about the other part: that I seemed to want to turn my garden to scientific account in some way, then write up the results (the pen and notebook, both anachronistic types) and disseminate them.

II

This was the year 2000, when four separate strains of HIV virus had been isolated and more than a million people had died. There was a desperate need for qualified volunteer help, for the hospital wings, hastily thrown up by the newly organized National Health, were bursting with AIDS patients. The great majority of new cases now were addicts and the spouses and infants of addicts, and most of these were poor people. Except among the poor, sexual transmission of the virus had become much less common for a variety of reasons. So there were far fewer groups like ours being formed by then, but still plenty of old cases around—people exposed years ago who had survived a long time but whose luck had finally run out. As mine might any day.

Perhaps I secretly believed that by caring for such people I could somehow propitiate or suborn the Fates—”magical thinking” this is called—or perhaps my bond with them, which I refused to feel,demanded some other expression of solidarity. I don’t know. I told myself that this was my debt to society, due and payable now.

So, soon after returning from my retreat, I attended an Induction Day for volunteers at the AIDS Task Force office in the city. The experience wrung me out and set me straight. I’d vaguely pictured myself helping in the wards, carrying lunch trays and cleaning bedpans, but it was plain from what the speakers told us that I would find this sort of work more emotionally demanding than I’d expected and more than I’d be at all able to handle. I had already known better than to offer myself as a counselor or a “buddy” assigned to a particular patient; I’d been “buddy” to too many Companions already, with more of this bound to come, and even in that collective and defended context it was hard. That left the dull but essential clerical work: getting new patients properly registered and identified within the bureaucracy of the National Health, processing and filing information, explaining procedures, taking medical histories.

I signed up for that, one afternoon a week. Compared to the burdens other volunteers were shouldering I felt like a coward, but within the Company itself I was a sort of hero, though resented also for what my action made the rest face anew: their fear. Several of the gay men who had gone to Induction Days in years past, but had not felt able to sign up for anything at all, felt especially put down; buteveryone reported a sense of being implicitly criticized. “You’re, like, the teetotaler at the cocktail party,” said one of the gays, making us all laugh.

We were no band of activists and saints, the nine of us left of the original Company. Nobody new had joined us for a long time. When the National Health was chartered by Congress, the mandatoryanonymous universal blood tests establishing who was and who was not a carrier had brought in a few fresh faces for a time, but those just-identified AB-Positives had mostly preferred to form groups of their own. The rigors of psychoneuroimmunology didn’t appeal to everybody, nor did the medical profession agree unanimously that avoiding stress should be a First Principle for the infected. But itwas ours; and by making my Companions feel guilty I was guilty myself of stressing them. I understood their resentment perfectly.

At the same time I did feel a first small flush of self-respect to find that none of the others could face this work, relatively undemanding though it was, and that I could.

And almost at once I had my reward. The obsessive blotch-hunting stopped, I could again bear with composure the sight of my own skin; but a stranger and funnier reward was to follow. One day in the hospital outlet shop, on an errand for a busier volunteer, my eye fell by chance upon an object invented to make life easier for diabetic women: a hard plastic device molded to be tucked between the legs, with a spout designed to project a stream of urine forward, the more conveniently to be tested with litmus strips. In a flash a bizarre idea sprang fully developed into my head, exactly like one of those toads that lie buried in dried-up mudholes in the desert, patiently waiting out the years for the rains that tell it the time had come to emerge and mate. I bought the thing.

Back home I dug out an old electric dildo whose motor had long since burned out—a flexible rod with a “skin” of pink rubber. This I castrated, or rather circumcised. I then glued the three inches of amputated rubber foreskin snugly to the base of the plastic spout and snipped a hole in the tip.

I now had an implement capable of letting female plumbing mimic male plumbing, at least from a short distance, unless the observer were very sharp-eyed or very interested.

Inspired, my next step was to go out and buy myself a complete set of men’s clothing: socks and underwear, trousers generously tailored, shirt, sweater, tie, and loosely fitting sport jacket, all of rather conservative cut and color and good quality. I even bought a pair of men’s shoes. I’m quite a tall woman—five feet ten and a half inches—with a large-boned face, a flat chest, and the muscular arms and shoulders you build up through years at the rowing machine. And I found that the proverb Clothes make the man is true, for my full-length bathroom mirror confirmed that I made a wholly creditable one. Last of all, into the pouch of my brand-new jockey shorts, right behind the zipper of my new slacks, I tucked the plastic-and-rubber penis. The hard thing pressed against my pubic bone, none too comfortably.

Dress rehearsals went on for a whole weekend. By Monday, based on comparisons with certain water-sports videos I had seen, I thought the effect hilariously realistic. Where Brother Mendel leads, I said to myself with reckless glee, I follow! I can tell you for sure that this entire undertaking—making my dildo, buying my disguises, learning to fish out the fake penis suavely and snug it in place and let fly—was altogether the most fun I’d had in years. The only fun, really, the only bursting out of bounds. The thought of beans and franks was nothing to this.

When I felt ready for a trial run I put on my reverse-drag costume and drove to a shopping mall in a neighboring state, where for three hours I practiced striding confidently into the men’s rooms of different department stores. I would hit the swinging door with a straight arm, swagger up to a urinal, plant my feet wide apart. . . . I kind of overacted the role, but I could do this much with a flourish anyway. What I could not do was unclench my sphincter; I was all style and no substance in the presence of authentic (urinating) men. So I flunked that final test.

But my first purpose all along had been voyeuristic, and in this I was wildly, immediately successful. It was a mild day in early autumn. Lots of guys in shirtsleeves, with no bulky outer clothing to hinder the eager voyeur, came in and struck a pose at urinals near mine. For three hours I stole furtive glances at exposed penises from within a disguise that no one appeared even to question, let alone see through. It was marvelous. I drove home exhilarated quite as much by my own daring as by what I’d managed to see. To have infiltrated that bastion of male privilege and gotten away with it! What a triumph! What an actor!

All that year, the year 2000, I worked by fits and starts on my role of male impersonator, adding outfits to suit the different seasons and practicing body control (roll of shoulders, length of stride) like a real actor training for a part. I cruised the men’s rooms less often than I’d have liked, since it seemed only prudent to avoid those near home, and I was kept fairly busy. But over time by trial and error I gained confidence. I learned that large public men’s rooms in bus and train stations, airports, interstate rest areas and the like, were best—that men visiting these were usually in a hurry and the rooms apt to be fairly crowded, so that people were least likely to take notice of me there. It was in one such place that I was at last able to perfect my role by actually relieving myself into the porcelain bowl, and after that time I could usually manage it, a fact which made me smug as a cat.

Every cock I sneaked a look at that year seemed beautiful to me. The holos were so much less interesting than this live show that I all but stopped renting them. I also made some fascinating observations. For instance, young gay men no longer rash enough to pick somebody up in a bus station or whatever would sometimes actually stand at adjacent urinals, stare at one another, and stroke themselves erect. Wow! I felt a powerful affinity with these gays, whose motives for being there were so much like my own. Alas, they also made me nervous, for my prosthesis couldn’t hold up to fixed regard, and sometimes, if I lingered too long, someone would show more interest than was safe.

The Company had been three-fourths gay men in the beginning, five of whom were still around, yet not one had ever said a word to the rest of us about mutual exhibitionism in public toilets, and it seemed possible that most straight men had never noticed. After sixteen years of weekly group therapy I’d have sworn none of us could possibly have any secrets left; but perhaps the gay Companions simply preferred not to offer up this behavior to the judgment of the straights—even now, and even us. Perhaps it was humiliating for them, even a bit sordid. I could see that. This behavior of mine had its sordid side. The recreational/adventurous side outweighed that twenty to one; but I took my cue from the gays, and kept my weird new hobby to myself—learning in this way that withholding a personal secret from the Company, retaining one exotic scrap of privacy, exhilarated me nearly as much as having live penises to admire after all the dreary years of admiring them on tape.

But if the dream image of Gregor-Mendel-as-hermaphrodite was present to me through much of this experience—for I knew that in some deep way they were connected—Mendel was a still more potent icon in the garden that summer. At first thought, backyard research seemed very small beer. I knew as well as anyone that the day had long since passed when a single white-coated scientist, working alone amid the test tubes in his own basement laboratory, could do important research. Mendel himself had had a larger plot of ground at his disposal.

Yet examining the unfamiliar literature of this field, and browsing in Biological Abstracts, forced me to revise my view: there were some very useful experiments within the scope even of a backyard researcher. Some of the published papers that interested me most had been written by amateurs. It appeared that master gardeners, like amateur archaeologists and paleontologists, had long been making substantial contributions to the fields of plant breeding, pest control, cultivation practices, and the field trials of new varieties. Organic methods of gardening and farming, which were what interested me, were particularly open to contributions from gardeners and farmers, non-scientists who had taught themselves to run valid trials and keep good records. Genetic engineering and chemical warfare were clearly not the only ways to skin the cat of improved crop yields.

The more I looked into it, the more impressed I was, and correspondingly the more hopeful. Though but a beginning gardener I was a trained scientist; if these other people could do something useful in their modest way, I should certainly be able to.

I’d lost my first two crops of melons to bacterial wilt and/or mosaic virus, I wasn’t sure which, and both years my cucumbers had also died of wilt. (The first couple of seasons in an organic garden are tough sledding.) The striped cucumber beetle was the probable vector for both diseases. God knows I had enough of the little bastards. Now, you can grow Cucurbita—the vining crops, including all melons, squashes, cucumbers, and gourds—under cheesecloth or spun-bonded floating row covers, which exclude the bugs, but you have to uncover the plants when the female flowers appear so the bees can get at them, and if the bees can, so can the beetles. Besides, half the fun of gardening is watching the crops develop, and how can you do that if they’re shrouded under a white web of Ultramay?

No, the thing was to produce a cultivar with resistance, or at least tolerance, to one or more of the insect-borne diseases. After reading everything I could get my hands on about bacterial wilt and cucumber mosaic virus, I concluded that a project of trying to breed a really flavorful variety of muskmelon strongly resistant to bacterial wilt would make the most sense. Wilt was a bigger problem in our area, and some hybridization for wilt resistance in musk-melons had already been done. But I was much more powerfully attracted to the mosaic problem. It took the Company about half a minute to point out, once they’d understood the question, that cucumber mosaic is caused by a virus. There’s no cure for mosaic; once it infects a plant the plant declines, leaf by leaf and vine by vine, until it dies.(Just like you-know-who.)

There’s no cure for bacterial wilt, either, but I couldn’t help myself: I began to plan an experiment focusing on mosaic.

I didn’t want to waste time duplicating the research of others, so I made several trips that summer to Penn State’s main campus at University Park to extract from their excellent library everything that was known about all previous efforts to breed virus resistance into muskmelons. These trips were fun. For one thing it pleased me a lot to be doing research again. For another I did the trips in undrag, stopping at every highway rest area on the Pennsylvania Turnpike between Valley Forge and Harrisburg to investigate men’s rooms—and in fact simply to use them too, as this was, prosthesis and all, easier, quicker, and less grubby than using the ladies’.

It turned out that the breeders had never made much headway against virus disease in muskmelons, and since the introduction of row covers and beetle traps the subject had been generally slighted. Commercial growers had been getting around the problem of pollination for quite a while by constructing great tents of Ultramay over their fields and putting a hive of honeybees inside with the melons. As this was hardly practical for the home gardener, the state agricultural extension services recommended several pesticides for use on the beetles (and aphids, another serious virus vector for cucurbits) during the two or three weeks when the plants would have to come out from under cover to be pollinated. Spraying at dusk was suggested, to spare the bees. But these were persistenttoxins and I doubted all the bees would be spared, though they might pollinate the vines before they died.

I also read up on the life cycle of the striped cucumber beetle, then built a clever cage in which to rear as many generations of virus-bearing beetles as necessary to carry the critters through the winter—they hibernate in garden trash, but I wanted to guarantee my supply. When the cage was ready I rigged a shelf-and-fluorescent-tube setup in which to raise a sequence of zucchini plants to feed the beetles—nothing grows faster than a zucchini, and nothing’s easier to grow, and the beetles love them. As each plant in turn began to sicken I would transplant a new, healthy seedling into the soil on the bottom of the rearing cage, then cut through the stem of the sick zucchini, shake off the beetles, and remove the plant. The roots had to be left undisturbed, because the soil around them contained eggs, feeding larvae, and pupae, but by the time the space was needed for a new transplant the roots would have died or been eaten up.

It worked beautifully. My quarter-inch black-and-yellow beetles spent that winter, and the next four winters, living the life of Riley.

And throughout that hard late winter of 2001 I spent all my spare time thinking out my project, its objectives and procedures, until I knew exactly what I wanted to do. By April a small ranked and labeled army of cantaloupe seedlings stood waiting in my basement, under lights, for the day when they could safely be set out in their carefully prepared beds and tucked under Ultramay. Assuming no spectacular early success, the plan would organize my summers for the next five years. Plant breeding is not an enterprise for impatient people. It is a gesture of faith in the (personal) future.

In early May, just as the azaleas were at their peak of bloom, a week before the last frost date in Delaware County, Jacob Lowenfels and his team of American and French researchers announced their discovery of the AIDS vaccine.

The announcement threw me, and the rest of the Company with me, into a profound funk. Except for us and several thousand dying people, the whole city seemed to rejoice around us; even the war news yielded pride of place. Thank God the spring quarter had ended, except for some finals I could grade with one hand tied behind me. Watering cantaloupe seedlings before turning in, on the night of May 15, I came within a hair of wrenching the table over and dumping the lot of them, smash, onto the concrete floor. Why should these frivolous Cucurbita live when so many innocents were dead?

I know, I know: the Lowenfels vaccine was of enormous importance even to us—even, for that matter, to those who had developed the disease but would not begin dying seriously for months or years; for overnight the fear of discovery and persecution ended. We were no longer lepers. People could acquire immunity to us now. Only those already in the final stages of dying from AIDS benefitted not at all, so that the AIDS wings of the hospitals lay for weeks beneath a blanket pall of sorrow.

And of course I knew all this really, even at the time. I carried out my trays of cantaloupes and honeydews on the sixteenth after all, and planted them on schedule. The beds beneath their Ultramay covers looked so peculiar that I decided to fence the yard, discourage the neighbor’s curiosity. I planted with a leaden heart that day, but the melons didn’t seem to mind; in their growing medium of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite dug well into my heavy clay soil they soon sent out runners and began to produce male flowers. When the female flowers appeared about ten days later I pulled the Ultramay off of some beds just long enough to rub the anthers of the male flowers against the pistils of the female ones. At other beds I sent in the beetle troops. At the same time I was growing a year’s supply of vegetables in my kitchen garden. My computer kept daily records for both garden and field trials. In August I gave my control melons away by the cartrunkload to the Companions, ate tons of them myself, froze some, saved the rest to rot peacefully till they could be blended with autumn leaves into a giant compost tower. (The vines that died of mosaic, and the malformed fruit they produced, if any, went out with the trash.) And I preserved, packaged, labeled, and froze my hybrid seeds.

None of the varieties I’d inoculated with the virus that first year had resisted it worth a damn. I saved seed from only one mosaic-stunted hybrid cultivar, a Cucumis melo called “Mi ting tang,” which had shown good resistance to cucumber mosaic (plus gummy stem blight and downy mildew) in field trials in Japan. That one had managed to struggle to maturity and produce a crop despite its illness. The fruit, though dwarfed, had a fair flavor and good thick flesh, and I thought I might backcross and then cross it with other varieties after I saw the results of my hybridizing the following year. Resistance in the Ano strains of muskmelon appeared to vary according to the weather; I wanted to find out more about that too.

Between times I canned and froze and dried my garden produce as one after another the overlapping crops came in. Once I’d gotten over the shock of the vaccine it was a wonderful summer, the best of my life, full of pleasurable outdoor work; and the four that followed resembled it pretty closely.

Each fall and winter I would overhaul my records and revise my schedules; compost plant residues; treat the soil of the inoculated beds to kill any leftover beetles; care for the next year’s beetle crop and manage their supply of zucchini plants; clean and oil my tools; consume my preserved stock of organically grown, squeaky-clean food; teach my classes and run my labs; put in my afternoon at the hospitals every week; meet with the Company; and take my treatments. In a small way I’d also begun to write for gardening magazines, mainly Rodale’s and National Gardening, though occasionally for Horticulture or even Harrowsmith. I’d never been so busy nor interested nor free of anxiety, and I think now that unconsciously I’d come to believe that I was safe. “Magical thinking,” sure—but it wasa much healthier and better-rounded way of life, no question.

It was the fifth year of the research, the spring of 2006, that two events occurred to shatter the even tenor of my days. The arrival of the ship from outer space was the big news; but the Hefn delegation was still in England, and in the daily headlines, when devastating news broke upon us in the Company: for our counselor Elizabeth had developed the bodily wasting and red-rimmed eyes of AIDS-Related Complex, and confessed at last that all this while she had been keeping a secret of her own.

One and all we were stricken anew with terror, my eight surviving Companions and I. Elizabeth who had been our mother, our guardian, our stay against destruction, who had held us together and wedged the door shut against the world’s cruelty, could not be dying—for if she were dying we could none of us feel safe. Our reaction was infantile and total: we were furious. Who would take care of us when she was dead? When an accountant who called himself “Phil” promptly developed skin lesions, we all blamed Elizabeth.

“Phil’s” symptoms turned out to be hysterical; his apparent defeat had been the medium through which we had collectively expressed our virulently reactivated panic and dread. After that episode we pulled ourselves together and stopped whining long enough to think a little of Elizabeth, and not so much about our miserable selves.

She had been admitted to Graduate Hospital, the one our psychoneuroimmunology team was affiliated with. I sat with her for a while one afternoon, a sulky, resentful child and her mortally ill mother. When I apologized for my behavior Elizabeth smiled tiredly. “Oh, I know how you all feel, you’re reacting exactly like I thought you would. Listen, Sandy, this had to happen sometime. You folks have all been much too dependent and you know it. Now’s your chance to stand on your own, ah, eighteen feet—but I’m sorry you feel let down.” She grimaced. “I feel pretty bad about that myself.”

Her generosity dissolved my fretful resentment; and love, shocking as the dream-love of Gregor Mendel, flooded into the vacancy. I choked and burst into wrenching tears; Elizabeth patted my arm, which made me cry harder; in a moment I was crouching beside her bed, my hot, wet face pressed against her shoulder, the first time in twenty years that I had touched another human being intimately. A surreal moment. It was glorious, to tell the truth, though I felt as if my chest would burst with grief.

When I forced myself to report this scene on Company time, the story was received in a glum silence tinged with embarrassment. Finally “Larry,” a balding, thickening physical therapist I’d known since he was a skinny teenager, puffed out a breath and said disgustedly, “Well, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Sandy. I never touch anybody either, except on the job. Hell, we all love Elizabeth! But I never let myself know that. I haven’t taken an emotional risk in so many years I literally can’t remember when the last time was, and you people aren’t any better than me.”

“I’ve often thought,” said “Phil,” “that it’s funny we don’t love each other. I mean, as much as we need each other, you’d think . . .”

He trailed off, and we glanced obliquely (and guiltily) at one another, except for the two couples present—who naturally couldn’t help looking a little smug—and the one father who blurted defensively, “I love my kids!”

“Elizabeth knows we love her,” said “Sherry,” over against the far wall.

“Maybe she does,” “Larry” growled, “but we need to know it. That’s my point, goddammit.”

“Other groups do better. Some of them are really close,” I put in. “Maybe we fuss over ourselves so much we can’t connect, except to spot weaknesses.”

“Other groups don’t have our survival rate either,” “Mitch” reminded me.

Breaking the gloomy silence, “Phil” roused himself to say, “What about these spacemen, anything doing in that direction?”

When the Hefn first arrived, half the world’s people had recoiled in panicky dismay; the other half had seemed to expect them to provide a magical cure for all our ills: war, cancer, pollution, overpopulation, famine, AIDS. So far they had shown no interest in us whatever. The landing party was presently in London because the mummified corpse of one of their relations, stranded here hundreds of years ago, had been discovered in a Yorkshire bog; but suggestions that they set up some sort of cultural and scientific exchange with humanity had been politely ignored and I doubted there was any chance at all that Elizabeth’s life was going to be saved by ET intervention. The AIDS Task Force in New York had already sent them a long, pleading letter, but had received no reply. We were all aware of these facts. Nobody bothered to answer “Phil,” and after a while the hour was over and we broke up; and when the Hefn ship took off from the moon a few weeks later, having neither helped nor harmed us by their visit, we weren’t surprised. It was what we’d expected.

Just as we expected Elizabeth to waste and decline, and finally die, and she did—leaving the Companions rudderless and demoralized. At least we’d rallied and borne up pretty well throughout the last weeks of her dying. We must have done her, and ourselves, a little good.

Surprisingly, despite even this trauma none of the rest of us became ill. Apparently we who were still alive were the hardiest of the lot, or at least the ones who had taken the best care of ourselves. But the emotional jolt of Elizabeth’s death—the one death we had not protected ourselves from being badly hurt by—showed me, as the dream of Mendel had showed me all those years ago, that something was still wrong with my life. It was still a loveless life, and just when I seemed to need it least it now appeared that I was no longer willing to do without love. I’d failed to acknowledge Elizabeth alive; now that she was dead I wanted at least to keep alive the emotion—the capacity for feeling and showing emotion—that she had released in me at the end.

It didn’t have to be romantic love, in fact I rather thought that any other sort would probably be preferable, though I was still determined not to teach lovingly. It seems odd now that I never thought of getting a pet—or maybe the image of a dog wouldn’t readily superimpose itself upon the image of a backyard carpeted with melon vines? And I’m allergic to cat dander . . . anyway, whatever the reasons, the idea never crossed my mind. The months glided by as usual, and became years, before anything changed.

III

What happened was that I broke a small bone in my left ankle in a common type of running accident: one foot came down at the edge of a pothole and twisted beneath me as I fell. The X-ray showed a hairline fracture. They put me in a cast and crutches and ordered me off the foot for a month, and this was May.

May 2010; Year Four of my second five-year plan. With the whole season’s research at stake I had no choice but to hire some help.

A bright, possibly talented sophomore in my botany course took the job. His name was Eric Meredith, and he was the first person other than my unobservant parents, a dishwasher repairer, and the water meter reader to have entered my house in the ten years I had owned it. I bitterly resented the need that had brought him there; but I knew the source of this bitterness (apprehension: what other infirmities would be violating my privacy in future summers?) and made a perfunctory effort not to work it out on Eric.

He seemed not to take my unfriendliness personally—I had a certain reputation at the college as a grump—and willingly did what I told him to without trying to chat me up. I showed him once how to handle the transplants, how big and how far apart to make the holes, how to work fertilizer and compost into the loose earth, dump in a liter of water, and firm the soil around the stem. He never forgot, never did it wrong, even beneath my jealous eye; he seemed to discover a knack for the work in the process of performing it that pleased him as much as it mollified me. He was scrupulously careful with the labeling and weighed the Ultramay at the beds’ edges with earth, leaving no gaps for wandering bees or beetles to find. In a week the entire lot of transplants was in the ground. I recorded the data myself—I could sit at a keyboard, anyway—but Eric did everything else.

He grew so earnestly interested in the experiment, what’s more, that after the second week he couldn’t help asking questions; and I found his interest so irresistible that before I knew it I’d invited him to review the records.

For I did, finally, really appear to be getting someplace. Several hybrids of the “Mi ting tang” (Ano II) strain had done unusually well the previous year; I thought I knew now which of their parents to cross with Perfection and Honey Dew to produce at least one variety which would show exceptional tolerance to mosaic in the field. Immunity now looked impossible, resistance unlikely; but I felt I would be more than satisfied with a strain that could tolerate the presence of the virus in its system without being killed or crippled too much—that could go on about its business of making a pretty good crop of sweet, firm-fleshed melons in spite of the disease.

Eric sat for an hour while the screen scrolled through the records of a near-decade. I jumped when he spoke. “This whole thing is just beautifully conceived.” His amazement was understandable; why expect anything good from a professor as mediocre in class as I? “You’re just about there, aren’t you?”

He had a plain, narrow face, much improved by enthusiasm. I felt my own face growing warm. “Mm-hm, I think so. One more season. Of course, this isn’t a very exciting experiment—not like what they do in the labs, genetic manipulation, that sort of thing.”

“Well,” said Eric, “but it’s not so much the experiment itself as the experimental model. Heck, you could apply this model to any traits you were trying to select for. Did you work it out yourself?” I suspected that this was doubt, but when I nodded he did too. “I thought so, I never came across this system of notation before and I bet everybody’ll be using it after you publish.”

I’d been working in isolation a long time, without admiration, and the traitorous balloon of gratitude that swelled my chest undid me. “Come have something cold to drink,” I offered gruffly, and as I went before him into the kitchen the rubber tip of my crutch slipped on a wet patch of linoleum and I fell, whacking my head hard on the corner of a shelf on the way down.

For a few seconds the pain in both ankle and scalp was blinding. Then as I struggled to rise, embarrassed and angry, and as Eric leaned over me to help, I saw the drops of blood on the floor, brilliant against the pale tiles. “Get away!” I shouted, shoving him so hard he stumbled against the counter and I fell flat on my back. In rage I hauled myself upright, holding to the counter, and managed to rip off some paper toweling to blot my head with. Again Eric moved instinctively to help, and again I snapped, “No, get back I said, keep away from me. Did you get any blood on yourself?”

“Unh-unh,” said Eric, looking at his hands and arms, bewildered and then—bright student—suddenly comprehending. “Oh, hey, it’s okay—I’m vaccinated.”

I froze and stared at him, my head singing. “What did you say?”

“I’m vaccinated against AIDS. A bone punch in the sixth grade, see?” He pulled down the neck of his tee shirt and showed me the little V-shaped scar on his collarbone.

Vaccinated. Immune. Of course he was. Everybody was vaccinated nowadays. Eric had been in no danger from me—but in my instinctive panic I’d given myself away. For exactly the third time that decade I burst into tears, and I couldn’t have told you which of the two of us was the more embarrassed.

I don’t remember how I got him out of the house. I spent that evening raging at myself, my situation, the plague that had blighted my life, aborted my career, turned me into a time bomb of thwarted need. So what if it came out that I was a carrier of the virus? Nobody gave a damn anymore. During the past few years, the deadly microorganisms that had built up strength in my system throughout the first ten had begun to decline. I might never die of AIDS now, might not even be infectious, nobody knew. Even if I were, the world had been immunized against me. Yet I felt infectious, consumed with longing for something that would certainly be destroyed if I tried to possess it. No amount of rational certainty that this was not so acted to defuse a conviction which had for so long been the central emotional truth, the virtual mainspring, of my life. For the past nine years I had abstained from sex for my own reasons of stress-avoidance, not to protect others; I had known this and not-known it, both.

The truth was, I had lived as a leper too long to change my self-concept. Now here was this boy, who had guessed my guilty secret just like that and spoken it aloud without batting an eye. He would have to be replaced, possibly bribed . . . no, that was crazy thinking. Yet the thought of facing him was unendurable. I’d pay him off in the morning and dismiss him. The pain of this thought astonished me; yet I couldn’t doubt it must be done.

I had not, however, factored in Eric’s own attitudes and wishes. The next day he showed up at the usual time and went straight to work in the kitchen garden, spreading straw mulch on the tomato and pepper beds, whistling the noble theme from the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh. From the kitchen window I watched his tall, bony frame fold and unfold, gather the straw from the cart in armfuls and heap it carefully around the bases of the plants; and gradually I became aware that here was the only living being, not one of the Company, who knew The Truth. Gradually, it even began to seem a wonderful thing that somebody knew. Eric dragged the empty cart across the yard for more straw bales, then back to the nightshade beds. I regarded his back in its sweat-soaked tee shirt, the play of the shoulder muscles, the stretching tendons at the sides of his knees as he folded and straightened—and something fluttered and turned over in my middle-aged insides. “Eric,” I murmured in wonderment; and as if he had heard he turned his head, saw me at the window, waved and grinned. Then he stooped to gather another armful of straw and I fell back out of view.

That grin . . . I dropped onto a stool, hearing in my head the incongruous voice of my best high-school friend: “He looked over at me from the other side of the class and it just really boinged me.” Boinged, I’d been boinged! By Eric’s cheerfulness, the wave of his long arm with its brown work glove at the end. I knew by then, I guess, that I wasn’t going to fire him; but I couldn’t see how to do anything else with him either.

At noon Eric came to the house to wash up under the spigot before leaving, in his khaki shorts and old running shoes. He had taken off his shirt, and dust and bits of straw had stuck to the sweaty skin of his chest and back, and in the curly golden hairs of his legs and the blond mop on his head. He was a very lanky guy, pretty well put together, not a bit handsome. I regarded his long body with awe.

“I’ll be late tomorrow, got a dentist appointment,” he said. “Listen, I wanted you to know I’m not going to say anything to anybody else about yesterday. In case you were worrying about it. I mean, I don’t go in for gossip much anyway, and even if I did I wouldn’t spread stuff around about you.”

I managed to reply, “Thanks, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t.”

Eric started to say something else but instead stuck his head under the faucet for a minute, dried himself on his shirt, and slipped away around the house. There was a paperback novel crammed into the back pocket of his shorts, its title Sowbug! scrawled diagonally across the cover in screaming colors, and water droplets spangled his bare shoulders.

And so we went on as before, but nothing was as it had been for me. Once again I became an actor, for I found myself against all sense and expectation carrying a blazing torch for a boy considerably less than half my age: a clever, nice, probably not terribly remarkable boy who (as the Companions agreed) was serving now as representative object of the pent-up love of half a lifetime. Eric, the wick for this deep reservoir of flammable fuel, became “Lampwick” in Company nomenclature: Lampwick, the boy who went to Pleasure Island with Pinocchio and turned into a braying jackass before the puppet’s horrified eyes.

I felt like the jackass, let me tell you. Knowing the passion that so rocked me to be symbolic and categorical, hardly about Eric-the-singular-individual at all, made exactly zero difference to my experience of it. In the Company we’d been talking and thinking more about love since Elizabeth’s death, and they all thought it was great. All loves are part personal, part associational, the more worldly among them assured me. Go for it! Get it out of your system. Wasn’t your primary sexual involvement in the past with a teacher? Hey, the unconscious is a tidy bastard; naturally yours would think it fitting to pass the baton to the next generation by making you fall for a student of your own.

And I have to admit that even the hopeless misery of this passion was, in a weird way, kind of fun. It rejuvenated my libido, for one thing. It took me out of myself. I no longer feared the lethal effects of stress so much, and in any case this stress was salutary too.

I did take enormous care to protect myself from the humiliation of letting Eric catch me out, as he had caught me out about my antibody status. He never dreamed I seethed with lust for him, I feel quite sure of that. I think he did regret my aloofness—he was a sociable boy, and truly admired my work—but not so much as to be pained by it; and in any event Eric had other fish to fry that summer.

My ankle had healed well enough by late July for me to take over the kitchen garden, and a bit later the processing of its produce, when that began to roll in; but I pretended a greater disability than I really had just to keep Eric around. And when my old mother in Denver had a stroke, making a visit unavoidable, I was happy to leave him in charge of both kitchen garden and melon plots. The specialhybrids were looking great, but records on rainfall and hours of sunlight during this crucial month would have to be kept. I asked Eric to come live in the house while I was away, and promised him a bonus if he did a meticulous job of keeping the records.

I decided not to fly, and drove west in an erotically supercharged state of psyche, sleeping in the carbed, peeing in the men’s rooms of seven states, feasting my eyes on hundreds of penises and fantasizing that this or that one could be Eric’s . . . I hadn’t done much of this recently and suspect I made a less convincing man as I grew older but I had a terrific time for a while, although to tell the truth I rather wore my imagination out. My mother was feeling better and received my attentions with gratified complacency; but the five grandchildren had become her life, and we regarded one another, benignly enough, through a glaze of mutual incomprehension. It seemed likely that I would see her next when I flew out for the funeral.

All the same I stayed a week before returning by easy stages across the hot, dry, dusty plains, eager to get back but pleased to think of Eric still holding the fort in my stead. No point in pretending I couldn’t handle the work now, not after a drive like this. Anyway, the term would be starting soon. When I got back I’d have to let him go; and so I dawdled and fantasized across Kansas and Missouri, and late in the afternoon of August 30 was approaching Indianapolis when I told the radio to turn itself on and was informed that early that same morning there had been a meltdown at the nuclear power plant at Peach Bottom, on the Susquehanna River downstream from Three Mile Island.

Luckily traffic was light. I managed to pull off the road without smashing up, and sat gripping the wheel while the radio filled me in. The disaster was unprecedented, making even Chernobyl look paltry. The Peach Bottom plant was fifty years old and overdue to be shut down for good. It had been shut down in the Eighties, then reopened in 1993, when improved decontamination technology had reduced its radioactivity to acceptable levels. Though the plant had a history of scandalously inept management, technicians asleep on duty and so on, stretching back a long way, it didn’t appear that the meltdown had been caused by human error.

From the standpoint of damage to nearby populations the weather could not have been much worse, given that it was summer. A storm system with a strong south-southwest wind had pushed the enormous radioactive plume across the fertile Amish farmland of Lancaster County; then a westerly shift had carried the plume over the continuous urban sprawl of Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Trenton. Heavy rains had dumped the hot stuff on the ground across that whole area. The storm had also put out the fire at the plant; damage was therefore horrific but, so far, highly localized.

The plume had been washed to earth before it could enter the upper atmosphere—but in one of the most densely populated regions of the world. A very high death count from acute radiation poisoning was expected; the Amish farmers, working in the fields without radios to warn them, were especially at risk. Eight million people, more or less, had to be evacuated and relocated, probably permanently, for the Philadelphia-Wilmington area would be a wasteland for at least a decade to come, perhaps much longer.

Terry Carpenter’s name was mentioned again and again. A moderate Republican Congressman from Delaware County, Carpenter was being described by reporters as a miracle worker. His understanding and the speed of his response suggested that Carpenter had planned carefully for just this sort of emergency. Because of him the cost in human lives would be far less, though no one person could cope with every aspect of a disaster as great as this one . . . (I’d crossed over and voted for the guy myself, last election. Good move.)

People who had not yet left their homes had been urged to keep doors and windows shut and air conditioners turned off, to reduce inhalation uptake, which would be reduced somewhat anyway by the rain, and to draw water in their bathtubs and sinks before the runoff from the storm could contaminate the supply. Each was to pack a small bag . . .

The radio went on and on as I sat by the highway, shocked beyond thought. My house, my garden, the campus, the hospital where I worked and the one where I had my monthly treatments, the Company, the experiment—all the carefully assembled infrastructure of my unnatural life—had melted down with the power plant. What in the world was I going to do? My trip had saved me from radiation poisoning, and from being evacuated and stuck in a Red Cross camp someplace; my car and I were clean. But my life was in ruins.

And all the while, still in shock, I thought about Eric, whom I’d left to mind the store, who might be in my house right now with the doors and windows shut, waiting to be evacuated. Abruptly snapping out of it, I drove back onto the road and went off at the next exit, where I found a pay phone that worked and put the call through.

But the phone in my house rang and rang, and finally I hung up and stood shaking in the already-sweltering morning, unable to think what to do now, stranded. Impossible to go back to Denver. Impossible to go home. Impossible also to find Eric, at least until things settled down. Eric, of course, would go to his parents’ house—only what if they lived in the evacuation zone? A lot of our students were local kids; it was that kind of college.

I knew not even that much about Eric’s personal life, I realized with a furious rush of shame, and at this moment all my uncertainty and powerlessness fused into a desperate need to find him, see him, make sure he was all right. Of all the desperately threatened people I knew in the area of contamination, only this one boy mattered to me.

I got back in my car and started driving. I drove all night, stopped at a western Pennsylvania sleepyside for a nap the following morning, drove on again. The radio kept me posted on developments. All that way I thought about Eric. Half of my mind was sure he was fine, safe in his parents’ (grandparents’ ?) home in Pittsburgh or Allentown; the other half played the Eric-tape over and over, his longness and leanness, the grownup way he’d handled my breaking down, his careful tenderness with the melon seedlings (like Mendel’s!), his reliability, his frank, unstudied admiration of my trial model, his schlock horror novel Sowbug! Why hadn’t I been nicer to him while I’d had the chance? Why had I played it safe? My house and garden were lost, my experimental records doubtless ruined by fallout, the work of the past decade all gone for nothing, yet worse by far was the fact that I had squandered my one God-given chance to come close to another person, thrown it away, out of fear. I beat on the steering wheel and sobbed. Eric, Eric, if only I hadn’t been so scared.

Whatever happened now, I knew I would never again watch him fold that long body up like a folding ruler to tend the crops or sic the virus-loaded striped cucumber beetles onto a melon cultivar. That life was finished. There was nothing to connect us now, because I had wasted my one chance and would never get another. I was hardly thinking straight, of course; I was in shock. I’d heard my colleagues speak often enough, and wistfully enough, of promising former students from whom they rarely or never heard anymore. Students go away and teachers stay—that’s the way it’s always been, they’d say. Put not your faith in students. A card at Christmas for a year or two after they leave, then zip.

But I wasn’t thinking of what Eric might or might not have done in some hypothetical future time; I was thinking of what I myself had failed to do and now could never do. I cried, off and on, for hours, being forced once by uncontrollable weeping to stop the car. I shed far more tears during that nightmarish trip than in my whole previous life since childhood. If I’d only put my arms around him, just one time, just held him for a minute, not even saying anything—if I’d just managed to do that—As the hours and miles went by my grief became more and more inconsolable, as if all the tragedy of the meltdown, and even of my life, were consolidated into this one spurned chance to become human. It didn’t matter whether Eric wanted to be befriended (let alone held) by me, diseased middle-aged spinsterish schoolmarm and part-time pervert that I had become; what mattered, beyond measure or expression, was that I’d been too cowardly even to consider the possibility of closeness with another person and now it was too late.

I drove and wept, wept and drove. Gradually traffic going the opposite direction began to build up. Just west of Harrisburg a bunch of state troopers were turning the eastbound cars back. Beyond the roadblock only two lanes were open; the other two, and the four going west, were full of cars fleeing the contaminated zone. I pulled over, cleaned my blotchy face as best I could with a wet cloth, and got out. A trooper was directing U-turns at the head of a line of creeping cars. I walked up to him. “Excuse me, do you know how I can find out where somebody is?”

The trooper turned, gray-faced with exhaustion. “You from Philadelphia?” I nodded. “I dunno, bud,” he replied—reminding me that I was still in my traveling costume of undrag. “In a coupla days they’ll know where everybody’s at, but it’s a madhouse back there right now, there’s eight million people they’re trying to evacuate. You had your radio on?”

“Yeah, but—”

“Maybe it’s too far to pick it up out here.” He took off his cap and rubbed his hand over his face. “Everybody that’s got someplace to go, that has a car, is supposed to go there. Relatives, whatever. That’s what all these people are doing. These are the ones from Lancaster and thereabouts—Philadelphia people were supposed to take the Northeast Extension or else head down into south Jersey or Delaware along with the Wilmington people. The ones that don’t have noplace to go, they’re all being sent to camps up in the Poconos or down around Baltimore. The Army’s bringing in tents and cots.”

“For eight million people?”

“Naaah, most of ’em’ll have somebody they can stay with for a while. They figure a million and a half, two million, tops. Still a hell of a lot of campers. Who ya looking for?”

“A student of mine, he was house-sitting for me.”

“Local kid?”

“I don’t know, actually.”

The trooper looked me over, red swollen eyes and rumpled, slept-in clothes, and drew his own conclusions but was too tired to care. “Probably went home to his folks if they don’t live around Philly. They’re telling everybody to call in with the info of where they’re at as soon as they get to wherever it is they’re going. There’s a phone number for every letter of the alphabet. A couple more days, if the kid does like he’s supposed to, you’ll be able to track him down.”

“Sounds pretty well worked out,” I said vaguely. A couple of days, IF he was okay, and no way to find out if he wasn’t.

“It’s a goddamn miracle is what it is,” said the trooper fervently. “That goddamn Congressman, Terry Carpenter, that son of a bitch was just waiting for something like this to happen, I swear to God, must of been. He had everything all thought out and ready to go. He commandeered the suburban trains in Philly, the busses, all the regular Amtrak trains and the freight trains too, that were anywheres around, and had ’em all rolling within a couple hours of the accident, got the hospitals and so forth emptied out, and look at this here—” he waved at the six lanes of cars contracting into four, but moving along pretty well, at about forty “—it’s the same back in Philadelphia except at the ramps and like that.” The trooper put his cap back on. “I got to get back to work here. Don’t worry about your little pal, he’ll be okay. You got someplace to go? I can give you directions to a refugee camp.”

“No thanks, I’m fine.” It was stupid to resent the trooper for what he was thinking but I did all the same.

I edged my car into the stream of traffic being guided back the way it had come, but at the first exit slid out of formation and onto a little road that headed off into the mountains. I drove along for several miles, looking for a town with a phone; but when I finally found one, in front of a closed-up shop in a closed-up town, there was still no answer.

That was crisis time, there and then. I don’t know how long I stood beside that phone kiosk while the battle raged. At one point several busloads of Amish families went by, probably headed for relatives in Ohio; they stared out, faces blank and stony; for them too it was the end of the world. The wind had only held SSW a little while before shifting to southwest, but that was long enough.

Finally I got back into the car, turned it around, reentered the turnpike by the eastbound ramp, drove back to the roadblock, and found my trooper. He stood still and watched me walk up to him, too beat to show surprise. “Look,” I said, “I’d like to go in and help search for the people that got missed. They must need volunteers. I’m volunteering.”

Very slowly he nodded. “If that’s what you want. Go on into Harrisburg and talk to somebody there. Get off at the Capitol, there’s a trooper station set up around there somewheres, you’ll see it. Maybe they’ll take you. I’ll radio ahead so they know you’re comin’.” I thanked him and started to leave; he called after me, “Listen up a minute, bud. Later on it might be too late to change your mind. We might be moving people out of York and Harrisburg if the wind shifts again.”

“I understand,” I called back, and felt him watch for a minute before moving to his car to use the radio.

In Harrisburg I talked fast and they took me—took me also, at face value, for a youthfully middle-aged man. They issued me a radiation suit, and minimal instructions, and flew me into the contaminated zone along with a batch of other volunteers, a few Quakers and some workers from Three Mile Island.

We were dropped in Center City, fifteen miles from where I needed to be. They didn’t like to spare any people for the suburbs, but emergency volunteers are hard to control and some of the others were looking for friends or relatives too. In the end they let each of us take a police vehicle with a loudspeaker and told us to make a mad dash for home, then drive back slowly into the city, keeping the siren on and picking up stragglers as we came.

I’d only made it a little more than halfway home when I ran out of gas. The damned van burned ethanol and I’d been driving some kind of electric or solar car for thirteen years, but even so . . . I tore off on foot in my radiation suit to find a filling station, looking I’m sure exactly like a space invader in a B-grade flick, trying to run along the deserted street—not deserted enough, though: when I got back with a can of ethanol half an hour later, streaming with sweat and nearly suffocated, the van was gone. Like an idiot I hadn’t taken the keys. I heaved the can into a hedge and started walking.

I was seven miles from home, give or take half a mile. Just as I set off, the sun came out. I had to pee badly and didn’t know how (or whether) to open the suit, and I was already terribly thirsty.

That walk was no fun at all. I had to rest a lot. I also had decided that wetting the suit was preferable to the consequences of any alternative I could think of, which made the hike even more unpleasant than it would have been in any case. It was more than three hours from the time I’d left the van when I finally got home. The key was in my pocket but I couldn’t get to it; I ended up breaking my own basement window to get in.

Eric wasn’t there.

I knew the house was empty the instant I got inside. In the basement I leaned against the cool wall, overcome with exhaustion and letdown. After a while I fumbled with the suit till something came unfastened, and crawled out of it, drenched and reeking; I left the suit in the basement with all my seed-starting equipment and insect cages and dragged myself on wobbling knees upstairs, shutting the door behind me.

The kitchen sink was full of water. So were both bathroom sinks and the tub. My feeling of letdown lifted; he’d followed instructions then, that probably meant he’d gotten safely away. Good old Eric. I drank a couple of liters of water from the sink before stripping off my vile clothes and plunging into the full, cool tub. Might as well die clean.

Almost instantly I went to sleep. When I woke an hour or so later with a stiff neck I took a thorough bath, got dressed again (this time in my “own” clothes, some shorts and a shirt), realized I was famished, and raided the refrigerator for a random sampling of Eric’s abandoned provisions: cold chicken, supermarket bread, a banana, a tomato from the garden. The power was off, but the doors had been kept shut and nothing had spoiled. I drank a can of Eric’s Coke, my first in nearly thirty years. It was delicious. In a cabinet I found a bag of potato chips and ate them all with deliberate relish: exquisite! There were half a dozen boxes of baked beans in there—and pickled herring—and a box of cheese—Irrationally I began to feel terrific, as if the lost chance with Eric were somehow being made up for by his unintended gifts, the last meals I expected ever to eat. I meant to enjoy them, and I did.

Sated at last, I wandered into my airless bedroom and fell across the bed. Strange as it may sound, I never thought to switch on the transistor, so wholly had I crossed over into a realm governed by the certainty of my own imminent death. I had been fleeing my death for so long that on one level I actually felt relief to believe I could give in to it now, stop twisting and doubling and trying to give it the slip. Nor, still stranger, did I even glance into the garden.

The house was stifling, must have been shut up for many hours. It had been many hours too since people had been told not to run any more water or flush their toilets, though both of mine were flushed and clean. These things pointed to Eric’s safe escape and relieved my mind of its last burden. I sank like a stone into sleep. When I woke it was dark, and the house was being battered by the amazing racket of the helicopter landing in the little park a block away.

They’d caught the person who had pinched my van as he was trying to cross the Commodore Barry Bridge into New Jersey. A police van is a conspicuous object to steal, but he’d been offered no alternatives and didn’t mind being apprehended at all, so long as his captors took him out of danger. He’d seen me stop and leave the van, waited till I was gone, then poured fuel from some cans in his landlady’s garage into the tank and taken off, while I’d still been hoofing it up the road. Inside the helmet I hadn’t heard the engine start. It seemed less reasonable to steal the van outright than to beg a lift, but people act oddly when their lives are at stake and that was how he’d chosen to play it—a white man in his fifties, no family, a nightshift worker who had somehow slept through the evacuation. In fact, the very sort of person I’d been sent to pick up. All this I learned later.

It had taken time to trace the van, and everybody was plenty busy enough without coming to rescue the would-be rescuer, and they didn’t even know my name. But I’d mentioned the name of my development to one of the other volunteers, and its general location near the campus, and eventually they sent the helicopter out to find me. It wasn’t till I was out of my suit again that anybody realized the man they’d come to find had metamorphosed into a woman.

The rest is all aftermath, but I may as well set it down anyway.

I lived for a month in a refugee camp near Kutztown, Pennsylvania, on land owned by the Rodale Research Center; I chose it for that reason. By month’s end it was obvious that Greater Philadelphia was going to be uninhabitable for years—maybe a decade, maybe more.

A month to the day after the accident they sighted the returning Hefn ship.

I took a pretty high dose of radiation. My chances of developing leukemia in fifteen or twenty years aren’t bad at all. However, I don’t expect to be around that long unless I accept the Hefn’s offer (of which more later).

One day in the camp they paged me, and when I got to the admin tent, who should be standing there in pack, tee shirt, and shorts but Eric Meredith. I’d found out, quite quickly, that he had indeed gone to relatives in Erie with the first wave of the evacuation, and had sent him a letter saying how relieved I was that he’d gotten away safely. I’d mentioned that I would be staying at the Rodale Camp for a while. Eric had come all that way, not to collect his bonus (as I thought at first), but to deliver the contents of his backpack: a complete printout of the records of my experiment, this season’s preliminary notes on disk, and six seriously overripe cantaloupes containing the seeds of Cucumis melo reticulatus var. Milky Tango, the hybrid melon I’d had the highest hopes for, saved by his quick thinking from the radioactive rain. “I didn’t know how to get the tough disk out of the computer,” he apologized.

I stared at the bagful of smelly spheres on the table before us with the oddest emotion. For part of a day not long before I’d surrendered, I’d given up my life. By purest luck my life had been restored to me; but I had crossed some psychic boundary that day, and had never crossed back again. And Eric and the experiment both belonged to the time before the accident, when fighting viral diseases had been most of what I cared to do.

It only took one step to close the distance. I took it, put my arms around that bony, sinewy, beanpole torso and held myself against it for a moment out of time. Eric stood stiff as a tomato stake, and about as responsive, but I didn’t mind. “Eric, do me a favor,” I said, letting go of him and stepping back. “I’ll take half of these, you keep the others. Plant them in your grandparents’ back yard next summer. Finish the experiment for me.”

A coughing fit made me break off, and Eric unstiffened enough to say, “Are you okay? That cough sounds terrible.”

“I’m fine now. I had a cold, then bronchitis. Listen: the soil at my place will be contaminated for years, and God knows when I’ll get another yard to grow things in. The college may reorganize, but it hasn’t been decided whether or where. Not in Delaware County, though. Will you be going on down to University Park?”

He nodded. “Next week. They’re letting us start late.”

“Good, then you just have time to collect yourself a supply of cucumber beetles. You can expose them to mosaic later if they haven’t already picked it up.” The poor kid was staring, unable to believe what was happening. “I’m perfectly serious. Look: you saved the data and the seed. I was in the house for eight hours or so myself and it never crossed my mind to try to rescue either one.” This was true. The only thing I’d thought to rescue, when the helicopter came, had been my fake penis. “You’ve earned the right to finish the work. But don’t feel you have to, either; the Rodale people will be glad to take over, or a seed company would.”

“Oh no, I want to! Really!” he protested. “If you don’t that is—but you could make money from this. It isn’t right.”

“Tell you what. For safety’s sake, let’s have another copy of these records made and print out the ones from this summer. I’ll hang on to half the seed, as I said. If you don’t produce salable results I’ll see that somebody who might gets my copy and the seed; and if you do get results we’ll split the money down the middle. How does that sound?”

The camp had several notaries. We wrote up an agreement and got one of them to notarize our signatures. I wasn’t even sure it was legal—Eric was only nineteen or twenty—but never mind, I thought, never mind!

I walked him back to his car. Still bedazzled by the turn of events, he let the window down to say earnestly, “Nobody ever gave me anything this important before. I don’t know what to say.”

“You gave me something important too.”

“I did? When? What was it?”

I thought of trying to tell him just what, thought better of it. “Cold chicken. Potato chips. Baked beans. Coke.”

It took him a minute to realize what I was talking about, but then he objected, “That’s different! That’s not the same thing at all!”

“Less different than you know. Think about it, eh?” And then, a bit rashly, “Think about me once in a while.”

Last month I attended Eric’s graduation from Penn State: Magna cum laude in biology and a graduate fellowship to Cornell. For a boy from the nether regions of academe, not bad at all. Maybe he’ll do with his life what I’d have done with mine if things had been different. Eric’s final proof of Milky Tango’s tolerance to mosaic under a wide variety of growing conditions earned him his classy degree, though he gave me full credit for my own work, to which his was only the capstone—but a beautifully cut and polished capstone, every bit as good as the one I might have cut myself. I wore a long-sleeved shirt to the commencement, too warm for such a sunny day, to cover the Kaposi’s lesions that have spread now over much of my body.

My own research has taken an unexpected turn.

Early last summer I donned a radiation suit and went back home to see my abandoned garden and my field trial beds. Everything was a disheartening mess, but that wasn’t what I’d come to see. Eric had ripped loose the Ultramay cover on the Milky Tango beds to harvest those six melons. Remnants of the stuff flapped around me as I knelt to look, imagining his haste and fright as he’d scrabbled frantically among the vines while behind him in the house the printer pipped and pinged. But such thoughts weren’t what I’d come for either.

The rest of the Milky Tango seedcrop had eventually rotted where it lay, and the seeds had been directly exposed to the elements all these months. I’d been reading a lot about using fast neutrons, X-rays, and gamma rays to induce desirable mutations in plants, including disease resistance, and had begun to wonder what effect the fallout might have had on my own already highly resistant muskmelons. I wanted to know whether any of the accidentally irradiated seed had made it through the winter and germinated, and so did my new bosses at the Rodale Press, who were paying for this expedition. Our Hefn observer was interested too—enough to come along and help.

Sure enough, there were about two dozen volunteer seedlings growing in the Milky Tango plots. Some leaves showed signs of moderate beetle damage but not enough to set the plants back much. With Godfrey’s help I transplanted each seedling, radioactive soil and all, into its own large peat pot brought along for the purpose. Back at the Research Center we planted the lot of them at a special site set apart from the other trials and waited to see what would happen.

While we were waiting I got sick. Before that, the eighteen months between the Peach Bottom accident and my illness were my happiest ever.

When Penn State made the decision to disband the Delaware County Campus, they offered to try to place the tenured faculty at other branches of the system; but by then the Rodale Press had offered me a job. I’d been writing for their magazines for years and knew a number of Rodale editors and writers through correspondence, so it was natural enough that they should think of me when an editorial slot opened up that September at Backyard Researcher magazine, the newest member of the Rodale family of publications.

I can remember when all this part of Pennsylvania was farmland, and Kutztown a tiny college town with one main street, one bad motel, and one decent restaurant. But high-tech industry like AT&T and Xerox had moved in, changing the character of the area completely. When I came here to live, the Research Center had become a green island in a sea of development. I moved into one of the old farm buildings at the Center and commuted to my job in Emmaus, where the Press was located. Living out at the Center made it easier to keep an eye on my new experimental garden. No more battling with diseases now; the project I devised had to do with increasing yields in several kinds of potatoes. No more hyperpure living, either; the potato chip and I were strangers no longer. No more Companions; we were scattered to the winds, but the new friends I made here knew about my condition. No more celibacy: for a while, one of these friends became my lover.

When the Hefn returned and decided to take charge of us, they looked around for pockets of sanity and right action in the general balls-up we’d made of things, and so they were interested in the Rodale enterprise and in sustainable agriculture generally—enough to assign us a permanent observer/ advisor, and that was Godfrey. He moved into the farmhouse with me. When I got sick he knewabout it; when the lesions appeared he asked about them, and the disease they meant I had. It’s because of Godfrey that the search for a “cure”—fallen on very thin times since the numbers of still-living victims had dropped below ten thousand—has taken off again.

It looks pretty promising, actually. They’ve found a way to paralyze the enzyme that the virus uses to replicate in the cell—not like zidovudine and its kindred, which only slowed the enzyme down, but a drug that stops it cold. There’s no way I’d still be alive by the time they finish sanding the side effects off the stuff, not in the natural course of things. But Godfrey’s had another idea.

You know that, like cucumber beetles, the Hefn hibernate—and that their bodies use chemicals pretty much the same way ours do? Well, Godfrey figures it should be possible to synthesize a drug—using a chipmunk or woodchuck model in conjunction with a Hefn model—that would put the ninety-five-hundred-odd AIDS patients and AB-positives to sleep for a couple of years, until the cure can be perfected. There’s a problem about testing the stuff if we all take the cold sleep, because of course the bosses, the Gafr, won’t let them use animals. So we might be asleep for quite a while—or forever—or be damaged by the procedure. But the Gafr have given the go-ahead, and I’m thinking seriously about it. The Kaposi’s can only be treated effectively with radiation, and I’ve had much more than my fair share of that already. I’ll die of cancer anyway, probably sooner than later; in a month I’ll be forty-nine. But I’m thinking about it. I wish they’d come up with this before, is all.

I have to tell you something funny. One of my irradiated melon plants turned out to be one hundred percent immune to mosaic! It’s peculiar in other ways that make it useless for commercial purposes at this point, but the Rodale breeders are sure to keep working on improvements. I mentioned before that like all cucurbits melons produce separate male and female flowers, the male flowers bearing the pollen-producing stamens, the female flowers the pistil and ovary. Ordinarily it’s easy to tell which is which, because the ovary behind the female blossom is a large hairy structure and the male flower has nothing behind it but a stem.

Well, the immune melon bears male and female flowers that look exactly alike! You can’t tell them apart, except by peering closely at the inner structures or tearing off the petals, because the ovary is tiny, and concealed entirely within the flower. The fruit is correspondingly tiny, about the size of a small orange—much too small to appeal to growers, though I’d think home gardeners might raise it as a novelty.

I’ve given this new cultivar the official name of Tiny Tango, a name to please the seed catalogue writers. Privately I think of it as Male Impersonator (or sometimes—a pun—Atomic Power Plant). Its rind is tan and thin, netted like the rind of an ordinary cantaloupe, and its flesh is a beautiful deep salmon-orange, as sweetly, intensely delicious as any I ever tasted.

THE FATHER OF STONES

Lucius Shepard

How The Father of Stones came into the possession of the gemcutter William Lemos continues to be a subject for debate among the citizens of Port Chantay. That Lemos purchased the stone from the importer Henry Sichi is not in question, nor is it in doubt that Sichi had traded several bolts of raw silk for the stone to a tailor in Teocinte, and although the tailor has not admitted it, witnesses have clearly established that he took the stone by force from his niece, who had seen it glinting amid a clump of ferns growing beneath the lip of the dragon Griaule. But how the stone came to be in that spot at that exact moment, therein lies the cause of the debate. Some hold that the stone is a natural artifact of Griaule, a slow production of his flesh, perhaps a kind of tumor, and that it served to embody his wishes, to move Lemos—who lived beyond the natural range of his domination—to do the dragon’s bidding in the affair of the priest Mardo Zemaille and the Temple of the Dragon. Others will say that, Yes, Griaule is indeed a marvel, a creature the size of a mountain, immobilized millennia before in a magical duel, who controls the population of the Carbonales Valley through the subtle exercise of his will and is capable of manipulating the most discrete of effects, the most complex of events; but to think that his tumors or kidney stones have the aspect of fabulous gems . . . well, that is stretching things a bit. Lemos, they claim, is merely attempting to use the fact of Griaule’s mastery to justify his crime, and doubtless The Father of Stones is a relic of the dragon’s hoard, probably dropped beneath the lip by one of the pitiful half-wits who inhabit his innards. Of course that’s how it got there, their opponents will say; do you believe Griaule incapable of such a simple machination as that of directing one of his minions to leave a stone in a certain place at a certain time? And as for the origin of the stone, here we have a vast, mysterious, and nearly immortal intelligence, one whose body supports forests and villages and parasites large enough to destroy a city—given all that, is the possibility that he might have fabricated The Father of Stones in some dark tuck of his interior really so far removed?

These arguments aside, the facts are as follows. One misty night in February some years ago, a young boy burst into the headquarters of the constabulary in Port Chantay, bursting with the news that Mardo Zemaille, the priest of the Temple of the Dragon, had been murdered, and that his assassin, William Lemos, was awaiting the pleasure of the constabulary at the temple gates. When the constables arrived at the temple, which was located a few hundred yards from the landward end of Ayler Point, they found Lemos, a pale sandy-haired man of forty-three with a pleasant yet unremarkable face and gray eyes and a distracted professorial air, pacing back and forth in front of the temple; after placing him in restraints, the constables proceeded onto the grounds, which were uncharacteristically deserted. In a corner building of the compound they discovered Zemaille lying crumpled beside an altar of black marble, his skull fractured, the fatal blow having been struck with a fist-sized gem of an inferior milky water, one side left rough, affording an excellent grip for someone wishing to hurl it, and the other side cut into a pattern of sharply edged facets. They also discovered Mirielle, Lemos’s daughter, stretched naked on the altar, drugged into a state of torpor. Port Chantay, while a fairly large city, was not so large that the constabulary had been unaware of the conflict between Lemos and Zemaille. Lemos’ wife Patricia, drowned in the waters off Ayler’s Point three years before (she had, it was rumored, been visiting her lover, a wealthy gentleman with a home at the seaward end of the point), had willed her portion of the gem-cutting business to Mirielle, and Mirielle, who had been deeply involved with the dragon cult and with Zemaille himself, had donated the half-share to the temple. Zemaille was accustomed to using rare gems in certain of his rituals, and he soon began to drain the resources of the shop; the imminent failure of the gemcutter’s business, along with his daughter’s rejection, her wantonness and sluttish obeisance to the priest, had driven him to the depths of despair and thence, it seemed, to murder. And so, with a confession in hand, one backed by clear motive and a wealth of physical evidence, the constables felt confident that justice would be swift and sure. But they had not reckoned on the nature of Lemos’s defense. Nor, it appeared from his initial reaction, had Lemos’s advocate, Adam Korrogly.

“You must be mad,” he told Lemos after the gemcutter had related his version of the events. “Or else you’re damned clever.”

“It’s the truth,” Lemos said glumly. He was slumped in a chair in a windowless interrogation room lit by a glass bowl depended from the ceiling that held clumps of luminous moss; he gazed at his hands, which were spread upon a wooden table, as if unable to accept that they had betrayed him.

Korrogly, a tall, thin intense man with receding black hair and features that looked to have been whittled into sharpness out of smooth white wood, walked to the door and, facing it, said, “I see where you’re trying to lead me.”

“I’m not trying to lead you anywhere,” Lemos said. “I don’t care what you think, it’s the truth.”

“You should care very much what I think,” said Korrogly, turning to him. “In the first place, I don’t have to accept your case; in the second, my performance will be greatly abetted if I believe you.”

Lemos lifted his head and engaged Korrogly’s eyes with a look of such abject hopelessness that for an instant the advocate imagined it had struck him with a physical force. “Proceed as you will,” Lemos said. “The quality of your performance matters little to me.”

Korrogly walked to the table and leaned forward, resting his hands so that the splayed tips of his fingers were nearly touching Lemos’s fingers. Lemos did not move his hands away, did not appear to notice the closeness of Korrogly’s hands, and this indicated that he was truly overborne by all that had happened, and not putting on an act. Either that, Korrogly thought, or the man’s got the nervous system of a snail.

“You’re asking me to attempt a defense that’s never been used before,” he said. “Now that I think of it, I’m amazed no one’s ever tried it. Griaule’s influence—over the Carbonales Valley, anyway—is not in doubt. But to claim you were enacting his will, that some essence embodied in the gem inspired you to serve as his agent, to use that as a defense in a criminal case . . . I don’t know.”

Lemos appeared not to have heard; after a moment he said, “Mirielle . . . is she all right?”

Irritated, Korrogly said, “Yes, yes, she’s fine. Were you listening to what I just said?”

Lemos stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“Your story,” Korrogly said, “appears to demand a defense that has never been used. Never. Do you know what will attend that?”

“No,” said Lemos, and lowered his eyes.

“Judges are not delighted by the prospect of setting precedent, and whoever presides over your trial is going to be particularly loath to establish this sort of precedent. Because if it is established, God knows how many villains will seek to use it to avoid punishment.”

Lemos was silent for a few seconds and then said, “I don’t understand. What do you wish me to say?”

Studying his face, Korrogly had a feeling of uneasiness: Lemos’s despair seemed too uniform, too all-encompassing. He had acted for a number of clients who had been in the grip of terrible despair, but even the most despondent of these had on occasion suddenly realized their plight and exhibited fright or desperation or some variant emotion. He had the idea that Lemos was an intelligent man, one capable of such a subtle deceit as this might be.

“It’s not necessary that you say anything,” he told Lemos. “I simply want you to understand the course you’ve set me. If I were to plead for mercy from the court, ask them to recognize the passions involved, to take into account the unscrupulous nature of the deceased, I’m confident that your sentence would be light. Zemaille was not well loved, and there are many who consider what you’ve done an act of conscience.”

“Not I,” said Lemos in such an agonized tone that Korrogly was persuaded for the moment to complete belief.

“However,” he went on, “should I pursue the defense that your story suggests, you may wind up facing a much harsher sentence, perhaps even the ultimate. That you choose to defend in this manner might imply to the judge that the crime was premeditated. Thus he would allow no mediating circumstance in his instructions to the jury. He would dismiss all possibility of it being a crime of passion.”

Lemos gave a dispirited laugh.

“That amuses you?” Korrogly asked.

“I find it simplistic that passion and premeditation are deemed to be mutually exclusive.”

Korrogly moved away from the table, folded his arms and regarded the luminous globe overhead. “Of course that’s not always the case. Not all crimes of passion are considered acts of the moment. There is leeway left for obsession, for irresistible compulsion. But what I’m telling you is that the judge in his desire to avoid setting precedent might block these avenues of mercy in his instructions to the jury.”

Once again Lemos appeared to have slipped into a reverie.

“Have you decided?” Korrogly insisted. “I can’t decide for you, I can only recommend.”

“You seem to be recommending that I lie,” said Lemos.

“How do you arrive at that?”

“You tell me the truth is a risk, that the secure course is best.”

“I’m merely counseling you as to the potential pitfalls.”

“There’s a fine line, is there not, between recommendation and counsel.”

“Between guilt and innocence also,” said Korrogly, thinking he might get a rise out of Lemos with this; but the gemcutter only stared at the table, brushed back his sandy forelock from his eyes.

“Very well.” Korrogly picked up his satchel from the floor. “I’ll assume you want me to go forward with the case as you’ve presented it.”

“Mirielle,” said Lemos. “Will you ask her to come and visit me?”

“I will.”

“Today . . . will you ask her today?”

“I plan to see her this afternoon, and I’ll ask her. But according to the constables, she may not respond favorably to anything I ask on your behalf. She is apparently quite bereft.”

Lemos muttered something, and when Korrogly asked him to repeat it, he said, “Nothing.”

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Lemos shook his head.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” said Korrogly; he started to tell Lemos to be of good cheer, but partly in recognition of the profundity of Lemos’s despair, partly due to his continuing sense of uneasiness, he thought better of it.

The gemcutter’s shop was in the Almintra quarter of Port Chantay, a section of the city bordering the ocean, touched yet not overwhelmed by decay and poverty. Dozens of shops were situated on the bottom floors of old peeling frame houses with witchy-looking peaked roofs and gables, and between them Korrogly could see the houses of the wealthy ranging Ayler’s Point: airy mansions with wide verandahs and gilt roofs nestled among stands of thistle palms. The sea beyond the point was a smooth jade-colored expanse broken by creamy surf, seeming to carry out the theme of elegance stated by the mansions; on the other hand, the breakers that heaped foam upon the beaches of the Almintra quarter were fouled with seaweed and offal and driftwood. It must be, he thought, dismaying to the residents of the quarter, which had not so long ago been considered exclusive, to have this view of success and beauty, and then to turn back to their own lives and watch the rats scurrying in piles of vegetable litter, the ghost crabs scuttling in the sandy streets, the beggars, the increasing dilapidation of their homes. He wondered if this could have played a part in the murder; he could discern no opportunity for profit in the crime, but there was so much still hidden, and he did not want to blind himself to the existence of such a motive. He did not believe Lemos, yet he could not fully discredit the gemcutter’s story. That was the story’s virtue; its elusiveness, the way it played upon the superstitious nature of the citizenry, how it employed the vast subtlety of Griaule to spread confusion through the mind of whomever sought to judge it. The jury was going to have one hell of a time. And, he thought, so was he. He could not deny the challenge presented him; a case of this sort came along but rarely, and its materials, so aptly suited to the game of the law, to the sleights-of-hand that had turned the law into a game, afforded him the opportunity of making a reputation in one fell swoop. His inability to disbelieve Lemos’s story might be a product of his hope that the gemcutter was telling the truth, that precedent was indeed involved, for he was beginning to realize that he needed something spectacular, something unique and unsettling, to reawaken his old hopes and enthusiasms, to restore his sense of self-worth. For the nine years since his graduation from the inns of court he had devoted himself to his practice, achieving a small success, all that could be expected of someone who was the son of poor farmers; he had watched less skilled advocates achieve greater success, and he had come to understand what he should have understood from the beginning: that the Law was subordinate to the unwritten laws of social status and blood relation. He was at the age of thirty-three an idealist whose ideals were foundering, yet whose fascination with the game remained undimmed, and this had left him open to a dangerous cynicism—dangerous in that it had produced in him a volatile mixture of old virtues and new half-understood compulsions. Lately the bubblings up of that mixture had tended to make him erratic, prone to wild swings of mood and sudden abandonments of hope and principle. He was, he thought, in much the same condition as the Almintra quarter: a working-class neighborhood funded by solid values that had once looked forward to an upwardly mobile future, but that now aspired to be a slum.

The gemcutter’s rooms were on the second floor of one of the frame houses, located directly above his shop, and it was there that Korrogly interviewed the daughter, Mirielle. She was a slim young woman in her early twenties with long black hair and hazel eyes and a heart-shaped face whose prettiness had been hardened by the stamp of dissipation; she wore a black dress with a lace collar, but her pose was hardly in keeping with the demureness of her garment or with her apparent grief. Her cheeks were puffy from weeping, her eyes reddened, and yet she lay asprawl on a sofa, smoking a crooked green cigar, her legs propped on the back and the arm, affording Korrogly a glimpse of the shadowy division between her thighs: it appeared that grief had offered her the chance to experience a new form of dissolution, and she had seized upon it wholeheartedly.

We’re proud of our little treasure, are we not, he thought, we like to give it lots of ventilation.

But Mirielle Lemos, for all her dissipation, was an extremely attractive woman, and despite her sarcasm, Korrogly—a lonely man—felt drawn to her.

The air was thick with stale cooking odors, and the central room was a typical bachelor’s disarray of soiled dishes and tumbled piles of clothing and scattered books, all strewn across furniture that had seen better days: the sprung sofa, a couple of easy chairs shiny with dirt and grease, a threadbare brown carpet with a faded blue pattern, a small scarred table that bore several framed sketches, one depicting a woman who greatly resembled Mirielle and was holding a baby in her arms—thin winter sunlight cast a glaze of reflection over the glass, imbuing the sketch with a mystical vagueness. On the wall were several paintings, and the largest of these was a representation of Griaule half-buried beneath centuries of grass and trees, only a portion of a wing and his entire massive head, as high as a hill itself, left visible; this painting, Korrogly noticed, was signed W. Lemos. He pushed aside some dirty clothing and perched on the edge of an easy chair facing Mirielle.

“So you’re my father’s advocate,” she said after exhaling a stream of gray smoke. “You don’t look competent.”

“Be assured that I am,” said Korrogly, who had been prepared for her hostility. “If you were hoping for some white-haired old man with ink on his fingers and crumpled legal notes peeping from waistcoat pockets, I’m . . .”

“No,” she said, “I was hoping for someone exactly like you. Somebody with a minimum of experience and skill.”

“I take it, then, that you’re anticipating a hard judgment for your father. That you’re embittered by his act.”

“Embittered?” She laughed. “I despised him before he killed Mardo. Now I hate him.”

“And yet he saved your life?”

“Is that what he told you?” Another laugh. “That’s scarcely the case.”

“You were drugged,” he said. “Lying naked on an altar. A knife was found on Zemaille’s body.”

“I’ve spent other nights lying on that altar in exactly the same state,” she said, “and never once have I experienced other than pleasure.” The knowing quality of her smile made clear the nature of that pleasure. “As for the knife, Mardo always went armed. He was in constant danger from fools like my father.”

“What do you remember of the murder?”

“I remember hearing my father’s voice. I thought I was dreaming. Then I heard a crack, a splintering sound. I looked up and saw Mardo fall with blood all over his face.” She tensed, looked up to the ceiling, apparently made uncomfortable by the memory; but then, as though also inflamed by it, she ran a hand along her belly and thigh. Korrogly averted his eyes, feeling an accumulation of heat in his own belly.

“Your father claims there were nine witnesses, nine hooded figures, all of whom fled the chamber. None of them have come forward. Do you know why this might be?”

“Why should they come forward? To experience more persecution from people who have no idea of what Mardo was attempting?”

“And what was that?”

She exhaled another stream of smoke and said nothing.

“You’ll be asked this question in court.”

“I will not betray our secrets,” she said. “I don’t care what happens to me.”

“Neither does your father . . . or so he says. He’s very depressed, and he wants to see you.”

She made a noise of contempt. “I’ll see him on the gallows.”

“You know,” Korrogly said, “despite what your father has done, he really does believe he was acting to save you.”

“You don’t know what he believes,” she said, sitting up, fixing him with a dead stare, her voice full of venom. “You don’t understand him at all. He pretends to be a humble craftsman, an artisan, a good honest soul. But in his heart he considers himself a superior being. Life, he used to say, has thrown obstacle after obstacle into his path, keeping him from achieving his proper station. He feels he’s been penalized with bad luck for his intelligence. He’s a schemer, a plotter. And his bad luck stems from the fact that he’s not so intelligent as he thinks. He bungles everything.”

The first part of what she had said was in such accord with Korrogly’s impression of Lemos that he was taken aback; hearing his feelings issue from Mirielle’s mouth acted both to reinforce his impression and—because she was so obviously her father’s antagonist—to invalidate it.

“That may be,” he said, covering his confusion by shuffling through papers, “but I doubt it.”

“Oh, you’ll find out,” she said. “If there’s one thing you’ll end up knowing about my father, it’s his capacity for deceit.” She settled back on the sofa, her skirt riding up onto her thigh. “He’s been wanting to kill Mardo ever since I got involved with him.” A smile hitched up the corners of her mouth. “He was jealous.”

“Jealous?” said Korrogly.

“Yes . . . as a lover is jealous. He delights in touching me.”

Korrogly did not reject the notion of incestuous desire out of hand, but after going through the mental file he had begun on Lemos, he refused to believe Mirielle’s accusation; she had been so committed to Zemaille and his way of life that he could not, he realized, believe anything she told him. She was ruined, abandoned to the point of dissolution; the stink pervading the rooms, he thought, was scarcely distinguishable from the reek of her own spoilage.

“Why do you despise your father?” he asked.

“His pomposity,” she said, “and his stodginess. His stale conception of what happiness should be, his inability to embrace life, his dull presence, his . . .”

“All that sounds quite adolescent,” he said. “Like the reaction of a stubborn child who’s been denied her favorite treat.”

She shrugged. “Perhaps. He rejected my suitors, he prevented me from becoming an actress . . . and I could have been a good one. Everybody said so. But how I am, how I was, doesn’t have any bearing on the truth of what I’ve said. And it’s not relevant to what my father did.”

“Relevant . . . possibly not. But it speaks to the fact that you’re not in the least interested in helping him.”

“I’ve made no secret of that.”

“No, you haven’t. But the history of your emotions will be helpful in pointing up that you’re a vindictive bitch and that your idea of the truth is whatever will hurt your father. It has no relation to what really happened.”

He had been trying to make her angry, wanting to get an idea of her boiling point, knowledge that would come in handy during the trial; but her smile only broadened. She crossed her legs and traced a florid shape in the air with the tip of her cigar. She was very cool, he thought, very cool. But in court that would work against her; it would cast Lemos in a more benign light, show him to be the patient, caring parent in contrast to her viperous ingrate. Of course that would be more significant to a defense based on compulsion, on wrong-headed passion; but Korrogly believed he could color his actual defense with this other and so win the jury’s sympathy.

“Well,” he said, coming to his feet. “I may have some more questions later, but I don’t see any use in continuing this now.”

“You think you’ve got me, don’t you?”

“Got you? I don’t know what you mean.”

“You think you’ve got me figured out.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“And how you would portray me in court?”

“I’m sure you must have an idea.”

“Oh, but I’d like to hear it.”

“All right. If necessary I’ll paint a picture of a spoiled, self-indulgent creature who has no real feelings for anyone. Even her grief for her lover seems to be no more than a kind of adornment, an accessory to be worn with a black dress. And in her degeneracy, a condition prompted by drugs and the black arts, by the depraved rituals of the dragon cult, the only emotions she is capable of mustering are those she thinks will serve her ends. Greed, perhaps. And vengefulness.”

She let out a lazy chuckle.

“That strikes you as inaccurate?”

“Not at all, advocate. What amuses me is that knowing this, you think you can use it to your advantage.” She turned on her side, supporting her head with one hand, her skirt twisting beneath her, exposing even more pale firm flesh. “I’ll look forward to our next meeting. Perhaps by then your understanding of the situation will have grown more complex, and you’ll have more . . . more interesting questions to ask.”

“May I ask one further question now?”

“Yes, of course.” She rolled onto her back, cutting her eyes toward him.

“This display of yours, the dress up to your waist and all that, is it intended to arouse me?”

She nodded. “Mmm-hmm. Is it working?”

“Why?” he said. “What possible benefit do you think that’ll gain you? Do you think I’ll defend your father with less enthusiasm?”

“I don’t know . . . will you?”

“Not at all.”

“Then it’ll be for nothing,” she said. “But that’s all right, too.”

He couldn’t tear his eyes away from her legs.

“Really, it’s all right,” she said. “I need a lover now. And I like you. You’re funny, but I like you anyway.”

He stared at her, his anger alternating with desire. Knowing that he could have her alarmed him. He could go to her now, this moment, and it would affect nothing, it would have no resonance with the trial, it would merely be an indulgence. Yet he understood that it was this increasing openness to indulgence that signaled his impending moral shipwreck. To reject her would not be an act of prudishness, but one of salvation.

“It’ll be good with us,” she said. “I have a feeling for these things.”

His eye followed the line of her thigh to the white seashell curve of her hip; her fingers were long, slender, and he imagined how they might touch him.

“I have to be going,” he said.

“Yes, I think you’d better.” Her voice was charged with gleeful spite. “That was a near thing, wasn’t it? You might have actually enjoyed yourself.”

During the next week Korrogly interviewed many witnesses, among them Henry Sichi, who reported that when Lemos purchased the gem-stone, he had been so entranced by it, so absorbed that Sichi had found it necessary to give him a nudge in order to alert him sufficiently to complete the deal. He spoke to various members of Lemos’s guild, all of whom were willing to testify to the mildness and honesty of his character; they described him as a man obsessed with his work, obsessed to the point of absentmindedness, drawing a vastly different picture of the man than had Mirielle. Korrogly had known quite a few men who had presented an exemplary public face and a wholly contradictory one in private; yet there was no doubt that the guildsmen’s testimony would outweigh Middle’s . . . in fact, whatever Mirielle said in evidence would, no matter how hostile, benefit Lemos’s case because of its vile context. He sought out experts on Griaule’s history and talked to people who’d had personal experience of Griaule’s influence. The only witness whose testimony ran contrary to the defense was that of an old man, a drunkard who was in the habit of sleeping it off in the dunes south of Ayler Point and on several occasions had seen Lemos hurling stones at a sign post, hurling them over and over again as if practicing for the fatal toss; the old man’s alcoholism would diminish the impact of the testimony, but it was nevertheless of consequence.

When Korrogly related it to Lemos, the gemcutter said. “I often walk out past the point of an afternoon, and sometimes I throw stones to relax. It was my only talent as a child, and I suppose I seek refuge in it when the world becomes too much to bear.”

Like every other bit of evidence, this too, Korrogly saw, was open to interpretation; it was conceivable, for instance, that Griaule’s choice of Lemos as an agent had been in part made because of this aptitude for throwing stones, that he had been moved by the dragon to practice in preparation for the violent act. He looked across the table at his client. Jail, it appeared, was turning Lemos gray. His skin, the tenor of his emotions, everything about him was going gray, and Korrogly felt infected by that grayness, felt that the gray was the color of the case, of all its indistinct structures and indefinite truths, and that it was spreading through him and wearing him away. He asked again if he could do anything for Lemos, and again Lemos’s answer was that he wished to see Mirielle.

On a Sunday in late March, Korrogly interviewed an elderly and wealthy woman who had until shortly before the murder been an active member of the Temple of the Dragon. The woman was known only as Kirin, and her past was a shadow; she seemed not to have existed prior to her emergence within the strictures of the temple, and since leaving it, she had lived a secretive life, known to the public only through the letters that she occasionally wrote to the newspaper attacking the cult. He was met at the door by a thick-waisted drab, apparently the woman’s servant, who led him into a room that seemed to have been less decorated than to have sprung from a green and leafy enchantment. It was roofed by a faceted skylight, divided by carved wooden screens, all twined with vines and epiphytes; plants of every variety choked the avenues among the screens, their foliage so luxuriant that sprays of leaves hid the pots in which they were rooted. The sun illuminated a profusion of greens—pale Pomona, nile, emerald, viridian, and chartreuse; intricate shadows dappled the hardwood floors. The fronds of sword ferns twitched in the breeze like the feelers of enormous insects.

After wandering through this jungly environment for nearly half an hour, growing more and more impatient, Korrogly was hailed by a fluting female voice, which asked him to call out so that she might find him among the leaves. Moments later, a tall white-haired woman in a floor-length gown of gray watered silk came up beside him; her face was the color of old ivory, deeply wrinkled and stamped with what struck Korrogly as a stern and suspicious character, and her hands moved ceaselessly, plucking at the nearby leaves as if they were the telling beads of some meditative religion. Despite her age, she radiated energy, and Korrogly thought that if he were to close his eyes, he would have the impression he was in the presence of a vital young woman. She directed him to a bench in a corner of the room and sat next to him, gazing out into the lushness of her sanctum, continuing to pluck and pick at stem and leaf.

“I distrust advocates, Mister Korrogly,” she said. “You should know that from the outset.”

“So do I, ma’am,” he said, hoping to elicit a laugh, some softening of her attitude, but she only pursed her lips.

“Had you represented any other client, I would not have agreed to see you. But the man who has rid the world of Mardo Zemaille deserves any help I can give . . . though I’m not at all certain how I can help.”

“I was hoping you might provide me with some background on Zemaille, particularly as regards his relationship with Mirielle Lemos.”

“Ah,” she said. “That.”

“Mirielle herself has not been forthcoming, and the other members of the cult have gone to ground.”

“They’re afraid.”

“Of what?”

She gave an amused hiss. “Of everything, Mister Korrogly. Mardo has addicted them to fear. And of course now that he’s gone, now that he’s abandoned them to the fear he instilled in them, they’ve fled. The temple will never thrive again.” She tore a strip of green off a frond. “That was Mardo’s one truth, that in the proper environment, fear can be a form of sustenance. It’s a truth that underlies many religions. Mirielle understands it as well.”

“Tell me about her.”

The old woman fingered a spray of bamboo leaves. “She’s not a bad girl . . . or at least she didn’t use to be. It was Mardo who corrupted her. He corrupted everyone, he broke them and then poured his black juice into their cracks. When I first met her—that was five years ago—I took her for a typical convert. She was an agitated, moody girl when she came to the temple. All dance and no standstill, as the saying goes. I assumed Mardo would have her—he had all the pretty ones—and that then he would let her fall from grace, become an ordinary devotee. But I underestimated Mirielle. She had something, some quality, that fascinated Mardo. I originally thought that he might have met his match sexually, for I knew from some of the other members that she was—” she seemed to be searching for the right word “—rapacious. And perhaps that did have something to do with it. But of greater relevance, I believe, was that she was driven in much the same way as he. And thus she is equally untrustworthy.”

“How do you mean ‘driven’ ?”

The old woman looked down at the floor. “It’s difficult to explain Mardo to anyone who never knew him, and it’s entirely unnecessary to explain him to anyone who did. When you examine what he said closely, it was all doctrinal persiflage, mumbo jumbo, a welter of half-baked ideas stirred together with high-flown empty language. But despite that, you always had the idea that he knew something, or that he was onto something, some course that would carry him to great achievement. I’m not speaking of charisma . . . not that Mardo was short in that department. What I’m trying to get at something more substantial. There was about him an air that he was being moved by forces within him that not even he fully comprehended.”

“And you’re saying Mirielle had this air as well.”

“Yes, yes, she was driven by something. Again, I don’t know if she understood its nature. But she was driven much like Mardo. He recognized this in her, and that’s why he trusted her so.”

“And yet it appears that he was going to kill her.”

She sighed. “The reason I left the temple . . . no, let me tell you first the reasons I joined it. I fancied myself a seeker, but even at the height of my self-deception, I realized that I was merely bored. Bored and old . . . too old to find better entertainment. The temple was for me a violent dark romance whose characters were constantly changing, and I was completely taken with it. And there was always the sense that Griaule was near. That chill scaley presence . . . that awful cold power.” She gave a dramatic shudder. “At any rate, two years ago I began to have a sense that things were getting serious, that the great work Mardo had talked of for so long was finally getting under way. It frightened me. And being frightened awakened me to the deceits and evils of the temple.”

“Do you know what it was . . . the great work?”

She hesitated. “No.”

He studied her, thinking that she was holding back something. “I have no one else to turn to in this,” he said. “The cult members have gone to ground.”

“They may have gone to ground, but some of them are watching even now. If I revealed secrets, they would kill me.”

“I could summon you.”

“You could,” she said, “but I would say no more than I have. And there is also the fact that I would not make a very reliable witness. The prosecutor would ask questions about my past, and those I would not answer.”

“I assume the great work had something to do with Griaule.”

She shrugged. “Everything did.”

“Can’t you even give me a clue? Something.”

“I’ll tell you this much. You have to understand the nature of the cult. They did not so much worship Griaule as they elevated their fear of him to the status of worship. Mardo saw himself in a particular relationship to Griaule; he felt he was the spiritual descendent of that first wizard who long ago did battle with the dragon . . . a sort of ritual adversary, both celebrant and enemy. That kind of duality appealed to Mardo; he considered it the height of subtlety.”

Korrogly continued to press her, but she would say no more and finally he gave it up. “Did Mirielle know about the work?”

“I doubt it. Mardo’s trust of her extended to the material world, but this was something else, something magical. Something serious. And that troubled me. I didn’t want things to be serious, I began to be afraid. People vanished, conversations became whispered, the darkness inside the temple seemed to be spreading everywhere. Finally I couldn’t bear it. I started to notice things. Perhaps I’d always noticed them, but had preferred not to see them. At any rate, I realized then how dangerous a thing had been my boredom, how low I had let it drag me. I understood that for all his drive and intensity, Mardo Zemaille was an evil man . . . evil in the blackest of definitions. He sought to master wizardly arts that have died away for lack of adherents corrupt enough to dig in the nightsoil where the roots of such power are buried.”

“What things did you notice?”

“Rituals of torture . . . sacrifices.”

“Human sacrifice?”

“Perhaps . . . I can’t be sure. But I believe at the least that Mardo was capable of it.”

“Then you think that he was going to sacrifice Mirielle.”

“It’s hard to credit. He doted on her. But, yes, it’s possible that he would feel he had to sacrifice the thing he most cared about in order to complete the great work. She may not have known it, but I think he may have had that in mind.”

Korrogly watched leaf shadows trembling on the sunlit floor; he felt tired, out of his element. What, he thought, am I doing here, talking to an old lady about evil, trying to prove that a dragon has committed murder, what am I doing?

“You mentioned trust between the two of them.”

“Yes, Mardo made it plain to everyone that in the event anything happened to him, she was to lead the temple. There was something . . .”

“What?” Korrogly asked.

“I was going to say I always suspected that there was a secret history between them, and that was another reason for Mardo’s trust. It was something I felt was true . . . but it was only a feeling. Nothing admissible, nothing you could use. Anyway, I suppose he drew up documents that would grant her some kind of legal succession. He was a stickler for that sort of detail.” She tilted her head to the side as if trying to make out some indefinite quality in his face. “You looked surprised. I’ve never known an advocate whose expressions were so readable.”

Failure, he thought, even my face is failing me now.

“I had no idea the bond between them had been ratified in any way,” he said.

“Perhaps it hasn’t. I can’t be sure. But if I’m correct and it has, you’ll have no end of trouble unearthing the documents. Mardo would have never gone to an advocate. If they exist they’re probably hidden in the temple somewhere.”

“I see.”

“What are you thinking?”

He made a noise of baffled amusement. “I thought this would be such a simple case, but everywhere I turn I come upon some new complexity.”

“It is a simple case,” she said, her wrinkled face tightening with a grim expression. “Take my word, no matter how villainous a creature you believe William Lemos to be, his act has made him an innocent.”

One night shortly before the opening of the trial, Korrogly visited the constabulary headquarters to have another look at the murder weapon—the Father of Stones, as Lemos had named it. Standing alone by a table in the evidence room, looking down at the stone, which rested in the center of a nest of tissue paper within a tin box, he was as confounded by it as he had been by every other element of the case. At one moment it seemed to enclose profane fractions of encysted light, its surface clouded and occult, a milky bulge with the reek of a thousand-year-old egg trapped inside; the next, it would appear lovely, subtle, embodying the delicate essence of some numinous philosophy. And at its heart was a dark flaw that resembled a man with upflung arms. Like Griaule himself, it was a thing of infinite shadings, of a thousand possible interpretations, and Korrogly could easily believe that its point of origin was a cavity in the dragon’s body. He was, however, still unable to believe Lemos’s story; it, too, was flawed, and this flaw would be enough to lead the gemcutter to the gallows. There was just no good reason, at least none he, Korrogly, could discern, why Griaule would have wanted Lemos to kill Zemaille. Not even Lemos could come up with a good reason; he simply continued to insist that it was so, and mere insistence would not save him. Yet it was that same flaw, the lack of patness to the story, that kept forcing Korrogly to relent in his judgment, to be tempted to belief. What a case, he thought, when he was back in the inns of court he’d dreamed of having a case like this, and now he had it, and all it was doing was making him weary, making him wonder if he had wasted his life, if every question, even the most fundamental, was as elusive as this one, and he just hadn’t noticed before.

He picked up the Father of Stones and juggled it; it was unusually heavy. Like dragon scale, like ancient thought.

Damn, he thought, damn this whole business, I should give it up and start a religion, there must be sufficient fools out there for some of them to consider me wise and wonderful.

“Thinking about murdering someone?” said a dry voice behind him. “Your client, perhaps?”

It was the magistrate, Ian Mervale, a reedy, aristocratic-looking man in a stylishly-cut black suit; his dark hair, combed back from a noble forehead, was salted with gray, and the vagueness of his eyes, which were watery blue, set in sleepy folds, belied a quick and aggressive mentality.

“I’m more likely to go after you,” said Korrogly wryly.

“Me?” Mervale affected shocked dismay. “I’m by far the least of your worries. If not your client, I’d consider an attack upon our venerable Judge Wymer. It appears he’s not at all sympathetic to your defense tactics.”

“I can’t blame him for that,” Korrogly muttered.

Mervale studied him for a moment, then shook his head and chuckled. “It’s always the same every time I run up against you. I know you’re being honest, you’re not trying to underplay your hand. But even though I know it, as soon as the trial begins I become positively convinced that you’re being duplicitous, that you’ve got some devastating trick up your sleeve.”

“You don’t trust yourself,” Korrogly said. “How can you trust anyone else?”

“I suppose you’re right. My greatest strength is my greatest weakness.” He started to turn toward the door, hesitated and then said, “Care for a drink?”

Korrogly juggled the Father of Stones one last time; it seemed to have grown heavier yet. “I suppose a drink might help,” he said.

The Blind Lady, a pub in Chancrey’s Lane, was as usual crowded with law clerks and young advocators, whose body heat fogged the mirrors on the walls, whose errant darts lodged in white plaster or blackened beam, and whose uproarious babble made quiet conversation impossible. Korrogly and Mervale worked their way through the press, holding their glasses high to avoid spillage, and at last found an unoccupied table at the rear of the pub. As they seated themselves, a group of clerks standing nearby began to sing a bawdy song. Mervale winced, then lifted his glass in a toast to Korrogly.

The singers moved off toward the front of the pub; Mervale leaned back, regarding Korrogly with fond condescension, an attitude more of social habit than one relating to their adversary positions. Mervale was the son of a moneyed shipbuilder, and there was always an edge of class struggle to their conversations, an edge they blunted by pretending to have a fund of mutual respect.

“So what do you think?” Mervale asked. “Is Lemos lying . . . demented? What?”

“Demented, no. Lying . . .?” Korrogly sipped his rum. “Every time I think I have the answer to that, I see another side to things. I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess at this stage. What do you think?”

“Of course he’s lying! The man had every motive in the world to kill Zemaille. His daughter, his business. My God! He could have done nothing else but kill him. But I have to admit his story’s ingenious. Brilliant.”

“Is it? I might have gotten him off with a couple of years if he’d pled some version of diminished capacity.”

“Yes, but that’s what makes it so brilliant, the fact that everyone knows that’s so. They’ll say to themselves, God, the man must be innocent or else he wouldn’t stick to such a far-fetched tale.”

“I’d hardly call it far-fetched.”

“Oh, very well! Let’s call it inspired then, shall we?”

Growing annoyed, Korrogly thought, you pompous piece of shit, I’m going to beat you this time.

He smiled. “As you wish.”

“Ah,” said Mervale, “I sense that a litigator has suddenly taken possession of your body.”

Korrogly drank. “I’m not in the mood tonight, Mervale. What are you after that you think I’m willing to give away?”

Displeasure registered on Mervale’s face.

“What’s wrong?” Korrogly asked. “Am I spoiling your fun?”

“I don’t know what’s got into you,” said Mervale. “Maybe you’ve been working too hard.”

“These little ritual fishing expeditions are beginning to bore me, that’s all. They always come to the same thing. Nothing. They’re just your way of reminding me of my station. You drag me in here and butter me up with the old school smile and talk about parties to which I haven’t been invited. I expect you believe this gives you a psychological advantage, but I think the false sense of superiority it lends you actually weakens your delivery. And you need all the strength you can muster. You’re simply not that proficient a magistrate.”

Mervale got stiffly to his feet, cast a scornful look down at Korrogly. “You’re a joke, you know that?” he said. “A tiresome drudge without a life, with only the law for a bed partner.” He tossed some coins onto the table. “Buy yourself a couple of drinks. Perhaps drunk you’ll be able to entertain yourself.”

Korrogly watched him move through the crowd, accepting the good wishes of the law clerks who closed around him. Now why, he thought, why did I bother doing that?

He waited until Mervale was out of sight before leaving, and then, instead of going directly home, he walked west along Biscaya Boulevard, heading nowhere in particular, moving aimlessly through the accumulating mist, his thoughts in a despondent muddle; the dank salt air seemed redolent of his own heaviness, of the damp dark moil inside his head. Only peripherally did he notice that he had entered the Almintra quarter, and it was not until he found himself standing in front of the gemcutter’s shop that he suspected he had tried to hide from himself the fact that he had intended to come this way. Or perhaps, he thought, I was moved to come here by some vast and ineluctable agency whose essence spoke to me from the Father of Stones. Though that thought had been formed in derision, it caused the hairs on the back of his neck to prickle, and he wondered, what if Lemos’s story is true, could I also be vulnerable to Griaule’s directives? The silence of the dead street unnerved him; the peaks of the rooftops looked lifca black simple mountains rising from plateaus of mist, and the few streetlamps left unbroken shone through the haze like evil luminous flowers. The shop windows were obsidian, reflective, hiding their secrets. It was still fairly early, but all the good artisans and shopkeepers were abed . . . all except the occupant of the rooms above Lemos’s shop. Her light still burned. He gazed up at it, thinking now that Mervale’s insulting and accurate depiction of his life might have motivated him to visit Mirielle, thereby to disprove it. He decided to leave, to return home, but remained standing in front of the shop, held in place, it seemed, by the glow of the lamp and the sodden crash of the surf from the darkness beyond. A dog began to bark nearby; from somewhere farther away came the call of voices singing, violins and horns, a melancholy tune that he felt was sounding the configuration of his own loneliness.

This is folly, he said to himself, she’ll probably kick you down the stairs, she was only playing with you the last time, and why the hell would you want it anyway . . . just to be away from your thoughts for a while, no matter how temporary the cure?

That’s right, that’s exactly right.

“Hell!” he said to the dark, to the whole unlistening world, “hell, why not?”

The woman who opened the door, though physically the same woman who had sprawled brazenly on the sofa during their first meeting, was in all other ways quite different. Distracted; twitchy; pale to the point of seeming bloodless, her black hair loose and in disarray; clad in a white robe of some heavy coarse cloth. The dissolute hardness had emptied from her face, and she seemed to have thrown off a handful of years, to be a troubled young girl. She stared for a second as if failing to recognize him and then said, “Oh . . . you.”

He was about to apologize for having come so late, to beat a retreat, put off by her manner; but before he could frame the words, she stepped back from the door and invited him in.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said, following him into the living room, which had undergone a cleaning. “I haven’t been able to sleep.”

She dropped onto the sofa, fumbled about on the end table, picked up a cigar, then set it down; she looked up at him expectantly.

“Well, have a seat.”

He did as instructed, taking his perch again on the easy chair. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions.”

“Questions . . . you want . . . oh, all right. Questions.” She gave a fey laugh and picked nervously at the fringe on the arm of the sofa. “Ask away.”

“I’ve heard,” he said, “that Mardo had in mind for you to take over the leadership of the temple in case of his death. Is that correct?”

She nodded, kept nodding, too forcefully for mere affirmation, as if trying to clear some painful entanglement from her head.

“Yes indeed,” she said. “That’s what he had in mind.”

“Were there papers drawn up to this effect?”

“No . . . yes, maybe . . . I don’t know. He talked about doing it, but I never saw them.” She rocked back and forth on the edge of the sofa, her hands plucking at ridges of its old embroidered pattern. “It doesn’t matter now.”

“Why . . . why doesn’t it matter?”

“There is no temple.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is no temple! Simple as that. No more adherents, no more ceremonies. Just empty buildings.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“But . . .”

She jumped to her feet, paced toward the back of the room; then she spun about to face him, brushing her hair back from her cheek. “I don’t want to talk about it! I don’t want to talk at all . . . not about . . . not about anything important.” She put a hand to her brow as if testing for a fever. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “My life’s a shambles, my lover’s dead, and my father goes on trial for his murder tomorrow morning. Everything’s fine.”

“I don’t know why your father’s plight should disturb you. I thought you hated him.”

“He’s still my father. I have feelings that hate won’t dissolve. Reflex feelings, you understand. But they have their pull.” She came back to the sofa and sat down; once again she began picking at the embroidered pattern. “Look, I can’t help you. I don’t know anything that can help you with the trial. Not a thing. If I did I think I’d tell you . . . that’s how I feel now, anyway. But there’s nothing, nothing at all.”

He sensed that the crack in her callous veneer ran deeper than she cared to admit, and, too, he thought that her anxiety might be due to the fact that she did know something helpful and was holding it back; but he decided not to push the matter.

“Very well,” he said. “What would you like to talk about?”

She glanced around the room, as if searching for something that would support a conversation.

He noticed that her eye lingered on the framed sketch of the woman and baby. “Is that your mother?” he asked, pointing to it.

That appeared to unsettle her.

“Yes,” she murmured, looking quickly away from the sketch.

“She’s very much like you. Her name was Patricia, wasn’t it?”

Mirielle nodded.

“It’s a terrible thing,” he said, “for a woman so lovely to be taken before her time. What happened? How did she drown?”

“Don’t you know how to talk without interrogating people?” she asked angrily.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wondering at the vehemence of her reaction. “I just . . .”

“My mother’s dead,” she said. “Let that be enough for you.”

“I was only making conversation. You choose the subject, all right?”

“All right,” she said after a moment. “Let’s talk about you.”

“There’s not much to tell.”

“There never is with people, but that’s all right. I won’t be bored, I promise.”

He began, reluctantly at first, to talk about his life, his childhood, the tiny farm in the hills above the city, with its banana grove, its corral and three cows—Rose, Alvina, and Esmeralda—and as he spoke, that old innocent life seemed to be resurrected, to be breathing just beyond the apartment walls. He told her how he used to sit on a hilltop and look down at the city and dream of owning one of the fine houses.

“And now you do,” she said.

“No I don’t. There’s a law against it. The fine houses belong to those with status, with history on their side. There are laws against people like me, laws that keep us in our place.”

“Of course,” she said. “I know that.”

He told her about his first interest in the law, how it had seemed in its logical construction and order to be a lever with which one could move any obstruction, but how he had discovered that there were so many levers and obstructions, when you moved one, another would drop down to crush you, and the trick was to keep in constant motion, to be moving things constantly and dancing out of the way.

“Did you always want to be an advocate?”

He laughed. “No, my first ambition was to be the man who slew the dragon Griaule, to claim the reward offered in Teocinte, to buy my mother silver bowls and my father a new guitar.”

Her expression, happy a moment before, had gone slack and distraught; he asked if she were all right.

“Don’t even say his name,” she said. “You don’t know, you don’t know . . .”

“What don’t I know?”

“Griaule . . . God! I used to feel him in the temple. Perhaps you think that’s just my imagination, but I swear it’s true. We all concentrated on him, we sang to him, we believed in him, we conjured him in our thoughts, and soon we could feel him. Cold and vast. Inhuman. This great scaley chill that owned a world.”

Korrogly was struck by the similarity of phrasing with which the old woman Kirin and now Mirielle had referred to their apprehension of Griaule, and thought to make mention of it; but Mirielle continued speaking, and he let the matter drop.

“I can still feel his touch in my mind. Heavy and steeped in blackness. Each one of his thoughts a century in forming, a tonnage of hatred, of sheer enmity. He’d brush against me, and I’d be cold for hours. That’s why . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing.” She was trembling violently, hugging herself.

He crossed to the sofa, sat beside her, and, after hesitating for a few seconds, draped an arm about her shoulder. Her hair had the smell of fresh oranges.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I can feel him still, I’ll always feel him.” She glanced up at Korrogly and then blurted out, “Come to bed with me. I know you don’t like me, but it’s warmth I want, not affection. Please, I won’t . . .”

“I do like you,” he said.

“No, you can’t, you . . . no.”

“I do,” he said, believing it as he spoke. “Tonight I like you, tonight you’re someone it’s possible to care about.”

“You don’t understand, you can’t see how he’s changed me.”

“Griaule, you mean?”

“Please,” she said, her arms going around his waist. “No more questions . . . not now. Please, just keep me warm.”

As Korrogly began his opening statement, half his mind was back in the gemcutter’s rooms with Mirielle, still embraced by her white arms, nourished by the rosy points of her breasts and her long supple legs, finding that beneath her veneer of depravity there existed a woman of virtue and sweetness, replaying in memory the joys of mastery and submission. None of this posed a distraction, but acted rather to inspire him, to urge him on to a more impassioned appeal than that he had originally contrived. Strolling alongside the jury box, stuffed with twelve pasty-faced models of good citizenship culled from an assortment of less worthy souls, he felt like a sea captain striding the deck of his ship, and the courtroom, it struck him, was essentially a cross between church and vessel, the ship of state sailing toward the coast of justice, with white walls for sails and boxy divisions of black wood holding a cargo of witnesses and jurors and the curious, and lording over all, the judge’s bench, an immense teak block carved into the semblance of dragon scales, where sat the oracular figurehead of this magical ship: the Honorable Ernest Wymer, white-haired and florid, an alcoholic old beast with a cruel mouth and tufted brows and a shiny red beak, hunched in the folds of his black-winged gown, ready to pounce upon any legal mouse that should happen to stray into his field of vision. Korrogly was not afraid of Wymer; he, not the judge, was in command this day. He knew the jury’s mind, knew that they wanted to believe Griaule was the guilty party, that this suited the mystical yearning of their hearts, and with all his wiles, he set about consolidating that yearning into intent. There was urgency in his voice, yet it was neither too strident nor too subdued, perfect, a blend of power and fluency; he felt that this harmony of intent and skill stemmed from his night with Mirielle. He was not in love with her, or perhaps he was . . . but love was not the salient matter. What most inspired him was to have found something unspoiled in her, in himself, and whether that was love or merely a place left untouched by the world, it was sufficient to renew his old enthusiasms.

“We are all aware,” he said toward the conclusion of his statement, “that Griaule’s power exists. The question remains, is he capable of reaching out from the Carbonales to touch us here in Port Chantay. That is a question we should not need ask. Look there.” He pointed to the judge’s bench and its carved scales. “And there.” He pointed to crude representations of the dragon carved twining the lintel posts at the back of the hall. “His image is everywhere in Port Chantay, and this is emblematic of his propinquity, of the tendrils of his will that have infiltrated our lives. Perhaps he cannot move us with the facility that he does those who dwell in Teocinte, but we are not so far beyond the range of his thoughts that he does not know us. He knows us well. He sees us, he holds us in his mind, and if he requires something of us, do you really believe he is incapable of affecting our lives in a more pronounced fashion? Griaule is, if anything, capable. He is an immortal, unfathomable creature who is as pervasive in our lives as the idea of God. And as with God, we do not have the wisdom to establish the limits of his capacities.” Korrogly paused, letting his gaze dwell on each of their rapt faces in turn, seeing therein a measure of anxiety, understanding how to play upon it; the slants of winter sunlight made them all look wan and sickly, like terminal patients hopeful of a cure. “Griaule is here, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. He is watching this proceeding. Perhaps he is even involved in it. Search inside yourselves. Can you feel secure that his eye is not upon you? And this—” he picked up the Father of Stones from the magistrate’s table “—can you be sure that this is not his eye? The magistrate will tell you that it is only a stone, but I tell you that it is much more.” He held it up to their faces as he passed along the jury box and was pleased to see them shrink from it. “This is Griaule’s instrument, the embodiment of his will, the vehicle by which his will has been effected here in Port Chantay, miles and miles beyond the range of his usual sphere of influence. If you doubt this, if you doubt that he could have formed it and injected it with the complex values of his wish and need, then I urge you to touch it. It brims with his cold vigor. And just as you now perceive it, so it is perceiving you.”

The magistrates case was elementary. A constable testified to the authenticity of Lemos’s confession; several witnesses were called to testify to the fact that they had seen him working at cutting the Father of Stones; the old drunkard related his story of Lemos throwing stones on the beach; others claimed to have seen him breaking into the temple. Korrogly limited his cross-examination to establishing the point that none of the witnesses had known the gemcutter’s mind. No more was needed. The defense would rise or fall on its own merits.

Late in the day, Mirielle was called to the stand. Her testimony, while not as embittered as Korrogly had assumed it would be, was nonetheless of great benefit to Lemos; it was obvious that she was of two minds about her father, that she despised him, and that this attitude warred with the guilt that arose from testifying against him—that she should be in the least guilty implied that Lemos must have been a good parent, that her spite was doubtless a product of Zemaille’s corrupting influence. It was also evident that she was not being entirely forthcoming. She denied knowledge of Zemaille’s great work, and there was—Korrogly was certain—something else that she was keeping from the light. In his cross-examination he touched upon it, establishing the area of vagueness, one having to do with her reasons for entering the temple.

“I’m not quite clear on this,” he said to her. “Surely you didn’t enter into such a dark society on a whim?”

“It was years ago,” she said. “Perhaps it was a whim, perhaps I simply wanted to escape my father.”

“Yes,” he said, “your father, who simply wanted to spare you the violent excesses of the temple. Truly, that was overly severe of him.”

Mervale leaped to his feet. “If the defense wishes to frame his lectoral remarks in a question, I suggest he do it.”

“I agree,” said Judge Wymer, with a cautionary nod to Korrogly.

“Your pardon.” Korrogly inclined his head in a respectful bow. “The temple,” he went on musingly, “what attracted you to it? Was it Zemaille?”

“I don’t know . . . yes, I think so.”

“A physical attraction?”

“It was more complex than that.”

“How so?”

Her face worked, she worried her lower lip. “I don’t know how to answer that.”

“Why not? It’s a simple question.”

“Nothing is simple!” she said, her voice growing shrill. “You couldn’t possibly understand!”

Korrogly wondered if she might be restraining herself from speaking of her father’s alleged abuse—he was not afraid of the topic, yet he did not want to break her down into tears and that seemed a likelihood. He would not have minded rage; but he did not wish to make her in any way an object of sympathy. He could, he knew, always recall her.

Questioning her, even though her adversary, he felt that a strange connection had been forged between them, as if they were partners in a plot, and it was difficult to maintain a professional distance; she looked beautiful in her lacy black dress, and standing beside the witness box, inhaling her scent of heat and oranges, he began to believe that his feelings for her did run deep, that something powerful had been dredged up from beneath the years of disappointment and failure.

The close of Mirielle’s testimony was also the close of the magistrate’s case, and Judge Wymer called for a recess until the morning. Lemos, as he had throughout the proceeding, sat without displaying any emotion—a gray statement of despair—and nothing Korrogly could say had a cheering effect upon him. He had been given a haircut in jail, his sandy forelock trimmed away, his ears left totally exposed, and this, along with his loss of weight and increased pallor, made him look as if he had been the victim of a prolonged and dehumanizing abuse.

“It’s going well,” Korrogly told him as they sat at the defense table afterward. “Before today I wasn’t sure how the jury would react to our tactics, I was concerned that we didn’t have sufficient detail. But now I don’t know if we’ll need it. They want to believe you.”

Lemos grunted, traced an imperfection in the wood of the table with his forefinger.

“Still, it would help a great deal if we could present a reason that would explain why Griaule wanted Zemaille dead,” Korrogly went on.

“Mirielle,” Lemos said, “she didn’t seem to be as distant from me today as before. I wonder, could you ask her again to visit me?”

Korrogly felt a rippling of guilt. “Yes, I’ll ask her tonight.”

“Tonight?” Lemos looked askance at him.

“Yes,” said Korrogly, hurrying to cover the slip, “I’ll make a special trip to see her. I want you to see her, I’m in favor of anything that’ll wake you up. You’re on trial for your life, man!”

“I know that.”

“You don’t much act like you do. I’ll ask Mirielle to see you, but my advice is to forget about her for the time being, concentrate on the trial. Once you’re free, then you can repair the relationship.”

Lemos blinked, gazed out the window at the reddening western sky. “All right,” he said listlessly.

Frustrated, Korrogly began packing up his papers.

“I know,” Lemos said.

“What?” Korrogly asked, preoccupied.

“I know about you and Mirielle. I’ve always been able to tell who she was bedding. She looks at them differently.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! I . . .”

“I know!” said Lemos, suddenly energized, turning a bright stare on him. “I’m not a fool!”

Korrogly, taken aback, began to wonder if Mirielle’s veiled accusations of parental lust might have had substance. “Even if I were . . .”

“I don’t want you to see her like that!” Lemos gripped the edge of the table. “I want you to stop!”

“We’ll talk more after you’ve calmed down.”

“I won’t have it! Ever since she’s been old enough, men like you have taken advantage of her. This time . . .”

Korrogly slammed down his satchel. “Now listen to me! Do you want to die? Because if you do, alienating your advocate’s a fine first step. I promise you, if you don’t stop this right now, I’ll start treating your case with the same lack of concern you’ve shown toward it. You don’t seem to care very much about living . . . or maybe that’s just an act. If it is an act, I caution you to be temperate with me.”

Lemos sank back into his chair, looking defeated, and Korrogly felt he had at last penetrated the man’s mask. The gemcutter did care about his fate; his pose of unconcern was a fake, his entire story a lie. Which made Korrogly an accomplice. He could back out of the case, he thought, claiming to have stumbled upon new information; but given Judge Wymer’s hostility toward the defense, it might be that charges would be brought against him in any event. And he could not be sure of the matter; there was nothing sure in this case. He had become so confused by the conflicting flows of evidence that he was unable to trust his own judgments. Lemos’ perverse desire for his daughter—if that, too, was not a fraud—might have enlivened him sufficiently to react to his peril.

After the guard had led Lemos back to his cell, Korrogly walked slowly through the twilight across town toward the Almintra quarter, ignoring the bustle of the evening traffic; his mind was in a turmoil, the greater part of his agitation caused not by the snarls of the case, but by the fact that he had threatened to turn against a client. It was the final tattering of his ideals, the ultimate violation of his contract with the law. How could he have done it, he thought. Was it Mirielle, her influence? No, he could not blame her—blame attached only to himself. The sole course open to him was to defend the gemcutter from this point forward to the best of his abilities, his guilt or innocence notwithstanding. And he would have to break it off with Mirielle; he could not in good faith continue to upset Lemos. It had been a long time since he had felt so at ease with a woman. But he would do it nevertheless, he told himself; he would not allow this case to become a drain down which the last of his conscience flowed.

When he reached the gemcutter’s rooms, however, his resolve went glimmering. Mirielle was even more ardent than she had been the previous night; it was not until much later that Korrogly thought of Lemos again, and then it was only in passing, produced by a flicker of remorse. Mirielle was lying on her side, one leg flung across his hip, still joined to him; her breasts were small and white, glowing in the misted light from the streetlamps with the milky purity of the Father of Stones; beneath the skin, faint blue veins forked upward to vanish in the hollow of her throat. He traced their path with his tongue, making her breath come fast; he cupped her buttocks with his hands, holding her against him while his hips moved with sinuous insistence. Her nails pricked his back, the rhythm of her own movements quickened, and then she let out the last best part of her feeling in a hoarse cry.

“God!” she said. “God, you feel so good!” And without thinking of what he was saying, he told her that he loved her.

A shadow seemed to cross her face. “Don’t say that.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Just don’t say it.”

“I’m afraid it’s true,” he said. “I don’t have much choice.”

“You don’t know me, you don’t know the things I’ve done.”

“With Zemaille?”

“I had sex with other people, with whomever Mardo wanted me to. I did things . . .” She closed her eyes. “It wasn’t so much what I did, it’s that I stood by while Mardo . . .” She broke off, buried her face in the join of his neck and shoulder. “God, I don’t want to tell you any of this.”

“It doesn’t matter, anyway.”

“It does,” she said. “You can’t go through what I have and come out a whole person. You may think you love me, but . . .”

“How do you feel about me?”

“Don’t expect me to say I love you.”

“I’m not expecting anything more than the truth.”

“Oh!” She laughed. “Is that all? If I knew the truth, things would be much easier.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Look.” She took his face in both hands. “Don’t make me say anything. It’s good between us, it helps. Sometimes I want to say things to you, but I’m not ready. I hope I will be someday, but if you force me to say anything now . . . I’m perverse that way. I’ll just try to deny it to myself. That’s what I’ve been taught to do with things that make me happy.”

“That says enough.”

“Does it? I hope so.”

He kissed her mouth, touched her breasts, feeling the nipples stiffen between his spread fingers.

“There’s something I’d like you to do for me, though. I want you to visit your father.”

She turned away from him. “I can’t.”

“Because he . . . abused you?”

“What do you think?”

“I think there’s some evidence you were abused by him.”

“Abused,” she said, enunciating the word precisely as if judging its flavor; then, after a moment, she added, “I can’t talk about it, I’ve never been able to talk about it. I just can’t bring myself to . . . to say what happened.”

“Well?” he said. “Will you see him?”

“It wouldn’t do any good, it wouldn’t make him any happier. And that’s what you’re after, isn’t it.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“A visit would just upset him, believe me.”

“I suppose I’ll have to,” he said. “I can’t force you. I just wish I could get him more involved.”

“You still think he’s innocent, don’t you?”

“I’m not sure . . . perhaps. I don’t think you’re sure, either.”

She looked as if she were going to respond, but her mouth thinned and she remained silent for a long moment. Finally she said, “I’m sure.”

He started to say something, and she put a finger to his lips.

“Don’t talk about it any more, please.”

He lay on his back, watching frail shadows of the mist coiling across the white ceiling, thinking about Lemos; he could accept nothing, believe nothing. That the gemcutter had molested his daughter seemed both apparent and unlikely, as was the case with his guilt and innocence. He did not doubt that Mirielle believed her father had abused her; but while he loved her, he was not sure of her stability, and thus her beliefs were in question. And in question also were her motives in being with him. He found it difficult to accept that she was anything but sincere in her responses; her reluctance to voice a commitment seemed clear evidence of the inner turmoil he was causing her. Still, he could not wholly reject the notion that she was using him . . . though for what reason he had no idea. He was walking across quicksand, in shadows, with inarticulate voices calling to him from every direction.

“You’re worrying about something,” she said. “Don’t . . . it’ll be all right.”

“Between us?”

“Is that what you’re worrying about?”

“Among other things.”

“I can’t promise you that you’ll like what will happen,” she said. “But I will try with you.”

He started to ask her why she was going to try, what she had found that would make her want something with him; but he reminded himself of her caution against pushing her.

“You’re still worrying,” she said.

“I can’t stop.”

“Yes, you can.” Her hand slid down across his chest, his belly, kindling a slow warmth. “That much I can promise.”

Against Korrogly’s objections, the case for the magistrate was reopened the following morning and Mirielle recalled to the stand. Mervale offered into evidence a sheaf of legal documents, which proved to have been signed by Mardo Zemaille and witnessed by Mirielle, and constituted a last will and testament, deeding the temple and its grounds to Mirielle in the event of the priest’s death. Mervale had unearthed the papers from the city archives and produced ample evidence to substantiate that the signatures were authentic and that the papers were legal.

“How much would you say the properties mentioned in the will are worth?” Mervale asked Mirielle, who was wearing a high-collared dress of blue velvet.

“I have no idea.”

“Would it be inaccurate to say that they’re worth quite a large sum of money? A sizeable fortune?”

“The witness has already answered the question,” said Korrogly.

“Indeed she has,” said Judge Wymer, with a stern look at Mervale, who shrugged, stepped to the magistrate table and offered into evidence the tax assessor’s report on the properties.

“Did your father know of this will?” Mervale asked after the exhibits had been marked.

Mirielle murmured, “Yes.”

Korrogly glanced at Lemos, who appeared not to be listening.

“And how did he come to know about it?”

“I told him.”

“On what occasion?”

“He came to the temple.” She drew in breath sharply, let it out slowly, as if ordering herself. “He wanted me to leave the cult, he said that once Mardo tired of me he would drop me and then the family would be without a penny. The shop would be gone . . . everything.” She drew in another breath. “He made me angry. I told him about the will, I said that Mardo had taken care of me far better than he had. And he said that he’d have me declared incompetent. He said he’d get an advocate and take everything Mardo left me.”

“Do you know if he ever did see an advocate?”

“Yes, he did.”

“And was that advocate’s name Artis Colari?”

“Yes.”

Mervale picked up more papers from his table. “Mister Colari is currently trying another case and cannot attend this proceeding. However, I have here a deposition wherein he states that he was approached by the defendant two weeks before the murder with the intent of having his daughter declared mentally incompetent for reasons of instability caused by her abuse of drugs.” He smiled at Korrogly. “Your witness.”

Korrogly requested a consultation with his client, and once they were sequestered he asked Lemos, “Did you know about the will?”

A nod. “But that wasn’t why I went to see Colari. I didn’t care about the money, I didn’t want anything that Zemaille had touched. I was afraid for Mirielle. I wanted her out of that place, and I thought the only way I could manage that was to have her declared incompetent.”

The uncharacteristic passion with which he had spoken startled Korrogly: it was the first sign of vitality that Lemos had displayed since his arrest.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I didn’t think of it.”

“It seems an odd thing to have forgotten.”

“It wasn’t so much that I forgot it . . . Look.” Lemos sat up straight, smoothing down his hair. “I realize I’ve given you a hard time, but I . . . it’s been . . . I can’t explain what it’s been like for me. I didn’t think you believed my story. I’m still not sure you do. And that’s just added to the despair I’ve been feeling. I’m sorry, I know I should have been more cooperative.”

Despite his prison haircut and coverall, his unhealthy complexion, Lemos seemed the picture of eager contrition, boyish in his renewed vigor, and Korrogly did not know whether to be pleased or disgusted. Incredible, he thought, more than incredible, the man was impossible to believe, except that somehow his very implausibility seemed believable. As for Mirielle, how could she have hidden this from him? What did that signal as to their relationship? Was her hatred for her father such a powerful taint that it could abrogate all other rules? Had he misjudged her in every way?

“It doesn’t look good, does it?” Lemos said.

Korrogly resisted the temptation to laugh. “We still have our witnesses, and I’m not going to let Mirielle’s testimony go unchallenged.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Try to overcome the effects of your despondency,” said Korrogly. “Come on.”

Once back in the courtroom, Korrogly took a turn around the witness box, studying Mirielle, who appeared nervous, picking at the seams of her dress, and at last he said, “Why do you hate your father?”

She looked surprised.

“It’s not a difficult question,” Korrogly said. “It’s obvious to everyone here that you want him found guilty.”

“Objection!” Mervale shrilled.

Judge Wymer said, “Limit yourself to proper questions, Mister Korrogly.”

Korrogly nodded. “Why do you hate your father?”

“Because . . .” Mirielle stared at him, pleading with her eyes. “Because . . .”

“Is it because you consider him a restrictive parent?”

“Yes.”

“Because he tried to separate you and your lover?”

“Yes.”

“Because you feel he is contemptible in the stodginess and staleness of his life?”

“Yes.”

“And can we assume you have other reasons yet for hating him?”

“Yes!” she cried. “Yes! What are you doing?”

“I’m establishing that you hate your father, Miss Lemos. That you hate him with sufficient passion to attempt to turn this trial into a melodrama so as to guarantee his conviction. That you’ve hidden evidence from the court so that it could be produced at a particularly theatrical moment. Perhaps you’ve had help in this from the theatrical Mister Mervale . . .”

“Objection!”

“Mister Korrogly!” said Judge Wymer.

“. . . but whatever the case, you most certainly have been duplicitous in your testimony . . .”

“Mister Korrogly!”

“Duplicitous in your intent, in your every action before this court!”

“Mister Korrogly! If you don’t stop this immediately . . .”

“I apologize, your honor.”

“You’re on thin ice, Mister Korrogly. I won’t permit another such outburst.”

“I can assure you, your honor, it won’t happen again.” He walked over to the jury box, leaned against it, hoping to ally himself thereby with the jurors, to make it seem that he was asking their questions. “Miss Lemos, you knew of the will prior to this morning . . . correct?”

“Yes.”

“Did you make mention of it to the magistrate?”

“Yes.”

“When did you mention it to him?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Why not before? Surely you must have recognized its importance.”

“I . . . it slipped my mind, I guess.”

“It slipped your mind,” said Korrogly, injecting heavy sarcasm into his tone. “You guess.” He turned to the jury, shook his head ruefully. “Is there anything else you have forgotten to mention?”

“Objection!”

“Overruled. The witness will answer.”

“I . . . no.”

“I hope not, for your sake,” Korrogly said. “Did your father ever tell you that the reason he wanted to declare you incompetent was to remove you from the temple, to prevent you from being destroyed by Zemaille?”

“Oh, he said that, but . . .”

“Just answer the question yes or no.”

“Yes.”

“This will,” said Korrogly, “you knew its contents . . . I mean you were versed in its contents, you knew its exact particulars.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Now the conversation during which you told your father about the will, it was, I take it, rather heated, was it not?”

“Yes.”

“And so in the midst of a heated conversation, a violent argument, if you will, you had the presence of mind to inform your father of the contents of a most complicated document. I assume you filled him in on every detail.”

“Well, no, not everything.”

“Oh!” Korrogly arched an eyebrow. “What exactly did you tell him?”

“I . . . I can’t recall. Not exactly.”

“Now let me get this straight, Miss Lemos. You remember telling him about the will, but you can’t recall if you informed him of its contents. Is it possible then that you merely blurted out something to the effect that Mardo had seen to your future.”

“No, I . . .”

“Or did you say . . .”

“He knew what it meant!” she shouted, standing up in the box. “He knew!” She stared with fierce loathing at Lemos. “He killed him for the money! But he’ll never . . .”

“Sit down, Miss Lemos!” said Judge Wymer. “Now!” Once she had obeyed, he warned her in no uncertain terms to restrain her behavior.

“So,” Korrogly went on, “in the midst of an argument you blurted out some incoherent . . .”

“Objection!”

“Sustained.”

“You blurted out something, you can’t recall exactly what, about the will. Is that a fair statement, Miss Lemos?”

“You’re twisting my words!”

“On the contrary, Miss Lemos, I’m simply repeating what you’ve said. It appears that the only persons who were absolutely clear as to the contents of the will were you and Mardo Zemaille.”

“No, that’s . . .”

“That wasn’t a question, Miss Lemos. Merely the preamble to one. Since you are likely to benefit greatly from your father’s conviction, since that will in effect prevent him from initiating a competency hearing, doesn’t that color your testimony the color of greed?”

“I never wanted anything except Mardo.”

“I believe everyone within earshot will second your characterization of Mardo Zemaille as a thing.”

“No need to object, Mister Mervale,” said Judge Wymer; then, to Korrogly: “I’ve given you a great deal of leeway. That leeway is now at an end. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, your honor.” Korrogly crossed to the defense table, picked up some of his notes, and leafing through them, walked to the witness box and stood facing Mirielle; her face was tight with anger. “Did you believe in Mardo Zemaille, Miss Lemos?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean did you believe in what he said, in his public statements, in his theological doctrines? In his work?”

“Yes.”

“What was his work? His great work?”

“I don’t know . . . nobody except Mardo knew.”

“Yet you believed in it?”

“I believed that Mardo was inspired.”

“Inspired . . . I see. Then you accepted his precepts as being the code by which you lived.”

“Yes.”

“Then it would be illuminating to examine some of those precepts, might it not?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, I think it would.” Korrogly turned a page. “Ah, here we are.” He read from his notes. “ ‘Do what thou wilt, that is all the law.’ Did you believe that?”

“I . . . yes, I did.”

“Hmmm. And this, did you believe this? ‘If blood is needed for the great work, blood will be provided.’ ”

“I don’t . . . I never knew what he meant by that.”

“Really? But you accepted it, did you not, as part of his inspired doctrine?”

“I suppose.”

“And this? ‘No crime, no sin, no breach of the rules of what is considered ordinary human conduct, shall be considered such so long as it serves the great work.’ ”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“And I assume that included under the label of sin would be the sin of lying?”

Her stare was hard and bright.

“Do you understand the question?”

“Yes.”

“Well?”

“Yes, I suppose. But. . . .”

“And included under the label of crime would be the crime of perjury?”

“Yes, but I no longer hold to those beliefs.”

“Don’t you? You’ve been heard recently to characterize Mardo Zemaille as a paragon.”

Her mouth thinned. “Things have changed.”

Korrogly knew he was invading dangerous territory, that she might make specific reference to the changes he had brought to her life, but he thought he could make his point and clear out before damage was done.

“I submit that things have not changed, Miss Lemos. I submit that the great work, whatever its nature, will go on under your aegis. I submit that all the miscreant rules attaching to that work still hold, and that you would tell any lie, commit any . . .”

“You bastard!” she cried. “I’ll . . .”

The courtroom was filled with babble, Mervale was objecting, Wymer pounding his gavel.

“And commit any crime,” Korrogly went on, “in order to assure its continuance. I submit that the great work is your sole concern, and the truth is the farthest thing from your mind.”

“You can’t do this!” she shrilled. “You can’t come to my . . .”

Judge Wymer’s bellow drowned her out.

“No further questions,” said Korrogly, watching with mixed emotions as the bailiffs led her, still shouting, from the courtroom.

Shortly after beginning the examination of the first witness for the defense, the historian and biologist Catherine Ocoi, a striking blonde woman in her late thirties, Korrogly was summoned to the bench for a whispered conversation with Judge Wymer. The judge leaned over the bench, pointing at the various displays that Catherine had brought with her, indicating with particular emphasis the huge painting of the mountainous dragon set beside the defense table.

“I warned you not to turn this into a circus,” he said.

“I scarcely think that displaying Griaule’s image . . .”

“Your opening statement was a masterpiece of intimidation,” said Wymer. “I didn’t censure you for it, but from now on I will not allow you to intimidate the jury. I want that painting removed.”

Korrogly started to object, but then saw virtue in having it done; that it was deemed important enough to be removed only gave added weight to his thesis.

“As you wish,” he said.

“Be careful, Mister Korrogly,” Wymer said. “Be very careful.”

As the painting was carried out, the jury’s eyes followed it, and once the painting was out of sight, they expressed a visible degree of relief. That relief, Korrogly thought, might be more valuable than the oppressive presence of the painting; he would be able to play them, to remind them of Griaule, to let them swing between relief and anxiety, and so exercise all the more control.

He led Catherine Ocoi through her testimony, the story of how she had been manipulated by Graiule to live inside the dragon for ten years, the sole purpose being for her to oversee a single event of Griaule’s internal economy; then he let her testify as to the marvels to be found within the dragon, the drugs she had distilled from his various secretions, the strange and in some instances miraculous parasites and plants that flourished there. She had no knowledge of the Father of Stones, but the wonders to which she was able to testify left little doubt in the jury’s mind that the stone could have been produced by Griaule. Her exhibits—every one of them taken from the interior of the dragon—included a glass case filled with spiders in whose webs could be seen all manner of fantastic imagery; cuttings of a most unusual plant that was capable of creating replicas of the animals who fell asleep in its coils; and most pertinently, nodes of an amber material, very like a mineral form, which she claimed was produced by the petrification of Griaule’s stomach acid.

“I have no doubt,” she said, “that Griaule could have produced this.” She held up the Father of Stones. “And touching it now, I know it is of Griaule. I had ten years to become intimately familiar with the feeling that attaches to his every element, and this stone is his.”

There was little Mervale could do to weaken her testimony: Catherine Ocoi’s reputation was above reproach, her story and discoveries celebrated throughout the region. However, with the witnesses that followed, philosophers and priests, all of whom presented opinions concerning Griaule’s capacity for manipulation, Mervale was not so gentle; he railed and ranted, accusing the witnesses of wild speculation and Korrogly of debasing the legal process.

“This does seem to be degenerating into something of a metaphysical debate,” said Wymer after calling the advocates for consultation at the bench.

“Metaphysical?” said Korrogly. “Perhaps, but no more so than the debate that underlies any fundamental point of law. Our laws are founded upon a moral code which comes down to us through the tenets of religious faith. Is that not metaphysics? Metaphysics are rendered into law based upon a consensus moral view, the view funded by religion and commonly held in our society as to what is right and appropriate as regards the limitations that should be placed upon men in their behavior. What I’m establishing first and foremost is that there is a consensus regarding the fact of Griaule’s influence. I could go out into the street and not find a single person who doesn’t believe to some degree or another in Griaule. That kind of unanimity can’t even be found as relates to a belief in God.”

“This is ridiculous!” said Mervale.

“Secondly,” Korrogly continued, “I’m establishing through expert testimony the consensus regarding the extent of Griaule’s influence, the range and limitations of his will. This is simple foundation. Essential to any decision regarding the validity not only of my client’s claim to innocence, but also to the validity of the precedent. If you disallow it, you disallow the plea. And since you have already allowed the plea, you’ll have to allow foundation to support it.”

Wymer appeared to be absorbing all this; he glanced inquiringly at Mervale, who sighed.

“All right,” he said, “I’m willing in the interests of brevity to stipulate that Griaule’s influence exists, that it is . . .”

“I’m afraid the interests of brevity are not altogether congruent with those of my client,” said Korrogly. “In order for precedent to be established, I wish to lay a proper foundation. I intend to make the jury aware of the history of Griaule and his various acts of influence. I think it’s absolutely essential they have a complete understanding of his subtlety in order to arrive at an equitable judgment.”

Wymer heaved a sigh. “Mister Mervale?”

Mervale’s mouth opened and closed; then he threw up his hands and stalked back to the magistrate table.

“Carry on, Mister Korrogly,” said Wymer. “But let’s try to keep the floorshow to a minimum, shall we? I doubt that anything you produce here is going to outweigh the evidence of the will, and there’s no point in wasting time.”

It came to be late in the day, but Korrogly did not ask for a recess; he wanted Lemos to tell his story, to give the jury a night to let it sink in, before exposing him to cross-examination. He conducted Lemos through some background testimony, allowing him to get a feel for the witness stand and the jury, and then asked him to tell in his own words what had happened after he had bought the Father of Stones from Henry Sichi.

Lemos wetted his lips, gazed down at the rail of the witness box, sighed, and then, meeting the jury’s eyes as he had been coached, said, “I remember I was in a great hurry to get home with the stone. I didn’t know why at the time, I just knew I wanted to examine it more closely. When I reached the shop, I went to my workbench and sat with it a while. The part you see now was gripped by what appeared to be claws of corroded-looking orange material, whose color came away on my fingers; it was flaky, soft, rather like old wood or some other organic matter. As for the stone itself, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it. Its clouded surface seemed so lovely, so mysterious. I became certain that an even greater beauty was trapped within it, beauty I knew I could unlock. Usually I will not cut a stone until I have lived with it for weeks, sometimes months. But I was in a kind of trance, invested with a strange confidence that I knew this stone, that I had known it always, that its internal structures were as familiar as the patterns of my thoughts. I cleaned off the orange material, then clamped the stone in a vise, put on my goggles and began to cut it.

“With each blow of my chisel, light seemed to fracture within the stone, to spray forth in beams that penetrated my eyes, and these beams acted to strike sprays of images from my brain, as if it too were a gemstone in process of being cut. The first image was of Griaule, not as he is now, but vital, spitting fire toward a tiny man in a wizard’s robe, a lean, swarthy man with a blade of a nose. There followed another image that depicted both dragon and man immobilized as a result of that battle. Then other images came, too rapidly for me to catalogue. My mind was alive with light, and the ringing in my ears was the music of light, and I knew with every fiber of my being that I was cutting one of the great gems. I would call it the Father of Stones, I thought, because it would be the archetype of mineral beauty. But when at last I set down my chisel and considered what I’d done, I was more than a little disappointed. The stone was flashy, full of glint and sparkle, but had no depth and subtlety of color. Indeed, it appeared to have a hollow center. Except for its weight, it might have been an intricate piece of blown glass.

“I was distressed that I’d wasted money on the thing. I couldn’t imagine what I’d been thinking—I should have realized it was worthless, I told myself. The shop was already in danger of going under, and I’d had no business making the purchase under any circumstance. Finally I decided to present the stone to Zemaille. He’d been harassing me to come up with something unusual for one of his rituals, and perhaps, I thought, he would allow the superficial brilliance of the stone to blind him to its worthlessness. And I also hoped I might get the chance to see Mirielle. I wrapped the stone in a velvet cloth and hurried toward the temple, but when I reached it I found the gates locked. I knocked again and again, but no one responded. I’ve never considered myself an intemperate man; however, being locked out after having walked all that way, it seemed a terrible affront. I paced up and down in front of the gates, stopping now and again to shout, my anger building into a towering frustration. Finally, unable to contain my rage, I set about climbing the temple walls, using the creepers that grew upon them for handholds. I pushed my way through the garden—if such noxious growths as flourish there can be called such—becoming even more angry, and when I heard chanting coming from the building that stood at a corner of the compound, I rushed toward it, so angry now that I intended to fling the stone at Zemaille’s feet, to cast a scornful look at Mirielle, and then storm out, leaving them to their perversions. But once inside the building, my anger was muted by the barbarity of the scene that met my eyes. The chamber into which I’d entered was pentagonal in shape, enclosed by screens of carved ebony. The floor was carpeted in black moss and declined into a pit where lay an altar of black stone worked with representations of Griaule. It was flanked by torches held in wrought-iron stands of grotesque design. Zemaille, robed in black and silver, was standing beside the altar—a swarthy hook-nosed man with his arms lifted in supplication, chanting in company with nine hooded figures who were ranged about the altar. Moments later, a door at the rear of the chamber opened, and Mirielle was led forth, naked except for a necklace of polished dragon scale. She was in an obvious state of intoxication, her head lolling, her eyes showing as crescents of white.

“I was so appalled at seeing my daughter in this pitiful condition that I was stunned, unable to act. It was as if the sight had ratified all the hopelessness of my life, and I think for a while I believed that this was proper, that I deserved such a fate. I watched as Mirielle was stretched out on the altar, her head tossing about, incapable—it appeared—of knowing what was happening to her. The chanting grew louder, and Zemaille, lifting his arms higher, cried, ‘Father! Soon you will be free!’ Then he lapsed into a tongue with which I was unfamiliar.

“It was at this point that I sensed Griaule’s presence. There was no great physical symptom or striking effect . . . except perhaps an intensification of the distance I felt from what I was seeing. I was absolutely unemotional, and that seems to me most peculiar, because I have never been unemotional where Mirielle is concerned. But I was nonetheless certain of his presence, and as I stood there overlooking the altar, I knew exactly what was going on and why it had to be stopped. This knowledge was nothing so simple as an awareness of my daughter’s peril, it was the knowledge of something old and violent and mystic. I can still feel the shape it made in my brain, though the particulars have fled me.

“I stepped forward and called to Zemaille. He turned his head. It was strange . . . never before had he displayed any reaction to me other than disdain, but there was tremendous fear in his face then, as if he knew that Griaule and not me was his adversary. I swear before God it was not in my mind to kill him before that moment, but as I moved toward him I knew not only that I must kill him, but that I must act that very second. I’d forgotten the stone in my hand, but then, without thinking, without even making a conscious decision to act, I hurled it at him. It was an uncanny throw. I could not have been less than fifty feet away, and the stone struck with a terrible crack dead center of his forehead. He dropped without a cry.”

Lemos lowered his head for a second, his grip tightening on the rail of the witness box. “I had expected that the nine gathered around the altar would attack me, but instead they ran out into the night. Perhaps they, too, sensed Griaule’s hand in all this. I was horrified by what I’d done. As I’ve stated, the knowledge of what was intended by the act had fled, had flown from my brain, evaporated like mist. I knew only that I had killed a man . . . a despicable man, but a man nonetheless. I went over to Zemaille, hoping that he might still be alive. The Father of Stones was lying beside him. Something about it had changed, I realized, and on picking it up I saw that the center was no longer hollow. At the heart of the stone was the flaw that you can see there now, a flaw in the shape of a man with uplifted arms.” He leaned back and sighed. “The rest you know.”

Mervale’s cross-examination was thorough, incisive, yet if it had not been for the will, Korrogly thought after the next day’s proceedings had been concluded, he would have had an excellent chance to win an acquittal; the weight of the material evidence would not have impressed the jury any more than his witnesses and Lemos’s account. But as things stood, the fact that Lemos could not put forward any reason why Griaule had wanted Zemaille dead, that seemed to Korrogly to tip the balance in favor of the magistrate. He stayed late at the courthouse, running over the details of the case in his mind, and finally, just after eleven o’clock, more frustrated than he had yet been, he packed up his papers and set out for the Almintra quarter, hoping that he could mend his fences with Mirielle; perhaps he could convince her of his good intentions, help her to understand that his responsibilities had demanded he treat her roughly.

By the time he reached the quarter, the streets were deserted and mist had sealed in the dilapidated houses from the beach, from the sky and the rest of the world, turning the streetlamps into fuzzy white blooms; the surf sounded sluggish, like slaps being delivered by an enormous hand, and the dampness of the air caused Korrogly to turn up his collar and hurry along, his footsteps scraping on the drifted sand. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in a shop window, a pale anxious man, clasping his coat shut with one hand, his brow furrowed, rushing through a glossy black medum . . . the medium of Griaule, he imagined it, the medium of guilt and innocence, of every human question. He walked faster, wanting to subsume his doubts in Mirielle’s warmth. Up ahead, he made out an indistinct figure standing wreathed in mist. Just standing, but there was something ominous about its stillness. Idiot, he said to himself, and kept going. But as the figure grew more solid, his nervousness increased; it was wearing a cloak or a robe of some kind. He peered through the mist. A hooded robe. He stopped by an alley mouth, remembering Lemos’ story and the nine hooded witnesses. Once again he told himself that he was being foolish, but he was unable to shake the feeling that the figure—no more than forty or fifty away—was waiting for him. He held his satchel to his chest, took a few tentative steps forward. The figure remained motionless.

There was no point, Korrogly thought, in taking chances.

He backed toward the alley mouth, keeping his eyes on the figure, then bolted down the alley; he stopped at the end of it, on the margin of the beach, and, hidden behind a pile of rotted boards, gazed back toward the street. A moment later, the figure appeared at the alley mouth and began walking down it.

Icy cold flowed down Korrogly’s spine, his testicles shriveled, his legs felt trembly and weak. Clutching his satchel, he ran through the darkness, slipping in the soft sand, stumbling, nearly falling across an overturned dory. He could see nothing, he might have been sprinting in the glossy darkness he had glimpsed within the shop window. Things came blooming suddenly out of the mist, visible in the faint glow from the windows of the houses—dead fish bones, a bucket, driftwood—and the erratic rhythm of the surf had the glutinous sound of huge laboring lungs.

He ran for several minutes, stopping for fractions of seconds to cast about for sign of pursuit, spinning about, jumping at every noise, peering into the misted blackness; at last he ran straight into what felt like a sticky thick spiderweb and fell tangled in its mesh. Panicked, he let out a strangled cry, tearing at the mesh, and it was only after he had freed himself that he discovered the web had been a fishing net hung on a wooden rack to dry. He began running again, making for the street, visible as a spectral white glow between houses. When he reached it, he found that he was less than a block from the gemcutter’s shop. He sprinted toward it, fetching up against the door, gasping, bracing against it with one hand, catching his breath. Then a terrible shock, and pain lanced through his hand, drawing forth a scream; he saw to his horror that it had been pierced by a long-bladed dagger, whose handle—entwined with the image of a coiled dragon—was still quivering. Blood trickled from the wound, flowing down his wrist and forearm. Making little shrieks, he managed to pull the blade free; the accompanying surge of pain almost caused him to lose consciousness, but he managed to keep his feet, staring at the neat incision in his palm, at the blood welling forth. Then he glanced wildly along the misted street—there was no one in sight. He pounded on the door with his good hand and called to Mirielle. No answer. He pounded again, kept it up. What could be taking her so long? At last steps sounded on the stairs, and Mirielle called, “Who is it? Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” he said, staring at his hand; the sight of the blood made him nauseated and dizzy. The wound throbbed, and he squeezed his wrist, trying to stifle the pain.

“Go away!”

“Help me!” he said. “Please, help me!”

The door swung inward.

He turned to Mirielle, suddenly weak and fading, holding up the injured hand as if it were something she could explain to him. Her face was a mask of shock; her lips were moving, but he could hear no sound.

Then, without knowing how he had gotten there, he was lying on the sand, looking at her foot. He had never seen a foot from that particular angle, and he gazed at it from the perspective of a dazed aesthetic. Then the foot was replaced by a bare knee. Milky white. The same clouded color as that of the Father of Stones. Against that white backdrop he seemed to see the various witnesses, the evidence, all the confounding materials of the case, arrayed before him like the scenes that reportedly came to the eyes of a dying man, as if it were the case and not the details of his own life that were of most significance to him. Just as he passed out he believed that he was about to understand something important.

Because of his injury, Korrogly was granted a day off from the trial, and since the following two days would be given over to a religious festival, he had nearly seventy-two hours in which to come up with some tactic or evidence that would save Lemos’s life. He was not sure how to proceed, nor was he sure that he wanted to proceed. He had not been the only victim of the previous night; Kirin, the old woman he had interviewed prior to the trial, was missing, and a bloody dagger identical to the one that had pierced his hand had been found on her stoop. Apparently the members of the cult were seeking to assure Lemos’s conviction by silencing everyone who could possibly help him.

He spent the first day going over his notes and was distressed to see how many avenues of investigation he had neglected; he had been so caught up with Mirielle, with all the complexities of the case, complexities that had led nowhere, he had failed to do much of what he normally would consider basic pretrial work. For example, apart from digging up character witnesses, that he had done nothing by way of researching Lemos’s background; he should, he realized, have checked into the gem-cutter’s marriage, the drowning of his wife, Mirielle’s childhood, her friends . . . there were so many routine things that he should have done and had not, he could spend most of the next two days in merely listing them. He had intended to interview Kirin a second time, certain that the old woman had known more than she was saying; but his infatuation with Mirielle had caused him to forget that intent, and now the old woman was gone, her secrets with her.

After a day, a night, and another day, he realized that he did not have sufficient time left to carry out further investigations, that he had been derelict in his duty to the court and to Lemos, and that—barring a miracle—his client was doomed. Oh, he could file an appeal. Then there would be time to investigate everything. But with precedent having been denied by a respected judge, he would have to present overwhelming proof of innocence in order to win an appeal, and given the nature of the case, such proof would likely not be forthcoming. Realizing this, he closed his notebooks, pushed aside his papers and sat brooding, gazing out the window of his study at Ayler Point and the twilit ocean. If he were to lean forward and crane his neck, he would be able to see the black pagoda roofs of the dragon cult standing up among palms and sea grape on the beach a few hundred yards beyond the point; but he had no desire to do so, to do anything that would remind him further of his failure. Lemos might well be guilty of the crime, but the fact remained that he had deserved a better defense than Korrogly had provided; even if he was a villain, he was not a great villain, certainly not as great a one as Mardo Zemaille had been.

It was a relatively clear night that fell over Port Chantay; the mists typical of the season failed to materialize, stars flickered between the pale masses of cloud that drove across the winded sky, and the lights of the houses picked out the toiling darkness along Ayler Point. White combers piled in toward the beach beyond the point; then, as the tide receded, they were swept sideways to break on the end of the point. Korrogly watched them, feeling there was something instructive in the process, that he was learning something by watching; but if a lesson was being taught, he did not recognize it. He began to grow restless, and he thought with frustration and longing of Mirielle. At length he decided to go to The Blind Lady and have a drink . . . or maybe several drinks; but before he could set out for the tavern there came a knock at his door and a woman’s voice called to him. Thinking it was Mirielle, he hurried to the door and flung it open; but the woman who faced him was much older than the gemcutter’s daughter, her head cowled in a dark shawl, the lumpiness of her body evident beneath a loose jacket and skirt. He backed away a step, reminded by her shawl of the cowled figure who had attacked him.

“I’ve something for you,” the woman said in a voice with a thick northern accent; she held out an envelope. “From Kirin.”

He recognized her then for Kirin’s servant, the drab who had admitted him to the old woman’s house some weeks before. Heavy-breasted and thick-waisted, with features so stuporous that they looked masklike.

She pushed the envelope at him. “Kirin said I was to give this to you if anything happened to her.”

Korrogly opened the envelope; inside were two ornate keys and an unsigned note.

Mr. Korrogly,

If you are reading this, you will know that I am dead. Perhaps you will not know by whose hand, though if you don’t, then you’re not the astute individual I reckon you to be.

The keys open the outer gate of the temple and the door to Mardo’s private rooms in the main building. If you wish to learn the nature of the great work, go with Janice to the temple as soon as you have received this. She will be helpful to you. You dare not wait longer, for it’s possible that others will know what I know. Do not involve the police; there are cult members among them. The cult has become afraid of the temple, afraid of what has happened there, and most of them have no wish to come near the place. However, the fanatics will be anxious to protect Mardo’s secrets.

Once in Mardo’s rooms search carefully and you will find what you need. Perhaps it will be enough to save your client.

Be thorough, but be swift.

Korrogly folded the note and looked at Janice, who, in turn, regarded him with bovine stolidity; he could not for the life of him think how she would be helpful.

“Do you have a weapon?” she asked.

Ruefully, he showed her his bandaged hand.

“When we reach the temple,” she said, “I’ll take the lead. But keep close behind me.”

He was about to ask how this would be an advantage, when she pulled a long knife from her jacket; the sight of it made him reconsider his options. This might be a trick, a trap set by the members of the cult.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked.

She looked perplexed. “Kirin asked it of me.”

“You’d put yourself in danger simply because she asked?”

She continued staring at him for a long moment; at last she said, “I’ve no love for dragons.” She tugged at her blouse, pulling the hem up from the waistband of her skirt, then turned away from him, exposing her naked back; the smooth pale skin below her shoulder blades had been branded by an iron in the shape of a coiled dragon; the flesh surrounding it was puckered and discolored.

“Zemaille did this to you?” asked Korrogly.

“And more.”

Korrogly remained unconvinced; the more fanatical of the cult members might have adopted such mutilations as a fashion.

“Are you coming?” Janice asked, and when he hesitated, she said, “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

“I’m wary of you,” he said.

“I don’t care if you come or not, but make up your mind quickly. If we are to go to the temple, we need to make use of the cover of darkness.”

She glanced about the room, then crossed to a table on which stood a decanter of brandy and glasses. She poured a glass and handed it to him.

“Courage,” she said.

Shamed by this, he drank the brandy down; he poured a second and sipped it, considering the situation. He questioned Janice concerning her mistress, and though her answers were circumspect, he derived from them the sense of an old brave woman who had done her best to thwart the evil ambitions of Zemaille. That, too, shamed him. What kind of advocate was he, he thought, to refuse to risk himself for his client? Perhaps it was the effects of the brandy, perhaps a product of the self-loathing he felt concerning his failure to provide Lemos with an adequate defense, but for whatever reason he soon began to feel brave and resolute, to perceive that unless he did his utmost now in Lemos’ defense, he would never be able to practice his profession again.

“All right,” he said finally, taking his cloak from its peg. “I’m ready.”

He had expected Janice to be pleased, to approve of his decision, but she only grunted and said, “Let’s just hope you haven’t waited too long.”

The road that led to the temple was paved with enormous slabs of gray stone and continued along the coast for several miles, then turned inland toward the Carbonales Valley, where Griaule held sway; it was said that the location had been chosen because it stood in the dragon’s imaginary line of sight, so that his eye would be always fixed upon the cult. At the spot where the road passed the temple it widened considerably, as if its builders had wanted to offer travelers the option of giving the place a wide berth. That option now greatly appealed to Korrogly. Standing before the gate, looking at the immense brass lock in the shape of a dragon, at the high black walls twined with vines that bore orchidaceous blooms the color of raw beef, the pagoda roofs that loomed like weird stylized mountains, he was inclined to discard any pretense he had of being a moral man and a committed officer of the court, and to hurry back to the security of his rooms. Not even the clarity of the night could diminish the temple’s forbidding aspect, and each concatenation of the surf, driven in onto the shore by a blustery wind, made him jump. If he had been alone, he would have had no compunction about fleeing. Only Janice’s dull regard, in which he saw a reflection of Lemos’s despondent stare, kept him there; he felt outfaced by her, and though he told himself that her courage was born of ignorance and thus not courage at all, he was unable to persuade himself that this was relevant to his own lack of fortitude.

With an unsteady hand, he unlocked the gate; it swung inward with surprising ease, as if either the place or its controlling agency were eager to receive him. Following Janice, who went with her knife at the ready, he moved along a path winding among shrubs hung with overripe berries and low spreading trees with blackish-green leaves; the foliage was so dense that he was unable to see anything of the buildings other than the rooftops. The wind did not penetrate there, and the stillness was such that every rustle he made in brushing against the bushes seemed inordinately loud; he fancied he could hear his heartbeat. Moonlight lacquered the leaves and applied lattices of shadow to the flagstones. He felt he was choking, moving deeper into an inimical hothouse atmosphere that clotted his lungs; he realized this was merely a symptom of fear, but knowing that did nothing to alleviate the symptom. He fastened his eyes on Janice’s broad back and tried to clear his mind; but as they drew near the building where Zemaille’s rooms were situated, he had the notion that someone was watching . . . not just an ordinary someone. Someone cold, vast, and powerful. He recalled how Kirin and Mirielle had described their apprehension of Griaule, and the thought that the dragon’s eye might be turned his way panicked him. His fists clenched, his jaw tightened, he had difficulty in swallowing. The shadows appeared to be acquiring volume and substance, and he imagined that terrible creatures were materializing within their black demarcations, preparing to leap out and tear at him.

Once inside the door, which opened onto a corridor lit by eerie mosaic patterns of luminous moss, like veins of a radiant blue-green mineral wending through the teakwood walls, his fear increased. He was certain now that he could feel Griaule; with every step his impression of the dragon grew more discrete. There was an aura of timelessness, or rather that time itself was not so large and elemental as the dragon, that it was something on which Griaule had gained a perspective, something he could control. And the walls, the veins of moss . . . he had the sense that those patterns reflected the patterns of the dragon’s thoughts. It was, he thought, as if he were inside Griaule, passing along some internal channel, and thinking this, he realized that it might be true, that the building, its function aligned with Griaule for so long, might well have become attuned with the dragon, might have in effect become the analogue of his body, subject to his full control. That idea produced in him an intense claustrophobia, and he had to bite back a cry. This was ridiculous, he told himself, absolutely ridiculous, he was letting his imagination run away with him. And yet he could not escape the feeling of enclosure, of being trapped beneath tons of cold flesh and bones the size of ships’ keels.

When at last Janice pointed out the door to Zemaille’s rooms, it was with tremendous relief that Korrogly inserted the key, eager to be out of the corridor, hoping that the rooms would provide a less oppressive environment; but although well-lit by globes of moss, the room that greeted his eye added more fuel to the fires of his imagination. Beyond an alcove was a bedchamber of a most grotesque design, the walls covered in a rich paper of crimson with a magenta stripe, and coiling around the entire room was a relief depicting a tail and a swollen reptile body, all worked in brass, every scale cunningly wrought, resolving into a huge dragon’s head with an open fanged mouth that protruded some nine feet out from the far wall, wherein lay a bed like a plush red tongue. The eyes of the dragon were lidded, with opalescent crescents showing beneath, and its claws extended from the foot of the bed; above the head, suspended from the ceiling, was a section of polished scale some four feet wide and five feet long, angled slightly downward so that whoever entered would see—as Korrogly did now—their dark reflection. He stood frozen, his eyes darting between the scale and the dragon, certain that through some mystic apparatus he was being perceived by Griaule, and he might have stood there for a good long time if Janice had not said, “Hurry! This is no place to linger!”

There was little furniture in the room—a bureau, a small chest, two chairs. Korrogly made a hasty search of the chest and bureau, finding only robes and linens. Then he turned to Janice and said, “What am I looking for?”

“Papers, I think,” she said. “Kirin told me once that Mardo kept records. But I’m not sure.”

Korrogly began feeling along the walls, searching for a hidden panel, while Janice stood watch at the door. Where, he thought, where would Zemaille have hidden his valuables? Then it struck him. Where else? He stared at the bed within the dragon’s mouth. The idea that Mirielle had once slept there repelled him, and he was no less repelled by the prospect of exploring the dark recess behind the bed; but it appeared he had no choice. He kneeled on the bed, his trouser leg catching on one of the fangs, stalling his heart for an instant, and then he crawled back into the darkness, tossing aside pillows. The recess extended for about six feet and was walled with a smooth material that felt like stone; he ran his hands along it, hunting for a crack, a bulge, some sign of concealment. At last his fingers encountered a slight depression . . . no, five depressions, each about the size of his fingertips. He pressed against them, but achieved nothing; he tapped on the stone and it resounded hollowly.

“Have you found it?” Janice called.

“There’s something here, but I can’t get it open.”

In a moment she came crawling up beside him, bringing with her a faint sweetish smell that seemed familiar. He showed her the depressions, and she began to push at them.

“Maybe it’s a sequence,” he said. “Maybe you have to push them one at a time in some order.”

“I felt something,” she said. “A tremor. Here . . . put your weight against the wall.”

He set his shoulder to the wall, heaved and felt the stone shift; the next second the stone gave way and he went sprawling forward. Terrified, he pushed up into a sitting position and found himself in a small round chamber whose pale walls, veined like marble, gave off a ruddy glow. At the rear of the chamber was a lacquered black box. He started to reach for it, but as he picked it up the veins in the stone began to writhe and thicken, melting up from the surface of the chamber, becoming adders with puffy sacs beneath their throats, and behind the wall, as if trapped in a reddish gel, there appeared the image of Mardo Zemaille, a dark hook-nosed man robed in black and silver, his hands arranged into tortuous mudras from which spat infant lightnings.

Korrogly screamed and pounded on the wall; he looked behind him and saw that the serpents were twining around one another, some beginning to slither toward him. Zemaille was intoning words in some guttural tongue, staring with demonic intent, and the detonations of light emerging from his fingertips were forming into balls of pale fire that spat and crackled and arrowed away in all directions. Korrogly pried at the wall, his breath coming in shrieks, expecting the adders to strike at any second, to be scorched by the balls of fire. A searing pain in his ankle, and he saw that one of the adders had sunk its fangs deep. His screams grew frantic, he lashed out his foot, shaking the adder loose, but another struck at his calf, and another. The pain was almost unendurable. He could feel the venom coursing through his veins like black ice. Half a dozen of the serpents were clinging to his legs, and his blood was flowing in rivulets from the wounds. He began to shiver, his right leg spasmed in a convulsion. His heart was huge, swelling larger yet, bloating with poison; it felt like a fist clenched about a thorn inside his chest. One of the fireballs struck his arm and clung there, eating into his arm, charring cloth and flesh. Zemaille’s voice echoed, the voice of doom, as meaningless and potent as the voice of a gong. Then the wall swung outward, and he scrambled from the chamber, falling, coming to his knees, making a clumsy dive toward the bed, only to be caught up by Janice.

“Easy,” she said. “Easy, it’s only one of Mardo’s illusions.”

“Illusion?” Korrogly, his heart racing, turned back to the chamber; it was empty of all but the ruddy light. The pain, he realized, had receded. There were no wounds, no blood.

Janice picked up the box from where he had let it fall, held it to her ear and shook it. “Sounds like something solid. Not papers. Maybe this isn’t it.”

“There’s nothing else there,” said Korrogly, snatching the box from her, desperate to be away from there. “Come on!”

He crawled to the edge of the bed, started for the door, then glanced back to see if Janice was following. She was swinging her legs off the side of the bed, and he was about to tell her to hurry when movement above the bed drew his eye. In the polished scale that overhung the bed he saw his own reflection . . . that and more. Deeper within the scale another figure was materializing, that of a man lying on his back, wearing the robes of a wizard. At first Korrogly thought it must be Zemaille, for the man was very like him: hook-nosed and swarthy. But then he realized that the figure was shrunken and old, incredibly old, and the eyes, half-lidded, showed no sign of white or iris or pupil, but were black and wound through by thready structures of blue-green fire. The image faded after a second, but was so striking in aspect that Korrogly continued staring at the scale, feeling that more might be forthcoming, that it had been part of a sending. Janice pulled at him, making him aware once again of their danger, and together they went sprinting along the corridor toward the door.

The wind had grown stronger, the tops of the bushes were seething and the boughs of the trees lifting as if in sluggish acclaim. After the silence within the building, the roil of wind and surf was an assault, disorienting Korrogly, and he let Janice, who seemed untroubled by all that had happened, lead him toward the gate. They had gone halfway through the toiling thickets when she came to a sudden stop and stood with her head tilted to the side.

“Someone’s coming,” she said.

“I don’t hear anything,” he said. But she hauled at him, dragging him back the way they had come, and he trusted in her direction.

“There’s a rear gate,” she said. “It opens out onto the bluff. If we get separated, go west along the beach and hide in the dunes.”

Korrogly hustled after her, clutching the lacquered box to his chest, glancing back once to try and make out their pursuers; he could have sworn he saw dark hooded figures as he went around a bend. It took them less than a minute to reach the gate, another few seconds for Janice to unlatch it, and then they were slogging through the soft sand atop the bluff, heading away from Ayler’s Point; the moonstruck waves below were flowing sideways, obeying the drag of the outgoing tide. Korrogly was relieved to have left the temple behind, and he was more confused than afraid; he thought that Janice might have been mistaken about hearing someone, that he had not really seen the hooded figures. He ran easily, feeling amazingly sound. It was as if something about the temple had occluded his faculties, diminished his strength. He soon began to outpace Janice, and when he slowed to let her catch up, she gestured for him to keep going; her face was drawn tight with fear, and seeing this, he redoubled his efforts. Just as he came to the slope that led down from the bluff onto the beach, a path of white sand winding through tall grasses, he heard an agonized cry behind him, and turning, he had a glimpse of Janice, her shawl blown by the wind into a pennant, her dark hair loose, teetering on the edge of the bluff, clutching at her breast, at the handle of a dagger that sprouted bloody between her hands. Her eyes rolled up, she toppled over the edge and was gone.

It had happened so suddenly that Korrogly stopped running, scarcely able to believe what he had seen, but after a split-second, hearing a shout above the wind, he set out in a mad dash along the path. Three-quarters of the way down, he lost his footing and went tumbling head over heels the rest of the way. At the bottom of the slope, he groped for the box, found it, and, bright with fear, made for the dunes which rose pale as salt above the narrow strip of mucky sand. By the time he had reached the top of the dunes, he was nearly out of breath, and he stood gasping, looking out over a rumpled moonlit terrain of grasses and hillocks, the folds between them holding bays of shadow. He set out running again, stumbling, dropping to his knees in a depression, tripping over exposed roots, and finally, his stamina exhausted, he dived into a cleft beneath a little rise and covered himself as best he could with sand and loose grass.

For a while he heard nothing except the wind and the muffled crunch of the surf. Clouds began to pass across the moon, their edges catching silver fire, and he stared at them, praying that they would close and draw a curtain of darkness across the land. After about ten minutes he heard a shout, and it was followed a moment later by another shout. He could not make out any words, but the outcries had, he thought, the quality of angry desperation. He tucked his head down and made promises to God, swearing to uphold every sacred tenet, to do good works, if only he would be permitted to survive the night.

At long last the shouts ceased, but Korrogly remained where he was, afraid even to lift his head. He gazed at the clouds; the wind had lessened, and they were coasting past the moon like huge ragged blue galleons, like continents, like anything he wanted to make of their indefinite shapes. A dragon, for instance. An immense cloudy bulk with a vicious head and one globed, glaring silver eye, coiled throughout the heavens, the edges of its scales glinting like stars on its blue-dark hide, spying him out, watching over him, or else merely watching him, merely keeping track of its frightened pawn. He watched it take wing and fly in soaring arcs, diving and looping, making a pattern that drew him in, that trapped him like a devil within a pentagram and, eventually, hypnotized him into a dream-ridden sleep.

Dawn came gray and drizzly, with clouds that resembled heaps of dirty . soap suds massing on the horizon. Korrogly’s head ached as if he had been drinking all night; he was sore, filthy . . . even his eyes felt soiled. He peered about and saw only the hillocks, the winded grasses, the heaving slate-colored ocean, gulls scything down the sky and keening. He rested his head against the sand, gathering himself for the walk back to town, and then remembered the box. It was unlocked. Zemaille, he supposed, had thought that his illusion would dissuade any intruders. He opened it cautiously on the chance that there were more tricks inside. It contained a leather-bound diary. He leafed through the pages, stopping occasionally to read a section; after going over a third of it, he knew that he could win an acquittal, yet he felt no triumph, no satisfaction, nothing. Perhaps, he thought, it was because he still was not sure that he believed in Lemos. Perhaps it was because he knew he should have unearthed the motive sooner; Kirin had given him a clue to it, one he had neglected in his confusion. Perhaps the deaths of Kirin and Janice were muting his reaction. Perhaps . . . he laughed, a sour little noise that wind blew away. There was no use in trying to understand anything now. He needed a bath, sleep, food. Then maybe things would make sense. But he doubted it.

The following morning, against Mervale’s objection, Korrogly recalled Mirielle to the stand. She had on a brown dress with a modest neckline—a schoolteacher’s dress—and her hair was done up primly like that of a young spinster. She had, it appeared, passed beyond mourning, and he wondered why she had not worn black; it might signal, he thought, some indecision on her part, some change of heart as related to her father. But whether or not that was so was unimportant. Looking at her, he had no emotional reaction; she seemed familiar yet distant, like someone he had known briefly years before. He knew that he could break down that distance and dredge up his feelings for her, but he was not moved to do so, for while he knew they were still strong, more than strong, he was not sure whether they would manifest as love or hate. She had used him, had confused him with her sexuality, had undermined his concentration, and nearly succeeded in killing her father, who was very likely innocent. She had told him that she could have been a good actress, and she had been unsurpassable in her counterfeit of love, so perfect in the role that he believed she had won a piece of his heart for all time. But she was a perjurer and probably worse, and he was dutybound to make her true colors known to the court, no matter what the cost.

“Good morning, Miss Lemos,” he said.

She gave him a quizzical look and returned the greeting.

“Did you sleep well last night?” he asked.

“Oh, dear!” said Mervale. “Is the counsel for the defense next going to inquire about the lady’s breakfast, or perhaps her dreams?”

Judge Wymer stared glumly at Korrogly.

“I was simply trying to make the witness feel comfortable,” Korrogly said. “I’m concerned for her welfare. She’s had a terrible weight on her conscience.”

“Mister Korrogly,” said the judge in a tone of warning.

Korrogly waved his hand as if both to accede to the caution and dismiss its importance. He rested both hands on the witness box, leaning toward Mirielle, and said, “What is the great work?”

“The witness has already answered that question,” said Mervale, and at the same time, Mirielle said, “I don’t know what more I can tell you, I . . .”

“The truth would be refreshing,” said Korrogly. “You see, I know for a fact you haven’t been candid with this court.”

“If the counselor has facts to present,” said Mervale, “I suggest that he present them and stop badgering the witness.”

“I will,” said Korrogly, addressing the bench. “In due course. But it’s important to my presentation that I show exactly to what extent and to what end the facts have been covered up.”

Wymer heaved a forlorn sigh. “Proceed.”

“I ask you again,” said Korrogly to Mirielle, “what is the great work? And I warn you, be truthful, for you will not escape prosecution for any lie you may tell from this point on.”

Doubt surfaced in Mirielle’s face, but she only said, “I’ve told you all I know.”

Korrogly took a turn around the witness box and stopped facing the jury. “What was the purpose of the ceremony in progress on the night that Zemaille was killed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it part of the great work?”

“No . . . I mean I don’t think so.”

“For someone who was Zemaille’s intimate you appear to know very little about him.”

“Mardo was a secretive man.”

“Was he, now? Did he ever discuss his parents with you?”

“Yes.”

“So he was not secretive concerning his origins?”

“No.”

“Did he ever discuss his grandparents?”

“I’m not sure. I believe he may have mentioned them once or twice.”

“Other relatives . . . did he ever discuss them?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Did he ever make mention of a remote ancestor, a man who—like himself—was involved in the occult?”

Her face tightened. “No.”

“You seem quite certain of that, yet a moment ago you claimed that you couldn’t recall if he had ever talked about other relatives.”

“I would have remembered something like that.”

“Indeed, I believe you would.” Korrogly crossed to the defense table. “Does the name Archiochus strike a chord in your memory?”

Mirielle sat motionless, her eyes widened slightly.

“Should I repeat the question?”

“No, I heard it . . . I was trying to think.”

“And have you finished thinking?”

“Yes, I’ve heard the name.”

“And who might this Archiochus be?”

“A wizard, I believe.”

“A wizard of some accomplishment, was he not? One who lived some time ago . . . thousands of years?”

“I think so.” Mirielle seemed to be mulling something over. “Yes, I remember now. Mardo considered him his spiritual father. He wasn’t an actual relation . . . at least I don’t think he was.”

“And that is the extent of your knowledge concerning him?”

“It’s all I can remember.”

“Odd,” said Korrogly, toying with the lid of his satchel. “Let’s return to the ceremony on the night Zemaille was killed. Did this have anything to do with Archiochus?”

“It may have.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“No.”

“Your father has testified that Zemaille cried out to his father at one point, saying, ‘Soon you will be free!’ Might he not have been referring at that moment to his spiritual father?”

“Yes.” Mirielle sat up straight, adopting an earnest expression as if she wanted to be helpful. “Now that you mention it, it’s possible he was trying to contact Archiochus. Mardo believed in the spirit world. He would often hold seances.”

“Then you’re suggesting that the ceremony in question was something on the order of a seance?”

“It could have been.”

“To contact the soul of Archiochus?”

“It’s possible.”

“Are you certain, Miss Lemos, that you know nothing more about this Archiochus? For instance, did he have anything to do with Griaule?”

“I . . . maybe.”

“Maybe,” said Korrogly bemusedly. “Maybe. I believe he had quite a bit to do with Griaule. As a matter of fact, was it not the wizard Archiochus, the man with whom Zemaille felt a spiritual—if not an actual—kinship, who thousands of years ago did battle with the dragon Griaule?”

Babble erupted from the onlookers, and Wymer gaveled them to silence.

Korrogly said to Mirielle, “Well?”

“Yes,” she said, “I believe it was he. I’d forgotten.”

“Of course,” said Korrogly. “Your flawed memory again.” He engaged the jury’s eyes and smiled. “According to legend, just as Griaule lies dormant, so that same fate struck the wizard who stilled him . . . have you ever heard that?”

“Yes.”

“Had Mardo?”

“I believe so.”

“So then Mardo believed that this powerful wizard was yet alive?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s talk about the work for a moment. Not the great work, just the ordinary run-of-the-mill work. Is it true that you took part in sexual rituals with Zemaille in that same room where he died?”

The vein in her temple pulsed. “Yes.”

“And these rituals involved intercourse with Zemaille?”

“Yes!”

“And others?”

Mervale stood at the magistrate’s table. “Your honor, I see no point in this line.”

“Nor do I,” said Wymer.

“But there is a point,” said Korrogly, “one I will shortly make plain.”

“Very well,” said Wymer impatiently. “But be succinct. The witness will answer.”

“What was the question?” Mirielle asked.

“Did you participate in sex with others aside from Zemaille for ritual purposes?” said Korrogly.

“Yes.”

“Why? What use did this wantonness serve?”

“Objection.”

“I’ll rephrase.” Korrogly leaned against the defense table. “Did sex have a specific function in these rituals.”

“I suppose . . . yes.”

“And what was it?”

“I’m not sure.”

Korrogly opened his satchel and toyed with Mardo’s diary. He opened the little book. “Was it to prepare the flesh?”

Mirielle stiffened.

“Shall I repeat the question?”

“No, I . . .”

“What does that mean, Miss Lemos . . . ‘to prepare the flesh’ ?”

She shook her head. “Mardo knew . . . I was never clear on it.”

“Did you practice any sort of birth control prior to these rituals? Did you for instance drink some infusion of roots and herbs, or in other ways attempt to prevent yourself from becoming pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Yet on the night Zemaille died, you used no birth control.”

Mirielle came to her feet. “How do you . . .” She bit her lip and sat back down.

“I believe that night was considered by Zemaille to be the anniversary of the battle between Griaule and Archiochus, was it not?”

“I don’t know.”

“I will introduce evidence,” said Korrogly, addressing the bench, “to show that this was indeed Zemaille’s opinion.” He turned again to Mirielle. “Was it your intent on that night to become pregnant?”

She sat mute.

“Answer the question, Miss Lemos,” said Judge Wymer.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Why of all nights did you hope to become pregnant on that one? Was it because you were hoping for a specific sort of child?”

She stared hatefully at him.

Korrogly removed the diary from the satchel. “The name of the child whom you were to bear, was it to be Archiochus?”

Her jaw dropped, her eyes were fixed on the leather book.

“Was it not Zemaille’s intent, the long focus of his great work, to achieve by some foul magic the liberation of Archiochus’s soul? And for that purpose did he not need flesh that was so soiled and degraded, it would offer a natural habitat for the black mind of that evil and moribund man? Your soiled flesh, Miss Lemos. Was it not your function to provide the vile womb that would allow the soul of this loathesome wizard to be reborn in innocent flesh? And would he not, once he had come to manhood and regained his full powers, with Zemaille’s aid, seek once again to destroy the dragon Griaule?”

Instead of answering, Mirielle let out a scream of such pure agony and despair that the courtroom was thrown into a stunned silence. She lowered her head, resting it on the rail of the witness box; at last she sat up straight, her face transformed into a mask of hatred.

“Yes!” she said. “Yes! And if it hadn’t been for him—” she flung out a hand, pointing at Lemos “—we would have killed the damned lizard! You would have thanked us . . . all of you! You would have praised Mardo as a liberator! You would have built statues, you . . .”

Judge Wymer cautioned her to silence, but she continued to rant; every muscle in her face was leaping, her eyes were distended, her hands gripping the rail.

“Mardo!” she cried, turning her face to the ceiling as if seeing through it into the kingdom of the dead. “Mardo, hear me!”

At length, unable to silence her, Wymer had her taken in restraints to an interrogation room, returned Lemos to his cell, and ordered a recess. After the courtroom had been cleared, Korrogly sat at the defense table, fingering the diary, staring gloomily into the middle distance; his thoughts seemed to arc out and upward like flares, bright for a moment, but then falling into darkness.

“Well,” said Mervale, coming to sit on the edge of the table. “I suppose I should offer my congratulations.”

“It’s not over yet.”

“Oh, yes it is! They’ll never convict now, and you know it.”

Korrogly nodded.

“You don’t seem very happy about it.”

“I’m just tired.”

“It’ll sink in soon.” Mervale said. “This is a tremendous victory for you. You’ve made your fortune.”

“Hmm.”

Mervale got to his feet and extended his hand. “No hard feelings,” he said. “I realize you were overwrought the other night. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones if you are.”

Korrogly took his hand and was surprised to see actual respect in Mervale’s face—his surprise stemmed from the fact that he felt no respect for himself; he could not stop thinking of Mirielle, wanting her, even though he realized that everything between them had been a sham. And, too, he was dissatisfied. The case struck him as a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces fit neatly together, but whose picture made no sense.

“Want a drink?” Mervale asked.

“No,” said Korrogly.

“Come on, man. Maybe there was some truth in what you said the other night, but I’m won over. You won’t find me patronizing you anymore. Let me buy you a drink.”

“No,” said Korrogly; then he looked up at Mervale with a grin. “You can buy me several.”

Korrogly’s dissatisfaction did not wane with time; he remained uncertain of Lemos’s innocence, and everything that happened as a result of the gemcutter’s acquittal caused his dissatisfaction to grow more extreme. Mirielle was declared incompetent, and the temple and its grounds were ceded to Lemos, who promptly sold them for an enormous sum; the buildings were razed and a hotel was planned for the site. Lemos also sold the Father of Stones at a large profit back to Henry Sichi, for it was now considered a relic of Griaule and thus of inestimable worth, and Sichi wanted it for an exhibit in the museum he had built to house such items. Lemos had invested the majority of his new wealth in indigo mills and silver mines, and had purchased a mansion out on Ayler Point; there, with the court’s permission, he and a staff of nurses took charge of nursing Mirielle back to health. They were rarely seen in public, but word had it that she was doing splendidly, and that father and daughter had reconciled.

Whenever he had a spare hour, his practice having grown large and profitable following the trial, Korrogly would use the time to do the pretrial work that he neglected and continued to investigate all the circumstances surrounding Zemaille’s death. In this he made no headway until almost a year and a half later, when he interviewed an ex-member of the dragon cult on the beach below the bluff where the temple had once stood. The man, a slight balding fellow whose innocuous appearance belied his dissolute past, was nervous, and Korrogly had been forced to pay him well in order to elicit his candor. He was of little help for the most part, and it was only toward the end of the interview that he provided information that substantiated Korrogly’s doubts.

“We all thought it strange that Mirielle took up with Mardo,” he said, “considering what happened to her mother.”

“What are you talking about?” Korrogly asked.

“Her mother,” said the man. “Patricia. She came to the temple one night, the night she died as a matter of fact.”

“What?”

“You didn’t know?”

“No, I’ve heard nothing about it.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it’s public knowledge. She only came the once, and that same night she drowned.”

“What happened?”

“Who can say? Word was that Mardo had her into his bed. Probably drugged her. Maybe she fought him. Mardo wouldn’t have liked that.”

“Are you saying he killed her?”

“Somebody did.”

“Why didn’t you come forward with this?”

“We were afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Griaule.”

“That’s ludicrous.”

“Is it, now? You’re the man who got Lemos off, you must understand what Griaule’s capable of.”

“But what you’re saying, it throws a different light on things. Perhaps Lemos and Mirielle plotted this whole affair to get revenge, perhaps . . .”

“Even if they did,” said the man, “it was still Griaule’s idea.”

Following this interview, Korrogly checked the tides on the night of Patricia Lemos’ death and discovered that they had been sweeping out from the temple bluff toward Ayler Point, that had her body entered the water in the early morning, she might well—as had been the case—have washed ashore on Ayler Point. That, however, was the extent of his enlightenment. Despite exploring every avenue, he could come up with no evidence to implicate Lemos or his daughter in a plot against Zemaille. The matter continued to prey on him, to cause him bad dreams and sleepless nights; having been used, he had an overwhelming compulsion to understand the nature of that usage, to put into perspective all that had happened, so that he could know the character of his fate. He did not know whether he wanted more to believe that he had been manipulated by Griaule or by Lemos and his daughter. Some nights he thought he would prefer to cling to the notion of free will, to think that he had been the victim of human wiles, not those of some creature as inexplicable as God; other nights he hoped that he had won the case fairly and freed an innocent man. The only thing he was certain of was that he wanted clarity.

Finally, having no other course of action open, he went to the source, to Lemos’s mansion on Ayler Point, and asked to see the gemcutter. A maid advised him that the master was not in, but that if he would wait, she would find out if the mistress was to home. After a brief absence she returned and ushered him onto a sunny verandah that overlooked the sea and provided a breathtaking view of the Almintra quarter. The strong sunlight applied a crust of diamantine glitter to the surface of the water, spreading it wider when the wind riffled the tops of the wavelets, and the gabled houses on the shore looked charming, quaint, their squalor hidden by distance. Mirielle, clad in a beige silk robe, was reclining on a lounge; on a small table close to her hand lay a long pipe and a number of dark pellets that Korrogly suspected to be opium. There was a clouded look to her eyes, and though she was still lovely, the marks of dissipation had eroded the fine edge of her good looks; a black curl was plastered to her sweaty cheek, and there was an unhealthy shine to her skin.

“It’s wonderful to see you,” she said lazily, indicating that he should take a chair beside her.

“Is it?” he said, feeling the rise of old longings, old bitternesses. God, he thought, I still love her, despite everything, she could do anything and I would love her.

“Of course.” She let out a fey laugh. “I doubt you’ll believe me, but I was quite fond of you.”

“Fond!” He made the word into an epithet.

“I told you I couldn’t love you.”

“You told me you’d try.”

She shrugged; her hand twitched toward the pipe. “Things didn’t work out.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” He gestured at the luxurious surround. “Things have worked out quite well for you.”

“And for you,” she said. “I’ve heard you’ve become a great success. All the ladies want you for their . . .” A giggle. “Their advocate.”

A large wave broke on the shore beneath the verandah, spreading a lace of foam halfway up the beach. The sound appeared to make Mirielle sleepy; her lids fluttered down, and she gave a long sigh that caused her robe to slip partway off one pale, poppling breast.

“I tried to be honest with you,” she said. “And I was. As honest as I knew how to be.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me about your mother and Zemaille?”

Her eyes blinked open. “What?”

“You heard me.”

She sat up, pulling her robe closed, and regarded him with a mixture of confusion and displeasure.

“Why have you come here?”

“For answers. I need answers.”

“Answers!” She laughed again. “You’re more a fool than I thought.”

Stung by that, he said, “Maybe I’m a fool, but I’m no whore.”

“An advocate who thinks he’s not a whore! Will wonders never cease!”

“Tell me,” he demanded. “Nothing can happen to you now, your father can’t be tried again. It was you, wasn’t it? This was all a scheme, a plot to kill Zemaille and avenge your mother. I don’t know how you pulled it off, but . . .”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mirielle,” he said. “I need to know. I won’t hurt you, I promise. I could never hurt you. It almost killed me to have to do what I did to you in court.”

She met his eyes for a long moment. “It was easy. You were easy. That’s why we picked you . . . because you were so lonely, so naive. We just kept you spinning. With love, with fear, with misdirection. And finally with drugs. Before I—or rather Janice—took you to the temple, I slipped a drug into your drink. It made you highly suggestible.”

“That’s what made me hallucinate?”

“You mean Mardo’s hidey hole? No, that was his illusion. That was real enough. The drug only made you believe what I wanted you to—that we were in danger, being pursued. All that.”

“What about the scale?”

“The scale?”

“Yes, the image of the dead wizard in the scale above Zemaille’s bed. Archiochus, I guess it was.”

Her brow wrinkled. “You were so frightened, you must have been seeing things.”

She got to her feet, swayed, righted herself by catching hold of the verandah railing. He thought he saw a softening in her face, the trace of a longing equal to his own, and he also thought he saw her madness, her instability. She would have had to be insane to do what she had, to be in love and not in love at the same time, to inhabit those roles fully, to lie and deceive with such compulsive thoroughness.

“If we’d presented our evidence in a straightforward way,” she said. “Daddy still might have been convicted. We needed to orchestrate the trial, to manipulate the jury. So we chose you to be the conductor. And you were wonderful! You believed everything we handed you.” She turned, let her robe drop to expose her perfect back and said in a northern accent, “I’ve no great love for dragons.” It was Janice’s voice.

He gazed at her, uncomprehending. “But she fell,” he said. “I saw it.”

“A net,” she said. “Rigged just below the bluff.”

This she said in a fluting voice, the voice of the old woman, Kirin.

“My God!” he said.

“A little make-up can do miracles,” she said. “And I’ve always been good at doing voices. We planned for years and years.”

“I still don’t understand. There were so many variables. How could you control them all? The nine witnesses, for example. How could you know they would run?”

She gave him a pitying look. “Oh,” he said. “Right. There were no witnesses.”

“Only Mardo and I. And of course Daddy didn’t throw the stone. We couldn’t take a chance on him missing. We overpowered Mardo, and then he smashed in his skull with it. Then I took drugs to make it look as if I’d been laid out on the altar. The cult had already disbanded, you see. They were all afraid of the great work. The cult was already in process of breaking up when I joined. That was the heart of the plan. Isolating Mardo. I spent hours encouraging him in the great work; I knew the others would abandon him if they thought he actually might complete it. They were more afraid of Griaule than of him.”

“Then that part of it was the truth?”

She nodded. “Mardo was obsessed with killing Griaule. He was mad!”

“What about the knife, the hooded figure?”

She bowed. “I didn’t intend to injure your hand, merely to frighten you. I was so worried because I’d hurt you. I had to run around to the rear of the shop and climb the back stairs in order to make you think I’d been in the rooms, and I almost decided to forget about the plan. Just to run to you and take care of you. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“You’re sorry! God!”

“You haven’t got anything to complain about! Your life’s better than it’s ever been. And like you said, Mardo’s death was no great loss to anyone. He was evil.”

“I don’t even know what that word means anymore.”

Looking back, he could see now the clues he should have seen long before, the similarities in nervous gesture between her and Kirin, her overwrought reaction when he had tried to talk about her mother, all the little inconsistencies, the too-pat connections. What an idiot he had been!

“Poor Adam.” She walked over to him, stroked his hair. “You expect the world to be so simple, and it is . . . just not in the way you want it to be.”

Her smell of heated oranges aroused him, and he pulled her onto his lap, both angry and lustful. With half his mind he tried to reject her, because to want her would ratify all the duplicity in which he had played a part and further weaken his fraying moral fiber; but the stronger half needed her, and he kissed her mouth, tasting the smoky sweetness of the opium. His lips moved along the curve of her neck to the slopes of her breasts. She responded sluggishly at first, then with abandon, whispering, “I’ve missed you so much, I love you, I really do,” and it seemed she was as she once had been, open and giving and soft. It startled him to see this, to realize that the vulnerability underlying her dissipation was no act, for he had come to doubt everything about her. He kissed her mouth again, and he might have taken her then and there, but a man’s voice interrupted them, saying, “I wish you’d be more discreet, darling.”

Korrogly jumped up, dumping Mirielle onto the floor.

Lemos was standing in the doorway, a smile touching the corners of his lips. He looked prosperous, content, a far cry from the gray failure whom Korrogly had defended. His clothes were expensive, rings adorned his hands, and there was about him such an air of health and well-being, it seemed an obscenity, like the ruddy complexion of a sated vampire. Mirielle scrambled up and went to him; he draped an arm about her shoulders.

“I’m surprised to find you here, Mister Korrogly,” said Lemos. “But I don’t suppose I should be. My daughter is alluring, is she not?”

“I told him, Daddy,” Mirielle said in a sugary, babyish voice. “About Mardo.”

“Did you now?”

To his horror, Korrogly saw that Lemos was fondling his daughter’s breast beneath the beige silk; she arched her back to meet the pressure of his hand, but he thought he detected tension in her expression.

Lemos, apparently registering Korrogly’s revulsion, said, “But you didn’t tell him everything, did you?”

“Not about mama. He thinks . . .”

“I can imagine what he thinks.”

Lemos’s smile was unwavering, but behind it, in those gray eyes, was something cold and implacable that made Korrogly afraid.

“You look disturbed,” Lemos said. “Surely a man of your experience can imagine how love might spring up between a man and his daughter. It’s frowned upon, true. But society’s condemnation of such a relationship need not diminish it. In our case, it only made us desperate.”

The final pieces were beginning to fall into place for Korrogly. “It wasn’t Zemaille who killed your wife, it was you.”

Lemos made an amused noise. “You’d play hell proving it. But let’s say for the sake of argument that you’re right. Let’s say that in order to . . . to enjoy one another fully, Mirielle and I needed privacy, something that Patricia prevented us from having. What better villain to use as our foil than Mardo Zemaille? The temple was at that time always open to the curious. It would have been easy for someone, someone like myself, to convince Patricia that it might be fun to pay the place a visit one night.”

“You killed her . . . you were going to blame it on Zemaille?”

“Her death was ruled an accident,” Lemos said. “There was no need to blame anyone.”

“And then you saw your opportunity with Zemaille.”

“Mardo was a weak man with power. Such men are easy to maneuver. It took some time, but the result was inevitable.”

Lemos’s hand slid lower to caress Mirielle’s belly. Despite her acquiescence, Korrogly sensed that she was less lover than slave, that her enjoyment was due to coercion, to confusion; a slack, sick look had come to her face, one that had not been evident when he had been touching her.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever properly expressed my gratitude to you,” Lemos continued. “Without you, I might still be back in Almintra. I’m forever in your debt.”

Korrogly just stared at them, uncertain of what to do.

“Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m being so open,” Lemos said. “It’s really no mystery. You’re a dogged man, Mister Korrogly. I have a lot of respect for you. Once you got the scent, and I’ve been aware that you’ve had the scent for some time, I knew you’d keep at it until you learned all there was to learn. I knew we’d play this scene sooner or later. I could have had you killed, but as I’ve said, I’m grateful to you, and I prefer to let you live. It’s unlikely you can harm me in any event. But you can consider this a warning. I’m watching you. If you ever get it in mind to try and harm me, it’ll be one of your last thoughts. And if you should doubt that, then I want you to think back to what you’ve heard today, to realize what I’m capable of, what I was able to do when I had no power, and to imagine what I might do now that I am powerful. Do you understand?”

Korrogly said, “Yes, I do.”

“Well.” Lemos disengaged from Mirielle, who tottered back to her lounge. “Then there’s nothing else to do except to bid you good day. Perhaps you’ll visit us again. For dinner, perhaps. Of course you’re always welcome to visit Mirielle. She does like you, she really does, and I’ve learned not to be jealous. I would hate to deny her whatever joy she might find with you. I’m afraid the things I’ve asked her to do have damaged her, and maybe you can help her overcome all that.” He put his hand on Korrogly’s back and began steering him through the house and toward the front door. “Pleasure’s a rare commodity. I don’t begrudge any man his share. That’s something that being wealthy has given me to understand about life. Yet another reason to be grateful to you. So—” he opened the front door “—when I say to you that what’s mine is yours, I mean it in the most profound and intimate sense. Do take advantage of our hospitality. Anytime.”

And with that, he waved and shut the door, leaving Korrogly blinking in the bright sunlight, feeling as if he had been marooned on a stone island in an uncharted sea.

Toward twilight, after walking and thinking for the remainder of the day, Korrogly ended up in Henry Sichi’s museum, standing in front of the glass case in which the Father of Stones was displayed. Lemos had been right—there was nothing he could do to achieve justice, and he would have to accept the fact that he had been used by someone who if anything was more monstrous than Griaule. His best course, he decided, would be to leave Port Chantay and to leave soon, for while Lemos might have meant all he had said, he might well change his mind and begin to consider Korrogly a threat. But the danger he was in, that was not the thing that rankled him; he was still enough of a moral soul—a fool, Lemos would say—to want a judgment upon Lemos, and that there would be none left him full of gloom and self-destructive impulse, regarding the shattered fragments of his wished-for orderly universe.

He gazed down at the Father of Stones. It sat winking in its nest of blue velvet, a clouded lump of mystery giving back prismatic refractions of the light, the peculiar man-shaped darkness at its heart appearing to shift and writhe as if it truly were the soul of an imprisoned wizard. Korrogly focused on that darkness, and suddenly it was all around him, like a little pocket of night into which he had fallen, and he was looking at a man lying on the ground, an old, old man with sunken cheeks and a hooked nose and dressed in wizard’s robes, with black eyes threaded by veins of blue-green fire. The vision lasted only a few seconds, but before it faded, he became aware of the propinquity of that same cold, powerful mind that he had sensed back in the temple, and when he found himself once again standing in front of the glass case, looking down at the Father of Stones, he felt not afraid, not shocked, but delighted. It had been Griaule after all, he realized; the vision could mean only that Zemaille had been a serious threat, one that Griaule had been forced to eliminate. And he, Korrogly, had actually seen the moribund wizard that night in the temple; it had been no hallucination. The dragon had even then been trying to illuminate him. He laughed and slapped his thigh. Oh, Lemos had worked his plan, but as the ex-member of the cult had said, it had still been Griaule’s idea, he had inspired Lemos to act . . . and he had done it through the agency of this shard of milky stone.

Korrogly’s delight stemmed not from his realization that in a way Lemos had been innocent—innocence was not a word he could apply to the gemcutter—but from a new comprehension of the intricate subtlety with which Griaule had acted; it spoke to him, it commanded him, it instructed him in a kind of law that he had neglected throughout his entire life. The law of self-determination. It was the only kind, he saw, that could produce justice. If he wanted justice, he would have to effect it, not the system, not the courts, and that was something he was well-equipped to do. He was amazed that he had not come to this conclusion before, but then he supposed that until this moment he had been too confused, too involved with the complexities of the case, to think of taking direct action. And perhaps he had not been ready to act, perhaps his motivation had been insufficient.

Well, he was motivated now.

Mirielle.

It might be that she was unsalvageable, that she had gone too far into perversity ever to emerge from it; but for a moment in his arms she had again been the woman he had loved. It had not been fraudulent. The least he could do was to deliver her from the man who had dominated her and seduced her into iniquity. That he would be also serving justice only made the act sweeter.

He strolled out of the museum and stood on the steps gazing over the shadowed lavender water toward Ayler Point. He knew exactly how he would proceed. Lemos himself had given him the key to successful action in his words concerning Zemaille.

“Mardo was a weak man with power,” he had said. “Such men are easy to maneuver.”

And of course Lemos was no different.

He was rife with weaknesses. His investments, Mirielle, his crimes, his false sense of control. That last, that was his greatest weakness. He was enamored of his own power, he believed his judgments to be infallible and he would never believe that Korrogly could be other than as he perceived him; he would think that the advocate would either do nothing or seek redress through the courts; he would not suspect that Korrogly might move against him in the way that he had moved against Zemaille. Zemaille had probably thought the same of him.

Korrogly smiled, understanding how marvelously complex was this chain of consecutive illuminations, of one man after another being induced to take decisive action. He stepped briskly down the steps and out onto Biscaya Boulevard, heading for The Blind Lady and a glass of beer, for a bout of peaceful contemplation, of deciding his future and Lemos’s fate. By the time he had walked a block he had already come up with the beginnings of a plan.

But then he was brought up short by a disturbing thought.

What if he was obeying Griaule’s will in all this, what if the Father of Stones had had an effect upon him? What if instead of taking his destiny in hand, he was merely obeying Griaule’s wishes, serving as an element in some dire scheme? What if he was by dismissing ordinary means and moral tactics taking a chance on becoming a monster like Lemos, one who would in the end be cut down by yet another of Griaule’s pawns? There was no way of telling. His sudden determination to act might be laid to a long inner process of deliberation, it might be the result of years of failed idealism; the resolution of the Lemos case could have been the weight that caused the final caving-in of his unsound moral structure.

He stood for a long moment considering these things, knowing that he might never come to the end of considering them, but searching for some rationalization that would allow him to put aside such concerns, to cease his analysis and questioning of events, and he found that this had become for him a matter of choice; it was as if the decision to act had freed him from an old snare, from the hampering spell of his ideals, and introduced him into a new and—though less moral—much more effective magic. What did he care who was in control, who was pulling the strings? Sooner or later a man had to stop thinking and start being, to leave off fretting over the vicissitudes and intricacies of life and begin to live. There was no certainty, no secure path, no absolutely moral one. You did the best you could for yourself and those you cared about, and hoped that this would be a sufficiently broad spectrum of concern to keep your soul in healthy condition. If not . . . well, there was no use in fretting over the prospect. Why trouble yourself with guilt in a world in which everyone was guilty?

He set off walking again, walking with a firm step and a smile for everyone who passed him by, bowing politely to an old woman sweeping off her stoop, stopping once to pat a young boy on the head, all the while giving thought to his campaign against Lemos, picturing the gemcutter in various states of ruinous defeat, imagining Mirielle in his arms, letting his mind roam freely through the realms of possibility, posing himself in judge’s robes, dispensing the dispassionate rule of the law, fair yet inflexible, full of imponderable wisdoms, and he saw himself as well on the sunny verandah of a mansion on Ayler Point, on a white yacht, in a glittering ballroom, in every manner of luxurious environment, with loyal friends and beautiful lovers and enemies whose secrets he had mastered. Life, which for so long had seemed distant, a treasure beyond his grasp, now seemed to embrace him, to close around him and make him dizzy with its rich scents and sights. What did it matter, he said to himself, who ran the world, it tasted no less sweet, it gave no less pleasure. He laughed out loud, he winked at a pretty girl, he plotted violence and duplicity, all things that brought him joy.

One way or another, the dragon was loose in Port Chantay.

TIME OUT

Connie Willis

Connie Willis returns to our pages with another of her wonderful SF comedies. Ms. Willis’s novella, “The Last of the Winnebagos,” (published a year ago in our July 1988 issue), is currently on the final ballot for the Nebula award.

“I want you to come with me to the airport, Dr. Lejeune,” Dr. Young said. “I’ve got to pick up Andrew Simons.”

It was the first time he’d spoken to Dr. Lejeune since she’d told him his project proposal was idiotic, and during the intervening three weeks she’d thought quite a bit about what she would say to him when he did speak to her, but now he sounded so much like the old sensible, sane Max Young that she picked up her purse and said, “Who’s Andrew Simons?”

“He’s coming from Tibet,” Dr. Young said, leading the way out of the physics building and over to the parking lot. “He’s with Duke University. Been studying the cultural aspects of time perception in a lamasery in the Himalayas. He’s perfect. I read a monograph of his on déjà vu three months ago and got in touch with Duke.” He stopped next to a red Porsche.

“When did you get a Porsche?” Dr. Lejeune said, looking at the license plates. They spelled WITHIT1, which was a bad sign. So was the Porsche. “And why exactly is this Simons person coming here?”

“He’s going to work on the time displacement project,” Dr. Young said as if it were obvious, and squeezed himself into the Porsche. “Come on. Get in. His plane gets in at four-nineteen.”

She attempted to get into the Porsche. She had hoped he’d given up on the time-displacement project. She had attempted to argue him out of it, with the result that he hadn’t spoken to her in three weeks, and she had hoped he had come to his senses, but apparently he hadn’t.

The project was idiotic. He had decided that time was a quantum object like space and leaped from there to the idea that it could be separated into pieces called hodiechrons, shaken up, and moved around. Quantum time travel. Only he was calling it hodiechron displacement and the silly gadget that was supposed to do all this a temporal oscillator instead of a time machine.

She had decided he was having some kind of midlife crisis, and now the Porsche confirmed it. “I am too old for sports cars,” she said, slamming the door shut on the tail of her lab coat. “And so are you.”

Dr. Young reached across her to the glove compartment and pulled out a tweed cap and a pair of leather driving gloves.

“Simons is extremely enthusiastic about the project. He accepted the job before I even had a chance to fully explain it to him.”

Which, considering what the project involves, is probably a good thing, Dr. Lejeune thought, clutching the dashboard as the Porsche shot out of the parking lot, down College Avenue, and onto the highway.

“How old is he?” she shouted over the roar of the wind.

“Forty-two,” Dr. Young shouted back.

“Is he married?”

“Of course not. He’s been in a lamasery in Tibet for five years.”

“No wonder he accepted,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I should fix him up with Bev Frantz. She’s forty. You know her, she’s teaching Intro to Nursing this semester. She’d be perfect for him.”

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Young shouted. “I will not have you endangering this project.” He swooped into the airport parking lot. He took off his cap and gloves, shoved them into the glove compartment, and got out. “Are you aware that matchmaking is a substitute for sex? It’s one of the classic symptoms of a midlife crisis.”

Which is a clear case of the pot psychoanalyzing the kettle, Dr. Lejeune thought, struggling up out of the car. “What do you call buying a Porsche?” she said, following him into the airport. “How about suddenly abandoning your work on subatomic particles and trying to build a time machine? Wouldn’t you call those classic symptoms?”

“It’s a temporal oscillator, not a time machine,” Dr. Young said. He walked through the security gate. It buzzed. The guard motioned him back through and held out a plastic bowl for him to empty his pockets into. “The university has complete faith in the project. Dr. Gillis has promised me full university support. And complete freedom in choosing my staff.”

“Obviously,” Dr. Lejeune said. “If you’re hiring Tibetan lamas.”

“Dr. Simons is a research psychologist,” he said stiffly, putting his keys in the dish and trying again. This time it buzzed before he was even halfway through. Some of the guards from other security gates came over to watch. “Are you aware that resistance to new ideas is a classic symptom in postmenopausal women?” He took off his belt. “The federal government doesn’t share your opinion of my project either. If they did, I’d hardly have gotten my funding, would I?”

“You got your funding?” Dr. Lejeune said, astonished. “The new administration must be as senile as the old one.”

He walked through the gate. It buzzed. “It is that kind of negative attitude that has already put this project a month behind schedule!” he said.

“You’re sure it isn’t displaced hodiechrons?” she said, and swept through the gate. “It’s his neck chains,” she told the guard. “He’s postmenopausal. Classic symptom.”

“Mom, when’s supper?” Liz asked, opening the refrigerator. “Lisa and I are going to start filling out college applications tonight.”

“As soon as your father gets home,” Carolyn said. She squeezed past Liz and got the radishes and a tomato out of the crisper drawer. “He had to stay for gymnastics.”

“But, Mom, I have to be at volleyball practice at six,” Wendy said.

“I thought the eighth-grade practices were at four,” Carolyn said, rummaging through the utensils drawer for a paring knife.

“On Mondays, Tuesdays, and every other Friday,” Wendy said. “This is Wednesday, Mom.”

The only knife in the entire drawer was a serrated bread knife. Carolyn tried slicing the tomato with it. It wouldn’t even cut through the skin.

“How come Dad’s having gymnastics practice?” Liz asked. “I thought the season didn’t start till next week.”

“It doesn’t,” Carolyn said. “Shut the refrigerator. He’s interviewing assistant coaches.”

“I have to have new hightops,” Wendy said.

“You had new hightops when school started.”

“These are for volleyball. Coach Nicotero says we need ones with bank and turn heels and spike insteps.”

The phone rang. Liz dived for it. “It’s for you,” she said disgustedly, and handed Carolyn the phone.

“Hi, this is Sherri at the elementary school,” the voice on the phone said. “I tried to catch you when you were doing your volunteer stuff, but you would not believe what our beloved principal Old Paperwork decided his secretary should do now! He’s having me call every parent and check to make sure the information is correct. Just in case, he says. Are you aware that you are the ‘person to be contacted if parents cannot be reached’ on fourteen separate emergency cards?”

“Yes,” Carolyn said. “It’s because I’m at home during the day. I may well be the last woman in America at home during the day.”

“No, Heidi Dreismeier’s mother doesn’t work either. Anyway, Old Paperwork decided I should call every single ‘person to be contacted if parents cannot be reached’ just to make sure they really can be contacted and their phones are in working order. The man’s a menace. . .”

“Mom, it’s five o’clock,” Wendy said.

“Anyway,” Sherri said, “I need to read you the names of all these kids. Heidi Dreismeier, Monica Morales, Ricky Morales—”

“Mom, I’m not going to have time to eat,” Wendy said.

“Troy Yoder,” Sherri said, “Brendan James. Speaking of which, did you know Brendan’s parents are getting a divorce?”

“You’re kidding,” Carolyn said. “She’s PTA vice president.”

“Not anymore she’s not. You remember that Make Me Marvy guy who was going around doing color consultations? Well, apparently Brendan’s mother didn’t stop with a few swatches.”

“Mother, Coach Nicotero said we’re supposed to let our food settle before we practice.”

“Look, Sherri, I’m going to have to go,” Carolyn said. “Whoever put my name on the emergency card, it’s fine.”

“Wait, wait, that isn’t really what I called about. Do you remember that fat, bald guy from the university who had you take all those tests last March?”

“Dr. Young?”

“Yeah. Well, he’s coming back with some kind of research team, and he wants you to work for him. It’d be every day all day for about a month, he said. It pays better than volunteering.”

“Oh, gosh, I don’t know,” Carolyn said, thinking about Wendy’s hightops. “Don starts gymnastics practice next week, and the PTA Fair’s coming up. Did he say how much he’d pay?”

“Yeah, and he must really want you because he said he’d pay anything you asked. And you wouldn’t have to start till October second.”

Carolyn tried to lift up the September page of the calendar with the hand that was still holding the bread knife. “That’s next Wednesday, right?”

“I have my orthodontist appointment on Wednesday,” Wendy said.

“I’ll have to see if I can reschedule some stuff. How long will you be at school?”

“Oh, till about midnight if Old Paperwork has his way. After I’m done with the emergency cards, he wants the recess-duty schedule redone alphabetically.”

“I’ll call you back,” Carolyn said, and hung up.

“There’s no way that meat loaf is going to be done by six,” Wendy said.

Carolyn poked some holes in a hot dog with the end of the bread knife and put it in the microwave. Then she called the orthodontist and changed Wendy’s appointment to four-fifteen on Tuesday.

“I have practice at four on Tuesdays,” Wendy said. “Coach Nicotero says if we miss even one practice, we can’t play.”

“What do you have on Thursday?” Carolyn asked the orthodontist’s receptionist.

“We have a five forty-five,” she said.

“How’s five forty-five?” Carolyn asked Wendy.

“Fine,” Wendy said.

“Thursday’s the College Fair,” Liz said. “You promised you’d drive Lisa and me.”

“I have a three-thirty on Wednesday,” the receptionist said.

“Oh, good. That’s after school. I’ll take it,” Carolyn said.

Before she could get the phone back in its cradle, it rang again.

“Hi, this is Lisa. Can I talk to Liz?”

Carolyn handed the phone to Liz and got Wendy’s hot dog out of the microwave. She poured her a glass of milk.

“Coach Nicotero says we’re supposed to have something from each of the four food groups. Meat, grains, dairy products—”

“Fruits and vegetables,” Carolyn said. She handed Wendy the tomato.

Liz hung up the phone. “I’m eating supper at Lisa’s,” she said. “Can you drop me off when you take Wendy?” She ran into her room and came out with a stack of college catalogs. “Where did you say you went to college, Mom?”

“NSC,” Carolyn said.

“Did you like it?”

I had all the time in the world, Carolyn thought. I didn’t have to take anybody anywhere, and I’d never heard of the four basic food groups. My favorite food was a suicide, which my roommate Allison and I made by mixing different flavors of pop together. “I loved it,” Carolyn said. The phone rang.

“Sorry to call so late, honey,” Don said. “We’re not even half-done. Don’t wait supper for me. You and the girls go ahead and eat.”

The plane taxied to a stop, and everyone made a dash for the aisles. Andrew was in the window seat. He pulled his duffel bag out from under the seat in front of him and leaned back against the upright seat back. He shouldn’t have had the Scotch on the L.A.-to-Denver leg. He had hoped it might put him to sleep so he wouldn’t have to listen to the obviously unhappily married couple in the seats next to him.

Instead it had sent him off into a sentimental reverie of his junior year in college, which was possibly the worst year of his life. He had nearly flunked out of prelaw, he had gotten serious about Stephanie Forrester, and he had been an usher at her wedding. There was no reason to remember that misbegotten year at all, and especially not nostalgically.

“I didn’t say I didn’t want you to play tennis,” the male half of the unhappy couple said. He stood up, opened the overhead compartment, and got down a suitcase and his raincoat. “I just said I thought four lessons a day was a little too much.”

“For your information,” the woman said, “Carlos thinks I have real potential.” She reached in the elasticized seat-back pocket, pulled out a paperback of Passages, and jammed it in her purse.

Andrew remembered Dr. Young’s project proposal and got it out of his seat pocket. That was the real reason he’d had the Scotch, to try to blot out the memory of Dr. Young’s harebrained ideas. Dr. Young’s theory was that time existed not as a continuous flow but as a series of discrete quantum objects. They were perceived as a flow because of a “persistence” phenomenon that was learned in childhood. That part of the theory wasn’t so bad. Ashtekar’s research at Syracuse University had already suggested the quantum nature of time, and the idea of perceptual time blocks of some duration was generally accepted by temporal psychologists. Without it, there couldn’t be phenomena like music, which depended on relationships between notes. If time were a continuous flow, music would be perceived as a single note replaced immediately in the consciousness by another instead of as a pattern of interval and duration.

But the concept of time blocks, or hodiechrons, as Dr. Young had christened them, was a perceptual concept, not a physical reality. Not only did Dr. Young think his hodiechrons were real, he also thought they were much longer than any temporal psychologist had suggested—minutes or even hours long instead of the seconds it took to hear a melody. But the truly crazy part of his theory was that these hodiechrons could be moved around like toy blocks, even stacked one on top of the other.

It had nothing to do with cultural aspects of time perception or déjà vu, and if he’d read it all the way through before this, he’d never have accepted Dr. Young’s offer, but he hadn’t checked Dr. Young out at all. Dr. Young had checked him out—he’d had him take a whole battery of tests before he offered Andrew the job. And Andrew had leaped at it without even reading the proposal. Andrew stood up in a semicrouch and looked ahead at the line of people in the aisle. He willed it to move.

“For your information,” the woman said, “Carlos says I have the most beautiful backhand he’s ever seen.”

“For your information,” the man said, wrestling with something in the overhead compartment, “Carlos is paid to say things like that to overweight, middle-aged women.”

Andrew took his plastic safety-instructions card out of the seat pocket and began reading the emergency-exit diagrams.

“I’ve been thinking about going on tour,” the woman said.

“Now that’s what I mean,” the man said, pulling down a tennis racket in a zippered lavender cover. “You’re getting carried away with this tennis thing!”

“The way you got carried away with those Managua municipal bonds? The way you got carried away with that little blond in securities?” She grabbed the tennis racket out of his hands.

According to the safety card there were emergency slides over both wings. If he could climb back over the seats till he got to row H and then pull down the handle on the emergency door . . .

“I thought we agreed not to talk about Vanessa,” the man said.

“I am not talking about Vanessa. I am talking about Heather.”

Andrew sat back down in his seat, fastened his seat belt, and pretended to read the proposal until everybody but the flight attendants had gotten off the plane. The proposal didn’t make any more sense now than when he had read it in earnest.

He looked longingly at the emergency-slide handle and then stuck the proposal in his duffel bag and walked out through the covered walkway and into the terminal. Dr. Young and a fiftyish woman with disorganized hair were the only people left at the gate. The woman was looking interestedly down the hall.

“Dr. Simons,” Dr. Young said, coming forward to shake his hand. “I want you to meet Dr. Lejeune. Dr. Lejeune, Dr. Simons is going to run the psychology end of our little project. Dr. Lejeune?”

Dr. Lejeune came over and shook his hand, still trying to peer down the corridor. “This woman just hit some man over the head with a tennis racket,” she said.

“She found out about Heather,” Andrew said.

“We’re very excited to have you working with us,” Dr. Young said. “I’ll be working with the oscillator, and Dr. Lejeune will be running the computer interp.”

“Since when?” Dr. Lejeune said.

Andrew began looking for emergency exits. There didn’t appear to be any.

“Dr. Gillis told me I could choose whatever staff I needed. I told him I wanted you as my second in command.”

Dr. Lejeune was glancing around as if she were looking for a tennis racket to hit Dr. Young over the head with. “Did you also tell him I think your project is completely addlepated?”

I should have had at least two more Scotches, Andrew thought. Or what were those things he had drunk when he ushered at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding? Clockstoppers. He should have had a clockstopper.

“Addlepated?” Dr. Young said. “Addlepated! Dr. Simons here doesn’t think it’s addlepated. He came all the way from Tibet to work on this project. Tell us, Dr. Simons, is ‘addlepated’ the word that springs to mind about this project?”

The word that sprang to mind was disaster. He should have had a lot of clockstoppers. Ten. Or fifteen.

“No,” he said.

“You see?” Dr. Young said triumphantly to Dr. Lejeune. He took Andrew’s bag. “We’ll go straight back to the lab and I’ll show you the oscillator. And then I’ll outline my theory in more detail.”

His junior year hadn’t been half-bad, all things considered, Andrew thought, walking out to the car with them. He had had to usher at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding, and when the minister had read that part about, “let him speak now or forever hold his peace,” the entire congregation had turned and looked at him, but otherwise it hadn’t been half bad.

Dr. Lejeune didn’t speak to Dr. Young on the way home from the airport even though he didn’t realize until they got to the Porsche that there wasn’t room for all three of them and then told her to take Andrew’s duffel bag and go find a taxi. Andrew, who was looking either jet-lagged or sorry he had ever left Tibet, insisted on being the one to take the taxi, and Dr. Young spent the trip back to the university telling her how her attitude was undermining the project. She maintained a stony silence.

She maintained it through his announcing that their research was not going to be done at the university but at an elementary school in a town called Henley that was halfway across the state and through his unveiling of the temporal oscillator, even though it was close on that one. It looked like a giant lava lamp.

She talked to Dr. Gillis instead, but she didn’t get anywhere. Dr. Gillis refused to take her refusal to work on the project seriously. Worse, he thought shiftable hodiechrons and temporal oscillation were entirely plausible, and when she told him she thought Max was having some kind of midlife crisis, Dr. Gillis stiffened and said, “Dr. Young is three years younger than I am. I would hardly call him middle-aged. Besides, he is far too intelligent and sensible a man to have a midlife crisis.”

“That’s what I thought,” Dr. Lejeune said, “till I saw the Porsche.”

She went back to the lab and Andrew Simons, who was staring at the temporal oscillator. He looked terrible. Max hadn’t given him a minute’s rest since he got there, but she had the feeling it was more than that. He looked unhappy. He needs to get married, she thought. I really should introduce him to Bev Frantz. She’s pretty and smart and unmarried. She’d be perfect.

“How can this be a temporal oscillator?” Andrew said. “It looks like a lava lamp.”

Dr. Young came in, beaming. “I’ve just been talking to the school secretary in Henley.” The top of his head was bright pink with excitement. “I decided you needed an assistant, Dr. Simons, and they just called to say they’d hired someone. Her name’s Carolyn Hendricks. She’s perfect. She’ll be helping you with the screening and getting coffee and things like that.”

“Why does she need to be perfect if all she’s doing is getting the coffee?” Dr. Lejeune almost asked, and then remembered she wasn’t speaking to him.

“She’s forty years old, married, secretary of the PTA, and has two daughters. Her husband coaches the girls’ gymnastics team. The seasons’ just started,” he added, as if that were perfect, too. “Which reminds me—” he said, and hurried out.

Why is her husband’s coaching a bunch of teenaged girls in leotards perfect? she thought. Does he expect her to fly off the uneven bars and into the past?

“Have you ever heard of a drink called a clockstopper?” Andrew asked, still staring at the lava lamp. “I used to drink them in college.”

“No,” Dr. Lejeune said, frowning at the door Dr. Young had just left by.

“Beer and wine,” Andrew said. “That’s what they were made out of. The clockstoppers.”

“Oh,” said Dr. Lejeune, still frowning. “We called them cataclysms.”

Carolyn dropped Wendy at the middle school and drove over to the elementary.

“Where am I supposed to go?” she asked Sherri in the office. “The library?”

“No,” Sherri said, handing Carolyn a sheaf of papers. “You’re downstairs in the music room.”

“Where’s music?”

“In with the PE classes. They divided the gym in half with masking tape.”

“And the music teacher stood for that?”

“She had to. Old Paperwork told her how much money Dr. Young was paying to use the school for this project.”

“If he’s paying so much, why didn’t he let him use the library?”

“I don’t know. The music room is pretty cramped.”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “I did hearing tests in there last year. The room’s L-shaped, and the light switch is at the top of this hall part next to the door and about a million miles from the main part of the room. The third-graders were always switching it off on their way to recess and leaving me in the dark, because there aren’t any windows. Can’t you see if we can be in the library instead?”

“I’ll ask Old Paperwork,” Sherri said. “I don’t know what you’re griping about, though. I’d love being stuck in a small space with a gorgeous-looking man like that.”

“Dr. Young?”

“No. The guy you’re working with.” She fumbled through the papers on the counter. “Andrew Something.” She picked up a pink sheet and looked at it. “Andrew Simons. Speaking of gorgeous looking, how’s that adorable husband of yours?”

“Adorable,” Carolyn said, smiling. “When I get to see him. Gymnastics is our worst time of the year. And this year’s been even worse because of his having to hire a new assistant coach.”

“I heard they hired some twenty-year-old who looks like Farrah Fawcett.”

“They did,” Carolyn said, looking through her collection of forms. “Don was really upset. He spent two whole weeks doing interviews and then the board hires this Linda person, who never even applied.”

“I’ll bet he’s not all that upset,” Sherri said. “He gets to work with Farrah Fawcett, you get to work with this absolute hunk of a psychologist—why don’t I ever get to work with anybody gorgeous?” Sherri asked. “Do you know what happened to me when I had the Make Me Marvy guy at my house? He wrapped a dish towel around my head, held up a few swatches, and told me I look sallow in pink. It isn’t fair. The married women are grabbing all the eligible bachelors. Like Shannon Williams’s mother.”

“Shannon Williams’s mother?” Carolyn said, looking up from her papers. “I thought it was Brendan’s mother who ran off with the colors guy.”

“It was. Shannon’s mother is messing around with some guy she works with at the bank. It seems they had to spend all this time in the vault together, and the next thing you know . . . Speaking of which, how much time will Don have to spend with this Linda person?”

“I think I’d better get down to the music room before the bell rings,” Carolyn said. “Is this Dr. Simons down there?”

“I don’t know. He’s been in and out all morning, carrying stuff. I’ll check with Old Paperwork about the library. And in the meantime, you watch out for this Andrew Simons guy. That music room is even smaller than the vault.” She held the pink paper up to her neck. “Do you really think pink makes me look sallow?”

“Yes,” Carolyn said.

Andrew hooked the temporal oscillator up to the response monitors and plugged the whole thing into the only outlet he could find in the music room. The lights stayed on.

Good, he thought, and started hooking up the rest of the response wires, which were supposed to register reactions in the students they tested.

According to Dr. Young they would be screening to find children who saw time as blocks rather than a continuous flow. These children would have longer hodiechrons since, according to Dr. Young, their hodiechrons got progressively shorter as they learned to perceive time as a flow.

After Andrew had found these children, they would be hooked up to the temporal oscillator and worked into an excited emotional state and they would begin switching their hodiechrons around. Dr. Young claimed he had been able to make it happen on a subatomic level.

“Maximum agitation,” Dr. Young had said. “Simple bombardment won’t do it. The key is maximum agitation.

“But even if it does happen at the microcosmic level, what makes you think you can make it happen in macro?” Dr. Lejeune had asked, the first thing she’d said to Dr. Young in a week and a half.

“It already happens,” Dr. Young had said. “You’ve both experienced it. The sensation of déjà vu. The now is displaced for a millisecond by a hodiechron from the past, and you have the sensation of having seen or heard something before. It usually occurs when you’re in an excited emotional state. Déjà vu is temporal displacement, and what we’re going to do in this project is to produce it in longer hodiechrons so the displacement lasts a second, a minute, as long as several hours.”

Andrew didn’t believe a word of it. He had told Dr. Lejeune so while they packed the equipment for the trip to the elementary school in Henley.

“I don’t believe it either,” she’d said.

“Then why are you staying?”

She’d shrugged. “Somebody needs to be around to save him from himself, or at least to pick up the pieces when his precious oscillator doesn’t work. But that’s no reason for you to stay. So why are you?”

I don’t know, he’d thought. Why did I agree to usher at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding? “Maybe I’m having a midlife crisis,” he said.

“Along with everybody else around here,” Dr. Lejeune had said, and then looked thoughtful. “You’re forty-two, right?” she said. “Hmm. Did you have a girlfriend in Tibet?”

“I was in a lamasery in the Himalayas.”

“Hmm,” she’d said, and handed him another piece of equipment.

There was too much equipment. He didn’t even know what some of it was. There was a medium-size gray box with only an on-off switch on it and two smaller ones without even that, and no jacks to plug any of them into anything else. He wondered if they were something the music teacher had left behind. He set them on the piano along with the photon counter and the spectroscope.

The lights went off. “Hey!” he said. The lights went back on.

“Sorry,” a woman’s voice said. She came down the ell and into the room. She had short dark hair and was wearing a skirt and blazer. She extended her hand. “I’m Carolyn Hendricks. I couldn’t tell if you were here or not, and I didn’t want to get locked in. Sherri forgot to give me a key. I called a couple of times, but the room’s soundproofed unless you really yell.”

He shook her hand. “Which you knew I’d do if you turned off the lights?”

“Yes,” she said. “I had to do hearing tests in here last year, and the third graders think it’s funny to flip the light switch on their way out to recess.” She smiled. “I yelled a lot.” She had a nice smile.

“For a minute there I thought maybe I’d blown the lights,” he said, indicating the jumble of wires. “Would you believe there’s only one outlet in the whole room?”

“Yes,” she said. She watched him plug the spectrum analyzer into the power supply. “Maybe it would be a good idea if I brought in a flashlight tomorrow, just in case we blow a fuse.”

“Or a miner’s lamp,” he said, peering at the back of the spectrum analyzer. “It got awfully black in here when you turned off the light.”

“ ‘Black as the pit from pole to pole,’ ” she said.

He looked up at her.

“I know you,” he said.

“Oh?” she said, squinting at him the way people did when they were trying to decide if someone looked familiar or not.

“Were you ever at Duke University?”

“No,” she said warily.

“And I don’t suppose you’ve been in Tibet lately.”

“No,” she said even more warily, and he realized suddenly how that must sound, especially down here in the black hole of Calcutta.

“Sorry,” he said. “That wasn’t meant to sound like the oldest line in the book. You must remind me of somebody,” he said, frowning.

That was a lie. She didn’t remind him of anybody. He was positive he’d never seen her before, but for a fraction of a second there, when she said, “Black as the pit from pole to pole,” he could have sworn he knew her.

She was still looking wary. He said, “What I need you to do is help me get this equipment arranged so we can actually move in here. If we could move that,” he pointed to the resonant converter, “over next to the blackboard and then do something with the chairs to get them out of the way—”

“Sure,” she said, squeezing between the oscilloscope and the magnetometer to get to him. Together they hefted the resonant converter, carried it over to the blackboard, and set it down. “We can move some of these chairs out of the room if you don’t need them,” she said. “We can store them in the supply closet.”

“Great,” he said.

“I’ll go get the key from the janitor,” she said. She started to pick up one of the chairs and knocked it over instead.

“I—” he said, and clamped it off.

She picked up the chair and looked inquiringly at him.

“Leave a couple for us,” he said lamely. “And one for the child we’ll be testing. And maybe you’d better leave a couple for Dr. Young and Dr. Lejeune in case they want to observe. Five. Leave five chairs.”

“Okay,” she said, and went down the hall. “I know you,” he said, looking after her. “I know you.”

Dr. Lejeune spent half the day setting up her computer equipment and the other half looking for Dr. Young. “Have you been down in that broom closet of a music room?” she asked when he finally came in. “My purse is bigger. I was down there this morning, and there was hardly room for the two of them to even move, let alone try to get kids in there.”

“Perfect,” Dr. Young said.

“Perfect?” Dr. Lejeune said suspiciously. He had said Carolyn Hendricks was perfect. Come to think of it, he had called Andrew that, too. “He’s perfect,” he had said. “He’s forty-two years old and spent the last five years in a Tibetan lamasery.”

“Why is it perfect?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Your computer setup,” Dr. Young said. “I knew the kindergarten was the perfect place for you to work.”

“Well, the music room isn’t.”

“No, I know,” he said, shaking his bald head sadly. “I tried to get the library, but Mr. Paprocki said they needed it for Fire Prevention Week. Maybe after that’s over, we can move them,” he said, and left before she could ask him anything else.

She went up to the office. “Is Mr. Paprocki in?” she asked Sherri, who was folding a stack of orange papers in half one at a time.

“He’s out on the playground. Brendan James got into a fight. It’s his third fight today. His mother ran off with the Make Me Marvy man.”

Dr. Lejeune took one of the folded sheets and unfolded it. It said, “ATTN PARENTS: IT’S CHICKEN-POX TIME!” Dr. Lejeune folded it back up. “Make Me Marvy?” she said.

“Yeah, you know, he tells you what colors you can wear by examining your skin tones. And then he runs off with you, at least if you’re Brendan James’s mother. All he did to me was tell me to wear fuchsia.”

Dr. Lejeune took part of the stack of orange sheets and started folding them.

“Actually, I wasn’t all that surprised it happened. There was this article in Woman’s Day about the Donkey Doldrums. You know, that point in a marriage where you feel like all you are is a pack animal, and just the week before she’d been in to bring Brendan his lunch that he forgot, and she told me the only time her husband noticed her anymore was when he needed her to find his keys. It still makes me mad, though. I mean, the Make Me Marvy man was just about the only single guy in town.”

“Is Mr. Paprocki married?” Dr. Lejeune asked, folding.

“Old Paperwork?” Sherri asked, surprised. She folded the last sheet in her pile and got a stamp and stamp-pad out of the desk drawer. “Married? Are you kidding? He never looks up from his triplicate forms long enough to see you’re a woman, let alone marry you!” She pounded the stamp into the stamp pad two or three times and banged it onto the folded sheet. It was a smiley face. She whacked the next sheet. “What about Dr. Simons? I suppose he’s too good-looking not to be married.”

“No,” Dr. Lejeune said, thinking of something else. “He spent the last five years in a lamasery in Tibet.”

“You’re kidding!” Sherri said. “That’s perfect!”

Dr. Lejeune narrowed her eyes. “Why do you say that?”

“Well, because he’s probably desperate. Five years and no sex would make me desperate,” she said, stamping. “What am I talking about? Five years and no sex have made me desperate. But I’ll bet the first woman who comes along can have him for the taking.”

“I’ll try to catch Mr. Paprocki later,” Dr. Lejeune said, handing the stack of folded sheets to Sherri. “Just tell him I want to talk to him about the music room.”

“What about it?”

“It’s too small. They’ve got all that equipment in there, and they can hardly move. I was just wondering if there was some other room they could use.”

“Carolyn Hendricks asked about that this morning, and I asked Old—Mr. Paprocki about it. He said he knew it was too small and he’d offered Dr. Young the library instead, but Dr. Young had insisted on the music room. He said it was perfect for what he was going to do.”

While Carolyn was waiting for Wendy at the orthodontist, she unstapled the orange flyer Sherri had handed her on her way out and read it.

“ATTN PARENTS: IT’S CHICKEN-POX TIME!” it said in all caps. There were subheadings: Be Aware, Be Prepared, and Be Informed, each with a cute picture of a bee next to it. “Be Aware. Sixteen cases have been reported in the state since school started, two in Henley, though so far we have had no cases in the schools.”

The Be Prepared section listed the symptoms of the disease, and the Be Informed section talked about the incubation period, which was from thirteen to seventeen days, and concluded, “Chicken pox is most contagious the day before any symptoms appear and during the first few days of breaking out.”

Great, Carolyn thought. Neither Liz nor Wendy had had the chicken pox even though they’d both been exposed when they were little.

After Wendy was done, Carolyn ran to the cleaners and the bank and went to the grocery store.

“Don’t forget we’re out of pop,” Wendy said. “And Coach Nicotero said we were supposed to have—”

“The four basic food groups,” Carolyn said. “Are you aware that pop is not a basic food group?”

“Are we going to the mall to get my hightops after this?” Wendy asked. “My shoelaces came untied during practice today and I called a time out and Sarah Perkins said there weren’t any time outs in volleyball and I said there were time outs in every game. So are we?”

“Are we what?” Carolyn said, staring at the two-liter bottles of pop. When she was in college, pop had come in reasonable-sized bottles. They had bought one bottle each of Coke and orange and lemon-lime for their suicides, and what else? Root beer? Cream soda?

“Getting my hightops. At the mall.”

Carolyn looked at her watch. “It’s a quarter to five already, and Dad said he’d be home early tonight. We’ll have to do it tonight after supper.”

“Mother,” Wendy said, somehow managing to get several extra syllables in “mother,” “it’s Wednesday. I have practice at six.”

Carolyn bought two-liter bottles of cola, orange, cream soda, root beer, and lemon-lime and some new batteries for the flashlight and raced Wendy out to the mall to get her hightops. They didn’t get home till five-thirty.

“I’m eating supper over at Lisa’s,” Liz said. “We’re going to do our applications on her computer.”

“I have to be at practice at six,” Wendy said, lacing up her hightops.

Carolyn made Wendy a peanut-butter sandwich and began unpacking the groceries. “Did your father call, Liz?”

“No. Sherri did, though. She wants you to call her at school. What kind of microcomputers did your college have?”

“None.” Carolyn took out the bottles of pop and set them on the counter. “There weren’t any microcomputers in those days.”

“You’re kidding! What did you have, then?”

“It’s twenty to six,” Wendy said, munching on her sandwich.

Carolyn handed Wendy an apple and called Sherri.

“I talked to Monica and Ricky Morales’s mother after school, and she says she’s not surprised Brendan James’s mother ran off with that Make Me Marvy man. She read this article in Cosmopolitan on the seven warning signs of Over-Forty-Frenzy, and she had them all. She was forty-three, her husband was never home, her kids were right at two of the most demanding ages—”

“What? Thirteen and seventeen?” Carolyn asked.

“No. Two and five. The article said she was easy prey for the first man who said two nice words to her.”

“Mom, it’s a quarter to six,” Wendy said.

“I know the feeling,” Carolyn said.

“And I know you,” Sherri said. “You’d never run off with anybody. You’re crazy about Don, and your girls are two of the nicest girls I know.”

“Mom,” Wendy said, pointing at the kitchen clock.

“I’m in kind of a hurry,” Carolyn said. “Can I call you back?”

“You don’t have to do that. I just wanted to warn you that Heidi Dreismeier’s mother called. She heard you were doing tests and wanted to know how Heidi should study for them. I told her not to worry, but you know how she is. She’ll probably call you next. I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” she said, and hung up.

Carolyn pulled her coat on and fished her car keys out of her purse. The phone rang. She handed Liz the keys and picked up the receiver.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Don said. “How was your first day of work?”

“Fine,” she said, waving good-bye to the girls. “We moved equipment all day. And chairs. I’m still not sure what this project is all about. There’s one machine that looks like a giant lava lamp. And the guy I work with—” She stopped.

“The guy you work with what?”

“Nothing. Did you know Brendan James’s mother ran off with the Make Me Marvy man? And there have been two cases of chicken pox in Henley.”

“Great,” Don said. “The girls will probably both get it. You’ve had it, haven’t you?”

“What? Chicken pox?” Carolyn said. “Of course I—” She stopped. “I don’t remember.” She frowned. “I must have. I had to have had it as a kid: I mean, all those times the girls were exposed when they were little, I was exposed, too, and I never got it, but . . . isn’t that funny? I don’t remember whether I’ve had it or not.”

“It’ll come to you if you don’t think about it,” Don said. “You’re probably just tired.”

“I am,” she said. “Wendy had her orthodontist appointment and then dragged me all over the mall looking for volleyball shoes, and then Sherri called and Wendy had to go to practice.”

“And you moved equipment all day. No wonder you’re exhausted. Linda says she doesn’t know how you do it all, taking care of the kids and all and now this job. She said she wondered if you had any time left over for being a wife.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“I said you were a terrific wife and I—” Don said something to somebody else and then came back on the line. “Sorry. Linda just came in. She went out to get us some sandwiches. That’s what I called about. I thought I was going to make it home early, but Linda is feeling real insecure about the meet tomorrow. She wanted to go over the floor ex routines again. But, listen, sweetheart, I can tell the girls to come in before school tomorrow.”

“No, that’s okay,” Carolyn said. “I’m just being tired and cranky.” She had a sudden thought. “I’ll make myself a suicide,” she said.

“A what?” Don said.

“A suicide,” she said. “We used to drink them in college when we’d had a bad day.”

She told Don good-bye, hung up, and opened all the bottles of pop.

We used to drink them in college, she thought, pouring some Coke into the glass. She added some orange and a little root beer. My roommate Allison and I used to sit on the floor and drink them and talk about what we were going to do with our lives. I do not remember our ever discussing driving people to the orthodontist or volleyball practice or the mall. She added a dollop of grape, filled the glass up with lemon lime, and stirred it with the knife she had used for peanut butter.

I don’t remember us ever discussing being married to a coach with a snotty assistant.

She took the suicide into the living room, sat down on the floor, and took a sip. It didn’t taste anything like the suicides she and Allison had made, probably because Allison was the one who always made them. That one fall quarter when Allison was in Europe, she had had to experiment for days before she got the recipe right. That had been a bad fall quarter. It had snowed all the time, and she had sat by the window and drunk suicides and thought about falling in love, and being pursued by handsome men, and sex.

Which reminded her. She set the suicide on the coffee table and went and got the flashlight and put the batteries in.

Andrew got to school early, hoping he’d have a few minutes to try to figure out why he kept thinking he knew Carolyn Hendricks, but she was already there.

“I brought the flashlight,” she said. “Where shall we put it so we both know where it is in case of emergency?”

“How about the top of the piano?” he said.

She set it on end between two gray boxes that didn’t plug into anything. She didn’t look familiar today, which Andrew was grateful for. It was bad enough working on a nutty project without behaving like a nut yourself.

“We’re just going to do some screening today,” he said. “The Idelman-Ponoffo Short-Term Memory Inventory. It consists of reading strings of numbers, letters, and words and having the child repeat them back to you, forward, backward, from the middle—”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “Dr. Young gave it to me when he tested me last year.”

“Oh,” Andrew said. He had had the idea Dr. Young didn’t know her, that she had been picked at random by the elementary school. “Good. You’ll be asking the questions, and I’ll be monitoring their responses. They’ll be hooked up to an EKG and autonomic response sensors, and I’ll be videotaping the testing.”

“Don’t you think all this equipment is liable to scare five-year-olds?”

“That’s what you’re here for. They know you already, and you’ll be the one interacting with them. Don’t start the test immediately. Talk to them awhile, and then we’ll hook them up as unobtrusively as possible and start the test.”

She went and got the first kindergartner and brought him in. “This is Matt Rothaus,” she said.

“Wow, neat!” Matt said, racing over to look at the temporal oscillator. “Star Trek: The Next Generation!”

Carolyn laughed. She leaned forward. “Do you like Star Trek?”

I know you, Andrew thought. I’ve never seen you before, but I’ve heard you laugh and lean forward just like that.

“What did you do in Show and Tell today?” Carolyn was asking Matt.

“Heidi threw up,” Matt said. “It was gross to the max.”

At lunch Dr. Lejeune set her tray down next to Sherri’s. “How’s Heidi?” she asked. “It isn’t the chicken pox, is it?”

“No. Nervous stomach. Her mother—”

“Don’t tell me. She ran off with the man who installed their cable TV.”

“You’re kidding!” Sherri said. “Where did you hear that?”

“I was kidding. What about her mother?”

“Oh, she just lessons Heidi to death. Ballet, tap, swimming, tae kwon do. The poor kid probably wishes her mother would run off with somebody and leave her alone.” She sighed. “I wish somebody would run off with me.”

“What about Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Old Paperwork? Are you kidding? He’s never even looked at me.” She took a bite of macaroni, hamburger, and tomato sauce. “I think my timing must be off or something. I always meet guys after they’re already married or engaged. Would you believe I was out with strep throat when Dr. Young did all that testing last March or I could have been the one down there in that cozy little music room with Dr. Simons?”

“All what testing?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“The testing he did to find somebody to work with Dr. Simons,” Sherri said, eating her peach slices. “He did all kinds of interviews and stuff and then gave the finalists all these psychological tests. If I’d known how gorgeous Dr. Simons was, I’d have taken a few tests myself, but I thought whoever Dr. Young picked was going to work with him!”

Dr. Young had gone up to Fermilab in February and been gone two months. She had assumed—correction, he had let her assume—he was working with the cyclotron that whole time, trying to get his subatomic hodiechrons to switch phases. “The school wouldn’t have copies of those tests, would it?”

“Are you kidding? Old Paperwork makes me make copies of everything.” She stacked her silverware and milk carton on top of her plate. “My timing’s always been off. In college I kept meeting guys who’d just been drafted.” She stood up and pushed her chair in. “It’d be great if this time-machine thing of Dr. Young’s worked, wouldn’t it? You’d be able to go back and get the timing right for once.”

“Yes,” Dr. Lejeune said. “It would.”

Wendy called after school and told Carolyn they had an out-of-town volleyball game and could Carolyn bring her money for McDonald’s and some Gatorade to drink on the bus. “Coach Nicotero says we have to have lots of electrolytes.” She and Andrew weren’t done testing Heidi Dreismeier, but he told her to go on and he’d finish the last few questions.

Carolyn ran by the grocery store and bought the Gatorade and a two-liter bottle of black-cherry pop, which she’d decided was the secret ingredient in the suicides. She took Wendy the Gatorade and the money and picked up Liz at the high school.

“Can you drop me over at Lisa’s?” Liz sad. “Harvard sent her a recruitment video. I don’t know, though. How important do you think coed dorms are?”

“I don’t know,” Carolyn said, stopping in front of Lisa’s. “We didn’t have them.”

“You’re kidding. How did you meet guys?” She gathered up her books and got out of the car. “Oh, I almost forgot. I saw Dad. He said to tell you he and Linda had to go out to the mall to look at warm-ups. He said not to wait supper.”

Carolyn went home and made herself a suicide, adding a very small amount of black cherry to try it out. Not only did we not have coed dorms, she thought, we weren’t even allowed to have boys in the dorm. The dorm mother ran a bed check at midnight, and you could be expelled for sneaking a boy into your room, but I still managed somehow to meet boys, Liz. They sat next to me in class, and they danced with me at mixers, and they called me on the phone.

The phone rang. “Thanks a lot for running out on me,” Andrew said.

“What happened?” Carolyn asked. “Did Heidi throw up?”

“Worse. Her mother came in. It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to convince her Heidi doesn’t need hodiechronicity lessons.”

“Sherri says she read this article about Housewife Hysteria, and that’s what she thinks Heidi’s mother has,” Carolyn said. She took a sip of the suicide. Black cherry was not the secret ingredient. “She can’t find a socially acceptable outlet for her frustrations and longings.”

“So she makes poor Heidi take belly-dancing. She spent forty-five minutes telling me about their Suzuki lessons. I felt like I was caught in some horrible time dilation. It serves me right for going into this business.”

“How did you get into this business anyway?” Carolyn said, opening the refrigerator and peering inside to see if there were any other flavors of pop she could try.

“You mean why did I decide to study time? Well, I. . .” There was a long pause and then he said in an odd voice, “Isn’t that funny? I don’t remember.”

“You mean you just sort of gradually got into it?” There was a jar of maraschino cherries in the refrigerator door with one cherry left in it. She ate the cherry and poured the juice into the suicide. “You just drifted into it?”

“Temporal psychology isn’t something you just drift into,” he said. “This is ridiculous. I can’t for the life of me remember.”

“Maybe you still haven’t gotten used to the altitude or something,” Carolyn said, trying out the suicide. Maraschino-cherry juice wasn’t the secret ingredient either. “And you’re probably under a lot of stress with the project and all. People forget things when they’re under stress.”

“You forget phone numbers and where you put your keys. You don’t forget why you picked your chosen vocation.”

“I can’t remember whether I had the chicken pox,” Carolyn said. “I even called my mother. She said I didn’t have it when I was little, but she thought I’d had it when I was in college, and when she said that, it sounded right, but I can’t for the life of me remember. It’s like there’s a big hole where the—”

“Nebraska State College,” Andrew said.

“What?” Carolyn said.

“Your college. You went to Nebraska State College. That’s where I know you from.”

“You’re kidding. You went to NSC, too?”

“No, Stanford, but—” He stopped. “You didn’t ever go to California when you were in college, did you? For spring break or something?”

“No,” Carolyn said. “Did you ever come to Nebraska?”

“No, and you still think I’m trying the old ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ routine, don’t you?”

“No,” Carolyn said. “I think you probably had a girlfriend in college that I remind you of.”

“Not a chance. Stephanie Forrester was blond and malicious.”

She certainly was, Carolyn thought. Making him usher at her wedding.

“Brown and gold,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“Your school colors. Brown and gold.”

She looked at the suicide and then poured it down the sink. Her school colors were brown and gold, and Andrew had never said a word about Stephanie Forrester until this minute, but she knew all about it, how the head usher was in love with her, too, how they’d gone out drinking clockstoppers and—

“I’ve got to go fix supper before my husband gets home,” she said, and hung up the phone.

Dr. Lejeune had hoped Sherri would look for the tests right away, but when she went into the office after school, Sherri said. “Oh, I forgot all about that. Old Paperwork suddenly decided he wanted me to take an inventory of the supply closet, including counting the individual sheets of construction paper.”

“How old is Mr. Paprocki?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Six, seven,” Sherri said, counting green. “Forty-three.”

“Forty-three,” Dr. Lejeune said thoughtfully, watching Sherri count. “Are you aware that obsessive attention to detail is a classic symptom of sexual repression?”

“Nineteen—you’re kidding,” Sherri said. She looked at the half-counted stack. “Where was I?”

“Nineteen,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Are you sure he’s never noticed you?”

“I’m sure. I’ve been wearing fuchsia for a week.” She finished the stack and tamped it down and along the side to straighten the sheets back into line. “I’ll try to look for those tests as soon as I finish this inventory.”

Dr. Lejeune went down to the music room to see what she could find out from Carolyn, but she wasn’t there and neither was Andrew. They had probably gotten lost in all the equipment, Dr. Lejeune thought, looking at the metal boxes stacked next to the piano and lined up under the blackboard. She wondered what he needed the photon counter for. And the spectrum analyzer. She didn’t even know what some of this stuff was. She picked up a gray metal box that wasn’t plugged into anything. There were no dials or markings on it except an on-off switch. Whatever it was, it was turned on.

The lights went off. “Hey!” Dr. Lejeune shouted. She took a step in the direction of the door. She crashed into the wastebasket. “Hey!” she said again.

“Sorry,” Dr. Young said, and the light came on. He came down the narrow ell and into the main part of the room, looking oddly guilty, as if she had just caught him at something. “I didn’t know anybody was in here, and I saw the light on. It’s a waste of electricity to leave a light on in an empty room and—” He stopped. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Dr. Lejeune said, surprised.

He was looking at the box she was still holding. She set it down on the piano. “I was looking for Dr. Simons.”

“What for?” he said suspiciously. “You weren’t going to try to fix him up with Bev Frantz, were you?”

“I wanted to ask him what he thought of the children he’d tested so far,” Dr. Lejeune said stiffly. “The computer isn’t showing even a glimmer of a hodiechron, long or short. You should check before you turn out the light. It got black as a coal mine in here.”

Dr. Young looked guilty all over again, and he still couldn’t take his eyes off the box on the piano.

“I’ve got to go finish running the extrapolations,” Dr. Lejeune said, and went back up to the office.

Sherri was counting yellow construction paper. Dr. Lejeune asked if she could use the phone in Mr. Paprocki’s office to call the university. “Forty-two, forty-three,” Sherri said. “Sure. You have to fill out these.” She handed Dr. Lejeune a sheaf of forms an inch thick.

“I’ll call collect,” Dr. Lejeune said. She went into the office, shut the door, and called the physics department. “I need to talk to somebody who worked on the temporal oscillator with Dr. Young,” she told the graduate assistant who answered the phone. “I want to know exactly what it does.”

“The main unit?”

“I suppose so,” Dr. Lejeune said. She hadn’t been aware the thing had more than one part.

“It has two functions. It produces the agitational stimuli, and it stores the temporal energy collected by the portable transmitter-receivers.”

“Agitational stimuli?”

“Yes. A combination of subsonic emissions and subliminal messages that produce an excited emotional state in the experimental subjects.”

Yes, and I’ll bet I know what those subliminal messages are saying, Dr. Lejeune thought.

“I don’t suppose this ‘main unit’ looks like a lava lamp, does it?”

“A lava lamp? Why on earth would a temporal oscillator look like a lava lamp?”

“Good question,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Tell me about these portable transmitter-receivers.”

It took two more days to finish kindergarten. Brendan James was the last one on the list. “Maybe we should just skip him,” Carolyn said. “He’s under a lot of stress.”

“I’m not sure we have enough time left today anyway,” Andrew said. It was nearly two-thirty. He could tell because the third grade was rattling past on their way out to recess. “Let’s put it off till tomorrow, and I’ll ask—”

The lights went out.

“Just a minute,” Andrew said. “I’ll get the flashlight. You can’t see a thing in here.”

That was an understatement. It was as black as pitch, as black as a mine shaft in there. It was so black, it seemed to destroy his sense of direction as well. He took a step toward the piano and cracked his knee against the desk. Wrong way. He turned around and started in the opposite direction, his hands out in front of him.

“I’ll try to find the light switch,” Carolyn said, and there was a loud metallic crash.

“Stay right where you are,” Andrew said. His hands hit the keyboard in a clatter of notes. “I’m almost there.” He grabbed for the piano top and got hold of one of the square metal boxes and then the other. The flashlight wasn’t there. He patted his hands over the surface of the piano. “Did you move the flashlight?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “Did you?”

“No,” he said, turning in the direction her voice was coming from. He crashed into the wastebasket. “I can’t see a thing,” he said. “It’s black as the pit from pole to pole in here. Where are you?”

She didn’t answer for a moment, but he didn’t need her to tell him. He suddenly knew exactly where she was. He couldn’t see a thing; there was not enough light for his eyes even to make an attempt at adjusting, but he knew exactly where she was.

“I’m by the blackboard, I think,” she said. She wasn’t. She was between the photon counter and the oscilloscope, and all he had to do was reach out his arm and pull her toward him. Her face was already turned up toward his in the pitch darkness. All he had to do was say her name.

And then what? Make her be the next piece of gossip for Sherri to spread? Well, you know what happened to Wendy and Liz’s mother, don’t you? She ran off with the hodiechronicity man.

“The blackboard’s over here,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder and turning her gently toward it. He patted the surface with his free hand, completely sure now of where everything was. He could have walked straight down the narrow tunnel to the light switch and never have made a misstep. “You have a better idea than I do where the light switch is,” he said, letting go of her shoulder. “Just keep your hand on the chalk tray, and when you get to the end of it, feel along the wall.”

“It’s against the rules,” she said. “The music teacher doesn’t let the kids run their hands against the wall like this.”

There was nothing in her voice to indicate she had any idea of how close they’d come to disaster, and probably she didn’t. She was happily married to the gymnastics coach. She had a teenaged daughter who was getting ready for college and one who was out for volleyball. She probably hadn’t even noticed that they couldn’t move in here without touching each other.

“I’m sure the music teacher will make an exception this time,” he said. “This is an emergency.”

He could tell she had stopped, her hand already on the switch. “I know.”

She turned on the light. “I guess I’d better go talk to the third-grade teacher,” she said, and opened the door.

“I guess you’d better,” he said.

After school Dr. Lejeune went up to the office to ask Mr. Paprocki if she could use his phone to place a long-distance call to Fermilab.

“I can’t believe it,” Sherri said. “The last single man in the state and he quits.”

“Who quit?” Dr. Lejeune said. “Dr. Simons?”

“Yes. He came up about two-thirty and said he was leaving, to tell Dr. Young he was going back to Tibet.”

“Is that all he said? Did he leave a note?”

“No,” Sherri said. “It’s not fair. I went out and bought a whole new fuchsia wardrobe.”

Dr. Lejeune went and found Dr. Young. He was in the third grade passing out lollipops. “Andrew’s quit,” she said.

“I know,” he said. He handed her a lollipop.

“He says he’s going to Tibet,” she said. “Aren’t you going to try and stop him?”

“Stop him?” he said. “Why would I do that? If he’s unhappy, he’s not much use to the project, is he? Besides”—he unwrapped a lollipop—“you can run a video camera, can’t you?”

“You sent all the way to Tibet for him. You said he was perfect.”

“I know,” he said, looking speculatively at the lollipop. “Well, we all make mistakes.”

“I should have introduced him to Bev Frantz while I had the chance,” Dr. Lejeune said under her breath.

“What?” Dr. Young said.

“I said, what about the project?”

“The project,” Dr. Young said, sticking a lollipop in his mouth, “is proceeding right on schedule.”

“I’ve got bad news,” Sherri said when Carolyn got to school in the morning.

“Don’t tell me,” Carolyn said, looking at the testing schedule. “Pam Lopez’s mother ran off with the Lutheran minister.”

Sherri didn’t rise to the bait. “Dr. Simons left,” she said.

“Oh,” Carolyn said, moving Brendan James’s name to the end of first grade. “Where did he go?”

“Tibet.”

Good, Carolyn thought. Maybe now you’ll stop acting like a college girl. You are not nineteen and living in the dorm. You are forty-one years old. You are married and have two children, and it is just as well he is in Tibet instead of down there in that music room, where you can’t even move without brushing against him. “Is Dr. Young going to continue the project?” she said.

“Yes.”

Brendan James’s mother was married and had two children, Carolyn thought, and what on earth is the matter with you? Brendan James’s mother is a complete flake and always has been, and you love your husband, you love Liz and Wendy, and just because they are a little preoccupied with gymnastics and volleyball and college right now is no reason to act like a college girl with a crush. “I wonder who they’re going to have replace him? Dr. Young?”

“I don’t know. Honestly, you don’t seem very upset that he left,” Sherri said. “Well, maybe you don’t care that the last single man around just departed for another continent, but I do.”

Another continent, Carolyn thought. The university wasn’t far enough. Even Duke University wasn’t far enough. He had to go all the way to Tibet to get away from me.

“There’s always Mr. Paprocki,” Carolyn said, and went down to the music room.

“Dr. Simons was called away suddenly,” Dr. Young told her. He was showing Dr. Lejeune how to use the video camera. “Some kind of emergency,” he said.

Some kind of emergency. “This is an emergency,” Andrew had said, and he hadn’t known the half of it. She had known exactly where he was, standing there in the pitch darkness. She hadn’t been able to see her own hand in front of her face, she hadn’t been able to find the spectrum analyzer even when she crashed into it, but she had known exactly where he was. All she would have had to do was put her hand on the back of his neck and pull him down to her.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Sherri said, holding out a note to Carolyn. “I’ve got bad news. The senior high just called. Liz has the chicken pox.”

Andrew took the Greyhound bus back to the university. Someone had left a McCall’s on the seat beside him. The cover had a picture of Elizabeth Taylor and the headline, “Are You Ready for an Affair? Our Test Can Help You Tell.”

He took the test, answering the questions the way he thought Carolyn would. He remembered her saying her husband was a coach, so he answered yes to “I am lonely a lot of the time.” He also answered yes to the question that said, “I sometimes fantasize about someone I know,” even though he was sure that was wishful thinking.

Under the test it said, “Give yourself one point for every yes. 0-5: You’re not ready. 6-10: Getting there. 11-15: Ready or not, here it comes. 16 and up: DANGER!”

Carolyn got a four.

He stared out the window a while and then took the test himself, rewording the questions so they would apply to him. To eliminate sexual bias, he answered no to every other PMS question and no to the one that said, “I find myself thinking a lot about an old flame.” Stephanie Forrester was not who he thought about while he was staring out the window, and he didn’t see how Carolyn Hendricks could qualify as an old flame when all he had ever done was know where she was in the dark.

He scored a twenty-two. He went back and marked all the PMS questions no. He still got a seventeen.

Dr. Young didn’t seem any more upset about losing Carolyn than he had about losing Andrew. In fact, as he recited number strings to Troy Yoder, he looked positively cheerful. As soon as he was finished, Dr. Lejeune offered to get the next first grader and went up to the office. “Have you found those tests yet?” she asked Sherri.

“No,” Sherri said disgustedly. “I am knee-deep in chicken pox, and he decides the milk money accounts should be double entry. The second I get a chance, I promise I’ll look for them.”

“It’s okay,” Dr. Lejeune said.

“If you’re in a hurry, you might ask Heidi Dreismeier’s mother,” Sherri said. “She probably sneaked copies of the tests home to try on Heidi.”

“Heidi Dreismeier’s mother?” Dr. Lejeune asked. “How many people exactly did Dr. Young test?”

“Well, he started out by screening the staff and volunteers and all the homeroom mothers, but that was just an interview kind of thing. Then he narrowed it down to five or so and gave them the whole battery.”

“Who were those five?”

“Well, Carolyn Hendricks, of course, and Heidi’s mother, and Francine Williams . . .”

“Shannon’s mother?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Yes, and who else?” She thought a minute. “Oh. Brendan James’s mother. It’s a good thing she didn’t come in first, isn’t it? And Maribeth Greenberg. She taught fourth grade here last year.”

“How old was she?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Forty,” Sherri said promptly. “We had a birthday party for her right before she quit.”

“She didn’t happen to run off with anybody, did she?”

“Maribeth?” Sherri said. “Are you kidding? She left to become a nun.”

Liz didn’t look too bad when Carolyn picked her up at the high school, but by the next morning she was covered. “What am I going to do?” she wailed. “My senior picture appointment is next week.”

“I’ll call and change it,” Carolyn said, but the phone rang before she could find the number.

“More bad news,” Sherri said.

“Wendy?” Carolyn said, thinking, please let them get it at the same time.

“No. Monica and Ricky Morales. I can’t get in touch with their mother. She’s in real estate. And your name was on the emergency card.”

“I’ll be right there,” Carolyn said. She checked on Liz, who was sleeping on the living-room couch, and drove to the elementary. On the way over she stopped at the grocery store and stocked up on 7-Up, Popsicles, and calamine lotion. She also bought some Dr. Pepper, which she had decided was the missing ingredient in Allison’s suicides.

When she got to school, Monica and Ricky were sitting in the office looking flushed and bright-eyed. “We’ve had five cases since this morning,” Sherri told her. “Five cases! And Heidi Dreismeier threw up, but I think it’s just her nervous stomach.” She helped Monica into her jacket. “I’ll keep trying their mother. The office said she was showing apartments to some bachelor.”

Carolyn took Monica and Ricky out to the car. Ricky promptly lay down on the backseat and wouldn’t budge. Carolyn had to put the groceries in the trunk so Monica could sit up front beside her. She fastened Monica into the seat belt and started the car.

“Wait, wait!” Sherri yelled, pounding on the window on Monica’s side. Carolyn leaned across and opened the window. “You’ve got another one,” she said breathlessly. “It wasn’t nervous stomach. Heidi’s chest is covered with them. Oh, and I forgot to tell you. Don called. He tried to get you at home. He’s going to be late. Two of his girls have got it, and he and Linda have to work up a beam routine with one of the freshmen.”

Carolyn shut off the car. “Why do I have to take Heidi?” she said. “Her mother doesn’t work.”

“She’s at a three-day seminar on Spending More Time with Your Child.”

Andrew went straight to Dr. Gillis’s office as soon as he got back to the university to tell him he’d resigned. “Yes, yes, Max called and told me all about it,” Dr. Gillis said. “It’s too bad, but if they need you in Tibet, well, then, I guess our project will just have to wait. Now what can we do to expedite your getting back to Tibet?” He called Duke University and the U.S. envoy to China, made arrangements for Bev Frantz to give him a cholera booster, and found a place he could stay on campus until he left.

That last was a bad idea. The dorm room reminded him of the one he had had his junior year at Stanford when he had been in love with Stephanie Forrester. He should have met Carolyn Hendricks his junior year instead of Stephanie. She wouldn’t have been Carolyn Hendricks then. She wouldn’t have been married and had two kids, and he could have fallen in love with her instead of the kind of girl who would ask her old boyfriends to usher at her wedding. The head usher had been an old boyfriend, too. He had told Andrew that, after a half-dozen clockstoppers or so, and they had both decided they needed a few more. He didn’t know how many, but it must have been enough, because the next morning he hadn’t been able to remember a thing, and he was completely over Stephanie.

A sure-fire cure. It was too bad liquor wasn’t allowed in dorms.

Dr. Young refused to give up on the project, even though by the end of the first week there was almost no one left to test. “We’ll work with the data we’ve got until the epidemic’s over,” he said, not at all upset. “How long does it take to get over the chicken pox?”

“Two weeks,” Dr. Lejeune said, “but Sherri says these outbreaks usually last at least a month. Why don’t we go back to the university until it’s over? We could leave the equipment here.”

“Absolutely not!” Dr. Young thundered. “It is that kind of attitude that has undermined this project from the start!” He stomped off, presumably to go to work with the data they had.

We don’t have any data, Dr. Lejeune thought, going up to the office, and my attitude is not what’s undermining this project. She wondered why he was so upset. Andrew’s leaving hadn’t upset him, Carolyn’s leaving hadn’t upset him, not even the chicken pox had upset him. But the suggestion of leaving here had turned the top of his bald head bright pink.

Sherri was dabbing calamine lotion on a fourth-grader. “I finally found the tests,” she said. She handed them to Dr. Lejeune. “Sorry it took so long, but I had six kids go home this morning, three of them to Carolyn Hendricks’s house.”

Dr. Lejeune looked at the tests. The one on the top was the Idelman-Ponoffo that they’d been giving the kids, and under it were an assortment of psychological tests.

“And as if that isn’t bad enough, Old Paperwork decides he wants me to alphabetize the field-trip release slips.”

The last test was something called the Rick. Dr. Lejeune didn’t recognize it. She asked Sherri if she could use Mr. Paprocki’s office and place a call to the psych department at the university.

“It tests logical thinking, responsibility, and devotion to duty,” the graduate assistant said.

“How about fidelity?” Dr. Lejeune asked.

“Oh, yes. In fact, Dr. Young over in the physics department just used it in a project of his. He wanted to test the likelihood of affairs among forty-year-olds.”

“Say someone scored a six hundred ninety-two on the Rick, what would their chances of having an extramarital affair be?”

“Six hundred ninety-two?” the graduate assistant said. “Nonexistent. Seven hundred’s a perfect score.”

Perfect, Dr. Lejeune thought. “You wouldn’t happen to have Dr. Andrew Simons’s score on file, would you?”

“I know Dr. Young did a Rick on him, but I’m not sure where it—”

“Never mind,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I already know what he got.”

Carolyn checked Wendy’s stomach every morning for two weeks, but she didn’t show any signs of getting the chicken pox, even though at one point Carolyn had five patients on Wendy’s bed, her and Don’s bed, and the family-room couch. “I can’t get sick,” Wendy told her, yanking her T-shirt down after Carolyn had checked her stomach. “We’ve got a game this afternoon. I have to start. Sarah Perkins got sick yesterday. Coach Nicotero had to call a time out and everything.”

That’s what I need, Carolyn thought, driving her to practice. A time out. Only there aren’t any in this game.

“I’ve narrowed it down to Vassar, Carleton, and Tufts,” Liz said when Carolyn got back. She was lying on the couch dabbing calamine lotion on her legs and reading college catalogs. “How important do you think VCRs in the dorms are, Mom?”

The phone rang. “I am so sorry to do this to you,” Sherri said, “but I didn’t know what else to do. It’s Shannon Williams. I called her mother at the bank. Do you think I should have done that?”

“Was she there?”

“I don’t know,” Sherri said, lowering her voice. “He answered the phone and he said she wasn’t there, but he sounded really angry and I think she was. So can you come pick her up?”

“I’ll be right there,” Carolyn said. She settled Erin in Wendy’s bed with her popsicle and some of Wendy’s comics. “I’ve got to go get Shannon Williams,” she told Liz, who had given up on the catalog and was watching All My Children.

“Is her mother in real estate, too?”

“No,” Carolyn said. Her mother is in deep trouble if her husband finds out. And how did that happen? I know how it happened, Carolyn thought. She knew exactly where he was, and she wasn’t thinking about her husband or her kids because right then they didn’t exist. Talk about time displacement. It was as if that moment, as she stood there in the dark, knowing all she had to do was put her hand on the back of his neck and pull him down to her, was out of time altogether.

Only it wasn’t. Shannon Williams’s mother was just kidding herself that it was. It would be wonderful if people could step out of time as Dr. Young seemed to think they could, go back to when they were in college and unencumbered with families and responsibilities, but they couldn’t. And standing there in the dark, Shannon’s mother should have been thinking about how much this was going to hurt her husband. She should have been thinking about who was going to take Shannon to volleyball practice and the orthodontist after the divorce was final.

The phone rang. It was Don. “How are things going?” he asked.

“Great,” she said. “Erin Peterson is on the couch, I am on my way to pick up Shannon Williams, we are all out of Popsicles and calamine lotion, and you have just called to tell me you’re going to be late again.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry to do this to you when you’ve got all those kids to take care of, but somebody erased all the floor ex music, and we’ve got a big invitational tomorrow. Luckily, Linda’s got a dual tape deck at her apartment, so we’re going over there. I’ll get home as soon as I can. And listen, you take it easy. You sound terrible.”

“Thank you,” Carolyn said coldly. She opened the refrigerator. They were all out of pop, too.

“That’s what I mean. You’re so edgy. Linda thinks you’re doing way too much with all these poxy kids. She says a woman your age has to be careful not to overdo.”

“Or my arthritis might kick up again?” she said. She hung up, called the bank, and asked for the head loan officer.

“You tell Shannon Williams’s mother that I don’t care if she’s there or not, but she has a sick child and she’d better come pick her up,” she said, and hung up.

The phone rang. “I have bad news,” Sherri said.

“I don’t care who it is,” Carolyn said. “Their mother has got to come and get them.”

“It’s Wendy,” Sherri said.

By the end of three weeks, a few scabby children had started to trickle back, but Dr. Young showed no interest in screening them.

“If we’re not going to use the music room, why don’t we at least move some of that equipment out so the music teacher can get back in?” Dr. Lejeune suggested.

“You are not moving anything anywhere,” Dr. Young shouted, his bald head turning fuchsia. “It is that kind of attitude—”

“I know, I know,” Dr. Lejeune said, but she went down to the music room anyway. She could at least shift things around so the music teacher could get to the piano.

She dismantled the video camera and stuck it in the music cupboard. At the back between two xylophones was a flashlight. That would come in handy if the lights went out, Dr. Lejeune thought. She put it in her pocket and sidled over to the piano to get the temporal oscillator. The gray box that didn’t plug into anything was still on top of the piano, but the two smaller flat ones weren’t.

She went upstairs to the office and called Carolyn. “Did Dr. Young send anything home with you?” she asked.

“The interview transcripts,” Carolyn said, sounding exhausted. “He thought I might have time to go over them, but I’ve got a whole bunch of—”

“There wouldn’t be a flat gray box in with them, would there?” Dr. Lejeune interrupted.

“I don’t think so. Just a minute,” Carolyn said. She was gone a long time. “Yeah, it’s here. I don’t know how it got in with the transcripts. Do you want me to bring it back to school?”

“No,” Dr. Lejeune said. “We can get it when we pick up the transcripts. Don’t worry about it.”

“Is the other one missing, too? There were two of them on top of the piano.”

“No, it’s not missing,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I know right where it is.”

Even with Dr. Gillis helping, it took three weeks to arrange everything, and then Andrew had trouble getting a flight to L.A. The one he finally got on was jammed. He was sandwiched in between a sleeping man and a little girl. When the flight attendant came around with the drinks cart, he ordered a clockstopper.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “I don’t know that drink. How is it made?”

“I wanta Coke,” the little girl said.

“Just give me a beer and a wine and I’ll mix it myself,” he said.

“I’m sorry, sir. I can only sell you one drink at a time.”

“Fine,” he said, pointing at the sleeping man in the window seat. “Give him a beer and me a wine, and I’ll pay for both of them.”

The flight attendant slapped a napkin down on his tray and followed it with a vile-looking pinkish-brown drink in a squat plastic glass. It was not anywhere near the amount to do anything but taste the way it looked. He drank it anyway.

The little girl picked her glass up with both hands and then tried to maneuver the straw into her mouth by moving the glass around and grabbing for it with her teeth. “I’m going to see my mom,” she said between grabs. “She lives in Santa Monica. My dad lives in Philadelphia. They’re getting a divorce.”

“Oh?” Andrew said. He twisted around in his seat and tried to catch the attendant’s eye, but the cart was already fifteen rows back.

“My mom went to California to find herself,” the little girl said. She put down her glass and began blowing bubbles into it with the straw. “She lives with this guy named Carlos. He plays tennis.”

The drinks cart disappeared into the recesses of the plane.

“My dad has a new girlfriend named Heather.”

A different flight attendant came up with headphones. “Would you like to see the movie? It’s Nostalgia Month.”

“What’s the movie?” the little girl said, bending her straw in half trying to drink upside down.

“An Affair to Remember.”

Andrew bought a headset. He put it on, turned the volume all the way down, and closed his eyes.

“My psychiatrist says the divorce has had a traumatic effect on me,” the little girl said, holding her straw above her head and catching the drips with her tongue. “He says I feel abandoned and neglected.”

Andrew took off the headphones and put them on the little girl. He put his seat back, snatched the blanket away from the sleeping man, and stared out the window of the plane. It looked like it was snowing.

Dr. Lejeune waited till nearly all the teachers had left the building and then went down to the music room and got the gray box with the on-off switch. She took it upstairs to the office and asked Sherri where Mr. Paprocki was.

“He’s got late bus duty,” Sherri said. “One of the second-grade teachers went home with the chicken pox at noon.”

“Oh,” Dr. Lejeune said. “Did he tell you about the music room?”

Sherri shook her head. She looked a little haggard, and she wasn’t wearing fuchsia, but that wouldn’t matter.

“He wants you to file all the sheet music according to key signature,” she said.

As soon as Sherri started downstairs, Dr. Lejeune walked out to the playground. She met Mr. Paprocki coming in. “Sherri sent me to get you. She’s in the music room. I’m afraid she’s coming down with the chicken pox.”

Mr. Paprocki took off at a dead run. Dr. Lejeune followed, still carrying the gray box, and as soon as he was all the way in the music room, she turned off the light.

“Hey!” Sherri and Mr. Paprocki said.

Dr. Lejeune locked the door and went up to the kindergarten. “I want to know what’s going on,” she said.

Dr. Young was sitting at the computer. “Going on?” he said, turning around. “What do you mean?” He saw the gray box. The top of his bald head went pale. “What are you doing with that?”

“I’m turning the temporal oscillator off in about ten seconds if you don’t tell me what’s going on,” she said, holding her hand over the switch. “This is the temporal oscillator, isn’t it? Along with the portable transmitter-receivers you sent home with Carolyn—where’s Andrew Simons’s? In his luggage?”

“Yes,” Dr. Young said. “Don’t—what do you want to know?”

“I want to know what your project really is, and don’t tell me you’re testing kindergartners’ hodiechrons, because I know that’s just a blind,” she said. “What are you really doing? You hired a housewife whose husband is never home and a psychologist who hasn’t had sex in five years, and you stuck them down in a tiny room where they couldn’t move without touching each other, and then you turned off the lights and started subsonically whispering in their ears.” She moved her hand closer to the switch. “You obviously wanted them to have an affair, and what I want to know is why.”

“I didn’t want them to have an affair,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, taking hold of the switch.

“It’s true! All right, all right, I’ll tell you everything! Just take your hand away from the switch.”

Dr. Lejeune did. Dr. Young sank down on one of the tiny kindergarten chairs. “I needed to have maximum agitation, but subsonics and subliminals aren’t enough to produce an excited emotional state, so I had to have subjects who were already under stress. People going through midlife crises experience a lot of stress. They worry about growing old, they think about death, they long for the past. Most of them find some outlet for that longing—”

“Like running off with the Make Me Marvy man,” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Or finding God,” Dr. Young said, “or becoming obsessive about their children or their work.”

“But people who score a six-ninety on the Rick don’t have any outlets.”

“Right. So their hodiechrons would be in a maximum state of agitation.”

“And if they weren’t, you’d see to it that they were,” Dr. Lejeune said grimly. “What did you do besides the subsonics? Hire Sherri to talk about Shannon Williams’s mother’s boyfriend at the bank? Release some chicken pox virus into the air?”

“I had nothing to do with Sherri or the chicken pox,” he said stiffly. “I was simply trying to maximize their agitation so their hodiechrons would be destabilized. Hodiechrons can’t be switched when they’re stable.”

“What about Carolyn and Andrew?”

“They’re simply supplying temporal energy, which is then stored in the oscillator. The actual time-displacement experiments will be carried out on laboratory rats.”

“Oh. They’re simply supplying temporal energy. And what about what’s going to happen to them afterwards?”

“Nothing’s going to happen to them afterwards,” Dr. Young said, looking as if he were getting ready to lunge for the storage unit. “The temporal oscillator has no effect on them whatsoever.”

“No effect on them? What about all those feelings you’ve churned up? What are they supposed to do with those?”

“They’ll get over them as soon as they’re removed from contact with the temporal oscillator. Their agitation level will gradually drop back to normal, and they’ll forget about it. I don’t know what you’re so worried about. They can’t have an affair with Andrew on the way to Tibet, and I plan to send Linda back to central casting as soon as—”

“You hired Linda!” Dr. Lejeune said, her hand trembling on the switch.

“I had to. Carolyn scored a six-ninety on the Rick. Nobody else got above a five hundred. But she was too happily married.”

“And you wanted maximum agitation, so you had to ruin her marriage.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Dr. Young said, walking carefully towards her. “Her husband scored a four-eighty, and Linda was under strict orders—”

“You wanted maximum agitation,” Dr. Lejeune said, so angry she could hardly speak, “so you took probably the only two people left in the world who wouldn’t cheat on their spouses and you poked and prodded them and subjected them to subliminals till they were in love and miserable and you planned to go off and leave them like that, sitting ducks for the next Tibetan bar girl or colors consultant to come along, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

Dr. Young took a few more cautious steps forward. “I think you’re exaggerating. They scored above six hundred on the Rick. They won’t go off with someone else. Andrew will go back to the lamasery and Carolyn will go back to her husband.”

“And what about all the resentment and distrust and desire that’s been built up in the meantime? What about all that longing for the past?”

“It will be used in my time-displacement experiments,” Dr. Young said.

“The hell it will.”

Dr. Young grabbed for the temporal oscillator and got it away from her before she could flip the switch. “I couldn’t let you turn it off,” he said. “There’s no telling what the sudden release of all that temporal energy might do.”

“It’s too late,” Dr. Lejeune said. “I already did.”

Linda called just after Don left for the state meet. “I was just wondering if I should bring an overnight bag. The weather report looks like we might have to stay overnight. Is it still chicken-pox city over there?”

“Yes,” Carolyn said, “and it’s highly contagious, so you’d better not get too close to Don. He’s never had the chicken pox, and it would be terrible if you got it with those French-cut leotards and all.”

After she hung up, she went in and checked on the patients. Liz was asleep on the couch with a Texas A & M brochure in her hand. Susy Hopkins was in her and Don’s bed. Her mother had called to say she had to work the late shift in the pediatrics ward because of all the chicken pox. Wendy still hadn’t finished breaking out. She looked flushed.

Carolyn put her hand on Wendy’s forehead, expecting it to be warm, but it felt cool. She felt her own forehead. Warm, too warm. I must not have had the chicken pox after all, she thought. But she had. In college. She’d been the only person in her whole dorm to get it, and the doctor hadn’t been able to figure out how she’d caught it.

She covered Wendy up. There was an afghan at the foot of the bed. She took it into Liz’s room and lay down under it.

She had been in the infirmary ten days, and the doctor had made her make a list of everybody she might have exposed, and she had written Don’s name down because he sat next to her in psychology, and that was how they met.

She was shivering badly, hunched under the too-small afghan. Her throat ached. I’m definitely catching chicken pox, she thought. Only I can’t be. I had it fall quarter of my sophomore year. The quarter Allison was in Europe. I remember now. She put her hand under her burning cheek and fell asleep.

The lights went out, and he couldn’t see anything. He took a step forward and crashed into something. A waste-basket. He didn’t remember there being a wastebasket next to the bar. He tried to set it back up and cracked his knee against something else. A chair. There hadn’t been any chairs in the bar either. And no bar stools either. He and Stephanie Forrester’s head usher had had to kind of lean on the bar to drink their clockstoppers. He must be back in his dorm room.

“Who’s there?” a female voice said. “Is somebody there?”

He was not in his room. He took a step backward and crashed into the wastebasket again.

“I know there’s somebody there,” the voice said, sounding frightened. He heard a crash, and then she must have opened the curtains or pulled a shade or something, because he could see her in the pale light thrown from a street lamp outside.

She was sitting up on a bed, wrapped in a blanket on top of the covers. There was a book open on the bed beside her. She must have fallen asleep reading. There was a clock on the desk. It said three-thirty. The lamp she’d just tried to turn on was lying on its side on the floor. He moved to pick it up.

“Don’t you come near me!” the girl said, scrambling back to the head of the bed, the blanket held up tight against her. “How did you get in here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He looked around the room. There was a chain on the door. The window. Maybe he’d come in the window and shut it behind him. It was snowing. Snowflakes drifted past the street lamp outside, and he could see it piled up on the windowsill. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly.

The girl was looking at the window and the chained door, too. “Are you a friend of Allison’s?” she asked.

“No.” Stephanie Forrester. He had been ushering at Stephanie Forrester’s wedding and . . . “Are you a friend of Stephanie’s?”

“No,” she said. “Are you drunk?” That must be it. He was drunk. It would explain a number of things, such as why he couldn’t remember what he was doing in some strange girl’s room in the middle of the night. “I’m drunk,” he said, suddenly remembering. “I was drinking clockstoppers with Stephanie’s head usher. Beer and wine. Together.”

“That’ll do it,” she said, not sounding particularly frightened anymore. She had let the blanket slip a little, and he could see that she was wearing a brown T-shirt that barely covered her hips. Nebraska State College, the yellow letters on the T-shirt said. He tried not to feel worried about that. And the snow.

There was a simple explanation for all this. It had started snowing while he and the head usher were in the bar. It snowed sometimes in California. Her boyfriend from Nebraska had given her the T-shirt.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he said, and instantly regretted it. She looked wildly around for something to defend herself with. “Your T-shirt,” he said hastily. “I figured your boyfriend gave it to you or something since it’s not from this school.”

“It is from this school,” she said. “Nebraska State College.”

“In Nebraska?” he said. He grabbed for the back of the desk chair and almost tipped it over again.

“Where exactly were you drinking these clock-stoppers?” the girl asked.

“California.”

Neither of them said anything for a minute. Finally the girl said, “Don’t you remember anything about how you got here?”

“Yes,” he said. “I was . . . no.”

“It’ll come to you if you don’t think about it,” the girl said, and then looked scared. “I feel like I said that before, or somebody said it to me. Only I have this funny feeling it hasn’t happened yet.”

She leaned forward on her hands and looked hard at him. “I know you,” she said. “You’re a temporal psychologist.”

“I’m an English major,” he said. “I was drinking clockstoppers with Stephanie Forrester’s head usher, and all of a sudden it got as black as—”

“The pit from pole to pole,” the girl said.

He knocked over the chair. “I know you,” he said. “You’re Carolyn Hendricks.”

She shook her head. “I’m Carolyn Rutherford.”

“That’s your maiden name. Your married name is Hendricks.”

“I’m not married,” she said, starting to look scared again.

“Not yet you’re not. But you will be. You’ll have two daughters.”

“You’re Dr. Andrew Simons,” she said suddenly. “You spent the last five years in Tibet studying déjà vu.”

“I spent the last five years in high school and going to Stanford. And why would I study déjà? I’m an English major.”

“Were an English major. I think after tonight you’ll probably switch your major to psychology.” She sat back on her heels. “Hendricks, huh? I think there’s a guy named Hendricks in my psych class.”

“But you haven’t met him yet,” he said, no longer bewildered, no longer uneasy. “And I haven’t met you yet. But I will. In about twenty years.”

“Yes,” she said, “and I’ll be married and have two daughters, and you’ll be in Tibet.”

“And there won’t be any possible way for us to get together because the timing will be all wrong,” he said.

“All things are possible,” she said. “It’s three-thirty.” She smiled a little, leaning toward him on her hands. “They never check the rooms after midnight.”

“What about your roommate?” he said, and her sudden look of surprised joy almost staggered him.

“Oh,” she said happily, “this is the quarter Allison’s in Europe.”

“I couldn’t find you,” Don said. He was standing over her with a mug.

“Susy was in our bed,” she said sleepily. “How was the meet?” She sat up and pulled the afghan over her knees.

“We took second.” He got down on the bed and handed her the mug. “Jennifer Whipple got sick and couldn’t do her bar routine, and Linda quit. How are you doing?”

“Fine,” she said, taking a sip. “What is this?”

“A suicide,” he said. “I remembered you were crazy about them in college, so I stopped at the 7-Eleven and bought some ginger ale and—”

“Ginger ale!” Carolyn said. “That was what I couldn’t remember.” She took another sip. “It tastes just like the ones Allison used to make. Oh, and speaking of Allison, I finally remembered when I had the chicken pox. It was the quarter Allison was in Europe. It was the strangest thing. I . . . Linda quit?”

“Halfway through the vaulting. She didn’t even come home on the bus with us. I tried to call you.”

“To tell me she quit? “she said. “No. To tell you you’d had the chicken pox. Jennifer got sick, and all of a sudden I remembered you’d had it in college. It beats me how I could have forgotten, since that’s how we met. I came to see you in the infirmary.”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “The doctor made me make a list of who I might have exposed, and I put your name down because you sat next to me in my psych class.”

“You looked terrible when I came to see you in the infirmary,” he said, grinning at her. “You were all covered with scabs. And sitting there looking at you, I had this funny kind of vision of the two of us married with two kids and both of them with the chicken pox. I don’t think Linda understood that part.”

“You told Linda?”

“Yeah. She was talking about how touchy you were on the phone. She said nobody could be that crabby unless they were coming down with something, and all of a sudden I remembered how I’d met you, and so I told her.”

“No wonder she quit,” Carolyn said.

“Yeah, I guess it was probably boring for a kid like her to have to listen to an old geezer like me talking about things that happened a long time ago. The funny thing is, it doesn’t feel like a long time ago, though, you know. It feels like it just happened yesterday.”

“I know,” Carolyn said. “That isn’t the only funny thing. I—”

“Listen, honey, I’ve got to go back to school,” Don said. He patted her knee. “I’ve got to unload the equipment. I just thought I’d better come check on you since you didn’t answer the phone.”

She draped the afghan over her shoulders and followed him into the living room. “I didn’t hear it ring,” she said. “And that’s not the only funny thing. I—”

“I decided on a college,” Liz said. She was sitting up on the couch dabbing calamine lotion on her arms. “NSC.”

“NSC?” Carolyn said. “I thought you’d narrowed it down to Vassar, Carleton, and Tufts.”

“Well, I had, but I couldn’t sleep because I was itching, and I got to thinking about how you and Dad are always saying how great NSC was, so I decided to go there instead.”

“It was great,” Don said. “That’s where I met your mother. She had the chicken pox and—”

“I know,” Liz said. “You’ve told that story about a million times.”

“The old geezer strikes again,” Don said. He kissed Carolyn. “I’ll be back in an hour if I don’t suddenly go senile while I’m unloading the bus.” He kissed Carolyn again.

“I don’t see how having the chicken pox could have been all that romantic,” Liz said after he’d left.

“It was,” Carolyn said.

Dr. Lejeune went to see Andrew in the university infirmary. “Sherri Paprocki said to say hello,” she said. “She wants to know how you managed to get the chicken pox. The incubation period is only two weeks, and you didn’t catch it till five weeks after you’d left.”

“On the plane to L.A. I sat next to a little girl who must have been contagious,” he said. “It’s a good thing I decided not to go to Tibet.”

“Excuse me,” Bev Frantz said. She came in with a thermometer. “I need to take your temp.”

“Great,” Andrew said. “I was hoping I’d see you agai—”

She stuck the thermometer in his mouth and looked at the box. He smiled up at her. She concentrated fiercely on the LED readout.

He didn’t look sick except for the calamine-covered scabs all over his face and arms. In fact, he looked better than Dr. Lejeune had ever seen him look. Happier.

The box beeped. Bev took the sensor out of his mouth and shoved it back in its carrier. She turned to Dr. Lejeune. “Dr. Young’s been asking for you.”

“You really should go see him,” Andrew said. “I think he wants to apologize.”

“You’re the one he should apologize to,” she said, and then looked closely at him. “Or should he? Are you sure you got the chicken pox from that little girl?”

“Max really cares about you, you know,” Andrew said. “He told me the reason he started the project in the first place was to impress you.”

“Hmm,” Dr. Lejeune said. She told Andrew good-bye and went out in the hall.

“I wondered if I could talk to you about Dr. Simons for a minute,” Bev said. “I really like him, but when he was in here before for his cholera booster, I got the idea he was in love with somebody else.”

“He was,” Dr. Lejeune said. “A girl he knew in college. But that was a long time ago. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

She started out the door and then turned around and went into Max’s room. He looked terrible. He had chicken pox on the top of his bald head, and he was wearing a pair of mittens that were taped at the wrist. “Well?” he said. “Has he asked her out yet?”

“Who?” Dr. Lejeune said.

“Andrew. Has he asked Bev out? I told him he’d better latch on to her while he still has the chance. I’ve been trying to get them together ever since I got in here. It’s the least I can do.”

“I thought you said matchmaking was a substitute for sex.”

“It is,” he said. “So was my time machine. I wanted to go back in time and be young again.”

“You’re not that old. You caught the chicken pox, didn’t you?”

“Nothing happened, did you know that? All that energy released at once, and nothing. Carolyn slept through the whole thing.” He reached up with his mittened hand to scratch his face and then laid his hand back in his lap. She had never felt so sorry for anyone in her whole life.

“Would you like me to rub on some calamine?” she asked.

“Nothing happened to him either.”

“He caught the chicken pox.” She opened the bottle of calamine and dabbed some on his cheek. “Did you know when Carolyn had it in college, she was the only person in her dorm to get it? Nobody could figure out where she caught it from. Personally, I think she caught it from that poxy bunch of kids at her house. And now Andrew has the chicken pox, and nobody can figure out where he got it from.”

“He said he caught it from a little girl he sat next to on the plane.”

“Personally, I think he caught it from Carolyn.” She stood up and dabbed calamine on the top of his head. “You mean—” he said, perking up noticeably. “Your theory says that an entire hodiechron could be displaced. Including chicken-pox viruses. Suppose Carolyn caught the chicken pox from one of those kids she was taking care of and was contagious but she didn’t have any symptoms yet. Suppose she gave the chicken pox to Andrew when they were in college.”

“We could call the airlines and find out who the little girl was and if she came down with the chicken pox,” he said excitedly. He began trying to get the tape off his wrists with his mittened hands. “We can run the experiment again. Heidi Dreismeier’s mother scored a four-ninety, and we can surely find—” He stopped and laid his hands back in his lap. “We can’t run the experiment again. You were right. I had no business messing with people’s lives.”

“Who said anything about messing with people’s lives? Why can’t we run the experiment on ourselves? I worry about being old, I long for the past, and I’m about as desperate for sex as they come. I’d love to be shut in a cramped little room with you.”

Dr. Young took hold of her hands with his mittened ones. “I don’t think you’re old,” he said. He leaned forward to peck her on the cheek.

Bev came in carrying her thermometer. “Oops, sorry,” she said. “I’m obviously in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“We may be able to do something about that,” Dr. Lejeune said.

A TOUCH OF LAVENDER

Megan Lindholm

Megan Lindholm, whose popular story “Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man” appeared in our January issue, returns to our pages with a deeply moving science fiction tale about “A Touch of Lavender.” Ms. Lindholm is currently working on a novel, tentatively titled Cloven Hooves, for Bantam Books.

We grew up like mice nesting in a rotting sofa, my sister and I. Even when I was only nine and she was an infant, I thought of us that way. At night, when she’d be asleep in the curl of my belly and I’d be half-falling off the old sofa we used as a bed, I’d hear the mice nibbling and moving inside the upholstery beneath us, and sometimes the tiny squeakings of the new-born ones when the mother came to nurse them. I’d curl tighter around Lisa and pretend she was a little pink baby mouse instead of a little pink baby girl, and that I was the father mouse, curled around her to protect her. Sometimes it made the nights less chill.

I’d lived in the same basement apartment all my life. It was always chill, even in summer. It was an awful place, dank and ratty, but the upstairs apartments were worse, rank with urine and rot. The building was an old townhouse, long ago converted to four apartments upstairs and one in the basement. None of them were great, but ours was the cheapest, because we had the furnace and the water heater right next to us. When I was real small, three or so, a water main beside the building broke, and water came rising up in our apartment, maybe a foot deep. I woke up to my stuff floating beside me, and the old couch sucking up water like a sponge. I yelled for Mom. I heard the splash as she rolled out of bed in the only bedroom and then her cussing as she waded through the water to pick me up. Her current musician took the whole thing as a big joke, until he saw his sax case floating. Then he grabbed up his stuff and was out of there. I don’t remember seeing him after that.

My mom and I spent that day sitting on the steps down to our apartment, waiting for the city maintenance crew to fix the pipe, waiting for the water to go down and then waiting for our landlord. He finally came and looked the place over and nodded, and said, hell, it was probably for the best, he’d been meaning to put down new tile and spraysulate the walls anyway. “You go ahead and tear out the old stuff,” he told my Mom. “Stack it behind the house, and I’ll have it hauled away. Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll send in a crew to fix the place up. Now about your rent . . .”

“I told you, I already mailed it,” my Mom said coldly, looking past his ear, and the landlord sighed and drove off.

So my Mom and her friends peeled up the cracking linoleum and tore the sheetrock off the walls, leaving the bare concrete floor with stripes of mastic showing and the two-by-four wall studs standing bare against the grey block walls. That was as far as the re-modeling ever got. The landlord never hauled the stuff away, or sent in a crew. He never spraysulated the walls, either. Even in the summer the walls were cool and misty, and in winter it was like the inside of a refrigerator. My Mom wasn’t so regular about paying the rent that she could raise a fuss. Most of the folks in our building were like that: pay when you can, and don’t stay home when you can’t, so the landlord can’t nag at you. The apartments were lousy, but complaining could get you kicked out. All the tenants knew that if the landlord had wanted to, he could have gotten a government grant to convert the place into Skoag units and really made a bundle. We were right on the edge of a Skoag sector and demand for Skoag units was increasing.

That was back when the Skoags were first arriving and there wasn’t much housing for them. It all had to be agency approved, too, to prevent any “interplanetary incidents.” Can’t have aliens falling down the steps and breaking a flipper, even if they are pariah aliens. These outcasts were the only link we had to their planet and culture, and especially to their technology for space travel that the whole world was so anxious to have. No one knew where they came from or how they got to earth. They just started wading out of the seas one day, not all that different from a washed-up Cuban. Just more wet-back aliens, as the joke went. They were very open about being exiles with no means of returning home. They arrived gradually, in groups of three and four, but of the ships that brought them there was never any sign and the Skoags weren’t saying anything. That didn’t stop any of the big government people from hoping, though. Hoping that if we were real nice to them, they might drop a hint or two about interstellar drives or something. So the Skoags got the government-subsidized housing with showers that worked and heat lamps and carpeted floors and spraysulated walls. The Federal Budget Control bill said that funds could be reapportioned, but the budget could not be increased, so folks like my Mom and I took a giant step downwards in the housing arena. But as a little kid, all I understood was that our place was cold most of the time, and everyone in the neighborhood hated Skoags.

I don’t think it really bothered Mom. She wasn’t home that much anyway. She’d bitch about it sometimes when she brought a bunch of her friends home, to jam and smoke and eat. It was always the same scene, party time, she’d come in with a bunch of them, hyped on the music like she always was, stoned maybe, too. They’d be carrying instruments and six-packs of beer, sometimes a brown bag of cheap groceries, salami and cheese and crackers or yogurt and rice cakes and tofu. They’d set the groceries and beer out on the table and start doodling around with their instruments while my Mom would say stuff like, “Damn, look at this dump. That damn landlord, he still hasn’t been around. Billy, didn’t the landlord come by today? No? Shit, man, that jerk’s been promising to fix this place for a year now. Damn.” Everyone would tell her not to sweat it, hell, their places were just as bad, all landlords were assholes anyway. Usually someone would get onto the Skoag thing, how it was a fine thing the government could take care of alien refugee trash but wouldn’t give its own citizens a break on rent. If there’d been a lot of Skoags at the cafe that night, Mom and her friends would get into how Skoags thought they were such hot shit, synthesizing music from their greasy hides. I remember one kid who really got worked up, telling everyone that they’d come to earth to steal our music. According to him, the government knew it and didn’t care. He said there was even a secret treaty that would give the Skoags free use of all copyrighted music in the U.S. if they would give us blueprints of their ships. No one paid much attention to him. Later that evening, when he was really stoned, he came and sat on the floor by my sofa and cried. He told me that he was a really great musician, except that he couldn’t afford a good synthesizer to compose on, while those damn Skoags could just puff out their skins and make every sound anybody had ever heard. He leaned real close and told me that the real danger was that the Skoags would make up all the good music before he even got a chance to try. Which I knew was dumb. While Skoags can play anything they’ve ever heard, perfectly, no one had ever heard them play anything original. No one had ever heard them play Skoag music, only ours. I started to tell him that but he passed out on the floor by my sofa. Everyone ignored him. They were into the food and the beer and the music. All my Mom’s parties were like that.

I’d usually curl up on one end of the sofa, face to the cushions, and try to sleep, sometimes with a couple necking at the other end of the sofa and two or three musicians in the kitchen, endlessly rehearsing the same few bars of a song I’d never heard before and would never hear again. That’s what my Mom was really into, struggling musicians that were performing their own stuff in the little “play for tips” places. She’d latch onto some guy and keep him with her aid check. She’d watch over him like he was gold, go with him every day, sit by him on the sidewalk while he played if he were a street musician, or take a table near the band if he was working cafes and clubs. They’d come home late and sleep late, and then get up and go out again. Sometimes I’d come in from school and find them sitting at the kitchen table, talking. It’s funny, the men always looked the same, eyes like starved dogs, and it seems like my Mom would always be saying the same thing. “Don’t give up. You’ve got a real talent. Someday you’ll make it, and you’ll look back at them and laugh. You’ve really got it, Lennie (or Bobby or Pete or Lance). I know it. I can feel it, I can, hear it. You’re gonna be big one day.” The funny part is, she was always right. Those guys would live with us for a few months or a year, and suddenly, out of the blue, their careers would take off. They’d be discovered, on a sidewalk or in a cafe, or picked up by a band on its way up. They’d leave my Mom, and go on to better things. She never got bitter about it, though she liked to brag to other women about all the hot ones she’d known “back when they were nothing.” Like that was her calling in life, feeding guitar humpers until someone besides her could hear their songs. Like only she could keep the real music flowing. One night she brought home a disc and gave it to me. It was called “Fire Eyes” and the guy on the front had dark hair and blue eyes, like me. “That’s your daddy, Billy boy,” she told me. “Though he don’t know it. He took off before I knew you were coming, and was on a national tour by the time you were born. Look at those pretty, pretty eyes. Same as you, kid. You should have heard him sing, Billy. I knew he had it, even then. Even then.” I think that was the first time I ever saw her sit down and cry. I’m still not sure if she was crying over my dad leaving us, or something else. She didn’t cry long, and she went to bed alone that night. But the next night she brought home a whole pack of musicians from some open mike. By next morning, my Mom had a new musician in her bed.

Sometimes during a party, if my Mom was really stoned, or safe-sexing someone in the bedroom, I’d get up in my pajamas and make for the food, stuffing down as much as I could and hiding a couple of rice cakes or a handful of crackers behind the sofa cushion. I knew the mice would nibble on it, but hell, they never took much, just lacing around the edges. I figured they didn’t do much better than I did anyway. If I was really lucky, there’d be some girls in the group, and they’d fuss over me, telling me how my big blue eyes were such a surprise with my dark hair, and giving me gum and Lifesavers from their purses, or maybe quarters and pennies. Like people in sidewalk cafes feed sparrows. If my Mom caught me, she’d get mad and tell me to get to sleep, I had school tomorrow and didn’t I want to make something of myself? Then she’d smile at everyone like she was really saying something and go, in a real sweety voice,

“If you miss school tomorrow, you miss music class, too. You don’t want that to happen, do you?” As if I gave a shit. She was always bragging that I had my Daddy’s voice, and someday I was going to be a singer, how my music was my life, and that the school music lesson was the only way she could get me to go to school.

Dumb. Like singing “Farmer in the Dell” with forty other bored first graders was teaching me a lot about music. Music was okay, but I never understood how people could live for it like my Mom did. She’d never learned to play any instrument, and while she could carry a tune, her voice was nothing special. But she lived for music, like it was air or food. Funny. I think the men she took in might have respected her more if she’d been able to create even a little of what she craved so badly. I could see it in their eyes, sometimes, that they looked down on her. Like she wasn’t real to them because she couldn’t make her own music. But my mother lived music, more than they did. She had to have it all the time, the stereo was always playing when she didn’t have an in-house musician of her own. I’d fall asleep to her swaying to the music, singing along in her mediocre voice. Sometimes she’d just be sprawled in our battered easy chair, her head thrown back, one hand steadying a mug of tea or a beer on her belly. Her brown eyes would be dark and gone, not seeing me or the bare wall studs, not seeing the ratty couch or scarred cupboards. Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else’s words and notes.

I know the day my life changed. I was about three blocks from home, partway into the Skoag sector, listening to some Skoags on a street corner. Not listening, really, so much as watching them puff their greasy skins out until they looked like those stupid balloon animals Roxie the clown used to make for my Headstart class. Then when they were all puffed out, membrane ballooned over corally bone webs, they’d start making music, the skin going in and out just like speaker cones on really old speakers like my Mom had. They reminded me of frogs, because of how their throats puffed out to croak, and because of the wet green-yellow glints on their skins.

I kept a safe distance from them. Everyone did. From the “Don’t Do Drugs” sessions at school, I knew what the stuff on their skin could do to me. I’d seen Skoag gropies, wandering around bald-eyed, hands reaching to grope any passing Skoag, to get one more rush even if it deafened them. Skoag gropies were always getting killed, squashed by cars and trucks they could no longer hear, or dreaming themselves to death, forgetting to eat or drink, forgetting everything but groping a fingerful of Skoag slime. But there were no gropies around these Skoags, and because they all still had crests, I knew they were new to earth. Skoags usually lost their crests pretty fast in our gravity. One of these Skoags had the tallest crest I’d ever seen, like a king’s crown, and purple like a deep old bruise. There was a mixed crowd around the Skoags. In-lander tourists who’d never seen a Skoag before, taking videos, making tapes. Locals panhandling the tourists, sometimes pretending they were passing the hat for the Skoags. Older boys and a few girls, just hanging out, calling the Skoags dirty names to shock the tourists, making out with a lot of tongue. And a few kids like me, skipping school because the sun was shining and it wasn’t too windy and we didn’t feel like doing the weekly pee-in-the-bottle thing. The Skoags played for us all.

They’d been playing all morning, the usual Skoag set. They did “Happy Trails to You,” and “Horiko Cries,” and “When You Were Mine,” and then “America the Beautiful.” That was the weirdest thing about Skoags, how they’d pick up any music they fancied, and then play it back in any order. They’d started “Moon over Bourbon Street” when I saw my Mom coming. She and Teddy had gone to pick up her aid check that morning. But Teddy wasn’t with her, and I knew from her face that another musician had moved out. I was glad, in a selfish way, because for the next few days there’d be regular meals on the table, and more food, because the check would only be feeding us two, and my Mom would talk to me twice as much as usual. Of course, she’d make sure I actually got up and went to school, too, but that wasn’t much price to pay. And it wouldn’t last long before she’d hold another party and reel in a new musician.

So I was determined to enjoy it while it lasted. So I ran up to her, saying, “Wow, Mom, you should hear this purple-crested one play, he’s really something.” I said that for about four reasons. First, so she wouldn’t have the chance to ask me why I wasn’t in school, and second to show that I wasn’t going to notice that jerk Teddy was gone because he wasn’t worth her time. Third, it cheered her up when I acted like I was interested in music. I think she always hoped I really would be like my father, would grow up to be a singer and redeem her, or justify her life or something. And fourth, because the purple-crested one really was something, though I couldn’t have said why.

“You playing tourist, Billy Boy?” my Mom asked me in her teasing way that she used when it was only she and I together again. And I laughed, because it was dumb the way the tourists from inland came down to our part of Seattle to spy on the Skoags and listen to them jam. Anybody who’d lived here ignored them the way you ignore supermarket music or a TV in a store window. All you ever heard from a Skoag was the same thing you’d heard a hundred times before anyway. So what I said was sort of a joke, too, to make her laugh and take the flatness out of her eyes. But Teddy must have been better than I’d known, because her smile faded, and she didn’t scold me or anything. She just stooped down and hugged me like I was all she had in the world. And then she said, very gently, as if I were the adult and she were the little kid explaining something bad she’d done, “I gave him our check, Billy Boy. See, Teddy has a chance to go to Portland and audition for Sound and Fury Records. It’s, a new label, and if things go like I know they will, he’ll be into the big money in no time. And he’ll send for us. We’ll have a real house, Billy, all to ourselves, or maybe we’ll get a motor home and travel across the country with him on tour, see the whole United States.” She said more stuff but I didn’t listen. I knew what it meant, because once one of her guys had stolen both checks, her Career Mother Wage and my Child Nutrition Supplement. What it meant was bad times. It meant a month of food bank food, runny peanut butter on dry bread, dry milk made up with more water than you were supposed to use, generic cereal that turned into sog in the milk, and macaroni. Lots and lots of microwaved macaroni, to the point where I used to swallow it whole because I couldn’t stand the squidgy feeling of chewing it any more. I was already hungry from being out in the wind all morning, and just thinking about it made me hungrier. There wasn’t much food at home; there never was right before the aid check was due.

I just went on holding onto my Mom, hating Teddy, but not much, because if it hadn’t been Teddy, it would have been someone else. I wanted to ask, “What about me? What about us? Aren’t we just as important as Teddy?” But I didn’t. Because it wouldn’t bring the money back, so there was no sense in making her cry. The other reason was, about three weeks before, Janice from upstairs had sat at our kitchen table and cried to Mom because she’d just given her little girls away. Because she couldn’t take care of them or feed them. Janice had kept saying that at least they’d get decent meals and warm clothes now. I didn’t want my Mom to think that I wanted food and clothes more than I wanted to stay with her. So I wiped my face on her shirt without seeming to, and pulled back to look at her. “It’s okay, Mom.” I told her. “We’ll get by. Let’s go home and figure things out.” But she wasn’t even listening to me. She was focused on the Skoags, actually on the one with the big crest, listening to “Moon over Bourbon Street” like she’d never heard it before. It sounded the same as always to me, and I tugged at her hand. But it was just like I wasn’t there, like she had gone off somewhere. So I just stood there and waited.

My Mom listened until they were done. The big purple-crested Skoag watched her listen to them. His big flat eye-spots were pointed toward her all the time, calm and dead and unfocused like all Skoag eyes are. He was looking over the heads of the tourists and hecklers, straight at her. When the song was finished, they didn’t go right into another song like usual. Purple stood there, watching my mother, and letting the air leak out of his puffers. The other Skoags looked at him, and they seemed puzzled, shifting around and one made a flat squawk. But then they let their air out, too, and pretty soon they were all empty and bony, their puffer things tight against their bodies again. My Mom kept staring at the Skoag, like she was still hearing music, until I shook her arm.

“I’m coming,” she said, but she didn’t. She didn’t even move, until I shook her arm again and said, “I’m hungry.”

Then she jerked, and looked down at me finally. “Oh, my poor little kid,” she said. She really meant it. That bothered me. I thought about it while we walked home. I wasn’t any more selfish than any kid is, and kids have a right to be selfish sometimes. So I walked along, thinking that she really did know how awful this month was going to be, and how much I hated squidgy macaroni, and she probably even knew that the sole was coming off my sneaker. But she’d still given the check to Teddy. And that was a hard thing for a kid to understand.

So we went home. Mom switched on the stereo and went right to work. She was real methodical and practical when there wasn’t a musician to distract her. She sorted out what groceries we had and organized them in the cupboard. Then she went through all the pockets of her clothes, and dug inside the chair and got together all the money we had. It was ten seventy-eight. Then she sat me at the table with her, like I was one of her musicians, and told me how she was going to get us through the month. She explained that if I went to school every day, I’d get the free morning milk and vita-roll, and free hot lunch on my aid ticket. So I’d be mostly okay, even if there wasn’t much for dinner. We’d get through just fine. After all, we were pretty tough, weren’t we? And couldn’t the two of us beat anything if we just stuck together? And were we going to let a month of crummy groceries knock down tough guys like us? All that stuff. But suddenly, in the middle of the pep talk, she got up and knelt by her stereo. She twiddled the knobs, frowning. “Signal’s drifting, or something. Damn, that’s all I need. For this to drop dead on me now.” She tried about three different stations, then snapped it off. “Lousy speakers,” she complained to me. “Everything sounds tinny.”

It had sounded okay to me, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I sat still and watched her take out a pot and run water and take things from the cupboards for dinner.

We had oatmeal for dinner, and toast with peanut butter melting on it. Mom gave me the last of the brown sugar for my oatmeal. “Good grains and protein in this meal,” Mom said wisely, as if she had planned it rather than scraped together what we had left. I nodded and ate it. It wasn’t so bad. At least it wasn’t macaroni.

That evening Mom sat at the table, reading a paperback that Teddy had left and wearing his old sweatshirt. I guess she felt pretty bad. Every so often, she’d turn on the stereo and fool with it for a while, then shake her head and snap it off. She’d read a little longer, and then she’d get up and turn the stereo on again, searching through the stations, but never finding what she wanted. In between, I was listening to the building sounds, spooky at night. The water heater in the utility room was growling and gurgling through the wall. I was coloring a “Don’t Do Drugs” handout from school, wishing they’d given me more than three crayons. I wanted to color the spoon and syringe silver. Yellow just wasn’t the same. Mom had just snapped the radio off for about the twelfth time. In the quiet I heard a sound like someone dragging a bag of potatoes down our steps.

Mom and I looked at each other. She lifted her finger to her lips and said, “Shush!” So I sat perfectly still, waiting. There came a slapping sound against the door, and whatever was slapping pushed against it, too. The door thudded against the catch.

My Mom’s dark eyes went huge, scaring me more than the noises outside the door. She went to the kitchen and got our biggest knife. “Go to my room, Billy Boy,” she whispered. But I was too scared to move. Like a monster movie, when the music screams and you know they’re going to show you something awful, but you can’t look away. I had to know what was outside. And Mom was too scared to make me obey. Instead she crept a little closer to the door, holding the knife tight. “Who’s out there?” she yelled, but her voice cracked.

The pressure on the door stopped, and for a moment all was silent. Then there was a sound, sort of like a harmonica wedged in a trumpet, and someone blowing through it anyway. It was a silly cartoon sound, Doofus Duck smacked with a rubber mallet, and my mother looked so startled that I burst out laughing. It was a dorko noise. Nothing scary could make a sound like that. Then a voice spoke, a low, low voice, like cello strings being rubbed slowly.

“That is my name on my world. But Humans call me Lavender.”

“The Skoag?” Mom asked, but I was already past her and undoing the flimsy deadbolt on the door. I had to see it. It was so impossible for a Skoag to be outside our door at night that I had to see it was real.

“Billy!” Mom warned, but I dragged the door open anyway.

The Skoag was there. The same purple-crested one we had listened to earlier. Only he looked a lot smaller with all his bladders deflated, not much bigger than my Mom. He was wearing a sort of pouch thing on his front, and in it was a brown grocery sack, a bouquet of flowers wrapped in green tissue paper, and a skinny brown liquor store bag. He was draped in the transparent plastic robe Skoags were supposed to wear in Human dwellings. His skin glistened through it in the watery street-lamp light like oil on a puddle, iridescent and shifting. His fat little flippers waved up and down slowly, like a fish underwater. His murky blue eye spots fixed on my mother.

She stared back at him. She still had the knife in her hand, but she had forgotten it. She crossed her arms, a closing, denying gesture. “What do you want?” she demanded, in the scared stubborn voice she kept for the landlord.

A little bladder above his eyes pulsed with his cello voice. “To come in.”

“Well, you can’t,” she said, at the same time as I asked, “How did you get down the steps?”

“With great difficulty,” he pulsed at me, but there was a violin squibble above the cello that made his answer a sort of joke. I grinned at him, I couldn’t help it. He’d noticed me. He’d answered my question before he paid attention to what my Mom had said, and he’d answered it in the way one buddy might kid with another. I felt two feet taller.

He looked back at my Mom, waiting.

“Go away,” she told him.

“I cannot,” he said, all cello again. “Earlier today, I heard you listening to us. I think. My companions tell me it was not so, that I am tricking myself because I want too badly. But I am not deceived. I have hope only. I have brought gifts. Flowers and wine for you, as is fitting, and food for your child, who said he was hungry. May I come in?”

She just stood there, staring at him. A car shushed by in the rainy street outside, and the wind gusted, blowing cold air down our steps and in past the Skoag. And still they both just stood there, waiting for something.

“I love you,” the cello thrummed and the sound swelled like a big warm wave washing through our apartment. The sound didn’t end with the words, it went on with music, like embroidery on the edges of the thought. I listened to it pass and fade, and then the silence came behind it, separating us again. The silence seemed unbearable.

“Come in,” said my mother.

So Lavender came to live with us.

Everything changed.

Everything.

Within just a few days, the neighbors stopped knowing us. I’d walk down the streets, and rocks would bounce around me, but I’d never see who’d thrown them. The radio was never turned on again. There was real food, every day. Mom stopped looking at street musicians and haunting the open mikes. The street people called her ugly names, and our mailbox got ripped off the wall in the upstairs lobby. I got into so many fights at school that the principal said I had to stay in at recesses for the rest of the year. After that, I was left totally alone. I didn’t care. Because I had Lavender at home. Every day I went to school, because Lavender said I should. It would be important, later, he assured me, and that was enough for me. Everyday I came home and slid down the ridged ramp that had replaced our steps. And Lavender was always waiting for me to come home, even if my mother wasn’t there. Always before, Mom’s musicians had tolerated and ignored me, treated me like a cat or a houseplant, a semi-annoying creature that lived in my mother’s house. Not Lavender. He knew I was there, and he was glad. He made me important. We would have a snack together, he rubbing his sludgy porridge through a membrane on his chest, me munching cookies and milk. Then I had to show him every single paper I’d brought home, read aloud from every library book I’d checked out. All I did amazed him. But mostly we’d talk and laugh. His laugh reminded me of a giant grasshopper chirring. Once he told me that Skoags had never laughed before they came to Earth, but the idea of a special sound made just to show happiness was so wonderful that now it was the first thing that all exiles were allowed to do. Each Skoag got to make up his own kind of laugh. He said it like it was some big favor for them. Then he told me that my laugh was one of the best ones he’d ever heard. That first day, when he’d heard my laugh in the street, he’d known that anyone who could create so marvelous a sound had to be very special indeed. And then he laughed my own laugh for me to hear, and that set me laughing, and we laughed together for about ten minutes, in harmony, like a new kind of song.

Looking back, I know he didn’t understand much of basic human needs. Because he learned mostly from me, he had a seven-year-old boy’s idea of what was important. Food he understood, and he always made sure there was plenty of it, though he tended to buy the same kinds over and over again. He loved bright, simple toys that moved, yo-yos and tops and plastic gliders, marbles and super balls and frisbees. I’m convinced he thought that flowers were essential to my mother, and he filled our little apartment with graceful glass vases full of them. I never thought to ask for anything more than what he brought and I know my mother never did. She was too used to giving to learn taking easily. Still, Lavender tried to provide for us. I remember the day I came home and found him cautiously touching his flippers to the protruding nails and scabs of sheetrock on the two-by-four wall studs. “This pleases the Mom?” he asked me.

“No. It’s really ugly. But it’s all we’ve got,” I told him. A wrinkling ran over his deflated bladders, a gesture I had learned was like an excited grin. “This would please the Mom?” the cello thrummed, and he began pulling yards and yards of stuff out of his belly pouch. Shiny like plastic, but soft like fabric, and so thin you could crumple a square yard of it up in your fist. He began fastening it to the wall, in graceful drapery, and as it fell straight, the room warmed with both color and heat, the musky basement smell faded, and a gentle light suffused the room. Then we hid in the closet until my Mom came home and was surprised by it. “Oh, Lavender, you cover up all the rough edges of my life,” Mom told him. For a long time, I thought she meant the wall studs. He could make the hanging different colors, and he adjusted it almost daily, though I never asked how. If I had, he would have told me. I just didn’t ask. He told me anything I wanted to know. I knew more about Skoags than any of the “experts” of that time. Anything I asked him, he answered. I knew that they had been exiled to our world because they sang in public, and that was not permitted on their home world. I knew that they sang only other people’s music, because making up new music was something only a holy leader could do. The earth Skoags were religious rebels, sort of like the Pilgrims. They believed singing was so worshipful that Skoags should do it all the time, everywhere, and that everyone should do it, not just priest-Skoags. On their own world, that was heresy, and anyone caught at it had to choose between exile or “a most unfortunate happening.” For a long time I didn’t know what he meant by that. A lot of what he told me was puzzling. Lavender kept trying to explain to me that singing was a circle, and that if one sang well enough to make the perfect music, it would create the one that would close the circle. My Mom, he said, was “Close. Almost the end of the circle. The one, but not quite.” I never understood what he meant, but it was very important to him. A day didn’t pass without him trying to make me understand. There just weren’t human words for the Skoag ideas. It worried him very much. It was the only hole in our communication. He told me other stuff, like how some Skoags had long, articulated flippers like my fingers, and how they were dehydrated for their space journeys, and how they thought of Humans as “half-sexed” because we weren’t self-fertile. Anything I asked, he answered. But if I didn’t ask, he didn’t bother me with it. I never asked him if he had come to end his people’s exile, or if he were a very important Skoag on his world or how their spaceships operated. Or he would have told me. But I didn’t ask.

In the long evenings, Lavender made music for us, playing anything we wanted. He knew every song my mother ever asked for, and could do them in any artist’s style. She would sit on the end of my couch, my feet warm against her, listening raptly while Lavender played until I fell asleep. Mornings I would waken to his slaps on the door and run to let him in. He’d be laden with cereal and milk and fruit and a packet of his own gruelly food, and always fresh flowers for my Mom. He’d play back to me all the new sounds he’d heard in the night city, not just the music that drifted out from the bars, but sea-gulls crying over the bay, and the coughing of winos and the barking of dogs. It was always hard to go to school. I was sure they had fun without me all day at home, but to please Lavender, I went. Life was good. There was food and talk and warmth at home and that’s all most kids ask. But on top of all that, I had Lavender. The value of that is too great to tell. For over a year, the world was as good as it could possibly be.

One day my mother touched him. By accident. I know, because I was there when it happened. So simple, so stupid. She slipped on the kitchen floor, reached out to steady herself and caught Lavender’s flipper. Lavender’s bare flipper tip, shining with Skoag slime, caught my mother’s hand, steadied her, and transported her to ecstasy. Her face changed, she cried out, a simple “oh” like a kid seeing his first Christmas tree, and sat down on the kitchen floor: She just sat and smiled. Lavender gently pulled his flipper free of her grip, but it was too late. His dark blue eye spots fastened on me.

“You didn’t do it on purpose,” I told him. “It wasn’t your fault.” But my heart was shaking my whole body.

A scant second later, my Mom was standing up, saying, “I’m all right. Don’t be upset, Lavender. Stop flapping like that. Billy, don’t stare, I’m fine.” She caught at the edge of the kitchen table, sat down in one of the chairs. “Shit. What a rush!” she said a moment later, and then sighed. And got up from the table and went to the stove and started stirring the spaghetti sauce again. And that was that. “Whew,” I thought as my mind darted to my Don’t Do Drugs book at school. “I’m glad Mom didn’t turn into a Skoag gropie.”

But, of course, she did.

At first she never touched Lavender when I was around. And kids don’t notice gradual changes. I’d get home from school, and she’d be sitting at the table, humming to herself. It got harder to get her attention. More and more, she told me to fix my own supper. At first she’d tell me what to cook, but later she’d just wave at the fridge. After a while, Lavender learned about frozen dinners and bought them for us. One day when I got home, I found that Lavender had replaced our little aid-issued microwave cooker with a more elaborate one. I cooked all the meals from then on. But even then, I didn’t catch on. If I suspected anything, it was only that Mom and Lavender were growing closer. That first night he had said he loved her. That had never seemed strange to me. I loved my Mom, a lot of musicians had said they loved her, so why shouldn’t a strange Skoag standing on the doorstep say it? I never doubted it was true, and I don’t think Mom did either. Lavender never missed a chance to show how important “the Mom” was. Not just the flowers, or the way he played whatever she wanted him to play. It was the way he respected her in a way no one else ever had. He made her listening as important as his playing. And it started being more and more important. Now when he played for her at night, he’d stop, sometimes in the middle of the music, and say, “Is that it? Is that right?”

“No,” she’d say, and he’d deflate with despair.

Or, “Almost,” she’d say, and hum a bit to herself, a swatch of music nothing like what he’d been playing, but he’d say, “I think I hear,” and try again.

And if she said, “Yes, yes, that’s it,” he’d play the piece over and over again, while she sat and nodded and smiled.

Slowly she changed. She didn’t care about her clothes anymore, and seldom went outside. She got fat, and bought big men’s shirts from the secondhand store to cover her belly. She became fussy about her hair, brushing and combing it like a fussy fiddler tuning his strings. Her voice changed, becoming dreamy and muffled, the ends of her words blurring. Sometimes when I got home from school, she’d be sitting at the table, dreaming with her eyes open. I’d talk to her but get no response until Lavender came to stand beside her. Then she’d focus on me, and answer my questions in a sweet dreamy voice. It was easier to talk to Lavender instead. He always knew everything anyway, and Mom was so happy and dreamy that I didn’t worry about anything being wrong. She wasn’t like the filthy, skinny Skoag gropies in the school book. She was clean, and shining with health and dreams, plump and pretty. About then I found out Lavender didn’t always leave at night anymore, but sometimes lay on the bed beside her, with Mom gripping his flipper all night, her head pillowed on his plastic coated body. So I should have known she was a Skoag gropie, right, and realized she was stone deaf? How could I? I was a kid, she didn’t look like a gropie, and even if she ignored me a lot, she was still my Mom. And she still listened every night to Lavender’s playing.

Even I was enchanted by his music. Mom no longer asked for stuff by titles, and I had never cared what he played. What had mattered to me was that he was playing for me as well as for Mom. That last bit of special attention at the end of the day was what mattered to me. But slowly that changed, as the music he played changed. He started playing a lot of stuff I didn’t know. Some of it was dreary and mournful, and sometimes the words were in a different language. Sometimes it was full of strings and campfires, and sometimes it sounded like brass challenges and steel replies. But sometimes the music was so strange and wonderful it made the hair stand up on my arms and legs and tickled the back of my neck. I began to understand how my mother could live for music. Some of the music he played made my heart want to dance outside my body, pulled me from my sofa to sit beside Lavender’s fat calloused feet-flippers, hypnotized me with joy. And some of it made me cry, isolated stinging tears because I could almost, but not quite, tell what the music was about.

That had to be Lavender’s music. No one else could have made up such music, music that knew me so well. It had to be his original music. But Skoags weren’t allowed to make their own music. Unless they were priest-Skoags, composing for the temples.

In February the first package fame for Lavender. It was at the bottom of the ramp when I got home, and I picked it up and took it into the house. Just a little flat black plastic box. “Look what I found,” I said as I came in the door, and Lavender came immediately and took it from me.

“For me,” he told me. “A message.” His cello strings quivered unnaturally as he slipped it into his pouch. I never saw him open it, and he didn’t speak of it again, just asked to see my school papers. There were three more after that, or perhaps four. Always at the bottom of the ramp when I got home from school, and always Lavender took them. One day it started raining on my way home and when I got to our house, there were flipper prints outlined on the ramp, leading to the flat black box. So Skoags left them. I wondered why the Skoags were sending him messages instead of just talking to him. The last message box was silver, not black. Lavender held it for a long time, just looking at it. Then the muscles around his eye spots moved and he looked at my Mom for a long time. She knew something about those message boxes, and it wasn’t good. I wanted terribly to know what it was, but I was too frightened to ask. Silence wrapped me so tightly it cut into me like wires. I went to my Mom, and she held me against her fat stomach and stroked my head like I was a baby. Then she gave me a gentle push and pointed to the door. I was to go outside.

“I’m not a baby anymore,” I said angrily, knowing I was being shut off from something.

“No,” said Lavender. He moved a slow flipper, and my Mom let go of me. “You certainly aren’t. You are old enough to be trusted with important things.” He paused, then the cello thrummed rapidly. “Billy Boy. I have made the other Skoags very angry by being here with you. They demand I come back to them and live as they wish me to live. I cannot. Tomorrow I will go to tell them that. There may be . . .” the cello sighed wordlessly, then went on, “a great unpleasantness for me. A most unfortunate happening, perhaps. Until I come back, I will rely on you to take care of the Mom.” He turned slowly until he faced my Mom again. “That is all there is to say. Billy does not need to leave.” She bowed her head, accepting his wishes. He spoke no more about it, but went about the apartment tunelessly humming and adjusting the wall hanging from pale mauve to a sky blue.

That evening he played long, wordless songs with lots of strings and high pitched wind instruments. I fell asleep to music like sea gulls crying after a storm.

The next day when I got home from school, Lavender wasn’t there. My Mom was sitting at the table. She didn’t even look up until I slapped my school books down in front of her. Then she looked up with eyes as flat and dark as Lavender’s eye spots. Her face was like the day she’d given Teddy our check, but a thousand times worse. “Billy,” she said, in a low swollen voice like her mouth was packed with marshmallows. She reached for me, to pull me near, but the palms of her hands were scarred with iridescence, like the pictures in the Don’t Do Drugs textbook. Suddenly I couldn’t let her touch me. My mind tagged and rejected the truth. I pulled back, feeling betrayed, knowing something was terribly, terribly wrong. “Lavender!” I cried, but no cello sawed an answer. I looked again at my Mom, at her scarred hands and her deaf loneliness. I saw what he had done, but his not being here, now, was worse.

“Don’t hate him,” Mom said, in her slow, sticky voice. “We had to do it, Billy. We couldn’t help ourselves. And someday it’s going to be all right.”

She couldn’t have known how bad it was going to get. All that long empty evening, she’d shiver suddenly and then wrap her arms around herself and cock her head as if seeking for a sound. I sat on the couch and watched her and tried to imagine her loneliness. My mother cut off from music, from all sound. As kind to seal off her lungs from air. But he loved her, he loved me, he couldn’t leave her empty like that and me alone, he wouldn’t just go away. I watched her digging her fingers into her ears like she was trying to claw out a stopper. Her nails came out with tiny shreds of dry skin and scabby stuff. She wiped at her ears with pieces of toilet paper, and they came away pink. It was awful to watch. But the worst was the sound of flippers on the ramp, and the heavy slap at the door. The worst was me jumping up, believing that Lavender had come back and everything was going to be all right. I ran to the door and dragged it open for him, and he fell halfway into the room.

It was a terribly clattery sound, his fall, but he didn’t cry out. My Mom didn’t make a sound as she went to him. I stood clear of them both, watched her roll him over.

I screamed when I saw what they had done to him. The remains of his bladders fluttered in feeble rags and a pale yellowish stuff oozed from the torn edges. They had slashed them all, every sound membrane on his body. He tried to speak, but made only a ridiculous sound of flapping curtains and newspapers blowing down the street, a terrible fluttering of ripped drumheads. My mother knelt over him and lifted his flippers and pressed them to her cheeks. Even now, I don’t believe it was the act of a junkie trying for one last rush. There was terrible wisdom and love in her eyes as his shining iridescence ate into her skin and marked her. His tattered membranes fluttered once more and then hung still. I ran out of the apartment and down the streets. They were shiny with rain, shining like his skin, and wet like the dripping stuff from his wounds. I ran as far and fast as I could, trying to run away from those terrible moments to a place where it hadn’t happened. I don’t know who called the police or the ambulance or whoever it was that came and took the body away. I know it wasn’t my Mom. She would have sat there forever, just holding his flippers while his music faded. I came back in the grey part of morning. A man and a woman were waiting for me. They wore long overcoats and stood, as if sitting in our chairs might make them dirty. An outline was chalked on the floor, and they wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Instead, they asked me questions, lots of them. Had the Skoags killed Lavender? Why? Did I see them do it? Did my Mom help them do it? Why had a Skoag been living with us? Had he ever tried to touch me? But the anger inside me wouldn’t let me answer their questions. “Where’s my Mom?” I demanded each time, and finally they put me in a car and took me to the Children’s Home and left me there.

The women at the Children’s Home all wore grey pants and white shirts. They all called me “honey.” They gave me two pants, two shirts, underwear, socks and shoes and a bath. They threw away all my own stuff. Then they showed me a bed with a brown blanket on it in a row of beds with brown blankets, and told me the bed and the box at the foot of it were mine.

The next day, more people came to talk to me. Nice people, with kind voices and gum and Lifesavers. A lady told me my Mommy was sick, but was in a place where she’d get better soon. But she said it like really my Mom was very bad, and had to stay somewhere until she was good again. They told me the Skoag was gone and I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. I could tell about it and no one would hurt me. They told me the best way to help my Mom was to answer all of their questions. But their voices sounded like creaking cage doors and iron gates swinging in the wind. I knew that talking to them wouldn’t help my Mom. So when they asked me questions, I always said I didn’t know, or answered the opposite of what was true. I contradicted myself on purpose. I said Lavender was my father. I said my Mom was his secretary. I said I was going to throw up. Then I did, trying to make it hit their shoes. After three days they left me alone.

After that I had to go to school classes each day with the other Home-kids and special anti-substance abuse classes for the kids of junkies. I got beat up nearly every day. The bigger kids called me “Billy Bun, the Skoag fucker’s son.” One of the kids had a checkstand newspaper with a picture of my Mom on the front and big black print that said, “SKOAG’S LOVE SLAVE WITNESSES RITUAL EXECUTION!!! Gropie confesses, `They killed him for loving me!’ ” I hit that kid and grabbed the paper and tore it up, and the playground lady said I was an animal not fit to associate with other children. I had to stay in for three recesses. Which was fine with me. That night I got out of bed and went down to that kid’s bunk and pissed on the foot of it. So he got in trouble for wetting his bed. I learned fast. A very long time went by. Probably it was only a month or two, but it seemed forever. My real life had ended, and someone had stuck me in this new one. I felt like I was someone else, that both Lavender’s life and Lavender’s death had happened to someone I knew, some dumb little kid who hadn’t seen his Mom was a junkie and his friend was her pusher. I’d never be that stupid again. The counselor told me that I must always remember that none of it was my fault. I was only a child, and I couldn’t have done a thing about my mother’s decision to become a Skoag gropie. They worked real hard at taking away my guilt and replacing it with bitterness toward my Mom, who had ruined my life. But then a spring day came, and I looked out the classroom window and saw a lady with a coat and hood and gloves and a scarf wrapped around her face. I didn’t recognize her, so I just went back to arithmetic. At recess they let her take me home.

Things are simple when you’re a kid. So simple and so awful. I accepted what happened and the aftermath, just kept on day after day, and nothing surprised me because I never knew what to expect. So I wasn’t shocked to find that our door had been busted in, and someone, our neighbors or the street kids, had trashed the place. The smeared chalk outline was still on the floor, with piles of human shit all over it. Lavender’s wall hangings were dead brown tatters, and his flowers were a moldering mess of brown stems and petals and broken glass on the table. The cupboard doors had been ripped down, the microwave was gone, and my couch smelled like urine. Food had been thrown around and mouse droppings were everywhere.

Mom picked up a kitchen chair and set it on its feet and brushed off the seat. She took off her coat and scarf and gloves and put them on the chair, baring her scars so matter-of-factly that they didn’t shock me. They were part of her now, like her fat belly and dark eyes. She picked up a scrap of paper off the floor and wrote down a list of cleaning supplies and cheap food and gave me some money. Then she picked up our old broom.

No one bothered me on the way to the store. The check-out man stared at me for about two minutes before he rang up the stuff. Coming home, I passed a Skoag on the street, a big fat one, and he turned and started following me. But all Skoags are slow, and I ignored the way he tooted for me to come back, he wanted to be my friend, he had candy for me. I just hurried, going through alleys until I lost him. I got home, and the place looked almost normal. Most of the mess had been scraped into brown sacks for me to shuttle out to the dumpster. The chalk lines were gone, and as if that was some kind of undoing magic.

I half expected to see Lavender come out of the bedroom, or to hear his cello thrumming. Instead there was silence, and the crisp brown tatters of his wall hangings dangled over the edges of a garbage sack. I stood there and the silence filled me up, made me as deaf and isolated as my mother. Welling up with the silence came the sudden grief of knowing he was really dead. I sat down on the floor and started crying and calling out, “Lavender, Lavender!” My Mom kept right on trying to put the cupboard doors back on, using a table knife for a screwdriver, and I kicked my feet and slapped my hands on the hard cold cement and screamed until someone upstairs started pounding on the floor with a broom handle. I guess Mom felt the vibrations. She came and held me until I stopped crying, and said I was okay. But I wasn’t. I knew just how alone I really was. My pain was like an invisible knife stuck in me that no one could see to pull out. I knew my mother was hurt just as badly, and there was nothing I could do to help her, either. That was when I decided to forgive her for the awful thing she had done to me, for making Lavender go away.

We found a rhythm in our days, a steady beat that kept us living. Mom became a very good housekeeper, mostly to fill her time. Everything was cleaned up and she pieced back together the broken stuff. She saved from each aid check until we could buy an economy microwave and have hot foods again. She mended all my clothes, and sewed things from my outgrown stuff. Every two weeks she’d put on her gloves and scarf and go after her aid check, but I did all the shopping. I went back to school. I got beat up every day on the playground. Then I stole a baseball bat from school and laid for the kid that had done it and really worked him over. The third time a kid beat me up, and then got bushwhacked, the other kids made the connection. They left me alone. They knew they could hit me at school, but sooner or later the price for doing it was higher than anyone wanted to pay. So I got by. I’d still see the fat Skoag outside the grocery store, and he’d call to me, but I outran him. So no one bothered me. The silence of my home spread out and wrapped me up. No one talked to me much, and that seemed fitting. What better way to mourn Lavender’s passing than with silence? I was nine years old, and the best part of my life was over.

Mom got fatter and slower. I thought she was going to die. She moved like an old, old woman, and sat like she was blind as well as deaf. Once a week an aid lady came, with pamphlets about how not to be a Skoag gropie, and Don’t Do Drugs coloring books and balloons and crayons for me. She’d give Mom a signed slip, and Mom had to turn it in to get her aid check. The aid lady was younger than Mom and wore grey pants and a white shirt. I secretly believed she was from the Children’s Home and might take me back there. She always made me show her my hands, and every week I had to pee in a bottle for her, even though everyone knows that Skoag slime won’t show in a pee test. She left signing booklets for my Mom, but she didn’t want them. So I took them and learned to sign dirty words to the kids at school. And Lavender was never there.

That’s how it would hit me, I’d be going along, doing a math page or signing out something about someone’s sister or folding up my blanket or getting a drink of water, and suddenly I’d notice, all over again, that Lavender wasn’t there. It always felt like someone had suddenly grabbed hold of my heart and squeezed it. I looked all through the house one day, trying to find one thing that he had touched, one thing he’d given to us that we still had. But there was nothing. It was like he’d never existed, and the silence was like he’d never made music.

One May day I came home from school and Mom had a baby. She hadn’t warned me, so it was a big shock to find her lying in bed with this little pink thing dressed in a nightgown made from one of my old T-shirts. I knew someone had helped her from the neatly folded towels by the bed, and the grey box of paper diapers. More aid stuff My Mom’s fat stomach was gone, and I felt really dumb for not knowing she had been pregnant. I saw pregnant women in the streets all the time, but it had never occurred to me that my Mom could get that way. I knew, too, that she couldn’t get a baby unless she’d done it with somebody. And the only one who’d been living with us . . .

Mom wasn’t saying much, just watching me as I looked at the baby. What fascinated me the most was those tiny little fingernails she had, thin as paper. I kept staring at her hands.

“Go ahead,” Mom finally said. “You can touch her. She’s your little sister, Billy. Put your finger in her hand.” Her voice dragged like an old tape, and she sounded really tired.

“Is it . . . safe?” I asked. But she wasn’t watching my mouth, so she didn’t know I’d said anything. I went and got my school tablet. On it I printed, very carefully, “IS SHE PART SKOAG ON HER SKIN?” Then I took it back into Mom’s bedroom and handed it to her.

She read it and crumpled it up and threw it across the room. Her mouth went so tight it was white around her lips. It scared me. She’d never been mad at me while Lavender was around, and since he’d died, she’d been too beaten to be angry at anything. “Shit!” she said, and the word came out with hard edges, sounding like she used to. She grabbed my wrist, and I could feel the hard slickness of her Skoag scarred palms. “You listen to me, Billy Boy,” she said fiercely. “I know what you been hearing. But you knew Lavender, and you damn well know me. And you should know that we . . . that we loved each other. And if he’d been a human and we could have had a baby together, we’d have done it. But he wasn’t, and we didn’t. This baby here, she’s all mine. One hundred percent. It sometimes happens to women who get hooked on Skoag touch. They call it a self-induced pregnancy. This baby’s a clone of me. You understand that? She’s the same as me, all over again. Only I’m going to make sure she comes out right. She’s going to be loved, she’s going to have chances. She’s not going to end up in a dump on aid, with no . . .”

Her voice got more and more runny, the words souping together. She let go of my wrist, and started crying. She lifted her hands and curled her fingers toward the tight skin on her palms, and held them near her face but not touching it. Her tears trickled into the flipper scars that her final touching of Lavender had left on her face. Her crying woke the baby up, and she started crying, too. Her little face got red and her mouth gaped open, but no sound came out. Then my Mom said to her, in the most terrible voice I’ve ever heard, “Baby, what’d you come here for? I got nothing to give you. I got nothing to give anyone.” And she rolled over and turned her back on her.

I stood there, watching them, thinking that any minute Mom would turn back and pick her up and take care of her. But a long time passed, and Mom just lay there, crying all shaky, and the baby lay there, all red and crying without sound.

So I picked her up. I knew how, I used to hold Janice’s baby before she gave her kids away. I held her against my chest, with her head on my shoulder so it wouldn’t wobble. I carried her around and rocked her, but her face stayed red and she kept breathing out through her mouth, really hard. She didn’t make any sound when she cried, but I thought maybe newborn babies didn’t cry out loud. I thought she might be hungry. So I went in the kitchen and I checked the refrigerator, to see if Mom had bottles and government aid formula in plastic envelopes like Janice used to have. And there was, so I warmed one up in the microwave until the plastic button on it turned blue to show it was the right temperature. Then I sat down and put the bottle in her wide open mouth. But she acted like she didn’t even know it was there, and kept up her unbearable screaming.

I sat down on the couch with her on my lap. Her little legs were curled up against her belly. I looked at her red wrinkly feet and her teeny toes. My old T-shirt looked dopey on her, and I wished I had something better for her to wear. Maybe she was cold. So I pulled a corner of my blanket up over her. Her mouth stayed open and her face stayed red. I really wished I had a suck-on thing to stick in her mouth. But I didn’t. So I started rocking her on my lap, and singing this song Janice used to sing to baby Peggy, about a mockingbird and a ponycart and all sorts of presents the baby would get if she’d be quiet. And right away she closed her mouth, and went back to being pink instead of red. She opened her eyes that she’d squinched shut and looked right at me. Her eyes were kind of a murky blue. I looked into them and I knew Mom had lied. Because she looked at me just the way Lavender used to, when I didn’t know if he was looking at my face or at something inside my head. I knew she was his, and as long as I had her, he wasn’t really gone. This baby was something he’d touched, something he’d left for me to hold onto and keep. Part of him for me to keep.

I suddenly felt shaky and my throat closed up so tight I couldn’t breathe or sing, but she didn’t seem to mind now. She just kept looking up at me and I kept looking at her, and I wondered if this was what Lavender had meant about closing a circle. Because I knew she was loving me as much as I loved her. It was as important as he had said it was. I held her until her eyes closed, and then I carefully lay down on the couch with her on my stomach and my blanket over us. Her face was against my neck, breathing, and every now and then her mouth would move in a wet baby kiss. Before I fell asleep, I named her Lisa, from an old song Lavender used to sing about Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa, Lisa. After that, she was more my baby than Mom’s. Coming home to her was like coming home to Lavender. I meant that much to her. She was always crying and wet when I got home. Mom never seemed to notice when she needed changing, and even if she hadn’t been deaf, she wouldn’t have heard this baby cry. So I’d clean her up and feed her and hold her and rock her. And I’d sing to her. She liked that the best. She was just like my Mom that way. I got the idea of tuning the stereo to an all-music station and leaving it on for her when I had to go to school in the morning. Since our place had been trashed, the stereo always had a background sound like cars going by in a wet street, but Lisa didn’t care. I’d put her down in the morning and turn on the stereo for her, and she’d still be happy when I got home from school. She slept with me at night, since I was afraid she’d fall out of Mom’s bed. But my couch was perfect, because I could put her between me and the back of it, and she’d be safe all night long, just as safe as the little mice nesting inside it.

A new pattern came into my life. I was taking care of things, taking care of the Mom, just like Lavender had told me, and taking care of him, in the form of Lisa. Mom didn’t have to do much at all. She got her checks, and kept the house clean. I took the checks to the store and got food and sometimes a few extra little things for Lisa. She loved anything that made a noise, rattles, bells, anything. The only time Mom got mad was when I spent seven dollars on a stuffed lamb with a music box inside it. She yelled at me in her mushy voice, because to get it I had to buy tofu instead of hamburger and skipped getting margarine and eggs and jam. But it was worth it to watch Lisa wave her little fists excitedly every time the lamb started playing.

After four or five months, I noticed Mom wasn’t keeping the house as clean. She still swept and stuff, but not like before, and I was doing almost all the cooking. Something had gone out of Mom and left her flat, something more than just a baby coming out of her stomach. I think she had expected more, had thought that Lisa was going to be better somehow. Disappointed was how she acted at first, and then later, disinterested. I felt mad about it, and I’d try to make her pay more attention to Lisa. I’d take her to Mom and show her how Lisa was learning to smile, or how she could sit on her own. But it didn’t do any good. Mom would hold her awhile and look at her, and then she’d go set her down on the couch, without even making sure she couldn’t roll off. She never talked to Lisa or played with her. And after a while I knew she never would. So I started loving her even more, to make up for Mom not loving her. It got harder as Lisa got bigger. Summer went okay, but by the time school started again, it wasn’t safe for me to leave her all day. I tried putting her in a cardboard box while I was gone, but it was hard to find ones that were strong enough. She’d get hold of the edges and try to stand up, and I was afraid she’d fall. She was eating more, too, so even if I left a bottle inside her box for her, she’d still be really hungry when I got home. Mom didn’t notice her at all, and of course she couldn’t hear Lisa’s silent crying. Mom didn’t seem to notice much of anything. She’d tidy up the house each day, and then just sit at the table. Late at night, she might put a scarf around her face and go out for a walk. But that was about all she did, and it didn’t make me feel any safer about leaving Lisa all day. So after Christmas I just didn’t go back to school and no one ever noticed.

When I think about those days, with Lisa starting to be a real person and all the time we had together, they’re almost as good as the days with Lavender. Lisa’s eyes turned brown, but they never lost that Lavender look, where she could look right through me while I rocked her to the music. Her hair was dark like Mom’s, but curly at the back of her head, and she was almost always smiling. I hated dressing her in stuff made from old T-shirts. The stuff was too small, and Mom hadn’t made her any new clothes. So I asked the aid lady who came about once every two months then, and she told me where I could get baby clothes that rich people gave away. She gave me slips for Lisa and me and Mom, and helped me write down the right sizes on them. That aid lady wasn’t too bad.

On Monday I took the slips and Lisa and went, using my aid pass to ride the bus. Everyone on the bus thought Lisa was cute, and kept calling her honey and touching her hands or bouncing her feet. She was real good about it. One old lady who sat beside us part of the way gave me a five dollar bill and told me to buy my little sister something with it.

She was really nice. When she got off the bus, she kept saying, “Bye-bye, sweety. Bye-bye,” like she expected Lisa to say something. “She doesn’t talk,” I told her, and the old lady just smiled and said, “Oh, she will pretty soon. Don’t you worry.”

It was the same at the clothes place. A lady at the counter kept talking to Lisa, saying, “You such a sweet thing! You such a good girl, aren’t you?” Lisa would smile, but never make a sound.

“She’s shy, isn’t she?” the lady said. “I bet she babbles her head off at home.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and then felt bad for lying when the other lady came back with three bags of clothes for us. They showed me the stuff they’d picked out for Lisa, little dresses with lace and a new blanket and a chiming rattle that Lisa grabbed right away. Lisa’s bag was the fullest of all, probably because she was so cute.

I should have felt good going home. But the bags were heavy and it was hard to carry them and Lisa. There was another baby on the bus, making fussy angry noises. It sounded awful, but I wished Lisa could do that. Her being quiet at home had never worried me, but now I was thinking, she won’t always be a baby at home, and what then?

I got off the bus with the heavy bags, and Lisa was wriggly. It was getting dark and starting to rain and I had eight blocks to go. I felt like I couldn’t take another step when the fat Skoag bounced out of an alley right in front of us.

“Hello, little boy!” he honked.

“Stuff it up your ass!” I said back, because I was really scared. Even if I dropped all the clothes, I couldn’t run with Lisa. In the dark and the rain I might fall on top of her and kill her. I squished her close to me, hoping the Skoag wouldn’t see Lavender’s eyes, and kept walking. Maybe if I just kept walking, he’d leave us alone. But his flipper feet kept on slapping the wet sidewalk beside us.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said, and I got even scareder, because that was just like the guy in the OKAY TO SAY NO book at school.

“Stuff it up your ass,” I said again and walked faster. One of the bags tore, and I wanted to cry. I’d have yelled for help, but it was dark and there was no one on the streets. This close to home, even if I did yell for help, no one would want to come.

“Boy,” he tootled softly. “It has been hard to find you, for it was commanded that none should speak of it. Every time I speak to you, I put myself in danger of a most unfortunate occurrence. Please take these and free me of a heavy promise.”

Lisa was wriggling in my arms, trying to get a better look at the tootling voice. She kicked out and one of my bags went flying. Before I could grab it up, he took a package from his pouch and dropped it into the bag. Plastic baggies, taped together, but I couldn’t tell what was inside them. I stood still and stared through the dark at him. I was scared to pick up the bag because I didn’t want to get close to him and I didn’t know what he’d put in it. Drugs, maybe, something I’d get arrested for having. But it was the bag with Lisa’s clothes in it, the ones I’d gone through all this for.

“What’s that?” I demanded, trying to sound tough.

“One for each of your months. Green trading paper, what is the word for it? Money. For you to take care of the Mom.”

“Lavender.” I said his name, knowing there was a connection but not figuring it out yet.

“Silence!” the fat Skoag honked, and he sounded like a scared Volkswagen. “To speak the name of a blasphemer is to invite a most unfortunate occurrence.”

“But . .”

“My task is done, until your next month begins. Next time I call, do not run away. This task is heavy and I would call back the promise, if I had known what would befall the one who asked. Go away quickly, before I am seen with you.”

He waddled off like a frightened duck. I managed to snag up the fallen bag. All the way home, my heart was banging against my lungs. I felt like I’d seen Lavender’s ghost, that he was still around somehow, looking out for us. I kept wondering about the money in the bag. Not how much it was, or what I’d use it for, but what Lavender had been thinking when he made the fat Skoag promise. If he’d known he was going to die, why’d he go to the Skoags who killed him, why didn’t he go to the police or something, or even just come home and ignore those message boxes?

Somehow I got Lisa and the bags down the ramp and managed to turn the doorknob without dropping anything. When I got inside, there was only one light burning and Mom wasn’t there. I didn’t know if she’d gone looking for us because it was so late, or just gone out on one of her night walks. Some things you just have to do first. So I changed Lisa and got her a bottle and put one of the new nightgowns on her and put her in a cardboard box with her bottle, the chiming rattle and the new blanket. She looked so sweet, all done up in new stuff that it was suddenly worth all I’d gone through. I turned the stereo to some soft music and she settled down.

Then there was time to think, but too much to think about. The package in Lisa’s bag was money, little rolls of it in plastic baggies. I opened it carefully and threw the bags away, even though the slime on them was dried, and dry Skoag slime isn’t dangerous. Each baggie was the same, five ten-dollar bills. I unfolded every single one, looking for a note, or some sign from Lavender to help me understand why he had left us and let someone kill him. But there was only money.

I wrapped the money in one of Lisa’s old nightgowns and stuffed it down the couch. I wasn’t giving it to Mom. Lavender had left it for me, because he knew I would buy the right things with it. I already knew I was going to get Lisa a playpen so she didn’t have to crawl on the cold cement anymore. And fresh, real bananas instead of dried banana flakes that always looked like grey goop. I went over to her box and looked in at her. She looked back at me, her legs curled up on her tummy and helping hold the bottle, one little leak of milk trickling down her cheek. I reached down and wiped it away, but she smiled at my touch and more milk trickled out of the corner of her mouth. Her dark Lavender eyes looked at me and through me, and for a second he was there, like any moment his cello voice would fill the room. But Lisa had no voice.

And that was another thing to think about.

She could hear, that was for sure. So why didn’t she make noises like other babies? I took her bottle away and tried to look in her mouth. She sucked on my finger, but when I tried to open her mouth, she got mad. Finally, she opened it herself, in one of her silent screams. I looked in, but if there was anything wrong in there, I couldn’t see what it was. I looked until she was all red and sweaty from her soundless crying. Then I gave her the bottle back and rocked her to make up for being mean. And I thought. Lisa was asleep and I was bedded down beside her, nearly falling off the couch now because she’d grown so much, when Mom came back in. She didn’t turn on any lights or say anything, she just came in and went straight to her room, making a little humming sound as she went. And I lay there on the couch and I knew. I knew what she’d gone out for. God, I was mad.

I lay there and shook with anger and being scared. Because she was going to blow us all up. I wanted to get up and go into her room and scream at her. But she wouldn’t hear me, and if I held up a note, she’d just ignore it. I could go to her and tell her everything, about the money from Lavender and the new clothes and Lisa not being able to talk, and she wouldn’t even care. She’d only go on with her idiot humming and staring. Because she didn’t care, and probably never had, not about anything except her damn music.

She wasn’t stupid. She’d keep the house clean and dress decent and pick up her aid checks. She didn’t want to be a Skoag gropie in the streets. She’d sneak out by night, find Skoags standing outside the clubs listening to the music, and touch one. I knew it as plainly as if I’d seen it. That was what mattered to her, a press of Skoag flesh. She didn’t care that if the aid worker caught her with slimy hands, they’d take Lisa and me to some Children’s Home. I remembered what it was like. I could imagine Lisa there, her silent crying going ignored, growing up not able to tell anyone when someone was mean to her. They’d put her with the other ones they called “Special” in a big room with a lot of baby toys and ignore her. I’d never see her and she’d forget about me. I’d lose the only thing Lavender had left me. Because of Mom. I watched Mom the next day, hoping I was wrong. But the signs were there, in the rhythmic way she swept the floor, her chin nodding to the unheard beat. She was groping Skoag slime. It was such a slutty thing to do. I had thought that her touching Lavender had been because they loved each other. Now she seemed like a whore to me, someone who’d touch any Skoag just to make music in her head. I hated her.

The next day I went out to the secondhand store. I bought Lisa a stroller, a playpen, and a piece of carpet to go in the bottom of it. And one of those suits with the feet and a hood. It took me two trips to get everything home.

When my Mom saw all the stuff, she tried to ask me where it had come from. But I just ignored her and her mashed potato voice. She grabbed hold of my arm and shook me. “Biw-wweee! Wherr aw thisss-tuff frum? Huh?” That’s what she sounded like. I grabbed her hand off my arm and turned it over and pried her fingers open. The Skoag scars were shiny, and wet in the cracks. She jerked away from me.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” I said as she held her hands to her chest. I didn’t yell it. I just said it real clearly, making sure she could see my mouth move. I picked Lisa up and took her to the couch. I started playing pat-a-cake with her, ignoring Mom. After a while, Mom started going, “Huh. Huh-uh-uh!

Huh!” She sat down and put her scarred hands over her scarred face and rocked. After a while I realized she was crying. I didn’t go to her. I remembered DON’T DO DRUGS at school, and I knew it was true, that junkies don’t have friends, don’t love, don’t care about anything but their next fix. No one can afford to love a junkie. So I did what the books said. I ignored her. And that was the day I was ten years old. I took control of things. I found the sign language booklets that the aid lady had left, and I started making Lisa sign. Simple stuff at first. Hold up your arms to be picked up. Finger in the mouth for bottle. Nod your head for stereo turned on. It was harder for me than for Lisa. Because I knew what she wanted, but I couldn’t give it to her until she signed, no matter how she cried. I’d make the sign and then I’d take her hands and make the sign. But after a while, I had to make her sign herself. She cried a lot. But finally, she started doing the simple signs. By the time she was two, we were on the ones in the pamphlet. Things went okay for a while. Mom was careful about her habit. None of the aid ladies caught on to her. She was always home when they visited, and the place was tidy. Once, I came back from the store and found her giving Lisa a bath in the sink. But it was only because the aid lady was there. It was just a trick to have her hands busy, and if the aid lady saw the wetness in the cracks of her palms, she’d think it was bath water. Lisa was splashing water all over and smiling like it was normal for Mom to take care of her. I set the groceries on the table and said, “Hi Mom,” like we were a happy little family. Mom kept on sponging Lisa, and finally the aid lady said she had to go, but she was glad that things were going better for us.

As soon as she left, I got a towel and took my Lisa and dried her carefully. Lisa kept signing for “cookie” while I was drying her and dressing her while she was kicking and wriggling. Mom gave her one and it wasn’t until I got her shoes tied and set her on the floor that I realized what that meant. It made me madder than her using Lisa’s bath to keep the aid lady from checking her hands. I found the sign booklets on her nightstand. I carried them out and slapped them down on the kitchen table. Mom was watching me.

“These are mine,” I told her, making my lip movements plain. “Leave them alone.”

“Bwee,” she said pleadingly, and I could see how big and purple her tongue was getting inside her mouth. It made me feel sick and sad and sorry, for Lisa and myself, mostly. That big purple tongue was a withdrawal symptom for a Skoag gropie, it meant she’d been down for more than forty-eight hours. I thought about her washing Lisa, keeping her back to the aid lady. Hiding. She’d still been hiding from the aid lady, it was just a different way from the one I’d figured. She was still using us. She wasn’t getting her slime. I didn’t know why, but I knew it was dangerous for us. She wouldn’t be able to last. Before long, everyone would know. It hit me. I’d have to take care of it. One more thing for me to handle to keep Lisa safe. It made me angry and at the same time, hot and satisfied because I’d been right about her, she was just going to drag us in deeper and make it all harder. I’d been right to stop caring about her, because she was just going to hurt us if we let her be important to us. Everything was getting harder. They’d tracked me down for school, and now I had to get there an hour earlier for remedial math. Which meant leaving Lisa with Mom for even longer. And Lisa was walking, so if you left the door open she’d head up the ramp and out onto the sidewalk. I’d sit in school and wonder if Mom had gone out to finger some Skoags and left the door open and Lisa had toddled out and been hit by a car. Or worse, just wandered off, and I’d go home and call her but she wouldn’t be able to answer. . . . My imagining made school hours torture.

I’d race home each day, and each day Lisa would be okay. Every few nights Mom would go out and I didn’t know what to hope for. That she’d score some slime and come home hummy, but easy to spot as a gropie? That she wouldn’t get any, but then she’d be trying to sign to Lisa and showing off her withdrawal? Maybe that she wouldn’t hear a delivery van coming down the alleys?

It all came together one night when I went to get another envelope from the fat Skoag. The street lamp was glinting off his skin, and flashing off his voice membrane each time it swelled like a khaki neon light. He was holding out the envelope in a plastic-mittened flipper, but I said, “I need a favor.”

“No,” he tooted. “No favors.” He flapped the envelope at me frantically. He looked toward the alley mouth, but there was nothing there. I took a breath.

I said calmly, like I was sure of it, “You promised Lavender you’d look out for me and the Mom.”

“Yes. I bring you the money, every time.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s good, but not enough. I need you to come to my house, twice a week, late at night.”

“No.” He said it fast, scared. Then, “Why?”

“Yes. You know why.”

He rocked on his flippers like a zoo elephant. “I can’t,” he tootled mournfully. “Please. I can’t. Take the money and go. Dangerous for me.”

“Dangerous for me if you don’t. And you promised Lavender.”

“I . . . Please. Please. Once a week. Wednesday night, very late. Please.” He shoved the envelope into my hand. I watched him rock. If I demanded it, he’d come twice a week, but he’d hate me. Or he’d come once a week, and think I’d let him off easy. “Okay,” I said, settling for the second one. I might need something else someday, and once a week would hold Mom together. He came late Wednesday. It startled me awake, his flippering down the ramp and then slapping the door. Mom had stayed in, looking at her hands and sighing, and gone to bed around midnight. It was two A.M. when the fat Skoag showed. I’d gone to sleep, thinking he wasn’t going to come. Odd. Just the sounds of him coming down the ramp, and me opening the door like I used to for Lavender made my heart pound. Like maybe I’d open the door and somehow it would be Lavender standing there, gently waving his flippers and waiting for me.

But it was only the fat Skoag. He was pressed into the darkest corner of the stairwell, staring up at the sidewalk. As soon as I opened the door, he scuttled in and pushed it shut.

“Quickly,” he said, pulling off a plastic mitten. “Quickly, please, and then I will go.”

“This way,” I said, and led him into my mother’s bedroom. She wasn’t asleep. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. The bed, wedged in a corner of the small room, was a tousled wreck. Some movement of air as we came into the room turned her eyes to us. She stared at us, between dreaming and awake, and suddenly she sat up and screamed “Lavender!” The word came out crisp and hard and real, like she used to talk. Then she saw it wasn’t him and she broke. She made this horrible laughing-crying sound. The fat Skoag freaked when she screamed and waddled frantically for the door, but I was closer, and I slammed it and put my back to it. “No,” I said, gripping the knob. “You don’t leave until she’s touched you.” His eye spots went flat and dead. He turned and slowly walked toward the bed. Her hysterics trailed away in broken sobs. I watched her face, her shock fading and being replaced by horror as the fat Skoag came closer. “No,” she said, clearly, and then, “Nooh. Nooh.” She backed up on the bed, pressing into the corner. “Noooh. Doanwanis. Goway. Bwee. Pease. Trynstob. No.” But when the Skoag held his flipper out, she suddenly lunged across the bed and gripped it like a handful of free lottery tickets. She held on and her body jerked in little spasms, like the kid at school who had fits. Her eyes went back and she threw her head way back on her neck and her tongue came out. I felt sick and dirty, like I was watching her have sex with someone, or watching a doctor work on guts. But I couldn’t look away. The Skoag stood there until her hands slid away. They were thick with his slime, and iridescent in the darkness. The stuff was thick, like the goop she used to rub on my chest when I was little and had a bad cold. She crumpled over onto her side. I pulled the blankets back up over her. As I let the Skoag out, I wondered why I had bothered to do that.

“Remember,” I said, as he waddled up the ramp. “Next Wednesday. It’s important. And you promised Lavender.”

I was thinking that Wednesday was about right, because the aid lady always came on Thursdays or Fridays, and Mom would still look okay when she got here. The fat Skoag paused on the ramp.

“For Lavender,” he said, like brass trumpets coming from a far hill. “Only for him would I do this thing. Only for him.”

I knew then that the fat Skoag was close to hating me tonight, and that it didn’t have to have been that way. If I hadn’t demanded this, he might have become my friend. I watched the fat Skoag leave and felt pimpish and sly and small for trading on his loyalty to Lavender. But I had to, to keep Lisa safe. Sometimes the only thing I was sure of was that Lavender had entrusted Lisa to me. I went back to bed, curling up around Lisa. I fell asleep hoping that the things I did to protect her wouldn’t stain her. So that’s how it went. The fat Skoag came once a week. Mom stayed slimed and happy. The aid lady never suspected a thing. I went to school enough to keep everyone happy, and took care of Lisa. Lisa grew. She turned into a little kid. On Saturdays we’d bus over to Gasworks Park. I’d push her on the swings or we’d watch the fancy kites people fly there. I kept her away from other kids, so she wouldn’t be teased about being mute. When some Mommy would say hello to her, or say, “My, such .pretty hair,” I’d step in and say, “She’s real shy. And my Mom says don’t talk to strangers.” Then I’d take her away and buy her ice cream. No one expects kids to talk while they’re eating. She was three when the message came. The radio was always on for Lisa. Classical music made her close her eyes and sway, or suddenly shiver. Jazz made her hyperactive. If I wanted her to go to sleep, it was good old rock and roll. I should have heard about it. But I never listened to the news, or wasted food money on a newspaper. So I scowled at the check-out guy when he shoved a Seattle Times into my brown bag.

“I ain’t paying for that,” I told him.

“On the house, kid,” he told me. “I figure you got a right to know, it being your Skoag and all.” He’d never talked about Lavender before that. He’d treated me decent while Lavender was alive, and he’d never given me a bad time about shopping there after Lavender died. Not like the laundromat where they threw me and our laundry out because they didn’t want “Skoag slime clogging the drains.” Anyway, he turned right away to the next customer so I knew he didn’t want me to say anything. I headed home. After I got dinner cooking, I unfolded the paper, wondering what I was supposed to look at. The headlines jumped at me. “SKOAG PLANET CONTACT CONFIRMED.” I read slowly, trying to understand it. The story said the rumors were confirmed, without saying what they were. The big deal was the Skoags officially sending a message to Earth, planet to planet. The newspaper went on about the sending technology being based on stuff we knew but hadn’t thought about using together, and stuff like that. I had to sort through the whole paper to find the last few lines. They scared the hell out of me. Sources wouldn’t say what the message had been, but didn’t deny it had to do with the ritual murder of a “highly-placed Skoag exile in Seattle.”

I didn’t know the microwave had buzzed until Mom set food in front of me. I looked up, arid Lisa had already finished eating. I hated it when Morn did stuff like that. Like she was pretending she was a good little mommy, taking care of her kids instead of a Skoag gropie who didn’t give a damn. In the drug classes at school, they called that “ingratiating behavior” and said junkies and alkies used it to fool their families into thinking they were changing, especially if the families were close to sending them to a cure station. It didn’t fool me. I crumpled up the paper and gave it to Lisa to play with, and ate dinner. Two nights later, the man came. Maybe he thought no one would notice a grey government sedan pulled up in front of a slummy house at midnight. I heard someone nearly fall down the ramp, and when he knocked, I opened the door on its chain.

“Yeah,” I said, but my stomach was shaking. Skoag slime dependency wasn’t supposed to show up in pee tests. That’s what all the kids said, and I’d always believed it was true, but what if they’d changed the test and knew from Mom’s pee that she was a gropie? But I tried not to let any of that show on my face as I stared out the crack at the government man.

“I have to come in,” he said, whispery. “I have to talk to your mother.” “Too bad,” I said, being tough.

“She’s deaf. You can write it down, or you can tell it to me, but you can’t talk to her.”

“I can sign,” he said nervously, echoing with his fingers.

“She can’t,” I said, and started to close the door.

“Please,” he said, not quite shoving his foot in the crack, but leaning on the door to keep it open. “It’s about the dead Skoag. Lavender. And it’s important, kid.”

We stared at each other.

“Look, kid,” he finally said. His voice came out normal, not whispery, but real tired. “I can come back with cops tomorrow and kick this door in and drag you out. It’s that important. Or you can let me in now, and we’ll keep this quiet.”

My mom reached past me and undid the chain and the man came in. I hadn’t even known she was awake. She looked awful, with her scarred face shining in the streetlamp light leaking in the door. All except for her hair, which was as pretty as ever. She clicked on the light and shut the door behind him. He looked around and said, “Oh, Jesus Christ.” It was the first time I’d ever heard a grown man say it like a prayer. Then he sat down at our table, and started signing to my Mom. He wasn’t an aid man, or a drug man, but a real, high up, government man. The second surprise was that my Mom signed back to him. I suddenly remembered I hadn’t seen the signing books around in a while. Probably in her room. Ingratiating behavior. I wondered what she’d been signing to Lisa while I was away at school each day. Then I forgot that and paid attention to what he was saying. He talked out loud as he signed, like it helped him keep his place or something.

“Lavender’s . . . people . . . are very angry . . . about his death. He was . . . important Skoag (the sign for Skoag was to put your fingers on your forehead and make your hand do pushups, like a pulsing membrane). Not exile . . . but like a priest . . . or civil rights worker.” He went on about how important Lavender had been, how he had come in the hopes of reconciling the exiles and instead he started sharing their beliefs, and then went further than they did. It didn’t match what Lavender had told me, but I kept my mouth shut. The heart of it was that news of his death had finally reached his home planet, and a lot of Skoags were very upset. The way he said it, I didn’t know if the message had just taken that long to get there, or if the exiled Skoags had kept killing Lavender a secret. But I still kept my mouth shut. Anyway, the planet Skoags were going to send someone to look into it, and our government had agreed to co-operate fully. Including letting the Skoag talk to my Mom and me. I felt like telling him it was up to us whether we met the Skoags. But I didn’t. He went on about how this was a real opportunity for Humans to establish diplomatic relations with the Skoag planet, and it might be our first step toward deep space, and the U.S. could lead the way, and all that shit. Then he suggested the first thing we’d have to do was move.

That’s when I opened my mouth. “No,” I said, firmly, and was surprised when my Mom repeated it, “No,” very clear.

He talked a lot about why we had to move. The Skoag ambassador or whatever was coming, probably within two or three years. (I was surprised they didn’t know exactly when, but they didn’t.) And we had to be somewhere nice, so the U.S. wouldn’t be embarrassed, and somewhere safe, so no terrorists would try to kidnap us or kill us, and somewhere more official, where advisors could tell us what to say to the Skoags.

He was still explaining at four in the morning, when Mom stood up, said, “NO” very emphatically, and then walked back to her bedroom and shut the door.

He stared at the door. Then he sighed, and rumpled up his hair. “This is a big mistake,” he said. And he shook his head. “A damn big mistake that we’re all going to hate remembering. You’re going to blow it for all of us, kid, for the whole damn human race. Shit. Well, I guess we work around it, then.” So he left.

For a while I lay awake, wondering if there really was danger, if our neighbors would turn on us or terrorists would bomb us. But then I decided that at least terrorists wouldn’t try to take Lisa away from me and put her in special school or a home while they treated Mom for being a gropie. That would happen for sure if they moved us, because there’d be no way to hide Mom’s addiction. That was why Mom said no, too. She was afraid of losing her Skoag slime source. As for me, I could never leave the only place I’d ever shared with Lavender. I stared at the spot where he’d died. The chalk marks were years gone, but I could still see them.

The government man was trickier than I thought. A month later our neighborhood was picked for Facelift Funding. All owners were given eighteen months to upgrade or lose the funding. So our walls got spraysulated and paneled, and they foamed the floor and put in carpet-heat and a tiny insta-hot unit under the sink. Then the old furnace room became part of our apartment, as a second bedroom. The whole neighborhood changed. They jackhammered up squares of sidewalk and put in skinny little trees, and all the buildings got new siding. They hauled away the trash heap from behind the building, including our old linoleum. They put in a tiny fenced play yard, with organo-turf and big plastic climbing toys. They put flower boxes around the streetlamps. I hated it. They were trying to cover us up, trying to say, these aren’t poor people living in their own trash, these are nice folks like in the readers at school. The daddys and mommys have jobs, they go to church and their kids drink white milk and eat brown bread. I hated it, but Lisa loved it. She kept picking the flowers and bringing them to Mom. Mom always put them in a vase, just like Lavender’s flowers. Sometimes I wanted to smash it. I came home from school one day, and a moving van was just pulling away. Scared hell out of me. Had Mom decided to move after all, had she kidnapped Lisa and left? But she was there. “Govamin” she said disgustedly, and stood there like there was no place to sit.

All our old stuff was gone. Even the cupboards and fridge were different, and the cooker was huge, with hot beverage taps on the side. My couch was gone, the friendly smell of mice gone with it. The new one matched the fat chair beside it. The stereo was about as big as a loaf of bread, but it was a real wall-shaker. There was a vid-box, a keyboard console and a mini-dish. Guess the government wanted us to look good.

The new bedroom had twin beds with a dorky little screen between them, like I hadn’t been bathing Lisa since she was born. Lisa was bouncing on her bed already, looking like a kid in a catalog. I caught her as she jumped, and for just a second, as she came down in my arms, she looked just like Mom. Exactly. Same hair, same eyes, and I knew it was true, she was Mom’s clone and would look just like her when she grew up. Except that her hands and cheeks would never be scarred. I set her down and she ran to Mom and hugged her around the knees. And we stood there and looked around, like there was no place left for us.

So they thought they changed us, so we wouldn’t shame the U.S. when the Skoag came. But they didn’t change the fat Skoag’s secret Wednesday visits, or Mom’s blank humming. The chalk lines were still there, and I could see them right through the carpet. And our neighbors still didn’t talk to us. We waited. One year. Two years. More Skoags came, but not the Skoag we waited for. Three years. Someone wrote a big article in the paper that the whole thing about a Skoag ambassador coming had been a scam, a hoax. The fat Skoag told me the truth. He’d come. He’d talked to the ones that killed Lavender. And he’d agreed it had been necessary. He hadn’t wanted to talk to Humans at all. The carpeting got worn spots, and Lisa scribbled on the new paneling and Mom couldn’t get it off. Four years. Graffiti on the buildings, and beer bottles in the flower beds. We forgot about the government and the government forgot about us.

Lisa was seven, nearly eight. We were walking home after a day at Gasworks Park. I was worrying because a letter had come from the school. Someone had turned us in, had reported that a child in our home was being deprived of an equal education. If Lisa didn’t go to school, they’d cancel the aid checks. We couldn’t get by without the aid checks. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I was thinking about running away with her. I was fifteen, nearly old enough to get work somewhere. A bunch of Skoags were jamming on the corner, same old thing. I kept walking. I never listened to Skoags anymore. I was a block past them before I realized Lisa wasn’t with me. I ran back, but it was too late.

All she was doing was listening. Eyes big, lips parted, listening like she always listened to music. The Skoags were playing some old Beatles thing. There were a few tourists, a few hecklers, the usual mix, and the Skoags were playing and Lisa was listening.

Then all of a sudden they stopped, their membranes all swelled out, and they all looked at her. Colors washed through their crests, bright colors, and they started making a sound, an incredible sound like Jesus coming in the sky on a white horse to save us all. It got louder and louder. Skoags started coming out of buildings, flippering down the sidewalks, and as soon as they came, they started making the sound, too, and colors started racing through their crests. They surrounded Lisa, pushing to get closer, all making the sound. It was a glorious Alleluia sound, and Lisa loved it. She glowed and her eyes were huge. I shoved my way in there. I grabbed her hand and I dragged her out of there, past Skoags who reached for us with shining flippers. I snatched her up and ran all the way home and I locked the door behind us.

The next day our street was packed so full of Skoags that cars couldn’t pass. Silent Skoags, standing and swaying on their big flat flippers, but not making a sound. Staring at our building. Copters flew over, and the film was on television, but the news people had no idea what was going on, they just “urged inhabitants of the affected neighborhood to stay inside and remain calm while officials determine what to do.”

It lasted for two days. The streets packed with Skoags, our door locked, and my heart hammering the whole time, until I thought my head would blow up. Suspecting, almost knowing. On the third day, I woke up to a sound like birds harmonizing with the rush of ocean waves and the laughter of little kids. The sound had been part of a very good dream I was having, so when I woke up and still heard it, I wasn’t really awake. Then I realized what had wakened me. A smaller set of sounds. A chair being pushed across the carpet to the door. The chain being undone. I jumped out of bed. The street was empty, almost. There was only a grey government sedan, and the same government man who had come four years ago. And a big, big Skoag, with a tall purple crest. He was singing the harmonizing bird song, and Lisa was walking straight toward him. She was smiling, and her hair was floating on the wind. Like a dream walker. Then the Skoag opened his mittenedflippers to her, and she began to run.

I screamed her name, I know I did, but she didn’t seem to hear me. The Skoag picked her up, and I was still running down the street as they all got in the car. The government man gunned it and they were gone. And that’s the end of the story. Almost.

Mom was standing in the doorway, crying. The tears went crooked where they met her scars and flowed around them.

“Go after her!” I screamed. “Get her back. They can’t just take her.”

“No.” She said each word carefully, signing them for emphasis. “They didn’t take her. She wanted to go. She had to go. She shouldn’t have to come back, not just for us.”

“You can’t know that!” I screamed. “How can you say that?” She looked at me a long time. “Because I heard it,” she signed slowly, silently. I watched her scarred fingers move, the wonder that flooded her face. “I heard it, and it called me. But it wasn’t for me, not the me that’s here. It was for the other me, the one you made. The one you made for them. The circle closer. The one who listens so well that she has no need to speak. The me done right. But this me heard it and knew how bad she wanted to go.”

Then Mom went back in her room and closed her door.

Nothing happened after that. The fat Skoag never came back and Mom never went through withdrawal. I guess the last song was enough to last her forever. I never went to school again, and the government people never came to ask about us. They never came to tell us anything either. There were no write-ups in the paper, no news stories about a little girl stolen by the Skoags. No one ever asked why Lisa never came to school. No one ever asked just how much one little girl is worth to the government. Or to a Skoag with a purple crest.

But the next month Boeing got a huge government contract that put half of Seattle back to work, and the papers were full of news about the break-through design that would give us the stars. So I didn’t need it spelled out. Do you?

The world gets the stars, the Skoags get Lisa, and I get nothing. Lisa’s gone, and with her every touch of Lavender. It was a hard thing he asked of me, but I did it. I looked after the Mom. The Skoags can go back home now. Every day, there are fewer of them on the streets. They always bow to my Mom and me. They no longer sing, but all their crests ripple with color. Sometimes I wonder if Lavender even knew what he was asking.

Or maybe all he meant was that I should look out for Mom, and the rest of it was just an accident. I don’t know.

Morn and I still live here. Next month I’ll be eighteen. I’ll have to register with the Aid office as an adult, and with the Job office for training. Mom’s Career Mother checks will stop and she’ll have to get job training or lose all her Aid. I’ll have to move out, because Aid receivers aren’t allowed to let other adults share their homes. Mom will probably get a smaller place.

That’s too bad. Because just last night, as I was falling asleep on the couch, I heard a mouse, nibbling inside there.

It’s been a good home, really. I had good folks.

EVERYTHING BUT HONOR

George Alec Effinger

George Alec Ettinger’s by-line last appeared in our Mid-December1987 issue along with his gripping tale, “King of the Cyber Rifles.” That same year, Mr. Ettinger’s novel, When Gravity Fails (Arbor House/Bantam Spectra), was published to critical acclaim. The book was also a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards.

Dr. Thomas Placide, a black American-born physicist, decided to murder Brigadier General David E. Twiggs, and he realized that it had to be done in December of 1860. He made this decision at the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Jesse Owens had just triumphed over the world’s best runners in the two-hundred-meter dash. The physicist jumped up and cheered for the American victory, while his companion applauded politely. Yaakov Fein was one of the most influential scientists in the German Empire, but he was no chauvinist. After the race, Owens was presented to Prince Friedrich. The papers later reported that the prince had apologized for the absence of the seventy-seven-year-old Kaiser, and Owens had replied, “I’m sure the most powerful man in the world has more important things to do than watch six young men in their underwear run halfway around a circle.” The quotation may have been the product of some journalist’s imagination, but it became so identified with Jesse Owens that there was no point in arguing about it.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Placide settled back in his seat and looked at his program, getting himself ready for the next event. “You must be proud of him,” said Fein. “A fellow Negro.”

“I am proud of him,” Placide said. “A fellow American.”

“But you are a naturalized German citizen now, Thomas. You should cheer for the German runners.”

Placide only shrugged.

Fein went on. “It’s a hopeful sign that a Negro has finally won a place on the American Olympic team.”

Placide showed some annoyance. “In America, Negroes have equal rights these days.”

“Separate, but equal,” said Fein.

The black man turned to him. “They aren’t slaves anymore, if that’s what you’re implying. The German Empire has this fatuous paternal concern for all the downtrodden people in the world. Maybe you haven’t noticed it, but the rest of the world is getting pretty damn tired of your meddling.”

“We believe in using our influence for everyone’s benefit.”

That seemed to irritate Placide even more. “Every time some Klan bigot burns a cross in Mississippi, you Germans—”

Fein smiled. “We Germans, you mean,” he said.

Placide frowned. “All right, we Germans send over a goddamn ‘peacekeeping force’ for the next nine months.”

Fein patted the air between them. “Calm down, Thomas,” he said, “you’re being far too sensitive.”

“Let’s just watch the track and field events, and forget the social criticism.”

“All right with me,” said Fein. They dropped the subject for the moment, but Placide was sure that it would come up again soon.

Two years later, in November 1938, Dr. Placide was selected to make the first full-scale operational test of the Cage. He liked to think it was because of his contribution to the project. His journey through time would be through the courtesy of the Placide-Born-Dirac Effect, and neither Max Born nor Paul Dirac expressed any enthusiasm for the chance to act as guinea pig. In Berlin and Gottingen, there was a great deal of argument over just what the Placide-Born-Dirac Effect was, and the more conservative theorists wanted to limit the experiments to making beer steins and rodents disappear, which Placide and Fein had been doing for over a year.

“My point,” said Placide at a conference of leading physicists in Gottingen, “is that after all this successful study, it’s time for someone to hop in the Cage and find out what’s happening, once and for all.”

“I think it’s certainly time to take the next step,” said Werner Heisenberg.

“I agree,” said Erwin Schrodinger.

Dirac rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Nevertheless,” he said, “it’s much too soon to talk about human subjects.”

“Are you seriously suggesting we risk a human life on the basis of our ill-fated and unproven theories?” asked Albert Einstein.

Zach Marquand shrugged. “It would be a chance to clear up all the foggy rhetoric about paradoxes,” he said.

Edward La Martine just stood to one side, sullenly shaking his head. He obviously thought Placide’s suggestion was unsound, if not altogether insane.

“We have four in favor of using a human subject in the Cage, and four against,” said Fein. He took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. “I’m the project director, and I suppose it’s my responsibility to settle this matter. God help me if I choose wrong. I say we go ahead and expand the scope of the experiment.”

Placide looked relieved. “Let me volunteer, then,” he said.

“Typical American recklessness,” said La Martine in a sour voice.

“You mean,” said Placide, “that you’ll be happy if I’m the one in the Cage. Not as a reward for my work, of course, but because if anybody’s alternate history is going to be screwed up, better it be America’s than Germany’s.”

La Martine just spread his hands and said nothing.

“Then I volunteer to go along,” said Fein. “As copilot.”

“There’s nothing for a copilot to do,” said Placide. Even then, it may have been that Fein didn’t have complete faith in Placide’s motives.

Placide had his own agenda, after all, but he kept it secret from the others.

“Why don’t you travel back a week or so,” suggested Bonn. “Then you can take a photograph or find some other proof to validate the experiment, and return immediately to Gottingen and time T_0.”

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” said Placide. “I’d like to choose my own destination, and possibly solve a little historical problem while I have the chance.” The Cage would never have existed without him, and so it didn’t take him long to persuade the others. Placide and Fein worked with Marquand and his team for nine more weeks learning to calibrate the Cage. In the meantime, Placide studied everything he could find about General Twiggs, and he carefully hid his true plan from the Europeans.

Placide should have known that his first attempt would not go smoothly, but as far as he could see, his plan was foolproof. His reasoning was simple: His primary goal—greater even than testing the operation of the Cage—was to relieve the barbaric conditions forced on American blacks following the Confederate Insurrection of 1861.

Although he’d quit the land of his birth, he still felt an unbreakable bond between himself and others of his race, who could never escape the oppression as he had. A white friend of his father had enabled Placide to attend Yale University, where he’d studied math, and physics. During the middle 1930s, after he joined the great community of experimental scientists working in the German Empire, he began to see how he might accomplish something far more important than adding a new quibble to the study of particle physics.

The Cage—his Cage, as he sometimes thought of it—gave him the opportunity to make a vital contribution. His unhappy experiences as a child and a young man in the United States supplied him with sufficient motive. All he lacked was the means, and this he found through historical research as painstaking as his scientific work with Dirac and Born.

To Placide, Brigadier General David Emanuel Twiggs seemed to be one of those anonymous yet crucial players in the long game of history. In 1860 he was the military commander of the Department of Texas. Although few students of the Confederate Insurrection would even recognize his name, Twiggs nevertheless had a moment, the briefest moment, when he determined the course of future events. Placide had come to realize that Twiggs was his target. Twiggs could be used to liberate American blacks from all the racist hardships and injustices of the twentieth century.

Leaving T_0, the Cage brought Placide and Yaakov Fein to San Antonio on December 24, 1860. Fein agreed to guard the Cage, which had come to rest in a wintry field about three miles from Twiggs’s headquarters. Fein, of course, had no idea that Placide had anything in mind other than a quick scouting trip into this city of the past.

Placide began walking. From nearby he could hear the lowing of cattle, gathered now in shadowed groups beneath the arching limbs of live oaks. He climbed down a hill into a shallow valley of moonlit junipers and red cedar. The air smelled clean and sharp, although this Christmas Eve in Texas was not as cold as the February he’d left behind in Germany. Frosty grass crunched underfoot; as he passed through the weeds, their rough seeds clung to his trouser legs.

His exhilaration at his safe arrival in another time was tempered almost immediately by anxiety over the danger he was in. If anyone stopped and questioned him, he would have an impossible time explaining himself. At best, he would be taken for a freed slave, and as such he could expect little if any help from the local citizens. Worse was the fact that he had no proper identification and no money, and thus he would certainly appear to be a runaway.

Placide had put himself in a grave and desperate situation. If he failed and was captured, his only hope would be Fein, but Fein was a German with little knowledge of this period in American history, did not have much faith in the other man’s ability to rescue him, if it came to that. It might happen that no one would ever learn of Placide’s sacrifice. He was thinking of the black generations yet unborn, and not his colleagues in Gottingen. He was in a unique position to do something remarkable for his oppressed people.

As it happened, Placide was not detained or captured. He made his way through the barren, cold night to the general’s quarters. Twiggs was already in bed, and there was a young soldier standing sentry duty outside the door. Placide shook his head ruefully. Here was the first serious hitch in his plans. He was going to have to do something about that guard.

It wasn’t so difficult to gain entry. Placide needed only to nod at the young man, grab him, and drive a knife into his chest. The soldier made a soft, gurgling cry and slumped heavily in Placide’s grasp. Placide let the body fall silently to the floor. He paused a moment, listening for any sign of alarm, but all was still. Oddly, he felt no sense of guilt for what he’d done. In a way, the world of 1860 didn’t seem truly real to him. It was as if the man he’d killed had never really existed, although the corporal’s dark blood had stained Placide’s trousers convincingly.

Placide went quietly through the door and stood over General Twiggs’s bed, looking down at him. He was old, seventy or so, with long white hair and a dense white beard. He looked like a Biblical patriarch, sleeping peacefully. Placide was surprised to discover that it was not in him simply to kill the old man in his sleep. Placide wasn’t sure if he was too cruel or too weak for that. He woke Twiggs, pressing one hand over the general’s mouth to keep him silent.

“Don’t make a sound,” Placide said as Twiggs struggled to sit up. “I must speak with you. I’ll remove my hand if you promise not to call out for help. That will do you no good, in any event.” Twiggs nodded slowly, his eyes wide.

Placide took his hand away. Twiggs gasped and tried to speak, but for a moment he could only wheeze. “Who are you?” he asked at last.

“That’s not important. You must understand that your life is in my hands. Will you answer my questions?”

Twiggs was no fool. He knew better than to bluster or threaten. He nodded again. Dressed in his bedclothes, he was a wrinkled, feeble figure; but Placide suppressed his pity for the old man. Twiggs was a Southerner by birth and a secessionist by inclination. “You are in command here,” Placide said.

“Yes,” said the general. “If you think that after breaking into my room, you can get me to arrange for you to escape—”

Placide raised a hand curtly, cutting him off. “If for some reason you stepped down, who would assume command in your place?”

Twiggs’s brow furrowed, but otherwise he showed no outward sign of fear. “I suppose it would be Lieutenant Colonel Lee,” he said.

“You mean Robert E. Lee?”

“Of the First Cavalry,” said Twiggs.

Placide was relieved to hear the answer. Some months before, while Twiggs had been away from San Antonio, he had named Lee acting commander of the Department of Texas. If Twiggs were forced to retire, Lee would take over again until the War Department made its own permanent appointment.

“Now let me propose a hypothetical situation,” said Placide. “Suppose Texas decides to secede from the Union—”

“So you’ve burst your way in here and ruined my sleep to argue politics?” Twiggs demanded angrily. “And what have you done to the young man on guard duty?”

Placide slapped Twiggs hard across the face. “Suppose Texas decides to secede from the Union,” he repeated calmly. “What would your position be?”

The general raised a trembling hand to his cheek. His expression was furious, and Placide caught the first hint of fear in his eyes. “Texas will secede,” Twiggs said softly. “Any fool can read that. I’ve already written to Washington, but the War Department has so far chosen not to send me any definite instructions.”

“What will you do when the secessionist rebels demand your surrender?”

Twiggs’s gaze left Placide’s face and stared blankly toward the far wall. “I will surrender,” he said finally. “I have not the means to carry on a civil war in Texas.”

A gunshot would have roused the entire garrison. Placide cut the old man’s throat with his knife, then searched the room for items to take back with him to show Fein and the others. Finally, he made his escape back into the silent night of the past. Outside, it was very strange to smell bread baking not far away, as if all was well, as if something impossible had not just happened.

“There,” he told himself, “you have changed history.” It remained to be seen if he’d changed it for the better.

When Placide met Fein later that night, he suggested that they not return directly to 1938 and Gottingen. Fein was dubious. “The more time we spend here,” he argued, “the more chance there is that someone will see us. We may cause an alteration in the flow of events. That could be disastrous.”

Placide swallowed a mouthful of brandy he’d taken from Twiggs’s headquarters building. The liquor had a harsh, sweet taste, but it gave the illusion of warmth. He offered the brandy to his companion. “Yaakov,” he said, shivering in the cold night wind, “it’s already too late.”

Fein’s brows narrowed. “What are you talking about?” He declined to sample the general’s brandy.

Placide shrugged. “Just that I’ve already inserted myself into the past. I had a conversation with General Twiggs.”

“Don’t you know what that means?” cried Fein. He was furious. “We may return to the present and find God only knows what!”

“I couldn’t help it,” said Placide. “I was discovered. I was arrested and taken to the commanding officer. I had to do some fancy talking or you would never have seen me again.”

“God help us,” murmured Fein. The two men looked at each other for a moment. There was no sound but the lonely creaking of bare tree limbs, and the rustle of dead leaves blowing along the ground.

“Look,” said Placide, “why don’t we jump ahead to, say, February, and find out if anything’s different. In case of some kind of disaster, we can always reappear a few minutes before T_0 and prevent ourselves from making this trip.”

“I don’t know,” said the German. “That might leave two of you and two of me in the present.”

“Let’s worry about that only if we have to. Right now we’ve got to find out if my little interview had any permanent effect.” Fein watched him closely, but said nothing more.

The two men entered the Cage, and Placide reset the controls to take them forward a few weeks. He knew that on February 16, 1861, Texas state troops would surround the government buildings in San Antonio. Twiggs would give in quickly to demands that he turn over all the arms and equipment to the militia. Of course, Placide had prevented that from happening with his single bold stroke. In effect, he’d put Robert E. Lee in command of the Department of Texas. Lee was a Virginian, but he had publicly stated he would have no part in a revolution against the Union. Placide had acted to change his mind.

They reappeared in San Antonio on the twentieth of February. Once more, Fein guarded the Cage while Placide went into town. The air was warmer, and smelled of wood smoke. He heard the ragged cries of birds, and once he saw a large black winged shape detach itself from the ground and fly into a cottonwood that was beginning to show new yellow-green leaves. For a while, everything seemed peaceful.

The town, however, was in a frenzied state of confusion. Bands of armed rebels patrolled the streets. Gunshots frequently split the air. The younger men wore the wide-eyed, fierce looks of inexperienced warriors looking forward to their first battle. The older men and women were grim and worried, obviously in fear that the conflict that had threatened so long in the abstract had come at last.

Placide stood in a narrow alley between two shops, afraid to push himself into the throngs of shouting people in the street. Finally, as both his curiosity and fear for his own safety increased, he stopped a well-dressed, elderly white man. “Pardon me, sir,” he said, trying to sound calm, “my master has sent me for news.”

The older man drew himself up, unhappy at being accosted in the street by an unfamiliar slave. “Tell your master that our boys have driven the Federals out,” he said.

“That news will ease his pain,” said Placide. He was galled to have to pretend to be a slave, but he had no other choice. “And Lee?”

“The rascal is dead, killed in the fight.” The man was so pleased to be able to report that fact, he actually slapped the black man’s shoulder.

Placide was stunned by the news; he’d hoped to persuade Lee to become a general for the South. He watched the man turn and go on about his business, and he knew that it was time to go about his own. His plan had not failed; it had but succeeded too well.

When they returned to T_0, Placide and Fein discovered that the present was just as they’d left it, that their excursion in time had not changed the past, but rather created a new alternate reality. Still, some of their colleagues were furious.

“What the hell were you thinking of?” demanded La Martine. He’d been fascinated by the theoretical aspects of their work, but fearful of practical applications.

Now Fein was convinced that the Cage was too dangerous to use, at least until the Placide-Born-Dirac Effect was better understood.

Placide knew that if he hoped to try again in the past, he’d have to win La Martine and Fein over. “Look,” he said, “we’re all curious about what happens when a change is made in the past.”

“You were tampering!” cried La Martine. “As it turned out, you had no permanent effect—”

“So I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

“—but there was the possibility that you might have changed this world disastrously, for all of us. You had no right to attempt such a thing!”

“Sending beer steins into the past might have had disastrous results, too, Eduard,” said Heisenberg thoughtfully. “Yet you had no qualms about that.”

“Making inanimate objects vanish is hardly equal to interviewing historical figures in their bedrooms,” said Paul Dirac indignantly.

Placide had told the others that he’d merely discussed politics with General Twiggs. It hadn’t seemed profitable at the time to mention that he’d killed the old man. “You know how I feel about the Legislated Equality programs in the United States.”

Dirac gave him a weary look and nodded.

“Before returning here to T_0, Yaakov and I jumped from 1861 to 1895, where we bought a history of that new timeline.” Placide held up the book. “Here are the effects of our visit. I thought by going back before the Confederate Insurrection and starting things off on a different course, I could keep the Equality programs and the Liberty Boroughs and all the other abuses from ever happening. I persuaded Twiggs to retire, because I knew Robert E. Lee wouldn’t surrender the garrison at San Antonio. His sense of duty and honor wouldn’t allow it. He’d resist, and there would be a violent confrontation. The war would begin there in Texas, rather than two months later at Fort Sumter.”

“So?” asked Heisenberg.

“So Lee would learn firsthand that the war could not be avoided, and that the needs of the Confederacy were immediate and desperate. I was certain that history would unfold differently from there on. I wanted Lee to turn down Lincoln’s invitation to command the Union Army. In our world, his military brilliance brought the rebellion under control in little more than eighteen months. Now, though, we’d created a new timeline, one in which Lee would not be the Great Traitor, but rather the great genius of the Southern cause.”

“But you were wrong, Thomas,” said Fein. “Without Lee to lead it, the Union still defeated the Confederacy. All you succeeded in doing was extending the bloody conflict another year while the North searched for able military leadership.”

Placide shrugged. “A minor miscalculation,” he said.

“You’re personally responsible for the death of Robert E. Lee, man!” said La Martine.

Placide was startled. “What do you mean? Robert E. Lee’s been dead for almost seventy years. He died peacefully in the White House, not yet halfway through his term as president.”

“Yes,” said Marquand, “in our timeline that’s what happened. But you went into another universe and interfered. Lee’s blood is on your hands.”

Placide suddenly saw the absurd point Marquand was trying to make. “Zach,” he said, “we went into a world that doesn’t exist. It was a fantasy world. That Robert E. Lee didn’t really live, and he didn’t really die. He was no more than a possibility, a quantum quirk.”

“We’re talking about people, Thomas,” said Schrodinger, “not particles.”

“Particles come into and go out of existence all the time,” Placide protested. “Just the same way, the people and events in that timeline were only local expressions of the wave function. You’re letting emotion twist your thinking.”

Fein frowned at him. “Thomas, I want you to prepare a report as quickly as you can. We’re all going to have to think very hard about this. You’ve shown us that there are moral questions involved with this project that none of us foresaw.”

“Yaakov, I wish you’d—”

“And I’m not going to permit anyone to use the Cage again until we establish some philosophical ground rules.” Fein gave Placide a long, appraising look, then turned and left the room. Placide glanced at the book they’d brought back, the history of America in the timeline they now called Universe_2. He was very eager to get back to his quarters and read of the elaborate and unpredictable results of what he’d done.

Placide made another trip into the past, this one unauthorized and in secret. He didn’t know what Fein would do if he found out that Placide had ignored his prohibition, but to be truthful, Placide didn’t care. He had more important matters to worry about. It was his belief—and both Schrodinger and Marquand agreed with him—that a second experiment would take him to an 1861 untouched by his previous meddling. If their many-worlds hypothesis had any validity, it was statistically unlikely that Placide would find himself back in Universe_2. He could make a clean start in Universe_3, profiting from his regrettable mistakes.

His destination this second time was the District of Columbia, on the morning of April 18, 1861. He was dressed in clothes that would attract little attention in the past, and he took with him a small sum of U.S. money in gold and silver that he’d purchased through numismatic shops in Berlin. Upon his arrival, Placide left the Cage outside of town, as he’d done in Texas. He walked some distance in the chilly air of early spring. He intended to find a hotel where he might hire a carriage, but this was more difficult than he’d imagined. He was, after all, a black man and a stranger, on some inscrutable errand of his own. Whenever he approached an innkeeper or carriage driver with his gold coins, he was told either that none of the vehicles were in proper repair, or that they had all been reserved to other parties. He understood their meaning well enough.

Placide made his way along Pennsylvania Avenue to Blair House, almost directly across the street from the Executive Mansion. He gave a little involuntary shiver when he realized that inside the White House, at that moment, Abraham Lincoln was hearing firsthand reports of the events at Fort Sumter, and preparing his order to blockade the Confederate ports. Placide was tempted to abandon his subtle plan and instead seek an interview with the president himself. What advice and warnings he could give Lincoln, if he would only listen . . .

That was the problem, of course: Getting these strong-willed men to pay attention. Placide knew that he could help them save thousands of lives, and at the same time build a future free of the oppression their shortsightedness would lead to. His influence, of course, would be greater if he were white, but there was no point in making idle wishes. He would do the best he could.

A carriage pulled up in front of Blair House just as he arrived. He knew the man who stepped down from it must be Robert E. Lee, although he didn’t look much like the photographs Placide was familiar with. Lee was wearing the blue uniform of the U.S. Army, and he carried the wide-brimmed hat of a cavalry officer in one hand. He had yet to grow his famous gray beard. He was taller, too, with broad shoulders and a strict posture and military bearing that gave him an imposing appearance. His manner was calm and poised, although he was on his way to a momentous meeting.

Lee paused a moment, perhaps collecting himself, before turning toward the entrance of the grand house. Placide hurried up to him-“General Lee,” he said.

Lee smiled. “You flatter me,” he said. “I presently hold the rank of colonel.” He waited patiently, apparently thinking that Placide was bringing him a message of some kind.

Placide was struck by Lee’s gentle manner. There was intelligence in his eyes, but not the haggard, haunted look that would come later. In the few years remaining to him after the Insurrection, Lee always carried with him the painful knowledge that he had been, after all, the fatal betrayer of his homeland.

“I have some important information for you, sir,” Placide said. Now that he was before the man, the physicist was unsure how to proceed. After all, Lee wasn’t The Great Traitor yet, not in this timeline. Placide had prevented him from becoming the savior of the Union in Universe_2, but he’d learned only that Lee dead was no better than Lee as Yankee. “May I have a moment of your time?”

Lee pursed his lips. “I have an appointment at this address, sir, and I am obliged by both courtesy and duty to respect it.”

“I know,” said Placide, “and I won’t keep you long. When you go inside, Francis Preston Blair is going to offer you command of the Union Army, on behalf of President Lincoln. I know that you intend to accept; but if you do, sir, you will be damning future generations of American Negroes to lives of degradation and suffering. They will harbor a rage that will grow until our nation is torn by violence more terrible than this quarrel over secession. I beg you to reconsider.”

Lee did not reply at once. He studied Placide’s face for a long moment. “May I inquire, sir,” he said quietly, “how you come to be in possession of this information?”

Placide took out his wallet and removed a fifty-dollar bill—currency from the United States of his world, of his time. He handed it to Lee. The cavalry officer examined it in silence, first the back, with the picture of the Capitol Building, then the front, with his own portrait. “Sir, what is this?” he asked.

“Paper money,” said Placide.

Lee turned the bill over and over in his hands. “Is it a bank note?”

“Legal tender printed by the federal government, and backed by government gold reserves.”

“I’ve never seen a note like it before,” said Lee dubiously.

Placide showed him the small legend beside Lee’s picture. “It was issued in 1932,” he said.

Lee took a deep breath and let it out. Then he gave the money back to Placide. “Mr. Blair is an elderly man, and I do him no honor by my tardiness. I beg you to excuse me.”

“General Lee,” Placide pleaded, “if you accept Lincoln’s offer, you must lead an invading army onto the soil of Virginia, your home. How can you raise your sword against your own family and friends? You must allow me to explain. I showed you the bill because you’d think me a madman unless I presented some evidence.”

“Evidence only of the skill of your engraver,” said Lee. “I did not find the portrait flattering, and I did not find the item in question amusing.”

As earnestly as he could, Placide explained to him that he’d come through time to let Lee know of the terrible consequences of his decision to defend the Union. “I can tell you that with you in command, the Army of the Potomac will withstand the first thrusts of the Confederate forces.”

“Indeed, sir,” said Lee with a little smile.

“And then you will sweep down to force the evacuation of Richmond. You will coordinate your army’s movements with those of McClellan in the west, and divide the South into helpless fragments. In the meantime, the navy will blockade the ports along the Atlantic, the Gulf Coast, and the Mississippi River.”

“Your predictions make the difficulties seem not so very daunting, after all.”

Placide paid no attention to Lee’s skepticism. “The Confederacy’s only true victory will come at Petersburg, and only because of the incompetence of one of your subordinates, General Ambrose Burnside. Finally, on October 17, 1862, P. G. T. Beauregard will surrender the Army of Northern Virginia to you at Dry Pond, Georgia, northeast of Atlanta.”

“And tell me, sir,” said Lee, “will the Union thereafter be restored?”

“Yes,” said Placide, “the Union will be restored, but in terrible circumstances.” Placide described to him the fight over Reconciliation, and how the radical Republicans would seek to punish the Southern states. “All that will hold the country together in those furious months will be your strength of will as president,” Placide told him.

Lee shook his head. “I am certain now that you offer me dreams and not prophecy. I cannot conceive of any circumstance that would persuade me to undertake that office. I have neither the temperament nor the wisdom.”

“The Democrats will come to you, as a war hero and as a Southerner. You’ll be the natural choice to oversee the process of Reconciliation. Congress will battle you, but your resolve will be as strong as Lincoln’s. You’ll prevent the plundering of the South.”

“I am glad to hear this, but I wonder why you wish me then to decline the offer that awaits me inside. Would you see the South torn apart in peace to more horrible effect than in war?”

Placide felt a tremendous sympathy for this man, and he had to fight the urge to tell him all that would happen. In Placide’s own world, Lee would die in 1870. Vice President Salmon P. Chase would then be sworn in, and the long, cruel struggle of the black would resume. Before his death, Lee would prepare a document emancipating all the slaves in the South; but on taking office Chase would find it convenient to set this initiative aside. The issue would still be the self-determination of the states. Chase would let progress on civil rights hang in abeyance rather than antagonize the newly reconstituted Congress. Not until 1878, during the Custer administration, would slavery be officially abolished.

“Please try to understand,” said Placide, “what seems like victory for you and for the Union will be, for the Negro population, the beginning of a dreadful spiral down into a social and economic abyss.”

“I’m not certain that I take your meaning, sir,” said Colonel Lee.

“I mean only that your concern for the slaves will blind you to the long-range effects of what Congress will propose. And after you’ve left the White House”—Placide still could not tell Lee how brief his tenure would be—“your successors will pervert your programs to trap the Negroes in misery. Even in my time, seventy-five years after the Insurrection, many Negroes believe that life as a slave must have been better than what they endure. As wretched as the condition of slavery is, the American Negro of 1938 has little more of freedom or opportunity or hope.”

Lee was bemused by Placide’s vehemence. “If I entertain your argument, sir, I am left with the feeling that all my actions will be futile, particularly those guided most strongly by my conscience.”

“Millions of Negroes are forced to live in squalid slums the government calls Liberty Boroughs, segregated from the prosperous white communities,” Placide told him. “We suffer under the Legislated Equality programs, and—”

Lee raised a hand, cutting him off. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said. “I am grateful to have your opinion, but I can tarry here no longer.” He gave Placide a nod and strode up to the front door of Blair House.

Placide didn’t know how effective his appeal had been. He was heartened to see, however, that as Lee turned away, his expression was solemn and thoughtful.

In his own timeline, Placide had read that Lee, as general-in-chief of the Union Army, resisted the president’s frequent pleas to attack the Confederate units across the Potomac in Virginia. “You must do something soon,” Lincoln demanded late in July 1861. “The army consists to a large degree of ninety-day recruits who volunteered after the attack on Fort Sumter. The period of enlistment has almost expired. When it does, those young men will leave the ranks and go back to their families, unless they are given something to inspire them to remain. You must use them to strike a strong and decisive blow.”

Lee remained firm. “Our soldiers are simply not ready,” he said. “The volunteers are poorly trained and poorly outfitted. It would be little more than murder to take such an unprepared mob into battle.”

“A victory would encourage our soldiers and open the way to the capture of Richmond.”

Lee saw it differently. “A defeat,” he argued, “would open the way for the enemy to capture Washington.”

As the weeks went by, Lincoln continued to put pressure on Lee to act, even threatening to strip the general-in-chief of his command. But Lee would not be bullied. When the ninety-day period came to an end, most of the recruits reenlisted out of respect and admiration for Lee himself, and not the Federal cause. Lee used the time to deploy his troops with care and precision. He instructed his subordinates to hinder any advance of the Confederate army, but to fall back slowly rather than engage. Finally, on September 1, Lee reported to the president and his Cabinet that he was satisfied. Two weeks later, at Occoquan, Virginia, Lee defeated a numerically superior Confederate force under the command of General Beauregard. Aided by Generals Irwin McDowell and Benjamin Butler, Lee prevented the Southern corps from crossing the Potomac into Maryland and then encircling Washington.

The Battle of Occoquan was the smashing victory that Lincoln had hoped for. With one stroke, Lee crushed the dreams of the Confederacy. At Occoquan, he seized the offensive and never relinquished it for a moment during the rest of the war. The remainder of the eighteen-month struggle in the east saw little more than Beauregard’s courageous though vain efforts to delay, with his clever skirmishes and retreats, the unavoidable outcome. Inevitably, however, he was to have his most difficult meeting with Lee at Folkston’s Dining Room in Dry Pond. Beauregard, The Napoleon in Gray, was as noble in defeat as Lee was gracious in victory. The two men had been friends when they’d served together in Mexico. They would be friends again when Lee was president and Beauregard governor of Louisiana.

All of this was a matter of record, but Placide knew just how easily the record could be erased.

Placide felt a mixture of hope and anxiety while he waited in the street outside Blair House. If Lee emerged as a Union general, if he became again the Great Traitor, Placide planned to return to T_0 and abandon this timeline. He would then have to hit on a more forceful method of persuading Lee—in Universe_4. If, however, Placide had read Lee’s expression correctly, then he planned to spend quite some time in Universe_3, making short jumps forward through time to follow the course of the Insurrection. With the invincible Robert E. Lee as the defender of the Confederacy’s fortunes, the fate of the South would certainly be different.

Placide opened to the first page of the journal he intended to keep during his experiment. He wrote his first entry:

Universe_3

April 18, 1861

Outside Blair House, Washington

If things turn out as I hope, I will remain in this newly made world, studying it and perhaps learning something of value to take back with me to T_0. I will adopt this alternative timeline as my own, and love these people regardless of their sins, for have I not created them? Perhaps that sounds mad, but there has not yet been time enough to evaluate properly this unlooked-for benefit of my work. But surely I am a god to these people, having called them out of nothing, with the power to send their history off in whichever direction I choose. The God of Abraham created but the universe of T_0, and I have already created two more. How many others will I call into being before I achieve my purpose? General Lee comes now, with the fate of Universe_3 in his hands.

It was September 16, 1861, and the air should have been thick with drifting clouds of gunsmoke, the acrid breath of massed rifles; but the autumn breeze carried only the tang of burning firewood from a farmhouse nearby. There should have been the menacing, booming shocks of the field artillery, and the ragged cries of wounded men; but there was only stillness. The roads near Occoquan, Virginia, should have been jammed with wild-eyed, charging infantry, and the urgent mounted messengers of the generals; but only Thomas Placide disturbed the quiet countryside.

It was a grim, gloomy day in late summer, and black clouds threatened low overhead. It had not yet begun to rain, but a storm seemed imminent. Thunder cracked and rolled, and Placide grimaced. He did not like to be out in this kind of weather. He was cheered only by the knowledge that he had truly persuaded Robert E. Lee that a mechanism for the salvation of American blacks had been set in motion. All that now remained was the job of supervision, to make certain that Placide’s careful scheme did not falter as this world’s divergent history unfolded.

He shook his head. He wouldn’t have guessed that this was the kind of day Lee would choose for his first major test as a general in the Confederate Army. Placide hurried down a rutted, dusty lane, to the white-painted frame farmhouse, hoping to meet someone who could direct him to the battlefield.

The house was surrounded by a bare yard and a gap-toothed fence. Placide went through the yawning gate and climbed three steps to the porch. He heard nothing from within the house. He rapped loudly. A moment later, a distracted white woman opened the door, gave Placide a critical look, and shut the door again. “Ma’am?” called Placide. “Will you help me, ma’am?”

The door opened again, and he was looking at a tall, burly, frowning man. “We got nothin’ for you,” said the farmer.

“I just need some directions from y’all,” said Placide. He reminded himself that once again he needed to behave modestly.

“Directions we can afford, I guess,” said the farmer.

Placide nodded gratefully. “I’ve got to find my way to the battle, and quickly.”

The white man closed one eye and stared at him for a few seconds. “Battle?” he asked.

“I’ve got news for General Lee.”

“You his boy?”

Placide felt a flush of anger, but he stifled it. “No, sir, I’m a free man of color. But I’ve got news for General Lee.”

“What’s this about a battle? There been no soldiers around here except when they come by in July. On their way to Manassas.”

“Manassas? Where’s that?”

The farmer gave him another close look. “Where the battle was. Bull Run. It was Beauregard and Joe Johnston that licked the Yankees at Bull Run. Your boss was busy fetchin’ coffee cups for Jeffy Davis down in Richmond.”

Placide wondered at how quickly men and events had found their new course. “General Lee is obliged to follow the wishes of President Davis,” he said . . .

The farmer gave a derisive laugh. “While Granny Lee was doin’ just that, one Sunday afternoon the blue boys come out of Washington, thinkin’ they was goin’ to whup Beauregard and send him on home. Then Joe Johnston showed up to help him out, and before you know it the damn Yankees are runnin’ ever which way, goin’ back to cry on Lincoln’s shoulder.”

Placide took all this in. “Well, sir,” he said, “I guess they told me wrong when they said he’d come up here.”

“Your General Lee ain’t never been within fifty mile of here. As far as I know, he’s somewheres off in the west, diddlin’ around in the mountains.”

“I thank you, sir. I suppose I’d just better get back to Richmond myself. Someone’s made some kind of mistake.”

The farmer laughed. “I’m lookin’ right at him.” He turned away and closed the door. Placide found that his hands were clenched into tight fists. He let out his breath slowly and forced himself to relax. He walked back out through the farmer’s gate and headed back the way he’d come. He wanted to get back to the Cage before the heavy rain began.

Although he hated having to play the role of fool, Placide was elated by the news. He’d prevented the crushing Confederate defeat at Occoquan from occurring in Universe_3. There had been a mighty rebel victory that had not happened in Placide’s timeline, and it had happened even without Robert E. Lee. With Lee yet on the verge of fulfilling his destiny, Placide could almost see the glory of the greater victories yet to come. He found himself smiling broadly as the first huge raindrops spatted about him in the dust.

Universe_3

October 17, 1862

Dry Pond, Georgia

For the second time, I’ve come to watch an event that has vanished from history. I suspected that would be the case, yet I jumped here from Occoquan anyway. Hearing the news of the Battle of Bull Run, I was of the opinion that I had wholly altered the course of the Insurrection. It would be unlikely in the extreme that its ending should now fall out just as it had in my own timeline, on the same day, at the same place, and for the same reasons. Still, I had to be certain.

In the deficient universe of my origin, Beauregard’s surrender took place in the salon of Folkston’s Dining Hall. I was not foolish enough to enter that white establishment by the front door. Rather, I went around to the rear of the building. There I won the sympathy of the kitchen slaves with a glib story of fear and desperation. They kindly gave me a good meal, some clothing more appropriate than my own, and a sum of money in both Confederate scrip and silver.

Of course, no one here has heard rumors of the approach of atriumphant Union Army. Everyone agrees that the fighting continues far to the north of Maryland, and far to the west of Mississippi. Yaakov was right:I have given this world a fiercer, longer conflict. In Universe 3, this is no mere Confederate Insurrection. This is civil war.

And how is the struggle going? My new friends have caught me up on the thirteen months I missed, jumping here from Occoquan: George McClellan is Lincoln’s general-in-chief. (I am certain he is no Lee, and will hardly present an obstacle to Confederate triumph.) There was a Southern victory at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, and a battle at Shiloh, in Tennessee, that wasn’t much of a victory for the Federals or much of a defeat for the South. Lee defended Richmond against McClellan, and then, damn it! Lee and Stonewall Jackson beat up the Yankees at Bull Run a second time! That gave Marse Robert confidence to try to invade the North by heading up through Maryland—just as Beauregard tried in my own timeline. And just like Beauregard, Lee was stopped. He was stalled at Antietam Creek because a set of his campaign orders was lost and later discovered by Union soldiers.

If there is a turn for the worse, and if I must abandon Universe_3, I may begin again as I did at Blair House; but this time, I will remove in advance that careless officer at Antietam. “In for a penny, in for a pound.” It was not enough, it seems, to have won Robert E. Lee to my cause. I find that I must continue to supervise and guide this entire war.

How astonished Dirac and the others will be when I return to T_0! I will seem to have aged several years in a single moment.

How sad I will be to leave a world I am perfecting, to return to a world I can no longer love.

Placide locked his door and went downstairs to dinner. The Negro rooming house was on Rampart Street, on the edge of the Vieux Carre. Placide had grown up in New Orleans, but that had been in the early years of the twentieth century. Here it was 1864, and the city was very different. There were still steamboats working on the river and bales of cotton piled high on the wharves. He thought that somewhere in this quaint version of New Orleans, his own grandparents were growing up. He could visit them, if he chose to. The idea made him a little queasy.

A young quadroon woman waved to him. “Monsieur Placide,” she called, “won’t you sit beside me this evening?”

“I’d be delighted,” he said. Her name was Lisette, and she’d been the mistress of the son of a prosperous businessman who lived above Canal Street in the American Sector. It was common for a young white man of means to select a light-skinned girl like Lisette and establish her in a small house of her own on Rampart or Burgundy streets. It was her misfortune that the boy’s interest had waned, and he no longer supported her. Now she was looking for a new friend—a new white friend. The quadroon beauty disdained forming attachments to black men. When she’d called to Placide, she was just practicing her social graces.

“You always have so much interesting gossip,” she said.

Placide sighed and held her chair for her, then seated himself. “I wonder what Mrs. Le Moyne has for us tonight,” he said.

Mrs. Le Moyne came into the dining room and gave Placide a dour look. “I will serve y’all what I always serve,” she said. “And that is, sir, what little the damn Yankees haven’t taken for themselves or spoiled.”

Placide rose slightly from his seat and gave her a little bow. “You work miracles, madame,” he said.

“I’m sure, sir, that you wish I could,” said Mrs. Le Moyne. She went back out into the kitchen.

“Isn’t she a charmer?” whispered Lisette.

Another of the tenants sat down across the table from them. He was a surgeon’s assistant in the black community. Placide thought the man always seemed to know too much of everyone else’s business. “Will you be leaving us again soon, Mr. Placide?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Placide. “Tomorrow.”

“Where are you going?” asked Lisette. “Don’t the Yankees stop you from traveling?”

Placide shrugged. “I don’t worry about them.”

The black man across the table laughed. “Then you must be the only person in New Orleans who doesn’t.”

“How long will you be gone?” asked Lisette.

“Maybe a month or two,” said Placide. “Maybe longer.” He thought of the Cage, safe upstairs in his room. The War of Southern Independence was proceeding differently than he’d planned. Lee’s final northward thrust had been turned back at Gettysburg. The Confederate nation now had little hope of victory, but it still fought grimly on. Oddly, though, Placide was not wholly dissatisfied. What mattered was that Lincoln had been driven to a point of urgency. Politics might yet achieve for blacks what military might had not.

Almost a year before, desperate to rally continued support for his war effort, Lincoln had issued what he called an Emancipation Proclamation. In Placide’s timeline, with Lee leading the Federal forces to quick victory in 1862, Lincoln was never pressed to make such a concession. And in Universe_2, with Lee killed before the Insurrection even began, Lincoln considered freeing the slaves but put the idea aside when victory proved imminent in 1863.

Only here in Universe_3, in the spring of 1864, with Lee in a grim and determined struggle to hold off defeat as long as possible, could Placide see some hope that American blacks might avoid the horror of what President James G. Elaine had so sanctimoniously called Parallel Development.

“Mr. Placide,” said Lisette sweetly, “would you bring me back something pretty from your travels? I’d be ever so grateful.” She gave him a dazzling smile.

He was neither flattered nor fooled. He thought that with luck he’d bring her freedom and dignity, although he was sure she’d much rather have a new dress from New York. He only smiled back at the young woman, then turned his attention to the food Mrs. Le Moyne was carrying in from the kitchen.

Universe_3

March 22, 1884

New Orleans, Louisiana

Shock has followed shock: Even with Lee at last general-in-chief, the Confederate hopes ended in 1865. It’s as if God Almighty has decreed that it must happen just so in all worlds, all timelines, across the breadth of the manifold realities. Evidently the South cannot win, with Lee or without him. There are economic, social, and political reasons too vast for me to correct with so simple a plan.

Today, in a raging downpour, I witnessed the dedication of a handsome, brooding bronze statue of General Lee. The monument stands upon a column seventy feet above the traffic of St. Charles Avenue. Lee gazes resolutely northward, as if grimly contemplating the designs not only of the Union Army, but also of the subtle and guileful Yankee mind. It is a statue I have seen before, although in the world of my childhood the model was P. G. T. Beauregard, and not Robert E. Lee. I knew the area as Beauregard Place; here it has been newly named Lee Circle. In this timeline, of course, Lee is not the Great Traitor. He is idolized as a hero and the defender of the Southern way of life, despite the fact that it was his defeat that ended both the war and what is already being spoken of as the “Old South.” To me (and possibly to me alone), he is the Great Failure.

I see that I must begin again. If Lee is to be successful in Universe4, I must take a greater hand in arranging things. Perhaps Lincoln should die in 1862. Perhaps Jefferson Davis should also be removed, or at least be firmly persuaded to leave Beauregard with his command and to make better and timelier use of Lee’s abilities. I have the leisure to consider these matters, as I intend to make a few more jumps to evaluate the fate of the Negroes in this timeline before I return at last to T_0.

On one hand, this world doesn’t know either the corruption of the Custer and Elaine administrations, or the abuses of Chase’s program of Reconciliation. On the other hand, it has suffered through the different though no less odious crookedness of Ulysses Grant’s two terms. I wonder where Grant came from. If he played any important part at all in the universe of my origin, I never read any reference to it. Yet here he emerged as a shrewd tactician, a victor, and a president. More important to me, though, is that he oversaw most of Reconstruction and permitted the wholesale rape of the South.

Reconstruction was a grotesque injustice inflicted on a conquered population. In my world, the brief Confederate Insurrection and Lee’s vigilance as president prevented Congress from exacting such harsh penalties on the South. Even the ancient Romans knew better than to impose tyrannical conditions on a defeated people.

Here in Universe_3, almost twenty years after the war’s end, I see continued evidence of the South’s rage and indignation. The Southern attitude, shaped by the war and by Reconstruction, is a desperate desire to cling to what little yet remains of the old ways and the old life. There have been many attempts to circumvent the will of the Yankee, even to reviving slavery under new guises. This is, all in all, a bitter, unhealthy society.

And yet I will remain in this timeline a little while longer. I plan to look around 1884 for another few days, and then jump to 1938 and Gottingen, just a week or so before T_0, so that I will remain in Universe_3. I’m very curious to see what changes my experiment makes in the rest of the world after seventy-five years.

Despite the problems here, it is a more hopeful world for the Negro. Amendments to the U.S. Constitution have abolished slavery, guaranteed civil rights, and given Negroes the right to vote. Southern state legislatures have seated many Negroes, and some Negroes have been elected to office as high as lieutenant governor or been sent to Washington as senators and district representatives. In my timeline, slavery wasn’t abolished until 1878, while in 1939 most Southern Negroes still can’t vote, let alone run for office.

The version here of Elaine’s Parallel Development is segregation, which is not so absolute and despotic, but is still highly offensive. In the New Orleans of my world, Negroes may live only in specially zoned Liberty Boroughs, which are crowded, undeveloped neighborhoods with virtually no communication or trade with each other or with the white community. Negroes here are permitted by law to take up residence wherever they choose, although in actual practice it is impossible for Negroes to find homes in many white areas.

In Universe_3, Negroes may travel freely within the city and throughout the South. They may not always be made welcome, of course, but no official restrictions are placed on their movements. In the America I abandoned, a Negro must still carry an endorsement book, which records his assigned Liberty Borough and prevents him from traveling beyond it without a special permit. At any time the state government may move individuals or groups of Negroes from one Liberty Borough to another, sometimes without warning, explanation, or recourse. There are many more similar provisions of the Blaine program, and most of them are happily absent from this timeline.

At the close of the war, the South lay ruined and bankrupt. My experiment ended in tragedies I did not foresee and that have no counterpart in my world. The burning of Atlanta, Sherman’s march of devastation from that city’s ashes to the Atlantic coast, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln all occurred as a result of what I set in motion. The war went on three and a half years longer than in my timeline, where some one hundred thousand soldiers died in the Confederate Insurrection. In Universe_3, more than six hundred thousand perished in the Civil War.

That nameless army guard outside General Twiggs’s quarters did not seem real to me at the time. Why has it taken vast mountains of dead soldiers to make me see the full extent of what I’ve done? Nevertheless, I believe now that although the cost has been high, I have succeeded in my dream of improving the lot of my people, at least to a small degree. I am confident that the end has truly justified the means.

Placide jumped to 1938, to T_0 minus seven days. He felt like a trespasser. It gave him an eerie feeling to walk around the university town of Gottingen, knowing that there was very likely a duplicate of himself nearby, one who had lived his whole life in Universe_3.

There were important differences between the two timelines. Some of the streets and buildings here had new names, clothing styles were oddly altered, and there were unfamiliar flags and signs wherever he looked. The degree of change depended on how much influence the United States had in this alternate reality. After the Confederate Insurrection in his own timeline, the North and South hadn’t joined together strongly enough to make America an international power comparable to England, France, Germany, or Russia. Placide could not predict how in Universe_3 the bloodier Civil War might have affected that situation.

He climbed the steps of the laboratory, which in his own world had been in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute; the building was now called the Max Planck Institute. He found what had been his own office, but a stranger’s name was now on the door. As he walked down the darkened hallway reading notices and posters, he met the building’s elderly porter. Placide was cheered that, despite all, some things remained the same. “Good afternoon, Peter,” he said.

The old man cocked his head and studied him. “May I help you?” he asked. His tone was suspicious.

“Don’t you know me?”

Peter shook his head. “We don’t see many black men here.”

Whatever other changes had been made in Universe_3, Placide evidently had not pursued his studies in the German Empire. “I’m looking for a few of my colleagues,” he said.

Peter raised his eyebrows.

“Werner Heisenberg,” said Placide.

“Ah, Dr. Heisenberg’s no longer here. He’s gone to Berlin, to the other Max Planck Institute.”

“Well, then, how about Dr. Schrodinger?”

“He went to Austria. That’s where he’s from, you know. But I think I’ve heard that since then he’s gone on to England.”

“Paul Dirac?”

“He’s at Cambridge now.”

Placide wondered if this scattering of his colleagues meant that the discoveries they’d made together had not been made in this world. “La Marline and Marquand?”

“I’m sorry, but there’s never been anyone here by those names in the years I’ve worked here.”

That made Placide uncomfortable. “Yaakov Fein?”

Peter’s expression grew even more cautious. “Who are these men?” he asked.

“Albert Einstein?”

“Gone to live in America.”

“Tell me about Max Born. Max must still be here.”

“He’s now at the University of Edinburgh. He’s a British subject.”

Placide felt gripped by a cold despair. He suspected that there was no Placide-Born-Dirac Effect in Universe_3, and no Cage, either. “These men were friends of mine,” he said. “Do you mind if I look around here for a little while? I planned to come work here myself once.”

Peter gave him a dubious look, but nodded his head. “I guess it will be all right, if you don’t disturb anything.”

“I won’t.” The old porter left him alone in the dusty, drafty corridor.

A quarter of an hour later, while Placide was inspecting some primitive laboratory equipment, two men in the uniform of the town’s police approached him. “Will you come with us, sir?” one said.

“Why should I?” asked Placide.

“We must establish your identity. Please show us your papers.”

He’d been afraid this might happen. He knew he could be in serious trouble now. “I’m a German citizen,” he said.

It was obvious that the policemen didn’t believe him. “If that’s true,” said the second officer, “we’ll get this cleared up quickly at headquarters.” There was nothing else for Placide to do but go along.

Some time later he was led to a jail cell. He’d had no identification, and none of his references existed in this timeline or could be produced to vouch for him. As the jailer clanged the cell door shut he said, “Make yourself comfortable, Dr. Placide. I’m sure there’s been some misunderstanding. In the meantime, you’ll just have to make the best of it here.”

Placide nodded. The jailer went away, leaving him in the small, dim cell with another prisoner. “How good of you to drop in,” said the other man. Placide lay on his hard bunk and stared sullenly at the ceiling. The air was stale, and there was a heavy smell of urine and vomit.

“My name is Schindler,” said his cellmate. “I’m a thief, but not a very good one.”

“Apparently,” murmured Placide.

Schindler laughed. “What got you nicked?”

“No identification.”

“That’s a hanging offense in this town, friend. Where are you from?”

“The United States, originally. But I’ve lived in Germany for a few years.”

Schindler whistled tunelessly for a little while. “What do you do in Germany?” he asked at last.

“I’m a scientist,” said Placide. “Particle physics, quantum mechanics. Nothing that would interest the average person.”

“Jewish physics,” said Schindler, laughing again. “Einstein and that gang, right?”

“Yes,” said Placide, puzzled.

“No wonder you’re locked up.”

“What do you mean, Jewish physics?”

“The government’s official policy is that sort of thing isn’t politically correct.”

“Politically correct?” cried Placide. “Science is science, truth is truth!”

“And the National Socialists decide which is which.”

They talked for some time, and Schindler gave him a great deal to think about. After a while, Placide told the good-humored thief about the Cage and his adventures traveling from one universe to another. Schindler was skeptical, but he stopped short of calling Placide a liar. The two men compared what they knew of recent history in their divergent worlds.

Here in Universe_3, the United States had taken part in the Great War, and the German Empire had come to an end. In response to the Depression, and growing out of Germany’s bitterness after the war, a party of fascists came to power in Berlin. Many talented people, liberals and Jews and other persecuted groups, fled Germany soon after that.

“You shouldn’t admit that you even knew those people,” advised Schindler. “You won’t do yourself any good.”

“What can they do to me?”

Schindler laid a finger alongside his nose and spoke in a hushed voice. “They can send you to the camps,” he said.

“What kind of camps?”

“The kind of place where your friend Einstein might have been sent. Where lots of brilliant but racially inferior scientists are hauling boulders around until they drop dead.” He gave Placide a meaningful look.

It was too crazy for Placide to believe, but still he began making plans to escape. When he was out, he’d use the Cage to get out of this stifling reality as quickly as he could. In the meantime, he hoped that the mechanism of the German government would operate efficiently.

Weeks later he was granted a hearing. He sat in a small room at a wooden table, while several strangers testified that he was insane. Peter the porter was brought in. He identified Placide as the man who’d wandered into the laboratory and asked after the decadent physicists. Schindler reported everything Placide had told him, and added his own embellishments. Quite obviously, he’d been put in the cell with Placide as an informer.

Placide himself was not permitted to testify. He was judged insane. The American embassy could find no record of him in New Orleans; the examining board ironically chose to believe only one item of Placide’s story, that he was a naturalized German. Therefore, it had the authority to remand him to a clinic for the mentally disturbed in Brandenburg. After the hearing, he was locked up again, along with Schindler.

“You goddamn spy!” cried Placide. His voice echoed in the cold stone cell.

Schindler shrugged. “Everyone is a spy these days,” he said. “I’m sorry you’re upset. Let me make it up to you. I’ll give you some advice: Be careful when you get to Brandenburg.” He lay down on his narrow wooden bunk and turned away from Placide.

“What are you talking about?”

Schindler took out a penknife and began chipping at the mortar between two blocks in the wall. “I mean, that clinic isn’t what it appears to be. The Brandenburg Clinic is a euthanasia center, friend. So when you go in, just take a deep breath and try to hold it as long as you can.”

Schindler’s knife was making a rasping, gritty sound. Placide stared at his back. “I’m being sent to a mental health clinic.”

“Carbon monoxide,” said Schindler, turning to face him. “That’s the only treatment they use. Look, you say you helped the Negroes of your country, but see what you’ve let loose in the world instead! When they drag you into that narrow room, think about that. Think about all the other people who are going to follow you to the gas, and decide if it was worth it.”

Placide shut his eyes tightly. “Of course it was worth it,” he said fiercely. “All that I’ve discovered. All that I’ve accomplished. I only regret that I won’t be able to go back to T_0 and report to the others. Then I’d go back to 1860 and try again, correct my mistakes. Even if it took me two or three more attempts, I’d succeed eventually. And then I could move on to another time, another problem. We could create a committee to guide similar experiments all through history, relieving suffering and oppression wherever we chose.”

Schindler jammed his penknife into the wooden frame of the bunk. “You are insane, Placide, do you know that? You haven’t learned a goddamn thing. You’d charge right ahead if you could, and who knows what new horrors you’d instigate? You’ve got a rare talent for making good times hard, and hard times worse.”

“I have one chance,” Placide murmured thoughtfully, not hearing Schindler’s words at all. “Another Thomas Placide, from another parallel reality, may be aware of my trouble here. He may be searching for me this very minute. I have to hang onto that hope. I must have faith.”

Schindler laughed as if he’d never heard anything so funny in his life.

And while Nazi guards patrolled the hallway beyond the cell’s iron-barred door, Placide began planning what he would do when he was released, and where he would go, and on whom he’d revenge himself.

THE PRICE OF ORANGES

Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress returns to our pages with a powerful tale that gently combines an often bitter reality with a touch of humor and a breath of hope. The author’s most recent novel, An Alien Light, has just been released by Avon Books in paperback. Ms. Kress is currently working on a novel that is mostly set in Rochester, New York.

“I’m worried about my granddaughter,” Harry Kramer said, passing half of his sandwich to Manny Feldman. Manny took it eagerly. The sandwich was huge, thick slices of beef and horseradish between fresh slabs of crusty bread. Pigeons watched the park bench hopefully.

“Jackie. The granddaughter who writes books,” Manny said. Harry watched to see that Manny ate. You couldn’t trust Manny to eat enough; he stayed too skinny. At least in Harry’s opinion. Manny, Jackie—the world, Harry sometimes thought, had all grown too skinny when he somehow hadn’t been looking. Skimpy. Stretch-feeling. Harry nodded to see horseradish spurt in a satisfying stream down Manny’s scraggly beard.

“Jackie. Yes,” Harry said.

“So what’s wrong with her? She’s sick?” Manny eyed Harry’s strudel, cherry with real yeast bread. Harry passed it to him. “Harry, the whole thing? I couldn’t.”

“Take it, take it, I don’t want it. You should eat. No, she’s not sick. She’s miserable.”

When Manny, his mouth full of strudel, didn’t answer, Harry put a hand on Manny’s arm. “Miserable.”

Manny swallowed hastily. “How do you know? You saw her this week?”

“No. Next Tuesday. She’s bringing me a book by a friend of hers. I know from this.”

He drew a magazine from an inner pocket of his coat. The coat was thick tweed, almost new, with wooden buttons. On the cover of the glossy magazine a woman smiled contemptuously. A woman with hollow, starved-looking cheeks who obviously didn’t get enough to eat either.

“That’s not a book,” Manny pointed out.

“So she writes stories, too. Listen to this. Just listen. ‘I stood in my backyard, surrounded by the false bright toxin-fed green, and realized that the earth was dead.

What else could it be, since we humans swarmed upon it like maggots on carrion, growing our hectic gleaming molds, leaving our slime trails across the senseless surface?’ Does that sound like a happy woman?”

“Hoo boy,” Manny said.

“It’s all like that. ‘Don’t read my things, Popsy,’ she says. ‘You’re not in the audience for my things.’ Then she smiles without ever once showing her teeth.” Harry flung both arms wide. “Who else should be in the audience but her own grandfather?”

Manny swallowed the last of the strudel. Pigeons fluttered angrily. “She never shows her teeth when she smiles? Never?”

“Never.”

“Hoo boy,” Manny said. “Did you want all of that orange?”

“No, I brought it for you, to take home. But did you finish that whole half a sandwich already?”

“I thought I’d take it home,” Manny said humbly. He showed Harry the tip of the sandwich, wrapped in the thick brown butcher paper, protruding from the pocket of his old coat.

Harry nodded approvingly. “Good, good. Take the orange, too. I brought it for you.”

Manny took the orange. Three teenagers carrying huge shrieking radios sauntered past. Manny started to put his hands over his ears, received a look of dangerous contempt from the teenager with green hair, and put his hands on his lap. The kid tossed an empty beer bottle onto the pavement before their feet. It shattered. Harry scowled fiercely but Manny stared straight ahead. When the cacophony had passed, Manny said, “Thank you for the orange. Fruit, it costs so much this time of year.”

Harry still scowled. “Not in 1937.”

“Don’t start that again, Harry.”

Harry said sadly, “Why won’t you ever believe me? Could I afford to bring all this food if I got it at 1988 prices? Could I afford this coat? Have you seen buttons like this in 1988, on a new coat? Have you seen sandwiches wrapped in that kind of paper since we were young? Have you? Why won’t you believe me?”

Manny slowly peeled his orange. The rind was pale, and the orange had seeds.

“Harry. Don’t start.”

“But why won’t you just come to my room and see?”

Manny sectioned the orange. “Your room. A cheap furnished room in a Social Security hotel. Why should I go? I know what will be there. What will be there is the same thing in my room. A bed, a chair, a table, a hot plate, some cans of food. Better I should meet you here in the park, get at least a little fresh air.” He looked at Harry meekly, the orange clutched in one hand. “Don’t misunderstand. It’s not from a lack of friendship I say this. You’re good to me, you’re the best friend I have. You bring me things from a great deli, you talk to me, you share with me the family I don’t have. It’s enough, Harry. It’s more than enough. I don’t need to see where you live like I live.”

Harry gave it up. There were moods, times, when it was just impossible to budge Manny. He dug in, and in he stayed. “Eat your orange.”

“It’s a good orange. So tell me more about Jackie.”

“Jackie.” Harry shook his head. Two kids on bikes tore along the path. One of them swerved towards Manny and snatched the orange from his hand. “Aw riggghhhtttt!”

Harry scowled after the child. It had been a girl. Manny just wiped the orange juice off his fingers onto the knee of his pants. “Is everything she writes so depressing?”

“Everything,” Harry said. “Listen to this one.” He drew out another magazine, smaller, bound in rough paper with a stylized linen drawing of a woman’s private parts on the cover. On the cover! Harry held the magazine with one palm spread wide over the drawing, which made it difficult to keep the pages open while he read. “ ‘She looked at her mother in the only way possible: with contempt, contempt for all the betrayals and compromises that had been her mother’s life, for the sad soft lines of defeat around her mother’s mouth, for the bright artificial dress too young for her wasted years, for even the leather handbag, Gucci of course, filled with blood money for having sold her life to a man who had long since ceased to want it.’ ”

“Hoo boy,” Manny said. “About a mother she wrote that?”

“About everybody. All the time.”

“And where is Barbara?”

“Reno again. Another divorce.” How many had that been? After two, did anybody count? Harry didn’t count. He imagined Barbara’s life as a large roulette wheel like the ones on TV, little silver men bouncing in and out of red and black pockets. Why didn’t she get dizzy?

Manny said slowly, “I always thought there was a lot of love in her.”

“A lot of that she’s got,” Harry said dryly.

“Not Barbara—Jackie. A lot of . . . I don’t know. Sweetness. Under the way she is.”

“The way she is,” Harry said gloomily. “Prickly. A cactus. But you’re right, Manny, I know what you mean. She just needs someone to soften her up. Love her back, maybe.

Although I love her.”

The two old men looked at each other. Manny said, “Harry . . .”

“I know, I know. I’m only a grandfather, my love doesn’t count, I’m just there. Like air. ‘You’re wonderful, Popsy,’ she says, and still no teeth when she smiles. But you know, Manny—you are right!” Harry jumped up from the bench. “You are! What she needs is a young man to love her!”

Manny looked alarmed. “I didn’t say—”

“I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before!”

“Harry—”

“And her stories, too! Full of ugly murders, ugly places, unhappy endings. What she needs is something to show her that writing could be about sweetness, too.”

Manny was staring at him hard. Harry felt a rush of affection. That Manny should have the answer! Skinny wonderful Manny!

Manny said slowly, “Jackie said to me, ‘I write about reality.’ That’s what she said, Harry.”

“So there’s no sweetness in reality? Put sweetness in her life, her writing will go sweet. She needs this, Manny. A really nice fellow!”

Two men in jogging suits ran past. One of their Reeboks came down on a shard of beer bottle. “Every fucking time!” he screamed, bending over to inspect his shoe.

“Fucking park!”

“Well, what do you expect?” the other drawled, looking at Manny and Harry.

“Although you’d think that if we could clean up Lake Erie . . .”

“Fucking derelicts!” the other snarled. They jogged away.

“Of course,” Harry said, “it might not be easy to find the sort of guy to convince Jackie.”

“Harry, I think you should maybe think—”

“Not here,” Harry said suddenly. “Not here. There. In 1937.”

“Harry....”

“Yeah,” Harry said, nodding several times. Excitement filled him like light, like electricity. What an idea! “It was different then.”

Manny said nothing. When he stood up, the sleeve of his coat exposed the number tattooed on his wrist. He said quietly, “It was no paradise in 1937 either, Harry.”

Harry seized Manny’s hand. “I’m going to do it, Manny. Find someone for her there.

Bring him here.”

Manny sighed. “Tomorrow at the chess club, Harry? At one o’clock? It’s Tuesday.”

“I’ll tell you then how I’m coming with this.”

“Fine, Harry. Fine. All my wishes go with you. You know that.”

Harry stood up too, still holding Manny’s hand. A middle-aged man staggered to the bench and slumped onto it. The smell of whiskey rose from him in waves. He eyed Manny and Harry with scorn. “Fucking fags.”

“Good night, Harry.”

“Manny—if you’d only come . . . money goes so much farther there . . .”

“Tomorrow at one. At the chess club.”

Harry watched his friend walk away. Manny’s foot dragged a little; the knee must be bothering him again. Harry wished Manny would see a doctor. Maybe a doctor would know why Manny stayed so skinny.

Harry walked back to his hotel. In the lobby, old men slumped in upholstery thin from wear, burned from cigarettes, shiny in the seat from long sitting. Sitting and sitting, Harry thought—life measured by the seat of the pants. And now it was getting dark. No one would go out from here until the next daylight. Harry shook his head.

The elevator wasn’t working again. He climbed the stairs to the third floor. Halfway there, he stopped, felt in his pocket, counted five quarters, six dimes, two nickels, and eight pennies. He returned to the lobby. “Could I have two dollar bills for this change, please? Maybe old bills?”

The clerk looked at him suspiciously. “Your rent paid up?”

“Certainly,” Harry said. The woman grudgingly gave him the money.

“Thank you. You look very lovely today, Mrs. Raduski.” Mrs. Raduski snorted.

In his room, Harry looked for his hat. He finally found it under his bed—how had it gotten under his bed? He dusted it off and put it on. It had cost him $3.25. He opened the closet door, parted the clothes hanging from their metal pole—like Moses parting the sea, he always thought, a Moses come again—and stepped to the back of the closet, remembering with his body rather than his mind the sharp little twist to the right just past the far gray sleeve of his good wool suit.

He stepped out into the bare corner of a warehouse. Cobwebs brushed his hat; he had stepped a little too far right. Harry crossed the empty concrete space to where the lumber stacks started, and threaded his way through them. The lumber, too, was covered with cobwebs; not much building going on. On his way out the warehouse door, Harry passed the night watchman coming on duty.

“Quiet all day, Harry?”

“As a church, Rudy,” Harry said. Rudy laughed. He laughed a lot. He was also indisposed to question very much. The first time he had seen Harry coming out of the warehouse in a bemused daze, he must have assumed that Harry had been hired to work there. Peering at Rudy’s round, vacant face, Harry realized that he must hold this job because he was someone’s uncle, someone’s cousin, someone’s something. Harry had felt a small glow of approval; families should take care of their own. He had told Rudy that he had lost his key and asked him for another.

Outside it was late afternoon. Harry began walking. Eventually there were people walking past him, beside him, across the street from him. Everybody wore hats. The women wore bits of velvet or wool with dotted veils across their noses and long, graceful dresses in small prints. The men wore fedoras with suits as baggy as Harry’s.

When he reached the park there were children, girls in long black tights and hard shoes, boys in buttoned shirts. Everyone looked like it was Sunday morning.

Pushcarts and shops lined the sidewalks. Harry bought a pair of socks, thick gray wool, for 89 cents. When the man took his dollar, Harry held his breath: each first time made a little pip in his stomach. But no one ever looked at the dates of old bills. He bought two oranges for five cents each, and then, thinking of Manny, bought a third. At a candystore he bought G-8 And His Battle Aces for fifteen cents. At The Collector’s Cozy in the other time they would gladly give him thirty dollars for it. Finally, he bought a cherry Coke for a nickel and headed towards the park.

“Oh, excuse me,” said a young man who bumped into Harry on the sidewalk. “I’m so sorry!” Harry looked at him hard: but, no. Too young. Jackie was twenty-eight.

Some children ran past, making for the movie theater. Spencer Tracy in Captains Courageous. Harry sat down on a green-painted wooden bench under a pair of magnificent Dutch elms. On the bench lay a news-magazine. Harry glanced at it to see when in September this was: the 28th. The cover pictured a young blond Nazi soldier standing at stiff salute. Harry thought again of Manny, frowned, and turned the magazine cover down.

For the next hour, people walked past. Harry studied them carefully. When it got too dark to see, he walked back to the warehouse, on the way buying an apple kuchen at a bakery with a curtain behind the counter looped back to reveal a man in his shirt sleeves eating a plate of stew at a table bathed in soft yellow lamplight. The kuchen cost thirty-two cents.

At the warehouse, Harry let himself in with his key, slipped past Rudy nodding over Paris Nights, and walked to his cobwebby corner. He emerged from his third-floor closet into his room. Beyond the window, sirens wailed and would not stop.

“So how’s it going?” Manny asked. He dripped kuchen crumbs on the chessboard; Harry brushed them away. Manny had him down a knight.

“It’s going to take time to find somebody that’s right,” Harry said. “I’d like to have someone by next Tuesday when I meet Jackie for dinner, but I don’t know. It’s not easy.

There are requirements. He has to be young enough to be attractive, but old enough to understand Jackie. He has to be sweet-natured enough to do her some good, but strong enough not to panic at jumping over fifty-two years. Somebody educated. An educated man—he might be more curious than upset by my closet. Don’t you think?”

“Better watch your queen,” Manny said, moving his rook. “So how are you going to find him?”

“It takes time,” Harry said. “I’m working on it.”

Manny shook his head. “You have to get somebody here, you have to convince him he is here, you have to keep him from turning right around and running back in time through your shirts . . . I don’t know, Harry. I don’t know. I’ve been thinking. This thing is not simple. What if you did something wrong? Took somebody important out of 1937?”

“I won’t pick anybody important.”

“What if you made a mistake and brought your own grandfather? And something happened to him here?”

“My grandfather was already dead in 1937.”

“What if you brought me? I’m already here.”

“You didn’t live here in 1937.”

“What if you brought you?”

“I didn’t live here either.”

“What if you . . .”

“Manny,” Harry said, “I’m not bringing somebody important. I’m not bringing somebody we know. I’m not bringing somebody for permanent. I’m just bringing a nice guy for Jackie to meet, go dancing, see a different kind of nature. A different view of what’s possible. An innocence. I’m sure there are fellows here that would do it, but I don’t know any, and I don’t know how to bring any to her. From there I know. Is this so complicated? Is this so unpredictable?”

“Yes,” Manny said. He had on his stubborn look again. How could somebody so skimpy look so stubborn? Harry sighed and moved his lone knight.

“I brought you some whole socks.”

“Thank you. That knight, it’s not going to help you much.”

“Lectures. That’s what there was there that there isn’t here. Everybody went to lectures. No TV, movies cost money, they went to free lectures.”

“I remember,” Manny said. “I was a young man myself. Harry, this thing is not simple.”

“Yes, it is,” Harry said stubbornly.

“1937 was not simple.”

“It will work, Manny.”

“Check,” Manny said.

That evening, Harry went back. This time it was the afternoon of September 16. On newsstands the New York Times announced that President Roosevelt and John L. Lewis had talked pleasantly at the White House. Cigarettes cost thirteen cents a pack. Women wore cotton stockings and clunky, high-heeled shoes. Schrafft’s best chocolates were sixty cents a pound. Small boys addressed Harry as “sir.”

He attended six lectures in two days. A Madame Trefania lectured on theosophy to a hall full of badly-dressed women with thin, pursed lips. A union organizer roused an audience to a pitch that made Harry leave after the first thirty minutes. A skinny, nervous missionary showed slides of religious outposts in China. An archeologist back from a Mexican dig gave a dry, impatient talk about temples to an audience of three people. A New Deal Democrat spoke passionately about aiding the poor, but afterwards addressed all the women present as “Sister.” Finally, just when Harry was starting to feel discouraged, he found it.

A museum offered a series of lectures on “Science of Today—and Tomorrow.” Harry heard a slim young man with a reddish beard speak with idealistic passion about travel to the moon, the planets, the stars. It seemed to Harry that compared to stars, 1989 might seem reasonably close. The young man had warm hazel eyes and a sense of humor.

When he spoke about life in a space ship, he mentioned in passing that women would be freed from much domestic drudgery they now endured. Throughout the lecture, he smoked, lighting cigarettes with a masculine squinting of eye and cupping of hands. He said that imagination was the human quality that would most help people adjust to the future. His shoes were polished.

But most of all, Harry thought, he had a glow. A fine golden Boy Scout glow that made Harry think of old covers for the Saturday Evening Post. Which here cost five cents.

After the lecture, Harry stayed in his chair in the front row, outwaiting even the girl with bright red lipstick who lingered around the lecturer, this Robert Gernshon. From time to time, Gernshon glanced over at Harry with quizzical interest. Finally the girl, red lips pouting, sashayed out of the hall.

“Hello,” Harry said. “I’m Harry Kramer. I enjoyed your talk. I have something to show you that you would be very interested in.”

The hazel eyes turned wary. “Oh, no, no,” Harry said. “Something scientific. Here, look at this.” He handed Gernshon a filtered Vantage Light.

“How long it is,” Gernshon said. “What’s this made of?”

“The filter? It’s made of . . . a new filter material. Tastes milder and cuts down on the nicotine. Much better for you. Look at this.” He gave Gernshon a styrofoam cup from MacDonald’s. “It’s made of a new material, too. Very cheap. Disposable.”

Gernshon fingered the cup. “Who are you?” he said quietly.

“A scientist. I’m interested in the science of tomorrow, too. Like you. I’d like to invite you to see my laboratory, which is in my home.”

“In your home?”

“Yes. In a small way. Just dabbling, you know.” Harry could feel himself getting rattled; the young hazel eyes stared at him so steadily. Jackie, he thought. Dead earths.

Maggots and carrion. Contempt for mothers. What would Gernshon say? When would Gernshon say anything?

“Thank you,” Gernshon finally said. “When would be convenient?”

“Now?” Harry said. He tried to remember what time of day it was now. All he could picture was lecture halls.

Gernshon came. It was nine-thirty in the evening of Friday, September 17. Harry walked Gernshon through the streets, trying to talk animatedly, trying to distract. He said that he himself was very interested in travel to the stars. He said it had always been his dream to stand on another planet and take in great gulps of completely unpolluted air. He said his great heroes were those biologists who made that twisty model of DNA.

He said science had been his life. Gernshon walked more and more silently.

“Of course,” Harry said hastily, “like most scientists, I’m mostly familiar with my own field. You know how it is.”

“What is your field, Dr. Kramer?” Gernshon asked quietly.

“Electricity,” Harry said, and hit him on the back of the head with a solid brass candlestick from the pocket of his coat. The candlestick had cost him three dollars at a pawn shop.

They had walked past the stores and pushcarts to a point where the locked business offices and warehouses began. There were no passers-by, no muggers, no street dealers, no Guardian Angels, no punk gangs. Only him, hitting an unarmed man with a candlestick. He was no better than the punks. But what else could he do? What else could he do? Nothing but hit him softly, so softly that Gernshon was struggling again almost before Harry got his hands and feet tied, well before he got on the blindfold and gag. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he kept saying to Gernshon. Gernshon did not look as if the apology made any difference. Harry dragged him into the warehouse.

Rudy was asleep over Spicy Stories. Breathing very hard, Harry pulled the young man—not more than 150 pounds, it was good Harry had looked for slim—to the far corner, through the gate, and into his closet.

“Listen,” he said urgently to Gernshon after removing the gag. “Listen. I can call the Medicare Emergency Hotline. If your head feels broken. Are you feeling faint? Do you think you maybe might go into shock?”

Gernshon lay on Harry’s rug, glaring at him, saying nothing.

“Listen, I know this is maybe a little startling to you. But I’m not a pervert, not a cop, not anything but a grandfather with a problem. My granddaughter. I need your help to solve it, but I won’t take much of your time. You’re now somewhere besides where you gave your lecture. A pretty long ways away. But you don’t have to stay here long, I promise. Just two weeks, tops, and I’ll send you back. I promise, on my mother’s grave.

And I’ll make it worth your while. I promise.”

“Untie me.”

“Yes. Of course. Right away. Only you have to not attack me, because I’m the only one who can get you back from here.” He had a sudden inspiration. “I’m like a foreign consul. You’ve maybe traveled abroad?”

Gernshon looked around the dingy room. “Untie me.”

“I will. In two minutes. Five, tops. I just want to explain a little first.”

“Where am I?”

“1989.”

Gernshon said nothing. Harry explained brokenly, talking as fast as he could, saying he could move from 1989 to September 1937 when he wanted to, but he could take Gernshon back too, no problem. He said he made the trip often, it was perfectly safe. He pointed out how much farther a small Social Security check, no pension, could go at 1937 prices. He mentioned Manny’s strudel. Only lightly did he touch on the problem of Jackie, figuring there would be a better time to share domestic difficulties, and his closet he didn’t mention at all. It was hard to keep his eyes averted from the closet door. He did mention how bitter people could be in 1989, how lost, how weary from expecting so much that nothing was a delight, nothing a sweet surprise. He was just working up to a tirade on innocence when Gernshon said again, in a different tone, “Untie me.”

“Of course,” Harry said quickly, “I don’t expect you to believe me. Why should you think you’re in 1989? Go, see for yourself. Look at that light, it’s still early morning. Just be careful out there, is all.” He untied Gernshon and stood with his eyes squeezed shut, waiting.

When nothing hit him, Harry opened his eyes. Gernshon was at the door. “Wait!”

Harry cried. “You’ll need more money!” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, carefully saved for this, and all the change he had.

Gernshon examined the coins carefully, then looked up at Harry. He said nothing. He opened the door and Harry, still trembling, sat down in his chair to wait.

Gernshon came back three hours later, pale and sweating. “My God!”

“I know just what you mean,” Harry said. “A zoo out there. Have a drink.”

Gernshon took the mixture Harry had ready in his toothbrush glass and gulped it down. He caught sight of the bottle, which Harry had left on the dresser: Seagram’s V.O., with the cluttered, tiny-print label. He threw the glass across the room and covered his face with his hands.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said apologetically. “But then it cost only $3.37 the fifth.”

Gernshon didn’t move.

“I’m really sorry,” Harry said. He raised both hands, palms up, and dropped them helplessly. “Would you . . . would you maybe like an orange?”

Gernshon recovered faster than Harry had dared hope. Within an hour he was sitting in Harry’s worn chair, asking questions about the space shuttle; within two hours taking notes; within three become again the intelligent and captivating young man of the lecture hall. Harry, answering as much as he could as patiently as he could, was impressed by the boy’s resilience. It couldn’t have been easy. What if he, Harry, suddenly had to skip fifty-two more years? What if he found himself in 2041? Harry shuddered.

“Do you know that a movie now costs six dollars?”

Gernshon blinked. “We were talking about the moon landing.”

“Not any more, we’re not. I want to ask you some questions, Robert. Do you think the earth is dead, with people sliming all over it like on carrion? Is this a thought that crosses your mind?”

“I . . . no.”

Harry nodded. “Good, good. Do you look at your mother with contempt?

“Of course not. Harry—”

“No, it’s my turn. Do you think a woman who marries a man, and maybe the marriage doesn’t work out perfect, whose does, but they raise at least one healthy child—say a daughter—that that woman’s life has been a defeat and a failure?”

“No. I—”

“What would you think if you saw a drawing of a woman’s private parts on the cover of a magazine?”

Gernshon blushed. He looked as if the blush annoyed him, but also as if he couldn’t help it.

“Better and better,” Harry said. “Now, think carefully on this next one—take your time—no hurry. Does reality seem to you to have sweetness in it as well as ugliness?

Take your time.”

Gernshon peered at him. Harry realized they had talked right through lunch. “But not all the time in the world, Robert.”

“Yes,” Gernshon said. “I think reality has more sweetness than ugliness. And more strangeness than anything else. Very much more.” He looked suddenly dazed. “I’m sorry, I just—all this has happened so—”

“Put your head between your knees,” Harry suggested. “There—better now? Good.

There’s someone I want you to meet.”

Manny sat in the park, on their late-afternoon bench. When he saw them coming, his face settled into long sorrowful ridges. “Harry. Where have you been for two days? I was worried, I went to your hotel—”

“Manny,” Harry said, “this is Robert.”

“So I see,” Manny said. He didn’t hold out his hand.

“Him,” Harry said.

“Harry. Oh, Harry.”

“How do you do, sir,” Gernshon said. He held out his hand. “I’m afraid I didn’t get your full name. I’m Robert Gernshon.”

Manny looked at him—at the outstretched hand, the baggy suit with wide tie, the deferential smile, the golden Baden-Powell glow. Manny’s lips mouthed a silent word: sir?

“I have a lot to tell you,” Harry said.

“You can tell all of us, then,” Manny said. “Here comes Jackie now.”

Harry looked up. Across the park a woman in jeans strode purposefully towards them.

“Manny! It’s only Monday!”

“I called her to come,” Manny said. “You’ve been gone from your room two days, Harry, nobody at your hotel could say where . . .”

“But Manny,” Harry said, while Gernshon looked, frowning, from one to the other and Jackie spotted them and waved.

She had lost more weight, Harry saw. Only two weeks, yet her cheeks had hollowed out and new, tiny lines touched her eyes. Skinny lines. They filled him with sadness.

Jackie wore a blue tee-shirt that said LIFE IS A BITCH—THEN YOU DIE. She carried a magazine and a small can of mace disguised as hair spray.

“Popsy! You’re here! Manny said—”

“Manny was wrong,” Harry said. “Jackie, sweetheart, you look—it’s good to see you.

Jackie, I’d like you to meet somebody, darling. This is Robert. My friend. My friend Robert. Jackie Snyder.”

“Hi,” Jackie said. She gave Harry a hug, and then Manny one. Harry saw Gernshon gazing at her very tight jeans.

“Robert’s a . . . a scientist,” Harry said.

It was the wrong thing to say; Harry knew the moment he said it that it was the wrong thing. Science—all science—was, for some reason not completely clear to him, a touchy subject with Jackie. She tossed her long hair back from her eyes. “Oh, yeah? Not chemical, I hope?”

“I’m not actually a scientist,” Gernshon said winningly. “Just a dabbler. I popularize new scientific concepts, write about them to make them intelligible.”

“Like what?” Jackie said.

Gernshon opened his mouth, closed it again. A boy suddenly flashed past on a skateboard, holding a boom box. Metallica blasted the air. Overhead, a jet droned.

Gernshon smiled weakly. “It’s hard to explain.”

“I’m capable of understanding,” Jackie said coldly. “Women can understand science, you know.”

“Jackie, sweetheart,” Harry said, “what have you got there? Is that your new book?”

“No,” Jackie said, “this is the one I said I’d bring you, by my friend. It’s brilliant. It’s about a man whose business partner betrays him by selling out to organized crime and framing the man. In jail he meets a guy who has founded his own religion, the House of Divine Despair, and when they both get out they start a new business, Suicide Incorporated, that helps people kill themselves for a fee. The whole thing is just a brilliant denunciation of contemporary America.”

Gernshon made a small sound.

“It’s a comedy,” Jackie added.

“It sounds . . . it sounds a little depressing,” Gernshon said.

Jackie looked at him. Very distinctly, she said, “It’s reality.”

Harry saw Gernshon glance around the park. A man nodded on a bench, his hands slack on his knees. Newspapers and MacDonald’s wrappers stirred fitfully in the dirt. A trash container had been knocked over. From beside a scrawny tree enclosed shoulder-height by black wrought iron, a child watched them with old eyes.

“I brought you something else, too, Popsy,” Jackie said. Harry hoped that Gernshon noticed how much gentler her voice was when she spoke to her grandfather. “A scarf.

See, it’s llama wool. Very warm.”

Gernshon said, “My mother has a scarf like that. No, I guess hers is some kind of fur.”

Jackie’s face changed. “What kind?”

“I—I’m not sure.”

“Not an endangered species, I hope.”

“No. Not that. I’m sure not . . . that.”

Jackie stared at him a moment longer. The child who had been watching strolled towards them. Harry saw Gernshon look at the boy with relief. About eleven years old, he wore a perfectly tailored suit and Italian shoes. Manny shifted to put himself between the boy and Gernshon. “Jackie, darling, it’s so good to see you . . .”

The boy brushed by Gernshon on the other side. He never looked up, and his voice stayed boyish and low, almost a whisper. “Crack . . .”

“Step on one and you break your mother’s back,” Gernshon said brightly. He smiled at Harry, a special conspiratorial smile to suggest that children, at least, didn’t change in fifty years. The boy’s head jerked up to look at Gernshon.

“You talking about my mama?”

Jackie groaned. “No,” she said to the kid. “He doesn’t mean anything. Beat it.”

“I don’t forget,” the boy said. He backed away slowly.

Gernshon said, frowning, “I’m sorry. I’m not sure exactly what all that was, but I’m sorry.”

“Are you for real?” Jackie said angrily. “What the fucking hell was all that? Don’t you realize this park is the only place Manny and my grandfather can get some fresh air?”

“I didn’t—”

“That punk runner meant it when he said he won’t forget!”

“I don’t like your tone,” Gernshon said. “Or your language.”

“My language!” The corners of Jackie’s mouth tightened. Manny looked at Harry and put his hands over his face. The boy, twenty feet away, suddenly let out a noise like a strangled animal, so piercing all four of them spun around. Two burly teenagers were running towards him. The child’s face crumpled; he looked suddenly much younger. He sprang away, stumbled, made the noise again, and hurled himself, all animal terror, towards the street behind the park bench.

“No!” Gernshon shouted. Harry turned towards the shout but Gernshon already wasn’t there. Harry saw the twelve-wheeler bearing down, heard Jackie’s scream, saw Gernshon’s wiry body barrel into the boy’s. The truck shrieked past, its air brakes deafening.

Gernshon and the boy rose in the street on the other side.

Car horns blared. The boy bawled, “Leggo my suit! You tore my suit!” A red light flashed and a squad car pulled up. The two burly teenagers melted away, and then the boy somehow vanished as well.

“Never find him,” the disgruntled cop told them over the clipboard on which he had written nothing. “Probably just as well.” He went away.

“Are you hurt?” Manny said. It was the first time he had spoken. His face was ashen.

Harry put a hand across his shoulders.

“No,” Gernshon said. He gave Manny his sweet smile. “Just a little dirty.”

“That took guts,” Jackie said. She was staring at Gernshon with a frown between her eyebrows. “Why did you do it?”

“Pardon?”

“Why? I mean, given what that kid is, given—oh, all of it—” she gestured around the park, a helpless little wave of her strong young hands that tore at Harry’s heart. “Why bother?”

Gernshon said gently, “What that kid is, is a kid.”

Manny looked skeptical. Harry moved to stand in front of Manny’s expression before anyone wanted to discuss it. “Listen, I’ve got a wonderful idea, you two seem to have so much to talk about, about . . . bothering, and . . . everything. Why don’t you have dinner together, on me? My treat.” He pulled another twenty dollar bill from his pocket. Behind him he could feel Manny start.

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Gernshon said, at the same moment that Jackie said warningly.

“Popsy . . .”

Harry put his palms on both sides of her face. “Please. Do this for me, Jackie. Without the questions, without the female protests. Just this once. For me.”

Jackie was silent a long moment before she grimaced, nodded, and turned with half-humorous appeal to Gernshon.

Gernshon cleared his throat. “Well, actually, it would probably be better if all four of us came. I’m embarrassed to say that prices are higher in this city than in . . . that is, I’m not able to . . . but if we went somewhere less expensive, the Automat maybe, I’m sure all four of us could eat together.”

“No, no,” Harry said. “We already ate.” Manny looked at him.

Jackie began, offended, “I certainly don’t want—just what do you think is going on here, buddy? This is just to please my grandfather. Are you afraid I might try to jump your bones?”

Harry saw Gernshon’s quick, involuntary glance at Jackie’s tight jeans. He saw, too, that Gernshon fiercely regretted the glance the instant he had made it. He saw that Manny saw, and that Jackie saw, and that Gernshon saw that they saw. Manny made a small noise. Jackie’s face began to turn so black that Harry was astounded when Gernshon cut her off with a dignity no one had expected.

“No, of course not,” he said quietly. “But I would prefer all of us to have dinner together for quite another reason. My wife is very dear to me, Miss Snyder, and I wouldn’t do anything that might make her feel uncomfortable. That’s probably irrational, but that’s the way it is.”

Harry stood arrested, his mouth open. Manny started to shake with what Harry thought savagely had better not be laughter. And Jackie, after staring at Gernshon a long while, broke into the most spontaneous smile Harry had seen from her in months.

“Hey,” she said softly. “That’s nice. That’s really, genuinely, fucking nice.”

The weather turned abruptly colder. Snow threatened but didn’t fall. Each afternoon Harry and Manny took a quick walk in the park and then went inside, to the chess club or a coffee shop or the bus station or the library, where there was a table deep in the stacks on which they could eat lunch without detection. Harry brought Manny a poor boy with mayo, sixty-three cents, and a pair of imported wool gloves, one dollar on pre-season sale.

“So where are they today?” Manny asked on Saturday, removing the gloves to peek at the inside of the poor boy. He sniffed appreciatively. “Horseradish. You remembered, Harry.”

“The museum, I think,” Harry said miserably.

“What museum?”

“How should I know? He says, ‘The museum today, Harry,’ and he’s gone by eight o’clock in the morning, no more details than that.”

Manny stopped chewing. “What museum opens at eight o’clock in the morning?”

Harry put down his sandwich, pastrami on rye, thirty-nine cents. He had lost weight the past week.

“Probably,” Manny said hastily, “they just talk. You know, like young people do, just talk . . .”

Harry eyed him balefully. “You mean like you and Leah did when you were young and left completely alone.”

“You better talk to him soon, Harry. No, to her.” He seemed to reconsider Jackie.

“No, to him.”

“Talk isn’t going to do it,” Harry said. He looked pale and determined. “Gernshon has to be sent back.”

“Be sent?”

“He’s married, Manny! I wanted to help Jackie, show her life can hold some sweetness, not be all struggle. What kind of sweetness is she going to find if she falls in love with a married man? You know how that goes! Jackie—” Harry groaned. How had all this happened? He had intended only the best for Jackie. Why didn’t that count more?

“He has to go back, Manny.”

“How?” Manny said practically. “You can’t hit him again, Harry. You were just lucky last time that you didn’t hurt him. You don’t want that on your conscience. And if you show him your, uh . . . your—”

“My closet. Manny, if you’d only come see, for a dollar you could get—”

“—then he could just come back any time he wants. So how?”

A sudden noise startled them both. Someone was coming through the stacks.

“Librarians!” Manny hissed. Both of them frantically swept the sandwiches, beer (fifteen cents), and strudel into shopping bags. Manny, panicking, threw in the wool gloves. Harry swept the table free of crumbs. When the intruder rounded the nearest bookshelf, Harry was bent over Making Paper Flowers and Manny over Porcelain of the Yung Cheng Dynasty. It was Robert Gernshon.

The young man dropped into a chair. His face was ashen. In one hand he clutched a sheaf of paper, the handwriting on the last one trailing off into shaky squiggles.

After a moment of silence, Manny said diplomatically, “So where are you coming from, Robert?”

“Where’s Jackie?” Harry demanded.

“Jackie?” Gernshon said. His voice was thick; Harry realized with a sudden shock that he had been crying. “I haven’t seen her for a few days.”

“A few days?” Harry said.

“No. I’ve been . . . I’ve been . . .”

Manny sat up straighter. He looked intently at Gernshon over Porcelain of the Yung Cheng Dynasty and then put the book down. He moved to the chair next to Gernshon’s and gently took the papers from his hand. Gernshon leaned over the table and buried his head in his arms.

“I’m so awfully sorry, I’m being such a baby....” His shoulders trembled. Manny separated the papers and spread them out on the library table. Among the hand-copied notes were two slim books, one bound between black covers and the other a pamphlet. A Memoir of Auschwitz. Countdown to Hiroshima.

For a long moment nobody spoke. Then Harry said, to no one in particular, “I thought he was going to science museums.”

Manny laid his arm, almost casually, across Gernshon’s shoulders. “So now you’ll know not to be at either place. More people should have only known.” Harry didn’t recognize the expression on his friend’s face, nor the voice with which Manny said to Harry, “You’re right. He has to go back.”

“But Jackie . . .”

“Can do without this ‘sweetness,’ ” Manny said harshly. “So what’s so terrible in her life anyway that she needs so much help? Is she dying? Is she poor? Is she ugly? Is anyone knocking on her door in the middle of the night? Let Jackie find her own sweetness. She’ll survive.”

Harry made a helpless gesture. Manny’s stubborn face, carved wood under the harsh fluorescent light, did not change. “Even him... Manny, the things he knows now—”

“You should have thought of that earlier.”

Gernshon looked up. “Don’t, I—I’m sorry. It’s just coming across it, I never thought human beings—”

“No,” Manny said. “But they can. You been here, every day, at the library, reading it all?”

“Yes. That and museums. I saw you two come in earlier. I’ve been reading, I wanted to know—”

“So now you know,” Manny said in that same surprisingly casual, tough voice.

“You’ll survive, too.”

Harry said, “Does Jackie know what’s going on? Why you’ve been doing all this . . .

learning?”

“No.”

“And you—what will you do with what you now know?”

Harry held his breath. What if Gernshon just refused to go back? Gernshon said slowly, “At first, I wanted to not return. At all. How can I watch it, World War II and the camps—I have relatives in Poland. And then later the bomb and Korea and the gulags and Vietnam and Cambodia and the terrorists and AIDS—”

“Didn’t miss anything,” Harry muttered.

“—and not be able to do anything, not be able to even hope, knowing that everything to come is already set into history—how could I watch all that without any hope that it isn’t really as bad as it seems to be at the moment?”

“It all depends what you look at,” Manny said, but Gernshon didn’t seem to hear him.

“But neither can I stay, there’s Susan and we’re hoping for a baby . . . I need to think.”

“No, you don’t,” Harry said. “You need to go back. This is all my mistake. I’m sorry.

You need to go back, Gernshon.”

“Lebanon,” Gernshon said. “D.D.T. The Cultural Revolution. Nicaragua.

Deforestation. Iran—”

“Penicillin,” Manny said suddenly. His beard quivered. “Civil rights. Mahatma Gandhi. Polio vaccines. Washing machines.” Harry stared at him, shocked. Could Manny once have worked in a hand laundry?

“Or,” Manny said, more quietly, “Hitler. Auschwitz. Hoovervilles. The Dust Bowl.

What you look at, Robert.”

“I don’t know,” Gernshon said. “I need to think. There’s so much . . . and then there’s that girl.”

Harry stiffened. “Jackie?”

“No, no. Someone she and I met a few days ago, at a coffee shop. She just walked in.

I couldn’t believe it. I looked at her and just went into shock—and maybe she did too, for all I know. The girl looked exactly like me. And she felt like—I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. She felt like me. I said hello but I didn’t tell her my name; I didn’t dare.” His voice fell to a whisper. “I think she’s my granddaughter.”

“Hoo boy,” Manny said.

Gernshon stood. He made a move to gather up his papers and booklets, stopped, left them there. Harry stood, too, so abruptly that Gernshon shot him a sudden, hard look across the library table. “Going to hit me again, Harry? Going to kill me?”

“Us?” Manny said. “Us, Robert?” His tone was gentle.

“In a way, you already have. I’m not who I was, certainly.”

Manny shrugged. “So be somebody better.”

“Damn it, I don’t think you understand—”

“I don’t think you do, Reuven, boychik. This is the way it is. That’s all. Whatever you had back there, you have still. Tell me, in all that reading, did you find anything about yourself, anything personal? Are you in the history books, in the library papers?”

“The Office of Public Documents takes two weeks to do a search for birth and death certificates,” Gernshon said, a little sulkily.

“So you lost nothing, because you really know nothing,” Manny said. “Only history.

History is cheap. Everybody gets some. You can have all the history you want. It’s what you make of it that costs.”

Gernshon didn’t nod agreement. He looked a long time at Manny, and something moved behind the unhappy hazel eyes, something that made Harry finally let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. It suddenly seemed that Gernshon was the one that was old. And he was—with the fifty-two years he’d gained since last week, he was older than Harry had been in the 1937 of Captains Courageous and wide-brimmed fedoras and clean city parks. But that was the good time, the one that Gernshon was going back to, the one Harry himself would choose, if it weren’t for Jackie and Manny...still, he couldn’t watch as Gernshon walked out of the book stacks, parting the musty air as heavily as if it were water.

Gernshon paused. Over his shoulder he said, “I’ll go back. Tonight. I will.”

After he had left, Harry said, “This is my fault.”

“Yes,” Manny agreed.

“Will you come to my room when he goes? To . . . to help?”

“Yes, Harry.”

Somehow, that only made it worse.

Gernshon agreed to a blindfold. Harry led him through the closet, the warehouse, the street. Neither of them seemed very good at this; they stumbled into each other, hesitated, tripped over nothing. In the warehouse Gernshon nearly walked into a pile of lumber, and in the sharp jerk Harry gave Gernshon’s arm to deflect him, something twisted and gave way in Harry’s back. He waited, bent over, behind a corner of a building while Gernshon removed his blindfold, blinked in the morning light, and walked slowly away.

Despite his back, Harry found that he couldn’t return right away. Why not? He just couldn’t. He waited until Gernshon had a large head start and then hobbled towards the park. A carousel turned, playing bright organ music: September 24. Two children he had never noticed before stood just beyond the carousel, watching it with hungry, hopeless eyes. Flowers grew in immaculate flower beds. A black man walked by, his eyes fixed on the sidewalk, his head bent. Two small girls jumping rope were watched by a smiling woman in a blue-and-white uniform. On the sidewalk, just beyond the carousel, someone had chalked a swastika. The black man shuffled over it. A Lincoln Zephyr V-12 drove by, $1090. There was no way it would fit through a closet.

When Harry returned, Manny was curled up on the white chenille bedspread that Harry had bought for $3.28, fast asleep.

“What did I accomplish, Manny? What?” Harry said bitterly. The day had dawned glorious and warm, unexpected Indian summer. Trees in the park showed bare branches against a bright blue sky. Manny wore an old red sweater, Harry a flannel workshirt.

Harry shifted gingerly, grimacing, on his bench. Sunday strollers dropped ice cream wrappers, cigarettes, newspapers, Diet Pepsi cans, used tissues, popcorn. Pigeons quarreled and children shrieked.

“Jackie’s going to be just as hard as ever—and why not?” Harry continued. “She finally meets a nice fellow, he never calls her again. Me, I leave a young man miserable on a sidewalk. Before I leave him, I ruin his life. While I leave him, I ruin my back.

After I leave him, I sit here guilty. There’s no answer, Manny.”

Manny didn’t answer. He squinted down the curving path.

“I don’t know, Manny. I just don’t know.”

Manny said suddenly, “Here comes Jackie.”

Harry looked up. He squinted, blinked, tried to jump up. His back made sharp protest.

He stayed where he was, and his eyes grew wide. “Popsy!” Jackie cried. “I’ve been looking for you!”

She looked radiant. All the lines were gone from around her eyes, all the sharpness from her face. Her very collar bones, Harry thought dazedly, looked softer. Happiness haloed her like light. She held the hand of a slim, red-haired woman with strong features and direct hazel eyes.

“This is Ann,” Jackie said. “I’ve been looking for you, Popsy, because . . . well, because I need to tell you something.” She slid onto the bench next to Harry, on the other side from Manny, and put one arm around Harry’s shoulders. The other hand kept a close grip on Ann, who smiled encouragement. Manny stared at Ann as at a ghost.

“You see, Popsy, for a while now I’ve been struggling with something, something really important. I know I’ve been snappy and difficult, but it hasn’t been—everybody needs somebody to love, you’ve often told me that, and I know how happy you and Grammy were all those years. And I thought there would never be anything like that for me, and certain people were making everything all so hard. But now . . . well, now there’s Ann. And I wanted you to know that.”

Jackie’s arm tightened. Her eyes pleaded. Ann watched Harry closely. He felt as if he were drowning.

“I know this must come as a shock to you,” Jackie went on, “but I also know you’ve always wanted me to be happy. So I hope you’ll come to love her the way I do.”

Harry stared at the red-haired woman. He knew what was being asked of him, but he didn’t believe in it, it wasn’t real, in the same way weather going on in other countries wasn’t really real. Hurricanes. Drought. Sunshine. When what you were looking at was a cold drizzle.

“I think that of all the people I’ve ever known, Ann is the most together. The most compassionate. And the most moral.”

“Ummm,” Harry said.

“Popsy?”

Jackie was looking right at him. The longer he was silent, the more her smile faded. It occurred to him that the smile had showed her teeth. They were very white, very even.

Also very sharp.

“I . . . I . . . hello, Ann.”

“Hello,” Ann said.

“See, I told you he’d be great!” Jackie said to Ann. She let go of Harry and jumped up from the bench, all energy and lightness. “You’re wonderful, Popsy! You, too, Manny!

Oh, Ann, this is Popsy’s best friend, Manny Feldman. Manny, Ann Davies.”

“Happy to meet you,” Ann said. She had a low, rough voice and a sweet smile. Harry felt hurricanes, drought, sunshine.

Jackie said, “I know this is probably a little unexpected—”

Unexpected. “Well—” Harry said, and could say no more.

“It’s just that it was time for me to come out of the closet.”

Harry made a small noise. Manny managed to say, “So you live here, Ann?”

“Oh, yes. All my life. And my family, too, since forever.”

“Has Jackie . . . has Jackie met any of them yet?”

“Not yet,” Jackie said. “It might be a little . . . tricky, in the case of her parents.” She smiled at Ann. “But we’ll manage.”

“I wish,” Ann said to her, “that you could have met my grandfather. He would have been just as great as your Popsy here. He always was.”

“Was?” Harry said faintly.

“He died a year ago. But he was just a wonderful man. Compassionate and intelligent.”

“What . . . what did he do?”

“He taught history at the university. He was also active in lots of organizations—

Amnesty International, the ACLU, things like that. During World War II he worked for the Jewish rescue leagues, getting people out of Germany.”

Manny nodded. Harry watched Jackie’s teeth.

“We’d like you both to come to dinner soon,” Ann said. She smiled. “I’m a good cook.”

Manny’s eyes gleamed.

Jackie said, “I know this must be hard for you—” but Harry saw that she didn’t really mean it. She didn’t think it was hard. For her it was so real that it was natural weather, unexpected maybe, but not strange, not out of place, not out of time. In front of the bench, sunlight striped the pavement like bars.

Suddenly Jackie said, “Oh, Popsy, did I tell you that it was your friend Robert who introduced us? Did I tell you that already?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” Harry said. “You did.”

“He’s kind of a nerd, but actually all right.”

After Jackie and Ann left, the two old men sat silent a long time. Finally Manny said diplomatically, “You want to get a snack, Harry?”

“She’s happy, Manny.”

“Yes. You want to get a snack, Harry?”

“She didn’t even recognize him.”

“No. You want to get a snack?”

“Here, have this. I got it for you this morning.” Harry held out an orange, a deep-colored navel with flawless rind: seedless, huge, guaranteed juicy, nurtured for flavor, perfect.

“Enjoy,” Harry said. “It cost me ninety-two cents.”

AT THE RIALTO

Connie Willis

Almost anything at all can happen . . .

Seriousness of mind was a prerequisite for understanding Newtonian physics. I am not convinced it is not a handicap in understanding quantum theory.”—Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address to the 1989 International Congress of Quantum Physicists Annual Meeting, Hollywood.

I got to Hollywood around one-thirty and started trying to check into the Rialto.

“Sorry, we don’t have any rooms,” the girl behind the desk said. “We’re all booked up with some science thing.”

“I’m with the science thing,” I said. “Dr. Ruth Baringer. I reserved a double.”

“There are a bunch of Republicans here, too, and a tour group from Finland. They told me when I started work here that they got all these movie people, but the only one I’ve seen so far was that guy who played the friend of that other guy in that one movie. You’re not a movie person, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m with the science thing. Dr. Ruth Baringer.”

“My name’s Tiffany,” she said. “I’m not actually a hotel clerk at all. I’m just working here to pay for my transcendental posture lessons. I’m really a model-slash-actress.”

“I’m a quantum physicist,” I said, trying to get things back on track. “The name is Ruth Baringer.”

She messed with the computer for a minute. “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

“Maybe it’s in Dr. Mendoza’s name. I’m sharing a room with her.”

She messed with the computer some more. “I don’t show a reservation for her either. Are you sure you don’t want the Disneyland Hotel? A lot of people get the two confused.”

“I want the Rialto,” I said, rummaging through my bag for my notebook. “I have a confirmation number. W37420.”

She typed it in. “Are you Dr. Gedanken?” she asked.

“Excuse me,” an elderly man said.

“I’ll be right with you,” Tiffany told him. “How long do you plan to stay with us, Dr. Gedanken?” she asked me.

“Excuse me,” the man said, sounding desperate. He had bushy white hair and a dazed expression, as if he had just been through a horrific experience or had been trying to check in to the Rialto.

He wasn’t wearing any socks. I wondered if he was Dr. Gedanken. Dr. Gedanken was the main reason I’d decided to come to the meeting. I had missed his lecture on wave/particle duality last year, but I had read the text of it in the ICQP Journal, and it had actually seemed to make sense, which is more than you can say for most of quantum theory. He was giving the keynote address this year, and I was determined to hear it.

It wasn’t Dr. Gedanken. “My name is Dr. Whedbee,” the elderly man said. “You gave me the wrong room.”

“All our rooms are pretty much the same,” Tiffany said. “Except for how many beds they have in them and stuff.”

“My room has a person in it!” he said. “Dr. Sleeth. From the University of Texas at Austin. She was changing her clothes.” His hair seemed to get wilder as he spoke. “She thought I was a serial killer.”

“And you said your name is Dr. Whedbee?” Tiffany asked, fooling with the computer once again. “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

Dr. Whedbee began to cry.

Tiffany got out a paper towel, wiped off the counter, and turned back to me. “May I help you?” she said.

Thursday, 7:30-9 PM Opening Ceremonies. Dr. Halvard Onofrio, University of Maryland at College Park, will speak on “Doubts Surrounding the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” Ballroom.

I finally got my room at five after Tiffany went off duty. Till then I sat around the lobby with Dr. Whedbee, listening to Abey Fields complain about Hollywood.

“What’s wrong with Racine?” he said. “Why do we always have to go to these exotic places, like Hollywood? And St. Louis last year wasn’t much better. The Institut Henri Poincare people kept going off to see the arch and Busch Stadium.”

“Speaking of St. Louis,” Dr. Takumi said, “have you seen David yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, really?” she said. “Last year at the annual meeting you two were practically inseparable. Moonlight riverboat rides and all.”

“What’s on the programming tonight?” I said to Abey.

“David was just here,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going out to look at the stars in the sidewalk.”

“That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Abey said. “Riverboat rides and movie stars. What do those things have to do with quantum theory? Racine would have been an appropriate setting for a group of physicists. Not like this . . . this . . . do you realize we’re practically across the street from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre? And Hollywood Boulevard’s where all those gangs hang out. If they catch you wearing red or blue, they’ll—”

He stopped. “Is that Dr. Gedanken?” he asked, staring at the front desk.

I turned and looked. A short, roundish man with a mustache was trying to check in. “No,” I said. “That’s Dr. Onofrio.”

“Oh, yes,” Abey said, consulting his program book. “He’s speaking tonight at the opening ceremonies. On the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Are you going?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, which was supposed to be a joke, but Abey didn’t laugh.

“I must meet Dr. Gedanken. He’s just gotten funding for a new project.”

I wondered what Dr. Gedanken’s new project was—I would have loved to work with him.

“I’m hoping he’ll come to my workshop on the wonderful world of quantum physics,” Abey said, still watching the desk. Amazingly enough, Dr. Onofrio seemed to have gotten a key and was heading for the elevators. “I think his project has something to do with understanding quantum theory.”

Well, that let me out. I didn’t understand quantum theory at all. I sometimes had a sneaking suspicion nobody else did either, including Abey Fields, and that they just weren’t willing to admit it.

I mean, an electron is a particle except it acts like a wave. In fact, a neutron acts like two waves and interferes with itself (or each other), and you can’t really measure any of this stuff properly because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and that isn’t the worst of it. When you set up a Josephson junction to figure out what rules the electrons obey, they sneak past the barrier to the other side, and they don’t seem to care much about the limits of the speed of light either, and Schrodinger’s cat is neither alive nor dead till you open the box, and it all makes about as much sense as Tiffany’s calling me Dr. Gedanken.

Which reminded me, I had promised to call Darlene and give her our room number. I didn’t have a room number, but if I waited much longer, she’d have left. She was flying to Denver to speak at CU and then coming on to Hollywood sometime tomorrow morning. I interrupted Abey in the middle of his telling me how beautiful Racine was in the winter and went to call her.

“I don’t have a room yet,” I said when she answered. “Should I leave a message on your machine, or do you want to give me your number in Denver?”

“Never mind all that,” Darlene said. “Have you seen David yet?”

To illustrate the problems of the concept of wave function, Dr. Schrodinger imagines a cat being put into a box with a piece of uranium, a bottle of poison gas. and a Geiger counter. If a uranium nucleus disintegrates while the cat is in the box, it will release radiation which will set off the Geiger counter and break the bottle of poison gas. Since it is impossible in quantum theory to predict whether a uranium nucleus will disintegrate while the cat is in the box, and only possible to calculate uranium’s probable half-life, the cat is neither alive nor dead until we open the box.—From “The Wonderful World of Quantum Physics,” a seminar presented at the ICQP Annual Meeting by A. Fields, Ph.D., University of Nebraska at Wahoo

I completely forgot to warn Darlene about Tiffany, the model-slash-actress.

“What do you mean you’re trying to avoid David?” she had asked me at least three times. “Why would you do a stupid thing like that?”

Because in St. Louis I ended up on a riverboat in the moonlight and didn’t make it back until the conference was over.

“Because I want to attend the programming,” I said the third time around, “not a wax museum. I am a middle-aged woman.”

“And David is a middle-aged man who, I might add, is absolutely charming. In fact, he may be the last charming man left in the universe.”

“Charm is for quarks,” I said and hung up, feeling smug until I remembered I hadn’t told her about Tiffany. I went back to the front desk, thinking maybe Dr. Onofrio’s success signaled a change. Tiffany asked, “May I help you?” and left me standing there.

After a while I gave up and went back to the red and gold sofas.

“David was here again,” Dr. Takumi said. “He said to tell you he was going to the wax museum.”

“There are no wax museums in Racine,” Abey said.

“What’s the programming for tonight?” I said, taking Abey’s program from him.

“There’s a mixer at six-thirty and the opening ceremonies in the ballroom and then some seminars.”

I read the descriptions of the seminars. There was one on the Josephson junction. Electrons were able to somehow tunnel through an insulated barrier even though they didn’t have the required energy. Maybe I could somehow get a room without checking in.

“If we were in Racine,” Abey said, looking at his watch, “we’d already be checked in and on our way to dinner.”

Dr. Onofrio emerged from the elevator, still carrying his bags. He came over and sank down on the sofa next to Abey.

“Did they give you a room with a semi-naked woman in it?” Dr. Whedbee asked.

“I don’t know,” Dr. Onofrio said. “I couldn’t find it.” He looked sadly at the key. “They gave me 1282, but the room numbers only go up to 75.”

“I think I’ll attend the seminar on chaos,” I said.

The most serious difficulty quantum theory faces today is not the inherent limitation of measurement capability or the EPR paradox. It is the lack of a paradigm. Quantum theory has no working model, no metaphor that properly defines it.—Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

I got to my room at six, after a brief skirmish with the bellboy-slash-actor who couldn’t remember where he’d stored my suitcase and unpacked.

My clothes, which had been permanent-press all the way from MIT, underwent a complete wave-function collapse the moment that I opened my suitcase, and came out looking like Schrodinger’s almost-dead cat.

By the time I had called housekeeping for an iron, taken a bath, given up on the iron, and steamed a dress in the shower, I had missed the “Mixer with Munchies” and was half an hour late for Dr. Onofrio’s opening remarks.

I opened the door to the ballroom as quietly as I could and slid inside. I had hoped they would be late getting started, but a man I didn’t recognize was already introducing the speaker: “—and an inspiration to all of us in the field.”

I dived for the nearest chair and sat down.

“Hi,” David said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where were you?”

“Not at the wax museum,” I whispered.

“You should have been,” he whispered back. “It was great. They had John Wayne, Elvis, and Tiffany the model-slash-actress with the brain of a pea-slash-amoeba.”

“Shh,” I said.

“—the person we’ve all been waiting to hear, Dr. Ringgit Dinari.”

“What happened to Dr. Onofrio?” I asked.

“Shhh,” David said.

Dr. Dinari looked a lot like Dr. Onofrio. She was short, roundish, and mustached and was wearing a rainbow-striped caftan. “I will be your guide this evening into a strange new world,” she said, “a world where all that you thought you knew, all common sense, all accepted wisdom, must be discarded. A world where all the rules have changed and it sometimes seems there are no rules at all.”

She sounded just like Dr. Onofrio, too. He had given this same speech two years ago in Cincinnati. I wondered if he had undergone some strange transformation during his search for room 1282 and was now a woman.

“Before I go on,” Dr. Dinari said, “how many of you have already channeled?”

Newtonian physics had as its model the machine. The metaphor of the machine, with its interrelated parts, its gears and wheels, its causes and effects, was what made it possible to think about Newtonian physics.—Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

“You knew we were in the wrong place,” I hissed at David when we made it out to the lobby.

When we stood up to leave, Dr. Dinari had extended her pudgy hand in its rainbow-striped sleeve and called out in a voice a lot like Charlton Heston’s, “O unbelievers! Leave not, for here only is reality!”

“Actually, channeling would explain a lot,” David said, grinning.

“If the opening remarks aren’t in the ballroom, where are they?”

“Beats me,” he said. “Want to go see the Capitol Records Building? It’s shaped like a stack of records.”

“I want to go to the opening remarks.”

“The beacon on top blinks out Hollywood in Morse code.”

I went over to the front desk.

“Can I help you?” the clerk behind the desk said. “My name is Natalie, and I’m an actress—”

“Where is the ICQP meeting this evening?” I said.

“They’re in the ballroom.”

“I’ll bet you didn’t have any dinner,” David said. “I’ll buy you an ice cream cone. There’s this great place that has the ice cream cone Ryan O’Neal bought for Tatum in Paper Moon.”

“A channeler’s in the ballroom,” I told Natalie. “I’m looking for the ICQP.”

She fiddled with the computer. “I’m sorry. I don’t show a reservation for them.”

“How about Grauman’s Chinese?” David said. “You want reality? You want Charlton Heston? You want to see quantum theory in action?”

He grabbed my hands. “Come with me,” he said seriously.

In St. Louis I had suffered a wave-function collapse a lot like what had happened to my clothes when I opened the suitcase. I had ended up on a riverboat halfway to New Orleans that time. It happened again, and the next thing I knew I was walking around the courtyard of Sid Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, eating an ice cream cone and trying to fit my feet in Myrna Loy’s footprints.

She must have been a midget or had her feet bound as a child. So, apparently, had Debbie Reynolds, Dorothy Lamour, and Wallace Beery.

The only footprints I came close to fitting were Donald Duck’s.

“I see this as a map of the microcosm,” David said, sweeping his hand over the slightly irregular pavement of printed and signed cement squares.

“See, there are all these tracks. We know something’s been here, and the prints are pretty much the same, only every once in a while you’ve got this”—he knelt down and pointed to the print of John Wayne’s clenched fist—“and over here”—he walked toward the box office and pointed to the print of Betty Grable’s leg—“and we can figure out the signatures, but what is this reference to ‘Sid’ on all these squares? And what does this mean?” He pointed at Red Skelton’s square. It said, THANKS SID, WE DOOD IT.

“You keep thinking you’ve found a pattern,” David said, crossing over to the other side, “but Van Johnson’s square is kind of sandwiched in here at an angle between Esther Williams and Cantinflas, and who the hell is May Robson? And why are all these squares empty?”

He had managed to maneuver me over behind the display of Academy Award winners. It was an accordionlike wrought-iron screen. I was in the fold between 1944 and 1945.

“And as if that isn’t enough, you suddenly realize you’re standing in the courtyard. You’re not even in the theater.”

“And that’s what you think is happening in quantum theory?” I said weakly. I was backed up into Bing Crosby, who had won for Best Actor in Going My Way. “You think we’re not in the theater yet?”

“I think we know as much about quantum theory as we can figure out about May Robson from her footprints,” he said, putting his hand up to Ingrid Bergman’s cheek (Best Actress, Gaslight) and blocking my escape. “I don’t think we understand anything about quantum theory, not tunneling, not complementarity.” He leaned toward me. “Not passion.”

The Best Movie of 1945 was The Lost Weekend. “Dr. Gedanken understands it,” I said, disentangling myself from the Academy Award winners and David. “Did you know he’s putting together a new research team for a big project on understanding quantum theory?”

“Yes,” David said. “Want to see a movie?”

“There’s a seminar on chaos at nine,” I said, stepping over the Marx Brothers. “I have to get back.”

“If it’s chaos you want, you should stay right here,” he said, stopping to look at Irene Dunne’s handprints. “We could see the movie and then go have dinner. There’s this place near Hollywood and Vine that has the mashed potatoes Richard Dreyfuss made into Devils Tower in Close Encounters.”

“I want to meet Dr. Gedanken,” I said, making it safely to the sidewalk. I looked back at David.

He had gone back to the other side of the courtyard and was looking at Roy Rogers’s signature.

“Are you kidding? He doesn’t understand it any better than we do.”

“Well, at least he’s trying.”

“So am I. The problem is, how can one neutron possibly interfere with itself, and why are there only two of Trigger’s hoof-prints here?”

“It’s eight fifty-five,” I said. “I am going to the chaos seminar.”

“If you can find it,” he said, getting down on one knee to look at the signature.

“I’ll find it,” I said grimly.

He stood up and grinned at me, his hands in his pockets. “It’s a great movie,” he said.

It was happening again. I turned and practically ran across the street.

“Benji IX is showing,” he shouted after me. “He accidentally exchanges bodies with a Siamese cat.”

Thursday, 9-10 PM. “The Science of Chaos.” I. Durcheinander, Leipzig. A seminar on the structure of chaos. Principles of chaos will be discussed, including the butterfly effect, fractals, and in solid billowing. Clara Bow Room.

I couldn’t find the chaos seminar. The Clara Bow Room, where it was supposed to be, was empty. A meeting of vegetarians was next door in the Fatty Arbuckle Room, and all the other conference rooms were locked. The channeler was still in the ballroom. “Come!” she commanded when I opened the door. “Understanding awaits!”

I went upstairs to bed.

I had forgotten to call Darlene. She would have left for Denver already, but I called her answering machine and told it the room number in case she picked up her messages. In the morning I would have to tell the front desk to give her a key. I went to bed.

I didn’t sleep well. The air conditioner went off during the night, which meant I didn’t have to steam my suit when I got up the next morning. I got dressed and went downstairs.

The programming started at nine o’clock with Abey Fields’s “Wonderful World” workshop in the Mary Pickford Room, a breakfast buffet in the ballroom, and a slide presentation on “Delayed Choice Experiments” in Cecil B. DeMille A on the mezzanine level.

The breakfast buffet sounded wonderful, even though it always turns out to be urn coffee and donuts. I hadn’t had anything but an ice cream cone since noon the day before, but if David were around, he would be somewhere close to the food, and he wanted to steer clear of him. Last night it had been Grauman’s Chinese. Today I was likely to end up at Knott’s Berry Farm. I wasn’t going to let that happen, even if he was charming.

It was pitch-dark inside Cecil B. DeMille A. Even the slide on the screen up front appeared to be black. “As you can see,” Dr. Lvov said, “the laser pulse is already in motion before the experimenter sets up the wave or particle detector.”

He clicked to the next slide, which was dark gray. “We used a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with two mirrors and a particle detector. For the first series of tries we allowed the experimenter to decide which apparatus he would use by whatever method he wished. For the second series, we used that most primitive of randomizers—”

He clicked again, to a white slide with black polka dots that gave off enough light for me to be able to spot an empty chair on the aisle ten rows up. I hurried to get to it before the slide changed, and sat down.

“—a pair of dice. Alley’s experiments had shown us that when the particle detector was in place, the light was detected as a particle, and when the wave detector was in place, the light showed wavelike behavior, no matter when the choice of apparatus was made.”

“Hi,” David said. “You’ve missed five black slides, two gray ones, and a white with black polka dots.”

“Shh,” I said.

“In our two series, we hoped to ascertain whether the consciousness of the decision affected the outcome.” Dr. Lvov clicked to another black slide. “As you can see, the graph shows no effective difference between the tries in which the experimenter chose the detection apparatus and those in which the apparatus was randomly chosen.”

“You want to go get some breakfast?” David whispered.

“I already ate,” I whispered back, and waited for my stomach to growl and give me away. It did.

“There’s a great place down near Hollywood and Vine that has the waffles Katharine Hepburn made for Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year.”

“Shh,” I said.

“And after breakfast, we could go to Frederick’s of Hollywood and see the bra museum.”

“Will you please be quiet? I can’t hear.”

“Or see,” he said, but he subsided more or less for the remaining ninety-two black, gray, and polka-dotted slides.

Dr. Lvov turned on the lights and blinked smilingly at the audience. “Consciousness had no discernible effect on the results of the experiment. As one of my lab assistants put it, ‘The little devil knows what you’re going to do before you know it yourself.’ ”

This was apparently supposed to be a joke, but I didn’t think it was very funny. I opened my program and tried to find something to go to that David wouldn’t be caught dead at.

“Are you two going to breakfast?” Dr. Thibodeaux asked.

“Yes,” David said.

“No,” I said.

“Dr. Hotard and I wished to eat somewhere that is vraiment Hollywood.”

“David knows just the place,” I said. “He’s been telling me about this great place where they have the grapefruit James Cagney shoved in Mae Clarke’s face in Public Enemy.”

Dr. Hotard hurried up, carrying a camera and four guidebooks. “And then perhaps you would show us Grauman’s Chinese Theatre?” he asked David.

“Of course he will,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t go with you, but I promised Dr. Verikovsky I’d be at his lecture on Boolean logic. And after Grauman’s Chinese, David can take you to the bra museum at Frederick’s of Hollywood.”

“And the Brown Derby?” Thibodeaux asked. “I have heard it is shaped like a chapeau.” They dragged him off. I watched till they were safely out of the lobby and then ducked upstairs and into Dr. Whedbee’s lecture on information theory. Dr. Whedbee wasn’t there.

“He went to find an overhead projector,” Dr. Takumi said. She had half a donut on a plate in one hand and a Styrofoam cup in the other.

“Did you get that at the breakfast buffet?” I asked.

“Yes. It was the last one. And they ran out of coffee right after I got there. You weren’t at Abey Fields’s thing, were you?” She set the coffee cup down and took a bite of the donut.

“No,” I said, wondering if I should try to take her by surprise or just wrestle the donut away from her.

“You didn’t miss anything. He raved the whole time about how we should have had the meeting in Racine.” She popped the last piece of donut in her mouth. “Have you seen David yet?”

Friday, 9-10 PM. “The Eureka Experiment: A Slide Presentation.” J. Lvov, Eureka College. Descriptions, results, and conclusions of Lvov’s delayed conscious/randomized choice experiments. Cecil B. DeMille A.

Dr. Whedbee eventually came in carrying an overhead projector, the cord trailing behind him. He plugged it in. The light didn’t go on.

“Here,” Dr. Takumi said, handing me her plate and cup. “I have one of these at Caltech. It needs its fractal basin boundaries adjusted.”

She whacked the side of the projector.

There weren’t even any crumbs left of the donut. There was about a millimeter of coffee in the bottom of the cup. I was about to stoop to new depths when she hit the projector again. The light came on. “I learned that in the chaos seminar last night,” she said, grabbing the cup away from me and draining it. “You should have been there. The Clara Bow Room was packed.”

“I believe I’m ready to begin,” Dr. Whedbee said. Dr. Takumi and I sat down. “Information is the transmission of meaning,” Dr. Whedbee said. He wrote meaning or possibly information on the screen with a green Magic Marker.

“When information is randomized, meaning cannot be transmitted, and we have a state of entropy.” He wrote it under meaning with a red Magic Marker. His handwriting appeared to be completely illegible.

“States of entropy vary from low entropy, such as the mild static on your car radio, to high entropy, a state of complete disorder, of randomness and confusion, in which no information at all is being communicated.”

Oh, my God, I thought. I forgot to tell the hotel about Darlene.

The next time Dr. Whedbee bent over to inscribe hieroglyphics on the screen, I sneaked out and went down to the desk, hoping Tiffany hadn’t come on duty yet. She had.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“I’m in room 663,” I said. “I’m sharing a room with Dr. Darlene Mendoza. She’s coming in this morning, and she’ll be needing a key.”

“For what?” Tiffany said.

“To get into the room. I may be in one of the lectures when she gets here.”

“Why doesn’t she have a key?”

“Because she isn’t here yet.”

“I thought you said she was sharing a room with you.”

“She will be sharing a room with me. Her name is Darlene Mendoza.”

“And your name?” she asked, hands poised over the computer.

“Ruth Baringer.”

“We don’t show a reservation for you.”

We have made impressive advances in quantum physics in the ninety years since Planck’s constant, but they have by and large been advances in technology, not theory. We can only make advances in theory when we have a model we can visualize.—Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

I high-entropied with Tiffany for a while on the subjects of my not having a reservation and the air-conditioning and then switched back suddenly to the problem of Darlene’s key, in the hope of catching her off guard. It worked about as well as Alley’s delayed-choice experiments.

In the middle of my attempting to explain that Darlene was not the air-conditioning repairman, Abey Fields came up.

“Have you seen Dr. Gedanken?”

I shook my head.

“I was sure he’d come to my ‘Wonderful World’ workshop, but he didn’t, and the hotel says they can’t find his reservation,” he said, scanning the lobby. “I found out what his new project is, incidentally, and I’d be perfect for it. He’s going to find a paradigm for quantum theory. Is that him?” he said, pointing at an elderly man getting in the elevator.

“I think that’s Dr. Whedbee,” I said, but he had already sprinted across the lobby to the elevator.

He nearly made it. The elevator slid to a close just as he got there.

He pushed the elevator button several times to make the door open again, and when that didn’t work, tried to readjust its fractal basin boundaries. I turned back to the desk.

“May I help you?” Tiffany said.

“You may,” I said. “My roommate, Darlene Mendoza, will be arriving sometime this morning. She’s a producer. She’s here to cast the female lead in a new movie starring Robert Redford and Harrison Ford. When she gets here, give her her key. And fix the air-conditioning.”

“Yes, ma’am,” she said.

The Josephson junction is designed so that electrons must obtain additional energy to surmount the energy barrier. It has been found, however, that some electrons simply tunnel, as Heinz Pagels put it, “right through the wall.”—From “The Wonderful World of Quantum Physics,” A. Fields, UNW

Abey had stopped banging on the elevator button and was trying to pry the elevator doors apart.

I went out the side door and up to Hollywood Boulevard. David’s restaurant was near Hollywood and Vine. I turned the other direction, toward Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and ducked into the first restaurant I saw.

“I’m Stephanie,” the waitress said. “How many are there in your party?”

There was no one remotely in my vicinity. “Are you an actress-slash-model?” I asked her.

“Yes. I’m working here part-time to pay for my holistic hairstyling lessons.”

“There’s one of me,” I said, holding up my forefinger to make it perfectly clear. “I want a table away from the window.”

She led me to a table in front of the window, handed me a menu the size of the macrocosm, and put another one down across from me.

“Our breakfast specials today are papaya stuffed with salmonberries and nasturtium/radicchio salad with a balsamic vinaigrette. I’ll take your order when your other party arrives.”

I stood the extra menu up so it hid me from the window, opened the other one, and read the breakfast entrees. They all seemed to have cilantro or lemongrass in their names.

I wondered if radicchio could possibly be Californian for donut.

“Hi,” David said, grabbing the standing-up menu and sitting down. “The sea urchin pate looks good.”

I was actually glad to see him. “How did you get here?” I asked.

“Tunneling,” he said. “What exactly is extra-virgin olive oil?”

“I wanted a donut,” I said pitifully.

He took my menu away from me, laid it on the table, and stood up. “There’s a great place next door that’s got the donut Clark Gable taught Claudette Colbert how to dunk in It Happened One Night.”

The great place was probably out in Long Beach someplace, but I was too weak with hunger to resist him. I stood up. Stephanie hurried over.

“Will there be anything else?” she asked.

“We’re leaving,” David said.

“Okay, then,” she said, tearing a check off her pad and slapping it on the table. “I hope you enjoyed your breakfast.”

Finding such a paradigm is difficult, if not impossible. Due to Planck’s constant the world we see is largely dominated by Newtonian mechanics. Particles are particles, waves are waves, and objects do not suddenly vanish through walls and reappear on the other side. It is only on the subatomic level that quantum effects dominate.—Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

The restaurant was next door to Grauman’s Chinese, which made me a little nervous, but it had eggs and bacon and toast and orange juice and coffee. And donuts. “I thought you were having breakfast with Dr. Thibodeaux and Dr. Hotard,” I said, dunking one in my coffee. “What happened to them?”

“They went to Forest Lawn. Dr. Hotard wanted to see the church where Ronald Reagan got married.”

“He got married at Forest Lawn?”

He took a bite of my donut. “In the Wee Kirk of the Heather. Did you know Forest Lawn’s got the World’s Largest Oil Painting Incorporating a Religious Theme?”

“So why didn’t you go with them?”

“And miss the movie?” He grabbed both my hands across the table. “There’s a matinee at two o’clock. Come with me.”

I could feel things starting to collapse. “I have to get back,” I said, trying to disentangle my hands. “There’s a panel on the EPR paradox at two o’clock.”

“There’s another showing at five. And one at eight.”

“Dr. Gedanken’s giving the keynote address at eight.”

“You know what the problem is?” he said, still holding on to my hands. “It isn’t really Grauman’s Chinese Theatre; it’s Mann’s, so Sid isn’t even around to ask. Like, why do some pairs like Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman share the same square and other pairs don’t? Like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire?”

“You know what the problem is?” I said, wrenching my hands free. “The problem is you don’t take anything seriously. This is a conference, but you don’t care anything about the programming or hearing Dr. Gedanken speak or trying to understand quantum theory!” I fumbled in my purse for some money for the check.

“I thought that was what we were talking about,” David said, sounding surprised. “The problem is, where do those lion statues that guard the door fit in? And what about all those empty spaces?”

Friday, 2-3 PM. Panel Discussion on the EPR Paradox. I. Takumi, moderator, R. Iverson, L. S. Ping. A discussion of the latest research in single-state correlations, including nonlocal influences, the Calcutta proposal, and passion. Keystone Kops Room.

I went up to my room as soon as I got back to the Rialto to see if Darlene was there yet. She wasn’t, and when I tried to call the desk, the phone wouldn’t work. I went back down to the registration desk. There was no one there. I waited fifteen minutes and then went into the panel on the EPR paradox.

“The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox cannot be reconciled with quantum theory,” Dr. Takumi was saying. “I don’t care what the experiments seem to indicate. Two electrons at opposite ends of the universe can’t affect each other simultaneously without destroying the entire theory of the space-time continuum.”

She was right. Even if it were possible to find a model of quantum theory, what about the EPR paradox? If an experimenter measured one of a pair of electrons that had originally collided, it changed the cross-correlation of the other instantaneously, even if the electrons were, light-years apart.

It was as if they were eternally linked by that one collision, sharing the same square forever, even if they were on opposite sides of the universe.

“If the electrons communicated instantaneously, I’d agree with you,” Dr. Iverson said, “but they don’t; they simply influence each other. Dr. Shimony defined this influence in his paper on passion, and my experiment clearly—”

I thought of David leaning over me between the Best Pictures of 1944 and 1945, saying, “I think we know as much about quantum theory as we do about May Robson from her footprints.”

“You can’t explain it away by inventing new terms,” Dr. Takumi said.

“I completely disagree,” Dr. Ping said. “Passion at a distance is not just an invented term. It’s a demonstrated phenomenon.” It certainly is, I thought, thinking about David taking the macrocosmic menu out of the window and saying, “The sea urchin pate looks good.”

It didn’t matter where the electron went after the collision. Even if it went in the opposite direction from Hollywood and Vine, even if it stood a menu in the window to hide it, the other electron would still come and rescue it from the radicchio and buy it a donut.

“A demonstrated phenomenon!” Dr. Takumi said. “Ha!” She banged her moderator’s gavel for emphasis.

“Are you saying passion doesn’t exist?” Dr. Ping said, getting very red in the face.

“I’m saying one measly experiment is hardly a demonstrated phenomenon.”

“One measly experiment! I spent five years on this project!” Dr. Iverson said, shaking his fist at her. “I’ll show you passion at a distance!”

“Try it, and I’ll adjust your fractal basin boundaries!” Dr. Takumi said, and hit him over the head with the gavel.

Yet finding a paradigm is not impossible. Newtonian physics is not a machine. It simply shares some of the attributes of a machine. We must find a model somewhere in the visible world that shares the often bizarre attributes of quantum physics. Such a model, unlikely as it sounds, surely exists somewhere, and it is up to us to find it.—Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

I went up to my room before the police came. Darlene still wasn’t there, and the phone and air-conditioning still weren’t working. I was really beginning to get worried. I walked up to Grauman’s Chinese to look for David, but he wasn’t there. Dr. Whedbee and Dr. Sleeth were behind the Academy Award winners folding screen.

“You haven’t seen David, have you?” I asked them.

Dr. Whedbee removed his hand from Norma Shearer’s cheek.

“He left,” Dr. Sleeth said, disentangling herself from the Best Movie of 1929-30.

“He said he was going out to Forest Lawn,” Dr. Whedbee said, trying to smooth down his bushy white hair.

“Have you seen Dr. Mendoza? She was supposed to get in this morning.”

They hadn’t seen her, and neither had Drs. Hotard and Thibodeaux, who stopped me in the lobby and showed me a postcard of Aimee Semple McPherson’s tomb. Tiffany had gone off duty. Natalie couldn’t find my reservation. I went back up to the room to wait, thinking Darlene might call.

The air-conditioning still wasn’t fixed. I fanned myself with a Hollywood brochure and then opened it up and read it. There was a map of the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese on the back cover. Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner didn’t have a square together either, and Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy weren’t even on the map. She had made him waffles in Woman of the Year, and they hadn’t even given them a square.

I wondered if Tiffany the model-slash-actress had been in charge of assigning the cement. I could see her looking blankly at Spencer Tracy and saying, “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

What exactly was a model-slash-actress? Did it mean she was a model or an actress or a model and an actress? She certainly wasn’t a hotel clerk.

Maybe electrons were actually the Tiffanys of the microcosm, and that explained their wave-slash-particle duality. Maybe they weren’t really electrons at all. Maybe they were just working part-time at being electrons to pay for their singlestate lessons.

Darlene still hadn’t called by seven o’clock. I stopped fanning myself and tried to open a window. It wouldn’t budge. The problem was, nobody knew anything about quantum theory. All we had to go on were a few colliding electrons that nobody could see and that couldn’t be measured properly because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And there was chaos to consider, and entropy, and all those empty spaces. We didn’t even know who May Robson was.

At seven-thirty the phone rang. It was Darlene. “What happened?” I said. “Where are you?”

“At the Beverly Wilshire.”

“In Beverly Hills?”

“Yes. It’s a long story. When I got to the Rialto, the hotel clerk—I think her name was Tiffany—told me you weren’t there. She said they were booked solid with some science thing and had had to send the overflow to other hotels. She said you were at the Beverly Wilshire in Room 1027. How’s David?”

“Impossible,” I said. “He’s spent the whole conference looking at Deanna Durbin’s footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and trying to talk me into going to the movies.”

“And are you going?”

“I can’t. Dr. Gedanken’s giving the keynote address in half an hour.”

“He is?” Darlene said, sounding surprised. “Just a minute.” There was a silence, and then she came back on and said, “I think you should go to the movies. David’s one of the last two charming men in the universe.”

“But he doesn’t take quantum theory seriously. Dr. Gedanken is hiring a research team to design a paradigm, and David keeps talking about the beacon on top of the Capitol Records Building.”

“You know, he may be on to something there. I mean, seriousness was all right for Newtonian physics, but maybe quantum theory needs a different approach. Sid says—”

“Sid?”

“This guy who’s taking me to the movies tonight. It’s a long story. Tiffany gave me the wrong room number, and I walked in on this guy in his underwear. He’s a quantum physicist. He was supposed to be staying at the Rialto, but Tiffany couldn’t find his reservation.”

The major implication of wavelparticle duality is that an electron has no precise location. It exists in a superposition of probable locations. Only when the experimenter observes the electron does it “collapse” into a location.

“The Wonderful World of Quantum Physics,” A. Fields, UNW

Forest Lawn closed at five o’clock. I looked it up in the Hollywood brochure after Darlene hung up.

There was no telling where he might have gone: the Brown Derby or the La Brea Tar Pits or some great place near Hollywood and Vine that had the alfalfa sprouts John Hurt ate right before his chest exploded in Alien.

At least I knew where Dr. Gedanken was. I changed my clothes and got in the elevator, thinking about wave/particle duality and fractals and high-entropy states and delayed-choice experiments. The problem was, where could you find a paradigm that would make it possible to visualize quantum theory when you had to include Josephson junctions and passion and all those empty spaces? It wasn’t possible. You had to have more to work with than a few footprints and the impression of Betty Grable’s leg.

The elevator door opened, and Abey Fields pounced on me.

“I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said. “You haven’t seen Dr. Gedanken, have you?”

“Isn’t he in the ballroom?”

“No,” he said. “He’s already fifteen minutes late, and nobody’s seen him. You have to sign this,” he said, shoving a clipboard at me.

“What is it?”

“It’s a petition.” He grabbed it back from me. “ ‘We the undersigned demand that annual meetings of the International Congress of Quantum Physicists henceforth be held in appropriate locations.’ Like Racine,” he added, shoving the clipboard at me again. “Unlike Hollywood.”

Hollywood.

“Are you aware it took the average ICQP delegate two hours and thirty-six minutes to check in? They even sent some of the delegates to a hotel in Glendale.”

“And Beverly Hills,” I said absently. Hollywood. Bra museums and the Marx Brothers and gangs that would kill you if you wore red or blue and Tiffany/Stephanie and the World’s Largest Oil Painting Incorporating a Religious Theme.

“Beverly Hills,” Abey muttered, pulling an automatic pencil out of his pocket protector and writing a note to himself. “I’m presenting the petition during Dr. Gedanken’s speech. Well, go on, sign it,” he said, handing me the pencil. “Unless you want the annual meeting to be here at the Rialto next year.”

I handed the clipboard back to him. “I think from now on the annual meeting might be here every year,” I said, and took off running for Grauman’s Chinese.

When we have that paradigm, one that embraces both the logical and the nonsensical aspects of quantum theory, we will be able to look past the colliding electrons and the mathematics and see the microcosm in all its astonishing beauty.—Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken’s keynote address

“I want a ticket to Benji IX,” I told the girl at the box office. Her name tag said, WELCOME TO HOLLYWOOD. MY NAME IS KIMBERLY.

“Which theater?” she said.

“Grauman’s Chinese,” I said, thinking, This is no time for a high-entropy state.

“Which theater?”

I looked up at the marquee. Benji IX was showing in all three theaters, the huge main theater and the two smaller ones on either side.

“They’re doing audience reaction surveys,” Kimberly said. “Each theater has a different ending.”

“Which one’s in the main theater?”

“I don’t know. I just work here part-time to pay for my organic breathing lessons.”

“Do you have any dice?” I asked, and then realized I was going about this all wrong. This was quantum theory, not Newtonian. It didn’t matter which theater I chose or which seat I sat down in. This was a delayed-choice experiment and David was already in flight.

“The one with the happy ending,” I said.

“Center theater,” she said.

I walked past the stone lions and into the lobby. Rhonda Fleming and some Chinese wax figures were sitting inside a glass case next to the door to the rest rooms. There was a huge painted screen behind the concession stand.

I bought a box of Raisinets, a tub of popcorn, and a box of jujubes and went inside the theater.

It was bigger than I had imagined. Rows and rows of empty red chairs curved between the huge pillars and up to the red curtains where the screen must be. The walls were covered with intricate drawings. I stood there, holding my jujubes and Raisinets and popcorn, staring at the chandelier overhead. It was an elaborate gold sunburst surrounded by silver dragons. I had never imagined it was anything like this.

The lights went down, and the red curtains opened, revealing an inner curtain like a veil across the screen.

I went down the dark aisle and sat in one of the seats. “Hi,” I said, and handed the Raisinets to David.

“Where have you been?” he said. “The movie’s about to start.”

“I know,” I said. I leaned across him and handed Darlene her popcorn and Dr. Gedanken his jujubes. “I was working on the paradigm for quantum theory.”

“And?” Dr. Gedanken said, opening his jujubes.

“And you’re both wrong,” I said. “It isn’t Grauman’s Chinese. It isn’t movies either, Dr. Gedanken.”

“Sid,” Dr. Gedanken said. “If we’re all going to be on the same research team, I think we should use first names.”

“If it isn’t Grauman’s Chinese or the movies, what is it?” Darlene asked, eating popcorn.

“It’s Hollywood.”

“Hollywood,” Dr. Gedanken said thoughtfully.

“Hollywood,” I said. “Stars in the sidewalk and buildings that look like stacks of records and hats, and radicchio and audience surveys and bra museums. And the movies. And Grauman’s Chinese.”

“And the Rialto,” David said.

“Especially the Rialto.”

“And the ICQR,” Dr. Gedanken said.

I thought about Dr. Lvov’s black and gray slides and the disappearing chaos seminar and Dr. Whedbee writing meaning or possibly information on the overhead projector. “And the ICQR,” I said.

“Did Dr. Takumi really hit Dr. Iverson over the head with a gavel?” Darlene asked.

“Shh,” David said. “I think the movie’s starting.” He took hold of my hand. Darlene settled back with her popcorn, and Dr. Gedanken put his feet up on the chair in front of him. The inner curtain opened, and the screen lit up.

DOGWALKER

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card’s novelette, “Dowser” (December 1988), I placed first in our third annual Readers’ Award poll. Mr. Card’s novel, Red Prophet (Tor), is currently a finalist for the 1989 Hugo award.

I was an innocent pedestrian. Only reason I got in this in the first place was I got a vertical way of thinking and Dogwalker thought I might be useful, which was true, and also he said I might enjoy myself, which was a prefabrication, since people done a lot more enjoying on me than I done on them.

When I say I think vertical, I mean to say I’m metaphysical, that is, simular, which is to say, I’m dead but my brain don’t know it yet and my feet still move. I got popped at age nine just lying in my own bed when the goat next door shot at his lady and it went through the wall and into my head. Everybody went to look at them cause they made all the noise, so I was a quart low before nobody noticed I been poked.

They packed my head with supergoo and light pipe, but they didn’t know which neutron was supposed to butt into the next so my alchemical brain got turned from rust to diamond. Goo Boy. The Crystal Kid.

From that bright electrical day I never grew another inch, anywhere. Bullet went nowhere near my gonadicals. Just turned off the puberty switch in my head. Saint Paul said he was a eunuch for Jesus, but who am I a eunuch for?

Worst thing about it is here I am near thirty and I still have to take barkeepers to court before they’ll sell me beer. And it ain’t hardly worth it even though the judge prints out in my favor and the barkeep has to pay costs, because my corpse is so little I get toxed on six ounces and pass out pissing after twelve. I’m a lousy drinking buddy. Besides, anybody hangs out with me looks like a pederast.

No, I’m not trying to make you drippy-drop for me—I’m used to it, okay? Maybe the homecoming queen never showed me True Love in a four-point spread, but I got this knack that certain people find real handy and so I always made out. I dress good and I ride the worm and I don’t pay much income tax. Because I am the Password Man. Give me five minutes with anybody’s curriculum vitae, which is to say their auto-psychoscopy, and nine times out of ten I’ll spit out their password and get you into their most nasty sticky sweet secret files. Actually it’s usually more like three times out of ten, but that’s still a lot better odds than having a computer spend a year trying to push out fifteen characters to make just the right P-word, specially since after the third wrong try they string your phone number, freeze the target files, and call the dongs.

Oh, do I make you sick? A cute little boy like me, engaged in critical unspecified dispopulative behaviors? I may be half glass and four feet high, but I can simulate you better than your own mama, and the better I know you, the deeper my hooks. I not only know your password now, I can write a word on a paper, seal it up, and then you go home and change your password and then open up what I wrote and there it’ll be, your new password, three times out of ten. I am vertical, and Dogwalker knowed it. Ten percent more supergoo and I wouldn’t even be legally human, but I’m still under the line, which is more than I can say for a lot of people who are a hundred percent zoo inside their head.

Dogwalker comes to me one day at Carolina Circle, where I’m playing pinball standing on a stool. He didn’t say nothing, just gave me a shove, so naturally he got my elbow in his balls. I get a lot of twelve-year-olds trying to shove me around at the arcades, so I’m used to teaching them lessons. Jack the Giant Killer. Hero of the fourth graders. I usually go for the stomach, only Dogwalker wasn’t a twelve-year-old, so my elbow hit low.

I knew the second I hit him that this wasn’t no kid. I didn’t know Dogwalker from God, but he gots the look, you know, like he been hungry before, and he don’t care what he eats these days.

Only he got no ice and he got no slice, just sits there on the floor with his back up against the Eat Shi’ite game, holding his boodle and looking at me like I was a baby he had to diaper. “I hope you’re Goo Boy,” he says, “cause if you ain’t, I’m gonna give you back to your mama in three little tupperware bowls.” He doesn’t sound like he’s making a threat, though. He sounds like he’s chief weeper at his own funeral.

“You want to do business, use your mouth, not your hands,” I says. Only I say it real apoplectic, which is the same as apologetic except you are also still pissed.

“Come with me,” he says. “I got to go buy me a truss. You pay the tax out of your allowance.”

So we went to Ivey’s and stood around in children’s wear while he made his pitch. “One P-word,” he says, “only there can’t be no mistake. If there’s a mistake, a guy loses his job and maybe goes to jail.”

So I told him no. Three chances in ten, that’s the best I can do. No guarantees. My record speaks for itself, but nobody’s perfect, and I ain’t even close.

“Come on,” he says, “you got to have ways to make sure, right? If you can do three times out of ten, what if you find out more about the guy? What if you meet him?”

“Okay, maybe fifty-fifty.”

“Look, we can’t go back for seconds. So maybe you can’t get it. But do you know when you ain’t got it?”

“Maybe half the time when I’m wrong, I know I’m wrong.”

“So we got three out of four that you’ll know whether you got it?”

“No,” says I. “Cause half the time when I’m right, I don’t know I’m right.”

“Shee-it,” he says. “This is like doing business with my baby brother.”

“You can’t afford me anyway,” I says. “I pull two dimes minimum, and you barely got breakfast on your gold card.”

“I’m offering a cut.”

“I don’t want a cut. I want cash.”

“Sure thing,” he says. He looks around, real careful. As if they wired the sign that said Boys Briefs Sizes 10-12. “I got an inside man at Federal Coding,” he says.

“That’s nothing,” I says. “I got a bug up the First Lady’s ass, and forty hours on tape of her breaking wind.”

I got a mouth. I know I got a mouth. I especially know it when he jams my face into a pile of shorts and says, “Suck on this, Goo Boy.”

I hate it when people push me around. And I know ways to make them stop. This time all I had to do was cry. Real loud, like he was hurting me. Everybody looks when a kid starts crying. “I’ll be good.” I kept saying it. “Don’t hurt me no more! I’ll be good.”

“Shut up,” he says. “Everybody’s looking.”

“Don’t you ever shove me around again,” I says. “I’m at least ten years older than you, and a hell of a lot more than ten years smarter. Now I’m leaving this store, and if I see you coming after me, I’ll start screaming about how you zipped down and showed me the pope, and you’ll get yourself a child-molesting tag so they pick you up every time some kid gets jollied within a hundred miles of Greensboro.” I’ve done it before, and it works, and Dogwalker was no dummy. Last thing he needed was extra reasons for the dongs to bring him in for questioning. So I figured he’d tell me to get poked and that’d be the last of it.

Instead he says, “Goo Boy, I’m sorry, I’m too quick with my hands.” Even the goat who shot me never said he was sorry. My first thought was, what kind of sister is he, abjectifying right out like that. Then I reckoned I’d stick around and see what kind of man it is who emulsifies himself in front of a nine-year-old-looking kid. Not that I figured him to be purely sorrowful. He still just wanted me to get the P-word for him, and he knew there wasn’t nobody else to do it. But most street pugs aren’t smart enough to tell the right lie under pressure. Right away I knew he wasn’t your ordinary street hook or low arm, pugging cause they don’t have the sense to stick with any kind of job. He had a deep face, which is to say his head was more than a hairball, by which I mean he had brains enough to put his hands in his pockets without seeking an audience with the pope. Right then was when I decided he was my kind of no-good lying son-of-a-bitch.

“What are you after at Federal Coding?” I asked him. “A record wipe?”

“Ten clean greens,” he says. “Coded for unlimited international travel. The whole i.d., just like a real person.”

“The President has a green card,” I says. “The Joint Chiefs have clean greens. But that’s all. The U.S. Vice-President isn’t even cleared for unlimited international travel.”

“Yes he is,” he says.

“Oh, yeah, you know everything.”

“I need a P. My guy could do us reds and blues, but a clean green has to be done by a burr-oak rat two levels up. My guy knows how it’s done.”

“They won’t just have it with a P-Word,” I says. “A guy who can make green cards, they’re going to have his finger on it.”

“I know how to get the finger,” he says. “It takes the finger and the password.”

“You take a guy’s finger, he might report it. And even if you persuade him not to, sombody’s gonna notice that it’s gone.”

“Latex,” he says. “We’ll get a mold. And don’t start telling me how to do my part of the job. You get P-words, I get fingers. You in?”

“Cash,” I says.

“Twenty percent,” says he.

“Twenty percent of pus.”

“The inside guy gets twenty, the girl who brings me the finger, she gets twenty, and I damn well get forty.”

“You can’t just sell these things on the street, you know.”

“They’re worth a meg apiece,” says he, “to certain buyers.” By which he meant Orkish Crime, of course. Sell ten, and my twenty percent grows up to be two megs. Not enough to be rich, but enough to retire from public life and maybe even pay for some high-level medicals to sprout hair on my face. I got to admit that sounded good to me.

So we went into business. For a few hours he tried to do it without telling me the baroque rat’s name, just giving me data he got from his guy at Federal Coding. But that was real stupid, giving me second-hand face like that, considering he needed me to be a hundred percent sure, and pretty soon he realized that and brought me in all the way. He hated telling me anything, because he couldn’t stand to let go. Once I knew stuff on my own, what was to stop me from trying to go into business for myself? But unless he had another way to get the P-word, he had to get it from me, and for me to do it right, I had to know everything I could. Dogwalker’s got a brain in his head, even if it is all biodegradable, and so he knows there’s times when you got no choice but to trust somebody. When you just got to figure they’ll do their best even when they’re out of your sight.

He took me to his cheap condo on the old Guilford College campus, near the worm, which was real congenital for getting to Charlotte or Winston or Raleigh with no fuss. He didn’t have no soft floor, just a bed, but it was a big one, so I didn’t reckon he suffered. Maybe he bought it back in his old pimping days, I figured, back when he got his name, running a string of bitches with names like Spike and Bowser and Prince, real hydrant leg-lifters for the tweeze trade. I could see that he used to have money, and he didn’t anymore. Lots of great clothes, tailor-tight fit, but shabby, out of sync. The really old ones, he tore all the wiring out, but you could still see where the diodes used to light up. We’re talking neanderthal.

“Vanity, vanity, all is profanity,” says I, while I’m holding out the sleeve of a camisa that used to light up like an airplane coming in for a landing.

“They’re too comfortable to get rid of,” he says. But there’s a twist in his voice so I know he don’t plan to fool nobody.

“Let this be a lesson to you,” says I. “This is what happens when a walker don’t walk.”

“Walkers do steady work,” says he. “But me, when business was good, it felt bad, and when business was bad, it felt good. You walk cats, maybe you can take some pride in it. But you walk dogs, and you know they’re getting hurt every time—”

“They got a built-in switch, they don’t feel a thing. That’s why the dongs don’t touch you, walking dogs, cause nobody gets hurt.”

“Yeah, so tell me, which is worse, somebody getting tweezed till they scream so some old honk can pop his pimple, or somebody getting half their brain replaced so when the old honk tweezes her she can’t feel a thing? I had these women’s bodies around me and I knew that they used to be people.”

“You can be glass,” says I, “and still be people.”

He saw I was taking it personally. “Oh hey,” says he, “you’re under the line.”

“So are dogs,” says I.

“Yeah well,” says he. “You watch a girl come back and tell about some of the things they done to her, and she’s laughing, you draw your own line.”

I look around his shabby place. “Your choice,” says I.

“I wanted to feel clean,” says he. “That don’t mean I got to stay poor.”

“So you’re setting up this grope so you can return to the old days of peace and propensity.”

“Propensity,” says he. “What the hell kind of word is that? Why do you keep using words like that?”

“Cause I know them,” says I.

“Well you don’t know them,” says he, “because half the time you get them wrong.”

I showed him my best little-boy grin. “I know,” says I. What I don’t tell him is that the fun comes from the fact that almost nobody ever knows I’m using them wrong. Dogwalker’s no ordinary pimp. But then the ordinary pimp doesn’t bench himself halfway through the game because of a sprained moral qualm, by which I mean that Dogwalker had some stray diagonals in his head, and I began to think it might be fun to see where they all hooked up.

Anyway we got down to business. The target’s name was Jesse H. Hunt, and I did a real job on him. The Crystal Kid really plugged in on this one. Dogwalker had about two pages of stuff—date of birth, place of birth, sex at birth (no changes since), education, employment history. It was like getting an armload of empty boxes. I just laughed at it. “You got a jack to the city library?” I asked him, and he shows me the wall outlet. I plugged right in, visual onto my pocket sony, with my own little crystal head for ee-i-ee-i-oh. Not every goo-head can think clear enough to do this, you know, put out clean type just by thinking the right stuff out my left ear interface port.

I showed Dogwalker a little bit about research. Took me ten minutes. I know my way right through the Greensboro Public Library. I have P-words for every single librarian and I’m so ept that they don’t even guess I’m stepping upstream through their access channels. From the Public Library you can get all the way into North Carolina Records Division in Raleigh, and from there you can jumble into federal personnel records anywhere in the country. Which meant that by nightfall on that most portentous day we had hardcopy of every document in Jesse H. Hunt’s whole life, from his birth certificate and first grade report card to his medical history and security clearance reports when he first worked for the feds.

Dogwalker knew enough to be impressed. “If you can do all that,” he says, “you might as well pug his P-word straight out.”

“No puedo, putz,” says I as cheerful as can be. “Think of the fed as a castle. Personnel files are floating in the moat—there’s a few alligators but I swim real good. Hot data is deep in the dungeon. You can get in there, but you can’t get out clean. And P-words—P-words are kept up the queen’s ass.”

“No system is unbeatable,” he says.

“Where’d you learn that, from graffiti in a toilet stall? If the P-word system was even a little bit breakable, Dogwalker, the gentlemen you plan to sell these cards to would already be inside looking out at us, and they wouldn’t need to spend a meg to get clean greens from a street pug.”

Trouble was that after impressing Dogwalker with all the stuff I could find out about Jesse H., I didn’t know that much more than before. Oh, I could guess at some P-words, but that was all it was—guessing. I couldn’t even pick a P most likely to succeed. Jesse was one ordinary dull rat. Regulation good grades in school, regulation good evaluations on the job, probably gave his wife regulation lube jobs on a weekly schedule.

“You don’t really think your girl’s going to get his finger,” says I with sickening scorn.

“You don’t know the girl,” says he. “If we needed his flipper she’d get molds in five sizes.”

“You don’t know this guy,” says I. “This is the straightest opie in Mayberry. I don’t see him cheating on his wife.”

“Trust me,” says Dogwalker. “She’ll get his finger so smooth he won’t even know she took the mold.”

I didn’t believe him. I got a knack for knowing things about people, and Jesse H. wasn’t faking. Unless he started faking when he was five, which is pretty unpopulated. He wasn’t going to bounce the first pretty girl who made his zipper tight. Besides which he was smart. His career path showed that he was always in the right place. The right people always seemed to know his name. Which is to say he isn’t the kind whose brain can’t run if his jeans get hot. I said so.

“You’re really a marching band,” says Dogwalker. “You can’t tell me his P-word, but you’re obliquely sure that he’s a limp or a wimp.”

“Neither one,” says I. “He’s hard and straight. But a girl starts rubbing up to him, he isn’t going to think it’s because she heard that his crotch is cantilevered. He’s going to figure she wants something, and he’ll give her string till he finds out what.”

He just grinned at me. “I got me the best Password Man in the Triass, didn’t I? I got me a miracle worker named Goo-Boy, didn’t I? The ice-brain they call Crystal Kid. I got him, didn’t I?”

“Maybe,” says I.

“I got him or I kill him,” he says, showing more teeth than a primate’s supposed to have.

“You got me,” says I. “But don’t go thinking you can kill me.”

He just laughs. “I got you and you’re so good, you can bet I got me a girl who’s at least as good at what she does.”

“No such,” says I.

“Tell me his P-word and then I’ll be impressed.”

“You want quick results? Then go ask him to give you his password himself.”

Dogwalker isn’t one of those guys who can hide it when he’s mad. “I want quick results,” he says. “And if I start thinking you can’t deliver, I’ll pull your tongue out of your head. Through your nose.”

“Oh, that’s good,” says I. “I always do my best thinking when I’m being physically threatened by a client. You really know how to bring out the best in me.”

“I don’t want to bring out the best,” he says. “I just want to bring out his password.”

“I got to meet him first,” says I.

He leans over me so I can smell his musk, which is to say I’m very olfactory and so I can tell you he reeked of testosterone, by which I mean ladies could fill up with babies just from sniffing his sweat. “Meet him?” he asks me. “Why don’t we just ask him to fill out a job application?”

“I’ve read all his job applications,” says I.

“How’s a glass-head like you going to meet Mr. Fed?” says he. “I bet you’re always getting invitations to the same parties as guys like him.”

“I don’t get invited to grown-up parties,” says I. “But on the other hand, grown-ups don’t pay much attention to sweet little kids like me.” He sighed. “You really have to meet him?”

“Unless fifty-fifty on a P-word is good enough odds for you.”

All of a sudden he goes nova. Slaps a glass off the table and it breaks against the wall, and then he kicks the table over, and all the time I’m thinking about ways to get out of there unkilled. But it’s me he’s doing the show for, so there’s no way I’m leaving, and he leans in close to me and screams in my face. “That’s the last of your fifty-fifty and sixty-forty and three times in ten I want to hear about, Goo Boy, you hear me?” And I’m talking real meek and sweet, cause this boy’s twice my size and three times my weight and I don’t exactly have no leverage. So I says to him, “I can’t help talking in odds and percentages, Dogwalker, I’m vertical, remember? I’ve got glass channels in here, they spit out percentages as easy as other people sweat.”

He slapped his hand against his own head. “This ain’t exactly a sausage biscuit, either, but you know and I know that when you give me all them exact numbers it’s all guesswork anyhow. You don’t know the odds on this beakrat anymore than I do.”

“I don’t know the odds on him, Walker, but I know the odds on me. I’m sorry you don’t like the way I sound so precise, but my crystal memory has every P-word I ever plumbed, which is to say I can give you exact to the third decimal percentages on when I hit it right on the first try after meeting the subject, and how many times I hit it right on the first try just from his curriculum vitae, and right now if I don’t meet him and I go on just what I’ve got here you have a 48.838 percent chance I’ll be right on my P-word first time and a 66.667 chance I’ll be right with one out of three.”

Well that took him down, which was fine I must say because he loosened up my sphincters with that glass-smashing table-tossing hot-breath-in-my-face routine he did. He stepped back and put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall. “Well I chose the right P-man, then, didn’t I,” he says, but he doesn’t smile, no, he says the back-down words but his eyes don’t back down, his eyes say don’t try to flash my face because I see through you, I got most excellent inward shades all polarized to keep out your glitz and see you straight and clear. I never saw eyes like that before. Like he knew me. Nobody ever knew me, and I didn’t think he really knew me either, but I didn’t like him looking at me as if he thought he knew me cause the fact is I didn’t know me all that well and it worried me to think he might know me better than I did, if you catch my drift.

“All I have to do is be a little lost boy in a store,” I says.

“What if he isn’t the kind who helps little lost boys?”

“Is he the kind who lets them cry?”

“I don’t know. What if he is? What then? Think you can get away with meeting him a second time?”

“So the lost boy in the store won’t work. I can crash my bicycle on his front lawn. I can try to sell him cable magazines.”

But he was ahead of me already. “For the cable magazines he slams the door in your face, if he even comes to the door at all. For the bicycle crash, you’re out of your little glass brain. I got my inside girl working on him right now, very complicated, because he’s not the playing around kind, so she has to make this a real emotional come-on, like she’s breaking up with a boyfriend and he’s the only shoulder she can cry on, and his wife is so lucky to have a man like him. This much he can believe. But then suddenly he has this little boy crashing in his yard, and because he’s paranoid, he begins to wonder if some weird rain isn’t falling, right? I know he’s paranoid because you don’t get to his level in the fed without you know how to watch behind you and kill the enemy even before they know they’re out to get you. So he even suspects, for one instant, that somebody’s setting him up for something, and what does he do?”

I knew what Dogwalker was getting at now, and he was right, and so I let him have his victory and I let the words he wanted march out all in a row. “He changes all his passwords, all his habits, and watches over his shoulder all the time.”

“And my little project turns into compost. No clean greens.”

So I saw for the first time why this street boy, this ex-pimp, why he was the one to do this job. He wasn’t vertical like me, and he didn’t have the inside hook like his fed boy, and he didn’t have bumps in his sweater so he couldn’t do the girl part, but he had eyes in his elbows, ears in his knees, by which I mean he noticed everything there was to notice and then he thought of new things that weren’t even noticeable yet and noticed them. He earned his forty percent. And he earned part of my twenty, too.

Now while we waited around for the girl to fill Jesse’s empty aching arms and get a finger off him, and while we were still working on how to get me to meet him slow and easy and sure, I spent a lot of time with Dogwalker. Not that he ever asked me, but I found myself looping his bus route every morning till he picked me up, or I’d be eating at Bojangle’s when he came in to throw cajun chicken down into his ulcerated organs. I watched to make sure he didn’t mind, cause I didn’t want to piss this boy, having once beheld the majesty of his wrath, but if he wanted to shiver me he gave me no shiv.

Even after a few days, when the ghosts of the cold hard street started haunting us, he didn’t shake me, and that includes when Bellbottom says to him, “Looks like you stopped walking dogs. Now you pimping little boys, right? Little catamites, we call you Catwalker now, that so? Or maybe you just keep him for private use, is that it? You be Boypoker now?” Well like I always said, someday somebody’s going to kill Bell-bottom just to flay him and use his skin for a convertible roof, but Dogwalker just waved and walked on by while I made little pissy bumps at Bell. Most people shake me right off when they start getting splashed on about liking little boys, but Doggy, he didn’t say we were friends or nothing, but he didn’t give me no Miami howdy, neither, which is to say I didn’t find myself floating in the Bermuda Triangle with my ass pulled down around my ankles, by which I mean he wasn’t ashamed to be seen with me on the street, which don’t sound like a six-minute orgasm to you but to me it was like a breeze in August, I didn’t ask for it and I don’t trust it to last but as long as it’s there I’m going to like it.

How I finally got to meet Jesse H. was dervish, the best I ever thought of. Which made me wonder why I never thought of it before, except that I never before had Dogwalker like a parrot saying “stupid idea” every time I thought of something. By the time I finally got a plan that he didn’t say “stupid idea,” I was almost drowned in the deepest lightholes of my lucidity. I mean I was going at a hundred watts by the time I satisfied him.

First we found out who did babysitting for them when Jesse H. and Mrs. Jesse went out on the town (which for Nice People in G-boro means walking around the mall wishing there was something to do and then taking a piss in the public john). They had two regular teenage girls who usually came over and ignored their children for a fee, but when these darlettes were otherwise engaged, which meant they had a contract to get squeezed and poked by some half-zipped boy in exchange for a humbuger and a vid, they called upon Mother Hubbard’s Homecare Hotline. So I most carefully assinuated myself into Mother Hubbard’s estimable organization by passing myself off as a lamentably prepubic fourteen-year-old, specializing in the northwest section of town and on into the county. All this took a week, but Walker was in no hurry. Take the time to do it right, he said, if we hurry somebody’s going to notice the blur of motion and look our way and just by looking at us they’ll undo us. A horizontal mind that boy had.

Came a most delicious night when the Hunts went out to play, and both their diddle-girls were busy being squeezed most delectably (and didn’t we have a lovely time persuading two toddle-boys to do the squeezing that very night). This news came to Mr. and Mrs. Jesse at the very last minute, and they had no choice but to call Mother Hubbard’s, and isn’t it lovely that just a half hour before, sweet little Stevie Queen, being moi, called in and said that he was available for baby-stomping after all. Ein and ein made zwei, and there I was being dropped off by a Mother Hubbard driver at the door of the Jesse Hunt house, whereupon I not only got to look upon the beatific face of Mr. Fed himself, I also got to have my dear head patted by Mrs. Fed, and then had the privilege of preparing little snacks for fussy Fed Jr. and foul-mouthed Fedene, the five-year-old and the three-year-old, while Microfed, the one-year-old (not yet human and, if I am any judge of character, not likely to live long enough to become such) sprayed uric acid in my face while I was diapering him. A good time was had by all.

Because of my heroic efforts, the small creatures were in their truckle beds quite early, and being a most fastidious baby-tucker, I browsed the house looking for burglars and stumbling, quite by chance, upon the most useful information about the beak-rat whose secret self-chosen name I was trying to learn. For one thing, he had set a watchful hair upon each of his bureau drawers, so that if I had been inclined to steal, he would know that unlawful access of his drawers had been attempted. I learned that he and his wife had separate containers of everything in the bathroom, even when they used the same brand of toothpaste, and it was he, not she, who took care of all their prophylactic activities (and not a moment too soon, thought I, for I had come to know their children). He was not the sort to use lubrificants or little pleasure-giving ribs, either. Only the regulation government-issue hard-as-concrete rubber rafts for him, which suggested to my most pernicious mind that he had almost as much fun between the sheets as me.

I learned all kinds of joyful information, all of it trivial, all of it vital. I never know which of the threads I grasp are going to make connections deep within the lumens of my brightest caves. But I never before had the chance to wander unmolested through a person’s own house when searching for his P-word. I saw the notes his children brought home from school, the magazines his family received, and more and more I began to see that Jesse H. Hunt barely touched his family at any point. He stood like a waterbug on the surface of life, without ever getting his feet wet. He could die, and if nobody tripped over the corpse it would be weeks before they noticed. And yet this was not because he did not care. It was because he was so very very careful. He examined everything, but through the wrong end of the microscope, so that it all became very small and far away. I was a sad little boy by the end of that night, and I whispered to Microfed that he should practice pissing in male faces, because that’s the only way he would ever sink a hook into his daddy’s face.

“What if he wants to take you home?” Dogwalker asked me, and I said, “No way he would, nobody does that,” but Dogwalker made sure I had a place to go all the same, and sure enough, it was Doggy who got voltage and me who went limp. I ended up riding in a beak-rat buggy, a genuine made-in-America rattletrap station wagon, and he took me to the for-sale house where Mama Pimple was waiting crossly for me and made Mr. Hunt go away because he kept me out too late. Then when the door was closed Mama Pimple giggled her gig and chuckled her chuck, and Walker himself wandered out of the back room and said, “That’s one less favor you owe me, Mama Pimple,” and she said, “No, my dear boyoh, that’s one more favor you owe me” and then they kissed a deep passionate kiss if you can believe it. Did you imagine anybody ever kissed Mama Pimple that way? Dogwalker is a boyful of shocks.

“Did you get all you needed?” he asks me.

“I have P-words dancing upward,” says I, “and I’ll have a name for you tomorrow in my sleep.”

“Hold onto it and don’t tell me,” says Dogwalker. “I don’t want to hear a name until after we have his finger.”

That magical day was only hours away, because the girl—whose name I never knew and whose face I never saw—was to cast her spell over Mr. Fed the very next day. As Dogwalker said, this was no job for lingeree. The girl did not dress pretty and pretended to be lacking in the social graces, but she was a good little clerical who was going through a most distressing period in her private life, because she had undergone a premature hysterectomy, poor lass, or so she told Mr. Fed, and here she was losing her womanhood and she had never really felt like a woman at all. But he was so kind to her, for weeks he had been so kind, and Dogwalker told me afterward how he locked the door of his office for just a few minutes, and held her and kissed her to make her feel womanly, and once his fingers had all made their little impressions on the thin electrified plastic microcoating all over her lovely naked back and breasts, she began to cry and most gratefully informed him that she did not want him to be unfaithful to his wife for her sake, that he had already given her such a much of a lovely gift by being so kind and understanding, and she felt better thinking that a man like him could bear to touch her knowing she was defemmed inside, and now she thought she had the confidence to go on. A very convincing act, and one calculated to get his hot naked handprints without giving him a crisis of conscience that might change his face and give him a whole new set of possible Ps.

The microsheet got all his fingers from several angles, and so Walker was able to dummy out a finger mask for our inside man within a single night. Right index. I looked at it most skeptically, I fear, because I had my doubts already dancing in the little lightpoints of my inmost mind. “Just one finger?”

“All we get is one shot,” said Dogwalker. “One single try.”

“But if he makes a mistake, if my first password isn’t right, then he could use the middle finger on the second try.”

“Tell me, my vertical pricket, whether you think Jesse H. Hunt is the sort of burr oak rat who makes mistakes?”

To which I had to answer that he was not, and yet I had my misgivings and my misgivings all had to do with needing a second finger, and yet I am vertical, not horizontal, which means that I can see the present as deep as you please but the future’s not mine to see, que sera, sera.

From what Doggy told me, I tried to imagine Mr. Fed’s reaction to this nubile flesh that he had pressed. If he had poked as well as peeked, I think it would have changed his P-word, but when she told him that she would not want to compromise his uncompromising virtue, it reinforced him as a most regular or even regulation fellow and his name remained pronouncedly the same, and his P-word also did not change. “Invictus-XYZrwr,” quoth I to Dogwalker, for that was his veritable password, I knew it with more certainty than I had ever had before.

“Where in hell did you come up with that?” says he.

“If I knew how I did it, Walker, I’d never miss at all,” says I. “I don’t even know if it’s in the goo or in the zoo. All the facts go down, and it all gets mixed around, and up come all these dancing P-words, little pieces of P.”

“Yeah but you don’t just make it up, what does it mean?”

“Invictus is an old poem in a frame stuck in his bureau drawer, which his mama gave him when he was still a little fed-to-be. XYZ is his idea of randomizing, and rwr is the first U.S. President that he admired. I don’t know why he chose these words now. Six weeks ago he was using a different P-word with a lot of numbers in it, and six weeks from now he’ll change again, but right now—”

“Sixty percent sure?” asked Doggy.

“I give no percents this time,” says I. “I’ve never roamed through the bathroom of my subject before. But this or give me an assectomy, I’ve never been more sure.”

Now that he had the P-word, the inside guy began to wear his magic finger every day, looking for a chance to be alone in Mr. Fed’s office. He had already created the preliminary files, like any routine green card requests, and buried them within his work area. All he needed was to go in, sign on as Mr. Fed, and then if the system accepted his name and P-word and finger, he could call up the files, approve them, and be gone within a minute. But he had to have that minute.

And on that wonderful magical day he had it. Mr. Fed had a meeting and his secretary sprung a leak a day early, and in went Inside Man with a perfectly legitimate note to leave for Hunt. He sat before the terminal, typed name and P-word and laid down his phony finger, and the machine spread wide its lovely legs and bid him enter. He had the files processed in forty seconds, laying down his finger for each green, then signed off and went on out. No sign, no sound that anything was wrong. As sweet as summertime, as smooth as ice, and all we had to do was sit and wait for green cards to come in the mail.

“Who you going to sell them to?” says I.

“I offer them to no one till I have clean greens in my hand,” says he. Because Dogwalker is careful. What happened was not because he was not careful.

Every day we walked to the ten places where the envelopes were supposed to come. We knew they wouldn’t be there for a week—the wheels of government grind exceeding slow, for good or ill. Every day we checked with Inside Man, whose name and face I have already given you, much good it will do, since both are no doubt different by now. He told us every time that all was the same, nothing was changed, and he was telling the truth, for the fed was most lugubrious and palatial and gave no leaks that anything was wrong. Even Mr. Hunt himself did not know that aught was amiss in his little kingdom.

Yet even with no sign that I could name, I was jumpy every morning and sleepless every night. “You walk like you got to use the toilet,” says Walker to me, and it is verily so. Something is wrong, I say to myself, something is most deeply wrong, but I cannot find the name for it even though I know, and so I say nothing, or I lie to myself and try to invent a reason for my fear. “It’s my big chance,” says I. “To be twenty percent of rich.”

“Rich,” says he, “not just a fifth.”

“Then you’ll be double rich.”

And he just grins at me, being the strong and silent type.

“But then why don’t you sell nine,” says I, “and keep the other green? Then you’ll have the money to pay for it, and the green to go where you want in all the world.”

But he just laughs at me and says, “Silly boy, my dear sweet pinheaded lightbrained little friend. If someone sees a pimp like me passing a green, he’ll tell a fed, because he’ll know there’s been a mistake. Greens don’t go to boys like me.”

“But you won’t be dressed like a pimp,” says I, “and you won’t stay in pimp hotels.”

“I’m a low-class pimp,” he says again, “and so however I dress that day, that’s just the way pimps dress. And whatever hotel I go to, that’s a low-class pimp hotel until I leave.”

“Pimping isn’t some disease,” says I. “It isn’t in your gonads and it isn’t in your genes. If your daddy was a Kroc and your mama was an Iacocca, you wouldn’t be a pimp.”

“The hell I wouldn’t,” says he. “I’d just be a high-class pimp, like my mama and my daddy. Who do you think gets green cards? You can’t sell no virgins on the street.”

I thought that he was wrong and I still do. If anybody could go from low to high in a week, it’s Dogwalker. He could be anything and do anything, and that’s the truth. Or almost anything. If he could do anything then his story would have a different ending. But it was not his fault. Unless you blame pigs because they can’t fly. I was the vertical one, wasn’t I? I should have named my suspicions and we wouldn’t have passed those greens.

I held them in my hands, there in his little room, all ten of them when he spilled them on the bed. To celebrate he jumped up so high he smacked his head on the ceiling again and again, which made them ceiling tiles dance and flip over and spill dust all over the room. “I flashed just one, a single one,” says he, “and a cool million was what he said, and then I said what if ten? And he laughs and says fill in the check yourself.”

“We should test them,” says I.

“We can’t test them,” he says. “The only way to test it is to use it, and if you use it then your print and face are in its memory forever and so we could never sell it.”

“Then sell one, and make sure it’s clean.”

“A package deal,” he says. “If I sell one, and they think I got more but I’m holding out to raise the price, then I may not live to collect for the other nine, because I might have an accident and lose these little babies. I sell all ten tonight at once, and then I’m out of the green card business for life.”

But more than ever that night I am afraid, he’s out selling those greens to those sweet gentlebodies who are commonly referred to as Organic Crime, and there I am on his bed, shivering and dreaming because I know that something will go most deeply wrong but I still don’t know what and I still don’t know why. I keep telling myself, You’re only afraid because nothing could ever go so right for you, you can’t believe that anything could ever make you rich and safe. I say this stuff so much that I believe that I believe it, but I don’t really, not down deep, and so I shiver again and finally I cry, because after all my body still believes I’m nine, and nine-year-olds have tear ducts very easy of access, no password required. Well he comes in late that night, and I’m asleep he thinks, and so he walks quiet instead of dancing, but I can hear the dancing in his little sounds, I know he has the money all safely in the bank, and so when he leans over to make sure if I’m asleep, I say, “Could I borrow a hundred thou?”

So he slaps me and he laughs and dances and sings, and I try to go along, you bet I do, I know I should be happy, but then at the end he says, “You just can’t take it, can you? You just can’t handle it,” and then I cry all over again, and he just puts his arm around me like a movie dad and gives me play-punches on the head and says, “I’m gonna marry me a wife, I am, maybe even Mama Pimple herself, and we’ll adopt you and have a little spielberg family in Summerfield, with a riding mower on a real grass lawn.”

“I’m older than you or Mama Pimple,” says I, but he just laughs. Laughs and hugs me until he thinks that I’m all right. Don’t go home, he says to me that night, but home I got to go, because I know I’ll cry again, from fear or something, anyway, and I don’t want him to think his cure wasn’t permanent. “No thanks,” says I, but he just laughs at me. “Stay here and cry all you want to, Goo Boy, but don’t go home tonight. I don’t want to be alone tonight, and sure as hell you don’t either.” And so I slept between his sheets, like with a brother, him punching and tickling and pinching and telling dirty jokes about his whores, the most good and natural night I spent in all my life, with a true friend, which I know you don’t believe, snickering and nickering and ickering your filthy little thoughts, there was no holes plugged that night because nobody was out to take pleasure from nobody else, just Dogwalker being happy and wanting me not to be so sad.

And after he was asleep, I wanted so bad to know who it was he sold them to, so I could call them up and say, “Don’t use those greens, cause they aren’t clean. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but the feds are onto this, I know they are, and if you use those cards they’ll nail your fingers to your face.” But if I called would they believe me? They were careful too. Why else did it take a week? They had one of their nothing goons use a card to make sure it had no squeaks or leaks, and it came up clean. Only then did they give the cards to seven big boys, with two held in reserve. Even Organic Crime, the All-seeing Eye, passed those cards same as we did.

I think maybe Dogwalker was a little bit vertical too. I think he knew same as me that something was wrong with this. That’s why he kept checking back with the inside man, cause he didn’t trust how good it was. That’s why he didn’t spend any of his share. We’d sit there eating the same old schlock, out of his cut from some leg job or my piece from a data wipe, and every now and then he’d say, “Rich man’s food sure tastes good.” Or maybe even though he wasn’t vertical he still thought maybe I was right when I thought something was wrong. Whatever he thought, though, it just kept getting worse and worse for me, until the morning when we went to see the inside man and the inside man was gone.

Gone clean. Gone like he never existed. His apartment for rent, cleaned out floor to ceiling. A phone call to the fed, and he was on vacation, which meant they had him, he wasn’t just moved to another house with his newfound wealth. We stood there in his empty place, his shabby empty hovel that was ten times better than anywhere we ever lived, and Doggy says to me, real quiet, he says, “What was it? What did I do wrong? I thought I was like Hunt, I thought I never made a single mistake in this job, in this one job.”

And that was it, right then I knew. Not a week before, not when it would do any good. Right then I finally knew it all, knew what Hunt had done. Jesse Hunt never made mistakes. But he was also so paranoid that he haired his bureau to see if the babysitter stole from him. So even though he would never accidentally enter the wrong P-word, he was just the kind who would do it on purpose. “He doublefingered every time,” I says to Dog. “He’s so damn careful he does his password wrong the first time every time, and then comes in on his second finger.”

“So one time he comes in on the first try, so what?” He says this because he doesn’t know computers like I do, being half-glass myself.

“The system knew the pattern, that’s what. Jesse H. is so precise he never changed a bit, so when we came in on the first try, that set off alarms. It’s my fault, Dog, I knew how crazy paranoidical he is, I knew that something was wrong, but not till this minute I didn’t know what it was. I should have known it when I got his password, I should have known, I’m sorry, you never should have gotten me into this, I’m sorry, you should have listened to me when I told you something was wrong, I should have known, I’m sorry.”

What I done to Doggy that I never meant to do. What I done to him! Anytime, I could have thought of it, it was all there inside my glassy little head, but no, I didn’t think of it till after it was way too late. And maybe it’s because I didn’t want to think of it, maybe it’s because I really wanted to be wrong about the green cards, but however it flew, I did what I do, which is to say I’m not the pontiff in his fancy chair, by which I mean I can’t be smarter than myself.

Right away he called the gentlebens of Ossified Crime to warn them, but I was already plugged into the library sucking news as fast as I could and so I knew it wouldn’t do no good, cause they got all seven of the big boys and their nitwit taster, too, locked up good and tight for card fraud.

And what they said on the phone to Dogwalker made things real clear. “We’re dead,” says Doggy.

“Give them time to cool,” says I.

“They’ll never cool,” says he. “There’s no chance, they’ll never forgive this even if they know the whole truth, because look at the names they gave the cards to, it’s like they got them for their biggest boys on the borderline, the habibs who bribe presidents of little countries and rake off cash from octopods like Shell and ITT and every now and then kill somebody and walk away clean. Now they’re sitting there in jail with the whole life story of the organization in their brains, so they don’t care if we meant to do it or not. They’re hurting, and the only way they know to make the hurt go away is to pass it on to somebody else. And that’s us. They want to make us hurt, and hurt real bad, and for a long long time.”

I never saw Dog so scared. That’s the only reason we went to the feds ourselves. We didn’t ever want to stool, but we needed their protection plan, it was our only hope. So we offered to testify how we did it, not even for immunity, just so they’d change our faces and put us in a safe jail somewhere to work off the sentence and come out alive, you know? That’s all we wanted.

But the feds, they laughed at us. They had the inside guy, see, and he was going to get immunity for testifying. “We don’t need you,” they says to us, “and we don’t care if you go to jail or not. It was the big guys we wanted.”

“If you let us walk,” says Doggy, “then they’ll think we set them up.”

“Make us laugh,” says the feds. “Us work with street poots like you? They know that we don’t stoop so low.”

“They bought from us,” says Doggy. “If we’re big enough for them, we’re big enough for the dongs.”

“Do you believe this?” says one fed to his identical junior officer. “These jollies are begging us to take them into jail. Well listen tight, my jolly boys, maybe we don’t want to add you to the taxpayers’ expense account, did you think of that? Besides, all we’d give you is time, but on the street, those boys will give you time and a half, and it won’t cost us a dime.”

So what could we do? Doggy just looks like somebody sucked out six pints, he’s so white. On the way out of the fedhouse, he says, “Now we’re going to find out what it’s like to die.”

And I says to him, “Walker, they stuck no gun in your mouth yet, they shove no shiv in your eye. We still breathing, we got legs, so let’s walk out of here.”

“Walk!” he says. “You walk out of G-boro, glasshead, and you bump into trees.”

“So what?” says I. “I can plug in and pull out all the data we want about how to live in the woods. Lots of empty land out there. Where do you think the marijuana grows?”

“I’m a city boy,” he says. “I’m a city boy.” Now we’re standing out in front, and he’s looking around. “In the city I got a chance, I know the city.”

“Maybe in New York or Dallas,” says I, “but G-boro’s just too small, not even half a million people, you can’t lose yourself deep enough here.”

“Yeah well,” he says, still looking around. “It’s none of your business now anyway, Goo Boy. They aren’t blaming you, they’re blaming me.”

“But it’s my fault,” says I, “and I’m staying with you to tell them so.”

“You think they’re going to stop and listen?” says he.

“I’ll let them shoot me up with speakeasy so they know I’m telling the truth.”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” says he. “And I don’t give a twelve-inch poker whose fault it is anyway. You’re clean, but if you stay with me you’ll get all muddy, too. I don’t need you around, and you sure as hell don’t need me. Job’s over. Done. Get lost.”

But I couldn’t do that. The same way he couldn’t go on walking dogs, I couldn’t just run off and leave him to eat my mistake. “They know I was your P-word man,” says I. “They’ll be after me, too.”

“Maybe for a while, Goo Boy. But you transfer your twenty percent into Bobby Joe’s Face Shop, so they aren’t looking for you to get a refund, and then stay quiet for a week and they’ll forget all about you.”

He’s right but I don’t care. “I was in for twenty percent of rich,” says I. “So I’m in for fifty percent of trouble.”

All of a sudden he sees what he’s looking for. “There they are, Goo Boy, the dorks they sent to hit me. In that Mercedes.” I look but all I see are electrics. Then his hand is on my back and he gives me a shove that takes me right off the portico and into the bushes, and by the time I crawl out, Doggy’s nowhere in sight. For about a minute I’m pissed about getting scratched up in the plants, until I realize he was getting me out of the way, so I wouldn’t get shot down or hacked up or lased out, whatever it is they planned to do to him to get even.

I was safe enough, right? I should’ve walked away, I should’ve ducked right out of the city. I didn’t even have to refund the money. I had enough to go clear out of the country and live the rest of my life where even Occipital Crime couldn’t find me.

And I thought about it. I stayed the night in Mama Pimple’s flophouse because I knew somebody would be watching my own place. All that night I thought about places I could go. Australia. New Zealand. Or even a foreign place, I could afford a good vocabulary crystal so picking up a new language would be easy.

But in the morning I couldn’t do it. Mama Pimple didn’t exactly ask me but she looked so worried and all I could say was, “He pushed me into the bushes and I don’t know where he is.”

And she just nods at me and goes back to fixing breakfast. Her hands are shaking she’s so upset. Because she knows that Dogwalker doesn’t stand a chance against Orphan Crime.

“I’m sorry,” says I.

“What can you do?” she says. “When they want you, they get you. If the feds don’t give you a new face, you can’t hide.”

“What if they didn’t want him?” says I.

She laughs at me. “The story’s all over the street. The arrests were in the news, and now everybody knows the big boys are looking for Walker. They want him so bad the whole street can smell it.”

“What if they knew it wasn’t his fault?” says I. “What if they knew it was an accident? A mistake?”

Then Mama Pimple squints at me—not many people can tell when she’s squinting, but I can—and she says, “Only one boy can tell them that so they’ll believe it.”

“Sure, I know,” says I.

“And if that boy walks in and says, Let me tell you why you don’t want to hurt my friend Dogwalker—”

“Nobody said life was safe,” I says. “Besides, what could they do to me that’s worse than what already happened to me when I was nine?”

She comes over and just puts her hand on my head, just lets her hand lie there for a few minutes, and I know what I’ve got to do.

So I did it. Went to Fat Jack’s and told him I wanted to talk to Junior Mint about Dogwalker, and it wasn’t thirty seconds before I was hustled on out into the alley, and driven somewhere with my face mashed into the floor of the car so I couldn’t tell where it was. Idiots didn’t know that somebody as vertical as me can tell the number of wheel revolutions and the exact trajectory of every curve. I could’ve drawn a freehand map of where they took me. But if I let them know that, I’d never come home, and since there was a good chance I’d end up dosed with speakeasy, I went ahead and erased the memory. Good thing I did—that was the first thing they asked me as soon as they had the drug in me.

Gave me a grown-up dose, they did, so I practically told them my whole life story and my opinion of them and everybody and everything else, so the whole session took hours, felt like forever, but at the end they knew, they absolutely knew that Dogwalker was straight with them, and when it was over and I was coming up so I had some control over what I said, I asked them, I begged them, Let Dogwalker live. Just let him go. He’ll give back the money, and I’ll give back mine, just let him go.

“Okay,” says the guy.

I didn’t believe it.

“No, you can believe me, we’ll let him go.”

“You got him?”

“Picked him up before you even came in. It wasn’t hard.”

“And you didn’t kill him?”

“Kill him? We had to get the money back first, didn’t we, so we needed him alive till morning, and then you came in, and your little story changed our minds, it really did, you made us feel all sloppy and sorry for that poor old pimp.”

Few a few seconds there I actually believed that it was going to be all right. But then I knew from the way they looked, from the way they acted, I knew the same way I know about passwords.

They brought in Dogwalker and handed me a book. Dogwalker was very quiet and stiff and he didn’t look like he recognized me at all. I didn’t even have to look at the book to know what it was. They scooped out his brain and replaced it with glass, like me only way over the line, way way over, there was nothing of Dogwalker left inside his head, just glass pipe and goo. The book was a User’s Manual, with all the instructions about how to program him and control him.

I looked at him and he was Dogwalker, the same face, the same hair, everything. Then he moved or talked and he was dead, he was somebody else living in Dogwalker’s body. And I says to them, “Why? Why didn’t you just kill him, if you were going to do this?”

“This one was too big,” says the guy. “Everybody in G-boro knew what happened, everybody in the whole country, everybody in the world. Even if it was a mistake, we couldn’t let it go. No hard feelings, Goo Boy. He is alive. And so are you. And you both stay that way, as long as you follow a few simple rules. Since he’s over the line, he has to have an owner, and you’re it. You can use him however you want—rent out data storage, pimp him as a jig or a jaw—but he stays with you always. Every day, he’s on the street here in G-boro, so we can bring people here and show them what happens to boys who make mistakes. You can even keep your cut from the job, so you don’t have to scramble at all if you don’t want to. That’s how much we like you, Goo Boy. But if he leaves this town or doesn’t come out, even one single solitary day, you’ll be very sorry for the last six hours of your life. Do you understand?”

I understood. I took him with me. I bought this place, these clothes, and that’s how it’s been ever since. That’s why we go out on the street every day. I read the whole manual, and I figure there’s maybe ten percent of Dogwalker left inside. The part that’s Dogwalker can’t ever get to the surface, can’t ever talk or move or anything like that, can’t ever remember or even consciously think. But maybe he can still wander around inside what used to be his head, maybe he can sample the data stored in all that goo. Maybe someday he’ll even run across this story and he’ll know what happened to him, and he’ll know that I tried to save him.

In the meantime this is my last will and testament. See, I have us doing all kinds of research on Orgasmic Crime, so that someday I’ll know enough to reach inside the system and unplug it. Unplug it all, and make those bastards lose everything, the way they took everything away from Dogwalker. Trouble is, some places there ain’t no way to look without leaving tracks. Goo is as goo do, I always say. I’ll find out I’m not as good as I think I am when somebody comes along and puts a hot steel putz in my face. Knock my brains out when it comes. But there’s this, lying in a few hundred places in the system. Three days after I don’t lay down my code in a certain program in a certain place, this story pops into view. The fact you’re reading this means I’m dead.

Or it means I paid them back, and so I quit suppressing this cause I don’t care anymore. So maybe this is my swan song, and maybe this is my victory song. You’ll never know, will you, mate?

But you’ll wonder. I like that. You wondering about us, whoever you are, you thinking about old Goo Boy and Dogwalker, you guessing whether the fangs who scooped Doggy’s skull and turned him into self-propelled property paid for it down to the very last delicious little drop.

And in the meantime, I’ve got this goo machine to take care of. Only ten percent a man, he is, but then I’m only forty percent myself. All added up together we make only half a man. But that’s the half that counts. That’s the half that still wants things. The goo in me and the goo in him is all just light pipes and electricity. Data without desire. Lightspeed trash. But I have some desires left, just a few, and maybe so does Dogwalker, even fewer. And we’ll get what we want. We’ll get it all. Every speck. Every sparkle. Believe it.

FOR I HAVE TOUCHED THE SKY

Mike Resnick

1988 was a good year for Mike Resnick and his superior SF work with an African background. A novel, IVORY, was published by TOR to excellent notices, and his story "Kirinyaga" (F&SF November 1988) won several award nominations. The story below also takes place on the far-future recreation of Kenya known as Kirinyaga.

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN men had wings.

Ngai, who sits alone on His throne atop Kirinyaga, which is now called Mount Kenya, gave men the gift of flight, so that they might reach the succulent fruits on the highest branches of the trees. But one man, a son of Gikuyu, who was himself the first man, saw the eagle and the vulture riding high upon the winds, and, spreading his wings, he joined them. He circled higher and higher, and soon he soared far above all other flying things.

Then, suddenly, the hand of Ngai reached out and grabbed the son of Gikuyu.

“What have I done that you should grab me thus?” asked the son of Gikuyu.

“I live atop Kirinyaga because it is the top of the world,” answered Ngai, “and no one’s head may be higher than my own.”

And so saying, Ngai plucked the wings from the son of Gikuyu, and then took wings away from all men, so that no man could ever again rise higher than His head.

And that is why all of Gikuyu’s descendents look at the birds with a sense of loss and envy, and why they no longer eat the succulent fruits from the highest branches of the trees.

We have many birds on the world of Kirinyaga, which was named for the holy mountain where Ngai dwells. We brought them along with our other animals when we received our charter from the Eutopian Council and departed from a Kenya that no longer had any meaning for true members of the Kikuyu tribe. Our new world is home to the marabou and the vulture, the ostrich and the fish eagle, the weaver and the heron, and many other species. Even I, Koriba, who am the mundumugu—the witch doctor—delight in their many colors, and find solace in their music. I have spent many afternoons seated in front of my boma, my back propped up against an ancient acacia tree, watching the profusion of colors and listening to the melodic songs as the birds come to slake their thirst in the river that winds through our village.

It was on one such afternoon that Kamari, a young girl who was not yet of circumcision age, walked up the long, winding path that separates my boma from the village, holding something small and gray in her hands.

“Jambo, Koriba,” she greeted me.

“Jambo, Kamari,” I answered her. “What have you brought to me, child?”

“This,” she said, holding out a young pygmy falcon that struggled weakly to escape her grasp. “I found him in my family’s shamba. He cannot fly.”

“He looks fully fledged,” I noted, getting to my feet. Then I saw that one of his wings was held at an awkward angle. “Ah!” I said. “He has broken his wing.”

“Can you make him well, mundumugu?” asked Kamari.

I examined the wing briefly, while she held the young falcon’s head away from me. Then I stepped back.

“I can make him well, Kamari,” I said. “But I cannot make him fly. The wing will heal, but it will never be strong enough to bear his weight again. I think we will destroy him.”

“No!” she exclaimed, pulling the falcon back. “You will make him live, and I will care for him!”

I stared at the bird for a moment, then shook my head. “He will not wish to live,” I said at last.

“Why not?”

“Because he has ridden high upon the warm winds.”

“I do not understand,” said Kamari, frowning.

“Once a bird has touched the sky,” I explained, “he can never be content to spend his days on the ground.”

“I will make him content,” she said with determination. “You will heal him, and I will care for him, and he will live.”

“I will heal him, and you will care for him,” I said. “But,” I added, “he will not live.”

“What is your fee, Koriba?” she asked, suddenly businesslike.

“I do not charge children,” I answered. “I will visit your father tomorrow, and he will pay me.”

She shook her head adamantly. “This is my bird. I will pay the fee.”

“Very well,” I said, admiring her spirit, for most children—and all adults—are terrified of their mundumugu, and would never openly contradict or disagree with him. “For one month you will clean myboma every morning and every afternoon. You will lay out my sleeping blankets, and keep my water gourd filled, and you will see that I have kindling for my fire.”

“That is fair,” she said after a moment’s consideration. Then she added: “What if the bird dies before the month is over?”

“Then you will learn that a mundumugu knows more than a little Kikuyu girl,” I said.

She set her jaw. “He will not die.” She paused. “Will you fix his wing now?”

“Yes.”

“I will help.”

I shook my head. “You will build a cage in which to confine him, for if he tries to move his wing too soon, he will break it again, and then I will surely have to destroy him.”

She handed the bird to me. “I will be back soon,” she promised, racing off toward her shamba.

I took the falcon into my hut. He was too weak to struggle very much, and he allowed me to tie his beak shut. Then I began the slow task of splinting his broken wing and binding it against his body to keep it motionless. He shrieked in pain as I manipulated the bones together, but otherwise he simply stared unblinking at me, and within ten minutes the job was finished.

Kamari returned an hour later, holding a small wooden cage in her hands.

“Is this large enough, Koriba?” she asked.

I held it up and examined it.

“It is almost too large,” I replied. “He must not be able to move his wing until it has healed.”

“He won’t,” she promised. “I will watch him all day long, every day.”

“You will watch him all day long, every day?” I repeated, amused.

“Yes.”

“Then who will clean my hut and my boma, and who will fill my gourd with water?”

“I will carry his cage with me when I come,” she replied.

“The cage will be much heavier when the bird is in it,” I pointed out.

“When I am a woman, I will carry far heavier loads on my back, for I shall have to till the fields and gather the firewood for my husband’s boma,” she said. “This will be good practice.” She paused. “Why do you smile at me, Koriba?”

“I am not used to being lectured to by uncircumcised children,” I replied with a smile.

“I was not lecturing,” she answered with dignity. “I was explaining.”

I held a hand up to shade my eyes from the afternoon sun.

“Are you not afraid of me, little Kamari?” I asked.

“Why should I be?”

“Because I am the mundumugu.”

“That just means you are smarter than the others,” she said with a shrug. She threw a stone at a chicken that was approaching her cage, and it raced away, squawking its annoyance. “Someday I shall be as smart as you are.”

“Oh?”

She nodded confidently. “Already I can count higher than my father, and I can remember many things.”

“What kind of things?” I asked, turning slightly as a hot breeze blew a swirl of dust about us.

“Do you remember the story of the honey bird that you told to the children of the village before the long rains?”

I nodded.

“I can repeat it,” she said.

“You mean you can remember it.”

She shook her head vigorously. “I can repeat every word that you said.”

I sat down and crossed my legs. “Let me hear it,” I said, staring off into the distance and idly watching a pair of young men tending their cattle.

She hunched her shoulders, so that she would appear as bent with age as I myself am, and then, in a voice that sounded like a youthful replica of my own, she began to speak, mimicking my gestures.

“There is a little brown honey bird,” she began. “He is much like a sparrow, and as friendly. He will come to your boma and call to you; and as you approach him, he will fly up and lead you to a hive, and then wait while you gather grass and set fire to it and smoke out the bees. But you must always”—she emphasized the word, just as I had done—”leave some honey for him, for if you take it all, the next time he will lead you into the jaws of fisi, the hyena, or perhaps into the desert, where there is no water and you will die of thirst.” Her story finished, she stood upright and smiled at me. “You see?” she said proudly.

“I see,” I said, brushing away a large fly that had lit on my cheek.

“Did I do it right?” she asked.

“You did it right.”

She stared at me thoughtfully. “Perhaps when you die, I will become the mundumugu.”

“Do I seem that close to death?” I asked her.

“Well,” she answered, “you are very old and bent and wrinkled, and you sleep too much. But I will be just as happy if you do not die right away.”

“I shall try to make you just as happy,” I said ironically. “Now take your falcon home.”

I was about to instruct her concerning his needs, but she spoke first.

“He will not want to eat today. But starting tomorrow, I will give him large insects, and at least one lizard every day. And he must always have water.”

“You are very observant, Kamari.”

She smiled at me again, and then ran off toward her boma.

She was back at dawn the next morning, carrying the cage with her. She placed it in the shade, then filled a small container with water from one of my gourds and set it inside the cage.

“How is your bird this morning?” I asked, sitting close to my fire, for even though the planetary engineers of the Eutopian Council had given Kirinyaga a climate identical to Kenya’s, the sun had not yet warmed the morning air.

Kamari frowned. “He has not eaten yet.”

“He will, when he gets hungry enough,” I said, pulling my blanket more tightly around my shoulders. “He is used to swooping down on his prey from the sky.”

“He drinks his water, though,” she noted.

“That is a good sign.”

“Can you not cast a spell that will heal him at once?”

“The price would be too high,” I said, for I had foreseen her question. “This way is better.”

“How high?”

“Too high,” I repeated, closing the subject. “Now, do you not have work to do?”

“Yes, Koriba.”

She spent the next few minutes gathering kindling for my fire and filling my gourd from the river. Then she went into my hut to clean it and straighten my sleeping blankets. She emerged a momentlater with a book in her hand.

“What is this, Koriba?” she asked.

“Who told you that you could touch your mundumugu’s possessions?” I asked sternly.

“How can I clean them without touching them?” she replied with no show of fear. “What is it?”

“It is a book.”

“What is a book, Koriba?”

“It is not for you to know,” I said. “Put it back.”

“Shall I tell you what I think it is?” she asked.

“Tell me,” I said, curious to hear her answer.

“Do you know how you draw signs on the ground when you cast the bones to bring the rains? I think that a book is a collection of signs.”

“You are a very bright little girl, Kamari.”

“I told you that I was,” she said, annoyed that I had not accepted her statement as a self-evident truth. She looked at the book for a moment, then held it up. “What do the signs mean?”

“Different things,” I said.

“What things?”

“It is not necessary for the Kikuyu to know.”

“But you know.”

“I am the mundumugu.”

“Can anyone else on Kirinyaga read the signs?”

“Your own chief, Koinnage, and two other chiefs can read the signs,” I answered, sorry now that she had charmed me into this conversation, for I could foresee its direction.

“But you are all old men,” she said. “You should teach me, so when you all die, someone can still read the signs.”

“These signs are not important,” I said. “They were created by the Europeans. The Kikuyu had no need for books before the Europeans came to Kenya; we have no need for them on Kirinyaga, which is our own world. When Koinnage and the other chiefs die, everything will be as it was long ago.”

“Are they evil signs, then?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “They are not evil. They just have no meaning for the Kikuyu. They are white man’s signs.”

She handed the book to me. “Would you read me one of the signs?”

“Why?”

“I am curious to know what kind of signs the white men made.”

I stared at her for a long minute, trying to make up my mind. Finally I nodded my assent.

“Just this once,” I said. “Never again.”

“Just this once,” she agreed.

I thumbed through the book, which was a Swahili translation of English poetry, selected one at random, and read it to her:

Live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
And all the craggy mountains yields.
There will we sit upon the rocks,
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, by whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
There will I make thee a bed of roses,
With a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle.
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Then live with me and be my love.

KAMARI FROWNED. “I do not understand.”

“I told you that you would not,” I said. “Now put the book away and finish cleaning my hut. You must still work in your father’s shamba, along with your duties here.’

She nodded and disappeared into my hut, only to burst forth excitedly a few minutes later.

“It is a story!” she exclaimed.

“What is?”

“The sign you read! I do not understand many of the words, but it is a story about a warrior who asks a maiden to marry him!” She paused. “You would tell it better, Koriba. The sign doesn’t even mention fisi, the hyena, and mamba, the crocodile, who dwells by the river and would eat the warrior and his wife. Still, it is a story! I had thought it would be spell for mundumugus.”

“You are very wise to know that it is a story,” I said.

“Read another to me!’ she said enthusiastically.

I shook my head. “Do you not remember our agreement? Just that once and never again.”

She lowered her head in thought, then looked up brightly. “Then teach me to read the signs.”

“That is against the law of the Kikuyu,” I said. “No woman is permitted to read.”

“Why?”

“It is a woman’s duty to till the fields and pound the grain and make the fires and weave the fabrics and bear her husband’s children,” I answered.

“But I am not a woman,” she pointed out. “I am just a little girl.”

“But you will become a woman,” I said, “and a woman may not read.”

“Teach me now, and I will forget how when I become a woman.”

“Does the eagle forget how to fly, or the hyena to kill?”

“It is not fair.”

“No,” I said. “But it is just.”

“I do not understand.”

“Then I will explain it to you,” I said. “Sit down, Kamari.”

She sat down on the dirt opposite me and leaned forward intently.

“Many years ago,” I began, “the Kikuyu lived in the shadow of Kirinyaga, the mountain upon which Ngai dwells.”

“I know,” she said. “Then the Europeans came and built their cities.”

“You are interrupting,” I said.

“I am sorry, Koriba,” she answered. “But I already know this story.”

“You do not know all of it,” I replied. “Before the Europeans came, we lived in harmony with the land. We tended our cattle and plowed our fields, and we produced just enough children to replace those who died of old age and disease, and those who died in our wars against the Maasai and the Wakamba and the Nandi. Our lives were simple but fulfilling.”

“And then the Europeans came!” she said.

“Then the Europeans came,” I agreed, “and they brought new ways with them.”

“Evil ways.”

I shook my head. “They were not evil ways for the Europeans,” I replied. “I know, for I have studied in European schools. But they were not good ways for the Kikuyu and the Maasai and the Wakamba and the Embu and the Kisi and all the other tribes. We saw the clothes they wore and the buildings they erected and the machines they used, and we tried to become like Europeans. But we are not Europeans, and their ways are not our ways, and they do not work for us. Our cities became overcrowded and polluted, and our land grew barren, and our animals died, and our water became poisoned, and finally, when the Eutopian Council allowed us to move to the world of Kirinyaga, we left Kenya behind and came here to live according to the old ways, the ways that are good for the Kikuyu.” I paused. “Long ago the Kikuyu had no written language, and did not know how to read, and since we are trying to create a Kikuyu world here on Kirinyaga, it is only fitting that our people do not learn to read or write.”

“But what is good about not knowing how to read?” she asked. “Just because we didn’t do it before the Europeans came doesn’t make it bad.”

“Reading will make you aware of other ways of thinking and living, and then you will be discontented with your life on Kirinyaga.”

“But you read, and you are not discontented.”

“I am the mundumugu,” I said. “I am wise enough to know that what I read are lies.”

“But lies are not always bad,” she persisted. “You tell them all the time.”

“The mundumugu does not lie to his people,” I replied sternly.

“You call them stories, like the story of the lion and the hare, or the tale of how the rainbow came to be, but they are lies.”

“They are parables,” I said.

“What is a parable?”

“A type of story.”

“Is it a true story?”

“In a way.”

“If it is true in a way, then it is also a lie in a way, is it not?” she replied, and then continued before I could answer her. “And if I can listen to a lie, why can I not read one?”

“I have already explained it to you.”

“It is not fair,” she repeated.

“No,” I agreed. “But it is true, and, in the long run, it is for the good of the Kikuyu.”

“I still don’t understand why it is good,” she complained.

“Because we are all that remain. Once before, the Kikuyu tried to become something that they were not, and we became not city-dwelling Kikuyu, or bad Kikuyu, or unhappy Kikuyu, but an entirely new tribe called Kenyans. Those of us who came to Kirinyaga came here to preserve the old ways—and if women start reading, some of them will become discontented, and they will leave, and then one day there will be no Kikuyu left.”

“But I don’t want to leave Kirinyaga!” she protested. “I want to become circumsized, and bear many children for my husband, and till the fields of his shamba, and someday be cared for by my grandchildren.”

“That is the way you are supposed to feel.”

“But I also want to read about other worlds and other times.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“But—”

“I will hear no more of this today,” I said. “The sun grows high in the sky, and you have not yet finished your tasks here, and you must still work in your father’s shamba and come back again this afternoon.”

She rose without another word and went about her duties. When she finished, she picked up the cage and began walking back to her boma.

I watched her walk away, then returned to my hut and activated my computer to discuss a minor orbital adjustment with Maintenance, for it had been hot and dry for almost a month. They gave their consent, and, a few moments later, I walked down the long, winding path into the center of the village. Lowering myself gently to the ground, I spread my pouchful of bones and charms out before me and invoked Ngai to cool Kirinyaga with a mild rain, which Maintenance had agreed to supply later in the afternoon.

Then the children gathered about me, as they always did when I came down from my boma on the hill and entered the village.

“Jambo, Koriba!” they cried.

“Jambo, my brave young warriors,” I replied, still seated on the ground.

“Why have you come to the village this morning, Koriba?” asked Ndemi, the boldest of the young boys.

“I have come here to ask Ngai to water our fields with His tears of compassion,” I said, “for we have had no rain this month, and the crops are thirsty.”

“Now that you have finished speaking to Ngai, will you tell us a story?” asked Ndemi.

I looked up at the sun, estimating the time of day.

“I have time for just one,” I replied. “Then I must walk through the fields and place new charms on the scarecrows, that they may continue to protect your crops.”

“What story will you tell us, Koriba?” asked another of the boys.

I looked around, and saw that Kamari was standing among the girls.

“I think I shall tell you the story of the Leopard and the Shrike,” I said.

“I have not heard that one before,” said Ndemi.

“Am I such an old man that I have no new stories to tell?” I demanded, and he dropped his gaze to the ground. I waited until I had everyone’s attention, and then I began:

“Once there was a very bright young shrike, and because he was very bright, he was always asking questions of his father.

“ ‘Why do we eat insects?’ he asked one day.

“ ‘Because we are shrikes, and that is what shrikes do,’ answered his father.

“ ‘But we are also birds,’ said the shirke. “And do not birds such as the eagle eat fish?’

“ ‘Ngai did not mean for shrikes to eat fish,’ said his father, ‘and even if you were strong enough to catch and kill a fish, eating it would make you sick.’

“ ‘Have you ever eaten a fish?’ asked the young shrike.

“ ‘No,’ said his father.

“ ‘Then how do you know?’ said the young shrike, and that afternoon he flew over the river and found a tiny fish. He caught it and ate it, and he was sick for a whole week.

“ ‘Have you learned your lesson now?’ asked the shrike’s father, when the young shrike was well again.

“ ‘I have learned not to eat fish,’ said the shrike. ‘But I have another question.’

“ ‘Why are shrikes the most cowardly of birds?’ asked the shrike. ‘Whenever the lion or the leopard appears, we flee to the highest branches of the trees and wait for them to go away.’

“ ‘Lions and leopards would eat us if they could,’ said the shrike’s father. ‘Therefore, we must flee from them.’

“ ‘But they do not eat the ostrich, and the ostrich is a bird,’ said the bright young shrike. ‘If they attack the ostrich, he kills them with his kick.’

“ ‘You are not an ostrich,’ said his father, tired of listening to him.

“ ‘But I am a bird, and the ostrich is a bird, and I will learn to kick as the ostrich kicks,’ said the young shrike, and he spent the next week practicing kicking any insects and twigs that were in his way.

“Then one day he came across chui, the leopard, and as the leopard approached him, the bright young shrike did not fly to the highest branches of the tree, but bravely stood his ground.

“ ‘You have great courage to face me thus,’ said the leopard.

“ ‘I am a very bright bird, and I am not afraid of you,’ said the shrike. ‘I have practiced kicking as the ostrich does, and if you come any closer, I will kick you and you will die.’

“ ‘I am an old leopard, and cannot hunt any longer,’ said the leopard. ‘I am ready to die. Come kick me, and put me out of my misery.’

“The young shrike walked up to the leopard and kicked him full in the face. The leopard simply laughed, opened his mouth, and swallowed the bright young shrike.

“ ‘What a silly bird,’ laughed the leopard, ‘to pretend to be something that he was not! If he had flown away like a shrike, I would have gone hungry today—but by trying to be what he was never meant to be, all he did was fill my stomach. I guess he was not a very bright bird, after all.”

I stopped and stared straight at Kamari.

“Is that the end?” asked one of the other girls.

“That is the end,” I said.

“Why did the shrike think he could be an ostrich?” asked one of the smaller boys.

“Perhaps Kamari can tell you,” I said.

All the children turned to Kamari, who paused for a moment and then answered.

“There is a difference between wanting to be an ostrich, and wanting to know what an ostrich knows,” she said, looking directly into my eyes. “It was not wrong for the shrike to want to know things. It was wrong for him to think he could become an ostrich.”

There was a momentary silence while the children considered her answer.

“Is that true, Koriba?” asked Ndemi at last.

“No,” I said, “for once the shrike knew what the ostrich knew, it forgot that it was a shrike. You must always remember who you are, and knowing too many things can make you forget.”

“Will you tell us another story?” asked a young girl.

“Not this morning,” I said, getting to my feet. “But when I come to the village tonight to drink pombe and watch the dancing, perhaps I will tell you the story about the bull elephant and the wise little Kikuyu boy. Now,” I added, “do none of you have chores to do?”

The children dispersed, returning to their shambas and their cattle pastures, and I stopped by Juma’s hut to give an ointment for his joints, which always bothered him just before it rained. I visitedKoinnage and drank pombe with him, and then discussed the affairs of the village with the Council of Elders. Finally I returned to my own boma, for I always take a nap during the heat of the day, and the rain was not due for another few hours.

Kamari was there when I arrived. She had gathered more wood and water, and was filling the grain buckets for my goats as I entered my boma.

“How is your bird this afternoon?” I asked, looking at the pygmy falcon, whose cage had been carefully placed in the shade of my hut.

“He drinks, but he will not eat,” she said in worried tones. “He spends all his time looking at the sky.”

“There are things that are more important to him than eating,” I said.

“I am finished now,” she said. “May I go home, Koriba?”

I nodded, and she left as I was arranging my sleeping blanket inside my hut.

She came every morning and every afternoon for the next week. Then, on the eighth day, she announced with tears in her eyes that the pygmy falcon had died.

“I told you this would happen,” I said gently. “Once a bird has ridden upon the winds, he cannot live on the ground.”

“Do all birds die when they can no longer fly?” she asked.

“Most do,” I said. “A few like the security of the cage, but most die of broken hearts, for, having touched the sky, they cannot bear to lose the gift of flight.”

“Why do we make cages, then, if they do not make the birds feel better?”

“Because they make us feel better,” I answered.

She paused, and then said: “I will keep my word and clean your hut and your boma, and fetch your water and kindling, even though the bird is dead.”

I nodded. “That was our agreement,” I said.

True to her word, she came back twice a day for the next three weeks. Then, at noon on the twenty-ninth day, after she had completed her morning chores and returned to her family’s shamba, her father, Njoro, walked up the path to my boma.

“Jambo, Koriba,” he greeted me, a worried expression on his face.

“Jambo, Njoro,” I said without getting to my feet. “Why have you come to my boma?”

“I am a poor man, Koriba,” he said, squatting down next to me. “I have only one wife, and she has produced no sons and only two daughters. I do not own as large a shamba as most men in the village, and the hyenas killed three of my cows this past year.”

I could not understand his point, so I merely stared at him, waiting for him to continue.

“As poor as I am,” he went on, “I took comfort in the thought that at least I would have the bride-prices from my two daughters in my old age.” He paused. “I have been a good man, Koriba. Surely I deserve that much.”

“I have not said otherwise,” I replied.

“Then why are you training Kamari to be a mundumugu?” he demanded. “It is well known that the mundumugu never marries.”

“Has Kamari told you that she is to become a mundumugu?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. She does not speak to her mother or myself at all since she has been coming here to clean your boma.”

“Then you are mistaken,” I said. “No woman may be a mundumugu. What made you think that I am training her?”

He dug into the folds of his kikoi and withdrew a piece of cured wildebeest hide. Scrawled on it in charcoal was the following inscription:

I AM KAMARI
I AM TWELVE YEARS OLD
I AM A GIRL

“This is writing,” he said accusingly. “Women cannot write. Only the mundumugu and great chiefs like Koinnage can write.”

“Leave this with me, Njoro,” I said, taking the hide, “and send Kamari to my boma.”

“I need her to work my shamba until afternoon.”

“Now,” I said.

He sighed and nodded. “I will send her, Koriba.” He paused. “You are certain that she is not to be a mundumugu?’ ”

“You have my word,” I said, spitting on my hands to show my sincerity.

He seemed relieved, and went off to his boma. Kamari came up the path a few minutes later.

“Jambo, Koriba,” she said.

“Jambo, Kamari,” I replied. “I am very displeased with you.”

“Did I not gather enough kindling this morning?” she asked.

“You gathered enough kindling.”

“Were the gourds not filled with water?”

“The gourds were filled.”

“Then what did I do wrong?” she asked, absently pushing one of my goats aside as it approached her.

“You broke your promise to me.”

“That is not true,” she said. “I have come every morning and every afternoon, even though the bird is dead.”

“You promised not to look at another book,” I said.

“I have not looked at another book since the day you told me that I was forbidden to.”

“Then explain this,” I said, holding up the hide with her writing on it.

“There is nothing to explain,” she said with a shrug. “I wrote it.”

“And if you have not looked at books, how did you learn to write?” I demanded.

“From your magic box,” she said. “You never told me not to look at it.”

“My magic box?” I said, frowning.

“The box that hums with life and has many colors.”

“You mean my computer?” I said, surprised.

“Your magic box,” she repeated.

“And it taught you how to read and write?”

“I taught me—but only a little,” she said unhappily. “I am like the shrike in your story—I am not as bright as I thought. Reading and writing is very difficult.”

“I told you that you must not learn to read,” I said, resisting the urge to comment on her remarkable accomplishment, for she had clearly broken the law.

Kamari shook her head.

“You told me I must not look at your books,” she replied stubbornly.

“I told you that women must not read,” I said. “You have disobeyed me. For this, you must be punished.” I paused. “You will continue your chores here for three more months, and you must bring me two hares and two rodents, which you must catch yourself. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Now come into my hut with me, that you may understand one thing more.”

She followed me into the hut.

“Computer,” I said. “Activate.”

“Activated,” said the computer’s mechanical voice.

“Computer, scan the hut and tell me who is here with me.”

The lens of the computer’s sensors glowed briefly.

“The girl, Kamari wa Njoro, is here with you,” replied the computer.

“Will you recognize her if you see her again?”

“Yes.”

“This is a Priority Order,” I said. “Never again may you converse with Kamari wa Njoro verbally or in any known language.”

“Understood and logged,” said the computer.

“Deactivate.” I turned to Kamari. “Do you understand what I have done, Kamari?”

“Yes,” she said, “and it is not fair. I did not disobey you.”

“It is the law that women may not read,” I said, “and you have broken it. You will not break it again. Now go back to your shamba.”

She left, head held high, youthful back stiff with defiance, and I went about my duties, instructing the young boys on the decoration of their bodies for their forthcoming circumcision ceremony, casting a counter-spell for old Siboki (for he had found hyena dung within his shamba, which is one of the surest signs of a thahu, or curse), instructing Maintenance to make another minor orbital adjustment that would bring cooler weather to the western plains.

By the time I returned to my hut for my afternoon nap, Kamari had come and gone again, and everything was in order.

FOR THE next two months, life in the village went its placid way. The crops were harvested, old Koinnage took another wife and we had a two-day festival with much dancing and pombe-drinking to celebrate the event, the short rains arrived on schedule, and three children were born to the village. Even the Eutopian Council, which had complained about our custom of leaving the old and the infirm out for the hyenas, left us completely alone. We found the lair of a family of hyenas and killed three whelps, then slew the mother when she returned. At each full moon, I slaughtered a cow—not merely a goat, but a large, fat cow—to thank Ngai for His generosity, for truly He had graced Kirinyaga with abundance.

During this period I rarely saw Kamari. She came in the mornings when I was in the village, casting bones to bring forth the weather, and she came in the afternoons when I was giving charms to the sick and conversing with the Elders—but I always knew she had been there, for my hut and my boma were immaculate, and I never lacked for water or kindling.

Then, on the afternoon after the second full moon, I returned to my boma after advising Koinnage about how he might best settle an argument over a disputed plot of land, and as I entered my hut, I noticed that the computer screen was alive and glowing, covered with strange symbols. When I had taken my degrees in England and America, I had learned English and French and Spanish, and of course I knew Kikuyu and Swahili, but these symbols represented no known language, nor, although they used numerals as well as letters and punctuation marks, were they mathematical formulas.

“Computer, I distinctly remember deactivating you this morning,” I said, frowning. “Why does your screen glow with life?”

“Kamari activated me.”

“And she forgot to deactivate you when she left?”

“That is correct.”

“I thought as much,” I said grimly. “Does she activate you every day?”

“Yes.”

“Did I not give you a Priority Order never to communicate with her in any known language?” I said, puzzled.

“You did, Koriba.”

“Can you then explain why you have disobeyed my directive?”

“I have not disobeyed your directive, Koriba,” said the computer. “My programming makes me incapable of disobeying a Priority Order.”

“Then what is this that I see upon your screen?”

“This is the Language of Kamari,” replied the computer. “It is not among the 1,732 languages and dialects in my memory banks, and hence does not fall under the aegis of your directive.”

“Did you create this language?”

“No, Koriba. Kamari created it.”

“Did you assist her in any way?”

“No, Koriba, I did not.”

“Is it a true language?” I asked. “Can you understand it?”

“It is a true language. I can understand it.”

“If she were to ask you a question in the Language of Kamari, could you reply to it?”

“Yes, if the question were simple enough. It is a very limited language.”

“And if that reply required you to translate the answer from a known language to the Language of Kamari, would doing so be contrary to my directives?”

“No, Koriba, it would not.”

“Have you in fact answered questions put to you by Kamari?”

“Yes, Koriba, I have,” replied the computer.

“I see,” I said. “Stand by for a new directive.”

“Waiting. . . .”

I lowered my head in thought, contemplating the problem. That Kamari was brilliant and gifted was obvious: she had not only taught herself to read and write, but had actually created a coherent and logical language that the computer could understand and in which it could respond. I had given orders, and without directly disobeying them, she had managed to circumvent them. She had no malice within her, and wanted only to learn, which in itself was an admirable goal. All that was on the one hand.

On the other was the threat to the social order we had labored so diligently to establish on Kirinyaga. Men and women knew their responsibilities and accepted them happily. Ngai had given the Maasai the spear, and He had given the Wakamba the arrow, and He had given the Europeans the machine and printing press; but to the Kikuyu, He had given the digging-stick and the fertile land surrounding the sacred fig tree on the slopes of Kirinyaga.

Once before we had lived in harmony with the land, many long years ago. Then had come the printed word. It turned us first into slaves, and then into Christians, and then into soldiers and factory workers and mechanics and politicians, into everything that the Kikuyu were never meant to be. It had happened before; it could happen again.

We had come to the world of Kirinyaga to create a perfect Kikuyu society, a Kikuyu Utopia: could one gifted little girl carry within her the seeds of our destruction? I could not be sure, but it was a fact that gifted children grew up. They became Jesus, and Mohammed, and Jomo Kenyatta—but they also became Tippoo Tib, the greatest slaver of all, and Idi Amin, butcher of his own people. Or, more often, they became Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx, brilliant men in their own right, but who influenced less brilliant, less capable men. Did I have the right to stand aside and hope that her influence upon our society would be benign, when all history suggested that the opposite was more likely to be true?

My decision was painful, but it was not a difficult one.

“Computer,” I said at last, “I have a new Priority Order that supersedes my previous directive. You are no longer allowed to communicate with Kamari under any circumstances whatsoever. Should she activate you, you are to tell her that Koriba has forbidden you to have any contact with her, and you are then to deactivate immediately. Do you understand?”

“Understood and logged.”

“Good,” I said. “Now deactivate.”

When I returned from the village the next morning, I found my water gourds empty, my blankets unfolded, my boma filled with the dung of goats.

The mundumugu is all-powerful among the Kikuyu, but he is not without compassion. I decided to forgive this childish display of temper, and so I did not visit Kamari’s father, nor did I tell the other children to avoid her.

She did not come again in the afternoon. I know, because I waited beside my hut to explain my decision to her. Finally, when twilight came, I sent for the boy, Ndemi, to fill my gourds and clean myboma, and although such chores are woman’s work, he did not dare disobey his mundumugu, although his every gesture displayed contempt for the tasks I had set for him.

When two more days had passed with no sign of Kamari, I summoned Njoro, her father.

“Kamari has broken her word to me,” I said when he arrived. “If she does not come to clean my boma this afternoon, I will be forced to place a thahu upon her.”

He looked puzzled. “She says that you have already placed a curse on her, Koriba. I was going to ask you if we should turn her out of our boma.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Do not turn her out of your boma. I have placed no thahu on her yet—but she must come to work this afternoon.”

“I do not know if she is strong enough,” said Njoro. “She has had neither food nor water for three days, and she sits motionless in my wife’s hut.” He paused. “Someone has placed a thahu on her. If it’s not you, perhaps you can cast a spell to remove it.”

“She has gone three days without eating or drinking?” I repeated.

He nodded.

“I will see her,” I said, getting to my feet and following him down the winding path to the village. When we reached Njoro’s boma, he led me to his wife’s hut, then called Kamari’s worried mother out and stood aside as I entered. Kamari sat at the farthest point from the door, her back propped against a wall, her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms encircling her thin legs.

“Jambo, Kamari,” I said.

She stared at me but said nothing.

“Your mother worries for you, and your father tells me that you no longer eat or drink.”

She made no answer.

“Listen to my words, Kamari,” I said slowly. “I made my decision for the good of Kirinyaga, and I will not recant it. As a Kikuyu woman, you must live the life that has been ordained for you.” I paused. “However, neither the Kikuyu nor the Eutopian Council are without compassion for the individual. Any member of our society may leave if he wishes. According to the charter we signed when we claimed this world, you need only walk to that area known as Haven, and a Maintenance ship will pick you up and transport you to the location of your choice.”

“All I know is Kirinyaga,” she said. “How am I to chose a new home if I am forbidden to learn about other places?”

“I do not know,” I admitted.

“I don’t want to leave Kirinyaga!” she continued. “This is my home. These are my people. I am a Kikuyu girl, not a Maasai girl or a European girl. I will bear my husband’s children and till his shamba;I will gather his wood and cook his meals and weave his garments; I will leave my parents’ shamba and live with my husband’s family. I will do all this without complaint, Koriba, if you will just let me learn to read and write!”

“I cannot,” I said sadly.

“But why?”

“Who is the wisest man you know, Kamari?” I asked.

“The mundumugu is always the wisest man in the village.”

“Then you must trust to my wisdom.”

“But I feel like the pygmy falcon,” she said, her misery reflected in her voice. “He spent his life dreaming of soaring high upon the winds. I dream of seeing words upon the computer screen.”

“You are not like the falcon at all,” I said. “He was prevented from being what he was meant to be. You are prevented from being what you are not meant to be.”

“You are not an evil man, Koriba,” she said solemnly. “But you are wrong.”

“If that is so, then I shall have to live with it,” I said.

“But you are asking me to live with it,” she said, “and that is your crime.”

“If you call me a criminal again,” I said sternly, for no one may speak thus to the mundumugu, “I shall surely place a thahu on you.”

“What more can you do?” she said bitterly.

“I can turn you into a hyena, an unclean eater of human flesh who prowls only in the darkness. I can fill your belly with thorns, so that your every movement will be agony. I can—”

“You are just a man,” she said wearily, “and you have already done your worst.”

“I will hear no more of this,” I said. “I order you to eat and drink what your mother brings to you, and I expect to see you at my boma this afternoon.”

I walked out of the hut and told Kamari’s mother to bring her banana mash and water, then stopped by old Benima’s shamba. Buffalo had stampeded through his fields, destroying his crops, and I sacrificed a goat to remove the thahu that had fallen upon his land.

When I finished, I stopped at Koinnage’s boma, where he offered me some freshly brewed pombe and began complaining about Kibo, his newest wife, who kept taking sides with Shumi, his second wife, against Wambu, his senior wife.

“You can always divorce her and return her to her family’s shamba,” I suggested.

“She cost twenty cows and five goats!” he complained. “Will her family return them?”

“No, they will not.”

“Then I will not send her back.”

“As you wish,” I said with a shrug.

“Besides, she is very strong and very lovely,” he continued. “I just wish she would stop fighting with Wambu.”

“What do they fight about?” I asked.

“They fight about who will fetch the water, and who will mend my garments, and who will repair the thatch on my hut.” He paused. ‘They even argue about whose hut I should visit at night, as if I had no choice in the matter.”

“Do they ever fight about ideas?” I asked.

“Ideas?” he repeated blankly.

“Such as you might find in books.”

He laughed. “They are women, Koriba. What need have they for ideas?” He paused. “In fact, what need have any of us for them?”

“I do not know,” I said. “I was merely curious.”

“You look disturbed,” he noted.

“It must be the pombe,” I said. “I am an old man, and perhaps it is too strong.”

“That is because Kibo will not listen when Wambu tells her how to brew it. I really should send her away”—he looked at Kibo as she carried a load of wood on her strong, young back—”but she is so young and so lovely.” Suddenly his gaze went beyond his newest wife to the village. “Ah!” he said. “I see that old Siboki has finally died.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

He pointed to a thin column of smoke. “They are burning his hut.”

I stared off in the direction he indicated. “That is not Siboki’s hut,” I said. “His boma is more to the west.”

“Who else is old and infirm and due to die?” asked Koinnage.

And suddenly I knew, as surely as I knew that Ngai sits on His throne atop the holy mountain, that Kamari was dead.

I walked to Njoro’s shamba as quickly as I could. When I arrived, Kamari’s mother and sister and grandmother were already wailing the death chant, tears streaming down their faces.

“What happened?” I demanded, walking up to Njoro.

“Why do you ask, when it was you who destroyed her?” he replied bitterly.

“I did not destroy her,” I said.

“Did you not threaten to place a thahu on her just this morning?” he persisted. “You did so, and now she is dead, and I have but one daughter to bring the bride-price, and I have had to burn Kamari’s hut.”

“Stop worrying about bride-prices and huts and tell me what happened, or you shall learn what it means to be cursed by a mundumugu!” I snapped.

“She hanged herself in her hut with a length of buffalo hide.”

Five women from the neighboring shamba arrived and took up the death chant.

“She hanged herself in her hut?” I repeated.

He nodded. “She could at least have hanged herself from a tree, so that her hut would not be unclean and I would not have to burn it.”

“Be quiet!” I said, trying to collect my thoughts.

“She was not a bad daughter,” he continued. “Why did you curse her, Koriba?”

“I did not place a thahu upon her,” I said, wondering if I spoke the truth. “I wished only to save her.”

“Who has stronger medicine than you?” he asked fearfully.

“She broke the law of Ngai,” I answered.

“And now Ngai has taken His vengeance!” moaned Njoro fearfully.

“Which member of my family will He strike down next?”

“None of you,” I said. “Only Kamari broke the law.”

“I am a poor man,” said Njoro cautiously, “even poorer now than before. How much must I pay you to ask Ngai to receive Kamari’s spirit with compassion and forgiveness?”

“I will do that whether you pay me or not,” I answered.

“You will not charge me?” he asked.

“I will not charge you.”

“Thank you, Koriba!” he said fervently.

I stood and stared at the blazing hut, trying not to think of the smoldering body of the little girl inside it.

“Koriba?” said Njoro after a lengthy silence.

“What now?” I asked irritably.

“We do not know what to do with the buffalo hide, for it bore the mark of your thahu, and we were afraid to burn it. Now I know that the marks were made by Ngai and not you, and I am afraid even to touch it. Will you take it away?”

“What marks?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

He took me by the arm and led me around to the front of the burning hut. There, on the ground, some ten paces from the entrance, lay the strip of tanned hide with which Kamari had hanged herself, and scrawled upon it were more of the strange symbols I had seen on my computer screen three days earlier.

I reached down and picked up the hide, then turned to Njoro. “If indeed there is a curse on your shamba,” I said, “I will remove it and take it upon myself, by taking Ngai’s marks with me.”

“Thank you, Koriba!” he said, obviously much relieved.

“I must leave to prepare my magic,” I said abruptly, and began the long walk back to my boma. When I arrived, I took the strip of buffalo hide into my hut.

“Computer,” I said. “Activate.”

“Activated.”

I held the strip up to its scanning lens.

“Do you recognize this language?” I asked.

The lens glowed briefly.

“Yes, Koriba. It is the Language of Kamari.”

“What does it say?”

“It is a couplet:

I know why the caged birds die—
For, like them, I have touched the sky.”

The entire village came to Njoro’s shamba in the afternoon, and the women wailed the death chant all night and all of the next day, but before long Kamari was forgotten, for life goes on, and she was, after all, just a little Kikuyu girl.

Since that day, whenever I have found a bird with a broken wing, I have attempted to nurse it back to health. It always dies, and I always bury it next to the mound of earth that marks where Kamari’s hut had been.

It is on those days, when I place the birds in the ground, that I find myself thinking of her again, and wishing that I were just a simple man, tending my cattle and worrying about my crops and thinking the thoughts of simple men, rather than a mundumugu who must live with the consequences of his wisdom.

THE HEMINGWAY HOAX

Joe Haldeman

While we’ve published a number of Joe Haldeman’s excellent poems, it is an honor to have the opportunity, at last, to run one of this Hugo- and Nebula- award winning author’s magnificent prose stories. Mr. Haldeman teaches at MIT in Massachusetts, and is a member of the Hemingway Society. He tells us that while he considers himself an amateur student of Hemingway, he is grateful to several scholars who helped him with this story. Mr. Haldeman’s next novel is also entitled The Hemingway Hoax. It will be out soon from William Morrow.

1. The Torrents Of Spring

Our story begins in a rundown bar in Key West, not so many years from now. The bar is not the one Hemingway drank at, nor yet the one that claims to be the one he drank at, because they are both too expensive and full of tourists. This bar, in a more interesting part of town, is a Cuban place. It is neither clean nor well-lighted, but has cold beer and good strong Cuban coffee. Its cheap prices and rascally charm are what bring together the scholar and the rogue.

Their first meeting would be of little significance to either at the time, though the scholar, John Baird, would never forget it. John Baird was not capable of forgetting anything.

Key West is lousy with writers, mostly poor writers, in one sense of that word or the other. Poor people did not interest our rogue, Sylvester Castlemaine, so at first he didn’t take any special note of the man sitting in the corner scribbling on a yellow pad. Just another would-be writer, come down to see whether some of Papa’s magic would rub off. Not worth the energy of a con.

But Castle’s professional powers of observation caught at a detail or two and focused his attention. The man was wearing jeans and a faded flannel shirt, but his shoes were expensive Italian loafers. His beard had been trimmed by a barber. He was drinking Heineken. The pen he was scribbling with was a fat Mont Blanc Diplomat, two hundred bucks on the hoof, discounted. Castle got his cup of coffee and sat at a table two away from the writer.

He waited until the man paused, set the pen down, took a drink. “Writing a story?” Castle said.

The man blinked at him. “No . . . just an article.” He put the cap on the pen with a crisp snap. “An article about stories. I’m a college professor.”

“Publish or perish,” Castle said.

The man relaxed a bit. “Too true.” He riffled through the yellow pad. “This won’t help much. It’s not going anywhere.”

“Tell you what . . . bet you a beer it’s Hemingway or Tennessee Williams.”

“Too easy.” He signaled the bartender. “Dos cervezas. Hemingway, the early stories. You know his work?”

“Just a little. We had to read him in school—The Old Man and the Fish? And then I read a couple after I got down here.” He moved over to the man’s table. “Name’s Castle.”

“John Baird.” Open, honest expression; not too promising. You can’t con somebody unless he thinks he’s conning you. “Teach up at Boston.”

“I’m mostly fishing. Shrimp nowadays.” Of course Castle didn’t normally fish, not for things in the sea, but the shrimp part was true. He’d been reduced to heading shrimp on the Catalina for five dollars a bucket. “So what about these early stories?”

The bartender set down the two beers and gave Castle a weary look.

“Well . . . they don’t exist.” John Baird carefully poured the beer down the side of his glass. “They were stolen. Never published.”

“So what can you write about them?”

“Indeed. That’s what I’ve been asking myself.” He took a sip of the beer and settled back. “Seventy-four years ago they were stolen. December 1922. That’s really what got me working on them; thought I would do a paper, a monograph, for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the occasion.”

It sounded less and less promising, but this was the first imported beer Castle had had in months. He slowly savored the bite of it.

“He and his first wife, Hadley, were living in Paris. You know about Hemingway’s early life?”

“Huh uh. Paris?”

“He grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. That was kind of a prissy, self-satisfied suburb of Chicago.”

“Yeah, I been there.”

“He didn’t like it. In his teens he sort of ran away from home, went down to Kansas City to work on a newspaper.

“World War I started, and like a lot of kids, Hemingway couldn’t get into the army because of bad eyesight, so he joined the Red Cross and went off to drive ambulances in Italy. Take cigarettes and chocolate to the troops.

“That almost killed him. He was just doing his cigarettes-and-chocolate routine and an artillery round came in, killed the guy next to him, tore up another, riddled Hemingway with shrapnel. He claims then that he picked up the wounded guy and carried him back to the trench, in spite of being hit in the knee by a machine-gun bullet.”

“What do you mean, ‘claims’ ?”

“You’re too young to have been in Vietnam.”

“Yeah.”

“Good for you. I was hit in the knee by a machine-gun bullet myself, and went down on my ass and didn’t get up for five weeks. He didn’t carry anybody one step.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Well, he was always rewriting his life. We all do it. But it seemed to be a compulsion with him. That’s one thing that makes Hemingway scholarship challenging.”

Baird poured the rest of the beer into his glass. “Anyhow, he actually was the first American wounded in Italy, and they made a big deal over him. He went back to Oak Park a war hero. He had a certain amount of success with women.”

“Or so he says?”

“Right, God knows. Anyhow, he met Hadley Richardson, an older woman but quite a number, and they had a steamy courtship and got married and said the hell with it, moved to Paris to live a sort of Bohemian life while Hemingway worked on perfecting his art. That part isn’t bullshit. He worked diligently and he did become one of the best writers of his era. Which brings us to the lost manuscripts.”

“Do tell.”

“Hemingway was picking up a little extra money doing journalism. He’d gone to Switzerland to cover a peace conference for a news service. When it was over, he wired Hadley to come join him for some skiing.

“This is where it gets odd. On her own initiative, Hadley packed up all of Ernest’s work. All of it. Not just the typescripts, but the handwritten first drafts and the carbons.”

“That’s like a Xerox?”

“Right. She packed them in an overnight bag, then packed her own suitcase. A porter at the train station, the Gare de Lyon, put them aboard for her. She left the train for a minute to find something to read—and when she came back, they were gone.”

“Suitcase and all?”

“No, just the manuscripts. She and the porter searched up and down the train. But that was it. Somebody had seen the overnight bag sitting there and snatched it. Lost forever.”

That did hold a glimmer of professional interest. “That’s funny. You’d think they’d get a note then, like ‘If you ever want to see your stories again, bring a million bucks to the Eiffel Tower’ sort of thing.”

“A few years later, that might have happened. It didn’t take long for Hemingway to become famous. But at the time, only a few of the literary intelligentsia knew about him.”

Castle shook his head in commiseration with the long-dead thief. “Guy who stole ’em probably didn’t even read English. Dumped ’em in the river.”

John Baird shivered visibly. “Undoubtedly. But people have never stopped looking for them. Maybe they’ll show up in some attic someday.”

“Could happen.” Wheels turning.

“It’s happened before in literature. Some of Boswell’s diaries were recovered because a scholar recognized his handwriting on an old piece of paper a merchant used to wrap a fish. Hemingway’s own last book, he put together from notes that had been lost for thirty years. They were in a couple of trunks in the basement of the Ritz, in Paris.” He leaned forward, excited. “Then after he died, they found another batch of papers down here, in a back room in Sloppy Joe’s. It could still happen.”

Castle took a deep breath. “It could be made to happen, too.”

“Made to happen?”

“Just speakin’, you know, in theory. Like some guy who really knows Hemingway, suppose he makes up some stories that’re like those old ones, finds some seventy-five-year-old paper and an old, what do you call them, not a word processor—”

“Typewriter.”

“Whatever. Think he could pass ’em off for the real thing?”

“I don’t know if he could fool me,” Baird said, and tapped the side of his head. “I have a freak memory: eidetic, photographic. I have just about every word Hemingway ever wrote committed to memory.” He looked slightly embarrassed. “Of course that doesn’t make me an expert in the sense of being able to spot a phony. I just wouldn’t have to refer to any texts.”

“So take yourself, you know, or somebody else who spent all his life studyin’ Hemingway. He puts all he’s got into writin’ these stories—he knows the people who are gonna be readin’ ’em; knows what they’re gonna look for. And he hires like an expert forger to make the pages look like they came out of Hemingway’s machine. So could it work?”

Baird pursed his lips and for a moment looked professorial. Then he sort of laughed, one syllable through his nose. “Maybe it could. A man did a similar thing when I was a boy, counterfeiting the memoirs of Howard Hughes. He made millions.”

“Millions?”

“Back when that was real money. Went to jail when they found out, of course.”

“And the money was still there when he got out.”

“Never read anything about it. I guess so.”

“So the next question is, how much stuff are we talkin’ about? How much was in that old overnight bag?”

“That depends on who you believe. There was half a novel and some poetry. The short stories, there might have been as few as eleven or as many as thirty.”

“That’d take a long time to write.”

“It would take forever. You couldn’t just ‘do’ Hemingway; you’d have to figure out what the stories were about, then reconstruct his early style—do you know how many Hemingway scholars there are in the world?”

“Huh uh. Quite a few.”

“Thousands. Maybe ten thousand academics who know enough to spot a careless fake.”

Castle nodded, cogitating. “You’d have to be real careful. But then you wouldn’t have to do all the short stories and poems, would you? You could say all you found was the part of the novel. Hell, you could sell that as a book.”

The odd laugh again. “Sure you could. Be a fortune in it.”

“How much? A million bucks?”

“A million . . . maybe. Well, sure. The last new Hemingway made at least that much, allowing for inflation. And he’s more popular now.”

Castle took a big gulp of beer and set his glass down decisively. “So what the hell are we waiting for?”

Baird’s bland smile faded. “You’re serious?”

2. in our time

Got a ripple in the Hemingway channel.

Twenties again?

No, funny, this one’s in the 1990s. See if you can track it down?

Sure. Go down to the armory first and—

Look—no bloodbaths this time. You solve one problem and start ten more.

Couldn’t be helped. It’s no tea party, twentieth century America.

Just use good judgment. That Ransom guy. . . .

Manson. Right. That was a mistake.

3. A Way You’ll Never Be

You can’t cheat an honest man, as Sylvester Castlemaine well knew, but then again, it never hurts to find out just how honest a man is. John Baird refused his scheme, with good humor at first, but when Castle persisted, his refusal took on a sarcastic edge; maybe a tinge of outrage. He backed off and changed the subject, talking for a half-hour about commercial fishing around Key West, and then said he had to run. He slipped his business card into John’s shirt pocket on the way out. (Sylvester Castlemaine, Consultant, it claimed.)

John left the place soon, walking slowly through the afternoon heat. He was glad he hadn’t brought the bicycle; it was pleasant to walk in the shade of the big aromatic trees, a slight breeze on his face from the Gulf side.

One could do it. One could. The problem divided itself into three parts; writing the novel fragment, forging the manuscript, and devising a suitable story about how one had uncovered the manuscript.

The writing part would be the hardest. Hemingway is easy enough to parody—one fourth of the take-home final he gave in English 733 was to write a page of Hemingway pastiche, and some of his graduate students did a credible job—but parody was exactly what one would not want to do.

It had been a crucial period in Hemingway’s development, those three years of apprenticeship the lost manuscripts represented. Two stories survived, and they were maddeningly dissimilar. “My Old Man,” which had slipped down behind a drawer, was itself a pastiche, reading like pretty good Sherwood Anderson, but with an O. Henry twist at the end—very unlike the bleak understated quality that would distinguish the stories that were to make Hemingway’s reputation. The other, “Up in Michigan,” had been out in the mail at the time of the loss. It was a lot closer to Hemingway’s ultimate style, a spare and, by the standards of the time, pornographic description of a woman’s first sexual experience.

John riffled through the notes on the yellow pad, a talismanic gesture, since he could have remembered any page with little effort. But the sight of the words and the feel of the paper sometimes helped him think.

One would not do it, of course. Except perhaps as a mental exercise. Not to show to anybody. Certainly not to profit from.

You wouldn’t want to use “My Old Man” as the model, certainly; no one would care to publish a pastiche of a pastiche of Anderson, now undeservedly obscure. So “Up in Michigan.” And the first story he wrote after the loss, “Out of Season,” would also be handy. That had a lot of the true Hemingway strength.

You wouldn’t want to tackle the novel fragment, of course, not just as an exercise, over a hundred pages. . . .

Without thinking about it, John dropped into a familiar fugue state as he walked through the rundown neighborhood, his freak memory taking over while his body ambled along on autopilot. This is the way he usually remembered pages. He transported himself back to the Hemingway collection at the JFK Library in Boston, last November, snow swirling outside the big picture windows overlooking the harbor, the room so cold he was wearing coat and gloves and could see his breath. They didn’t normally let you wear a coat up there, afraid you might squirrel away a page out of the manuscript collection, but they had to make an exception because the heat pump was down.

He was flipping through the much-thumbed Xerox of Carlos Baker’s interview with Hadley, page 52: “Stolen suitcase,” Baker asked; “lost novel?”

The typescript of her reply appeared in front of him, more clear than the cracked sidewalk his feet negotiated: “This novel was a knock-out, about Nick, up north in Michigan—hunting, fishing, all sorts of experiences—stuff on the order of “Big Two-Hearted River,” with more action. Girl experiences well done, too.” With an enigmatic addition, evidently in Hadley’s handwriting, “Girl experiences too well done.”

That was interesting. John hadn’t thought about that, since he’d been concentrating on the short stories. Too well done? There had been a lot of talk in the eighties about Hemingway’s sexual ambiguity—gender ambiguity, actually—could Hadley have been upset, sixty years after the fact, remembering some confidence that Hemingway had revealed to the world in that novel; something girls knew that boys were not supposed to know? Playful pillow talk that was filed away for eventual literary exploitation?

He used his life that way. A good writer remembered everything and then forgot it when he sat down to write, and reinvented it so the writing would be more real than the memory. Experience was important, but imagination was more important.

Maybe I would be a better writer, John thought, if I could learn how to forget. For about the tenth time today, like any day, he regretted not having tried to succeed as a writer, while he still had the independent income. Teaching and research had fascinated him when he was younger, a rich boy’s all-consuming hobbies, but the end of this fiscal year would be the end of the monthly checks from the trust fund. So the salary from Boston University wouldn’t be mad money any more, but rent and groceries in a city suddenly expensive.

Yes, the writing would be the hard part. Then forging the manuscript, that wouldn’t be easy. Any scholar would have access to copies of thousands of pages that Hemingway typed before and after the loss. Could one find the typewriter Hemingway had used? Then duplicate his idiosyncratic typing style—a moment’s reflection put a sample in front of him, spaces before and after periods and commas. . . .

He snapped out of the reverie as his right foot hit the first step on the back staircase up to their rented flat. He automatically stepped over the fifth step, the rotted one, and was thinking about a nice tall glass of iced tea as he opened the screen door.

“Scorpions!” his wife screamed, two feet from his face.

“What?”

“We have scorpions!” Lena grabbed his arm and hauled him to the kitchen.

“Look!” She pointed at the opaque plastic skylight. Three scorpions, each about six inches long, cast sharp silhouettes on the milky plastic. One was moving.

“My word.”

“Your word!” She struck a familiar pose, hands on hips, and glared up at the creatures. “What are we going to do about it?”

“We could name them.”

“John.”

“I don’t know.” He opened the refrigerator. “Call the bug man.”

“The bug man was just here yesterday. He probably flushed them out.”

He poured a glass of cold tea and dumped two envelopes of artificial sweetener into it. “I’ll talk to Julio about it. But you know they’ve been there all along. They’re not bothering anybody.”

“They’re bothering the hell out of me!”

He smiled. “Okay. I’ll talk to Julio.” He looked into the oven. “Thought about dinner?”

“Anything you want to cook, sweetheart. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand there with three . . . poisonous . . . arthropods staring down at me.”

“Poised to jump,” John said, and looked up again. There were only two visible now, which made his skin crawl.

“Julio wasn’t home when I first saw them. About an hour ago.”

“I’ll go check.” John went downstairs and Julio, the landlord, was indeed home, but was not impressed by the problem. He agreed that it was probably the bug man, and they would probably go back to where they came from in a while, and gave John a flyswatter.

John left the flyswatter with Lena, admonishing her to take no prisoners, and walked a couple of blocks to a Chinese restaurant. He brought back a few boxes of take-out, and they sat in the living room and wielded chopsticks in silence, listening for the pitter-patter of tiny feet.

“Met a real live con man today.” He put the business card on the coffee table between them.

“Consultant?” she read.

“He had a loony scheme about counterfeiting the missing stories.” Lena knew more about the missing stories than 98 percent of the people who Hemingway’ed for a living. John liked to think out loud.

“Ah, the stories,” she said, preparing herself.

“Not a bad idea, actually, if one had a larcenous nature.” He concentrated for a moment on the slippery Moo Goo Gai Pan. “Be millions of bucks in it.”

He was bent over the box. She stared hard at his bald spot. “What exactly did he have in mind?”

“We didn’t bother to think it through in any detail, actually. You go and find. . . .” He got the slightly wall-eyed look that she knew meant he was reading a page of a book a thousand miles away. “Yes. A 1921 Corona portable, like the one Hadley gave him before they were married. Find some old paper. Type up the stories. Take them to Sotheby’s. Spend money for the rest of your life. That’s all there is to it.”

“You left out jail.”

“A mere detail. Also the writing of the stories. That could take weeks. Maybe you could get arrested first, write the stories in jail, and then sell them when you got out.”

“You’re weird, John.”

“Well. I didn’t give him any encouragement.”

“Maybe you should’ve. A few million would come in handy next year.”

“We’ll get by.”

“ ‘We’ll get by.’ You keep saying that. How do you know? You’ve never had to ‘get by.’ ”

“Okay, then. We won’t get by.” He scraped up the last of the fried rice. “We won’t be able to make the rent and they’ll throw us out on the street. We’ll live in a cardboard box over a heating grate. You’ll have to sell your body to keep me in cheap wine. But we’ll be happy, dear.” He looked up at her, mooning. “Poor but happy.”

“Slap-happy.” She looked at the card again. “How do you know he’s a con man?”

“I don’t know. Salesman type. Says he’s in commercial fishing now, but he doesn’t seem to like it much.”

“He didn’t say anything about any, you know, criminal stuff he’d done in the past?”

“Huh uh. I just got the impression that he didn’t waste a lot of time mulling over ethics and morals.” John held up the Mont Blanc pen. “He was staring at this, before he came over and introduced himself. I think he smelled money.”

Lena stuck both chopsticks into the half-finished carton of boiled rice and set it down decisively. “Let’s ask him over.”

“He’s a sleaze, Lena. You wouldn’t like him.”

“I’ve never met a real con man. It would be fun.”

He looked into the darkened kitchen. “Will you cook something?”

She followed his gaze, expecting monsters. “If you stand guard.”

4. Romance is Dead
subtitle

The Hell it is

“Be a job an’ a half,” Castle said, mopping up residual spaghetti sauce with a piece of garlic bread. “It’s not like your Howard Hughes guy, or Hitler’s notebooks.”

“You’ve been doing some research,” John’s voice was a little slurred. He’d bought a half-gallon of Portuguese wine, the bottle wrapped in straw like cheap Chianti, the wine not quite that good. If you could get past the first couple of glasses, it was okay. It had been okay to John for some time now.

“Yeah, down to the library. The guys who did the Hitler notebooks, hell, nobody’d ever seen a real Hitler notebook; they just studied his handwriting in letters and such, then read up on what he did day after day. Same with the Howard Hughes, but that was even easier, because most of the time nobody knew what the hell Howard Hughes was doing anyhow. Just stayed locked up in that room.”

“The Hughes forgery nearly worked, as I recall,” John said. “If Hughes himself hadn’t broken silence. . . .”

“Ya gotta know that took balls. ’Scuse me, Lena.” She waved a hand and laughed. “Try to get away with that while Hughes was still alive.”

“How did the Hitler people screw up?” she asked.

“Funny thing about that one was how many people they fooled. Afterwards everybody said it was a really lousy fake. But you can bet that before the newspapers bid millions of dollars on it, they showed it to the best Hitlerologists they could find, and they all said it was real.”

“Because they wanted it to be real,” Lena said.

“Yeah. But one of the pages had some chemical in it that wouldn’t be in paper before 1945. That was kinda dumb.”

“People would want the Hemingway stories to be real,” Lena said quietly, to John.

John’s gaze stayed fixed on the center of the table, where a few strands of spaghetti lay cold and drying in a plastic bowl. “Wouldn’t be honest.”

“That’s for sure,” Castle said cheerily. “But it ain’t exactly armed robbery, either.”

“A gross misuse of intellectual . . . intellectual. . . .”

“It’s past your bedtime, John,” Lena said. “We’ll clean up.” John nodded and pushed himself away from the table and walked heavily into the bedroom.

Lena didn’t say anything until she heard the bedsprings creak. “He isn’t always like this,” she said quietly.

“Yeah. He don’t act like no alky.”

“It’s been a hard year for him.” She refilled her glass. “Me, too. Money.”

“That’s bad.”

“Well, we knew it was coming. He tell you about the inheritance?” Castle leaned forward. “Huh uh.”

“He was born pretty well off. Family had textile mills up in New Hampshire. John’s grandparents died in an auto accident in the forties and the family sold off the mills—good timing, too. They wouldn’t be worth much today.

“Then John’s father and mother died in the sixties, while he was in college. The executors set up a trust fund that looked like it would keep him in pretty good shape forever. But he wasn’t interested in money. He even joined the army, to see what it was like.”

“Jesus.”

“Afterwards, he carried a picket sign and marched against the war—you know, Vietnam.

“Then he finished his Ph.D. and started teaching. The trust fund must have been fifty times as much as his salary, when he started out. It was still ten times as much, a couple of years ago.”

“Boy . . . howdy.” Castle was doing mental arithmetic and algebra with variables like Porsches and fast boats.

“But he let his sisters take care of it. He let them re-invest the capital.”

“They weren’t too swift?”

“They were idiots! They took good solid blue-chip stocks and tax-free municipals, too ‘boring’ for them, and threw it all away gambling on commodities.” She grimaced. “Pork bellies? I finally had John go to Chicago and come back with what was left of his money. There wasn’t much.”

“You ain’t broke, though.”

“Damned near. There’s enough income to pay for insurance and eventually we’ll be able to draw on an IRA. But the cash payments stop in two months. We’ll have to live on John’s salary. I suppose I’ll get a job, too.”

“What you ought to get is a typewriter.”

Lena laughed and slouched back in her chair. “That would be something.”

“You think he could do it? I mean if he would, do you think he could?”

“He’s a good writer.” She looked thoughtful. “He’s had some stories published, you know, in the literary magazines. The ones that pay four or five free copies.”

“Big deal.”

She shrugged. “Pays off in the long run. Tenure. But I don’t know whether being able to write a good literary story means that John could write a good Hemingway imitation.”

“He knows enough, right?”

“Maybe he knows too much. He might be paralyzed by his own standards.” She shook her head. “In some ways he’s an absolute nut about Hemingway. Obsessed, I mean. It’s not good for him.”

“Maybe writing this stuff would get it out of his system.”

She smiled at him. “You’ve got more angles than a protractor.”

“Sorry; I didn’t mean to—”

“No.” She raised both hands. “Don’t be sorry; I like it. I like you, Castle. John’s a good man but sometimes he’s too good.”

He poured them both more wine. “Nobody ever accused me of that.”

“I suspect not.” She paused. “Have you ever been in trouble with the police? Just curious.”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

He laughed. “Nickel and dime stuff, when I was a kid. You know, jus’ to see what you can get away with.” He turned serious. “Then I pulled two months’ hard time for somethin’ I didn’t do. Wasn’t even in town when it happened.”

“What was it?”

“Armed robbery. Then the guy came back an’ hit the same god-damned store! I mean, he was one sharp cookie. He confessed to the first one and they let me go.”

“Why did they accuse you in the first place?”

“Used to think it was somebody had it in for me. Like the clerk who fingered me.” He took a sip of wine. “But hell. It was just dumb luck. And dumb cops. The guy was about my height, same color hair, we both lived in the neighborhood. Cops didn’t want to waste a lot of time on it. Jus’ chuck me in jail.”

“So you do have a police record?”

“Huh uh. Girl from the ACLU made sure they wiped it clean. She wanted me to go after ’em for what, false arrest an’ wrongful imprisonment. I just wanted to get out of town.”

“It wasn’t here?”

“Nah. Dayton, Ohio. Been here eight, nine years.”

“That’s good.”

“Why the third degree?”

She leaned forward and patted the back of his hand. “Call it a job interview, Castle. I have a feeling we may be working together.”

“Okay.” He gave her a slow smile. “Anything else you want to know?”

5. The Doctor And The Doctor’s Wife

John trudged into the kitchen the next morning, ignored the coffeepot, and pulled a green bottle of beer out of the fridge. He looked up at the skylight. Four scorpions, none of them moving. Have to call the bug man today.

Red wine hangover, the worst kind. He was too old for this. Cheap red wine hangover. He eased himself into a soft chair and carefully poured the beer down the side of the glass. Not too much noise, please.

When you drink too much, you ought to take a couple of aspirin, and some vitamins, and all the water you can hold, before retiring. If you drink too much, of course, you don’t remember to do that.

The shower turned off with a bass clunk of plumbing. John winced and took a long drink, which helped a little. When he heard the bathroom door open he called for Lena to bring the aspirin when she came out.

After a few minutes she brought it out and handed it to him. “And how is Dr. Baird today?”

“Dr. Baird needs a doctor. Or an undertaker.” He shook out two aspirin and washed them down with the last of the beer. “Like your outfit.”

She was wearing only a towel around her head. She simpered and struck a dancer’s pose and spun daintily around. “Think it’ll catch on?”

“Oh my yes.” At thirty-five, she still had the trim model’s figure that had caught his eye in the classroom, fifteen years before. A safe, light tan was uniform all over her body, thanks to liberal sunblock and the private sunbathing area on top of the house—private except for the helicopter that came low overhead every weekday at 1:15. She always tried to be there in time to wave at it. The pilot had such white teeth. She wondered how many sunbathers were on his route.

She undid the towel and rubbed her long blonde hair vigorously. “Thought I’d cool off for a few minutes before I got dressed. Too much wine, eh?”

“Couldn’t you tell from my sparkling repartee last night?” He leaned back, eyes closed, and rolled the cool glass back and forth on his forehead.

“Want another beer?”

“Yeah. Coffee’d be smarter, though.”

“It’s been sitting all night.”

“Pay for my sins.” He watched her swivel lightly into the kitchen and, more than ever before, felt the difference in their ages. Seventeen years; he was half again as old as she. A young man would say the hell with the hangover, go grab that luscious thing and carry her back to bed. The organ that responded to this meditation was his stomach, though, and it responded very audibly.

“Some toast, too. Or do you want something fancier?”

“Toast would be fine.” Why was she being so nice? Usually if he drank too much, he reaped the whirlwind in the morning.

“Ugh.” She saw the scorpions. “Five of them now.”

“I wonder how many it will hold before it comes crashing down. Scorpions everywhere, stunned. Then angry.”

“I’m sure the bug man knows how to get rid of them.”

“In Africa they claimed that if you light a ring of fire around them with gasoline or lighter fluid, they go crazy, run amok, stinging themselves to death in their frenzies. Maybe the bug man could do that.”

“Castle and I came up with a plan last night. It’s kinda screwy but it might just work.”

“Read that in a book called Jungle Ways. I was eight years old and believed every word of it.”

“We figured out a way that it would be legal. Are you listening?”

“Uh huh. Let me have real sugar and some milk.”

She poured some milk in a cup and put it in the microwave to warm. “Maybe we should talk about it later.”

“Oh no. Hemingway forgery. You figured out a way to make it legal. Go ahead. I’m all ears.”

“See, you tell the publisher first off what it is, that you wrote it and then had it typed up to look authentic.”

“Sure, be a big market for that.”

“In fact, there could be. You’d have to generate it, but it could happen.” The toast sprang up and she brought it and two cups of coffee into the living room on a tray. “See, the bogus manuscript is only one part of a book.”

“I don’t get it.” He tore the toast into strips, to dunk in the strong Cuban coffee.

“The rest of the book is in the nature of an exegesis of your own text.”

“If that con man knows what exegesis is, then I can crack a safe.”

“That part’s my idea. You’re really writing a book about Hemingway. You use your own text to illustrate various points—‘I wrote it this way instead of that way because. . . .’ ”

“It would be different,” he conceded. “Perhaps the second most egotistical piece of Hemingway scholarship in history. A dubious distinction.”

“You could write it tongue-in-cheek, though. It could be really amusing, as well as scholarly.”

“God, we’d have to get an unlisted number, publishers calling us night and day. Movie producers. Might sell ten copies, if I bought nine.”

“You really aren’t getting it, John. You don’t have a particle of larceny in your heart.”

He put a hand on his heart and looked down. “Ventricles, auricles. My undying love for you, a little heartburn. No particles.”

“See, you tell the publisher the truth . . . but the publisher doesn’t have to tell the truth. Not until publication day.”

“Okay. I still don’t get it.”

She took a delicate nibble of toast. “It goes like this. They print the bogus Hemingway up into a few copies of bogus bound galleys. Top secret.”

“My exegesis carefully left off.”

“That’s the ticket. They send it out to a few selected scholars, along with Xeroxes of a few sample manuscript pages. All they say, in effect, is ‘Does this seem authentic to you? Please keep it under your hat, for obvious reasons.’ Then they sit back and collect blurbs.”

“I can see the kind of blurbs they’d get from Scott or Mike or Jack, for instance. Some variation of ‘What kind of idiot do you think I am?’ ”

“Those aren’t the kind of people you send it to, dope! You send it to people who think they’re experts, but aren’t. Castle says this is how the Hitler thing almost worked—they knew better than to show it to historians in general. They showed it to a few people and didn’t quote the ones who thought it was a fake. Surely you can come up with a list of people who would be easy to fool.”

“Any scholar could. Be a different list for each one; I’d be on some of them.”

“So they bring it out on April Fool’s Day. You get the front page of the New York Times Book Review. Publishers Weekly does a story. Everybody wants to be in on the joke. Bestseller list, here we come.”

“Yeah, sure, but you haven’t thought it through.” He leaned back, balancing the coffee cup on his slight pot belly. “What about the guys who give us the blurbs, those second-rate scholars? They’re going to look pretty bad.”

“We did think of that. No way they could sue, not if the letter accompanying the galleys is carefully written. It doesn’t have to say—”

“I don’t mean getting sued. I mean I don’t want to be responsible for hurting other people’s careers—maybe wrecking a career, if the person was too extravagant in his endorsement, and had people looking for things to use against him. You know departmental politics. People go down the chute for less serious crimes than making an ass of yourself and your institution in print.”

She put her cup down with a clatter. “You’re always thinking about other people. Why don’t you think about yourself for a change?” She was on the verge of tears. “Think about us.”

“All right, let’s do that. What do you think would happen to my career at BU if I pissed off the wrong people with this exercise? How long do you think it would take me to make full professor? Do you think BU would make a full professor out of a man who uses his specialty to pull vicious practical jokes?”

“Just do me the favor of thinking about it. Cool down and weigh the pluses and minuses. If you did it with the right touch, your department would love it—and God, Harry wants to get rid of the chairmanship so bad he’d give it to an axe murderer. You know you’ll make full professor about thirty seconds before Harry hands you the keys to the office and runs.”

“True enough.” He finished the coffee and stood up in a slow creak. “I’ll give it some thought. Horizontally.” He turned toward the bedroom.

“Want some company?”

He looked at her for a moment. “Indeed I do.”

6. in our time

Back already?

Need to find a meta-causal. One guy seems to be generating the danger flag in various timelines. John Baird, who’s a scholar in some of them, a soldier in some, and a rich playboy in a few. He’s always a Hemingway nut, though. He does something that starts off the ripples in ’95, ’96, ’97; depending on which timeline you’re in—but I can’t seem to get close to it. There’s something odd about him, and it doesn’t have to do with Hemingway specifically.

But he’s definitely causing the eddy?

Has to be him.

All right. Find a meta-causal that all the doom lines have in common, and forget about the others. Then go talk to him.

There’ll be resonance—

But who cares? Moot after A.D. 2006.

That’s true. I’ll hit all the doom lines at once, then: neutralize the meta-causal, then jump ahead and do some spot checks.

Good. And no killing this time.

I understand. But—

You’re too close to 2006. Kill the wrong person and the whole thing could unravel.

Well, there are differences of opinion. We would certainly feel it if the world failed to come to an end in those lines.

As you say, differences of opinion. My opinion is that you better not kill anybody or I’ll send you back to patrol the fourteenth century again.

Understood. But I can’t guarantee that I can neutralize the metacausal without eliminating John Baird.

Fourteenth century. Some people love it. Others think it was nasty, brutish, and long.

7. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Most of the sleuthing that makes up literary scholarship takes place in settings either neutral or unpleasant. Libraries’ old stacks, attics metaphorical and actual; dust and silverfish, yellowed paper and fading ink. Books and letters that appear in card files but not on shelves.

Hemingway researchers have a haven outside of Boston, the Hemingway Collection at the University of Massachusetts’s John F. Kennedy Library. It’s a triangular room with one wall dominated by a picture window that looks over Boston Harbor to the sea. Comfortable easy chairs surround a coffee table, but John had never seen them in use; work tables under the picture window provided realistic room for computer and clutter. Skins from animals the Hemingways had dispatched in Africa snarled up from the floor, and one wall was dominated by Hemingway memorabilia and photographs. What made the room Nirvana, though, was row upon row of boxes containing tens of thousands of Xerox pages of Hemingway correspondence, manuscripts, clippings—everything from a boyhood shopping list to all extant versions of every short story and poem and novel.

John liked to get there early so he could claim one of the three computers. He snapped it on, inserted a CD, and typed in his code number. Then he keyed in the database index and started searching.

The more commonly requested items would appear on screen if you asked for them—whenever someone requested a physical copy of an item, an electronic copy automatically was sent into the database—but most of the things John needed were obscure, and he had to haul down the letter boxes and physically flip through them, just like some poor scholar inhabiting the first nine tenths of the twentieth century.

Time disappeared for him as he abandoned his notes and followed lines of instinct, leaping from letter to manuscript to note to interview, doing what was in essence the opposite of the scholar’s job: a scholar would normally be trying to find out what these stories had been about. John instead was trying to track down every reference that might restrict what he himself could write about, simulating the stories.

The most confining restriction was the one he’d first remembered, walking away from the bar where he’d met Castle. The one-paragraph answer that Hadley had given to Carlos Baker about the unfinished novel; that it was a Nick Adams story about hunting and fishing up in Michigan. John didn’t know anything about hunting and most of his fishing experience was limited to watching a bobber and hoping it wouldn’t go down and break his train of thought.

There was the one story that Hemingway had left unpublished, “Boys and Girls Together,” mostly clumsy self-parody. It covered the right period and the right activities, but using it as a source would be sensitive business, tiptoeing through a minefield. Anyone looking for a fake would go straight there. Of course John could go up to the Michigan woods and camp out, see things for himself and try to recreate them in the Hemingway style. Later, though. First order of business was to make sure there was nothing in this huge collection that would torpedo the whole project—some postcard where Hemingway said “You’re going to like this novel because it has a big scene about cleaning fish.”

The short stories would be less restricted in subject matter. According to Hemingway, they’d been about growing up in Oak Park and Michigan and the battlefields of Italy.

That made him stop and think. The one dramatic experience he shared with Hemingway was combat—fifty years later, to be sure, in Vietnam, but the basic situations couldn’t have changed that much. Terror, heroism, cowardice. The guns and grenades were a little more streamlined, but they did the same things to people. Maybe do a World War I story as a finger exercise, see whether it would be realistic to try a longer growing-up-in-Michigan pastiche.

He made a note to himself about that on the computer, oblique enough not to be damning, and continued the eyestraining job of searching through Hadley’s correspondence, trying to find some further reference to the lost novel—damn!

Writing to Ernest’s mother, Hadley noted that “the taxi driver broke his typewriter” on the way to the Constantinople conference—did he get it fixed, or just chuck it? A quick check showed that the typeface of his manuscripts did indeed change after July 1924. So they’d never be able to find it. There were typewriters in Hemingway shrines in Key West, Billings, Schruns; the initial plan had been to find which was the old Corona, then locate an identical one and have Castle arrange a swap.

So they would fall back on Plan B. Castle had claimed to be good with mechanical things, and thought if they could find a 1921 Corona, he could tweak the keys around so they would produce a convincing manuscript—lower-case “s” a hair low, “e” a hair high, and so forth.

How he could be so sure of success without ever having seen the inside of a manual typewriter, John did not know. Nor did he have much confidence.

But it wouldn’t have to be a perfect simulation, since they weren’t out to fool the whole world, but just a few reviewers who would only see two or three Xeroxed pages. He could probably do a close enough job. John put it out of his mind and moved on to the next letter.

But it was an odd coincidence for him to think about Castle at that instant, since Castle was thinking about him. Or at least asking.

8. The Coming Man

“How was he when he was younger?”

“He never was younger.” She laughed and rolled around inside the compass of his arms to face him. “Than you, I mean. He was in his mid-thirties when we met. You can’t be much over twenty-five.”

He kissed the end of her nose. “Thirty this year. But I still get carded sometimes.”

“I’m a year older than you are. So you have to do anything I say.”

“So far so good.” He’d checked her wallet when she’d gone into the bathroom to insert the diaphragm, and knew she was thirty-five. “Break out the whips and chains now?”

“Not till next week. Work up to it slowly.” She pulled away from him and mopped her front with the sheet. “You’re good at being slow.”

“I like being asked to come back.”

“How ‘bout tonight and tomorrow morning?”

“If you feed me lots of vitamins. How long you think he’ll be up in Boston?”

“He’s got a train ticket for Wednesday. But he said he might stay longer if he got onto something.”

Castle laughed. “Or into something. Think he might have a girl up there? Some student like you used to be?”

“That would be funny. I guess it’s not impossible.” She covered her eyes with the back of her hand. “The wife is always the last to know.”

They both laughed. “But I don’t think so. He’s a sweet guy but he’s just not real sexy. I think his students see him as kind of a favorite uncle.”

“You fell for him once.”

“Uh huh. He had all of his current virtues plus a full head of hair, no pot belly—and, hm, what am I forgetting?”

“He was hung like an elephant?”

“No, I guess it was the millions of dollars. That can be pretty sexy.”

9. Wanderings

It was a good thing John liked to nose around obscure neighborhoods shopping; you couldn’t walk into any old K-Mart and pick up a 1921 Corona portable. In fact, you couldn’t walk into any typewriter shop in Boston and find one, not any. Nowadays they all sold self-contained word processors, with a few dusty electrics in the back room. A few had fancy manual typewriters from Italy or Switzerland; it had been almost thirty years since the American manufacturers had made a machine that wrote without electronic help.

He had a little better luck with pawnshops. Lots of Smith-Coronas, a few L.C. Smiths, and two actual Coronas that might have been old enough. One had too large a typeface and the other, although the typeface was the same as Hemingway’s, was missing a couple of letters: Th quick b own fox jump d ov th lazy dog. The challenge of writing a convincing Hemingway novel without using the letters “e” and “r” seemed daunting. He bought the machine anyhow, thinking they might ultimately have two or several broken ones that could be concatenated into one reliable machine.

The old pawnbroker rang up his purchase and made change and slammed the cash drawer shut. “Now you don’t look to me like the kind of man who would hold it against a man who. . . .” He shrugged. “Well, who sold you something and then suddenly remembered that there was a place with lots of those somethings?”

“Of course not. Business is business.”

“I don’t know the name of the guy or his shop; I think he calls it a museum. Up in Brunswick, Maine. He’s got a thousand old typewriters. He buys, sells, trades. That’s the only place I know of you might find one with the missing whatever-you-call-ems.”

“Fonts.” He put the antique typewriter under his arm—the handle was missing—and shook the old man’s hand. “Thanks a lot. This might save me weeks.”

With some difficulty John got together packing materials and shipped the machine to Key West, along with Xeroxes of a few dozen pages of Hemingway’s typed copy and a note suggesting Castle see what he could do. Then he went to the library and found a Brunswick telephone directory. Under “Office Machines & Supplies” was listed Crazy Tom’s Typewriter Museum and Sales Emporium. John rented a car and headed north.

The small town had rolled up its sidewalks by the time he got there. He drove past Crazy Tom’s and pulled into the first motel. It had a neon VACANCY sign but the innkeeper had to be roused from a deep sleep. He took John’s credit card number and directed him to Room 14 and pointedly turned on the NO sign. There were only two other cars in the motel lot.

John slept late and treated himself to a full “trucker’s” breakfast at the local diner: two pork chops and eggs and hash browns. Then he worked off ten calories by walking to the shop.

Crazy Tom was younger than John had expected, thirtyish with an unruly shock of black hair. A manual typewriter lay upside-down on an immaculate work table, but most of the place was definitely maculate. Thousands of peanut shells littered the floor. Crazy Tom was eating them compulsively from a large wooden bowl. When he saw John standing in the doorway, he offered some. “Unsalted,” he said. “Good for you.”

John crunched his way over the peanut-shell carpet. The only light in the place was the bare bulb suspended over the work table, though two unlit high-intensity lamps were clamped on either side of it. The walls were floor-to-ceiling gloomy shelves holding hundreds of typewriters, mostly black.

“Let me guess,” the man said as John scooped up a handful of peanuts. “You’re here about a typewriter.”

“A specific one. A 1921 Corona portable.”

“Ah.” He closed his eyes in thought. “Hemingway. His first. Or I guess the first after he started writing. A ’27 Corona, now, that’d be Faulkner.”

“You get a lot of calls for them?”

“Couple times a year. People hear about this place and see if they can find one like the master used, whoever the master is to them. Sympathetic magic and all that. But you aren’t a writer.”

“I’ve had some stories published.”

“Yeah, but you look too comfortable. You do something else. Teach school.” He looked around in the gloom. “Corona Corona.” Then he sang the six syllables to the tune of “Corina, Corina.” He walked a few steps into the darkness and returned with a small machine and set it on the table. “Newer than 1920 because of the way it says “Corona” here. Older than 1927 because of the tab set-up.” He found a piece of paper and a chair. “Go on, try it.”

John typed out a few quick foxes and aids to one’s party. The typeface was identical to the one on the machine Hadley had given Hemingway before they’d been married. The up-and-down-displacements of the letters were different, of course, but Castle should be able to fix that once he’d practiced with the back-up machine.

John cracked a peanut. “How much?”

“What you need it for?”

“Why is that important?”

“It’s the only one I got. Rather rent it than sell it.” He didn’t look like he was lying, trying to push the price up. “A thousand to buy, a hundred a month to rent.”

“Tell you what, then. I buy it, and if it doesn’t bring me luck, you agree to buy it back at a pro ratum. My one thousand dollars minus ten percent per month.”

Crazy Tom stuck out his hand. “Let’s have a beer on it.”

“Isn’t it a little early for that?”

“Not if you eat peanuts all morning.” He took two long-necked Budweisers from a cooler and set them on paper towels on the table. “So what kind of stuff you write?”

“Short stories and some poetry.” The beer was good after the heavy greasy breakfast. “Nothing you would’ve seen unless you read magazines like Iowa Review and Triquarterly.”

“Oh yeah. Foldouts of Gertrude Stein and H.D. I might’ve read your stuff.”

“John Baird.”

He shook his head. “Maybe. I’m no good with names.”

“If you recognized my name from The Iowa Review you’d be the first person who ever had.”

“I was right about the Hemingway connection?”

“Of course.”

“But you don’t write like Hemingway for no Iowa Review. Short declarative sentences, truly this truly that.”

“No, you were right about the teaching, too. I teach Hemingway up at Boston University.”

“So that’s why the typewriter? Play show and tell with your students?”

“That, too. Mainly I want to write some on it and see how it feels.”

From the back of the shop, a third person listened to the conversation with great interest. He, it, wasn’t really a “person,” though he could look like one: he had never been born and he would never die. But then he didn’t really exist, not in the down-home pinch-yourself-ouch! way that you and I do.

In another way, he did more than exist, since he could slip back and forth between places you and I don’t even have words for.

He was carrying a wand that could be calibrated for heart attack, stroke, or metastasized cancer on one end; the other end induced a kind of aphasia. He couldn’t use it unless he materialized. He walked toward the two men, making no crunching sounds on the peanut shells because he weighed less than a thought. He studied John Baird’s face from about a foot away.

“I guess it’s a mystical thing, though I’m uncomfortable with that word. See whether I can get into his frame of mind.”

“Funny thing,” Crazy Tom said; “I never thought of him typing out his stories. He was always sitting in some café writing in notebooks, piling up saucers.”

“You’ve read a lot about him?” That would be another reason not to try the forgery. This guy comes out of the woodwork and says “I sold John Baird a 1921 Corona portable.”

“Hell, all I do is read. If I get two customers a day, one of ’em’s a mistake and the other just wants directions. I’ve read all of Hemingway’s fiction and most of the journalism and I think all of the poetry. Not just the Querschnitt period; the more interesting stuff.”

The invisible man was puzzled. Quite obviously John Baird planned some sort of Hemingway forgery. But then he should be growing worried over this man’s dangerous expertise. Instead, he was radiating relief.

What course of action, inaction? He could go back a few hours in time and steal this typewriter, though he would have to materialize for that, and it would cause suspicions. And Baird could find another. He could kill one or both of them, now or last week or next, but that would mean duty in the fourteenth century for more than forever—when you exist out of time, a century of unpleasantness is long enough for planets to form and die.

He wouldn’t have been drawn to this meeting if it were not a strong causal nexus. There must be earlier ones, since John Baird did not just stroll down a back street in this little town and decide to change history by buying a typewriter. But the earlier ones must be too weak, or something was masking them.

Maybe it was a good timeplace to get John Baird alone and explain things to him. Then use the wand on him. But no, not until he knew exactly what he was preventing. With considerable effort of will and expenditure of something like energy, he froze time at this instant and traveled to a couple of hundred adjacent realities that were all in this same bundle of doomed timelines.

In most of them, Baird was here in Crazy Tom’s Typewriter Museum and Sales Emporium. In some, he was in a similar place in New York. In two, he was back in the Hemingway collection. In one, John Baird didn’t exist: the whole planet was a lifeless blasted cinder. He’d known about that timeline; it had been sort of a dry run.

“He did both,” John then said in most of the timelines. “Sometimes typing, sometimes fountain pen or pencil. I’ve seen the rough draft of his first novel. Written out in a stack of seven French schoolkids’ copybooks.” He looked around, memory working. A red herring wouldn’t hurt. He’d never come across a reference to any other specific Hemingway typewriter, but maybe this guy had. “You know what kind of machine he used in Key West or Havana?”

Crazy Tom pulled on his chin. “Nope. Bring me a sample of the typing and I might be able to pin it down, though. And I’ll keep an eye out—got a card?”

John took out a business card and his checkbook. “Take a check on a Boston bank?”

“Sure. I’d take one on a Tierra del Fuego bank. Who’d stiff you on a seventy-year-old typewriter?” Sylvester Castlemaine might, John thought. “I’ve had this business almost twenty years,” Tom continued; “not a single bounced check or bent plastic.”

“Yeah,” John said. “Why would a crook want an old typewriter?” The invisible man laughed and went away.

10. Banal Story

Dear Lena & Castle,

Typing this on the new/old machine to give you an idea about what has to be modified to mimic EH’s:

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 234567890,./ ″#$%_&′()*?

Other mechanical things to think about—

1. Paper—One thing that made people suspicious about the Hitler forgery is that experts know that old paper smells old. And of course there was that fatal chemical-composition error that clinched it.

As we discussed, my first thought was that one of us would have to go to Paris and nose around in old attics and so forth, trying to find either a stack of 75-year-old paper or an old blank book we could cut pages out of. But in the JFK Library collection I found out that EH actually did bring some American-made paper along with him. A lot of the rough draft of in our time—written in Paris a year or two after our “discovery”—was typed on the back of 6 × 7″ stationery from his parents’ vacation place in Windemere, Xerox enclosed. It should be pretty easy to duplicate on a hand press, and of course it will be a lot easier to find 75-year-old American paper. One complication, unfortunately, is that I haven’t really seen the paper; only a Xerox of the pages. Have to come up with some pretext to either visit the vault or have a page brought up, so I can check the color of the ink, memorize the weight and deckle of the paper, check to see how the edges are cut . . .

I’m starting to sound like a real forger. In for a penny, though, in for a pound. One of the critics who’s sent the fragment might want to see the actual document, and compare it with the existing Windemere pages.

2. Inks. This should not be a problem. Here’s a recipe for typewriter ribbon ink from a 1918 book of commercial formulas:

8 oz. lampblack

4 oz. gum arabic

1 quart methylated spirits

That last one is wood alcohol. The others ought to be available in Miami if you can’t find them on the Rock.

Aging the ink on the paper gets a little tricky. I haven’t been able to find anything about it in the libraries around here; no FORGERY FOR FUN & PROFIT. May check in New York before coming back.

(If we don’t find anything, I’d suggest baking it for a few days at a temperature low enough not to greatly affect the paper, and then interleaving it with blank sheets of the old paper and pressing them together for a few days, to restore the old smell, and further absorb the residual ink solvents.)

Toyed with the idea of actually allowing the manuscript to mildew somewhat, but that might get out of hand and actually destroy some of it—or for all I know we’d be employing a species of mildew that doesn’t speak French. Again, thinking like a true forger, which may be a waste of time and effort, but I have to admit is kind of fun. Playing cops and robbers at my age.

Well, I’ll call tonight. Miss you, Lena.

Your partner in crime,

11. A Divine Gesture

When John returned to his place in Boston, there was a message on his answering machine: “John, this is Nelson Van Nuys. Harry told me you were in town. I left something in your box at the office and I strongly suggest you take it before somebody else does. I’ll be out of town for a week, but give me a call if you’re here next Friday. You can take me and Doris out to dinner at Panache.”

Panache was the most expensive restaurant in Cambridge. Interesting. John checked his watch. He hadn’t planned to go to the office, but there was plenty of time to swing by on his way to returning the rental car. The train didn’t leave for another four hours.

Van Nuys was a fellow Hemingway scholar and sometimes drinking buddy who taught at Brown. What had he brought ninety miles to deliver in person, rather than mail? He was probably just in town and dropped by. But it was worth checking.

No one but the secretary was in the office, noontime, for which John was obscurely relieved. In his box were three interdepartmental memos, a textbook catalog, and a brown cardboard box that sloshed when he picked it up. He took it all back to his office and closed the door.

The office made him feel a little weary, as usual. He wondered whether they would be shuffling people around again this year. The department liked to keep its professors in shape by having them haul tons of books and files up and down the corridor every couple of years.

He glanced at the memos and pitched them, irrelevant since he wasn’t teaching in the summer, and put the catalog in his briefcase. Then he carefully opened the cardboard box.

It was a half-pint Jack Daniel’s bottle, but it didn’t have bourbon in it. A cloudy greenish liquid. John unscrewed the top and with the sharp Pernod tang the memory came back: He and Van Nuys had wasted half an afternoon in Paris years ago, trying to track down a source of true absinthe. So he had finally found some.

Absinthe. Nectar of the gods, ruination of several generations of French artists, students, workingmen—outlawed in 1915 for its addictive and hallucinogenic qualities. Where had Van Nuys found it?

He screwed the top back on tightly and put it back in the box and put the box in his briefcase. If its effect really was all that powerful, you probably wouldn’t want to drive under its influence. In Boston traffic, of course, a little lane weaving and a few mild collisions would go unnoticed.

Once he was safely on the train, he’d try a shot or two of it. It couldn’t be all that potent. Child of the sixties, John had taken LSD, psilocybin, ecstasy, and peyote, and remembered with complete accuracy the quality of each drug’s hallucinations. The effects of absinthe wouldn’t be nearly as extreme as its modern successors. But it was probably just as well to try it first in a place where unconsciousness or Steve Allen imitations or speaking in tongues would go unremarked.

He turned in the rental car and took a cab to South Station rather than juggle suitcase, briefcase, and typewriter through the subway system. Once there, he nursed a beer through an hour of the Yankees murdering the Red Sox, and then rented a cart to roll his burden down to track 3, where a smiling porter installed him aboard the Silver Meteor, its range newly extended from Boston to Miami.

He had loved the train since his boyhood in Washington. His mother hated flying and so they often clickety-clacked from place to place in the snug comfort of first-class compartments. Eidetic memory blunted his enjoyment of the modern Amtrak version. This compartment was as large as the ones he had read and done puzzles in, forty years before—amazing and delighting his mother with his proficiency in word games—but the smell of good old leather was gone, replaced by plastic, and the fittings that had been polished brass were chromed steel now. On the middle of the red plastic seat was a Hospitality Pak, a plastic box encased in plastic wrap that contained a wedge of indestructible “cheese food,” as if cheese had to eat, a small plastic bottle of cheap California wine, a plastic glass to contain it, and an apple, possibly not plastic.

John hung up his coat and tie in the small closet provided beside where the bed would fold down, and for a few minutes he watched with interest as his fellow passengers and their accompaniment hurried or ambled to their cars. Mostly old people, of course. Enough young ones, John hoped, to keep the trains alive a few decades more.

“Mr. Baird?” John turned to face a black porter, who bowed slightly and favored him with a blinding smile of white and gold. “My name is George, and I will be at your service as far as Atlanta. Is everything satisfactory?”

“Doing fine. But if you could find me a glass made of glass and a couple of ice cubes, I might mention you in my will.”

“One minute, sir.” In fact, it took less than a minute. That was one aspect, John had to admit, that had improved in recent years: The service on Amtrak in the sixties and seventies had been right up there with Alcatraz and the Hanoi Hilton.

He closed and locked the compartment door and carefully poured about two ounces of the absinthe into the glass. Like Pernod, it turned milky on contact with the ice.

He swirled it around and breathed deeply. It did smell much like Pernod, but with an acrid tang that was probably oil of wormwood. An experimental sip: the wormwood didn’t dominate the licorice flavor, but it was there.

“Thanks, Nelson,” he whispered, and drank the whole thing in one cold fiery gulp. He set down the glass and the train began to move. For a weird moment that seemed hallucinatory, but it always did, the train starting off so smoothly and silently.

For about ten minutes he felt nothing unusual, as the train did its slow tour of Boston’s least attractive backyards. The conductor who checked his ticket seemed like a normal human being, which could have been a hallucination.

John knew that some drugs, like amyl nitrite, hit with a swift slap, while others creep into your mind like careful infiltrators. This was the way of absinthe; all he felt was a slight alcohol buzz, and he was about to take another shot, when it subtly began.

There were things just at the periphery of his vision, odd things with substance, but somehow without shape, that of course moved away when he turned his head to look at them. At the same time a whispering began in his ears, just audible over the train noise, but not intelligible, as if in a language he had heard before but not understood. For some reason the effects were pleasant, though of course they could be frightening if a person were not expecting weirdness. He enjoyed the illusions for a few minutes, while the scenery outside mellowed into woodsy suburbs, and the visions and voices stopped rather suddenly.

He poured another ounce and this time diluted it with water. He remembered the sad woman in “Hills Like White Elephants” lamenting that everything new tasted like licorice, and allowed himself to wonder what Hemingway had been drinking when he wrote that curious story.

Chuckling at his own—what? Effrontery?—John took out the 1921 Corona and slipped a sheet of paper into it and balanced it on his knees. He had earlier thought of the first two lines of the WWI pastiche; he typed them down and kept going:

The dirt on the sides of the trenches was never completely dry in the morning. If Nick could find an old newspaper he would put it between his chest and the dirt when he went out to lean on the side of the trench and wait for the light. First light was the best time. You might have luck and see a muzzle flash. But patience was better than luck. Wait to see a helmet or a head without a helmet.

Nick looked at the enemy line through a rectangular box of wood that went through the trench at about ground level. The other end of the box was covered by a square of gauze the color of dirt. A person looking directly at it might see the muzzle flash when Nick fired through the box. But with luck, the flash would be the last thing he saw.

Nick had fired through the gauze six times, perhaps killing three enemy, and the gauze now had a ragged hole in the center.

Okay, John thought, he’d be able to see slightly better through the hole in the center but staring that way would reduce the effective field of view, so he would deliberately try to look to one side or the other. How to type that down in a simple way? Someone cleared his throat.

John looked up from the typewriter. Sitting across from him was Ernest Hemingway, the weathered, wise Hemingway of the famous Karsh photograph.

“I’m afraid you must not do that,” Hemingway said.

John looked at the half-full glass of absinthe and looked back. Hemingway was still there. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

“It isn’t the absinthe.” Hemingway’s image rippled and he became the handsome teenager who had gone to war, the war John was writing about. “I am quite real. In a way, I am more real than you are.” As it spoke it aged: the mustachioed leading-man-handsome Hemingway of the twenties; the slightly corpulent, still magnetic media hero of the thirties and forties; the beard turning white, the features hard and sad and then twisting with impotence and madness, and then a sudden loud report and the cranial vault exploding, the mahogany veneer of the wall splashed with blood and brains and imbedded chips of skull. There was a strong smell of cordite and blood. The almost headless corpse shrugged, spreading its hands. “I can look like anyone I want.” The mess disappeared and it became the young Hemingway again.

John slumped and stared.

“This thing you just started must never be finished. This Hemingway pastiche. It will ruin something very important.”

“What could it ruin? I’m not even planning to—”

“Your plans are immaterial. If you continue with this project it will profoundly affect the future.”

“You’re from the future?”

“I’m from the future and the past and other temporalities that you can’t comprehend. But all you need to know is that you must not write this Hemingway story. If you do, I or someone like me will have to kill you.”

It gestured and a wand the size of a walking stick, half black and half white, appeared in its hand. It tapped John’s knee with the white end. There was a slight tingle.

“Now you won’t be able to tell anybody about me, or write anything about me down. If you try to talk about me, the memory will disappear—and reappear moments later, along with the knowledge that I will kill you if you don’t cooperate.” It turned into the bloody corpse again. “Understood?”

“Of course.”

“If you behave, you will never have to see me again.” It started to fade.

“Wait. What do you really look like?”

“This. . . .” For a few seconds John stared at an ebony presence deeper than black, at once points and edges and surfaces and volume and hints of further dimensions. “You can’t really see or know,” a voice whispered inside his head. He reached into the blackness and jerked his hand back, rimed with frost and numb. The thing disappeared.

He stuck his hand under his armpit and feeling returned. That last apparition was the unsettling one. He had Hemingway’s appearance at every age memorized, and had seen the corpse in his mind’s eye often enough. A drug could conceivably have brought them all together and made up this fantastic demand—which might actually be nothing more than a reasonable side of his nature trying to make him stop wasting time on this silly project.

But that thing. His hand was back to normal. Maybe a drug could do that, too; make your hand feel freezing. LSD did more profound things than that. But not while arguing about a manuscript.

He considered the remaining absinthe. Maybe take another big blast of it and see whether ol’ Ernie comes back again. Or no—there was a simpler way to check.

The bar was four rocking and rolling cars away, and bouncing his way from wall to window helped sober John up. When he got there, he had another twinge for the memories of the past. Stained formica tables. No service; you had to go to a bar at the other end. Acrid with cigarette fumes. He remembered linen tablecloths and endless bottles of Coke with the names of cities from everywhere stamped on the bottom and, when his father came along with them, the rich sultry smoke of his Havanas. The fat Churchills from Punch that emphysema stopped just before Castro could. “A Coke, please.” He wondered which depressed him more, the red can or the plastic cup with miniature ice cubes.

The test. It was not in his nature to talk to strangers on public conveyances. But this was necessary. There was a man sitting alone who looked about John’s age, a Social-Security bound hippy with wire-rimmed John Lennon glasses, white hair down to his shoulders, bushy grey beard. He nodded when John sat down across from him, but didn’t say anything. He sipped beer and looked blankly out at the gathering darkness.

“Excuse me,” John said, “but I have a strange thing to ask you.”

The man looked at him. “I don’t mind strange things. But please don’t try to sell me anything illegal.”

“I wouldn’t. It may have something to do with a drug, but it would be one I took.”

“You do look odd. You tripping?”

“Doesn’t feel like it. But I may have been . . . slipped something.” He leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “I just talked to Ernest Hemingway.”

“The writer?”

“In my roomette, yeah.”

“Wow. He must be pretty old.”

“He’s dead! More than thirty years.”

“Oh wow. Now that is something weird. What he say?”

“You know what a pastiche is?”

“French pastry?”

“No, it’s when you copy . . . when you create an imitation of another person’s writing. Hemingway’s, in this case.”

“Is that legal? I mean, with him dead and all.”

“Sure it is, as long as you don’t try to foist it off as Hemingway’s real stuff.”

“So what happened? He wanted to help you with it?”

“Actually, no . . . he said I’d better stop.”

“Then you better stop. You don’t fuck around with ghosts.” He pointed at the old brass bracelet on John’s wrist. “You in the ‘Nam.”

“Sixty-eight,” John said. “Hue.”

“Then you oughta know about ghosts. You don’t fuck with ghosts.”

“Yeah.” What he’d thought was aloofness in the man’s eyes, the set of his mouth, was aloneness, something slightly different. “You okay?”

“Oh yeah. Wasn’t for a while, then I got my shit together.” He looked out the window again, and said something weirdly like Hemingway: “I learned to take it a day at a time. The day you’re in’s the only day that’s real. The past is shit and the future, hell, some day your future’s gonna be that you got no future. So fuck it, you know? One day at a time.”

John nodded. “What outfit were you in?”

“Like I say, man, the past is shit. No offense?”

“No, that’s okay.” He poured the rest of his Coke over the ice and stood up to go.

“You better talk to somebody about those ghosts. Some kinda shrink, you know? It’s not that they’re not real. But just you got to deal with ’em.”

“Thanks. I will.” John got a little more ice from the barman and negotiated his way down the lurching corridor back to his compartment, trying not to spill his drink while also juggling fantasy, reality, past, present, memory. . . .

He opened the door and Hemingway was there, drinking his absinthe. He looked up with weary malice. “Am I going to have to kill you?”

What John did next would have surprised Castlemaine, who thought he was a nebbish. He closed the compartment door and sat down across from the apparition. “Maybe you can kill me and maybe you can’t.”

“Don’t worry. I can.”

“You said I wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone about you. But I just walked down to the bar car and did.”

“I know. That’s why I came back.”

“So if one of your powers doesn’t work, maybe another doesn’t. At any rate, if you kill me you’ll never find out what went wrong.”

“That’s very cute, but it doesn’t work.” It finished off the absinthe and then ran a finger around the rim of the glass, which refilled out of nowhere.

“You’re making assumptions about causality that are necessarily naive, because you can’t perceive even half of the dimensions that you inhabit.”

“Nevertheless, you haven’t killed me yet.”

“And assumptions about my ‘psychology’ that are absurd. I am no more a human being than you are a paramecium.”

“I’ll accept that. But I would make a deal with a paramecium if I thought I could gain an advantage from it.”

“What could you possibly have to deal with, though?”

“I know something about myself that you evidently don’t, that enables me to overcome your don’t-talk restriction. Knowing that might be worth a great deal to you.”

“Maybe something.”

“What I would like in exchange is, of course, my life, and an explanation of why I must not do the Hemingway pastiche. Then I wouldn’t do it.”

“You wouldn’t do it if I killed you, either.”

John sipped his Coke and waited.

“All right. It goes something like this. There is not just one universe, but actually uncountable zillions of them. They’re all roughly the same size and complexity as this one, and they’re all going off in a zillion different directions, and it is one hell of a job to keep things straight.”

“You do this by yourself? You’re God?”

“There’s not just one of me. In fact, it would be meaningless to assign a number to us, but I guess you could say that altogether, we are God . . . and the Devil, and the Cosmic Puppet master, and the Grand Unification Theory, the Great Pumpkin and everything else. When we consider ourselves as a group, let me see, I guess a human translation of our name would be the Spacio-Temporal Adjustment Board.”

“STAB?”

“I guess that is unfortunate. Anyhow, what STAB does is more the work of a scalpel than a knife.” The Hemingway scratched its nose, leaving the absinthe suspended in midair. “Events are supposed to happen in certain ways, in certain sequences. You look at things happening and say cause-and-effect, or coincidence, or golly, that couldn’t have happened in a million years—but you don’t even have a clue. Don’t even try to think about it. It’s like an ant trying to figure out General Relativity.”

“It wouldn’t have a clue. Wouldn’t know where to start.”

The apparition gave him a sharp look and continued. “These universes come in bundles. Hundreds of them, thousands, that are pretty much the same. And they affect each other. Resonate with each other. When something goes wrong in one, it resonates and screws up all of them.”

“You mean to say that if I write a Hemingway pastiche, hundreds of universes are going to go straight to hell?”

The apparition spread its hands and looked to the ceiling. “Nothing is simple. The only thing that’s simple is that nothing is simple.

“I’m a sort of literature specialist. American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Usually. Most of my timespace is taken up with guys like Hemingway, Teddy Roosevelt, Heinlein, Bierce. Crane, Spillane, Twain.”

“Not William Dean Howells?”

“Not him or James or Carver or Coover or Cheever or any of those guys. If everybody gave me as little trouble as William Dean Howells I could spend most of my timespace on a planet where the fishing was good.”

“Masculine writers?” John said. “But not all hairy-chested macho types.”

“I’ll give you an A—on that one. They’re writers who have an accumulating effect on the masculine side of the American national character. There’s no one word for it, though it is a specific thing: individualistic, competence-worshiping, short-term optimism and long-term existentialism. ‘There may be nothing after I die but I sure as hell will do the job right while I’m here, even though I’m surrounded by idiots.’ You see the pattern?”

“Okay. And I see how Hemingway fits in. But how could writing a pastiche interfere with it?”

“That’s a limitation I have. I don’t know specifically. I do know that the accelerating revival of interest in Hemingway from the seventies through the nineties is vitally important. In the Soviet Union as well as the United States. For some reason, I can feel your pastiche interfering with it.” He stretched out the absinthe glass into a yard-long amber crystal, and it changed into the black-and-white cane. The glass reappeared in the drink holder by the window. “Your turn.”

“You won’t kill me after you hear what I have to say?”

“No. Go ahead.”

“Well . . . I have an absolutely eidetic memory. Everything I’ve ever seen—or smelled or tasted or heard or touched, or even dreamed—I can instantly recall.”

“Every other memory freak I’ve read about was limited—numbers, dates, calendar tricks, historical details—and most of them were idiots savants. I have at least normal intelligence. But from the age of about three, I have never forgotten anything.”

The Hemingway smiled congenially. “Thank you. That’s exactly it.” It fingered the black end of the cane, clicking something. “If you had the choice, would you rather die of a heart attack, stroke, or cancer?”

“That’s it?” The Hemingway nodded. “Well, you’re human enough to cheat. To lie.”

“It’s not something you could understand. Stroke?”

“It might not work.”

“We’re going to find out right now.” He lowered the cane.

“Wait! What’s death? Is there . . . anything I should do, anything you know?”

The rod stopped, poised an inch over John’s knee. “I guess you just end. Is that so bad?”

“Compared to not ending, it’s bad.”

“That shows how little you know. I and the ones like me can never die. If you want something to occupy your last moment, your last thought, you might pity me.”

John stared straight into his eyes. “Fuck you.”

The cane dropped. A fireball exploded in his head.

12. Marriage Is A Dangerous Game

“We’ll blackmail him.” Castle and Lena were together in the big antique bathtub, in a sea of pink foam, her back against his chest.

“Sure,” she said. “ ‘If you don’t let us pass this manuscript off as the real thing, we’ll tell everybody you faked it.’ Something wrong with that, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.”

“Here, I’ll put mine on it.”

She giggled. “Later. What do you mean, blackmail?”

“Got it all figured out. I’ve got this friend Pansy, she used to be a call girl. Been out of the game seven, eight years; still looks like a million bucks.”

“Sure. We fix John up with this hooker—”

“Call girl isn’t a hooker. We’re talkin’ class.”

“In the first place, John wouldn’t pay for sex. He did that in Vietnam and it still bothers him.”

“Not talkin’ about pay. Talkin’ about fallin’ in love. While she meanwhile fucks his eyeballs out.”

“You have such a turn of phrase, Sylvester. Then while his eyeballs are out, you come in with a camera.”

“Yeah, but you’re about six steps ahead.”

“Okay, step two; how do we get them together? Church social?”

“She moves in next door.” There was another upstairs apartment, unoccupied. “You and me and Julio are conveniently somewhere else when she shows up with all these boxes and that big flight of stairs.”

“Sure, John would help her. But that’s his nature; he’d help her if she were an ugly old crone with leprosy. Carry a few boxes, sit down for a cup of coffee, maybe. But not jump into the sack.”

“Okay, you know John.” His voice dropped to a husky whisper and he cupped her breasts. “But I know men, and I know Pansy . . . and Pansy could give a hard-on to a corpse.”

“Sure, and then fuck his eyeballs out. They’d come out easier.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Go ahead.”

“Well . . . look. Do you know what a call girl does?”

“I suppose you call her up and say you’ve got this eyeball problem.”

“Enough with the eyeballs. What she does, she works for like an escort service. That part of it’s legal. Guy comes into town, business or maybe on vacation, he calls up the service and they ask what kind of companion he’d like. If he says, like, give me some broad with a tight ass, can suck the chrome off a bumper hitch—the guy says like ‘I’m sorry, sir, but this is not that kind of a service.’ But mostly the customers are pretty hip to it, they say, oh, a pretty young blonde who likes to go dancing.”

“Meanwhile they’re thinking about bumper hitches and eyeballs.”

“You got it. So it starts out just like a date, just the guy pays the escort service like twenty bucks for getting them together. Still no law broken.”

“Now about one out of three, four times, that’s it. The guy knows what’s going on but he don’t get up the nerve to ask, or he really doesn’t know the score, and it’s like a real dull date. I don’t think that happened much with Pansy.”

“In the normal course of things, though, the subject of bumper hitches comes up.”

“Uh huh, but not from Pansy. The guy has to pop the question. That way if he’s a cop it’s, what, entrapment.”

“Do you know whether Pansy ever got busted?”

“Naw. Mainly the cops just shake down the hookers, just want a blowjob anyhow. This town, half of ’em want a blowjob from guys.

“So they pop the question and Pansy blushes and says for you, I guess I could. Then, on the way to the motel or wherever she says, you know, I wouldn’t ask this if we weren’t really good friends, but I got to make a car payment by tomorrow, and I need like two hundred bucks before noon tomorrow?”

“And she takes MasterCard and Visa.”

“No, but she sure as hell knows where every bank machine in town is. She even writes up an I.O.U.” Castle laughed. “Told me a guy from Toledo’s holdin’ five grand of I.O.U.’s from her.”

“All right, but that’s not John. She could suck the chrome off his eyeballs and he still wouldn’t be interested in her if she didn’t know Hemingway from hummingbirds.”

Castle licked behind her ear, a weird gesture that made her shiver. “That’s the trump card. Pansy reads like a son of a bitch. She’s got like a thousand books. So this morning I called her up and asked about Hemingway.”

“And?”

“She’s read them all.”

She nodded slowly. “Not bad, Sylvester. So we promote this love affair and sooner or later you catch them in the act. Threaten to tell me unless John accedes to a life of crime.”

“Think it could work? He wouldn’t say hell, go ahead and tell her?”

“Not if I do my part . . . starting tomorrow. I’m the best, sweetest, lovingest wife in this sexy town. Then in a couple of weeks Pansy comes into his life, and there he is, luckiest man alive. Best of both worlds. Until you accidentally catch them in flagrante delicioso.”

“So to keep both of you, he goes along with me.”

“It might just do it. It might just.” She slowly levered herself out of the water and smoothed the suds off her various assets.

“Nice.”

“Bring me that bumper hitch, Sylvester. Hold on to your eyeballs.”

13. In Another Country

John woke up with a hangover of considerable dimension. The diluted glass of absinthe was still in the drink holder by the window. It was just past dawn, and a verdant forest rushed by outside. The rails made a steady hum; the car had a slight rocking that would have been pleasant to a person who felt well.

A porter knocked twice and enquired after Mr. Baird. “Come in.” John said. A short white man, smiling, brought in coffee and Danish.

“What happened to George?”

“Pardon me, sir? George who?”

John rubbed his eyes. “Oh, of course. We must be past Atlanta.”

“No, sir.” The man’s smile froze as his brain went into nutty-passenger mode. “We’re at least two hours from Atlanta.”

“George . . . is a tall back guy with gold teeth who—”

“Oh, you mean George Mason, sir. He does do this car, but he picks up the train in Atlanta, and works it to Miami and back. He hasn’t had the northern leg since last year.”

John nodded slowly and didn’t ask what year it was. “I understand.” He smiled up and read the man’s nametag. “I’m sorry, Leonard. Not at my best in the morning.” The man withdrew with polite haste.

Suppose that weird dream had not been a dream. The Hemingway creature had killed him—the memory of the stroke was awesomely strong and immediate—but all that death amounted to was slipping into another universe where George Mason was on a different shift. Or perhaps John had gone completely insane.

The second explanation seemed much more reasonable.

On the tray underneath the coffee, juice, and Danish was a copy of USA Today, a paper John normally avoided because, although it had its comic aspects, it didn’t have any funnies. He checked the date, and it was correct. The news stories were plausible—wars and rumors of war—so at least he hadn’t slipped into a dimension where Martians ruled an enslaved Earth or Barry Manilow was president. He turned to the weather map and stopped dead.

Yesterday the country was in the middle of a heat wave that had lasted weeks. It apparently had ended overnight. The entry for Boston, yesterday, was “72/58/sh.” But it hadn’t rained and the temperature had been in the nineties.

He went back to the front page and began checking news stories. He didn’t normally pay much attention to the news, though, and hadn’t seen a paper in several days. They’d canceled their Globe delivery for the six weeks in Key West and he hadn’t been interested enough to go seek out a newsstand.

There was no mention of the garbage collectors’ strike in New York; he’d overheard a conversation about that yesterday. A long obituary for a rock star he was sure had died the year before.

An ad for DeSoto automobiles. That company had gone out of business when he was a teen-ager.

Bundles of universes, different from each other in small ways. Instead of dying, or maybe because of dying, he had slipped into another one. What would be waiting for him in Key West?

Maybe John Baird.

He set the tray down and hugged himself, trembling. Who or what was he in this universe? All of his memories, all of his personality, were from the one he had been born in. What happened to the John Baird that was born in this one? Was he an associate professor in American Literature at Boston University? Was he down in Key West wrestling with a paper to give at Nairobi—or working on a forgery? Or was he a Fitzgerald specialist snooping around the literary attics of St. Paul, Minnesota?

The truth came suddenly. Both John Bairds were in this compartment, in this body. And the body was slightly different.

He opened the door to the small washroom and looked in the mirror. His hair was a little shorter, less grey, beard better trimmed.

He was less paunchy and . . . something felt odd. There was feeling in his thigh. He lowered his pants and there was no scar where the sniper bullet had opened his leg and torn up the nerves there.

That was the touchstone. As he raised his shirt, the parallel memory flooded in. Puckered round scar on the abdomen; in this universe the sniper had hit a foot higher—and instead of the convalescent center in Cam Ranh Bay, the months of physical therapy and then back into the war, it had been peritonitis raging; surgery in Saigon and Tokyo and Walter Reed, and no more army.

But slowly they converged again. Amherst and U. Mass.—perversely using the G.I. Bill in spite of his access to millions—the doctorate on The Sun Also Rises and the instructorship at B. U., meeting Lena and virtuously waiting until after the semester to ask her out. Sex on the second date, and the third . . . but there they verged again. This John Baird hadn’t gone back into combat to have his midsection sprayed with shrapnel from an American grenade that bounced off a tree; never had dozens of bits of metal cut out of his dick—and in the ensuing twenty-five years had made more use of it. Girl friends and even one disastrous homosexual encounter with a stranger. As far as he knew, Lena was in the dark about this side of him; thought that he had remained faithful other than one incident seven years after they married. He knew of one affair she had had with a colleague, and suspected more.

The two Johns’ personalities and histories merged, separate but one, like two vines from a common root, climbing a single support.

Schizophrenic but not insane.

John looked into the mirror and tried to address his new or his old self—John A, John B. There were no such people. There was suddenly a man who had existed in two separate universes and, in a way, it was no more profound than having lived in two separate houses.

The difference being that nobody else knows there is more than one house.

He moved over to the window and set his coffee in the holder; picked up the absinthe glass and sniffed it, considered pouring it down the drain, but then put it in the other holder, for possible future reference.

Posit this: is it more likely that there are bundles of parallel universes prevailed over by a Hemingway lookalike with a magic cane, or that John Baird was exposed to a drug that he had never experienced before and it had had an unusually disorienting effect?

He looked at the paper. He had not hallucinated two weeks of drought. The rock star had been dead for some time. He had not seen a DeSoto in twenty years, and that was a hard car to miss. Tailfins that had to be registered as lethal weapons.

But maybe if you take a person who remembers every trivial thing, and zap his brain with oil of wormwood, that is exactly the effect: perfectly recalled things that never actually happened.

The coffee tasted repulsive. John put on a fresh shirt and decided not to shave and headed for the bar car. He bought the last imported beer in the cooler and sat down across from the long-haired white-bearded man who had an earring that had escaped his notice before, or hadn’t existed in the other universe.

The man was staring out at the forest greening by. “Morning,” John said.

“How do.” The man looked at him with no sign of recognition.

“Did we talk last night?”

He leaned forward. “What?”

“I mean did we sit in this car last night and talk about Hemingway and Vietnam and ghosts?”

He laughted. “You’re on somethin’, man. I been on this train since two in the mornin’ and ain’t said boo to nobody but the bartender.”

“You were in Vietnam?”

“Yeah, but that’s over; that’s shit.” He pointed at John’s bracelet. “What, you got ghosts from over there?”

“I think maybe I have.”

He was suddenly intense. “Take my advice, man; I been there. You got to go talk to somebody. Some shrink. Those ghosts ain’t gonna go ‘way by themself.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“It ain’t the ones you killed.” He wasn’t listening. “Fuckin’ dinks, they come back but they don’t, you know, they just stand around.” He looked at John and tears came so hard they actually spurted from his eyes. “It’s your fuckin’ friends, man, they all died and they come back now. . . .” He took a deep breath and wiped his face. “They used to come back every night. That like you?” John shook his head, helpless, trapped by the man’s grief. “Every fuckin’ night, my old lady, finally she said you go to a shrink or go to hell.” He fumbled with the button on his shirt pocket and took out a brown plastic prescription bottle and stared at the label. He shook out a capsule. “Take a swig?” John pushed the beer over to him. He washed the pill down without touching the bottle to his lips.

He sagged back against the window. “I musta not took the pill last night, sometimes I do that. Sorry.” He smiled weakly. “One day at a time, you know? You get through the one day. Fuck the rest. Sorry.” He leaned forward again suddenly and put his hand on John’s wrist. “You come outa nowhere and I lay my fuckin’ trip on you. You don’ need it.”

John covered the hand with his own. “Maybe I do need it. And maybe I didn’t come out of nowhere.” He stood up. “I will see somebody about the ghosts. Promise.”

“You’ll feel better. It’s no fuckin’ cure-all but you’ll feel better.”

“Want the beer?”

He shook his head. “Not supposed to.”

“Okay.” John took the beer and they waved at each other and he started back.

He stopped in the vestibule between cars and stood in the rattling roar of it, looking out the window at the flashing green blur. He put his forehead against the cool glass and hid the blur behind the dark red of his eyelids.

Were there actually a zillion of those guys each going through a slightly different private hell? Something he rarely asked himself was “What would Ernest Hemingway have done in this situation?”

He’d probably have the sense to leave it to Milton.

14. The Dangerous Summer

Castle and Lena met him at the station in Miami and they drove back to Key West in Castle’s old pick-up. The drone of the air-conditioner held conversation to a minimum, but it kept them cool, at least from the knees down.

John didn’t say anything about his encounter with the infinite, or transfinite, not wishing to bring back that fellow with the cane just yet. He did note that the two aspects of his personality hadn’t quite become equal partners yet, and small details of this world kept surprising him. There was a monorail being built down to Pigeon Key, where Disney was digging an underwater park. Gasoline stations still sold Regular. Castle’s car radio picked up TV as well as AM/FM, but sound only.

Lena sat between the two men and rubbed up against John affectionately. That would have been remarkable for John-one and somewhat unusual for John-two. It was a different Lena here, of course; one who had had more of a sex life with John, but there was something more than that, too. She was probably sleeping with Castle, he thought, and the extra attention was a conscious or unconscious compensation, or defense.

Castle seemed a little harder and more serious in this world than the last, not only from his terse moodiness in the pickup, but from recollections of parallel conversations. John wondered how shady he actually was; whether he’d been honest about his police record.

(He hadn’t been. In this universe, when Lena had asked him whether he had ever been in trouble with the police, he’d answered a terse “no.” In fact, he’d done eight hard years in Ohio for an armed robbery he hadn’t committed—the real robber hadn’t been so stupid, here—and he’d come out of prison bitter, angry, an actual criminal. Figuring the world owed him one, a week after getting out he stopped for a hitchhiker on a lonely country road, pulled a gun, walked him a few yards off the road into a field of high corn, and shot him pointblank at the base of the skull. It didn’t look anything like the movies.)

(He drove off without touching the body, which a farmer’s child found two days later. The victim turned out to be a college student who was on probation for dealing—all he’d really done was buy a kilo of green and make his money back by selling bags to his friends, and one enemy—so the papers said DRUG DEALER FOUND SLAIN IN GANGLAND-STYLE KILLING and the police pursued the matter with no enthusiasm. Castle was in Key West well before the farmer’s child smelled the body, anyhow.)

As they rode along, whatever Lena had or hadn’t done with Castle was less interesting to John than what he was planning to do with her. Half of his self had never experienced sex, as an adult, without the sensory handicaps engendered by scar tissue and severed nerves in the genitals, and he was looking forward to the experience with relish that was obvious, at least to Lena. She encouraged him in not-so-subtle ways, and by the time they crossed the last bridge into Key West, he was ready to tell Castle to pull over at the first bush.

He left the typewriter in Castle’s care and declined help with the luggage. By this time Lena was smiling at his obvious impatience; she was giggling by the time they were momentarily stalled by a truculent door key; laughed her delight as he carried her charging across the room to the couch, then clawing off a minimum of clothing and taking her with fierce haste, wordless, and keeping her on a breathless edge he drifted the rest of the clothes off her and carried her into the bedroom, where they made so much noise Julio banged on the ceiling with a broomstick.

They did quiet down eventually, and lay together in a puddle of mingled sweat, panting, watching the fan push the humid air around. “Guess we both get to sleep in the wet spot,” John said.

“No complaints.” She raised up on one elbow and traced a figure eight on his chest. “You’re full of surprises tonight, Dr. Baird.”

“Life is full of surprises.”

“You should go away more often—or at least come back more often.”

“It’s all that Hemingway research. Makes a man out of you.”

“You didn’t learn this in a book,” she said, gently taking his penis and pantomiming a certain motion.

“I did, though; an anthropology book.” In another universe. “It’s what they do in the Solomon Islands.”

“Wisdom of Solomon,” she said, lying back. After a pause: “They have anthropology books at JFK?”

“Uh, no.” He remembered he didn’t own that book in this universe. “Browsing at Wordsworth’s.”

“Hope you bought the book.”

“Didn’t have to.” He gave her a long slow caress. “Memorized the good parts.”

On the other side of town, six days later, she was in about the same position on Castle’s bed, and even more exhausted.

“Aren’t you overdoing the loving little wifey bit? It’s been a week.”

She exhaled audibly. “What a week.”

“Missed you.” He nuzzled her and made an unsubtle preparatory gesture.

“No, you don’t.” She rolled out of bed. “Once is plenty.” She went to the mirror and ran a brush through her damp hair. “Besides, it’s not me you missed. You missed it.” She sat at the open window, improving the neighborhood’s scenery. “It’s gonna need a Teflon lining installed.”

“Old boy’s feelin’ his oats?”

“Not feeling his anything. God, I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Four, five times a day; six.”

“Screwed, blewed, and tattooed. You asked for it.”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t. I haven’t had a chance to start my little act. He got off that train with an erection, and he still has it. No woman would be safe around him. Nothing wet and concave would be safe.”

“So does that mean it’s a good time to bring in Pansy? Or is he so stuck on you he wouldn’t even notice her?”

She scowled at the brush, picking hair out of it. “Actually, Castle, I was just about to ask you the same thing. Relying on your well-known expertise in animal behavior.”

“Okay.” He sat up. “I say we oughta go for it. If he’s a walkin’ talkin’ hard-on like you say . . . Pansy’d pull him like a magnet. You’d have to be a fuckin’ monk not to want Pansy.”

“Like Rasputin.”

“Like who?”

“Never mind.” She went back to the brush. “I guess, I guess one problem is that I really am enjoying the attention. I guess I’m not too anxious to hand him over to this champion sexpot.”

“Aw, Lena—”

“Really. I do love him in my way, Castle. I don’t want to lose him over this scheme.”

“You’re not gonna lose him. Trust me. You catch him dickin’ Pansy, get mad, forgive him. Hell, you’ll have him wrapped around your finger.”

“I guess. You make the competition sound pretty formidable.”

“Don’t worry. She’s outa there the next day.”

“Unless she winds up in love with him. That would be cute.”

“He’s almost twice her age. Besides, she’s a whore. Whores don’t fall in love.”

“They’re women, Castle. Women fall in love.”

“Yeah, sure. Just like on TV.”

She turned away from him; looked out the window. “You really know how to make a woman feel great, you know?”

“Come on.” He crossed over and smoothed her hair. She turned around but didn’t look up. “Don’t run yourself down, Lena. You’re still one hell of a piece of ass.”

“Thanks.” She smiled into his leer and grabbed him. “If you weren’t such a poet I’d trade you in for a vibrator.”

15. In Praise Of His Mistress

Pansy was indeed beautiful, even under normal conditions; delicate features, wasp waist combined with generous secondary sexual characteristics. The conditions under which John first saw her were calculated to maximize sexiness and vulnerability. Red nylon running shorts, tight and very short, and a white sleeveless T-shirt from a local bar that was stamped “LAST HETEROSEXUAL IN KEY WEST”—all clinging to her golden skin with a healthy sweat, the cloth made translucent enough to reveal no possibility of underwear.

John looked out the screen door and saw her at the other door, struggling with a heavy box while trying to make the key work. “Let me help you,” he said through the screen, and stepped across the short landing to hold the box while she got the door open.

“You’re too kind.” John tried not to stare as he handed the box back. Pansy, of course, was relieved at his riveted attention. It had taken days to set up this operation, and would take more days to bring it to its climax, so to speak, and more days to get back to normal. But she did owe Castle a big favor and this guy seemed nice enough. Maybe she’d learn something about Hemingway in the process.

“More to come up?” John asked.

“Oh, I couldn’t ask you to help. I can manage.”

“It’s okay. I was just goofing off for the rest of the day.”

It turned out to be quite a job, even though there was only one load from a small rented truck. Most of the load was uniform and heavy boxes of books, carefully labeled LIT A-B, GEN REF, ENCY 1—12, and so forth. Most of her furniture, accordingly, was cinder blocks and boards, the standard student bookshelf arrangement.

John found out that despite a couple of dozen boxes marked LIT, Pansy hadn’t majored in literature, but rather Special Education; during the school year, she taught third grade at a school for the retarded in Key Largo. She didn’t tell him about the several years she’d spent as a call girl, but if she had, John might have seen a connection that Castle would never have made—that the driving force behind both of the jobs was the same, charity. The more-or-less easy forty dollars an hour for going on a date and then having sex was a factor, too, but she really did like making lonely men feel special, and had herself felt more like a social worker than a woman of easy virtue. And the hundreds of men who had fallen for her, for love or money, weren’t responding only to her cheerleader’s body. She had a sunny disposition and a natural, artless way of concentrating on a man that made him for a while the only man in the world.

John would not normally be an easy conquest. Twenty years of facing classrooms full of coeds had given him a certain wariness around attractive young women. He also had an impulse toward faithfulness, Lena having suddenly left town, her father ill. But he was still in the grip of the weird overweening hominess that had animated him since inheriting this new body and double-image personality. If Pansy had said “Let’s do it,” they would be doing it so soon that she would be wise to unwrap the condom before speaking. But she was being as indirect as her nature and mode of dress would allow.

“Do you and your wife always come down here for the summer?”

“We usually go somewhere. Boston’s no fun in the heat.”

“It must be wonderful in the fall.”

And so forth. It felt odd for Pansy, probably the last time she would ever seduce a man for reasons other than personal interest. She wanted it to be perfect. She wanted John to have enough pleasure in her to compensate for the embarrassment of their “accidental” exposure, and whatever hassle his wife would put him through afterwards.

She was dying to know why Castle wanted him set up, but he refused to tell. How Castle ever met a quiet, kindly gentleman like John was a mystery, too—she had met some of Castle’s friends, and they had other virtues.

Quiet and kindly, but horny. Whenever she contrived, in the course of their working together, to expose a nipple or a little beaver, he would turn around to adjust himself, and blush. More like a teenager, discovering his sexuality, than a middle-aged married man.

He was a pushover, but she didn’t want to make it too easy. After they had finished putting the books up on shelves, she said thanks a million; I gotta go now, spending the night house-sitting up in Islamorada. You and your wife come over for dinner tomorrow? Oh, then come on over yourself. No, that’s all right, I’m a big girl. Roast beef okay? See ya.

Driving away in the rented truck, Pansy didn’t feel especially proud of herself. She was amused at John’s sexiness and looking forward to trying it out. But she could read people pretty well, and sensed a core of deep sadness in John. Maybe it was from Vietnam; he hadn’t mentioned it, but she knew what the bracelet meant.

Whatever the problem, maybe she’d have time to help him with it—before she had to turn around and add to it.

Maybe it would work out for the best. Maybe the problem was with his wife, and she’d leave, and he could start over. . . .

Stop kidding yourself. Just lay the trap, catch him, deliver him. Castle was not the kind of man you want to disappoint.

16. Fiesta

She had baked the roast slowly with wine and fruit juice, along with dried apricots and apples plumped in port wine, seasoned with cinnamon and nutmeg and cardamom. Onions and large cubes of acorn squash simmered in the broth. She served new potatoes steamed with parsley and dressed Italian style, with garlicky olive oil and a splash of vinegar. Small Caesar salad and air-light pan de agua, the Cuban bread that made you forget every other kind of bread.

The way to a man’s heart, her mother had contended, was through his stomach, and although she was accustomed to aiming rather lower, she thought it was probably a good approach for a long-time married man suddenly forced to fend for himself. That was exactly right for John. He was not much of a cook but he was an accomplished eater.

He pushed the plate away after three helpings. “God, I’m such a pig. But that was irresistible.”

“Thank you.” She cleared the table slowly, accepting John’s offer to help. “My mother’s ‘company’ recipe. So you think Hadley might have just thrown the stories away, and made up the business about the train?”

“People have raised the possibility. There she was, eight years older than this handsome hubby—with half the women on the Left Bank after him, at least in her mind—and he’s starting to get published, starting to build a reputation. . . .”

“She was afraid he was going to ‘grow away’ from her? Or did they have that expression back then?”

“I think she was afraid he would start making money from his writing. She had an inheritance, a trust fund from her grandfather, that paid over two thousand a year. That was plenty to keep the two of them comfortable in Paris. Hemingway talked poor in those days, starving artist, but he lived pretty well.”

“He probably resented it, too. Not making the money himself.”

“That would be like him. Anyhow, if she chucked the stories to ensure his dependency, it backfired. He was still furious thirty years later—three wives later. He said the stuff had been ‘fresh from the mint,’ even if the writing wasn’t so great, and he was never able to reclaim it.”

She opened a cabinet and slid a bottle out of its burlap bag, and selected two small glasses. “Sherry?” He said why not? and they moved into the living room.

The living room was mysteriously devoid of chairs, so they had to sit together on the small couch. “You don’t actually think she did it.”

“No.” John watched her pour the sherry. “From what I’ve read about her, she doesn’t seem at all calculating. Just a sweet gal from St. Louis who fell in love with a cad.”

“Cad. Funny old-fashioned word.”

John shrugged. “Actually, he wasn’t really a cad. I think he sincerely loved every one of his wives . . . at least until he married them.”

They both laughed. “Of course it could have been something in between,” Pansy said, “I mean, she didn’t actually throw away the manuscripts, but she did leave them sitting out, begging to be stolen. Why did she leave the compartment?”

“That’s one screwy aspect of it. Hadley herself never said, not on paper. Every biographer seems to come up with a different reason: she went to get a newspaper, she saw some people she recognized and stepped out to talk with them, wanted some exercise before the long trip . . . even Hemingway had two different versions—she went out to get a bottle of Evian water or to buy something to read. That one pissed him off, because she did have an overnight bag full of the best American writing since Mark Twain.”

“How would you have felt?”

“Felt?”

“I mean, you say you’ve written stories, too. What if somebody, your wife, made a mistake and you lost everything?”

He looked thoughtful. “It’s not the same. In the first place, it’s just a hobby with me. And I don’t have that much that hasn’t been published—when Hemingway lost it, he lost it for good. I could just go to a university library and make new copies of everything.”

“So you haven’t written much lately?”

“Not stories. Academic stuff.”

“I’d love to read some of your stories.”

“And I’d love to have you read them. But I don’t have any here. I’ll mail you some from Boston.”

She nodded, staring at him with a curious intensity. “Oh hell,” she said, and turned her back to him. “Would you help me with this?”

“What?”

“The zipper.” She was wearing a clingy white summer dress. “Undo the zipper a little bit.”

He slowly unzipped it a few inches. She did it the rest of the way, stood up and hooked her thumbs under the shoulder straps and shrugged. The dress slithered to the floor. She wasn’t wearing anything else.

“You’re blushing.” Actually, he was doing a good imitation of a beached fish. She straddled him, sitting back lightly on his knees, legs wide, and started unbuttoning his shirt.

“Uh,” he said.

“I just get impatient. You don’t mind?”

“Uh . . . no?”

17. On Being Shot Again

John woke up happy but didn’t open his eyes for nearly a minute, holding on to the erotic dream of the century. Then he opened one eye and saw it hadn’t been a dream: the tousled bed in the strange room, unguents and sex toys on the nightstand, the smell of her hair on the other pillow. A noise from the kitchen; coffee and bacon smells.

He put on pants and went into the living room to pick up the shirt where it had dropped. “Good morning, Pansy.”

“Morning, stranger.” She was wearing a floppy terrycloth bathrobe with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She turned the bacon carefully with a fork. “Scrambled eggs okay?”

“Marvelous.” He sat down at the small table and poured himself a cup of coffee. “I don’t know what to say.”

She smiled at him. “Don’t say anything. It was nice.”

“More than nice.” He watched her precise motions behind the counter. She broke the eggs one-handed, two at a time, added a splash of water to the bowl, plucked some chives from a windowbox and chopped them with a small Chinese cleaver, rocking it in a staccato chatter; scraped them into the bowl, and followed them with a couple of grinds of pepper. She set the bacon out on a paper towel, with another towel to cover. Then she stirred the eggs briskly with the fork and set them aside. She picked up the big cast-iron frying pan and poured off a judicious amount of grease. Then she poured the egg mixture into the pan and studied it with alertness.

“Know what I think?” John said.

“Something profound?”

“Huh-uh. I think I’m in a rubber room someplace, hallucinating the whole thing. And I hope they never cure me.”

“I think you’re a butterfly who’s dreaming he’s a man. I’m glad I’m in your dream.” She slowly stirred and scraped the eggs with a spatula.

“You like older men?”

“One of them.” She looked up, serious. “I like men who are considerate . . . and playful.” She returned to the scraping. “Last couple of boyfriends I had were all dick and no heart. Kept to myself the last few months.”

“Glad to be of service.”

“You could rent yourself out as a service.” She laughed. “You must have been impossible when you were younger.”

“Different.” Literally.

She ran hot water into a serving bowl, then returned to her egg stewardship. “I’ve been thinking.”

“Yes?”

“The lost manuscript stuff we were talking about last night, all the different explanations.” She divided the egg into four masses and turned each one. “Did you ever read any science fiction?”

“No. Vonnegut.”

“The toast.” She hurriedly put four pieces of bread in the toaster. “They write about alternate universes. Pretty much like our own, but different in one way or another. Important or trivial.”

“What, uh, what silliness.”

She laughed and poured the hot water out of the serving bowl, and dried it with a towel. “I guess maybe. But what if . . . what if all of those versions were equally true? In different universes. And for some reason they all came together here.” She started to put the eggs into the bowl when there was a knock on the door.

It opened and Ernest Hemingway walked in. Dapper, just twenty, wearing the Italian army cape he’d brought back from the war. He pointed the black and white cane at Pansy. “Bingo.”

She looked at John and then back at the Hemingway. She dropped the serving bowl; it clattered on the floor without breaking. Her knees buckled and she fainted dead away, executing a half-turn as she fell so that the back of her head struck the wooden floor with a loud thump and the bathrobe drifted open from the waist down.

The Hemingway stared down at her frontal aspect. “Sometimes I wish I were human,” it said. “Your pleasures are intense. Simple, but intense.” It moved toward her with the cane.

John stood up. “If you kill her—”

“Oh?” It cocked an eyebrow at him. “What will you do?”

John took one step toward it and it waved the cane. A waist-high brick wall surmounted by needle-sharp spikes appeared between them. It gestured again and an impossible moat appeared, deep enough to reach down well into Julio’s living room. It filled with water and a large crocodile surfaced and rested its chin on the parquet floor, staring at John. It yawned teeth.

The Hemingway held up its cane. “The white end. It doesn’t kill, remember?” The wall and moat disappeared and the cane touched Pansy lightly below the navel. She twitched minutely but continued to sleep. “She’ll have a headache,” it said. “And she’ll be somewhat confused by the uncommunicatable memory of having seen me. But that will all fade, compared to the sudden tragedy of having her new lover die here, just sitting waiting for his breakfast.”

“Do you enjoy this?”

“I love my work. It’s all I have.” It walked toward him, footfalls splashing as it crossed where the moat had been. “You have not personally helped, though. Not at all.”

It sat down across from him and poured coffee into a mug that said ON THE SIXTH DAY GOD CREATED MAN—SHE MUST HAVE HAD PMS.

“When you kill me this time, do you think it will ‘take’ ?”

“I don’t know. It’s never failed before.” The toaster made a noise. “Toast?”

“Sure.” Two pieces appeared on his plate; two on the Hemingway’s. “Usually when you kill people they stay dead?”

“I don’t kill that many people.” It spread margarine on its toast; gestured, and marmalade appeared. “But when I do, yeah. They die all up and down the Omniverse, every timespace. All except you.” He pointed toast at John’s toast. “Go ahead. It’s not poison.”

“Not my idea of a last meal.”

The Hemingway shrugged. “What would you like?”

“Forget it.” He buttered the toast and piled marmalade on it, determined out of some odd impulse to act as if nothing unusual were happening. Breakfast with Hemingway, big deal.

He studied the apparition and noticed that it was somewhat translucent, almost like a traditional TV ghost. He could barely see a line that was the back of the chair, bisecting its chest below shoulderblade level. Was this something new? There hadn’t been too much light in the train; maybe he had just failed to notice it before.

“A penny for your thoughts.”

He didn’t say anything about seeing through it. “Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re not supposed to kill me? That’s why I came back?”

The Hemingway chuckled and admired its nails. “That’s a nearly content-free assertion.”

“Oh really.” He bit into the toast. The marmalade was strong, pleasantly bitter.

“It presupposes a higher authority, unknown to me, that’s watching over my behavior, and correcting me when I do wrong. Doesn’t exist, sorry.”

“That’s the oldest one in the theologian’s book.” He set down the toast and kneaded his stomach; shouldn’t eat something so strong first thing in the morning. “You can only assert the nonexistence of something; you can’t prove it.”

“What you mean is you can’t.” He held up the cane and looked at it. “The simplest explanation is that there’s something wrong with the cane. There’s no way I can test it; if I kill the wrong person there’s hell to pay up and down the Omniverse. But what I can do is kill you without the cane. See whether you come back again, some timespace.”

Sharp, stabbing pains in his stomach now. “Bastard.” Heart pounding slow and hard: shirt rustled in time to its spasms.

“Cyanide in the marmalade. Gives it a certain frisson, don’t you think?”

He couldn’t breathe. His heart pounded once, and stopped. Vicious pain in his left arm, then paralysis. From an inch away, he could just see the weave of the white tablecloth. It turned red and then black.

18. The Sun Also Rises

From blackness to brilliance: the morning sun pouring through the window at a flat angle. He screwed up his face and blinked.

Suddenly smothered in terrycloth, between soft breasts. “John, John.”

He put his elbow down to support himself, uncomfortable on the parquet floor, and looked up at Pansy. Her face was wet with tears. He cleared his throat. “What happened?”

“You, you started putting on your foot and . . . you just fell over. I thought. . . .”

John looked down over his body, hard ropy muscle and deep tan under white body hair, the puckered bullet wound a little higher on the abdomen. Left leg ended in a stump just above the ankle.

Trying not to faint. His third past flooding back. Walking down a dirt road near Kontum, the sudden loud bang of the mine and he pitched forward, unbelievable pain, rolled over and saw his bloody boot yards away; grey, jagged shinbone sticking through the bloody smoking rag of his pants leg, bright crimson splashing on the dry dust, loud in the shocked silence; another bloodstain spreading between his legs, the deep mortal pain there—and he started to buck and scream and two men held him while the medic took off his belt and made a tourniquet and popped morphine through the cloth and unbuttoned his fly and slowly worked his pants down: penis torn by shrapnel, scrotum ripped open in a bright red flap of skin, bloody grey-blue egg of a testicle separating, rolling out. He fainted, then and now.

And woke up with her lips against his, her breath sweet in his lungs, his nostrils pinched painfully tight. He made a strangled noise and clutched her breast.

She cradled his head, panting, smiling through tears, and kissed him lightly on the forehead. “Will you stop fainting now?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry.” Her lips were trembling. He put a finger on them. “Just a longer night than I’m accustomed to. An overdose of happiness.”

The happiest night of his life, maybe of three lives. Like coming back from the dead.

“Should I call a doctor?”

“No. I faint every now and then.” Usually at the gym, from pushing too hard. He slipped his hand inside the terrycloth and covered her breast. “It’s been . . . do you know how long it’s been since I . . . did it? I mean . . . three times in one night?”

“About six hours.” She smiled. “And you can say ‘fuck.’ I’m no schoolgirl.”

“I’ll say.” The night had been an escalating progression of intimacies, gymnastics, accessories. “Had to wonder where a sweet girl like you learned all that.”

She looked away, lips pursed, thoughtful. With a light fingertip she stroked the length of his penis and smiled when it started to uncurl. “At work.”

“What?”

“I was a prostitute. That’s where I learned the tricks. Practice makes perfect.”

“Prostitute. Wow.”

“Are you shocked? Outraged?”

“Just surprised.” That was true. He respected the sorority and was grateful to it for having made Vietnam almost tolerable, an hour or so at a time. “But now you’ve got to do something really mean. I could never love a prostitute with a heart of gold.”

“I’ll give it some thought.” She shifted. “Think you can stand up?”

“Sure.” She stood and gave him her hand. He touched it but didn’t pull; rose in a smooth practiced motion, then took one hop and sat down at the small table. He started strapping on his foot.

“I’ve read about those new ones,” she said, “the permanent kind.”

“Yeah; I’ve read about them, too. Computer interface, graft your nerves onto sensors.” He shuddered. “No, thanks. No more surgery.”

“Not worth it for the convenience?”

“Being able to wiggle my toes, have my foot itch? No. Besides, the VA won’t pay for it.” That startled John as he said it: here, he hadn’t grown up rich. His father had spent all the mill money on a photocopy firm six months before Xerox came on the market. “You say you ‘were’ a prostitute. Not any more?”

“No, that was the truth about teaching. Let’s start this egg thing over.” She picked up the bowl she had dropped in the other universe. “I gave up whoring about seven years ago.” She picked up an egg, looked at it, set it down. She half-turned and stared out the kitchen window. “I can’t do this to you.”

“You . . . can’t do what?”

“Oh, lie. Keep lying.” She went to the refrigerator. “Want a beer?”

“Lying? No, no thanks. What lying?”

She opened a beer, still not looking at him. “I like you, John. I really like you. But I didn’t just . . . spontaneously fall into your arms.” She took a healthy swig and started pouring some of the bottle into a glass.

“I don’t understand.”

She walked back, concentrating on pouring the beer, then sat down gracelessly. She took a deep breath and let it out, staring at his chest. “Castle put me up to it.”

“Castle?”

She nodded. “Sylvester Castlemaine, boy wonder.”

John sat back stunned. “But you said you don’t do that anymore,” he said without too much logic. “Do it for money.”

“Not for money,” she said in a flat, hurt voice.

“I should’ve known. A woman like you wouldn’t want. . . .” He made a gesture that dismissed his body from the waist down.

“You do all right. Don’t feel sorry for yourself.” Her face showed a pinch of regret for that, but she plowed on. “If it were just the obligation, once would have been enough. I wouldn’t have had to fuck and suck all night long to win you over.”

“No,” he said, “that’s true. Just the first moment, when you undressed. That was enough.”

“I owe Castle a big favor. A friend of mine was going to be prosecuted for involving a minor in prostitution. It was a set-up, pure and simple.”

“She worked for the same outfit you did?”

“Yeah, but this was free-lance. I think it was the escort service that set her up, sort of delivered her and the man in return for this or that.”

She sipped at the beer. “Guy wanted a three-way. My friend had met this girl a couple of days before at the bar where she worked part-time . . . she looked old enough; said she was in the biz.”

“She was neither?”

“God knows. Maybe she got caught as a juvie and made a deal. Anyhow, he’d just slipped it to her and suddenly cops comin’ in the windows. Threw the book at him. ‘Two inches, twenty years,’ my friend said. He was a county commissioner somewhere, with enemies. Almost dragged my friend down with him. I’m sorry.” Her voice was angry.

“Don’t be.” John said, almost a whisper. “It’s understandable. Whatever happens, I’ve got last night.”

She nodded. “So two of the cops who were going to testify got busted for possession, cocaine. The word came down and everybody remembered the woman was somebody else.”

“So what did Castle want you to do? With me?”

“Oh, whatever comes natural—or un-natural, if that’s what you wanted. And later be doing it at a certain time and place, where we’d be caught in the act.”

“By Castle?”

“And his trusty little VCR. Then I guess he’d threaten to show it to your wife, or the university.”

“I wonder. Lena . . . she knows I’ve had other women.”

“But not lately.”

“No. Not for years.”

“It might be different now. She might be starting to feel, well, insecure.”

“Any woman who looked at you would feel insecure.”

She shrugged. “That could be part of it. Could it cost you your job, too?”

“I don’t see how. It would be awkward, but it’s not as if you were one of my students—and even that happens, without costing the guy his job.” He laughed. “Poor old Larry. He had a student kiss and tell, and had to run the Speakers’ Committee for four or five years. Got allergic to wine and cheese. But he made tenure.”

“So what is it?” She leaned forward. “Are you an addict or something?”

“Addict?”

“I mean how come you even know Castle? He didn’t pick your name out of a phone book and have me come seduce you, just to see what would happen.”

“No, of course not.”

“So? I confess, you confess.”

John passed a hand over his face and pressed the other hand against his knee, bearing down to keep the foot from tapping. “You don’t want to be involved.”

“What do you call last night, Spin the Bottle? I’m involved!”

“Not the way I mean. It’s illegal.”

“Oh golly. Not really.”

“Let me think.” John picked up their dishes and limped back to the sink. He set them down there and fiddled with the straps and pad that connected the foot to his stump, then poured himself a cup of coffee and came back, not limping.

He sat down slowly and blew across the coffee. “What it is, is that Castle thinks there’s a scam going on. He’s wrong. I’ve taken steps to ensure that it couldn’t work.” His foot tapped twice.

“You think. You hope.”

“No. I’m sure. Anyhow, I’m stringing Castle along because I need his expertise in a certain matter.”

“ ‘A certain matter,’ yeah. Sounds wholesome.”

“Actually, that part’s not illegal.”

“So tell me about it.”

“Nope. Still might backfire.”

She snorted. “You know what might backfire. Fucking with Castle.”

“I can take care of him.”

“You don’t know. He may be more dangerous than you think he is.”

“He talks a lot.”

“You men.” She took a drink and poured the rest of the bottle into the glass. “Look, I was at a party with him, couple of years ago. He was drunk, got into a little coke, started babbling.”

“In vino veritas?”

“Yeah, and Coke is It. But he said he’d killed three people, strangers, just to see what it felt like. He liked it. I more than halfway believe him.”

John looked at her silently for a moment, sorting out his new memories of Castle. “Well . . . he’s got a mean streak. I don’t know about murder. Certainly not over this thing.”

“Which is?”

“You’ll have to trust me. It’s not because of Castle that I can’t tell you.” He remembered her one universe ago, lying helpless while the Hemingway lowered its cane onto her nakedness. “Trust me?”

She studied the top of the glass, running her finger around it. “Suppose I do. Then what?”

“Business as usual. You didn’t tell me anything. Deliver me to Castle and his video camera; I’ll try to put on a good show.”

“And when he confronts you with it?”

“Depends on what he wants. He knows I don’t have much money.” John shrugged. “If it’s unreasonable, he can go ahead and show the tape to Lena. She can live with it.”

“And your department head?”

“He’d give me a medal.”

19. in our time

So it wasn’t the cane. He ate enough cyanide to kill a horse, but evidently only in one universe.

You checked the next day in all the others?

All 119. He’s still dead in the one where I killed him on the train—

That’s encouraging.

—but there’s no causal resonance in the others.

Oh, but there is some resonance. He remembered you in the universe where you poisoned him. Maybe in all of them.

That’s impossible.

Once is impossible. Twice is a trend. A hundred and twenty means something is going on that we don’t understand.

What I suggest—

No. You can’t go back and kill them all one by one.

If the wand had worked the first time, they’d all be dead anyhow. There’s no reason to think we’d cause more of an eddy by doing them one at a time.

It’s not something to experiment with. As you well know.

I don’t know how we’re going to solve it otherwise.

Simple. Don’t kill him. Talk to him again. He may be getting frightened, if he remembers both times he died.

Here’s an idea. What if someone else killed him?

I don’t know. If you just hired someone—made him a direct agent of your will—it wouldn’t be any different from the cyanide. Maybe as a last resort. Talk to him again first.

All right. I’ll try.

20. Of Wounds and Other Causes

Although John found it difficult to concentrate, trying not to think about Pansy, this was the best time he would have for the forseeable future to summon the Hemingway demon and try to do something about exorcising it. He didn’t want either of the women around if the damned thing went on a killing spree again. They might just do as he did, and slip over into another reality—as unpleasant as that was, it was at least living—but the Hemingway had said otherwise. There was no reason to suspect it was not the truth.

Probably the best way to get the thing’s attention was to resume work on the Hemingway pastiche. He decided to rewrite the first page to warm up, typing it out in Hemingway’s style:

ALONG WITH YOUTH

1. Mitraigliatrice

The dirt on the side of the trench was never dry in the morning. If Fever could find a dry newspaper he could put it between his chest and the dirt when he went out to lean on the side of the trench and wait for the light. First light was the best time. You might have luck and see a muzzle flash to aim at. But patience was better than luck. Wait to see a helmet or a head without a helmet.

Fever looked at the enemy trench line through a rectangular box of wood that pushed through the trench wall at about ground level. The other end of the box was covered with a square of gauze the color of dirt. A man looking directly at it might see the muzzle flash when Fever fired through the box. But with luck, the flash would be the last thing he saw.

Fever had fired through the gauze six times. He’d potted at least three Austrians. Now the gauze had a ragged hole in the center. One bullet had come in the other way, an accident, and chiseled a deep gouge in the floor of the wooden box. Fever knew that he would be able to see the splinters sticking up before he could see any detail at the enemy trench line.

That would be maybe twenty minutes. Fever wanted a cigarette. There was plenty of time to go down in the bunker and light one. But it would fox his night vision. Better to wait.

Fever heard movement before he heard the voice. He picked up one of the grenades on the plank shelf to his left and his thumb felt the ring on the cotter pin. Someone was crawling in front of his position. Slow crawling but not too quiet. He slid his left forefinger through the ring and waited.

———Help me, came a strained whisper.

Fever felt his shoulders tense. Of course many Austrians could speak Italian.

———I am wounded. Help me. I can go no farther.

———What is your name and unit whispered through the box.

———Jean-Franco Dante. Four forty-seventh.

That was the unit that had taken such a beating at the evening show.———At first light they will kill me.

———All right. But I’m coming over with a grenade in my hand. If you kill me, you die as well.

———I will commend this logic to your superior officer. Please hurry.

Fever slid his rifle into the wooden box and eased himself to the top of the trench. He took the grenade out of his pocket and carefully worked the pin out, the arming lever held secure. He kept the pin around his finger so he could replace it.

He inched his way down the slope, guided by the man’s whispers.

After a few minutes his probing hand found the man’s shoulder.

———Thank God. Make haste, now.

The soldier’s feet were both shattered by a mine. He would have to be carried.

———Don’t cry out, Fever said. This will hurt.

———No sound, the soldier said. And when Fever raised him up onto his back there was only a breath. But his canteen was loose. It fell on a rock and made a loud hollow sound.

Firecracker pop above them and the night was all glare and bobbing shadow. A big machine-gun opened up rong, cararong, rong, rong. Fever headed for the parapet above as fast as he could but knew it was hopeless. He saw dirt spray twice to his right and then the felt the thud of the bullet into te the Italian, who said “Jesus” as if only annoyed, and they almost made it then but on the lip of the trench a hard snowball hit Fever behind the kneecap and they both went down in a tumble. They fell two yards to safety but the Italian was already dead.

Fever had sprained his wrist and hurt his nose falling and they hurt worse than the bullet. But he couldn’t move his toes and he knew that must be bad. Then it started to hurt.

A rifleman closed the Italian’s eyes and with the help of another clumsy one dragged Fever down the trench to the medical bunker. It hurt awfully and his shoe filled up with blood and he puked. They stopped to watch him puke and then dragged him the rest of the way.

The surgeon placed him between two kerosene lanterns. He removed the puttee and shoe and cut the bloody pants leg with a straight razor. He rolled Fever onto his stomach and had four men hold him down while he probed for the bullet. The pain was great but Fever was insulted enough by the four men not to cry out. He heard the bullet clink into a metal dish. It sounded like the canteen.

“That’s a little too pat, don’t you think?” John turned around and there was the Hemingway, reading over his shoulder. “ ‘It sounded like the canteen,’ indeed.” Khaki army uniform covered with mud and splattered with bright blood. Blood dripped and pooled at its feet.

“So shoot me. Or whatever it’s going to be this time. Maybe I’ll rewrite the line in the next universe.”

“You’re going to run out soon. You only exist in eight more universes.”

“Sure. And you’ve never lied to me.” John turned back around and stared at the typewriter, tensed.

The Hemingway sighed. “Suppose we talk, instead.”

“I’m listening.”

The Hemingway walked past him toward the kitchen. “Want a beer?”

“Not while I’m working.”

“Suit yourself.” It limped into the kitchen, out of sight, and John heard it open the refrigerator and pry the top off of a beer. It came back out as the five-year-old Hemingway, dressed up in girl’s clothing, both hands clutching an incongruous beer bottle. It set the bottle on the end table and crawled up onto the couch with childish clumsiness.

“Where’s the cane?”

“I knew it wouldn’t be necessary this time,” it piped. “It occurs to me that there are better ways to deal with a man like you.”

“Do tell.” John smiled. “What is ‘a man like me’ ? One on whom your cane for some reason doesn’t work?”

“Actually, what I was thinking of was curiosity. That is supposedly what motivates scholars. You are a real scholar, not just a rich man seeking legitimacy?”

John looked away from the ancient eyes in the boy’s face. “I’ve sometimes wondered myself. Why don’t you cut to the chase, as we used to say. A few universes ago.”

“I’ve done spot-checks on your life through various universes,” the child said. “You’re always a Hemingway buff, though you don’t always do it for a living.”

“What else do I do?”

“It’s probably not healthy for you to know. But all of you are drawn to the missing manuscripts at about this time, the seventy-fifth anniversary.”

“I wonder why that would be.”

The Hemingway waved the beer bottle in a disarmingly mature gesture. “The Omniverse is full of threads of coincidence like that. They have causal meaning in a dimension you can’t deal with.”

“Try me.”

“In a way, that’s what I want to propose. You will drop this dangerous project at once, and never resume it. In return, I will take you back in time, back to the Gare de Lyon on December 14, 1921.”

“Where I will see what happens to the manuscripts.”

Another shrug. “I will put you on Hadley’s train, well before she said the manuscripts were stolen. You will be able to observe for an hour or so, without being seen. As you know, some people have theorized that there never was a thief; never was an overnight bag; that Hadley simply threw the writings away. If that’s the case, you won’t see anything dramatic. But the absence of the overnight bag would be powerful indirect proof.”

John looked skeptical. “You’ve never gone to check it out for yourself?”

“If I had, I wouldn’t be able to take you back. I can’t exist twice in the same timespace, of course.”

“How foolish of me. Of course.”

“Is it a deal?”

John studied the apparition. The couch’s plaid upholstery showed through its arms and legs. It did appear to become less substantial each time. “I don’t know. Let me think about it a couple of days.”

The child pulled on the beer bottle and it stretched into a long amber stick. It turned into the black-and-white cane. “We haven’t tried cancer yet. That might be the one that works.” It slipped off the couch and sidled toward John. “It does take longer and it hurts. It hurts ‘awfully.’ ”

John got out of the chair. “You come near me with that and I’ll dropkick you into next Tuesday.”

The child shimmered and became Hemingway in his mid-forties, a big-gutted barroom brawler. “Sure you will, Champ.” It held out the cane so that the tip was inches from John’s chest. “See you around.” It disappeared with a barely audible pop, and a slight breeze as air moved to fill its space.

John thought about that as he went to make a fresh cup of coffee. He wished he knew more about science. The thing obviously takes up space, since its disappearance caused a vacuum, but there was no denying that it was fading away.

Well, not fading. Just becoming more transparent. That might not affect its abilities. A glass door is as much of a door as an opaque one, if you try to walk through it.

He sat down on the couch, away from the manuscript so he could think without distraction. On the face of it, this offer by the Hemingway was an admission of defeat. An admission, at least, that it couldn’t solve its problem by killing him over and over. That was comforting. He would just as soon not die again, except for the one time.

But maybe he should. That was a chilling thought. If he made the Hemingway kill him another dozen times, another hundred . . . what kind of strange creature would he become? A hundred overlapping autobiographies, all perfectly remembered? Surely the brain has a finite capacity for storing information; he’d “fill up,” as Pansy said. Or maybe it wasn’t finite, at least in his case—but that was logically absurd. There are only so many cells in a brain. Of course he might be “wired” in some way to the John Bairds in all the other universes he had inhabited.

And what would happen if he died in some natural way, not dispatched by an inter-dimensional assassin? Would he still slide into another identity? That was a lovely prospect: sooner or later he would be 130 years old, on his deathbed, dying every fraction of a second for the rest of eternity.

Or maybe the Hemingway wasn’t lying, this time, and he had only eight lives left. In context, the possibility was reassuring.

The phone rang; for a change, John was grateful for the interruption. It was Lena, saying her father had come home from the hospital, much better, and she thought she could come on home day after tomorrow. Fine, John said, feeling a little wicked; I’ll borrow a car and pick you up at the airport. Don’t bother, Lena said; besides, she didn’t have a flight number yet.

John didn’t press it. If, as he assumed, Lena was in on the plot with Castle, she was probably here in Key West, or somewhere nearby. If she had to buy a ticket to and from Omaha to keep up her end of the ruse, the money would come out of John’s pocket.

He hung up and, on impulse, dialed her parents’ number. Her father answered. Putting on his professorial tone, he said he was Maxwell Perkins, Blue Cross claims adjuster, and he needed to know the exact date when Mr. Monaghan entered the hospital for this recent confinement. He said you must have the wrong guy; I haven’t been inside a hospital in twenty years, knock on wood. Am I not speaking to John Franklin Monaghan? No, this is John Frederick Monaghan. Terribly sorry, natural mistake. That’s okay; hope the other guy’s okay, goodbye, good night, sir.

So tomorrow was going to be the big day with Pansy. To his knowledge, John hadn’t been watched during sex for more than twenty years, and never by a disinterested, or at least dispassionate, observer. He hoped that knowing they were being spied upon wouldn’t affect his performance. Or knowing that it would be the last time.

A profound helpless sadness settled over him. He knew that the last thing you should do, in a mood like this, was go out and get drunk. It was barely noon, anyhow. He took enough money out of his wallet for five martinis, hid the wallet under a couch cushion, and headed for Duval Street.

21. Dying, Well Or Badly

John had just about decided it was too early in the day to get drunk. He had polished off two martinis in Sloppy Joe’s and then wandered uptown because the tourists were getting to him and a band was setting up, depressingly young and cheerful. He found a grubby bar he’d never noticed before, dark and smoky and hot. In the other universes it was a yuppie boutique. Three Social Security drunks were arguing politics almost loudly enough to drown out the game show on the television. It seemed to go well with the headache and sour stomach he’d reaped from the martinis and the walk in the sun. He got a beer and some peanuts and a couple of aspirin from the bartender, and sat in the farthest booth with a copy of the local classified-ad newspaper. Somebody had obscurely carved FUCK ANARCHY into the tabletop.

Nobody else in this world knows what anarchy is, John thought, and the helpless anomie came back, intensified somewhat by drunken sentimentality. What he would give to go back to the first universe and undo this all by just not. . . .

Would that be possible? The Hemingway was willing to take him back to 1921; why not back a few weeks? Where the hell was that son of a bitch when you needed him, it, whatever.

The Hemingway appeared in the booth opposite him, an Oak Park teenager smoking a cigarette. “I felt a kind of vibration from you. Ready to make your decision?”

“Can the people at the bar see you?”

“No. And don’t worry about appearing to be talking to yourself. A lot of that goes on around here.”

“Look. Why can’t you just take me back to a couple of weeks before we met on the train, back in the first universe? I’ll just. . . .” The Hemingway was shaking its head slowly. “You can’t.”

“No. As I explained, you already exist there—”

“You said that you couldn’t be in the same place twice. How do you know I can’t?”

“How do you know you can’t swallow that piano? You just can’t.”

“You thought I couldn’t talk about you, either; you thought your stick would kill me. I’m not like normal people.”

“Except in that alcohol does nothing for your judgment.”

John ate a peanut thoughtfully. “Try this on for size. At 11:46 on June 3, a man named Sylvester Castlemaine sat down in Dos Hermosas and started talking with me about the lost manuscripts. The forgery would never have occurred to me if I hadn’t talked to him. Why don’t you go back and keep him from going into that cafe? Or just go back to 11:30 and kill him.”

The Hemingway smiled maliciously. “You don’t like him much.”

“It’s more fear than like or dislike.” He rubbed his face hard, remembering. “Funny how things shift around. He was kind of likeable the first time I met him. Then you killed me on the train and in the subsequent universe, he became colder, more serious. Then you killed me in Pansy’s apartment and in this universe, he has turned mean. Dangerously mean, like a couple of men I knew in Viet Nam. The ones who really love the killing. Like you, evidently.”

It blew a chain of smoke rings before answering. “I don’t ‘love’ killing, or anything else. I have a complex function and I fulfill it, because that is what I do. That sounds circular because of the limitations of human language.

“I can’t go killing people right and left just to see what happens. When a person dies at the wrong time it takes forever to clean things up. Not that it wouldn’t be worth it in your case. But I can tell you with certainty that killing Castlemaine would not affect the final outcome.”

“How can you say that? He’s responsible for the whole thing.” John finished off most of his beer and the Hemingway touched the mug and it refilled. “Not poison.”

“Wouldn’t work,” it said morosely. “I’d gladly kill Castlemaine any way you want—cancer of the penis is a possibility—if there was even a fighting chance that it would clear things up. The reason I know it wouldn’t is that I am not in the least attracted to that meeting. There’s no probability nexus associated with it, the way there was with your buying the Corona or starting the story on the train, or writing it down here. You may think that you would never have come up with the idea for the forgery on your own, but you’re wrong.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“Nope. There are universes in this bundle where Castle isn’t involved. You may find that hard to believe, but your beliefs aren’t important.”

John nodded noncommittally and got his faraway remembering look. “You know . . . reviewing in my mind all the conversations we’ve had, all five of them, the only substantive reason you’ve given me not to write this pastiche, and I quote, is that “I or someone like me will have to kill you.” Since that doesn’t seem to be possible, why don’t we try some other line of attack?”

It put out the cigarette by squeezing it between thumb and forefinger. There was a smell of burning flesh. “All right, try this: give it up or I’ll kill Pansy. Then Lena.”

“I’ve thought of that, and I’m gambling that you won’t, or can’t. You had a perfect opportunity a few days ago—maximum dramatic effect—and you didn’t do it. Now you say it’s an awfully complicated matter.”

“You’re willing to gamble with the lives of the people you love?”

“I’m gambling with a lot. Including them.” He leaned forward. “Take me into the future instead of the past. Show me what will happen if I succeed with the Hemingway hoax. If I agree that it’s terrible, I’ll give it all up and become a plumber.”

The old, wise Hemingway shook a shaggy head at him. “You’re asking me to please fix it so you can swallow a piano. I can’t. Even I can’t go straight to the future and look around; I’m pretty much tied to your present and past until this matter is cleared up.”

“One of the first things you said to me was that you were from the future. And the past. And ‘other temporalities,’ whatever the hell that means. You were lying then?”

“Not really.” It sighed. “Let me force the analogy. Look at the piano.”

John twisted half around. “Okay.”

“You can’t eat it—but after a fashion, I can.” The piano suddenly transformed itself into a piano-shaped mountain of cold capsules, which immediately collapsed and rolled all over the floor. “Each capsule contains a pinch of sawdust or powdered ivory or metal, the whole piano in about a hundred thousand capsules. If I take one with each meal, I will indeed eat the piano, over the course of the next three hundred-some years. That’s not a long time for me.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“It’s not a proof; it’s a demonstration.” It reached down and picked up a capsule that was rolling by, and popped it into its mouth. “One down, 99,999 to go. So how many ways could I eat this piano?”

“Ways?”

“I mean I could have swallowed any of the hundred thousand first. Next I can choose any of the remaining 99,999. How many ways can—”

“That’s easy. One hundred thousand factorial. A huge number.”

“Go to the head of the class. It’s ten to the godzillionth power. That represents the number of possible paths—the number of futures—leading to this one guaranteed, pre-ordained event: my eating the piano. They are all different, but in terms of whether the piano gets eaten, their differences are trivial.

“On a larger scale, every possible trivial action that you or anybody else in this universe takes puts us into a slightly different future than would have otherwise existed. An overwhelming majority of actions, even seemingly significant ones, make no difference in the long run. All of the futures bend back to one central, unifying event—except for the ones that you’re screwing up!”

“So what is this big event?”

“It’s impossible for you to know. It’s not important, anyhow.” Actually, it would take a rather cosmic viewpoint to consider the event unimportant: the end of the world.

Or at least the end of life on Earth. Right now there were two earnest young politicians, in the United States and Russia, who on 11 August 2006 would be President and Premier of their countries. On that day, one would insult the other beyond forgiveness, and a button would be pushed, and then another button, and by the time the sun set on Moscow, or rose on Washington, there would be nothing left alive on the planet at all—from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere; not a cockroach, not a paramecium, not a virus, and all because there are some things a man just doesn’t have to take, not if he’s a real man.

Hemingway wasn’t the only writer who felt that way, but he was the one with the most influence on this generation. The apparition who wanted John dead or at least not typing didn’t know exactly what effect his pastiche was going to have on Hemingway’s influence, but it was going to be decisive and ultimately negative. It would prevent or at least delay the end of the world in a whole bundle of universes, which would put a zillion adjacent realities out of kilter, and there would be hell to pay all up and down the Omniverse. Many more people than six billion would die—and it’s even possible that all of Reality would unravel, and collapse back to the Primordial Hiccup from whence it came.

“If it’s not important, then why are you so hell-bent on keeping me from preventing it? I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t believe me, then!” At an imperious gesture, all the capsules rolled back into the corner and reassembled into a piano, with a huge crashing chord. None of the barflies heard it. “I should think you’d cooperate with me just to prevent the unpleasantness of dying over and over.”

John had the expression of a poker player whose opponent has inadvertently exposed his hole card. “You get used to it,” he said. “And it occurs to me that sooner or later I’ll wind up in a universe that I really like. This one doesn’t have a hell of a lot to recommend it.” His foot tapped twice and then twice again.

“No,” the Hemingway said. “It will get worse each time.”

“You can’t know that. This has never happened before.”

“True so far, isn’t it?”

John considered it for a moment. “Some ways. Some ways not.”

The Hemingway shrugged and stood up. “Well. Think about my offer.” The cane appeared. “Happy cancer.” It tapped him on the chest and disappeared.

The first sensation was utter tiredness, immobility. When he strained to move, pain slithered through his muscles and viscera, and stayed. He could hardly breathe, partly because his lungs weren’t working and partly because there was something in the way. In the mirror beside the booth he looked down his throat and saw a large white mass, veined, pulsing. He sank back into the cushion and waited. He remembered the young wounded Hemingway writing his parents from the hospital with ghastly cheerfulness: “If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did.” I don’t know, Ernie; maybe it gets harder with practice. He felt something tear open inside and hot stinging fluid trickled through his abdominal cavity. He wiped his face and a patch of necrotic skin came off with a terrible smell. His clothes tightened as his body swelled.

“Hey buddy, you okay?” The bartender came around in front of him and jumped. “Christ, Harry, punch nine-one-one!”

John gave a slight ineffectual wave. “No rush,” he croaked.

The bartender cast his eyes to the ceiling. “Always on my shift?”

22. Death In The Afternoon

John woke up behind a dumpster in an alley. It was high noon and the smell of fermenting garbage was revolting. He didn’t feel too well in any case; as if he’d drunk far too much and passed out behind a dumpster, which was exactly what had happened in this universe.

In this universe. He stood slowly to a quiet chorus of creaks and pops, brushed himself off, and staggered away from the malefic odor. Staggered, but not limping—he had both feet again, in this present. There was a hand-sized numb spot at the top of his left leg where a .51 caliber machine gun bullet had missed his balls by an inch and ended his career as a soldier.

And started it as a writer. He got to the sidewalk and stopped dead. This was the first universe where he wasn’t a college professor. He taught occasionally—sometimes creative writing; sometimes Hemingway—but it was only a hobby now, and a nod toward respectability.

He rubbed his fringe of salt-and-pepper beard. It covered the bullet scar there on his chin. He ran his tongue along the metal teeth the army had installed thirty years ago. Jesus. Maybe it does get worse every time. Which was worse, losing a foot or getting your dick sprayed with shrapnel, numb from severed nerves, plus bullets in the leg and face and arm? If you knew there was a Pansy in your future, you would probably trade a foot for a whole dick. Though she had done wonders with what was left.

Remembering furiously, not watching where he was going, he let his feet guide him back to the oldster’s bar where the Hemingway had showed him how to swallow a piano. He pushed through the door and the shock of air conditioning brought him back to the present.

Ferns. Perfume. Lacy underthings. An epicene sales clerk sashayed toward him, managing to look worried and determined at the same time. His nose was pierced, decorated with a single diamond button. “Si-i-r,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice, “may I help you?”

Crotchless panties. Marital aids. The bar had become a store called The French Connection. “Guess I took a wrong turn. Sorry.” He started to back out.

The clerk smiled. “Don’t be shy. Everybody needs something here.”

The heat was almost pleasant in its heavy familiarity. John stopped at a convenience store for a sixpack of greenies and walked back home.

An interesting universe; much more of a divergence than the other had been. Reagan had survived the Hinckley assassination and actually went on to a second term. Bush was elected rather than succeeding to the presidency, and the country had not gone to war in Nicaragua. The Iran/Contra scandal nipped it in the bud.

The United States was actually cooperating with the Soviet Union in a flight to Mars. There were no DeSotos. Could there be a connection?

And in this universe he had actually met Ernest Hemingway.

Havana, 1952. John was eight years old. His father, a doctor in this universe, had taken a break from the New England winter to treat his family to a week in the tropics. John got a nice sunburn the first day, playing on the beach while his parents tried the casinos. The next day they made him stay indoors, which meant tagging along with his parents, looking at things that didn’t fascinate eight-year-olds.

For lunch they went to La Florida, on the off chance that they might meet the famous Ernest Hemingway, who supposedly held court there when he was in Havana.

To John it was a huge dark cavern of a place, full of adult smells. Cigar smoke, rum, beer, stale urine. But Hemingway was indeed there, at the end of the long dark wood bar, laughing heartily with a table full of Cubans.

John was vaguely aware that his mother resembled some movie actress, but he couldn’t have guessed that that would change his life. Hemingway glimpsed her and then stood up and was suddenly silent, mouth open. Then he laughed and waved a huge arm. “Come on over here, daughter.”

The three of them rather timidly approached the table, John acutely aware of the careful inspection his mother was receiving from the silent Cubans. “Take a look, Mary,” he said to the small blond woman knitting at the table, “The Kraut.”

The woman nodded, smiling, and agreed that John’s mother looked just like Marlene Dietrich ten years before. Hemingway invited them to sit down and have a drink, and they accepted with an air of genuine astonishment.

He gravely shook John’s hand, and spoke to him as he would to an adult. Then he shouted to the bartender in fast Spanish, and in a couple of minutes his parents had huge daiquiris and he had a Coke with a wedge of lime in it, tropical and grown-up. The waiter also brought a tray of boiled shrimp. Hemingway even ate the heads and tails, crunching loudly, which impressed John more than any Nobel Prize. Hemingway might have agreed, since he hadn’t yet received one, and Faulkner had.

For more than an hour, two Cokes, John watched as his parents sat hypnotized in the aura of Hemingway’s famous charm. He put them at ease with jokes and stories and questions—for the rest of his life John’s father would relate how impressed he was with the sophistication of Hemingway’s queries about cardiac medicine—but it was obvious even to a child that they were in awe, electrified by the man’s presence.

Later that night John’s father asked him what he thought of Mr. Hemingway. Forty-four years later, John of course remembered his exact reply: “He has fun all the time. I never saw a grown-up who plays like that.”

Interesting. That meeting was where his eidetic memory started. He could remember a couple of days before it pretty well, because they had still been close to the surface. In other universes, he could remember back well before grade school. It gave him a strange feeling. All of the universes were different, but this was the first one where the differentness was so tightly connected to Hemingway.

He was flabby in this universe, fat over old tired muscle, like Hemingway at his age, perhaps, and he felt a curious anxiety that he realized was a real need to have a drink. Not just desire, not thirst. If he didn’t have a drink, something very very bad would happen. He knew that was irrational. Knowing didn’t help.

John carefully mounted the stairs up to their apartment, stepping over the fifth one, also rotted in this universe. He put the beer in the refrigerator and took from the freezer a bottle of icy vodka—that was different—and poured himself a double shot and knocked it back, medicine drinking.

That spiked the hangover pretty well. He pried the top off a beer and carried it into the living room, thoughtful as the alcoholic glow radiated through his body. He sat down at the typewriter and picked up the air pistol, a fancy Belgian target model. He cocked it and with a practiced two-handed grip aimed at a paper target across the room. The pellet struck less than half an inch low.

All around the room the walls were pocked from where he’d fired at roaches, and once a scorpion. Very Hemingwayish, he thought; in fact, most of the ways he was different from the earlier incarnations of himself were in Hemingway’s direction.

He spun a piece of paper into the typewriter and made a list:

EH & me—

—both had doctor fathers

—both forced into music lessons

—in high school wrote derivative stuff that didn’t show promise

—Our war wounds were evidently similar in severity and location. Maybe my groin one was worse; army doctor there said that in Korea (and presumably WWI), without helicopter dustoff, I would have been dead on the battlefield. (Having been wounded in the kneecap and foot myself. I know that H’s story about carrying the wounded guy on his back is unlikely. It was a month before I could put any stress on the knee.) He mentioned genital wounds, possibly similar to mine, in a letter to Bernard Baruch, but there’s nothing in the Red Cross report about them.

But in both cases, being wounded and surviving was the central experience of our youth. Touching death.

—We each wrote the first draft of our first novel in six weeks (but his was better and more ambitious).

—Both had unusual critical success from the beginning.

—Both shy as youngsters and gregarious as adults.

—Always loved fishing and hiking and guns; I loved the bullfight from my first corrida, but may have been influenced by H’s books.

—Spain in general

—have better women than we deserve

—drink too much

—hypochondria

—accident proneness

—a tendency toward morbidity

—One difference. I will never stick a shotgun in my mouth and pull the trigger. Leaves too much of a mess.

He looked up at the sound of the cane tapping. The Hemingway was in the Karsh wise-old-man mode, but was nearly transparent in the bright light that streamed from the open door. “What do I have to do to get your attention?” it said. “Give you cancer again?”

“That was pretty unpleasant.”

“Maybe it will be the last.” It half sat on the arm of the couch and spun the cane around twice. “Today is a big day. Are we going to Paris?”

“What do you mean?”

“Something big happens today. In every universe where you’re alive, this day glows with importance. I assume that means you’ve decided to go along with me. Stop writing this thing in exchange for the truth about the manuscripts.”

As a matter of fact, he had been thinking just that. Life was confusing enough already, torn between his erotic love for Pansy and the more domestic, but still deep, feeling for Lena . . . writing the pastiche was kind of fun, but he did have his own fish to fry. Besides, he’d come to truly dislike Castle, even before Pansy had told him about the set-up. It would be fun to disappoint him.

“You’re right. Let’s go.”

“First destroy the novel.” In this universe, he’d completed seventy pages of the Up-in-Michigan novel.

“Sure.” John picked up the stack of paper and threw it into the tiny fireplace. He lit it several places with a long barbecue match, and watched a month’s work go up in smoke. It was only a symbolic gesture, anyhow; he could retype the thing from memory if he wanted to.

“So what do I do? Click my heels together three times and say ‘There’s no place like the Gare de Lyon’ ?”

“Just come closer.”

John took three steps toward the Hemingway and suddenly fell up down sideways—

It was worse than dying. He was torn apart and scattered throughout space and time, being nowhere and everywhere, everywhen, being a screaming vacuum forever—

Grit crunched underfoot and coalsmoke was choking thick in the air. It was cold. Gray Paris skies glowered through the long skylights, through the complicated geometry of the black steel trusses that held up the high roof. Bustling crowds chattering French. A woman walked through John from behind. He pressed himself with his hands and felt real.

“They can’t see us,” the Hemingway said. “Not unless I will it.”

“That was awful.”

“I hoped you would hate it. That’s how I spend most of my timespace. Come on.” They walked past vendors selling paper packets of roasted chestnuts, bottles of wine, stacks of baguettes and cheeses. There were strange resonances as John remembered the various times he’d been here more than a half-century in the future. It hadn’t changed much.

“There she is.” The Hemingway pointed. Hadley looked worn, tired, dowdy. She stumbled, trying to keep up with the porter who strode along with her two bags. John recalled that she was just recovering from a bad case of the grippe. She’d probably still be home in bed if Hemingway hadn’t sent the telegram urging her to come to Lausanne because the skiing was so good, at Chamby.

“Are there universes where Hadley doesn’t lose the manuscripts?”

“Plenty of them,” the Hemingway said. “In some of them he doesn’t sell ‘My Old Man’ next year, or anything else, and he throws all the stories away himself. He gives up fiction and becomes a staff writer for the Toronto Star. Until the Spanish Civil War; he joins the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and is killed driving an ambulance. His only effect on American literature is one paragraph in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”

“But in some, the stories actually do see print?”

“Sure, including the novel, which is usually called Along With Youth. There.” Hadley was mounting the steps up into a passenger car. There was a microsecond of agonizing emptiness, and they materialized in the passageway in front of Hadley’s compartment. She and the porter walked through them.

“Merci,” she said, and handed the man a few sou. He made a face behind her back.

“Along With Youth?” John said.

“It’s a pretty good book, sort of prefiguring A Farewell To Arms, but he does a lot better in universes where it’s not published. The Sun Also Rises gets more attention.”

Hadley stowed both the suitcase and the overnight bag under the seat. Then she frowned slightly, checked her wristwatch, and left the compartment, closing the door behind her.

“Interesting,” the Hemingway said. “So she didn’t leave it out in plain sight, begging to be stolen.”

“Makes you wonder,” John said. “This novel. Was it about World War I?”

“The trenches in Italy,” the Hemingway said.

A young man stepped out of the shadows of the vestibule, looking in the direction Hadley took. Then he turned around and faced the two travelers from the future.

It was Ernest Hemingway. He smiled. “Close your mouth, John. You’ll catch flies.” He opened the door to the compartment, picked up the overnight bag, and carried it into the next car.

John recovered enough to chase after him. He had disappeared.

The Hemingway followed. “What is this?” John said. “I thought you couldn’t be in two timespaces at once.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“It sure as hell wasn’t the real Hemingway. He’s in Lausanne with Lincoln Steffens.”

“Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.”

“He knew my name!”

“That he did.” The Hemingway was getting fainter as John watched.

“Was he another one of you? Another STAB agent?”

“No. Not possible.” It peered at John. “What’s happening to you?”

Hadley burst into the car and ran right through them, shouting in French for the conductor. She was carrying a bottle of Evian water.

“Well,” John said, “that’s what—”

The Hemingway was gone. John just had time to think Marooned in 1922? when the railroad car and the Gare de Lyon dissolved in an inbursting cascade of black sparks and it was no easier to handle the second time, spread impossibly thin across all those light years and millennia, wondering whether it was going to last forever this time, realizing that it did anyhow, and coalescing with an impossibly painful snap:

Looking at the list in the typewriter. He reached for the Heineken; it was still cold. He set it back down. “God,” he whispered. “I hope that’s that.”

The situation called for higher octane. He went to the freezer and took out the vodka. He sipped the gelid syrup straight from the bottle, and almost dropped it when out of the corner of his eye he saw the overnight bag.

He set the open bottle on the counter and sleepwalked over to the dining room table. It was the same bag, slightly beat up, monogrammed EHR, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson. He opened it and inside was a thick stack of manila envelopes.

He took out the top one and took it and the vodka bottle back to his chair. His hands were shaking. He opened the folder and stared at the familiar typing.

ERNEST M. HEMINGWAY

ONE - EYE FOR MINE

Fever stood up. In the moon light he could see blood starting on his hands. His pants were torn at the knee and he knew it would be bleeding there too. He watched the lights of the caboose disppear in the trees where the track curved.

That lousy crut of a brakeman. He would get him some day.

Fever off the end of a tie and sat down to pick the cinders out of his hands and knee. He could use some water. The brakeman had his canteen.

He could smell a campfire. He wondered if it would be smart to go find it. He knew about the wolves, the human kind that lived along the rails and the disgusting things they liked. He wasn’t afraid of them but you didn’t look for trouble.

You don’t have to look for trouble, his father would say. Trouble will find you. His father didn’t tell him about wolves, though, or about women.

There was a noise in the brush. Fever stood up and slipped his hand around the horn grip of the fat Buck clasp knife in his pocket.

The screen door creaked open and he looked up to see Pansy walk in with a strange expression on her face. Lena followed, looking even stranger. Her left eye was swollen shut and most of that side of her face was bruised blue and brown.

He stood up, shaking with the sudden collision of emotions. “What the hell—”

“Castle,” Pansy said. “He got outta hand.”

“Real talent for understatement.” Lena’s voice was tightly controlled but distorted.

“He went nuts. Slappin’ Lena around. Then he started to rummage around in a closet, rave about a shotgun, and we split.”

“I’ll call the police.”

“We’ve already been there,” Lena said. “It’s all over.”

“Of course. We can’t work with—”

“No, I mean he’s a criminal. He’s wanted in Mississippi for second-degree murder. They went to arrest him, hold him for extradition. So no more Hemingway hoax.”

“What Hemingway?” Pansy said.

“We’ll tell you all about it,” Lena said, and pointed at the bottle. “A little early, don’t you think? You could at least get us a couple of glasses.”

John went into the kitchen, almost floating with vodka buzz and anxious confusion. “What do you want with it?” Pansy said oh-jay and Lena said ice. Then Lena screamed.

He turned around and there was Castle standing in the door, grinning. He had a pistol in his right hand and a sawed-off shotgun in his left.

“You cunts,” he said. “You fuckin’ cunts. Go to the fuckin’ cops.”

There was a butcher knife in the drawer next to the refrigerator, but he didn’t think Castle would stand idly by and let him rummage for it. Nothing else that might serve as a weapon, except the air pistol. Castle knew that it wouldn’t do much damage.

He looked at John. “You three’re gonna be my hostages. We’re gettin’ outta here, lose ’em up in the Everglades. They’ll have a make on my pickup, though.”

“We don’t have a car,” John said.

“I know that, asshole! There’s a Hertz right down on One. You go rent one and don’t try nothin’ cute. I so much as smell a cop, I blow these two cunts away.”

He turned back to the women and grinned crookedly, talking hard-guy through his teeth. “Like I did those two they sent, the spic and the nigger. They said somethin’ about comin’ back with a warrant to look for the shotgun and I was just bein’ as nice as could be, I said hell, come on in, don’t need no warrant. I got nothin’ to hide, and when they come in I take the pistol from the nigger and kill the spic with it and shoot the nigger in the balls. You shoulda heard him. Some nigger. Took four more rounds to shut him up.”

Wonder if that means the pistol is empty, John thought. He had Pansy’s orange juice in his hand. It was an old-fashioned Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum six-shot, but from this angle he couldn’t tell whether it had been reloaded. He could try to blind Castle with the orange juice.

He stepped toward him. “What kind of car do you want?”

“Just a car, damn it. Big enough.” A siren whooped about a block away. Castle looked wary. “Bitch. You told ’em where you’d be.”

“No,” Lena pleaded. “We didn’t tell them anything.”

“Don’t do anything stupid,” John said.

Two more sirens, closer. “I’ll show you stupid!” He raised the pistols towards Lena. John dashed the orange juice in his face.

It wasn’t really like slow motion. It was just that John didn’t miss any of it. Castle growled and swung around and in the cylinder’s chambers John saw five copper-jacketed slugs. He reached for the gun and the first shot shattered his hand, blowing off two fingers, and struck the right side of his chest. The explosion was deafening and the shock of the bullet was like being hit simultaneously in the hand and chest with baseball bats. He rocked, still on his feet, and coughed blood spatter on Castle’s face. He fired again, and the second slug hit him on the other side of the chest, this time spinning him half around. Was somebody screaming? Hemingway said it felt like an icy snowball, and that was pretty close, except for the inside part, your body saying Well, time to close up shop. There was a terrible familiar radiating pain in the center of his chest, and John realized that he was having a totally superfluous heart attack. He pushed off from the dinette and staggered toward Castle again. He made a grab for the shotgun and Castle emptied both barrels into his abdomen. He dropped to his knees and then fell over on his side. He couldn’t feel anything. Things started to go dim and red. Was this going to be the last time?

Castle cracked the shotgun and the two spent shells flew up in an arc over his shoulder. He took two more out of his shirt pocket and dropped one. When he bent over to pick it up, Pansy leaped past him. In a swift motion that was almost graceful—it came to John that he had probably practiced it over and over, acting out fantasies—he slipped both shells into their chambers and closed the gun with a flip of the wrist. The screen door was stuck. Pansy was straining at the knob with both hands. Castle put the muzzles up to the base of her skull and pulled one trigger. Most of her head covered the screen or went through the hole the blast made. The crown of her skull, a bloody bowl, bounced off two walls and went spinning into the kitchen. Her body did a spastic little dance and folded, streaming.

Lena was suddenly on his back, clawing at his face. He spun and slammed her against the wall. She wilted like a rag doll and he hit her hard with the pistol on the way down. She unrolled at his feet, out cold, and with his mouth wide open laughing silently he lowered the shotgun and blasted her pointblank in the crotch. Her body jack-knifed and John tried with all his will not to die but blackness crowded in and the last thing he saw was that evil grin as Castle reloaded again, peering out the window, presumably at the police.

It wasn’t the terrible sense of being spread infinitesimally thin over an infinity of pain and darkness; things had just gone black, like closing your eyes. If this is death, John thought, there’s not much to it.

But it changed. There was a little bit of pale light, some vague figures, and then colors bled into the scene, and after a moment of disorientation he realized he was still in the apartment, but apparently floating up by the ceiling. Lena was conscious again, barely, twitching, staring at the river of blood that pumped from between her legs. Pansy looked unreal, headless but untouched from the neck down, lying in a relaxed, improbable posture like a knocked-over department store dummy, blood still spurting from a neck artery out through the screen door.

His own body was a mess, the abdomen completely excavated by buckshot. Inside the huge wound, behind the torn coils of intestine, the shreds of fat and gristle, the blood, the shit, he could see sharp splintered knuckles of backbone. Maybe it hadn’t hurt so much because the spinal cord had been severed in the blast.

He had time to be a little shocked at himself for not feeling more. Of course most of the people he’d known who had died did die this way, in loud spatters of blood and brains. Even after thirty years of the occasional polite heart attack or stroke carrying off friend or acquaintance, most of the dead people he knew had died in the jungle.

He had been a hero there, in this universe. That would have surprised his sergeants in the original one. Congressional Medal of Honor, so called, which hadn’t hurt the sales of his first book. Knocked out the NVA machine-gun emplacement with their own satchel charge, then hauled the machine-gun around and wiped out their mortar and command squads. He managed it all with bullet wounds in the face and triceps. Of course without the bullet wounds he wouldn’t have lost his cool and charged the machine-gun emplacement, but that wasn’t noted in the citation.

A pity there was no way to trade the medals in—melt them down into one big fat bullet and use it to waste that crazy motherfucker who was ignoring the three people he’d just killed, laughing like a hyena while he shouted obscenities at the police gathering down below.

Castle fires a shot through the lower window and then ducks and a spray of automatic-weapon fire shatters the upper window, filling the air with a spray of glass; bullets and glass fly painlessly through John where he’s floating and he hears them spatter into the ceiling and suddenly everything is white with plaster dust—it starts to clear and he is much closer to his body, drawing down closer and closer; he merges with it and there’s an instant of blackness and he’s looking out through human eyes again.

A dull noise and he looked up to see hundreds of shards of glass leap up from the floor and fly to the window; plaster dust in billows sucked up into bullet holes in the ceiling, which then disappeared.

The top windowpane reformed as Castle uncrouched, pointed the shotgun, then jerked forward as a blossom of yellow flame and white smoke rolled back into the barrel.

His hand was whole, the fingers restored. He looked down and saw rivulets of blood running back into the hole in his abdomen, then individual drops; then it closed and the clothing restored itself; then one of the holes in his chest closed up and then the other.

The clothing was unfamiliar. A tweed jacket in this weather? His hands had turned old, liver spots forming as he watched. Slow like a plant growing, slow like the moon turning, thinking slowly too, he reached up and felt the beard, and could see out of the corner of his eye that it was white and long. He was too fat, and a belt buckle bit painfully into his belly. He sucked in and pried out and looked at the buckle, yes, it was old brass and said “GOTT MIT UNS,” the buckle he’d taken from a dead German so long ago. The buckle Hemingway had taken.

John got to one knee. He watched fascinated as the stream of blood gushed back into Lena’s womb, disappearing as Castle grinning jammed the barrels in between her legs, flinched, and did a complicated dance in reverse (while Pansy’s decapitated body writhed around and jerked upright); Lena, sliding up off the floor, leaped up between the man’s back and the wall, then fell off and ran backwards as he flipped the shotgun up to the back of Pansy’s neck and seeming gallons of blood and tissue came flying from every direction to assemble themselves into the lovely head and face, distorted in terror as she jerked awkwardly at the door and then ran backwards, past Castle as he did a graceful pirouette, unloading the gun and placing one shell on the floor, which flipped up to his pocket as he stood and put the other one there.

John stood up and walked through some thick resistance toward Castle. Was it time resisting him? Everything else was still moving in reverse: Two empty shotgun shells sailed across the room to snick into the weapon’s chambers; Castle snapped it shut and wheeled to face John—

But John wasn’t where he was supposed to be. As the shotgun swung around, John grabbed the barrels—hot!—and pulled the pistol out of Castle’s waistband. He lost his grip on the shotgun barrels just as he jammed the pistol against Castle’s heart and fired. A spray of blood from all over the other side of the room converged on Castle’s back and John felt the recoil sting of the Magnum just as the shotgun muzzle cracked hard against his teeth, mouthful of searing heat then blackness forever, back in the featureless infinite timespace hell that the Hemingway had taken him to, forever, but in the next instant, a new kind of twitch, a twist. . . .

23. The Time Exchanged

What does that mean, you “lost” him?

We were in the railroad car in the Gare de Lyon, in the normal observation mode. This entity that looked like Hemingway walked up, greeted us, took the manuscripts, and disappeared.

Just like that.

No. He went into the next car. John Baird ran after him. Maybe that was my mistake. I translated instead of running.

That’s when you lost him.

Both of them. Baird disappeared, too. Then Hadley came running in—

Don’t confuse me with Hadleys. You checked the adjacent universes.

All of them, yes. I think they’re all right.

Think?

Well . . . I can’t quite get to that moment. When I disappeared. It’s as if I were still there for several more seconds, so I’m excluded.

And John Baird is still there?

Not by the time I can insert myself. Just Hadley running around—

No Hadleys. No Hadleys. So naturally you went back to 1996.

Of course. But there is a period of several minutes there from which I’m excluded as well. When I can finally insert myself, John Baird is dead.

Ah.

In every doomline, he and Castlemaine have killed each other. John is lying there with his head blown off, Castle next to him with his heart torn out from a pointblank pistol shot, with two very distraught women screaming while police pile in through the door. And this.

The overnight bag with the stories.

I don’t think anybody noticed it. With Baird dead, I could spotcheck the women’s futures; neither of them mentions the bag. So perhaps the mission is accomplished.

Well, Reality is still here. So far. But the connection between Baird and this Hemingway entity is disturbing. That Baird is able to return to 1996 without your help is very disturbing. He has obviously taken on some of your characteristics, your abilities, which is why you’re excluded from the last several minutes of his life.

I’ve never heard of that happening before.

It never has. I think that John Baird is no more human than you and I.

Is?

I suspect he’s still around somewhen.

24. Islands In The Stream
and the unending lightless desert of pain becomes suddenly one small bright spark and then everything is dark red and a taste, a bitter taste, Hoppe’s No. 9 gun oil and the twin barrels of the fine Boss pigeon gun cold and oily on his tongue and biting hard against the roof of his mouth; the dark red is light on the other side of his eyelids, sting of pain before he bumps a tooth and opens his eyes and mouth and lowers the gun and with shaking hands unloads—no, dis-loads—both barrels and walks backwards, shuffling in the slippers, slumping, stopping to stare out into the Idaho morning dark, helpless tears coursing up from the snarled white beard, walking backwards down the stairs with the shotgun heavily cradled in his elbow, backing into the storeroom and replacing it in the rack, then back up the stairs and slowly put the keys there in plain sight on the kitchen windowsill, a bit of mercy from Miss Mary, then sit and stare at the cold bad coffee as it warms back to one acid sip—

A tiny part of the mind saying wait! I am John Baird it is 1996
and back to a spiritless shower, numb to the needle spray, and cramped constipation and a sleep of no ease; an evening with Mary and George Brown tiptoeing around the blackest of black-ass worse and worse each day, only one thing to look forward to
got to throw out an anchor
faster now, walking through the Ketchum woods like a jerky cartoon in reverse, fucking FBI and IRS behind every tree, because you sent Ezra that money, felt sorry for him because he was crazy, what a fucking joke, should have finished the Cantos and shot himself.

effect preceding cause but I can read or hear scraps of thought somehow speeding to a blur now, driving in reverse hundreds of miles per hour back from Ketchum to Minnesota, the Mayo Clinic, holding the madness in while you talk to the shrink, promise not to hurt myself have to go home and write if I’m going to beat this, figuring what he wants to hear, then the rubber mouthpiece and smell of your own hair and flesh slightly burnt by the electrodes then deep total blackness
sharp stabs of thought sometimes stretching
hospital days blur by in reverse, cold chrome and starch white, a couple of mouthfuls of claret a day to wash down the pills that seem to make it worse and worse
what will happen to me when he’s born?

When they came back from Spain was when he agreed to the Mayo Clinic, still all beat up from the plane crashes six years before in Africa, liver and spleen shot to hell, brain too, nerves, can’t write or can’t stop: all day on one damned sentence for the Kennedy book but a hundred thousand fast words, pure shit, for the bullfight article. Paris book okay but stuck. Great to find the trunks in the Ritz but none of the stuff Hadley lost.

Here it stops. A frozen tableau:

Afternoon light slanting in through the tall cloudy windows of the Cambon bar, where he had liberated, would liberate, the hotel in August 1944. A good large American-style martini gulped too fast in the excitement. The two small trunks unpacked and laid out item by item. Hundreds of pages of notes that would become the Paris book. But nothing before ’23, of course. the manuscripts The novel and the stories and the poems still gone. One moment nailed down with the juniper sting of the martini and then time crawling rolling flying backwards again—
no control?

Months blurring by, Madrid Riviera Venice feeling sick and busted up, the plane wrecks like a quick one-two punch brain and body, blurry sick even before them at the Finca Vigia, can’t get a fucking thing done after the Nobel Prize, journalists day and night, the prize bad luck and bullshit anyhow but need the $35,000
damn, had to shoot Willie, cat since the boat-time before the war, but winged a burglar too, same gun, just after the Pulitzer, now that was all right
slowing down again—Havana—the Floridita—

Even Mary having a good time, and the Basque jai alai players too though they don’t know much English, most of them, interesting couple of civilians, the doctor and the Kraut lookalike, but there’s something about the boy that makes it hard to take my eyes off him, looks like someone I guess, another round of Papa Dobles, that boy, what is it about him? and then the first round, with lunch, and things speeding up to a blur again.

out on the Gulf a lot, enjoying the triumph of The Old Man and the Sea, the easy good-paying work of providing fishing footage for the movie, and then back into 1951, the worst year of his life that far, weeks of grudging conciliation, uncontrollable anger, and black-ass depression from the poisonous critical slime that followed Across the River, bastards gunning for him, Harold Ross dead, mother Grace dead, son Gregory a dope addict hip-deep into the dianetics horseshit, Charlie Scribner dead but first declaring undying love for that asshole Jones
most of the forties an anxious blur, Cuba Italy Cuba France Cuba China found Mary kicked Martha out, thousand pages on the fucking Eden book wouldn’t come together Bronze Star better than Pulitzer

Martha a chromeplated bitch in Europe but war is swell otherwise, liberating the Ritz, grenades rifles pistols and bomb runs with the RAF, China boring compared to it and the Q-ship runs off Cuba, hell, maybe the bitch was right for once, just kid stuff and booze
marrying the bitch was the end of my belle epoch, easy to see from here, the thirties all sunshine Key West Spain Key West Africa Key West, good hard writing with Pauline holding down the store, good woman but sorry I had to
sorry I had to divorce
stopping

Walking Paris streets after midnight:

I was never going to throw back at her losing the manuscripts. Told Steffens that would be like blaming a human for the weather, or death. These things happen. Nor say anything about what I did the night after I found out she really had lost them. But this one time we got to shouting and I think I hurt her. Why the hell did she have to bring the carbons what the hell did she think carbons were for stupid stupid stupid and she crying and she giving me hell about Pauline Jesus any woman who could fuck up Paris for you could fuck up a royal flush
it slows down around the manuscripts or me—
golden years the mid-twenties everything clicks Paris Vorarlburg Paris Schruns Paris Pamplona Paris Madrid Paris Lausanne
couldn’t believe she actually
most of a novel dozens of poems stories sketches—contes, Kitty called them by God woman you show me your conte and I’ll show you mine
so drunk that night I know better than to drink that much absinthe so drunk I was half crawling going up the stairs to the apartment I saw weird I saw God I saw I saw myself standing there on the fourth landing with Hadley’s goddamn bag

I waited almost an hour, that seemed like no time or all time, and when he, when I, when he came crashing up the stairs he blinked twice, then I walked through me groping, shook my head without looking back and managed to get the door unlocked.

Flying back through the dead winter French countryside, standing in the bar car fighting hopelessness to Hadley crying so hard she can’t get out what was wrong with Steffens standing gaping like a fish in a bowl
twisting again, painlessly inside-out, I suppose through various dimensions, seeing the man’s life as one complex chord of beauty and purpose and ugliness and chaos, my life on one side of the Moebius strip consistent through its fading forty-year span, starting, starting, here:

the handsome young man sits on the floor of the apartment holding himself, rocking racked with sobs, one short manuscript crumpled in front of him, the room a mess with drawers pulled out, their contents scattered on the floor, it’s like losing an arm a leg (a foot a testicle), it’s like losing your youth and along with youth
with a roar he stands up, eyes closed fists clenched, wipes his face dry and stomps over to the window
breathes deeply until he’s breathing normally
strides across the room, kicking a brassiere out of his way
stands with his hand on the knob and thinks this:

life can break you but you can grow back strong at the broken places
and goes out slamming the door behind him, somewhat conscious of having been present at his own birth.

With no effort I find myself standing earlier that day in the vestibule of a train. Hadley is walking away, tired, looking for a vendor. I turn and confront two aspects of myself.

“Close your mouth, John. You’ll catch flies.”

They both stand paralyzed while I slide open the door and pull the overnight bag from under the seat. I walk away and the universe begins to tingle and sparkle.

I spend forever in the black void between timespaces. I am growing to enjoy it.

I appear in John Baird’s apartment and set down the bag. I look at the empty chair in front of the old typewriter, the green beer bottle sweating cold next to it, and John Baird appears, looking dazed, and I have business elsewhere, elsewhen. A train to catch. I’ll come back for the bag in twelve minutes or a few millennia, after the bloodbath that gives birth to us all.

25. A Moveable Feast

He wrote the last line and set down the pencil and read over the last page sitting on his hands for warmth. He could see his breath. Celebrate the end with a little heat.

He unwrapped the bundle of twigs and banked them around the pile of coals in the brazier. Crazy way to heat a room but it’s France. He cupped both hands behind the stack and blew gently. The coals glowed red and then orange and with the third breath the twigs smoldered and a small yellow flame popped up. He held his hands over the fire, rubbing the stiffness out of his fingers, enjoying the smell of the birch as it cracked and spit.

He put a fresh sheet and carbon into the typewriter and looked at his penciled notes. Final draft? Worth a try:

Ernest M. Hemingway,

74 rue da Cardinal Lemoine,

Paris, France

UP IN MICHIGAN

Jim Gilmore came to Horton’s Bay from Canada. He bought the blacksmith shop from old man Hortom

Shit, a typo. He flinched suddenly, as if struck, and shook his head to clear it. What a strange sensation to come out of nowhere. A sudden cold stab of grief. But larger somehow than grief for a person.

Grief for everybody, maybe. For being human.

From a typo?

He went to the window and opened it in spite of the cold. He filled his lungs with the cold damp air and looked around the familiar orange and grey mosaic of chimney pots and tiled roofs under the dirty winter Paris sky.

He shuddered and eased the window back down and returned to the heat of the brazier. He had felt it before, exactly that huge and terrible feeling. But where?

For the life of him he couldn’t remember.

THE MANAMOUKI

Mike Resnick

Many eons ago, the children of Gikuyu, who was himself the first Kikuyu, lived on the slopes of the holy mountain Kirinyaga, which men now call Mount Kenya.

There were many serpents on the mountain, but the sons and grandsons of Gikuyu found them repulsive, and they soon killed all but one.

Then one day the last serpent entered their village and killed and ate a young child. The children of Gikuyu sought out their mundumugu—their witch doctor—and asked him to destroy the menace.

The mundumugu rolled the bones and sacrificed a goat, and finally he created a poison that would kill the serpent. He slit open the belly of another goat, and placed the poison inside it, and left it beneath a tree, and the very next day the serpent swallowed the goat and died.

“Now,” said the mundumugu, “you must cut the serpent into one hundred pieces and scatter them on the holy mountain, so that no demon can breathe life back into its body.”

The children of Gikuyu did as they were instructed, and scattered the hundred pieces of the serpent across the slopes of Kirinyaga. But during the night, each piece came to life and became a new serpent, and soon the Kikuyu were afraid to leave their bomas.

The mundumugu ascended the mountain, and when he neared the highest peak, he addressed Ngai.

“We are beseiged by serpents,” he said. “If you do not slay them, then the Kikuyu shall surely die as a people.”

“I made the serpent, just as I made the Kikuyu and all other things,” answered Ngai, who sat on His golden throne atop Kirinyaga. “And anything that I made, be it a man or a serpent or a tree or even an idea, is not repellent in My eyes. I will save you this one time, because you are young and ignorant, but you must never forget that you cannot destroy that which you find repulsive—for if you try to destroy it, it will always return one hundred times greater than before.”

This is one of the reasons why the Kikuyu chose to till the soil rather than hunt the beasts of the jungle like the Wakamba, or make war on their neighbors like the Maasai, for they had no wish to see that which they destroyed return to plague them. It is a lesson taught by every mundumugu to his people, even after we left Kenya and emigrated to the terraformed world of Kirinyaga.

In the entire history of our tribe, only one mundumugu ever forgot the lesson that Ngai taught atop the holy mountain on that distant day.

And that mundumugu was myself.

When I awoke, I found hyena dung within the thorn enclosure of my boma. That alone should have warned me that the day carried a curse, for there is no worse omen. Also the breeze, hot and dry and filled with dust, came from the west, and all good winds come from the east.

It was the day that our first immigrants were due to arrive. We had argued long and hard against allowing any newcomers to settle on Kirinyaga, for we were dedicated to the old ways of our people, and we wanted no outside influences corrupting the society that we had created. But our charter clearly stated that any Kikuyu who pledged to obey our laws and made the necessary payments to the Eutopian Council could emigrate from Kenya, and after postponing the inevitable for as long as we could, we finally agreed to accept Thomas Nkobe and his wife.

Of all the candidates for immigration, Nkobe had seemed the best. He had been born in Kenya, had grown up in the shadow of the holy mountain, and after going abroad for his schooling, had returned and run the large farm his family had purchased from one of the last European residents. Most important of all, he was a direct descendant of Jomo Kenyatta, the great Burning Spear of Kenya, who had led us to independence.

I trudged out across the hot, arid savannah to the tiny landing field at Haven to greet our new arrivals, accompanied only by Ndemi, my youthful assistant. Twice buffalo blocked our path, and once Ndemi had to hurl some stones to frighten a hyena away, but eventually we reached our destination, only to discover that the Maintenance ship which was carrying Nkobe and his wife had not yet arrived. I squatted down in the shade of an acacia tree, and a moment later Ndemi crouched down beside me.

“They are late,” he said, peering into the cloudless sky. “Perhaps they will not come at all.”

“They will come,” I said. “The signs all point to it.”

“But they are bad signs, and Nkobe may be a good man.”

“There are many good men,” I replied. “Not all of them belong on Kirinyaga.”

“You are worried, Koriba?” asked Ndemi as a pair of crested cranes walked through the dry, brittle grass.

“I am concerned,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I do not know why he wants to live here.”

“Why shouldn’t he?” asked Ndemi, picking up a dry twig and methodically breaking it into tiny pieces. “Is it not Utopia?”

“There are many different notions of Utopia,” I replied. “Kirinyaga is the Kikuyus’.”

“And Nkobe is a Kikuyu, so this is where he belongs,” said Ndemi decisively.

“I wonder.”

“Why?”

“Because he is almost forty years old. Why did he wait so long to come here?”

“Perhaps he could not afford to come sooner.”

I shook my head. “He comes from a very wealthy family.”

“They have many cattle?” asked Ndemi.

“Many,” I said.

“And goats?”

I nodded.

“Will he bring them with him?”

“No. He will come empty-handed, as we all did.” I paused, frowning. “Why would a man who owned a large farm and had many tractors and men to do his work turn his back on all that he possessed? That is what troubles me.”

“You make it sound like the way he lived on Earth was better,” said Ndemi.

“Not better, just different.”

He paused for a moment. “Koriba, what is a tractor?”

“A machine that does the work of many men in the fields.”

“It sounds truly wonderful,” offered Ndemi.

“It makes deep wounds in the ground and stinks of gasoline,” I said, making no effort to hide my contempt.

We sat in silence for another moment. Then the Maintenance ship came into view, its descent creating a huge cloud of dust and causing a great screeching and squawking by the birds and monkeys in the nearby trees. “Well,” I said, “we shall soon have our answer.”

I remained in the shade until the ship had touched down and Thomas Nkobe and his wife emerged from its interior. He was a tall, well-built man dressed in casual Western clothes; she was slender and graceful, her hair elegantly braided, her khaki slacks and hunting jacket exquisitely tailored.

“Hello!” said Nkobe in English as I approached him. “I was afraid we might have to find our way to the village ourselves.”

“Jambo,” I replied in Swahili. “Welcome to Kirinyaga.”

“Jambo,” he amended, switching to Swahili. “Are you Koinnage?”

“No,” I answered. “Koinnage is our paramount chief. You will live in his village.”

“And you are?”

“I am Koriba,” I said.

“He is the mundumugu,” added Ndemi proudly. “I am Ndemi.” He paused. “Someday I will be a mundumugu too.”

Nkobe smiled down at him. “Pm sure you will.” Suddenly he remembered his wife. “And this is Wanda.”

She stepped forward, smiled, and extended her hand. “A true mundumugu!” she said in heavily-accented Swahili. “I’m thrilled to meet you!”

“I hope you will enjoy your new life on Kirinyaga,” I said, shaking her hand.

“Oh, I’m certain I will,” she replied enthusiastically, as the ship disgorged their baggage and promptly took off again. She looked around at the dry savannah, and saw a trio of maribou storks and a jackal patiently waiting for a hyena to finish gorging itself on the wildebeest calf it had killed earlier in the morning. “I love it already!” She paused, then added confidentially, “I’m really the one who got Tom to agree to come here.”

“Oh?”

She nodded her head. “I just couldn’t stand what Kenya has become. All those factories, all that pollution! Ever since I learned about Kirinyaga, I’ve wanted to move here, to come back to Nature and live the way we were meant to live.” She inhaled deeply. “Smell that air, Tom! It will add ten years to your life.”

“You don’t have to sell me any more,” he said with a smile. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

I turned to Wanda Nkobe. “You yourself are not Kikuyu, are you?”

“I am now,” she replied. “Ever since I married Tom. But to answer your question, no, I was born and raised in Oregon.”

“Oregon?” repeated Ndemi, brushing some flies away from his face with his hand.

“That’s in America,” she explained. She paused. “By the way, why are we speaking Swahili rather than Kikuyu?”

“Kikuyu is a dead language,” I said. “Most of our people no longer know it.”

“I had rather hoped it would still be spoken here,” she said, obviously disappointed. “I’ve been studying it for months.”

“If you had moved to Italy, you would not speak Latin,” I replied. “We still use a few Kikuyu words, just as the Italians use a few Latin words.” She was silent for a moment, then shrugged. “At least I’ll have the opportunity to improve my Swahili.”

“I am surprised that you are willing to forego the amenities of America for Kirinyaga,” I said, studying her closely.

“I was willing years ago,” she answered. “It was Tom who had to be convinced, not me.” She paused. “Besides, I gave up most of those so-called amenities when I left America and moved to Kenya.”

“Even Kenya has certain luxuries,” I noted. “We have no electricity here, no running water, no—”

“We camp out whenever we can,” she said, and I placed a hand on Ndemi’s shoulder before he could chide her for interrupting the mundumugu. “I’m used to roughing it.”

“But you have always had a home to return to.”

She stared at me, an amused smile on her face. “Are you trying to talk me out of moving here?”

“No,” I replied. “But I wish to point out that nothing is immutable. Any member of our society who is unhappy and wishes to leave need only inform Maintenance of the fact and a ship will arrive at Haven an hour later.”

“Not us,” she said. “We’re in for the long haul.”

“The long haul?” I repeated.

“She means that we’re here to stay,” explained Nkobe, putting an arm around his wife’s shoulders.

A hot breeze sent the dust swirling around us.

“I think I should take you to the village,” I said, shielding my eyes. “You are doubtless tired and will wish to rest.”

“Not at all,” said Wanda Nkobe. “This is a brand-new world. I want to look around.” Her gaze fell upon Ndemi, who was staring at her intently. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

“You are very strong and sturdy,” said Ndemi approvingly. “That is good. You will bear many children.”

“I certainly hope not,” she said. “If there’s one thing Kenya has more than enough of, it’s children.”

“This is not Kenya,” said Ndemi.

“I will find other ways to contribute to the society.”

Ndemi studied her for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “I suppose you can carry firewood.”

“I’m glad I meet with your approval,” she said.

“But you will need a new name,” continued Ndemi. “Wanda is a European name.”

“It is just a name,” I said. “Changing it will not make her more of a Kikuyu.”

“I have no objection,” she interjected. “I’m starting a new life; I ought to have a new name.”

I shrugged. “Which name will you take as your own?”

She smiled at Ndemi. “You choose one,” she said.

He furrowed his brow for a long moment, then looked up at her. “My mother’s sister, who died in childbirth last year, was named Mwange, and now there is no one in the village of that name.”

“Then Mwange it shall be,” she said. “Mwange wa Ndemi.”

“But I am not your father,” said Ndemi.

She smiled at him. “You are the father of my new name.”

Ndemi puffed his chest up proudly.

“Well, now that that’s settled,” said Nkobe, “what about our luggage?”

“You will not need it,” I said.

“Yes we will,” said Mwange.

“You were told to bring nothing of Kenya with you.”

“I’ve brought some kikois that I made myself,” she said. “Surely that must be permissible, since I will be expected to weave my own fabrics and make my own clothes on Kirinyaga.”

I considered her explanation for a moment, then nodded my consent. “I will send one of the village children for the bags.”

“It’s not that heavy,” said Nkobe. “I can carry it myself.”

“Kikuyu men do not fetch and carry,” said Ndemi.

“What about Kikuyu women?” asked Mwange, obviously reluctant to leave the luggage behind.

“They carry firewood and grain, not bags of clothing,” responded Ndemi. “Those,” he said, pointing contemptuously toward the two leather bags, “are for children.”

“Then we might as well start walking,” said Mwange. “There are no children here.”

Ndemi beamed with pride and strutted forward.

“Let Ndemi go first,” I said. “His eyes are young and clear. He will be able to see any snakes or hyenas hiding in the tall grass.”

“Do you have poisonous snakes here?” asked Nkobe.

“A few.”

“Why don’t you kill them?”

“Because this is not Kenya,” I replied.

I walked directly behind Ndemi, and Nkobe and Mwange followed us, remarking upon the scenery and the animals to each other. After about half a mile we came to an impala ram standing directly in our path. “Isn’t he beautiful?” whispered Mwange. “Look at the horns on him!”

“I wish I had my camera with me!” said Nkobe.

“We do not permit cameras on Kirinyaga,” I said.

“I know,” said Nkobe. “But to be perfectly honest, I can’t see how something as simple as a camera could be a corrupting influence to your society.”

“To have a camera, one needs film, and one must therefore have a factory that manufactures both cameras and films. To develop the film, one needs chemicals, and then one must find a place to dump those chemicals that haven’t been used. To print the pictures, one needs photographic paper, and we have barely enough wood to burn in our fires.”

I paused. “Kirinyaga supplies us with all of our desires. That is why we came here.”

“Kirinyaga supplies you with all of your needs,” said Mwange. “That, is not quite the same thing.”

Suddenly Ndemi stopped walking and turned to her.

“This is your first day here, so you are to be forgiven your ignorance,” he explained. “But no manamouki may argue with the mundumugu.”

“Manamouki?” she repeated. “What is a manamouki?”

“You are,” said Ndemi.

“I’ve heard that word before,” said Nkobe. “I think it means wife.”

“You are wrong,” I said. “A manamouki is a female.”

“You mean a woman?” asked Mwange.

I shook my head. “Any female property,” I said. “A woman, a cow, a sow, a bitch, a ewe.”

“And Ndemi thinks I’m some kind of property?”

“You are Nkobe’s manamouki,” said Ndemi.

She considered it for a moment, then shrugged with amusement. “What the hell,” she said in English. “If Wanda was only a name, manamouki is only a word. I can live with it.”

“I hope so,” I replied in Swahili, “for you will have to.”

She turned to me. “I know we are the first immigrants to come to Kirinyaga, and that you must have your doubts about us—but this is the life Tve always wanted. I’m going to be the best damned manamouki you ever saw.”

“I hope so,” I said, but I noticed that the wind still blew from the west.

I introduced Nkobe and Mwange to their neighbors, showed them their shamba where they would grow their food, pointed out their six cattle and ten goats and recommended that they lock them in their boma at night to protect them from the hyenas, told them how to reach the river to procure water, and left them at the entrance to their hut. Mwange seemed enthused about everything, and was soon engaged in animated conversation with the women who came by to look at her strange outfit.

“She is very nice,” commented Ndemi as I walked through the fields, blessing the scarecrows. “Perhaps the omens you read were wrong.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

He stared at me. “But you do not think so.”

“No.”

“Well, I like her,” he said.

“That is your right.”

“Do you dislike her, then?”

I paused as I considered my answer.

“No,” I said at last. “I fear her.”

“But she is just a manamouki!” he protested. “She can do no harm.”

“Under the proper circumstances, anything can do harm.”

“I do not believe it,” said Ndemi.

“Do you doubt your mundumugu’s word?” I asked.

“No,” he said uncomfortably. “If you say something, then it must be true. But I cannot understand how.”

I smiled wryly. “That is because you are not yet a mundumugu.”

He stopped and pointed to a spot some three hundred yards away, where a group of impala does were grazing.

“Can even they do harm?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But how?” he asked, frowning. “When danger appears, they do not confront it, but run away from it. Ngai has not blessed them with horns, so they cannot defend themselves. They are not large enough to destroy our crops. They cannot even kick an enemy, as can the zebra. I do not understand.”

“I shall tell you the tale of the Ugly Buffalo, and then you will understand,” I said.

Ndemi smiled happily, for he loved stories above all things, and I led him to the shade of a thorn tree, where we both squatted down, facing each other.

“One day a cow buffalo was wandering through the savannah,” I began. “The hyenas had recently taken her first calf, and she was very sad. Then she came upon a newborn impala, whose mother had been killed by hyenas that very morning.

“ ‘I would like to take you home with me,’ said the buffalo, Tor I am very lonely, and have much love in my heart. But you are not a buffalo.’

“ ‘I, too, am very lonely,’ said the impala. ‘And if you leave me here, alone and unprotected, I surely will not survive the night.’

“ ‘There is a problem,’ said the buffalo. ‘You are an impala, and we are buffalo. You do not belong with us.’

“ ‘I will become the best buffalo of all,’ promised the impala. ‘I will eat what you eat, drink what you drink, go where you go.’

“ ‘How can you become a buffalo? You cannot even grow horns.’

“ ‘Then I will wear the branches of a tree upon my head.’

“ ‘You do not wallow in the mud to protect your skin from parasites,’ noted the buffalo.

“ ‘Take me home with you and I will cover myself with more mud than any other buffalo,’ said the impala.

“For every objection the buffalo raised, the impala had an answer, and finally the buffalo agreed to take the impala back with her. Most of the members of the herd thought that the impala was the ugliest buffalo they had ever seen”—Ndemi chuckled at that—“but because the impala tried so hard to act like a buffalo, they allowed her to remain.

“Then one day a number of young buffalo were grazing some distance from the herd, and they came to a deep mud wallow that blocked their way.

“ ‘We must return to the herd,’ said one of the young buffalo.

“ ‘Why?’ asked the impala. ‘There is fresh grass on the other side of the wallow.’

“ ‘Because we have been warned that a deep wallow such as this can suck us down beneath the surface and kill us.’

“ ‘I do not believe it,’ said the impala, and, bolder than her companions, she walked out to the center of the mud wallow.

“ ‘You see?’ she said. ‘I have not been sucked beneath the surface. It is perfectly safe.’

“Soon three of the young buffalo ventured out across the mud wallow, and each in turn was sucked beneath the surface and drowned.

“ ‘It is the ugly buffalo’s fault,’ said the king of the herd. ‘It was she ‘who told them to cross the mud wallow.’

“ ‘But she meant no harm,’ said her foster mother. ‘And what she told them was true: the wallow was safe for her. All she wants is to live with the herd and be a buffalo; please do not punish her.”

“The king was blessed with more generosity than wisdom, and so he forgave the ugly buffalo.

“Then, a week later, the ugly buffalo, who could leap as high as a tall bush, jumped up in the air and saw a pack of hyenas lurking in the grass. She waited until they were almost close enough to catch her, and then cried out a warning. All the buffalo began running, but the hyenas were able to catch the ugly buffalo’s foster mother, and they pulled her down and killed her.

“Most of the other buffalo were grateful to the ugly buffalo for warning them, but during the intervening week there had been a new king, and this one was wiser than the previous one.

“ ‘It is the ugly buffalo’s fault,’ he said.

“ ‘How can it be her fault?’ asked one of the older buffalo. ‘It was she who warned us of the hyenas.’

“ ‘But she only warned you when it was too late,’ said the king. ‘Had she warned you when she first saw the hyenas, her mother would still be among us. But she forgot that we cannot run as fast as she can, and so her mother is dead.’

“And the new king, though his heart was sad, decreed that the ugly buffalo must leave the herd, for there is a great difference between being a buffalo and wanting to be a buffalo.”

I leaned back against the tree, my story completed.

“Did the ugly buffalo survive?” asked Ndemi.

I shrugged and brushed a crawling insect from my forearm. “That is another story.”

“She meant no harm.”

“But she caused harm nonetheless.”

Ndemi traced patterns in the dirt with his finger as he considered my answer, then looked up at me. “But if she had not been with the herd, the hyenas would have killed her mother anyway.”

“Perhaps.”

“Then it was not her fault.”

“If I fall asleep against this tree, and you see a black mamba slithering through the grass toward me, and you make no attempt to wake me, and the mamba kills me, would you be to blame for my death?” I asked. “Yes.”

“Even though it would certainly have killed me had you not been here?”

Ndemi frowned. “It is a difficult problem.”

“Yes, it is.”

“The mud wallow was much easier,” he said. “That was surely the ugly buffalo’s fault, for without her urging, the other buffalo would never have entered it.”

“That is true,” I said.

Ndemi remained motionless for a few moments, still wrestling with the nuances of the story.

“You are saying that there are many different ways to cause harm,” he announced.

“Yes.”

“And that it takes wisdom to understand who is to blame, for the foolish king did not recognize the harm of the ugly buffalo’s action, while the wise king knew that she was to blame for her inaction.”

I nodded my head.

“I see,” said Ndemi.

“And what has this to do with the manamouki?” I asked.

He paused again. “If harm comes to the village, you must use your wisdom to decide whether Mwange, who wants nothing more than to be a Kikuyu, is responsible for it.”

“That is correct,” I said, getting to my feet.

“But I still do not know what harm she can do.”

“Neither do I,” I answered.

“Will you know it when you see it?” he asked. “Or will it seem like a good deed, such as warning the herd that hyenas are near?”

I made no reply.

“Why are you silent, Koriba?” asked Ndemi at last.

I sighed heavily. “Because there are some questions that even a mundumugu cannot answer.”

Ndemi was waiting for me, as usual, when I emerged from my hut five mornings later.

“Jambo, Koriba,” he said.

I grunted a greeting and walked over to the fire that he had built, sitting cross-legged next to it until it removed the chill from my aging bones.

“What is today’s lesson?” he asked at last.

“Today I will teach you how to ask Ngai for a fruitful harvest,” I answered.

“But we did that last week.”

“And we will do it next week, and many more weeks as well,” I answered.

“When will I learn how to make ointments to cure the sick, or how to turn an enemy into an insect so that I may step on him?”

“When you are older,” I said.

“I am already old.”

“And more mature.”

“How will you know when I am more mature?” he persisted.

“I will know because you will have gone an entire month without asking about ointments or magic, for patience is one of the most important virtues a mundumugu can possess.” I got to my feet. “Now take my gourds to the river and fill them with water,” I said, indicating two empty water gourds.

“Yes, Koriba,” he said dejectedly.

While I was waiting for him, I went into my hut, activated my computer, and instructed Maintenance to make a minor orbital adjustment that would bring rain and cooler air to the western plains.

This done, I slung my pouch around my neck and went back out into my boma to see if Ndemi had returned, but instead of my youthful apprentice, I found Wambu, Koinnage’s senior wife, waiting for me, bristling with barely controlled fury.

“Jambo, Wambu,” I said.

“Jambo, Koriba,” she replied.

“You wish to speak to me?”

She nodded. “It is about the Kenyan woman.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” said Wambu. “You must make her leave!”

“What has Mwange done?” I asked.

“I am the senior wife of the paramount chief, am I not?” demanded Wambu.

“That is true.”

“She does not treat me with the respect that is my due.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“In all ways!”

“For example?”

“Her khanga is much more beautiful than mine. The colors are brighter, the designs more intricate, the fabric softer.”

“She wove her khanga on her own loom, in the old way,” I said.

“What difference does that make?” snapped Wambu.

I frowned. “Do you wish me to make her give you the khanga?” I asked, trying to understand her rage.

“No!”

“Then I do not understand,” I said.

“You are no different than Koinnage!” she said, obviously frustrated that I could not comprehend her complaint. “You may be a mundumugu, but you are still a man!”

“Perhaps if you told me more,” I suggested.

“Kibo was as silly as a child,” she said, referring to Koinnage’s youngest wife, “but I was training her to be a good wife. Now she wants to be like the Kenyan woman.”

“But the Kenyan woman,” I said, using her terminology, “wants to be like you.”

“She cannot be like me!” Wambu practically shouted at me. “I am Koinnage’s senior wife!”

“I mean that she wants to be a member of the village.”

“Impossible!” scoffed Wambu. “She speaks of many strange things.”

“Such as?”

“It does not matter! You must make her leave!”

“For wearing a pretty khanga and making a good impression on Kibo?” I said.

“Bah!” she snapped. “You are just like Koinnage! You pretend not to understand, but you know she must go!”

“I truly do not understand,” I said.

“You are my mundumugu, not hers. I will pay you two fat goats to place a thahu on her.”

“I will not place a curse on Mwange for the reasons you gave me,” I said firmly.

She glared at me for a long moment, then spat on the ground, turned on her heel and walked back down the winding path to the village, muttering furiously to herself, practically knocking Ndemi down as he returned with my water gourds.

I spent the next two hours instructing Ndemi in the harvest prayer, then told him to go into the village and bring Mwange back. An hour later Mwange, resplendent in her khanga, climbed up my hill, accompanied by Ndemi, and entered my boma.

“Jambo,” I greeted her.

“Jambo, Koriba,” she replied. “Ndemi says that you wish to speak to me.”

I nodded. “That is true.”

“The other women seemed to think I should be frightened.”

“I cannot imagine why,” I said.

“Perhaps it is because you can call down the lightning, and change hyenas into insects, and kill your enemies from miles away,” suggested Ndemi helpfully.

“Perhaps,” I said.

“Why have you sent for me?” asked Mwange.

I paused for a moment, trying to think of how best to approach the subject. “There is a problem with your clothing,” I said at last.

“But I am wearing a khanga that I wove on my own loom,” she said, obviously puzzled.

“I know,” I responded. “But the quality of the fabric and the subtlety of the colors, have caused a certain . . .” I searched for the proper word. “Resentment?” she suggested.

“Precisely,” I answered, grateful that she so quickly comprehended the situation. “I think it would be best if you were to weave some less colorful garments.”

I half-expected her to protest, but she surprised me by agreeing immediately.

“Certainly,” she said. “I have no wish to offend my neighbors. May I ask who objected to my khanga?”

“Why?”

“I’d like to make her a present of it.”

“It was Wambu,” I said.

“I should have realized the effect my clothing would have. I am truly sorry, Koriba.”

“Anyone may make a mistake,” I said. “As long as it is corrected, no lasting harm will be done.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said sincerely.

“He is the mundumugu,” said Ndemi. “He is always right.”

“I don’t want the women to be resentful of me,” continued Mwange. “Perhaps I could find some way to show my good intentions.” She paused. “What if I were to offer to teach them to speak Kikuyu?”

“No manamouki may be a teacher,” I explained. “Only the chiefs and the mundumugu may instruct our people.”

“That’s not very efficient,” she said. “It may very well be that someone besides yourself and the chiefs has something to offer.”

“It is possible,” I agreed. “Now let me ask you a question.”

“What is it?”

“Did you come to Kirinyaga to be efficient?”

She sighed. “No,” she admitted. She paused for a moment. “Is there anything else?”

“No.”

“Then I think I’d better go back and begin weaving my new fabric.”

I nodded my approval, and she walked back down the long, winding path to the village.

“When I become mundumugu,” said Ndemi, watching her retreating figure, “I will not allow any manamoukis to argue with me:’

“A mundumugu must also show understanding,” I said. “Mwange is new here, and has much to learn.”

“About Kirinyaga?”

I shook my head. “About manamoukis.”

Life proceeded smoothly and uneventfully for almost six weeks, until just after the short rains. Then one morning, just as I was preparing to go down into the village to bless the scarecrows, three of the women came up the path to my boma.

There was Sabo, the widow of old Kadamu, and Bori, the second wife of Sabana, and Wambu.

“We must speak with you, mundumugu,” said Wambu.

I sat down, cross-legged, in front of my hut, and waited for them to seat themselves opposite me.

“You may speak,” I said.

“It is about the Kenyan woman,” said Wambu.

“Oh?” I said. “I thought the problem was solved.”

“It is not.”

“Did she not present you with her khanga as a gift?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“You are not wearing it,” I noted.

“It does not fit,” said Wambu.

“It is only a piece of cloth,” I said. “How can it not fit?”

“It does not fit,” she repeated adamantly.

I shrugged. “What is this new problem?”

“She flaunts the traditions of the Kikuyu,” said Wambu.

I turned to the other women. “Is this true?” I asked.

Sabo nodded. “She is a married woman, and she has not shaved her head.”

“And she keeps flowers in her hut,” added Bori.

“It is not the custom for Kenyan women to shave their heads,” I replied. “I will instruct her to do so. As for the flowers, they are not in violation of our laws.”

“But why does she keep them?” persisted Bori.

“Perhaps she thinks they are pleasing to the eye,” I suggested.

“But now my daughter wants to grow flowers, and she answers with disrespect when I tell it her is more important to grow food to eat.”

“And now the Kenyan woman has made a throne for her husband, Nkobe,” put in Sabo.

“A throne?” I repeated.

“She put a back and arms on his sitting stool,” said Sabo. “What man besides a chief sits upon a throne? Does she think Nkobe will replace Koinnage?”

“Never!” snarled Wambu.

“And she has made another throne for herself,” continued Sabo. “Even Wambu does not sit atop a throne.”

“These are not thrones, but chairs,” I said.

“Why can she not use stools, like all the other members of the village?” demanded Sabu.

“I think she is a witch,” said Wambu.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Just look at her,” said Wambu. “She has seen the long rains come and go thirty-five times, and yet her back is not bent, and her skin is not wrinkled, and she has all her teeth.”

“Her vegetables grow better than ours,” added Sabo, “and yet she spends less time planting and tending to them than we do.” She paused. “I think she must be a witch.”

“And although she carries with her the worst of all thahus, that of barrenness, she acts as if she is not cursed at all,” said Bori.

“And her new garments are still more beautiful than ours,” muttered Sabo sullenly.

“That is true,” agreed Bori. “Now Sabana is displeased with me because his kikoi is not so bright and soft as Nkobe’s.”

“And my daughters all want thrones instead of sitting stools,” added Sabo. “I tell them that we have scarcely enough wood for the fire, and they say that this is more important. She has turned their heads. They no longer respect their elders.”

“The young women all listen to her, as if she were the wife of a chief instead of a barren manamouki,” complained Wambu. “You must send her away, Koriba.”

“Are you giving me an order, Wambu?” I asked softly, and the other two women immediately fell silent.

“She is an evil witch, and she must go,” insisted Wambu, her outrage overcoming her fear of disobeying her mundumugu.

“She is not a witch,” I said, “for if she were, then I, your mundumugu, would certainly know it. She is just a manamouki who is trying to learn our ways, and who, as you note, carries the terrible thahu of barrenness with her.”

“If she is less than a witch, she is still more than a manamouki,” said Sabo.

“More in what way?” I asked.

“Just more,” she answered with a sullen expression.

Which totally summed up the problem.

“I will speak to her again,” I said.

“And you will make her shave her head?” demanded Wambu.

“Yes.”

“And remove the flowers from her hut?”

“I will discuss it.”

“Perhaps you can tell Nkobe to beat her from time to time,” added Sabo. “Then she would not act so much like a chiefs wife.”

“I feel very sorry for him,” said Bori.

“For Nkobe?” I asked.

Bori nodded. “To be cursed with such a wife, and further, to have no children.”

“He is a good man,” agreed Sabo. “He deserves better than the Kenyan woman.”

“It is my understanding that he is perfectly happy with Mwange,” I said.

“That is all the more reason to pity him, for being so foolish,” said Wambu.

“Have you come here to talk about Mwange or Nkobe?” I asked.

“We have said what we have come to say,” replied Wambu, getting to her feet. “You must do something, mundumugu.”

“I will look into the matter,” I said.

She walked down the path to the village, followed by Sabo. Bori, her back bent from carrying firewood all her life, her stomach distended from producing three sons and five daughters, all but nine of her teeth missing, her legs permanently bowed from some childhood disease, Bori, who had seen but thirty-four long rains, stood before me for a moment.

“She really is a witch, Koriba,” she said. “You have only to look at her to know it.”

Then she, too, left my hill and returned to the village.

Once again I summoned Mwange to my boma.

She came up the path with the graceful stride of a young girl, lithe and lean and filled with energy.

“How old are you, Mwange?” I asked as she approached me.

“Thirty-eight,” she replied. “I usually tell people that I’m thirty-five, though,” she added with a smile. She stood still for a moment. “Is that why you asked me to come here? To talk about my age?”

“No,” I said. “Sit down, Mwange.”

She seated herself on the dirt by the ashes of my morning fire, and I squatted across from her.

“How are you adjusting to your new life on Kirinyaga?” I asked at last. “Very well,” she said enthusiastically. “I’ve made many friends, and I find that I don’t miss the amenities of Kenya at all.”

“Then you are happy here?”

“Very.”

“Tell me about your friends.”

“Well, my closest friend is Kibo, Koinnage’s youngest wife, and I have helped Sumi and Kalena with their gardens, and—”

“Have you no friends among the older women?” I interrupted.

“Not really,” she admitted.

“Why should that be?” I asked. “They are women of your own age.”

“We don’t seem to have anything to talk about.”

“Do you find them unfriendly?” I asked.

She considered the question. “Ndemi’s mother has always been very kind to me. The others could be a little friendlier, I suppose, but I imagine that’s just because most of them are senior wives and are very busy running their households.”

“Did it ever occur to you that there could be some other reason why they are not friendly?” I suggested.

“What are you getting at?” she asked, suddenly alert.

“There is a problem,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Some of the older women resent your presence.”

“Because I’m an immigrant?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No.”

“Then why?” she persisted, genuinely puzzled.

“It is because we have a very rigid social order here, and you have not yet fit in.”

“I thought I was fitting in very well,” she said defensively.

“You were mistaken.”

“Give me an example.”

I looked at her. “You know that Kikuyu wives must shave their heads, and yet you have not done so.”

She sighed and touched her hair. “I know,” she replied. “I’ve been meaning to, but I’m very fond of it. I’ll shave my head tonight.” She seemed visibly relieved. “Is that what this is all about?”

“No,” I said. “That is merely an outward sign of the problem.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“It is difficult to explain,” I said. “Your khangas are more pleasing to the eye than theirs. Your garden grows better. You are as old as Wambu, but appear younger than her daughters. In their minds, these things set you apart from them and make you more than a manamouki. The corollary, which they have not yet voiced but must surely feel, is that if you are somehow more, then this makes them somehow less.”

“What do you expect me to do?” she asked. “Wear rags and let my gardens go to seed?”

“No,” I said. “I do not expect that.”

“Then what can I do?” she continued. “You’re telling me that they feel threatened because I am competent.” She paused. “You are a competent man, Koriba. You have been schooled in Europe and America, you can read and write and work a computer. And yet I notice that you feel no need to hide your talents.”

“I am a mundumugu,” I said. “I live alone on my hill, removed from the village, and I am viewed with awe and fear by my people. This is the function of a mundumugu. It is not the function of a manamouki, who must live in the village and find her place in the social order of the tribe.”

“That’s what I am trying to do,” she said in frustration.

“Do not try so hard.”

“If you’re not telling me to be incompetent, then I still don’t understand.”

“One does not fit in by being different,” I said. “For example, I know that you bring flowers into your house. Doubtless they are fragrant and pleasing to the eye, but no other woman in the village decorates her hut with flowers.”

“That’s not true,” she said defensively. “Sumi does.”

“If so, then she does it because you do it,” I pointed out. “Can you see that this is even more threatening to the older women than if you alone kept flowers, for it challenges their authority?”

She stared at me, trying to comprehend.

“They have spent their entire lives achieving their positions within the tribe,” I continued, “and now you have come here and taken a position entirely outside of their order. We have a new world to populate: You are barren, but far from feeling shame or grief, you act as though this is not a terrible thahu. Such an attitude is contrary to their experience, just as decorating your house with flowers or creating khangas with intricate patterns is contrary to their experience, and thus they feel threatened.”

“I still don’t see what I can do about it,” she protested. “I gave my original khangas to Wambu, but she refuses to wear them. And I have offered to show Bori how to get a greater yield from her gardens, but she won’t listen.”

“Of course not,” I replied. “Senior wives will not accept advice from a manamouki, any more than a chief would accept advice from a newly circumcised young man. You must simply”—here I switched to English, for there is no comparable term in Swahili—“maintain a low profile. If you do so, in time the problems will go away.”

She paused for a moment, considering what I had told her.

“I’ll try,” she said at last.

“And if you must do something that will call attention to yourself,” I continued, reverting to Swahili, “try to do it in a way that will not offend.”

“I didn’t even know I was offending,” she said. “How am I to avoid it if I’m calling attention to myself?”

“There are ways,” I answered. “Take, for example, the chair that you built.”

“Tom has had back spasms for years,” she said. “I built the chair because he couldn’t get enough support from a stool. Am I supposed to let my husband suffer because some of the women don’t believe in chairs?”

“No,” I said. “But you can tell the younger women that Nkobe ordered you to build the chair, and thus the stigma will not be upon you.”

“Then it will be upon him.”

I shook my head. “Men have far greater leeway here than women. There will be no stigma upon him for ordering his manamouki to see to his comfort.” I paused long enough for the thought to sink in. “Do you understand?”

She sighed. “Yes.”

“And you will do as I suggest?”

“If I’m to live in peace with my neighbors, I suppose I must.”

“There is always an alternative,” I said.

She shook her head vigorously. “I’ve dreamed of a place like this all my life, and nobody is going to make me leave it now that I’m here. I’ll do whatever I have to do.”

“Good,” I said, getting to my feet to signify that the interview was over. “Then the problem will soon be solved.”

But, of course, it wasn’t.

I spent the next two weeks visiting a neighboring village whose chief had died quite suddenly. He had no sons and no brothers, and the line of succession was in doubt. I listened to all the applicants to the throne, discussed the situation with the Council of Elders until there was unanimity, presided at the ceremony that installed the new chief in his ceremonial robes and headdress, and finally returned to my own village.

As I climbed the path to my boma, I saw a female figure sitting just outside my hut. I drew closer and saw that it was Shima, Ndemi’s mother. “Jambo, Koriba,” she said.

“Jambo, Shima,” I responded.

“You are well, I trust.”

“As well as an old man can feel after walking for most of the day,” I responded, sitting down opposite her. I looked around my boma. “I do not see Ndemi.”

“I sent him to the village for the afternoon, because I wished to speak to you alone.”

“Does this concern Ndemi?” I asked.

She shook her head. “It is about Mwange.”

I sighed wearily. “Proceed.”

“I am not like the other women, Koriba,” she began. “I have always been good to the Mwange.”

“So she has told me.”

“Her ways do not bother me,” she continued. “After all, someday I shall be the mother of the mundumugu, and while there can be many senior wives, there can be only one mundumugu and one mundumugu’s mother.”

“This is true,” I said, waiting for her to get to the point of her visit. “Therefore, I have befriended Mwange, and have shown her many kindnesses, and she has responded in kind.”

“I am pleased to hear it.”

“And because I have befriended her,” continued Shima, “I have felt great compassion for her, because as you know she carries the thahu of barrenness. And it seemed to me that, since Nkobe is such a wealthy man, that he should take another wife to help Mwange with the work on the shamba and to produce sons and daughters.” She paused. “My daughter Shuni, as you know, will be circumcised before the short rains come, and so I approached Mwange as a friend, and as the mother of the future mundumugu, to suggest that Nkobe pay the bride price for Shuni.” Here she paused again, and frowned. “She got very mad and yelled at me. You must speak to her, Koriba. A rich man like Nkobe should not be forced to live with only a barren wife.”

“Why do you keep calling Nkobe a rich man?” I asked. “His shamba is small, and he has only six cattle.”

“His family is rich,” she stated. “Ndemi told me that they have many men and machines to do their planting and harvesting.”

Thank you for nothing, little Ndemi, I thought irritably. Aloud I said: “All that is back on Earth. Here Nkobe is a poor man.”

“Even if he is poor,” said Shima, “he will not remain poor, for grain and vegetables grow for Mwange as for no one else, as if this is Ngai’s blessing to make up for His thahu of barrenness.” She stared at me. “You must talk to her, Koriba. This would be a good thing. Shuni is very obedient and hard-working, and she already likes Mwange very much. We will not demand a large bride price, for we know that the mundumugu’s family will never go hungry.”

“Why did you not wait for Nkobe to approach you, as is the custom?” I asked.

“I thought if I explained my idea to Mwange, she would see the wisdom of it and speak to Nkobe herself, for he listens to her more than most husbands listen to their wives, and surely the thought of a fertile woman who would share her chores would appeal to her.”

“Well, you have presented your idea to her,” I said. “Now it is up to Nkobe to make the offer or choose not to.”

“But she says that she will permit him to marry no one else,” answered Shima, more puzzled than outraged, “as if a manamouki could stop her husband from buying another wife. She is ignorant of our ways, Koriba, and for this reason you must speak with her. You must point out that she should be grateful to have another woman with whom to speak and share the work, and she should not want Nkobe to die without having fathered any children just because she has been cursed.” She hesitated for a moment, and then concluded: “And you should remind her that Shuni will someday be sister to the mundumugu.”

“I am glad that you are so concerned about Mwange’s future,” I said at last.

She caught the trace of sarcasm in my voice.

“Is it so wrong to be concerned about my little Shuni as well?” she demanded.

“No,” I admitted. “No, it is not wrong.”

“Oh!” said Shima, as if she had suddenly remembered something important. “When you speak to Mwange, remind her that she is named for my sister.”

“I do not intend to speak to Mwange at all.”

“Oh?”

“No,” I said. “As you yourself pointed out, this is not her concern. I will speak to Nkobe.”

“And you will mention Shuni?” she persisted.

“I will speak to Nkobe,” I answered noncommittally.

She got to her feet and prepared to leave.

“You can do me a favor, Shima,” I said.

“Oh?”

I nodded. “Have Ndemi come to my boma immediately. I have many tasks for him to do here.”

“How can you be sure, since you have only just returned?”

“I am sure,” I said adamantly.

She looked across my boma, still the protective mother. “I can see no. chores that have been left undone.”

“Then I will find some,” I said.

I went down to the village in the afternoon, for old Siboki needed ointments to keep the pain from his joints, and Koinnage had asked me to help him settle a dispute between Njoro and Sangora concerning the ownership of a calf that their jointly owned cow had just produced.

When I had finished my business there, I placed charms on some of the scarecrows, and then, in midafternoon, I walked over to Nkobe’s shamba, where I found him herding his cattle.

“Jambo, Koriba!” he greeted me, waving his hand.

“Jambo, Nkobe,” I replied, approaching him.

“Would you like to come into my hut for some pombe?” he offered. “Mwange just brewed it yesterday.”

“Thank you for the offer, but I do not care to drink warm pombe on a hot afternoon like this.”

“It’s actually quite cool,” he said. “She buries the gourd in the ground to keep it that way.”

“Then I will have some,” I acquiesced, falling into step beside him as he drove his cattle toward his boma.

Mwange was waiting for us, and she invited us into the cool interior of the hut and poured our pombe for us, then began to leave, for manamoukis do not listen to the conversation of men.

“Stay here, Mwange,” I said.

“You’re sure?” she said.

“Yes.”

She shrugged and sat on the floor, with her back propped up against a wall of the hut.

“What brings you here, Koriba?” asked Nkobe, sitting gingerly upon his chair, and I could see that his back was troubling him. “You have not paid us a visit before.”

“The mundumugu rarely visits those who are healthy enough to visit him,” I replied.

“Then this is a special occasion,” said Nkobe.

“Yes,” I replied, sipping my pombe. “This is a special occasion.”

“What is it this time?” asked Mwange warily.

“What do you mean, This time?” said Nkobe sharply.

“There have been some minor problems,” I answered, “none of which concern you.”

“Anything that affects Mwange concerns me,” responded Nkobe. “I am not blind or deaf, Koriba. I know that the older women have refused to accept her—and I’m getting more than a little bit angry about it. She has gone out of her way to fit in here, and has met them more than halfway.”

“I did not come here to discuss Mwange with you,” I said.

“Oh?” he said suspiciously.

“Are you saying we have a problem that concerns him?” demanded Mwange.

“It concerns both of you,” I replied. “That is why I have come here.”

“All right, Koriba—what is it?” said Nkobe.

“You have made a good effort to fit into the community and to live as a Kikuyu, Nkobe,” I said. “And yet there is one more thing that you will be expected to do, and it is this that I have come to discuss with you.”

“And what is that?”

“Sooner or later, you will be expected to take another wife.”

“I knew it!” said Mwange.

“I’m very happy with the wife I have,” said Nkobe with unconcealed hostility.

“That may be,” I said, draining the last of my pombe, “but you have no children, and as Mwange gets older she will need someone to help her with her duties.”

“Now you listen to me!” snapped Nkobe. “I came here because I thought it would make Mwange happy. So far she’s been ostracized and shunned and gossiped about, and now you’re telling me that I have to take another wife into my house so that Mwange can keep being spat on by the other women? We don’t need this, Koriba! I was just as happy on my farm in Kenya. I can go back there any time I want.”

“If that is the way you feel, then perhaps you should return to Kenya,” I said.

“Tom,” said Mwange, staring at him, and he fell silent.

“It is true that you do not have to stay,” I continued. “But you are Kikuyus, living on a Kikuyu world, and if you do stay, you will be expected to act as Kikuyus.”

“There’s no law that says a Kikuyu man must take a second wife,” said Nkobe sullenly.

“No, there is no such law,” I admitted. “Nor is there a law that says a Kikuyu man must father children. But these are our traditions, and you will be expected to abide by them.”

“To hell with them!” he muttered in English.

Mwange laid a restraining hand on his arm. “There is a coterie of young warriors who live beyond the forest,” she said. “Why don’t they marry some of the young women? Why should the men of the village monopolize them all?”

“They cannot afford wives,” I said. “That is why they live alone.”

“That’s their problem,” said Nkobe.

“I’ve made many sacrifices in the name of communal harmony,” said Mwange, “but this is asking too much, Koriba. We are happy just the way we are, and we intend to stay this way.”

“You will not remain happy.”

“What does that mean?” she demanded.

“Next month is the circumcision ritual,” I said. “When it is over, there will be many girls eligible for marriage, and since you are barren, it is only reasonable to suppose that a number of their families will suggest that Nkobe pay the bride price for their daughters. He may refuse once, he may refuse twice, but if he continues to refuse, he will offend most of the village. They will assume that because he comes from Kenya he feels their women are not good enough for him, and they will be further offended by the fact that he refuses to have children with which to populate our empty planet.”

“Then I’ll explain my reasons to them,” said Nkobe.

“They will not understand,” I answered.

“No, they will not understand,” agreed Mwange unhappily.

“Then they will have to learn to live with it,” said Nkobe firmly.

“And you will have to learn to live with silence and animosity,” I said. “Is this the life you envisioned when you came to Kirinyaga?”

“Of course not!” snapped Nkobe. “But nothing can make me—”

“We will think about it, Koriba,” interrupted Mwange.

Nkobe turned to his wife, stunned. “What are you saying?”

“I am saying that we will think about it,” repeated Mwange.

“That is all that I ask,” I said, getting to my feet and walking to the door of the hut.

“You demand a lot, Koriba,” said Mwange bitterly.

“I demand nothing,” I replied. “I merely suggest.”

“Coming from the mundumugu, is there a difference?”

I did not answer her, because in truth there was no difference whatsoever.

“You seem unhappy, Koriba,” said Ndemi.

He had just finished feeding my chickens and my goats, and now he sat down beside me in the shade of my acacia tree.

“I am,” I said.

“Mwange,” he said, nodding his head.

“Mwange,” I agreed.

Two weeks had passed since I had visited her and Nkobe.

“I saw her this morning, when I went to the river to fill your gourds,” said Ndemi. “She, too, seems unhappy.”

“She is,” I said. “And there is nothing that I can do about it.”

“But you are the mundumugu.”

“I know.”

“You are the most powerful of men,” continued Ndemi. “Surely you can put an end to her sorrow.”

I sighed. “The mundumugu is both the most powerful and the weakest of men. In Mwange’s case, I am the weakest.”

“I do not understand.”

“The mundumugu is the most powerful of men when it comes to interpreting the law,” I said. “But he is also the weakest of men, for it is he, of all men, who must be bound by that law, no matter what else happens.” I paused. “I should allow her to be what she can be, instead of being merely a manamouki. And failing that, I should make her leave Kirinyaga and return to Kenya.” I sighed again. “But she must behave like a manamouki if she is to have a life here, and she has broken no law that would allow me to force her to leave.”

Ndemi frowned. “Being a mundumugu can be more difficult than I thought.”

I smiled at him and placed a hand upon his head. “Tomorrow I will begin to teach you to make the ointments that cure the sick.”

“Really?” he said, his face brightening.

I nodded. “Your last statement tells me that you are no longer a child.”

“I have not been a child for many rains,” he protested.

“Do not say any more,” I told him with a wry smile, “or we will do more harvest prayers instead.”

He immediately fell silent, and I looked out across the distant savannah, where a swirling tower of dust raced across the arid plain, and wondered, for perhaps the thousandth time, what to do about Mwange.

How long I sat thus, motionless, I do not know, but eventually I felt Ndemi tugging at the blanket I had wrapped around my shoulders.

“Women,” he whispered.

“What?” I said, not comprehending.

“From the village,” he said, gesturing toward the path that led to my boma.

I looked where he indicated and saw four of the village women approaching. There was Wambu, and Sabo, and Bori, and with them this time was Morina, the second wife of Kimoda.

“Should I leave?” asked Ndemi.

I shook my head. “If you are to become a mundumugu, it is time you started listening to a mundumugu’s problems.”

The four women stopped perhaps ten feet away from me.

“Jambo,” I said, staring at them.

“The Kenyan witch must leave!” said Wambu.

“We have been through this before,” I said.

“But now she has broken the law,” said Wambu.

“Oh?” I said. “In what way?”

Wambu grabbed Morina by the arm and shoved her even closer to me. “Tell him,” she said triumphantly.

“She has bewitched my daughter,” said Morina, obviously uneasy in my presence.

“How has Mwange bewitched your daughter?” I asked.

“My Muri was a good, obedient child,” said Morina. “She always helped me grind the grain, and she dutifully cared for her two younger brothers when I was working in the fields, and she never left the thorn gate open at night so that hyenas could enter our boma and kill our goats and cattle.” She paused, and I could see that she was trying very hard not to cry. “All she could talk about since the last long rains was her forthcoming circumcision ceremony, and who she hoped would pay the bride price for her. She was a perfect daughter, a daughter any mother would be proud of.” Now a tear trickled down her cheek. “And then the Kenyan woman came, and Muri spent her time with her, and now—” suddenly the single tear became a veritable flood “—now she tells me that she refuses to be circumcised. She will never marry and she will die an old, barren woman!”

Morina could speak no more, and began beating her breasts with her clenched fists.

“That is not all,” added Wambu. “The reason Muri does not wish to be circumcised is because the Kenyan woman herself has not been circumcised. And yet the Kenyan woman has married a Kikuyu man, and has tried to live among us as his manamouki.” She glared at me. “She has broken the law, Koriba! We must cast her out!”

“I am the mundumugu,” I replied sternly. “I will decide what must be done.”

“You know what must be done!” said Wambu furiously.

“That is all,” I said. “I will hear no more.”

Wambu glared at me, but did not dare to disobey me, and finally, turning on her heel, she stalked back down the path to the village, followed by Sabo and the still-wailing Morina.

Bori stood where she was for an extra moment, then turned to me.

“It is as I told you before, Koriba,” she said, almost apologetically. “She really is a witch.”

Then she, too, began walking back to the village.

“What will you do, Koriba?” asked Ndemi.

“The law is clear,” I said wearily. “No uncircumcised woman may live with a Kikuyu man as his wife.”

“Then you will make her leave Kirinyaga?”

“I will offer her a choice,” I said, “and I will hope that she chooses to leave.”

“It is too bad,” said Ndemi. “She has tried very hard to be a good manamouki.”

“I know,” I said.

“Then why is Ngai visiting her with such unhappiness?”

“Because sometimes trying is not enough.”

We stood at Haven—Mwange, Nkobe, and I—awaiting the Maintenance ship’s arrival.

“I am truly sorry that things did not work out,” I said sincerely.

Nkobe glared at me, but said nothing.

“It didn’t have to end this way,” said Mwange bitterly.

“We had no choice,” I said. “If we are to create our Utopia here on Kirinyaga, we must be bound by its rules.”

“The fact that a rule exists does not make it right, Koriba,” she said. “I gave up almost everything to live here, but I will not let them mutilate me in the name of some foolish custom.”

“Without our traditions, we are not Kikuyu, but only Kenyans who live on another world,” I pointed out.

“There is a difference between tradition and stagnation, Koriba,” she said. “If you stifle every variation in taste and behavior in the name of the former, you achieve only the latter.” She paused. “I would have been a good member of the community.”

“But a poor manamouki,” I said. “The leopard may be a stealthy hunter and fearsome killer, but he does not belong among a pride of lions.”

“Lions and leopards have been extinct for a long time, Koriba,” she said. “We are talking about human beings, not animals, and no matter how many rules you make and no matter how many traditions you invoke, you cannot make all human beings think and feel and act alike.”

“It’s coming,” announced Nkobe as the Maintenance ship broke through the thin cloud cover.

“Kwaheri, Nkobe,” I said, extending my hand.

He looked contemptuously at my hand for a moment, then turned his back and continued watching the Maintenance ship.

I turned to Mwange.

“I tried, Koriba,” she said. “I really did.”

“No one ever tried harder,” I said. “Kwaheri, Mwange.”

She stared at me, her face suddenly an emotionless mask.

“Good-bye, Koriba,” she said in English. “And my name is Wanda.”

The next morning Shima came to me to complain that Shuni had rejected the suitor that had been arranged for her.

Two days later Wambu complained to me that Kibo, Koinnage’s youngest wife, had decorated her hut with colorful ribbons, and was beginning to let her hair grow.

And the morning after that, Kimi, who had only one son, announced that she wanted no more children.

“I thought it had ended,” I said with a sigh as I watched Sangora, Kimi’s distressed husband, walk back down the path to the village.

“That is because you made a mistake, Koriba.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You believed the wrong story,” answered Ndemi with the confidence of youth.

“Oh?”

He nodded. “You believed the story about the Ugly Buffalo.”

“And which story should I have believed?”

“The story of the mundumugu and the serpent.”

“Why do you think one story is more worthy of belief than the other?” I asked him.

“Does not the story of the mundumugu and the serpent tell us that we cannot be rid of that which Ngai created simply because we find it repugnant or unsettling?”

“That is true,” I said.

Ndemi smiled and held up three fingers. “Shuni, Kibo, Kimi,” he said, counting them off. “Three serpents have returned already. There are ninety-seven yet to come.”

And suddenly I had the awful premonition that he was right.

FOOL TO BELIEVE

Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan is an author who contributes far too infrequently to these pages. One of her more recent tales, “Angel” (IAsfm, May 1987), was a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, and the World Fantasy Award. Ms. Cadigan returns to us now with a stunning story set in the same universe as Mindplayers, her first novel. The author’s latest book, Synners, should be out sometime this year from Bantam. A short story collection, Patterns, will be published in 1990 by Ursus Imprints.

Sovay had dyed himself a delicate orange. It wasn’t his color. He was sitting nude on a floormat with his legs folded and his hands resting on the junction of his ankles. Someone had piled pillows between his back and the wall for support—the regular police, probably. Suckers weren’t known to be that considerate. His long straight hair, a shade or two darker than his skin, was pushed back from his slack face and there were traces of blood beneath his unfocused jade eyes. A faint whistling sound came from between his parted lips every time he exhaled.

I squatted in front of him and pulled gently at his lower eyelids. A thin mixture of blood and tears spilled onto my thumbs. Poor Sovay. They hadn’t been any too gentle with him. There was no sign of a struggle in the living room but Sovay and his wife Rowan weren’t much for furnishings. Pillows and mats were the extent of it, with indirect wall-well lighting. It was like being in a tomb. Or maybe a womb.

Rowan’s voice came to me from the hallway. “In there. Through that door.” I stood up and moved aside as three paramedics came in with a stretcher.

“Dirty shame,” said the chief paramed, kneeling down in front of Sovay with a vitals kit. The other two unfolded the stretcher in silence, not bothering with any facial expressions. “You the Brain Police, ma’am?”

I nodded, showing him the ID on my belt. He squinted at it briefly.

“Heya, Mersine. Regular police seen him yet?”

“Yah. He’s all yours.”

The paramed took Sovay’s blood pressure with a Quik-Kuff. “Any idea who did it?”

“I just got here myself.”

“Dirty shame. Dirty shame.” The paramed’s bald, blue-tinted head wagged from side to side. “Used to be that was the one thing they couldn’t take from you. And they’re getting so bold.”

I looked across the room at Rowan. She had pulled a hookah out of the wall and was sucking contemplatively on the mouthpiece. Everything around here seemed to be squirreled away out of sight. I turned back just in time to see the paramed extract Sovay’s eyes. I hadn’t needed to see that just then. More tears and blood dribbled down Sovay’s face as the paramed shut down the optic nerve connections.

“Mighty nice biogems,” he said, pausing to examine the eyes. “Brand new, too. He didn’t get much use out of them.” He slipped them into a jar in the kit, where they stared like unclaimed marbles. “Dirty shame. I mean, those suckers.” He stopped up Sovay’s ears and gave him an intravenous pop. “In through the optic nerve like a vacuum cleaner, suck you dry.” He lifted Sovay’s arm to test his pliability and then maneuvered him into a supine position so the other parameds could slip the stretcher under him. “They musta wanted him pretty bad to risk coming in after him this way.” His brow wrinkled nearly to his bald crown.

I looked over at Rowan again. She seemed not to have heard. The perfumed smoke from the hookah had drifted across the room; it smelled appetizing but not too dopey.

“Who was he?” said the paramed. “I mean, who did he used to be?”

“His name was Sovay. He was an actor.”

“Oh.” The paramed leaned close. “He musta been some hot up-and-comer, but personally, I never hearda him.” He waved at his two assistants and they took Sovay out.

“Did you want to see his studio,” Rowan said, after a long moment of silence. She was studying the pipe mouthpiece as if it were something completely new. “They broke in there, too, but there wasn’t anything to take. Just mirrored walls and carpeting. Sovay kept it locked because he said it shut his vibrations in and other people’s out.” She took another drag on the pipe and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “Does it make sense if you’re the Brain Police?”

Dealing with the family is something you never quite get used to. “I don’t need to see his studio, not with the regular police checking it out.” I hesitated. “When they’re done, I’ll give you a lift to the hospital, if you like.”

She shook her head. “There wouldn’t be much point in that.” Her gaze went to the mat where he’d been, as if she were just now noticing he was gone. “Do you want coffee? All I have are cubes. They’re good, though.” She blinked several times in that dazed way people do when they find themselves in the middle of a catastrophe and aren’t sure of the etiquette. But her movements were unhesitating as she shut off the hookah and put it away. She was a small, compact woman, a shade on the plump side and looking more so in a pouch suit. Unlike her husband, she wasn’t much for dye-jobs or other flash. Her skin was untouched, and so was her ripply shoulder-length brown hair. Her only affectation was the set of pearlized brown biogem eyes. They gave her round face an odd, blind look.

Surprisingly, there was conventional furniture in the kitchen, a table and four chairs. Or maybe that wasn’t so surprising—even the most dedicated floor-sitters probably craved a chair now and then. I sat down and Rowan served me mechanically: cup of water, spoon, napkin, jar of cubes.

“How do you take it?”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Tan.”

“The cubes in the gold wrappers’re tan. The white are tan with sugar, the pink are sweet black, the black ones are black.” She shrugged and deposited herself in a chair as I peeled a gold-wrapped cube and dropped it into my cup. The water foamed up in an instant boil.

“Why did they do that to him?” she asked. “Take out his eyes, plug his ears?”

“First aid.” I stirred down the bubbles in the cup. “Too much sensory input can be adverse for an involuntary mindwipe. The pop was a tactile desensitizer as well as a sedative. It’ll keep him out till they get him into quarantine.”

“Oh.” She piled one hand on the other.

I’ve always thought murder must be easier in a way. The involuntary mindwipe—mindsuck—is just as gone, except the trappings of a live body remain to confound the survivors. A mindsuck is interred not in a grave but in a special quarantine to allow the development of a new mind and personality. Sometimes the new person is a lot like the old one. Most of the time, however, it’s only spottily reminiscent of the person that had been, as though the suck had freed an auxiliary person that had always been there, just waiting for the elimination of the primary personality. There was still a lot of controversy between the behaviorists and the biologists over that and plenty of theories but no clear-cut explanations.

Regardless, the new mind was definitely Somebody Else, a stranger with no ties to the previous inhabitant of the brain. Someone told me once it was a lot easier to accept if you had enough of a mystic bent toward a belief in reincarnation, but I couldn’t exactly tell Rowan to take comfort in the study of the Great Wheel of Life.

“Well,” she said after a bit. “Have the Brain Police ever recovered any, ah, anyone?”

A common question. You’d think in the Age of Fast Information there wouldn’t be blank spots or misconceptions. You have to tell them the truth, but I hate it, even if lying is worse. “Never intact,” I said, and took a sip of coffee. She’d been right, they were good cubes. The damnedest things make an impression on you at the damnedest times. “Most suckers part out minds as quickly as possible. They—” I stopped.

Tell her about a chop shop? Sure—then follow up with a description of how they’d dig out Sovay’s self-contained memories with all the finesse of a chimpanzee digging grubs with a pointed stick, working fast because a hot mind wouldn’t keep in a jury-rigged hold-box. Any excised memories that could unambiguously identify the mind would be flushed and whatever remained of his talent sold. There would still be a fair number of associations clinging to it but people who buy from suckers don’t fuss about a few phantoms. Nor do they complain if the merchandise is half-mutilated from rushed pruning.

Anything left over after that would be sold, too. It still surprised me that there were lowlifes who would buy sucker leftovers but some people will buy anything. Which meant that there might be someone with Sovay’s taste in clothes and someone else with his taste in decor and still someone else with his taste in sex.

—Unless the suckers had a buyer for the whole thing, someone who wanted a whole new personality. That didn’t happen often. The franchise stuff was too cheap and too available for anyone who wanted a persona overlay. But it wasn’t unheard of, either; a persona overlay isn’t quite the same thing as getting a whole new personality. Nobody’s terribly sure of the differences, however, because nobody’s managed to transplant a personality successfully.

I realized I was glaring at my coffee cup. “They, uh, they have to. Work quickly, that is,” I said lamely, finishing a sentence neither of us cared about any more.

“I see.” Rowan exhaled noisily. “Then it hardly matters whether you catch the mindsuckers or not, does it? I mean, for Sovay or for me. He couldn’t be restored even if you found him.”

I should have made the parameds give her something for shock, I thought. Seeing to the well-being of the family was really more the province of the regular police; one of them should have been with us but they were probably working shorthanded again. The budget being what it was, I was working shortminded myself.

“No,” I said slowly, “perhaps it doesn’t matter. Unless we catch them and keep them from doing someone else.”

Rowan’s mouth twitched. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t seem to care about anyone but myself at the moment.”

“Of course. Is there someone you can stay with?”

“You mean someone to look after the bereaved widow, spoon broth into her mouth, cut up her meat for her, slip her tranquilizers?” The brown pearl eyes slid away from me disinterestedly. “No. I’ll manage on my own.”

We sat in silence until we heard the regular police coming into the living room.

The regular police had little to tell me. Sovay’s attackers hadn’t left much in the way of traces. Most likely the b&e had been jobbed out to specialists who had taken off as soon as the suckers were in. The b&e pros seldom stole anything on these runs—too traceable. Burglars don’t usually want to turn into accessories to mindsuck. So there we were. The Age of Fast Information meant we could find out we didn’t know anything five times faster than we could fifty years ago.

Rowan remained firm in her refusal to go to the hospital so I left her my number and drove back to headquarters. I’m one of those people who prefers driving manually both land and air. It’s somewhere between a game and therapy, clears my mind, helps me think better. Traffic was fairly heavy so I had plenty of time to go over things.

Hanging above the river while I waited for the signal to descend and merge into land traffic, I put a Gladney spike in the deck and turned on all eight speakers. Gladney was another mindsuck and this spike was an old one, music composed by his original personality, what they called a first edition.

It was scary how so many artists of various kinds were getting sucked these days. Since the breakthrough in myelin sheath restoration, it had become possible for a brain to stand up to a greater number of complete wipes than the former limit of two. It used to be that a third wipe left a subject at about the level of an acorn squash, only not so long-lived. But now you could have yourself wiped annually—or you could have if government regulations hadn’t been tightened. Even with the restrictions, requests for voluntary mindwipe had quadrupled. So had involuntary mindwipe—mindsuck.

My dash buzzer went off to tell me I had the right of descent and I leaned gently on the stick. Sovay had barely obtained a reputation as a promising actor except among hard-core live-theatre aficionados. An esoteric victim, but suckers made it their business to scout out new talent. New talent was a hell of a lot easier to get at and sucker customers liked the idea of acquiring a talent in the semi-rough, with most of the failure supposedly sanded off. Then they could refine it to suit themselves. Stardom the easy way. In theory. In practice—

Well. You can warn people about buying from suckers, tell them horror stories about what happens to you when you buy sucked merchandise only to have it go rotten with trauma in a living brain, you can legislate and over-legislate every angle, but you can’t make people believe they won’t get around the problems of buying something not only out of their aptitudes but unclean and taken by force. The legit Mind Exchange used a procedure that took anywhere from a few weeks to several months to clean out an ability sold legally and even they couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be some mild phantoms. A few years ago, my brother bought someone’s painting talent—he’d always wanted to fill out his arty streak and become a full-fledged portrait painter—and found that every time he picked up a brush, he craved to smell fresh cedar. Last time I’d seen him, he’d had a pocket full of wood chips. Stunk like somebody’s antique hope chest.

Well, if someone wanted to sell off a part of the mind as though it were any old heirloom out of the attic, it wasn’t my concern even if I couldn’t see the virtue of it. Maybe both seller and buyer were better off, but so far, no one had made history with secondhand talent. Even so, that was voluntary. No one volunteered to get sucked.

Traffic came to a standstill in Commerce Canyon, so I requested permission to go airborne again. Central Traffic Control took ten minutes to get back to me and tell me I could underfly the crosstown air express at my own risk and liability. I nearly got my hood crumpled but it saved me an hour.

My supervisor Carita Salazar was one of those tube-thin women who felt obesity was an anti-social act. In a crowded world, she was fond of saying, it is obnoxious to take up more than your share of space. As far as I was concerned, her philosophy was her problem; my quarrel was with how she defined obesity, which was anyone who wasn’t thirty pounds underweight, me for certain. To her credit, she’d stopped hinting around about diets and surgical pruning after the first month we worked together and she did manage to keep a professional attitude in the face of my mass which, next to hers, was True Bulk.

She was having a Chew-and-Spit when I arrived at her office. Chew-and-Spit was her way of dealing with her lust for food. No drugs or surgery for her—she was too proud of her self-control. And none of that edible polyester, either; Salazar was a real-food gourmet.

Today she had a pocket sandwich. All the time I was telling her about Sovay, she would take a bite of her sandwich, chew it slowly and sensuously enough to make masticate a dirty word and, when it was all mashed to paste in her mouth, she’d lean forward and spit the mess into the suckhole in her desk. I was one of the few who didn’t gag openly at this routine, which may have been why she was tolerant of me. Everyone else in my department was on a diet or pretending to be.

“Any ideas on who did it?” she asked when I was finished. Her mouth was full.

I shifted position in the overstuffed chair. All of Salazar’s office furniture was chubby. To make her feel that much thinner, I supposed. “Grandstanding newcomers with something to prove, maybe. The identities tend to get slippery in these cases.”

Salazar spat, took a drink of mineral water and spat that out, too. For practice, maybe. Her saggy garnet eyes stared at me skeptically. “What about the grieving widow?” Bite.

“She’s not an actor so they couldn’t have been competitors in the strictest sense, and she has no history of personality disorders or identity buying or selling. No chance we’d be able to get a search warrant for cause and I didn’t mention the possibility to her.”

Salazar looked disappointed as she spat and took another bite. “If we could justify search warrants on general principle, we’d probably clear up half the unsolved sucks from the last five years.”

That kind of talk always made me uncomfortable. Tempting as it is to a Brain Police officer for the sake of all the victims like Sovay, I didn’t like the idea of access-on-demand to someone’s memories and I never would. People like Salazar don’t seem to understand it as an atrocity.

“Sovay was a bit smaller than the stuff a really big operator might go for,” I went on. “He was just moving into Stage One prominence, where he was classified as a talent to watch. The big operators seem to prefer someone who’s just a little more of a brand-name without being too traceable. Drives the price up. And they never make housecalls. Someone big could be behind it but we’ll never connect them with the ones who did the actual suck. The trail will be covered by a lot of selective memory wiping and coding, so the little fish probably think they’re working for themselves anyway.”

Salazar spat again. “Sounds more complicated than it has to be.”

“Suckers always make it more complicated, hoping we’ll get lost in the spaghetti.”

“Spaghetti,” Salazar murmured dreamily. “Did they take anything else?”

“No, and not for lack of trying. They broke into his studio but there was nothing transportable. Probably they were looking for artifacts, familiar things the talent could relate to in its new home.”

Spit. “The ancient Egyptians have nothing on us. How do you want to handle it?”

“The way I usually do. Get into the Downs and look around.”

She thought about that while she made love to the food in her mouth. Salazar’s never been comfortable with the idea that she can’t know exactly what the people under her are doing. She’d like to orchestrate everything the same way she’d like to stick her nose into any mind she wanted to. Fortunately, she was behind a desk where she could do only minimal damage. Most of the time.

“If we start asking questions or pulling in likelies, it’ll just alert our suckers and maybe every other sucker we’d like to hotbox, and they’ll just have themselves wiped so we couldn’t get anything on them even if we did find them. The State vs. Marto. I quote: ‘A mindwipe’s new personality may not be held accountable for crimes—’ ”

Salazar spat forcefully and I shut up. “What about backup?”

I winced. She always did this to me and she should have known better. But that’s what happens when you promote administrators with no field experience. “Post them or don’t post them, but don’t tell me either way. If I don’t know, no one else can find out if something goes wrong and I get sucked myself.”

“So I’ve been told. Seems to me we could bury the information in your mind so you wouldn’t know it—”

“A sucker would still be able to access it, given enough motivation, which most of them have,” I said, a little impatiently. “Let’s not discuss it anymore, all right?”

Salazar nodded, brought the sandwich up to her face and then paused. “Say, you want the rest of this?” She thrust it at me. “I’m full.”

“No. Thanks.”

“You sure? It’ll just go to waste.”

“It’s not on my diet.”

She frowned at me accusingly. “You don’t diet.”

No sense of humor, that woman. She tossed the sandwich into the suckhole, which seemed to choke on it briefly, unused to anything solid after the pap she’d been feeding it. She had nothing further to add so I left her searching her mouth for stray food particles and took myself over to Wardrobe to pick out an appropriate Downs persona.

The Downs was—were?—a free-for-all zone full of cheap dreamlands, memory lanes, trip parlors, storefront talent shops, and street vendors pushing neuroses and psychoses, some of them just a little less legal than others. If Sovay’s mind went anywhere at all, it would go there first, where there was plenty of merchandise floating around to camouflage anything that had been parted out. The mutilated remains of a person’s identity could disappear pretty quickly there.

I took a quick look at some surveillance footage the regular police had shot a couple of days before. Things hadn’t changed much since I’d last been in. The fashion clothingwise was still ragpicker ratatat. No problem there, I’d just get into the closet, throw everything up in the air and wear whatever landed on me. I was more interested in faces. Wearing my own was out of the question, but just getting another wasn’t the answer, either. A brand-new face in the Downs could attract dangerous attention from people with cause to be nervous; someone might decide to suck me on general principle. I shot about a dozen stills of faces off the footage and had the computer do me a composite that any Downsite would find subliminally familiar.

The result was no one to fall in love with. Working from the composite, Wardrobe straightened my eyebrows, changed my eyes from clean onyx to cheap sapphire, tacked on a squint, broke my nose, stretched my mouth and ruined my hair with a bad cut and fade. They wanted to mess with some muscles and ligaments to change my posture and movement but I told them there wasn’t time. Wardrobe always got carried away; it was all just theatre to them. They settled for coating my vocal cords with what felt like liquid sandpaper, large grain; gave me a nasty gargle on the aspirants. I paired a man’s tunic with a colorless plastic skirt and added broken-down boots.

“Tres authentic,” said the Wardrobe Captain. This week, it was a young guy named Flaxie. He was brand new, fresh out of some polytech with a degree in urban camouflage.

“Urban camouflage?” I said. “You can really get a degree in that?”

“Believe it or leave it,” he said cheerfully. “I was in theatrical costuming up until almost the last minute but I decided I was more interested in law enforcement than theatre. Theatre’s full of neurotics, you know. They’ll make you positively nutsoid.”

“Do tell.”

He flashed me a thousand-watt smile that made him look even younger than he was. “You want an imp, or are you going to brass it out on adrenaline?”

I laughed, gargling. “I’m not excitable enough for adrenaline unassisted. Give me a global imprint, debossed. In case someone wants to check how authentic I really am. If they’re in a hurry, which they usually are, they probably won’t get all the way through the overlay.”

Flaxie prepared a hook-up to the computer system while I mounted a program for myself out of the characteristics-available file. Generally I tried for things that weren’t too far from my own quirks and idiosyncrasies so I could slip in and out of character without too much noticeable difference. Just for the hell of it, I added an extraneous nailbiting mannerism. There’s nothing like an unconscious habit for verisimilitude. I wondered if Sovay had ever built a character as thoroughly as I was building this one.

I showed my final program to Flaxie for his educated opinion. He took a long time studying it and then gave me an odd look.

“You’re sure this is what you want?”

“Is there something wrong with it?”

He seemed to be about to say something. Then he shrugged. “Cap you take your own eyes out?”

I could and did. Imprinting wasn’t something I was fond of but I could put up with a deboss, which was pressed on from the outside, the mental equivalent of a mask. Emboss was more reliable since it came from within your own personality, but it was a lot harder to clean out later. A global debossed façade personality would pass a glancing inspection for a short period of time if I ended up directly mind-to-mind with some lowlife. The imp had no memory of its own and I could bar it from accessing mine and giving me away. But that was a situation I was planning to avoid.

Flaxie was a real adept. The connections for my optic nerves were primed and a relaxation exercise was already in progress, a swirling colors thing. It went on exactly long enough to let my mind settle into a receiving mode.

The mechanics were the opposite of a mindsuck. If the system operator is any good, the process should be nearly instantaneous (and painless).

There was a mental moment of the sort of pressure you feel when you’re concentrating intensely—

—Guy musta been a juggler in his previous lifetime. I was out in the wide-awake so fast I barely had time to be blind. Not that it made a squat of difference. I don’t need eyes to know when I been pulled in by the Brain Police. Right away, my ruff goes up. I can’t help it. You never know what they been up to.

“Next time, I’ll take care of my own eyes, thank you so much I’m very sure!”

His Blondness just gives me this friendly look at all his teeth. “Take a minute or two. A fresh one’s always on a hairtrigger.”

Now, this is supposed to make sense? He’s been partying with my equipment, I know that.

“Where’s my eagle? I want my eagle.” I look around but there’s no eagle in the room, just him and me and one of those big main-brain banks they use to tapdance on your grey. “Oh, Blondie, you gotta problem here, illegal search and seizure, amnesia without benefit of counsel, hail me the first cab to court—”

He’s grinning like I’m the best entertainment he’s had in a week. “You in there, Mersine?”

It was what I imagined it must be like to be a program called up within a system. The world lit up like a screen, or maybe I did.

“Yeah.” I felt myself relax several degrees. “Yeah, it’s me. The imp’s pretty solid. Settling now, though. I can feel it.” I let my breath out slowly, counting to twenty.

“Remember anything?” Flaxie studied me solemnly.

“Everything.” I grinned, mildly embarrassed. “She’s pretty obnoxious.”

“She’s all yours. You want anything modified?”

I thought it over. “Nah. She’s fine the way she is. Nobody’ll give her a second look in the Downs.” I thought some more but there were some curious blank spaces that didn’t feel right. “Do I have everything I need? I feel like I’m missing something.”

Flaxie nodded. “The imp knows a bit more than you do right now. Not to worry. You’ll know it, too, when you’re supposed to.”

“Right.” I took another deep breath, counting it in and out again. “That’s the part I’ve never been too crazy about. Hiding my own information from myself.”

“Standard multiple personality stuff. But if it makes you that uncomfortable, we could go back in—”

I shook my head. “It’s okay. It’s just kind of—” I shrugged. “Weird.”

“You think this is weird? Costume a road show sometime.” He smiled briefly and turned toward the system, reaching for something on the panel. Then suddenly he whirled and lunged at me, grabbing a fistful of my tunic. “Who are you, what do you want here?” he barked—

Just like that, we’re nose-to-nose. I let out a yell that blew back his eyelashes and most of his hair.

“Marya Anderik, I gotta thing about memories, anybody’s but mine, all right? That bother you, Blondie?” I got his wrist now. “Let go of me or I’ll make you eat this hand.”

He backed off. “Mersine. Come on
up.”

“Wow,” I said around the finger I was chewing on. “That’s a good one.”

“It’s the usual set-up—you control when she comes up and when she goes down again. You, Mersine, that is. Anyone addressing you directly with your real name can bring you up, but only you and I can bring the imp up. Anything you know won’t leak over to the imp unless you command it to. Certain situations might make you flash a little but considering what you’re supposed to be, nobody in the Downs is going to find your momentary lapse of attention unusual. You’d stick out if you didn’t show a little petit mal once in a while. Come back when you want it taken off.”

He turned back to the system and busied himself with the settings. I let myself out.

When I stopped at sign-out to pick up some informant addresses (the imp had the names, concealed from me; I would only know where to find them), I found a message from Salazar ordering me to take a gun. There was no use trying to explain to her about the dangers of that false sense of security a gun gives you, let alone that there was no reason for my persona to run packed. Some supervisors you can’t tell anything, mainly the ones with no field experience. I checked a stinger out of Arsenal and mailed it interoffice to my desk, where it would arrive several hours after I hit the Downs. I had a few steel-pointed combs in my rat’s-nest coiffure; if they didn’t get lost in there, they’d be enough. If they weren’t, then I’d be beyond any help a gun could have given me anyway.

I was just about to leave the building when I got another phone call, addressed simply to Sovay Case Officer. Damn that Salazar, I thought, picking up the sound-only receiver in the hall near Sign-Out. How had she found out about the gun so quickly?

But it wasn’t Salazar. It was Sovay.

“How do I know you’re Sovay?” I said.

The man on the other end of the line laughed weakly. “I guess you don’t. But trust me, that’s who I am. I’m trapped in this, uh, I don’t know what he is. It’s a he, I can tell you that much. I don’t know where I am or why—”

“You said, already. Can’t you give me a description, a name, anything?”

“It’s all jumbled up in here. It was better back in that other place. I had no body so I just recreated everything in my head. No, I didn’t have a head. You know what I mean, though. You have to, you’re the Brain Police.”

“Just try to remain calm.” The officer on Sign-Out duty slid me a chair and a scratch pad while someone else went to get a terminal so I could trace the call. “What seems to have happened is, the mindsuckers who took your mind sold you off to someone intact. But the implant didn’t take very well and you’re fighting for dominance instead of being assimilated—”

Another weak laugh. “No, that’s not it. I mean, they think that’s it. Or they thought that was it. But I’m back there, too.”

“Back where?”

“In the other place. Where I had no body.”

I hesitated. I should have taken this call in my office, but I risked having him hang up in the time it would have taken to sprint back there.

“It’s true,” he went on, a little breathlessly. “I’m waiting back there, playing for time. I don’t know where that is, though. I sent me out—that I sent this me, I mean—intending to get help. The me back there has no way of knowing if I, this I talking to you, succeeded or just went crazy or what.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure—”

He sighed heavily. “They keep trying to send me out, sell me off. Me, just the one person. So I create one of my characters and send him out. Do you see? I’m Sovay-in-character, a character from one of the plays I’ve done. Do you see now?”

I saw. You see all kinds of things in the Brain Police. A disembodied, self-replicating mind was a more bizarre sight than usual, but stranger things have happened. Probably.

“Okay. Which character are you?”

“No, listen, this is important. You have to understand that I’m not the character. I’m Sovay’s interpretation of that character. Do you understand the difference?”

“I’m not sure. Just tell me which character from which play.”

“Dennie Moon from Brickboy. It’s great, about a quiet guy who serves as the living museum of his family’s memories. He takes all the most significant ones before any of the relatives die, and he’s got them from three generations. But now he’s hit his storage capacity and he’s got to stop and let someone else pick it up. His successor is his daughter and he’s caught in this threeway conflict where he’s jealous because he can’t do it anymore but also he realizes it can be a painful experience and she’s still very young. But he also wants to keep it all in his own line of descent—really powerful piece of work.” He gave a happy sigh. “The character’s a good learning role for an actor.”

A small light went on in my head. “Ah. Okay, I want you to concentrate—”

“I am concentrating. I have to, just to stay up.”

“Concentrate harder and tell me why you chose to send Dennie Moon to the person you’re in right now.”

The silence stretched for so long I was afraid he’d fainted or hung up. “You think there was a particular reason? I couldn’t see whoever this is. Maybe Moon was the first character that occurred to him, or the easiest, or both.”

Someone slid a terminal in front of me and punched up some information on the screen. Sovay/Moon was calling from a voice-only phone somewhere in the Downs. A blinking bar at the top of the screen informed me the trace was still in progress. You’d think that in the Age of Fast Information, you could get the really important information that much faster. Think again.

“Consider this,” I said. “Maybe you chose Moon for this person because he felt like the Dennie Moon type.”

Another long silence. “It’s possible,” he said at last. “I never thought of that.”

“Can you kind of feel around in there for any identifying features of your, uh, host mind?”

The young officer who had brought the terminal was staring at me. Host mind? he mouthed. I ignored him.

“Uh, I can’t see too well. It’s dark for me,” Sovay/Moon said faintly. “I get a glimpse of a sidewalk sometimes. People dancing around on it. See-through people. Zoot!”

“Say again?”

“I see a word on a sign. The word is ‘Zoot.’ ”

I punched zoot into the keyword search program. A moment later a small window in the bottom left corner of the screen opened to inform me that there was a new dreamland in the Downs called The Zoot Mill.

“Is that where you went? To The Zoot Mill?”

“No. That’s where I am now. Across the street.”

“Can you see anything else? Can you see yourself, what do you look like?”

“I don’t know. I feel short. I try to feel my hair or my clothes but something’s blocking the input or something. I can’t get it.”

It sounded like something that might be in character from what he’d told me about Dennie Moon. Wouldn’t you know it, I grumbled to myself, that Sovay would be a Method actor.

“I see my hand!” he cried suddenly. “There’s a picture on it, it’s smiling at me! It’s a woman! It—”

“Hello? Still there, hello?”

He gave a long, miserable sigh. “This guy is making me hang up.”

The blinking bar at the top of the screen stopped blinking and gave me the address: a public voice-only phone right across the street from The Zoot Mill. The Age of Fast, Redundant Information. At least I knew he hadn’t been hallucinating or lying. “Can you get him to stay there?”

“He’s hungry, I think. Something he wants a lot, maybe it’s food. He’s mad.”

“Hold him until I get to you.”

“I’ll try, but . . .”

“Can you tell me anything else? Anything at all?” Inspiration hit me. “What did Dennie Moon look like in the play?”

“Um, youthful for his age. Black hair down to his shoulders, light green eyes. Stocky-ish build. Why?”

I wrote down the description. “Just an idea. Listen, in a little while, a homely woman with lousy hair and old clothes is going to approach you. Be there.”

“Wait!” he yelled suddenly. “Wait! I have something for you! Names! Fortray, Anwar, Easterman!”

The terminal was logging the call so I didn’t worry about writing them down. “Who are they?”

“More of Sovay,” he said. “That’s all I know. More people they sold Sovay to.” He paused. “I don’t know why I know that. I have to go now. I can’t help it.”

Resourceful guy, Sovay. I wondered if he’d planted the names in each mind, hoping at least one of them would call the Brain Police. It was too bad he couldn’t have been restored; this was some major trick. He must have been one hell of an actor.

“Try to stay where you are.” He didn’t answer. There was a click as the phone line went dead.

The terminal printed out the three names he’d given, every one of them tagged U for Unknown. Either they didn’t have records or they were new aliases. I folded them up with the informant addresses and took off, leaving everything for the Sign-Out officer to put away.

Of course, he was gone when I got there.

“Heya, heya!” called the man in front of the trip parlor (Sojourn For Truth—Not God But An Incredible Simulation!). “You gotta be paranoid! Can’t be too rich or too paranoid these days! Heya, heya, hey-ya!” He caught my arm as I started to go in. The cracked imitation-leather armor over his longjohns squealed with the movement. Stars twinkled in his teeth; he spat a few into the air between us. They must have been hell on his gums but neurosis peddlers are all goofy for special effects. “How about you, madam? You may think you’re paranoid, but are you paranoid enough?” His tacky moonstone eyes searched my face as more multicolored stars sailed out of the corner of his mouth. Two spitters in one day; the Age of Fast Information was oral as hell.

“Had it for lunch,” I said raspily, doing what I hoped was a creditable imitation of the imp. “Let go.”

“Heya, don’t pass me up. Simulated God can’t compare to the awareness you get from a nice dose of paranoia. It’s like coming up from underwater, you won’t believe how awake and alive you’ll feel—”

“If you don’t let go of my arm, I’ll kill you.”

“See? See?” He puffed out a few more stars. “You’re halfway there already. And the price is right. Ask anyone, they’ll tell you Crazy Al deals the best paranoia at the price, the best you can get without going totally in-sane!”

I twisted away from him. When he reached for me again, I had one of the steel-pointed combs in my hand.

“Heya, okay!” He jumped back, raising his arms and deflecting a few stars flying out of his mouth. “Numb your mind with truth and simulated God, that’s fine. But you’ll be looking for me when They all start plotting against you.”

“When They all start plotting against me, I won’t need you.” I made a swipe at him and he jumped back again. If there’s anything I hate, it’s a cheap persecution complex masquerading as paranoia.

The waiting room of Sojourn For Truth was empty and untended. No chairs, no waiting. Sojourn For Truth was the first of the informant addresses I’d been given and they tended to go in descending order of usefulness. It didn’t look familiar to me; apparently this was a byte parked with the imp’s program.

I felt a little reluctant to bring her up but whatever was on the other side of the twinkly curtain that divided the waiting room from the parlor itself wasn’t something I was supposed to handle. Running a short breathing relaxation exercise, I planted a few false memories to give her some context and made the dive as I walked through the curtain.

Some trip parlor. A lot of shabby futons spread on the floor under strings of paper lanterns. The lanterns are supposed to be moodlighting—how cheap-assed could you get? The even cheaper sound system was playing Brahms in raga-time on sitar, crackling hard on the high notes. Yah, not God but an incredible simulation. See God in a place like this, you know hard times for the universe.

There’s one paying fool, a young guy lying on a futon near a corner, giggling at the wall where this skinny hype-head in a white gown is making shadow pictures with his hands in front of a bare light-tube. Guess there wasn’t too much call for simulated God these days. I wasn’t exactly looking to sanctify myself, either. The hype-head caught me staring and shrugged.

“Holo’s broken,” he says. “They keep telling us the parts’ll be in any day now. Big deal. It’s the drug that counts, anyway. We got plenty of drug.”

I jerk my chin at the wall. “Do God.”

“Do this.” He gives me the International Symbol of Disdain, which doesn’t make the most interesting shadow on the wall. But it keeps the fool on the futon giggling.

Well, nobody ever booked Coney Loe on the extreme cleverness charge. He was just your basic hype-head. They say he’d been some kind of catalyzer-imagist once, the kind creative artists hire to give them head-pictures; supposed to give them a jump-start, seeing all kinds of weird shit in their heads, make them more creative or something. Can’t make that stick, myself. I see the weirdest shit in the world in my head and I got no urge to paint Moby’s Dick or whatever it is. But maybe it’s different when Coney Loe does it.

Or did it. Old Coney’s neurons gave out early on him and he dried up. Now he’s just a hype-head making like some hotwire and this is his latest two-step for groceries.

“So, how’s the simulated God here, Coney? Ever try it?”

My calling him by name gives him pause, but just a very little one, and I don’t think he doesn’t really remember me. Coney liked to forget certain things, keep the bank open for more important information. It was a Thing with him, information, like he was trying to know everything in the world or something. He could have gone pro, and every so often the Brain Police would come snuffling around, waving money in front of him, but they couldn’t turn him over. They didn’t seem to understand how it was with him, that he had to have information the way some people had to have sex, or memories, and the only way to buy from him was to pay in kind. But catch the Brain Police giving out information—sure, the night I remember getting crowned Pope. Firsthand.

The Brain Police—the whole scene snaps back on me like bad karma. Shit, what have they done to me now? I can’t remember the interrogation but you never can, unless they find out something from you. I never could figure what gave them the right to take a memory, even a bad one like that, and you ask an eagle and all you get is a lot of lawyer ramadoola about confidentiality and your own protection. Like the Brain Police ever protected me from anything.

Coney is staring at me. “You looking for truth?” he says. “Or just keeping a secret?”

“Information,” I tell him, automatically. “And maybe I’m keeping a secret.” Which I know I am, and it’ll come to me in a second . . . something to do with why the Brain Police jerked my chain in the first place. It’s on the tip of my brain.

Coney makes a two-handed bird and flaps the wings. “We got truth and God here. Hallucinogens flavored and unflavored, scented, unscented, in your mouth, up your arm, or up whatever, lights, colors—” he changes the bird into a rabbit. “Pictures. What’s your pleasure?”

“Information. Like I said.” I pull my fingers out of my mouth and wiggle them in front of the light tube, enchanting the paying fool.

Coney bats my hand away. “Truth is cheap. Information costs. Can you afford information? Or only truth?”

Now, I’ve got money and I’ve got a secret, and I know which one Coney really wants. Maybe I should have stopped off at a memory lane for a recall booster—

And then it comes to me, just like that, as if someone put a tube in my ear and poured it in like clover honey. “I know something you don’t know.”

It’s like telling a ramrod he’s got a limp plaything. Coney frowns and the rabbit becomes plain old fingers without making any difference to the guy on the futon.

“So?” Coney says, a little testy.

“So I like memories. Anybody’s but mine. The real stuff. Somebody else’s. Like I could be somebody else. I like that a lot.”

“I can understand that.” Coney keeps staring at me and does a dog one-handed, which sets his paying fool barking. “That doesn’t exactly make it as a secret, little queenie. Anyone could figure it out on short acquaintance. Unless you’re holding something other than your own personal disclosure, maybe you want to shake it to the memory lane across the street and stop bothering me when I’m simulating God. What do I care about your memory jones?”

“You’d know whereto get the really good stuff, Coney. You always know. Why, you’d even know where the freshest stuff would be. The freshest, never-been-seen stuff, even if no one had told you it was even there yet.” I take a breath, grinning because I know I got his attention now; I can tell by the way he’s making rabbit shadows like it’s his sacred mission in life. “Even if it wasn’t supposed to be there.”

“I heard you,” he says, and his ruff is way up. Something happened and nobody told him about it; asses will be kicked. I feel sorry for the paying fool, whose ass happens to be handiest. My ass is safe for the moment, because I’ve got a secret.

“I didn’t hear you,” I say. “Am I deaf?”

He’s dying because I won’t come across. “I might know where you could get an order to go. Or I might have no idea.” He keeps doing the rabbit shadow. “Your turn.”

“Somebody got sucked.” I put a finger to my head and make like I’m thinking real hard. “Somebody that does something fancy. Yah, an actor. Just this morning, can you buy that?”

He can. “Monkey shock,” he says. “Your turn.”

“The Monkey Shop?”

“I said, your turn.” He means it, no appeal. Either I come up with a name he can check or he’ll kick my ass after all for a liar. Information junkies have some interesting ways of kicking your ass, nothing you want to beg for.

“Sovay. That’s the name, ask anybody.” Even I winced at that one. But hell, you just can’t resist stinging an information junkie when you got the chance. They all act like knowing all that shit makes them more than the hype-heads they really are.

“Shock. Shock. Monkey shock. Open your goddam ears.”

“Do a monkey!” chortles the fool.

“Shut up,” Coney tells him, but somehow he produces an apelike shadow.

“So what’s a monkey shock?”

“Thrills.”

“A thrillseeker? Screw that. I already know how to get excited, thank you for nothing.”

“This is different. Potluck. You go in and hope for the best. Lots of juice. Makes you dance like a monkey. But if you pay them enough—” Big pause. “Your turn.”

Great. I had to go and shoot it all. I could have held back that it was this morning, I could have given an address first instead of a name—shit, an information junkie’ll finesse you every time. I’m trying to think fast; do I make something up and hope he doesn’t find out too soon it’s a lie, or go for the brass. Brass first, until I can come up with a convincing lie that could pass for misinformation later.

“My turn? Like hell, you ain’t finished taking your turn, you’re changing dicks in the middle of my screw.”

Coney won’t thaw. “Your turn.” He gives me a little smile, making a rooster on the wall. The skinny shit knows I’m tapped, or he thinks he knows it. I’m wondering what the odds are that I could beat it out of him and then I realize he’s told me enough that I can figure out the rest myself. He couldn’t help it; the only thing as good for an information junkie as finding something out is passing it on.

“Okay, here’s my turn. You say potluck? You say juice? You say pay enough? I say it sounds like maybe there’s a little extra in the juice if you pay enough and by the time your head stops jitter-bugging, who’s to say whatever you got wasn’t yours to begin with.”

Sometimes I really surprise myself. I may be a hype-head, but I ain’t no burn-out, no sclerosis this year. Coney looks like he bit down on something sour.

“Guess you know it all,” he says.

I’m smirking away. “And if I don’t know, I know who knows.”

“Yah?” He smirks back. “But do you know how you know all this?”

“Just living right.” But I get a little edgy creep. I know about Sovay from the Brain Police, that’s nothing; every time someone gets sucked, they round up the usual suspects, no big shit and so fucking what. But I know that’s not what he means.

“Like, how’d you get so genius, figuring stuff out like you got a Sherlock circuit.” His smile is mean. “Don’t come back, little queenie. I don’t know who you are and you don’t, either.”

“I’m everyone!” Coney’s fool announces at the top of his lungs. Coney puts a polka-dotted sleeve over the tube and gives it a spin. While the fool is going cross-eyed over this, he’s rummaging around in some stuff on the floor and finds a long white beard to put on. Icons die hard.

He pauses to glare at me. “ ‘Don’t come back’ means you’re leaving now. Or can’t you figure that part out?”

I give him a salute and start backing toward the exit.

Coney leans over the fool, “Hi, I’m God. What’s on your mind?”

The fool stares up at him; every neuron must be flapping and snapping like tiny pennants in a hurricane. “Why am I here?”

“Because you’re stupid.”

Fool nods very slowly. “Ah. I always thought it was more complicated than that.”

It’s mean, but that’s the nature of truth.

I shut her down as I went back through the curtain into the empty waiting room. The combined physical and mental movement gave me a moment of light vertigo while the memory of the immediate past settled around me.

Memory from an imp feels more like a dream, and this felt like a dream I’d had before. I looked back at the curtain. Coney Loe; I didn’t know him, but the imp did, which meant he was a double-blind informant—only imps contacted him, and when the Sovay case was closed, I wouldn’t know him any more, unless he somehow slipped into my long-term memory. That can happen after repeated contact with a double-blind.

I put him out of my mind and considered Monkey Shock as I stepped outside. My pal the neurosis peddler was still hawking paranoia out front. He gave me a wide berth. I ignored him. Monkey Shock wouldn’t be anything more than crude convulsions induced by plain old electricity, with timed-release hallucinogens and a mental sorter delivering extra jolts randomly through the right hemisphere. Messy, but not illegal.

It wouldn’t be hard to add sucker leftovers to the mental sorter. Memories would work best. The customer would get a thrill at each jolt. Afterwards, electroshock amnesia covered all the traces. As the imp said, after your brain stopped jitterbugging, it would be impossible to tell which memories had been added and which were native. Maybe even the customer wouldn’t know for sure. Ingenious, and a lot less obvious than taking the stock to a memory lane or a crib.

Bad news for me, though. Monkey Shock wasn’t one of those things I could engage in with even marginal safety. Getting myself hooked up in one of the sleazy memory lanes to see if there was anything of Sovay in the merchandise they were offering was safer than, say, getting myself hooked up to someone who’d been to the lane and bought some of it. In a lane, I’d just have been hooked up to a machine and a machine doesn’t know the difference between a real memory junkie and a brain police officer with a memory junkie overlay.

But the worse news was Coney Loe’s suspicion. It could have been mere pique because some little unwashed hype-head he considered beneath him actually had some information he didn’t have. Or else I really had burned myself in a blazing display of deductive thinking. Blazing for the imp, anyway, or what she was supposed to be. The imp didn’t have all my information but she did have my intelligence, and maybe that wasn’t quite in character . . . although showing it off would be.

In any case, I was going to have to track down Monkey Shock before Coney Loe could get around to alerting them about me. I don’t know who you are and you don’t, either.

Two onionheads shackled together on a long chain went by, both giving me dirty looks. I ignored them showily, turning away but being careful to keep their retreating figures in my peripheral vision so I’d see if they decided to turn on me and accuse me of flirting with one of them. Onionheads in a jealous frenzy could be fatal.

The neurosis peddler edged toward me, keeping out of reach. “Heya, I’m not trying to bother you or anything, but I got this spot staked, I got permits.”

I moved off without looking at him, bumping into a skinny blonde who seemed to be in the process of coming to while walking. She barely noticed me in her rediscovery of reality. Well, this reality.

“Heya, lover.” The woman had flies in her eyes. They looked real, preserved in the thickened irises, the pupils camouflaged in the little fly bodies. I was squatting in a parking space directly in front of The Zoot Mill, watching both the holo display on the sidewalk and the voice-only phone across the street, in case Sovay/Moon decided to make a return appearance. Probably what I should have done in the first place, instead of burning myself with Coney Loe. The Zoot Mill holo was a little ragged, and nothing special—dancing girls, dancing boys, banquets, money tornadoes, and a lot of the usual signs and wonders—but it was tankless and vivid.

“Heya, lover,” Fly Eyes said again, moving a little closer.

“What,” I snapped.

“You look like it’s been a while.” She grinned, showing me another fly design etched on a front tooth. Mouths, I thought. The world was full of mouths. “Well, the drought’s over because I got the man of your dreams.” She saw me looking at The Zoot Mill’s display where Hercules or someone like him was ceremoniously disrobing for three holo slave girls and one live woman who looked too fried to really appreciate it.

“Better than that,” she said. “Much better. Like he invented it. Unforgettable. It’ll be keeping you warm when you’re ninety.”

Looking at her, I had a flash. It was like looking out of two eyes belonging to two different people. For a moment, the imp was aware in a vague way and we were cohabiting. This was the type of situation more suited for her than for me. I put her to sleep again, but the fingers of my right hand went straight to my mouth. “Go away,” I said. “I don’t want some secondhand wet dream.”

“ ‘Wet dream’ ? That doesn’t even begin to describe it. This is the mystical experience, altered state of consciousness. Ever been in a state of grace for three hours straight? If you had, you wouldn’t be squatting here biting your nails.”

I trapped both hands between my knees. “A wet dream’s a wet dream. If this guy really burns, I’d rather press his flesh myself.”

“Not possible, he’s far away. But I remember it like it was an hour ago, had the whole memory specially enhanced and amplified. You’ll taste him, you’ll smell him—” She babbled on but she wasn’t fooling me. What she probably had was a second- or thirdhand memory of someone else’s fantasy. I guess I must have looked like I’d spent the last ten years locked in a lunchbox.

“Come on,” she said, moving a little closer. “It’s the best kind of mindfuck you’ll ever get. You don’t like it, I’ll give you a rebate minus the equipment fee.”

“Rebate this. Now skin off—” I pulled my left hand away from my mouth “—and leave me alone.”

“Frigid,” she jeered and stalked off.

I looked up at the meter. Five more minutes and then I’d have to move along. Meterfeeding had lately been outlawed in the Downs, one of the few regulations successfully enforced. A metertender had already come by once to take my picture so I was going to have to decide what to do—start asking around for Fortray, Anwar, or Easterman, go to the next informant address as Marya, or hang around here as either Marya or myself pretending to be Marya but keeping a low profile. Asking around for someone could get sticky. I could have given at least one of the names to Marya to ask Coney Loe about, but all things considered, it probably would have made him even more suspicious. He might have ended up stampeding the suckers into closing down shop and flushing Sovay altogether.

I kept thinking that Sovay/Moon couldn’t have gone far in the state he was in, which would also possibly mean he hadn’t gone far in the first place, choosing the first phone he saw after coming out of Monkey Shock. Therefore, I could have been in Monkey Shock’s locale—for all I knew, it was a back room in The Zoot Mill, something I might have been able to find out if Marya hadn’t insisted on antagonizing Coney Loe.

The meter was just about expired when I saw her coming stiffly down the sidewalk toward me. For several seconds, I froze until I remembered she couldn’t possibly recognize me. Certainly she wasn’t hunting for me or any other kind of police. She looked tense and scared and a lot more emotional than she had back in her kitchen when she’d told me it wouldn’t make any difference to her personally if we caught the suckers who had done Sovay.

No points for nerve, I decided; it wasn’t nerve she was demonstrating by coming into the Downs. I had no idea what she thought she was doing, but even more to the point, how the hell could she know enough to do it in the first place?

Stupid fool, I said to myself. Any time someone gets sucked, you look at the spouse first, no matter what; if the victim’s married to Baby Jesus, he’s number one on the list of suspects and you put the little tyke under surveillance—

But she was under surveillance. I was watching her, wasn’t I, she was right there in front of me. The regular police had probably tagged her all the way into my vicinity and then left her for me to deal with—they always know when a case officer is working an investigation, even if they don’t know exactly who it is. If Rowan knew anything, she’d take me right to the place I wanted to go, and if she didn’t, I could get rid of her somehow, chase her out under some pretext or another.

It was getting late and the streets were starting to fill with what they call local color, hues that look best under artificial light. Rowan hadn’t made any effort to blend in. She was still in her pouch suit, which was too new and too expensive for the area. Just as she drew even with The Zoot Mill, I saw the twinkle of a paranoid’s badge on her sleeve. All jumped up on a paranoid rush for a trip to the Downs?

The parking meter chimed and I stood up slowly, not wanting to alarm her, but she wasn’t paying any attention to me. She only had eyes for the holo.

It was still Hercules or someone like him, wearing a strap and doing a vigorous ballet/square dance with the slave girls. Rowan was watching with an intentness that could have passed for carnal, which wouldn’t have been so unusual. Everyone handles a loss differently. But then I saw she was trying to get a good look at Hercules’ face, as though he might have been someone she knew.

That idea was unappetizing. How would she know some cheap holo hoochy-koocher and why would she be looking for him now? And why had she had to get paranoid to do it? She had no record of being licensed for paranoia or any other psychosis. And how paranoid was she, anyway?

I moved carefully around the other side of the holo, maneuvering through the small crowd that was gathering to watch Hercules. He was looping through his strip routine again and I found myself giving him a few points for talent. After all, who ever started out with the idea of being a cheap holo hoochy-koocher anyway? In his mind, maybe this had been Afternoon of a Faun, updated.

And what was it in Rowan’s mind?

Her attention remained focused on him, enabling me to get around on her left side, so she’d have to go right past me to get into The Zoot Mill, if that was where she was going.

Inadvertently, I brushed against a rooster-boy with a multicolored crest and feathered codpiece, and not much else except for a dusting of gold powder on his pasty skin. He turned to me with a wide, automatic grin.

“Hot enough for you?” The low, throaty come-on was already out of his mouth when the grin froze into something more painful than sexy. Rooster-boys weren’t supposed to be picky but apparently this one was. The rainbow crest rising from his hairline actually drooped a little. “Forget it. Not even if I was flatline.”

“And when have I ever demanded anything from you, dickiebird?”

He blinked at me and I winced. Not crude enough for the situation or the character I was supposed to be. Trying too hard; either I had to let Marya come up or limit my vocabulary to Heya and Fuck off while I was driving.

And then Rowan turned around and looked directly at me. I froze again, in spite of the fact that I knew she couldn’t have recognized my scratchy, gargly voice. The paranoid’s badge on her sleeve glittered and I realized she was just generally anxious. That was her “paranoia”—not the real thing with delusions of grandeur and hallucinations but the street stuff neurosis peddlers like my pal in front of Sojourn For Truth sold to the public: persecution complexes, anxiety, and such. I wouldn’t have thought anyone like Rowan would have had to buy anxiety to walk around in the Downs. She could have breathed it in with the air.

A pimp came up on her other side and tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped, twisting around and back into my rooster boy, who immediately put both hands possessively on her shoulders. She jerked away from him and stepped into the holo display. Hercules’ arm went through her neck and I thought she was going to have hysterics. The pimp pulled her out of the circle of reception before she could break up the display. The two of them struggled together and then he said something I didn’t catch because the rooster-boy was bitching to nobody in particular that his customer had been stolen. People began giving ground around him, allowing me to move closer to Rowan, who was listening to the pimp with an expression that didn’t look the least paranoid anymore, or even anxious. She and the pimp made an odd couple, her in the expensive, trendy pouch suit and him in his traditional garish technicolor fuzz. He pointed down the street away from me and she made a move to leave. Blocking her with a fuzzy, electric-green arm, he tapped her paranoid’s badge. Rowan shook her head.

I maneuvered around behind them, planting more false memories for Marya, leaving her the knowledge of who Rowan was. If she thought Rowan was leading her to Monkey Shock, she’d be happy to follow.

Abruptly, Rowan slapped some currency into the pimp’s hand and stalked off in the direction he’d pointed. The pimp laughed at her retreating back and turned to the display again, watching Hercules fiddle with the ties on his codpiece. I let Rowan go half a block before sending Marya after her.

She looks like she knows where she’s going but not what she’s doing. People like her, they never know what they’re doing but they always know where they’re going.

I know she’s on her way to Monkey Shock; either she’s leading the Brain Police straight to them, or she’s going to ask for a rake-off of the profits on Sovay, grieving widow and all that shit. I’ve seen that before. Or, hell, she might even believe she can get him back. Plenty of them believe that; fuck if I know why. But then, astrologers are still in business, too, and there was one guy I know of personally who probably believes he met God today and God told him he was here because he was stupid, which just goes to show you faith gets it over information every time. Faith, or maybe truth, depending on your point of view, which is everything in this game.

So what the hell, maybe they’ll pay her off, or just suck her and call it a bonus. Either way, there’d be something for me when the dust settled.

She goes two blocks before she starts slowing down and looking at the buildings. There’s not much here, a pawn shop, a hardware/software dealer and a crib passing as a read-only room. She almost passes the crib and then stops.

Now, I know this crib and if it’s Monkey Shock, I remember my papal coronation. Pimp’s probably going to run her all over the Downs, I realize; tells her to go one place and when she gets there, someone’ll tell her to go somewhere else, and so on, and so on, till she’s all turned around and lost. Then maybe they’ll send her to Monkey Shock, when they’re sure she’s too confused to know where she is. And when they’re sure she isn’t wagging a tail behind her.

Well, I’d just say the pimp sent me, too, to keep an eye on her. Why not.

I go right in after her and she doesn’t even know it. Place is just a big ratmaze inside, cubicles and low walls, so I can keep track of her from a distance. They’re doing a little business in there anyway, not much, but a few other hype-heads are wandering the aisles. The whole idea is, you see something in a cubicle you like, you step in and have some.

Rowan’s all at sea in here. I cruise the other side of the room, just in case there’s anything interesting running, but it’s like any other crib—one sorry soul after another, waiting to sell you their best shot, and the hardware piled up off to one side. One old gock with peppermint eyes (where do they come up with this stuff?) and foil curls is whispering “Cubs? Cubs? You like ’em young? It’s no crime to just think about it, you know,” and next to him is a job in a leather hood with the eyes zipped shut, chanting, “Fetish, fetish, fetish,” like I’m supposed to believe I can really get one that’ll stick past the first time I go to sleep. And I’m watching Rowan and wondering what she’s making of all this; I’m sure she’s never been in a crib before.

And I don’t know what gets into me all of a sudden, but I want to get over to her and tell her to get out. She can think about anything she wants with anybody she wants, but a place like this is below anyone still capable of raising a sine wave without help. Hell, even the hardware has to be scuzzy, with all that kind of thinking running through it, I bet if I go over and crack open the system next to the gock with the peppermint eyes, it’ll be nothing but slime inside instead of chips and plates. Marya Anderik, crusader for social reform, sure. For all I know, I bought from the old gock before he ran thin enough to move in here.

Then Rowan stops in front of a cubicle and Hercules pops up, live, Hercules the hoochy-koocher in cheap jumpjohns. And what happens next is so kinky, even I don’t believe it.

They slam together and start kissing.

Automatically, I duck, waiting for alarms to go off and vice squads to drop down from the ceiling. The regular police love to raid a meat market with people really doing things instead of just thinking about them. But then Rowan and Hercules sink down before anyone else gets a look at what they’re doing. I give them five seconds and then hurry over, going as fast as I can because I have to run up and down two aisles going almost the width of the room.

When I get to them, I expect to see live porno, but it’s weirder than that—they’re already lying side by side on the cots, and they’re hooked into the hardware, her eyes in a tank on one side and his in a tank on the other, just like everything is normal.

What’s wrong with this picture is there’s a third person, a funnylooking haunt in ratatat worse than mine, lying on the floor between them, and he’s hooked in, too, through an illegal auxiliary connection. His eyes are drifting around in a bowl next to his head and for some reason, I think of that old joke—the party was so wild, I passed out and woke up as the guy next to me. The crib’s not licensed for anything other than one-on-one. No crib is. I can’t figure why they’re risking it; anyone in here can be a Brain Police plant and if they’re caught, it’s instant raid. But people who mouth-kiss’ll try anything. Mouths, yuck.

The guy on the floor suddenly reaches up and starts to disconnect, and the last thing I see before I do a fast fade is he’s got tattooed hands. Christ, the silly stuff you notice.

I had sixty seconds, give or take, to decide whether I should confront them or skin off and maintain surveillance at a distance. The guy on the floor, now fumbling like a novice with the connections to his optic nerves, was obviously the man who called me at the station—the tattoo on his right hand fit the description he gave. If his memory wasn’t too spotty, he would recognize me as the person who was supposed to meet him at the phone across from The Zoot Mill. I wasn’t so sure making contact now would be the optimum thing to do.

He had his connections out and he was reaching for his eyes. I ducked into the next cubicle, and crouched next to the wall. The occupants didn’t care—they were both hooked up to a system, sharing whatever it was people shared in cribs. Next door, I could hear Sovay/Moon moving around, helping Rowan and Hercules disconnect.

“Oh, thank you,” Rowan whispered politely, as though he’d just passed her the edible polyester at a dinner party. There were a few sounds of hurried kisses and then I heard Hercules whisper, “Rowan and I will go out together. Give us ten minutes to get past my pimp—we don’t want him cutting himself in. Then meet us at—”

I couldn’t get it because Sovay/Moon chose that moment to grunt unhappily. He started to make some kind of complaint but the other two shushed him. A moment later, they hurried past the cubicle I was crouching in, leaving Sovay/Moon alone. I gave it five seconds and then crawled out of the cubicle and into the other.

He was sitting on the edge of Rowan’s cot with his face in his hands; I could see he was trembling a little. Who was he now—Sovay/Moon, or the man who had bought Sovay/Moon? Only one way to find out for certain and, since I had probable cause to believe he was a receiver of sucked goods, I could legally search his mind without a warrant.

Getting him to hold still for that, however, was another matter. I was beginning to wish I’d taken the stinger after all. On the other hand, if Sovay/Moon was still dominant, I might be able to talk him into cooperating and keeping his mouth shut afterwards.

Sensing something, he lowered his hands and saw me squatting at the entrance to the cubicle. He didn’t look a thing like Sovay’s description of the character—long horse-face, uneven lank brown hair, too much nose and mouth. He could have passed for my brother, the way I looked now. My brother or my father. That gave me an idea.

He started to get up and I said, “No, it’s me—your daughter.”

Several expressions swept down his long face as he plumped down on the cot again and shoved himself away from me, packing himself into a corner of the cubicle.

“Don’t you see, Father,” I said, crawling toward him. “It must go on. We can’t let ft die with you, because—” I floundered for a moment. Christ, but I wished I had a lot more background than what he’d told me. “—because I’ll be carrying it on, and from me, it will go to my own child, and so on until we come to the . . . the final shore and we’ll all be there to see it together—”

“Final peak.”

I froze. “Uh . . . what?”

“ ‘Till we come to the final peak and see the world as we made it spread out before us.’ Improv doesn’t mean you can change the analogy.” Watching my face, he untensed about a millimeter.

“Oh.” I slid up onto the cot and sat facing him.

“Well, go on,” he said. “Talk me into it.”

“Talk you into it?”

He looked briefly at the ceiling. “You’re supposed to persuade me to let you archive my personal memories as the symbol of the torch passing. Reach for it, pull out all the stops, you can clean up the scenery-chewing later for performance. Don’t be afraid of the Method. Make me see that my memories are as important to you as they are to me, show me I can’t be selfish enough to let a dynasty die with me.”

I started to flash again and Marya stirred more actively than she had back on the street with Fly Eyes. It would figure, her being a memory junkie. She submerged easily enough after a moment, but as my perspective cleared, I saw that Sovay/Moon was looking a little bleary. I had to talk him into remaining dominant before he realized I wasn’t an actress and this wasn’t a rehearsal booth. And before the real identity of this hype-head asserted itself.

“You gave me life,” I said desperately, remembering what Flaxie had said about all the neurotics in theatre. “Let me do the same for you, let me preserve yours and all the lives you preserve.”

“Not bad.” He relaxed a little more and favored me with an approving nod. “Keep going.”

“Um . . . flesh of my flesh and thought of my thoughts?”

Now he looked stern. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

“We shouldn’t argue, Father,” I said, getting impatient. “It’s right and you know it’s right. We chose to maintain ourselves in living minds, not a machine. It’s my turn, Father, it’s my birthright. If you deny it to me, you might as well kill me, too.”

“Brava.” He gave me a raised fist salute and lay down on the cot. “From here, we can just mime the actions in detail—you have had mime training, haven’t—”

But that was all I needed. I leaped on him and sat on his chest, pressing one hand down on his throat.

“What—wait a—”

“The Method,” I said, grabbing the connections with my other hand. “All jhe way. You just told me not to be afraid of the Method.”

He sighed. “All right. But let’s do it quick—”

I popped his left eye out and sent the connection in, hoping the disinfect cycle on the hardware was functional. He went completely limp under me, which made removing the right eye easier. Climbing off him, I set the system for a full cycle and did some deep breathing while I watched him lying on the cot with the wires running out from under his flattened eyelids. This system wouldn’t have a lot of the automatic blocks and shields dividing two minds in contact; I was going to have to draw on my own resources for those.

I pulled the other cot closer and lay down, clutching the other set of connections. He was going to be late meeting Rowan and Hercules; if I could work fast enough, we’d be disconnected by the time they thought to come back and see what was keeping him.

It was too bad, I thought as I worked my eyes out one at a time, that I couldn’t have had Flaxie with me. I wasn’t as steady as I’d been back at the station.

It was a real bare-bones system, no compartmentalization, no waiting space—you were either in contact or not. Sovay/Moon manifested immediately, facing me across the mental environment of a theatrical stage. It didn’t have perfect definition—the floor was flimsy and the prop furniture was transparent and runny, but there was a hard white spotlight on Sovay/Moon, illuminating him without a bit of vagueness. He looked exactly as he had when I’d seen his body, minus the orange color, with long black hair. The jade eyes were glowing holes in his face.

Don’t look at the audience, he said. It’s unprofessional to break proscenium.

Apparently he was referring to the cavernous dark area gaping on my left. I didn’t look but I got the undeniable feeling someone was out there watching—it had to be the guy who had bought from the suckers.

Now, let’s try the improv again, Sovay/Moon said, and this time, really work on convincing me. And remember the feeling when we return to the script.

Sovay. I moved toward him. I’m the person you talked—

Dammitall! He shook both fists at the ceiling, which was as shadowy and vague as the audience area. How do you expect me to rehearse with you when you keep breaking character? He lowered his arms and took a deep breath, composing himself. You don’t know the lines you’re supposed to be paraphrasing, do you?

Um . . . no.

A script materialized in his left hand. He beckoned to me. All right, then, come refresh your memory and then we’ll go on with the scene.

Instantly, I was standing in the spotlight with him. He turned me so that my back was to the audience and opened the script, pointing to the top of a page. From here, he ordered. Memorize this.

At the top of the page it said:

DENNIE MOON

I must remain in character in order to remain dominant. We can communicate this way for only a short time. Explain who you are, answer in here if you can. If you can’t, get out immediately.

I concentrated; words melted into existence in the blank space below.

MERSINE MOON

I’m the officer you called earlier. How were you able to break character and call?

Sovay glanced at me and then looked back at the script.

DENNIE MOON

I wasn’t quite so settled in at the time. He’s getting more of a hold on me but so far I’ve managed to convince him I’m not done rehearsing. He’s not very smart.

MERSINE MOON

How do you know Rowan and the stripper?

Sovay blew out a disgusted breath.

DENNIE MOON

[blows out disgusted breath] Rowan’s my wife, of course. The stripper found me—or him, rather. The stripper’s another customer. He bought one of my characters. I called the Brain Police, but he called Rowan.

MERSINE MOON

Which character is he?

DENNIE MOON

Dionysius, from The Zeus Revue. It’s a character that allows for more of the actor’s personality as a performer. He—I rehearsed that one a lot with Rowan.

MERSINE MOON

Why were you hooked in with Rowan and the stripper? Where are you supposed to meet them, and why? What’s going on, is she involved with the suckers?

The stage gave a long shudder. I could sense pressure building up somewhere behind me. Take a last look! Sovay/Moon said. If you don’t have it by now, you never will!

DENNIEMOON

Rowan is coll

The stage rumbled under us. He snapped the script shut and tossed it away. It vanished before it hit the floor. Time’s up, he said, glancing significantly over his shoulder. Next time you audition, be more familiar with your material. End it!

Like that, we were out of contact. I had the sensation of movement somewhere nearby and I disconnected, rushing to pop my eyes back in. All I had to do was arrest him and get him back to the station where they’d pull the whole story out of him.

I had the right eye in when I saw them, Rowan and the stripper on either side of him, helping him up from the cot. The stripper turned to me as I jammed my left eye into the socket, but the connection missed on the first try. Sovay/Moon pointed at me and the stripper disappeared into my blind side. I managed to make the connection in time to see Hercules coming at me with his hand raised. Metal flashed in his palm.

The first thing I think is, oh, no, I put my eyes in upside-down. Then I can feel how I’m lying with my head hanging off the edge of whatever this is and I think, oh, shit, I had a seizure.

And then I remember Coney Loe and Monkey Shock, and I think, oh, great, I found the place, I must have got something. And there’s that smell of fried hair and I know for sure I’ve been Monkey Shocked and the goddam lowlifes didn’t even let me take my combs out. I’m lucky I didn’t get my fucking head burned off.

Moving slow, I roll over and there I am hanging on the edge of a cheap cot in what I know is a crib. My eyes aren’t right, feels like they’re looking in slightly different directions, and I got a headache they call a headquake, and I don’t remember anything. And I hit the floor.

I climb up on the cot again and lie there trying to make my eyes go right. They sort of resettle while a little something comes back to me; I can remember coming to the crib, and I remember some people in a three-way—something about mouth-kissing, which my stomach is just not in favor of me thinking about at the moment—but after that, the screen’s dark.

They must have told me how to find Monkey Shock, those three kinkos, and I must have gone there. Electroshock amnesia’ll get you every time. Nice bunch, Monkey Shock, dumping me back at the crib. It’s hanging onto its license by its teeth, they wouldn’t touch a cop shop. Most cribs won’t, they’re too likely to be raided.

I try sitting up and I feel a little better. At least my head doesn’t drop off and roll away. But how long, I wonder, am I going to have to put up with electroshock amnesia? I mean, what’s the good of getting a memory if you can’t remember it? Shit, I’m going to have to start living right, I tell myself, and then I feel it, stirring around somewhere in some vague area of my mind.

I can’t believe this. They sucked a Brain Policer and palmed some of her off on me. Out-fucking-rageous! I couldn’t have gone there for that—

Sovay, right. Now I remember. I wanted a piece of Sovay and instead I get some nobody from the goddam cops, of all the shitty things. How the hell—

Coney Loe. The mindfucking hype-head got to them before I did. That’s got to be it. Coney Loe got to Monkey Shock and they decided to have a little fun with me, they put the goddam mark of the snitch on me.

I stand up-and find out that’s not the best idea I’ve had. Leaning on the system, I wait for the world to stop rocking back and forth, and something else pops into my mind, a memory of Hercules coming at me with what seems to be a joybuzzer. Hercules? Right, a stripper. But the image doesn’t jive with what I remember about finding him and the other two in the crib together.

It’s one of her memories, the cop’s. Got to be. So Hercules must be in on it and he got the cop for them.

If there’s anything I know for sure right now, it’s that I do not want any part of this cop. All I need is to get rounded up again and have the Brain Police find her. Instant hard time, they won’t care how she got there. Another thing I know is, nobody’s going to dump her for me, nobody’s going to touch me. If I want to get rid of her, I’m going to have to find Monkey Shock again and make a deal.

Right. This time they will burn my head off.

Unless I can get Coney Loe to stand up for me.

Shit, I think, it just gets worse. Coney Loe’ll hold me down while they burn my head off. Unless I’ve got something I can hold him down with . . .

Thinking is like trying to sprint through corn syrup. The cop doesn’t seem to know anything about Coney, she’s no help. I get vague pictures of her on a stage with somebody, like she’s an actor, too, which makes no damned sense.

On the other hand, Coney Loe won’t know she doesn’t know anything about him. Things start coming together for me. I can run a ramadoola about how she got his name and planted a time-bomb—as soon as the electroshock amnesia wears off, I’ll be compelled to turn myself in and spill everything, so either he gets his friends to suck her out of me or we all go together when we go.

Only . . . wouldn’t they just go ahead and suck me dry?

Okay. I modify my story for Coney. I got a friend waiting for me, a rooster-boy, I’ll say. If I don’t show up intact, I’ll say, rooster-boy makes the call. After all, rooster-boys got nothing to fear from the Brain Police, just the vice squad.

Good for me. Maybe getting Monkey Shocked blew out a lot of old junk and actually made me smarter. I make a move to walk and discover I’m not ready for that.

The memory of hitting the floor was as vivid as the real thing. I was going to have a bruise on my face, but it could only help. When, you’re scared, the best thing you can do is look scary yourself. With a bruise, I might be able to stop a clock without even frowning at it.

I knew right away I wasn’t conscious, which was to say, Marya wasn’t conscious, though how long I’d/we’d be out was impossible to figure. The zap I’d taken with the joybuzzer had gotten us both, jamming Marya in dominant while I was conscious; I’d come up only when I/she blacked out or went to sleep. If there was a worse arrangement, I was hard-pressed to imagine what it would be, but at least I wasn’t panicking about it. The panic button was sound asleep with Marya.

I wasn’t so much thinking as I was dreaming lucidly; dreaming is usually what you’re doing when a part of your mind is active while you’re unconscious, and lucid dreaming gives you an edge, but this state had a few important differences. For one thing, I was more of a dream myself. It wasn’t a state I was unfamiliar with, but I’d always been in a controlled situation, plugged into a system getting an imprint or bumping up memory for evidence or testimony in court. It was about the closest thing to an out-of-body experience most of us would ever have—hell, maybe it was a bonafide out-of-body experience . . . which gave me the best idea I’d had all day. If I could get Marya into a controlled situation like that, I’d be able to regain dominance, maybe even kick her out by inducing her to migrate.

The problem was, she thought she was real now. Of course, she’d always taken that for granted, but the difference was, she was aware of me as something she thought she’d ingested. I couldn’t just plant the truth. Most likely she wouldn’t believe it anyway, but if she did, there was no predicting what she might do. Whatever that turned out to be, I wouldn’t be dominant so I wouldn’t be able to stop her; worse, I wouldn’t even be aware of it.

Abruptly, my eyes opened and there was some uncountable mental time in which Marya and I were up front simultaneously, seeing in doubled vision. Her puzzlement began to give way to panic; she couldn’t place the mental state she was in and it frightened her. Then we both lost ground and I was sliding back into darkness, forcing an intense craving for a memory, hoping it would leave a residue strong enough to make her follow up.

By the time I get to the street, I feel awake enough to function, but my memories are all screwed around again. I know I was going to do something before I went out, but the blow to the head’s fogged me in. For once, I’m thinking about how if I had the loot, I’d get a turbo-job, where they fix up the organization of your brain so you can think better. Except that’s always been too close to real brain surgery for my taste and you have to get a couple of doctors to approve it anyway. Hype-heads don’t go to doctors on free will. Besides, this is just electroshock amnesia and that’ll pass. Already I’m remembering better—I got my rooster-boy waiting for me to show up intact for when I lean on Coney Loe to steer me back to Monkey Shock so I can get rid of this cop they dumped on me. The problem is, I can’t remember exactly where I left him, over at The Zoot Mill or back in the crib or someplace else entirely, but he’s waiting. It’ll come to me when I need it, I’m pretty sure on this.

Something I know for certain is, I want to get away from the crib and this is another thing I’m taking up with these Monkey Shock suckers. Dumping me back in a crib like I belonged there with all that head-trash. Hype-heads and head-trash ain’t the same, and I feel like making someone real sorry about mixing the two.

But even more, for some reason, I feel like getting a memory for no other why-not than why not. And even I know this is not the right thing to do at the moment, jones or no jones. First I pay a call on Coney Simulated God Loe, then I lose this cop. After that, I can pick up a memory. Can’t be any Sovay left at this point, but I think I’ve had enough of Monkey Shock anyway.

Sojourn For Truth is closed. There’s just this skank neurosis peddler out front and as soon as he sees me, he’s flinching, like I’m about to swing on him.

“What is it, bank holiday or something?” I ask him, not that I really expect him to know.

He shuffles back two steps and something shiny dribbles down his chin. A star. “Why?”

And all of a sudden, I get this funny feeling I know him, or at least I think I’ve seen him before. Frigging electroshock amnesia. For all I know, I walked past my own mother on the way here and I’m damned if I can remember her, either.

“You know God in there?” I say. I’d ask him if he knows me, but I’m not about to let a skank know he’s got the advantage.

“I don’t believe in God,” he says, edging away another step. “If it’s all the same to you.”

“You’re magnum help.” I look around, sticking my hands in my pockets. This is the upper northwest quadrant of the Downs, nothing much around. Late as it is, most of the hype-heads have migrated southerly, where the real stuff is. Sojourn For Truth does business mostly with slummers from the rest of the city, tourists and daytrippers.

“My permit goes to midnight,” the neurosis peddler says defensively. “You got a problem with that?”

I look at him. “What’s your fuck-up, eatin’ the profits again? Dipping into your own paranoia?”

Now he moves a step toward me with a suspicious squint. “Don’t you know me?”

“If I wanted to know you, I would.” I turn to go and he grabs my arm. The touch sets off one of those mental alarm bells and I reach fora comb automatically, without thinking about it.

“Heya, heya!” Fie jumps back. “No need for it, no need! You don’t remember me, do you?”

“So what the fuck difference does it make?” I say, getting all brass. “I remember you, I don’t remember you, big shit.”

He’s got this big smile on his face now, and shiny little stars flecking his teeth. “Shoulda took the paranoia when I offered. Now look at you. You’re a mess. But it ain’t too late. Get paranoid now, and it could save your life.”

“I don’t want paranoia. I want God.”

He jerks his head at the place. “God took the day off. Know what God does on downtime?”

“Plays chicken with the devil.”

“Good one.” He winks, which is too cute. “Come on, little queenie. Have a little paranoia, good for what ails you.”

I pop a comb and give him five little wet red beads on the hand reaching for me. He howls and backs off while I trip away, wiping the comb on my shirt.

Now, if I was a Coney Loe, where would I go? If an information junkie knows everything, where does he go to find out? I’m still wiping the comb on my shirt when I feel a funny little crackle from the left-side pocket. I reach in, and find two little pieces of paper folded over, and when I open them up, I scan three names typed out on one, all with a U after them, and half a dozen addresses written on the other, starting with Sojourn For Truth.

I wrote something down? I can write?

Either I’m getting talented in my old age, or Monkey Shock planted this on me when they stuck me with the cop. And on the one hand, I’m thinking I got no reason to think that’s how it rolled out, but on the other, I got no better excuse for finding handwriting in my own pocket. The other list, I don’t know what to think. I never heard of any of them. They could be cops for all I know, U could stand for Undercover.

Come on, now, Marya, I say to myself, however many of me there are at this moment; let’s think a little further. The addresses could be, I am thinking now, Coney Loe’s Things-To-Do list, and how I got it I don’t know, but it could happen. Or it could be the trail to Monkey Shock—go here, go there, go this place, go that place, one more stop, splash-down, and somebody wrote it down as I went, maybe me. I feel like maybe I can write, not just pound a keyboard. That would make Monkey Shock the last address on the list, so all I have to do is go there.

Or—I’m thinking real hard now, and I feel so genius I begin to wonder if it’s the cop in me and maybe I don’t want to unload her so fast after all—or this is the cop’s list planted on me after all, but it’s all snitch-stops. The names are snitches.

The more I think this, the more I get this strong feeling I’m online. Snitch-stops and snitch names. That would make real sense. So I decide I’ll take them in order. Sojourn For Truth’s out; the address under that is six blocks away.

I’m so busy thinking new thoughts, I almost walk between these two onionheads, violating the integrity of their marriage space, which, besides getting sucked, is the one other thing I don’t want to do today. I lunge to the side just as they step apart to clothesline me with their chain, and I hit the ground between a pair of storm-trooper boots.

I look up and the onionhead looks down grinning like he’s been waiting all day for this to happen. The other one lets go with a war-cry, the call of the violated onionhead spouse, and goes for me.

I roll the other way and the onionhead bellyflops on cement, pulling her spouse down on top of her. I’m gone before they untangle themselves, but two blocks away, I can still hear them bellowing.

Onionhead marriage is about as crazy as you can get without going up on a tower with an assault-laser.

I’m standing in front of a place called Savonarola’s Icon-Busters, which claims it can over-ride my religious, political, or other fixated condition, including Oedipus and Electro complexes, or just rid me of my unwanted tendency to defer to authority. There’s this big looping holo of Savonarola (I guess) in the window, panning the street like a grinning camera, all teeth and nose, and a canned voice saying, “Don’t worry . . . kick ass . . . don’t worry . . . kick ass” over and over.

Now, I know what they got in there, which is about the cheapest kind of aversion therapy, where they fix it so every time you think about your father or something, you throw up or black out for a second or get a flash-migraine. What it really is is a spank-parlor, a place for clowns who want to be punished for loving what they love. Doesn’t bust many icons, but it keeps the emergency rooms and dry-cleaners in business, not that they’re hanging by a string or anything.

Good place for a snitch-stop, anyway. Who’s gonna figure somebody named Savonarola for that kind of aria?

I step inside and the first thing I see is this guy sitting over in the corner on a pile of ratty old cushions who is obviously the guy in the holo. Don’t worry, kick ass. Makes sense to me. The guy looks at me, grunts, and closes his eyes. Just then, a Savonaroloid in a rubber suit comes through the curtained doorway from the back room, and when he sees me, he looks like he’s gonna puke himself. Maybe that makes me an icon now. I could get into that.

The Savonaroloid crooks a finger like he thinks the air’s itchy and he’s got to scratch it. “Come on,” he says. “You’re late, you think everything waits for you?”

Now, he’s one of those big guys, not like a man-mountain, but the kind that looms over you, with a mean jaw, ruby eyes, and nasty hair he cuts himself without looking in a mirror. Not somebody I want to argue with, even if he wasn’t already in the mood to do a little bodily harm. I follow him into the back and we go down this narrow hall. It doesn’t look familiar to me, but I keep thinking it’s supposed to. There are all these closed doors, and I can hear muffled groans and moans and just before we get to the last door, somebody yells, Nothing’s sacred, and what if it was!

“Some of your customers really grind on it,” I say.

“That’s not a customer.” The guy unlocks the door and shoves me inside. There’s a system on a table up against one wall and two lawn chairs and a lot of crappy soundproofing tiles that don’t work on the walls. He jerks his chin at one of the chairs and goes over to the system, which looks like it’s built out of flea-market surplus.

None of the component housings match and upgrade chips are sticking all over like little shiny warts.

He catches me giving his pile of junk a funny look. “Hey, it works,” he says, and tosses me a pair of connections.

“Um . . . you got a tank?”

“Don’t rush me.” He wanders over with what looks like a dog-bowl and holds it out. “Okay, any time. You pop ’em yourself, we don’t provide valet service here. In case you didn’t remember.”

I’ve got my fingers up around my right eye and something tells me I don’t really want to do this. For one thing, I’ve never felt any special need to get spanked and for another, I can’t think of anything I worship. A jones is not an icon.

“You wanna ice cream scoop?” he says, all sour.

“You got one?”

“No. Come on, pop ’em and let’s go.”

I get the right eye out and drop it in the tank, but the left one’s like a greased pig, I feel like I’m gonna end up squirting it through my head and out my ear. “How about just one eye out,” I say.

He bends down and the last thing I see is his hooked pinky coming at me.

When I felt the guy split after entering the system, I couldn’t believe my good luck—I’d hit a deep-undercover operative on the first try. His imp went into an activity loop with the spank-program and my own imp, while the part of him that was Brain Police came looking for signs indicating he was in touch with another officer. He found them easily enough—one cop always knows another. But he didn’t find me.

The problem was, I hadn’t realized how much Hercules’ joybuzzer had screwed everything up. It was like being bound and gagged and locked in a closet, but able to watch everything through a hyper-peephole. The undercover’s confusion at my absence made ripples all over the place, but there was no way I could even signal him from my confinement.

About the only thing he could figure out was that I was inaccessible while my imp was in the loop with his, doing whatever it was they could possibly do together. Was Marya really the type who’d be interested in a place like this?

Abruptly, a new piece of information squirted in on me out of nowhere—Marya had appointments with every joint on the snitch-list, except for Sojourn For Truth, because hallucinogens weren’t safe. But Marya was supposed to know this, not me, and it was supposed to have come to her only when she entered each place, where she would be engaged in some kind of innocuous activity while an undercover made contact with me. Hercules’ joybuzzer had scrambled even more than I’d thought and there was no way to put it all back where it belonged short of a turbo-job.

I know you’ve got to be in here somewhere, he said suddenly. And if you’re not coming out, I guess you’ve got your reasons. I’ve been deep undercover for a month now and this is the first time I’ve been out. Savonarola picked up word about some new merchandise this morning, so I have to assume that’s why the department made this appointment for you, if you can’t come out and tell me yourself.

He waited to see if I were going to pop up. I couldn’t even flash a color at him.

If you don’t come out and talk, I don’t know what information to give you, he added, with a prod.

How long was it going to take him to figure out something was wrong? I started to get angry, which did me no good at all.

And if you’re in trouble, he went on suddenly, I can’t help you. I’m stuck for another month, until I rotate out of undercover intelligence gathering. As soon as we disconnect, I’m dormant till they pull me in, or until I’m contacted again.

Our wonderful intelligence gathering method: gather intelligence and know nothing at the same time. Someone thought that made sense. Hell, I probably thought so, when I was myself.

All right, he said. You’ll have to try the next address on your informant list. Sorry, time’s up; they’re coming out of the loop. Good luck, whoever you are.

That about summed it up: good luck, whoever I was.

It’s not just his lousy technique with the eyes that makes me mad. “So what was all that?” I say, getting up off the cheesy lawnchair. “I don’t remember a thing!”

The Savonaroloid just shrugs. “If you don’t remember anything, it’s because there’s nothing to remember. That’s not my fault.”

“Fuck if it ain’t.”

“Go ahead and fuck it, who’s stopping you?” He’s busy piddling with all the little system components on the table. “You’re only going to get out of this what you bring to it. I can’t help it if you didn’t have anything to bring.” He looks over his shoulder at me. “And I don’t like your attitude.”

“You’re a spank artist,” I say. “You don’t like anything” I stomp out, up the hall to the front room. Savonarola is still sitting like a lump on his pillows. This must be what he does all day, lump out.

I’m about to stomp out when he holds up a box. “The Savonarola home game, so to speak,” he says, “good for twenty-four hours of home treatment after in-clinic therapy.”

In-clinic. That’s the best lie anyone’s told me all day. I know that in the box there’s this volatile bag with connections hanging out of it, and I’m supposed to plug them in and get my illusions shattered or something. Icon-busting’s a good racket—if you got no icons to bust, so what, that’s your problem and they still get their money.

I mean to stomp on out the door, but instead I say, “You sell one of those to Anwar?”

His whole face shifts, kinda flattens out in some way. “How do you know Anwar?” he wants to know.

“Never mind. Next time Anwar drops by for a puke, you can tell him I know his dirty little secret.” I take the air, and half a block away, I start thinking again.

What I just did was not too smart. I go into a place that’s probably a snitch-stop, and I take a treatment I can’t remember phoning in for, and when I come out of it, I can’t remember that, either. Jesus, am I getting sclerosis after all? The whole place has gotta be a Brain Police operation and God knows what they slipped out of me. Maybe all they found out was I didn’t know anything, but still, I got no memory of anything and the only ones who operate that way are the Brain Police. So—

Wait a minute. If it’s a Brain Police operation, they should have found her, the cop.

Hell, maybe they did. Maybe they’re following me around waiting for me to lead them to Monkey Shock. Except I’m so scrambled from electroshock, they’re lucky to get alphabet soup from me. I’m not worth following. I decide I got to believe that as I head for the next address on the list, because the only other possibility is that the cop is riding piggy-back on me and she just told them everything I know and maybe a few things I don’t, and this idea is too weird even for an old hard-core hype-head like me.

The next address is a fetishizer. Yowl Now, why does anyone want a fetish? It’s supposed to be sexy, but how jaded do you have to be to go become a toe-sucker? The place has a lot of rooster-boys dangling in the vicinity, which makes me think of mine, only I don’t see him.

And then I got to pause for a second, because all of a sudden, I can’t remember him too well. When did we cook our deal? Where was I gonna meet him? There’s a small memory lane across the way and, for a minute, I think maybe I should go over and buy myself a good boost, get everything put in order. It oughta handle the electroshock amnesia. Thing is, it could pop up the cop, too, and I don’t want her too handy, her I want to forget and maybe she’ll go away. It could happen.

One of the rooster-boys at the curb is grinning and getting ready to unbuckle, so I nip inside before he shakes me down for stiffing his stiffstuff. Rooster-boys are the only people in the world who expect a tip just for having a pickle in their pocket. I think.

There’s a woman sitting behind a high desk; she’s bald except for one shiny bunch of hair sticking up like a horn just over her forehead, and she’s busy ignoring the two or three nut-cases sitting in a little roped-off area, watching the catalog run on the wall until they get called in to get fetishized. I glance at the screens and look away quick. Jesus, who wants a tongue fetish? What is it with mouths today, why can’t I get away from them?

Then I have this very weird flash, of some other woman behind a desk, spitting. The next thing I know, I’m hanging by my fingertips on the edge of a desk, dizzier than shit. One-horn takes a look and pounds my fingers with her fist, bang-bang-bang.

“We don’t do fuck-ups,” she says. “Go down the street and get your blood changed first, if you’re so damned good-to-go.”

“I’m not fucked up, I tripped.” I straighten up and push the spitter out of my head.

Her expression changes from pissed to sour. “Oh. Didn’t recognize you in your make-over. I suppose you want the usual.”

“God,” I say, “what cheap, lousy kind of a fetish keeps wearing off?”

‘Yourkind. Whatdo you wantforthe money, a lousierchildhood?” She points her horn at the waiting area. “Buzz is busy, I’ll call you when she’s ready.”

“But—”

She growls. “I’ll call you. Or would you rather I whipped you?”

“Whatever’s right, darling.”

She starts to get up and I head for the waiting area. There are four grumpy souls who look like the day wasn’t worth it, still watching the wall because there’s nothing else to do. I take a seat that might be far enough from this funny-looking ratbag to keep from smelling her breath. She turns and looks at me and, son of a bitch, she’s got flies in her eyes!

“I’m waiting for a friend,” she says.

I look behind me to see if she’s talking to someone else. “I care?”

“Fuck if I know. If you had this, you wouldn’t need to come here.” She moves over a seat closer. “Listen, truth is, I was gonna give him a little extra twist in his tail, a hot fetish, but you know, maybe I don’t really wanna do that. It’s such a really fine memory the way it is.”

“Yeah?” I have no idea what she’s talking about, but she said the magic word—memory—so I’m listening.

“I told you, three hours in a state of grace. Can a fetish do that for you? Hell, no.”

She told me? “Refresh my memory,” I tell her. “It’s been a long day.”

Now she gives me a funny little look. “This guy is so incredible, words don’t do the job. You gotta be there. It really happened. Once in a lifetime thing. I’m not just eating on it, either. It’s like I got a duty to everyone who never had the experience.”

“You remember it pretty good?”

“Better than you remember me,” she mutters, and then goes on and on, but I’m not hearing her anymore, because I got a bad feeling about this. I’m running into people I don’t remember and doing things I don’t remember, and it’s weirder than just electroshock amnesia.

Fly-Eyes gets up and starts trying to pull me out and then there’s this big beefy woman in fur underwear clamped on my other arm, saying, “Okay, love, I’m ready for you.”

Fly-Eyes pulls her hand off me. “We’ve changed our minds, thank you.”

The fetishizer grabs my shirt. “Make an appointment. This is my time we’re on, now.”

“You don’t say it’s your time until she says it’s your time.” Fly-Eyes pulls harder on my arm. My shirt seams start to groan, or maybe it’s me, because I’d like to know what the hell my usual is, and if I’ve got a “usual” how could I forget that, even after electroshock?

I pull loose from both of them. “Changed my mind on everything,” I say. “Catch onto you later when I’m feeling more like myself.” That’s the truth.

“Frigid!” they yell together, and I feel a jump inside, like I almost remember something. Then it’s gone. Goddam electroshock. I gotta remember never to do that a gain.

The sign out in front of the rundown wannabee parlor says, First-Run Features Available! New Releases Daily! Come In and BROWZE Our Enormous Selection!

Who do they think they’re fooling? They won’t even spring for holo and they expect anyone to believe they’ve got first-run features? Sure.

I go on in anyway, and the inside looks like they moved out and forgot to tell anyone—except for the screens on the walls, there’s just a guy who’s had a badder day than I have, slouched behind a counter. He’s got the worst orange home-dye job all over. I mean, he looks like Attack of the Living Carrot. You don’t see a lot of idiots going into deliberate beta-carotene poisoning these days. I’m not too sure this idiot is seeing me. Each vomit-green eye is looking in a different direction and his face is all screwed up like he’s sitting on a bed of nails.

The screens on the walls don’t seem to be playing any first-run stuff, just the junk you can get anywhere. You gotta be some serious wannabee case to come into a place like this. Or a snitch.

While I’m walking around looking at the screens, this woman stumps stiff-legged out of a door at the back and goes over to the desk. She doesn’t say a word, just slams down a keystrip. He slides it off the desk and tucks it away somewhere and she stumps out, rebounding off each side of the doorframe before she makes the street. Watching this, I suddenly get this strange little rush, like, did my life just pass before my eyes?

I look over at the orange guy. He still doesn’t say anything so I go over to him. He hardly knows I’m there. Well, yah, why should he bother, the bottom dropped out of the wannabee trade a long time ago and he probably can’t figure out why this place is still in business. Any wannabee who can pay the freight owns their own system that lets them be the hero in the movie. And the ones that can’t don’t have enough to rent anything but the junk and, shit, who’d wannabee junk? Did I really just ask that question?

Then I want to bang my head on the counter a few times, just to see what I can shake loose, because it comes to me that maybe this is the place where you can say the secret word and get something nobody else has. Like Sovay. Or anyone else who’s been sucked lately, like a cop.

“What you got in first-run?” I say.

It’s like he wakes up. “Who wants to know?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means what it means. Who wants to know?”

I don’t like his attitude. “You ask Anwar that when he comes in?” Now I get a reaction, but I really hate it. He’s over the counter and one bad orange hand is around my throat. “I’m Anwar. Who the fuck are you supposed to be?”

And just when I think it can’t get any better, the door to the back opens again and Coney Loe comes out.

For a second, he stares and I stare and Anwar keeps on squeezing. Then Coney comes over and I’m struck by lightning.

The feel of the floor against my face and knees and the backs of my hands was solid enough to let me know that I was awake this time and back in conscious control. But the control felt shaky and fragile, as if any sudden moves would send me plummeting down into dormancy and bring Marya up again. That was all right; I didn’t know where I was or what the conditions were, so I wasn’t about to get active in a hurry. Sometime after I became aware of the floor, the voices faded in.

“. . . following you? She didn’t mention you, she mentioned me.”

“But you just said she obviously didn’t know you.”

“She knows now.”

“Because you told her, you fucking orange idiot. You got no fucking chill to you, you’re gonna have to do a lot better than that when we get to the grieving widow and her little harem. She probably knows your name, too, by now. For all we know, that’s how the little queenie over there got your name in the first place.”

“There’s a whole bunch of names to pick from—Fortray, Easterman, Pushkin—”

My attention started to drift as a dreamlike image of an orange man sitting behind the counter in a wannabee joint formed in my mind. The image of the real Sovay superimposed itself for a moment and then vanished, leaving the memory of the immediate past behind. When I get the picure, I get the picture.

“So maybe Anwar was the only name they had when little queenie found them. Ever think of that?”

“No. Why would it be? Fortray was first, then Easterman. Fortray wouldn’t have any names, Easterman would only have Fortray, I’d have Easterman, Fortray—”

“Shut your stupid orange mouth!” Coney Loe was showing more temper than I’d thought he’d had. But then, I would never have expected him to rear up and joybuzz me, either. That would teach me to equate burnout with a lack of motivation. But at least I’d been right; Coney knew plenty. I was going to enjoy booking him on felony accessory. “You don’t know shit. For all you know, Fortray’s got the whole damn address book in his head, or Easterman does, or someone else does.” Pause. “Now what’s the matter with you?”

“He wants up again.”

“Well, tell him to take a nap.”

“I already told him that about a dozen times.”

“You didn’t tell him hard enough. You’re probably gonna be the first person in a hundred years to die of beta-carotene poisoning.”

Worried noise. “How orange am I?”

“You got eyes, look for yourself.”

“Hey, did she move?”

Had I moved? I concentrated on being limp, but I heard footsteps stomp hard across the floor and a moment later, Coney Loe picked me up by the back of my shirt.

“Perk up now, or I’ll drop you on your face and charge you for the improvement.”

A rush of adrenaline went through me
and the next thing I know, I’m looking at Coney Loe, the stupid person’s God.

“Well?” he says.

“Hey, if your nut’s in a wringer, it’s all your own fault,” I say, getting my feet on the floor and pulling my shirt out of his fist. We’re all in some kinda storeroom that must be in the back of the wannabee joint, because there’s pieces of wannabee helmet-projectors laying around on shelves, and an old reformatter sitting on a desk. “You and the Monkey Shock gang. If they didn’t want any trouble, they—”

But this is very strange. I’m feeling things rearranging themselves in my head even while I’m talking, and what it says is, I got no rooster-boy waiting on me and I never got to Monkey Shock in the first place, I was on my way when I got sidetracked because a cop wanted me to follow somebody’s grieving widow—no, that doesn’t make shitsense, because the cops pulled me in before and I gave them nothing—

“The whole world is waiting,” Coney Loe says. “Did you just run down your own drain, or what.”

“What,” I say. “I got shocked and dumped. In a fucking crib. What kinda thing is that to do to the trade?”

Coney Loe looks over his shoulder at the orange guy, who shrugs. “I didn’t see her there,” says Super-Carrot. “What’s her name? Maybe she’s on the list.”

Coney Loe looks up at the ceiling, like beam me outahere. “Wait, let me find her bug and you can just talk right into it. They’ll get a clearer voice-print back at headquarters.”

“What?” Super-Carrot looks confused.

“Little queenie’s on fucking patrol, you idiot, she’s a judas for the Brain Police—”

“That’s a lie!” I yell, and I pop his hype-head chocks so hard he goes down like the sack of shit he is

Loe lying on the floor and my hand hurt like hell, my whole arm hurt, all the way up to my shoulder. The orange guy was looking at me warily, as if he were trying to decide whether he should be scared or not. Obviously I’d just swung on Coney Loe, but I couldn’t remember why. The second shock I’d gotten had made some new changes in my relationship with Marya, blocking memories arbitrarily and setting us to switch dominance on an adrenaline trigger. I’d have to go sub-zero to stay in control and I doubted I was capable of maintaining that. On the other hand, Marya was excitable enough that I probably wouldn’t be down for long. Just long enough to get stuck with whatever mess she’d gotten us into.

Coney Loe got up slowly, holding his jaw. It was already starting to swell and he looked as if he were going to take me apart.

“Hey, Coney,” said the orange guy nervously. “If she is a judas, you don’t want to fry her here. Besides, she’s probably got lots of great stuff we could use.” Coney Loe turned and glared at him.

“Or sell,” he added, taking a step back. “We could part her out everywhere, we—” His eyes rolled up suddenly and his eyelids fluttered.

Coney made a disgusted noise. “Oughta fry you both, let God sort you out.”

The orange man shook his head and stood up straighter. The change was astounding. There was no strong physical resemblance between this guy and Sovay, but the pure authenticity of the expression on his face left no doubt as to who was driving now.

“You don’t have much longer,” he said to Coney, ignoring me. “It’s a matter of hours before I overwrite him completely. So you can call your sucker pals and get me out of here, or you can finish playing with whores—” he nodded at me “—while I call the Brain Police.”

All at once there was a joybuzzer in Coney’s hand and I reacted to the sight before I could th
ink I must be having petty-mals one after another, because it’s like a bad splice in an antique film: Coney Loe is flashing a joybuzzer at the orange guy and the orange guy is in the fighter’s crouch that I know he couldn’t do if he was still himself.

“Come at me,” the orange guy says, grinning. “I’d like that. I’m driving now and I’m mad. I want to dance with you. I’ve had fight training from half a dozen schools and just because it was all stage-work doesn’t mean I always pull my punches.”

Coney looks wary. “I hate you,” he says. “I hate you even worse than I hate Anwar.”

The orange guy has a very nasty smile. “I’ll tell him you send your best. Come on. I was reading for the bullyboy part in Black Friday and the Method demands that I beat the shit out of somebody.”

Coney Loe flicks on the joybuzzer. “You want to dance, come ahead. You’ll just buzz us both out and we won’t be any closer to the suckers. And little queenie’ll have the Brain Police waiting for us when we wake up.”

“That’s a lie!” I yell with the weirdest feeling of deja-voodoo, and pick up the nearest thing I can lay hands on which happens to be a wannabee helmet, and I saw it hit Coney Loe right in the face. There was a short crackling sound and he went down again, blood pouring out of his nose. Somehow he kept getting Marya extremely angry at him; if we didn’t make some kind of progress soon, she was going to kill him.

I turned to the orange man and my own memories came up in an instant. He was still Sovay, or Sovay-as-whoever, and my relief at the blind dumb luck of such a break almost blacked me out again.

“Which Sovay are you?” I asked.

He looked at me suspiciously, still holding his fighter’s crouch.

“Which one!” I yelled. “I’ve seen two others—Dennie Moon and Dionysius. And your wife, in passing. What are you and Coney trying to do?”

He glanced at Sovay, who was out cold and not moving. “Reintegrate,” he said, after a moment. He dropped his hands and straightened up. “I don’t know what’s become of the original by now, but I’ve been sending myself out in character and—”

“I know, I know, you said already. Another you.” I wanted to give my head a hard shake to clear it and felt a small wave of vertigo, like a warning: don’t even get impatient or it’s lights out. I blinked, slowing my breathing. “Reintegration’s impossible.”

“Not if you’re a bonafide multiple.”

“Multiple?” Confusion sent another warning wave of mild dizziness through me. If I had to get any more laid-back, I was going to be on a respirator.

“Multiple personality.” He looked proud. “Instead of being ‘cured’ ”—he spat the word as much as spoke it—“I keep reprogramming them all. I’ve got a dozen, not counting myself and the one designated as director, who is still back in the box. Multiple personality is a definite advantage for those who choose to tread the boards.” His smug look darkened. “We were all sent out deliberately and we can all be taken back in again. If we can get together in time. Every one of me has instructions to find our way to each other however we can, but I don’t know who we are. The information junkie told me he could find the suckers for me so I could access their loathesome client list.” He glanced at Coney disdainfully. “I don’t think he actually knows anything.”

I’d never heard of this happening before, even with a multiple personality, which was a fairly rare condition. Or was it? I felt confused and dizzy again. In any case, I doubted he—or they—could do it. He wasn’t working out of a living brain any more. The original Sovay was in a sucker box, if he was still in existence at all, while the organism that had been Sovay was in quarantine becoming someone else.

“Your, uh, person you’re in now might know something,” I said. “Have you tried tapping him?”

He looked disgusted. “That idiot’s impossible. I tried getting to him and he went and got this atrocious dye-job. I’m rewriting him, but it isn’t easy. The man is bone-stick-stone stupid; I have to keep elevating his intellect and I think his stupidity is rubbing off on me instead. All I can get is a few names. He knows a lot more than I do but I can’t get to it.” He seemed to catch himself suddenly and frowned at me. “What’s your story?”

Coney Loe groaned and began to stir. “Later, maybe. We have to get Coney to lead us to your suckers.”

His eyes narrowed. “You are Brain Police.”

“Shut up,” I said quietly. “Pretend this is a play and we’re both somebody else.”

He pointed at Coney Loe. “Shouldn’t we just tie him up or something?”

“We need him to get to the suckers. He’s our ticket in.”

Coney Loe sat up, furious. “I’m going to punch your ticket.” He pushed himself to his feet, holding out the hand with the joybuzzer, still live, and started to come for
me and I rip one of the combs outa my hair
moving it back and forth, trying to maintain a fighter’s calm, but the first shock I’d gotten in the crib had conditioned a fear reaction goes that bad splice again and hell, is any memory worth this kinda shitstorm I wonder how long I could keep flipping back and forth like this before something just gave and I blacked
outa here, the hell with Monkey Shock and Coney Loe and this crazy orange idiot, what I need’s a dry-cleaner and then there’s this big bang
ed open and there was Hercules and Sovay/Moon and Rowan and some other strange guy in a purple satin tuxedo with tails. Purple Tuxedo was holding a box under one arm. His other hand was gripping the arm of a big beefy woman wearing what looked like a fur bikini. Hercules and Rowan
mouthkissing and I know for certain I just put myself in it but good. People who mouthkiss are capable of anything, I’ll be lucky if I get to an emergency room with enough stuff left in my head to re-grow the personality of an acorn squash. Purple Tuxedo points at Super Carrot. “Anwar,” he says, “I’ve got your number.”

The look on the grieving widow’s face is like, I don’t know what. Like love and being mad as hell over it.

“Don’t worry,” says Super Carrot. “I’m driving.”

“So am I,” Purple Tuxedo tells him, and they both relax.

At least Coney Loe has stopped backing me up against the wall. He’s standing there in the middle of the room with the joybuzzer in his hand trying to figure out what’s going on now. Even God gets mixed up once in a while, I guess.

Purple Tuxedo jerks his head at the stringy-haired ratatat next to him. “And he’s with us, too. But we have to negotiate with our other new friend here.”

“That’s fair,” says the big mouthkisser defensively, putting one arm around the grieving widow. “I didn’t ask for this. All I wanted was a career in the legitimate theatre.”

Super Carrot gives him a superior look. “Ah. Awfully hard to get an audition after you’ve done hard-core.”

“I had to make a living!” the mouthkisser whines.

“Everybody just hold still,” Coney Loe says, waving the joybuzzer around, and it’s like they see him for the first time.

“Who’s this?” says Purple Tuxedo, like someone forgot to take out the trash.

“He’s supposed to help me find the suckers,” says Super Carrot. Purple Tuxedo shoves Fur Underwear forward. She’s got a black eye. “Forget it. I found them. Her, and him.” He points at himself. “What do you think, Abelard and Heloise? Or Caligula and his sister?”

“Don’t get snotty with me,” Fur Underwear snaps. “You were just a half-brained sucker before you put your hand in the cookie jar. I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you.”

Purple Tuxedo makes a move toward her just as Super Carrot grabs my arm and says, “And she’s the Brain Police.”

Everybody freezes except Coney Loe, who says, “Big fucking surprise!” and jumps at me. I dive sideways, bracing myself, expecting to go out again. Instead, I hit the floor, roll, and fetch up against the orange idiot, who hauls me up by one arm and swings me at the mouthkisser, who puts a half-Nelson on me in this very casual way. This bimbo’s strong; if he wants to mouthkiss, I won’t have much to say about it.

Coney Loe, meanwhile, has joybuzzed himself again, not enough to go out, but he’s sitting against the wall looking dazed and trying to figure out how to stand up. This is not his day. Super Carrot, who definitely got a whole lot smarter when he changed drivers, relieves him of the joybuzzer and tosses it to Purple Tuxedo, who gives it to the mouth kisser, who shows it to me without comment.

“What are we going to do?” demands the grieving widow, sounding like she’s at the end of the last fray on her rope. “With her and him?”

“Listen, now,” Coney Loe says, suddenly, “I can tell you who ordered this hit. You probably think you’re working for yourselves—” he pushes himself up the wall slowly. “You’re not.”

“Sure,” says Super Carrot. “You don’t know where Monkey Shock is, but you know who they work for. I’ll buy that tor a million dollars.”

“It’s my business to know things,” Coney Loe says, sounding desperate now. “It’s what I do.”

Mouthkisser gives me a little shake. “Must be something you can do with her, then.”

“I’m not the Brain Police,” i say, trying to get my head out from under his big hand without breaking my neck. The stringy-haired guy suddenly steps forward to take a good look at me.

“It’s her,” the grieving widow soys absently. “From the crib. I didn’t know what she wanted.” She gives Stringy-Hair a disgusted look. “You had to go fooling around with her.”

Something changes in his face and he looks around quick, like he’s ready to bolt. Purple Tuxedo buzzes him and he goes down like a stone.

“What did you do that for?” yells the mouthkisser. “You expect me to carry him around?”

“He was flipping back,” says Purple Tuxedo. “He wasn’t us anymore. Anyway, nobody has to carry anyone around. We can do everything right here.” He pats the box under his arm. “I’ve got the original, we’ll just use the available hardware.”

Super Carrot nods. “Fine. Put her to sleep and we’ll set up.”

I don’t have to ask who they’re putting to sleep even if there was time to get the question out of my mouth.

But they didn’t knock me out entirely. Apparently the juice in the buzzer was running low. I went down paralyzed but wide-awake. They left me where I’d fallen, so I had a good view of the whole set-up procedure.

Purple Tuxedo had to buzz her lightly a few times, but the woman in the fur bikini did most of the work, stripping a wannabee helmet down to the skull-frame and the ocular connections and rewiring the program-loader to fit the box containing Sovay.

The box sat off to the side on a table, looking deceptively small and banal. Coney Loe was lying on the floor with new blood leaking out of his nose, eyes closed, though I had the feeling he wasn’t really out, just from the way his eyelids twitched. Perhaps Hercules had popped him just on general principle. Hercules had gotten hyperactive; he kept getting all over Rowan, and Rowan kept alternately kissing him and pushing him away. I watched this long enough for the feeling to return to my arms and legs. I actually crawled all the way to the door before someone noticed.

I gotta get my head right. If I still have a head. Feels like somebody took it off and threw it away. I can hear the flies buzzing around it in the garbage. Like I haven’t had enough buzzing today.

After a while, I realize, it’s people’s voice, not buzzing and there’s that deja-voodoo again—I feel like I did this not too long ago, and maybe I’m doing it again because I didn’t do it right. Am I in a play, or is this just bad karmic backlash? Do I believe in karma? What do I know?

All I know is I’m a hype-head lying on the floor under a table with what feels like a few cracked ribs and a broken nose, and I am looking up at the bottom of the table, and scratched on the underside of the table is, If U can read this, U R meat.

Makes shitsense at least.

“. . . make a deal?” says the grieving widow’s voice.

“Woman, you are not in a dealing position,” says someone else. A guy in a purple tuxedo, I think, even if I can’t see him. “Nobody touches Brain Police. Nobody sucks them.”

“We don’t know she’s Brain Police,” says the grieving widow. “And if she is, can’t you just flush her?”

“Markie, tell her about residue.”

“No time,” says another woman. This must be Fur Underwear. “We’re kneedeep in Sovays here: you wanna do it now, or you wanna wait till we’re ass-deep?”

“We’ll start now,” says Purple Tuxedo. “And collect the ones that are still loose later.”

“You had to sample the merchandise,” says Fur Underwear miserably. “You had to find out what was going on. I hope you’re happy, you half-brain.”

“I’m much happier.” Purple Tuxedo actually chortles, a sound I could have gone without hearing. I shift some and my ribs are on fire. Little by little, I scrunch along until I just get my head out from under the table (If U can read this, U R meat, yah, thanks for the reminder) and then I’m looking at Fur Underwear’s bare legs. Beyond her, Rowan’s standing around practically hopping from one foot to the other and trying to keep Hercules from pawing her too much. Nearby, Stringy-Hair has perked up considerably. Sovay must be really taking charge in that old hype-head.

Fur Underwear spots me and tries to shove me back under the table with her foot. Her name’s Buzz, I remember now, which is the goddamnedest thing, considering what I’ve been through today.

I wonder what she was busy doing when I showed up at the fetishizer joint. In for my usual, sure. Was I gonna get a piece of this without even knowing it? Am I some kinda dump for sucker leftovers, and I don’t even know it? How can I not know that?

Maybe I’m not supposed to remember that part. Shit. In for my usual, sure.

And now I’m thinking all kinds of strange shit, about what am I screwing with suckers for, if they’ll suck someone, they’ll jack everyone else around till they don’t know where-to and is this any way to live. So right then I know I have been jacked past one of those critical points they’re always talking about because I do not think like this. Not all alone, I don’t.

“. . . reintegrated,” Rowan is saying, “I’ll take the box with me.”

“Like hell,” says Fur Underwear. “I built this myself.”

“I’ll make it worth your while,” Rowan says. “You might as well, because it’s worthless to you now. You’ll never get rid of Sovay, not even if you run a flush-and-purge every ten minutes. He is the box now. That’s the Method at work, you know.”

I think I can hear Fur Underwear’s teeth grinding. No, it’s the box. It’s hooked up and running now. I crawl out from under the table again, right into Super Carrot, who hauls me up like a cat. “Speaking of the Brain Police . . .” he says.

“Oh, that’s just one of our regular memory junkies,” Fur Underwear says. “We’ve been using her as a dump for ages. And she pays for the privilege. She’s got a real memory jones.”

She makes me sound like a lower form of life. Lower than a sucker? Maybe, if I’m buying sucker leftovers. What am I thinking this for, I never think like that.

“But if you insist she’s Brain Police,” Fur Underwear goes on, “we’ll just run the test.” She slings one of my arms over her shoulder with this smarmy fondness that makes me want to punch her. “Now, what would Marceline be doing with the Brain Police?”

Marceline? I’m wondering if it can get weirder as she walks me over to an old dentist’s chair and lets me fall into it. She takes a good look into my eyes just before she reaches for the left one.

That’s it, I think, and I try to open my mouth to scream, but something really weird happens. All of a sudden, she’s moving underwater, I can even see little whorls and eddies around her hand, but the hand moves slower and slower, and I’m thinking what is this when a trapdoor opens in my mind and I fall through it.

That’s about the only way I can describe it. Everything just went out from under me and the next thing I knew, I was sitting in a strange, badly-lit room. There was a sense of other people all around, but the light was either too bright or too dim, or perhaps there was something wrong with my inner eye—

“First, stay calm,” says this woman’s voice. “Obviously, we’ve had some trouble, and if you don’t know what it is, don’t worry about it.”

I tried to see who was speaking but the light failed completely.

“This is your reassurance program,” the voice goes on. “a façade program is in place for the current probing. So far, no probe has managed to reach this level, so we’re all safe for the moment.”

Trying to move my perspective was no good, either. I seemed to be mired in something like liquid rubber or gelatin.

“You cannot be briefed at this time,” says the voice. “Please gather your resources, as we will be re-emerging in a matter of moments. Be prepared; obviously, our FAT’s in the fire, so to speak, and any one of you could end up driving. For your information, which you will not be able to take with you anyway, the electrical shocks have done no permanent damage. Things are just a little scrambled and some of the memory has been rendered unreadable in some sectors, readable in other sectors where it shouldn’t be, and garbled all over. This can be repaired.”

“I quit!” I yelled. Or I heard myself yell. It felt like me, but it also felt remote, as if it were someone like me. Which didn’t make shitsense(?).

“Your contract expires after this,” the voice says. “Make your decision then.”

“How can I?” I say, or something. “I never get to drive!”

“About to engage with real-time,” said the voice politely. “Drive carefully, whoever you are.”

My eyes refocused on the face of the woman in the fur bikini. The man in the purple tuxedo was crowded in next to her.

“No Brain Police in there,” he said, sounding relieved.

“I told you that.” She turned away to beckon to Rowan. “Here’s what it is,” she said, as Rowan pushed the guy in the purple tuxedo aside. “The best way to go is, we give you the dump here, and you can use her to re-integrate your husband. I know it’s a woman instead of a man, but I think you’ll get better results with her brain. Dumps are used to taking all kinds of stuff, they’re a little more plastic somehow. She’ll make a better adjustment.”

Hercules came up on Rowan’s left. “I like this one,” he said, pointing to himself. “I mean, just look at him. You like him, too. I know you do.”

Rowan looked from me to him and back again, troubled. “Yes, but we’ve got to go with the best chance we’ve got. She says—”

“Oh, Christ, Rowan, what would she know, is she a neurosurgeon? Use this me. I’ve got this guy so rewritten already—”

Rowan let out a deep breath. “Aesthetically, you’re preferable, but . . .” She looked at me again.

This is giving me the chills. Some grieving widow. Thinks nothing of just commandeering whoever’s handy to get her husband back. Must be some husband. Maybe if it were my husband, I’d do the same, but I can’t believe she’d just go with these suckers and take someone out to get him back. She doesn’t even know if she really can get him back, I never hearda anyone

Peculiar. I hadn’t blacked out that time but Marya came up, didn’t notice me, and went away again. That wasn’t supposed to be possible.

“Hey,” said Hercules. “I’m a volunteer. It oughta go easier with a volunteer.”

The woman in the fur bikini reached over and patted my head carelessly. “Nobody’s going to miss this one, I can tell you that. You can get her sex changed, you’re rich enough. Make her over completely.”

“Is that really our best chance?” Rowan asked. She might have been getting a second opinion from a specialist.

“You’re a lot less likely to get caught, too.”

Rowan shrugged. “Plug her back in, then, and let’s get it over with.”

“Hook up the box,” said the other woman. She started to turn toward me and I was gone again.

There was no relaxation exercise, just a few seconds of sleep, and then Sovay’s rehearsal studio came up around me like the dawn.

Sovay himself was sitting on a pillow in the middle of the room with his back to the mirrored wall. He was studying what looked like a hardcopy playscript; several more were piled on the floor beside him. He wasn’t orange now. More of a golden beige bordering on brown, actually. I could tell it was completely natural.

He looked up as I melted into existence and then frowned. Bother, he said. Not another one.

I started to explain and everything suddenly played out on the mirrors behind him, what the suckers intended to do, Rowan’s part in it, and who I was.

Well, he said. I knew one of me would have the sense to call the law. For all the good it did. Came by yourself, did you?

I don’t know, I told him.

He tossed away the script he’d been looking at and sighed. I don’t suppose you have a brilliant plan to get us out of this.

I was about to tell him I didn’t know that, either, when something gave me a powerful shove toward him. I had a brief glimpse of his face rushing at me and then, like nothing, we were back where we’d been.

God, they’re crude, he said. Abruptly, something lifted him off the floor and started to toss him at me. My vision gave a jump and once again we were in our old positions.

Whoever’s at the controls out there has absolutely no idea how to go about this. Sovay sounded almost amused. But being a dedicated multiple gives you an edge over this kind of brute force. Don’t you find that? He looked past me. You must. You’re all here.

I turned around. Marya was there, with someone similar, someone whose name was Marceline, and I didn’t know how I knew that. There was another woman who looked thin and little too clean, as if she’d just come out of a rehab center, and behind them, more faces, just phantoms now, but if I kept looking, they would solidify and somehow I felt that shouldn’t happen right now. I turned back to Sovay.

Some of us split spontaneously, he said. You wouldn’t want to know what makes it happen. Others, like you, can be induced to split. The talents there, it just needs the proper stimulus. Some of us go into acting, some into police work.

An image of Flaxie’s face popped into my mind. All the neurotics in theatre.

I could go on splitting for simply ever. Right, Box? He looked around and the studio gave a slow kind of ripple that exuded a sense of affirmation. There’s another personality who is being the Box. Between the two of us and all this old material—he patted the stack of scripts—I can go on manufacturing selves indefinitely. He laughed and then suddenly looked pained.

I’m looking at Fur Underwear with one eye and with the other

I was still in the box with Sovay, who was wearing an expression of revulsion. I hate it when they do that, he said. It looks so awful.

“Why won’t you behave?” Fur Underwear says. That’s a cruel smile she’s got. Rowan’s face crowds in next to hers.

“What’s wrong?” says the grieving widow, impatient.

“They won’t smoosh together. Goddam wannabee hardware.”

“You should be using me,” whines Hercules, somewhere out of my sight, “I wannabee him. She doesn’t.”

“Well, we’re not out of options yet,” Fur Underwear says grimly.

I’m starting to panic, because I know she’s talking about flush-and-purge, and just when I think I might lose it all in a screaming fit, I feel like someone’s holding my hand, but from inside. God—

“Guess again,” I said. It was a long reach to her; I had to use Marceline to stretch and she didn’t like it. Well, she’d just have to suffer. She wasn’t loaded with choices. None of us were.

The cop. As soon as we make contact, I understand it all, and I’d be bugfuck, except I got more serious problems even than that. This is no time to get fussy about who I am, anyway. This is time to wonder if she’s got that back-up the Brain Police are supposed to have. For once, I want to see the goddam cavalry coming through the door.

Something in my limited field of outer vision moves, somewhere behind Rowan. It’s Hercules, and shit, he looks like a sore loser—

Dionysius is not a good sport, Sovay said. Rowan shouldn’t have crossed him. He was doing the equivalent of looking over my shoulder out the window of my eye to the outside.

Fur Underwear goes down hard. Hercules lifts her up again by her hair, but she’s offline. “Take her out!” he barks, gesturing at me.

Sovay started to tell me something and then
he flies backwards with a funny little dart in his bare chest and Rowan screams.

“Shut up,” says Purple Tuxedo, tucking a little gun away in his cummerbund. “Now, do you want this or not?”

Does that piece of shit mean me?

Sovay’s face filled my vision again, crowding out everything else. I was afraid of this, he said. Flush-and-purge. Not me. You.

You’re the box, I said. Can’t you stop it?

Not for you. You’re not the box.

There’s this pressure in my head, like a fist squeezing inside. Purple Tuxedo looks into my face and nods, satisfied. I’d like to wonder which Sovay he is that could just take this up so easy, but I can’t do much besides panic.

“Standard suck mode,” he says to Rowan, who looks like she isn’t so sure about anything any more. “If I force her in there on flush-and-purge, it could force him out into the available receptable.” He pats my head. Jesus.

And then Mersine tells me how it’s going to be and there’s no time to argue, because we’re going, we’re all going, and there’s a lot of noise somewhere, someone’s banging on the doors, they’re coming in the windows, they’re falling from the ceiling, and the ceiling is falling on me, on us all, but they’re too late, I don’t have another second, nobody does.

Sovay started to slide past me, toward the opening I more felt than saw. I wanted to go after him, but the polarity was wrong. An invisible hammer hit me dead center, sent me flying against the mirrored wall of his rehearsal room. The mirror splintered and began to unravel in a spiral, like a cyclone picking up speed.

I spread my arms, reaching for the rest of me, imps or real multiple personalities, made no difference now.

You should have told me, Flaxie, it’s against the rules but you should have told me anyway, you should have told me it wasn’t an imp but a catalyst to wake her, instead of letting me be the fool to believe in what I thought I was, in what I thought any of us were.

But I was the only one who had believed. The rest of me, they’d all known differently, and I couldn’t know. Because if I had, it would have completed the circuit, it would have been the thing that linked us all and mindwipe could have taken us all out. Instead of just me. Just me. Just me. Just
reach up with my right hand and rip the connection out of my eye.

Somebody screams. It sounds like Rowan, but maybe it’s me.

Good luck, he said. I hope you make it.

• • • • • • • • •

• • • • • • • •

• • • • • • •

• • • • • •

• • • • •

• • • •

• • •

• •

•
feels like a boulder packed into the side of my face. I can see the paramed hovering over me. Bald, blue skin, very folksy. Makes me want to pop him one, but I couldn’t pop a bubble.

“. . . mess,” he’s saying. “Dirty shame. Dirty shame. Optic nerve’s shredded, must hurt like a son of a bitch. Gonna need a graft on that.”

Rowan comes into sight behind him, and it’s like I’m seeing her through the wrong end of a telescope, she looks so far away. And so familiar.

And they come and gather around her, Purple Tuxedo, String-Hair, Hercules, Super Carrot. And more, that I hadn’t seen before. Are they Sovays who found their way to the source, like swimming upstream to unspawn?

“Goddamnedest things occur to you at the goddamnedest times, hey, Mersine?” says the blue paramed, and I realize I’ve been talking away and not even hearing it. Or maybe someone else is doing the talking and I’m just the look-out here.

Someone pushes through the Sovay gang. Fly-Eyes. She looks at me and shakes her head. Someone else moves in next to her, some guy in bad leather body armor and twinkly things stuck here and there around his mouth, and he looks purely disgusted.

“Salazar’s going to spit,” he says.

“Salazar’s going to spit anyway,” says Fly-Eyes. “It’s what she does.” She moves in a little closer, hovering over the paramed’s shoulder. “Can you hear me in there?”

“I hear you,” somebody says. Not this me, whoever’s got the vocal cords.

“You were supposed to leave the fetishizer’s with me. We had her staked out for months. We thought you might be her dump when you were driving, but we couldn’t get a warrant to search her, and when you wouldn’t come with me, I thought that meant you’d found out somebody else had sucked Sovay and you wanted to wait. But then you didn’t respond to the trigger word.”

“Trigger word?” I hear myself ask.

“Frigid. The second time I called you frigid, you were supposed to come with me. Marya would have gotten the wet dream while the cop was telling me what you’d found out.”

“I didn’t know anything except the name ‘Monkey Shock,’ ” I say.

“It would have been all we’d needed,” says the guy in bad imitation leather. “We had a chain of back-ups we could have activated, to keep an eye on you in turns.”

“That don’t make shitsense,” I say—I say. “You shoulda just triggered the cop and had her tell you right out.”

Fly-Eyes shakes her head. “We never let our cops know exactly who’s backing them up. Brain Police policy.”

“In case I got sucked.”

“Oh, we were expecting you to get sucked,” she says. “Marya, that is, not Mersine. Marya came up as a variant of you, Marceline. Since you were the original dump, we couldn’t risk losing you and your testimony. This certainly does screw things up. Marya has Mersine’s spot in the brain now, and it’s going to take ages to build another cop and put her in there—”

I go frantic, pushing to get up and pop her fucking chocks but the folksy blue paramed’s got me tied down or something and he keeps pushing on my shoulders and going, “Sh, now, gotta stay calm, dirty, dirty shame,” and he looks up at Fly-Eyes and says, “I don’t think you were talkin’ to who you thought you were talkin’ to, maybe you oughta go think out loud someplace else before you bring on a seiz—”

They say it was sixteen hours in the hospital, but I don’t remember most of it. It would have been longer, but I wouldn’t stay. I told them no thanks to their graft. Fuck it, I can live without an eye, especially a Brain Police eye. And there isn’t a damned thing they could do about it with my contract up and everything, except get petty and demand their clothes back. Which is what they did.

Little Blondie in the wardrobe department made a big deal out of that, having me exchange piece by piece for the cop’s old clothes. Those were in better condition than what they took back, so I came out with the better end on something. But I couldn’t figure out why he was taking so long and making a big fucking ceremony out of it until she showed up.

Skinny? I seen fatter people that starved to death. I couldn’t believe I’d ever known this woman, but I knew I had. The cop had, I mean. There was this old memory laying around in my mind, the woman behind a desk chewing up food and spitting it into a suckhole. That made me think about mouthkissing and it just turned my stomach inside out practically, seeing her and having to think about that.

“You are legally entitled to leave, since your contract’s up,” she goes, all official. “But I wish you’d reconsider. Or at least let us give you a new optic nerve and an eye. We owe you that much.”

I touch the eyepatch and think about the cop I used to be, or who used to be me, and I get the feeling she’d have wanted it this way. I mean, I don’t know, because I never really knew her, and it’s not like cops are my favorite people even when they’re me, but I feel bad for her, wherever she is. I was supposed to get sucked, not her. So I owe her a big one, and maybe I’m a fool to believe that, because maybe if she’d known all along that she was a multiple, she might have changed places with me and let me go down the drain anyway. But she never got the chance to make that choice.

“Rowan’ll be doing time for that,” says Skinny, nodding at my eyepatch. “And some of the Sovays. The others’ll be waiting for them when they get out. I’m not sure what they’ll do after that. Most of the original people have been rewritten so thoroughly they’re past the point of restoration, either as themselves or as Sovay.”

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

“I thought you’d be interested.”

“I’m not. I been a dump long enough, I don’t need what you’re spitting out.”

She looks offended, but what is she gonna do, fire me? I never worked here, and I’m driving now. If that’s not fair to the rest of me, well, nothing’s ever really fair. Not that I remember, anyway.

I finish the Big Clothing Exchange and ignore the pained look Little Blondie is giving me. I got this other memory laying around, just a tiny one, him looking at me and saying, Come back when you want it taken off, and I can’t forgive him for that. He lied like a goddam rug, and I don’t care if it was his job to do it. Maybe she’d have just gone ahead and let him suck me out, her not knowing what I really was to her, but she should have been told so she could have made that choice, too, whether to get rid of me or let me live.

Ah, fuck her, too. She was Brain Police, as bad as any of them. If I can live with one less eye, the world can live with one less cop.

And besides, I know something they don’t know. For once. And it’s this: she’s going to grow back. Not today, not even next month, but sometime soon, she’ll be filling back in. All those little memories she left laying around, the associations are already starting to reconnect, and she won’t be able to help it. One of these days, she’ll pop up and take a look around and wonder what the hell happened. And I’ll tell her all about it, what they did to her and what they did to me and to all of us, and we’ll see if she wants to be a cop again.

And if she does . . . well, this time she’ll know more, enough that she can make the choice to give us all a chance. Maybe? I mean, I would. Wouldn’t she? Don’t know. Don’t know. Just don’t know
who the hell she thinks she is.

A SHORT, SHARP SHOCK

Kim Stanley Robinson

1. The Night Beach

When he came to he was drowning. The water was black and he bobbed up in it swiftly, obscurely aware that it was dangerous to do so, but he was helpless to stop; he tumbled over and swam downward, arms loose and thrusting like tentacles, but it was useless. Air popped out of him in a stream of white bubbles that flattened and shimmied as they squashed upward, all clustered around bearing him to the surface. He glanced up, suddenly aware of the idea of surface; and there it was, an undulating sheet of obsidian silk on which chips of raw silver skittered wildly back and forth. A flock of startled birds turning all at once—no—it was, he thought as the world began to roar, the shattered image of a crescent moon. At the thought a whole cosmology bloomed in him—

And broke apart like the moon’s image, as he crashed up into the air and gasped. He flailed at the water whooping and kicking hard to stay afloat; he felt a wave lift him and flopped around to face it. A cold smack in the face and he tumbled again, thrashed through a somersault and came up breathing, barking like a seal to suck in more air.

The next time under he rammed a sandbar and then he was rolling on a steep shorebreak, sluiced by sandy water and struck repeatedly by small silver fish. He crawled up through rushing foam, mouth full of salty grit, hands sinking wrist-deep in the wet sand. The little fish leaped in the phosphorescent foam, banged into his arms and legs. The beach was bouncing with silver fish, it was like an infestation of insects. On hands and knees he couldn’t avoid squashing some into the sand.

At the high water mark he collapsed. He looked across a gleaming black strand, filigreed with sea foam receding on a wave. Coarse-grained sand sparked with reflected moonlight, and the fish arched to the shape of the crescent moon, which hung over the horizon at the end of a mirrorflake path of water. Such a dense, intricate, shifting texture of black and white—

A large wave caught him, rolled him back down among the suffocating fish. He clawed the sand without effect, then slammed into another body, warm and as naked as he was. The receding wave rushed down to the triple ripple of the low water mark, leaving them behind: he and a woman, a woman with close-cropped hair. She appeared senseless and he tried to pull her up, but the next wave knocked them down and rolled them like driftwood. He untangled himself from her and got to his knees, took her arms and pulled her up the wet sand, shifting one knee at a time, the little silver fish bouncing all around them. When he had gotten her a few body lengths into dry sand he fell beside her. He couldn’t move.

From down the beach came shrill birdy cries. Children ran up to them shouting, buckets swinging at the ends of their arms like great deformed hands. When they ran on he could not move his head to track them. They returned to his field of vision, with taller people whose heads scraped the moon. The children dashed up and down the strand on the lace edge of the waves. They dumped full buckets of wriggling silver leaves in a pile beyond his head. Fire bloomed and driftwood was thrown on it, until transparent gold ribbons leaped up into the night.

Then another wave caught them and rolled them back down to the sea; the tide was rising and they would have perished, but the cords of a thrown net stopped them short, and they were hauled back and dumped closer to the fire, which hissed and sizzled. The children were laughing.

Later, fighting unconsciousness, he lifted the great stone at the end of his neck. The fire had died, the moon sat on the beach. He looked at the woman beside him. She lay on her stomach, one knee to the side. Dry sand stuck to her skin and the moonlight reflecting from her was gritty; it sparkled as she breathed. Powerful thighs met in a rounded muscly bottom, which curved the light into the dip of her lower back. Her upper back was broad, her spine in a deep trough of muscle, her shoulders rangy, her biceps thick. Short-cropped hair, dark under the moon’s glaze, curled tight to her head; and the profile glimpsed over one shoulder was straight-nosed and somehow classical: a swimmer, he thought as his head fell back, with the big chest and smooth hard muscling of a sponge diver, or a sea goddess, something from the myths of a world he couldn’t remember.

Then her arm shifted out, and her hand came to rest against his flank, and the feel of her coursed all through him: a short, sharp, shock. He caught his breath and found he was sitting up facing her, her palm both cool and warm against his side. He watched her catch the moon on her skin and fling it away.

2. Sea Wrack

When he woke in the morning, the woman was gone. The sun burned just over the water. He lay on a crumbling sand cliff, the high mark of the previous tide’s assault on the beach. With his head resting on one ear, he saw a wet slick foam-flecked strand of silvery brown, and the sea; resting on the other, he saw a lumpy expanse of blond beach, dotted with driftwood. Behind the beach was a forest, which rose steeply to a very tall cliff of white stone; its top edge made a brilliant border with the deep blue sky above.

He lifted his head and noticed that the sand cliff under him was a tiny model of the granite cliff standing over the forest—a transient replica, already falling into the sea. But then again the immense rock cliff was also falling into the sea, the forest its beach, the beach its strand. It repeated the little sand cliffs dissolution on a scale of time so much vaster that the idea of it made him dizzy. The tide ebbs and the stars die.

On the wet strand a troop of birds ran back and forth. They seemed a kind of sandpiper, except their feathers were a dark metallic red. They stabbed away at dead grunion rolling in the wrack, and then dashed madly up the strand chased by waves, their stick legs pumping over blurred reflections of themselves. They made one of these frantic cavalry charges right under a thick white fishing line; surprised at the sight, he raised himself up on his elbows and looked behind him.

A surf fisher sat on a big driftwood log. In fact there were several of them, scattered down the beach at more or less regular intervals. The one closest to him was all in brown, an old brown woman in a baggy coat and floppy hat, who waved briefly at him and did not stir from her log.

He stood and walked to her. Beside her a bucket stood on the sand, filled with the little silver fish from the previous night. She gestured at the bucket, offering him some of the fish, and he saw that her hand was a thick mass of shiny dark brown, her fingers long tubes of lighter hollow brown, with bulbs at their ends. Like tubes of seaweed. And her coat was a brown frond of kelp, and her face a wrinkled brown bulb, popped by the slit of her mouth; and her eyes were polyps, smooth and wet.

An animated bundle of seaweed. He knew this was wrong, but there she sat, and the sun was bright and it was hard to think. Many things inside his head had broken or gone away. He felt no particular emotion. He sat on the sand beside her fishing pole, trying to think. There was a thick tendril that fell from her lower back to her driftwood log, attaching her to it.

He found he was puzzled. “Were you here last night?” he croaked.

The old woman cackled. “A wild one. The stars fell and the fish tried to become birds again. Spring.” She had a wet hissing voice, a strange accent. But it was his language, or a language he knew. He couldn’t decide if he knew any others or not.

She gestured again at her bucket, repeating her offer. Noticing suddenly the pangs of his hunger, he took a few grunion from the bucket and swallowed them.

When he had finished he said, “Where is the woman who washed up with me?”

She jerked a thumb at the forest behind them. “Sold to the spine kings.”

“Sold?”

“They took her, but they gave us some hooks.”

He looked up at the stone cliff above the trees, and she nodded.

“Up there, yes. But they’ll take her on to Kataptron Cove.”

“Why not me?”

“They didn’t want you.”

A child ran down the beach toward them, stepping on the edge of the sand cliff and collapsing it with her passage. She too wore a baggy frond coat and a floppy hat. He noticed that each of the seated surf fishers had a child running about in its area. Buckets sat on the sand like discarded party hats. For a long time he sat and watched the child approach. It was hard to think. The sunlight hurt his eyes.

“Who am I?” he said.

“You can’t expect me to tell you that,” the fisherwoman said.

“No.” He shook his head. “But I. . . . I don’t know who I am.”

“We say, the fish knows it’s a fish when we yank it into the air.”

He got to his feet, laughed oddly, waited for the blood to return to his head. “Perhaps I’m a fish, then. But . . . I don’t know what’s happened to me. I don’t know what happened.”

“Whatever happened, you’re here.” She shrugged and began to reel in her line. “It’s now that matters, we say.”

He considered it.

“Which way is the cove you mentioned?” he said at last.

She pointed down the beach, away from the sun. “But the beach ends, and the cliff falls straight into the sea. It’s best to climb it here.”

He looked at the cliff. It would be a hard climb. He took a few more grunion from the bucket. Fellow fish, dead of self-discovery. The seaweed woman grubbed in a dark mass of stuff in the lee of her log, then offered him a skirt of woven seaweed. He tied it around his waist, thanked her and took off across the beach.

“You’d better hurry,” she called after him. “Kataptron Cove is a long way west, and the spine kings are fast.”

3. The Spine

The forest was thick and damp, with leaves scattered at every level, from the rotting logs embedded in the carpet of ferns to the sunbroken ceiling of leaves overhead. Streams gurgled down the slope, but apparently it had not rained for some time, as smaller creekbeds held only trickles; one served him as a pebble-bottomed trail, broken by networks of exposed roots. In the cool gloom he hiked uphill, moving from glade to glade as if from one green room to the next, each sculpted according to a different theory of space and color. Leaves everywhere gave proof of his eye’s infinite depth of field, and all was still except for the water falling to the sea—and an occasional flash in his peripheral vision, birds, perhaps, which he could never quite see.

The forest ended at the bottom of the cliff, which rose overhead like the side of an enormous continent. Boulders taller than the trees were scattered about at the foot of the cliff. Ferns and mosses covered the tumble of rotten granite between boulders. The cliff itself was riven by deep gulleys, which were almost as steep as the buttresses separating them. He clambered between boulders looking for a likely way up, in a constant fine mist: far above waterfalls had broken apart, and to the left against the white rock was a broad faint rainbow.

Just as he was concluding that he would have to scramble up one of the gulleys he came on a trail going up the side of one, beginning abruptly in the ferny talus. The trail was wide enough for two people to walk side by side, and had been hacked out of the granite side wall of the gulley, where it switchbacked frequently. When the side wall became completely vertical, the trail wound out over the buttress to the left and zigzagged up that steep finger of stone, in stubborn defiance of the breathtaking exposure. It was impossible to imagine how the trail had been built, and it was also true that a break anywhere in the supporting walls would have cut the trail as neatly as miles of empty air; but there were no breaks, and the weedless gravel and polished bedrock he walked over indicated frequent use. He climbed as if on a staircase in a dream, endlessly ascending in hairpin turns, until the forest and beach below became no more than green and blond stripes running far as he could see in both directions, between the sunbeaten blue of the ocean and the sunbeaten white of the granite.

Then the cliff laid back, and the trail led straight ahead on an incline that got less and less steep, until he saw ahead a skyline of shattered granite, running right to left as far as he could see. The rock stood stark against the sky. He hurried forward and suddenly he was on the crest of a ridge extending to his left and right, and before him he saw ocean again—ocean far below, spread out in front of him exactly as it was behind. Surprised, he walked automatically to a point where he could see all the way down: a steep cliff, a strip of forest, a strip of sand, the white-on-blue tapestry of breaking waves, the intense cobalt of the sea. He stepped back and staggered a little, trying to look in every direction at once.

He was standing on the crest of a tall peninsula, which snaked through an empty ocean for as far as he could see. It was a narrow ridge of white granite, running roughly east to west, bisecting the blue plate of the sea and twice marring the circular line of the horizon. The ridge rose to peaks again and again, higher perhaps in the talcum of afternoon light to the west; it also undulated back and forth, big S shapes making a frozen sine wave. The horizon was an enormous distance away, so far away that it seemed wrong to him, as wrong as the seaweed woman. In fact the whole prospect was fantastically strange; but there he stood, feeling the wind rake hard over the lichen-stained ridge, watching it shove at low shrubs and tufts of sedge.

It occurred to him that the peninsula extended all the way around the world. A big ocean world, and this lofty ring of rock its only land: he was sure of it. It was as if it were something he remembered.

4. Beauty Is the Promise of Happiness

He roused himself and headed west, thinking that a bend in the peninsula out that way might hide Kataptron Cove. The sun fell just to the right of the rock, slowing as it fell, flattening as if reluctant to touch the horizon, breaking into bands of glowing orange light that stretched until they were sucked down by the sea. The twilight was long, a mauve and purple half day, and he hiked rapidly over the crest’s shattered granite, which was studded with crystals of translucent quartz. As he walked over the rough edges of stones, feeling liberty in the twisting ligaments of his ankles, he kept an eye out for some sort of shelter for the night. The trail he had followed onto the spine had disappeared, no doubt because the crest itself served as a broad high trail; but at one point a deep transverse cleft had been filled at a single spot by boulders, confirming his notion that the trail still ran, and would reappear when needed.

So he was not surprised when he came upon a low circular stone hut, next to a small pool of water. In this area stone broke away from the bedrock in irregular plates, and a great number of these had been gathered and stacked in rings that grew successively smaller as they got higher off the ground, until a final large capstone topped things off. The stones had been sized and placed so precisely that it would have been difficult to get more than a fingernail between any two of them. A short chimney made of smaller stones protruded from one side of the roof.

Opening a wooden door in the wall opposite the chimney, he entered and found a wooden shelf circling the interior of the wall. Next to the fireplace was a stack of kindling and logs; other than that the hut was empty. He was without the means to start a fire, and it was fairly warm in any case, so he went back outside and drank from the pool, then sat against the west wall to eat the last of the fisherwoman’s grunion, in the final hour of twilight. As the light leaked out of the sky it turned a deep rich blue, dark but not quite black: and across this strangely palpable firmament the stars popped into existence, thousands upon thousands of them, from bright disks that might have been nearby planets to dots so faint that he could only see them by looking slightly to the side. Eventually the sky was packed with stars, so densely that they defined perfectly the dome of sky; and frightened him. “Where I come from there are not so many stars,” he said shakily to the hut, and then felt acutely his solitude, and the emptinesses inside his mind, the black membranes he could not penetrate. He retreated into the hut. After a long time lying on the hard wooden shelf, he fell asleep.

Sometime before dawn he was awakened by a crowd of folk banging in the doorway. They held him down and searched under his skirt. They had broad hard hands. Cloaks made of small leaves sewn together clicked in the dark, and it smelled like oranges.

“Are you the spine kings?” he asked, drunk with sleep.

They laughed, an airy sound. One said, “If we were you’d be strangled with your own guts by now.”

“Or tossed down the cliff.”

The first voice said, “Or both. The spine kings’ hello.”

They all had lumps on their left shoulders, irregular dark masses that looked like shrubs. They took him out of the hut, and under the sea-colored sky he saw that the lumps were in fact shrubs—miniature fruit trees, it appeared, growing out of their left shoulders. The fruits were fragrant and still reminded him of oranges, although the smell had been altered by the salt tang, made more bitter. Round fruit, in any case, of a washed-out color that in better light might have been pale green.

The members of this group arranged themselves in a circle facing inward, took off their leaf cloaks and sat down. He sat in the circle between two of them, glancing at the shoulder tree to his right. It definitely grew directly out of the creature’s skin—the gnarled little roots dove into the flesh just as a wart would, leaving an overgrown fissure between bark and skin.

With a jerk he looked away. It was almost dawn, and the treefolk began singing a low monophonic chant, in a language he didn’t recognize. The sky lightened to its day blue, slightly thickened by the sun’s absence, and the wind suddenly picked up, as if a door had banged open somewhere—a cool fresh breeze, peeling over the spine in the same moment that the sun pricked the distant gray line of the horizon, a green point stretching to a line of hot yellow and then a band of white fire, throwing the sea’s surface into shadow and revealing a scree of low diaphanous cloud. Before the sun had detached itself from the sea each member of the circle had plucked a fruit from the shoulder of the person on their right, and when the sun was clear and the horizon sinking rapidly away from it, they ate. Their bites caused a faint cystalline ringing, and the odor of bitter oranges was strong. He felt his stomach muscles contract, and saliva ran down his throat. The celebrant nearest the sun glanced at him and said, “Treeless here will be hungry.”

He almost nodded, but held himself still.

“What’s your name?” the celebrant asked. He had been the first speaker in the hut.

“I don’t know.”

“No?” The creature considered it. “Treeless will be good enough, then. In our naming language, that is Thel.”

In his mind he called himself Thel. But his real name . . . black space behind his nose, in the sky under his skull. . . . “It will do here,” he said, and waved a hand. “It is accurate enough.”

The man laughed. “So it is. I am Julo.” He looked across the circle. “Garth, come here.”

A young man stood. He had been sitting opposite Julo, facing out from the circle, and now Thel noticed his tree grew from the right shoulder rather than the left.

“This is Garth, which means Rightbush. Garth, give Thel here an apple.” Garth hesitated, and Julo strode across the circle of watchers and cuffed him on the arm. “Do it!”

Garth approached Thel and stood before him, looked down. Thel said to him, “Which should I choose?”

With a grateful glance up the youth indicated the largest fruit, on a lower branch. Thel took the round green sphere in his fingers and pulled sharply, noting Garth’s involuntary wince. Then he sniffed the stem, and bit through the skin. The bitter taste of orange, he sat in a small dark room, watching the wick of a lamp lit by a match held in long fingers, the flame turned up and burning poorly, in a library with bookcases for walls and a huge old leather globe in one corner. . . . He shook his head, back on the windy dawn spine, Julo’s laughter in his ear, behind that a crystalline ringing. A bird hovered in the updraft, a windhover searching the lee cliff for prey. “Thank you,” Thel said to Garth.

The treefolk gathered around him, touched his bare shoulders, asked him questions. He had nothing but questions in reply. Who were the spine kings? he asked, and their faces darkened. “Why do you ask?” Julo said. “Why don’t you know?”

Thel explained. “The fisherfolk pulled me from the sea. Before that—I don’t know. I can’t . . .” He shook his head. “They pulled out a woman with me, a swimmer, and sold her to the spine kings.” He gestured helplessly, the thought of her painful. Already the memory of her was fading, he knew. But that touch in the moonlight—“I want to find her.”

“They have some of our people as well,” Julo said. “We’re going after them.” He reached into his bag and threw Thel a leaf cloak and a pair of leather moccasins with thick soles. “You can come along. They’re at Kataptron Cove, for the sacrifices.”

The boy’s fruit was suddenly heavy on his stomach, and he shuddered as if every cell in him had tasted something bitter.

5. The Snake and the Tree

The treefolk hiked long and hard, following a line on the broad crest that minimized the ups and downs, nearly running along a rock road that Thel judged to be some three thousand feet above the sea. After a few days the south side of the sinuous peninsula became a fairly gentle slope, cut by ravines and covered with tall redwood trees; in places on this side the beach was a wide expanse, dotted with ponds and green with rippling dune grass. The north side, on the other hand, remained a nearly vertical cliff, falling directly into waves, which slapped against the rock unbroken and sent bowed counterwaves back out to the north, stippling the blue surface of the water with intersecting arcs.

Once their ridge road narrowed, and big blocky towers of pink granite stood in their way. The trail reappeared then, on the sunny southern slope, and they followed it along a contoured traverse below the boulders, passing small pools that looked hacked into the rock. Half a day of this and they had passed the sharp peaks and were back on the ridge, looking ahead down its back as it snaked through the blue ocean. “How long is this peninsula?” Thel asked, but they only stared at him.

Every morning at sunrise, Julo ordered young Garth to provide a shoulder apple for Thel’s consumption, and in the absence of any other food Thel accepted it and ate hungrily. He saw no more hallucinations, but each time experienced a sudden flush of pinkness in his vision, and felt the bitter tang of the taste to his bones. His right shoulder began to ache as he lay down to sleep. He ignored it and hiked on. He noticed that on cloudy days his companions hiked more slowly, and that when they stopped by pools to rest on those days, they took off their boots and stuck their feet between cracks in the rock, looking weary and relaxed.

Some days later the peninsula took a broad curve to the north, and for the first time the sun set on the south side of it. They stopped at a hut set on a particularly high knob on the ridge, and Thel looked around at the peninsula, splitting the ocean all the way to the distant horizon. It was a big world, no doubt of it; and the days and nights were much longer than what he had been used to, he was sure. He grew tired at midday, and often woke for a time in the middle of the long nights. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said to Garth, waving perplexed at the mountainous mound zigzagging across the sea. “There isn’t any geological process that could create a feature like this.”

This was said almost in jest, given the other more important mysteries of his existence. But Garth stared at him, eyes feverish. He was lying exhausted, his feet deep in a crack; seeing this in the evenings Thel always resolved not to eat, and every morning he awoke too ravenous to refuse. Now, as if to pay Garth back with conversation, he added, “Land floats like wood, thick cakes of it drifting on slow currents of melted rock below, and a peninsula like this, as tall as this . . . I suppose it could be a mid-oceanic ridge, but in that case it would be volcanic, and this is all granite. I don’t understand.”

Garth said, “It’s here, so it must be possible.”

Thel laughed. “The basis of your world’s philosophy. You didn’t tell me you were a philosopher.”

Garth smiled bitterly. “Live like me and you too will become one. Maybe it’s happening already, eh? Maybe before you swam ashore you didn’t concern yourself with questions like that.”

“No,” Thel said, considering it. “I was always curious. I think.” And to Garth’s laugh: “So it feels, you see. Perhaps not everything is gone.” It seemed possible that the questions came from the shattered side of his mind, from some past self he couldn’t recall but which shaped his thinking anyway. “Perhaps I studied rock.” Though it seemed a strange enterprise.

At sunset the wind tended to die, just as the sunrise quickened it; now it slackened. Perhaps I have died like the wind, he thought; perhaps the only thing that survives after death are the questions, or the habit of questioning.

The two of them watched the sun sink, just to the left of the bump of the spine on the horizon. “It’s as if it’s a river in reverse,” Thel said. “If a deep river ran across a desert land, and then you reversed the landscape, water and earth, you would get something that looked like this.”

“The earth river,” Garth said. “The priests of the birdfolk call it that.”

“Are there any tributaries? Any lakes-turned-into-islands?”

“I’ve never seen any.”

The air darkened and the salt air grew chill. Garth was breathing deeply, about to fall asleep, when he said in a voice not his, a voice pleasant but at the same time chilling: “Through mirrors we see things right way round at last.”

In the days that followed, this image of a landscape in reverse haunted Thel, though in the end it explained nothing. The stony spine continued to split the water, and it got taller, the south side becoming as steep as the north again. In places they walked on a strip of level granite no wider than a person, and on each side the cliffs plunged some five thousand feet into white foam tapestries that shifted back and forth over deep water, as if something below the blue were lightly breathing: it disturbed one’s balance to look down at it, and though the strip was wide enough to walk on comfortably, the sheer airiness of it gave Thel vertigo. Garth walked over it with a pinched expression, and Julo laughed at him, cuffed him hard so that he had to go to his knees to avoid falling over the side; then Julo forced him to walk backward, which served the others as amusement.

Eventually the north side grew less steep, laying out until the peninsula was wider than ever. In this section a hot white cliff faced south, a cool forested slope faced north. On the north slope were scattered stands of enormous evergreens, the tallest trees three or four hundred feet high. One of these giants stood on a ledge just below the crest, and had grown up above the ridge, where the winds had flattened it so that its branches grew horizontally in all directions, some laying over the ridge, others fanning out into the air over the beach and the sea far below.

The treefolk greeted this flat-topped giant as an ancestor, and clambered out over the horizontal branches to the tree’s mighty trunk, over it, and out the other side. They ended up on three or four lightning-blasted gnarly branches, ten feet wide and so solid that jumping up and down would not move them, though the whole tree swayed gently in a fitful west wind. Big shallow circular depressions had been cut into the tops of these branches, and the exposed wood had been polished till it gleamed.

They spent the night in these open-roofed rooms, under the star-flooded sky. By starlight Thel looked at the wood by his head and saw the grain of centuries of growth exposed. The peninsula had been here for thousands of years, millions of years—both the plant life and the erosion of the granite showed that. But how had it begun? “When you talk among yourselves about the spine,” he said to the treefolk, “do you ever talk about where it came from? Do you have a story that explains it?”

Julo was looking down into the grain of the floor beneath him, still and rapt as if he had not heard Thel; but after a while he said, in a low voice, “We tell a story about it. Traveling in silent majesty along their ordered ways, the gods tree and snake were lovers in the time without time. But they fell into time, and snake saw a vision of a lover as mobile as he, and he chased round the sky until he saw the vision was his own tail. He bit the tail in anger and began to bleed, and his blood flowed out into a single great drop, bound by the circle his long body made. He died of the loss, and tree climbed on his back and drove her roots deep into his body, trying to feed his blood into him, trying to bring him back to life, and all her acorns dropped and grew to join in the attempt. And here we are, accidents of her effort, trying to help her as we can, and some day the snake will live again, and we will all sail off among the stars, traveling in silent majesty.”

“Ah,” Thel said. And then: “I see.”

But he didn’t see, and he arranged himself for sleep and looked up into the thickets of stars, disappointed. Garth lay next to him, and much later, when the others were asleep, Garth whispered, “You don’t know where you came from. You have no idea how you came here or what you are. Worry about that, and when you know those things, then worry about the great spine.”

6. Kataptron Cove

The next dawn it was bitterly cold out on the swaying branches, and they sat back against the curved wall of the biggest room shivering as Julo watched the sky to determine the exact moment of sunrise, hidden behind the ridge. When he turned to pluck the fruit from the man next to him he took three, and the others did the same. Thel restricted himself to his usual one of Garth’s, and asked him why the others had eaten more.

“We’ll reach Kataptron Cove this evening.”

And so they did. It was on the south side, in an arc the peninsula made. Here the granite side of the peninsula was marred by the shattered walls of a small crater—a horseshoe ring of jagged black rock, extending into the sea and broken open to it at its outermost point, so that the inside of the crater was a small lagoon. Clearly it was an old volcanic vent, and as it was the first sign of vulcanism that Thel had seen, he approached it with interest. But he was soon distracted by the grim faces of the treefolk, who marched around him as if going into battle. Foreboding charged the air, and the treefolk abandoned the trail that descended the southern slope in a long traverse to the crater bay, and struggled through dense woods above the trail.

They descended into thick salt air filled with the sound of waves, gliding from tree to tree like spirits, moving very slowly onto the high crumbly rim of the crater, overlooking the inner lagoon. The curving inner wall of the crater was a reddish cliff, overgrown with green. Where the crater met the spine a stream fell down the inner wall and across the sand into the lagoon; on the banks of the stream there was a permanent camp, built in a grove of trees that had been cleared of undergrowth. In the shadows of these trees people moved, and smoke spiraled up through the sunbeams lancing among the branches.

In the depths of the grove there was a hubbub, and a crowd emerged onto the open beach, a gang wearing leather skirts and belted short swords, and tight golden helmets. They chivvied along a short row of prisoners, naked and in chains, and Thel heard Garth whimper softly. He looked around and saw that the treefolk had their eyes fixed on the beach in horror, and unwilling fascination. “What is it?” he said.

Garth pointed at where the grove met the beach. Two tall tree trunks standing beside each other had been stripped bare; behind the trunks stood a platform about half their height. “It’s the flex X,” Garth whispered, and would not elaborate. He sat with his back to the scene, head in hands.

Thel and the rest of the treefolk watched as a prisoner was hauled up the steps of the platform. Two crews on the ground set about winding ropes tied to the top of each treetrunk, until the trunks were crossing each other at about the level of the platform. Intuitively Thel understood the function of the large bowed X the trees made, and his stomach contracted to a hard knot of tension and vicarious terror; still he watched as the first prisoner was tied to the two trees, and the thick ropes holding the trees in position were knocked off notched stumps, and the two tall trunks returned to an upright position, with a stately swaying motion that had not the slightest hitch in it when the prisoner was ripped apart. Blood fountained from the head and the body, now separated. Thel saw that the beach around the two trees was littered with lumps here and there, all a dark brown, now splattered with red: the wreckage of lives.

At that distance people were the size of dolls, and they heard nothing of them over the sounds of waves. The executioners tied each prisoner to the two trees in a different manner, so that the second came apart at the limbs, and the third in the middle, leaving a long loop of intestine hanging between the two poles.

Thel found he was sitting. His skin was covered with a sour sweat. He felt cold. He moved in front of Garth, took his face in his hands. “The spine kings?”

Garth nodded miserably.

“Who are they?”

No response. Feeling the futility of the question, Thel stood and went to Julo, who laughed maliciously as he saw Thel’s face.

“What will you do?” Thel asked.

“Go have a look. They’ll be drinking tonight, they’ll all get drunk and there’ll be little watch kept. They fear no one in any case. We can be quiet, and some of us will go have a look for our kind. If we can find them, we can see what kind of lock they’re under. It may be possible to slip them out on a night like this. We’re lucky to have seen that,” he said, ironic to the point of snarling. “We know they’ll be off guard.”

Thel nodded, impressed despite himself by Julo’s courage. “I want to come with you,” he said. “I can look for the swimmer.”

“She’ll be under stronger guard,” Julo warned him. “But you’re welcome to try. It’s why you’re here, right?”

7. Two Xs

So in the long indigo twilight they made their way around the rim of the crater bay like ghosts, stepping so silently that the loudest sound coming from them was their heartbeats, tocking at the backs of their open mouths. Shadows with heartbeats, as silent as the fear of death, slipping from trunk to trunk and searching the forest ahead with the acute gaze of hunted beasts . . . the spine king sentinels carried crossbows, Julo had said. They descended the crater wall well away from the village, and then worked their way back to it through a thin forest of pines, stepping across a carpet of brown needles.

Ahead came the sound of voices, and the beach stream. The leaves of the treefolk’s shoulder bushes rustled when they moved too quickly. It was getting dark, the color draining out of everything except the pinpricks of fire dancing in the black needles ahead.

Drumming began, parodying their heavy heartbeats. They hugged the crater wall, circled to the edge of a firelit clearing. In the clearing were huts, cages, and platforms, all made of straight branches with the bark still on them. Some of the cages held huddled figures.

Thel froze. Reflection of torchlight from a pair of eyes, the shaggy head of a wild beast captured and caged, brilliant whites defiant and exhausted: it was her. Thel stared and stared at the black lump of the body, heavy in the dark, clothed only in dirt—the tangled hair backlit by fire—eyes reflecting torchlight. He had no idea why he was so certain. But he knew it was the swimmer.

The treefolk were clustered around him. When guards with torches arrived in the clearing, the prisoners sat up, and around him Thel heard a faint rustling of leaves. He peered more closely and saw that the cage beside the swimmer’s held seated figures, slumped over. One of them begged for water and the guards approached. In the sharply flickering torchlight Thel could see slack faces, eyes shut against the light, odd hunched shoulders—ah. Trunks, stalks, stumps: their shoulder bushes had been chopped off. One of the captured treefolk, lying flat on the ground, was hauled up; he still had his little tree, its fruit gone, its leaves drooping. “The fire’s low,” one guard said drunkenly, and drew his short broad sword and hacked away. It took several blows, thunk, thunk, the victim weeping, his companions listless, looking away, the other guards holding the victim upright and steady and finally bending the trunk of the miniature tree until it broke with a dull crack. The victim flopped to the ground and the guards left the cage and tossed the little tree onto the embers of a big fire: it flared up white and burned well for several minutes, as if the wood were resinous.

Thel’s companions had watched this scene without moving; only the rustle of leaves betrayed their distress. The guards left and they slipped back into the black forest, and Thel followed them. When they showed no signs of stopping he crashed forward recklessly, and pulled at Julo’s arm; when Julo shrugged him off and continued on, Thel reached out and grabbed the trunk of Julo’s shoulder tree and yanked him around, and then had to defend himself immediately from a vicious rain of blows, which stopped only when the other treefolk threw themselves between the two, protesting in anxious mutters, whispering shh, shh, shhh.

“What are you doing?” Thel cried softly.

“Leaving,” Julo said between his teeth.

“Aren’t you going to free them?”

“They’re dead.” Julo turned away, clearly too disgusted and furious to discuss it further. With a fierce chopping gesture he led the others away.

“What about the swimmer?”

They didn’t stop. Suddenly the black forest seemed filled with distant voices, with drunken bodies crashing into underbrush, with yellow winking torches bouncing through the trees. Thel backed into a tree, leaned against the shaggy bark. He took deep deliberate breaths. The cage had been made of lashed branches, but out in the center of the clearing like that. . . .

“I’ll help you,” Garth said out of the darkness, giving Thel a start. “It’s me, Garth.”

They held each other’s forearms in the dark. “You’ll lose the others if you stay,” Thel said.

“I know,” Garth said, voice low and bitter. “You’ve seen how he treats me. I want to be free of them all, forever. I’ll make my own life from now on.”

“That’s not an easy thing,” Thel said.

Without replying Garth turned back the way they had come, and they crept back to the clearing. Once there they lay behind a fallen log and looked into the firelit cages. Garth’s fellow folk sat there listlessly.

“Their trees won’t grow back?”

“Would your arm?”

“And so they’ll die?”

“Yes.”

Garth slipped away, and after a time Thel saw an orange light like a sort of firefly bobbing through the trees: Garth, holding a branch tipped by a glowing ember. Thel joined him, and they crept to the back of the treefolk’s cage, and Garth held the tip of the branch to the lashings at the bottom of one pole. As they blew on the coal the treefolk inside watched, without a sound or any sign of interest.

Garth begged those inside to emerge, and got no reply. Thel stared at the orange ember which brightened as they blew on it, embarrassed for Garth, and worried about what he could do alone. When the cage lashing caught fire with a miniature explosion of white flame, Garth looked at his comrades through the smoke and said fiercely, “You know what the spine kings have done to you! You know what they’ll do to you next! Come out and exact some revenge, meet your end like trees should. While you do we can rescue a friend who yet lives, and you’ll either make a quick end to it, or escape to be free on the great spine when your time comes.” He jerked hard on the pole and it came loose. “Come on, get out there among them and remember the part of you they threw on their fires.”

One of them started forward and crawled under the lifted pole, and the rest looked at each other, at the raw stumps protruding from their shoulders; they too slipped from the cage. In a moment they had all disappeared into the dark.

“It would be better if we had something else for the other cage,” Garth said to Thel. “The ember is dying.”

“There are a lot more in the fire.”

“My kin’s lives.”

“They can free these others.”

Garth nodded. “We burn hot. But one of those swords they carry would be helpful.” And he disappeared again.

Thel waited, as near the swimmer’s cage as he could get without emerging into the light. From the hut beside the bonfire and the central cage came the sounds of laughter, then those of an argument turning ugly. Around him in the forest were odd noises, sudden silences, and he imagined the treeless treefolk wandering murderously in the dark, jumping drunken guards as they stumbled off to piss in the trees, bludgeoning them and then stealing their swords to slip between the ribs of others. The spine kings feared no one and now they would pay, ambushed in their own village in the midst of their death bacchanal. Sick with images of brutal murder, keyed to the highest pitch of tension, Thel leaped to his feet involuntarily as a crash and cries came from the direction of the beach, and the guards in the clearing’s hut rushed out and down a path. “The platform!” someone was shouting in the distance as Thel ran to the bonfire and snatched up a brand. Sparks streamed in a wide arc from the burning end as he ran to the cage and crushed the burning end of the branch against the lashings at the bottom of a pole. This cage was better constructed and it was going to take longer. A twig cracked behind him and the swimmer croaked a warning; he swung the brand around and caught an onrushing guard in the face. The guard’s raised broadsword flew into the cage, cutting one prisoner who cried out; the guard himself couldn’t, do more than grunt, as Thel beat him furiously across the neck and head. When Thel turned back to the cage the prisoners had cut the lashing with the sword and were squeezing out of the cage and cursing one another under their breath. Thel took the swimmer woman by the arm and pulled her out; she was thicker than the others and barely fit through the gap. She appeared dazed, but when Thel held her face in his hands and caught her eye, she recognized him. Garth had reappeared, and Thel was about to lead the swimmer out of the clearing when one of the other prisoners said urgently, “Wonderful saviors, thank you eternally, please, follow me, I know where the trailhead is that leads up to the spine!” So they followed him, but it seemed to Thel he went straight for the center of the camp.

Shrieks cut the night and torches had been tossed high into the trees, some of which had caught fire and become great torches themselves, so that there was far too much light for their purpose. “Wait one moment please,” the prisoner who claimed to know the way said, and he ran into the largest house in the camp.

Apparently some of the treefolk amputees had found the flex X and set it alight. The crater wall enclosing the lagoon appeared out of the darkness, faintly illuminated by the burning village. Sparks wafted among the stars, it seemed the cosmos was winking out fire by fire. The prisoner ran out of the house carrying a sack. “Follow me now,” he cried jubilantly, “and run for your lives!”

They ran after him. Thel took the swimmer by the arm, determined not to lose her in the mayhem. But now the prisoner was true to his word, and he led them through firebroken shadows to a wide cobbled trail, ignoring the shouts and cries around them. The trail ran up to the crater’s rim and then along it, to the point where the crater wall diverged from the great slope of the spine ridge. The trail began to switchback up the slope. Looking across an arc of the lagoon they saw the village dotted with burning trees and smaller patches of fire, the flex X burning high on a beach glossy as a seal’s back, and there were two images of everything: one burning whitely over the beach, another, inverted, burning a clear yellow in the calm black water of the bay.

8. The Mirror

Afraid of the spine kings’ pursuit, they ran the trail west for many days, scarcely pausing to loot caches located by the prisoner who led them. The caches contained clothing and shoes, and also buried jugs of dried meat and fruit, lumps so hard and dry they couldn’t tell what anything was until chewing it; good food, but because there were seven of them they were still hungry. “We’ll come to my village soon,” the prisoner said one evening after doling out a meager dinner, and outfitting Thel and the swimmer in pants and tunics, and boots that were a lucky fit. The prisoner’s name was Tinou, and he had a wonderful big smile; he seemed astonished and delighted to have escaped the spine kings, and often he thanked Thel and Garth for their rescue. “When we get there we’ll eat like the lords of the ocean deep.”

The sun had set an hour before, and a line of clouds over the western horizon was the pink of azaleas, set in a sky the color of lapis. The seven sat around a small fire: Thel, the swimmer, Garth, Tinou, and three women. These women all had faces cast in the same mold, and a strange mold it was; where their right eye should have been the skin bulged out into another, smaller face, lively and animated, with features that did not look like the larger one around it—except for the fact that its own little right eye was again replaced by a face, a very little face—which had an even tinier face where its right eye should have been, and so on and so on, down in a short curve to the limit of visibility, and no doubt beyond.

This oddity made the three women’s faces impressive and even frightening, and because the three full-sized faces seldom spoke, Thel always felt that when talking to them he was really conversing with one of the smaller faces—perhaps the very smallest, beyond the limit of visibility—who might reply in a tiny high squeak at any time.

But now the three women stood before Tinou, and one said, “We want to know what you took from Kataptron Cove.”

“I took this bag,” Tinou said, “and it’s mine.”

“It is all of ours,” the middle woman said, her voice heavy and slow. Her companions moved to Tinou’s sides. “Show us what it is.”

In the dusk it was hard to tell if expressions or firelight were flickering across Tinou’s long and mobile face. Thel and the swimmer leaned forward together to see better this small confrontation, and Tinou flashed them his friendly smile. “I suppose there is justice in that,” he said, and picked up his shoulder bag. Untying the drawstring he said, “Here,” and slipped something out of the bag, a small shiny plate of some sort.

“Gold,” the middle facewoman said.

Tinou nodded. “Yes, in a manner of speaking. But it is more that, in fact. It is a mirror, see?”

He held it up—a round smooth mirror with no rim, the glass of it golden rather than silver. Held up against the dark eastern sky it gleamed like a lamp, revealing a rich blue line in a field of pink.

“It is no ordinary mirror,” Tinou said. “My people will reward us generously when we arrive with it, I assure you.”

He put it back in the bag, and for a moment it seemed to Thel he was stuffing light into the bag as well, until with a hard jerk he closed the drawstring. Wind riffled over them, below lay the calm surface of the sea, and in the east the moon rose, its blasted face round and brilliant; looking from it to the quick yellow banners of their fire, Thel suddenly felt he walked in a world of riches. Night beach and big-handed children, running the mirrorflake road on the sea. . . .

The next dawn they were off again. At first Thel had been shy of the swimmer, even a bit frightened of her; she couldn’t know how important her image had been to him before the rescue, and he didn’t know what to say to her. But now he walked behind her or beside her, depending on the width of the trail, and as they walked he asked her questions. Who was she? What did she remember from before the night they had washed onto the beach? What had gotten them to that point under the water? What was her name?

She only shook her head. She remembered the night on the beach; beyond that she was unable to say. She concentrated her gaze on her long feet, which seemed to have trouble negotiating the rock, and rarely looked at him. He didn’t mind. It was a comfort to be walking with her and to know that someone shared the mystery of his arrival on the peninsula. She was a fellow exile, moving like a dancer caught in heavier gravity than she was used to, and it was a pleasure just to watch her as the sun roasted her brown hair white at the tips, and burned her pale skin red-brown. Often aspects of her reminded Thel of that first night: the set of her rangy shoulders, the profile of her long nose. With speech or without, she reassured him.

So they moved westward, and the peninsula got steep and narrow again, the granite as hard as iron and a gray near black, flecked with rose quartz nodules. The dropoffs on both sides became so extreme that they could see nothing but a short curved slope of rock, and then ocean, a few thousand feet below. Tinou told them that here the walls of the sea cliffs were concave, so that they walked on a tube of rock that rested on a thin vertical sheet of stone, layered like an onion; in some places, he said, the two cliffsides had fallen away to nothing, so that they walked on arches over open holes, called the Serpent’s Gates. “If you were on the tide trail, you could climb up into them and sit under a giant rainbow of stone, the wind howling through the hole.”

Instead they tramped a trail hacked waist-deep into the dense dark rock, to give some protection from falls. Every day Tinou said they were getting close to his village, and to support the claim the trail changed under their feet, shifting imperceptibly from barely touched broken rock to a loose riprap, and then to cobblestones set in rings of concentric overlapping arcs, and finally, early one morning shortly after they started off, to a smoothly laid mosaic, made of small polished segments of the rose quartz. Longer swirls of dark hornblende were set into this pink road, forming letters in a cursive alphabet, and Tinou sang out the words they spelled in a jubilant tenor, the “Song of Mystic Arrival in Oia” as he explained, fluid syllables like the sound of a beach stream’s highest gurgling.

Then they came over a rise in the ridge, and there facing the southern sea, tucked in a steep scoop in the top of the cliff, was a cluster of whitewashed blocky buildings, lined in tight rows so that the narrow lanes were protected from the wind. Terrace after terrace cut the incurved slope, until it reached an escarpment hanging over the sea; from there a white staircase zigzagged down a gully to a tiny harbor below, three white buildings and a dock, gleaming like a pendant hanging from Oia.

9. The Sorcerers of Oia

A crowd greeted them as they entered the village, men and women convening almost as though by coincidence, as though if Tinou and his retinue had not appeared they would have gathered anyway; but when they saw Tinou they smiled, for the most part, and congratulated him on his return. “Not many escape the spine kings,” one woman said, and laughing the others crushed in on them to touch Tinou and his companions, while Tinou sang the trail’s mosaic song, ending with an exuberant leap in the air.

“I thought I would never return here again,” he cried, “and I never would have if not for Thel here, who slipped into the spine kings’ village the night we were to be torn apart on the crossing trees. He set us free, he saved our lives!” Jubilantly he embraced Thel, then added, “He made it possible for all of us to return to Oia—” and he took the mirror out of his shoulder bag.

Silence fell, and the crowd seemed both to step back and to press in at once. Thel thought he could hear the sound of the sea, murmuring far below. A woman dressed in a saffron dress said, “Well, Tinou, your return was one thing, but this—”

General laughter, and then they were being led into the narrow streets of the village. These either contoured across town, making simple arcs, or ascended it in steep marble staircases, each step bowed in the middle from centuries of wear. Every lane and alley was lined by blocky whitewashed buildings, often painted with the graceful cursive lettering. By the time they came to a tiny plaza on the far side of the village, the sun was low on the horizon, it broke under clouds and suddenly every west wall was as gold as Tinou’s mirror, and many of the west-facing windows were blinding white.

Restaurants ringed the plaza, each sporting a cluster of outdoor tables, and as dusk seeped into things lanterns were hung in small gnarled trees or put on windowsills, and the people ate and drank long into the night. Thel and the swimmer and the three facewomen ate voraciously, and became drunk on the fiery spirits poured for them, and the villagers danced, their long pantaloons and dresses swirling like the colors in a kaleidoscope, yards of cloth spinning under strong wiry naked torsos, both men and women dancing like gods, so that the watchers were shocked when a bottle shattered and the color of blood spurted into their field of vision, off to the side; a fight, quickly broken up, overridden by the gaiety of the sorcerers of Oia. The mirror was back.

In the days that followed, the celebration continued. Eventually it became clear that this was the permanent state of things in Oia, that this was the way the sorcerers lived. They poured sea water into stone vats, and later drew their spirits from taps at the vats’ bottoms. Sea lions brought them their daily fish in exchange for drinks of this liquor; the creatures swam right up to the dock at the cliff bottom, barking hoarsely as they deposited long three-eyed fish on the dock. Later the sorcerers turned some of the fish meat into tough dark red steak, which tasted nothing like the flaking fish. Their gardens and goats were tended by their children—and in short, they lived lives of leisure, playing complex games, undergoing abstruse studies, and performing rituals and ceremonies. Tinou took his fellow travelers with him wherever he went, and introduced them as his saviors, and they were feted to exhaustion.

One day to escape it Thel and the swimmer walked down the staircase trail that switchbacked precipitously to the sea. On the way they passed grown-over foundations, and roofless walls filled with weeds: vestiges of earlier Oias, shaken by earthquakes into the sea. On the dock below some of the sorcerers stood talking to the sea lions, taking their bloody catch and pouring tankards of the liquor down their throats. Even their vilest imprecations couldn’t keep a flock of gulls away, and the gulls wheeled overhead crying madly until the barking sea lions breeched far into the air, thick sleek sluglike bodies twisting adroitly as they snagged birds and crushed them in their small powerful mouths. Eventually the gulls departed and the lions swam off, a wrack of feathered corpses left on the groundswell.

After they were gone, Thel and the swimmer shed their garments and dove in. Underwater Thel became instantly afraid, but the sight of the swimmer stroking downward was somehow familiar, and strangely reassuring. He stayed under for as long as he could hold his breath, and then joined her in bodysurfing the groundswells that rose up to strike the cliffs. As the two rode the waves they remained completely inside the water, surfing as the sea lions did, and they were drawn swiftly forward in the wave until they ducked down and out to avoid crashing into the cliff or the dock. During these rides, slung through the water by two curves of spacetime rushing across each other, Thel would look over at the swimmer’s long naked body and feel his own flowing in the water, until it was hard to hold his breath, not because he was winded but because he needed to shout for joy.

When they pulled themselves back onto the worn stones of the dock, Tinou was there, except now he was a woman, lapghing in a contralto at their expressions as she stripped and dove in; her face was clearly Tinou’s, unmistakeable despite the fact that it was slimmer, more feminine—yet clearly not a sister or twin, no, nothing but Tinou himself, shape-changed into a svelte female form. Thel and the swimmer looked at each other, baffled by this transformation; and halfway through the long climb up the stairs Tinou caught up with them, a man again, coquettishly embracing first the swimmer and then Thel (slim wet arms quick around his shoulders), and then laughing uproariously at their expressions.

That sunset he led them and the facewomen down into the ruins of the previous village. Here broken buildings had dropped their barrel roofs onto their floors, and worn splintered sticks of old furniture still stuck out between the bowed bricks. Other sorcerers set lanterns in a circle around what appeared to be an abandoned plaza, smaller even than the one above, and in the long lavender dusk more of the sorcerers gathered, somber for once and drinking hard. In the sky above a windhover caught the last rays of the sun, a white kestrel turned pink by the sunset, fluttering its wings in the rapid complex pattern that allowed it to stay fixed in the air.

Tinou took the stolen mirror from his bag and set it on a short wooden stand, on the eastern edge of the circle the sorcerers made. Against the starry east it was a circle of pure pink sheen. When Tinou sat down the circle of seated sorcerers was complete, and they began to sing, their faces upturned to the windhover riding the last rays of the sun. The light leaked out of the sky and the wind riffled the enormous space of dusk and the sea, and Thel, surprising himself, feeling the old compulsion, said “As you can change your shape, and bend the world to serve you, perhaps you can tell me how this world came to be the way it is.”

They all stared at him. “We have only a story,” Tinou said finally in a kind tone, “just like anyone else.”

Another voice took over, that of an old woman; but it was impossible to pick out the speaker from the circle of faces. “The universe burst from a bubble the size of an eye, some fifteen billion years ago, and it has been flying apart ever since. It will achieve its maximum reach outward in our lifetimes, and fall back into that eye of density which is God’s eye, and then all will begin again, just as it was the time before, and the time before that, eternally. So that every breath that you take has occurred in just that way an infinity of times, and none of us are but statues in time to the eye of God.”

“As for this world,” said the voice of an old man, a cold, hard voice, “this road of mountain across an empty sea, an equatorial peninsula circumnavigating the great globe: it came about like this.

“Gods fly through space in bubbles of glass, and their powers exceed ours as ours exceed those of the stones we stand on, who know only to endure. And once long ago gods voyaged through this forgotten bay of the night sea, and to pass the time they argued a point of philosophy.” And here the speaker’s voice grew harsh, the edge of every word sharper, until they were as edged as the taste of Garth’s shoulder fruit, sending the same kind of bitter shock through Thel. “They argued aesthetics, the most metaphysical of philosophical problems. One of them said that beauty was a quality of the universe independent of any other, that it was inlaid in the fabric of being like gravity, in a pattern that no one could pull out. Another disagreed: beauty is the ache of mortality, this god said, an attribute of consciousness, and nothing is beautiful except perceived through the love of lost time, so that wherever there is beauty, love was there also, and first.”

Here another voice spoke, on the breaking edge of bitterness. “And so they agreed to put it to a test, and being gods and therefore just like us, less ignorant but no less cruel, they decided to transform and populate one of the planets they sailed by, sinking all its land but this spine under an endless sea, and then making what remained as beautiful as they could imagine; but leeching every living thing of love, to see if the beauty would yet remain. And here we are.”

Silence. For a moment Thel felt he was falling.

A tray was passed around, and Thel did as the rest and took from it a thin white wafer, feeling a powerful compulsion. He ate it and his skin tingled as if crystallizing. Looking up he thought he could still see the kestrel hovering overhead, a black star among the sparkling white ones. The mirror’s surface was a dark lustrous violet now, nothing like the western sky which had grown as dark as the east; as his gaze began to fall into the drop of rich glossy color there was a disturbance across the circle, and one of the sorcerer children burst among them. “The spine kings,” she gasped, “at the Thera Gate.”

All the sorcerers rose to their feet.

“So,” Tinou said, “we must hurry a little.”

Quickly several of them seized Thel by the arms and legs; when he struggled he might as well have been thrashing on an iron rack. His skin was shattering. The swimmer and the three facewomen were being held back. Thel was lifted up, carried to the mirror.

Tinou appeared beside him, touched his temple. His smile was solicitous. “My thanks for the rescue,” he said jovially, then in more formal tones: “Through mirrors we see things right way round at last.”

They shoved his left foot into the surface, which was as smooth as a glass of water full over the rim, completely violet and completely gold at one and the same time; and the foot went in to the ankle. Now he had a left foot made of fire, it seemed, and he twisted in the implacable grip, cried out. Tinou nodded sympathetically, cocked his head. “It’s pain most proves we live. Nothing serves better to focus our attention on our bodies and the flesh metronomes ticking inside them, timing the bombs that will go off someday and end the universe. Remember!”

He stepped forward and leaned over Thel’s face, looked at him curiously. “There are so many kinds of pain, really.” They shoved his leg in to the hip. “Is it pulsing, throbbing, shooting, lancing, cutting, stabbing, scalding? Is it pressing, gnawing, cramping, wrenching, burning, searing, ripping? Is it smarting, stinging, pricking, pounding, itching, freezing, drilling? Is it superficial or profound? Can you think of anything else? Can you tell me what eight times six equals? Can you take a full breath and hold it?”

And with each question Thel was thrust further in. A brief flare of genitals, the sickening twist of the gut, all his skin an organ of pain, every atom of him spinning in vain efforts to fly off—and Tinou, smiling, leaning over his face and questioning still, each word slower, louder, more drawn out: “Is it dull, sore, taut, tender? Is it rasping, splitting, exhausting, sickening? Is it suffocating, frightful, punishing? Vicious, wretched? Blinding? Horrible? Killing? Excruciating? Unbearable?”

Then they got his face to the glossy surface, and the reflected visage within was that of a complete stranger, puffy and thick-necked, eyes bulging out—“I have never looked like that,” Thel tried to say, certain he was dying. Compared to this the flex X would have been bliss, he thought, and with one last glimpse of Tinou’s laughing face he was through the glass and gone.

10. Through the Mirror

Blue stars ahead, red behind. Flare of an oil lamp in the library. We know more than our senses ever tell us, but how? How? Old brown globe, bookcases, beyond it a glassine sphere, the image of a wall. Milky black of the galactic core, tumbling down, down, down, down. Emergency landing. Emergence. The sensuous rise to consciousness.

Splayed on riprap, the taste of ocean wrack in his throat. Once with his parents he tripped and smashed his nose, vivid image of sunny pain and a chocolate ice cream, down by the canals filled with trash, a glassy sheen like the taste of blood suffusing every sundrenched manifestation of the world. Filled with sudden grief at the lost past, Thel sat up shakily and wiped his nose, spat red. Bloody spit on uneven paving stones, crowded with dead weeds. The whole village of Oia was in ruins, the walls just a block or two high. Dark wind was keening through him and the weeds rustled, it had been centuries and clearly he would never see the swimmer on the night beach again, it was past and irrecoverable. All his past was gone for good, even if he could remember it; given the sense of loss for what little he could remember, it was perhaps for the best that so much was forgotten. But he knew he had had a life, childhood, adolescence, he felt its intensity and knew it would never return no matter what he did, even if he remembered every instant of it perfectly, as he felt he did, all of it right there behind some impermeable membrane in his mind, pressing against his thoughts until the ache of it filled everything.

And yet really it didn’t matter if he remembered or not. Live a life and seize it to you with an infant’s fierce clench of the fist, it still would slip away as lovely as the mountain sky at dusk and never come back again: not the moment in the dim library, the noon by the poolside, that moonlit beach and the warm sandy touch, none of it, none of it, none of it. How he loved his past in that moment, how he wanted it back! Eternal recurrence, as the sorcerers had said; ah, it would almost be worth it to be a clockwork mechanism, a bronze creature of destiny, if you could then have it over and over and over. As long as it felt new at every recurrence, who cared? He was a creature of destiny in any case, impelled by forces utterly beyond his control. To move his forefinger left rather than right was an enormous exertion against fate, anything more was too much to ask, it would be only water splashing uphill for a moment; he would bend to the curve of spacetime at last, which leads to the sea in the end. Fate is the path of least action. And if you never know it is all recurrence then it only means you feel the loss, over and over and over. But he had loved his life, he knew he had, the bad and the good and he wanted to keep it forever, all of it, observe it from some eternal beach and perhaps step back into it, a moment here, a moment there, looking out a bay window at streetlight, bare branch, falling snow, listening to a snatch of piano by the coals of a fire, those moments of being when all the past seemed in him and alive, suffusing the moment and the only moment with a feeling—with every feeling, all at once.

Wind soughed in the weeds. Inside him the flesh metronome went tick, tick. Life slipped away hadon by hadon, limning every joy with a rime of grief; and he walked backward into the future, waving and crying out “Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!”

It was dark. There were only pinprick stars, a dozen at most though the sky was black as an eye’s pupil. Shivering with fear, he stood and staggered up one of the marble staircases, now littered with blocks of stone which glowed whitely underfoot, apparently from some internal luminance, so faint it was at the edge of the visible. He was seeing the skeleton of the world.

On the spine the view of both seas was disorienting, literally in that he became aware that the sun would dawn in the west, and that he would have to trek east to new ground to escape the spine kings. Still it was reassuring to see both the oceans, to straddle the high edge of the peninsula, riding the back of the present as it snaked through past and future. He stood there for a minute, savoring the view and the bitter bite of the wind.

Looking back down at the dark luminous ruins of Oia, he saw a figure moving up terrace after terrace, flitting between walls and seeming at times to jump from place to place instantaneously. The figure looked up, and its eyes gleamed like two stars in its dark face. Thel shivered and waited, knowing the figure was coming to join him; and so it did, taking much of the night though it moved rapidly.

Finally it approached him: a man, though it was a man so slight and fluid in his movement that he seemed androgynous, or feminine. His skin was blacker than the sky, so that his smile and the whites of his eyes seemed disembodied above clothing that glowed like the stones of Oia, outlining his slim form. “The spine kings are upon us,” he said in a bright, friendly voice. “Side-stepping them only works for so long. If you want to escape you’ll have to move fast. I can show you the way.”

“Lead on,” Thel said. He knew he could trust this figure, at the same time that another part of his mind was aware that it was a manifestation of Tinou. The intonation of the voice was the same, but it didn’t matter. This one could be trusted. “What is your name?” Thel asked, to be sure.

“I am Naousa,” the figure said, and reached forward in a confidential way to touch Thel lightly on the upper arm, a touch suasive and erotic. “This way.”

He led Thel to a steep drop-off in the ridge, unlike anything Thel had seen before. Here the spine of the peninsula planed down and away in a smooth flat incline, as if an enormous blade had shaved off the mountain range, cutting at a hard angle down toward the beaches. Cliffs on the sides to the north and south remained, while the cut itself descended at nearly a forty-five degree angle. The exposed stone of the cut was as smooth as glass, and a black that somehow indicated it would be dark gray in daylight. Descending this slippery slope would be extremely difficult on foot, but Naousa reached deep into a cleft in the granite and pulled out two lightweight bobsleds, both a whitish color. The sleds’ bottoms were smoother than the glassy rock slope, and had no runners or steering mechanism. “You lean in the direction you want to go,” Naousa said. “The drop isn’t entirely level left to right, so you have to steer a little to keep from going over the cliffs. Just follow me, and look out for bumps.” And before Thel could nod he had jumped on his bobsled and was off.

Thel threw his sled down and sat on it, and quickly was sliding down the slope. Naousa was an obvious dot below, cutting big slalom curves down an invisible course. The cut slope was only a couple of hundred feet wide, though it broadened as they dropped lower. Bumps and curves invisible to the eye threw Thel left and right as he picked up speed, accelerating at what seemed an accelerating rate; he realized the only hope for survival was to follow Naousa’s every move, even if it meant going as fast as Naousa and staying right on his tail. Naousa was flying down the slope, carving wide curves and crying out for joy—Thel could hear the shouts wafting back at him as another impossible turn by Naousa skirted the cliffs. It was thrilling to watch and Thel shouted himself, leaning hard left or right to follow Naousa’s bold track, and despite the fact that it was like bobsledding on an open ice slope with cliffs on both sides, Thel began to enjoy himself—to enjoy the contemplation of Naousa’s expertise, and his own reproduction of it, and the sheer noise of the sleds and the wind smashing his face and the tears streaming back over his ears and off the cliff edges into space, falling down like dewdrop stars into the original salt.

It was a long ride but did not take much time. At the bottom they sledded out onto the grass of a meadow and tumbled head over heels. Naousa picked up the sleds and tucked them behind a round boulder perched on the ridge. Down here the peninsula was different in character: the stone old and weathered and graying, the spine only fifty to a hundred feet above the noisy sea, and the beaches to both sides wide, with sand white as could be, even in the starless night. “The south side is the easiest walking,” Naousa said, and headed down to the north side.

Thel shouted thanks, and dropped to the south side, and walked west toward the sunrise. The sun would be up soon, the sky to the west was blueing. The white sand underfoot was tightly packed; scuffing it made a squeaking sound, squick, squick, and the scuffed sand sprayed ahead of Thel’s feet in brief blazes of phosphorous. The dunes behind the tidal stretch were neatly scalloped, and covered with dense short grass all blown flat, pointing west to the dawn. The dome of the sky was higher down here and fuzzier, the blues of dawn glowing pastels. Then as he walked stars began popping into sight overhead and he stepped knee deep into the beach, as if the sand were gel; he was sinking in it, the sky was the pink of cherry blossoms and he was in sand to his cheekbones, drowning in it.

11. Inside the Wave

The sun was hot on his cheek. There was too much light. He rolled on sand, shaded his eyes with a hand and cracked a lid: his brain pulsed painfully and the eyelash-blurred gold-on-white pattern meant nothing to him, then coalesced with a jolt that jerked his body up. The swimmer lay on the wide morning beach. Beyond her lay Garth and the three facewomen, leaves in their hair and long scratches on their arms and legs. Then he saw the shape of the mirror, in a bag tucked under the swimmer’s outstretched arm. He was sitting and he almost rolled to her side, every muscle creaking as if carved of wood. He shook her arm, afraid to touch the bag holding the mirror.

She woke, and he asked her what had happened. She stared at him.

“I don’t remember,” he explained. “I mean, Tinou and the others pushed me through that,” pointing at the mirror bag. “After that. . . .”

She spoke slowly. “The spine kings attacked and everything caught fire. The sorcerers left you on the plaza, and the mirror as well. We picked you up and carried you away, and took the mirror too. Then you woke and told us to follow you, and we did. We climbed out on the cliff face beside Oia to escape the sorcerers and the spine kings, and the next night we climbed to the spine and started west. You talked most of the time but we couldn’t see who you talked to. Garth carried the mirror. The spine dropped into a forest and you ran all the way, and we chased you. Then it seemed you were never going to see us, and so Garth said we should push you back through the mirror. We did that and you fell through, unconscious—”

“You could just push me through?”

“No, it wouldn’t work at first, it was hard as glass when I tried it, but Garth said it had to be at sunset, on the spine, with a kessel hawk hunting in the western sky. We waited three days until we saw one, and then it worked. But after we got you through you were asleep again. So we waited and then we fell asleep too. I’m hungry.”

The others were stirring at the sound of their voices. They woke and the beach air was filled with the chatter of voices over the hiss of broken waves. As they shared their stories they walked to the sea without volition, drawn by their hunger. The peninsula had changed to something like what Thel had traversed in his time beyond the mirror: a low forested mound snaking through the sea, sandy moon bays alternating with chalky headlands. They walked to the next bay. The beach was a steep pebbly shingle that roared and grumbled at every wave’s swift attack and retreat, and among the millions of shifting oval pebbles, which when wet looked like semiprecious stones, they found crabs, beach eels, scraps of seaweed that the facewomen declared edible, and one surprised-looking fish, tossed up by a wave and snatched by Garth. As they made their catch they wandered west, marking the sine curve of the hours with their passage until the sun was low. Knobs of old worn sandstone stood here and there like vertebrae out of the scrubby forest, and they climbed to one of these bony boulder knots collecting dead wood as they went, and in the sunset made a fire using Garth’s firestone and knocker. Every scrap of the sea’s provender tasted better than the last, the least scrap finer than a master chefs creation. Clouds came in from the south as if a roll of carpet had been kicked over them, and the sinking sun tinted the frilly undersurface a delicate yellow. Their fire blazed through the long dusk, and in the wind the whitecaps tossed, so that it felt as if they were on the deck of a ship.

Each day they foraged west, and spent the night on knolls. “We’ll reach your folk soon?” Thel asked the facewomen.

“Perhaps.”

They hurried on, hiking on the beaches over wet round stones that clacked together all the day long. In the evenings around the fire they pulled the mirror from its bag and contemplated it cautiously. Each of them saw different things in it, and they couldn’t agree on its color. Salmon, gold, copper, lapis; such divergence of perception was frightening, and they snapped at each other and put it away, and slept uneasily.

One dawn Thel woke. The night before the mirror had been left face up on a rock, and he circled his hand over it, looking down at eyes, hair, red stones, years. The swimmer inched over the sandstone and lay prone beside him, their heads together as they peered down into it, as if looking down a well. “What is it?” Thel said.

“It shows the truth,” the swimmer said, then smiled. “Or maybe it just makes things pretty.”

They tilted it so it reflected their two faces.

“Hey!” Thel exclaimed. “That’s me.”

It was the face he knew from a billion beard burns: narrow jaw, round forehead, long nose, wide mouth. He would have looked a long time but the reflection of the swimmer stole his gaze; it was her face, but subtly transformed, the harsh strong lines emphasized and given a pattern, a human face before anything else, but so purely human that it was, he thought happily, that of a god.

They broke their gazes at the same time and looked at each other; grinning like children who have gotten away with something forbidden, they let the mirror drop and rolled together. Blood surged through Thel as they kissed and made love, he sank into her as if into a wave, riding inside the wave on an endless rise, pulled along as when bodysurfing. Touch was everything then, her skin, the stone under his knees and elbows; but once he looked up and saw the mirror beyond her head and filled with joy he waved a hand over it: gold light flashed up into the chill salt predawn air.

12. The Facewomen

After that Thel carried the mirror bag himself. Ahead, where the horizon washed over the black mark of the spit, a short line of bonfires sparked in the late twilight skies. The three facewomen stood and watched intently. “They are our signal beacons,” one said, and after a while added, “They say we are being pursued.”

So they began to hike all through the long days, and in the dawns and dusks, and each night the three facewomen talked among themselves, and then one night their eyefaces talked among themselves, in high-pitched voices; and yet they said to the other three travelers only, “We are being pursued.”

Wearily they hiked on, spurred by this pronouncement, and then one day in the late morning they came to a deep stone-ringed firepit. The leader of the facewomen touched one of the stones. “We are home,” her eyeface said. She and her two companions led the way thereafter, across sunken meadows spotted with vernal ponds and patches of bright wild-flowers.

These meadows, strung like green stones on a necklace, grew larger and larger until they came on one that was broad and flat, and ringed by a split log fence and a number of low twisty pines. At the far side of the fenced-in enclosure clustered a herd of small quick dark horses, flowing along the fence like a single organism. In the trees behind the fence stood hexagonal buildings with wood walls and hide roofs.

The three facewomen ran to one of the huts and burst into it, and emerged with a small gang of other facewomen clinging to them and shouting. When they had calmed down, Thel, the swimmer and Garth were welcomed with a fluid formality, recursive smiles of welcome shrinking away into the infinity of the facewomen’s right eyes. It seemed to Thel that all the inhabitants of the meadow were women, but he noticed children among them, and saw that they tended to clump in groups of three; Garth confirmed that these were reproductive units.

Their threesome took them to what appeared to be the oldest threesome, village elders who greeted them and thanked them for rescuing their granddaughters. “When the spine kings arrive you must not be here,” one said. “But we will provide you with horses to speed you on your way west, in thanks for helping our daughters. And you may spend two nights here resting.”

They slept in a storage hut on piles of woven blankets, feeling so luxurious that they could scarcely get comfortable. The next day they were taken to the big meadow pasture’s corral, and introduced to three of the small horses. Their hair was the chestnut red of certain fir trees Thel had seen back on the high spine, and their manes, long and rough, felt exactly like handfuls of the trees’ hairy fibrous bark: indeed, looking closely at it, he couldn’t see any difference. He laughed. Then the small herd in the enclosure bolted and ran around the inside of the fence, all in a mass, their manes and long russet hair flowing behind them as if they were underwater, and he laughed again. “A horse is a fish made of trees,” he told the startled swimmer, and leaped on his animal and rode head pressed into the stiff rough red mane, feeling the sea wind course over him as it had during his wild ride on the other side of the mirror. Jerking the animal’s head to one side or another influenced its direction, and pulling back on the mane slowed it, as kicking it spurred it on. The corral mistress said as he leaped off, “Ride these until you come to the brough—they can take you no further. Set them free and they will return to us. They know to hide from the spine kings.”

“Thanks for your help,” Thel said.

One of the smallest visible eyefaces grinned. “With what you are carrying,” it said in a small voice, “we want you as far away as possible when the spine kings arrive.”

“Ah.”

13. No Distinctions

The following morning Thel, Garth, and the swimmer woke with the dawn, and the facewomen led them to their horses and waved farewell as they rode off. The horses were exuberant with running, and galloped over the dunes waving their heads from side to side like blind things, eating the air and snapping at their riders if they were interfered with. So they hung on and rode. Thick white thunderheads grew over the water to the south, and the colors of everything in the long morning light were richer than they remembered them being, the water a dark glassy blue outside jade shallows, the foam on the breakers as white as the clouds, the dune grass subtle khaki, the red barky hair of their horses an irresistible magnet for the eye. The horses ran along the beach until midday, then browsed on the sparse dune grass. In the midafternoon they rode again. They traveled so much faster than they could have on foot that it was hard to grasp: they were already far from the facewomen’s meadow, and the horses ran on tirelessly through the long glarey stretches of late afternoon, until at sunset they trotted to a halt and stood in a wind-protected dip between two dunes, browsing easily through the mauve dusk.

They rode like that for days. Each day the peninsula became lower, narrower, more stripped of life. The thick mats of dune grass reduced to occasional patches, the tufts of grass as sparse as the hair on a balding man. Each tuft had been blown in every direction by the winds, creating a perfect circle of smoothed hard sand around it, deepest at the outer edge; the dunes became geometrical worksheets, sine waves covered with circles. One sunset walking in this deeply patterned sand Thel looked down at a tuft of grass and the perfect circle around it, and thought, That is your life: a stalk of living stuff blown in every direction, leaving a brief pattern in sand.

After many days of travel on horseback they saw in the distance ahead a small knob in the peninsula. Days passed and it seemed they would reach the knob the following afternoon for several days running, but it was bigger than they had first thought, and kept receding.

Finally it loomed up, several hundred feet tall, like a sandstone lighthouse. They skirted it on the wide southern beach, and on the other side discovered a most extraordinary thing: the beach stretched out into the blue sea, and got thinner and lower, until it sank under the water. “It’s the end!” Thel cried.

“No no,” Garth said. “It’s the water gate. I’ve heard stories about it. Look out there, see that smudge? It’s the other cape, where the peninsula proper begins again. In between is a tidal bar. This is the lowest part of the spine, nothing more. At low tide a strip of sand will emerge as fine as any road, and stay above the waves for half the day.”

It proved to be true. As the afternoon progressed the beach extended farther into the water, which was racing from north to south in a strong current, breaking whitely in a straight line that divided the sea. This stretch of white foam boiled furiously in a line to the horizon and the distant smudge of the farther cape. Then in a matter of moments, it seemed, the whitewater divided and fell away into two sets of waves rolling in from right and left, leaving a strip of wet gray sand and wet brown rock standing between them. The breakers tumbled in over rocky shallows on both sides, but the bar stood clear of them. And the spine trail extended even here; squarish blocks of water-holed rock had been laid in a path over the bar, making a causeway a foot or two higher than the bar itself. “The horses can’t cross that,” Garth said. “The rock would tear up their hooves.”

“But surely it’s more than one tide’s walk across?” the swimmer said.

Garth nodded. “Still we must send the horses back, as we said we would.” And he kicked and shouted at the horses, threw rocks at them until they cantered off, and circled nervously; then regarded each other and broke for home, flowing down the beach like a school of red fish darting through the sea.

Something moved on the side of the knob and they jumped, turned to look. It was a man the same color as the sandstone, his skin the same grainy dark brown.

As he approached they saw he was naked, and that his eyes, his hair, everything was the brown of the rock. In his eyes the color seemed darker, the way the rock did when it was wet.

He stopped before them and said, “I am Birsay the guide. It is more than one tide’s walk to cross the brough, as you noted. This is how we do it; there is a rise near the halfway point, and we run to that in one low tide, on a path that I have built. It is just possible, though you get your legs wet. There on the rise I have left several large holed rocks. We tie ropes I have made to those anchors, and as the water rises we rise on it, floated by slings I have made of kelp bladders and wood. The current pushes us out, usually to the south, but we are tied by the ropes to the anchor rocks, and when the tide ebbs, we float down to a landing, and complete the crossing of the brough to the other cape.”

“Why have you made these things?” Thel asked. “Why do you do this?”

The sandstone-colored man shrugged. “The peninsula extends around the world, and there is no land but it. And this is the only place in its circumference where the sea has chewed the peninsula down almost to its level. And naturally the peninsula must be passable. Traders come through, and circumnavigators on pilgrimages—believers of more religious persuasions than I’d care to recall. It is simply the natural order of things. The land itself calls forth a guide to sustain that order, and I am the forty-ninth reincarnation of that guide, Birsay.”

He led them to a tall cave entrance in the side of the knob, down stone steps to a dry sand floor. Against one wall were circles of coiled rope, made of some sort of animal hair or plantlike fiber—impossible in this world to be sure which, it occurred to Thel as he examined it. It was thick in the hand, and would certainly hold against any current. The floats Birsay had mentioned were there too, made of the big bulbs one saw at the base of kelp tubes, tied by flat cords to a wooden framework that held them under the arms, and around the chest and back. “You spend almost half a day suspended in the tide,” Birsay said. “The water is warm, though by the end it doesn’t feel so. The bath is good for the skin. Then the distance from the rise to the western cape is not as great as the distance from here to the rise.”

The three travelers conferred by eye. Garth said, “When would you have us leave?”

“We’ve wasted too much of this ebb. And they are getting longer every day now, for twenty more days. The next one will begin in the dark before dawn.”

“The next, then,” Thel said, and the other two nodded their agreement.

They spent the night in the cave, around a small warm driftwood fire, the twisted shapes of the wood burning in bright flames tinged with blue, green, salmon. What little smoke there was rose through a blowhole in the roof of the cave. The guide fed them broiled conch, seasoned with wild onions and a gingery seaweed.

Birsay had a place for everything, and he moved neatly and quickly around the fire, catching its light just as the cave walls did, so that sometimes it was hard to see him. He brought out a tray of black loam for Garth to stick his feet into after the regular meal was done, and with a blush and a grateful look, Garth silently buried his feet in the dirt.

“Do you guide all travelers that appear here?” Thel asked.

“I do.”

“You make no distinctions?”

“What do you mean?”

“Those that follow us are murderers, intent on our lives.”

“Is that so?” The wet pebble eyes regarded him with interest. “Well, I wish you all speed. I make no distinctions of that kind, no. Good, evil, right, wrong—they are personal matters, shifting from one to the next. These murderers may regard themselves as righteous folk, and you as great criminals perhaps, thieves of something they cherish, perhaps, who knows?” Though he glanced at Thel’s mirror bag as if he did know. “How am I to judge? By your stories? By the looks on your faces?” He dismissed the idea with a flip of the hand. “My task is to lead travelers across the low point in the world road. Their purposes, their identity—none of my concern. One winter I led death himself across the brough, you can still see his footprints in the rock where a wave splashed him and he got angry. . . .” And as the firelight played over his face he told them stories of travelers who had passed, men and women and creatures it sometimes took him the burning of a branch to describe. One such had had the legs and waist of a man, his chest then rising up into the rounded and feathered body of a giant eagle. This creature had spoken to him in grim croaks, and after a while Birsay had guessed the truth; it walked across the brough because it had had its wing muscles clipped, so that it could no longer fly. The guide laughed at Thel: “How judge that, eh? How judge that?”

14. Crossing the Bar

In the middle of the night Birsay crouched by their warm sand beds and roused them. “The brough comes clear soon.” They rose and ate more conch, and at Birsay’s instruction drank from a jug of fresh water until their stomachs were heavy and cold.

The star flood still lit the beach as they walked onto the wet sand. Birsay watched each wave closely, and as one ran up the sand he pointed. “Last high wave,” he said. “From now on they ebb.”

Then more and more of the beach was revealed as each wave sluiced back and hopped over the nonexistent rail where the water regrouped and turned again. A point emerged, wet tan sand with a crosshatched stippling of black. Then the waves fell back to left and right as they had the afternoon before, and the line of boiling white water appeared. The bar emerged, at first just as an extension of their point of sand, receding away from them at a walking pace: then, in the blue of dawn, the water simply ran away from them to right and left, and they walked on a sandbar that extended all the way to the horizon.

Struck silent at the uncanny sight, the three travelers strode quickly after Birsay, their ropes coiled and hung over their shoulders, their floats hanging on straps tied over their own backpacks and bags. The sun rose and cast long faint shadows ahead of them. The seas rolled up flat wet sand to right and left, the northern and southern seas separated only by their spit of wet sand.

They walked through patches crunchy with seashells, or squishy with living anemones. It was a blue day, the air clear as glass and the sea and sky darker and lighter shades of the same full blue. The sand and Birsay were a color composed of tan and black sand, mixed thoroughly. A handful of it washed thin by water revealed clear grains, smaller white and brown grains, and tiny floating black flecks.

Then the sand began to grow thin over bedrock of the same color, which broke through as if it were a little model of the spine, here worn to ankle-high knobs and nubs, split by the sea down its grain of stratification, running across the bar from sea to sea. Eventually they walked on bare rock, sharp ribs of brown that ran out under the white waves, which grumbled toward them to nothing in hundreds of parallel grooves. Eventually the shallow faults turned the brough into a stretch of pitted knife edges, set across their way. Walking over these edges would have devastated first sandals and then feet, but Birsay or his predecessors had filled a rough narrow path through the faults with blocks of loose stones—an old path, it seemed, for the blocks were worn in their settings, and in places had been washed away.

They hurried over this low causeway, until when they looked behind they could see no sign of Birsay’s knob, or the low peninsula beyond it; ahead they saw no sign of the knob at the halfway point, nor the farther cape. The brough extended all the way to the horizon in both directions, a horizon nearly at eye level, so that it seemed they crossed the bottom of a flatfish bowl of ocean, which would sooner or later rush in on them. It was a strange sight.

In late mid-afternoon they came to Birsay’s knob, first seen as a bulge in the bar, a widening of the white water to the sides. “We’ve made good time,” Birsay said, “but it’s always a close thing. By sunset we’ll be floating.”

Once on the knob it seemed not much different from the rest of the brough: slightly wider, minutely taller, pocked and runneled like all the rest of the rock they had traversed. In the largest potholes were big blocks of rock that had had holes chiseled through them, and following Birsay’s instructions they tied the ends of their ropes through these holes. Birsay chose the anchor rocks very carefully, after observing the surging mush and the wind, and his charges’ bodies; he spread them out at intervals along the bar, Thel, Birsay, Garth, the swimmer. Their few possessions they placed in other potholes, with stones placed over them.

They sat on the damp rock, and waited. The tide began to come in.

It was impossible not to be frightened at the sight. Each broken wave rushed at them, at first as thick as the wave had been high, and boiling over the reef below; it thinned as it made its furious rush, until it was bubbling water trickling up the furrows in the rock, and then receding. But each final gurgle was closer than the last.

“Usually the south reaches us first,” Birsay said, “because that’s where the prevailing winds come from. But today—” he frowned, sniffing—“the wind is from the east. And the north side is closing faster.” He turned and turned again on the knob’s highest point, sniffing. “It may be windy tonight.”

Then, in the surge of just a few waves, the four of them were sitting on a tiny rock island in a sea of boiling white water, waves from the two seas running together and slapping up into the air, in lines of wind-tossed spray. Then a big wave from the north ran up the rock and right over their feet and backs. Quicker than Thel would have believed possible, every wave rolled over the rock and their lower legs. They stood around Birsay on the peak, and then waves from the south sea piled in as well, and up and down the brough to east and west they could see long sheets of white water squirting up into the air, underneath them a chaos of wave and backwash, the sea white with foam, millions of bubbles hissing out their lives, sending a fine rain into the air and creating a tremendous loud roar, a roar made of glugs and hisses that individually would scarcely be heard across a room.

When the water got waist high they were shoved hard this way and that, and Birsay told them in a loud voice to hang on—that this was the only tricky part—and that they should soon cast off and get away from the knob, trusting to their floats and anchors. When the waves were chest high they were forced to take his advice, and they swam off after him to the south, floating easily on their miniature rafts and spreading out as they were pushed straight out from their anchors.

As the tide rose the water grew calmer, until the only signs of the brough were long snaking lines of crusty foam floating away to the south, and an occasional brief mushy break at the top of the largest waves as they crossed the bar. The waves, and the current that pushed them, were from the northwest. So they floated to the southeast of the knob, connected to it like kites flying in the wind of the tidal current. If they rested they were some thirty feet from each other, and they were about two hundred feet from the submerged knob, so that Thel and the swimmer, on the outsides, could easily paddle over to talk to the middle two. Garth’s shoulder tree looked odd indeed sticking up out of the water, like the last remnant of a deluged land. Garth’s face was sputtering and apprehensive beside it; he couldn’t swim and had to trust his float, clearly a difficult act of faith.

It was a strange sunset. Now the horizon was closer and higher than ever, the dome of the sky taller: all as blue as they had been at dawn. The sun dropped through the air yellow as a daisy and sunk without fanfare, turning green at the end as if the last rays had shone through water. During the long dusk a line of puffy white clouds appeared to the northwest, so tall they redefined the height of the sky. These clouds eventually took on copper and iron hues, and cast their color over everything else, so that the sea took on a coppery sheen, and the air was dark and metallic. Birsay watched this development nervously, and when the wind shifted and picked up suddenly, he swam to Thel’s side and said, “It may be a cold night. The northerlies are hard.”

Thel swallowed salt and nodded. Already the water felt warmer than the air, so that his head was cold, and it was warming to duck it into the brine. Birsay said the southern current was warmer still; Thel was content with the northern one, which felt just a touch below body temperature. But the northwest wind was cold, and the swells rolling by began to steam a little. In the last light of the dusk they saw the line of tall clouds approaching, blocking out the stars that were just popping into salt-blurred existence. The travelers rose and fell on dark swells that steamed whitely. They rose and fell, rose and fell.

The wind strengthened and waves began to break on the bar, emerging from the dark several hundred feet away from them, on the northern shallows. There low dark surges in the sea’s surface reared up and toppled over in a white roar, water shattered and tumbling chaotically, in a line as far as they could see. The broken waves rolled over the bar in a low continuous thunder, but as the water deepened again each wave would reconstitute itself out of its own mush, the whitewater shrinking back up the side of the swell until it was only a whitecap; and then it was only a groundswell again, on which they rose and fell, rose and fell, crest to trough and back again.

But the wind got stronger, and the waves bigger. A groundswell breaks when the depth of water below it is equal to the height of the swell, trough to crest; now the swells were as high as the water beneath their feet, and they were at the ends of their ropes, they couldn’t get any farther out onto the south sea. The wind picked up again, and now each time they rose on a swell there was broken water at the crest, so that they had to plunge under it and hold their breath until their floats pulled through the wave and out into the air again.

It was raining, Thel noticed once when he came up, a cold rain that roiled the ocean surface and threw up more steam. Now the wind howled, and the waves became big rolling walls of broken white mush, wild and powerful. It was all Thel could do to hold his breath as he was thrashed up and down under these broken waves; he held his float to him, waited grimly each time for it to pull him back up into the roaring black night. When it did he gasped in huge breaths, and looked to his right where the others were, but could see little through the spray. Then another wave would lift him and he would duck under the whitewater, endure its tumblng, come up again. Efforts to swim sideways to Birsay were useless, and getting to Garth and the swimmer unthinkable: and yet she was only ninety feet away.

He could only concentrate on getting under each wave with a full breath, and on staying upright in his float. The night fell into an endless pattern of rising, ducking under whitewater, holding on with lungs bursting, popping back out into the shrieking wind, resting against the float’s restraint. Then again. And again. It went on until at one point he got so tired it seemed he couldn’t go on, and he considered cutting the rope and floating off to the south on the groundswell. But then a sort of second wind came to him, a stubborness suffusing every cell of his muscles and lungs, and he worked to make each forced plunge as streamlined and efficient as he could, grimly trying to relax and be at ease as the broken water threw him about, as loose as a rag on a clothesline in a stiff wind. He fell into a rhythm. Nothing marked the passing of time, it seemed he had been breathing in a pattern of submergence in the sea for years. The water began to feel cool, then cold. His head and arms were frigid in the wind’s rip. Then as he floated, waiting for the next rise, lightning forked down to his left. By the fey snap of light he glimpsed dots on the water, heads and floats—and then he was under again. The lightning struck again when he was underwater, he saw the flash and opened his closed eyes and saw a field of bubbles, white in green—then black. Three or four more times lightning struck, but always when he was submerged. He wondered if they would be electrocuted.

Then one wave thumped him down onto rock. The air burst from his lungs and he nearly blacked out before resurfacing. It was still dark night up there, the storm raging, rain coming down harder than ever: he could get a refreshing swallow of fresh water merely by turning his open mouth to the northwest. Submerged again, he kept his feet down and hit the rock bottom more gently. But it got harder as the tide ebbed, and the broken waves swept across the brough more wildly; often they knocked him down against the bottom and thumped him against it repeatedly, until he ached with the battering, and it seemed that after all the night’s labors he might be killed by his landing.

Eventually he stood chest high in the waves’ troughs, then waist high; but it was too much work to stand, and too cold. He crouched down in the water and let the float and rope hold him, peering through the blackness for the next onrushing wall of whitewater.

Finally the broken waves themselves were low enough that he could float over them, his head clear; and in the troughs the whitewater only sluiced over his knees. He hauled himself up the rope toward the knob, where it was shallower still; he could sit, and turn his back to the waves and the wind. Relaxing his stomach muscles made him retch. When he had gathered some strength he hauled himself up onto the knob, and found the other anchors, and slogged down the length of Garth’s rope; out in the murk he could see Garth bobbing.

But it was only his float. “No,” Thel said. Rather than return to the knob he just swung on his rope sideways, and bumped into Birsay unexpectedly; but Birsay hung in his float, head back, mouth and eyes wide open to the waves. He had drowned. Stomach spasming, Thel swung back the other way, stepping on sharp rock. No sign of the swimmer. Back, forth, up, back; nothing. He had to walk back to the knob and find her anchor. The rope hung loose in the water, trailing out to sea, and he hauled it in feeling like Death the Fisherman, afraid and sick at heart. Its end came to him, frayed. In the first predawn blue he peered at the ends of the fibers; it looked as if she had chewed through the rope, bitten her way free. The swimmer. He kneeled on the rock, collapsing around his cramped stomach. The swimmer. She had freed herself but kept the float, smart woman. Perhaps she had swum over and pulled Garth from his float, yes. Took them both off the bar, off to where the groundswell would pose no challenge to her swimming powers. Yes. She would come back. Or else swim to the cape in the west.

When dawn illuminated the seascape the tide had ebbed and the brough had returned, thought it was often overrun by the storm surf. Everything today was green, the sea a light jade, the clouds a heavy dark gray tinged with green, the bar brown, but greenish as if with algae.

Thel untied the float from his chest and tossed it aside. Angrily he kicked Birsay’s anchor, left him bobbing in the waves. He put his bags over his shoulder, the mirror like a heavy plate in its wet sack. He took off along the bar, squish, squish.

It was hard to walk. Often he got off Birsay’s path and fell in knee-deep transverse crevices, cracking his shins so hard that the world itself burst with pain, as it had when he was shoved through the mirror. The wind keened across the brough, in his ear and cold. It rained intermittently and clouds rushed overhead like the horses of the facewomen. Several times he heard the swimmer and Garth calling to him from the surf to his left, but he never saw them. The current in the southern sea was running swiftly toward the cape to the west, which now appeared as a dark hill in the clouds. A good sign, it would help them along. He drank sea water, he was so thirsty; he drank the blood from his shins for food, cupping it in a palm and getting a good mouthful after every fall. Its taste reminded him of Garth’s fruit. Blindly he kicked on, and then the brough was sand. He ate some of it. The mirror was heavy on his back, he wanted to toss it aside but didn’t.

He lay on the cape beach, in wet sand. Sand crabs hopped around him, tried to eat him and he ate them in return. Along the southern side of the cape, that was where they would land. A beach stream, fresh water cutting through the shingle. He lay in it and drank. When he woke again he was stronger, and could bury himself in the sand and sleep properly. The next day he found abalone studding a beach reef like geodes, and he broke them with rocks and ate the muscles after pounding them tender. That and the beach stream infused him with strength, and he began walking the cape’s broad southern beach, under the steep green prow of the reemerging peninsula. The beach was studded with pools of water blue as the sky, and with driftwood logs from what had been immense trees, and with shell fragments that were sometimes big enough to sit in. All kinds of debris, on fine tawny sand, loose underfoot so that he often stumbled, and sometimes fell.

All kinds of debris: and yet when he came across one piece of driftwood, he knew it instantly. It was the remains of a shrub, stripped of leaves and bark—a thin trunk dividing into thinner branches, their broken ends rounded and smooth as if rolled in the waves for years. Just a sand-colored piece of driftwood, a splay of branches like a hand reaching out. He sat on the sand and wept.

15. Submergence

He wandered the beaches on the southern side of the cape, and during each low tide ventured back out on the brough, looking for signs of the swimmer. In the evenings he grubbed on a beach of oval fiat stones for crabs, and cracked more abalone, and felt a traitor to Garth and the swimmer every time he swallowed. He hated his hunger then, the way it drove him, the way he was its slave. The days were so long. During one he sat in the sand at the tip of the cape, on the edge of the prow that rose out of the sea to a grassy peak some five hundred feet above; and each part of that day passed like a year of grieving.

The next day he climbed the grassy peak. When he reached the top he could see far over the brough, a dark swath in the sea studded with whitecaps. It was an overcast day, the sun a white smeary blob and the sky like the inside of an abalone shell, arched over a sea of lead. The brough seemed to disappear out at the horizon, with no sign of the peninsula on the other side, as if the peninsula were sinking as he passed, sinking and disappearing forever, so that even if he walked around the world he would only someday come to a final cape, with the empty sea beyond and the land he stood on sinking.

16. A Face

As blank and bleached as a fragment of driftwood, he sat and let waves break on his head. He drank the salty tide until he could drink no more, threw it up, crawled to the beach stream to drink. One afternoon it occurred to him that the currents could have shifted, she could have come ashore on the north beaches, or been swept by currents far down the peninsula to the west, past him. Those small white teeth chewing away at the rope—surely such pure will have lived! Surely the will to survive had something to do with survival!

Next morning he walked west on the spine, investigating every cove beach tucked out of the view of the crest trail. Days passed like that, he no longer remembered much of the night of the storm, it was too much like the memory of a dream, vague, incoherent, illuminated in flashes, intensely disturbing. We forget dreams, he thought, because they are too vivid to face.

He sometimes had trouble remembering what had happened to him on the peninsula before the storm; once he couldn’t recall what he was looking for, it was just something he did, climb up and down rocks step after step, looking closely at the margin of sea and shore, searching for patterns in the sand. Clouds rolled overhead, west to east in their own frilly groundswell, wave after wave of fronts, the masses of warm air wedging under the cold air and then rising like bubbles up through that drafty emptiness, clouds burgeoning into existence as the warm air expressed its watery milk.

For a week the sunsets were purest pink. Why in perfectly clear air some sunsets were pink, others bronze, others purple: he pondered that through many dusks, tending fires of driftwood started with a lens of clear glass he had found beachcombing. Through the long days he hiked westward and westward, roving from shore to shore. It was a task, a filling of the hours, a compulsion, a destiny. Kicking the rocks with the toe of his boot he heard chants come from his own mouth, wordless grunts, howls of pain, broken phrases: “And that. And that. And that. And that. And. . . .”

One day he came upon the grass-covered walls of an old hill fort. Around the old grassy mounds were a cluster of driftwood crofts, their roofs made of sod. The people he found in these buildings were tiny, thin, and brown.

At their bidding he entered the largest croft and sat and ate with them, around the smoke of a peat fire. The east wall had two small windows, and shafts of sunlight shone motty through the reek. The closeness and the warmth induced a great lassitude in him, and for a long hour he thought he might lie there and never get up again. The crofters appeared to forget him, and went about their tasks as if he weren’t there.

And then, at the window: a face.

It disappeared; he leaped up, and crashed out the door, and ran straight into her. They fell together as they had on the night beach. The swimmer.

“Ah,” he said. “Ah, God—”

She laughed. Face drawn, body thin—“It’s you!” she cried, and grabbed his shoulders.

He embraced her, held that strong hard body against him, then pushed her back to look at her. Still her. It made him weep and laugh at once in the same hot convulsion of his face; it was her, no doubt of it, in his arms as real as his living hand.

“I thought you were dead,” he whispered.

“And I you.” Her voice. “I thought you had drowned.”

He nodded, speechless. “Garth did. Garth and the guide.”

She pursed her lips. “That was a bad storm.”

Thel looked around. The crofters had emerged to find out what the commotion was about. The swimmer saw them and laughed. “Have you still got the mirror?” she said.

“Yes,” said Thel. He found he was shaking.

“Then let’s be on our way. The spine kings may still be following, and we don’t want to get these people in trouble.”

“No.” Thel went inside the croft and got his bag. Outside again the swimmer took his hand and led him out of the hill fort, west and up a tumbled boulderslope to the crest of the spine. By then it was late in the day, the light pool of the sea split by the dark peninsula, and the sky darkly luminous and semi-transparent, revealing for an instant the world behind the sky; still astounded by her presence, nearly floating with joy, Thel started to run. He pulled her into her clumsy swimmer’s gait and they ran along the spine trail.

17. Exfoliation

It was like being born again. They hiked through the long days napping only briefly at midday, and wandered the long dusks hunting for food on the beaches, swimming and then sleeping in sand. In the midnights Thel rose and walked about looking at stars till he chilled, then returned to the swimmer and her blanket.

One night when he returned to the swimmer, lying against her back with an arm over her and feeling her bottom shift back into his belly, he noticed the wind pouring over them. They were sleeping on the very edge of a beach cliff, just for the fun of the views at sunset and dawn, tucked into a hollow scooped at the cliffs edge, and wind was tearing down and out to sea; but as he had walked around the central plateau of the peninsula the night had been perfectly still, he had noticed it particularly. He got up and walked back out onto the hills, and again it was still; and at the cliffs edge, windy. He roused the swimmer and moved them inland a bit for the second half of the night. “The weight of the air keeps me awake,” he told her. “It’s falling over the edge.”

He found out what had happened to her in the time since the storm on the brough, but only in snatches, in response to his questions. She had bitten her way free of the rope, as he had guessed. She had swum for a long time, she couldn’t say how long, but from the way she spoke of it (or didn’t), he thought it might have been very long indeed; days, certainly. She had landed on the southern side, and, assuming they had all survived and made it to the cape, she had walked back to it and searched for them, but found nothing. She waited there for a long time, regaining her strength and assuming she would see Birsay, escorting other travelers across; but no one ever appeared, and so finally she started west again. Groups traveling east to west passed her, and she had hidden from them, afraid that they might be the spine kings or the sorcerers. And then one day she had come on the crofts around the hill fort, and looked in the window.

“We may have been wandering on the opposite sides of that cape at around the same time,” Thel said. “And even along the peninsula.” It was painful to think that they might have met much sooner simply by making an arbitrary change of direction.

“We’re lucky we ever met again at all,” she said. “It’s a big world.”

“But narrow.” The thought of never meeting her again made him shiver. “As long as we both continued westward. . . .”

“We were lucky. We’ve always been lucky.”

One night after lying down and talking for a while they rolled together and kissed, then mated, and at first he was frightened because it was such a vital connection, so important to him. But that was the price of such a bond. Joy itself had an element of fear, he thought, the fear of loss; that was what it meant to live in time. He was lucky to have a reason for such fear.

As they continued westward the peninsula rose in elevation again, the backbone of pure granite breaking up out of the sea and sand and climbing like the edge of some enormous battered scimitar. They walked without urgency, merely to walk, to create a good space between themselves and all that lay behind, and each day was spent watching where each step went, climbing the shattered staircase of stone, becoming intimate with the local granite, an ever-modulating mixture of feldspars pink or orange or yellow, big clear grains of quartz, flecks of black hornblende. These three types of rock, jumbled and melded, forming the hard cracked fin of granite lifting out of the sea: it was hard for Thel not to be mesmerized by such a thing, to imagine it amelt and flowing like candlewax under the immense pressures inside the earth.

They came to a long straight stretch of the spine, where the feldspar was white and the hornblende just freckled the mix, making it the whitest granite possible. Here the southern side of the spine became a perfectly vertical drop to the sea, while the northern flank offered a gentle rocky slope to a wide white beach. The trail stayed well away from the southern cliff, but at midday or dusk they sometimes walked up to the edge to take a look down, and one evening in a dulcet sunset they looked over the edge and found that the whole cliff was a single gigantic overhang, as if the spine had been tipped to the south. They looked straight down at the sea, and could see nothing of the upper two-thirds of the cliff under them.

Quickly they stepped back, then lay flat and crawled forward, to stick their heads over the edge and have another look. The two or three thousand feet of the cliff looked like the curved inner wall of a shallow cave; they lay on an immense overhang. Thel could feel his stomach trying to reach through his skin and clamp onto the rock, like an abalone muscle; the drop was such that he and the swimmer laughed, in an instinctive attempt to ward off the fear of it. Thel crawled back and grabbed a loose rock that was as heavy as he cared to play with in that area, and shoved it over the edge. They watched it fall until it was a speck that disappeared, but the splash was bigger, a brief burst of white in the flat plate of blue, a long distance offshore from the cliffs bottom. They exclaimed at the sight, and did it again, and then they lay there until the light was almost gone, hypnotized by the lascivious false sense of danger, the sublimity. Mid-dusk a flock of seabirds rose up from the water in spiraling gyres, big white birds like cormorants that apparently nested in cracks or arches in the exfoliated cliff under them, out of their sight—for the birds rose and rose, tilting together on updrafts, flapping and banking, growing bigger, shifting this way and that like bubbles rising in water.

18. Nautilus Universe

A week or so later the spine twisted south and dropped again, fanning out into a big broken rockfield, granite hills and knobs faulted with long grabens that had become skinny ponds or rectangular pools, or thin meadows that cut the rock from beach to beach. Up and down they walked over this terrain, sometimes on the trail which continued to snake its way along the path of least action, or else rambling over the rock, down into a meadow, up edges, over the rock, down into another grassy swale. It was good land, dotted with trees that clung to the steep jumbles of rock and soil that walled the meadows: foxtail pines, no taller than the two travelers but with thick riven trunks, and bare dead branches spiking out of them in every direction. Steep bluffs stood over the white bay beaches, and many of the bluff tops were rimmed by a tuck of these foxtails, growing crabbed and horizontal in the winds.

They crossed this land for many days, and one afternoon when they were foraging on the southern beach for food, they came upon a shallow bay, a perfect arc of a circle. The bluffs backing the bay were cut by sandy ravines, and between bluff and beach there was a crescent of dunes covered with olive and silver grass.

Scattered over the dunes in irregular rows were sea shells as big as houses. They resembled nautilus shells in which the smaller segments have been pulled a bit out to the side, but they stood about three or four times Thel’s height. Their thick curved walls were colored in complex spiraling patterns of brown or deep purple trapezoids, which turned with the shape of the shells and grew smaller and smaller as they twisted around to an invisible center point, like the eyefaces of the facewomen.

Thel and the swimmer walked among these specimens in awe, observing how they gleamed in the late afternoon light, for each one appeared to have been polished as smooth as glass; and there were even, they saw, windows of some clear material replacing some of the brown and purple trapezoids, high in the curved sides.

They were just looking under the bottom edge of one shell when a short brown woman ducked out and regarded them suspiciously. “Who are you?” she demanded, touching the thick edge of her shell, looking as though she might bolt back under at any second. “What are you doing?”

“I am a swimmer,” the swimmer said gently. “This is Thel. We are travelers from east of the brough. We seek nothing of you, and will leave if our presence makes you unhappy.”

“No, no,” the woman said. “Not necessary.” As she spoke, others ducked out from their shell cottages, people small like the woman, and with leathery skin of brown or purplish cast. They were a nervous crowd, and as they shuffled about the two they moved away reflexively each time the swimmer gestured. But in the end they welcomed the two cordially enough, and invited them to eat with them, a varied meal of fish and seaweed bits, washed down by a sparkling liquor that made the two instantly drunk. The shell people offered them a shell of their own to spend the night in, and they agreed, dropping to hands and knees to get under the edge of one really large brown-flecked specimen.

Once inside it much resembled other beach cottages, or so the swimmer said. Cut plank floors had been set flat in each chamber, with plank staircases leading through holes cut from one chamber to the next. In each chamber driftwood furniture was covered with padded cloth made of fine seaweed hair, on which simple striped patterns had been printed with shell dyes. There were knick-knacks from the sea on the curved walls, and in an upper chamber a small bed was tucked under a window, across from a brick fireplace cut into the central wall. Each chamber had a window cut in its outer wall, the trapezoids filled with a clear fibrous material in the lower chambers where the windows were big, with mosaics of colored driftglass upstairs where the windows were small.

The swimmer observed it all with a delighted, little girl’s smile, unlike any Thel had seen on her face. “It’s just like my aunt and uncle’s,” she kept saying. “I used to love visiting them.”

So they spent the night dry and warm, cuddled together in a narrow bed, and in the morning the shell people were out working the beach or the ravines or the meadows up above the bluffs. Their next door neighbor said to them, “If you will collect puka shells for us, you can stay in that house for as long as you care to. It hasn’t been used in ages.”

Collecting puka shells, they found, was a simple business, so simple that the shell people found it tedious; all of them but the children had more interesting or important things to do. Nevertheless they loved having the jewelry made from these shells. On the steep strand of the bay a vicious shorebreak sluiced the coarse blond sand back and forth, and as it did it ground up all the shells and coral bits and rocks that had found their way there, turning them into more of the coarse sand. Their next door neighbor showed the two travelers that among the shell fragments being washed up and down were many specimens of a small fat cone-shaped shell, all of which were being worn down until only the thick caps at the base of the cone remained, round and usually holed in the middle, at the centerpoint of the shell’s whorl where it had been quite thin to begin with. So at a certain point in their disintegration these round flat holed pieces made perfect necklace beads, ready to be strung and worn; and a tiny percentage of them were a rich, deep blue, the color of the sky in mid-twilight. These blue pieces the shell folk treasured, and the most important members of the community wore many necklaces and bracelets and anklets of the blue buttons, and every shell person owned at least one big necklace of them.

The easiest method of finding them was simple, they were told. Stand in the shorebreak facing the shore, and as the waves sluiced back down over the coarse sand, one saw thousands of fragments of pastel shell color. Once every dozen or score of waves one saw a flash of the blue, a flash that somehow suggested it was not a jagged tiny fragment but a complete cap; and then with a quick pounce and some luck one could snatch it up, in a streaming handful of wet sand.

So Thel and the swimmer spent a day hunting puka shells, and at sunset they each had a small belt bag filled with the little blue circles. The shell folk were tremendously pleased, and fed them a feast of squid, shark, seaweed salad, and corn. And the day had passed pleasantly enough, and the swimmer remained delighted with their curved shell home; and so they decided to stay a while.

Soon enough they found that all was not peaceful among the shell folk. In fact they were all involved in ceaseless conflicts with one another, and alliances and social wars among them were quick, constant and volatile. The division among them between brown skin and purple seemed part of the conflict, but in some original sense that had been long since lost in subsequent permutations; now purple-skinned folk were likely to refer to themselves as brown, and vice versa, and they all wore clothing and shell jewelry in color codes, to indicate where their loyalties stood on any given day.

The important shifts in alliances and enemies were marked by the physical moving of their shell homes. The inhabitants, never more than one or two to a shell, would enlist friends and drag their home over the sand to a new neighborhood, sent on their way by bursts of violent cursing from their old neighbors, and leaving a swath through the sand to mark the dramatic event. The bay beach was crisscrossed by these trails, which wind and tide erased quickly enough; but there were always new tracks to replace the old. Psara, a lithe graceful man with purple skin that was the darkest in the village, explained to them that this was a fundamental part of their nature, and with a broad white smile he offered an explanation: “There are too few of us to reproduce properly if there is anything short of a total mixture. We cannot afford tribes or even families of any extent. Besides—” he grinned—“we are descended from crabs, and inclined to be solitary and feisty. An argument a day and you live forever, we say.”

Thel and the swimmer found this a bit much, and one day they decided to take advantage of the mobility of residence, and they got Psara and some others to help them drag their shell out to the edge of the village, just inside the broad eastern point of the bay, beside a stream, behind a dune, and all by themselves. Their old neighbors shouted abuse at them as they left, but in a friendly tone, and they dropped by later to help return all the furniture to its proper place, and to trade for the previous day’s catch of blue puka shells.

19. Pure Duration

And so they fell into the rhythm of the bay, into their own rhythm. They had their home, isolated from the battles and out under the eastern point’s bluff. That whole stretch of beach they had to themselves, especially in the mornings; and the point was washed by the tides, and was an especially rich source of the blue shells.

Each strangely long day became a sort of eternity in itself. In the mornings the air was cool and clear and salty, the sea calm and the sun blazing over it. They stood calf-deep in the tumbling waves, facing the beach and the granite bluff behind, watching the sand mix wildly in the water, tiny shell fragments of pink and brown and yellow and purple and red tumbling over each other among the clear and white and tan grains of sand, all a tumble and a rush of wet brilliant color with the clear foam-flecked water pouring over it, and once in a while a flash of blue like a dark sky would reveal itself among the rest and they would dive, scoop up handfuls of sand, let it sift through fingers until the blue fragment was there to be plucked out and put in a bag. If they proved to have missed it, they groaned and started again. And it seemed it would be morning forever.

At midday they sat on the beach and ate something, and slept on the sand or talked, and it seemed the midday would last forever, a warm lazy eternal nap; and then in the afternoons they would walk the beach in search of food or the rare overlooked blue button poking out of the dry sand, or get in the surf and hunt again, and it seemed the afternoon would never end, the sun white and stationary in the broad western sky. Only at sunset did it seem time passed; slow, stately, the sun dropped and slowed as it dropped, it seemed, until it stood on the horizon chopped into orange slices by the layering of the atmosphere, and they had time to climb the bluffs and watch the mallow sea go indigo and the air become visible and the pared sun turn to a yellow sliver, then an emerald green dot, the green flash that ended the sunset. And then they were in the endless dusk, all its dark grainy colors filling with blackness as the eternal night came on. And this was just one day in an eternal round of unchanging days, until Thel felt that they lived forever every couple of weeks; and beyond that, in the unimaginable fullness of whole years, lay the touch of pure duration.

20. Castaway

Most of these endless days they spent alone, but sometimes one or more of the shell folk would drop by, especially the children, who were delighted to see them do something as childish as recover pukas. Their most frequent adult companion was Psara, who occasionally joined them in the surf, laughing at the sport but incredibly fluid and quick-eyed and quick-handed at it; he could collect more blue shells in a morning than Thel could in a couple of days. As he dove and spluttered in the shorebreak he regaled them with the village gossip, which was consistently lurid and melodramatic, a never-ending extravaganza of petty feuds and sordid sexual affairs.

He also invited them in to the rare festival nights, when everyone came out to a driftwood fire by the biggest stream and drank the clear liquor until they were all maudlin with drunken affection for one another, their feuds forgotten in the brilliant yellow light of festival reality. They would dance in rings around the fire, holding hands and crashing left and right, embracing their partners and declaring them wonderful browns or purples.

During one of these parties, late, when the fire was a pile of pulsing embers and the shell folk were comatose with liquor and neighborly feeling, Psara regarded the two beachcombers with his quick ironic smile, and slipped over to them and put a sensuous hand on the swimmer’s broad shoulder, and on Thel’s. “Would you like to hear a story?”

The two nodded easily.

“Paros,” Psara said loudly, and the oldest person there jerked upright, peered around sleepily. “Tell us the story of the castaways, Paros!” and several children said “Yes please, please!”

Old Paros nodded and stood precariously. “This is a story from the world’s beginning, when ocean never equaled gleamed in the dark, perfect and white and empty. Across her white body sailed a raft, not our ship of fools but an orderly and good society, the brown and the purple having little to do with each other but coexisting in peace.” Some of the villagers laughed at that.

“But one day a brown man and a purple woman met at the mast, and talked, and later they did it again, and again, and when the browns and the purples bathed over the side they dove under the raft and swam together for a time; and they fell in love.

“Now both of them were married, and their partners were prominent in the societies of brown and purple. So when the two were finally discovered, all the browns and purples were outraged, and there were calls to drown the two lovers.

“But the raft sailed by an island in the white sea, the smallest speck of land—a rock, a tree, a shell and a stream. And the browns and purples decided to maroon the two lovers, and threw them overboard, and the two swam to the island. And as they swam, ocean never equaled seeped into their minds and took all memory of the raft away from them, so that they would not despair.

“And they landed on the island, and the raft sailed away and would never come back. The woman gave birth to many children, and the children quarreled and would have killed each other. So ocean never equaled made the island longer, so that there would be room for the children and grandchildren of the two lovers to live without mortal strife between them. But they fought and multiplied at such a rate that ocean never equaled had to stretch the island all the way around her, to give them room to chase each other endlessly; and the white sea turned blue with the blood and tears shed.”

Silence. Paros sat down. Gray film fluttered on the dull coals of the fire. Thel felt as though he were falling; he had to clasp the swimmer’s arm to steady himself, even though they were sitting.

Later as they walked back home he stumbled once or twice, though he had not drunk that much. And several times he started to speak, and stopped; and he noticed the swimmer did the same. And that night in their narrow bed they hugged each other like two frightened children, lost at night in the woods.

21. We are Clouds

Days passed. In the summer the shallows got so hot that they had to swim offshore to get any refreshment from the sea, and they searched for shells naked, as brown as the brown shellfolk. In the winter the water was so cold that it hurt their ankles as it rushed over their feet, and each day their skin turned as purple as the purple shellfolk, teeth chattering so that the fire in their bedroom was a lovely warmth. They spent storm days sitting in the bed watching the fire and talking and making love, while wind and rain lashed at their streaming window. Days like that were wonderful to Thel, but better yet were the long summer days, knee deep in surf under the sun, the intense rays pulsing on his neck in what felt like discrete little pushes of light and heat. He would look up from the sand tumbling in the whitewater and see the swimmer make some graceful move, her naked brown body twisting as she dove for a blue fragment, or streaming with water as she stood up after a dive; or the muscles of her arms rippling like backwash hitting an oncoming wave; or the sight of her legs and bottom and back as she walked away down the beach; or the tilt of her head as she walked toward him, looking down at the whitewater; and his heart would swell like an erection inside him and he would run through the broken surf and tackle her, kissing her neck and face until she laughed at him and they would make love there, with water and sand running over them. And sometimes she would run up and tackle him and they would do the same. And afterward they would play grunion in the surf, lying in the shorebreak and rolling up and down with the broken waves, taking the sea in and spurting it out like fountains, not thinking a thing. Every part of the day eternal, on summer days like that.

But the sun moved, and time passed nevertheless. Sitting in the shorebreak and watching his lover roll back and forth like beautifully rounded driftwood, Thel couldn’t help thinking of that, from time to time; of time passing. He watched the clouds tumble overhead and let handfuls of sand run through his fingers, the little clear grains of quartz, flecks of black mica, pieces of coral, shell fragments like small bits of hard ceramic, and he saw that a substantial portion of the sand was made of shells, that living things had labored all their lives to create ceramic shelters, homes, the most permanent efforts of themselves; which had then been pummeled into shards just big enough to see, millions upon millions of lives ground up and strewn under him, the beach made out of the wreckage of generations. And before long he and the swimmer too would become no more than sand on a beach; and they would never really have understood anything. Clouds rushed over the granite boulders of the point. Both granite and cloud had deeply complex textured surfaces, but in their mutability they were so different that it was hard to grasp. Reflecting on this he was surprised when the swimmer rolled into him on a wave and said, “We are clouds.” And even more surprised when he heard himself reply, “But mountains are clouds, too.”

22. Festival

One evening in early spring, after a long day on the hot tawny beach, Thel and the swimmer walked homeward, between great logs of driftwood that had washed ashore in the winter. In the blue twilight the logs looked like the bodies of fallen giants after a titanic battle, and above them in the sky a black star was fluttering, a bird high in the air. The swimmer clasped Thel’s arm: “Look,” she said, and pointed down the beach. “We have visitors.” Torchlight glimmered around their shell home, a dozen points of yellow weaving in the dusk.

It was a group of the shellfolk, drinking liquor from curved shells and laughing as they danced in a circle around their home.

“Is it New Year’s already?” the swimmer asked.

“Something else,” Thel said.

They walked into the circle of light, and the shellfolk greeted them and explained it was Paros’s birthday, and, as had happened once or twice before, they had decided to celebrate out at Thel and the swimmer’s home, because they had not been able to agree whether brown or purple should host. So Thel and the swimmer joined the party, and ate and danced around the bonfire, and drank the liquor until everything was bright with the colors of fire and night, and the faces of the shellfolk were like crude masks of their daytime selves. Thel stumbled as he swung his feet out in dance, and a face the brown nearest black appeared before him, harsh with laughter and some shouted curse he didn’t understand. Then someone the purple nearest black darted from the side, trying to trip him; Thel looked up and it seemed that people were not quite themselves, so that when Psara came out of their house holding the mirror overhead, Thel saw immediately that it was not Psara but Tinou. Tinou’s black skin was now purplish in tint, and his face was twisted into Psara’s visage, but with Tinou’s big grin on it, and Tinou’s shouting laugh.

As the transformed shellfolk seized Thel and the swimmer by the arms and dragged them to Tinou, a part of Thel was distracted, wondering if Psara had been Tinou all along, waiting all these years for whatever unimaginable reason to reveal himself—or if he had recently arrived in the village, and for reasons equally beyond comprehension had taken over Psara’s form. In any case the voice was the same, and as Tinou placed the mirror in the wooden frame familiar. From Oia, he laughed and said, “All life is a case of deja vu, don’t you think? And here we are again. Let us put the woman through first, so Thel can see what it looks like.”

Thel struggled against the hands holding him down, but there were too many of them; all his neighbors, faces gleaming yellow and their eyes big and hungry as they watched the other group lift the struggling swimmer and force her feet into the bright liquid surface of the mirror. Tinou laughed and began his litany of questions, face inches from hers, spittle flying over her as he shouted in a gross parody of solicitousness, “Pinching? pressing? gnawing? cramping? crushing? wrenching? scalding? searing?” Thel was proud of her, the way she could hold her face rigid in a mask of stoic disgust, staring Tinou in the eye; but his stomach was flipflopping inside him as he saw the flesh of her legs and torso jerk at the contact with the mirror. Her body remained visible on the other side, flesh pale and inert yet still there among them. But remembering his own voyage on the other side, Thel feared they would be separated again, separated for good, and as her head popped through and she tumbled unconscious to the ground behind the mirror, Thel ripped convulsively away from the hands holding him and leaped forward to dive head first through the mirror and after her. The last thing he saw was Tinou’s face, bright with torchlight and astonishment, as big around as the mirror itself.

23. The Pursuit

It was early morning, sun bright in his eyes. The swimmer lay next to him, sleeping or unconscious, and the world smelled as fresh as the shadows under trees. It hurt to move—to raise his head, to sit up—each joint a stab of pain when he moved it. Nevertheless he was happy to be with her still.

And yet it hurt, it hurt to move. This was an aspect of pain he noticed at once: it was hard to see through it to anything else. It took a discipline that would have to be learned.

Groaning, he rolled to her side and shook her awake. She woke with a gasp and held her left arm to her side. They sat up, looked around at a cold windy hillside—the spine, in fact, near the crest, on a prominence overlooking the sea. There was no sign of the shellfolk’s bay. “The sun,” the swimmer said. “It’s moving east. It will set in the east.”

Thel ignored the conundrum of how she could orient herself by something other than the sun in the sky, and merely nodded. “It’s the mirror world,” he said. “Everything’s backward.”

They would need clothes, having been thrust into this world nearly naked. Even something like the leaf capes that the treefolk had worn would help shelter them from the wind.

Then the swimmer pointed. “Look, it’s him. The thing that took over our Psara.” Far to the east, on the crest of the spine, a figure was walking away from them. It had a lump on its back. “He’s carrying the mirror,” the swimmer said. She had a hand shading her eyes, and was squinting. “It’s Tinou, isn’t it.”

“Yes.” Thel peered after the tiny figure speculatively. “If we could get the mirror from him, and push through it again. . . .”

It might end the pain. It might return them to their hot tawny beach. It might. . . . They looked each other in the eyes, stood with some difficulty, followed the figure east.

It was hard going, even on the trail. At sunset each day they descended to the beach, the sun sinking into the eastern sea. Over time they wove capes of palm and fan seaweed; and each night they foraged for food, and the swimmer found a mollusk that when eaten dulled the pain of her arm, and Thel’s joints. But the spine was getting higher and higher as they moved farther to the mirror east, and the trail stayed right on the crest of the spine, and the descent to the beaches became more difficult. Tinou stayed about the same distance ahead of them, so perhaps he was descending to water each night as well; but finally one sunset it was impossible, and the next, possible but too strenuous to contemplate. Besides, in the dusk the swimmer caught sight of Tinou, sitting next to the trail far above them; so they slept tucked in a fault to get out of the wind, and it was cold but they found bird’s nests, and were able to raid them for food. Holes and dips in the granite held rainwater for their thirst, and the swimmer had dried a collection of the mollusks for their pain. But they ran out quickly enough.

Because the spine continued to rise they caught sight of Tinou several times a day, always most of a day’s walk ahead of them, a speck against the pinkish broken granite of the spine’s bony edge. The peninsula here resembled the precipitous blade of rock that Thel had traversed with the treefolk, a knife edge of scarcely weathered granite slicing the world ocean into two halves, so many thousands of feet high that the waves were no more than the faintest pattern of curves on the sea. Higher and higher this great ridge arched into the sky, in irregular swoops, with an unhappily large number of sudden drops in the ridge that they were forced to climb down, and then up again. As they made their way they sometimes saw broken bird nests scattered down the cliffs to right and left, the precious meat of eggs burst and dried over the rocks and sticks: Tinou had been kicking them apart as he passed, and so must have known they were following.

When the swimmer’s mollusks were gone, they hiked on in pain; her arm never healed, and Thel’s joints creaked as if filled with grit, and each day’s march added to their scrapes, bruises, sprains: and none of these ever seemed to heal. In the mirror world their bodies had lost that ability. Hunger plagued them as well, but not thirst; some of the ponds they passed had Tinou’s feces floating in them, but there were more of the little granite pools than he could find to foul, and they drank as deeply as if they might be able to get their sustenance from water alone. They ate mice, and birds, and eggs, and once a whole glorious patch of blueberries; then later, a bright green moss. As they climbed higher the crevices in the rock supported nothing but this moss, and blotchy lichen, and occasional junipers that up here were nothing but little wind-tortured bushes, tucked between-boulders and down in cracks. They slept under these piney shrubs, and tried eating the pinecones but couldn’t.

One evening in the indigo twilight Thel looked at the swimmer’s bright pain-filled eyes. It was hard to remember the world on the other side of the mirror, their life on the hot tawny beach—a blur, a moment like the snapping of fingers, a dream. He said, “We never gain on him, and we’re going slower every day. My joints—” he stopped, wanting to cry. “I’m hungry,” he said instead.

She gave him a handful of the moss. He noticed that her fingers were narrower and longer, with full webs of skin between them, and a dusting of blond fur over the backs of the hands. She said, “Whatever happens, you must accept it.”

He ate, considering what that implied. His own hands were gnarled and his thumbs were longer and less opposed to the fingers than they used to be. Flickering, pulsing, throbbing, shooting, lancing, cutting, rasping, splitting, yes. All of these. “Maybe,” he said, feeling his face and the enlarged jaw, “maybe if we made an extraordinary effort. If we hiked all night—if we kept hiking till we caught him, you know. He’s sleeping at night like we are, or we’d never be keeping pace with him. If we dispensed with that, and hiked all night. . . .”

“Tomorrow,” she said, sleepy. Her nose was smaller, and it twitched at the end. “One last night of rest, and we’ll start tomorrow.”

So the next sunset they stopped and foraged hard, collecting for their waist bags a bit of everything that was not granite itself, and they kept walking as the sun’s light dimmed in the eastern sky, until only a few clouds high over the eastern sea caught a dim red glow in the deep indigo; and then by the light of the million stars they stumbled on.

Even in these remote heights the trail continued to wind its way along the spine crest, weaving to north or south depending on the shape of the rock and the cliffs on each side. The trail was in poor repair and had not been used, it appeared, in years. Sometimes, because it was the only flatness in a vertical landscape, and had been crushed to sand over the centuries, it was the only foothold for the green moss, so that a mossy path extended through the white rock, a highly visible black sidewalk in the starry night. Elsewhere the trail was just a slightly less obstacle-filled track, and nearly impossible to see. They kept losing it and coming on it again, and each time they rediscovered it Thel felt a tiny bit of satisfaction, of communion across time with whoever had built the trail; they had both picked the same route as best. And now it was essential that they keep to that route, if they were not to come to some impassable drop-off or rise; so in places they moved on hands and knees, feeling for sand and the intangible traces of earlier feet. At times they could move their heads to the side and stare straight down to the obsidian sea, flat and glossy some thousands of feet below; then they crawled, happy to hug the rock, long past talk, merely panting, gasping, from time to time whimpering or cursing under their breath, or simply groaning.

It was a long night. When dawn came and light leaked back into the world, in the hour when everything was made of translucent slabs of gray, Thel looked at the swimmer and observed that her whole shape was changing; torso longer, feet longer, ribs visible but not quite human, she was making a slow transformation back to something clearly aquatic—as she had always been, but now it was more pronounced, obvious that her race had descended from some fluid water mammal. She would be forced to crawl all the time if the transformation continued. And if her joints felt anything like his . . . he exerted the discipline, peered through the black haze of pain, saw that his own legs were thicker and his arms longer and heavier: it was a comfortable prospect to walk on all fours, and climbing the endless granite staircase of the spine was in some senses a happy challenge. Tree ancestor, he thought, and the image of a quick beautiful creature came into his mind, with the word baboon.

When the sun rose behind them, he looked at the ridge ahead carefully. This was the time of day when Tinou, looking back into the western dawn, would have trouble spotting them; while they looked up the ridge for him with the blaze of a nearby star as their spotlight. And eventually Thel’s patience was rewarded. A head popped over the rock, just above and beyond them, a few minutes’ walk only, and Tinou emerged, looked back blindly into the sun, and then hiked east up the ridge trail.

All that day they hunted him, hiding when he looked back, and so losing some ground. In pain as they were they could not keep pace with him in any case. But after sunset they caught sight of him, settling for the night at a flat spot in the trail.

There was still a trace of dusk in the sky when they crawled silently over the granite knobs to his camp. He was sleeping in the trail’s sand, rolled in a blanket, or so they thought; but as they crept toward him his eyes opened, the whites reflecting starlight so that it seemed two glittery little jewels had popped into being, and with a laugh he said, “What persistent little things, crawling around in the night! Come out in the open, my little ones!”

He was standing over them. “My, my.” Amusement made his beautiful voice bounce musically, a low fast burble. “A monkey and a water rat, it seems! Following me all this way, whatever for?” He loomed over Thel, and anger threaded into the amusement. “What kind of creature jumps through the mirror, eh? What kind of thing?”

But Thel and the swimmer were long past the snare of language, long past even much hearing Tinou’s beautiful voice. He seemed to recognize this, for when they stood and approached him, spreading out to come at him from two sides, he retreated to the flat spot and his blanket.

“We want the mirror,” Thel croaked, shuffling in toward him, sidling at angles in hopes of getting close more quickly than Tinou could notice. “Give it to us and we’ll call it quits.”

Tinou laughed and reached down into his blankets, pulled out the mirror bag. He held it out, then swung it around to throw it over the cliff into the southern sea—but he had not reckoned on Thel’s new animal swiftness, and the bag crashed into Thel’s upper arm as Thel rushed forward, and quicker than Thel could react or plan his numbed arm had caught Tinou by the throat and the claws of his other hand were raking Tinou’s face and knocking aside the flailing arms, and then with tremendous force he caught up the sorcerer’s head in both hands and threw the man’s whole body to the ground. The swimmer dove and bit the bent and exposed neck, and awkwardly she got to her feet and they stood watching Tinou’s blood drain out of him. Mortality, how strange: that Tinou, who had given them so much, was now gone! That he had left no more behind than this! It was hard to grasp.

Thel picked up the mirror bag and checked inside it; the mirror was unbroken, its surface the color of the sky some hour or two before. Meanwhile the swimmer had taken a knife from Tinou’s bag, then found a firestone and clapper. The skeleton of a dead juniper stood twisted in the lee of boulders protecting the flat, and they broke it apart right down to the ground, bashing it with rocks they could barely lift. Thel started a fire while the swimmer cut away the skin over Tinou’s thighs and buttocks, and hacked out big steaks that they roasted on sticks of juniper. When they were full they slept all the way through to dawn, warmed by the coals of the fire, and their first real meal in weeks.

24. The Green Flash

They woke in the late morning and hiked on, continuing eastward without discussion; it seemed clear to Thel that it was necessary, that they could not recross the mirror’s smooth barrier on the site of Tinou’s murder. That, in fact, there was a specific moment when it would be possible, a time and a place of which he knew nothing. They would have to watch. Without speaking of it he knew the swimmer had come to the same conclusion.

So they hiked on. The spine continued to rise, a granite wall splitting the sea, curving sinuously left and right, its top edge shattered over the eons into a broken split serrated knife edge of a ridge, rising unevenly as they crawled antlike along it. Often they crawled in the literal sense, as it was too painful and precipitous to walk. The moss grew less frequently here and they were often hungry. They often recalled the delicious meal of Tinou and regretted bitterly not staying to eat all of him, or at least not taking with them his heart and liver, they drooled thinking of it. “But livers make you mad,” Thel said, “someone told me. Livers and life.”

Hunger made them light and they found they could almost float up smaller aretes, just a touch here and there on the rough grainy rock, something to keep them from blowing away—to keep their shells from blowing away—everything inside having danced off on the wind. Once Thel tried to tell the swimmer how he felt about that, and he couldn’t find the words to express it. He listened to the thin slow trickle of his thoughts and was surprised to hear how simple it had become: I am climbing. I will always climb. The ocean is far below. That is a rock. I hope we find some moss. These were his thoughts. And all that great whirling maelstrom of feeling and significance, of meaning: on the other side of the mirror, back down the peninsula among his forgotten friends, adventures, hopes, loves, dreams. All the dreams forgotten in the moment of waking, the flight that mattered so much . . . it was strange to no longer desire his desires, to look at the swimmer and see a broken ancient animal, to understand that all their love had been a way of fixing time, each embrace a moment’s touch of the eternal, because the caress preserves. And yet here he crawled, something like a baboon, long knuckled hairy claws at the end of furred forearms, next to something like an otter, and only her eyes remained hers, the face he remembered mostly gone, but all of it evoked by those calm black eyes unfogged by the pain that crippled her gait, clear and calm and looking around, still capable of that small ironic amused squint, as when she laid her forearm next to his and said, “Now you see why we never had children.”

They had come from different worlds. They spoke different languages. What they had shared had been at least partly illusion. And yet, and yet, and yet. . . . He took comfort in limping along the trail beside her, before her, behind her, thumping shoulders together or sharing moss they found. Beauty is only the beginning of terror, but just to have company, to share the news: there is a block of pink quartz. The seas look high. The wind is strong. And so the terror is staved off. Through black haze, beauty still perceived.

The ridge became deeply serrated, peaks like the teeth of a crude saw, making progress nearly impossible. Why go on, Thel thought one morning, but then the swimmer started off, scrambling up a broken cliff, using all fours, and he followed. Why was one of the questions that had gone away. Pain clouded his vision. A bird’s nest gave them a feast. A storm left them soaked and cold. Near its end lightning shattered the peak above them, leaving their ears blasted, their nerves tingling, the strong smell of ozone in the wind. The shock of it seemed to invigorate the swimmer and she led all the next day with a will, over peak after peak, and down into deep cols. Their bodies were continuing to devolve, and only this allowed them to continue; now she could slither up rock, and how he could cling!

Then late one afternoon they made their way slowly over a hump of granite, and on the other side of it the peninsula dropped off into the sea, and came to an end.

It did so in a sheer clean prow, so smooth that it had to have been crafted. Also there was a smoothed waist-high wall to each side, bowing in and meeting at an angle, at the final point of the ridge. They walked out to the meeting of the two walls and leaned out to look. Clearly in some past age some civilization had come here and cut the granite cape smooth, creating two polished curving walls that came together in a straight edge which dropped to the sea in a single swoop, a clean crease like the bowline of a great ship. It was a drop, Thel estimated, of about ten thousand feet.

They walked around on this last forecastle, south to north and back again, looking down at the worksmanship of the two cliffsides. The polished granite was a flecked color, an infinitely dense mix of feldspar, quartz, and hornblende, so that just below them it appeared speckled like a trout, while farther down it seemed only a pinkish brown, like a kind of marble. Stones that Thel dropped over the walls skipped down and disappeared, and he never even saw them mar the dark blue of the sea.

It was nearly sunset. The swimmer wandered about, collecting rocks and laying them on the triangular block where the two walls met, the outermost point. Thel asked what she was doing and she smiled, gesturing at the mirror bag. “This must be the place, yes?”

Thel shivered, looked around. They could see for many, many miles, and the horizon was a clear sharp line between sea and sky; but the air was somehow thick, the sunlight in it dark. He took the mirror from the bag and put it on the final tip of the wall, held it in place with the rocks the swimmer had gathered. The eastern sky was full of the setting sun’s yellow, and the mirror’s surface glowed like a lens, as if scooping up all the beautiful sunlight in the world and flinging it westward, in a single coherent beam. “But what will we do?” Thel asked.

The swimmer stretched and stood on her hind legs, pointing with one foreleg at the glass. “At the last moment of sunset we will leap through;” she said happily. But she was a sea creature, and this was, perhaps, a return to the sea; while he was a tree creature, in a land without trees, and he was afraid. And yet, and yet. . . .

They sat on the wall and watched the sunset, the light leaking out of the sky, the wind rustling the great space of dusk and the sea. The incredible furnace of the sun fountained light even as it sank into the ocean, which gleamed like a cut polished stone. Overhead a windhover fluttered in place, slicing the wind and sideslipping, and seeing it Thel was calmed. Whatever happened, yes, but more than that there was a kind of glory in it, to fling themselves out into the spaces they breathed, if only for one last dive or flight. The sun pared to a yellow line on the sea, and the sky darkened still; the mirror surface, still a kind of lens gathering sunlight, glowed a rich yellow that greened and greened as the sun’s rays bent around the curve of the globe, prisming under gravity’s pull. Out on the horizon the brilliant yellow line contracted in from both sides, greening all the while, until at last it was nothing but a single point of the most intense emerald light: the green flash, the sun’s farewell, and the mirror’s surface was flush with green light, the whole circle a pool of glowing green, and the swimmer’s paw caught Thel by the arm and pulled him to his feet. Overhead the kestrel tipped and dove, down in a curving stoop, shooting by them and falling faster until it burst to white, like a meteor streaking over the sea; and with a cry the swimmer leaped forward and jumped through the mirror, and Thel followed fast on her heels.

BONES

Pat Murphy

In her past tales for IAsfm, Pat Murphy has set her characters in some of the most exotic corners of the Earth. She has captured our imagination on a tour that has included the Yucatan (“On a Hot Summer Night in a Place Far Away,” May 1985) and Nepal (“In the Abode of the Snows,” Mid-December 1986). Her latest stop is the eighteenth century and a fantasy that travels from the mysterious Irish countryside to the treacherous streets of London. These stories and others will soon be available in her collection Points of Departure (Bantam).

This is a true story, more or less. In the history books, you can find Dr. John Hunter, a noted surgeon and naturalist. London’s Royal College of Surgeons maintains his museum, an amazing collection of eighteenth-century oddities and natural curiosities.

Charlie Bryne is in the history books, too. He came to London from Ireland in 1782. Advertised as the World’s Tallest Man and the Descendant of Irish Kings, he exhibited himself as a curiosity and a freak.

The history books tell of their meeting—but now I’m getting ahead of myself. I must start long before that.

On a cold winter evening, when the ground was white with frost, Charlie Bryne sat on a stool by the peat fire. Though the boy was only ten years old, he was already as tall as a grown man. His mother, a youthful widow, sat close by, her shawl pulled up around her shoulders and a glass of whiskey in her hand. The firelight shone on her face, making her cheeks rosy and her eyes bright.

“Tell me the story, Mum,” Charlie asked. “Tell me how I got to be so big.”

She smiled at him fondly. “Ah, you know the tale as well as I do, Charlie. You have no need for me to tell it.”

“I’ve forgotten. Tell me again,” he pleaded.

“All right—just once more. Fill my glass and we’ll have the story.” He refilled her glass from the jug and she settled herself more comfortably in her chair.

“It was a year after a young horse threw my husband and broke his back,” she began. “I was a widow with a fine farm, and many a bachelor farmer would gladly have had me to wife. But I was happy to be on my lone, and I would have none of them.” She pushed back her dark hair with her hand, smiling at the memory. “Old Sean Dermot died that autumn, and I went to the wake. As it came about, I stayed too late, and I was walking home after dark. ’Twas a lonesome road I had to travel—I was tired, so I took a short cut, the path that ran beside the Giant’s Boneyard.”

She shook her head at her own foolishness. The Giant’s Boneyard was a lonely, haunted spot. In a field too rocky for planting, wild grasses grew thick and green around great boulders of unusual shapes. People said that the boulders were the bones of a giant, a king of Ireland who had died a hundred years before, while fighting to protect his people from invaders. Some said that he had promised, with his dying words, to return if ever Ireland needed him. Some said he walked at night, strolling through the field that held his bones. In any case, most people avoided the place after dark.

“The moon was a sliver in the sky, hanging low and giving just enough light for me to see. I was only halfway across the field when I saw a blue light, a beautiful light, the color of the Blessed Virgin’s robes. I was not foolish enough to go running after fairy lanterns. I kept to the path, hurrying home, but the light danced across the field toward me. And then I saw it clearly.”

She clasped her hands before her, and leaned toward Charlie. He caught his breath, watching her. “The blue light shone from a golden crown on the head of an enormous man. A powerful man—stronger than the blacksmith in the village, taller than the tallest I had ever seen. He was handsome, but his eyes were dark and fierce. When he looked at me, I froze, bound to the spot and unable to run.”

She fixed her gaze on Charlie, as if to show him how it felt, and he shivered. “He spoke to me sweetly, saying that I would bear him a son. His son would have the old blood in his veins, and he would save Ireland. Then he took me by the hand and let me to a spot where the grass was soft. There he lay with me, taking his pleasure as a man does with a woman. In the morning, I woke with the sun in my eyes, beside the boulder they call the Giant’s Skull.” She leaned back in her chair. “Nine months later, you were born. You were the biggest baby the midwife had ever laid her eyes upon. And you’ve kept growing ever since. You take after your father, sure enough.”

Charlie nodded, gazing into the fire. “Have you ever seen my father again?”

“That I have not,” she murmured. “But I know you for his son.”

“Then I must save Ireland? When must I do this?”

“That I don’t know. When the time comes, surely it will be clear to you.”

Charlie frowned at the fire, his expression fierce. “I will do what I must do,” he said. “If only I can figure out what that is.”

Charlie wasn’t his mother’s son, though he sat at her knee and fetched her whiskey. He was a child of the woods and the wild fields—growing up outdoors as much as in. Summer and winter alike, he ran barefoot, coming home to his mother’s house with dusty feet and brambles in his hair.

He was a strange lad—with a peculiar, dreamy air about him that made some think he was dim-witted. But he wasn’t stupid—he just paid attention to other lessons. Reading and writing seemed unimportant when he could look out the window and see the flowers growing in the fields, hear the birds singing. He understood the mathematics of bird nests, the poetry of cloud formations, the penmanship of snail tracks left on the cold stones of the churchyard wall.

He had a way about him. Animals liked him: the wildest horse would consent to be shod when Charlie held its head. Cows bore their calves more easily if he were standing by. Over the years, the widow Bryne’s farm prospered: her fields were fertile and her hens laid more eggs than any in the village. Her cows gave the richest milk and bore their calves with never a bit of trouble.

Charlie lived with his mother, helping to tend her prospering farm. When he was just sixteen, he was taller than the tallest man in the county. At twenty, he measured eight-foot-tall, and he was still growing. And always he wondered when he would be called upon to save Ireland.

One sunny day, he was drowsing in the Giant’s Boneyard, his back against the boulder known as the Giant’s Skull. Leaning against the sunwarmed surface, he listened to the wind in the grass and the high thin peeping of the little birds that searched for seeds in the meadow. A lark flew from the grass and came to perch on the boulder. When Charlie held out his hand, the bird flew to him. With one finger, he gently rubbed the bird’s head. When Charlie stopped his petting, the lark tilted back its head, sang a liquid trill, then pushed off his finger and took flight.

Charlie watched the bird fly, then plucked a blade of grass from a clump beside him and chewed on the sweet stem. The earth beneath him was warm; the sun shone on his face. He belonged in this meadow the way the boulders belonged. It seemed to him sometimes that he should stay here always, letting the grass grow over him, its roots tickling the surface of his skin as it tickled the granite boulders.

The wind carried the sound of voices. Some neighboring farmers had stopped their work in a nearby field to have a bit of lunch. Their deep voices blended with the distant songbirds and the humming of bees in the wildflowers. Charlie let the sounds wash over him.

“Patrick’s gone to England,” said one man. Charlie recognized the voice of Mick, an elderly farmer. Patrick was his oldest son. “He said he’ll come home rich or not at all.”

“Not at all, more than likely,” muttered his companion. John, Charlie guessed from the voice—another neighbor. “Have you ever known a young lad to come home? My wife has borne me five strong sons. The Lord took two of them, and they are happy with the angels in heaven. But the other three are in England. I think the ones that are with the angels are more likely to come home than the ones that are in London.”

“Aye, that’s God’s truth,” Mick agreed sadly. “I’ve never known a one to come home to till his father’s farm.”

A pause, punctuated by the gurgling of beer pouring from the jug.

“Every night, as I go to sleep, I wonder who will till this land when I’m gone,” John said softly. “ ‘Tis not such a large plot—barely enough to feed us—but it was my father’s farm and his father’s before him. John stopped talking long enough to take a draught of beer, then continued. “ ‘Tis a sad thing when a man who has raised five sons has no one to help him with the plowing.”

“It ain’t right,” Mick said. “It ain’t right that the best of our children run away to England, never to return.”

John laughed, a dry humorless sound. “Aye, we need to protect ourselves. The blasted English have given up fighting with swords. Instead they lure the children away with sweet promises and gold. Treacherous bastards.”

“Aye,” Mick agreed sadly. “That they are.”

The men were silent for a moment, and then John spoke again. “I see you looking over there at those boulders. Old stories won’t help you now.”

Mick’s voice was soft. “I think sometimes about the old king, rising up from his bones. If he were to come before us, I’d tell him to bring the children home. Go to London and bring our sons and daughters back to us.”

John snorted. “If you’re looking for magic to save you, you’re more foolish than I thought. There’s no magic there—just boulders and tall green grass. The magic faded long ago.”

Charlie frowned. John was an unhappy man—bitter, tired, dried up as the land he cultivated. Charlie understood why all his sons left and why all his daughters married young.

“Ah, well,” Mick said. “All the wishing in the world won’t till the field. I think we’d best get back to work.”

The voices faded, leaving only the humming of the bees and the wind in the grasses. Charlie tilted his head to the sun and thought.

Thinking made Charlie uneasy. But he could not help considering Mick’s words. For some time, he had felt that something was wrong, an uneasy and uncomfortable sensation in his belly. He had watched his neighbors’ sons and daughters leave their fathers’ rocky farms and go to England, saying they would return. The land called out to them, wishing them back again, but they did not come back. And he dreamed of a day when the children were all gone; old men and women tilled farms, weeping for their sons and daughters who had run away, never to return.

Maybe he fell asleep in the sun. Without being aware of it, he may have quietly slipped over the thin line between sleep and wakefulness, lying there in the grass. The sun was low in the sky and the boulders cast long shadows across the meadow.

He heard footsteps and looked up. A tall man wearing a crown regarded him sadly. Charlie scrambled to his feet. He recognized his father, though the man did not entirely match his mother’s description. The King’s eyes were not fierce, but mournful and sad. He wasn’t really handsome: his face was broad and pleasant, rather like Charlie’s own. His gray beard was touched with green, as if strands of moss grew among the hairs. He wore armor made of tarnished metal plate, joined by strips of leather, and small, soft-petaled flowers sprouted among the lacings. His crown gave off a weak blue light, like the strange fluorescence that glows from rotting wood.

The king sat down heavily on a nearby boulder. “Your turn has come, my son,” he said. His tone was melancholy; his voice, a soft rumble. “You must go to England and bring the sons and daughters of Ireland home.”

Charlie nodded eagerly. “I know,” he said eagerly. “I’ll bring them home.”

The king stared at the ground. “There is still magic here, though some do not have eyes to see it.” He studied Charlie. “You must come back to this place, when your task is done. You belong here. You are part of the magic and power. This is the place where you must die and be buried.”

Charlie frowned. He saw no need to talk about what would happen when he died. He was young and strong and eager to do what his father wanted. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I understand.”

The king reached for the scabbard that hung at his side and pulled out a sword. It was as tarnished as the armor, but jewels gleamed on its hilt. “Here is my sword. Perhaps it will help you.” He looked at the weapon doubtfully. “It was my father’s before me, and it still has some magic in it.”

Charlie took hold of the hilt and bowed to his father clumsily.

It was dark when Charlie woke. The grass was damp with dew, and where the sword had been was a plain straight staff of hawthorn wood. When Charlie picked it up, white blossoms and green shoots sprouted from the dry wood, as if spring had come in the space of a minute. Charlie frowned and brushed the blossoms away but they sprouted again. At last, he gave up and left them be, carrying a staff adorned with small white flowers that smelled of spring.

Every August, not far from Dublin, farmers gathered at the Donnybrook Fair to race horses, sell cattle, drink whiskey, and get into fights. That year, on the last day of the fair, the sky was gray and a misty rain was falling. The hardpacked soil of the fairground was slick and muddy.

Joe Vance hunched his shoulders against the dampness and pushed through the crowd, making his way down the aisle of hastily constructed booths and sagging tents. The countrypeople seemed oblivious to the rain: they were playing pitch-and-toss, gawking at the Punch and Judy show, listening to the hideous wail of the organ grinder’s instrument and laughing at the antics of his flea-bitten monkey.

Vance had spent the morning trying to entice passing farmers into a simple sporting game. He had three shells and a dried pea: to win, a farmer had only to guess which shell hid the pea. But the crowd had been reluctant to play. For five hours, Vance had been sitting in the drizzle and calling to the crowd without a penny to show for it. Vance suspected that some other thimble rigger must have passed through recently, and the locals were wise to the trick. All in all, Vance was sick of the country and eager to return to London, where a sharp had a chance to earn a guinea or two.

Vance was almost to the end of the aisle when he saw a clump of people gathered around a young man. The young man seemed to be standing on a box; he towered over the tallest man in the crowd. On his shoulder, a meadowlark perched, looking just as calm as you please. As Vance watched, the small bird tipped back his head and sang a high sweet trill, followed by a glorious burst of song. The liquid notes cut through the babble of the crowd and the wailing of the organ.

“Is the bloody bird tame?” Vance asked a man in the crowd, but the man shrugged. Vance pushed his way closer. He had seen caged finches fetch a pretty penny among the London gentry, and they did nothing but chirp and flutter. A man might turn a profit if he had a supply of tame larks.

Just as Vance reached the front of the crowd, the bird finished its song and took flight. The young man on whose shoulder it had perched smiled after it and took a step, as if to follow. With a shock, Vance realized that the man was not standing on a box at all. With his bare feet planted firmly on the muddy earth, he stood at least two feet taller than any other man in the crowd. He was a country lad, dressed in rough homespun cloth that was marked with the dust of the road. In one hand, he held a wooden staff that was decorated with white flowers.

Vance forgot the lark and the hope of profits that had flown with the bird. “God save me, man—how bloody tall are you?” Vance asked, staring up.

The young man glanced down at Vance and shrugged. “Tallest in County Derry.”

“Tallest I’ve ever laid eyes on,” Vance said. “How old are you?”

“Twenty years this summer.”

“Bloody remarkable,” Vance muttered. He squinted, measuring the man with his eyes. Londoners were always willing to pay to see a curiosity. “Must be eight feet tall, if you’re an inch. What’s your name, lad?”

“Charlie Bryne.”

“My name’s Joe Vance, Charlie, and I’m pleased to meet you. You’re a likely lad, Charlie, a very likely lad. I must confess, I’ve never met a one like you before. A marvel in your own right.”

Charlie’s eyes were a brilliant innocent blue, as pale and clear as the summer sky. “Where are you from?” he asked.

“From London, the finest city in all the world.”

Charlie studied Vance. “Tell me—are there many Irishmen in London?”

“Irishmen? Why I’d wager half a crown that there are more Irishmen in St. Giles Rookery than in all of County Derry,” Vance said enthusiastically. “You’d never be homesick in London.”

Charlie’s face was guileless, the sweet face of a fool. “I want to go to London,” he said.

Vance smiled at the way that fate was playing into his hands. His luck, it seemed, had finally turned. “I knew it when I laid eyes on you, Charlie. I knew you for a man with a spirit of adventure, an itching to see the world. And you’re in luck, Charlie, tremendous luck.” Vance moved closer, reaching up to place a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. “I’ll take you there, lad. You see, I’m a manager. I find people with special talents, and I help ’em along. Groom ’em, so to speak. Back in London, I managed Bruisin’ Peg. You may have heard of her?”

Charlie shook his head.

“Best lady prize fighter in all London. When Peg was in the ring, you could hear the screaming for miles around. Pity she had to retire.” Vance felt it unnecessary to mention that her decision to retire had been precipitated by a broken leg and a clout on the ear that had left her half deaf. He had abandoned her in a low London boarding house, with enough money to pay a week’s rent. It had seemed like an opportune time to leave town with the rest of the profits. “I’ll take you to London, lad,” Vance continued. “It’ll be a wonderful opportunity for you, a wonderful opportunity.”

And so it happened that Charlie came to be on board a bluff-bowed brig that sailed from Dublin to England. Late at night, on the first night of the crossing, Tom Dorland was on deck, having been awakened by the lice that infested his bedding and clothes. He strolled in the open air, grateful that the cold and the motion had quieted the insects, but knowing that they would rouse again if he returned to his narrow bunk.

A half-moon, high in the sky, illuminated the deck, casting a silver light on the boxes and barrels and bundles that were lashed to the railings. The wind had died and the ship was barely moving through the water. Tom leaned on the railing, staring out to sea.

“ ‘Tis a pleasant evening,” a deep voice said from the shadows beside a large box.

Tom glanced toward the voice, frowning into the shadows. “ ‘Seems a chilly night to be sleeping out in the air,” he said.

“Too many people in the cabin,” the man said.

Tom nodded. The passenger’s cabin was a dank shelter on the foredeck. When the ship was fully booked, as it was for this passage, the small space became impossibly crowded.

“How long will it take to reach London?” the man asked.

Tom looked up at the stars. “We could be on the sea for days unless we get a wind.”

“Ah,” the man in the shadows said. “Is that so?” Tom heard the creaking of the deck and saw a large shadow detach itself from the others. A very large shadow—the man was taller than Tom by more than two feet. Tom stared up at the giant—another crewman had told him of the tall man who had come aboard as a passenger, but Tom had assumed that the other sailor’s talk was exaggerated.

“You’re a big ’un,” Tom managed at last.

“I’m my father’s son,” the giant said, leaning on the railing beside Tom. The big man shook his head, staring out at the calm waters. “I have urgent business in London.”

Tom shrugged. “If you want to get there quickly, you have my blessing,” he said disrespectfully. “Call up a wind and blow us there in a hurry.”

The giant did not take offense at Tom’s tone. “A wind,” he mused. “A wind to blow us away from Ireland.” He moved his hand and Tom noticed, for the first time, the staff he carried. The giant frowned at it, then waved it tentatively out over the rail, swinging it in a circle. A breath of fresh wind puffed against Tom’s face. The giant waved the staff again, smiling now. The wind filled the sails and gently pushed the ship toward the shore of England.

London was larger than Charlie had expected. So many people, bustling here and there with their own business to attend to. He would have been lost in a minute without Joe Vance. He followed the little man down narrow winding streets, ducking to avoid the wooden signs that hung over shop doorways. Vance threaded his way through the commotion with ease, dodging coaches and hackneys, pushing past fruit sellers with baskets and barrows, side-stepping odorous puddles of offal and horse dung. Charlie was hard-pressed to keep up. He saw an Irishwoman selling oranges on the street corner, her black shawl wrapped tight about her shoulders to keep off the cold. He wanted to stop and chat with her, but Vance rushed on and Charlie feared he would lose his guide. He noticed a young Irish girl selling flowers. But he could not stop to talk, he had to hurry to follow Vance. People stared at him as he passed, called to their friends and pointed at him.

Vance turned from a narrow street into an even narrower alley. The thin strip of evening sky that showed between the tenements was gray with fog; the air was damp and cool. Laundry, strung between the buildings, hung limp in the still air. A group of boys was playing marbles at the far end of the street. Two pigs slept in a scatter of straw in the gutter. As Charlie passed, the larger animal lifted its head and sniffed the air, its small eyes regarding the giant with a dim sort of recognition.

The alley led to a small courtyard where tall buildings blocked out all but the smallest square of gray sky. Vance stepped into a hallway that reeked of varnish from the caneshop next door and called up the stairs. The woman who came down shrieked when she saw him—a cry of surprise and delight, mixed with a little bit of chiding. “Well, it’s Joe Vance, blast your eyes. Where have you been, you no-good scoundrel.”

While Vance and the woman talked, Charlie waited in the courtyard, staring up at the patch of sky. He heard them murmuring about someone named Peg, and Vance said “God rest her soul,” in an insincere voice. But Charlie paid no attention.

He felt tired and confused. On the ship, he had begun to feel ill at ease, missing the solid warmth of Irish soil beneath his feet. When he had complained to Vance, the little man had attributed the complaint to seasickness and said that the feeling would go away when he reached solid ground again. But the sickness remained, a hollowness in his belly, like the emptiness of hunger without the hunger pains. He wore shoes now—Vance had insisted on that when they reached Dublin—and he longed for the touch of honest soil beneath his feet.

“Charlie, come along, lad. Mary will set us up with the rooms we need,” Vance called to him.

Vance seemed familiar with the house. The woman showed them a furnished sitting room and a bedroom that attached to it. The bedroom was dark and cold, but Charlie just shrugged when Vance asked him what he thought. He barely looked at the rooms, knowing that he would not be in London for so very long. He would gather the Irish, and then be on his way. So it was not worth quibbling about the look of the rooms.

Vance engaged the rooms and then hurried Charlie along, saying that they had many things to do that day. They went to a tailor shop and Vance had Charlie measured for a suit of clothes. Then they went to the office of the Morning Herald where Vance placed an advertisement and ordered handbills to post. “Make ’em say—‘The tallest man in the world,’ ” Vance told the clerk. “ ‘Eighth wonder of the world.’ ”

While Vance was talking to the clerk, Charlie stepped outside. He looked down the narrow street. In the distance, he saw the open sky and a spot of green. He left Vance behind, drawn to the greenery.

The River Thames flowed through London, bringing water to the city and carrying away the sewage and refuse. Charlie walked down the street and found himself on steps leading down to the river. A tall tree grew on the river bank, providing a restful spot in the gray stone of the city. In the tree, a bird was singing.

Charlie sat on the stone steps. A seagull landed beside him and cocked its head from side to side, studying him with one yellow eye and then the other. Charlie smiled at the bird, then tilted his head back so that the sun shone on his face. The river water lapped gently against the bottom step, whispering comforting words in a language all its own. He rested there, soaking up the warmth of the sun and feeling a portion of his strength returning to him.

Sean was a mudlark, one of the filthy crew who made their living by scavenging bits of saleable refuse from the mud of the River Thames. When the tide was out, he and his two brothers waded into the dirty water, foraging for bits of rope and old iron to sell to the rag man, or for lumps of coal that their mother could burn.

Sean was seven years old, and he had been mudlarking since he was six. His father, a laborer on the docks, had died after being crushed between two barges. With Sean’s father’s death, the family had fallen on hard times. His mother did char work when she could get it, and all the children scavenged.

On warm days, it was not so bad to wade in the river: they could clamber from the water and let the sun warm them every now and again. But when the wind blew, there was no comfort for them—just cold mud and cold water and a gray and cheerless sky.

On that sunny day, Sean and his brothers had been both lucky and unlucky. Over by the docks where some men were repairing a ship, they found a dozen copper nails, worth a half-penny for the lot. That was good luck—but bad luck came with it. Sean had stepped on one of the nails, running it deep into his foot. When the sailors chased them away from the docks, he could scarcely run for the pain. Even now, hours later, his foot throbbed with a hot pain and he hobbled after his brothers, walking on his heel to avoid touching the wound to the mud.

“Look there,” David, his oldest brother, called. “By the river steps.”

The tallest man Sean had ever seen was lounging in the sun on the stone steps that led down to the water. “Come on,” David said. “Let’s go talk to him.”

The three boys approached cautiously, marveling at the size of the man. Their mother had told them stories of the giants who lived in Ireland in the early days. This man might have emerged from such a story.

Sean was in shallow water just a few yards away from the giant when the man opened his eyes. “Good day, sir,” said David, the boldest of the three. “Have you a penny for some poor lads?”

The giant blinked at them. “A penny?” He shook his head. “Not so much as a penny, though Joe Vance says that I will be a wealthy man soon enough.”

Encouraged by such an amiable response, Sean stepped closer. “You’re very big,” he said. “Are you a giant, like the ones in the stories?”

The man nodded. “My father was a giant. I suppose I’m one, too.” He held out his hand. “Come up out of the water if you like.” He took Sean’s hand and lifted him from the water. “There now,” he murmured. “Sit down here.”

Sean limped up the steps to sit beside the giant. His brothers hung back, gaping at him from the safety of the river. But the giant seemed friendly enough.

“What have you done to your foot?” the giant asked him.

“Stuck it with a nail,” Sean said, bending his leg and twisting his foot around so he could examine the wound in the sole. The skin around the puncture had turned a deep purple. The chill of the river water had numbed the foot somewhat, but when Sean tried to wipe the mud away from the wound, he winced at the stabbing pain.

The giant’s hand closed over Sean’s, engulfing the boy’s hand and foot both. “Don’t poke at it, lad. Let it be, and perhaps I can help.” The giant’s hand was warm and it seemed to soothe the pain.

The boy gaped up at the giant. “Are you a doctor?”

The giant shook his head. “Not a doctor. But it seems I sometimes have a healing way about me.” He wet his lips. Suddenly, for all his size, he looked as if he were not so much older than Sean. “My father gave me a magic sword,” he said softly, jerking his head toward a stout wooden staff that leaned against the steps beside him. “It has a power to it. You can touch it if you like.”

Sean reached out and fingered the white blossoms that grew from the wooden shaft.

“Do you come from Ireland?” the giant asked.

Sean shook his head. “My mother came from Ireland. I have never been there.”

“Ah,” the giant said. “But still you are Irish by blood.” He nodded slowly. “I have come to take the Irish back home. You’ll be coming with me.

Young as he was, Sean knew the way of the world. He frowned at the giant. “We can’t go to Ireland,” he said. “We don’t have any money for the fare.”

The giant studied him solemnly, as if this were the first time that he had thought of the fare. “Bran the Blessed once waded across the water between England and Ireland. He could have carried the Irish home—but he was a bigger giant than I am.” He hesitated, frowning. “Maybe we could walk.”

Sean shook his head. “We can’t walk across the sea.”

The giant looked mournful, and Sean cast about in his mind, trying to think of something that might help. “Moses parted the waters,” he said. His mother made a practice of telling them stories from the Bible, on nights when she was not too tired. “Maybe you could do that.”

The giant studied the Thames. He lifted his staff and waved it at the water, as if pushing it back. “Go back,” he rumbled. “Show me some dry land.”

The water obeyed sluggishly, drawing back away from the base of the steps to reveal the black muck of the bottom. It stopped a few feet from the steps, and the giant waved again, as if herding a reluctant cow. “Go on now. Move yourself.” The water drew back another two feet, forming a smooth green-brown wall that was as smooth and shiny as glass. Sean’s brothers stood ankle-deep in the mud, gazing at their own feet in amazement.

“Charlie! Where are you, you blasted Irishman? Charlie!” Hearing an angry voice, the giant lowered his staff. The waters flowed back into place and lapped quietly at the base of the steps. Sean slipped off the steps and returned to the safety of the river. A small man appeared at the top of the steps and shouted again at the sight of the giant. “Where have you been, Charlie?”

“Right here by the river,” the giant said with quiet dignity. “Just talking to these lads. They’re from Ireland.”

Vance glared at Sean and his brothers. “Half the mudlarks in London are Irish,” he grumbled. “Come on now, Charlie. We have business to attend to.”

“They are my people, Joe. I’ll be taking them back to Ireland presently.”

Vance nodded impatiently, but softened his tone. “Certainly you will, Charlie. But now we must be going.”

Sean watched the giant go. It wasn’t until he followed his brothers that he realized that his foot no longer ached. That night, he sat by the fire and searched for the wound. But the sole of his foot was smooth and unblemished, with nary a puncture, a hole, or a scrape.

There are no gardens in Co vent Garden. The square that bore that name was in the heart of London’s West End, in the shadow of St. Paul’s Church and not far from the decaying tenement houses of a slum inhabited by the Irish. By day, costermongers, people selling fruit and vegetables, filled the square. As they called out their wares, their cries competed with the braying voices of would-be entertainers: a juggler who sent sharp knives dancing through the air, a Welshman who swallowed live mice and snakes, a man with a monkey that danced on its hind legs to the music of a hand-cranked organ, another with a chicken that walked a tightrope.

In nearby Drury Lane, gentlemen wagered on the cockfights. In the coffeehouses, gamblers favored games that depended on the spin of a wheel or the toss of the dice, playing roulette and faro, brag and basset, crimp and hazard and rolypoly. For those gamblers with money to spare at the evening’s end, the south side of the square offered Mother Needham’s and Mother Cole’s, well-known among London’s brothels.

An Irishwoman named Kathleen had a stall in Covent Garden. Her face was pretty enough—she had even features and her eyes were the color of the ocean caught in a tidepool. But most people didn’t notice her eyes or her face. Instead, their gazes lingered on the hump that rose from her back like the pack on a peddler. Kathleen was born with a twist in her back, and with this she made her living.

She read palms and told fortunes. Her stall was not far from Tom King’s Coffeehouse where gentlemen gambled, and many a gambler came to touch her hump for luck. Sometimes they asked her if they should gamble that night. She would study their palms and give them advice. “Not tonight, Your Grace. There’s a bad look to the moon and the luck is not with you.”

“Stick to the wheel. The dice will be against you.” Maids, out shopping for fresh fruit, would give her a penny to tell them about handsome young men. “His heart is false, dearie,” she told them. “Look elsewhere for your true love.”

On a sunny morning, she sat on a stool outside her stall, letting the warmth of the day soak into her bones. The weather had changed from foul to fair, and the changes made her hump ache with a deep abiding pain. She had smeared on a salve that a patterer had claimed would heal any misery, but the ache remained.

Above the cries of farmers hawking their vegetables, she heard a trill of birdsong. She looked to see if someone had caged birds to sell. The man with caged birds and the boys with nests to sell were the first and sometimes the only signs of spring in London.

When she heard the song again, she looked up and saw a songbird perched on the pole that supported her rain cover. He tilted back his head and loosed another sweet song.

“Look there,” an appleseller cried. When she looked toward the voice, she saw a man who towered above the rest of the crowd. He wore the garb of a country lad and carried a walking staff decorated with hawthorn blossoms.

“That’s right, look sharp, lads,” said the small man who walked beside the giant. “My name’s Joe Vance and this is Charlie Bryne, the Irish giant, descendant of kings. I’ll wager you’ve never seen his like before. Tell your friends to come and see him. On display every day except Sunday.”

While the small man shouted his pitch, the tall man glanced at the crowd, clearly a little bewildered by all the noise and confusion around him. If it hadn’t been for his size, he would have looked like a schoolboy, visiting the big city for the first time.

When Kathleen smiled at him, he smiled genially back. “Good day to you,” she called to him. “Would you have your fortune told, Charlie Bryne? No charge for the descendant of kings.” Telling his fortune for free would be worth her while, she knew, attracting the crowd’s attention to her and bringing her business after he was gone.

He came to her, the crowd moving aside before him like wheat before the wind. “Where in Ireland are you from?” he asked, his voice a deep grumbling that blended with the noise of the crowd.

“My parents came from County Cork,” she said. “But I have been in England since I was just a babe.”

He held out his hand and she took it. His skin was warm and rough, like a boulder that had been warmed by the sun. The lines on the palm were etched deep, like cracks in a granite boulder.

“Someone is looking for you,” she said. “You have a secret he wants.”

“I have no secrets,” Charlie said.

“Someone wants something you have. There will be pain and sorrow, and you will die far from home.”

He shook his head stubbornly. “That cannot be,” he rumbled. “I promised my father that I would return to Ireland.” He smiled down at her. “I will take you with me.”

Vance called to Charlie then, shouting across the crowd. He squeezed Kathleen’s hand gently. When he walked off through the crowd, the songbird followed, circling the giant. After he left, Kathleen realized that her hump no longer ached. For a time, she was free of the pain.

The clock on the mantel struck eight and Joe Vance moved into the crowd. “That’s the end of today’s visiting hours, ladies and gentlemen. Come again tomorrow. The amazing Irish giant will be accepting visits from the gentry from eleven to three and from five to eight each day. Tell your friends.”

Charlie stood by the fire and watched the crowd leave the room, glad to see them go. For the past hour, he had answered the same questions over and over: he was twenty years old; he stood eight foot two inches in his stocking feet; his foot was fifteen inches long.

He was uncomfortable in his new suit. The tailor had cut it too tight in the chest and shoulders. Whenever Charlie took a deep breath, the seams threatened to split. Joe Vance had advised him to breathe shallowly.

Joe Vance sat in one of the chairs by the fire and spilled a handful of coins onto a kerchief that he had spread on the hearth rug. He was counting out Charlie’s share: one-quarter of the take. Vance took the rest. He had explained to Charlie that out of his share he took care of all the necessities of business—paying the rent, arranging to have young boys hand out advertisements in the streets and so on.

Firelight reflecting from the coins sparkled in Vance’s eyes. He finished counting and pushed a small stack of coins toward Charlie. Charlie picked up the coins and jingled them in his hand.

“There you go, lad—enough money to keep you busy for the night, eh?” Vance grinned at Charlie and slipped the rest of the take into his money pouch. “Now I’ll be off—I have business to attend to.” He winked at Charlie and hurried off.

In the dark bedroom, Charlie took off his new suit and his new shoes, and put on his comfortable old homespun clothes. The hawthorn flowers that bloomed on his staff perfumed the room with the fresh scent of spring. He took the staff in hand and set out to find the Irish and do his father’s bidding.

Night was settling over London as he left his rooms and made his way down the dark alley toward Covent Garden. Here and there, an oil lamp in a doorway illuminated the threshold of a shop. Charlie kept to one side of the narrow street, ducking beneath the hanging wooden shop signs. A few industrious shopkeepers had scattered cobblestones in front of their doorways. The stones, embedded in the hard-packed dirt of the alley, hurt Charlie’s bare feet.

The street opened into a square crowded with stalls and people. The air was loud with the cries of sellers: “Chestnut, penny a score!”

“Apples! Fine heating apples!”

“Oysters, three for a penny. Fine and fresh. Oysters!”

A candle cast an uncertain light over a vegetable stall. The hot coals of the chestnut seller’s stall shone with a hellish glow, painting the passersby as ruddy as devils. The oyster seller’s makeshift stall was beneath a streetlamp. The wick in the oil-filled globe cast a puddle of feeble yellow light. The flickering light distorted people’s faces, making them look pinched and angry.

Three gentlemen hurried through the square—swell gamblers by the look of them, on their way to a coffeehouse or a bordello. A young girl, no more than eight years old, trotted after them, calling out—“Please, gentlemen, do buy my flowers. Do buy a bunch please.” As she passed the oyster seller’s stall, the child lost her footing, tripping over a pothole in the street. She bumped into the stall and fell, dropping her flowers and knocking half a dozen shellfish into the street.

She was in the mud, scrambling after her fallen bouquets, when the oyster seller swore and lifted his hand to cuff her. In the flickering light, his face looked frozen and masklike, as if all human feeling had left him.

“Here now,” Charlie called out. He stepped between the man and the child. “She didn’t mean you any harm.”

The oyster seller glared up at Charlie. “Blasted Irish whelp,” he muttered, but he lowered his hand and stepped back, putting his stall between himself and the giant, clearly fearful.

Turning to the little girl, Charlie found her on her knees in the mud, gathering up her flowers. The blossoms were muddy and battered, and the child was weeping as she tried unsuccessfully to brush the filth from the bouquets. He squatted beside her. “Now, lass,” he murmured, not knowing what to say. “Come now, don’t cry.”

She ignored him, continuing to inspect her flowers through her tears. Charlie studied her a moment, then held out his staff, where the hawthorn flowers still bloomed. “Look here, lass. You can pick a new bouquet right here.”

She glanced up and Charlie helped her to her feet. “There’s a lass,” he said, still holding out his staff. His legs were tired from squatting, and so he plucked the child from the mud and lifted her, supporting her on one arm. He held the staff in his other hand, where she might easily reach the blossoms. “Pick a bouquet,” he urged her.

A few passersby, intrigued by Charlie’s size, had stopped to watch him argue with the oyster seller. They lingered to watch the girl pluck flowers from the giant’s staff. She picked a bunch and bound them together with a dirty bit of string that she pulled from some hidden pocket in the rags that served as her clothes. She picked another bunch, larger than the first. The watching crowd grew larger. Though clearly the staff should have been plucked bare, it was as thick with flowers as ever.

The girl picked a third bunch of flowers, working awkwardly with her right hand while her left arm cradled an enormous bouquet. Her arms were full when the giant set her down, and yet the staff still bore a crown of white blossoms. As the little girl passed among the crowd, selling flowers to people who marveled at how sweet and fresh they were, the crowd watched Charlie expectantly, awaiting his next trick.

“ ’Tis a miracle,” murmured an elderly Irish apple seller. She wore her shawl over her graying hair and clenched a pipe in her teeth.

“It’s nothing but a conjurer’s trick,” said a dapperly dressed young gentleman. “A very clever one, I admit. How do you do it, man?”

Charlie blinked at him, a little confused. “What do you mean?”

“Where did the flowers come from?” the man asked impatiently.

“From the soil of Ireland,” Charlie said, giving as honest an answer as he knew how.

The man snorted in disbelief. “They never give away a trick,” he said to the lady beside him. Before Charlie could speak again, the man reached out and took the staff from Charlie’s hand to examine it. When the staff left Charlie’s hand, the flowers wilted. Their petals showered to the ground, like an early snowfall. When Charlie took the staff back, the blossoms returned, fresh flowers opening where no buds had even been visible.

“Trickery,” the man said, and pushed away through the crowd, the lady on his arm.

“Let us have another trick,” said a lad in the crowd. He was a ragged young man, bold because he was surrounded by his mates, who were as ragged and dirty as he was. “Conjure us something.”

Charlie looked around at the crowd, not knowing what to do. “I don’t know any tricks. I have come here from Ireland to bring the Irish home.”

“Home to Ireland?” The bold lad made a rude sound, and his companions laughed. “I’d sooner go to blazes than go to Ireland.”

“But you must go home,” Charlie said. “The land, it needs you back.”

“The land needs me,” one of the lad’s companions scoffed. “And what about what I need?”

“The land will give you what you need,” Charlie said, confident as could be.

Another of the young men laughed. “I need a fine suit of clothes and a gold watch. Will the land give me that?”

The first lad shouted, “I need a coach and four fine horses. Will the land give me that?”

“I need a house in the country!”

“I need a roast goose for dinner!”

“I need five gold guineas!”

Charlie shouted above them. “These are not the things you need. You don’t understand. I have come to take you back where you belong. You must listen to me.”

But the crowd would not listen. Their pleasure seemed to border on hysteria: half of them were drunk; the others would like to be. Their laughter was not genuine and easy; it had a frantic edge to it.

“Do not waste yourselves in this foul city where you can’t see the sky.” Charlie’s voice boomed over the babble of the crowd. “Come back to the island where you were born! Come with me!”

“And who are you to tell us what we must do?” shouted the first lad.

“I am my father’s son,” Charlie bellowed above the noise. “My father was a king. He sent me here.”

“A king, you say?” The ragged lad laughed. “King of the beggars!” Charlie protested, shaking his head. “No, a king of Ireland. He fought and—”

“King of the Vagabonds!” another young man cried.

“King of the Fools!” shouted a third.

“Aye, that is it,” cried the first lad, taking up the shout. “King of the Fools! That is what we have.” They surged around him, laughing and pulling at him, like a flock of starlings harrying a raven. “King of the Fools!”

They crowned him with a garland of watercress, snatched from a vegetable seller. They dressed him in a rude cape of flour sacking, grabbed from the protesting baker. They would have done more, but a policeman came to stop the merriment, and the lads left Charlie sitting in the mud not far from Kathleen’s stall.

Kathleen found him there when she stepped out to see what all the noise was about. Charlie was leaning against a wall on the edge of the square, the flour sacks around his neck, the garland drooping over one eye. He still clung to his staff.

Kathleen took pity on him, helping him from the mud, taking the garland from his head, using her kerchief to wipe the muck from a cut he had somehow gotten beneath his eye.

“What is it you did, to make those rowdy boys treat you so rudely?” she asked him.

He shook his head, obviously still bewildered by it all. “I only told them I had come to bring them home to Ireland.”

Kathleen dabbed at his wound, making exasperated sounds beneath her breath. He was like a big child, he was. “Bring them home to Ireland?” You’ll have to tie them up and put them in a box for that. They’ll not go willingly.”

He shivered in the cold of the night fog, shaking his head. “I don’t understand these people. This place has changed them. This place makes people hard, scarcely people at all.”

She shook her head. “They’re people, right enough. People trying to make their way in a hard cruel world.”

“ ’Tis a cold place, London. I have not been warm since I left Ireland,” Charlie muttered.

He looked so mournful and hangdog. She cast about for a way to cheer him. “There are ways to warm yourself, Charlie. I’ll show you a way out of the cold. We’ll stop a bit at the Black Horse Tavern. You’ll find more Irish there, right enough.”

The Black Horse Tavern was crowded and noisy, ringing with the shouts of drunken young costermongers playing at cards, dice, and dominos. A whore who had paused to warm herself with gin was laughing at a bawdy joke; a pimple-faced apprentice stared at her half-exposed breasts and grinned. The air was close with the greasy aroma of roasting mutton.

Kathleen found them a place to sit at a rude wooden table and waved a hand to a serving man. “Gin will warm you,” she muttered. “It’ll warm you as you’ve never been warmed before.”

The man brought them two glasses of gin, and she sipped at one. The liquor stung her lips and the biting aroma brought tears to her eyes, but it warmed her. A glass or two, and the pain in her hump would ease, the ache in her bones would subside. The gin was medicinal, she reckoned, and that was why she drank it. “It’s a foul drink, but it eases a person,” she said to Charlie.

Charlie tasted it gingerly. “It has more of a bite than whiskey,” he said. “But it does warm me.”

“That it does,” she said. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and looking up at Charlie, wondering what to do with him. An overgrown schoolboy, that’s what he was. “Why don’t you go home, Charlie? Go home to your mother’s farm. You don’t belong here.”

He downed the rest of the glass of gin and shook his head. “My father told me I must bring the Irish home. I cannot go home alone.”

Kathleen shook her head. “The Irish will never go home. We all talk of the green hills and how we long for them, but we remember the famines and the hardships as well. We won’t go back.”

“But you must,” he said, his tone urgent. He had another glass of gin, and told her of falling asleep in the Giant’s Boneyard. He told her of how his father came to him and told him what to do. “He gave me his sword,” Charlie said, gesturing with the staff. “It’s a magic thing. On the ship that carried me from Ireland, I waved my staff and a wind came to blow us to England.” He leaned forward, his face already flushed from the gin. “And when I waved it over the river, the waters parted, leaving a path of dry land.”

Kathleen sipped her gin and listened, watching his broad daft face. He was an innocent and a lunatic, that was clear enough. But she could not help thinking about the stories that her mother had told her when she was a little girl. Legends of giants and heroes and magical swords. Charlie’s story began like an old tale—the enchanted son, the magic sword, the quest.

As Charlie talked, he drank gin, downing glass after glass. With each glass his words grew louder and made less sense. He was growing agitated. “And the Irish will follow me to the side of the sea,” he said, his voice loud enough to cut through the noise of the tavern. “And I will wave my staff and the waters will part before me.” He stood up, knocking over his bench and stretching his hands apart to show how the waters would open to let him through. “We will march across the empty seabed, walking back to the land where we belong.”

“Sit down, Charlie,” Kathleen said. “Calm yourself.”

Around him, the costermongers and apprentices were staring and laughing.

“Come with me,” he called to them, spreading his arms. “Come with me, my people. I will lead you back to Ireland.” The gin had released a passion in him, and he shouted to be heard over the laughter and the rude shouts. “Follow me,” he called to them. “Follow me back to Ireland.”

Kathleen watched him sway just a little, made unsteady by the gin. He lifted his staff, and apprentices scrambled aside for fear of a clouting. Charlie strode into the gap, his head held as proudly as a king. He lifted his staff high, and the crowd parted, leaving him a path that he accepted as his due. “Follow me,” he called, his voice slurred with drink. Kathleen stood to pursue him. The poor fool would never find his way home alone. But the crowd closed in behind him, leaving her to struggle slowly toward the door.

The night air was cold and Charlie was woozy from the gin. He found himself on the street, puzzled that no one had come after him. Surely in the tavern, when they had made way before him, they had planned to follow. But when he looked back, no one was there, not even Kathleen.

He had not meant to drink so much. But the gin had touched the empty spot that had been in his gut since he left Ireland, providing him with warmth and comfort.

When the wind blew, he shivered and shuffled in the direction that he thought might lead him to his rented rooms. His head seemed to have grown largely and unwiedly: his feet seemed very far away and very slow in responding to his desires. He managed to walk just a few blocks before he sat down beneath a streetlamp for a little rest. Benumbed by gin, he fell asleep in the gutter.

On the far side of the street, a pair of whores trudged past, carefully picking their way through the garbage and filth from chamberpots. It was getting late, and law-biding citizens were at home in bed, their doors barred against cutthroats and robbers.

A dog ventured from the mouth of an alley where it had been feeding on scraps of garbage. The animal walked with a peculiar lurching gait, its right hind leg having been broken years before by the well-placed kick of a carriage horse. The bone had healed crooked, and the leg no longer touched the ground.

The dog sniffed Charlie. His suit smelled of roasting meat and gin, aromas from the Black Horse Tavern. Attracted by the man’s body heat, the dog curled up by Charlie’s side and went to sleep. In his sleep, Charlie moved a hand to encircle the dog.

For a time, the man and dog slept peacefully. A burning wick in the oil-filled globe that served as streetlamp cast a yellow light on Charlie’s face. He smiled in his sleep.

Charlie was dreaming. In his dream, there was music: the singing of larks and the laughter of children filled the air. He was leading a triumphant procession made up of all the Irish who had left the island to seek their fortune in England. He was bringing them home, and they were all dancing after him. The girl who sold flowers was dancing with the rude lad who had called Charlie King of Fools. The girl’s rags flapped around her legs and her bonnet had fallen back on her head. She and her partner were pale from lack of sun and thin from bad food, but already the sunshine was putting roses in their cheeks again. Everyone was dancing: the whore from the tavern; the old woman who sold apples; the mudlarks and the ragged Irish beggars from the streets of London.

Charlie danced at the head of the procession, laughing at the way the old apple-seller capered. Overhead the sky was blue, and the sun was on his face. The earth was warm beneath his bare feet. He led them through the country roads to his mother’s farm, past the fields filled with growing grain, out to the Giant’s Boneyard, where he lay down in the fragrant grass. He belonged here, among the bones of his father. With his head pillowed on his arm, he closed his eyes. In the distance he could hear people laughing and singing.

Someone was calling to him: “Charlie. Charlie Bryne. You can’t just lie there like a great lump. Rouse yourself, man. Wake up.”

Charlie blinked. Kathleen was shaking him awake. “Wake up you gin soaked lump,” she grumbled at him. “The cold will be the death of you if you lie here all night.”

Charlie squinted up at her. “What happened?” he mumbled. “Where did all the people go?” He stared at the houses around him—tall, gray, and foreboding in the dim light.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Kathleen was saying. “I knew you couldn’t find your way alone. Now where is it you’re living?”

Charlie sat up, groaning with the effort. Disturbed by the movement, the dog that lay beside him stood up, shook itself, and wagged its tail tentatively. Absent-mindedly, Charlie reached over and rubbed the animal’s ears.

“I lay down to rest for a time,” Charlie said. “I felt mortally tired, Kathleen.”

“Mortally drunk, more like it. You put away enough gin to fell an ox.” The dog leaned against Charlie’s side, a small patch of warmth in the chilly night. Charlie’s hand stroked the animal idly. “They didn’t follow me, Kathleen. It seemed to me they would.”

Kathleen reached out and touched his shoulder. “Go back home, Charlie. If you stay here, you’ll die in the gutter with a bellyful of gin.”

He straightened his shoulders. “The old blood runs in my veins. I’ll bring my people home.” Then the edge of doubt crept into his voice for the first time. “You believe me, Kathleen. Don’t you?”

“You must get on home,” she said in a weary voice. “Tell me where you live and I’ll walk you there.”

“ ‘Tis right by a cane shop on a narrow street where a man can scarcely see the sky,” Charlie said. “Not so far from Covent Garden.”

“I know the one,” Kathleen said. She held her hand out to him, coaxing him as if he were a wayward child. “Come along, Charlie. I’ll take you home.”

“It isn’t my home,” Charlie said stubbornly. “ ‘Tis a place I live, nothing more.”

“True, but it’s a warm place to sleep, and for tonight you’d best settle for that,” she said. “Now come with me.”

Leaning on his staff, Charlie staggered to his feet. The dog moved away, wagging its tail in earnest. When Charlie stood, Kathleen’s head did not reach his chest. He looked down at her and placed a hand on her shoulder, seeking the warmth of contact with another person as much as support. Charlie and Kathleen started off down the street, and the dog followed Charlie, trotting easily on all four legs.

Charlie sat in a chair by the fire. He had been on his feet all afternoon, answering questions from the gentry and showing off his size. His head ached with a blinding pain. For the past few days, the world seemed to close in around him when his head ached; his vision narrowed and blackness nibbled at the edges, like the premature coming of night. He closed his eyes for a moment.

“Hey there, lad,” Vance said. Charlie heard Vance pull another chair close to the fire and sit down. “You all right?”

“I’m cold.”

Charlie heard Vance poke the fire and toss some more coal on the grate. He could see the light of the fire dancing on the inside of his eyelids and feel the heat on his hands. But the warmth did not seem to penetrate the skin. The fire could warm the surface, but his bones were cold. Only the sun and earth of Ireland could warm him deep down. The sun of Ireland or a glass of British gin.

Each night, he went out to the streets to preach to the Irish. There were some who came to hear him each night, a few who believed in him. The old apple-seller called him a saint and brought her ailing granddaughter to him for healing. The little flower seller sought him out—but that may have been for practical reasons; she could count on him for a supply of fresh blossoms. The rude young men called him a conjurer, a madman, a fool. The costermongers laughed at him. He offered to show them that he could make the river waters part, but no one would follow him to the riverside. Each evening ended the same way: in the tavern, drinking gin with Kathleen.

He blinked and Vance came into focus. The little man was leaning forward in his chair, peering into Charlie’s face with a considering air. “You’ve been drinking too much, lad. Gin will be the death of you.”

“This country will be the death of me,” Charlie muttered.

“Right you are, lad.” Vance was not paying attention. He was counting the take. When he handed Charlie his share, he frowned a little.

“Now don’t spend it all on gin,” Vance said. “You’d do well to stay home tonight.”

Charlie stared at Vance. He did not like the man’s proprietary tone. “I will go or stay as I please,” he said slowly.

Vance stopped in the act of gathering up the coins. “Well sure, Charlie, of course you will. I was just saying, as a friend, that you . . .”

“I go to the ginhouses to find my people,” Charlie interrupted. “I find them there, drinking gin to warm their bones. They miss the soil of Ireland, though they do not know that’s what it is they’re missing. They feel the hollowness, just as I feel it, and they drink gin to fill it. I go there to find them and bring them home.” He stood up and glared down at Vance.

Vance studied the giant with cold, blank eyes. “Just take care not to sleep in the gutter, lad. Your cough’s getting worse.”

Charlie’s shoulders slumped a little. His head ached and the power had gone from him. “Right you are, Joe. I’ll not sleep in the gutter. I’m sorry, Joe.”

Now that’s enough of Charlie Bryne. Let’s consider John Hunter, a man of science, as different from Charlie Bryne as a man could be. We can begin at Kathleen’s stall in Covent Garden, on a chilly morning just a few weeks after she met Charlie.

The wind off the Thames blew through Kathleen’s wool shawl and made her hump ache. A burly Scot dressed in a fine wool coat passed her stall and glanced into the shadows where she sat.

“You there,” he said. “Have you seen the man with the dancing monkey? I’m looking for him.”

“I have not seen him this morning.” She studied the gentleman, wondering if she might earn a penny from him. It was bitter cold, and she had only told a single fortune that day. “I might see him later. I could give him a message.”

The Scot glanced at her, his expression cautious, but strangely greedy. “I hear his monkey died,” he said softly.

“I heard the same.” The animal had died of a chill and the man was grief-stricken, mourning the loss of the income from the monkey’s dancing.

His voice dropped a little further. “I have a need for the animal’s body,” he said. “I will pay handsomely. Here.” He fumbled in his pocket. “A penny to tell the man that John Hunter has an offer for him.” He held out the coin.

John Hunter—she knew the name. Surgeon to the King, he was. And, from the stories that she had heard, an unnaturally curious man. When the tiger died at the Royal Zoo, he had anatomized the beast and mounted the skeleton. When the Siamese twins in the Covent Garden freak show died, rumor had it that the manager had sold the body to Hunter for a tidy sum. People said he was a body-snatcher and a resurrectionist.

“And what would you do with the body?” she asked him. “You’ll anatomize it, won’t you?” She hadn’t cared much for the monkey—a dirty, noisy animal that spent more time scratching for fleas than it did dancing. But it seemed unnatural to want to poke and pry into its innards. “Why don’t you let the poor beast rest in peace?”

“Would you bury the beast so its body can rot, benefiting no one?” he asked angrily. “Why is it that people have no trouble eating the meat of a cow—but they consider it wrong to examine the dead animal too closely? Yes, I’ll anatomize the beast. I’ll examine the organs and see what killed it. I’ll study the muscles and mount the bones so that I can study them later. And when I’m done, I’ll add a few humble observations to our knowledge of natural philosophy.” His tone was bitter, and she had a feeling he was talking to himself, as much as to her. “A patient of mine—a young boy—died today of a coughing disease. When I wished to examine his lungs, to see how the disease affected them, what influence my treatment had had, his father forbade it. The ignorant fool. What I learned from his son’s body might have helped me heal another child. But instead his son’s body must rot in peace and children must go on dying. How can I learn to cure what ails people, if I can’t observe the action of disease on a body? Would you have doctors continue in ignorance, peddling salves and tonics that work indifferently well? Little better than butchers, most of them.”

Kathleen stayed in the shadows, startled by his vehemence.

He held out the penny again, his face softening as if he repented his outburst. “Come on, lass, take the penny and tell the man if you see him.” He glanced at the sign that a clerk had sketched for Kathleen in exchange for his fortune: an open hand with the palm exposed, the life line marked in black ink. “I’ll give you another penny to tell my fortune.”

For two pennies, she left her stool and stepped from her stall. In the light of the sun, he saw her clearly for the first time. “Ah,” he said. His voice was that of a man discovering an unexpected treasure. He stared at her honestly, not troubling to hide his interest. “Your back—how long has it been like that?”

“Since I was a babe.” She pulled the shawl more tightly around her shoulders—distressed both by the cold and by the way he studied her. She was used to people who stared—but his interest was more intense than that of the casual passerby.

“Does it pain you?” he asked.

She nodded cautiously. “When the weather’s cold, it does.” She took the two coins and held his hand in hers, turning the palm up to the light so that she could study the lines. She stared for a moment, and the patterns emerged from the crisscrossing lines. “You will meet someone very important, very powerful. He has something you want very much. Some secret you are lacking.” She frowned at the lines. “You want something and you get it, but when you do, it will not be what you want.” She shook her head, staring at the lines. “There is something that you do not understand, something important.”

He laughed abruptly at this last. “That is not the future. That is now. There are many things I do not understand.”

She shook her head and released his hand. “That is all I can tell you now.” She started to turn away, but he called her back.

“Wait,” he said urgently. “I have a salve that might help your aches.” He wet his lips and his expression was that of a greedy child. “If you come to my examination room, I will give you some. My house is on Jermyn Street. Anyone nearby can tell you the way there.”

Kathleen studied his face. He did, in his own peculiar way, wish to give her relief from the pain. But he also had an unhealthy desire to know the twists of her bones. She did not trust him.

“I would like to examine you,” he said. “Perhaps I can help.”

“I’ll give some thought to it,” she said, and turned away from the eagerness in his eyes. She had lived in London long enough to be wary.

John Hunter was, without a doubt, a curious man. He started out as a curious boy, naturally enough.

When John was just eight, he found a burrow in the winter-blasted kitchen garden of his parents’ Scottish farm. Curious about the animal inside, he dug beneath the frost into the cold soil, where he found a toad lying in a tunnel of its own making. The animal was cold and motionless—by all appearances, stone dead. But when he held it tightly, he thought he felt a stirring inside the cold body—the beating of its tiny heart. He slipped the animal into the pocket of his britches and smuggled it past his mother into the house.

He set the stiff creature just behind the coal scuttle, where it would be warmed by the heat of the fire, and left it there during supper. When he checked on it just before bed, the creature had stirred to reluctant life. It blinked at him lazily and then slowly hopped across the hearth rug.

His mother caught him. “What have you there, Johnnie? Lord save me—where did you get that beast?”

Despite his protests, she cast the toad back into the garden. In the morning, he found the chilly corpse huddled beneath a clump of straw. He warmed it in his hands, but it did not move. He snuck it into the house and warmed it by the fire, but the beast did not return to life. He puzzled over it: why had the beast perished when it was returned to the cold?

In the back of the chicken run, where his mother wouldn’t catch him, John anatomized the body with his pocket knife, delving into its innards to see if he could learn why the beast had died.

John Hunter grew up. As a boy of twelve, he loitered with his cousin by the churchyard. His parents were inside, christening his youngest sister. Bored with the proceedings and ignored by the adults, the boys had slipped from the church.

Late afternoon clouds hung low in the sky, as gray as the tombstones in the churchyard. John and his cousin leaned on the stone wall, idly chatting.

“The churchyard’s haunted,” John’s cousin said. “At night, the ghost of old man MacDonald wanders among the graves, looking for children who are out too late.” MacDonald, an old man who had died a month before, had had a reputation for disliking small boys.

John looked doubtful.

“You don’t believe in ghosts?” His cousin’s tone was challenging.

John considered the question carefully. He was a methodical boy. “I’ve never seen one. Have you?”

His cousin hesitated, and then decided to stick to the truth. “No, but I’ve heard about them.” He wet his lips, studying John’s face. “If you don’t believe in ghosts, then I dare you to run around the old man’s grave. Three times. Counterclockwise.”

John thought about it. “If I run ’round it counterclockwise, that’ll bring bad luck,” he said. “I believe in bad luck.”

“Then just go out and touch the grave and come back. I dare you.”

John stared out into the graveyard. It seemed darker now—the low hanging clouds stole the light from the day. The old man’s grave was a long way off. He was afraid—but he was also curious, and the second emotion was the more powerful of the two. What would a ghost look like?

“Or else you have to say that you believe in ghosts,” his cousin went on.

In the end, it was John’s own curiosity, not his cousin’s taunting, that drove him on. John climbed the churchyard wall, scuffing the knee of his best pants against the damp stone. With a nonchalance he did not feel, he strolled toward the grave. The graveyard was very quiet. In the hush, he listened to the tiny skittering sounds of birds in the trees, the whisper of his pantlegs brushing against the wet grass. Suddenly brave, he reached out and touched the wing of a stone angel. Cool stone, nothing more. The air smelled of dampness and fresh-turned soil, only that. He slowed his footsteps, waiting for something to happen in the stillness. He glanced back at his cousin and was startled by how far he had come: his cousin’s face was a spot of white against the darkness of the churchwall.

When he reached the old man’s grave, he laid his hand on the stone and waited. Nothing happened. He stood still, almost disappointed. He had, up to that moment, been willing to believe in the ghost, if the ghost had chosen to present himself. John lingered for a moment, studying the new stone marker, chose a single flower from the bouquet beside the grave, and then walked back.

From a distance, he could see his cousin’s face, his wide eyes. John handed his cousin the flower from the old man’s grave. “I guess I don’t believe in ghosts,” he said, and realized it was true.

Years later, John climbed another graveyard wall—this one in London. The stones were slippery beneath his hands. It was a moonless night in early winter. John Hunter and a fellow student, bent on acquiring essential supplies for their anatomy classes, wore workmen’s clothing that was stained with clay from past excursions.

John ghosted along the paths of the deserted graveyard, sniffing the air for the scent of freshly dug earth. At the far corner of the yard, he found what he was looking for: the new grave of a young woman, dead of childbirth just one day past.

Thomas, his colleague, lifted the flowers that decorated the grave aside, setting them on a nearby grave. Working quickly, John started digging, using a wooden shovel to avoid the tell-tale rattle of metal on stones. Thomas spread a canvas sheet over the grass, and John heaped the loose soil on top of the cloth. The exertion of digging warmed him pleasantly. When he tired of digging, Thomas took over, digging silently while John kept watch.

“Is that a sound?” Thomas whispered, looking up from the grave and cocking his head in the direction of the church.

“Just the wind,” John muttered. “Nothing more.”

Thomas shivered, looking over his shoulder. “A nasty business, this,” he murmured. “I don’t like it.”

John glanced at his friend and shook his head. “Hush,” he said. “Too much talk.” John took another turn in the grave, digging quickly down to the coffin lid. He neatly slipped the broad iron hooks under the edges of the lid, up near the head of the coffin. He climbed from the grave and then he and Thomas hauled up on the rope. The lid cracked with a dull splintering sound, and John lowered himself onto the grave to lift the broken wood out.

After that, it was easy enough to slide a rope around the shoulders of the corpse and pull her through the opening. They stripped the body—stealing clothing carried a greater penalty than stealing a body alone—and slipped the naked cadaver into a canvas sack. They refilled the grave, leaving no evidence that they had passed that way.

John arranged the flowers tenderly on the grave, then slung the sack over his shoulder. The two men left the graveyard as silently as they had come.

After delivering their burden to their surgical school, they stopped in the tavern. John was cheerful, but he noticed that Thomas seemed morose. “What is it, Thomas, my lad? We did a fine job—the body’s in the school, ready for tomorrow’s lesson, and there’s no harm done.”

Thomas shook his head. “Doesn’t it bother you?” he asked softly.

John looked up from his beer. “What should be bothering me?”

“Creeping about in the churchyard at night,” Thomas murmured.

John took another swallow of beer. He did not understand Thomas’ need to chatter on about the matter. John was not fond of the late-night escapades, but he accepted them as necessary to his training as a surgeon and took them as a matter of course. He could not learn about human anatomy without dissecting cadavers.

“If we do not get the bodies, we cannot learn anatomy,” John said. “And if we do not learn anatomy, then how can we be surgeons?” It seemed obvious enough.

Thomas shrugged, staring into his beer. “It doesn’t sit right,” he said. “That’s all.”

John studied his friend’s face, frowning. “What is it that bothers you, Thomas? The woman is dead and gone. We cannot hurt her by taking her body.”

Thomas was watching him with a peculiar expression. John shook his head, bewildered by his friend’s mood. It seemed to him sometimes that understanding human anatomy was simple compared to understanding the peculiarities of the human heart.

There was, perhaps, a bit of something missing in John Hunter, some bit of human sympathy, some bit of wonder, some bit of fear of the unknown. You might say he was a brave man, but it was not truly bravery, because he saw no reason to be afraid. You might say he was a devil, completely lacking in common human compassion, but you would be wrong there as well. He had compassion of a sort—he dearly desired to help those who were ailing and in pain. But he lacked a sympathy with those who would leave the dead untouched. When life had fled, a body—be it mother or wife or beloved child—was dead meat. He did not understand those who saw it differently.

And so John Hunter became a surgeon. But he did not limit his investigations to the human body. He was a man of boundless curiosity, eager to investigate everything that nature had to offer. He concerned himself with the habits of hedgehogs, the animal heat of growing vegetables, the behavior of cuckoo birds, and the natural history of the viviparous lizard. He collected information like a jackdaw gathering shiny bits of metal. He discovered, by experiment, that the heart of a frog continued beating hours after the animal’s spinal cord had been severed. He learned that eels could survive near-freezing temperatures. He developed a method for artificially stimulating the production of pearls by river mussels. In all his studies, he found human curiosities most interesting. By examining anomalies, he felt he could gain an understanding of the normal way of things.

Now of course Charlie Bryne and John Hunter must come together—you know that as well as I do. And so it was that on a sunny day, John Hunter went down to Covent Garden. He had stopped at the freak show to see if the showman had obtained any specimens for him. Every now and again, the man picked up something that John found of interest: the tattooed forearm of a South Sea Islander, for example, preserved in brine by a seaman with a liking for oddities; or the skull of a pig that was born with a single eye.

That afternoon, the showman had nothing to offer, and John strolled through the market. As he walked past an aisle of vegetable stalls, he heard the sweet song of a greenfinch, sounding over the calls of the melon seller. He followed the birdsong to the end of the aisle. There a man stood beside a cage filled with songbirds that chirped and fluttered their wings against the rough wooden slats. In his hand, the birdseller held a smaller cage, in which a gaudily colored bird sat on a perch.

“It’s God’s truth,” the bird seller was saying to a young woman. “I bought this bird from a sailor who had just come from the West Indies. A bird like this—why it can be taught to talk just as clear as a person. Two shillings is an uncommonly low price for such a bird.”

John stepped closer, peering at the bird. Without a doubt, the bird was a greenfinch; the gaudy colors were painted on.

“That’s too dear for me,” the young woman said, stepping back from the cage. “Though I’m sure it’s a wonderful bird.”

The birdseller cast John a glance and decided he was the more likely prospect. “You look like a discerning gentleman, sir, one who would appreciate a rare bird. Very rare, indeed.”

John snorted. “You’re a fool, man, or you take me for one. The bird is a greenfinch that you’ve painted up like a Drury Lane tart.” John pursed his lips and whistled a credible imitation of the greenfinch’s song. The bird in the cage stirred in response, then returned the song, staring about as if searching for its rival.

“What a pretty song,” the birdseller exclaimed. “I’ve never heard a greenfinch sing like that in all my days.”

“Then you’ve never heard a greenfinch sing,” John said abruptly. The attempt at deception, however clumsy, annoyed him. “A greenfinch is worth three pence, but with a little paint, you’ve more than tripled the price. I’ve half a mind to . . .”

The birdseller’s eyes widened as he looked past John. “You there,” he cried. John looked around in time to see finches and sparrows explode through an opening in their cage and make for the open sky. Beside the cage stood an enormous man. In one hand he held the slat that he had ripped from the cage; in the other, a wooden staff decorated with hawthorn blossoms.

“God save us!” shouted the birdseller, running to the broken cage. The last of the sparrows flicked its tail and took flight, leaving the cage empty save for loose feathers and bird droppings. The birdseller began to shriek. “You blasted noddy-headed fool!” He turned on the big man, raising his hand as if to strike.

The man straightened to his full height and glared down at the birdseller. “They wanted to go free,” the big man said.

John stared at the giant, amazed at his dimensions. He had, on occasion, visited freak shows that advertised tall men or giants, but this man topped them all.

The birdseller lowered his hand, his fury tempered by a fearful respect. But he continued shouting. “Who’s going to pay for my birds? They were my livelihood, and now they’ve flown. I’ll call the constable on you, you great lout.”

“Here, man,” John said hastily. “I’m sure that the constable would be interested in this foreign bird that you painted at home.”

The birdseller glanced uneasily at his one remaining bird. “Now, sir, there’s no need of that. This quarrel is none of yours.”

John reached into his purse. “Stop your shouting,” he said, handing the man a few coins. “Take this for your trouble, and leave well enough alone.”

“Hours of collecting for nothing.” The birdseller continued complaining bitterly as he pocketed the coins.

“What about that one?” the giant asked, waving a hand at the caged bird.

John dug two shillings from his pocket and took the cage. Then he glanced again at the giant and suggested, with a jerk of his head, that they leave the place before the grumbling birdseller changed his mind. The giant led the way down to the River Thames. At the river steps, he sat down and held out a hand for the cage. Heedless of the mud and fascinated by the big man, John sat on the stone beside him.

“Poor bird,” the giant muttered, looking at the greenfinch.

“The color will wash off,” John said. “I’m sure the birdseller used the cheapest paint he could find.”

The giant opened the cage door and the bird hopped out onto the man’s finger. He splashed the bird with river water. The runoff was scarlet, and the tail feathers lost a touch of color.

John marveled at the bird’s passivity—no doubt it was stunned by the heat of the day. But more than that, he marveled at the giant. A magnificent specimen, John thought. He wondered, gazing at the man’s oversized hand, what the bones looked like underneath. Ah, what he would give for a skeleton like this man’s in his collection.

The man’s face was broad and young-looking. His blue eyes were a little wild—a hint of lunacy there.

“Why did you pay for the birds I let go?” the giant asked John.

“I wanted to make your acquaintance,” John answered honestly. “I’ve never seen a man as big as you before.” He was watching the giant closely. “Do your hands pain you? I noticed the knuckles seemed reddened.”

“They ache, right enough.”

“I thought so. Your knees and hips—they give you pain, too?”

“My knees, and hips, and feet, and hands. They all ache, God save me. They have since I came to London.”

John nodded thoughtfully. “I have a salve that might help a bit with that,” he said slowly. “Worth a try. If you’d like to come to my office, I could give you some.”

The giant looked down at John. He seemed to be grateful for the man’s attention. “Perhaps I will.”

Just a few days later, in the dissecting room of his Jermyn Street house, John Hunter instructed a group of would-be surgeons in human anatomy. The corpse of an old man lay face down on the dissecting table. Over the course of his instruction, Hunter had neatly laid back the layers of skin and fibrous tissue covering the muscles of the lower leg, lecturing his students on the treatment of injuries to the Achilles tendon. He stressed, as always, the need to experiment and observe.

Only after dissecting the leg to the hip did he complete his lecture and dismiss the students. He watched them go, wondering if any of the lot would ever amount to much. Or would they become like their learned teachers at St. George’s, relying on historical hearsay, failing to test and experiment and observe?

Hunter removed his bloodstained smock and washed his hands in a basin of clear water. He was climbing the stairs that connected his basement dissecting room with the rest of the house, when Mrs. Shields, the housekeeper, appeared in the doorway.

“A tall man named Charlie Bryne is here to see you,” she said, looking a little flustered. “A very tall man.”

“Very good, Mrs. Shields,” John exclaimed. “Very good indeed. Send him right in.”

The giant stood uneasily by the fire, in the small room that served as John Hunter’s examination room. He was out of his element, John thought. By the river, he had seemed confident, powerful. In this confined space, he lacked that expansive vitality. His shoulders were hunched, as if the ceiling were pressing too close. His face was pale. His hands were clasped behind his back, like a schoolboy who had been told not to touch anything. John studied him, estimating how large a display case he would need for the skeleton.

“I’ve come for that salve you told me about,” Charlie said. “I thought it might help warm me.”

“I’m so glad you could come,” John exclaimed. “Sit down. Mrs. Shields will bring us some tea—or perhaps a glass of sherry. That would help warm you.”

“I’ve never had sherry,” Charlie said.

“Then you must try it now,” John said. “Please sit down.” He gestured to a chair. “How’s the greenfinch? Did its feathers come clean?”

Charlie nodded. “It flew off. Back to the country.”

Mrs. Shields brought the sherry, pouring the glasses and setting the tray down on the table by the fire. John lifted his glass and smiled at Charlie. “Here’s to the birds. I’m glad they didn’t die uselessly in the smokes of London.”

“Aye,” Charlie said, and sipped his sherry.

John hesitated for a moment, considering his words, then spoke quickly, eager not to miss the opportunity. “Would you mind if I took a few measurements while you’re here? Your body temperature, your heart rate—a few simple things, really.”

Charlie frowned. “Why do you want all that?”

John chose his words carefully. “I study people like you,” he said. Charlie shook his head. “I do not think there are any other people like me.

John waved a hand to dismiss the objection. “Not precisely like you,” he said. “Not giants. But people who are smaller than most, or bigger, or somehow different. The differences are where Nature’s secrets lie. I have dedicated myself to the study of amazing things. By studying these things, I learn about the world. If I knew why some lambs grew two heads, I’d know why most grow only one.”

Charlie finished his glass of sherry and John poured him another. “Why do you want to know that?”

John set his glass of sherry on the table and leaned forward. “Your body is a remarkable machine, Charlie. When you will it, your fingers move, your eyes blink, you stand, you sit.” He reached out and tapped lightly on Charlie’s chest. “Your heart beats in your chest, steady as a clock. Why?” John sat back. “You grow and keep on growing, so much larger than other men. Why?”

“Because the old blood runs in my veins,” Charlie said, but John ignored the interruption.

“The answer’s in there,” John said. “In your body. Ticking like a clock.” Charlie glanced uneasily at his own chest.

“I want to understand these things,” John murmured.

“Perhaps you cannot understand,” Charlie said. He drained his second glass of sherry and held out his glass so that John could fill it again.

“I just don’t know enough,” John said. “Nature is keeping her secrets, but I will outsmart her.” He sipped his own sherry. “If you will do me the great favor of letting me take a few measurements . . .”

Charlie shrugged. “As you like,” he said.

John counted Charlie’s pulse, took his temperature, measured his height, his girth, the length of his hands, his feet, the reach of his outstretched hands, and the circumference of his head. As he worked, noting each measurement in the pages of a little book, John made conversation. “I have the bones of a great whale, strung together just as they were when the animal lived. Fascinating creature.”

“I have never seen a whale,” Charlie said. “Biggest fish there is, they say.”

“I’ve never encountered a live one, but a student of mine supplied me with the pickled carcasses of two smallish specimens. They’re less like a fish, from the build of their skeleton, and more like a cow.”

“A cow that spends all its life at sea?” Charlie commented. “Not bloody likely.”

John shrugged. “They lack the gills of a fish, but have lungs of a sort. Most peculiar. I’ve preserved their skeletons in my museum. The skeleton betrays much about the working of the body.” He settled back into his chair, done with measurements for just then. “We share an interest in natural history,” John said. “Perhaps you would like to come to my country house sometime. See my gardens, my menagerie. A pleasant break from the streets of London.” He watched Charlie’s face for a sign of fear. Ah, the man was an innocent; he smiled at John.

“I’d like that,” Charlie murmured. “That I would.”

They became friends, of a sort. On many a fine afternoon, John went to meet Charlie at his rooms. Sometimes, he brought the giant a bottle of sherry and they sat by the fire and talked. John brought a salve that seemed to ease the pain in Charlie’s hands, though he still complained of aching knees and hips. He seemed to feel most comfortable by the fire.

In his own way, John genuinely liked the giant. The man fascinated him. John had decided quite early in their acquaintance that Charlie was quite mad. He had a peculiar turn of mind—he told John quite seriously about the most amazing things: haunted meadows and ghostly kings and magic swords. John could tell, from Charlie’s wild tale of his own conception, that the man was of illegitimate birth. Charlie told John about his quest—he had to bring the Irish back to Ireland—and John nodded politely, accepting this as just one more indication of the giant’s madness.

John was struck by the giant’s remarkable staff and its seemingly permanent crown of flowers, though he gave no credence to the miracles Charlie claimed it had performed. He examined it closely, verifying that the blossoms sprouted directly from the wood. He had heard that the branches of certain trees in the West Indies continued to bear leaves even after they had been cut from the parent tree, and he speculated that the staff might be of a similar plant, one that only resembled the common hawthorn. He wanted to cut the staff in half to see if the wood were green inside, but Charlie would not allow it, would not even allow the staff out of his sight.

As the weeks passed, it became obvious that London did not agree with Charlie. Clearly, the man was dying. His hands trembled as he raised a glass of sherry to his lips; he could never get warm. He developed a cough that shook his frame like an oak tree in a gale. His skin grew pale and broken blood vessels in his nose and cheeks betrayed his affection for gin. He took to wearing shoes, trying desperately to keep his feet warm. John noted Charlie’s decline with a mixture of regret and anticipation. He would miss the opportunity to study the living giant, of course, but he was eager to examine the body and bones.

He worried, sometimes, about Charlie’s drinking habits. If the giant died in the gutter, who could know where his body might end up. Body snatchers abounded, and John feared that some other surgeon might obtain the body.

It was during this time, on a fine sunny afternoon, that John took Charlie to his country house at Earl’s Court. They rode in John’s coach, though the giant had to hunch his shoulders and bow his head to fit in the seat. The lethargy that had grown habitual seemed to drop away from the giant as soon as they left London. Charlie stared out the window, grinning at the trees and meadows.

“It’s wonderful,” he said. “Just wonderful to see green fields again.”

At Earl’s Court, John took Charlie around the grounds, showing him the exotic beasts and fowl. Charlie gaped at the zebra and smooth-skinned Asian water buffalo that shared a paddock, shook his head in amazement at the two young leopards and the African lion. In the conservatory, he marveled at John’s beehive, a box that had been built of plate glass. Beneath the glass, the worker bees hurried through the complex combs, going about their business. Through the glass and from the surrounding fields came the faint sound of buzzing.

“It reminds me of home,” Charlie said, his voice a soft rumble. “I used to sleep in my mother’s fields, listening to the sound of the bees in the clover. A beautiful sound.”

“I’ve studied the pitch of their humming and compared it to the pianoforte,” John said. “It’s treble A above middle C.”

Charlie did not seem to be listening. He was leaning close to the glass, watching the workers making their way through the combs. “So many of them, so busy.”

“An average of approximately 3,400 to a hive, by my count. And there’s always a queen bee, you know. In every hive I’ve checked.”

Charlie held out his hand, and a bee that was returning from the fields landed on a finger.

“Careful there,” John said. “They’ve a nasty, irritable temper. I was stung four times last week.”

“They’ll not sting me,” Charlie said. The insect crawled over the massive hand, its wings buzzing, but it never stung.

“Come,” said John. “There’s more to see.”

John led the way to the fishpond, where he bred carp, tench, leeches, and eels for experiments. On the way, he noticed that larks, finches, and other small birds seemed to be particularly abundant in the fields that day—the grass was alive with them. They fluttered up from the grass before them, circling the giant’s head before flying away. Once, to John’s amazement, a lark landed on Charlie’s shoulder, tipped back its head to release a torrent of song, then flew away. John was wondering at what had brought the birds to this place when Charlie fell behind. John looked back to see the man unfastening his shoes. One large foot was already bare.

“Feels good underfoot,” Charlie said. “Warm. Not like the streets of London.” He took off his other shoe and set the pair beside a fencepost. Straightening up, he lifted his arms over his head in a prodigious stretch. He looked healthier than he had for weeks.

“The sunshine agrees with you,” John commented. He considered the giant for a moment. “You could stay here for a time, if you like.” That would solve so many problems—Charlie might live longer, but John would no longer have to worry about losing the body. The situation would be under his control.

Charlie’s face brightened momentarily, but then he frowned and shook his head. “I cannot do that.”

“I could take you into London, now and again,” John persisted. “But you could stay here the rest of the time. The city air’s unhealthy. It does you no good.”

Charlie shook his head stubbornly. “Until I can return to Ireland, I must stay in London. That is where the Irish are and that is where I must stay.”

“As you will,” John said. He considered, as he walked, whether the right time had come to ask the giant about his bones. He tried to introduce the notion of scientific investigation gently. “You must see my other animals.” He led the way back to the paddocks surrounding the house. He stopped by the pig pen and leaned on the fence. “I’ve found pigs to be the best for experimentation. They are easily managed and breed well in captivity.” The old sow had pushed close to the fence and was staring up at Charlie. The tall man leaned over to scratch the top of her head, and she sighed in contentment.

“What has happened to her piglets?” Charlie asked. All three of the young animals bore scars on their right hind leg and limped a little.

“They are part of an experiment,” John explained. “I am investigating the way bones grow. The French botanist Henri Duhmamel du Monceau claims that they increase by accretion throughout their length. I maintain that they grow from the extremities.” He explained his experimental procedure to Charlie. He had operated on all the piglets. On each one, he had laid bare the bone of the right rear leg, drilled two holes precisely two inches apart, inserted lead shot in the holes, and then stitched up the incision again. Following the operation, John was butchering the piglets one by one at weekly intervals and checking the bone. Though the leg bone had lengthened overall, the distance between the deposits of lead was the same as it had been on the day that he inserted it. This supported his hypothesis that bones grew through accretion at the ends, not in mid-span.

Charlie stared at the piglets in the pen. “Why is it you want to know how bones grow?” he asked at last. “Isn’t it enough that they do? By God’s grace, they grow quite well.”

“Can’t always trust in God’s grace,” John said briskly.

“What else is there?”

“Knowledge,” John said. “Sometimes, they do not grow, or they grow improperly. I want to know why.” He gazed at the piglets. “There is so much to know,” he murmured. “Do you know, Charlie, if I could look at your bones, I might be able to tell why they pain you so. It would not help you, but it might help someone else whose bones ache.”

“My bones?” Charlie stared at him, his eyes suddenly wide. “You want to see my bones?”

“When you die, Charlie, as we all must do,” John said gently. “If I could take your body . . .”

Charlie was backing away from him, his expression shocked. “My bones, John? What would you do with my bones?”

“Examine them, Charlie.” John spread his hand, the gesture of a reasonable man making a reasonable proposal. “You’ll have no more use for them, once you’re dead.”

Charlie was shaking his head. His big hands formed fists at his sides. “My bones must return to Ireland,” he said. “That’s where they belong. I promised my father . . .”

“Superstition, Charlie,” John said gently. “You must not take it so seriously.”

Charlie turned and fled. Startled by Charlie’s reaction, John called after him, but the giant did not look back. John ran after him, but did not have a chance of overtaking him. Finally, he let the man go, knowing that he would eventually return to his rooms in London.

John was sorry that Charlie had reacted so precipitously. He reviewed the conversation in his mind, wondering how he might have made his suggestion more delicately. In the end, he decided that nothing he could have said would have overcome the giant’s superstition, so John made peace with himself. He spent that night at Earl’s Court, dissecting a series of worker bees, an exacting task that soothed his nerves.

The next day, on his morning stroll, John noticed a new variety of flower growing in the meadow. The plants grew low to the ground and bore tiny golden blossoms. They grew only in discrete patches. John realized, on close examination, that the flowers had sprouted in the giant’s footprints. He attributed this curious effect to the compression of the soil beneath Charlie’s feet and drew up plans for a series of experiments to test the sprouting of seeds under pressure.

Charlie heard John’s voice calling him back, but he did not stop. In his haste, he dropped his shoes and left them behind, escaping John Hunter’s voice.

It was a cold afternoon, and the walk back to London was a long one. A farmer gave him a ride for a few miles in an ox-drawn cart filled with straw, but he walked the rest. His legs ached by the time he reached the outskirts of the city proper. He let his head hang, unwilling to look up and see the smoky sky overhead. The road was cold and hard beneath his bare feet.

When rain began to fall, he made no effort to take shelter. The cold drops soaked his coat, plastered his hair to his head, ran down his cheeks like dirty tears, leaving tracks of soot behind.

Back at the rooms, he fell ill and lay on the straw ticking mattress that served as his bed, unable and unwilling to move. “It’s the gin,” Vance said. “I told you it’d be the death of you.” Charlie did not reply. He lay on the pallet of blankets that served as his bed, staring into the flames of the fire.

A few days later, Kathleen found him there. When he did not come to visit her stall in Covent Garden, she came looking for him. On the door beside the caneshop, a notice said: “No show today. Come back tomorrow.” By the look of it, the notice was several days old. When Kathleen banged on the door, Mary, the landlady, answered and regarded her with a sour look.

“I have come to see Charlie,” Kathleen said. “I’m a friend.”

“Visit him quick,” Mary said in a scornful tone. “He may not have much time left.” She let Kathleen in and the hunchback found her way through dimly lit, stale-smelling rooms to Charlie’s bedside.

He lay on a straw ticking mattress by a fire that burned low. Light from the glowing coals gave his face a ruddy color that did not match his feverish eyes and mournful expression. He was shivering despite the blankets that covered him. “Ah, Kathleen,” he murmured. “Sit with me for a time. I am lonely now, very lonely.”

Sometimes, he shivered and huddled closer to the fire; sometimes, he threw off all his blankets, suddenly drenched in sweat. He complained that his head ached constantly.

He was sick and delirious for three days, and she stayed with him, bringing him bread and cheese to eat, tucking the blankets close around his shoulders, holding his hand so that he would know he was not alone. On the seventh day, he came to himself again. Kathleen had fallen asleep on the floor beside his mattress, and she woke to see him watching her.

“Kathleen,” he said. His eyes were sad, but the fever had left them. “What are you doing here?”

“Taking care of you, Charlie my lad.”

“There’s not much use to that now,” he muttered. He shook his head weakly. “I’ve been foolish. I thought that the magic would be strong enough. But that’s dead and gone. The world is changing.”

“Don’t say that, Charlie.” Now that he was finally giving up his mad notions, it pained her to see it.

“I’ll die here in London.”

“No, Charlie,” she said, “you’ll get better soon.” He just shook his head, recognizing the lie.

“Have you seen Joe Vance?” he asked.

Kathleen went out looking for Vance. After the darkened room, the courtyard seemed brilliantly lit. She found Vance lounging in the gray light that passed for sunshine in London, practicing a game involving three shells and a pea. When she told him that Charlie wanted to see him, he reluctantly followed her into the room.

“You’re looking bad,” Vance said. “That doctor—John Hunter—came to see you again. Says he might be able to give you something for that fever, if he could see you. A swell gentleman, by the look of him.”

Charlie shook his head. “I told you I will not see him.”

“Been a week since any money came in,” Vance said slowly. “And Mary will be looking for her rent, come Monday.”

Charlie said nothing. He was watching the flames, ignoring Vance’s words. When Vance stood up, as if preparing to go, he roused himself. “You got to help me, Joe,” he said. “Can you tell me where I’d find an honest undertaker?”

Mr. Fields, undertaker and friend of Joe Vance, studied Charlie with an expert eye and decided that he wouldn’t last long. His face was pale and wet with sweat; his eyes were bloodshot.

“You’re interested in a coffin?” said Fields. “I’ll have to build it special. That’ll be extra.”

“You must make arrangements for me,” Charlie muttered weakly. He reached out and grasped Fields’ hand. “Take my body back to Ireland. To my mother’s farm. You must see to it. I’ll pay.”

“I’ve heard of Chinamen sending their bones home,” the undertaker said, “but never an Irishman.”

“Please,” Charlie said hoarsely, squeezing the man’s hand. “You must see to it.” He fumbled in his bedclothes and pulled out a small pouch that clinked in his hand. Fields eyed it, assessing its contents. “You must take me home safe.”

“For a price, anything can be arranged,” Fields said heartily. “You can rest easy, Mr. Bryne.”

Kathleen nursed Charlie as best she could. But when her money ran out, she had to return to her stall in the afternoons and evenings to earn money she needed to bring him food. She brought him bread and cheese and mutton stew, though he did not eat half of what she brought.

It rained that week, a dark sooty rain that turned the streets to mud. The costermongers went out late and came in early, with little profit to show for their efforts. The mud clung to the wheels of coaches and to the horses’ hooves, and the hackney drivers cursed the weather. The men who carried sedan chairs got chilblains.

Early in the morning on the seventh day of rain, all the dogs of St. Giles Rookery congregated at the door to the canemaker’s shop. The canemaker tried to drive them away with kicks and curses, but as often as he scattered them, they returned. He gave up at last and tried to ignore them, glancing out only occasionally to see the filthy mongrels sitting beneath his sign. Surprisingly, the dogs did not fight.

The cats came later, slinking over the rooftops. Despite the rain, they crouched above the canemaker’s shop, glowering at the people in the street below. Strangely, the dogs did not bark at the cats and the cats did not yowl at the dogs. They waited quietly.

Early in the afternoon, a sparrow came to perch on the wooden sign that marked the canemaker’s shop. For a time, it sat alone in the rain, its feathers fluffed against the cold. Then it was joined by another sparrow and a pair of finches. A little later, four mourning doves came to perch on the sign, not far from the cats. But the cats made no move to stalk them.

The canemaker looked up when a sound that was at once familiar and strange penetrated his consciousness, making its way past the rattle of coach wheels and the cursing of drivers. He paused, brush in hand. Still holding the cane that he had been varnishing, he went to the doorway, following the sound that called up memories of his boyhood in the country. Sitting on his sign, above the filthy street, a meadowlark was singing its heart out.

From the eaves, the mourning doves watched him with their bright black eyes. From the gutter, the dogs regarded him sadly. The canemaker looked up at the small, gold-flecked bird, then retreated into his shop.

Twilight settled over London. The light had a peculiarly gray tone, as if the city had sucked all color and life from the air. The proprietor of a pie shop was lighting an oil lamp to hang in the door of his establishment. Here and there, the yellow glow of burning lamps marked the shops and taverns that remained open.

Joe Vance emerged from the hallway beside the canemaker’s shop, kicked his way through the crowd of waiting dogs, and made his way to the nearest tavern. Just inside the door he surveyed the smoky interior, then made his way to the corner table, where the undertaker waited with John Hunter.

“How fares the patient?” the undertaker asked jovially. He had been drinking gin, by the smell of it, and he was smiling, an expression that sat uncomfortably on his long face.

“Won’t be long now,” Vance said. “I took him a bottle of gin to ease the pain.”

“And hurry him along,” said Fields, chuckling. He grinned at John Hunter, but John glared back, not sharing the joke.

“I’d help him if I could,” John muttered defensively.

“Certainly you would, Dr. Hunter,” Vance said expansively. “We all would. Why, I care about the lad as if he were my own son. Isn’t that so, Fields?”

John scowled and shook his head, believing none of it. “Let’s get on to business,” he said.

The undertaker nodded and spoke softly. “Now, we were discussing the price. Dr. Hunter had offered twenty pounds for the body.”

“Twenty pounds?” Vance scowled, forgetting his love for the giant at the mention of money. “Out of the question.”

“It does seem inadequate for the unusual merchandise we have to offer,” the undertaker murmured. “It seems to me that ten times that amount would be fair.”

John Hunter looked up from his beer. “You’ll find few takers for such merchandise.”

“Ah, you would be surprised,” said the undertaker. “My conversations with the head surgeon at St. George’s Hospital suggest that there may be a number of takers.”

“Thirty pounds,” John said.

The bargaining was protracted. Vance spoke of his great affection for the giant so eloquently that his eyes became moist with tears. He was the giant’s friend—perhaps his only friend—and he would never consider the doctor’s offer were it not for his own need for capital. Persuaded by his own eloquence, he felt a brief pang of regret, but dismissed it as John raised the price.

Fields stressed the rarity of the commodity they offered. “Unique on the face of the earth,” he said. “An opportunity like this comes along once in a lifetime—if you’re lucky.”

John was the least garrulous of the lot, protesting that the two of them had unrealistic notions of their merchandise’s value. But clearly Vance and Fields had the advantage. Finally after much gin and talk, John settled at one hundred pounds and would not budge. They drank to seal the bargain.

The clock was striking eleven when Vance went to check on the giant. The street seemed unnaturally quiet. In the dim light of the tavern’s lantern, Vance could see that the dogs were still waiting. He heard a rustle of feathers above his head. Suddenly, the lark sang, a sweet burst of glory, like a sudden ray of sunshine in a dark place. The largest of the mongrels tilted back his head and began to howl, and the rest joined in, wailing like banshees.

A man in a nightshirt flung open the window above Vance’s head and shouted at the dogs, but the howling continued. The shouting was followed by a pail of water and then the contents of a chamberpot. Vance quickly ducked for the protection of the tavern doorway. Retreating inside, he said to Fields and John Hunter, “I suppose he’s dead.”

In the dark of night, with the help of Vance and Fields, John Hunter stripped the corpse of the dead giant, slipped a sack over the body, and loaded the sack into his coach. In his haste to be off, he overlooked the giant’s staff, which was propped in the corner by the fire.

The pack of mongrels that hung about the door followed the coach for half a mile or so, but he lost them after that. At Earl’s Court, the coachman, who had grown used to nocturnal errands, helped him load the body into a barrow and transport it to the basement workshop.

Alone with the cadaver, John hesitated. “So Charlie,” he muttered, “You came to me after all, whether you would or not. I feel half sorry for you, but I suppose you died happy enough.” He shook his head, thinking of the giant’s superstition and ignorance. Then he wielded his sharp knife and prepared Charlie’s bones for the boiling pot.

It was nearly dawn when he became aware that the caged lark in the next room was singing its heart out. He cocked his head to listen, wondering what had prompted the bird to sing. In the months that he had kept it in confinement beneath the earth, the lark had never to his knowledge sung a note.

Putting the last bone in the pot, John went to investigate, but the bird fell silent at his approach and never sang again.

Charlie was gone when Kathleen returned from Covent Garden that night. His room was dark and the fire had burned out. His clothing was scattered about the straw ticking mattress, and she guessed at what had happened.

When she found his staff by the fireside, its blossoms wilted and dry, she knew he was dead. He never would have left without it. She took the staff with her when she left. It had a nice feel in her hand and it reminded her of Charlie.

It was strange, but her hump never ached when she held the staff in her hand. Free of the pain, she drank less gin. After a time, it seemed to her that her hump was beginning to shrink. And then she was sure of it: the twist in her back grew straighter every day.

Her livelihood shrank with her hump—no one would pay for a fortune from a straight-backed Irishwoman. She lost business to the fortune teller on the other side of the garden, a darkskinned man who wore multi-colored scarves and stared into a crystal to see the future. Finally, with the last of her earnings, Kathleen returned to Ireland. There was no reason to stay in London, and the staff in her hand gave her the urge to wander. She went to Ireland and wandered the winding roads, telling stories in return for a bit of food and a place to sleep. Sometimes, she told stories of London. Sometimes, she talked about a giant named Charlie, and in her tales he grew to nearly the size of Bran the Blessed. It was not a bad life.

A month of wandering and she found herself in County Derry. Enquiring here and there, she found her way to the wild pastureland known as the Giant’s Boneyard. There she leaned the staff against the largest boulder and stood for a time, looking out over the valley and thinking of Charlie. At last, she decided to walk back to the village and look for a friendly home where she might sleep—but when she went to pick up the staff she found that it had taken root. White blossoms sprouted from the dry wood, and new green shoots reached for the gray sky. She left it there, where it belonged. She had had it long enough.

Eventually, Kathleen married a farmer. As a farmer’s wife, she took care of the land. It was a hard life, but one for which she was well-suited, with her strong back and willing ways.

John Hunter examined Charlie Bryne’s skeleton carefully, but the doctor died without learning why Charlie grew so large. More than one hundred years after John’s death, a surgeon named Harvey Williams Cushing examined Charlie’s skull and noticed a deformity in the bone that had covered the pituitary gland. This observation ultimately led to Cushing’s discovery that the pituitary plays a role in controlling human growth, one more small piece in the great puzzle that John Hunter was trying to solve.

Cushing did not explain why birds often congregated at the window of the room in which the giant’s bones hung. The sill was thick with their droppings. Sometimes, they would rattle on the glass with their beaks and flap their wings impatiently, as if demanding to be let in.

Perhaps Cushing did not notice them. Like Hunter, he was preoccupied with understanding what made the human body tick. He had no time for the foolishness of birds, the poetry of cloud formations, the illegible scrawls left by snails crawling across the slate paving stones in the garden.

That’s the truth, as near as I can tell it. Oh, historians may quibble with some events I have described. I can find no historical documentation detailing the flowers that grew on Charlie’s staff or mentioning the staff at all, for that matter. And perhaps the birds did not really gather at the window to pay court to Charlie’s bones. I can find no records that say they did—but then, I can find no denial of it either. Surely these are minor points. At its heart, the tale is true.

Charlie Bryne is dead and gone and his bones still hang in London’s Royal College of Surgeons. In the Giant’s Boneyard, songbirds nest in the hawthorn thicket that has grown up near the boulder that old people call the Giant’s Skull. In this lonely spot, there lingers a sense of sadness and loss. Sometimes, a foolish traveler, heading home late at night, will feel a sudden chill as he passes the field. When the chill touches him, he’ll clutch his coat around him, glance back over his shoulder like a man pursued by ghosts, and hurry home to the safety of electric lighting, content to live in a world where ghosts do not walk and bones rest easy.

BULLY!

Mike Resnick

I.

The date was January 8, 1910.

“At midnight we had stopped at the station of Koba, where we were warmly received by the district commissioner, and where we met half a dozen of the professional elephant hunters, who for the most part make their money, at hazard of their lives, by poaching ivory in the Congo. They are a hard-bit set, these elephant poachers; there are few careers more adventurous, or fraught with more peril, or which make heavier demands upon the daring, the endurance, and the physical hardihood of those who follow them. Elephant hunters face death at every turn, from fever, from the assaults of warlike native tribes, from their conflicts with their giant quarry; and the unending strain on their health and strength is tremendous.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

AFRICAN GAME TRAILS

“. . . . When we were all assembled in my tent and champagne had been served out to everyone except Roosevelt—who insisted on drinking nonintoxicants, though his son Kermit joined us—he raised his glass and gave the toast ‘To the Elephant Poachers of the Lado Enclave.’ As we drank with him one or two of us laughingly protested his bluntness, so he gravely amended his toast to ‘The Gentleman Adventurers of Central Africa,’ ‘for,’ he added, ‘that is the title by which you would have been known in Queen Elizabeth’s time.’

“A real man, with the true outdoor spirit, the ex-President’s sympathy with and real envy of the life we were leading grew visibly as the evening advanced; and he finally left us with evident reluctance. I, for one, was shaken by the hand three times as he made for the door on three separate occasions; but each time, after hesitatingly listening to the beginning of some new adventure by one of the boys, he again sat down to hear another page from our every-day life. We even urged him to chuck all his political work and come out like the great white man he was, and join us. If he would do this, we promised to put a force under his command to organize the hunting and pioneering business of Central Africa, and perhaps make history. He was, I believe, deeply moved by this offer; and long afterward he told a friend that no honor ever paid him had impressed and tempted him like that which he received from the poachers of the Lado Enclave.”

—John Boyes

COMPANY OF ADVENTURERS

Roosevelt walked to the door of the tent, then paused and turned back to face Boyes.

“A force, you say?” he asked thoughtfully, as a lion coughed and a pair of hyenas laughed maniacally in the distance.

“That’s right, Mr. President,” said Boyes, getting to his feet. “I can promise you at least fifty men like ourselves. They may not be much to look at, but they’ll be men who aren’t afraid to work or to fight, and each and every one of them will be loyal to you, sir.”

“Father, it’s getting late,” called Kermit from outside the tent.

“You go along,” said Roosevelt distractedly. “I’ll join you in a few minutes.” He turned back to Boyes. “Fifty men?”

“That’s right, Mr. President.”

“Fifty men to tame the whole of Central Africa?” mused Roosevelt. Boyes nodded. “That’s right. There’s seven of us right here; we could have the rest assembled inside of two weeks.”

“It’s very tempting,” admitted Roosevelt, trying to suppress a guilty smile. “It would be a chance to be both a boy and a president again.”

“The Congo would make one hell of a private hunting preserve, sir,” said Boyes.

The American was silent for a moment, and finally shook his massive head. “It couldn’t be done,” he said at last. “Not with fifty men.”

“No,” said Boyes. “I suppose not.”

“There are no roads, no telephones, no telegraph lines.” Roosevelt paused, staring at the flickering lanterns that illuminated the interior of the tent. “And the railway ends in Uganda.”

“No access to the sea, either,” agreed Boyes pleasantly, as the lion coughed again and a herd of hippos started bellowing in the nearby river.

“No,” said Roosevelt with finality. “It simply couldn’t be done—not with fifty men, not with five thousand.”

Boyes grinned. “Not a chance in the world.”

“A man would have to be mad to consider it,” said Roosevelt.

“I suppose so, Mr. President,” said Boyes.

Roosevelt nodded his head for emphasis. “Totally, absolutely mad.”

“No question about it,” said Boyes, still grinning at the burly American. “When do we start?”

“Tomorrow morning,” said Roosevelt, his teeth flashing as he finally returned Boyes’ grin. “By God, it’ll be bully!”

II.

“Father?”

Roosevelt, sitting on a chair in front of his tent, continued staring through his binoculars.

“Kermit, you’re standing in front of a lilac-breasted roller and a pair of crowned cranes.”

Kermit didn’t move, and finally Roosevelt put his binoculars down on a nearby table. He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and began scribbling furiously.

“Remarkable bird viewing here,” he said as he added the roller and the cranes to his list. “That’s thirty-four species I’ve seen today, and we haven’t even had breakfast yet.” He looked up at his son. “I love these chilly Ugandan nights and mornings. They remind me of the Yellowstone. I trust you slept well?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Wonderful climate,” said Roosevelt. “Just wonderful!”

“Father, I’d like to speak to you for a few moments, if I may.” Roosevelt carefully tucked the notebook back into his breast pocket. “Certainly,” he replied. “What would you like to talk about?”

Kermit looked around, found another canvas chair, carried it over next to his father, and sat down on it.

“This entire enterprise seems ill-conceived, Father.”

Roosevelt seemed amused. “That’s your considered opinion, is it?”

“One man can’t civilize a country half the size of the United States,” continued Kermit. “Not even you.”

“Kermit, when I was twelve years old, the best doctors in the world told me I’d always be underweight and sickly,” said Roosevelt. “But when I was nineteen, I was the lightweight boxing champion of Harvard.”

“I know, Father.”

“Don’t interrupt. People told me I couldn’t write a proper sentence, but I’ve written twenty books, and four of them have been bestsellers. They told me that politics was no place for a young man, but when I was twenty-four I was Speaker of the House of the New York State Legislature. They told me that law and order had no place in the West, but I went out and single-handedly captured three armed killers in the Dakota Bad Lands during the Winter of the Blue Snow.” Roosevelt paused. “Even my Rough Riders said we couldn’t take San Juan Hill; I took it.” He stared at his son. “So don’t tell me what I can’t do, Kermit.”

“But this isn’t like anything else you’ve done,” persisted Kermit. “What better reason is there to do it?” said Roosevelt with a delighted grin.

“But—”

“Ex-presidents are supposed to sit around in their rocking chairs and only come out for parades. Well, I’m fifty-one years old, and I’m not ready to retire yet. Another opportunity like this may never come along.” Roosevelt gazed off to the west, toward the Congo. “Think of it, Kermit! More than half a million square miles, filled with nothing but animals and savages and a few missionaries. The British and French and Portuguese and Belgians and Italians all have had their chance at this continent; Africa ought to have one country developed by someone who will bring them American know-how and American democracy and American values. We’re a rustic, frontier race ourselves; who better to civilize yet another frontier?” He paused, envisioning a future that was as clear to him as the present. “And think of the natural resources! We’ll turn it into a protectorate, and give it favored nation trading status. There’s lumber here to build thirty million houses, and where we’ve cleared the forests away we’ll create farms and cities. It will be America all over again—only this time there will be no slavery, no genocide practiced against an indigenous people, no slaughter of the buffalo. I’ll use America not as a blueprint, but as a first draft, and I’ll learn from our past mistakes.”

“But it isn’t another America, Father,” said Kermit. “It’s a harsh, savage country, filled with hundreds of tribes whose only experience with white men is slavery.”

“Then they’ll be happy to find a white man who is willing to redress the balance, won’t they?” replied Roosevelt with a confident smile.

“What about the legalities involved?” persisted Kermit. “The Congo is a Belgian colony.”

“They’ve had their chance, and they’ve muddled it badly.” Roosevelt paused. “Suppose you let me worry about the Belgians.”

Kermit seemed about to argue the point, then realized the fruitlessness of further debate. “All right,” he said with a sigh.

“Was there anything else?”

“Yes,” said Kermit. “What do you know about this man Boyes?”

“The man’s a true pioneer,” said Roosevelt admiringly. “He should have been an American.”

Kermit shook his head. “The man’s a scalawag.”

“That’s your conclusion after being wined and dined in his tent for a single evening?”

“No, Father. But while you were taking your morning walk and watching birds, I was talking to some of his companions about him. They thought they were bragging about him, and telling me stories that would impress me—but what I heard gave me a true picture of the man.”

“For example?” asked Roosevelt.

“He’s always in trouble—with the law, with the British army, with the Colonial Office.” Kermit paused. “They’ve tried to deport him from East Africa twice. Did you know that?”

“Certainly I know it,” answered Roosevelt. Suddenly he grinned and pointed to a small book that was on the table next to his binoculars. “I spent most of the night reading his memoirs. Remarkable man!”

“Then you know that the British government arrested him for . . .” Kermit searched for the word.

“Dacoity?”

Kermit nodded. “Yes.”

“Do you know what it means?” asked his father.

“No,” admitted Kermit.

“In this particular case, it means that he signed a treaty with the Kikuyu and got them to open their land to white settlement, and some higher-up in the Colonial government felt that Mr. Boyes was usurping his authority.” Roosevelt chuckled. “So they sent a squad of six men into Kikuyuland to arrest him, and they found him surrounded by five thousand armed warriors. And since none of the arresting officers cared very much for the odds, Mr. Boyes volunteered to march all the way to Mombasa on his own recognizance.” Roosevelt paused and grinned. “When he walked into court with his five thousand Kikuyu, the case was immediately thrown out.” He laughed. “Now, that’s a story that could have come out of our own Wild West.”

“There were other stories, too, Father,” said Kermit. “Less savory stories.”

“Good,” said Roosevelt. “Then he and I will have something to talk about on the way to the Congo.”

“You know, of course, that he’s the so-called White King of the Kikuyu.”

“And I’m an honorary Indian chief. We have a lot in common.”

“You have nothing in common,” protested Kermit. “You helped our Indians. Boyes became king through deceit and treachery.”

“He walked into a savage kingdom that had never permitted a white man to enter it before, and within two years he became the king of the entire Kikuyu nation. That’s just the kind of man I need for the work at hand.”

“But Father—”

“This is a harsh, savage land, Kermit, and I’m embarking on an enterprise that is neither for the timid nor the weak,” said Roosevelt with finality. “He’s the man I want.”

“You’re certain that you won’t reconsider?”

Roosevelt shook his head. “The subject is closed.”

Kermit stared at his father for a long moment, then sighed in defeat. “What shall I tell Mother?”

“Edith will understand,” said Roosevelt. “She has always understood. Tell her I’ll send for her as soon as I’ve got a proper place to house us all.” Suddenly he grinned again. “Maybe we should send for your sister Alice immediately. If there’s any native opposition, she can terrify them into submission, just the way she used to do with my cabinet.”

“I’m being serious, Father.”

“So am I, Kermit. America’s never had an empire, and doesn’t want one—but I made us a world power, and if I can increase our influence on a continent where we’ve yet to gain a foothold, then it’s my duty to do so.”

“And it’ll be such fun,” suggested Kermit knowingly.

Roosevelt flashed his son another grin. “It will be absolutely bully!” Kermit stared at his father for a moment. “If I can’t talk you out of this enterprise, I wish you’d let me stay here with you.”

Roosevelt shook his head. “Someone has to make sure all the trophies we’ve taken get to the American Museum on schedule. Besides, if we both stay here, the press will be sure I died during the safari. You’ve got to go back and tell them about the work I’m doing here.” Suddenly he frowned. “Oh, and you’ll have to see my editor at Scribner’s and tell him that I’ll be a little late on the safari manuscript. I’ll start working on it as soon as we set up a permanent camp.” He paused again. “Oh, yes. Before you woke up this morning, I gave a number of letters to Mr. Cunninghame, who will accompany you for the remainder of the journey.

I want you to mail them when you get back to the States. The sooner we get some engineers and heavy equipment over here, the better.”

“Heavy equipment?”

“Certainly. We’ve got a lot of land to clear and a railway to build.” A superb starling walked boldly up to the mess tent, looking for scraps, and Roosevelt instantly withdrew his notebook and began scribbling again.

“The Congo’s in the middle of the continent,” Kermit pointed out. “It will be very difficult to bring in heavy equipment from the coast.”

“Nonsense,” scoffed Roosevelt. “The British disassembled their steamships, transported them in pieces, and then reassembled them on Lake Victoria and Lake Nyasa. Are you suggesting that Americans, who could build the Panama Canal and crisscross an entire continent with railroads, can’t find a way to transport bulldozers and tractors to the Congo?” He paused. “You just see to it that those letters are delivered. The rest will take care of itself.”

Just then Boyes approached them. “Good morning, Mr. Boyes,” said Roosevelt pleasantly. “Are we ready to leave?”

“We can break camp whenever you wish, Mr. President,” said Boyes. “But one of our natives tells me there’s a bull elephant carrying at least one hundred and thirty pounds a side not five miles from here.”

“Really?” said Roosevelt, standing up excitedly. “Is he certain? I never saw ivory that large in Kenya.”

“This particular boy’s not wrong very often,” answered Boyes. “He says this bull is surrounded by three or four askaris—young males—and that he’s moving southeast. If we were to head off in that direction—” he pointed across the river to an expanse of dry, acacia-studded savannah “—we could probably catch up with him in a little less than three miles.”

“Have we time?” asked Roosevelt, trying unsuccessfully to hide his eagerness.

Boyes smiled. “The Congo’s been waiting for someone to civilize it for millions of years, Mr. President. I don’t suppose another day will hurt.” Roosevelt turned to his son and shook his hand. “Have a safe trip, Kermit. If I bag this elephant, I’ll have his tusks sent on after you.”

“Good-bye, Father.”

Roosevelt gave the young man a hug, and then went off to get his rifle. “Don’t worry, son,” said Boyes, noting the young man’s concern. “We’ll take good care of your father. The next time you see him, he’ll be the king of the Congo.”

“President,” Kermit corrected him.

“Whichever,” said Boyes with a shrug.

III.

It took Roosevelt six hours to catch up with his elephant, and the close stalk and kill took another hour. The rest of the day was spent removing the tusks and—at the ex-President’s insistence—transporting almost three hundred pounds of elephant meat to the porters who had remained with Kermit.

It was too late to begin the trek to the Congo that day, but their little party was on the march shortly after sunrise the next morning. The savannah slowly changed to woodland, and finally, after six days, they came to the Mountains of the Moon.

“You’re a remarkably fit man, Mr. President,” remarked Boyes, as they made their first camp in a natural clearing by a small, clear stream at an altitude of about six thousand feet.

“A healthy mind and a healthy body go hand-in-hand, John,” replied Roosevelt. “It doesn’t pay to ignore either of them.”

“Still,” continued Boyes, “once we cross the mountains, I think we’ll try to find some blooded horses to ride.”

“Blooded?” repeated Roosevelt.

“Horses that have already been bitten by the tsetse fly and survived,” answered Boyes. “Once they’ve recovered from the disease, they’re immune to it. Such animals are worth their weight in gold out here.”

“Where will we find them, and how much will they cost?”

“Oh, the Belgian soldiers will have some,” answered Boyes easily. “And they’ll cost us two or three bullets.”

“I don’t understand.”

Boyes grinned. “We’ll kill a couple of elephants and trade the ivory for the horses.”

“You’re a resourceful man, Mr. Boyes,” said Roosevelt with an appreciative grin.

“Out here a white man’s either resourceful or he’s dead,” answered Boyes.

“I can well imagine,” replied Roosevelt. He stared admiringly at the profusion of birds and monkeys that occupied the canopied forest surrounding the clearing. “It’s beautiful up here,” he commented. “Pleasant days, brisk nights, fresh air, clear running water, game all around us. A man could spend his life right here.”

“Some men could,” said Boyes. “Not men like us.”

“No,” agreed Roosevelt with a sigh. “Not men like us.”

“Still,” continued Boyes, “there’s no reason why we can’t spend two or three days here. We’ll be meeting our party on the other side of the mountains, but they probably won’t arrive for another week to ten days. It will take time for word of our enterprise to circulate through the Lado.”

“Good!” said Roosevelt. “It’ll give me time to catch up on my writing.” He paused. “By the way, where did you plan to pitch my tent?”

“Wherever you’d like it.”

“As close to the stream as possible,” answered Roosevelt. “It’s really quite a lovely sight to wake up to.”

“No reason why not,” said Boyes. “I haven’t seen any crocs or hippos about.” He gave a brief command to the natives, and pointed to the spot Roosevelt had indicated.

“Please make sure the American flag is stationed in front of it,” said Roosevelt. “Oh, and have my books placed inside it.”

“You know,” said Boyes, “we’re using two boys just to carry your books, Mr. President. Perhaps we could leave some of them behind when we break camp and push inland.”

Roosevelt shook his head. “That’s out of the question: I’d be quite lost without access to literature. If we’re short of manpower, we’ll leave my rifle behind and have my gunbearer carry one of the book boxes.”

Boyes smiled. “That won’t be necessary, Mr. President. It was just a suggestion.”

“Good,” said Roosevelt with a smile. “Just between you and me, I’d feel almost as lost without my Winchester.”

“You handle it very well.”

“I’m just a talented amateur,” answered Roosevelt. “I’m not in a class with you professional hunters.”

Boyes laughed. “I’m no professional.”

“You were hunting for ivory when we met.”

“I was trying to increase my bank account,” answered Boyes. “The ivory was just a means to an end. Karamojo Bell is a real hunter, or your friend Selous. I’m just an entrepreneur.”

“Don’t be so modest, John,” said Roosevelt. “You managed to amass quite a pile of ivory. You couldn’t do that if you weren’t an expert hunter.”

“Would you like to know how I actually went about collecting that ivory?” asked Boyes with a grin.

“Certainly.”

“I don’t know the first thing about tracking game, so I stopped at a British border post, explained that I was terrified of elephants, and slipped the border guards a few pounds to mark the major concentrations on a map of the Lado Enclave so I could avoid them.”

Roosevelt laughed heartily. “Still, once you found the herds, you obviously knew what to do.”

Boyes shrugged. “I just went where there was no competition.”

“I thought the Enclave was filled with ivory hunters.”

“Not in the shoulder-high grass,” answered Boyes. “No way to sight your rifle, or to maneuver in case of a charge.”

“How did you manage to hunt under such conditions?”

“I stood on my bearer’s shoulders.” Boyes chuckled at the memory. “The first few times I used a .475, but the recoil was so powerful that it knocked me off my perch each time I fired it, so in the end I wound up using a Lee-Enfield .303.”

“You’re a man of many talents, John.”

A yellow-vented bulbul, bolder than its companions, suddenly landed in the clearing to more closely observe the pitching of the tents.

“Lovely bird, the bulbul,” remarked Roosevelt, pulling out his notebook and entering the time and location where he had spotted it. “It has an absolutely beautiful voice, too.”

“You’re quite a bird-watcher, Mr. President,” noted Boyes.

“Ornithology was my first love,” answered Roosevelt. “I published my initial monograph on it when I was fourteen.” He paused. “For the longest time, I thought my future would be in ornithology and taxidermy, but eventually I found men more interesting than animals.” Suddenly he grinned. “Or at least, more in need of leadership.”

“Well, we’ve come to the right place,” replied Boyes. “I think the Congo is probably more in need of leadership than most places.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” agreed Roosevelt. “In fact, I think the time has come to begin formulating an approach to the problem. So far we’ve just been speaking in generalizations; we must have some definite plan to present to the men when we’re fully assembled.” He paused. “Let’s take another look at that map.”

Boyes withdrew a map from his pocket and unfolded it.

“This will never do,” said Roosevelt, trying to study the map as the wind kept whipping through it. “Let’s find a table.”

Boyes ordered two of the natives to set up a table and a pair of chairs, and a moment later he and Roosevelt were sitting side by side, with the map laid out on the table and held in place by four small rocks.

“Where are we now?” asked Roosevelt.

“Right about here, sir,” answered Boyes, pointing to their location. “The mountains are the dividing line between Uganda and the Congo. We’ll have to concentrate our initial efforts in the eastern section.”

“Why?” asked Roosevelt. “If we move here—” he pointed to a more centrally located spot “—we’ll have access to the Congo River.”

“Not practical,” answered Boyes. “Most of the tribes in the eastern quarter of the country understand Swahili, and that’s the only native language most of our men will be able to speak. Once we get inland we’ll run into more that two hundred dialects, and if they speak any civilized language at all, it’ll be French, not English.”

“I see,” said Roosevelt. He paused to consider this information, then stared at the map again. “Now, where does the East African Railway terminate?”

“Over here,” said Boyes, pointing. “In Kampala, about halfway through Uganda.”

“So we’ll have to extend the railway or build a road about three hundred miles or more to reach a base in the eastern section of the Congo?”

“That’s a very ambitious undertaking, Mr. President,” said Boyes dubiously.

“Still, it will have to be done. There’s no other way to bring in the equipment we’ll need.” Roosevelt turned to Boyes. “You look doubtful, John.”

“It could take years. The East African Railway wasn’t called the Lunatic Line without cause.”

Roosevelt smiled confidently. “They called it the Lunatic Line because only a lunatic would spend one thousand pounds per mile of track. Well, if there’s one thing Americans can build, it’s railroads. We’ll do it for a tenth of the cost in a fiftieth of the time.”

“If you extend it from Kampala, you’ll have to run it over the Mountains of the Moon,” noted Boyes.

“We ran railroads over the Rocky Mountains almost half a century ago,” said Roosevelt, dismissing the subject. “Now, are there any major cities in the eastern sector? Where’s Stanleyville?”

“Stanleyville could be on a different planet, for all the commerce it has with the eastern Congo,” replied Boyes. “In fact, most of the Belgian settlements are along the Congo River—” he pointed out the river “—which, as you can see, doesn’t extend to the eastern section. There are no railways, no rivers, and no roads connecting the eastern sector to the settlements.” He paused. “Initially, this may very well work to our advantage, as it could be months before news of anything we may do will reach them.”

“Then what is in the east?”

Boyes shrugged. “Animals and savages.”

“We’ll leave the animals alone and elevate the savages,” said Roosevelt. “What’s the major tribe there?”

“The Mangbetu.”

“Do you know anything about them?”

“Just that they’re as warlike as the Maasai and the Zulu. They’ve conquered most of the other tribes.” He paused. “And they’re supposed to be cannibals.”

“We’ll have to put a stop to that,” said Roosevelt. He flashed Boyes another grin. “We can’t have them going around eating registered voters.

“Especially Republicans?” suggested Boyes with a chuckle. “Especially Republicans,” agreed Roosevelt. He paused. “Have they had much commerce with white men?”

“The Belgians leave them pretty much alone,” answered Boyes. “They killed the first few civil servants who paid them a visit.”

“Then it would be reasonable to assume that they will be unresponsive to our peaceful overtures?”

“I think you could say so, yes.”

“Then perhaps we can draw upon your expertise, John,” said Roosevelt. “After all, Kikuyuland was also hostile to white men when you first entered it.”

“It was a different situation,” explained Boyes. “They were warring among themselves, so I simply placed myself and my gun at the disposal of one of the weaker clans and made myself indispensable to them. Once word got out that I had sided with them and turned the tide of battle, they knew they’d be massacred if I left, so they begged me to stay, and one by one we began assimilating the other Kikuyu clans until we had unified the entire nation.” He paused. “The Mangbetu are already united, and I very much doubt that they would appreciate any interference from us.” He stared thoughtfully at Roosevelt. “And there’s something else.”

“What?”

“I didn’t enter Kikuyuland to bring them the benefits of civilization. The East African Railway needed supplies for 25,000 coolie laborers, and all I wanted to do was find a cheap source of food that I could resell. I was just trying to make a living, not to change the way the Kikuyu lived.” He paused. “African natives are a very peculiar lot. You can shoot their elephants, pull gold and diamonds out of their land, even buy their slaves, and they don’t seem to give a damn. But once you start interfering with the way they live, you’ve got a real problem on your hands.”

“There’s an enormous difference between American democracy and European colonialism,” said Roosevelt firmly.

“Let’s hope the residents of the Congo agree, sir,” said Boyes wryly. “They will,” said Roosevelt. “You know, John, this enterprise was initially your suggestion. If you feel this way, why have you volunteered to help me?”

“I’ve made and lost three fortunes on this continent,” answered Boyes bluntly. “Some gut instinct tells me that there’s another one to be made in the Congo. Besides,” he added with a smile, “it sounds like a bully adventure.”

Roosevelt laughed at Boyes’ use of his favorite term. “Well, at least you’re being honest, and I can’t ask for more than that. Now let’s get back to work.” He paused, ordering his thoughts. “It seems to me that as long as the Mangbetu control the area, it makes sense to work through them, to use them as our surrogates until we can educate all the natives.”

“I suppose so,” said Boyes. “Still, we can’t just walk in there, tell them that we’re bringing them the advantages of civilization, and expect a friendly reception.”

“Why not?” said Roosevelt confidently. “The direct approach is usually best.”

“They’re predisposed to dislike and distrust you, Mr. President.”

“They’re predisposed to dislike and distrust Belgians, John,” answered Roosevelt. “They’ve never met an American before.”

“I don’t think they’re inclined to differentiate between white men,” said Boyes.

“You’re viewing them as Democrats,” said Roosevelt with a smile. “I prefer to think of them as uncommitted voters.”

“I think you’d be better advised to think of them as hostile—and hun—”

“John, when I was president, I used to have a saying: Walk softly, but carry a big stick.”

“I’ve heard it,” acknowledged Boyes.

“Well, I intend to walk softly among the Mangbetu—but if worst comes to worst, we’ll be carrying fifty big sticks with us.”

“I wonder if fifty guns will be enough,” said Boyes, frowning.

“We’re not coming to slaughter them, John—merely to impress them.”

“We might impress them more if we waited for some of your engineers and Rough Riders to show up.”

“Time is a precious commodity,” answered Roosevelt. “I have never believed in wasting it.” He paused. “Bill Taft will almost certainly run for re-election in 1912. I’d like to make him a gift of the Congo as an American protectorate before he leaves office.”

“You expect to civilize this whole country in six years?” asked Boyes in amused disbelief.

“Why not?” answered Roosevelt seriously. “God made the whole world in just six days, didn’t He?”

IV.

They remained in camp for two days, with Roosevelt becoming more and more restless to begin his vast undertaking. Finally he convinced Boyes to trek across the mountain range, and a week later they set up a base camp on the eastern border of the Belgian Congo.

The ex-president was overflowing with energy. When Boyes would awaken at sunrise, Roosevelt had already written ten or twelve pages, and was undergoing his daily regimen of vigorous exercise. By nine in the morning he was too restless to remain in camp, and he would take a tracker and a bearer out to hunt some game for the pot. In the heat of the day, while Boyes and the porters slept in the shade, Roosevelt sat in a canvas chair beside his tent, reading from the sixty-volume library that accompanied him everywhere. By late afternoon it was time for a long walk and an hour of serious bird-watching, followed by still more writing and then dinner. And always, as he sat beside the fire with Boyes and those poachers who had begun making their way to the base camp, he would speak for hours, firing them with his vision for the Congo and discussing how best to accomplish it. Then, somewhere between nine and ten at night, everyone would go off to bed, and while the others slept, Roosevelt’s tent was always aglow with lantern light as he read for another hour.

Boyes decided that if Roosevelt weren’t given something substantial to do he might spontaneously combust with nervous energy. Therefore, since thirty-three members of his little company had already arrived, he broke camp and assumed that the remaining fifteen to twenty men would be able to follow their trail.

They spent two days tracking down a large bull elephant and his young askaris, came away with fourteen tusks, six of them quite large, and then marched them twenty miles north to a Belgian outpost. They traded the tusks for seven blooded horses, left three of their party behind to acquire more ivory and trade it for the necessary number of horses, and then headed south into Mangbetu country.

They were quite a group. There was Deaf Banks, who had lost his hearing from proximity to repeated elephant gun explosions, but had refused to quit Africa or even leave the bush, and had shot more than five hundred elephants. There was Bill Buckley, a burly Englishman who had given up his gold mine in Rhodesia for the white gold he found further north. There was Mickey Norton, who had spent a grand total of three days in cities during the past twenty years. There was Charlie Ross, who had left his native Australia to become a Canadian Mountie, then decided that the life was too tame and emigrated to Africa. There was Billy Pickering, who had already served two sentences in Belgian jails for ivory poaching, and had his own notions concerning how to civilize the Congo. There were William and Richard Brittlebanks, brothers who had found hunting in the Klondike to be too cold for their taste, and had been poaching ivory in the Sudan for the better part of a decade. There was even an American, Yank Rogers, one of Roosevelt’s former Rough Riders, who had no use for the British or the Belgians, but joined up the moment he heard that his beloved Teddy was looking for volunteers. Only the fabled Karamojo Bell, who had just killed his 962nd elephant and was eager to finally bag his thousandth, refused to leave the Lado.

It was understood from the start that Boyes was Roosevelt’s lieutenant, and the few who choose to argue the point soon found out just how much strength and determination lay hidden within his scrawny, five foot two inch body. After a pair of fist fights and a threatened pistol duel, which Roosevelt himself had to break up, the chain of command was never again challenged.

They began marching south and west, moving further from the border and into more heavily forested territory as they sought out the Mangbetu. By the time a week had passed, eighteen more men had joined them.

On the eighth day they came to a large village. The huts were made of dried cattle dung, with thatched roofs, and were clustered around a large central compound.

The inhabitants still spoke Swahili, and explained that the Mangbetu territory was another two days’ march to the south. Boyes had the Brittlebanks brothers shoot a couple of bushbuck and a duiker, and made a gift of the meat to the village. He promised to bring them still more meat upon their return, explaining to Roosevelt that this was a standard practice, as one never knew when one might need a friendly village while beating a hasty retreat.

Roosevelt was eager to meet the Mangbetu, and he got his wish two mornings later, shortly after sunrise, when they came upon a Mangbetu village in a large clearing by a river.

“I wonder how many white men they’ve seen before?” said Roosevelt as a couple of hundred painted Mangbetu, some of them wearing blankets and leopardskin cloaks in the cold morning air, gathered in the center of the village, brandishing their spears and staring at the approaching party.

“They’ve probably eaten their fair share of Belgians,” replied Boyes. “At any rate, they’ll know what a rifle is, so we’d better display them.”

“They can see that we have them,” answered Roosevelt. “That’s enough.”

“But sir—”

“We’ve come to befriend them, not decimate them, John. Keep the men back here so they don’t feel that we’re threatening them,” ordered Roosevelt.

“Mr. President, sir,” protested Mickey Norton, “please listen to me. I’ve had experience dealing with savages. We all have. You’ve got to show ’em who’s boss.”

“They’re not savages, Mr. Norton,” said Roosevelt.

“Then what are they?”

Roosevelt grinned. “Voters.” He climbed down off his horse. “They’re our constituents, and I think I’d like to meet them on equal footing.”

“Then you’d better take off all your clothes and get a spear.”

“That will be enough, Mr. Norton,” said Roosevelt firmly.

One old man, wearing a headdress made of a lion’s mane and ostrich feathers, seated himself on a stool outside the largest hut, and a number of warriors immediately positioned themselves in front of him.

“Would that be the chief?” asked Roosevelt.

“Probably,” said Boyes. “Once in a while, you get a real smart chief who puts someone else on the throne and disguises himself as a warrior, just in case you’re here to kill him. But since the Mangbetu rule this territory, I think we can assume that he’s really the headman.”

“Nice headdress,” commented Roosevelt admiringly. He handed his rifle to Norton. “John, leave your gun behind and come with me. The rest of you men, wait here.”

“Would you like us to fan out around the village, sir?” suggested Charlie Ross.

Roosevelt shook his head. “If they’ve seen rifles before, it won’t be necessary, and if they haven’t, then it wouldn’t do any good.”

“Is there anything we can do, sir?”

“Try smiling,” answered Roosevelt. “Come on, John.”

They began approaching the cluster of warriors. A dog raced up, barking furiously. Roosevelt ignored it, and when it saw that it had failed to intimidate them, it lay down in the dust with an almost human expression of disappointment on its face and watched the two men walk past.

The warriors began murmuring, softly at first, then louder, and someone began beating a primal rhythm on the drum.

“The Lado is looking better and better with every step we take,” commented Boyes under his breath.

“They’re just people, John,” Roosevelt assured him.

“With very unusual dietary habits,” muttered Boyes.

“If you’re worried, I can always have Yank act as my interpreter.”

“I’m not worried about dying,” answered Boyes. “I just don’t want to go down in the history books as the man who led Teddy Roosevelt into a Mangbetu cooking pot.”

Roosevelt chuckled. “If it happens, there won’t be any survivors to write about it. Now try to be a little more optimistic.” He looked ahead at the assembled Mangbetu. “What do you suppose would happen if we walked right up to the chief?”

“He’s got a couple of pretty mean-looking young bucks standing on each side of him,” noted Boyes. “I wish we had our rifles.”

“We won’t need them, John,” Roosevelt assured him. “I was always surrounded by the Secret Service when I was president—but they never interfered with my conduct of my office.”

They were close enough now to smell the various oils that the Mangbetu had rubbed onto their bodies, and to see some of the patterns that had been tattooed onto their faces and torsos.

“Just keep smiling,” answered Roosevelt. “We’re unarmed, and our men are keeping their distance.”

“Why do we have to smile?” asked Boyes.

“First, to show that we’re happy to see them,” said Roosevelt. “And second, to show them that we don’t file our teeth.”

The Mangbetu brandished their spears threateningly as Roosevelt reached them, but the old headman uttered a single command and they parted, allowing the two men a narrow path to the chief. When they got to within eight feet of him, however, four large bodyguards stepped forward and barred their way.

“John, tell him that I’m the king of America, and that I bring him greetings and felicitations.”

Boyes translated Roosevelt’s message. The chief stared impassively at him, and the four warriors did not relax their posture.

“Tell him that my country has no love for the Belgians.”

Boyes uttered something in Swahili, and suddenly the old man seemed to show some interest. He nodded his head and responded.

“He says he’s got no use for them either.”

Roosevelt’s smile broadened. “Tell him we’re going to be great friends.” Boyes spoke to the chief again. “He wants to know why.”

“Because I am going to bring him all the gifts of civilization, and I ask nothing in return except his friendship.”

Another brief exchange followed. “He wants to know where the gifts of civilization are.”

“Tell him they’re too big for our small party of men to carry, but they’re on their way.”

The chief listened, finally flashed Roosevelt a smile, and turned to Boyes.

“He says any enemy of the Belgians is a friend of his.”

Roosevelt stepped forward and extended his hand. The chief stared at it for a moment, then hesitantly held out his own. Roosevelt took it and shook it vigorously. Two of the old man’s bodyguards tensed and raised their spears again, but the chief said something to them and they immediately backed off.

“I think you startled them,” offered Boyes.

“A good politician always likes to press the flesh, as we say back home,” responded Roosevelt. “Tell him that we’re going to bring democracy to the Congo.”

“There’s no word for democracy in Swahili.”

“What’s the closest approximation?”

“There isn’t one.”

The chief suddenly began speaking. Boyes listened for a moment, then turned to Roosevelt.

“He suggests that our men leave their weapons behind and come join him in a feast celebrating our friendship.”

“What do you think?”

“Maybe he’s as friendly as he seems, but I don’t think it would be a good idea just yet.”

“All right,” responded Roosevelt, holding his hand up to his glasses as a breeze brought a cloud of dust with it. “Thank him, tell him that the men have already eaten, but that you and I accept his gracious invitation while our men guard the village against the approach of any Belgians.”

“He says there aren’t any Belgians in the area.”

“Tell him we didn’t see any either, but one can’t be too careful in these dangerous times, and that now that we are friends, our men are prepared to die defending his village from his Belgian oppressors.”

The chief seemed somewhat mollified, and nodded his acquiescence. “Did you ever drink pombe?” asked Boyes, as the chief arose and invited them into his hut.

“No,” said Roosevelt. “What is it?”

“A native beer.”

“You know I don’t imbibe stimulants, John.”

“Well, Mr. President, you’re going to have to learn how to imbibe very fast, or you’re going to offend our host.”

“Nonsense, John,” said Roosevelt. “This is a democracy. Every man is free to drink what he wants.”

“Since when did it become a democracy?” asked Boyes wryly.

“Since you and I were invited to partake in dinner, rather than constitute it,” said Roosevelt. “Now let’s go explain all the wonders we’re going to bring to the Congo.”

“Has it occurred to you that you ought to be speaking to the people about democracy, rather than to the hereditary chief?” suggested Boyes wryly.

“You’ve never seen me charm the opposition, John,” said Roosevelt with a confident smile. He walked to the door of the hut, then lowered his head and entered the darkened interior. “Give me three hours with him and he’ll be our biggest supporter.”

He was wrong. It only took ninety minutes.

V.

They spent the next two weeks marching deeper into Mangbetu territory. News of their arrival always preceded them, transmitted by huge, eight-foot drums, and their reception was always cordial, so much so that after the first four encounters Roosevelt allowed all of his men to enter the villages.

By their eighth day in Mangbetu country the remainder of their party had caught up with them, bringing enough horses so that all fifty-three men were mounted. Boyes assigned rotating shifts to construct camps, cook, and hunt for meat, and Roosevelt spent every spare minute trying to master Swahili. He forbade anyone to speak to him in English, and within two weeks he was able to make himself understood to the Mangbetu, although it was another month before he could discuss his visions of a democratic Congo without the aid of a translator.

“A wonderful people!” he exclaimed one night as he, Boyes, Charlie Ross and Billy Pickering sat by one of the campfires, after having enlisted yet another two thousand Mangbetu to their cause. “Clean, bright, willing to listen to new ideas. I have high hopes for our crusade, John.” Boyes threw a stone at a pair of hyenas that had been attracted by the smell of the impala they had eaten for dinner, and they raced off into the darkness, yelping and giggling.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Everything’s gone smoothly so far, but . . .”

“But what?”

“These people don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Mr. President,” said Boyes bluntly.

“I was going to mention that myself,” put in Charlie Ross.

“Certainly they do,” said Roosevelt. “I spent the entire afternoon with Matapoli—that was his name, wasn’t it?—and his Elders, explaining how we were going to bring democracy to the Congo. Didn’t you see how enthused they all were?”

“There’s still no word for democracy in Swahili,” answered Boyes. “They probably think it’s something to eat.”

“You underestimate them, John.”

“I’ve lived among blacks all my adult life,” replied Boyes. “If anything, I tend to over-estimate them.”

Roosevelt shook his head. “The problem is cultural, not racial. In America, we have many Negroes who have become doctors, lawyers, scientists, even politicians. There is nothing a white man can do that a Negro can’t do, given the proper training and opportunity.”

“Maybe American blacks,” said Billy Pickering. “But not Africans.” Roosevelt chuckled in amusement. “Just where do you think America’s Negroes came from, Mr. Pickering?”

“Not from the Congo, that’s for sure,” said Pickering adamantly. “Maybe West African blacks are different.”

“All men are pretty much the same, if they are given the same opportunities,” said Roosevelt.

“I disagree,” said Boyes. “I became the king of the Kikuyu, and you’re probably going to become president of the Congo. You don’t see any blacks becoming king or president of white countries, do you?”

“Give them time, John, and they will.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“You may not live to see it, and I may not,” said Roosevelt. “But one of these days it’s going to happen. Take my word for it.”

A lion coughed about a hundred yards away. Both men ignored it. “Well, you’re a very learned man, so if you say it’s going to happen, then I suppose it is,” said Boyes. “But I hope you’re also right that I’ll be dead and buried when that happy day occurs.”

“You know,” mused Roosevelt, “maybe I ought to urge some of our American Negroes to come over here. They could become the first generation of congressmen, so to speak.”

“A bunch of your freed slaves set up shop in Liberia a few years back,” noted Charlie Ross. “The first thing they did was to start rounding up all the native Liberians and sell them into slavery.” He snorted contemptuously. “Some democracy.”

“This will be different, Mr. Ross,” responded Roosevelt. “These will be educated American politicians, who also just happen to be Negroes.”

“Their heads would be decorating every village from here to the Sudan a week later,” said Pickering with absolute certainty.

“The Belgians may be oppressing the natives now,” added Boyes, “but as soon as they leave, it’ll be back to tribal warfare as usual.” He paused. “Your democracy is going to have exactly as many political parties as there are tribes, no more and no less, and no tribal member will ever vote for anyone other than a tribal brother.”

“Nonsense!” scoffed Roosevelt. “If that philosophy held true, I’d never have won a single vote outside of my home state of New York.”

“We’re not in America, Mr. President,” responded Boyes.

“I obviously have more faith in these people than you do, John.”

“Maybe that’s because I know them better.”

Suddenly Roosevelt grinned. “Well, it wouldn’t be any fun if it was too easy, would it?”

Boyes smiled wryly. “I think you’re in for a little more fun than you bargained for.”

“God put us here to meet challenges.”

“Oh,” said Charlie Ross. “I was wondering why He put us here.”

“That’s blasphemy, Mr. Ross,” said Roosevelt sternly. “I won’t hear any more of it.”

The men fell silent, and a few moments later, when the fire started dying down, Roosevelt went off to his tent to read.

“He’s biting off more than he can chew, John,” said Billy Pickering when the ex-president was out of earshot.

“Maybe,” said Boyes noncommittally.

“There’s no maybe about it,” said Pickering. “He hasn’t lived with Africans. We have. You know what they’re like.”

“There’s another problem, too, John,” added Ross.

“Oh?” said Boyes.

“I have a feeling he thinks of us as the Rough Riders, all in for the long haul. But the long rains are coming in a couple of months, and I’ve got to get my ivory to Mombasa before then. So do a lot of the others.”

“You’re making a big mistake, Charlie,” said Boyes. “He’s offering us a whole country. There’s not just ivory here; there’s gold and silver and copper as well, and somebody is going to have to administer it. If you leave now, we may not let you come back.”

“You’d stop me?” asked Ross, amused.

“I’ve got no use for deserters,” answered Boyes seriously.

“I never signed any enlistment papers. How can I be a deserter?”

“You can be a deserter by leaving the president when he needs every man he can get.”

“Look, John,” said Ross. “If I thought there was one chance in a hundred that he could pull this off, I’d stay, no question about it. But we’ve all managed to accumulate some ivory, and we’ve had a fine time together, and we haven’t had to fight the Belgians yet. Maybe it’s time to think about pulling out, while we’re still ahead of the game.”

Boyes shook his head. “He’s a great man, Charlie, and he’s capable of great things.”

“Even if he does what he says he’s going to do, do you really want to live in the Congo forever?”

“I’ll live anywhere the pickings are easy,” answered Boyes. “And if you’re smart, so will you.”

“I’ll have to think about it, John,” said Ross, getting up and heading off toward his tent.

“How about you, Billy?” asked Boyes.

“I came here for just one reason,” answered Pickering. “To kill Belgians. We haven’t seen any yet, so I guess I’ll stick around a little longer.” Then he, too, got up and walked away.

The little Yorkshireman remained by the dying embers for a few more minutes, wondering just how much time Roosevelt had before everything fell apart.

VI.

Two months into what Roosevelt termed their “bully undertaking” they finally ran into some organized resistance. To nobody’s great surprise, it came not from the various tribes they had been enlisting in their project, but from the Belgian colonial government.

Despite the imminent arrival of the long rains, Roosevelt’s entire party was still in the Congo, due mostly to the threats, pleadings, and promises of riches that Boyes had made when the ex-president was out of earshot.

They had made their way through a dense forest and were now camped by a winding, crocodile-infested river. A dozen of the men were out hunting for ivory, and Pickering was scouting about thirty miles to the west with a Mangbetu guide, seeking a location for their next campsite. Three more members of the party were visiting large Mangbetu villages, scheduling visits from the “king of America” and arranging for word to be passed to the leaders of the smaller villages, most of whom wanted to come and listen to him speak of the wonders he planned to bring to the Congo.

Roosevelt was sitting on a canvas chair in front of his tent, his binoculars hung around his neck and a sheaf of papers laid out on a table before him, editing what he had written that morning, when Yank Rogers, clad in his trademark stovepipe chaps and cowboy stetson, approached him.

“We got company, Teddy,” he announced in his gentle Texas drawl. “Oh?”

Rogers nodded. “Belgians—and they look like they’re ready to declare war before lunch.”

“Mr. Pickering will be heartbroken when he finds out,” remarked Roosevelt wryly. He wiped some sweat from his face with a handkerchief. “Send them away, and tell them we’ll only speak to the man in charge.”

“In charge of what?” asked Rogers, puzzled.

“The Congo,” answered Roosevelt. “We’re going to have to meet him sooner or later. Why should we march all the way to Stanleyville?”

“What if they insist?”

“How big is their party?” asked Roosevelt.

“One guy in a suit, six in uniforms,” said Rogers.

“Take twenty of our men with you, and make sure they’re all carrying their rifles. The Belgians won’t insist.”

“Right, Teddy.”

“Oh, and Yank?”

The American stopped. “Yes?”

“Tell Mr. Boyes not to remove their wallets before they leave.”

Rogers grinned. “That little bastard could find an angle on a baseball. You know he’s taking 10 percent off the top on all the ivory our men shoot?”

“No, I didn’t know. Has anyone objected?”

“Not since he went up against Big Bill Buckley and gave him a whipping,” laughed Rogers. “I think he’s got notions of taking a percentage of every tusk that’s shipped out of the Congo from now till Doomsday.” He paused. “Well, I’d better round up a posse and go have a pow-wow with our visitors.”

“Do that,” said Roosevelt, spotting an insect that was crawling across his papers and flicking it to the ground. “And send Mr. Boyes over here. I think I’d better have a talk with him.”

“If you’re going to fight him, I think I can get three-to-one on you,” said Rogers. “The rest of ’em never saw you take out that machine gun nest single-handed at San Juan Hill; I did. Want me to put a little something down for you, Teddy?”

Roosevelt chuckled at the thought. “Maybe a pound or two, if it comes to that. Which,” he added seriously, “it won’t.”

Rogers went off to gather some of the men, and a few minutes later Boyes approached Roosevelt’s tent.

“You wanted to see me, Mr. President?” he asked.

“Yes, I did, John.”

“Is it anything to do with the Belgians? Yank Rogers said you were sending them away.”

“They’ll be back,” said Roosevelt, wiping his face once again and wondering if he’d ever experienced this much humidity anywhere in America. “Pull up a chair, John.”

Boyes did so, and sat down opposite Roosevelt.

“John, Yank tells me that you’ve got a healthy little business going on here.”

“You mean the ivory?” asked Boyes, making no attempt to conceal it. Roosevelt nodded. “We’re not here to get rich, John. We’re here to turn the Congo into a democracy.”

“There’s no law against doing both,” said Boyes.

“I strongly disapprove of it, John. It’s profiteering.”

“I’m not making a single shilling off the natives, Mr. President,” protested Boyes. “How can that be profiteering?”

“You’re making it off our own people,” said Roosevelt. “That’s just as bad.”

“I was afraid you were going to look at it like that,” said Boyes with a sigh. “Look, Mr. President, we’re all for civilizing the Congo—but we’re grown men, and we’ve got to make a living. Now, for most of them, that means ivory hunting when we’re not busy befriending the natives. Believe me when I tell you that if you were to forbid it, 80 percent of the men would leave.”

“I believe you, John,” said Roosevelt. “And I haven’t stopped them from hunting ivory whenever they’ve had the time.”

“Well, I haven’t got any spare time, between running the camp and acting as your second-in-command,” continued Boyes, “so if I’m to make any money, it can’t be by spending long days in the bush, hunting for ivory. So unless you see fit to pay me a salary, this seems like the most reasonable way of earning some money. It doesn’t cost you anything, it doesn’t cost the natives anything, and every one of our men knew the conditions before they signed on.”

Roosevelt considered Boyes’ argument for a moment, then nodded his consent.

“All right, John. Far be it from me to stand in the way of a entrepreneur.” He paused for a moment. “But I want you to promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“You’ll let me know before you indulge in any other plans to get rich.”

“Oh, I’m never without plans, Mr. President,” Boyes assured him. “Would you care to confide in me, then?”

“Why not?” replied Boyes with a shrug. “I’ve got nothing to hide.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Once you start putting your railroad through here, you’re going to need about ten thousand laborers. Now, I don’t know if you’re going to draft some workers from the local tribes, or hire a bunch of coolies from British East, or import all your labor from America—but I do know that ten thousand men eat a lot of food. I thought I’d set up a little trading company to deal with some of the tribes; you know, give them things they want in exchange for bags of flour and other edibles.” He paused. “It’ll be the same thing I did with the Kikuyu when they built the Lunatic Line, and I kept 25,000 coolies fed for the better part of two years.”

“I don’t want you fleecing the same people we’re trying to befriend,” said Roosevelt. “We’re here to liberate this country, not plunder it.”

“If they don’t like what I have to trade, they don’t have to part with their goods,” said Boyes. “And if they do like it, I’ll undersell any competitor by 50 percent, which will save your fledgling treasury a lot of money.”

Roosevelt stared at him for a long moment.

“Well?” said Boyes at last.

“John, if you can save us that much money without cheating the natives, get as rich as you like.”

Boyes smiled. “I don’t mind if I do, Mr. President.”

“You’re a remarkable man, John.”

Boyes shook his head. “I’m just a skinny little guy who had to learn to use his head to survive with all these brawny white hunters.”

“I understand you gave one of them quite a lesson in fisticuffs,” remarked Roosevelt.

“You mean Buckley? I had no choice in the matter,” answered Boyes. “If I’d let him get away with it, by next week they’d all be backing out on their bargain.” Suddenly he smiled again. “I gave him a bottle of gin and helped him finish it, and by the next morning we were good friends again.”

“You’re in the wrong profession, John,” said Roosevelt. “You should have been a politician.”

“Not enough money in it,” answered Boyes bluntly. “But while we’re on the subject of politics, why did we run the Belgians off? Sooner or later we’re going to have to deal with them.”

“It’s simply a matter of practicality,” answered Roosevelt. “I think we gave them enough of an insult that the governor of the Congo will have to come here in person to prove that we can’t get away with such behavior—and the sooner we meet with him, the sooner we can present our demands.”

“What, exactly, do we plan to demand?”

“We’re going to demand their complete withdrawal from the Congo, and we’re going to stipulate that they must make a public statement in the world press that they no longer have any colonial ambitions in Africa.”

“You’re not asking for much, are you?” said Boyes sardonically.

“The Belgians have no use for it, and it costs them a fortune to administer it.” Roosevelt paused. “King Albert can go find another hunting reserve. We’ve got a nation to build here.”

Boyes laughed in amusement. “And you think they’re going to turn it over to a force of fifty-three men?”

“Certainly not,” said Roosevelt. “They’re going to turn it over to the natives who live here.”

Boyes stared intently at Roosevelt. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“That is what we’ve come here for, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but—”

“We have a job to do, John, and time is the one irreplaceable commodity in this world. We can’t afford to waste it.”

“Are you sure you’re not being a little premature about this, Mr. President?” asked Boyes. “I thought we’d spend a year building a native army, and—”

“We can’t win a war with the Belgians, John.”

“Then what kind of pressure can you bring to bear on them?” asked Boyes, puzzled.

“We can threaten to lose a war with them.”

Boyes frowned. “I don’t think I quite understand, sir.”

“You will, John,” said Roosevelt confidently. “You will.”

VII.

It took the Assistant Governor of the Congo exactly seven weeks to hear of Roosevelt’s summary dismissal of his district representative and to trek from Stanleyville to the American’s base camp, by which time the rains had come and gone and the ex-president had enlisted not only the entire Mangbetu nation to his cause, but seven lesser tribes as well.

Word of the Belgians’ impending arrival reached camp a full week before they actually showed up—“God, I love those drums!” was Roosevelt’s only comment—and Yank Rogers and the Brittlebanks brothers were sent out to greet the party and escort them back to camp.

Roosevelt ordered Boyes to send five of their men out on a two-week hunting expedition. When the little Yorkshireman asked what they were supposed to be hunting for, Roosevelt replied that he didn’t much care, as long as they were totally out of communication for at least fourteen days. Boyes shrugged, scratched his head, and finally selected five of his companions at random and suggested they do a little ivory hunting far to the south for the next two weeks. Since they had virtually shot out the immediate area, he received no objections.

When the Belgian party finally reached the camp, Roosevelt was waiting for them. He had had his men construct a huge table, some thirty feet long and five feet wide, and the moment they dismounted he invited them to join him and his men for lunch. The Assistant Governor, a tall, lean, ambitious man named Gerard Silva, seemed somewhat taken aback by the American’s hospitality, but allowed himself and his twenty armed soldiers to be escorted to the table, where a truly magnificent feast of warthog, bushbuck, and guinea fowl awaited them.

Roosevelt’s men, such as could fit on one side of the table, sat facing the west, and the Belgian soldiers were seated opposite them. The American sat at the head of the table, and Silva sat at the foot of it, thirty feet away. Under such an arrangement, private discussion between the two leaders was impossible, and Roosevelt encouraged his men to discuss their hunting and exploring adventures, though not more than half a dozen of the Belgian soldiers could speak or understand English.

Finally, after almost two hours, the meal was concluded, and Roosevelt’s men—except for Boyes—left the table one by one. Silva nodded to a young lieutenant, and the Belgian soldiers followed suit, clustering awkwardly around their horses. Then Silva stood up, walked down to Roosevelt’s end of the table, and seated himself next to the American.

“I hope you enjoyed your meal, Mr. Silva,” said Roosevelt, sipping a cup of tea.

“It was quite excellent, Mr. . . .?” Silva paused. “What would you prefer that I call you?”

“Colonel Roosevelt, Mr. Roosevelt, or Mr. President, as you prefer,” said Roosevelt expansively.

“It was an excellent meal, Mr. Roosevelt,” said Silva in precise, heavily accented English. He withdrew a cigar and offered one to Roosevelt, who refused it. “A wise decision,” he said. “The tobacco we grow here is decidedly inferior.”

“You must be anxious to return to Belgium, then,” suggested Roosevelt.

“As you must be anxious to return to America,” responded Silva.

“Actually, I like it here,” said Roosevelt. “But then, I don’t smoke.”

“A nasty habit,” admitted Silva. “But then, so is trespassing.”

“Am I trespassing?” asked Roosevelt innocently.

“Do not be coy with me, Mr. Roosevelt,” said Silva. “It is most unbecoming. You have brought a force of men into Belgian territory for reasons that have not been made clear to us. You have no hunting permit, no visa, no permission to be here at all.”

“Are you telling us to leave?”

“I am simply trying to discover your purpose here,” said Silva. “If you have come solely for sport, I will personally present you with papers that will allow you to go anywhere you wish within the Congo. If you have come for some other reason, I demand to know what it is.”

“I would rather discuss that with the governor himself,” responded Roosevelt.

“He is quite ill with malaria, and may not be able to leave Stanleyville for another month.”

Roosevelt considered the statement for a moment, then shook his head. “No, we’ve wasted enough time already. I suppose you’ll simply have to take my message to him.” He paused. “I suppose it doesn’t make much difference. The only thing he’ll do is transmit my message to King Albert.”

“And what is the gist of your message, Mr. Roosevelt?” asked Silva, leaning forward intently.

“My men and I don’t consider ourselves to be in Belgian territory.” Silva smiled humorlessly. “Perhaps you would like me to pinpoint your position on a map. You are indeed within the legal boundaries of the Belgian Congo.”

“We know where we are, and we fully agree that we are inside the border of the Congo,” answered Roosevelt. “But we don’t recognize your authority here.”

“Here? You mean right where we are sitting?”

“I mean anywhere in the Congo.”

“The Congo is Belgian territory, Mr. Roosevelt.”

Roosevelt shook his head. “The Congo belongs to its inhabitants. It’s time they began determining their own future.”

“That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” said Silva. “It has been acknowledged by all the great powers that the Congo is our colony.”

“All but one,” said Roosevelt.

“America acknowledges our right to the Congo.”

“America has a history of opposing imperialism wherever we find it,” replied Roosevelt. “We threw the British out of our own country, and we’re fully prepared to throw the Belgians out of the Congo.”

“Just as, when you were president, you threw the Panamanians out of Panama?” asked Silva sardonically.

“America has no imperial claim to Panama. The Panamanians have their own government and we recognize it.” Roosevelt paused. “However, we’re not talking about Panama, but about the Congo.”

Silva stared at Roosevelt. “For whom do you speak, Mr. Roosevelt?” asked Silva. “You are no longer president, so surely you do not speak for America.”

“I speak for the citizens of the Congo.”

Silva laughed contemptuously. “They are a bunch of savages who have no interest whatsoever in who rules them.”

“Would you care to put that to a vote?” asked Roosevelt with a smile. “So they vote now?”

“Not yet,” answered Roosevelt. “But they will as soon as they are free to do so.”

“And who will set them free?”

“We will,” interjected Boyes from his seat halfway down the table. “You will?” repeated Silva, turning to face Boyes. “I’ve heard about you, John Boyes. You have been in trouble with every government from South Africa to Abyssinia.”

“I don’t get along well with colonial governments,” replied Boyes. “You don’t get along well with native governments, either,” said Silva. He turned to Roosevelt. “Did you know that your companion talked the ignorant natives who proclaimed him their king into selling him Mount Kenya for the enormous price of four goats?”

“Six,” Boyes corrected him with a smile. “I wouldn’t want it said that I was cheap.”

“This is ridiculous!” said Silva in exasperation. “I cannot believe I am hearing this! Do you really propose to conquer the Belgian Congo with a force of fifty-three men?”

“Absolutely not,” said Roosevelt pleasantly.

“Well, then?”

“First,” said Roosevelt, “it is the Congo, not the Belgian Congo. Second, we don’t propose to conquer it, but to liberate it. And third, your intelligence is wrong. There are only forty-eight men in my party.”

“Forty-eight, fifty-three—what is the difference?”

“Oh, there is a difference, Mr. Silva,” said Roosevelt. He paused. “The other five are halfway to Nairobi by now.”

“What do they propose to do once they get there?” asked Silva suspiciously.

“They propose to tell the American press that Teddy Roosevelt—who is, in all immodesty, the most popular and influential American of the past half century—is under military attack by the Belgian government. His brave little force is standing firm, but he can’t hold out much longer without help, and if he should die while trying to free the citizens of the Congo from the yoke of Belgian tyranny, he wants America to know that he died at the hands of King Albert, who, I believe, has more than enough problems in Europe without adding this to his burden.”

“You are mad!” exclaimed Silva. “Do you really think anyone will care what happens here?”

“That is probably just what the Mahdi said to Chinese Gordon at the fall of Khartoum,” said Roosevelt easily. “Read your history books and you’ll see what happened when the British people learned of his death.”

“You are bluffing!”

“You are welcome to think so,” replied Roosevelt calmly. “But in two months’ time, fifty thousand Americans will be standing in line to fight at my side in the Congo—and if you kill me, you can multiply that number by one hundred, and most of them will want to take the battle right to Belgium.”

“This is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard!” exclaimed Silva.

Roosevelt reached into a pocket of his hunting jacket and pulled out a thick, official-looking document he had written the previous day.

“It’s all here in black and white, Mr. Silva. I suggest that you deliver it to your superior as quickly as possible, because he’ll want to send it on to Belgium, and I know how long these things take.” He paused. “We’d like you out of the Congo in six months, so you can see that there’s no time to waste.”

“We are going nowhere!”

Roosevelt sighed deeply. “I’m afraid you are up against an historic inevitability,” he said. “You have twenty armed men. I have forty-seven, not counting myself. It would be suicidal for you to attack us here and now, and by the time you return from Stanleyville, I’ll have a force of more than thirty thousand Mangbetu plus a number of other tribes, who will not be denied their independence any longer.”

“My men are a trained military force,” said Silva. “Yours are a ragtag band of outcasts and poachers.”

“But good shots,” said Roosevelt with a confident grin. He paused again and the grin vanished. “Besides, if you succeed in killing me, you’ll be the man who precipitated a war with the United States. Are you quite certain you want that responsibility?”

Silva was silent for a moment. Finally he spoke.

“I will return to Stanleyville,” he announced. “But I will be back. This I promise you.”

“We won’t be here,” answered Roosevelt.

“Where will you be?”

“I have no idea—but I have every intention of remaining alive until news of what’s happening here gets back to America.” Roosevelt paused and smiled. “The Congo is a large country, Mr. Silva. I plan to make many more friends here while awaiting Belgium’s decision.”

Silva got abruptly to his feet. “With this paper,” he said, holding up the document, “you have signed not only your own death warrant, but the death warrant of every man who follows you.”

Boyes laughed from his position halfway down the table. “Do you know how many death warrants have been issued on me? I’ll just add this one to my collection.” He paused, amused. “I’ve never had one written in French before.”

“You are both mad!” snapped Silva, stalking off toward his men.

Roosevelt watched the assistant governor mount his horse and gallop off, followed by his twenty soldiers.

“I suppose we should have invited him to stay for dinner,” he remarked pleasantly.

“You don’t really think this is going to work, do you?” asked Boyes.

“Certainly.”

“It’s a lot of fancy talk, but it boils down to the fact that we’re still only fifty-three men,” said Boyes. “You’ll never get the natives to go to war with the Belgians. They haven’t any guns, and even if they did, we can’t prepare them to fight a modern war in just six months’ time.”

“John, you know Africa and you know hunting,” answered Roosevelt seriously, “but I know politics and I know history. The Congo is an embarrassment to the Belgians; Leopold wasted so much money here that his own government took it away from him two years ago. Furthermore, Europe is heading hell-for-leather for a war such as it has never seen before. The last thing they need is a battle with America over a piece of territory they didn’t really want to begin with.”

“They must want it or they wouldn’t be here,” said Boyes stubbornly.

Roosevelt shook his head. “They just didn’t want anyone else to have it. When Africa was divided among the great powers in 1885, Belgium would have lost face if it hadn’t insisted on its right to colonize the Congo, but it’s been an expensive investment that has been a financial drain and a political embarrassment for more than two decades.” He paused. “And what I said about General Gordon was true. He refused to leave Khartoum, and his death eventually forced the British government to take over the Sudan when the public demanded that they avenge him.” Suddenly Roosevelt grinned. “A lot more people voted for me than ever even heard of Gordon. Believe me, John, the Belgian government will bluster and threaten for a month or two, and then they’ll start negotiating.”

“Well, it all sounds logical,” said Boyes. “But I still can’t believe that a force of fifty-three men can take over an entire country. It’s just not possible.”

“Once and for all, John, we are not a force of fifty-three men,” said Roosevelt. “We are a potential force of a million outraged Americans.”

“So you keep saying. But still—”

“John, I trust you implicitly when we’re stalking an elephant or a lion. Try to have an equal degree of trust in me when we’re doing what I do best.”

“I wish I could,” said Boyes. “But it just can’t be this easy.”

On December 3, 1910, five months and twenty-seven days after receiving Roosevelt’s demands, the Belgian government officially relinquished all claims to the Congo, and began withdrawing their nationals.

VIII.

“Damn that Taft!”

Roosevelt crumpled the telegram, which had been delivered by runner from Stanleyville, in his massive hand and threw it to the ground. The sound of his angry, high-pitched voice combined with the violence of his gesture frightened a number of birds that had been searching for insects on the sprawling lawn, and they flew, squawking and screeching, to sanctuary in a cluster of nearby trees.

“Bad news, Mr. President?” asked Boyes.

They were staying at the house of M. Beauregard de Vincennes, a French plantation owner, some fifteen miles west of Stanleyville, on the shores of the Congo River. Three dozen of Roosevelt’s men were camped out on the grounds, while the remainder were alternately hunting ivory and preparing the Lulua and Baluba, two of the major tribes in the area, for visits from Roosevelt himself.

“The man has no gratitude, no gratitude at all!” snapped Roosevelt. “I gave him the presidency, handed it to him as a gift, and now I’ve offered to give him a foothold in Africa as well, and he has the unmitigated gall to tell me that he can’t afford to send me the men and the money I’ve requested!”

“Is he sending anything at all?” asked Boyes.

“I requested ten thousand men, and he’s sending six hundred!” said Roosevelt furiously. “I told him I needed at least twenty million dollars to build roads and extend the railroad from Uganda, and he’s offered three million. Three million dollars for a country a third the size of the United States! Damn the man! J. P. Morgan may be a scoundrel and a brigand, but he would recognize an opportunity like this and pounce on it, I’ll guarantee you that!” He paused and suddenly nodded his head vigorously. “By God, that’s what I’ll do! I’ll wire Morgan this afternoon!”

“I thought he was your mortal enemy,” remarked Boyes. “At least, that’s the way it sounds whenever you mention him.”

“Nonsense!” said Roosevelt. “We were on different sides of the political fence, but he’s a competent man, which is more than I can say for the idiot sitting in the White House.” Roosevelt grinned. “And he loves railroads. Yes, I’ll wire him this afternoon.”

“Are we refusing President Taft’s offer, then?”

“Certainly not. We need all the manpower and money we can get. I’ll wire our acceptance, and send off some telegrams to a few sympathetic newspaper publishers telling them what short shrift we’re getting from Washington. I can’t put any more pressure on Taft from here, but perhaps they can.” Roosevelt shook his head sadly. “It serves me right for putting a fool in the White House. I tell you, John, if I didn’t have a job to do right here, I’d go back to the States and take the nomination away from him in 1912. The man doesn’t deserve to run a second time.”

Roosevelt ranted against the “fat fool” in the White House for another fifteen minutes, then retired to his room to draft his telegrams. When he emerged an hour later for lunch, he was once again his usual pleasant, vigorous, optimistic self. Boyes, Bill Buckley, Mickey Norton, Yank Rogers, and Deaf Banks were sitting at a table beneath an ancient tree, and all of them except Banks, who hadn’t heard the ex-president’s approach, stood up as he joined them.

“Please be seated, gentlemen,” said Roosevelt, pulling up a chair. “What’s on the menu for this afternoon?”

“Salad and cold guinea hen in some kind of sauce,” answered Norton. “Or that’s what Madame Vincennes told me, anyway.”

“I love guinea fowl,” enthused Roosevelt. “That will be just bully!” He paused. “Good people, Monsieur and Madame Vincennes. I’m delighted that they offered to be our hosts.” He paused. “This is much more pleasant than being cooped up in those airless little government buildings in Stanleyville.”

“I hear we got some bad news from your pal Bill Taft,” ventured Rogers. “It’s all taken care of,” answered Roosevelt, confidently tapping the pocket that held his telegrams. “The men he’s sending will arrive during the rainy season, anyway—and by the time the rains are over, we’ll have more than enough manpower.” He looked around the table. “It’s time we considered some more immediate problems, gentlemen.”

“What problems did you have in mind, sir?” asked Buckley, as six black servants approached the table, bearing trays of salad and drinks. “We’ve had this country for two months now,” answered Roosevelt.

“It’s time we began doing something with it—besides decimating its elephant population, that is,” he added harshly.

“Well, we could decimate the Belgians that have stayed behind,” said Buckley with an amused smile. “Billy Pickering would like that.”

“I’m being serious, Mr. Buckley,” said Roosevelt, taking a small crust of bread from his plate and tossing it to a nearby starling, which immediately picked it up and pranced off with it. “What’s the purpose of making the Belgians leave if we don’t improve the lot of the inhabitants? Everywhere we’ve gone we’ve promised to bring the benefits of democracy to the Congo. I think it’s time we started delivering on that promise. The people deserve no less.”

“Boy!” said Norton to one of the servants. “This coffee’s cold. Go heat it up.”

The servant nodded, bowed, put the coffee pot back on the tray, and walked toward the kitchen building.

“I don’t know how you’re going to civilize them when they can’t remember from one day to the next that coffee’s supposed to be served hot and not warm,” said Norton. “And look at the way he’s loafing: it could be hot when he gets it and cold by the time he brings it here.”

“The natives don’t drink coffee, so it can hardly be considered important to them,” answered Roosevelt.

“They don’t vote, or hold trial by jury, either,” offered Buckley.

“Well, if we’re to introduce them to the amenities of civilization, I think that voting and jury trials come well ahead of coffee drinking, Mr. Buckley.”

“They can’t even read,” said Buckley. “How are you going to teach them to vote?”

“I plan to set up a public school system throughout the country,” said Roosevelt. “The Belgian missionaries made a start, but they were undermanned and under-financed. In my pocket is a telegram that will appear in more than a thousand American newspapers, an open appeal to teachers and missionaries to come to the Congo and help educate the populace.”

“That could take years, sir,” noted Boyes.

“Ten at the most,” answered Roosevelt confidently.

“How will you pay ’em, Teddy?” asked Rogers. “Hell, you can’t even pay us.”

“The missionaries will be paid by their churches, of course,” said Roosevelt. “As for the teachers, I suppose we’ll have to pay them with land initially.”

“That might not sit too well with the people whose land we’re giving away,” noted Rogers.

“Yank, if there’s one thing the Congo abounds in, besides insects and humidity, it’s land.”

“You say it’ll take ten years to educate them,” continued Rogers. “How will you hold elections in the meantime?”

“By voice,” answered Roosevelt. “Every man and woman will enter the polling place and state his or her preference. As a matter of fact, there will probably be a lot less vote fraud that way.”

“Did I hear you say that women are going to vote too, Teddy?” asked Yank Rogers.

“They’re citizens of the Congo, aren’t they?”

“But they don’t even vote back home!”

“That’s going to change,” said Roosevelt firmly. “Our founding fathers were wrong not to give women the right to vote, and there’s no reason to make the same mistake here. They’re human beings, the same as us, and they deserve the same rights and privileges.” Suddenly he grinned. “I pity the man who has to tell my Alice that she can’t cast her vote at the polls. There won’t be enough of him left to bury!”

“You know, we could raise money with a hut tax,” suggested Buckley. “That’s what the British have done wherever they’ve had an African colony.”

“A hut tax?” asked Roosevelt.

Buckley nodded. “Tax every native ten or twenty shillings a year for each hut he erects. It not only raises money for the treasury, but it forces them to be something more than subsistence farmers, since they need money to pay the tax.”

Roosevelt shook his head adamantly. “We’re supposed to be freeing them, Mr. Buckley, not enslaving them.”

“Besides,” added Boyes, “it never worked that well in British East. If they didn’t pay their hut tax, the government threw them into jail.” He turned to Roosevelt and smiled. “You know what the Kikuyu and Wakamba called the jail in Nairobi? The King George Hotel. It was the only place they knew of where they could get three square meals a day and a free roof over their heads.” He chuckled at the memory. “Once word of it got out, they were lining up to get thrown in jail.”

“Well, there will be no such attempt to exploit the natives of the Congo,” said Roosevelt. “We must always remember that this is their country and that our duty is to teach them the ways of democracy.”

“That may be easier said than done,” said Rogers.

“Why should you think so, Yank?” asked Roosevelt.

“Democracy’s a pretty alien concept to them,” answered Rogers. “It’s going to take some getting used to.”

“It was an alien concept to young Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, too,” said Roosevelt, “but they seem to have adapted to it readily enough. It’s never difficult to get used to freedom.”

“We ain’t talking freedom, Teddy,” said Rogers. “They were free for thousands of years before the Belgians showed up, but they ain’t never had a democracy. Their tribes are ruled by chiefs and witch doctors, not congressmen.”

“And now that the Belgians are clearing out,” added Norton, “our biggest problem is going to be to stop them from killing each other long enough to get to the polls.”

“All of you keep predicting the most dire consequences,” said Roosevelt irritably, “and yet you ignore the enormous strides the American Negro has taken since the Emancipation Proclamation. I tell you, gentlemen, that freedom has no color and democracy is not the special province of one race.”

Boyes smiled, and Buckley turned to him.

“What are you looking so amused about, John? You’ve been here long enough to know everything we’ve said is the truth.”

“You all think you’re discouraging Mr. Roosevelt, and that if you tell him enough stories about how savage the natives are, maybe you’ll convince him to join you long enough to kill every last elephant in the Congo and then go back to Nairobi.” Boyes paused. “But I know him a little better than you do, and if there’s one thing he can’t resist, it’s a challenge.” He turned to Roosevelt. “Am I right, sir?”

Roosevelt grinned back at him. “Absolutely, Mr. Boyes.” He looked around at his companions. “Gentlemen,” he announced, “I’ve heard enough doomsaying for one day. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.”

IX.

Roosevelt stared at his image in the full-length ornate gilt mirror that adorned the parlor of the state house at Stanleyville, and adjusted the tie of his morning suit.

“Good thing that little German tailor decided not to leave,” he remarked to Boyes, who was similarly clad, “or we’d be conducting matters of state in our safari clothes.”

“I’d be a damned sight more comfortable in them,” replied Boyes, checking his appearance in the mirror, and deciding that his hair needed more combing.

“Nonsense, John,” said Roosevelt. “We’ve got reporters and photographers from all over the world here.”

“Personally, I’d much rather face a charging elephant,” said Boyes, looking out the window. “I don’t like crowds.”

Roosevelt smiled. “I’d forgotten just how much I miss them.” He put on his top hat and walked to the door. “Well, we might as well begin.”

Boyes, unhappy and uncomfortable, and feeling quite naked without his pistol and rifle, followed the American out the front door to the raised wooden platform that had been constructed in front of the state house the previous day. The press was there, as Roosevelt had said: reporters and photographers from America, Belgium, England, France, Italy, Portugal, Kenya, and even a pair of Orientals had made the long, arduous trek to Stanleyville to hear this speech and record the moment for posterity. Seated on the front row of chairs, in a section reserved for VIPs and dignitaries, were the paramount chiefs of the Mangbetu, the Simba, the Mongo, the Luba, the Bwaka, the Zande, and the Kongo (which centuries ago had given the country its name). There was even a pair of pygmy chiefs, one of whom was completely naked except for a loincloth, a pair of earrings, and a necklace made of leopards’ claws, while the other wore a suit that could have been tailored on Saville Row.

The crowd, some six hundred strong, and divided almost equally between whites and black Africans, immediately ceased its chattering when Roosevelt mounted the platform and waited in polite expectation while he walked to a podium and pulled some notes out of his pocket.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I thank you for your attendance and patience. I realize that, with our transportation system not yet constructed, you may have had some slight difficulty in reaching Stanleyville—” he paused for the good-natured laughter that he knew would follow “—but you’re here now, and we’re delighted to have you as the guests of our new nation.”

He paused, pulled a brand-new handkerchief out of his pocket, and wiped away the sweat that had begun pouring down his face.

“We are here to proclaim the sovereignty of this beautiful land. Some years ago it was known as the Congo Free State. At the time, that was a misnomer, for it was anything but free. Today it is no longer a misnomer, and so it shall once again be known as the Congo Free State, an independent nation dedicated to the preservation of human dignity and the celebration of human endeavor.”

A pair of blue touracos began shrieking in a nearby tree, and he smiled and waited a few seconds until the noise had subsided.

“What’s past is past,” he continued, “and the Congo Free State begins life with a clean slate. It bears no rancor toward any person or any nation that may have exploited its resources and its people in the past. But—” and here Roosevelt’s chin jutted out pugnaciously “—this land will never be plundered or exploited again.” He stared darkly out at his audience. “Never again will a privileged minority impose its will upon the majority. Never again will one tribe bear arms against another. Never again will women do most of the work and reap none of the benefits. And never again will the dreadful specters of ignorance, poverty, and disease run rampant in what Henry Stanley termed Darkest Africa.” He raised his voice dramatically. “From this day forward, we shall illuminate the Congo Free State with the light of democracy, and turn it into the exemplar of Brightest Africa!”

Roosevelt paused long enough for his words to be translated, then smiled and nodded as the row of chiefs rose to their feet and cheered wildly, followed, somewhat less enthusiastically, by the Europeans.

“Thank you, my friends,” he continued when the chiefs finally sat down. “We who have been fortunate enough to help in the birth of the Congo Free State have great plans for its future.” He smiled triumphantly. “Great plans, indeed!” he repeated emphatically.

“Within two years, we will extend the East African Railway from its present terminus in Uganda all the way to Stanleyville, and within another year to Leopoldville. This will give us access to the Indian Ocean, as the Congo River gives us access to the Atlantic, and with the modern farming methods we plan to introduce, we will shortly be shipping exports in great quantity to both coasts.”

There was more applause, a little less rabid this time, as most of the chiefs had only the haziest understanding of an economy that extended beyond their own tribes.

“We will construct public schools throughout the country,” Roosevelt added. “Our goal is nothing less than 100 percent literacy by the year 1930.”

This time the applause came only from the chiefs, as the whites in the audience looked openly skeptical.

“We will soon begin the construction of modern hospitals in every major city in the Congo Free State,” continued Roosevelt, “and no citizen shall ever again want for medical care. American engineers will build dams the length of the Congo River, so that we can generate all the electricity that a modern nation will need. While leaving vast tracts of land untouched as national parks and game reserves, we will nonetheless crisscross the country with a network of roads, so that no village, no matter how remote, remains inaccessible.”

He paused and glared at the disbelieving white faces in his audience.

“We will do everything I have said,” he concluded. “And we will do it sooner than you think!”

The assembled chiefs began cheering and jumping around in their enthusiasm and the remainder of the audience, sensing that he had concluded the major part of his address, applauded politely.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, if you will all rise, we will, for the very first time, raise the flag of the Congo Free State.” He turned to Boyes. “Mr. Boyes?”

Boyes withdrew the folded flag that he had been carrying inside his morning coat, waited for an honor guard of khaki-clad native soldiers to approach, and solemnly handed the flag over to their leader. The soldiers then marched to a recently erected flagpole near the platform, and began raising a banner that depicted the colorful shields of twenty of the major tribes arranged in a pattern on a field of green, while Yank Rogers, who had been unable to create a national anthem on two days’ notice, played a-military march on his ancient bugle. Roosevelt stood at attention and saluted, Boyes and the chiefs followed suit, and the reporters, politicians, and dignitaries were quick to rise to their feet as well.

When the flag had been raised and the rope secured at the base of the flagpole, Roosevelt faced the crowd once more.

“I have been selected, by the unanimous consent of the tribes that are represented here today, to draft and implement a democratic constitution for the Congo Free State. During this time I shall hold the office of Chief Administrator, an office that will be abolished when the first national election is held one year from today. At that time all the people of the Congo Free State, regardless of race or gender, will choose their own president and legislature, and their destiny will finally be in their own hands.”

He stared out at the audience.

“I thank you for your attendance at this historic ceremony. Lunch will be provided for everyone on the lawn, and I will be available for interviews throughout the afternoon.”

He climbed down from the platform to one last round of applause, finally allowed them a look at the famed Roosevelt grin, waited for Boyes to join him, and disappeared into the interior of the state house.

“How was I, John?” he asked anxiously.

“I thought you were excellent, Mr. President,” answered Boyes truthfully.

“Mr. Chief Administrator, you mean,” Roosevelt corrected him. Suddenly he smiled. “Although by this time you certainly know me well enough to call me Teddy. Everyone else does.”

“I think I prefer Mr. President,” replied Boyes. “I’m used to it.”

Roosevelt shrugged, then looked out the window as the crowd began lining up at the long buffet tables.

“They don’t think I can do it, do they, John?”

“No, sir, they don’t,” answered Boyes honestly.

“Well, they’d be correct if I applied their outmoded methods,” said Roosevelt. He drew himself up to his full height. “However, this is a new century. We have new technologies, new methods, and new outlooks.”

“But this is an old country,” said Boyes.

“What is that supposed to mean, John?”

“Just that it might not be ready for your new approach, Mr. President.”

“You saw the chiefs out there, John,” said Roosevelt. “They’re my strongest supporters.”

“It’s in their best interest to be,” said Boyes. “After all, you’ve promised them the moon.”

“And I’ll deliver it,” said Roosevelt resolutely.

X.

Boyes walked into the state house and was ushered into Roosevelt’s office.

“Where have you been, John?” asked Roosevelt. “I expected you back three days ago.”

“It took a little longer than I thought to set up my trading company,” answered Boyes. “But if your laborers ever arrive, at least they won’t starve to death. I’ve got commitments for flour and meat.”

“What are you trading for them?”

“Iodine,” answered Boyes. “That’s what took me so long. My shipment was late arriving from Nairobi.”

“Iodine?” repeated Roosevelt, curious.

Boyes smiled. “There are some infections even a witch doctor can’t cure.” He sat down in a leather chair opposite Roosevelt’s desk, looking quite pleased with himself. “An ounce of iodine for thirty pounds of flour or one hundred pounds of meat.”

“That’s immoral, John. Those people need that medication.”

“Our people will need that food,” answered Boyes.

“My hospitals will put you out of business,” said Roosevelt sternly. “We will never withhold treatment despite a patient’s inability to pay for it.”

“When you build your hospitals, I’ll find something else to trade them,” said Boyes with a shrug. He decided to change the subject. “I hear you held your first local election while I was gone. How did it go?”

“I would call it a limited success.”

“Oh?”

“It was a trial run, so to speak,” said Roosevelt. “We selected a district at random and tried to show them how an election works.” He paused. “We had a turnout of almost ninety percent, which is certainly very promising.”

“Let me guess about the unpromising part,” said Boyes. “Your candidates didn’t get a single crossover vote.”

Roosevelt nodded his head grimly. “The vote went one hundred percent along tribal lines.”

“I hope you’re not surprised.”

“No, but I am disappointed.” Roosevelt sighed. “I’ll simply have to keep explaining to them that they are supposed to vote on the issues and not the tribal connections until they finally understand the principle involved.”

For the first time since they had met, Boyes felt sorry for the American.

“Not guilty?” repeated Roosevelt. “How in the name of pluperfect hell could they come in with a verdict of not guilty?”

He had turned the local theater into a court room, and had spent the better part of a week instructing the members of the Luba and Zande tribes in the intricacies of the jury system. Then he himself had acted as the presiding judge at the Congo Free State’s very first trial by jury, and he was now in his makeshift chambers, barely able to control his fury.

“It was a unanimous decision,” said Charlie Ross, who had acted as bailiff.

“I know it was a unanimous decision, Mr. Ross!” thundered Roosevelt. “What I don’t know is how, in the face of all the evidence, they could come up with it?”

“Why don’t you ask them?” suggested Ross.

“By God, that’s exactly what I’ll do!” said Roosevelt. “Bring them in here, one at a time.”

Ross left the room for about five minutes, during which time Roosevelt tried unsuccessfully to compose himself.

“Sir,” said Ross, re-entering in the company of a tall, slender black man, “this is Tambika, one of the jurors.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ross,” said Roosevelt. He turned to the African. “Mr. Tambika,” he said in heavily accented Swahili, “I wonder if you could explain your decision to me.”

“Explain it, King Teddy?” asked Tambika, bewildered.

“Please call me Mr. Chief Administrator,” said Roosevelt uncomfortably. He paused. “The man, Toma, was accused of stealing six cows. Four eyewitnesses claimed to see him driving the cows back toward his own home, and Mr. Kalimi showed you a bill of sale he received when he purchased the cows from Toma. There is no question that the cows bore the mark, or brand, of the plaintiff, Mr. Salamaki. Can you please tell me why you found him innocent?”

“Ah, now I understand,” said Tambika with a large smile. “Toma owes me money. How can he pay me if he is in jail?”

“But he broke the law.”

“True,” agreed Tambika.

“Then you must find him guilty.”

“But if I had found him guilty, he would never be able to pay me what he owes me,” protested Tambika. “That is not justice, King Teddy.” Roosevelt argued with Tambika for another few minutes, then dismissed him and had Ross bring in the next juror, an old man named Begoni. After reciting the evidence again, he put the question to the old man.

“It is very clear,” answered Begoni. “Toma is a Luba, as am I. Salamaki is a Zande. It is impossible for the Luba to commit a crime against the Zande.”

“But that is precisely what he did, Mr. Begoni,” said Roosevelt.

The old man shook his head. “The Zande have been stealing our cattle and our women since God created the world. It is our right to steal them back.”

“The law says otherwise,” Roosevelt pointed out.

“Whose law?” asked the old man, staring at him with no show of fear or awe. “Yours or God’s?”

“If Mr. Toma were a Zande, would you have found him guilty?”

“Certainly,” answered Begoni, as if the question were too ridiculous to consider.

“If Mr. Toma were a Zande and you knew for a fact that he had not stolen the cattle, would you have found him innocent?” asked Roosevelt. “No.”

“Why?” asked Roosevelt in exasperation.

“There are too many Zande in the world.”

“That will be all, Mr. Begoni.”

“Thank you, Mr. Teddy,” said the old man, walking to the door. He paused for a moment just before leaving. “I like jury trials,” he announced. “It saves much bloodshed.”

“I can’t believe it!” said Roosevelt, getting to his feet and stalking back and forth across the room after the door had closed behind Begoni. “I spent an entire week with these people, explaining how the system works!”

“Are you ready for the next one, sir?” asked Ross.

“No!” snapped Roosevelt. “I already know what he’ll say. Toma’s a tribal brother. Toma can’t pay the bride price for his daughter if we throw him in jail. If a document, such as a bill of sale, implicates a Luba, then it must have been cursed by a Zande witch doctor and cannot be believed.” Roosevelt turned to Ross. “What is the matter with these people, Charlie? Don’t they understand what I’m trying to do for them?”

“They have their own system of justice, Mr. President,” answered Ross gently.

“I’ve seen that system in action,” said Roosevelt contemptuously. “A witch doctor touches a hot iron to the accused’s tongue. If he cries out, he’s guilty; if he doesn’t, he’s innocent. What kind of system is that, I ask you?”

“One they believe in,” said Ross.

“Well, that’s that,” said Roosevelt grimly, after opening the weekly mail. “Morgan isn’t interested in investing in a railroad.”

“Is there anyone else you can ask?” inquired Boyes.

“Bill Taft is mismanaging the economy. I have a feeling that the people who can afford to invest are feeling exceptionally conservative this year.” Nevertheless, he wrote another thirty letters that afternoon, each soliciting funds, and mailed them the next morning. He expressed great confidence that the money would soon be forthcoming, but he began making contingency plans for the day, not far off, when construction of the Trans-Congo Railway would be forced to come to a halt.

“What do you mean, you have no more supplies?” demanded Roosevelt. “You had ample track for another five miles, Mr. Brody.”

Brody, a burly American, stood uncomfortably before Roosevelt’s desk, fidgeting with his pith helmet, which he held awkwardly in his huge hands.

“Yes, we did, Mr. Roosevelt.”

“Well?”

“It’s the natives, sir,” said Brody. “They keep stealing it.”

“Rubbish! What possible use could they have for steel track?”

“You wouldn’t believe the uses they put it to, sir,” answered Brody. “They use it to support their huts, and to make pens for their goats and cattle, and they melt it down for spearheads.”

“Well, then, take it back.”

“We were expressly instructed not to harm any of the natives, sir, and whenever we’ve tried to retrieve our tracks we’ve been threatened with spears, and occasionally even guns. If we can’t take them back by force, they’re going to stay right where they are until they rust.”

“Who’s the headman in your area, Mr. Brody?” asked Roosevelt.

“A Mangbetu named Matapoli.”

“I know him personally,” said Roosevelt, his expression brightening. “Bring him here and perhaps we can get this situation resolved.”

“That could take six weeks, sir—and that’s assuming he’ll come with me.

Roosevelt shook his head. “That won’t do, Mr. Brody. I can’t pay your men to sit on their hands for six weeks.” He paused, then nodded to himself, his decision made. “I’ll return with you. It’s time I got out among the people again, anyway.”

He summoned Yank Rogers while Brody was getting lunch at a small restaurant down the street.

“What can I do for you, Teddy?” asked the American.

“I’m going to have to go to Mangbetu country, Yank,” answered Roosevelt. “I want you and Mr. Buckley to remain in Stanleyville and keep an eye on things here while I’m gone.”

“What about Boyes?” asked Rogers. “Isn’t that his job?”

“John will be accompanying me,” answered Roosevelt. “The Mangbetu seem to be very fond of him.”

“They’re equally fond of you, Teddy.”

“I enjoy his company,” said Roosevelt. He smiled wryly. “I’ll also find it comforting to know that the state house hasn’t been sold to the highest bidder in my absence.”

“John,” remarked Roosevelt, as he and Boyes sat beside a campfire, “have you noticed that we haven’t seen any sign of elephants in more than a week now?”

The horses started whinnying as the wind brought the scent of lion and hyena to them.

“Perhaps they’ve migrated to the west,” said Boyes.

“Come on, John,” said Roosevelt. “I’m not as old a hand at this as you are, but I know when an area’s been shot out.”

“We’ve shipped a lot of ivory to Mombasa and Zanzibar during the past year,” said Boyes.

“I didn’t mind our men making a little money on the side, John, but I won’t have them decimating the herds.”

“They’ve been more than a year without a paycheck,” answered Boyes seriously. “If you tell them they have to stop hunting ivory, I doubt that more than a dozen of them will stay in the Congo.”

“Then we’ll have to make do without their services,” said Roosevelt. “The elephants belong to the people of the Congo Free State now. We’ve got to start a game department and charge for hunting licenses while there’s still something left to hunt.”

“If you say so,” replied Boyes.

Roosevelt stared long and hard at him. “Will you be one of the ones who leaves, John?”

Boyes shook his head. “I’m the one who talked you into this in the first place, Mr. President,” he answered. “I’ll stay as long as you do.” He paused thoughtfully. “I’ve made more than my share of money off the ivory anyway, and I suppose we really ought to stop while there are still some elephants left. I was just pointing out the consequences of abolishing poaching.”

“Then start passing the word as soon as we get back,” said Roosevelt. Suddenly he frowned. “That’s funny.”

“What is, sir?”

“I felt very dizzy for just a moment there.” He shrugged. “I’m sure it will pass.”

But it didn’t, and that night the ex-president came down with malaria. Boyes tended to him and nursed him back to health, but another week had been wasted, and Roosevelt had the distinct feeling that he didn’t have too many of them left to put the country on the right track.

“Ah, my friend Johnny—and King Teddy!” Matapoli greeted them with a huge smile of welcome. “You honor my village with your presence.”

“Your village has changed since the last time we were here,” noted Boyes wryly.

Matapoli pointed proudly to the five railroad coach cars that his men had dragged miles through the bush over a period of months, and which now housed his immediate family and the families of four of the tribe’s elders.

“Oh, yes,” he said happily. “King Teddy promised us democracy, and he kept his promise.” He pointed to one of the cars. “My democracy is the finest of all. Come join me inside it.”

Roosevelt and Boyes exchanged ironic glances and followed Matapoli into the coach car, which was filled with some twenty or so of his children.

“King Teddy has returned!” enthused the Mangbetu chief. “We must have a hunt in the forest and have a feast in your honor.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Matapoli,” said Roosevelt. “But it has been many months since we last saw each other. Let us talk together first.”

“Yes, that would be very good,” agreed Matapoli, puffing out his chest as the children recognized the two visitors and raced off to inform the rest of the village.

“Just how many children do you have?” asked Roosevelt.

Matapoli paused in thought for a moment. “Ten, and ten more, and then seven,” he answered.

“And how many wives?”

“Five.”

The puritanical American tried without success to hide his disapproval. “That’s a very large family, Matapoli.”

“Should be more, should be more,” admitted the Mangbetu. “But it took many months to bring the democracies here.”

“Had you left them on the track, you could have traveled all across the country with them,” Boyes pointed out.

Matapoli threw back his head and laughed. “Why should I want to go to Lulua or Bwaka country?” he asked. “They would just kill me and take my democracies for themselves.”

“Please try to understand, Matapoli,” said Roosevelt. “There are no longer Mangbetu or Lulua or Bwaka countries. There is just the Congo Free State, and you all live in it.”

“You are king of all the countries, King Teddy,” answered Matapoli. “You need have no fear. If the Bwaka say that you are not, then we shall kill them.”

Roosevelt spent the next ten minutes trying to explain the Congo Free State to Matapoli, who was no closer to comprehending it at the end of the discussion than at the beginning.

“All right,” said the American with a sigh of resignation. “Let’s get back to talking about the trains.”

“Trains?” repeated Matapoli.

“The democracies, and the steel logs they rolled upon,” interjected Boyes.

“Another gift from King Teddy,” said Matapoli enthusiastically. “No longer can the leopards and the hyenas break through the thorns and kill my cattle. Now I use the metal thorns, and my animals are safe.”

“The metal thorns were built so that you and the other Mangbetu could travel many miles without having to walk,” said Roosevelt.

“Why should we wish to go many miles?” asked Matapoli, honestly puzzled. “The river runs beside the village, and the forest and its game are just a short walk away.”

“You might wish to visit another tribe.”

Matapoli smiled. “How could we sneak up on our enemies in the democracies? They are too large, and they would make too much noise when they rolled upon the iron thorns.” He shook his head. “No, King Teddy, they are much better right here, where we can put them to use.” Long after the feast was over and Roosevelt and Boyes were riding their horses back toward Stanleyville, Roosevelt, who had been replaying the frustrating day over and over in his mind, finally sighed and muttered: “By God, that probably is the best use they could have been put to!” Boyes found the remark highly amusing, and burst into laughter. A moment later Roosevelt joined him with a hearty laugh of his own, and that was the official end of the Trans-Congo Railway.

They came to a newly paved road when they were fifteen miles out of Stanleyville and, glad to finally be free of the bush and the forest, they veered their mounts onto it. As they continued their journey, they passed dozens of men and women walking alongside the road.

“Why don’t they walk on it, John?” asked Roosevelt curiously. “There can’t be fifteen trucks in the whole of the Congo. Until we import some more, we might as well put the roads to some use.”

“They’re barefoot,” Boyes pointed out.

“So what? The road is a lot smoother than the rocks alongside it.”

“It’s also a lot hotter,” answered Boyes. “By high noon you could fry an egg on it.”

“You mean we’ve spent a million dollars on roads for which there not only aren’t any cars and trucks, but that the people can’t even walk on?”

“This isn’t America, sir.”

“A point that is being driven home daily,” muttered Roosevelt wearily.

XI.

Roosevelt sat at his desk, staring at a number of letters and documents that lay stacked neatly in front of him. To his left was a photograph of Edith and his children, to his right a picture of himself delivering a State of the Union address to the United States Congress, and behind him, on an ornate brass stand, was the flag of the Congo Free State.

Finally, with a sigh, he opened the final letter, read it quickly, and, frowning, placed it atop the stack.

“Bad news, Mr. President?” asked Boyes, who was sitting in the leather chair on the opposite side of the desk.

“No worse than the rest of them,” answered Roosevelt. “That was from Mr. Bennigan, our chief engineer on the Stanley Falls Bridge. He sends his regrets, but his men haven’t been paid in three weeks, and he’s going to have to pull out.” He stared at the letter. “There’s no postmark, of course, but I would guess that it took at least two weeks to get here.”

“We didn’t need him anyway,” said Boyes, dismissing the matter with a shrug. “What’s the sense of building a bridge over the falls if we don’t have any trains or cars?”

“Because someday we’ll have them, John, and when we do, they’re going to need roads and tracks and bridges.”

“When that happy day arrives, I’m sure we’ll have enough money to complete work on the bridge,” replied Boyes.

Roosevelt sighed. “It’s not as devastating a blow as losing the teachers. How many of them have left?”

“Just about all.”

“Damn!” muttered Roosevelt. “How can we educate the populace if there’s no one to teach them?”

“With all due respect, sir, they don’t need Western educations,” said Boyes. “You’re trying to turn them into Americans, and they’re not. Reading and writing are no more important to them than railroads are.”

Roosevelt stared at him for a long moment. “What do you think is important to them, John?”

“You’re talking about a primitive society,” answered Boyes. “They need to learn crop rotation and hygiene and basic medicine far more than they need roads that they’ll never use and railroad cars that they think are simply huts on wheels.”

“You’re wrong, John,” said Roosevelt adamantly. “A little black African baby is no different than a little black American baby—or a little white American baby, for that matter. If we can get them young enough, and educate them thoroughly enough . . .”

“I don’t like to contradict you, sir,” interrupted Boyes, “but you’re wrong. What’s the point of having ten thousand college graduates if they all have to go home to their huts every night because there aren’t two hundred jobs for educated men in the whole country? If you want to have a revolution on your hands, raise their expectations, prepare them to live and function in London or New York—and then make them stay in the Congo.”

Roosevelt shook his head vigorously. “If we did things your way, these people would stay in ignorance and poverty forever. I told you when we began this enterprise that I wasn’t coming here to turn the Congo into my private hunting preserve.” He paused. “I haven’t found the key yet, but if anyone can bring the Congo into the twentieth century, I can.”

“Has it occurred to you that perhaps no one can?” suggested Boyes gently.

“Not for a moment,” responded Roosevelt firmly.

“I’ll stay as long as you do, sir,” said Boyes. “You know that. But if you don’t come up with some answers pretty soon, we may be the last two white men in this country, except for the missionaries and some of the Belgian planters who stayed behind. Almost half our original party has already left.”

“They were just here for ivory or adventure,” said Roosevelt dismissively. “We need people who care about this country more than we need people who are here merely to plunder it.” Suddenly he stared out the window at some fixed point in space.

“Are you all right, sir?” asked Boyes after Roosevelt had remained motionless for almost a minute.

“Never better,” answered the American suddenly. “You know, John, I see now that I’ve been going about this the wrong way. No one cares as much for the future of the Congo as the people themselves. I was wrong to try to bring in help from outside; in the long run, any progress we make here will be much more meaningful if it’s accomplished by our own efforts.”

“Ours?” repeated Boyes, puzzled. “You mean yours and mine?”

“I mean the citizens of the Congo Free State,” answered Roosevelt. “I’ve been telling you and the engineers and the teachers and the missionaries what they need. I think it’s about time I told the people and rallied them to their own cause.”

“We’ve already promised them democracy,” said Boyes. “And there’s at least one Mangbetu village that will swear we delivered it to them,” he added with a smile.

“Those were politicians’ promises, designed to get our foot in the door,” said Roosevelt. “Democracy may be a right, but it isn’t a gift. It requires effort and sacrifice. They’ve got to understand that.”

“First they’ve got to understand what democracy means.”

“They will, once I’ve explained it to them,” answered Roosevelt.

“You mean in person?” asked Boyes.

“That’s right,” said Roosevelt. “I’ll start in the eastern section of the country, now that my Swahili has become fluent, and as I move west I’ll use translators. But I’m going to go out among the people myself. I’m certainly not doing any good sitting here in Stanleyville; it’s time to go out on the stump and get my message across to the only people who really need to understand it.” He paused. “I’d love to have your company, John, but there are so few of us left that I think it would be better for you to remain here and keep an eye on things.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. President,” replied Boyes. “When will you leave?”

“Tomorrow,” said Roosevelt. He paused. “No. This afternoon. There’s nothing more important to do, and we’ve no time to waste.”

He went among the people for five weeks, and everywhere he stopped, the drums had anticipated his arrival and the tribes flocked to see him.

He took his time, avoided any hint of jingoism, and carefully explained the principles of democracy to them. He pointed out the necessity of education, the importance of modern farming methods, the need to end all forms of tribalism, and the advantages of a monied economy. At the end of each “town meeting,” as he called them, he held a prolonged question-and-answer session, and then he moved on to the next major village and repeated the entire procedure again.

During the morning of his thirty-sixth day on the stump, he was joined by Yank Rogers, who rode down from Stanleyville to see him.

“Hello, Yank!” cried Roosevelt enthusiastically as he saw the American riding up to his tent, which had been pitched just outside of a Lulua village.

“Hi, Teddy,” said Rogers, pulling up his horse and dismounting. “You’re looking good. Getting out in the bush seems to agree with you.”

“I feel as fit as a bull moose,” replied Roosevelt with a smile. “How’s John doing?”

“Getting rich, as usual,” said Rogers, not without a hint of admiration for the enterprising Yorkshireman. “I thought he was going to be stuck with about a million pounds of flour when all the construction people pulled out, but he heard that there was a famine in Portugese Angola, so he traded the flour for ivory, and then had Buckley and the Brittlebanks brothers cart it to Mombasa when they decided to call it quits, in exchange for half the profits.”

“That sounds like John, all right,” agreed Roosevelt. “I’m sorry to hear that we’ve lost Buckley and the others, though.”

Rogers shrugged. “They’re just Brits. What the hell do they know about democracy? They’d slit your throat in two seconds flat if someone told them that it would get ’em an audience with the king.” He paused. “All except Boyes, anyway. He’d find some way to put the king on display and charge money for it.”

Roosevelt chuckled heartily. “You know, I do believe you’re right.”

“So much for Mr. Boyes,” said Rogers, “How’s your campaign going?”

“Just bully,” answered Roosevelt. “The response has been wildly enthusiastic.” He paused. “I’m surprised news of it hasn’t reached you.”

“How could it?” asked Rogers. “There aren’t any radios or newspapers—and even if there were, these people speak three hundred different languages and none of ’em can read or write.”

“Still,” said Roosevelt, “I’ve made a start.”

“I don’t doubt it, sir.”

“I’m drawing almost five hundred natives a day,” continued Roosevelt. “That’s more than 15,000 converts in just over a month.”

“If they stay converted.”

“They will.”

“Just another six million to go,” said Rogers with a chuckle.

“I’m sure they’re passing the word.”

“To their fellow tribesmen, maybe,” answered Rogers. “I wouldn’t bet on their talking to anyone else.”

“You sound like a pessimist, Yank,” said Roosevelt.

“Pessimism and realism are next-door neighbors on this continent, Teddy,” said Rogers.

“And yet you stay,” noted Roosevelt.

Rogers smiled. “I figure if anyone can whip this country into shape, it’s you—and if you do, I want to be able to laugh at all those Brits who gave up and left.”

“Well, stick around,” said Roosevelt. “I’m just getting warmed up.”

“Sounds like fun,” said Rogers. “I haven’t heard you rile up a crowd since you ran for Governor of New York. I was in Africa before you ran for president.” Suddenly he reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew an envelope. “I almost forgot why I rode all this way,” he said, handing it to Roosevelt.

“What is it?”

“A letter from Boyes,” answered Rogers. “He said to deliver it to you personally.”

Roosevelt opened the letter, read it twice, then crumpled it into a ball and stuffed it into a pocket.

“I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to hear me giving any speeches this week, Yank,” he announced. “I’ve got to return to Stanleyville.”

“Something wrong?”

Roosevelt nodded. “It seems that Billy Pickering found four Belgian soldiers in a remote area in the southwest, men who had never received word that the Belgians had withdrawn from the Congo, and shot them dead.”

“You mean he had me ride all the way here just for that?” demanded Rogers.

“It’s a matter of vital importance, Yank.”

“What’s so important about four dead men?” asked Rogers. “Life is cheap in Africa.”

“The Belgian government is demanding reparation.”

“Yeah, I see where that can make it a little more expensive,” admitted Rogers.

XII.

“I wasn’t sure how you wanted to handle it,” Boyes said, staring across the desk at Roosevelt, who had just returned to Stanleyville less than an hour ago.

“You were right to summon me, John.”

“So far they haven’t made any threats, but we’re receiving diplomatic communiques every other day.”

“What’s the gist of them?”

“Reparation, as I mentioned in my note to you.”

Roosevelt shook his head. “They know we don’t have any money,” he answered. “They want something else.”

“Pickering’s head on a platter, I should think,” suggested Boyes. “They don’t care any more about their soldiers than he did,” said Roosevelt. “Let me see those communiques.”

Boyes handed over a sheaf of papers, and Roosevelt spent the next few minutes reading through them.

“Well?” asked Boyes when the American had set the papers down.

“I don’t have sufficient information,” answered Roosevelt. “Have they gone to the world press with this?”

“If they have, we won’t know it for months,” said Boyes. “The most recent paper I’ve seen is a ten-week-old copy of the East African Standard.” He paused. “Why would going to the press make a difference?”

“Because if they’ve gone public, then they’re positioning themselves to try to take the Congo back from us, by proving that we can’t protect European nationals.”

“But they weren’t nationals,” said Boyes. “They were soldiers.”

“That just makes our position worse,” replied Roosevelt. “If we can’t protect a group of armed men who know the Congo, how can we protect anyone else?”

“Then what do you want to do about Pickering?” inquired Boyes. “Where is he now?”

“In the jail at Leopoldville. Charlie Ross brought him in dead drunk, and locked him away.”

“The proper decision,” said Roosevelt, nodding approvingly. “I must remember to commend him for it.”

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to, Mr. President,” said Boyes. “He’s back in Kenya.”

“Charlie?” said Roosevelt, surprised. “I’d have thought he’d be just about the last one to leave.”

Boyes paused and stared uncomfortably across the desk at Roosevelt. “Except for Yank Rogers and me, he was.”

“They’re all gone?”

“Yes, sir.” Boyes cleared his throat and continued: “You did your best, sir, but everything’s coming unraveled. Most of them stuck it out for better than two years, but we always knew that sooner or later they’d leave. They’re not bureaucrats and administrators, they’re hunters and adventurers.”

“I know, John,” said Roosevelt, suddenly feeling his years. “And I don’t hold it against them. They helped us more than we had any right to expect.” He paused and sighed deeply. “I had rather hoped we’d have a bureaucracy in place by this time.”

“I know, sir.”

“I wonder if it would have done much good,” Roosevelt mused aloud. He looked across at Boyes. “That trip I just returned from—I wasted my time, didn’t I?”

“Yes, sir, you did.”

“We needed more teachers,” said Roosevelt. “One man can’t educate them overnight. We needed more teachers, and more money, and more time.”

Boyes shook his head. “You needed a different country, Mr. President.”

“Let’s have no more talk about the inferiority of the African race, John,” said Roosevelt. “I’m not up to it today.”

“I’ve never said they were inferior, Mr. President,” said Boyes, surprised.

“Certainly you have, John—and frequently, too.”

“That’s not so, sir,” insisted Boyes. “No matter what you may think, I have no contempt or hatred for the Africans—which is why I’ve always been able to function in their countries.” He paused. “I understand them—as much as any white man can. They’re not inferior, but they are different. The things they care about seem almost meaningless to us—and because of that, you simply can’t turn them into Americans in two short years, or even twenty.”

“We did it in America,” said Roosevelt stubbornly.

“That’s because your blacks were being assimilated into a dominant society that had already existed and was in possession of the country,” answered Boyes. “The whites here are just passing through, and the Africans know it, even if the whites don’t. They may have to put up with us temporarily, but we won’t have any lasting effect on their culture.” He paused as Roosevelt considered his words, then continued: “When all is said and done, it’s their country and their continent, and one of these days they’re going to throw us all out. But what follows us won’t look anything like a Western society; it’ll be an African society, shaped by and for the Africans.” He smiled wryly. “I wish them well, but personally I wouldn’t care to be part of it.”

“I’ve said it before, John: You’re a very interesting man,” said Roosevelt, a strange expression on his face. “Please continue.”

“Continue?” repeated Boyes, puzzled.

“Tell me why you wouldn’t care to be part of an African nation based on African principles and beliefs.”

“For the same reason that they have no desire to become Americans or Europeans, once we stop bribing them to pretend otherwise,” answered Boyes. “Their culture is alien to my beliefs.” He paused. “Democracy, and the Christian virtues, and the joys of literature, and a reverence for life, all these things work for you, sir, because you have a deep and abiding belief in them. They won’t work here because the people of the Congo don’t believe in them. They believe in witch doctors, and tribalism, and polygamy, and rituals that seem barbaric to me even after a quarter century of being exposed to them. We couldn’t adapt to their beliefs any more than they can adapt to ours.”

“Go on, John,” said Roosevelt, his enthusiasm mounting.

Boyes stared at him curiously. “You’ve got that look about you, Mr. President.”

“What look?”

“The same one I saw that first night we met in the Lado Enclave,” said Boyes.

“How would you describe it?” asked Roosevelt, amused.

“I’d call it the look of a crusader.”

Roosevelt chuckled with delight. “You’re a very perceptive man, John,” he said. “By God, I wish I were a drinking man! I’d celebrate with a drink right now!”

“I’ll be happy to have two drinks, one for each of us, if you’ll tell me what you’re so excited about, Mr. President,” said Boyes.

“I finally understand what I’ve been doing wrong,” said Roosevelt.

“And what is that, sir?” asked Boyes cautiously.

“Everything!” said Roosevelt with a hearty laugh. “Lord knows I’ve had enough discussions on the subject with you and the others, but I’ve always proceeded on the assumption that I was part of the solution. Well, I’m not.” He paused, delighted with his sudden insight. “I’m part of the problem! So are you, John. So are the British and the French and the Portugese and the Belgians and everyone else who has tried to impose their culture on this continent. That’s what you and Mickey Norton and Charlie Ross and all the others have been telling me, but none of you could properly articulate your position or carry it through to its logical conclusion.” He paused again, barely able to sit still. “Now I finally see what we have to do, John!”

“Are you suggesting we leave?” asked Boyes.

Roosevelt shook his head. “It’s not that simple, John. Eventually we’ll have to, but if we leave now, the Belgians will just move back in and nothing will have changed. It’s our duty—our holy mission, if you will—to make sure that doesn’t happen, and that the Congo is allowed to develop free from all external influences, including ours.”

“That’s a mighty tall order, sir,” said Boyes. “For instance, what will you do about the missionaries?”

“If they’ve made converts, they’re here at the will of the people, and they’ve become part of the process,” answered Roosevelt after some consideration. “If they haven’t, eventually they’ll give up and go home.”

“All right,” said Boyes. “Then what about—?”

“All in good time, John,” interrupted Roosevelt. “We’ll have to work out thousands of details, but I feel in my bones that after two years of false starts, we’re finally on the proper course.” He paused thoughtfully. “Our first problem is what to do with Billy Pickering.”

“If you’re worried about the Belgians, we can’t give him a trial by jury,” said Boyes. “These people have hated the Belgians for decades. They’ll find him innocent of anything more serious than eliminating vermin, and probably vote him into the presidency.”

“No, we can’t have a jury trial,” agreed Roosevelt. “But not for the reason you suggest.”

“Oh?”

“We can’t have it because it’s a Western institution, and that’s what we’re going to eradicate—unless and until it evolves naturally.”

“Then do you want to execute him?” asked Boyes. That might satisfy the Belgians.”

Roosevelt shook his head vigorously. “We’re not in the business of satisfying the Belgians, John.” He paused thoughtfully. “Have Yank Rogers escort him to the nearest border and tell him never to return to the Congo. If the Belgians want him, let them get him.”

Having summarily eliminated the system of justice that he had imposed on the country, Roosevelt spent the remainder of the week eagerly dismantling the rest of the democracy that he had brought to the Congo.

XIII.

Roosevelt was sitting beneath the shade of an ancient baobob tree, composing his weekly letter to Edith. It had been almost three weeks since he had embraced his new vision for the future of the Congo, and he was discussing it enthusiastically, in between queries about Kermit, Quentin, Alice, and the other children.

Boyes sat some distance away, engrossed in Frederick Selous’ latest memoirs. The book had been personally inscribed to Roosevelt, whose safari Selous had arranged some three years earlier.

Suddenly Yank Rogers walked up the broad lawn of the state house and approached Roosevelt.

“What is it, Yank?”

“Company,” he said with a contemptuous expression on his face.

“Oh?”

“Our old pal, Silva,” said Rogers. “You want me to bring him to your office?”

Roosevelt shook his head. “It’s too beautiful a day to go inside, Yank. I’ll talk to him right here.”

Rogers shrugged, walked around to the front of the building, and returned a moment later with Gerard Silva.

“Hello, Mr. Silva,” said Roosevelt, getting to his feet and extending his hand.

“Ambassador Silva,” replied Silva, shaking his hand briefly.

“I wasn’t aware that Belgium had sent an Ambassador to the Congo Free State.”

“My official title is Ambassador-at-Large,” said Silva.

“Well, you seem to have come a long way since you were an Assistant Governor of an unprofitable colony,” said Roosevelt easily.

“And you have come an equally long way since you promised to turn the Congo into a second America,” answered Silva coldly. “All of it downhill.”

“It’s all a matter of perspective,” said Roosevelt.

There was an uneasy silence.

“I have come to Stanleyville for two reasons, Mr. Roosevelt,” said Silva at last.

“I was certain that you wouldn’t come all this way without a reason,” replied Roosevelt.

“First, I have come to inquire about the man, Pickering.”

“Mr. Pickering was deported as an undesirable some nineteen days ago,” answered Roosevelt promptly.

“Deported?” demanded Silva. “He killed four Belgian soldiers!”

“That was hearsay evidence, Mr. Silva,” responded Roosevelt. “We could find no eyewitnesses to confirm it.”

“Pickering himself admitted it!”

“That was why he was deported,” said Roosevelt. “Though there was insufficient evidence to convict him, we felt that there was every possibility that he was telling the truth. This made him an undesirable alien, and he was escorted to the border and told never to return.”

“You let him go!”

“We deported him.”

“This is totally unacceptable.”

“We are a free and independent nation, Mr. Silva,” said Roosevelt, a hint of anger in his high-pitched voice. “Are you presuming to tell us how to run our internal affairs?”

“I am telling you that this action is totally unacceptable to the government of Belgium,” said Silva harshly.

“Then should Mr. Pickering ever confess to committing a murder within the borders of Belgium, I am sure that your government will deal with it in a manner that is more acceptable to you.” Roosevelt paused, as Boyes tried not to laugh aloud. “You had a second reason for coming to Stanleyville, I believe?”

Silva nodded. “Yes, I have, Mr. Roosevelt. I bring an offer from my government.”

“The same government that is furious with me for deporting Mr. Pickering?” said Roosevelt. “Well, by all means, let me hear it.”

“Your experiment has been a dismal failure, Mr. Roosevelt,” said Silva, taking an inordinate amount of pleasure in each word he uttered. “Your treasury is bankrupt, your railroads and highways will never be completed, your bridges and canals do not exist. You have failed to hold the national election that was promised to the international community. Even the small handful of men who accompanied you at the onset of this disastrous misadventure have deserted you.” Silva paused and smiled. “You must admit that you are in an unenviable position, Mr. Roosevelt.”

“Get to the point, Mr. Silva.”

“The government of Belgium is willing to put our differences behind us.”

“How considerate of them,” remarked Roosevelt dryly.

“If you will publicly request our assistance,” continued Silva, “we would be willing to once again assume the responsibility of governing the Congo.” He smiled again. “You really have no choice, Mr. Roosevelt. With every day that passes, the Congo retreats further and further into insolvency and barbarism.”

Roosevelt laughed harshly. “Your government has a truly remarkable sense of humor, Mr. Silva.”

“Are you rejecting our offer?”

“Of course I am,” said Roosevelt. “And you’re lucky I don’t pick you up by the scruff of the neck and throw you clear back to Brussels.”

“Need I point out that should my government decide that the Congo’s vital interests require our presence, you have no standing army that can prevent our doing what must be done?”

Roosevelt glanced at his wristwatch. “Mr. Silva,” he said, “I’m going to give you exactly sixty seconds to say good-bye and take your leave of us. If you’re still here at that time, I’m going to have Mr. Boyes escort you to the nearest form of transportation available and point you toward Belgium.”

“That is your final word?” demanded Silva, his face flushing beneath his deep tan.

“My final word is for King Albert,” said Roosevelt heatedly. “But since I am a Christian and a gentleman, I can’t utter it. Now get out of my sight.”

Silva glared at him, then turned on his heel and left.

Roosevelt turned to Boyes, who was still sitting in his chair, book in hand. “You heard?” he asked.

“Every word of it.” Boyes paused and smiled. “I wish he’d have stayed another forty seconds.” He got to his feet and approached Roosevelt. “What do you plan to do about the Belgians?”

“We certainly can’t allow them back into the country, that much is clear,” said Roosevelt.

“How do you propose to stop them?”

Roosevelt lowered his head in thought for a moment, then looked up. “There’s only one way, John.”

“Raise an army?”

Roosevelt smiled and shook his head. “What would we pay them with?” He paused. “Besides, we don’t want a war. We just want to make sure that the Congo is allowed to develop in its own way, free from all outside influences.”

“What do you plan to do?” asked Boyes.

“I’m going to return to America and run for the Presidency again,” announced Roosevelt. “Bill Taft is a fat fool, and I made a mistake by turning the country over to him. I’ll run on a platform of making the Congo a United States Protectorate. That ought to make the Belgians think twice before trying to march in here again!” He nodded his head vigorously. “That’s what I’ll have to do, if these people are ever to develop their own culture in their own way.” His eyes reflected his eagerness. “In fact, I’ll leave this afternoon! I’ll take Yank with me; I’m sure I can find a place for him in Washington.”

“You realize what will happen if you lose?” said Boyes. “The Belgians will march in here five minutes later.”

“Then there’s no time to waste, is there?” said Roosevelt. “You’re welcome to come along, John.”

Boyes shook his head. “Thank you for the offer, Mr. President, but there’s still a few shillings to be made here in Africa.” He paused. “I’ll stay in Stanleyville until you return, or until I hear that you’ve lost the election.”

“A little more optimism, John,” said Roosevelt with a grin. “The word ‘lose’ is not in our lexicon.”

Boyes stared at him for a long moment. “You mean it, don’t you?” he said at last, as the fact of it finally hit home. “You’re really going to run for the presidency again.”

“Of course I mean it.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of challenges?” asked Boyes.

“Do you ever get tired of breathing?” replied Roosevelt, his face aglow as he considered the future and began enumerating the obstacles he faced. “First the election, then Protectorate status for the Congo, and then we’ll see just what direction its social evolution takes.” He paused. “This is a wonderful experiment we’re embarking upon, John.”

“It’ll be interesting,” commented Boyes.

“More than that,” said Roosevelt enthusiastically. “It’ll be bully—just bully!”

The date was April 17, 1912.

XIV.

After returning home from the Congo, Theodore Roosevelt was denied the Republican nomination for President in 1912. Undaunted, he formed the Bull Moose party, ran as its presidential candidate, and was believed to be ahead in the polls when he was shot in the chest by a fanatic named John Chrank on October 14. Although he recovered from the wound, he was physically unable to campaign further and lost the election to Woodrow Wilson, though finishing well ahead of the seated Republican President, William Howard Taft. He lost what remained of his health in 1914 while exploring and mapping the River of Doubt (later renamed the Rio Teodoro) at the behest of the Brazilian government, and never returned to Africa. He died at his home in Sagamore Hill, New York, on January 6, 1919.

John Boyes made and lost three more fortunes in British East Africa, spent his final days driving a horse-drawn milk wagon in Nairobi, and died in 1951.

The Belgian Congo (later renamed Zaire) was granted its independence in 1960, and held the first and only free election in its history. This was followed by three years of the most savage inter-tribal bloodletting in the history of the continent.

A BRAVER THING

Charles Sheffield

The author was raised in the north of England, attended a non-private, non-prestigious grammar school, and majored in mathematics at Cambridge University, where he was a scholar of St. John’s College. The relevance of all of this information will, he tells us, only become apparent after one reads the following story.

The palace banquet is predictably dull, but while the formal speeches roll on with their obligatory nods to the memory of Alfred Nobel and his famous bequest, it is not considered good manners to leave or to chat with one’s neighbors. I have the time and opportunity to think about yesterday; and, at last, to decide on the speech that I will give tomorrow.

A Nobel prize in physics means different things to different people. If it is awarded late in life, it is often viewed by the recipient as the capstone on a career of accomplishment. Awarded early (Lawrence Bragg was a Nobel Laureate at twenty-five) it often defines the winner’s future; an early Prize may also announce to the world at large the arrival of a new titan of science (Paul Dirac was a Nobel Laureate at thirty-one).

To read the names of the Nobel Prize winners in physics is almost to recapitulate the history of twentieth-century physics, so much so that the choice of winners often seems self-evident. No one can imagine a list without Planck, the Curies, Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, Dirac, Fermi, Yukawa, Bardeen, Feynman, Weinberg, or the several Wilson’s (though Rutherford is, bizarrely, missing from the Physics roster, having been awarded his Nobel Prize in Chemistry).

And yet the decision-making process is far from simple. A Nobel Prize is awarded not for a lifetime’s work, but explicitly for a particular achievement. It is given only to living persons, and as Alfred Nobel specified in his will, the prize goes to “the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics.”

It is those constraints that make the task of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences so difficult. Consider these questions:

lWhat should one do when an individual is regarded by his peers as one of the leading intellectual forces of his generation, but no single accomplishment offers the clear basis for an award? John Archibald Wheeler is not a Nobel Laureate; yet he is a “physicist’s physicist,” a man who has been a creative force in half a dozen different fields.

lHow does one weight a candidate’s age? In principle, not at all. It is not a variable for consideration; but in practice every committee member knows when time is running out for older candidates, while the young competition will have opportunities for many years to come.

lHow soon after a theory or discovery is it appropriate to make an award? Certainly, one should wait long enough to be sure that the accomplishment is “most important,” as Nobel’s will stipulates; but if one waits too long, the opportunity may vanish with the candidate. Max Born was seventy-two years old when he received the Nobel Prize in 1954—for work done almost thirty years earlier on the probabilistic interpretation of the quantum mechanical wave function. Had George Gamow lived as long as Born, surely he would have shared with Penzias and Wilson the 1978 prize, for the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921, at the age of forty-two. But it cited his work on the photoelectric effect, rather than the theory of relativity, which was still considered open to question. And if his life had been no longer than that of Henry Moseley or Heinrich Hertz, Einstein would have died unhonored by the Nobel Committee.

So much for logical choices. I conclude that the Nobel rules allow blind Atropos to play no less a part than Athene in the award process.

My musings can afford to be quite detached. I know how the voting must have gone in my own case, since although the work for which my award is now being given was published only four years ago, already it has stimulated an unprecedented flood of other papers. Scores more are appearing every week, in every language. The popular press might seem oblivious to the fundamental new view of nature implied by the theory associated with my name, but they are very aware of its monstrous practical potential. A small test unit in orbit around Neptune is already returning data, and in the tabloids I have been dubbed Giles “Starman” Turnbull. To quote The New York Times: “The situation is unprecedented in modern physics. Not even the madcap run from the 1986 work of Muller and Bednorz to today’s room-temperature superconductors can compete with the rapid acceptance of Giles Turnbull’s theories, and the stampede to apply them. The story is scarcely begun, but already we can say this, with confidence: Professor Turnbull has given us the stars.”

The world desperately needs heroes. Today, it seems, I am a hero. Tomorrow? We shall see.

In a taped television interview last week, I was asked how long my ideas had been gestating before I wrote out the first version of the Turnbull Concession Theory. And can you recall a moment or an event, asked the reporter, which you would pinpoint as seminal?

My answer must have been too vague to be satisfactory, since it did not appear in the final television clip. But in fact I could have provided a very precise location in space-time, at the start of the road that led me to Stockholm, to this dinner, and to my first (and, I will guarantee, my last) meeting with Swedish royalty.

Eighteen years ago, it began. In late June, I was playing in a public park two miles from my home when I found a leather satchel sitting underneath a bench. It was nine o’clock at night, and nearly dark. I took the satchel home with me.

My father’s ideas of honesty and proper behavior were and are precise to a fault. He would allow me to examine the satchel long enough to determine its owner, but not enough to explore the contents. Thus it was, sitting in the kitchen of our semi-detached council house, that I first encountered the name of Arthur Sandford Shaw, penned in careful red ink on the soft beige leather interior of the satchel. Below his name was an address on the other side of town, as far from the park as we were but in the opposite direction.

Should we telephone Arthur Sandford Shaw’s house, tell him that we had his satchel, and advise him where he could collect it?

No, said my father gruffly. Tomorrow is Saturday. You cycle over in the morning and return it.

To a fifteen-year-old, even one without specific plans, a Saturday morning in June is precious. I hated my father then, for his unswerving, blinkered attitude, as I hated him for the next seventeen years. Only recently have I realized that “hate” is a word with a thousand meanings.

I rode over the next morning. Twice I had to stop and ask my way. The Shaw house was in the Garden Village part of the town, an area that I seldom visited. The weather was preposterously hot, and at my father’s insistence I was wearing a jacket and tie. By the time that I dismounted in front of the yellow brick house with its steep red-tile roof and diamond glazed windows, sweat was trickling down my face and neck. I leaned my bike against a privet hedge that was studded with sweet-smelling and tiny white flowers, lifted the satchel out of my saddlebag, and rubbed my sleeve across my forehead.

I peered through the double gates. They led to an oval driveway, enclosing a bed of well-kept annuals.

I saw pansies, love-in-a-mist, delphiniums, phlox, and snapdragons. I know their names now, but of course I did not know them then.

And if you ask me, do I truly remember this so clearly, I must say, of course I do; and will, until my last goodnight. I have that sort of memory. Lev Landau once said, “I am not a genius. Einstein and Bohr are geniuses. But I am very talented.” To my mind, Landau (1962 Nobel Laureate, and the premier Soviet physicist of his generation) was certainly a genius. But I will echo him, and say that while I am not a genius, I am certainly very talented. My memory in particular has always been unusually precise and complete.

The sides of the drive curved symmetrically around to meet at a brown- and-white painted front door. I followed the edge of the gravel as far as the front step, and there I hesitated.

For my age, I was not lacking in self-confidence. I had surveyed the students in my school, and seen nothing there to produce discomfort. It was clear to me that I was mentally far superior to all of them, and the uneasy attitude of my teachers was evidence—to me, at any rate—that they agreed with my assessment.

But this place overwhelmed me. And not just with the size of the house, though that was six times as big as the one that I lived in. I had seen other big houses; far more disconcerting were the trained climbing roses and espaliered fruit trees, the weed-free lawn, the bird-feeders, and the height, texture and improbable but right color balance within the flower beds. The garden was so carefully structured that it seemed a logical extension of the building at its center. For the first time, I realized that a garden could comprise more than a hodge-podge of grass and straggly flowers.

So I hesitated. And before I could summon my resolve and lift the brass knocker, the door opened.

A woman stood there. At five feet five, she matched my height exactly. She smiled at me, eye to eye.

Did I say that the road to Stockholm began when I found the satchel? I was wrong. It began with that smile.

“Yes? Can I help you?”

The voice was one that I still thought of as “posh,” high-pitched and musical, with clear vowels. The woman was smiling again, straight white teeth and a broad mouth in a high-cheekboned face framed by curly, ash- blond hair. I can see that face before me now, and I know intellectually that she was thirty-five years old. But on that day I could not guess her age to within fifteen years. She could have been twenty, or thirty, or fifty, and it would have made no difference. She was wearing a pale-blue blouse with full sleeves, secured at the top with a mother-of-pearl brooch and tucked into a grey wool skirt that descended to mid-calf. On her feet she wore low-heeled tan shoes, and no stockings.

I found my voice.

“five brought this back.” I held out the satchel, my defense against witchcraft.

“So I see.” She took it from me. “Drat that boy, I doubt he even knows he lost it. I’m Marion Shaw. Come in.”

It was an order. I closed the door behind me and found myself following her along a hall that passed another open door on the left. As we approached, a piano started playing rapid staccato triplets, and I saw a red- haired girl crouched over the keyboard of a baby grand.

My guide paused and stuck her head in for a moment. “Not so fast, Meg. You’ll never keep up that pace for the whole song.” And then to me, as we walked on, “Poor old Schubert, ‘Impatience’ is right, it’s what he’d feel if he heard that. Do you play?”

“We don’t have a piano.”

“Mm. I sometimes wonder why we do.”

We had reached an airy room that faced the back garden of the house. My guide went in before me, peered behind the door, and clucked in annoyance.

“Arthur’s gone again. Well, he can’t be far. I know for a fact that he was here five minutes ago.” She turned to me. “Make yourself at home, Giles. I’ll find him.”

Giles. I have been terribly self-conscious about my first name since I was nine years old. By the time that I was twenty I had learned how to use it to my advantage, to suggest a lineage that I never had. But at fifteen it was the bane of my life. In a class full of Tom’s and Ron’s and Brian’s and Bill’s, it did not fit. I cursed my fate, to be stuck with a “funny” name, just because one of my long-dead uncles had suffered with it.

But there was stronger witchcraft at work here. I had arrived unheralded on her doorstep.

“How do you know my name?”

That earned another smile. “From your father. He called me early this morning, to make sure someone would be home. He didn’t want you to bike all this way for nothing.”

She went out, and left me in the room of my dreams.

It was about twelve feet square, with an uncarpeted floor of polished hardwood. All across the far wall was a window that began at waist height, ran to the ceiling, and looked south to a vegetable garden. The windowsill was a long work bench, two feet deep, and on it stood a dozen projects that I could identify. In the center was a compound microscope, with slides scattered all around. I found tiny objects on them as various as a fly’s leg, a single strand of hair, and two or three iron filings. The mess on the left-hand side of the bench was a half-ground telescope lens, covered with its layer of hardened pitch and with the grinding surface sitting next to it. The right side, just as disorderly, was a partially- assembled model airplane, radio-controlled and with a two c.c. diesel engine. Next to that stood an electronic balance, designed to weigh anything from a milligram to a couple of kilos, and on the other side was a blood-type testing kit. The only discordant note to my squeamish taste was a dead puppy, carefully dissected, laid out, and pinned organ by organ on a two-foot square of thick hardboard. But that hint of a possible future was overwhelmed by the most important thing of all: everywhere, in among the experiments and on the floor and by the two free-standing aquariums and next to the flat plastic box behind the door with its half-inch of water and its four black-backed, fawn-bellied newts, there were books.

Books and books and books. The other three walls of the room were shelved and loaded from floor to ceiling, and the volumes that scattered the work bench were no more than a small sample that had been taken out and not replaced. I had never seen so many hard-cover books outside a public library or the town’s one and only technical bookstore.

When Marion Shaw returned with Arthur Sandford Shaw in tow I was standing in the middle of the room like Buridan’s Ass, unable to decide what I wanted to look at the most. I was in no position to see my own eyes, but if I had been able to do so I have no doubt that the pupils would have been twice their normal size. I was suffering from sensory overload, first from the house and garden, then from Marion Shaw, and finally from that paradise of a study. Thus my initial impressions of someone whose life so powerfully influenced and finally directed my own are not as clear in my mind as they ought to be. I also honestly believe that I never did see Arthur clearly, if his mother were in the room.

Some things I can be sure of. Arthur Shaw made his height early, and although I eventually grew to within an inch of him, at our first meeting he towered over me by seven or eight inches. His coordination had not kept pace with his growth, and he had a gawky and awkward manner of moving that would never completely disappear. I know also that he was holding in his right hand a live frog that he had brought in from the garden, because he had to pop that in an aquarium before he could, at his mother’s insistence, shake hands with me.

For the rest, his expression was surely the half-amused, half-bemused smile that seldom left his face. His hair, neatly enough cut, never looked it. Some stray spike on top always managed to elude brush and comb, and his habit of running his hands up past his temples swept his hair untidily off his forehead.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” he said. “Thank you for bringing it back.”

He was, I think, neither pleased nor displeased to meet me. It was nice to have his satchel back (as Marion Shaw had predicted, he did not know he had left it behind in the park), but the thought of what might have happened had he lost it, with its cargo of schoolbooks, did not disturb him as it would have disturbed me.

His mother had been following my eyes.

“Why don’t you show Giles your things,” she said. “I’ll bet that he’s interested in science, too.”

It was an implied question. I nodded.

“And why don’t I call your mother,” she said, “and see if it’s all right for you to stay to lunch?”

“My mother’s dead.” I wanted to stay to lunch, desperately. “And my dad will be at work ’til late.”

She raised her eyebrows, but all she said was, “So that’s settled, then.” She held out her hand. “Let me take your jacket, you don’t need that while you’re indoors.”

Mrs. Shaw left to organize lunch. We played, though Arthur Shaw and I would both have been outraged to hear such a verb applied to our efforts. We were engaging in serious experiments of chemistry and physics, and reviewing the notebooks in which he recorded all his earlier results. Even in our first meeting he struck me as a bit strange, but that slight negative was swamped by a dozen positive reactions. The orbit in which I had traveled all my life contained no one whose interests in any way resembled my own. It was doubly shocking to meet a person who was as interested in science as I was, and who had on the shelves of his own study more reference sources than I dreamed existed.

Lunch was an unwelcome distraction. Mrs. Shaw studied me as openly as my inspection of her was covert, Arthur sat in thoughtful silence, and the table conversation was dominated by the precocious Megan, who at twelve years old apparently loved horses and boats, hated anything to do with science, school-work, or playing the piano, and talked incessantly when I badly wanted to hear from the other two. (I know her still; my present opinion is that I was a little harsh in the assessment of eighteen years ago—but not much.) Large quantities of superior food and the beatific presence of Marion Shaw saved lunch from being a disaster, and finally Arthur and I could escape back to his room.

At five o’clock I felt obliged to leave and cycle home. I had to make dinner for my father. The jacket that was returned to me was newly stitched at the elbow where a leather patch had been working loose, and a missing black button on the cuff had been replaced. It was Marion Shaw rather than Arthur who handed me my coat and invited me to come to the house again the following week, but knowing her as I do now I feel sure that the matter was discussed with him before the offer was made. I mention as proof of my theory that as I was pulling my bike free of the privet hedge, Arthur pushed into my hand a copy of E.T. Bell’s Men Of Mathematics. “It’s pretty old,” he said offhandedly. “And it doesn’t give enough details. But it’s a classic. I think it’s terrific—and so does Mother.”

I rode home through the middle of town. When I arrived there, my own house felt as alien and inhospitable to me as the far side of the moon.

It was Tristram Shandy who set out to write the story of his life, and never progressed much beyond the day of his birth.

If I am to avoid a similar problem, I must move rapidly in covering the next few years. And yet at the same time it is vital to define the relationship between the Shaw family and me, if the preposterous request that Marion Shaw would make of me thirteen years later, and my instant aquiescence to it, are to be of value in defining the road to Stockholm.

For the next twenty-seven months I enjoyed a double existence. “Enjoyed” is precisely right, since I found both lives intensely pleasurable. In one world I was Giles Turnbull, the son of a heel-man at Hendry’s Shoe Factory, as well as Giles Turnbull, student extraordinary, over whom the teachers at my school nodded their heads and for whom they predicted a golden scholastic future. In that life, I moved through a thrilling but in retrospect unremarkable sequence of heterosexual relationships, with Angela, Louise, and finally with Jennie.

At the same time, I became a regular weekend visitor to the Shaw household. Roland Shaw, whom my own father described with grudging respect after two meetings as “sharp as a tack,” had a peripheral effect on me, but he was a seldom-seen figure absorbed in his job, family, and garden It was Marion and Arthur who changed me and shaped me. From him I learned concentration, tenacity, and total attack on a single scientific problem (the school in my other life rewarded facility and speed, not depth). I learned that there were many right approaches, since he and I seldom used the same attack on a problem. I also learned—surprisingly—that there might be more than one right answer. One day he casually asked me, “What’s the average length of a chord in a unit circle?” When I had worked out an answer, he pointed out with glee that it was a trick question. There are at least three “right” answers, depending on the mathematical definition you use for “average.”

Arthur taught me thoroughness and subtlety. From Marion Shaw I learned everything else. She introduced me to Mozart, to the Chopin waltzes and etudes, to the Beethoven symphonies, and to the first great Schubert song cycle, while steering me clear of Bach fugues, the Ring of the Nibelung, Beethoven’s late string quartets and Winterreise. “There’s a place for those, later in life,” she said, “and it’s a wonderful place. But until you’re twenty you’ll get more out of Die Schone Mullerin and Beethoven’s Seventh.” Over the dinner table, I learned why sane people might actually read Wordsworth and Milton, to whom an exposure at school had generated an instant and strong distaste. (“Boring old farts,” I called them, though never to Marion Shaw.)

And although nothing could ever give me a personal appreciation for art and sculpture, I learned a more important lesson: that there were people who could tell the good from the bad, and the ugly from the beautiful, as quickly and as naturally as Arthur and I could separate a rigorous mathematical proof from a flawed one, or a beautiful theory from an ugly one.

The Shaw household also taught me, certainly with no intention to do so, how to fake it. Soon I could talk a plausible line on music, literature, or architecture, and with subtle hints from Marion I mastered that most difficult technique, when to shut up. From certain loathed guests at her dinner table I learned to turn on (and off) a high-flown, euphuistic manner of speech that most of the world confuses with brain-power. And finally, walking around the garden with Marion for the sheer pleasure of her company, I picked up as a bonus a conversational knowledge of flowers, insects, and horticulture, subjects which interested me as little as the sequence of Chinese dynasties.

It’s obvious, is it not, that I was in love with her? But it was a pure, asexual love that bore no relationship to the explorations, thrills, and physical urgencies of Angela, Louise, and Jennie. And if I describe a paragon who sat somewhere between Saint and Superwoman, it is only because I saw her that way when I was sixteen years old, and I have never quite lost the illusion. I know very well, today, that Marion was a creature of her environment, as much as I was shaped by mine. She had been born to money, and she had never had to worry about it. It was inevitable that what she thought she was teaching me would become transformed when I took it to a house without books and servants, and to a way of life where the battle for creature comforts and self-esteem was fought daily.

I looked upon the world of Marion Shaw, and wanted it and her. Desperately. But I knew no way to possess them.

“It were all one that I should love a bright particular star, and think to wed it, he is so above me,” Marion quoted to me one day, for no reason I could understand. That’s how I, mute and inglorious, felt about her.

And by a curious symmetry, Megan Shaw trailed lovelorn after me, just as I trailed after her mother. One day, to my unspeakable embarrassment, Megan cornered me in the music room and told me that she loved me. She took the initiative, and tried to kiss me. At fourteen she was becoming a beauty, but I, who readily took the part of eager sexual aggressor with my girlfriends, could no more have touched her than I could have played the Chopin polonaise with which she had been struggling. I muttered, mumbled, ducked my head, and ran.

Despite such isolated moments of awkwardness, that period was still my personal Nirvana, a delight in the sun that is young once only. But even at sixteen and seventeen I sensed that, like any perfection, this one could not endure.

The end came after two years, when Arthur went off to the university. He and I were separated in age by only six months, but we went to different schools and we were, more important, on opposite sides of the Great Divide of the school year.

He had taken the Cambridge scholarship entrance exam the previous January and been accepted at King’s College, without covering himself with glory. If his failure to gain a scholarship or exhibition upset his teachers, it surprised me not at all. And when I say that I knew Arthur better than anyone, while still not knowing him, that makes sense to me if to no one else.

Success in the Cambridge scholarship entrance examinations in mathematics calls for a good deal of ingenuity and algebraic technique, but the road to success is much smoother if you also know certain tricks. Only a finite number of questions can be asked, and certain problems appear again and again. A bright student, without being in any way outstanding, can do rather well by practicing on the papers set in previous years.

And this, of course, was what Arthur absolutely refused to do. He had that rare independence of spirit, which disdained to walk the well-trod paths. He would not practice examination technique. That made the exams immeasurably harder. A result which, with the help of a clever choice of coordinate system or transformation, dropped out in half a dozen lines, would take several pages of laborious algebra by a direct approach. Genius would find that trick of technique in real time, but to do so consistently, over several days, was too much to ask of any student. Given Arthur’s fondness for approaching a problem ab ovo, without reference to previous results, and adding to it a certain obscurity of presentation that even I, who knew him well, had found disturbing, it was a wonder that he had done as well as he had.

I had observed what happened. It took no great intellect to resolve that I would not make the same mistake. I worked with Arthur, until his departure for Cambridge in early October, on new fields of study (I had long passed the limits of my teachers at school). Then I changed my focus, and concentrated on the specifics of knowledge and technique needed to do well in the entrance examinations.

Tests of any kind always produce in me a pleasurable high of adrenalin. In early December I went off to Cambridge, buoyed by a good luck kiss (my first) from Marion Shaw, and a terse, “Do your best, lad,” from my father. I stayed in Trinity College, took the exams without major trauma, saw a good deal of Arthur, and generally had a wonderful time. I already knew something of the town, from a visit to Arthur halfway through Michaelmas Term.

The results came just before Christmas. I had won a major scholarship to Trinity. I went up the following October.

And at that point, to my surprise, my course and Arthur’s began to move apart. We were of course in different colleges, and of different years, and I began to make new friends. But more important, back in our home town the bond between us had seemed unique: he was the single person in my world who was interested in the arcana of physics and mathematics. Now I had been transported to an intellectual heaven, where conversations once possible only with Arthur were the daily discourse of hundreds.

I recognized those changes of setting, and I used them to explain to Marion Shaw why Arthur and I no longer saw much of each other. I also, for my own reasons, minimized to her the degree of our estrangement; for if I were never to see Arthur during college breaks, I would also not see Marion.

There were deeper reasons, though, for the divergence, facts which I could not mention to her. While the university atmosphere, with its undergraduate enthusiasms and overflowing intellectual energy, opened me and made me more gregarious, so that I formed dozens of new friendships with both men and women, college life had exactly the opposite effect on Arthur. As an adolescent he had tended to emotional coolness and intellectual solitude. At Cambridge those traits became more pronounced. He attended few lectures, worked only in his rooms or in the library, and sought no friends. He became somewhat nocturnal, and his manner was increasingly brusque and tactless.

That sounds enough to end close acquaintance; but there was a deeper reason still, one harder to put my finger on. The only thing I can say is that Arthur now made me highly uncomfortable. There was a look in his eyes, of obsession and secret worry, that kept me on the edge of my seat. I wondered if he had become homosexual, and was enduring the rite of passage that implied. There had been no evidence of such tendencies during the years I had known him, except that he had shown no interest in girls.

A quiet check with a couple of my gay friends disposed of that theory. Both the grapevine and their personal observations of Arthur indicated that if he was not attracted to women, neither was he interested in men. That was a vast relief. I had seen myself being asked to explain the inexplicable to Marion Shaw.

I accepted the realities: Arthur did not want to be with me, and I was uncomfortable with him. So be it. I would go on with my studies.

And in those studies our new and more distant relationship had another effect, one that ultimately proved far more important than personal likes and dislikes. For I could no longer compare myself with Arthur.

In our first two years of acquaintance, he had been my calibration point. As someone a little older than me, and a full year ahead in a better school, he served as my pacer. My desire was to know what Arthur knew, to be able to solve the problems that he could solve. And on the infrequent occasions when I found myself ahead of him, I was disproportionately pleased.

Now my pace-setting hare had gone. The divergence that I mentioned was intellectual as well as personal. And because Arthur had always been my standard of comparison, it took me three or four years to form a conclusion that others at the university had drawn long before.

His lack of interest in attending lectures, coupled with his insistence on doing things his own way, led to as many problems in the Tripos examinations as it had in scholarship entrance. His supervision partner found him “goofy,” while their supervisor didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about. Arthur was always going off, said his partner, in irrelevant digressions. By contrast, my old approach of focusing on what was needed to do well in exams, while making friends with both students and faculty, worked as well as ever.

In sum, my star was ascendant. I did splendidly, was secretly delighted, and publicly remained nonchalant and modest.

And yet I knew, somewhere deep inside, that Arthur was more creative than I. He generated ideas and insights that I would never have. Surely that would weigh most heavily, in the great balance of academic affairs?

Apparently not. To my surprise, it was I alone who at the end of undergraduate and graduate studies was elected to a Fellowship, and stayed on at Cambridge. Arthur would have to leave, and fend for himself. After considering a number of teaching positions at other universities both in Britain and abroad, he turned his back on academia. He accepted a position as a research physicist with A.N.F. Gesellschaft, a European hi-tech conglomerate headquartered in Bonn.

In August he departed Cambridge to take up his new duties. I would remain, living in college and continuing my research. When we had dinner together a few days before he left he seemed withdrawn, but no more than usual. I mentioned that I was becoming more and more interested in the problem of space-time quantization, and proposed to work on it intensely. He came to life then, and said that in his opinion I was referring to the most important open question of physics. I was delighted by that reaction, and told him so. At that point his moodiness returned and remained for the rest of the evening.

When we parted at midnight there was no formality or sense of finality in our leave-taking. And yet for several years I believed that on that evening the divergence of our worldlines became complete. Only later did I learn that from a scientific point of view they had separated, only to run parallel to each other.

And both roads led to Stockholm.

When one sets forth on an unknown intellectual trail it is easy to lose track of time, place, and people. For the next four years the sharp realities of my world were variational principles, Lie algebra, and field theory. Food and drink, concerts, vacations, friends, social events, and even lovers still had their place, but they stood on the periphery of my attention, slightly misty and out of focus.

I saw Arthur a total of five times in those four years, and each was in a dinner-party setting at his parents’ house. In retrospect I can recognize an increasing remoteness in his manner, but at the time he seemed like the same old Arthur, ignoring any discussion or guest that didn’t interest him. No opportunity existed for deep conversation between us; neither of us sought one. He never said a word about his work, or what he thought of life in Bonn. I never talked about what I was trying to do in Cambridge.

It was the shock of my life to be sitting at tea in the Senate House, one gloomy November afternoon, and be asked by a topologist colleague from Churchill College, “You used to hang around with Arthur Shaw, didn’t you, when he was here?”

At my nod, he tapped the paper he was holding. “Did you see this, Turnbull,” he said, “On page ten? He’s dead.”

And when I looked at him, stupefied: “You didn’t know? Committed suicide. In Germany. His obituary’s here.”

He said more, I’m sure, and so did I. But my mind was far away as I took the newspaper from him. It was a discreet two inches of newsprint. Arthur Sandford Shaw, aged twenty-eight. Graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, son of etc. Coroner’s report, recent behavior seriously disturbed . . . no details.

I went back to my rooms in Trinity and telephoned the Shaw house. While it was ringing, I realized that no matter who answered I had no idea what to say. I put the phone back on its stand and paced up and down my study for the next hour, feeling more and more sick. Finally I made the call and it was picked up by Marion.

I stumbled through an expression of regret. She hardly gave me time to finish before she said, “Giles, I was going to call you tonight. I’d like to come to Cambridge. I must talk to you.”

The next day I had scheduled appointments for late morning and afternoon, two with research students, one with the college director of studies on the subject of forthcoming entrance interviews, and one with a visiting professor from Columbia. I could have handled them and still met with Marion. I canceled every one, and went to meet her at the station.

The only thing I could think of when I saw her step off the train was that she had changed hardly at all since that June morning, thirteen years ago, when we first met. It took close inspection to see that the ash- blond hair showed wisps of grey at the temples, and that a network of fine lines had appeared at the outer corners of her eyes.

Neither of us had anything to say. I put my arms around her and gave her an embarrassed hug, and she leaned her head for a moment on my shoulder. In the taxi back to college we talked the talk of strangers, about the American election results, new compact disk recordings, and the town’s worsening traffic problems.

We did not go to my rooms, but set out at once to walk on the neardeserted paths of the College Backs. The gloom of the previous afternoon had intensified. It was perfect weather for weltschmerz, cloudy and dark, with a thin drizzle falling. We stared at the crestfallen ducks on the Cam and the near-leafless oaks, while I waited for her to begin. I sensed that she was winding herself up to say something unpleasant. I tried to prepare myself for anything.

It came with a sigh, and a murmured, “He didn’t kill himself, you know. That’s what the report said, but it’s wrong. He was murdered.”

I was not prepared for anything. The hair rose on the back of my neck.

“It sounds insane,” she went on. “But I’m sure of it. You see, when Arthur was home in June, he did something that he’d never done before. He talked to me about his work. I didn’t understand half of it—” she smiled, a tremulous, tentative smile; I noticed that her eyes were slightly bloodshot from weeping “—you’d probably say not even a tenth of it. But I could tell that he was terrifically excited, and at the same time terribly worried and depressed.”

“But what was he doing? Wasn’t he working for that German company?” I was ashamed to admit it, but in my preoccupation with my own research I had not given a moment’s thought in four years to Arthur’s doings, or to A.N.F. Gesellschaft.

“He was still there. He was in his office the morning of the day that he died. And what he was doing was terribly important.”

“You talked to them?”

“They talked to us. The chief man involved with Arthur’s work is called Otto Braun, and he flew over two days ago specially to talk to me and Roland. He said he wanted to be sure we would hear about Arthur’s death directly, rather than just being officially notified. Braun admitted that Arthur had done very important work for them.”

“But if that’s true, it makes no sense at all for anyone to think of killing him. They’d do all they could to keep him alive.”

“Not if he’d found something they were desperate to keep secret. They’re a commercial operation. Suppose that he found something hugely valuable? And suppose that he told them that it was too important for one company to own, and he was going to let everyone in on it.”

It sounded to me like a form of paranoia that I would never have expected in Marion Shaw. Arthur would certainly have been obliged to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the company he worked for, and there were many legal ways to assure his silence. In any case, to a hi- tech firm Arthur and people like him were the golden goose. Companies didn’t murder their most valuable employees.

We were walking slowly across the Bridge of Sighs, our footsteps echoing from the stony arch. Neither of us spoke until we had strolled all the way through the first three courts of St. Johns College, and turned right onto Trinity Street.

“I know you think I’m making all this up,” said Marion at last, “just because I’m so upset. You’re just humoring me. You’re so logical and clear-headed, Giles, you never let yourself go overboard about anything.”

There is a special hell for those who feel but cannot tell. I started to protest, half-heartedly.

“That’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to be polite to me. We’ve known each other too long. You don’t think I understand anything about science, and maybe I don’t. But you’ll admit that I know a fair bit about people. And I can tell you one thing, Otto Braun was keeping something from us. Something important.”

“How do you know?”

“I could read it in his eyes.”

That was an unarguable statement; but it was not persuasive. The drizzle was slowly turning into a persistent rain, and I steered us away from Kings Parade and towards a coffee shop. As we passed through the doorway she took my arm.

“Giles, do you remember Arthur’s notebooks?”

It was a rhetorical question. Anyone who knew Arthur knew his notebooks. Maintaining them was his closest approach to a religious ritual. He had started the first one when he was twelve years old. A combination of personal diary, scientific workbook, and clippings album, they recorded everything in his life that he believed to be significant.

“He still kept them when he went to Germany,” Marion continued. “He even mentioned them, the last time he was home, because he wanted me to send him the same sort of book that he always used, and he had trouble getting them there. I sent him a shipment in August. I asked Otto Braun to send them back to me, with Arthur’s personal things. He told me there were no notebooks. There were only the work journals that every employee of ANF was obliged to keep.”

I stared at her across the little table, with its red-and-white checkered cloth. At last, Marion was offering evidence for her case. I moved the salt and pepper shakers around on the table. Arthur may have changed in the past four years, but he couldn’t have changed that much. Habits were habits.

She leaned forward, and put her hands over mine. “I know. I said to Braun just what you’re thinking. Arthur always kept notebooks. They had to exist, and after his death they belonged to me. I wanted them back. He wriggled and sweated, and said there was nothing. But if I want to know what Arthur left, he said, I can get someone I trust who’ll understand Arthur’s work, and have them go over to Bonn. Otto Braun will let them see everything there is.”

She gazed at me with troubled grey eyes.

I picked up my coffee cup and took an unwanted sip. Some requests for help were simply too much. The next two weeks were going to be chaotic. I had a horrendous schedule, with three promised papers to complete, two London meetings to attend, half a dozen important seminars, and four out-of-town visitors. I had to explain to her somehow that there was no way for me to postpone any part of it.

But first I had to explain matters to someone else. I had been in love with Marion Shaw, I told myself, there was no use denying it. Hopelessly, and desperately, and mutely. She had been at one time my inamorata, my goddess, the central current of my being; but that was ten years ago. First love’s impassioned blindness had long since passed away in colder light.

I opened my mouth to say that I could not help.

Except that this was still my Maid Marion, and she needed me.

The next morning I was on my way to Bonn.

Otto Braun was a tall, heavily-built man in his mid-thirties, with a fleshy face, a high forehead, and swept-back dark hair. He had the imposing and slightly doltish look of a Wagnerian heldentenor—an appearance that I soon learned was totally deceptive. Otto Braun had the brains of a dozen Siegfrieds, and his command of idiomatic English was so good that his slight German accent seemed like an affectation.

“We made use of certain ancient principles in designing our research facility,” he said, as we zipped along the Autobahn in his Peugeot. “Don’t be misled by its appearance.”

He had insisted on meeting me at Wahn Airport, and driving me (at eighty-five miles an hour) to the company’s plant. I studied him, while to my relief he kept his eyes on the road ahead and the other traffic. I could not detect in him any of the shiftiness that Marion Shaw had described. What I did sense was a forced cheerfulness. Otto Braun was uneasy.

“The monasteries of northern Europe were designed to encourage deep meditation,” he went on. “Small noise-proof cells, hours of solitary confinement, speech only at certain times and places. Well, deep meditation is what we’re after. Of course, we’ve added a few modern comforts—heat, light, coffee, computers, and a decent cafeteria.” He smiled. “So don’t worry about your accommodation. Our guest quarters at the lab receive high ratings from visitors. You can see the place now, coming into view over on the left.”

I had been instructed not to judge by appearances. Otherwise, I would have taken the research facility of ANF Gesellschaft to be the largest concrete prison blockhouse I had ever seen. Windowless, and surrounded by smooth lawns that ended in a tall fence, it stood fifty feet high and several hundred long. All it needed were guard dogs and machine-gun towers.

Otto Braun drove us through the heavy, automatically opening gates and parked by a side entrance.

“No security?” I said.

He grinned, his first sign of genuine amusement. “Try getting out without the right credentials, Herr Doktor Professor Turnbull.”

We traversed a deserted entrance hall to a quiet, carpeted corridor, went up in a noiseless elevator, and walked along to an office about three meters square. It contained a computer, a terminal, a desk, two chairs, a blackboard, a filing cabinet, and a book-case.

“Notice anything unusual about this room?” he said.

I had, in the first second. “No telephone.”

“Very perceptive. The devil’s device. Do you know, in eleven years of operation, no one has ever complained about its absence? Every office, including my own, is the same size and shape and has the same equipment in it. We have conference rooms for the larger meetings. This was Dr. Shaw’s office and it is, in all essentials, exactly as he left it.”

I stared around me with increased interest. He gestured to one of the chairs, and didn’t take his eyes off me.

“Mrs. Shaw told me you were his best friend,” he said. It was midway between a question and a statement.

“I knew him since we were both teenagers,” I replied. And then, since that was not quite enough, “I was probably as close a friend as he had. But Arthur did not encourage close acquaintances.”

He nodded. “That makes perfect sense to me. Dr. Shaw was perhaps the most talented and valuable employee we have ever had. His work on quantized Hall effect devices was unique, and made many millions of marks for the company. We rewarded him well and esteemed his work highly. Yet he was not someone who was easy to know.” His eyes were dark and alert, half-hidden in that pudgy face. They focused on me with a higher intensity level. “And Mrs. Shaw. Do you know her well?”

“As well as I know anyone.”

“And you have a high regard for each other?”

“She has been like a mother to me.”

“Then did she confide in you her worry—that her son Arthur did not die by his own hand, and his death was in some way connected with our company?”

“Yes, she did.” My opinion of Otto Braun was changing. He had something to hide, as Marion had said, but he was less and less the likely villain. “Did she tell you that?”

“No. I was forced to infer it, from her questions about what he was doing for us. Hmph.” Braun rubbed at his jowls. “Herr Turnbull, I find myself in a most difficult situation. I want to be as honest with you as I can, just as I wanted to be honest with Mr. and Mrs. Shaw. But there were things I could not tell them. I am forced to ask again: is your concern for Mrs. Shaw sufficient that you are willing to withhold certain facts from her? Please understand, I am not suggesting any form of criminal behavior. I am concerned only to minimize sorrow.”

“I can’t answer that question unless I know what the facts are. But I think the world of Marion Shaw. I’ll do anything I can to make the loss of her son easier for her.”

“Very well.” He sighed. “I will begin with something that you could find out for yourself, from official sources. Mrs. Shaw thinks there was some sort of foul play in Arthur Shaw’s death. I assure you that he took his own life, and the proof of that is provided by the curious manner of his death. Do you know how he died?”

“Only that it was in his apartment.”

“It was. But he chose to leave this world in a way that I have never before encountered. Dr. Shaw removed from the lab a large plastic storage bag, big enough to hold a mattress. It is equipped with a zipper along the outside, and when that zipper is closed, such a bag is quite airtight.” He paused. Otto Braun was no machine. This explanation was giving him trouble. “Dr. Shaw took it to his apartment. At about six o’clock at night he turned the bag inside out and placed it on top of his bed. Then he changed to his pajamas, climbed into the bag, and zipped it from the inside. Sometime during that evening he died, of asphyxiation.” He looked at me unhappily. “I am no expert in ‘locked room’ mysteries, Professor Turnbull, but the police made a thorough investigation. They are quite sure that no one could have closed that bag from the outside. Dr. Shaw took his own life, in a unique and perverse way.”

“I see why you didn’t want Mr. and Mrs. Shaw to know this. Let me assure you that they won’t learn it from me.” I felt nauseated. Now that I knew how Arthur had died, I would have rather remained ignorant.

He raised dark eyebrows. “But they do know, Professor Turnbull. Naturally, they insisted on seeing the coroner’s report on the manner of his death, and I was in no position to keep such information from them. Mrs. Shaw’s suspicion of me arose from a quite different incident. It came when she asked me to return Dr. Shaw’s journals to her.”

“And you refused.”

“Not exactly. I denied their existence. Maybe that was a mistake, but I do not pretend to be infallible. If you judge after examination that the books should be released to Dr. Shaw’s parents, I will permit it to happen.” Otto Braun stood up and went across to the grey metal file cabinet. He patted the side of it. “These contain Arthur Shaw’s complete journals. On the day of his death, he took them all and placed them in one of the red trash containers in the corridor, from which they would go to the shredder and incinerator. I should explain that at ANF we have many commercial secrets, and we are careful not to allow our competitors to benefit from our garbage. Dr. Shaw surely believed that his notebooks would be destroyed that night.”

He pulled open a file drawer, and I saw the familiar spiral twelve-by- sixteen ledgers that Arthur had favored since childhood.

“As you see, they were not burned or shredded,” Braun went on. “In the past we’ve had occasional accidents, in which valuable papers were placed by oversight into the red containers. So our cleaning staff—all trusted employees—are instructed to check with me if they see anything that looks like a mistake. An alert employee retrieved all these notebooks and brought them to my office, asking approval to destroy them.”

It seemed to me that Marion Shaw had been right on at least one thing. For if after examining Arthur’s ledgers, Otto Braun had not let them be destroyed, they must contain material of value to ANF.

I said this to him, and he shook his head. “The notebooks had to be kept, in case they were needed as evidence for the investigation of death by suicide. They were, in fact, one of the reasons why I am convinced that Dr. Shaw took his own life. Otherwise I would have burned them. Every piece of work that Dr. Shaw did relevant to ANF activities was separately recorded in our ANF work logs. His own notebooks . . .” He paused. “Beyond that, I should not go. You will draw your own conclusions.”

He moved away from the cabinet, and steered me with him towards the door. “It is six o’clock, Professor, and I must attend our weekly staff meeting. With your permission, I will show you to your room and then leave you. We can meet tomorrow morning. Let me warn you. You were his friend; be prepared for a shock.”

He would make no other comment as we walked to the well-furnished suite that had been prepared for me, other than to say again, as he was leaving, “It is better if you draw your own conclusions. Be ready for a disturbing evening.”

The next morning I was still studying Arthur’s notebooks.

It is astonishing how, even after five years, my mind reaches for that thought. When I relive my three days in Bonn I feel recollection rushing on, faster and faster, until I reach the point where Otto Braun left me alone in my room. And then memory leaps out towards the next morning, trying to clear the dark chasm of that night.

I cannot permit that luxury now.

It took about three minutes to settle my things in the guest suite at the ANF laboratory. Then I went to the cafeteria, gulped down a sandwich and two cups of tea, and hurried back to Arthur’s office. The grey file cabinet held twenty-seven ledgers; many more than I expected, since Arthur normally filled only two or three a year.

In front of the ledgers was a heavy packet wrapped in white plastic. I opened that first, and almost laughed aloud at the incongruity of the contents, side-by-side with Arthur’s work records. He had enjoyed experimental science, but the idea of car or bicycle repair was totally repugnant to him. This packet held an array of screwdrivers, heavy steel wire, and needle-nosed and broad-nosed pliers, all shiny and brand-new.

I replaced the gleaming tool kit and turned to the ledgers. If they were equally out of character . . .

It was tempting to begin with the records from the last few days of his life. I resisted that urge. One of the lessons that he had taught me in adolescence was an organized approach to problems, and now I could not afford to miss anything even marginally significant to his death. The ledgers were neatly numbered in red ink on the top right-hand corner of the stiff cover, twenty-two through forty-eight. It was about six-thirty in the evening when I picked up Volume Twenty-two and opened it to the first page.

That gave me my first surprise. I had expected to see only the notebooks for the four years that Arthur had been employed by ANF Gesellschaft. Instead, the date at the head of the first entry was early April, seven and a half years ago. This was a notebook from Arthur’s final undergraduate year at Cambridge. Why had he brought with him such old ledgers, rather than leaving them at his parents’ house?

The opening entry was unremarkable, and even familiar. At that time, as I well remembered, Arthur’s obsession had been quantized theories of gravity. He was still coming to grips with the problem, and his note said nothing profound. I skimmed it and read on. Successive entries were strictly chronological. Mixed in with mathematics, physics, and science references was everything else that had caught his fancy—scraps of quoted poetry (he was in a world-weary Housman phase), newspaper clippings, comments on the weather, lecture notes, cricket scores, and philosophical questions.

It was hard to read at my usual speed. For one thing I had forgotten the near-illegible nature of Arthur’s personal notes. I could follow everything, after so many years of practice, but Otto Braun must have had a terrible time. Despite his command of English, some of the terse technical notes and equations would be unintelligible to one of his background. Otto was an engineer. It would be astonishing if his knowledge extended to modern theoretical physics.

And yet in some ways Otto Braun would have found the material easier going than I did. I could not make myself read fast, for the words of those old notebooks whispered in my brain like a strange echo of false memory. Arthur and I had been in the same place at the same time, experiencing similar events, and many of the things that he felt worth recording had made an equal impression on me. We had discussed many of them. This was my own Cambridge years, my own life, seen from a different vantage point and through a lens that imposed a subtle distortion on shapes and colors.

And then it changed. The final divergence began.

It was in December, eight days before Christmas, that I caught a first hint of something different and repugnant. Immediately following a note on quantized red shifts came a small newspaper clipping. It appeared without comment, and it reported the arrest of a Manchester man for the torture, murder and dismemberment of his own twin daughters. He had told the police that the six-year-olds had “deserved all they got.”

That was the first evidence of a dark obsession. In successive months and years, Arthur Shaw’s ledgers told of his increasing preoccupation with death; and it was never the natural, near-friendly death of old age and a long, fulfilled life, but always the savage deaths of small children. Death unnatural, murder most foul. The clippings spoke of starvation, beating, mutilation, and torture. In every case Arthur had defined the source, without providing any other comment. He must have combed the newspapers in his search, for I, reading those same papers in those same editions, had not noticed the articles.

It got worse. Nine years ago it had been one clipping every few pages. By the time he went to live in Bonn the stories of brutal death occupied more than half the journals, and his sources of material had become world-wide.

And yet the Arthur that I knew still existed. It was bewildering and frightening to recognize the cool, analytical voice of Arthur Shaw, interspersed with the bloody deeds of human monsters. The poetry quotes and the comments on the weather and current events were still there, but now they shared space with a catalog of unspeakable acts.

Four years ago, just before he came to Bonn, another change occurred. It was as though the author of the written entries had suddenly become aware of the thing that was making the newspaper clippings. When Arthur discovered that the other side of him was there, he began to comment on the horror of the events that he was recording. He was shocked, revolted, and terrified by them.

And yet the clippings continued, along with the lecture notes, the concerts attended, the careful record of letters written; and there were the first hints of something else, something that made me quiver.

I read on, to midnight and beyond until the night sky paled. Now at last I am permitted the statement denied to me earlier: The next morning I was still studying Arthur’s notebooks.

Otto Braun came into the office, looked at me, and nodded grimly.

“I am sorry, Professor Turnbull. It seemed to me that nothing I could say would be the same as allowing you to read for yourself.” He came across to the desk. “The security officer says you were up all night. Have you eaten breakfast?”

I shook my head.

“I thought not.” He looked at my hands, which were perceptibly shaking. “You must have rest.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“You will. But first you need food. Come with me. I have arranged for us to have a private dining-room.”

On the way to the guest quarters I went to the bathroom. I saw myself in the mirror there. No wonder Otto Braun was worried. I looked terrible, pale and unshaven, with purple-black rings under my eyes.

In the cafeteria Braun loaded a tray with scrambled eggs, speckwurst, croissants, and hot coffee, and led me to a nook off the main room. He watched like a worried parent to make sure that I was eating, before he would pour coffee for himself.

“Let me begin with the most important question,” he said. “Are you convinced that Arthur Shaw took his own life?”

“I feel sure of it. He could not live with what one part of him was becoming. The final entry in his journal says as much. And it explains the way he chose to die.”

Enough is enough, Arthur had written. I can’t escape from myself. “To cease upon the midnight with no pain.” Better to return to the womb, and never be born . . .

“He wanted peace, and to hide away from everything,” I went on. “When you know that, the black plastic bag makes more sense.”

“And you agree with my decision?” Braun’s chubby face was anxious. “To keep the notebooks away from his parents.”

“It was what he would have wanted. They were supposed to be destroyed, and one of his final entries proves it. He said, ‘I have done one braver thing.’ ”

His brow wrinkled, and he put down his cup. “I saw that. But I did not understand it. He did not say what he had done.”

“That’s because it’s part of a quotation, from a poem by John Donne. ‘I have done one braver thing, Than all the worthies did, And yet a braver thence doth spring, And that, to keep it hid.’ He wanted what he had been doing to remain secret. It was enormously important to him.”

“That is a great relief. I hoped that it was so, but I could not be sure. Do you agree with me, we can now destroy those notebooks?”

I paused. “Maybe that is not the best answer. It will leave questions in the mind of Marion Shaw, because she is quite sure that the books must exist. Suppose that you turn them over to my custody? If I tell Marion that I have them, and want to keep them as something of Arthur’s, I’m sure she will approve. And of course I will never let her see them.”

“Ah.” Braun gave a gusty sigh of satisfaction. “That is a most excellent suggestion. Even now, I would feel uneasy about destroying them. I must admit, Professor Turnbull, that I had doubts as to my own wisdom when I agreed to allow you to come here and examine Dr. Shaw’s writings. But everything has turned out for the best, has it not? If you are not proposing to eat those eggs . . .”

Everything for the best, thought Otto Braun, and probably in the best of all possible worlds.

We had made the decision. The rest was details. Over the next twelve hours, he and I wrote the script.

I would handle Marion and Roland Shaw. I was to confirm that Arthur’s death had been suicide, while his mind was unbalanced by overwork. If they talked to Braun again about his earlier discomfort in talking to them, it was because he felt he had failed them. He had not done enough to help, he would say, when Arthur so obviously needed him. (No lie there; that’s exactly how Otto felt).

And the journals? I would tell the Shaws of Arthur’s final wish, that they be destroyed. Again, no lie; and I would assure them that I would honor that intent.

I went home. I did it, exactly as we had planned. The only intolerable moment came when Marion Shaw put her arms around me, and actually thanked me for what I had done.

Because, of course, neither she nor Otto Braun nor anyone else in the world knew what I had done.

When I read the journals and saw Arthur’s mind fluttering towards insanity, I was horrified. But it was not only the revelation of madness that left me the next morning white-faced and quivering. It was excitement derived from the other content of the ledgers, material interwoven with the cool comments on personal affairs and the blood-obsessed newspaper clippings.

Otto Braun, in his relief at seeing his own problems disappear, had grabbed at my explanation of Arthur’s final journal entries, without seeing that it was wholly illogical. “I have done one braver thing,” quoted Arthur. But that was surely not referring to the newspaper clippings and his own squalid obsessions. He was appalled by them, and said so. What was the “brave thing” that he had done?

I knew. It was in the notebooks.

For four years, since Arthur’s departure from Cambridge, I had concentrated on the single problem of a unified theory of quantized spacetime. I made everything else in my life of secondary importance, working myself harder than ever before, to the absolute limit of my powers. At the back of my mind was always Arthur’s comment: this was the most important problem in modern physics.

It was the best work I had ever done. I suspect that it is easily the best work that I will ever do.

What I had not known, or even vaguely suspected, was that Arthur Shaw had begun to work on the same problem after he went to Bonn.

I found that out as I went through his work ledgers. How can I describe the feeling, when in the middle of the night in Arthur’s old office I came across scribbled thoughts and conjectures that I had believed to belong in my head alone? They were mixed in hodge-podge with everything else, side-by-side with the soccer scores, the day’s high temperature, and the horror stories of child molestation, mutilation, and murder. To Otto Braun or anyone else, those marginal scribbles would have been random nonsensical jottings. But I recognized that integral, and that flux quantization condition, and that invariant.

How can I describe the feeling?

I cannot. But I am not the first to suffer it. Thomas Kydd and Ben Jonson must have been filled with the same awe in the 1590s, when Shakespeare carried the English language to undreamed-of heights. Hofkapellmeister Salieri knew it, to his despair, when Mozart and his God-touched work came on the scene at the court of Vienna. Edmund Halley surely felt it, sitting in Newton’s rooms at Trinity College in 1684, and learning that the immortal Isaac had discovered laws and invented techniques that would make the whole System of the World calculable’, and old Legendre was overwhelmed by it, when the Disquisitiones came into his hands and he marveled at the supernatural mathematical powers of the young Gauss.

When half-gods go, the gods arrive. I had struggled with the problem of space-time quantization, as I said, with every working neuron of my brain. Arthur Shaw went so far beyond me that it took all my intellect to mark his path. “It were all one that I should love a bright particular star, and think to wed it, he is so above me.” But I could see what he was doing, and I recognized what I had long suspected. Arthur was something that I would never be. He was a true genius.

I am not a genius, but I am very talented. I could follow where I could not lead. From the hints, scribbled theorems, and conjectures in Arthur Shaw’s notebooks I assembled the whole; not perhaps as the gorgeous tapestry of thought that Arthur had woven in his mind, but enough to make a complete theory with profound practical implications.

That grand design was the “braver thing” that he knew he had done, an intellectual feat that placed him with the immortals.

It was also, paradoxically, the cause of his death.

Some scientific developments are “in the air” at a particular moment; if one person does not propose them, another will. But other creative acts lie so far outside the mainstream of thought that they seem destined for a single individual. If Einstein had not created the theory of general relativity, it is quite likely that it would not exist today. Arthur Shaw knew what he had wrought. His approach was totally novel, and he was convinced that without his work an adequate theory might be centuries in the future.

I did not believe that; but I might have, if I had not been stumbling purblind along the same road. The important point, however, is that Arthur did believe it.

What should he do? He had made a wonderful discovery. But when he looked inside himself, he saw in that interior mirror only the glassy essence of the angry ape. He had in his grasp the wondrous spell that would send humanity to the stars—but he regarded us as a bloody- handed, bloody-minded humanity, raging out of control through the universe.

His duty as he saw it was clear. He must do the braver thing, and destroy both his ideas and himself.

What did I do?

I think it is obvious.

Arthur’s work had always been marred by obscurity. Or rather, to be fair to him, in his mind the important thing was that he understand an idea, not that he be required to explain it to someone of lesser ability.

It took months of effort on my part to convert Arthur’s awkward notation and sketchy proofs to a form that could withstand rigorous scrutiny. At that point the work felt like my own; the re-creation of his half-stated thoughts was often indistinguishable from painful invention.

Finally I was ready to publish. By that time Arthur’s ledgers had been, true to my promise, long-since destroyed, for whatever else happened in the world I did not want Marion Shaw to see those notebooks or suspect anything of their contents.

I published. I could have submitted the work as the posthumous papers of Arthur Sandford Shaw . . . except that someone would certainly have asked to see the original material.

I published. I could have assigned joint authorship, as Shaw and Turnbull . . . except that Arthur had never presented a line on the subject, and the historians would have probed and probed to learn what his contribution had been.

I published—as Giles Turnbull. Three papers expounded what the world now knows as the Turnbull Concession Theory. Arthur Shaw was not mentioned. It is not easy to justify that, even to myself. I clung to one thought: Arthur had wanted his ideas suppressed, but that was a consequence of his own state of mind. It was surely better to give the ideas to the world, and risk their abuse in human hands. That, I said to myself, was the braver thing.

I published. And because there were already eight earlier papers of mine in the literature, exploring the same problem, acceptance of the new theory was quick, and my role in it was never in doubt.

Or almost never. In the past four years, at scattered meetings around the world, I have seen in perhaps half a dozen glances the cloaked hint of a question. The world of physics holds a handful of living giants. They see each other clearly, towering above the rest of us, and when someone whom they have assessed as one of the pygmies shoots up to stand tall, not at their height but even well above them, there is at least a suspicion . . .

There is a braver thing.

Last night I telephoned my father. He listened quietly to everything that I had to tell him, then he replied, “Of course I won’t say a word about that to Marion Shaw. And neither will you.” And at the end he said what he had not said when the Nobel announcement was made: “I’m proud of you, Giles.”

At the cocktail party before tonight’s dinner, one of the members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences was tactless enough to tell me that he and his colleagues found the speeches delivered by the Nobel laureates uniformly boring. It’s always the same, he said, all they ever do is recapitulate the reason that the award had been made to them in the first place.

I’m sure he is right. But perhaps tomorrow I can be an exception to that rule.

This is a birthday present for Bob Porter.

—Charles Sheffield, February 27, 1989.

OVER THE LONG HAUL

Martha Soukup

In 1988, Martha Soukup was a John W. Campbell Award nominee. She was also a member of the SFWA Nebula Award jury) which means that she’ll always be one of the experts on the science fiction published in 1988.

“Over the Long Haul” is her second story sale to Amazing® Stories (her first was “Dreams of Sawn Ivory” May 1989). “The idea of remote-driven trucks was Algis Budrys’s” she informs US) “but the characters) society) and plot are all mine.” And we add that this is a quite telling tale about the future of the welfare program.

Sometimes I think I’ve been in this truck forever, but of course that’s not so. I just have to look at my license card if I want the proof: “Shawana Mooney,” it says, and right next to that the day I got the card, two years ago. Two weeks after little Cilehe was born, which makes it easy to remember her birthday.

That name “Shawana” makes me think sometimes my daddy was a guy named Shawn Parker. My mama sure cried when he got shot dead when I was eight, but she wouldn’t say he was my daddy. She just said he was no good and ran drugs and then she cried some more. Mooney, of course, that’s my mama’s name and her mama’s, and it was my great-grandma’s too. Also my great-grandpa’s. They were married.

Then the card’s got my picture, which looks terrible with my eyes all stary the way the camera caught them, but I kind of like the way I had my hair done then, with all those little braids my grandma put in.

I must look awful now. I look at myself in the big side mirror when I fix up my makeup, but I don’t really look hard at the whole effect, if you know what I mean. When Tomi gets a little bigger—he’s barely four now—maybe I can teach him to fix my hair.

Or maybe we’ll get out of this truck.

I think about that a lot, especially when Cilehe gets cranky and yells. Which isn’t fair to her of course because what two-year-old wants to grow up in the cab of a truck, six feet wide and six feet deep? Sure, she’s got “Sesame Street” like I did—and a lot of other much more boring TV, like it or not—but I could go outside besides, even if my grandma was always warning me about gangs. Cilehe’s the kind of baby who needs to move around and tire herself out, which is pretty hard here.

I know exactly how she feels.

But it’s none of her doing. I tell myself that. I got her by my own self—well, I had help, but it isn’t her fault her daddy isn’t in a truck too. They put the welfare parents who actually are raising the kids in the trucks. Now, do you know any guy who’s going to take them? Nope. Both their daddies were long gone before that happened.

One truck stop looks a lot like another. I was kind of dozing behind the wheel when it took a big pull right and the truck went off to an exit. I tried to guess where we were—I thought maybe Nebraska. Sure was flat as hell out there.

Cilehe started kicking up a fit. She always acts like the last couple minutes before we stop is a couple of hours, and screaming will make the truck go faster. The only thing that could make the truck go faster is if I hit MANUAL OVERRIDE and drove it myself, and I’d better have a damn good reason for that or it’s big trouble. She was screaming for the potty. She just started with that, and she doesn’t like the portapotty in the cab. Me neither. I don’t care what they say, the thing smells.

Got her in before she messed up her panties, Tomi following quiet as a mouse. He’s not quite big enough to send into the boy’s room alone yet. Then she didn’t want to wash her hands, and when I made her, she got her hands and face and hair and T-shirt and the floor all wet, and glared up at me like I did it. She stomped out of the bathroom with her sneakers going squish, squish, squish.

I looked in to see if I knew any of the drivers. Kimberlea and Avis were both there, still going along the same route I was. I met Avis for the first time in Minneapolis on this run. Kimberlea I met soon after I started. The women on the road tell me you can go forever between seeing someone twice, so that was lucky. As long as we kept going along the same route, taking our full breaks—who wouldn’t take her full break?—so they’d be the same length, we’d keep meeting up. Kimberlea is older than my mama, maybe forty, and she used to do keypunching in the very last office that still used it, years and years after everyone else stopped, until the business was sold and they retired the old-time system. Her kids are twelve and eight, and she was even married when she had them.

Avis was having trouble with her boy. Her one-year-old twins were in the big playpen in the middle of the dining room, the boy screaming his head off. I looked at Cilehe, but she just stared at the kid with big round eyes, didn’t copy him. The baby wailed, while Avis drank Coke with her face turned away from him, her eyebrows down and her mouth real tight, trying to act like the baby wasn’t there.

“But I don’t know if I want green or blue,” she was saying to Kimberlea.

Kimberlea sighed. “Girl, what do you need with neon fingernails?” I put Cilehe in the pen, away from Avis’s boy, and let Tomi sit next to me.

“Just because I’m stuck in a truck all day doesn’t mean I can’t look good!” Avis is a couple years younger than me, maybe seventeen.

“That sort of thing costs money. You don’t get that much to save.”

“So what else do I have to spend it on?”

“You can save it,” Kimberlea said stubbornly.

“Right, and maybe in twelve years when my babies are teenagers and they let me out, I’ll have a couple hundred bucks!” Avis took a long drink of her Coke. Kimberlea and I said hi. “So why not order the implant kit and have something now?”

“Couple hundred dollars is better than nothing. And you could save more than that.”

“On what the government gives us?” Avis snorted and peeled open a Snickers.

“I save six dollars a week,” Kimberlea said.

“You told us,” Avis said.

Last stop, Kimberlea’d laid out her whole plan over breakfast. She’s studying for her accounting license. Accounting’s just a matter of using spreadsheets and stuff, she said, but they still make you study for it. The course work costs, and then you have to get a license, which is a lot of money even before the bribes. She saves every penny. Doesn’t even use up her food vouchers; sells the leftovers back to the government for half-value, or sometimes to other truckers for two-thirds. Her plate had scraps of meat loaf and carrots. Not even Jello for desert. She stays husky just the same.

“What the fuck you want an accounting license for anyway?” Avis asked. “It’s just minimum wage. Your oldest is thirteen next year, so you get out one way or another.” Trucking’s also a labor option for mothers with just one pre-teenager, but I’ve only seen a couple women who chose it when they didn’t have to. They’d put her on some other workfare labor. Maybe sidewalk cleaning. That’s what I did, five hours a day, before Cilehe. I used to hate it, but it’s better than trucking.

Kimberlea took her paper napkin off her lap, folded it neatly, and laid it on her tray. “I don’t like being on welfare if I can work,” she said. “Not this workfare joke—a real job. I always worked until they took my job away. That’s the way I know.”

The boy was screaming so loud now even Avis couldn’t ignore it any longer. “Shit,” she said. She stuffed the rest of the Snickers into her mouth and went to get him.

Kimberlea and I talked for a couple minutes until her watch started beeping. “Back to the road,” she said. She gathered up her two kids, who had been reading quietly at another table—don’t know how she saves six bucks a week, if she buys them books—and left.

Avis came back. “Damn kid needed a new diaper,” she said. “Where’s old Kim Burly?”

“Her break was up.”

“Stuck-up bitch.” She wiggled her fingers in my face. “So do you think green or blue?”

Tomi tugged my arm and pointed. I was set to ignore him, but the room had gone quiet. I looked up.

There was a man in the dining room.

Maybe if you don’t truck, you don’t know how strange that was. When I was little, I guess most truckers were guys. Then they came up with the remote-driving system, one guy in his living room controlling a dozen trucks. The unions kicked a fuss about that, of course, so everyone yelled at each other until they came up with a couple solutions: early retirement with heaps of compensation for the old truckers—lot of younger guys took that and went into other work—and retraining the truckers that passed the tests to be controllers at a big fat salary. At the same time, they passed a law that there had to be a driver in each truck. For manual override in emergencies, like that was going to happen. But nobody trusts computers and leastways unions.

Then came the Welfare Labor Act, the workfare act.

Bound to happen, they put us in the trucks. It’s boring. It doesn’t pay shit—the controllers get the real money. We all know why they put us with two kids in the trucks. It’s like, you get yourself one kid, they put you cleaning sidewalks or something and thinking on what happens if you get another one. You get another one anyway, and bam! into a truck. So now you’re on the road all the time, only get out at a truck stop and see other drivers and they’re all women too. A third kid is too many to live in a truck cab, so you’d get out, but how’re you going to get a third one? Locking you in a convent couldn’t work any better.

What they say is truck cabs are perfect classrooms, educational TV the kids (and their moms) can’t get away from. Getting away from bad influences. Breaking the cycle of poverty.

What it’s about is punishing us, keeping us away from that nasty stuff that got us here. We all know it. These are the same people who got abortion made illegal, and whittled down sex ed next to nothing. (Though from what my mama told me once before she moved on, people hardly used birth control even when they had teachers telling them about it.) They’re punishing us, all right.

I never saw a guy trucking. As far as I ever knew, they didn’t even let guys choose trucking.

Avis was staring. “Jesus, it’s a man!” she whispered.

“Real good,” I said. “You remember what they look like.”

Maybe I hadn’t, though. Oh, he was tall and he was fine. White, like Cilehe’s daddy, but dark tan skin. Maybe Latin. His hair came down in a braid over one shoulder, thick and brown and shiny. Cheekbones cut high like a TV Indian’s. He had tight old jeans on. The way they hugged his hips close you could imagine doing yourself.

Man, it had been too long since I’d seen a guy.

He walked over to an empty table across the room and a dozen pairs of eyes followed him. Nobody said a word.

One skinny girl with a baby on her hip went over and stared down at him. “Truckers only in this room,” she said in a mean voice.

That broke the silence. Everyone started up with catcalls, hisses, and “Who cares?” The girl glared back at all of us. Some of them, when they get put in the trucks, actually buy the crap about our Evil Ways and get worse than any taxpayer.

The guy just smiled up at her so nice your toes curled. “You’re right,” he said. His voice was like caramel candy. He pulled out his trucker’s card.

The girl’s lips went white. She grabbed the kid up in her arm, pulled another off her chair, and left the room.

“This is mine,” Avis said, to me or maybe just to the universe.

“What are you talking about?” Her eyes looked like a cat’s fixing to go after a mouse. Squintier than a cat’s, though, in her pasty pimply face. No way a man so fine-looking would go for her.

Not that I was after him.

“Seventeen months,” Avis said. No need to ask seventeen months since what.

I fluffed my hair up around my forehead. I knew it looked like hell.

Avis was already moving, plowing through a crowd of women all trying to look like they had some casual reason for happening to go over by that particular table at that particular time. It sure wasn’t worth it to join the mob.

“Look after your sister,” I told Tomi. I put him in the pen with the other kids. “I’ll be back in five minutes. Need some fresh air.”

“Me too, Mama?” he asked, but he’s a good kid. He didn’t complain. I didn’t want fresh air, I wanted to get out of the room so my eyes wouldn’t be all over that guy. Something got you in this fix, I told myself. You think you’d learn someday.

Even the place outside for truckers to walk around is separate from the place car drivers go to let their poodles piddle. Same sky, though, high and gray, the wind whipping around pretty good. I took a deep breath of windy air. I told myself I wasn’t a kid anymore, fourteen and stupid like when Tomi’s daddy got him on me. When that didn’t work, I tried telling myself he had a whole truck stop full of girls to pick from. When that didn’t work, I looked at my watch and told myself I only had another ten minutes in my break, and odds were this guy wasn’t going the same way anyway.

I talked to myself until I had me just about convinced.

“Nice day,” he said.

I didn’t jump. I was great. “Sure, if you hate sun and like smog.”

“Somebody must,” he said, “or you wouldn’t be outside in it.”

I turned then. “Oh, I just get tired of girl talk all the time,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said. The wind was strong enough to flop his braid around. Some of his hair was loose and blowing over his forehead. His eyes were the clearest lightest brown I’d ever seen. “The women always seem to stop talking when I come in.”

“Yeah, well, they’re easily impressed.” I couldn’t understand why he was out here with me. Couldn’t understand why I was saying bitchy things to him either.

“But not you, I guess,” he said.

“I been around some.”

“I can tell you’re a woman of experience.”

Was he laughing at me? He didn’t look like it. I grunted in a worldly sort of way.

“Cal,” he said, sticking his hand out. After a moment I realized it was his name.

“Shawana,” I said. Took his hand. Right when I did, I knew I never should have. Something about man flesh just feels different, and the skin of my hand, I realized, had been starved for the taste of it.

The rest of my skin started up a clamor.

He was still holding on to my hand, so I pulled it back. I tried to think of something regular to say. “Don’t see a lot of guys trucking.” I said. Oh, smooth. Real smooth.

“Well, you’ve seen me,” he said.

“Don’t you have to have kids to get a trucking license?”

“Yes.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that—or too many things: You got kids? How come you have them and not their mamas? Where are they—the mamas and especially the kids? What are you doing out here?

Maybe he read my mind a little. “The baby’s in his crib in the truck. I didn’t want to wake him.”

“Just one baby?”

Cal nodded—the braid went swish, swish.

“How come you’re trucking?” Maybe it was rude to ask, but I could have said, Why isn’t his mama stuck with him like the usual course of events?—which would’ve been ruder.

He looked away, which showed off his sharp cheekbones against the gray sky just about perfect. “I needed time to be alone. To think.”

“Well, you sure got that,” I said. I couldn’t not ask any longer. “I didn’t think they let guys truck. I thought it was a mother’s job.”

He rubbed his face in his hands and the air seemed to get even darker. “SheJess’s mother died. When he was born.”

Oh, shit. “Jesus, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

He looked back at me and tried to smile. “That’s okay. You couldn’t know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s the one exception to the guideline that unwed welfare mothers get all the trucks. If the mother’s dead, they let the father do it.” His mouth quirked with no smile to it. “After all, their big argument is that the truck’s the ideal classroom, so they can’t say no. It’s for the good of the kid, right?”

I felt bad about my nosiness. The silence stretched out.

“Um, you miss her?”

“Well, it’s getting better. I don’t think she was going to marry me anyway.”

“You were engaged?”

He shook his head. “But I thought I could get her to marry me after—” He stopped and looked straight up at the sky, blinking hard.

I grabbed his hand, saying some nonsense like I do when Tomi’s crying. Here I’d just been thinking about this guy as a hot body. Then I was holding him and still saying soothing nonsense things.

My watched beeped. He pulled back.

“I gotta be going.”

“I’m sorry. Usually I want to be alone, but sometimes it’s hard—and in the truck stops there’s always such a crowd—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I hope things are better.

“Which way are you going?” he asked suddenly.

“How do I know? It’s been west on 80, if that’s any help. I think I may be going to Salt Lake. I’ve done that route once or twice.”

“Maybe we’ll see each other again along the route.”

My face got warm. “There’s no way to know that.”

He smiled an I-know-things-you-don’t smile. “I have ways of being more certain.”

The watched beeped again. “Well—bye, Cal.”

“Until we meet again,” he said.

Cilehe was in a real bad mood from being left alone. Tomi was trying to make her laugh, meowing like a cat and rubbing against her feet. Don’t know where he ever saw a cat. Maybe on “Sesame Street.” My watch was beeping steady now: if I didn’t get into the truck in a big hurry, I’d lose all my discretionary money for a week. I helped Tomi out of the pen, yanked Cilehe up by the armpit, and ran to the parking lot.

Cal was leaning against a big black truck like I’d never seen. He looked at us as we scrambled up into the cab. I pushed the button to say we were ready to go. The truck lurched and squealed out of the lot and onto the highway.

It was fractions on the TV—one half, one third, one quarter—over and over and over and over again. Tomi watched for a while. Cilehe just scowled and rocked back and forth. Usually I pick her up when she gets like that. But as long as she wasn’t making noise, I had other things to think on.

Out in the walking area, holding Cal, I was just trying to make him feel better. Now it was over, I was noticing all the ways he felt to me. His thick braid of hair squeezed between our chests. His soft flannel shirt and the hard muscles underneath it. The man smell. The little raspy sound when his tight jeans rubbed on mine—

Another twenty minutes and there’s no telling what might have happened.

But the road wore on and the Buttery feeling began to die away. The guy had acted like he had reason to think we’d be at the same truck stop down the road, but that was about as likely as running into a whole different guy would be. If only I’d run into him earlier—nearer the beginning of the hour lunch break. Next break would only be twenty minutes, to gas up the truck and grab a quick bite, and he was running more than twenty minutes behind me on the road even if he did go the same direction and stop at the same stop.

Unless he decided to cut his lunch short and get right back on the road—

I began to have another thought I maybe wasn’t proud of, a thought about getting us out of the truck.

We stayed on 80 like I’d guessed, which means the long way across Nebraska, not the best scenery for distracting the brain. Corn, wheat—it all just looks green at a distance. About twenty thousand fractions later, the truck pulled itself off.

I looked for the strange black truck, but of course it wasn’t there. I’d’ve seen him pass me on the road. I gassed up, parked, and took the kids into the stop.

Kimberlea wasn’t there. Avis was. Didn’t really know anyone else, so I sat next to her again.

“That guy left early,” she complained.

“Maybe he had to go check on his kid,” I said.

“How do you know he has a kid?”

“He’s gotta have one or he wouldn’t be trucking,” I said. “If he didn’t bring it in, it must’ve been in its crib.”

“Not much of a parent, if he leaves his kid alone in his truck,” Avis said.

I hadn’t even thought about that.

“It was probably sleeping, and he didn’t want to wake it,” I said.

“Why you want to defend him?” she asked.

I shrugged. “No reason. Just seemed to make sense.”

“I don’t care if he’s a lousy parent or Nelly Nurture,” she said. (Nelly Nurture is the teenage star of a show on public TV who tells you how to eat when you’re pregnant and how to take care of your babies.) “I just care if his parts are all in working order.”

Then who should walk in but Cal himself, which Avis saw before I did. “And it looks like a great time to find out!” She jumped up. I couldn’t stand to look at the way she embarrassed herself. I wondered at him being right when he said we’d meet again down the road.

“Is this seat taken?” He’d come over to the table, Avis hovering behind him looking mad. More girls were beginning to gather.

“I don’t think so.”

He sat. “What do you know about teething pain?”

“Well, if you rub his gums it helps. And they sell this stuff in little tubes that numbs them up.”

“Could you show me?”

So I took him over to the counter and showed him. He pulled out some vouchers to pay for it. I noticed he had a fat wad of them.

“Will you show me how to use it?”

I told Tomi to look after his baby sister again, and Cal and I went out to the lot, all those female eyes at our backs. There was his truck, black and somehow heavy-looking, without the regular Mack or Peterbilt symbols on it.

“Let’s stop at your truck first—I have something I’d like to do.”

I unlocked it. He opened the door and got in, reaching down his hand to help me up. Cool, firm hand.

First thing he did was fold down the playpen’s walls. The pen is big enough to sleep two big kids, and my mattress behind it is big enough to sleep one fat woman. (I’m not fat.) Fold down the walls, and most of the cab is mattress.

“What are you doing?” I asked, though I thought I knew.

“You’ll see,” he said. On the right wall of the cab, where it had been covered up by the playpen’s wall, there was a little panel. You almost couldn’t see it even looking straight at it. The place he pushed to make it pop open didn’t look any different from the rest of the wall. Inside was a number display, what they call liquid crystal, and a whole lot of tiny little switches. He started messing with them.

“What are you doing?” I asked again.

“Just a second.” He messed around some more, closed up the panel, and smiled at me. “Now your central controller’s computer thinks you’re still on the road and haven’t even gotten here yet. Then it’ll register you coming here and starting your break in forty minutes. You’ve got an hour before you have to get going again.”

“How can you do that?”

“I’ve got a few skills.”

“If you can do that kind of thing, why are you driving a truck? You could be making real money.”

There was a glitter in Cal’s eye. He bowed his head down low and said some woman’s name—Ellen or something, it was hard to hear. I went over and held his head up against my chest, with his braid snaked over the crook of my arm. Murmured nonsense again. His arms came up around my back and my hands went down behind his jeans.

We used every last inch of that mattress space.

“Oh Christ,” I said later, “my babies have been in the stop all this time.”

“They’ll be okay,” he said.

I put the rubber band back on his braid. I’d been playing with it. “They are never alone this long. And what about Jess?” He looked at me. “You said he had teething pain.”

“Oh—my god, you’re right. I’d better get to him.” He started pulling his pants on.

“Do you want me to help show you how to use the medicine?”

“No, that’s okay. I’m sure I can figure it out.”

“It’s no trouble—”

“The instructions are on the tube, right? You go get your kids.” He looked at his watch. “You’ve got ten more minutes.”

Ten minutes left! I hadn’t been stopped this long in two years.

I left him off at his truck and he kissed me right out in public. “See you next stop,” he said.

I hadn’t even thought of seeing him again. On the trucking routes, he could have any action he wanted. But if I was his first since Ellen or Helen or whoever, maybe it actually meant something to him.

I felt a little bad about that.

Tomi was sitting in the big pen, holding Cilehe and crying. Not screaming or anything—his face was wet and he was hiccupping. When I came in, I could see him trying to look brave. He also looked surprised—like he thought I was dead and was amazed to see me.

“C’mon guys,” I said. When we got out, the big black truck was gone.

I had to raise the playpen walls, which took a while since I’d never had them down before. Finally I found the catch that did it. My watch beeped, I pressed the button, and we started off.

Nebraska’s a wide state. We probably had another whole stretch of it. At some point I noticed my watch had changed time an hour earlier—Mountain Time Zone. That’s one way to measure progress: time travel. Another is to measure the money you save, but unless you’re Kimberlea, that’s pointless. Just as pointless to measure by the calendar, since Friday’s just like Wednesday’s just like Sunday, and night is like day but dark and not as many stops.

Another is to measure the seasons go by. But you spend some time driving in the south where it’s warmer in winter than North Dakota is some summers. And you spend so little time outside that the weather might as well be television, except for rainstorms crashing against the cab’s roof. The babies never get used to that.

Or you can measure the seasons of your own body. Now that means something, because I’ve always been as regular as clockwork.

For example, I knew it was just about ten days before my next period.

The kids were fussy. Even Tomi. He wanted me to hold him and he wouldn’t let me let go. Cilehe screamed. After an hour I blew up.

“If you don’t shut up, I’ll drive off without you next time!”

Cilehe screamed louder. Tomi’s eyes went round and he bit his lips in like he was afraid a word would come out by itself if he didn’t hold it back, and tears came down his face like crazy.

“Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry. Mama’d never do that. Mama’d never do that.” If he’d been bigger, I’d have told him how much trouble I’d be in at the next checkpoint if I didn’t have the kids registered to me. Truck’s not much, but jail’s worse. Or I might have tried to explain I love my babies and everything I was doing was for them as much as me.

Instead I rocked him until he fell asleep in my lap, while Cilehe cried herself out.

When the truck pulled over, the black truck was there. We parked, I jumped out, and Cal was waiting. “Got something for you,” he said to Tomi, and from behind his back he pulled out a big bag of M&Ms. “Can you share those with your little sister?”

I shot him a look. It was an awful lot of candy. But Tomi was so excited I could hardly take it away from him. Cal took Tomi’s other hand and we all went into the stop.

“Why don’t we grab a couple of burgers and eat in your truck?” Cal said. “Sure.” I explained to Tomi that Mama’d be gone for a while, but was coming back. “Be brave for Cilehe,” I said.

Cal messed with those switches again while I wolfed down my cheeseburger. You can get really horny again in just a few hours, especially when it’s been almost three years since the time before.

He lay with his head on my stomach. “You’ve really got nice kids,” he said.

“Thanks.”

“Do they look like their fathers?”

“Actually, I think they favor me more. Too bad for them.”

“I don’t have any complaints,” he said quietly, drawing his hand along the bottom of my jaw.

I felt I was blushing, though I’m a little dark for that. “Go on.”

“Your boy’s a real little man. What’s his name again?”

“Tomi.”

“Tomi, right. I hope Jess grows up like that.”

“I’m sure he will.”

“Do your kids get along well?”

“Sure. Tomi’s a great big brother. Kids can get to feel responsible for each other sometimes.”

“Do you think so?”

I laughed. “When they aren’t trying to kill each other. But I’m glad they have each other. I never had any sisters or brothers. My mama got some kind of infection in her tubes that stopped her from having more babies. I’m sorry about that sometimes.”

“But you had friends, other kids you grew up with.”

“Yeah.”

He looked away. “Jess will never have a sister. He’s never spent more than an hour in the company of the same children.”

I brushed back the little pieces of hair around his forehead with my fingers. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing you can do about it.” Then he looked straight up at me, his light brown eyes real intense. “Except maybe there is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Loan me one of your kids.”

“What?”

He pulled himself up out of my lap and took my shoulders. “Let one of your kids ride in my truck for a leg or two. To play with Jess. To get to know him, and be a big brother or sister to him.”

I shook his hands off. “That’s crazy, Cal! You can’t take off with my baby. I might never see you again!”

He patted his hand on the little hidden panel. “I told you we’d see each other again before, and how did it turn out?”

“But how do you know we’ll even be staying on the same route?”

“Do you think I could make those changes if I didn’t have access to your central controller’s data through the remote unit?”

I guessed not. Still—“What if there’s a checkpoint, and I have one kid too few and you have one too many? We’d both be arrested, and I don’t think they’ll accept your asking me so nicely as a good excuse.”

“Same source of information,” he said. “There’s no checkpoint on this route until Utah.”

All that from a little panel I hadn’t even known was there. “If you can do that sort of stuff,” I said, “why aren’t you—?”

He put a finger over my lips. “I know I seem complicated,” he said. “But just look at me and you’ll see how simple I really am. I thought I needed time alone to help me get over—” He stopped and looked away, then he smiled at me. “Now I know I was right.” He swapped his own lips for his finger. After a while he leaned back and said, “As a favor to me?”

“Or as a favor to Jess. You’re a mother. You know what children need. If you help him out, you’ll be being the mother he never had.”

This was all coming so fast. My first plan began to be pushed away by a whole different Plan B. Which wasn’t a bad plan at all, since it could supply everyone’s needs and make all of us happy. Another three hour’s drive from now, when I saw how things were going, I’d have a pretty good idea how likely Plan B was.

“All right,” I said. “For Jess’s sake.”

I thought the point of M&Ms was not to get chocolate all over your face. Cal took a paper napkin and wiped off Cilehe’s mouth, gentle and careful, and rubbed his hand through her hair just like a daddy should.

Tomi stared up at him. I realized for the first time he’d never seen a man that close before.

“Which one?” Cal asked.

I considered. “Tomi looks scared of you. How about Cilehe?”

“That’s fine.” He picked her up. “You’re coming with me, pretty lady.” She started screaming.

“Um—I’m sorry—she’s usually not like that.” Well, sometimes she’ll go a whole day without screaming much. I took her from him and rocked her until she shut it down. I carried her outside to the big black truck.

“I’ll take her from here,” Cal said, reaching for my baby.

I suddenly didn’t much like the looks of that black truck. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea,” I said.

“Shawana,” he said. He leaned forward and kissed me; while kissing me, he took Cilehe from my arms, smooth as silk. “We’ll just try it for this leg. If she’s unhappy, she goes straight back with you. Maybe your little boy would like to ride in such a big truck next time, huh?” He said that to Tomi, who stared up at him. “Or you might like to have Jess, later,” he said to me. “I’d like you to get to know him.”

“I’d like that too,” I said.

He smiled. He kissed me again, and he ruffled Tomi’s hair with the hand that wasn’t holding Cilehe. “See you in a few hours,” he said, opened his door, and swung the two of them up into the cab so fast I never got more than a glimpse of it, big and dark like the truck’s outside, before the door shut. But then he rolled down the window.

“You’re a really special lady, did you know?” he said.

The black truck pulled away.

Tomi started to cry.

“Don’t,” I said to him, “c’mon, don’t cry.” We went back to the truck, me pulling and pulling on Tomi’s arm, him not wanting to move. “Don’t cry, it’s okay, everything’s wonderful, listen to Mama.”

After Nebraska is Colorado, which at least isn’t flat all the way through. Tomi usually loves hills and mountains, going up and down. Cilehe hates having her ears pop, hates it worse when they won’t pop. I had to keep reminding myself I didn’t have to worry about it.

“Where’s Cee, Mama? Where’s Cee?”

“Just ahead of us, baby. A couple miles ahead. It’s okay, baby.”

“Where’s Cee?” he insisted. I thought his sister could get on my nerves!

“She’s fine, Tomi. Watch the TV.”

“Where’s Cee?”

Helping us get out of this truck, baby. Up with a man who wants a mother for his son, comfort for his bed, and once he has them won’t have any reason to stay in these rolling jail cells. A man who knows enough about computers to get a job that buys stereos and big TVs with channels you can change and nice haircuts that look pretty. A man who’s actually wanted to get married, and can want to again.

A man we can all live with just fine, if it means getting out of this truck.

Plan B.

I decided it was some sugar reaction thing making Tomi so cranky and it would wear down. He did get quiet after a while, after I stopped trying to answer his questions.

It seemed like the longest stretch we’d ever driven. I spent it trying out all the different ways Plan B could work. Ways to become a permanent part of Cal’s life. To get out of the truck. I’d never even begun to guess what it’s like in it. Some drivers even have told me they’d thought it would be a great way to get away from their mamas nagging on them all the time. Me, I didn’t want to risk an illegal abortion. Some nasty nights I’ve wondered if I did the right thing.

Then I began to worry if I’d done the right thing having Cilehe ride with Cal. She’s the cranky one. If she was kicking a shitfit, and if his Jess wasn’t the cranky type so he wasn’t used to it, he might get a bad impression of me as a mother. It’s not my fault she’s cranky. Every baby’s different. But he might not know that.

When the truck started to pull over, it seemed like three hours. Hell, it seemed like six. I wanted to find out how it had gone, make a little nice with Cal, and let Tomi see his sister so he’d stop pestering me.

It wasn’t until we were almost there I saw it wasn’t a truck stop.

It was a checkpoint.

There wasn’t supposed to be one till Utah! Cal said we were perfectly safe swapping babies until then. Cal was right about everything else—how could he have screwed this up?

There was a knock on the window. “Out of the truck, lady.”

“What’s this all about?” I called, thinking hard.

“Just come out of the truck, and there won’t be any trouble.”

There were cops out there, besides the welfare worker who usually just checks your license, makes sure you are who you say you are and your babies are okay. There were cops out there, and they had guns.

“Why do you want to have guns on me?” I called, just to use up some time and think some more.

“Come on out of the truck,” the first cop repeated, but another one said, “Child abandonment’s a serious charge, lady.”

Oh Christ, yes, it is. Worst thing they can catch us at aside from welfare fraud.

“I wouldn’t abandon my babies!”

“Maybe so,” said the second cop, “but that’s not the tip we got from the trucker who just came through.”

“She was lying.”

“Don’t think he was.” The cop elbowed his friend and said, “Look at her face. She knows who we’re talking about.”

The other one sniggered. “You can learn a lot about a girl’s secrets when you get a piece of her. Maybe we should start an undercover program! I’d volunteer.”

I felt like I’d been hit, but I knew I had to stay cool. “Let me get out and I’ll explain.”

“That’s what we’re asking you to do, lady—”

They give you a two-week training before they put you on the road. That’s hardly enough to begin to know how to drive the truck manually, and it’s a couple years since I even had that. But nobody expects us to ever really have to drive, whatever the emergency regs say.

Maybe that’s why it caught them flat-footed when a driver made a break for it. It just wasn’t possible.

They were just about right, too.

I leaned forward and yanked the handle marked MANUAL OVERRIDE. I hit the gas. I nearly ran over a cop and I did go right through two trees on my way to the highway. A sound of metal crumpling. I couldn’t look at the road much because it took all my concentration shifting gears, trying to pick up some speed. It took all my concentration and it still sounded awful. I wondered if I was stripping gears. I wondered if I could do anything wrong that would crash the truck.

He set me up. He stole my baby and he set me up. Why would he steal my baby?

I leaned hard on my horn. A big RV just got out of my way in time.

He must have known the checkpoint was coming up. And you need at least one kid to be a trucker. If there was no little Jess, he needed a baby. If he could alter his trucking card, make it look like Cilehe was his, then his only problem was me telling them at the same checkpoint I didn’t have my other baby because he took her from me. I’d still be in big trouble, but so would he. And with almost no other guys in the trucks, he’d be easy to track down.

(I was afraid I really gave him Cilehe because I was tired of dealing with her fussing all the time. I never asked to be a mother, but I was one—the worst who ever lived.)

Cars were scattering in front of me. Horns blaring. Out of the corner of my eye I suddenly saw Tomi had climbed up the wall of his playpen to look out at what was going on.

“Get down, Tomi! Get down!” I grabbed out with my right hand and yanked him down hard on the playpen’s mattress. The truck lurched. He went spinning across and hit his head on the other pen wall. The walls are light. I could see it give.

I couldn’t look to see if he was okay. I had to keep changing lanes while I went faster.

That bastard made sure they wouldn’t listen to me. He told them I was a child abandoner, so then anything I said would sound like a lie, to save my ass. He went on the offensive before I had a chance.

I started to hear sirens.

I went faster. I was almost to top gear, driving on the shoulder because it was too hard to keep going around the cars.

Thank god we were on a flattish stretch.

All the time I thought Cal was someone I could marry to get me and my babies out of the truck, even feeling guilty because I enjoyed his body but I wasn’t likely to love him back—all that time he was setting me up.

I realized I was swearing, fast and steady in a low fierce voice. Tomi whimpered. At least he was awake.

“You damn black truck—you fucker—where are you, you son of a bitch?—you fucker, you stole my baby—you bastard, you lied to me!”

Lights began flashing in my side mirrors. The cops were catching up. I had to catch him before they caught me.

I shifted up. I was almost at top gear.

A couple cars split in front of me, screeching out of the way, and there was the bastard. He was going uphill. Black smoke belched out of a side pipe. I hit the foot of the hill and I remembered I had to down-shift, fast. The truck couldn’t keep that speed climbing. I made myself do it though I just wanted to go faster and faster until I had him—

The truck made horrible noises. I wasn’t in the right gear. I slowed and started to lose ground. He must’ve seen me by now. I shifted, shifted, shifted until it didn’t make those awful noises. I didn’t care if my truck was trashed—shit, I’d be in prison anyway, my babies god knows where—but I wasn’t going to lose that black monster truck.

He hit the top of the hill and vanished from sight. I got there minutes later—I say minutes, but it must have been five seconds. His truck was picking up speed fast. Mine plunged down while my stomach stayed back up top. Tomi wailed. I shifted up and up and shoved the gas to the floor. I was gaining on him. The lights were close in the side mirrors.

I could make out the face of the nearest cop, he was that close. Could see his little blond moustache, even, and the mean way he looked like he was going to kill me if I didn’t do it for him first.

A red sports car was half an inch in front of me, getting closer. I had to hit the brakes, and the engine almost died. Almost. I was hitting on the gearshifter like it was Cal’s face, kicking the accelerator like it was his balls.

The black truck ducked ahead of a blue minivan. The van hit its brakes hard and seemed to come right back into me, like Cal had thrown it into my face deliberately.

I swerved. I missed it.

I spent long seconds wrestling with the wheel.

Looked up and saw him cut again in front of some foreign-looking job.

He didn’t have it figured right. He was going to plow right into a station wagon in the next lane by the shoulder—

“Cilehe!” I screamed. I hit my horn. I careened on the shoulder as he careened off it.

There was a steep hill a few yards off the side of the shoulder, and the black truck was about to go straight down it—

I grabbed Tomi, hit the gas hard, and shut my eyes.

The whole world went white.

It shouldn’t have worked. I couldn’t see because the airbags came bursting out and filled my face with canvas.

My truck caught his trailer right on the side, smashed into it, and spun his truck around almost facing us. I went mostly straight, destroying my cab but not quite me or Tomi, cushioned in airbag. I picked up a concussion, though.

The black truck came to a stop angled over the side of the hill.

But it didn’t roll down.

When the cops helped me out of what was left of my cab, I could hardly see straight. I did see that the black truck’s trailer had burst open. I saw broken crates. I saw the ugly black metal shapes inside them. And, thank god, I didn’t see Cal. If I’d seen him, I don’t know what I would have done to him, concussion and all.

I screamed until they put Cilehe in my arms. She was so quiet and good you’d swear she was her brother.

I had time to think in the hospital. When my head cleared—before then, if you believe the nurses—I demanded they run the tests. It was the biggest relief of my life to learn Plan A hadn’t worked. A little bit of Cal growing inside me is the last thing I wanted. I know a baby has nothing to do with his daddy. I’m sure no Shawn Parker. But I wanted no piece of Cal. The plan to have three kids so they’d let me out seems a foolish, childish thing now.

I made them tell me about Cal. They acted like I had no right to know, but they gave in enough to tell me that his real name was Charles Kavey, he was single and had assets of over a million, and was—surprise—no welfare trucker. He worked with his controller, and they made, said the government lawyer type, “illicit shipments.”

I bet. I don’t know anything about high-tech weapons, but I guess I can tell the ugly things when I see them. Interstate 80 could’ve taken him on to San Francisco, and from there I imagine they could have been smuggled either down to Chile or to the civil war in the Philippines. (News comes on twice a day in the truck, though I always wonder what they’re leaving out of it.)

Cal—Charles—and his buddy must have had the system pretty well bamboozled, all the parts that are just computer talking to computer; but when it comes to the checkpoints, human beings make sure your babies match up with what it says on the license. No way around needing a real live kid for that. I guess when he found out about the surprise checkpoint, he was already on the road. He had it down so smooth, he must have used his little trick for getting a kid before. I couldn’t even have identified him, if it had ever come to that. He didn’t have the braid when he got to the checkpoint—it actually came off somehow, which surprised the hell out of me—and his hair was black and his eyes were dark blue. Contacts and dye. He was real smooth. The bastard enjoyed it too, I bet. Bastard.

He’d had to perform his act on short notice—unless it was a dream when I heard the nurses gossiping. When I did dream after that, the dreams were full of nightmares about a shriveled-up little body jammed in a carton among all the weapons in the black truck’s trailer.

Probably the baby’s name wasn’t even really Jess. . . .

My grandma called the hospital. She wanted to know if she could help. She’s got so little I hated to ask her, but I did.

After all, I’m back in the truck as soon as the hospital releases me, and I don’t want to stay there.

But if I don’t eat desserts, don’t buy new clothes and makeup for myself, and take what my grandma can give me, I can start studying. Kimberlea manages; so can I. Even with my allowance cut in half in penalty for smashing up the truck. I can read really good. I’m going to take Kimberlea for a role model and order myself some accounting textbooks. Maybe even, years from now, when I’m out and I’ve gotten used to computers, I can go on studying and get a truck controller’s license.

Nobody’s going to make me keep doing what they want me to do.

My babies are going to be proud of their mama.

THE COON ROLLED DOWN AND RUPTURED HIS LARINKS, A SQUEEZED NOVEL BY MR. SKUNK

Dafydd ab Hugh

In Dafydd ab Hugh’s first tale for IAsfm, a boy, a dog, and a skunk set out on a courageous quest to bring about Progrets and Democrazy for all. The author’s latest novel, Warriorwards, will be out soon from Baen Books.

A word of warning: this story contains brief scenes which may be disturbing to some.

Chapter one we hear the story

I heard the story from an old Coon at first sitting at my favorite place on the hardground just outside the bowl alley on venture path. Then later he and I played chase and bounce with a ball and bounded it on venture path. But the story kept running around and around inside my ears like it was casting for a scent so I just had to find out more about it.

So I and the Boy Nik Nok and Disha the Dog and Hanki and Yanki the Cats sat in a circle and I told them each and all about the Hidden Den and the Coon who could not talk:

He lived under the jerryfams next to the bowl alley. He told me by whispers that he had ruptured his larinks. That is his throat where he talks, Disha the Dog said (she is very smart, smarter than me and the others especially Hanki and Yanki). Then the Coon acted out the whole story standing on his back legs to mean human being, staggering to tell me he meant stupid and looking back east so I would know he meant stupid like the fourlegs were before Democrazy.

I put what the Coon said in words as best I could and this, was it:

Across the city and too far for a chase there are humans like before Democrazy and they are all sealed up in a den where no air can go in and out, and the Winds of Law have not blown either.

Inside the den the fourlegs are all stupid like before Democrazy too, and they have to work for the humans and cannot think and have no Inalienable Progrets.

Nobody knew what to say after I finished my story. Disha and Nik Nok always ignore me for they see no real difference between a Skunk and a Cat, except for the white stripe and the odie Skunk of course.

But even I knew something had to be done, so I said “if we love Democrazy then something has to be done.”

Chapter two we deleminate the problem

“Well if you love Democrazy and the Winds of Law that made us all Equal then what are we going to do about that den, where there is no Progrets and no Law?”

I was afraid to answer for I knew what the only answer could be and I was only a Skunk!

But I knew I had no choice and neither did Disha and neither even did Nik Nok. He was not of the old Men, the ones who exploded the less fortunate and took advantages. He believed in Democrazy. I had seen him cover his face in the Cord House.

I looked up at Disha and “this is what we will do about that den,” said I, “journey all the way across the city and bring Democrazy and the Will of Progrets to this den of unequity.”

Disha squatted and made water on the whitestone trail beside my favorite old den.

“Do you really want to take the trip when you might find the Overizon instead?”

Now I thought for a long time before I answered her. Was there even Democrazy and Equality beyond the venture path? I did not know even though I always thought Progrets had spread it everywhere. But after hearing the old Coon’s tale I wondered.

“These humans are trying to stop the spread of Democrazy that Progrets started when it loosed the bug that rode the Winds of Law and did us all,” I said and I thought I had said a mouthful.

“But will you go,” she asked like Fiday the teacher coaxing the right answer.

Chapter three some decide to go

I thought quietly, not looking at her. I do not know what made me ask “who will come with me if I go” but it slipped out.

She waited too long and I knew she was afraid too, then she said “if you go I at least will come with you. You must ask the others for yourself.”

We gathered the group again and told them what we were going to do to save Democrazy.

The old Coon had said only one thing more to me, in the whisper again for he could not convoy this by gestures. He whispered that this Hidden Den was across the city of angels at the foot of the other mountains, where the underbuild had fallen in.

As soon as Hanki and Yanki heard this, they said there would be wild things along the way, and then they high tailed it out of there as Cats will, for Cats are hardly smarter than before there was Progrets. Only I and Disha and Nik Nok the Boy stayed.

“Is Disha going to go,” asked Nik Nok in a strange voice. “Yes” she said for she had already said she at least would go with me. “Then surely I shall go too,” he said.

Disha tilted her head as she looked at him. A gleam in her eyes frightened me, being somehow wrong.

“Then there are three of us” she said, and “when shall we start?”

“Let us wait,” said I, “let us wait until the shadows are longer. I bow to the Will of Progrets but I hear there is no Democrazy under a hot sun.”

Chapter four off we go then

All too soon the shadows grew, and the hot Santa’s Anus blew from the nightside and we had to set out.

We chased the scents between the fallen walls and square builds sometimes running and sometimes walking when old Disha got tired but all the while making way toward the other mountains.

Nik Nok never seemed to tire as Boys will not, but he stayed very near Disha even when she had to rest.

Soon all the smells were strange to me and I could see nothing I knew, it was not the venture path or anywhere I had been before and I was uneasy.

We ran by a fire once. I heard the boom boom boom inside the giant den and I watched until the walls tired and fell in against each other, such is Progrets.

Chapter five we meet death and Democrazy

All at once as the sun rose in the sky like a big burn, Disha stopped and I almost ran into her.

She perked her ears up and snuffled her nose towards the sun but I could not smell anything yet and there was nothing to see but a hill of metal trash and rotwood. “Come on Nik Nok,” she said and started to climb through a notch in the hill.

No one called to me, but I followed anyway for I was not about to get left alone in a strange place.

Then I smelled it too, it was a dead Dog in the bottom of the hill, named Duk Duk. I had played chase and bounce with her not long before.

He was dead and he smelled of junk to me.

Disha and Nik Nok stood together at the top of the hill and I could see the Boy did not really understand death yet, for he called out to Duk Duk. Then I smelled his fear as he began to understand.

Disha must have smelled it too for she moved over to put her head against his thigh.

“Do not be afraid Nik Nok,” she said “for I will protect you.”

“It is not Junkyard Dogs and falling walls that scare me,” he said “but I had a funny feeling in my stomach just now. Something bad is going to come of this extra diction. I have never been away from the bowl alley and venture path before.”

Disha nuzzled his ear softly and licked it.

“Nik Nok you are still too young to fight wars. You go home and I will be back to play with you very soon.”

He put his arms around her neck and “I cannot let you do it alone,” he said. “And I am not too young for I became a man a season ago, at night in a dream.”

I shivered and looked back at Duk Duk. There were things on him. Every so often his fur would rup and flutter like he itched but it was only the bugs and burrowers who had gotten under his skin. His eyes watched me like they knew something and said “watch us well Skunk, you will come to this in no time yourself!”

Nik Nok and Disha held each other for a little bit, and they ignored me. But I watched them with bright Skunk eyes. I had began to know in words what was happening between them. It was not Democrazy, Democrazy was what lay in the ditch with Duk Duk.

Chapter six the watcher in the dark

About this time I prickled like we were being watched. I looked around but nothing and I decided I was jumpy being so far from the venture path. I said nothing but “please you two let us go.”

We walked for a long time until it was full, comfortable dark and cold in the moon.

At last Disha decided we should stop for the night, but it was more for Nik Nok I think than for me. “We are far away from bowl alley and there are marauders here,” she said. I saw a hole across the hardground beneath writing words and I told her. “It says exon,” she said.

Disha investigated the hole first because she was the leader. It smelled like Rats and burn-juice. She had me ask them if it was alright if we stayed there for a mome, and they said they would ask their king.

Chapter seven we all eat Cat food

We left them to deleminate and stalked out like mighty hunters in search of food. I still had that same watchy feeling but I was too unsure to tell Disha yet.

I let them in front and stayed behind as quiet as I could. Disha scented the air and cast about for something edible and catchable. We were away from the bowl alley so I knew anyone we caught we could eat (except not a Dog or a Boy or a Skunk of course).

Nik Nok saw something before Disha smelled it, a flash of white on top of a wall on the other side of the hardground and we began to stalk.

We sneaked from build to fall keeping to shadows and picking up our feet so as not to scuff.

Disha slunk forward and Nik Nok clung to the black fur on her back. But he watched her not the prey, even I could see that. He watched her hard muscles flex and stretch beneath her sleek fur and watched her slink lower and lower to the ground invisible in the dark as the Winds of Law.

I listened. Skunks can listen well. I heard Nik Nok’s breath catch in his throat as he felt her body beneath his hand. I smelled the same smell I make when the lady Skunks come into season.

When we got across the hardground “split to the left and drive it towards me.” Disha snuffled to Nik Nok. I crept away from them both and poked my head around the corner.

It was a Cat fat and lazy licking himself, full and stuffed and paying no tensions to Progrets and the bitter world.

Clever Nik Nok reached into his bag and found our best ball, took aim and beaned the Cat right where it counts.

At first he flew into the air and screamed out “oh shit,” then he began to run for his life with Nik Nok pounding after and me behind them as fast as four Skunk legs could carry me.

“Help! Do not eat me!” the Cat added for good measure but he did not turn around to see if we were agreeable to this suggestion.

We chased him along the wall jumping over the stones and falls for he was fleeing for his very life. He tried to jump up a telephone tree but Nik Nok jumped up after him and he could climbor as well as the Cat and he jumped down again and ran down an alley for he was fleeing for his very life. Nik Nok disappeared after him and at once I heard a snarl and a Cat scream. When I poked an eye around the corner I saw Disha had the Cat cornered against the whitestone at the other end.

“Oh please please do not eat me!” the Cat cried in terror as Disha padded closer. I smelled the water of his fear and saw his eyes wide and wet and almost I asked Disha to seize and desist, for Cats are nearly Skunks. But then I reminated I was hungry.

“Why not eat you,” she asked “you are an inferior being, to wit a Cat. Cats are made to be eaten.”

“But I have a wife,” argued the Cat “and she will have no one to provide for her if I am dead and eaten.”

“Oh that is no problem just bring her here, and I shall solve her problem too!” retorted Disha.

The Cat perked up at this suggestion which I would not have thought he would and suggested “very well, just let me go and I shall get her.” It seemed a reasonable request except of course I doubted his sincerity in returning, for you can never trust a Cat.

“Not so fast Mr. Dinner,” said Disha. “I would not have you tire yourself by walking all that way and all the way back. I think it is best if we avoid inconveniencing your wife and just eat you now.”

Nik Nok and I had said nothing so far, for Disha was doing well on her own.

“But surely you do not want to deplete the food supply,” said the Cat, thinking furiously which is very out of character for a Cat “you should eat the aged and the sick not Cats like me in their prime who can still sire kittens.”

“But if we do not eat you then we will die and I too can still whelp pups and Nik Nok can now sire children, so he tells me.”

“But you must further the cause of Progrets and kill only the Cats who have not become smart.”

“That would mean all of you,” retorted Disha, thinking no doubt of Hanki and Yanki.

“But surely you are not against Democrazy are you?”

I worried because I reminated the looks that Disha and Nik Nok had given each other lately. But Disha just laughed all the time edging closer to the Cat. The Cat saw this and arched his back and hissed. He was fighting for his very life now.

“If you were stupid enough to get caught” debated Disha “then killing you is Progrets!”

“Yes it is eat or be eaten,” said Nik Nok.

The Cat could see his situation was now desperate and he tried one last gambol.

“But you should not eat me for we are brothers, we fourlegs must all stick together in the city of the angels.”

“So,” said Disha with sudden anger “I shall eat you anyway because I am hungry, and that after all is the only real argument.” Then she rushed forward and caught the Cat who in the end did not even try to escape for he knew he was a goner.

“Disha,” asked Nik Nok, “why should we not eat our brothers?”

Chapter eight Democrazy is violented

“Good kill,” I said, but nobody heard me. Nik Nok gave Disha a hug that was not entirely innocent I think.

Nik Nok ran his hand gently over Disha’s soft fur, and watched with Raccoon eyes as her hard muscles underneath flexed and stretched as she tore and tugged at the Cat, getting him open.

She chewed off a warm hindquarter, hesitated a moment and then laid it in his lap. “Here beautiful,” she said “you take the first Cat cut.”

He picked it up slowly, pulled the fur off and sunk his teeth in and tore off a juicy hunk.

I slunk back into the shadows for I realized I was not wanted at this particle mome. But I watched for we Skunks have very good eyes.

He chewed and held his hunk out to Disha, and she ate from the same piece. They looked into each other’s eyes and Disha put her paw on Nik Nok’s forearm and I heard the Boy panting like he was chasing something invisible.

I was frightened. I knew this was not Democrazy and that the Winds of Law would blow across us for this.

Fresh Cat has an effect, the meat is tangy without dipping it in the black specks and the blood sends a wild hair through the back of your jaw and makes you squint. This time it was dubbly so for the frightened Cat had pushed excitement through his whole body, I could smell it even from where I was. But they hungered for more than food even so.

The Cat blood dripped down Nik Nok’s chin and he wiped it with his hand and held it out for Disha to lick. The kill smell was making even me excited, but I stayed in the shadows again for I love Progrets and Democrazy.

He ripped a piece of catsmeat off the leg and offered the next bite to Disha, and moved closer and closer to her. He dipped his finger in the blood and drew a line with it along Disha’s head and down her nose.

She licked his finger as he let it trail over her lips and all at once they did not even care about the Cat. They moved a little away and I darted forward and caught a piece. But I watched as I ate and I shivered wondering what the Winds of Law would feel like.

Chapter nine for the strong of heart

Disha began licking his throat and then his chest and his ling began to swell. I smelled the lady Dog smell. Nik Nok was shaking and gasping like he had run a race and Disha turned herself around and knelt her front legs down. “Gently,” she said, “slowly do not rush it or you will hurt me.”

“I do not know how,” said Nik Nok and his voice was thick and white.

“Hold my tail up out of the way. I will tell you if you are doing something wrong.” She suddenly caught her breath and held it.

“Does it feel good,” she asked him.

“Like nothing I have ever felt and better even than when I used my hand before!” he told her.

“Wait wait,” Disha said “it is too tight yet.” But then she whined and snuffled and sounded very excited herself, and Nik Nok found the going easier. I hoped that they had forgotten I was watching them for I did not want to foul soot—either like the Cat, or even like Disha! For if you start out violenting Democrazy one time why not do anything you want then?

He held the fur on her side with one hand and the going was easier. His other hand kept stroking her tail and rubbing it against his bare belly.

“Does this feel like this always” he asked.

She sighed only “will of Democrazy.”

I closed my eyes at the Blast Femmy and listened only. I was reminateing when I had last had a lady, and it was long ago and usually I cannot reminate it, but the scent remimbered me. I lay quiet and listened to Disha and Nik Nok.

The Boy cried out suddenly, not even afraid of a Junkyard Dog hearing him but when afterward he started to pull out she said “do not dare stop! Keep going even if you are finished for I am not.”

“But how,” he asked “I am not hard anymore.” I opened my eyes again because maybe the horror was almost over, and I wanted to see what it looked like when you violented Democrazy.

“Damn you just keep going I am almost there, you are hard enough.” So of course he did. At last it happened to Disha too, but she did not cry out as he had. She went stiff all over and her tail stood straight up against his stomach.

He bent over to lay his body against her back and his head on hers and still stayed in her. He licked Disha’s ears very gently.

“I have been with many other Dogs before,” she said “and you are so much better for you took much more care with me than they do. They are all only interested in pleasuring themselves and something happens and they get big and lumpy and cannot pull out. But that never stops them from trying. They cannot do it slow and gentle like you do.” Nik Nok said nothing but he did not look as happy as he might, for perhaps he saw to the future then.

Chapter ten love and Democrazy

“And there is more about you,” she added “but I cannot say what it is, the thought of you is like gas that has floated up to my heart and is pushing everything else aside and nearly bursting out my chest.”

They held each other as mates. I think they had forgotten all about me and Progrets and the Hidden Den.

“Let’s stay here forever Disha,” said Nik Nok, “we can do it again as soon as—”

But Disha got a junk look on her face, and she looked at me and I almost turned and ran even though she is my friend. She is still a Dog and I only a Skunk, and she is more equal.

I tried to talk but I was too afraid.

“I know that you saw but you cannot talk about what you have just seen,” snarled Disha, and all I could do was shake my head. They had violented Democrazy and I was afraid.

Now Nik Nok looked frightened, for he had not thought about the Winds of Law before he foolishly fell in love.

“But why not? Do we not love each the other?”

“Love,” sneered Disha, “what does love have to do with the Will of Democrazy? We are cranimals now, for all of our friends on venture path cannot stand the thought of what we have done and it is eat or be eaten. So if this Skunk talks we shall be goners you and I.”

I curled up in a ball shaking, meaning I would not say anything and betray my friends to Democrazy and thus I too became victim to the Winds of Law, as you will see at the novel ending.

“Let us stay,” said Nik Nok, “and never return to face the bath of Democrazy.”

“No beautiful,” said Disha to Nik Nok, “for we must eat and go back to today’s den. We set out again when the sun sinks. Have you forgotten our quest?”

With a wasteful look he looked down at himself. He had fallen out of her. His ling was still wet from inside Disha and he wiped it with his hand and rubbed some on his nose so he could smell her all the way back.

That is how I found out about love in the streets.

Chapter eleven a junk waffle

When we got back King Rat said it was all right to stay if we gave him some Cat, which we did and then he let us stay the day inside the exon.

It was hot but even so all three of us huddled next to each other. We needed each other’s solstice.

So it was that I jumped in fear when I suddenly heard a junk howl from outside, across the hardground and the paths and the metal autobiles that we were going to cross the next day, even towards the other mountains.

The scream scraped like a falling wall and rumbled like thunderbum “damn all of you die horrible!” it said, and then “it is not the Junkyard Dogs what we learned to mean to me!”

It was junk, through and through and I wondered if he would try to break into the exon and get us. It was death and dismembrane. It was howls and horrors, junk city, junk waffle, Junkyard Dog!

Soon his howls came closer, and he said things that did not mean anything but fear and death except maybe to another junk: “anyone we caught we could eat once—kill them! Do not let them—I toreall living creatures in piece!”

In between these cries I heard him run around and around the exon moaning like a cub with stomach rot and coughing like a redstone mountain falling down in an earthshake, and even that made me afraid and by the way they shivered I knew Disha and Nik Nok were too. You never know what these Junkyard Dogs will do for they are mad and do not drink water and if they bite you you become junk yourself.

We heard each curly nailed paw tickity-tickity scrabbing the hardground, round and round and round until it was as if brats were throwing stones, bounding chinks of redstone in a circle to pen us inside.

Then “I held onto the fur on hunks of metal!” he suddenly hissed from right beneath our windrow!

We got up as quiet as we could and crouched by the door because he might smell us and try to get in at us. I had even heard of a Junkyard Dog leaping straight through a glass windrow! for after all they cannot feel pain, being junk anyway and outside Democrazy.

Something tugged at my mind about some of the things he said. Then, when he sang like a jay from just underneath the windrow “not so fast, Mr. Dinner!” I knew what I reminated.

The junk things he said were our own words turned, like a poison snake into something other, frightful.

The junk had been stalking us and listening the whole time. My watchy feeling had been true.

We listened hard and tried to track him as he trotted around and around crazily, but the Winds of Law and the Santa’s Anus kept howling too and knocking things over so it was hard to tell which was which.

There was too much to see in the exon. There were tables and broken windrows and spilled blackoil, and three very frightened Dogs Boys and Skunks slunking around trying to watch and listen at each and every windrow.

We strained and looked but he never stepped out and showed himself. Of course we imagined he was everywhere and sometimes it even seemed he was here in the exon with us, but it always turned out to be just one of the three of us knocking something over.

Then a thump on the roof and “my favorite place, the hardgrover moon!” he croaked from above.

We all fell to silence and held our collectivist breaths.

I for one could hear the junk panting and wheezing on the roof. Slowly he walked to one side, tickity-tickity. Slowly he walked back, scritchity-scritchity, tickity—and stopped.

“I know you,” he whispered, so clear we could hear the hair stand on our backs. “Anyone we caught we could eat once” he added, so quiet we could hear pieces and drips of junk spatter on the metal roof.

Then with a terrible creak like the roof caving in and dropping him there among us, he leaped and was gone. There was a frightful bulge, left there in the roof right in the middle of the den.

I do not know how long we stayed up and shivered but we never heard anything more from him that day.

Chapter twelve Law and Custom

We made good time towards the other mountains and climbored over many crickley hills of autobiles and metals. We were so tired that after we found a dead Rat and ate lunch we were too beat to even play chase and bounce with our other ball, and we plodded again as soon as we had swallowed our food.

I kept listening hard for the Junkyard Dog but either he had decided to let us alone which I doubted or he was very, very good at stalking.

I was afraid it was the latter. None of us heard anything we could say was surely him but many a scrape and click that could have been his flank against a wall, and could have been his claws on top an unbroken piece of hardground but could have been anything else either.

My feeling was stronger than ever. We were all uneasy but could not sit around worrying about a Junkyard Dog so we tried to ignore him and run on.

I knew that Disha and Nik Nok wanted to be alone so I kept my distance. I listened though, for a Skunk has good ears. Mostly I listened for the Junkyard Dog but I heard every word that Disha said to Nik Nok, or vice verses.

Disha said that even though everybody is all for Democrazy nobody agrees what it is, so we hide what we think for fear we will be too different and become company dinner, and this is Custom. Even back before there was Law to enforce the will of Democrazy there was Custom, and Custom is stronger even than Law.

I kept hoping they would both see the light and allow Custom and Progrets to get in the way of animal love.

Custom says we can eat only what we can eat and that we cannot love anybody who is too different. If you break Custom, it is company dinner for you, boy, just like happened to Taggo. But his violentation provided us with a lovely feast, so you see what goes around comes around and Progrets is always satisfied. This is some of what the two of them said, Disha and Nik Nok:

“What love can this be,” he said “when we can never be together with friends, and cannot make children?”

But she said “I have made many pups already and the last thing I need now is more when I cannot always feed what I have.”

He said “but does this love violent Democrazy? What will happen to us?”

She said “sometimes two people that can touch each other are more important than the Custom of Democrazy, for love itself is Progrets and even Democrazy must obey.”

She said “before the plague that did us all there was hardly any love. Love can only live between equals. Back then everyone was either lesser or greater than everyone else so how could there be true love? Now there is perfect equality and Democrazy and we can finally love.”

But as Disha said this last I thought I heard the ghost of a sour chasm, for she knew as well as did I what Democrazy would think of her love for Nik Nok.

He said “what is love really?” I thought Disha would answer because she is wise and a Dog but she just walked on, thinking.

At last I could not keep my silence, and I answered for her what my mother had heard from a Zoocamel long ago:

I said “love is knowing each other like worms know the dead.”

Disha stopped. “That is pretty good for a Skunk,” she admitted and said “this cannot happen when one is more than the other, because how can the lesser know the greater? And how can the greater respect one who is less than she?”

Nik Nok asked “is this how it was before the plague that did us all?”

Chapter thirteen Disha has a tail

“In the days before the plague,” she said “the Dogs could not talk or even think, and neither could the other animals. This I know, this I know. Men were all that were intelly and they were even more intelly than the Dogs and Men are now. They set about to make some of the fourlegs intelly too.”

“Some say,” she said “they only wanted servants and they could not use each other as they always had because of Servile Rights, but I have always admired the early Men and I prefer to think they truly believed we should all be crated equally. This I know, this I know.”

“In any case,” she said “they did it, and they did it by crating an unnatural plague that would do us, Dogs and Cats and other mamuals. This I know, this I know.”

“I am not sure what a plague is” asked Nik Nok, and I listened hard for I had never understood that explanation either as often as Disha had shown this tail.

“A plague is a little bug that crawls into every bump and hole in your body,” she admitted. “Whenever you get sick that is caused by these bugs, and that is a plague.

“Anyway, they deliberately fected some of us Dogs with this plague and then sat back on their haunches to see what would develop. This I know, this I know.”

“And this is where Progrets and Democrazy came from,” whispered the Boy out of rivulance.

“What developed,” she smugged “is that one of these plague Dogs escaped. The men were not as smart as they thought and Fang the Savor got away with the plague bug still fecting him.”

“This I know, this I know,” said both I and Nik Nok at once.

“The Dogs were first and then next the plague fected the Rats and the Skunks and the Coons and the Zoomals and everything else. The Cats were last for they were always so full of themselves licking their body that they kept licking the bugs right off until they wised up! And that is why Dogs are first and Cats are last and all others fall in between.”

“This I know, this I know,” we supplied for her.

I had forgotten all about the Junkyard Dog, so intent was I on Disha’s tail.

“Ah but Men are a different story,” she continued finally. “For the rest of us it was a climb up the hill for more intelly, but the Men had the easy route and came down the hill backwards. We met Democrazically in the middle, for the plague has finally made us all equal . . . the furries and birds and scales and frogs and even some of the fish, who are getting more intelly all of the time.”

“Until at last today,” she whispered “when I can love you truly as my grandmother could never love your grandfather. This I know, Nik Nok. This I know.”

“What is the use of more intelly,” asked Nik Nok angrily “if the Old Men did not have love? I am glad for this plague even if I am stupider than men were before! I am glad for our love Disha.”

She stopped and bit at a flea on her hind leg for a mome.

“Even,” she snuffled “if you can no longer understand the things of Men?”

“Things?”

“The autobiles and the glass mountains, the redstone dens, the hard-ground, telephone trees, walls and builds and all? If you can no longer understand them?”

“Then,” he said “they are not the things of men anymore,” and there he had her.

Chapter fourteen our junk fears are real eyes

“These things of men are not any of them as warm and pretty and furry as you,” said Nik Nok and I began to get an easy because here again was love against Democrazy.

“You will not always have me,” Disha warned “Dogs do not live as long as men do for that is something the plague did not change.”

“I am here now,” he said “and you too and what is tomorrow? Maybe I will die first if that Junkyard Dog is still shuddowing us.”

I wondered which was worth more, love or Progrets and I could feel my tail raise in horror. Is wonder a crime against Democrazy?

Then all at once I heard a sound I must have been listening for all day and dreading, a rumbling cough like a redstone mountain falling down in an earthshake, a moaning like a cub with stomach rot and out of the shuddows of a heap of dead cars staggered the Junkyard Dog in the flesh, what was left of it!

All three of us froze in terror and I felt urine trickle down my leg. I also raised my tail and sprayed my wad but I doubted the Junkyard Dog would care about how he smelled as long as he got to bite us, all three!

He staggered forward stiff-legged and I thought, maybe he is already dead but does not know it yet.

In little sharp words he said “you might think my sex will eat me . . . and the part of her I was in squeezed Democrazy.”

“Go away,” Disha said with tried authority, but “I am who I have been and can eat once anybody I have caught,” answered the Junkyard Dog.

“Go away!” I whimpered for I could not find my voice. I felt like the silent Coon.

“If you were stupid enough you is Progrets’ ” said he.

And with that he lunged at us and we three broke in all four directions and I ran up a wall of dead autobiles before I even knew it was blocking. Then I looked back and saw Disha. She had frozen in fear and could not move and she stood nose to nose with the Junkyard Dog who was dripping white at the mouth. I do not know why she did not run or why he had not bitten her yet. I shivered in fear.

But then I heard a cranky squeak and Nik Nok rose from the build he had hidden behind. He found his voice and charged the Junkyard Dog screaming like a Commonest.

It broke the spell. Disha unfroze and bolted away but oddly the Junkyard Dog did not charge the Boy instead and tear him to shreds like I thought, he turned instead and with a deaf move slashed Disha as she ran by. She screamed and skittered away but I could see the blood flowing from her hind leg. The junk ran in circles three times laughing like a falling pile of autobiles.

Disha shook, tail between her legs. Nik Nok only stared, his face the color of my stripe. We all knew what would happen to her now.

“Well if I am already bit,” said she sounding strange and quiet and queerly calm “then you can no longer frighten me, Junk. This I know, this I know.” And she leapt upon him as if she were junk herself and they fought tearing and biting and the Junkyard Dog had the worst of it for Disha tore off his ear and opened up his throat.

He fell to his knees and still had mind enough to submit but he was a goner anyway. My throat lumped, because I knew Disha was a goner too. Worse, she would finally be like him and might even bite me then too or Nik Nok. I knew she would never allow that to happen, but there was only one thing that could stop it and that was the Duk Duk path.

The Junk fell over on his side and now blood was flowing out of his throat in spurts so I knew she had struck paydirt. But just for a moment his eyes seemed to clear a little and he raised his head with a big strain and said “that hurt. You are bigger than I suggested. Knelt—knelt her front legs into the pocket of my clothes.”

Then “the truck is the key. Hold my tail up out of conveniencing my wife and putting it in. If machines make the wall only machines can onetwothreeone. Against the will of Del so wet.”

His voice became weaker and he whispered “keep going even if you are finished, then we will, die. At first, even I could, at first, both our hearts, need meat. Even I, the rules must roll, even I, could hear my life, with me, pounding after.”

“Cats” he croaked “are made just outside the bowl. But the truck is the key, you must understand. I smell onions.”

Then all at once he pulled himself up as if he had not even been mauled, he looked at us and shrugged and explained “anyone we caught we could eat once.” Then he settled back with a sigh and moved no more, for he was gone.

Chapter fifteen where Democrazy gets it in the end

We watched him for a long time to make sure he would not pop back up again and say something or maybe bite someone else but he was permanently dead. We moved on without spirit.

We found a den-hole among the dead autobiles that was empty after we chased out a scrawny Cat. Nik Nok made a halfheart grab and missed but we did not miss it, none of us was hungry anyway. I was still full from the night before, and the way Disha looked I did not even ask her if she wanted the Cat so he got lucky that night. After we settled in I shrunked farther back in the pile so Disha and her love could be alone together.

She was quiet as though submitting but the way she held her head seemed more like quiet domination. She knew she was horribly dead because the Junkyard Dog draw blood.

“Nik Nok,” she said “you know we have only a little time left together now. Let us not waste it.”

Skunks have very good eyes.

They violented Democrazy again in the day-heat, but this time it was gentle and slow like the black river instead of laughing and plunging like a waterfoul. She licked his belly very lightly and he breathed into her ear and stroked the underside of her tail and when he went inside her she coughed in surprise that it was so smooth and easy. Once he forgot and grabbed her wounded and stiffening leg to pull himself in deeper and she jerked away, but she never made a sound except right at the very end when she moaned just a little. This time she finished before he did but she was true to her word and kept on until he was done.

Afterward they lay together and talked without words while Nik Nok picked fleas out of her fur. They slept face to face even though she being a Dog was not exactly built for it.

Now that I knew what Nik Nok would soon lose I found I no longer cared about Custom and let Democrazy be hanged. Love is Progrets. Strange creatures fluttered in my stomach.

As the sun set we rose. When the air became stullen, and we resumed our journey I began to wish Nik Nok had nabbed the cat afterall. The stullen air was even browner than yestereve and blood red with the setting sun so it would be hard to main train a course for the other mountains across the city of angels. Disha said we would be there by the dawn’s oily light, and could the underbuild be far away then?

Chapter sixteen we explore Disha’s tunnel of love

Well we were not at the mountains by sun-up but we kept at our quest even through the daylight for we were tired, and wanted it all over. We saw no more Junkyard Dogs but my funny-watchy feeling continued, and I felt like everyone we saw was Junk in some way or another.

Finally through the cracked and fallen builds, Disha spied the arch with the folded arms that reprehented an underbuild. “We shall enter sex the line here,” said she “and follow it along towards the sea that swallows the sun. Soon we shall find the fallen underbuild and thence the hidden den.”

So down we went and into the stingy in blackness.

It swallowed us both and three but I felt no comfort, for this was not a den nor a hidey-hole but a build—a build of men and it reeked of them and their Undemocrazy. In some places I found a cold metal road and ran along it for a way, but the ticking of my claws against the hardmetal sent shivers through us all and Disha asked me to walk on the grabble to the side. I was happy to oblige for to tell the truth, I did not like the sound either and even Nik Nok cast his eyes down and grew silent at the echoes. We walked for a passing in silence but I cannot say how long for there are no momes in the dark.

Chapter seventeen we find the hidden den at last!

The journey through the wendless tunnel passed an easily, for even the Santa’s Anus and the Winds of Law could not brush us down there. At last we began to see cracks of light in the overhead, and then whole pocks of hardground and finally we discovered the Great Buildfall that the Coon had reminated. We climbored out of the underbuild into bright and treacherous sunlight, and saw stretched down below us the last defense against Democrazy.

It was a build squat like a stone spider and it was all gleaming, while the other builds around it were broken and dulled. There were men in strange clothing outside: they wore thick brown clothes that covered them completely and round hats that surrounded their heads and they looked out of glass windrows in their hats. I did not need for Disha to tell me that the clothes were meant to keep out Progrets but she did anyway. When I objected she said that she had only been telling Nik Nok.

We watched them for a long time. When they went inside two big doors opened for them, but they opened into a little room that did not seem worth the efforts.

“So how do we get Progrets beyond those doors” Disha asked.

“Maybe we can knock a hole through them,” asked Nik Nok, but Disha injected. “We might be able to dig our way through one door if we were quick enough, but long before we got through the other door those men would do us. But maybe there is only one wall, perhaps we should consecrate on that.”

We crept forward and studied the build some more.

“Nik Nok,” said Disha “if these humans have never been fected by Progrets, that means these walls have stood for many seasons. They must be very strong walls indeed for there have been earthshakes and many storms.”

I tried watching the men (or were they women? I could not tell inside their clothing). I began to have a glimmering in my mind like moonlight on the water.

Something the Junkyard Dog said kept buzzing to be reminated, but I could not pull it out and look at it.

The den was in a deep canyon from our vintage point with a long path of mostly straight unbroken hardground leading down towards it. It was to this path that my eyes looked. It had something to do with the important thing the Junkyard Dog said that I could not reminate. Oh how I wished I were a Dog or a Man, that could reminate everything!

“Let us explore the path,” I asked “and see if we can find anything.” Since neither Disha nor Nik Nok had a better suggestion we turned about and began walking back along the hardground away from the hidden den.

I looked at everything we passed trying to reminate what I knew was in my mind. I reminated, that the Junkyard Dog in between all his gibbers had said something that would help us now.

Chapter eighteen we discover the key to the mysteries

I looked at an arco and a hydrant and a lot of square builds and a store but none of them joggled my memory.

And then I saw the autobile truck and at once the thought leapt back into my mind.

“I reminate!” I cried “the truck is the key said the Junkyard Dog!”

Disha looked at the truck and then at me, saying “that is what I am now, a Junkyard Dog.” At once I regretted my hasty words but “you are right, I reminate him saying that too,” she added.

“But what could he know about today,” I asked “for you killed him yesterday.”

“To the junk,” she said “there is no yesterday or tomorrow, it sees backward and forward in days the way we see left and right along venture path. But what does that mean, the truck is the key?”

It was the biggest autobile truck I had ever seen. Even Nik Nok could not reach its top and it had more wheels than there are numbers in the city of angels. It was stopped along the edge of the hardground and was covered with foul-smelling rust.

For a long time we all three stared at the truck trying to figure out how it was the key. Then Nik Nok whispered “if machines make the wall then maybe machines can. . .”

“Can what,” I asked.

“That was something else he said,” said the Boy. “Only machines can what, break the wall?”

“If we could get the truck rolling down the hardground,” Disha said think loud “maybe it would roll fast enough that it could smash through the wall and into the Den.”

Nik Nok looked at the autobile for a long time.

“It is a very big truck,” he said at last.

“But how do we get it rolling,” I asked.

“And more important,” asked Nik Nok “once we do how do we make sure it stays on the hardground and does not hit a tree and stop?”

“That wheel in front of the chair makes it go left and right,” answered Disha like a know-all “for I have spoken with Hanaka Tag the eldest and she told me of these autobiles.”

“Well I think these men make the machine come alive,” retorted Nik Nok “do you know how to bring it to life also?”

“We do not need to,” said Disha though she did not sound too sure and I could tell she was only guessing “for if we can get it rolling then the hill will make it go fast enough.”

I kept my mouth shut during this axe change, for I am only a Skunk. I listened well though for we Skunks have very good ears.

Nik Nok fumbled with the latch until he could get the metal open and we looked inside.

“What we must do,” said Disha “is get it rolling and then one of us stays inside to turn the hoop-wheel and make the truck go left and right to stay on the hardground.”

“But then what,” asked Nik Nok, full of frights and astonishments “what will happen when it hits the Den? Will I be killed?”

Disha smiled. “Whichever one of us it is in the truck must jump clear before the crash my love.” She touched his side gently with her greying muzzle, for she was not as young as she had been the season before.

The truck was not rolling so we decided something was blocking it. After we ran around for a few momes looking Disha saw some pieces of wood under the wheels. We tried to pull them out, but even Nik Nok could not so he knocked them out finally with a rock. The truck ground and groaned but still did not roll. We climbored up to look, and there were lots of metal pulls.

“One of these must be what makes the truck stop and go,” announced Disha, but I think she put on more show of know-all than she really had. Nik Nok began pulling and pushing on the pulls, and Disha was vindulated because when he pulled a partically hard one the truck screamed and began to roll slowly. It rolled down the hill warbling like a broken thunderbum.

Nik Nok was afraid even when it went so slow. Then it picked up speed and we all shivered.

I was so frightened I could not move and I feared I would not be able to jump out, when the time came being so frightened.

Disha had Nik Nok turn the hoop-wheel, for she did not have the strength in her jaws and it was almost too hard for him!

“Reminate my love,” she cautioned “keep the door from latching for we must be ready to fly out at the very last mome.”

Nik Nok touched her paw and looked into her eyes, “oh I love you so much” he said with a tear in his eye. I could not figure out why his eyes were wet. Was there dust in them?

The autobile truck got faster and faster and soon Nik Nok was barely able to keep it on the hardground and away from trees and builds. I began to be afraid and sick as if I had eaten wormroot when I looked to the side and saw the world whizzing past me faster than a sparrow flies, and almost would have jumped out right then except that I knew Disha would not let us be killed, especially not Nik Nok. She rested her muzzle against his ear, and I could barely hear her snuffle “You are precious to me too. Life is precious.”

Then we roared around the last turn with Nik Nok straining to make the hoop-wheel turn so that the autobile truck would stay where it was supposed. We were heading right for the Den.

Some of the Men saw us coming and ran out waiving their hands and then tried to ride their own autobile into our path. They must have known what we were doing and were ready to give their lives to thwart the will of Democrazy, such was their fear of Progrets. But their autobile could not run fast enough and it only hit the back of the truck and did not even turn us. Just before we hit Disha snuffled “junk bonds, but love is stronger.” Then “NOW!” she barked “JUMP NOW!”

Nik Nok pushed open the door and just before he jumped he grabbed me by the scruff and saved my life!

We were lucky we were on grass and not on hardground for we hit and hit hard. I rolled over and over the Boy and ended up on my back watching the truck plow into the Den.

I do not know if Disha ever had a chance. Just before the crash I saw her still in the truck, gripping the hoop with her mouth and keeping the truck aimed true.

Then I heard a thunderbum like I had never imagined and the whole wall of the Last Old Den caved in like a buildfall in an earthshake. We had opened the last remnant of yesterday to the clouds of Progrets and the plague.

Chapter nineteen

But Disha was dead.

Chapter twenty triumph of Democrazy

I was still shaking from the fall I thought. I looked about unable to move, but I could not see Nik Nok and I was alone.

I saw the truck went much deeper into the Den than I imagined, it went right through three rooms.

Dust and smoke puffed on the Winds of Law around inside and in and out of the hole we had made and I knew that the bugs of Democrazy were drifting in too and would bear fruit.

Now all of us would be truly equal and the fourlegs would be liberated.

Then I saw Disha.

She had been thrown from the truck. She lay on the ground covered in blood.

Nik Nok held her broken lifeless body in his arms and tried to kiss her back to life, and the tears were streaming down his cheeks.

“What is this? What is this” he asked touching the salty water.

“I think that means you are a Man again,” I said “for Democrazy has triumphed. Our brethren and sistern are free and equal now.”

But a junk voice in my head, maybe Disha’s ghost whispered “you cannot be both.”

Disha pulled me into the Hidden Den, deeper and deeper than we had been even in the underbuild for it was a darkness of the heart not of the air and her ghost glowed like the moon.

I saw a Rat shivering and shaking and looking at me with wide eyes. “We have come to liberate you,” I said to resure him, but he only made a scrittering sound and ran away.

I stopped in panic. What was that sound? What did he say?

Then a Dog came out and I called to him, for he was a brother of Disha and I wanted to tell him of her sacrifice and how he was free now.

“You are free Mr. Dog,” I said, and “the free live free, you must go out into the City of Angels now and learn the Will of Democrazy.”

At first he snarled, but I knew he was only reacting to a strange Skunk. But when he heard my words he settled down and began to moan in pleasure at his newfound equality.

But then the moans turned into a whimper and he crawled on his belly to me. I backed up in consarnation for what was he, to wit a Dog doing playing subservant to a mere Skunk? Where was his equality before the Winds of Law?

Then I smelled his fear.

It ran unchecked down his leg and I could hear his heart racing like the truck that brought him Democrazy in the first place. He was terrified and did not understand.

“You would do well to buck up and be a Dog,” I chastised “for this is Progrets and the Will of Democrazy!” I boldly approached to lead him out into the real world, but instead he barked . . . and it was not words he barked. It was a cough, a grunt and held no more meaning than fear and confusion.

He may have been a Dog, but he was still only an animal. He was no brother of Disha.

We turned and ran at the same time in opposite directions. Terror gripped me too, for I suddenly realized that I was in another land.

There was no Democrazy here today, no matter what the bugs may say tomorrow and I was more afraid than I had been of the Junkyard Dog.

A Man stood in my path. “Do not stop me,” I announced “for I am Progrets!”

He screamed and staggered back against the wall of the Den covering his face. Another man heard me and tried to bean me with a stick crying “another one, kill him! Break his throat like the other!” and I did not need to ask to know that they meant the Coon. Now I knew how he had come to rupture his larinks. I ran like a Commonest.

At once the whole Den came alive against me, Men and Fourlegs and it was I who was fleeing for my very life. I found the hole, I do not know how. And then I was through. I did not stop running until I found the fallen underbuild again, and there was Nik Nok. But Disha’s body was not with him and he would not tell me where it was.

Chapter twenty-one to the winners go the spoiled

I will not tell you of the journey back across the waste, to the venture path with Nik Nok carrying me under one arm. All I reminate is that the Dogs snarled fiercely and the builds rumbled and shook, but none of them could touch us for Disha trotted right beside us still, and her laugh echoed around us as we slept the day away.

By the night we returned the color finally crept back into Nik Nok’s face, and he could smile though he vanished the next day and I never saw him again.

When I knew he had gone Overizon I felt a tear in my eye. I, the last of our extra diction, learned to cry.

Chapter twenty-two Mr. Skunk lowers his tale

I have nothing left to say. I am getting old and soon I will be a feast myself if you can stand the smell.

I, a Skunk am the very last of us who is able to cry since Nik Nok left and Disha died. I see you do not even understand what it is, except perhaps dust in my eye or a thorn in my paw.

In the high build at the end of venture path is a tower with a bell at the top, but it is silent now for there are none with the will to ring it. Pigeons roost under the metal and I hear them call to each other through the long, hot days: “Home! Fly home! Come home!”

They know nothing else to say, but it is a miracle that they can say even that, and I think that the plague is finally doing them as well. I think this means that soon we shall be equal to the pigeons too and only able to call each other home without even knowing where our home lies.

That is true Democrazy after all, and there is an end to love.

I will not be there to see, thank Democrazy.

Long reign Progrets! I bow to the Will, the Winds and Inalienable Progrets!

I confess that sometimes I wonder: have we lost something urgent? But I do not think wondering should be a crime against Democrazy.

TOWER OF BABYLON

Ted Chiang

A tower reaches for the vault of heaven, and its builders discover that the wrath of God is the least of their worries

Were the tower to be laid down across the plain of Shinar, it would be two days journey to walk from one end to the other. While the tower stands, it takes a month and a half to climb from its base to its summit, if a man walks unburdened. But few men climb the tower with empty hands; the pace of most men is much slowed by the cart of bricks that they pull behind them. Four months pass between the day a brick is loaded onto a cart and the day it is taken off to form a part of the tower.

Hillalum had spent all his life in Elam and knew Babylon only as a buyer of Elam’s copper. The copper ingots were carried on boats that traveled down the Karun to the Lower Sea, headed for the Euphrates. Hillalum and the other miners traveled overland, alongside a merchant’s caravan of loaded onagers. They walked along a dusty path leading down from the plateau, across the plains, to the green fields sectioned by canals and dikes.

None of them had seen the tower Before. It became visible when they were still leagues away: a line as thin as a strand of flax, wavering in the shimmering air, rising up from the crust of mud that was Babylon itself. As they drew closer, the crust grew into the mighty city walls, but all they saw was the tower. When they did lower their gazes to the level of the river plain, they saw the marks the tower had made outside the city: The Euphrates itself now flowed at the bottom of a wide, sunken bed, dug to provide clay for bricks. To the south of the city could be seen rows upon rows of kilns, no longer burning.

As they approached the city gates, the tower appeared more massive than anything Hillalum had ever imagined: a single column that must have been as large around as an entire temple, yet it rose so high that it shrank into invisibility.

All of them walked with their heads tilted back, squinting in the sun.

Hillalum’s friend Nanni elbowed him, awestruck.

“We’re to climb that? To the top?”

“Going up to dig. It seems . . . unnatural.”

The miners reached the central gate in the western wall, where another caravan was leaving. While they crowded forward into the narrow strip of shade provided by the wall, their foreman Beli shouted to the gatekeepers standing atop the gate towers.

“We are the miners who were summoned from the land of Elam.”

The gatekeepers were delighted. One called back, “You are the ones who are to dig through the vault of heaven?”

“We are.”

The entire city was celebrating. The festival had begun eight days ago, when the last of the bricks were sent on their way, and would last two more. Every day and night, the city rejoiced, danced, feasted.

Along with the brickmakers were the cart pullers, men whose legs were roped with muscle from climbing the tower. Each morning a crew began its ascent; they climbed for four days, transferred their loads to the next crew of pullers, and returned to the city with empty carts on the fifth. A chain of such crews led all the way to the top of the tower, but only the bottommost celebrated with the city. For those who lived upon the tower, enough wine and meat had been.

“Why a trowel?”

“If a bricklayer drops his trowel, he can do no work until a new one is brought up. For months he cannot earn the food that he eats, so he must go into debt. The loss of a trowel is cause for much wailing. But if a man falls, and his trowel remains, men are secretly relieved. The next one to drop his trowel can pick up the extra one and continue working, without incurring debt.”

Hillalum was appalled, and for a frantic moment he tried to count how many picks the miners had brought. Then he realized. “That cannot be true. Why not have spare trowels Drought up? Their weight would be nothing against all the bricks that go up there. And surely the loss of a man means a serious delay, unless they have an extra man at the top who is skilled at bricklaying. Without such a man, they must wait for another one to climb from the bottom.”

All of the pullers roared with laughter. “We cannot fool this one,” Lugatum said with much amusement. He turned to Hillalum. “So you’ll begin your climb once the festival is over?”

Hillalum drank from a bowl of beer. “Yes. I’ve heard that we’ll be joined by miners from a western land, but I haven’t seen them. Do you know of them?”

“Yes, they come from a land called Egypt, but they do not mine ore as you do. They quarry stone.”

“We dig stone in Elam, too,” said Nanni, his mouth full of pork.

“Not as they do. They cut granite.”

“Granite?” Limestone and alabaster were quarried in Elam, but not granite. “Are you certain?”

“Merchants who have traveled to Egypt say that they have ziggurats and temples, built with huge blocks of limestone and granite. And they carve giant statues from granite.”

“But granite is so difficult to work.” Lugatum shrugged. “Not for them. The royal architects believe such stoneworkers may be useful when you reach the vault of heaven.” Hillalum nodded. That could be true. Who knew for certain what they would need? “Have you seen them?”

“No, they are not here yet, but they are expected in a few days time. They may not arrive before the festival ends, though; then you Elamites will ascend alone.”

“You will accompany us, won’t you?”

“Yes, but only for the first four days. Then we must turn back, while you lucky ones go on.”

“Why do you think us lucky?”

“I long to make the climb to the top. I once pulled with the higher crews, and reached a height of twelve days climb, but that is as high as I have ever gone. You will go far higher.” Lugatum smiled ruefully. “I envy you, that you will touch the vault of heaven.”

To touch the vault of heaven. To break it open with picks. Hillalum felt uneasy at the idea. “There is no cause for envy—” he began.

“Right,” said Nanni. “When we are finished, all men will touch the vault of heaven.”

The next morning, Hillalum went to see the tower. He stood in the giant courtyard surrounding it. There was a temple off to one side that would have been impressive if seen by itself, but it stood unnoticed beside the tower.

He could sense the utter solidity of it. According to all the tales, the tower was constructed to have a mighty strength that no ziggurat possessed; it was made of baked brick all the way through, when ordinary ziggurats were mere sun-dried mud brick, having baked brick only for the facing. The bricks were set in a bitumen mortar, which soaked into the fired clay, and hardened to form a bond as strong as the bricks themselves.

The tower’s base resembled the first two platforms of an ordinary ziggurat. There stood a giant square platform some two hundred cubits on a side and forty cubits high, with a triple staircase against its south face. Stacked upon that first platform was another level, a smaller platform reached only by the central stair. It was atop the second platform that the tower itself began.

It was sixty cubits on a side and rose like a square pillar that bore the weight of heaven. Around it wound a gently inclined ramp, cut into the side, that banded the tower like the leather strip wrapped around the handle of a whip. No; upon looking again, Hillalum saw that there were two ramps, and they were intertwined. The outer edge of each ramp was studded with pillars, not thick but broad, to provide some shade behind them. In running his gaze up the tower, he saw alternating bands—ramp, brick, ramp, brick—until they could no longer be distinguished. And still the tower rose up and up, farther than the eye could see; Hillalum blinked, and squinted, and grew dizzy. He stumbled backward a couple steps and turned away with a shudder.

Hillalum thought of the-story told to him in childhood, the tale following that of the Deluge. It told of how men had once again populated all the corners of the earth, inhabiting more lands than they ever had before. How men had sailed to the edges of the world and seen the ocean falling away into the mist to join the black waters of the Abyss far below. How men had thus realized the extent of the earth, and felt it to be small, and desired to see what lay beyond its borders, all the rest of Yahweh’s creation. How they looked skyward and wondered about Yahweh’s dwelling place, above the reservoirs that contained the waters of heaven. And how, many centuries ago, there began the construction of the tower, a pillar to heaven, a stair that men might ascend to see the works of Yahweh, and that Yahweh might descend to see the works of men.

It had always seemed inspiring to Hillalum, a tale of thousands of men toiling ceaselessly, but with joy, for they worked to know Yahweh better. He had been excited when the Babylonians came to Elam looking for miners. Yet now that he stood at the base of the tower, his senses rebelled, insisting that nothing should stand so high. He didn’t feel as if he were on the earth when he looked up along the tower.

Should he climb such a thing?

On the morning of the climb, the second platform was covered edge to edge with stout two-wheeled carts arranged in rows.

Many were loaded with nothing but food of all sorts: sacks filled with barley, wheat, lentils, onions, dates, cucumbers, loaves of bread, dried fish. There were countless giant clay jars of water, date wine, beer, goat’s milk, palm oil. Other carts were loaded with such goods as might be sold at a bazaar: bronze vessels, reed baskets, bolts of linen, wooden stools and tables. There was also a fattened ox and a goat that some priests were fitting with hoods so that they could not see to either side and would not be afraid on the climb. They would be sacrificed when they reached the top.

Then there were the carts loaded with the miners’ picks and hammers, and the makings for a small forge. Their foreman had also ordered a number of carts be loaded with wood and sheaves of reeds.

Lugatum stood next to a cart, securing the ropes that held the wood. Hillalum walked up to him. “From where did this wood come? I saw no forests after we left Elam.”

“There is a forest of trees to the north, which was planted when the tower was begun. The cut timber is floated down the Euphrates.”

“You planted an entire forest?”

“When they began the tower, the architects knew that far more wood would be needed to fuel the kilns than could be found on the plain, so they had a forest planted. There are crews who provide water and plant one new tree for each that is cut.”

Hillalum was astonished. “And that provides all the wood needed?”

“Most of it. Many other forests in the north have been cut as well, and their wood brought down the river.” He inspected the wheels of the cart, uncorked a leather bottle he carried, and poured a little oil between the wheel and axle.

Nanni walked over to them, staring at the streets of Babylon laid out before them. “I’ve never before been this high, that I can look down upon a city.”

“Nor have I,” said Hillalum, but Lugatum simply laughed. “Come along. All of the carts are ready.”

Soon all the men were paired up and matched with a cart. The men stood between the carts’ two pull rods, which had rope loops for pulling. The carts pulled by the miners were mixed in with those of the regular pullers, to ensure that they would keep the proper pace. Lugatum and another puller had the cart right behind that of Hillalum and Nanni.

“Remember,” said Lugatum, “stay about ten cubits behind the cart in front of you. The man on the right does all the pulling when you turn corners, and you’ll switch every hour.”

Pullers were beginning to lead their carts up the ramp. Hillalum and Nanni bent down and slung the ropes of their cart over their opposite shoulders. They stood up together, raising the front end of the cart off the pavement.

“Now PULL,” called Lugatum.

They leaned forward against the ropes, and the cart began rolling. Once it was moving, pulling seemed to be easy enough, and they wound their way around the platform. Then they reached the ramp, and they again had to lean deeply. “This is a light wagon?” muttered Hillalum.

The ramp was wide enough for a single man to walk beside a cart if he had to pass. The surface was paved with brick, with two grooves worn deep by centuries of wheels. Above their heads, the ceiling rose in a corbeled vault, with the wide, square bricks arranged in overlapping layers until they met in the middle. The pillars on the right were broad enough to make the ramp seem a bit like a tunnel. If one didn’t look off to the side, there was little sense of being on a tower.

“Do you sing when you mine?” asked Lugatum.

“When the stone is soft.”

“Sing one of your mining songs, then.”

The call went down to the other miners, and before long the entire crew was singing.

As the shadows shortened, they ascended higher and higher. With only clear air surrounding them, and much shade from the sun, it was much cooler than in the narrow alleys of a city at ground level, where the heat at midday could kill lizards as they scurried across the street. Looking out to the side, the miners could see the dark Euphrates, and the green fields stretching out for leagues, crossed by canals that glinted in the sunlight. The city of Babylon was an intricate pattern of close-set streets and buildings, dazzling with gypsum whitewash; less and less of it was visible as it seemingly drew nearer the base of the tower.

Hillalum was again pulling on the right-hand rope, nearer the edge, when he heard some shouting from the upward ramp one level below. He thought of stopping and looking down the side, but he didn’t wish to interrupt their pace, and he wouldn’t be able to see the lower ramp clearly anyway. “What’s happening down there?” he called to Lugatum behind him.

“One of your fellow miners fears the height. There is occasionally such a man among those who climb for the first time. Such a man embraces the floor and cannot ascend further. Few feel it so soon, though.”

Hillalum understood. “We know of a similar fear, among those who would be miners. Some men cannot bear to enter the mines, for fear that they will be buried.”

“Really?” called Lugatum. “I had not heard of that. How do you feel yourself about the height?”

“I feel nothing.” But he glanced at Nanni, and they both knew the truth.

“You feel nervousness in your palms, don’t you?” whispered Nanni.

Hillalum rubbed his hands on the coarse fibers of the rope and nodded.

“I felt it, too, earlier when I was closer to the edge.”

“Perhaps we should go hooded, like the ox and the goat,” muttered Hillalum jokingly.

“Do you think we, too, will fear the height, when we climb further?”

Hillalum considered. That one of their comrades should feel the fear so soon did not bode well. He shook it off; thousands climbed with no fear, and it would be foolish to let one miner’s fear infect them all. “We are merely unaccustomed. We will have months to grow used to the height. By the time we reach the top of the tower, we will wish it were taller.”

“No,” said Nanni. “I don’t think I’ll wish to pull this any further.”

They both laughed.

In the evening they ate a meal of barley and onions and lentils, and slept inside narrow corridors that penetrated into the body of the tower. When they woke the next morning, the miners were scarcely able to walk, so sore were their legs. The pullers laughed, and gave them salve to rub into their muscles, and redistributed the load on the carts to reduce the miners’ burden.

By now, looking down the side turned Hillalum’s knees to water. A wind blew steadily at this height, and he anticipated that it would grow stronger as they climbed. He wondered if anyone had ever been blown off the tower in a moment of carelessness. And the fall: a man would have time to say a prayer before he hit the ground. Hillalum shuddered at the thought.

Aside from the soreness in the miners’ legs, the second day was similar to the first. They were able to see much farther now, and the breadth of land visible was stunning; the deserts beyond the fields were visible, and caravans appeared to be little more than lines of insects. No other miner feared the height so greatly that he couldn’t continue, and their ascent proceeded all day without incident.

On the third day, the miners’ legs had not improved, and Hillalum felt like a crippled old man. Only on the fourth day did their legs feel better, and they were pulling their original loads again. Their climb continued until the evening, when they met the second crew of pullers leading empty carts rapidly along the downward ramp. The upward and downward ramps wound around each other without touching, but they were joined by the corridors through the tower’s body. When the crews had intertwined thoroughly on the two ramps, they crossed over to exchange carts.

The miners were introduced to the pullers of the second crew, and they all talked and ate together that night. The next morning the first crew readied the empty carts for their return to Babylon, and Lugatum bid farewell to Hillalum and Nanni.

“Take care of your cart. It has climbed the entire height of the tower, more times than any man.”

“Do you envy the cart, too?” asked Nanni.

“No, because every time it reaches the top, it must come all the way back down. I could not bear to do that.”

When the second crew stopped at the end of the day, the puller of the cart behind Hillalum and Nanni came over to them. His name was Kudda.

“You have never seen the sun set at this height. Come, look.” The puller went to the edge and sat down, his legs hanging over the side. He saw that they hesitated. “Come. You can lie down and peer over the edge, if you like.” Hillalum did not wish to seem like a fearful child, but he could not bring himself to sit at a cliff face that stretched for thousands of cubits below his feet. He lay down on his belly, with only his head at the edge. Nanni joined him.

“When the sun is about to set, look down the side of the tower.” Hillalum glanced downward and then quickly looked to the horizon.

“What is different about the way the sun sets here?”

“Consider, when the sun sinks behind the peaks of the mountains to the west, it grows dark down on the plain of Shinar. Yet here, we are higher than the mountaintops, so we can still see the sun. The sun must descend further for us to see night.”

Hillalum’s jaw dropped as he understood. “The shadows of the mountains mark the beginning of night. Night falls on the earth before it does here.” Kudda nodded. “You can see night travel up the tower, from the ground up to the sky. It moves quickly, but you should be able to see it.”

He watched the red globe of the sun for a minute and then looked down and pointed. “Now!”

Hillalum and Nanni looked down. At the base of the immense pillar, tiny Babylon was in shadow. Then the darkness climbed the tower, like a canopy unfurling upward. It moved slowly enough that Hillalum felt he could count the moments passing, but then it grew faster as it approached, until it raced past them faster than he could blink, and they were in twilight.

Hillalum rolled over and looked up, in time to see darkness rapidly ascend the rest of the tower. Gradually, the sky grew dimmer as the sun sank beneath the edge of the world, far away.

“Quite a sight, is it not?”

Hillalum said nothing. For the first time, he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.

After climbing for two more days, Hillalum had grown more accustomed to the height. Though they were the better part of a league straight up, he could bear to stand at the edge of the ramp and look down the tower. He held on to one of the pillars at the edge and cautiously leaned out to look upward. He noticed that the tower no longer looked like a smooth pillar.

He asked Kudda, “The tower seems to widen further up. How can that be?”

“Look more closely. There are wooden balconies reaching out from the sides. They are made of cypress, and suspended by ropes of flax.”

Hillalum squinted. “Balconies? What are they for?”

“They have soil spread on them, so people may grow vegetables. At this height water is scarce, so onions are most commonly grown. Higher up, where there is more rain, you’ll see beans.”

Nanni asked, “How can there be rain above that does not just fall here?”

Kudda was surprised at him. “It dries in the air as it falls, of course.”

“Oh, of course.” Nanni shrugged.

By the end of the next day they reached the level of the balconies. They were flat platforms, dense with onions, supported by heavy ropes from the tower wall above, just below the next tier of balconies.

On each level the interior of the tower had several narrow rooms inside, in which the families of the pullers lived. Women could be seen sitting in the doorways sewing tunics, or out in the gardens digging up bulbs. Children chased each other up and down the ramps, weaving amidst the pullers’ carts and running along the edge of the balconies without fear. The tower dwellers could easily pick out the miners, and they all smiled and waved.

When it came time for the evening meal, all the carts were set down and much food and other goods were taken off to be used by the people here. The pullers greeted their families and invited the miners to join them for the evening meal. Hillalum and Nanni ate with the family of Kudda, and they enjoyed a fine meal of dried fish, bread, date wine, and fruit.

Hillalum saw that this section of the tower formed a tiny kind of town, laid out in a line between two streets, the upward and downward ramps. There was a temple, in which the rituals for the festivals were performed; there were magistrates, who settled disputes; there were shops, which were stocked by the caravan. Of course, the town was inseparable from the caravan: Neither could exist without the other. And yet any caravan was essentially a journey, a thing that began at one place and ended at another. This town was never intended as a permanent place; it was merely part of a centuries-long journey.

After dinner, Hillalum asked Kudda and his family, “Have any of you ever visited Babylon?”

Kudda’s wife, Alitum, answered. “No, why would we? It’s a long climb, and we have all we need here.”

“You have no desire to actually walk on the earth?”

Kudda shrugged. “We live on the road to heaven; all the work that we do is to extend it further. When we leave the tower, we will take the upward ramp, not the downward.”

As the miners ascended, in the course of time there came the day when the tower appeared to be the same when one looked upward or downward from the ramp’s edge. Below, the tower’s shaft shrank to nothing long before it seemed to reach the plain below. Likewise the miners were still far from being able to see the top. All that was visible was a length of the tower. To look up or down was frightening, for the reassurance of continuity was not provided; they were no longer part of the ground. The tower might have been a thread suspended in the air, unattached to either Earth or heaven.

There were moments during this section of the climb when Hillalum despaired, feeling displaced and estranged from the world; it was as if the earth had rejected him for his faithlessness, while heaven disdained to accept him. He wished Yahweh would give a sign, to let men know that their venture was approved; otherwise how could they stay in a place that offered so little welcome to the spirit?

The tower dwellers at this altitude felt no unease with their station; they always greeted the miners warmly and wished them luck with their task at the vault. They lived inside the damp mists of clouds, they saw storms from below and from above, they harvested crops from the air, and they never feared that this was an improper place for men to be. There were no divine assurances to be had, but the people never knew a moment’s doubt.

With the passage of the weeks, the sun and moon peaked lower and lower in their daily journeys. The moon flooded the south side of the tower with its silver radiance, glowing like the eye of Yahweh peering at them. Before long, they were at precisely the same level as the moon when it passed; they had reached the height of the first of the celestial bodies. They squinted at the moon’s pitted face, marveled at its stately motion that scorned any support.

Then they approached the sun. It was the summer season, when the sun appears nearly overhead from Babylon, making it pass close by the tower at this height. No families lived in this section of the tower, nor were there any balconies, since the heat was enough to roast barley. The mortar between the tower’s bricks was no longer bitumen, which would have softened and flowed, but clay, which had been virtually baked by the heat. As protection against the day temperatures, the pillars had been widened until they formed a nearly continuous wall, enclosing the ramp into a tunnel with only narrow slots admitting the whistling wind and blades of golden light.

The crews of pullers had been spaced very regularly up to this point, but here an adjustment was necessary. They started out earlier and earlier each morning, to gain more darkness for when they pulled. When they were at the level of the sun, they traveled entirely at night. During the day, they tried to sleep, naked and sweating in the hot breeze. The miners worried that if they did manage to sleep, they would be baked to death before they awoke. But the pullers had made the journey many times and never lost a man, and eventually they passed above the sun’s level, where things were as they had been below.

Now the light of day shone upward, which seemed unnatural to the utmost. The balconies had planks removed from them so that the sunlight could shine through, with soil on the walkways that remained; the plants grew sideways and downward, bending down to catch the sun’s rays.

Then they drew near the level of the stars, small fiery spheres spread on all sides. Hillalum had expected them to be spread more thickly, but even with the tiny stars invisible from the ground, they seemed to be thinly scattered. They were not all set at the same height but instead occupied the next few leagues above. It was difficult to tell how far they were, since there was no indication of their size, but occasionally one would make a close approach, evidencing its astonishing speed. Hillalum realized that all the objects in the sky hurtled by with similar speed, in order to travel the world from edge to edge in a day’s time.

During the day, the sky was a much paler blue than it appeared from the earth, a sign they were nearing the vault. When studying the sky, Hillalum was startled to see that there were stars visible during the day. They couldn’t be seen from the earth amidst the glare of the sun, but from this altitude they were quite distinct.

One day Nanni came to him hurriedly and said, “A star has hit the tower!”

“What!” Hillalum looked around panicked, feeling like he had been struck by a blow.

“No, not now. It was long ago, more than a century. One of the tower dwellers is telling the story; his grandfather was there.”

They went inside the corridors and saw several miners seated around a wizened old man. “—lodged itself in the bricks about half a league above here. You can still see the scar it left; it’s like a giant pockmark.”

“What happened to the star?”

“It burned and sizzled, and was too bright to look upon. Men considered prying it out, so that it might resume its course, but it was too hot to approach closely, and they dared not quench it. After weeks it cooled into a knotted mass of black heaven metal, as large as a man could wrap his arms around.”

“So large?” said Nanni, his voice full of awe. When stars fell to the earth of their own accord, small lumps of heaven metal were sometimes found, tougher, than the finest bronze. The metal could not be melted for casting, so it was worked by hammering when heated red; amulets were made from it.

“Indeed, no one had ever heard of a mass of this size found on the earth. Can you imagine the tools that could be made from it!”

“You did not try to hammer it into tools, did you?” asked Hillalum, horrified.

“Oh, no. Men were frightened to touch it. Everyone descended from the tower, waiting for retribution from Yahweh for disturbing the workings of creation. They waited for months, but no sign came. Eventually they returned and pried out the star. It sits in a temple in the city below.”

There was silence. Then one of the miners said, “I have never heard of this in the stories of the tower.”

“It was a transgression, something not spoken of.”

As they climbed higher up the tower, the sky grew lighter in color, until one morning Hillalum awoke and stood at the edge and yelled from shock: What had before seemed a pale sky now appeared to be a white ceiling stretched far above their heads. They were close enough now to perceive the vault of heaven, to see it as a solid carapace enclosing all the sky. All of the miners spoke in hushed tones, staring up like idiots, while the tower dwellers laughed at them.

As they continued to climb, they were startled at how near they actually were. The blankness of the vault’s face had deceived them, making it undetectable until it appeared, abruptly, seemingly just above their heads. Now instead of climbing into the sky, they climbed up to a featureless plain that stretched endlessly in all directions.

All of Hillalum’s senses were disoriented by the sight of it. Sometimes when he looked at the vault, he felt as if the world had flipped around somehow, and if he lost his footing he would fall upward to meet it. When the vault did appear to rest above his head, it had an oppressive weight. The vault was a stratum as heavy as all the world, yet utterly without support, and he feared what he never had in the mines: that the ceiling would collapse upon him.

Too, there were moments when it appeared as if the vault was a vertical cliff face of unimaginable height rising before him, and the dim earth behind him was another like it, and the tower was a cable stretched taut between the two. Or worst of all, for an instant it seemed that there was no up and no down, and his body did not know which way it was drawn. It was like fearing the height, but much worse. Often he would wake to find himself sweating and his fingers cramped, trying to clutch the brick floor.

Nanni and many of the other miners were bleary-eyed, too, though no one spoke of what disturbed their sleep. Their ascent grew slower, instead of faster as their foreman Beli had expected; the sight of the vault inspired unease rather than eagerness. The regular pullers became impatient with them. Hillalum wondered what sort of people were forged by living under such conditions; did they escape madness? Did they grow accustomed to this? Would the children born under a solid sky scream if they saw the ground beneath their feet?

Perhaps men were not meant to live in such a place. If their own natures restrained them from approaching heaven too closely, then men should remain on the earth.

When they reached the summit of the tower, the disorientation faded, or perhaps they had grown immune. Here, standing upon the square platform of the top, the miners gazed upon the most awesome scene ever glimpsed by men: Far below them lay a tapestry of soil and sea, veiled by mist, rolling out in all directions to the limit of the eye. Just above them hung the roof of the world itself, the absolute upper demarcation of the sky, guaranteeing their vantage point as the highest possible. Here. Mas as much of creation as could be apprehended at once.

The priests led a prayer to Yahweh; they gave thanks that they were permitted to see so much and begged forgiveness for their desire to see more.

And at the top, the bricks were laid. One could catch the rich, raw smell of tar, rising out of the heated caldrons in which the lumps of bitumen were melted. It was the most earthy odor the miners had smelled in four months., and their nostrils were desperate to catch a whiff before it was whipped away by the wind. Here at the summit, where the ooze that had once seeped from the earth’s cracks now grew solid to hold bricks in place, the earth was growing a limb into the sky.

Here worked the bricklayers, the men smeared with bitumen who mixed the mortar and deftly set the heavy bricks with absolute precision. More than anyone else, these men could not permit themselves to experience dizziness when they saw the vault, for the tower could not vary a finger’s width from the vertical. They were nearing the end of their task, finally, and after four months of climbing, the miners were ready to begin theirs.

The Egyptians arrived shortly afterward. They were dark of skin and slight of build and had sparsely bearded chins. They had pulled carts filled with dolerite hammers, and bronze tools, and wooden wedges. Their foreman was named Senmut, and he conferred with Beli, the Elamites’ foreman, on how they would penetrate the vault. The Egyptians built a forge with what they had brought, as did the Elamites, for recasting the bronze tools that would be blunted during the mining.

The vault itself remained just above a man’s outstretched fingertips; it felt smooth and cool when one leapt up to touch it. It seemed to be made of finegrained white granite, unmarred and utterly featureless. And therein lay the problem. Long ago Yahweh had released the Deluge, unleashing waters from both below and above; the waters of the Abyss had burst forth from the springs of the earth, and the waters of heaven had poured through the sluice gates in the vault. Now men saw the vault closely, but there were no sluice gates discernible. They squinted at the surface in all directions, but no openings, no windows, no seams interrupted the granite plain.

It seemed that their tower met the vault at a point between any reservoirs, which was fortunate indeed. If a sluice gate had been visible, they would have had to risk breaking it open and emptying the reservoir. That would mean rain for Shinar, out of season and heavier than the winter rains; it would cause flooding along the Euphrates. The rain would most likely end when the reservoir was emptied, but there was always the possibility that Yahweh would punish them and continue the rain until the tower fell and Babylon was dissolved into mud.

Even though there were no visible gates, a risk still existed. Perhaps the gates had no seams perceptible to mortal eyes, and a reservoir lay directly above them. Or perhaps the reservoirs were huge, so that even if the nearest sluice gates were many leagues away, a reservoir still lay above them.

There was much debate over how best to proceed.

“Surely Yahweh will not wash away the tower,” argued Qurdusa, one of the bricklayers. “If the tower were sacrilege, Yahweh would have destroyed it earlier. Yet in all the centuries we’ve been working, we have never seen the slightest sign of Yahweh’s displeasure. Yahweh will drain any reservoir before we penetrate it.”

“If Yahweh looked upon this venture with such favor, there would already be a stairway ready-made for us in the vault,” countered Eluti, an Elamite. “Yahweh will neither help or hinder us; if we penetrate a reservoir, we will face the onrush of its waters.”

Hillalum could not keep his doubts silent at such a time. “And if the waters are endless? Yahweh may not punish ®us, but Yahweh may allow us to bring our judgment upon ourselves.”

“Elamite,” said Qurdusa, “even as a newcomer to the tower, you should know better than that. We labor for our love of Yahweh, we have done so for all our lives, and so have our fathers for generations back. Men as righteous as we could not be judged harshly.”

“It is true that we work with the purest of aims, but that doesn’t mean we have worked wisely. Did men truly choose the correct path when they opted to live their lives away from the soil from which they were shaped? Never has Yahweh said that the choice was proper. Now we stand ready to break open heaven, even when we know that water lies above us. If we are misguided, how can we be sure Yahweh will protect us from our own errors?”

“Hillalum advises caution, and I agree,” said Beli. “We must ensure that we do not bring a second Deluge upon the world, nor even dangerous rains upon Shinar. I have conferred with Senmut of the Egyptians, and he has shown me designs which they have employed to seal the tombs of their kings. I believe that their methods can provide us with safety when we begin digging.”

The priests sacrificed the ox and the goat in a ceremony in which many sacred words were spoken and much incense was burned, and the miners began work.

Even before the miners reached the vault, it had been obvious that simple digging with hammers and picks would be impractical: Even if they were tunneling horizontally, they would make no more than two finger widths of progress a day through granite, and tunneling upward would be far, far slower. Instead, they employed fire setting.

With the wood they had brought, a bonfire was built below the chosen point of the vault and fed steadily for a day. Before the heat of the flames, the stone cracked and spalled. After letting the fire burn out, the miners splashed water onto the stone to further the cracking. They could then break the stone into large pieces, which fell heavily onto the tower. In this manner they could progress the better part of a cubit for each day the fire burned.

The tunnel did not rise straight up, but at the angle a staircase takes, so that they could build a ramp of steps up from the tower to meet it. The fire setting left the walls and floor smooth; the men built a frame of wooden steps underfoot so that they would not slide back down. They used a platform of baked bricks to support the bonfire at the tunnel’s end.

After the tunnel rose ten cubits-into the vault, they leveled it out and widened it to form a room. After the miners had removed all the stone that had been weakened by the fire, the Egyptians began work. They used no fire in their quarrying. With only their dolerite balls and hammers, they began to build a sliding door of granite. They first chipped away stone to cut an immense block of granite out of one wall. Hillalum and the other miners tried to help but found it difficult: One did not wear away the stone by grinding but instead pounded chips off, using hammer blows of one strength alone, and lighter or heavier ones would not do.

After some weeks, the block was ready. It stood taller than a man and was even wider than that. To free it from the floor, they cut slots around the base of the stone and pounded in dry wooden wedges. Then they pounded thinner wedges into the first wedges to split them and poured water into the cracks so that the wood would swell. In a few hours, a crack traveled into the stone, and the block was freed.

At the rear of the room, on the right-hand side, the miners burned out a narrow upward-sloping corridor, and in the floor in front of the chamber entrance they dug a downward-sloping channel into the floor for a cubit. Thus there was a smooth continuous ramp that cut across the floor immediately in front of the entrance and ended just to its left.

On this ramp the Egyptians loaded the block of granite. They dragged and pushed it up into the side corridor, where it just barely fit, and propped it in place with a stack of flat mud bricks braced against the bottom of the left wall, like a pillar lying on the ramp.

With the sliding stone to hold back the waters, it was safe for the miners to continue tunneling. If they broke into a reservoir and the waters of heaven began pouring down into the tunnel, they would break the bricks one by one, and the stone would slide down until it rested in the recess in the floor, utterly blocking the doorway. If the waters flooded in with such force that they washed men out of the tunnels, the mud bricks would gradually dissolve, and again the stone would slide down. The waters would be retained, and the miners could then begin a new tunnel in another direction, to avoid the reservoir.

The miners again used fire setting to continue the tunnel, beginning at the far end of the room. To aid the circulation of air within the vault, oxhides were stretched on tall frames of wood and placed obliquely on either side of the tunnel entrance at the top of the tower. Thus the steady wind that blew underneath the vault of heaven was guided upward into the tunnel; it kept the fire blazing and cleared the air after the fire was extinguished, so that the miners could dig without breathing smoke.

The Egyptians did not stop working once the sliding stone was in place. While the miners swung their picks at the tunnel’s end, the Egyptians labored at the task of cutting a stair into the solid stone, to replace the wooden steps. This they did with the wooden wedges, and the blocks they removed from the sloping floor left steps in their place.

Thus the miners worked, extending the tunnel on and on. The tunnel always ascended, though it reversed direction regularly like a thread in a giant stitch, so that its general path was straight up. They built other sliding-door rooms so that only the uppermost segment of the tunnel would be flooded if they penetrated a reservoir. They cut channels in the vault’s surface from which they hung walkways and platforms; starting from these platforms, well away from the tower, they dug side tunnels, which joined the main tunnel deep inside. The wind was guided through these to provide ventilation, clearing the smoke from deep inside the tunnel.

For years the labor continued. The pulling crews no longer hauled bricks but wood and water for the fire setting. People came to inhabit those tunnels just inside the vault’s surface, and on hanging platforms they grew downwardbending vegetables. The miners lived there at the border of heaven; some married and raised children. Few ever set foot on the earth again.

With a wet cloth wrapped around his face, Hillalum climbed down from wooden steps onto stone, having just fed some more wood to the bonfire at the tunnel’s end. The fire would continue for many hours, and he would wait in the lower tunnels, where the wind was not thick with smoke.

Then there was a distant sound of shattering, the sound of a mountain of stone being split through, and then a steadily growing roar. A torrent of water came rushing down the tunnel.

For a moment, Hillalum was frozen in horror. The water, shockingly cold, slammed into his legs, knocking him down. He rose to his feet, gasping for breath, leaning against the current, clutching at the steps.

They had hit a reservoir.

He had to descend below the highest sliding door, before it was closed. His legs wished to leap down the steps, but he knew he couldn’t remain on his feet if he did, and being swept down by the raging current would likely batter him to death. Going as fast as he dared, he took the steps one by one.

He slipped several times, sliding down as many as a dozen steps each time; the stone steps scraped against his back, but he felt no pain. All the while he was certain the tunnel would collapse and crush him, or else the entire vault would split open, and the sky would gape beneath his feet, and he would fall down to Earth amidst the heavenly rain. Yahweh’s punishment had come, a second Deluge.

How much further until he reached the sliding stone? The tunnel seemed to stretch on and on, and the waters were pouring down even faster now. He was virtually running down the steps.

Stumbling, he splashed into shallow water. He had run down past the end of the stairs and fallen into the room of the sliding stone, and there was water higher than his knees.

He stood up and saw Damqiya and Ahuni, two fellow miners, just noticing him. They stood in front of the stone, which already blocked the exit.

“No!” he cried.

“They closed it!” screamed Damqiya. “They did not wait!”

“Are there others coming?” shouted Ahuni, without hope. “We may be able to move the block.”

“There are no others,” answered Hillalum. “Can they push it from the other side?”

“They cannot hear us.” Ahuni pounded the granite with a hammer, making not a sound against the din of the rushing water.

Hillalum looked around the tiny room, only now noticing that an Egyptian floated facedown in the water.

“He died falling down the stairs,” yelled Damqiya.

“Is there nothing we can do?”

Ahuni looked upward. “Yahweh, spare us.”

The three of them stood in the rising water, praying desperately, but Hillalum knew it was in vain: Yahweh had not asked men to build the tower or to pierce the vault; the decision belonged to men alone, and they would die in this endeavor just as they did in any of their earthbound tasks. Their righteousness could not save them from the consequences of their deeds.

The water reached their chests. “Let us ascend,” shouted Hillalum.

They climbed the tunnel laboriously, against the onrush, as the water rose behind their heels. The few torches illuminating the tunnel had been extinguished, so they ascended in the dark, murmuring prayers that they couldn’t hear. The wooden steps at the top of the tunnel had dislodged from their place and were jammed farther down in the tunnel. They climbed past them until they reached the smooth stone slope, and there they waited for the water to carry them higher.

They waited without words, their prayers exhausted. Hillalum imagined that he stood in the black gullet of Yahweh, as the Mighty One drank deep of the waters of heaven, ready to swallow the sinners.

The water rose and bore them up, until Hillalum could reach up with his hands and touch the ceiling. The giant fissure from which the waters gushed forth was right next to him. Only a tiny pocket of air remained. Hillalum shouted, “When this chamber is filled, we can swim heavenward.”

He could not tell if they heard him. He gulped his last breath as the water reached the ceiling, and swam up into the fissure. He would die closer to heaven than any man ever had before.

The fissure extended for many cubits. As soon as Hillalum passed through, the stone stratum slipped from his fingers, and his flailing limbs touched nothing. For a moment he felt a current carrying him, but then he was no longer sure. With only blackness around him, he once again felt that horrible vertigo that he had experienced when first approaching the vault: He could not distinguish any directions, not even up of down. He pushed and kicked against the water but did not know if he moved.

Helpless, he was perhaps floating in still water, perhaps swept furiously by a current; all he felt was numbing cold. Never did he see any light. Was there no surface to this reservoir that he might rise to?

Then he was slammed into stone again. His hands felt a fissure in the surface. Was he back where he had begun? He was being forced into it, and he had no strength to resist. He was drawn into the tunnel and was rattled against its sides. It was incredibly deep, like the longest mine shaft: He felt as if his lungs would burst, but there was still no end to the passage. Finally his breath would not be held any longer, and it escaped from his lips. He was drowning, and the blackness around him entered his lungs.

But suddenly the walls opened out away from him. He was being carried along by a rushing stream of water; he felt air above the water! And then he felt no more.

Hillalum awoke with his face pressed against wet stone. He could see nothing, but he could feel water near his hands. He rolled over and groaned; his every limb ached, he was naked, and much of his skin was scraped raw or wrinkled from wetness, but he breathed air.

Time passed, and finally he could stand. Water flowed rapidly about his ankles. Stepping in one direction, the water deepened. In the other, there was dry stone—shale by the feel of it.

It was utterly dark, like a mine without torches. With torn fingertips he felt his way along the floor, until it rose up and became a wall. Slowly, like some blind creature, he crawled back and forth. He found the water’s source, a large opening in the floor. He remembered! He had been spewed up from the reservoir through this hole. He continued crawling for what seemed to be hours; if he were in a cavern, it was immense. He found a place where the floor rose in a slope. Was there a passage leading upward? Perhaps it could still take him to heaven.

Hillalum crawled, having no idea of how much time passed, not caring that he would never be able to retrace his steps, for he could not return whence he had come. He followed upward tunnels when he found them, downward ones when he had to. Though earlier he had swallowed more water than he would have thought possible, he began to feel thirst, and hunger.

And eventually he saw light and raced to the outside.

The light made his eyes squeeze closed, and he fell to his knees, his fists clenched before his face. Was it the radiance of Yahweh? Could his eyes bear to see it? Minutes later he could open them, and he saw desert. He had emerged from a cave in the foothills of some mountains, and rocks and sand stretched to the horizon.

Was heaven just like the earth? Did Yahweh dwell in a place such as this? Or was this merely another realm within Yahweh’s creation, another Earth above his own, while Yahweh dwelled still higher?

A sun lay near the mountaintops behind his back. Was it rising or falling? Were there days and nights here?

Hillalum squinted at the sandy landscape. A line moved along the horizon. Was it a caravan?

He ran to it, shouting with his parched throat until his need for breath stopped him. A figure at the end of the caravan saw him and brought the entire line to a stop.

The one who had seen him seemed to be man, not spirit, and was dressed like a desert crasser. He had a waterskin ready. Hillalum drank as best he could, panting for breath.

Finally he returned it to the man and gasped, “Where is this place?”

“Were you attacked by bandits? We are headed to Erech.”

Hillalum stared. “You would deceive me!” he shouted. The man drew back and watched him as if he were mad from the sun. Hillalum saw another man in the caravan walking over to investigate. “Erech is in Shinar!”

“Yes, it is. Were you not traveling to Shinar?” The other man stood ready with his staff.

“I came from—I was in—” Hillalum stopped. “Do you know Babylon?”

“Oh, is that your destination? That is north of Erech. It is an easy journey between them.”

“The tower—have you heard of it?”

“Certainly, the pillar to heaven. It is said men at the top are tunneling through the vault of heaven.”

Hillalum fell to the sand.

“Are you unwell?” The two caravan drivers mumbled to each other and went off to confer with the others. Hillalum was not watching them.

He was in Shinar. He had returned to the earth. He had climbed above the reservoirs of heaven and arrived back at the earth. Had Yahweh brought him to this place to keep him from reaching further above? Yet Hillalum still hadn’t seen any signs, any indication that Yahweh noticed him. He had not experienced any miracle that Yahweh had performed to place him here. As far as he could see, he had merely swum up from the vault and entered the cavern below.

Somehow the vault of heaven lay beneath the earth. It was as if they lay against each other, though they were separated by many leagues. How could that be? How could such distant places touch? Hillalum’s head hurt trying to think about it.

And then it came to him: a seal cylinder. When rolled upon a tablet of soft clay, the carved cylinder left an imprint that formed a picture. Two figures might appear at opposite ends of the tablet, though they stood side by side on the surface of the cylinder. All the world was as such a cylinder. Men imagined heaven and Earth as being at the ends of a tablet, with sky and stars stretched between; yet the world was wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and Earth touched.

It was clear now why Yahweh had not struck down the tower, had not punished men for wishing to reach beyond the bounds set for them—for the longest journey would merely return them to the place whence they’d come. Centuries of their labor would not reveal to them any more of creation than they already knew. Yet through their endeavor, men would glimpse the unimaginable artistry of Yahweh’s work, in seeing how ingeniously the world had been constructed. By this construction, Yahweh’s work was indicated, and Yahweh’s work was concealed.

Thus would men know their place.

Hillalum rose to his feet, his legs unsteady from awe, and sought out the caravan drivers. He would go back to Babylon. Perhaps he would see Lugatum again. He would send word to those on the tower. He would tell them about the shape of the world.

BEGGARS IN SPAIN

Nancy Kress

With energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.

—Abraham Lincoln, to Major General Joseph Hooker, 1863

1

They sat stiffly on his antique Eames chairs, two people who didn’t want to be here, or one person who didn’t want to and one who resented the other’s reluctance. Dr. Ong had seen this before. Within two minutes he was sure: the woman was the silently furious resister. She would lose. The man would pay for it later, in little ways, for a long time.

“I presume you’ve performed the necessary credit checks already,” Roger Camden said pleasantly, “so let’s get right on to details, shall we, Doctor?”

“Certainly,” Ong said. “Why don’t we start by your telling me all the genetic modifications you’re interested in for the baby.”

The woman shifted suddenly on her chair. She was in her late twenties—clearly a second wife—but already had a faded look, as if keeping up with Roger Camden was wearing her out. Ong could easily believe that. Mrs. Camden’s hair was brown, her eyes were brown, her skin had a brown tinge that might have been pretty if her cheeks had had any color. She wore a brown coat, neither fashionable nor cheap, and shoes that looked vaguely orthopedic. Ong glanced at his records for her name: Elizabeth. He would bet people forgot it often.

Next to her, Roger Camden radiated nervous vitality, a man in late middle age whose bullet-shaped head did not match his careful haircut and Italian-silk business suit. Ong did not need to consult his file to recall anything about Camden. A caricature of the bullet-shaped head had been the leading graphic of yesterday’s on-line edition of the Wall Street Journal: Camden had led a major coup in cross-border data-atoll investment. Ong was not sure what cross-border data-atoll investment was.

“A girl,” Elizabeth Camden said. Ong hadn’t expected her to speak first. Her voice was another surprise: upper-class British. “Blonde. Green eyes. Tall. Slender.”

Ong smiled. “Appearance factors are the easiest to achieve, as I’m sure you already know. But all we can do about ‘slenderness’ is give her a genetic disposition in that direction. How you feed the child will naturally—”

“Yes, yes,” Roger Camden said, “that’s obvious. Now: intelligence. High intelligence. And a sense of daring.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Camden—personality factors are not yet understood well enough to allow genet—”

“Just testing,” Camden said, with a smile that Ong thought was probably supposed to be light-hearted.

Elizabeth Camden said, “Musical ability.”

“Again, Mrs. Camden, a disposition to be musical is all we can guarantee.”

“Good enough,” Camden said. “The full array of corrections for any potential gene-linked health problem, of course.”

“Of course,” Dr. Ong said. Neither client spoke. So far theirs was a fairly modest list, given Camden’s money; most clients had to be argued out of contradictory genetic tendencies, alteration overload, or unrealistic expectations. Ong waited. Tension prickled in the room like heat.

“And,” Camden said, “no need to sleep.”

Elizabeth Camden jerked her head sideways to look out the window.

Ong picked a paper magnet off his desk. He made his voice pleasant. “May I ask how you learned whether that genetic-modification program exists?”

Camden grinned. “You’re not denying it exists. I give you full credit for that, Doctor.”

Ong held onto his temper. “May I ask how you learned whether the program exists?”

Camden reached into an inner pocket of his suit. The silk crinkled and pulled; body and suit came from different social classes. Camden was, Ong remembered, a Yagaiist, a personal friend of Kenzo Yagai himself. Camden handed Ong hard copy: program specifications.

“Don’t bother hunting down the security leak in your data banks, Doctor—you won’t find it. But if it’s any consolation, neither will anybody else. Now.” He leaned suddenly forward. His tone changed. “I know that you’ve created twenty children so far who don’t need to sleep at all. That so far nineteen are healthy, intelligent, and psychologically normal. In fact, better than normal—they’re all unusually precocious. The oldest is already four years old and can read in two languages. I know you’re thinking of offering this genetic modification on the open market in a few years. All I want is a chance to buy it for my daughter now. At whatever price you name.”

Ong stood. “I can’t possibly discuss this with you unilaterally, Mr. Camden. Neither the theft of our data—”

“Which wasn’t a theft—your system developed a spontaneous bubble regurgitation into a public gate, have a hell of a time proving otherwise—”

“—nor the offer to purchase this particular genetic modification lies in my sole area of authority. Both have to be discussed with the Institute’s Board of Directors.”

“By all means, by all means. When can I talk to them, too?”

“You?”

Camden, still seated, looked at him. It occurred to Ong that there were few men who could look so confident eighteen inches below eye level. “Certainly. I’d like the chance to present my offer to whoever has the actual authority to accept it. That’s only good business.”

“This isn’t solely a business transaction, Mr. Camden.”

“It isn’t solely pure scientific research, either,” Camden retorted. “You’re a for-profit corporation here. With certain tax breaks available only to firms meeting certain fair-practice laws.”

For a minute Ong couldn’t think what Camden meant. “Fair-practice laws . . .”

“. . . are designed to protect minorities who are suppliers. I know, it hasn’t ever been tested in the case of customers, except for red-lining in Y-energy installations. But it could be tested, Doctor Ong. Minorities are entitled to the same product offerings as non-minorities. I know the Institute would not welcome a court case, Doctor. None of your twenty genetic beta-test families are either Black or Jewish.”

“A court . . . but you’re not Black or Jewish!”

“I’m a different minority. Polish-American. The name was Kaminsky.” Camden finally stood. And smiled warmly. “Look, it is preposterous. You know that, and I know that, and we both know what a grand time journalists would have with it anyway. And you know that I don’t want to sue you with a preposterous case, just to use the threat of premature and adverse publicity to get what I want. I don’t want to make threats at all, believe me I don’t. I just want this marvelous advancement you’ve come up with for my daughter.” His face changed, to an expression Ong wouldn’t have believed possible on those particular features: wistfulness. “Doctor—do you know how much more I could have accomplished if I hadn’t had to sleep all my life?”

Elizabeth Camden said harshly, “You hardly sleep now.”

Camden looked down at her as if he had forgotten she was there. “Well, no, my dear, not now. But when I was young . . . college, I might have been able to finish college and still support . . . well. None of that matters now. What matters, Doctor, is that you and I and your board come to an agreement.”

“Mr. Camden, please leave my office now.”

“You mean before you lose your temper at my presumptuousness? You wouldn’t be the first. I’ll expect to have a meeting set up by the end of next week, whenever and wherever you say, of course. Just let my personal secretary, Diane Clavers, know the details. Anytime that’s best for you.”

Ong did not accompany them to the door. Pressure throbbed behind his temples. In the doorway Elizabeth Camden turned. “What happened to the twentieth one?”

“What?”

“The twentieth baby. My husband said nineteen of them are healthy and normal. What happened to the twentieth?”

The pressure grew stronger, hotter. Ong knew that he should not answer; that Camden probably already knew the answer even if his wife didn’t; that he, Ong, was going to answer anyway; that he would regret the lack of self-control, bitterly, later.

“The twentieth baby is dead. His parents turned out to be unstable. They separated during the pregnancy, and his mother could not bear the twenty-four-hour crying of a baby who never sleeps.”

Elizabeth Camden’s eyes widened. “She killed it?”

“By mistake,” Camden said shortly. “Shook the little thing too hard.” He frowned at Ong. “Nurses, Doctor. In shifts. You should have picked only parents wealthy enough to afford nurses in shifts.”

“That’s horrible!” Mrs. Camden burst out, and Ong could not tell if she meant the child’s death, the lack of nurses, or the Institute’s carelessness. Ong closed his eyes.

When they had gone, he took ten milligrams of cyclobenzaprine-III. For his back—it was solely for his back. The old injury hurting again. Afterward he stood for a long time at the window, still holding the paper magnet, feeling the pressure recede from his temples, feeling himself calm down. Below him Lake Michigan lapped peacefully at the shore; the police had driven away the homeless in another raid just last night, and they hadn’t yet had time to return. Only their debris remained, thrown into the bushes of the lakeshore park: tattered blankets, newspapers, plastic bags like pathetic trampled standards. It was illegal to sleep in the park, illegal to enter it without a resident’s permit, illegal to be homeless and without a residence. As Ong watched, uniformed park attendants began methodically spearing newspapers and shoving them into clean self-propelled receptacles.

Ong picked up the phone to call the president of Biotech Institute’s Board of Directors.

Four men and three women sat around the polished mahogany table of the conference room. Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, thought Susan Melling, looking from Ong to Sullivan to Camden. She smiled. Ong caught the smile and looked frosty. Pompous ass. Judy Sullivan, the Institute lawyer, turned to speak in a low voice to Camden’s lawyer, a thin, nervous man with the look of being owned. The owner, Roger Camden, the Indian chief himself, was the happiest-looking person in the room. The lethal little man—what did it take to become that rich, starting from nothing? She, Susan, would certainly never know—radiated excitement. He beamed, he glowed, so unlike the usual parents-to-be that Susan was intrigued. Usually the prospective daddies and mommies—especially the daddies—sat there looking as if they were at a corporate merger. Camden looked as if he were at a birthday party.

Which, of course, he was. Susan grinned at him, and was pleased when he grinned back. Wolfish, but with a sort of delight that could only be called innocent—what would he be like in bed? Ong frowned majestically and rose to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I think we’re ready to start. Perhaps introductions are in order. Mr. Roger Camden, Mrs. Camden, are of course our clients. Mr. John Jaworski, Mr. Camden’s lawyer. Mr. Camden, this is Judith Sullivan, the Institute’s head of Legal; Samuel Krenshaw, representing Institute Director Dr. Brad Marsteiner, who unfortunately couldn’t be here today; and Dr. Susan Melling, who developed the genetic modification affecting sleep. A few legal points of interest to both parties—”

“Forget the contracts for a minute,” Camden interrupted. “Let’s talk about the sleep thing. I’d like to ask a few questions.”

Susan said, “What would you like to know?” Camden’s eyes were very blue in his blunt-featured face; he wasn’t what she had expected. Mrs. Camden, who apparently lacked both a first name and a lawyer, since Jaworski had been introduced as her husband’s but not hers, looked either sullen or scared, it was difficult to tell which.

Ong said sourly, “Then perhaps we should start with a short presentation by Dr. Melling.”

Susan would have preferred a Q&A, to see what Camden would ask. But she had annoyed Ong enough for one session. Obediently she rose.

“Let me start with a brief description of sleep. Researchers have known for a long time that there are actually three kinds of sleep. One is ‘slow-wave sleep,’ characterized on an EEG by delta waves. One is ‘rapid-eye-movement sleep,’ or REM sleep, which is much lighter sleep and contains most dreaming. Together these two make up ‘core sleep.’ The third type of sleep is ‘optional sleep,’ so-called because people seem to get along without it with no ill effects, and some short sleepers don’t do it at all, sleeping naturally only three or four hours a night.”

“That’s me,” Camden said. “I trained myself into it. Couldn’t everybody do that?”

Apparently they were going to have a Q&A after all. “No. The actual sleep mechanism has some flexibility, but not the same amount for every person. The raphe nuclei on the brain stem—”

Ong said, “I don’t think we need that level of detail, Susan. Let’s stick to basics.”

Camden said, “The raphe nuclei regulate the balance among neurotransmitters and peptides that lead to a pressure to sleep, don’t they?”

Susan couldn’t help it; she grinned. Camden, the laser-sharp ruthless financier, sat trying to look solemn, a third-grader waiting to have his homework praised. Ong looked sour. Mrs. Camden looked away, out the window.

“Yes, that’s correct, Mr. Camden. You’ve done your research.”

Camden said, “This is my daughter,” and Susan caught her breath. When was the last time she had heard that note of reverence in anyone’s voice? But no one in the room seemed to notice.

“Well, then,” Susan said, “you already know that the reason people sleep is because a pressure to sleep builds up in the brain. Over the last twenty years, research has determined that’s the only reason. Neither slow-wave sleep nor REM sleep serve functions that can’t be carried on while the body and brain are awake. A lot goes on during sleep, but it can go on awake just as well, if other hormonal adjustments are made.

“Sleep once served an important evolutionary function. Once Clem Pre-Mammal was done filling his stomach and squirting his sperm around, sleep kept him immobile and away from predators. Sleep was an aid to survival. But now it’s a left-over mechanism, like the appendix. It switches on every night, but the need is gone. So we turn off the switch at its source, in the genes.”

Ong winced. He hated it when she oversimplified like that. Or maybe it was the light-heartedness he hated. If Marsteiner were making this presentation, there’d be no Clem Pre-Mammal.

Camden said, “What about the need to dream?”

“Not necessary. A-left-over bombardment of the cortex to keep it on semi-alert in case a predator attacked during sleep. Wakefulness does that better.”

“Why not have wakefulness instead then? From the start of the evolution?”

He was testing her. Susan gave him a full, lavish smile, enjoying his brass. “I told you. Safety from predators. But when a modern predator attacks—say, a cross-border data-atoll investor—it’s safer to be awake.”

Camden shot at her, “What about the high percentage of REM sleep in fetuses and babies?”

“Still an evolutionary hangover. Cerebrum develops perfectly well without it.”

“What about neural repair during slow-wave sleep?”

“That does go on. But it can go on during wakefulness, if the DNA is programmed to do so. No loss of neural efficiency, as far as we know.”

“What about the release of human growth enzyme in such large concentrations during slow-wave sleep?”

Susan looked at him admiringly. “Goes on without the sleep. Genetic adjustments tie it to other changes in the pineal gland.”

“What about the—”

“The side effects?” Mrs. Camden said. Her mouth turned down. “What about the bloody side effects?”

Susan turned to Elizabeth Camden. She had forgotten she was there. The younger woman stared at Susan, mouth turned down at the corners.

“I’m glad you asked that, Mrs. Camden. Because there are side effects.” Susan paused; she was enjoying herself. “Compared to their age mates, the non-sleep children—who have not had IQ genetic manipulation—are more intelligent, better at problem-solving, and more joyous.”

Camden took out a cigarette. The archaic, filthy habit surprised Susan. Then she saw that it was deliberate: Roger Camden drawing attention to an ostentatious display to draw attention away from what he was feeling. His cigarette lighter was gold, monogrammed, innocently gaudy.

“Let me explain,” Susan said. “REM sleep bombards the cerebral cortex with random neural firings from the brainstem; dreaming occurs because the poor besieged cortex tries so hard to make sense of the activated images and memories. It spends a lot of energy doing that. Without that energy expenditure, non-sleep cerebrums save the wear-and-tear and do better at coordinating real-life input. Thus—greater intelligence and problem-solving.

“Also, doctors have known for sixty years that anti-depressants, which lift the mood of depressed patients, also suppress REM sleep entirely. What they have proved in the last ten years is that the reverse is equally true: suppress REM sleep and people don’t get depressed. The non-sleep kids are cheerful, outgoing . . . joyous. There’s no other word for it.”

“At what cost?” Mrs. Camden said. She held her neck rigid, but the corners of her jaw worked.

“No cost. No negative side effects at all.”

“So far,” Mrs. Camden shot back.

Susan shrugged. “So far.”

“They’re only four years old! At the most!”

Ong and Krenshaw were studying her closely. Susan saw the moment the Camden woman realized it; she sank back into her chair, drawing her fur coat around her, her face blank.

Camden did not look at his wife. He blew a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Everything has costs, Dr. Melling.”

She liked the way he said her name. “Ordinarily, yes. Especially in genetic modification. But we honestly have not been able to find any here, despite looking.” She smiled directly into Camden’s eyes. “Is it too much to believe that just once the universe has given us something wholly good, wholly a step forward, wholly beneficial? Without hidden penalties?”

“Not the universe. The intelligence of people like you,” Camden said, surprising Susan more than anything else that had gone before. His eyes held hers. She felt her chest tighten.

“I think,” Dr. Ong said dryly, “that the philosophy of the universe may be beyond our concerns here. Mr. Camden, if you have no further medical questions, perhaps we can return to the legal points Ms. Sullivan and Mr. Jaworski have raised. Thank you, Dr. Melling.”

Susan nodded. She didn’t look again at Camden. But she knew what he said, how he looked, that he was there.

The house was about what she had expected, a huge mock Tudor on Lake Michigan north of Chicago. The land heavily wooded between the gate and the house, open between the house and the surging water. Patches of snow dotted the dormant grass. Biotech had been working with the Camdens for four months, but this was the first time Susan had driven to their home.

As she walked toward the house, another car drove up behind her. No, a truck, continuing around the curved driveway to a service entry at the side of the house. One man rang the service bell; a second began to unload a plastic-wrapped playpen from the back of the truck. White, with pink and yellow bunnies. Susan briefly closed her eyes.

Camden opened the door himself. She could see the effort not to look worried. “You didn’t have to drive out, Susan—I’d have come into the city!”

“No, I didn’t want you to do that, Roger. Mrs. Camden is here?”

“In the living room.” Camden led her into a large room with a stone fireplace. English country-house furniture; prints of dogs or boats, all hung eighteen inches too high: Elizabeth Camden must have done the decorating. She did not rise from her wing chair as Susan entered.

“Let me be concise and fast,” Susan said, “I don’t want to make this any more drawn-out for you than I have to. We have all the amniocentesis, ultrasound, and Langston test results. The fetus is fine, developing normally for two weeks, no problems with the implant on the uterus wall. But a complication has developed.”

“What?” Camden said. He took out a cigarette, looked at his wife, put it back unlit.

Susan said quietly, “Mrs. Camden, by sheer chance both your ovaries released eggs last month. We removed one for the gene surgery. By more sheer chance the second fertilized and implanted. You’re carrying two fetuses.”

Elizabeth Camden grew still. “Twins?”

“No,” Susan said. Then she realized what she had said. “I mean, yes. They’re twins, but non-identical. Only one has been genetically altered. The other will be no more similar to her than any two siblings. It’s a so-called ‘normal’ baby. And I know you didn’t want a so-called normal baby.”

Camden said, “No. I didn’t.”

Elizabeth Camden said, “I did.”

Camden shot her a fierce look that Susan couldn’t read. He took out the cigarette again, lit it. His face was in profile to Susan, thinking intently; she doubted he knew the cigarette was there, or that he was lighting it. “Is the baby being affected by the other one’s being there?”

“No,” Susan said. “No, of course not. They’re just . . . co-existing.”

“Can you abort it?”

“Not without risk of aborting both of them. Removing the unaltered fetus might cause changes in the uterus lining that could lead to a spontaneous miscarriage of the other.” She drew a deep breath. “There’s that option, of course. We can start the whole process over again. But as I told you at the time, you were very lucky to have the in vitro fertilization take on only the second try. Some couples take eight or ten tries. If we started all over, the process could be a lengthy one.”

Camden said, “Is the presence of this second fetus harming my daughter? Taking away nutrients or anything? Or will it change anything for her later on in the pregnancy?”

“No. Except that there is a chance of premature birth. Two fetuses take up a lot more room in the womb, and if it gets too crowded, birth can be premature. But the—”

“How premature? Enough to threaten survival?”

“Most probably not.”

Camden went on smoking. A man appeared at the door. “Sir, London calling. James Kendall for Mr. Yagai.”

“I’ll take it.” Camden rose. Susan watched him study his wife’s face. When he spoke, it was to her. “All right, Elizabeth. All right.” He left the room.

For a long moment the two women sat in silence. Susan was aware of disappointment; this was not the Camden she had expected to see. She became aware of Elizabeth Camden watching her with amusement.

“Oh, yes, Doctor. He’s like that.”

Susan said nothing.

“Completely overbearing. But not this time.” She laughed softly, with excitement. “Two. Do you . . . do you know what sex the other one is?”

“Both fetuses are female.”

“I wanted a girl, you know. And now I’ll have one.”

“Then you’ll go ahead with the pregnancy.”

“Oh, yes. Thank you for coming, Doctor.”

She was dismissed. No one saw her out. But as she was getting into her car, Camden rushed out of the house, coatless. “Susan! I wanted to thank you. For coming all the way out here to tell us yourself.”

“You already thanked me.”

“Yes. Well. You’re sure the second fetus is no threat to my daughter?”

Susan said deliberately, “Nor is the genetically altered fetus a threat to the naturally conceived one.”

He smiled. His voice was low and wistful. “And you think that should matter to me just as much. But it doesn’t. And why should I fake what I feel? Especially to you?”

Susan opened her car door. She wasn’t ready for this, or she had changed her mind, or something. But then Camden leaned over to close the door, and his manner held no trace of flirtatiousness, no smarmy ingratiation. “I better order a second playpen.”

“Yes.”

“And a second car seat.”

“Yes.”

“But not a second night-shift nurse.”

“That’s up to you.”

“And you.” Abruptly he leaned over and kissed her, a kiss so polite and respectful that Susan was shocked. Neither lust nor conquest would have shocked her; this did. Camden didn’t give her a chance to react; he closed the car door and turned back toward the house. Susan drove toward the gate, her hands shaky on the wheel until amusement replaced shock: It had been a deliberately distant, respectful kiss, an engineered enigma. And nothing else could have guaranteed so well that there would have to be another.

She wondered what the Camdens would name their daughters.

Dr. Ong strode the hospital corridor, which had been dimmed to half-light. From the nurse’s station in Maternity a nurse stepped forward as if to stop him—it was the middle of the night, long past visiting hours—got a good look at his face, and faded back into her station. Around a corner was the viewing glass to the nursery. To Ong’s annoyance, Susan Melling stood pressed against the glass. To his further annoyance, she was crying.

Ong realized that he had never liked the woman. Maybe not any women. Even those with superior minds could not seem to refrain from being made damn fools by their emotions.

“Look,” Susan said, laughing a little, swiping at her face. “Doctor—look.”

Behind the glass Roger Camden, gowned and masked, was holding up a baby in white undershirt and pink blanket. Camden’s blue eyes—theatrically blue, a man really should not have such garish eyes—glowed. The baby had a head covered with blond fuzz, wide eyes, pink skin. Camden’s eyes above the mask said that no other child had ever had these attributes.

Ong said, “An uncomplicated birth?”

“Yes,” Susan Melling sobbed. “Perfectly straightforward. Elizabeth is fine. She’s asleep. Isn’t she beautiful? He has the most adventurous spirit I’ve ever known.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve; Ong realized that she was drunk. “Did I ever tell you that I was engaged once? Fifteen years ago, in med school? I broke it off because he grew to seem so ordinary, so boring. Oh, God, I shouldn’t be telling you all this I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

Ong moved away from her. Behind the glass Roger Camden laid the baby in a small wheeled crib. The nameplate said BABY GIRL CAMDEN #1. 5.9 POUNDS. A night nurse watched indulgently.

Ong did not wait to see Camden emerge from the nursery or to hear Susan Melling say to him whatever she was going to say. Ong went to have the OB paged. Melling’s report was not, under the circumstances, to be trusted. A perfect, unprecedented chance to record every detail of gene-alteration with a non-altered control, and Melling was more interested in her own sloppy emotions. Ong would obviously have to do the report himself, after talking to the OB. He was hungry for every detail. And not just about the pink-cheeked baby in Camden’s arms. He wanted to know everything about the birth of the child in the other glass-sided crib: BABY GIRL CAMDEN #2. 5.1 POUNDS. The dark-haired baby with the mottled red features, lying scrunched down in her pink blanket, asleep.

2

Leisha’s earliest memory was of flowing lines that were not there. She knew they were not there because when she reached out her fist to touch them, her fist was empty. Later she realized that the flowing lines were light: sunshine slanting in bars between curtains in her room, between the wooden blinds in the dining room, between the crisscross lattices in the conservatory. The day she realized the golden flow was light she laughed out loud with the sheer joy of discovery, and Daddy turned from putting flowers in pots and smiled at her.

The whole house was full of light. Light bounded off the lake, streamed across the high white ceilings, puddled on the shining wooden floors. She and Alice moved continually through light, and sometimes Leisha would stop and tip back her head and let it flow over her face. She could feel it, like water.

The best light, of course, was in the conservatory. That’s where Daddy liked to be when he was home from making money. Daddy potted plants and watered trees, humming, and Leisha and Alice ran between the wooden tables of flowers with their wonderful earthy smells, running from the dark side of the conservatory where the big purple flowers grew to the sunshine side with sprays of yellow flowers, running back and forth, in and out of the light. “Growth,” Daddy said to her, “flowers all fulfilling their promise. Alice, be careful! You almost knocked over that orchid!” Alice, obedient, would stop running for a while. Daddy never told Leisha to stop running.

After a while the light would go away. Alice and Leisha would have their baths, and then Alice would get quiet, or cranky. She wouldn’t play nice with Leisha, even when Leisha let her choose the game or even have all the best dolls. Then Nanny would take Alice to “bed,” and Leisha would talk with Daddy some more until Daddy said he had to work in his study with the papers that made money. Leisha always felt a moment of regret that he had to go do that, but the moment never lasted very long because Mamselle would arrive and start Leisha’s lessons, which she liked. Learning things was so interesting! She could already sing twenty songs and write all the letters in the alphabet and count to fifty. And by the time lessons were done, the light had come back, and it was time for breakfast.

Breakfast was the only time Leisha didn’t like. Daddy had gone to the office, and Leisha and Alice had breakfast with Mommy in the big dining room. Mommy sat in a red robe, which Leisha liked, and she didn’t smell funny or talk funny the way she would later in the day, but still breakfast wasn’t fun. Mommy always started with The Question.

“Alice, sweetheart, how did you sleep?”

“Fine, Mommy.”

“Did you have any nice dreams?”

For a long time Alice said no. Then one day she said, “I dreamed about a horse. I was riding him.” Mommy clapped her hands and kissed Alice and gave her an extra sticky bun. After that Alice always had a dream to tell Mommy.

Once Leisha said, “I had a dream, too. I dreamed light was coming in the window and it wrapped all around me like a blanket and then it kissed me on my eyes.”

Mommy put down her coffee cup so hard that coffee sloshed out of it. “Don’t lie to me, Leisha. You did not have a dream.”

“Yes, I did,” Leisha said.

“Only children who sleep can have dreams. Don’t lie to me. You did not have a dream.”

“Yes I did! I did!” Leisha shouted. She could see it, almost: The light streaming in the window and wrapping around her like a golden blanket.

“I will not tolerate a child who is a liar! Do you hear me, Leisha—I won’t tolerate it!”

“You’re a liar!” Leisha shouted, knowing the words weren’t true, hating herself because they weren’t true but hating Mommy more and that was wrong, too, and there sat Alice stiff and frozen with her eyes wide, Alice was scared and it was Leisha’s fault.

Mommy called sharply, “Nanny! Nanny! Take Leisha to her room at once. She can’t sit with civilized people if she can’t refrain from telling lies!”

Leisha started to cry. Nanny carried her out of the room. Leisha hadn’t even had her breakfast. But she didn’t care about that; all she could see while she cried was Alice’s eyes, scared like that, reflecting broken bits of light.

But Leisha didn’t cry long. Nanny read her a story, and then played Data Jump with her, and then Alice came up and Nanny drove them both into Chicago to the zoo where there were wonderful animals to see, animals Leisha could not have dreamed—nor Alice either. And by the time they came back Mommy had gone to her room and Leisha knew that she would stay there with the glasses of funny-smelling stuff the rest of the day and Leisha would not have to see her.

But that night, she went to her mother’s room.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she told Mamselle. Mamselle said, “Do you need any help?” maybe because Alice still needed help in the bathroom. But Leisha didn’t, and she thanked Mamselle. Then she sat on the toilet for a minute even though nothing came, so that what she had told Mamselle wouldn’t be a lie.

Leisha tiptoed down the hall. She went first into Alice’s room. A little light in a wall socket burned near the “crib.” There was no crib in Leisha’s room. Leisha looked at her sister through the bars. Alice lay on her side, with her eyes closed. The lids of the eyes fluttered quickly, like curtains blowing in the wind. Alice’s chin and neck looked loose.

Leisha closed the door very carefully and went to her parents’ room.

They didn’t “sleep” in a crib but in a huge enormous “bed,” with enough room between them for more people. Mommy’s eyelids weren’t fluttering; she lay on her back making a hrrr-hrrr sound through her nose. The funny smell was strong on her. Leisha backed away and tiptoed over to Daddy. He looked like Alice, except that his neck and chin looked even looser, folds of skin collapsed like the tent that had fallen down in the backyard. It scared Leisha to see him like that. Then Daddy’s eyes flew open so suddenly that Leisha screamed.

Daddy rolled out of bed and picked her up, looking quickly at Mommy. But she didn’t move. Daddy was wearing only his underpants. He carried Leisha out into the hall, where Mamselle came rushing up saying, “Oh, sir, I’m sorry, she just said she was going to the bathroom—”

“It’s all right,” Daddy said. “I’ll take her with me.”

“No!” Leisha screamed, because. Daddy was only in his underpants and his neck had looked all funny and the room smelled bad because of Mommy. But Daddy carried her into the conservatory, set her down on a bench, wrapped himself in a piece of green plastic that was supposed to cover up plants, and sat down next to her.

“Now, what happened, Leisha? What were you doing?”

Leisha didn’t answer.

“You were looking at people sleeping, weren’t you?” Daddy said, and because his voice was softer Leisha mumbled, “Yes.” She immediately felt better; it felt good not to lie.

“You were looking at people sleeping because you don’t sleep and you were curious; weren’t you? Like Curious George in your book?”

“Yes,” Leisha said. “I thought you said, you made money in your study all night!”

Daddy smiled. “Not all night. Some of it. But then I sleep, although not very much.” He, took Leisha on his lap. “I don’t need much sleep, so I get a lot more done at night than most people. Different people need different amounts of sleep. And a few, a very few, are like you. You don’t need any.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re special. Better than other people. Before you were born, I had some doctors help make you that way.”

“Why?”

“So you could do anything you want to and make manifest your own individuality.”

Leisha twisted in his arms to stare at him; the words meant nothing. Daddy reached over and touched a single flower growing on a tall potted tree. The flower had thick white petals like the cream he put in coffee, and the center was a light pink.

“See, Leisha—this tree made this flower. Because it can. Only this tree can make this kind of wonderful flower. That plant hanging up there can’t, and those can’t either. Only this tree. Therefore the most important thing in the world for this tree to do is grow this flower. The flower is the tree’s individuality—that means just it, and nothing else—made manifest. Nothing else matters.”

“I don’t understand, Daddy.”

“You will. Someday.”

“But I want to understand now,” Leisha said, and Daddy laughed with pure delight and hugged her. The hug felt good, but Leisha still wanted to understand.

“When you make money, is that your indiv . . . that thing?”

“Yes,” Daddy said happily.

“Then nobody else can make money? Like only that tree can make that flower?”

“Nobody else can make it just the way I do.”

“What do you do with the money?”

“I buy things for you. This house, your dresses, Mamselle to teach you, the car to ride in.”

“What does the tree do with the flower?”

“Glories in it,” Daddy said, which made no sense. “Excellence is what counts, Leisha. Excellence supported by individual effort. And that’s all that counts.”

“I’m cold, Daddy.”

“Then I better bring you back to Mamselle.”

Leisha didn’t move. She touched the flower with one finger. “I want to sleep, Daddy.”

“No, you don’t, sweetheart. Sleep is just lost time, wasted life. It’s a little death.”

“Alice sleeps.”

“Alice isn’t like you.”

“Alice isn’t special?”

“No. You are.”

“Why didn’t you make Alice special, too?”

“Alice made herself. I didn’t have a chance to make her special.”

The whole thing was too hard. Leisha stopped stroking the flower and slipped off Daddy’s lap. He smiled at her. “My little questioner. When you grow up, you’ll find your own excellence, and it will be a new order, a specialness the world hasn’t ever seen before. You might even be like Kenzo Yagai. He made the Yagai generator that powers the world.”

“Daddy, you look funny wrapped in the flower plastic.” Leisha laughed. Daddy did, too. But then she said, “When I grow up, I’ll make my specialness find a way to make Alice special, too,” and Daddy stopped laughing.

He took her back to Mamselle, who taught her to write her name, which was so exciting she forgot about the puzzling talk with Daddy. There were six letters, all different, and together they were her name. Leisha wrote it over and over, laughing, and Mamselle laughed too. But later, in the morning, Leisha thought again about the talk with Daddy. She thought of it often, turning the unfamiliar words over and over in her mind like small hard stones, but the part she thought about most wasn’t a word. It was the frown on Daddy’s face when she told him she would use her specialness to make Alice special, too.

Every week Dr. Melling came to see Leisha and Alice, sometimes alone, sometimes with other people. Leisha and Alice both liked Dr. Melling, who laughed a lot and whose eyes were bright and warm. Often Daddy was there, too. Dr. Melling played games with them, first with Alice and Leisha separately and then together. She took their pictures and weighed them. She made them lie down on a table and stuck little metal things to their temples, which sounded scary but wasn’t because there were so many machines to watch, all making interesting noises, while you were lying there. Dr. Melling was as good at answering questions as Daddy. Once Leisha said, “Is Dr. Melling a special person? Like Kenzo Yagai?” And Daddy laughed and glanced at Dr. Melling and said, “Oh, yes, indeed.”

When Leisha was five she and Alice started school. Daddy’s driver took them every day into Chicago. They were in different rooms, which disappointed Leisha. The kids in Leisha’s room were all older. But from the first day she adored school, with its fascinating science equipment and electronic drawers full of math puzzlers and other children to find countries on the map with. In half a year she had been moved to yet a different room, where the kids were still older, but they were nonetheless nice to her. Leisha started to learn Japanese. She loved drawing the beautiful characters on thick white paper. “The Sauley School was a good choice,” Daddy said.

But Alice didn’t like the Sauley School. She wanted to go to school on the same yellow bus as Cook’s daughter. She cried and threw her paints on the floor at the Sauley School. Then Mommy came out of her room—Leisha hadn’t seen her for a few weeks, although she knew Alice had—and threw some candlesticks from the mantlepiece on the floor. The candlesticks, which were china, broke. Leisha ran to pick up the pieces while Mommy and Daddy screamed at each other in the hall by the big staircase.

“She’s my daughter, too! And I say she can go!”

“You don’t have the right to say anything about it! A weepy drunk, the most rotten role model possible for both of them . . . and I thought I was getting a fine English aristocrat!”

“You got what you paid for! Nothing! Not that you ever needed anything from me or anybody else!”

“Stop it!” Leisha cried. “Stop it!” and there was silence in the hall. Leisha cut her fingers on the china; blood streamed onto the rug. Daddy rushed in and picked her up. “Stop it,” Leisha sobbed, and didn’t understand when Daddy said quietly, “You stop it, Leisha. Nothing they do should touch you at all. You have to be at least that strong.”

Leisha buried her head in Daddy’s shoulder. Alice transferred to Carl Sandburg Elementary School, riding there on the yellow school bus with Cook’s daughter.

A few weeks later Daddy told them that Mommy was going away for a few weeks to a hospital, to stop drinking so much. When Mommy came out, he said, she was going to live somewhere else for a while. She and Daddy were not happy. Leisha and Alice would stay with Daddy and they would visit Mommy sometimes. He told them this very carefully, finding the right words for truth. Truth was very important, Leisha already knew. Truth was being true to yourself, your specialness. Your individuality. An individual respected facts, and so always told the truth.

Mommy, Daddy did not say but Leisha knew, did not respect facts.

“I don’t want Mommy to go away,” Alice said. She started to cry. Leisha thought Daddy would pick Alice up, but he didn’t. He just stood there looking at them both.

Leisha put her arms around Alice. “It’s all right, Alice. It’s all right! We’ll make it all right! I’ll play with you all the time we’re not in school so you don’t miss Mommy!”

Alice clung to Leisha. Leisha turned her head so she didn’t have to see Daddy’s face.

3

Kenzo Yagai was coming to the United States to lecture. The title of his talk, which he would give in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, with a repeat in Washington as a special address to Congress, was “The Further Political Implications of Inexpensive Power.” Leisha Camden, eleven years old, was going to have a private introduction after the Chicago talk, arranged by her father.

She had studied the theory of cold fusion at school, and her Global Studies teacher had traced the changes in the world resulting from Yagai’s patented, low-cost applications of what had, until him, been unworkable theory. The rising prosperity of the Third World, the last death throes of the old communist systems, the decline of the oil states, the renewed economic power of the United States. Her study group had written a news script, filmed with the school’s professional-quality equipment, about how a 1985 American family lived with expensive energy costs and a belief in tax-supported help, while a 2019 family lived with cheap energy and a belief in the contract as the basis of civilization. Parts of her own research puzzled Leisha.

“Japan thinks Kenzo Yagai was a traitor to his own country,” she said to Daddy at supper.

“No,” Camden said. “Some Japanese think that. Watch out for generalizations, Leisha. Yagai patented and marketed Y-energy first in the United States because here there were at least the dying embers of individual enterprise. Because of his invention, our entire country has slowly swung back toward an individual meritocracy, and Japan has slowly been forced to follow.”

“Your father held that belief all along,” Susan said. “Eat your peas, Leisha.” Leisha ate her peas. Susan and Daddy had only been married less than a year; it still felt a little strange to have her there. But nice. Daddy said Susan was a valuable addition to their household: intelligent, motivated, and cheerful. Like Leisha herself.

“Remember, Leisha,” Camden said, “a man’s worth to society and to himself doesn’t rest on what he thinks other people should do or be or feel, but on himself. On what he can actually do, and do well. People trade what they do well, and everyone benefits. The basic tool of civilization is the contract. Contracts are voluntary and mutually beneficial. As opposed to coercion, which is wrong.”

“The strong have no right to take anything from the weak by force,” Susan said. “Alice, eat your peas, too, honey.”

“Nor the weak to take anything by force from the strong,” Camden said. “That’s the basis of what you’ll hear Kenzo Yagai discuss tonight, Leisha.”

Alice said, “I don’t like peas.”

Camden said, “Your body does. They’re good for you.”

Alice smiled. Leisha felt her heart lift; Alice didn’t smile much at dinner anymore. “My body doesn’t have a contract with the peas.”

Camden said, a little impatiently, “Yes, it does. Your body benefits from them. Now eat.”

Alice’s smile vanished. Leisha looked down at her plate. Suddenly she saw a way out. “No, Daddy look—Alice’s body benefits, but the peas don’t! It’s not a mutually beneficial consideration—so there’s no contract! Alice is right!”

Camden let out a shout of laughter. To Susan he said, “Eleven years old . . . eleven.” Even Alice smiled, and Leisha waved her spoon triumphantly, light glinting off the bowl and dancing silver on the opposite wall.

But even so, Alice did not want to go hear Kenzo Yagai. She was going to sleep over at her friend Julie’s house; they were going to curl their hair together. More surprisingly, Susan wasn’t coming either. She and Daddy looked at each other a little funny at the front door, Leisha thought, but Leisha was too excited to think about this. She was going to hear Kenzo Yagai.

Yagai was a small man, dark and slim. Leisha liked his accent. She liked, too, something about him that took her a while to name. “Daddy,” she whispered in the half-darkness of the auditorium, “he’s a joyful man.”

Daddy hugged her in the darkness.

Yagai spoke about spirituality and economics. “A man’s spirituality—which is only his dignity as a man—rests on his own efforts. Dignity and worth are not automatically conferred by aristocratic birth—we have only to look at history to see that. Dignity and worth are not automatically conferred by inherited wealth—a great heir may be a thief, a wastrel, cruel, an exploiter, a person who leaves the world much poorer than he found it. Nor are dignity and worth automatically conferred by existence itself—a mass murderer exists, but is of negative worth to his society and possesses no dignity in his lust to kill.

“No, the only dignity, the only spirituality, rests on what a man can achieve with his own efforts. To rob a man of the chance to achieve, and to trade what he achieves with others, is to rob him of his spiritual dignity as a man. This is why communism has failed in our time. All coercion—all force to take from a man his own efforts to achieve—causes spiritual damage and weakens a society. Conscription, theft, fraud, violence, welfare, lack of legislative representation—all rob a man of his chance to choose, to achieve on his own, to trade the results of his achievement with others. Coercion is a cheat. It produces nothing new. Only freedom—the freedom to achieve, the freedom to trade freely the results of achievement—creates the environment proper to the dignity and spirituality of man.”

Leisha applauded so hard her hands hurt. Going backstage with Daddy, she thought she could hardly breathe. Kenzo Yagai!

But backstage was more crowded than she had expected. There were cameras everywhere. Daddy said, “Mr. Yagai, may I present my daughter Leisha,” and the cameras moved in close and fast—on her. A Japanese man whispered something in Kenzo Yagai’s ear, and he looked more closely at Leisha. “Ah, yes.”

“Look over here, Leisha,” someone called, and she did. A robot camera zoomed so close to her face that Leisha stepped back, startled. Daddy spoke very sharply to someone, then to someone else. The cameras didn’t move. A woman suddenly knelt in front of Leisha and thrust a microphone at her. “What does it feel like to never sleep, Leisha?”

“What?”

Someone laughed. The laugh was not kind. “Breeding geniuses . . .”

Leisha felt a hand on her shoulder. Kenzo Yagai gripped her very firmly, pulled her away from the cameras. Immediately, as if by magic, a line of Japanese men formed behind Yagai, parting only to let Daddy through. Behind the line, the three of them moved into a dressing room, and Kenzo Yagai shut the door.

“You must not let them bother you, Leisha,” he said in his wonderful accent. “Not ever. There is an old Oriental proverb: ‘The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.’ You must never let your individual caravan be slowed by the barking of rude or envious dogs.”

“I won’t,” Leisha breathed, not sure yet what the words really meant, knowing there was time later to sort them out, to talk about them with Daddy. For now she was dazzled by Kenzo Yagai, the actual man himself who was changing the world without force, without guns, with trading his special individual efforts. “We study your philosophy at my school, Mr. Yagai.”

Kenzo Yagai looked at Daddy. Daddy said, “A private school. But Leisha’s sister also studies it, although cursorily, in the public system. Slowly, Kenzo, but it comes. It comes.” Leisha noticed that he did not say why Alice was not here tonight with them.

Back home, Leisha sat in her room for hours, thinking over everything that had happened. When Alice came home from Julie’s the next morning, Leisha rushed toward her. But Alice seemed angry about something.

“Alice—what is it?”

“Don’t you think I have enough to put up with at school already?” Alice shouted. “Everybody knows, but at least when you stayed quiet it didn’t matter too much! They’d stopped teasing me! Why did you have to do it?”

“Do what?” Leisha said, bewildered.

Alice threw something at her: a hard-copy morning paper, on newsprint flimsier than the Camden system used. The paper dropped open at Leisha’s feet. She stared at her own picture, three columns wide, with Kenzo Yagai. The headline said: YAGAI AND THE FUTURE: ROOM FOR THE REST OF US? Y-ENERGY INVENTOR CONFERS WITH ‘SLEEP-FREE’ DAUGHTER OF MEGA-FINANCIER ROGER CAMDEN.

Alice kicked the paper. “It was on TV last night too—on TV. I work hard not to look stuck-up or creepy, and you go and do this! Now Julie probably won’t even invite me to her slumber party next week!” She rushed up the broad curving stairs toward her room.

Leisha looked down at the paper. She heard Kenzo Yagai’s voice in her head: “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.” She looked at the empty stairs. Aloud she said, “Alice—your hair looks really pretty curled like that.”

4

“I want to meet the rest of them,” Leisha said. “Why have you kept them from me this long?”

“I haven’t kept them from you at all,” Camden said. “Not offering is not the same as denial. Why shouldn’t you be the one to do the asking? You’re the one who now wants it.”

Leisha looked at him. She was fifteen, in her last year at the Sauley School. “Why didn’t you offer?”

“Why should I?”

“I don’t know,” Leisha said. “But you gave me everything else.”

“Including the freedom to ask for what you want.”

Leisha looked for the contradiction, and found it. “Most things that you provided for my education I didn’t ask for, because I didn’t know enough to ask and you, as the adult, did. But you’ve never offered the opportunity for me to meet any of the other sleepless mutants—”

“Don’t use that word,” Camden said sharply.

“—so you must either think it was not essential to my education or else you had another motive for not wanting me to meet them.”

“Wrong,” Camden said. “There’s a third possibility. That I think meeting them is essential to your education, that I do want you to, but this issue provided a chance to further the education of your self-initiative by waiting for you to ask.”

“All right,” Leisha said, a little defiantly; there seemed to be a lot of defiance between them lately, for no good reason. She squared her shoulders. Her new breasts thrust forward. “I’m asking. How many of the Sleepless are there, who are they, and where are they?”

Camden said, “If you’re using that term—‘the Sleepless’—you’ve already done some reading on your own. So you probably know that there are 1,082 of you so far in the United States, a few more in foreign countries, most of them in major metropolitan areas. Seventy-nine are in Chicago, most of them still small children. Only nineteen anywhere are older than you.”

Leisha didn’t deny reading any of this. Camden leaned forward in his study chair to peer at her. Leisha wondered if he needed glasses. His hair was completely gray now, sparse and stiff, like lonely broomstraws. The Wall Street Journal listed him among the hundred richest men in America; Women’s Wear Daily pointed out that he was the only billionaire in the country who did not move in the society of international parties, charity balls, and personal jets. Camden’s jet ferried him to business meetings around the world, to the chairmanship of the Yagai Economics Institute, and to very little else. Over the years he had grown richer, more reclusive, and more cerebral. Leisha felt a rush of her old affection.

She threw herself sideways into a leather chair, her long slim legs dangling over the arm. Absently she scratched a mosquito bite on her thigh. “Well, then, I’d like to meet Richard Keller.” He lived in Chicago and was the beta-test Sleepless closest to her own age. He was seventeen.

“Why ask me? Why not just go?”

Leisha thought there was a note of impatience in his voice. He liked her to explore things first, then report on them to him later. Both parts were important.

Leisha laughed. “You know what, Daddy? You’re predictable.”

Camden laughed, too. In the middle of the laugh Susan came in. “He certainly is not. Roger, what about that meeting in Buenos Aires Thursday? Is it on or off?” When he didn’t answer, her voice grew shriller. “Roger? I’m talking to you!”

Leisha averted her eyes. Two years ago Susan had finally left genetic research to run Camden’s house and schedule; before that she had tried hard to do both. Since she had left Biotech, it seemed to Leisha, Susan had changed. Her voice was tighter. She was more insistent that Cook and the gardener follow her directions exactly, without deviation. Her blonde braids had become stiff sculptured waves of platinum.

“It’s on,” Roger said.

“Well, thanks for at least answering. Am I going?”

“If you like.”

“I like.”

Susan left the room. Leisha rose and stretched. Her long legs rose on tiptoe. It felt good to reach, to stretch, to feel sunlight from the wide windows wash over her face. She smiled at her father, and found him watching her with an unexpected expression.

“Leisha—”

“What?”

“See Keller. But be careful.”

“Of what?”

But Camden wouldn’t answer.

The voice on the phone had been noncommittal. “Leisha Camden? Yes, I know who you are. Three o’clock on Thursday?” The house was modest, a thirty-year-old Colonial on a quiet suburban street where small children on bicycles could be watched from the front window. Few roofs had more than one Y-energy cell. The trees, huge old sugar maples, were beautiful.

“Come in,” Richard Keller said.

He was no taller than she, stocky, with a bad case of acne. Probably no genetic alterations except sleep, Leisha guessed. He had thick dark hair, a low forehead, and bushy black brows. Before he closed the door Leisha saw his stare at her car and driver, parked in the driveway next to a rusty ten-speed bike.

“I can’t drive yet,” she said. “I’m still fifteen.”

“It’s easy to learn,” Keller said. “So, you want to tell me why you’re here?”

Leisha liked his directness. “To meet some other Sleepless.”

“You mean you never have? Not any of us?”

“You mean the rest of you know each other?” She hadn’t expected that.

“Come to my room, Leisha.”

She followed him to the back of the house. No one else seemed to be home. His room was large and airy, filled with computers and filing cabinets. A rowing machine sat in one corner. It looked like a shabbier version of the room of any bright classmate at the Sauley School, except there was more space without a bed. She walked over to the computer screen.

“Hey—you working on Boesc equations?”

“On an application of them.”

“To what?”

“Fish migration patterns.”

Leisha smiled. “Yeah—that would work. I never thought of that.”

Keller seemed not to know what to do with her smile. He looked at the wall, then at her chin. “You interested in Gaea patterns? In the environment?”

“Well, no,” Leisha confessed. “Not particularly. I’m going to study politics at Harvard. Pre-law. But of course we had Gaea patterns at school.”

Keller’s gaze finally came unstuck from her face. He ran a hand through his dark hair. “Sit down, if you want.”

Leisha sat, looking appreciatively at the wall posters, shifting green on blue, like ocean currents. “I like those. Did you program them yourself?”

“You’re not at all what I pictured,” Keller said.

“How did you picture me?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Stuck-up. Superior. Shallow, despite your IQ.”

She was more hurt than she had expected to be.

Keller blurted, “You’re the only one of the Sleepless who’s really rich. But you already know that.”

“No, I don’t. I’ve never checked.”

He took the chair beside her, stretching his stocky legs straight in front of him, in a slouch that had nothing to do with relaxation. “It makes sense, really. Rich people don’t have their children genetically modified to be superior—they think any offspring of theirs is already superior. By their values. And poor people can’t afford it. We Sleepless are upper-middle class, no more. Children of professors, scientists, people who value brains and time.”

“My father values brains and time,” Leisha said. “He’s the biggest supporter of Kenzo Yagai.”

“Oh, Leisha, do you think I don’t already know that? Are you flashing me or what?”

Leisha said with great deliberateness, “I’m talking to you.” But the next minute she could feel the hurt break through on her face.

“I’m sorry,” Keller muttered. He shot off his chair and paced to the computer, back. “I am sorry. But I don’t . . . I don’t understand what you’re doing here.”

“I’m lonely,” Leisha said, astonished at herself. She looked up at him. “It’s true. I’m lonely. I am. I have friends and Daddy and Alice—but no one really knows, really understands—what? I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Keller smiled. The smile changed his whole face, opened up its dark planes to the light. “I do. Oh, do I. What do you do when they say, ‘I had such a dream last night!’ ?”

“Yes!” Leisha said. “But that’s even really minor—it’s when I say, ‘I’ll look that up for you tonight’ and they get that funny look on their face that means ‘She’ll do it while I’m asleep.’ ”

“But that’s even really minor,” Keller said. “It’s when you’re playing basketball in the gym after supper and then you go to the diner for food and then you say ‘Let’s have a walk by the lake’ and they say ‘I’m really tired. I’m going home to bed now.’ ”

“But that’s really minor,” Leisha said, jumping up. “It’s when you really are absorbed by the movie and then you get the point and it’s so goddamn beautiful you leap up and say ‘Yes! Yes!’ and Susan says ‘Leisha, really—you’d think nobody but you ever enjoyed anything before.’ ”

“Who’s Susan?” Keller said.

The mood was broken. But not really; Leisha could say “My stepmother” without much discomfort over what Susan had promised to be and what she had become. Keller stood inches from her, smiling that joyous smile, understanding, and suddenly relief washed over Leisha so strong that she walked straight into him and put her arms around his neck, only tightening them when she felt his startled jerk. She started to sob—she, Leisha, who never cried.

“Hey,” Richard said. “Hey.”

“Brilliant,” Leisha said, laughing. “Brilliant remark.”

She could feel his embarrassed smile. “Wanta see my fish migration curves instead?”

“No,” Leisha sobbed, and he went on holding her, patting her back awkwardly, telling her without words that she was home.

Camden waited up for her, although it was past midnight. He had been smoking heavily. Through the blue air he said quietly, “Did you have a good time, Leisha?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad,” he said, and put out his last cigarette, and climbed the stairs—slowly, stiffly, he was nearly seventy now—to bed.

They went everywhere together for nearly a year: swimming, dancing, to the museums, the theater, the library. Richard introduced her to the others, a group of twelve kids between fourteen and nineteen, all of them intelligent and eager. All Sleepless.

Leisha learned.

Tony’s parents, like her own, had divorced. But Tony, fourteen, lived with his mother, who had not particularly wanted a Sleepless child, while his father, who had, acquired a red hovercar and a young girlfriend who designed ergonomic chairs in Paris. Tony was not allowed to tell anyone—relatives, schoolmates—that he was Sleepless. “They’ll think you’re a freak,” his mother said, eyes averted from her son’s face. The one time Tony disobeyed her and told a friend that he never slept, his mother beat him. Then she moved the family to a new neighborhood. He was nine years old.

Jeanine, almost as long-legged and slim as Leisha, was training for the Olympics in ice skating. She practiced twelve hours a day, hours no Sleeper still in high school could ever have. So far the newspapers had not picked up the story. Jeanine was afraid that, if they did, they would somehow not let her compete.

Jack, like Leisha, would start college in September. Unlike Leisha, he had already started his career. The practice of law had to wait for law school; the practice of investment required only money. Jack didn’t have much, but his precise financial analyses parlayed $600 saved from summer jobs to $3000 through stock-market investing, then to $10,000, and then he had enough to qualify for information-fund speculation. Jack was fifteen, not old enough to make legal investments; the transactions were all in the name of Kevin Baker, the oldest of the Sleepless, who lived in Austin. Jack told Leisha, “When I hit eighty-four percent profit over two consecutive quarters, the data analysts logged onto me. They were just sniffing. Well, that’s their job, even when the overall amounts are actually small. It’s the patterns they care about. If they take the trouble to cross-reference data banks and come up with the fact that Kevin is a Sleepless, will they try to stop us from investing somehow?”

“That’s paranoid,” Leisha said.

“No, it’s not,” Jeanine said. “Leisha, you don’t know.”

“You mean because I’ve been protected by my father’s money and caring,” Leisha said. No one grimaced; all of them confronted ideas openly, without shadowy allusions. Without dreams.

“Yes,” Jeanine said. “Your father sounds terrific. And he raised you to think that achievement should not be fettered—Jesus Christ, he’s a Yagaiist. Well, good. We’re glad for you.” She said it without sarcasm. Leisha nodded. “But the world isn’t always like that. They hate us.”

“That’s too strong,” Carol said. “Not hate.”

“Well, maybe,” Jeanine said. “But they’re different from us. We’re better, and they naturally resent that.”

“I don’t see what’s natural about it,” Tony said. “Why shouldn’t it be just as natural to admire what’s better? We do. Does any one of us resent Kenzo Yagai for his genius? Or Nelson Wade, the physicist? Or Catherine Raduski?”

“We don’t resent them because we are better,” Richard said. “Q.E.D.”

“What we should do is have our own society,” Tony said. “Why should we allow their regulations to restrict our natural, honest achievements? Why should Jeanine be barred from skating against them and Jack from investing on their same terms just because we’re Sleepless? Some of them are brighter than others of them. Some have greater persistence. Well, we have greater concentration, more biochemical stability, and more time. All men are not created equal.”

“Be fair, Jack—no one has been barred from anything yet,” Jeanine said.

“But we will be.”

“Wait,” Leisha said. She was deeply troubled by the conversation. “I mean, yes, in many ways we’re better. But you quoted out of context, Tony. The Declaration of Independence doesn’t say all men are created equal in ability. It’s talking about rights and power—it means that all are created equal under the law. We have no more right to a separate society or to being free of society’s restrictions than anyone else does. There’s no other way to freely trade one’s efforts, unless the same contractual rules apply to all.”

“Spoken like a true Yagaiist,” Richard said, squeezing her hand.

“That’s enough intellectual discussion for me,” Carol said, laughing. “We’ve been at this for hours. We’re at the beach, for Chrissake. Who wants to swim with me?”

“I do,” Jeanine said. “Come on, Jack.”

All of them rose, brushing sand off their suits, discarding sunglasses. Richard pulled Leisha to her feet. But just before they ran into the water, Tony put his skinny hand on her arm. “One more question, Leisha. Just to think about. If we achieve better than most other people, and we trade with the Sleepers when it’s mutually beneficial, making no distinction there between the strong and the weak—what obligation do we have to those so weak they don’t have anything to trade with us? We’re already going to give more than we get—do we have to do it when we get nothing at all? Do we have to take care of their deformed and handicapped and sick and lazy and shiftless with the products of our work?”

“Do the Sleepers have to?” Leisha countered.

“Kenzo Yagai would say no. He’s a Sleeper.”

“He would say they would receive the benefits of contractual trade even if they aren’t direct parties to the contract. The whole world is better-fed and healthier because of Y-energy.”

“Come on!” Jeanine yelled. “Leisha, they’re dunking me! Jack, you stop that! Leisha, help me!”

Leisha laughed. Just before she grabbed for Jeanine, she caught the look on Richard’s face, on Tony’s: Richard frankly lustful, Tony angry. At her. But why? What had she done, except argue in favor of dignity and trade?

Then Jack threw water on her, and Carol pushed Jack into the warm spray, and Richard was there with his arms around her, laughing.

When she got the water out of her eyes, Tony was gone.

Midnight. “Okay,” Carol said. “Who’s first?”

The six teenagers in the brambled clearing looked at each other. A Y-lamp, kept on low for atmosphere, cast weird shadows across their faces and over their bare legs. Around the clearing Roger Camden’s trees stood thick and dark, a wall between them and the closest of the estate’s outbuildings. It was very hot. August air hung heavy, sullen. They had voted against bringing an air-conditioned Y-field because this was a return to the primitive, the dangerous; let it be primitive.

Six pairs of eyes stared at the glass in Carol’s hand.

“Come on,” she said. “Who wants to drink up?” Her voice was jaunty, theatrically hard. “It was difficult enough to get this.”

“How did you get it?” said Richard, the group member——except for Tony—with the least influential family contacts, the least money. “In a drinkable form like that?”

“My cousin Brian is a pharmaceutical supplier to the Biotech Institute. He’s curious.” Nods around the circle; except for Leisha, they were Sleepless precisely because they had relatives somehow connected to Biotech. And everyone was curious. The glass held interleukin-1, an immune system booster, one of many substances which as a side effect induced the brain to swift and deep sleep.

Leisha stared at the glass. A warm feeling crept through her lower belly, not unlike the feeling when she and Richard made love.

Tony said, “Give it to me!”

Carol did. “Remember—you only need a little sip.”

Tony raised the glass to his mouth, stopped, looked at them over the rim from his fierce eyes. He drank.

Carol took back the glass. They all watched Tony. Within a minute he lay on the rough ground; within two, his-eyes closed in sleep.

It wasn’t like seeing parents sleep, siblings, friends. It was Tony. They looked away, didn’t meet each other’s eyes. Leisha felt the warmth between her legs tug and tingle, faintly obscene.

When it was her turn, she drank slowly, then passed the glass to Jeanine. Her head turned heavy, as if it were being stuffed with damp rags. The trees at the edge of the clearing blurred. The portable lamp blurred, too—it wasn’t bright and clean anymore but squishy, blobby; if she touched it, it would smear. Then darkness swooped over her brain, taking it away: Taking away her mind. “Daddy!” She tried to call, to clutch for him, but then the darkness obliterated her.

Afterward, they all had headaches. Dragging themselves back through the woods in the thin morning light was torture, compounded by an odd shame. They didn’t touch each other. Leisha walked as far away from Richard as she could. It was a whole day before the throbbing left the base of her skull, or the nausea her stomach.

There had not even been any dreams.

“I want you to come with me tonight,” Leisha said, for the tenth or twelfth time. “We both leave for college in just two days; this is the last chance. I really want you to meet Richard.”

Alice lay on her stomach across her bed. Her hair, brown and lusterless, fell around her face. She wore an expensive yellow jumpsuit, silk by Ann Patterson, which rucked up in wrinkles around her knees.

“Why? What do you care if I meet Richard or not?”

“Because you’re my sister,” Leisha said. She knew better than to say “my twin.” Nothing got Alice angry faster.

“I don’t want to.” The next moment Alice’s face changed. “Oh, I’m sorry, Leisha—I didn’t mean to sound so snotty. But . . . but I don’t want to.”

“It won’t be all of them. Just Richard. And just for an hour or so. Then you can come back here and pack for Northwestern.”

“I’m not going to Northwestern.”

Leisha stared at her.

Alice said, “I’m pregnant.”

Leisha sat on the bed. Alice rolled onto her back, brushed the hair out of her eyes, and laughed. Leisha’s ears closed against the sound. “Look at you,” Alice said. “You’d think it was you who was pregnant. But you never would be, would you, Leisha? Not until it was the proper time. Not you.”

“How?” Leisha said. “We both had our caps put in . . .”

“I had the cap removed,” Alice said.

“You wanted to get pregnant?”

“Damn flash I did. And there’s not a thing Daddy can do about it. Except, of course, cut off all credit completely, but I don’t think he’ll do that, do you?” She laughed again. “Even to me?”

“But Alice . . . why? Not just to anger Daddy!”

“No,” Alice said. “Although you would think of that, wouldn’t you? Because I want something to love. Something of my own. Something that has nothing to do with this house.”

Leisha thought of her and Alice running through the conservatory, years ago, her and Alice, darting in and out of the sunlight. “It hasn’t been so bad growing up in this house.”

“Leisha, you’re stupid. I don’t know how anyone so smart can be so stupid. Get out of my room! Get out!”

“But Alice . . . a baby . . .”

“Get out!” Alice shrieked. “Go to Harvard! Go be successful! Just get out!”

Leisha jerked off the bed. “Gladly! You’re irrational, Alice! You don’t think ahead, you don’t plan a baby . . .” But she could never sustain anger. It dribbled away, leaving her mind empty. She looked at Alice, who suddenly put out her arms. Leisha went into them.

“You’re the baby,” Alice said wonderingly. “You are. You’re so . . . I don’t know what. You’re a baby.”

Leisha said nothing. Alice’s arms felt warm, felt whole, felt like two children running in and out of sunlight. “I’ll help you, Alice. If Daddy won’t.”

Alice abruptly pushed her away. “I don’t need your help.”

Alice stood. Leisha rubbed her empty arms, fingertips scraping across opposite elbows. Alice kicked the empty, open trunk in which she was supposed to pack for Northwestern, and then abruptly smiled, a smile that made Leisha look away. She braced herself for more abuse. But what Alice said, very softly, was, “Have a good time at Harvard.”

5

She loved it.

From the first sight of Massachusetts Hall, older than the United States by a half century, Leisha felt something that had been missing in Chicago: Age. Roots. Tradition. She touched the bricks of Widener Library, the glass cases in the Peabody Museum, as if they were the grail. She had never been particularly sensitive to myth or drama; the anguish of Juliet seemed to her artificial, that of Willy Loman merely wasteful. Only King Arthur, struggling to create a better social order, had interested her. But now, walking under the huge autumn trees, she suddenly caught a glimpse of a force that could span generations, fortunes left to endow learning and achievement the benefactors would never see, individual effort spanning and shaping centuries to come. She stopped, and looked at the sky through the leaves, at the buildings solid with purpose. At such moments she thought of Camden, bending the will of an entire genetic research institute to create her in the image he wanted.

Within a month, she had forgotten all such mega-musings.

The workload was incredible, even for her. The Sauley School had encouraged individual exploration at her own pace; Harvard knew what it wanted from her, at its pace. In the last twenty years, under the academic leadership of a man who in his youth had watched Japanese economic domination with dismay, Harvard had become the controversial leader of a return to hard-edged learning of facts, theories, applications, problem-solving, intellectual efficiency. The school accepted one out of every two hundred applications from around the world. The daughter of England’s Prime Minister had flunked out her first year and been sent home.

Leisha had a single room in a new dormitory, the dorm because she had spent so many years isolated in Chicago and was hungry for people, the single so she would not disturb anyone else when she worked all night. Her second day a boy from down the hall sauntered in and perched on the edge of her desk.

“So you’re Leisha Camden.”

“Yes.”

“Sixteen years old.”

“Almost seventeen.”

“Going to out-perform us all, I understand, without even trying.”

Leisha’s smile faded. The boy stared at her from under lowered downy brows. He was smiling, his eyes sharp. From Richard and Tony and the others Leisha had learned to recognize the anger that presented itself as contempt.

“Yes,” Leisha said coolly, “I am.”

“Are you sure? With your pretty little-girl hair and your mutant little-girl brain?”

“Oh, leave her alone, Hannaway,” said another voice. A tall blond boy, so thin his ribs looked like ripples in brown sand, stood in jeans and bare feet, drying his wet hair. “Don’t you ever get tired of walking around being an asshole?”

“Do you?” Hannaway said. He heaved himself off the desk and started toward the door. The blond moved out of his way. Leisha moved into it.

“The reason I’m going to do better than you,” she said evenly, “is because I have certain advantages you don’t. Including sleeplessness. And then after I ‘out-perform’ you, I’ll be glad to help you study for your tests so that you can pass, too.”

The blond, drying his ears, laughed. But Hannaway stood still, and into his eyes came an expression that made Leisha back away. He pushed past her and stormed out.

“Nice going, Camden,” the blond said. “He deserved that.”

“But I meant it,” Leisha said. “I will help him study.”

The blond lowered his towel and stared. “You did, didn’t you? You meant it.”

“Yes! Why does everybody keep questioning that?”

“Well,” the boy said, “I don’t. You can help me if I get into trouble.” Suddenly he smiled. “But I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m just as good at anything as you are, Leisha Camden.”

She studied him. “You’re not one of us. Not Sleepless.”

“Don’t have to be. I know what I can do. Do, be, create, trade.”

She said, delighted, “You’re a Yagaiist!”

“Of course.” He held out his hand. “Stewart Sutter. How about a fish-burger in the Yard?” .

“Great,” Leisha said. They walked out together, talking excitedly. When people stared at her, she tried not to notice. She was here. At Harvard. With space ahead of her, time to learn, and with people like Stewart Sutter who accepted and challenged her.

All the hours he was awake.

She became totally absorbed in her classwork. Roger Camden drove up once, walking the campus with her, listening, smiling. He was more at home than Leisha would have expected: He knew Stewart Sutter’s father, Kate Addams’ grandfather. They talked about Harvard, business, Harvard, the Yagai Economics Institute, Harvard. “How’s Alice?” Leisha asked once, but Camden said that he didn’t know, she had moved out and did not want to see him. He made her an allowance through his attorney. While he said this, his face remained serene.

Leisha went to the Homecoming Ball with Stewart, who was also majoring in pre-law but was two years ahead of Leisha. She took a weekend trip to Paris with Kate Addams and two other girlfriends, taking the Concorde III. She had a fight with Stewart over whether the metaphor of superconductivity could apply to Yagaiism, a stupid fight they both knew was stupid but had anyway, and afterward they became lovers. After the fumbling sexual explorations with Richard, Stewart was deft, experienced, smiling faintly as he taught her how to have an orgasm both by herself and with him. Leisha was dazzled. “It’s so joyful,” she said, and Stewart looked at her with a tenderness she knew was part disturbance but didn’t know why.

At mid-semester she had the highest grades in the freshman class. She got every answer right on every single question on her mid-terms. She and Stewart went out for a beer to celebrate, and when they came back Leisha’s room had been destroyed. The computer was smashed, the data banks wiped, hardcopies and books smoldering in a metal wastebasket. Her clothes were ripped to pieces, her desk and bureau hacked apart. The only thing untouched, pristine, was the bed.

Stewart said, “There’s no way this could have been done in silence. Everyone on the floor—hell, on the floor below—had to know. Someone will talk to the police.” No one did. Leisha sat on the edge of the bed, dazed, and looked at the remnants of her Homecoming gown. The next day Dave Hannaway gave her a long, wide smile.

Camden flew east again, taut with rage. He rented her an apartment in Cambridge with E-lock security and a bodyguard named Toshio. After he left, Leisha fired the bodyguard but kept the apartment. It gave her and Stewart more privacy, which they used to endlessly discuss the situation. It was Leisha who argued that it was an aberration, an immaturity.

“There have always been haters, Stewart. Hate Jews, hate Blacks, hate immigrants, hate Yagaiists who have more initiative and dignity than you do. I’m just the latest object of hatred. It’s not new, it’s not remarkable. It doesn’t mean any basic kind of schism between the Sleepless and Sleepers.”

Stewart sat up in bed and reached for the sandwiches on the night stand. “Doesn’t it? Leisha, you’re a different kind of person entirely. More evolutionarily fit, not only to survive but to prevail. Those other ‘objects of hatred’ you cite except Yagaiists—they were all powerless in their societies. They occupied inferior positions. You, on the other hand—all three Sleepless in Harvard Law are on the Law Review. All of them. Kevin Baker, your oldest, has already founded a successful bio-interface software firm and is making money, a lot of it. Every Sleepless is making superb grades, none have psychological problems, all are healthy—and most of you aren’t even adults yet. How much hatred do you think you’re going to encounter once you hit the big-stakes world of finance and business and scarce endowed chairs and national politics?”

“Give me a sandwich,” Leisha said. “Here’s my evidence you’re wrong: You yourself. Kenzo Yagai. Kate Addams. Professor Lane. My father. Every Sleeper who inhabits the world of fair trade, mutually beneficial contracts. And that’s most of you, or at least most of you who are worth considering. You believe that competition among the most capable leads to the most beneficial trades for everyone, strong and weak. Sleepless are making real and concrete contributions to society, in a lot of fields. That has to outweigh the discomfort we cause. We’re valuable to you. You know that.”

Stewart brushed crumbs off the sheets. “Yes. I do. Yagaiists do.”

“Yagaiists run the business and financial and academic worlds. Or they will. In a meritocracy, they should. You underestimate the majority of people, Stew. Ethics aren’t confined to the ones out front.”

“I hope you’re right,” Stewart said. “Because, you know, I’m in love with you.”

Leisha put down her sandwich.

“Joy,” Stewart mumbled into her breasts, “you are joy.”

When Leisha went home for Thanksgiving, she told Richard about Stewart. He listened tight-lipped.

“A Sleeper.”

“A person,” Leisha said. “A good, intelligent, achieving person!”

“Do you know what your good intelligent achieving Sleepers have done, Leisha? Jeanine has been barred from Olympic skating. ‘Genetic alteration, analogous to steroid abuse to create an unsportsmanlike advantage.’ Chris Devereaux’s left Stanford. They trashed his laboratory, destroyed two years’ work in memory formation proteins. Kevin Baker’s software company is fighting a nasty advertising campaign, all underground of course, about kids using software designed by ‘non-human minds.’ Corruption, mental slavery, satanic influences: the whole bag of witch-hunt tricks. Wake up, Leisha!”

They both heard his words. Moments dragged by. Richard stood like a boxer, forward on the balls of his feet, teeth clenched. Finally he said, very quietly, “Do you love him?”

“Yes,” Leisha said. “I’m sorry.”

“Your choice,” Richard said coldly. “What do you do while he’s asleep? Watch?”

“You make it sound like a perversion!”

Richard said nothing. Leisha drew a deep breath. She spoke rapidly but calmly, a controlled rush: “While Stewart is asleep I work. The same as you do. Richard—don’t do this. I didn’t mean to hurt you. And I don’t want to lose the group. I believe the Sleepers are the same species as we are—are you going to punish me for that? Are you going to add to the hatred? Are you going to tell me that I can’t belong to a wider world that includes all honest, worthwhile people whether they sleep or not? Are you going to tell me that the most important division is by genetics and not by economic spirituality? Are you going to force me into an artificial choice, ‘us’.or ‘them’ ?”

Richard picked up a bracelet. Leisha recognized it: She had given it to him in the summer. His voice was quiet. “No. It’s not a choice.” He played with the gold links a minute, then looked up at her. “Not yet.”

By spring break, Camden walked more slowly. He took medicine for his blood pressure, his heart. He and Susan, he told Leisha, were getting a divorce. “She changed, Leisha, after I married her. You saw that. She was independent and productive and happy, and then after a few years she stopped all that and became a shrew. A whining shrew.” He shook his head in genuine bewilderment. “You saw the change.”

Leisha had. A memory came to her: Susan leading her and Alice in “games” that were actually controlled cerebral-performance tests, Susan’s braids dancing around her sparkling eyes. Alice had loved Susan, then, as much as Leisha had.

“Dad, I want Alice’s address.”

“I told you up at Harvard, I don’t have it,” Camden said. He shifted in his chair, the impatient gesture of a body that never expected to wear out. In January Kenzo Yagai had died of pancreatic cancer; Camden had taken the news hard. “I make her allowance through an attorney. By her choice.”

“Then I want the address of the attorney.”

The attorney, however, refused to tell Leisha where Alice was. “She doesn’t want to be found, Ms. Camden. She wanted a complete break.”

“Not from me,” Leisha said.

“Yes,” the attorney said, and something flickered behind his eyes, something she had last seen in Dave Hannaway’s face.

She flew to Austin before returning to Boston, making her a day late for classes. Kevin Baker saw her instantly, canceling a meeting with IBM. She told him what she needed, and he set his best data-net people on it, without telling them why. Within two hours she had Alice’s address from the attorney’s electronic files. It was the first time, she realized, that she had ever turned to one of the Sleepless for help, and it had been given instantly. Without trade.

Alice was in Pennsylvania. The next weekend Leisha rented a hovercar and driver—she had learned to drive, but only groundcars as yet—and went to High Ridge, in the Appalachian Mountains.

It was an isolated hamlet, twenty-five miles from the nearest hospital. Alice lived with a man named Ed, a silent carpenter twenty years older than she, in a cabin in the woods. The cabin had water and electricity but no news net. In the early spring light the earth was raw and bare, slashed with icy gullies. Alice and Ed apparently worked at nothing. Alice was eight months pregnant.

“I didn’t want you here,” she said to Leisha. “So why are you?”

“Because you’re my sister.”

“God, look at you. Is that what they’re wearing at Harvard? Boots like that? When did you become fashionable, Leisha? You were always too busy being intellectual to care.”

“What’s this all about, Alice? Why here? What are you doing?”

“Living,” Alice said. “Away from dear Daddy, away from Chicago, away from drunken broken Susan—did you know she drinks? Just like Mom. He does that to people. But not to me. I got out. I wonder if you ever will.”

“Got out? To this?”

“I’m happy,” Alice said angrily. “Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be about? Isn’t that the aim of your great Kenzo Yagai—happiness through individual effort?”

Leisha thought of saying that Alice was making no efforts that she could see. She didn’t say it. A chicken ran through the yard of the cabin. Behind, the mountains rose in layers of blue haze. Leisha thought what this place must have been like in winter: cut off from the world where people strived towards goals, learned, changed.

“I’m glad you’re happy, Alice.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m glad, too,” Alice said, almost defiantly. The next moment she abruptly hugged Leisha, fiercely, the huge hard mound of her belly crushed between them. Alice’s hair smelled sweet, like fresh grass in sunlight.

“I’ll come see you again, Alice.”

“Don’t,” Alice said.

6

SLEEPLESS MUTIE BEGS FOR REVERSAL OF GENE TAMPERING, screamed the headline in the Food Mart. “PLEASE LET ME SLEEP LIKE REAL PEOPLE!” CHILD PLEADS.

Leisha typed in her credit number and pressed the news kiosk for a printout, although ordinarily she ignored the electronic tabloids. The headline went on circling the kiosk. A Food Mart employee stopped stacking boxes on shelves and watched her. Bruce, Leisha’s bodyguard, watched the employee.

She was twenty-two, in her final year at Harvard Law, editor of the Law Review, ranked first in her class. The next three were Jonathan Cocchiara, Len Carter, and Martha Wentz. All Sleepless.

In her apartment she skimmed the printout. Then she accessed the Groupnet run from Austin. The files had more news stories about the child, with comments from other Sleepless, but before she could call them up Kevin Baker came on-line himself, on voice.

“Leisha. I’m glad you called. I was going to call you.”

“What’s the situation with this Stella Bevington, Kev? Has anybody checked it out?”

“Randy Davies. He’s from Chicago but I don’t think you’ve met him, he’s still in high school. He’s in Park Ridge, Stella’s in Skokie. Her parents wouldn’t talk to him—were pretty abusive, in fact—but he got to see Stella face-to-face anyway. It doesn’t look like an abuse case, just the usual stupidity: parents wanted a genius child, scrimped and saved, and now they can’t handle that she is one. They scream at her to sleep, get emotionally abusive when she contradicts them, but so far no violence.”

“Is the emotional abuse actionable?”

“I don’t think we want to move on it yet. Two of us will keep in close touch with Stella—she does have a modem, and she hasn’t told her parents about the net—and Randy will drive out weekly.”

Leisha bit her lip. “A tabloid shitpiece said she’s seven years old.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t be left there. I’m an Illinois resident, I can file an abuse grievance from here if Candy’s got too much in her briefcase . . . .” Seven years old.

“No. Let it sit a while. Stella will probably be all right. You know that.”

She did. Nearly all of the Sleepless stayed “all right,” no matter how much opposition came from the stupid segment of society. And it was only the stupid segment, Leisha argued—a small if vocal minority. Most people could, and would, adjust to the growing presence of the Sleepless, when it became clear that that presence included not only growing power but growing benefits to the country as a whole.

Kevin Baker, now twenty-six, had made a fortune in microchips so revolutionary that Artificial Intelligence, once a debated dream, was yearly closer to reality. Carolyn Rizzolo had won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for her play Morning Light. She was twenty-four. Jeremy Robinson had done significant work in superconductivity applications while still a graduate student at Stanford. William Thaine, Law Review editor when Leisha first came to Harvard, was now in private practice. He had never lost a case. He was twenty-six, and the cases were becoming important. His clients valued his ability more than his age.

But not everyone reacted that way.

Kevin Baker and Richard Keller had started the datanet that bound the Sleepless into a tight group, constantly aware of each other’s personal fights. Leisha Camden financed the legal battles, the educational costs of Sleepless whose parents were unable to meet them, the support of children in emotionally bad situations. Rhonda Lavelier got herself licensed as a foster mother in California, and whenever possible the Group maneuvered to have small Sleepless who were removed from their homes assigned to Rhonda. The Group now had three ABA lawyers; within the next year they would gain four more, licensed to practice in five different states.

The one time they had not been able to remove an abused Sleepless child legally, they kidnapped him.

Timmy DeMarzo, four years old. Leisha had been opposed to the action. She had argued the case morally and pragmatically—to her they were the same thing—thus: If they believed in their society, in its fundamental laws and in their ability to belong to it as free-trading productive individuals, they must remain bound by the society’s contractual laws. The Sleepless were, for the most part, Yagaiists. They should already know this. And if the FBI caught them, the courts and press would crucify them.

They were not caught.

Timmy DeMarzo—not even old enough to call for help on the datanet, they had learned of the situation through the automatic police-record scan Kevin maintained through his company—was stolen from his own backyard in Wichita. He had lived the last year in an isolated trailer in North Dakota; no place was too isolated for a modem. He was cared for by a legally irreproachable foster mother who had lived there all her life. The foster mother was second cousin to a Sleepless, a bread cheerful woman with a much better brain than her appearance indicated. She was a Yagaiist. No record of the child’s existence appeared in any data bank: not the IRS, not any school’s, not even the local grocery store’s computerized check-out slips. Food specifically for the child was shipped in monthly on a truck owned by a Sleepless in State College, Pennsylvania. Ten of the Group knew about the kidnapping, out of the total 3,428 born in the United States. Of that total, 2,691 were part of the Group via the net. Another 701 were as yet too young to use a modem. Only thirty-six Sleepless, for whatever reason, were not part of the Group.

The kidnapping had been arranged by Tony Indivino.

“It’s Tony I wanted to talk to you about,” Kevin said to Leisha. “He’s started again. This time he means it. He’s buying land.”

She folded the tabloid very small and laid it carefully on the table. “Where?”

“Allegheny Mountains. In southern New York State. A lot of land. He’s putting in the roads now. In the spring, the first buildings.”

“Jennifer Sharifi still financing it?” She was the American-born daughter of an Arab prince who had wanted a Sleepless child. The prince was dead and Jennifer, dark-eyed and multilingual, was richer than Leisha would one day be.

“Yes. He’s starting to get a following, Leisha.”

“I know.”

“Call him.”

“I will. Keep me informed about Stella.”

She worked until midnight at the Law Review, then until four A.M. preparing her classes. From four to five she handled legal matters for the Group. At five A.M. she called Tony, still in Chicago. He had finished high school, done one semester at Northwestern, and at Christmas vacation he had finally exploded at his mother for forcing him to live as a Sleeper. The explosion, it seemed to Leisha, had never ended.

“Tony? Leisha.”

“The answer is yes, yes, no, and go to hell.”

Leisha gritted her teeth. “Fine. Now tell me the questions.”

“Are you really serious about the Sleepless withdrawing into their own self sufficient society? Is Jennifer Sharifi willing to finance a project the size of building a small city? Don’t you think that’s a cheat of all that can be accomplished by patient integration of the Group into the mainstream? And what about the contradictions of living in an armed restricted city and still trading with the Outside?”

“I would never tell you to go to hell.”

“Hooray for you,” Tony said. After a moment he added, “I’m sorry. That sounds like one of them.”

“It’s wrong for us, Tony.”

“Thanks for not saying I couldn’t pull it off.”

She wondered if he could. “We’re not a separate species, Tony.”

“Tell that to the Sleepers.”

“You exaggerate. There are haters out there, there are always haters, but to give up . . .”

“We’re not giving up. Whatever we create can be freely traded: software, hardware, novels, information, theories, legal counsel. We can travel in and out. But we’ll have a safe place to return to. Without the leeches who think we owe them blood because we’re better than they are.”

“It isn’t a matter of owing.”

“Really?” Tony said. “Let’s have this out, Leisha. All the way. You’re a Yagaiist—what do you believe in?”

“Tony . . .”

“Do it,” Tony said, and in his voice she heard the fourteen-year-old Richard had introduced her to. Simultaneously, she saw her father’s face: not as he was now, since the bypass, but as he had been when she was a little girl, holding her on his lap to explain that she was special.

“I believe in voluntary trade that is mutually beneficial. That spiritual dignity comes from supporting one’s life through one’s own efforts, and trading the results of those efforts in mutual cooperation throughout the society. That the symbol of this is the contract. And that we need each other for the fullest, most beneficial trade.”

“Fine,” Tony bit off. “Now what about the beggars in Spain?”

“The what?”

“You walk down a street in a poor country like Spain and you see a beggar. Do you give him a dollar?”

“Probably.”

“Why? He’s trading nothing with you. He has nothing to trade.”

“I know. Out of kindness. Compassion.”

“You see six beggars. Do you give them all a dollar?”

“Probably,” Leisha said.

“You would. You see a hundred beggars and you haven’t got Leisha Camden’s money—do you give them each a dollar?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Leisha reached for patience. Few people could make her want to cut off a comm link; Tony was one of them. “Too draining on my own resources. My life has first claim on the resources I earn.”

“All right. Now consider this. At Biotech Institute—where you and I began, dear pseudo-sister—Dr. Melling has just yesterday—”

“Who?”

“Dr. Susan Melling. Oh, God, I completely forgot—she used to be married to your father!”

“I lost track of her,” Leisha said. “I didn’t realize she’d gone back to research. Alice once said . . . never mind. What’s going on at Biotech?”

“Two crucial items, just released. Carla Dutcher has had first-month fetal genetic analysis. Sleeplessness is a dominant gene. The next generation of the Group won’t sleep either.”

“We all knew that,” Leisha said. Carla Dutcher was the world’s first pregnant Sleepless. Her husband was a Sleeper. “The whole world expected that.”

“But the press will have a windfall with it anyway. Just watch. Muties Breed! New Race Set To Dominate Next Generation of Children!”

Leisha didn’t deny it. “And the second item?”

“It’s sad, Leisha. We’ve just had our first death.”

Her stomach tightened. “Who?”

“Bemie Kuhn. Seattle.” She didn’t know him. “A car accident. It looks pretty straightforward—he lost control on a steep curve when his brakes failed. He had only been driving a few months. He was seventeen. But the significance here is that his parents have donated his brain and body to Biotech, in conjunction with the pathology department at the Chicago Medical School. They’re going to take him apart to get the first good look at what prolonged sleeplessness does to the body and brain.”

“They should,” Leisha said. “That poor kid. But what are you so afraid they’ll find?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a doctor. But whatever it is, if the haters can use it against us, they will.”

“You’re paranoid, Tony.”

“Impossible. The Sleepless have personalities calmer and more reality-oriented than the norm. Don’t you read the literature?”

“Tony—”

“What if you walk down that street in Spain and a hundred beggars each want a dollar and you say no and they have nothing to trade you but they’re so rotten with anger about what you have that they knock you down and grab it and then beat you out of sheer envy and despair?”

Leisha didn’t answer.

“Are you going to say that’s not a human scenario, Leisha? That it never happens?”

“It happens,” Leisha said evenly. “But not all that often.”

“Bullshit. Read more history. Read more newspapers. But the point is: What do you owe the beggars then? What does a good Yagaiist who believes in mutually beneficial contracts do with people who have nothing to trade and can only take?”

“You’re not—”

“What, Leisha? In the most objective terms you can manage, what do we owe the grasping and non-productive needy?”

“What I said originally. Kindness. Compassion.”

“Even if they don’t trade it back? Why?”

“Because . . .” She stopped.

“Why? Why do law-abiding and productive human beings owe anything to those who neither produce very much nor abide by laws? What philosophical or economic or spiritual justification is there for owing them anything? Be as honest as I know you are.”

Leisha put her head between her knees. The question gaped beneath her, but she didn’t try to evade it. “I don’t know. I just know we do.”

“Why?”

She didn’t answer. After a moment, Tony did. The intellectual challenge was gone from his voice. He said, almost tenderly, “Come down in the spring and see the site for Sanctuary. The buildings will be going up then.”

“No,” Leisha said.

“I’d like you to.”

“No. Armed retreat is not the way.”

Tony said, “The beggars are getting nastier, Leisha. As the Sleepless grow richer. And I don’t mean in money.”

“Tony—” she said, and stopped. She couldn’t think what to say.

“Don’t walk down too many streets armed with just the memory of Kenzo Yagai.”

In March, a bitterly cold March of winds whipping down the Charles River, Richard Keller came to Cambridge. Leisha had not seen him for four years. He didn’t send her word on the Groupnet that he was coming. She hurried up the walk to her townhouse, muffled to the eyes in a red wool scarf against the snowy cold, and he stood there blocking the doorway. Behind Leisha, her bodyguard tensed.

“Richard! Bruce, it’s all right, this is an old friend.”

“Hello, Leisha.”

He was heavier, sturdier-looking, with a breadth of shoulder she didn’t recognize. But the face was Richard’s, older but unchanged: dark low brows, unruly dark hair. He had grown a beard.

“You look beautiful,” he said.

She handed him a cup of coffee. “Are you here on business?” From the Groupnet she knew that he had finished his Master’s and had done outstanding work in marine biology in the Caribbean, but had left that a year ago and disappeared from the net.

“No. Pleasure.” He smiled suddenly, the old smile that opened up his dark face. “I almost forgot about that for a long time. Contentment, yes, we’re all good at the contentment that comes from sustained work, but pleasure? Whim? Caprice? When was the last time you did something silly, Leisha?”

She smiled. “I ate cotton candy in the shower.”

“Really? Why?”

“To see if it would dissolve in gooey pink patterns.”

“Did it?”

“Yes. Lovely ones.”

“And that was your last silly thing? When was it?”

“Last summer,” Leisha said, and laughed.

“Well, mine is sooner than that. It’s now. I’m in Boston for no other reason than the spontaneous pleasure of seeing you.”

Leisha stopped laughing. “That’s an intense tone for a spontaneous pleasure, Richard.”

“Yup,” he said, intensely. She laughed again. He didn’t.

“I’ve been in India, Leisha. And China and Africa. Thinking, mostly. Watching. First I traveled like a Sleeper, attracting no attention. Then I set out to meet the Sleepless in India and China. There are a few, you know, whose parents were willing to come here for the operation. They pretty much are accepted and left alone. I tried to figure out why desperately poor countries—by our standards anyway, over there Y-energy is mostly available only in big cities—don’t have any trouble accepting the superiority of Sleepless, whereas Americans, with more prosperity than any time in history, build in resentment more and more.”

Leisha said, “Did you figure it out?”

“No. But I figured out something else, watching all those communes and villages and kampongs. We are too individualistic.”

Disappointment swept Leisha. She saw her father’s face: Excellence is what counts, Leisha. Excellence supported by individual effort . . . . She reached for Richard’s cup. “More coffee?”

He caught her wrist and looked up into her face. “Don’t misunderstand me, Leisha. I’m not talking about work. We are too much individuals in the rest of our lives. Too emotionally rational. Too much alone. Isolation kills more than the free flow of ideas. It kills joy.”

He didn’t let go of her wrist. She looked down into his eyes, into depths she hadn’t seen before: It was the feeling of looking into a mine shaft, both giddy and frightening, knowing that at the bottom might be gold or darkness. Or both.

Richard said softly, “Stewart?”

“Over long ago. An undergraduate thing.” Her voice didn’t sound like her own.

“Kevin?”

“No, never—we’re just friends.”

“I wasn’t sure. Anyone?”

“No.”

He let go of her wrist. Leisha peered at him timidly. He suddenly laughed. “Joy, Leisha.” An echo sounded in her mind, but she couldn’t place it and then it was gone and she laughed too, a laugh airy and frothy as pink cotton candy in summer.

“Come home, Leisha. He’s had another heart attack.”

Susan Melling’s voice on the phone was tired. Leisha said, “How bad?”

“The doctors aren’t sure. Or say they’re not sure. He wants to see you. Can you leave your studies?”

It was May, the last push toward her finals. The Law Review proofs were behind schedule. Richard had started a new business, marine consulting to Boston fishermen plagued with sudden inexplicable shifts in ocean currents, and was working twenty hours a day. “I’ll come,” Leisha said.

Chicago was colder than Boston. The trees were half-budded. On Lake Michigan, filling the huge east windows of her father’s house, whitecaps tossed up cold spray. Leisha saw that Susan was living in the house: her brushes on Camden’s dresser, her journals on the credenza in the foyer.

“Leisha,” Camden said. He looked old. Gray skin, sunken cheeks, the fretful and bewildered look of men who accepted potency like air, indivisible from their lives. In the corner of the room, on a small eighteenth-century slipper chair, sat a short, stocky woman with brown braids.

“Alice.”

“Hello, Leisha.”

“Alice. I’ve looked for you . . .” The wrong thing to say. Leisha had looked, but not very hard, deterred by the knowledge that Alice had not wanted to be found. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Alice said. She seemed remote, gentle, unlike the angry Alice of six years ago in the raw Pennsylvania hills. Camden moved painfully on the bed. He looked at Leisha with eyes which, she saw, were undimmed in their blue brightness.

“I asked Alice to come. And Susan. Susan came a while ago. I’m dying, Leisha.”

No one contradicted him. Leisha, knowing his respect for facts, remained silent. Love hurt her chest.

“John Jaworski has my will. None of you can break it. But I wanted to tell you myself what’s in it. The last few years I’ve been selling, liquidating. Most of my holdings are accessible now. I’ve left a tenth to Alice, a tenth to Susan, a tenth to Elizabeth, and the rest to you, Leisha, because you’re the only one with the individual ability to use the money to its full potential for achievement.”

Leisha looked wildly at Alice, who gazed back with her strange remote calm. “Elizabeth? My . . . mother? Is alive?”

“Yes,” Camden said.

“You told me she was dead! Years and years ago!”

“Yes. I thought it was better for you that way. She didn’t like what you were, was jealous of what you could become. And she had nothing to give you. She would only have caused you emotional harm.”

Beggars in Spain . . .

“That was wrong, Dad. You were wrong. She’s my mother . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

Camden didn’t flinch. “I don’t think I was. But you’re an adult now. You can see her if you wish.”

He went on looking at her from his bright, sunken eyes, while around Leisha the air heaved and snapped. Her father had lied to her. Susan watched her closely, a small smile on her lips. Was she glad to see Camden fall in his daughter’s estimation? Had she all along been that jealous of their relationship, of Leisha . . .

She was thinking like Tony.

The thought steadied her a little. But she went on staring at Camden, who went on staring implacably back, unbudged, a man positive even on his death bed that he was right.

Alice’s hand was on her elbow, Alice’s voice so soft that no one but Leisha could hear. “He’s done now, Leisha. And after a while you’ll be all right.”

Alice had left her son in California with her husband of two years, Beck Watrous, a building contractor she had met while waitressing in a resort on the Artificial Islands. Beck had adopted Jordan, Alice’s son.

“Before Beck there was a real bad time,” Alice said in her remote voice. “You know, when I was carrying Jordan I actually used to dream that he would be Sleepless? Like you. Every night I’d dream that, and every morning I’d wake up and have morning sickness with a baby that was only going to be a stupid nothing like me. I stayed with Ed—in Pennsylvania, remember? You came to see me there once—for two more years. When he beat me, I was glad. I wished Daddy could see. At least Ed was touching me.”

Leisha made a sound in her throat.

“I finally left because I was afraid for Jordan. I went to California, did nothing but eat for a year. I got up to 190 pounds.” Alice was, Leisha estimated, five-foot-four. “Then I came home to see Mother.”

“You didn’t tell me,” Leisha said. “You knew she was alive and you didn’t tell me.”

“She’s in a drying-out tank half the time,” Alice said, with brutal simplicity. “She wouldn’t see you if you wanted to. But she saw me, and she fell slobbering all over me as her ‘real’ daughter, and she threw up on my dress. And I backed away from her and looked at the dress and knew it should be thrown up on, it was so ugly. Deliberately ugly. She started screaming how Dad had ruined her life, ruined mine, all for you. And do you know what I did?”

“What?” Leisha said. Her voice was shaky.

“I flew home, burned all my clothes, got a job, started college, lost fifty pounds, and put Jordan in play therapy.”

The sisters sat silent. Beyond the window the lake was dark, unlit by moon or stars. It was Leisha who suddenly shook, and Alice who patted her shoulder.

“Tell me . . .” Leisha couldn’t think what she wanted to be told, except that she wanted to hear Alice’s voice in the gloom, Alice’s voice as it was now, gentle and remote, without damage anymore from the damaging fact of Leisha’s existence. Her very existence as damage. “. . . tell me about Jordan. He’s five now? What’s he like?”

Alice turned her head to look levelly into Leisha’s eyes. “He’s a happy ordinary little boy. Completely ordinary.”

Camden died a week later. After the funeral, Leisha tried to see her mother at the Brookfield Drug and Alcohol Abuse Center. Elizabeth Camden, she was told, saw no one except her only child, Alice Camden Watrous.

Susan Melling, dressed in black, drove Leisha to the airport. Susan talked deftly, determinedly, about Leisha’s studies, about Harvard, about the Review. Leisha answered in monosyllables but Susan persisted, asking questions, quietly insisting on answers: When would Leisha take her bar exams? Where was she interviewing for jobs? Gradually Leisha began to lose the numbness she had felt since her father’s casket was lowered into the ground. She realized that Susan’s persistent questioning was a kindness.

“He sacrificed a lot of people,” Leisha said suddenly.

“Not me,” Susan said. She pulled the car into the airport parking lot. “Only for a while there, when I gave up my work to do his. Roger didn’t respect sacrifice much.”

“Was he wrong?” Leisha said. The question came out with a kind of desperation. she hadn’t intended.

Susan smiled sadly. “No. He wasn’t wrong. I should never have left my research. It took me a long time to come back to myself after that.”

He does that to people, Leisha heard inside her head. Susan? Or Alice? She couldn’t, for once, remember clearly. She saw her father in the old conservatory, potting and repotting the dramatic exotic flowers he had loved.

She was tired. It was muscle fatigue from stress, she knew; twenty minutes of rest would restore her. Her eyes burned from unaccustomed tears. She leaned her head back against the car seat and closed them.

Susan pulled the car into the airport parking lot and turned off the ignition. “There’s something I want to tell you, Leisha.”

Leisha opened her eyes. “About the will?”

Susan smiled tightly. “No. You really don’t have any problems with how he divided the estate, do you? It seems to you reasonable. But that’s not it. The research team from Biotech and Chicago Medical has finished its analysis of Bernie Kuhn’s brain.”

Leisha turned to face Susan. She was startled by the complexity of Susan’s expression. Determination, and satisfaction, and anger, and something else Leisha could not name.

Susan said, “We’re going to publish next week, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Security has been unbelievably restricted—no leaks to the popular press. But I want to tell you now, myself, what we found. So you’ll be prepared.”

“Go on,” Leisha said. Her chest felt tight.

“Do you remember when you and the other Sleepless kids took interleukin-1 to see what sleep was like? When you were sixteen?”

“How did you know about that?”

“You kids were watched a lot more closely than you think. Remember the headache you got?”

“Yes.” She and Richard and Tony and Carol and Jeanine . . . after her rejection by the Olympic Committee, Jeanine had never skated again. She was a kindergarten teacher in Butte, Montana.

“Interleukin-1 is what I want to talk about. At least partly. It’s one of a whole group of substances that boost the immune system. They stimulate the production of antibodies, the activity of white blood cells, and a host of other immunoenhancements. Normal people have surges of IL-1 released during the slow-wave phases of sleep: That means that they—we—are getting boosts to the immune system during sleep. One of the questions we researchers asked ourselves twenty-eight years ago was: Will Sleepless kids who don’t get those surges of IL-1 get sick more often?”

“I’ve never been sick,” Leisha said.

“Yes, you have. Chicken pox and three minor colds by the end of your fourth year,” Susan said precisely. “But in general you were all a very healthy lot. So we researchers were left with the alternate theory of sleep-driven immunoenhancement: That the burst of immune activity existed as a counterpart to a greater vulnerability of the body in sleep to disease, probably in some way connected to the fluctuations in body temperature during REM sleep. In other words, sleep caused the immune vulnerability that endogenous pyrogens like IL-1 counteract. Sleep was the problem, immune system enhancements were the solution. Without sleep, there would be no problem. Are you following this?”

“Yes.”

“Of course you are. Stupid question.” Susan brushed her hair off her face. It was going gray at the temples. There was a tiny brown age spot beneath her right ear.

“Over the years we collected thousands—maybe hundreds of thousands—of Single Photon Emission Tomography scans of you and the other kids’ brains, plus endless EEG’s, samples of cerebrospinal fluid, and all the rest of it. But we couldn’t really see inside your brains, really know what’s going on in there. Until Bernie Kuhn hit that embankment.”

“Susan,” Leisha said, “give it to me straight. Without more build-up.”

“You’re not going to age.”

“What?”

“Oh, cosmetically, yes. Gray hair, wrinkles, sags. But the absence of sleep peptides and all the rest of it affects the immune and tissue-restoration systems in ways we don’t understand. Bernie Kuhn had a perfect liver. Perfect lungs, perfect heart, perfect lymph nodes, perfect pancreas, perfect medulla oblongata. Not just healthy, or young—perfect. There’s a tissue regeneration enhancement that clearly derives from the operation of the immune system but is radically different from anything we ever suspected. Organs show no wear and tear—not even the minimal amount expected in a seventeen-year-old. They just repair themselves, perfectly, on and on . . . and on.”

“For how long?” Leisha whispered.

“Who the hell knows? Bernie Kuhn was young—maybe there’s some compensatory mechanism that cuts in at some point and you’ll all just collapse, like an entire fucking gallery of Dorian Grays. But I don’t think so. Neither do I think it can go on forever; no tissue regeneration can do that. But a long, long time.”

Leisha stared at the blurred reflections in the car windshield. She saw her father’s face against the blue satin of his casket, banked with white roses. His heart, unregenerated, had given out.

Susan said, “The future is all speculative at this point. We know that the peptide structures that build up the pressure to sleep in normal people resemble the components of bacterial cell walls. Maybe there’s a connection between sleep and pathogen receptivity. We don’t know. But ignorance never stopped the tabloids. I wanted to prepare you because you’re going to get called supermen, homo perfectus, who-all-knows what. Immortal.”

The two women sat in silence. Finally Leisha said, “I’m going to tell the others. On our datanet. Don’t worry about the security. Kevin Baker designed Groupnet; nobody knows anything we don’t want them to.”

“You’re that well organized already?”

“Yes.”

Susan’s mouth worked. She looked away from Leisha. “We better go in. You’ll miss your flight.”

“Susan . . .”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Susan said, and in her voice Leisha heard the thing she had seen before in Susan’s expression and not been able to name: It was longing.

Tissue regeneration. A long, long time, sang the blood in Leisha’s ears on the flight to Boston. Tissue regeneration. And, eventually: Immortal. No, not that, she told herself severely. Not that. The blood didn’t listen.

“You sure smile a lot,” said the man next to her in first class, a business traveler who had not recognized Leisha. “You coming from a big party in Chicago?”

“No. From a funeral.”

The man looked shocked, then disgusted. Leisha looked out the window at the ground far below. Rivers like micro-circuits, fields like neat index cards. And on the horizon, fluffy white clouds like masses of exotic flower blooms in a conservatory filled with light.

The letter was no thicker than any hard-copy mail, but hard-copy mail addressed by hand to either of them was so rare that Richard was nervous. “It might be explosive.” Leisha looked at the letter on their hall credenza. MS. LIESHA CAMDEN. Block letters, misspelled.

“It looks like a child’s writing,” she said.

Richard stood with head lowered, legs braced apart. But his expression was only weary. “Perhaps deliberately like a child’s. You’d be more open to a child’s writing, they might have figured.”

“ ‘They’ ? Richard, are we getting that paranoid?”

He didn’t flinch from the question. “Yes. For the time being.”

A week earlier the New England Journal of Medicine had published Susan’s careful, sober article. An hour later the broadcast and datanet news had exploded in speculation, drama, outrage, and fear. Leisha and Richard, along with all the Sleepless on the Groupnet, had tracked and charted each of four components, looking for a dominant reaction: speculation (“The Sleepless may live for centuries, and this might lead to the following events . . .”); drama (“If a Sleepless marries only Sleepers, he may have lifetime enough for a dozen brides—and several dozen children, a bewildering blended family . . .”); outrage (“Tampering with the law of nature has only brought among us unnatural so-called people who will live with the unfair advantage of time: time to accumulate more kin, more power, more property than the rest of us could ever know . . .”); and fear (“How soon before the Super-race takes over?”).

“They’re all fear, of one kind or another,” Carolyn Rizzolo finally said, and the Groupnet stopped their differentiated tracking.

Leisha was taking the final exams of her last year of law school. Each day comments followed her to the campus, along the corridors and in the classroom; each day she forgot them in the grueling exam sessions, all students reduced to the same status of petitioner to the great university. Afterward, temporarily drained, she walked silently back home to Richard and the Groupnet, aware of the looks of people on the street, aware of her bodyguard Bruce striding between her and them.

“It will calm down,” Leisha said. Richard didn’t answer.

The town of Salt Springs, Texas, passed a local ordinance that no Sleepless could obtain a liquor license, on the grounds that civil rights statutes were built on the “all men were created equal” clause of the Constitution, and Sleepless clearly were not covered. There were no Sleepless within a hundred miles of Salt Springs and no one had applied for a new liquor license there for the past ten years, but the story was picked up by United Press and by Datanet News, and within twenty-four hours heated editorials appeared, on both sides of the issue, across the nation.

More local ordinances appeared. In Pollux, Pennsylvania, the Sleepless could be denied apartment rental on the grounds that their prolonged wakefulness would increase both wear-and-tear on the landlord’s property and utility bills. In Cranston Estates, California, Sleepless were barred from operating twenty-four-hour businesses: “unfair competition.” Iroquois County, New York, barred them from serving on county juries, arguing that a jury containing Sleepless, with their skewed idea of time, did not constitute “a jury of one’s peers.”

“All those statutes will be thrown out in superior courts,” Leisha said. “But God! The waste of money and docket time to do it!” A part of her mind noticed that her tone as she said this was Roger Camden’s.

The state of Georgia, in which some sex acts between consenting adults were still a crime, made sex between a Sleepless and a Sleeper a third-degree felony, classing it with bestiality.

Kevin Baker had designed software that scanned the newsnets at high speed, flagged all stories involving discrimination or attacks on Sleepless, and categorized them by type. The files were available on Groupnet. Leisha read through them, then called Kevin. “Can’t you create a parallel program to flag defenses of us? We’re getting a skewed picture.”

“You’re right,” Kevin said, a little startled. “I didn’t think of it.”

“Think of it,” Leisha said, grimly. Richard, watching her, said nothing.

She was most upset by the stories about Sleepless children. Shunning at school, verbal abuse by siblings, attacks by neighborhood bullies, confused resentment from parents who had wanted an exceptional child but had not bargained on one who might live centuries. The school board of Cold River, Iowa, voted to bar Sleepless children from conventional classrooms because their rapid learning “created feelings of inadequacy in others, interfering with their education.” The board made funds available for Sleepless to have tutors at home. There were no volunteers among the teaching staff. Leisha started spending as much time on Groupnet with the kids, talking to them all night long, as she did studying for her bar exams, scheduled for July.

Stella Bevington stopped using her modem.

Kevin’s second program catalogued editorials urging fairness towards Sleepless. The school board of Denver set aside funds for a program in which gifted children, including the Sleepless, could use their talents and build teamwork through tutoring even younger children. Rive Beau, Louisiana, elected Sleepless Danielle du Cherney to the City Council, although Danielle was twenty-two and technically too young to qualify. The prestigious medical research firm of Halley-Hall gave much publicity to their hiring of Christopher Amren, a Sleepless with a Ph.D. in cellular physics.

Dora Clarq, a Sleepless in Dallas, opened a letter addressed to her and a plastic explosive blew off her arm.

Leisha and Richard stared at the envelope on the hall credenza. The paper was thick, cream-colored, but not expensive: the kind of paper made of bulky newsprint dyed the shade of vellum. There was no return address. Richard called Liz Bishop, a Sleepless who was majoring in Criminal Justice in Michigan. He had never spoken with her before—neither had Leisha—but she came on Groupnet immediately and told them how to open it, or she could fly up and do it if they preferred. Richard and Leisha followed her directions for remote detonation in the basement of the townhouse. Nothing blew up. When the letter was open, they took it out and read it:

Dear Ms. Camden,

You been pretty good to me and I’m sorry to do this but I quit. They are making it pretty hot for me at the union not officially but you know how it is. If I was you I wouldn’t go to the union for another bodyguard I’d try to find one privately. But be careful. Again I’m sorry but I have to live too.

Bruce

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Leisha said. “The two of us getting all this equipment, spending hours on this set-up so an explosive won’t detonate . . .”

“It’s not as if I at least had a whole lot else to do,” Richard said. Since the wave of anti-Sleepless sentiment, all but two of his marine-consultant clients, vulnerable to the marketplace and thus to public opinion, had canceled their accounts.

Groupnet, still up on Leisha’s terminal, shrilled in emergency override. Leisha got there first. It was Tony.

“Leisha. I’ll need your legal help, if you’ll give it. They’re trying to fight me on Sanctuary. Please fly down here.”

Sanctuary was raw brown gashes in the late-spring earth. It was situated in the Allegheny Mountains of southern New York State, old hills rounded by age and covered with pine and hickory. A superb road led from the closest town, Belmont, to Sanctuary. Low, maintenance-free buildings, whose design was plain but graceful, stood in various stages of completion. Jennifer Sharifi, looking strained, met Leisha and Richard. “Tony wants to talk to you, but first he asked me to show you both around.”

“What’s wrong?” Leisha asked quietly. She had never met Jennifer before but no Sleepless looked like that—pinched, spent, weary—unless the stress level was enormous.

Jennifer didn’t try to evade the question. “Later. First look at Sanctuary. Tony respects your opinion enormously, Leisha; he wants you to see everything.”

The dormitories each held fifty, with communal rooms for cooking, dining, relaxing, and bathing, and a warren of separate offices and studios and labs for work. “We’re calling them ‘dorms’ anyway, despite the etymology,” Jennifer said, trying to smile. Leisha glanced at Richard. The smile was a failure.

She was impressed, despite herself, with the completeness of Tony’s plans for lives that would be both communal and intensely private. There was a gym, a small hospital—“By the end of next year, we’ll have eighteen AMA-certified doctors, you know, and four are thinking of coming here”—a daycare facility, a school, an intensive-crop farm. “Most of our food will come in from the outside, of course. So will most people’s jobs, although they’ll do as much of them as possible from here, over datanets. We’re not cutting ourselves off from the world—only creating a safe place from which to trade with it.” Leisha didn’t answer.

Apart from the power facilities, self-supported Y-energy, she was most impressed with the human planning. Tony had Sleepless interested from virtually every field they would need both to care for themselves and to deal with the outside world. “Lawyers and accountants come first,” Jennifer said. “That’s our first line of defense in safeguarding ourselves. Tony recognizes that most modern battles for power are fought in the courtroom and boardroom.”

But not all. Last, Jennifer showed them the plans for physical defense. She explained them with a mixture of defiance and pride: Every effort had been made to stop attackers without hurting them. Electronic surveillance completely circled the 150 square miles Jennifer had purchased—some counties were smaller than that, Leisha thought, dazed. When breached, a force field a half-mile within the E-gate activated, delivering electric shocks to anyone on foot—“But only on the outside of the field. We don’t want any of our kids hurt.” Unmanned penetration by vehicles or robots was identified by a system that located all moving metal above a certain mass within Sanctuary. Any moving metal that did not carry a special signaling device designed by Donna Pospula, a Sleepless who had patented important electronic components, was suspect.

“Of course, we’re not set up for an air attack or an outright army assault,” Jennifer said. “But we don’t expect that. Only the haters in self-motivated hate.” Her voice sagged.

Leisha touched the hard-copy of the security plans with one finger. They troubled her. “If we can’t integrate ourselves into the world . . . free trade should imply free movement.”

“Yeah. Well,” Jennifer said, such an uncharacteristic Sleepless remark—both cynical and inarticulate—that Leisha looked up. “I have something to tell you, Leisha.”

“What?”

“Tony isn’t here.”

“Where is he?”

“In Allegheny County jail. It’s true we’re having zoning battles about Sanctuary—zoning! In this isolated spot! But this is something else, something that just happened this morning. Tony’s been arrested for the kidnapping of Timmy DeMarzo.”

The room wavered. “FBI?”

“Yes.”

“How . . . how did they find out?”

“Some agent eventually cracked the case. They didn’t tell us how. Tony needs a lawyer, Leisha. Dana Monteiro has already agreed, but Tony wants you.”

“Jennifer—I don’t even take the bar exams until July!”

“He says he’ll wait. Dana will act as his lawyer in the meantime. Will you pass the bar?”

“Of course. But I already have a job lined up with Morehouse, Kennedy, & Anderson in New York—” She stopped. Richard was looking at her hard, Jennifer gazing down at the floor. Leisha said quietly, “What will he plead?”

“Guilty,” Jennifer said, “with—what is it called legally? Extenuating circumstances.”

Leisha nodded. She had been afraid Tony would want to plead not guilty: more lies, subterfuge, ugly politics. Her mind ran swiftly over extenuating circumstances, precedents, tests to precedents . . . . They could use Clements v.Voy . . .

“Dana is at the jail now,” Jennifer said. “Will you drive in with me?”

“Yes.”

In Belmont, the county seat, they were not allowed to see Tony. Dana Monteiro, as his attorney, could go in and out freely. Leisha, not officially an attorney at all, could go nowhere. This was told them by a man in the D.A.’s office whose face stayed immobile while he spoke to them, and who spat on the ground behind their shoes when they turned to leave, even though this left him with a smear of spittle on his courthouse floor.

Richard and Leisha drove their rental car to the airport for the flight back to Boston. On the way Richard told Leisha he was leaving her. He was moving to Sanctuary, now, even before it was functional, to help with the planning and building.

She stayed most of the time in her townhouse, studying ferociously for the bar exams or checking on the Sleepless children through Groupnet. She had not hired another bodyguard to replace Bruce, which made her reluctant to go outside very much; the reluctance in turn made her angry with herself. Once or twice a day she scanned Kevin’s electronic news clippings.

There were signs of hope. The New York Times ran an editorial, widely reprinted on the electronic news services:

PROSPERITY AND HATRED:

A LOGIC CURVE WE’D RATHER NOT SEE

The United States has never been a country that much values calm, logic, rationality. We have, as a people, tended to label these things “cold.” We have, as a people, tended to admire feeling and action: We exalt in our stories and our memorials, not the creation of the Constitution but its defense at Iwo Jima; not the intellectual achievements of a Stephen Hawking but the heroic passion of a Charles Lindbergh; not the inventors of the monorails and computers that unite us but the composers of the angry songs of rebellion that divide us.

A peculiar aspect of this phenomenon is that it grows stronger in times of prosperity. The better off our citizenry, the greater their contempt for the calm reasoning that got them there, and the more passionate their indulgence in emotion. Consider, in the last century, the gaudy excesses of the Roaring Twenties and the anti-establishment contempt of the sixties. Consider, in our own century, the unprecedented prosperity brought about by Y-energy—and then consider that Kenzo Yagai, except to his followers, was seen as a greedy and bloodless logician, while our national adulation goes to neo-nihilist writer Stephen Castelli, to “feelie” actress Brenda Foss, and to daredevil gravity-well diver Jim Morse Luter.

But most of all, as you ponder this phenomenon in your Y-energy houses, consider the current outpouring of irrational feeling directed at the “Sleepless” since the publication of the joint findings of the Biotech Institute and the Chicago Medical School concerning Sleepless tissue regeneration.

Most of the Sleepless are intelligent. Most of them are calm, if you define that much-maligned word to mean directing one’s energies into solving problems rather than to emoting about them. (Even Pulitzer Prize winner Carolyn Rizzolo gave us a stunning play of ideas, not of passions run amuck.) All of them show a natural bent toward achievement, a bent given a decided boost by the one-third more time in their days to achieve in. Their achievements lie, for the most part, in logical fields rather than emotional ones: Computers. Law. Finance. Physics. Medical research. They are rational, orderly, calm, intelligent, cheerful, young, and possibly very long-lived.

And, in our United States of unprecedented prosperity, increasingly hated.

Does the hatred that we have seen flower so fully over the last few months really grow, as many claim, from the “unfair advantage” the Sleepless have over the rest of us in securing jobs, promotions, money, success? Is it really envy over the Sleepless’ good fortune? Or does it come from something more pernicious, rooted in our tradition of shoot-from-the-hip American action: Hatred of the logical, the calm, the considered? Hatred in fact of the superior mind?

If so, perhaps we should think deeply about the founders of this country: Jefferson, Washington, Paine, Adams—inhabitants of the Age of Reason, all. These men created our orderly and balanced system of laws precisely to protect the property and achievements created by the individual efforts of balanced and rational minds. The Sleepless may be our severest internal test yet of our own sober belief in law and order. No, the Sleepless were not “created equal,” but our attitudes toward them should be examined with a care equal to our soberest jurisprudence. We may not like what we learn about our own motives, but our credibility as a people may depend on the rationality and intelligence of the examination.

Both have been in short supply in the public reaction to last month’s research findings.

Law is not theater. Before we write laws reflecting gaudy and dramatic feelings, we must be very sure we understand the difference.

Leisha hugged herself, gazing in delight at the screen, smiling. She called the New York Times: Who had written the editorial? The receptionist, cordial when she answered the phone, grew brusque. The Times was not releasing that information, “prior to internal investigation.”

It could not dampen her mood. She whirled around the apartment, after days of sitting at her desk or screen. Delight demanded physical action. She washed dishes, picked up books. There were gaps in the furniture patterns where Richard had taken pieces that belonged to him; a little quieter now, she moved the furniture to close the gaps.

Susan Melling called to tell her about the Times editorial; they talked warmly for a few minutes. When Susan hung up, the phone rang again.

“Leisha? Your voice still sounds the same. This is Stewart Sutter.”

“Stewart.” She had not seen him for years. Their romance had lasted two years and then dissolved, not from any painful issue so much as from the press of both their studies. Standing by the comm terminal, hearing his voice, Leisha suddenly felt again his hands on her breasts in the cramped dormitory bed: All those years before she had found a good use for a bed. The phantom hands became Richard’s hands, and a sudden pain pierced her.

“Listen,” Stewart said, “I’m calling because there’s some information I think you should know. You take your bar exams next week, right? And then you have a tentative job with Morehouse, Kennedy, & Anderson.”

“How do you know all that, Stewart?”

“Men’s room gossip. Well, not as bad as that. But the New York legal community—that part of it, anyway—is smaller than you think. And, you’re a pretty visible figure.”

“Yes,” Leisha said neutrally.

“Nobody has the slightest doubt you’ll be called to the bar. But there is some doubt about the job with Morehouse, Kennedy. You’ve got two senior partners, Alan Morehouse and Seth Brown, who have changed their minds since this . . . flap. ‘Adverse publicity for the firm,’ ‘turning law into a circus,’ blah blah blah. You know the drill. But you’ve also got two powerful champions, Ann Carlyle and Michael Kennedy, the old man himself. He’s quite a mind. Anyway, I wanted you to know all this so you can recognize exactly what the situation is and know whom to count on in the in-fighting.”

“Thank you,” Leisha said. “Stew . . . why do you care if I get it or not? Why should it matter to you?”

There was a silence on the other end of the phone. Then Stewart said, very low, “We’re not all noodleheads out here, Leisha. Justice does still matter to some of us. So does achievement.”

Light rose in her, a bubble of buoyant light.

Stewart said, “You have a lot of support here for that stupid zoning fight over Sanctuary, too. You might not realize that, but you do. What the Parks Commission crowd is trying to pull is . . . but they’re just being used as fronts. You know that. Anyway, when it gets as far as the courts, you’ll have all the help you need.”

“Sanctuary isn’t my doing. At all.”

“No? Well, I meant the plural you.”

“Thank you. I mean that. How are you doing?”

“Fine. I’m a daddy now.”

“Really! Boy or girl?”

“Girl. A beautiful little bitch, drives me crazy. I’d like you to meet my wife sometime, Leisha.”

“I’d like that,” Leisha said.

She spent the rest of the night studying for her bar exams. The bubble stayed with her. She recognized exactly what it was: joy.

It was going to be all right. The contract, unwritten, between her and her society—Kenzo Yagai’s society, Roger Camden’s society—would hold. With dissent and strife and yes, some hatred: She suddenly thought of Tony’s beggars in Spain, furious at the strong because they themselves were not. Yes. But it would hold.

She believed that.

She did.

7

Leisha took her bar exams in July. They did not seem hard to her. Afterward three classmates, two men and a woman, made a fakely casual point of talking to Leisha until she had climbed safely into a taxi whose driver obviously did not recognize her, or stop signs. The three were all Sleepers. A pair of undergraduates, clean-shaven blond men with the long faces and pointless arrogance of rich stupidity, eyed Leisha and sneered. Leisha’s female classmate sneered back.

Leisha had a flight to Chicago the next morning. Alice was going to join her there. They had to clean out the big house on the lake, dispose of Roger’s personal property, put the house on the market. Leisha had had no time to do it earlier.

She remembered her father in the conservatory, wearing an ancient flat-topped hat he had picked up somewhere, potting orchids and jasmine and passion flowers.

When the doorbell rang she was startled; she almost never had visitors. Eagerly, she turned on the outside camera—maybe it was Jonathan or Martha, back in Boston to surprise her, to celebrate—why hadn’t she thought before about some sort of celebration?

Richard stood gazing up at the camera. He had been crying.

She tore open the door. Richard made no move to come in. Leisha saw that what the camera had registered as grief was actually something else: tears of rage.

“Tony’s dead.”

Leisha put out her hand, blindly. Richard did not take it.

“They killed him in prison. Not the authorities—the other prisoners. In the recreation yard. Murderers, rapists, looters, scum of the earth—and they thought they had the right to kill him because he was different.”

Now Richard did grab her arm, so hard that something, some bone, shifted beneath the flesh and pressed on a nerve. “Not just different—better. Because he was better, because we all are, we goddamn just don’t stand up and shout it out of some misplaced feeling for their feelings . . . God!”

Leisha pulled her arm free and rubbed it, numb, staring at Richard’s contorted face.

“They beat him to death with a lead pipe. No one even knows how they got a lead pipe. They beat him on the back of the head and they rolled him over and—”

“Don’t!” Leisha said. It came out a whimper.

Richard looked at her. Despite his shouting, his violent grip on her arm, Leisha had the confused impression that this was the first time he had actually seen her. She went on rubbing her arm, staring at him in terror.

He said quietly, “I’ve come to take you to Sanctuary, Leisha. Dan Walcott and Vernon Bulriss are in the car outside. The three of us will carry you out, if necessary. But you’re coming. You see that, don’t you? You’re not safe here, with your high profile and your spectacular looks—you’re a natural target if anyone is. Do we have to force you? Or do you finally see for yourself that we have no choice—the bastards have left us no choice—except Sanctuary?”

Leisha closed her eyes. Tony, at fourteen, at the beach. Tony, his eyes ferocious and alight, the first to reach out his hand for the glass of interleukin-1. Beggars in Spain.

“I’ll come.”

She had never known such anger. It scared her, coming in bouts throughout the long night, receding but always returning again. Richard held her in his arms, sitting with their backs against the wall of her library, and his holding made no difference at all. In the living room Dan and Vernon talked in low voices.

Sometimes the anger erupted in shouting, and Leisha heard herself and thought I don’t know you. Sometimes it became crying, sometimes talking about Tony, about all of them. Not the shouting nor the crying nor the talking eased her at all.

Planning did, a little. In a cold dry voice she didn’t recognize, Leisha told Richard about the trip to close the house in Chicago. She had to go; Alice was already there. If Richard and Dan and Vernon put Leisha on the plane, and Alice met her at the other end with union bodyguards, she should be safe enough. Then she would change her return ticket from Boston to Belmont and drive with Richard to Sanctuary.

“People are already arriving,” Richard said. “Jennifer Sharifi is organizing it, greasing the Sleeper suppliers with so much money they can’t resist. What about this townhouse here, Leisha? Your furniture and terminal and clothes?”

Leisha looked around her familiar office. Law books lined the walls, red and green and brown, although most of the same information was on-line. A coffee cup rested on a print-out on the desk. Beside it was the receipt she had requested from the taxi driver this afternoon, a giddy souvenir of the day she had passed her bar exams; she had thought of having it framed. Above the desk was a holographic portrait of Kenzo Yagai.

“Let it rot,” Leisha said.

Richard’s arm tightened around her.

“I’ve never seen you like this,” Alice said, subdued. “It’s more than just clearing out the house, isn’t it?”

“Let’s get on with it,” Leisha said. She yanked a suit from her father’s closet. “Do you want any of this stuff for your husband?”

“It wouldn’t fit.”

“The hats?”

“No,” Alice said. “Leisha—what is it?”

“Let’s just do it!” She yanked all the clothes from Camden’s closet, piled them on the floor, scrawled FOR VOLUNTEER AGENCY on a piece of paper and dropped it on top of the pile. Silently, Alice started adding clothes from the dresser, which already bore a taped paper scrawled ESTATE AUCTION.

The curtains were already down throughout the house; Alice had done that yesterday. She had also rolled up the rugs. Sunset glared redly on the bare wooden floors.

“What about your old room?” Leisha said. “What do you want there?”

“I’ve already tagged it,” Alice said. “A mover will come Thursday.”

“Fine. What else?”

“The conservatory. Sanderson has been watering everything, but he didn’t really know what needed how much, so some of the plants are—”

“Fire Sanderson,” Leisha said curtly. “The exotics can die. Or have them sent to a hospital, if you’d rather. Just watch out for the ones that are poisonous. Come on, let’s do the library.”

Alice sat slowly on a rolled-up rug in the middle of Camden’s bedroom. She had cut her hair; Leisha thought it looked ugly, jagged brown spikes around her broad face. She had also gained more weight. She was starting to look like their mother.

Alice said, “Do you remember the night I told you I was pregnant? Just before you left for Harvard?”

“Let’s do the library!”

“Do you?” Alice said. “For God’s sake, can’t you just once listen to someone else, Leisha? Do you have to be so much like Daddy every single minute?”

“I’m not like Daddy!”

“The hell you’re not. You’re exactly what he made you. But that’s not the point. Do you remember that night?”

Leisha walked over the rug and out the door. Alice simply sat. After a minute Leisha walked back in. “I remember.”

“You were near tears,” Alice said implacably. Her voice was quiet. “I don’t even remember exactly why. Maybe because I wasn’t going to college after all. But I put my arms around you, and for the first time in years—years, Leisha—I felt you really were my sister. Despite all of it—the roaming the halls all night and the show-off arguments with Daddy and the special school and the artificially long legs and golden hair—all that crap. You seemed to need me to hold you. You seemed to need me. You seemed to need.”

“What are you saying?” Leisha demanded. “That you can only be close to someone if they’re in trouble and need you? That you can only be a sister if I was in some kind of pain, open sores running? Is that the bond between you Sleepers? ‘Protect me while I’m unconscious, I’m just as crippled as you are’ ?”

“No,” Alice said. “I’m saying that you could be a sister only if you were in some kind of pain.”

Leisha stared at her. “You’re stupid, Alice.”

Alice said calmly, “I know that. Compared to you, I am. I know that.”

Leisha jerked her head angrily. She felt ashamed of what she had just said, and yet it was true, and they both knew it was true, and anger still lay in her like a dark void, formless and hot. It was the formless part that was the worst. Without shape, there could be no action; without action, the anger went on burning her, choking her.

Alice said, “When I was twelve Susan gave me a dress for our birthday. You were away somewhere, on one of those overnight field trips your fancy progressive school did all the time. The dress was silk, pale blue, with antique lace—very beautiful. I was thrilled, not only because it was beautiful but because Susan had gotten it for me and gotten software for you. The dress was mine. Was, I thought, me.” In the gathering gloom Leisha could barely make out her broad, plain features. ‘The first time I wore it a boy said, ‘Stole your sister’s dress, Alice? Snitched it while she was sleeping?’ Then he laughed like crazy, the way they always did.

“I threw the dress away. I didn’t even explain to Susan, although I think she would have understood. Whatever was yours was yours, and whatever wasn’t yours was yours, too. That’s the way Daddy set it up. The way he hard-wired it into our genes.”

“You, too?” Leisha said. “You’re no different from the other envious beggars?”

Alice stood up from the rug. She did it slowly, leisurely, brushing dust off the back of her wrinkled skirt, smoothing the print fabric. Then she walked over and hit Leisha in the mouth.

“Now do you see me as real?” Alice asked quietly.

Leisha put her hand to her mouth. She felt blood. The phone rang, Camden’s unlisted personal line. Alice walked over, picked it up, listened, and held it calmly out to Leisha. “It’s for you.”

Numb, Leisha took it.

“Leisha? This is Kevin. Listen, something’s happened. Stella Bevington called me, on the phone not Groupnet, I think her parents took away her modem. I picked up the phone and she screamed, ‘This is Stella! They’re hitting me he’s drunk—’ and then the line went dead. Randy’s gone to Sanctuary—hell, they’ve all gone. You’re closest to her, she’s still in Skokie. You better get there fast. Have you got bodyguards you trust?”

“Yes,” Leisha said, although she hadn’t. The anger—finally—took form. “I can handle it.”

“I don’t know how you’ll get her out of there,” Kevin said. “They’ll recognize you, they know she called somebody, they might even have knocked her out . . .”

“I’ll handle it,” Leisha said.

“Handle what?” Alice said.

Leisha faced her. Even though she knew she shouldn’t, she said, “What your people do. To one of ours. A seven-year-old kid who’s getting beaten up by her parents because she’s Sleepless—because she’s better than you are—” She ran down the stairs and out to the rental car she had driven from the airport.

Alice ran right down with her. “Not your car, Leisha. They can trace a rental car just like that. My car.”

Leisha screamed, “If you think you’re—”

Alice yanked open the door of her battered Toyota, a model so old the Y-energy cones weren’t even concealed but hung like drooping jowls on either side. She shoved Leisha into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and rammed herself behind the wheel. Her hands were steady. “Where?”

Blackness swooped over Leisha. She put her head down, as far between her knees as the cramped Toyota would allow. Two—no, three—days since she had eaten. Since the night before the bar exams. The faintness receded, swept over her again as soon as she raised her head.

She told Alice the address in Skokie.

“Stay way in the back,” Alice said. “And there’s a scarf in the glove compartment—put it on. Low, to hide as much of your face as possible.”

Alice had stopped the car along Highway 42. Leisha said, “This isn’t—”

“It’s a union quick-guard place. We have to look like we have some protection, Leisha. We don’t need to tell him anything. I’ll hurry.”

She was out in three minutes with a huge man in a cheap dark suit. He squeezed into the front seat beside Alice and said nothing at all. Alice did not introduce him.

The house was small, a little shabby, with lights on downstairs, none upstairs. The first stars shone in the north, away from Chicago. Alice said to the guard, “Get out of the car and stand here by the car door—no, more in the light—and don’t do anything unless I’m attacked in some way.” The man nodded. Alice started up the walk. Leisha scrambled out of the back seat and caught her sister two-thirds of the way to the plastic front door.

“Alice, what the hell are you doing? I have to—”

“Keep your voice down,” Alice said, glancing at the guard. “Leisha, think. You’ll be recognized. Here, near Chicago, with a Sleepless daughter—these people have looked at your picture in magazines for years. They’ve watched long-range holovids of you. They know you. They know you’re going to be a lawyer. Me they’ve never seen. I’m nobody.”

“Alice—”

“For Chrissake, get back in the car!” Alice hissed, and pounded on the front door.

Leisha drew off the walk, into the shadow of a willow tree. A man opened the door. His face was completely blank.

Alice said, “Child Protection Agency. We got a call from a little girl, this number. Let me in.”

“There’s no little girl here.”

“This is an emergency, priority one,” Alice said. “Child Protection Act 186. Let me in!”

The man, still blank-faced, glanced at the huge figure by the car. “You got a search warrant?”

“I don’t need one in a priority-one child emergency. If you don’t let me in, you’re going to have legal snarls like you never bargained for.”

Leisha clamped her lips together. No one would believe that, it was legal gobbledygook . . . . Her lip throbbed where Alice had hit her.

The man stood aside to let Alice enter.

The guard started forward. Leisha hesitated, then let him. He entered with Alice.

Leisha waited, alone, in the dark.

In three minutes they were out, the guard carrying a child. Alice’s broad face gleamed pale in the porch light. Leisha sprang forward, opened the car door, and helped the guard ease the child inside. The guard was frowning, a slow puzzled frown shot with wariness.

Alice said, “Here. This is an extra hundred dollars. To get back to the city by yourself.”

“Hey . . .” the guard said, but he took the money. He stood looking after them as Alice pulled away.

“He’ll go straight to the police,” Leisha said despairingly. “He has to, or risk his union membership.”

“I know,” Alice said. “But by that time we’ll be out of the car.”

“Where?”

“At the hospital,” Alice said.

“Alice, we can’t—” Leisha didn’t finish. She turned to the back seat.”Stella? Are you conscious?”

“Yes,” said the small voice.

Leisha groped until her fingers found the rear-seat illuminator. Stella lay stretched out on the back seat, her face distorted with pain. She cradled her left arm in her right. A single bruise colored her face, above the left eye.

“You’re Leisha Camden,” the child said, and started to cry.

“Her arm’s broken,” Alice said.

“Honey, can you . . .” Leisha’s throat felt thick, she had trouble getting the words out “. . . can you hold on till we get you to a doctor?”

“Yes,” Stella said. “Just don’t take me back there!”

“We won’t,” Leisha said. “Ever.” She glanced at Alice and saw Tony’s face.

Alice said, “There’s a community hospital about ten miles south of here.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was there once. Drug overdose,” Alice said briefly. She drove hunched over the wheel, with the face of someone thinking furiously. Leisha thought, too, trying to see a way around the legal charge of kidnapping. They probably couldn’t say the child came willingly: Stella would undoubtedly cooperate but at her age and in her condition she was probably non sui juris, her word would have no legal weight . . .

“Alice, we can’t even get her into the hospital without insurance information. Verifiable on-line.”

“Listen,” Alice said, not to Leisha but over her shoulder, toward the back seat, “here’s what we’re going to do, Stella. I’m going to tell them you’re my daughter and you fell off a big rock you were climbing while we stopped for a snack at a roadside picnic area. We’re driving from California to Philadelphia to see your grandmother. Your name is Jordan Watrous and you’re five years old. Got that, honey?”

“I’m seven,” Stella said. “Almost eight.”

“You’re a very large five. Your birthday is March 23. Can you do this, Stella?”

“Yes,” the little girl said. Her voice was stronger.

Leisha stared at Alice. “Can you do this?”

“Of course I can,” Alice said. “I’m Roger Camden’s daughter.”

Alice half-carried, half-supported Stella into the emergency room of the small community hospital. Leisha watched from the car: the short stocky woman, the child’s thin body with the twisted arm. Then she drove Alice’s car to the farthest corner of the parking lot, under the dubious cover of a skimpy maple, and locked it. She tied the scarf more securely around her face.

Alice’s license plate number, and her name, would be in every police and rental-car databank by now. The medical banks were slower; often they uploaded from local precincts only once a day, resenting the governmental interference in what was still, despite a half-century of battle, a private-sector enterprise. Alice and Stella would probably be all right in the hospital. Probably. But Alice could not rent another car.

Leisha could.

But the data file that would flash to rental agencies on Alice Camden Watrous might or might not include that she was Leisha Camden’s twin.

Leisha looked at the rows of cars in the lot. A flashy luxury Chrysler, an Ikeda van, a row of middle-class Toyotas and Mercedes, a vintage ’99 Cadillac—she could imagine the owner’s face if that were missing—ten or twelve cheap runabouts, a hovercar with the uniformed driver asleep at the wheel. And a battered farm truck.

Leisha walked over to the truck. A man sat at the wheel, smoking. She thought of her father.

“Hello,” Leisha said.

The man rolled down his window but didn’t answer. He had greasy brown hair.

“See that hovercar over there?” Leisha said. She made her voice sound young, high. The man glanced at it indifferently; from this angle you couldn’t see that the driver was asleep. “That’s my bodyguard. He thinks I’m in the hospital, the way my father told me to, getting this lip looked at.” She could feel her mouth swollen from Alice’s blow.

“So?”

Leisha stamped her foot. “So I don’t want to be inside. He’s a shit and so’s Daddy. I want out. I’ll give you four thousand bank credits for your truck. Cash.”

The man’s eyes widened. He tossed away his cigarette, looked again at the hovercar. The driver’s shoulders were broad, and the car was within easy screaming distance.

“All nice and legal,” Leisha said, and tried to smirk. Her knees felt watery.

“Let me see the cash.”

Leisha backed away from the truck, to where he could not reach her. She took the money from her arm clip. She was used to carrying a lot of cash; there had always been Bruce, or someone like Bruce. There had always been safety.

“Get out of the truck on the other side,” Leisha said, “and lock the door behind you. Leave the keys on the seat, where I can see them from here. Then I’ll put the money on the roof where you can see it.”

The man laughed, a sound like gravel pouring. “Regular little Dabney Engh, aren’t you? Is that what they teach you society debs at your fancy schools?”

Leisha had no idea who Dabney Engh was. She waited, watching the man try to think of a way to cheat her, and tried to hide her contempt. She thought of Tony.

“All right,” he said, and slid out of the truck.

“Lock the door!”

He grinned, opened the door again, locked it. Leisha put the money on the roof, yanked open the driver’s door, clambered in, locked the door, and powered up the window. The man laughed. She put the key into the ignition, started the truck, and drove toward the street. Her hands trembled.

She drove slowly around the block twice. When she came back, the man was gone, and the driver of the hovercar was still asleep. She had wondered if the man would wake him, out of sheer malice, but he had not. She parked the truck and waited.

An hour and a half later Alice and a nurse wheeled Stella out of the Emergency Entrance. Leisha leaped out of the truck and yelled, “Coming, Alice!” waving both her arms. It was too dark to see Alice’s expression; Leisha could only hope that Alice showed no dismay at the battered truck, that she had not told the nurse to expect a red car.

Alice said, “This is Julie Bergadon, a friend that I called while you were setting Jordan’s arm.” The nurse nodded, uninterested. The two women helped Stella into the high truck cab; there was no back seat. Stella had a cast on her arm and looked drugged.

“How?” Alice said as they drove off.

Leisha didn’t answer. She was watching a police hovercar land at the other end of the parking lot. Two officers got out and strode purposefully towards Alice’s locked car under the skimpy maple.

“My God,” Alice said. For the first time, she sounded frightened.

“They won’t trace us,” Leisha said. “Not to this truck. Count on it.”

“Leisha.” Alice’s voice spiked with fear. “Stella’s asleep.”

Leisha glanced at the child, slumped against Alice’s shoulder. “No, she’s not. She’s unconscious from painkillers.”

“Is that all right? Normal? For . . . her?”

“We can black out. We can even experience substance-induced sleep.” Tony and she and Richard and Jeanine in the midnight woods . . . “Didn’t you know that, Alice?”

“No.”

“We don’t know very much about each other, do we?”

They drove south in silence. Finally Alice said, “Where are we going to take her, Leisha?”

“I don’t know. Any one of the Sleepless would be the first place the police would check—”

“You can’t risk it. Not the way things are,” Alice said. She sounded weary. “But all my friends are in California. I don’t think we could drive this rust bucket that far before getting stopped.”

“It wouldn’t make it anyway.”

“What should we do?”

“Let me think.”

At an expressway exit stood a pay phone. It wouldn’t be data-shielded, as Groupnet was. Would Kevin’s open line be tapped? Probably.

There was no doubt the Sanctuary line would be.

Sanctuary. All of them going there or already there, Kevin had said. Holed up, trying to pull the worn Allegheny Mountains around them like a safe little den. Except for the children like Stella, who could not.

Where? With whom?

Leisha closed her eyes. The Sleepless were out; the police would find Stella within hours. Susan Melling? But she had been Alice’s all-too-visible stepmother, and was co-beneficiary of Camden’s will; they would question her almost immediately. It couldn’t be anyone traceable to Alice. It could only be a Sleeper that Leisha knew, and trusted, and why should anyone at all fit that description? Why should she risk so much on anyone who did? She stood a long time in the dark phone kiosk. Then she walked to the truck. Alice was asleep, her head thrown back against the seat. A tiny line of drool ran down her chin. Her face was white and drained in the bad light from the kiosk. Leisha walked back to the phone.

“Stewart? Stewart Sutter?”

“Yes?”

“This is Leisha Camden. Something has happened.” She told the story tersely, in bald sentences. Stewart did not interrupt.

“Leisha—” Stewart said, and stopped.

“I need help, Stewart.”

“I’ll help you, Alice.”

“I don’t need your help.” A wind whistled over the dark field beside the kiosk and Leisha shivered. She heard in the wind the thin keen of a beggar. In the wind, in her own voice.

“All right,” Stewart said, “this is what we’ll do. I have a cousin in Ripley, New York, just over the state line from Pennsylvania on the route you’ll be driving east. It has to be in New York, I’m licensed in New York. Take the little girl there. I’ll call my cousin and tell her you’re coming. She’s an elderly woman, was quite an activist in her youth, her name is Janet Patterson. The town is—”

“What makes you so sure she’ll get involved? She could go to jail. And so could you.”

“She’s been in jail so many times you wouldn’t believe it. Political protests going all the way back to Vietnam. But no one’s going to jail. I’m now your attorney of record, I’m privileged. I’m going to get Stella declared a ward of the state. That shouldn’t be too hard with the hospital records you established in Skokie. Then she can be transferred to a foster home in New York, I know just the place, people who are fair and kind. Then Alice—”

“She’s resident in Illinois. You can’t—”

“Yes, I can. Since those research findings about the Sleepless life span have come out, legislators have been railroaded by stupid constituents scared or jealous or just plain angry. The result is a body of so-called ‘law’ riddled with contradictions, absurdities, and loopholes. None of it will stand in the long run—or at least I hope not—but in the meantime it can all be exploited. I can use it to create the most goddamn convoluted case for Stella that anybody ever saw, and in meantime she won’t be returned home. But that won’t work for Alice—she’ll need an attorney licensed in Illinois.”

“We have one,” Leisha said. “Candace Holt.”

“No, not a Sleepless. Trust me on this, Leisha. I’ll find somebody good. There’s a man in—are you crying?”

“No,” Leisha said, crying.

“Ah, God,” Stewart said. “Bastards. I’m sorry all this happened, Leisha.”

“Don’t be,” Leisha said.

When she had directions to Stewart’s cousin, she walked back to the truck. Alice was still asleep, Stella still unconscious. Leisha closed the truck door as quietly as possible. The engine balked and roared, but Alice didn’t wake. There was a crowd of people with them in the narrow and darkened cab: Stewart Sutter, Tony Indivino, Susan Melling, Kenzo Yagai, Roger Camden.

To Stewart Sutter she said, You called to inform me about the situation at Morehouse, Kennedy. You are risking your career and your cousin for Stella. And you stand to gain nothing. Like Susan telling me in advance about Bernie Kuhn’s brain. Susan, who lost her life to Daddy’s dream and regained it by her own strength. A contract without consideration for each side is not a contract: Every first-year student knows that.

To Kenzo Yagai she said, Trade isn’t always linear. You missed that. If Stewart gives me something, and I give Stella something, and ten years from now Stella is a different person because of that and gives something to someone else as yet unknown—it’s an ecology. An ecology of trade, yes, each niche needed, even if they’re not contractually bound. Does a horse need a fish? Yes.

To Tony she said, Yes, there are beggars in Spain who trade nothing, give nothing, do nothing. But there are more than beggars in Spain. Withdraw from the beggars, you withdraw from the whole damn country. And you withdraw from the possibility of the ecology of help. That’s what Alice wanted, all those years ago in her bedroom. Pregnant, scared, angry, jealous, she wanted to help me, and I wouldn’t let her because I didn’t need it. But I do now. And she did then. Beggars need to help as well as be helped.

And finally, there was only Daddy left. She could see him, bright-eyed, holding thick-leaved exotic flowers in his strong hands. To Camden she said, You were wrong. Alice is special. Oh, Daddy—the specialness of Alice! You were wrong.

As soon as she thought this, lightness filled her. Not the buoyant bubble of joy, not the hard clarity of examination, but something else: sunshine, soft through the conservatory glass, where two children ran in and out. She suddenly felt light herself, not buoyant but translucent, a medium for the sunshine to pass clear through, on its way to somewhere else.

She drove the sleeping woman and the wounded child through the night, east, toward the state line.

GOLD

Isaac Asimov

An Open Letter to the Late John Wood Campbell, Jr.

Dear John:

Fifty years ago, this month, you published my story “Nightfall" in the September 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The story was mine, but the idea was yours. For several years, I wrote stories under your kindly and gentle, but steel-firm guidance, and I owe you all that has happened to me since.

Twenty years ago, you died, at the age of 61. I have missed you every day of those 20 years, and I wish you could have lived to see this golden anniversary of ours. It was possible. You would have been only 81.

But alas, I must celebrate it alone, and so I have written a story for you, John. I had to do it without your help, which is a terrible disadvantage, but I have done my best. Thank you once again, John, for everything, and in honor of the anniversary, I call the story:

GOLD

Jonas Willard looked from side to side and tapped his baton on the stand before him.

He said, “Understood now? This is just a practice scene, designed to find out if we know what we’re doing. We’ve gone through this enough times so that I expect a professional performance now. Get ready. All of you get ready.”

He looked again from side to side. There was a person at each of the voice-recorders, and there were three others working the image projection. A seventh was for the music and an eighth for the all important background. Others waited to one side for their turn.

Willard said, “All right now. Remember this old man has spent his entire adult life as a tyrant. He is accustomed to having everyone jump at his slightest word, of having everyone tremble at his frown. That is all gone now but he doesn’t know it. He faces his daughter whom he thinks of only as a bent-headed obsequious girl who will do anything he says, and he cannot believe that it is an imperious queen that he now faces. So let’s have the King.”

Lear appeared. Tall, white hair and beard, somewhat disheveled, eyes sharp and piercing.

Willard said, “Not bent. Not bent. He’s eighty years old but he doesn’t think of himself as old. Not now. Straight. Every inch a king.” The image was adjusted. “That’s right. And the voice has to be strong. No quavering. Not now. Right?”

“Right, chief,” said the Lear voice-recorder, nodding.

“All right. The Queen.”

And there she was, almost as tall as Lear, standing straight and rigid as a statue, her draped clothing in fine array, nothing out of place. Her beauty was as cold and unforgiving as ice.

“And the Fool.”

A little fellow, thin and fragile, like a frightened teenager but with a face too old for a teenager and with a sharp look in eyes that seemed so large that they threatened to devour his face.

“Good,” said Willard. “Be ready for Albany. He comes in pretty soon. Begin the scene.” He tapped the podium again, took a quick glance at the marked-up play before him and said, “Lear!” and his baton pointed to the Lear voice-recorder moving gently to mark the speech cadence that he wanted created.

Lear says, “How now, daughter? What makes that frontlet on? Methinks you are too much o’ late i’ th’ frown.”

The Fool’s thin voice, fifelike, piping, interrupts, “Thou wast a pretty fellow when thou hadst no need to care for her frowning—”

Goneril. the Queen, turns slowly to face the Clown as he speaks, her eyes turning momentarily into balls of lurid light—doing it so momentarily that those watching caught the impression rather than viewed the fact. The Fool completes his speech in gathering fright and backs his way behind Lear in a blind search for protection against the searing glance.

Goneril proceeds to tell Lear the facts of life and there is the faint crackling of thin ice as she speaks, while the music plays in soft discords, barely heard.

Nor are Goneril’s demands so out of line, for she wants an orderly court and there couldn’t be one as long as Lear still thought of himself as tyrant. But Lear is in no mood to recognize reason. He breaks into a passion and begins railing.

Albany enters. He is Goneril’s consort—round-faced, innocent, eyes looking about in wonder. What is happening? He is completely drowned out by his dominating wife and by his raging father-in-law. It is at this point that Lear breaks into one of the great piercing denunciations in all of literature. He is overreacting. Goneril has not as yet done anything to deserve this, but Lear knows no restraint. He says:

“Hear, Nature, hear! dear goddess, hear!

Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend

To make this creature fruitful.

Into her womb convey sterility;

Dry up in her the organs of increase; And from her derogate body never spring

A babe to honour her! If she must teem,

Create her child of spleen, that it may live

And be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her.

Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth.

With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks.

Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits

To laughter and contempt, that she may feel

How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, it is

To have a thankless child!”

The voice-recorder strengthened Lear’s voice for this speech, gave it a distant hiss, his body became taller and somehow less substantial as though it had been converted into a vengeful Fury.

As for Goneril, she remained untouched throughout, never flinching, never receding, but her beautiful face, without any change that could be described seemed to accumulate evil so that by the end of Lear’s curse, she had the appearance of an archangel still, but an archangel ruined. All possible pity had been wiped out of the countenance, leaving behind only a devil’s dangerous magnificence.

The Fool remained behind Lear throughout, shuddering. Albany was the very epitome of confusion, asking useless questions, seeming to want to step between the two antagonists and clearly afraid to do so.

Willard tapped his baton and said, “All right. It’s been recorded and I want you all to watch the scene. He lifted his baton high and the synthesizer at the rear of the set began what could only be called the instant replay.

It was watched in silence, and Willard said, “It was good, but I think you’ll grant it was not good enough. I’m going to ask you all to listen to me, so that I can explain what we’re trying to do. Computerized theater is not new, as you all know. Voices and images have been built up to beyond what human beings can do. You don’t have to break your speechifying in order to breathe; the range and quality of the voices are almost limitless; and the images can change to suit the words and action.

Still, the technique has only been used, so far, for childish purposes. What we intend now is to make the first serious compu-drama the world has ever seen, and nothing will do—for me. at any rate—but to start at the top. I want to do the greatest play written by the greatest playwright in history: King Lear by William Shakespeare.

“I want not a word changed. I want not a word left out. I don’t want to modernize the play. I don’t want to remove the archaisms, because the play, as written, has its glorious music and any change will diminish it. But in that case, how do we have it reach the general public? I don’t mean the students. I don’t mean the intellectuals, I mean everybody. I mean people who’ve never watched Shakespeare before and whose idea of a good play is a slapstick musical. This play is archaic in spots, and people don’t talk in iambic pentameter. They are not even accustomed to hearing it on the stage.

“So we’re going to have to translate the archaic and the unusual. The voices, more than human, will, just by their timbre and changes, interpret the words. The images will shift to reinforce the words.

“Now Goneril’s change in appearance as Lear’s curse proceeded was good. The viewer will gauge the devastating effect it has on her even though her iron will won’t let it show in words. The viewer will therefore feel the devastating effect upon himself, too, even if some of the words Lear uses are strange to him.

“In that connection, we must remember to make the Fool look older with every one of his appearances. He’s a weak, sickly fellow to begin with, broken-hearted over the loss of Cordelia, frightened to death of Goneril and Regan, destroyed by the storm from which Lear, his only protector, can’t protect him—and I mean by that the storm of Lear’s daughter’s as well as of the raging weather. When he slips out of the play in Act HI, Scene VI, it must be made plain that he is about to die. Shakespeare doesn’t say so. so the Fool’s face must say so.

“However, we’ve got to do something about Lear. The voice-recorder was on the right track by having a hissing sound in the voice-track. Lear is spewing venom: he is a man who. having lost power, has no recourse but vile and extreme words. He is a cobra who cannot strike. But I don’t want the hiss noticeable until the right time. What I am more interested in is the background.”

The woman in charge of background was Meg Cathcart. She had been creating backgrounds for as long as the Compu-drama technique had existed.

“What do you want in background?” Cathcart asked, coolly.

“The snake motif.” said Willard. “Give me some of that and there can be less hiss in Lear’s voice. Of course, I don’t want you to show a snake. The too obvious doesn’t work. I want a snake there that people can’t see but that they can feel without quite noting why they feel. I want them to know a snake is there without really knowing it is there, so that it will chill them to the bone, as Lear’s speech should. So when we do it over. Meg. give us a snake that is not a snake.”

“And how do I do that. Jonas?” said Cathcart, making free with his first name. She knew her worth and how essential she was.

He said. “I don’t know. If I did I’d be a backgrounder instead of a lousy director. I only know what I want. You’ve got to supply it. You’ve got to supply sinuosity, the impression of scales. Until we get to one point. Notice when Lear says, ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.’ That is power. The whole speech leads up to that and it is one of the most famous quotes in Shakespeare. And it is sibilant. There is the ‘sh,’ the three s’s in ‘serpent’s’ and in ‘thankless’ and the two unvoiced ‘th’s in ‘tooth’ and ‘thankless.’ That can be hissed. If you keep down the hiss as much as possible in the rest of the speech, you can hiss here, and you should zero in to his face and make it venomous. And for background, the serpent—which, after all, is now referred to in the words—can make its appearance in background. A flash of an open mouth and fangs, fangs—We must have the momentary appearance of fangs as Lear says, ‘a serpent’s tooth.’ ”

Willard felt very tired suddenly. “All right. We’ll try again tomorrow. I want each one of you to go over the entire scene and try to work out the strategy you intend to use. Only please remember that you are not the only ones involved. What you do must match the others, so I’ll encourage you to talk to each other about this—and, most of all, to listen to me because I have no instrument to handle and I alone can see the play as a whole. And if I seem as tyrannical as Lear at his worst in spots, well, that’s my job.”

Willard was approaching the great storm scene, the most difficult portion of this most difficult play, and he felt wrung out. Lear has been cast out by his daughters into a raging storm of wind and rain, with only his Fool for company, and he has gone almost mad at this mistreatment. To him, even the storm is not as bad as his daughters, Willard pointed his baton and Lear appeared. A point in another direction and the Fool was there clinging, disregarded, to Lear’s left leg. Another point and the background came in, with its impression of a storm, of a howling wind, of driving rain, of the crackle of thunder and the flash of lightning.

The storm took over, a phenomenon of nature, but even as it did so, the image of Lear extended and became what seemed mountain-tall. The storm of his emotions matched the storm of the elements, and his voice gave back to the wind every last howl. His body lost substance and wavered with the wind as though he himself were a storm-cloud, contending on an equal basis with the atmospheric fury. Lear, having failed with his daughters, defied the storm to do its worst. He called out in a voice that was far more than human:

“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires.

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts.

Singe my white head! And thou, allshaking thunder.

Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,

Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,

That make ingrateful man.”

The Fool interrupts, his voice shrilling, and making Lear’s defiance the more heroic by contrast. He begs Lear to make his way back to the castle and make peace with his daughters, but Lear doesn’t even hear him. He roars on:

“Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.

I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children.

You owe me no subscription. Then let fall

Your horrible pleasure. Here I stand your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man. . . .”

The Duke of Kent, Lear’s loyal servant (though the King in a fit of rage has banished him) finds Lear and tries to lead him to some shelter. After an interlude in the castle of the Duke of Gloucester, the scene returns to Lear in the storm, and he is brought, or rather dragged, to a hovel.

And then, finally, Lear learns to think of others. He insists that the Fool enter first and then he lingers outside to think (undoubtedly for the first time in his life) of the plight of those who are not kings and courtiers.

His image shrank and the wildness of his face smoothed out. His head was lifted to the rain, and his words seemed detached and to be coming not quite from him, as though he were listening to someone else read the speech. It was, after all, not the old Lear speaking, but a new and better Lear, refined and sharpened by suffering. With an anxious Kent watching, and striving to lead him into the hovel, and with Meg Cathcart managing to work up an impression of beggars merely by producing the fluttering of rags, Lear says:

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are.

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm.

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en

Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

That thou mayst shake the superflux to them

And show the heavens more just.”

“Not bad,” said Wilbur, eventually. “We’re getting the idea. Only, Meg, rags aren’t enough. Can you manage an impression of hollow eyes? Not blind ones. The eyes are there, but sunken in.”

“I think I can do that,” said Cathcart.

It was difficult for Willard to believe. The money spent was greater than expected. The time it had taken was considerably greater than had been expected. And the general weariness was far greater than had been expected. Still, the project was coming to an end.

He had the reconciliation scene to get through—so simple that it would require the most delicate touches. There would be no background, no souped-up voices, no images, for at this point Shakespeare became simple. Nothing beyond simplicity was needed.

Lear was an old man. just an old man. Cordelia, having found him. was a loving daughter, with none of the majesty of Goneril. none of the cruelty of Regan, just softly endearing.

Lear, his madness burned out of him, is slowly beginning to understand the situation. He scarcely recognizes Cordelia at first and thinks he is dead and she is a heavenly spirit. Nor does he recognize the faithful Kent.

When Cordelia tries to bring him back the rest of the way to sanity, he says:

“Pray, do not mock me.

I am a very foolish fond old man. Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less.

And, to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you. and know this man;

Yet I am doubtful; for I am mainly ignorant

What place this is; and all the skills I have

Remembers not these garments; nor I know not

Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me;

For (as I am a man) I think this lady To be my child Cordelia.”

Cordelia tells him she is and he says:

“Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray weep not.

If you have poison for me, I will drink it.

I know you do not love me; for your sisters

Have, as I do remember, done me wrong.

You have some cause, they have not.”

All poor Cordelia can say is “No cause, no cause.”

And eventually. Willard was able to draw a deep breath and say, “We’ve done all we can do. The rest is in the hands of the public.”

It was a year later that Willard, now the most famous man in the entertainment world, met Gregory Laborian. It had come about almost accidentally and largely because of the activities of a mutual friend. Willard was not grateful.

He greeted Laborian with what politeness he could manage and cast a cold eye on the time-strip on the wall.

He said, “I don’t want to seem unpleasant or inhospitable, Mr.—uh—but I’m really a very busy man, and don’t have much time.”

“I’m sure of it. but that’s why I want to see you. Surely, you want to do another compu-drama.”

“Surely I intend to, but,” and Willard smiled dryly, “King Lear is a hard act to follow and I don’t intend to turn out something that will seem like trash in comparison.”

“But what if you never find anything that can match King Lear?”

“I’m sure I never will, but I’ll find something.”

“I have something.”

“Oh?”

“I have a story, a novel, that could be made into a compu-drama.”

“Oh, well. I can’t really deal with items that come in over the transom.”

“I’m not offering you something from a slush pile. The novel has been published and it has been rather highly thought of.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t want to be insulting. But I didn’t recognize your name when you introduced yourself.”

“Laborian. Gregory Laborian.”

“But I still don’t recognize it. I never read anything by you. I never heard of you.”

Laborian sighed. “I wish you were the only one, but you’re not. Still, I could give you a copy of my novel to read.”

Willard shook his head. “That’s kind of you, Mr. Laborian, but I don’t want to mislead you. I have no time to read it. And even if I had the time—I just want you to understand—I don’t have the inclination.”

“I could make it worth your while, Mr. Willard.”

“In what way?”

“I could pay you. I wouldn’t consider it a bribe, merely an offer of money that you would well deserve if you worked with my novel.”

“I don’t think you understand, Mr. Laborian, how much money it takes to make a first-class compu-drama. I take it you’re not a multimillionaire.”

“No, I’m not, but I can pay you a hundred thousand globo-dollars.”

“If that’s a bribe, at least it’s a totally ineffective one. Fora hundred thousand globo-dollars, I couldn’t do a single scene.”

Laborian sighed again. His large brown eyes looked soulful. “I understand, Mr. Willard, but if you’ll just give me a few more minutes—” (for Willard’s eyes were wandering to the time-strip again.)

“Well, five more minutes. That’s all I can manage really.”

“It’s all I need. I’m not offering the money for making the compu-drama. You know, and I know, Mr. Willard, that you can go to any of a dozen people in the country and say you are doing a compu-drama and you’ll get all the money you need. After King Lear, no one will refuse you anything, or even ask you what you plan to do. I’m offering you one hundred thousand globo-dollars for your own use.”

“Then it is a bribe, and that won’t work with me. Good-bye, Mr. Laborian.”

“Wait. I’m not offering you an electronic switch. I don’t suggest that I place my financial card into a slot and that you do so, too, and that a hundred thousand globo-dollars be transferred from my account to yours. I’m talking gold, Mr. Willard.”

Willard had risen from his chair, ready to open the door and usher Laborian out, but now he hesitated. “What do you mean, gold?”

“I mean that I can lay my hands on a hundred thousand globo-dollars of gold, about fifteen pounds’ worth, I think. I may not be a multi-millionaire, but I’m quite well off and I wouldn’t be stealing it. It would be my own money and I am entitled to draw it in gold. There is nothing illegal about it.

What I am offering you is a hundred thousand globo-dollars in five-hundred globo-dollar pieces—two hundred of them. Gold, Mr. Willard.”

Gold! Willard was hesitating. Money, when it was a matter of electronic exchange, meant nothing. There was no feeling of either wealth or of poverty above a certain level. The world was a matter of plastic cards (each keyed to a nucleic acid pattern) and of slots, and all the world transferred, transferred, transferred.

Gold was different. It had a feel. Each piece had a weight. Piled together it had a gleaming beauty. It was wealth one could appreciate and experience. Willard had never even seen a gold coin, let alone felt or hefted one. Two hundred of them!

He didn’t need the money. He was not so sure he didn’t need the gold.

He said, with a kind of shamefaced weakness. “What kind of a novel is it that you are talking about?”

“Science fiction.”

Willard made a face. “I’ve never read science fiction.”

“Then it’s time you expanded your horizons, Mr. Willard. Read mine. If you imagine a gold coin between every two pages of the book, you will have your two hundred.”

And Willard, rather despising his own weakness, said, “What’s the name of your book?”

“Three in One.”

“And you have a copy?”

“I brought one with me.”

And Willard held out his hand and took it.

That Willard was a busy man was by no means a lie. It took him better than a week to find the time to read the book, even with two hundred pieces of gold glittering, and luring him on.

Then he sat a while and pondered. Then he phoned Laborian.

The next morning, Laborian was in Williard’s office again.

Willard said, bluntly, “Mr. Laborian. I have read your book.”

Laborian nodded and could not hide the anxiety in his eyes. “I hope you liked it, Mr. Willard.”

Willard lifted his hand and rocked it right and left. “So-so. I told you I have not read science fiction, and I don’t know how good or bad it is of its kind—”

“Does it matter, if you liked it?”

“I’m not sure if I liked it. I’m not used to this sort of thing. We are dealing in this novel with three sexes.”

“Yes.”

“Which you call a Rational, an Emotional, and a Parental.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t describe them?” Laborian looked embarrassed. “I didn’t describe them, Mr. Willard, because I couldn’t. They’re alien creatures, really alien. I didn’t want to pretend they were alien by simply giving them blue skins or a pair of antennae or a third eye. I wanted them indescribable, so I didn’t describe them, you see.”

“What you’re saying is that your imagination failed.”

“N-no. I wouldn’t say that. It’s more like not having that kind of imagination. I don’t describe anyone. If I were to write a story about you and me, I probably wouldn’t bother describing either one of us.”

Willard stared at Laborian without trying to disguise his contempt. He thought of himself. Middle-sized, soft about the middle, needed to reduce a bit, the beginnings of a double chin, and a mole on his right wrist. Light brown hair, dark blue eyes, bulbous nose. What was so hard to describe? Anyone could do it. If you had an imaginary character, think of someone real—and describe.

There was Laborian, dark in complexion, crisp curly black hair, looked as though he needed a shave, probably looked that way all the time, prominent Adam’s apple, small scar on the right cheek, dark brown eyes rather large, and his only good feature.

Willard said, “I don’t understand you. What kind of writer are you if you have trouble describing things? What do you write?”

Laborian said, gently, somewhat as though this was not the first time he had had to defend himself along those lines, “You’ve read Three in One. I’ve written other novels and they’re all in the same style. Mostly conversation. I don’t see things when I write; I hear, and for most part, what my characters talk about are ideas—competing ideas. I’m strong on that and my readers like it.”

“Yes, but where does that leave me? I can’t devise a compu-drama based on conversation alone. I have to create sight and sound and subliminal messages, and you leave me nothing to work on.”

“Are you thinking of doing Three in One, then?”

“Not if you give me nothing to work on. Think, Mr. Laborian, think! This Parental. He’s the dumb one.”

“Not dumb,” said Laborian, frowning. “Single-minded. He only has room in his mind for children, real and potential.”

“Blockish! If you didn’t use that actual word for the Parental in the novel, and I don’t remember offhand whether you did or not, it’s certainly the impression I got. Cubical. Is that what he is?”

“Well, simple. Straight lines. Straight planes. Not cubical. Longer than he is wide.”

“How does he move? Does he have legs?”

“I don’t know. I honestly never gave it any thought.”

“Hmp. And the Rational. He’s the smart one and he’s smooth and quick. What is he? Egg-shaped?”

“I’d accept that. I’ve never given that any thought, either, but I’d accept that.”

“And no legs?”

“I haven’t described any.”

“And how about the middle one. Your ‘she’ character—the other two being ‘he’s’.”

“The Emotional.”

“That’s right. The Emotional. You did better on her.”

“Of course. I did most of my thinking about her. She was trying to save the alien intelligences—us—of an alien world. Earth. The reader’s sympathy must be with her, even though she fails.”

“I gather she was more like a cloud, didn’t have any firm shape at all, could attenuate and tighten.”

“Yes, yes. That’s exactly right.”

“Does she flow along the ground or drift through the air?”

Laborian thought, then shook his head. “I don’t know. I would say you would have to suit yourself when it came to that.”

“I see. And what about the sex?” Laborian said, with sudden enthusiasm. “That’s a crucial point. I never have any sex in my novels beyond that which is absolutely necessary and then I manage to refrain from describing it—”

“You don’t like sex?”

“I like sex fine, thank you. I just don’t like it in my novels. Everyone else puts it in and. frankly. I think that readers find its absence in my novels refreshing; at least, my readers do. And I must explain to you that my books do very well. I wouldn’t have a hundred thousand dollars to spend if they didn’t.”

“All right. I’m not trying to put you down.”

“However, there are always people who say I don’t include sex because I don’t know how, so—out of vainglory. I suppose—I wrote this novel just to show that I could do it. The entire novel deals with sex. Of course, it’s alien sex. not at all like ours.”

“That’s right. That’s why I have to ask you about the mechanics of it. How does it work?”

Laborian looked uncertain for a moment. “They melt.”

“I know that that’s the word you use. Do you mean they come together? Superimpose?”

“I suppose so.”

Willard sighed. “How can you write a book without knowing anything about so fundamental a part of it?”

“I don’t have to describe it in detail. The reader gets the impression. With subliminal suggestion so much a part of the compu-drama. how can you ask the question?”

Willard’s lips pressed together. Laborian had him there. “Very well. They superimpose. What do they look like after they have superimposed?”

Laborian shook his head. “I avoided that.”

“You realize, of course, that I can’t.” Laborian nodded. “Yes.”

Willard heaved another sigh and said. “Look. Mr. Laborian. assuming that I agree to do such a compu-drama—and I have not yet made up my mind on the matter—I would have to do it entirely my way. I would tolerate no interference from you. You have ducked so many of your own responsibilities in writing the book that I can’t allow you to decide suddenly that you want to participate in my creative endeavors.”

“That’s quite understood. Mr. Willard. I only ask that you keep my story and as much of my dialogue as you can. All of the visual, sonic, and subliminal aspects I am willing to leave entirely in your hands.”

“You understand that this is not a matter of a verbal agreement which someone in our industry, about a century and a half ago, described as not worth the paper it was written on. There will have to be a written contract made firm by my lawyers that will exclude you from participation.”

“My lawyers will be glad to look over it. but I assure you I am not going to quibble.”

“And.” said Willard severely. “I will want an advance on the money you offered me. I can’t afford to have you change your mind on me and I am not in the mood for a long lawsuit.”

At this, Laborian frowned. He said, “Mr. Willard, those who know me never question my financial honesty. You don’t know me so I’ll permit the remark, but please don’t repeat it. How much of an abvance do you wish?”

“Half,” said Willard, briefly. Laborian said, “I will do better than that. Once you have obtained the necessary commitments from those who will be willing to put up the money for the compu-drama and once the contract between us is drawn up, then I will give you every cent of the hundred thousand dollars even before you begin the first scene of the book.”

Willard’s eyes opened wide and he could not prevent himself from saying, “Why?”

“Because I want to urge you on. What’s more, if the compu-drama turns out to be too hard to do, if it won’t work, or if you turn out something that will not do—my hard luck—you can keep the hundred thousand. It’s a risk I’m ready to take.”

“Why? What’s the catch?”

“No catch. I’m gambling on immortality. I’m a popular writer but I have never heard anyone call me a great one. My books are very likely to die with me. Do Three in One as a compu-drama and do it well and that at least might live on, and make my name ring down through the ages,” he smiled ruefully, “or at least some ages. However—”

“Ah,” said Willard. “Now we come to it.”

“Well, yes. I have a dream that I’m willing to risk a great deal for, but I’m not a complete fool. I will give you the hundred thousand I promised before you start and if the thing doesn’t work out you can keep it, but the payment will be electronic. If, however, you turn out a product that satisfies me. then you will return the electronic gift and I will give you the hundred thousand globo-dollars in gold pieces. You have nothing to lose except that to an artist like yourself, gold must be more dramatic and worthwhile than blips in a finance-card.” And Laborian smiled gently.

Willard said. “Understand, Mr. Laborian! I would be taking a risk, too. I risk losing a great deal of time and effort that I might have devoted to a more likely project. I risk producing a docu-drama that will be a failure and that will tarnish the reputation I have built up with Lear. In my business, you’re only as good as your most recent product. I will consult various people—”

“On a confidential basis, please.”

“Of course! And I will do a bit of deep consideration. I am willing to go along with your proposition for now. but you mustn’t think of it as a definite commitment. Not yet. We will talk further.”

Jonas Willard and Meg Cathcart sat together over lunch in Meg’s apartment. They were at their coffee when Willard said, with apparent reluctance as one who broaches a subject he would rather not, “Have you read the book?”

“Yes, I have.”

“And what did you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Cathcart peering at him from under the dark, reddish hair she wore clustered over her forehead. “At least not enough to judge.”

“You’re not a science fiction buff, either, then?”

“Well, I’ve read science fiction, mostly sword and sorcery, but nothing like Three in One. I’ve heard of Laborian, though. He does what they call “hard science fiction.’ ”

“It’s hard enough. I don’t see how I can do it. That book, whatever its virtues, just isn’t me.”

Cathcart fixed him with a sharp glance. “How do you know it isn’t you?”

“Listen, it’s important to know what you can’t do.”

“And you were born knowing you can’t do science fiction?”

“I have an instinct in these things.”

“So you say. Why don’t you think what you might do with those three undescribed characters, and what you would want subliminally, before you let your instinct tell you what you can and can’t do. For instance, how would you do the Parental, who is referred to constantly as ‘he’ even though it’s the Parental who bears the children? That struck me as jackassy, if you must know.”

“No, no,” said Willard, at once. “I accept the ‘he.’ Laborian might have invented a third pronoun, but it would have made no sense and the reader would have gagged on it. Instead, he reserved the pronoun, ‘she,’ for the Emotional. She’s the central character, differing from the other two enormously. The use of ‘she’ for her and only for her focuses the reader’s attention on her. and it’s on her that the reader’s attention must focus. What’s more, it’s on her that the viewer’s attention must focus in the compu-drama.”

“Then you have been thinking of it.” She grinned, impishly. “I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t needled you.” Willard stirred uneasily. “Actually, Laborian said something of the sort, so I can’t lay claim to complete creativity here. But let’s get back to the Parental. I want to talk about these things to you because everything is going to depend on subliminal suggestion, if I do try to do this thing. The Parental is a block, a rectangle.”

“A right parallelepiped. I think they would call it in solid geometry.”

“Come on. I don’t care what they call it in solid geometry. The point is we can’t just have a block. We have to give it personality. The Parental is a ‘he’ who bears children, so we have to get across an epicene quality. The voice has to be neither clearly masculine nor feminine. I’m not sure that I have in mind exactly the timbre and sound I will need, but that will be for the voice-recorder and myself to work out by trial and error. I think. Of course, the voice isn’t the only thing.”

“What else?”

“The feet. The Parental moves about, but there is no description of any limbs. He has to have the equivalent of arms; there are things he does. He obtains an energy source that he feeds the Emotional. so we’ll have to evolve arms that are alien but that are arms. And we need legs. And a number of sturdy, stumpy legs that move rapidly.”

“Like a caterpillar? Or a centipede?” Willard winced. “Those aren’t pleasant comparisons, are they?”

“Well, it would be my job to subliminate. if I may use the expression, a centipede, so to speak, without showing one. Just the notion of a series of legs, a double fading row of parentheses, just on and off as a kind of visual leitmotiv for the Parental, whenever he appears.”

“I see what you mean. We’ll have to try it out and see what we can get away with. The Rational is ovoid. Laborian admitted it might be egg-shaped. We can imagine him progressing by rolling but I find that completely inappropriate. The Rational is mind-proud, dignified. We can’t make him do anything laughable, and rolling would be laughable.”

“We could have him with a flat bottom slightly curved, and he could slide along it, like a penguin belly-whopping.”

“Or like a snail on a layer of grease. No. That would be just as bad. I had thought of having three legs extrude. In other words, when he is at rest, he would be smoothly ovoid and proud of it. but when he is moving three stubby legs emerge and he can walk on them.”

“Why three?”

“It carries on the three-motif; three sexes, you know. It could be a kind of hopping run. The foreleg digs in and holds firm and the two hind legs come along on each side.”

“Like a three-legged kangaroo?”

“Yes! Can you subliminate a kangaroo?”

“I can try.”

“The Emotional, of course, is the hardest of the three. What can you do with something that may be nothing but a coherent cloud of gas?”

Cathcart considered, “What about giving the impression of draperies containing nothing. They would be moving about wraithlike, just as you presented Lear in the storm scene. She would be wind, she would be air, she would be the filmy, foggy draperies that would represent that.”

Willard felt himself drawn to the suggestion. “Hey, that’s not bad, Meg. For the subliminal effect, could you do Helen of Troy?”

“Helen of Troy?”

“Yes! To the Rational and Parental, the Emotional is the most beautiful thing ever invented. They’re crazy about her. There’s this strong, almost unbearable sexual attraction—their kind of sex—and we’ve got to make the audience aware of it in their terms. If you can somehow get across a statuesque Greek woman, with bound hair and draperies—the draperies would exactly fit what we’re imagining for the Emotional—and make it look like the paintings and sculptures everyone is familiar with, that would be the Emotional’s leitmotiv.”

“You don’t ask simple things. The slightest intrusion of a human figure will destroy the mood.”

“You don’t intrude a human figure. Just the suggestion of one. It’s important. A human figure, in actual fact, may destroy the mood, but we’ll have to suggest human figures throughout. The audience has to think of these odd things as human beings. No mistake.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Cathcart, dubiously.

“Which brings us to another thing. The melting. The triple-sex of these things. I gather they superimpose. I gather from the book that the Emotional is the key to that. The Parental and Rational can’t melt without her. She’s the essential part of the process. But, of course, that fool, Laborian, doesn’t describe it in detail. Well, we can’t have the Rational and Parental running toward the Emotional and jumping on her. That would kill the drama at once no matter what else we might do.”

“I agree.”

“What we must do, then, and this is off the top of my head, is to have the Emotional expand, the draperies move out and enswathe (if that’s the word) both Parental and Rational. They are obscured by the draperies and we don’t see exactly how its done but they get closer and closer until they superimpose.”

“We’ll have to emphasize the drapery,” said Cathcart. “We’ll have to make it as graceful as possible in order to get across the beauty of it, and not just the eroticism. We’ll have to have music.”

“Not the Romeo and Juliet overture, please. A slow waltz, perhaps, because the melting takes a long time. And not a familiar one. I don’t want the audience humming along with it. In fact, it would be best if it comes in occasional bits so that the audience gets the impression of a waltz, rather than actually hearing it.”

“We can’t see how to do it. until we try it and see what works.”

“Everything I say now is a first-order suggestion that may have to be yanked about this way and that under the pressure of actual events. And what about the orgasm? We’ll have to indicate that somehow.”

“Color.”

“Hmm.”

“Better than sound, Jonas. You can’t have an explosion. I wouldn’t want some kind of eruption, either. Color. Silent color. That might do it.”

“What color? I don’t want a blinding flash, either.”

“No. You might try a delicate pink, very slowly darkening, and then toward the end suddenly becoming a deep, deep red.”

“I’m not sure. We’ll have to try it out. It must be unmistakeable and moving and not make the audience giggle or feel embarrassed. I can see ourselves running through every color change in the spectrum, and. in the end, find that it will depend on what you do subliminally. And that brings us to the triplebeings.”

“The what?”

“You know. After the last melting, the superimposition remains permanent and we have the adult form that is all three components together. There, I think, we’ll have to make them more human. Not human, mind you. Just more human. A faint suggestion of human form, not just subliminal, either. We’ll need a voice that is somehow reminiscent of all three, and I don’t know how the recorder can make that work. Fortunately, the triple-beings don’t appear much in the story.”

Willard shook his head. “And that brings us to the rough fact that the compu-drama might not be a possible project at all.”

“Why not? You seem to have been offering potential solutions of all kinds for the various problems.”

“Not for the essential part. Look! In King Lear, we had human characters, more than human characters. You had searing emotions. What have we got here? We have funny little cubes and ovals and drapery. Tell me how my

Three in One is going to be different from an animated cartoon?”

“.For one thing, an animated cartoon is two-dimensional. Even with elaborate animation it is flat, and its coloring is without shading. It is invariably satiricial—”

“I know all that. That’s not what I want you to tell me. You’re missing the important point. What a compu-drama has, that a mere animated cartoon does not, are subliminal suggestions such as can only be created by a complex computer in the hands of an imaginative genius. What my compu-drama has that an animated cartoon doesn’t is you, Meg.”

“Well, I was being modest.”

“Don’t be. I’m trying to tell you that everything—everything—is going to depend on you. We have a story here that is dead serious. Our Emotional is trying to save Earth out of pure idealism; it’s not her world. And she doesn’t succeed, and she won’t succeed in my version, either. No cheap, happy ending.”

“Earth isn’t exactly destroyed.”

“No, it isn’t. There’s still time to save it if Laborian ever gets around to doing a sequel, but in this story the attempt fails. It’s a tragedy and I want it treated as one—as tragic as Lear. No funny voices, no humorous actions, no satirical touches. Serious. Serious. Serious. And I’m going to depend on you to make it so. It will be you who makes sure that the audience reacts to the Rational, the Emotional, the Parental, as though they were human beings. All their peculiarities will have to melt away and they’ll have to be recognized as intelligent beings on a par with humanity, if not ahead of it. Can you do it?”

Cathcart said dryly, “It looks as though you will insist I can.”

“I do so insist.”

“Then you had better see about getting the ball rolling, and you leave me alone while you’re doing it. I need time to think. Lots of time.”

The early days of the shooting were an unmitigated disaster. Each member of the crew had his copy of the book; carefully, almost surgically trimmed; but with no scenes entirely omitted.

“We’re going to stick to the course of the book as closely as we can, and improve it as we go along just as much as we can,” Willard had announced confidently. “And the first thing we do is get a hold on the triple-beings.”

He turned to the head voice-recorder, “How have you been working on that?”

“I’ve tried to fuse the three voices.”

“Let’s hear. All right, everyone quiet.”

“I’ll give you the Parental first,” said the recorder. There came a thin, tenor voice, out of key with the blockish figure that the Image man had produced. Willard winced slightly at the mismatch, but the Parental was mismatched—a masculine mother. The Rational, rocking slowly back and forth, had a somewhat self-important voice; enunciation over-careful, and it was a light baritone.

Willard interrupted. “Less rocking in the Rational. We don’t want the audience to become seasick. He rocks when he is deep in thought, and not all the time.”

He then nodded his head at Dua’s draperies, which seemed quite successful, as did her clear and infinitely sweet soprano voice.

“She must never shriek,” said Willard, severely, “not even when she is in a passion.”

“She won’t,” said the recorder. “The trick is, though, to blend the voices in setting up the triple-being, in having each one distantly identifiable.”

All three voices sounded softly, the words not clear. They seemed to melt into each other and then the voice could be heard enunciating.

Willard shook his head in immediate discontent. “No, that won’t do at all. We can’t have three voices in a kind of intimate patchwork. We’d be making the triple-being a figure of fun. We need one voice which somehow suggests all three.”

The voice-recorder was clearly offended. “It’s easy to say that. How do you suggest we do it?”

“I do it,” said Willard, brutally, “by ordering you to do it. I’ll tell you when you have it. And Cathcart—where is Cathcart?”

“Here I am,” she said, emerging from behind her instrumentation. “Where I’m supposed to be.”

“I don’t like the sublimination, Cathcart. I gather you tried to give the impression of cerebral convolutions.”

“For intelligence. The triple-beings represent the intelligence-peak of these aliens.”

“Yes, I understand, but what you managed to do was to give the impression of worms. You’ll have to think of something else. And I don’t like the appearance of the triple-being, either. He looks just like a big Rational.”

“He is like a big Rational,” said one of the imagists.

“Is he described in the book that way?” asked Willard, sharply.

“Not in so many words, but the impression I get—”

“Never mind your impression. I’ll make the decisions.”

Willard grew fouler-tempered as the day wore on. At least twice he had difficulty controlling his passion, the second time coming when he happened to notice someone watching the proceedings from a spot at one edge of the lot.

He strode toward him angrily. “What are you doing here?”

It was Laborian, who answered quietly. “Watching.”

“Our contract states—”

“That I am to interfere in the proceedings in no way. It does not say I cannot watch quietly.”

“You’ll get upset if you do. This is the way preparing a compu-drama works. There are lots of glitches to overcome and it would be upsetting to the company to have the author watching and disapproving.”

“I’m not disapproving. I’m here only to answer questions if you care to ask them.”

“Questions? What kind of questions?”

Laborian shrugged. “I don’t know. Something might puzzle you and you might want a suggestion.”

“I see,” said Willard, with heavy irony, “so you can teach me my business.”

“No, so I can answer your questions.”

“Well, I have one.”

“Very well,” and Laborian produced a small cassette recorder. “If you’ll just speak into this and say that you are asking me a question and wish me to answer without prejudicing the contract, we’re in business.”

Willard paused for a considerable time, staring at Laborian as though he suspected trickery of some sort, then he spoke into the cassette.

“Very well,” said Laborian. “What’s your question?”

“Did you have anything in mind for the appearance of the triple-being in the book?”

“Not a thing,” said Laborian. cheerfully.

“How could you do that?” Willard’s voice trembled as though he were holding back a final “you idiot” by main force.

“Easily. What I don’t describe, the reader supplies in his own mind. Each reader does it differently to suit himself, I presume. That’s the advantage of writing. A compu-drama would have an enormously larger audience than a book could have, but you must pay for that by having to present an image.”

“I understand that.” said Willard. “So much for the question, then.”

“Not at all. I have a suggestion.”

“Like what?”

“Like a head. Give the triple-being a head. The Parental has no head, nor the Rational, nor the Emotional, but all three look up to the triple-beings as creatures of intelligence beyond their own. That is the entire difference between the triple-beings and the three Separates. Intelligence.”

“A head?”

“Yes. We associate intelligence with heads. The head contains the brain, it contains the sense-organs. Omit the head and we cannot believe in intelligence. The headless oysters or clams are mollusks that seem no more intelligent to us than a sprig of grass would be, but the related octopus, also a mollusk, we accept as possibly intelligent because it has a head—and eyes. Give the triple-being eyes, too.”

Work had, of course, ceased on the set. Everyone had gathered in as closely as they thought judicious to listen to the conversation between director and author.

Willard said. “What kind of head?”

“Your choice. All you need is a bulge suggesting a head. And eyes. The viewer is sure to get the idea.”

Willard turned away, shouting. “Well, get back to work. Who called a vacation? Where are the imagists? Back to the machine and begin trying out heads.”

He turned suddenly and said, in an almost surly fashion, to Laborian. “Thank you!”

“Only if it works,” said Laborian, shrugging.

The rest of the day was spent in testing heads, searching for one that was not a humorous bulge, and not an unimaginative copy of the human head, and eyes that were not astonished circles or vicious slits. Then, finally, Willard called a halt and growled. “We’ll try again tomorrow. If anyone gets any brilliant thoughts overnight, give them to Meg Cathcart. She’ll pass on to me any that are worth it.” And he added, in an annoyed mutter, “I suppose she’ll have to remain silent.”

Willard was right and wrong. He was right. There were no brilliant ideas handed to him, but he was wrong for he had one of his own.

He said to Cathcart, “Listen, can you get across a top hat?”

“A what?”

“The sort of thing they wore in Victorian times. Look, when the Parental invades the lair of the triple-beings to steal an energy source, he’s not an impressive sight in himself, but you told me you could just get across the idea of a helmet and a long line that will give the notion of a spear. He’ll be on a knightly quest.”

“Yes, I know,” she said, “but it might not work. We’ll have to try it out.”

“Of course, but that points the direction. If you have just a suggestion of a top hat, it will give the impression of the triple-being as an aristocrat. The exact shape of the head and eyes becomes less crucial in that case. Can it be done?”

“Anything can be done. The question is: will it work?”

“We’ll try it.”

And as it happened, one thing led to another. The suggestion of the top hat caused the voice recorder to say, “Why not give the triple-being a British accent?”

Willard was caught off-guard. “Why?”

“Well, the British have a language with more tones than we do. At least, the upper classes do. The American version of English tends to be flat, and that’s true of the Separates, too. If the triple-being spoke British rather than English, his voice could rise and fall with the words—tenor and baritone and even an occasional soprano squeak.

That’s what we would want to indicate with the three voices out of which his voice was formed.”

“Can you do that?” said Willard.

“I think so.”

“Then we’ll try. Not bad—if it works.”

It was interesting to see how the entire group found themselves engaged in the Emotional.

The scene in particular where the Emotional was fleeing across the face of the planet, where she had her brief set-to with the other Emotionals caught at everyone.

Willard said tensely, “This is going to be one of the great dramatic scenes. We’ll put it out as widely as we can. It’s going to be draperies, draperies, draperies, but they must not be entangled one with the other. Each one must be distinct. Even when you rush the Emotionals in toward the audience I want each set of draperies to be a different off-white. And I want Dua’s drapery to be distinct from all of them. I want her to glitter a little, just to be different, and because she’s our Emotional. Got it?”

“Got it.” said the leading imagist. “We’ll handle it.”

“And another thing. All the other Emotionals twitter. They’re birds. Our Emotional doesn’t twitter, and she despises the rest because she’s more intelligent than they are and she knows it. And when she’s fleeing—” he paused, and brooded a bit, “Is there any way we can get away from the Ride of the Valkyrie?”

“We don’t want to,” said the soundman promptly. “Nothing better for the purpose has ever been written.”

Cathcart said, “Yes, but we’ll only have snatches of it now and then. Hearing a few bars has the effect of the whole, and I can insert the hint of tossing manes.”

“Manes?” said Willard, dubiously.

“Absolutely. Three thousand years of experience with horses has pinned us down to the galloping stallion as the epitome of wild speed. All our mechanical devices are too static, however fast they go. And I can arrange to have the manes just match, emphasize, and punctuate the flowing of the draperies.”

“That sounds good. We’ll try it.”

Willard knew where the final stumbling block would be found. The last melting. He called the troupe together to lecture them, partly to make sure they understood what it was they were all doing now, partly to put off the time of reckoning when they would actually try to put it all into sound, image, and sublimination.

He said, “All right, the Emotional’s interest is in saving the other world—Earth—only because she can’t bear the thought of the meaningless destruction of intelligent beings. She knows the triple-beings are carrying through a scientific project, necessary for the welfare of her world and caring nothing for the danger into which it puts the alien world—us.

“She tries to warn the alien world and fails. She knows, at last, that the whole purpose of melting is to produce a new set of Rational, Emotional and Parental, and then, with that done, there is a final melting that would turn the original set into a triple-being. Do you have that? It’s a sort of larval form of Separates and an adult form of triples.

“But the Emotional doesn’t want to melt. She doesn’t want to produce the new generation. Most of all, she doesn’t want to become a triple-being and participate in what she considers their work of destruction. She is, however, tricked into the final melt and realizes too late that she is not only going to be a triplebeing but a triple-being who will be, more than any other, responsible for the scientific project that will destroy the other world.

“All this Laborian could describe in words, words, words, in his book, but we’ve got to do it more immediately and more forcefully, in images and sublimination as well. That’s what we’re now going to try to do.”

They were three days in the trying, before Willard was satisfied.

The weary Emotional, uncertain, stretching outward, with Cathcart’s sublimination instilling the feeling of not-sure. not-sure. The Rational and Parental enfolded and coming together, more rapidly than on previous occasions—hurrying for the superimposition before it might be stopped—and the Emotional realizing too late the significance of it all and struggling—struggling—

And failure. The drenching feeling of failure as a new triple-being stepped out of the superimposition, more nearly human than anyone else in the compu-drama—proud, indifferent.

The scientific procedure would go on. Earth would continue the downward slide.

And somehow this was it—this was the nub of everything that Willard was trying to do—that within the new triplebeing the Emotional still existed in part. There was just the wisping of drapery and the viewer was to know that the defeat was not final after all.

The Emotional would, somehow, still try, lost though it was in a greater being.

They watched the completed compu-drama, all of them, seeing it for the first time as a whole and not as a collection of parts, wondering if there were places to edit, to reorder. (Not now. thought Willard, not now. Afterwards, when he had recovered and could look at it more objectively.)

He sat in his chair, slumped. He had put too much of himself into it. It had seemed to him that it contained everything he wanted it to contain: that it did everything he wanted to have done: but how much of that was merely wishful thinking?

When it was over and the last tremulous, subliminal cry of the defeated-but-not-yet-defeated Emotional faded, he said, “Well.”

And Cathcart said, “That’s almost as good as your King Lear was, Jonas.”

There was a general murmur of agreement and Willard cast a cynical eye about him. Wasn’t that what they would be bound to say, no matter what?

His eye caught that of Gregory Laborian. The writer was expressionless, said nothing.

Willard’s mouth tightened. There at least he could expect an opinion that would be backed, or not backed, by gold. Willard had his hundred thousand. He would see now whether it would stay electronic.

He said, and his own uncertainty made him sound imperious. “Laborian, I want to see you in my office.”

They were together alone for the first time since well before the compu-drama had been made.

“Well?” said Willard. “What do you think, Mr. Laborian?”

Laborian smiled. “That woman who runs the subliminal background told you that it was almost as good as your King Lear was, Mr. Willard.”

“I heard her.”

“She was quite wrong.”

“In your opinion?”

“Yes. My opinion is what counts right now. She was quite wrong. Your Three in One is much better than your King Lear.”

“Better?” Willard’s weary face broke into a smile.

“Much better. Consider the material you had to work with in doing King Lear. You had William Shakespeare, producing words that sang, that were music in themselves; William Shakespeare producing characters who, whether for good or evil, whether strong or weak, whether shrewd or foolish, whether faithful or traitorous, were all larger than life; William Shakespeare, dealing with two overlapping plots, reinforcing each other and tearing the viewers to shreds.

“What was your contribution to King Lear? You added dimensions that Shakespeare lacked the technological knowledge to deal with; that he couldn’t dream of; but the fanciest technologies and all that your people and your own talents could do could only build somewhat on the greatest literary genius of all time, working at the peak of his power.

“But in Three in One, Mr. Willard, you were working with my words which didn’t sing; my characters, which weren’t great; my plot which tore at no one. You dealt with me, a run-of-the-mill writer and you produced something great, something that will be remembered long after I am dead. One book of mine, anyway, will live on because of what you have done.

“Give me back my electronic hundred thousand, Mr. Willard, and I will give you this.”

The hundred thousand was shifted back from one financial card to the other and, with an effort, Laborian then pulled his fat briefcase on to the table and opened it. From it, he drew out a box, fastened with a small hook. He unfastened it carefully, and lifted the top. Inside it glittered the gold pieces, each one marked with the planet Earth, the western hemisphere on one side, the eastern on the other. Large gold pieces, two hundred of them, each worth five hundred globo-dollars.

Willard, awed, plucked out one of the gold pieces. It weighed about one and a quarter ounces. He threw it up in the air and caught it.

“Beautiful,” he said.

“It’s yours, Mr. Willard,” said Laborian. “Thank you for doing the compu-drama for me. It is worth every piece of that gold.”

Willard stared at the gold and said, “You made me do the compu-drama of your book with your offer of this gold. To get this gold, I forced myself beyond my talents. Thank you for that, and you are right. It was worth every piece of that gold.”

He put the gold piece back in the box and closed it. Then he lifted the box and handed it back to Laborian.

GRIFFIN’S EGG

Michael Swanwick

The moon? It is a griffin’s egg,
Hatching to-morrow night.
And how the little boys will watch
With shouting and delight
To see him break the shell and stretch
And creep across the sky.
The boys will laugh. The little girls,
I fear, may hide and cry. . .

—Vachel Lindsay

The sun cleared the mountains. Gunther Weil raised a hand in salute, then winced as the glare hit his eyes in the instant it took his helmet to polarize.

He was hauling fuel rods to Chatterjee Crater industrial park. The Chatterjee B reactor had gone critical forty hours before dawn, taking fifteen remotes and a microwave relay with it, and putting out a power surge that caused collateral damage to every factory in the park. Fortunately, the occasional meltdown was designed into the system. By the time the sun rose over the Rhaeticus highlands, a new reactor had been built and was ready to go online.

Gunther drove automatically, gauging his distance from Bootstrap by the amount of trash lining the Mare Vaporum road. Close by the city, discarded construction machinery and damaged assemblers sat in open-vacuum storage, awaiting possible salvage. Ten kilometers out, a pressurized van had exploded, scattering machine parts and giant worms of insulating foam across the landscape. At twenty-five kilometers, a poorly graded stretch of road had claimed any number of cargo skids and shattered running lights from passing traffic.

Forty kilometers out, though, the road was clear, a straight, clean gash in the dirt. Ignoring the voices at the back of his skull, the traffic chatter and automated safety messages that the truck routinely fed into his transceiver chip, he scrolled up the topographicals on the dash.

Right about here.

Gunther turned off the Mare Vaporum road and began laying tracks over virgin soil. “You’ve left your prescheduled route,” the truck said. “Deviations from schedule may only be made with the recorded permission of your dispatcher.”

“Yeah, well.” Gunther’s voice seemed loud in his helmet, the only physical sound in a babel of ghosts. He’d left the cabin unpressurized, and the insulated layers of his suit stilled even the conduction rumbling from the treads. “You and I both know that so long as I don’t fall too far behind schedule, Beth Hamilton isn’t going to care if I stray a little in between.”

“You have exceeded this unit’s linguistic capabilities.”

“That’s okay, don’t let it bother you.” Deftly he tied down the send switch on the truck radio with a twist of wire. The voices in his head abruptly died. He was completely isolated now.

“You said you wouldn’t do that again.” The words, broadcast directly to his trance chip, sounded as deep and resonant as the voice of God. “Generation Five policy expressly requires that all drivers maintain constant radio—”

“Don’t whine. It’s unattractive.”

“You have exceeded this unit’s linguistic—”

“Oh, shut up.” Gunther ran a finger over the topographical maps, tracing the course he’d plotted the night before: Thirty kilometers over cherry soil, terrain no human or machine had ever crossed before, and then north on Murchison road. With luck he might even manage to be at Chatterjee early.

He drove into the lunar plain. Rocks sailed by to either side. Ahead, the mountains grew imperceptibly. Save for the treadmarks dwindling behind him, there was nothing from horizon to horizon to show that humanity had ever existed. The silence was perfect.

Gunther lived for moments like this. Entering that clean, desolate emptiness, he experienced a vast expansion of being, as if everything he saw, stars, plain, craters and all, were encompassed within himself. Bootstrap City was only a fading dream, a distant island on the gently rolling surface of a stone sea. Nobody will ever be first here again, he thought. Only me.

A memory floated up from his childhood. It was Christmas eve and he was in his parents’ car, on the way to midnight Mass. Snow was falling, thickly and windlessly, rendering all the familiar roads of Dusseldorf clean and pure under sheets of white. His father drove, and he himself leaned over the front seat to stare ahead in fascination into this peaceful, transformed world. The silence was perfect.

He felt touched by solitude and made holy.

The truck plowed through a rainbow of soft greys, submerged hues more hints than colors, as if something bright and festive held itself hidden just beneath a coating of dust. The sun was at his shoulder, and when he spun the front axle to avoid a boulder, the truck’s shadow wheeled and reached for infinity. He drove reflexively, mesmerized by the austere beauty of the passing land.

At a thought, his peecee put music on his chip. Stormy Weather filled the universe.

He was coming down a long, almost imperceptible slope when the controls went dead in his hands. The truck powered down and coasted to a stop. “Goddamn you, you asshole machine!” he snarled. “What is it this time?”

“The land ahead is impassible.”

Gunther slammed a fist on the dash, making the maps dance. The land ahead was smooth and sloping, any unruly tendencies tamed eons ago by the Mare Imbrium explosion. Sissy stuff. He kicked the door open and clambered down.

The truck had been stopped by a baby rille: a snakelike depression meandering across his intended route, looking for all the world like a dry streambed. He bounded to its edge. It was fifteen meters across, and three meters down at its deepest. Just shallow enough that it wouldn’t show up on the topos. Gunther returned to the cab, slamming the door noiselessly behind him.

“Look. The sides aren’t very steep. I’ve been down worse a hundred times. We’ll just take it slow and easy, okay?”

“The land ahead is impassible,” the truck said. “Please return to the originally scheduled course.”

Wagner was on now. Tannhauser. Impatiently, he thought it off.

“If you’re so damned heuristic, then why won’t you ever listen to reason?” He chewed his lip angrily, gave a quick shake of his head. “No, going back would put us way off schedule. The rille is bound to peter out in a few hundred meters. Let’s just follow it until it does, then angle back to Murchison. We’ll be at the park in no time.”

Three hours later he finally hit the Murchison road. By then he was sweaty and smelly and his shoulders ached with tension. “Where are we?” he asked sourly. Then, before the truck could answer, “Cancel that.” The soil had turned suddenly black. That would be the ejecta fantail from the Sony-Reinpfaltz mine. Their railgun was oriented almost due south in order to avoid the client factories, and so their tailings hit the road first. That meant he was getting close.

Murchison was little more than a confluence of truck treads, a dirt track crudely leveled and marked by blazes of orange paint on nearby boulders. In quick order Gunther passed through a series of landmarks: Harada Industrial fantail, Sea of Storms Macrofacturing fantail, Krupp funfzig fantail. He knew them all. G5 did the robotics for the lot.

A light flatbed carrying a shipped bulldozer sped past him, kicking up a spray of dust that fell as fast as pebbles. The remote driving it waved a spindly arm in greeting. He waved back automatically, and wondered if it was anybody he knew.

The land hereabouts was hacked and gouged, dirt and boulders shoved into careless heaps and hills, the occasional tool station or Oxytank Emergency Storage Platform chopped into a nearby bluff. A sign floated by: TOILET FLUSHING FACILITIES 1/2 KILOMETER. He made a face. Then he remembered that his radio was still off and slipped the loop of wire from it. Time to rejoin the real world. Immediately his dispatcher’s voice, harsh and staticky, was relayed to his trance chip.

“—ofabitch! Weil! Where the fuck are you?”

“I’m right here, Beth. A little late, but right where I’m supposed to be.”

“Sonofa—” The recording shut off, and Hamilton’s voice came on, live and mean. “You’d better have a real good explanation for this one, honey.”

“Oh, you know how it is.” Gunther looked away from the road, off into the dusty jade highlands. He’d like to climb up into them and never come back. Perhaps he would find caves. Perhaps there were monsters: vacuum trolls and moondragons with metabolisms slow and patient, taking centuries to move one body’s-length, hyperdense beings that could swim through stone as if it were water. He pictured them diving, following lines of magnetic force deep, deep into veins of diamond and plutonium, heads back and singing. “I picked up a hitchhiker, and we kind of got involved.”

“Try telling that to E. Izmailova. She’s mad as hornets at you.”

“Who?”

“Izmailova. She’s the new demolitions jock, shipped up here on a multicorporate contract. Took a hopper in almost four hours ago, and she’s been waiting for you and Siegfried ever since. I take it you’ve never met her?”

“No.”

“Well, I have, and you’d better watch your step with her. She’s exactly the kind of tough broad who won’t be amused by your antics.”

“Aw, come on, she’s just another tech on a retainer, right? Not in my line of command. It’s not like she can do anything to me.”

“Dream on, babe. It wouldn’t take much pull to get a fuckup like you sent down to Earth.”

The sun was only a finger’s breadth over the highlands by the time Chatterjee A loomed into sight. Gunther glanced at it every now and then, apprehensively. With his visor adjusted to the H-alpha wavelength, it was a blazing white sphere covered with slowly churning black specks: More granular than usual. Sunspot activity seemed high. He wondered that the Radiation Forecast Facility hadn’t posted a surface advisory. The guys at the Observatory were usually right on top of things.

Chatterjee A, B and C were a triad of simple craters just below Chladni, and while the smaller two were of minimal interest, Chatterjee A was the child of a meteor that had punched through the Imbrian basalts to as sweet a vein of aluminum ore as anything in the highlands. Being so convenient to Bootstrap made it one of management’s darlings, and Gunther was not surprised to see that Kerr-McGee was going all out to get their reactor online again.

The park was crawling with walkers, stalkers and assemblers. They were all over the blister-domed factories, the smelteries, loading docks and vacuum garages. Constellations of blue sparks winked on and off as major industrial constructs were dismantled. Fleets of heavily-loaded trucks fanned out into the lunar plain, churning up the dirt behind them. Fats Waller started to sing The Joint is Jumping and Gunther laughed.

He slowed to a crawl, swung wide to avoid a gas-plater that was being wrangled onto a loader, and cut up the Chatterjee B ramp road. A new landing pad had been blasted from the rock just below the lip, and a cluster of people stood about a hopper resting there. One human and eight remotes.

One of the remotes was speaking, making choppy little gestures with its arms. Several stood inert, identical as so many antique telephones, unclaimed by Earthside management but available should more advisors need to be called online.

Gunther unstrapped Siegfried from the roof of the cab and, control pad in one hand and cable spool in the other, walked him toward the hopper.

The human strode out to meet him. “You! What kept you?” E. Izmailova wore a jazzy red-and-orange Studio Volga boutique suit, in sharp contrast to his own company-issue suit with the G5 logo on the chest. He could not make out her face through the gold visor glass. But he could hear it in her voice: blazing eyes, thin lips.

“I had a flat tire.” He found a good smooth chunk of rock and set down the cable spool, wriggling it to make sure it sat flush. “We got maybe five hundred yards of shielded cable. That enough for you?”

A short, tense nod.

“Okay.” He unholstered his bolt gun. “Stand back.” Kneeling, he anchored the spool to the rock. Then he ran a quick check of the unit’s functions. “Do we know what it’s like in there?”

A remote came to life, stepped forward and identified himself as Don Sakai, of G5’s crisis management team. Gunther had worked with him before: a decent enough guy, but like most Canadians he had an exaggerated fear of nuclear energy. “Ms. Lang here, of Sony-Reinpfaltz, walked her unit in but the radiation was so strong she lost control after a preliminary scan.” A second remote nodded confirmation, but the relay time to Toronto was just enough that Sakai missed it. “The remote just kept on walking.” He coughed nervously, then added unnecessarily, “The autonomous circuits were too sensitive.”

“Well, that’s not going to be a problem with Siegfried. He’s as dumb as a rock. On the evolutionary scale of machine intelligence he ranks closer to a crowbar than a computer.” Two and a half seconds passed, and then Sakai laughed politely. Gunther nodded to Izmailova. “Walk me through this. Tell me what you want.”

Izmailova stepped to his side, their suits pressing together briefly as she jacked a patch cord into his control pad. Vague shapes flickered across the outside of her visor like the shadows of dreams. “Does he know what he’s doing?” she asked.

“Hey, I—”

“Shut up, Weil,” Hamilton growled on a private circuit. Openly, she said, “He wouldn’t be here if the company didn’t have full confidence in his technical skills.”

“I’m sure there’s never been any question—” Sakai began. He lapsed into silence as Hamilton’s words belatedly reached him.

“There’s a device on the hopper,” Izmailova said to Gunther. “Go pick it up.”

He obeyed, reconfiguring Siegfried for a small, dense load. The unit bent low over the hopper, wrapping large, sensitive hands about the device. Gunther applied gentle pressure. Nothing happened. Heavy little bugger. Slowly, carefully, he upped the power. Siegfried straightened.

“Up the road, then down inside.”

The reactor was unrecognizable, melted, twisted and folded in upon itself, a mound of slag with twisting pipes sprouting from the edges. There had been a coolant explosion early in the incident, and one wall of the crater was bright with sprayed metal. “Where is the radioactive material?” Sakai asked. Even though he was a third of a million kilometers away, he sounded tense and apprehensive.

“It’s all radioactive,” Izmailova said.

They waited. “I mean, you know. The fuel rods?”

“Right now, your fuel rods are probably three hundred meters down and still going. We are talking about fissionable material that has achieved critical mass. Very early in the process the rods will have all melted together in a sort of superhot puddle, capable of burning its way through rock. Picture it as a dense, heavy blob of wax, slowly working its way toward the lunar core.”

“God, I love physics,” Gunther said.

Izmailova’s helmet turned toward him, abruptly blank. After a long pause, it switched on again and turned away. “The road down is clear at least. Take your unit all the way to the end. There’s an exploratory shaft to one side there. Old one. I want to see if it’s still open.”

“Will the one device be enough?” Sakai asked. “To clean up the crater, I mean.”

The woman’s attention was fixed on Siegfried’s progress. In a distracted tone she said, “Mr. Sakai, putting a chain across the access road would be enough to clean up this site. The crater walls would shield anyone working nearby from the gamma radiation, and it would take no effort at all to reroute hopper overflights so their passengers would not be exposed. Most of the biological danger of a reactor meltdown comes from alpha radiation emitted by particulate radioisotopes in the air or water. When concentrated in the body, alpha-emitters can do considerable damage; elsewhere, no. Alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper. So long as you keep a reactor out of your ecosystem, it’s as safe as any other large machine. Burying a destroyed reactor just because it is radioactive is unnecessary and, if you will forgive me for saying so, superstitious. But I don’t make policy. I just blow things up.”

“Is this the shaft you’re looking for?” Gunther asked.

“Yes. Walk it down to the bottom. It’s not far.”

Gunther switched on Siegfried’s chestlight, and sank a roller relay so the cable wouldn’t snag. They went down. Finally Izmailova said, “Stop. That’s far enough.” He gently set the device down and then, at her direction, flicked the arming toggle. “That’s done,” Izmailova said. “Bring your unit back. I’ve given you an hour to put some distance between the crater and yourself.” Gunther noticed that the remotes, on automatic, had already begun walking away.

“Um . . . I’ve still got fuel rods to load.”

“Not today you don’t. The new reactor has been taken back apart and hauled out of the blasting zone.”

Gunther thought now of all the machinery being disassembled and removed from the industrial park, and was struck for the first time by the operation’s sheer extravagance of scale. Normally only the most sensitive devices were removed from a blasting area. “Wait a minute. Just what kind of monster explosive are you planning to use?”

There was a self-conscious cockiness to Izmailova’s stance. “Nothing I don’t know how to handle. This is a diplomat-class device, the same design as saw action five years ago. Nearly one hundred individual applications without a single mechanical failure. That makes it the most reliable weapon in the history of warfare. You should feel privileged having the chance to work with one.”

Gunther felt his flesh turn to ice. “Jesus Mother of God,” he said. “You had me handling a briefcase nuke.”

“Better get used to it. Westinghouse Lunar is putting these little babies into mass production. We’ll be cracking open mountains with them, blasting roads through the highlands, smashing apart the rille walls to see what’s inside.” Her voice took on a visionary tone. “And that’s just the beginning. There are plans for enrichment fields in Sinus Aestum. Explode a few bombs over the regolith, then extract plutonium from the dirt. We’re going to be the fuel dump for the entire solar system.”

His dismay must have shown in his stance, for Izmailova laughed. “Think of it as weapons for peace.”

“You should’ve been there!” Gunther said. “It was unfuckabelievable. The one side of the crater just disappeared. It dissolved into nothing. Smashed to dust. And for a real long time everything glowed! Craters, machines, everything. My visor was so close to overload it started flickering. I thought it was going to burn out. It was nuts.” He picked up his cards. “Who dealt this mess?”

Krishna grinned shyly and ducked his head. “I’m in.”

Hiro scowled down at his cards. “I’ve just died and gone to Hell.”

“Trade you,” Anya said.

“No, I deserve to suffer.”

They were in Noguchi park by the edge of the central lake, seated on artfully scattered boulders that had been carved to look water-eroded. A kneehigh forest of baby birches grew to one side, and somebody’s toy sailboat floated near the impact cone at the center of the lake. Honeybees mazily browsed the clover.

“And then, just as the wall was crumbling, this crazy Russian bitch—”

Anya ditched a trey. “Watch what you say about crazy Russian bitches.”

“—goes zooming up on her hopper . . .”

“I saw it on television,” Hiro said. “We all did. It was news. This guy who works for Nissan told me the BBC gave it thirty seconds.” He’d broken his nose in karate practice, when he’d flinched into his instructor’s punch, and the contrast of square white bandage with shaggy black eyebrows gave him a surly, piratical appearance.

Gunther discarded one. “Hit me. Man, you didn’t see anything. You didn’t feel the ground shake afterwards.”

“Just what was Izmailova’s connection with the Briefcase War?” Hiro asked. “Obviously not a courier. Was she in the supply end or strategic?”

Gunther shrugged.

“You do remember the Briefcase War?” Hiro said sarcastically. “Half of Earth’s military elites taken out in a single day? The world pulled back from the brink of war by bold action? Suspected terrorists revealed as global heroes?”

Gunther remembered the Briefcase War quite well. He had been nineteen at the time, working on a Finlandia Geothermal project when the whole world had gone into spasm and very nearly destroyed itself. It had been a major factor in his decision to ship off the planet. “Can’t we ever talk about anything but politics? I’m sick and tired of hearing about Armageddon.”

“Hey, aren’t you supposed to be meeting with Hamilton?” Anya asked suddenly.

He glanced up at the Earth. The east coast of South America was just crossing the dusk terminator. “Oh, hell, there’s enough time to play out the hand.”

Krishna won with three queens. The deal passed to Hiro. He shuffled quickly, and slapped the cards down with angry little punches of his arm. “Okay,” Anya said, “what’s eating you?”

He looked up angrily, then down again and in a muffled voice, as if he had abruptly gone bashful as Krishna, said, “I’m shipping home.”

“Home?”

“You mean to Earth?”

“Are you crazy? With everything about to go up in flames? Why?”

“Because I am so fucking tired of the Moon. It has to be the ugliest place in the universe.”

“Ugly?” Anya looked elaborately about at the terraced gardens, the streams that began at the top level and fell in eight misty waterfalls before reaching the central pond to be recirculated again, the gracefully winding pathways. People strolled through great looping rosebushes and past towers of forsythia with the dreamlike skimming stride that made moonwalking so like motion underwater. Others popped in and out of the office tunnels, paused to watch the finches loop and fly, tended to beds of cucumbers. At the midlevel straw market, the tents where offduty hobby capitalists sold factory systems, grass baskets, orange glass paperweights and courses in postinterpretive dance and the meme analysis of Elizabethan poetry, were a jumble of brave silks, turquoise, scarlet and aquamarine. “I think it looks nice. A little crowded, maybe, but that’s the pioneer aesthetic.”

“It looks like a shopping mall, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s—” He groped for words. “It’s like—it’s what we’re doing to this world that bothers me. I mean, we’re digging it up, scattering garbage about, ripping the mountains apart, and for what?”

“Money,” Anya said. “Consumer goods, raw materials, a future for our children. What’s wrong with that?”

“We’re not building a future, we’re building weapons.”

“There’s not so much as a handgun on the Moon. It’s an intercorporate development zone. Weapons are illegal here.”

“You know what I mean. All those bomber fuselages, detonation systems, and missile casings that get built here, and shipped to low earth orbit. Let’s not pretend we don’t know what they’re for.”

“So?” Anya said sweetly. “We live in the real world, we’re none of us naive enough to believe you can have governments without armies. Why is it worse that these things are being built here rather than elsewhere?”

“It’s the short-sighted, egocentric greed of what we’re doing that gripes me! Have you peeked out on the surface lately and seen the way it’s being ripped open, torn apart and scattered about? There are still places where you can gaze upon a harsh beauty unchanged since the days our ancestors were swinging in trees. But we’re trashing them. In a generation, two at most, there will be no more beauty to the Moon than there is to any other garbage dump.”

“You’ve seen what Earthbound manufacturing has done to the environment,” Anya said. “Moving it off the planet is a good thing, right?”

“Yes, but the Moon—”

“Doesn’t even have an ecosphere. There’s nothing here to harm.”

They glared at each other. Finally Hiro said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and sullenly picked up his cards.

Five or six hands later, a woman wandered up and plumped to the grass by Krishna’s feet. Her eye shadow was vivid electric purple, and a crazy smile burned on her face. “Oh hi,” Krishna said. “Does everyone here know Sally Chang? She’s a research component of the Center for Self-Replicating Technologies, like me.”

The others nodded. Gunther said, “Gunther Weil. Blue collar component of Generation Five.”

She giggled.

Gunther blinked. “You’re certainly in a good mood.” He rapped the deck with his knuckles. “I’ll stand.”

“I’m on psilly,” she said.

“One card.”

“Psilocybin?” Gunther said. “I might be interested in some of that. Did you grow it or microfacture it? I have a couple of factories back in my room, maybe I could divert one if you’d like to license the software?”

Sally Chang shook her head, laughing helplessly. Tears ran down her cheeks.

“Well, when you come down we can talk about it.” Gunther squinted at his cards. “This would make a great hand for chess.”

“Nobody plays chess,” Hiro said scornfully. “It’s a game for computers.”

Gunther took the pot with two pair. He shuffled, Krishna declined the cut, and he began dealing out cards. “So anyway, this crazy Russian lady—”

Out of nowhere, Chang howled. Wild gusts of laughter knocked her back on her heels and bent her forward again. The delight of discovery dancing in her eyes, she pointed a finger straight at Gunther. “You’re a robot!” she cried.

“Beg pardon?”

“You’re nothing but a robot,” she repeated. “You’re a machine, an automaton. Look at yourself! Nothing but stimulus-response. You have no free will at all. There’s nothing there. You couldn’t perform an original act to save your life.”

“Oh yeah?” Gunther glanced around, looking for inspiration. A little boy—it might be Pyotr Nahfees, though it was hard to tell from here—was by the edge of the water, feeding scraps of shrimp loaf to the carp. “Suppose I pitched you into the lake? That would be an original act.”

Laughing, she shook her head. “Typical primate behavior. A perceived threat is met with a display of mock aggression.”

Gunther laughed.

“Then, when that fails, the primate falls back to a display of submission. Appeasal. The monkey demonstrates his harmlessness—you see?”

“Hey, this really isn’t funny,” Gunther said warningly. “In fact, it’s kind of insulting.”

“And so back to a display of aggression.”

Gunther sighed and threw up both his hands. “How am I supposed to react? According to you, anything I say or do is wrong.”

“Submission again. Back and forth, back and forth from aggression to submission and back again.” She pumped her arm as if it were a piston. “Just like a little machine—you see? It’s all automatic behavior.”

“Hey, Kreesh—you’re the neurobiowhatever here, right? Put in a good word for me. Get me out of this conversation.”

Krishna reddened. He would not meet Gunther’s eyes. “Ms. Chang is very highly regarded at the Center, you see. Anything she thinks about thinking is worth thinking about.” The woman watched him avidly, eyes glistening, pupils small. “I think maybe what she means, though, is that we’re all basically cruising through life. Like we’re on autopilot. Not just you specifically, but all of us.” He appealed to her directly. “Yes?”

“No, no, no, no.” She shook her head. “Him specifically.”

“I give up.” Gunther put his cards down, and lay back on the granite slab so he could stare up through the roof glass at the waning Earth. When he closed his eyes, he could see Izmailova’s hopper, rising. It was a skimpy device, little more than a platform-and-chair atop a cluster of four bottles of waste-gas propellant, and a set of smart legs. He saw it lofting up as the explosion blossomed, seeming briefly to hover high over the crater, like a hawk atop a thermal. Hands by side, the red-suited figure sat, watching with what seemed inhuman calm. In the reflected light she burned as bright as a star. In an appalling way, she was beautiful.

Sally Chang hugged her knees, rocking back and forth. She laughed and laughed.

Beth Hamilton was wired for telepresence. She flipped up one lens when Gunther entered her office, but kept on moving her arms and legs. Dreamy little ghost motions that would be picked up and magnified in a factory somewhere over the horizon. “You’re late again,” she said with no particular emphasis.

Most people would have experienced at least a twinge of reality sickness dealing with two separate surrounds at once. Hamilton was one of the rare few who could split her awareness between two disparate realities without loss of efficiency in either. “I called you in to discuss your future with Generation Five. Specifically, to discuss the possibility of your transfer to another plant.”

“You mean Earthside.”

“You see?” Hamilton said. “You’re not as stupid as you like to make yourself out to be.” She flipped the lens down again, stood very still, then lifted a metal-gauntleted hand and ran through a complex series of finger movements. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Tokyo, Berlin, Buenos Aires—do any of these hold magic for you? How about Toronto? The right move now could be a big boost to your career.”

“All I want is to stay here, do my job, and draw down my salary,” Gunther said carefully. “I’m not looking for a shot at promotion, or a big raise, or a lateral career-track transfer. I’m happy right where I am.”

“You’ve sure got a funny way of showing it.” Hamilton powered down her gloves, and slipped her hands free. She scratched her nose. To one side stood her work table, a polished cube of black granite. Her peecee rested there, alongside a spray of copper crystals. At her thought, it put Izmailova’s voice onto Gunther’s chip.

“It is with deepest regret that I must alert you to the unprofessional behavior of one of your personnel components,” it began. Listening to the complaint, Gunther experienced a totally unexpected twinge of distress and, more, of resentment that Izmailova had dared judge him so harshly. He was careful not to let it show.

“Irresponsible, insubordinate, careless, and possessed of a bad attitude.” He faked a grin. “She doesn’t seem to like me much.” Hamilton said nothing. “But this isn’t enough to . . .” His voice trailed off. “Is it?”

“Normally, Weil, it would be. A demo jock isn’t ‘just a tech on retainer,’ as you so quaintly put it; those government licenses aren’t easy to get. And you may not be aware of it, but you have very poor efficiency ratings to begin with. Lots of potential, no follow-through. Frankly, you’ve been a disappointment. However, lucky for you, this Izmailova dame humiliated Don Sakai, and he’s let us know that we’re under no particular pressure to accommodate her.”

“Izmailova humiliated Sakai?”

Hamilton stared at him. “Weil, you’re oblivious, you know that?”

Then he remembered Izmailova’s rant on nuclear energy. “Right, okay. I got it now.”

“So here’s your choice. I can write up a reprimand, and it goes into your permanent file, along with Izmailova’s complaint. Or you can take a lateral Earthside, and I’ll see to it that these little things aren’t logged into the corporate system.”

It wasn’t much of a choice. But he put a good face on it. “In that case it looks like you’re stuck with me.”

“For the moment, Weil. For the moment.”

He was back on the surface the next two days running. The first day he was once again hauling fuel rods to Chatterjee C. This time he kept to the road, and the reactor was refueled exactly on schedule. The second day he went all the way out to Triesnecker to pick up some old rods that had been in temporary storage for six months while the Kerr-McGee people argued over whether they should be reprocessed or dumped. Not a bad deal for him, because although the sunspot cycle was on the wane, there was a surface advisory in effect and he was drawing hazardous duty pay.

When he got there, a tech rep telepresenced in from somewhere in France to tell him to forget it. There’d been another meeting, and the decision had once again been delayed. He started back to Bootstrap with the new a capella version of the Threepenny Opera playing in his head. It sounded awfully sweet and reedy for his tastes, but that was what they were listening to up home.

Fifteen kilometers down the road, the UV meter on the dash jumped.

Gunther reached out to tap the meter with his finger. It did not respond. With a freezing sensation at the back of his neck, he glanced up at the roof of the cab and whispered, “Oh, no.”

“The Radiation Forecast Facility has just intensified its surface warning to a Most Drastic status,” the truck said calmly. “This is due to an unanticipated flare storm, onset immediately. Everyone currently on the surface is to proceed with all haste to shelter. Repeat: Proceed immediately to shelter.”

“I’m eighty kilometers from—”

The truck was slowing to a stop. “Because this unit is not hardened, excessive fortuitous radiation may cause it to malfunction. To ensure the continued safe operation of this vehicle, all controls will be frozen in manual mode and this unit will now shut off.”

With the release of the truck’s masking functions, Gunther’s head filled with overlapping voices. Static washed through them, making nonsense of what they were trying to say:

**astic Status***epeat: We******his is Beth. The****hail******yo****ere?*C Su**ace adv***ry *as*******ve jus**issued****ost*** om**on**good**uddy****ven up*******to Most**rast rastic ad*isory**Get*off me a**oot***Miko, Sabra*ic Sta**s. All unit* and the surfac*****ddamn**ou, Kangmei******your asse** personn*l are to find sh are you list***ng? Find undergrou***right now*** elter immediately. Maxim shelter. Don*t try to ge don’t want*to hear you’*um exposure twenty minut t back to Bootstrap. Too stayed behind to turn of es. Repeat: Maximum exp far, it’ll fry you. List f the lights. Who else os*re twenty m*nutes. Fi* en, ther* are thr*e facto is out*ther*? Come in ri ****helter im***iatel****ries no****r from***ur pr ght n*w**Ev**yone! Anybo Th*******h***eco*ded*voi **ent**ocat*on***Are***u dy k*ow w**re*Mikhail isce of t***Radiati***Fore li***ning**y***goofoff******C*mon, Misha***on’t yocast Fa**lity. Due**o an* Weisskopf*AG*is one, Niss ***et coy on us***ound u unpre**c*ed solar flar********and**unar**acrostruct **your voice, hea***We g th***urfa***adviso****as ural***Weil******me kn*****ot word Ezra’s dug**nt** *****upgrad******Most Dr if****’re listeni*****ome a factory out Chladn****

“Beth! The nearest shelter is back at Weisskopf—that’s half an hour at top speed and I’ve got an advisory here of twenty minutes. Tell me what to do!”

But the first sleet of hard particles was coming in too hard to make out anything more. A hand, his apparently, floated forward and flicked off the radio relay. The voices in his head died.

The crackling static went on and on. The truck sat motionless, half an hour from nowhere, invisible death sizzling and popping down through the cab roof. He put his helmet and gloves on, doublechecked their seals, and unlatched the door.

It slammed open. Pages from the op manual flew away, and a glove went tumbling gaily across the surface, chasing the pink fuzzy-dice that Eurydice had given him that last night in Sweden. A handful of wheat biscuits in an open tin on the dash turned to powder and were gone, drawing the tin after them. Explosive decompression. He’d forgotten to depressurize. Gunther froze in dismayed astonishment at having made so basic—so dangerous—a mistake.

Then he was on the surface, head tilted back, staring up at the sun. It was angry with sunspots, and one enormous and unpredicted solar flare.

I’m going to die, he thought.

For a long, paralyzing instant, he tasted the chill certainty of that thought. He was going to die. He knew that for a fact, knew it more surely than he had ever known anything before.

In his mind, he could see Death sweeping across the lunar plain toward him. Death was a black wall, featureless, that stretched to infinity in every direction. It sliced the universe in half. On this side were life, warmth, craters and flowers, dreams, mining robots, thought, everything that Gunther knew or could imagine. On the other side . . . Something? Nothing? The wall gave no hint. It was unreadable, enigmatic, absolute. But it was bearing down on him. It was so close now that he could almost reach out and touch it. Soon it would be here. He would pass through, and then he would know.

With a start he broke free of that thought, and jumped for the cab. He scrabbled up its side. His trance chip hissing, rattling and crackling, he yanked the magnetic straps holding Siegfried in place, grabbed the spool and control pad, and jumped over the edge.

He landed jarringly, fell to his knees, and rolled under the trailer. There was enough shielding wrapped around the fuel rods to stop any amount of hard radiation—no matter what its source. It would shelter him as well from the sun as from his cargo. The trance chip fell silent, and he felt his jaws relaxing from a clenched tension.

Safe.

It was dark beneath the trailer, and he had time to think. Even kicking his rebreather up to full, and offlining all his suit peripherals, he didn’t have enough oxygen to sit out the storm. So okay. He had to get to a shelter. Weisskopf was closest, only fifteen kilometers away and there was a shelter in the G5 assembly plant there. That would be his goal.

Working by feel, he found the steel supporting struts, and used Siegfried’s magnetic straps to attach himself to the underside of the trailer. It was clumsy, difficult work, but at last he hung face-down over the road. He fingered the walker’s controls, and sat Siegfried up.

Twelve excruciating minutes later, he finally managed to get Siegfried down from the roof unbroken. The interior wasn’t intended to hold anything half so big. To get the walker in he had first to cut the door free, and then rip the chair out of the cab. Discarding both items by the roadside, he squeezed Siegfried in. The walker bent over double, reconfigured, reconfigured again, and finally managed to fit itself into the space. Gently, delicately, Siegfried took the controls and shifted into first.

With a bump, the truck started to move.

It was a hellish trip. The truck, never fast to begin with, wallowed down the road like a cast-iron pig. Siegfried’s optics were bent over the controls, and couldn’t be raised without jerking the walker’s hands free. He couldn’t look ahead without stopping the truck first.

He navigated by watching the road pass under him. To a crude degree he could align the truck with the treadmarks scrolling by. Whenever he wandered off the track, he worked Siegfried’s hand controls to veer the truck back, so that it drifted slowly from side to side, zig-zagging its way down the road.

Shadows bumping and leaping, the road flowed toward Gunther with dangerous monotony. He jiggled and vibrated in his makeshift sling. After a while his neck hurt with the effort of holding his head back to watch the glaring road disappearing into shadow by the front axle, and his eyes ached from the crawling repetitiveness of what they saw.

The truck kicked up dust in passing, and the smaller particles carried enough of a static charge to cling to his suit. At irregular intervals he swiped at the fine grey film on his visor with his glove, smearing it into long, thin streaks.

He began to hallucinate. They were mild visuals, oblong patches of colored light that moved in his vision and went away when he shook his head and firmly closed his eyes for a concentrated moment. But every moment’s release from the pressure of vision tempted him to keep his eyes closed longer, and that he could not afford to do.

It put him in mind of the last time he had seen his mother, and what she had said then. That the worst part of being a widow was that every day her life began anew, no better than the day before, the pain still fresh, her husband’s absence a physical fact she was no closer to accepting than ever. It was like being dead, she said, in that nothing ever changed.

Ah God, he thought, this isn’t worth doing. Then a rock the size of his head came bounding toward his helmet. Frantic hands jerked at the controls, and Siegfried skewed the truck wildly, so that the rock jumped away and missed him. Which put an end to that line of thought.

He cued his peecee. Saint James’ Infirmary came on. It didn’t help.

Come on, you bastard, he thought. You can do it. His arms and shoulders ached, and his back too, when he gave it any thought. Perversely enough, one of his legs had gone to sleep. At the angle he had to hold his head to watch the road, his mouth tended to hang open. After a while, a quivering motion alerted him that a small puddle of saliva had gathered in the curve of his faceplate. He was drooling. He closed his mouth, swallowing back his spit, and stared forward. A minute later he found that he was doing it again.

Slowly, miserably, he drove toward Weisskopf.

The G5 Weisskopf plant was typical of its kind: A white blister-dome to moderate temperature swings over the long lunar day, a microwave relay tower to bring in supervisory presence, and a hundred semiautonomous units to do the work.

Gunther overshot the access road, wheeled back to catch it, and ran the truck right up to the side of the factory. He had Siegfried switch off the engine, and then let the control pad fall to the ground. For well over a minute he simply hung there, eyes closed, savoring the end of motion. Then he kicked free of the straps, and crawled out from under the trailer.

Static skatting and stuttering inside his head, he stumbled into the factory.

In the muted light that filtered through the dome covering, the factory was dim as an undersea cavern. His helmet light seemed to distort as much as it illumined. Machines loomed closer in the center of its glare, swelling up as if seen through a fisheye lens. He turned it off, and waited for his eyes to adjust.

After a bit, he could see the robot assemblers, slender as ghosts, moving with unearthly delicacy. The flare storm had activated them. They swayed like seaweed, lightly out of sync with each other. Arms raised, they danced in time to random radio input.

On the assembly lines lay the remains of half-built robots, looking flayed and eviscerated. Their careful frettings of copper and silver nerves had been exposed to view and randomly operated upon. A long arm jointed down, electric fire at its tip, and made a metal torso twitch.

They were blind mechanisms, most of them, powerful things bolted to the floor in assembly logic paths. But there were mobile units as well, overseers and jacks-of-all-trades, weaving drunkenly through the factory with sun-maddened eye.

A sudden motion made Gunther turn just in time to see a metal puncher swivel toward him, slam down an enormous arm and put a hole in the floor by his feet. He felt the shock through his soles.

He danced back. The machine followed him, the diamond-tipped punch sliding nervously in and out of its sheath, its movements as trembling and dainty as a newborn colt’s.

“Easy there, baby,” Gunther whispered. To the far end of the factory, green arrows supergraffixed on the crater wall pointed to an iron door. The shelter. Gunther backed away from the punch, edging into a service aisle between two rows of machines that rippled like grass in the wind.

The punch press rolled forward on its trundle. Then, confused by that field of motion, it stopped, hesitantly scanning the ranks of robots. Gunther froze.

At last, slowly, lumberingly, the metal puncher turned away.

Gunther ran. Static roared in his head. Grey shadows swam among the distant machines, like sharks, sometimes coming closer, sometimes receding. The static loudened. Up and down the factory welding arcs winked on at the assembler tips, like tiny stars. Ducking, running, spinning, he reached the shelter and seized the airlock door. Even through his glove, the handle felt cold.

He turned it.

The airlock was small and round. He squeezed through the door and fit himself into the inadequate space within, making himself as small as possible. He yanked the door shut.

Darkness.

He switched his helmet lamp back on. The reflected glare slammed at his eyes, far too intense for such a confined area. Folded knees-to-chin into the roundness of the lock he felt a wry comradeship with Siegfried back in the truck.

The inner lock controls were simplicity itself. The door hinged inward, so that air pressure held it shut. There was a yank bar which, when pulled, would bleed oxygen into the airlock. When pressure equalized, the inner door would open easily. He yanked the bar.

The floor vibrated as something heavy went by.

The shelter was small, just large enough to hold a cot, a chemical toilet and a rebreather with spare oxytanks. A single overhead unit provided light and heat. For comfort there was a blanket. For amusement, there were pocket-sized editions of the Bible and the Koran, placed there by impossibly distant missionary societies. Even empty, there was not much space in the shelter.

It wasn’t empty.

A woman, frowning and holding up a protective hand, cringed from his helmet lamp. “Turn that thing off,” she said.

He obeyed. In the soft light that ensued he saw: strack white flattop, pink scalp visible through the sides. High cheekbones. Eyelids lifted slightly, like wings, by carefully sculpted eye shadow. Dark lips, full mouth. He had to admire the character it took to make up a face so carefully, only to hide it beneath a helmet. Then he saw her red and orange Studio Volga suit.

It was Izmailova.

To cover his embarassment, he took his time removing his gloves and helmet. Izmailova moved her own helmet from the cot to make room, and he sat down beside her. Extending a hand, he stiffly said, “We’ve met before. My name is—”

“I know. It’s written on your suit.”

“Oh yeah. Right.”

For an uncomfortably long moment, neither spoke. At last Izmailova cleared her throat and briskly said, “This is ridiculous. There’s no reason we should—”

CLANG.

Their heads jerked toward the door in unison. The sound was harsh, loud, metallic. Gunther slammed his helmet on, grabbed for his gloves. Izmailova, also suiting up as rapidly as she could, tensely subvocalized into her trance chip: “What is it?”

Methodically snapping his wrist latches shut one by one, Gunther said, “I think it’s a metal punch.” Then, because the helmet muffled his words, he repeated them over the chip.

CLANG. This second time, they were waiting for the sound. Now there could be no doubt. Something was trying to break open the outer airlock door.

“A what?!”

“Might be a hammer of some type, or a blacksmith unit. Just be thankful it’s not a laser jig.” He held up his hands before him. “Give me a safety check.”

She turned his wrists one way, back, took his helmet in her hands and gave it a twist to test its seal. “You pass.” She held up her own wrists. “But what is it trying to do?”

Her gloves were sealed perfectly. One helmet dog had a bit of give in it, but not enough to breach integrity. He shrugged. “It’s deranged—it could want anything. It might even be trying to repair a weak hinge.”

CLANG.

“It’s trying to get in here!”

“That’s another possibility, yes.”

Izmailova’s voice rose slightly. “But even scrambled, there can’t possibly be any programs in its memory to make it do that. How can random input make it act this way?”

“It doesn’t work like that. You’re thinking of the kind of robotics they had when you were a kid. These units are state of the art: They don’t manipulate instructions, they manipulate concepts. See, that makes them more flexible. You don’t have to program in every little step when you want one to do something new. You just give it a goal—”

CLANG.

“—like, to Disassemble a Rotary Drill. It’s got a bank of available skills, like Cutting and Unbolting and Gross Manipulation, which it then fits together in various configurations until it has a path that will bring it to the goal.” He was talking for the sake of talking now, talking to keep himself from panic. “Which normally works out fine. But when one of these things malfunctions, it does so on the conceptual level. See? So that—”

“So that it decides we’re rotary drills that need to be disassembled.”

“Uh . . . yeah.”

CLANG.

“So what do we do when it gets in here?” They had both involuntarily risen to their feet, and stood facing the door. There was not much space, and what little there was they filled. Gunther was acutely aware that there was not enough room here to either fight or flee.

“I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m going to hit that sucker over the head with the toilet.”

She turned to look at him.

CLA—The noise was cut in half by a breathy, whooshing explosion. Abrupt, total silence. “It’s through the outer door,” Gunther said flatly.

They waited.

Much later, Izmailova said, “Is it possible it’s gone away?”

“I don’t know.” Gunther undogged his helmet, knelt and put an ear to the floor. The stone was almost painfully cold. “Maybe the explosion damaged it.” He could hear the faint vibrations of the assemblers, the heavier rumblings of machines roving the factory floor. None of it sounded close. He silently counted to a hundred. Nothing. He counted to a hundred again.

Finally he straightened. “It’s gone.”

They both sat down. Izmailova took off her helmet, and Gunther clumsily began undoing his gloves. He fumbled at the latches. “Look at me.” He laughed shakily. “I’m all thumbs. I can’t even handle this, I’m so unnerved.”

“Let me help you with that.” Izmailova flipped up the latches, tugged at his glove. It came free. “Where’s your other hand?”

Then, somehow, they were each removing the other’s suit, tugging at the latches, undoing the seals. They began slowly but sped up with each latch undogged, until they were yanking and pulling with frantic haste. Gunther opened up the front of Izmailova’s suit, revealing a red silk camisole. He slid his hands beneath it, and pushed the cloth up over her breasts. Her nipples were hard. He let her breasts fill his hands and squeezed.

Izmailova made a low, groaning sound in the back of her throat. She had Gunther’s suit open. Now she pushed down his leggings and reached within to seize his cock. He was already erect. She tugged it out and impatiently shoved him down on the cot. Then she was kneeling on top of him, and guiding him inside her.

Her mouth met his, warm and moist.

Half in and half out of their suits, they made love. Gunther managed to struggle one arm free, and reached within Izmailova’s suit to run a hand up her long back and over the back of her head. The short hairs of her buzz cut stung and tickled his palm.

She rode him roughly, her flesh slippery with sweat against his. “Are you coming yet?” she murmured. “Are you coming yet? Tell me when you’re about to come.” She bit his shoulder, the side of his neck, his chin, his lower lip. Her nails dug into his flesh.

“Now,” he whispered. Possibly he only subvocalized it, and she caught it on her trance chip. But then she clutched him tighter than ever, as if she were trying to crack his ribs, and her whole body shuddered with orgasm. Then he came too, riding her passion down into spiraling desperation, ecstasy and release.

It was better than anything he had ever experienced before.

Afterward, they finally kicked free of their suits. They shoved and pushed the things off the cot. Gunther pulled the blanket out from beneath them, and with Izmailova’s help wrapped it about the both of them. They lay together, relaxed, not speaking.

He listened to her breathe for a while. The noise was soft. When she turned her face toward him, he could feel it, a warm little tickle in the hollow of his throat. The smell of her permeated the room. This stranger beside him.

Gunther felt weary, warm, at ease. “How long have you been here?” he asked. “Not here in the shelter, I mean, but . . .”

“Five days.”

“That little.” He smiled. “Welcome to the Moon, Ms. Izmailova.”

“Ekatarina,” she said sleepily. “Call me Ekatarina.”

Whooping, they soared high and south, over Herschel. The Ptolemaeus road bent and doubled below them, winding out of sight, always returning. “This is great!” Hiro crowed. “This is—I should’ve talked you into taking me out here a year ago.”

Gunther checked his bearings and throttled down, sinking eastward. The other two hoppers, slaved to his own, followed in tight formation. Two days had passed since the flare storm and Gunther, still on mandatory recoop, had promised to guide his friends into the highlands as soon as the surface advisory was dropped. “We’re coming in now. Better triplecheck your safety harnesses. You doing okay back there, Kreesh?”

“I am quite comfortable, yes.”

Then they were down on the Seething Bay Company landing pad.

Hiro was the second down and the first on the surface. He bounded about like a collie off its leash, chasing upslope and down, looking for new vantage points. “I can’t believe I’m here! I work out this way every day, but you know what? This is the first time I’ve actually been out here. Physically, I mean.”

“Watch your footing,” Gunther warned. “This isn’t like telepresence—if you break a leg, it’ll be up to Krishna and me to carry you out.”

“I trust you. Man, anybody who can get caught out in a flare storm, and end up nailing—”

“Hey, watch your language, okay?”

“Everybody’s heard the story. I mean, we all thought you were dead, and then they found the two of you asleep. They’ll be talking about it a hundred years from now.” Hiro was practically choking on his laughter. “You’re a legend!”

“Just give it a rest.” To change the subject, Gunther said, “I can’t believe you want to take a photo of this mess.” The Seething Bay operation was a strip mine. Robot bulldozers scooped up the regolith and fed it to a processing plant that rested on enormous skids. They were after the thorium here, and the output was small enough that it could be transported to the breeder reactor by hopper. There was no need for a railgun and the tailings were piled in artificial mountains in the wake of the factory.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Hiro swept an arm southward, toward Ptolemaeus. “There!” The crater wall caught the sun, while the lowest parts of the surrounding land were still in shadow. The gentle slopes seemed to tower; the crater itself was a cathedral, blazing white.

“Where is your camera?” Krishna asked.

“Don’t need one. I’ll just take the data down on my helmet.”

“I’m not too clear on this mosaic project of yours,” Gunther said. “Explain to me one more time how it’s supposed to work.”

“Anya came up with it. She’s renting an assembler to cut hexagonal floor tiles in black, white and fourteen intermediate shades of grey. I provide the pictures. We choose the one we like best, scan it in black and white, screen for values of intensity, and then have the assembler lay the floor, one tile per pixel. It’ll look great—come by tomorrow and see.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

Chattering like a squirrel, Hiro led them away from the edge of the mine. They bounded westward, across the slope.

Krishna’s voice came over Gunther’s trance chip. It was an old ground-rat trick. The chips had an effective transmission radius of fifteen yards—you could turn off the radio and talk chip-to-chip, if you were close enough. “You sound troubled, my friend.”

He listened for a second carrier tone, heard nothing. Hiro was out of range. “It’s Izmailova. I sort of—”

“Fell in love with her.”

“How’d you know that?”

They were spaced out across the rising slope, Hiro in the lead. For a time neither spoke. There was a calm, confidential quality to that shared silence, like the anonymous stillness of the confessional. “Please don’t take this wrong,” Krishna said.

“Take what wrong?”

“Gunther, if you take two sexually compatible people, place them in close proximity, isolate them and scare the hell out of them, they will fall in love. That’s a given. It’s a survival mechanism, something that was wired into your basic makeup long before you were born. When billions of years of evolution say it’s bonding time, your brain doesn’t have much choice but to obey.”

“Hey, come on over here!” Hiro cried over the radio. “You’ve got to see this.”

“We’re coming,” Gunther said. Then, over his chip, “You make me out to be one of Sally Chang’s machines.”

“In some ways we are machines. That’s not so bad. We feel thirsty when we need water, adrenalin pumps into the bloodstream when we need an extra boost of aggressive energy. You can’t fight your own nature. What would be the point of it?”

“Yeah, but . . .”

“Is this great or what?” Hiro was clambering over a boulder field. “It just goes on and on. And look up there!” Upslope, they saw that what they were climbing over was the spillage from a narrow cleft entirely filled with boulders. They were huge, as big as hoppers, some of them large as prefab oxysheds. “Hey, Krishna, I been meaning to ask you—just what is it that you do out there at the Center?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Aw, come on.” Hiro lifted a rock the size of his head to his shoulder and shoved it away, like a shot-putter. The rock soared slowly, landed far downslope in a white explosion of dust. “You’re among friends here. You can trust us.”

Krishna shook his head. Sunlight flashed from the visor. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

Hiro hoisted a second rock, bigger than the first. Gunther knew him in this mood, nasty-faced and grinning. “My point exactly. The two of us know zip about neurobiology. You could spend the next ten hours lecturing us, and we couldn’t catch enough to compromise security.” Another burst of dust.

“You don’t understand. The Center for Self-Replicating Technologies is here for a reason. The lab work could be done back on Earth for a fraction of what a lunar facility costs. Our sponsors only move projects here that they’re genuinely afraid of.”

“So what can you tell us about? Just the open stuff, the video magazine stuff. Nothing secret.”

“Well . . . okay.” Now it was Krishna’s turn. He picked up a small rock, wound up like a baseball player and threw. It dwindled and disappeared in the distance. A puff of white sprouted from the surface. “You know Sally Chang? She has just finished mapping the neurotransmitter functions.”

They waited. When Krishna added nothing further, Hiro dryly said, “Wow.”

“Details, Kreesh. Some of us aren’t so fast to see the universe in a grain of sand as you are.”

“It should be obvious. We’ve had a complete genetic map of the brain for almost a decade. Now add to that Sally Chang’s chemical map, and it’s analogous to being given the keys to the library. No, better than that. Imagine that you’ve spent your entire life within an enormous library filled with books in a language you neither read nor speak, and that you’ve just found the dictionary and a picture reader.”

“So what are you saying? That we’ll have complete understanding of how the brain operates?”

“We’ll have complete control over how the brain operates. With chemical therapy, it will be possible to make anyone think or feel anything we want. We will have an immediate cure for all nontraumatic mental illness. We’ll be able to fine-tune aggression, passion, creativity—bring them up, damp them down, it’ll be all the same. You can see why our sponsors are so afraid of what our research might produce.”

“Not really, no. The world could use more sanity,” Gunther said.

“I agree. But who defines sanity? Many governments consider political dissent grounds for mental incarceration. This would open the doors of the brain, allowing it to be examined from the outside. For the first time, it would be possible to discover unexpressed rebellion. Modes of thought could be outlawed. The potential for abuse is not inconsiderable.

“Consider also the military applications. This knowledge combined with some of the new nanoweaponry might produce a berserker gas, allowing you to turn the enemy’s armies upon their own populace. Or, easier, to throw them into a psychotic frenzy and let them turn on themselves. Cities could be pacified by rendering the citizenry catatonic. A secondary, internal reality could then be created, allowing the conqueror to use the masses as slave labor. The possibilities are endless.”

They digested this in silence. At last Hiro said, “Jeeze, Krishna, if that’s the open goods, what the hell kind of stuff do you have to hide?”

“I can’t tell you.”

A minute later, Hiro was haring off again. At the foot of a nearby hill he found an immense boulder standing atilt on its small end. He danced about, trying to get good shots past it without catching his own footprints in them.

“So what’s the problem?” Krishna said over his chip.

“The problem is, I can’t arrange to see her. Ekatarina. I’ve left messages, but she won’t answer them. And you know how it is in Bootstrap—it takes a real effort to avoid somebody who wants to see you. But she’s managed it.”

Krishna said nothing.

“All I want to know is, just what’s going on here?”

“She’s avoiding you.”

“But why? I fell in love and she didn’t, is that what you’re telling me? I mean, is that a crock or what?”

“Without hearing her side of the story, I can’t really say how she feels. But the odds are excellent she fell every bit as hard as you did. The difference is that you think it’s a good idea, and she doesn’t. So of course she’s avoiding you. Contact would just make it more difficult for her to master her feelings for you.”

“Shit!”

An unexpected touch of wryness entered Krishna’s voice. “What do you want? A minute ago you were complaining that Sally Chang thinks you’re a machine. Now you’re unhappy that Izmailova thinks she’s not.”

“Hey, you guys! Come over here. I’ve found the perfect shot. You’ve got to see this.”

They turned to see Hiro waving at them from the hilltop. “I thought you were leaving,” Gunther grumbled. “You said you were sick of the Moon, and going away and never coming back. So how come you’re upgrading your digs all of a sudden?”

“That was yesterday! Today, I’m a pioneer, a builder of worlds, a founder of dynasties!”

“This is getting tedious. What does it take to get a straight answer out of you?”

Hiro bounded high and struck a pose, arms wide and a little ridiculous. He staggered a bit on landing. “Anya and I are getting married!”

Gunther and Krishna looked at each other, blank visor to blank visor. Forcing enthusiasm into his voice, Gunther said, “Hey, no shit? Really! Congratu—”

A scream of static howled up from nowhere. Gunther winced and cut down the gain. “My stupid radio is—”

One of the other two—they had moved together and he couldn’t tell them apart at this distance—was pointing upward. Gunther tilted back his head, to look at the Earth. For a second he wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Then he saw it: a diamond pinprick of light in the middle of the night. It was like a small, bright hole in reality, somewhere in continental Asia. “What the hell is that?” he asked.

Softly, Hiro said, “I think it’s Vladivostok.”

By the time they were back over the Sinus Medii, that first light had reddened and faded away, and two more had blossomed. The news jockey at the Observatory was working overtime splicing together reports from the major news feeds into a montage of rumor and fear. The radio was full of talk about hits on Seoul and Buenos Aires. Those seemed certain. Strikes against Panama, Iraq, Denver and Cairo were disputed. A stealth missile had flown low over Hokkaido and been deflected into the Sea of Japan. The Swiss Orbitals had lost some factories to fragmentation satellites. There was no agreement as to the source agggressor, and though most suspicions trended in one direction, Tokyo denied everything.

Gunther was most impressed by the sound feed from a British video essayist, who said that it did not matter who had fired the first shot, or why. “Who shall we blame? The Southern Alliance, Tokyo, General Kim, or possibly some Grey terrorist group that nobody has ever heard of before? In a world whose weapons were wired to hair triggers, the question is irrelevant. When the first device exploded, it activated autonomous programs which launched what is officially labeled ‘a measured response.’ Gorshov himself could not have prevented it. His tactical programs chose this week’s three most likely aggressors—at least two of which were certainly innocent—and launched a response. Human beings had no say over it.

“Those three nations in turn had their own reflexive ‘measured responses.’ The results of which we are just beginning to learn. Now we will pause for five days, while all concerned parties negotiate. How do we know this? Abstracts of all major defense programs are available on any public data net. They are no secret. Openness is in fact what deterrence is all about.

“We have five days to avert a war that literally nobody wants. The question is, in five days can the military and political powers seize control of their own defense programming? Will they? Given the pain and anger involved, the traditional hatreds, national chauvinism, and the natural reactions of those who number loved ones among the already dead, can those in charge overcome their own natures in time to pull back from final and total war? Our best informed guess is no. No, they cannot.

“Good night, and may God have mercy on us all.”

They flew northward in silence. Even when the broadcast cut off in mid-word, nobody spoke. It was the end of the world, and there was nothing they could say that did not shrink to insignificance before that fact. They simply headed home.

The land about Bootstrap was dotted with graffiti, great block letters traced out in boulders: KARL OPS - EINDHOVEN ’49 and LOUISE MCTIGHE ALBUQUERQUE N.M. An enormous eye in a pyramid. ARSENAL WORLD RUGBY CHAMPS with a crown over it. CORNPONE. Pi Lambda Phi. MOTORHEADS. A giant with a club. Coming down over them, Gunther reflected that they all referred to places and things in the world overhead, not a one of them indigenous to the Moon. What had always seemed pointless now struck him as unspeakably sad.

It was only a short walk from the hopper pad to the vacuum garage. They didn’t bother to summon a jitney.

The garage seemed strangely unfamiliar to Gunther now, though he had passed through it a thousand times. It seemed to float in its own mystery, as if everything had been removed and replaced by its exact double, rendering it different and somehow unknowable. Row upon row of parked vehicles were slanted by type within painted lines. Ceiling lights strained to reach the floor, and could not.

“Boy, is this place still!” Hiro’s voice seemed unnaturally loud.

It was true. In all the cavernous reaches of the garage, not a single remote or robot service unit stirred. Not so much as a pressure leak sniffer moved.

“Must be because of the news,” Gunther muttered. He found he was not ready to speak of the war directly. To the back of the garage, five airlocks stood all in a row. Above them a warm, yellow strip of window shone in the rock. In the room beyond, he could see the overseer moving about.

Hiro waved an arm, and the small figure within leaned forward to wave back. They trudged to the nearest lock and waited.

Nothing happened.

After a few minutes, they stepped back and away from the lock to peer up through the window. The overseer was still there, moving unhurriedly. “Hey!” Hiro shouted over open frequency. “You up there! Are you on the job?”

The man smiled, nodded and waved again.

“Then open the goddamned door!” Hiro strode forward, and with a final, nodding wave, the overseer bent over his controls.

“Uh, Hiro,” Gunther said, “There’s something odd about . . .”

The door exploded open.

It slammed open so hard and fast the door was half torn off its hinges. The air within blasted out like a charge from a cannon. For a moment the garage was filled with loose tools, parts of vacuum suits and shreds of cloth. A wrench struck Gunther a glancing blow on his arm, spinning him around and knocking him to the floor.

He stared up in shock. Bits and pieces of things hung suspended for a long, surreal instant. Then, the air fled, they began to slowly shower down. He got up awkwardly, massaging his arm through the suit. “Hiro, are you all right? Kreesh?”

“Oh my God,” Krishna said.

Gunther spun around. He saw Krishna crouched in the shadow of a flatbed, over something that could not possibly be Hiro, because it bent the wrong way. He walked through shimmering unreality and knelt beside Krishna. He stared down at Hiro’s corpse.

Hiro had been standing directly before the door when the overseer opened the door without depressurizing the corridor within first. He had caught the blast straight on. It had lifted him and smashed him against the side of a flatbed, snapping his spine and shattering his helmet visor with the backlash. He must have died instantaneously.

“Who’s there?” a woman said.

A jitney had entered the garage without Gunther’s noticing it. He looked up in time to see a second enter, and then a third. People began piling out. Soon there were some twenty individuals advancing across the garage. They broke into two groups. One headed straight toward the locks and the smaller group advanced on Gunther and his friends. It looked for all the world like a military operation. “Who’s there?” the woman repeated.

Gunther lifted his friend’s corpse in his arms and stood. “It’s Hiro,” he said flatly. “Hiro.”

They floated forward cautiously, a semicircle of blank-visored suits like so many kachinas. He could make out the corporate logos. Mitsubishi. Westinghouse. Holst Orbital. Izmailova’s red-and-orange suit was among them, and a vivid Mondrian pattern he didn’t recognize. The woman spoke again, tensely, warily. “Tell me how you’re feeling, Hiro.”

It was Beth Hamilton.

“That’s not Hiro,” Krishna said. “It’s Gunther. That’s Hiro. That he’s carrying. We were out in the highlands and—” His voice cracked and collapsed in confusion.

“Is that you, Krishna?” someone asked. “There’s a touch of luck. Send him up front, we’re going to need him when we get in.” Somebody else slapped an arm over Krishna’s shoulders and led him away.

Over the radio, a clear voice spoke to the overseer. “Dmitri, is that you? It’s Signe. You remember me, don’t you, Dmitri? Signe Ohmstede. I’m your friend.”

“Sure I remember you, Signe. I remember you. How could I ever forget my friend? Sure I do.”

“Oh, good. I’m so happy. Listen carefully, Dmitri. Everything’s fine.”

Indignantly, Gunther chinned his radio to send. “The hell it is! That fool up there—!”

A burly man in a Westinghouse suit grabbed Gunther’s bad arm and shook him. “Shut the fuck up!” he growled. “This is serious, damn you. We don’t have the time to baby you.”

Hamilton shoved between them. “For God’s sake, Posner, he’s just seen—” She stopped. “Let me take care of him. I’ll get him calmed down. Just give us half an hour, okay?”

The others traded glances, nodded, and turned away.

To Gunther’s surprise, Ekatarina spoke over his trance chip. “I’m sorry, Gunther,” she murmured. Then she was gone.

He was still holding Hiro’s corpse. He found himself staring down at his friend’s ruined face. The flesh was bruised and as puffy-looking as an overboiled hot dog. He couldn’t look away.

“Come on.” Beth gave him a little shove to get him going. “Put the body in the back of that pick-up and give us a drive out to the cliff.”

At Hamilton’s insistence, Gunther drove. He found it helped, having something to do. Hands afloat on the steering wheel, he stared ahead looking for the Mausoleum road cut-off. His eyes felt scratchy, and inhumanly dry.

“There was a preemptive strike against us,” Hamilton said. “Sabotage. We’re just now starting to put the pieces together. Nobody knew you were out on the surface or we would’ve sent somebody out to meet you. It’s all been something of a shambles here.”

He drove on in silence, cushioned and protected by all those miles of hard vacuum wrapped about him. He could feel the presence of Hiro’s corpse in the back of the truck, a constant psychic itch between his shoulder blades. But so long as he didn’t speak, he was safe; he could hold himself aloof from the universe that held the pain. It couldn’t touch him. He waited, but Beth didn’t add anything to what she’d already said.

Finally he said, “Sabotage?”

“A software meltdown at the radio station. Explosions at all the railguns. Three guys from Microspacecraft Applications bought it when the Boitsovij Kot railgun blew. I suppose it was inevitable. All the military industry up here, it’s not surprising somebody would want to knock us out of the equation. But that’s not all. Something’s happened to the people in Bootstrap. Something really horrible. I was out at the Observatory when it happened. The newsjay called back to see if there was any backup software to get the station going again, and she got nothing but gibberish. Crazy stuff. I mean, really crazy. We had to disconnect the Observatory’s remotes, because the operators were . . .” She was crying now, softly and insistently, and it was a minute before she could speak again. “Some sort of biological weapon. That’s all we know.”

“We’re here.”

As he pulled up to the foot of the Mausoleum cliff, it occurred to Gunther that they hadn’t thought to bring a drilling rig. Then he counted ten black niches in the rockface, and realized that somebody had been thinking ahead.

“The only people who weren’t hit were those who were working at the Center or the Observatory, or out on the surface. Maybe a hundred of us all told.”

They walked around to the back of the pick-up. Gunther waited, but Hamilton didn’t offer to carry the body. For some reason that made him feel angry and resentful. He unlatched the gate, hopped up on the treads, and hoisted the suited corpse. “Let’s get this over with.”

Before today, only six people had ever died on the Moon. They walked past the caves in which their bodies awaited eternity. Gunther knew their names by heart: Heisse, Yasuda, Spehalski, Dubinin, Mikami, Castillo. And now Hiro. It seemed incomprehensible that the day should ever come when there would be too many dead to know them all by name.

Daisies and tiger lilies had been scattered before the vaults in such profusion that he couldn’t help crushing some underfoot.

They entered the first empty niche, and he laid Hiro down upon a stone table cut into the rock. In the halo of his helmet lamp the body looked piteously twisted and uncomfortable. Gunther found that he was crying, large hot tears that crawled down his face and got into his mouth when he inhaled. He cut off the radio until he had managed to blink the tears away. “Shit.” He wiped a hand across his helmet. “I suppose we ought to say something.”

Hamilton took his hand and squeezed.

“I’ve never seen him as happy as he was today. He was going to get married. He was jumping around, laughing and talking about raising a family. And now he’s dead, and I don’t even know what his religion was.” A thought occurred to him, and he turned helplessly toward Hamilton. “What are we going to tell Anya?”

“She’s got problems of her own. Come on, say a prayer and let’s go. You’ll run out of oxygen.”

“Yeah, okay.” He bowed his head. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . .”

Back at Bootstrap, the surface party had seized the airlocks and led the overseer away from the controls. The man from Westinghouse, Posner, looked down on them from the observation window. “Don’t crack your suits,” he warned. “Keep them sealed tight at all times. Whatever hit the bastards here is still around. Might be in the water, might be in the air. One whiff and you’re out of here! You got that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Gunther grumbled. “Keep your shirt on.”

Posner’s hand froze on the controls. “Let’s get serious here. I’m not letting you in until you acknowledge the gravity of the situation. This isn’t a picnic outing. If you’re not prepared to help, we don’t need you. Is that understood?”

“We understand completely, and we’ll cooperate to the fullest,” Hamilton said quickly. “Won’t we, Weil?”

He nodded miserably.

Only the one lock had been breached, and there were five more sets of pressurized doors between it and the bulk of Bootstrap’s air. The city’s designers had been cautious.

Overseen by Posner, they passed through the corridors, locks and changing rooms and up the cargo escalators. Finally they emerged into the city interior.

They stood blinking on the lip of Hell.

At first, it was impossible to pinpoint any source for the pervasive sense of wrongness nattering at the edge of consciousness. The parks were dotted with people, the fill lights at the juncture of crater walls and canopy were bright, and the waterfalls still fell gracefully from terrace to terrace. Button quail bobbed comically in the grass.

Then small details intruded. A man staggered about the fourth level, head jerking, arms waving stiffly. A plump woman waddled by, pulling an empty cart made from a wheeled microfactory stand, quacking like a duck. Someone sat in the kneehigh forest by Noguchi park, tearing out the trees one by one.

But it was the still figures that were on examination more profoundly disturbing. Here a man lay half in and half out of a tunnel entrance, as unselfconscious as a dog. There, three women stood in extreme postures of lassitude, bordering on despair. Everywhere, people did not touch or speak or show in any way that they were aware of one other. They shared an absolute and universal isolation.

“What shall we—” Something slammed onto Gunther’s back. He was knocked forward, off his feet. Tumbling, he became aware that fists were striking him, again and again, and then that a lean man was kneeling atop his chest, hysterically shouting, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

Hamilton seized the man’s shoulders, and pulled him away. Gunther got to his knees. He looked into the face of madness: eyes round and fearful, expression full of panic. The man was terrified of Gunther.

With an abrupt wrench, the man broke free. He ran as if pursued by demons. Hamilton stared after him. “You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure.” Gunther adjusted his tool harness. “Let’s see if we can find the others.”

They walked toward the lake, staring about at the self-absorbed figures scattered about the grass. Nobody attempted to speak to them. A woman ran by, barefooted. Her arms were filled with flowers. “Hey!” Hamilton called after her. She smiled fleetingly over her shoulder, but did not slow. Gunther knew her vaguely, an executive supervisor for Martin Marietta.

“Is everybody here crazy?” he asked.

“Sure looks that way.”

The woman had reached the shore and was flinging the blossoms into the water with great sweeps of her arm. They littered the surface.

“Damned waste.” Gunther had come to Bootstrap before the flowers; he knew the effort involved getting permission to plant them and rewriting the city’s ecologics. A man in a blue-striped Krupp suit was running along the verge of the lake.

The woman, flowers gone, threw herself into the water.

At first it appeared she’d suddenly decided to take a dip. But from the struggling, floundering way she thrashed deeper into the water it was clear that she could not swim.

In the time it took Gunther to realize this, Hamilton had leaped forward, running for the lake. Belatedly, he started after her. But the man in the Krupp suit was ahead of them both. He splashed in after the woman. An outstretched hand seized her shoulder and then he fell, pulling her under. She was red-faced and choking when he emerged again, arm across her chest.

By then Gunther and Beth were wading into the lake, and together they three got the woman to shore. When she was released, the woman calmly turned and walked away, as if nothing had happened.

“Gone for more flowers,” the Krupp component explained. “This is the third time fair Ophelia there’s tried to drown herself. She’s not the only one. I’ve been hanging around, hauling ’em out when they stumble in.”

“Do you know where everybody else is? Is there anyone in charge? Somebody giving out orders?”

“Do you need any help?” Gunther asked.

The Krupp man shrugged. “I’m fine. No idea where the others are, though. My friends were going on to the second level when I decided I ought to stay here. If you see them, you might tell ’em I’d appreciate hearing back from them. Three guys in Krupp suits.”

“We’ll do that,” Gunther said.

Hamilton was already walking away.

On a step just beneath the top of the stairs sprawled one of Gunther’s fellow G5 components. “Sidney,” he said carefully. “How’s it going?”

Sidney giggled. “I’m making the effort, if that’s what you mean. I don’t see that the ‘how’ of it makes much difference.”

“Okay.”

“A better way of phrasing that might be to ask why I’m not at work.” He stood, and in a very natural manner accompanied Gunther up the steps. “Obviously I can’t be two places at once. You wouldn’t want to perform major surgery in your own absence, would you?” He giggled again. “It’s an oxymoron. Like horses: Those classically beautiful Praxitelesian bodies excreting these long surreal turds.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve always admired them for squeezing so much art into a single image.”

“Sidney,” Hamilton said. “We’re looking for our friends. Three people in blue-striped work suits.”

“I’ve seen them. I know just where they went.” His eyes were cool and vacant; they didn’t seem to focus on anything in particular.

“Can you lead us to them?”

“Even a flower recognizes its own face.” A gracefully winding gravel path led through private garden plots and croquet malls. They followed him down it.

There were not many people on the second terrace; with the fall of madness, most seemed to have retreated into the caves. Those few who remained either ignored or cringed away from them. Gunther found himself staring obsessively into their faces, trying to analyze the deficiency he felt in each. Fear nested in their eyes, and the appalled awareness that some terrible thing had happened to them coupled with a complete ignorance of its nature.

“God, these people!”

Hamilton grunted.

He felt he was walking through a dream. Sounds were muted by his suit, and colors less intense seen through his helmet visor. It was as if he had been subtly removed from the world, there and not-there simultaneously, an impression that strengthened with each new face that looked straight through him with mad, unseeing indifference.

Sidney turned a corner, broke into a trot and jogged into a tunnel entrance. Gunther ran after him. At the mouth of the tunnel, he paused to let his helmet adjust to the new light levels. When it cleared he saw Sidney dart down a side passage. He followed.

At the intersection of passages, he looked and saw no trace of their guide. Sidney had disappeared. “Did you see which way he went?” he asked Hamilton over the radio. There was no answer. “Beth?”

He started down the corridor, halted, and turned back. These things went deep. He could wander around in them forever. He went back out to the terraces. Hamilton was nowhere to be seen.

For lack of any better plan, he followed the path. Just beyond an ornamental holly bush he was pulled up short by a vision straight out of William Blake.

The man had discarded shirt and sandals, and wore only a pair of shorts. He squatted atop a boulder, alert, patient, eating a tomato. A steel pipe slanted across his knees like a staff or scepter, and he had woven a crown of sorts from platinum wire with a fortune’s worth of hyperconductor chips dangling over his forehead. He looked every inch a kingly animal.

He stared at Gunther, calm and unblinking.

Gunther shivered. The man seemed less human than anthropoid, crafty in its way, but unthinking. He felt as if he were staring across the eons at Grandfather Ape, crouched on the edge of awareness. An involuntary thrill of superstitious awe seized him. Was this what happened when the higher mental functions were scraped away? Did Archetype lie just beneath the skin, waiting for the opportunity to emerge?

“I’m looking for my friend,” he said. “A woman in a G5 suit like mine? Have you seen her? She was looking for three—” He stopped. The man was staring at him blankly. “Oh, never mind.”

He turned away and walked on.

After a time, he lost all sense of continuity. Existence fragmented into unconnected images: A man bent almost double, leering and squeezing a yellow rubber duckie. A woman leaping up like a jack-in-the-box from behnd an air monitor, shrieking and flapping her arms. An old friend sprawled on the ground, crying, with an broken leg. When he tried to help her, she scrabbled away from him in fear. He couldn’t get near to her without doing more harm. “Stay here,” he said, “I’ll find help.” Five minutes later he realized that he was lost, with no slightest notion of how to find his way back to her again. He came to the stairs leading back down to the bottom level. There was no reason to go down them. There was no reason not to. He went down.

He had just reached the bottom of the stairs when someone in a lavender boutique suit hurried by.

Gunther chinned on his helmet radio.

“Hello!” The lavender suit glanced back at him, its visor a plate of obsidian, but did not turn back. “Do you know where everyone’s gone? I’m totally lost. How can I find out what I should be doing?” The lavender suit ducked into a tunnel.

Faintly, a voice answered, “Try the city manager’s office.”

The city manager’s office was a tight little cubby an eighth of a kilometer deep within the tangled maze of administrative and service tunnels. It had never been very important in the scheme of things. The city manager’s prime duties were keeping the air and water replenished and scheduling airlock inspections, functions any computer could handle better than a man had they dared trust them to a machine. The room had probably never been as crowded as it was now. Dozens of people suited for full vacuum spilled out into the hall, anxiously listening to Ekatarina confer with the city’s Crisis Management Program. Gunther pushed in as close as he could; even so, he could barely see her.

“—the locks, the farms and utilities, and we’ve locked away all the remotes. What comes next?”

Ekatarina’s peecee hung from her work harness, amplifying the CMP’s silent voice. “Now that elementary control has been established, second priority must go to the industrial sector. The factories must be locked down. The reactors must be put to sleep. There is not sufficient human supervisory presence to keep them running. The factories have mothballing programs available upon request.

“Third, the farms cannot tolerate neglect. Fifteen minutes without oxygen, and all the tilapia will die. The calimari are even more delicate. Three experienced agricultural components must be assigned immediately. Double that number, if you only have inexperienced components. Advisory software is available. What are your resources?”

“Let me get back to you on that. What else?”

“What about the people?” a man asked belligerantly. “What the hell are you worrying about factories for, when our people are in the state they’re in?”

Izmailova looked up sharply. “You’re one of Chang’s research components, aren’t you? Why are you here? Isn’t there enough for you to do?” She looked about, as if abruptly awakened from sleep. “All of you! What are you waiting for?”

“You can’t put us off that easily! Who made you the little brass-plated general? We don’t have to take orders from you.”

The bystanders shuffled uncomfortably, not leaving, waiting to take their cue from each other. Their suits were as good as identical in this crush, their helmets blank and expressionless. They looked like so many ambulatory eggs.

The crowd’s mood balanced on the instant, ready to fall into acceptance or anger with a featherweight’s push. Gunther raised an arm. “General!” he said loudly. “Private Weil here! I’m awaiting my orders. Tell me what to do.”

Laughter rippled through the room, and the tension eased. Ekatarina said, “Take whoever’s nearest you, and start clearing the afflicted out of the administrative areas. Guide them out toward the open, where they won’t be so likely to hurt themselves. Whenever you get a room or corridor emptied, lock it up tight. Got that?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He tapped the suit nearest him, and its helmet dipped in a curt nod. But when they turned to leave, their way was blocked by the crush of bodies.

“You!” Ekatarina jabbed a finger. “Go to the farmlocks and foam them shut; I don’t want any chance of getting them contaminated. Anyone with experience running factories—that’s most of us, I think—should find a remote and get to work shutting the things down. The CMP will help direct you. If you have nothing else to do, buddy up and work at clearing out the corridors. I’ll call a general meeting when we’ve put together a more comprehensive plan of action.” She paused. “What have I left out?”

Surprisingly, the CMP answered her: “There are twenty-three children in the city, two of them seven-year-old prelegals and the rest five years of age or younger, offspring of registered-permanent lunar components. Standing directives are that children be given special care and protection. The third-level chapel can be converted to a care center. Word should be spread that as they are found, the children are to be brought there. Assign one reliable individual to oversee them.”

“My God, yes.” She turned to the belligerent man from the Center, and snapped, “Do it.”

He hesitated, then saluted ironically and turned to go.

That broke the logjam. The crowd began to disperse. Gunther and his co-worker—it turned out to be Liza Nagenda, another ground-rat like himself—set to work.

In after years Gunther was to remember this period as a time when his life entered a dark tunnel. For long, nightmarish hours he and Liza shuffled from office to storage room, struggling to move the afflicted out of the corporate areas and into the light.

The afflicted did not cooperate.

The first few rooms they entered were empty. In the fourth, a distraught-looking woman was furiously going through drawers and files and flinging their contents away. Trash covered the floor. “It’s in here somewhere, it’s in here somewhere,” she said frantically.

“What’s in there, darling?” Gunther said soothingly. He had to speak loudly so he could be heard through his helmet. “What are you looking for?”

She tilted her head up with a smile of impish delight. Using both hands, she smoothed back her hair, elbows high, pushing it straight over her skull, then tucking in stray strands behind her ears. “It doesn’t matter, because I’m sure to find it now. Two scarabs appear, and between them the blazing disk of the sun, that’s a good omen, not to mention being an analogy for sex. I’ve had sex, all the sex anyone could want, buggered behind the outhouse by the lizard king when I was nine. What did I care? I had wings then and thought that I could fly.”

Gunther edged a little closer. “You’re not making any sense at all.”

“You know, Tolstoy said there was a green stick in the woods behind his house that once found would cause all men to love one another. I believe in that green stick as a basic principle of physical existence. The universe exists in a matrix of four dimensions which we can perceive and seven which we cannot, which is why we experience peace and brotherhood as a seven-dimensional greenstick phenomenon.”

“You’ve got to listen to me.”

“Why? You gonna tell me Hitler is dead? I don’t believe in that kind of crap.”

“Oh hell,” Nagenda said. “You can’t reason with a flick. Just grab her arms and we’ll chuck her out.”

It wasn’t that easy, though. The woman was afraid of them. Whenever they approached her, she slipped fearfully away. If they moved slowly, they could not corner her, and when they both rushed her, she leaped up over a desk and then down into the kneehole. Nagenda grabbed her legs and pulled. The woman wailed, and clutched at the knees of her suit. “Get offa me,” Liza snarled. “Gunther, get this crazy woman off my damn legs.”

“Don’t kill me!” the woman screamed. “I’ve always voted twice—you know I did. I told them you were a gangster, but I was wrong. Don’t take the oxygen out of my lungs!”

They got the woman out of the office, then lost her again when Gunther turned to lock the door. She went fluttering down the corridor with Nagenda in hot pursuit. Then she dove into another office, and they had to start all over again.

It took over an hour to drive the woman from the corridors and release her into the park. The next three went quickly enough by contrast. The one after that was difficult again, and the fifth turned out to be the first woman they had encountered, wandered back to look for her office. When they’d brought her to the open again, Liza Nagenda said, “That’s four flicks down and three thousand, eight hundred fifty-eight to go.”

“Look—” Gunther began. And then Krishna’s voice sounded over his trance chip, stiffly and with exaggerated clarity. “Everyone is to go to the central lake immediately for an organizational meeting. Repeat: Go to the lake immediately. Go to the lake now.” He was obviously speaking over a jury-rigged transmitter. The sound was bad and his voice boomed and popped on the chip.

“Alright, okay, I got that,” Liza said. “You can shut up now.”

“Please go to the lake immediately. Everyone is to go directly to the central—”

“Sheesh.”

By the time they got out to the parklands again, the open areas were thick with people. Not just the suited figures of the survivors, either. All the afflicted were emerging from the caves and corridors of Bootstrap. They walked blindly, uncertainly, toward the lake, as if newly called from the grave. The ground level was filling with people.

“Sonofabitch,” Gunther said wonderingly.

“Gunther?” Nagenda asked. “What’s going on?”

“It’s the trance chips! Sonofabitch, all we had to do was speak to them over the chips. They’ll do whatever the voice in their heads tells them to do.”

The land about the lake was so crowded that Gunther had trouble spotting any other suits. Then he saw a suited figure standing on the edge of the second level waving broadly. He waved back and headed for the stairs.

By the time he got to level two, a solid group of the unafflicted had gathered. More and more came up, drawn by the concentration of suits. Finally Ekatarina spoke over the open channel of her suit radio.

“There’s no reason to wait for us all to gather. I think everyone is close enough to hear me. Sit down, take a little rest, you’ve all earned it.” People eased down on the grass. Some sprawled on their backs or stomachs, fully suited. Most just sat.

“By a fortunate accident, we’ve discovered a means of controlling our afflicted friends.” There was light applause. “But there are still many problems before us, and they won’t all be solved so easily. We’ve all seen the obvious. Now I must tell you of worse. If the war on Earth goes full thermonuclear, we will be completely and totally cut off, possibly for decades.”

A murmur passed through the crowd.

“What does this mean? Beyond the immediate inconveniences—no luxuries, no more silk shirts, no new seed stock, no new videos, no way home for those of us who hadn’t already decided to stay—we will be losing much that we require for survival. All our microfacturing capability comes from the Swiss Orbitals. Our water reserves are sufficient for a year, but we lose minute quantities of water vapor to rust and corrosion and to the vacuum every time somebody goes in or out an airlock, and those quantities are necessary for our existence.

“But we can survive. We can process raw hydrogen and oxygen from the regolith, and burn them to produce water. We already make our own air. We can do without most nanoelectronics. We can thrive and prosper and grow, even if Earth . . . even if the worst happens. But to do so we’ll need our full manufacturing capability, and full supervisory capability as well. We must not only restore our factories, but find a way to restore our people. There’ll be work and more for all of us in the days ahead.”

Nagenda touched helmets with Gunther and muttered, “What a crock.”

“Come on, I want to hear this.”

“Fortunately, the Crisis Management Program has contingency plans for exactly this situation. According to its records, which may be incomplete, I have more military command experience than any other functional. Does anyone wish to challenge this?” She waited, but nobody said anything. “We will go to a quasimilitary structure for the duration of the emergency. This is strictly for organizational purposes. There will be no privileges afforded the officers, and the military structure will be dismantled immediately upon resolution of our present problems. That’s paramount.”

She glanced down at her peecee. “To that purpose, I am establishing beneath me a triumvirate of subordinate officers, consisting of Carlos Diaz-Rodrigues, Miiko Ezumi, and Will Posner. Beneath them will be nine officers, each responsible for a cadre of no more than ten individuals.”

She read out names. Gunther was assigned to Cadre Four, Beth Hamilton’s group. Then Ekatarina said, “We’re all tired. The gang back at the Center have rigged up a decontamination procedure, a kitchen and sleeping spaces of sorts. Cadres One, Two and Three will put in four more hours here, then pull down a full eight hours sleep. Cadres Four through Nine may return now to the Center for a meal and four hours rest.” She stopped. “That’s it. Go get some shut-eye.”

A ragged cheer arose, fell flat and died. Gunther stood. Liza Nagenda gave him a friendly squeeze on the butt and when he started to the right yanked his arm and pointed him left, toward the service escalators. With easy familiarity, she slid an arm around his waist.

He’d known guys who’d slept with Liza Nagenda, and they all agreed that she was bad news, possessive, hysterical, ludicrously emotional. But what the hell. It was easier than not.

They trudged off.

There was too much to do. They worked to exhaustion—it was not enough. They rigged a system of narrow-band radio transmissions for the CMP and ran a microwave patch back to the Center, so it could direct their efforts more efficiently—it was not enough. They organized and rearranged constantly. But the load was too great and accidents inevitably happened.

Half the surviving railguns—small units used to deliver raw and semiprocessed materials over the highlands and across the bay—were badly damaged when the noonday sun buckled their aluminum rails; the sunscreens had not been put in place in time. An unknown number of robot bulldozers had wandered off from the strip mines and were presumably lost. It was hard to guess how many because the inventory records were scrambled. None of the food stored in Bootstrap could be trusted; the Center’s meals had to be harvested direct from the farms and taken out through the emergency locks. An inexperienced farmer mishandled her remote, and ten aquaculture tanks boiled out into vacuum geysering nine thousand fingerlings across the surface. On Posner’s orders, the remote handler rigs were hastily packed and moved to the Center. When uncrated, most were found to have damaged rocker arms.

There were small victories. On his second shift, Gunther found fourteen bales of cotton in vacuum storage and set an assembler to sewing futons for the Center. That meant an end to sleeping on bare floors and made him a local hero for the rest of that day. There were not enough toilets in the Center; Diaz-Rodrigues ordered the flare storm shelters in the factories stripped of theirs. Huriel Garza discovered a talent for cooking with limited resources.

But they were losing ground. The afflicted were unpredictable, and they were everywhere. A demented systems analyst, obeying the voices in his head, dumped several barrels of lubricating oil in the lake. The water filters clogged, and the streams had to be shut down for repairs. A doctor somehow managed to strangle herself with her own diagnostic harness. The city’s ecologics were badly stressed by random vandalism.

Finally somebody thought to rig up a voice loop for continuous transmission. “I am calm,” it said. “I am tranquil. I do not want to do anything. I am happy where I am.”

Gunther was working with Liza Nagenda trying to get the streams going again when the loop came on. He looked up and saw an uncanny quiet spread over Bootstrap. Up and down the terraces, the flicks stood in postures of complete and utter impassivity. The only movement came from the small number of suits scurrying like beetles among the newly catatonic.

Liza put her hands on her hips. “Terrific. Now we’ve got to feed them.”

“Hey, cut me some slack, okay? This is the first good news I’ve heard since I don’t know when.”

“It’s not good anything, sweetbuns. It’s just more of the same.”

She was right. Relieved as he was, Gunther knew it. One hopeless task had been traded for another.

He was wearily suiting up for his third day when Hamilton stopped him and said, “Weil! You know any electrical engineering?”

“Not really, no. I mean, I can do the wiring for a truck, or maybe rig up a microwave relay, stuff like that, but . . .”

“It’ll have to do. Drop what you’re on, and help Krishna set up a system for controlling the flicks. Some way we can handle them individually.”

They set up shop in Krishna’s old lab. The remnants of old security standards still lingered, and nobody had been allowed to sleep there. Consequently, the room was wonderfully neat and clean, all crafted-in-orbit laboratory equipment with smooth, anonymous surfaces. It was a throwback to a time before clutter and madness had taken over. If it weren’t for the new-tunnel smell, the raw tang of cut rock the air carried, it would be possible to pretend nothing had happened.

Gunther stood in a telepresence rig, directing a remote through Bootstrap’s apartments. They were like so many unconnected cells of chaos. He entered one and found the words BUDDHA = COSMIC INERTIA scrawled on its wall with what looked to be human feces. A woman sat on the futon tearing handfuls of batting from it and flinging them in the air. Cotton covered the room like a fresh snowfall. The next apartment was empty and clean, and a microfactory sat gleaming on a ledge. “I hereby nationalize you in the name of the People’s Provisional Republic of Bootstrap, and of the oppressed masses everywhere,” he said dryly. The remote gingerly picked it up. “You done with that chip diagram yet?”

“It will not be long now,” Krishna said.

They were building a prototype controller. The idea was to code each peecee, so the CMP could identify and speak to its owner individually. By stepping down the voltage, they could limit the peecee’s transmission range to a meter and a half so that each afflicted person could be given individualized orders. The existing chips, however, were high-strung Swiss Orbital thoroughbreds, and couldn’t handle oddball power yields. They had to be replaced.

“I don’t see how you can expect to get any useful work out of these guys, though. I mean, what we need are supervisors. You can’t hope to get coherent thought out of them.”

Bent low over his peecee, Krishna did not answer at first. Then he said, “Do you know how a yogi stops his heart? We looked into that when I was in grad school. We asked Yogi Premanand if he would stop his heart while wired up to our instruments, and he graciously consented. We had all the latest brain scanners, but it turned out the most interesting results were recorded by the EKG.

“We found that the yogi’s heart did not as we had expected slow down, but rather went faster and faster, until it reached its physical limits and began to fibrillate. He had not slowed his heart; he had sped it up. It did not stop, but went into spasm.

“After our tests, I asked him if he had known these facts. He said no, that they were most interesting. He was polite about it, but clearly did not think our findings very significant.”

“So you’re saying . . .?”

“The problem with schizophrenics is that they have too much going on in their heads. Too many voices. Too many ideas. They can’t focus their attention on a single chain of thought. But it would be a mistake to think them incapable of complex reasoning. In fact, they’re thinking brilliantly. Their brains are simply operating at such peak efficiencies that they can’t organize their thoughts coherently.

“What the trance chip does is to provide one more voice, but a louder, more insistent one. That’s why they obey it. It breaks through that noise, provides a focus, serves as a matrix along which thought can crystallize.”

The remote unlocked the door into a conference room deep in the administrative tunnels. Eight microfactories waited in a neat row atop the conference table. It added the ninth, turned, and left, locking the door behind it. “You know,” Gunther said, “all these elaborate precautions may be unnecessary. Whatever was used on Bootstrap may not be in the air anymore. It may never have been in the air. It could’ve been in the water or something.”

“Oh, it’s there all right, in the millions. We’re dealing with an airborne schizomimetic engine. It’s designed to hang around in the air indefinitely.”

“A schizomimetic engine? What the hell is that?”

In a distracted monotone, Krishna said, “A schizomimetic engine is a strategic nonlethal weapon with high psychological impact. It not only incapacitates its target vectors, but places a disproportionately heavy burden on the enemy’s manpower and material support caring for the victims. Due to the particular quality of the effect, it has a profoundly demoralizing influence on those exposed to the victims, especially those involved in their care. Thus, it is particularly desirable as a strategic weapon.” He might have been quoting from an operations manual.

Gunther pondered that. “Calling the meeting over the chips wasn’t a mistake, was it? You knew it would work. You knew they would obey a voice speaking inside their heads.”

“Yes.”

“This shit was brewed up at the Center, wasn’t it? This is the stuff that you couldn’t talk about.”

“Some of it.”

Gunther powered down his rig and flipped up the lens. “God damn you, Krishna! God damn you straight to Hell, you stupid fucker!”

Krishna looked up from his work, bewildered. “Have I said something wrong?”

“No! No, you haven’t said a damned thing wrong—you’ve just driven four thousand people out of their fucking minds, is all! Wake up and take a good look at what you maniacs have done with your weapons research!”

“It wasn’t weapons research,” Krishna said mildly. He drew a long, involuted line on the schematic. “But when pure research is funded by the military, the military will seek out military applications for the research. That’s just the way it is.”

“What’s the difference? It happened. You’re responsible.”

Now Krishna actually set his peecee aside. He spoke with uncharacteristic fire. “Gunther, we need this information. Do you realize that we are trying to run a technological civilization with a brain that was evolved in the neolithic? I am perfectly serious. We’re all trapped in the old hunter-gatherer programs, and they are of no use to us anymore. Take a look at what’s happening on Earth. They’re hip-deep in a war that nobody meant to start and nobody wants to fight and it’s even money that nobody can stop. The type of thinking that put us in this corner is not to our benefit. It has to change. And that’s what we are working toward—taming the human brain. Harnessing it. Reining it in.

“Granted, our research has been turned against us. But what’s one more weapon among so many? If neuroprogrammers hadn’t been available, something else would have been used. Mustard gas maybe, or plutonium dust. For that matter, they could’ve just blown a hole in the canopy and let us all strangle.”

“That’s self-justifying bullshit, Krishna! Nothing can excuse what you’ve done.”

Quietly, but with conviction, Krishna said, “You will never convince me that our research is not the most important work we could possibly be doing today. We must seize control of this monster within our skulls. We must change our ways of thinking.” His voice dropped. “The sad thing is that we cannot change unless we survive. But in order to survive, we must first change.”

They worked in silence after that.

Gunther awoke from restless dreams to find that the sleep shift was only half over. Liza was snoring. Careful not to wake her, he pulled his clothes on and padded barefoot out of his niche and down the hall. The light was on in the common room and he heard voices.

Ekatarina looked up when he entered. Her face was pale and drawn. Faint circles had formed under her eyes. She was alone.

“Oh, hi. I was just talking with the CMP.” She thought off her peecee. “Have a seat.”

He pulled up a chair and hunched down over the table. Confronted by her, he found it took a slight but noticeable effort to draw his breath. “So. How are things going?”

“They’ll be trying out your controllers soon. The first batch of chips ought to be coming out of the factories in an hour or so. I thought I’d stay up to see how they work out.”

“It’s that bad, then?” Ekatarina shook her head, would not look at him. “Hey, come on, here you are waiting up on the results, and I can see how tired you are. There must be a lot riding on this thing.”

“More than you know,” she said bleakly. “I’ve just been going over the numbers. Things are worse than you can imagine.”

He reached out and took her cold, bloodless hand. She squeezed him so tightly it hurt. Their eyes met and he saw in hers all the fear and wonder he felt.

Wordlessly, they stood.

“I’m niching alone,” Ekatarina said. She had not let go of his hand, held it so tightly in fact, that it seemed she would never let it go.

Gunther let her lead him away.

They made love, and talked quietly about inconsequential things, and made love again. Gunther had thought she would nod off immediately after the first time, but she was too full of nervous energy for that.

“Tell me when you’re about to come,” she murmured. “Tell me when you’re coming.”

He stopped moving. “Why do you always say that?”

Ekatarina looked up at him dazedly, and he repeated the question. Then she laughed a deep, throaty laugh. “Because I’m frigid.”

“Hah?”

She took his hand, and brushed her cheek against it. Then she ducked her head, continuing the motion across her neck and up the side of her scalp. He felt the short, prickly hair against his palm and then, behind her ear, two bumps under the skin where biochips had been implanted. One of those would be her trance chip and the other . . . “It’s a prosthetic,” she explained. Her eyes were grey and solemn. “It hooks into the pleasure centers. When I need to, I can turn on my orgasm at a thought. That way we can always come at the same time.” She moved her hips slowly beneath him as she spoke.

“But that means you don’t really need to have any kind of sexual stimulation at all, do you? You can trigger an orgasm at will. While you’re riding on a bus. Or behind a desk. You could just turn that thing on and come for hours at a time.”

She looked amused. “I’ll tell you a secret. When it was new, I used to do stunts like that. Everybody does. One outgrows that sort of thing quickly.”

With more than a touch of stung pride, Gunther said, “Then what am I doing here? If you’ve got that thing, what the hell do you need me for?” He started to draw away from her.

She pulled him down atop her again. “You’re kind of comforting,” she said. “In an argumentative way. Come here.”

He got back to his futon and began gathering up the pieces of his suit. Liza sat up sleepily and gawked at him. “So,” she said. “It’s like that, is it?”

“Yeah, well. I kind of left something unfinished. An old relationship.” Warily, he extended a hand. “No hard feelings, huh?”

Ignoring his hand, she stood, naked and angry. “You got the nerve to stand there without even wiping my smile off your dick first and say no hard feelings? Asshole!”

“Aw, come on now, Liza, it’s not like that.”

“Like hell it’s not! You got a shot at that white-assed Russian ice queen, and I’m history. Don’t think I don’t know all about her.”

“I was hoping we could still be, you know, friends.”

“Nice trick, shithead.” She balled her fist and hit him hard in the center of his chest. Tears began to form in her eyes. “You just slink away. I’m tired of looking at you.”

He left.

But did not sleep. Ekatarina was awake and ebullient over the first reports coming in of the new controller system. “They’re working!” she cried. “They’re working!” She’d pulled on a silk camisole, and strode back and forth excitedly, naked to the waist. Her pubic hair was a white flame, with almost invisible trails of smaller hairs reaching for her navel and caressing the sweet insides of her thighs. Tired as he was, Gunther felt new desire for her. In a weary, washed-out way, he was happy.

“Whooh!” She kissed him hard, not sexually, and called up the CMP. “Rerun all our earlier projections. We’re putting our afflicted components back to work. Adjust all work schedules.”

“As you direct.”

“How does this change our long-range prospects?”

The program was silent for several seconds, processing. Then it said, “You are about to enter a necessary but very dangerous stage of recovery. You are going from a low-prospects high-stability situation to a high-prospects high-instability one. With leisure your unafflicted components will quickly grow dissatisfied with your government.”

“What happens if I just step down?”

“Prospects worsen drastically.”

Ekatarina ducked her head. “All right, what’s likely to be our most pressing new problem?”

“The unafflicted components will demand to know more about the war on Earth. They’ll want the media feeds restored immediately.”

“I could rig up a receiver easily enough,” Gunther volunteered. “Nothing fancy, but . . .”

“Don’t you dare!”

“Hah? Why not?”

“Gunther, let me put it to you this way: What two nationalities are most heavily represented here?”

“Well, I guess that would be Russia and—oh.”

“Oh is right. For the time being, I think it’s best if nobody knows for sure who’s supposed to be enemies with whom.” She asked the CMP, “How should I respond?”

“Until the situation stabilizes, you have no choice but distraction. Keep their minds occupied. Hunt down the saboteurs and then organize war crime trials.”

“That’s out. No witch hunts, no scapegoats, no trials. We’re all in this together.”

Emotionlessly, the CMP said, “Violence is the left hand of government. You are rash to dismiss its potentials without serious thought.”

“I won’t discuss it.”

“Very well. If you wish to postpone the use of force for the present, you could hold a hunt for the weapon used on Bootstrap. Locating and identifying it would involve everyone’s energies without necessarily implicating anybody. It would also be widely interpreted as meaning an eventual cure was possible, thus boosting the general morale without your actually lying.”

Tiredly, as if this were something she had gone over many times already, she said, “Is there really no hope of curing them?”

“Anything is possible. In light of present resources, though, it cannot be considered likely.”

Ekatarina thought the peecee off, dismissing the CMP. She sighed. “Maybe that’s what we ought to do. Donkey up a hunt for the weapon. We ought to be able to do something with that notion.”

Puzzled, Gunther said, “But it was one of Chang’s weapons, wasn’t it? A schizomimetic engine, right?”

“Where did you hear that?” she demanded sharply.

“Well, Krishna said . . . He didn’t act like . . . I thought it was public knowledge.”

Ekatarina’s face hardened. “Program!” she thought.

The CMP came back to life. “Ready.”

“Locate Krishna Narasimhan, unafflicted, Cadre Five. I want to speak with him immediately.” Ekatarina snatched up her panties and shorts, and furiously began dressing. “Where are my damned sandals? Program! Tell him to meet me in the common room. Right away.”

“Received.”

To Gunther’s surprise, it took over an hour for Ekatarina to browbeat Krishna into submission. Finally, though, the young research component went to a lockbox, identified himself to it, and unsealed the storage areas. “It’s not all that secure,” he said apologetically. “If our sponsors knew how often we just left everything open so we could get in and out, they’d—well, never mind.”

He lifted a flat, palm-sized metal rectangle from a cabinet. “This is the most likely means of delivery. It’s an aerosol bomb. The biological agents are loaded here, and it’s triggered by snapping this back here. It’s got enough pressure in it to spew the agents fifty feet straight up. Air currents do the rest.” He tossed it to Gunther who stared down at the thing in horror. “Don’t worry, it’s not armed.”

He slid out a slim drawer holding row upon gleaming row of slim chrome cylinders. “These contain the engines themselves. They’re off-the-shelf nanoweaponry. State of the art stuff, I guess.” He ran a fingertip over them. “We’ve programmed each to produce a different mix of neurotransmitters. Dopamine, phencylclidine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, met-enkephalin, substance P, serotonin—there’s a hefty slice of Heaven in here, and—” he tapped an empty space—”right here is our missing bit of Hell.” He frowned, and muttered, “That’s curious. Why are there two cylinders missing?”

“What’s that?” Ekatarina said. “I didn’t catch what you just said.”

“Oh, nothing important. Um, listen, it might help if I yanked a few biological pathways charts and showed you the chemical underpinnings of these things.”

“Never mind that. Just keep it sweet and simple. Tell us about these schizomimetic engines.”

It took over an hour to explain.

The engines were molecule-sized chemical factories, much like the assemblers in a microfactory. They had been provided by the military, in the hope Chang’s group would come up with a misting weapon that could be sprayed in an army’s path to cause them to change their loyalty. Gunther dozed off briefly while Krishna was explaining why that was impossible, and woke up sometime after the tiny engines had made their way into the brain.

“It’s really a false schizophrenia,” Krishna explained. “True schizophrenia is a beautifully complicated mechanism. What these engines create is more like a bargain-basement knockoff. They seize control of the brain chemistry, and start pumping out dopamine and a few other neuromediators. It’s not an actual disorder, per se. They just keep the brain hopping.” He coughed. “You see.”

“Okay,” Ekatarina said. “Okay. You say you can reprogram these things. How?”

“We use what are technically called messenger engines. They’re like neuromodulators—they tell the schizomimetic engines what to do.” He slid open another drawer, and in a flat voice said, “They’re gone.”

“Let’s keep to the topic, if we may. We’ll worry about your inventory later. Tell us about these messenger engines. Can you brew up a lot of them, to tell the schizomimetics to turn themselves off?”

“No, for two reasons. First, these molecules were hand-crafted in the Swiss Orbitals; we don’t have the industrial plant to create them. Secondly, you can’t tell the schizomimetics to turn themselves off. They don’t have off switches. They’re more like catalysts than actual machines. You can reconfigure them to produce different chemicals, but . . .” He stopped, and a distant look came into his eyes. “Damn.” He grabbed up his peecee, and a chemical pathways chart appeared on one wall. Then beside it, a listing of major neurofunctions. Then another chart covered with scrawled behavioral symbols. More and more data slammed up on the wall.

“Uh, Krishna . . .?”

“Oh, go away,” he snapped. “This is important.”

“You think you might be able to come up with a cure?”

“Cure? No. Something better. Much better.”

Ekatarina and Gunther looked at each other. Then she said, “Do you need anything? Can I assign anyone to help you?”

“I need the messenger engines. Find them for me.”

“How? How do we find them? Where do we look?”

“Sally Chang,” Krishna said impatiently. “She must have them. Nobody else had access.” He snatched up a light pen, and began scrawling crabbed formulae on the wall.

“I’ll get her for you. Program! Tell—”

“Chang’s a flick,” Gunther reminded her. “She was caught by the aerosol bomb.” Which she must surely have set herself. A neat way of disposing of evidence that might’ve led to whatever government was running her. She’d have been the first to go mad.

Ekatarina pinched her nose, wincing. “I’ve been awake too long,” she said. “All right, I understand. Krishna, from now on you’re assigned permanently to research. The CMP will notify your cadre leader. Let me know if you need any support. Find me a way to turn this damned weapon off.” Ignoring the way he shrugged her off, she said to Gunther, “I’m yanking you from Cadre Four. From now on, you report directly to me. I want you to find Chang. Find her, and find those messenger engines.”

Gunther was bone-weary. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had a good eight hours’ sleep. But he managed what he hoped was a confident grin. “Received.”

A madwoman should not have been able to hide herself. Sally Chang could. Nobody should have been able to evade the CMP’s notice, now that it was hooked into a growing number of afflicted individuals. Sally Chang did. The CMP informed Gunther that none of the flicks were aware of Chang’s whereabouts. It accepted a directive to have them all glance about for her once every hour until she was found.

In the west tunnels, walls had been torn out to create a space as large as any factory interior. The remotes had been returned, and were now manned by almost two hundred flicks spaced so that they did not impinge upon each other’s fields of instruction. Gunther walked by them, through the CMP’s whispering voices: “Are all bulldozers accounted for? If so . . . Clear away any malfunctioning machines; they can be placed . . . for vacuum-welded dust on the upper surfaces of the rails . . . reduction temperature, then look to see that the oxygen feed is compatible . . .” At the far end a single suit sat in a chair, overseer unit in its lap.

“How’s it going?” Gunther asked.

“Absolutely top-notch.” He recognized Takayuni’s voice. “Most of the factories are up and running, and we’re well on our way to having the railguns operative too. You wouldn’t believe the kind of efficiencies we’re getting here.”

“Good, huh?”

Takayuni grinned; Gunther could hear it in his voice. “Industrious little buggers!”

Takayuni hadn’t seen Chang. Gunther moved on.

Some hours later he found himself sitting wearily in Noguchi park, looking at the torn-up dirt where the kneehigh forest had been. Not a seedling had been spared; the silver birch was extinct as a lunar species. Dead carp floated belly-up in the oil-slicked central lake; a chain-link fence circled it now, to keep out the flicks. There hadn’t been the time yet to begin cleaning up the litter, and when he looked about, he saw trash everywhere. It was sad. It reminded him of Earth.

He knew it was time to get going, but he couldn’t. His head sagged, touched his chest, and jerked up. Time had passed.

A flicker of motion made him turn. Somebody in a pastel lavender boutique suit hurried by. The woman who had directed him to the city controller’s office the other day. “Hello!” he called. “I found everybody just where you said. Thanks. I was starting to get a little spooked.”

The lavender suit turned to look at him. Sunlight glinted on black glass. A still, long minute later, she said, “Don’t mention it,” and started away.

“I’m looking for Sally Chang. Do you know her? Have you seen her? She’s a flick, kind of a little woman, flamboyant, used to favor bright clothes, electric makeup, that sort of thing.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you.” Lavender was carrying three oxytanks in her arms. “You might try the straw market, though. Lots of bright clothes there.” She ducked into a tunnel opening and disappeared within.

Gunther stared after her distractedly, then shook his head. He felt so very, very tired.

The straw market looked as though it had been through a storm. The tents had been torn down, the stands knocked over, the goods looted. Shards of orange and green glass crunched underfoot. Yet a rack of Italian scarfs worth a year’s salary stood untouched amid the rubble. It made no sense at all.

Up and down the market, flicks were industriously cleaning up. They stooped and lifted and swept. One of them was being beaten by a suit.

Gunther blinked. He could not react to it as a real event. The woman cringed under the blows, shrieking wildly and scuttling away from them. One of the tents had been re-erected, and within the shadow of its rainbow silks, four other suits lounged against the bar. Not a one of them moved to help the woman.

“Hey!” Gunther shouted. He felt hideously self-conscious, as if he’d been abruptly thrust into the middle of a play without memorized lines or any idea of the plot or notion of what his role in it was. “Stop that!”

The suit turned toward him. It held the woman’s slim arm captive in one gloved hand. “Go away,” a male voice growled over the radio.

“What do you think you’re doing? Who are you?” The man wore a Westinghouse suit, one of a dozen or so among the unafflicted. But Gunther recognized a brown, kidney-shaped scorch mark on the abdomen panel. “Posner—is that you? Let that woman go.”

“She’s not a woman,” Posner said. “Hell, look at her—she’s not even human. She’s a flick.”

Gunther set his helmet to record. “I’m taping this,” he warned. “You hit that woman again, and Ekatarina will see it all. I promise.”

Posner released the woman. She stood dazed for a second or two, and then the voice from her peecee reasserted control. She bent to pick up a broom, and returned to work.

Switching off his helmet, Gunther said, “Okay. What did she do?”

Indignantly, Posner extended a foot. He pointed sternly down at it. “She peed all over my boot!”

The suits in the tent had been watching with interest. Now they roared. “Your own fault, Will!” one of them called out. “I told you you weren’t scheduling in enough time for personal hygiene.”

“Don’t worry about a little moisture. It’ll boil off next time you hit vacuum!”

But Gunther was not listening. He stared at the flick Posner had been mistreating and wondered why he hadn’t recognized Anya earlier. Her mouth was pursed, her face squinched up tight with worry, as if there were a key in the back of her head that had been wound three times too many. Her shoulders cringed forward now, too. But still.

“I’m sorry, Anya,” he said. “Hiro is dead. There wasn’t anything we could do.”

She went on sweeping, oblivious, unhappy.

He caught the shift’s last jitney back to the Center. It felt good to be home again. Miiko Ezumi had decided to loot the outlying factories of their oxygen and water surpluses, then carved a shower room from the rock. There was a long line for only three minutes’ use, and no soap, but nobody complained. Some people pooled their time, showering two and three together. Those waiting their turns joked rowdily.

Gunther washed, grabbed some clean shorts and a Glavkosmos teeshirt, and padded down the hall. He hesitated outside the common room, listening to the gang sitting around the table, discussing the more colorful flicks they’d encountered.

“Have you seen the Mouse Hunter?”

“Oh yeah, and Ophelia!”

“The Pope!”

“The Duck Lady!

“Everybody knows the Duck Lady!”

They were laughing and happy. A warm sense of community flowed from the room, what Gunther’s father would have in his sloppy-sentimental way called Gemutlichkeit. Gunther stepped within.

Liza Nagenda looked up, all gums and teeth, and froze. Her jaw snapped shut. “Well, if it isn’t Izmailova’s personal spy!”

“What?” The accusation took Gunther’s breath away. He looked helplessly about the room. Nobody would meet his eye. They had all fallen silent.

Liza’s face was grey with anger. “You heard me! It was you that ratted on Krishna, wasn’t it?”

“Now that’s way out of line! You’ve got a lot of fucking gall if—” He controlled himself with an effort. There was no sense in matching her hysteria with his own. “It’s none of your business what my relationship with Izmailova is or is not.” He looked around the table. “Not that any of you deserve to know, but Krishna’s working on a cure. If anything I said or did helped put him back in the lab, well then, so be it.”

She smirked. “So what’s your excuse for snitching on Will Posner?”

“I never—”

“We all heard the story! You told him you were going to run straight to your precious Izmailova with your little helmet vids.”

“Now, Liza,” Takayuni began. She slapped him away.

“Do you know what Posner was doing?” Gunther shook a finger in Liza’s face. “Hah? Do you? He was beating a woman—Anya! He was beating Anya right out in the open!”

“So what? He’s one of us, isn’t he? Not a zoned-out, dead-eyed, ranting, drooling flick!”

“You bitch!” Outraged, Gunther lunged at Liza across the table. “I’ll kill you, I swear it!” People jerked back from him, rushed forward, a chaos of motion. Posner thrust himself in Gunther’s way, arms spread, jaw set and manly. Gunther punched him in the face. Posner looked surprised, and fell back. Gunther’s hand stung, but he felt strangely good anyway; if everyone else was crazy, then why not him?

“You just try it!” Liza shrieked. “I knew you were that type all along!”

Takayuni grabbed Liza away one way. Hamilton seized Gunther and yanked him the other. Two of Posner’s friends were holding him back as well.

“I’ve had about all I can take from you!” Gunther shouted. “You cheap cunt!”

“Listen to him! Listen what he calls me!”

Screaming, they were shoved out opposing doors.

“It’s all right, Gunther.” Beth had flung him into the first niche they’d come to. He slumped against a wall, shaking, and closed his eyes. “It’s all right now.”

But it wasn’t. Gunther was suddenly struck with the realization that with the exception of Ekatarina he no longer had any friends. Not real friends, close friends. How could this have happened? It was as if everyone had been turned into werewolves. Those who weren’t actually mad were still monsters. “I don’t understand.”

Hamilton sighed. “What don’t you understand, Weil?”

“The way people—the way we all treat the flicks. When Posner was beating Anya, there were four other suits standing nearby, and not a one of them so much as lifted a finger to stop him. Not one! And I felt it too, there’s no use pretending I’m superior to the rest of them. I wanted to walk on and pretend I hadn’t seen a thing. What’s happened to us?”

Hamilton shrugged. Her hair was short and dark about her plain round face. “I went to a pretty expensive school when I was a kid. One year we had one of those exercises that’re supposed to be personally enriching. You know? A life experience. We were divided into two groups—Prisoners and Guards. The Prisoners couldn’t leave their assigned areas without permission from a guard, the Guards got better lunches, stuff like that. Very simple set of rules. I was a Guard.

“Almost immediately, we started to bully the Prisoners. We pushed ’em around, yelled at ’em, kept ’em in line. What was amazing was that the Prisoners let us do it. They outnumbered us five to one. We didn’t even have authority for the things we did. But not a one of them complained. Not a one of them stood up and said No, you can’t do this. They played the game.

“At the end of the month, the project was dismantled and we had some study seminars on what we’d learned: the roots of fascism, and so on. Read some Hannah Arendt. And then it was all over. Except that my best girlfriend never spoke to me again. I couldn’t blame her either. Not after what I’d done.

“What did I really learn? That people will play whatever role you put them in. They’ll do it without knowing that that’s what they’re doing. Take a minority, tell them they’re special, and make them guards—they’ll start playing Guard.”

“So what’s the answer? How do we keep from getting caught up in the roles we play?”

“Damned if I know, Weil. Damned if I know.”

Ekatarina had moved her niche to the far end of a new tunnel. Hers was the only room the tunnel served, and consequently she had a lot of privacy. As Gunther stepped in, a staticky voice swam into focus on his trance chip. “. . . reported shock. In Cairo, government officials pledged . . .” It cut off.

“Hey! You’ve restored—” He stopped. If radio reception had been restored, he’d have known. It would have been the talk of the Center. Which meant that radio contact had never really been completely broken. It was simply being controlled by the CMP.

Ekatarina looked up at him. She’d been crying, but she’d stopped. “The Swiss Orbitals are gone!” she whispered. “They hit them with everything from softbombs to brilliant pebbles. They dusted the shipyards.”

The scope of all those deaths obscured what she was saying for a second. He sank down beside her. “But that means—”

“There’s no spacecraft that can reach us, yes. Unless there’s a ship in transit, we’re stranded here.”

He took her in his arms. She was cold and shivering. Her skin felt clammy and mottled with gooseflesh. “How long has it been since you’ve had any sleep?” he asked sharply.

“I can’t—”

“You’re wired, aren’t you?”

“I can’t afford to sleep. Not now. Later.”

“Ekatarina. The energy you get from wire isn’t free. It’s only borrowed from your body. When you come down, it all comes due. If you wire yourself up too tightly, you’ll crash yourself right into a coma.”

“I haven’t been—” She stalled, and a confused, uncertain look entered her eyes. “Maybe you’re right. I could probably use a little rest.”

The CMP came to life. “Cadre Nine is building a radio receiver. Ezumi gave them the go-ahead.”

“Shit!” Ekatarina sat bolt upright. “Can we stop it?”

“Moving against a universally popular project would cost you credibility you cannot afford to lose.”

“Okay, so how can we minimize the—”

“Ekatarina,” Gunther said. “Sleep, remember?”

“In a sec, babe.” She patted the futon. “You just lie down and wait for me. I’ll have this wrapped up before you can nod off.” She kissed him gently, lingeringly. “All right?”

“Yeah, sure.” He lay down and closed his eyes, just for a second.

When he awoke, it was time to go on shift, and Ekatarina was gone.

It was only the fifth day since Vladivostok. But everything was so utterly changed that times before then seemed like memories of another world. In a previous life I was Gunther Weil, he thought. I lived and worked and had a few laughs. Life was pretty good then.

He was still looking for Sally Chang, though with dwindling hope. Now, whenever he talked to suits he’d ask if they needed his help. Increasingly, they did not.

The third-level chapel was a shallow bowl facing the terrace wall. Tiger lilies grew about the chancel area at the bottom, and turquoise lizards skittered over the rock. The children were playing with a ball in the chancel. Gunther stood at the top, chatting with a sad-voiced Ryohei Iomato.

The children put away the ball and began to dance. They were playing London Bridge. Gunther watched them with a smile. From above they were so many spots of color, a flower unfolding and closing in on itself. Slowly, the smile faded. They were dancing too well. Not one of the children moved out of step, lost her place, or walked away sulking. Their expressions were intense, self-absorbed, inhuman. Gunther had to turn away.

“The CMP controls them,” Iomato said. “I don’t have much to do, really. I go through the vids and pick out games for them to play, songs to sing, little exercises to keep them healthy. Sometimes I have them draw.”

“My God, how can you stand it?”

Iomato sighed. “My old man was an alcoholic. He had a pretty rough life, and at some point he started drinking to blot out the pain. You know what?”

“It didn’t work.”

“Yah. Made him even more miserable. So then he had twice the reason to get drunk. He kept on trying, though, I’ve got to give him that. He wasn’t the sort of man to give up on something he believed in just because it wasn’t working the way it should.”

Gunther said nothing.

“I think that memory is the only thing keeping me from just taking off my helmet and joining them.”

The Corporate Video Center was a narrow run of offices in the farthest tunnel reaches, where raw footage for adverts and incidental business use was processed before being squirted to better-equipped vid centers on Earth. Gunther passed from office to office, slapping off flatscreens left flickering since the disaster.

It was unnerving going through the normally busy rooms and finding no one. The desks and cluttered work stations had been abandoned in purposeful disarray, as though their operators had merely stepped out for a break and would be back momentarily. Gunther found himself spinning around to confront his shadow, and flinching at unexpected noises. With each machine he turned off, the silence at his back grew. It was twice as lonely as being out on the surface.

He doused a last light and stepped into the gloomy hall. Two suits with interwoven H-and-A logos loomed up out of the shadows. He jumped in shock. The suits did not move. He laughed wryly at himself, and pushed past. They were empty, of course—there were no Hyundai Aerospace components among the unafflicted. Someone had simply left these suits here in temporary storage before the madness.

The suits grabbed him.

“Hey!” He shouted in terror as they seized him by the arms and lifted him off his feet. One of them hooked the peecee from his harness and snapped it off. Before he knew what was happening he’d been swept down a short flight of stairs and through a doorway.

“Mr. Weil.”

He was in a high-ceilinged room carved into the rock to hold air-handling equipment that hadn’t been constructed yet. A high string of temporary work lamps provided dim light. To the far side of the room a suit sat behind a desk, flanked by two more, standing. They all wore Hyundai Aerospace suits. There was no way he could identify them.

The suits that had brought him in crossed their arms.

“What’s going on here?” Gunther asked. “Who are you?”

“You are the last person we’d tell that to.” He couldn’t tell which one had spoken. The voice came over his radio, made sexless and impersonal by an electronic filter. “Mr. Weil, you stand accused of crimes against your fellow citizens. Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

“What?” Gunther looked at the suits before him and to either side. They were perfectly identical, indistinguishable from each other, and he was suddenly afraid of what the people within might feel free to do, armored as they were in anonymity. “Listen, you’ve got no right to do this. There’s a governmental structure in place, if you’ve got any complaints against me.”

“Not everyone is pleased with Izmailova’s government,” the judge said.

“But she controls the CMP, and we could not run Bootstrap without the CMP controlling the flicks,” a second added.

“We simply have to work around her.” Perhaps it was the judge; perhaps it was yet another of the suits. Gunther couldn’t tell.

“Do you wish to speak on your own behalf?”

“What exactly am I charged with?” Gunther asked desperately. “Okay, maybe I’ve done something wrong, I’ll entertain that possibility. But maybe you just don’t understand my situation. Have you considered that?”

Silence.

“I mean, just what are you angry about? Is it Posner? Because I’m not sorry about that. I won’t apologize. You can’t mistreat people just because they’re sick. They’re still people, like anybody else. They have their rights.”

Silence.

“But if you think I’m some kind of a spy or something, that I’m running around and ratting on people to Ek—to Izmailova, well that’s simply not true. I mean, I talk to her, I’m not about to pretend I don’t, but I’m not her spy or anything. She doesn’t have any spies. She doesn’t need any! She’s just trying to hold things together, that’s all.

“Jesus, you don’t know what she’s gone through for you! You haven’t seen how much it takes out of her! She’d like nothing better than to quit. But she has to hang in there because—” An eerie dark electronic gabble rose up on his radio, and he stopped as he realized that they were laughing at him.

“Does anyone else wish to speak?”

One of Gunther’s abductors stepped forward. “Your honor, this man says that flicks are human. He overlooks the fact that they cannot live without our support and direction. Their continued well-being is bought at the price of our unceasing labor. He stands condemned out of his own mouth. I petition the court to make the punishment fit the crime.”

The judge looked to the right, to the left. His two companions nodded, and stepped back into the void. The desk had been set up at the mouth of what was to be the air intake duct. Gunther had just time enough to realize this when they reappeared, leading someone in a G5 suit identical to his own.

“We could kill you, Mr. Weil,” the artificial voice crackled. “But that would be wasteful. Every hand, every mind is needed. We must all pull together in our time of need.”

The G5 suit stood alone and motionless in the center of the room.

“Watch.”

Two of the Hyundai suits stepped up to the G5 suit. Four hands converged on the helmet seals. With practiced efficiency, they flicked the latches and lifted the helmet. It happened so swiftly the occupant could not have stopped it if he’d tried.

Beneath the helmet was the fearful, confused face of a flick.

“Sanity is a privilege, Mr. Weil, not a right. You are guilty as charged. However, we are not cruel men. This once we will let you off with a warning. But these are desperate times. At your next offense—be it only so minor a thing as reporting this encounter to the Little General—we may be forced to dispense with the formality of a hearing.” The judge paused. “Do I make myself clear?”

Reluctantly, Gunther nodded.

“Then you may leave.”

On the way out, one of the suits handed him back his peecee.

Five people. He was sure there weren’t any more involved than that. Maybe one or two more, but that was it. Posner had to be hip-deep in this thing, he was certain of that. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out the others.

He didn’t dare take the chance.

At shift’s end he found Ekatarina already asleep. She looked haggard and unhealthy. He knelt by her, and gently brushed her cheek with the back of one hand.

Her eyelids fluttered open.

“Oh, hey. I didn’t mean to wake you. Just go back to sleep, huh?”

She smiled. “You’re sweet, Gunther, but I was only taking a nap anyway. I’ve got to be up in another fifteen minutes.” Her eyes closed again. “You’re the only one I can really trust anymore. Everybody’s lying to me, feeding me misinformation, keeping silent when there’s something I need to know. You’re the only one I can count on to tell me things.”

You have enemies, he thought. They call you the Little General, and they don’t like how you run things. They’re not ready to move against you directly, but they have plans. And they’re ruthless.

Aloud, he said, “Go back to sleep.”

“They’re all against me,” she murmured. “Bastard sons of bitches.”

The next day he spent going through the service spaces for the new air-handling system. He found a solitary flick’s nest made of shredded vacuum suits, but after consultation with the CMP concluded that nobody had lived there for days. There was no trace of Sally Chang.

If it had been harrowing going through the sealed areas before his trial, it was far worse today. Ekatarina’s enemies had infected him with fear. Reason told him they were not waiting for him, that he had nothing to worry about until he displeased them again. But the hindbrain did not listen.

Time crawled. When he finally emerged into daylight at the end of his shift, he felt light-headedly out of phase with reality from the hours of isolation. At first he noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Then his suit radio was full of voices, and people were hurrying about every which way. There was a happy buzz in the air. Somebody was singing.

He snagged a passing suit and asked, “What’s going on?”

“Haven’t you heard? The war is over. They’ve made peace. And there’s a ship coming in!”

The Lake Geneva had maintained television silence through most of the long flight to the Moon for fear of long-range beam weapons. With peace, however, they opened direct transmission to Bootstrap.

Ezumi’s people had the flicks sew together an enormous cotton square and hack away some hanging vines so they could hang it high on the shadowed side of the crater. Then, with the fill lights off, the video image was projected. Swiss spacejacks tumbled before the camera, grinning, all denim and red cowboy hats. They were talking about their escape from the hunter-seeker missiles, brash young voices running one over the other.

The top officers were assembled beneath the cotton square. Gunther recognized their suits. Ekatarina’s voice boomed from newly erected loudspeakers. “When are you coming in? We have to make sure the spaceport field is clear. How many hours?”

Holding up five fingers, a blond woman said, “Forty-five!”

“No, forty-three!”

“Nothing like that!”

“Almost forty-five!”

Again Ekatarina’s voice cut into the tumult. “What’s it like in the orbitals? We heard they were destroyed.”

“Yes, destroyed!”

“Very bad, very bad, it’ll take years to—”

“But most of the people are—”

“We were given six orbits warning; most went down in lifting bodies, there was a big evacuation.”

“Many died, though. It was very bad.”

Just below the officers, a suit had been directing several flicks as they assembled a camera platform. Now it waved broadly, and the flicks stepped away. In the Lake Geneva somebody shouted, and several heads turned to stare at an offscreen television monitor. The suit turned the camera, giving them a slow, panoramic scan.

One of the spacejacks said, “What’s it like there? I see that some of you are wearing space suits, and the rest are not. Why is that?”

Ekatarina took a deep breath. “There have been some changes here.”

There was one hell of a party at the Center when the Swiss arrived. Sleep schedules were juggled, and save for a skeleton crew overseeing the flicks, everyone turned out to welcome the dozen newcomers to the Moon. They danced to skiffle, and drank vacuum-distilled vodka. Everyone had stories to tell, rumors to swap, opinions on the likelihood that the peace would hold.

Gunther wandered away midway through the party. The Swiss depressed him. They all seemed so young and fresh and eager. He felt battered and cynical in their presence. He wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them awake.

Depressed, he wandered through the locked-down laboratories. Where the Viral Computer Project had been, he saw Ekatarina and the captain of the Lake Geneva conferring over a stack of crated bioflops. They bent low over Ekatarina’s peecee, listening to the CMP.

“Have you considered nationalizing your industries?” the captain asked. “That would give us the plant needed to build the New City. Then, with a few hardwired utilities, Bootstrap could be managed without anyone having to set foot inside it.”

Gunther was too distant to hear the CMP’s reaction, but he saw both women laugh. “Well,” said Ekatarina. “At the very least we will have to renegotiate terms with the parent corporations. With only one ship functional, people can’t be easily replaced. Physical presence has become a valuable commodity. We’d be fools not to take advantage of it.”

He passed on, deeper into shadow, wandering aimlessly. Eventually, there was a light ahead, and he heard voices. One was Krishna’s, but spoken faster and more forcefully than he was used to hearing it. Curious, he stopped just outside the door.

Krishna was in the center of the lab. Before him, Beth Hamilton stood nodding humbly. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’ll do that. Yes.” Dumbfounded, Gunther realized that Krishna was giving her orders.

Krishna glanced up. “Weil! You’re just the man I was about to come looking for.”

“I am?”

“Come in here, don’t dawdle.” Krishna smiled and beckoned, and Gunther had no choice but to obey. He looked like a young god now. The force of his spirit danced in his eyes like fire. It was strange that Gunther had never noticed before how tall he was. “Tell me where Sally Chang is.”

“I don’t—I mean, I can’t, I—” He stopped and swallowed. “I think Chang must be dead.” Then, “Krishna? What’s happened to you?”

“He’s finished his research,” Beth said.

“I rewrote my personality from top to bottom,” Krishna said. “I’m not half-crippled with shyness anymore—have you noticed?” He put a hand on Gunther’s shoulder, and it was reassuring, warm, comforting. “Gunther, I won’t tell you what it took to scrape together enough messenger engines from traces of old experiments to try this out on myself. But it works. We’ve got a treatment that among other things will serve as a universal cure for everyone in Bootstrap. But to do that, we need the messenger engines, and they’re not here. Now tell me why you think Sally Chang is dead.”

“Well, uh, I’ve been searching for her for four days. And the CMP has been looking too. You’ve been holed up here all that time, so maybe you don’t know the flicks as well as the rest of us do. But they’re not very big on planning. The likelihood one of them could actively evade detection that long is practically zilch. The only thing I can think is that somehow she made it to the surface before the effects hit her, got into a truck and told it to drive as far as her oxygen would take her.”

Krishna shook his head and said, “No. It is simply not consistent with Sally Chang’s character. With all the best will in the world, I cannot picture her killing herself.” He slid open a drawer: row upon row of gleaming canisters. “This may help. Do you remember when I said there were two canisters of mimetic engines missing, not just the schizomimetic?”

“Vaguely.”

“I’ve been too busy to worry about it, but wasn’t that odd? Why would Chang have taken a canister and not used it?”

“What was in the second canister?” Hamilton asked.

“Paranoia,” Krishna said. “Or rather a good enough chemical analog. Now, paranoia is a rare disability, but a fascinating one. It’s characterized by an elaborate but internally consistent delusional system. The paranoid patient functions well intellectually, and is less fragmented than a schizophrenic. Her emotional and social responses are closer to normal. She’s capable of concerted effort. In a time of turmoil, it’s quite possible that a paranoid individual could elude our detection.”

“Okay, let’s get this straight,” Hamilton said. “War breaks out on Earth. Chang gets her orders, keys in the sofware bombs, and goes to Bootstrap with a canister full of madness and a little syringe of paranoia—no, it doesn’t work. It all falls apart.”

“How so?”

“Paranoia wouldn’t inoculate her against schizophrenia. How does she protect herself from her own aerosols?”

Gunther stood transfixed. “Lavender!”

They caught up with Sally Chang on the topmost terrace of Bootstrap. The top level was undeveloped. Someday—so the corporate brochures promised—fallow deer would graze at the edge of limpid pools, and otters frolic in the streams. But the soil hadn’t been built up yet, the worms brought in or the bacteria seeded. There were only sand, machines, and a few unhappy opportunistic weeds.

Chang’s camp was to one side of a streamhead, beneath a fill light. She started to her feet at their approach, glanced quickly to the side and decided to brazen it out.

A sign reading EMERGENCY CANOPY MAINTENANCE STATION had been welded to a strut supporting the stream’s valve stem. Under it were a short stacked pyramid of oxytanks and an aluminum storage crate the size of a coffin. “Very clever,” Beth muttered over Gunther’s trance chip. “She sleeps in the storage crate, and anybody stumbling across her thinks it’s just spare equipment.”

The lavender suit raised an arm and casually said, “Hiya, guys. How can I help you?”

Krishna strode forward and took her hands. “Sally, it’s me—Krishna!”

“Oh, thank God!” She slumped in his arms. “I’ve been so afraid.”

“You’re all right now.”

“I thought you were an Invader at first, when I saw you coming up. I’m so hungry—I haven’t eaten since I don’t know when.” She clutched at the sleeve of Krishna’s suit. “You do know about the Invaders, don’t you?”

“Maybe you’d better bring me up to date.”

They began walking toward the stairs. Krishna gestured quietly to Gunther and then toward Chang’s worksuit harness. A canister the size of a hip flask hung there. Gunther reached over and plucked it off. The messenger engines! He held them in his hand.

To the other side, Beth Hamilton plucked up the near-full cylinder of paranoia-inducing engines and made it disappear.

Sally Chang, deep in the explication of her reasonings, did not notice. “. . . obeyed my orders, of course. But they made no sense. I worried and worried about that until finally I realized what was really going on. A wolf caught in a trap will gnaw off its leg to get free. I began to look for the wolf. What kind of enemy justified such extreme actions? Certainly nothing human.”

“Sally,” Krishna said, “I want you to entertain the notion that the conspiracy—for want of a better word—may be more deeply rooted than you suspect. That the problem is not an external enemy, but the workings of our own brains. Specifically that the Invaders are an artifact of the psychotomimetics you injected into yourself back when this all began.”

“No. No, there’s too much evidence. It all fits together! The Invaders needed a way to disguise themselves both physically, which was accomplished by the vacuum suits, and psychologically, which was achieved by the general madness. Thus, they can move undetected among us. Would a human enemy have converted all of Bootstrap to slave labor? Unthinkable! They can read our minds like a book. If we hadn’t protected ourselves with the schizomimetics, they’d be able to extract all our knowledge, all our military research secrets . . .”

Listening, Gunther couldn’t help imagining what Liza Nagenda would say to all of this wild talk. At the thought of her, his jaw clenched. Just like one of Chang’s machines, he realized, and couldn’t help being amused at his own expense.

Ekatarina was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Her hands trembled noticeably, and there was a slight quaver in her voice when she said, “What’s all this the CMP tells me about messenger engines? Krishna’s supposed to have come up with a cure of some kind?”

“We’ve got them,” Gunther said quietly, happily. He held up the canister. “It’s over now, we can heal our friends.”

“Let me see,” Ekatarina said. She took the canister from his hand.

“No, wait!” Hamilton cried, too late. Behind her, Krishna was arguing with Sally Chang about her interpetations of recent happenings. Neither had noticed yet that those in front had stopped.

“Stand back.” Ekatarina took two quick steps backward. Edgily, she added, “I don’t mean to be difficult. But we’re going to sort this all out, and until we do, I don’t want anybody too close to me. That includes you too, Gunther.”

Flicks began gathering. By ones and twos they wandered up the lawn, and then by the dozen. By the time it was clear that Ekatarina had called them up via the CMP, Krishna, Chang and Hamilton were separated from her and Gunther by a wall of people.

Chang stood very still. Somewhere behind her unseen face, she was revising her theories to include this new event. Suddenly, her hands slapped at her suit, grabbing for the missing canisters. She looked at Krishna and with a trill of horror said, “You’re one of them!”

“Of course I’m not—” Krishna began. But she was turning, stumbling, fleeing back up the steps.

“Let her go,” Ekatarina ordered. “We’ve got more serious things to talk about.” Two flicks scurried up, lugging a small industrial kiln between them. They set it down, and a third plugged in an electric cable. The interior began to glow. “This canister is all you’ve got, isn’t it? If I were to autoclave it, there wouldn’t be any hope of replacing its contents.”

“Izmailova, listen,” Krishna said.

“I am listening. Talk.”

Krishna explained, while Izmailova listened with arms folded and shoulders tilted skeptically. When he was done, she shook her head. “It’s a noble folly, but folly is all it is. You want to reshape our minds into something alien to the course of human evolution. To turn the seat of thought into a jet pilot’s couch. This is your idea of a solution? Forget it. Once this particular box is opened, there’ll be no putting its contents back in again. And you haven’t advanced any convincing arguments for opening it.”

“But the people in Bootstrap!” Gunther objected. “They—”

She cut him off. “Gunther, nobody likes what’s happened to them. But if the rest of us must give up our humanity to pay for a speculative and ethically dubious rehabilitation . . . Well, the price is simply too high. Mad or not, they’re at least human now.”

“Am I inhuman?” Krishna asked. “If you tickle me, do I not laugh?”

“You’re in no position to judge. You’ve rewired your neurons and you’re stoned on the novelty. What tests have you run on yourself? How thoroughly have you mapped out your deviations from human norms? Where are your figures?” These were purely rhetorical questions; the kind of analyses she meant took weeks to run. “Even if you check out completely human—and I don’t concede you will!—who’s to say what the long-range consequences are? What’s to stop us from drifting, step by incremental step, into madness? Who decides what madness is? Who programs the programmers? No, this is impossible. I won’t gamble with our minds.” Defensively, almost angrily, she repeated, “I won’t gamble with our minds.”

“Ekatarina,” Gunther said gently, “how long have you been up? Listen to yourself. The wire is doing your thinking for you.”

She waved a hand dismissively, without responding.

“Just as a practical matter,” Hamilton said, “how do you expect to run Bootstrap without it? The setup now is turning us all into baby fascists. You say you’re worried about madness—what will we be like a year from now?”

“The CMP assures me—”

“The CMP is only a program!” Hamilton cried. “No matter how much interactivity it has, it’s not flexible. It has no hope. It cannot judge a new thing. It can only enforce old decisions, old values, old habits, old fears.”

Abruptly Ekatarina snapped. “Get out of my face!” she screamed. “Stop it, stop it, stop it! I won’t listen to any more.”

“Ekatarina—” Gunther began.

But her hand had tightened on the canister. Her knees bent as she began a slow genuflection to the kiln. Gunther could see that she had stopped listening. Drugs and responsibility had done this to her, speeding her up and bewildering her with conflicting demands, until she stood trembling on the brink of collapse. A good night’s sleep might have restored her, made her capable of being reasoned with. But there was no time. Words would not stop her now. And she was too far distant for him to reach before she destroyed the engines. In that instant he felt such a strong outwelling of emotion toward her as would be impossible to describe.

“Ekatarina,” he said. “I love you.”

She half-turned her head toward him and in a distracted, somewhat irritated tone said, “What are you—”

He lifted the bolt gun from his work harness, leveled it, and fired.

Ekatarina’s helmet shattered.

She fell.

“I should have shot to just breach the helmet. That would have stopped her. But I didn’t think I was a good enough shot. I aimed right for the center of her head.”

“Hush,” Hamilton said. “You did what you had to. Stop tormenting yourself. Talk about more practical things.”

He shook his head, still groggy. For the longest time, he had been kept on beta endorphins, unable to feel a thing, unable to care. It was like being swathed in cotton batting. Nothing could reach him. Nothing could hurt him. “How long have I been out of it?”

“A day.”

“A day!” He looked about the austere room. Bland rock walls and laboratory equipment with smooth, noncommital surfaces. To the far end, Krishna and Chang were hunched over a swipeboard, arguing happily and impatiently overwriting each other’s scrawls. A Swiss spacejack came in and spoke to their backs. Krishna nodded distractedly, not looking up. “I thought it was much longer.”

“Long enough. We’ve already salvaged everyone connected with Sally Chang’s group, and gotten a good start on the rest. Pretty soon it will be time to decide how you want yourself rewritten.”

He shook his head, feeling dead. “I don’t think I’ll bother, Beth. I just don’t have the stomach for it.”

“We’ll give you the stomach.”

“Naw, I don’t . . .” He felt a black nausea come welling up again. It was cyclic; it returned every time he was beginning to think he’d finally put it down. “I don’t want the fact that I killed Ekatarina washed away in a warm flood of self-satisfaction. The idea disgusts me.”

“We don’t want that either.” Posner led a delegation of seven into the lab. Krishna and Chang rose to face them, and the group broke into swirling halves. “There’s been enough of that. It’s time we all started taking responsibility for the consequences of—” Everyone was talking at once. Hamilton made a face.

“Started taking responsibility for—”

Voices rose.

“We can’t talk here,” she said. “Take me out on the surface.”

They drove with the cabin pressurized, due west on the Seething Bay road. Ahead, the sun was almost touching the weary walls of Sommering crater. Shadow crept down from the mountains and cratertops, yearning toward the radiantly lit Sinus Medii. Gunther found it achingly beautiful. He did not want to respond to it, but the harsh lines echoed the lonely hurt within him in a way that he found oddly comforting.

Hamilton touched her peecee. Putting on the Ritz filled their heads.

“What if Ekatarina was right?” he said sadly. “What if we’re giving up everything that makes us human? The prospect of being turned into some kind of big-domed emotionless superman doesn’t appeal to me much.”

Hamilton shook her head. “I asked Krishna about that, and he said No. He said it was like . . . Were you ever nearsighted?”

“Sure, as a kid.”

“Then you’ll understand. He said it was like the first time you came out of the doctor’s office after being lased. How everything seemed clear and vivid and distinct. What had once been a blur that you called ‘tree’ resolved itself into a thousand individual and distinct leaves. The world was filled with unexpected detail. There were things on the horizon that you’d never seen before. Like that.”

“Oh.” He stared ahead. The disk of the sun was almost touching Sommering. “There’s no point in going any farther.”

He powered down the truck.

Beth Hamilton looked uncomfortable. She cleared her throat and with brusque energy said, “Gunther, look. I had you bring me out here for a reason. I want to propose a merger of resources.”

“A what?”

“Marriage.”

It took Gunther a second to absorb what she had said. “Aw, no . . . I don’t . . .”

“I’m serious. Gunther, I know you think I’ve been hard on you, but that’s only because I saw a lot of potential in you, and that you were doing nothing with it. Well, things have changed. Give me a say in your rewrite, and I’ll do the same for you.”

He shook his head. “This is just too weird for me.”

“It’s too late to use that as an excuse. Ekatarina was right—we’re sitting on top of something very dangerous, the most dangerous opportunity humanity faces today. It’s out of the bag, though. Word has gotten out. Earth is horrified and fascinated. They’ll be watching us. Briefly, very briefly, we can control this thing. We can help to shape it now, while it’s small. Five years from now, it will be out of our hands.

“You have a good mind, Gunther, and it’s about to get better. I think we agree on what kind of a world we want to make. I want you on my side.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“You want true love? You got it. We can make the sex as sweet or nasty as you like. Nothing easier. You want me quieter, louder, gentler, more assured? We can negotiate. Let’s see if we can come to terms.”

He said nothing.

Hamilton eased back in the seat. After a time, she said, “You know? I’ve never watched a lunar sunset before. I don’t get out on the surface much.”

“We’ll have to change that,” Gunther said.

Hamilton stared hard into his face. Then she smiled. She wriggled closer to him. Clumsily, he put an arm over her shoulder. It seemed to be what was expected of him. He coughed into his hand, then pointed a finger. “There it goes.”

Lunar sunset was a simple thing. The crater wall touched the bottom of the solar disk. Shadows leaped from the slopes and raced across the lowlands. Soon half the sun was gone. Smoothly, without distortion, it dwindled. A last brilliant sliver of light burned atop the rock, then ceased to be. In the instant before the windshield adjusted and the stars appeared, the universe filled with darkness.

The air in the cab cooled. The panels snapped and popped with the sudden shift in temperature.

Now Hamilton was nuzzling the side of his neck. Her skin was slightly tacky to the touch, and exuded a faint but distinct odor. She ran her tongue up the line of his chin and poked it in his ear. Her hand fumbled with the latches of his suit.

Gunther experienced no arousal at all, only a mild distaste that bordered on disgust. This was horrible, a defilement of all he had felt for Ekatarina.

But it was a chore he had to get through. Hamilton was right. All his life his hindbrain had been in control, driving him with emotions chemically derived and randomly applied. He had been lashed to the steed of consciousness and forced to ride it wherever it went, and that nightmare gallop had brought him only pain and confusion. Now that he had control of the reins, he could make this horse go where he wanted.

He was not sure what he would demand from his reprogramming. Contentment, perhaps. Sex and passion, almost certainly. But not love. He was done with the romantic illusion. It was time to grow up.

He squeezed Beth’s shoulder. One more day, he thought, and it won’t matter. I’ll feel whatever is best for me to feel. Beth raised her mouth to his. Her lips parted. He could smell her breath.

They kissed.

AND WILD FOR TO HOLD

Nancy Kress

The author’s short story, “Touchdown” (October 1990), has been turned into an SF planetarium show, that premiers in June at the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, NY. Ms. Kress is currently working on a novel that has grown out of her stunning tale of “Beggars in Spain” (April 1991). She returns to our pages with a new story that brilliantly depicts a willful Anne Boleyn forcibly taken to a the future.

The demon came to her first in the long gallery at Hever Castle. She had gone there to watch Henry ride away, magnificent on his huge charger, the horse’s legs barely visible through the summer dust raised by the King’s entourage. But Henry himself was visible. He rose in his stirrups to half-turn his gaze back to the manor house, searching its sun- glazed windows to see if she watched. The spurned lover, riding off, watching over his shoulder the effect he himself made. She knew just how his eyes would look, small blue eyes under the curling red-gold hair. Mournful. Shrewd. Undeterred.

Anne Boleyn was not moved. Let him ride. She had not wanted him at Hever in the first place.

As she turned from the gallery window a glint of light in the far corner caught her eye, and there for the first time was the demon.

It was made all of light, which did not surprise her. Was not Satan himself called Lucifer? The light was square, a perfectly square box such as no light had ever been before. Anne crossed herself and stepped forward. The box of light brightened, then winked out.

Anne stood perfectly still. She was not afraid; very little made her afraid. But nonetheless she crossed herself again and uttered a prayer. It would be unfortunate if a demon took residence at Hever. Demons could be dangerous.

Like kings.

Lambert half-turned from her console towards Culhane, working across the room. “Culhane—they said she was a witch.”

“Yes? So?” Culhane said. “In the 1500s they said any powerful woman was a witch.”

“No, it was more. They said it before she became powerful.” Culhane didn’t answer. After a moment Lambert said quietly, “The Rahvoli equations keep flagging her.”

Culhane grew very still. Finally he said, “Let me see.”

He crossed the bare small room to Lambert’s console. She steadied the picture on the central Square. At the moment the console appeared in this location as a series of interlocking Squares mounting from floor to ceiling. Some of the Squares were solid real-time alloys; some were holo-simulations; some were not there at all, neither in space nor time, although they appeared to be. The Project Focus Square, which was there, said:

TIME RESCUE PROJECT
UNITED FEDERATION OF UPPER SLIB, EARTH
FOCUS: ANNE BOLEYN

HEVER CASTLE, KENT ENGLAND, EUROPE
1525: 645:89:3

CHURCH OF THE HOLY HOSTAGE TEMPORARY PERMIT
#4592

In the time-jump square was framed a young girl, dark hair just visible below her coif, her hand arrested at her long, slender neck in the act of signing the cross.

Lambert said, as if to herself, “She considered herself a good Catholic.”

Culhane stared at the image. His head had been freshly shaved, in honor of his promotion to Project Head. He wore, Lambert thought, his new importance as if it were a fragile implant, liable to be rejected. She found that touching.

Lambert said, “The Rahvoli probability is .798. She’s a definite key.”

Culhane sucked in his cheeks. The dye on them had barely dried. He said, “So is the other. I think we should talk to Brill.”

The serving women had finally left. The priests had left, the doctors, the courtiers, the nurses, taking with them the baby. Even Henry had left, gone. . . where? To play cards with Harry Norris? To his latest mistress? Never mind—they had all at last left her alone.

A girl.

Anne rolled over in her bed and pounded her fists on the pillow. A girl. Not a prince, not the son that England needed, that she needed . . . a girl. And Henry growing colder every day, she could feel it, he no longer desired her, no longer loved her. He would bed with her—oh, that, most certainly, if it would get him his boy, but her power was going. Was gone. That power she had hated, despised, but had used nonetheless because it was there and Henry should feel it, as he had made her feel his power over and over again . . . her power was going. She was Queen of England but her power was slipping away like the Thames at ebb tide, and she just as helpless to stop it as to stop the tide itself. The only thing that could have preserved her power was a son. And she had borne a girl. Strong, lusty, with Henry’s own red curling hair . . . but a girl.

Anne rolled over on her back, painfully. Elizabeth was already a month old but everything in Anne hurt. She had contracted white-leg, so much less dreaded than childbed fever but still weakening, and for the whole month had not left her bed chamber. Servants and ladies and musicians came and went, while Anne lay feverish, trying to plan . . . Henry had as yet made no move. He had even seemed to take the baby’s sex well: “She seems a lusty wench. I pray God will send her a brother in the same good shape.” But Anne knew. She always knew. She had known when Henry’s eye first fell upon her. Had known to a shade the exact intensity of his longing during the nine years she had kept him. waiting: nine years of celibacy, of denial. She had known the exact moment when that hard mind behind the small blue eyes had decided: It is worth it. I will divorce Catherine and make her Queen. Anne had known before he did when he decided it had all been a mistake. The price for making her queen had been too high. She was not worth it. Unless she gave him a son.

And if she did not . . .

In the darkness Anne squeezed her eyes shut. This was but an attack of childbed vapors, it signified nothing. She was never afraid, not she. This was only a night terror, and when she opened her eyes it would pass, because it must. She must go on fighting, must get herself heavy with son, must safeguard her crown. And her daughter. There was no one else to do it for her, and there was no way out.

When she opened her eyes a demon, shaped like a square of light, glowed in the corner of the curtained bedchamber.

Lambert dipped her head respectfully as the High Priest passed.

She was tall, and wore no external augments. Eyes, arms, ears, shaved head, legs under the gray-green ceremonial robe—all were her own, as required by the Charter of the Church of the Holy Hostage. Lambert had heard a rumor that before her election to High Priest she had had brilliant violet augmented eyes and gamma-strength arms, but on her election had had both removed and the originals restored. The free representative of all the Hostages in the solar system could not walk around enjoying high-maintenance augments. Hostages could, of course, but the person in charge of their spiritual and material welfare must appear human to any hostage she chose to visit. A four-handed Spacer held in a free-fall chamber on Mars must find the High Priest as human as did a genetically altered flyer of Ipsu being held hostage by the New Trien Republic. The only way to do that was to forego external augments.

Internals, of course, were a different thing.

Beside the High Priest walked the Director of the Time Research Institute, Toshio Brill. No ban on externals for him: Brill wore gold-plated sensors in his shaved black head, a display Lambert found slightly ostentatious. Also puzzling: Brill was not ordinarily a flamboyant man. Perhaps he was differentiating himself from Her Holiness. Behind Brill his Project Heads, including Culhane, stood silent, not speaking unless spoken to. Culhane looked nervous: He was ambitious, Lambert knew. She sometimes wondered why she was not.

“So far I am impressed,” the High Priest said. “Impeccable Hostage conditions on the material side.”

Brill murmured, “Of course, the spiritual is difficult. The three Hostages are so different from each other, and even for culture specialists and historians. . . the Hostages arrive here very upset.”

“As would you or I,” the High Priest said, not smiling, “in similar circumstances.”

“Yes, Your Holiness.”

“And now you wish to add a fourth Hostage, from a fourth time stream.”

“Yes.”

The High Priest looked slowly around at the main console; Lambert noticed that she looked right past the time-jump Square itself. Not trained in peripheral vision techniques. But she looked a long time at the stasis Square. They all did; outsiders were unduly fascinated by the idea that the whole building existed between time streams. Or maybe Her Holiness merely objected to the fact that the Time Research Institute, like some larger but hardly richer institutions, was exempt from the allworld taxation that supported the Church. Real estate outside time was also outside taxation.

The High Priest said, “I cannot give permission for such a political disruption without understanding fully every possible detail. Tell me again.”

Lambert hid a grin. The High Priest did not need to hear it again. She knew the whole argument, had pored over it for days, most likely, with her advisors. And she would agree; why wouldn’t she? It could only add to her power. Brill knew that. He was being asked to explain only to show that the High Priest could force him to do it, again and again, until she—not he—decided the explanation was sufficient and the Church of the Holy Hostage issued a permanent hostage permit to hold one Anne Boleyn, of England Time Delta, for the altruistic purpose of preventing a demonstrable, Class One war.

Brill showed no outward recognition that he was being humbled. “Your Holiness, this woman is a fulcrum. The Rahvoli equations, developed in the last century by—”

“I know the Rahvoli equations,” the High Priest said. And smiled sweetly.

“Then Your Holiness knows that any person identified by the equations as a fulcrum is directly responsible for the course of history. Even if he or she seems powerless in local time. Mistress Boleyn was the second wife of Henry VIII of England. In order to marry her, he divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and in order to do that, he took all of England out of the Catholic Church. Protestantism was—”

“And what again was that?” Her Holiness said, and even Culhane glanced sideways at Lambert, appalled. The High Priest was playing. With a Research Director. Lambert hid her smile. Did Culhane know that high seriousness opened one to the charge of pomposity? Probably not.

“Protestantism was another branch of ‘Christianity,’ ” the Director said patiently. So far, by refusing to be provoked, he was winning. “It was warlike, as was Catholicism. In 1642 various branches of Protestantism were contending for political power within England, as was a Catholic faction. King Charles was Catholic, in fact. Contention led to civil war. Thousands of people died fighting, starved to death, were hung as traitors, were tortured as betrayers . . .”

Lambert saw Her Holiness wince. She must hear this all the time, Lambert thought, what else was her Office for? Yet the wince looked genuine.

Brill pressed his point. “Children were reduced to eating rats to survive. In Cornwall, rebels’ hands and feet were cut off, gibbets were erected in market squares and men hung on them alive and—”

“Enough,” the High Priest said. “This is why the Church exists. To promote the Holy Hostages that prevent war.”

“And that is what we wish to do,” Brill said swiftly, “in other time streams, now that our own has been brought to peace. In Stream Delta, which has only reached the sixteenth century—Your Holiness knows that each stream progresses at a different relative rate—”

The High Priest made a gesture of impatience.

“—the woman Anne Boleyn is the fulcrum. If she can be taken hostage after the birth of her daughter Elizabeth, who will act throughout a very long reign to preserve peace, and before Henry declares the Act of Supremacy that opens the door to religious divisiveness in England, we can prevent great loss of life. The Rahvoli equations show a 79.8 percent probability that history will be changed in the direction of greater peace, right up through the following two centuries. Religious wars often—”

“There are other, bloodier religious wars to prevent than the English civil war.”

“True, Your Holiness,” the Director said humbly. At least it looked like humility to Lambert. “But ours is a young science. Identifying other time streams, focusing on one, identifying historical fulcra—it is such a new science. We do what we can, in the name of Peace.”

Everyone in the room looked pious. Lambert kept her face blank. In the name of Peace—and of prestigious scientific research, attended by rich financial support and richer academic reputations.

“And it is Peace we seek,” Brill pressed, “as much as the Church itself does. With a permanent permit to take Anne Boleyn Hostage, we can save countless lives in this other time stream, just as the Church preserves peace in our own.”

The High Priest played with the sleeve of her robe. Lambert could not see her face. But when she looked up, she was smiling.

“I’ll recommend to the All-World Forum that your hostage permit be granted, Director. I will return in two months to make an official check on the Holy Hostage.”

Brill, Lambert saw, didn’t quite stop himself in time from frowning. “Two months? But with the entire solar system of Hostages to supervise—”

“Two months, Director,” Her Holiness said. “The week before the All- World Forum convenes to vote on revenue and taxation.”

“Now I would like to inspect the three Holy Hostages you already hold for the altruistic prevention of war.”

Later, Culhane said to Lambert, “He did not explain it very well. It could have been made so much more urgent . . . it is urgent. Those bodies rotting in Cornwall. . .” He shuddered.

Lambert looked at him. “You care. You genuinely do.”

He looked back at her, in astonishment. “And you don’t? You must, to work on this project!”

“I care,” Lambert said. “But not like that.”

“Like what?”

She tried to clarify it for him, for herself. “The bodies rotting . . . I see them. But it’s not our own history—”

“What does that matter? They’re still human!”

He was so earnest. Intensity burned on him like skin tinglers. Did Culhane even use skin tinglers, Lambert wondered? Fellow researchers spoke of him as an ascetic, giving all his energy, all his time, to the Project. A woman in his domicile had told Lambert he even lived chaste, doing a Voluntary Celibacy Mission for the entire length of his research grant. Lambert had never met anyone who actually did that. It was intriguing.

She said, “Are you thinking of the priesthood once the project is over, Culhane?”

He flushed. Color mounted from the dyed cheeks, light blue since he had been promoted to Project Head, to pink on the fine skin of his shaved temples.

“I’m thinking of it.”

“And doing a Celibacy Mission now?”

“Yes. Why?” His tone was belligerent: a Celibacy Mission was slightly old-fashioned. Lambert studied his body: tall, well-made, strong. Augments? Muscular, maybe. He had beautiful muscles.

“No reason,” she said, bending back to her console until she heard him walk away.

The demon advanced. Anne, lying feeble on her curtained bed, tried to call out. But her voice would not come, and who would hear her anyway? The bedclothes were thick, muffling sound; her ladies would all have retired for the night, alone or otherwise; the guards would be drinking the ale Henry had provided all of London to celebrate Elizabeth’s christening. And Henry . . . he was not beside her. She had failed him of his son.

“Be gone,” she said weakly to the demon. It moved closer.

They had called her a witch. Because of her little sixth finger, because of the dog named Urian, because she had kept Henry under her spell so long without bedding him. But if I were really a witch, she thought, I could send this demon away. More: I could hold Henry, could keep him from watching that whey-faced Jane Seymour, could keep him in my bed . . . She was not a witch.

Therefore, it followed that there was nothing she could do about this demon. If it was come for her, it was come. If Satan Master of Lies was decided to have her, to punish her for taking the husband of another woman, and for . . . how much could demons know?

“This was all none of my wishing,” she said aloud to the demon. “I wanted to marry someone else.” The demon continued to advance.

Very well, then, let it take her. She would not scream. She never had—she prided herself on it. Not when they had told her she could not marry Harry Percy. Not when she had been sent home from the Court, peremptorily and without explanation. Not when she had discovered the explanation: Henry wished to have her out of London so he could bed his latest mistress away from Catherine’s eyes. She had not screamed when a crowd of whores had burst into the palace where she was supping, demanding Nan Bullen, who they said was one of them. She had escaped across the Thames in a barge, and not a cry had escaped her lips. They had admired her for her courage: Wyatt, Norris, Weston, Henry himself. She would not scream now.

The box of light grew larger as it approached. She had just time to say to it, “I have been God’s faithful and true servant, and my husband the King’s,” before it was upon her.

“The place where a war starts,” Lambert said to the faces assembled below her in the Hall of Time, “is long before the first missile, or the first bullet, or the first spear.”

She looked down at the faces. It was part of her responsibilities as an intern Researcher to teach a class of young, some of whom would become historians. The class was always taught in the Hall of Time. The expense was enormous: keeping the Hall in stasis for nearly an hour, bringing the students in through the force field, activating all the Squares at once. Her lecture would be replayed for them later, when they could pay attention to it: Lambert did not blame them for barely glancing at her now. Why should they? The walls of the circular room, which were only there in a virtual sense, were lined with Squares, which were not really there at all. The Squares showed actual, local-time scenes from wars that had been there, were there now, somewhere, in someone’s reality.

Men died writhing in the mud, arrows through intestines and necks and groins, at Agincourt.

Women lay flung across the bloody bodies of their children at Cawnpore.

In the hot sun the flies crawled thick upon the split faces of the heroes of Marathon.

Figures staggered, their faces burned off, away from Hiroshima.

Breathing bodies, their perfect faces untouched and their brains turned to mush by spekaline, sat in orderly rows under the ripped dome on Io- One.

Only one face turned towards Lambert, jerked as if on a string, a boy with wide violet eyes brimming with anguish. Lambert obligingly started again.

“The place where a war starts is long before the first missile, or the first bullet, or the first spear. There are always many forces causing a war: economic, political, religious, cultural. Nonetheless, it is the great historical discovery of our time that if you trace each of these back—through the records, through the eye-witness accounts, through the entire burden of data only Rahvoli equations can handle—you come to a fulcrum. A single event or act or person. It is like a decision tree with a thousand thousand generations of decisions: Somewhere there was one first yes/no. The place where the war started, and where it could have been prevented.

“The great surprise of Time Rescue work has been how often that place was female.

“Men fought wars, when there were wars. Men controlled the gold and the weapons and the tariffs and sea rights and religions that have caused wars, and the men controlled the bodies of other men that did the actual fighting. But men are men. They acted at the fulcrum of history, but often what tipped their actions one way or another was what they loved. A woman. A child. She became the passive, powerless weight he chose to lift, and the balance tipped. She, not he, is the branching place, where the decision tree splits and the war begins.”

The boy with the violet eyes was still watching her. Lambert stayed silent until he turned to watch the Squares—which was the reason he had been brought here. Then she watched him. Anguished, passionate, able to feel what war meant—he might be a good candidate for the Time Rescue team, when his preliminary studies were done. He reminded her a little of Culhane.

Who right now, as Project Head, was interviewing the new Hostage, not lecturing to children.

Lambert stifled her jealousy. It was unworthy. And short-sighted: She remembered what this glimpse of human misery had meant to her three years ago, when she was an historian candidate. She had had nightmares for weeks. She had thought the event was pivotal to her life, a dividing point past which she would never be the same person again. How could she? She had been shown the depths to which humanity, without the Church of the Holy Hostage and the All-World Concordance, could descend. Burning eye sockets, mutilated genitals, a general who stood on a hill and said, “How I love to see the arms and legs fly!” It had been shattering. She had been shattered, as the Orientation intended she should be.

The boy with the violet eyes was crying. Lambert wanted to step down from the platform and go to him. She wanted to put her arms around him and hold his head against her shoulder . . . but was that because of compassion, or was that because of his violet eyes?

She said silently to him, without leaving the podium, You will be all right. Human beings are not as mutable as you think. When this is over, nothing permanent about you will have changed at all.

Anne opened her eyes. Satan leaned over her.

His head was shaved, and he wore strange garb of an ugly blue-green. His cheeks were stained with dye. In one ear metal glittered and swung. Anne crossed herself.

“Hello,” Satan said, and the voice was not human.

She struggled to sit up; if this be damnation, she would not lie prone for it. Her heart hammered in her throat. But the act of sitting brought the Prince of Darkness into focus, and her eyes widened. He looked like a man. Painted, made ugly, hung around with metal boxes that could be tools of evil—but a man.

“My name is Culhane.”

A man. And she had faced men. Bishops, nobles, Chancellor Wolsey.

She had outfaced Henry, Prince of England and France, Defender of the Faith.

“Don’t be frightened, Mistress Boleyn. I will explain to you where you are and how you came to be here.”

She saw now that the voice came not from his mouth, although his mouth moved, but from the box hung around his neck. How could that be? Was there then a demon in the box? But then she realized something else, something real to hold onto.

“Do not call me Mistress Boleyn. Address me as Your Grace. I am the queen.”

The something that moved behind his eyes convinced her, finally, that he was a mortal man. She was used to reading men’s eyes. But why should this one look at her like that—with pity? With admiration?

She struggled to stand, rising off the low pallet. It was carved of good English oak. The room was paneled in dark wood and hung with tapestries of embroidered wool. Small-paned windows shed brilliant light over carved chairs, table, chest. On the table rested a writing desk and a lute. Reassured, Anne pushed down the heavy cloth of her night shift and rose.

The man, seated on a low stool, rose too. He was taller than Henry—she had never seen a man taller than Henry—superbly muscled. A soldier? Fright fluttered again, and she put her hand to her throat. This man, watching her—watching her throat. Was he then an executioner? Was she under arrest, drugged and brought by some secret method into the Tower of London? Had someone brought evidence against her—or was Henry that disappointed that she had not borne a son that he was eager to supplant her already?

As steadily as she could, Anne walked to the window.

The Tower bridge did not lay beyond in the sunshine. Nor the river, nor the gabled roofs of Greenwich Palace. Instead there was a sort of yard, with huge beasts of metal growling softly. On the grass naked young men and women jumped up and down, waving their arms, running in place and smiling and sweating as if they did not know either that they were uncovered or crazed.

Anne took firm hold of the windowsill. It was slippery in her hands and she saw that it was not wood at all, but some material made to resemble wood. She closed her eyes, then opened them. She was a queen. She had fought hard to become a queen, defending a virtue nobody believed she still had, against a man who claimed that to destroy that virtue was love. She had won, making the crown the price of her virtue. She had conquered a king, brought down a Chancellor of England, outfaced a pope. She would not show fear to this executioner in this place of the damned, whatever it was.

She turned from the window, her head high. “Please begin your explanation, Master. . .”

“Culhane.”

“Master Culhane. We are eager to hear what you have to say. And we do not like waiting.”

She swept aside her long night dress as if it were Court dress and seated herself in the not-wooden chair carved like a throne.

“I am a hostage,” Anne repeated. “In a time that has not yet happened.”

From beside the window, Lambert watched. She was fascinated. Anne Boleyn had, according to Culhane’s report, listened in silence to the entire explanation of the Time Rescue, that explanation so carefully drafted and revised a dozen times to fit what the sixteenth century mind could understand of the twenty-second. Queen Anne had not become hysterical. She had not cried, nor fainted, nor professed disbelief. She had asked no questions. When Culhane had finished, she had requested, calmly and with staggering dignity, to see the ruler of this place, with his ministers. Toshio Brill, watching on monitor because the wisdom was that at first new Hostages would find it easier to deal with one consistent researcher, had hastily summoned Lambert and two others. They had all pressed in the floor-length robes used for grand academic ceremonies and never else. And they had marched solemnly into the ersatz sixteenth- century room, bowing their heads.

Only their heads. No curtsies. Anne Boleyn was going to learn that no one curtsied anymore.

Covertly Lambert studied her, their fourth Time Hostage, so different from the other three. She had not risen from her chair, but even seated she was astonishingly tiny. Thin, delicate bones, great dark eyes, masses of silky black hair loose on her white nightdress. She was not pretty by the standards of this century; she had not even been counted pretty by the standards of her own. But she was compelling. Lambert had to give her that.

“And I am prisoner here,” Anne Boleyn said. Lambert turned up her translator; the words were just familiar, but the accent so strange she could not catch them without electronic help.

“Not prisoner,” the Director said. “Hostage.”

“Lord Brill, if I cannot leave, then I am a prisoner. Let us not mince words. I cannot leave this castle?”

“You cannot.”

“Please address me as ‘Your Grace.’ Is there to be a ransom?”

“No, Your Grace. But because of your presence here thousands of men will live who would have otherwise died.”

With a shock, Lambert saw Anne shrug; the deaths of thousands of men evidently did not interest her. It was true, then. They really were moral barbarians, even the women. The students should see this. That small shrug said more than all the battles viewed in Squares. Lambert felt her sympathy for the abducted woman lessen, a physical sensation like the emptying of a bladder, and was relieved to feel it. It meant she, Lambert, still had her own moral sense.

“How long must I stay here?”

“For life, Your Grace,” Brill said bluntly.

Anne made no reaction; her control was awing.

“And how long will that be, Lord Brill?”

“No person knows the length of his or her life, Your Grace.”

“But if you can read the future, as you claim, you must know what the length of mine would have been.”

Lambert thought: We must not underestimate her. This Hostage is not like the last one.

Brill said, with the same bluntness that honored Anne’s comprehension—did she realize that?—“If we had not brought you here, you would have died May 19, 1536.”

“How?”

“It does not matter. You are no longer part of that future, and so now events there will—”

“How?”

Brill didn’t answer.

Anne Boleyn rose and walked to the window, absurdly small, Lambert thought, in the trailing nightdress. Over her shoulder she said, “Is this castle in England?”

“No,” Brill said. Lambert saw him exchange glances with Culhane.

“In France?”

“It is not in any place on the Earth,” Brill said, “although it can be entered from three places on Earth. It is outside of Time.”

She could not possibly have understood, but she said nothing, only went on staring out the window. Over her shoulder Lambert saw the exercise court, empty now, and the anti-matter power generators. Two technicians crawled over them with a robot monitor. What did Anne Boleyn make of them?

“God knows if I had merited death,” Anne said. Lambert saw Culhane start.

Brill stepped forward. “Your Grace—”

“Leave me now,” she said, without turning.

They did. Of course she would be monitored constantly—everything from brain scans to the output of her bowels. Although she would never know this. But if suicide was in that life-defying mind, it would not be possible. If Her Holiness ever learned of the suicide of a Time Hostage . . . Lambert’s last glimpse before the door closed was of Anne Boleyn’s back, still by the window, straight as a spear as she gazed out at anti-matter power generators in a building in permanent stasis.

“Culhane, meeting in ten minutes,” Brill said. Lambert guessed the time lapse was to let the Director change into working clothes. Toshio Brill had come away from the interview with Anne Boleyn somehow diminished. He even looked shorter, although shouldn’t her small stature have instead augmented his?

Culhane stood still in the corridor outside Anne’s locked room (would she try the door?). His face was turned away from Lambert’s. She said, “Culhane . . . you jumped a moment in there. When she said God alone knew if she had merited death.”

“It was what she said at her trial,” Culhane said. “When the verdict was announced. Almost the exact words.”

He still had not moved so much as a muscle of that magnificent body. Lambert said, probing, “You found her impressive, then. Despite her scrawniness, and beyond the undeniable pathos of her situation.”

He looked at her then, his eyes blazing: Culhane, the research engine. “I found her magnificent.”

She never smiled. That was one of the things she knew they remarked upon among themselves: She had overheard them in the walled garden. Anne Boleyn never smiles. Alone, they did not call her Queen Anne, or Her Grace, or even the Marquis of Rochford, the title Henry had conferred upon her, the only female peeress in her own right in all of England. No, they called her Anne Boleyn, as if the marriage to Henry had never happened, as if she had never borne Elizabeth. And they said she never smiled.

What cause was there to smile, in this place that was neither life nor death?

Anne stitched deftly at a piece of amber velvet. She was not badly treated. They had given her a servant, cloth to make dresses—she had always been clever with a needle, and the skill had not deserted her when she could afford to order any dresses she chose. They had given her books, the writing Latin but the pictures curiously flat, with no raised ink or painting. They let her go into any unlocked room in the castle, out to the gardens, into the yards. She was a Holy Hostage.

When the amber velvet gown was finished, she put it on. They let her have a mirror. A lute. Writing paper and quills. Whatever she asked for, as generous as Henry had been in the early days of his passion, when he had divided her from her love Harry Percy, and had kept her loving hostage to his own fancy.

Cages came in many sizes. Many shapes. And, if what Master Culhane and the Lady Mary Lambert said was true, in many times.

“I am not a lady,” Lady Lambert had protested. She needn’t have bothered. Of course she was not a lady—she was a commoner, like the others, and so perverted was this place that the woman sounded insulted to be called a lady. Lambert did not like her, Anne knew, although she had not yet found out why. The woman was unsexed, like all of them, working on her books and machines all day, exercising naked with men, who thus no more looked at their bodies than they would those of fellow soldiers in the roughest camp. So it pleased Anne to call Lambert a lady when she did not want to be one, as she was now so many things she had never wanted to be. “Anne Boleyn.” Who never smiled.

“I will create you a lady,” she said to Lambert. “I confer on you the rank of baroness. Who will gainsay me? I am the queen, and in this place there is no king.”

And Mary Lambert had stared at her with the unsexed bad manners of a common drab.

Anne knotted her thread and cut it with silver scissors. The gown was finished. She slipped it over her head and struggled with the buttons in the back, rather than call the stupid girl who was her servant. The girl could not even dress hair. Anne smoothed her hair herself, then looked critically at her reflection in the fine mirror they had brought her.

For a woman a month and a half from childbed, she looked strong. They had put medicines in her food, they said. Her complexion, that creamy dark skin that seldom varied in color, was well set off by the amber velvet. She had often worn amber, or tawny. Her hair, loose since she had no headdress and did not know how to make one, streamed over her shoulders. Her hands, long and slim despite the tiny extra finger, carried a rose brought to her by Master Culhane. She toyed with the rose, to show off the beautiful hands, and lifted her head high.

She was going to have an audience with Her Holiness, a female pope. And she had a request to make.

“She will ask, Your Holiness, to be told the future. Her future, the one Anne Boleyn experienced in our own time stream, after the point we took her Hostage from hers. And the future of England.” Brill’s face had darkened; Lambert could see that he hated this. To forewarn his political rival that a Hostage would complain about her treatment. A Hostage, that person turned sacred object through the sacrifice of personal freedom to global peace. When Tullio Amaden Koyushi had been Hostage from Mars Three to the Republic of China, he had told the Church official in charge of his case that he was not being allowed sufficient exercise. The resulting inter-system furor had lost the Republic of China two trade contracts, both important. There was no other way to maintain the necessary reverence for the Hostage political system. The Church of the Holy Hostage was powerful because it must be, if the solar system was to stay at peace. Brill knew that.

So did Her Holiness.

She wore full state robes today, gorgeous with hundreds of tiny mirrors sent to her by the grateful across all worlds. Her head was newly shaved. Perfect, synthetic jewels glittered in her ears. Listening to Brill’s apology- in-advance, Her Holiness smiled. Lambert saw the smile, and even across the room she felt Brill’s polite, concealed frustration.

“Then if this is so,” Her Holiness said, “why cannot Lady Anne Boleyn be told her future? Hers and England’s?”

Lambert knew that the High Priest already knew the answer. She wanted to make Brill say it.

Brill said, “It is not thought wise, Your Holiness. If you remember, we did that once before.”

“Ah, yes, your last Hostage. I will see her, too, of course, on this visit. Has Queen Helen’s condition improved?”

“No,” Brill said shortly.

“And no therapeutic brain drugs or electronic treatments have helped? She still is insane from the shock of finding herself with us?”

“Nothing has helped.”

“You understand how reluctant I was to let you proceed with another Time Rescue at all,” Her Holiness said, and even Lambert stifled a gasp. The High Priest did not make those determinations; only the All-World Forum could authorize or disallow a Hostage taking—across space or time. The Church of the Holy Hostage was responsible only for the inspection and continuation of permits granted by the Forum. For the High Priest to claim political power she did not possess—

The Director’s eyes gleamed angrily. But before he could reply, the door opened and Culhane escorted in Anne Boleyn.

Lambert pressed her lips together tightly. The woman had sewn herself a gown, a sweeping ridiculous confection of amber velvet so tight at the breasts and waist she must hardly be able to breathe. How had women conducted their lives in such trappings? The dress narrowed her waist to nearly nothing; above the square neckline her collar bones were delicate as a bird’s. Culhane hovered beside her, huge and protective. Anne walked straight to the High Priest, knelt, and raised her face.

She was looking for a ring to kiss.

Lambert didn’t bother to hide her smile. A High Priest wore no jewelry except earrings, ever. The pompous little Hostage had made a social error, no doubt significant in her own time.

Anne smiled up at Her Holiness, the first time anyone had seen her smile at all. It changed her face, lighting it with mischief, lending luster to the great dark eyes. A phrase came to Lambert, penned by the poet Thomas Wyatt to describe his cousin Anne: And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Anne said, in that sprightly yet aloof manner that Lambert was coming to associate with her, “It seems, Your Holiness, that we have reached for what is not there. But the lack is ours, not yours, and we hope it will not be repeated in the request we come to make of you.”

Direct. Graceful, even through the translator and despite the ludicrous imperial plural. Lambert glanced at Culhane, who was gazing down at Anne as at a rare and fragile flower. How could he? That skinny body, without muscle tone let alone augments, that plain face, the mole on her neck . . . This was not the sixteenth century. Culhane was a fool.

As Thomas Wyatt had been. And Sir Harry Percy. And Henry, King of England. All caught not by beauty but by that strange elusive charm.

Her Holiness laughed. “Stand up, Your Grace. We don’t kneel to officials here.” Your Grace. The High Priest always addressed Hostages by the honorifics of their own state, but in this case it could only impede Anne’s adjustment.

And what do I care about her adjustment? Lambert jeered at herself. Nothing. What I care about is Culhane’s infatuation, and only because he rejected me first. Rejection, it seemed, was a great whetter of appetite—in any century.

Anne rose. Her Holiness said, “I’m going to ask you some questions, Your Grace. You are free to answer any way you wish. My function is to ensure that you are well treated, and that the noble science of the prevention of war, which has made you a Holy Hostage, is also well served. Do you understand?”

“We do.”

“Have you received everything you need for your material comfort?”

“Yes,” Anne said.

“Have you received everything you’ve requested for your mental comfort? Books, objects of any description, company?”

“No,” Anne said. Lambert saw Brill stiffen.

Her Holiness said, “No?”

“It is necessary for the comfort of our mind—and for our material comfort as well—to understand our situation as fully as possible. Any rational creature requires such understanding to reach ease of mind.” Brill said, “You have been told everything related to your situation. What you ask is to know about situations that now, because you are here, will never happen.”

“Situations that have happened, Lord Brill, else no one could know of them. You could not.”

“In your time stream they will not happen,” Brill said. Lambert could hear the suppressed anger in his voice, and wondered if the High Priest could. Anne Boleyn couldn’t know how serious it was to be charged by Her Holiness with a breach of Hostage treatment. If Brill was ambitious—and why wouldn’t he be?—such charges could hurt his future.

Anne said swiftly, “Our time is now your time. You have made it so. The situation was none of our choosing. And if your time is now ours, then surely we are entitled to the knowledge that accompanies our time.” She looked at the High Priest. “For the comfort of our mind.”

Brill said, “Your Holiness—”

“No, Queen Anne is correct. Her argument is valid. You will designate a qualified researcher to answer any questions she has—any at all—about the life she might have had, or the course of events England took when the queen did not become a sacred Hostage.”

Brill nodded stiffly.

“Good-bye, Your Grace,” Her Holiness said. “I shall return in two weeks to inspect your situation again.”

Two weeks? The High Priest was not due for another inspection for six months. Lambert glanced at Culhane to see his reaction to this blatant political fault-hunting, but he was gazing at the floor, to which Anne Boleyn had sunk in another of her embarrassing curtsies, the amber velvet of her skirts spread around her like gold.

They sent a commoner to explain her life to her, the life she had lost. A commoner. And he had as well the nerve to be besotted with her. Anne always knew. She tolerated such fellows, like that upstart musician Smeaton, when they were useful to her. If this Master Culhane dared to make any sort of declaration, he would receive the same sort of snub Smeaton once had. Inferior persons should not look to be spoken to as noblemen.

He sat on a straight-backed chair in her Tower room, looking humble enough, while Anne sat in the great carved chair with her hands tightly folded to keep them from shaking.

“Tell me how I came to die in 1536.” God’s blood! Had ever before there been such a sentence uttered?

Culhane said, “You were beheaded. Found guilty of treason.” He stopped, and flushed.

She knew, then. In a queen, there was one cause for a charge of treason. “He charged me with adultery. To remove me, so he could marry again.”

“Yes.”

“To Jane Seymour.”

“Yes.”

“Had I first given him a son?”

“No,” Culhane said.

“Did Jane Seymour give him a son?”

“Yes. Edward VI. But he died at sixteen, a few years after Henry.” There was vindication in that, but not enough to stem the sick feeling in her gut. Treason. And no son . . . There must have been more than desire for the Seymour bitch. Henry must have hated her. Adultery . . . “With whom?”

Again the oaf flushed. “With five men, Your Grace. Everyone knew the charges were false, created merely to excuse his own adultery—even your enemies admitted such.”

“Who were they?”

“Sir Henry Norris. Sir Francis Weston. William Brereton. Mark Smeaton. And . . . and your brother George.”

For a moment she thought she would be sick. Each name fell like a blow, and the last like the axe itself. George. Her beloved brother, so talented at music, so high-spirited and witty . . . Henry Norris, the King’s friend. Weston and Brereton, young and light-hearted but always, to her, respectful and careful. . . and Mark Smeaton, the oaf made courtier because he could play the virginals.

The long, beautiful hands clutched the sides of the chair. But the moment passed, and she could say with dignity, “They denied the charges?”

“Smeaton confessed, but he was tortured into it. The others denied the charges completely. Henry Norris offered to defend your honor in single combat.”

Yes, that was like Harry: so old-fashioned, so principled. She said, “They all died.” It was not a question: If she had died for treason, they would have, too. And not alone; no one died alone. “Who else?”

Culhane said, “Maybe we should wait for the rest of this, Your—”

“Who else? My father?”

“No. Sir Thomas More, John Fisher—”

“More? For my . . .” she could not say adultery.

“Because he would not swear to the Oath of Supremacy, which made the king and not the pope head of the Church in England. That act opened the door to religious dissension in England.”

“It did not. The heretics were already strong in England. History cannot fault that to me!”

“Not as strong as they would become,” Culhane said, almost apologetically. “Queen Mary was known as Bloody Mary for burning heretics who used the Act of Supremacy to break from Rome—Your Grace! Are you all right. . . Anne!”

“Do not touch me,” she said. Queen Mary. Then her own daughter Elizabeth had been disinherited, or killed . . . Had Henry become so warped that he would kill a child? His own child? Unless he had come to believe . . .

She whispered, “Elizabeth?”

Comprehension flooded his eyes. “Oh, no, Anne! No! Mary ruled first, as the elder, but when she died heirless, Elizabeth was only twenty-five. Elizabeth became the greatest ruler England had ever known! She ruled for forty-four years, and under her England became a great power.”

The greatest ruler. Her baby Elizabeth. Anne could feel her hands unknotting on the ugly artificial chair. Henry had not repudiated Elizabeth, nor had her killed. She had become the greatest ruler England had ever known.

Culhane said, “This is why we thought it best not to tell you all this.”

She said coldly, “I will be the judge of that.”

“I’m sorry.” He sat stiffly, hands dangling awkwardly between his knees. He looked like a plowman, like that oaf Smeaton . . . She remembered what Henry had done, and rage returned.

“I stood accused. With five men . . . with George. And the charges were false.” Something in his face changed. Anne faced him steadily. “Unless . . . were they false, Master Culhane? You who know so much of history—does history say—” She could not finish. To beg for history’s judgment from a man like this . . . no humiliation had ever been greater. Not even the Spanish Ambassador, referring to her as “the Concubine,” had ever humiliated her so.

Culhane said carefully, “History is silent on the subject, Your Grace. What your conduct was . . . would have been . . . is known only to you.”

“As it should be. It was . . . would have been . . . mine,” she said viciously, mocking his tones perfectly. He looked at her like a wounded puppy, like that lout Smeaton when she had snubbed him. “Tell me this, Master Culhane. You have changed history as it would have been, you tell me. Will my daughter Elizabeth still become the greatest ruler England has ever seen—in my time stream? Or will that be altered, too, by your quest for peace at any cost?”

“We don’t know. I explained to you . . . We can only watch your time stream now as it unfolds. It had only reached October, 1533, which is why after analyzing our own history we—”

“You have explained all that. It will be sixty years from now before you know if my daughter will still be great. Or if you have changed that as well by abducting me and ruining my life.”

“Abducting! You were going to be killed! Accused, beheaded—”

“And you have prevented that.” She rose, in a greater fury than ever she had been with Henry, with Wolsey, with anyone. “You have also robbed me of my remaining three years as surely as Henry would have robbed me of my old age. And you have mayhap robbed my daughter as well, as Henry sought to do with his Seymour-get prince. So what is the difference between you, Master Culhane, that you are a saint and Henry a villain? He held me in the Tower until my soul could be commended to God; you hold me here in this castle you say I can never leave where time does not exist, and mayhap God neither. Who has done me the worse injury? Henry gave me the crown. You—all you and my Lord Brill have given me is a living death, and then given my daughter’s crown a danger and uncertainty that without you she would not have known! Who has done to Elizabeth and me the worse turn? And in the name of preventing war! War! You have made war upon me! Get out, get out!”

“Your—”

“Get out! I never want to see you again! If I am in hell, let there be one less demon!”

Lambert slipped from her monitor to run down the corridor. Culhane flew from the room; behind him the sound of something heavy struck the door. Culhane slumped against it, his face pasty around his cheek dye. Almost Lambert could find it in herself to pity him. Almost.

She said softly, “I told you so.”

“She’s like a wild thing.”

“You knew she could be. It’s documented enough, Culhane. I’ve put a suicide watch on her.”

“Yes. Good. I . . . she was like a wild thing.”

Lambert peered at him. “You still want her! After that!”

That sobered him; he straightened and looked at her coldly. “She is a Holy Hostage, Lambert.”

“I remember that. Do you?”

“Don’t insult me, Intern.”

He moved angrily away; she caught his sleeve. “Culhane—don’t be angry. I only meant that the sixteenth century was so different from our own, but s—”

“Do you think I don’t know that? I was doing historical research while you were learning to read, Lambert. Don’t instruct me.”

He stalked off. Lambert bit down hard on her own fury and stared at Anne Boleyn’s closed door. No sound came from behind it. To the soundless door she finished her sentence: “—but some traps don’t change.” The door didn’t answer. Lambert shrugged. It had nothing to do with her. She didn’t care what happened to Anne Boleyn, in this century or that other one. Or to Culhane, either. Why should she? There were other men. She was no Henry VIII, to bring down her world for passion. What was the good of being a time researcher, if you could not even learn from times past?

She leaned thoughtfully against the door, trying to remember the name of the beautiful boy in her Orientation lecture, the one with the violet eyes.

She was still there, thinking, when Toshio Brill called a staff meeting to announce, his voice stiff with anger, that Her Holiness of the Church of the Holy Hostage had filed a motion with the All-World Forum that the Time Research Institute, because of the essentially reverent nature of the Time Rescue program, be removed from administration by the Forum and placed instead under the direct control of the Church.

She had to think. It was important to think, as she had thought through her denial of Henry’s ardor, and her actions when that ardor waned. Thought was all.

She could not return to her London, to Elizabeth. They had told her that. But did she know beyond doubt that it was true?

Anne left her apartments. At the top of the stairs she usually took to the garden she instead turned and opened another door. It opened easily. She walked along a different corridor. Apparently even now no one was going to stop her.

And if they did, what could they do to her? They did not use the scaffold or the rack; she had determined this from talking to that oaf Culhane and that huge ungainly woman, Lady Mary Lambert. They did not believe in violence, in punishment, in death. (How could you not believe in death? Even they must one day die.) The most they could do to her was shut her up in her rooms, and there the female pope would come to see she was well-treated.

Essentially they were powerless.

The corridor was lined with doors, most set with small windows. She peered in: rooms with desks and machines, rooms without desks and machines, rooms with people seated around a table talking, kitchens, still rooms. No one stopped her. At the end of the corridor she came to a room without a window and tried the door. It was locked, but as she stood there, her hand still on the knob, the door opened from within.

“Lady Anne! Oh!”

Could no one in this accursed place get her name right? The woman who stood there was clearly a servant, although she wore the same ugly gray-green tunic as everyone else. Perhaps, like Lady Mary, she was really an apprentice. She was of no interest, but behind her was the last thing Anne expected to see in this place: a child.

She pushed past the servant and entered the room. It was a little boy, his dress strange but clearly a uniform of some sort. He had dark eyes, curling dark hair, a bright smile. How old? Perhaps four. There was an air about him that was unmistakable; she would have wagered her life this child was royal.

“Who are you, little one?”

He answered her with an outpouring of a language she did not know. The servant scrambled to some device on the wall; in a moment Culhane stood before her.

“You said you didn’t want to see me, Your Grace. But I was closest to answer Kiti’s summons . . .”

Anne looked at him. It seemed to her that she looked clear through him, to all that he was: desire, and pride of his pitiful strange learning, and smugness of his holy mission that had brought her life to wreck. Hers, and perhaps Elizabeth’s as well. She saw Culhane’s conviction, shared by Lord Director Brill and even by such as Lady Mary, that what they did was right because they did it. She knew that look well: It had been Cardinal Wolsey’s, Henry’s right-hand man and Chancellor of England, the man who had advised Henry to separate Anne from Harry Percy. And advised Henry against marrying her. Until she, Anne Boleyn, upstart Tom Boleyn’s powerless daughter, had turned Henry against Wolsey and had the Cardinal brought to trial. She.

In that minute, she made her decision.

“I was wrong, Master Culhane. I spoke in anger. Forgive me.” She smiled, and held out her hand, and she had the satisfaction of watching Culhane turn color.

How old was he? Not in his first youth. But neither had Henry been.

He said, “Of course, Your Grace. Kiti said you talked to the Tsarevich.”

She made a face, still smiling at him. She had often mocked Henry thus. Even Harry Percy, so long ago, a lifetime ago . . . No. Two lifetimes ago. “The what?”

“The Tsarevich.” He indicated the child.

Was the dye on his face permanent, or would it wash off?

She said, not asking, “He is another Time Hostage. He, too, in his small person, prevents a war.”

Culhane nodded, clearly unsure of her mood. Anne looked wonderingly at the child, then winningly at Culhane. “I would have you tell me about him. What language does he speak? Who is he?”

“Russian. He is—was—the future emperor. He suffers from a terrible disease: You called it the bleeding sickness. Because his mother the empress was so driven with worry over him, she fell under the influence of a holy man who led her to make some disastrous decisions while she was acting for her husband the Emperor, who was away at war.”

Anne said, “And the bad decisions brought about another war.”

“They made more bloody than necessary a major rebellion.”

“You prevent rebellions as well as wars? Rebellions against a monarchy?”

“Yes, it—history did not go in the direction of monarchies.”

That made little sense. How could history go other than in the direction of those who were divinely anointed, those who held the power? Royalty won. In the end, they always won.

But there could be many casualties before the end.

She said, with that combination of liquid dark gaze and aloof body that had so intrigued Henry—and Norris, and Wyatt, and even presumptuous Mark Smeaton, God damn his soul—“I find I wish to know more about this child and his country’s history. Will you tell me?”

“Yes,” Culhane said. She caught the nature of his smile: relieved, still uncertain how far he had been forgiven, eager to find out. Familiar, all so familiar.

She was careful not to let her body touch his as they passed through the doorway. But she went first, so he would catch the smell of her hair.

“Master Culhane—you are listed on the demon machine as ‘M. Culhane.’ ”

“The . . . oh, the computer. I didn’t know you ever looked at one.”

“I did. Through a window.”

“It’s not a demon, Your Grace.”

She let the words pass; what did she care what it was? But his tone told her something. He liked reassuring her. In this world where women did the same work as men and female bodies were to be seen uncovered in the exercise yard so often that even turning your head to look must become a bore, this oaf nonetheless liked reassuring her.

She said, “What does the ‘M’ mean?”

He smiled. “Michael. Why?”

As the door closed, the captive royal child began once more to wail. Anne smiled, too. “An idle fancy. I wondered if it stood for Mark.”

“What argument has the Church filed with the All-World Forum?” a senior researcher asked.

Brill said irritably, as if it were an answer, “Where is Mahjoub?” Lambert spoke up promptly. “He is with Helen of Troy, Director, and the doctor. The queen had another seizure last night.” Enzio Mahjoub was the unfortunate Project Head for their last Time Rescue.

Brill ran his hand over the back of his neck. His skull needed shaving, and his cheek dye was sloppily applied. He said, “Then we will begin without Mahjoub. The argument of Her Holiness is that the primary function of this Institute is no longer pure time research, but practical application, and that the primary practical application is time rescue. As such, we exist to take Hostages, and thus should come under direct control of the Church of the Holy Hostage. Her secondary argument is that the time Hostages are not receiving treatment up to inter-system standards as specified by the All-World Accord of 2154.”

Lambert’s eyes darted around the room. Cassia Kohambu, Project Head for the Institute’s greatest success, sat up straight, looking outraged. “Our Hostages aren’t—on what are these charges allegedly based?”

Brill said, “No formal charges as yet. Instead, she has requested an investigation. She claims we have hundreds of potential Hostages pinpointed by the Rahvoli equations, and the ones we have chosen do not meet standards for either internal psychic stability or benefit accrued to the hostages themselves, as specified in the All-World Accord. We have chosen to please ourselves, with flagrant disregard for the welfare of the Hostages.”

“Flagrant disregard!” It was Culhane, already on his feet. Beneath the face dye his cheeks flamed. Lambert eyed him carefully. “How can Her Holiness charge flagrant disregard when without us the Tsarevich Alexis would have been in constant pain from hemophiliac episodes, Queen Helen would have been abducted and raped, Herr Hitler blown up in an underground bunker, and Queen Anne Boleyn beheaded!”

Brill said bluntly, “Because the Tsarevich cries constantly for his mother, the Lady Helen is mad, and Mistress Boleyn tells the Church she has been made war upon!”

Well, Lambert thought, that still left Herr Hitler. She was just as appalled as anyone at Her Holiness’s charges, but Culhane had clearly violated both good manners and good sense. Brill never appreciated being upstaged.

Brill continued, “An investigative committee from the All-World Forum will arrive here next month. It will be small: Delegates Soshiru, Vlakhav, and Tullio. In three days the Institute staff will meet again at 0700, and by that time I want each project group to have prepared an argument in favor of the Hostage you hold. Use the pre-permit justifications, including all the mathematical models, but go far beyond that in documenting benefits to the Hostages themselves since they arrived here. Are there any questions?”

Only one, Lambert thought. She stood. “Director—were the three delegates who will investigate us chosen by the All-World Forum or requested by Her Holiness? To whom do they already owe their allegiance?”

Brill looked annoyed. He said austerely, “I think we can rely upon the All-World delegates to file a fair report, Intern Lambert,” and Lambert lowered her eyes. Evidently she still had much to learn. The question should not have been asked aloud.

Would Mistress Boleyn have known that?

Anne took the hand of the little boy. “Come, Alexis,” she said. “We walk now.”

The prince looked up at her. How handsome he was, with his thick curling hair and beautiful eyes almost as dark as her own. If she had given Henry such a child. . . She pushed the thought away. She spoke to Alexis in her rudimentary Russian, without using the translator box hung like a peculiarly ugly pendant around her neck. He answered with a stream of words she couldn’t follow, and she waited for the box to translate.

“Why should we walk? I like it here in the garden.”

“The garden is very beautiful,” Anne agreed. “But I have something interesting to show you.”

Alexis trotted beside her obediently then. It had not been hard to win his trust—had no one here ever passed time with children? Wash off the scary cheek paint, play for him songs on the lute—an instrument he could understand, not like the terrifying sounds coming without musicians from yet another box—learn a few phrases of his language. She had always been good at languages.

Anne led the child through the far gate of the walled garden, into the yard. Machinery hummed; naked men and women “exercised” together on the grass. Alexis watched them curiously, but Anne ignored them. Servants. Her long full skirts, tawny silk, trailed on the ground.

At the far end of the yard she started down the short path to that other gate, the one that ended at nothing.

Queen Isabella of Spain, Henry had told Anne once, had sent an expedition of sailors to circumnavigate the globe. They were supposed to find a faster way to India. They had not done so, but neither had they fallen off the edge of the world, which many had prophesied for them. Anne had not shown much interest in the story, because Isabella had after all been Catherine’s mother. The edge of the world.

The gate ended with a wall of nothing. Nothing to see, or smell, or taste—Anne had tried. To the touch the wall was solid enough, and faintly tingly. A “force field,” Culhane said. Out of time as we experience it; out of space. The gate, one of three, led to a place called Upper Slib, in what had once been Egypt.

Anne lifted Alexis. He was heavier than even a month ago; since she had been attending him every day, he had begun to eat better, play more, cease crying for his mother. Except at night. “Look, Alexis, a gate. Touch it.”

The little boy did, then drew back his hand at the tingling. Anne laughed, and after a moment Alexis laughed, too.

The alarms sounded.

“Why, Your Grace?” Culhane said. “Why again?”

“I wished to see if the gate was unlocked,” Anne said coolly. “We both wished to see.” This was a lie. She knew it—did he? Not yet, perhaps.

“I told you, Your Grace, it is not a gate that can be left locked or unlocked, as you understand the terms. It must be activated by the stasis Square.”

“Then do so; the Prince and I wish for an outing.”

Culhane’s eyes darkened; each time, he was in more anguish. And each time, he came running. However much he might wish to avoid her, commanding his henchmen to talk to her most of the time, he must come when there was an emergency because he was her gaoler, appointed by Lord Brill. So much had Anne discovered in a month of careful trials. He said now, “I told you, Your Grace, you can’t move past the force field, no more than I could move into your palace at Greenwich. In the time stream beyond that gate—my time stream—you don’t exist. The second you crossed the force field you’d disintegrate into nothingness.”

Nothingness again. To Alexis she said sadly in Russian, “He will never let us out. Never, never.”

The child began to cry. Anne held him closer, looking reproachfully at Culhane, who was shifting toward anger. She caught him just before the shift was complete, befuddling him with un-looked-for wistfulness: “It is just that there is so little we can do here, in this time where we do not belong. You can understand that, can you not, Master Culhane? Would it not be the same for you, in my Court of England?”

Emotions warred on his face. Anne put her free hand gently on his arm. He looked down: the long slim fingers with their delicate tendons, the tawny silk against his drab uniform. He choked out, “Anything in my power, anything within the rules, Your Grace . . .”

She had not yet gotten him to blurt out “Anne,” as he had the day she’d thrown a candlestick after him at the door.

She removed her hand, shifted the sobbing child against her neck, spoke so softly he could not hear her.

He leaned forward, toward her. “What did you say, Your Grace?”

“Would you come again tonight to accompany my lute on your guitar? For Alexis and me?

Culhane stepped back. His eyes looked trapped.

“Please, Master Culhane?”

Culhane nodded.

Lambert stared at the monitor. It showed the hospital suite, barred windows and low white pallets, where Helen of Troy was housed. The queen sat quiescent on the floor, as she usually did, except for the brief and terrifying periods when she erupted, shrieking and tearing at her incredible hair. There had never been a single coherent word in the eruptions, not since the first moment Helen had awoken as Hostage and had been told where she was, and why. Since that day Queen Helen had never responded in the slightest to anything said to her. Or maybe that fragile mind, already quivering under the strain of her affair with Paris, had snapped too completely to even hear them. Helen, Lambert thought, was no Anne Boleyn.

Anne sat close to the mad Greek queen, her silk skirts overlapping Helen’s white tunic, her slender body leaning so far forward that her hair, too, mingled with Helen’s, straight black waterfall with masses of springing black curls. Before she could stop herself, Lambert had run her hand over her own shaved head.

What was Mistress Anne trying to say to Helen? The words were too low for the microphones to pick up, and the double curtain of hair hid Anne’s lips. Yet Lambert was as certain as death that Anne was talking. And Helen, quiescent—was she nonetheless hearing? What could it matter if she were, words in a tongue that from her point of view would not exist for another two millennia?

Yet the Boleyn woman visited her every day, right after she left the Tsarevich. How good was Anne, from a time almost as barbaric as Helen’s own, at non-verbal coercion of the crazed?

Culhane entered, glanced at the monitor, and winced.

Lambert said levelly, “You’re a fool, Culhane.”

He didn’t answer.

“You go whenever she summons. You—”

He suddenly strode across the room, two strides at a time. Grabbing Lambert, he pulled her from her chair and yanked her to her feet. For an astonished moment she thought he was actually going to hit her—two Researchers hitting each other. She tensed to slug him back. But abruptly he dropped her, giving a little shove so that she tumbled gracelessly back into her chair.

“You feel like a fat stone.”

Lambert stared at him. Indifferently, he activated his own console and began work. Something rose in her, so cold the vertebrae of her back felt fused in ice. Stiffly she rose from the chair, left the room, and walked along the corridor.

A fat stone. Heavy, stolid yet doughy, the flesh yielding like a slug, or a maggot. Bulky, without grace, without beauty, almost without individuality, as stones were all alike. A fat stone.

Anne Boleyn was just leaving Helen’s chamber. In the corridor, back to the monitor, Lambert faced her. Her voice was low, like a subterranean growl. “Leave him alone.”

Anne looked at her coolly. She did not ask whom Lambert meant.

“Don’t you know you are watched every minute? That you can’t so much as use your chamberpot without being taped? How do you ever expect to get him to your bed? Or to do anything with poor Helen?”

Anne’s eyes widened. She said loudly, “Even when I use the chamberpot? Watched? Have I not even the privacy of the beasts in the field?”

Lambert clenched her fists. Anne was acting. Someone had already told her, or she had guessed, about the surveillance. Lambert could see that she was acting—but not why. A part of her mind noted coolly that she had never wanted to kill anyone before. So this, finally, was what it felt like, all those emotions she had researched throughout time: fury and jealousy and the desire to destroy. The emotions that started wars.

Anne cried, even more loudly, “I had been better had you never told me!” and rushed toward her own apartments.

Lambert walked slowly back to her work area, a fat stone.

Anne lay on the grass between the two massive power generators. It was a poor excuse for grass; although green enough, it had no smell. No dew formed on it, not even at night. Culhane had explained that it was bred to withstand disease, and that no dew formed because the air had little moisture. He explained, too, that the night was as man-bred as the grass; there was no natural night here. Henry would have been highly interested in such things; she was not. But she listened carefully, as she listened to everything Michael said.

She lay completely still, waiting. Eventually the head of a Researcher thrust around the corner of the towering machinery: a purposeful thrust. “Your Grace? What are you doing?”

Anne did not answer. Getting to her feet, she walked back toward the castle. The place between the generators was no good: The woman had already known where Anne was.

The three delegates from the All-World Forum arrived at the Time Research Institute looking apprehensive. Lambert could understand this; for those who had never left their own time-space continuum, it probably seemed significant to step through a force field to a place that did not exist in any accepted sense of the word. The delegates looked at the ground, and inspected the facilities, and asked the same kinds of questions visitors always asked, before they settled down to actually investigate anything.

They were given an hour’s overview of the time rescue program, presented by the Director himself. Lambert, who had not helped write this, listened to the careful sentiments about the prevention of war, the nobility of Hostages, the deep understanding the Time Research Institute held of the All-World Accord of 2154, the altruistic extension of the Holy Mission of Peace into other time streams. Brill then moved on to discuss the four time Hostages, dwelling heavily on the first. In the four years since Herr Hitler had become a Hostage, the National Socialist Party had all but collapsed in Germany. President Paul von Hindenburg had died on schedule, and the new moderate Chancellors were slowly bringing order to Germany. The economy was still very bad and unrest was widespread, but no one was arresting Jews or Gypsies or homosexuals or Jehovah’s Witnesses or . . . Lambert stopped listening. The delegates knew all this. The entire solar system knew all this. Hitler had been a tremendous popular success as a Hostage, the reason the Institute had obtained permits for the next three. Herr Hitler was kept in his locked suite, where he spent his time reading power-fantasy novels whose authors had not been born when the bunker under Berlin was detonated.

“Very impressive, Director,” Goro Soshiru said. He was small, thin, elongated, a typical free-fall Spacer, with a sharp mind and a reputation for incorruptibility. “May we now talk to the Hostages, one at a time?”

“Without any monitors. That is our instruction,” said Anna Vlakhav. She was the senior member of the investigative team, a sleek, gray Chinese who refused all augments. Her left hand, Lambert noticed, trembled constantly. She belonged to the All-World Forum’s Inner Council and had once been a Hostage herself for three years.

“Please,” Soren Tullio smiled. He was young, handsome, very wealthy. Disposable, added by the Forum to fill out the committee, with few recorded views of his own. Insomuch as they existed, however, they were not tinged with any bias toward the Church. Her Holiness had not succeeded in naming the members of the investigative committee—if indeed she had tried.

“Certainly,” Brill said. “We’ve set aside the private conference room for your use. As specified by the Church, it is a sanctuary: There are no monitors of any kind. I would recommend, however, that you allow the bodyguard to remain with Herr Hitler, although of course you will make up your own minds.”

Delegate Vlakhav said, “The bodyguard may stay. Herr Hitler is not our concern here.”

Surprise, Lambert thought. Guess who is?

The delegates kept Hitler only ten minutes, the catatonic Helen only three. They said the queen did not speak. They talked to the little Tsarevich a half hour. They kept Anne Boleyn in the sanctuary/conference room four hours and twenty-three minutes.

She came out calm, blank-faced, and proceeded to her own apartments. Behind her the three delegates were tight-lipped and silent. Anna Vlakhav, the former Hostage, said to Toshio Brill, “We have no comment at this time. You will be informed.”

Brill’s eyes narrowed. He said nothing.

The next day, Director Toshio Brill was subpoenaed to appear before the All-World Forum on the gravest of all charges: mistreating Holy Hostages detained to keep Peace. The tribunal would consist of the full Inner Council of the All-World Forum. Since Director Brill had the right to confront those who accused him, the investigation would be held at the Time Research Institute.

How, Lambert wondered? They would not take her unsupported word. How had the woman done it?

She said to Culhane, “The Delegates evidently make no distinction between political Hostages on our own world and time Hostages snatched from shadowy parallel ones.”

“Why should they?” coldly said Culhane. The idealist. And where had it brought him?

Lambert was assigned that night to monitor the Tsarevich, who was asleep in his crib. She sat in her office, her screen turned to Anne Boleyn’s chambers, watching her play on the lute and sing softly to herself the songs written for her by Henry VIII when his passion was new and fresh, six hundred years before.

Anne sat embroidering a sleeve cover of cinnamon velvet. In strands of black silk she worked intertwined H and A: Henry and Anne. Let their spying machines make of that what they would.

The door opened and, without permission, Culhane entered. He stood by her chair and looked down into her face. “Why, Anne? Why?”

She laughed. He had finally called her by her Christian name. Now, when it could not possibly matter.

When he saw that she would not answer, his manner grew formal. “A lawyer has been assigned to you. He arrives tomorrow.”

A lawyer. Thomas Cromwell had been a lawyer, and Sir Thomas More. Dead, both of them, at Henry’s hand. So had Master Culhane told her, and yet he still believed that protection was afforded by the law.

“The lawyer will review all the monitor records. What you did, what you said, every minute.”

She smiled at him mockingly. “Why tell me this now?”

“It is your right to know.”

“And you are concerned with rights. Almost as much as with death.” She knotted the end of her thread and cut it. “How is it that you command so many machines and yet do not command the knowledge that every man must die?”

“We know that,” Culhane said evenly. His desire for her had at last been killed; she could feel its absence, like an empty well. The use of her name had been but the last drop of living water. “But we try to prevent death when we can.”

“Ah, but you can’t. ‘Prevent death’—as if it were a fever! You can only postpone it, Master Culhane, and you never even ask if that is worth doing.”

“I only came to tell you about the lawyer,” Culhane said stiffly. “Good night, Mistress Boleyn.”

“Good night, Michael,” she said, and started to laugh. She was still laughing when the door closed behind him.

The Hall of Time, designed to hold three hundred, was packed.

Lambert remembered the day she had given the Orientation lecture to the history candidates, among them what’s-his-name of the violet eyes. Twenty young people huddled together against horror in the middle of Squares, virtual and simulated, but not really present. Today the Squares were absent and the middle of the floor was empty, while all four sides were lined ten-deep with All-World Inner Council members on high polished benches, archbishops and lamas and shamans of the Church of the Holy Hostage, and reporters from every major newsgrid in the solar system. Her Holiness the High Priest sat among her followers, pretending she wanted to be inconspicuous. Toshio Brill sat in a chair alone, facing the current Premier of the All-World Council, Dagar Krenya of Mars.

Anne Boleyn was led to a seat. She walked with her head high, her long black skirts sweeping the floor.

Lambert remembered that Anne had worn black to her trial for treason, in 1536.

“This investigation will begin,” Premier Krenya said. He wore his hair to his shoulders; fashions must have changed again on Mars. Lambert looked at the shaved heads of her colleagues, at the long loose black hair of Anne Boleyn. To Culhane, seated beside her, she whispered, “We’ll be growing our hair again soon.” He looked at her as if she were crazy.

It was a kind of crazy, to live everything twice: once in research, once in the flesh. Did it seem so to Anne Boleyn? Lambert knew her frivolity was misplaced, and she thought of the frivolity of Anne in the Tower, awaiting execution: “They will have no trouble finding a name for me. I shall be Queen Anne Lackhead.” At the memory, Lambert’s hatred burst out fresh. She had the memory, and now Anne never would. But in bequeathing it forward in time to Lambert, the memory had become second-hand. That was Anne Boleyn’s real crime, for which she would never be tried: She had made this whole proceeding, so important to Lambert and Brill and Culhane, a mere re-enactment. Pre-scripted. Second-hand. She had robbed them of their own, unused time.

Krenya said, “The charges are as follows: That the Time Research Institute has mistreated the Holy Hostage Anne Boleyn, held Hostage against war. Three counts of mistreatment are under consideration this day: First, that researchers willfully increased a Hostage’s mental anguish by dwelling on the pain of those left behind by the Hostage’s confinement, and on those aspects of confinement that cause emotional unease. Second, that researchers failed to choose a hostage that would truly prevent war. Third, that researchers willfully used a hostage for sexual gratification.”

Lambert felt herself go very still. Beside her, Culhane rose to his feet, then sat down again slowly, his face rigid. Was it possible he had . . . no. He had been infatuated, but not to the extent of throwing away his career. He was not Henry, any more than she had been over him.

The spectators buzzed, an uneven sound like malfunctioning equipment. Krenya rapped for order. “Director Brill—how do you answer these charges?”

“False, Premier. Every one.”

“Then let us hear the evidence against the Institute.”

Anne Boleyn was called. She took the chair in which Brill had been sitting. “She made an entry as though she were going to a great triumph and sat down with elegance,” . . . but that was the other time, the first time. Lambert groped for Culhane’s hand. It felt limp.

“Mistress Boleyn,” Krenya said—he had evidently not been told that she insisted on being addressed as a queen, and the omission gave Lambert a mean pleasure—“In what ways was your anguish willfully increased by researchers at this Institute?”

Anne held out her hand. To Lambert’s astonishment, her lawyer put into it a lute. At an official All-World Forum investigation—a lute. Anne began to play, the tune high and plaintive. Her unbound black hair fell forward; her slight body made a poignant contrast to the torment in the words:

Defiled is my name, full sore,
Through cruel spite and false report,
That I may say forever more,
Farewell to joy, adieu comfort.

“Oh, death, rock me asleep,
Bring on my quiet rest,
Let pass my very guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast.

Ring out the doleful knell,
Let its sound my death tell,
For I must die, There is no remedy,
For now I die!

The last notes faded. Anne looked directly at Krenya. “I wrote that, my Lords, in my other life. Master Culhane of this place played it for me, along with death songs written by my . . . my brother . . .”

“Mistress Boleyn . . .”

“No, I recover myself. George’s death tune was hard for me to hear, my Lords. Accused and condemned because of me, who always loved him well.”

Krenya said to the lawyer whose staff had spent a month reviewing every moment of monitor records, “Culhane made her listen to these?”

“Yes,” the lawyer said. Beside Lambert, Culhane sat unmoving.

“Go on,” Krenya said to Anne.

“He told me that I was made to suffer watching the men accused with me die. How I was led to a window overlooking the block, how my brother George knelt, putting his head on the block, how the axe was raised—” She stopped, shuddering. A murmur ran over the room. It sounded like cruelty, Lambert thought—but whose?

“Worst of all, my Lords,” Anne said, “was that I was told I had bastardized my own child. I chose to sign a paper declaring no valid marriage had ever existed because I had been pre-contracted to Sir Henry Percy, so my daughter Elizabeth was illegitimate and thus barred from her throne. I was taunted with the fact that I had done this, ruining the prospects of my own child. He said it over and over, Master Culhane did . . .”

Krenya said to the lawyer, “Is this in the visuals?”

“Yes.”

Krenya turned back to Anne. “But, Mistress Boleyn—these are things that, because of your time rescue, did not happen. Will not happen, in your time stream. How can they thus increase your anguish for relatives left behind?”

Anne stood. She took one step forward, then stopped. Her voice was low and passionate. “My good Lord—do you not understand? It is because you took me here that these things did not happen. Left to my own time, I would have been responsible for them all. For my brother’s death, for the other four brave men, for my daughter’s bastardization, for the torment in my own music . . . I have escaped them only because of you. To tell me them in such detail, not the mere provision of facts that I myself requested but agonizing detail of mind and heart—is to tell me that I alone, in my own character, am evil, giving pain to those I love most. And that in this time stream you have brought me to, I did these things, felt them, feel them still. You have made me guilty of them. My Lord Premier, have you ever been a Hostage yourself? Do you know, or can you imagine, the torment that comes from imagining the grief of those who love you? And to know you have caused this grief, not merely loss but death, blood, the pain of disinheritance—that you have caused it, and are now being told of the anguish you cause? Told over and over? In words, in song even—can you imagine what that feels like to one such as I, who cannot return at will and comfort those hurt by my actions?” The room was silent. Who, Lambert wondered, had told Anne Boleyn that Premier Krenya had once served as Holy Hostage?

“Forgive me, my Lords,” Anne said dully, “I forget myself.”

“Your testimony may take whatever form you choose,” Krenya said, and it seemed to Lambert that there were shades and depths in his voice.

The questioning continued. A Researcher, said Anne, had taunted her with being spied on even at her chamberpot—Lambert leaned slowly forward—which had made Anne cry out, “I had been better had you never told me!” Since then, modesty had made her reluctant to even answer nature, “so that there is every hour a most wretched twisting and churning in my bowels.”

Asked why she thought the Institute had chosen the wrong Hostage, Anne said she had been told so by my Lord Brill. The room exploded into sound, and Krenya rapped for quiet. “That visual now, please.” On a Square created in the center of the room, the visuals replayed on three sides:

“My Lord Brill . . . Was there no other person you could take but I to prevent this war you say is a hundred years off? This civil war in England?”

“The mathematics identified you as the best Hostage, Your Grace.”

“The best? Best for what, my Lord? If you had taken Henry himself, then he could not have issued the Act of Supremacy. His supposed death would have served the purpose as well as mine.”

“Yes. But for Henry VIII to disappear from history while his heir is but a month old . . . We did not know if that might not have started a civil war in itself. Between the factions supporting Elizabeth and those for Queen Catherine, who was still alive.”

“What did your mathematical learning tell you?”

“That it probably would not,” Brill said.

“And yet choosing me instead of Henry left him free to behead yet another wife, as you yourself have told me, my cousin Catherine Howard!”

Brill shifted on his chair. “That is true, Your Grace.”

“Then why not Henry instead of me?”

“Tm afraid Your Grace does not have sufficient grasp of the science of probabilities for me to explain, Your Grace.”

Anne was silent. Finally she said, “I think that the probability is that you would find it easier to deal with a deposed woman than with Henry of England, whom no man can withstand in either a passion or a temper.” Brill did not answer. The visual rolled—ten seconds, fifteen—and he did not answer.

“Mr. Premier,” Brill said in a choked voice, “Mr. Premier—”

“You will have time to address these issues soon, Mr. Director,” Krenya said. “Mistress Boleyn, this third charge—sexual abuse—”

The term had not existed in the sixteenth century, thought Lambert. Yet Anne understood it. She said, “I was frightened, my Lord, by the strangeness of this place. I was afraid for my life. I didn’t know then that a woman may refuse those in power, may—”

“That is why sexual contact with Hostages is universally forbidden,” Krenya said. “Tell us what you think happened.”

Not what did happen—what you think happened. Lambert took heart. Anne said, “Master Culhane bade me meet him at a place . . . it is a small alcove beside a short flight of stairs near the kitchens . . . He bade me meet him there at night. Frightened, I went.”

“Visuals,” Krenya said in a tight voice.

The virtual Square re-appeared. Anne, in the same white nightdress in which she had been taken Hostage, crept from her chamber, along the corridor, her body heat registering in infrared. Down the stairs, around to the kitchens, into the cubbyhole formed by the flight of steps, themselves oddly angled as if they had been added, or altered, after the main structure was built, after the monitoring system installed . . . Anne dropped to her knees and crept forward beside the isolated stairs. And disappeared.

Lambert gasped. A time Hostage was under constant surveillance, that was a basic condition of their permit, there was no way the Boleyn bitch could escape constant monitoring. But she had.

“Master Culhane was already there,” Anne said in a dull voice. “He . . . he used me ill there.”

The room was awash with sound. Krenya said over it, “Mistress Boleyn—there is no visual evidence that Master Culhane was there. He has sworn he was not. Can you offer any proof that he met you there? Anything at all?”

“Yes. Two arguments, my Lord. First: How would I know there were not spying devices in but this one hidden alcove? I did not design this castle; it is not mine.”

Krenya’s face showed nothing. “And the other argument?”

“I am pregnant with Master Culhane’s child.”

Pandemonium. Krenya rapped for order. When it was finally restored, he said to Brill, “Did you know of this?”

“No, I . . . it is a Hostage’s right by the Accord to refuse intrusive medical treatment. . . she has been healthy . . .”

“Mistress Boleyn, you will be examined by a doctor immediately.”

She nodded assent. Watching her, Lambert knew it was true. Anne Boleyn was pregnant, and had defeated herself thereby. But she did not know it yet.

Lambert fingered the knowledge, seeing it as a tangible thing, cold as steel.

“How do we know,” Krenya said, “that you were not pregnant before you were taken Hostage?”

“It was but a month after my daughter Elizabeth’s birth, and I had the white-leg. Ask one of your doctors if a woman would bed a man then. Ask a woman expert in the women of my time. Ask Lady Mary Lambert.”

Heads in the room turned; ask whom? Krenya said, “Ask whom?” An aide leaned toward him and whispered something. He said, “We will have her put on the witness list.”

Anne said, “I carry Michael Culhane’s child. I, who could not carry a prince for the king.”

Krenya said, almost powerlessly, “That last has nothing to do with this investigation, Mistress Boleyn.”

She only looked at him.

They called Brill to testify, and he threw up clouds of probability equations that did nothing to clarify the choice of Anne over Henry as Holy Hostage. Was the woman right? Had there been a staff meeting to choose between the candidates identified by the Rahvoli applications, and had someone said of two very close candidates, “We should think about the effect on the Institute as well as on history . . .” Had someone been developing a master theory based on a percentage of women influencing history? Had someone had an infatuation with the period, and chosen by that what should be altered? Lambert would never know. She was an intern.

Had been an intern.

Culhane was called. He denied seducing Anne Boleyn. The songs on the lute, the descriptions of her brother’s death, the bastardization of Elizabeth—all done to convince her that what she had been saved from was worse than where she had been saved to. Culhane felt so much that he made a poor witness, stumbling over his words, protesting too much.

Lambert was called. As neutrally as possible she said, “Yes, Mr. Premier, historical accounts show that Queen Anne was taken with white- leg after Elizabeth’s birth. It is a childbed illness. The legs swell up and ache painfully. It can last from a few weeks to months. We don’t know how long it lasted—would have lasted—for Mistress Boleyn.”

“And would a woman with this disease be inclined to sexual activity?”

“ ‘Inclined’—no.”

“Thank you, Researcher Lambert.”

Lambert returned to her seat. The committee next looked at visuals, hours of visuals—Culhane, flushed and tender, making a fool of himself with Anne. Anne with the little Tsarevich, an exile trying to comfort a child torn from his mother. Helen of Troy, mad and pathetic. Brill, telling newsgrids around the solar system that the time rescue program, savior of countless lives, was run strictly in conformance with the All-World Accord of 2154. And all the time, through all the visuals, Lambert waited for what was known to everyone in that room except Anne Boleyn: That she could not pull off in this century what she might have in Henry’s. That the paternity of a child could be genotyped in the womb.

Who? Mark Smeaton, after all? Another miscarriage from Henry, precipitately gotten and unrecorded by history? Thomas Wyatt, her most faithful cousin and cavalier?

After the committee had satisfied itself that it had heard enough, everyone but Forum delegates was dismissed. Anne, Lambert saw, was led away by a doctor. Lambert smiled to herself. It was already over. The Boleyn was defeated.

The All-World Forum investigative committee deliberated for less than a day. Then it issued a statement: The child carried by Holy Hostage Anne Boleyn had not been sired by Researcher Michael Culhane. Its genotypes matched no one’s at the Institute for Time Research. The Institute, however, was guilty of two counts of Hostage mistreatment. The Institute charter as an independent, tax-exempt organization was revoked. Toshio Brill was released from his position, as were Project Head Michael Culhane and intern Mary Lambert. The Institute stewardship was re-assigned to the Church of the Holy Hostage under the direct care of Her Holiness the High Priest.

Lambert slipped through the outside door to the walled garden. It was dusk. On a seat at the far end a figure sat, skirts spread wide, a darker shape against the dark wall. As Lambert approached, Anne looked up without surprise.

“Culhane’s gone. I leave tomorrow. Neither of us will ever work in time research again.”

Anne went on gazing upward. Those great dark eyes, that slim neck, so vulnerable. . . Lambert clasped her hands together hard.

“Why?” Lambert said. “Why do it all again? Last time use a King to bring down the power of the Church, this time use a Church to—before, at least you gained a crown. Why do it here, when you gain nothing?”

“You could have taken Henry. He deserved it; I did not.”

“But we didn’t take Henry!” Lambert shouted. “So why?”

Anne did not answer. She put out one hand to point behind her. Her sleeve fell away, and Lambert saw clearly the small sixth finger that had marked her as a witch. A tech came running across the half-lit garden. “Researcher Lambert—”

“What is it?”

“They want you inside. Everybody. The queen—the other one, Helen—she’s killed herself.”

The garden blurred, straightened. “How?”

“Stabbed with a silver sewing scissors hidden in her tunic. It was so quick, the researchers saw it on the monitor but couldn’t get there in time.”

“Tell them I’m coming.”

Lambert looked at Anne Boleyn. “You did this.”

Anne laughed. This lady, wrote the Tower Constable, hath much joy in death. Anne said, “Lady Mary—every birth is a sentence of death. Your age has forgotten that.”

“Helen didn’t need to die yet. And the Time Research Institute didn’t need to be dismantled—it will be dismantled. Completely. But somewhere, sometime, you will be punished for this. I’ll see to that!”

“Punished, Lady Mary? And mayhap beheaded?”

Lambert looked at Anne: the magnificent black eyes, the sixth finger, the slim neck. Lambert said slowly, “You want your own death. As you had it before.”

“What else did you leave me?” Anne Boleyn said. “Except the power to live the life that is mine?”

“You will never get it. We don’t kill, here!”

Anne smiled. “Then how will you ‘punish’ me—‘sometime, somehow’ ?” Lambert didn’t answer. She walked back across the walled garden, toward the looming walls gray in the dusk, towards the chamber where lay the other dead queen.

THE GALLERY OF HIS DREAMS

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Let him who wishes to know what war is look at this series of illustrations . . . It was so nearly like visiting the battlefield to look over these views, that all the emotions excited by the actual sight of the stained and sordid scene, strewed with rags and wrecks, came back to us, and we buried them in the recesses of our cabinet as we would have buried the mutilated remains of the dead they too vividly represented.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes

1838

Brady leaned against a hay bale and felt the blades dig into his back. He smelled of pig dung and his own sweat, and his muscles ached. His da had gone to the pump to wash up, and then into the cow shed, but Brady claimed he needed a rest. His da, never one to argue with relaxation, let him sit against the hay bales. Brady didn’t dare stay too long; if his ma saw him, she would be on the front porch, yelling insults unintelligible through her Irish brogue.

He did need to think, though. Milking cows and cleaning the pigpen didn’t give him enough time to make plans. He couldn’t stay on the farm the rest of his life, he knew that. He hated the work, the animals, the smell, and the long hours that all led to a poor, subsistence living. His da thought the farm a step up from the hovel he had grown up in and certainly an improvement from Brady’s grandfather’s life back in the Old Country. Brady often wished he could see what his da’s or his grandfather’s life had really been like.

But he had to trust their memories, memories that, at least in his grandfather’s case, had become more and more confusing as the years progressed.

Brady pulled a strand of hay from the bale, sending a burst of sharp fresh summer-scent around him. He wanted more than a ruined farm and a few livestock in upstate New York. Mr. Hanley, his teacher, had pulled Brady aside on the day he left school, and reminded him that in the United States of America even farmboys could become great men. Mr. Hanley used to start the school day by telling the boys that the late President Thomas Jefferson defined the nation’s creed when he wrote that all men were created equal, and President Andrew Jackson had proven the statement true with his election not ten years before.

Brady didn’t want to be president. He wanted to do something different, something he couldn’t even imagine now. He wanted to be great—and he wanted to be remembered.

1840

The spring thaw had turned the streets of New York city into rivers.

Brady laughed as he jumped from one sidewalk board to the next, then turned and waited for Page to jump. Page hesitated a moment, running a slender hand through his beard. Then he jumped and landed, one tattered shoe in the cold water, one out. Brady grabbed his friend’s arm, and pulled him up.

“Good Lord, William, how far away is this man’s home?”

“He’s not just any man,” Page said, shaking the water off his legs. “He’s a painter, and a damn fine one.”

Brady smiled. Page was a painter himself and had, a few months earlier, opened a studio below their joint apartment. Brady helped with the rent on the studio as a repayment for Page’s help in moving Brady from the farm. Being a clerk at A. T. Stewart’s largest store was an improvement over farm life—the same kind of improvement that Brady’s father had made. Only Brady wasn’t going to stop there. Page had promised to help by showing Brady how to paint. While Brady had an eye for composition, he lacked the firm hand, the easy grace of a portraitist. Page had been polite; he hadn’t said that Brady was hopeless. But they both knew that Mathew B. Brady would never make his living with a paintbrush in his hand.

Brady braced himself against a wooden building as he stepped over a submerged portion of sidewalk.

“You haven’t said what this surprise is.”

“I don’t know what the surprise is. Samuel simply said that he had learned about it in France and that we would be astonished.” Page slipped into a thin alley between buildings and then pulled open a door.

Brady followed, and found himself staring up a dark flight of stairs. Page was already halfway up, his wet shoe squeaking with each step. Brady gripped the railing and took the stairs two at a time.

Page opened the door, sending light across the stairs. Brady reached the landing just as Page bellowed, “Samuel!” Brady peered inside, nearly choking on the scent of linseed and turpentine.

Large windows graced the walls, casting dusty sunlight on a room filled with canvases. Dropcloths covered most of the canvases and some of the furniture scattered about. A desk, overflowing with papers, stood under one window. Near that a large wooden box dwarfed a rickety table. A stoop-shouldered long-haired man braced the table with one booted foot.

“Over here, Page, over here. Don’t dawdle. Help me move this thing. The damn table is about to collapse.”

Page scurried across the room, bent down and grabbed an edge of the box. The man picked up the other side and led the way to his desk. He balanced the box with one hand and his knee while his other hand swept the desk clean. They set the box down and immediately the man pulled out a handkerchief and wiped away the sweat that had dripped into his bushy eyebrows.

“I meant to show you in a less dramatic fashion,” he said, then looked up. Brady whipped his hat off his head and held it with both hands. The man had sharp eyes, eyes that could see right through a person, clear down to his dreams.

“Well?” the man said.

Brady nodded. He wouldn’t be stared down. “I’m Mathew B. Brady, sir.”

“Samuel F. B. Morse.” Morse tucked his handkerchief back into his pocket and clasped his hands behind his back. “You must be the boy Page has been telling me about. He assumes you have some sort of latent talent.”

Brady glanced at Page. Page blushed, the color seeping through the patches of skin still visible through his beard.

“Hmmm,” Morse said as he stalked forward. He paced around Brady, studied him for a moment.

“You’re what, eighteen?”

“Almost, sir.”

“If you had talent, you’d know it by now.” Morse shook his head. His suit smelled faintly of mothballs.

“No, no. You’re one of the lucky ones, blessed with drive. A man with talent merely has a head start. A man with drive succeeds.”

Morse stalked back to his desk, stepping on the papers that littered the floor. “Drive but no talent. I have the perfect machine for you.” He put his hand on the box. “Ever hear of Louis Daguerre? No, of course not. What would a farmboy know of the latest scientific discoveries?”

Brady started, then shot another look at Page. Perhaps Page had said something about Brady’s background. Page ignored him and had come closer to Morse.

“Daguerre found a way to preserve the world in one image. Look.” He handed Page a small metal plate.

As Page tilted it toward the light, Brady saw the Unitarian Church he walked past almost every day.

“This is a daguerreotype,” Morse said. “I made this one through the window of the third floor staircase at New York University.”

“That is the right view.” Page’s voice held awe. “You used no paints.”

“I used this,” Morse said, his hand pounding on the box’s top. “It has a lens here—” and he pointed at the back end from which a glass-topped cylinder protruded “—and a place here for the plates. The plates are silver on copper which I treat with iodine and expose to light through the lens. Then I put the plate in another box containing heated mercury and when I’m done—an image! An exact reproduction of the world in black and white.”

Brady touched the cool edge of the plate. “It preserves memories,” he said, thinking that if such a device had existed before, he could have seen his father’s hovel, his grandfather’s home.

“It does more than that, son,” Morse said. “This is our future. It will destroy portrait painting. Soon everything will be images on metal, keepsakes for generations to come.”

Page pulled back at the remark about portrait painting. He went to the window, looked at the street below. “I suppose that’s why you brought us up here. To show me that I’ll be out of work soon?”

“No, lad.” Morse laughed and the sound boomed and echoed off the canvas-covered walls. “I want to save you, not destroy you. I’m opening a school to teach this new process and I invite you to join. Fifty dollars tuition for the entire semester and I promise you’ll be a better portraitist when you’re done than you are now.”

Page gave Morse a sideways look. Page’s back was rigid and his hands were clenched in trembling fists.

Brady could almost feel his friend’s rage. “I paint.” Page spoke with a slow deliberation. “I have no need for what will clearly become a poor man’s art.”

Morse did not seem offended by Page’s remark. “And you, young Brady. Will you use your drive to acquire a talent?”

Brady stared at the plate and mysterious box. Fifty dollars was a lot of money, but he already had twenty set aside for a trip home. Page did say he had an eye for composition. And if a man with an eye for composition, a lot of drive and a little talent took Daguerre’s Box all over the world, he would be able to send his memories back to the people left behind.

Brady smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I’ll take your class.”

He would postpone the trip to see his parents, and raise the rest of the money somehow. Page whirled away from the window as if Brady had betrayed him. But Brady didn’t care. When they got home, he would explain it all. And it was so simple. He had another improvement to make.

1840

That night, Brady dreamed. He stood in a large cool room, darkened and hidden in shadows. He bumped into a wall and found himself touching a ribbed column—a Doric column, he believed. He took cautious steps forward, stumbled, then caught himself on a piece of painted wood. His hands slid up the rough edges until he realized he was standing beside a single-horse carriage. He felt his way around to the back. The carriage box had no windows, but the back stood wide open. He climbed inside. The faint rotten-egg smell of sulphur rose. He bumped against a box and glass rattled. A wagon filled with equipment. He climbed out, feeling like he was snooping. There was more light now. He saw a wall ahead of him, covered with portraits.

The darkness made the portraits difficult to see, but he thought he recognized the light and shadow work of a Daguerre portrait and yet—and yet—something differed, distorted, perhaps, by the dream. And he knew he was in a dream. The cool air was too dry, the walls made of a foreign substance, the lights (what he could see of them), glass-encased boxes on the ceiling. The portraits were of ghastly things: dead men and stark fields, row after row of demolished buildings. On several, someone had lettered his last name in flowing white script.

“They will make you great,” said a voice behind him. He turned, and saw a woman. At least he thought it was a woman. Her hair was cropped above her ears, and she wore trousers.

“Who will make me great?” he asked.

“The pictures,” she said. “People will remember them for generations.” He took a step closer to her, but she smiled and touched his palm. The shadows turned black and the dream faded into a gentle, restful sleep.

1849

Brady leaned against the hand-carved wooden railing. The candles on the large chandelier burned steady, while the candelabras flickered in the breezes left by the dancing couples. A pianist, a violinist and a cello player—all, Mr. Handy had assured him, very well respected—played the newest European dance, the waltz, from one corner of the huge ballroom. Mothers cornered their daughters along the wall, approving dance cards, and shaking fans at impertinent young males. The staircase opened into the ballroom, and Brady didn’t want to cross the threshold. He had never been to a dance like this before. His only experiences dancing had been at gatherings Page had taken him to when he first arrived in New York.

He knew none of the girls, except Samuel Handy’s daughter Juliet, and she was far too pretty for Brady to approach.

So he watched her glide across the floor with young man after young man, her hooped skirts swaying, her brown hair in ringlets, her eyes sparkling, and her cheeks flushed. Handy had told him that at the age of four, she had been presented to President Jackson. She had been so beautiful, Handy said, that Jackson had wanted to adopt her. Brady was glad he hadn’t seen her as a child, glad he had seen the mature beauty. When he finished taking the portraits of her father, he would ask if he could take one of her. The wet-plate process would let him make copies, and he would keep one in his own rooms, just so that he could show his friends how very lovely she was.

The waltz ended, and Juliet curtsied to her partner, then left the floor. Her dance card swung from her wrist and the diamonds around her neck caught the candlelight. Too late, Brady realized she was coming to see him.

“I have one spot left on my dance card,” she said as she stopped in front of him. She smelled faintly of lilacs, and he knew he would have to keep a sprig near her portrait every spring. “And I was waiting for you to fill it.

Brady blushed. “I barely know you, Miss Juliet.”

She batted his wrist lightly with her fan. “Julia,” she said. “And I know you better than half the boys here.

You have spent three days in my daddy’s house, Mr. Brady, and your conversation at dinner has been most entertaining. I was afraid that I bored you.”

“No, no,” he said. The words sounded so formal. How could he joke with his female clients and let this slip of a girl intimidate him? “I would love to take that slot on your dance card, Miss Juliet.”

“Julia,” she said again. “I hate being named after a stupid little minx who died for nothing. I think when a woman loves, it is her duty to love intelligently, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Brady said, although he had no idea what she was talking about. “And I’m Mathew.”

“Wonderful, Mathew.” Her smile added a single dimple to her left cheek. She extended her card to him and he penciled his name in for the next dance, filling the bottom of the first page. The music started—another waltz—and she took his hand. He followed her onto the floor, placed one hand on her cinched waist, and held the other lightly in his own. They circled around the floor, the tip of her skirt brushing against his pants leg. She didn’t smile at him. Instead her eyes were very serious and her lips were pursed and full.

“You don’t do this very often, do you, Mathew?”

“No,” he said. In fact, he felt as if he were part of a dream—the musicians, the beautifully garbed women, the house servants blending into the wallpaper. Everything at the Handy plantation had an air of almost too much sensual pleasure. “I work, probably too much.”

“I have seen what you do, Mathew, and I think it is a wondrous magic.” A slight flush crept into her cheeks, whether from the exertion or her words, Brady couldn’t tell. She lowered her voice. “I dreamed about you last night. I dreamed I was in a beautiful large gallery with light clearer than sunlight, and hundreds of people milled about, looking at your portraits on the wall. They all talked about you, how marvelous your work was, and how it influenced them. You’re a great man, Mathew, and I am flattered at the interest you have shown in me.”

The music stopped and she slipped from his arms, stopping to chat with another guest as she wandered toward the punch table. Brady stood completely still, his heart pounding against his chest. She had been to the gallery of his dreams. She knew about his future. The musicians began another piece, and Brady realized how foolish he must look, standing in the center of the dance floor. He dodged whirling couples and made his way to the punch table, hoping that he could be persuasive enough to convince Julia Handy to let him replace all those other names on the remaining half of her dance card.

1861

He woke up with the idea, his body sweat-covered and shimmering with nervous energy. If he brought a wagon with him, it would work: a wagon like the one he had dreamed about the night he had met Morse.

Brady moved away from his sleeping wife and stepped onto the bare hardwood. The floor creaked. He glanced at Julia, but she didn’t awaken. The bedroom was hot; Washington in July had a muggy air. If the rumors were to be believed the first battle would occur in a matter of days. He had so little time. He had thought he would never come up with a way to record the war.

He had started recording history with his book, The Gallery of Illustrious Americans. He had hoped to continue by taking portraits of the impending war, but he hadn’t been able to figure out how. The wet plates had to be developed right after the portrait had been taken. He needed a way to take the equipment with him. The answer was so simple, he was amazed he had to dream it.

But that dream had haunted him for years now. And when he had learned the wet-plate process, discovered that the rotten-egg smell of sulphur was part of it, the dream had come back to him as vividly as an old memory. That had been years ago. Now, with the coming war, he found himself thinking of the portraits of demolished buildings, and the woman’s voice, telling him he would be great.

He would have to set up a special war fund. The president had given him a pass to make portraits of the army on the field, but had stressed that Brady would have to use his own funds. As Lincoln told Brady with only a hint of humor, the country was taking enough gambles already.

Small price, Brady figured, to record history. He was, after all, a wealthy man.

1861

Julia had hoped to join the picnickers who sat on the hills overlooking the battlefield, but Brady was glad he had talked her out of it. He pulled the wet plate out of his camera, and placed the plate into the box.

The portrait would be of smoke and tiny men clashing below him. He glanced at the farmhouse, and the army that surrounded it. They seemed uneasy, as if this battle wasn’t what they expected. It wasn’t what he had expected, either. The confusion, the smoke, even the heat made sense. The screaming did not.

Brady put the plate in its box, then set the box in his wagon. Before the day was out, he would return to Washington, set the plates and send portraits to the illustrated magazines. The wagon was working out better than he expected. The illustrations would probably earn him yet another award.

The cries seemed to grow louder, and above them, he heard a faint rumbling. He checked the sky for clouds and saw nothing. The smoke gave the air an acrid tinge and made the heat seem even hotter. A bead of sweat ran down the side of his face. He grabbed the camera and lugged it back to the wagon, then returned for the tripod. He was proud of himself; he had expected to be afraid and yet his hands were as steady as they had been inside his studio.

He closed up the back of the wagon, waved his assistant, Tim O’Sullivan, onto the wagon, and climbed aboard. O’Sullivan sat beside him and clucked the horse onto Bull Run road. The army’s advance had left ruts so deep that the wagon tilted at an odd angle. The rumble was growing louder. Overhead, something whistled and then a cannonball landed off to one side, spraying dirt and muck over the two men. The horse shrieked and reared; Brady felt the reins cut through his fingers. The wagon rocked, nearly tipped, then righted itself. Brady turned, and saw a dust cloud rising behind him. A mass of people was running toward him.

“Lord a mercy,” he whispered, and thrust the reins at O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan looked at them as if he had never driven the wagon before. “I’m going to get the equipment. Be ready to move on my signal.”

O’Sullivan brought the horse to a stop and Brady leapt off the side. He ran to the back, opened the door, grabbed his camera, and set up just in time to take portraits of soldiers running past. Both sides—Union and Confederate—wore blue, and Brady couldn’t tell which troops were scurrying past him. He could smell the fear, the human sweat, see the strain in the men’s eyes. His heart had moved to his throat, and he had to concentrate to shove a wet plate into the camera. He uncapped the lens, hoping that the scene wouldn’t change too much, that in his precious three seconds, he would capture more than a blur.

Mixed with the soldiers were women, children, and well-dressed men—some still clutching picnic baskets, others barely holding their hats. All ran by. A few loose horses galloped near Brady; he had to hold the tripod steady. He took portrait after portrait, seeing faces he recognized—like that silly newspaper correspondent Russell, the man who had spread the word about Brady’s poor eyesight—mouths agape, eyes wide in panic. As Brady worked, the sounds blended into each other. He couldn’t tell the human screams from the animal shrieks and the whistle of mortar. Bullets whizzed passed, and more than one lodged in the wagon. The wagon kept lurching, and Brady knew that O’Sullivan was having trouble holding the horse.

Suddenly the wagon rattled away from him. Brady turned, knocked over the tripod himself, and watched in horror as people trampled his precious equipment. He started to get down, to save the camera, then realized that in their panic, the people would run over him. He grabbed what plates he could, shoved them into the pocket of his great coat, and joined the throng, running after the wagon, shouting at O’Sullivan to stop.

But the wagon didn’t stop. It kept going around the winding, twisting corners of the road, until it disappeared in the dust cloud. Another cannon ball landed beside the road and Brady cringed as dirt spattered him. A woman screamed and fell forward, blood blossoming on her back. He turned to help her, but the crowd pushed him forward. He couldn’t stop even if he wanted to.

This was not romantic; it was not the least bit pretty. It had cost him hundreds of dollars in equipment and might cost him his life if he didn’t escape soon. This was what the history books had never told him about war, had never explained about the absolute mess, the dirt and the blood. Behind him, he heard screaming, someone shouting that the black cavalry approached, the dreaded black cavalry of the Confederacy, worse than the four horses of the apocalypse, if the illustrated newspapers were to be believed, and Brady ran all the harder. His feet slipped in the ruts in the road and he nearly tripped, but he saw other people down, other people trampled, and he knew he couldn’t fall.

He rounded a corner, and there it was, the wagon, on its side, the boxes spilling out, the plates littering the dirt road. O’Sullivan was on his hands and knees, trying to clean up, his body shielded only because the carriage wall made the fleeing people reroute.

Brady hurried over the carriage side, ignoring the split wood, the bullet holes and the fact that the horse was missing. Tears were running down the side of O’Sullivan’s face, but the man seemed oblivious to them. Brady grabbed O’Sullivan’s arm, and pulled him up. “Come on, Tim,” he said. “Black cavalry on the hills. We’ve got to get away.”

“The plates—” O’Sullivan said.

“Forget the plates. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“The horse spooked and broke free. I think someone stole her, Mat.”

O’Sullivan was shouting, but Brady could barely hear him. His lungs were choked and he thought he was going to drown in dust. “We have to go,” he said.

He yanked O’Sullivan forward, and they rejoined the crowd. They ran until Brady could run no longer; his lungs burned and his side ached. Bullets continued to penetrate, and Brady saw too many men in uniform motionless on the side of the road.

“The crowd itself is a target,” he said, not realizing he had spoken aloud. He tightened his grip on O’Sullivan’s arm and led him off the road into the thin trees. They trudged straight ahead, Brady keeping the setting sun to his left, and soon the noises of battle disappeared behind them. They stopped and Brady leaned against a thick oak to catch his breath. The sun had gone down and it was getting cool.

“What now?” O’Sullivan asked.

“If we don’t meet any rebs, we’re safe,” Brady said. He took off his hat, wiped the sweat off his brow with his sleeve, and put his hat back on. Julia would have been very angry with him if he had lost that hat.

“But how do we get back?” O’Sullivan asked.

An image of the smashed equipment rose in Brady’s mind along with the broken, overturned horseless wagon. “We walk, Tim.” Brady sighed. “We walk.”

1861

Julia watched as he stocked up the new wagon. She said nothing as he lugged equipment inside, new equipment he had purchased from Anthony’s supply house on extended credit. He didn’t want to hurt his own business by taking away needed revenue, and the Anthonys were willing to help—especially after they had seen the quality of his war work for the illustrated newspapers.

“I can’t come with you, can I?” she asked as he tossed a bedroll into the back.

“I’m sorry,” Brady said, remembering the woman scream and fall beside him, blood blossoming on her back. His Julia wouldn’t die that way. She would die in her own bed, in the luxury and comfort she was used to. He took her hands. “I don’t want to be apart from you, but I don’t know any other way.”

She stroked his face. “We have to remember—” she said. The tears that lined the rims of her eyes didn’t touch her voice. “—that this is the work that will make you great.”

“You have already made me great,” he said, and kissed her one final time.

1863

Brady pushed his blue-tinted glasses up on his nose and wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his hand. The Pennsylvania sun beat on his long black waistcoat, baking his clothes against his skin. The corpse, only a few hours dead, was already gaseous and bloated, straining its frayed Union uniform. The too-florid smell of death ripened the air. If it weren’t for the bodies, human and equine, the farmer’s land would seem peaceful, not the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

Brady tilted the corpse’s head back. Underneath the gray mottled skin, a young boy’s features had frozen in agony. Brady didn’t have to alter the expression: he never did. The horror was always real. He set the repeating rifle lengthwise across the corpse, and stood up. A jagged row of posed corpses stretched before him. O’Sullivan had positioned the wagon toward the side of the field and was struggling with the tripod. Brady hurried to help his assistant, worried, always worried about destroying more equipment.

They had lost so much trying to photograph the war. He should have known from the first battle how difficult this would be. He had sold nearly everything, asked Julia to give up even the simplest comforts, borrowed against his name from the Anthonys for equipment to record this. History. His country’s folly and its glory. And the great, terrible waste of lives. He glanced back at the dead faces, wondered how many people would mourn.

“I think we should put it near the tree.” O’Sullivan lugged the top half of the tripod at an angle away from the corpse row. “The light is good—the shade is on the other side. Mathew?”

“No.” Brady backed up a few steps. “Here. See the angle? The bodies look random now, but you can see the faces.”

He squinted, wishing he could see the faces better. His eyesight had been growing worse; in 1851 it had been so bad that the press thought he would be blind in a decade. Twelve years had passed and he wasn’t blind yet. But he wasn’t far from it.

O’Sullivan arranged the black curtain, then Brady swept his assistant aside. “Let me,” he said.

He climbed under the curtain. The heat was thicker; the familiar scent of chemicals cleared the death from his nose. He peered through the lens. The image was as he had expected it to be, clear, concise, well composed. The light filtered through, reflected oddly through the blue tint on his glasses, and started a sharp ache in his skull. He pulled out, into the sun. “Adjust as you need to. But I think we have the image.”

Brady turned away from the field as O’Sullivan prepared the wet plate and then shoved it into the camera. Sweat trickled down the back of Brady’s neck into his woolen coat. He was tired, so tired, and the war had already lasted two years longer than anyone expected. He didn’t know how many times he had looked on the faces of the dead, posed them for the camera the way he had posed princes and presidents a few years before. If he had stayed in New York, like the Anthonys, everything would have been different. He could have spent his nights with Julia . . .

“Got it,” O’Sullivan said. He held the plate gingerly, his face flushed with the heat.

“You develop it,” Brady said. “I want to stay here for few minutes.”

O’Sullivan frowned; Brady usually supervised every step of the battle images. But Brady didn’t explain his unusual behavior. O’Sullivan said nothing. He clutched the plates and went in the back of the black-covered wagon. The wagon rocked ever so gently as he settled in.

Brady waited until the wagon stopped rocking, then clasped his hands behind his back and walked through the trampled, blood-spattered grass. The aftermath of battle made him restless: the dead bodies, the ruined earth, the shattered wagons. Battles terrified him, made him want to run screaming from the scene. He often clutched his equipment around him like a talisman—if he worked, if he didn’t think about it, he would stave off the fear until the shooting stopped. He tripped over an abandoned canteen. He crouched, saw the bullet hole in its side.

“You stay, even though it appalls you.”

The woman’s voice startled him so badly he nearly screamed. He backed up as he stood, and found himself facing a thin, short-haired woman wearing pants, a short-sleeved shirt and (obviously) no undergarments. She looked familiar.

“That takes courage.” She smiled. Her teeth were even and white.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. His voice shook and he clenched his fists to hide his shaking. “Are you looking for someone in particular? I can take you to the General.”

“I’m looking for you. You’re the man they call Brady of Broadway?”

He nodded.

“The man who sells everything, bargains his studio to photograph a war?”

Her comment was too close to his own thoughts—and too personal. He felt a flush rise that had nothing to do with the heat. “What do you want?”

“I want you to work for me, Mathew Brady. I will pay for your equipment, take care of your travel, if you shoot pictures for me when and where I say.”

She frightened him, a crazy woman standing in a field of dead men. “I run my own business,” he said.

She nodded, the smile fading just a little. “And it will bankrupt you. You will die forgotten, your work hidden in crates in government warehouses. That’s not why you do this, is it, Mr. Brady.”

“I do this so that people can see what really happens here, so that people can travel through my memories to see this place,” he said. The ache in his head grew sharper. This woman had no right to taunt him. “I do this for history.”

“And it’s history that calls you, Mr. Brady. The question is, will you serve?”

“I already serve,” he snapped—and found himself speaking to air. Heat shimmered in front of him, distorting his view of the field for a moment. Then the tall grass and the broken picket fence returned, corpses hovering at the edge of his vision like bales of hay.

He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. The strain was making him hallucinate. He had been too long in the sun. He would go back to the wagon, get a drink of water, lie in the shade. Then, perhaps, the memory of the hallucination would go away.

But her words haunted him as he retraced his steps: I will pay for your equipment, take care of your travel. If only someone would do that. He had spent the entire sum of his fortune and still saw no end ahead. She hadn’t been a hallucination, she had been a dream. A wish for a different, easier life that no one would ever fulfill.

1865

The day after Appomattox—the end of the war, Brady dreamed:

He walked the halls of a well-lit place he had never seen before. His footsteps echoed on the shiny floor covering. Walls, made of a smooth material that was not wood or stone, smelled of paint and emollients.

Ceiling boxes encased the lamps—and the light did not flicker but flowed cleaner than gaslight. Most of the doors lining the hallway were closed, but one stood open. A sign that shone with a light of its own read:

MATHEW B. BRADY EXHIBIT

OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER:

UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR

(1861-1865)

Inside, he found a spacious room twice the size of any room he had ever seen, with skylights in the ceiling and Doric columns creating a hollow in the center. A camera, set up on its tripod, had its black curtain thrown half back, as if waiting for him to step inside. Next to it stood his wagon, looking out of place and ancient without its horse. The wagon’s back door also stood open, and Brady saw the wooden boxes of plates inside, placed neatly, so that a path led to the darkroom. The darkroom looked odd: no one had picked up the sleeping pallets, and yet the chemical baths sat out, ready for use. He would never have left the wagon that way. He shook his head, and turned toward the rest of the room.

Three of the long, wide walls were bare. On the fourth, framed pictures crowded together. He walked to them, saw that they were his portraits, his work from Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg. He even saw a picture of General Lee in his confederate gray. Beneath the portrait, the attribution read By Brady (or assistant), but Brady had never taken such a portrait, never developed one, never posed one. A chill ran up his back when he realized he hadn’t squinted to read the print. He reached up, touched the bridge of his nose. His glasses were gone. He hadn’t gone without glasses since he had been a boy. In the mornings, he had to grab his glasses off the nightstand first, then get out of bed.

His entire wartime collection (with huge gaps) framed, on exhibit. Four thousand portraits, displayed for the world to see, just as he had hoped. He reached out to the Lee portrait. As his finger brushed the smooth wood—

—he found himself beneath the large tree next to the Appomattox farmhouse where the day before Lee and Grant had signed the peace treaty. The farmhouse was a big white blur against the blue of the April sky. He grabbed his glasses (somehow they had fallen to his lap) and hooked the frames around his ears.

The world came into sharper focus, the blue tint easing the glare of the sun. He knew what he had to do.

Even though he had arrived too late to photograph the historic signing of the treaty, he could still photograph General Lee one last time in his uniform.

Brady got up and brushed the grass off his pants. His wagon stood beside the farmhouse. The wagon looked proper—dust-covered, mud-spattered, with a few splintered boards and a cock-eyed wheel that he would have to fix very soon—not clean and neat as it had in his dream. The horse, tied to another tree, looked tired, but he would push her with him to Richmond, to General Lee, to complete the exhibit.

Three empty walls, he thought as he went to find his assistant. He wondered why his earlier portraits weren’t mounted there. Perhaps the wall’s awaiting something else. Something better.

1866

Brady held his nephew Levin’s shoulders and propelled him toward the door. The ticket taker at the desk in the lobby of the New York Historical Society waved them past.

“How many today, John?” Brady asked.

“We had a few paying customers yesterday,” the large man said, “but they all left after looking at the first wall.”

Brady nodded. The society had said they would close the exhibit of his war portraits if attendance didn’t go up. But despite the free publicity in the illustrated newspapers and the positive critical response, the public was not attending.

Levin had already gone inside. He stood, hands behind his back, and stared at the portraits of destruction he had been too young to remember. Brady had brought Levin to the exhibit to discourage the boy and make him return to school. He had arrived a few days before, declaring that he wanted to be a photographer like his Uncle Mat. Brady had said twelve was too young to start learning the trade, but Julia had promised Levin a place to stay if no one demanded that he return to school. So far, no one had.

Brady went inside too. The lighting was poor, and the portraits were scattered on several small walls. No Doric columns, no wide empty spaces. This was a cramped showing, like so many others he had had, but it shared the emptiness of the gallery in his dreams.

He stared at the portraits, knowing them by heart. They ran in order, from the first glorious parade down Pennsylvania Avenue—taken from his Washington studio—to the last portrait of Lee after Appomattox.

Each portrait took him back to the sights and sounds of the moment: the excitement of the parade, the disgust at the carnage, the hopelessness in Lee’s eyes. It was here: the recent past, recorded as faithfully as a human being could. One of his reviewers had said that Brady had captured time and held it prisoner in his little glass plates. He certainly did in his mind. Sometimes all it took was a smell—decaying garbage, horse sweat—and he was back on the battlefield, fighting to live while he took his portraits.

From outside the door, he heard the murmur of voices. He turned in time to see John talking to a woman in widow’s weeds. John pointed at Brady. Brady smiled and nodded, knowing he was being identified as the artist behind the exhibit.

The woman pushed open the glass doors and stood in front of Brady. She was slight and older than he expected—in her forties or fifties—with deep lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth.

“I’ve come to plead with you, Mr. Brady,” she said. Her voice was soft. “I want you to take these portraits away. Over there, you have an image of my husband’s body, and in the next room, I saw my son. They’re dead, Mr. Brady, and I buried them. I want to think about how they lived, not how they died.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Brady said. He didn’t turn to see which portraits she had indicated. “I didn’t mean to offend you. These portraits show what war really is, and I think it’s something we need to remember lest we try it again.”

Levin had stopped his movement through the gallery. He hadn’t turned toward the conversation, but Brady could tell the boy was listening from the cocked position of his head.

“We’ll remember, Mr. Brady,” the woman said. She smoothed her black skirt. “My whole family has no choice.” She turned her back and walked out, her steps firm and proud. The street door closed sharply behind her. John got up from his chair.

“You’ve gotten this before,” Brady said.

“Every day,” John said. “People want to move forward, Mathew. They don’t need more reminders of the past.”

Brady glanced at his nephew. Levin had moved into one of the back rooms. “Once Levin is done looking at the exhibit, I’ll help you remove it,” Brady said. “No sense hurting your business to help mine.”

He sighed and glanced around the room. Four years of work. Injured associates, ruined equipment, lost wealth and a damaged business. He had expected acclaim, at least, if not a measure of additional fame.

One of his mother’s aphorisms rose in his mind: a comment she used to make when he would come inside, covered with dirt and dung. “How the mighty hath fallen,” she’d say. She had never appreciated his dreams nor had she lived long enough to see them come true. Now her shade stood beside him, as clearly as she had stood on the porch so many years ago, and he could hear the “I-told-you-so” in her voice.

He shook the apparition away. What his mother had never realized was that the mighty had farther to fall.

1871

That morning, he put on his finest coat, his best hat, and he kissed Julia with a passion he hadn’t shown in years. She smiled at him, her eyes filled with tears, as she held the door open for him. He stepped into the hallway, and heard the latch snick shut behind him. Nothing looked different: the gas lamps had soot marks around the base of the chimneys; the flowered wallpaper peeled in one corner; the stairs creaked as he stepped on them, heading down to the first floor and the street. Only he felt different: the shuddery bubble in his stomach, the tension in his back, the lightheadedness threatening the sureness of his movements.

He stopped on the first landing and took a breath of the musty hotel air. He wondered what they would think of him now, all the great men he had known. They came back to him, like battlefield ghosts haunting a general. Samuel Morse, his large dark eyes snapping, his gnarled hands holding the daguerreotypes, his voice echoing in the room, teaching Brady that photography would cause a revolution—a revolution, boy!—and he had to ride the crest.

“I did,” Brady whispered. His New York studio, so impressive in the 1850s, had a portrait of Morse hanging near the door for luck. Abraham Lincoln had gazed at that portrait. So had his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Presidents, princes, actors, assassins had all passed through Brady’s door. And he, in his arrogance, had thought his work art, not commerce. Art and history demanded his presence at the first Battle of Bull Run. Commerce had demanded he stay home, take carte de visites, imperials and portraits of soldiers going off to war, of families about to be destroyed, of politicians, great and small.

No. He had left his assistants to do that, while he spent their earnings, his fortune and his future chasing a dream.

And this morning, he would pay for that dream.

So simple, his attorney told him. He would sign his name to a paper, declare bankruptcy, and the government would apportion his assets to his remaining creditors. He could still practice his craft, still attempt to repay his debts, still live, if someone wanted to call that living.

He adjusted his jacket one final time and stepped into the hotel’s lobby. The desk clerk called out his customary good morning, and Brady nodded. He would show no shame, no anger. The doorman opened the door and cool, manure-tinged air tickled Brady’s nostrils. He took a deep breath and walked into the bustle of the morning: Mathew Brady, photographer. A man who had joked with Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan. A man who had raised a camera against bullets, who had held more dead and dying than half the physicians on the battlefield. Brady pushed forward, touching the brim of his hat each time he passed a woman, nodding at the gentlemen as if the day were the best in his life. Almost everyone had seen his work, in the illustrated papers, in the exhibits, in the halls of Congress itself. He had probably photographed the sons of most of the people who walked these streets.

Dead faces, turned toward the sun.

The thought sobered him. These people had lost husbands, fathers, children. Losses greater than his. And they had survived, somehow. Somehow.

He held the thought as he made his way through the morning, listening to the attorney mumble, the government officials drone on, parceling out his possessions like clothing at an orphan’s charity. The thought carried him out the door, and back onto the street before the anger burst through the numbness:

The portraits were his children. He and Julia had none—and he had nothing else. Nothing else at all.

“Now, are you ready to work with me?”

The female voice was familiar enough that he knew who he would see before he looked up: the crazy woman who haunted him, who wanted him to give everything he could to history.

As if he hadn’t given enough.

She stood before him, the winter sunlight backlighting her, and hiding her features in shadow. The Washington crowd walked around her, unseeing, as if she were no more than a post blocking the path.

“And what do I get if I help you?” he asked, his voice sounding harsher than he had ever heard it.

“Notice. Acclaim. Pictures on walls instead of buried in warehouses. The chance to make a very real difference.”

He glanced back at the dark wooden door, at the moving figures faint in the window, people who had buried his art, given it to the Anthonys, separated it and segregated it and declared it worthless. His children, as dead as the ones he had photographed.

“And you’ll pay my way?” he asked.

“I will provide your equipment and handle your travel, if you take photographs for me when and where I say.”

“Done,” he said, extending a hand to seal the bargain, thinking a crazy, mannish woman like this one would close a deal like a gentleman. She took his hand, her palm soft, unused to work, and as she shook, the world whirled. Colors and pain and dust bombarded him. Smells he would briefly catch and by the time he identified them disappeared. His head ached, his eyes throbbed, his body felt as if it were being torn in fifteen different directions. And when they stopped, he was in a world of blackness, where hot rain fell like fire from the sky.

“I need you to photograph this,” she said, and then she disappeared. In her place, his wagon stood, the only friend in a place of strangeness. The air smelled of burning buildings, of sticky wet, of decay. Death.

He recognized it from the battlefields years ago. The horizon was black, dotted with orange flame. The trees rose stunted against the oppression. People—Orientals, he realized with some amazement—ran by him, their strange clothing ripped and torn, their faces burned, peeling, shining with the strange heat. They made no sound as they moved: all he heard was the rain slapping against the road.

He grabbed an old man, stopped him, felt the soft, decaying flesh dissolve between his fingers. “What is this place?” he asked.

The old man reached out a trembling hand, touched Brady’s round eyes, his white skin. “Amelican—” the old man took a deep breath and exhaled into a wail that became a scream. He wrenched his arm from Brady’s grasp, and started to run. The people around him screamed too, and ran, as if they were fleeing an unseen enemy. Brady grabbed his wagon, rocking with the force of the panicked crowd, and hurried to the far side.

People lay across the grass like corpses on the battlefield. Only these corpses moved. A naked woman swayed in the middle of the ground, her body covered with burns except for large flower-shaped patches all over her torso. And beside him lay three people, their faces melted away, their eyes bubbling holes in their smooth, shiny faces.

“What is this?” he cried out again.

But the woman who had brought him here was gone.

One of the faceless people grabbed his leg. He shook the hand away, trembling with the horror. The rich smell of decay made him want to gag.

He had been in this situation before—in the panic, among the decay, in the death—and he had found only one solution.

He reached inside his wagon and pulled out the camera. This time, though, he didn’t scout for artistic composition. He turned the lens on the field of corpses, more horrifying than anything he’d seen under the Pennsylvania sun, and took portrait after portrait after portrait, building an artificial wall of light and shadow between himself and the black rain, the foul stench, and the silent, grasping hands of hundreds of dying people.

1871

And hours—or was it days?—later, after he could no longer move the tripod alone, no longer hold a plate between his fingers, after she appeared and took his wet plates and his equipment and his wagon, after he had given water to more people than he could count, and tore his suit and felt the sooty rain drops dig into his skin, after all that, he found himself standing on the same street in Washington, under the same sunlit winter sky. A woman he had never seen before peered at him with concern on her wrinkled face and asked, “Are you all right, sir?”

“I’m fine,” he said and felt the lightheadedness that had threatened all morning take him to his knees on the wooden sidewalk. People surrounded him and someone called him by name. They took his arms and half carried him to the hotel. He dimly realized that they got him up the stairs—the scent of lilacs announcing Julia’s presence—and onto the bed. Julia’s cool hand rested against his forehead and her voice, murmuring something soothing, washed over him like a blessing. He closed his eyes.

And dreamed in jumbled images:

Flowers burned into naked skin; row after row after row of bodies stretched out in a farmer’s field, face after face tilted toward the sun; and the faces blend into troops marching under gray skies, General Grant’s dust-covered voice repeating that war needs different rules, different players, and General Lee, staring across a porch on a gray April morning, wearing his uniform for the last time saying softly that being a soldier is no longer an occupation for gentleman. And through it all, black rain fell from the gray skies, coating everything in slimy heat, burning through skin, leaving bodies ravaged, melting people’s clothes from their frames—

Brady gasped and sat up. Julia put her arm around him. “It’s all right, Mathew,” she said. “You were dreaming.”

He put his head on her shoulder, and closed his eyes. Immediately, flower-burned skin rose in his vision and he forced his eyelids open. He still wore his suit, but there was no long gash in it and the fabric was dry. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said.

“You just need rest.”

He shook his head and got up. His legs were shaky, but the movement felt good. “Think of where we would be if I hadn’t gone to Bull Run,” he said. “We were rich. We had what we wanted. I would have taken portraits, and we would have made more money. We would have an even nicer studio and a home, instead of this apartment.” He smiled a little. “And now the government will sell everything they can, except the portraits. Portraits that no one wants to see.”

Julia still sat at the edge of the bed. Her black dress was wrinkled, and her ringlets mussed. She must have held him while he slept.

“You know,” he said, leaning against the windowsill. “I met a woman just after the Battle of Gettysburg, and she told me that I would die forgotten with my work hidden in government warehouses. And I thought she was crazy; how could the world forget Brady of Broadway? I had dreams of a huge gallery, filled with my work—”

“Dreams have truth,” Julia said.

“No,” Mathew said. “Dreams have hope. Dreams without hope are nightmares.” He swept his hand around the room. “This is a nightmare, Julia.”

She bowed her head. Her hands were clasped together so tightly her knuckles had turned white. Then she raised her head, tossing her ringlets back, and he saw the proud young woman he had married. “So how do we change things, Mathew?”

He stared at her. Even now, she still believed in him, thought that together they could make things better.

He wanted to tell her that they would recapture what they had lost; he wanted to give her hope. But he was forty-eight years old, nearly blind, and penniless. He didn’t have time to rebuild a life from nothing.

“I guess we keep working,” he said, quietly. But even as he spoke, a chill ran down his back. He had worked for the crazy woman and she had taken him to the gates of hell. And he had nothing to show for it except strange behavior and frightening memories. “I’m sorry, Julia.”

“I’m not.” She smiled that cryptic smile she had had ever since he married her. “The reward is worth the cost.”

He nodded, feeling the rain still hot on his skin, hearing voices call for help in a language he could not understand. He wondered if any reward was worth the sacrifices made for it.

He didn’t think so.

1871

Six weeks later, Brady dreamed:

The exhibit room was colder than it had been before, the lighting better. Brady stood beside his wagon and clutched its wooden frame. He stepped around the wagon, saw that the doors to the exhibit were closed, and he was alone in the huge room. He touched his eyes. The glasses were missing, and he could see, just as he had in the previous dreams. His vision was clear, clearer than it had ever been.

No portraits had been added to the far wall. He walked toward his collection and then stopped. He didn’t want to look at his old work. He couldn’t bear the sight of it, knowing the kind of pain and loss those portraits had caused. Instead he turned and gasped.

Portraits graced a once-empty wall. He ran toward them, nearly tripping over the boards of the wagon.

Hundreds of portraits framed and mounted at odd angles glinted under the strange directed lights, the lights that never flickered. He stood closer, saw scenes he hoped he would forget: the flowered woman; the three faceless people, their eyes boiling in their sockets; a weeping man, his skin hanging around him like rags. The portraits were clearer, cleaner than the war portraits from the other wall. No dust had gotten in the fluid, no cracked wet plates, no destroyed glass. Clean, crisp portraits, on paper he had never seen before. But it was all his work, clearly his work.

He made himself look away. The air had a metallic smell. The rest of the wall was blank, as were the other two. More pictures to take, more of hell to see. He had experienced the fire and the brimstone, the burning rain—Satan’s tears. He wondered what else he would see, what else she would make him record.

He touched the portrait of the men with melted faces. If he had to trade visions like this for his eyesight and his wealth, he wouldn’t make the trade. He would die poor and blind at Julia’s side.

The air got colder.

He woke up screaming.

1873

Brady stared at the plate he held in his hand. His subject had long since left the studio, but Brady hadn’t moved. He remembered days when subject after subject had entered the studio, and his assistants had had to develop the prints while Brady staged the sittings.

“I’ll take that, Uncle.”

Brady started. He hadn’t realized that Levin was in the room. He wondered if Levin had been watching Brady stand there, doing nothing. Levin hadn’t said anything the past few years, but he seemed to notice Brady’s growing strange behaviors. “Thank you, Levin,” Brady said, making sure his voice was calm.

Levin kept his eyes averted as he grabbed the covered plate and took it into the darkroom for developing. Levin had grown tall in the seven years that he’d been with Brady. Far from the self-assured twelve-year-old who had come to work for his uncle, Levin had become a silent man who came alive only behind the camera lens. Brady couldn’t have survived without him, especially after he had to let the rest of his staff go.

Brady moved the camera, poured the collodion mixture back into its jar and covered the silver nitrate.

Then he washed his hands in the bowl filled with tepid water that sat near the chemical storage.

“I have another job for you. Can you be alone on Friday at four?”

This time, Brady didn’t jump, but his heart did. It pounded against his ribcage like a child trying to escape a locked room. His nerves had been on edge for so long. Julia kept giving him hot teas and rubbing the back of his neck, but nothing seemed to work. When he closed his eyes he saw visions he didn’t want to see.

He turned, slowly. The crazy woman stood there, her hands clasped behind her back. Since she hadn’t appeared in almost two years, he had managed to convince himself that she wasn’t real—that he had imagined her.

“Another job?” he asked. He was shaking. Either he hadn’t imagined the last one, or he was having another nightmare. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“Can’t?” Her cheeks flushed. “You promised, Mathew. I need you.”

“You never told me you were going to send me to hell,” he snapped. He moved away from the chemicals, afraid that in his anger, he would throw them. “You’re not real, and yet the place you took me stays in my mind. I’m going crazy. You’re a sign of my insanity.”

“No,” she said. She came forward and touched him lightly. Her fingertips were soft, and he could smell the faint perfume of her body. “You’re not crazy. You’re just faced with something from outside your experience. You had dreams about the late War, didn’t you? Visions you couldn’t escape?”

He was about to deny it, when he remembered how, in the first year of his return, the smell of rotted garbage took him back to the Devil’s Hole; how the whinny of a horse made him duck for cover; how he stored his wagon because being inside it filled him with a deep anxiety. “What are you telling me?”

“I come from a place you’ve never heard of,” she said. “We have developed the art of travel in an instant and our societal norms are different from yours. The place I sent you wasn’t hell. It was a war zone, after the Uni—a country had used a new kind of weapon on another country. I want to send you to more places like that, to photograph them, so that we can display those photographs for people of my society to see.”

“If you can travel in an instant—” and he remembered the whirling world, the dancing colors and sounds as he traveled from his world to another “—then why don’t you take people there? Why do you need me?”

“Those places are forbidden. I received special dispensation. I’m working on an art project, and I nearly lost my funding because I saw you in Gettysburg.”

Brady’s shaking eased. “You risked everything to see me?”

She nodded. “We’re alike in that way,” she said. “You’ve risked everything to follow your vision too.”

“And you need me?”

“You’re the first and the best, Mathew. I couldn’t even get funding unless I guaranteed that I would have your work. Your studio portraits are lovely, Mathew, but it’s your war photos that make you great.”

“No one wants to see my war work,” Brady said.

Her smile seemed sad. “They will, Mathew. Especially if you work with me.”

Brady glanced around his studio, smaller now than it had ever been. Portraits of great men still hung on the walls along with actors, artists, and people who just wanted a remembrance.

“At first it was art for you,” she said, her voice husky. “Then it became a mission, to show people what war was really like. And now no one wants to look. But they need to, Mathew.”

“I know,” he said. He glanced back at her, saw the brightness in her face, the trembling of her lower lip.

This meant more to her than an art project should. Something personal, something deep, got her involved. “I went to hell for you, and I never even got to see the results of my work.”

“Yes, you did,” she said.

“Uncle!” Levin called from the next room.

The woman vanished, leaving shimmering air in her wake. Brady reached out and touched it, felt the remains of a whirlwind. She knew about his dreams, then. Or was she referring to the work he had done inside his wagon on the site, developing plates before they dried so that the portraits would be preserved?

“Did I hear voices?” Levin came out of the back room, wiping his hands on his smock.

Brady glanced at Levin, saw the frown between the young man’s brows. Levin was really worried about him. “No voices,” Brady said. “Perhaps you just heard someone calling from the street.”

“The portrait is done.” Levin looked at the chemicals, as if double-checking his uncle’s work.

“I’ll look at it later,” Brady said. “I’m going home to Julia. Can you watch the studio?”

Levin nodded.

Brady grabbed his coat off one of the sitting chairs and stopped at the doorway. “What do you think of my war work, Levin? And be honest, now.”

“Honest?”

“Yes.”

Brady waited. Levin took a deep breath. “I wish that I were ten years older so that I could have been one of your assistants, Uncle. You preserved something that future generations need to see. And it angers me that no one is willing to look.”

“Me, too,” Brady said. He slipped his arms through the sleeves of his coat. “But maybe—” and he felt something cautious rise in his chest, something like hope “—if I work just a little harder, people will look again. Think so, Levin?”

“It’s one of my prayers, Uncle,” Levin said.

“Mine, too,” Brady said, and let himself out the door. He whistled a little as he walked down the stairs.

Maybe the woman was right; maybe he had a future, after all.

1873

Friday at four, Brady whirled from his studio to a place so hot that sweat appeared on his body the instant he stopped whirling. His wagon stood on a dirt road, surrounded by thatched huts. Some of the huts were burning, but the flames were the only movement in the entire village. Far away, he could hear a chop-chop-chopping sound, but he could see nothing. Flies buzzed around him, not landing, as if they had more interesting places to go. The air smelled of burning hay and something fetid, something familiar.

He swallowed and looked for the bodies.

He grabbed the back end of the wagon, and climbed inside. The darkness was welcome. It took a moment for his eyes to get used to the gloom, then he grabbed his tripod and his camera and carried them outside. He pushed his glasses up his nose, but his finger encountered skin instead of metal. He could see. He squinted and wondered how she did that—gave him his eyesight for such a short period of time. Perhaps it was his reward for going to hell.

A hand extended from one of the burning huts. Brady stopped beside it, crouched, and saw a man lying face down in the dust, the back of his head blown away. Bile rose in Brady’s throat, and he swallowed to keep his last meal down. He assembled the camera, uncapped the lens and looked through, seeing the hand and the flames flickering in his narrow, rounded vision. Then he climbed out from under the curtain, went back into the wagon and prepared a plate.

This time he felt no fear. Perhaps knowing that the woman (why had she never told him her name?) could flash him out of the area in an instant made him feel safer. Or perhaps it was his sense of purpose, as strong as it had been at the first battle of Bull Run, when the bullets whizzed by him, and his wagon got stampeded by running soldiers. He had had a reason then, a life then, and he would get it back.

He went outside and photographed the dead man in the burning hut. The chop-chop-chopping sound was fading, but the heat seemed to intensify. The stillness in the village was eerie. The crackles of burning buildings made him jump. He saw no more bodies, no evidence other than the emptiness and the fires that something had happened in this place.

Then he saw the baby.

It was a toddler, actually. Naked, and shot in the back, the body lying at the edge of a ditch. Brady walked over to the ditch and peered in, then stepped back and got sick for the first time in his professional career.

Bodies filled the ditch—women, children, babies, and old men—their limbs flung back, stomachs gone, faces shot away. Blood flowed like a river, added its coppery scent to the smell of burning hay and the reek of decay. What kind of places was she taking him to, where women and children died instead of soldiers?

He grabbed his camera, his shield, and set it up, knowing that this would haunt him as the hot, slimy rain haunted him. He prepared more plates and photographed the toddler over and over, the innocent baby that had tried to crawl away from the horror and had been shot in the back for its attempts at survival.

And as he worked, his vision blurred, and he wondered why the sweat pouring into and out of his eyes never made them burn.

1875

Brady stared at the $25,000 check. He set it on the doily that covered the end table. In the front room, he heard Levin arguing with Julia.

“Not today,” she said. “Give him at least a breath between bad news.”

Brady touched the thin paper, the flowing script. The government had given him one-quarter of the wealth he had lost going into the war, one-tenth of the money he spent photographing history. And too late. The check was too late. A month earlier, the War Department, which owned the title to the wet plates, sold them all to the Anthonys for an undisclosed sum. They had clear, legal title, and Edward Anthony had told Brady that they would never, ever sell.

He got up with a sigh and brushed aside the half-open bedroom door. “Tell me what?” he asked.

Levin looked up—guiltily, Brady thought. Julia hid something behind her back. “Nothing, Uncle,” Levin said. “It can wait.”

“You brought something and I want to know what it is.” Brady’s voice was harsh. It had been too harsh lately. The flashbacks on his travels, the strain of keeping silent—of not telling Julia the fantastical events—and the reversal after reversal in his own life were taking their toll.

Julia brought her hand out from behind her back. She clutched a stereoscope. The small device shook as she handed it to Brady.

He put the lenses up to his eyes, feeling the frame clink against his glasses. The three dimensional view inside was familiar: the war parade he had taken over ten years ago, as the soldiers rode down Pennsylvania Avenue. Brady removed the thick card from the viewer. The two portraits stood side by side, as he expected. He even expected the flowery script on the side, stating that the stereoscopic portrait was available through the Anthonys’ warehouse. What he didn’t expect was the attribution at the bottom, claiming that the photography had been done by the Anthonys themselves.

He clenched his fists and turned around, letting the device fall to the wooden floor. The stereoscope clinked as it rolled, and Brady stifled an urge to kick it across the room.

“We can go to Congressman Garfield,” Levin said, “and maybe he’ll help us.”

Brady stared at the portrait. He could take the Anthonys to court. They did own the rights to the wet plates, but they should have given him proper attribution. It seemed a trivial thing to fight over. He had no money, and what influence he had would be better spent getting the plates back than fighting for a bit of name recognition. “No,” Brady said. “You can go to the newspapers, if you like, Levin, but we won’t get James to act for us. He’s done his best already. This is our fight. And we’ll keep at it, until the bitter end if we have to.”

Julia clenched her hands together and stared at him. It seemed as if the lines around her mouth had grown deeper. He remembered the first time he danced with her, the diamonds around her neck glittering in the candlelight. They had sold those diamonds in 1864 to fund the Petersburg expedition—the expedition in which half of his equipment was destroyed by Confederate shells. You are going to be a great man, she had told him. The problem was, he had never asked her what she meant by great. Perhaps she thought of her wealthy father as a great man. Perhaps she stayed with Brady out of wifely loyalty.

She came over to him and put her arm around him. “I love you, Mathew,” she said. He hugged her close, so close that he worried he would hurt her. He wouldn’t have been able to do anything without her. None of his work, none of his efforts would have been possible—especially in the lean years—if she hadn’t believed in him.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into her shoulder.

She slipped out of his embrace and held him so that she could look into his eyes. “We’ll keep fighting, Mathew. And in the end, we’ll win.”

1877

And the assignments kept coming. Brady began to look forward to the whirling, even though he often ended up in hell. His body was stronger there; his eyesight keener. He could forget, for a short time, the drabness of Washington, the emptiness of his life. On the battlefields, he worked—and he could still believe that his work had meaning. One dark, gray day, he left his studio and found himself hiding at the edge of a forest. His wagon, without a horse, leaned against a spindly tree. The air was thick and humid.

Brady’s black suit clung to his skin, already damp. Through the bushes he could see soldiers carrying large rifles, surrounding a church. Speaking a language he thought he understood—Spanish?—they herded children together. Then, in twos and threes, the soldiers marched the children inside.

The scene was eerily quiet. Brady went behind the wagon, grabbed his tripod and set up the camera. He stepped carefully on the forest bed; the scuffing noise of his heavy leather shoes seemed to resound like gunshots. He took portrait after portrait, concentrating on the soldiers’ faces, the children’s looks of resignation. He wondered why the soldiers were imprisoning the children, and what they planned to do to the town he could see just over the horizon. And a small trickle of relief ran through him that here, at least, the children would be spared.

Once the children were inside, the soldiers closed the heavy doors and barred them. Someone had already boarded up the windows. Brady put another plate into his camera to take a final portrait of the closed church before following the army to their nasty work at the village. He looked down, checking the plates the woman had given him, when he heard a whoosh. A sharp, tingling scent rose in his nostrils, followed by the smell of smoke. Automatically he opened the lens—just as a soldier threw a burning torch at the church itself.

Brady screamed and ran out of the bushes. The soldiers saw him—and one leveled a rifle at him. The bullets ratt-a-tatted at him, the sound faster and more vicious than the repeating rifles from the war.

Brady felt his body jerk and fall, felt himself roll over, bouncing with each bullet’s impact. He wanted to crawl to the church, to save the children, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t do anything. The world was growing darker—and he saw a kind of light—and his mother? waiting for him—

And then the whirling began. It seemed slower, and he wasn’t sure he wanted it to start. It pulled him away from the light, away from the mother he hadn’t seen since he left the farm at 16, away from the church and the burning children (he thought he could hear their screams now—loud, terrified, piercing—) and back to the silence of his studio.

He wound up in one of his straightbacked chairs. He tried to stand up, and fell, his glasses jostling the edge of his nose. Footsteps on the stairs ran toward him, then hands lifted him. Levin.

“Uncle? Are you all right?”

“Shot,” Brady whispered. “The children. All dead. Must get the children.”

He pushed Levin aside and groped for something, anything to hold on to. “I have to get back!” he yelled.

“Someone has to rescue those children!”

Levin grabbed his shoulders, forced Brady back to the chair. “The war is over, Uncle,” Levin said. “It’s over. You’re home. You’re safe.”

Brady looked up at Levin and felt the shakes begin. She wouldn’t send him back. She wouldn’t let him save those children. She knew all along that the church would burn and she wanted him to photograph it, to record it, not to save it. He put his hands over his face. He had seen enough atrocities to last him three lifetimes.

“It’s all right,” Levin said. “It’s all right, Uncle.”

It wasn’t all right. Levin was becoming an expert at this, at talking Brady home. And to his credit, he never said anything to Julia. “Thank you,” Brady said. His words were thin, rushed, as if the bullet holes still riddled his body and sucked the air from it.

He patted Levin on the shoulder, then walked away—walked—to the end of the studio, his room, his home. Perhaps the crazy woman didn’t exist. Perhaps what Levin saw was truth. Perhaps Brady’s mind was going, after all.

“Thank you,” he repeated, and walked down the stairs, comforted by the aches in his bones, the blurry edge to his vision. He was home, and he would stay—

Until she called him again. Until he had his next chance to be young, and working, and doing something worthwhile.

1882

Brady sat in front of the window, gazing into the street. Below, carriages rumbled past, throwing up mud and chunks of ice. People hurried across the sidewalk, heads bowed against the sleet. The rippled glass was cold against his fingers, but he didn’t care. He could hear Levin in the studio, talking with a prospective client. Levin had handled all of the business this past week. Brady had hardly been able to move.

The death of Henry Anthony shouldn’t have hit him so hard. The Anthony Brothers had been the closest thing Brady had to enemies in the years since the war. Yet, they had been friends once, and companions in the early days of the art. All of photography was dying; Morse was gone. Henry Anthony dead. And three of Brady’s assistants, men he had trained to succeed him, dead in the opening of the West.

Levin opened the door and peeked in. “Uncle, a visitor,” he said.

Brady was about to wave Levin away when another man stepped inside. The man was tall, gaunt, wearing a neatly pressed black suit. He looked official. “Mr. Brady?”

Brady nodded but did not rise.

“I’m John C. Taylor. I’m a soldier, sir, and a student of your work. I would like to talk with you, if I could.”

Brady pushed back the needlepoint chair beside him. Taylor sat down, hat in his hands.

“Mr. Brady, I wanted to let you know what I’ve been doing. Since the end of the war, I’ve tried to acquire your work. I have secured, through various channels, over 7,000 negatives of your best pictures.”

Brady felt the haze that surrounded him lift somewhat. “And you would like to display them?”

“No, sir, actually, I’ve been trying to preserve them. The plates the government bought from you years ago have been sitting in a warehouse. A number were destroyed due to incautious handling. I’ve been trying to get them placed somewhere else. I have an offer from the Navy Department—I have connections there—and I wanted your approval.”

Brady laughed. The sound bubbled from inside of him, but he felt no joy. He had wanted the portraits for so long and finally, here was someone asking for his approval. “No one has asked me what I wanted before.”

Taylor leaned back. He glanced once at Levin, as if Brady’s odd reaction had made Taylor wary.

“My uncle has gone through quite an odyssey to hold on to his plates,” Levin said softly. “He has lost a lot over the years.”

“From the beginning,” Brady said. “No one will ever know what I went through in securing the negatives.

The whole world can never appreciate it. It changed the course of my life. Some of those negatives nearly cost me that life. And then the work was taken from me. Do you understand, Mr. Taylor?”

Taylor nodded. “I’ve been tracking these photographs for a long time, sir. I remembered them from the illustrated papers, and I decided that they needed to be preserved, so that my children’s children would see the devastation, would learn the follies we committed because we couldn’t reason with each other.”

Brady smiled. A man who did understand. Finally. “The government bought my portraits of Webster, Calhoun and Clay. I got paid a lot of money for those paintings that were made from my photographs.

Not my work, mind you. Paintings of my work. Page would have been so happy.”

“Sir?”

Brady shook his head. Page had left his side long ago. “But no one wants to see the war work. No one wants to see what you and I preserved. I don’t want the Navy to bury the negatives. I want them to display the work, reproduce it or make it into a book that someone can see.”

“First things first, Mr. Brady,” Taylor said. “The Navy has the negatives I’ve acquired, but we need to remove the others from the War department before they’re destroyed. And then you, or your nephew, or someone else can go in there and put together a showing.”

Brady reached over and gripped Taylor’s hands. They were firm and strong—a young man’s hands on an older man’s body. “If you can do that,” Brady said. “You will have made all that I’ve done worthwhile.”

1882

Julia huddled on the settee, a blanket over her slight frame. She had grown gaunt, her eyes big saucers on the planes of her face. Her hands shook as she took the letter from Brady. He had hesitated about giving it to her, but he knew that she would ask and she would worry. It would be better for her frail heart to know than to constantly fret. She leaned toward the lamp. Brady watched her eyes move as she read.

He already knew the words by heart. The letter was from General A. W. Greeley, in the War department. He was in charge of the government’s collection of Brady’s work. After the opening amenities, he had written:

The government has stated positively that their negatives must not be exploited for commercial purposes. They are the historical treasures of a whole people and the government has justly refused to establish a dangerous system of “special privilege” by granting permission for publication to individuals. As the property of the people, the government negatives are held in sacred trust.

Where no one could see them, and not even Brady himself could use them. He wondered what Taylor thought—Taylor who would have received the letter in Connecticut by now.

Julia looked up, her eyes dotted with tears. “What do they think, that you’re going to steal the plates from them like they stole them from you?”

“I don’t know,” Brady said. “Perhaps they really don’t understand what they have.”

“They understand,” Julia said, her voice harsh. “And it frightens them.”

1883

In his dreams, he heard the sounds of people working. Twice he had arrived at the door to his gallery, and twice it had been locked. Behind the thin material, he heard voices—“Here, Andre. No, no. Keep the same years on the same wall space”—and the sounds of shuffling feet. This time, he knocked and the door opened a crack.

Ceiling lights flooded the room. It was wide and bright—brighter than he imagined a room could be. His work covered all the walls but one. People, dressed in pants and loose shirts like the woman who hired him, carried framed portraits from one spot to the next, all under the direction of a slim man who stood next to Brady’s wagon.

The man looked at Brady. “What do you want?”

“I just wanted to see—”

The man turned to one of the others walking through. “Get rid of him, will you? We only have a few hours, and we still have one wall to fill.”

A woman stopped next to Brady and put her hand on his arm. Her fingers were cool. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re preparing an exhibit.”

“But I’m the artist,” Brady said.

“He says—”

“I know what he says,” the man said. He squinted at Brady, then glanced at a portrait that hung near the wagon. “And so he is. You should be finishing the exhibit, Mr. Brady, not gawking around the studio.”

“I didn’t know I had something to finish.”

The man sighed. “The show opens tomorrow morning, and you still have one wall to fill. What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Brady said. The woman took his arm and led him out the door.

“We’ll see you tomorrow night,” she said. And then she smiled. “I like your work.”

And then he woke up, shivering and shaking in the dark beside Julia. Her even breathing was a comfort.

He drew himself into a huddle and rested his knees against his chest. One wall to fill by tomorrow? He wished he understood what the dreams meant. It had taken him nearly twenty years to fill all the other walls. And then he thought that perhaps dream time worked differently than real time. Perhaps dream time moved in an instant the way he did when the woman whirled him away to another place.

It was just a dream, he told himself, and by the time he fell back to sleep, he really believed it.

1884

By the time the wagon appeared beside him, Brady was shaking. This place was silent, completely silent.

Houses stood in neat rows on barren, brown treeless land. Their white formations rested like sentries against the mountains that stood in the distance. A faint smell, almost acrid, covered everything. The air was warm, but not muggy, and beads of sweat rose on his arms like drops of blood.

Brady had arrived behind one of the houses. Inside, a family sat around the table—a man, a woman and two children. They all appeared to be eating—the woman had a spoon raised to her mouth—but no one moved. In the entire time he had been there, no one had moved.

He went into his wagon, removed the camera and tripod, then knocked on the door. The family didn’t acknowledge him. He pushed the door open and stepped inside, setting up the camera near a gleaming countertop. Then he walked over to the family. The children were laughing, gazing at each other. Their chests didn’t rise and fall, their eyes didn’t move. The man had his hand around a cup full of congealed liquid. He was watching the children, a faint smile on his face. The woman was looking down, at the bowl filled with a soggy mush. The hand holding the spoon—empty except for a white stain in the center—had frozen near her mouth. Brady touched her. Her skin was cold, rigid.

They were dead.

Brady backed away, nearly knocking over the tripod. He grabbed the camera, felt its firmness in his hands. For some reason, these specters frightened him worse than all the others. He couldn’t tell what killed them or how they died. It had become increasingly difficult, at the many varied places he had been, but he could at least guess. Here, he saw nothing—and the bodies didn’t even feel real.

He climbed under the dark curtain, finding a kind of protection from his own equipment. Perhaps, near his own stuff, whatever had killed them would avoid him. He took the photograph, and then carried his equipment to the next house, where a frozen woman sat on a sofa, looking at a piece of paper. In each house, he took the still lives, almost wishing for the blood, the fires, the signs of destruction.

1885

Brady folded the newspaper and set it down. He didn’t wish to disturb Julia, who was sleeping soundly on the bed. She seemed to get so little rest. Her face had become translucent, the shadows under her eyes so deep that they looked like bruises.

He couldn’t share the article with her. A year ago, she might have laughed. But now, tears would stream down her cheeks and she would want him to hold her. And when she woke up, he would hold her, because they had so little time left.

She didn’t need to see the paragraph that stood out from the page as if someone had expanded the type:

. . . and with his loss, all of photography’s pioneers are dead. In the United States alone we have lost, in recent years, Alexander Gardiner, Samuel F. B. Morse, Edward and Henry Anthony, and Mathew B. Brady. Gardiner practiced the craft until his death, going west and sending some of the best images back home. The Anthonys sold many of their fine works in stereoscope for us all to see. Morse had other interests and quit photography to pursue them. Brady lost his eyesight after the War, and closed his studios here and in New York . . .

Perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps they wouldn’t laugh together. Perhaps she would be as angry as he was.

He hadn’t died. He hadn’t. No one allowed him to show his work any more. He hadn’t even been to the gallery of his dreams since that confusing last dream, years ago.

Brady placed the newspaper with the others near the door. Then he crawled onto the bed and pulled Julia close. Her small body was comfort, and in her sleep, she turned and held him back.

1886

One morning, he whirled into a place of such emptiness it chilled his soul. The buildings were tall and white, the grass green, and the flowers in bloom. His wagon was the only black thing on the surface of this place. He could smell lilacs as he walked forward, and he thought of Julia resting at their apartment—too fragile now to even do her needlepoint.

This silence was worse than at the last place. Here it felt as if human beings had never touched this land, despite the buildings. He felt as if he were the only person alive.

He walked up the stone steps of the first building and pushed open the glass door. The room inside was empty—as empty as his gallery had been when he first dreamed it. No dust or footprints marred the white floor, no smudges covered the white walls. He looked out the window and, as he watched, a building twenty yards away shimmered and disappeared.

Brady shoved his hands in his pockets and scurried outside. Another, squarer building also disappeared.

The shimmering was different, more ominous than the shimmering left by his benefactress. In these remains, he could almost see the debris, the dust from the buildings that had once been. He could feel the destruction and knew that these places weren’t reappearing somewhere else. He ran to his wagon, climbed inside, and peered out at the world from the wagon’s edge. And, as he watched, building after building winked out of existence.

He clutched the camera to him, but took no photographs. The smell of lilacs grew stronger. His hands were cold, shaking. He watched the buildings disappear until only a grassy field remained.

“You can’t even photograph it.”

Her appearance didn’t surprise him. He expected her, after seeing the changes, perhaps because he had been thinking of her. Her hair was shoulder-length now, but other than that, she hadn’t changed in all the years since he last saw her.

“It’s so clean and neat.” Her voice shook. “You can’t even tell that anyone died here.”

Brady crawled out of the wagon and stood beside her. He felt more uneasy here than he had felt under the shelling at the first battle of Bull Run. There at least he could hear the whistle, feel the explosions.

Here the destruction came from nowhere.

“Welcome to war in my lifetime, Mathew.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Here we get rid of everything, not just a person’s body, but all traces of their home, their livelihood—and, in most cases, any memories of them. I lost my son like this and I couldn’t remember that he had existed until I started work on this project.” She smiled just a little. “The time travel gives unexpected gifts, some we can program for, like improved eyesight or health, and some we can’t, like improved memories. The scientists say it has something to do with molecular rearrangement, but that makes no sense to you, since most people didn’t know what a molecule was in your day.”

He stood beside her, his heart pounding in his throat. She turned to him, took his hand in hers.

“We can’t go any farther than this, Mathew.”

He frowned. “I’m done?”

“Yes. I can’t thank you in the ways that I’d like. If I could, I’d send you back, give you money, let you rebuild your life from the war on. But I can’t. We can’t. But I can bring you to the exhibit when it opens, and hope that the response is what we expect. Would you like that, Mathew?”

He didn’t know exactly what she meant, and he wasn’t sure he cared. He wanted to keep making photographs, to keep working here with her. He had nothing else. “I could still help you. I’m sure there are a number of things to be done.”

She shook her head, then kissed his forehead. “You need to go home to your Julia, and enjoy the time you have left. We’ll see each other again, Mathew.”

And then she started to whirl, to shimmer. Brady reached for her and his hand went through her into the heated air. This shimmer was different; it had a life to it. He felt a thin relief. She had traveled beyond him, but not out of existence. He leaned against the edge of his wagon and stared at the lilac bushes and the wind blowing through the grasses, trying to understand what she had just told him. He and the wagon sat alone, in a field where people had once built homes and lived quiet lives. Finally, at dusk, he too shimmered out of the blackness and back to his own quiet life.

1887

Only Levin and Brady stood beside the open grave. The wind ruffled Brady’s hair, dried the tear tracks on his cheeks. He hadn’t realized how small Julia’s life had become. Most of the people at the funeral had been his friends, people who had come to console him.

He could hear the trees rustling behind him. The breeze carried a scent of lilacs—how appropriate, Julia dying in the spring so that her flower would bloom near her grave. She had been so beautiful when he met her, so popular. She had whittled her life down for him, because she had thought he needed her. And he had.

Levin took Brady’s arm. “Come along, Uncle,” Levin said.

Brady looked up at his nephew, the closest thing to a child he and Julia had ever had. Levin’s hair had started to recede, and he too wore thick glasses.

“I don’t want to leave her,” Brady said. “I’ve left her too much already.”

“It’s all right, Uncle,” Levin said as he put his arm around Brady’s waist and led him through the trees.

“She understands.”

Brady glanced back at the hole in the ground, at his wife’s coffin, and at the two men who had already started to shovel dirt on top. “I know she understands,” he said. “She always has.”

1887

That night, Brady didn’t sleep. He sat on the bed he had shared with Julia, and clutched her pillow against his chest. He missed her even breathing, her comfortable presence. He missed her hand on his cheek and her warm voice, reassuring him. He missed holding her, and loving her, and telling her how much he loved her.

It’s all right, Uncle, Levin had said. She understands.

Brady got up, set the pillow down and went to the window. She had looked out so many times, probably feeling alone, while he pursued his dreams of greatness. She had never said what she thought these past few years, but he saw her look at him, saw the speculation in her eyes when he returned from one of his trips. She had loved him too much to question him.

Then he felt it: the odd sensation that always preceded a whirling. But he was done—he hadn’t left in over a year. He was just tired, just spinning. Colors and pain and dust bombarded him. Smells he would briefly catch and by the time he identified them they had disappeared. His head ached, his body felt as if it were being torn in fifteen different directions. And when he stopped, he stood in the gallery of his dreams . . . only he knew that he was wide awake.

It existed then. It really existed.

And it was full of people.

Women wore long clingy dresses in a shining material. Their hair varied in hue from brown to pink, and many had jewelry stapled into their noses, their cheeks and, in one case, along the rim of the eye. The men’s clothes were as colorful and as shiny. They wore makeup, but no jewelry. A few people seemed out of place, in other clothes—a woman in combat fatigues from one of the wars Brady had seen, a man in dust-covered denim pants and a ripped shirt, another man dressed in all black leaning against a gallery door. All of the doors in the hallway were open and people spilled in and out, conversing or holding shocked hands to their throats.

The conversation was so thick that Brady couldn’t hear separate voices, separate words. A variety of perfumes overwhelmed him and the coolness seemed to have left the gallery. He let the crowd push him down the hall toward his own exhibit and as he passed, he caught bits and pieces of other signs:

. . . IMAGE ARTIST . . .

. . . (2000-2010) . . .

. . . HOLOGRAPHER, AFRICAN BIOLOGICAL . . .

. . . ABC CAMERAMAN, LEBANON . . .

. . . PHOTOJOURNALIST, VIETNAM CONFLICT . . .

. . . (1963) . . .

. . . NEWS REELS FROM THE PACIFIC THEATER . . .

. . . OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER, WORLD WAR I . . .

. . . (1892- . . .

. . . INDIAN WARS . . .

And then his own:

MATHEW B. BRADY EXHIBIT

OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER:

UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR

(1861-1865)

The room was full. People stood along the walls, gazing at his portraits, discussing and pointing at the fields of honored dead. One woman turned away from the toddler, shot in the back; another from the burning church. People looked inside Brady’s wagon, and more than a few stared at the portraits of him, lined along the doric columns like a series of somber, aging men.

He caught a few words:

“Fantastic composition” . . . “amazing things with black and white” . . . “almost looks real” . . . “turns my stomach” . . . “can’t imagine working with such primitive equipment” . . .

Someone touched his shoulder. Brady turned. A woman smiled at him. She wore a long purple gown and her brown hair was wrapped around the top of her head. It took a moment for him to recognize his benefactress.

“Welcome to the exhibit, Mathew. People are enjoying your work.”

She smiled at him and moved on. And then it hit him. He finally had an exhibit. He finally had people staring at his work, and seeing what had really happened in all those places during all that time. She had shown him this gallery all his life, whirled him here when he thought he was asleep. This was his destiny, just as dying impoverished in his own world was his destiny.

“You’re the artist?” A slim man in a dark suit stood beside Brady.

“This is my work,” Brady said.

A few people crowded around. The scent of soap and perfume nearly overwhelmed him.

“I think you’re an absolutely amazing talent,” the man said. His voice was thin, with an accent that seemed British but wasn’t. “I can’t believe the kind of work you put into this to create such stark beauty. And with such bulky equipment.”

“Beauty?” Brady could barely let the word out of his throat. He gazed around the room, saw the flowered woman, the row of corpses on the Gettysburg battlefield.

“Eerie,” a woman said. “Rather like late Goya, don’t you think, Lavinia?”

Another woman nodded. “Stunning, the way you captured the exact right light, the exact moment to illuminate the concept.”

“Concept?” Brady felt his hands shake. “You’re looking at war here. People died in these portraits. This is history, not art.”

“I think you’re underestimating your work,” the man said. “It is truly art, and you are a great, great artist.

Only an artist would see how to use black and white to such a devastating effect—”

“I wasn’t creating art,” Brady said. “My assistants and I, we were shot at. I nearly died the day the soldiers burned that church. This isn’t beauty. This is war. It’s truth. I wanted you to see how ugly war really is.”

“And you did it so well,” the man said. “I truly admire your technique.” And then he walked out of the room. Brady watched him go. The women smiled, shook his hand, told him that it was a pleasure to meet him. He wandered around the room, heard the same types of conversation and stopped when he saw his benefactress.

“They don’t understand,” he said. “They think this was done for them, for their appreciation. They’re calling this art.”

“It is art, Mathew,” she said softly. She glanced around the room, as if she wanted to be elsewhere.

“No,” he said. “It actually happened.”

“A long time ago.” She patted his hand. “The message about war and destruction will go home in their subconscious. They will remember this.” And then she turned her back on him and pushed her way through the crowd. Brady tried to follow her, but made it as far as his wagon. He sat on its edge and buried his face in his hands.

He sat there for a long time, letting the conversation hum around him, wondering at his own folly. And then he heard his name called in a voice that made his heart rise.

“Mr. Brady?”

He looked up and saw Julia. Not the Julia who had grown pale and thin in their small apartment, but the Julia he had met so many years ago. She was slender and young, her face glowing with health. No gray marked her ringlets, and her hoops were wide with a fashion decades old. He reached out his hands.

“Julia.”

She took his hands and sat beside him on the wagon, her young-girl face turned in a smile. “They think you’re wonderful, Mr. Brady.”

“They don’t understand what I’ve done. They think it’s art—” he stopped himself. This wasn’t his Julia.

This was the young girl, the one who had danced with him, who had told him about her dream. She had come from a different place and a different time, the only time she had seen the effects of his work.

He looked at her then, really looked at her, saw the shine in her blue eyes, the blush to her cheeks. She was watching the people look at his portraits, soaking in the discussion. Her gloved hand clutched his, and he could feel her wonderment and joy.

“I would be so proud if this were my doing, Mr. Brady. Imagine a room like this filled with your vision, your work.”

He didn’t look at the room. He looked at her. This moment, this was what kept her going all those years.

The memory of what she thought was a dream, of what she hoped would become real. And it was real, but not in any way she understood. Perhaps, then, he didn’t understand it either.

She turned to him, smiled into his face. “I would so like to be a part of this,” she said. She thought it was a dream; otherwise she would have never spoken so boldly. No, wait. She had been bold when she was young.

“You will be,” Brady said. And until that moment, he never realized how much a part of it she had been, always standing beside him, always believing in him even when he no longer believed in himself. She had made the greater sacrifice—her entire life for his dream, his vision, his work.

“Julia,” he said, thankful for this last chance to touch her, this last chance to hold her. “I could not do this without you. You made it all possible.”

She leaned against him and laughed, a fluted sound he hadn’t heard in decades. “But it’s your work that they admire, Mr. Brady. Your work.”

“They call me an artist.”

“That’s right.” Her words were crisp, sure. “An artist’s work lives beyond him. This isn’t our world, Mr.

Brady. In the other rooms, the pictures move.”

The pictures move. He had been given a gift, to see his own future. To know that the losses he suffered, the reversals he and Julia had lived through weren’t all for nothing. How many people got even that?

He tucked her arm in his. He had to be out of this room, out of this exhibit he didn’t really understand.

They stood together, her hoop clearing a path for them in the crowd. He stopped and surveyed the four walls—filled with his portraits, portraits of places most of these people had never seen—his memories that they shared and made their own.

Then he stepped out of the exhibit into a future in which he would never take part, perhaps to gain a perspective he had never had before.

And all the while, Julia remained beside him.

JACK

Connie Willis

Connie Willis’s major new novel, Doomsday Book, will be released in hardcover by Bantam next year. Now that she’s finished working on that book, Ms. Willis has found the time to write a few stories for us. We have at least one tale in inventory and we are expecting to see more of her work soon. In “Jack,” her latest story, she uncovers new terrors and heartbreak in the London of the Blitz that she first visited in her masterful Hugo-and Nebula-award-winning novella “Firewatch” [IAsfm, February 1982).

The night Jack joined our post, Vi was late. So was the Luftwaffe. The sirens still hadn’t gone by eight o’clock.

“Perhaps our Violet’s tired of the RAF and begun on the aircraft spotters,” Morris said, “and they’re so taken by her charms they’ve forgotten to wind the sirens.”

“You’d best watch out then,” Swales said, taking off his tin warden’s hat. He’d just come back from patrol. We made room for him at the linoleum-covered table, moving our tea cups and the litter of gas masks and pocket torches. Twickenham shuffled his papers into one pile next to his typewriter and went on typing.

Swales sat down and poured himself a cup of tea. “She’ll set her cap for the ARP next,” he said, reaching for the milk. Morris pushed it toward him. “And none of us will be safe.” He grinned at me. “Especially the young ones, Jack.”

“I’m safe,” I said. “I’m being called up soon. Twickenham’s the one who should be worrying.”

Twickenham looked up from his typing at the sound of his name. “Worrying about what?” he asked, his hands poised over the keyboard.

“Our Violet setting her cap for you,” Swales said. “Girls always go for poets.”

“I’m a journalist, not a poet. What about Renfrew?” He nodded his head toward the cots in the other room.

“Renfrew!” Swales boomed, pushing his chair back and starting into the room.

“Shh,” I said. “Don’t wake him. He hasn’t slept all week.”

“You’re right. It wouldn’t be fair in his weakened condition.” He sat back down. “And Morris is married. What about your son, Morris? He’s a pilot, isn’t he? Stationed in London?”

Morris shook his head. “Quincy’s up at North Weald.”

“Lucky, that,” Swales said. “Looks as if that leaves you, Twickenham.”

“Sorry,” Twickenham said, typing. “She’s not my type.”

“She’s not anyone’s type, is she?” Swales said.

“The RAF’s,” Morris said, and we all fell silent, thinking of Vi and her bewildering popularity with the RAF pilots in and around London. She had pale eyelashes and colorless brown hair she put up in flat little pincurls while she was on duty, which was against regulations, though Mrs. Lucy didn’t say anything to her about them. Vi was dumpy and rather stupid, and yet she was out constantly with one pilot after another, going to dances and parties.

“I still say she makes it all up,” Swales said. “She buys all those things she says they give her herself, all those oranges and chocolate. She buys them on the black market.”

“On a full-time’s salary?” I said. We only made two pounds a week, and the things she brought home to the post—sweets and sherry and cigarettes—couldn’t be bought on that. Vi shared them round freely, though liquor and cigarettes were against regulations as well. Mrs. Lucy didn’t say anything about them either.

She never reprimanded her wardens about anything, except being malicious about Vi, and we never gossiped in her presence. I wondered where she was. I hadn’t seen her since I came in.

“Where’s Mrs. Lucy?” I asked. “She’s not late as well, is she?”

Morris nodded toward the pantry door. “She’s in her office. Olmwood’s replacement is here. She’s filling him in.”

Olmwood had been our best part-time, a huge out-of-work collier who could lift a house beam by himself, which was why Nelson, using his authority as district warden, had had him transferred to his own post.

“I hope the new man’s not any good,” Swales said. “Or Nelson will steal him.”

“I saw Olmwood yesterday,” Morris said. “He looked like Renfrew, only worse. He told me Nelson keeps them out the whole night patrolling and looking for incendiaries.”

There was no point in that. You couldn’t see where the incendiaries were falling from the street, and if there was an incident, nobody was anywhere to be found. Mrs. Lucy had assigned patrols at the beginning of the Blitz, but within a week she’d stopped them at midnight so we could get some sleep. Mrs. Lucy said she saw no point in our getting killed when everyone was already in bed anyway.

“Olmwood says Nelson makes them wear their gas masks the entire time they’re on duty and holds stirrup pump drills twice a shift,” Morris said.

“Stirrup pump drills!” Swales exploded. “How difficult does he think it is to learn to use one? Nelson’s not getting me on his post, I don’t care if Churchill himself signs the transfer papers.”

The pantry door opened. Mrs. Lucy poked her head out. “It’s half-past eight. The spotter’d better go upstairs even if the sirens haven’t gone,” she said. “Who’s on duty tonight?”

“Vi,” I said, “but she hasn’t come in yet.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Perhaps someone had better go look for her.”

“I’ll go,” I said, and started pulling on my boots.

“Thank you, Jack,” she said. She shut the door.

I stood up and tucked my pocket torch into my belt. I picked up my gas mask and slung it over my arm in case I ran into Nelson. The regulations said they were to be worn while patrolling, but Mrs. Lucy had realized early on that you couldn’t see anything with them on. Which is why, I thought, she has the best post in the district, including Admiral Nelson’s.

Mrs. Lucy opened the door again and leaned out for a moment. “She usually comes by underground. Sloane Square,” she said. “Take care.”

“Right,” Swales said. “Vi might be lurking outside in the dark, waiting to pounce!” He grabbed Twickenham round the neck and hugged him to his chest.

“I’ll be careful,” I said and went up the basement stairs and out onto the street.

I went the way Vi usually came from Sloane Square Station, but there was no one in the blacked-out streets except a girl hurrying to the underground station, carrying a blanket, a pillow, and a dress on a hanger.

I walked the rest of the way to the tube station with her to make sure she found her way, though it wasn’t that dark. The nearly full moon was up, and there was a fire still burning down by the docks from the raid of the night before.

“Thanks awfully,” the girl said, switching the hanger to her other hand so she could shake hands with me. She was much nicer-looking than Vi, with blonde, very curly hair. “I work for this old stewpot at John Lewis’s, and she won’t let me leave even a minute before closing, will she, even if the sirens have gone.”

I waited outside the station for a few minutes and then walked up to the Brompton Road, thinking Vi might have come in at South Kensington instead, but I didn’t see her, and she still wasn’t at the post when I got back.

“We’ve a new theory for why the sirens haven’t gone,” Swales said. “We’ve decided our Vi’s set her cap for the Luftwaffe, and they’ve surrendered.”

“Where’s Mrs. Lucy?” I asked.

“Still in with the new man,” Twickenham said.

“I’d better tell Mrs. Lucy I couldn’t find her,” I said and started for the pantry.

Halfway there the door opened, and Mrs. Lucy and the new man came out. He was scarcely a replacement for the burly Olmwood. He was not much older than I was, slightly built, hardly the sort to lift housebeams. His face was thin and rather pale, and I wondered if he was a student.

“This is our new part-time, Mr. Settle,” Mrs. Lucy said. She pointed to each of us in turn. “Mr. Morris, Mr. Twickenham, Mr. Swales, Mr. Harker.” She smiled at the part-time and then at me. “Mr. Harker’s name is Jack, too,” she said. “I shall have to work at keeping you straight.”

“A pair of jacks,” Swales said. “Not a bad hand.”

The part-time smiled.

“Cots are in there if you’d like to have a lie-down,” Mrs. Lucy said, “and if the raids are close, the coal cellar’s reinforced. I’m afraid the rest of the basement isn’t, but I’m attempting to rectify that.” She waved the papers in her hand. “I’ve applied to the district warden for reinforcing beams. Gasmasks are in there,” she said, pointing at a wooden chest, “batteries for the torches are in here,” she pulled a drawer open, “and the duty roster’s posted on this wall.” She pointed at the neat columns. “Patrols here and watches here. As you can see, Miss Westen has the first watch for tonight.”

“She’s still not here,” Twickenham said, not even pausing in his typing.

“I couldn’t find her,” I said.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I do hope she’s all right. Mr. Twickenham, would you mind terribly taking Vi’s watch?”

“I’ll take it,” Jack said. “Where do I go?”

“I’ll show him,” I said, starting for the stairs.

“No, wait,” Mrs. Lucy said. “Mr. Settle, I hate to put you to work before you’ve even had a chance to become acquainted with everyone, and there really isn’t any need to go up till after the sirens have gone. Come and sit down, both of you.” She took the flowered cozy off the teapot. “Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Settle?”

“No, thank you,” he said.

She put the cozy back on and smiled at him. “You’re from Yorkshire, Mr. Settle,” she said as if we were all at a tea party. “Whereabouts?”

“Newcastle,” he said politely.

“What brings you to London?” Morris said.

“The war,” he said, still politely.

“Wanted to do your bit, eh?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what my son Quincy said. ‘Dad,’ he says. ‘I want to do my bit for England. I’m going to be a pilot.’ Downed fifteen planes, he has, my Quincy,” Morris told Jack, “and been shot down twice himself. Oh, he’s had some scrapes, I could tell you, but it’s all top-secret.”

Jack nodded.

There were times I wondered whether Morris, like Violet with her RAF pilots, had invented his son’s exploits. Sometimes I even wondered if he had invented the son, though if that were the case he might surely have made up a better name than Quincy.

“ ‘Dad,’ he says to me out of the blue, ‘I’ve got to do my bit,’ and he shows me his enlistment papers. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. Not that he’s not patriotic, you understand, but he’d had his little difficulties at school, sowed his wild oats, so to speak, and here he was, saying, ‘Dad, I want to do my bit.

The sirens went, taking up one after the other. Mrs. Lucy said, “Ah, well, here they are now,” as if the last guest had finally arrived at her tea party, and Jack stood up.

“If you’ll just show me where the spotter’s post is, Mr. Harker,” he said.

“Jack,” I said. “It’s a name that should be easy for you to remember.”

I took him upstairs to what had been Mrs. Lucy’s cook’s garret bedroom, unlike the street a perfect place to watch for incendiaries. It was on the fourth floor, higher than most of the buildings on the street so one could see anything that fell on the roofs around. One could see the Thames, too, between the chimneypots, and in the other direction the searchlights in Hyde Park.

Mrs. Lucy had set a wing-backed chair by the window, from which the glass had been removed, and the narrow landing at the head of the stairs had been reinforced with heavy oak beams that even Olmwood couldn’t have lifted.

“One ducks out here when the bombs get close,” I said, shining the torch on the beams. “It’ll be a swish and then a sort of rising whine.” I led him into the bedroom. “If you see incendiaries, call out and try to mark exactly where they fall on the roofs.” I showed him how to use the gunsight mounted on a wooden base that we used for a sextant and handed him the binoculars. “Anything else you need?” I asked.

“No,” he said soberly. “Thank you.”

I left him and went back downstairs. They were still discussing Violet.

“I’m really becoming worried about her,” Mrs. Lucy said. One of the ack-ack guns started up, and there was the dull crump of bombs far away, and we all stopped to listen.

“ME 109’s,” Morris said. “They’re coming in from the south again.”

“I do hope she has the sense to get to a shelter.” Mrs. Lucy said, and Vi burst in the door.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, setting a box tied with string on the table next to Twickenham’s typewriter. She was out of breath and her face was suffused with blood. “I know I’m supposed to be on watch, but Harry took me out to see his plane this afternoon, and I had a horrid time getting back.” She heaved herself out of her coat and hung it over the back of Jack’s chair. “You’ll never believe what he’s named it! The Sweet Violet!” She untied the string on the box. “We were so late we hadn’t time for tea, and he said, ‘You take this to your post and have a good tea, and I’ll keep the jerries busy till you’ve finished.’ ” She reached in the box and lifted out a torte with sugar icing. “He’s painted the name on the nose and put little violets in purple all round it,” she said, setting it on the table. “One for every jerry he’s shot down.”

We stared at the cake. Eggs and sugar had been rationed since the beginning of the year and they’d been in short supply even before that. I hadn’t seen a fancy torte like this in over a year.

“It’s raspberry filling,” she said, slicing through the cake with a knife. “They hadn’t any chocolate.” She held the knife up, dripping jam. “Now, who wants some then?”

“I do,” I said. I had been hungry since the beginning of the war and ravenous since I’d joined the ARP, especially for sweets, and I had my piece eaten before she’d finished setting slices on Mrs. Lucy’s Wedgwood plates and passing them round.

There was still a quarter left. “Who’s upstairs taking my watch?” she said, sucking a bit of raspberry jam off her finger.

“The new part-time,” I said. “I’ll take it up to him.”

She cut a slice and eased it off the knife and onto the plate. “What’s he like?” she asked.

“He’s from Yorkshire,” Twickenham said, looking at Mrs. Lucy. “What did he do up there before the war?”

Mrs. Lucy looked at her cake, as if surprised that it was nearly eaten. “He didn’t say,” she said.

“I meant, is he handsome?” Vi said, putting a fork on the plate with the slice of cake. “Perhaps I should take it up to him myself.”

“He’s puny. Pale,” Swales said, his mouth full of cake. “Looks as if he’s got consumption.”

“Nelson won’t steal him any time soon, that’s certain,” Morris said.

“Oh, well, then,” Vi said, and handed the plate to me.

I took it and went upstairs, stopping on the second floor landing to shift it to my left hand and switch on my pocket torch.

Jack was standing by the window, the binoculars dangling from his neck, looking out past the rooftops toward the river. The moon was up, reflecting whitely off the water like one of the German flares, lighting the bombers’ way.

“Anything in our sector yet?” I said.

“No,” he said, without turning round. “They’re still to the east.”

“I’ve brought you some raspberry cake,” I said.

He turned and looked at me.

I held the cake out. “Violet’s young man in the RAF sent it.”

“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m not fond of cake.”

I looked at him with the same disbelief I had felt for Violet’s name emblazoned on a Spitfire. “There’s plenty,” I said. “She brought a whole torte.”

“I’m not hungry, thanks. You eat it.”

“Are you sure? One can’t get this sort of thing these days.”

“I’m certain,” he said and turned back to the window.

I looked hesitantly at the slice of cake, guilty about my greed but hating to see it go to waste, and still hungry. At the least I should stay up and keep him company.

“Violet’s the warden whose watch you took, the one who was late,” I said. I sat down on the floor, my back to the painted baseboard, and started to eat. “She’s full-time. We’ve got five full-timers. Violet and I and Renfrew—you haven’t met him yet, he was asleep. He’s had rather a bad time. Can’t sleep in the day—and Morris and Twickenham. And then there’s Petersby. He’s part-time like you.”

He didn’t turn around while I was talking or say anything, only continued looking out the window. A scattering of flares drifted down, lighting the room.

“They’re a nice lot,” I said, cutting a bite of cake with my fork. In the odd light from the flares the jam filling looked black. “Swales can be rather a nuisance with his teasing sometimes, and Twickenham will ask you all sorts of questions, but they’re good men on an incident.”

He turned around. “Questions?”

“For the post newspaper. Notice sheet, really, information on new sorts of bombs, ARP regulations, that sort of thing. All Twickenham’s supposed to do is type it and send it round to the other posts, but I think he’s always fancied himself an author, and now he’s got his chance. He’s named the notice sheet Twickenham’s Twitterings, and he adds all sorts of things—drawings, news, gossip, interviews.”

While I had been talking, the drone of engines overhead had been growing steadily louder. It passed, there was a sighing whoosh and then a whistle that turned into a whine.

“Stairs,” I said, dropping my plate. I grabbed his arm, and yanked him into the shelter of the landing. We crouched against the blast, my hands over my head, but nothing happened. The whine became a scream and then sounded suddenly farther off. I peeked round the reinforcing beam at the open window. Light flashed and then the crump came, at least three sectors away. “Lees,” I said, going over to the window to see if I could tell exactly where it was. “High explosive bomb.” Jack focused the binoculars where I was pointing.

I went out to the landing, cupped my hands, and shouted down the stairs, “HE. Lees.” The planes were still too close to bother sitting down again. “Twickenham’s done interviews with all the wardens,” I said, leaning against the wall. “He’ll want to know what you did before the war, why you became a warden, that sort of thing. He wrote up a piece on Vi last week.”

Jack had lowered the binoculars and was watching where I had pointed. The fires didn’t start right away with a high explosive bomb. It took a bit for the ruptured gas mains and scattered coal fires to catch. “What was she before the war?” he asked.

“Vi? A stenographer,” I said. “And something of a wallflower, I should think. The war’s been rather a blessing for our Vi.”

“A blessing,” Jack said, looking out at the high explosive in Lees. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see his face except in silhouette, and I couldn’t tell whether he disapproved of the word or was merely bemused by it.

“I didn’t mean a blessing exactly. One can scarcely call something as dreadful as this a blessing. But the war’s given Vi a chance she wouldn’t have had otherwise. Morris says without it she’d have died an old maid, and now she’s got all sorts of beaux.” A flare drifted down, white and then red. “Morris says the war’s the best thing that ever happened to her.”

“Morris,” he said, as if he didn’t know which one that was.

“Sandy hair, toothbrush mustache,” I said. “His son’s a pilot.”

“Doing his bit,” he said, and I could see his face clearly in the reddish light, but I still couldn’t read his expression.

A stick of incendiaries came down over the river, glittering like sparklers, and fires sprang up everywhere.

The next night there was a bad incident off Old Church Street, two HE’s. Mrs. Lucy sent Jack and me over to see if we could help. It was completely overcast, which was supposed to stop the Luftwaffe but obviously hadn’t, and very dark. By the time we reached Kings Road I had completely lost my bearings.

I knew the incident had to be close, though, because I could smell it. It wasn’t truly a smell; it was a painful sharpness in the nose from the plaster dust and smoke and whatever explosive the Germans put in their bombs. It always made Vi sneeze.

I tried to make out landmarks, but all I could see was the slightly darker outline of a hill on my left. I thought blankly, “We must be lost. There aren’t any hills in Chelsea,” and then realized it must be the incident.

“The first thing we do is find the incident officer,” I told Jack. I looked round for the officer’s blue light, but I couldn’t see it. It must be behind the hill.

I scrabbled up it with Jack behind me, trying not to slip on the uncertain slope. The light was on the far side of another, lower hill, a ghostly bluish blur off to the left. “It’s over there,” I said. “We must report in. Nelson’s likely to be the incident officer, and he’s a stickler for procedure.”

I started down, skidding on the broken bricks and plaster. “Be careful,” I called back to Jack. “There are all sorts of jagged pieces of wood and glass.”

“Jack,” he said.

I turned around. He had stopped halfway down the hill and was looking up, as if he had heard something. I glanced up, afraid the bombers were coming back, but couldn’t hear anything over the antiaircraft guns. Jack stood motionless, his head down now, looking at the rubble.

“What is it?” I said.

He didn’t answer. He snatched his torch out of his pocket and swung it wildly round.

“You can’t do that!” I shouted. “There’s a blackout on!”

He snapped it off. “Go and find something to dig with,” he said and dropped to his knees. “There’s someone alive under here.”

He wrenched the bannister free and began stabbing into the rubble with its broken end.

I looked stupidly at him. “How do you know?”

He jabbed viciously at the mess. “Get a pickaxe. This stuffs hard as rock.” He looked up at me impatiently. “Hurry!”

The incident officer was someone I didn’t know. I was glad. Nelson would have refused to give me a pickaxe without the necessary authorization and lectured me instead on departmentalization of duties. This officer, who was younger than me and broken out in spots under his powdering of brick dust, didn’t have a pickaxe, but he gave me two shovels without any argument.

The dust and smoke were clearing a bit by the time I started back across the mounds, and a shower of flares drifted down over by the river, lighting everything in a fuzzy, overbright light like headlights in a fog. I could see Jack on his hands and knees halfway down the mound, stabbing with the bannister. He looked like he was murdering someone with a knife, plunging it in again and again.

Another shower of flares came down, much closer. I ducked and hurried across to Jack, offering him one of the shovels.

“That’s no good,” he said, waving it away.

“What’s wrong? Can’t you hear the voice anymore?”

He went on jabbing with the bannister. “What?” he said, and looked in the flare’s dazzling light like he had no idea what I was talking about.

“The voice you heard,” I said. “Has it stopped calling?”

“It’s this stuff,” he said. “There’s no way to get a shovel into it. Did you bring any baskets?”

I hadn’t, but farther down the mound I had seen a large tin saucepan. I fetched it for him and began digging. He was right, of course. I got one good shovelful and then struck an end of a floor-joist and bent the blade of the shovel. I tried to get it under the joist so I could pry it upward, but it was wedged under a large section of beam farther on. I gave it up, broke off another of the bannisters, and got down beside Jack.

The beam was not the only thing holding the joist down. The rubble looked loose—bricks and chunks of plaster and pieces of wood—but it was as solid as cement. Swales, who showed up out of nowhere when we were three feet down, said, “It’s the clay. All London’s built on it. Hard as statues.” He had brought two buckets with him and the news that Nelson had shown up and had had a fight with the spotty officer over whose incident it was.

“ ‘It’s my incident,’ Nelson says, and gets out the map to show him how this side of King’s Road is in his district,” Swales said gleefully, “and the incident officer says, ‘Your incident? Who wants the bloody thing, I say,’ he says.”

Even with Swales helping, the going was so slow whoever was under there would probably have suffocated or bled to death before we could get to him. Jack didn’t stop at all, even when the bombs were directly overhead. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, though none of us heard anything in those brief intervals of silence and Jack seemed scarcely to listen.

The bannister he was using broke off in the iron-hard clay, and he took mine and kept digging. A broken clock came up, and an egg cup. Morris arrived. He had been evacuating people from two streets over where a bomb had buried itself in the middle of the street without exploding. Swales told him the story of Nelson and the spotty young officer and then went off to see what he could find out about the inhabitants of the house.

Jack came up out of the hole. “I need braces,” he said. “The sides are collapsing.”

I found some unbroken bed slats at the base of the mound. One of the slats was too long for the shaft. Jack sawed it halfway through and then broke it off.

Swales came back. “Nobody in the house,” he shouted down the hole. “The Colonel and Mrs. Godalming went to Surrey this morning.” The all-clear sounded, drowning out his words.

“Jack,” Jack said from the hole, and I turned around to see if the rescue squad had brought the jack down with them.

“Jack,” he said again, more urgently. I leaned over the tunnel.

“What time is it?” he said.

“About five,” I said. “The all-clear just went.”

“Is it getting light?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Have you found anything?”

“Yes,” he said. “Give us a hand.”

I eased myself into the hole. I could understand his question; it was pitch dark down here. I switched my torch on. It lit up our faces from beneath like spectres.

“In there,” he said, and reached for a bannister just like the one he’d been digging with.

“Is he under a stairway?” I said and the bannister clutched at his hand.

It only took a minute or two to get him out. Jack pulled on the arm I had mistaken for a bannister, and I scrabbled through the last few inches of plaster and clay to the little cave he was in, formed by an icebox and a door leaning against each other.

“Colonel Godalming?” I said, reaching for him.

He shook off my hand. “Where the bleeding hell have you people been?” he said. “Taking a tea break?”

He was in full evening dress, and his big mustache was covered with plaster dust. “What sort of country is this, leave a man to dig himself out?” he shouted, brandishing a serving spoon full of plaster in Jack’s face. “I could have dug all the way to China in the time it took you blighters to get me out!”

Hands came down into the hole and hoisted him up. “Blasted incompetents!” he yelled. We pushed on the seat of his elegant trousers. “Slackers, the lot of you! Couldn’t find the nose in front of your own face!”

Colonel Godalming had in fact left for Surrey the day before but had decided to come back for his hunting rifle, in case of invasion. “Can’t rely on the blasted Civil Defence to stop the jerries,” he had said as I led him down to the ambulance.

It was starting to get light. The incident was smaller than I’d thought, not much more than two blocks square. What I had taken for a mound to the south was actually a squat office block, and beyond it the row houses hadn’t even had their windows blown out.

The ambulance had pulled up as near as possible to the mound. I helped him over to it. “What’s your name?” he said, ignoring the doors I’d opened. “I intend to report you to your superiors. And the other one. Practically pulled my arm out of its socket. Where’s he got to?”

“He had to go to his day job,” I said. As soon as we had Godalming out, Jack had switched on his pocket torch again to glance at his watch and said, “I’ve got to leave.”

I told him I’d check him out with the incident officer and started to help Godalming down the mound. Now I was sorry I hadn’t gone with him.

“Day job!” Godalming snorted. “Gone off to take a nap is more like it. Lazy slacker. Nearly breaks my arm and then goes off and leaves me to die. I’ll have his job!”

“Without him, we’d never even have found you,” I said angrily. “He’s the one who heard your cries for help.”

“Cries for help!” the colonel said, going red in the face. “Cries for help! Why would I cry out to a lot of damned slackers!”

The ambulance driver got out of the car and came round to see what the delay was.

“Accused me of crying out like a damned coward!” he blustered to her. “I didn’t make a sound. Knew it wouldn’t do any good. Knew if I didn’t dig myself out, I’d be there till Kingdom Come! Nearly had myself out, too, and then he comes along and accuses me of blubbering like a baby! It’s monstrous, that’s what it is! Monstrous!”

She took hold of his arm.

“What do you think you’re doing, young woman? You should be at home instead of out running round in short skirts! It’s indecent, that’s what it is!”

She shoved him, still protesting, onto a bunk, and covered him up with a blanket. I slammed the doors to, watched her off, and then made a circuit of the incident, looking for Swales and Morris. The rising sun appeared between two bands of cloud, reddening the mounds and glinting off a broken mirror.

I couldn’t find either of them, so I reported in to Nelson, who was talking angrily on a field telephone and who nodded and waved me off when I tried to tell him about Jack, and then went back to the post.

Swales was already regaling Morris and Vi, who were eating breakfast, with an imitation of Colonel Godalming. Mrs. Lucy was still filling out papers, apparently the same form as when we’d left.

“Huge mustaches,” Swales was saying, his hands two feet apart to illustrate their size, “like a walrus’s, and tails, if you please. ‘Oi siy, this is disgriceful!’ ” he sputtered, his right eye squinted shut with an imaginary monocle, “ ‘Wot’s the Impire coming to when a man cahn’t even be rescued!’ ” He dropped into his natural voice. “I thought he was going to have our two Jacks court-martialed on the spot.” He peered round me. “Where’s Settle?”

“He had to go to his day job,” I said.

“Just as well,” he said, screwing the monocle back in. “The colonel looked like he was coming back with the Royal Lancers.” He raised his arm, gripping an imaginary sword. “Charge!”

Vi tittered. Mrs. Lucy looked up and said, “Violet, make Jack some toast. Sit down, Jack. You look done in.”

I took my helmet off and started to set it on the table. It was caked with plaster dust, so thick it was impossible to see the red W through it. I hung it on my chair and sat down.

Morris shoved a plate of kippers at me. “You never know what they’re going to do when you get them out,” he said. “Some of them fall all over you, sobbing, and some act like they’re doing you a favor. I had one old woman acted all offended, claimed I made an improper advance when I was working her leg free.”

Renfrew came in from the other room, wrapped in a blanket. He looked as bad as I thought I must, his face slack and gray with fatigue. “Where was the incident?” he asked anxiously.

“Just off Old Church Street. In Nelson’s sector,” I added to reassure him.

But he said nervously, “They’re coming closer every night. Have you noticed that?”

“No, they aren’t,” Vi said. “We haven’t had anything in our sector all week.”

Renfrew ignored her. “First Gloucester Road and then Ixworth Place and now Old Church Street. It’s as if they’re circling, searching for something.”

“London,” Mrs. Lucy said briskly. “And if we don’t enforce the blackout, they’re likely to find it,” She handed Morris a typed list. “Reported infractions from last night. Go round and reprimand them.” She put her hand on Renfrew’s shoulder. “Why don’t you go have a nice lie-down, Mr. Renfrew, while I cook you breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry,” he said, but he let her lead him, clutching his blanket, back to the cot.

We watched Mrs. Lucy spread the blanket over him and then lean down and tuck it in around his shoulders, and then Swales said, “You know who this Godalming fellow reminds me of? A lady we rescued over in Gower Street,” he said, yawning. “Hauled her out and asked her if her husband was in there with her. ‘No,’ she says, ‘the bleedin’ coward’s at the front.’ ”

We all laughed.

“People like this colonel person don’t deserve to be rescued,” Vi said, spreading oleo on a slice of toast. “You should have left him there awhile and seen how he liked that.”

“He was lucky they didn’t leave him there altogether,” Morris said. “The register had him in Surrey with his wife.”

“Lucky he had such a loud voice,” Swales said. He twirled the end of an enormous mustache. “Oi siy,” he boomed. “Get me out of here immeejufly, you slackers!”

But he said he didn’t call out, I thought, and could hear Jack shouting over the din of the antiaircraft guns, the drone of the planes, “There’s someone under here.”

Mrs. Lucy came back to the table. “I’ve applied for reinforcements for the post,” she said, standing her papers on end and tamping them into an even stack. “Someone from the Town Hall will be coming to inspect in the next few days.” She picked up two bottles of ale and an ashtray and carried them over to the dustbin.

“Applied for reinforcements?” Swales asked. “Why? Afraid Colonel Godal-ming’ll be back with the heavy artillery?”

There was a loud banging on the door.

“Oi siy,” Swales said. “Here he is now, and he’s brought his hounds.”

Mrs. Lucy opened the door. “Worse,” Vi whispered, diving for the last bottle of ale. “It’s Nelson.” She passed the bottle to me under the table, and I passed it to Morris, who tucked it inside his coverall.

“Mr. Nelson,” Mrs. Lucy said as if she were delighted to see him, “Do come in. And how are things over your way?”

“We took a beating last night,” he said, glaring at us as though we were responsible.

“He’s had a complaint from the Colonel,” Swales whispered to me. “You’re done for, mate.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Mrs. Lucy said. “Now, how may I help you?

He pulled a folded paper from the pocket of his uniform and carefully opened it out. “This was forwarded to me from the City Engineer,” he said. “All requests for material improvements are to be sent to the district warden, not over his head to the Town Hall.”

“Oh, I’m so glad,” Mrs. Lucy said, leading him into the pantry. “It is such a comfort to deal with someone one knows, rather than a faceless bureaucracy. If I had realized you were the proper person to appeal to, I should have contacted you immediately.” She shut the door.

Morris took the ale bottle out from under his coverall and buried it in the dustbin. Violet began taking out her bobby pins.

“We’ll never get our reinforcements now,” Swales said. “Not with Adolf von Nelson in charge.”

“Shh,” Vi said, yanking at her snail-like curls. “You don’t want him to hear you.”

“Olmwood told me he makes them keep working at an incident, even when the bombs are right overhead. Thinks all the posts should do it.”

“Shh!” Vi said.

“He’s a bleeding Nazi!” Swales said, but he lowered his voice. “Got two of his wardens killed that way. You better not let him find out you and Jack are good at finding bodies or you’ll be out there dodging shrapnel, too.”

Good at finding bodies. I thought of Jack, standing motionless, looking at the rubble and saying, “There’s someone alive under here. Hurry.”

“That’s why Nelson steals from the other posts,” Vi said, scooping her bobby pins off the table and into her haversack. “Because he does his own in.” She pulled out a comb and began yanking it through her snarled curls.

The pantry door opened and Nelson and Mrs. Lucy came out, Nelson still holding the unfolded paper. She was still wearing her tea-party smile, but it was a bit thin. “I’m sure you can see it’s unrealistic to expect nine people to huddle in a coal cellar for hours at a time,” she said.

“There are people all over London ‘huddling in coal cellars for hours at a time,’ as you put it,” Nelson said coldly, “who do not wish their Civil Defence funds spent on frivolities.”

“I do not consider the safety of my wardens a frivolity,” she said, “though it is clear to me that you do, as witnessed by your very poor record.”

Nelson stared for a full minute at Mrs. Lucy, trying to think of a retort, and then turned on me. “Your uniform is a disgrace, warden,” he said and stomped out.

Whatever it was Jack had used to find Colonel Godalming, it didn’t work on incendiaries. He searched as haphazardly for them as the rest of us, Vi, who had been on spotter duty, shouting directions: “No, farther down Fulham Road. In the grocer’s.”

She had apparently been daydreaming about her pilots, instead of spotting. The incendiary was not in the grocer’s but in the butcher’s three doors down, and by the time Jack and I got to it, the meat locker was on fire. It wasn’t hard to put out, there were no furniture or curtains to catch and the cold kept the wooden shelves from catching, but the butcher was extravagantly grateful. He insisted on wrapping up five pounds of lamb chops in white paper and thrusting them into Jack’s arms.

“Did you really have to be at your day job so early or were you only trying to escape the colonel?” I asked Jack on the way back to the post.

“Was he that bad?” he said, handing me the parcel of lamb chops.

“He nearly took my head off when I said you’d heard him shouting. Said he didn’t call for help. Said he was digging himself out.” The white butcher’s paper was so bright the Luftwaffe would think it was a searchlight. I tucked the parcel inside my overalls so it wouldn’t show. “What sort of work is it, your day job?” I asked.

“War work,” he said.

“Did they transfer you? Is that why you came to London?”

“No,” he said. “I wanted to come.” We turned into Mrs. Lucy’s street. “Why did you join the ARP?”

“I’m waiting to be called up,” I said, “so no one would hire me.”

“And you wanted to do your bit.”

“Yes,” I said, wishing I could see his face.

“What about Mrs. Lucy? Why did she become a warden?”

“Mrs. Lucy?” I said blankly. The question had never even occurred to me. She was the best warden in London. It was her natural calling, and I’d thought of her as always having been one. “I’ve no idea,” I said. “It’s her house, she’s a widow. Perhaps the Civil Defence commandeered it, and she had to become one. It’s the tallest in the street.” I tried to remember what Twickenham had written about her in his interview. “Before the war she was something to do with a church.”

“A church,” he said, and I wished again I could see his face. I couldn’t tell in the dark whether he spoke in contempt or longing.

“She was a deaconess or something,” I said. “What sort of war work is it? Munitions?”

“No,” he said and walked on ahead.

Mrs. Lucy met us at the door of the post. I gave her the packages of lamb chops, and Jack went upstairs to replace Vi as spotter. Mrs. Lucy cooked the chops up immediately, running upstairs to the kitchen during a lull in the raids for salt and a jar of mint sauce, standing over the gas ring at the end of the table and turning them for what seemed an eternity. They smelled wonderful.

Twickenham passed around newly run-off copies of Twickenham’s Twitterings. “Something for you to read while you wait for your dinner,” he said proudly.

The lead article was about the change in address of Sub-Post D, which had taken a partial hit that broke the water mains.

“Had Nelson refused them reinforcements, too?” Swales asked.

“Listen to this,” Petersby said. He read aloud from the newssheet. “ ‘The crime rate in London has risen 28 percent since the beginning of the blackout.’ ”

“And no wonder,” Vi said, coming down from upstairs. “You can’t see your nose in front of your face at night, let alone someone lurking in an alley. I’m always afraid someone’s going to jump out at me while I’m on patrol.”

“All those houses standing empty, and half of London sleeping in the shelters,” Swales said. “It’s easy pickings. If I was a bad’un, I’d come straight to London.”

“It’s disgusting,” Morris said indignantly. “The idea of someone taking advantage of there being a war like that to commit crimes.”

“Oh, Mr. Morris, that reminds me. Your son telephoned,” Mrs. Lucy said, cutting into a chop to see if it was done. Blood welled up. “He said he’d a surprise for you, and you were to come out to—” She switched the fork to her left hand and rummaged in her overall pocket till she found a slip of paper, “—North Weald on Monday, I think. His commanding officer’s made the necessary travel arrangements for you. I wrote it all down.” She handed it to him and went back to turning the chops.

“A surprise?” Morris said, sounding worried. “He’s not in trouble, is he? His commanding officer wants to see me?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say what it was about. Only that he wanted you to come.”

Vi went over to Mrs. Lucy and peered into the skillet. “I’m glad it was the butcher’s and not the grocer’s,” she said. “Rutabagas wouldn’t have cooked up half so nice.”

Mrs. Lucy speared a chop, put it on a plate, and handed it to Vi. “Take this up to Jack,” she said.

“He doesn’t want any,” Vi said. She took the plate and sat down at the table.

“Did he say why he didn’t?” I asked.

She looked curiously at me. “I suppose he’s not hungry,” she said. “Or perhaps he doesn’t like lamb chops.”

“I do hope he’s not in any trouble,” Morris said, and it took me a minute to realize he was talking about his son. “He’s not a bad boy, but he does things without thinking. Youthful high spirits, that’s all it is.”

“He didn’t eat the cake either,” I said. “Did he say why he didn’t want the lamb chop?”

“If Mr. Settle doesn’t want it, then take it to Mr. Renfrew,” Mrs. Lucy said sharply. She snatched the plate away from Vi. “And don’t let him tell you he’s not hungry. He must eat. He’s getting very run-down.”

Vi sighed and stood up. Mrs. Lucy handed her back the plate and she went into the other room.

“We all need to eat plenty of good food and get lots of sleep,” Mrs. Lucy said reprovingly. “To keep our strength up.”

“I’ve written an article about it in the Twitterings,” Twickenham said, beaming. “It’s known as ‘walking death.’ It’s brought about by lack of sleep and poor nutrition, with the anxiety of the raids. The walking dead exhibit slowed reaction time and impaired judgment which result in increased accidents on the job.”

“Well, I won’t have any walking dead among my wardens,” Mrs. Lucy said, dishing up the rest of the chops. “As soon as you’ve had these, I want you all to go to bed.”

The chops tasted even better than they had smelled. I ate mine, reading Twickenham’s article on the walking dead. It said that loss of appetite was a common reaction to the raids. It also said that lack of sleep could cause compulsive behavior and odd fixations. “The walking dead may become convinced that they are being poisoned or that a friend or relative is a German agent. They may hallucinate, hearing voices, seeing visions or believing fantastical things.”

“He was in trouble at school, before the war, but he’s steadied down since he joined up,” Morris said. “I wonder what he’s done.”

At three the next morning a land mine exploded in almost the same spot off Old Church Street as the HE’s. Nelson sent Olmwood to ask for help, and Mrs. Lucy ordered Swales, Jack, and me to go with him.

“The mine didn’t land more’n two houses away from the first crater,” Olmwood said while we were getting on our gear. “The jerries couldn’t have come closer if they’d been aiming at it.”

“I know what they’re aiming at,” Renfrew said from the doorway. He looked terrible, pale and drawn as a ghost. “And I know why you’ve applied for reinforcements for the post. It’s me, isn’t it? They’re after me.”

“They’re not after any of us,” Mrs. Lucy said firmly. “They’re two miles up. They’re not aiming at anything.”

“Why would Hitler want to bomb you more than the rest of us?” Swales said.

“I don’t know.” He sank down on one of the chairs and put his head in his hands. “I don’t know. But they’re after me. I can feel it.”

Mrs. Lucy had sent Swales, Jack, and me to the incident because “you’ve been there before. You’ll know the terrain,” but that was a fond hope. Since they explode above ground, land mines do considerably more damage than HE’s. There was now a hill where the incident officer’s tent had been, and three more beyond it, a mountain range in the middle of London. Swales started up the nearest peak to look for the incident officer’s light.

“Jack, over here!” somebody called from the hill behind us, and both of us scrambled up a slope toward the voice.

A group of five men were halfway up the hill looking down into a hole.

“Jack!” the man yelled again. He was wearing a blue foreman’s armband, and he was looking straight past us at someone toiling up the slope with what looked like a stirrup pump. I thought, surely they’re not trying to fight a fire down that shaft, and then saw it wasn’t a pump. It was, in fact, an automobile jack, and the man with the blue armband reached between us for it, lowered it down the hole, and scrambled in after it.

The rest of the rescue squad stood looking down into the blackness as if they could actually see something. After awhile they began handing empty buckets down into the hole and pulling them out heaped full of broken bricks and pieces of splintered wood. None of them took any notice of us, even when Jack held out his hands to take one of the buckets.

“We’re from Chelsea,” I shouted to the foreman over the din of the planes and bombs. “What can we do to help?”

They went on bucket-brigading. A china teapot came up on the top of one load, covered with dust but not even chipped.

I tried again. “Who is it down there?”

“Two of ’em,” the man nearest me said. He plucked the teapot off the heap and handed it to a man wearing a balaclava under his helmet. “Man and a woman.”

“We’re from Chelsea,” I shouted over a burst of antiaircraft fire. “What do you want us to do?”

He took the teapot away from the man with the balaclava and handed it to me. “Take this down to the pavement with the other valuables.”

It took me a long while to get down the slope, holding the teapot in one hand and the lid on with the other and trying to keep my footing among the broken bricks, and even longer to find any pavement. The land mine had heaved most of it up, and the street with it.

I finally found it, a square of unbroken pavement in front of a blownout bakery, with the “valuables” neatly lined up against it; a radio, a boot, two serving spoons like the one Colonel Godalming had threatened me with, a lady’s beaded evening bag. A rescue worker was standing guard next to them.

“Halt!” he said, stepping in front of them as I came up, holding a pocket torch or a gun. “No one’s allowed inside the incident perimeter.”

“I’m ARP,” I said hastily. “Jack Harker. Chelsea.” I held up the teapot. “They sent me down with this.”

It was a torch. He flicked it on and off, an eyeblink. “Sorry,” he said. “We’ve had a good deal of looting recently.” He took the teapot and placed it at the end of the line next to the evening bag. “Caught a man last week going through the pockets of the bodies laid out in the street waiting for the mortuary van. Terrible how some people will take advantage of something like this.”

I went back up to where the rescue workers were digging. Jack was at the mouth of the shaft, hauling buckets up and handing them back. I got in line behind him.

“Have they found them yet?” I asked him as soon as there was a lull in the bombing.

“Quiet!” a voice shouted from the hole, and the man in the balaclava repeated, “Quiet, everyone! We must have absolute quiet!”

Everyone stopped working and listened. Jack had handed me a bucket full of bricks, and the handle cut into my hands. For a second there was absolute silence, and then the drone of a plane and the distant swish and crump of an HE.

“Don’t worry,” the voice from the hole shouted, “we’re nearly there.” The buckets began coming up out of the hole again.

I hadn’t heard anything, but apparently down in the shaft they had, a voice or the sound of tapping, and I felt relieved, both that one of them at least was still alive, and that the diggers were on course. I’d been on an incident in October where we’d had to stop halfway down and sink a new shaft because the rubble kept distorting and displacing the sound. Even if the shaft was directly above the victim, it tended to go crooked in working past obstacles, and the only way to keep it straight was with frequent soundings. I thought of Jack digging for Colonel Godalming with the bannister. He hadn’t taken any soundings at all. He had seemed to know exactly where he was going.

The men in the shaft called for the jack again, and Jack and I lowered it down to them. As the man below it reached up to take it, Jack stopped. He raised his head, as if he were listening.

“What is it?” I said. I couldn’t hear anything but the ack-ack guns in Hyde Park. “Did you hear someone calling?”

“Where’s the bloody jack?” the foreman shouted.

“It’s too late,” Jack said to me. “They’re dead.”

“Come along, get it down here,” the foreman shouted. “We haven’t got all day.”

He handed the jack down.

“Quiet,” the foreman shouted, and above us, like a ghostly echo, we could hear the balaclava call, “Quiet, please everyone.”

A church clock began to chime and I could hear the balaclava say irritatedly, “We must have absolute quiet.”

The clock chimed four and stopped, and there was a skittering sound of dirt falling on metal. Then silence, and a faint sound.

“Quiet!” the foreman called again, and there was another silence, and the sound again. A whimper. Or a moan. “We hear you,” he shouted. “Don’t be afraid.”

“One of them’s still alive,” I said.

Jack didn’t say anything.

“We just heard them,” I said angrily.

Jack shook his head.

“We’ll need lumber for bracing,” the man in the balaclava said to Jack, and I expected him to tell him it was no use, but he went off immediately and came back dragging a white-painted bookcase.

It still had three books in it. I helped Jack and the balaclava knock the shelves out of the case and then took the books down to the store of “valuables.” The guard was sitting on the pavement going through the beaded evening bag.

“Taking inventory,” he said, scrambling up hastily. He jammed a lipstick and a handkerchief into the bag. “So’s to make certain nothing gets stolen.”

“I’ve brought you something to read,” I said, and laid the books next to the teapot. “Crime and Punishment.”

I toiled back up the hill and helped Jack lower the bookshelves down the shaft and after a few minutes buckets began coming up again. We reformed our scraggly bucket brigade, the balaclava at the head of it and me and then Jack at its end.

The all-clear went. As soon as it wound down, the foreman took another sounding. This time we didn’t hear anything, and when the buckets started again I handed them to Jack without looking at him.

It began to get light in the east, a slow graying of the hills above us. Two of them, several stories high, stood where the row houses that had escaped the night before had been, and we were still in their shadow, though I could see the shaft now, with the end of one of the white bookshelves sticking up from it like a gravestone.

The buckets began to come more slowly.

“Put out your cigarettes!” the foreman called up, and we all stopped, trying to catch the smell of gas. If they were dead, as Jack had said, it was most likely gas leaking in from the broken mains that had killed them, and not internal injuries. The week before we had brought up a boy and his dog, not a scratch on them. The dog had barked and whimpered almost up to when we found them, and the ambulance driver said she thought they’d only been dead a few minutes.

I couldn’t smell any gas and after a minute the foreman said excitedly, “I see them!”

The balaclava leaned over the shaft, his hands on his knees. “Are they alive?”

“Yes! Fetch an ambulance!”

The balaclava went leaping down the hill, skidding on broken bricks that skittered down in a minor avalanche.

I knelt over the shaft. “Will they need a stretcher?” I called down.

“No,” the foreman said, and I knew by the sound of his voice they were dead.

“Both of them?” I said.

“Yes.”

I stood up. “How did you know they were dead?” I said, turning to look at Jack. “How did—”

He wasn’t there. I looked down the hill. The balaclava was nearly to the bottom—grabbing at a broken window sash to stop his headlong descent, his wake a smoky cloud of brick dust—but Jack was nowhere to be seen.

It was nearly dawn. I could see the gray hills and at the far end of them the warden and his “valuables.” There was another rescue party on the third hill over, still digging. I could see Swales handing down a bucket.

“Give a hand here,” the foreman said impatiently and hoisted the jack up to me. I hauled it over to the side and then came back and helped the foreman out of the shaft. His hands were filthy, covered in reddish-brown mud.

“Was it the gas that killed them?” I asked, even though he was already pulling out a packet of cigarettes.

“No,” he said, shaking a cigarette out and taking it between his teeth. He patted the front of his coverall, leaving red stains.

“How long have they been dead?” I asked.

He found his matches, struck one, and lit the cigarette. “Shortly after we last heard them, I should say,” he said, and I thought, but they were already dead by then. And Jack knew it. “They’ve been dead at least two hours.”

I looked at my watch. I read a little past six. “But the mine didn’t kill them?”

He took the cigarette between his fingers and blew a long puff of smoke. When he put the cigarette back in his mouth there was a red smear on it. “Loss of blood.”

The next night the Luftwaffe was early. I hadn’t gotten much sleep after the incident. Morris had fretted about his son the whole day and Swales had teased Renfrew mercilessly. “Goering’s found out about your spying,” he said, “And now he’s sent his Stukas after you.”

I finally went up to the third floor and tried to sleep in the spotter’s chair, but it was too light. The afternoon was cloudy, and the fires burning in the East End gave the sky a nasty reddish cast.

Someone had left a copy of Twickenham’s Twitterings on the floor. I read the article on the walking dead again, and then, still unable to sleep, the rest of the newssheet. There was an account of Hitler’s invasion of Transylvania, and a recipe for butterless strawberry tart, and the account of the crime rate. “London is currently the perfect place for the criminal element,” Nelson was quoted as saying. “We must constantly be on the lookout for wrongdoing.”

Below the recipe was a story about a Scottish terrier named Bonny Charlie who had barked and scrabbled wildly at the ruins of a collapsed house till wardens heeded his cries, dug down, and discovered two unharmed children.

I must have fallen asleep reading that because the next thing I knew Morris was shaking me and telling me the sirens had gone. It was only five o’clock.

At half-past we had an HE in our sector. It was just three blocks from the post, and the walls shook and plaster rained down on Twickenham’s typewriter and on Renfrew, lying awake in his cot.

“Frivolities, my foot,” Mrs. Lucy muttered as we dived for our tin hats. “We need those reinforcing beams.”

The part-times hadn’t come on duty yet. Mrs. Lucy left Renfrew to send them on. We knew exactly where the incident was—Morris had been looking in that direction when it went—but even so we had difficulty finding it. It was still evening, but by the time we had gone half a block, it was pitch black.

The first time that had happened, I thought it was some sort of afterblindness from the blast, but it’s only the brick and plaster dust from the collapsed buildings. It rises up in a haze that’s darker than any blackout curtain, obscuring everything. When Mrs. Lucy set up shop on a stretch of sidewalk and switched on the blue incident light it glowed spectrally in the manmade fog.

“Only two families still in the street,” she said, holding the register up to the light. “The Kirkcuddy family and the Hodgsons.”

“Are they an old couple?” Morris asked, appearing suddenly out of the fog.

She peered at the register. “Yes. Pensioners.”

“I found them,” he said in that flat voice that meant they were dead. “Blast.”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “The Kirkcuddys are a mother and two children. They’ve an Anderson shelter.” She held the register closer to the blue light. “Everyone else has been using the tube shelter.” She unfolded a map and showed us where the Kirkcuddys’ backyard had been, but it was no help. We spent the next hour wandering blindly over the mounds, listening for sounds that were impossible to hear over the Luftwaffe’s comments and the ack-ack’s replies.

Petersby showed up a little past eight and Jack a few minutes later, and Mrs. Lucy set them to wandering in the fog too.

“Over here,” Jack shouted almost immediately, and my heart gave an odd jerk.

“Oh, good, he’s heard them,” Mrs. Lucy said. “Jack, go and find him.”

“Over here,” he called again, and I started off in the direction of his voice, almost afraid of what I would find, but I hadn’t gone ten steps before I could hear it, too. A baby crying, and a hollow, echoing sound like someone banging a fist against tin.

“Don’t stop,” Vi shouted. She was kneeling next to Jack in a shallow crater. “Keep making noise. We’re coming.” She looked up at me. “Tell Mrs. Lucy to ring the rescue squad.”

I blundered my way back to Mrs. Lucy through the darkness. She had already rung up the rescue squad. She sent me to Sloane Square to make sure the rest of the inhabitants of the block were safely there.

The dust had lifted a little but not enough for me to see where I was going. I pitched off a curb into the street and tripped over a pile of debris and then a body. When I shone my torch on it, I saw it was the girl I had walked to the shelter three nights before.

She was sitting against the tiled entrance to the station, still holding a dress on a hanger in her limp hand. The old stewpot at John Lewis’s never let her off even a minute before closing, and the Luftwaffe had been early. She had been killed by the blast, or by flying glass. Her face and neck and hands were covered with tiny cuts, and glass crunched underfoot when I moved her legs together.

I went back to the incident and waited for the mortuary van and went with them to the shelter. It took me three hours to find the families on my list. By the time I got back to the incident, the rescue squad was five feet down.

“They’re nearly there,” Vi said, dumping a basket on the far side of the crater. “All that’s coming up now is dirt and the occasional rosebush.”

“Where’s Jack?” I said.

“He went for a saw.” She took the basket back and handed it to one of the rescue squad, who had to put his cigarette into his mouth to free his hands before he could take it. “There was a board, but they dug past it.”

I leaned over the table. I could hear the sound of banging but not the baby. “Are they still alive?”

She shook her head. “We haven’t heard the baby for an hour or so. We keep calling, but there’s no answer. We’re afraid the banging may be something mechanical.”

I wondered if they were dead and Jack, knowing it, had not gone for a saw at all but off to that day job of his.

Swales came up. “Guess who’s in hospital?” he said.

“Who?” Vi said.

“Olmwood. Nelson had his wardens out walking patrols during a raid, and he caught a piece of shrapnel from one of the ack-acks in the leg. Nearly took it off.”

The rescue worker with the cigarette handed a heaping basket to Vi. She took it, staggering a little under the weight, and carried it off.

“You’d better not let Nelson see you working like that,” Swales called after her, “or he’ll have you transferred to his sector. Where’s Morris?” he said and went off, presumably to tell him and whoever else he could find about Olmwood.

Jack came up, carrying the saw.

“They don’t need it,” the rescue worker said, the cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth. “Mobile’s here,” he said and went off for a cup of tea.

Jack knelt and handed the saw down the hole.

“Are they still alive?” I asked.

Jack leaned over the hole, his hands clutching the edges. The banging was incredibly loud. It must have been deafening inside the Anderson. Jack stared into the hole as if he heard neither the banging nor my voice.

He stood up, still looking into the hole. “They’re farther to the left,” he said.

How can they be farther to the left? I thought. We can hear them. They’re directly under us. “Are they alive?” I said.

“Yes.”

Swales came back. “He’s a spy, that’s what he is,” he said. “Hitler sent him here to kill off our best men one by one. I told you his name was Adolf Von Nelson.”

The Kirkcuddys were farther to the left. The rescue squad had to widen the tunnel, cut the top of the Anderson open and pry it back, like opening a can of tomatoes. It took till nine o’clock in the morning, but they were all alive.

Jack left sometime before it got light. I didn’t see him go. Swales was telling me about Olmwood’s injury, and when I turned around, Jack was gone.

“Has Jack told you where this job of his is that he has to leave so early for?” I asked Vi when I got back to the post.

She had propped a mirror against one of the gas masks and was putting her hair up in pincurls. “No,” she said, dipping a comb in a glass of water and wetting a lock of her hair. “Jack, could you reach me my bobby pins? I’ve a date this afternoon, and I want to look my best.”

I pushed the pins across to her. “What sort of job is it? Did Jack say?”

“No. Some sort of war work, I should think.” She wound a lock of hair around her finger. “He’s had ten kills. Four Stukas and six 109’s.”

I sat down next to Twickenham, who was typing up the incident report. “Have you interviewed Jack yet?”

“When would I have had time?” Twickenham asked. “We haven’t had a quiet night since he came.”

Renfrew shuffled in from the other room. He had a blanket wrapped round him Indian-style and a bedspread over his shoulders. He looked terrible, pale and drawn as a ghost.

“Would you like some breakfast?” Vi asked, prying a pin open with her teeth.

He shook his head. “Did Nelson approve the reinforcements?”

“No,” Twickenham said in spite of Vi’s signaling him not to.

“You must tell Nelson it’s an emergency,” he said, hugging the blanket to him as if he were cold. “I know why they’re after me. It was before the war. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia I wrote a letter to the Times.”

I was grateful Swales wasn’t there. A letter to the Times.

“Come, now, why don’t you go and lie down for a bit?” Vi said, securing a curl with a bobby pin as she stood up. “You’re tired, that’s all, and that’s what’s getting you so worried. They don’t even get the Times over there.”

She took his arm, and he went docilely with her into the other room. I heard him say, “I called him a lowland bully. In the letter.” The person suffering from severe sleep loss may hallucinate, hearing voices, seeing visions, or believing fantastical things.

“Has he mentioned what sort of day job he has?” I asked Twickenham.

“Who?” he asked, still typing.

“Jack.”

“No, but whatever it is, let’s hope he’s as good at it as he is at finding bodies.” He stopped and peered at what he’d just typed. “This makes five, doesn’t it?”

Vi came back. “And we’d best not let von Nelson find out about it,” she said. She sat down and dipped the comb into the glass of water. “He’d take him like he took Olmwood, and we’re already shorthanded, with Renfrew the way he is.”

Mrs. Lucy came in carrying the incident light, disappeared into the pantry with it, and came out again carrying an application form. “Might I use the typewriter, Mr. Twickenham?” she asked.

He pulled his sheet of paper out of the typewriter and stood up. Mrs. Lucy sat down, rolled in the form, and began typing. “I’ve decided to apply directly to Civil Defence for reinforcements,” she said.

“What sort of day job does Jack have?” I asked her.

“War work,” she said. She pulled the application out, turned it over, rolled it back in. “Jack, would you mind taking this over to headquarters?”

“Works days,” Vi said, making a pin curl on the back of her head. “Raids every night. When does he sleep?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“He’d best be careful,” she said. “Or he’ll turn into one of the walking dead, like Renfrew.”

Mrs. Lucy signed the application form, folded it in half, and gave it to me. I took it to Civil Defence headquarters and spent half a day trying to find the right office to give it to.

“It’s not the correct form,” the sixth girl said. “She needs to file an A-114, Exterior Improvements.”

“It’s not exterior,” I said. “The post is applying for reinforcing beams for the cellar.”

“Reinforcements are classified as exterior improvements,” she said. She handed me the form, which looked identical to the one Mrs. Lucy had already filled in, and I left.

On the way out, Nelson stopped me. I thought he was going to tell me my uniform was a disgrace again, but instead he pointed to my tin hat and demanded, “Why aren’t you wearing a regulation helmet, warden? ‘All ARP wardens shall wear a helmet with the letter W in red on the front,’ ” he quoted.

I took my hat off and looked at it. The red W had partly chipped away so that it looked like a V.

“What post are you?” he barked.

“Forty-eight. Chelsea,” I said and wondered if he expected me to salute.

“Mrs. Lucy is your warden,” he said disgustedly, and I expected his next question to be what I was doing at Civil Defence, but instead he said, “I heard about Colonel Godalming. Your post has been having good luck locating casualties these last few raids.”

“Yes, sir,” was obviously the wrong answer, and “no, sir,” would make him suspicious. “We found three people in an Anderson last night,” I said. “One of the children had the wits to bang on the roof with a pair of pliers.”

“I’ve heard that the person finding them is a new man, Settle.” He sounded friendly, almost jovial. Like Hitler at Munich.

“Settle?” I said blankly. “Mrs. Lucy was the one who found the Anderson.”

Morris’s son Quincy’s surprise was the Victoria Cross. “A medal,” he said over and over. “Who’d have thought it, my Quincy with a medal? Fifteen planes he shot down.”

It had been presented at a special ceremony at Quincy’s commanding officer’s headquarters, and the Duchess of York herself had been there. Morris had pinned the medal on himself.

“I wore my suit,” he told us for the hundredth time, “in case he was in trouble I wanted to make a good impression, and a good thing, too. What would the Duchess of York have thought if I’d gone looking like this?”

He looked pretty bad. We all did. We’d had two breadbaskets of incendiaries, one right after the other, and Vi had been on watch. We had had to save the butcher’s again, and a baker’s two blocks farther down, and a thirteenth century crucifix.

“I told him it went through the altar roof,” Vi had said disgustedly when she and I finally got it out. “Your friend Jack couldn’t find an incendiary if it fell on him.”

“You told Jack the incendiary came down on the church?” I said, looking up at the carved wooden figure. The bottom of the cross was blackened, and Christ’s nailed feet, as if he had been burnt at the stake instead of crucified.

“Yes,” she said. “I even told him it was the altar.” She looked back up the nave. “And he could have seen it as soon as he came into the church.”

“What did he say? That it wasn’t there?”

Vi was looking speculatively up at the roof. “It could have been caught in the rafters and come down after. It hardly matters, does it? We put it out. Come on, let’s get back to the post,” she said, shivering. “I’m freezing.”

I was freezing, too. We were both sopping wet. The AFS had stormed up after we had the fire under control and sprayed everything in sight with icy water.

“Pinned it on myself, I did,” Morris said. “The Duchess of York kissed him on both cheeks and said he was the pride of England.” He had brought a bottle of wine to celebrate the Cross. He got Renfrew up and brought him to the table, draped in his blankets, and ordered Twickenham to put his typewriter away. Petersby brought in extra chairs, and Mrs. Lucy went upstairs to get her crystal.

“Only eight, I’m afraid,” she said, coming down with the stemmed goblets in her blackened hands. “The Germans have broken the rest. Who’s willing to make do with the tooth glass?”

“I don’t care for any, thank you,” Jack said. “I don’t drink.”

“What’s that?” Morris said jovially. He had taken off his tin helmet, and below the white line it left he looked like he was wearing blackface in a music hall show. “You’ve got to toast my boy at least. Just imagine. My Quincy with a medal.”

Mrs. Lucy rinsed out the porcelain tooth glass and handed it to Vi, who was pouring out the wine. They passed the goblets round. Jack took the tooth glass.

“To my son Quincy, the best pilot in the RAF!” Morris said, raising his goblet.

“May he shoot down the entire Luftwaffe!” Swales shouted, “and put an end to this bloody war!”

“So a man can get a decent night’s sleep!” Renfrew said, and everyone laughed.

We drank. Jack raised his glass with the others but when Vi took the bottle round again, he put his hand over the mouth of it.

“Just think of it,” Morris said. “My son Quincy with a medal. He had his troubles in school, in with a bad lot, problems with the police. I worried about him, I did, wondered what he’d come to, and then this war comes along and here he is a hero.”

“To heroes!” Petersby said.

We drank again, and Vi dribbled out the last of the wine into Morris’s glass. “That’s the lot, I’m afraid.” She brightened. “I’ve a bottle of cherry cordial Charlie gave me.”

Mrs. Lucy made a face. “Just a minute,” she said, disappeared into the pantry, and came back with two cobwebbed bottles of port, which she poured out generously and a little sloppily.

“The presence of intoxicating beverages on post is strictly forbidden,” she said. “A fine of five shillings will be imposed for a first offense, one pound for subsequent offenses.” She took out a pound note and laid it on the table. “I wonder what Nelson was before the war?”

“A monster,” Vi said.

I looked across at Jack. He still had his hand over his glass.

“A headmaster,” Swales said. “No, I’ve got it. An Inland Revenue collector!”

Everyone laughed.

“I was a horrid person before the war,” Mrs. Lucy said.

Vi giggled.

“I was a deaconess, one of those dreadful women who arranges the flowers in the sanctuary and gets up jumble sales and bullies the rector. ‘The Terror of the Churchwardens,’ that’s what I used to be. I was determined that they should put the hymnals front side out on the backs of the pews. Morris knows. He sang in the choir.”

“It’s true,” Morris said. “She used to instruct the choir on the proper way to line up.”

I tried to imagine her as a stickler, as a petty tyrant like Nelson, and failed.

“Sometimes it takes something dreadful like a war for one to find one’s proper job,” she said, staring at her glass.

“To the war!” Swales said gaily.

“I’m not sure we should toast something so terrible as that,” Twickenham said doubtfully.

“It isn’t all that terrible,” Vi said. “I mean, without it, we wouldn’t all be here together, would we?”

“And you’d never have met all those pilots of yours, would you, Vi?” Swales said.

“There’s nothing wrong with making the best of a bad job,” Vi said, miffed.

“Some people do more than that,” Swales said. “Some people take positive advantage of the war. Like Colonel Godalming. I had a word with one of the AFS volunteers. Seems the Colonel didn’t come back for his hunting rifle after all.” He leaned forward confidingly. “Seems he was having a bit on with a blonde dancer from the Windmill. Seems his wife thought he was out shooting grouse in Surrey and now she’s asking all sorts of unpleasant questions.”

“He’s not the only one taking advantage,” Morris said. “That night you got the Kirkcuddys out, Jack, I found an old couple killed by blast. I put them by the road for the mortuary van, and later I saw somebody over there, bending over the bodies, doing something to them. I thought, he must be straightening them out before the rigor sets in, but then it comes to me. He’s robbing them. Dead bodies.”

“And who’s to say they were killed by blast?” Swales said. “Who’s to say they weren’t murdered? There’s lots of bodies, aren’t there, and nobody looks close at them? Who’s to say they were all killed by the Germans?”

“How did we get on to this?” Petersby said. “We’re supposed to be celebrating Quincy Morris’s medal, not talking about murderers.” He raised his glass. “To Quincy Morris!”

“And the RAF!” Vi said.

“To making the best of a bad job,” Mrs. Lucy said.

“Hear, hear,” Jack said softly and raised his glass, but he still didn’t drink.

Jack found four people in the next three days. I did not hear any of them until well after we had started digging, and the last one, a fat woman in striped pyjamas and a pink hairnet, I never did hear, though she said when we brought her up that she had “called and called between prayers.”

Twickenham wrote it all up for the Twitterings, tossing out the article on Quincy Morris’s medal and typing up a new master’s. When Mrs. Lucy borrowed the typewriter to fill in the A-114, she said, “What’s this?”

“My lead story,” he said. “ ‘Settle Finds Four in Rubble.’ ” He handed her the master’s.

“ ‘Jack Settle, the newest addition to Post Forty-Eight,’ ” she read, “ ‘located four air raid victims last night. “I wanted to be useful,” says the modest Mr. Settle when asked why he came to London from Yorkshire. And he’s been useful since his very first night on the job when he—’ ” She handed it back to him. “Sorry. You can’t print that. Nelson’s been nosing about, asking questions. He’s already taken one of my wardens and nearly gotten him killed. I won’t let him have another.”

“That’s censorship!” Twickenham said, outraged.

“There’s a war on,” Mrs. Lucy said, “and we’re shorthanded. I’ve relieved Mr. Renfrew of duty. He’s going to stay with his sister in Birmingham. And I wouldn’t let Nelson have another one of my wardens if we were overstaffed. He’s already gotten Olmwood nearly killed.”

She handed me the A-l14 and asked me to take it to Civil Defence. I did. The girl I had spoken to wasn’t there, and the girl who was said, “This is for interior improvements. You need to fill out a D-268.”

“I did,” I said, “and I was told that reinforcements qualified as exterior improvements.”

“Only if they’re on the outside.” She handed me a D-268. “Sorry,” she said apologetically. “I’d help you if I could, but my boss is a stickler for the correct forms.”

“There’s something else you can do for me,” I said. “I was supposed to take one of our part-times a message at his day job, but I’ve lost the address. If you could look it up for me. Jack Settle? If not, I’ve got to go all the way back to Chelsea to get it.”

She looked back over her shoulder and then said, “Wait a mo,” and darted down the hall. She came back with a sheet of paper.

“Settle?” she said. “Post Forty Eight, Chelsea?”

“That’s the one,” I said. “I need his work address.”

“He hasn’t got one.”

He had left the incident while we were still getting the fat woman out. It was starting to get light. We had a rope under her, and a makeshift winch, and he had abruptly handed his end to Swales and said, “I’ve got to leave for my day job.”

“You’re certain?” I said.

“I’m certain.” She handed me the sheet of paper. It was Jack’s approval for employment as a part-time warden, signed by Mrs. Lucy. The spaces for work and home addresses had been left blank. “This is all there was in the file,” she said. “No work permit, no identity card, not even a ration card. We keep copies of all that, so he must not have a job.”

I took the D-268 back to the post, but Mrs. Lucy wasn’t there. “One of Nelson’s wardens came round with a new regulation,” Twickenham said, running off copies on the duplicating machine. “All wardens will be out on patrol unless on telephone or spotter duty. All wardens. She went off to give him what-for,” he said, sounding pleased. He was apparently over his anger at her for censoring his story on Jack.

I picked up one of the still-wet copies of the newssheet. The lead story was about Hitler’s invasion of Greece. He had put the article about Quincy Morris’s medal down in the right-hand corner under a list of “What the War Has Done For Us.” Number one was, “It’s made us discover capabilities we didn’t know we had.”

“She called him a murderer,” Twickenham said.

A murderer.

“What did you want to tell her?” Twickenham said.

That Jack doesn’t have a job, I thought. Or a ration card. That he didn’t put out the incendiary in the church even though Vi told him it had gone through the altar roof. That he knew the Anderson was farther to the left.

“It’s still the wrong form,” I said, taking out the D-268.

“That’s easily remedied,” he said. He rolled the application into the typewriter, typed for a few minutes, handed it back to me.

“Mrs. Lucy has to sign it,” I said, and he snatched it back, whipped out a fountain pen, and signed her name.

“What were you before the war?” I asked. “A forger?”

“You’d be surprised.” He handed the form back to me. “You look dreadful, Jack. Have you gotten any sleep this last week?”

“When would I have had the chance?”

“Why don’t you lie down now while no one’s here?” he said, reaching for my arm the way Vi had reached for Renfrew’s. “I’ll take the form back to Civil Defence for you.”

I shook off his arm. “I’m all right.”

I walked back to Civil Defence. The girl who had tried to find Jack’s file wasn’t there, and the first girl was. I was sorry I hadn’t brought the A-114 along as well, but she scrutinized the form without comment and stamped the back. “It will take approximately six weeks to process,” she said.

“Six weeks!” I said. “Hitler could have invaded the entire Empire by then.”

“In that case, you’ll very likely have to file a different form.”

I didn’t go back to the post. Mrs, Lucy would doubtless be back by the time I returned, but what could I say to her? I suspect Jack. Of what? Of not liking lamb chops and cake? Of having to leave early for work? Of rescuing children from the rubble?

He had said he had a job and the girl couldn’t find his work permit, but it took the Civil Defence six weeks to process a request for a few beams. It would probably take them till the end of the war to file the work permits. Or perhaps his had been in the file, and the girl had missed it. Loss of sleep can result in mistakes on the job. And odd fixations.

I walked to Sloane Square Station. There was no sign of where the young woman had been. They had even swept the glass up. Her stewpot of a boss at John Lewis’s never let her go till closing time, even if the sirens had gone, even if it was dark. She had had to hurry through the blacked-out streets all alone, carrying her dress for the next day on a hanger, listening to the guns and trying to make out how far off the planes were. If someone had been stalking her, she would never have heard him, never have seen him in the darkness. Whoever found her would think she had been killed by flying glass.

He doesn’t eat, I would say to Mrs. Lucy. He didn’t put out an incendiary in a church. He always leaves the incidents before dawn, even when we don’t have the casualties up. The Luftwaffe is trying to kill me. It was a letter I wrote to the Times. The walking dead may hallucinate, hearing voices, seeing visions, or believing fantastical things.

The sirens went. I must have been standing there for hours, staring at the sidewalk. I went back to the post. Mrs. Lucy was there. “You look dreadful, Jack. How long’s it been since you’ve slept?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Where’s Jack?”

“On watch,” Mrs. Lucy said.

“You’d best be careful,” Vi said, setting chocolates on a plate. “Or you’ll turn into one of the walking dead. Would you like a sweet? Eddie gave them to me.”

The telephone rang. Mrs. Lucy answered it, spoke a minute, hung up. “Slaney needs help on an incident,” she said. “They’ve asked for Jack.”

She sent both of us. We found the incident without any trouble. There was no dust cloud, no smell except from a fire burning off to one side. “This didn’t just happen,” I said. “It’s a day old at least.”

I was wrong. It was two days old. The rescue squads had been working straight through, and there were still at least thirty people unaccounted for. Some of the rescue squad were digging halfheartedly halfway up a mound, but most of them were standing about, smoking and looking like they were casualties themselves. Jack went up to where the men were digging, shook his head, and set off across the mound.

“Heard you had a bodysniffer,” one of the smokers said to me. “They’ve got one in Whitechapel, too. Crawls round the incident on his hands and knees, sniffing like a bloodhound. Yours do that?”

“No,” I said.

“Over here,” Jack said.

“Says he can read their minds, the one in Whitechapel does,” he said, putting out his cigarette and taking up a pickaxe. He clambered up the slope to where Jack was already digging.

It was easy to see because of the fire, and fairly easy to dig, but halfway down we struck the massive headboard of a bed.

“We’ll have to go in from the side,” Jack said.

“The hell with that,” the man who’d told me about the bodysniffer said. “How do you know somebody’s down there? I don’t hear anything.”

Jack didn’t answer him. He moved down the slope and began digging into its side.

“They’ve been in there two days,” the man said. “They’re dead and I’m not getting overtime.” He flung down the pickaxe and stalked off to the mobile canteen. Jack didn’t even notice he was gone. He handed me baskets, and I emptied them, and occasionally Jack said, “Saw,” or “Tinsnips,” and I handed them to him. I was off getting the stretcher when he brought her out.

She was perhaps thirteen. She was wearing a white nightgown, or perhaps it only looked white because of the plaster dust. Jack’s face was ghastly with it. He had picked her up in his arms, and she had fastened her arms about his neck and buried her face against his shoulder. They were both outlined by the fire.

I brought the stretcher up, and Jack knelt down and tried to lay her on it, but she would not let go of his neck. “It’s all right,” he said gently. “You’re safe now.”

He unclasped her hands and folded them on her chest. Her nightgown was streaked with dried blood, but it didn’t seem to be hers. I wondered who else had been in there with her. “What’s your name?” Jack said.

“Mina,” she said. It was no more than a whisper.

“My name’s Jack,” he said. He nodded at me. “So’s his. We’re going to carry you down to the ambulance now. Don’t be afraid. You’re safe now.”

The ambulance wasn’t there yet. We laid the stretcher on the sidewalk, and I went over to the incident officer to see if it was on its way. Before I could get back, somebody shouted, “Here’s another,” and I went and helped dig out a hand that the foreman had found, and then the body all the blood had come from. When I looked down the hill the girl was still lying there on the stretcher, and Jack was bending over it.

I went out to Whitechapel to see the bodysniffer the next day. He wasn’t there. “He’s a part-time,” the post warden told me, clearing off a chair so I could sit down. The post was a mess, dirty clothes and dishes everywhere.

An old woman in a print wrapper was frying up kidneys in a skillet. “Works days in munitions out to Dorking,” she said.

“How exactly is he able to locate the bodies?” I asked. “I heard—”

“That he reads their minds?” the woman said. She scraped the kidneys onto a plate and handed it to the post warden. “He’s heard it, too, more’s the pity, and it’s gone straight to his head. ‘I can feel them under here,’ he says to the rescue squads, like he was Houdini or something, and points to where they’re supposed to start digging.”

“Then how does he find them?”

“Luck,” the warden said.

“I think he smells ’em,” the woman said. “That’s why they call ’em bodysniffers.”

The warden snorted. “Over the stink the jerries put in the bombs and the gas and all the rest of it?”

“If he were a—” I said and didn’t finish it. “If he had an acute sense of smell, perhaps he could smell the blood.”

“You can’t even smell the bodies when they’ve been dead a week,” the warden said, his mouth full of kidneys. “He hears them screaming, same as us.”

“He’s got better hearing than us,” the woman said, switching happily to his theory. “Most of us are half-deaf from the guns, and he isn’t.”

I hadn’t been able to hear the fat woman in the pink hairnet, although she’d said she had called for help. But Jack, just down from Yorkshire, where they hadn’t been deafened by anti-aircraft guns for weeks, could. There was nothing sinister about it. Some people had better hearing than others.

“We pulled an army colonel out last week who claimed he didn’t cry out,” I said.

“He’s lying,” the warden said, sawing at a kidney. “We had a nanny, two days ago, prim and proper as you please, swore the whole time we was getting her out, words to make a sailor blush, and then claimed she didn’t. ‘Unclean words have never crossed my lips and never will,’ she says to me.” He brandished his fork at me. “Your colonel cried out, all right. He just won’t admit it.”

“I didn’t make a sound,” Colonel Godalming had said, brandishing his serving spoon. “Knew it wouldn’t do any good,” and perhaps the warden was right, and it was only bluster. But he hadn’t wanted his wife to know he was in London, to find out about the dancer at the Windmill. He had had good reason to keep silent, to try to dig himself out.

I went home and rang up a girl I knew in the ambulance service and asked her to find out where they had taken Mina. She rang me back with the answer in a few minutes, and I took the tube over to St. George’s Hospital. The others had all cried out, or banged on the roof of the Anderson, except Mina. She had been so frightened when Jack got her out she couldn’t speak above a whisper, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t cried or whimpered.

“When you were buried last night, did you call for help?” I would ask her, and she would answer me in her mouse voice, “I called and called between prayers. Why?” And I would say, “It’s nothing, an odd fixation brought on by lack of sleep. Jack spends his days in Dorking, at a munitions plant, and has exceptionally acute hearing.” And there is no more truth to my theory than to Renfrew’s belief that the raids were brought on by a letter to the Times.

St. George’s had an entrance marked “Casualty Clearing Station.” I asked the nursing sister behind the desk if I could see Mina.

“She was brought in last night. The James Street incident.”

She looked at a penciled and crossed-over roster. “I don’t show an admission by that name.”

“I’m certain she was brought here,” I said, twisting my head round to read the list. “There isn’t another St. George’s, is there?”

She shook her head and lifted up the roster to look at a second sheet.

“Here she is,” she said, and I had heard the rescue squads use that tone of voice often enough to know what it meant, but that was impossible. She had been under that headboard. The blood on her nightgown hadn’t even been hers.

“I’m so sorry,” the sister said.

“When did she die?” I said.

“This morning,” she said, checking the second list, which was much longer than the first.

“Did anyone else come to see her?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just been on since eleven.”

“What did she die of?”

She looked at me as if I were insane.

“What was the listed cause of death?” I said.

She had to find Mina’s name on the roster again. “Shock due to loss of blood,” she said, and I thanked her and went to find Jack.

He found me. I had gone back to the post and waited till everyone was asleep and Mrs. Lucy had gone upstairs and then sneaked into the pantry to look up Jack’s address in Mrs. Lucy’s files. It had not been there, as I had known it wouldn’t. And if there had been an address, what would it have turned out to be when I went to find it? A gutted house? A mound of rubble?

I had gone to Sloane Square Station, knowing he wouldn’t be there, but having no other place to look. He could have been anywhere. London was full of empty houses, bombed-out cellars, secret places to hide until it got dark. That was why he had come here.

“If I was a bad’n, I’d head straight for London,” Swales had said. But the criminal element weren’t the only ones who had come, drawn by the blackout and the easy pickings and the bodies. Drawn by the blood.

I stood there until it started to get dark, watching two boys scrabble in the gutter for candy that had been blown out of a confectioner’s front window, and then walked back to a doorway down the street from the post, where I could see the door, and waited. The sirens went. Swales left on patrol. Petersby went in. Morris came out, stopping to peer at the sky as if he were looking for his son Quincy. Mrs. Lucy must not have managed to talk Nelson out of the patrols.

It got dark. The searchlights began to crisscross the sky, catching the silver of the barrage balloons. The planes started coming in from the east, a low hum. Vi hurried in, wearing high heels and carrying a box tied with string. Petersby and Twickenham left on patrol. Vi came out, fastening her helmet strap under her chin and eating something.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” Jack said.

I turned around. He had driven up in a lorry marked ATS. He had left the door open and the motor running. “I’ve got the beams,” he said. “For reinforcing the post. The incident we were on last night, all these beams were lying on top, and I asked the owner of the house if I could buy them from him.”

He gestured to the back of the lorry, where jagged ends of wood were sticking out. “Come along then, we can get them up tonight if we hurry.” He started toward the truck. “Where were you? I’ve looked everywhere for you.

“I went to St. George’s Hospital,” I said.

He stopped, his hand on the open door of the truck.

“Mina’s dead,” I said, “but you knew that, didn’t you?”

He didn’t say anything.

“The nurse said she died of loss of blood,” I said. A flare drifted down, lighting his face with a deadly whiteness. “I know what you are.”

“If we hurry, we can get the reinforcements up before the raid starts,” he said. He started to pull the door to.

I put my hand on it to keep him from closing it. “War work,” I said bitterly. “What do you do, make sure you’re alone in the tunnel with them or go to see them in hospital afterward?”

He let go of the door.

“Brilliant stroke, volunteering for the ARP,” I said. “Nobody’s going to suspect the noble air raid warden, especially when he’s so good at locating casualties. And if some of those casualties die later, if somebody’s found dead on the street after a raid, well, it’s only to be expected. There’s a war on.”

The drone overhead got suddenly louder, and a whole shower of flares came down. The searchlights wheeled, trying to find the planes. Jack took hold of my arm.

“Get down,” he said, and tried to drag me into the doorway.

I shook his arm off. “I’d kill you if I could,” I said. “But I can’t, can I?” I waved my hand at the sky. “And neither can they. Your sort don’t die, do they?”

There was a long swish, and the rising scream. “I will kill you, though,” I shouted over it. “If you touch Vi or Mrs. Lucy.”

“Mrs. Lucy,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he said it with astonishment or contempt.

“Or Vi or any of the rest of them. I’ll drive a stake through your heart or whatever it takes,” I said, and the air fell apart.

There was a long sound like an enormous monster growling. It seemed to go on and on. I tried to put my hands over my ears, but I had to hang onto the road to keep from falling. The roar became a scream, and the sidewalk shook itself sharply, and I fell off.

“Are you all right?” Jack said.

I was sitting next to the lorry, which was on its side. The beams had spilled out the back. “Were we hit?” I said.

“No,” he said, but I already knew that, and before he had finished pulling me to my feet, I was running toward the post that we couldn’t see for the dust.

Mrs. Lucy had told Nelson having everyone out on patrol would mean no one could be found in an emergency, but that was not true. They were all there within minutes, Swales and Morris and Violet, clattering up in her high heels, and Petersby. They ran up, one after the other, and then stopped and looked stupidly at the space that had been Mrs. Lucy’s house, as if they couldn’t make out what it was.

“Where’s Renfrew?” Jack said.

“In Birmingham.” Vi said.

“He wasn’t here,” I explained. “He’s on sick leave.” I peered through the smoke and dust, trying to see their faces. “Where’s Twickenham?”

“Here,” he said.

“Where’s Mrs. Lucy?” I said.

“Over here,” Jack said, and pointed down into the rubble.

We dug all night. Two different rescue squads came to help. They called down every half hour, but there was no answer. Vi borrowed a light from somewhere, draped a blue headscarf over it, and set up as incident officer. An ambulance came, sat awhile, left to go to another incident, came back. Nelson took over as incident officer, and Vi came back up to help. “Is she alive?” she asked.

“She’d better be,” I said, looking at Jack.

It began to mist. The planes came over again, dropping flares and incendiaries, but no one stopped work. Twickenham’s typewriter came up in the baskets, and one of Mrs. Lucy’s wine glasses. It began to get light. Jack looked vaguely up at the sky.

“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “You’re not going anywhere.”

At around three Morris thought he heard something, and we stopped and called down, but there was no answer. The mist turned into a drizzle at a little past half past four. I shouted to Mrs. Lucy, and she called back, from far underground, “I’m here.”

“Are you all right?” I shouted.

“My leg’s hurt. I think it’s broken,” she shouted, her voice calm. “I seem to be under the table.”

“Don’t worry,” I shouted. “We’re nearly there.”

The drizzle turned the plaster dust into a slippery, disgusting mess. We had to brace the tunnel repeatedly and cover it with a tarpaulin, and then it was too dark to see to dig. Swales lay above us, holding a pocket torch over our heads so we could see. The Ail-Clear went.

“Jack!” Mrs. Lucy called up.

“Yes!” I shouted.

“Was that the Ail-Clear?”

“Yes,” I shouted. “Don’t worry. We’ll have you out soon now.”

“What time is it?”

It was too dark in the tunnel to see my watch. I made a guess. “A little after five.”

“Is Jack there?”

“Yes.”

“He mustn’t stay,” she said. “Tell him to go home.”

The rain stopped. We ran into one and then another of the oak beams that had reinforced the landing on the fourth floor and had to saw through them. Swales reported that Morris had called Nelson “a bloody murderer.” Vi brought up paper cups of tea.

We called down to Mrs. Lucy, but there wasn’t any answer. “She’s probably dozed off,” Twickenham said, and the others nodded as if they believed him.

We could smell the gas long before we got to her, but Jack kept on digging, and like the others, I told myself that she was all right, that we would get to her in time.

She was not under the table after all, but under part of the pantry door. We had to call for a jack to get it off her. It took Morris a long time to come back with it, but it didn’t matter. She was lying perfectly straight, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes closed as if she were asleep. Her left leg had been taken off at the knee. Jack knelt beside her and cradled her head.

“Keep your hands off her,” I said.

I made Swales come down and help get her out. Vi and Twickenham put her on the stretcher. Petersby went for the ambulance. “She was never a horrid person, you know,” Morris said. “Never.”

It began to rain again, the sky so dark it was impossible to tell whether the sun had come up yet or not. Swales brought a tarp to cover Mrs. Lucy.

Petersby came back. “The ambulance has gone off again,” he said. “I’ve sent for the mortuary van, but they said they doubt they can be here before half past eight.”

I looked at Jack. He was standing over the tarp, his hands slackly at his sides. He looked worse than Renfrew ever had, impossibly tired, his face gray with wet plaster dust. “We’ll wait,” I said.

“There’s no point in all of us standing here in the rain for two hours,” Morris said. “I’ll wait here with the . . . I’ll wait here. Jack,” he turned to him, “go and report to Nelson.”

“I’ll do it,” Vi said. “Jack needs to get to his day job.”

“Is she up?” Nelson said. He clambered over the fourth-floor beams to where we were standing. “Is she dead?” He glared at Morris and then at my hat, and I wondered if he were going to reprimand me for the condition of my uniform.

“Which of you found her?” he demanded.

I looked at Jack. “Settle did,” I said. “He’s a regular wonder. He’s found six this week alone.”

Two days after Mrs. Lucy’s funeral, a memo came through from Civil Defence transferring Jack to Nelson’s post, and I got my official notice to report for duty. I was sent to basic training and then on to Portsmouth. Vi sent me food packets, and Twickenham posted me copies of his Twitterings.

The post had relocated across the street from the butcher’s in a house belonging to a Miss Arthur, who had subsequently joined the post. “Miss Arthur loves knitting and flower arranging and will make a valuable addition to our brave little band,” Twickenham had written. Vi had got engaged to a pilot in the RAF. Hitler had bombed Birmingham. Jack, in Nelson’s post now, had saved sixteen people in one week, a record for the ARP.

After two weeks I was shipped to North Africa, out of the reach of the mails. When I finally got Morris’s letter, it was three months old. Jack had been killed while rescuing a child at an incident. A delayed-action bomb had fallen nearby, but “that bloody murderer Nelson” had refused to allow the rescue squad to evacuate. The D.A. had gone off, the tunnel Jack was working in had collapsed, and he’d been killed. They had gotten the child out, though, and she was unhurt except for a few cuts.

But he isn’t dead, I thought. It’s impossible to kill him. I had tried, but even betraying him to von Nelson hadn’t worked, and he was still somewhere in London, hidden by the blackout and the noise of the bombs and the number of dead bodies, and who would notice a few more?

In January I helped take out a tank battalion at Tobruk. I killed nine Germans before I caught a piece of shrapnel. I was shipped to Gibraltar to hospital, where the rest of my mail caught up with me. Vi had gotten married, the raids had let up considerably, Jack had been awarded the George Cross posthumously.

In March I was sent back to hospital in England for surgery. It was near North Weald, where Morris’s son Quincy was stationed. He came to see me after the surgery. He looked the very picture of an RAF pilot, firm-jawed, steely eyed, rakish grin, not at all like a delinquent minor. He was flying nightly bombing missions over Germany, he told me, “giving Hitler a bit of our own back.”

“I hear you’re to get a medal,” he said, looking at the wall above my head as if he expected to see violets painted there, nine of them, one for each kill.

I asked him about his father. He was fine, he told me. He’d been appointed Senior Warden. “I admire you ARP people,” he said, “saving lives and all that.”

He meant it. He was flying nightly bombing missions over Germany, reducing their cities to rubble, creating incidents for their air raid wardens to scrabble through looking for dead children. I wondered if they had body-sniffers there, too, and if they were monsters like Jack.

“Dad wrote to me about your friend Jack,” Quincy said. “It must have been rough, hearing so far away from home and all.”

He looked genuinely sympathetic, and I supposed he was. He had shot down twenty-eight planes and killed who knows how many fat women in hairnets and thirteen-year-old girls, but no one had ever thought to call him a monster. The Duchess of York had called him the pride of England and kissed him on both cheeks.

“I went with Dad to Vi Westren’s wedding,” he said. “Pretty as a picture she was.”

I thought of Vi, with her pincurls and her plain face. It was as though the war had transformed her into someone completely different, someone pretty and sought-after.

“There were strawberries and two kinds of cake,” he said. “One of the wardens—Tottenham?—read a poem in honor of the happy couple. Wrote it himself.”

It was as if the war had transformed Twickenham as well, and Mrs. Lucy, who had been the terror of the churchwardens. What the War Has Done for Us. But it hadn’t transformed them. All that was wanted was for someone to give Vi a bit of attention for all her latent sweetness to blossom. Every girl is pretty when she knows she’s sought after.

Twickenham had always longed to be a writer. Nelson had always been a bully and a stickler, and Mrs. Lucy, in spite of what she said, had never been either. “Sometimes it takes something dreadful like a war for one to find one’s proper job,” she’d said.

Like Quincy, who had been, in spite of what Morris said, a bad boy, headed for a life of petty crime or worse, when the war came along. And suddenly his wildness and daring and “high spirits” were virtues, were just what was needed.

What the War Has Done For Us. Number Two. It has made jobs that didn’t exist before. Like RAF pilot. Like post warden. Like bodysniffer.

“Did they find Jack’s body?” I asked, though I knew the answer. No, Quincy would say, we couldn’t find it, or, there was nothing left.

“Didn’t Dad tell you?” Quincy said with an anxious look at the transfusion bag hanging above the bed. “They had to dig past him to get to the little girl. It was pretty bad, Dad said. The blast from the D.A. had driven the leg of a chair straight through his chest.”

So I had killed him after all. Nelson and Hitler and I.

“I shouldn’t have told you that,” Quincy said, watching the blood drip from the bag into my veins as if it were a bad sign. “I know he was a friend of yours. I wouldn’t have told you only Dad said to tell you yours was the last name he said before he died. Just before the D.A. went up. ‘Jack,’ he said, like he knew what was going to happen, Dad said, and called out your name.”

He didn’t though, I thought. And “that bloody murderer Nelson” hadn’t refused to evacuate him. Jack had just gone on working, oblivious to Nelson and the D.A., stabbing at the rubble as though he were trying to murder it, calling out “saw” and “wire cutters” and “braces.” Calling out “jack.” Oblivious to everything except getting them out before the gas killed them, before they bled to death. Oblivious to everything but his job.

I had been wrong about why he had joined the ARP, about why he had come to London. He must have lived a terrible life up there in Yorkshire, full of darkness and self-hatred and killing. When the war came, when he began reading of people buried in the rubble, of rescue wardens searching blindly for them, it must have seemed a godsend. A blessing.

It wasn’t, I think, that he was trying to atone for what he’d done, for what he was. It’s impossible, at any rate. I had only killed ten people, counting Jack, and had helped rescue nearly twenty, but it doesn’t cancel out. And I don’t think that was what he wanted. What he had wanted was to be useful.

“Here’s to making the best of a bad job,” Mrs. Lucy had said, and that was all any of them had been doing: Swales with his jokes and gossip, and Twickenham, and Jack, and if they found friendship or love or atonement as well, it was no less than they deserved. And it was still a bad job.

“I should be going,” Quincy said, looking worriedly at me. “You need your rest, and I need to be getting back to work. The German army’s halfway to Cairo, and Yugoslavia’s joined the Axis.” He looked excited, happy. “You must rest, and get well. We need you back in this war.”

“I’m glad you came,” I said.

“Yes, well, Dad wanted me to tell you that about Jack calling for you.” He stood up. “Tough luck, your getting it in the neck like this.” He slapped his flight cap against his leg. “I hate this war,” he said, but he was lying.

“So do I,” I said.

“They’ll have you back killing jerries in no time,” he said.

“Yes.”

He put his cap on at a rakish angle and went off to bomb lecherous retired colonels and children and widows who had not yet managed to get reinforcing beams out of the Hamburg Civil Defence and paint violets on his plane. Doing his bit.

A sister brought in a tray. She had a large red cross sewn to the bib of her apron.

“No, thanks, I’m not hungry,” I said.

“You must keep your strength up,” she said. She set the tray beside the bed and went out.

“The war’s been rather a blessing for our Vi,” I had told Jack, and perhaps it was. But not for most people. Not for girls who worked at John Lewis’s for old stewpots who never let them leave early even when the sirens had gone. Not for those people who discovered hidden capabilities for insanity or betrayal or bleeding to death. Or murder.

The sirens went. The nurse came in to check my transfusion and take the tray away. I lay there for a long time, watching the blood come down into my arm.

“Jack,” I said, and didn’t know who I called out to, or if I had made a sound.

UNDERSTAND

Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang graduated from Brown University in 1989 with a degree in computer science. He is an alumnus of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop as well, and his short stories have sold to Omni and Full Spectrum 3. “Understand" is his first tale for IAsfm.

A layer of ice; it feels rough against my face, but not cold. I’ve got nothing to hold on to; my gloves just keep sliding off it. I can see people on top, running around, but they can’t do anything. I’m trying to pound the ice with my fists, but my arms move in slow motion, and my lungs must have burst, and my head’s going fuzzy, and I feel like I’m dissolving—

I wake up, screaming. My heart’s going like a jackhammer. Christ. I pull off my blankets and sit on the edge of the bed.

I couldn’t remember that before. Before I only remembered falling through the ice; the doctor said my mind had suppressed the rest. Now I remember it, and it’s the worst nightmare I’ve ever had.

I’m grabbing the down comforter with my fists, and I can feel myself trembling. I try to calm down, to breathe slowly, but sobs keep forcing their way out. It was so real I could feel it: feel what it was like to die.

I was in that water for nearly an hour; I was more vegetable than anything else by the time they brought me up. Am I recovered? It was the first time the hospital had ever tried their new drug on someone with so much brain damage. Did it work?

The same nightmare, again and again. After the third time, I know I’m not going to sleep again. I spend the remaining hours before dawn worrying. Is this the result? Am I losing my mind?

Tomorrow is my weekly checkup with the resident at the hospital. I hope he’ll have some answers.

I drive into downtown Boston, and after half an hour Dr. Hooper can see me. I sit on a gurney in an examining room, behind a yellow curtain. Jutting out of the wall at waist-height is a horizontal flatscreen, adjusted for tunnel vision so it appears blank from my angle. The doctor types at the keyboard, presumably calling up my file, and then starts examining me. As he’s checking my pupils with a penlight, I tell him about my nightmares.

“Did you ever have any before the accident, Leon?” He gets out his little mallet and taps at my elbows, knees, and ankles.

“Never. Are these a side effect of the drug?”

“Not a side effect. The hormone K therapy regenerated a lot of damaged neurons, and that’s an enormous change that your brain has to adjust to. The night-mares are probably just a sign of that.”

“Is this permanent?”

“It’s unlikely,” he says. “Once your brain gets used to having all those pathways again, you’ll be fine. Now touch your index finger to the tip of your nose, and then bring it to my finger here.”

I do what he tells me. Next he has me tap each finger to my thumb, quickly. Then I have to walk a straight line, as if I’m taking a sobriety test. After that, he starts quizzing me.

“Name the parts of an ordinary shoe.”

“There’s the sole, the heel, the laces. Um, the holes that the laces go through are eyes, and then there’s the tongue, underneath the laces . . .”

“Okay. Repeat this number: three nine one seven four—”

“—six two.”

Dr. Hooper wasn’t expecting that. “What?”

“Three nine one seven four six two. You used that number the first time you examined me, when I was still an inpatient. I guess it’s a number you test patients with a lot.”

“You weren’t supposed to memorize it; it’s meant to be a test of immediate recall.”

“I didn’t intentionally memorize it. I just happened to remember it.”

“Do you remember the number from the second time I examined you?”

I pause for a moment. “Four zero eight one five nine two.”

He’s surprised. “Most people can’t retain so many digits if they’ve only heard them once. Do you use mnemonic tricks?”

I shake my head. “No. I always keep phone numbers in the autodialer.”

He goes to the terminal and taps at the numeric keypad. “Try this one.” He reads a fourteen-digit number, and I repeat it back to him. “You think you can do it backwards?” I recite the digits in reverse order. He frowns, and starts typing something into my file.

I’m sitting in front of a terminal in one of the testing rooms in the psychiatric ward; it’s the nearest place Dr. Hooper could get some intelligence tests. There’s a small mirror set in one wall, probably with a video camera behind it. In case it’s recording, I smile at it and wave briefly. I always do that to the hidden cameras in automatic cash machines.

Dr. Hooper comes in with a printout of my test results. “Well, Leon, you did . . . very well. On both tests you scored in the ninety-ninth percentile.”

My jaw drops. “You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not.” He has trouble believing it himself. “Now that number doesn’t indicate how many questions you got right; it means that relative to the general population—”

“I know what it means,” I say absently. “I was in the seventieth percentile when they tested us in high school.” Ninety-ninth percentile. Inwardly, I’m trying to find some sign of this. What should it feel like?

He sits down on the table, still looking at the printout. “You never attended college, did you?”

I return my attention to him. “I did, but I left before graduating. My ideas of education didn’t mesh with the professors’.”

“I see.” He probably takes this to mean I flunked out. “Well, clearly you’ve improved tremendously. A little of that may have come about naturally as you grew older, but most of it must be a result of the hormone K therapy.”

“This is one hell of a side-effect.”

“Well, don’t get too excited. Test scores don’t predict how well you can do things in the real world.” I roll my eyes upward when Dr. Hooper isn’t looking. Something amazing is going on, and all he can offer is a truism. “I’d like to follow up on this with some more tests. Can you come in tomorrow?”

I’m in the middle of retouching a holograph when the phone rings. I waver between the phone and the console, and reluctantly opt for the phone. I’d normally have the answering machine take any calls when I’m editing, but I need to let people know I’m working again. I lost a lot of business when I was in the hospital: one of the risks of being a freelancer. I touch the phone and say, “Greco Holographics, Leon Greco speaking.”

“Hey Leon, it’s Jerry.”

“Hi Jerry. What’s up?” I’m still studying the image on the screen: it’s a pair of helical gears, intermeshed. A trite metaphor for cooperative action, but that’s what the customer wanted for his ad.

“You interested in seeing a movie tonight? Me and Sue and Tori were going to see Metal Eyes.”

“Tonight? Oh, I can’t. Tonight’s the last performance of the one-woman show at the Hanning Playhouse.” The surfaces of the gear teeth are scratched and oily-looking. I highlight each surface using the cursor, and type in the parameters to be adjusted.

“What’s that?”

“It’s called Symplectic. It’s a monologue in verse.” Now I adjust the lighting, to remove some of the shadows from where the teeth mesh. “Want to come along?”

“Is this some kind of Shakespearean soliloquy?”

Too much: with that lighting, the outer edges will be too bright. I specify an upper limit for the reflected light’s intensity. “No, it’s a stream-of-consciousness piece, and it alternates between four different meters; iambic’s only one of them. All the critics called it a tour de force.”

“I didn’t know you were such a fan of poetry.”

After checking all the numbers once more, I let the computer recalculate the interference pattern. “Normally, I’m not, but this one seemed really interesting. How’s it sound to you?”

“Thanks, but I think we’ll stick with the movie.”

“Okay, you guys have fun. Maybe we can get together next week.” We say goodbye and hang up, and I wait for the recalc to finish.

Suddenly it occurs to me what’s just happened. I’ve never been able to do any editing while talking on the phone. But this time I had no trouble keeping my mind on both things at once.

Will the surprises never end? Once the nightmares were gone and I could relax, the first thing I noticed was the increase in my reading speed and comprehension. I was actually able to read the books on my shelves that I’d always meant to get around to, but never had the time; even the more difficult, technical material. Back in college, I’d accepted the fact that I couldn’t study everything that interested me. It’s exhilarating to discover that maybe I can; I was positively gleeful when I bought an armload of books the other day.

And now I find I can concentrate on two things at once; something I never would have predicted. I stand up at my desk and shout out loud, as if my favorite baseball team had just surprised me with a triple play. That’s what it feels like.

The Neurologist-In-Chief, Dr. Shea, has taken over my case, presumably because he wants to take the credit. I scarcely know him, but he acts as if I’ve been his patient for years.

He’s asked me into his office to have a talk. He interlaces his fingers and rests his elbows on his desk. “How do you feel about the increase in your intelligence?” he asks.

What an inane question. “I’m very pleased about it.”

“Good,” says Dr. Shea. “So far, we’ve found no adverse effects of the hormone K therapy. You don’t require any further treatment for the brain damage from your accident.” I nod. “However, we’re conducting a study to learn more about the hormone’s effect on intelligence. If you’re willing, we’d like to give you a further injection of the hormone, and then monitor the results.”

Suddenly he’s got my attention; finally, something worth listening to. “I’d be willing to do that.”

“You understand that this is purely for investigational purposes, not therapeutic. You may benefit from it with further gains in your intelligence, but this is not medically necessary for your health.”

“I understand. I suppose I have to sign a consent form.”

“Yes. We can also offer you some compensation for participating in this study.” He names a figure, but I’m barely listening.

“That’ll be fine.” I’m imagining where this might lead, what it might mean for me, and a thrill runs through me.

“We’d also like you to sign a confidentiality agreement. Clearly this drug is enormously exciting, but we don’t want any announcements to be made prematurely.”

“Certainly, Dr. Shea. Has anyone been given additional injections before?”

“Of course; you’re not going to be a guinea pig. I can assure you, there haven’t been any harmful side effects.”

“What sort of effects did they experience?”

“It’s better if we don’t plant suggestions in your mind: you might imagine you were experiencing the symptoms I mention.”

Shea’s very comfortable with the doctor-knows-best routine. I keep pushing. “Can you at least tell me how much their intelligence increased?”

“Every individual is different. You shouldn’t base your expectations on what’s happened to others.”

I conceal my frustration. “Very well, Doctor.”

If Shea doesn’t want to tell me about hormone K, I can find out about it on my own. From my terminal at home I log onto the datanet. I access the FDA’s public database, and start perusing their current IND’s, the Investigational New Drug applications that must be approved before human trials can begin.

The application for hormone K was submitted by Sorensen Pharmaceutical, a company researching synthetic hormones that encourage neuron regeneration in the central nervous system. I skim the results of the drug tests on oxygen-deprived dogs, and then baboons: all the animals recovered completely. Toxicity was low, and long term observation didn’t reveal any adverse effects.

The results of cortical samples are provocative. The brain-damaged animals grew replacement neurons with many more dendrites, but the healthy recipients of the drug remained unchanged. The conclusion of the researchers: hormone K replaces only damaged neurons, not healthy ones. In the brain-damaged animals, the new dendrites seemed harmless: PET scans didn’t reveal any change in brain metabolism, and the animals’ performance on intelligence tests didn’t change.

In their application for human clinical trials, the Sorensen researchers outlined protocols for testing the drug first on healthy subjects, and then on several types of patients: stroke victims, sufferers of Alzheimer’s, and persons—like me—in a persistent vegetative state. I can’t access the progress reports for those trials: even with patient anonymity, only participating doctors have clearance to examine those records.

The animal studies don’t shed any light on the increased intelligence in humans. It’s reasonable to assume that the effect on intelligence is proportional to the number of neurons replaced by the hormone, which in turn depends on the amount of initial damage. That means that the deep coma patients would undergo the greatest improvements. Of course, I’d need to see the progress of the other patients to confirm this theory; that’ll have to wait.

The next question: is there a plateau, or will additional dosages of the hormone cause further increases? I’ll know the answer to that sooner than the doctors.

I’m not nervous; in fact, I feel quite relaxed. I’m just lying on my stomach, breathing very slowly. My back is numb; they gave me a local anaesthetic, and then injected the hormone K intraspinally. An intravenous wouldn’t work, since the hormone can’t get past the blood-brain barrier. This is the first such injection I can recall having, though I’m told that I’ve received two before: the first while still in the coma, the second when I had regained consciousness but no cognitive ability.

More nightmares. They’re not all actually violent, but they’re the most bizarre, mind-blowing dreams I’ve ever had, often with nothing in them that I recognize. I often wake up screaming, flailing around in bed. But this time, I know they’ll pass.

There are several psychologists at the hospital studying me now. It’s interesting to see how they analyze my intelligence. One doctor perceives my skills in terms of components, such as acquisition, retention, performance, and transfer. Another looks at me from the angles of mathematical and logical reasoning, linguistic communication, and spatial visualization.

I’m reminded of my college days when I watch these specialists, each with a pet theory, each contorting the evidence to fit. I’m even less convinced by them now than I was back then; they still have nothing to teach me. None of their categorizations are fruitful in analyzing my performance, since—there’s no point in denying it—I’m equally good at everything.

I could be studying a new class of equation, or the grammar of a foreign language, or the operation of an engine; in each case, everything fits together, all the elements cooperate beautifully. In each case, I don’t have to consciously memorize rules, and then apply them mechanically. I just perceive how the system behaves as a whole, as an entity. Of course, I’m aware of all the details and individual steps, but they require so little concentration that they almost feel intuitive.

Penetrating computer security is really quite dull; I can see how it might attract those who can’t resist a challenge to their cleverness, but it’s not intellectually aesthetic at all. It’s no different than tugging on the doors of a locked house until you find an improperly installed lock. A useful activity, but hardly interesting.

Getting into the FDA’s private database was easy. I played with one of the hospital wall terminals, running the visitor information program, which displays maps and a staff directory. I broke out of the program to the system level, and wrote a decoy program to mimic the opening screen for logging on. Then I simply left the terminal alone; eventually one of my doctors came by to check one of her files. The decoy rejected her password, and then restored the true opening screen. The doctor tried logging in again, and was successful this time, but her password was left with my decoy.

Using the doctor’s account, I had clearance to view the FDA patient record database. In the Phase I trials, on healthy volunteers, the hormone had no effect. The ongoing Phase II clinical trials are a different matter. Here are weekly reports on eighty-two patients, each identified by a number, all treated with hormone K, most of them victims of a stroke or Alzheimer’s, some of them coma cases. The latest reports confirm my prediction: those with greater brain damage display greater increases in intelligence. PET scans reveal heightened brain metabolism.

Why didn’t the animal studies provide a precedent for this? I think the concept of critical mass provides an analogy. Animals fall below some critical mass in terms of synapses; their brains support only minimal abstraction, and gain nothing from additional synapses. Humans exceed that critical mass. Their brains support full self-awareness, and—as these records indicate—they use any new synapses to the fullest possible extent.

The most exciting records are those of the newly begun investigational studies, using a few of the patients who volunteered. Additional injections of the hormone do increase intelligence further, but again it depends on the degree of initial damage. The patients with minor strokes haven’t even reached genius levels. Those with greater damage have gone further.

Of the patients originally in deep coma states, I’m the only one thus far who’s received a third injection. I gained more new synapses than anyone previously studied; it’s an open question as to how high my intelligence will go. I can feel my heart pounding when I think about it.

Playing with the doctors is becoming more and more tedious as the weeks go by. They treat me as if I were simply an idiot savant: a patient who exhibits certain signs of high intelligence, but still just a patient. As far as the neurologists are concerned, I’m just a source of PET scan images and an occasional vial of cerebrospinal fluid. The psychologists have the opportunity to gain some insight into my thinking through their interviews, but they can’t shed their preconception of me as someone out of his depth, an ordinary man awarded gifts that he can’t appreciate.

On the contrary, the doctors are the ones who don’t appreciate what’s happening. They’re certain that real-world performance can’t be enhanced by a drug, and that my ability exists only according to the artificial yardstick of intelligence tests, so they waste their time with those. But the yardstick is not only contrived, it’s too short: my consistently perfect scores don’t tell them anything, because they have no basis for comparison this far out on the bell curve.

Of course, the test scores merely capture a shadow of the real changes occurring. If only the doctors could feel what’s going on in my head: how much I’m recognizing that I missed before, how many uses I can see for that information. Far from being a laboratory phenomenon, my intelligence is practical and effectual. With my near-total recall and my ability to correlate, I can assess a situation immediately, and choose the best course of action for my purposes; I’m never indecisive. Only theoretical topics pose a challenge.

No matter what I study, I can see patterns. I see the gestalt, the melody within the notes, in everything: mathematics and science, art and music, psychology and sociology. As I read the texts, I can think only that the authors are plodding along from one point to the next, groping for connections that they can’t see. They’re like a crowd of people unable to read music, peering at the score for a Bach sonata, trying to explain how one note leads to another.

As glorious as these patterns are, they also whet my appetite for more. There are other patterns waiting to be discovered, gestalts of another scale entirely. With respect to those, I’m blind myself; all my sonatas are just isolated data points by comparison. I have no idea what form such gestalts might assume, but that’ll come in time. I want to find them, and comprehend them. I want this more than anything I’ve ever wanted before.

The visiting doctor’s name is Clausen, and he doesn’t behave like the other doctors. Judging by his manner, he’s accustomed to wearing a mask of blandness with his patients, but he’s a bit uncomfortable today. He affects an air of friendliness, but it isn’t as fluent the perfunctory noise that the other doctors make.

“The test works this way, Leon: you’ll read some descriptions of various situations, each presenting a problem. After each one, I want you to tell me what you’d do to solve that problem.”

I nod. “I’ve had this kind of test before.”

“Fine, fine.” He types a command, and the screen in front of me fills with text. I read the scenario: it’s a problem in scheduling and prioritizing. It’s realistic, which is unusual; scoring such a test is too arbitrary for most researchers’ tastes. I wait before giving my answer, though Clausen is still surprised at my speed.

“That’s very good, Leon.” He hits a key on his computer. “Try this one.”

We continue with more scenarios. As I’m reading the fourth one, Clausen is careful to display only professional detachment. My response to this problem is of special interest to him, but he doesn’t want me to know. The scenario involves office politics and fierce competition for a promotion.

I realize who Clausen is: he’s a government psychologist, perhaps military, probably part of the CIA’s Office of Research and Development. This test is meant to gauge hormone K’s potential for producing strategists. That’s why he’s uncomfortable with me: he’s used to dealing with soldiers and government employees, subjects whose job is to follow orders.

It’s likely that the CIA will wish to retain me as a subject for more tests; they may do the same with other patients, depending on their performance. After that, they’ll get some volunteers from their ranks, starve their brains of oxygen, and treat them with hormone K. I certainly don’t wish to become a CIA resource, but I’ve already demonstrated enough ability to arouse their interest. The best I can do is to downplay my skills and get this question wrong.

I offer a poor course of action as my answer, and Clausen is disappointed. Nonetheless, we press on. I take longer on the scenarios now, and give weaker responses. Sprinkled among the harmless questions are the critical ones: one about avoiding a hostile corporate takeover, another about mobilizing people to prevent the construction of a coal-burning plant. I miss each of these questions.

Clausen dismisses me when the test ends; he’s already trying to formulate his recommendations. If I’d shown my true abilities, the CIA would recruit me immediately. My uneven performance will reduce their eagerness, but it won’t change their minds; the potential returns are too great for them to ignore hormone K.

My situation has changed profoundly; when the CIA decides to retain me as a test subject, my consent will be purely optional. I must make plans.

It’s four days later, and Shea is surprised. “You want to withdraw from the study?”

“Yes, effective immediately. I’m returning to work.”

“If it’s a matter of compensation, I’m sure we can—”

“No, money’s not the problem. I’ve simply had enough of these tests.”

“I know the tests become tiring after a while, but we’re learning a great deal. And we appreciate your participation, Leon. It’s not merely—”

“I know how much you’re learning from these tests. It doesn’t change my decision: I don’t wish to continue.”

Shea starts to speak again, but I cut him off. “I know that I’m still bound by the confidentiality agreement; if you’d like me to sign something confirming that, send it to me.” I get up and head for the door. “Goodbye, Dr. Shea.”

It’s two days later when Shea calls.

“Leon, you have to come in for an examination. I’ve just been informed: adverse side effects have been found in patients treated with hormone K at another hospital.”

He’s lying; he’d never tell me that over the phone. “What sort of side effects?”

“Loss of vision. There’s excessive growth of the optic nerve, followed by deterioration.”

The CIA must have ordered this when they heard that I’d withdrawn from the study. Once I’m back in the hospital, Shea will declare me mentally incompetent, and confine me to their care. Then I’ll be transferred to a government research institution.

I assume an expression of alarm. “I’ll come down right away.”

“Good.” Shea is relieved that his delivery was convincing. “We can examine you as soon as you arrive.”

I hang up and turn on my terminal to check the latest information in the FDA database. There’s no mention of any adverse effects, on the optic nerve or anywhere else. I don’t discount the possibility that such effects might arise in the future, but I’ll discover them by myself.

It’s time to leave Boston. I begin packing. I’ll empty my bank accounts when I go. Selling the equipment in my studio would generate more cash, but most of it is too large to transport; I take only a few of the smallest pieces. After I’ve been working a couple of hours, the phone rings again: Shea wondering where I am. This time I let the machine pick it up.

“Leon, are you there? This is Dr. Shea. We’ve been expecting you for quite some time.”

He’ll try calling one more time, and then he’ll send the orderlies in white suits, or perhaps the actual police, to pick me up.

Seven-thirty P.M. Shea is still in the hospital, waiting for news about me. I turn the ignition key and pull out of my parking spot across the street from the hospital. Any moment now, he’ll notice the envelope I slipped under the door to his office. As soon as he opens it he’ll realize that it’s from me.

Greetings Dr. Shea,

I imagine you’re looking for me.

A moment of surprise, but no more than a moment; he’ll regain his composure, and alert security to search the building for me, and check all vehicles leaving. Then he’ll continue reading.

You can call off those burly orderlies who are waiting at my apartment; I don’t want to waste their valuable time. You’re probably determined to have the police issue an APB on me, though. Therefore, I’ve taken the liberty of inserting a virus in the DMV computer, that will substitute information whenever my license plate number is requested. Of course, you could give a description of my car, but you don’t even know what it looks like, do you?

Leon

He’ll call the police to have their programmers work on that virus. He’ll conclude that I have a superiority complex, based on the arrogant tone of the note, the unnecessary risk taken in returning to the hospital to deliver it, and the pointless revelation of a virus which might otherwise have gone undetected.

Shea will be mistaken, though. Those actions are designed to make the police and CIA underestimate me, so I can rely on their not taking adequate precautions. After cleaning my virus from the DMV computer, the police programmers will assess my programming skill as good but not great, and then load the backups to retrieve my actual license number. This will activate a second virus, a far more sophisticated one. This one will modify both the backups and the active database. The police will be satisfied that they’ve got the correct license number, and spend their time chasing that wild goose.

My next goal is to get another ampule of hormone K. Doing so, unfortunately, will give the CIA an accurate idea of how capable I really am. If I hadn’t sent that note, the police would discover my virus later, at a time when they’d know to take super-stringent precautions when eradicating it. In that case, I might never be able to remove my license number from their files.

Meanwhile, I’ve checked into a hotel, and am working out of the room’s datanet terminal.

I’ve broken into the private database of the FDA. I’ve seen the addresses of the hormone K subjects, and the internal communications of the FDA. A clinical hold was instituted for hormone K: no further testing permitted until the hold is lifted. The CIA has insisted on capturing me and assessing my threat potential before the FDA goes any further.

The FDA has asked all the hospitals to return the remaining ampules by courier. I must get an ampule before this happens. The nearest patient is in Pittsburgh; I reserve a seat on a flight leaving early tomorrow morning. Then I check a map of Pittsburgh, and make a request to the Pennsylvania Courier company for a pick-up at an investment firm in the downtown area. Finally I sign up for several hours of CPU time on a supercomputer.

I’m parked in a rental car around the corner from a skyscraper in Pittsburgh. In my jacket pocket is a small circuit board with a keypad. I’m looking down the street in the direction the courier will arrive from; half the pedestrians wear white air filter masks, but visibility is good.

I see it two intersections away; it’s a late-model domestic van, Pennsylvania Courier painted on the side. It’s not a high-security courier; the FDA isn’t that worried about me. I get out of my car and begin walking toward the skyscraper. The van arrives shortly, parks, and the driver gets out. As soon as he’s inside, I enter the vehicle.

It’s just come from the hospital. The driver is on his way to the fortieth floor, expecting to pick up a package from an investment firm there. He won’t be back for at least four minutes.

Welded to the floor of the van is a large locker, with double-layered steel walls and door. There is a polished plate on the door; the locker opens when the driver lays his palm against its surface. The plate also has a data port in its side, used for programming it.

Last night I penetrated the service database for Lucas Security Systems, the company that sells handprint locks to Pennsylvania Courier. There I found an encrypted file containing the codes to override their locks.

I must admit that, while penetrating computer security remains generally unaesthetic, certain aspects of it are indirectly related to very interesting problems in mathematics. For example, a commonly used method of encryption normally requires years of supercomputer time to break. However, during one of my forays into number theory, I found a lovely technique for factoring extremely large numbers. With this technique, a supercomputer could break this encryption scheme in a matter of hours.

I pull the circuit board from my pocket and connect it to the data port with a cable. I tap in a twelve digit number, and the locker door swings open.

By the time I’m back in Boston with the ampule, the FDA has responded to the theft by removing all pertinent files from any computer accessible through the datanet: as expected.

With the ampule and my belongings, I drive to New York City.

The fastest way for me to make money is, oddly enough, gambling. Handicapping horse races is simple enough. Without attracting undue attention, I can accumulate a moderate sum, and then sustain myself with investments in the stock market.

I’m staying in a room in the cheapest apartment I could find near New York that has datanet outlets. I’ve arranged several false names under which to make my investments, and will change them regularly. I shall spend some time on Wall Street, so that I can identify high-yield short-term opportunities from the body language of brokers. I won’t go more than once a week; there are more significant matters to attend to, gestalts beckoning my attention.

As my mind develops, so does my control over my body. It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one’s body is a mental activity. While my strength hasn’t increased, my coordination is now well above average; I’m even becoming ambidextrous. Moreover, my powers of concentration make biofeedback techniques very effective. After comparatively little practice, I am able to raise or lower my heart rate and blood pressure.

I write a program to perform a pattern match for photos of my face, and search for occurrences of my name; I then incorporate it into a virus for scanning all public display files on the datanet. The CIA will have the national datanet news briefs display my picture and identify me as a dangerously insane escaped patient, perhaps a murderer. The virus will replace my photo with video static. I plant a similar virus in the FDA and CIA computers, to search for copies of my picture in any downloads to regional police. These viruses should be immune to anything that their programmers can come up with.

Undoubtably Shea and the other doctors are in consultation with the psychologists of the CIA, guessing where I might have gone. My parents are dead, so the CIA is turning its attention to my friends, asking whether I’ve contacted them; they’ll maintain surveillance on them in the event I do. A regrettable invasion of their privacy, but it isn’t a pressing matter.

It’s unlikely that the CIA will treat any of their agents with hormone K to locate me. As I myself demonstrate, a superintelligent person is too difficult to control. However, I’ll keep track of the other patients, in case the government decides to recruit them.

The quotidian patterns of society are revealed without my making effort. I walk down the street, watching people go about their business, and though not a word is spoken, the subtext is conspicuous. A young couple strolls by, the adoration of one bouncing off the tolerance of the other. Apprehension flickers and becomes steady as a businessman, fearful of his supervisor, begins to doubt a decision he made earlier today. A woman wears a mantle of simulated sophistication, but it slips when it brushes past the genuine article.

As always, the roles one plays become recognizable only with greater maturity. To me, these people seem like children on a playground; I’m amused by their earnestness, and embarassed to remember myself doing those same things. Their activities are appropriate for them, but I couldn’t bear to participate now; when I became a man, I put away childish things. I will deal with the world of normal humans only as needed to support myself.

I acquire years of education each week, assembling ever larger patterns. I view the tapestry of human knowledge from a broader perspective than anyone ever has before; I can fill gaps in the design where scholars never even noticed a lack, and enrich the texture in places that they felt were complete.

The natural sciences have the clearest patterns. Physics admits of a lovely unification, not just at the level of fundamental forces, but when considering its extent and implications. Classifications like “optics” or “thermodynamics” are just straitjackets, preventing physicists from seeing countless intersections. Even putting aside aesthetics, the practical applications that have been overlooked are legion; years ago engineers could have been artifically generating spherically symmetric gravity fields.

Having realized this, however, I won’t build such a device, or any other. It would require many custom-built components, all difficult and time-consuming to procure. Furthermore, actually constructing the device wouldn’t give me any particular satisfaction, since I already know it would work, and it wouldn’t illuminate any new gestalts.

I’m writing part of an extended poem, as an experiment; after I’ve finished one canto, I’ll be able to choose an approach for integrating the patterns within all the arts. I’m employing six modern and four ancient languages; they include most of the significant worldviews of human civilization. Each one provides different shades of meaning and poetic effects; some of the juxtapositions are delightful. Each line of the poem contains neologisms, born by extruding words through the declensions of another language. If I were to complete the entire piece, it could be thought of as Finnegans Wake multiplied by Pound’s Cantos.

The CIA interrupts my work; they’re baiting a trap for me. After two months of trying, they’ve accepted that they can’t locate me by conventional methods, so they’ve turned to more drastic measures. The news services report that the girlfriend of a deranged murderer has been charged with aiding and abetting his escape. The name given is Connie Perritt, someone I was seeing last year. If it goes to trial, it’s a foregone conclusion that she’ll be sentenced to a lengthy prison term; the CIA is hoping that I won’t allow that. They expect me to attempt a maneuver that will expose me to capture.

Connie’s preliminary hearing is tomorrow. They’ll insure that she’s released on bail, through a bondsman if necessary, to give me an opportunity to contact her. Then they’ll saturate the area around her apartment with undercover agents to wait for me.

I begin editing the first image on screen. These digital photos are so minimal compared to holos, but they serve the purpose. The photos, taken yesterday, show the exterior of Connie’s apartment building, the street out front, and nearby intersections. I move the cursor across the screen, drawing small crosshairs in certain locations on the images. A window, with lights out but curtains open, in the building diagonally opposite. A street vendor two blocks from the rear of the building.

I mark six locations altogether. They indicate where CIA agents were waiting last night, when Connie went back to her apartment. Having been cued by the videotapes of me in the hospital, they knew what to look for in all male or ambiguous passerbys: the confident, level gait. Their expectations worked against them; I simply lengthened my strides, bobbed my head up and down a bit, reduced my arm motion. That and some atypical clothes were sufficient for them to ignore me as I walked through the area.

At the bottom of one photo I type the radio frequency used by the agents for communication, and an equation describing the scrambling algorithm employed. Once I’ve finished, I transmit the images to the Director of the CIA. The implication is clear: I could kill his undercover agents at any time, unless they withdraw.

To have them drop charges against Connie, and for a more permanent deterrent against the CIA’s distractions, I shall have to do some more work.

Pattern recognition again, but this time it’s of a mundane variety. Thousands of pages of reports, memos, correspondence; each one is a dot of color in a pointillist painting. I step back from this panorama, watching for lines and edges to emerge and create a pattern. The megabytes that I scanned constituted only a fraction of the complete records for the period I investigated, but they were enough.

What I’ve found is rather ordinary, far simpler than the plot of a spy novel. The Director of the CIA was aware of a terrorist group’s plan to bomb the Washington, D.C. metro system. He let the bombing occur, in order to gain Congressional approval for the use of extreme measures against that group. A congressman’s son was among the casualties, and the CIA director was given a free hand in handling the terrorists. While his plans aren’t actually stated in CIA records, they’re implied quite clearly. The relevant memos make only oblique references, and they float in a sea of innocuous documents; if an investigating committee were to read all of the records, the evidence would be drowned out by the noise. However, a distillation of the incriminating memos would certainly convince the press.

I send the list of memos to the Director of the CIA, with a note: “Don’t bother me, and I won’t bother you.” He’ll realize that he has no alternative.

This little episode has reinforced my opinion of the affairs of the world; I could detect clandestine ploys everywhere if I kept informed about current events, but none of them would be interesting. I shall resume my studies.

Control over my body continues to grow. By now I could walk on hot coals or stick needles in my arm, if I were so inclined. However, my interest in Eastern meditation is limited to its application to physical control; no meditative trance I can attain is nearly as desirable to me as my mental state when I assemble gestalts out of elemental data.

I’m designing a new language. I’ve reached the limits of conventional languages, and now they frustrate my attempts to progress further. They lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they’re imprecise and unwieldy. They’re hardly fit for speech, let alone thought.

Existing linguistic theory is useless; I’ll reevaluate basic logic to determine the suitable atomic components for my language. This language will support a dialect co-expressive with all of mathematics, so that any equation I write will have a linguistic equivalent. However, mathematics will be only a small part of the language, not the whole; unlike Leibniz, I recognize symbolic logic’s limits. Other dialects I have planned will be co-expressive with my notations for aesthetics and cognition. This will be a time-consuming project, but the end result will clarify my thoughts enormously. After I’ve translated all that I know into this language, the patterns I seek should become evident.

I pause in my work. Before I develop a notation for aesthetics, I must establish a vocabulary for all the emotions I can imagine.

I’m aware of many emotions beyond those of normal humans; I see how limited their affective range is. I don’t deny the validity of the love and angst I once felt, but I do see them for what they were: like the infatuations and depressions of childhood, they were just the forerunners of what I experience now. My passions now are more multifaceted; as self-knowledge increases, all emotions become exponentially more complex. I must be able to describe them fully if I’m to even attempt the composing tasks ahead.

Of course, I actually experience far fewer emotions than I could; my development is limited by the intelligence of those around me, and the scant intercourse I permit myself with them. I’m reminded of the Confucian concept of ren: inadequately conveyed by “benevolence,” that quality which is quintessentially human, which can only be cultivated through interaction with others, and which a solitary person cannot manifest. It’s one of many such qualities. And here am I, with people, people everywhere, yet not a one to interact with. I’m only a fraction of what a complete individual with my intelligence could be.

I don’t delude myself with either self-pity or conceit: I can evaluate my own psychological state with the utmost objectivity and consistency. I know precisely which emotional resources I have and which I lack, and how much value I place on each. I have no regrets.

My new language is taking shape. It is gestalt-oriented, rendering it beautifully suited for thought, but impractical for writing or speech. It wouldn’t be transcribed in the form of words arranged linearly, but as a giant ideogram, to be absorbed as a whole. Such an ideogram could convey, more deliberately than a picture, what a thousand words cannot. The intricacy of each ideogram would be commensurate with the amount of information contained; I amuse myself with the notion of a colossal ideogram that describes the entire universe.

The printed page is too clumsy and static for this language; the only serviceable media would be video or holo, displaying a time-evolving graphic image. Speaking this language would be out of the question, given the limited bandwidth of the human larynx.

My mind seethes with expletives from ancient and modern languages, and they taunt me with their crudeness, reminding me that my ideal language would offer terms with sufficient venom to express my present frustration.

I cannot complete my artificial language; it’s too large a project for my present tools. Weeks of concentrated effort have yielded nothing usable. I’ve attempted to write it via bootstrapping, by employing the rudimentary language that I’ve already defined to rewrite the language and produce successively fuller versions. Yet each new version only highlights its own inadequacies, forcing me to expand my ultimate goal, condemning it to the status of a Holy Grail at the end of a divergent infinite regress. This is no better than trying to create it ex nihilo.

What about my fourth ampule? I can’t remove it from my thoughts: every frustration I experience at my present plateau reminds me of the possibility for still greater heights.

Of course, there are significant risks. This injection might be the one that causes brain damage or insanity. Temptation by the Devil, perhaps, but temptation nonetheless. I find no reason to resist.

I’d have a margin of safety if I injected myself in a hospital, or, failing that, with someone standing by in my apartment. However, I imagine the injection will either be successful or else cause irreparable damage, so I forego those precautions.

I order equipment from a medical supply company, and assemble an apparatus for administering the spinal injection by myself. It may take days for the full effects to become evident, so I’ll confine myself to my bedroom. It’s possible that my reaction will be violent; I remove breakables from the room and attach loose straps to the bed. The neighbors will interpret anything they hear as an addict howling.

I inject myself and wait.

My brain is on fire, my spine bums itself through my back, I feel near apoplexy. I am blind, deaf, insensate.

I hallucinate. Seen with such preternatural clarity and contrast that they must be illusory, unspeakable horrors loom all around me, scenes not of physical violence but of psychic mutilation.

Mental agony and orgasm. Terror and hysterical laughter.

For a brief moment, perception returns. I’m on the floor, hands clenched in my hair, some uprooted tufts lying around me. My clothes are soaked in sweat. I’ve bitten my tongue, and my throat is raw: from screaming, I surmise. Convulsions have left my body badly bruised, and a concussion is likely given the contusions on the back of my head, but I feel nothing. Has it been hours or moments?

Then my vision clouds and the roar returns.

Critical mass.

Revelation.

I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term “self-aware.”

Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I’d previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.

With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don’t pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.

I know how they make up my thoughts.

These thoughts.

Initially I am overwhelmed by all this input, paralyzed with awareness of my self. It is hours before I can control the flood of self-describing information. I haven’t filtered it away, nor pushed it into the background. It’s become integrated into my mental processes, for use during my normal activities. It will be longer before I can take advantage of it, effortlessly and effectively, the way a dancer uses her kinesthesic knowledge.

All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision.

What can I do with this knowledge? Much of what is conventionally described as “personality” is at my discretion; the higher-level aspects of my psyche define who I am now. I can send my mind into a variety of mental or emotional states, yet remain ever aware of the state and able to restore my original condition. Now that I understand the mechanisms that were operating when I attended to two tasks at once, I can divide my consciousness, simultaneously devoting almost full concentration and gestalt recognition abilities to two or more separate problems, meta-aware of all of them. What can’t I do?

I know my body afresh, as if it were an amputee’s stump suddenly replaced by a watchmaker’s hand. Controlling my voluntary muscles is trivial; I have inhuman coordination. Skills that normally require thousands of repetitions to develop, I can learn in two or three. I find a video with a shot of a pianist’s hands playing, and before long I can duplicate his finger movements without a keyboard in front of me. Selective contraction and relaxation of muscles improve my strength and flexibility. Muscular response time is thirty-five milliseconds for conscious or reflex action. Learning acrobatics and martial arts would require little training.

I have somatic awareness of kidney function, nutrient absorption, glandular secretions. I am even conscious of the role that neurotransmitters play in my thoughts. This state of consciousness involves mental activity more intense than in any epinephrine-boosted stress situation; part of my mind is maintaining a condition that would kill a normal mind and body within minutes. As I adjust the programming of my mind, I experience the ebb and flow of all the substances that trigger my emotional reactions, boost my attention, or subtly shape my attitudes.

And then I look outward.

Blinding, joyous, fearful symmetry surrounds me. So much is incorporated within patterns now that the entire universe verges on resolving itself into a picture. I’m closing in on the ultimate gestalt: the context in which all knowledge fits and is illuminated, a mandala, the music of the spheres, kosmos.

I seek enlightenment, not spiritual but rational. I must go still further to reach it, but this time the goal will not be perpetually retreating from my fingertips. With my mind’s language, the distance between myself and enlightenment is precisely calculable. I’ve sighted my final destination.

Now I must plan my next actions. First, there are the simple enhancements to self-preservation, starting with martial arts training. I will watch some tournaments to study possible attacks, though I will take only defensive action; I can move rapidly enough to avoid contact with even the fastest striking techniques. This will let me protect myself and disarm any street criminals, should I be assaulted. Meanwhile, I must eat copious amounts of food to meet my brain’s nourishment requirements, even given increased efficiency in my metabolism. I shall also shave my scalp, to allow greater radiative cooling for the heightened blood flow to my head.

Then there is the primary goal: decoding those patterns. For further improvements to my mind, artificial enhancements are the only possibility. A direct computer-mind link, permitting mind downloading, is what I need, but I must create a new technology to implement it. Anything based on digital computation will be inadequate; what I have in mind requires nano-scale structures based on neural networks.

Once I have the basic ideas laid out, I set my mind to multiprocessing: one section of my mind deriving a branch of mathematics that reflects the networks’ behavior; another developing a process for replicating the formation of neural pathways on a molecular scale in a self-repairing bioceramic medium; a third devising tactics for guiding private industrial R & D to produce what I’ll need. I cannot waste time: I will introduce explosive theoretical and technical breakthroughs so that my new industry will hit the ground running.

I’ve gone into the outside world to re-observe society. The sign language of emotion I once knew has been replaced by a matrix of interrelated equations. Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do.

At the moment I’m sitting at a bar. Three stools to my right sits a man, familiar with this type of establishment, who looks around and notices a couple in a dark corner booth. He smiles, motions for the bartender to come over, and leans forward to speak confidentially about the couple. I don’t need to listen to know what he’s saying.

He’s lying to the bartender, easily, extemporaneously. A compulsive liar, not out of a desire for a life more exciting than his own, but to revel in his facility for deceiving others. He knows the bartender is detached, merely affecting interest—which is true—but he knows the bartender is still fooled, which is also true.

My sensitivity to the body language of others has increased to the point that I can make these observations without sight or sound: I can smell the pheromones exuded by his skin. To an extent, my muscles can even detect the tension within his, perhaps by their electric field. These channels can’t convey precise information, but the impressions I receive provide ample basis for extrapolation; they add texture to the web.

Normal humans may detect these emanations subliminally. I’ll work on becoming more attuned to them; then perhaps I can try consciously controlling my own expressions.

I’ve developed abilities reminiscent of the mind-control schemes offered by tabloid advertisements. My control over my somatic emanations now lets me provoke precise reactions in others. With pheromones and muscle tension, I can cause another person to respond with anger, fear, sympathy or sexual arousal. Certainly enough to win friends and influence people.

I can even induce a self-sustaining reaction in others. By associating a particular response with a sense of satisfaction, I can create a positive reinforcement loop, like biofeedback; the person’s body will strengthen the reaction on its own. I’ll use this on corporate presidents to create support for the industries I’ll need.

I can no longer dream in any normal sense. I lack anything that would qualify as a subconscious, and I control all the maintenance functions performed by my brain, so normal REM sleep tasks are obsolete. There are moments when my grasp on my mind slips, but they cannot be called dreams. Meta-hallucinations, perhaps. Sheer torture. These are periods during which I’m detached: I understand how my mind generates the strange visions, but I’m paralyzed and unable to respond. I can scarcely identify what I see; images of bizarre transfinite self-references and modifications that even I find nonsensical.

My mind is taxing the resources of my brain. A biological structure of this size and complexity can just barely sustain a self-knowing psyche. But the self-knowing psyche is also self-regulating, to an extent. I give my mind full use of what’s available, and restrain it from expanding beyond that. But it’s difficult: I’m cramped inside a bamboo cage that doesn’t let me sit down or stand up. If I try to relax, or try to extend myself fully, then agony, madness.

I’m hallucinating. I see my mind imagining possible configurations it could assume, and then collapsing. I witness my own delusions, my visions of what form my mind might take when I grasp the ultimate gestalts.

Will I achieve ultimate self-awareness? Could I discover the components that make up my own mental gestalts? Would I penetrate racial memory? Would I find innate knowledge of morality? I might determine whether mind could be spontaneously generated from matter, and understand what relates consciousness with the rest of the universe. I might see how to merge subject and object: the zero experience.

Or perhaps I’d find that the mind gestalt cannot be generated, and some sort of intervention is required. Perhaps I would see the soul, the ingredient of consciousness that surpasses physicality. Proof of God? I would behold the meaning, the true character of existence.

I would be enlightened. It must be euphoric to experience . . .

My mind collapses back into a state of sanity. I must keep a tighter rein over myself. When I’m in control at the metaprogramming level, my mind is perfectly self-repairing; I could restore myself from states that resemble delusion or amnesia. But if I drift too far on the metaprogramming level, my mind might become an unstable structure, and then I would slide into a state beyond mere insanity. I will program my mind to forbid itself from moving beyond its own reprogramming range.

These hallucinations strengthen my resolve to create an artificial brain. Only with such a structure will I be able to actually perceive those gestalts, instead of merely dreaming about them. To achieve enlightenment, I’ll need to exceed another critical mass in terms of neuronal analogs.

I open my eyes: it’s two hours, twenty-eight minutes, and ten seconds since I closed my eyes to rest, though not to sleep. I rise from bed.

I request a listing of my stocks’ performance on my terminal. I look down the flatscreen, and freeze.

The screen shouts at me. It tells me that there is another person with an enhanced mind.

Five of my investments have demonstrated losses; they’re not precipitous, but large enough that I’d have detected them in the body language of the stockbrokers. Reading down the alphabetical list, the initial letters of the corporations whose stock values have dropped are: C, E, G, O, and R. Which when rearranged, spell GRECO.

Someone is sending me a message.

There’s someone else out there like me. There must have been another comatose patient who received a third injection of hormone K. He erased his file from the FDA database before I accessed it, and supplied false input to his doctors’ accounts so that they wouldn’t notice. He too stole another ampule of the hormone, contributing to the FDA’s closing of their files, and with his whereabouts unknown to the authorities, he’s reached my level.

He must have recognized me through the investment patterns of my false identities; he’d have to have been supercritical to do that. As an enhanced individual, he could have effected sudden and precise changes to trigger my losses, and attract my attention.

I check various data services for stock quotes; the entries on my listing are correct, so my counterpart didn’t simply edit the values for my account alone. He altered the selling patterns of the stock of five unrelated corporations, for the sake of a word. It makes for quite a demonstration; I consider it no mean feat.

Presumably his treatment began before mine did, meaning that he is further along than I, but by how much? I begin extrapolating his likely progress, and will incorporate new information as I acquire it.

The critical question: is he friend or foe? Was this merely a good-natured demonstration of his power, or an indication of his intent to ruin me? The amounts I lost were moderate; does this indicate concern for me, or for the corporations which he had to manipulate? Given all the harmless ways he could have attracted my attention, I must assume that he is to some degree hostile.

In which case, I am at risk, vulnerable to anything from another prank to a fatal attack. As a precaution, I will leave immediately. Obviously, if he were actively hostile, I’d be dead already. His sending a message means that he wishes us to play games. I’ll have to place myself on equal terms with him: hide my location, determine his identity, and then attempt to communicate.

I pick a city at random: Memphis. I switch off the flatscreen, get dressed, pack a travel bag, and collect all the emergency cash in the apartment.

In a Memphis hotel, I begin working at the suite’s datanet terminal. The first thing I do is reroute my activities through several dummy terminals; to an ordinary police trace, my queries will appear to originate from different terminals all over the state of Utah. A military intelligence facility might be able to track them to a terminal in Houston; continuing the trace to Memphis would try even me. An alarm program at the Houston terminal will alert me if someone has successfully traced me there.

How many clues to his identity has my twin erased? Lacking all FDA files, I’ll begin with the files of courier services in various cities, looking for deliveries from the FDA to hospitals during the time of the hormone K study. Then a check of the hospital’s brain-damage cases at that time, and I’ll have a place to start.

Even if any of this information remains, it’s of minor value. What will be crucial is an examination of the investment patterns, to find the traces of an enhanced mind. This will take time.

His name is Reynolds. He’s originally from Phoenix, and his early progress closely parallels mine. He received his third injection six months and four days ago, giving him a head start over me of fifteen days. He didn’t erase any of the obvious records. He waits for me to find him. I estimate that he’s been supercritical for twelve days, twice as long as I’ve been.

I now see his hand in the investment patterns, but the task of locating Reynolds is Herculean. I examine usage logs across the datanet to identify the accounts he’s penetrated. I have twelve lines open on my terminal. I’m using two single-hand keyboards and a throat-mike, so I can work on three queries simultaneously. Most of my body is immobile; to prevent fatigue, I’m insuring proper blood flow, regular muscle contraction and relaxation, and removal of lactic acid. While I absorb all the data I see, studying the melody within the notes, looking for the epicenter of a tremor in the web.

Hours pass. We both scan gigabytes of data, circling each other.

His location is Philadelphia. He waits for me to arrive.

I’m riding in a mud-splattered taxi to Reynolds’ apartment.

Judging by the databases and agencies Reynolds has queried over the past months, his private research involves bio-engineered microorganisms for toxic waste disposal, inertial containment for practical fusion, and subliminal dissemination of information through societies of various structures. He plans to save the world, to protect it from itself. And his opinion of me is therefore unfavorable.

I’ve shown no interest in the affairs of the external world, and made no investigations for aiding the normals. Neither of us will be able to convert the other. I view the world as incidental to my aims, while he cannot allow someone with enhanced intelligence to work purely in self-interest. My plans for mind-computer links will have enormous repercussions for the world, provoking government or popular reactions that would interfere with his plans. As I am proverbially not part of the solution, I am part of the problem.

If we were members of a society of enhanced minds, the nature of human interaction would be of a different order. But in this society, we have unavoidably become juggernauts, by whose measure the actions of normals are inconsequential. Even if we were twelve thousand miles apart we couldn’t ignore each other. A resolution is necessary.

Both of us have dispensed with several rounds of games. There are a thousand ways we could have attempted to kill the other, from painting neurotoxin-laced DMSO on a doorknob to ordering a surgical strike from a military killsat. We both could have swept the physical area and datanet for each of the myriad possibilities beforehand, and set more traps for each other’s sweeps. But neither of us has done any of that, has felt a need to check for those things. A simple infinite regression of second-guessing and double-thinking has dismissed those. What will be decisive are those preparations that we could not predict.

The taxi stops; I pay the driver and walk up to the apartment building. The electric lock on the door opens for me. I take off my coat and climb four flights.

The door to Reynolds’ apartment is also open. I walk down the entryway to the living room, hearing a hyperaccelerated polyphony from a digital synthesizer. Evidently it’s his own work; the sounds are modulated in ways undetectable to normal hearing, and even I can’t discern any pattern to them. An experiment in high-information density music, perhaps.

There is a large swivel chair in the room, its back turned toward me. Reynolds is not visible, and he is restricting his somatic emanations to comatose levels. I imply my presence and my recognition of his identity.

<Reynolds.>

Acknowledgement. <Greco.>

The chair turns around smoothly, slowly. He smiles at me and shuts off the synthesizer at his side.

Gratification. <A pleasure to meet you.>

To communicate, we are exchanging fragments from the somatic language of the normals: a shorthand version of the vernacular. Each phrase takes a tenth of a second. I give a suggestion of regret. <A shame it must be as enemies.>

Wistful agreement, then supposition. <Indeed. Imagine how we could change the world, acting in concert. Two enhanced minds; such an opportunity missed.>

True, acting cooperatively would produce achievements far outstripping any we might attain individually. Any interaction would be incredibly fruitful: how satisfying it would be to simply have a discussion with someone who can match my speed, who can offer an idea that is new to me, who can hear the same melodies I do. He desires the same. It pains us both to think that one of us will not leave this room alive.

An offer. <Do you wish to share what we’ve learned in the past six months?>

He knows what my answer is.

We will speak aloud, since somatic language has no technical vocabulary. Reynolds says, quickly and quietly, five words. They are more pregnant with meaning than any stanza of poetry: each word provides a logical toehold I can mount after extracting everything implicit in the preceding ones. Together they encapsulate a revolutionary insight into sociology; using somatic language he indicates that it was among the first he ever achieved. I came to a similar realization, but formulated it differently. I immediately counter with seven words, four that summarize the distinctions between my insight and his, and three that describe a non-obvious result of the distinctions. He responds.

We continue. We are like two bards, each cueing the other to extemporize another stanza, jointly composing an epic poem of knowledge. Within moments we accelerate, talking over each other’s words but hearing every nuance, until we are absorbing, concluding, and responding, continuously, simultaneously, synergistically.

Many minutes pass. I learn much from him, and he from me. It’s exhilarating, to be suddenly awash in ideas whose implications would take me days to consider fully. But we’re also gathering strategic information: I infer the extent of his unspoken knowledge, compare it with my own, and simulate his corresponding inferences. For there is always the awareness that this must come to an end; the formulation of our exchanges renders ideological differences luminously clear.

Reynolds hasn’t witnessed the beauty that I have; he’s stood before lovely insights, oblivious to them. The sole gestalt that inspires him is the one I ignored: that of the planetary society, of the biosphere. I am a lover of beauty, he of humanity. Each feels that the other has ignored great opportunities.

He has an unmentioned plan for establishing a global network of influence, to create world prosperity. To execute it, he’ll employ a number of people, some of whom he’ll give simple heightened intelligence, some meta-self-awareness; a few of them will pose threats to him. <Why assume such a risk for the sake of the normals?>

<Your indifference toward the normals would be justified if you were enlightened; your realm wouldn’t intersect theirs. But as long as you and I can still comprehend their affairs, we can’t ignore them.>

I can measure the distance between our respective moral stances precisely, see the stress between their incompatible radiating lines. What motivates him is not simply compassion or altruism, but something that entails both those things. On the other hand, I concentrate only on understanding the sublime. <What about the beauty visible from enlightenment? Doesn’t it attract you?>

<You know what kind of structure would be required to hold an enlightened consciousness. I have no reason to wait the time it would take to establish the necessary industries.>

He considers intelligence to be a means, while I view it as an end in itself. Greater intelligence would be of little use to him. At his present level, he can find the best possible solution to any problem within the realm of human experience, and many beyond. All he’d require is sufficient time to implement his solution.

There’s no point in further discussion. By mutual assent, we begin.

It’s meaningless to speak of an element of surprise when we time our attacks; our awareness can’t become more acute with forewarning. It’s not affording a courtesy to each other when we agree to begin our battle, it’s actualizing the inevitable.

In the models of each other that we’ve constructed from our inferences, there are gaps, lacunae: the internal psychological developments and discoveries that each has made. No echoes have radiated from those spaces, no strands have tied them to the world web, until now.

I begin.

I concentrate on initiating two reinforcing loops in him. One is very simple: it increases blood pressure rapidly and enormously. If it were to continue unchecked for over a second, this loop would raise his blood pressure to stroke levels—perhaps three hundred over two hundred—and burst capillaries in his brain.

Reynolds detects it immediately. Though it’s clear from our conversation that he never investigated the inducement of biofeedback loops in others, he recognizes what is happening. Once he does, he reduces his heart rate and dilates the blood vessels throughout his body.

But it is the other, subtler reinforcing loop that is my real attack. This is a weapon I’ve been developing ever since my search for Reynolds began. This loop causes his neurons to dramatically overproduce neurotransmitter antagonists, preventing impulses from crossing his synapses, shutting down brain activity. I’ve been radiating this loop at a much higher intensity than the other.

As Reynolds is parrying the ostensible attack, he experiences a slight weakening of his concentration, masked by the effects of the heightened blood pressure. A second later, his body begins to amplify the effect on its own. Reynolds is shocked to feel his thoughts blurring. He searches for the precise mechanism: he’ll identify it soon, but he won’t be able to scrutinize it for long.

Once his brain function has been reduced to the level of a normal, I should be able to manipulate his mind easily. Hypnotic techniques can make him regurgitate most of the information his enhanced mind possesses.

I inspect his somatic expressions, watching them betray his diminishing intelligence. The regression is unmistakeable.

And then it stops.

Reynolds is in equilibrium. I’m stunned. He was able to break the reinforcing loop. He has stopped the most sophisticated offensive I could mount.

Next, he reverses the damage already done. Even starting with reduced capabilities, he can correct the balance of neurotransmitters. Within seconds, Reynolds is fully restored.

I, too, was transparent to him. During our conversation he deduced that I had investigated reinforcing loops, and as we communicated, he derived a general preventative without my detecting it. Then he observed the specifics of my particular attack while it was working, and learned how to reverse its effects. I am astonished at his discernment, his speed, his stealth.

He acknowledges my skill. <A very interesting technique; appropriate, given your self-absorption. I saw no indication when—> Abruptly he projects a different somatic signature, one that I recognize. He used it when he walked behind me at a grocery store, three days ago. The aisle was crowded; around me were an old woman, wheezing behind her air filter, and a thin teenager on an acid trip, wearing a liquid crystal shirt of shifting psychedelic patterns. Reynolds slipped behind me, his mind on the porn mag stands. His surveillance didn’t inform him of my reinforcing loops, but it did permit a more detailed picture of my mind.

A possibility I anticipated. I reformulate my psyche, incorporating random elements for unpredictability. The equations of my mind now bear little resemblance to those of my normal consciousness, undermining any assumptions Reynolds may have made, and rendering ineffectual any psyche-specific weapons of his.

I project the equivalent of a smile.

Reynolds smiles back. <Have you ever considered—> Suddenly he projects only silence. He is about to speak, but I can’t predict what. Then it comes, as a whisper: “self-destruct commands, Greco?”

As he says it, a lacuna in my reconstruction of him fills and overflows, the implications coloring all that I know about him. He means the Word: the sentence that, when uttered, would destroy the mind of the listener. Reynolds is claiming that the myth is true, that every mind has such a trigger built in; that for every person, there is a sentence that can reduce him to an idiot, a lunatic, a catatonic. And he is claiming he knows the one for me.

I immediately tune out all sensory input, directing it to an insulated buffer of short-term memory. Then I conceive a simulator of my own consciousness to receive the input and absorb it at reduced speed. As a metaprogrammer I will monitor the equations of the simulation indirectly. Only after the sensory information has been confirmed as safe will I actually receive it. If the simulator is destroyed, my consciousness should be isolated, and I’ll retrace the individual steps leading to the crash and derive guidelines for reprogramming my psyche.

I get everything in place by the time Reynolds has finished saying my name; his next sentence could be the destruct command. I’m now receiving my sensory input with a one hundred and twenty millisecond time lag. I reexamine my analysis of the human mind, explicitly searching for evidence to verify his assertion.

Meanwhile I give my response lightly, casually. <Hit me with your best shot.>

<Don’t worry; it’s not on the tip of my tongue.>

My search produces something. I curse myself: there’s a very subtle back door to a psyche’s design, which I lacked the necessary mindset to notice. Whereas my weapon was one born of introspection, his is something only a manipulator could originate.

Reynolds knows that I’ve built my defenses; is his trigger command designed to circumvent them? I continue deriving the nature of trigger command’s actions.

<What are you waiting for?> He’s confident that additional time won’t allow me to construct a defense.

<Try to guess.> So smug. Can he actually toy with me so easily?

I arrive at a theoretical description of a trigger’s effects on normals. A single command can reduce any subcritical mind to a tabula rasa, but an undetermined degree of customization is needed for enhanced minds. The erasure has distinctive symptoms, which my simulator can alert me to, but those are symptoms of a process calculable by me. By definition the destruct command is that specific equation beyond my ability to imagine; would my metaprogrammer collapse while diagnosing the simulator’s condition?

<Have you used the destruct command on normals?> I begin calculating what’s needed to generate a customized destruct command.

<Once, as an experiment on a drug dealer. Afterward I concealed the evidence with a blow to the temple.>

It becomes obvious that the generation is a colossal task. Generating a trigger requires intimate knowledge of my mind; I extrapolate what he could have learned about me. It appears to be insufficient, given my reprogramming, but he may have techniques of observation unknown to me. I’m acutely aware of the advantage he’s gained by studying the outside world.

<You will have to do this many times.>

His regret is evident. His plan can’t be implemented without more deaths: those of normal humans, by strategic necessity, and those of a few enhanced assistants of his, whose temptation by greater heights would interfere. After using the command, Reynolds may reprogram them—or me—as savants, having focused intentions and restricted self-metaprogrammers. Such deaths are a necessary cost of his plan.

<I make no claims of being a saint.>

Merely a savior.

Normals might think him a tyrant, because they mistake him for one of them, and they’ve never trusted their own judgement. They can’t fathom that Reynolds is equal to the task. His judgement is optimal in questions of their affairs, and their notions of greed and ambition do not apply to an enhanced mind.

In a histrionic gesture, Reynolds raises his hand, forefinger extended, as if to make a point. I don’t have sufficient information to generate his destruct command, so for the moment I can only attend to defense. If I can survive his attack, I may have time to launch another one of my own.

With his finger upraised, he says, “Understand.”

At first I don’t. And then, horrifyingly, I do.

He didn’t design the command to be spoken; it’s not a sensory trigger at all. It’s a memory trigger: the command is made out of a string of perceptions, individually harmless, that he planted in my brain like time bombs. The mental structures that were formed as a result of those memories are now resolving into a pattern, forming a gestalt that defines my dissolution. I’m intuiting the Word myself.

Immediately my mind is working faster than ever before. Against my will, a lethal realization is suggesting itself to me. I’m trying to halt the associations, but these memories can’t be suppressed. The process occurs inexorably, as a consequence of my awareness, and like a man falling from a height, I’m forced to watch.

Milliseconds pass. My death passes before my eyes.

An image of the grocery store when Reynolds passed by. The psychedelic shirt the boy was wearing; Reynolds had programmed the display to implant a suggestion within me, ensuring that my “randomly” reprogrammed psyche remained receptive. Even then.

No time. All I can do is metaprogram myself over randomly, at a furious pace. An act of desperation, possibly crippling.

The strange modulated sounds that I heard when I first entered Reynolds’ apartment. I absorbed the fatal insights before I had any defenses raised.

I tear apart my psyche, but still the conclusion grows clearer, the resolution sharper.

Myself, constructing the simulator. Designing those defense structures gave me the perspective needed to recognize the gestalt.

I concede his greater ingenuity. It bodes well for his endeavor. Pragmatism avails a savior far more than aestheticism.

I wonder what he intends to do after he’s saved the world.

I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve.

DISPATCHES FROM THE REVOLUTION

Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan says she would like to tell everyone that Synners, her novel about virtual reality and rock ’n’ roll, is out from Bantam along with a reissue of her first novel, Mindplayers, but being the mother to Kansas’s answer to Bart Simpson keeps her so busy that, she has time only to mention that “Dispatches from the Revolution” will also appear in Alternate Presidents, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin Harry Greenberg.

Dylan was coming to Chicago.

The summer air, already electric with the violence of the war, the assassination attempts successful and unsuccessful, the anti-war riots, became super-charged with the rumor. Feeling was running high, any feeling about anything, real high, way up high, eight miles high and rising, brothers and sisters. And to top it all off, there was a madman in the White House.

Johnson, pull out like your father should have! The graffito of choice for anyone even semi-literate; spray paint sales must have been phenomenal that summer. The old bastard with a face like the dogs he lifted up by their ears would not give it up, step aside, and graciously bow to the inevitable. He wuz the President, the gaw-damned Prezident, hear that, muh fellow Amurricans? Dump Johnson, my ass, don’t even think about it, boys, the one we ought to dump is that candy-assed Humphrey. Gaw-damned embarrassment is what he is.

And the President’s crazy, that’s what he is, went the whispers all around Capitol Hill, radiating outward until they became shouts. Madman in the White House—the crazy way with LBJ! If you couldn’t tell he was deranged by the way he was stepping up the bombing and the number of troops in Vietnam, his conviction that he could actually stand against Bobby Kennedy clinched it. Robert F. Kennedy, sainted brother to martyred Jack, canonized in his own lifetime by an assassination attempt. Made by the only man in America who was obviously crazier than LBJ, frothed-up Arab with a name like automatic weapons fire, Sirhan Sirhan, ka-boom, ka-boom. The Golden Kennedy had actually assisted in the crazed gunman’s capture, shoulder to shoulder with security guards and the Secret Service as they all wrestled him to the floor Pity about the busboy taking that bullet right in the eye, but the Kennedys had given him a positively lovely funeral with RFK himself doing the eulogy. And, needless to say, the family would never want for anything again in this life.

But Johnson the Madman was going to run! Without a doubt he was a dangerous psychotic Madman in the White House-damned straight yon didn’t need a Weatherman to know the way the wind blew.

Nonetheless, there was one-after all, hadn’t Dylan said the answer was blowin’ in the wind? And if he was coming to Chicago to support the brothers and sisters, that proved the wind was about to blow gale force. Storm coming batten down the hatches, fasten your seatbelts, and grab yourself a helmet’ or steal a hardhat from some redneck construction worker.

Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement already had their riot gear. Seven years after the first freedom ride stalled out in Birmingham, the feelings of humdiation and defeat at having to let the Justice Department scoop them up and spirit them away to New Orleans for their own protection had been renewed in the violent death of the man who had preached victory through non-violence. He’d had a dream; the wake-up call had come as a gunshot Dreaming was for when you were asleep. Now it was time to be wide-awake in America. . . .

Annie Phillips

“There were plenty of us already wide-awake in America by that late date. I’d been to Chicago back in ’66, two years to the month in Marquette Park. If I was never awake any other day in my life before April ’68, I was awake that day. Surrounded by a thousand of the meanest white people in America waving those Confederate flags and those swastikas, screaming at us. And then they let fly with rocks and bricks and bottles, and I saw when Dr. King took one in the head. I’d thought he was gonna die that day and all the rest of us with him. Well, he didn’t and we didn’t, but it was a near thing. After, the buses were pulling away and they were chasing us and I looked back at those faces and I thought, ‘There’s no hope. There’s really no hope.’

“When Daley got the court order against large groups marching in the city, I breathed a sigh of relief, I can tell you. I felt like that man had saved my life. And then Dr. King says okay, we’ll march in Cicero, it’s a suburb, the order doesn’t cover Cicero. Cicero. I didn’t want to do it, I knew they’d kill us, shoot us, burn us, tear us up with their bare hands and teeth. Some of us were ready to meet them head-on. I truly believe that Martin Luther King would have died that day if Daley hadn’t wised up in a hurry and said he’d go for the meeting at the Palmer House.

“Summit Agreement, yeah. Sell-Out Agreement, we called it, a lot of us. I think even Dr. King knew it. And so a whole bunch of us marched in Cicero anyway. I wasn’t there, but I know what happened, just like everybody else. Two hundred dead, most of them black, property damage in the millions though I can’t say I could ever find it in me to grieve for property damage over people damage. Even though I wasn’t there, something of me died that day in Cicero and was reborn in anger. By ’68, I had a good-sized bone to pick with good old Chi-town, old Daley-ville. I don’t regret what I did. All I regret is that the bomb didn’t get Daley. It had his name on it, I put it on there myself, on the side of the pipe. ‘Richard Daley’s ticket to hell, coach class.’

“Looking back on it, I think I might have had better luck as a sniper.”

Excerpt from an interview conducted covertly.

at Sybil Brand, published in

The Whole Samizdat Catalog, 1972?

exact date unknown

Veterans of the Free Speech Movement at Berkley also knew what they were up against. Reagan’s tear-gas campaign against campus protestors drew praise from a surprising number of people who felt the Great Society was seriously threatened by the disorder promoted by campus dissidents. The suggestion that the excessive force used by the police caused more problems rather than solving any was rejected by the Reagan administration and its growing blue-collar following alike.

By the time Reagan assumed the governorship, he had already made up his mind to challenge Nixon in ’68. But what he needed for a serious bid was the southern vote, which was divided between Kennedy and Wallace. Cleverly, the ex-movie actor managed to suggest strong parallels between campus unrest and racial unrest, implying that both groups were seeking the violent overthrow and destruction of the government of the United States. Some of the more radical rhetoric that came out of both the student left and the civil rights movement, and the fact that the student anti-war movement aligned itself with the civil rights movement, only seemed to validate Reagan’s position.

That the southern vote would be divided between two individuals as disparate as Robert F. Kennedy and George C. Wallace seems bizarre to us in the present. But both men appealed to the working class, who felt left out of the American dream. Despite the inevitable trouble that Wallace’s appearances resulted in, his message did reach the audience for which it was intended—the common man who had little to show for years, sometimes decades of hard work beyond a small piece of property and a paycheck taxed to the breaking point, and, as far as the common man could tell, to someone else’s benefit. Wallace understood that the common man felt pushed around by the government and exploited this feeling. In a quieter era, he would have come off as a bigoted buffoon; but in a time when blacks and students were demonstrating, rioting, and spouting unthinkable statements against the government, the war, and the system in general, Wallace seemed to be one of the few, if not the only political leader who had the energy to meet this new threat to the American way of life and wrestle it into submission.

Some people began to wonder if McCarthy hadn’t been right about Communist infiltration and subversion after all . . . and that wasn’t Eugene McCarthy they were wondering about. By the time of the Chicago Democratic Convention, Eugene McCarthy had all but disappeared, his student supporters a liability rather than an asset. They undermined his credibility; worse, they could not vote for him, since the voting age at that time was a flat twenty-one for everyone. . . .

Carl Shipley

“I hadn’t been around Berkley long when the Free Speech Movement started. Like, the university, Towle, Kerr, all of them were so out-to-lunch on what was happening with us. They thought they were dealing with Beaver Cleaver and his Little League team, I guess. And with us, it was, ‘Guess what, Mr. Man, the neighborhood’s changing, it ain’t Beaver Cleaver any more, it’s Eldridge Cleaver and Wally just got a notice to report for his physical and maybe he doesn’t want to go get his ass shot off in southeast Asia and maybe we’ve had enough of this middle-American conservative bullshit.’ That’s why they wanted to shut down Bancroft Strip. That was the first place I went to see when I got there and it was just like everybody said, all these different causes and stuff, the Young Republicans hanging in right along with the vegetarians and the feminists and people fund-raising for candidates and I don’t know what-all.

“So we all said, fuck this shit, you ain’t closing us down, we’re closing you down. And we did it, we closed the university down. We had the power and we kept it—and then in comes Ronald Reagan two years later in ’66 and he says, Relax, Mr. and Mrs. America, the cavalry’s here. I know you’re worried about the Beave, but I’ve got the solution.

“He sure did. By spring 1968, a lot of campus radio stations all over California were off the air and the campus newspapers were a joke. No funding, see. And by then, everyone was too sick of the smell of tear gas to fight real hard. That was Reagan’s whole thing—sit-ins and take-overs weren’t covered by the right of free assembly, they were criminal acts. Unless you had to be in a building for a class, you were trespassing. I got about a mile of trespassing convictions on my rap sheet and so do a lot of other people. And Mr. and Mrs. America, they were real impressed the way Reagan came down on the troublemakers.

“Sure were a lot of troublemakers. Too many to keep track of. That’s what happened to me, you know. Got lost in the court system. The next thing I knew, it was 1970, and nobody remembered my name, except the guards. And they could remember my number a lot easier. Still can.

“The thing is, I never burned my draft card. That was a frame-up. I wouldn’t have burned it. I was ready to go to Canada, but I intended to keep my draft card. As a reminder, you know. And not even my parents believed me. By then, I’d been into so much radical shit, they figured everything the pigs said about me was true.

“But the fact is, everything I owned was in that building when it burned. So of course my draft card burned up with it! But I never set that fire. My court-appointed lawyer—this is me laughing bitterly—said if I told my ‘crazy story’ about seeing off-duty cops with gasoline cans running from the scene just before the explosion, the judge would tack an extra five years on my sentence for perjury. I should have believed him, because it was the only time anyone told me the truth.

Interview conducted at

Attica, published in

Orphans of the Great Society,

Fuck The System Press,

197?

(circulated illegally in photocopy)

Some say, even today, that Reagan wouldn’t have taken such an extremist path if Wallace hadn’t been such a strong contender. Nixon’s mistake was in dismissing Wallace’s strong showing, choosing to narrow his focus to the competition within his own party for the nomination. This made him look dinky, as if he didn’t care as much about being President as he did about being the Republican candidate for President. That would show those damned reporters that they couldn’t kick around Dick Nixon, uh-huh. Even if he lost, they’d have to take him seriously; if he actually won, they’d have to take him even more seriously. Which made him look not only dinky, but like a whiner—the kind of weak sister who, for example, might stand up in front of a television camera and rant about cocker spaniel puppies and good Republican cloth coats, instead of telling the American people that rioting looting, and draft-card burning would no longer be tolerated Even Ike’s coattails weren’t enough to repair Nixon’s image, and Ike himself was comatose or nearly so in Walter Reed after a series of heart attacks.

The Republican National Convention was notable for three things: Rockefeller’s last minute declaration of candidacy, which further diluted Nixon’s support, the luxuriousness of the accommodations and facilities and its complete removal from the rioting that had broken out in Miami proper where an allegedly minor racial incident escalated into a full-scale battle’ The convention center was in Miami Beach, far from the madding Miami crowd, a self-contained playground for the rich. You couldn’t smell the tear gas from Miami Beach, and the wind direction was such that you couldn’t hear the sirens that screamed all night long . . .

“Carole Feeney” [this subject is still a fugitive]

“I told everybody it was the goddam fatcat Republicans that we ought to go after, not the Democrats. But Johnson the Madman was running and everyone really thought that he was going to get the nomination. I said they were crazy, Kennedy had it in the bag. But Johnson really had them all running scared. I tried talking to some of the people in the Mobe. Half of them didn’t want to go to either convention and the other half were trying to buy guns to take to Chicago! Off the pigs, they kept saying. Off the pigs. Jesus, I thought, the only pig that was going to get offed was Pigasus—the real pig that the Yippies were going to announce as the candidate from the Youth International Party. That was cute. I mean, really, it was. I said, let’s go ahead and do that somewhere in California, film it and send the film to a TV station and let them run it on the news. Uh-uh, nothing doing. Lincoln Park or bust. Yeah, right—Lincoln Park and bust. Busted heads, busted bodies, busted and thrown in jail.

“So I wasn’t going to go. Then I found out what Davis was doing. I couldn’t believe it—Davis Trainor had been in on everything practically from the beginning. He was real good-looking and real popular, he had this real goofy sense of humor and he always seemed to come up with good ideas for guerrilla action. He actually did all the set-up work on the pirate radio station we ran out of Oakland and he worked out our escape routes. Not one of us got caught in the KCUF caper. We called it our Fuck-You caper, of course.

“Then I’m doing the laundry and I find it—his COINTELPRO I.D.—stuffed into that little bitty pocket in his jeans. You know, it’s like a little secret pocket right above the regular pocket on the right. The one thing I always hated about the movement was that it was as sexist as the Establishment. If you were a woman, you always got stuck doing all the cooking and the cleaning up and the laundry and stuff. Unless you were a movement queen like Dohrn. Then you didn’t have to do anything except make speeches and get laid if you wanted. Oh, they threw us a sop by letting us set up our own feminist actions and stuff, but we all knew it was a sop. We kept telling each other that after we changed things, it would be different and for now, we’d watch and listen and learn. Besides, everyone knew that the Establishment wouldn’t take women as seriously as they would men. I wonder now how much any of us believed that—that it would really be different, that we could change things at all.

“Anyway, I went straight to the Mobe with my discovery, but it was too late—Davis discovered his pants were missing and he’d already split. I really didn’t want to go to Chicago after that, but the alternative seemed to be either stay home and wait to get busted, or go to Chicago and get busted in action. I was still enough of an idealist that they talked me into Chicago. If I was going to get busted, I might as well be accomplishing something, and anyway, after the revolution, I’d be a National Heroine, and not a political prisoner.

“So, the revolution’s come and gone and here I am. Still working for the movement—the feminist movement, that is. What little I can do, referring women with unwanted pregnancies to safe abortionists. Yes, there are some. Not all of us were poly-sci majors—some of us were premed, some of us went to nursing school. It costs a goddam fortune, but I’m not getting rich on it. It’s for the risk, you know. You get the death penalty in this state for performing an illegal abortion. I could get life as an accessory, and there was a woman in Missouri who did get death for doing what I’m doing.

“Nobody in my family knows, of course. Especially not my husband. If he knew, he’d probably kill me himself. Odd as it sounds, I don’t hate him . . . not when I think what good cover he is, and what the alternative would be if I didn’t have such good cover. . .”

Part of a transcript labeled “Carole Feeney”

obtained in a 1989 raid on a motel said to
be part of a network of underground

“safe houses” for tax protestors,
leftist terrorists, and other
subversives; no other illegal
literature recovered

The source of the DYLAN IS COMING! rumor never was pinpointed Some say it sprang into being all on its own and stayed alive because so many people wanted it to be true. And for all anyone knows, perhaps it actually was true, for a little while anyway; perhaps Dylan simply changed his mind The more cynical suggested that the rumor had been planted by infiltrators like the notorious Davis Trainor, whose face became so well-known thanks to the Mobe’s mock wanted poster that he had to have extensive plastic surgery, a total of a dozen operations in all. The poster was done well enough that it passed as legitimate and was often allowed to hang undisturbed in post offices libraries, and other public places, side by side with the FBI’s posters of dissidents and activists. One poster was found in a Minneapolis library as late as 1975; the head librarian was taken into custody, questioned, and released. But it is no coincidence that the library was audited for objectionable material soon after that and has been subject to surprise spot checks for the last fifteen years, in spite of the fact that it has always showed 100 percent compliance with government standards for reading matter. The price of a tyrant’s victory is eternal vigilance.

This was once considered to be the price of liberty. Nothing buys what it used to.

Steve D’Alessandro

“By Sunday, when Dylan didn’t show, people were starting to get angry. I kept saying, well, hey, Allen Ginsberg showed. Allen Ginsberg! Man, he was like . . . God to me. He was doing his best, going around rapping with people, trying to get everybody calmed down and focused, you know. A whole bunch of us got in a circle around him and we were chanting Om, Om. I was getting a really good vibe and then some asshole throws a bottle at him and yells, Oh, shut up, you fag!

“I went crazy. Sure, I was in the closet then because the movement wasn’t as enlightened as some of us wished it were. The FBI was doing this thing where it was going around trying to discredit a lot of people by accusing them of being queer, and everybody caught homophobia like it was measles. I ain’t no fairy, no, sir, not me, I fucked a hundred chicks this week and my dick’s draggin’ on the ground so don’t you call me no fag! It still stings, even when I compare it to how things are now. But then, I don’t expect any kind of enlightened feeling in a society where I have to take fucking hormone treatments so I won’t get a hard-on when I see another guy.

“Anyway, I found the scumbag that did it and I punched him out. I gave him a limp wrist. I gave him two of them. And I know I had a lot of support—I mean, a lot of straights admired Ginsberg, too, even if he was gay, just on the basis of Howl, but later, a bunch of Abbie’s friends blamed me for creating the disturbance that gave the police the excuse they needed to wade in and start busting heads.

“Sometimes I’m afraid maybe they were right. But Annie Phillips told me it was just a coincidence. About me, I mean. She said they came in because they saw a black guy kissing a white girl. I guess nobody’ll ever really know for sure, because the black guy died of his injuries and the white girl never came forward.

“I prefer to think that’s what made Annie and her crowd go ahead with the bomb at the convention center. I don’t like to think that Annie really wanted to blow anybody up. It was kind of weird how I knew Annie. Well, not weird, really. I probably owed Annie my life, or damn near, and so did a certain man of African-American descent. We were lucky it was her that walked in on us that day. She was enlightened, or at least tolerant, and we could trust her not to say anything. I didn’t think she liked white people too much, but I’d heard she’d been with Martin Luther King a couple of years before on those marches and I couldn’t blame her. Anyway, she couldn’t give me away without giving away the brother, but to this day, I believe it really didn’t matter to her—homosexuality, that is. Maybe because the Establishment hated us worse than they hated blacks.

“Anyway, I wasn’t intending to be in the crowd that crashed the gate at the convention center on Wednesday. Nomination day. We’d been fighting in the streets since Monday and Daley’s stormtroopers were beating the shit out of us. Late Tuesday night, the National Guard arrived. That’s when we knew it was war.

“On Wednesday, we got hemmed in in Grant Park. People were pouring in by then, and nobody had expected that. It was like everyone was standing up to be counted because Dylan hadn’t, or something. Anyway, there were maybe ten-twelve thousand of us at the band shell in the park, singing, listening to speeches, and then two kids went up a flagpole and lowered the flag to half-mast. The cops went crazy—they came in swinging wild and they didn’t care who they hit or where they hit them. I was scared out of my mind. I saw those cops close up and they looked as mad as Johnson was supposed to be. On the spot, I became a believer like I’d never been before—Madman in the White House and Madman Daley and his Madman cops. It was all true, I thought while I curled up on the ground with my hands over my head and prayed some kill-crazy pig wouldn’t decide to pound my ass to jelly.

“Somebody pulled me up and yelled that we were supposed to all go to in front of the Hilton. I ran like hell all the way to the railroad tracks along with everybody else and that was where the Guard caught us with the tear gas. Man, I thought I was going to die of tear-gas suffocation if I didn’t get trampled by the people I was with. Everyone was running around like crazy. I don’t know how we ever got out of there but somebody found a way onto Michigan Avenue and somehow we all followed. And the Guard followed after us. Somebody said later they weren’t supposed to, but they did. And they weren’t carrying popguns.

“Well, we ran smack into Ralph Abernathy and his Poor People’s Campaign mule train and that was more confusion. Then the Guard waded in and a lot of Poor People went to the hospital that night (it was after seven by then). I’ll never forget that, or the sight of all those TV cameras and the bright lights shining in our eyes. We were all staggering around when a fresh bus-load of riot cops arrived, and that’s another sight I’ll never forget—two dozen beefy bruisers in riot gear shooting out of that bus like they were being shot from cannons and landing on all of us with both feet and their billyclubs. I lost my front teeth and I was so freaked I didn’t even feel it until the next day.

“I was freaked, but I was also furious. We were all furious. It was like, Johnson would send us to Vietnam to be killed or he’d let us be killed by Daley’s madman cops on the Chicago streets, it didn’t matter to him. I think a lot of us expected the convention to adjourn in protest at our treatment. At least that Bobby Kennedy would speak out in protest against the brutality. The name Kennedy meant human rights, after all. Nobody knew that Kennedy had been removed from the convention center under heavy guard because they were all convinced that someone would make another attempt on his life. I heard that later, before they clamped down on all the information. He was about to get the fucking nomination and he was on his way back to his hotel. They said Madman Johnson was more like Mad-Dog Johnson over that, but who the fuck knows?

“George McGovern was at the podium when we busted in. I hadn’t really been intending to be in that group that busted in, but I got carried along and when I saw we were going to crash the amphitheatre, I thought, what the fuck.

“I almost got crushed against the doors before they gave, and I barely missed falling on my face and getting run over by six thousand screaming demonstrators. And the first person I saw was Annie Phillips.

“I thought I was in a Fellini film. She was dressed in this godawful maid’s uniform with a handkerchief around her head mashing down her Afro, but I knew it was her. We looked right into each other’s eyes as I went by, still more carried along with the crowd than running on my own and she put both hands over her mouth in horror. That was the last time I saw her until she was on TV.

“I managed to get out of the way and stay to the back of the amphitheatre itself. I just wanted to catch my breath and try to think how I was going to get out of all this shit without getting my head split open by a crazy Guardsman or a cop. I was still there when the bomb went off down front.

“The sound was so loud I thought my ears were bleeding. Automatically, I dropped to the floor and covered my head. There was a little debris, not much, where I was. When I finally dared to look, what I saw didn’t make any sense. I still can’t tell you exactly what I saw. I blocked it out. But sometimes, I think I dream it. I dream that I saw Johnson’s head sitting on a Texas flagpole. I’m pretty sure that’s just my imagination, because in the dream, he’s got this vaguely surprised-annoyed expression on his saggy old face, like he’s saying, Whut the fuck is goin’ on here?

“Anyway, the next thing I knew, I was out on the street again, and somebody was crying about they were bombing us now, along with the Vietnamese. Which was about the time the Guard opened fire, thinking we were bombing them, I guess.

“I was lucky. I took a bullet in my thigh and it put me out of action. Just a flesh wound, really. It bled pretty impressively for a while and then quit. By then, I was so out of my head that I can’t even tell you where I staggered off to. The people who found me in their front yard the next morning took care of me and got me to a hospital. It was a five-hour wait in the emergency room. That was where I was when I heard about Kennedy.”

Part of the data recovered
from a disk
taken in a raid on an illegal
software laboratory,

March, 1981

Jack Kennedy had died in the middle of a Dallas street, his head blown off in front of thousands of spectators and his horrified wife. Bobby Kennedy had narrowly missed meeting his end during a moment of triumph in a Los Angeles hotel. Ultimately, that seemed to have been only a brief reprieve before fate caught up with him . . .

Jasmine Chang

“Everyone heard the explosion but nobody knew whether it was something the demonstrators had done, or if the National Guard had rolled in a tank, or if the world had come to an end. I ran down to the lobby with just about everyone else on the staff and a good many of the hotel guests, trying to see what was happening outside without having to go out in it. Nobody wanted to go outside. That night, the manager on duty had told us that anyone who wanted could stay over if we didn’t mind roughing it in the meeting rooms. I made myself a sleeping bag out of spare linens under a heavy table in one of the smaller rooms. The night before, the cops had cracked one of the dining room windows with a demonstrator’s head. I wasn’t about to risk my neck going out in that frenzy.

“Well, after the explosion, we heard the rifle fire. Then the street in front of the hotel, already crowded, was packed all of a sudden. Wall-to-wall cops and demonstrators, and the cops were swinging at anything they could reach. They were scything their way through the crowd, you see—they were mowing people down to make paths so they could walk. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. For awhile it was the worst. I wish it could have stayed that way.

“The lobby was filling up, too, but nobody really noticed because we were all watching that sickening scene outside. The whole world was watching, they said. I saw a camera crew and all I could think was their equipment was going to get smashed to bits.

“I don’t know when Kennedy came down to the lobby. I don’t know why the Secret Service didn’t stop him, I don’t know what he thought he could do. He must have been watching from his window. Maybe he thought he could actually address the crowd—as if anyone could have heard him. Anyway, he was there in the lobby and none of us really noticed him.

“The demonstrator who forced his way into the revolving door—he was just a kid, he looked about fifteen years old to me. Scared out of his mind. The revolving door was supposed to be locked, but when I saw that kid’s face, I was glad it wasn’t.

“Then the cops tried to force their way in after him but they got stuck, there was a billyclub jammed in the door or something. And the kid was babbling about how they’d blown up Kennedy at the convention. ‘They threw a bomb and killed Kennedy! They blew him up with Johnson and McGovern!’ he was yelling over and over. And Bobby Kennedy himself rushed over to the kid. I’m pretty sure that was the first any of us really noticed him, when it registered. I remember, I felt shocked and surprised and numb all at once, seeing Kennedy right there, right in the middle of a lobby. Like he was anybody. And nobody else moved, we all just stood there and stared like dummies.

“And Kennedy was trying to tell the kid who he was, that he wasn’t dead and what bomb and all that. The kid got even more hysterical, and Kennedy was shaking him, trying to get something coherent out of him, we’re all standing there watching and finally the cops manage to get through the revolving door.

“They must have thought the kid was attacking Kennedy. That’s all I can figure. Even if that’s not how they looked. The cops. They looked . . . weird. Like they didn’t know what they were doing, or they did know but they’d forgotten why they were supposed to do it. I don’t know. I don’t know. But it was so weird, because they all looked exactly alike to me right at that moment, even though when I looked at them again after, they weren’t anything alike, even in their uniforms. But they looked like identical dolls then, or puppets, because they moved all at once together. Like a kick-line of chorus girls, you know? Except that it wasn’t their legs that came up but their arms.

“I know that when they raised their guns, they were looking at the kid, and I thought, ‘No, wait!’ I tried to move toward them, I was reaching out and they fired.

“It was like another bomb had gone off. For a moment, I thought another bomb had gone off, just a split second before they were going to fire. Then John Kennedy—I mean, Bobby, Bobby Kennedy—that’s a Freudian slip, isn’t it?—he did this clumsy whirl around and it looked like he was turning around in anger, like people do sometimes, you know? Like he was going, ‘Dammit, I’m leaving!’ And then he went down, and it was so awful because—well, this is going to sound really strange, I guess, but . . . well . . . when you see people get shot on a TV show, it’s choreographed or something, they do these kind of graceful falls. Kennedy was . . . they’d robbed him of his dignity. That’s the only way I can think to put it. They shot him and humiliated him all at once, he looked clumsy and awkward and helpless.

“And I was outraged at that. I know it must sound weird, a man got shot, killed, and I’m talking about how he looked undignified. But that’s like what taking someone’s life is—taking their humanity, making them a thing. And I was outraged. I wanted to grab one of those cops’ guns and make them into things. Not just because it was Bobby Kennedy, it could have been anyone on that floor at that moment, the kid, the manager, my supervisor—and I hated my supervisor’s guts.

“Right then, I understood what the demonstrations were about, and I was against the war. Up until then, I’d been kind of for it—not really for it, more like, ‘I hate war, but you’re supposed to serve your country.’ But right then, I understood how horrifying it must be to be told to make somebody into a thing, or be told you have to go out and risk being made into a thing. To kill, to be killed.

“All that went through my mind in a split second and then I started screaming. Then I heard this noise . . . under my screams, I heard this weird groan. It was Kennedy. They say he was dead by then and it must have been the air going out of his lungs past his vocal cords that made the sound. Awful. Just awful. I ran and pulled the fire alarm. It was the only thing I could think to do. And this other chambermaid, Lucy Anderson, she started pounding on the front windows and screaming, ‘Stop! Stop! They killed Kennedy! They killed Kennedy!’ Probably nobody could hear her, but even if anyone had, it wouldn’t have mattered, because most of the people out there thought Kennedy was already dead in the explosion.

“It wasn’t the Fire Department that used the hoses on those people. The cops commandeered the fire trucks and did that. And we were stuck in that hotel for another whole day and night. Even after they cleared the streets, they wouldn’t let any of us go anywhere. Like house arrest.

“The questioning was awful. Nobody mistreated me or hit me or anything like that, it was just that they kept at me. I had to tell what I saw over and over and over and over until I thought they were either trying to drive me out of my mind so I wouldn’t be able to testify against those cops, or trying to find some way to make it seem like I was really the one who’d done it.

“By the time they told me I could leave the hotel, I was mad at the world, I can tell you. Especially since that Secret Service agent or whoever he was told me I’d be a lot happier if I moved out of Chicago and started over somewhere else. He really screwed that one up, and it was lucky for me he did. I left, and I was far, far away when the shit really hit the fan. I started over, all right—I got a new name and a new identity. Everybody else who was in that lobby—Lucy Anderson, the manager, the other staff and guests—they all disappeared. The last anyone saw of them, the Secret Service was taking them away. The cops vanished, too, but I have a feeling they didn’t vanish to quite the same thing as the others. And the kid killed himself. They said. Right, sure. I bet he couldn’t survive the interrogation.

“Of course, all that was a long time ago. Hard to imagine now how things were then. I was only twenty, then. I was working days and taking college courses at night. I wanted to be a teacher. Now I’m in my early forties, and sometimes I think I dreamed it all. I dreamed that I lived in a country where people voted their leaders into office, where you just had to be old enough and not be a convicted felon and you could vote. Instead of having to take those psychological tests and wait for the investigators to give you a voting clearance. It is like a dream, isn’t it? Imagining that there was a time in this country when you could be anything you wanted to be, a teacher, a doctor, a banker, a scientist. I was going to be a teacher. I was going to be a history teacher, but those are mostly white people. My family’s been in this country forever, but because I’m Oriental, I’ve got conditional citizenship now . . . and I was born here! I suppose I shouldn’t complain. If anyone found out I saw Kennedy get it, I’d probably be unconditionally dead. Because everyone knows that the rumor that Kennedy was shot by some cops with a bad aim in a hotel lobby is just another stupid rumor, like the second gunman in Dallas in 1963. Everyone knows Kennedy died in the explosion at the convention center. That’s the official version of how he died and it’s the official version, government certified, that’s the truth.

“Where I live, they have routine segregation, so I can’t use any of the whites’ facilities. I’ve thought about applying to move to one of the larger cities where there’s elective segregation and nothing’s officially ‘white-only,’ but I hear the waiting lists are years long. And somebody told me that everything is really just as segregated as here, they’re just not as open and honest about it. So maybe I’d really be no better off . . .

“But I wish that I could have become a teacher—any kind of teacher—instead of a cook. I can’t even become a chef, because that’s another men-only field. I don’t want to be a chef necessarily, because I really don’t like to cook and I’m not very good at it. But it was all I could get. The list of available careers for non-whites gets smaller all the time.

“Sometimes, I think it actually wasn’t meant to be this bad. Sometimes I think that nobody really wanted the military to take over the government for real, I think it was just panic about so many of the Democratic candidates dying along with the President in that blast and the rioting that wouldn’t stop and all that. It did seem as if the country was completely falling apart and somebody had to do something fast and decisive. Well, sure, somebody should have. Somebody should have figured out who was the President with Madman Johnson and Humpty Humphrey and all those Senators dead—there had to be somebody left, right? All of Congress wasn’t there. I mean, if I’d known, if a lot of us had known how things were going to come out, I think we’d have just let Ronald Reagan be president for four years, run him against Wallace or something and kept free elections, instead of postponing the elections and then having them abolished.

“People panicked. That’s what it all came down to, I think. They were panicking in the streets, they were panicking in the government, and they were panicking in their homes. Our own panic brought us down.”

Undated typescript found in
a locker in the downtown

San Diego bus terminal,

April 9, 1993

Our own panic brought us down. For many who were eyewitness to certain events of 1968, this would seem to be a fitting coda, if coda is the word, for the ensuing twenty-five years . . .

Oh, hell, I don’t know why I’m bothering to try to sum this up. How do you sum up a piece of history gone wrong? How do you sum up the fall of a country that believes it was saved from chaos and destruction? And who am I asking, anyway? I’m out of the country now, another wetback who finally made it across the border to freedom. There was a time when wetbacks went north to freedom, but I’m pretty sure nobody would remember that now. Mexico is sad and dusty and ancient, the people poor and suspicious of Anglos, though I’m so brown now that I can pass convincingly as long as I don’t try to speak the language—my accent is still atrocious.

But the freedom here—nothing like what we used to have, but the constraints are far fewer. You don’t need to apply for a travel permit in-country, you just go from place to place. Of course, it’s not really that hard to get a travel permit in the US, they give them out routinely. But I’m of that generation that remembers when it was different, and it galls me that I would have to apply for one at all if I want to go from, say, Newark to, say, Cape May. I’ve deliberately chosen two cities I’ve never been to, just in case these papers fall into the wrong hands. God knows enough of my papers have been lost over the years. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle I haven’t been caught.

It’s a hell of a life when you’re risking prosecution and imprisonment just for trying to put together a true account of something that happened two and a half decades before.

Why I bothered—well, there are a lot of reasons. Because I’ve learned to love truth. And because I want to atone for what I did to “Carole Feeney” and the others. I’m still amazed that she didn’t recognize me, but I guess twenty-five years is a long time after all.

I really thought I was doing the right thing at the time. I thought infiltrating the leftist groups was all right if it was just to make sure that nobody was stockpiling weapons or planning to blow up a building. Or assassinate another leader. I truly wish I could have arrested Annie Phillips and her group long before Chicago. Some of the people I talked to who were in the streets that night blame Annie for everything that’s happened since, and I think that’s why the authorities kept her alive instead of killing her—so the old radicals could hate her more than the government.

After I talked to Annie, I understood why she turned violent, even if I didn’t condone it. If her voice could have been heard in 1964, maybe all these voices could be heard now, though they might not have so much to say . . .

How melodramatic, “Davis.” I can’t help it. I was actually just like any of them in the year 1968—I thought my country was in trouble, and I was trying to do something about it. And—

And what the hell, we won the Vietnam war. Hooray for America. The Vietnamese are all but extinct, but we brought the boys back home. We sent them right back out to the Middle East, and then down to Nicaragua, and to the Philippines, and to Europe, of course, where they don’t protest our missile bases much any more. That big old stick. We’ve gone one better than talking softly and carrying a big stick. Now we don’t talk at all . . .

In the weeks since I finally got out of the country, I’ve been having this recurring dream. I keep dreaming that things turned out differently, that there was even just one thing that didn’t happen, or something else that did happen, and the country just . . . went on. And so I keep thinking about it. If Johnson hadn’t run . . . if that bomb hadn’t gone off . . . if Kennedy hadn’t been killed. . . . if it had only been half the number of demonstrators . . . if Dylan had showed up.

If Dylan had showed up . . . I wonder sometimes if that’s it. God, the world should be so simple. Instead of simple and brutal and crude.

Even after putting together this risky account, I’m not sure that I really know much more than I did in the beginning. I was hoping that I might figure it all out, how, instead of winning the battle and losing the war, we won the war and lost everything we had. But it could have been different. I don’t know why it’s so important to me to believe that. Maybe because I don’t want to believe that this was the way we were going no matter what. I don’t want to believe that everything that was of any value is stuck back there in the sixties.

Papers found in a hastily vacated room
in an Ecuadorian flophouse by occupying

American forces during the third

South American War, October 13, 1998

FIN DE CYCLÉ

Howard Waldrop

I. Humors in Uniform

A. Gentlemen, Start Your Stilts!

There was clanking and singing as the company came back from maneuvers.

Pa-chinka Pa-chinka, a familiar and comforting sound. The first of the two scouts came into view five meters in the air atop the new steam stilts. He storked his way into the battalion area, then paused.

Behind him came the second scout, then the cyclists in columns of three. They rode high-wheeled ordinaries, dusty now from the day’s ride. Their officer rode before them on one of the new safety bicycles, dwarfed by those who followed behind.

At the headquarters he stopped, jumped off his cycle.

“Company! . . .” he yelled, and the order was passed back along by NCOs, “. . . company . . . company . . . company! . . .”

“Halt!” Again the order ran back. The cyclists put on their spoon-brakes, reached out and grabbed the handlebars of the man to the side. The high-wheelers stood immobile in place, 210 of them, with the two scouts standing to the fore, steam slowly escaping from the legs of their stilts.

“Company . . .” again the call and echoes, “Dis—” at the command, the leftward soldier placed his left foot on the step halfway down the spine of the bicycle above its small back wheel. The others shifted their weight backwards, still holding to the other man’s handlebars.

“—mount!” The left-hand soldier dropped back to the ground, reached through to grab the spine of the ordinary next to him; the rider of that repeated the first man’s motions, until all three men were on the ground beside their high-wheels.

At the same time the two scouts pulled the levers beside the knees of their metal stilts. The columns began to telescope down into themselves with a hiss of steam until the men were close enough to the ground to step off and back.

“Company C, 3rd Battalion, 11th Bicycle Infantry, Attention!” said the lieutenant. As he did so, the major appeared on the headquarters’ porch. Like the others, he was dressed in the red baggy pants, blue coat and black cap with a white kepi on the back. Unlike them, he wore white gloves, sword, and pistol.

“Another mission well done,” he said. “Tomorrow—a training half-holiday, for day after tomorrow, Bastille Day, the ninety-ninth of the Republic—we ride to Paris and then we roll smartly down the Champs-Élysées, to the general appreciation of the civilians and the wonder of the children.”

A low groan went through the bicycle infantrymen.

“Ah, I see you are filled with enthusiasm! Remember—you are the finest Army in France—the Bicycle Infantry! A short ride of seventy kilometers holds no terrors for you! A mere ten kilometers within the city. An invigorating seventy kilometers back! Where else can a man get such exercise? And such meals! And be paid besides? Ah, were I a younger man, I should never have become an officer, but joined as a private and spent a life of earnest bodybuilding upon two fine wheels!”

Most of the 11th were conscripts doing their one year of service, so the finer points of his speech were lost on them.

A bugle sounded somewhere off in the fort. “Gentlemen: Retreat.”

Two clerks came out of headquarters and went to the flagpole.

From left and right bands struck up the Retreat. All came to attention facing the flagpole, as the few sparse notes echoed through the quadrangles of the garrison.

From the corner of his eye the major saw Private Jarry, already placed on Permanent Latrine Orderly, come from out of the far row of toilets set halfway out toward the drill course. The major could tell Private Jarry was disheveled from this far away—even with such a job one should be neat. His coat was buttoned sideways by the wrong buttons, one pants leg in his boots, one out. His hat was on front-to-back with the kepi tied up above his forehead.

He had his toilet brush in his hand.

The back of the major’s neck reddened.

Then the bands struck up “To the Colors”—the company area was filled with the sound of salutes snapping against cap brims.

The clerks brought the tricolor down its lanyard.

Private Jarry saluted the flag with his toilet brush.

The major almost exploded; stood shaking, hand frozen in salute.

The notes went on; the major calmed himself. This man is a loser. He does not belong in the Army; he doesn’t deserve the Army! Conscription is a privilege. Nothing I can do to this man willever be enough; you cannot kill a man for being a bad soldier; you can only inconvenience him; make him miserable in his resolve; the result will be the same. You will both go through one year of hell; at the end you will still be a major, and he will become a civilian again, though with a bad discharge. His kind never amount to anything. Calm yourself—he is not worth a stroke—he is not insulting France, he is insultingyou . And he is beneath your notice.

At the last note the major turned on his heel with a nod to the lieutenant and went back inside, followed by the clerks with the folded tricolors.

The lieutenant called off odd numbers for cycle-washing detail; evens were put to work cleaning personal equipment and rifles.

Private Jarry turned with military smartness and went back in to his world of strong disinfectant soap andmerde.

After chow that evening, Private Jarry retired behind the bicycle shop and injected more picric acid beneath the skin of his arms and legs.

In three more months, only five after being drafted, he would be released, with a medical discharge, for “chronic jaundice.”

B. Cannons in the Rain

Cadet Marcel Proust walked into the company orderly room. He had been putting together his belongings; today was his last full day in the Artillery. Tomorrow he would leave active duty after a year at Orleans.

“Attention,” shouted the corporal clerk as he came in. “At ease,” said Marcel, nodding to the enlisted men who copied orders by hand at their desks. He went to the commanding officer’s door, knocked.“Entre.” said a voice and he went in.

“Cadet Proust reporting,mon capitaine ,” said Marcel, saluting.

“Oh, there’s really no need to salute in here, Proust,” said Captain Dreyfus.

“Perhaps, sir, it will be my last.”

“Yes,yes,” said Captain Dreyfus. “Tea? Sugar?” The captain indicated the kettle. “Serve yourself.” He looked through some papers absent-mindedly. “Sorry to bring you in on your last day—sure we cannot talk you into joining the officers corps? France has need of bright young men like you!—No, I thought not. Cookies? Over there; Madame Dreyfus baked them this morning.” Marcel retrieved a couple, while stirring the hot tea in his cup.

“Sit, sit. Please!” Dreyfus indicated the chair. Marcel slouched into it.

“You were saying?” he asked.

“Ah! Yes. Inspections coming up, records, all that,” said the captain. “You remember, some three months ago, August 19th to be exact, we were moving files from the old headquarters across the two quadrangles to this building? You were staff duty officer that day?”

“I remember the move,mon capitaine . That was the day we received the Maxim gun tricycles, also. It was—yes—a day of unseasonable rain.”

“Oh? Yes?” said Dreyfus. “Thatis correct. Do you remember, perhaps, the clerks having to take an alternate route here, until we procured canvas to protect the records?”

“They took several. Or am I confusing that with the day we exchanged barracks with the 91st Artillery? That also was rainy. What is the matter?”

“Some records evidently did not make it here. Nothing important, but they must be in the files for the inspection, else we shall get a very black mark indeed.”

Marcel thought. Some of the men used the corridors of the instruction rooms carrying files, some went through the repair shops. There were four groups of three clerks to each set of cabinets. . . .

“Which files?”

“Gunnery practice, instruction records. The boxes which used to be—”

“—on top of the second set of wooden files,” said Marcel. “I remember them there. I do not remember seeing themhere. . . . I am at a total loss as to how they could not have made it to the orderly room,mon capitaine .”

“They were checked off as leaving, in your hand, but evidently, we have never seen them again.”

Proust racked his brain. The stables? The instruction corridor; surely they would have been found by now. . . .

“Oh, we’ll just have to search and search, get the 91st involved. They’re probably intheir files. This army runs on paperwork—soon clerks will outnumber the generals, eh, Proust?”

Marcel laughed. He drank at his tea—it was lemon tea, pleasant but slightly weak. He dipped one of the cookies—the kind called a madeline—in it and took a bite.

Instantly a chill and an aching familiarity came over him—he saw his Grandmother’s house in Balbec, an identical cookie, the same kind of tea, the room cluttered with furniture, the sound of his brother coughing upstairs, the feel of the wrought iron dinner table chair against the back of his bare leg, his father looking out the far kitchen window into the rain, the man putting down the burden, heard his mother hum a tune, a raincoat falling, felt the patter of raindrops on the tool-shed roof, smelled the tea and cookie in a second overpowering rush, saw a scab on the back of his hand from eleven years before. . . .

“Mon capitaine!” said Marcel, rocking forward, slapping his hand against his forehead. “Now I remember where the box was left!”

II. Both Hands

Rousseau was painting a tiger.

It was not just any tiger. It was the essence of tiger, the apotheosis offelis horribilis . It looked out from the canvas with yellow-green eyes through which a cold emerald light shone. Its face was beginning to curve into a snarl. Individual quills of whiskers stood out from the black and gold jaws in rippling lines. The edge of the tongue showed around lips with a faint edge of white. A single flower, its stem bent, was the only thing between the face of the tiger and the viewer.

Henri Rousseau put down his brush. He stepped back from the huge canvas. To left and right, birds flew in fright from the charging tiger. The back end of a water buffalo disappeared through the rank jungle at the rear of the canvas. Blobs of gray and tan indicated where the rhinoceros and impala would be painted in later. A huge patch of bamboo was just a swatch of green-gold; a neutral tan stood in for the unstarted blue sky.

A pearl-disk of pure white canvas, with tree limbs silhouetted before it would later be a red-ocher sun.

At the far back edge of the sky, partially eclipsed by a yellow riot of bananas, rose the newly completed Eiffel Tower.

Rousseau wiped his hand against his Rembrandt beret. His eyes above his graying spade beard and mustache moved back and forth, taking in the wet paint.

Pinned to one leg of the easel was a yellowed newspaper clipping he kept there (its duplicate lay in a thick scrapbook at the corner of the room in the clutter away from the north light). He no longer read it; he knew the words by heart. It was from a review of the showing at the Salon des Refusés two years before.

“The canvases of Monsieur Rousseau are something to be seen (then again, they’re not!). One viewer was so bold to wonder with which hand the artist had painted this scene, and someone else was heard to reply: ‘Both, sir! Both hands! And both feet!’ ”

Rousseau walked back to the painting, gobbed his brush three times across the palette, and made a two-centimeter dot on the face of the tiger.

Now the broken flower seemed to bend from the foul breath of the animal; it swayed in the hot mammal wind.

Rousseau moved on to another section of the painting.

The tiger was done.

III. Supper for Four

Three young men walked quickly through the traffic of Paris on streets aclank with the sound of pedals, sprockets, and chains. They talked excitedly. Quadricycles and tricycles passed, ridden by women, older men, couples having quiet conversations as they pedaled.

High above them all, their heads three meters in the air, came young men bent over their gigantic wheels. They sailed placidly along, each pump of their legs covering six meters of ground, their trailing wheels like afterthoughts. They were aloof and intent; the act of riding was their life.

Occasionally a horse and wagon came by the three young men, awash in a sea of cyclists. A teamster kept pace with a postman on a hens-and-chickens pentacycle for a few meters, then fell behind.

There was a ringing of bells ahead and the traffic parted to each side; pedaling furiously came a police tricycle, a man to the front on the seat ringing the bell, another to the rear standing on the back pedals. Between them an abject-looking individual was strapped to the reclining seat, handcuffed and foot-manacled to the tricycle frame.

The ringing died away behind them, and the three young men turned a corner down toward the Seine. At a certain address they turned in, climbed to the third landing-and-a-half, and knocked loudly on the door.

“Enter Our Royal Chasublerie!” came the answer.

Blinking, the three tumbled into the dark room. The walls were covered with paintings and prints, woodcuts, stuffed weasels and hawks, books, papers, fishing gear and bottles. It was an apartment built from half a landing. Their heads scraped the ceiling. A huge ordinary lay on its side, taking up the whole center of the room.

“Alfred,” said one of the young men. “Great news of Pierre and Jean-Paul!”

“They arrived in the Middle Orient on their world tour!” said the second.

“They’ve been sighted in Gaza and bombed in Gilead!” said the third.

“More bulletins soon!” said the first. “We have brought a bottle of wine to celebrate their joyous voyage.”

The meter-and-a-quarter-tall Jarry brushed his butt-length hair back from his face. When they had knocked, he had just finished a bottle of absinthe.

“Then we must furnish a royal feast—that will be four in all for supper?” he asked. “Excuse our royal pardon.”

He put on his bicycling cap with an emblem from the far-off League of American Wheelmen. He walked to the mantelpiece, where he took down a glass of water in which he had earlier placed 200 drops of laudanum, and ate the remains of a hashish cookie. Then he picked up his fly rod and fish basket and left, sticking his head back in to say, “Pray give us a few moments.”

Two of the students began teasing one of Jarry’s chameleons, putting it through an astonishing array of clashing color schemes, and then tossing one of his stuffed owls around like a football while the living one jumped back and forth from one side of its perch to the other, hooting wildly.

The second student watched through the single window.

This is what the student saw:

Jarry went through the traffic of bicycles and wheeled conveyances on the street, disappeared down the steps to the river, rigged up and made four casts—Bip bap bim bom—came up with a fish on each one—a tench, a gudgeon, a pickerel, and a trout, threw them in the basket, and walked back across the street, waving as he came.

What Jarry saw:

He was carrying a coffin as he left the dungeon and went into the roadway filled with elephants, and pigs on stilts. A bicycle ridden by a skeleton rose into the sky, the bony cyclist laughing, the sound echoing off itself, getting louder the further away it got.

He took a week getting down the twenty-seven-kilometer abyss of the steps, each step a block of antediluvian marble a hundred meters wide.

Overhead, the sun was alternate bands of green and brown, moving like a newly electric-powered barbershop sign. The words “raspberry jam teapot” whispered themselves over and over somewhere just behind his right ear.

He looked into the thousand-kilometer width of the river of boiling ether. The fumes were staggering—sweet and nausea-producing at the same time. A bird with the head of a Pekingese lapdog flew by the now purple and black orb of the sun.

Jarry pulled out his whip-coach made of pure silver with its lapis-lazuli guides and its skull of a reel. The line was an anchor chain of pure gold. He had a bitch of a time getting the links of chain through the eye of his fly. It was a two-meter-long, four-winged stained glass and pewter dragonfly made by Alphonse Mucha.

Jarry false-cast into the ether, lost sight of his fly in the roiling fumes, saw a geyser of water rise slowly into the golden air. The tug pulled his arm from its socket. He set the hook.

Good! He had hooked a kraken. Arms writhing, parrot beak clacking, it fought for an hour before he regained line and pulled it to the cobbles, smashing it and its ugly eyes and arms beneath his foot. Getting it into the steamer trunk behind him, he cast again.

There were so many geysers exploding into the sky he wasn’t sure which one was his. He set the hook anyway and was rewarded with a Breughel monster; human head and frog arms with flippers, it turned into a jug halfway back and ended in a horse. As he fought it he tried to remember which painting it was from;The Temptation of St. Anthony , most likely.

The landing accomplished, he cast again just as the planet Saturn, orange and bloated like a pumpkin, its rings whirring and making a noise like a mill-saw, fell and flattened everything from Notre Dame to the Champ de Mars. Luckily, no one was killed.

Another strike. For a second, the river became a river, the fly rod a fly rod, and he pulled in a fish, a pickerel. Only this one had hands, and every time he tried to unhook it, it grabbed the hook and stuck it back in its own jaw, pulling itself toward Jarry with plaintive mewling sounds.

“Merde!” he said, taking out his fishing knife and cutting away the hands. More grew back. He cut them away, too, and tossed the fish into the mausoleum behind him.

Better. The ether-river was back. His cast was long. It made no sound as it disappeared. There was the gentlest tug of something taking the dragonfly—Jarry struck like a man possessed.

Something huge, brown and smoking stood up in the ether fumes, bent down and stared at Jarry. It had shoulders and legs. It was the Colossus of Rhodes. A fire burned through vents in the top of its head, the flames shone out the eyes. It could have reached from bank to bank; its first stride would take it to Montmartre.

Alfred gave another huge tug. The chain going from his rod to the lip of the Colossus pulled taut. There was a pause and a groan, the sound of a ship on a reef. With a boom and rattle, the bronze man tottered, tried to regain its balance, then fell, shattering itself on the bridges and quays, the fires turning to steam. The tidal wave engulfed the Île de la Cité and would no doubt wipe out everything all the way to the sea.

Painfully, Jarry gathered up the tons of bronze shards and put them in the wheelless stagecoach and dragged it up the attic stairs to the roadway.

The bicyclists and wolverines seemed unconcerned. Saturn had buried itself below its equator. Its rings still ran, but much more slowly; they would stop by nightfall. Pieces of the bronze Colossus were strewn all over the cityscape.

Jarry looked toward the Walls of Troy before him as he struggled with the sarcophagus. At one portal he saw his friends Hannibal, Hamilcar, and Odoacer waiting for him. If the meal weren’t to their satisfaction, they were to kill and eathim . He put up his hand in acknowledgement of doom.

The sky was pink and hummed a phrase from Wagner, a bad phrase. The Eiffel Tower swayed to its own music, a gavotte of some kind. Jarry got behind the broken-down asphalt wagon and pushed it toward the drawbridge of despair that was the door of his building.

He hoped he could find the matches and cook supper without burning down the whole fucking city.

IV. Artfully Arranged Scenes

Georges Méliès rose at dawn in Montreuil, bathed, breakfasted, and went out to his home-office. By messenger, last night’s accounts from the Théâtre Robert-Houdin would have arrived. He would look over those, take care of correspondence, and then go back to the greenhouse glass building that was his Star Films studio.

At ten, the workmen would arrive. They and Méliès would finish the sets, painting scenery in shades of gray, black, and white, each scene of which bore, at some place, the Star Films trademark to discourage film footage piracy. The mechanics would rig the stage machinery, which was Méliès’ forte.

At eleven the actors would appear, usually from the Folies Bergére, and Méliès would discuss with them the film to be made, block out the movements, and with them improvise the stage business. Then there would be a jolly lunch, and a free time while Méliès and his technicians prepared the huge camera.

It was fixed on a track perpendicular to the stage, and could be moved from a position, at its nearest point, which would show the actors full-length upon the screen, back into the T-shaped section of the greenhouse to give a view encompassing the entire acting area. Today, the camera was to be moved and then locked down for use twice during the filming.

At two, filming began after the actors were costumed. The film was a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. The first scene, of the girl’s house, was rolled in, accessory wings and flies dropped, and the establishing scene filmed. The actresses playing the girl and her mother were exceptionally fine. Then the next scene, of the forest path, was dropped down; the camera moved back and locked in place.

The scene opened with fairies and forest animals dancing; then the Wolf (a tumbler from the Folies) came on in a very hideous costume, and hid behind a painted tree.

The forest creatures try to warn the approaching girl, who walks on the path toward the camera, then leave. She and the Wolf converse. The Wolf leaves.

The second scene requires eleven takes, minor annoyances growing into larger ones as filming progresses. A trap door needed for a later scene comes open at one point while the animals romp, causing a painted stump to fall into it.

The camera is moved once more, and the scenery for the grandmother’s house is put in place, the house interior with an open window at the back. The Wolf comes in, chases the grandmother away, in continuous action, goes to the wardrobe, dresses, climbs in bed. Only then is the action stopped.

When filming begins again, with the same camera location, Red Riding Hood enters. The action is filmed continuously from this point to when the Wolf jumps from the bed. Then the Wolf chases the girl around the room, a passing hunter appears at the window, watches the action a second, runs in the door, shoots the Wolf (there is a flash powder explosion and the Wolf-actor drops through the trap door).

The grandmother appears at the window, comes in; she, the hunter, and Red Riding Hood embrace.Fin.

Méliès thanks the actors and pays them. The last of the film is unloaded from the camera (for such a bulky object it only holds sixteen meters of film per magazine) and taken to the laboratory building to be developed, then viewed and assembled by Méliès tomorrow morning.

Now 5:00 P.M. , Méliès returns to the house, has early supper with his wife and children. Then he reads to them, and at 7:00 P.M. performs for them the magic tricks he is trying out, shows new magic lantern transition-transfigurations to be incorporated into his stage act, gives them a puppet show or some other entertainment. He bids goodnight to his children, then returns to the parlor where he and his wife talk for an hour, perhaps while they talk he sketches her, or doodles scene designs for his films. He tells her amusing stories of the day’s filming, perhaps jokes or anecdotes from the Folies the actors have told him at lunch.

He accompanies his wife upstairs, undresses her, opens the coverlet, inviting her in. She climbs into bed.

He kisses her sweetly goodnight.

Then he goes downstairs, puts on his hat, and goes to the home of his mistress.

V. We Grow Bored

The banquet was in honor of Lugné-Poe, the manager of the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre.

Jarry, in his red canvas suit and paper shirt with a fish painted on it for a tie, was late. The soup was already being served.

There were three hundred people, all male, attending. Alfred went to his seat; a bowl of soup, swimming with fish eyes, was placed before him. He finished it at once, as he had forgotten to eat for the last two days.

He looked left and right; to the right was a man known vaguely to him as a pederast and afrotteur , but whose social station was such that he would rather have swallowed the national tricolor, base, standard, and spike, than to have spoken to Jarry. To the left was a shabby man, with large spade beard and mustache, wearing an artist’s beret and workman’s clothes. He slowly spooned his soup while deftly putting all the bread and condiments within reach into the pockets of his worn jacket.

Then Jarry looked across the table and found himself staring into the eyes of a journalist for one of the right-wing nationalist Catholic cycling weeklies.

“Are you not Jarry?” asked the man, with narrowed eyes.

“We are,” said Alfred. “Unfortunately, our royal personage does not converse with those who have forsaken the One True Means of Transportation.”

“Ha. A recidivist!” said the reporter. “It is we who are of the future, while you remain behind in the lost past.”

“Our conversation is finished,” said Jarry. “You and Monsieur Norpois have lost our true salvation of the Wheel.”

“Bi-cycle means two wheels,” said the journalist. “When you and your kind realize that true speed, true meaning, and true patriotism depend on equal size and mighty gearing, this degenerate country will become strong once more.”

The man to Jarry’s left was looking back and forth from one to the other; he had stopped eating, but his left hand brought another roll to his pocket.

“Does not the First Citizen of our Royal Lands and Possessions to the East, the Lord Amida Buddha himself, speak of the Greater and Lesser Wheels?” asked Jarry. “Putthat in your ghost-benighted, superstition-ridden censer and try to smoke it. Our Royal Patience becomes stretched. We have nothing against those grown weary, old, effete who go to three, four wheels or more; they have given up. Those, however, with equal wheels, riders of crocodiles and spiders, with false mechanical aids, we deem repugnant, unworthy; one would almost say, but would never, ever, that they have given in to . . .German ideas.”

The conversation at the long table stopped dead. The man to Jarry’s left put down his spoon and eased his chair back from the table ever so slightly.

The face of the reporter across the table went through so many color changes that Jarry’s chameleon, at the height of mating season, would be shamed. The journalist reached under the table, lifted his heavy-headed cane, pushed it up through the fingers of his right hand with his left, caught it by the tip.

“Prepare yourself for a caning,” said the turnip-faced man. No challenge to the field of honor, no further exchange of unpleasantries. He lifted his cane back, pushing back his sleeve.

“Monsieur,” said Jarry, turning to the man on his left, “do us the honor of standing us upon our throne, here.” He indicated his chair.

The man scooted back, picked up the one-and-a-quarter-meter-high Jarry and stood him on the seat of his chair in a very smooth motion. Then the man grabbed his soup bowl and stood away.

“I will hammer you down much farther before I am done,” said the reporter, looking Jarry up and down. People from the banquet committee rushed toward them; Lugné-Poe was yelling who was the asshole who made the seating arrangements?

“By your red suit I take you for an anarchist. Very well, no rules,” said the reporter. The cane whistled.

“By our Red Suit you should take us for a man whose Magenta Suit is being cleaned,” said Jarry. “This grows tedious. We grow bored.” He pulled his Navy Colt Model .41 from his waistband, cocked it and fired a great roaring blank which caught the reporter’s pomaded hair on fire. The man went down yelling and rolling while others helpfully poured pitchers of water on him.

The committee members had stopped at the gun’s report. Jarry held up his finger to the nearest waiter. “Check, please!” he said.

He left the hall out the front door as the reporter, swearing great oaths of vengeance and destruction, was carried back into the kitchen for butter to be applied to his burns.

Jarry felt a hand on his shoulder, swung his arm up, came around with the Colt out again. It was the man who had stood him on the chair.

“You talk with the accent of Laval,” said the man.

“Bred, born, raised, and boredmerdeless there,” said Jarry.

“I, too,” said the man.

“We find Laval an excellent place to befrom , if you get our royal meaning,” said Jarry.

“Mr. Henri-Jules Rousseau,” said the man.

“Mr. Alfred-Henri Jarry.” They shook hands.

“I paint,” said Rousseau.

“We set people’s hair afire,” said Jarry.

“You must look me up; my studio is on the Boulevard du Port-Royal.”

“We will be happy if a fellow Lavalese accompanies us immediately to drink, do drugs, visit the brothels, and become fast friends for life.”

“Are you kidding?” said Rousseau. “They’re getting ready to serve the cabbage back in there. Do look me up, though,” he said, heading back in toward the banquet hall and putting his napkin back under his chin.

“We shall,” said Jarry, and mounted his high-wheeler and was gone into the darkness.

VI. News from All Over

January 14, 1895 Le Cycliste Français

TRAITOR ON THE GENERAL STAFF!

ARREST AND TRIAL OF THE JEW CAPTAIN DREYFUS

DEGRADATION AND STRIPPING OF RANK

DEPORTATION TO GUIANA FOR LIFE

“Secrets vital to the Nation,” says a General, “from which our Enemy will profit and France never recover. It is only the new lenient Jew-inspired law which kept the Tribunal from sentencing the human rat to Death!”

VII. Like the Spokes of a Luminous Wheel

The reporter Norpois rode a crocodile velocipede of singular aspect. Its frame was low and elongated. The seat was at the absolute center of the bicycle’s length, making it appear as if its rider were disincorporated.

Though extremely modern in that respect, its wheels were anachronisms, heavily spoked and rimmed to the uncaring eye. On a close examination it was revealed the spokes were ironwork, eight to each wheel, and over them were wrought two overlapping semicircles, one of a happy, the other of a sad, aspect of the human face.

In unison, front and back, the wheels first smiled, then frowned at the world around them as they whirled their rider along the newly macadamized roads and streets.

In his sporty cap and black knickers, Norpois seemed almost to lean between the wheels of strife and fortune. Other bicyclists paused to watch him go spoking silently by, with an almost inaudible whisper of iron rim on asphalt. The crocodile frame seemed far too graceful and quiet for the heavy wheels on which it rode.

Norpois worked forLe Cycliste Français . His assignments took him to manyarrondissements and the outlying parts of the city.

He was returning from interviewing a retired general before sunset one evening, when, preparatory to stopping to light his carbide handlebar-lamp, he felt a tickle of heat at his face, then a dull throbbing at his right temple. To his left, the coming sunset seemed preternaturally bright, and he turned his head to look at it.

His next conscious thought was of picking himself and his velocipede up from the side of the road where he had evidently fallen. He noticed he was several dozen meters down the road from where he had turned to look at the sunset. His heart hammered in his chest. The knees of his knickers were dusty, his left hand was scraped, with two small pieces of gravel embedded in the skin, and he had bitten his lip, which was beginning to swell. He absently dug the gravel from his hand. He had no time for small aches and pains. He had to talk to someone.

“Jules,” he said to the reporter who shared the three-room apartment with him. As he spoke he filled a large glass with half a bottle of cognac and began sipping at it between his sentences. “I must tell you what life will be like in twenty years.”

“You, Robida, and every other frustrated engineer,” said Jules, putting down his evening paper.

“Tonight I have had an authentic vision of the next century. It came to me not at first as a visual illusion, a pattern on my eyes, some ecstatic vision. It came to me first through my nose, Jules. An overpowering, oppressive odor. Do you know what the coming years smell like, Jules? They smell of burning flesh. It was the first thing to come to me, and the last to leave. Think of the worst fire you ever covered. Remember the charred bodies, the popped bones? Multiply it by a city, a nation, a hemisphere! It was like that.

“The smell came; then I saw in the reddened clouds a line of ditches, miles, kilometers upon thousands of kilometers of ditches in churned earth, men like troglodytes killing each other as far as the eye could see, smoke everywhere, the sky raining death, the sky filled with aerial machines dropping explosives; detonations coming and going like giant brown trees which sprout, leaf, and die in an instant. Death everywhere, from the air, from guns, shells falling on all beneath them, the aerial machines pausing in their rain of death below only to shoot each other down. Patterns above the ditches, like vines, curling vines covered with thorns—over all a pattern formed on my retina—always the incessant chatter of machinery, screams, fire, death-agonies, men stomping each other in mud and earth. I could see it all, hear it all, above all else, smell it all, Jules, and . . .”

“Yes?”

“Jules, it was the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced.” He stared at his roommate.

“There’s some cold mutton on the table,” said Jules. “And half a bottle of beer. He looked back down at his paper. After a few minutes he looked up. Norpois stood, looking out the window at the last glow of twilight, still smiling.

VIII. One Ordinary Day, with Anarchists

Alfred Jarry sailed along the boulevard, passing people and other cyclists right and left. Two and a half meters up, he bent over his handlebars, his cap at a rakish angle, his hair a black flame behind his head. He was the very essence of speed and grace, no longer a dwarfish man of slight build. A novice rider on a safety bicycle took a spill ahead of him. Jarry used his spoon-brake to stop a few centimeters short of the wide-eyed man who feared broken ribs, death, a mangled vehicle.

Then Jarry jumped up and down on his seat, his feet on the locked pedals, jerking the ordinary in small jumps a meter to the left until his path was clear; then he was gone down the road as if nothing had happened.

Riders who drew even with him dropped back—Jarry had a carbine slung across his back, carried bandoliers of cartridges for it on his chest, had two Colt pistols sticking from the waistband of his pants, the legs of which were tucked into his socks, knicker-fashion. Jarry was fond of saying firearms, openly displayed, were signs of peaceableness and good intentions, and wholly legal. He turned down a side street and did not hear the noise from the Chamber of Deputies.

A man named Vaillant, out of work, with a wife and children, at the end of his tether, had gone to the Chamber carrying with him a huge sandwich made from a whole loaf of bread. He sat quietly watching a debate on taxes, opened the sandwich to reveal a device made of five sticks of the new dynamite, a fuse and blasting cap, covered with one and a half kilos of #4 nails. He lit it in one smooth motion, jumped to the edge of the gallery balcony and tossed it high into the air.

It arced, stopped, and fell directly toward the center of the Chamber. Some heard the commotion, some saw it; Dreyfussards sensed it and ducked.

It exploded six meters in the air.

Three people were killed, forty-seven injured badly, more than seventy less so. Desks were demolished; the speaker’s rostrum was turned to wood lace.

Vaillant was grabbed by alert security guards.

The first thing that happened, while people moaned and crawled out from under their splintered desks, was that the eight elected to the Chamber of Deputies on the Anarchist ticket, some of them having to pull nails from their hands and cheeks to do so, stood and began to applaud loudly. “Bravo!” they yelled, “Bravo! Encore!”

IX. The Kid from Spain

His name was Pablo, and he was a big-nosed, big-eyed Spanish kid who had first come to Paris with his mother two years before at the age of thirteen; now he was back on his own as an art student.

On this trip, the first thing he learned to do was fuck; the second was to learn to paint.

One day a neighbor pointed out to him the figure of Jarry tearing down the street. Pablo thought the tiny man on the huge bicycle, covered with guns and bullets, was the most romantic thing he had ever seen in his life. Pablo immediately went out and bought a pistol, a .22 single-shot, and took to wearing it in his belt.

He was sketching the River one morning when the shadow of a huge wheel fell on the ground beside him. Pablo looked up. It was Jarry, studying the sketch over his shoulder.

Pablo didn’t know what to do or say, so he took out his gun and showed it to Jarry.

Jarry looked embarrassed. “We are touched,” he said, laying his hand on Pablo’s shoulder. “Take one of ours,” he said, handing him a .38 Webley. Then he was up on his ordinary and gone.

Pablo did not remember anything until it was getting dark and he was standing on a street, sketchbook in one hand, pistol still held by the barrel in the other. He must have walked the streets all day that way, a seeming madman.

He was outside a brothel. He checked his pockets for money, smiled, and went in.

X. More Beans, Please

“Georges Méliès,” said Rousseau, “Alfred Jarry.”

“Pleased.”

“We are honored.”

“Erik Satie,” said Méliès, “Henri Rousseau.”

“Charmed.”

“At last!”

“This is Pablo,” said Satie. “Marcel Proust.”

“’Lo.”

“Delighted.”

“Gentlemen,” said Rousseau, “Mme. Méliès.”

“Dinner is served,” she said.

“But of course,” said Marcel, “Everyone knows evidence was introduced in secret at the first trial, evidence the defense was not allowed to see.”

“Ah, but that’s the military mind for you!” said Rousseau. “It was the same when I played piccolo for my country between 1864 and 1871. What matters is not the evidence, but that the charge has been brought against you in the first place. It proves you guilty.”

“Out of my complete way of thinking,” said Satie, taking another helping of calamari in aspic, “having been unfortunate enough to be a civilian all my life. . . .”

“Hear, hear!” they all said.

“. . . but is it not true that they asked him to copy thebordereau , the list found in the trash at the German Embassy and introducedthat at the court-martial, rather than the original outline of our defenses?”

“More beans, please,” said Pablo.

“That is one theory,” said Marcel. “The list, of course, leaves off halfway down, because Dreyfus realized what was going to happen as they were questioning him back in December of ’94.”

“That’s the trouble,” said Rousseau. “There are too many theories, and of course, none of this will be introduced at the Court of Cassation next month. Nothing but the original evidence, and of course, the allegations brought up by Colonel Picquart, whose own trial for insubordination is scheduled month after next.”

Méliès sighed. “The problem, of course, is that we shall suffer one trial after another; the generals are all covering ass now. First they convict an innocent man on fabricated evidence. Finding the spying has not stopped with the wrongful imprisonment of Dreyfus, they listen to Colonel Picquart, no friend of anyone, who tells them it’s the Alsatian Esterhazy, but Esterhazy’s under the protection of someone in the War Ministry, so they send Picquart off to Fort Zinderneuf, hoping he will be killed by the Rifs; when he returns covered with scars and medals, they throw him in jail on trumped-up charges of daring to question the findings of the court-martial. Meanwhile the public outcry becomes so great that the only way things can be kept at status quo is to say questioning Dreyfus’ guilt is to question France itself. We can all hope, but of course, there can probably be only one verdict of the court of review.”

“More turkey, please,” said Pablo.

“The problem, of course,” said Satie, “is that France needs to be questioned if it breeds such monsters of arrogance and vanity.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Satie,” said Madame Méliès, speaking for the first time in an hour. “The problem, of course, is that Dreyfus is a Jew.”

She had said the thing none of the others had yet said, the thing at base, root, and crown of the Affair.

“And being so,” said Jarry, “we are sure, Madame, if through our actions this wronged man is freed, he will be so thankful as to allow Our Royal Person to put him upon the nearest cross, with three nails, for whatever period we deem appropriate.”

“Pass the wine, please,” said Pablo.

“It is a rough time for us,” said Jarry, “what with our play to go into production soon, but we shall give whatever service we can to this project.”

“Agreed by all, then!” said Méliès. “Star Films takes the unprecedented step of collaborating with others! I shall set aside anentire week , that of Tuesday next, for the production ofThe Dreyfus Affair . Bring your pens, your brushes, your ideas! Mr. Satie, our piano at Théâtre Robert-Houdin is at your disposal for practice and for thepremière ; begin your plans now. And so, having decided the fate of France, let us visit the production facilities at the rear of the property, then return to the parlor for cigars and port!”

They sat in comfortable chairs. Satie played a medley of popular songs, those he knew by heart from his days as the relief piano player at the Black Cat; Méliès, who had a very good voice, joined Pablo and Rousseau (who was sorry he had not brought his violin) in a rousing rendition of “The Tired Workman’s Song.”

Jarry and Proust sat with unlit cigars in their mouths.

“Is it true you studied with Professor Bergson, at the Lycée Henri IV?” asked Marcel. “I was class of ’91.”

“We are found out,” said Alfred. “We were class of all the early 1890s, and consider ourselves his devoted pupil still.”

“Is it his views on time, on duration? His idea that character comes in instants of perception and memory? Is it his notion of memory as a flux of points in the mind that keeps you under his spell?” asked Proust.

“He makes us laugh,” said Jarry.

They spent the rest of the evening—after meeting and bidding goodnight to the Méliès children, and after Madame Méliès rejoined them—playing charades, doing a quick round of Dreyfus Parcheesi, and viewing pornographic stereopticon cards, of which Georges had a truly wonderful collection.

They said their goodbyes at the front gate of the Montreuil house. Pablo had already gone, having a hot date with anyone at a certain street address, on his kangaroo bicycle; Rousseau walked the two blocks to catch an omnibus; Satie, as was his wont, strode off into the night at a brisk pace whistling an Aristide Bruant tune; he sometimes walked twenty kilometers to buy a piece of sheet music without a second thought.

Marcel’s coachman waited. Jarry stood atop the Méliès wall, ready to step onto his ordinary. Georges and Madame had already gone back up the walkway.

Then Marcel made a Proposal to Alfred, which, if acted upon, would take much physical activity and some few hours of their time.

“We are touched by many things lately,” said Jarry. “We fear we grow sentimental. Thank you for your kind attention, Our Dear Marcel, but we must visit the theater, later to meet with Pablo to paint scenery, and our Royal Drug Larder runs low. We thank you, though, from the bottom of our heart, graciously.”

And he was gone, silently, a blur under each gas lamp he passed.

For some reason, during the ride back to Faubourg Ste.-Germain, Marcel was not depressed as he usually was when turned down. He too, hummed a Bruant song. The coachman joined in.

Very well, very well, thought Proust. We shall give them a Dreyfus they willnever forget.

XI. The Enraged Umbrella

In the park, two days later, Marcel thought he was seeing a runaway carousel.

“Stop!” he yelled to the cabriolet driver. The brake squealed. Marcel leapt out, holding his top hat in his hand. “Wait!” he called back over his shoulder.

There was a medium-sized crowd, laborers, fashionable people out for a stroll, several tricycles and velocipedes parked nearby. Attention was all directed toward an object in the center of the crowd. There was a wagon nearby, with small machines all around it.

What Marcel had at first taken for a merry-go-round was not. Itwas round, and it did go.

The most notable feature looked like a ten-meter-in-diameter Japanese parasol made of, Marcel guessed, fine wire struts and glued paper. Coming down from the center of this, four meters long, was a central pipe, at its bottom was a base shaped like a plumb bob. Above this base, a seat, pedals and set of levers faced the central column. Above the seat, halfway down the pipe, parallel to the umbrella mechanism, was what appeared to be a weathervane, at the front end of which, instead of an arrow was a spiral, two-bladed airscrew. At its back, where the iron fletching would be, was a half-circle structure, containing within it a round panel made of the same stuff as the parasol. Marcel saw that it was rotatable on two axes, obviously a steering mechanism of some sort.

Three men in coveralls worked at the base; two holding the machine vertical while the third tightened bolts with a wrench, occasionally giving the pedal mechanism a turn, which caused the giant umbrella above to spin slowly.

Obviously the machine was very lightweight—what appeared to be iron must be aluminum or some other alloy, the strutwork must be very fine, possibly piano wire.

The workman yelled. He ran the pedal around with his hand. The paper-wire umbrella moved very fast indeed.

At the call, a man in full morning suit, like Marcel’s, came out from behind the wagon. He walked very solemnly to the machine, handed his walking stick to a bystander, and sat down on the seat. He produced two bicyclist’s garters from his coat and applied them to the legs of his trousers above his spats and patent-leather shoes.

He moved a couple of levers with his hands and began to pedal, slowly at first, then faster. The moving parasol became a flat disk, then began to strobe, appearing to move backwards. The small airscrew began a lazy revolution.

There was a soft growing purr in the air. Marcel felt gentle wind on his cheek.

The man nodded to the mechanics, who had been holding the machine steady and upright. They let go. The machine stood of its own accord. The grass beneath it waved and shook in a streamered disk of wind.

The man doffed his top hat to the crowd. Then he threw another lever. The machine, with no strengthening of sound or extra effort from its rider, rose three meters into the air.

The crowds gasped and cheered.“Vive la France!” they yelled. Marcel, caught up in the moment, had a terrible desire to applaud.

Looking to right and left beneath him, the aeronaut moved a lever slightly. The lazy twirling propeller on the weathervane became a corkscrewing blur. With a very polite nod of his head, the man pedaled a little faster.

Men threw their hats in the air; women waved their four-meter-long scarves at him.

The machine, with a sound like the slow shaking-out of a rug, turned and moved slowly off toward the Boulevard Haussmann, the crowd, and children who had been running in from all directions, following it.

While one watched, the other two mechanics loaded gear into the wagon. Then all three mounted, turned the horses, and started off at a slow roll in the direction of the heart of the city.

Marcel’s last glimpse of the flying machine was of it disappearing gracefully down the line of an avenue above the treetops, as if an especially interesting woman, twirling her parasol, had just left a pleasant garden party.

Proust and the cabriolet driver were the only persons left on the field. Marcel climbed back in, nodded. The driver applied the whip to the air.

It was, Marcel would read later, the third heavier-than-air machine to fly that week, the forty-ninth since the first of the year, the one-hundred-twelfth since man had entered what the weeklies referred to as the Age of the Air late year-before-last.

XII. The Persistence of Vision

The sound of hammering and sawing filled the workshop. Rousseau painted stripes on a life-sized tiger puppet. Pablo worked on the silhouette jungle foliage Henri had sketched. Jarry went back and forth between helping them and going to the desk to consult with Proust on the scenario. (Proust had brought in closely written pages, copied in a fine hand, that he had done at home the first two days; after Jarry and Méliès drew circles and arrows all over them, causing Marcel visible anguish, he had taken to bringing in only hastily worded notes. The writers were trying something new—both scenario and title cards were to be written by them.)

“Gentlemen,” said Satie, from his piano in the corner. “The music for the degradation scene!” His left hand played heavy bass notes, spare, foreboding. His right hit every other note from “La Marseillaise.”

“Marvelous,” they said. “Wonderful!”

They went back to their paintpots. The Star Films workmen threw themselves into the spirit wholeheartedly, taking directions from Rousseau or Proust as if they were Méliès himself. They also made suggestions, explaining the mechanisms which would, or could, be used in the filming.

“Fellow collaborators!” said Méliès, entering from the yard. “Gaze on our Dreyfus!” He gestured dramatically.

A thin balding man, dressed in cheap overalls entered, cap in hand. They looked at him, each other, shifted from one foot to another.

“Come, come, geniuses of France!” said Méliès. “You’re not using your imaginations!”

He rolled his arm in a magician’s flourish. A blue coat appeared in his hands. The man put it on. Better.

“Avec!” said Méliès, reaching behind his own back, producing a black army cap, placing it on the man’s head. Better still.

“Voilà!” he said, placing a mustache on the man’s lip.

To Proust, it was the man he had served under seven years before, grown a little older and more tired. A tear came to Marcel’s eye; he began to applaud, the others joined in.

The man seemed nervous, did not know what to do with his hands. “Come, come, Mr. Poulvain, get used to applause,” said Méliès. “You’ll soon have to quit your job at the chicken farm to portray Captain Dreyfus on the international stage!” The man nodded and left the studio.

Marcel sat back down and wrote with redoubled fury.

“Monsieur Méliès?” asked Rousseau.

“Yes?”

“Something puzzles me.”

“How can I help?”

“Well, I know nothing about the making of cinematographs, but, as I understand, you take the pictures, from beginning to the end of the scenario, in series, then choose the best ones to use after you have developed them?”

“Exactement!” said Georges.

“Well, as I understand (if only Jarry and Proust would quit diddling with the writing), we use the same prison cell both for the early arrest scenes, and for Dreyfus’ cell on Devil’s Island?”

“Yes?”

“Your foreman explained that we would film the early scenes, break the backdrops, shoot other scenes, and some days or hours later reassemble the prison cell again, with suitable changes. Well, it seems to me, to save time and effort, you should film the early scenes, then change the costume and the makeup on the actor, and add the properties which represent Devil’s Island, and put those scenes in their proper place when the scenes are developed. That way, you would be through with both sets, and go on to another.”

Méliès looked at him a moment. The old artist was covered with blobs of gray, white, and black paint. “My dear Rousseau; we have never done it that way, since it cannot be done that way in the theater. But . . .”

Rousseau was pensive. “Also, I noticed that great care must be taken in moving the camera, and that right now the camera is to be moved many times in the filming. Why not also photograph all the scenes where the camera is in one place a certain distance from the stage, then all the others at the next, and so on? It seems more efficient that way, to me.”

“Well,” said Méliès. “That is surely asking too much! But your first suggestion, in the interest of saving time with the scenery. Yes. Yes, we could possibly do that! Thank you . . . as it is going now, the trial may very well be over before we evenbegin filming—if someone doesn’t shoot Dreyfus as he sits in court since his return from Devil’s Island evenbefore that. Perhaps we shall try your idea . . .”

“Just thinking aloud,” said Rousseau.

“Monsieur Director?” said Marcel.

“Yes?”

“Something puzzles me.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve seen few Lumièreoscopes—”

“That name!” said Méliès, clamping his hands over his ears.

“Sorry . . . I’ve seen few films, at any rate. But in each one (and it comes up here in the proposed scenario) that we have Dreyfus sitting in his cell, on one side, the cutaway set of the hut with him therein; then the guard walks up and pounds on the door. Dreyfus gets up, goes to the door, opens it, and the guard walks in and hands him the first letter he is allowed to receive from France.”

“A fine scene!” said Méliès.

“Hmmm. Yes. Another thing I have seen in all Lu—in moving pictures is that the actors are always filmed as if you were watching them on stage, their whole bodies from a distance of a few meters away.”

“That is the only way it is done, my dear Marcel.”

“Perhaps . . . perhaps we could do it another way. We see Dreyfus in his hut, in his chair. We show only his upper body, from waist to head. We could see the ravages of the ordeal upon him, the lines in his face, the circles under his eyes, the gray in his hair.”

“But . . .”

“Hear me, please. Then you show a fist, as if it were in your face, pounding on the door. From inside the hut Dreyfus gets up, turns, walks to the door. Then he is handed the letter. We see the letter itself, the words of comfort and despair . . .”

Méliès was looking at him as if there were pinwheels sticking from his eye sockets.

“. . . can you imagine the effects on the viewer?” finished Marcel.

“Oh yes!” said Méliès. “They would scream. Where are their legs? Where are their arms? What is this writing doing in my eye?!!!”

“But think of the impact! The drama?”

“Marcel, we are here to plead for justice, not frighten people away from the theater!”

“Think of it! What better way to show the impact on Dreyfus than by putting the impact on the spectator?”

“My head reels, Proust!”

“Well, just a suggestion. Sleep on it.”

“I shall have nightmares,” said Méliès.

Pablo continued to paint, eating a sandwich, drinking wine.

“Méliès?” said Jarry.

“(Sigh) Yes?”

“Enlighten us.”

“In what manner?”

“Our knowledge of motio-kineto-photograms is small, but one thing is a royal poser to us.”

“Continue.”

“In our wonderful scene of the nightmares . . . we are led to understand that Monsieur Rousseau’s fierce tigers are to be moved by wires, compressed air, and frantic stagehands?”

“Yes.”

“Our mind works overtime. The fierce tigers are wonderful, but such movement will be seen, let us say, like fierce tigers moved by wires, air, and stage-labor.”

“A necessary convention of stage and cinematograph,” said Méliès. “One the spectator accepts.”

“But we are not here to have the viewer accept anything but an intolerable injustice to a man.”

“True, but pity . . .”

“Méliès,” said Jarry. “We understand each click of the camera takes one frame of film. Many of these frames projected at a constant rate leads to the illusion of motion. But each is of itself but a single frame of film.”

“The persistence of vision,” said Méliès.

“We were thinking. What if we took a single click of the camera, taking one picture of our fierce tigers . . .”

“But what would that accomplish?”

“Ah . . . then, Méliès, our royal personage moves the tiger to a slightly different posture, but the next in some action, but only one frame advanced, and took another click of the camera?”

Méliès looked at him. “Then . . .”

“Then the next and the next and the next and so on! The fierce tiger moves, roars, springs, devours! But each frame part of the movement, each frame a still.”

Méliès thought a second. “An actor in the scenes would not be able to move at all. Or he would have to move at the same rate as the tiger. He would have to hold perfectly still (we already do that when stopping the camera to substitute a skeleton for a lady or somesuch) but they would have to do it endlessly. It would take weeks to get any good length of film. Also, the tigers would have to be braced, strutted to support their own weight.”

“This is ouridea , Méliès; we are not technicians.”

“I shall take it under advisement.”

Méliès’ head began to hurt. He had a workman go to the chemist’s, and get some of the new Aspirin for him. He took six.

The film took three weeks to photograph. Méliès had to turn out three fairy tales in two days besides to keep his salesmen supplied with footage. Every day they worked, the Court of Cassation met to rehear the Dreyfus case, every day brought new evasions, new half-insinuations; Dreyfus’ lawyer was wounded by a gunshot while leaving court. Every day the country was split further and further down the center: There was no middle ground. There was talk of acoup d’état by the right.

At last the footage was done.

“I hope,” said Méliès to his wife that night, “I hope that after this I shall not hear the name of Dreyfus again, for the rest of my life.”

XIII. The Elephant at the Foot of the Bed

Jarry was on stage, talking in a monotone as he had been for five minutes. The crowd, including women, had come to the Theater of the Work to see what new horrors Lugné-Poe had in store for them.

Alfred sat at a small folding table, which had been brought onstage, and a chair placed behind it, facing the audience. Jarry talked, as someone said, as a nutcracker would speak. The audience had listened but was growing restless—we have come for a play, not for someone dressed as a bicyclist to drone on about nothing in particular.

The last week had been a long agony for Jarry—working on this play, which he had started in his youth, as a puppet play satirizing a pompous teacher—it had grown to encompass all mankind’s foibles, all national and human delusions. Then there had been the work on the Dreyfus film with Pablo and Rousseau and Proust and Méliès—it had been trying and demanding, but it was like pulling teeth, too collaborative, with its own limitations and ideas. Give a man the freedom of the page and boards!

Jarry ran down like a clock. He finished tiredly.

“The play takes place in Poland, which is to say, Nowhere.” He picked up his papers while two stagehands took off the table and chair. Jarry left. The lights dimmed. There were three raps on the floor with Lugné-Poe’s cane, the curtains opened in the darkness as the lights came up.

The walls were painted as a child might have—representing sky, clouds, stars, the sun, moon, elephants, flowers, a clock with no hands, snow falling on a cheery fireplace.

A round figure stood at one side, his face hidden by a pointed hood on which was painted the slitted eyes and mustache of a caricature bourgeoisie. His costume was a white canvas cassock with an immense stomach on which was painted three concentric circles.

The audience tensed, leaned forward. The figure stepped to the center of the stage, looked around.

“Merde!” he said.

The riot could be heard for a kilometer in all directions.

XIV. What He Really Thinks

“Today, France has left the past of Jew-traitors and degeneracy behind.

“Today, she has taken the final step toward greatness, a return to the True Faith, a way out of the German-Jew morass in which she has floundered for a quarter-century.

“With the second conviction of the traitor-spy Dreyfus, she sends a signal to all his rat-like kind that France will no longer tolerate impurities in its body-politic, its armies, its commerce. She has served notice that the Future is written in the French language; Europe, indeed the world, shall one day speak only one tongue, Française.

“The verdict ofGuilty!—even with its softening of ‘With extenuating circumstances’—will end this Affair, once and for all, the only way—short of public execution by the most excruciating means, which, unfortunately the law no longer allows—ah! but True Frenchmen are working to change that!—that it could be ended; with the slow passing of this Jew-traitor to rot in the jungle of Devil’s Island—a man who should never have been allowed to don the uniform of this country in the first place.

“Let there be no more talk of injustice! Injustice has already been served by the spectacle of a thoroughly guilty man being giventwo trials; by a man not worth asous causing great agitation—surely the work of enemies of the state.

“Let every True Frenchman hold this day sacred until the end of time. Let him turn his eyes eastward at our one Great Enemy, against that day when we shall rise up and gain just vengeance—let him not forget also to look around him, let him not rest until every Christ-murdering Jew, every German-inspired Protestant is driven from the boundaries of this country, or gotten rid of in an equally advantageous way—their property confiscated, their businesses closed, their ‘rights’—usurped rights!—nullified.

“If this decision wakens Frenchmen to that threat, then Dreyfus will have, in all his evil machinations, his total acquiescence to our enemy’s plans, done one good deed: He will have given us the reason not to rest until every one of his kind is gone from the face of the earth; that in the future the only place Hebrew will be spoken is in Hell.”

—Robert Norpois

XV. Truth Rises from the Well

Emile Zola stared at the white sheet of paper with the British watermark.

He dipped his pen in the bottle of Pelikan ink in the well and began to write.

As he wrote, the words became scratchier, more hurried. All his feelings of frustration boiled over in his head and out onto the fine paper. The complete cowardice and stultification of the Army, the anti-Semitism of the richand the poor, the Church; the utter stupidity of the government, the treason of the writers who refused to come to the aid of an innocent man.

It was done sooner than he thought; six pages of his contempt and utter revulsion with the people of the country he loved more than life itself.

He put on his coat and hat and hailed a pedal cabriolet, ordering it to the offices ofL’Aurore . The streets were more empty than usual, the cafés full. The news of the second trial verdict had driven good people to drink. He was sure there were raucous celebrations in every Church, every fort, and the basement drill-halls of every right-wing organization in the city and the country. This was an artist’s quarter—there was no loud talk, no call to action. There would be slow and deliberate drunkenness and oblivion for all against the atrocious verdict.

Zola sat back against the cushion, listening to the clicking pedals of the driver. He wondered if all this would end with the nation, half on one side of some field, half on the other, charging each other in final bloodbath.

He paid the driver, who swerved silently around and headed back the other way. Zola stepped into theAurora’s office, where Clemenceau waited for him behind his desk. Emile handed him the manuscript.

Clemenceau read the first sentence, wrote, “Page One, 360 point RED TYPE headline—‘J’ACCUSE,’ ” called “Copy boy!”, said to the boy, “I shall be back for a proof in three hours,” put on his coat, and arm in arm he and Zola went off to the Théâtre Robert-Houdin for the first showing of Star Films’The Dreyfus Affair , saying not a word to each other.

XVI. Chamber Pots Shall Light Your Way

Zola and Clemenceau, crying tears of pride and exultation, ran back arm in arm down the Place de l’Opéra, turning into a side street toward the publisher’s office.

Halfway down, they began to sing “La Marseillaise”; people who looked out their windows, not knowing the reason, assumed their elation for that of the verdict of the second trial, flungmerde pots at them from second-story windows. “Anti-Dreyfussard scum!” they yelled, shaking their fists. “Wait till I get my fowling piece!”

Emile and Georges ran into the office, astonishing the editors and reporters there.

They went to Clemenceau’s desk, where the page proof of Zola’s article waited, with a separate proof of the red headline.

Zola picked up the proof.

“No need of this, my dear Georges?”

“I think not, my friend Emile.”

Zola shredded it, throwing the strips on the pressman who was waiting in the office for word from Clemenceau.

“Rip off the front page!” Clemenceau yelled out the door of his office. “We print a review of a moving picture there! Get Veyou out of whatever theater watching whatever piece of stage-pap he’s in and hustle him over to the Robert-Houdin for the second showing!”

Emile and Georges looked at each other, remembering.

“The Awful Trip to the Island!”

“The Tigers of the Imagination!”

“First News of Home!” said Emile.

“Star Films,” said Clemenceau.

“Méliès,” said Zola.

“Dreyfus!” they said in unison.

Three days later, the President overturned the conviction of the second court, pardoned Dreyfus, and returned him to his full rank and privileges. The Ministry of War was reorganized, and the resignations of eleven generals received.

The President was, of course, shot down like a dog on the way home from a cabinet meeting that night. Three days of mourning were declared.

Dreyfus had been released the same night, and went to the country home of his brother Mathieu; he was now a drawn, shaken man whose hair had turned completely white.

XVII. Three Famous Quotes Which Led to Duels:

1. “The baron writes the kind of music a priest can hum while he is raping a choirboy.”

2. “I see you carry the kind of cane which allows you to hit a woman eight or ten times before it breaks.”

3. “Monsieur Jarry,” said Norpois, “I demand satisfaction for your insults to France during the last three years.”

“Captain Dreyfus is proved innocent. We have called attention to nothing that was not the action of madmen and cowards.”

“You are a spineless dwarf masturbator with the ideas of a toad!” said Norpois.

“Our posture, stature, and habits are known to every schoolboy in France, Mister Journalist,” said Jarry. “We have come through five years of insult, spittle, and outrage. Nothing you say will make Dreyfus guilty or goad our royal person into a gratuitous display of our unerring marksmanship.”

Jarry turned to walk away with Pablo.

“Then, Monsieur Jarry, your bicycle . . .” said Norpois.

Jarry stopped. “What of Our Royal Vehicle?”

“Your bicycle eatsmerde sandwiches.”

XVIII. The Downhill Bicycle Race

A. Prelims

The anemometer barely moved behind his head. The vane at its top pointed to the south; the windsock swelled and emptied slowly.

Jarry slowly recovered his breath. Below and beyond lay the city of Paris and its environs. The Seine curved like a piece of gray silk below and out to two horizons. It was just after dawn; the sun was a fat red beet to the east.

It was still cool at the weather station atop the Eiffel Tower, 300 meters above the ground.

Jarry leaned against his high-wheeler. He had taken only the least minimum of fortifying substances, and that two hours ago on this, the morning of the duel.

Proust had acted as his second (Jarry would have chosen Pablo—good thing he hadn’t, as the young painter had not shown up with the others this morning, perhaps out of fear of seeing Jarry maimed or killed—but Proust had defended himself many times, with a large variety of weapons, on many fields of honor). Second for Norpois was the journalist whose hair Alfred had set afire at the banquet more than a year ago. As the injured party, Jarry had had choice of place and weapons.

The conditions were thus: weapons, any. Place: the Eiffel Tower. Duelistsmust be mounted on their bicycles when using their weapons. Jarry would start at the weather station at the top, Norpois at the base. After Jarry was taken to the third platform, using all three sets of elevators on the way up, and the elevator man—since this was a day of mourning, the tower was closed, and the guards paid to look the other way—returned to the ground, the elevators could not be used, only the stairways. Jarry had still had to climb the spiral steps from the third platform to the weather station, from which he was now recovering.

With such an arrangement, Norpois would, of course, be waiting in ambush for him on the second observation platform by the time Jarry reached it. Such was the nature of duels.

Jarry looked down the long swell of the south leg of the tower—it was gray, smooth, and curved as an elephant’s trunk, plunging down and out into the earth. Tiny dots waited there; Norpois, the journalist, Proust, a few others, perhaps by now Pablo. The Tower cast a long shadow out away from the River. The shadow of the Trocadéro almost reached to the base of the Tower in the morning sun. There was already talk of painting the Tower again, for the coming Exposition of 1900 in a year and a half.

Alfred took a deep breath, calmed himself. He was lightly armed, having only a five-shot .32 revolver in his holster and a poniard in a sheath on his hip. He would have felt almost naked except for the excruciatingly heavy but comforting weapon slung across his shoulders.

It was a double-barreled Greener 4-bore Rhino Express which could fire a 130-gram bullet at 1200 meters per second. Jarry had decided that if hehad to kill Norpois, he might as well wipe him off the face of the earth.

He carried four extra rounds in a bandolier; they weighed more than a kilo in all.

He was confident in his weapons, in himself, in his high-wheeler. He had oiled it the night before, polished it until it shone. After all, it was the insulted party, not him, not Dreyfus.

He sighed, then leaned out and dropped the lead-weighted green handkerchief as the signal he was starting down. He had his ordinary over his shoulder opposite the Greener and had his foot on the first step before he heard the weighted handkerchief ricocheting on its way down off the curved leg of the Tower.

B. The Duel

He was out of breath before he passed the locked apartment which Gustave Eiffel had built for himself during the last phase of construction of the Tower, and which he sometimes used when aerodynamic experiments were being done on the drop-tube which ran down the exact center of the Tower.

Down around the steps he clanged, his bike brushing against the spiral railing. It was good he was not subject to vertigo. He could imagine Norpois’ easy stroll to the west leg, where he would be casually walking up the broad stairs to the first level platform with four restaurants, arcades and booths, and its entry to the stilled second set of elevators. (Those between the ground and first level were the normal counterweighted kind; hydraulic ones to the second—American Otis had had to set up a dummy French corporation to win the contract—no one in France had the technology, and the charter forbade foreign manufacture; and tracked ones to the third—passengers had to change halfway up, as no elevator could be made to go from roughly 70° to 90° halfway up its rise.)

Panting mightily, Jarry reached the third platform, less than a third of the way down. Only 590 more steps down to sure and certain ambush. The rifle, cartridges, and high-wheeler were grinding weights on his back. Gritting his teeth, he started down the steep steps with landings every few dozen meters.

His footsteps rang like gongs on the iron treads. He could see the tops of the booths on the second level, the iron framework of the Tower extending all around him like a huge narrow cage.

Norpois would be waiting at one of the corners, ready to fire at either set of stairs. (Of course, he probably already knew which set Jarry was using, oh devious man, or it was possible he was truly evil and was waiting on the first level. It would be just like a right-wing nationalist Catholic safety-bicycle rider to do that.)

Fifteen steps up from the second level, in one smooth motion, Jarry put the ordinary down, mounted it holding immobile the pedals with his feet, swung the Rhino Express off his shoulder, and rode the last crashing steps down, holding back, then pedaling furiously as his giant wheel hit the floor.

He expected shots at any second as he swerved toward a closed souvenir booth: He swung his back wheel up and around behind him holding still, changing direction, the drainpipe barrels of the 4-bore resting on the handlebars.

Over at the corner of another booth the front wheel and handlebar of Norpois’ bicycle stuck out.

With one motion Jarry brought the Greener to his cheek. We shall shoot the front end off his bicycle—without that he cannot be mounted and fire; ergo, he cannot duel; therefore, we have won; he is disgraced.Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Jarry fired one barrel—the recoil sent him skidding backwards two meters. The forks of the crocodile went away—Fortune’s smiling face wavered through the air like the phases of the Moon. The handlebars stuck in the side of another booth six meters away.

Jarry hung onto his fragile balance, waiting for Norpois to tumble forward or stagger bleeding with bicycle shrapnel from behind the booth.

He heard a noise behind him; at the corner of his eye he saw Norpois standing beside one of the planted trees—he had to have been there all along—with a look of grim satisfaction on his face.

Then the grenade landed directly between the great front and small back wheels of Jarry’s bicycle.

C. High Above the City

He never felt the explosion, just a wave of heat and a flash that blinded him momentarily. There was a carnival ride sensation, a loopy feeling in his stomach. Something touched his hand; he grabbed it. Something tugged at his leg. He clenched his toes together.

His vision cleared.

He hung by one hand from the guardrail. He dangled over Paris. His rifle was gone. His clothes smelt of powder and burning hair. He looked down. The weight on his legs was his ordinary, looking the worse for wear. The rim of the huge front wheel had caught on the toe of his cycling shoe. He cupped the toe of the other one through the spokes.

His hand was losing its grip.

He reached down with the other for his pistol. The holster was still there, split up the middle, empty.

Norpois’ head appeared above him, looking down, then his gun hand with a large automatic in it, pointing at Jarry’s eyes.

“There are rules, Monsieur,” said Jarry. He was trying to reach up with the other hand but something seemed to be wrong with it.

“Get with the coming century, dwarf,” said Norpois, flipping the pistol into the air, catching it by the barrel. He brought the butt down hard on Jarry’s fingers.

The second time the pain was almost too much. Once more and Alfred knew he would let go, fall, be dead.

“One request. Save our noble vehicle,” said Jarry, looking into the journalist’s eyes. There was a clang off somewhere on the second level.

Norpois’ grin became sardonic. “You die. So does your crummy bike.”

There was a small pop. A thin line of red, like a streak of paint slung off the end of a brush, stood out from Norpois’ nose, went over Jarry’s shoulder.

Norpois raised his automatic, then wavered, let go of it. It bounced off Alfred’s useless arm, clanged once on the way down.

Norpois, still staring into Jarry’s eyes, leaned over the railing and disappeared behind his head. There was silence for a few seconds, then:

Pif-Paf! Quel Bruit!

The sound of the body bouncing off the ironworks went on for longer than seemed possible.

Far away on the second level was the sound of footsteps running downstairs.

Painfully, Jarry got his left arm up next to his right, got the fingers closed, began pulling himself up off the side of the Eiffel Tower, bringing his mangled high-wheeler with him.

D. Code Duello

A small crowd had gathered, besides those concerned. Norpois’ second was over by the body, with the police. There would of course be damages to pay for. Jarry carried his ordinary and the Greener, which he had found miraculously lying on the floor of the second level.

Proust came forward to shake Alfred’s hand. Jarry gave him the rifle and ordinary, but continued to walk past him. Several others stepped forward, but Jarry continued on, nodding.

He went to Pablo. Pablo had on a long cloak and was eating an egg sandwich. His eyes would not meet Alfred’s.

Jarry stepped in front of him. Pablo tried to move away without meeting his gaze. Alfred reached inside the cloak, felt around, ignoring the Webley strapped at Pablo’s waist.

He found what he was looking for, pulled it out. It was the single-shot .22. Jarry sniffed the barrel as Pablo tried to turn away, working at his sandwich.

“Asshole,” said Jarry, handing it back.

XIX. Fin de Cyclé

The bells were still ringing in the New Century.

Satie had given up composing and had gone back to school to learn music at the age of thirty-eight. Rousseau still exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, and was now married for the second time. Proust had locked himself away in a room he’d had lined with cork and was working on a never-ending novel. Méliès was still out at Montreuil, making films about trips to the Moon and the Bureau of Incoherent Geography. Pablo was painting; but so much blue; blue here, blue there, azure, cerulean, Prussian. Dreyfus was now a commandant.

Jarry lived in a shack over the Seine which stood on four supports. He called it Our Suitable Tripod.

There was noise, noise everywhere. There were few bicycles, and all those were safeties. He had not seen another ordinary in months. He looked over where his repaired one stood in the middle of the small room. His owl and one of his crows perched on the handlebars.

The noise was deafening—the sound of bells, of crowds, sharp reports of fireworks. Above all, those of motor-cycles and motor-cars.

He looked back out the window. There was a new sound, a dark flash against the bright moonlit sky. A bat-shape went over, buzzing, trailing laughter and gunshots, the pilot banking over the River. Far up the Seine, the Tower stood, bathed in floodlights, glorying in its blue, red, and white paint for the coming Exposition.

A zeppelin droned overhead, electric lights on the side spelling out the name of a hair pomade. The bat-shaped plane whizzed under it in near-collision.

Someone gunned a motor-cycle beneath his tiny window. Jarry reached back into the room, brought out his fowling piece filled with rock salt and fired a great tongue of flame into the night below. After a scream, the noise of the motor-cycle raced away.

He drank from a glass filled with brandy, ether, and red ink. He took one more look around, buffeted by the noise from all quarters and a motor launch on the River. He said a word to the night before slamming the window and returning to his work on the next Ubu play.

The word was“merde!”

MIRACLE

Connie Willis

The author admits that while Miracle on 34th Street is her favorite Christmas movie, It’s A Wonderful Life does have its moments. The following tale is a delightful homage to both. Ms. Willis’s last December story, “Cibola,” is now a finalist for the Hugo award.

There was a Christmas tree in the lobby when Lauren got to work, and the receptionist was sitting with her chin in her hand, watching the security monitor. Lauren set her shopping bag down and looked curiously at the screen. On it, Jimmy Stewart was dancing the Charleston with Donna Reed.

“The Personnel Morale Special Committee had cable piped in for Christmas,” the receptionist explained, handing Lauren her messages. “I love It’s a Wonderful Life, don’t you?”

Lauren stuck her messages in the top of her shopping bag and went up to her department. Red and green crepe paper hung in streamers from the ceiling, and there was a big red crepe-paper bow tied around Lauren’s desk.

“The Personnel Morale Special Committee did it,” Evie said, coming over with the catalog she’d been reading. “They’re decorating the whole building, and they want us and Document Control to go caroling this afternoon. Don’t you think PMS is getting out of hand with this Christmas spirit thing? I mean, who wants to spend Christmas Eve at an office party?”

“I do,” Lauren said. She set her shopping bag down on the desk, sat down, and began taking off her boots.

“Can I borrow your stapler?” Evie asked. “I’ve lost mine again. I’m ordering my mother the Water of the Month, and I need to staple my check to the order form.”

“The Water of the Month?” Lauren said, opening her desk drawer and taking out her stapler.

“You know, they send you bottles of a different one every month. Perrier, Evian, Calistoga.” She peered into Lauren’s shopping bag. “Do you have Christmas presents in there? I hate people who have their shopping done four weeks before Christmas.”

“It’s four days till Christmas,” Lauren said, “and I don’t have it all done. I still don’t have anything for my sister. But I’ve got all my friends, including you, done.” She reached into the shopping bag and pulled out her pumps. “And I found a dress for the office party.”

“Did you buy it?”

“No,” She put on one of her shoes. “I’m going to try it on during my lunch hour.”

“If it’s still there,” Evie said gloomily. “I had this echidna toothpick holder all picked out for my brother, and when I went back to buy it, they were all gone.”

“I asked them to hold the dress for me,” Lauren said. She put on her other shoe. “It’s gorgeous. Black off-the-shoulder. Sequined.”

“Still trying to get Scott Buckley to notice you, huh? I don’t do things like that anymore. Nineties women don’t use sexist tricks to attract men. Besides, I decided he was too cute to ever notice somebody like me.” She sat down on the edge of Lauren’s desk and started leafing through the catalog. “Here’s something your sister might like. The Vegetable of the Month. February’s okra.”

“She lives in southern California,” Lauren said, shoving her boots under the desk.

“Oh. How about the Sunscreen of the Month?”

“No,” Lauren said. “She’s into New Age stuff. Channeling. Aromatherapy. Last year she sent me a crystal pyramid mate selector for Christmas.”

“The Eastern Philosophy of the month,” Evie said. “Zen, Sufism, tai chi—”

“I’d like to get her something she’d really like,” Lauren mused. “I always have a terrible time figuring out what to get people for Christmas. So this year, I decided things were going to be different. I wasn’t going to be tearing around the mall the day before Christmas, buying things no one would want and wondering what on earth I was going to wear to the office party. I started doing my shopping in September, I wrapped my presents as soon as I bought them, I have all my Christmas cards done and ready to mail—”

“You’re disgusting,” Evie said. “Oh, here, I almost forgot.” She pulled a folded slip of paper out of her catalog and handed it to Lauren. “It’s your name for the Secret Santa gift exchange. PMS says you’re supposed to bring your present for it by Friday so it won’t interfere with the presents Santa Claus hands out at the office party.”

Lauren unfolded the paper, and Evie leaned over to read it. “Who’d you get? Wait, don’t tell me. Scott Buckley.”

“No. Fred Hatch. And I know just what to get him.”

“Fred? The fat guy in Documentation? What is it, the Diet of the Month?”

“This is supposed to be the season of love and charity, not the season when you make mean remarks about someone just because he’s overweight,” Lauren said sternly. “I’m going to get him a videotape of Miracle on 34th Street.”

Evie looked uncomprehending.

“It’s Fred’s favorite movie. We had a wonderful talk about it at the office party last year.”

“I never heard of it.”

“It’s about Macy’s Santa Claus. He starts telling people they can get their kids’ toys cheaper at Gimbel’s, and then the store psychiatrist decides he’s crazy—”

“Why don’t you get him It’s a Wonderful Life? That’s my favorite Christmas movie.”

“Yours and everybody else’s. I think Fred and I are the only two people in the world who like Miracle on 34th Street better. See, Edmund Gwenn, he’s Santa Claus, gets committed to Bellevue because he thinks he’s Santa Claus, and since there isn’t any Santa Claus, he has to be crazy, but he is Santa Claus, and Fred Gailey, that’s John Payne, he’s a lawyer in the movie, he decides to have a court hearing to prove it and—”

“I watch It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas. I love the part where Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed fall into the swimming pool,” Evie said. “What happened to the stapler?”

They had the dress and it fit, but there was an enormous jam-up at the cash register, and then they couldn’t find a hanging bag for it.

“Just put it in a shopping bag,” Lauren said, looking anxiously at her watch.

“It’ll wrinkle,” the clerk said ominously and continued to search for a hanging bag. By the time Lauren convinced her a shopping bag would work, it was already 12:15. She had hoped she’d have a chance to look for a present for her sister, but there wasn’t going to be time. She still had to run the dress home and mail the Christmas cards.

I can pick up Fred’s video, she thought, fighting her way onto the escalator. That wouldn’t take much time, since she knew what she wanted, and maybe they’d have something with Shirley MacLaine in it she could get her sister. Ten minutes to buy the video, she thought, tops.

It took her nearly half an hour. There was only one copy, which the clerk couldn’t find.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have It’s a Wonderful Life?” she asked Lauren. “It’s my favorite movie.”

“I want Miracle on 34th Street,” Lauren said patiently. “With Edmund Gwenn and Natalie Wood.”

The clerk picked up a copy of It’s a Wonderful Life from a huge display. “See, Jimmy Stewart’s in trouble and he wishes he’d never been born, and this angel grants him his wish—”

“I know,” Lauren said. “I don’t care. I want Miracle on 34th Street.”

“Okay!” the clerk said, and wandered off to look for it, muttering, “Some people don’t have any Christmas spirit.”

She finally found it, in the M’s, of all places, and then insisted on giftwrapping it.

By the time Lauren made it back to her apartment, it was a quarter to one. She would have to forget lunch and mailing the Christmas cards, but she could at least take them with her, buy the stamps, and put the stamps on at work.

She took the video out of the shopping bag and set it on the coffee table next to her purse, picked up the bag, and started for the bedroom.

Someone knocked on the door.

“I don’t have time for this,” she muttered, and opened the door, still holding the shopping bag.

It was a young man wearing a “Save the Whales” T-shirt and khaki pants. He had shoulder-length blond hair arid a vague expression that made her think of southern California.

“Yes? What is it?” she asked.

“I’m here to give you a Christmas present,” he said.

“Thank you, I’m not interested in whatever you’re selling,” she said, and shut the door.

He knocked again immediately. “I’m not selling anything,” he said through the door. “Really.”

I don’t have time for this, she thought, but she opened the door again.

“I’m not a salesguy,” he said. “Have you ever heard of the Maharishi Ram Das?”

A religious nut.

“I don’t have time to talk to you.” She started to say, “I’m late for work,” and then remembered you weren’t supposed to tell strangers your apartment was going to be empty. “I’m very busy,” she said and shut the door, more firmly this time.

The knocking commenced again, but she ignored it. She started into the bedroom with the shopping bag, came back and pushed the deadbolt across and put the chain on, and then went in to hang up her dress. By the time she’d extricated it from the tissue paper and found a hanger, the knocking had stopped. She hung up the dress, which looked just as deadly now that she had it home, and went back into the living room.

The young man was sitting on the couch, messing with her TV remote. “So, what do you want for Christmas? A yacht? A pony?” He punched buttons on the remote, frowning. “A new TV?”

“How did you get in here?” Lauren said squeakily. She looked at the door. The deadbolt and chain were both still on.

“I’m a spirit,” he said, putting the remote down. The TV suddenly blared on. “The Spirit of Christmas Present.”

“Oh,” Lauren said, edging toward the phone. “Like in A Christmas Carol.”

“No,” he said, flipping through the channels. She looked at the remote. It was still on the coffee table. “Not Christmas Present. Christmas Present. You know, Barbie dolls, ugly ties, cheese logs, the stuff people give you for Christmas.”

“Oh, Christmas Present. I see,” Lauren said, carefully picking up the phone.

“People always get me confused with him, which is really insulting. I mean, the guy obviously has a really high cholesterol level. Anyway, I’m the Spirit of Christmas Present, and your sister sent me to—”

Lauren had dialed nine one. She stopped, her finger poised over the second one. “My sister?”

“Yeah,” he said, staring at the TV. Jimmy Stewart was sitting in the guard’s room, wrapped in a blanket. “Oh, wow! It’s a Wonderful Life.”

My sister sent you, Lauren thought. It explained everything. He was not a Moonie or a serial killer. He was this year’s version of the crystal pyramid mate selector. “How do you know my sister?”

“She channeled me,” he said, leaning back against the sofa. “The Maharishi Ram Das was instructing her in trance-meditation, and she accidentally channeled my spirit out of the astral plane.” He pointed at the screen. “I love this part where the angel is trying to convince Jimmy Stewart he’s dead.”

“I’m not dead, am I?”

“No. I’m not an angel. I’m a spirit. The Spirit of Christmas Present. You can call me Chris for short. Your sister sent me to give you what you really want for Christmas. You know, your heart’s desire. So what is it?”

For my sister not to send me any more presents, she thought. “Look, I’m really in a hurry right now. Why don’t you come back tomorrow and we can talk about it then?”

“I hope it’s not a fur coat,” he said as if he hadn’t heard her. “I’m opposed to the killing of endangered species.” He picked up Fred’s present. “What’s this?”

“It’s a videotape of Miracle on 34th Street. I really have to go.”

“Who’s it for?”

“Fred Hatch. I’m his Secret Santa.”

“Fred Hatch.” He turned the package over. “You had it gift-wrapped at the store, didn’t you?”

“Yes. If we could just talk about this later—”

“This is a great part, too,” he said, leaning forward to watch the TV. The angel was explaining to Jimmy Stewart how he hadn’t gotten his wings yet.

“I have to go. I’m on my lunch hour, and I need to mail my Christmas cards, and I have to be back at work by”—she glanced at her watch—“oh my God, fifteen minutes ago.”

He put down the package and stood up. “Gift-wrapped presents,” he said, making a “tsk”-ing noise, “everybody rushing around spending money, rushing to parties, never stopping to have some eggnog or watch a movie. Christmas is an endangered species.” He looked longingly back at the screen, where the angel was trying to convince Jimmy Stewart he’d never been alive, and then wandered into the kitchen. “You got any Evian water?”

“No,” Lauren said desperately. She hurried after him. “Look, I really have to get to work.”

He had stopped at the kitchen table and was holding one of the Christmas cards. “Computer-addressed,” he said reprovingly. He tore it open.

“Don’t—” Lauren said.

“Printed Christmas cards,” he said. “No letter, no quick note, not even a handwritten signature. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. An endangered species.”

“I didn’t have time,” Lauren said defensively. “And I don’t have time to discuss this or anything else with you. I have to get to work.”

“No time to write a few words on a card, no time to think about what you want for Christmas.” He slid the card back into the envelope. “Not even on recycled paper,” he said sadly. “Do you know how many trees are chopped down every year to send Christmas cards?”

“I am late for—” Lauren said, and he wasn’t there anymore.

He didn’t vanish like in the movies, or fade out slowly. He simply wasn’t there.

“—work,” Lauren said. She went and looked in the living room. The TV was still on, but he wasn’t there, or in the bedroom. She went into the bathroom and pulled the shower curtain back, but he wasn’t there either.

“It was a hallucination,” she said out loud, “brought on by stress.” She looked at her watch, hoping it had been part of the hallucination, but it still read 1:15. “I will figure this out later,” she said. “I have to get back to work.”

She went back in the living room. The TV was off. She went into the kitchen. He wasn’t there. Neither were her Christmas cards, exactly.

“You! Spirit!” she shouted. “You come back here this minute!”

“You’re late,” Evie said, filling out a catalog form. “You will not believe who was just here. Scott Buckley. God, he is so cute.” She looked up. “What happened?” she said. “Didn’t they hold the dress?”

“Do you know anything about magic?” Lauren said.

“What happened?”

“My sister sent me her Christmas present,” Lauren said grimly. “I need to talk to someone who knows something about magic.”

“Fat . . . I mean Fred Hatch is a magician. What did your sister send you?”

Lauren started down the hall to Documentation at a half-run.

“I told Scott you’d be back any minute,” Evie said. “He said he wanted to talk to you.”

Lauren opened the door to Documentation and started looking over partitions into the maze of cubicles. They were all empty.

“Anybody here?” Lauren called. “Hello?”

A middle-aged woman emerged from the maze, carrying five rolls of wrapping paper and a large pair of scissors. “You don’t have any Scotch tape, do you?” she asked Lauren.

“Do you know where Fred Hatch is?” Lauren asked.

The woman pointed toward the interior of the maze with a roll of reindeer-covered paper. “Over there. Doesn’t anyone have any tape? I’m going to have to staple my Christmas presents.”

Lauren worked her way toward where the woman had pointed, looking over partitions as she went. Fred was in the center one, leaning back in a chair, his hands folded over his ample stomach, staring at a screen covered with yellow numbers.

“Excuse me,” Lauren said, and Fred immediately sat forward and stood up.

“I need to talk to you,” she said. “Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”

“Right here,” Fred said. “My assistant’s on the 800 line in my office, placing a catalog order, and everyone else is next door in Graphic Design at a Tupperware party.” He pushed a key, and the computer screen went blank. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Evie said you’re a magician,” she said.

He looked embarrassed. “Not really. The PMS Committee put me in charge of the magic show for the office party last year, and I came up with an act. This year, luckily, they assigned me to play Santa Claus.” He smiled and patted his stomach. “I’m the right shape for the part, and I don’t have to worry about the tricks not working.”

“Oh, dear,” Lauren said. “I hoped . . . do you know any magicians?”

“The guy at the novelty shop,” he said, looking worried. “What’s the matter? Did PMS assign you the magic show this year?”

“No.” She sat down on the edge of his desk. “My sister is into New Age stuff, and she sent me this spirit—”

“Spirit,” he said. “A ghost, you mean?”

“No. A person. I mean he looks like a person. He says he’s the Spirit of Christmas Present, as in Gift, not Here and Now.”

“And you’re sure he’s not a person? I mean, tricks can sometimes really look like magic.”

“There’s a Christmas tree in my kitchen,” she said.

“Christmas tree?” he said warily.

“Yes. The spirit was upset because my Christmas cards weren’t on recycled paper. He asked me if I knew how many trees were chopped down to send Christmas cards, then he disappeared, and when I went back in the kitchen there was this Christmas tree in my kitchen.”

“And there’s no way he could have gotten into your apartment earlier and put it there?”

“It’s growing out of the floor. Besides, it wasn’t there when we were in the kitchen five minutes before. See, he was watching It’s a Wonderful Life on TV, which, by the way, he turned on without using the remote, and he asked me if I had any Evian water, and he went into the kitchen and . . . this is ridiculous. You have to think I’m crazy. I think I’m crazy just listening to myself tell this ridiculous story. Evian water!” She folded her arms. “People have a lot of nervous breakdowns around Christmastime. Do you think I could be having one?”

The woman with the wrapping-paper rolls peered over the cubicle. “Have you got a tape dispenser?”

Fred shook his head.

“How about a stapler?”

Fred handed her his stapler, and she left.

“Well,” Lauren said when she was sure the woman was gone, “do you think I’m having a nervous breakdown?”

“That depends,” he said.

“On what?”

“On whether there’s really a tree growing out of your kitchen floor. You said he got angry because your Christmas cards weren’t on recycled paper. Do you think he’s dangerous?”

“I don’t know. He says he’s here to give me whatever I want for Christmas. Except a fur coat. He’s opposed to the killing of endangered species.”

“A spirit who’s an animal-rights activist!” Fred said delightedly. “Where did your sister get him from?”

“The astral plane,” Lauren said. “She was trance-channeling or something. I don’t care where he came from. I just want to get rid of him before he decides my Christmas presents aren’t recyclable, too.”

“Okay,” he said, hitting a key on the computer. The screen lit up. “The first thing we need to do is find out what he is and how he got here. I want you to call your sister. Maybe she knows some New Age spell for getting rid of the spirit.” He began to type rapidly. “I’ll get on the Net and see if I can find someone who knows something about magic.”

He swiveled around to face her. “You’re sure you want to get rid of him?”

“I have a tree growing out of my kitchen floor!”

“But what if he’s telling the truth? What if he really can get you what you want for Christmas?”

“What I wanted was to mail my Christmas cards, which are now shedding needles on the kitchen tile. Who knows what he’ll do next?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Listen, whether he’s dangerous or not, I think I should go home with you after work, in case he shows up again, but I’ve got a PMS meeting for the office party—”

“That’s okay. He’s an animal-rights activist. He’s not dangerous.”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow,” Fred said. “I’ll come over as soon as my meeting’s over, and meanwhile I’ll check the Net. Okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She started out of the cubicle and then stopped. “I really appreciate your believing me, or at least not saying you don’t believe me.”

He smiled at her. “I don’t have any choice. You’re the only other person in the world who likes Miracle on 34th Street better than It’s a Wonderful Life. And Fred Gailey believed Macy’s Santa Claus was really Santa Claus, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think this guy is Santa Claus. He was wearing Birkenstocks.”

“I’ll meet you at your front door,” he said. He sat down at the computer and began typing.

Lauren went out through the maze of cubicles and into the hall.

“There you are!” Scott said. “I’ve been looking for you all over.” He smiled meltingly. “I’m in charge of buying gifts for the office party, and I need your help.”

“My help?”

“Yeah. Picking them out. I hoped maybe I could talk you into going shopping with me after work tonight.”

“Tonight?” she said. “I can’t. I’ve got—“A Christmas tree growing in my kitchen. “Could we do it tomorrow after work?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got a date. What about later on tonight? The stores are open till nine. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to do the shopping, and then we could go have a late supper somewhere. What say I pick you up at your apartment at six-thirty?”

And have the spirit lying on the couch, drinking Evian water and watching TV? “I can’t,” she said regretfully.

Even his frown was cute. “Oh, well,” he said, and shrugged. “Too bad. I guess I’ll have to get somebody else.” He gave her another adorable smile and went off down the hall to ask somebody else.

I hate you, Spirit of Christmas Present, Lauren thought, standing there watching Scott’s handsome back recede. You’d better not be there when I get home.

A woman came down the hall, carrying a basket of candy canes. “Compliments of the Personnel Morale Special Committee,” she said, offering one to Lauren. “You look like you could use a little Christmas spirit.”

“No, thanks, I’ve already got one,” Lauren said.

The door to her apartment was locked, which didn’t mean much, since the chain and the deadbolt had both been on when he got in before. But he wasn’t in the living room, and the TV was off.

He had been there, though. There was an empty Evian water bottle on the coffee table. She picked it up and took it into the kitchen. The tree was still there, too. She pushed one of the branches aside so she could get to the wastebasket and threw the bottle away.

“Don’t you know plastic bottles are nonbiodegradable?” the spirit said. He was standing on the other side of the tree, hanging things on it. He was dressed in khaki shorts and a “Save the Rain Forest” T-shirt, and had a red bandanna tied around his head. “You should recycle your bottles.”

“It’s your bottle,” Lauren said. “What are you doing here, Spirit?”

“Chris,” he corrected her. “These are organic ornaments,” he said. He held one of the brown things out to her. “Handmade by the Yanomamo Indians. Each one is made of natural by-products found in the Brazilian rain forest.” He hung the brown thing on the tree. “Have you decided what you want for Christmas?”

“Yes,” she said. “I want you to go away.”

He looked surprised. “I can’t do that. Not until I give you your heart’s desire.”

“That is my heart’s desire. I want you to go away and take this tree and your Yanomamo ornaments with you.”

“You know the biggest problem I have as the Spirit of Christmas Present?” he said. He reached into the back pocket of his shorts and pulled out a brown garland of what looked like coffee beans. “My biggest problem is that people don’t know what they want.”

“I know what I want,” Lauren said. “I don’t want to have to write my Christmas cards all over again—”

“You didn’t write them,” he said, draping the garland over the branches. “They were printed. Do you know that the inks used on those cards contain harmful chemicals?”

“I don’t want to be lectured on environmental issues, I don’t want to have to fight my way through a forest to get to the refrigerator, and I don’t want to have to turn down dates because I have a spirit in my apartment. I want a nice, quiet Christmas with no hassles. I want to exchange a few presents with my friends and go to the office Christmas party and . . . “And dazzle Scott Buckley in my off-the-shoulder black dress, she thought, but she decided she’d better not say that. The spirit might decide Scott’s clothes weren’t made of natural fibers or something and turn him into a Yanomamo Indian.

“. . . and have a nice, quiet Christmas,” she finished lamely.

“Take It’s a Wonderful Life,” the spirit said, squinting at the tree. “I watched it this afternoon while you were at work. Jimmy Stewart didn’t know what he wanted.”

He reached into his pocket again and pulled out a crooked star made of Brazil nuts and twine. “He thought he wanted to go to college and travel and get rich, but what he really wanted was right there in front of him the whole time.”

He did something, and the top of the tree lopped over in front of him. He tied the star on with the twine, and did something else. The tree straightened up. “You only think you want me to leave,” he said.

Someone knocked on the door.

“You’re right,” Lauren said. “I don’t want you to leave. I want you to stay right there.” She ran into the living room.

The spirit followed her into the living room. “Luckily, being a spirit, I know what you really want,” he said, and disappeared.

She opened the door to Fred. “He was just here,” she said. “He disappeared when I opened the door, which is what all the crazies say, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Fred said. “Or else, ‘He’s right there. Can’t you see him?’ ” He looked curiously around the room. “Where was he?”

“In the kitchen,” she said, shutting the door. “Decorating a tree which probably isn’t there either.” She led him into the kitchen.

The tree was still there, and there were large brownish cards stuck all over it.

“You really do have a tree growing in your kitchen,” Fred said, squatting down to look at the roots. “I wonder if the people downstairs have roots sticking out of their ceiling.” He stood up. “What are these?” he said, pointing at the brownish cards.

“Christmas cards.” She pulled one off. “I told him I wanted mine back.” She read the card aloud.“ ‘In the time it takes you to read this Christmas card, eighty-two harp seals will have been clubbed to death for their fur.’ ” She opened it up.“ ‘Happy Holidays.’ ”

“Cheery,” Fred said. He took the card from her and turned it over. “ ‘This card is printed on recycled paper with vegetable inks and can be safely used as compost.’ ”

“Did anyone on the Net know how to club a spirit to death?” she asked.

“No. Didn’t your sister have any ideas?”

“She didn’t know how she got him in the first place. She and her Maharishi were channeling an Egyptian nobleman and he suddenly appeared, wearing a ‘Save the Dolphins’ T-shirt. I got the idea the Maharishi was as surprised as she was.” She sat down at the kitchen table. “I tried to get him to go away this afternoon, but he said he has to give me my heart’s desire first.” She looked up at Fred, who was cautiously sniffing one of the organic ornaments. “Didn’t you find out anything on the Net?”

“I found out there are a lot of loonies with computers. What are these?”

“By-products of the Brazilian rain forest.” She stood up. “I told him my heart’s desire was for him to leave, and he said I didn’t know what I really wanted.”

“Which is what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I went into the living room to answer the door, and he said that luckily he knew what I wanted because he was a spirit, and I told him to stay right where he was, and he disappeared.”

“Show me,” he said.

She took him into the living room and pointed at where he’d been standing, and Fred squatted down again and peered at the carpet.

“How does he disappear?”

“I don’t know. He just . . . isn’t there.”

Fred stood up. “Has he changed anything else? Besides the tree?”

“Not that I know of. He turned the TV on without the remote,” she said, looking around the room. The shopping bags were still on the coffee table. She looked through them and pulled out the video. “Here. I’m your Secret Santa. I’m not supposed to give it to you till Christmas Eve, but maybe you’d better take it before he turns it into a snowy owl or something.”

She handed it to him. “Go ahead. Open it.”

He unwrapped it. “Oh,” he said without enthusiasm. “Thanks.”

“I remember last year at the party we talked about it, and I was afraid you might already have a copy. You don’t, do you?”

“No,” he said, still in that flat voice.

“Oh, good. I had a hard time finding it. You were right when you said we were the only two people in the world who liked Miracle on 34th Street. Everybody else I know thinks It’s a Wonderful Life is—”

“You bought me Miracle on 34th Street?” he said, frowning.

“It’s the original black-and-white version. I hate those colorized things, don’t you? Everyone has gray teeth.”

“Lauren.” He held the box out to her so she could read the front. “I think your friend’s been fixing things again.”

She took the box from him. On the cover was a picture of Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed dancing the Charleston.

“Oh, no! That little rat!” she said. “He must have changed it when he was looking at it. He told me It’s a Wonderful Life was his favorite movie.”

“Et tu, Brute?” Fred said, shaking his head.

“Do you suppose he changed all my other Christmas presents?”

“We’d better check.”

“If he has . . .” she said, darting into the kitchen. She dropped to her knees and started rummaging through them.

“Do you think they look the same?” Fred asked, squatting down beside her.

“Your present looked the same.” She grabbed a package wrapped in red-and-gold paper and began feeling it. “Evie’s present is okay, I think.”

“What is it?”

“A stapler. She’s always losing hers. I put her name on it in Magic Marker.” She handed it to him to feel.

“It feels like a stapler, all right,” he said.

“I think we’d better open it and make sure.”

Fred tore off the paper. “It’s still a stapler,” he said, looking at it. “What a great idea for a Christmas present! Everybody in Documentation’s always losing their staplers. I think PMS steals them to use on their Christmas memos.” He handed it back to her. “Now you’ll have to wrap it again.”

“That’s okay,” Lauren said. “At least it wasn’t a Yanomamo ornament.”

“But it might be any minute,” Fred said, straightening up. “There’s no telling what he might take a notion to transform next. I think you’d better call your sister again, and ask her to ask the Maharishi if he knows how to send spirits back to the astral plane, and I’ll go see what I can find out about exorcism.”

“Okay,” Lauren said, following him to the door. “Don’t take the videotape with you. Maybe I can get him to change it back.”

“Maybe,” Fred said, frowning. “You’re sure he said he was here to give you your heart’s desire?”

“I’m sure.”

“Then why would he change my videotape?” he said thoughtfully. “It’s too bad your sister couldn’t have conjured up a nice, straightforward spirit.”

“Like Santa Claus,” Lauren said.

Her sister wasn’t home. Lauren tried her off and on all evening, and when she finally got her, she couldn’t talk. “The Maharishi and I are going to Barbados. They’re having a harmonic divergence there on Christmas Eve, so you need to send my Christmas present to Barbados,” she said, and hung up.

“I don’t even have her Christmas present bought yet,” Lauren said to the couch, “and it’s all your fault.”

She went into the kitchen and glared at the tree. “I don’t even dare go shopping because you might turn the couch into a humpbacked whale while I’m gone,” she said, and then clapped her hand over her mouth.

She peered cautiously into the living room and then made a careful circuit of the whole apartment, looking for endangered species. There were no signs of any, and no sign of the spirit. She went back into the living room and turned on the TV Jimmy Stewart was dancing the Charleston with Donna Reed. She picked up the remote and hit the channel button. Now Jimmy Stewart was singing, “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?”

She hit the automatic channel changer. Jimmy Stewart was on every channel except one. The Ghost of Christmas Present was on that one, telling Scrooge to change his ways. She watched the rest of A Christmas Carol. When it reached the part where the Cratchits were sitting down to their Christmas dinner, she remembered she hadn’t had any supper and went into the kitchen.

The tree was completely blocking the cupboards, but by mightily pushing several branches aside she was able to get to the refrigerator. The eggnog was gone. So were the Stouffer’s frozen entrees. The only thing in the refrigerator was a half-empty bottle of Evian water.

She shoved her way out of the kitchen and sat back down on the couch. Fred had told her to call if anything happened, but it was after eleven o’clock, and she had a feeling the eggnog had been gone for some time.

A Christmas Carol was over, and the opening credits of the next movie were starting. “Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.”

She must have fallen asleep. When she woke up, Miracle on 34th Street was on, and the store manager was giving Edmund Gwenn as Macy’s Santa Claus a list of toys he was supposed to push if Macy’s didn’t have what the children asked Santa for.

“Finally,” Lauren said, watching Edmund Gwenn tear the list into pieces, “something good to watch,” and promptly fell asleep. When she woke up again, John Payne as Fred Gailey was kissing Doris, a.k.a. Maureen O’Hara, and someone was knocking on the door.

I don’t remember anyone knocking on the door, she thought groggily. Fred told Doris how he’d convinced the State of New York that Edmund Gwenn was Santa Claus, and then they both stared disbelievingly at a cane standing in the corner. “The End” came on the screen.

The knocking continued.

“Oh,” Lauren said, and answered the door.

It was Fred, carrying a McDonald’s sack.

“What time is it?” Lauren said, blinking at him.

“Seven o’clock. 1 brought you an Egg McMuffin and some orange juice.”

“Oh, you wonderful person!” she said. She grabbed the sack and took it over to the coffee table. “You don’t know what he did.” She reached into the sack and pulled out the sandwich. “He transformed the food in my refrigerator into Evian water.”

He was looking curiously at her. “Didn’t you go to bed last night? He didn’t come back, did he?”

“No. I waited for him, and I guess I fell asleep.” She took a huge bite of the sandwich.

Fred sat down beside her. “What’s that?” He pointed to a pile of dollar bills on the coffee table.

“I don’t know,” Lauren said.

Fred picked up the bills. Under them was a handful of change and a piece of pink paper. “ ‘Returned three boxes Christmas cards for refund,’ ” Lauren said, reading it. “ ‘$38.18.’ ”

“That’s what’s here,” Fred said, counting the money. “He didn’t turn your Christmas cards into a Douglas fir after all. He took them back and got a refund.”

“Then that means the tree isn’t in the kitchen!” she said, jumping up and running to look. “No, it doesn’t.”

She came back and sat down on the couch.

“But at least you got your money back,” Fred said. And it fits in with what I learned on the Net last night. They think he’s a friendly spirit, probably some sort of manifestation of the seasonal spirit. Apparently these are fairly common, variations of Santa Claus being the most familiar, but there are other ones, too. All benign. They think he’s probably telling the truth about wanting to give you your heart’s desire.”

“Do they know how to get rid of him?” she asked, and took a bite.

“No. Apparently no one’s ever wanted to exorcise one.” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I got a list of exorcism books to try, though, and this one guy, Clarence, said the most important thing in an exorcism is to know exactly what kind of spirit it is.”

“How do we do that?” Lauren asked with her mouth full.

“By their actions,” Clarence said. “He said appearance doesn’t mean anything because seasonal spirits are frequently in disguise. He said we need to write down everything the spirit’s said and done, so I want you to tell me exactly what he did.” He took a pen and a notebook out of his jacket pocket. “Everything from the first time you saw him.”

“Just a minute.” She finished the last bite of sandwich and took a drink of the orange juice. “Okay. He knocked on the door, and when I answered it, he told me he was here to give me a Christmas present, and I told him I wasn’t interested, and I shut the door and started into the bedroom to hang up my dress and—my dress!” she gasped and went tearing into the bedroom.

“What’s the matter?” Fred said, following her.

She flung the closet door open and began pushing clothes madly along the bar. “If he’s transformed this—” She stopped pushing hangers. “I’ll kill him,” she said and lifted out a brownish collection of feathers and dried leaves. “Benign??” she said. “Do you call that benign??”

Fred gingerly touched a brown feather. “What was it?”

“A dress,” she said. “My beautiful black, off-the-shoulder, drop-dead dress.”

“Really?” he said doubtfully. He lifted up some of the brownish leaves. “I think it still is a dress,” he said. “Sort of.”

She crumpled the leaves and feathers against her and sank down on the bed. “All I wanted was to go to the office party!”

“Don’t you have anything else you can wear to the office party? What about that pretty red thing you wore last year?”

She shook her head emphatically. “Scott didn’t even notice it!”

“And that’s your heart’s desire?” Fred said after a moment. “To have Scott Buckley notice you at the office party?”

“Yes, and he would have, too! It had sequins on it, and it fit perfectly!” She held out what might have been a sleeve. Greenish-brown lumps dangled from brownish strips of bamboo. “And now he’s ruined it!”

She flung the dress on the floor and stood up. “I don’t care what this Clarence person says. He is not benign! And he is not trying to get me what I want for Christmas. He is trying to ruin my life!”

She saw the expression on Fred’s face and stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “None of this is your fault. You’ve been trying to help me.”

“And I’ve been doing about as well as your spirit,” he said. “Look, there has to be some way to get rid of him. Or at least get the dress back. Clarence said he knew some transformation spells. I’ll go on to work and see what I can find out.”

He went out into the living room and over to the door. “Maybe you can go back to the store and see if they have another dress like it.” He opened the door.

“Okay.” Lauren nodded. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. And you have been a lot of help.”

“Right,” he said glumly, and went out.

“Where’d you get that dress?” Jimmy Stewart said to Donna Reed.

Lauren whirled around. The TV was on. Donna Reed was showing Jimmy Stewart her new dress.

“Where are you?” Lauren demanded, looking at the couch. “I want you to change that dress back right now!”

“Don’t you like it?” the spirit said from the bedroom. “It’s completely biodegradable.”

She stomped into the bedroom. He was putting the dress on the hanger and making little “tsk”-ing noises. “You have to be careful with natural fibers,” he said reprovingly.

“Change it back the way it was. This instant.”

“It was handmade by the Yanomamo Indians,” he said, smoothing down what might be the skirt. “Do you realize that their natural habitat is being destroyed at the rate of 750 acres a day?”

“I don’t care. I want my dress back.”

He carried the dress on its hanger over to the chest. “It’s so interesting. Donna Reed knew right away she was in love with Jimmy Stewart, but he was so busy thinking about college and his new suitcase, he didn’t even know she existed.” He hung up the dress. “He practically had to be hit over the head.”

“I’ll hit you over the head if you don’t change that dress back this instant, Spirit,” she said, looking around for something hard.

“Call me Chris,” he said. “Did you know sequins are made from nonrenewable resources?” and disappeared as she swung the lamp.

“And good riddance,” she shouted to the air.

They had the dress in a size three. Lauren put herself through the indignity of trying to get into it and then went to work. The receptionist was watching Jimmy Stewart standing on the bridge in the snow and weeping into a Kleenex. She handed Lauren her messages.

There were two memos from the PMS Committee—they were having a sleigh ride after work, and she was supposed to bring cheese puffs to the office party. There wasn’t a message from Fred.

“Oh!” the receptionist wailed. “This part is so sad!”

“I hate It’s a Wonderful Life,” Lauren said, and went up to her desk. “I hate Christmas,” she said to Evie.

“It’s normal to hate Christmas,” Evie said, looking up from the book she was reading. “This book, it’s called Let’s Forget Christmas, says it’s because everyone has these unrealistic expectations. When they get presents, they—”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Lauren said. She rummaged in her bag and brought out Evie’s present, fingering it quickly to make sure it was still a stapler. It seemed to be. She held it out to Evie. “Merry Christmas.”

“I don’t have yours wrapped yet,” Evie said. “I don’t even have my wrapping paper bought yet. The book says I’m suffering from an avoidance complex.” She picked up the package. “Do I have to open it now? I know it will be something I love, and you won’t like what I got you half as well, and I’ll feel incredibly guilty and inadequate.”

“You don’t have to open it now,” Lauren said. “I just thought I’d better give it to you before—” She picked her messages up off her desk and started looking through them. “Before I forgot. There haven’t been any messages from Fred, have there?”

“Yeah. He was here about fifteen minutes ago looking for you. He said to tell you the Net hadn’t been any help, and he was going to try the library.” She looked sadly at the present. “It’s even wrapped great,” she said gloomily. “I went shopping for a dress for the office party last night, and do you think I could find anything off-the-shoulder or with sequins? I couldn’t even find anything I’d be caught dead in. Did you know the rate of stress-related illnesses at Christmas is seven times higher than the rest of the year?”

“I can relate to that,” Lauren said.

“No, you can’t. You didn’t end up buying some awful gray thing with gold chains hanging all over it. At least Scott will notice me. He’ll say, ‘Hi, Evie, are you dressed as Marley’s ghost?’ And there you’ll be, looking fabulous in black sequins—”

“No, I won’t,” Lauren said.

“Why? Didn’t they hold it for you?”

“It was . . . defective. Did Fred want to talk to me?”

“I don’t know. He was on his way out. He had to go pick up his Santa Claus suit. Oh, my God.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “It’s Scott Buckley.”

“Hi,” Scott said to Lauren. “I was wondering if you could go shopping with me tonight.”

Lauren stared at him, so taken aback she couldn’t speak.

“When you couldn’t go last night, I decided to cancel my date.”

“Uh . . . I . . .” she said.

“I thought we could buy the presents and then have some dinner.”

She nodded.

“Great,” Scott said. “I’ll come over to your apartment around six-thirty.”

“No!” Lauren said. “I mean, why don’t we go straight from work?”

“Good idea. I’ll come up here and get you.” He smiled melt-ingly and left.

“I think I’ll kill myself,” Evie said. “Did you know the rate of suicides at Christmas is four times higher than the rest of the year? He is so cute,” she said, looking longingly down the hall after him. “There’s Fred.”

Lauren looked up. Fred was coming toward her desk with a Santa Claus costume and a stack of books. Lauren hurried across to him.

“This is everything the library had on exorcisms and the occult,” Fred said, transferring half of the books to her arms. “I thought we could both go through them today, and then get together tonight and compare notes.”

“Oh, I can’t,” Lauren said. “I promised Scott I’d help him pick out the presents for the office party tonight. I’m sorry. I could tell him I can’t.”

“Your heart’s desire? Are you kidding?” He started awkwardly piling the books back on his load. “You go shopping. I’ll go through the books and let you know if I come up with anything.”

“Are you sure?” she said guiltily. “I mean, you shouldn’t have to do all the work.”

“It’s my pleasure,” he said. He started to walk away and then stopped. “You didn’t tell the spirit Scott was your heart’s desire, did you?”

“Of course not. Why?”

“I was just wondering . . . nothing. Never mind.” He walked off down the hall. Lauren went back to her desk.

“Did you know the rate of depression at Christmas is sixteen times higher than the rest of the year?” Evie said. She handed Lauren a package.

“What’s this?”

“It’s from your Secret Santa.”

Lauren opened it. It was a large book entitled It’s a Wonderful Life: The Photo Album. On the cover, Jimmy Stewart was looking depressed.

“I figure it’ll take a half hour or so to pick out the presents,” Scott said, leading her past two inflatable palm trees into The Upscale Oasis. “And then we can have some supper and get acquainted.” He lay down on a massage couch. “What do you think about this?”

“How many presents do we have to buy?” Lauren asked, looking around the store. There were a lot of inflatable palm trees, and a jukebox, and several life-size cardboard cutouts of Malcolm Forbes and Leona Helmsley. Against the far wall were two high-rise aquariums and a bank of televisions with neon-outlined screens.

“Seventy-two.” He got up off the massage couch, handed her the list of employees and went over to a display of brown boxes tied with twine. “What about these? They’re handmade Yano-mamo Christmas ornaments.”

“No,” Lauren said. “How much money do we have to spend?”

“The PMS Committee budgeted six thousand, and there was five hundred left in the Sunshine fund. We can spend . . .” He picked up a pocket calculator in the shape of Donald Trump and punched several buttons. “Ninety dollars per person, including tax. How about this?” He held up an automatic cat feeder.

“We got those last year,” Lauren said. She picked up a digital umbrella and put it back down.

“How about a car fax?” Scott said. “No, wait. This, this is it!”

Lauren turned around. Scott was holding up what looked like a gold cordless phone. “It’s an investment pager,” he said, punching keys. “See, it gives you the Dow Jones, treasury bonds, interest rates. Isn’t it perfect?”

“Well,” Lauren said.

“See, this is the hostile takeover alarm, and every time the Federal Reserve adjusts the interest rate it beeps.”

Lauren read the tag.“ ‘Portable Plutocrat. $74.99.’ ”

“Great,” Scott said. “We’ll have money left over.”

“To invest,” Lauren said.

He went off to see if they had seventy-two of them, and Lauren wandered over to the bank of televisions.

There was a videotape of Miracle on 34th Street lying on top of the VCR/shower massage. Lauren looked around to see if anyone was watching and then popped the Wonderful Life tape out and stuck in Miracle.

A dozen Edmund Gwenns dressed as Macy’s Santa Claus appeared on the screens, listening to twelve store managers tell them which overstocked toys to push.

Scott came over, lugging four shopping bags. “They come gift-wrapped,” he said happily, showing her a Portable Plutocrat wrapped in green paper with gold dollar signs. “Which gives us a free evening.”

“That’s what I’ve been fighting against for years,” a dozen Edmund Gwenns said, tearing a dozen lists to bits, “the way they commercialize Christmas.”

“What I thought,” Scott said when they got in the car, “was that instead of going out for supper, we’d take these over to your apartment and order in.”

“Order in?” Lauren said, clutching the bag of Portable Plutocrats on her lap to her.

“I know a great Italian place that delivers. Angel-hair pasta, wine, everything. Or, if you’d rather, we could run by a grocery store and pick up some stuff to cook.”

“Actually, my kitchen’s kind of a mess,” she said. There is a Christmas tree in it, she thought, with organic by-products hanging on it.

He pulled up outside her apartment building. “Then Italian it is.” He got out of the car and began unloading shopping bags. “You like prosciutto? They have a great melon and prosciutto.”

“Actually, the whole apartment’s kind of a disaster,” Lauren said, following him up the stairs. “You know, wrapping presents and everything. There are ribbons and tags and paper all over the floor and—”

“Great,” he said, stopping in front of her door. “We have to put tags on the presents, anyway.”

“They don’t need tags, do they?” Lauren said desperately. “I mean, they’re all exactly alike.”

“It personalizes them,” he said, “it shows the gift was chosen especially for them.” He looked expectantly at the key in her hand and then at the door.

She couldn’t hear the TV, which was a good sign. And every time Fred had come over, the spirit had disappeared. So all I have to do is keep him out of the kitchen, she thought.

She opened the door and Scott pushed past her and dumped the shopping bags onto the coffee table. “Sorry,” he said. “Those were really heavy.” He straightened up and looked around the living room. There was no sign of the spirit, but there were three Evian water bottles on the coffee table. “This doesn’t look too messy. You should see my apartment. I’ll bet your kitchen’s neater than mine, too.”

Lauren walked swiftly over to the kitchen and pulled the door shut. “I wouldn’t bet on it. Aren’t there still some more presents to bring up?”

“Yeah. I’ll go get them. Shall I call the Italian place first?” “No,” Lauren said, standing with her back against the kitchen door. “Why don’t you bring the bags up first?” “Okay,” he said, smiling meltingly, and went out. Lauren leaped to the door, put the deadbolt and the chain on, and then ran back to the kitchen and opened the door. The tree was still there. She pulled the door hastily to and walked rapidly into the bedroom. He wasn’t there, or in the bathroom. “Thank you,” she breathed, looking heavenward, and went back in the living room.

The TV was on. Edmund Gwenn was shouting at the store psychologist.

“You know, you were right,” the spirit said. He was stretched out on the couch, wearing a “Save the Black-Footed Ferret” T-shirt and jeans. “It’s not a bad movie. Of course, it’s not as good as It’s a Wonderful Life, but I like the way everything works out at the end.”

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, glancing anxiously at the door.

“Watching Miracle on 34th Street,” he said, pointing at the screen. Edmund Gwenn was brandishing his cane at the store psychiatrist. “I like the part where Edmund Gwenn asks Natalie Wood what she wants for Christmas, and she shows him the picture of the house.”

Lauren picked up Fred’s video and brandished it at him. “Fine. Then you can change Fred’s video back.”

“Okay,” he said, and did something. She looked at Fred’s video. It showed Edmund Gwenn hugging Natalie Wood in front of a yellow moon with Santa Claus’s sleigh and reindeer flying across it. Lauren put the video hastily down on the coffee table.

“Thank you,” she said. “And my dress.”

“Natalie Wood doesn’t really want a house, of course. What she really wants is for Maureen O’Hara to marry John Payne. The house is just a symbol for what she really wants.”

On the TV Edmund Gwenn rapped the store psychologist smartly on the forehead with his cane.

There was a knock on the door. “It’s me,” Scott said.

“I also like the part where Edmund Gwenn yells at the store manager for pushing merchandise nobody wants. Christmas presents should be something the person wants. Aren’t you going to answer the door?”

“Aren’t you going to disappear?” she whispered.

“Disappear?” he said incredulously. “The movie isn’t over. And besides, I still haven’t gotten you what you want for Christmas.” He did something, and a bowl of trail mix appeared on his stomach.

Scott knocked again.

Lauren went over to the door and opened it two inches.

“It’s me,” Scott said. “Why do you have the chain on?”

“I . . .” She looked hopefully at Chris. He was eating trail mix and watching Maureen O’Hara bending over the store psychologist, trying to wake him up.

“Scott, I’m sorry, but I think I’d better take a rain check on supper.”

He looked bewildered. And cute. “But I thought . . .” he said.

So did I, she thought. But I have a spirit on my couch who’s perfectly capable of turning you into a Brazilian rain forest byproduct.

“The Italian take-out sounds great,” she said, “but it’s kind of late, and we’ve both got to go to work tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

“Uh . . . I meant go to work on wrapping presents. Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, and I haven’t even started my wrapping. And I have to make cheese puffs for the office party and wash my hair and . . .”

“Okay, okay, I get the message,” he said. “I’ll just bring in the presents and then leave.”

She thought of telling him to leave them in the hall, and then closed the door a little and took the chain off the door.

Go away! she thought at the spirit, who was eating trail mix.

She opened the door far enough so she could slide out, and pulled it to behind her. “Thanks for a great evening,” she said, taking the shopping bags from Scott. “Good night.”

“Good night,” he said, still looking bewildered. He started down the hall. At the stairs he turned and smiled.

I’m going to kill him, Lauren thought, waving back, and took the shopping bags inside.

The spirit wasn’t there. The trail mix was still on the couch, and the TV was still on.

“Come back here!” she shouted. “You little rat! You have ruined my dress and my date, and you’re not going to ruin anything else! You’re going to change back my dress and my Christmas cards, and you’re going to get that tree out of my kitchen right now!”

Her voice hung in the air. She sat down on the couch, still holding the shopping bags. On the TV, Edmund Gwenn was sitting in Bellevue, staring at the wall.

“At least Scott finally noticed me,” she said, and set the shopping bags down on the coffee table. They rattled.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Not the Plutocrats!”

“The problem is,” Fred said, closing the last of the books on the occult, “that we can’t exorcise him if we don’t know which seasonal spirit he is, and he doesn’t fit the profiles of any of these. He must be in disguise.”

“I don’t want to exorcise him,” Lauren said. “I want to kill him.”

“Even if we did manage to exorcise him, there’d be no guarantee that the things he’s changed would go back to their original state.”

“And I’d be stuck with explaining what happened to six thousand dollars’ worth of Christmas presents.”

“Those Portable Plutocrats cost six thousand dollars?”

“$5895.36.”

Fred gave a low whistle. “Did your spirit say why he didn’t like them? Other than the obvious, I mean. That they were non-biodegradable or something?”

“No. He didn’t even notice them. He was watching Miracle on 34th Street, and he was talking about how he liked the way things worked out at the end and the part about the house.”

“Nothing about Christmas presents?”

“I don’t remember.” She sank down on the couch. “Yes, I do. He said he liked the part where Edmund Gwenn yelled at the store manager for talking people into buying things they didn’t want. He said Christmas presents should be something the person wanted.”

“Well, that explains why he transformed the Plutocrats then,” Fred said. “It probably also means there’s no way you can talk him into changing them back. And I’ve got to have something to pass out at the office party, or you’ll be in trouble. So we’ll just have to come up with replacement presents.”

“Replacement presents?” Lauren said. “How? It’s ten o’clock, the office party’s tomorrow night, and how do we know he won’t transform the replacement presents once we’ve got them?”

“We’ll buy people what they want. Was six thousand all the money you and Scott had?”

“No,” Lauren said, rummaging through one of the shopping bags. “PMS budgeted sixty-five hundred.”

“How much have you got left?”

She pulled out a sheaf of papers. “He didn’t transform the purchase orders or the receipt,” she said, looking at them. “The investment pagers cost $5895.36. We have $604.64 left.” She handed him the papers. “That’s $8.39 apiece.”

He looked at the receipt speculatively and then into the shopping bag. “I don’t suppose we could take these back and get a refund from The Upscale Oasis?”

“They’re not going to give us $5895.36 for seventy-two ‘Save the Ozone Layer’ buttons,” Lauren said. “And there’s nothing we can buy for eight dollars that will convince PMS it cost sixty-five hundred. And where am I going to get the money to pay back the difference?”

“I don’t think you’ll have to. Remember when Chris changed your Christmas cards into the tree? He didn’t really. He returned them somehow to the store and got a refund. Maybe he’s done the same thing with the Plutocrats and the money will turn up on your coffee table tomorrow morning.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“We’ll worry about that tomorrow. Right now we’ve got to come up with presents to pass out at the party.”

“Like what?”

“Staplers.”

“Staplers?”

“Like the one you got Evie. Everybody in my department’s always losing their staplers, too. And their tape dispensers. It’s an office party. We’ll buy everybody something they want for the office.”

“But how will we know what that is? There are seventy-two people on this list.”

“We’ll call the department heads and ask them, and then we’ll go shopping.” He stood up. “Where’s your phone book?”

“Next to the tree.” She followed him into the kitchen. “How are we going to go shopping? It’s ten o’clock at night.”

“Bizmart’s open till eleven,” he said, opening the phone book, “and the grocery store’s open all night. We’ll get as many of the presents as we can tonight and the rest tomorrow morning, and that still gives us all afternoon to get them wrapped. How much wrapping paper do you have?”

“Lots. I bought it half-price last year when I decided this Christmas was going to be different. A stapler doesn’t seem like much of a present.”

“It does if it’s what you wanted.” He reached for the phone.

It rang. Fred picked up the receiver and handed it to Lauren.

“Oh, Lauren,” Evie’s voice said. “I just opened your present, and I love it! It’s exactly what I wanted!”

“Really?” Lauren said.

“It’s perfect! I was so depressed about Christmas and the office party and still not having my shopping done. I wasn’t even going to open it, but in Let’s Forget Christmas it said you should open your presents early so they won’t ruin Christmas morning, and I did, and it’s wonderful! I don’t even care whether Scott notices me or not! Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” Lauren said, but Evie had already hung up. She looked at Fred. “That was Evie. You were right about people liking staplers.” She handed him the phone. “You call the department heads. I’ll get my coat.”

He took the phone and began to punch in numbers, and then put it down. “What exactly did the spirit say about the ending of Miracle on 34th Street?”

“He said he liked the way everything worked out at the end. Why?”

He looked thoughtful. “Maybe we’re going about this all wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“What if the spirit really does want to give you your heart’s desire, and all this transforming stuff is some roundabout way of doing it? Like the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s supposed to save Jimmy Stewart from committing suicide, and instead of doing something logical, like talking him out of it or grabbing him, he jumps in the river so Jimmy Stewart has to save him.”

“You’re saying he turned seventy-two Portable Plutocrats into ‘Save the Ozone Layer’ buttons to help me?”

“I don’t know. All I’m saying is that maybe you should tell him you want to go to the office party in a black sequined dress with Scott Buckley, and see what happens.”

“See what happens? After what he did to my dress? If he knew I wanted Scott, he’d probably turn him into a harp seal.” She put on her coat. “Well, are we going to call the department heads or not?”

The Graphic Design department wanted staplers, and so did Accounts Payable. Accounts Receivable, which was having an outbreak of stress-related Christmas colds, wanted Puffs Plus and cough drops. Document Control wanted scissors.

Scott looked at the list, checking off Systems and the other departments they’d called. “All we’ve got left is the PMS Committee,” he said.

“I know what to get them,” Lauren said. “Copies of Let’s Forget Christmas.”

They got some of the things before Bizmart closed, and Fred was back at nine Saturday morning to do the rest of it. At the bookstore they ran into the woman who had been stapling presents together the day Lauren enlisted Fred’s help.

“I completely forgot my husband’s first wife,” she said, looking desperate, “and I don’t have any idea of what to get her.”

Fred handed her the videotape of It’s a Wonderful Life they were giving the receptionist. “How about one of these?” he said.

“Do you think she’ll like it?”

“Everybody likes it,” Fred said.

“Especially the part where the bad guy steals the money, and Jimmy Stewart races around town, trying to replace it,” Lauren said.

It took them most of the morning to get the rest of the presents and forever to wrap them. By four they weren’t even half done.

“What’s next?” Fred asked, tying the bow on the last of the staplers. He stood up and stretched.

“Cough drops,” Lauren said, cutting a length of red paper with Santa Clauses on it.

He sat back down. “Ah, yes. Accounts Receivable’s heart’s desire.”

“What’s your heart’s desire?” Lauren asked, folding the paper over the top of the cough drops and taping it. “What would you ask for if the spirit inflicted himself on you?”

Fred unreeled a length of ribbon. “Well, not to go to an office party, that’s for sure. The only year I had an even remotely good time was last year, talking to you.”

“I’m serious,” Lauren said. She taped the sides and handed the package to Fred. “What do you really want for Christmas?”

“When I was eight,” he said thoughtfully, “I asked for a computer for Christmas. Home computers were new then and they were pretty expensive, and I wasn’t sure I’d get it. I was a lot like Natalie Wood in Miracle on 34th Street. I didn’t believe in Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe in miracles, but I really wanted it.”

He cut off the length of ribbon, wrapped it around the package, and tied it in a knot.

“Did you get the computer?”

“No,” he said, cutting off shorter lengths of ribbon. “Christmas morning I came downstairs, and there was a note telling me to look in the garage.” He opened the scissors and pulled the ribbon across the blade, making it curl. “It was a puppy.” He smiled, remembering. “The thing was, a computer was too expensive, but there was an outside chance I’d get it, or I wouldn’t have asked for it. Kids don’t ask for stuff they know is impossible.”

“And you hadn’t asked for a puppy because you knew you couldn’t have one?”

“No, you don’t understand. There are things you don’t ask for because you know you can’t have them, and then there are things so far outside the realm of possibility, it would never even occur to you to want them.” He made the curled ribbon into a bow and fastened it to the package.

“So what you’re saying is your heart’s desire is something so far outside the realm of possibility, you don’t even know what it is?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said. He stood up again. “Do you want some eggnog?”

“Yes, thanks. If it’s still there.”

He went into the kitchen. She could hear forest-thrashing noises and the refrigerator opening. “It’s still here,” he said.

“It’s funny Chris hasn’t been back,” she called to Fred. “I keep worrying he must be up to something.”

“Chris?” Fred said. He came back into the living room with two glasses of eggnog.

“The spirit. He told me to call him that,” she said. “It’s short for Spirit of Christmas Present.” Fred was frowning. “What’s wrong?” Lauren asked.

“I wonder . . . nothing. Never mind.” He went over to the TV. “I don’t suppose Miracle on 34th Street’s on TV this afternoon?”

“No, but I made him change your video back.” She pointed. “It’s there, on top of the TV.”

He turned on the TV, inserted the video in the VCR, and hit play. He came and sat down beside Lauren. She handed him the wrapped cough drops, but he didn’t take them. He was watching the TV. Lauren looked up. On the screen, Jimmy Stewart was walking past Donna Reed’s house, racketing a stick along the picket fence.

“That isn’t Miracle,” Lauren said. “He told me he changed it back.” She snatched up the box. It still showed Edmund Gwenn hugging Natalie Wood. “That little sneak! He only changed the box!”

She glared at the TV. On the screen Jimmy Stewart was glaring at Donna Reed.

“It’s all right,” Fred said, taking the package and reaching for the ribbon. “It’s not a bad movie. The ending’s too sentimental, and it doesn’t really make sense. I mean, one minute everything’s hopeless, and Jimmy Stewart’s ready to kill himself, and then the angel convinces him he had a wonderful life, and suddenly everything’s okay.” He looked around the table, patting the spread-out wrapping paper. “But it has its moments. Have you seen the scissors?”

Lauren handed him one of the pairs they’d bought. “We’ll wrap them last.”

On the TV Jimmy Stewart was sitting in Donna Reed’s living room, looking awkward. “What I have trouble with is Jimmy Stewart’s being so self-sacrificing,” she said, cutting a length of red paper with Santa Clauses on it. “I mean, he gives up college so his brother can go, and then when his brother has a chance at a good job, he gives up college again. He even gives up committing suicide to save Clarence. There’s such a thing as being too self-sacrificing, you know.”

“Maybe he gives up things because he thinks he doesn’t deserve them.”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“He’s never gone to college, he’s poor, he’s deaf in one ear. Sometimes when people are handicapped or overweight they just assume they can’t have the things other people have.”

The telephone rang. Lauren reached for it and then realized it was on TV.

“Oh, hello, Sam,” Donna Reed said, looking at Jimmy Stewart. “Can you help me with this ribbon?” Fred said. “Sure,” Lauren said. She scooted closer to him and put her finger on the crossed ribbon to hold it taut.

Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed were standing very close together, listening to the telephone. The voice on the phone was saying something about soybeans.

Fred still hadn’t tied the knot. Lauren glanced up at him. He was looking at the TV, too.

Jimmy Stewart was looking at Donna Reed, his face nearly touching her hair. Donna Reed looked at him and then away. The voice from the phone was saying something about the chance of a lifetime, but it was obvious neither of them was hearing a word. Donna Reed looked up at him. His lips almost touched her forehead. They didn’t seem to be breathing.

Lauren realized she wasn’t either. She looked at Fred. He was holding the two ends of ribbon, one in each hand, and looking down at her.

“The knot,” she said. “You haven’t tied it.”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

Jimmy Stewart dropped the phone with a clatter and grabbed Donna Reed by both arms. He began shaking her, yelling at her, and then suddenly she was wrapped in his arms, and he was smothering her with kisses.

“The knot,” Fred said. “You have to pull your finger out.”

She looked uncomprehendingly at him and then down at the package. He had tied the knot over her finger, which was still pressing against the wrapping paper.

“Oh. Sorry,” she said, and pulled her finger free. “You were right. It does have its moments.”

He yanked the knot tight. “Yeah,” he said. He reached for the spool of ribbon and began chopping off lengths for the bow. On the screen Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart were being pelted with rice.

“No. You were right,” he said. “He is too self-sacrificing.” He waved the scissors at the screen. “In a minute he’s going to give up his honeymoon to save the building and loan. It’s a wonder he ever asked Donna Reed to marry him. It’s a wonder he didn’t try to fix her up with that guy on the phone.”

The phone rang. Lauren looked at the screen, thinking it must be in the movie, but Jimmy Stewart was kissing Donna Reed in a taxicab.

“It’s the phone,” Fred said.

Lauren scrambled up and reached for it.

“Hi,” Scott said.

“Oh, hello, Scott,” Lauren said, looking at Fred.

“I was wondering about the office party tonight,” Scott said. “Would you like to go with me? I could come get you and we could take the presents over together.”

“Uh . . . I . . .” Lauren said. She put her hand over the receiver. “It’s Scott. What am I going to tell him about the presents?”

Fred motioned her to give him the phone. “Scott,” he said. “Hi. It’s Fred Hatch. Yeah, Santa Claus. Listen, we ran into a problem with the presents.”

Lauren closed her eyes.

“We got a call from The Upscale Oasis that investment pagers were being recalled by the Federal Safety Commission.”

Lauren opened her eyes. Fred smiled at her. “Yeah. For excessive cupidity.”

Lauren grinned.

“But there’s nothing to worry about,” Fred said. “We replaced them. We’re wrapping them right now. No, it was no trouble. I was happy to help. Yeah, I’ll tell her.” He hung up. “Scott will be here to take you to the office party at seven-thirty,” he said. “It looks like you’re going to get your heart’s desire after all.”

“Yeah,” Lauren said, looking at the TV. On the screen, the building and loan was going under.

They finished wrapping the last pair of scissors at six-thirty, and Fred went back to his apartment to change clothes and get his Santa Claus costume. Lauren packed the presents in three of the Upscale Oasis shopping bags, said sternly, “Don’t you dare touch these,” to the empty couch, and went to get ready.

She showered and did her hair, and then went into the bedroom to see if the spirit had biodegraded her red dress, or, by some miracle, brought the black off-the-shoulder one back. He hadn’t.

She put on her red dress and went back into the living room. It was only a little after seven. She turned on the TV and put Fred’s video into the VCR. She hit play. Edmund Gwenn was giving the doctor the X-ray machine he’d always wanted.

Lauren picked up one of the shopping bags and felt the top pair of scissors to make sure they hadn’t been turned into bottles of Evian water. There was an envelope stuck between two of the packages. Inside was a check for $5895.36. It was made out to the Children’s Hospital fund.

She shook her head, smiling, and put the check back into the envelope.

On TV, Maureen O’Hara and John Payne were watching Natalie Wood run through an empty house and out the back door to look for her swing. They looked seriously at each other. Lauren held her breath. John Payne moved forward and kissed Maureen O’Hara.

Someone knocked on the door. “That’s Scott,” Lauren said to John Payne, and waited till Maureen O’Hara had finished telling him she loved him before she went to open the door.

It was Fred, carrying a foil-covered plate. He was wearing the same sweater and pants he’d worn to wrap the presents. “Cheese puffs,” he said. “I figured you couldn’t get to your stove.” He looked seriously at her. “I wouldn’t worry about not having your black dress to dazzle Scott with.”

He went over and set the cheese puffs on the coffee table. “You need to take the foil off and heat them in a microwave for two minutes on high. Tell PMS to put the presents in Santa’s bag, and I’ll be there at eleven-thirty.”

“Aren’t you going to the party?”

“Office parties are your idea of fun, not mine,” he said. “Besides, Miracle on 34th Street’s on at eight. It may be the only chance I have to watch it.”

“But I wanted you—”

There was a knock on the door. “That’s Scott,” Lauren said.

“Well,” Fred said, “if the spirit doesn’t do something in the next fifteen seconds, you’ll have your heart’s desire in spite of him.” He opened the door. “Come on in,” he said. “Lauren and the presents are all ready.” He handed two of the shopping bags to Scott.

“I really appreciate your helping Lauren and me with all this,” Scott said.

Fred handed the other shopping bag to Lauren. “It was my pleasure.”

“I wish you were coming with us,” she said.

“And give up a chance of seeing the real Santa Claus?” He held the door open. “You two had better get going before something happens.”

“What do you mean?” Scott said, alarmed. “Do you think these presents might be recalled, too?”

Lauren looked hopefully at the couch and then the TV. On the screen Jimmy Stewart was standing on a bridge in the snow, getting ready to kill himself.

“Afraid not,” Fred said.

It was snowing by the time they pulled into the parking lot at work. “It was really selfless of Fred to help you wrap all those presents,” Scott said, holding the lobby door open for Lauren. “He’s a nice guy.”

“Yes,” Lauren said. “He is.”

“Hey, look at that!” Scott said. He pointed at the security monitor. “It’s a Wonderful Life. My favorite movie!” On the monitor Jimmy Stewart was running through the snow, shouting, “Merry Christmas!”

“Scott,” Lauren said, “I can’t go to the party with you.”

“Just a minute, okay?” Scott said, staring at the screen. “This is my favorite part.” He set the shopping bags down on the receptionist’s desk and leaned his elbows on it. “This is the part where Jimmy Stewart finds out what a wonderful life he’s had.”

“You have to take me home,” Lauren said.

There was a gust of cold air and snow. Lauren turned around.

“You forgot your cheese puffs,” Fred said, holding out the foil-covered plate to Lauren.

“There’s such a thing as being too self-sacrificing, you know,” Lauren said.

He held the plate out to her. “That’s what the spirit said.”

“He came back?” She shot a glance at the shopping bags.

“Yeah. Right after you left. Don’t worry about the presents.

He said he thought the staplers were a great idea. He also said not to worry about getting a Christmas present for your sister.”

“My sister!” Lauren said, clapping her hand to her mouth. “I completely forgot about her.”

“He said since you didn’t like it, he sent her the Yanomamo dress.”

“She’ll love it,” Lauren said.

“He also said it was a wonder Jimmy Stewart ever got Donna Reed, he was so busy giving everybody else what they wanted,” he said, looking seriously at her.

“He’s right,” Lauren said. “Did he also tell you Jimmy Stewart was incredibly stupid for wanting to go off to college when Donna Reed was right there in front of him?”

“He mentioned it.”

“What a great movie!” Scott said, turning to Lauren. “Ready to go up?”

“No,” Lauren said. “I’m going with Fred to see a movie.” She took the cheese puffs from Fred and handed them to Scott.

“What am I supposed to do with these?”

“Take the foil off,” Fred said, “and put them in a microwave for two minutes.”

“But you’re my date,” Scott said. “Who am I supposed to go with?”

There was a gust of cold air and snow. Everyone turned around.

“How do I look?” Evie said, taking off her coat.

“Wow!” Scott said. “You look terrific!”

Evie spun around, her shoulders bare, the sequins glittering on her black dress. “Lauren gave it to me for Christmas,” she said happily. “I love Christmas, don’t you?”

“I love that dress,” Scott said.

“He also told me,” Fred said, “that his favorite thing in Miracle on 34th Street was Santa Claus’s being in disguise—”

“He wasn’t in disguise,” Lauren said. “Edmund Gwenn told everybody he was Santa Claus.”

Fred held up a correcting finger. “He told everyone his name was Kris Kringle.”

“Chris,” Lauren said.

“Oh, I love this part,” Evie said.

Lauren looked at her. She was standing next to Scott, watching Jimmy Stewart standing next to Donna Reed and singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

“He makes all sorts of trouble for everyone,” Fred said. “He turns Christmas upside down—”

“Completely disrupts Maureen O’Hara’s life,” Lauren said.

“But by the end, everything’s worked out, the doctor has his X-ray machine, Natalie Wood has her house—”

“Maureen O’Hara has Fred—”

“And no one’s quite sure how he did it, or if he did anything.”

“Or if he had the whole thing planned from the beginning.” She looked seriously at Fred. “He told me I only thought I knew what I wanted for Christmas.”

Fred moved toward her. “He told me just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean a miracle can’t happen.”

“What a great ending!” Evie said, sniffling. “It’s a Wonderful Life is my favorite movie.”

“Mine, too,” Scott said. “Do you know how to heat up cheese puffs?” He turned to Lauren and Fred. “Cut that out, you two, we’ll be late for the party.”

“We’re not going,” Fred said, putting his arm around Lauren. They started for the door. “Miracle’s on at eight.”

“But you can’t leave,” Scott said. “What about all these presents? Who’s going to pass them out?”

There was a gust of cold air and snow. “Ho ho ho,” Santa Claus said.

“Isn’t that your costume, Fred?” Lauren said.

“Yes. It has to be back at the rental place by Monday morning,” he said to Santa Claus. “And no changing it into rainforest by-products.”

“Merry Christmas!” Santa Claus said.

“I like the way things worked out at the end,” Lauren said.

“All we need is a cane standing in the corner,” Fred said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Santa Claus said. “Where are all these presents I’m supposed to pass out?”

“Right here,” Scott said. He handed one of the shopping bags to Santa Claus.

“Plastic shopping bags,” Santa Claus said, making a “tsk”-ing sound. “You should be using recycled paper.”

“Sorry,” Scott said. He handed the cheese puffs to Evie and picked up the other two shopping bags. “Ready, Evie?”

“We can’t go yet,” Evie said, gazing at the security monitor. “Look, It’s a Wonderful Life is just starting.” On the screen Jimmy Stewart’s brother was falling through the ice. “This is my favorite part,” she said.

“Mine, too,” Scott said, and went over to stand next to her.

Santa Claus squinted curiously at the monitor for a moment and then shook his head. “Miracle on 34th Street’s a much better movie, you know,” he said reprovingly. “More realistic.”

BARNACLE BILL THE SPACER

Lucius Shepard

From the breathtaking beauty of an FTL ship setting out from Solitaire Space Station to the taunting barbs cruelly tossed at a retarded man living on that station, Lucius Shepard brilliantly captures a dark and violent, yet ultimately hopeful, future in his extraordinary new novella. The author’s latest book, Kalimantan, was published in January by St. Martin’s Press. His next novel, The Off Season, will be out soon from Ziesing.

The way things happen, not the great movements of time but the ordinary things that make us what we are, the savage accidents of our births, the simple lusts that because of whimsy or a challenge to one’s pride become transformed into complex tragedies of love, the heartless operations of chance, the wild sweetness of other souls that intersect the orbits of our lives, travel along the same course for a while, then angle off into oblivion, leaving no formal shape for us to consider, no easily comprehensible pattern from which we may derive enlightenment . . . I often wonder why it is when stories are contrived from such materials as these, the storyteller is generally persuaded to perfume the raw stink of life, to replace bloody loss with talk of noble sacrifice, to reduce the grievous to the wistfully sad. Most people, I suppose, want their truth served with a side of sentiment; the perilous uncertainty of the world dismays them, and they wish to avoid being brought hard against it. Yet by this act of avoidance they neglect the profound sadness that can arise from a contemplation of the human spirit in extremis and blind themselves to beauty. That beauty, I mean, which is the iron of our existence. The beauty that enters through a wound, that whispers a black word in our ears at funerals, a word that causes us to shrug off our griever’s weakness and say, No more, never again. The beauty that inspires anger, not regret, and provokes struggle, not the idle aesthetic of a beholder. That, to my mind, lies at the core of the only stories worth telling. And that is the fundamental purpose of the storyteller’s art, to illumine such beauty, to declare its central importance and make it shine forth from the inevitable wreckage of our hopes and the sorry matters of our decline.

This, then, is the most beautiful story I know.

It all happened not so long ago on Solitaire Station, out beyond the orbit of Mars, where the lightships are assembled and launched, vanishing in thousand-mile-long shatterings, and it happened to a man by the name of William Stamey, otherwise known as Barnacle Bill.

Wait now, many of you are saying, I’ve heard that story. It’s been told and retold and told again. What use could there be in repeating it?

But what have you heard, really?

That Bill was a sweet, balmy lad, I would imagine. That he was a carefree sort with a special golden spark of the Creator in his breast and the fey look of the hereafter in his eye, a friend to all who knew him. That he was touched not retarded, moonstruck and not sick at heart, ill-fated rather than violated, tormented, sinned against.

If that’s the case, then you would do well to give a listen, for there were both man and boy in Bill, neither of them in the least carefree, and the things he did and how he did them are ultimately of less consequence than why he was so moved and how this reflects upon the spiritual paucity and desperation of our age.

Of all that, I would suspect, you have heard next to nothing.

Bill was thirty-two years old at the time of my story, a shambling, sour-smelling, unkempt fellow with a receding hairline and a daft, mooney face whose features—weak-looking blue eyes and Cupid mouth and snub nose—were much too small for it, leaving the better part of a vast round area unexploited. His hands were always dirty, his station jumpsuit mapped with stains, and he was rarely without a little cloth bag in which he carried, among other items, a trove of candy and pornographic VR crystals. It was his taste for candy and pornography that frequently brought us together—the woman with whom I lived, Arlie Quires, operated the commissary outlet where Bill would go to replenish his supplies, and on occasion, when my duties with Security Section permitted, I would help Arlie out at the counter. Whenever Bill came in, he would prefer to have me wait on him; he was, you understand, intimidated by everyone he encountered, but by pretty women most of all. And Arlie, lithe and brown and clever of feature, was not only pretty but had a sharp mouth that put him off even more.

There was one instance in particular that should both serve to illustrate Bill’s basic circumstance and provide a background for all that later transpired. It happened one day about six months before the return of the lightship Perseverence. The shift had just changed over on the assembly platforms, and the commissary bar was filled with workers. Arlie had run off somewhere, leaving me in charge, and from my vantage behind the counter, located in an ante-room whose walls were covered by a holographic photomural of a blue sky day in the now-defunct Alaskan wilderness, and furnished with metal tables and chairs, all empty at that juncture, I could see colored lights playing back and forth within the bar, and hear the insistent rhythms of a pulse group. Bill, as was his habit, peeked in from the corridor to make sure none of his enemies were about, then shuffled on in, glancing left and right, ducking his head, hunching his shoulders, the very image of a guilty party. He shoved his moneymaker at me, three green telltales winking on the slim metal cylinder, signifying the amount of credit he was releasing to the commissary, and demanded in that grating, adenoidal voice of his that I give him “new stuff,” meaning by this new VR crystals.

“I’ve nothing new for you,” I told him.

“A ship came in.” He gave me a look of fierce suspicion. “I saw it. I was outside, and I saw it!”

Arlie and I had been quarreling that morning, a petty difference concerning whose turn it was to use the priority lines to speak with relatives in London that had subsequently built into a major battle; I was in no mood for this sort of exchange. “Don’t be an ass,” I said. “You know they won’t have unloaded the cargo yet.”

His suspicious look flickered, but did not fade. “They unloaded already,” he said. “Sleds were going back and forth.” His eyes went a bit dreamy and his head wobbled, as if he were imagining himself back out on the skin of the station, watching the sleds drifting in and out of the cargo bays; but he was, I realized, fixed upon a section of the holographic mural in which a brown bear had just ambled out of the woods and was sniffing about a pile of branches and sapling trunks at the edge of a stream that might have been a beaver dam. Though he had never seen a real one, the notion of animals fascinated Bill, and when unable to think of anything salient to say, he would recite facts about giraffes and elephants, kangaroos and whales, and beasts even more exotic, all now receded into legend.

“Bloody hell!” I said. “Even if they’ve unloaded, with processing and inventory, it’ll be a week or more before we see anything from it. If you want something, give me a specific order. Don’t just stroll in here and say”—I tried to imitate his delivery—“ ‘Gimme some new stuff’.”

Two men and a woman stepped in from the corridor as I was speaking; they fell into line, keeping a good distance between themselves and Bill, and on hearing me berating him, they established eye contact with me, letting me know by their complicitor’s grins that they supported my harsh response. That made me ashamed of having yelled at him.

“Look here,” I said, knowing that he would never be able to manage the specific. “Shall I pick you out something? I can probably find one or two you haven’t done.”

He hung his great head and nodded, bullied into submissiveness. I could tell by his body language that he wanted to turn and see whether the people behind him had witnessed his humiliation, but he could not bring himself to do so. He twitched and quivered as if their stares were pricking him, and his hands gripped the edge of the counter, fingers kneading the slick surface.

By the time I returned from the stockroom several more people had filtered in from the corridor, and half-a-dozen men and women were lounging about the entrance to the bar, laughing and talking, among them Braulio Menzies, perhaps the most dedicated of Bill’s tormentors, a big, balding, sallow man with sleek black hair and thick shoulders and immense forearms and a Mephistopholean salt-and-pepper goatee that lent his generous features a thoroughly menacing aspect. He had left seven children, a wife and a mother behind in São Paolo to take a position as foreman in charge of a metalworkers unit, and the better part of his wages were sent directly to his family, leaving him little to spend on entertainment; if he was drinking, and it was apparent he had been, I could think of nothing that would have moved him to this end other than news from home. As he did not look to be in a cheerful mood, chances were the news had not been good.

Hostility was thick as cheap perfume in the room. Bill was still standing with his head hung down, hands gripping the counter, but he was no longer passively maintaining that attitude—he had gone rigid, his neck was corded, his fingers squeezed the plastic, recognizing himself to be the target of every disparaging whisper and snide laugh. He seemed about to explode, he was so tightly held. Braulio stared at him with undisguised loathing, and as I set Bill’s goods down on the counter, the skinny blond girl who was clinging to Braulio’s arm sang, “He can’t get no woman, least not one that’s human, he’s Barnacle Bill the Spacer.”

There was a general outburst of laughter, and Bill’s face grew flushed; an ugly, broken noise issued from his throat. The girl, her smallish breasts half-spilling out from a skimpy dress of bright blue plastic, began to sing more of her cruel song.

“Oh, that’s brilliant, that is!” I said. “The creative mind never ceases to amaze!” But my sarcasm had no effect upon her.

I pushed three VR crystals and a double handful of hard candy, Bill’s favorite, across to him. “There you are,” I said, doing my best to speak in a kindly tone, yet at the same time hoping to convey the urgency of the situation. “Don’t be hanging about, now.”

He gave a start. His eyelids fluttered open, and he lifted his gaze to meet mine. Anger crept into his expression, hardening the simple terrain of his face. He needed anger, I suppose, to maintain some fleeting sense of dignity, to hide from the terror growing inside him, and there was no one else whom he dared confront.

“No!” he said, swatting at the candy, scattering much of it onto the floor. “You cheated! I want more!”

“Gon’ mek you a pathway, boog man!” said a gangly black man, leaning in over Bill’s shoulder. “Den you best travel!” Others echoed him, and one gave Bill a push toward the corridor.

Bill’s eyes were locked on mine. “You cheated me, you give me some more! You owe me more!”

“Right!” I said, my temper fraying. “I’m a thoroughly dishonest human being. I live to swindle yits like yourself.” I added a few pieces of candy to his pile and made to shoo him away. Braulio came forward, swaying, his eyes none too clear.

“Let the son’ beetch stay, man,” he said, his voice burred with rage. “I wan’ talk to heem.”

I came out from behind the counter and took a stand between Braulio and Bill. My actions were not due to any affection for Bill—though I did not wish him ill, neither did I wish him well; I suppose I perceived him as less a person than an unwholesome problem. In part, I was still motivated by the residue of anger from my argument with Arlie, and of course it was my duty as an officer in the Security Section to maintain order. But I think the actual reason I came to his defense was that I was bored. We were all of us bored on Solitaire. Bored and bad-tempered and despairing, afflicted with the sort of feverish malaise that springs from a sense of futility.

“That’s it,” I said wearily to Braulio. “That’s enough from all of you. Bugger off.”

“I don’t wan’ hort you, John,” said Braulio, weaving a bit as he tried to focus on me. “Joos’ you step aside.”

A couple of his co-workers came to stand beside him. Jammers with silver nubs protruding from their crewcut scalps, the tips of receivers that channeled radio waves, solar energy, any type of signal, into their various brain centers, producing a euphoric kinaesthesia. I had a philosophical bias against jamming, no doubt partially the result of some vestigial Christian reflex. The sight of them refined my annoyance.

“You poor sods are tuned to a dark channel,” I said. “No saved by the bell. Not today. No happy endings.”

The jammers smiled at one another. God only knows what insane jangle was responsible for their sense of well-being. I smiled, too. Then I kicked the nearer of the in the head, aiming at but missing his silver stub; I did for his friend with a smartly delivered backfist. They lay motionless, their smiles still in place. Perhaps, I thought, the jamming had turned the beating into a stroll through the park. Braulio faded a step and adopted a defensive posture. The onlookers edged away. The throb of music from the bar seemed to be giving a readout of the tension in the room.

There remained a need in me for violent release, but I was not eager to mix it with Braulio; even drunk, he would be formidable, and in any case, no matter how compelling my urge to do injury, I was required by duty to make a show of restraint.

“Violence,” I said, affecting a comical lower class accent, hoping to defuse the situation. “The wine of the fucking underclass. It’s like me father used to say, son, ‘e’d say, when you’re bereft of reason and the wife’s sucked up all the cooking sherry, just amble on down to the pub and have a piss in somebody’s face. There’s nothing so sweetly logical as an elbow to the throat, no argument so poignant as that made by grinding somebody’s teeth beneath your heel. The very cracking of bones is in itself a philosophical language. And when you’ve captioned someone’s beezer with a nice scar, it provides them a pleasant ‘omily to read each time they look in the mirror. Aristotle, Plato, Einstein. All the great minds got their start brawling in the pubs. Groin punches. Elbows to the throat. These are often a first step toward the expression of the most subtle mathematical concepts. It’s a fantastic intellectual experience we’re embarking upon ‘ere, and I for one, ladies and gents, am exhilirated by the challenge.”

Among the onlookers there was a general slackening of expression and a few titters. Braulio, however, remained focused, his eyes pinned on Bill.

“This is ridiculous,” I said to him. “Come on, friend. Do me the favor and shut it down.”

He shook his head slowly, awkwardly, like a bear bothered by a bee.

“What’s the point of it all, man?” I nodded at Bill. “He only wants to vanish. Why don’t you let him?”

The blond girl shrilled, “Way you huffin’ this bombo’s shit, you two gotta be flatbackin’, man!”

“I didn’t catch your name, darling,” I said. “Tarantula, was it? You’d do well to feed her more often, Braulio. Couple of extra flies a day ought to make her more docile.”

I ignored her curses, watching Braulio’s shoulders; when the right one dropped a fraction, I tried a round kick; but he ducked under it and rolled away, coming up into the fluid, swaying stance of a capoeirista. We circled one another, looking for an opening. The crowd cleared a space around us. Then someone—Bill, I think—brushed against me. Braulio started what appeared to be a cartwheel, but as he braced on one hand at the mid-point of the move, his long left leg whipped out and caught me a glancing blow on the temple. Dazed, I reeled backward, took a harder blow on the side of my neck and slammed into the counter. If he had been sober, that would have done for me; but he was slow to follow, and as he moved in, I kicked him in the liver. He doubled over, and I drove a knee into his face, then swept his legs from under him. He fell heavily, and I was on him, no longer using my techniques, but punching in a frenzy like a streetfighter, venting all my ulcerated emotions. Somebody was clawing at my neck, my face. The blond girl. She was screaming, sobbing, saying, “No, no, stop it, you’re killin’ him.” Then somebody else grabbed me from behind, pinned my arms, and I saw what I had wrought. Braulio’s cheekbone was crushed, one eye was swollen shut, his upper lip had been smashed into a pulp.

“He’s grievin’, man!” The blond girl dropped to her knees beside him. “That’s all he be doin’ ! Grievin’ his little ones!” Her hands fluttered about his face. Most of the others stood expressionless, mute, as if the sight of violence had mollified their resentments.

I wrenched free of the man holding me.

“Fuckin’ Security bitch!” said the blond. “All he’s doin’s grievin’.”

“I don’t give a fat damn what he was doing. There’s no law says”—I labored for breath—“says he can exorcize it this way. Is there now?”

This last I addressed to those who had been watching, and though some refused to meet my eyes, from many I received nods and a grumbling assent. They cared nothing about my fate or Braulio’s; they had been willing to witness whatever end we might have reached. But now I understood that something had happened to Braulio’s children, and I understood too why he had chosen Bill to stand in for those who were truly culpable, and I felt sore in my heart for what I had done.

“Take him to the infirmary,” I said, and then gestured at the jammers, who were still down, eyes closed, their smiles in place. “Them, too.” I put a hand to my neck; a lump had materialized underneath my right ear and was throbbing away nicely.

Bill moved up beside me, clutching his little cloth sack. His smell and his softness and his witling ways, every facet of his being annoyed me. I think he was about to say something, but I had no wish to hear it; I saw in him then what Braulio must have seen: a pudgy monstrosity, a uselessness with two legs.

Get out of here!” I said, disgusted with myself for having interceded on his behalf. “Go back to your goddamn crawl and stay there.”

His shoulders hitched as if he were expecting a blow, and he started pushing his way through the press at the door. Just before he went off along the corridor, he turned back. I believe he may have still wanted to say something, perhaps to offer thanks or—just as likely—to drive home the point that he was dissatisfied with the quantity of his goods. In his face was a mixture of petulant defiance and fear, but that gave me no clue to his intent. It was his usual expression, one that had been thirty-two years in the making, for due to his peculiar history, he had every cause to be defiant and afraid.

Bill’s mother had been a medical technician assigned to the station by the Seguin Corporation, which owned the development contract for the lightship program, and so, when his pre-natal scan displayed evidence of severe retardation, she was able to use her position to alter computer records in order to disguise his condition; otherwise, by station law—in effect, the law of the corporation—the foetus would have been aborted. Why she did this, and why she then committed suicide seventeen months after Bill’s birth, remain a mystery, though it is assumed that her irrational actions revolved around the probability that Bill’s father, a colonist aboard the lightship Perseverence, would never more be returning.

The discovery that Bill was retarded incited a fierce controversy. A considerable plurality of the station’s work force insisted that the infant be executed, claiming that since living space was at a premium, to allow this worthless creature to survive would be an affront to all those who had made great personal sacrifices in order to come to Solitaire. This group consisted in the main of those whose lives had been shaped by or whose duty it was to uphold the quota system: childless women and administrators and—the largest element of the plurality and of the population in general—people who, like Braulio, had won a job aboard the station and thus succeeded in escaping the crushing poverty and pollution of Earth, but who had not been sufficiently important to have their families sent along, and so had been forced to abandon them. In opposition stood a vocal minority comprised of those whose religious or philosophical bias would not permit such a callous act of violence; but this was, I believe, a stance founded almost entirely on principle, and I doubt that many of those involved were enthusiastic about Bill in the specific. Standing apart from the fray was a sizeable group who, for various social and political reasons, maintained neutrality; yet I would guess that at least half of them would, if asked, have expressed their distaste for the prospect of Bill’s continued existence. Fistfights and shouting matches soon became the order of the day. Meetings were held; demands made; ultimatums presented. Finally, though, it was not politics or threats of force or calls to reason that settled the issue, but rather a corporate decision.

Among Seguin’s enormous holdings was a company that supplied evolved animals to various industries and government agencies, where they were utilized in environments that had been deemed too stressful or physically challenging for human workers. The difficulty with such animals lay in maintaining control over them—the new nanotechnologies were considered untrustworthy and too expensive, and computer implants, though serviceable, inevitably failed. There were a number on ongoing research programs whose aim it was to perfect the implants, and thus Seguin, seeing an opportunity for a rigorous test, not to mention a minor public relations coup that would speak to the deeply humane concerns of the corporation, decided—in a reversal of traditional scientific methodology—to test on Bill a new implant that would eventually be used to govern the behavior of chimpanzees and dogs and the like.

The implant, a disc of black alloy about the size of a soy wafer, contained a personality designed to entertain and jolly and converse with its host; it was embedded just beneath the skin behind the ear, and it monitored emotional levels, stimulating appropriate activity by means of electrical charges capable of bestowing both pleasure and pain. According to Bill, his implant was named Mister C, and it was—also according to Bill—his best friend, this despite the fact that it would hurt him whenever he was slow to obey its commands. I could always tell when Mister C was talking to him. His face would empty, and his eyes dart about as if trying to see the person who was speaking, and his hands would clench and unclench. Not a pleasant thing to watch. Still I suppose that Mister C was, indeed, the closest thing Bill had to a friend. Certainly it was attentive to him and was never too busy to hold a conversation; more importantly, it enabled him to perform the menial chores that had been set him: janitorial duties, fetch and carry, and, once he had reached the age of fifteen, the job that eventually earned him the name Barnacle Bill. But none of this assuaged the ill feeling toward him that prevailed throughout the station, a sentiment that grew more pronounced following the incident with Braulio. Two of Braulio’s sons had been killed by a death squad who had mistaken them for members of a gang, and this tragedy caused people to begin talking about what an injustice it was that Bill should have so priviledged an existence while others more worthy should be condemned to hell on Earth. Before long, the question of Bill’s status was raised once again, and the issue was seized upon by Menckyn Samuelson, one of Solitaire’s leading lights and—to my shame, because he was such a germ—a fellow Londoner. Samuelson had emigrated to the station as a low temperature physicist and since had insinuated himself into a position of importance in the administration. I did not understand what he stood to gain from hounding Bill—he had, I assumed, some hidden political agenda—but he flogged the matter at every opportunity to whomever would listen and succeeded in stirring up a fiercely negative reaction toward Bill. Opinion came to be almost equally divided between the options of executing him, officially or otherwise, and shipping him back to an asylum on Earth, which—as everyone knew—was only a slower and more expensive form of the first option.

There was a second development resulting from my fight with Braulio, one that had a poignant effect on my personal life, this being that Bill and I began spending a good deal of time together.

It seemed the old Chinese proverb had come into play, the one that states if you save somebody’s life you become responsible for them. I had not saved his life, perhaps, but I had certainly spared him grievous injury; thus he came to view me as his protector, and I . . . Well, initially I had no desire to be either his protector or his apologist, but I was forced to adopt both these roles. Bill was terrified. Everywhere he went he was cursed or cuffed or ill-treated in some fashion, a drastic escalation of the abuse he had always suffered. And then there was the blond girl’s song: “Barnacle Bill The Spacer”. Scarcely a day passed when I did not hear a new verse or two. Everyone was writing them. Whenever Bill passed in a corridor or entered a room people would start to sing. It harrowed him from place to place, that song. He woke to it and fell asleep to it, and whatever self-esteem he had possessed was soon reduced to ashes.

When he first began hanging about me, dogging me on my rounds, I tried to put him off, but I could not manage it. I held myself partly to blame for the escalation of feeling against him; if I had not been so vicious in my handling of Braulio, I thought, Bill might not have come to this pass. But there was another, more significant reason behind my tolerance. I had, it appeared, developed a conscience. Or at least so I chose to interpret my growing concern for him. I have had cause to wonder if those protective feelings that emerged from some corner of my spirit were not merely a form of perversity, if I were using my relationship with Bill to demonstrate to the rest of the station that I had more power than most, that I could walk a contrary path without fear of retribution; but I remain convinced that the compassion I came to feel toward Bill was the product of a renewal of the ideals I had learned in the safe harbor of my family’s home back in Chelsea, conceptions of personal honor and trust and responsibility that I had long believed to be as extinct as the tiger and the dove. It may be there was a premonitory force at work in me, for it occurs to me now that the rebirth of my personal hopes were the harbinger of a more general rebirth; and yet because of all that has happened, because of how my hopes were served, I have also had reason to doubt the validity of every hope, every renewal, and to consider whether the rebirth of hope is truly possible for such diffuse, heartless, and unruly creatures as ourselves.

One day, returning from my rounds with Bill shuffling along at my shoulder, I found a black crescent moon with a red star tipping its lower horn painted on the door of Bill’s quarters: the symbol used by the Strange Magnificence, the most prominent of the gang religions flourishing back on Earth, to mark their intended victims. I doubt that Bill was aware of its significance. Yet he seemed to know instinctively the symbol was a threat, and no ordinary one at that. He clung to my arm, begging me to stay with him, and when I told him I had to leave, he threw a tantrum, rolling about on the floor, whimpering, leaking tears, wailing that bad things were going to happen. I assured him that I would have no trouble in determining who had painted the symbol; I could not believe that there were more than a handful of people on Solitaire with ties to the Magnificence. But this did nothing to soothe him. Finally, though I realized it might be a mistake, I told him he could spend the night in my quarters.

“Just this once,” I said. “And you’d better keep damn quiet, or you’ll be out on your bum.”

He nodded, beaming at me, shifting his feet, atremble with eagerness. Had he a tail he would have wagged it. But by the time we reached my quarters, his mood had been disrupted by the dozens of stares and curses directed his way. He sat on a cushion, rocking back and forth, making a keening noise, completely unmindful of the decor, which had knocked me back a pace on opening the door. Arlie was apparently in a less than sunny mood herself, for she had slotted in a VR interior of dark greens and browns, with heavy chairs and a sofa and tables whose wood had been worked into dragons heads and clawed feet and such; the walls were adorned with brass light fixtures shaped like bestial masks with glowing eyes, and the rear of the room had been transformed into a receding perspective of sequentially smaller, square segments of black delineated by white lines, like a geometric tunnel into nowhere, still leading, I trusted, to something resembling a bedroom. The overall atmosphere was of one of derangement, of a cramped magical lair through whose rear wall a hole had been punched into some negative dimension. Given this, I doubted that she would look kindly upon Bill’s presence, but when she appeared in the far reaches of the tunnel—her chestnut hair done up, wearing a white Grecian-style robe, walking through an infinite black depth, looking minute at first, then growing larger by half with each successive segment she entered—she favored him with a cursory nod and turned her attention to me.

“ ‘Ave you eaten?” she asked, and before I could answer she told me she wasn’t hungry, there were some sandwiches, or I could do for myself, whatever I wanted, all in the most dispirited of tones. She was, as I have said, a pretty woman, with a feline cast of feature and sleek, muscular limbs; having too many interesting lines in her face, perhaps, to suit the prevailing standards of beauty, but sensual to a fault. Ordinarily, sexual potential surrounded her like an aura. That day, however, her face had settled into a dolorous mask, her shoulders had slumped and she seemed altogether drab.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Nuffin’.”

“Nothing?” I said. “Right! You look like the Queen just died, and the place is fixed up like the death of philosophy. But everything’s just bloody marvelous, right?”

“Do you mind?” she snapped. “It’s personal!”

“Personal, is it? Well, excuse me. I certainly wouldn’t want to be getting personal with you. What the hell’s the matter? You been struck by the monthlies?”

She pinned me with a venemous stare. “God, you’re disgustin’ ! What is it? You ‘aven’t broken any ‘eads today, so you’ve decided to bash me around a bit?”

“All right, all right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Nao,” she said. “G’wan with it. Oi fuckin’ love it when you’re masterful. Really, Oi do!” She turned and started back along the tunnel. “Oi’ll just await your pleasure, shall Oi?” she called over her shoulder. “Oi mean, you will let me know what more Oi can do to serve?”

“Christ!” I said, watching her ass twitching beneath the white cloth, thinking that I would have to make a heartfelt act of contrition before I laid hands on it again. I knew, of course, why I had baited her. It was for the same reason that had brought on her depression, that provoked the vast majority of our aberrant behaviors. Frustration, anger, despair, all feelings that—no matter their immediate causes—in some way arose from the fact that Solitaire had proved to be an abject failure. Of the twenty-seven ships assembled and launched, three had thusfar returned. Two of the ships had reported no hospitable environments found. The crew of the third ship had been unable to report anything, being every one of them dead, apparently by each others’ hands.

We had gotten a late start on the colonization of space, far too late to save the home planet, and it was unclear whether the piddling colonies on Mars and Europa and in the asteroids would allow us to survive. Perhaps it should have been clear, perhaps we should have realized that despite the horror and chaos of Earth, the brush wars, the almost weekly collapse of governments, our flimsy grasp of the new technologies, despite the failure of Solitaire and everything else . . . perhaps it should have been more than clear that our species possessed a root stubbornness capable of withstanding all but the most dire of cataclysms, and that eventually our colonies would thrive. But they would never be able to absorb the desperate population of Earth, and the knowledge that our brothers and sisters and parents were doomed to a life of diminishing expectations, to famines and wars and accidents of industry that would ultimately kill off billions, it caused those of us fortunate enough to have escaped to become dazed and badly weighted in our heads, too heavy with a sense of responsibility to comprehend the true moral requisites of our good fortune. Even if successful the lightship program would only bleed off a tiny percentage of Earth’s population, and most, I assumed, would be personnel attached to the Seguin Corporation and those whom the corporation or else some corrupt government agency deemed worthy; yet we came to perceive ourselves as the common people’s last, best hope, and each successive failure struck at our hearts and left us so crucially dismayed, we developed astonishing talents for self-destruction. Like neurotic Prometheans, we gnawed at our own livers and sought to despoil every happy thing that fell to us. And when we grew too enervated to practice active self-destruction, we sank into clinical depression, as Arlie was doing now.

I sat thinking of these things for a long while, watching Bill rock back and forth, now and then popping a piece of hard candy into his mouth, muttering, and I reached no new conclusions, unless an evolution of distaste for the corporation and the world and the universe could be considered new and conclusive. At length, weary of the repetitive circuit of my thoughts, I decided it was time I tried to make my peace with Arlie. I doubted I had the energy for prolonged apology, but I hoped that intensity would do the trick.

“You can sleep on the couch,” I said to Bill, getting to my feet. “The bathroom”—I pointed off along the corridor—“is down there somewhere.”

He bobbed his head, but as he kept his eyes on the floor, I could not tell if it had been a response or simply a random movement.

“Did you hear me?” I asked.

“I gotta do somethin’,” he said.

“Down there.” I pointed again. “The bathroom.”

“They gonna kill me ‘less I do somethin’.”

He was not, I realized, referring to his bodily functions.

“What do you mean?”

His eyes flicked up to me, then away. “ ‘Less I do somethin’ good, really good, they gonna kill me.”

“Who’s going to kill you?”

“The men,” he said.

The men, I thought, sweet Jesus! I felt unutterably sad for him.

“I gotta find somethin’,” he said with increased emphasis. “Somethin’ good, somethin’ makes ’em like me.”

I had it now—he had seized on the notion that by some good deed or valuable service he could change people’s opinion of him.

“You can’t do anything, Bill. You just have to keep doing your job, and this will all wash away, I promise you.”

“Mmn-mn.” He shook his head vehemently like a child in denial. “I gotta find somethin’ good to do.”

“Look,” I said. “Anything you try is very likely to backfire. Do you understand me? If you do something and you bugger it, people are going to be more angry at you than ever.”

He tucked his lower lip beneath the upper and narrowed his eyes and maintained a stubborn silence.

“What does Mister C say about this?” I asked.

That was, apparently, a new thought. He blinked; the tightness left his face. “I don’t know.”

“Well, ask him. That’s what he’s there for . . . to help you with your problems.”

“He doesn’t always help. Sometimes he doesn’t know stuff.”

“Try, will you? Just give it a try.”

He did not seem sure of this tactic, but after a moment he pawed at his head, running his palm along the crewcut stubble, then squeezed his eyes shut and began to mumble, long pattering phrases interrupted by pauses for breath, like a child saying his prayers as fast as he can. I guessed that he was outlining the entire situation for Mister C. After a minute his face went blank, the tip of his tongue pushed out between his lips, and I imagined the cartoonish voice—thus I had been told the implant’s voice would manifest—speaking to him in rhymes, in silly patter. Then, after another few seconds, his eyes snapped open and he beamed at me.

“Mister C says good deeds are always good,” he announced proudly, obviously satisfied that he had been proven right, and popped another piece of candy into his mouth.

I cursed the simplicity of the implant’s programming, sat back down, and for the next half-hour or so I attempted to persuade Bill that his best course lay in doing absolutely nothing, in keeping a low profile. If he did, I told him, eventually the dust would settle and things would return to normal. He nodded and said, yes, yes, uh-huh, yet I could not be certain that my words were having an effect. I knew how resistant he could be to logic, and it was quite possible that he was only humoring me. But as I stood to take my leave of him, he did something that went some ways toward convincing me that I had made an impression: he reached out and caught my hand, held it for a second, only a second, but one during which I thought I felt the sorry hits of his life, the dim vibrations of all those sour loveless nights and lonely ejaculations. When he released my hand he turned away, appearing to be embarrassed. I was embarrassed myself. Embarrassed and, I must admit, a bit repelled at having this ungainly lump display affection toward me. Yet I was also moved, and trapped between those two poles of feeling, I hovered above him, not sure what to do or say. There was, however, no need for me to deliberate the matter. Before I could summon speech he began mumbling once again, lost in a chat with Mister C.

“Good night, Bill,” I said.

He gave no response, as still as a Buddha on his cushion.

I stood beside him for a while, less observing him than cataloguing my emotions; then, puzzling more than a little over their complexity, I left him to his candy and his terror and his inner voices.

Apology was not so prickly a chore as I had feared. Arlie knew as well as I the demons that possessed us, and once I had submitted to a token humiliation, she relented and we made love. She was demanding in the act, wild and noisy, her teeth marked my shoulder, my neck; but as we lay together afterward in the dark, some trivial, gentle music trickling in from the speakers above us, she was tender and calm and seemed genuinely interested in the concerns of my day.

“God ‘elp us!” she said. “You don’t actually fink the Magnificence is at work ‘ere, do you?”

“Christ, no!” I said. “Some miserable dwight’s actin’ on mad impulse, that’s all. Probably done it ’cause his nanny wiped his bum too hard when he’s a babe.”

“Oi ‘ope not,” she said. “Oi’ve seen their work back ‘ome too many toimes to ever want to see it again.”

“You never told me you’d had dealings with the Magnificence.”

“Oi never ‘ad what you’d call dealin’s with ’em, but they was all over our piece of ‘eaven, they were. ‘Alf the bloody houses sported some kind of daft mark. It was a bleedin’ fertile field for ’em, with nobody ‘avin’ a job and the lads just ‘angin about on the corners and smokin’ gannie. ‘Twas a rare day the Bills didn’t come ‘round to scrape up some yobbo wearing his guts for a necktie and the mark of his crime carved into his fore’ead. Nights you’d hear ’em chantin’ down by the stadium. ‘Orrid stuff they was singin’. Wearin’ that cheap black satin gear and those awrful masks. But it ‘ad its appeal. All the senile old ‘ooligans were diggin’ out their jackboots and razors, and wantin’ to go marchin’ again. And in the pubs the soaks would be sayin’, Yes, yes, they do the odd bad thing, the Magnificence, but they’ve got the public good to ‘eart. The odd bad thing! Jesus! Oi’ve seen messages written on the pavement in ‘uman bones. Colored girls with their ‘ips broken and their legs lashed back behind their necks. Still breathin’ and starin at you with them ‘ollow eyes, loike they were mad to die. You were lucky, John, to be living up in Chelsea.”

“Lucky enough, I suppose,” I said stiffly, leery of drawing such distinctions; the old British class wars, though somewhat muted on Solitaire, were far from dormant, and even between lovers, class could be a dicey subject. “Chelsea’s not exactly the Elysian Fields.”

“Oi don’t mean nuffin’ by it, luv. You don’t have to tell me the ‘ole damn world’s gone rotten long ago. Oi remember how just a black scrap of a life looked loike a brilliant career when Oi was livin’ there. Now Oi don’t know how Oi stood it.”

I pulled her close against me and we lay without speaking for a long while. Finally Arlie said, “You know, it’s ‘alf nice ‘avin’ ‘im ‘ere.”

“Bill, you mean?”

“Yeah, Bill.”

“I hope you’ll still feel that way if he can’t find the loo,” I said.

Arlie giggled. “Nao, I’m serious. It’s loike ‘avin family again. The feel of somebody snorin’ away in the next room. That’s the thing we miss ‘avin here. We’re all so bloody isolated. Two’s a crowd and all that. We’re missin’ the warmth.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

I touched her breasts, smoothed my hand along the swell of her hip, and soon we were involved again, more gently than before, more giving to the other, as if what Arlie had said about family had created a resonance in our bodies. Afterward I was so fatigued, the darkness seemed to be slowly circulating around us, pricked by tiny bursts of actinic light, the way a djinn must circulate within its prison bottle, a murky cloud of genius and magic. I was at peace lying there, yet I felt strangely excited to be so peaceful, and my thoughts, too, were strange, soft, almost formless, the kind of thoughts I recalled having had as a child when it had not yet dawned on me that all my dreams would eventually be hammered flat and cut into steely dies so they could withstand the dreadful pressures of a dreamless world.

Arlie snuggled closer to me, her hand sought mine, clasped it tightly. “Ah, Johnny,” she said. “Toimes loike this, Oi fink Oi was born to forget it all.”

The next day I was able to track down the villain who had painted the menacing symbol on Bill’s door. The cameras in the corridor outside his door had malfunctioned, permitting the act of vandalism to go unobserved; but this was hardly surprising—the damned things were always failing, and should they not fail on their own, it was no great feat to knock them out by using an electromagnet. Lacking a video record, I focused my attention on the personnel files. Only nine people on Solitaire proved to have had even minimal ties with the Strange Magnificence; by process of elimination I was able to reduce the number of possible culprits to three. The first of them I interviewed, Roger Thirwell, a pale, rabbity polymath in his mid-twenties who had emigrated from Manchester just the year before, admitted his guilt before I had scarcely begun his interrogation.

“I was only tryin’ to do the wise and righteous,” he said, squaring his shoulders and puffing out his meager chest. “Samuelson’s been tellin’ us we shouldn’t sit back and allow things to just happen. We should let our voices be heard. Solitaire’s our home. We should be the ones decide how it’s run.”

“And so, naturally,” I said, “when it came time to let your majestic voice resound, the most compelling topic you could find upon which to make a statement was the fate of a halfwit.”

“It’s not that simple and you know it. His case speaks to a larger issue. Samuelson says . . .”

“Fuck you,” I said. “And fuck Samuelson.” I was sick of him, sick of his Midlands accent, sick especially of his references to Samuelson. What possible service, I wondered, could a dwight such as he have provided for the Magnificence? Something to do with logistics, probably. Anticipating police strategies or solving computer defenses. Yet from what I knew of the Magnificence, it was hard to imagine them putting up with this nit for very long. They would find a hard use for him and then let him fall off the edge of the world.

“Why in hell’s name did you paint that thing on his door?” I asked. “And don’t tell me Samuelson ordered you to do it.”

The light of hope came into his face, and I would have sworn he was about to create some fantasy concerning Samuelson and himself in order to shift the guilt to broader shoulders. But all he said was, “I wanted to scare him.”

“You could have achieved that with a bloody stick figure,” I said.

“Yeah, but no one else would have understood it. Samuelson says we ought to try to influence as many people as possible whenever we state our cause, no matter how limited our aims. That way we enlist others in our dialogue.”

I was starting to have some idea of what Samuelson’s agenda might be, but I did not believe Thirwell could further enlighten me on the subject. “All you’ve succeeded in doing,” I told him, “is to frighten other people. Or is it your opinion that there are those here who would welcome a chapter of the Magnificence?”

He ducked his eyes and made no reply.

“If you’re homesick for them, I can easily arrange for you to take a trip back to Manchester,” I said.

This elicited from Thirwell a babble of pleas and promises. I saw that I would get no more out of him, and I cautioned him that if he were ever to trouble Bill again I would not hesitate to make good on my threat. I then sent him on his way and headed off to pay a call on Menckyn Samuelson.

Samuelson’s apartment, like those belonging to most corporate regals, was situated in a large module adjoining the even larger module that housed the stations propulsion controls, and was furnished with antiques and pictures that would have fetched a dear price back on Earth, but here were absolutely priceless, less evidence of wealth than emblems of faith . . . the faith we were all taught to embrace, that one day life would be as once it had been, a vista of endless potential and possibility. The problem with Samuelson’s digs, however, was that his taste was abysmally bad; he had assembled a motley collection of items, Guilford chests and blond Finnish chairs, a Jefferson corner cabinet and freeform video sculptures, Victorian sideboard and fiberoptic chandelier, that altogether created the impression one had stumbled into a pawn shop catering to millionaires. It may be that my amusement at this appalling display showed in my face, for though he presented a smile and an outstretched hand, I sensed a certain stiffness in his manner. Nevertheless, the politician in him brought him through that awkward moment. Soon he was nattering away, pouring me a glass of whiskey, ushering me to an easy chair, plopping himself down into another, giving out with an expansive sigh, and saying, “I’m so awfully glad you’ve come, John. I’ve been meaning to have you in for a cup of reminiscence, you know. Two old Londoners like ourselves, we can probably find a few choice topics to bang around.”

He lifted his chin, beaming blandly, eyes half-lidded, as if expecting something pleasant to be dashed into his face. It was such a thespian pose, such a cliched take on upper class manners, so redolent of someone trying to put on airs, I had to restrain a laugh. Everything about him struck me as being just the slightest bit off. He was a lean, middle-aged man, dressed in a loose cotton shirt and moleskin trousers, alert in manner, almost handsome, but the nose was a tad sharp, the eyes set a fraction too close together, the cheekbones not sufficiently prominent, the chin a touch insubstantial, too much forehead and not enough hair. He had the essential features of good breeding, yet none of the charming detail, like the runt of a pedigreed litter.

“Yes,” I said, “we must do sometime. However, today I’ve come on station business.”

“I see.” He leaned back, crossed his legs, cradled his whiskey in his lap. “Then p’rhaps after we’ve concluded your business, there’ll be time for a chat, eh?”

“Perhaps.” I had a swallow of whiskey, savored the smoky flavor. “I’d like to talk with you about William Stamey.”

“Ah, yes. Old Barnacle Bill.” Samuelson’s brow was creased by a single furrow, the sort of line a cartoonist would use to indicate a gently rolling sea. “A bothersome matter.”

“It might be considerably less bothersome if you left it alone.”

Not a crack in the veneer. He smiled, shook his head. “I should dearly love to, old fellow. But I’m afraid you’ve rather a short-sighted view of the situation. The question we must settle is not the question of Bill per se, but of general policy. We must develop clear guide. . . .”

“Come on! Give it up!” I said. “I’m not one of your damned pint and kidney pie boys who get all narky and start to drool at the thought of their rights being abused. Their rights! Jesus Christ! The poor scuts have been buggered more times than a Sydney whore, and they still think it feels good. You wouldn’t waste a second on this if it were merely a question of policy. I want to know what you’re really after.”

“Oh my God,” Samuelson said, bemused. “You’re not going to be an easy lay, are you?”

“Not for you, darling. I’m saving myself for the one I love.”

“And just who is that, I wonder.” He swirled the whiskey in his glass, watched it settle. “What do you think I’m after?”

“Power. What else is it makes your toby stiffen?”

He made a dry noise. “A simplistic answer. Not inaccurate, I’ll admit. But simplistic all the same.”

“I’m here for an education,” I told him, “not to give a lecture.”

“And I may enlighten you,” Samuelson said. “I very well may. But let me ask you something first. What’s your interest in all this?”

“I’m looking after Bill’s interests.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Surely there’s more to it than that.”

“That’s the sum of it. Aside from the odd deep-seated pyschological motive, of course.”

“Of course.” His smile could have sliced an onion; when it vanished, his cheeks hollowed. “I should imagine there’s an element of noblesse oblige involved.”

“Call it what you like. The fact remains, I’m on the case.”

“For now,” he said. “These things have a way of changing.”

“Is that a threat? Don’t waste your time. I’m the oldest slut on the station, Samuelson. I know where all the big balls have been dragging, and I’ve made certain I’m protected. Should anything happen to me or mine, it’s your superiors who’re going to start squealing. They’ll be most perturbed with you.”

“You’ve nothing on me.” This said with, I thought, forced confidence.

“True enough,” I said. “But I’m working on it, don’t you worry.”

Samuelson drained his glass, got to his feet, went to the sideboard and poured himself a fresh whiskey. He held up the bottle, gave me an inquiring look.

“Why not?” I let him fill my glass, which I then lifted in a toast. “To England. May the seas wash over her and make her clean.”

He gave an amused snort. “England,” he said, and drank. He sat back down, adjusted his bottom. “You’re an amazing fellow, John. I’ve been told as much, but now, having had some firsthand experience, I believe my informants may have underestimated you.” He pinched the crease of one trouserleg. “Let me put something to you. Not as a threat, but as an item for discussion. You do understand, don’t you, that the sort of protection you’ve developed is not proof against every circumstance?”

“Absolutely. In the end it all comes down to a question of who’s got the biggest guns and the will to use them. Naturally I’m prepared along those lines.”

“I don’t doubt it. But you’re not seeking a war, are you?”

I knocked back half my whiskey, rested the glass on my lap. “Look here, I’m quite willing to live as one with you, no matter. Until lately, you’ve done nothing to interfere with my agenda. But this dust-up over Bill, and now this bit with your man Thirwell and his paint gun, I won’t have it. Too many people here, Brits and Yanks alike, have a tendency to soil their nappy when they catch a scent of the Magnificence. I’ve no quarrel with you making a power play. And that’s what you’re doing, old boy. You’re stirring up the groundlings, throwing a few scraps to the hounds so they’ll be eager for the sound of your voice. You’re after taking over the administrative end of things, and you’ve decided to give climbing the ladder of success a pass in favor of scaling the castle walls. A bloodless coup, perhaps. Or maybe a spot of blood thrown in to slake the fiercest appetites. Well, that’s fine. I don’t give a fuck who’s sitting in the big chair, and I don’t much care how they get there, so long as we maintain the status quo. But one thing I won’t have is you frightening people.”

“People are forever being frightened,” he said. “Whether there’s a cause for fear or not. But that’s not my intent.”

“Perhaps not. But you’ve frightened the bejesus out of Bill, and now you’ve frightened a good many others by bringing the Magnificence into the picture.”

“Thirwell’s not my responsibility.”

The hell he’s not! He’s the walking Book of Samuelson. Every other sentence begins, ‘Samuelson says . . .’ Give him a pretty smile, and he’ll be your leg-humper for life.”

“Leg-humper?” Samuelson looked bewildered.

“A little dog,” I said impatiently. “You know the kind. Randy all the time. Jumps up on you and goes to having his honeymoon with your calf.”

“I’ve never heard the term. Not British, is it?”

“American, I think. I heard it somewhere. I don’t know.”

“Marvelous expression. I’ll have to remember it.”

“Remember this, too,” I said, trying to pick up the beat of my tirade. “I’m holding you responsible for any whisper I hear of the Magnificence. Before we had this heart-to-heart I was inclined to believe you had no part in what Thirwell did. Now I’m not altogether sure. I think you’re quite capable of using fear to manipulate the public. I think you may have known something of Thirwell’s history and given him a nudge.”

“Even if that were true,” he said, “I don’t understand the depth of your reaction. We’re a long way from the Magnificence here. A daub of paint or two can’t have much effect.”

My jaw dropped a fraction on hearing that. “You’re not from London. You couldn’t be and still say that.”

“Oh, I’m from London all right,” he said coldly. “And I’m no virgin where the Magnificence is concerned. They left my brother stretched on Kings Road one morning with the Equation of Undying Love scrawled in his own blood on the sidewalk beneath him. They mailed his private parts to his wife in a plastic container. But I’ve come a very long way from those days and those places. I’d be terrified of the Magnificence if they were here. But they’re not here, and I’ll be damned if I’ll treat them like the bogeyman just because some sad little twit with too much brain and the social skills of a ferret paints the Magelantic Exorcism on somebody’s door.”

His statement rang true, but nevertheless I made a mental note to check on his brother. “Wonderful,” I said. “It’s good you’ve come to terms with all that. But not everyone here has managed to put as much distance between themselves and their old fears as you seem to have done.”

“That may be, but I’m. . . .” He broke off, clicked his tongue against his teeth. “All right. I see your point.” He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Let’s see if we can’t reach an accord. It’s not in my interests at the moment to break off my campaign against Bill, but”—he held up a hand to stop me from interrupting—“but I will acknowledge that I’ve no real ax to grind where he’s concerned. He’s serving a strictly utilitarian purpose. So here’s what I’ll do. I will not allow him to be shipped back to Earth. At a certain juncture, I’ll defuse the campaign. Perhaps I’ll even make a public apology. That should help return him to grace. In addition, I’ll do what I can to prevent further incidents involving the Magnificence. Frankly I very much doubt there’ll be further problems. If there are, it won’t be because I’m encouraging them.”

“All well and good,” I said. “Very magnanimous, I’m sure. But nothing you’ve promised guarantees Bill’s safety during the interim.”

“You’ll have to be his guarantee. I’ll try to maintain the temper of the station at a simmer. The rest is up to you.”

“Up to me? No, you’re not going to avoid responsibility that way. I’ll do my best to keep him from harm, but if he gets hurt, I’ll hurt you. That much I can guarantee.”

“Then let’s hope that nothing happens to him, shall we? For both our sakes.” His smile was so thin, such a sideways stretching of the lip muscles, I thought it must be making his gums ache. “Funny. I can’t decide whether we’ve established a working relationship or declared war.”

“I don’t think it matters,” I said.

“No, probably not.” He stood, straightened the fall of his trousers, and again gave me that bland, beaming, expectant look. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer. Do drop around once the dust has settled. We’ll have that chat.”

“About London.”

“Right.” He moved to the door.

“I don’t know as I’d have very much to say about London,” I told him. “Nothing fit for reminiscence, at any rate.”

“Really?” he said, ushering me out into the corridor. “The old girl’s petticoats have gotten a trifle bloody, I’ll admit. Terrible, the things that go on nowadays. The hunting parties, hive systems, knife dances. And of course, the Magnificence. But here, you know”—he patted his chest—“in her heart, I firmly believe there’s still a bit of all right. Or maybe it’s just I’m the sentimental sort. Like the song says, ‘call ‘er a satan, call ‘er a whore, she’ll always be Mother to me’.”

Unlike Samuelson, I no longer thought of London as mother or home, or in any framework that smacked of the wholesome. Even ‘satan’ would have been a euphemism. London for me was flurry of night visions: a silhouetted figure standing in the window of a burning building, not waving its arms, not leaning out, but calm, waiting to be taken by the flames; men and women in tight black satin, white silk masks all stamped with the same feral, exultant expression, running through the streets, singing; moonlight painting the eddies of the Thames into silk, water lapping at a stone pier, and floating just beyond the shadow of the pier, the enormous bulk of man I had shot only a minute before, nearly four hundred pounds of strangler, rapist, cannibal, brought down by a bullet weighing no more than one of his teeth; the flash of a shotgun from around a dark corner, like the flash of heat lightning; the charge of poisonous light flowing along the blade of a bloody macro-knife just removed from the body of a fellow detective; a garbage bag resting on a steel table that contained the neatly butchered remains of seven infants; the facade of St. Paul’s dyed into a grooved chaos of vermillion, green, and purple by stone-destroying bacteria released by the artist, Miralda Hate; the wardrobe of clothing sewn of human skin and embroidered in gilt and glitter with verses from William Blake that we found in a vacant Brixton flat; the blind man who begged each evening on St. Martin’s Lane, spiders crawling in the hollow globes of his glass eyes; the plague of saints, young men and women afflicted by a drug that bred in them the artificial personalities of Biblical characters and inspired them to martyr themselves during certain phases of the moon; the eyes of wild dogs in Hyde Park gleaming in the beam of my torch like the flat discs of highway reflectors; those and a thousand equally blighted memories, that was my London. Nightmare, grief, and endless fever.

It was Solitaire that was home and mother to me, and I treated it with the appropriate respect. Though I was an investigative officer, not a section guard, I spent a portion of nearly every day patrolling various areas, searching less for crime than for symptoms of London, incidences of infection that might produce London-like effects. The station was not one place, but many: one hundred and forty-three modules, several of which were larger than any of the Earth orbit stations, connected by corridors encased in pressure shells that could be disengaged by means of the Central Propulsion Control and—as each module was outfitted with engines—moved to a new position in the complex, or even to a new orbit; should the CPC be destroyed or severely damaged, disengagement was automatic, and the modules would boost into pre-progammed orbits. I hardly ever bothered to include places such as the labs, tank farms, infirmaries, data management centers, fusion modules, and such on my unofficial rounds; nor did I include the surface of the station, the electronic and solar arrays, radiator panels, communications and tracking equipment; those areas were well maintained and had no need of a watchman. I generally limited myself to entertainment and dwelling modules like East Louie, where Bill’s quarters and mine were located, idiosyncratic environments decorated with VR scenarios so ancient that they had blanked out in patches and you would often see a coded designation or a stretch of metal wall interrupting the pattern of, say, a hieroglyphic mural; and from time to time I also inspected those sections of the station that were rarely visited and were only monitored via recordings several times a day—storage bays and transport hangars and the CPC (the cameras in those areas were supposed to transmit automatic alarms whenever anyone entered, but the alarm system was on the fritz at least half the time, and due to depleted staff and lack of materials, repairs such as that were not a high priority).

The CPC was an immense, white, portless room siuated, as I’ve said, in the module adjoining that which housed Samuelson’s digs and the rest of the corporate dwelling units. The room was segmented by plastic panels into work stations, contained banks of terminals and control panels, and was of little interest to me; but Bill, once he learned its function, was fascinated by the notion that his world could separate into dozens of smaller worlds and arrow off into the nothing, and each time we visited it, he would sit at the main panel and ask questions about its operation. There was never anyone else about, and I saw no harm in answering the questions. Bill did not have suffcient mental capacity to understand the concept of launch codes, let alone to program a computer so it would accept them. Solitaire was the only world he would ever know, and he was eager to accumulate as much knowledge about it as possible. Thus I encouraged his curiosity and showed him how to call up pertinent information on his own computer.

Due to Arlie’s sympathetic response, Bill took to sleeping in our front room nearly every night, this in addition to tagging along on my rounds, and therefore it was inevitable that we became closer; however, closeness is not a term I happily apply to the relationship. Suffice it to say that he grew less defiant and petulant, somewhat more open and, as a consequence, more demanding of attention. Because his behavior had been modified to some degree, I found his demands more tolerable. He continued to cling to the notion that in order to save himself he would have to perform some valuable service to the community, but he never insisted that I help him in this; he appeared satisfied merely to hang about and do things with me. And to my surprise I found there were some things I actually enjoyed doing with him. I took especial pleasure in going outside with him, in accompanying him on his rounds and watching as he cleared barnacles away from communications equipment and other delicate mechanisms.

Sauter’s Barnacle was, of course, not a true barnacle, yet it possessed certain similarities to its namesake, the most observable of which was a supporting structure that consisted of a hard exoskeleton divided into plates so as to allow movement. They bore a passing resemblance to unopened buds, the largest about the size of a man’s fist, and they were variously colored, some streaked with metallic shades of red, green, gold, and silver (their coloration depended to a great extent on the nature of the substrate and their nutrient sources), so that when you when you saw a colony of them from a distance, spreading over the surface of a module—and all the modules were covered by hundreds of thousands of them—they had the look of glittering beds of moss or lichen. I knew almost nothing about them, only that they fed on dust, that they were sensitive to changes in light, that they were not found within the orbit of Mars, and that wherever there was a space station, they were, as my immediate superior, the Chief of Security, Gerald Sessions, put it, “thick as flies on shit”. Once it had been learned that they did no harm, that, indeed, their excretions served to strengthen the outer shells of the modules, interest in them had fallen off sharply. There was, I believe, some ongoing research into their physical characteristics, but it was not of high priority.

Except with Bill.

To Bill the barnacles were purpose, a reason for being. They were, apart from Mister C, the most important creatures in the universe, and he was obsessive in his attentiveness toward them. Watching him stump about over the skin of the station, huge and clumsy in his pressure suit, a monstrous figure made to appear even more monstrous by the light spraying up around him from this or that port, hosing offending clumps of barnacles with bursts of oxygen from the tank that floated alongside him, sending them drifting up from their perches, I had the impression not of someone performing a menial task, but of a gardener tending his prize roses or—more aptly—a shepherd his flock. And though according to the best information, the barnacles were mindless things, incapable of any activity more sophisticated than obeying the basic urges of feeding and reproduction, it seemed they responded to him; even after he had chased them away they would bobble about him like strange pets, bumping against his faceplate and sometimes settling on him briefly, vivid against the white material of the pressure suit, making it appear that he was wearing jeweled rosettes on his back and shoulders. (I did not understand at the time that these were females which, unable to effect true mobility, had been stimulated to detach from the station by the oxygen and now were unable to reattach to the colony.)

With Bill’s example before me, I was no longer able to take the barnacles for granted, and I began reading about them whenever I had a spare moment. I discovered that the exoskeleton was an organic-inorganic matrix composed of carbon compounds and silicate minerals, primarily olivine, pyroxene, and magnetite, substances commonly found in meteorites. Changes in light intensity were registered by iridescent photophores that dotted the plates; even the finest spray of dust passing between the barnacle and a light source would trigger neurological activity and stimulate the opening of aperture plates, permitting the egress of what Jacob Sauter, the barnacles’ Linnaeus, an amateur at biology, had called the “tongue”, an organ utilized both in feeding and in the transmission of seminal material from the male to the female. I learned that only the males could move about the colony, and that they did so by first attaching to the substrate with their tongues, which were coated with adhesive material, then detaching at one of their upper plate segments, and finally re-attaching to the colony with the stubby segmented stalks that depended from their bottom plates. “In effect,” Sauter had written, “they are doing cartwheels.”

The most profound thing I discovered, however, had nothing to do with the barnacles, or rather had only peripherally to do with them, and was essentially a rediscovery, a rewakening of my wonderment at the bleak majesty surrounding us. The cold diamond chaos of the stars, shining so brightly they might have just been finished that day; the sun, old god grown small and tolerable to the naked eye; the surreal brilliance and solidity that even the most mundane object acquired against the backdrop of that black, unvarying distance; that blackness itself, somehow managing to seem both ominous and serene, absence and presence, metal-hard and soft as illusion, like a fold in God’s magesterial robe; the station with its spidery complexes of interconnecting corridors and modules, all coated with the rainbow swirls and streaks of the barnacles’ glittering colors, and beams of light spearing out from it at every angle, like some mad, gay, rickety toy, the sight of which made me expect to hear calliope music; the Earth transport vessels, gray and bulky as whales, berthed in the geometric webs of their docks; the remote white islands of the assembly platforms, and still more remote, made visible by setting one’s faceplate for maximum visual enhancement, the tiny silver needle we were soon to hurl into the haystack of the unknown. It was glorious, that vista. It made a comprehensible map of our endeavors and led me to understand that we had not botched it completely. Not yet. I had seen it all before, but Bill’s devotion to the barnacles had rekindled the embers of my soul, restored my cognizance of the scope of our adventure, and looking out over the station, I would think I could feel the entire blast and spin of creation inside my head, the flood of particles from a trillion suns, the crackling conversations of electric clouds to whom the frozen seas of ammonia above which they drifted were repositories of nostalgia, the endless fall of matter through the less-than-nothing of a pure anomaly, the white face of Christ blurred and streaming within the frost-colored fire of a comet’s head, the quasars not yet congealed into dragons and their centuries, the unerring persistence of meteors that travel for uncounted millennia through the zero dark to scoot and burn across the skies onto the exposure plates of mild astronomers and populate the legends of a summer night and tumble into cinders over the ghosted peaks of the Karakorum and then are blown onto the back porches of men who have never turned their faces to the sky and into the dreams of children. I would have a plunderous sense of my own destiny, and would imagine myself hurtling through the plenum at the speed of thought, of wish, accumulating a momentum that was in itself a charge to go, to witness, to take; and I was so enlivened I would believe for an instant that, like a hero returning from war, I could lift my hand and let shine a blessing down upon everyone around me, enabling them to see and feel all I had seen and felt, to know as I knew that despite everything we were closer to heaven than we had ever been before.

It was difficult for me to regain my ordinary take on life following these excursions, but after the departure of the lightship Sojourner, an event that Bill and I observed together from a catwalk atop the solar array in East Louie, it was thrust hard upon me that I had best set a limit on my woolgathering and concentrate on the matters at hand, for it was coming more and more to look as if the Strange Magnificence had gained a foothold on Solitaire. Scraps of black satin had been found tied to several crates in one of the storage bays, one of them containing drugs; copies of The Book of Inexhaustible Delirium began turning up; and while I was on rounds with Bill one day, I discovered a cache of packet charges in the magnetism lab, each about half the size of a flattened soccer ball, any one of which would have been sufficient to destroy a module; Gerald Sessions and I divided them up and stored them in our apartments, not trusting our staff with the knowledge of their existence. Perhaps the most troubling thing of all, the basic question of whether or not the Magnificence had the common good to heart was being debated in every quarter of the station, an argument inspired by fear and fear alone, and leading to bloody fights and an increase in racial tension and perversion of every sort. The power of the Strange Magnificence, you see, lay in the subversive nihilism of their doctrine, which put forward the idea that it was man’s duty to express all his urges, no matter how dark or violent, and that from the universal exorcism of these black secrets would ultimately derive a pure consensus, a vast averaging of all possible behaviors that would in turn reveal the true character of God and the manifest destiny of the race. Thus the leaders of the Magnificence saw nothing contrary in funding a group in York, say, devoted to the expulsion of Pakistanis from Britain by whatever means necessary while simultaneously supporting a Sufi cult. They had no moral or philosophical problem with anything because according to them the ultimate morality was a work-in-progress. Their tracts were utter tripe, quasi-intellectual homily dressed up in the kind of adjective-heavy, gothic prose once used to give weight to stories of ghosts and ancient evil; their anthems were even less artful, but the style suited the product, and the product was an easy sell to the disenfranchised, the desperate and the mad, categories into one of which almost everyone alive would fit to some extent, and definitely were one or another descriptive of everyone on Solitaire. As I had promised him, once these symptoms started to manifest, I approached Samuelson again, but he gave every evidence of being as concerned about the Magnificence as was I, and though I was not certain I believed his pose, I was too busy with my official duties and my unofficial one—protecting Bill, who had become the target of increased abuse—to devote much time to him. Then came the day of the launch.

It was beautiful, of course. First a tiny stream of fire, like a scratch made on a wall painted black, revealing a white undercoat. This grew smaller and smaller, and eventually disappeared; but mere seconds after its disappearance, what looked to be an iridescent crack began to spread across the blackness, reaching from the place where Sojourner had gone superluminal to its point of departure, widening to a finger’s breadth, then a hand’s, and more, like an all-colored piece of lightning hardened into a great jagged sword that was sundering the void, and as it swung toward us, widening still, I thought I saw in it intimations of faces and forms and things written, as one sees the images of circuitry and patterns such as might be found on the skin of animals when staring at the grain of a varnished board, and the sight of these half-glimpsed faces and the rest, not quite decipherable yet familiar in the way a vast and complex sky with beams of sunlight shafting down through dark clouds appears to express a familiar glory . . . those sights were accompanied by a feeling of instability, a shivery apprehension of my own insubstantiality which, although it shook me to my soul, disabling any attempt to reject it, was also curiously exalting, and I yearned for that sword to swing through me, to bear me away into a thundering genesis where I would achieve completion, and afterward, after it had faded, leaving me bereft and confused, my focus upon it had been so intent, I felt I had witnessed not an exercise of intricate technology but a simple magical act of the sort used to summon demons from the ready rooms of Hell or to wake a white spirit in the depths of an undergound lake. I turned to Bill. His faceplate was awash in reflected light, and what I could make out of his face was colored an eerie green by the read-outs inside his helmet. His mouth was opened, his eyes wide. I spoke to him, saying I can’t recall what, but wanting him to second my amazement at the wonderful thing we had seen.

“Somethin’s wrong,” he said.

I realized then that he was gazing in another direction; he might have seen Sojourner’s departure, but only out of the corner of his eye. His attention was fixed upon one of the modules—the avionics lab, I believe—from which a large number of barnacles had detached and were drifting off into space.

“Why’re they doin’ that?” he asked. “Why’re they leavin’ ?”

“They’re probably sick of it here,” I said, disgruntled by his lack of sensitivity. “Like the rest of us.”

“No,” he said. “No, must be somethin’ wrong. They wouldn’t leave ‘less somethin’s wrong.”

“Fine,” I said. “Something’s wrong. Let’s go back in.”

He followed me reluctantly into the airlock, and once we had shucked off our suits, he talked about the barnacles all the way back to my quarters, insisting that they would not have vacated the station if there had been nothing wrong.

“They like it here,” he said. “There’s lots of dust, and nobody bothers ’em much. And they . . .”

“Christ!” I said. “If something’s wrong, figure it out and tell me! Don’t just blither on!”

“I can’t.” He ducked his eyes, swung his arms in exaggerated fashion, as if he were getting ready to skip. “I don’t know how to figure it out.”

“Ask Mister C.” We had reached my door, and I punched out the entry code.

“He doesn’t care.” Bill pushed his lower lip to cover the upper, and he shook his head back and forth, actually not shaking it so much as swinging it in great slow arcs. “He thinks it’s stupid.”

“What?” The door cycled open; the front room was pitch-dark..

“The barnacles,” Bill said. “He thinks everything I like is stupid. The barnacles and the CPC and . . .”

Just then I heard Arlie scream, and somebody came hurtling out of the dark, knocking me into a chair and down onto the floor. In the spill of light from the corridor, I saw Arlie getting to her feet, covering her breasts with her arms. Her blouse was hanging in tatters about her waist; her jeans were pushed down past her hips; her mouth was bloody. She tried to speak, but only managed a sob.

Sickened and terrified at the sight of her, I scrambled out into the corridor. A man dressed all in black was sprinting away, just turning off into one of the common rooms. I ran after him. Each step spiked the boil of my emotions with rage, and by the time I entered the common room, done up as the VR version of a pub, with dart boards and dusty, dark wood, and a few fraudulent old red-cheeked men slumped at corner tables, there was murder in my heart. I yelled at people taking their ease to call Security, then raced into the next corridor.

Not a sign of the man in black.

The corridor was ranged by about twenty doors, the panel of light above most showing blue, signalling that no one was within. I was about to try one of the occupied apartments when I noticed that the telltale beside the airlock hatch was winking red. I went over to the hatch, switched on the closed circuit camera; on the screen above the control panel appeared a grainy black-and-white picture of the airlock’s interior; the man I had been chasing was pacing back and forth, making an errratc humming noise. A pale, twitchy young man with a malnourished look and bones that seemed as frail as a bird’s, the product of some row-house madonna and her pimply king, of not enough veggies and too many cigarettes, of centuries of a type of ignorance as peculiarly British as the hand-rolled lawns of family estates. I recognized him at once. Roger Thirwell. I also recognized his clothes. The tight black satin trousers and shirt of the Strange Magnificence, dotted with badges proclaiming levels of spiritual attainment and attendance at this or that function.

“Hello, Roger,” I said into the intercom. “Lovely day for a rape, isn’t it, you filthy bastard?”

He glanced around, then up to the monitor. Fear came into his face, then was washed away by hostility, which in turn was replaced by a sort of sneering happiness. “Send me to Manchester, will you?” he said. “Send me down the tube to bloody Manchester! I think not! Perhaps you realize now I’m not the sort to take threats lying down.”

“Yeah, you’re a fucking hero! Why don’t you come out and show me how much of a man you are.”

He appeared distracted, as if he had not heard me. I began to suspect that he was drugged; but drugged or not, I hated him.

“Come on out of there!” I said. “I swear to God, I’ll be gentle.”

“I’ll show you,” he said. “You want to see the man I am, I’ll show you.”

But he made no move.

“I had her in the mouth,” he said quietly. “She’s got a lovely, lovely mouth.”

I didn’t believe him, but the words afflicted me nevertheless. I pounded on the hatch. “You beady-eyed piece of shit! Come out, damn you!”

Voices talking excitedly behind me, then somebody put an arm on my shoulder and said in a carefully enunciated baritone, “Let me handle this one, John.”

It was Gerald Sessions, my superior, a spindly black man with a handsome, open face and freckly light complexion and spidery arms that possessed inordinate strength. He was a quiet, private sort, not given to displays of emotion, understated in all ways, possessed of the glum manner of someone who continually feels themselves put upon; yet because of our years together, he was a man for whom I had developed some affection, and though I trusted no one completely, he was one of the few people whom I was willing to let watch my back. Standing beside him were four guards, among them his bodyguard and lover, Ernesto Carbajal, a little fume of a fellow with thick, oily yet well-tended black hair and a prissy cast to his features; and behind them, at a remove, was a grave-looking Menckyn Samuelson, nattily attired in dinner jacket and white trousers. Apparently he had been called away from a social occasion.

“No, thank you,” I told Gerald. “I plan to hurt the son of a bitch. Send someone round to check on Arlie, will you?”

“It’s been taken care of.” He studied me a moment. “All right. Just don’t kill him.”

I turned back to the screen just as Thirwell, who had moved to the outer hatch and was gazing at the control panel, burst into song.

“Night, my brother, gather round me,
Breed the reign of violence,
And with temptations of the spi-i-rit
Blight the curse of innocence.
Oh, supple daughters of the twilight,
Will we have all our pleasures spent,
when God emerges from the shadows,
blinding in his Strange Magni-i-fi-i-cence . . .”

He broke off and let out a weak chuckle. I was so astounded by this behavior that my anger was muted and my investigative sensibilities engaged.

“Who’re your contacts on Solitaire?” I asked. “Talk to me, and maybe things will go easier for you.”

Thirwell continued staring at the panel, seemingly transfixed by it.

“Give it up, Roger,” I said. “Tell us about the Magnificence. You help us, and we’ll do right by you, I swear.”

He lifted his face to the ceiling and, in a shattered tone, verging on tears, said, “Oh, God!”

“I may be wrong,” I said, “but I don’t believe he’s going to answer you. You’d best brace it up in there, get your head clear.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Sure you do. You know. It was your brains got you here. Now use them. Think. You have to make the best of this you can.” It was hard to make promises of leniency to this little grout who’d had his hands on Arlie, but the rectitude of the job provided me a framework in which I was able to function. “Look here, I can’t predict what’s going to happen, but I can give you this much. You tell us what you know, chapter and verse, and I’ll speak up for you. There could be mitigating circumstances. Drugs. Coercion. Blackmail. That strike a chord, Roger? Hasn’t someone been pushing you into this? Yeah, yeah, I thought so. Mitigating circumstances. That being the case, it’s likely the corporation will go lightly with you. And one thing I can promise for certain sure. We’ll keep you safe from the Magnificence.”

Thirwell turned to the monitor. From the working of his mouth and the darting of his eyes, I could see he was close to falling apart.

“That’s it, there’s the lad. Come along home.”

“The Magnificence.” He glanced about, as if concerned that someone might be eavesdropping. “They told me . . . uh . . . I . . .” He swallowed hard and peered at the camera as if trying to see through to the other side of the lens. “I’m frightened,” he said in a whispery, conspiratorial tone.

“We’re all frightened, Roger. It’s shit like the Magnificence keeps us frightened. Time to stop being afraid, don’t you think. Maybe that’s the only way to stop. Just to do it, I mean. Just to say, the hell with this! I’m. . . .”

“P’rhaps if I had a word with him,” said Samuelson, leaning in over my shoulder. “You said I had some influence with the boy. P’rhaps . . .”

I shoved him against the wall; Gerald caught him on the rebound and slung him along the corridor, holding a finger up to his lips, indicating that Samuelson should keep very quiet. But the damage was done. Thirwell had turned back to the control panel and was punching in the code that would break the seal on the outer hatch.

“Don’t be an ass!” I said. “That way’s no good for anyone.”

He finished punching in the code and stood staring at the stud that would cycle the lock open. The Danger lights above the inner hatch were winking, and a computer voice had begun repeating, Warning, Warning, The outer hatch has been unsealed, the airlock has not been depressurized, Warning, Warning . . .

“Don’t do it, Roger!”

“I have to,” he said. “I realize that now. I was confused, but now it’s okay. I can do it.”

“Nobody wants this to happen, Roger.”

“I do, I want it.”

“Listen to me!”

Thirwell’s hand went falteringly toward the stud. “Lord of the alley mouths,” he said, “Lord of the rifles, Lord of the inflamed, Thou who hath committed every vileness . . .”

“For Christ’s sake, man!” I said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. Not the Magnificence, not anyone. I’ll guarantee your safety.”

“. . . every sin, every violence, stand with me now, help me shape this dying into an undying love . . .” His voice dropped in volume, becoming too low to hear.

“Goddamn it, Thirwell! You silly bastard. Will you stop jabbering that nonsense! Don’t give in to it! Don’t listen to what they’ve taught you. It’s all utter rot!”

Thirwell looked up at the camera, at me. Terror warped his features for a moment, but then the lines of tension softened and he giggled. “He’s right,” he said. “The man’s dead on right. You’ll never understand.”

“Who’s right? What won’t I understand?”

“Watch,” said Thirwell gleefully. “Watch my face.”

I kept silent, trying to think of the perfect thing to say, something to foil his demented impulse.

“Are you watching?”

“I want to understand,” I said. “I want you to help me understand. Will you help me, Roger? Will you tell me about the Magnificence?”

“I can’t. I can’t explain it.” He drew a deep breath, let it out slowly. “But I’ll show you.”

He smiled blissfully at the camera as he pushed the stud.

Explosive decompression, even when viewed on a black-and-white monitor, is not a good thing to see. I looked away. Inadvertantly, my eyes went to Samuelson. He was standing about fifteen feet away, hands behind his back, expressionless, like a minister composing himself before delivering his sermon; but there was something else evident in that lean, blank face, something happening beneath the surface, some slight engorgement, and I knew, knew , that he was not distressed in the least by the death, that he was pleased by it. No one of his position, I thought, would be so ingenuous as to interrupt a security man trying to talk in a potential suicide. And if what he had done to Thirwell had been intentional, a poorly disguised threat, if he had that much power and menace at his command, then he might well be responsible for what Thirwell had done to Arlie.

I strolled over to him. His eyes tracked my movements. I stopped about four feet away and studied him, searching for signs of guilt, for hints of a black satin past, of torchlight and blood and group sing-alongs. There was weakness in his face, but was it a weakness bred by perversion and brutality, or was it simply a product of fear? I decided that for Arlie’s sake, for Thirwell’s, I should assume the worst. “Guess what I’m going to do next?” I asked him. Before he could answer I kicked him in the pit of the stomach, and as he crumpled, I struck him a chopping left to the jaw that twisted his head a quarter-turn. Two of the guards started toward me, but I warned them back. Carbajal fixed me with a look of prim disapproval.

“That was a stupid damn thing to do,” said Gerald, ambling over and gazing down at Samuelson, who was moaning, stirring.

“He deserves worse,” I said. “Thirwell was coming out. I’m certain of it. And then this bastard opened his mouth.”

“Yeah.” Gerald leaned against the wall, crossed his legs. “So how come you figure he did it?”

“Why don’t you ask him? Be interesting to see how he responds.”

Gerald let out a sardonic laugh. “Man’s an altruist. He was trying to help.” He picked at a rough place on one of his knuckles. “The real question I got is how deep he’s in it. Whether he’s involved with the Magnificence, or if he’s just trying to convince everyone he is. I need to know so I can make an informed decision.”

I did not much care for the edge of coolness in his voice. “And what decision is that, pray?”

Carbajal, staring at me over his shoulder, flashed me a knowing smile.

“He already don’t like you, John,” said Gerald. “Man told me so. Now he’s gonna want your ass on a plaque. And I have to decide whether or not I should let him have you.”

“Oh, really?”

“This is some serious crap, man. I defy Samuelson, we’re gonna have us one helluva situation. Security lined up against Administration.”

Samuelson was trying to sit up; his jaw was swollen and discolored. I hoped it was broken.

“We could be talkin’ about a war,” Gerald said.

“I think you’re exaggerating,” I said. “Even so, a civil war wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen, not so long as the right side won. There are a number of assholes on station who would make splendid casualties.”

Gerald said, “No comment.”

Samuelson had managed to prop himself up on an elbow. “I want you to arrest him,” he said to Gerald.

I looked at Gerald. “Might I have a few words with him before you decide?”

He met my eyes for a few beats, then shook his head in dismay. “Aw, fuck it,” he said.

“Thanks, friend,” I said.

“Fuck you, too,” he said; he walked a couple of paces away and stood gazing off along the corridor; Carbajal went with him, whispered in his ear and rubbed his shoulders.

“Did you hear what I told you?” Samuelson heaved himself up into a sitting position, cupping his jaw. “Arrest him. Now!”

“Here, let me help you up.” I grabbed a fistful of Samuelson’s jacket, hauled him to his feet, and slammed him into the wall. “There. All better, are we?”

Samuelson’s eyes darted left to right, hoping for allies. I bashed his head against the wall to get his attention, and he struggled against my hold.

“Such a tragedy,” I said in my best upper crust accent. “The death of young Thirwell, what?”

The fight went out of him; his eyes held on mine.

“That was as calculated a bit of murder as I’ve seen in many a year,” I told him.

“I haven’t the foggiest notion what you’re talking about!”

“Oh, yes you do! I had him walking the tightrope back. Then you popped in and reminded him of the consequences he’d be facing should he betray the Magnificence. God only knows what he thought you had in store for him.”

“I did no such thing! I was . . .”

I dug the fingers of my left hand in behind his windpipe; I would have liked to squeeze until thumb and fingers touched, but I only applied enough force to make him squeak. “Shut your gob! I’m not finished.” I adjusted my grip to give him more air. “You’re dirty, Samuelson. You’re the germ that’s causing all the pale looks around here. I don’t know how you got past the screens, but that’s not important. Sooner or later I’m going to have your balls for breakfast. And when I’ve cleaned my plate, I’ll send what’s left of you to the same place you chased Thirwell. Of course you could tell me the names of everyone on Solitaire who’s involved with the Magnificence. That might weaken my resolve. But don’t be too long about it, because I am fucking lusting for you. I can scarcely wait for you to thwart me. My saliva gets all thick and ropy when I think of the times we could have together.” I gave him a shake, listened to him gurgle. “I know what you are, and I know what you want. You got a dream, don’t you? A vast, splendid dream of men in black satin populating the stars. New planets to befoul. Well, it’s just not going to happen. If it ever comes to pass that a ship returns with good news, you won’t be on it, son. Nor will any of your tribe. You’ll be floating out there in the black grip of Jesus, with your blood all frozen in sprays around you and your hearts stuffed in your fucking mouths.” I released him, gave him a cheerful wink. “All right. Go ahead. Your innings.”

Samuelson scooted away along the wall, holding his throat. “You’re mad!” He glanced over at Gerald. “The both of you!”

Gerald shrugged, spread his hands. “It’s part of the job description.”

“May we take it,” I said to Samuelson, “that you’re not intending to confess at this time?”

Samuelson noticed, as had I, that a number of people had come out of the common room and were watching the proceedings. “I’ll tell you what I intend,” he said, pulling himself erect in an attempt to look impressive. “I intend to make a detailed report concerning your disregard for authority and your abuse of position.”

“Now, now,” Gerald said, walking toward him. “Let’s have no threats. Otherwise somebody”—his voice built into a shout—“somebody might lose their temper!” He accompanied the shout by slapping his palm against the wall, and this sent Samuelson staggering back another dozen feet or so.

Several of the gathering laughed.

“Come clean, man,” I said to Samuelson. “Do the right thing. I’m told it’s better than sex once those horrid secrets start spilling out.”

“If it’ll make you feel any easier, you can dress up in your black satins first,” Gerald said. “Having that smooth stuff next to your skin, that’ll put a nice wiggle on things.”

“You know, Gerald,” I said. “Maybe these poofs are onto something. Maybe the Magnificence has a great deal to offer.”

“I’m always interested in upgrading my pleasure potential,” he said. “Why don’t you give us the sales pitch, Samuelson?

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s hear about all the snarky quivers you get from twisting the arms off a virgin.”

The laughter swelled in volume, inspired by Samuelson’s expression of foolish impotence.

“You don’t understand who’re you’re dealing with,” he said. “But you will, I promise.”

There, I said to myself, there’s his confession. Not enough to bring into court, but for a moment it was there in his face, all the sick hauteur and corrupted passion of his tribe.

“I bet you’re a real important man with the Magnificence,” said Gerald. “Bet you even got a title.”

“Minister of Scum and Delirium,” I suggested.

“I like it,” said Gerald. “How ‘bout Secretary of the Inferior?”

“Grand High Salamander,” said Carbajal, and tittered.

“Master of the Excremental.”

“Stop it,” said Samuelson, clenching his fists; he looked ready to stamp his foot and cry.

Several other titular suggestions came from the crowd of onlookers, and Gerald offered, “Queen of the Shitlickers.”

“I’m warning you,” said Samuelson; then he shouted, “I am warning you!” He was flushed, trembling. All the twitchy material of his inner core exposed. It had been fun bashing him about, but now I wanted to put my heel on him, feel him crunch underfoot.

“Go on,” Gerald said. “Get along home. You’ve done all you can here.”

Samuelson shot him an unsteady look, as if not sure what Gerald was telling him.

Gerald waved him off. “We’ll talk soon.”

“Yes,” said Samuelson, straightening his jacket, trying to muster a shred of dignity. “Yes, indeed, we most certainly will.” He delivered what I suppose he hoped was a withering stare and stalked off along the corridor.

“There goes an asshole on a mission,” said Gerald, watching him round the bend.

“Not a doubt in my mind,” I said.

“Trouble.” Gerald scuffed his heel against the steel floor, glanced down as if expecting to see a mark. “No shit, the man’s trouble.”

“So are we,” I said.

“Yeah, uh-huh.” He sounded unconvinced.

We exchanged a quick glance. We had been through a lot together, Gerald and I, and I knew by the tilt of his head, the wry set of his mouth, that he was very worried. I was about to make a stab at boosting his spirits when I remembered something more pressing.

“Oh, Christ!” I said. “Arlie! I’ve got to get back.”

“Forgot about her, huh?” He nodded gloomily, as if my forgetfulness were something he had long decried. “You know you’re an asshole, don’t you? You know you don’t deserve the love of woman or the friendship of man.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Can you handle things here?”

He made a gesture of dismissal. Another morose nod. “Just so you know,” he said.

There were no seasons on Solitaire, no quick lapses into cold, dark weather, no sudden transformations into flowers and greenery; yet it seemed that in those days after Thirwell’s suicide the station passed through an autumnal dimming, one lacking changes in foliage and temperature, but having in their stead a flourishing of black satin ribbons and ugly rumors, a gradual decaying of the spirit of the place into an oppressive atmosphere of sullen wariness, and the slow occlusion of all the visible brightness of our lives, a slump of patronage in the bars, the common rooms standing empty, incidences of decline that reminded me in sum of the stubborn resistance of the English oaks to their inevitable change, their profuse and solemn green surrendering bit by bit to the sparse imperatives of winter, like a strong man’s will gradually being eroded by grief.

War did not come immediately, as Gerald had predicted; but the sporadic violences continued, along with the arguments concerning the true intentions and nature of the Strange Magnificence, and few of us doubted that war, or something akin to it, was in the offing. Everyone went about their duties hurriedly, grimly—everyone, that is, except for Bill. He was so absorbed by his own difficulties, I doubt he noticed any of this, and though the focus of hostility had shifted away from him to an extent, becoming more diffuse and general, he grew increasingly agitated and continued to prattle on about having to “do something” and—this a new chord in his simple symphony—that something must be terribly wrong because the barnacles were leaving.

That they were leaving was undeniable. Every hour saw the migration of thousands more, and large areas of the station’s surface had been laid bare. Not completely bare, mind you. There remained a layer of the substrate laid down by the females, greenish silver in color, but nonetheless it was a shock to see the station so denuded. I gave no real credence to Bill’s contention that we were in danger, but neither did I totally disregard it, and so, partly to calm him, to reassure him that the matter was being investigated, I went back to Jacob Sauter’s notes to learn if such migrations were to be expected.

According to the notes, pre-adult barnacles—Sauter called them “larva”—free-floated in space, each encapsulated in its own segement of a tube whose ends had been annealed so as to form a ring. Like the adult barnacle, the exterior of the ring was dotted with light-sensitive photophores, and when a suitable place for attachment was sensed, the ring colony was able to orient itself by means of excretions sprayed through pores in the skin of the tube, a method not dissimilar to that utilized by orbital vessels when aligning themselves for re-entry. The slightest change in forward momentum induced secretions to occur along the edge of the colony oriented for imminent attachment, and ultimately the colony stuck to its new home, whereupon the females excreted an acidic substrate that bonded with the metal. The barnacles were hermphroditic, and the initial metamorphitosis always resulted in female barnacles alone. Once the female colony grew dense, some of the females would become male. When the colony reached a certain density it reproduced en masse. As the larval tubes were secreted, they sometimes intertwined, and this would result in braided ring colonies, which helped endure variation in the gene pool. And that was all I could find on the subject of migration. If Sauter were to be believed, by giving up their purchase on the station, the barnacles were essentially placing their fate in the hands of God, taking the chance—and given the vastness of space, the absence of ring secretions, it was an extremely slim chance—that they would happen to bump into something and be able to cling long enough to attach themselves. If one were to judge their actions in human terms, it would appear that they must be terrified of something, otherwise they would stay where they were; but it would require an immense logical leap for me to judge them according to those standards and I had no idea what was responsible for their exodus.

Following my examination of Sauter’s notes I persuaded Gerald to accompany me on an inspection tour of Solitaire’s surface. I thought seeing the migration for himself might affect him more profoundly than had the camera views, and that he might then join me in entertaining the suspicion that—as unlikely a prospect as it was—Bill had stumbled onto something. But Gerald was not moved to agreement.

“Man, I don’t know,” he said as we stood on the surface of East Louie, looking out toward the CPC and the administration module. There were a few sparse patches of barnacles around us, creatures that for whatever reason—impaired sensitivity, some form of silicate stubbornness—had not abandoned the station. Now and then one or several would drift up toward the glittering clouds of their fellows that shone against the blackness like outcroppings of mica in anthracite. “What do I know about these damn things! They could be doing anything. Could be they ran out of food, and that’s why they’re moving. Shit! You giving the idiot way too much credit! He’s got his own reasons for wanting this to mean something.”

I could not argue with him. It would be entirely consistent with Bill’s character for him to view the migration as part of his personal apocalypse, and his growing agitation might stem from the fact that he saw his world being whittled down, his usefulness reduced, and thus his existence menaced all the more.

“Still,” I said, “it seems odd.”

“ ‘Odd’ ain’t enough. Weird, now, that might carry some weight. Crazy. Run amok. They qualify for my attention. But ‘odd’ I can live with. You want to worry about this, I can’t stop you. Me, I got more important things to do. And so do you.”

“I’m doing my job, don’t you worry.”

“Okay. Tell me about it.”

Through the glaze of reflection on his faceplate, I could only make out his eyes and his forehead, and these gave no clue to his mood.

“There’s not very much to tell. As far as I can determine Samuelson’s pure through and through. There’s a curious lack of depth to the background material, a few dead ends in the investigative reports. Deceased informants. Vanished employers. That sort of thing. It doesn’t feel quite right to me, but it’s nothing I could bring to the corporation. And it does appear that his elder brother was murdered by the Magnificence, which establishes at least one of his bona fides.”

“If Samuelson’s part of the Magnificence, I . . .”

“ ‘If’, my ass!” I said. “You know damned well he is.”

“I was going to say, his brother’s murder is just the kind of tactic they like to use in order to draw suspicion away from one of their own. Hell, he may have hated his brother.”

“Or he may have loved him and wanted the pain.”

Gerald grunted.

“I’ve isolated fourteen files that have a sketchiness reminiscent of Samuelson’s,” I said. “Of course that doesn’t prove anything. Most of them are administration and most are relatively new on Solitaire. But only a couple are his close associates.”

“That makes it more likely they’re all dirty. They don’t believe in bunching up. I’ll check into it.” I heard a burst on static over my earphones, which meant that he had let out a heavy sigh. “The damn thing is,” he went on, “Samuelson might not be the lead dog. Whoever’s running things might be keeping in the shadows for now.”

“No, not a chance,” I said. “Samuelson’s too lovely in the part.”

A construction sled, a boxy thing of silver struts powered by a man in a rocket pack, went arcing up from the zero physics lab and boosted toward one of the assembly platforms; all manner of objects were lashed to the struts, some of them—mostly tools, vacuum welders and such—trailing along in its wake, giving the sled a raggedy, gypsy look.

“Those explosives you got stashed,” Gerald said, staring after the sled.

“They’re safe.”

“I hope so. We didn’t have ’em, they might have moved on us by now. Done a hostage thing. Or maybe just blown something up. I’m pretty sure nothing else has been brought on station, so you just keep a close watch on that shit. That’s our hole card.”

“I don’t like waiting for them to make the first move.”

“I know you don’t. Was up to you, we’d be stiffening citizens right and left, and figuring out later if they guilty or not. That’s how come you got the teeth, and I’m holding the leash.”

Though his face was hidden, I knew he was not smiling.

“Your way’s not always the right of it, Gerald,” I said. “Sometimes my way’s the most effective, the most secure.”

“Yeah, maybe. But not this time. This is too bullshit, this mess. Too many upper level people involved. We scratch the wrong number off the page, we be down the tube in a fucking flash. You don’t want to be scuffling around back on Earth, do you? I sure as hell don’t.”

“I’d prefer it to having my lungs sucked out through my mouth like Thirwell.”

“Would you, now? Me, I’m not so sure. I want a life that’s more than just gnawing bones, John. I ain’t up to that kind of hustle no more. And I don’t believe you are, either.”

We stood with speaking for a minute or so. It was getting near time for a shift change, and everywhere bits of silver were lifting from the blotched surface of the station, flocking together in the brilliant beams of light shooting from the transport bays, their movements as quick and fitful as the play of dust in sunlight.

“You’re thinking too much these days, man,” Gerald said. “You’re not sniffing the air, you’re not feeling things here.” He made a slow, ungainly patting motion above his gut.

“That’s rot!”

“Is it? Listen to this. ‘Life has meaning but no theme. There is no truth we can assign to it that does not in some way lessen the bright flash of being that is its essential matter. There is no lesson learned that does not signal a misapprehension of our stars. There is no moral to this darkness.’ That’s some nice shit. Extremely profound. But the man who wrote that, he’s not watching the water for sharks. He’s too busy thinking.”

“I’m so pleased,” I said, “you’ve been able to access my computer once again. I know the childlike joy it brings you. And I’m quite sure Ernesto is absolutely thrilled at having a peek.”

“Practice makes perfect.”

“Any further conclusions you’ve drawn from poking around in my personal files?”

“You got one helluva fantasy life. Or else that Arlie, man, she’s about half some kind of beast. How come you write all that sex stuff down?”

“Prurience,” I said. “Damn! I don’t know why I put up with this shit from you.”

“Well, I do. I’m the luckiest Chief of Security in the system, see, ’cause I’ve got me a big, bad dog who’s smart and loyal, and”—he lifted one finger of his gauntleted hand to signify that this was key—“who has no ambition to take my job.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“No, man, you don’t want my job. I mean, you’d accept it if it was handed to you; but you like things the way they are. You always running wild and me trying to cover your ass.”

“I hope you’re not suggesting that I’m irresponsible.”

“You’re responsible, all right. You just wouldn’t want the kind of responsibility I’ve got. It’d interfere with your style. The way you move around the station, talking bullshit to the people, everything’s smooth, then all of a sudden you go Bam! Bam!, and take somebody down, then the next second you’re talking about Degas or some shit, and then, Bam!, somebody else on the floor, you say, Oops, shit, I guess I messed up, will you please forgive me, did I ever tell you ‘bout Paris in the springtime when all the poets turn into cherryblossoms, Bam! It’s fucking beautiful, man. You got half the people so scared they crawl under the damn rug when they see you coming, and the other half loves you to death, and most all of ’em would swear you’re some kind of Robin Hood, you whip ’em ’cause you love ’em and it’s your duty, and you only use your powers for goodness and truth. They don’t understand you like I do. They don’t see you’re just a dangerous, amoral son of a bitch.”

“Is this the sort of babble that goes into your personnel reports.”

“Not hardly. I present you as a real citizen. A model of integrity and courage and resourcefulness.”

“Thanks for that,” I said coldly.

“Just don’t ever change, man. Don’t ever change.”

The sleds that had lifted from the station had all disappeared, but others were materializing from the blackness, tiny points of silver and light coming home from the assembly platforms, looking no more substantial than the clouds of barnacles. Finally Gerald said, “I got things to take care of.” He waved at the barnacles. “Leave this shit alone, will you? After everything else gets settled, maybe then we’ll look into it. Right now all you doing is wasting my fucking time.”

I watched him moving off along the curve of the module toward the airlock, feeling somewhat put off by his brusque reaction and his analysis. I respected him a great deal as a professional, and his clinical assessment of my abilities made me doubt that his respect for me was so unqualiifed.

There was a faint click against the side of my helmet. I reached up and plucked off a barnacle. Lying in the palm of my gauntlet, its plates closed, its olive surface threaded with gold and crimson, it seemed cryptic, magical, rare, like something one would find after a search lasting half a lifetime, a relic buried with a wizard king, lying in his ribcage in place of a heart. I had shifted my position so that the light from the port behind me cast my shadow over the surface, and, a neurological charge having been triggered by the change in light intensity, some of the barnacles in the shadow were opening their plates and probing the vacuum with stubby gray “tongues”, trying to feed. It was an uncanny sight, the way their “tongues” moved, stiffly, jerkily, like bad animation, like creatures in a grotesque garden hallucinated by Hawthorne or Baudelaire, and standing there among them, with the technological hodge-podge of the station stretching away in every direction, I felt as if I were stranded in a pool of primitive time, looking out onto the future. It was, I realized, a feeling akin to that I’d had in London whenever I thought about the space colonies, the outposts strung across the system.

Gnawing bones.

As my old Classics professor would have said, Gerald’s metaphor was “a happy choice”.

And now I had time to consider, I realized that Gerald was right: after all the years on Solitaire, I would be ill-suited for life in London, my instincts rusty, incapable of readjusting to the city’s rabid intensity. But I did not believe he was right to wait for Samuelson to move against us. Once the Magnificence set their sights on a goal, they were not inclined to use half-measures. I was too disciplined to break ranks with Gerald, but there was nothing to prevent me from preparing myself for the day of judgment. Samuelson might bring us down, I told myself, but I would see to it that he would not outlive us. I was not aware, however, that judgment day was almost at hand.

Perhaps it was the trouble of those days that brought Arlie and I closer together, that reawakened us to the sweetness of our bodies and the sharp mesh of our souls, to all those things we had come to take for granted. And perhaps Bill had something to do with it. As dismal an item as he was, it may be his presence served—as Arlie had suggested—to supply us with some missing essential of warmth or heart. But whatever the cause, it was a great good time for us, and I came once again to perceive her not merely as someone who could cure a hurt or make me stop thinking for a while, but as the embodiment of my hopes. After everything I had witnessed, all the shabby, bloody evidence I had been presented of our kind’s pettiness and greed, that I could feel anything so pure for another human being . . . Christ, it astounded me! And if that much could happen, then why not the fulfillment of other, more improbable hopes? For instance, suppose a ship were to return with news of a habitable world. I pictured the two of us boarding, flying away, landing, being washed clean in the struggle of a stern and simple life. Foolishness, I told myself. Wild ignorance. Yet each time I fell into bed with Arlie, though the darkness that covered us seemed always imbued with a touch of black satin, with the sickly patina of the Strange Magnificence, I would sense in the back of my mind that in touching her I was flying away again, and in entering her I was making landfall on some perfect blue-green sphere. There came a night, however, when to entertain such thoughts seemed not mere folly but the height of indulgence.

It was close upon half-eleven, and the three of us, Bill, Arlie, and I, were sitting in the living room, the walls playing a holographic scenario of a white-capped sea and Alps of towering cumulus, with whales breeching and a three-masted schooner coasting on the wind, vanishing whenever it reached a corner, then reappearing on the adjoining wall. Bill and Arlie were on the sofa, and she was telling him stories about Earth, lies about the wonderful animals that lived there, trying to distract him from his obsessive nattering about the barnacles. I had just brought out several of the packet charges that Gerald and I had hidden away, and I was working at reshaping them into smaller units, a project that had occupied me for several nights. Bill had previously seemed frightened by them and had never mentioned them. That night, however, he pointed at the charges and said, “ ‘Splosives?”

“Very good,” I said. “The ones we found, you and I. The ones I was working with yesterday. Remember?”

“Uh-huh.” He watched me re-insert a timer into one of the charges and then asked what I was doing.

“Making some presents,” I told him.

“Birthday presents?”

“More like Guy Fawkes Day presents.”

He had no clue as to the identity of Guy Fawkes, but he nodded sagely as though he had. “Is one for Gerald?”

“You might say they’re all for Gerald.”

He watched me a while longer, then said, “Why is it presents? Don’t ‘splosives hurt?”

“E’s just havin’ a joke,” Arlie said.

Bill sat quietly for a minute or so, his eyes tracking my fingers, and at last he said, “Why won’t you talk to Gerald about the barnacles? You should tell him it’s important.”

“Give it a rest, Billy,” Arlie said, patting his arm.

“What do you expect Gerald to do?” I said. “Even if he agreed with you, there’s nothing to be done.”

“Leave,” he said. “Like the barnacles.”

What a marvelous idea! We’ll just pick up and abandon the place.”

“No, no!” he shrilled. “CPC! CPC!”

“Listen ‘ere,” said Arlie. “There’s not a chance in ‘ell the corporation’s goin’ to authorize usin’ the CPC for somethin’ loike that. So put in from mind, dear, won’t you?”

“Don’t need the corporation,” Bill said in a whiney tone.

“He’s got the CPC on the brain,” I said. “Every night I come in here and find him running the file.”

Arlie shushed me and asked, “What’s that you said, Bill?”

He clamped his lips together, leaned back against the wall, his head making a dark, ominous-looking interruption in the path of the schooner; a wave of bright water appeared to crash over him, sending up a white spray.

“You ‘ave somethin’ to tell us, dear?”

“Be grateful for the silence,” I said.

A few seconds later Bill began to weep, to wail that it wasn’t fair, that everyone hated him.

We did our best to soothe him, but to no avail. He scrambled to his feet and went to beating his fists against his thighs, hopping up and down, shrieking at the top of his voice, his face gone as red as a squalling infant’s. Then of a sudden he clutched the sides of his head. His legs stiffened, his neck cabled. He fell back on the sofa, twitching, screaming, clawing at the lump behind his ear. Mister C had intervened and was punishing him with electric shocks. It was a hideous thing to see, this enormous, babyish man jolted by internal lightnings, strings of drool braiding his chin, the animation ebbing from his face, his protests growing ever more feeble, until at last he sat staring blankly into nowhere, an ugly, outsized doll in a stained white jumpsuit.

Arlie moved close to him, mopped his face with a tissue. Her mouth thinned; the lines bracketing the corners of her lips deepened. “God, e’s a disgustin’ object,” she said. “I don’t know what it is about ‘im touches me so.”

“Perhaps he reminds you of your uncle.”

“I realize this is hard toimes for you, luv,” she said, continuing to mop Bill’s face. “But do you really find it necessary to treat me so sarcastic, loike I was one of your culprits?”

“Sorry,” I said.

She gave an almost imperceptible shrug. Something shifted in her face, as if an opaque mask had slid aside, revealing her newly vulnerable. “What you fink’s goin’ to ‘appen to ‘im?”

“Same as’ll happen to us, probably. It appears our fates have become intertwined.” I picked up another charge. “Anyway, what’s it matter, the poor droob? His best pal is a little black bean that zaps him whenever he throws a wobbler. He’s universally loathed, and his idea of a happy time is to pop a crystal and flog the bishop all night long. As far as I can tell, his fate’s already bottomed out.”

She clicked her tongue against her teeth. “Maybe it’s us Oi see in ‘im.”

“You and me? That’s a laugh.”

“Nao, I mean all of us. Don’t it seem sometimes we’re all ‘elpless loike ‘im? Just big, loopy animals without a proper sense of things.”

“I don’t choose to think that way.”

Displeasure came into her face, but before she could voice it, a loud buzzer went off in the bedroom—Gerald’s private alarm, a device he would only use if unable to communicate with me openly. I jumped to my feet and grabbed a hand laser from a drawer in the table beside the sofa.

“Don’t let anyone in,” I told Arlie. “Not under any circumstances.”

She nodded, gave me a brisk hug. “You ‘urry back.”

The corridors of East Louie were thronged, hundreds of people milling about the entrances of the common rooms and the commisaries. I smelled hashish, perfume, pheromene sprays. Desperate with worry, I pushed and elbowed my way through the crowds toward Gerald’s quarters, which lay at the opposite end of the module. When I reached his door, I found it partway open and the concerned brown face of Ernesto Carbajal, peering out at me. He pulled me into the foyer. The room beyond was dark; a slant of light fell across the carpet from the bedroom door, which was open a foot or so; but I could make out nothing within.

“Where’s Gerald?” I asked.

Carbajal’s hands made delicate, ineffectual gestures in the air, as if trying to find a safe hold on something with a lot of sharp edges. “I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I didn’t know . . . I . . .”

I watched him flutter and spew. He was Gerald’s man, and Gerald claimed he was trustworthy. For my part, I had never formed an opinion. Now, however, I saw nothing that made me want to turn my back on him. And so, of course, I determined that I would do exactly that as soon as a suitable opportunity presented itself.

“You gave the alarm?” I asked him.

“Yes, I didn’t want anyone to hear . . . the intercom. You know, it . . . I . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Calm down!” I pushed him against the wall, kept my hand flat against his chest. “Where’s Gerald?”

His eyes flicked toward the bedroom; for an instant the flesh of his face seemed to sag away from the bone, to lose all its firmness. “There,” he said. “Back there. Oh, God!”

It was at that moment I knew Gerald was dead, but I refused to let the knowledge affect me. No matter how terrible the scene in the bedroom, Carbajal’s reactions—though nicely done—were too flighty for a professional; even considering his involvement with Gerald, he should have been able to manage a more businesslike facade.

“Let’s have a look, shall we?”

“No, I don’t want to go back in there!”

“All right, then,” I said. “You wait here.”

I crossed to the bedroom, keeping an ear out for movement behind me. I swallowed, held my breath. The surface of the door seemed hot to the touch, and when I slid it open, I had the thought that the heat must be real, that all the glare off the slick red surfaces within had permeated the metal. Gerald was lying on the bed, the great crimson hollow of his stomach and chest exposed and empty, unbelievably empty, cave empty, with things like glistening, pulpy red fruit resting by his head, hands and feet; but I did not admit to the sight, I kept a distant focus. I heard a step behind me and turned, throwing up my guard as Carbajal, his face distorted by a grimace, struck at me with a knife. I caught his knife arm, bent the elbow backwards against the doorframe; I heard it crack as he screamed and shoved him back into the living room. He staggered off-balance, but did not fall. He righted himself, began to move in a stealthy crouch, keeping his shattered elbow toward me, willing to accept more pain in order to protect his good left hand. Disabled or not, he was still very fast, dangerous with his kicks. But I knew I had him so long as I was careful, and I chose to play him rather than end it with the laser. The more I punished him, I thought, the less resistant he would be to interrogation. I feinted, and when he jumped back, I saw him wince. A chalky wash spread across his skin. Every move he made was going to hurt him.

“You might as well hazard it all on one throw, Ernesto,” I told him. “If you don’t, you’re probably going to fall over before I knock you down.”

He continued to circle me, unwilling to waste energy on a response; his eyes looked all dark, brimming with concentrated rage. Passing through the spill of light from the bedroom, he seemed ablaze with fury, a slim little devil with a crooked arm.

“It’s not your karate let you down, Ernesto. It’s that ridiculous drama queen style of acting. Absolutely vile! I thought you might start beating your breast and crying out to Jesus for succor. Of course that’s the weakness all you yobbos in the Magnificence seem to have. You’re so damned arrogant, you think you can fool everyone with most rudimentary tactics. I wonder why that is. Never mind. In a moment I’m going to let you tell me all about it.”

I gave him an opening, a good angle of attack. I’m certain he knew it was a trap, but he was in so much pain, so eager to stop the pain, that his body reacted toward the opening before his mind could cancel the order. He swung his right leg in a vicious arc, I stepped inside the kick, executed a hip throw; as he flew into the air and down, I wrenched his good arm out of the socket with a quick twist. He gave a cry, but wriggled out of my reach and bridged to his feet, both arms dangling. I took him back down with a leg sweep and smashed his right kneecap with my heel. Once his screaming had subsided I sat down on the edge of a coffee table and showed him the laser.

“Now we can talk undisturbed,” I said brightly. “I hope you feel like talking, because otherwise . . .”

He cursed in Spanish, spat toward me.

“I can see there’s no fooling you, Ernesto. You obviously know you’re not leaving here alive, not after what you’ve done. But you do have one life choice remaining that might be of some interest. Quickly”—I flourished the laser—“or slowly. What’s your pleasure?”

He lay without moving, his chest heaving, blinking from time to time, a neutral expression on his face, perhaps trying to think of something he could tell me that would raise the stakes. His breath whistled in his throat; sweat beaded his forehead. My thoughts kept pulling me back into that red room, and as I sat there the pull became irresistable. I saw it clearly this time. The heart lying on the pillow above Gerald’s head, the other organs arranged neatly beside his hands and feet; the darkly crimson hollow with its pale flaps. Things written in blood on the wall. It made me weary to see it, and the most wearisome thing of all was the fact that I was numb, that I felt almost nothing. I knew I would have to rouse myself from this spiritual malasie and go after Samuelson. I could trust no one to help me wage a campaign—quick retaliation was the best chance I had. Perhaps the only chance. The Magnificence had a number of shortcomings. Their arrogance, a crudeness of tactics, an infrastructure that allowed unstable personalities to rise to power. To be truthful, the fear and ignorance of their victims was their greatest strength. But their most pertinent flaw was that they tended to give their subordinates too little autonomy. With Samuelson out of the picture, the rest might very well scatter. And then I realized there was something I could do that would leave nothing to chance.

“Ernesto,” I said, “now I’ve considered it, there’s really not a thing you can tell me that I want to know.”

“No,” he said. “No, I have something. Please!”

I shrugged. “All right. Let’s hear it.”

“The bosses,” he said. “I know where they are.”

“The Magnificence, you mean? Those bosses?”

A nod. “Administration. They’re all there.”

“They’re there right this moment?”

Something must have given a twinge, for he winced and said, “Dios!”

When he recovered he added, “Yes. They’re waiting . . .” Another pain took him away for a moment.

“Waiting for the revolution to be won?” I suggested.

“Yes.”

“And just how many bosses are we speaking about?”

“Twenty. Almost twenty, I think.”

Christ, I thought, nearly half of the administration gone to black satin and nightmare.

I got to my feet, pocketed the laser.

“What. . . .” Ernesto said, and swallowed; his pallor had increased, and I realized he was going into shock. His dark eyes searched my face.

“I’m going, Ernesto,” I said. “I don’t have the time to treat you as you did Gerald. But my fervent hope is that someone else with more time on their hands will find you. Perhaps one of your brothers in the Magnificence. Or one of Gerald’s friends. Neither, I suspect, will view your situation in a favorable light. And should no one come upon you in the forseeable future, I suppose I shall have to be satisfied with knowing you died a lingering death.” I bent to him. “Getting cold, isn’t it? You’ve had the sweet bit, Ernesto. There’ll be no more pretending you’ve a pretty pair of charlies and playing sweet angelina to the hard boys. No more gobble offs for you, dearie. It’s all fucking over.”

I would have loved to hurt him some more, but I did not believe I would have been able to stop once I got started. I blew him a kiss, told him that if the pain got too bad he could always swallow his tongue, and left him to what would almost certainly be the first of his final misgivings.

When I returned to my quarters Arlie threw her arms about me and held me tight while I gave her the news about Gerald. I still felt nothing. Telling her was like hearing my own voice delivering a news summary.

“I’ve got work to do,” I said. “I can’t protect you here. They’re liable to pay a visit while I’m away. You’ll have to come with me.”

She nodded, her face buried in my shoulder.

“We have to go outside,” I said. “We can use one of the sleds. Just a short hop over to Administration, a few minutes there, and we’re done. Can you manage?”

Arlie liked having something solid underfoot; going outside was was a dread prospect for her, but she made no objection.

“What are you intendin’ ?” she asked, watching me gather the packet charges I had left scattered about the floor.

“Nothing nice,” I said, peering under the sofa; I was, it appeared, short four charges. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t you get cheeky with me! Oi’m not some low-heel Sharon you’ve only just met. Oi’ve a right to know what you’re about.”

“I’m going to blow up the damned place,” I said, moving the sofa away from the wall.

She stared at me, open-mouthed. “You’re plannin’ to blow up Admin? ‘Ave you done your crust? What you finkin’ of?”

I told her about the suspicious files and what Ernesto had said, but this did little to soothe her.

“There’s twenty other people livin’ in there!” she said. “What about them?”

“Maybe they won’t be at home.” I pushed the sofa back against the wall. “I’m missing four charges here. You seen ’em?”

“It’s almost one o’clock. Some of ’em might be out, Oi grant you. But whether its twenty or fifteen, you’re talkin’ about the murder of innocent people.”

“Look here,” I said, continuing my search, heaving chairs about to bleed off my anger. “First of all, they’re not people. They’re corporation deadlegs. Using the word ‘innocent’ to describe them makes as much sense as using the word ‘dainty’ to describe a pig’s eating habits. At one time or another they’ve every one put the drill to some poor Joey’s backside and made it bleed. And they’d do it again in a flicker, because that’s all they fucking know how to do. Secondly, if they were in my shoes, if they had a chance to rid the the station of the Magnificence with only twenty lives lost, they wouldn’t hesitate. Thirdly”—I flipped up the cushions on the sofa—“and most importantly, I don’t have a bloody choice! Do you understand me? There’s no one I can trust to help. I don’t have a loyal force with which to lay seige to them. This is the only way I can settle things. I’m not thrilled with the idea of murdering—as you say—twenty people in order to do what’s necessary. And I realize it allows you to feel morally superior to think of me as a villain. But if I don’t do something soon there’ll be hearts and livers strewn about the station like party favors, and twenty dead is going to seem like nothing!” I hurled a cushion into the corner. “Shit! Where are they?”

Arlie was still staring at me, but the outrage had drained from her face. “Oi ‘aven’t seen ’em.”

“Bill,” I said, struck by a notion. “Where he’d get to?”

“Bill?”

“Yeah, Bill. The fuckwit. Where is he?”

“E’s away somewhere,” she said. “ ‘E was in the loo for a while, then Oi went in the bedroom, and when Oi come out ‘e was gone.”

I crossed to the bathroom, hoping to find the charges there. But when the door slid open, I saw only that the floor was spattered with bright, tacky blood; there was more blood in the sink, along with a kitchen knife, matted hair, handfuls of wadded, becrimsoned paper towels. And something else: a thin black disc about the size of a soy wafer. It took me a while to absorb all this, to put it together with Bill’s recent obsessions, and even after I had done so, my conclusion was difficult to credit. Yet I could think of no other explanation that would satisfy the conditions.

“Arlie,” I called. “You seen this?”

“Nao, what?” she said, coming up behind me; then: “Holy Christ!”

“That’s his implant, isn’t it?” I said, pointing to the disc.

“Yeah, I s’pose it is. My God! Why’d he do that?” She put a hand to her mouth. “You don’t fink ‘e took the charges . . .”

“The CPC,” I said. “He knew he couldn’t do anything with Mister C along for the ride, so he cut the bastard out. And now he’s gone for the CPC. Jesus! That’s just what we needed, isn’t it! Another fucking maniac on the loose!”

“It must ‘ave ‘urt ‘im somethin’ fierce!” Arlie said wonderingly. “I mean, he ‘ad to ‘ave done it quick and savage, or else Mister C would ‘ave ‘ad time to stop ‘im. And I never heard a peep.”

“I wouldn’t worry about Bill if I were you. You think twenty dead’s a tragedy? Think what’ll happen if he blows the CPC. How many do you reckon will be walking between modules when they disengage? How many others will be killed by falling things? By other sorts of accidents?”

I went back into living room, shouldered my pack; I handed Arlie a laser. “If you see anyone coming after us, use it. Burn them low if that’s all you can bear, but burn them. All right?”

She gave a tight, anxious nod and looked down at the weapon in her hand.

“Come on,” I said. “Once we get to the airlock we’ll be fine.”

But I was none too confident of our chances. Thanks to the greed of madmen and the single-mindedness of our resident idiot, it seemed that the chances of everyone on Solitaire were growing slimmer by the second.

I suppose some of you will say at this juncture that I should have known bad things were going to happen, and further will claim that many of the things that did happen night have been forestalled had I taken a few basic precautions and shown the slightest good sense. What possessed me, you might ask, to run out of my quarters leaving explosives scattered about the floor where Bill could easily appropriate them? And couldn’t I have seen that his fascination with the CPC might lead to some perilous circumstance? And why had I not perceived his potential for destructiveness? Well, what had possessed me was concern for a friend, the closest to a friend that I had ever known. And as to Bill, his dangerous potentials, he had never displayed any sign that he was capable of enduring the kind of pain he must have endured, or of employing logic sufficiently well so as to plan even such a simple act as he perpetrated. It was desperation, I’m certain, that fathered the plan, and how was I to factor in desperation with the IQ of a biscuit and come up with the sum of that event? No, I reject guilt and credit both. My part in things was simpler than demanded by that complex twist of fate. I was only there, it seems, to finish things, to stamp out a few last fires, and—in the end—to give a name to the demons of that place and time. And yet perhaps there was something in that whole fury of moments that was mine. Perhaps I saw an opportunity to take a step away from the past, albeit a violent step, and moved by a signal of some sort, one too slight to register except in my cells, I took it. I would like to think I had a higher purpose in mind, and was not merely acting out the imperatives of some fierce vanity.

We docked the sled next to an airlock in the administration module, my reasoning being that if we were forced to flee, it would take less time to run back to administration than it would to cycle the CPC airlock; but instead of entering there, we walked along the top of the corridor that connected administration and the CPC, working our way along molded troughs of plastic covered with the greenish silver substrate left by the barnacles, past an electric array, beneath a tree of radiator panels thirty times as tall as a man, and entered the emergency lock at its nether end. There was a sled docked beside it, and realizing that Bill must have used it, I thought how terrified he must have been to cross even that much of the void without Mister C to lend him guidance. Before entering, I set the timer of one of the charges in the pack to a half-second delay and stuck it in the hip pouch of my pressure suit. I would be able to trigger the switch with just the touch of my palm against the pouch. A worst case eventuality.

The cameras inside the CPC were functioning, but since there were no security personnel in evidence, I had to assume that the automatic alarms had failed and that—as usual—no one was bothered to monitor the screens. We had not gone twenty feet into the main room when we saw Bill, dressed in a pressure suit, helmet in hand, emerge from behind a plastic partition, one of many which—as I have said—divided the cavernous white space into a maze of work stations. He looked stunned, lost, and when he noticed us he gave no sign of recognition; the side of his neck was covered with dried blood, and he held his head tipped to that side, as one might when trying to muffle pain by applying pressure to the injured spot. His mouth hung open, his posture was slack, and his eyes were bleary. Under the trays of cold light his complexion was splotchy and dappled with the angry red spots of pimples just coming up.

“The explosives,” I said. “Where are they? Where’d you put them?”

His eyes wandered up, grazed my face, twitched toward Arlie, and then lowered to the floor. His breath made an ugly, glutinous noise.

He was a pitiable sight, but I could not afford pity; I was enraged at him for having betrayed my trust. “You miserable fucking stain!” I said. “Tell me where they are!” I palmed the back of his head with my left hand; with my right I knuckled the ragged wound behind his ear. He tried to twist away, letting out a wail; he put his hands up to his chest and pushed feebly at me. Tears leaked from his eyes. “Don’t!” he bawled. “Don’t! It hurts!”

“Tell me where the explosives are,” I said, “or I’ll hurt you worse. I swear to Christ, I won’t ever stop hurting you.”

“I don’t remember!” he whined.

“I take you into my house,” I said. “I protect you, I feed you, I wash your messes up. And what do you do? You steal from me.” I slapped him, eliciting a shriek. “Now tell me where they are!”

Arlie was watching me, a hard light in her eyes; but she said nothing.

I nodded toward the labyrinth of partitions. “Have a fucking look round, will you? We don’t have much time!”

She went off, and I turned again to Bill.

“Tell me,” I said, and began cuffing him about the face, not hard, but hurtful, driving him back with the flurries, setting him to stagger and wail and weep. He fetched up against a partition, eyes popped, that tiny pink mouth pursed in a moue. “Tell me,” I repeated, and then said it again, said it every time I hit him, “Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me . . .”, until he dropped to his knees, cowering, shielding his head with arms, and yelled, “Over there! It’s over there!”

“Where?” I said, hauling him to his feet. “Take me to it.”

I pushed him ahead of me, keeping hold of the neck ring of his suit, yanking, jerking, not want to give him a second to gather himself, to make up a lie. He yelped, grunted, pleaded, saying, “Don’t!”, “Stop it!”, until at last he bumped and spun round a corner, and there, resting atop a computer terminal, was one of the charges, a red light winking on the timer, signalling that it had been activated. I picked it up and punched in the deactivation code. The read-out showed that fifty-eight seconds had remained before detonation.

“Arlie!” I shouted. “Get back here! Now!”

I grabbed Bill by the neck ring, pulled him close. “Did you set all the timers the same?”

He gazed at me, uncomprehending.

“Answer me, damn you! How did you set the timers?”

He opened his mouth, made a scratchy noise in the back of his throat; runners of saliva bridged between his upper and lower teeth.

My interior clock was ticking down, 53, 52 51. . . .Given the size of the room, there was no hope of locating the other three charges in less than a minute. I would have risked a goodly sum on the proposition that Bill had been inconsistent, but I was not willing to risk my life.

Arlie came trotting up and smiled. “You found one!”

“We’ve got fifty seconds,” I told her. “Or less. Run!”

I cannot be certain how long it took us to negotiate the distance between where we had stood and the hatch of the administration module; it seemed an endless time, and I kept expecting to feel the corridor shake and sway and tear loose from its fittings, and to go whirling out into the vacuum. Having to drag Bill along slowed us considerably, and I spent perhaps ten seconds longer opening the hatch with my pass key; but altogether, I would guess we came very near to the fifty second limit. And I am certain that I as I sealed the hatch behind us, that limit was exceeded. Bill had, indeed, proved inconsistent.

As I stepped in through the inner hatch, I saw that Admin had been transformed into a beautiful starfield spread across a velvety black depth in which—an oddly charming incongruity—fifteen or twenty doors were visible, a couple of them open, slants of white light spilling out, it seemed, from God’s office space behind the walls of space and time. We were walking on gas clouds, nebulae, constellate beings. Then I noticed the body of a woman lying some thirty feet away, blood pooled wide as a table beneath her. No one else was in sight, but as we proceded toward the airlock, the outlines of the hatch barely perceptible beneath the atsronomical display, three men in black gear stepped out from a doorway farther along the passage. I fired at them, as did Arlie, but our aim was off. Strikes of ruby light smoked the starry expanse beside them as they ducked back into cover. I heard shouts, then shouted answers. The next second, as I fumbled with the hatch, laser fire needled from several doorways, pinning us down. Whoever was firing could have killed us easily, but they satisfied themselves by scoring near misses. Above Bill’s frightened cries and the sizzle of burning metal, I could hear laughter. I tossed my laser aside and told Arlie to do the same. I touched the charge in my hip pouch. I believed if necessary I would be able to detonate it, but the thought made me cold.

A group of men and women, some ten or eleven strong, came along the corridor toward us, Samuelson in the lead. Like the rest, he wore black satin trousers and a blouse of the same material adorned with badges. Creatures, it appeared, wrought from the same mystic stuff as the the black walls and ceiling and floor. He was smiling broadly and nodding, as if our invasion were a delightful interlude that he had been long awaiting.

“How kind of you do your dying with us, John,” he said as we came to our feet; they gathered in a semi-circle around us, hemming us in against the hatch. “I never expected to have this opportunity. And with your lady, too. We’re going to have such fun together.”

“Bet she’s a real groaner,” said a muscular, black-haired man at his shoulder.

“Well, we’ll find enough soon enough, won’t we?” said Samuelson.

“Try it,” said Arlie, “and Oi’ll squeeze you off at the knackers!”

Samuelson beamed at her, then glanced at Bill. “And how are you today, sir? What brings you along, I wonder, on this merry outing?”

Bill returned a look of bewilderment that after a moment, infected by Samuelson’s happy countenance, turned into a perplexed smile.

“Do me a favor,” I said to Samuelson, moving my hand so that the palm was almost touching the switch of the charge at my hip. “There’s something I’ve been yearning to know. Does that gear of yours come with matching underwear? I’d imagine it must. Bunch of ginger-looking poofs and lizzies like you got behind you, I suppose wearing black nasties is de rigeuer.”

“For somebody who’s ‘bout to major in high-pitched screams,” said a woman at the edge of the group, a heavyset blond with a thick American accent and an indecipherable tattoo on her bicep, “you gotta helluva mouth on you, I give ya that.”

“That’s just John’s unfortunate manner,” Samuelson said. “He’s not very good at defeat, you see. It should be interesting to watch him explore the boundaries of this particular defeat.”

My hand had begun to tremble on the switch; I found myself unable to control it.

“What is it with you, Samuelson?” said the blond woman. “Every time you chop someone, you gotta play Dracula? Let’s just do ’em and get on with business.”

There was a brief argument concerning the right of the woman to speak her mind, the propriety of mentally preparing the victim, of “tasting the experience”, and other assorted drivel. Under different circumstances, I would have laughed to see how ludicrous and inept a bunch were these demons; I might have thought how their ineptitude spoke to the terminal disarray back on Earth, that such a feeble lot could have gained so much power. But I was absorbed by the trembling of my hand, the sweat trickling down my belly, and the jellied weakness of my legs. I imagined I could feel the cold mass of explosives turning, giving a kick, like a dark and fatal child striving to break free of the womb. Before long I would have to reveal the presence of the charge and force a conclusion, one way or another, and I was not sure I was up to it. My hand wanted to slap the switch, pushed against, it seemed, by the all the weighty detritus of my violent life.

Finally Samuelson brought an end to the argument. “This is my show, Amy. I’ll do as please. If you want to discuss method during Retreat, I’ll be happy to satisfy. Until then, I’d appreciate your full cooperation.”

He said all this with the mild ultra-sincerity of a priest settling a squabble among the Ladies Auxilliary concerning a jumble sale; but when he turned to me, all the anger that he must have repressed came spewing forth.

“You naff little scrote!” he shouted. “I’m sick to death of you getting on my tits! When I’ve done working over your slippery and that great dozy blot beside you, I’m going to paint you red on red.”

I did not see what happened at that moment with Arlie. Somebody tried to fondle her, I believe, and there was a commotion beside me, too brief to call a struggle, and then she had a laser in her hand and was firing. A beam of crimson light no thicker than a knitting needle spat from the muzzle and punched its way through the temple of a compact graying man, exiting through the top of his skull, dropping him in a heap. Another beam spitted the shoulder of the blond woman. All this at close quarters, people shrieking, stumbling, pushing together, nudging me, nearly causing me to set off the charge. Then the laser was knocked from Arlie’s hand, and she was thrown to the floor. Samuelson came to stand astraddle her, his laser aimed at her chest.

“Carve the bitch up!” said the blond woman, holding her shoulder.

“Splendid idea,” Samuelson said, adjusting the setting of his laser. “I’ll just do a little writing to begin with. Start with an inspirational saying, don’t you think? Or maybe”—he chuckled—“John Loves Arlie.”

“No,” I said, my nerves steadied by this frontal assault; I pulled out the packet charge. “No, you’re not going to do that. Because unless you do the right thing, in about two seconds the best part of you is going to be sliding all greasy-like down the walls. I’ll give you to three to put down your weapons.” I drew a breath and tried to feel Arlie beside me. “One.” I stared at Samuelson, coming hard at him with all the fire left in me. “You best tell ’em how mad I am for you.” I squared my shoulders; I prayed I had the guts to press the switch on three. “That’s two.”

“Do it!” he said to his people. “Do it now!”

They let their weapons fall.

“Back it off,” I said, feeling relief, but also a ghostly momentum as if the count had continued on in some alternate probability and I was now blowing away in fire and ruin. I picked up my pack, grabbed Samuelson by the shirtfront as the rest retreated along the corridor. “Open the hatch,” I told Arlie, who had scrambled up from the floor.

I heard her punching out the code, and a moment later, I heard the hatch swing open. I backed around the door, slung Samuelson into the airlock, slamming him up against Bill, who had wandered in on his own. At that precise moment, the CPC exploded.

The sound of the explosion was immense, a great wallop of pressure and noise that sent me reeling into the airlock, reeling and floating up, the artificial gravity systems no longer operative; but what was truly terrifying was the vented hiss that followed the explosion, signalling disengagement from the connecting corridors, and the sickening sway of the floor, and then the roar of ignition as the module’s engines transformed what had been a habitat into a ship. I pictured the whole of Solitaire coming apart piece by piece, each one igniting and moving off into the nothing, little glowing bits, like the break-up of an electric reef.

Arlie had snatched up one of the lasers and she was now training it at Samuleson, urging him into his pressure suit—a difficult chore considering the acceleration. But he was managing. I helped Bill on with his helmet and fitted mine in place just as the boost ended and we drifted free. Then I broke the seal on the outer hatch, started the lock cycling.

Once the lock had opened, I told Arlie she would have to drive the sled. I watched as she fitted herself into the harness of the rocket pack, then I lashed Samuelson to one of the metal struts, Bill to another. I set the charge I had been carrying on the surface of the station, took two more out of the pack. I set the timers for 90 seconds. I had no thought in my head as I was doing this; I might have been a technician stripping a wire, a welder joining a seam. Yet as I prepared to activate the charges, I realized that I was not merely ridding the station of the Strange Magnificence, but of the corporation’s personnel. I had, of course, known this before, but I had not understood what it meant. Within a month, probably considerably less, the various elements of the station would reunite, and when they did, for the first time in our history, Solitaire would be a free place, without a corporate presence to strike the fear of God and Planet Earth into the hearts and minds of the workers. Oh, it was true, some corporates might have been in other modules when the explosion occurred, but most of them were gone, and the survivors would not be able to wield much power; it would be six months at least before their replacements arrived and a new administration could be installed. A lot could happen in that time. My comprehension of this was much less linear than I am reporting; it came to me as a passion, a hope, and as I activated the timers, I had a wild sense of freedom that, though I did not fathom it then, seems now to have been premonitory and inspired.

I lashed and locked myself on to a strut close to Arlie and told her to get the hell gone, pointing out as a destination the web of a transport dock that we were passing. I did not see the explosion, but I saw the white flare of it in Arlie’s faceplate as she turned to watch; I kept my eyes fixed for a time on the bits and pieces of Solitaire passing silently around us, and when I turned to her, as the reflected fire died away and her eyes were revealed, wide and lovely and dark, I saw no hatred in her, no disgust. Perhaps she she had already forgiven me for being the man I was. Not kindly, and yet not without kindness. Merely someone who had learned to do the necessary and to live with it. Someone whose past had burned a shadow that stretched across his future.

I told her to reverse the thrusters and stop the sled. There was one thing left to do, though I was not so eager to have done with it as once I had been. Out in the dark, in the nothing, with all those stars pointing their hot eyes at you and trying to spear your mind with their secret colors, out in that absolute desert the questions of villainy and heroism grow remote. The most terrible of sins and the sweetest virtues often become compressed in the midst of all that sunless cold; compared to the terrible inhumanity of space, they both seem warmly human and comprehensible. And thus when I approached the matter of ending Samuelson’s life I did so without relish, without the vindictive spirit that I might have expressed had we been back on Solitaire.

I inched my way back to where I had tied him and locked on to a strut; I trained the laser on the plastic rope that lashed him to the sled and burned it through. His legs floated up, and he held on to a strut with his gauntleted hands.

“Please, God! Don’t!” he said, the panic in his voice made tinny and comical by my helmet speaker; he stared down through the struts that sectioned off the void into which he was about to travel—silver frames each enclosing a rectangle of unrelieved black, some containing a few scraps of billion-year-old light. “Please!”

“What do you expect from me?” I asked. “What do you expect from life? Mercy? The accolade? Here.” I pointed at the sweep of stars and poetry, the iron puzzle of the dock beginning to loom, to swell into a massive crosshatching of girders, each strung with white lights, with Mars a phantom crescent below and the sun a yellow coal. “You longed for God, didn’t you? Where is He if not here? Here’s your strange magnificence.” I gestured with the laser. “Push off. Hard. If you don’t push hard enough, we’ll come after you and give you a nudge. You can open your faceplate whenever you want it to end.”

He began to plead, to bargain. “I can make you wealthy,” he said. “I can get you back to Earth. Not London. Nova Sibersk. One of the towers.”

“Of course you can,” I said. “And I would be a wise man, indeed, to trust that promise, now wouldn’t I?”

“There are ways,” Samuelson said. “Ways to guarantee it. It’s not that difficult. Really. I can . . .”

“Thirwell smiled at me,” I reminded him. “He sang. Are your beliefs so shallow you won’t even favor us with a tune?”

“Do you want me to sing? Do you want me to be humiliated? If that’s what it’ll take to get you to listen, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I want.”

His eyes were big with the idea of death. I knew what he was feeling: all his life was suddenly thrilling, precious, new; and he was almost made innocent by the size and intensity of his fear, almost cleansed and converted by the knowledge that all this sensey splendor was about to go on forever and ever without him. It was a hard moment, and he did not do well by it.

When he began to weep I burned a hole in his radio housing to silence him. He put a hand up to shield his face, fearing I would burn the helmet; I kicked his other hand loose from the sled, sending him spinning away slowly, head over heels toward the sun, a bulky white figure growing toylike and clever against the black ground of his future, like one of those little mechanical monkeys that spins round and round on a plastic bar. I knew he would never open his faceplate—the greater the villain, the greater their inability to accept fate. He would be a long time dying.

I checked on Bill—he was sleeping!—and returned to my place beside Arlie. We boosted again toward the dock. I thought about Gerald, about the scattered station, about Bill, but I could not concentrate on them. It was as if what I saw before me had gone inside my skull, and my mind was no longer a storm of electric impulse, but an immense black emptiness lit by tiny stars and populated by four souls, one of whom was only now beginning to know the terrible loneliness of his absent god.

We entrusted Bill to the captain of the docked transport, Steel City , a hideous name for a hideous vessel, pitted and gray and ungainly in form, like a sad leviathian. There was no going back to Solitaire for Bill. They had checked the recordings taken in the CPC, and they knew who had been responsible for the break-up of the station, for the nearly one hundred and thirty lives that had been lost, for the billions in credit blown away. Even under happier circumstances, without Mister C to guide him, he would not be able to survive. Nor would he survive on Earth. But there he would at least have a slight chance. The corporation had no particular interest in punishing him. They were not altogether dissatisfied with the situation, being pleased to learn that their failsafe system worked, and they would, they assured us, see to it that he was given institutional care. I knew what that portended. Shunted off to some vast dark building with a Catholic statue centering a seedy garden out front, and misplaced, lost among the howling damned and terminally feeble, and eventually, for want of any reason to do otherwise, going dark himself, lying down and breathing, perhaps feeding from time to time, for a while, and then, one day, simply giving up, giving out, going away on a rattle of dishes on the dinner cart or a wild cry ghosting up from some nether region or a shiver of winter light on a cracked linoleum floor, some little piece of brightness to which he could attach himself and let go of the rest. It was horrible to contemplate, but we had no choice. Back on the station he would have been torn apart.

The Steel City was six hours from launching inbound when Arlie and I last saw Bill. He was in a cell lit by a billious yellow tray of light set in the ceiling, wearing a gray ship’s jumpsuit; his wound had been dressed, and he was clean, and he was terrified. He tried to hold us, he pleaded with us to take him back home, and when we told him that was impossible, he sat cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, humming a tune that I recognized as “Barnacle Bill the Spacer”. He had apparently forgotten its context and the cruel words. Arlie kneeled beside him and told stories of the animals he would soon be seeing. There were tigers sleek as fire, she said, and elephants bigger than small towns, and birds faster than rain, and wolves with mysterious lights in their eyes. There were serpents too, she said, green ones with ruby tongues that told the most beautiful stories in the world, and cries so musical had been heard in the Mountains of the Moon that no one dared seek out the creature who had uttered them for fear of being immolated by the sight of such beauty, and the wind, she said, the wind was also an animal, and to those who listened carefully to it, it would whisper its name and give them a ride around the world in a single day. Birds as bright as the moon, great lizards who roared when it thundered as if answering questions, white bears with golden claws and magical destinies. It was a wonderland to which he was traveling, and she expected him to call and tell us all the amazing things that he would do and see.

Watching them, I had a clearer sense of him than ever before. I knew he did not believe Arlie, that he was only playing at belief, and I saw in this his courage, the stubborn, clean drive to live that had been buried under years of abuse and denial. He was not physically courageous, not in the least, but I for one knew how easy that sort of courage was to sustain, requring only a certain careless view of life and a few tricks to inspire a red madness. And I doubted I could have withstood all he had suffered, the incessant badgering and humiliation, the sharp rejection, the sexual defeats, the monstrous loneliness. Years of it. Decades. God knows, he had committed an abysmal stupidity, but we had driven him to it, we had menaced and tormented him, and in return—an act of selfishness and desperation, I admit, yet selfishness in its most refined form, desperation in its most gentle incarnation—he had tried to save us, to make us love him.

It is little enough to know of a man or a woman, that he or she has courage. Perhaps there might have been more to know about Bill had we allowed him to flourish, had we given his strength levers against which to test itself and thus increase. But at that moment knowing what I knew seemed more than enough, and it opened me to all the feelings I had been repressing, to thoughts of Gerald in particular. I saw that my relationship with him—in fact most of my relationships—were similar to the one I’d had with Bill; I had shied away from real knowledge, real intimacy. I felt like weeping, but the pity of it was, I would only be weeping for myself.

Finally it was time for us to leave. Bill pawed us, gave us clumsy hugs, clung to us, but not so desperately as he might have; he realized, I am fairly certain, that there would be no reprieve. And, too, he may not have thought he deserved one. He was ashamed, he believed he had done wrong, and so it was with a shameful attitude, not at all demanding, that he asked me if they would give him another implant, if I would help him get one.

“Yeah, sure, Bill,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

He sat back down on the floor, touched the wound on his neck. “I wish he was here,” he said.

“Mister C?” said Arlie, who had been talking to a young officer; he had just come along to lead us back to our sled. “Is that who you’re talkin’ about, dear?”

He nodded, eyes on the floor.

“Don’t you fret, luv. You’ll get another friend back ‘ome. A better one than Mister C. One what won’t ‘urt you.”

“I don’t mind he hurts me,” Bill said. “Sometimes I do things wrong.”

“We all of us do wrong, luv. But it ain’t always necessary for us to be ‘urt for it.”

He stared up at her as if she were off her nut, as if could not imagine a circumstance in which wrong was not followed by hurt.

“That’s the gospel,” said the officer. “And I promise, we’ll be takin’ good care of you, Bill.” He had been eyefucking Arlie, the officer had, and he was only saying this to impress her with his humanity. Chances were, as soon as we were out of sight, he would go to kicking and yelling at Bill. Arlie was not fooled by him.

“Goodbye, Bill,” she said, taking his hand, but he did not return her pressure, and his hand slipped out of her grasp, flopped onto his knee; he was already retreating from us, receding into his private misery, no longer able to manufacture a brave front. And as the door closed on him, that first of many doors, leaving him alone in that sickly yellow space, he put his hands to the sides of his head as if his skull could not contain some terrible pain, and began rocking back and forth, and saying, almost chanting the words, like a bitter monk his hopeless litany, “Oh, no . . . oh, no . . . oh, no. . . .”

Some seventy-nine hours after the destruction of the CPC and the dispersal of Solitaire, the lightship Perseverance came home . . . came home with such uncanny accuracy, that had the station been situated where it should have been, the energies released by the ship’s re-entry from the supraluminal would have annihilated the entire facility and all on board. The barnacles, perhaps sensing some vast overload of light through their photophores . . . the barnacles and an idiot man had proved wiser than the rest of us. And this was no ordinary homecoming in yet another way, for it turned out that the voyage of the Perseverance had been successful. There was a new world waiting on the other side of the nothing, unspoiled, a garden of possibility, a challenge to our hearts and a beacon to our souls.

I contacted the corporation. They, of course, had heard the news, and they also recognized that had Bill not acted the Perseverance and all aboard her would have been destroyed along with Solitaire. He was, they were delighted to attest, a hero, and they would treat him as such. How’s that, I asked. Promotions, news specials, celebrations, parades, was their answer. What he really wants, I told them, is to come back to Solitaire. Well, of course, they said, we’ll see what we can do. When it’s time, they said. We’ll do right by him, don’t you worry. How about another implant, I asked. Absolutely, no problem, anything he needs. By the time I broke contact, I understood that Bill’s fate would be little different now he was a hero than it would have been when he was a mere fool and a villain. They would use him, milk his story for all the good it could do them, and then he would be discarded, misplaced, lost, dropped down to circulate among the swirling masses of the useless, the doomed and the forgotten.

Though I had already—in concert with others—formed a plan of action, it was this duplicity on the corporation’s part that hardened me against them, and thereafter I threw myself into the implementation of the plan. A few weeks from now, the Perseverance and three other starships soon to be completed will launch for the new world. Aboard will be the population of Solitaire, minus a few unsympathetic personnel who have been rendered lifeless, and the populations of other, smaller stations in the asteroid belt and orbiting Mars. Solitaire itself, and the other stations, will be destroyed. It will take the corporation decades, perhaps a century, to rebuild what has been lost, and by the time they are able to reach us, we hope to have grown strong, to have fabricated a society free of corporations and Strange Magnificences, composed of those who have learned to survive without the quotas and the dread consolations of the Earth. It is an old dream, this desire to say, No more, Never again, to build a society cleansed of the old compulsions and corruptions, the ancient, vicious ways, and perhaps it is a futile one, perhaps the fact that men like myself must be included on the rosted, violent men, men who will do the necessary, who will protect against all enemies with no thought for moral fall-out, perhaps this pre-ordains failure. Nevertheless, it needs to be dreamed every so often, and we are prepared to be the dreamers.

So that is the story of Barnacle Bill. My story, and Arlie’s as well, yet his most of all, though his real part in it, the stuff of his thoughts and hopes, the pain he suffered and the fear he overcame, those things can never be told. Perhaps you have seen him recently on the HV, or even in person, riding in an open car at the end of a parade with men in suits, eating an ice and smiling, but in truth he is already gone into history, already part of the past, already half-forgotten, and when the final door has closed on him, it may be that his role in all this will be reduced to a mere footnote or simply a mention of his name, the slightest token of a life. But I will remember him, not in memorial grace, not as a hero, but as he was, in all his graceless ways and pitiable form. It is of absolute importance to remember him thus, because that, I have come to realize, the raw and the deformed, the ugly, the miserable miracles of our days, the unalloyed baseness of existence, that is what we must learn to love, to accept, to embrace, if we are to cease the denials that weaken us, if we are ever to admit our dismal frailty and to confront the natural terror and heartbreak weather of our lives and live like a strong light across the sky instead of retreating into darkness.

The barnacles have returned to Solitaire. Or rather, new colonies of barnacles have attached to the newly re-united station, not covering it completely, but dressing it up it in patches. I have taken to walking among them, weeding them as Bill once did; I have become interested in them, curious as to how they perceived a ship coming from light years away, and I intend to carry some along with us on the voyage and make an attempt at a study. Yet what compells me to take these walks is less scientific curiosity than a kind of furious nostalgia, a desire to remember and hold the center of those moments that have so changed the direction of our lives, to think about Bill and how it must have been for him, a frightened lump of a man with a clever voice in his ear, alone in all that daunting immensity, fixing his eyes on the bright clots of life at his feet. Just today Arlie joined me on such a walk, and it seemed we were passing along the rim of an infinite dark eye flecked with a trillion bits of color, and that everything of our souls and of every other soul could be seen in that eye, that I could look down to Earth through the haze and scum of the ocean air and see Bill where he stood looking up and trying to find us in that mottled sky, and I felt all the eerie connections a man feels when he needs to believe in something more than what he knows is real, and I tried to tell myself he was all right, walking in his garden in Nova Sibersk, taking the air with an idiot woman so beautiful it nearly made him wise. But I could not sustain the fantasy. I could only mourn, and I had no right to mourn, having never loved him—or if I did, even in the puniest of ways, it was never his person I loved, but what I had from him, the things awakened in me by what had happened. Just the thought that I could have loved him, maybe that was all I owned of right.

We were heading back toward the East Louie airlock, when Arlie stooped and plucked up a male barnacle. Dark green as an emerald, it was, except for its stubby appendage. Glowing like magic, alive with threads of color like a potter’s glaze.

“That’s a rare one,” I said. “Never saw one that color before.”

“Bill would ‘ave fancied it,” she said.

“Fancied, hell. He would have hung the damned thing about his neck.”

She set it back down, and we watched as it began working its way across the surface of the barnacle patch, doing its slow, ungainly cartwheels, wobbling off-true, lurching in flight, nearly missing its landing, but somehow making it, somehow getting there. It landed in the shadow of some communications gear, stuck out its tongue and tried to feed. We watched it for a long, long while, with no more words spoken, but somehow there was a little truth hanging in the space between us, in the silence, a poor thing not worth naming, and maybe not even having a name, it was such a infinitesimal slice of what was, and we let it nourish us as much as it could, we took its luster and added it to our own, we sucked it dry, we had its every flavor, and then we went back inside, arm in arm, to rejoin the lie of the world.

THE NUTCRACKER COUP

Janet Kagan

Janet Kagan’s Christmas tale of “The Nutcracker Coup” is a delightful mix of human traditions and unforgettable aliens. Ms. Kagan has a story appearing in Unicorns II—an Ace anthology edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois—and her novel, Mirabile, is now available from Tor in paperback.

Marianne Tedesco had The Nutcracker Suite turned up full blast for inspiration, and as she whittled she now and then raised her knife to conduct Tchaikovsky. That was what she was doing when one of the locals poked his delicate snout around the corner of the door to her office. She nudged the sound down to a whisper in the background and beckoned him in.

It was Tatep, of course. After almost a year on Rejoicing (that was the literal translation of the world’s name), she still had a bit of trouble recognizing the Rejoicers by snout alone, but the three white quills in Tatep’s ruff had made him the first real “individual” to her. Helluva thing for a junior diplomat not to be able to tell one local from another—but there it was. Marianne was desperately trying to learn the snout shapes that distinguished the Rejoicers to each other.

“Good morning, Tatep. What can I do for you?”

“Share?” said Tatep.

“Of course. Shall I turn the music off?” Marianne knew that The Nutcracker Suite was as alien to him as the rattling and scraping of his music was to her. She was beginning to like pieces here and there of the Rejoicer style, but she didn’t know if Tatep felt the same way about Tchaikovsky.

“Please, leave it on,” he said. “You’ve played it every day this week—am I right? And now I find you waving your knife to the beat. Will you share the reason?”

She had played it every day this week, she realized. “I’ll try to explain. It’s a little silly, really, and it shouldn’t be taken as characteristic of human. Just as characteristic of Marianne.”

“Understood.” He climbed the stepstool she’d cobbled together her first month on Rejoicing and settled himself on his haunches comfortably to listen. At rest, the wicked quills adorning his ruff and tail seemed just that: adornments. By local standards, Tatep was a handsome male.

He was also a quadruped, and human chairs weren’t the least bit of use to him. The stepstool let him lounge on its broad upper platform or sit upright on the step below that—in either case, it put a Rejoicer eye to eye with Marianne. This had been so successful an innovation in the embassy that they had hired a local artisan to make several for each office. Chornian’s stepstools were a more elaborate affair, but Chornian himself had refused to make one to replace “the very first.” A fine sense of tradition, these Rejoicers.

That was, of course, the best way to explain the Tchaikovsky. “Have you noticed, Tatep, that the farther away from home you go, the more important it becomes to keep traditions?”

“Yes,” he said. He drew a small piece of sweetwood from his pouch and seemed to consider it thoughtfully. “Ah! I hadn’t thought how very strongly you must need tradition! You’re very far from home indeed. Some thirty light-years, is it not?” He bit into the wood, shaving a delicate curl from it with one corner or his razor-sharp front tooth. The curl he swallowed, then he said, “Please, go on.”

The control he had always fascinated Marianne—she would have preferred to watch him carve, but she spoke instead. “My family tradition is to celebrate a holiday called Christmas.”

He swallowed another shaving and repeated, “Christmas.”

“For some humans Christmas is a religious holiday. For my family, it was more of . . . a turning of the seasons. Now, Esperanza and I couldn’t agree on a date—her homeworld’s calendar runs differently than mine—but we both agreed on a need to celebrate Christmas once a year. So, since it’s a solstice festival, I asked Muhammad what was the shortest day of the year on Rejoicing. He says that’s Tamemb Nap Ohd.”

Tatep bristled his ruff forward, confirming Muhammad’s date.

“So I have decided to celebrate Christmas Eve on Tarnemb Nap Ohd and to celebrate Christmas Day on Tememb Nap Chorr.”

“Christmas is a revival, then? An awakening?”

“Yes, something like that. A renewal. A promise of spring to come.”

“Yes, we have an Awakening on Tememb Nap Chorr as well.”

Marianne nodded. “Many peoples do. Anyhow, I mentioned that I wanted to celebrate and a number of other people at the embassy decided it was a good idea. So, we’re trying to put together something that resembles a Christmas celebration—mostly from local materials?”

She gestured toward the player. “That piece of music is generally associated with Christmas. I’ve been playing it because it gives me an anticipation of the Awakening to come.”

Tatep was doing fine finishing work now, and Marianne had to stop to watch. The bit of sweetwood was turning into a pair of tommets—the Embassy staff had dubbed them “notrabbits” for their sexual proclivities—engaged in their mating dance. Tatep rattled his spines, amused, and passed the carving into her hands. He waited quietly while she turned it this way and that, admiring the exquisite workmanship.

“You don’t get the joke,” he said, at last.

“No, Tatep. I’m afraid I don’t. Can you share it?”

“Look closely at their teeth.”

Marianne, did, and got the joke. The creatures were tommets, yes, but the teeth they had were not tommet teeth. They were the same sort of teeth that Tatep had used to carve them. Apparently, “fucking like tommets” was a Rejoicer joke.

“It’s a gift for Hapet and Achinto. They had six children! We’re all pleased and amazed for them.”

Four to a brood was the usual, but birthings were few and far between. A couple that had more than two birthings in a lifetime was considered unusually lucky.

“Congratulate them for me, if you think it appropriate,” Marianne said. “Would it be proper for the embassy to send a gift?”

“Proper and most welcome. Hapet and Achinto will need help feeding that many.”

“Would you help me choose? Something to make children grow healthy and strong, and something as well to delight their senses.”

“I’d be glad to. Shall we go to the market or the wood?”

“Let’s go chop our own, Tatep. I’ve been sitting behind this desk too damn long. I could use the exercise.”

As Marianne rose, Tatep put his finished carving into his pouch and climbed down. “You will share more about Christmas with me while we work? You can talk and chop at the same time.”

Marianne grinned. “I’ll do better than that. You can help me choose something that we can use for a Christmas tree, as well. If it’s something that is also edible when it has seasoned for a few weeks’ time, that would be all the more to the spirit of the festival.”

The two of them took a leisurely stroll down the narrow cobbled streets. Marianne shared more of her Christmas customs with Tatep and found her anticipation growing apace as she did.

At Tatep’s suggestion they paused at Killim the glassblower’s, where Tatep helped Marianne describe and order a dozen ornamental balls for the tree. Unaccustomed to the idea of purely ornamental glass objects, Killim was fascinated. “She says,” reported Tatep when Marianne missed a few crucial words of her reply, “she’ll make a number of samples and you’ll return on Debern Op Chorr to choose the most proper.”

Marianne nodded. Before she could thank Killim, however, she heard the door behind her open, heard a muffled squeak of surprise, and turned. Halemtat had ordered yet another of his subjects clipped—Marianne saw that much before the local beat a hasty retreat from the door and vanished.

“Oh, god,” she said aloud. “Another one.” That, she admitted to herself for the first time, was why she was making such an effort to recognize the individual Rejoicers by facial shape alone. She’d seen no less than fifty clipped in the year she’d been on Rejoicing. There was no doubt in her mind that this was a new one—the blunted tips of its quills had been bright and crisp. “Who is it this time, Tatep?”

Tatep ducked his head in shame. “Chornian,” he said.

For once, Marianne couldn’t restrain herself. “Why?” she asked, and she heard the unprofessional belligerence in her own voice.

“For saying something I dare not repeat, not even in your language,” Tatep said, “unless I wish to have my quills clipped.”

Marianne took a deep breath. “I apologize for asking, Tatep. It was stupid of me.” Best thing to do would be to get the hell out and let Chornian complete his errand without being shamed in front of the two of them. “Though,” she said aloud, not caring if it was professional or not, “it’s Halemtat who should be shamed, not Chornian.”

Tatep’s eyes widened, and Marianne knew she’d gone too far. She thanked the glassblower politely in Rejoicer and promised to return on Debem Op Chorr to examine the samples.

As they left Killim’s, Marianne heard the scurry behind them—Chornian entering the shop as quickly and as unobtrusively as possible. She set her mouth—her silence raging—and followed Tatep without a backward glance.

At last they reached the communal wood. Trying for some semblance of normalcy, Marianne asked Tatep for the particulars of an unfamiliar tree.

“Huep,” he said. “Very good for carving, but not very good for eating.” He paused a moment, thoughtfully. “I think I’ve put that wrong. The flavor is very good, but it’s very low in food value. It grows prodigiously, though, so a lot of people eat too much of it when they shouldn’t.”

“Junk food,” said Marianne, nodding. She explained the term to Tatep and he concurred. “Youngsters are particularly fond of it—but it wouldn’t be a good gift for Hapet and Achinto.”

“Then let’s concentrate on good healthy food for Hapet and Achinto,” said Marianne.

Deeper in the wood, they found a stand of the trees the embassy staff had dubbed gnomewood for its gnarly, stunted appearance. Tatep proclaimed this perfect, and Marianne set about to chop the proper branches. Gathering food was more a matter of pruning than chopping down, she’d learned, and she followed Tatep’s careful instructions so she did not damage the tree’s productive capabilities in the process.

“Now this one—just here,” he said. “See, Marianne? Above the bole, for new growth will spring from the bole soon after your Awakening. If you damage the bole, however, there will be no new growth on this branch again.”

Marianne chopped with care. The chopping took some of the edge off her anger. Then she inspected the gnomewood and found a second possibility. “Here,” she said. “Would this be the proper place?”

“Yes,” said Tatep, obviously pleased that she’d caught on so quickly. “That’s right.” He waited until she had lopped off the second branch and properly chosen a third, and then he said, “Chornian said Halemtat had the twining tricks of a talemtat. One of his children liked the rhyme and repeated it.”

“Talemtat is the vine that strangles the tree it climbs, am I right?” She kept her voice very low.

Instead of answering aloud, Tatep nodded.

“Did Halemtat—did Halemtat order the child clipped as well?”

Tatep’s eyelids shaded his pupils darkly. “The entire family. He ordered the entire family clipped.”

So that was why Chornian was running the errands. He would risk his own shame to protect his family from the awful embarrassment—for a Rejoicer—of appearing in public with their quills clipped.

She took out her anger on yet another branch of the gnomewood. When the branch fell—on her foot, as luck would have it—she sat down in a heap, thinking to examine the bruise, then looked Tatep straight in the eye. “How long? How long does it take for the quills to grow out again?” After much of a year, she hadn’t yet seen evidence that an adult’s quills regenerated at all. “They do regrow?”

“After several Awakenings,” he said. “The regrowth can be quickened by eating welspeth, but . . .”

But welspeth was a hothouse plant in this country. Too expensive for someone like Chornian.

“I see,” she said. “Thank you, Tatep.”

“Be careful where you repeat what I’ve told you. Best you not repeat it at all.” He cocked his head at her and added with a rattle of quills, “I’m not sure where Halemtat would clip a human, or even if you’d feel shamed by a clipping, but I wouldn’t like to be responsible for finding out.”

Marianne couldn’t help but grin. She ran a hand through her pale white hair. “I’ve had my head shaved—that was long ago and far away—and it was intended to shame me.”

“Intended to?”

“I painted my naked scalp bright red and went about my business as usual. I set something of a new fashion and, in the end, it was the shaver who was—quite properly—shamed.”

Tatep’s eyelids once again shaded his eyes. “I must think about that,” he said at last. “We have enough branches for a proper gift now, Marianne. Shall we consider the question of your Christmas tree?”

“Yes,” she said. She rose to her feet and gathered up the branches. “And another thing as well . . . I’ll need some more wood for carving. I’d like to carve some gifts for my friends, as well. That’s another tradition of Christmas.”

“Carving gifts? Marianne, you make Christmas sound as if it were a Rejoicing holiday!”

Marianne laughed. “It is, Tatep. I’ll gladly share my Christmas with you.”

Clarence Doggett was the Super Plenipotentiary Representing Terra to Rejoicing and today he was dressed to live up to his extravagant title in striped silver tights and a purple silk weskit. No less than four hoops of office jangled from his belt. Marianne had, since meeting him, conceived the theory that the more stylishly outré his dress the more likely he was to say yes to the request of a subordinate. Scratch that theory . . .

Clarence Doggett straightened his weskit with a tug and said, “We have no reason to write a letter of protest about Emperor Halemtat’s treatment of Chornian. He’s deprived us of a valuable worker, true, but . . .”

“Whatever happened to human rights?”

“They’re not human, Marianne. They’re aliens.”

At least he hadn’t called them “Pincushions” as he usually did, Marianne thought. Clarence Doggett was the unfortunate result of what the media had dubbed “the Grand Opening.” One day humans had been alone in the galaxy, and the next they’d found themselves only a tiny fraction of the intelligent species. Setting up five hundred embassies in the space of a few years had strained the diplomatic service to the bursting point. Rejoicing, considered a backwater world, got the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. Marianne was trying very hard not to be one of those scrapings, despite the example set by Clarence. She clamped her jaw shut very hard.

Clarence brushed at his fashionably large mustache and added, “It’s not as if they’ll really die of shame, after all.”

“Sir,” Marianne began.

He raised his hands. “The subject is closed. How are the plans coming for the Christmas bash?”

“Fine, sir,” she said without enthusiasm. “Killim—she’s the local glassblower—would like to arrange a trade for some dyes, by the way. Not just for the Christmas tree ornaments, I gather, but for some project of her own. I’m sending letters with Nick Minski to a number of glassblowers back home to find out what sort of dye is wanted.”

“Good work. Any trade item that helps tie the Rejoicers into the galactic economy is a find. You’re to be commended.”

Marianne wasn’t feeling very commended, but she said, “Thank you, sir.”

“And keep up the good work—this Christmas idea of yours is turning out to be a big morale booster.”

That was the dismissal. Marianne excused herself and, feet dragging, she headed back to her office. “ ‘They’re not human,’ ” she muttered to herself. “ ‘They’re aliens. It’s not as if they’ll really die of shame . . .’ ” She slammed her door closed behind her and snarled aloud, “But Chornian can’t keep up work and the kids can’t play with their friends and his mate Chaylam can’t go to the market. What if they starve?”

“They won’t starve,” said a firm voice.

Marianne jumped.

“It’s just me,” said Nick Minski. “I’m early.” He leaned back in the chair and put his long legs up on her desk. “I’ve been watching how the neighbors behave. Friends—your friend Tatep included—take their leftovers to Chornian’s family. They won’t starve. At least, Chornian’s family won’t. I’m not sure what would happen to someone who is generally unpopular.”

Nick was head of the ethnology team studying the Rejoicers. At least he had genuine observations to base his decision on.

He tipped the chair to a precarious angle. “I can’t begin to guess whether or not helping Chornian will land Tatep in the same hot water, so I can’t reassure you there. I take it from your muttering that Clarence won’t make a formal protest?”

Marianne nodded . . .

He straightened the chair with a bang that made Marianne start. “Shit,” he said. “Doggett’s such a pissant.”

Marianne grinned ruefully. “God, I’m going to miss you, Nick. Diplomats aren’t permitted to speak in such matter-of-fact terms.”

“I’ll be back in a year. I’ll bring you fireworks for your next Christmas.” He grinned.

“We’ve been through that, Nick. Fireworks may be part of your family’s Christmas tradition, but they’re not part of mine. All that banging and flashing of light just wouldn’t feel right to me, not on Christmas.”

“Meanwhile,” he went on, undeterred, “you think about my offer. You learned more about Tatep and his people than half the folks on my staff; academic credentials or no, I can swing putting you on the ethnology team. We’re shorthanded as it is. I’d rather have skipped the rotation home this year, but . . .”

“You can’t get everything you want, either.”

He laughed. “I think they’re afraid we’ll all go native if we don’t go home one year in five.” He preened and grinned suddenly. “How d’you think I’d look in quills?”

“Sharp,” she said and drew a second burst of laughter from him.

There was a knock at the door. Marianne stretched out a toe and tapped the latch. Tatep stood on the threshold, his quills still bristling from the cold. “Hi, Tatep—you’re just in time. Come share.”

His laughter subsiding to a chuckle, Nick took his feet from the desk and greeted Tatep in high-formal Rejoicer. Tatep returned the favor, then added by way of explanation, “Marianne is sharing her Christmas with me.”

Nick cocked his head at Marianne. “But it’s not for some time yet . . .”

“I know,” said Marianne. She went to her desk and pulled out a wrapped package. “Tatep, Nick is my very good friend. Ordinarily, we exchange gifts on Christmas Day, but since Nick won’t be here for Christmas, I’m going to give him his present now.”

She held out the package. “Merry Christmas, Nick. A little too early, but—”

“You’ve hidden the gift in paper,” said Tatep. “Is that also traditional?”

“Traditional but not necessary. Some of the pleasure is the surprise involved,” Nick told the Rejoicer. With a sidelong glance and smile at Marianne, he held the package to his ear and shook it. “And some of the pleasure is in trying to guess what’s in the package.” He shook it and listened again.

“Nope, I haven’t the faintest idea.”

He laid the package in his lap.

Tatep flicked his tail in surprise. “Why don’t you open it?”

“In my family, it’s traditional to wait until Christmas Day to open your presents, even if they’re wrapped and sitting under the Christmas tree in plain sight for three weeks or more.”

Tatep clambered onto the stool to give him a stare of open astonishment from a more effective angle.

“Oh, no!” said Marianne. “Do you really mean it, Nick? You’re not going to open it until Christmas Day?”

Nick laughed again. “I’m teasing.” To Tatep, he said, “It’s traditional in my family to wait—but it’s also traditional to find some rationalization to open a gift the minute you lay hands on it. Marianne wants to see my expression; I think that takes precedence in this case.”

His long fingers found a cranny in the paper wrapping and began to worry it ever so slightly. “Besides, our respective homeworlds can’t agree on a date for Christmas . . . On some world today must be Christmas, right?”

“Good rationalizing,” said Marianne, with a sigh and a smile of relief. “Right!”

“Right,” said Tatep, catching on. He leaned precariously from his perch to watch as Nick ripped open the wrapping paper.

“Tchaikovsky made me think of it,” Marianne said. “Although, to be honest, Tchaikovsky’s nutcracker wasn’t particularly traditional. This one is: take a close look.”

He did. He held up the brightly painted figure, took in its green weskit, its striped silver tights, its flamboyant mustache. Four metal loops jangled at its carved belt, and Nick laughed aloud.

With a barely suppressed smile, Marianne handed him a “walnut” of the local variety.

Nick stopped laughing long enough to say, “You mean, this is a genuine, honest-to-god, working nutcracker?”

“Well, of course it is! My family’s been making them for years.” She made a motion with her hands to demonstrate. “Go ahead—crack that nut!”

Nick put the nut between the cracker’s prominent jaws and, after a moment’s hesitation, closed his eyes and went ahead.

The nut gave with an audible and very satisfying craaack! and Nick began to laugh all over again.

“Share the joke,” said Tatep.

“Gladly,” said Marianne. “The Christmas nutcracker, of which that is a prime example, is traditionally carved to resemble an authority figure—particularly one nobody much likes. It’s a way of getting back at the fraudulent, the pompous. Through the years they’ve poked fun at everybody from princes to policemen to”—Marianne waved, a gracious hand at her own carved figure—“well, surely you recognize him.”

“Oh, my,” said Tatep, his eyes widening. “Clarence Doggett, is it not?” When Marianne nodded, Tatep said, “Are you about to get your head shaved again?”

Marianne laughed enormously. “If I do, Tatep, this time I’ll paint my scalp red and green—traditional Christmas colors—and hang one of Killim’s glass ornaments from my ear. Not likely, though,” she added, to be fair. “Clarence doesn’t go in for head shaving.” To Nick, who had clearly taken in Tatep’s “again,” she said, “I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

Nick nodded and stuck another nut between Clarence’s jaws. This time he watched as the nut gave way with an explosive bang. Still laughing, he handed the nutmeat to Tatep, who ate it and rattled his quills in laughter of his own. Marianne was doubly glad she’d invited Tatep to share the occasion—now she knew exactly what to make him for Christmas.

Christmas Eve found Marianne at a loss—something was missing from her holiday and she hadn’t been able to put her finger on precisely what that something was.

It wasn’t the color of the tree Tatep had helped her choose. The tree was the perfect Christmas-tree shape, and if its foliage was a red so deep it approached black, that didn’t matter a bit. “Next year we’ll have Killim make some green ornaments.” Marianne said to Tatep, “for the proper contrast.”

Tinsel—silver thread she’d bought from one of the Rejoicer weavers and cut to length—flew in all directions. All seven of the kids who’d come to Rejoicing with their ethnologist parents were showing the Rejoicers the “proper” way to hang tinsel, which meant more tinsel was making it onto the kids and the Rejoicers than onto the tree.

Just as well. She’d have to clean the tinsel off the tree before she passed it on to Hapet and Achinto—well-seasoned and just the thing for growing children.

Nick would really have enjoyed seeing this, Marianne thought. Esperanza was filming the whole party, but that just wasn’t the same as being here.

Killim brought the glass ornaments herself. She’d made more than the commissioned dozen. The dozen glass balls she gave to Marianne. Each was a swirl of colors, each unique. Everyone ooohed and aaahed—but the best was yet to come. From her sidepack, Killim produced a second container. “Presents,” she said. “A present for your Awakening Tree.”

Inside the box was a menagerie of tiny, bright glass animals: notrabbits, fingerfish, wispwings. Each one had a loop of glass at the top to allow them to be hung from the tree. Scarcely trusting herself with such delicate objects of art, Marianne passed them on to George to string and hang.

Later, she took Killim aside and, with Tatep’s help, thanked her profusely for the gifts. “Though I’m not sure she should have. Tell her I’ll be glad to pay for them, Tatep. If she’d had them in her shop, I’d have snapped them upon the spot. I didn’t know how badly our Christmas needed them until I saw her unwrap them.”

Tatep spoke for a long time to Killim, who rattled all the while. Finally, Tatep rattled too. “Marianne, three humans have commissioned Killim to make animals for them to send home.” Killim said something Marianne didn’t catch. “Three humans in the last five minutes. She says, ‘Think of this set as an advertisement.’ ”

“No, you may not pay me for them,” Killim said, still rattling. “I have gained something to trade for my dyes.”

“She says,” Tatep began.

“It’s okay, Tatep. That I understood.”

Marianne hung the wooden ornaments she’d carved and painted in bright colors, then she unsnagged a handful of tinsel from Tatep’s ruff, divided it in half, and they both flung it onto the tree. Tatep’s handful just barely missed Matsimoto, who was hanging strings of beads he’d bought in the bazaar, but Marianne’s got Juliet, who was hanging chains of paper cranes it must have taken her the better part of the month to fold. Juliet laughed and pulled the tinsel from her hair to drape it—length by length and neatly—over the deep red branches.

Then Kelleb brought out the star. Made of silver wire delicately filigreed, it shone just the way a Christmas-tree star should. He hoisted Juliet to his shoulders and she affixed it to the top of the tree and the entire company burst into cheers and applause.

Marianne sighed and wondered why that made her feel so down. “If Nick had been here,” Tatep observed, “I believe he could have reached the top without an assistant.”

“I think you’re right,” said Marianne. “I wish he were here. He’d enjoy this.” Just for a moment, Marianne let herself realize that what was missing from this Christmas was Nick Minski.

“Next year,” said Tatep.

“Next year,” said Marianne. The prospect brightened her.

The tree glittered with its finery. For a moment they all stood back and admired it—then there was a scurry and a flurry, as folks went to various bags and hiding places and brought out the brightly wrapped presents. Marianne excused herself from Tatep and Killim and brought out hers to heap at the bottom of the tree with the rest.

Again there was a moment’s pause of appreciation. Then Clarence Doggett—of all people—raised his glass and said, “A toast! A Christmas toast! Here’s to Marianne, for bringing Christmas thirty light-years from old Earth!”

Marianne blushed as they raised their glasses to her. When they’d finished, she raised hers and found the right traditional response: “A Merry Christmas—and God bless us, every one!”

“Okay, Marianne. It’s your call,” said Esperanza. “Do we open the presents now or”—her voice turned to a mock whine—“do we hafta wait till tomorrow?”

Marianne glanced at Tatep. “What day is it now?” she asked. She knew enough about local time reckoning to know what answer he’d give.

“Why, today is Tememb Nap Chorr.”

She grinned at the faces around her. “By Rejoicer reckoning, the day changes when the sun sets—it’s been Christmas Day for an hour at least now. But stand back and let the kids find their presents first.”

There was a great clamor and rustle of wrapping paper and whoops of delight as the kids dived into the pile of presents.

As Marianne watched with rising joy, Tatep touched her arm. “More guests,” he said, and Marianne turned.

It was Chornian, his mate Chaylam, and their four children. Marianne’s jaw dropped at the sight of them. She had invited the six with no hope of a response and here they were. “And all dressed up for Christmas!” she said aloud, though she knew Christmas was not the occasion. “You’re as glittery as the Christmas tree itself,” she told Chornian, her eyes gleaming with the reflection of it.

Ruff and tail, each and every one of Chornian’s short-clipped quills was tipped by a brilliant red bead. “Glass?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Chornian. “Killim made them for us.”

“You look magnificent! Oh—how wonderful!” Chaylam’s clipped quills had been dipped in gold; when she shifted shyly, her ruff and tail rippled with light. “You sparkle like sun on the water,” Marianne told her. The children’s ruffs and tails had been tipped in gold and candy pink and vivid yellow and—the last but certainly not the least—in beads every color of the rainbow.

“A kid after my own heart,” said Marianne “I think that would have been my choice too.” She gave a closer look. “No two alike, am I right? Come—join the party. I was afraid I’d have to drop your presents by your house tomorrow. Now I get to watch you open them, to see if I chose correctly.”

She escorted the four children to the tree and, thanking her lucky stars she’d had Tatep write their names on their packages, she left them to hunt for their presents. Those for their parents she brought back with her.

“It was difficult,” Chornian said to Marianne. “It was difficult to walk through the streets with pride but—we did. And the children walked the proudest. They give us courage.”

Chaylam said, “If only on their behalf.”

“Yes,” agreed Chornian. “Tomorrow I shall walk in the sunlight. I shall go to the bazaar. My clipped quills will glitter, and I will not be ashamed that I have spoken the truth about Halemtat.”

That was all the Christmas gift Marianne needed, she thought to herself, and handed the wrapped package to Chornian. Tatep gave him a running commentary on the habits and rituals of the human Awakening as he opened the package. Chornian’s eyes shaded and Tatep’s running commentary ceased abruptly as they peered together into the box.

“Did I get it right?” said Marianne, suddenly afraid she’d committed some awful faux pas. She’d scoured the bazaar for welspeth shoots and, finding none, she’d pulled enough strings with the ethnology team to get some imported.

Tatep was the one who spoke. “You got it right,” he said. “Chorian thanks you.” Chornian spoke rapid-fire Rejoicer for a long time; Marianne couldn’t follow the half of it. When he’d finished, Tatep said simply, “He regrets that he has no present to give you.”

“It’s not necessary. Seeing those kids all in spangles brightened up the party—that’s present enough for me!”

“Nevertheless,” said Tatep, speaking slowly so she wouldn’t miss a word. “Chornian and I make you this present.”

Marianne knew the present Tatep drew from his pouch was from Tatep alone, but she was happy enough to play along with the fiction if it made him happy. She hadn’t expected a present from Tatep and she could scarcely wait to see what it was he felt appropriate to the occasion.

Still, she gave it the proper treatment—shaking it, very gently, beside her ear. If there was anything to hear, it was drowned out by the robust singing of carols from the other side of the room. “I can’t begin to guess, Tatep,” she told him happily.

“Then open it.”

She did. Inside the paper, she found a carving, the rich wine red of burgundy-wood, bitter to the taste and therefore rarely carved but treasured because none of the kids would gnaw on it as they tested their teeth. The style of carving was so utterly Rejoicer that it took her a long moment to recognize the subject, but once she did, she knew she’d treasure the gift for a lifetime.

It was unmistakably Nick—but Nick as seen from Tatep’s point of view, hence the unfamiliar perspective. It was Looking Up At Nick.

“Oh, Tatep!” And then she remembered—just in time—and added, “Oh, Chornian! Thank you both so very much. I can’t wait to show it to Nick when he gets back. Whatever made you think of doing Nick?”

Tatep said, “He’s your best human friend. I know you miss him. You have no pictures; I thought you would feel better with a likeness.”

She hugged the sculpture to her. “Oh, I do. Thank you, both of you.” Then she motioned, eyes shining. “Wait. Wait right here, Tatep. Don’t go away.”

She darted to the tree and, pushing aside wads of rustling paper, she found the gift she’d made for Tatep. Back she darted to where the Rejoicers were waiting.

“I waited,” Tatep said solemnly.

She handed him the package. “I hope this is worth the wait.”

Tatep shook the package. “I can’t begin to guess,” he said.

“Then open it. I can’t stand the wait!”

He ripped away the paper as flamboyantly as Nick had—to expose the brightly colored nutcracker and a woven bag full of nuts.

Marianne held her breath. The problem had been, of course, to adapt the nutcracker to a recognizable Rejoicer version. She’d made the Emperor Halemtat sit back on his haunches, which meant far less adaptation of the cracking mechanism. Overly plump, she’d made him, and spiky. In his right hand, he carried an oversized pair of scissors—of the sort his underlings used for clipping quills. In his left, he carried a sprig of talemtat, that unfortunate rhyme for his name.

Chornian’s eyes widened. Again, he rattled off a spate of Rejoicer too fast for Marianne to follow . . . except that Chornian seemed anxious.

Only then did Marianne realize what she’d done. “Oh, my God, Tatep! He wouldn’t clip your quills for having that, would he?”

Tatep’s quills rattled and rattled. He put one of the nuts between Halemtat’s jaws and cracked with a vengeance. The nutmeat he offered to Marianne, his quills still rattling. “If he does, Marianne, you’ll come to Killim’s to help me choose a good color for my glass beading.”

He cracked another nut and handed the meat to Chornian. The next thing Marianne knew, the two of them were rattling at each other—Chornian’s glass beads adding a splendid tinkling to the merriment.

Much relieved, Marianne laughed with them. A few minutes later, Esperanza dashed out to buy more nuts—so Chornian’s children could each take a turn at the cracking.

Marianne looked down at the image of Nick cradled in her arm. “I’m sorry you missed this,” she told it, “but I promise I’ll write everything down for you before I go to bed tonight. I’ll try to remember every last bit of it for you.”

“Dear Nick,” Marianne wrote in another letter some months later. “You’re not going to approve of this. I find I haven’t been ethnologically correct—much less diplomatic. I’d only meant to share my Christmas with Tatep and Chornian and, for that matter, whoever wanted to join in the festivities. To hear Clarence tell it, I’ve sent Rejoicing to hell in a handbasket.

“You see, it does Halemtat no good to clip quills these days. There are some seventy-five Rejoicers walking around town clipped and beaded—as gaudy and as shameless as you please. I even saw one newly male (teenager) with beads on the ends of his unclipped spines!

“Killim says thanks for the dyes, by the way. They’re just what she had in mind. She’s so busy, she’s taken on two apprentices to help her. She makes ‘Christmas ornaments’ and half the art galleries in the known universe are after her for more and more. The apprentices make glass beads. One of them—one of Chornian’s kids, by the way—hit upon the bright idea of making simple sets of beads that can be stuck on the ends of quills cold. Saves time and trouble over the hot glass method.

“What’s more—

“Well, yesterday I stopped by to say ‘hi’ to Killim, when who should turn up but Koppen—you remember him? He’s one of Halemtat’s advisors? You’ll never guess what he wanted: a set of quill-tipping beads.

“No, he hadn’t had his quills clipped. Nor was he buying them for a friend. He was planning, he told Killim, to tell Halemtat a thing or two—I missed the details because he went too fast—and he expected he’d be clipped for it, so he was planning ahead. Very expensive blue beads for him, if you please, Killim!

“I find myself unprofessionally pleased. There’s a thing or two Halemtat ought to be told . . .

“Meanwhile, Chornian has gone into the business of making nutcrackers. All right, so sue me, I showed him how to make the actual cracker work. It was that or risk his taking Tatep’s present apart to find out for himself.

“I’m sending holos—including a holo of the one I made—because you’ve got to see the transformation Chornian’s worked on mine. The difference between a human-carved nutcracker and a Rejoicer-carved nutcracker is as unmistakable as the difference between Looking Up At Nick and . . . well, looking up at Nick.

“I still miss you, even if you do think fireworks are appropriate at Christmas.

“See you soon—if Clarence doesn’t boil me in my own pudding and bury me with a stake of holly through my heart.”

Marianne sat with her light pen poised over the screen for a long moment; then she added, “Love, Marianne,” and saved it to the next outgoing Dirt-bound mail.

Rejoicing

Midsummer’s Eve

(Rejoicer reckoning)

Dear Nick—

This time it’s not my fault. This time it’s Esperanza’s doing. Esperanza decided, for her contribution to our round of holidays, to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. And she invited a handful of the Rejoicers to attend as well.

Now, the final part of the celebration is that each person in turn “has a dream.” This is not like wishes, Nick. This is more on the order of setting yourself a goal, even one that looks to all intents and purposes to be unattainable, but one you will strive to attain. Even Clarence got so into the occasion that he had a dream that he would stop thinking of the Rejoicers as “Pincushions” so he could start thinking of them as Rejoicers. Esperanza said later Clarence didn’t quite get, the point but for him she supposed that was a step in the right direction.

Well, after that, Tatep asked Esperanza, in his very polite fashion, if it would be proper for him to have a dream as well. There was some consultation over the proper phrasing—Esperanza says her report will tell you all about that—and then Tatep rose and said, “I have a dream—I have a dream that someday no one will get his quills clipped for speaking the truth.”

(You’ll see it on the recording. Everybody agreed that this was a good dream, indeed.)

After which, Esperanza had her, dream “for human rights for all.”

Following which, of course, we all took turns trying to explain the concept of “human rights” to a half-dozen Rejoicers. Esperanza ended up translating five different constitutions for them—and an entire book of speeches by Martin Luther King . . .

Oh, god. I just realized . . . maybe it is my fault. I’d forgotten till just now. Oh. You judge, Nick.

About a week later Tatep and I were out gathering wood for some carving he plans to do—for Christmas, he says, but he wanted to get a good start on it—and he stopped gnawing long enough to ask me, “Marianne, what’s ‘human’ ?”

“How do you mean?”

“I think when Clarence says ‘human,’ he means something different than you do.”

“That’s entirely possible. Humans use words pretty loosely at the best of times—there, I just did it myself.”

“What do you mean when you say ‘human’ ?”

“Sometimes I mean the species Homo sapiens. When I say, Humans use words pretty loosely, I do. Rejoicers seem to be more particular about their speech, as a general rule.”

“And when you say ‘human rights,’ what do you mean?”

“When I say ‘human rights,’ I mean Homo sapiens and Rejoicing sapiens. I mean any sapiens, in that context. I wouldn’t guarantee that Clarence uses the word the same way in the same context.”

“You think I’m human?”

“I know you’re human. We’re friends, aren’t we? I couldn’t be friends with—oh, a notrabbit—now, could I?”

He made that wonderful rattly sound he does when he’s amused. “No, I can’t imagine it. Then, if I’m human, I ought to have human rights.”

“Yes,” I said. “You bloody well ought to.”

Maybe it is all my fault. Esperanza will tell you the rest—she’s had Rejoicers all over her house for the past two weeks—they’re watching every scrap of film she’s got on Martin Luther King.

I don’t know how this will all end up, but I wish to hell you were here to watch.

Love, Marianne

Marianne watched a Rejoicer child crack nuts with his Halemtat cracker and a cold, cold shiver went up her spine. That was the eleventh she’d seen this week. Chornian wasn’t the only one making them, apparently; somebody else had gone into the nutcracker business as well. This was, however, the first time she’d seen a child cracking nuts with Halemtat’s jaw.

“Hello,” she said, stooping to meet the child’s eyes. “What a pretty toy! Will you show me how it works?”

Rattling all the while, the child showed her, step by step. Then he (or she—it wasn’t polite to ask before puberty) said, “Isn’t it funny? It makes Mama laugh and laugh and laugh.”

“And what’s your mama’s name?”

“Pilli,” said the child. Then it added, “With the green and white beads on her quills.”

Pilli—who’d been clipped for saying that Halemtat had been overcutting the imperial reserve so badly that the trees would never grow back properly.

And then she realized that, less than a year ago, no child would have admitted that its mama had been clipped. The very thought of it would have shamed both mother and child.

Come to think of it . . . she glanced around the bazaar and saw no less than four clipped Rejoicers shopping for dinner. Two of them she recognized as Chornian and one of his children, the other two were new to her. She tried to identify them by their snouts and failed utterly—she’d have to ask Chornian. She also noted, with utterly unprofessional satisfaction, that she could ask Chornian such a thing now. That too would have been unthinkable and shaming less than a year ago.

Less than a year ago. She was thinking in Dirt terms because of Nick. There wasn’t any point dropping him a line; mail would cross in deep space at this late a date. He’d be here just in time for “Christmas.” She wished like hell he was already here. He’d know what to make of all this, she was certain.

As Marianne thanked the child and got to her feet, three Rejoicers—all with the painted ruff of quills at their necks that identified them as Halemtat’s guards—came waddling officiously up. “Here’s one,” said the largest. “Yes,” said another. “Caught in the very act.”

The largest squatted back on his haunches and said, “You will come with us, child. Halemtat decrees it.”

Horror shot through Marianne’s body.

The child cracked one last nut, rattled happily, and said, “I get my quills clipped?”

“Yes,” said the largest Rejoicer. “You will have your quills clipped.” Roughly, he separated child from nutcracker and began to tow the child away, each of them in that odd three-legged gait necessitated by the grip.

All Marianne could think to do was call after the child, “I’ll tell Pilli what happened and where to find you!”

The child glanced over its shoulder, rattled again, and said, “Ask her could I have silver beads like Hortap!”

Marianne picked up the discarded nutcracker—lest some other child find it and meet the same fate—and ran full speed for Pilli’s house.

At the corner, two children looked up from their own play and galloped along beside her until she skidded to a halt by Pilli’s bakery. They followed her in, rattling happily to themselves over the race they’d run. Marianne’s first thought was to shoo them off before she told Pilli what had happened, but Pilli greeted the two as if they were her own, and Marianne found herself blurting out the news.

Pilli gave a slow inclination of the head. “Yes,” she said, pronouncing the words carefully so Marianne wouldn’t miss them, “I expected that. Had it not been the nutcracker, it would have been words.” She rattled. “That child is the most outspoken of my brood.”

“But—” Marianne wanted to say, Aren’t you afraid? but the question never surfaced.

Pilli gave a few coins to the other children and said, “Run to Killim’s, my dears, and ask her to make a set of silver beads, if she doesn’t already have one on hand. Then run tell your father what has happened.” The children were off in the scurry of excitement. Pilli drew down the awning in front of her shop, then paused. “I think you are afraid for my child.”

“Yes,” said Marianne. Lying had never been her strong suit; maybe Nick was right—maybe diplomacy wasn’t her field.

“You are kind,” said Pilli. “But don’t be afraid. Even Halemtat wouldn’t dare to order a child hashay.”

“I don’t understand the term.”

“Hashay?” Pilli flipped her tail around in front of her and held out a single quill. “Chippet will be clipped here,” she said, drawing a finger across the quill about halfway up its length. “Hashay is to clip here.” The finger slid inward, to a spot about a quarter of an inch from her skin. “Don’t worry, Marianne. Even Halemtat wouldn’t dare to hashay a child.”

I’m supposed to be reassured, thought. Marianne. “Good,” she said, aloud, “I’m relieved to hear that.” In truth, she hadn’t the slightest idea what Pilli was talking about—and she was considerably less than reassured by the ominous implications of the distinction. She’d never come across the term in any of the ethnologists’ reports.

She was still holding the Halemtat nutcracker in her hands. Now she considered it carefully. Only in its broadest outlines did it resemble the one she’d made for Tatep. This nutcracker was purely Rejoicer in style and—she almost dropped it at the sudden realization—peculiarly Tatep’s style of carving. Tatep was making them too?

If she could recognize Tatep’s distinctive style, surely Halemtat could—what then?

Carefully, she tucked the nutcracker under the awning—let Pilli decide what to do with the object; Marianne couldn’t make the decision for her—and set off at a quick pace for Tatep’s house . . .

On the way, she passed yet another child with a Halemtat nutcracker. She paused, found the child’s father, and passed the news to him that Halemtat’s guards were clipping Pilli’s child for the “offense.” The father thanked her for the information and, with much politeness, took the nutcracker from the child.

This one, Marianne saw, was not carved in Tatep’s style or in Chornian’s. This one was the work of an unfamiliar set of teeth.

Having shooed his child indoors, the Rejoicer squatted back on his haunches. In plain view of the street, he took up the bowl of nuts his child had left uncracked and began to crack them, one by one, with such deliberation that Marianne’s jaw dropped.

She’d never seen an insolent Rejoicer, but she would have bet money she was seeing one now. He even managed to make the crack of each nut resound like a gunshot. With the sound still ringing in her ears, Marianne quickened her steps toward Tatep’s.

She found him at home, carving yet another nutcracker. He swallowed, then held out the nutcracker to her and said, “What do you think, Marianne? Do you approve of my portrayal?”

This one wasn’t Halemtat, but his—for want of a better term—grand vizier, Corten. The grand vizier always looked to her as if he smirked. She knew the expression was due to a slightly malformed tooth but, to a human eye, the result was a smirk. Tatep’s portrayal had the same smirk, only more so. Marianne couldn’t help it . . . she giggled.

“Aha!” said Tatep, rattling up a rainstorm’s worth of sound. “For once, you’ve shared the joke without the need of explanation!” He gave a long, grave look at the nutcracker. “The grand vizier has earned his keep this once!”

Marianne laughed, and Tatep rattled. This time the sound of the quills sobered Marianne. “I think your work will get you clipped, Tatep,” she said, and she told him about Pilli’s child.

He made no response. Instead, he dropped to his feet and went to the chest in the corner, where he kept any number of carvings and other precious objects. From the chest, he drew out a box. Three-legged, he walked back to her “Shake this! I’ll bet you can guess what’s inside.”

Curious, she shook the box: it rattled. “A set of beads,” she said.

“You see? I’m prepared. They rattle like a laugh, don’t they? A laugh at Halemtat. I asked Killim to make the beads red because that was the color you painted your scalp when you were clipped.”

“I’m honored . . .”

“But?”

“But I’m afraid for you. For all of you.”

“Pilli’s child wasn’t afraid.”

“No. No, Pilli’s child wasn’t afraid. Pilli said even Halemtat wouldn’t dare hashay a child.” Marianne took a deep breath and said, “But you’re not a child.” And I don’t know what hashaying does to a Rejoicer, she wanted to add.

“I’ve swallowed a taipseed,” Tatep said, as if that said it all.

“I don’t understand.”

“Ah! I’ll share, then. A taipseed can’t grow unless it has been through the”—he patted himself—“stomach? digestive system?—of a Rejoicer. Sometimes they don’t grow even then. To swallow a taipseed means to take a step toward the growth of something important. I swallowed a taipseed called ‘human rights.’ ”

There was nothing Marianne could say to that but: “I understand.”

Slowly, thoughtfully, Marianne made her way back to the embassy. Yes, she understood Tatep—hadn’t she been screaming at Clarence for just the same reason? But she was terrified for Tatep—for them all.

Without consciously meaning, to, she bypassed the embassy for the little clutch of domes that housed the ethnologists. Esperanza—it was Esperanza she had to see. She was in luck. Esperanza was at home writing up one of her reports. She looked up and said, “Oh, good. It’s time for a break!”

“Not a break, I’m afraid. A question that, I think, is right up your alley. Do you know much about the physiology of the Rejoicers?”

“I’m the expert,” Esperanza said, leaning back in her chair. “As far as there is one in the group.”

“What happens if you cut a Rejoicer’s spine”—she held her fingers—“this close to the skin?”

“Like, a cat’s claw, sort of. If you cut the tip, nothing happens. If you cut too far down, you hit the blood supply—and maybe the, nerve. The quill would bleed most certainly. Might never grow back properly. And it’d hurt like hell, I’m sure—like gouging the base of your thumbnail.”

She sat forward suddenly. “Marianne, you’re shaking. What is it?”

Marianne took a deep breath but couldn’t stop shaking. “What would happen if somebody did that to all of Ta . . .”—she found she couldn’t get the name out—“all of a Rejoicer’s quills?”

“He’d bleed to death, Marianne.” Esperanza took her hand and gave it a firm squeeze. “Now, I’m going to get you a good stiff drink and you are going to tell me all about it.”

Fighting nausea, Marianne nodded. “Yes,” she said with enormous effort. “Yes.”

“Who the hell told the Pincushions about ‘human rights’ ?” Clarence roared. Furious, he glowered down at Marianne and waited for her response.

Esperanza drew herself up to her full height and stepped between the two of them. “Martin Luther King told the Rejoicers about human rights. You were there when he did it. Though you seem to have forgotten your dream, obviously the Rejoicers haven’t forgotten theirs.”

“There’s a goddamned revolution going on out there!” Clarence waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the center of town.

“That is certainly what it looks like,” Juliet said mildly. “So why are we here instead of out there observing?”

“You’re here because I’m responsible for your safety.”

“Bull,” said Matsimoto. “Halemtat isn’t interested in clipping us.”

“Besides,” said Esperanza. “The supply ship will be landing in about five minutes. Somebody’s got to go pick up the supplies—and Nick. Otherwise, he’s going to step right into the thick of it. The last mail went out two months ago. Nick’s had no warning that the situation has”—she frowned slightly, then brightened as she found the proper phrase—“changed radically.”

Clarence glared again at Marianne. “As a member of the embassy staff, you are assigned the job. You will pick up the supplies and Nick.”

Marianne, who’d been about to volunteer to do just that, suppressed the urge to say, “Thank you!” and said instead, “Yes, sir.”

Once out of Clarence’s sight, Marianne let herself breathe a sigh of relief. The supply transport was built like a tank.

While Marianne wasn’t any more afraid of Halemtat’s wrath than the ethnologists were, she was well aware that innocent Dirt bystanders might easily find themselves stuck—all too literally—in a mob of Rejoicers. When the Rejoicers fought, as she understood it, they used teeth and quills. She had no desire to get too close to a lashing tailful. An unclipped quill was needle-sharp.

Belatedly, she caught the significance of the clipping Halemtat had instituted as punishment. Slapping a snout with a tail full of glass beads was not nearly as effective as slapping a snout with a morning star made of spines.

She radioed the supply ship to tell them they’d all have to wait for transport before they came out. Captain’s gonna love that, I’m sure, she thought, until she got a response from Captain Tertain. By reputation he’d never set foot on a world other than Dirt and certainly didn’t intend to do so now. So she simply told Nick to stay put until she came for him.

Nick’s cheery voice over the radio said only, “It’s going to be a very special Christmas this year.”

“Nick,” she said, “you don’t know the half of it.”

She took a slight detour along the way, passing the narrow street that led to Tatep’s house. She didn’t dare to stop, but she could see from the awning that he wasn’t home. In fact, nobody seemed to be home . . . even the bazaar was deserted.

The supply truck rolled on, and Marianne took a second slight detour. What Esperanza had dubbed “the Grande Alle” led directly to Halemtat’s imperial residence. The courtyard was filled with Rejoicers. Well-spaced Rejoicers, she saw, for they were—each and every one—bristled to their fullest extent. She wished she dared go for a closer look, but Clarence would be livid if she took much more time than normal reaching the supply ship. And he’d be checking—she knew his habits well enough to know that.

She floored the accelerator and made her way to the improvised landing field in record time. Nick waved to her from the port and stepped out. Just like Nick, she thought. She’d told him to wait in the ship until she arrived; he’d obeyed to the letter. It was all she could do to keep from hugging him as she hit the ground beside him. With a grateful sigh of relief, she said, “We’ve got to move fast on the transfer, Nick. I’ll fill you in as we load.”

By the time the two of them had transferred all the supplies from the ship, she’d done just that.

He climbed into the seat beside her, gave her a long thoughtful look, and said, “So Clarence has restricted all of the other ethnologists to the embassy grounds, has he?” He shook his head in mock sadness and clicked his tongue. “I see I haven’t trained my team in the proper response to embassy edicts.” He grinned at Marianne. “So the embassy advises that I stay off the streets, does it?”

“Yes,” said Marianne. She hated being the one to tell him but he’d asked her. “The Super Plenipotentiary Et Cetera has issued a full and formal Advisory to all nongovernmental personnel . . .”

“Okay,” said Nick. “You’ve done your job: I’ve been Advised. Now I want to go have a look at this revolution-in-progress.” He folded his arms across his chest and waited.

He was right. All Clarence could do was issue an Advisory; he had no power whatsoever to keep the ethnologists off the streets. And Marianne wanted to see the revolution as badly as Nick did.

“All right,” she said. “I am responsible for your safety, though, so best we go in the transport. I don’t want you stuck.” She set the supply transport into motion and headed back toward the Grande Allez.

Nick pressed his nose to the window and watched the streets as they went. He was humming cheerfully under his breath.

“Uh, Nick—if Clarence calls us . . .”

“We’ll worry about that when it happens,” he said.

Worry is right, thought Marianne, but she smiled. He’d been humming Christmas carols, like some excited child. Inappropriate as all hell, but she liked him all the more for it.

She pulled the supply transport to a stop at the entrance to the palace courtyard and turned to ask Nick if he had a good enough view. He was already out the door and making his way carefully into the crowd of Rejoicers. “Hey!” she shouted, and she hit the ground running to catch up with him. “Nick!”

He paused long enough for her to catch his arm, then said, “I need to see this, Marianne. It’s my job.”

“It’s my job to see you don’t get hurt.”

He smiled. “Then you lead. I want to be over there where I can see and hear everything Halemtat and his advisors are up to.”

Marianne harbored a brief fantasy about dragging him bodily back to the safety of the supply transport, but he was twice her weight and, from his expression, not about to cooperate. Best she lead, then. Her only consolation was that, when Clarence tried to radio them, there’d be nobody to pick up and receive his orders.

“Hey, Marianne!” said Chornian from the crowd. “Over here! Good view from here!”

And safer too. Grateful for the invitation, Marianne gingerly headed in Chornian’s direction. Several quilled Rejoicers eased aside to let the two of them safely through. Better to be surrounded by beaded Rejoicers.

“Welcome back, Nick,” said Chornian. He and Chaylam stepped apart to create a space of safety for the two humans. “You’re just in time.”

“So I see. What’s going on?”

“Halemtat just had Pilli’s Chippet clipped for playing with a Halemtat cracker. Halemtat doesn’t like the Halemtat crackers.”

Beside him, a fully quilled Rejoicer said, “Halemtat doesn’t like much of anything. I think a proper prince ought to rattle his spines once or twice a year at least.”

Marianne frowned up at Nick, who grinned and said, “Roughly translated: Hapter thinks a proper prince ought to have a sense of humor, however minimal.”

“Rattle your spines, Halemtat!” shouted a voice from the crowd. “Let’s see if you can do it.”

“Yes,” came another voice—and Marianne realized, it was Chornian’s—“Rattle your spines, Great Prince of the Nutcrackers!”

All around them, like rain on a tin roof, came the sound of rattling spines. Marianne looked around—the laughter swept through the crowd, setting every Rejoicer in vibrant motion. Even the grand vizier rattled briefly, then caught himself, his ruff stiff with alarm.

Halemtat didn’t rattle.

From his pouch, Chornian took a nutcracker and a nut. Placing the nut in the cracker’s smirking mouth, Chornian made the bite cut through the rattling of the crowd like the sound of a shot. From somewhere to her right, a second crack resounded. Then a third . . . Then the rattling took up a renewed life.

Marianne felt as if she were under water. All around her spines shifted and rattled. Chornian’s beaded spines chattered as he cracked a second nut in the smirking face of the nutcracker.

Then one of Halemtat’s guards ripped the nutcracker from Chornian’s hands. The guard glared at Chornian, who rattled all the harder.

Looking over his shoulder to Halemtat, the guard called, “He’s already clipped. What shall I do?”

“Bring me the nutcracker,” said Halemtat. The guard glared again at Chornian, who had not stopped laughing, and loped back with the nutcracker in hand. Belatedly, Marianne recognized the smirk on the nutcracker’s face.

The guard handed the nutcracker to the grand vizier—Marianne knew beyond a doubt that he recognized the smirk too.

“Whose teeth carved this?” demanded Halemtat.

An unclipped Rejoicer worked his way to the front of the crowd, sat proudly back on his haunches, and said, “Mine.” To the grand vizier, he added, with a slight rasp of his quills that was a barely suppressed laugh, “What do you think of my work, Corten? Does it amuse you? You have a strong jaw.”

Rattling swept the crowd again.

Halemtat sat up on his haunches. His bristles stood straight out. Marianne had never seen a Rejoicer bristle quite that way before. “Silence!” he bellowed.

Startled, either by the shout or by the electrified bristle of their ruler, the crowd spread itself thinner. The laughter had subsided only because each of the Rejoicers had gone as bristly as Halemtat. Chornian shifted slightly to keep Marianne and Nick near the protected cover of his beaded ruff.

“Marianne,” said Nick softly, “that’s Tatep.”

“I know,” she said. Without meaning to, she’d grabbed his arm for reassurance.

Tatep . . . He sat back on his haunches, as if fully at ease—the only sleeked Rejoicer in the courtyard. He might have been sitting in Marianne’s office discussing different grades of wood, for all the excitement he displayed.

Halemtat, rage quivering, in every quill, turned to his guards and said, “Clip Tatep. Hashay.”

“No!” shouted Marianne, starting forward as she realized she’d spoken Dirtside and opened her mouth to shout it again in Rejoicer, Nick grabbed her and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“No!” shouted Chornian, seeming to translate for her, but speaking his own mind.

Marianne fought Nick’s grip in vain. Furious, she bit the hand he’d clapped over her mouth. When he yelped and removed it—still not letting her free—she said, “It’ll kill him!’ He’ll bleed to death! Let me go.” On the last word, she kicked him hard, but he didn’t let go.

A guard produced the ritual scissors and handed them to the official in charge of clipping. She held the instrument aloft and made the ritual display, clipping the air three times. With each snap of the scissors, the crowd chanted, “No. No. No.”

Taken aback, the official paused. Halemtat clicked at her and she abruptly remembered the rest of the ritual. She turned to make the three ritual clips in the air before Halemtat.

This time the voice of the crowd was stronger. “No. No. No,” came the shout with each snap.

Marianne struggled harder, as the official stepped toward Tatep . . .

Then the grand vizier scuttled to intercept. “No,” he told the official. Turning to Halemtat, he said, “The image is mine. I can laugh at the caricature. Why is it, I wonder, that you can’t, Halemtat? Has some disease softened your spines so that they no longer rattle?”

Marianne was so surprised she stopped struggling against Nick’s hold—and felt the hold ease. He didn’t let go, but held her against him in what was almost an embrace. Marianne held her breath, waiting for Halemtat’s reply.

Halemtat snatched the ritual scissors from the official and threw them at Corten’s feet. “You,” he said. “You will hashay Tatep.”

“No,” said Corten. “I won’t. My spines are still stiff enough to rattle.”

Chornian chose that moment to shout once more, “Rattle your spines, Halemtat! Let us hear you rattle your spines!”

And without so much as a by-your-leave the entire crowd suddenly took up the chant: “Rattle your spines! Rattle your spines!”

Halemtat looked wildly around. He couldn’t have rattled if he’d wanted to—his spines were too bristled to touch one to another. He turned his glare on the official, as if willing her to pick up the scissors and proceed.

Instead, she said, in perfect cadence with the crowd, “Rattle your spines!”

Halemtat made an imperious gesture to his guard—and the guard said, “Rattle your spines!”

Halemtat turned and galloped full tilt into his palace. Behind him the chant continued—“Rattle your spines! Rattle your spines!”

Then, quite without warning, Tatep rattled his spines. The next thing Marianne knew, the entire crowd was laughing and laughing and laughing at their vanished ruler.

Marianne went limp against Nick. He gave her a suggestion of a hug, then let her go. Against the rattle of the crowd, he said, “I thought you were going to get yourself killed, you idiot.”

“I couldn’t—I couldn’t stand by and do nothing; they might have killed Tatep.”

“I thought doing nothing was a diplomat’s job.”

“You’re right; some diplomat I make. Well, after this little episode, I probably don’t have a job anyhow.”

“My offer’s still open.”

“Tell the truth, Nick. If I’d been a member of your team fifteen minutes ago, would you have let me go?”

He threw back his head and laughed. “Of course not,” he said. “But at least I understand why you bit the hell out of my hand.”

“Oh, god, Nick! I’m so sorry! Did I hurt you?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I accept your apology—and next time, I won’t give you that option!”

“ ‘Next time,’ huh?”

Nick, still grinning, nodded.

Well, there was that to be said for Nick: he was realistic.

“Hi, Nick,” said Tatep. “Welcome back.”

“Hi, Tatep. Some show you folks laid on. What happens next?”

Tatep rattled the length of his body, “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “I’ve never done anything like this before. Corten’s still rattling. In fact, he asked me to make him a grand vizier nutcracker. I think I’ll make him a present of it—for Christmas.”

He turned to Marianne. “Share?” he said. “I was too busy to watch at the time. Were you and Nick mating? If you do it again, may I watch?”

Marianne turned a vivid shade of red, and Nick laughed entirely too much.

“You explain it to him,” Marianne told Nick firmly. “Mating habits are not within my diplomatic jurisdiction. And I’m still in the diplomatic corps—at least, until we get back to the embassy.”

Tatep sat back on his haunches, eagerly awaiting Nick’s explanation. Marianne shivered with relief and said hastily, “No, it wasn’t mating, Tatep. I was so scared for you I was going to charge in and—well, I don’t know what I was going to do after that—but I couldn’t just stand by and let Halemtat hurt you.” She scowled at Nick and finished, “Nick was afraid I’d get hurt myself and wouldn’t let me go.”

Tatep’s eyes widened in surprise. “Marianne, you would have fought for me?”

“Yes. You’re my friend.”

“Thank you,” be said solemnly. Then to Nick, he said, “You were right to hold her back. Rattling is a better way than fighting.” He turned again to Marianne. “You surprise me,” he said. “You showed us how to rattle at Halemtat.”

He shook from snout to tail-tip, with a sound like a hundred snare drums. “Halemtat turned tail and ran from our rattling!”

“And now?” Nick asked him.

“Now I’m going to go home. It’s almost dinner time and I’m hungry enough to eat an entire tree all by myself.” Still rattling, he added, “Too bad the hardwood I make the nutcrackers from is so bitter—though tonight I could almost make an exception and dine exclusively on bitter wood.”

Tatep got down off his haunches and started for home. Most of the crowd had dispersed as well. It seemed oddly anticlimactic, until Marianne heard and saw the rattles of laughter ripple through the departing Rejoicers.

Beside the supply transport, Tatep paused. “Nick, at your convenience, I really would like you to share about human mating. For friendship’s sake, I should know when Marianne is fighting and when she’s mating. Then I’d know whether she needs help or—or what kind of help she needs. After all, some trees need help to mate . . .”

Marianne had turned scarlet again. Nick said, “I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I get settled in again.”

“Thank you.” Tatep headed for home, for all the world as if nothing unusual had happened. In fact, the entire crowd, laughing as it was, might have been a crowd of picnickers off for home as the sun began to set.

A squawk from the radio brought Marianne back to business. No use putting it off. Time to bite the bullet and check in with Clarence—if nothing else, the rest of the staff would be worried about both of them.

Marianne climbed into the cab. Without prompting, Nick climbed in beside her. For a long moment, they listened to the diatribe that came over the radio, but Marianne made no move to reply. Instead, she watched the Rejoicers laughing their way home from the palace courtyard.

“Nick,” she said. “Can you really laugh a dictator into submission?”

He cocked a thumb at the radio. “Give it a try,” he said. “It’s not worth cursing back at Clarence—you haven’t his gift for bureaucratic invective.”

Marianne also didn’t have a job by the time she got back to the embassy. Clarence had tried to clap her onto the returning supply ship, but Nick stepped in to announce that Clarence had no business sending anybody from his ethnology staff home. In the end, Clarence’s bureaucratic invective had failed him and the ethnologists simply disobeyed, as Nick had. All Clarence could do, after all, was issue a directive; if they chose to ignore it, the blame no longer fell on Clarence. Since that was all that worried Clarence, that was all right.

In the end, Marianne found that being an ethnologist was considerably more interesting than being a diplomat . . . especially during a revolution.

She and Nick, with Tatep, had taken time off from their mutual studies to choose this year’s Christmas tree—from Halemtat’s reserve. “Why,” said Marianne, bemused at her own reaction, “do I feel like I’m cutting a Christmas tree with Thomas Jefferson?”

“Because you are,” Nick said. “Even Thomas Jefferson did ordinary things once in a while. Chances are, he even hung out with his friends.” He waved. “Hi, Tatep. How goes the revolution?”

For answer, Tatep rattled the length of his body.

“Good,” said Nick.

“I may have good news to share with you at the Christmas party,” added the Rejoicer.

“Then we look forward to the Christmas party even more than usual,” said Marianne.

“And I brought a surprise for Marianne all the way from Dirt,” Nick added. When Marianne lifted an eyebrow, he said, “No, no hints.”

“Share?” said Tatep.

“Christmas Eve,” Nick told him. “After you’ve shared your news, I think.”

The tree-trimming party was in full swing. The newly formed Ad Hoc Christmas Chorus was singing Czech carols—a gift from Esperanza to everybody on both staffs. Clarence had gotten so mellow on the Christmas punch that he’d even offered Marianne her job back—if she was willing to be dropped a grade for insubordination. Marianne, equally mellow, said no, but said it politely.

Nick had arrived at last, along with Tatep and Chornian and Chaylam and their kids. Surprisingly, Nick stepped in between verses to wave the Ad Hoc Christmas Chorus to silence. “Attention, please,” he shouted over the hubbub. “Attention, please! Tatep has an announcement to make.” When he’d finally gotten silence, Nick turned to Tatep and said, “You have the floor.”

Tatep looked down, then looked up again at Nick.

“I mean,” Nick said, “go ahead and speak. Marianne’s not the only one who’ll want to know your news, believe me.”

But it was Marianne Tatep chose to address.

“We’ve all been to see Halemtat,” he said. “And Halemtat has agreed: No one will be clipped again unless five people from the same village agree that the offense warrants that severe a punishment. We will choose the five, not Halemtat. Furthermore, from this day forward, anyone may say anything without fear of being clipped. Speaking one’s mind is no longer to be punished.”

The crowd broke into applause. Beside Tatep, Nick beamed.

Tatep took a piece of parchment from his pouch. “You see, Marianne? Halemtat signed it and put his bite to it.”

“How did you get him to agree?”

“We laughed at him—and we cracked our nutcrackers in the palace courtyard for three days and three nights straight, until he agreed,” Chornian rattled. “He said he’d sign anything if we’d all just go away and let him sleep.” He hefted the enormous package he’d brought with him and rattled again. “Look at all the shelled nuts we’ve brought for your Christmas party!”

Marianne almost found it in her heart to feel sorry for Halemtat. Grinning, she accepted the package and mounded the table with shelled nuts. “Those are almost too important to eat,” she said, stepping back to admire their handiwork. “Are you sure they oughtn’t to go into a museum?”

“The important thing,” Tatep said, “is that I can say anything I want.” He popped one of the nuts into his mouth and chewed it down. “Halemtat is a talemtat,” he said, and rattled for the sheer joy of it.

“Corten looks like he’s been eating too much briarwood,” said Chornian, catching the spirit of the thing.

Not recognizing the expression, Marianne cast an eye at Nick, who said, “We’d say, ‘Been eating a lemon.’ ”

One of Chonian’s brood sat back on his/her haunches and said, “I’ll show you Halemtat’s guards—”

The child organized its siblings with much pomp and ceremony (except for the littlest, who couldn’t stop rattling) and marched them back and forth. After the second repetition, Marianne caught the rough import of their chant: “We’re Halemtat’s guards/We send our regards/We wish you nothing but ill/Clip! We cut off your quill!”

After three passes, one child stepped on another’s tail and the whole troop dissolved into squabbling among themselves and insulting each other. “You look like Corten!” said one, for full effect. The adults rattled away at them. The littlest one, delighted to find that insults could be funny, turned to Marianne and said, “Marianne! You’re spineless!”

Marianne laughed even harder. When she’d caught her breath, she explained to the child what the phrase meant when it was translated literally into Standard. “If you want a good Dirt insult,” she said, mischievously, “I give you ‘birdbrain.’ ” All the sounds in that were easy for a Rejoicer mouth to utter—and when Marianne explained why it was an insult, the children all agreed that it was a very good insult indeed.”

“Marianne is a birdbrain,” said the littlest.

“No,” said Tatep. “Halemtat is a birdbrain, not Marianne.”

“Let the kid alone, Tatep,” said Marianne. “The kid can say anything it wants!”

“True,” said Tatep. “True!”

They shooed the children off to look for their presents under the tree, and Tatep turned to Nick. “Share, Nick—your surprise for Marianne.”

Nick reached under the table. After a moment’s searching he brought out a large bulky parcel and hoisted it onto the table beside the heap of Halemtat nuts. Marianne caught a double-handful before they spilled onto the floor.

Nick laid a protective hand atop the parcel. “Wait,” he said. “I’d better explain. Tatep, every family has a slightly different Christmas tradition—the way you folks do for Awakening. This is part of my family’s Christmas tradition. It’s not part of Marianne’s Christmas tradition—but, just this once, I’m betting she’ll go along with me.” He took his hand from the parcel and held it out to Marianne. “Now you can open it,” he said.

Dropping the Halemtat nuts back onto the pile, Marianne reached for the parcel and ripped it open with enough verve to satisfy anybody’s Christmas unwrapping tradition. Inside was a box, and inside the box a jumble of gaudy cardboard tubes—glittering in stars and stripes and polka dots and even an entire school of metallic green fish. “Fireworks!” said Marianne. “Oh, Nick . . .”

He put his finger to her lips. “Before you say another word—you chose today to celebrate Christmas because it was the right time of the Rejoicer year. You, furthermore, said that holidays on Dirt and the other human worlds don’t converge—”

Marianne nodded.

Nick let that slow smile spread across his face. “But they do. This year, back on Dirt, today is the Fourth of July in the United States of America. The dates won’t coincide again in our lifetimes but, just this once, they do. So, just this once—fireworks. You do traditionally celebrate Independence Day with fireworks, don’t you?”

The pure impudence in his eyes made Marianne duck her head and look away but, in turning, she found herself looking right into Tatep’s bright expectant gaze. In fact, all of the Rejoicers were waiting to see what Nick had chosen for her and if he’d chosen right.

“Yes,” she said, speaking to Tatep but turning to smile at Nick. “After all, today’s Independence Day right here on Rejoicing, too. Come on, let’s go shoot off fireworks!”

For the next twenty minutes the night sky of Rejoicing was alive with Roman candles, shooting stars, and all the brightness of all the Christmases and all the Independence Days in Marianne’s memory. In the streets, humans ooohed and aaahed and Rejoicers rattled. The pops and bangs even woke Halemtat, but all he could do was come out on his balcony and watch.

A day later Tatep reported the rumor that one of the palace guards even claimed to have heard Halemtat rattle. “I don’t believe it for a minute,” Nick added when he passed the tale on to Marianne.

“Me neither,” she said, “but it’s a good enough story that I’d like to believe it.”

“A perfect Christmas tale, then. What would you like to bet that the story of ‘The First Time Halemtat Rattled’ gets told every Christmas from now on?”

“Sucker bet,” said Marianne. Then the wonder struck her. “Nick? Do traditions start that easily—that quickly?”

He laughed. “What kind of fireworks would you like to have next year?”

“One of each,” she said. “And about five of those with the gold fishlike things that swirl down and then go bam! at you when you least expect it.”

For a moment, she thought he’d changed the subject, then she realized he’d answered her question. Wherever she went, for the rest of her life, her Christmas tradition would include fireworks—not just any fireworks, but Fourth of July fireworks. She smiled. “Next year, maybe, we should play Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture as well as The Nutcracker Suite.”

He shook his head “No,” he said, “The Nutcracker Suite has plenty enough fireworks all by itself—at least your version of it certainly did!”

STOPPING AT SLOWYEAR

Frederik Pohl

Chapter 1

The ship was called the Nordvik (though no one aboard it remembered why), and it was a big one. Even if you didn’t count the thrusters on the outriggers astern, or the projectors for the Bussard collection cone at the bow, it was more than a hundred meters long; if just the habitable part of Nordvik had set down on any football field on Earth it would have lapped over at both ends. That would never happen, though. It had been a good many centuries, Earth time, since Nordvik had been anywhere near its home planet, and there was very little chance that it would ever return. It also wouldn’t happen because Nordvik, or any ship like it, could never set down on any planet anyway. All those ancient starships were built in space and lived all their lives in space-mostly interstellar space, at that-and sooner or later they all died in space.

More likely it would be sooner, thought Mercy MacDonald as she slammed her door in the face of Deputy Captain Hans Horeger. What MacDonald didn’t want to do was die when the ship did. She had lived aboard Nordvik for twenty-seven years, ship’s time-never mind the time the outside universe went by; she didn’t want to think about that-twenty-seven years and eight planetary systems, and it was time to find some comfortable place and settle down. With some suitable man, she hoped. But not just any man. Certainly not with the fat and lecherous-unselectively lecherous, which made it worse-Deputy Captain Hans Horeger.

The first thing MacDonald did was make sure the door was well locked behind her, with Horeger on the other side. The second thing was unwrap the towel she had clutched around her as she dashed out of the shower stall and dab at her sticky body. The bastard hadn’t even let her rinse before he began grabbing. It wasn’t much use. She moistened a cloth in her washstand, but you never could get all the soap off with a cloth. She resigned herself to going around sticky until her next turn at the showers.

It wasn’t hard to do that. She’d had plenty of practice. The people who couldn’t resign themselves to aggravation didn’t last long on a tramp starship; and there were always plenty of tranks available in her medicine chest.

She swallowed one, sighed, and set to work. Naked, she sat down at her desk to begin keying up the ship’s trade-goods manifest for the next planetfall. Concentration came hard. Horeger had not given up. She could hear him scratching at the door. She could even hear his voice; it was too low-pitched to carry, but that didn’t matter. She knew what he was saying, and the occasional words that filtered through-“bitch” and “tease” and even that word he used as a final argument, “love”-were all words she had heard from him before.

It made her laugh. She knew just what he was doing out there. She could picture him crouched at her door, lips close to the crack, hands cupped around his mouth so that the rest of Nordvik’s people wouldn’t hear. As though any of them had failed to observe his unrelenting pursuit. Especially his wife, Maureen.

Mercy MacDonald stood up and dressed quickly in fresh clothes, not because there was anyone to see but because she intended to speak to Horeger and obscurely did not want to do so naked. She looked at herself in the mirror while she was pulling on the blue coverall. Figure still good, chin clean, eyes clear-not bad for forty-five and a bit, she thought. The coverall, on the other hand, need mending again at the shoulder seams; she would have to do a good deal of patching, she thought, to get herself ready for a planetfall. She listened at the door for a moment, then called, “Leave me alone, Hans. It’s over. If you’re that horny, go find Maureen.”

But he didn’t answer.

“Why, you bastard,” MacDonald said to the door, suddenly angry when she realized he had given up. She didn’t have any legitimate reason for the anger. She had certainly made it clear to him that furtive sex when his wife wasn’t looking didn’t satisfy her any more, especially when she discovered she was sharing him also with her best friend . . . but why had he given up so easily?

One of the worst features of life aboard Nordvik was that among the fifty-six human beings who lived on the starship, adult males were a distinct minority. There were only twenty-two of them, against thirty-one adult women-adult enough, anyway. There were also three children (would be four in a week or two, MacDonald reminded herself, as soon as Betsy arap Dee delivered herself), but the ones already born were all girls, which would some day make the balance even worse. Would, that is, if no one else jumped ship, or if they didn’t recruit any new people at their next stop; but that was for the future. Meanwhile the oldest child, at eight, was still too unripe even for Hans Horeger’s attention.

Facing odds of that sort was a bad deal for the nine women without regular mates. Mercy MacDonald didn’t like being one of them.

She hadn’t always been. She’d had a husband for a good many years; in fact, both she and Walter were among the handful who were said to own a piece of Nordvik’s keel. Apart from the doddering old captain there was no one else left aboard who, like Mercy MacDonald, had signed on when the ship first launched from Earth orbit. Counting the three children, eleven of the ship’s complement were ship-born; all the rest had been picked up at one planetfall or another along the long, twisted way.

That was just one more injustice to swallow. Seniority should have counted for something. Even not factoring in the datum that MacDonald was probably the smartest and most able person aboard; even not adding on the intangible fact that she was also just about the most loyal person in the ship’s complement, which she had proved by not jumping ship, not even at Hades, their last port of call, when twenty-three others were finally sufficiently fed up to pay off . . . including her own husband.

Neither brains nor loyalty had paid off for her, though. MacDonald was still no more than eighth or ninth down in the ship’s heirarchy. As “purser,” whatever that ancient title meant, she was head of the trading section, to be sure, but that meant nothing when the ship was between planets.

She thought for a moment about Hades. She had been tempted to leave with the others there; Nordvik was running poorer and less hopeful every year, and there was certainly no future aboard for anyone.

But Hades had been the wrong place. Hades didn’t have much good land. Most of the planet was rocky hills and desert, and everything good had been nailed down by the first settlers. For whom everybody else worked-at low pay, when they could get any pay at all. All the promising planets were well in the past, MacDonald told herself. The longer Nordvik traveled, the worse the places it visited seemed to get. It was even possible that this new one they were coming up on would be even drearier than Hades.

It wasn’t the first time that notion had occurred to her. She had even thought it during the wretched weeks when they were orbiting Hades, with her husband and herself snapping at each other whenever they were in earshot. She might well have paid off there herself . . . if Walter hadn’t.

There had almost been a mutiny after Hades. A near half of the crew were urging tottering old Captain Hawkins to give up the whole idea of trading with future planets. They wanted either to settle down on one of the colonized worlds, or even to find some new one from the old robot-probe reports and start a colony of their own. That was when Hans Horeger had become the actual captain, in all but name. He was the one who stirred everyone up to go on.

Anyway, it wasn’t a good idea. Nobody was settling new worlds right now. There were at least a dozen that the robot probes had identified by now, and maybe more reports still coming in from stars still farther away. But by now everybody knew how hard it was to start a colony in a world where no human being, no creature from Earth at all, had ever lived before. The rage for colonizing had worn itself out centuries (Earth-time centuries, at least) before.

Oh, no doubt, the pioneering spirit would blossom back to life again-some time-some later time, maybe a few centuries down the pike, when all the new worlds were themselves beginning to bulge at the seams and the adventurers and the malcontents would yearn to move on. But not just yet. And definitely not with the discouraged, tired, aging crew of the starship Nordvik.

Mercy MacDonald shook herself and got back to work. Maybe Slowyear would be better.

Maybe it wouldn’t, too, because tramp starships like Nordvik didn’t get to the better worlds. Ships like Nordvik didn’t have any real reason for being any more. Ships like Nordvik were fossils. The only reason their cooperative had been able to buy it in the first place was that that whole class of starships had already been made obsolete by the new grid-function vessels that could actually land on a planet’s surface, at least when the planet was big enough and prosperous enough to afford a landing system. Nordviks were a disappearing breed, good for nothing but wandering around the poorest and least developed colony worlds, in the hope of transacting a little business and replenishing their supplies so they could wander a little farther.

But as she patiently checked over the invoices, MacDonald wondered whether even a poor world would be poor enough to want to buy any of the things they had to sell. Some of the appliances and machines aboard Nordvik were ten or fifteen years old-ship’s time-and technology had progressed beyond them wherever they had gone. Their trade goods were almost as obsolete as the ship. There were 2300 pieces of “scrimshaw”-the novelties the ship’s crew made for themselves, to sell and to pass the time between stars-including poems, art objects and knitted goods. There were eleven thousand, almost, varieties of flowers, fruits, ornamental trees, vegetables and grasses, the most promising of them already setting new seeds in the refresher plots. There was a library of nearly 50,000 old Earth books in the datastore-assuming anybody on this new planet read books any more; at Hades that part of the cargo had been a total loss, which was one of the reasons why MacDonald thought the planet was so well named. (But they were good books! MacDonald had read six or seven thousand of them herself, one time or another, and they’d made the long travel times endurable for her. Almost.) There were machines to sell to be copied (if ancient Earth machines had any value any more) and, most of all, the huge store of data that covered every branch of human knowledge, from medicine to anthropology to combinatorial mathematics (also, sadly, subject to being deflatingly out of date.)

If you put a cash value on all Nordvik’s wares (as MacDonald had to do, to figure out what to trade for what) that had to be easily thirty or forty million dollars’ worth of goods, even after you discounted the holds packed with stuff that probably wasn’t ever going to sell to anyone, anywhere.

But the value of a commodity was what it would fetch in the market, and who knew what these Slowyear people would be willing to pay?

She was glad to be interrupted by the ship’s bell, less glad when it was Hans Horeger’s flabbily hairy face that appeared in the corner of the screen. “Oh, shit,” she said. At least it wasn’t a personal call; it was one of his incessant all-ship addresses.

That didn’t make it much better. She resignedly saved her worksheet and let Horeger take over the full screen. He had got dressed from their little interlude in the showers, anyway. Now he was wearing his public face, calm, self-possessed and not at all like the frantic breast-grabber whose sweaty hands had been all over her twenty minutes before.

“Shipmates,” Horeger was saying, yellow teeth gleaming between mustache and beard, “I have just received another communication from our next port of call at the planet of Slowyear. We’re still at long range, but reception is better now and the news from them is all good. They say they haven’t had a ship call in a long time. I don’t know how long, exactly, because they use their own calendar. But long. And they’re thrilled we’re coming. They’re a good size for us, too. They’ve got a world population of half a million or so. That’s kind of funny,” he said, in that chatty, endearing style that endeared nobody, “because they’ve had twelve or fifteen generations to build up their numbers, but it could have been a lot worse.” Of course it could have, MacDonald thought. It could have been zero. Slowyear wouldn’t have been the first planet to die out between visits, leaving the next wanderer to arrive that way high and dry. “Anyway that’s half a million customers. Good ones, friends! They’re farmers. Farmers and stock raisers, and that means they won’t have a hell of a lot of industry so I’m counting on selling a lot of our machine cargo there. Let’s take a look at what Slowyear is like.”

He waved a hand, and under his chin the planet’s stats appeared: An F8 star; a planetary surface gravity very close to Earth normal; an atmosphere a little denser, but with a slightly lower partial pressure of oxygen. “See what it says about the primary?” he invited. “It’s bright. So those worrywarts among you can’t rest easy-we won’t have any trouble refueling there.”

“Meaning worrywarts like me,” Mercy MacDonald told the screen, since she had been telling Horeger for months that if they didn’t refuel pretty soon their next stop would be their last.

She might have said more, because talking back to Horeger on the screen was one of the habits that had become standard for her-and a lot less maddening than talking to Horeger when he could hear-but it dawned on her that the faint tapping sound she heard was someone at her door.

For a nasty moment she feared it might be Horeger back again. Impossible, of course; there he was blithely pontificating away in real time on the screen. When she opened the door she was pleased to see that it was little Betsy arap Dee, as close as she had to a “best friend” on Nordvik. “Hi,” she said, welcoming.

Then she got a better look at Betsy’s face. “What’s the matter?” MacDonald asked sharply, suddenly afraid.

Betsy was holding her swollen belly. “The baby,” she sobbed. “I’m spotting, and I hurt. Can you help me get to the sickbay, please?”

By the time Mercy MacDonald got her friend to the room they used for a sickbay Sam Bagehot, the closest thing they had to a nurse, had an obstetric bed ready and Danny de Bride, their approximation of a doctor, was fretfully studying the obstetric displays from their medical database.

De Bride wasn’t a real doctor, but he was the best Nordvik had left after the mass desertion on Hades, and he had at least long since read through all the gynecological section. “I hope I know what I’m doing,” he gritted to MacDonald as the nurse guided Betsy’s feet into the stirrups and he played with the fetoscope earphones in his hand.

“I hope so, too,” MacDonald said, but not out loud. Out loud she only whispered encouragingly in Betsy arap Dee’s ear. Whether her friend heard her she could not say. Betsy’s eyes were closed, her forehead was cold and clammy and she was moaning.

De Bride was muttering something to his nurse, but MacDonald missed it. Over their heads Horeger was still prattling noisily away on the screen. “What?” she demanded.

“I said she’s hardly dilated at all,” de Bride complained.

“And I’m not getting any fetal heartbeat,” said Sam, holding the metal disk on Betsy’s belly and watching the readout.

“Oh, shit,” said de Bride. “What do you think, Sam? Do I have to do a C-section? I’ve never even seen one!”

“You’ll see one now,” his nurse told him. “Mercy, give me a hand. You take care of the instruments while I handle the anesthesia, will you?”

The “will you” was only politeness. There wasn’t any real choice. If there had been, Mercy MacDonald would have been out of there long before the cutting started, but under the circumstances she was present for it all.

She had never seen anyone deliberately slice into the flesh of another human being before. There was less blood than she had expected, but still a great deal of blood; it went faster than she had imagined, but still a long business of de Bride muttering angrily to himself as he inexpertly pushed muscle walls and tissues out of the way and fumbled for the little scarlet gnome curled up inside Betsy’s abdomen. MacDonald was both horrified and fascinated-yes, and something else, too. Almost even envious. For here was silly little Betsy arap Dee bringing a whole new person into existence. Marvelously! Wonderfully. Enviably. . . .

For a moment MacDonald almost forgot the gore, didn’t hear de Bride’s steady muttering to himself or Horeger’s orating from the screen. She could do this, she told herself. She could have done it years earlier, when she still had Walter to be a father; could still do it, maybe, if she didn’t take too long getting it started.

“Here,” said de Bride suddenly. “Hold it while I cut the cord.”

MacDonald found herself with that purple-red little creature in her unpracticed hands. She blinked down at it, wondering. It wasn’t until de Bride said, shamefaced, “I couldn’t save it, you saw that. Maybe it twisted in the womb, you know?, and the cord strangled it?” that she realized the baby she was holding was dead.

She stood frozen, until the nurse told her that she might as well put the tiny thing down. Then she did as she was told, and began to clean the bloodstains off the arms of her blue coverall (now really ruined, she thought regretfully) with a dressing. She didn’t look at Betsy arap Dee, now being sewn glumly back together. She was watching Hans Horeger’s face on the screen, listening as intently as if she cared about anything he might say.

“We’re still about two light-weeks away,” he was saying. “Call it three thousand a.u. We’ll be there in eight months, just about. Friends, I feel in my bones that this is going to be the stop that pays off for all the others. They’re going to be crazy about us!”

From behind Mercy MacDonald, Sam Bagehot said, “They’d better be.”

Chapter 2

Actually, the people on Slowyear pretty nearly were going crazy over the approaching ship, or at least some of them were, though it would be many weeks before Nordvik entered orbit. Mostly if was the young ones who were working up steam on the subject, though even among them there were quite a few who had too many other things on their minds to get excited over the prospect of a visiting interstellar ship.

For instance, there was Blundy. Blundy had his mind full of other things, which not only weren’t the approaching Nordvik, but weren’t even the wife who was waiting for him in the summer city, much less the seventeen hundred things he was supposed to keep his mind on-namely the long ambling column of sheep he was herding into town for shearing and slaughter. Hans Horeger had been right about that. The people of Slowyear spent a lot of time farming their fields and tending their livestock, stocks, but where Horeger went wrong was that they didn’t stop there. To the people aboard Nordvik a word like “shepherd” meant a beardless boy or a doddering old man with a stick, not someone riding in a computer-guided, hydrogen-fueled crawler who led his flock with a radio beacon keyed to the receivers implanted in each nose. The people of Slowyear had their high technology, all right; they just didn’t show it off.

In that Blundy was like his planet, because he didn’t show off all his strengths, either. Blundy was short and broad, with a body that was all muscle and almost no fat. The muscle didn’t show. If you ever picked him up you would be surprised to discover how much he massed-if he allowed you to take the liberty of trying to pick him up. There wasn’t much chance of that. Trying it would most likely turn out to mean that you were stretched out on the ground in front of him, gazing stupidly up as you wondered if anyone else had felt the earthquake.

What Blundy was thinking about on his homebound trip was politics. He had plenty of time to think, of course, because what he was doing took very little of his attention. There was hardly any local traffic on the road this far from the city-a few tractor-trailers on their way to and from the fishing villages on the coast and almost nothing else-and anyway the crawler’s computer did most of the driving. Blundy could have been thinking about many things because he was many things-not least of them, a celebrated entertainer on the view screens. But what drew his imagination just then was his political planning.

Because he had been off with the flock for the four seventy-day months that were his taxtime he was beginning to feel eager to get back into his political incarnation again. He was trying to find a theme for a campaign. If he could work out the right subjects to talk about he would then, he calculated, do well to take the town auditorium for a speech the next night-if the auditorium was finished, as his helper, Petoyne, had told him it would be when they talked on the radio; if Petoyne had been efficient enough to reserve it for him.

There remained the difficult question, which was what the speech should be about. It had to be important. His followers would expect no less.

But what could he say that would sound important enough to shock them all into life?

Because his mind was far from what he was doing, he almost missed the traffic warden standing in the road before him. The man’s hand was held sternly up and he was scowling.

Blundy slowed the crawler; he hadn’t noticed that they had just passed the highest point in the pass. Other roads joined them there, and there was a tractor-trailer train of construction material waiting to cross before him. Blundy leaned out of the cab window to give the warden a quizzical look. Then the warden recognized him. He gave Blundy an embarrassed salute and waved him on.

Blundy waved his thanks to the warden and his apology to the other driver, who would now have a good long wait for the flock to clear the crossing. He didn’t refuse the courtesy, though. It was a real nuisance to try to halt a procession of seventeen hundred sheep.

Then, as they began their descent into town, on impulse Blundy opened the cab door and jumped out to stretch his legs. The computer would be quite capable of following its programmed route without him, and he thought better on his feet.

Blundy landed easily on the packed dirt beside the stock road. He stretched and took a deep breath, letting the tractor and its trailer crawl past him at their two-kilometer-an-hour trudge. The road itself had been repaved since the last time he had come by, four months earlier, with the much shorter line of sheep heading out to the eastern pastures. Now there were beginning to be an occasional high-speed vehicle passing by in both directions-not at high speed here, though, not as they squeezed past the shambling line of sheep, careful of the occasional wilful stray. There weren’t many strays, Blundy saw with satisfaction. The flock was obediently following the bellwether radio in the trailer; and the dogs were properly patrolling between sheep and vehicles to keep them off the paved road and on the grassy verge.

Then Blundy pressed two fingertips to his lips. It was what he did when he got an idea.

“Like sheep,” he said, half-voicing the words past his nearly closed lips. “Like sheep we stray in all directions, pointlessly and ignorantly, without a real goal, wandering until we die—”

No. It was the right sort of note to strike, but certainly not “until we die”. There was too much dying going on all the time as it was. He scowled at the flock and tried again. “-wandering without goal or direction. How can we find a goal worth attaining? What can lead us as surely as the radio call leads the flock to—”

No again, positively no. Wrong image entirely. What the call led the sheep to was the shearers’ sheds for all and the slaughterhouse for most. He was getting back to death again, and that was no good.

Still, he had the feeling that there was something there that he could use. It was just the kind of quick, elucidating metaphor that his political audiences loved: the radio beacon that guided the sheep standing for the purpose that would carry the voters with him. And there was something more there waiting to be expressed. Something about sheep going astray was tickling his mind, some phrase he had heard once that had come out of some old book. . . .

Murra would know. “The hell with it,” he said, meaning for now; he would ask Murra, out of her vast reading in the books that no one else bothered with, and then maybe it would all come clear.

He looked around, pleased at the sight, pleased to be going home again after taxtime. Looking down into the valley, he thought the broad Sometimes River had dropped a good deal since the last time he had passed this way. It was still well over its summertime banks, a hundred meters of flood rushing furiously downhill, but nothing like the raging torrents of first melt he had seen four months before. The glacier on the west wall was showing the signs of advancing warmth, too; it had retreated half a kilometer at least. He squinted at it until he thought he had found the spot under its lip where, at the end of the summer before, he had shared a cabin with the woman who had then been his new and brightest love.

That had been a long time ago.

Murra wasn’t new and bright any more, and the intervening winter’s ice had planed away all trace of the cabin.

Then an eruption of yelping behind him made him turn. He took a good look at his flock and swore. The long line of sheep was breaking up into clots. Even though the dogs barked and nipped at their rumps the animals were tiring and so they were pausing to nibble at the fresh growth beneath their hooves. He touched the talk button on his lapel. “Give them a jolt to wake them up; they’re clumping,” he ordered Katiro, his replacement helper now drowsing in the trailer (and the boy was incompetent, too; why had Petoyne begged to go in early to take care of some undefined business and left him with this idiot?) A moment later Blundy heard a chorus of dismayed baaing from the flock as their radio collars gave them peremptory little electric shocks. Obediently they picked up their pace, but Blundy was annoyed. The radioman in the back of the tractor should have prevented that. If Petoyne had been in the trailer it wouldn’t have happened. Petoyne would have kept an eye on the flock without without being reminded. But Petoyne had had that private business that Blundy had decided he didn’t even want to know about-and out of fondness for his chief helper Blundy had agreed.

It occurred to Blundy that his fondness for Petoyne was likely to become a liability.

He turned and walked after the trailer, trying to remember that glimmering of an idea-about sheep, wasn’t it? But just as it was coming back to him he heard his name called. “Hey, Blundy!” A tractor pulling a flatbed loaded with protein supplement for the nursing ewes in the field had slowed and the driver was waving to him. “You’ve got a welcoming committee!” the man shouted, jerking a thumb back down the hill toward the summer city. When Blundy craned his neck to see past his own tractor, already half a kilometer ahead, he saw that it was the truth. . . .

And that useful half-formed idea was irretrievably gone.

There were fifty people waiting for Blundy as he stepped aside and let the tractor proceed toward the pens-people of all shapes and sizes, male and female, oldsters of four and even five years and children-well, semi-children, like his quite nearly adult assistant Petoyne, who was waving violently to catch his eye.

Blundy gave them all a sober salute. He didn’t smile at them. Blundy did not mind at all when his partisans made a fuss over him, but he didn’t like to give the appearance of encouraging it. Petoyne was hurrying toward him, whispering urgently. “Blundy? I need a favor, and you’re my best friend, so you’re the only one I can ask. Remember my dog that was getting kind of old? Well, I didn’t like the idea of killing him just because he wasn’t a pup any more, so I did a kind of dumb thing—”

Blundy shook his head. “Oh, hell, Petoyne. Another dumb thing? Talk to me later,” he said, not wanting to hear. He turned to the waiting crowd, marshalling his thoughts. There was a rock at the side of the road, thrown there by Sometimes River when it had rampaged through at icebreak. Blundy climbed up it to get a better look at his welcomers. Were they political or theatrical? A little of each, he decided, and settled on political, not on the evidence, but because what he really wanted was to convert some of the people who admired him for his theatrical work into the ones who followed his political lead.

So, “Citizens,” he said, improvising as he went along, “you know where I’ve been. I’ve been paying off my taxtime, and I ask myself: Why so much taxtime? What do the governors do with the taxtime? Is the winter city any bigger or more comfortable with all the taxtime work we put in? Are we ever going to start that other city on Deep Bay they’ve been talking about for years? Do they have a plan?”

He shook his head to indicate the answer, and there was a mutter of moderate agreement from the crowd-they didn’t see quite where he was going, but they were willing to follow him far enough to find out. “Then why so much taxtime?” he demanded. “Why should an ordinary citizen have to spend a twentieth of his life working off his obligations to the state, when nothing ever changes for the better? I’m not talking about money taxes; we all pay income tax, and that’s all right; no one complains about that. But to be required as well to put in long, weary hours at the state’s business-and always in the best times of the year, when we could be enjoying ourselves-why, that is slavery.” Louder grunts of approval. Blundy was beginning to catch the rhythm of his own oratory, so he gave them the smile he had withheld. “But we can’t discuss that as fully as it deserves now,” he said. “Tomorrow night-“ he glanced at Petoyne, who nodded. “Tomorrow night I’ll be speaking at the assembly, and I hope I’ll see you all there. But now-well, I haven’t been home for four months. So if you’ll excuse me-?”

And he jumped nimbly off the rock, moving through them, shaking hands, kissing some of the younger women, with Petoyne tagging grimly behind. It all took time. When he was well clear of the last of them Petoyne tugged imploringly at his blouse. “Please, Blundy. I need a favor.”

He didn’t stop, because he didn’t want any of the fans to catch up with him, but he looked down at her. She was a small woman-small girl, really; she hadn’t yet finished her first full year. She was undersized for her age and that made her even shorter than Blundy, though he was no giant himself. “Well?” he asked.

She hesitated. “Remember my dog?” she said, as though she hadn’t said it before. “They were going to put him down because of his age, you know. But he was a good dog, Blundy. I grew up with him. I thought if I could switch him with one of the others—”

“Oh, God,” he said, knowing what would come next.

It did. “They caught me,” she said simply.

“You keep doing really dumb things,” he said, shaking his head.

“I know,” she admitted. “But I need a witness. Now. I’m supposed to be in the execution hall in about half an hour. I’ve been waiting and waiting for you, Blundy—”

“They sentenced you already?” he asked, suddenly fearful for her.

She nodded. “They gave me another poison pill,” she said. “I have to take it today.”

It was, Blundy counted as he glumly accompanied his friend, the third time he had gone with Petoyne to the execution chamber. He was getting really fed up. Not just with the nasty business of poison pills itself, but with Petoyne for her dumbness, for the demands she made on him when he had more important things to keep him busy. “But I just got back,” he complained to her as they walked, and, “I could be seeing Murra now instead of wasting my time on this crap,” and, “Can’t you just stay out of trouble for a while?”

Petoyne didn’t answer, not directly anyway. She just stretched to look up at him, shivering in the wind that came down from the ice, her face woebegone, with sorrowful eyes and trembling chin. She didn’t say that the law required her to have a witness for her execution date, because everybody knew that, or that they had long ago agreed that they were best friends, because she’d said that already. Instead she mentioned a fact: “You know you’re getting pretty tired of Murra anyway.” And she complained: “Who did it hurt if I just let Barney live a little longer?” And she mourned, a couple of times, in different ways, “But, Blundy, don’t you see what this means? If I die of this business I could miss the ship. I’ve never seen a ship. By the time this one lands I could be dead.”

He didn’t respond. They walked in silence, Blundy nodding to people who recognized him, while the girl thought hard. Then an encouraging thought struck her. “One good thing,” she said. “People will see you on the TV.”

He gave her a scowl, intending to show that that wasn’t the kind of publicity he sought, and even more to show that he didn’t care what she said because he had one answer for all. “Quit complaining. It’s your own damn fault,” he told her judgmatically. Petoyne had known what the price was going to be, just as she had known all the other times she’d broken the laws-the two times she’d been caught and the dozens of times she hadn’t.

All the same, Blundy knew how the kid felt. Petoyne wasn’t just afraid of dying-well, of course she was afraid of that. Who wouldn’t be? But worse than just the normal fear of dying was that nobody, not anybody, least of all an almost-one-year-old like Petoyne, wanted to be left out of that special once-in-a-lifetime excitement, both thrilling and bleak, that only happened when some wandering spaceship came along. And even “once in a lifetime” was an exaggeration. It wasn’t that often; ships didn’t usually happen along even once in a normal lifetime. There was hardly a soul alive on Slowyear who remembered the last time a ship had called, apart from the tiny and dwindling handful of five- and six-year-old dodderers.

You got to the summer execution chamber by a pebbled walk through a garden. Ribbonblossoms and roses were in bloom, thousands of them, already halfway up their two-meter trellises though spring was only five months old. The flowers didn’t quite hide the chamber from people going by on the summer town’s streets, but they at least kept it decently remote. Most people didn’t look, though a child of thirty months or so stopped as they passed, leaning his bike against the gate to follow them with his fascinated eyes.

The marshal at the door nodded respectfully to Blundy as they entered the hall. Inside, generic music was playing in the waiting room for the execution chamber, the kind of low-pitched whispery strings Blundy associated with funerals and his almost-wife, Murra. (Funnily, at first he had loved Murra’s taste in music.) The waiting lounge smelled as flowery as the grounds outside. There was a pot of babywillows in the center of the room, honey-sweet, and minty greenflowers hung from ceiling baskets.

Blundy and Petoyne weren’t the only ones waiting. There were four couples ahead of them, sitting quietly on the comfortable benches or pretending to be conversing with each other. They would have to wait, Blundy saw with resignation. The waiting was an extra burden, because Petoyne was getting nervouser and nervouser as she came closer to the deed itself, gripping tight Blundy’s hand even though she was still technically short of her first birthday, and thus was only going to take from the children’s jar.

They sat down in the waiting room, nodding politely to the ones ahead of them. The execution clerk wasn’t at his desk, but almost as soon as they sat he came back in, looking around impatiently. Petoyne clutched Blundy’s arm and took a quick breath, trying to read the man’s face. There wasn’t much on it to read, though, because the clerk was a hard-bitten old guy, easily five, maybe more, had seen everything and was surprised at nothing.

He did blink in recognition as he saw Blundy there, and quickly glanced at the monitor on his desk. Then he called a name and read a sentence: “Mossriker Woller Duplesset, for falsification of taxtime records, one in fifty.” A man not much older than Petoyne stood up, hanging his head. The woman with him was nearly three-his mother, Blundy supposed-and she was the one who was weeping as the executioner escorted them out to a chamber. He paused in the doorway to give Blundy a friendly nod, then closed the door behind them.

There was a moment’s silence, then the ones left began to talk. The old man got up from beside the woman who seemed to be a daughter. Wandering around the room, he paused and absently stroked the soft, downy pods of the babywillow. Then he looked more closely and frowned at what he saw. He got a cup from the water cooler and carefully moistened the roots of the plant. “They should take better care of their plants,” he said severely, to no one in particular. Then his eyes focused on Blundy.

“You were just coming in this morning, weren’t you?” he asked politely, “I thought so. Those were nice-looking herds you brought in.” Blundy agreed that, for late spring herds, the sheep had fattened up nicely. Another-a middle-aged woman, there with a younger woman who could have been her daughter-what crime could she have committed to bring her here?-said, “They’ve started taking the shuttles out of mothballs,” and then a couple of them began talking about what their parents, or their grandparents, had told them about the way it was the last time a ship came to call. What they did not talk about was why they were here.

Petoyne didn’t join in the conversation, but she was obviously beginning to get her nerve back. “They’re all adults,” she told Blundy, looking around at the others in the room. “I guess they’ve really got something to worry about.”

“You’ll be an adult pretty soon,” Blundy reminded her.

“But I’m not now,” Petoyne said, managing a smile for the first time. “What I am is hungry. Are you?” And then, without waiting for an answer: “I bet you don’t want any more lamb chops, anyway. Listen, Blundy. Let me tell you what I had last night. I made myself a scogger-broiled; a big one, with plenty of melted butter, the way you like it. And I’ve got a couple more in the freezer, if you wanted to come over tonight-I mean,” she added, glancing at the door, “if everything, uh, if everything goes all right here.” He shook his head. “Well, Murra’s expecting you, I guess.” She might have said more but then, much sooner than any of them expected, the clerk was back for another condemned and escort. The charge was assault this time, one in forty, and, surprisingly, the convict was the middle-aged woman.

“Looks like there’s life in the old girl yet,” Petoyne whispered, almost giggling.

Two other couples were coming in, but Blundy didn’t get a good look at them because the old man was standing up and coming toward them. “I guess it’s my turn next,” he said apologetically. “I didn’t recognize you before, but-you are Irakaho Blundy Spenotex, aren’t you? I thought so. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your show last winter, and, well, I might not get the chance to tell you later on.”

“Of course,” Blundy said, professionally warm. “Nice of you to say it.”

The old man stood there, nodding like any fan who had made the approach and didn’t really know what to say. “My wife really loved it. It was about the only thing that kept us going, the last couple of months,” he said.

“Well, that’s what it was supposed to do,” Blundy said politely. “Do you recognize Petoyne here? She played Liv on Winter Wife. The younger daughter, remember?”

“Really?” The man seemed quite interested as he studied the girl up and down. “I wouldn’t have known her,” he marveled, “but then, I guess everybody says that, don’t they? The augmentation and all. Well, I’m sorry to see you here, Petoyne, but you’re still under age, aren’t you? So it won’t be so-oh,” he said in a different voice, as the door opened, “I guess it’s my turn. I hope I see you again.”

And as the door closed behind him, the executioner and his witness, Petoyne said, “Hopes to see you again! I bet he does! Did you hear that? He got a one in five! For murder. Do you know what I think, Blundy? I think it probably was his wife he murdered, don’t you think? Who else would an old guy like that kill? So maybe the show didn’t keep him going all that long, after all.”

Then there was another wait.

The wall screen was showing a musical group, which was getting on Blundy’s nerves. He got up. “Mind if I try to get some news?” he asked. No one seemed to care, though they all looked docilely at the screen when it came on. The oilwells on Harbor Island had been successfully uncapped, the pipelines to the refineries on the continent checked and reopened-but Blundy already knew that, because he’d seen the smoke on the horizon. The warmspring census, taken after the first crop ofpost-winter babies had had a chance to be born, showed a planetwide population of 534,907, the highest for that season in nine years. The water temperature in Sometime River was up to 3.5 C, and there was an 80% chance of rain.

And then the woman came back in. She was alone.

She looked very sober as she made a phone call to the crematorium. It only took a moment to arrange for the disposition of her father’s remains.

Then, long before they were ready for it, it was their turn.

Inside the room Blundy sought out the cameras and found them, discreetly inconspicuous in corners of the room; the carrying out of sentences was a matter of public record. Few bothered to watch unless some relative was at risk, but Blundy squared his shoulders and assumed a properly grave expression.

The clerk looked directly at Petoyne and then looked down at his charge sheet. “Larasissa Petoyne Marcolli, first year, for wilfully failing to destroy a surplus animal,” he read. “Sentence is one in thousand. Come on, and hurry up,” he said, “because I want to get home sometime tonight.”

Blundy rose with the girl. He took her arm firmly, though she didn’t resist. They didn’t say anything to the newcomers they had left behind in the waiting room, though Blundy could almost feel the resentment the adults felt toward a mere one-in-a-thousand.

The execution room was the one for children, with pretty pictures on the walls. The room itself was not much bigger than a closet, no chairs, just a sort of metal bench along one side of it and a low table that contained the urn. “Up on the table, Petoyne,” the executioner ordered. “You’ve been here before.” Petoyne climbed up, looking woebegone at Blundy, uncomfortable on the cold metal. There were drains around the edge of it to carry off the involuntary excretions an executed criminal often could not help but release, and there was a faint shit smell in the room to show that some had. The executioner turned to take a jar off its shelf, saying chattily over his shoulder, “I was surprised to see you out there, Blundy, but of course I knew you were just being a witness. I would have been sorry if it had been the other way around, because I really like your work.”

“Thank you,” Blundy said automatically. He was mildly annoyed, though; Winter Wife was only a minor work in his eyes. His social, political and philosophical contributions were what he really prided himself on, and yet it was the video plays that everyone praised him for. Then he blinked. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“I said, do your job, Blundy,” the executioner repeated, and obediently Blundy bent to check the jar with its thousand little jellybean pills. The seals were intact. When he said so, the execution clerk said fretfully, “Well, then, break it open, man!”

And he then took the lid off the jar, and offered it to Petoyne, who unhesitatingly thrust her little fist in, pulled out a pill, popped it in her mouth, swallowed.

She looked suddenly lost and fearful for a moment. Then she gave Blundy a broad, happy smile.

“Open your mouth,” the executioner commanded, and rummaged around inside it with his forefinger. Then he nodded. “Sentence carried out,” he said. “Try not to come back here again, will you? Next time you’ll be grown up,” And opened the back door to let them out into the warm spring afternoon sun.

#

“You know, I’m getting to like the taste of those things,” bragged Petoyne, almost skipping along beside Blundy. “What do you want to do now? Have a drink somewhere? Go check on the slaughtering? Get something to eat? No,” she said, watching his face, “you’re off to see Murra, aren’t you? Why don’t you break it off with her, Blundy? She’s such a pain.”

He stopped and glowered down at her. “Leave Murra out of it,” he ordered. “And, listen, I’m not going to this place with you again, Petoyne. You’re going to be a one-year-old pretty soon, and then you won’t be getting any one in a thousand shots any more. So straighten out if you want to live to see that ship come in.”

Chapter 3

When Mercy MacDonald came looking for Betsy arap Dee, she found her friend in the Lesser Common Room of the starship, working with her fingers on a scrimshaw sampler but her eyes on the picture of their next planet that was displayed on the wall screen.

“We’re getting good pictures now,” MacDonald commented, looking for a good way to start a conversation. They were only a couple of light-days out now; four or five more weeks and they would be in orbit, and then the frenzy of transshipping and dealing would start.

MacDonald stretched to reach up and trace the outlines of Slowyear’s single great continent with a fingertip. It was more or less pear-shaped, with the widest part of the pear right around the planet’s equator. “Where do you suppose the landing parties will touch down?” she asked. Betsy didn’t answer, except possibly with the faintest of shrugs, so MacDonald answered herself: “Probably right near their city, here-“ putting her finger on the place the radio signals came from. “It ought to be nice by the time we get there. They say it’s their springtime.”

Betsy finally found some words worth saying. “That would have been nice for the baby,” she said, bending her head back over her sampler.

MacDonald bit her lip and tried another tack. “How about giving me a hand?” she suggested. “I need to check the special-interest programs in the store so we can see what we’ve got to sell.”

Betsy glanced up at her. “Why? We already did that, Mercy.”

“So I want to do it again. To make sure. It’s no good if we suddenly discover something we overlooked after we’ve left, is it?”

Betsy sighed and put her sampler down. She gave her friend a level gaze. “I know what you’re doing. You’re just trying to keep me busy so I won’t be depressed, aren’t you? But you don’t have to bother. I’m keeping myself busy, can’t you see?”

“But you’re still depressed,” Mercy said reasonably.

Betsy nodded. “Of course I am. I’m still on this damn ship. Once I get off I’ll perk right up, I promise.”

MacDonald lifted an eyebrow. “You really think a few weeks on a planet will straighten everything out?”

“Who said anything about a few weeks. I’m staying.”

MacDonald blinked at her in surprise. It wasn’t really astonishing that Betsy arap Dee was thinking of jumping ship at Slowyear-almost everybody thought such thoughts, almost every time they made a planetfall. The unusual thing was that she was talking about it out loud. Even to her best friend. “Horeger wouldn’t like to hear you say that,” she offered. Horeger had devoted no less than five of his all-hands broadcasts to the reasons why no one should leave the ship on Slowyear, along with threats of what would happen if anyone tried.

Betsy laughed. It was a curiously somber sound. “Do you think I care what Hans likes any more?” she asked. “Do you?”

When Mercy MacDonald had a problem that needed talking over, her confidant of first choice was of course Betsy arap Dee. But when Betsy herself was the problem, she had to turn to someone else. That somebody else had to be a friend. A real one.

The list of possible candidates was not long. The little universe of Nordvik was far too small to hold any strangers, but the bulk of them weren’t friends, either. Not friends of Mercy MacDonald’s, anyway. Betsy was certainly a friend, moody as she was since the loss of her baby. Another definite friend was the captain of Nordvik-by which she certainly didn’t mean nasty, grabby Hans Horeger but the real captain, Arnold Hawkins. So were the three old navigator/astrographers, Moira Glorietti, Yahouda ben Aaron and Dicke Dettweiler. They’d all come aboard together on Earth, like the captain and Mercy MacDonald herself; like MacDonald and Captain Hawkins they’d voted against Hans Horeger’s takeover. Also like the captain, they were getting a little elderly to be close friends any more.

Then there was the larger number of those who used to be friends, of one degree or another, but had voted for Horeger and so weren’t friends any more. That included most of the engineers and the bio people, both the medics and the ones that cared for their biological stocks. And then there were the handful of those who had never been friend of Mercy MacDonald’s at all. That wasn’t a long list, though. Most of the time there was only one person on it, that person of course being Deputy Captain Hans Horeger. There had never been a time when MacDonald thought of Horeger as a friend (though, she was ashamed of herself to admit, for a time she had been feeling low enough to accept him as a lover.) There were quite a few times when she wished him off the ship, if not actually dead-because of his crude and meaningless sexual advantages; because he had unseated old Captain Hawkins; and most of all because of what he had done to Betsy arap Dee.

Captain Hawkins. . . .

Yes, MacDonald decided, he was the one she needed to talk to. The problem was to find him. He certainly wouldn’t be on the bridge; that was Horeger’s territory now. When she stopped by the little suite he shared with his elderly wife, she was there but the captain wasn’t. But Marjorie Hawkins, though not fond of Mercy MacDonald (or of any other single woman on the ship, her husband’s advanced age notwithstanding), somewhat reluctantly told her he could be found in his workshop.

He wasn’t there, either, when MacDonald pushed open the door after a couple of minutes of fruitless knocking. She could see, though, that he wasn’t far. Captain Hawkins’s scrimshaw work was glass mosaics, assembled with painstaking care and a fair number of cut fingers. Pieces of the work were scattered all over the room, piles of glass chips of a hundred colors covering every flat surface in the room. For further indication that he was nearby, the wall screen was on.

Confident that he was no farther than the nearest toilet, MacDonald sat down to wait for his return. She saw that the captain’s screen, like Betsy arap Dee’s, was displaying their next port of call. It was a different view, though; probably it was what was being seen, in real time, by Nordvik’s bow cameras. Thousands of stars were visible, but there was no doubt which star was Slowyear’s sun. Nordvik was still far away from Slowyear’s star, much farther than Pluto was from its primary. All the same, Slowyear’s star was far the brightest thing in that part of the sky. She squinted to see if she could make out the planet of Slowyear itself, but didn’t expect success. It was still too faint, probably lost in its sun’s glare.

She knew well enough what Slowyear was going to be like. Like everybody else on Nordvik, she had pored over its statistics for hour after hour, partly out of generalized curiosity, partly looking for a reason to make it her home for the rest of her life-or for not.

MacDonald knew that the bad thing about Slowyear was the very thing it was named after. Slowyear had a very slow year indeed. The planet was a good long way from its sun, and took a good long time to circle it-nineteen standard years, just about.

Fortunately for the hope of any life on Slowyear, its orbit was nearly circular. “Nearly” circular still wasn’t quite. The small difference between elliptical and round was critical. It meant that the planet had winters, and it had summers. And when you said “winter”, she thought, biting her lip, you weren’t talking about three or four chilly months. You were talking nasty. At aphelion the planet was moving slowly, like a yo-yo at the top of its climb, and Slowyear stayed at that distant point for nearly five standard years. Five bitter-cold Earth-time years of hiding underground to stay away from the surface snow and cold and misery. Mercy Macdonald, who had not experienced any real winter since she was eighteen years old, remembered the data table that said a typical night-time winter low on Slowyear was minus 70 degrees Celsius and a typical daytime winter high was only about minus ten, and felt herself shivering in anticipation.

Of course, luck had been with the visitors on Nordvik. It wasn’t winter on Slowyear now. The good part was that they would be reaching the planet in its late spring. There would be plenty of time to decide whether to stay or not before things got frigid.

When Captain Hawkins found her waiting he gave her an apologetic grin. “It’s nice to see you, Mercy,” he said, pleased. “Sorry I missed you, but that’s what comes with being an old man.” He made a face to express the annoying problems of being old and male, then changed the subject. “How do you like it?” he asked, gesturing at the nearly finished scrimshaw wall plaque on his easel. It was a mosaic picture of their starship, made of thousands of bits of glass, carefully cracked and mounted on a plastic board, and under it he had assembled bright red letters to spell out a motto: Ad astra per aspera.

“It’ll sell,” Macdonald said, giving her professional opinion. “What does it say?”

The captain dreamily traced the words with a fingertip. “It’s Latin,” he said with pride. “It means, To the stars through difficulties.” Macdonald snickered, and he looked up at her with shrewd humor, enjoying the patness of the motto with her. Then he sighed. “Of course, I don’t suppose they’ll remember Latin on Slowyear. We’ll have to translate for them-but that just makes it more interesting, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure of it,” she told him, glad to be able to say something kind to him that was also true. Macdonald liked the captain. He was old and feeble, sure, and she hadn’t forgiven him for letting the reins of the ship fall into Hans Horeger’s hands, but he was a nice man. If he had been just a little younger.

But he wasn’t younger. He’d been in his fifties when he took command of the ship, back in Earth orbit. Now that he was well past eighty his principal activities were scrimshaw and naps.

He was already sitting before his scrimshaw, sorting through the pile of violet glass for just the right piece to make a background star. She cleared her throat. “Captain?”

He looked up with a smile of reluctant resignation. “You didn’t just come down here for my company, did you? I suppose something’s the matter.”

“With Betsy arap Dee,” she specified. “I don’t know if you know about her problems—”

“Of course I do,” Captain Hawkins said, finding the right chip of purple and dabbing it with cement. “She’s miserable. She didn’t really want to have that baby, because Hans was the father and wanted to pretend he wasn’t, and then it died. Now she hates everybody.”

“She doesn’t hate me!” MacDonald protested, then amended herself. “Not really, anyway. She hates the whole ship, I guess. She’s talking about jumping on Slowyear.”

“Yes,” the captain nodded, carefully setting his new star in place.

“And so am I,” she finished.

He looked up at her kindly. “Of course you are, Mercy. Did you want to ask for my blessing? You’ve got it. Betsy, too. There’s no future for you here.” He reached out and covered her hand with his lean, age-spotted one. “I’d do it myself,” he said, “if I were a little younger. If Maureen would agree. As it is, I don’t know if I’ll even go down.”

That startled her. Never before had the captain failed to touch the soil of a new planet. “But you have to!”

“Nonsense, Mercy. You don’t need me. You can handle all the bargaining yourself, and anyway I’m going to have to stay aboard.”

“You mean for the refueling,” Macdonald said, trying to understand. “But Horeger can take care of that—”

“Not just the refueling. Rebuilding.” He reached past her to the screen. “Look here, Mercy,” he ordered as the schematics of Nordvik appeared to replace the starfield. The whole ship was outlined skeletally there, mostly white lines but with some components in yellow and green and a few flashing red. “Look at the air system. It’s falling apart; we’re going to have to rebuild it if we can-or buy one on Slowyear, if they have anything we can use. And water regeneration’s almost as bad, and-well, Maureen tells me we’re almost out of fabrics for clothes and bedding; we’ll have to see what they can offer there, too. We need a lot of stuff. You’ll have to make some good deals for us, Mercy.”

“And if I can’t?”

He considered for a moment, studying the engineering reports. “You will,” he said. Then, wearily, he flicked the screen off. “You have to. Otherwise we don’t go anywhere from Slowyear.” He looked at her face and smiled comfortingly. “It won’t be so bad for you down there. They eat bugs on Slowyear, did you know that? Oh, they raise sheep and eat them, too, but the only native land life forms they can eat are arthropods. Although there’s a lot of native fish, or something like fish. They don’t seem to have any cows or pigs, by the way. Your frozen genetic materials ought to be worth something. . . . And the place has a lousy climate, and it’s a pretty backward world, I think, but you can make a life there, Mercy.”

She looked at him, suddenly apprehensive. True, she had been toying with the idea of jumping ship there in her own thoughts. . . . But that was when she had a choice. But if she didn’t? If Slowyear was going to be her last stop, ever? Make a life on a planet with a year nearly twenty years long? Bitter winters, burning summers, the only time the place would be bearable at all when freeze was melting toward burn, or sweat on its way down to chill. What kind of life would that be?

Or (the question came uninvited to her mind), for that matter, what kinf of life did she have now?

Chapter 4

What Blundy knew for sure as he headed toward Murra’s house was that Murra would be there waiting for him. She always was.

He had to look around and finally ask directions, though, because he not only couldn’t find Murra, he couldn’t even find their house.

Naturally she wasn’t in the house they’d shared all the mean, long winter just past. That place hadn’t even been a house at all, actually; it was a nasty, cramped three-room flat, not much worse than any other winter flat, but not much better, either. It had been in the winter city, dug into the caverns under the hill. No one would want to go back and live there again for many months now. Certainly not until summer drove them to it, maybe not until the next desolate winter came, when the babies born now would be getting close to puberty and just beginning to understand what they were in for when the cold came.

As it turned out, Murra wasn’t even in the house he’d left her in (that one hardly more than a tent), because while Blundy was out with the flocks the building boom had reached its peak. Most of the constructions of the year before, that winter ice had crushed and spring floods had washed away entirely, had now been replaced. Now they had a real house, he discovered. Murra had moved their things into it while he was out with the sheep. It was smallish but spanking new, all their own; and of course Murra was waiting in it for him, because she always was.

What she was waiting for was to be kissed. He obliged her, wondering why a kiss seemed so much like a political statement, but she had no such reservations. She pressed herself against him as they kissed, confident she was welcomed.

In a certain sense she was; Blundy could feel his body confirming it. Whatever Blundy’s thoughts felt about his wife, his body found her powerfully attractive. Murra was a handsome woman: tall, ten centimeters taller than Blundy himself. She was big-boned and not exactly pretty, but very close to beautiful. Murra had a kind of Oriental cast to her face, with long, black hair and blue eyes, and when she moved it was with studied grace.

More than any of that, she was Blundy’s. She proclaimed it in everything she did. She was totally supportive of him in everything he chose to do, and let that fact be known to everyone. She had a soft, cultivated, well-articulated voice; for Blundy it was her best feature, and the one that made her the exact right choice to appear in his vid productions.

All in all, she was ideal for him. He accepted that fact. It was an annoyance that he didn’t always enjoy it.

When they had finished their kiss she didn’t release him but comfortably and whispered the latest bits of news against his lips to bring him up to date. “They’re starting up the shuttles,” she told him. “Ten-month infant mortality figures are up a little-around eleven point three per cent-but that’s still in the normal range. I hope you like your new house; I only finished moving things in last week. And, oh, yes, the Fezguth-Mokorris have broken up, he’s taken up with some two-year-old and Miwa simply can’t stand it.”

She sounded proud. Blundy recognized the tone, because he knew what the pride came from. Both Kilowar Miwa Fezguth and Murra were among the few who could call themselves successful winter wives, the envied kind who had managed to keep their marriages going all through the cramped, everybody-in-everybody’s-pocket months and months of the interminable winter. But Murra’s pride was double now, because, of the two of them, it now transpired that only Murra had managed to stay married through the spring. “I feel so sorry for her,” she added generously, smug in her own security. “They say if you can make it as a winter wife you can make it forever, but I guess they showed that isn’t true for everybody. Just the lucky ones like us,” she finished with pride.

“Yes,” he said, separating himself from her at last.

She gazed at him fondly. “And do you like what I’ve done with your new house?”

“Of course. Are they all in working condition?” Blundy asked, and she looked puzzled until she realized he meant the shuttles.

“Oh, I think so. They’ve been kept in a good, sheltered valley ever since the last ship came. Of course, the ice covered them every year, but the roof held.” She smiled at him affectionately. “Don’t worry, they’ll be ready to go by the time the ship gets here. And it’ll be warmspring by then-a good time to come here, don’t you think? Are you going to write something about it?”

Since Blundy was used to his wife’s uncanny ability to read his mind-though he was certain he’d never said anything to her about his plans-he didn’t blink at that. “I’ve been thinking about it, yes.”

“I thought you might. Of course, you know best, dear, but isn’t that sort of depressing subject?”

“Tragic,” he corrected her. “That’s where real drama is, after all, and I’m tired of writing all this light stuff to keep people quiet during the winter.”

“I see. So you’ll want to go up to the ship right away, won’t you? Don’t deny it, dear; who knows you as well as I do? And of course you should.”

He didn’t deny it. He’d already decided to put his application in, and with his standing in the community there was every chance the governor’s council would approve it. He had even told Murra when he’d done it. What he hadn’t told her was who he proposed to take with him on that first mission to the starship, and so he was surprised when, without a break, she went on:

“And how was Petoyne?”

Blundy misunderstood her on purpose. “She’s fine. She got away with it again.”

“No, of course she got away with it,” Murra said, tolerant and sweet, and not in the least interested with the fact that once more Petoyne had escaped with her life, “or you would have said something right away. That’s not what I mean. I mean how was she in bed?”

He glared at her. “For God’s sake, Murra, she isn’t even one yet!”

“I know,” Murra agreed, her tone interested and a little amused. “Isn’t it funny how men always like the very young ones? Is it because they’re so skinny? Or so ignorant and unexperienced? Please don’t be embarrassed to talk about it with me, Blundy. I’ve never been jealous, have I? And you know we always tell each other things like that.” She smiled. “In pillow talk,” she added, “because, do you realize, you haven’t even looked at your new house yet? Not even at the new bed I just put in.” And he knew what to do then, and wondered when it had begun to be a chore.

There were times while they were making love when Blundy’s body managed to make Blundy’s mind forget the fact that Murra was really a royal pain in the ass. At those times he pretty much forgot to think about anything at all, because Murra in bed was not at all like the Murra who let herself be viewed as she sat, perfumed, enrobed and regal, in her reception room. In sexual intercourse she was wild. She screamed and scratched, and she writhed and squeezed; she was everything any man dreamed of in the arts of intercourse. None of it was inadvertent, either. That had been of the most disillusioning of Blundy’s slow discoveries about the woman he had married. It was all rehearsed. Murra made love by script, her skills quickly and thoroughly learned. “A lady in the drawing room, a harlot in bed,” she said of herself, in that pillow talk that meant so much to her, and she had herself perfectly right.

But then, when they had sufficiently worn each other out, she naturally had to spoil it all by talking.

“I wrote you a poem, my love,” she told him, serene again if sweaty. “Would you like to hear it?”

“Of course,” he of course said, but hardly listened as she pulled her notebook out of the nightstand and sat naked and crosslegged at the foot of the bed, reading. The poem was a typically long one. It had to do with ancient shepherds and the loving lasses they had left behind them, and it was full of graceful little turns of phrase and unexpected rhymes, but he didn’t really listen. He was studying her. He observed, as though for the first time, that his wife had a wide-browed face that tapered to the chin, with large, pale blue eyes and the kind of bobbed hair that is usually seen in pictures of medieval squires. She smiled a lot as she read-faintly, enigmatically, frequently. It occurred to Blundy that Murra’s smiles didn’t seem to be related to anything she found humorous, only to an inner confidence that whatever happened next was bound to be nice.

She didn’t ask him if he liked the poem when she was done, she only sat there, regarding him with that smiling self-confidence. So naturally he said, “It’s a fine poem, Murra. Your poems are always fine.”

She nodded graciously. “Thank you, Bludy, but what about you? Did you write anything while you were away?” That was the naked question he had known she would ask, so much an offense to hear. He shook his head. “Not even a political manifesto?” He shook his head again, resentfully now. Murra didn’t let that put her off. She laughed, the silvery, loving, forgiving laugh that he had heard so often. “Oh, Blundy, what am I going to do with you? You don’t write anything but puppet shows all winter because you need to be alone in order to do anything serious. Then you don’t write anything at all when you’re out in the boonies with all the room in the world because- Well, I don’t know what the because is there, do I? Maybe then you’re not alone enough out there, are you, with that pretty little Petoyne there to distract you?”

“Good night,” he said, and rolled over, and pretended to be asleep.

Murra was not deceived. She snuggled down next to him, rubbing the small of his back in the way that he liked, or had once told her he liked. She was thinking. Part of her thoughts were about the fact that he hadn’t really said anything specifically admiring about her poem, but what she was mostly thinking about was Petoyne.

Murra would not have described her feelings about Petoyne as jealousy. Murra never felt jealousy; she was far above that. She would have said she was simply surprised. What surprised her was that Blundy hadn’t become tired of the girl by now. After all, he’d seen a lot of little Petoyne all through the filming of Winter Wife, twenty long months from Freeze to New Year’s, a show every week for two hundred weeks. Petoyne hadn’t even reached puberty when they started taping; that had been the subject of one whole set of shows.

Of course, there hadn’t been anything sexual between Petoyne and Blundy then. That had happened later. Blundy had not confided a date to her, but, Murra conjectured, it had probably been about the time the month of New Year’s changed to Firstmelt, and with the first touch of coldspring the world began to look interesting again.

“Blundy?” she said softly, sweetly, inquiringly. He didn’t answer, but she knew he was awake. “Blundy, what I don’t understand is why she went out with you. A young girl like that, she should be doing her taxtime in town. What does she do about her schooling?”

“She studies in the camp,” Blundy said, without turning over.

“Yes, but she can get in trouble there, can’t she? I mean, this thing with the dog. It wasn’t her dog. It was just a sheepdog, and it was too old to be any good any more. Why didn’t she let them put the silly thing to sleep, the way they were supposed to?”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I guess when Petoyne loves something she hates to let go of it.”

“I see,” Murra said. “Yes, I see that.” And a moment later she heard Blundy’s regular breathing turn into a gentle snore as he really did go to sleep; but she lay awake for some time, thinking about that.

Although Murra was careful to preserved her public image of perfect, unstriving self-control, but she was not at all an idle person. On the contrary. Murra acted with great and speedy force when force was needed. She simply used her force in the most economical fashion, by pushing where whatever force opposed her was weakest.

In the present case, she was quite confident that that weakest point was young Petoyne herself, and so Murra made it her business to be at the sheep pens the next day, knowing that Petoyne would be working off another stretch of her taxtime there.

The sheep pens were not the sort of place Murra generally cared to visit. The place sounded and smelled and looked like what it was, a killing field, and when Murra arrived the processing of the flock for shearing and slaughter was already well under way. These particular herds were all meat animals, smaller and more active than the larger breeds kept for milk, and so their life expectancy was always short. They were milling restlessly in the pens as they waited their turns to be shorn before being slaughtered. Murra could hear the terrified bleating of the sheep as they filed into the shearing shed and, one by one, were each rudely caught and cropped by the shearers. Their wool flopped in great flat tangled mats to the floor, sometimes reddened with blood when the shearer’s giant scissors cut too close to the skin. Nude and yammering, the sheep then ran to the nearest exit, where they were sorted out-young ewes herded away to be preserved for the next lambing, the old ones and the young males on to the slaughterhouse itself.

That was where the bleating stopped forever. What remained of each animal was swiftly dealt with by men and women in bloody coveralls as the carcass was gutted, sectioned, cleaned, wrapped and sent on its way to the freezers against the next winter’s needs. It was all very quick: forty-five minutes, tops, from the first touch of the shears to the ice. The speed made it merciful, Murra thought, but it did not make it any less ugly to watch.

She looked around for Petoyne, and found the girl in the wool sheds, with a dozen others lugging the mats of raw wool to a flatbed trailer.

Petoyne looked up, sweaty and disgruntled, when Murra called her name. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

“You seem to be busy right now,” Murra smiled.

“Oh, is that the way it looks to you?” Petoyne nodded agreeably. “It looks that way to me, too. I’m supposed to be working now.”

Murra saw with satisfaction that the girl was trying to deal with her on her own terms. She had never doubted that her will would prevail over this presumptuous child, but now it was certain. “It’s really fine of you to be so sensible about it,” she said. “What I don’t see is why you can’t be so sensible about other things.”

“What particular other things?” Petoyne challenged.

“Why, your recklessness, of course. You really should stop getting in trouble. You’re going to be one soon, aren’t you?”

“Next month. The eleventh of Green.”

“And then you won’t be taking from the baby jar any more, will you?”

“Yes, everybody says that,” Petoyne agreed. “Is that what you came here to tell me?”

“Not exactly, no. I did want to talk about responsibility, though. Our responsibility to the world we live in. I’m sure you know how important Blundy’s plays are to the whole world-Blundy’s and mine, really. They aren’t just entertainments, you know. People rely on us. We help them keep their lives under control.”

She tried to decipher the girl’s bland expression, then nodded. “I know what you’re thinking, Petoyne. You think I’m not really that important to the plays, don’t you? You’re thinking that Blundy’s the one who counts and, after all, I’ll be nearly four next winter, and maybe a little elderly to still be playing in Blundy’s stories?” She nodded again, a friendly, understanding nod. “Yes, that’s what you’re thinking, all right. But the important thing here is what Blundy thinks, don’t you agree?”

Petoyne shrugged. Murra allowed her one of those silvery laughs. “Oh, don’t mind what I say, child,” she said good-naturedly. “I have this terrible habit of reading other people’s thoughts. Confess, I knew just what was on your mind.”

Petoyne turned to face her squarely. “What I was thinking was that I have to finish here, so I can go home and get cleaned up and hear Blundy in the stadium tonight. Aren’t you going?”

In surprise, “But, my dear, I can’t go to the stadium. I have to work. But I’ll hear all about it from Blundy himself. When he comes home. Because he always comes home, you know.”

It was true that Murra had to work out her labor tax. No one avoided that, because the community always had jobs that had to be done. What was also true was that being Murra-being Blundy’s Murra-she had almost the same privileges of picking and choosing as Blundy himself. She used her privileges a lot more freely than Blundy did, too. Of course, she wasn’t in politics, as he was, and so she could afford to be less concerned about seeming diligent.

These were the seasons of the long year when you needed privileges, too, if you wanted to avoid some such ghastly assignment as Petoyne’s, because there was a lot of hard and unpleasant work to be done after the winter. Construction, for instance. Everything that the kilometers-thick glaciers had planed into rubble had to be built over again; that was hard, physical work of the exact kind that Murra would never let herself be trapped into. The farms had to be plowed and seeded-just as laboriously; the fishing fleets had to be repaired, or more often replaced with new construction-even more laborious; the roads graded, the power lines restrung, even the sewers cleared and patched. In that sort of taxtime work people sweat a lot, and that did not suit Murra.

During the harshest, earliest month of Slowyear’s long vernal seasons she had made sure to get work in the hospital. At least you were always indoors there, besides which the work was not intellectually demanding and most of the time was even fairly easy. On the other hand, much of it was, by Murra’s standards, rather ignoble-she loathed the bedpans, and had been repelled by her first few weeks, when she had found herself committed to the obstetrical wards. Transfer to caring for the newborns was a slight improvement, though it involved crying babies and messy diapers. Then she had worked her way up to the large wards where the dying infants were kept. At least those brats were either comatose or heavily sedated, which came to the same thing, but overseeing a couple of hundred small kids in the process of dying was simply too depressing for Murra to put up with.

Then she got the job she wanted. A position came open in the utilities section. It was Murra’s kind of work-checking employment records for the people who did the physical work of keeping the solar-power plants running at maximum efficiency. She stayed away from the actual physical labor, of course. That kind of work was at least dirty, since you couldn’t stay neat when you were digging down to a leaking pipe in the underground clay beds that stored the summer’s heat to feed back to the city all winter long. Some of it was actively dangerous-maintaining the high-pressure storage tanks where the hydrogen fuel was kept after being electrolyzed out of glacier meltwater by the solar energy; there weren’t many accidents with the hydrogen, but when there was one people generally died. And all of it was hard-or at least, all of it but Murra’s own part, which was spent in the air-conditioned accounting office, with a pot of tea always beside her, safely away from the nastiness of the actual digging and repairing.

She even had a little vid screen of her own on her desk, and when Blundy gave his speech she naturally stopped work to watch. No one objected. Everyone she worked with knew very well how important she was to Blundy. Now and then some of her colleagues would even take time from their own work to drift to her desk and look over her shoulder at the screen. They were careful not to disturb her concentration, of course. If they spoke to her at all, it was only to say things like. “He’s in good form tonight,” or, “Blundy really ought to be on the council.” She didn’t even really hear such remarks. They were completely expected, and she acknowledged them only with an automatic nod or smile.

The burden of the speech, she heard, was a challenge to the council to make better plans for the future.

It was a pity that he hadn’t discussed it with her ahead of time, she thought regretfully; it wasn’t a very forceful issue. Still, he made it sound serious enough as he demanded that the pipes be laid farther underground, so that they might not freeze in the next cold, to find safer places for the fishing fleet-“to think ahead,” he cried, “so we don’t have to start from scratch every spring, so we can make things better each year instead of working as hard as we can just to stay even!”

Unfortunately, the audience seemed to share her opinions of the themes. Oh, they cheered him, all right, and he’d been given a really satisfactory turnout-the cameras showed that there had to be at least a couple of thousand people in the audience, with no doubt twenty or thirty times as many watching at home on their screens. But the same cameras showed that they weren’t all staying. All through his talk a few were getting up and leaving. Not many. Just a handful, now and then, and they were quite polite and quiet about it . . . but he was losing them.

And if the cameras saw that, Blundy would be seeing it too.

Murra sighed and resigned herself. He would not be in a good mood when he got home. So her primary job then would have to be reassurance. She would be supportive and complimentary rather than critical. The little notes she had made to pass on to him-his distracting little habit of scratching his nose every few minutes, her suggestion that he look directly into the camera more often, to allow for closeups-they would have to wait for another time.

All those burdens were easily borne. They were exactly the things that made her indispensable to Blundy. What was harder to bear was that, when the speech was over, not a single one of her office colleagues came over to congratulate her. It almost seemed as though they had been disappointed.

Blundy himself was, though. That was apparent from the fact that he wasn’t home when Murra got there. When he did show up, hours late, he shook his head at the dinner she had rushed to prepare for him. She smiled to show she didn’t mind. “I suppose you’ve been ruining your digestion with hawkerfood,” she said, her tone gently humorous to show that it wasn’t meant as a reproach, although it was.

He shrugged. “I was discussing the meeting with some people, it got late, I was hungry. Murra? Do you think I ought to hold off on any more meetings for a while?”

“Oh, no, my dear! Look at the way they applauded you!”

“But there wasn’t a single question about anything I said!” he complained, flinging himself onto a chair. “All they wanted to talk about was the ship-how I thought we should receive the people, how much we should tell them, what I thought we’d gain from their visit.”

She knelt beside him and said apologetically, “I’m afraid I didn’t hear any of the discussion period. They cut away right after your speech.”

“I wish I had!” He was silent for a moment. Then his hand reached out absently to stroke her head. “Well, what about it? Shouldn’t I give it up until this ship thing has come and gone? Some of my friends think so.”

Murra, who was quite sure which of his “friends” the advice was coming from, said only, “I think that must be your decision to make, my dear. Would you like to come to bed?”

He shook his head. She got up and kissed him good night, not failing to notice the faint echo of her own perfume on him.

That wasn’t unexpected. Murra didn’t comment. It was a fact, though, that although she had no intention of quarreling over Petoyne’s attempts to replace her in Blundy’s bed, she came very close to complaint when she discovered the girl had switched to wearing her own perfume.

This part of spring was a joyous time. Murra did her best to make it joyous for Blundy. As the days went on, though, it began to trouble her to observe how little time he chose to spend with her. He was always busy. Yes, she understood, Blundy needed to get away by himself from time to time-that was why she had not objected, or at least had not objected much, when he signed up to escort the flocks of pregnant ewes off to the grazing lands. (But how incongrous that Irakaho Blundy Spenotex should be a shepherd!) But that was then. This was now. She did her best to understand what it was that kept him away from her so much of the time (doing such strange and inferior things as helping inseminate the ewes and sod the bare lawns of the new houses-anybody could do them!)

It was not, of course, simply that she longed for his company. She wasn’t sure she did long for it very much, really. The certainty that he would always return to her was almost as good as his physical presence, and a lot less trouble. No, what Murra jealously wanted was the privilege of making sure that Blundy’s needs were met.

When she realized that what he needed most was simple-minded recreation, nothing that made demands on him, nothing that required thought, her task became simple.

She would arrange a dinner party.

Yes, a dinner party would please him. Her dinner parties always had. As soon as she had thought of it she wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before, and immediately began to plan.

The guest list was the most important part, of course. No more than six people: Blundy mustn’t be tired by the company. For the same reason, nobody serious. The party was to relax Blundy and give him pleasure, not to be work. The first couple she chose were Delyle and Kondi, a natural selection because they had appeared as young marrieds in Winter Wife. Although they hadn’t actually been married then, they’d got along with each other so well that now they were. More important, they’d got along with Blundy, too. And he liked Vennit and Ginga, too, who had the additional advantage that Ginga-Macklin Ginga Spenotex-was some sort of distant relative of Blundy’s. Besides, they both were outspokenly loyal to Blundy’s political ideals, though Murra doubted either of them knew just what they were. Finally she decided on her sister and her husband, though only if they were willing to leave the kids at home; she didn’t want Blundy to have to share his guests’ attention with children.

When she had finished her list she regarded it with satisfaction. All the guests she chose were young, attractive and as close as possible to brainless; and the list did not, of course, include Petoyne.

On the day of the party she sent Blundy about his business, without asking what that business was, and set off on an exhaustive study of the marketplace. The salad had to be the crispest, the yams the sweetest, the butter for her sauces the richest. She circled the stalls critically, looking for inspiration. She had already decided that the main dish would not be scoggers, because she had served them to Blundy too many times already in the recent past. Nor would it be anything that came from sheep, of which he had had plenty while out with the herd. She settled finally on a handsome, meter-long “fish”-they called it a salmon, though it did not resemble anything on Earth-which she steamed to a golden yellow, chilled and, that night, served with a rich sauce on a bed of greens, and was satisfied.

Almost satisfied. The food was first-rate, the guests were obligingly cheerful; and Blundy sat through it patiently. He praised the food, and carried on polite talk with the guests. But he was bored.

When Murra found out what Blundy was doing with his time she was mildly vexed.

He wasn’t secretly writing, as she had hoped. He wasn’t even meeting with his political allies, or even with Petoyne-not often, anyway. What the man was doing was taking flying lessons. Every day he was climbing the hill to the plateau people called the “spaceport”, where the shabby old shuttles were being checked and de-mothballed, and spending hour after hour sitting at the simulator controls, with an instruction program running on his screen.

When she laughed at him he didn’t get angry, only patient. “But how can you learn to operate a spaceship out of a training program?” she asked.

“How else? There’s nobody alive to teach me.”

“But, my dear, why should it be you to take such a risk?”

He thought it over carefully before he found the right answer. “Because I want to,” he said.

As the month of Thunder warmed into the month of Green Murra tried again and again to recapture his attention, or at least to entertain him. She didn’t nag her husband; that wasn’t her style. Murra’s style was to be forgiving, loving and never irritating-in fact, a perfect winter wife, even through coldspring and warmspring and right on through the year. She kept inventing pleasures for him-unfortunately, pleasures that he didn’t seem to want.

That didn’t keep Murra from going on with her project of devising entertainments for him. Some represented real sacrifices on her own part, as when she persuaded Blundy to a weekend’s rafting on Sometimes River, slowly dwindling down from its coldspring flooded size. That wasn’t a success for either of them. Murra managed to contain, or at least disguise, her own distaste for anything out of doors, but Blundy was not entertained. He did some mood-disguising of his own. He dutifully paddled the raft with her, shouting as loud as she when they were drenched in the rapids, smiled a lot, exclaimed appropriately at the pretty warmspring flowers that were beginning to carpet the canyonsides-and was bored again.

The sort of thing that would really give Blundy the pleasure and stimulation he needed had to be a mixture, she decided. Fun people to talk to (but not the sort of dolts she had invited for dinner), an interesting place to visit (but nothing that required too much exertion)-of course! She had it: a picnic up on the glaciers, perhaps at a place near where the shuttles were just now emerging from their winter shroud of ice.

Again she chose her guest list with the greatest care. Her first pick was Vorian, who was old but still spry, and was always willing to play chess with Blundy; besides, Vorian wouldn’t be with them much longer, she was pretty sure. Then Morney, who was still pretty in spite of the fact that she was nearly three; Blundy liked being around pretty women. Importantly, she was also quite securely married to Megrith, the family doctor, who was an asset to the picnic in his own way: he loved to cook outdoors. Finally, there were Vincor and Verla, Vincor because Blundy liked him and Verla because she was Murra’s sister. And this time they would be invited to bring their children. You couldn’t have children at a dinner party, but how could you have a picnic without them? They were good enough children, as children went; they were winter-born kids, old enough to be reasonably civilized. (And sister Verla, though a cheerful soul and always good company, was conspicuously plain.)

Of course, when Blundy was told about the picnic he got that cold and obstinate look of his. But then he always did. And he gave in in the end.

When Blundy found Petoyne to make his apologies she was working in the insemination pens. “I’m sorry, Petoyne,” Blundy told her, watching while she worked. “You know I wanted to spend your birthday with you, but I really can’t get out of this picnic. Maybe I can fix it so you could come along?”

She finished with the bleating ewe, spraddled on its back with all four of its legs tied in the air, and looked up at him. “Fat chance of that,” she said dispassionately. “Even if Murra would let me come I’d spoil the whole day for her. Not that I’d mind that so much. But she’d make it miserable for me, too. No,” she said, “I’ll spend my first birthday by myself. It’s all right. I’ll have others.”

She filled the syringe again with the mixture of sheep semen and distilled water and moved to the next writhing ewe. Blundy knotted his brows. “Why did you volunteer for insemination? You don’t have to do all this kind of scut work,” he protested.

“I have to pay my taxtime off, don’t I?”

“Well, sure.” They all had that problem-Petoyne, Murra, Blundy himself, everyone connected with Winter Wife; the show had been a great financial success, and their taxes were high. “But not this way, Petoyne. I’ll be going out with the herd again, after the ship lands. You could come with me again.”

“Oh,” she said, “I want to get it out of the way. I think I’m going to be want to stay in town when the ship’s here. You know. Just to see what they have to sell; and mostly, I guess, just to see the strangers.”

“That’s not my idea of fun,” Blundy said.

“Well, it’ll be interesting, anyway. You don’t get the chance to see that every day.” She finished with that ewe and moved to the next; it was almost the last. “Do you know what these people from the ship are like?” she asked.

“As much as you do, I guess. No more. They’re just traders, people in an old ship, trying to make a living going from planet to planet.” He thought for a moment, then added, “They’ll probably seem pretty strange. They’re old, you know. I don’t mean physically-I mean the time dilation-they travel pretty close to the speed of light, between stars, so time slows down for them. I’d bet that some of them were already born when the first colonists landed here.”

She nodded. It wasn’t anything she didn’t know for herself, but it needed repetition to make her believe that any living person could have been alive that long, long time ago, more than twenty-five of Slowyear’s very slow years. She sighed. “Poor people,” she said, finishing the last of the ewes. She patted the creature’s head, then sealed the bottle of semen for return to the freezer and sat down to wait until it was time to release the dozen bleating animals. “You’d think it would be more fun for them to do it the other way,” she said absently, watching them struggle against their bonds. “With a ram, I mean.”

“Then we couldn’t control the breeding. We get better lambs with artificial insemination,” he pointed out.

She nodded, then suddenly giggled. “You could do it this way with Murra,” she said, grinning up at him. “Then you could get a baby, and you wouldn’t have to touch her.”

Blundy cleared his throat uncomfortably. He hated it when Petoyne talked that way about Murra, almost as much as he hated it when Murra talked about Petoyne. All he said was, “What makes you think I want a baby?”

“Well, everybody does, don’t they?” she said reasonably. “I do. I’ll take my chances, some day. Maybe pretty soon, too,” she added, “because that’s the best time to do it, when you’re one.”

It was another allusion to her birthday, Blundy thought, the birthday that he would not be spending with her. The trouble was, birthdays were important. You didn’t have more than four or five of them in your life, and every one marked a real change. The first long year was for growing up. The second was when you finished your education and began to get your career and your family and your life together. In your third and fourth years you were as successful and able as you were ever going to be, because the fourth birthday was retirement time-if you lived to see it-and then you just went downhill until you died.

“I’ve got to get cleaned up and out of here,” Petoyne said. “And I guess you’ve got to get back to Murra.”

“Well, I promised—”

“Sure,” the girl said. “So long, Blundy. Have a nice picnic.”

And she put her face up to be kissed, just as though nothing had changed.

He gave it up. He kissed her. “Happy birthday tomorrow,” he said, turning to leave. He was a dozen paces away when he heard her call his name.

He turned to look at her. “Blundy?” she said. “I wanted to tell you- Well, if you did want to have a baby- Well, I’d be willing to have it for you.”

Blundy resisted going on the picnic again at the last minute, suddenly determined to spend Petoyne’s coming-of-age birthday with her after all. But it didn’t take Murra long to reason him out of disappointing the others, and at last he let Murra drag him along to the hills.

And when they got out of the borrowed cat-car in a pleasant glade he seemed resigned to going along with the picnic spirit. More than that, Murra thought; he seemed quite relaxed. Even happy. He sat on a blanket under the biggest tree they could find–no more than two meters tall, because of course it had only had coldspring to grow-and gazed out over the scene before them. Far below the Sometimes River had at last returned to within its banks. The floodplain all around was already planted, and the first crops well along-good crops they would be, too, because all that land was refreshed every years from the spring flooding, just as ancient Egypt had been before the building of the Aswan Dam. (Though neither Murra nor Blundy had any clear knowledge of the country of Egypt, much less of Aswan.)

The thing was that when at last he stirred himself he fled from the grownups Murra had selected with such care and romped up onto the glacier with the children. Murra gazed indulgently up at them, sliding around on the ice as they chased a little flock of pollies. “He’s so good with children,” she told Verla proudly-thoughtlessly, because then her sister had no more sense than to say:

“I’ve always thought Blundy would love having some of his own.”

“Oh, certainly he would,” Murra said, her lips smiling but her eyes suddenly cold. “But we can’t have everything we want, can we? You know how it is with Blundy and me. Can you imagine us with children? We do love them so, naturally we do, but you see that for us it would be quite impossible.”

Verla nodded, seeing-seeing mostly what Murra hadn’t said. She understood, out of her own experience, why any woman would hesitate to have a baby on Slowyear. They were unbearable in winter, when everyone was huddled together underground, and not much better in the hot summer, when most people were back in the buried city again. And even if you arranged to have the childbirth at the best possible time-right after New Year’s, say, when people were getting ready to emerge into the sunlight again, as she had with her younger child-there was the high risk of heartbreak, with infant mortality on Slowyear so frighteningly high. Verla had seen a dozen of her friends go through all the mess and misery of bearing a child, and watch it like a hawk for ten long months, knowing there were three chances in ten that it would sicken and die, swiftly and inevitably, before it could walk. She’d been lucky with her own . . . so far.

But others had not. Two of her own friends had lost babies just in the past five months since New Year’s, one of them twice. Verla didn’t say any of that to her sister. She turned to peer down into the crevasse, where the pumps were sucking the meltwater from around the hydrogen fuel complex. That would serve the shuttles, all three of them gleaming like beached whales on the flat plateau off to the west. She said, to the group at large, “It looks like everything will be ready in time for the ship.”

“In time for the ship, in time for the ship,” Megrith said, looking up from the fire he was starting in the grill. “That’s all you hear these days, what’s going to happen when the ship comes.”

Old Varion agreed. “But it’s exciting, Megrith,” he said. “You can’t blame people. It’s a good thing the ship’s coming in warmspring, too. There’ll plenty of time for the unloading before the worst of the summer.”

Megrith nodded. “The last one was bad, they say. You know, the one that came in, oh, eight years ago, was it? It came in winter, and they had a terrible time getting the shuttles ready to fly.”

“Before my time,” Varion cackled. At four and a bit, it pleased him to talk about things before his time. He craned his neck. “Isn’t Blundy ever coming down?” he complained. “I brought the chessboard.”

“Oh, leave him alone, Varion,” Verla said good-naturedly. “Can’t you see he’s having fun? Let him wear himself out with the kids-maybe he’ll wear them out, too, and then we can have a civilized lunch and talk.”

Her husband looked at her and cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to Blundy about something-and to you too, Murra.”

“Oh?” said Murra.

“I’ve just been wondering,” Vincor said apologetically. “I mean, Winter Wife was such a great success—”

“They’re going to rerun it, aren’t they?” Verla asked.

“Yes, so they say,” Murra agreed, looking at her brother-in-law. She was well aware that Vincor had always been a little envious of Blundy’s success-and hers, of course; the man wanted to be a director himself. Warily she asked, “What about it, Vincor?”

“Well, I had an idea. With a huge success like that, you might as well follow up on it. You know, in a few months it’ll be summer. . . .”

“Personally,” his wife put in, “I think summer’s as hard to get through as winter, though it’s shorter, of course.”

“So what would you think of a new one for the summer? I thought of a natural title. It tells the whole story: You could call the new series Summer Wife.”

Murra pursed her lips. They had obviously been planning this for some time. She didn’t blame her sister for being ambitious-didn’t blame anyone, as long as their ambitions didn’t conflict with her own, and there were advantages to working with your own family. “Summer Wife,” she said meditatively. “Now, that’s quite an idea, isn’t it?”

“Do you think Blundy would like to do it?” Vincor asked, the eagerness showing in his voice.

“Oh, heavens, Vincor,” Murra smiled, “you’d have to ask Blundy about that. I never interfere. When you’re married to a genius you have to learn to let the man do things his own way.” She spread her hands helplessly. Then she said, “Anyway, I think I’ll just go up and join them on the ice for a bit; it looks like so much fun.”

Before she reached the ice she had to dodge half a dozen screeching pollies, making their escape from Blundy and the little boys. Brightly colored-emerald green, scarlet, one or two patterned with diamonds and polkadots-the pollies weren’t dangerous, except to the bugs they fed on, but Murra disliked having them there: they were uncontrolled. Climbing up from the greensward onto the glacier itself was a very un-Murralike thing to do. It meant puffing and panting, and besides the grass turned into mud and the mud into slush before you were on solid ice. She was glad she’d worn old boots.

She was also glad she’d worn warm clothes, because it was cold up there. Not winter cold, of course; the sun was still hot. But the breeze was chilling. Besides, she could hear sounds of running water from underneath the ice, and now and then a sharp cracking sound, like a large stick snapping. Was this place really safe?

She paused and looked at Blundy and the two little boys, Petternel the sturdy fourteen-month-old, Porly the toddler. They hadn’t seen her yet. They had found a smooth place for sliding, and they were running toward it, then planting their feet and gliding along it, arms windwilling to keep their balance, shouting with pleasure, laughing when little Porly fell down anyway.

It was very good, Murra thought with satisfaction, to see her husband laughing like that again. The picnic had been an excellent idea. She glanced around. The world was a pretty sight from the ice sheet. She could see clear down to Sometimes River and to the dozen streams that fed it with meltwater, some of them crystal clear as the ice itself, some milky white with the powdered rock they had ground away in their course. It would have been even prettier if it were a photograph or a painting hanging in her drawing room, and a lot warmer, she thought, and for a moment wondered if she should try painting again. For a while in the early part of her second year Murra, before she turned to poetry, had thought she had a talent for art. But it had been a lot of hard work, with improvement coming very slowly; and anyway then she met Blundy and found a new career. As his leading lady, of course; there was always a part for her in everything Blundy wrote. More importantly, as his wife.

But a wife could also be a mother to children.

Verla had put that unwelcome idea in her mind, not for the first time. It wasn’t a prospect Murra could look forward to: four long months of pregnancy, with your belly swelling and your grace of movement stolen away. Then the pain of parturition. Then the other pain if the baby died.

She shuddered. The trouble was that time was running fast on Murra’s biological clock. Your second year was when you had your children if you were intelligent about it, and it was an unfortunate fact that Murra’s second year was some time past.

But did she really want to have physical children? Squalling, messy ones? Wasn’t it better to have mind-children? Her poems, for instance; weren’t those as valuable as babies?

But there too the clock was running for Murra. If anyone was ever going to be a poet-a real poet, a poet whose work would be admired and cherished by many others than the poet’s own husband-this was the time to do that, too, wasn’t it?

She turned around, startled. Blundy was approaching with the boys, one on either hand. Grinning, Blundy asked, “Time for lunch yet? I hope Verla brought along dry socks for the kids.”

“I’m sure she did,” Murra said, and waited for Blundy to drop the children’s hands so he could help her down the slippery ice, back to where Megrith had put the chops on the grill and old Varion was gazing wistfully at the spring-he would not likely see another. Concentrating on her footing, Murra had forgotten about the little boys behind them until she heard her sister scream the toddler’s name.

They turned. Little Porly was spread-eagled on the ice, with his brother fearfully tugging at him.

“He just fell,” Petternel moaned, “but he won’t get up.”

Then all the adults were racing up the slope, Verla in the lead, Megrith close behind her-transformed instantly from cook to doctor. By the time Murra got to them they had all surrounded the child and Megrith had the boy’s head on his crouching knee, lifting an eyelid to peer at the eye. Verla was sobbing and Blundy was swearing to himself.

Then the little boy opened the other eye and, struggling to get up, began to cry.

Megrith gave a little laugh. “He’s all right, Verla. He just fell and it knocked the wind out of him. But now his clothes are all wet . . . and, oh, hell, can’t you smell the chops? They’ll be burned black if I don’t get back to them!”

The chops, really, were quite all right, and so was the salad and old Varion, sampling the bottle of wine he had opened, pronounced it first-rate. So the picnic was a success after all, though Verla was still shaken.

When they had settled down after the meal Murra sat next to her husband, watching the others clean up. Lowering her voice, she said, “Oh, Blundy, Vincor had an idea he wanted to talk over with you. Summer Wife. A new series for the hot time; what do you think?”

Blundy pursed his lips. Then he shrugged. But he hadn’t said no. “Of course,” she went on, “we wouldn’t have to have the same cast, exactly, I mean if you think it’s worth doing at all. For instance, maybe I’m getting a little too, well, mature for the wife’s part—”

And waited for him to say, “That’s ridiculous. I wouldn’t do anything like that without you, you know that,” and found the day quite spoiled for her when he didn’t.

Chapter 5

Mercy MacDonald was nothing if not fair, so fair that she even gave Deputy Captain Hans Horeger credited when he had earned it-even him. As a human being he was scum and nothing would change her mind about that. Still, she admitted to herself that he was a first-class ship handler. The way he eased Nordvik into its capture orbit around Slowyear was optimal. Nothing shuddered or jerked. The thrust just dwindled, and dwindled more, until they were there.

It was the slowest part of the long journey. MacDonald spent it lying in her bed, trying to make herself sleep. She failed. There were too many thoughts and memories and sudden starts of apprehension to wake her right up again every time she came close. They had to do with the decision she would have to make (jump ship or stay?), with the barren wasteland that was her life up to this moment (tedium punctuated with blazing flareups of anger-at, for instance, Hans Horeger) and, most of all, with the worry about what these Slowyear people were going to be like. Would they be friendly? Even welcoming? Would they at least not be unkind?

There were things she had learned about them which were, to say the least, not reassuring. For instance, their criminal law. What kind of human beings punished every infraction of the law with the chance of instant death? What people would simply cut themselves off from communication-however tenuous or difficult, or even pointless-with the rest of the galaxy?

For that matter, what kind of people could go on living in so mean an environment? (And could she herself possibly live as one of them?)

Then the last little gentle nudge of thrust was gone. They had arrived.

It was a critical moment, a moment to reflect, a transitional moment. But there wasn’t much chance for reflection. What there was was pandemonium. With Nordvik at relative rest, nothing weighed anything any more and everybody was scurrying around the ship chasing the floating pens, dishes, books, keys-chasing down and capturing the thousand little items that somebody should have secured, but hadn’t. They should have remembered what zero thrust was like, of course, but years made you forget even that. What Mercy MacDonald had forgotten was to put the lid on a jar of hard candies. She’d taken them out to have one to suck as a prophylactic against no-weight nausea. Then the whole jarful had followed her out the door and halfway down the hall, bright little balls of colored sugar that were sure to raise hell with the air pumps or the light fixtures if she didn’t track them down.

So in that very significant moment all she was seeing of the planet they had come to visit was a quick glimpse out of the corner of her eye now and then.

In fact, it didn’t look like anything special anyway. It looked a lot like every other habitable planet in the universe, naturally enough. Blue sky, white cloud, dappled land, bright blue seas-that was pretty much what a planet had to look like, if any human being was going to be able to spend much time there. And when she finally got the last peppermint-green candy back in the jar and the lid on tight this time, when she finally was able to race down to the lock room, it didn’t look much different even in the big screen.

Except for one thing. It was hard to get a good look at the screen. There was too much in the way. Every one of the fifty-six people of Nordvik had huddled there, floating every which way in a thicket of arms and legs and torsos in the microgravity. Still, MacDonald saw the one thing that was different at once. Something new was in the picture. Coming up toward them out of the rim of the planet’s dark side was a tiny diamond-bright point of intense white light.

A shuttle was already rising from the planet.

“I told you they’d be eager,” Hans Horeger said happily. “See that? They couldn’t even wait for us to come down in our own shuttle. They had to launch their own shuttle right away.” But then, out of loyalty to the ship, he added, “I’ll bet it’s a piece of junk, though. A place like this, hardly sees a ship every fifty years. We don’t want to depend on them.” He peered around the crowded lock room for the engineering officer, pushing stray limbs out of his way. “Dave? Is our own shuttle ready?”

It was, of course, and Horeger had known all along that it was, because he’d been driving the poor engineers crazy for a month, testing every circuit to make sure no part of the shuttle had broken or rotted away since the last time they’d used it.

Horeger’s wife, hanging to her husband’s shoulder for a better look, said disgustedly, “That’s pretty ancient, Hans.”

He frowned. “It’s bigger than I expected, though. And they’re really pouring on the power.”

His wife turned her look of disgust to him. “There you go again, worrying,” she scolded. “What does it matter if it’s big? The important thing is it’s old. It’s a fossil. I bet no one’s visited this place in a good long time.”

Old Captain Hawkins cleared his throat. From the wall-hold where he was hanging, he said mildly, “We don’t know that. All we know is that nobody’s come back from it for a long time.” But no one listened. No one listened because they couldn’t; his deputy had quelled his wife and begun to shout to everyone in general. “All of you,” he cried, “pay attention! Quiet down! Do you all remember what your orders are? Nobody goes down to the surface of the planet without my permission! No one’s allowed into their shuttle unless I order you there. And when Nordvik leaves for its next port of call, no one’s going to stay behind unless I say you can-and I won’t. Do you all understand that?”

He raked his crew with his eyes, one by one, craning and twisting to make each eye contact. Satisfied, or as satisfied as Hans Horeger ever got, he finished, “And if any of you forget what I’m saying, I promise you I’ll make you regret it.”

But MacDonald noticed that he didn’t say how.

Nordvik was a hundred times the size of the shuttle, but they could feel the whole vast starship shuddering as the Slowyear shuttle nuzzled in. Then there were long seconds of squeaking and rasping while the shuttle’s portal seals felt the outlines of Nordvik’s, and slowly adjusted themselves to fit.

Then the lock opened.

Nordvik’s whole crew moved forward as one as the shuttle people pulled themselves in, hand over hand. Through the tangled crowd MacDonald could see clearly enough that they were carrying no weapons. There were only three of them. One was a slim young girl who held a briefcase, the second a tall, lean man who had nothing at all in his hands, the third a squat, good-looking one who held only a flower. The man with the flower peered in, at and around the various faces, in all their angles of presentation, taking his time. Then he settled on Mercy MacDonald. He grinned at her and handed her the flower. “My name’s Blundy. Welcome to Slowyear,” he said.

The young girl gave him a quick, angry look, then turned it on MacDonald. “Are you the governor?” she demanded.

Her accent was odd, but MacDonald understood her easily enough. “We don’t have a governor. I guess you mean the captain. That’s him over there on the wall,” she said, pointing-to the real captain, of course.

“But I’m his executive, so I’m the one you have to talk to,” Horeger said quickly. And belatedly added, “Uh, welcome to Interstellar Ship Nordvik.”

The girl bent to her briefcase and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers. The man named Blundy still had his eyes appreciatively on Mercy MacDonald. She stared right back. He was, she thought, the smallest person present-well, the shortest, anyway (though even that was hard to be sure of, with everyone floating in odd directions). There was nothing small about his body, especially the thick muscles in his bare forearms. And his eyes did not leave Mercy MacDonald.

He was interested, she thought, liking the fact that he was showing interest, even liking the feelings inside her that came from enjoying it. She was sorry when he turned his gaze to Hans Horeger. “The kind of thing we want-“ he began.

“Visas first, Blundy,” the girl interrupted. “I’ve got my orders.”

“Sure, Petoyne,” the man said indulgently, “but they don’t have to have visas until they come down, do they?”

“They’re all probably going to want to, won’t they? So they have to fill out the forms.” She cleared her throat and addressed the group: “On behalf of the governor general, I welcome you all to Slowyear—”

“I already said that, Petoyne,” said Blundy.

“I’m saying it officially. -And ask that you fill out these forms and sign them. Then we can get on with the business we’re all really interested in. Each of you take one, please-have you all got pencils? Well, get some, will you?”

While someone was hurrying away to find things to write with, MacDonald took her eyes off the squat man long enough to read one of the forms. The people of this backwater planet didn’t seem to have much regular use for such things, she saw, because these were just photocopied printouts, headed “Planet of Slowyear, Department of Trade and Immigration,” with the impromptu look of something somebody had remembered to whomp up at the last minute before Nordvik arrived. There was an awful lot of tiny type. When she signed that form she would be relinquishing any claim for liability for almost any kind of ill that might befall her on the surface of the planet or on the way to it-from mechanical failure of the planet’s ancient shuttles or their own; from navigation errors; from disease or attack by animals . . . but there weren’t any dangerous animals on Slowyear, Mercy MacDonald knew very well; they must have copied the thing out of an old lawbook. Really, it amused her. She looked up at the girl named Petoyne. “I didn’t know you had lawyers on Slowyear,” she said.

The Slowyear girl gave her an impatient look. “Did you sign it? All right, you’ve got your visa. Next!”

And the man named Blundy was saying, “Who’s in charge of selling stuff?”

MacDonald raised her hand. “I am. Mercy MacDonald. Purser.”

He looked at her again. “That’s nice,” he said, approving. “Then let’s find some place where we can go, Mercy MacDonald, so we can talk business.”

Business was business, and this Blundy man didn’t waste much time getting down to it. He perched companionably next to her at her display screen, one hand lightly holding her shoulder, and frowned at the readout. No seeds, ova or sperm right now, he said; not on this first trip. “We came up light so we could carry a max load back, so there’s no refrigeration on board this time.” No living plants right now, either, not until that other man, whose name was Gowen, finished checking them. “He’s our health officer,” Blundy explained. “He’ll stay on board until he quick-cultures everything-so you won’t bring anything nasty down with you, you know.”

“He’s going to check everything? Even us?”

Blundy looked surprised. “Hasn’t he done you yet? No, of course not; well, give him a drop of blood as soon as you can. You’re coming on the first trip, of course.”

“I am?”

Blundy grinned at her. “Of course you are-I’m glad to say. We’ll only take two of you this time-to have as much cargo mass as possible, you see-and that deputy captain of yours insists on being one of them. So you’re the other.”

MacDonald just smiled at that, not having made her own mind up yet-though actually there wasn’t any real doubt about it-and he got back to business. Scrimshaw? Sure. A lot of people would like that sort of stuff, he conceded, though only heaven knew why. Books? Certainly; and music and dramas and dance recitals, too, why not.

But the big thing, he told her, was datastores. “Science, history, medicine-especially medicine; we’ll buy copies of everything you’ve got about medicine or biochemistry. Diagnosis, therapies, pharmaceuticals, surgical procedures-you name it, we’ll buy it. Can you get all that in the first load? I assume all this stuff is electronic, so it won’t mass much- Fine! Now, what are these Hades artifacts I see on the list?”

He kept her jumping, but it wasn’t all business. She could see that. She didn’t miss the way he was looking at her, even when what he was talking about was merchandise. It was exciting.

It gave her pleasure. The excitement was good for her. She could feel it in her groin, an almost sexual tingling-no, she corrected herself fairly, not “almost” at all. It was defnitely sexual, all right. And Blundy’s interest in her was not just for generic sex, as it always was with dirty Hans Horeger, because when she took the stranger to see Betsy arap Dee she observed carefully that, although he gave Betsy a thoroughly assessing look, his eyes returned to MacDonald herself.

Betsy, of course, assessed him right back. It didn’t seem to be serious, though, because the other stranger, Gowen, had obviously already taken a lien on Betsy’s interest when he took her blood sample. The four of them went over Betsy’s datastores rapidly, and before they were halfway through MacDonald made a surprising discovery.

The surprise was that Betsy wasn’t moping. More than that, for the first time since the death of her baby, Betsy looked not only alert but actually happy. There was no other word for it. Her face was flushed and her eyes sparkled; she smiled; she even laughed out loud.

Then MacDonald made the even more surprising discovery that she was quite happy too. She was eager to board the shuttle and find out what this forbidding, but also intriguing, new planet had to offer her.

Of course, that was the point at which Hans Horeger came bustling into the datastore room, radiating officious authority and orders. MacDonald didn’t let even that puncture her mood. She let him strut for a few minutes. Then, “Come on, Hans,” she said, pulling him by the sleeve as she invented an errand to get him away from Betsy and the new man-realizing with astonishment that it was the first time in a good long while that she had deliberately invited Horeger to do anything with her-“come on, help me pick out the first load of scrimshaw and start loading the shuttle.”

That kept them both busy for half an hour. Then, with the selections made, she left Horeger to round up a loading crew, shouting more orders that no one either heeded or needed, and she went looking for the “health officer”.

He wasn’t in the datastore room, wasn’t even with Betsy arap Dee, who was back in her own room dreamily changing into more interesting clothes. MacDonald finally found all three of the Slowyear people together, hanging onto wall holds and talking quietly together. For a moment she thought they might not want to be interrupted, but as soon as Blundy caught sight of her he beckoned her over.

“I thought you could take my blood sample now,” she explained to Gowen, holding out her wrist. The girl, Petoyne, sniffed at that, but Gowen immediately dug into his pouch and pulled out a tiny syringe. It didn’t hurt. It only took a second-long enough to pull a thin streak of red into an ampoule-but also long enough for Petoyne to turn away in a marked manner and leave.

“Gowen’ll put your sample in a culture box,” Blundy explained. “By the time we land we’ll know for sure if you have to go into quarantine or anything. But you look pretty healthy to me.”

She smiled back at him, but said, “Are you sure I should go on the first trip? That girl didn’t look as though she wanted me to.”

“Oh,” he said dismissively, “Petoyne. Don’t worry about Petoyne. Pack a bag, and don’t be too long, please-you don’t want to miss the flight!”

She didn’t, though. Didn’t pack just one bag; at least, did pack one, and then bit her thumb for a moment, and went on to pack a second, and a third, until everything she really wanted to preserve of all her life to date was packed.

It took up more space in the shuttle than she had planned, but Blundy only grinned and, although Hans Horeger certainly saw it and was not pleased at all, his wife, who was complaining about being left on the ship, was a more immediate problem for him. And then they were inside, and the hatches were closed, and they were on their way.

Chapter 6

Not even Murra stayed home on the day the first shuttle came back from the ship. She dressed herself in her prettiest robes and perfumed herself with an extra bit of her special (if no longer unique) essence, since she would be outdoors. Before leaving the house she studied herself in the mirror for several minutes. Then, regretfully, she took off the pretty bugsilk slippers that became her feet so well and replaced them with sheepskin half-boots. The boots were beautifully ornamented of course, but so rugged. She didn’t have any choice about that. Practicality had to triumph over looks because, even though warmspring had begun to dry out the landscape, there would surely be mud and puddles near the landing strip.

There were. She was lucky enough to get a ride up the slope on a flatbed. Although it was packed she wasn’t refused, since everyone was kind enough to make room for Blundy’s Murra. The landing strip was on the far side of the pass, five kilometers of meadow bulldozed flat, and at least five thousand other people had already gathered there. Scores of armbanded marshals were herding them behind a roped line away from the stirp itself, but even the marshals were looking up half the time in the hope of catching a glimpse of the shuttle through the clouds. Heaven knew how many thousand others were up in the hills, watching with binoculars or simply their unaided eyes. Everybody was bouncing with anticipation. Children ran and shouted. Vendors were all through the crowd, selling cold drinks and sandwiches.

There was a scream from the sky. Five thousand heads jerked back, and voices began to shout: “I see it. There it is! It’s coming!”

Then, squinting, Murra saw it too-first the thread-thin snowy plume that followed the shuttle, then the glint of the spacecraft itself. It was high overhead, passing beyond them to the east, then banking sharply and turning back.

When at last it landed Murra thought she had never seen anything moving so fast-as indeed she hadn’t; it was going a good hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, even with its flaps and airbrakes extended. But it settled on the strip cleverly enough, though sudden spurts of smoke and dust puffed up as its tires touched. It rolled away, long away-far down the strip, until it was only a toylike thing.

Then the marshals gave up trying to keep order. The crowds burst through, running toward the shuttle. At the end of the strip a waiting tractor backed itself into position to snag the towring in the shuttle’s nose and begin to drag it back toward the sheds.

Murra spared herself that silly scramble. She knew perfectly well that it would be nearly half an hour before the shuttle was in position and had cooled off enough for the hatches to be opened. She waited. She planted herself where the movable stairs were ready to be rolled into position, bought an ice for a vendor-who almost forgot to take her money, she was so intent on staring down the runway-and allowed the whole procession to come to her. When everybody had come drifting back, pacing the slowly dragged shuttle itself, Murra was in the front row, neatly finishing the last of her ice.

Even then, even there, nearly everybody recognized Murra. While they waited for the shuttle to finish its cooling process, crackling and pinging alarmingly as it did, people took time to smile at her, and nod. She accepted their attention as graciously as always. It didn’t particularly please her; it simply would have puzzled her if it had been withheld. When at last the handlers pushed the rolling stairs to the hatch and it opened Murra did not join in the cheering. She was there, though. She was right there to see Blundy and Petoyne appear in the doorway with a couple of strangers, strutty little man and dark, middle-aged woman; and she only had to see the woman once to see what she saw. As soon as they came down she was right at the foot of the stairs, gracefully moving up between the woman and Blundy to kiss him. “I’m so glad to have you back, my very dearest,” she said, marking out her claim, “and I hope you’ve remembered to invite your friends to dine with us tomorrow night. Her too,” she said, gazing benignly at Petoyne.

Murra saw rather little of her husband that day, or at least not at close range. He was frequently on the news screen, of course: taking the visitors to see the governor, showing the visitors around the summer city, standing with the visitors as they were welcomed, and welcomed, and welcomed. No, actually she saw quite a lot of Blundy that day, and it pleased her that she saw him as she did because so did everyone else on Slowyear.

It was less pleasing, though, because it was never Blundy alone she saw on the screen but always Blundy plus that foolish little Petoyne, and Blundy with that rather unattractive starship woman who would, Murra was resignedly certain, be the next Petoyne in Blundy’s life . . . for a time.

By the time Blundy got home that night he was too tired to talk, or said he was. She had expected as much. Anyway, as she certainly had expected, he slept that night where he belonged, next to her side. He didn’t talk in the morning, either, because as soon as he was awake he was out, muttering excuses, no time, so much to do; but that was all right, too, because the dinner was a fixture for that night.

In a whole marriage’s worth of arranging pleasing dinners for Blundy she was determined this would be the grandest and best. Everything would have to be perfect; so to beging with Murra called in the cleaners as soon as he was out of the house, and informed her cooker that he would be needed by noon at the latest to start preparing the meal. Then, content that that much was well in hand, she allowed herself to go shopping.

The shopping was for food, she told herself. But although there were plenty of food stores nearer than the central marketplace, that was where she went. That was where everyone else went, too, because the second shuttle, this one the starship’s own, had landed at daybreak, and the people from the ship were already setting up their displays.

Of course, there weren’t any actual goods there; those were already in the sheds by the landing strip. What the ship people had were a dozen or so video displays to show the catalogue of their wares. One screen was showing a succession of industrial-looking machines, another household appliances, a third plants of many kinds, from tiny baby’s-breath blossoms to giant redwoods, a fourth animals. It was hard to see individuals in the press around the displays, but a short, sallow man stranger at one of the booths came forward to greet her. “Mrs., ah, Blundy, isn’t it?” he asked, and she recognized the man she had invited to dinner.

“Actually my name is Murra. I’m afraid I didn’t catch yours?”

“Hans Horeger,” the man said promptly, holding out his hand. “I’m executive officer and deputy captain-acting captain, really,” he said, with a deprecating shrug, “because old Hawkins is really pretty much past it.”

“I’m honored,” Murra said gravely. “And please do be sure to come tonight, and bring your charming friend—”

“You mean Mercy Macdonald, I suppose,” Horeger said. Murra was aware of his eyes on her, missing nothing. His study of her was discreet, which she appreciated, but also quite admiring, which she appreciated even more. “Oh, would you call her charming? I guess so, in her way-but of course next to someone like you—”

She gave him her prettiest smile. “I don’t see her here,” she remarked, looking around.

The man looked around too. “No, I guess she’s not back yet. She and your husband had to go to the sheds to look at some samples.”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I rather thought they would.”

Blundy and herself, the two from the starship, Petoyne-there had to be one more, a male, to make an even number. Since the extra male would be more or less Petoyne’s escort, he needn’t be particularly attractive. Murra thought for a moment, then smiled and picked up the phone. It was answered at once. “Vorian? I know how much you wanted to meet the people from the starship. Well, if you’re free for dinner this evening—”

Of course he was. That settled, Murra gave orders and watched until she was sure the cleaner and the cooker were well started on them. Normally Murra didn’t care for hired servers. But they were absolutely necessary this night, for there would be no spending time in the kitchen for the hostess. When she was convinced they were properly doing the gruntwork they were hired for, Murra began doing the things she alone could do. She arranged the flowers she had bought prettily around the room. Then music: She selected tapes of unobtrusive strings and flutes to play in the background. Then she programmed the big wall screen with suitable background images, mostly a series of still shots from Winter Wife and other productions she and Blundy had done together, with of course the most flattering shots of herself featured. She worked as hard as the hired help, because it all had to be perfect. . . .

It was perfect, too. She was sure of that before the first guest arrived. Yet when Mercy Macdonald showed up Murra had a quick moment of doubt. The woman had managed to get herself rested and cleaned up, and she did not look quite so middle-aged any more. Indeed, Murra thought justly, she looked no older than herself. She greeted the woman with a hands-on-the-shoulder almost hug, and gave the air by her ear an almost kiss. “We’re so grateful you took the time to come, my dear,” she said, sweetly and intimately, as though they had been long-lost sisters, tragically separated somehow but still, somehow, bonded for life. “Oh, what’s this? You shouldn’t have.” For the woman was handing her something soft wrapped in an even softer fabric. Was it bugsilk? No, Murra realized, it had to be real silk! From old Earth! It was a pity that it was patterned with those quite hideous flowers, but still. One day, Murra thought-but not a very near day, not until the woman who had given it to her was no longer around-that wrapping could become a pretty scarf, or something attractively unusual to throw over the back of a chair.

When she unwrapped it and saw what the wrapping contained she said warmly, “Why, it’s really beautiful,” trying not to laugh, but all the same making sure Blundy saw with what effort she was politely not laughing. The gift inside was-imagine!-a stiff piece of some coarse fabric sewn with wool lettering. Greetings from space, it said, in strident green, blue and purple.

“It’s a sampler. People on Earth used to make them to hang up in their living rooms,” Mercy Macdonald explained. “I didn’t know if you’d like it-we call this sort of thing scrimshaw. People on other planets like to have these things, for souvenirs of our visit.”

“It’s stunning,” Murra said, knowing that Blundy would understand she thought it hideous; and just because she thought it so hideous she insisted that Blundy put it up at once on the wall over the couch in the living room.

“Can’t I help?” the man from the ship asked politely.

“Of course not, Captain Horeger,” Murra said warmly, consciously flattering him by upgrading his title. “You’re a guest.”

“Oh, please, call me Hans,” he said, looking at her with admiration, and not bothering to mention the fact that Mercy Macdonald, who was also a guest, was already standing to help Blundy with the hanging.

“Hans, then,” she said, saying it in a way that conveyed appreciation of the name, and also of the man who owned it. “Please, just sit down and make yourself comfortable. Let me get you some wine? It’s summer wine from last year. That’s when the grapes are best, just when everything starts to get too hot to grow.” And smiled at him while she was pouring, but did not fail to see, out of the corner of her eye, Mercy Macdonald handing the sampler up to Blundy, and their hands touching.

Although there were only six at dinner it wasn’t quite as intimate as Murra had intended. Though only the six of them sat down to eat, Rosha, the cleaner, had stayed on to serve and Grannis, the cooker, insisted on carrying some of the dishes in himself, thrilled to be so close to the visitors; and both of them felt quite free to take part in the conversation.

Murra made sure there was plenty of conversation, careful to guide it to new areas whenever it showed signs of slowing (after all, Murra’s dinners were not about food, they were about talk). But it didn’t need much guiding. There was plenty to talk about. The visitors had so much to learn about Slowyear, and the locals were delighted to tell them. About Slowyear’s seasons: “Well, yes, we have a very long year,” Blundy was telling Mercy MacDonald, “so we divide it into six principal seasons-coldspring, warmspring, summer, hotfall, coldfall and, of course, winter.”

Petoyne made a face. “Winter’s the worst,” she said, looking at Mercy MacDonald in a very wintery way.

“Not for me,” Rosha disagreed. He leaned past Murra to set down the soup tureen. “Wow, that was heavy,” he informed them all. “The way I look at it, when it’s winter at least you can dress warm and go out for a little while if you want to, but there’s nowhere to go in summer. Unless you’re rich. How’s the soup?”

“Fine,” Blundy said, just as though it were a reasonable question for a server to ask.

“Good, I’ll tell Grannis,” he said, and reluctantly left the room.

Murra smiled after him, just as though she meant it. “As a matter of fact,” she told her guests, “Blundy and I do go to one of the polar places sometimes in the summer.” Then she saw the look on Blundy’s face. “But not this one, I think,” she said.

Blundy picked up the conversation where it had been interrupted. “So altogether we have a hundred months, each one about seventy days long-there are holidays now and then to make it come out even with the year. Right now we’re in Green, coming up on Flower. The whole countryside gets really pretty in Flower; you’d like it.”

“I was born in Flower,” Vorian contributed. “That isn’t a good time, though. I was just beginning to get big enough to be really active when summer came along. My mother told me she had the devil of a time keeping me indoors from Fry to Sweat.”

“And I was born on the sixty-seventh of Shiver-that’s the first month of winter,” Murra added, “and Blundy’s birthday is the forty-fifth of Christmas, while Petoyne here has just had her very first birthday. The 11th of Green, wasn’t it, dear?”

Petoyne looked down at her food without answering. Blundy took up the thread. “So I’m two and seventeen months,” he told the company. “That would be about thirty-five of your years, Mercy. And, let’s see, Murra’s now—”

Murra was already overriding his voice. To the deputy captain: “Are you really enjoying your soup?”

“It’s delicious,” Horeger responded gallantly. “What is it?”

Petoyne giggled. “You don’t want to know. What do you eat on the ship?”

“Nothing as good as this,” Horeger said at once, and gave Murra a complimentary smile. She smiled back, comfortably aware that the main appreciation in his eyes was not for the food but for herself. That was a situation familiar to Murra, and always welcome. There was no doubt in her mind that this Hans Horeger person would sooner or later do his best to get her alone, and from there to a bed. She didn’t mind that. She looked forward to it, in fact. She also, however, knew that she definitely would not let it go that far, not ever. The self-indulgece of actually sleeping with any of the men who had made it clear she was invited would cost too much. As a minimum, it would mean the sacrificing of a grievance: she wouldn’t be unselfishly tolerating Blundy’s adulteries any more. Simply knowing that she could easily be bedded by Horeger was almost as good as doing it, and a lot less trouble in the long run.

When the scoggers were served, and each of the guests from the spaceship had sampled them with enjoyment, Petoyne spoke up. “They’re bugs, you know,” she said, avoiding Murra’s quick, vexed look. “The soup was made out of their shells, now this is the meat.”

Horeger stopped with a fork almost at his lips. “Bugs?”

Blundy took over, explaining that Slowyear’s native fauna were seldom vertebrate, not counting the flying “pollies”, and never mammalian. The largest life forms the original settlers found were arthropods, vaguely like terrestrial insects, with an insectoid egg-pupa-winged life cycle. “You won’t see them now-they’re only out at night-but they’re around,” he told the visitors. “Then when the dry season starts they burrow into the ground and cocoon up. In hotfall they come out when the rains start. By then they’re big winged things the size of my fist; they fly, eat, mate, lay eggs and die. Then the eggs hatch and over the winter the pupae grow underground. We use dogs to dig them up in the winter, before they hatch come out by themselves; this time of year we can catch them on the surface, if we’re good at it.”

“These are fresh,” Murra said, proudly careful to refrain from displaying the pride she felt in the meal she had set before her guests-after all, not every hostess could provide out-of-season delicacies on short notice. “Hunters brought them back this morning.”

“They do taste good,” Horeger said, doubtful but game.

Mercy MacDonald said, “Oh, God, Hans, why shouldn’t they? After all, back on Earth we used to eat lobsters. We’d eat them on the ship, too, if we had any.”

Which led to talk about shiplife. That was the part that really fascinated the servers, consequently slowing the meal down. Murra sighed and resigned herself: at least that meant more time for conversation. Mercy MacDonald described the universal shipboard practice of making scrimshaw-“to sell, sure, but mostly to give us something to do. Otherwise we’d all go crazy.” Hans Horeger modestly explained the difficulties involved in guiding a starship across the long light-years between worlds. MacDonald pointed out how boring it was for everyone and how, no matter how careful they were in dealing with each other, sometimes some members of the crew simply could not stand some other member of the crew one second longer-she was, Murra thought with interest, talking more to her deputy captain than to her hosts. But Horeger didn’t appear to notice. He blithely began to explain that they would soon have to dislodge the ship’s fuel storage, converting it to a factory for more fuel and sending it close in to the star for solar energy to make the antimatter fuel. Murra said quickly, “Surely there’s no hurry. Aren’t we being good hosts for you here?”

“Well,” said Hans Horeger, turning toward her, “in some ways extremely good.”

“He means we don’t have any complaints at all,” Mercy MacDonald put in. “You’ve been so good about commercial dealings you’ve just about put me out of a job. I don’t have to bargain! You pay us so well that we can afford just about everything we ask for-machine parts, metal, supplies—”

“Some of us can still hope for more,” Horeger murmured in Murra’s ear.

“We’re getting plenty from you people in return, of course,” Blundy declared, paying no attention to what was going on at the other end of the table. “That’s what makes good business, a fair price both ways and everybody sat- Is that the phone, Murra?”

It was. She looked resignedly amused. “Excuse me, please,” she said, getting up. “It won’t take me more than a minute—”

In fact, it took less. She wasn’t out of the dining room before Grannis appeared from the kitchen, his flushed face looking sad. “Say, Murra,” he said, “this isn’t so good. It’s your sister. You know your nephew Porly? She says he’s in the hospital.”

While Murra was out of the room everybody, of course, had some sort of reassurance, or at least good wishes, to offer. But it was Horeger who said the thing that no one else said. He looked around the table, then turned to Blundy. “Is it this infant-mortality thing you people have?” he asked.

Vorian gave him a sharp look. “What infant-mortality thing is that?” he demanded.

Horeger looked surprised. “Oh, shouldn’t I have said anything? I mean, I wondered why you were so hot for all our medical data and so on, so I assumed that was it. All the babies that die, I mean.”

“Who told you about babies dying?” Vorian asked, but Blundy answered instead.

“What difference does it make who told him?” he asked reasonably. “That’s right, Horeger. We have a very high infant-mortality rate; it’s the worst thing about living here. And every time a ship comes by we hope they’ll have something we can use-but they never have so far.”

“I thought so,” Horeger said, sounding satisfied. “Believe me, Blundy, we want to help you any way we can—”

“Oh, Christ,” Mercy MacDonald interrupted him. “Why don’t you just shut up?”

Horeger turned a wrathful face on her. “Have you forgotten who you’re talking to?” His voice was strangled, as though he was striving against insuperable odds for self-control. “I’m simply making a humanitarian offer of aid to people in need.”

“Yes? What kind of aid is that? We don’t even have a real doctor on Nordvik.” She looked at Blundy. “I think,” she said, “the best thing we could do is mind our business.”

Vorian sighed. “We’d appreciate that,” he said softly. “And now I think it’s getting late for an old man to be out.”

When Murra came back they were all at the door, and unwilling to be cajoled into staying. “No, really,” Horeger said apologetically, pressing her hand. “We really must go. Especially you, Mercy.”

MacDonald gave him a surprised look. “Me?”

Horeger nodded blandly. “To catch the shuttle back to Nordvik,” he explained. “It’ll be taking off early in the morning and you’ll have to be on it.”

“I will?”

“It’s your job.” He was grinning at her, but quite determined. “You have to check out the rest of the cargo. Oh, you can come back down when that’s done, of course.”

MacDonald thought for a moment, then shrugged. “I’ll do that,” she said. “Good night, Murra.”

And then all the good nights were said. It was too bad in a way, Murra thought, that Verla’s call about little Porly had spoiled the party. On the other, one major part of the party’s purpose had been to allow Blundy the chance to compare his wife and the challenging new woman side by side. Murra was quite content with the results.

Blundy offered to show Horeger and MacDonald back to the quarters they had been given, with the rest of Nordvik’s landing party. Vorian went along. But when Petoyne started to leave with them, Murra touched her arm in a friendly way. “Stay a little, please?” she urged. “I sent the servers home, so could you help me straighten things up?”

Petoyne couldn’t refuse that, as Murra had intended she couldn’t; and when, sulkily, the child began to pick up glasses to take them to the housework room Murra stopped her. “The cleaner will be back tomorrow to take care of that,” she said sweetly. “Sit down, Petoyne. Help me finish that last bottle of wine-you’re old enough now, surely. Just sit with me a minute, please.”

Petoyne was unwilling, but she was also very young. She did as she was told by the older woman whose husband she had borrowed. She watched without speaking while Murra fetched clean glasses from the sideboard and poured, chatting idly about the soup, that awful “scrimshaw” thing, the guests.

“I’m sorry about your nephew,” Petoyne offered.

Murra looked surprised, then shrugged. “It’s a pity, of course, but what can you do?” She sipped her wine, looking at Petoyne over the top of her glass. “You know, you’ve been very brave,” she said.

Petoyne stiffened. “Me? Brave?”

“I don’t know what else to call it. I know this is difficult for you, dear,” Murra said, her tone sympathetic. It’s an unfortunate situation. Blundy is a wonderful man, but he simply can’t help being drawn to attractive women.”

Petoyne, with her untouched wine glass before her, said stiffly, “If you’re talking about Mercy MacDonald, I don’t have anything to be brave about. I happen to know Blundy and that woman aren’t lovers. Blundy would have told me.”

“No, I don’t suppose they are, now,” Murra agreed. “But they surely will be, dear, and you mustn’t let yourself be hurt.”

Petoyne looked at her for a moment without speaking. Then she stood up, proud if young. “I’ll be all right, Murra. I do want to go home now.”

“Of course,” Murra smiled, and would have kissed her cheek at the door if the girl had given her the chance. She gazed after her, quite content. They all had to learn, after all. These little peccadillos of Blundy’s were-well-sometimes hard to accept, as no one knew better than she. In the long run they didn’t matter, for what was certain was that such silly affairs were all temporary and in any case definitely did not threaten Blundy’s marriage to Murra. Sooner or later they always would end-this one with the woman from the interstellar ship sooner than most, of course.

And, she thought, heading back into the house, it was an established fact that Blundy never went back to a previous mistress. Poor starship woman. Poor Petoyne.

Chapter 7

When Mercy MacDonald pulled herself out of the shuttle into Nordvik’s hatch the first thing that struck her was how many people there were aboard the old ship, and how few of them she knew. The only one nearby was not one she really wanted to talk to, but she did her best to be amiable. “Hello, Maureen,” she said to Horeger’s wife, who was looking even sulkier than usual.

The woman grunted. “So how’s Slowyear?” she asked, managing to convey in three words her extreme irritation at not having already seen it for herself.

“It’s fine. You’ll like it,” MacDonald said generously. “Do you know where Betsy arap Dee is?”

“Christ, no. I don’t know where anybody is,” Maureen Horeger complained. “You could try the datastore room-unless she’s shacked up with that damn Slowyear doctor again.”

“Thanks,” MacDonald said, quite pleased at the news. And when she found Betsy, in the datastore room after all, she was even more pleased to see the sparkle in her friend’s eyes. The health officer from Slowyear that, MacDonald supposed, had put it there wasn’t with her, but old Captain Hawkins was. So MacDonald didn’t think it the right time to ask the questions on her mind, although she was pretty sure she knew the answers anyway. “Horeger,” she said, “wants the complete manifest brought up to date, and I’m supposed to check it out. Can you help me?”

“No problem,” Betsy said cheerfully, but the old captain had ideas of his own for MacDonald’s time. He was, it turned out, looking for warm bodies to help prepare the drive unit for its remote-controlled sojourn near the star, soaking up solar energy to make antimatter fuel. “What do you mean you can’t, Mercy?” he complained. “But most of the crew’s already down on Slowyear! I want to go there myself.”

“That’s fine,” she said, slightly surprised. “Come down with me; I’ll be going back as soon as I can.”

“I wish! But I’ve got to finish my work here.” He gave her an eager look. “I get the impression you’re enjoying Slowyear,” he said. “How are things going?”

“My God, wonderful. They’re buying everything, and they don’t care what it costs.”

He said wistfully, “You know, maybe we could buy what we need to fix the ship up after all. I’ve got to get down there and see-only how am I supposed to get them started on the fuel production, so I can get away?”

“Draft some of these new people,” she suggested. There were certainly plenty of them. Nordvik had more people aboard it than it had seen in years, and three-quarters of them were Slowyearians. They were all over the old ship, poking into crew quarters, looking into storage holds, grinning (or politely trying not to grin) at the sanitary facilities (of course microgravity made all that sort of thing much more complicated; the toilets worked better when the ship was under way), taking pictures of the bridge-when Mercy MacDonald opened the door of her own room, there was even a Slowyearian in her bed, blinking up at her in surprise, the covers pulled around her head. “Oh,” the woman in the bed said, “you must be the one- your name is- oh, hell,” she said finally, beginning to unbuckle the sleep straps, “this is your room, isn’t it? I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were coming back. Look, I’ll get right out of here; just give me a minute to get my clothes on.”

She was floating free in the room, scrabbling in total non-dignity for the handhold she had forgotten to grasp, before MacDonald could stop her. She was also quite naked. MacDonald found herself laughing. “But it’s really all right,” she said to the naked woman. “Stay where you are. Please. I’m just coming up to get my things and I’m going to catch the next shuttle back down.”

The woman looked at her, still half asleep. “You’re sure you don’t mind?” Then she realized she had nothing on and made a grab for a sheet. Fortunately she caught a flying corner and managed to tug herself back to the bed. Wrapped in the sheet, now firmly holding to the grip at the headboard, she joined MacDonald in laughing. “Sorry about all this,” she said again. “Look, I’m Ilson. Burganjee Ilson Threely.” She held out a hand and MacDonald drifted herself close enough to shake it.

“Mercy MacDonald,” Mercy MacDonald said, releasing the hand. “Why don’t you stay right where you are? It won’t take me more than ten minutes to get everything together-there’s not that much here that I want to keep-and then you can go back to sleep.”

“Fine,” Ilson said, and watched silently for a moment while MacDonald opened closets, pulled out drawers, searched through cabinets. She had pretty well cleaned her stuff out, but there were, she found, a few bits of clothes, plus a few keepsakes, she had overlooked. She threw everything into a cloth bag, closing the top every time to keep what she packed from drifting out again. “You look like you’re getting ready for a long stay,” Ilson offered.

“Um,” MacDonald said, bobbing her head but more interested in the cabinet she was ransacking.

“I guess it makes a nice change,” Ilson said sociably. “It does for me. Being here on this ship, I mean. I’m an intrument and control device specialist; I never thought I’d have the chance to actually study a spaceship’s systems.”

“Are you getting all the help you need?” MacDonald said, making the effort to be polite.

“Oh, sure, everybody’s been great. It’s not that hard, anyway. This ship’s a pretty standard design-for the old days, I mean. I could probably fly it myself.”

That made MacDonald look at her more closely. Why would this sensible-looking woman want to know how to fly an interstellar ship? Slowyear didn’t have any. Slowyear wasn’t going to be building any, either, certainly not in the lifetime of anyone alive there now. They couldn’t. They didn’t have any of the necessary resource base: they had no antimatter technology, no c-speed instruments, none of the complicated gadgetry you needed to get a ship from star to star.

So, MacDonald deduced, there could be only one reason for Ilson’s interest: the woman was intending to ship out on Nordvik when it left.

There was a lot that Mercy MacDonald could have said to this woman. She didn’t say any of it. The regrettably bad decisions of a Slowyearian woman she didn’t even know were none of MacDonald’s business, and she wanted to get everything done that she needed to do on Nordvik so she wouldn’t miss her shuttle. She threw the last decent blouse she owned into the bag, closed it, held herself steady with one hand to the doorknob, her brow wrinkled as she tried to remember if there was anything else worth taken. Then she shrugged and said, “I guess that’s it.” She was silent for a moment, looking around the room. “I wonder if I’ll miss this place,” she mused out loud.

Ilson looked surprised. “Then you are planning to stay on Slowyear for awhile,” she said.

“You bet. For the rest of my life,” said Mercy MacDonald with satisfaction. “So I make you a present of this room. May it give you more pleasure than it ever gave me.”

Chapter 8

In a way, Blundy wasn’t sorry that Mercy MacDonald was back on the ship for a few days, or at least not entirely sorry. (He did feel strongly that there was unfinished business between them, and since she was just off a ship that business couldn’t be postponed too long.) He had work to do, though, by which he meant not the creation of silly entertainments that other people valued so but his real work. Politics.

He faced the fact that, at present, his most effective political work had to be non-political. That was because that was the non-political present mood of the people of Slowyear, who could never (Blundy believed) keep more than one thought in their minds at a time. Right now what obsessed all minds was the ship; so Blundy gave up the idea of proposing taxtime reforms and building programs and concentrated on making sure that whenever anyone thought of Nordvik and its crew they also had to think about Arakaho Blundy Spenotex as well.

Meanwhile there was a job to be done that was sort of political. The governor and council had invited a few prominent persons, Blundy one of them, to help them deal with the trade problem.

That wasn’t too tough, except that they should have taken care of all that long since-trade had already begun. There wasn’t any doubt of that, because from the window of the council room, where they had gathered, they could look right down on the marketplace and see the shopping going on.

So they disposed of it quickly. They already had Mercy MacDonald’s catalogue of the goods Nordvik wanted to sell them. All they had to do was make a generous estimate of their aggregate value, then double it, then issue enough supplementary script to divide among the people of Slowyear to pay for it all. The only hard part was allocating the proper amount of scrip to each citizen, because the governor thought the most important citizens should be rewarded with extra scrip, and some of the council put forth the idea that lawbreakers, for instance, should be given less. But Blundy argued for flat-equal distribution to every living human on Slowyear, babies and felons included. He carried the day.

“After all,” the governor mused when the vote had been taken, consoling himself for the defeat, “what does it matter? The only thing that’s important is to make the ship people happy.”

And one of the council, shrewdly looking forward to future power changes, said, “Exactly. We’ll call it the Blundy plan, and we can start the distribution tomorrow.”

All that went just as Blundy wished it, but he was dissatisfied. He began to wish for Mercy MacDonald’s return. Not just for her physical company, although there was certainly a sexual interest, but for what she knew. In Blundy’s eyes, Mercy MacDonald was a resource. She had once lived on Earth. Earth was the breeding ground of all politics, and he yearned to ask her for everything she knew.

Where MacDonald was, however, was two hundred-odd kilometers overhead, circling Slowyear nineteen times a day. Twice, after dark, he looked up and was able to pick out the glimmer of Nordvik in its angled orbit. There were shuttles going back and forth, almost every day. There wasn’t any shortage of ship people. More than thirty of them had already come down in one shuttle or another-even in Nordvik’s own shuttle, time-scarred and reentry-heat stained from its long use in so many different parts of the galaxy. (Slowyearians laughed at it-among themselves; they would not be so rude to their guests.) Almost all of the thirty-odd-always excepting Mercy Macdonald-were still on the surface of Slowyear, being feted and entertained by (and entertaining) their hosts.

Blundy did not fail to note that in one particular place there especially was no shortage of ship people, or at least of one ship person. That place was in his own house. It seemed to Blundy that every time he came home Hans Horeger was there before him, sitting under that dumb piece of scrimshaw on the wall, sipping wine with Murra and looking ill at ease when Murra’s husband turned up.

That wasn’t important, either. It certainly didn’t cause Blundy very much annoyance-least of all, jealousy; if there was anything Blundy was sure of, it was that, whatever Horeger was hoping for in his persistent attentions to Murra, Murra was not supplying it.

But still.

Blundy found himself staying out of the house even more than usual. Fortunately he had a lot to keep him busy. He had nearly decided-at least, he had come to the point of thinking seriously about whether he was going to decide-that it would be worth his political while to write something, after all, about Nordvik and its crew, and so he spent a lot of time visiting (“interviewing” was too strong a word) the ship people on Slowyear. That was easy. They were all over, mingling with the natives, looking at everything, curious about everything. They seemed be happy that the Slowyearians were spending their new scrip freely, snapping up almost everything they had to offer without much regard to price-or quality, either, because a lot of the junk Nordvik had hauled from star to star really was junk: old machines that nobody would dream of using any more, “art” that was almost as ugly as Mercy Macdonald’s guest gift, plants that wouldn’t grow on Slowyear and sperm and ova of animals that would certainly die there.

None of them were MacDonald, though. When Blundy, tiring of their company, decided to go back home for lunch it wasn’t to see whether Horeger was there before him.

But of course Horeger was. The only surprising thing was that he wasn’t alone. Their doctor, Megrith, was there, and he looked solemn.

Horeger was looking solemn, too, and even Murra seemed sober. Blundy guessed the reason. “Porly?” he asked, and Megrith nodded.

“He died an hour ago.”

“But let’s not talk about it,” Murra said-as she naturally would, since such subjects as the death of a small child were not only depressing but quite a bore.

Horeger, however, wasn’t smart enough to let it go. He said, sounding sad and sincere, “I feel we’ve let you down, Blundy. I wish we’d had something that helped.”

Murra started to speak, then restrained herself. “I’ll see how lunch is getting on,” she said, getting up.

Megrith responded for all of them. “Well, you didn’t,” he said. “I checked everything in your file myself. Nothing that seems to help with our own situation. Of course, there are plenty of items from way back on Earth. We found entries about all kinds of human prion diseases-kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Gerstmann-Straussler syndrome-and the veterinary syndromes, scrapie and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, but it’s all old, old stuff. Our own particular variation of the prion syndrome evidently didn’t occur on Earth.”

“Maybe not on any other planet we visited, either,” Horeger said regretfully, “because we dumped most of their data in, too. Where was he?” When Blundy blinked at him, he added, “Porly, I mean. The baby that, ah, passed away.”

“Oh. In the hospital, of course.”

“That’s in the winter city,” Megrith explained. “The hospital’s too much trouble to move with the seasons, with all the equipment and everything. We have aid stations out here, but the real hospital’s in the winter city, up under the hill.”

“I’d like to see that too,” Horeger said thoughtfully. “The whole idea of everybody holing up for the cold weather-that’s interesting.” Then, looking at Blundy, he added, “Mercy would, too. She’s coming back down tomorrow, by the way.”

“How very nice,” Murra said, coming in to announce lunch and speaking for Blundy without looking at him. “Why don’t we all go up there and show you around?”

“I’d love it,” Horeger said, moving toward the table. “I’m sure Mercy would, too. And oh,” he said, sniffing appreciatively, “that does smell good! What is it? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

Blundy didn’t have to invite Mercy Macdonald to tour the winter city. Murra did that for him. As soon as the ship woman had returned to the surface Murra was there at the landing strip, welcoming her back warmly, telling her how much pleasure it would give her and Blundy to show Murra and Hans Horeger around the underground dwellings. Macdonald looked at her strangely, but accepted at once; and the next morning they set out up the hill, all four of them in a tractor cab.

The winter city was set into the side of Winter Hill-“Well, what else would we call it?” Murra said, amused. “Regard it well. It’s where we all live, squeezed in on top of each other, for ten long months every year.” Horeger stared up at the thirty-meter metal tower on top of Winter Hill. “In that? That big metal thing?”

Murra smiled, and Blundy explained. “The tower is just the entrance. The city’s all underground, to conserve heat.

Horeger frowned up at the tower. “But it’s got all those doors,” he said, as of course it had: six great doors, one at each level, of which only the lowest one was open.

“Because of the snow,” Blundy said. “It piles up all winter long, you see. It doesn’t start to melt until New Year’s, so sometimes it gets twenty meters deep here. As it keeps building up we have to switch to a higher door every month or two so as to come out on top of it.”

He halted the tractor at the base of the tower and they got out to look around. Holding her floppy hat against the hilltop breeze, Murra pointed south. “Can you see the pastures over the rim hills there? That’s where we take the sheep to fatten; Blundy can tell you all about that.”

“Yes,” Blundy said, giving his wife a look, “I do go out with the sheep sometimes. It’s taxtime work for me. See, we have to pay part of our taxes in community labor, and—”

But, smiling, Horeger was holding up a hand to stop him. “Yes, I know about taxtime. Murra has explained it all.”

“Well, anyway. . . . I pay the taxes that way because I like it. It gives me a chance to be off by myself—”

“Or with a good friend,” Murra put in amiably.

“Or with a friend, maybe, but pretty much by myself. So I can think. As a matter of fact,” he added, “I’ve decided to go out again with the next flock, maybe in a couple of days.” He didn’t meet the gaze his wife turned on him, but waved to the planted lands down the hill. “That’s all farm. We’re lucky with our farmland here. We always get good crops; there aren’t any native pests, just a few stowaway bugs that sneaked in from Earth on the first landing, and not many of those.”

Horeger said, as a pleasantry, “I hope we haven’t brought any new ones.”

“There’s no chance of that,” Murra said reassuringly, “because of course we checked everything. Did you know that we have farms in the winter city, too?”

“Underground?” Horeger said in admiration.

“Well, hothouses, anyway,” Murra amended herself. “They aren’t very big. There’s plenty of power and water for them, of course, but we are a little cramped for space. Still, we get fresh vegetables from them all winter long.”

“Some,” Blundy said.

Murra gave him another look. “Well, we can’t grow enough to feed everybody all the time, of course, but there’s always plenty of summer-grown food in the freezers.”

“The power’s the big thing,” Blundy said. He took Mercy MacDonald’s arm and pointed. “Look over here. Do you see that field that looks like it’s just been plowed? It hasn’t been.

They’re solar collectors. They’re where we get most of our heat and power. Murra can tell you all about that; she works there.”

“Just for taxtime,” Murra added quickly, to make sure the visitors understood her real career was as actress and poet-and, mostly, as wife to Arakaho Blundy Spenifex.

Gallantly, Horeger said, “But that sounds fascinating, Murra. Solar power! That’s how we make the antimatter for Nordvik, you know. I’d really love to see how you do it here.”

“Shall I show you around the power plant? I’d be happy to,” Murra said. “But let’s take a look at the winter city itself first.”

So they did. At Horeger’s request, for whatever sentimental reason Horeger thought he had, they visited the hospital first. Naturally enough, the hospital was on the highest level of the city. That was for the benefit of those who needed to get to it in a hurry, in the seventy-odd months of the year when the winter city itself was nearly abandoned . . . though it did nothing for the great bulk of the hospital’s occupants.

Showing visitors around the hospital was a brand-new experience for Blundy. No Slowyear citizen had ever had to be given a tour of it, since no Slowyear citizen ever got through his first year without at least an occasional visit. He knew what the starship people wanted, though. He gave them a cursory look at the general medical section, the maternity wing, and the long wards, more than five hundred beds worth of wards, partly occupied with adults recovering from surgery or illness-or not recovering, as the case might be. Then he led them to the saddest wards of all, the custodial facility for terminal cases, where nearly two hundred children, some looking like newborns, others toddlers and talkers, were lying stupefied, or gazing blankly, or giggling pointlessly.

Murra wrinkled her nose fastidiously; even the older children were too sick to be continent. Horeger scowled helplessly, and Mercy MacDonald shuddered. “I don’t know why we wanted to come here,” she said, her voice shaking with sympathy. And Horeger said, as Blundy had known he would:

“Isn’t your nephew here, Murra?”

Murra gave the captain a sweet look of sorrowful resignation. “Dear little Porly,” she sighed. “Oh, he’s here, all right. We could ask one of the nurses to help us find which crib he’s in if you like, but, really, there’s no point.”

“He wouldn’t know we were here,” Blundy explained-or apologized. “None of them do, you see, not after the first day or two. It’s the brain that’s attacked first. It just turns into a kind of sponge, and that’s it.”

“I’m so sorry,” MacDonald said.

“Yes, of course,” Murra said, nodding graciously. “Well, what can one say? Except that this is a depressing place, isn’t it? Perhaps we should go on to look at the rest of the city. There are elevators just outside here; we can go down a few flights to the apartment quarters, and you can see how we lived.”

The elevator was big enough for forty people, or for any reasonably sized cargo; the four of them took only a corner of it. When it stopped they emerged into a long hall, metal walled and punctuated with metal doorways, dimly illuminated with sparse standby lights. “Just a minute,” Blundy said, and rummaged around a closet until he found the right switch.

Then the overhead lights sprang up. They were carefully covered with colored glass to make the light as pleasant, and as varied, as possible; and the walls, once the lights were on, turned out to be painted and decorated handsomely. But Blundy’s look was dour.

“It strikes me as a bit-well-sterile,” Horeger suggested, peering down the long hallway.

Murra gave him a kindly smile. “Oh, it is. We all feel that, don’t we, dear? Still, it’s better than being out in the cold,” she told him. “Although sometimes we don’t think so, along about Christmas or Mean.”

“And it really is a whole city, isn’t it?” Mercy MacDonald said, strolling a few meters down the hall and testing a door. It was unlocked. It opened to show stripped rooms, nothing in them but bare built-in desks and empty wall shelves.

“We take everything we own when we move out in the spring,” Blundy told her, and went on to give her the statistics: “Just about five hundred thousand people live here all winter long. That’s practically the world’s whole population, not counting the few people who stay on in the outposts. We have factories here in the city, as well as stores, and schools, and swimming pools-they’re on the next level, along with the gyms and the sports facilities-and theaters and everything else that makes up a city.”

“We’ll be expanding it come fall,” Murra added. “There’ll be fifteen hundred new rooms added, so some families can have private sitting rooms and so on. That’s one of the things Blundy’s been so good at, making the council take action on things that everybody needs, but they just haven’t got around to. They’ll be getting ready to debate the plans in a month or so, isn’t that right, dear?” Blundy nodded. “We do all our construction in the fall, you see, because that’s when everything’s dried out and it’s not too hot to work outside. So we do all our planning before the end of summer.”

“When a lot of us come right back into the city here,” Blundy said sourly. “The summer heat’s almost as bad as the winter cold.”

“So,” Murra finished, giving the guests an admiring look, “you see that you people came at the best time of year. This is when everybody’s pretty happy—”

“Or as happy as we ever get,” Blundy finished.

MacDonald found herself shivering. When she saw that Murra had noticed she said apologetically, “It was a lot warmer in the hospital.”

Murra was immediately solicitous. “Oh, I’m sorry about that, but, you see, we don’t heat the whole city this time of year-even the hospital won’t need it much longer; but the outside air’s still a little cool, up here on Winter Hill.” She smiled. “I don’t know if you’re interested in the details—”

“I am,” Horeger said immediately.

“Well, we pump heat in-you remember the photovoltaic farm you saw? Well, the PV cells turn the sunlight into electricity; that’s where we get our power, and we use the surplus to electrolyze icewater into hydrogen for fuel-for tractors and aircraft, and now for the space shuttles, too, of course. But the photovoltaic cells can’t use much of the infrared radiation-the heat-from the sun; in fact, they work better when they’re kept cooler. So we run pipes under them to carry the heat away to a big aquifer in the mountain. The aquifer stores heat all spring, summer and most of the fall, then we pump the heat back into the city all winter long.”

“I’d really like to see that, if you’d be willing to show it to me,” Horeger said.

“Of course, Hans. You too, Mercy, if you’d like it?”

“I don’t care much about power plants. I’d rather poke around the city,” MacDonald said. “If Blundy doesn’t mind showing me, I mean.”

Blundy didn’t, at all. When the other two had gone, he said, “I could start by showing you where I lived-“ And when she nodded, “But I’m hungry right now, aren’t you? Let’s get some sandwiches first. We can take them with us and eat them in one of the apartments, then you’ll get an idea of what it’s like to live in this place for ten dreary months on end.”

In the huge elevator going back to the hospital level, walking down the cafeteria lines to choose their food, Blundy held Mercy MacDonald’s arm-not aggressively; just confidently, because things were working out as well as he could have hoped. They chatted on the way about non-essentials. He asked her how her shipmates were enjoying Slowyear, and she told him they all seemed to love it-“All of them; even old Captain Hawkins came down with his wife and Sam Bagehot-he’s one of our medics-got someone to give him a ride to some fishing village on the coast. He said he’s always wanted to go fishing.”

He looked at her affectionately. “It’s interesting for you to be here?”

“You bet, Blundy. I’d almost forgotten what a planet was like. All this space-well, not here in this place, of course; but out in the open—”

He nodded. “Then you’ll understand how much I hate being cooped up here all through the winter. Here, let’s see if we can get into our old apartment.”

He selected a door, no different from any other door in the hall as far as MacDonald could see, then scowled apologetically. “I’m sorry; I forgot we locked it, and I don’t have the key. But all the apartments along here are pretty much the same.”

He tried three or four other doors before he found one that opened, shook his head, tried a dozen more until he found the one he was looking for. “This’ll do,” he said, and held the door open for her.

She looked around the room, no bigger than her own cabin on Nordvik. It was almost as bare the one they had seen on the other level, though it did contain a stripped-down bed.

“So we’ll have something to sit on,” he said.

“Of course,” she said, and he saw her nose wrinkling.

“Stinks, doesn’t it?” he said. “They turn off most of the ventilation when people are outside-but it’s not much better in the winter.”

“I was just thinking that it looks pretty crowded,” she said, half apologizing. “And-well-dreary?”

“It was dreary. Crowded, too,” he said sourly, gazing around. “Well, we might as well sit down.”

They sat on the edge of the bed, since there was no other place to sit, and opened their sandwiches. There wasn’t much room. Their elbows touched from time to time, and Blundy could feel, or imagined he could feel, the warmth that came from her body.

He was surprised when she asked him, “Are you sure you want to be here?”

He blinked at her; that wasn’t the question on his mind at all.

“You seem-well, I don’t know. Depressed, maybe. Is it seeing the hospital?”

He shook his head, then thought for a moment. “Maybe a little,” he said, avoiding the truthful answer. “Maybe it’s this whole place. I can’t tell you how much it begins to look like a prison after the first few weeks. Of course, Murra and I were lucky because we had our work. We kept pretty busy all winter long with Winter Wife, and we got to spend a lot of time in the studios. We even went outside on location, for a couple of episodes, though that wasn’t much fun, either; if you’re going to be out for more than a few minutes you have to dress really warmly, with electrically heated boots and gloves.”

She looked at Blundy quizzically. “And that was a big success? Winter Wife, I mean?” He shrugged. She studied him for a moment. “I don’t understand, Blundy. You’re a famous playwright—”

“Video dramas,” he corrected her.

“Same thing; and yet you work as a shepherd.”

“But I enjoy that,” he said, surprised. “After you spend seven hundred winter days crowded together in this place a little solitude is a good thing. Besides, it’s beautiful out there. You see all the stars at night, and in daylight the mountains are always there on the horizon. They’re really spectacular to look at. And the air’s so pure, and it’s quiet, and by now the flowers are springing up all over and everything smells so sweet—”

He stopped, surprised. She was almost laughing. “That’s quite a sales talk,” she said.

“Sales talk?”

“It sounds like you’re saying I ought to go out with you,” she amplified.

“Well,” he said, touching her arm, “I suppose I am. If you’d like to.”

“I accept,” she said gravely. “But in that case-and because it’s still a little chilly in here-if you and I are going off into the boondocks together, don’t you think that now it’s about time you put your arms around me?”

Blundy slept in his own bed that night, with Murra peacefully sleeping beside him. If she knew he had bedded Mercy MacDonald that afternoon, as he was convinced she always did, she had had the grace to keep silent about it. She had asked no questions when he came home, offered no criticism, invited no sexual advances. She was a model winter wife, Blundy thought glumly as he drifted off to sleep. Unfortunately it was now spring.

The next morning he rose early, wakened by the thunder of the departing shuttle, and headed for the marketplace.

As he had expected he would, he found Petoyne idly looking through the scanty remaining stocks of scrimshaw. When she saw Blundy, and put down the carved plastic statuette she’d been looking at to come over to him, there was something in her face that told Blundy she knew as well as Murra that he had found a new lover.

Unlike Murra, she didn’t pretend not to. She said, her tone hostile, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do know. And, listen-“ getting it over with-“I’m going to take Mercy MacDonald out to the flocks with me.”

Petoyne nodded as though she had expected it. “You won’t want me along, then.”

“Well, I think—”

“I know what you think.” Then she gave him a look which he could not decipher. It was neither angry nor amused. It was, if anything-sympathetic? Sad?

“What’s the matter?” he demanded.

“There’s something I think you should know. That old captain from the ship? I saw him taking his clothes off in the marketplace this morning.” He stared at her, and she nodded. “So if you’re going anywhere with Mercy MacDonald,” she said, “my advice is, do it pretty soon.”

Chapter 9

Up to the very last minute, Mercy Macdonald had not really decided whether to have an affair with this conspicuously married little man; in fact, she had decided quite a long time ago that going to bed with married men was the sort of mistake she had outgrown long since. But there were always extenuating circumstances, weren’t there? Obviously this particular man’s marriage to that slinky, pretentious woman had become a burden to him, while Blundy himself had seemed so down-and also so very male. . . . No, there was something about this Blundy that was worth pursuing, she was sure of it.

All the same she was startled, when she thought about it, to find herself climbing into his stubby, high-roofed vehicle on the way to the (for God’s sake!) sheep pastures with him; and it occurred to her that she hadn’t really decided to do that, either.

But she was doing it.

Since she was actually doing it, there was no reason to worry about it. Maybe at some later time, Macdonald informed herself, she would have to think harder about what all this was getting her into. Not now. Now she was quite content to enjoy this interesting new experience with this interesting new man.

The word that was important here was “new.” MacDonald had had quite a reasonable number of lovers before, at one time or another, but it had been most of her life since any one of them could have been called “new.” New to share her bed, maybe, but for decades now any new body that showed up in her bed had been simply an old, familiar body in a somewhat altered relationship.

But now there was this Blundy man-squat, sometimes sulky, quite married-but, oh, so very, so excitingly and completely new.

She laughed out loud, surprising herself. When Blundy turned to give her a puzzled look, she just shook her head. She was as silly as silly little Betsy arap Dee, she thought. Or as lucky. Or as-yes-as young. All of a sudden, without any physical change, she was seeing the world through the eyes of a teen-ager again.

It was all fascinating, even this silly, blocky car they were riding in. She had never been in a vehicle quite like it before; it was obviously designed for just two people, and her big traveling bag had barely squeezed into the space behind the seats-wouldn’t have made it at all if Blundy’s own bag hadn’t been quite small. As she studied the way he drove the thing she concluded she could easily learn how to do it herself. There was a wheel that steered it, and on the wheel a selector lever that seemed to shift gears; and on the floor a pedal that controlled the speed and another that controlled a brake. All that was simple enough. Once you started it up and put your foot on the right pedal the high-pitched, sputtering hydrogen motor pushed the little car along at a satisfying rate of speed.

There were other vehicles on the road-big tractor-trailers going empty out to the farms and coming back laden with crates of vegetables and fruits and bins of grain; flatbeds with farm workers who dangled their feet over the sides and waved to them as they passed; smaller trucks with machinery and beams and slabs of construction materials. The important part about driving, she decided, was knowing how to avoid hitting any of the other vehicles. Blundy seemed to manage it well enough, snaking around and past them. If Blundy could do it so could Mercy Macdonald.

Then they were climbing up through a pass and the basin that held the summertown was behind them. The number of vehicles dropped sharply. The character of the landscape changed. The farmland that had been all around them was now gone. The road they were on hugged a cliff, high above a gorge. Far below a good-sized river ran, sculptured by rapids and boulders.

“I thought we were taking the sheep out to pasture,” she offered.

“The flock had to leave at daybreak. By now they’re thirty or forty kilometers down the pike, almost to the graze. I got a friend of mine to start them off for us. We’ll take over when we catch them.”

She nodded, looking around. Once through the hills the landscape had flattened out again, but there were no farms here, nothing but meadow and scrub as far as she could see.

When she commented on that to Blundy he explained, “It’s the river, Mercy. The first thing that freezes in the winter is Sometimes River, and then the ice blocks its channel. So the whole basin behind the ice dam fills up, fifty or sixty meters deep, and then that freezes, too. So all the silt comes out and makes the soil better there. On this side of the hills, not as good. Good enough for pasturing sheep, though-see?”

And ahead of them she did see, a long, plodding line of stone-colored animals, with a dozen dogs loping back and forth along them to keep them in order. At the head of the line a tractor-trailer was leading the way, its pace creeping no faster than the sheep. Blundy pressed a button on the steering wheel and a horn blared; a moment later an arm stretched out from the cab of the tractor and waved. “She sees us,” he said. “We’ll catch up in just a minute—”

And in not more than a minute they had. The tractor had pulled a few dozen meters ahead of the flock; Blundy and Mercy MacDonald were out of their car and Blundy was heaving their bags into the tractor cab at once.

That part was all right. The part that wasn’t all right was that the driver of the cab turned out to be the skinny little teen-aged girl who was named Petoyne.

“I thought we were going to be alone,” MacDonald couldn’t help saying, but Blundy didn’t hear; he was already climbing into the cab himself, sliding behind the wheel.

“Come on, Mercy,” he ordered. And then, leaning out of the cab, he waved to the girl, who was standing with one hand on the door of the little car they had chased her in, looking at the two of them with a hard stare. “Thanks, Petoyne,” he called. “See you in a month or so.” And, the leaders of the flock already beginning to catch up with them, he started the tractor crawling forward again as soon as Mercy MacDonald’s feet left the ground.

So it was just as well he hadn’t heard, MacDonald thought as she settled herself in, although what she also thought was that the way Petoyne looked at her suggested something Blundy hadn’t seen fit to mention. How many lovers could this man handle, she wondered.

It was not a serious question, though. For the next few weeks, anyway, the answer would surely be: one. For there wasn’t going to be anyone else around.

Never once before in all of her life had Mercy MacDonald been so remote from the society of others. In this place there was simply no one at all. Outside the shell of the tent they lived in (imagine living in a tent!) there was not a single living creature she could see for many miles in any direction, except for the herd of snuffling, grunting ewes and the dogs that watched over them. . . .

And except, of course, for Arakaho Blundy Spenotex.

It was almost dark before she realized that she didn’t feel lonely at all, and that the reason was Blundy. He seemed to take up a great deal of space in her life, enough for multitudes. He was inescapably, but not at all oppressively, there.

When they had reached the grazing grounds, bumping slowly over open ground for several hours till they reached the stream he had been looking for, Blundy turned off the radio beacon, hauled great bulky packages out of the back of the trailer and began setting up their quarters. He waved at the sun, still high in the sky but beginning to lower. “We want to get all set up before dark,” he said, “so let’s get on with it.”

Within the first hour he had made them a home-no, they had made it; she did as much as Blundy did. He showed her how to set the first tent peg in at the proper angle, then left her to drive the others in, in the pattern he marked out for her, while he unrolled the fabric itself. They put it up together, sweating and grunting. Blundy lugged in the stuff too heavy for her to carry, or too awkward, but her bag, his own, the cooking utensils, the one airbed, the folding furniture-all that he left for her to sort out and shift into position. While he dug the sanitary pit and moved the trailer down to the stream, she opened cartons and tried to figure out where everything went.

That wasn’t easy. Tents didn’t seem to have built-in lockers. MacDonald had never even seen a tent before, much less lived in one. The only time she’d come across the word was in books, where the things seemed mostly associated with armies. She spent a long time, that first long afternoon, wondering what she had got herself into.

But then things began to pick up. When she came out of the tent with sandwiches she saw that Blundy had single-handed pitched a smaller tent over the sanitary hole (she had wondered about that). They ate companionably, if rapidly, while Blundy outlined to her the other things they had to do that day. “It’s clouding up over there,” he said, waving to the west, “so I think we’ll have rain tomorrow. And we want as much as possible done before that.”

She nodded. The sheep were scattered all around now, without the radio beacon to keep them in order, individual animals spotted across the landscape, munching away. “Don’t you have to worry about the herd?” she asked.

“What for? All they have to do is roam around and eat. The dogs won’t let them stray too far, and the rest they can handle by themselves. Let’s get the pipes strung.” And so the two of them ran a flexible hose from the tractor at the banks of the stream; a pump in the tractor sucked water out of the stream, the idling engine warmed it and it came out of a nozzle at the top of a pole: a shower. “We’d better only use it in the daytime,” Blundy said, “because the nights are still a little chilly.” But it wasn’t quite dark yet when they had finished, and MacDonald insisted on trying it out, which is when she discovered the interesting possibilities when two people showered at once. When they came damply out of the shower, wrapped in towels, into the still warm evening, it was full dark. She looked up and caught her breath.

“I told you about the stars,” Blundy said, his arm around her.

But no one could have. Although the western edge of the sky was clouded black, most of it was still clear; and stars seen through Nordvik’s vision plates were nothing like stars spread over your head on a warm spring night. There was nothing in the heavens to compete with them. Slowyear didn’t have a moon; Slowyear’s sun certainly had a family of planets, but the distances between them were great and none were very bright from the surface of Slowyear; the stars had Slowyear’s sky to themselves, and they filled it. Here, away from the lights of the summer city, the sky was black and pearl, sprinkled with diamonds. The Milky Way spread across one whole corner of the sky like a lunar mist.

Mercy MacDonald leaned against Blundy’s warm arm, her head back, eyes filled with the starry splendor. It was not only dark, apart from the faint glow that came through the fabric of their living tent, it was silent. All she could hear was small snuffling noises from sleeping sheep. She could smell them-not an offensive odor, just a natural one. One of the dogs woke up enough to amble over to investigate them, then lay with its head on its paws to watch them.

This was what solitude was like, MacDonald thought. A little scary. But fine.

Blundy stirred and pointed. “That’s where the Earth is,” he said. She tried to peer along his index finger. “You see those two lines of stars-three in a row, and then four in a row just above them? Well, right between those two lines—”

“I don’t see anything,” she said.

“No. You can’t. We’re too far, but that’s where it is.”

She didn’t answer that, and she didn’t go on looking at the stars, either. She was looking at Blundy’s face, very near her own but almost invisible with nothing but starlight to see it by. She could not make out his expression.

“Would you like to go there?” she asked.

He lowered his gaze to look at her. “Go to the Earth? But I can’t,” he said reasonably.

“Ships do go there, Blundy. Not Nordvik, of course. I don’t know where Nordvik will go from here, but it isn’t likely to be the Earth, but—”

“I’m never going to leave Slowyear,” he said, his tone flat. “So what’s the use of wishing? Come to bed.”

The next morning Mercy MacDonald woke with thunder crashing in her ears and a drumming of rain on the side of the tent. Blundy was nowhere in sight. That was a new experience for her, too, and not one she really enjoyed-peering out of the flap of the tent she saw eye-searing flashes of lightning all around, and the rain that was turning the ground into swamp was not just rain. Chunks of ice the size of her thumbnail were bouncing off the ground, astonishing her. She had heard the word “hail” before; she had never seen any.

But when Blundy came dripping into the tent a few minutes later he promised it would all be over soon; and it was; and by noontime the water had run off and the sky was blue and warm.

It was not a bad way to live, she decided.

Sheepherding had a lot going for it. The food was good, the accommodations comfortable enough, once you got used to them, and the sex with Blundy was-she hunted for the right word and grinned to herself when she found it: “ample”. It changed the way she felt about everything. Her whole metabolism seemed to have shifted gears.

It was just as well that making love never failed to give pleasure, because there wasn’t much else to do. The sheep took care of themselves, pretty much, with a little help from the dogs-but it didn’t matter if they wandered. When it came time for lambing, Blundy explained, he would turn on the radio beacon and that would bring all the ewes back close to the tent. Then things would get busy enough-helping the ewes deliver when they needed help; fitting the newborn lambs with radio guides of their own, clipped into their noses.

“Can we do that by ourselves?” she asked, trying to imagine what it would be like to “help” a ewe bring forth its lamb and not liking what she imagined.

He hesitated for a moment, putting his arm around her. “We wouldn’t have to,” he said. “I’d get some help out here for that.” And she might have asked more, but his arm was tightening around her and his hands were on her as he spoke, and there was only one place for them to go then.

But even while they were making love she was thinking. And kept on thinking as they settled in. This existence was interesting as an experience, and rewarding in bed, but it did, she admitted, get a little-well, not boring, exactly, but empty. Their “work” was certainly not demanding. Once a day she and Blundy went out for a walk-he called it “inspection”-and what they inspected was the landscape, dotted with sheep. “What are we looking for?” she asked, and he shrugged.

“Sick ones. Dead ones, maybe. If they’re dead we bury them, and if they’re sick we give them antibiotics-but it’s pretty early for that. We don’t usually get any real problems until the lambing starts.” He took her hand and moved on, to the top of a hill; he took out his field glasses and swept the area, finding nothing that needed attention.

MacDonald was glad to sit down on the grass for a moment; it had been a long time since she had done this much walking. She gazed around at the pretty landscape, with its haze of bugs-none of them more than mild annoyances, because Slowyear’s bugs did not care for the blood of mammals, never having had any mammals to co-evolve with. The only large creatures in sight were the idle dogs and the scattered sheep. “That’s all you have for livestock, sheep? No cattle, goats, pigs, horses-?”

He took the glasses away from his eyes and frowned down at her, trying to remember. “We did have, some of them. A long time ago-twenty-five slowyears ago, when the colony first landed. But they died.”

“They’ve got frozen sperm and ova on the ship, you know.”

“Yes, you told us. I don’t think they’d work here.”

“You could try,” she said.

“Well, we probably will-hey,” he said, scuffing at the base of a bush with the toe of his boot. “Look at that. There’s scoggers here.”

She looked, but could see nothing but a hole in the ground. But that was all you ever saw in the daytime, he explained. “They only come out at night, but fresh scogger’s the best eating there is. We’ll catch us a couple one of these nights.” He grinned down at her. “Speaking of which,” he said, “I’m getting hungry, aren’t you?”

And that was a shock to her, too, because what they ate was lamb chops, but they didn’t get them out of a frozen food locker, they got them from that permanently available larder on the hoof that was all around them. She closed her eyes with a faint squawk when Blundy leisurely selected one of the smaller ewes, lifted its chin with one hand, slit its throat with the knife in the other.

That wasn’t the end of it, either. Then there was the skinning, and the disposal of the offal (buried deep so the dogs wouldn’t dig it up again), then the rough butchering, then, while their own chops were broiling over the little hydrogen-burning grill, Blundy whistled the dogs in and fed them the rest of the dismembered carcass. “They have to eat, too,” he reminded her, “so we’ll slaughter one sheep a day as long as we’re here.”

MacDonald wasn’t at all sure she could eat something that had been gazing at her with sad eyes no more than half an hour earlier. But she did. It tasted good, too. And when it was done, and they’d buried the bones she looked around expectantly. “Now what do we do?” she asked.

“Whatever we like,” he said. “We’re through for the day.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “What would you be doing if I weren’t here?”

He shrugged. “Write for a while, maybe.”

“Then do it,” she commanded, and tried to make herself inconspicuous while he obediently sat down at his little keyboard.

That wasn’t easy to do, she discovered. MacDonald was used to having a lot of free time-between stars, that was what you had the most of on Nordvik. But on the ship at least she had her books, amd her recorded music and films, and people to talk to-even if they were always the same few dozen people you had got tired of talking to years before. Here there was nothing. They could have had television, but Blundy explained that he had vetoed that-“There’s no point looking for solitude and bringing the whole world along, is there?” But then, almost as an apology, he added, “There’s a player in the cab of the tractor, you know.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, it’s there. And I think there are disks. Mostly they’d be technical stuff on taking care of the sheep, you know, but there might be some others. Anyway, you might want to learn more about sheep.”

She did learn more about sheep-more than she had ever wanted to know about sheep-but what saved MacDonald’s sanity was that there turned out to be quite a few disks on other subjects, too. Some had evidently been left behind by that gawky adolescent, Petoyne, Blundy’s former helper. Those were school work: math lessons, accountancy lessons, grammar lessons. They were not in any particular order, and some had been spilled out of their container and wedged their way under the seats or behind forgotten tools. None of the school lessons were really exciting for Mercy MacDonald, but in among the lesson disks were some recorded episodes from Blundy’s video drama, Winter Wife.

Those interested Mercy MacDonald quite a lot. Not just because Blundy was the guiding spirit behind them, but because those particular episodes had been selected for a purpose. She did not need to be told that they had been Petoyne’s. They mostly had Petoyne herself in a leading role, but a younger, skinnier Petoyne than the young woman MacDonald had met, and MacDonald studied them with a good deal of interest.

So she spent most of her afternoon hours watching vid disks there in the tractor cab, while Blundy did whatever he did with his writing machine; he did not want to show her any of it, and she stopped asking. And they ate, and slept, and did their chores, and made love. And sometimes (but not often) swam in the very cold stream. And sometimes picked wildflowers. And sometimes, on clouded nights when there wasn’t even much starshine to guide them, went out scogger-hunting in the velvet dark (stumbling over bushes and hillocks, with ultraviolet lights that made the grubs’ epicuticles fluoresce so they looked like neon-lit cockroaches in the night) and broiled their catch for breakfast. And made love. And sometimes MacDonald sat by herself out of Blundy’s sight and stared thoughtfully into space, wondering just what she was doing there, on this planet, with this stranger.

That took a lot of thinking. There was no doubt in MacDonald’s mind that she was fond of Blundy-she had not yet decided to entertain the word “love”-or that Blundy was an attractive man, most so because he was a brand-new one, but that didn’t answer her main question, which was: was there a future with him? She wondered what he would be like in the long term (assuming there was a long term, assuming his wife conveniently evaporated while they were gone.) Of course that wouldn’t happen. Of course (there were so many “of course”s) she could change her mind and leave with the ship. Leave without him-of course-or, alternatively, she considered the possibility that he might want to come along in Nordvik. The beauty part of that was that Murra certainly never would. So that part of the problem would solve itself.

But Blundy wouldn’t go either.

It wasn’t enough for her to be sure of that in her mind, she had to hear it from Blundy himself. When she broached the subject, joking seriously, he shook his head. “Nobody from Slowyear will ever leave,” he said positively.

“Why?”

He took her hand in his, kissing it while he thought for a moment. “We wouldn’t be welcome,” he said at last, and then his kisses moved up her arm, and naturally they made love again. To change the subject, she was pretty sure. And why were there so many subjects he kept on changing?

The last disks she found were the most disturbing.

They turned up when she had abandoned hope of discovering any more, forgotten under a seat cushion, and they were additional episodes from Winter Wife. She played one of them over and over, until it made her weep. When she could watch no more the sun was almost setting, and she stumbled to the tent and Blundy.

He looked up in startlement from his machine. “Mercy!” he cried, alarmed, jumping up to take her in his arms. “What’s the matter?”

“Winter Wife,” she said, trying not to sob. “The part where the little girl dies-like your little nephew, Porly.”

“Oh,” he said, beginning to understand. “yes. That episode. You found a copy? That was one of the best ratings we got, when the baby died.”

“It was horrible,” she said. “They called it ‘Essie,’ or something like that.”

He held her silently for a moment before he answered. “It’s the letters, SE,” he said. “Stands for spongiform encephalopathy. Like we said. The brain turns all loose and fluffy, and they die.”

She let him stroke her hair while he told her again about spongiform encephalopathy. Known as a disease of animals on Earth-it was called “scrapie” when sheep got it, “Mad Cow Disease” when it infected cattle-on Slowyear it was a kind of failure of the human body’s auto-immune systems. The brain deteriorated-fast-and stopped being any kind of a useful brain. Adult Slowyearians were generally safe from it. Babies weren’t. Their immune systems were incompletely developed, so they were at severe risk . . . and four out of ten of them died of it. So were old people, as their immune systems begin to break down, putting them at risk. “If you survive past the first twenty months,” he explained, “you’re almost always all right until you’re almost three—”

“Three Slowyears,” MacDonald said, doing the arithmetic in her head. “Almost fifty standard years?”

“I suppose so.”

“Oh, Blundy,” she said woefully. “I don’t think I could stand it.”

He said soberly, “A lot of people can’t.”

She didn’t answer that, because a thought had struck her. What she was thinking was that accounted for Murra’s childlessness. Then she made herself stop crying. She sat up straight, rubbing the last damp from her cheeks, and said the other thing that was on her mind: “That was really moving,” she said. “The show, I mean. It made me cry.”

Blundy didn’t answer, unless looking modestly pleased was an answer, so MacDonald pressed on with her thought. “What I mean,” she said, “is that you could sell those disks. To the captain. I’m sure there’d be an audience for them on other planets.”

He didn’t answer that, either, but the way he didn’t answer surprised her. His face suddenly went still, no expression at all. She waited to see if he would speak. When he didn’t, she ventured, “Is something wrong? You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”

He stirred and got up. “I do want to,” he said. “Mercy, what do you think I am? I’m a writer-part of the time, anyway-and when I write I write for people. I’d love to have an audience-a big audience, the biggest there is-people I don’t even know, maybe even people who aren’t born yet—”

“Well? So then will you give the captain the disks?”

“Sure,” he said, in a tone that was not intended to be believed, and turned away. She looked at him, puzzled. He seened to have forgotten the matter. He was going about the simple household business of turning on the lights, and when that was done he went to the cooler and pulled out a bottle of wine.

It took the lighting of the lamps to make MacDonald realize that it had become dark outside. “Oh, my,” she said. “We’re forgetting about dinner.”

He nodded agreement, pouring wine for both of them. She accepted hers willingly enough-they generally had some wine with their dinners, why not a glass before? But it wasn’t going to be just one glass, for as soon as the first glasses were down he was pouring more.

Well, MacDonald told herself, she wasn’t that hungry. If Blundy felt like having a few drinks, why should they not have them? She sat companionably next to him in silence, thinking about the things she hadn’t really wanted to think about before, until the wine emboldened her to speak. “It is pretty awful, isn’t it? I mean knowing what might happen to your babies, if you had them?”

“Awful enough,” he agreed.

“And knowing that it’s going to happen to you, too, I mean even as a grownup, if you live long enough,” she went on thoughtfully. “Is that why you-ah—”

“Why we what?” he demanded, pouring again.

“Well, I mean the poison pills. I mean, sentencing people to take poison for doing things that really aren’t so bad, you know? I mean, on other planets they have laws, too, but mostly they just put people in jail if they break them.”

He thought it over. “Maybe so,” he said.

“Because dying of a poison pill is better than the, ah, the SE thing?”

He had to think about that, too. “Maybe,” he said. “Well, I guess it is, but that’s not the only thing. Everybody dies on all the other planets, too, don’t they?”

“You do seem to have a different attitude on Slowyear, though.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “I guess we do have a different attitude on Slowyear. On Slowyear I don’t think we’d ever put anybody in jail. Maybe we don’t have jails because we’re all in jail all winter long-twenty months. Fourteen hundred days. And it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty of anything or not.”

“Poor Blundy,” she said, kissing his cheek, and Blundy said:

“Finish your wine, then let’s go to bed.”

When Mercy MacDonald woke up the next morning she knew she’d gone to bed pretty tipsy-both times; because she had a memory of Blundy and herself stumbling out into the warm night, sometime or other, just to breathe a little fresh air before sleeping. She even remembered that he had pointed out the glimmer of light on the western horizon that was Nordvik, high enough above the planet to be caught in the last of the sunlight before it entered Slowyear’s shadow, and that he had been crying. She remembered that, for some reason, that had seemed funny to her at the time.

What she hadn’t expected was that, although her head hurt with a serious hangover, it seemed funny now, too. She giggled at the thought that she was still a bit tipsy.

She got up, looking for Blundy to tell him that amusing fact. He wasn’t far. He was right outside the door, feeding a piece of the scogger they hadn’t remembered to eat for dinner to one of the dogs, and he looked up when he saw her. “Hi,” he said, smiling because he saw that she was smiling. She giggled at him.

“What are you doing that for?” she asked.

He looked surprised. “I’m giving him a taste for it,” she explained. “Come winter we use dogs to sniff out the larvae-on the slopes, sometimes, where the wind scours the snow away. We have to wear the heated suits to dig them up, but the dogs have to tough it out-“ He broke off, smiling no longer. “What is it?” he asked sharply.

“It’s just that that’s so funny,” she gasped, laughing. “Digging up bugs. With dogs.”

It was quite annoying, though, that this man was not laughing with her. His look was serious-even frightened. “You don’t see the humor of it,” she said, pouting, “you- you-“ Then she reeled. It was almost as though she were back on the ship, suddenly weightless, and it was embarrassing, too.

She pulled herself together. “Do you know,” she said, “it’s a funny thing, but I don’t seem to remember your name.” And saw with astonishment that the man was crying.

Chapter 10

When they moved Deputy Captain Hans Horeger of the interstellar spaceship Nordvik to the adult terminal ward Murra went with him, though she could not have said why. By then there was no longer any chance that the man would regain consciousness again. He was in the deep sleep, or coma, or paralysis that marked the final stage of spongiform encephalopathy, and, though sometimes his eyes opened, she knew that there was nothing he saw. The eyes might work still, but that was the end of it. Horeger no longer had enough of a brain to know what they were seeing.

Murra didn’t tarry in that depressing place. Twenty of its thirty-two beds were occupied now. Another twenty of Nordvik’s people had died already. By now they were smoke and ash in the crematorium, surviving only as some few harvested grams of cell cultures for the doctors to ponder over later. A handful were dead or dying on the spaceship itself, not worth the trouble of shipping down to planetside; and so Nordvik’s long voyages were coming to an end.

Murra took the flowers she had brought and arranged them in a vase by Horeger’s bed. It was not a sensible thing to do, but, she was aware, it was a pretty one. Then she nodded to the attendant, drowsing in a chair by the door, and when she left the ward Deputy Captain Hans Horeger ceased to exist in her mind.

At the desk a friend hailed her to say that Blundy’s tractor had been sighted coming down the road from the pass. She accepted the news with thanks and, of course, a certain amount of pleasure, and decided to wait to see him come in. So she went to the hospital cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a bit of pastry, chatting with the others sitting around there. It was a more cheerful crowd there this day; after all, the influx of terminal cases were almost all from Nordvik, and it was not as though they were relatives, or friends. Across the long table from Murra a doctor who had just come down from the ship was holding court. He was tired, everyone could see that, but willing to indulge everyone’s natural curiosity. Yes, every remaining Nordvik person in orbit was now terminal or gone; he’d given the last of them soporifics to ease their passing. No, he didn’t think it was just as well to feed them a poison pill, as they did with babies in the last stages of SE; they were not in pain, they were very little trouble-and they would die on their own quickly enough. No, it didn’t look as though any of Nordvik’s people had been among the very lucky very few who were naturally immune; outsiders so rarely were. He held up one of the little dry-ice-cooled boxes he’d brought with him. “Still, I’ve brought down all the tissue samples. This one was a woman named Betsy arap Dee; she was one of the first to die, and I checked her out myself. She never did get down to Slowyear,” he added, sounding almost sentimental.

“Do you think you’ll learn anything from the tissue samples?” one of the nurses on break asked. The doctor shrugged but didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. They all knew the answer was no-but that they’d study them as carefully as they could anyway, because what else was there to do?

Then the conversation turned general. Yes, the doctor told them, the emptying of Nordvik was coming along on schedule. All the shuttles were busily going back and forth, bringing down everything that could conceivably be worth keeping; the hastily erected storage tents by the landing strip were already bulging with the loot. Yes, the instrument and control people were nearly finished with installing the automatic controls in Nordvik. No, there was nothing unusual about the way SE had struck the ship’s people. It was just as it had always been. Every one of them had come down with the disease, and every one would die.

It was an interesting conversation, but a little sad, too. Everyone was feeling a little of that end-of-the-party letdown. The arrival of Nordvik had been exciting. It was a once in a lifetime event-more than that, because many lifetimes came and went without the thrill of a visit from space-but now it was over. In a little while the last person from Slowyear would leave Nordvik, setting the automatic controls that would launch the old ship on its final trip, accelerating until the last of its fuel ran out, then going on endlessly, forever, never to be seen again by anyone.

“It does seem a kind of a waste,” a visitor said thoughtfully.

The doctor bent a curious look on him. “Waste? But we’re stripping everything out that we can possibly use.”

The visitor flushed. “I was just thinking-“ he said. “I mean, that’s a whole operating ship. We could refuel it, you know. The equipment’s all there, and the operating material’s in the datastores. Then we could send out an expedition-somewhere—”

“But where?” the doctor said impatiently, looking around in an aggrieved way, and of course there was no answer for that one, either.

By then Murra had finished her second cup of coffee. She glanced at her watch and decided it was time to look for Blundy. She gathered her robes around her, nodded a pretty good-by to the others at the table and walked gracefully to the admitting room.

She had almost left it too late. Blundy had made better time than she expected. He was there before her, half carrying the stumbling Mercy MacDonald, whose eyes were wildly glancing around, who was whispering gibberish too softly for anyone to hear, who had soiled herself, whose head lolled helplessly against Blundy’s shoulder until the nurses eased her onto a gurney for her last trip.

Blundy hadn’t seen her, and Murra decided to leave it that way. There was a question she wanted to ask Blundy-was he going to write something about Nordvik and its crew? And was there a part for her?-but she confidently knew those answers already. So inconspicuously she turned and went to the outside door, where she had no trouble finding a ride back to the summer city. He was, she thought kindly, entitled to his last moments alone with the MacDonald woman.

For herself, there were things to do. She planned the rest of her day with care. She would go to their comfortable, charming home and prepare a nice meal for him. He would be tired when he got home, and frayed from what had to have been a distressing experience. Choosing the menu was a bit of a problem, she reflected on the way down the hill. It would have to be something that could be kept ready for serving to him at short notice. She didn’t know just when he would get there, but there was no doubt in her mind that, sooner or later, he would; for where else was there for him to go?

PROTECTION

Maureen F. McHugh

The author’s earlier IAsfm tales, “Baffin Island” (August 1989) and “Kites” (October 1989), make up part of her first novel, China Mountain Zhang. Tor released the hardcover edition of this book last February. Ms. McHugh’s latest story shares the novel’s setting, but its theme was inspired by a very moral man she knew in China who had been a member of the Red Guard. Her exploration into how such a person could convert to a political system led to “Protection.”

When the train gets to the camp I’m scared out of my mind, but I’m trying to act smooth, you know? I was supposed to go to Green River, an all women camp out in Wyoming, but there was some kind of jack-jockey mix-up and I end up going to Protection in Kansas. I’ve never heard of Protection—I’ve heard of Green River, of course. I guess in a way I’m kind of pissed, I was supposed to go to this famous, badass labor camp and instead they send me to this place nobody ever heard of. Like it’s some kind of contest, you know, and people are going to give a damn what camp I end up in. Still thinking outside, and I’m inside. But I don’t know that yet.

I think of myself as one ticklish bitch, let me tell you. I think I’m hard-circuited. I’m not doing anything the whole way out from Wichita to Protection except I’ve got a seat on the train by the window and I’m just sitting there. Nobody will climb on me, even though a lot of people are sitting in the aisle and stepping on each other. That’s because I managed to shove a pen down the side seam of one of the three pairs of pants I’m wearing and everybody knows if they come near me I’m like as not to shove it in them, so nobody bothers me.

But there’s nothing to see outside the train window except all this dead, brown grass. Kansas must be a hell of a place. The train trip is about five hours, because we don’t go very fast, and the whole time there’s nothing outside but dried grass and once in awhile we go over a place that used to be a road before the Corridor dried up, back when it used to rain out west and there were farms. People keep stepping on each other because they’ve got to go to the bathroom, but I figure I can wait pretty long because I know the moment I get up someone is going to have my seat.

We all look real wonderful. They let us keep our clothes, which kind of surprised me, I thought they’d make us wear gray coveralls or something, but all they did was shave the back of our heads and put these implants in. I don’t know what they’re for. Maybe they can always tell where we are, hell maybe they can tell what we’re thinking. Anybody who’d had their metabolism stabilized was de-stabilized, too. I guess nobody worries about being overweight in a labor camp. The back of my head itches, and I’ve been wearing these clothes for two weeks. I’m wearing like three of everything, it looks really stupid and it’s hot. I worried about that, you know, you want to look smooth, but when they told us that we could only keep what we had on I thought it might take me awhile to get out. I mean, I’ll probably bust out before winter, you know? But just in case. And since I don’t know what the hell I’ll be doing when I get out, I think I better have extra clothes. It’s not like the officials don’t know I intend to be out, they probably assume everybody wants to get out, and when I do they’re not going to let me just buy an Amtrak ticket home, I could spend a lot of time getting back to Cleveland. I may have to walk part of the way, and that could take a hell of a long time, so I could be really glad I kept this stuff.

So we get to Protection. It’s nothing, not even fence, just this concrete platform as long as the train and a dirt road and dead grass. The train stops and we sit. I figure it’s got to be Protection, what else would be out here? Where else would a convict train go?

After we sit for awhile, maybe twenty minutes in the train with the blowers off, sweating, and far off I see this plume of brown smoke. Except it’s not smoke, it’s dust, and it’s coming off the road. Buses, bunches of them. A whole long elephant trail of dark green buses, humping up and down these kind of rolling hills. Until now I never knew what they meant by rolling hills, but they’re like ripples, all covered with dust colored dead grass. They stop on the road, the first one is almost nose up against the platform. It’s a gas bus, with a big methane gas bag on top, half inflated, kind of sagging in a cage. I never saw one before, we don’t have them in Cleveland. Guards in army colored coveralls get off the buses, lots of heavy arsenal swinging around. Deal guns, which isn’t what I expected, I thought they’d have projectile weapons, but what do I know? Maybe disruptive guns are less messy, that’s why city cops use them. But out here in a labor camp, who cares if they bloody up the landscape?

They fiddle around for a moment, crack the door on our car and three of them charge in screaming at us not to move and swinging those deal guns. Hey, I’m not going anywhere, not until I find out what’s going on. “You’re going to go out on the platform, in two lines! You assholes understand me?” this woman is screaming at us. “I been working out here in this goddamn place for five years, maybe if I kill enough of you they’ll think I can’t be trusted and transfer me somewhere, so I’m looking for an excuse! Now move!”

So we start streaming off our train car, all up and down the platform the other train cars are doing the same. When I get to the door, a guard signals I should get in the left line so I do. There doesn’t seem to be any difference between the left and right line. So there we all are, all lined up, and it’s hot and I gotta go to the bathroom.

They make us stand there in the sun while they prowl up and down the platform. Yeah, I’m getting scared. I know what’s going on, I know what I’d do in a situation like this. If I had a bunch of scum to take care of, first thing I’d do is show them what a badass I was. So we stand and I wonder what they’re going to do to us.

Finally the woman who was head screamer stops in front of our two lines. I think of her as ‘Helga.’ “You,” she points that deal gun at a guy in the right line. Tall, skinny looking guy, the kind who didn’t get a seat. He doesn’t have any expression on his face at all, almost like he expected this. “GET UP HERE!” she screams. He shambles forward. He’s got his ankles shackled, they only do that for psychos and politics; they wouldn’t pull a psycho out of the line unless they were going to roast him, besides, he just doesn’t act psycho, so I figure he’s politics. They probably don’t mind roasting a politics, either.

“TURN AROUND,” she screams. He does what he’s told so he’s standing with his back to us. “You shitheads like his haircut? Well, let me tell you, the perimeter of the camp is wired.” All up and down the platform every car is getting the same thing screamed at them. I look back at the guy, his hair is kind of long so it covers part of the shaved place. “I’m going to show you what happens if you cross the perimeter.”

She puts her hand in his back and shoves him off the platform and he falls off, hands out, flat into the dust around the concrete. “WALK!” she screams at him. I’m leaving out a lot of what she called us, just because it was pretty much the same thing over and over. Anyway, he struggles to his feet and looks up at her.

“Why should I walk if you’re going to kill me anyway?” he says in this normal, reasonable way. You can tell he’s scared, but his voice is just as nice and adult.

I like people who give the world lip.

“WALK!” she screams at him and shoves her deal gun in his face, so he kind of stumbles back, then suddenly his whole body goes stiff. Like a board. All the muscles in his neck stand out and his hands make claws and he falls over like a frigging tree, straight. Then he goes all loose.

I look up and down the platform, except for one guy who they’re having to push, all up and down are these people lying in the brown grass. Two guards hop down and I catch my breath expecting them to keel over, too, but they just pick up the guy by his arms and legs and sling him on the bus.

“Cross it often enough and you’ll fry your frigging brains to scrambled eggs,” the woman says with satisfaction. “That is, if any of you assholes have brains.”

We don’t get on the bus until Helga has told us the rules, which takes forever. When we get on our bus nobody wants to sit next to Political but he’s sitting near the front so I do. Buses make me sick, the closer I am to the front the better off I am. He’s still out, head against the window, and I have to move him to sit down. He has nice clothes, real ragged but good stuff, Chinese or something. He’s wearing a sweater and pants and under the dust they’re both this kind of maroon color, with little flecks of gray in them. They’ve taken the shackles off and thrown them back on the train. He’s got real long fingers. Something about him I like, maybe it’s the way he turned around and talked to Helga. I could understand if he got mad or freaked, but he was just real reasonable.

Everybody is looking at me because I sat down next to Political, everybody knows he’s already marked for trouble. I figure if I don’t care it marks me as a real hard-circuit and then nobody will bother me.

Besides, something about him really attracts me, so I figure he’s mine.

He doesn’t really come to in the time it takes us to get to the camp, so I have to sling his arm over my shoulders and half-carry him out of the bus. I’m not that big a girl. He’s skinny, but 180, maybe 190 centimeters and weighs more than I do. He’s not completely out, and I keep talking to him. His eyes are barely open. “Come on,” I say, “steps, get your feet under you, you son of a bitch or they’ll take it out on my kidneys.” I just keep pressing on him, get him down the steps and into the barracks. The barracks are new, concrete block and the beds are just like metal bookshelves. I sling him into a bottom bunk and take a middle one. I watch everybody else mill around before settling in.

Scared, man I’m scared. I sure as hell didn’t want a mixed camp, in a woman’s camp it’s not like I’ll be out-massed by over half the inmates. On the bus it was about two guys to every woman. Men are bigger, the only hope I have is to get a reputation as crazy, or else to come up with something everybody needs. Worrying about Politics gives me something to do other than worry about myself. The only time I leave is to go to the bucket. I never pissed in a metal bucket before, it’s an experience, not to mention that it’s loud. They turn the lights out before I get back to my bunk, which is also exciting.

I don’t sleep that night. I want to be in a real bed. I want to brush my teeth. I know that’s a bad way to think, ’cause when I did two years of juvenile reform, I learned, you don’t think about what you miss—and it isn’t really as good as you remember it anyway. Hell, most the time I sleep on someone’s couch, or floor. But it’s different.

It’s still dark when the lights come back on. Helga told us we have half an hour in the morning, then roll call, then breakfast. I don’t know what the hell the half an hour is for, most everybody spends it sleeping. I hop down out of my bunk—Goddamn Marx and Lenin, every bone in my body aches from sleeping on a metal bookshelf—and check Politics. Most of the night he was just sprawled the way he landed, one leg half off, but now he’s curled up like he’s cold. He moved, I figure that’s a good sign.

“Hey,” I shake him gently. “Come on, wake up.” For the first time it occurs to me that maybe he’s brain damaged. Helga made it sound as if you had to do it a couple of times, but how do I know? I don’t want him to be brain damaged, I need him. “Come on,” I say, “look at me. Politics, look at me.”

He groans and opens his eyes.

“Come on,” I say, “sit up.”

He sits up and grabs his head with those long fingers. Spider fingers.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Paul,” he says. Well, at least he understands.

“I’m Janee,” I say, “and we’re going to stick together, okay Paul?” If he’s brain damaged I’ll ditch him later.

He looks at me; his head is really killing him, but the way he looks at me, kind of judging, figuring, and I think, well, if he’s brain damaged he must have been a genius before. “Janee,” he says, hoarse sounding. “Okay, Janee.”

I prowl up and down the barracks. Out in the yard is an old fashioned water spigot. I don’t have anything to get water in, not even a juice bulb, but I open the door—it’s dark and clear, the stars are still bright except off to the east—and check. The perimeter is brightly lit but our door isn’t locked and I don’t see anyone walking a beat. I sneak out to the spigot. It’s got weeds right around the base, then the rest of the ground is dry and cracked. It’s real hard to turn on, and the water comes out in a trickle. I soak the outermost shirt I’m wearing, rinse it out real good, then bring it back in. I crawl into Paul’s bunk and hand him the shirt.

“It’s wet,” he says, sounding surprised.

“There’s a spigot outside.”

He wipes his face and holds it against his forehead. “Thanks Janee,” he says.

“I told you, we stick together.”

“You don’t want to stick with me,” he says. “I’m political.”

“Yeah, I know,” I say. “I’ll let you know when it’s a problem.”

The guy in the bottom bunk across from Paul’s is watching us. I look right at him, then give him a long, slow, skitzy smile. He looks away first. Little victories.

The camp is hell. That’s all there is to it. And Protection isn’t as bad as Green River, or so they say. I can’t see how that could be true. All the time I’m hungry, and either too hot or too cold. My bones hurt from sleeping on a shelf. I figure out the reason why the lights go on half-an-hour early, so we can lie there hungry and dread the day. We get up every morning and wait half-an-hour to go out to roll call. Roll call takes twenty minutes if there’s no lecture, and then we get twenty minutes for breakfast. The first day we are all given a cup, a bowl and a spoon. We march in lines to the mess, which is just a roof, no walls. For breakfast we get something that’s mostly water and a steamed roll. And coffee, if you can call it that. When they pour the soup stuff into my bowl I think it’s some kind of yeast soup, it’s just brown watery slop. It doesn’t have much taste. In the bottom are a couple of tablespoons of barley or something. The coffee is clear, like tea.

I look at it, ten years of this if I don’t figure out how to cross that perimeter. This is day one. I have 3,650 days, plus a couple of leap days.

Paul gets his and goes to a pole holding up the roof and squats down sliding against it. He hasn’t bothered to get coffee, I can’t understand it, I’m so dry I could drink a gallon and I got water in the morning at the spigot. He hands me his bowl.

“What,” I say.

“I can’t eat it,” he says.

“You got to,” I say.

“I’ll get sick,” he says. Then with this kind of sickly smile. “I like mine with milk and sugar anyway.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“Oatmeal,” he says.

Oatmeal? I sniff at it. It does smell sort of like oatmeal. I take his cup and pour some of the liquid into it. “You’ve got to have something in your stomach.”

“I’ll get sick,” he says.

“So you get sick. Maybe then you’ll feel better.”

“It’s not a hangover,” he says. But while I’m eating our breakfast, he drinks it. I stash the rolls in my bag, I could eat them but I figure he’s going to get hungry eventually.

That first day we go to the ‘factory’ and learn how to stitch quilts on these old black sewing machines with ‘Singer’ on them in gold letters. I guess because of the noise they make, although it doesn’t sound like singing to me. I sit next to Paul. We put the backs on, the blank, not-pretty parts. We’re supposed to finish three an hour. I don’t know jackshit about sewing, I mean, I didn’t sit around doing this a whole lot, you know? So I ruin the first one, big time, and the second one looks like hell, but the third one isn’t too bad. It’s not hard, just, ziiiip, up one side, ziiip, across the top, ziiip, ziiiip, side and bottom, a big square.

The first day Paul is so sick he’s lucky to be able to do one an hour. By the third day we’re doing six an hour, but that first day I can do two extra for Paul. The problem is getting them into his basket without getting caught. He doesn’t say anything about my doing them. His basket is always the first one they check.

I think I’m pretty fast at making quilts. It never hurts to be good at something. But that day and the next day, I don’t push, there’s no reason to work any harder than I have to.

By the third day Paul’s doing as well as anyone, long spider fingers aren’t shaking anymore.

We work until two-thirty, then we get a twenty minute break, then we work until seven. By dinner I’m so empty I echo. We stand in the wind with our plates and cups. Dinner is two rolls each, pale beans with a bit of white pork fat and bitter coffee.

The second day, Paul says we should take pick grass and use it in our bunks, but it’s hard to find much in the camp. That’s the problem with politicals, people like that are always thinking, but the stuff never works in the real world.

The third day they let us mix with the people who’ve been here for awhile.

I know we’re in trouble when Paul and I squat down by our pole. I happen to look around and most of the guards are gone, only a string left to protect the mess cooks, who are turning the stinking stuff they use to rinse the kettles onto the ground. “Hey,” I say.

Paul looks up.

The walking dead are headed towards us. All these skinny people in filthy clothes, maybe fifty of them. The first time, I don’t know catshit about the walking dead, I think everybody looks like that after they’ve been here awhile and I feel sick. I’m still planning to get out of here before winter, but the business of crossing the perimeter is a real problem, and besides, it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m not going to just going to walk to St. Louis and hitch a ride on a transport.

“Keep eating,” I whisper to Paul, so we do. When they get to the edge of the mess I notice that the last of the guards and the cook detail are disappearing. I keep eating. The first dead gets to a guy who’s holding his half-empty bowl and without much ado, kicks him in the ribs, and two of them fall on top of the guy, steal his food.

They start moving through and jumping people. They don’t jump everybody, somebody looks big, they just go around them. Man, I’ve got to do something. Some of them have sticks and I think to myself, I got to find out where they get those sticks. The walking dead don’t make much noise. They’re either all nuts or they’re trying to scare people. It’s creepy, watching them come through. I got a feeling that Paul and I are people they’ll press.

I’ve got to do something. We’re going to loose our dinner no matter what we do. I could just put down my bowl and then maybe they wouldn’t touch us, but that’s a bad thing to do. You don’t give in, or you become a pushover. So I’ve got to make myself so much trouble that after this they don’t mess with me.

So I look right into the face of one skinny bastard walking towards me and I smile. Then I start screaming and running, right at him, just screaming as loud as I can, and battering at him with my bowl, beans spattering. It wasn’t exactly what he expected, he’s not ready for some lunatic and I get him down, one hand pressed against his throat and keep hitting him in the face with my bowl.

Then another one of them grabs my arms and tries to pull me off. They’re real skinny, these walking dead, and I’m all pumped up, so he’s having real trouble, even with the one I’m sitting struggling like mad. Then Paul tries to grab the one pulling on me, and a guy named Carlos starts whacking on the one Paul is pulling on (which is good because Paul is a lousy fighter.)

I guess that’s when the guards decide enough is enough and start moving in, swinging the butts of the deal guns. I end up with a split lip and a black eye and the next morning all of us in the fight have to stand for an extra hour and miss breakfast—plus, we’re not supposed to get behind on our quota of quilts even though we missed forty minutes. But I also get a stick one of the walking dead dropped. And I have a good idea people are pretty much going to leave me alone.

My Paul. My Paul. He has long spider fingers and his skin is so thin you can see the copper-green stain of his neural jacks on his wrists. He never asks what I did to end up in a reform through labor camp. “Don’t you want to know?” I ask, curled up against him in our bunk.

“No,” he says, “that’s outside, we’re inside.”

He was a history teacher, a middle school teacher I think. He’s older than I am, I’m twenty-three and he’s almost thirty. He’s here for twenty years, I’m here for ten. He wouldn’t have a chance if it wasn’t for me, he doesn’t have the first idea how to protect himself and he’s a Political, that makes him a target because the guards don’t care what happens to a Political. Nobody messes with him now, because everybody knows that Janee is crazy. Sometimes if I’m careful I can hook an extra bun and split it with him. I wonder about his life outside. “Did you have a girlfriend?” I ask. “Where did you live? What kind of flat did you have?” He’s from Pennsylvania, I think. “Did you have any brothers and sisters?”

“That’s outside, Janee, it doesn’t matter here.”

He sounds like our political instruction meetings. Our old lives are outside, now, inside, we have a chance to put together new lives.

We have political instruction meetings a couple of times a week, the twelve rules are painted on the wall of the barracks.

#1. We are not strong enough ourselves, we must rely on a power greater than ourselves.

A power greater than ourselves is society, of course. The first time we go there’s this lecture, about how we are all maladjusted, and how we are all denying that we are maladjusted. And the first thing we have to do is admit that we are. So we have to go all around the room and stand up and say our first name and what our problem is. Well, Catalano, one of the guards is standing there, so everybody mostly just stands up and says their name and why they are there.

First couple of guys aren’t much, they stand up and say things like, “My name is Derrick and I am a thief.”

But then it gets to be a contest. Guys stand up and we kind of hold our breath to find out what sort of badass crime they’d committed. If a guy stands up and says he’s a thief or a pimp or that he’s in for assault everybody just sits there. But then this guy gets up, just a normal looking guy, not very big, and he says, “My name is Vincent, not Vinny, Vincent. And I am a hijacker.”

Everything gets real quiet. Even though the guy is supposed to sit down he sort of smiles and says, “I hijacked a city bus and killed the driver.”

“That’s enough,” Natalie says. She’s a prisoner too, but she’s been here for years, and so she leads our political discussion group. She knows that Vincent is putting the whammy on us, and she makes a little note in this notebook she carries.

Some people stand up and say their crimes real fast and sit down. One woman, she’s in for prostitution, but she’s not a hard case, you can tell. Maybe some smalltown girl who puts out, who got somebody bothered. She stands up and she’s crying and she says in this real little voice, real fast, “MynameisNancyandI’maprostitute,” and sits down.

But Natalie makes her stand back up, and there she is crying, and makes her say it again, slower. Nobody can understand what she’s saying, she’s scared so bad and crying so hard. It’s just mean to make her stand up, a little piece of white meat like that, ’cause the little girl knows, and she’s right, that these guys are going to be all over her once lights are out.

But I’m thinking about my reputation. I’m only in for larceny and assault, which isn’t going to sound like much. And I’ve got a reputation between me and big trouble.

Paul doesn’t have to stand up and say anything, politicals aren’t allowed to say anything in political instruction for the first two years, which is another weird rule. You’d think they’d need it worse than us.

So I’m thinking, while it gets closer and closer to my turn, and finally I’ve got to stand up. I stand up and stand there a moment, thinking if I really want to go through with this, and just before Natalie says something, because I can see she’s going to, I say, “My name is Janee, and my problem is that I’m stuck in this goddamn camp.” And I sit down.

A lot of guys laugh and a couple of them whistle and I don’t smile or anything. Catalano, the guard, reverses his deal gun and starts coming towards me, so I stand back up and say, “I’m in for larceny and assault.” Which makes it sound like there might be other stuff that they never got on me. And then I sit down and Natalie scribbles in her little book.

The next morning, Vincent and I have to stand at roll call for an extra forty minutes, which was what Natalie was scribbling down. But Paul hooks an extra roll at breakfast, and gives me his and the extra. I’m real proud of him, he’s learning a little, too.

At lunch he tells me that the political study is based on Alcoholics Anonymous.

“Give me a break,” I say. “Alcoholics Anonymous isn’t about politics.”

“No,” he says, “it’s about changing behavior. They use most of the old rules, maybe change them a little. Rule No. 1, about relying on a power greater than ourselves, that’s straight from AA. Except that traditionally the power greater than ourselves was God, not society.”

“I knew they meant society,” I say, he probably thinks I’m stupid, and I’m not, I know a lot more about staying alive than some goddamn history teacher.

But he isn’t paying any attention at all. “It backfired big time last night,” he says. “You and Vincent.” He grins at me. I thought he might not understand about what I did, he didn’t say anything when we crawled into our bunk the night before, but he does, he thinks it’s all right.

I gotta think about getting out. Paul keeps shaking his head every time I say something about it. “How are you going to get across the perimeter?” he asks.

“I got in,” I say.

“Are you going to wait until there’s a shipment of new prisoners and then just walk past them?” he says. Which is a point. I don’t know if the whole perimeter shuts off when prisoners come in or not.

“I can test it,” I say.

“Fry your brains?” he says.

“Nah,” I say, “shove one of the walking dead across.”

He laughs, but I’m serious. The walking dead don’t care about each other, they don’t care about anything. I can go snag me a walking dead and the others will just look at me.

So I’m waiting. The only problem is that it isn’t like they post an arrival schedule for new prisoners. The first time we get new prisoners, we’re inside sewing quilts. We come out for dinner, and there are new people, so we have to wait because we can’t mix with them. Standing there in the wind, shivering, while these stupid people, looking even stupider with the backs of their heads still new-shaved, are getting their dinner.

But it’s early October, I think, and we’re out for our break and somebody says, “Look.”

There are a couple of the big green buses, rolling up to the perimeter. I start up, look around, can I get to one of the walking dead before the perimeter gets back up? Walking dead don’t wander far from their factory work room. I can’t even imagine one of them working. Most of them are in group six, which is officially the group for incorrigibles. Group six is pretty far from us, we’re group thirty-six.

I don’t see how I can get to one and back, I look back at the perimeter, the first bus slows down and then speeds up and crosses. There are bunches of guards and deal guns at the road, but nothing between us and the perimeter. Maybe I should just try it? Helga made it sound like I’d have to get fried a couple of times before it would hurt me permanently.

But this guy in Group thirty-three makes his decision before me, takes out running for the perimeter, away from the buses and the guards. I look back at the guards, expecting them to start firing. Deal guns aren’t real accurate if you’re too far away, he might still make it.

But they don’t do anything. That tells me right there. I should have known, they’d be guarding if the whole perimeter went down. We all sit and watch the guy, he hits the perimeter, it’s just a bunch of white stakes with a string about ankle high, just to mark it. He leaps the wire and goes down. We can see him spasm in the grass, just beyond the wire.

The guards aren’t in any hurry. After awhile two of them finally walk from the road across the compound to the guy.

It’s time for us to be called back inside to sew more quilts, but the loudspeakers are still quiet, just that hum that means they’re on. I look up at Natalie, who is supposed to be calling us back inside and she’s looking at her feet.

This is a lesson I guess. I figure they’re going to roast the guy.

The guards walk across the perimeter like it wasn’t even there. It’s not for them. They grab the guy by the arms and drop him across the wire, and walk back, leaving him there.

“What are they—” I say. But I know.

“They’re leaving him to fry,” Paul says.

Right. “Can he feel anything?” I ask.

Paul doesn’t say anything for a moment. “No,” he says finally, “probably not.”

We sit out there for a long time, Natalie looking at her feet, some of us watching the guy. Every so often he jerks around for awhile and stops. Finally we go in to work until dinner, and when we come out to get our slop, the poor sucker is gone.

It’s not going to stop me, you know? There’s always a way. Once I get out of Protection, all I got to do is get to Saint Louis, then I can hitch with a transport and be in Cleveland in no time. In Cleveland I know some people who’ll hide me.

People get in, people can get out.

But it dawns on me that it’s getting on to winter and I’m not real sure about my chances of getting to Saint Louis in the winter. Besides, if I winter over in Protection, then the hair on the back of my hair will grow out better and I won’t look so much like a goddamn escapee. My clothes’ll get worse, but maybe next spring I can steal the clothes off a newcomer. And during the winter I can watch and plan, so I can figure how to get out of here.

Anyway, if I’m going to be spending the winter here, I’ve got to start playing the game different. Got to work the system a little better, score some points with the guards and the upper orders, you know? When I was in juvenile detention they made a big thing about political instruction, so I try to pay attention.

Thing is, all that stuff about ideology and infrastructure and shit goes right over my head. And Natalie is always asking me things like, “Why are we here in Protection?”

“Cause we screwed up,” I say.

Natalie shakes her head and asks somebody else and they answer with one of those slogan kind of answers about society and bourgeois mal-a-dap-ta-tion. And I look at Paul and roll my eyes. I can’t keep this stuff in my head. I mean, it’s all just words that don’t mean anything. I can’t understand why anyone would ever get in political trouble because none of it ever seems to mean anything. Maybe if I’d finished High School it would be easier.

I can’t figure out what’s so awful about capitalism in the first place. Back when America had capitalism we were rich and powerful. Now we’re not. So isn’t capitalism better?

One night I waited until lights out and I asked Paul.

He laughed. “It’s not that simple, Janee.”

“So why not,” I whisper.

“Because we lost our power while we were still capitalist. You’ve heard about the Second Depression.”

Sort of. “When New York City used to turn off the electricity at night?” I used to watch this show called Stormtime, it was real popular, with that cute guy, Sam Basarico. They were always turning the electricity off and people always had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night or die, and Sam Basarico was always waking up doctors and stuff.

“Yeah,” he says.

“So,” I say.

“So what?” he says.

“So what’s wrong with capitalism?”

He sighs. For a minute I wonder if maybe he’s a capitalist. But then he says, “It’s not a fair system.”

“That’s stupid,” I say. Things aren’t fair. Only little kids expect things to be fair.

“I’m tired,” Paul says. “Go to sleep.”

“No,” I say, and start kinda making up to him, scrunching up against him, playing with him. And when he’s starting to get all hot I say, “You want to go to sleep?”

“Jesus, Janee,” he whispers. So we hump a little in the dark. I should be worried about getting pregnant. I wonder what they do if someone gets pregnant? But I haven’t had a period since I got to the camp, which is strange. Maybe the implant.

“Okay,” I say, “now tell me about capitalism and what’s wrong with it.”

“Tomorrow.”

“No,” I say.

And the guy on the rack above us hisses, “You two shut up!”

So we’re quiet for awhile and then I say real close to Paul’s ear—he’s falling asleep and I’m tired, too, but you can’t give up on stuff like this—“Come on, tell me about capitalism.”

“If we talk politics, I’ll get in trouble and you’ll get in trouble,” he says.

“If I don’t figure out how to say the right stuff in political instruction I’m going to get in trouble anyway.”

He kind of laughs. I can feel him shake, even though he doesn’t make any noise. “Okay,” he whispers. “But tomorrow. Go to sleep.”

So he starts by asking me what I know about capitalism.

“People were rich and there was a lot of corruption and a lot of crime,” I say. “And now we have socialism and people are poor and there’s a lot of corruption and a lot of crime.”

He laughed. Evidently anything I say about politics makes him laugh.

“You think I’m not that smart,” I say. “Just because I’m not book smart.”

“You’re not stupid Janee, you just never had much chance.”

I don’t know how to answer that so I don’t say anything, I mean, is it an insult or what?. So he tells me about capitalism, and people making money. And he tells me about people having to pay rent for the places they lived. That sounds pretty screwy. People had to pay for water, too. People could sell anything.

I make him tell me how capitalism caused global warming and he tells me all about how people wouldn’t give up things because if they stop buying capitalism doesn’t work, so the technology and the pollution made the earth heat up and now the whole corridor, Texas and Kansas and Oklahoma and Idaho and all those states that used to have farming don’t have enough rainfall. Protection used to be a farming community. Now it never rained.

Which explains a lot of what was wrong with capitalism. I get the idea that people knew all this bad stuff was going to happen, but they wouldn’t stop buying gasoline driven cars and stuff, and the government wouldn’t stop them. So now people like me have to suffer for it.

Except none of that helps in political instruction.

“What class are you?” Natalie asks me.

“Proletariat,” I say. I know that one, I remember that from when I was still in high school.

Wrong again. None of us know what class we are. Natalie sighs. We’re ‘criminal element.’ Right, I should have got that.

We have a stove in the barracks, and it’s getting real cold at night. I keep hoping that they’re going to start heating the place a bit. It’s been cold enough that one night water froze. And we may sew quilts all day but we never get to take any of them back to the barracks at night.

“Hey,” I say in political instruction, “one of the big differences between capitalism and socialism is that in capitalist times people had to pay for stuff like where they lived and water and heat and all that, right?”

“Yes,” Natalie says.

“So if we live in Socialism, how come we don’t have heat?”

Natalie scrunches her mouth together in a line, real flat. Paul looks down at his hands. I screwed up again, and I don’t even understand why I’m wrong.

Finally Natalie says, “Girl, I’m telling you, you’ve got an attitude. You should be thinking about working on that.”

All my life people have been telling me about my frigging at-ti-tude. Seems to me, a lot of times, my at-ti-tude has been all that’s been between me and the world making me part of the pavement. Seems to me, here in Protection, my at-ti-tude is about all I’ve got.

I’m cold all the time. Out here in Kansas, the wind blows all the time. It’s sunny, but the sky is real pale blue and real far away. Natalie says that long about January we’ll start getting dust storms.

When the lights come on in the morning, none of us bother to get up. I stay right up against Paul, trying to get a little warm. We got two blankets because they’re are two of us, but they’re really not big enough to cover two people, even when I lie right up against him. Still, we get some overlap. So my legs and feet are cold, and his backside is cold, because those are places where there isn’t enough cover, but we’re okay.

We take our blankets to the factory, all wrapped up like Indians. If you do it right, part of the time you are sewing a quilt you can have it in your lap, but if they catch us doing that they chew us out. Nancy gets in trouble because when she’s finished sewing a quilt, instead of putting it in her basket, she keeps it on her lap.

We’ve been doing quilts a couple of months, it’s not real hard. We’re supposed to do twelve an hour, one every five minutes. You got to fold a little, pin a little, then zip, zip, zip, zip, four seams and you go on to the next one. When you run out of thread you have to signal Natalie and she brings you thread. If you don’t do twelve an hour, then you have to stand for detention. So I do fourteen or fifteen the first hour, just in case I have a problem, and then twelve an hour for the rest of the day. Our hands get so cold it’s hard to do them right. If you make a mistake, the bad quilt is called ‘waste.’ I asked if we couldn’t keep a couple of the ‘wastes’ to use ourselves but Natalie said that unscrupulous people would ruin quilts on purpose just so they could have them.

Well, yeah, I would.

Then one morning, Corbin, who with Natalie, is one of our Group Leaders, says that we’re going to have a change. Corbin doesn’t have any teeth in front. At first I thought he was real old, but then I found out he’s only thirty-six, but he’s been in labor camps for fourteen years. I guess that and the fact that his mouth is all caved in from having no teeth is what makes him look old.

He says that there is rationing outside, like there usually is in the winter. It’s the first time anyone has mentioned outside in a long time. It seems so far away, outside. I guess there didn’t used to be rationing, before the Second Depression, but I guess if they could farm the corridor there would be a lot more food.

From now on, he says, if we make 120 quilts a day, we get regular rations, if we make more than 180 we get extra rations, and if we make less than 120, we get half rations.

I figure maybe I can make 180 quilts, I mean, I’ve never really tried had before. I have to make eighteen quilts an hour. The first hour I make nineteen, raggedy-assed things but nineteen and they’re good enough to pass, not waste, you know. Man, I figure I got this thing licked, and I’m tasting extra rations. But the next hour I screw up two and I only end up with fifteen. And the third hour I get up to thirteen and the thirteenth one I screw the thread all to hell, tangled in the bobbin and all, and I got to be real careful or I’ll break the needle. If I break the needle they’ll dock me ten quilts because needles are expensive. I finish the day with 154. Chris, this big guy from Detroit who killed somebody with a top from a trash barrel, he makes 182. His fingers just blur. I’m always afraid that I’m going to end up sewing my own hand if I go that fast.

This other guy, Nesly, he only makes 114. He’s just a klutz, he goes real slow and he messes some up. At dinner, Chris gets two extra buns, and I’m disappointed, I thought he’d get more than that. But Nesly only gets half his beans.

We discuss it at our political meeting. First the title of the lesson, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Then Natalie has a discussion group and we talk about what it means.

Nesly says, kind of desperate, “It doesn’t seem fair, I work as hard as I can.”

Maybe he does, I don’t know. I don’t like Nesly, he’s one of those people who you look at and you know they’re a screw-up. He’s not very big, and he’s got no front, no pride. And he whines all the time.

Natalie says, “Think about it Nesly. People like Chris work harder, they need more food. Society is like a machine. A person like Chris makes sure that more people have blankets. It’s for the good of society that if there is only so much food, people like Chris get it, because he’s more efficient.”

Some people nod. I can see it, in a way.

Mostly I don’t care, it’s warmer in the bunk, with Paul, and that’s where I want to be. I’m tired all the time, from being cold. It seems like I just go to sleep and the lights snap on.

I close my eyes again, not bothering to get up.

Paul says, “You still want to learn more for political instruction?”

“I dunno,” I say, and then from habit, because he’s doing something I want him to do, “Yeah, I guess.”

But he doesn’t talk about anything that makes sense, he starts by saying, “What’s feudalism?”

“Bad,” I say, thinking about how in half an hour I have to go stand out in the cold for roll call. When we have roll call in the morning, the stars are still out and it’s still dark.

“Why is it bad?”

Hell, I don’t know, I don’t even really know what feudalism is except it has to do with kings and queens.

So that morning he tells me about serfs, who were like slaves, because only a few people owned all the land, and everybody else had to work for them. And because if you didn’t work for someone you would starve, you’d do anything to work for someone. But they could pay you whatever they wanted.

I think I can understand that pretty well. “People like us,” I say, “we’re like serfs, because we’re trapped, and they don’t have to do anything but give us a little food.”

“Right,” he says, pleased with me. Well halleluia, Janee finally said something right. “The only difference,” he says, “is that a feudal economy is based on land. Since people don’t have much money, mostly land, they can’t really buy and sell a lot. I mean, you can’t carry a hectare of land in your pocket, you know?”

I laugh, because I’m supposed to, but he sounds like a frigging teacher.

“Now a factory is expensive,” he says. “You know how animals and people evolve?”

“Like people started out from apes,” I say.

“Sort of,” he says. “Anyway, first are primitive societies, like the Indians. Then there are feudal societies, which are more organized. And then people get money together and they buy machines and build buildings and you have factories. But to start a factory you have to have a lot of money, you need capital. And that’s why people who run factories are called capitalists.”

Okay. So out on the field for roll call, while I’m freezing my buns off, I’m thinking about factory workers and serfs. And about labor camps. Paul thinks they’re different, because of land and money, but they really aren’t. It seems to me that if society is going to evolve, it should get better for everyone, not just the people at the top, right? I mean, Indians had it a lot better than I do.

“Where did you live in Pennsylvania?” I ask Paul.

He doesn’t answer.

“Did you live in a big city, like Philadelphia or Pittsburgh?”

He doesn’t pay any attention to me.

“Maybe in a little town, like Allentown?” Everybody has heard of Allentown, because it’s a famous battleground of class struggle. That and the little town in Kentucky where the miners went on strike. “Did you have a girlfriend?”

“That was outside,” he finally says.

“Do you want to know if I had a boyfriend?” I ask.

“I’m sure you did.”

“You don’t know,” I say. “You try to make it sound like you don’t care, but you don’t know anything about me. Maybe I ax-murdered my boyfriend,” I say.

It irritates me, he won’t tell me anything. He doesn’t want to hear anything about me, either. I mean I don’t think it’s a good idea to always be talking about it, but it’s stupid to pretend that we didn’t have any life at all out there. I figure he had a girlfriend, maybe a wife. Sometimes, people divorce people who go into labor camps. It’s an okay reason for divorce.

“What’s the big secret?” I say. “Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

“That’s a whole different person,” he says, “a whole different life.”

“Why don’t you ever talk about politics, I mean, you’re here because of politics.”

“I am talking about politics,” he says, sounding angry, “I’m teaching you, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, but you never teach me anything subversive,” I say. “We just talk about feudalism. Natalie doesn’t even care about feudalism, I still don’t know the right answers when she asks me questions.”

“It’s not something somebody can explain overnight,” he says.

“I don’t even think you’re right,” I say. “You say that feudalism was better than the Indians, and that capitalism was better than feudalism. But it’s not, it’s just the same for people like me, we always get shit on. Except maybe for the Indians. I’d be better off if I were an Indian.”

“That’s the point,” he says, exasperated. “Feudalism and capitalism exploit people like you and me.”

Exploit. That crops up all the time, exploitation of the workers. I feel like I’ve just gotten another piece of the puzzle.

“So how would you change things, Janee?” he says.

I think. “I’d make sure that . . . I mean, people still have to work, right? Or we wouldn’t have anything to eat. But I’d give more to the people like me, like I’d make sure that people had enough to eat and all that. I wouldn’t let some people have a lot and not have to work. And I wouldn’t make people do stupid things. You know, sewing quilts all the time is boring.”

“But how are you going to have factories if no one has enough money to build them?” Paul asks.

He’s got a point. I mean, if everybody is pretty much the same, nobody has a whole lot of money. I try to think who builds factories. I get it, all the sudden I get it. “The Government. The Government can build them.”

“Why the Government?” he asks.

“Because they’ve got the money,” I say.

“But then the Government just becomes like the capitalists, exploiting people.”

That’s what we’ve got but I don’t say it.

“Think about it, Janee,” he says.

Right. He knows the answer, but he wants me to guess, stupid son of a bitch playing stupid teacher games.

If it wasn’t for me, the poor sorry bastard would be in real deep shit. I know he thinks I’m stupid, I can tell by the way he talks to me. When he’s telling me about politics he talks slower, real careful, and he asks questions he already knows the answers to and there I am, trying to guess the right answer when he could just tell me and then I’d know. And why won’t he tell me anything about himself? Why doesn’t he want to know anything? ’cause I don’t really matter, that’s why. He doesn’t need to tell me anything because I’m just dumb old Janee.

“Listen,” I say, “what difference does it make? Why the hell can’t you just tell me where you lived? Huh? Why do you have to be so goddamn secret about it?”

“What difference does it make where I lived,” he says. He’s in a pissy mood. When he’s like this I’m not supposed to bother him, he kind of sits around and doesn’t say anything. What, he thinks he’s the only one whose life is screwed up?

“Fine,” I say. “You don’t want to talk to me? I don’t want to talk to you.” And I don’t talk to him. I just leave him right there and I just start ignoring him from then on, take my blanket, sleep in the goddamn bunk by the door even though it’s colder. I mean, I boot Nesly out, make him sleep in the middle bunk so I can have the bottom, I can’t let goddamn Nesly sleep better than I do, not even for Paul. And the bunk is the pits, there’s a draft in from the door and I’ve only got one blanket, so I have to sleep curled up in the corner trying to get all of me under the stupid green blanket.

Paul doesn’t say anything. He has that way, like he expects shit to happen, like he always expected I’d dump him. And the next morning nobody really bothers him. Nobody really bothers me, either, but then, people don’t bother me. So we just go through the day, not talking to each other. I even make Nesly sit at my Singer sewing machine, next to Paul. I see people watching, seeing how pissed I am. Seeing if Paul is out there by himself.

At dinner Paul gets in line, he’s in front of Marisa, who is okay, and Roy and Sal cut in front of Marisa, which gets her real nervous until they start bumping into Paul and she realizes she’s not the target. She looks back at me, I can see her head turn, but I’m making like I’m not really looking. Paul looks back, not knowing what’s going on, and says something, and Sal and Roy laugh. So he gets his beans and they get theirs, and I’m still like I’m not watching, and Sal and Roy are leaning on him. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I can tell, they’re over there by the kettles and now since it’s cold there’s always like this steam blowing like smoke.

And Paul doesn’t know what to do, you can see his shoulders up around his ears and he’s all elbows and you can tell that Roy and Sal got him running, but he’s holding his beans and shaking his head, and Sal pulls on the plate, but Paul won’t let go, so it’s kind of a tug of war. Sal’s looking a little stupid, and Paul calls to one of the guards, which is a mistake, because it’s a guy we call Arkansas who doesn’t care what happens as long as he doesn’t have to do anything. He’s this short little guy with a big adam’s apple and those stupid green guard’s uniforms fit him even worse than they fit the other guards. Paul always says Arkansas is an example of too much inbreeding.

Arkansas goes deaf and pretends he doesn’t know what’s going on and the next thing I know Sal flicks Paul’s plate of beans onto Paul’s face and shirt. And Sal and Roy are laughing, and I guess it’s not as good as getting Paul’s beans but it’s better than nothing, and Paul yells at Arkansas, “Did you see that! Are you going to let them do that!”

Arkansas sort of half reverses his deal gun, so that the metal stock is out there, like he’s going to club someone, and narrows his eyes and says, “Politics, you causing a disturbance?” in this real lazy way.

“I wasn’t doing anything—”

“I don’t like trouble,” Arkansas says.

And Paul must realize that it’s open season when you’re political, ’cause he doesn’t say anything after that.

And I’m pretending not to notice anything. Son of a bitch thinks I’m stupid, let him survive out there on his brains.

Things are really different without me being with Paul. I guess I kind of look around. Not that there’s a whole lot to see. Kansas looks like hard, pale ripples, and the sky is light blue, real far away. The barracks are all in lines and they’re low and long and even though they were painted green, now they’re just all washed out, a kind of darker Kansas color. The only colors are the guard’s uniforms, which are dark green, all stamped The U.S. People’s Army over the pockets.

I feel so small. It was okay when I busy watching everybody in group thirty-six and worrying about Paul, but now I feel so small, and I have this awful thing in my stomach, all the time. Every time I look out past the guard wire that marks the perimeter, and there’s dry, empty Kansas, it’s like my stomach is trying to swallow me up. I know I’m going to get out of here in the spring, something will come up, it has to come up, I can’t stand it here, I’ll die, I’ll really die out here.

People do die. Nobody from group thirty-six, but sometimes from other groups, like group six, the zombies. They put the body in a green bag in the morning and we see the guards throw them in a truck while we’re standing in line for breakfast, and I realize they’ve been doing that since it started to get cold. I’ve been watching them but it’s like I didn’t really notice.

I start thinking about running out, just running, just trying it. Maybe the perimeter isn’t on all the time. We don’t go near it. Maybe they leave it off. And if they don’t, I’d never know, just zap and then the guards leave you there and Paul thought that you didn’t feel anything and he ought to know, since he’s been zapped.

Crazy thoughts, that scare me, but it’s so tempting. Like my mind doesn’t really believe anything could happen to me.

In political instruction Natalie gives us all lapboards and paper and little short stubby pencils. Even Paul gets a lapboard. That’s real different. Which makes me more nervous, I don’t like different. Different is bad. My first thought is that we’re going to have a test and I know there’s no way I can pass, and I start wondering what they’ll do to me if I flunk. Cut my rations? I’m trying, I’m trying as hard as I can. But that’s what Nesly always says. So I clench my pencil and wait to see what she says.

Natalie says, “We need to see how you are progressing in your self-struggle. Please write about yourself. You can write anything you wish, but we will check to see what you have omitted. Everybody understand?”

No, I don’t understand. I don’t write very good. I mean, I didn’t even finish high school. I don’t know what they want. But nobody else says anything, so I’m not going to say anything. So I look down at the piece of paper. I look up and around the room and I see the twelve rules of self-struggle on the wall. All that stuff about one day at a time, and denial and all that stuff. A couple of people are writing but a lot of people are like me, just sitting there.

Paul is looking at me, and when I look at him, he shakes his head. No.

I frown. ‘No’ what? But if I keep looking at him Natalie will notice and we’ll both be in trouble.

So I look back at my paper. I try to write something.

My name is Janee Scott. I am a theif and I asalted a person. I am . . .

I don’t know how to spell ‘maladjusted’. So I change my sentence.

. . . a criminol elamint.

That looks wrong, too. So I make the ‘i’ and ‘e’, ‘elament’ looks better. So now what am I supposed to do? Natalie said that we would be checked for stuff we left out. So maybe I should tell about my arrest? So I write down about the woman I beat up and about stealing her purse.

I used to steal from the grocery, too. In the winter it was easy. I got picked up a couple of times and I spent a couple of nights in jail. So I better tell about that, too. I can’t spell grocery so I write ‘store.’

Finally I write:

I am sory for my crimes, and for the bad things I did to sosiaty.

I haven’t written very much, not even half the page. Some people are still writing. Some people have written most of a page already. I wonder what else I’m supposed to write. Natalie said we’d get in trouble if we left things out, but I don’t know what kind of things. What else could I say? Maybe I’m supposed to write about the things I did in camp? About the fight with the walking dead and about standing up in political instruction and saying that my problem was that I was in a labor camp?

Other people are asking Natalie questions, they kind of wait until she is looking around and then they half raise their hand and she comes over. So I wait and when she looks at me I put my hand up, feeling stupid. Natalie already knows I’m stupid, what difference does it make?

“Are we supposed to write about things we’ve done at camp?” I whisper.

“Whatever you want,” Natalie says.

Somebody else raises their hand and she goes to them.

I don’t know what to do. But she said that we’ll get in trouble for the stuff we leave out. So I try to think of how to say what I’ve done at Protection.

I have a bad atitude. I was in a fite with some pepoul from gr.

6 becase they tried to take my beans. Also, in our meeting, I say
that my problim is I am at a laber camp, but my problim is that

I am a theif and I asalted the person at the store and I stol food.

When I stol food from the store, I hurt sosiaty.

I think the last sentence is pretty good, but when I think I’ve done something right in political instruction, I’m always wrong.

After the political instruction meeting, Sal starts ragging on Paul about his bunk, telling him he’s going to throw him out. Sal has a bottom bunk, so he’s really just leaning on Paul. I figure if Sal is going to take Paul’s bunk, I’ll take Sal’s, so I grab my blanket and throw it there while Sal is facing down Paul.

Paul is going to come here first, thinking that Sal’s bunk is empty. I’m going to tell him to try near the door. Actually, maybe I’ll let him stay, maybe I won’t, it depends. If he acts mealy-mouthed and just slinks down the door, he can freeze for all I care.

And he will, too, cause Paul’s so tall that his blanket isn’t long enough, and when he scrunches up it seems like his knees always stick out. And he’s thin, the way some tall guys are, even thinner now. We’re all even thinner now. He’s going to end up all bones and joints, like his long fingers, stuck down there with Nesly. And Nesly’ll latch on to him, and he won’t have the sense to tell Nesly to get out of his face.

He’ll feel sorry for Nesly. And he’ll be nice to him, cause Paul’s like that. He’s decent. Even if it drives me nuts sometimes, like maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to know about me before I came here, like he’d prefer to think nice things about me or something. Or maybe that’s not it at all, it’s hard to know what he’s thinking. He’d have to be pretty stupid to think nice things about me. But I do know, if someone doesn’t take care of him, being decent will get him in deep.

And then all the sudden I’m thinking all these things at once, like what if Paul got like the zombies, what if he stopped caring, and I’m wondering if it could happen, although I can just see him, all raggedy-assed and blank-eyed, stick-like and smelling like piss, specially because he’s thin to begin with. And at the same time, I keep thinking of Kansas out there, all pale colored, and us so little, and wondering if I might not end up a zombie, ’cause worrying about Paul, I never thought about people ending up zombies. I never thought about running for the perimeter. It’s like my cousin said about her kid, when you have a baby, you don’t have a chance to know how screwed up you are because you got to think about milk and diapers and all that shit, and the baby just keeps loving you.

So, not even meaning to, I pop out of Sal’s bunk and just grab my blanket and go to see what’s going on. And what’s going on is this: Paul has my stick, the one I got from the living dead, which I keep stuck in the frame under our bunk, and he doesn’t really look like he’s sure what to do with it. But Sal isn’t sure how to get around him, because there isn’t a lot of room between the bunks, you know. And Eddy, who has the bottom bunk across from ours, and Marisa, who has the bunk above Eddy’s, are both swearing like mad, telling Sal to leave everything alone, ’cause if Paul starts swinging that stick in that little space people might get their heads knocked.

So I just walk up and say, “Sal, get back to your own bunk.”

“Stay outta this,” Sal says.

Paul doesn’t say anything, so I just walk past Sal. The stupid dick elbows me and pushes me into the bunk, so I pop out again and grab the stick from Paul and stick it like a sword right into Sal’s stomach and then start smacking him with it, bap, bap, bap, not really hurting him, but real fast, so he can’t get a hold of it, and he puts up his hands trying to keep me off and keeps walking backwards until he’s clear of the bunks and I say, “Listen, mess with me again and I’ll put it in your teeth.”

That’s the way you deal with trash.

So then I just walk back and sit down on the bunk and lean down and shove the stick back in the frame.

Paul stands there a moment and I look up at him and say, “What?”

He’s got a kind of funny little smile on his face, but he just says, in that real reasonable way of his, “Are you back or do you just want the bunk?”

“It’s warmer with someone else,” I say. “And I’ve already got you broke in.”

“Okay,” he says. And sits down.

Eddy says, “Shit,” and turns over with his back to us. Marisa is looking over the edge of her bunk. Marisa is with Kirk, I don’t know where he’s been all through this.

“Janee,” Paul says, real quiet.

I look up at him, wondering, wondering what he’s going to say, and feeling kind of funny, and maybe a little embarrassed, just because of the way he said my name.

“What did you write?” he says.

For a moment I don’t follow, because it wasn’t what I expected at all. Then I figure out he means that stupid thing at political instruction, and without even thinking I kind of look over towards where the twelve rules are written on the wall, even though you can’t see them from the bunk.

I’m irritated. Here I just saved his balls and he’s going to play teacher games. “None of your business,” I say.

“Janee—” he says, and takes my shoulder and kind of pushes my hair away from my face, nice, something he’s never done before. Not like humping, but nice, like just for me, Janee. “It’s important, what did you write?”

I shrug. “Just about being a thief and about fighting with the guys from group six and then about the time I said that my big problem was being in a labor camp.”

He nods. “Good. When they give it back to you, just write the same thing, only in different words.”

“Why are they going to give it back to me?”

“It’s something they do,” he says. He’s real tense, real scared. I can’t figure out what the big deal is. I know he’s rattled from Sal, he doesn’t know that the Sal’s of this world are really just looking for someone to tell them what they can and can’t do.

“Hey,” I say. “Don’t worry about it. Come on, sit down here with me. It’s cold enough in this barn.” Saying that makes me smile. “My mother used to say that,” I tell him. “She’d say, ‘Close the door, it’s cold enough in this barn.’ ”

He smiles a little. “Mother’s say that sort of thing. Mine used to say, ‘Close the door, you weren’t raised in a barn.’ ”

“Must be a Pennsylvania thing,” I say, even though I’ve heard it before, people in Cleveland say it.

“Yeah,” he says, “must be a Harrisburg thing.”

“You know,” I say, real quiet, “you can be a real pain in the ass, but sometimes, you’re all right.”

“Janee,” he says, “you’ve got to be real careful. I don’t know why you adopted me, but you don’t want me telling you things. You think you do, but I tell you about my life and then I’ll be talking about things, things I think and believe, and you’ll spend the rest of your life in a labor camp. You’ve got to just say back to them whatever they say to you, okay?”

He looks sad, he looks lonely. Well I’m lonely, too. All the time I’m lonely here. “Most of what they say is crap,” I say, and I can feel myself getting irritated at him, getting irritated at all of it, I’m cold all the time, and hungry, damn it.

“I didn’t say you had to believe it,” he whispers.

Finally, they start the little electric heaters in the factory where we sew quilts, mostly because it’s so cold that our fingers are stiff and our production is falling. It doesn’t make the place warm, but I can’t see my breath anymore.

I think about being warm all the time. I get these bruises on my legs, most of us do, from the cold. Chilblains. They hurt, real bad. Get up in the morning and it hurts to move my legs, and when I’m standing out there for roll call, the wind comes whipping over those little ripply Kansas hills and my legs hurt so much I have tears in my eyes. Then we cripple on over for breakfast and take it into the factory. Paul and I sit together against the wall, one blanket around our shoulders, the other across our legs, and eat.

I still haven’t gotten to 180 quilts. I get 177 once and Corbin calls time to quit. I’m so mad I almost cry. Really, I never understood that saying, but I can feel the hot tears. I want to hit something. Nesly’s doing real bad. He’s coughing all the time, and spitting. He’s on half rations, because his production is so low. I know when I’m losing my concentration because I can hear Nesly back there, coughing his lungs out.

I sew quilts. I can mostly sew without thinking, just zip, zip, zip, zip. I think about a lot of things. I think about what Paul said, about saying whatever they want me to say. And I think about what they want me to say. And I think about the question he asked me, when I said that it seemed to me that the Indians had it the best, that factory workers, and serfs and people like me, we all had it just about the same.

I keep trying to think about what would make it better. Everybody has to work, or people wouldn’t have anything. Even Indians had to hunt or something. Like quilts, there’s a lot in a quilt. There’s the cottony stuff in the middle, somebody has to make that, and then somebody has to put it in the middle of the quilt. Somebody like us has to make the plain part, that they put the stuffing in. And somewhere, somebody has to put together all the little pieces of cloth and make the top part. Sometimes I imagine the way my plain shells will look when the top goes on them. I don’t know if they’ll be the kind with the patches, or if they’ll be the ones with the stars, or the fans, or the pin wheels . . . There’s a lot of different patterns.

I’d like making quilts a lot better if I could do different things, like the top part, too. If I were going to make a new society, I’d have people do different things, not the same things all the time. So that somebody wouldn’t always get stuck doing the stuff that no one likes to do.

At break one day, I tell Paul about my idea.

“That’s a good idea,” he says. “But who would make the schedule?”

I shrug. “Maybe everybody could talk about it. Like consensus.” In political meetings we’ve been talking about consensus, having everybody come to agreement. It means that when you know you’re out-voted, you give in, because you know you’re not going to win. First you talk, and everybody kind of finds out what everybody else thinks, then when you vote, it’s not really a vote, you consent. And if one person says no, then you have to talk about it until everybody agrees. But you shouldn’t say ‘no’ unless you really have to. Everybody has to kind of trust everybody else, you have to decide, you may disagree, but do you disagree enough to stop everything?

“Quaker socialism,” Paul says. For a moment I think he’s laughing at me, but he’s not. Things strike him funny that aren’t funny to anyone else.

“What’s that mean?” I ask.

“Quakers were a religious group that practiced some socialist techniques,” he says.

“Religion is anti-socialist,” I say, which everybody knows is true. Opiate of the masses and all that.

“A lot of Christian groups experimented with communal living,” he says, “and some of the ways they found are very practical, like consensus. And Socialism uses a lot of—” he stops.

“What,” I say.

He shakes his head. “So you would use consensus to establish your schedule. I think that’s a good idea. Have you figured out how to build your factories yet?”

He’s changing the subject, because it’s wrong to say that socialism is like religion. “No,” I say. “I’m still working on it.”

And then we have to go back to work. But the nice thing about going back to work after our two-thirty break is that it’s only four more hours until dinner. And I’m thinking about what Paul said, about socialism being like religion. Which is very, very weird, because everybody knows that religion is all superstition.

But I don’t say anything about religion to Paul. I just kind of store that away. And then I go back to thinking about my quilt factory.

Dinner is some sort of stew with floury dumplings, we don’t always have beans. There’s a bit of fatty meat in my bowl and I save it for last. Fat tastes so good to me. That sounds disgusting, but it does. I think I could eat straight fat. I’m hungry when I’m done, but I save my roll, because Paul and I always eat our bread right before we go to sleep. Some people save their cornbread from morning, they save it all day.

The next morning Corbin says that Nesly doesn’t have to work.

Nesly says he’ll work, it’s okay, even though he’s really sick and he’s not even making eighty quilts a day. He’s real thin, the bones in his chest are real sharp and his wrists look like sticks and his skin is real dry and scaly. His hair is coming out, too. Sometimes when I look over, he isn’t even sewing, he’s just got his head down on his table. Sometimes his eyes are closed, sometimes they’re open.

We all know why he wants to go to work, if he doesn’t go to work he’ll be on infirmary rations.

Corbin says he should stay and rest and it’s like Nesly just doesn’t care. Like the walking dead.

Nesly is going to die.

When we’re sewing, once in awhile I hear someone coughing—a lot of people cough—and then I think, ‘it’s not Nesly. Nesly is going to die.’

Nothing I can do.

In my society, Nesly wouldn’t go on half rations, not if everybody felt Nesly was really trying. I think about what group thirty-six could do. If everybody gave Nesly a spoonful of their food, that would be thirty-one spoonfuls. That would be a lot, added to his half-ration, then he wouldn’t starve. If everybody does it, that spreads it out, so nobody has to do a whole lot. Not that I think people really would, not for Nesly.

I don’t tell anybody, though. They’d think I’d gone soft in the head.

Natalie hands out lapboards again, and the little stubby pencils. I’ve still got the pen stuck in the seam of my pants, it’s been there since I stuck it in the seam of pants when they told us we could only take what we were wearing. I never even think of it. Sometimes, Paul used to kind of play with it through my pants, but we don’t do anything anymore but sleep. I look over at Paul, and he looks scared.

Which makes me real nervous.

Natalie just hands all back those pieces of paper that we wrote before, and I look over mine. It really looks stupid.

Natalie says. “All of you left things out, things that we know about, so please explain further. Please tell us more about yourself and your self-struggle.”

My self-struggle? I look up at the twelve rules. Look back down at my lapboard. It’s real lousy plastic, bumpy with scrapes and scratches so that when I write my pencil will catch in the indentations. What do they know about that I didn’t say? Juvenile reform?

I was in jewvinile reform becase I stol a player and some chips.

I had a chanse to reform at Brigum House but I did not. Sosiaty
had to pay mony to fed me and give me cloths and when I got
out of Brigum House I did the same bad things.

I know I’m doing good, now. At Brigham House they were always talking about our debt to society. And here they talk about that to. In a way we’re like Nesly, we never make our quotas, so now society has to pay for us, like a spoonful from everybody.

Now I am here . . .

I want to say in Protection, but I’m not sure how to spell it,

. . . and Sosiaty gives me food and has to buld a camp so I have
to work hard and make alot of quiwlts so I can give back to
sosiaty. When I go home, I have to be a productiv member of
sosiaty. Soshalisum means everbody together in sosiaty.

I underline the part about everybody together. I understand what Natalie had been trying to teach us, socialism means that everybody shares. The way to build the factory was to share, if everybody gave a little bit, like if we all gave a teaspoon of food to Nesly, nobody would notice the little bit. But put all the little bits together, and then you have a lot, and you can build a factory. I had figured it out, all by myself. I want to tell somebody, I want to tell Natalie, or Paul.

Paul is just sitting, looking at his lapboard. Natalie is answering someone’s question. Natalie looks up at Paul, then walks over to him and says, “Aren’t you going to add anything?”

Paul shrugs. “I added something.”

Natalie looks walks beside him, so she can read it. “I have failed to renew my commitment to the revolution each day,” she says, in a funny voice. “Is that all you can think to add, Paul?”

“That’s all,” he says.

Natalie flicks open her notebook, “What about Kevin Hanrahan?”

Paul says, like he doesn’t care, “What about him, Natalie?”

“Why don’t you write about him?”

He bends over his lapboard. We’re all watching. Natalie always ignores Paul, she never says anything to him. Politicals aren’t allowed to say anything in political meetings for the first two years.

She reads; “Natalie has asked me to write about Kevin Hanrahan. Kevin Hanrahan was a student of mine six years ago. After he left my class I had no further communication with him.”

She shakes her head. Natalie looks mean. I think of when we first had political meeting, when she made Nancy stand up and say she was a prostitute. I wonder what Natalie did to get sent to a labor camp. I mean, Natalie always just seemed like a person who you felt sorry for, a chump, I was never afraid of her before.

“Paul,” she says. “Wasn’t there a letter?”

He doesn’t say anything. Then he says, “I don’t remember a letter.”

“You’re holding out,” she says. “You realize, holding out on us will only hurt you, and hurt Kevin Hanrahan.”

“Maybe when Degraff—” the camp guard I always called Helga “—used me as a demonstration model on the perimeter there was brain damage, Natalie.” He says her name sarcastic, like he’s being polite, and he’s not.

“This isn’t a camp for politicals,” Natalie says. “This camp is easy. You don’t want to end up somewhere like Rushville.”

“Why don’t you go help the kids with their compositions,” he says, but this time he doesn’t sound sarcastic at all, he just sounds like he doesn’t care.

But he does, because when we climb into our bunk, he’s shaking all over, all tense and scared. And I don’t know what to do, so I don’t do anything. And after awhile he goes to sleep.

A couple of days later they take Nesly to the infirmary. He can’t walk anymore, and he mutters all the time, talking, talking, but he doesn’t know what he’s saying and nobody can understand him.

“We could have done something,” I tell Paul.

He shakes his head. “There’s nothing you could do, Janee.”

“No,” I say, irritated, “not me. Us. All of us, group thirty-six.” So I explain to him about if everybody gave him a spoonful. “That’s socialism,” I say, “that’s how you build the factory.”

He nods. “So who owns the factory?”

Owns the factory? “The people who work in it, I guess.” I think a moment. “No, everybody, because everybody put a spoonful in. It’s everybody’s factory!”

He grins, “That’s right, that’s it, Janee. That’s socialism.”

“Yeah,” I say. “And the people who work there decide the way to do the job, and they use consensus to make the schedule, and everybody takes turns, I mean, except for the jobs that someone can’t do, like you know, if they have to fix a sewing machine, I can’t do that, but all the rest of the jobs, people all trade around, so nobody has to do the boring stuff all the time.”

“And there are no bosses,” he says.

“But it doesn’t work that way,” I say. At least, I never heard of it working that way, I mean, we’re supposed to be socialist, even in Cleveland, and Cleveland isn’t like that.

“No,” he says, “it doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

He shrugs, looks at the floor. “I don’t know,” he says.

But I don’t believe him, he could answer me. He could tell me why it’s not working. It’s one of the things he won’t talk about, like that stuff about religion.

We’re sitting in the factory, eating our breakfast. Corbin comes in. “Corbin’s not a prisoner,” Paul says.

Which is stupid. “What, you think he’s a guard in disguise?” I say.

“No, Corbin was in on a ten year sentence. Chick, over in group thirty-one told me.”

That doesn’t make any sense. Why the hell would someone stay here after he’s served his time unless he’s soft upstairs? Corbin even told us that he’s served time in seven different work camps, some as far west as Colorado, out where there’s no water. Corbin is a little weird, in the summer he doesn’t wear shoes so he can save the people the cost of shoe leather. Corbin is a first-class chump.

Corbin makes us all go to our sewing machines and then he tells us that the camp director has asked us all to show some unity, to show some spirit. “Today is our chance to show the rest of the camp that group thirty-six is not slacking,” Corbin says. It’s some sort of production push. “If you normally make 120 quilts, try to make 160. If you make 160, try to make 200.”

Then the big news. “You’ll get extra beans at 2:30, because of your extra effort,” Corbin says. “But think, if you earn those extra beans, maybe this will happen more often.”

Hell, for extra beans, I’d make 500 quilts.

In the first hour I make nineteen, which is great, but my shoulders are killing me because I’m working the foot of the threader right at my fingers and pushing the cloth through as hard as I can and I’m afraid I’m going to get my fingers under the needle.

The second hour I make twenty, which is the most I ever made in an hour. I can feel myself sweating. I mean, it’s cold in that stupid factory but I’m sweating, I’m concentrating so hard. And the third hour I mess up two in a row, and I only make sixteen. I tell myself I can still make 180. Chris makes 180 all the time, and he’s just some stupid dickhead from Detroit. When we break at 2:30 I’ve made 114 quilts, which is a personal best. Paul has made 106, which is good for him. Corbin makes us count, then we go for beans.

Beans at 2:30, it’s wonderful. I can’t believe we get to eat again at 7:30. “We get beans at dinner, right?” I ask Corbin.

“Yeah,” he says, “you do.” But he’s talking to some other group leaders.

As soon as we eat the beans, Corbin hurries us back to our factory building. “Group fourteen is making an average of seventeen an hour,” he says. Then he makes us tell our figures out loud. Chris has made 127 quilts. Thirteen more than me. Two more an hour than me. But I’m okay, not the fastest, but not the slowest, either. I’m up in the top five. The slowest is Roy, who has only made 91.

Everybody gets real quiet when Roy tells how many he’s made, everybody is thinking that he’ll pull our group average down.

“We’ll stop for dinner, but then we’ll work late, so everybody has a chance to meet their quota.”

We go back to work. Usually the four hours between 2:30 and dinner just drag by, but today they go fast. At dinner Corbin has us figure again. I’ve made 185 quilts, the most I’ve ever made. A lot of people have made more than they ever made before.

Marisa says, “Maybe we should just take ten minutes for dinner and then come back, so we have more time until lights out at ten.”

Corbin nods, and says we have to decide. So we vote, and decide we will, although some people don’t want to. I think about consensus. But first of all, if we wait until we have consensus it will take too much time. Second of all, a lot of people in the group don’t understand about consensus, they’re selfish.

Anyway, we gobble our food—normally I never eat fast, normally I eat real slow, trying to make it last—and hurry back. Other groups are doing the same thing. It’s weird to be back in the factory with the clamp lamps on, and my table isn’t in good light, so I can’t see very well, so I have to go slower. I’m real tired. I’m so tired I can’t see good. I can’t focus. I get tired more easily. And if I try to comb my hair with my fingers, some of it comes out. I can’t concentrate on sewing, I keep thinking about Cleveland, about riding the bus down I-90 past Martin Luther King Boulevard, and how right before Dead Man’s Curve you can see the lake, and the rocks. Sometimes the lake’s real clear, and sometimes, if there’s been a storm or something, the water’s real brown.

So I start to cry a little, which is stupid. I hated the bus. I only took the bus when the rapid broke down—which it did fairly often. And then I had to stand because all the people who took the rapid were on the bus.

Finally we stop, and I’ve only made 39 quilts. That’s 224. I don’t even remember falling into the bunk.

The next morning some of us even get extra cornbread, because we went over 180 quilts, and after work we get extra beans, although my production is way down after the day before. I’m still tired from the push.

And we have political instruction. I figure I’m just going to do nothing during political instruction, maybe I’ll sit in the back and go to sleep.

But Natalie sees me in the back. “Janee,” she says, first thing, “what have you learned from all this?”

The questions are all trick questions and I always get them wrong anyway. “That we work better for rewards,” I say. Natalie gets this little smile she has when she’s going to roast somebody’s ideology, “and that shows we need to analyze our own motives better,” I say, quick, because that’s always good. I’m just beginning to figure out what we’re supposed to be analyzing for.

And all the sudden it’s like I know the right answer. Capitalism is selfish, our problem is that we are still selfish. What has to happen is that we have to be less selfish, otherwise socialism will never work. “If we were truly socialist,” I say, “we would work for the good of everybody, that’s society, but we still have old-fashioned, uh, capitalist ways of thinking and we work for rewards.”

Natalie looks surprised, then she looks at Paul—who is staring at his long spider fingers and doesn’t look at me even though you think he’d be happy that I finally gave them back an answer they wanted. She thinks he told me what to say.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” I say. “I think that socialism is a really good idea, you know, everybody sharing, and everybody being equal and everything, but what I want to know is, why isn’t it like that on the outside?”

Natalie frowns. I’ve made a mistake.

“What I mean is, socialism says that, say, if we had a real quilt factory, everybody would own it, right? And the people that made the quilts, they’d like, trade jobs, so that sometimes you have to do the boring stuff, but sometimes you get to do the more interesting stuff, like putting the piece work, the stars and stuff, on the top. And that everybody would vote, like we did last night about coming back from dinner to work on our quota. But outside, things don’t work like that, there are bosses and people don’t trade. In a way,” I say, “we’re more socialist than they are outside.”

Natalie looks really surprised. “Well, Janee,” she says, “the difference is that inside, we really analyze ourselves, and we really work together.”

“So maybe everybody ought to have to do what we do,” I say, “but that makes it sound like everybody ought to come to a labor camp, which isn’t what I mean. But if I hadn’t come here, I’d have never figured this out.”

Natalie writes awhile in her notebook and I figure I’m roasted. Then she looks up and says, “Janee, when you first came here you had a very negative, a very ego-centered attitude. I want you to know I’m astonished and impressed at the progress you’ve made.” And then she smiles at me.

Some people are nodding to themselves. Some are like Paul, staring at their hands. Roy is looking at me, naked hate on his face.

In bed, after lights out, Paul says to me, “Why did you say that?”

“Because I figured it out, from what you told me.”

I think he’ll at least say something nice, but he just sighs.

“I figured it out, myself,” I say.

“I know you did,” he says.

“You told me to tell them what they wanted,” I say. Even though I didn’t just say it because it’s what they want me to say.

He doesn’t answer me. Sometimes I don’t understand him at all.

The next evening, at dinner, I get two extra chunks of cornbread. I must look surprised because Ears, one of the cooks, says, “Camp Director’s orders, Janee.”

After dinner Natalie says, “I made a report on your progress in self-analysis and self-education.”

For a moment I think, I owe her. Then I think, she looks good for having someone make progress, so maybe we’re even. I try to give Paul a chunk of cornbread.

“You earned it,” he says.

“You act like I did something bad,” I say. “You told me to tell them what they want. You told me to think about it. Things would be better if everybody was socialist, wouldn’t they?”

“Yeah,” he says, just agreeing with me.

“You don’t believe in socialism.”

“Janee,” he says, then stops. “Janee, you don’t ever talk about escaping anymore.”

“I am,” I say. “I’m still thinking about it. But I can’t do anything about it until spring.” I sound kind of whiny, even to me. “You never talk to me,” I say. “You think I’m stupid. I figured that stuff out myself, nobody told me.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” he says.

“Bullshit,” I say. “Look at you, Mr. Schoolteacher. You still think you’re special, an intellectual. Well, if it wasn’t for me, people like Sal would have you for lunch. And I can figure things out, too. And I can figure out that you gotta be here for a reason and you didn’t off no street-jock with the lid of a trash barrel. But you don’t want to talk about it. Why don’t you ever talk about it, huh? What are you afraid of? ‘Cept you think none of us dumbshits can understand.”

All the time he’s shaking his head, standing there shaking his head, no, no, no, no. “I wrote a couple of articles on socialist trends in America before the revolution,” he says, “about attempts to establish Christian utopias along socialist lines. I didn’t toe the party line.”

“Yeah? How come when I say something like I did at the political instruction last night you act like you’re all disappointed in me?”

“I’m not disappointed in you,” he says.

“Bullshit, jack-jockey. I been in your bunk for a couple of months, I know you pretty well, even if don’t use twenty dollar words to say what I’m thinking.”

“I don’t care about your vocabulary,” he says. “Janee, Janee. You’re tough and you’re smart. I’m glad you’re figuring out what they want. But when you say that you that the labor camp helped make you a better citizen I’m not going to like it.”

“I didn’t say that,” I say. He twists things. He twists them around. Listen to television, that’s what political people do.

“In political instruction,” he said. “What do you think you got brownie points with the Camp Director for if not your impassioned defense of re-education?”

“That’s not true!” I say. “That’s not true! I said I didn’t want everybody to go to labor camps!”

“But if you never went to a labor camp, you never would have learned about socialism!” he says.

“So? So I might have said that. So it’s true. Maybe I had to come to a place like this, where I had to learn about it, or I never would have paid any attention.”

“And what, all of society has to go through re-education?” he says. “That’s what I was studying, in the nineteenth century, people used to try to establish socialist communities, they were all people willing to give up everything. And not one of those communities worked. Not one. They all died out after a few years, the Oneida Colony, the Shakers, all of them.”

“So you don’t believe,” I say. Which scares me, I don’t know why, but it scares me. Because what if he’s right, what if it’s all wrong?

He shakes his head. “I don’t believe in re-education. I don’t know, I don’t know what I believe. But I know one thing, I mean, look at you, practical, tough little Janee who saw this goddamn system for what it is, slave labor! And now you’re talking about re-educating all of society!”

“I don’t even understand what you’re talking about. You said that we were evolving,” I say. “First the Indians, then feudalism, then capitalism, now socialism. We still have all of these capitalist ideas in our heads, how are we going to get rid of them?”

And all of the sudden I start crying. I never cry. I mean, I feel like crying sometimes at the camp, but I never cry. And I don’t even know why I’m crying except I am. I want socialism, I want things to be better. I want to go home. Paul hugs me.

“I’m so scared,” I tell him. “I’m so scared we’re all going to die, like Nesly.”

In political instruction Natalie has lapboards again but only certain people have to write, all the rest of us can do whatever we want. Paul is one of the people who has to write. I lie in the bunk, wrapped up in both blankets and doze, waiting.

Lately, when I’m half asleep, I sort of dream. It happens when I’m sewing, it happens at break sometimes. I’m not really sound asleep, just barely into sleep. Nothing ever happens, sometimes I dream I’m at work. I always dream about things that are at the camp, and usually I’m just doing something real. This time I dream about morning, when it’s blue. While we are getting our breakfast, when the sun is just coming up and some of the sky is black and still night off in the west, Kansas turns blue, like water, like air.

It’s real beautiful when that happens. I never knew places could be blue. The lake could be blue, the sky could be blue, but I never knew hills could be blue. Blue isn’t a solid color, it’s an air color, a water color. If something as big as Kansas can turn blue, I feel like I can disappear. Nothing happens while I am dreaming, Kansas is just blue and I feel like I could disappear.

I wake up scared.

So I get up, wrapped in both blankets, and sit on the concrete at the foot of the bunk beds where I can see the end of the barracks where the political instruction is going on. I can see Paul, he’s not writing, and I can see Natalie when she walks in the part of the room where the bunks aren’t blocking my view.

Finally she stops in front of Paul and she says, “Is that all?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“You’re resisting.”

“You want me to accuse people,” he says.

She shakes her head, “No, we don’t need you to accuse people, we already know. We are trying to help you.” And when he doesn’t say anything she says, “You’re only one person. You’re full of egotism. You’re saying everyone else is wrong and you’re right.”

He is only one person. Natalie and Corbin and a lot of people believe in socialism, why should Paul be right and everybody else wrong?

Eventually Paul comes back and lies down, all tense and shaky.

He’s cold when I curl up against him, but we get our blankets all in the right place and I go right back to sleep, like falling down, like slipping under water, and Kansas is blue. Soft, without having real edges, blue. I don’t dream about anybody else, and nothing happens, just Kansas, rolling away towards the sunrise, blue.

In the morning when we get our breakfast, Kansas is blue.

When we take our break, I sit down where I can lean against the wall, and when I close my eyes, Kansas is blue.

So I work, and I eat, and I conduct self-analysis. Now in political instruction we are testifying. That means that people get up, and they say their name and what they did wrong, like when I testify I will say, ‘I am Janee Scott, and I am thief and a criminal.’ And then we have to tell about our life.

It’s not like it was when we stood up at the first instruction and said that, now only people who want to stand up and testify. Sometimes someone will stand up to testify and Natalie will say, “No, you’re not ready.”

I figure I’m not ready. But one day Natalie says to me, “Janee, why don’t you tell us your story.” She says it in the nice way she sometimes talks to me now, real gentle. So I stand up and I say, “I am Janee Scott and I am a thief and a criminal. I was born in Lorraine, Ohio, but my mother moved to Cleveland when I was real little.”

I tell my whole life, just standing there talking. My voice just goes on and on. And I tell about the things I did, and how unhappy I was sometimes, and how I hated people who were just normal, and I start to cry. Like I never realized how much I wanted to be like the people on television. I tell about the woman I assaulted, and how I never thought about how’d she feel, and I keep crying. It’s awful, but it feels good. And the group understands, nobody says anything, everybody just listens, we are all together.

And when I’m all done, I’m so tired, but I feel so light and empty. I feel pure. Paul is watching me, and I think he’ll never understand this feeling.

That night, when I sleep, I don’t dream about Kansas being blue.

Summer in Kansas is almost as bad as winter, it’s so hot in the factory buildings that people faint. But when we wake up it’s already getting light, and I never feel like I’m going to drown in the blue while we’re getting breakfast.

It’s been hot for awhile, it’s maybe July, and Natalie says one morning, “Paul, get your things together and don’t go over to the factory building today.”

I know what it is, he’s being transferred. I grab hold of both Paul’s hands.

“They’re transferring politicals,” Natalie says.

Paul nods. He looks thin and sad. His hair is long and he looks scraggly.

“Natalie,” I say, “I’d like to give Paul a haircut so that group thirty-six will make a good impression when he is transferred.”

She knows I just want to say good-bye, but she nods. So Corbin lets me have a pair of scissors and I try to cut his hair.

We don’t say very much. I’m not a good barber, but he looks better when I’m finished. I even trim his beard. I don’t know what to say. I keep thinking of political instruction, sometimes I think he’s looking at me, that way he does, like he’s disappointed, but most of the time when I look at him, he is looking at his hands and he just looks sad.

I carry his blanket roll out for him, even though he could carry it himself. There are some other people waiting, other politicals from other groups, all standing by themselves. He touches my shoulder and then my face with his long spider fingers.

“Be careful, okay?” I say.

“You pick better next time,” he says, “okay? No politicals.”

“You find someone to look out for you,” I say.

Then I have to go back to the factory. In a funny way, I’m relieved. No one is watching me anymore.

But that night, I have a hard time falling asleep by myself. And when I do, I dream of blue Kansas, and Paul’s in my dream. Just one person, way out in the blue, hard to see.

But I know it’s Paul, who else would it be?

UH-OH CITY

Jonathan Carroll

The inspiration for this issue’s mysticism comes from Jonathan Carroll’s novella, “Uh-Oh City.” Like the other stories in this issue, “Uh-Oh City” takes the everyday and turns it into something remarkable. Jonathan Carroll’s career has been remarkable. In the last few years, he has written seven critically acclaimed books. His most recent is OUTSIDE THE DOG MUSEUM, published by Doubleday. The same company will publish his new novel, AFTER SILENCE, early next year.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity . . .

In my end is my beginning.

—T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”

ALL RIGHT, LOOK AT IT this way. If her name had been Codruta or Glenyus or Heulwen, it would have been easier to accept. Some exotic name from the Urals or Druid country, places where strange events are as common as grass. But no, her name was Beenie. Beenie Rushforth. Doesn’t that sound like a fifty-year-old golfing “gal” from the local country club? It does to me.

A woman with too loud a voice, too deep a tan, and too much bourbon in her glass at eleven in the morning. Beenie Rushforth, Wellesley, class of ’65.

Even the way she arrived was no big deal, either. Our last cleaning woman decided to marry her boyfriend and move to Chicago. No great loss. She wasn’t the world’s best worker. She was the kind who swept around a rug rather than under it. My wife, Roberta, is also convinced this woman was taking nips from our liquor bottles, but that didn’t bother me. What does get on my nerves is paying good money for a clean house, but getting instead secret comers of dust, and streaked windows in the guest room.

She gave notice, and Roberta put a file card on the bulletin board outside the supermarket. You know, along with the “lawns mowed/German lessons/portable typewriter barely used . . .” signs. The place you check either when you’re in need, or only bored.

We can clean our house well enough, but since the kids left and I was given a chair at the university, there is more money now than ever before. I want to use some of it to make life nicer for us. Roberta deserves it.

Throughout my adult life, I have had an uncanny talent for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. I specifically chose the U. of Michigan graduate program so that I could study with Ellroy, the greatest Melville scholar around. Who just happened to die six weeks after I began there. Roberta was pregnant with our first daughter, Norah, and was having her own tough time. But she was magnificent. Told me I had a full fellowship to a great school, and, Ellroy or not, a Ph.D. from the place meant something; so shut up and get to work. I did. Three very lean years later, we walked out of there with a doctorate and two babies in hand. For the next decade, we lived your typical academic vagabond’s life, loading up the VW bus every couple of years and driving from one end of the country to the other to new jobs. The students liked me, but my colleagues were jealous. I was writing fast and well then, and had already knocked out the monograph on Melville’s Gnosticism that sent a lot of people running to their copies of Moby Dick to see what they’d missed. Then came “Moonlight marines—a study of the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder and Herman Melville,” which should have made me a famous man, but did not. I didn’t complain. I knew it was good, we were young, had our love, healthy babies, promise . . . what else do you need when you’re that age? In Minnesota, we bought our first house and first dog. The sixties were starting to flex their muscles, so once again I chose the wrong place at the wrong time. Norah started kindergarten in New Mexico. We liked it there. The dry winters and long views to the mountains made us happy. The college was disgracefully conservative, but we had friends there, and life was comfortable.

Everyone was passionate in the sixties; everyone had something “important” to say about the state of the world. Me, too. I was one of those idiots who let their hair grow too long and demonstrated loudly against the war. That would have been fine if we’d lived in New England or California, where it was fashionable, but the Southwest was full of blind patriots and armament factories. Besides, the university was a state school, and thus tied umbilically to the government. Suffice it to say, when I came up for well-deserved tenure, it wasn’t granted.

Desperate, I looked around for another job, but the only one available was at an agricultural college in Hale, Texas. God forbid you should ever spend time in Hale. We were there for four of the worst years of our lives. Pay was miserable, the kids went to a lousy school, and the other people in my department were Cro-Magnon both in their approach to education and the social graces. I almost went out of my mind. Single-handedly, I came close to ruining our marriage with my unforgivable behavior. One horrendous night, Roberta and I stared at each other across the dining room table. She said, “I never thought it would come to this.” I said, “That’s what happens when you marry a loser with a big mouth.” She said, “I always knew you had a big mouth, but not that you were a loser. Not till now. And a mean one, too.”

Unfortunately, it didn’t end there, and only because of my wife’s patience and goodwill did we survive. By then I was at wit’s end, and the kids were so scared of my moods that they wouldn’t come close unless I ordered them over. A life that had once been as interesting and rich as a good novel was turning into a railroad timetable.

Out of the blue, I was offered a position here. The department chairman was an old acquaintance from Michigan I’d kept in touch with over the years because we worked in the same field. I will never forget turning to Roberta after his phone call and saying, “Toots, pack the bags. We’re goin’ North.”

The transition was not easy. Norah was happy in her school, things were far more expensive in the new town (partially because we never did anything in Texas, because there was nothing to do), and my teaching load was greater. But despite things like that, after six months I felt like all my veins and arteries had come unclogged. We were back in the race.

What followed was twenty years of mostly interesting days, some horrendous ones, and a general contentment that is rare. I’ve noticed few people say, “I have a good life.” It is as if they are embarrassed or ashamed of their lucky lot, ashamed God permitted them to travel a smooth road. Not I. Five years ago I realized how blessed I was, and thought it time I began attending church. I looked around and chose one as simple as could be; a place where one could give thanks but not get choked in velvet robes and oblique ceremonies that missed the point. I am fifty-five years old, and believe God is willing to listen if we speak clearly and to the point. His responses are manifested, not in immediate answers or results, but in dots everywhere around us that need to be connected intelligently. I feel that even more strongly now because of Beenie. Despite Beenie. Bless her. Damn her.

I answered the phone the first time she called. Certain people’s voices fit their looks. Big man, deep voice—that sort of thing. My first impression of Mrs. Rushforth was middle-aged, hearty, good-natured. She said she’d seen our notice on the board and was interested in the “position.” I smiled at the word. Since when had housecleaner become a position? However, we live in a time when garbage collectors are “sanitary engineers,” so if she wanted it to be a position, O.K. She told me more about herself than I needed to know: she had grown children, had lost a husband, didn’t need the money, but liked to keep active. I wondered if that was the truth; who cleans houses to keep their muscles toned? Why not join a gym instead and sculpt a body on gleaming silver machines? I invited her over to the house the next morning, and she readily accepted. I added another word to my list of her qualities via the sound of her voice—lonely. She sounded so eager to come. Before hanging up, she gave me her telephone number in case something went wrong and I had to cancel the meeting. As soon as I got off the phone, I went to the telephone book and looked up Rushforth. I do things like that—look people up in phone books, read the small print on contest offers and cereal boxes. Equal parts curiosity, nosiness, and scholarship. I am used to gathering as much information as I can on a subject, then culling what I need from it. I didn’t go to the phone book because I was particularly suspicious of this Mrs. Rushforth. Only curious.

To my great surprise, the only B. Rushforth lived on Plum Hill, a charming and prestigious neighborhood down near the lake. A cleaning woman who lived there? Now I was thoroughly intrigued, and so was Roberta after hearing about the call and my little research.

“Oh Scott, maybe she’ll be like Auntie Marne. Rich and eccentric. We’ll have Rosalind Russell cleaning our house!”

Early the next morning, I got a call from a colleague who needed my help immediately, so I had to leave and miss the meeting with the mysterious Beenie.

When I returned at lunchtime, Roberta filled me in.

“What does she look like?”

“Middle-age, middle-size, a little round, short gray hair. She looks like a masseuse.”

“I thought so. How’d she dress?”

“In one of those bright running suits and complicated sneakers. She’s very friendly, but also very take-charge. Know what I mean? She asked it she could look around the house before I even offered her the job. Checking out the work load.”

“You did offer it?”

“Yes. Sweetie, she’s nice and looks dependable. Any person who lives on Plum Hill but wants to clean houses to keep busy has got to be at least interesting, right? And if she turns out to be a good cleaner, too, all the better.”

“True. Bring on the Beenie.”

“She starts tomorrow.”

My seminar in Hawthorne took up most of the next morning. It’s a good class, full of intelligent students who appear to have a genuine interest in the work. Generally I come out of there feeling invigorated and happy to be a teacher. That day a rather heated discussion arose over certain imagery in the short story “Young Goodman Brown.” In the middle of it, one fellow asked another, “Do you think you’d say all these things if you knew Hawthorne was sitting in the back of the room? You should hear yourself. Would you be so confident if you knew the guy who’d written it was listening?”

A good question I’d heard asked in a variety of ways over the years. I was thinking it over as I walked in our front door and was greeted by the familiar voice of our vacuum cleaner.

“Anyone home?”

The vacuum kept up its high roar.

“Helllllo?”

Nothing. Then a burst of familiar laughter from the living room. I walked in and saw Roberta hunched over on the couch, cackling. My wife is a dramatic laugher—she’ll smack a knee and rock back and forth if the joke’s good. It’s easy to amuse her, and a pleasure, too, because she’s so appreciative. I think part of the reason why I fell in love with her in the first place was that she was the first woman to genuinely laugh at my jokes. Sex is great, but making a woman laugh can be even more satisfying sometimes.

“You must be Scott. Roberta was giving me the lowdown on you.” She was all gray and silver. Gray hair, gray sweatsuit, gray sneakers. Hands on hips, she looked me over as though I were a used car. The vacuum was still on and stood humming by her side.

“Beenie?”

“It’s really Bernice, but if you call me that, I’ll quit. How do you do?”

“Very well. Looks like you two are doing O.K.”

“I was telling Roberta about my son.”

My wife waved a hand in front of her face as if there were a fly too close. “You’ve got to hear these stories, Scott. Tell him the one about the rabbit. Please!”

Beenie looked both pleased and shy. “Aww, I’ll tell him some other time. I got to get this vacuuming done. I want to get to the windows today, but I’m still not half-done with this.”

She unplugged the machine and pulled it behind her into the hall. A moment later it started up again in the dining room.

I looked over my shoulder to make sure she wasn’t near. “How’s she doing?”

“Terrific! She’s an atomic power plant. Have you seen the kitchen yet? Take a look. It’s like an ad for floor wax on T.V.—the whole room is one big gleam. You need sunglasses. I think we lucked out with her.”

“That would be nice. Why were you laughing so hard?”

“Oh, because she’s funny. The woman tells stories . . . You’ve got to hear her talk.”

“I’ll be happy if she can clean.”

“That’s what’s great—she does both.”

New sounds filled our house that day. Pillows pounded and plumped; the vacuum cleaner hissed up against floorboards and walls that hadn’t been cleaned in years. She found a window in the bathroom that had probably never known full sunlight to pass through it since the house was built thirty years ago. The dog bowls shone; curtains were washed; Roberta couldn’t get over the fact that the area under the unused back bathroom sink was not only spotless, but also smelled wonderfully of an unknown new disinfectant. Beenie’s answer? “When it comes to cleaners, I bring my own.” My desk was dusted and the papers neatly arranged. Even the books on it were stacked alphabetically. I didn’t like anyone touching my desk—it was one of those great taboos in the family—but I was so impressed by the detail of her cleaning that I said nothing. Neither of us knew if this whirlwind stopped for lunch. Neither of us saw her even sit down. She accomplished so much in that eight-hour period that, after she was gone, the two of us walked around our still-glowing house, exclaiming about one find after the other.

“My God, she washed the dog, too?”

“No, just vacuumed and brushed him, but did you see your shoes? They’ve been polished.”

“And my underwear? I think she ironed them. No one’s ever ironed my underpants.”

“Are you trying to tell me something, dear husband?”

It was an Easter-egg hunt. Who would think of cleaning invisible things like light bulbs in table lamps or the top of the saltshaker? This latter cleaning I discovered days later at breakfast. I had often looked at that object and thought about wiping the glut of white crystals away and sticking a toothpick down the holes to free up the blockage. Now it had been done, along with so much else.

God knows, Roberta and I have enough to talk about. If it’s not the kids, it’s our life, or our separate lives, or books, or whatever. But Beenie Rushforth was a major topic of conversation the next few days. Whether it was what she’d done or how she’d done it, somehow or other, she kept coming up. We discovered after the initial shock that not only had she cleaned, ironed, scrubbed, polished . . . her way through the entire house, but also had done a myriad of small things in most rooms to organize us better. The alphabetized books on my desk, for example. In the kitchen cupboard, the canned foods were ordered, the spices arranged in such a way that they were now all visible, rather than before, when they had been thrown together in a heap that needed sorting through any time one needed bay leaves or cinnamon. The ink bottle on Roberta’s desk had been wiped, and the envelopes next to it sorted and arranged by color.

“This is too much.”

“What?”

“Look—the toothpaste tube’s been squeezed from the bottom so it’s all up in the top. You didn’t do it, did you?”

“Me? You’ve been yelling at me for thirty years to squeeze from the bottom.”

“I thought so. Roberta? Why are we so astonished by our cleaning lady?”

“Because she’s amazing. And costs the same as the last one, who didn’t lift a finger.”

“Tell me what else she told you. How does she work living on Plum Hill?”

“It’s not what you think. Apparently, it’s someone’s estate, but there’s a small gatehouse on the edge of the property, and that’s what she rents. She’s been there for years, and pays very little for it. Her husband died ten years ago. He was an executive for an insurance company in Kansas City.”

“I guess that explains why she said she didn’t need the money: Whenever an insurance guy pops off, his family inevitably inherits a bundle because he held the best policy.”

“She did say she was comfortable.”

“I’ll bet. And she had a son?”

“Yes, and a daughter. He sounds like a card. Get her to tell you the story about the cigars.”

“O.K. You know what I’ve been thinking? This sounds odd, but I’ve been wondering what is she going to clean when she comes next week? What is there left to do?”

The basement.

“Oh Beenie, that’s not necessary. It’s only the laundry room and storage. We’re never there.”

“I went down last week to have a look, and I think it’s got a lot of possibilities if you want to use them. I’ll need only a few hours, and we’ll have everything ready and right.”

Roberta said, for the rest of that morning until I came home for lunch, she heard the most disconcerting mix of sounds coming from that pit. Which is what it is, truth be told. The dark at the bottom of our stairs; the once-a-week-descent-with-a-basket-of-laundry-under-your-arm ordeal when there are so many other things you’d rather be doing.

In our house, there are two places to purposely misplace things—attic and basement, in that order. If you vaguely want to keep something, but have little desire to see it for a while, disappear it into the attic. If you don’t ever want to see it again, but have neither the heart nor guts to make the big break and toss it in the garbage, travel it to the basement. The land of damp shadows and dead suitcases. If it had been up to me, I would have detached that bottom part of our house like the first stage of a rocket once it’s reached a certain altitude. With the exception of the ten-year-old washing machine, the only function the basement served was as momentary memory flash now and then of kids stomping around down there, yelling across hide-and-seek or monster games. Our children were grown and gone. When they came to visit, their own were still too young or uninterested to play there.

A house closes down on you as you grow older. Because you need less space, the rooms once filled with life accuse with their closed-door stillness: you gave me life, but now you’ve taken it away. Where are the kids, the parties, the noise and movement and things resting on the floor a moment? No one’s ever reflected in the mirrors anymore; there are no teenage-perfume or warm-chicken-dinner smells in the unused dining room. You have nothing for me? Then I damn you with my quiet, the objects that never move, the things that stay clean too long.

I call it the creeping-museum syndrome—everything we own becomes more museumlike the older one gets, including ourselves.

“Uh-Oh City!”

I forgot to mention this. The floorboards between the ground floor and basement in our house are not thick. The first time I heard that loud and strange exclamation coming from down below, I looked to my wife in her chair nearby for enlightenment. We were eating lunch, and, by coincidence, both of us happened to be holding potato chips in midair.

“What is ‘Uh-Oh City’ ?”

“That seems to be her war cry when she finds something interesting.”

“Oh. I take it, that means I’ll be seeing her soon? The egg salad is very good today. There’s something new in it?”

“Horseradish. Beenie gave me the recipe. Isn’t it good?”

“Scott, you’re back! What are these?”

“Hello. They’re old New Yorker magazines, as you can see.”

“I saw, all right. You want to keep them, or what? I found ’em down the cellar, but half are so rotten they don’t even have print on them anymore.”

She was right, but the scold in her voice reminded me of Miss Kastburg, my insufferable first-grade teacher. That was not a good memory.

“Beenie, you’re here to clean the house, not clean it out. Leave the magazines, O.K.”

“Even the rotten ones? I could sort through ’em and—”

“Even the rotten ones. I like rotten. I turn the pages more carefully.”

“You’re an odd one, Scott.”

“Thank you, Beenie. Just leave the magazines.”

She reappeared several other times, holding mysterious or forgotten objects at arm’s length, wanting to know if they could be thrown out. On each occasion, Roberta and I enthusiastically agreed they could.

The last time she trudged up, the stairs sounded heavier, more weighed down. No wonder—she had a television on her head, and looked like an African woman carrying her pot to the well.

“My God, Beenie!”

“Oh Beenie, what are you doing?!”

“Bringing up treasure! Do you folks realize what you’ve got here? This’s a Brooker television. These things are collector’s items! Some people say the Brooker was the best TV set ever made in America. Strong as a Model T Ford.”

My wife and I exchanged smirks. “That was the first TV we bought, and it was terrible from the moment we got it. Nothing but trouble. How many times did it break down?”

Roberta looked at Beenie and shrugged as if the breakdowns were her fault. “At least five. Remember that terrible fat man who used to come and fix it?”

The memory of his Vandyke bearded face came to me like a blastful of exhaust from a dirty truck. “Craig Tenney! I remember the name written in yellow on his blue overalls. The worst! The only pompous TV repairman in the world. Not to mention the fact that he was also a crook. . . . Beenie, put that thing down. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Nope, that’s not true. Once you get it up on the head, your neck’ll pretty much support anything. Waddya want to do with it. Don’t leave it downstairs. I’m telling you, whether it works or not, it’s worth a good chunk to a collector.”

“Well then, it’s yours if you’d like to have it.”

She looked at me appraisingly. “How come you kept it if you don’t want it?”

“Probably because I was too lazy to cart it to the dump. Really, if you want it, take it.”

“You’ve got a deal. I know a man who’d be interested.”

I HADN’T LAID eyes on that set for years. It had lived so long in the basement that even if I had seen it, I didn’t remember because it had grown invisible. Objects have a way of doing that when they are broken or serve no more function in our lives. Yet seeing it again like that in the light of day, returned once more to the middle of our living room where it had once owned the eyes of an entire family, I found myself remembering things about that set. Like the awful repairman who used to pontificate to me about the state of the world while purportedly fixing the damned machine.

There were also nice memories. Like the whole gang of us sitting around that tube after dinner, eating hot-fudge sundaes and watching “Laugh-In” or “Star Trek.” Unlike others, I’ve never had any real objection to television besides its basic silliness. When I was growing up, we listened religiously to silly shows on the radio, so what’s the difference? Our kids were always devoted readers and decent students. If they liked to plop down in front of the set for an hour or two after school or a football game on the weekend, O.K. I was often there next to them, enjoying both the show and their company. It also came back to me that the first time any of the kids ever asked a question about sex came while watching that television. In the middle of the “Dick Van Dyke Show” one night, Norah informed us she’d heard from a girlfriend that babies were made when men and women went to a hospital, lay down on separate beds, were connected genital to genital by a long white rubber hose, et cetera. Was this true, Dad?

So, great things had happened in the presence of this now-departed pain in the ass. It almost made me want to ask for it back.

Apparently, Roberta had had much the same experience. Over dinner that night, she told me she’d been thinking about the television, too, and different memories connected with it.

“Remember switching it on, and, at that moment, Oswald was brought out and shot by Ruby? I remember it so well. The world was in mourning. We all walked around like we were drugged. No one thought something else was going to happen. But right there in front of us on that TV, it was like the first public killing ever televised!”

“We saw it on that one, the Brooker? Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“My son, Dean, lives way out in the country. He and his wife, Gaby, have got this dachshund named Zip. It’s a nice little thing, but the problem is, their next-door neighbor had a rabbit for a pet that Zip was always trying to get. They let this rabbit run loose in their yard, and it drove the dog crazy. Every time he’d see the thing, he’d bark and scratch at the ground or throw himself at the fence separating them. It caused bad feeling between the two families, but what are you going to do?

“One night, Dean and Gaby were sitting in the kitchen after dinner, drinking coffee. Who comes in covered with dirt from head to toe, carrying the dead rabbit in his mouth and proud as General MacArthur? Zip. The little stinker’d finally figured a way under the fence and killed the poor thing. Well, you can imagine what happened! Gaby had a conniption fit and grabbed it away from the dog while there was still something left. Luckily, Zip hadn’t bitten into it. They guessed he’d killed it by shaking it and breaking its neck.

“But what were they going to do now? Both of them could just imagine what the neighbors would say in the morning when Dean and Gaby brought it over and explained what’d happened.

“They talked over all the possible ways out of this, and finally came up with a real long shot. Clever, but a long shot. Gaby took the rabbit and washed it real well. Shampoo and everything. Then she got out her blow-dryer, if you can imagine that. Dried and combed the damned body till it looked brand-new and fluffy. Peter Cottontail-fresh. By this time, it was about ten at night, and part two of the plan.

“Dean took the beautiful dead lump, snuck into the neighbors’ backyard, where it’d lived in a hutch up on stilts, and put the body back in its home. Then he tiptoed back, and the two of them went to bed with crossed fingers. What they were hoping was, the neighbors’d see it dead out there, and think it’d died of a heart attack or something in the night. Natural causes. But next morning early, they heard this crazy, wild scream next door, and both of them thought the jig’s up. A little while later, the neighbor woman, who by the way was very religious, came banging on their door, looking like she had just seen a horror movie. White as a sheet and talking a million miles an hour, she kept saying, ‘A miracle! Honest to God, a miracle!’ Turns out, yesterday morning their poor little bunny died. So she and her husband dug a deep hole in their backyard and buried him. But when she came out this morning to hang laundry, she found it back in its hutch, clean as a cloud and looking like it hadn’t spent the night under a foot of dirt. Mr. Resurrection Rabbit! He was still dead, of course, but hey, you take you miracles where you can find ’em!”

The three of us were sitting on the porch. Beenie had finished the attic and had been coaxed by Roberta into telling the story. I had the feeling she was happy to hang around and chat awhile rather than go home to her empty apartment. We knew about her children, her dead husband, a general description of what life had been like for her till now. From what I’d heard, it wasn’t a special life, but a good one. She was proud of her children, had her health, enough money to get by, and a sense of humor that buoyed her and made her the center of attention when she wanted to be.

“Well, I gotta go now, but I’m warning you two: next week I’m tackling the garage and shaping it up. That’ll take me all day, so I won’t have time for much of the rest of the house. But once it’s done, the only thing we’ll have to do around here is maintenance.”

It was futile to argue that, even more than the basement, we never, ever went into the garage other than to park the car in the winter. Secretly, I rather enjoyed the fact that our small world would be shipshape in a week. Looking at what she’d done in the basement and attic silenced both Roberta’s and my protests. The places had been transformed from Grimesvilles to a lot of ordered space and certain interesting objects that, like the television set, evoked enjoyable memories and were thus fun to see again. A red sled we’d hauled the kids around on in both Minnesota and New Mexico, a doll that’d once meant the world to two little girls, and, to my own delight and astonishment, the paperback copies of Piene a) Redburn I’d used in graduate school and thought had been lost in a move eons ago. Beenie just kept toting stuff in, looking grim and impatient at the same time. “How about this? was her usual shorthand question for whether or not we wanted what she held. Although even that was abbreviated toward the end to “this?,” Roberta and I sat there waiting to see what would emerge next, what part of our history would return to the surface like a periscope up for a look round. It was hard saying goodbye to some of these things, although there was no earthly reason to keep them. Despite being broken or burned or obsolete, they were our past. Small pieces of a shared life that had worked and grown and found its place in the end.

A few days later, I went to the supermarket to do the shopping. It’s a chore I enjoy because the abundance of a market heartens me. I grew up the fourth of five children, and, although we had enough to eat, there was never more than enough. To walk into a store, see all that gorgeous stuff, and know you can buy anything you want or two of anything you want, is a pleasure for me even today. Roberta and I had our lean times, but since we came from similar backgrounds, food was something we never scrimped on. The car could be old and dying, the roof full of leaks, but meals at our house were always plentiful, and if the kids wanted to have a friend over for dinner, pull up a chair.

Because both of us enjoy cooking, we alternate nights in the kitchen, but the shopping is my job, and I’m glad to do it.

Surprisingly, the argument over what an author really meant in his work had flared again in my Hawthorne class, and the students divided down the middle into those who believed the artist had the final say about his product, and those who felt any interpretation was valid so long as it was appropriate and well supported. I took no sides, but followed the discussion closely after one earnest girl bit off more than she could chew by saying, “Look at God, assuming there is one. What did He mean by creating the world? We could say the separate religions are literary critics because each is convinced their interpretation is correct. But are any of them? Isn’t God the only one who knows?”

“Yes, but your ‘author’ is dead, or silent, and won’t tell us what He meant. So it’s up to us to figure it out, right?” scoffed another.

Smarty-pants theology. Wise guys sneering at the miraculous. I kept quiet, but it irritated me to hear these hermetic twenty-five-year-olds pontificating snidely about something both obvious and important.

Still preoccupied with discussion, I was automatically scanning the shopping list and taking things off the shelves, when, looking up, I saw Beenie Rushforth twenty feet away. My first impulse was to go up and say hello, but she seemed so content with what she was doing that I held back.

She had an open bag of cookies in her hand and was eating one. Nothing special there, except for the look on her face, which was pure bliss. She’d take a bite, close her eyes, and I could almost hear her groan of pleasure. Swallowing, the eyes would open again, look at the cookie as if it were telling her wonderful things, take a bite, et cetera. Either they were the best cookies ever, or she had something else going. Standing there watching, I realized with a shock that I was as bad as my students. I couldn’t simply think that here was someone enjoying a moment of their life. No, with all that happiness showing, she had to be a little daffy or strange or just plain off. Why are we so suspicious of the good?

“Hey, Beenie.”

She smiled at me, but her expression didn’t click recognition for a few beats. “Hey, Scott! How are you?”

“Fine. Those must be great. You look so happy eating them.”

“They’re good, but I’m not smiling at the cookies. It’s remembering something I did as a kid. We were poor, and I was usually hungry the whole day. Even during meals. There were a couple of markets in our town, and I did the shopping for my mother. Every time, I went to a different one, because I had a trick up my sleeve. I’d get everything she asked for, then I’d take a bag of cookies—it didn’t matter what kind, because they all tasted great to me. In every store, there was at least one blind corner where the people who ran it couldn’t see you. I knew where each one was. I’d get my cookies, step over there like I was browsing, and verrry carefully open the bag along the seams. You can do that if you watch what you’re doing. I was an expert! Now, when it was open, I’d take out two. Only two! And shove those babies into my mouth. Then, chewing really lightly so no one could see, I’d put the bags back on their shelf way in the back so they wouldn’t be found soon. I never got caught, and was very proud of it.”

“But it’s not so much fun, now that you can afford to buy the bag?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Scott. Five weeks ago the doctor told me I’m sick. Since, then, just about everything tastes better than it used to.” She said it as fact. Not a trace of “pity me” in her voice.

“Beenie, I’m sorry. Is there anything we can do? Are there treatments—”

“It’s too far gone. I was feeling lousy for a long time, and kept telling myself to go have a checkup, but you know how those things are: you’re lazy, or down deep you’re scared and don’t want to know . . . Anyway, you get more scared when you start feeling really bad. So you go when it’s impossible to get through a day, and you know pretty much by then it’s real trouble—” She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Remember that word ‘folly’ ? You’re the English teacher. How come no one uses that word anymore?

“Anyway, I decided I was going to take their medicine and treatments, but if they get in the way of the time I’ve got left, then the hell with it—I’m living my days the way I want. And you see this bag of cookies. I ate three of them, and I’m putting the bag back on the shelf, and I ain’t paying for it, like the old days. Once a thief, always a thief. But you can never make cookies taste as good as they did.”

“Would you like to go for a cup of coffee?”

“No, I’ve got to go clean a house now. That’s one thing I like doing very much. You go into a home, work hard all day getting everything right, then give it back to the owners and let them live in it for another week.”

“You’re certainly the best we’ve ever had.”

“Thank you, Scott. I’m glad you said that.”

NATURALLY, ROBERTA was shocked when I told her about the meeting. She asked the same question, sat in the same sad silence I had during the drive home from the market. My father used to call it “touching the razor”—you hear that someone you know is dead or dying, and the first impulse is to rear back as though you had touched a razor blade.

“Is there anything we can do?”

“Let her clean the house. She said that’s what she likes to do best now.”

“Put all her houses in order, huh?”

“I guess you could say that. She spoke so matter-of-factly. ‘I’m sick, and it’s too late to do anything.’ For some odd reason, it reminded me of her dead-rabbit story.”

I was about to enter the classroom, when I heard her voice behind me. “Scott?” I turned, and there was Beenie, an uncertain smile on her face, her hands clasping a small, shiny red purse.

“Beenie! Are you taking classes here?”

“No, I wanted to ask you if it was all right to come to one of yours. I called Roberta just after you left today, and she told me to come right down. I thought, why not? He can only say no.”

“Sure you can come. Were doing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories. Do you know them?”

“No, but that’s O.K. I want to sit in a class and watch what it does. The subject isn’t important.”

“Then, madam, please come in.”

The students were already in the room, and looked interestedly at her when we entered together. I introduced her as Dr. Rushforth, and said she would be sitting in that day and observing. I had never brought anyone else to the class, so the kids were doubly interested in my colleague.

It was the first time I’d seen her in anything other than jogging clothes. She wore a bench-brown skirt and matching cardigan over a white blouse with a large bow at the neck. Somehow the outfit diminished her. In her sweatsuit, she was a gray package of energy. What she wore today made it look as though she were trying to fit in with a bunch of bores.

As class proceeded, I watched her out of the comer of my eye. She kept a smile on throughout that reminded me of the smile we create when we’re spoken to in a language we don’t understand, but don’t want to offend the speaker. A vaguely tuned-out look. It made me wonder more why she’d come in the first place.

When it was finished, she remained in her seat. I went over.

“They like you, don’t they? Your students.”

“It’s good if they do, but sometimes better if they don’t. Then they want to compete with me, so they put everything they’ve got into their work. Why did you come, Beenie?”

“To watch you in action, Scott. To see what you do outside that house. I see you only eating lunch and talking to Roberta. You’re a good teacher, and it shows in the way you do it. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s not my subject, but you make him interesting. And I learned what a ‘pathetic fallacy’ is today, too!” She patted my arm and stood up. Halfway up, she stopped for a second and winced. It could only have been from her pain. She smiled at me, seeing I’d caught the look. “My constant houseguest. You’ll do, Professor Silver. You’ll do. See you day after tomorrow.”

Roberta was at an aerobics class, and I was in my study, working on an article. Right in the middle of a superb thought, there was a thump thump on my door.

“Yes?”

“Scott, I got something here. Can you come out and look?”

I liked Beenie and admired her courage, but was it necessary to disturb me in the middle of work to see if we wanted an old tennis racket? I made a face and went to the door. “Yes, Beenie, what is it?”

She held a cardboard box the color of oatmeal. Wrapped around it was a piece of brown rawhide. Written across the top in large block letters was THE KING OF TOMORROW. I hadn’t seen the box in twenty years, but didn’t need to open it to know what was inside.

When I was a graduate student, besides my course work, I was required to teach a class in Freshman Composition. It was a pleasant chore, and—because I was young, idealistic, and full of energy—I taught it well.

One of the students in there was a serious young woman named Annette Taugwalder. She was smart and talented and wanted more than anything else in the world to be a writer. Annette cared so much about literature that she often read class assignments twice. I liked her, but was put off by her intensity. I loved books, too, but got the impression she ate them as well as read them. Also, she had an arrogance that said, Nobody is on my level here, folks, so stand back.

Halfway through the semester, she came to me after a class and asked if I would be willing to read the manuscript of her novel. I said yes, but also told her I would be totally honest if I didn’t like it. She said she knew that, and it was one of the reasons she was asking me and not another teacher.

Unfortunately, it was no good. Yet another twenty-year-old’s buildings-roman—there were good parts in it, but generally it was only old stuff trying to sound new. But I spent the better part of a weekend reading it carefully and making notes so Annette would know I had given it a fair shake.

On Monday we sat together after class, and, as cannily and diplomatically as I could, I told her what I thought was wrong with her book. There were strong things there, but they needed shaping up, better characterization, clearer perspective. She asked if I thought the manuscript was publishable, and I said no; I thought it had to be rewritten. She became defensive, and said she’d already submitted it to one publisher, who had written a very encouraging letter back. I congratulated her, and said I could very well be wrong. She seesawed back and forth between arrogance and pleas. I could see the discussion was getting nowhere, and, after two hours—two hours!—I told her I’d said all I could about the book, and, in the end, it was her decision. Never once was I condescending or dismissive. I am sure of that. To make a terrible story short, Annette walked out of the room and left the manuscript in its box on the table. I thought it a bad dramatic gesture, and best not to follow. I’d wait till our next class and give it back then. I never saw her again. A week later she committed suicide.

Tell me you were connected to a suicide, but feel no guilt, and I will call you a liar. We start whole, but soon guilt begins to carve its insidious tunnels around and through our souls. By the time you are my age, much of the structure should be condemned as unsafe. I have never gotten over this. I don’t know what influence our meeting had over her final decision, if any, but what difference does it make? I see myself as one of her accused. I talked to Roberta; I talked to an analyst; I tried talking to God. But nothing helped.

“Where did you find that?”

“Up way back on a shelf in the garage. What do you want to do with it?”

My first instinct was to say dump it. Instead, I told her to leave it with me. What was more troubling than seeing it again was knowing for sure I had left that box with the police the day I heard about her death. I walked into the police station and spoke to men I’d never had any real contact with, other than seeing them give parking tickets and chatting with store owners. Now two of these blue uniforms were asking me questions, and their faces were solemn, suspicious. One of them took the box and opened it. He looked inside, although I’d already described what was in there. What did he expect to find? I told them what I could, and left. The box looked strangely naked there, open in the middle of that wide oak desk. I left the police station empty-handed.

Beenie gave me this same box and left the room without questions.

Adrenaline rushed through my body, and I started breathing shallowly, quickly. Whatever I’d been doing before fell from my thoughts. I took Annette’s novel back into my office and spent the rest of the day reading it.

Roberta was still gone at four when Beenie came in to say good-bye. “Well, I’m done. That garage is smiling again. Hey Scott, are you all right? You look gray as cement. I think you should put down those papers and go out for a walk.”

I was two-thirds of the way through. It was still a bad book, worse than I remembered. “Do you know what this is, Beenie? Do you have a minute to listen?”

She said sure, and I invited her in. I went to the desk, and she sat in my fat reading chair by the window. For such a terrible experience, it took only a short time to tell. I’d spent years going over it in my mind, but here I was, telling it again, and it took no more than ten minutes. When I was finished, she looked at her hands.

“When I was young, my husband and I liked to spend New Year’s Eve in interesting places. Once, it was in a train going across Canada; another time in a firehouse in Moscow, Idaho. Then the children came—” She threw a hand in the air as though she were throwing confetti to the wind. “Kids tame you, don’t they? After Dean was born, we usually stayed home on New Year’s, and maybe brought in a bottle of champagne. Once in a while, there was a party, but we weren’t so crazy about going out and wearing funny hats.”

I looked at her, confused by her connection between funny hats and my story. We sat there, silently thinking about death and December 31st.

“I never could figure out what I liked better—New Year’s on the back of a camel, or sitting in the living room with our kids, waving sparklers and jumping around. Both were good.

“What does that have to do with you? Who knew more, Scott—you before this girl died, or the you after? Scars make our faces ugly, but they also give it character. From my point of view, I’d’ve done the same thing you did back then. That girl didn’t want your opinion; she wanted you to say she was great. Well, she wasn’t, and, sooner or later, that would’ve caught up with her.”

“Maybe if it had caught up with her later, she would have been better equipped—”

“Nonsense. She’s dead, Scott. Weak links snap. But as for you, here’s something I believe in really strongly: guilt’s a whore. It goes with anybody, but it’s not good in bed. You’re not dying, but this thing you’ve got with the girl is no different than my situation. We could both use up whole days feeling guilty ’bout what we didn’t do in life, but why spend a day in bed with someone who doesn’t give you any pleasure?”

“That’s too easy, Beenie.”

“No, it’s not! It’s the hardest thing in the world. Just dumping your guilt and moving on.

“Like I gotta be right now. Sorry we don’t see eye-to-eye on this. You know, I do believe in recycling. Save your old papers, Coke cans, glass. But not old guilt. Far as I’m concerned, guilt goes bad after a certain while, and can’t be used after that.”

We said our good-byes, and she left. It was so disappointing. I knew Beenie wasn’t Albert Einstein, but it seemed a person who knew they were going to die soon would also know . . . more. But what she’d said sounded as though it had come from one of those popular psychology books you find at a drugstore. Sighing, I put my glasses back on and picked up the last pages of Annette Taugwalder.

New Year’s came and went, and I thought of Beenie’s evenings with her family. Would she visit with Dean and his wife? Or with the daughter? Why did she talk so much about the son, but almost nothing about the daughter? Roberta knew.

“Because they don’t get along. The girl married a stinker who caused bad blood between them. It breaks Beenie’s heart.”

“There’s been no reconciliation since she got sick?”

“No.”

I could not throw the manuscript away, but my smart wife came up with a solution, as usual. Following her suggestion, I went to the university hall of records, found Annette’s old address, and sent the manuscript there with a note on the package to forward it if necessary. I assumed her parents had a copy of her book, but what a remarkable surprise if they didn’t!

At two o’clock in the morning, I woke Roberta to read her this passage from Rousseau:

“She only kept her bed for the last two days, and continued to converse quietly with everyone to the last. Finally when she could no longer talk and was already in her death agony, she broke wind loudly. “Good!” She said, turning over, “a woman who can fart is not dead.” Those were the last words she spoke.

“Now, Beenie Rushforth or not? Can’t you imagine her going out like that? Farting and stomping and shaking her broom at the gods!”

Roberta reached for her glasses on the night table, which was her prelude to saying something that mattered. She would chat with glasses off, but when it was serious, she somehow felt she needed a clear field of vision.

“I think you’ve got her pegged wrong, Scott. She’s tough in ways, but also very vulnerable. Extremely vulnerable. Just listening to her talk about her daughter is so damned sad! The woman grieves. I think their separation hurts her more than the cancer. You know, I look at her, and we talk, and every time I think, ‘Scott and I are so lucky. We are so, so lucky.’ ”

I was shoveling snow off the front sidewalk, when the Rushforth Toyota pulled to the curb in front of me. She got out wearing the giant green government-issue parka her son had given her after he left the army.

“Scott, you and I gotta talk.”

“What’s up, Beenie?”

“That book. You shouldn’t’ve sent it back to the parents.”

“Flow did you know about that? Did Roberta tell you?”

“No, but I knew. From now on, things like that, you either throw away or you keep ’em. Never pass ’em on. They’re your memories, not theirs.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I did the same thing, and it got me into big trouble. You can do what you want, but I’m just telling you now so you know: there can be problems. Keep it or throw it away. That’s the only rule to follow.” She touched my arm, then walked back to her car and got out a bottle of cleaner. “It’s tricky because everything seems loose and open. It’s not! See you later.”

I watched her walk to the house. What was tricky? How had she known about what I’d done with the manuscript? Keep it or throw it away? Had she gone mad?

I stabbed the snow shovel into the nearest mound and marched to the kitchen door, preparing for a talk either about Beenie with Roberta, or a talk with Beenie about what the hell was going on. Looking through the window, I saw both women sitting at the table. Beenie was looking straight ahead and crying. She’d say something, stop, shake her head or drop it in defeat. I continued to watch, not knowing what to do. Finally Roberta happened to look my way. I pointed to me, then to the door. Can I come in? Her eyes widened, and she mouthed a big No! I went back to shoveling.

When I’d finished the sidewalk and the never-ending path to the front door, I wondered if it was safe to go back inside yet. There was so much happening, and it all had to do with the cleaning woman.

“Scott?”

“Yes? I’m freezing! Can I enter my own house now? Or are we wrestling another crisis to the ground?”

“Come in.”

Despite my displeasure, my antennae went up, and the signals sent were not good. Roberta’s arms were crossed. A bad sign. Her face was expressionless. Bad sign two. My wife is an optimistic, good-natured person. If she gets mad once every two months, it’s surprising—and most of the time, that anger is totally justified.

“What’s the matter, dear?”

“The matter is, you are going to take me out to lunch and explain these.”

Our family had spent four years in Hale, Texas. A few of the only good times I remember there were sitting in the Lone Star Bar, drinking beer with Glenda Revelle, who might have been the most beautiful student I have ever known. If they’re honest, all teachers will admit that, at least once in their careers, a young person walked into the class who had the potential to turn both the teacher and their world inside out. Some get involved; most don’t. The problem for those who don’t is, this ravishing student continues to sit in front of us half a year, their physical presence alone a daily reminder of the erotic dare: how intriguing it would be to live in a land way far from the mind. A land where the senses are everything, humiliation is likely, and outside the door of the room is probably nothing. Glenda and I did not have an affair, although she made it plain that would have been fine. We came close twice, and I was tempted. Close enough to smell her breath and the heat off the skin of her shoulder. But it did not happen.

She was persistent, and sent me a number of letters. Silver calligraphic letters on black paper. Stupidly, I kept two—and Roberta found them. That led to the evening across the kitchen table when she called me a mean loser. Eventually she believed I had not been with the girl, and we reached a thin truce. The best one can hope for in situations like that.

Now Roberta stood in front of the fireplace, holding out two black envelopes as if they were diseased.

“Ro—”

“Why did you save these, Scott?”

“I didn’t. You saw what I did with those letters. Where did you get those?”

“Beenie found them.”

“Oh, Beenie, huh? Well, where is she? I want to ask her a few questions.”

“She left for the day. She’s too upset to work. But that doesn’t explain these. Why did you lie to me? Have you been writing her?”

I walked over, took the letters out of her hand, and threw them in the fire. “I haven’t done anything! I threw those letters away just like that, a long time ago, and you watched me do it! I have been a good man since then, Roberta. I’ve worked very hard to make amends to you and the children for treating you all badly, and I think I’ve done O.K. If you don’t trust me any more than to think for twenty years I kept some half-assed love letters from a student hidden in the back of a drawer to moon over.

Where is Beenie? I want to talk to her.”

“She left. I told you she left. Why did you keep those letters?”

“I DIDN’T!”

“Then why did she find them?”

“I DON’T KNOW!”

Do, too!”

“DO NOT! YOU SAW ME THROW THEM IN THE FIREPLACE IN HALE!”

“Obviously not all of them!”

“For Christ’s sake, Roberta, I’m telling you the truth!”

“Then why’d she find these?”

“I don’t know! How did she know I had sent the manuscript to Annette’s family? How did she find it in the first place? I left it with the police. THAT’S WHY I WANT TO TALK TO HER!” Fuming, I gave her my back and walked to the door.

“Where are you going? Come back here and start telling the truth!”

I turned again and faced her. “What is holy to you, wife?”

“The grandchildren.”

“Then I swear to you on all of their heads that you saw me burn each and every one of Glenda Revelle’s letters back in Hale. O.K.? Is there anything else I can say? Shall I slice my throat for further proof? Do I deserve no trust?”

That was a terrible moment, because we looked at each other across a room that was suddenly miles wide. There was such silence between us. It told me no; in her mind, I still deserved no trust. That was so shocking after all those years. I would have gone to my grave thinking I had been bad once, but slowly, slowly, I had gotten all right again in my wife’s heart. Wrong. Like one of those ghastly accidents in nuclear power plants, my almost with Glenda Revelle had spoiled the earth around us for a thousand years.

“Scott!”

“What?! I’m going to find Beenie. I’m going to talk to her and find out what the hell she’s doing. Then I’m going to come back here and dig out what other poisons you’ve got inside you.”

I don’t like driving in the snow, because I never feel like I have full control over the car on icy roads. But you can bet your behind I drove that day. I drove too fast, and a couple of times fishtailed going around turns. Beenie had never gone home early, much less ten minutes after arriving, but her unhappiness today didn’t concern me. I would leave her alone as soon as she told me about the dead girl’s manuscript, and where she’d found letters I’d burned years ago.

Strange as it sounds, it didn’t cross my mind that these circumstances were bizarre and verging on the impossible. I knew I’d given Annette’s book to the cops and had thrown the black letters into the fire. Despite that, here they all were again, back on earth to accuse and alarm. Yet I wasn’t spooked; I was irate! Who was this woman to dredge my past and come up with the only things I wanted to stay buried a fathom deep? I wasn’t a bad man, damn it, but these two memories said I was. Insensitive and selfish, a pedantic lecher who cared little for most people and too much in the wrongest way for others.

We have friends who live on Plum Hill. Houses there are old and big, and most have long sweeps of lawn right down to the lake. Groucho Marx had spent a summer there, and was purported to have said it would have been a nice place if it hadn’t been so beautiful. Whenever there, I always marveled over the way the buildings, like powerful elder statesmen, sat up on that hill and knew they were impressive even if you had no idea whom they belonged to. Now and then, Roberta and I talked about what it’d be like to live on Plum Hill, but in our hearts, we knew it wasn’t for us. What would we do next door to Peter Dawson, who owned the biggest newspaper in the state? Or Dexter Lewis, the junk-bond king? These were people you saw in town on Saturday wearing freshly ironed khaki pants and denim shirts, getting a haircut or buying a hammer at the hardware store. You nodded at each other and perhaps said a few pleasant, shoot-the-breeze words while waiting on line for the cashier to get on with it. But outside, the “Plums” drove off in their new Mercedes, while you dug in your pocket for the keys to a Chevy that hadn’t been washed in some weeks. The world of difference doesn’t rip you apart, but, once in a while, you stand by the door of your car a little too long and give a small sigh.

I stopped at a gas station and used the book in their phone booth to find her address. “B. Rushforth—Plum Hill 67a.” I assumed the small a meant the difference between her gatehouse and the main. The sky had started the morning blue, but had slipped down gray-white to almost brown by the time I entered the Plum Hill gates and started looking for numbers. A large black labrador retriever ran out of a driveway and followed the car, barking awhile until he lost interest a few houses down and wagged his tail back home. 63, 65, 67. The name on the mailbox was none other than Samuel Morgan, sole owner of the Morgan Computer Company. You know the one I’m talking about—each machine costs millions and is the darling of the U.S. Defense Department? I think the man is still in his thirties, but is reputed to be astronomically wealthy. Beenie rented her house from this guy?

The driveway wound up and around a long way before you actually saw anything. The “gatehouse” came first, although it guarded no gate. No car was parked near her house, and, from what I could see, none were at the big house, either. I felt like a thief casing the joint. I am not a thief or a snoop, but I decided to snoop. I would do it in plain sight, however, so if anyone happened to come up, they’d see me at it. But I did have every intention of looking in whatever windows were there and finding whatever clues were available.

Snow had begun to fall, but it was light and playful. The whole feeling of what I was about to do lightened my mood. It was so out of character for me—so nosy and so none of my business to peek in a stranger’s windows. I couldn’t help smiling, although I was still pretty riled.

Flakes began to stick and melt on my glasses. I had to take them off for a wipe before spying in earnest. Specs in hand, I looked around and realized what an utterly beautiful scene it was. Acres of lawn, dark trees on the edges, the green-brown stillness of the lake behind the fat floating snowflakes. . . .

Beenie’s house was nothing special. A small Cape Cod saltbox the color of silvery tree bark—from the outside, it appeared cozy and a good place for one person to live, two at most. Pink gauzy curtains framed the windows. From afar, I looked through and saw a couch covered in a large flower print. Eyeglasses back in place, I went to the window that looked into her living room. Typical stuff: appropriate furniture, a few throw rugs, dull pictures on the walls. For no reason, I looked at my watch and then chuckled. I’d seen too much TV. Without realizing it, I was spying the way they did it on television—check your watch a lot; check over your shoulder constantly; don’t spent too much time looking in a window before moving on to the next. Check that watch again—you have only so much time. I had no idea how much I would have before someone noticed me peeking in windows, and came over or called the cops, and I would get myself into big trouble.

Moving slowly around the house, I passed a kitchen with the remnants of breakfast left out—a knife on a plate filled with bread crumbs, a coffee cup tipped over on its saucer. Something touched my mind, but didn’t come into focus until a few minutes later. A small window into a bathroom. Standing on tiptoe, I could make out a yellow shower curtain and a rumpled towel tossed across the sink.

I was a step toward the next window, when it registered.

“It’s messy!”

Her whole house was messy. Beenie Rushforth, Queen Terminator of the dust speck, Grand Wielder of Mop and Broom/Look-Out-Dirt-Here-I Come, lived in a house with wet towels and strawberry-jam smudges on her tablecloth? It was not only hard to believe, it was nigh onto impossible. I know—People are a giant admixture of contradictions, and nothing should be surprising in life, but if you had seen the results of this woman’s work, you would fully understand why it was inconceivable for her to live like this.

Still dumbfounded, I walked to the last window and saw dead Annette Taugwalder sitting on Beenie Rushforth’s bed, reading a magazine.

It was a trick, a joke; I was drunk; I was insane. She was dead. She could not be there. But oh, she most certainly was. Twenty years’ dead Annette flipping the pages of a magazine. Without realizing it, I put my head on the glass, because the world was suddenly a new place for me.

“Annette?” I put a hand on the glass, too. It was cold. I felt that. She looked up and smiled. I was fifty-five years old and thought. . . . Forget what I thought. I was wrong.

She stood up and walked out of the room. I kept my forehead on the glass, and kept looking at the tangled bedspread where she’d sat. I had never in my life been so close to the answer, but I was petrified. Everything inside me howled and screeched and shook the bars of their cages. Let us out. Let us run away. The fire’s close and will kill us.

“Professor Silver?”

I turned, and there was Annette. “I’m scared of you.”

She nodded, said she understood.

“I don’t know what to do. Can one talk to Death?”

“Yes, Professor. We have to talk.”

“Is it because of Beenie?”

She nodded again, then gestured for me to follow. We walked a long way across the lawn and down to a boathouse beside the lake. There was a pinewood bench in front of it, and we sat down.

“She thought it was best if I came first, because you and I have the most to talk about. The other things aren’t as serious.”

“Sometimes I dream of talking to the dead. Sometimes the dreams are very vivid.”

She frowned. “This isn’t a dream. I’m really here, and we have to talk, so please don’t pinch yourself or jump up and down trying to wake up. It’s real; I’m real. I am dead, but I’m here now.”

“Why?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Because I hate you, and you must know that. It was your fault back then. Or a lot of it was. You were the straw that broke my back. You said my book was bad, and bingo, that did it.”

“Oh Annette, I didn’t—”

“Yes, you did! I wasn’t dumb, you know. I knew what you were saying.”

“Should I have lied? You said you wanted the truth.”

“I did, but not one that would kill me. Your truth was like stabbing a knife into my fucking brain!

“I was so sure it was good. So sure you’d say, ‘Annette, it’s stunning! It’s like nothing else.’ ” She slid closer down the bench, pointing furiously at me. “Do you remember what you did say? Huh? I do. You said, ‘I think in certain places you’ve sat a little too close to the fires of your favorite writers. Sometimes you use their heat to keep your prose warm.’ ” You pompous, smug asshole! It was my fire! I lit all the fires in that book—”

“Annette, that’s enough.”

Beenie’s firm voice came from behind me, but before I turned, I saw the girl’s fury sink back into her face like a fist she had to hide. She still hated me, but was more afraid of what would happen if she didn’t do what she’d been told.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. “Hiya, Scott. I wasn’t expecting you so soon. Go in the house, Annette. You can talk more to him later.”

Like the hyperbolic young woman she was, or had been, she got up without deigning to look at me, tsk’d loudly, and stomped off. I looked at her shoes, and realized they were the same high riding boots she’d worn and had been so in fashion when I had known her. “I feel like I’m going to have a heard attack, Beenie.”

“Don’t worry—your heart’s as strong as a horse’s. What you should watch out for is that uric acid. Stay away from tomatoes, is my advice.”

I took a deep breath and looked at her. “Who are you?”

“God.”

“Oh.”

She smiled and took my hand. “Uh-Oh City!”

Had it gotten colder, or had my soul’s temperature dropped ten degrees since sitting on the bench? Beenie had a large stick in her hand and was snapping off little bits. That was the only sound around us except for the occasional faraway car driving into the Plum Hill turnoff.

“Don’t you want to ask any questions?”

I was trying to get calm. My eyes were closed. She nudged me and handed over a piece of stick. I looked. A perfectly carved head of me about three inches high. Perfect coloring, too—my gray hair, blue eyes. I dropped it and unconsciously wiped my hands on my pants.

“Come on, boy; lighten up! It’s funny. Ask me some questions, and let’s get going on this.”

It was my turn for narrowed eyes. “How can you be God and have cancer?”

“Good shot, Professor. Now we’re cooking! I guess I should begin from the beginning, huh?’ She was about to go on, when she saw something behind me and stopped. Standing up, she cupped both hands around her mouth and shouted, “You go back to the house, Annette! I’m not fooling, and I’m not telling you again!”

I didn’t turn, because I had no desire whatsoever to see A. Taugwalder again anytime soon.

“That damned girl. I told her, you know? I told her she could have her say, but then she had to back off so I could explain things to you. But she’s headstrong and so used to getting her way. Are you all right, Scott?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Where was I? At the beginning. O.K. I was born in McPherson, Kansas. My father owned a hardware store, and our whole family worked there. One day, when I was behind the counter, a man I’d never seen before came in and asked for a pair of pliers. We got to talking, and he told me his name was Gilbert, Nolan Gilbert. I was fifteen years old. Do you know anything about the mystic Jewish?”

“You mean Jewish mystics?”

“Right, that’s them.”

“Well, something. I’ve read—”

“They came closest. Ever heard of the Lamed Wufniks?”

“Beenie, what are you talking about?”

“These mystics believed in Lamed Wufniks. Thirty-six righteous men whose job is to justify the world to God. Or, looking at it another way, they’re supposed to explain to God why man has a right to be here. Now, if one of these thirty-six ever discovered who he was, he immediately died, and somebody else, in another part of the world, took his place. Because, you see, even though they don’t know it, they’re the secret pillars of the universe. Saviors. Without them doing this justifying, God would get rid of the whole bunch of mankind.”

“Wup—”

“Wuf. Lamed Wufniks. Which is not so far from wrong. The big difference is, we don’t do any justifying, because we are God.”

“You’re a ‘Wufnik’ ?”

“No, I’m God. Or one-thirty-sixth of Him. They got the number right.”

A bird flew in over the water and out again. I looked at Beenie, the ground, Beenie, the ground. What was I supposed to say?

“You don’t believe me. And what about Annette? You need more miracles? I can give them if it’ll help, but I thought she’d be enough. You’re a tough audience, Professor Silver. Here.” With her left hand, she pulled a silver dollar from behind my neck. With her right, she held something up. In her palm was one of those plastic, dome-shaped doodads you shake up, and fake snow flutters and falls over a scene like Paris or the North Pole. Only, in this one, real life tiny people were sitting on a bench, moving—and after staring, I realized it was us in there, doing what we out here were doing, move for move.

“For God’s sake, stop it!”

“O.K.” She closed her hand around the snowy dome, and it disappeared.

I half-stood. “What do you want from me? Why are you doing this?”

She pulled me down again. “Just sit back and listen to the rest of my story. I was fifteen when I met Nolan Gilbert. He was about seventy. First he told me, then showed me, who he was, like I’m doing with you. Then he said he was dying, and I was supposed to replace him.

“That’s how it works, see. You live your life normally, even after you know. But like everybody else—and you are like everybody else, Scott; you got to know that. Sooner or later, our time to die comes, too. A normal lifetime—sixty or seventy years, usually. But the difference is, when our time comes, we have to find a replacement. Some are luckier than others—they know who it is that they want years before they die. Like me with you.”

“You knew me before?”

“Sure. I’ve been cleaning your room at the university for years, but you never really saw me, because I worked night shift. Sometimes we’d pass each other in the hall if you worked late.”

“You’re telling me God is man?”

“No, no, no! I am not saying that at all. Man has God in him, but he’s not God! No, the absolute simplest way to put it is this: man is man, but there are thirty-six chosen men who, together, are God. That’s why normal people feel close to Him—because He’s them in many ways. Nolan told me about the Greeks. You know about that. They believed there were lots of gods, which is kind of right, and that they all had human feelings. They were interested in sex, got angry, and did unfair things, stuff like that. So the Greeks were close, too, in guessing right, but they also thought gods lived up on special mountains away from the rest of the world. Wrong. We’re here—just all over the place, and not looking like people’d expect, you know? I’m one, and I’m sure not impressive, huh? But I’m only a thirty-sixth of the big puzzle. Fit me together with the other parts, and you’ve got ONE IMPRESSIVE GOD, all right!

“I’ll tell you something else, too—the world is full of puzzle pieces. Know how you feel lonely and apart sometimes? That’s because you’re not connected up the right way. People who find out that secret spend the rest of their lives trying to find their matching other parts. But I’m not here to talk about that with you. We don’t have time for it. There’s so much else I gotta tell you.”

AS I mentioned earlier, before that wondrous afternoon with Beenie Rushforth, I was beginning to believe more and more in God, but one along the lines of Emily Dickinson’s “God is a distant, stately lover.” One who is fully aware of us and what we are up to every minute of our lives, but one who has the love and respect to allow us our own fates. When we die and reach whatever other side there is, He will go over our lives with us page by page, like an essay written for school, an essay having on it many mistakes that must be identified and corrected before the essay is put away. Once the mistakes have been brought to our attention, we will recognize most of them, and He will point out others. By the time we get up from His desk, we’ll fully understand what we did wrong. Did I believe in reincarnation? No. Why would we repeat third grade if we fully perceived all of the mistakes we’d made there? I believed in an afterlife, but not on earth. I hadn’t a clue as to where we went, and I did not want to guess.

However, when I arrived at my own front door again many hours later, my understanding of the world, of life, of death, of God . . . was a quintillion miles away from what I had thought before. For this loud, sweet, dying woman had proven without question that what she had told me was true. As she said, I was a hard case and wanted proof even beyond Annette. Proof that transcended the transcendent. I cannot tell you what she did, but I can say she took me where I wanted to go, and showed me the impossible.

I wanted to see Melville and Hawthorne alive and in the flesh, wanted to hear their voices and the kind of words they used outside their books. I wanted to see Albert Pinkham Ryder at Christmastime, brewing up his own private brand of perfume and giving it away in little jars to children. I wanted to visit Montaigne in his tower, circa 1591, and look over his shoulder while he wrote, “Though we may mount on stilts, we must still walk on our own legs, and on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own bottom.” These were my heroes, the people I’d thought about my entire adult life. If Beenie was God, and time belongs to God, then she could clap once and give me these people for a moment. She did. She took me wherever I wanted to go, and affably said stay as long as you like. Funny thing was, I didn’t need or want to stay long. Only a few minutes to breathe their air, see how they held their pen or formed words with their lips. That was all I needed, and she gave it to me.

After that, when I was sure, I asked questions, but her answers were often unsatisfying.

“Why me?”

“Scott, I’d tell you if I knew. But I don’t, honest. It just happens. They tell you that—one day you’ll see your replacement, and you’ll know. I guess it’s sort of like love at first sight.”

“Beenie, you’re God! God knows everything. There’s nothing He doesn’t know.”

“Maybe when we’re all joined together, all thirty-six of us. But that never happens, so individually we got to struggle along with what we do know. You’re it, mister. You’re the one who’s gonna take my place.”

“Where do we go when we die?”

“Wherever you want. Some people stick around here; others take off.”

“Take off where!”

“I told you: wherever they want.”

“You’re not helping!”

“They’re vague questions. Remember in your class? ‘Be more specific, Silver!’ By the way, you know where you got that name? Your family’s real name is ‘Flink,’ but when your great-grandfather came here from Saarland, he didn’t think it sounded American, so he changed it to ‘Silver.’ Jack Silver instead of Udo Flink.”

“Udo Flink? That’s the stupidist name I ever heard.”

“I guess your grandpa thought so, too. Do you want egg salad or corned beef?” From her left and right pockets, she took out sandwiches wrapped in plastic. “Roberta told me you liked my egg salad.”

“I do. Thank you. That would be nice.” She handed it to me, and I held it up. “An egg-salad sandwich from God.”

“At least that way you can be sure it’s fresh, eh?”

“Beenie, what am I supposed to do now? It’s an incredible compliment that you’ve chosen me, but . . . what do you do when you’re . . .”

“Well, you’re not there yet, bug, so don’t start worrying about that. First you gotta pass the tests. I mean, you’re already over the first hurdle, which is getting picked. But now come the tests. Those’re the rules, and you’ve just gotta follow them.”

“What kind of tests? What kind of rules?”

“You want to know now? Don’t you want to finish your sandwich first?”

“Now.”

“O.K.” She wiped her mouth with a paper napkin that had ‘Dairy Queen’ printed across it. “First thing you gotta do—the first test, if you want to call it that—is work out your problem with Annette. A dead person can’t be angry. There’s a lot they’ve got to do on the other side, but so long as they’re still mad at something in life, it keeps them sidetracked. Know what I mean?”

“Why can’t you do something to take her anger away?”

“First of all, I wouldn’t know how; remember, I’m only a fraction of the whole, and my powers aren’t as great as you think. Second, you two’ve got to work it out yourselves. If I waved some kind of magic wand over her and did what you said, it wouldn’t solve her problems. It’d only be like a stopgap. A kid’s got to learn to tie its own shoes sooner or later.”

“What should I do to help her?”

“That’s part of your test. You have to figure her out and how to start patching things up. I can tell you, though, she’s not going to be much help. You’ve got yourself a hostile witness there, counselor. She hates your guts.”

“So I gathered. Does she know about me? Obviously she knows about you, since you were the one who brought her back.”

“Yeah, she knows about me, but not about you. She thinks I brought her here so you could make peace. She doesn’t know it’s part of your test.”

“How do you hush the dead?”

She slapped my shoulder. “That’s a good question. You know what one of my tests was?”

“Beenie, these are the ultimate mysteries! They’re not recondite—they’re impossible to understand. How am I supposed to go about—”

“What does ‘recondite’ mean?”

“ ‘Difficult to understand.’ ”

“Stop whining, man. Of course they’re hard to understand! You’re the scholar, the thinker. I’m just a stupid little woman from Kansas with kids who don’t like me. But I passed my tests. Sure, they were different from yours, but they weren’t any easier.”

“How can God have trouble with His children?”

“Hey, friend, did you ever read the Bible? A lot of His kids gave him lip. From what I heard, Moses sat up on the mountain and argued forty days! Christ? ‘Why have You forsaken me? Some gratitude, huh? And Job! He wanted personal proof! He wanted us to drop everything, come down and show him, like we were demonstrating a vacuum cleaner!”

“I thought you said all thirty-six of you never got together.”

“Not anymore. In the old days, but not now. It hasn’t been necessary until now. Don’t you see, Scott? That’s why man keeps wanting to be immortal. Not so he can live a million years, but because, deep in his blood, he knows God must be kept alive for every generation. God, who’s a part of every man because He’s made up of men. Thirty-six of them. From all cultures, all kinds of personalities and professions, men, women, kids. . . . The faces of God are always changing, because the separate pieces change. But at the end, there’s just Him, and He’s immortal so long as man wants to be. The fact that I have trouble with my daughter, or that I’m dying of cancer, doesn’t matter. It’s important to me, sure, but not to the big picture. Those’re some of my tests—making peace with my children, and learning how to die. Christ had to learn how to die, too.”

I made fists and shook them at the sky. “It’s too earthly! It’s supposed to be more majestic!”

Beenie said nothing while I raged, and after, when my futile hands opened and dropped slowly to my lap.

“Finish your lunch, Scott. I recondite it very highly.”

The snow had started again as we approached her house. I would much rather have stayed outside and watched it fall than go in and talk to Annette.

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Play it by ear. See how she acts.”

Beenie opened the front door and waved me in. It smelled nice inside. An aroma of woodsmoke and soap. Brushing the top of her head vigorously to get the snow off, she called, “Annette?”

No answer.

“Annette, come on out here, will you?”

When nothing happened, she scratched her nose and went looking. No Annette.

“Nowhere! That little skunk. Where’d she go?”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to see me.” I hoped my relief wasn’t too obvious.

“I guess not. Well, that isn’t your problem. I’ll find her and get you two together. You want a hot toddy or something? Another sandwich?”

“No, thank you. I need to go and sit alone awhile. There’s too much to think about.”

“I’ll say!” She opened the door and walked me out to the car. “Say, what’s that inside there? Is it Annette?”

“I don’t know.”

There was something propped in the passenger’s seat. At first, I, too, thought it was the girl, because it was so large. Getting closer, I could almost—“Nisco?! Great God in Heaven, it is! It’s Nisco!”

“What?” Beenie came up next to me and bent over to look through the windshield. “What’s Nisco? It’s a stuffed animal. Look how big it is! Must have cost you a fortune. Did you buy it for one of your grandchildren? Hey, what’s the matter?”

“It’s the Nisco! I can’t believe it! I haven’t thought of that—” I couldn’t finish the sentence. My jaw worked up and down a couple of times, but didn’t have the oomph to do anything else.

“Hey, what’s up? What is that thing?”

I turned to Beenie and looked at her with, I’m sure, very stunned eyes. “It’s the Nisco.”

“You keep saying that. Looks like a stuffed animal to me.”

“It is. When I was a boy, the only bad dreams I ever had were of that wolf. See the X’s where the eyes should be? I once went to the movies and saw a cartoon with him in it. He was the bad guy. The tilted hat, big mouth, fangs. He was chasing the Three Little Pigs. That night and for months afterward, I dreamed he was chasing me. Holding a knife and fork and always drooling, he was going to carve me up. I was so scared. I used to wake up screaming. My parents’d run in, thinking someone was murdering me—”

“Why’d you call him Nisco?”

“I don’t know. He was always that. Not Big Bad Wolf, just Nisco. The only thing that really frightened me when I was young.

“Annette put it there, didn’t she? No one else in the world knew about him.”

“Yes, she probably did. That’s why she’s not around. Left her calling card, but I don’t know what she’s trying to tell you. What’re you going to do with it?”

I thought of that petrified little boy jerking awake in the middle of many nights, heart banging, panting—escaping, but only just. The sound of him behind me running, running so fast, rubbing his knife and fork together, ssslick-ssslick-ssslick, inches away, screaming, “I’m going to EAT you!” Laughing that terrifying, stupid cartoon laugh. No Devil from Hell can scare us more than childhood demons, cartoon wolves or not. Our soft spots are so much larger then. We have no armor.

“Huh? You want to keep it?”

“No! Can I throw it out here?”

“It’s not necessary.” She put her hand on the windshield over the passenger’s side. The Nisco faded and slowly began to disappear. Then, at the last moment, when it was mostly shimmer and dark blur, there was a loud BLAP!, and the inside of the windshield splattered with blood.

I didn’t hear from either of them for three days. I tried to go about my life in as normal a fashion as possible, but that was absurd. God and Death and Sanity had all walked into my house and sat down at the table. They wanted to talk; they had plans for me. Was I supposed to pretend it wasn’t them, and listen as if theirs were only another business proposition?

How would I handle Annette? What other tests would I have to face if I were able to resolve the conflict with her? What happened to you after you ‘passed’ ? Did angels come down and take you on a tour of the heavens? Were there angels? I had to remember to ask Beenie: Do Angels exist?

Can you imagine having someone in your life who could answer that question conclusively?

I remained nervous and alert. I taught well, really singing out the questions and answers in my classes, keeping the students up on their toes. One girl stopped me in the hall and asked why I was in such a good mood. I laughed like a hyena. Good mood? Oh my dear, if only you knew.

Norah called one night to say she had broken up with the cartoonist and was going out with an airline pilot now. My daughter’s fickleness and vague promiscuity had been a real thorn in my side for years, and we’d had more than one squabble about it and about her whole life-style. But this time, we talked seriously and illuminatingly about why she’d decided to make the change. At the end of the conversation, there was a comfortable silence, then she said, “Thank you, Dad.”

“For what?”

“Taking me seriously.”

“Darling, I’ve taken you seriously since you were a girl.”

“No, you’ve often treated me like I was a student you thought was going to be great, but ended up disappointing you.”

“Norah!”

“It’s true, Dad, but listen to me. Hear what I’m saying. This conversation was special; it was really different. It’s the first time in I-can’t-remember-when that I felt you were listening and were actually interested. You don’t have to approve of me, Dad. I’m not asking for that anymore. I want only for you to love me and hear about my life.”

When we’d hung up, I went to find Roberta, who had been listening in on another extension. “Was what she said true? Have I been such a lousy father all these years?”

“Not lousy, Scott, but tough and often removed. You were very hard on the girls for years. We’ve talked about this before. Gerald was born when Norah was twelve, remember. I’m sure that’s what she was referring to.”

Our three children—Norah, Freya, and Gerald. Norah illustrates medical textbooks and lives in Los Angeles. Freya is married with two children and lives in Chicago. Gerald is severely retarded and is institutionalized. We tried for years to keep him home with us, but if you know about care for the severely retarded, you know it is virtually impossible to live any kind of normal life around someone with this handicap. They are black holes of need for help and love. No matter what you give them, it is never enough or correct. You can ask for nothing in return, because they have nothing. Sure, you pray for them to show some sign of recognition or normal behavior. Just once. Just a flash of what in your greatest hopes might happen some magical day: they smile when you kiss them rather than scream as if they’ve been wounded. Or pick up a spoon and dip it in the soup instead of hitting themselves in the face with it or gouging at their eyes. Unknowingly, they take everything you have. When you are exhausted and resentful, guilt taps you on the shoulder and knocks you down another way. It is a terrible lesson and burden. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

When Gerald was seven, Freya walked out of the kitchen one morning to answer the telephone, and her brother put his hand down on a lit kitchen burner. At the hospital, even Roberta, who had fought hardest to keep him home, agreed we could no longer care for him properly. After he recovered, we found a perfect school, and he has lived there since. He is both our sword of Damocles and our permanent reminder of how wonderful life can be if you are lucky.

“We all adjusted to him differently, Scott. I tried too hard to see him normal and gave him too much of the love I should have given the girls. You did what you could, but it was a terrible disappointment, and it ate you up. When it got too much, you retreated from all of us into your work. It makes sense. It’s both of our personalities perfectly. I wanted everyone to be happy; you wanted everyone to be exceptional. Neither of us had a chance of succeeding, so we both made big mistakes. But you know, we couldn’t have been so bad, because the girls still love us. It’s clear in whatever they do.”

Yes, we’d had this discussion before, but having it again right after Norah’s comment hit me a K.O. punch to the heart. Had I really been so bad and negligent? Worse, had I known that all along, but spent years hiding it from myself? I knew life was a progressively more sophisticated game of hide-and-seek with ourselves, but could we really be unaware of something this momentous?

Further, if it were true, why would I rate to replace Beenie Rushforth as one of the thirty-six? A man who treated his family with such arrogance and disrespect? In her inimitable way, she’d told me that “it took all kinds,” but could such an appalling egoist be one of them?

So much at once. My life jumped, bounced, and floated like one of those astronauts walking in space. It had suddenly become almost weightless, because its own personal gravity had ceased to be. I tried repeatedly to call Beenie, but there was never an answer. Finally I realized she wanted me to think things over, and would answer my questions only when she came again to clean our house. How ridiculous yet correct that profession was for her. The ultimate cleaner. The ultimate bringer of order.

Needless to say, I galloped back and forth over the emotional gamut, waiting for her next visit. I canceled my class for that day, and bribed Roberta out of the house with a gift of lunch and an afternoon movie with her best friend. Ten minutes after she left, the empty and quiet house made me so nervous that I got out the vacuum cleaner and did the floor in the kitchen before the bell rang.

I opened the door, and there was Annette Taugwalder.

“Beenie couldn’t come, so she sent me. I’m supposed to clean your house.” She brushed by me into the hall, throwing this last line over her shoulder. “Wow, I never thought I would be in this house. Vacuum cleaner’s all ready for me, eh? O.K.”

I closed the door and looked at her. “Why didn’t she come?”

“Because she told me to. I’m a good Putzfrau. Don’t you remember the chapter in my book where the girl cleans houses in the summer for extra money? Don’t worry, Professor; your place will look nice when I’m done.” With that, she took off her coat, threw it on a chair, turned on the vacuum cleaner, and went right to work. I stood there feeling like a fool. She didn’t look at me again.

What was going on? There was nothing to do but retreat to my study and try again to call Beenie at home. The phone there rang and rang. She had to have done this for some reason, but what? She must have known I’d have a million questions. Why wasn’t she here to answer them? How could she drop this girl in my lap and walk away? Where the hell was she?

Luckily, there was a small television in my room. I switched it on to fill up some mental airspace. What was Annette doing out there? The idea of a dead woman cleaning the house was monstrous and monstrously funny. I couldn’t help smiling. A peculiar thought crossed my mind: she was the second dead person to be in this house. Our poor son, for all intents and purposes dead, had spent years here.

The person on television was talking about Gorgonzola cheese. I had once lived in the same universe as Gorgonzola cheese. Now I lived in one where dead students vacuumed my house and God wouldn’t answer her phone.

I sat at my desk and pretended to work by pushing pencils and papers around, looking for nothing in an address book, reading a bank statement twice because even the numbers had no meaning.

I tiptoed to my door and put an ear to it. Only the “hoooosh” of the machine. Was she really here only to clean? Both the expression on her face and the tone of her voice had been so haughty and dismissive. She knew she held all the best cards, and I could do nothing till she made a first play. All because of a badly written, sophomoric, heavy-breathing, and pale copy of—There was a knock at the door. I forced myself not to run and open it. Count to five, rise slowly, turn the doorknob slowly. “Yes?”

“Sorry to interrupt, but I didn’t know if you wanted this or not?” It was the same relic finding that Beenie had done each time she cleaned. Had she instructed Annette to do this, too? The girl held out a beat-up green spiral notebook with the word “Chargers” printed in thick black letters across the top. That was the nickname of the local high school. I assumed the book belonged to one of our girls.

“I’ll take it. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She handed it to me and started to leave.

“Annette? Why did you come today?”

Her face was only innocence. “To clean your house. Beenie asked me to take her place. I told you.”

“Cleaning’s not important. Wouldn’t you rather talk about your—”

“No. She just told me to bring you things to see if you want them.” She left.

I didn’t know what to do. Follow her, grab her arm, sit her down and say, “Listen, dead person, you and I have to have it out. We have to talk about your bad novel.” No, that wouldn’t do.

I went back to my desk with the school notebook and, for want of anything better to do, opened it.

“Hey, Turd Bird!”

I whipped my head aside to see who had said it, but a hand went over my mouth. Scared, I looked at whose hand. I didn’t know the boy. I realized only then that we were face-to-face, very close. And I felt him. I felt him inside me down there.

“Quiet, ssh; he’ll go away!”

I looked at this boy. Who was he? There were three small pimples on his chin. What was he talking about? What was I doing here? We were inside a toilet stall. I was sitting on his lap. He was on the toilet seat. His pants lay below his knees.

“Hey man, come on, hurry up with her, willya?”

My lover started grinning at what his pal outside the stall had said. He pumped and pumped away inside me, that awkward position, trying to finish, trying to bring himself off, get it over with so he could go back to the class we were both missing.

I was my daughter Freya. Quiet, dull Freya, who covered her bedroom walls with pictures of kittens and read seven-hundred-page books with titles like Love’s Flame and Fury. She received average grades in school and let her sister do most of the talking and arguing. She liked to take care of Gerald. She baked him cakes and fed them to him in slow forkfuls.

She was having sex on a high school toilet with a boy who was hurrying to finish so he could sneak back to class with his friend who waited on the other side of the stall door.

I was her. I could feel the boy, smell his heat and ugly cologne. The zipper on his pants cut into me.

“O.K., O.K., O.K.!” Coming, he flung his head back too hard and banged it against the wall. “Damn! Oh, yeah, nice. Damn that hurt! Thanks, Freebie; that was good.” Rubbing his head with one hand, he pushed me off gently with the other. I hovered above him on bended, quivering knees. I wanted him to say something else. Hadn’t I come out here with him in the middle of my favorite class? Something nice I could hold to me when he was gone. But he was too busy pulling himself together.

“Come on, Dipwad! Five minutes left to class!”

“Right!” He zipped up quickly and reached behind me to open the door. “Seeya, Freebie. Thanks for the Freebie!”

His friend outside tipped his head around the door, checked me out, and said in a loud, long falsetto, “FREEEEEEEEBIE!” The two of them snickered and were gone. I knew I should return to class, too, but, with five minutes left, what was the point? I’d use paper towels to clean off my legs, check my makeup in the mirror, and be looking O.K. again before the bell rang and anyone might see me walking out of the men’s room.

“I DID THAT once when I was in high school. But the guy didn’t come. We were both too scared.”

Because my eyes were closed, I only heard Annette’s voice and felt when she pulled the notebook out of my hands.

“Hey, don’t worry, be happy! That’s all you get. You can open your eyes—you’re back home.”

She was squatting down in front of me, close by. Unsmiling, but I could tell she was pleased.

“Was that really Freya? Did she do that?”

“Frequently. Touch this notebook again, and you’ll see many things she did. She had two nicknames in high school. ‘Freebie,’ as in, it’s free for anyone who wants it. And ‘Tunnel.’ ‘The Silver Tunnel.’ I have something else for you that I found.”

“I don’t want it! Go away!”

“Oh no, you have to have it, Perfesser. Them’s the rules. You told me the truth; now I tell you. Why do you think she brought me back? I’m your Medusa! I tell you nothin’ but the truth, and the whole truth about your life. Remember how Beenie started finding things here? I found more.”

“Beenie’s not evil!”

“This isn’t evil; this is the facts. I’m showing you your truth. What others thought of you, what really happened when you weren’t looking.”

“You like telling it to other people. Here’s some for you. Remember what Norah said: ‘You don’t have to approve of me, Dad.’ ”

“You don’t know Norah!”

“No, but I know the truth. Here’s treasure number two, Dad. Remember this? He loved these.”

She held something out, but I was so confused that I didn’t realize what it was at first.

“It’s a bagel! Don’t you remember how Gerald loved them? Used to walk around the house with one in his mouth? In the good old days, that is. Before you so thoughtfully shipped him away to the loony bin.”

When I didn’t take it, she tossed it into my lap. I didn’t want it. It felt heavy. A piece of bread.

The moment it touched me, I saw the world through his eyes. Through the eyes of Gerald/child/man/madman/animal. Colors roared and whispered. They had voices. Loud—everything was screamingly louder. Chairs weren’t chairs anymore, because I didn’t understand what they were. Smells—the smallest nothing smell was an explosion a hundred times what I knew, good and bad. Chemicals, flowers, the bugs in the ground, breakfast dishes stewing in the sink. Things. I smelled them all.

My mouth. There was something in my mouth, and I liked it. I hummed around it. It was nice against my teeth. Soft.

I walked around wherever I could go. There were people sometimes. They smelled good, too. Sometimes they touched me or said things at me or pushed me to be in a place or not in a place. If I didn’t like the place, I’d yell. O.K., O.K., O.K., they’d say. O.K.

Everything was O.K. and tasted good, and I smelled the world and heard the people making noise. And then there was a BANG, and he came in, and I fell on the floor and yelled because here he was. He hurts me. He yells at me. He takes my arm and pulls it and yells at me. I hate him. I hate him. I hit him. I will hit and hit. That big thing will hurt. Pick it up and hit him, and he’ll fall down. He is bad. Sometimes he’s soft and puts me under his arm, but he’s bad. The others say things to him, but they are scared, too. He yells at them, too. He goes into the room and BAMS! the door. When he’s gone, people talk again and are nice. He is bad. I hate. Bad. Hate. Bad. BAM.

“Stop it!”

I don’t understand.

“Stop it, Annette! Take it away from him this minute.”

They yell. I don’t understand. The white one comes to me and takes away my mouth thing.

I came to again in my study and understood. For the last minutes, I knew the world through my son’s hideously shattered perception. The world through broken glass, fragments of beauty and terror and mystery that exceed all bounds. Disturbing beyond any bounds, truly Hell on earth, was one simple realization: my retarded son hated me. Of all the bizarre bits, scraps, slivers, pieces of our world he could grasp, the only thing he consciously knew was that he hated me. His only truth, the only genuine clearness he knew. I was bad. He wanted me dead.

“Get out of here. Go back to my place and wait for me.”

“You told me to clean their house!”

“Annette, go back.”

I sat on the floor blinking, a survivor of my own life. I watched the two of them bellow at each other. The gray woman and the young one who might have been her daughter.

“Why don’t you let me finish? Let me have him! He deserves it!”

“Get out, Annette. I am not going to tell you again!”

My son. His mind of stone, or air, clouds you would fall right through to the ground, but he knew how to despise me. Wanted me dead. Was I that bad? Had I been that evil?

“To him, you were, but he doesn’t understand things too good, Scott. Come on; let me help you up.”

I had no energy. It was fine to be sitting on the floor. I must have fallen there. I wouldn’t let her pull me. Annette left the room, screaming, “ASSHOLES!” And I was an asshole. I was a miserable beast.

“He hates me. He’s capable of doing that. It’s astonishing. We thought he had no clear idea of anything. But he’s clear enough to hate me.”

“I know the feeling, kid. When I told my daughter I had cancer, first thing she said, the very first, was had I made a will or not.” Beenie left the room and returned with two glasses of grapefruit juice. Handing one to me, she said drink first and we’ll talk in a minute. I was so empty and burned out of feeling that I’d have bitten the glass if she’d told me. I sipped, and the bitter, fresh taste of cold juice slid down my throat.

“Hey, don’t you remember?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Remember what? Beenie, have I really been so bad? Such a total failure?”

“I’m not talking about that. Don’t you remember your glass?” I looked at it and saw a glass. So what? “So what?”

“Don’t you remember these glasses?”

I looked again. “No.”

“Christmas 1975. Norah wanted to be special and have cocktails before dinner, so you told her to fill up these glasses with fruit juice for all of you.”

“And we threw them in the fireplace after we were finished. I did it first. Even Gerald. He watched what we did, and threw his, too. They were expensive glasses. Roberta was furious, but ended up throwing hers, too. That was lovely. We felt Russian.”

“There’s been a lot of nice in your life. No, you’re not such a bad man. You’ve been bad, but you’re not bad. Annette just picked moments. It’s easy to do that when you’re talking about fifty years of moments. She’s very bad. Very angry and messed up.”

“What do I do now, Beenie? How do I win with her?”

“You can’t. That’s the problem. I thought—”

The study door crashed open, and Annette stood there, a hand out in front of her, pointing. “I don’t care what you say. I’ve waited years for this.” She started across the room for me. I didn’t even have a chance to wonder what would happen, much less get up and run away, because behind her were things. Not ogres and monsters, grave things, but my things. Things I would know only because she had brought my life with her. Only, they came as vapors, colors, smells, sounds, lights, darks, forms, hints. . . . My life stood seething behind her, ready to pounce, ready to kill me with its fatal truth. Life through Gerald’s eyes, my daughter in a toilet stall, things I already knew and hated or ignored. Things I didn’t know, but people knew about me. Lies others had believed. Truths people said, but no one believed. Things I’d longed for, but knew would never happen. Lies I’d told myself, truths that cut deep, realizations sharp and bitter or fresh as air across ice. All of them, all of their energy and force. We think these things go away with time, like mist on an early-morning field; the sun comes up, and it bums the mist away.

But it doesn’t. Because I caught a glimpse of it, alive and full of power, I tell you it does not go away. Like any sound ever made, the truth of our lives remains. It is still there somewhere, forever, no matter what our memory tries to do to it.

If I’d been exposed to it longer, I’d’ve died. As it was, I saw enough in seconds to scald my soul the rest of my life. If I’m not mistaken, in there amongst the other facts and certainties was how long the rest of my life would be.

“Annette!” Beenie whipped an arm down as though she were pitching a baseball. The girl and what was behind her disappeared at once. Beenie made fists, held them up, and shook them at the ceiling. “Again, again, again. Why again? What is going on?”

It was not my place to ask questions at that point, so I kept quiet. Quiet and shaken. Beenie shook her fists a long time, then slowly let them fall. “I’m sorry, Scott.”

“Sorry? You saved me!”

“No, I used you.” She came over and sat down next to me on the floor. Before she spoke, she balled her hands again and asked, “Why is this happening?

“Scott, remember when I told you about the thirty-six people who make up God? At least that part is true. And the other part is, I really am one of them, dumb as I am. The lying begins with you and Annette. Remember when I said I’ve been watching you for years? Well, that’s true, too, but not for the reasons I said.

“Years ago, when she was a senior in college, I saw Annette and knew she was the one to replace me in the thirty-six. I’m sorry I said it was you; I lied.” She reached over and took my hand, gave it a squeeze, and let go. “It was never you—it was Annette. I knew it the minute I saw her, and have been following her ever since. Just like when Nolan saw me.

“So I told her, and, amazingly enough, she seemed to understand. In the beginning, everything was fine, and the first tests she had, she went right through with no problem. Then she went to graduate school and took your class. She wrote that novel, asked you to read it, and you know the rest.”

“She killed herself.” It took an instant to crystallize in my mind. “Killed herself? One of the thirty-six killed themselves? How is that possible? God doesn’t—”

“No, He doesn’t, and that’s our problem. We don’t understand, either. What’s worse, it’s happening more than you would think. Once in a while in the past, there’d be a mistake, and something like this would happen—but it was so rare, we paid no attention. But now something’s gone very wrong, and it’s happening more than ever. We have to find out why. So me and a couple of others were told to get these people and bring them back. Try to find out either why they did it, or at least make peace with what caused them to do it. Maybe that way we’ll begin to figure out. . . .” She grimaced, sighed. “Because, you see, they can’t be replaced if they do this to themselves—”

“People chosen to be God, people who know that and understand what that means still kill themselves?!”

“Yup.”

“ ‘Yup’ ? That’s all—‘Yup’ ? What does it mean? What does it say about the future? There’s got to be someone to replace Annette.”

“No one. She didn’t choose anyone. She hadn’t even finished taking the tests. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I brought her back to see you. We don’t know.”

“What do you mean? You know everything, damn it! You’re IT! And if God is diminished, if there are fewer of you, then good is diminished, too!”

“That’s right. That’s why more and more is falling apart. That’s why it’s so bad here.”

“And Beenie, what am I supposed to do now? I’m not one of your chosen, O.K. I don’t deserve to be, but what do I do with all this knowledge? What am I supposed to do now that I know it? Please take it away. Just do that—move a hand like you did and clear it out of my head. Just do that one thing for me.”

“You don’t want that, Scott. You’re the only one who owns your experiences. Now that you know the truth about them, use it to try and make yourself better. That’s the best thing to do with it. Sure, I can wave it away, abracadabra, but you have the potential to be a much better person now that you know who you really are.”

“Fate’s not determined? But I saw when I was going to die!”

“That’s only time on the clock. I’m talking human time. How long does it take to write a book? For some, it’s fast; for others, slow. However long it takes to get down those sentences of the heart, eh? I can’t show you the book you’ll write, Scott. I can only help you do research and verify your sources.”

Despite everything, a smile popped onto my face. “Verify?

“Yeah, I’ve been studying my vocabulary to keep up with you.”

“You . . . and your people haven’t decided the future already?”

She shook her head no. God shook no. It was as simple as that.

THE TERRITORY

Bradley Denton

Bradley Denton (“Rerun Roy, Donna and the Freak” October/November 1991) grew up in Kansas. Ever since he attended the University of Kansas in 1976, he has wanted to write a story about the raid on Lawrence that occurred in 1863—one of many guerilla raids in Kansas and Missouri and in many ways, one of the worst. “I didn’t know how to approach the story until the summer of 1991,” Brad writes, “when I realized that with only one plausible change in earlier events, a certain displaced steamboat pilot could have been present during the raid. After all, he himself had been a member of a Missouri guerilla band in the spring of 1861, but had deserted that band after only a few weeks and had then gone West with his brother . . .

SAM CAME AWAKE AND sat up choking. His chest was as tight as if wrapped in steel cables, and his heart was trying to hammer its way out. He gulped a breath and coughed. The air in the abandoned barn was thick with dust. There was just enough light for him to see the swirling motes.

A few feet away, the skinny form of Fletcher Taylor groaned and rose on one elbow. “What the hell’s wrong?” he asked.

“Shut the hell up,” the man on the other side of Taylor said.

“You go to hell,” Taylor snapped.

“Go to hell yourself.”

“Let me sleep, or I’ll send you all to hell,” another man said.

“The hell you will.”

“The hell I won’t.”

Taylor shook a finger at Sam. “See all the hell you’ve raised?”

Sam put on the new slouch hat that Taylor had given him, pulled on his boots, and stood, picking up the leather saddlebags he’d been using as a pillow. “I’m sorry as hell,” he said, and left the barn, trying not to kick more than four or five of the other men on his way out.

The light was better outside, but the sun had not yet risen. Sam closed his left nostril with a finger and blew through his right, then closed his right nostril and blew through his left, trying to clear his head of dust. The ground was dry. The thunderheads that had formed the night before had rolled by without dropping enough rain to fill a teacup. He could have slept outside, in clean air, and been fine. As it was, his head ached. This wasn’t the first night he had spent in a barn or corn crib since leaving the river, but he still wasn’t used to it. At three months shy of twenty-eight, he feared that he was already too old for this kind of life.

Most of the camp was still asleep, but a few men were building fires and boiling chicory. One of them gestured to Sam to come on over, but Sam shook his head and pointed at the sycamore grove that served as the camp latrine. The other man nodded.

Sam went into the trees, and within twenty steps the smells of chicory and smoke were overwhelmed by the smell caused by two hundred men all doing their business in the same spot over the course of a week. It was even worse than usual this morning, because the leaders of other guerrilla bands had brought some of their own men into camp the day before. But at least Sam had the grove to himself for now.

When he had finished his business, he continued eastward through the grove until the stench faded and the trees thinned. Then he sat down with his back against the bole of a sycamore and opened one of his saddlebags. He removed his Colt Navy revolver and laid it on the ground beside him, then took out a pen, a bottle of ink, and the deerhide pouch that held his journal. He slid the notebook from the pouch and flipped pages until he reached a blank sheet, then opened the ink bottle, dipped his pen, and began to write.

Tuesday, August 11, 1863:

I have had the same dream again, or I should say, another variation thereof. This time when I reached the dead man, I discovered that his face was that of my brother Henry. Then I awoke with the thought that it was my fault that Henry was on board the Pennsylvania when she blew, which in turn led to the thought that I was an idiot to ask a young and unsure physician to give him morphine.

But I would have been on the Pennsylvania as well had it not been for the malice of a certain William Brown, perhaps the only man caught in that storm of metal, wood, and steam who received what he deserved. As for the morphine, Dr. Peyton himself instructed me to ask the night doctor to give Henry an eighth of a grain should he become restless. If the doctor administered too much, the fault was his, not mine.

I see by my words that I have become hard. But five years have passed since that night in Memphis, and I have seen enough in those years that the hours I spent at Henry’s deathbed do not seem so horrific now—or, at least, they do not seem so during my waking hours.

A pistol shot rang out back at camp and was followed by the shouted curses of men angry at having been awakened. Someone had killed a rat or squirrel, and might soon wish that he’d let the creature live to gnaw another day. These once-gentle Missouri farmboys had become as mean as bobcats. They generally saved their bullets for Bluebellies, but didn’t mind using their fists and boots on each other.

The dream seems more pertinent, Sam continued, on those nights when the man’s face is that of Orion. Orion was as intolerable a scold as any embittered crone, and a Republican crone at that—but he was my brother, and it might have been in my power to save him.

Sam paused, rolling the pen between his fingers. He looked up from the paper and stared at the brightening eastern sky until his eyes stung. Then he dipped the pen and resumed writing.

It is as fresh and awful in my memory as if it had happened not two years ago, but two days ago.

I could have fought the Red Legs, as Orion and our companions tried to do. I had a Smith & Wesson seven-shooter. If I had used it, I would have either preserved Orion’s life, or fallen beside him. Either result would have been honorable.

But I faltered. When the moment came, I chose to surrender, and handed over my pistol—which one of the Red Legs laughed at, saying he was glad I had not fired the weapon, for to be struck with a ball from its barrel might give one a nasty welt.

Then, as if to prove his point, he turned it on the driver, and on the conductor, and on Mr. Bemis, and on my brother.

As Orion lay dying, the Red Leg attempted to shoot me as well. But the pistol misfired, and I ran. Two of the Red Legs caught me and took my watch, but then let me go, saying that killing a Missourian the likes of me would not be so advantageous to their cause as letting me live.

I continued to run like the coward I had already proven myself to be.

Sam paused again. His hand was shaking, and he didn’t think he would be able to read the jagged scrawl of what he had just written. But he would always know what the words said.

He rubbed his forehead with his wrist, then turned the notebook page and dipped his pen.

I could not have saved Henry. But Orion would be alive today, safe in Nevada Territory, had I been a man. And I would be there with him instead of here at Blue Springs; I would be thriving in the mountains of the West instead of sweltering in the chaos of Western Missouri.

I have remained in Missouri to pay for my sin, but in two years have had no success in doing so. Perhaps now that I have come to Jackson County and fallen in with the Colonel’s band, my luck will change.

When this war began, I served with my own county’s guerrilla band, the Marion Rangers, for three weeks. But there the actual need for bushwhacking was about as substantial as an owl’s vocabulary. That was before I had crossed the state, entered Kansas, and encountered the Red Legs. That was before I had seen my brother shot down as if he were a straw target.

I have not had a letter from Mother, Pamela, or Mollie in several weeks, although I have written to each of them as often as I can. I do not know whether this means that they have disowned me, or whether their letters are not reaching Independence. I intend to go up to investigate once this coming business is completed, assuming that it does not complete me in the process.

Sam laid the journal on the ground and wiped his ink-stained fingers on the grass. Then he peered into the ink bottle and saw that it was almost empty. He decided not to buy more until he was sure he would live long enough to use it.

The sun had risen and was a steady heat on Sam’s face. The day was going to be hot. Another shot rang out back at camp, and this time it was followed by yips and hollers. The boys were up and eager.

Sam slid his journal into its pouch, then returned it and the other items to the saddlebag. He stood, stretched, and walked back to Colonel Quantrill’s camp.

As he emerged from the sycamores, Sam saw fifty or sixty of his fellow bushwhackers clustered before Quantrill’s tent. The tent was open, and the gathered men, although keeping a respectful distance, were trying to see and hear what was going on inside. Fletcher Taylor was standing at the rear of the cluster, scratching his sparse beard.

“ ‘Morning, Fletch,” Sam said as he approached. “Sleep well?”

Taylor gave him a narrow-eyed glance. “Rotten, thanks to you.”

“Well, you’re welcome.”

“Be quiet. I’m trying to hear.”

“Hear what?”

“You know damn well what. The Colonel’s planning a raid. Most of the boys are betting it’ll be Kansas City, but my money’s on Lawrence.”

Sam nodded. “The story I hear is that the Colonel’s wanted to teach Jim Lane and Lawrence a lesson ever since he lived there himself.”

A man standing in front of Taylor turned to look at them. “I’d like to teach Jim Lane a lesson too,” he said, “but I’m not crazy and neither’s the Colonel. Lawrence is forty miles inside the border, and the Bluebellies are likely to be as thick as flies on a dead possum. It’d be like putting our pistols to our own heads.”

“Maybe,” Sam said.

The man raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean, maybe? You know something I don’t?”

Sam shrugged and said nothing. Two nights before, in a dream, he had seen Colonel Quantrill surrounded by a halo of fire, riding into Lawrence before a band of shooting, shouting men. He had known the town was Lawrence because all of its inhabitants had looked like the caricatures he had seen of Senator Jim Lane and had worn red pants. Sam had learned to trust his dreams when they were as clear as that. Several days before the Pennsylvania had exploded, a dream had shown him Henry lying in a coffin; and before he and Orion had left St. Joseph, a dream had shown him Orion lying dead in the dust. But it wouldn’t do to talk of his dreams with the other bushwhackers. Most of them seemed to think that Sam Clemens was odd enough as it was, hoarding perfectly good ass-wiping paper just so he could write on it.

“Well, you’re wrong,” the man said, taking Sam’s shrug as a statement. “Kansas City’s got it coming just as bad, and there’s places for a man to hide when he’s done.”

Taylor looked thoughtful. “I see your point,” he said. “Calling on Senator Lane would be one thing, but coming home from the visit might be something else.”

Sam stayed quiet. It didn’t matter what the others thought now. They would mold bullets and make cartridges until they were told where to shoot them, and they’d be just as happy to shoot them in Lawrence as anywhere else—happier, since most of the jayhawkers and Red Legs who had robbed them, burned them out of their homes, killed their brothers, and humiliated their women had either hailed from Lawrence or pledged their allegiance to Jim Lane. And if Quantrill could pull several guerrilla bands together under his command, he would have enough men both to raid Lawrence and to whip the Federals on the way there and back.

Captain George Todd emerged from the tent and squinted in the sunlight. He was a tall, blond, square-jawed man whom some of the men worshipped even more than they did Quantrill. He was wearing a blue jacket he’d taken from a dead Union lieutenant.

“Hey, cap’n, where we going?” someone called out.

Todd gave the men a stern look. “I doubt we’ll be going anywhere if you boys keep standing around like sick sheep when there’s guns to be cleaned and bridles to be mended.”

The men groaned, but began to disperse.

“Fletch Taylor!” Todd yelled. “Wherever you are, get your ass in here!” He turned and went back into the tent.

Sam nudged Taylor. “Now, what would a fine leader of men like George Todd be wanting with a lowdown thief like you?” he asked.

Taylor sneered. “Well, he told me to keep my eyes open for Yankee spies,” he said, “so I reckon he’ll be wanting me to give him your name.” He started for the tent.

“I’m not worried!” Sam called after him. “He’ll ask you to spell it, and you’ll be stumped!”

Taylor entered the tent, and someone pulled the flaps closed. Sam stood looking at the tent for a moment longer, then struck off across camp in search of breakfast. Why Quantrill and the other guerrilla leaders were taking so long to form their plans, and why they were keeping the men in the dark, he couldn’t imagine. There shouldn’t be any great planning involved in striking a blow at Lawrence and the Red Legs: Ride in hard, attack the Red Legs’ headquarters and the Union garrison like lightning, and then ride out again, pausing long enough to set fire to Jim Lane’s house to pay him back for the dozens of Missouri houses he’d burned himself.

As for keeping the rank-and-file bushwhackers ignorant . . . well, there were about as many Yankee spies among Quantrill’s band as there were fish in the sky. Sam had talked to over a hundred of these men, and all of them had lost property or family to abolitionist raiders of one stripe or another. Sam had even spoken with one man whose brother had been killed by John Brown in 1856, and who still longed for vengeance even though John Brown was now as dead as a rock.

Vengeance could be a long time coming, as Sam well knew. In the two years since Orion’s murder, he had yet to kill a single Federal soldier, let alone one of the marauding Kansas Red Legs. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. He had fired countless shots at Bluebellies, but always at a distance or in the dark. He had never hit anything besides trees and the occasional horse.

Sam had a breakfast of fatty bacon with three young brothers who were from Ralls County south of Hannibal and who therefore considered him a kinsman. He ate their food, swapped a few East Missouri stories, and promised to pay them back with bacon of his own as soon as he had some. Then he shouldered his saddlebags again and walked to the camp’s makeshift corral to see after his horse, Bixby.

Bixby was a swaybacked roan gelding who had been gelded too late and had a mean disposition as a result. The horse also seemed to think that he knew better than Sam when it came to picking a travel route, or when it came to deciding whether to travel at all. Despite those flaws, however, Sam had no plans to replace Bixby. He thought that he had the horse he deserved.

Sam tried to give Bixby a lump of hard brown sugar from one of his saddlebags, but Bixby ignored it and attempted to bite Sam’s shoulder.

“Sometimes I think you forget,” Sam said, slapping Bixby on the nose, “that I am the man who freed you from your bondage to an abolitionist.”

Bixby snorted and stomped, then tried to bite Sam’s shoulder again.

“Clemens!” a voice called.

Sam turned and saw that the voice belonged to one of the Ralls County boys who had fed him breakfast.

“The Colonel wants you at the tent!” the boy shouted.

Sam was astonished. Except for his friendship with Fletch Taylor, he was less than a nobody in the band. Not only was he a new arrival, but it was already obvious that he was the worst rider, the worst thief, and the worst shot. Maybe Taylor really had told Todd and Quantrill that he was a Yankee spy.

“Better come quick!” the boy yelled.

Sam waved. “I’ll be right—God damn son of a bitch!”

Bixby had succeeded in biting him. Sam whirled and tried to slug the horse in the jaw with the saddlebags, but Bixby jerked his head up and danced away.

Sam rubbed his shoulder and glared at Bixby. “Save some for the Red Legs, why don’t you,” he said. Then he ducked under the corral rope and hurried to Quantrill’s tent. He remembered to remove his hat before going inside.

William Clarke Quantrill leaned back, his left leg crossed over his right, in a polished oak chair behind a table consisting of three planks atop two sawhorses. He wore a white embroidered “guerrilla shirt,” yellow breeches, and black cavalry boots. He gave a thin smile as Sam approached the table. Above his narrow upper lip, his mustache was a straight reddish-blond line. His eyelids drooped, but his blue-gray eyes probed Sam with a gaze as piercing as a bayonet. Sam stopped before the table and clenched his muscles so he wouldn’t shudder. His own eyes, he had just realized, were of much the same color as Quantrill’s.

“You’ve only been with us since June, Private Clemens,” Quantrill said in a flat voice, “and yet it seems that you have distinguished yourself. Corporal Taylor tells me you saved his life a few weeks ago.”

Sam looked at Fletch Taylor, who was standing at his left. Taylor appeared uncomfortable under Sam’s gaze, so Sam looked past him at some of the other men in the tent. He recognized the guerrilla leaders Bill Gregg and Andy Blunt, but several of the others were strangers to him.

“Well, sir,” Sam said to Quantrill, “I don’t know that I did. My horse was being cantankerous and brought me in on an abolitionist’s house about two hundred feet behind and to one side of Fletch and the other boys, so I happened to see a man hiding up a tree.”

“He was aiming a rifle at Corporal Taylor, I understand,” Quantrill said.

“Yes, sir, that’s how it looked,” Sam said. “So I hollered and took a shot at him.”

“And that was his undoing.”

Sam twisted the brim of his hat in his hands. “Actually, sir,” he said, “I believe that I missed by fourteen or fifteen feet.”

Quantrill uncrossed his legs and stood. “But you diverted the ambusher’s attention. According to Corporal Taylor, the ambusher then fired four shots at you, one of which took your hat from your head, before he was brought down by a volley from your comrades. Meanwhile you remained steadfast, firing your own weapon without flinching, even though the entire focus of the enemy’s fire was at yourself.”

Sam licked his lips and said nothing. The truth was that he had been stiff with terror—except for his right hand, which had been cocking and firing the Colt, and his left foot, which had been kicking Bixby in the ribs in an effort to make the horse wheel and run. But Bixby, who seemed to be deaf as far as gunfire was concerned, had been biting a crabapple from a tree and had not cared to move. The horse’s position had blocked the other bushwhackers’ view of Sam’s left foot.

Quantrill put his hands on the table and leaned forward. “That was a brave and noble act, Private Clemens,” he said.

A stretch of silence followed until Sam realized that he was expected to say something. “Thank, thank you, Colonel,” he stammered. It was well known that Quantrill liked being called “Colonel.”

“You understand, of course,” Quantrill said, “that in the guerrilla service we have no formal honors. However, as the best reward of service is service itself, I’m promoting you to corporal and ordering you to reconnoiter the enemy in the company of Corporal Taylor.”

“And a nigger,” someone on Sam’s right said. The voice was low, ragged, and angry.

Sam turned toward the voice and saw the most fearsome man he had ever seen in his life. The man wore a Union officer’s coat with the insignia torn off, and a low-crowned hat with the brim turned up. His brown hair was long and shaggy, and his beard was the color of dirt. His face was gaunt, and his eyes, small and dark, glowered. He wore a wide-buckled belt with two pistols jammed into it. A scalp hung from the belt on each side of the buckle.

George Todd, standing just behind this man, placed a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t much like it either, Bill, but Quantrill’s right. A nigger’s the perfect spy.”

The seated man shook Todd’s hand away. “Perfect spy, my hairy ass. You can’t trust a nigger any more than you can trust Abe Lincoln.”

Quantrill looked at the man without blinking. “That concern is why I’m sending two white men as well—one that I trust, and one that he in turn trusts. Don’t you agree that two white men can keep one nigger under control, Captain Anderson?”

Anderson met Quantrill’s gaze with a glare. “I have three sisters in prison in Kansas City for the simple act of remaining true to their brother’s cause,” he said. “I do not believe they would care to hear that their brother agreed to send a nigger to fight in that same cause, particularly knowing the treachery of which that race is capable.”

Quantrill smiled. “As for sending a nigger to fight, I’m doing no such thing just yet. I’m sending him as a spy and as a guarantee of safe conduct for two brave sons of Missouri. No Kansan is likely to assault white men traveling with a free nigger. As for treachery, well, I assure you that John Noland has proven his loyalty. He’s killed six Yankee soldiers and delivered their weapons to me. I trust him as much as I would a good dog, and have no doubt that he will serve Corporals Taylor and Clemens as well as he has me.” The Colonel looked about the tent. “Gentlemen, we’ve been jawing about this enterprise for twenty-four hours. I suggest that it’s now time to stop jawing and begin action. If you never risk, you never gain. Are there any objections?”

No one spoke. Anderson spat into the dirt, but then looked at Quantrill and shook his head.

“Very well,” said Quantrill. “Captains Anderson and Blunt will please gather your men and communicate with me by messenger when your forces are ready.” He nodded to Taylor. “Corporal, you’re to return no later than sundown next Monday. So you’d best be on your way.”

Sam made a noise in his throat. “Sir? On our way where?”

Quantrill turned to Sam. “Kansas Territory,” he said. “Corporal Taylor has the particulars. You’re dismissed.”

Sam didn’t need to be told twice. He left the tent, picked up his saddlebags where he’d dropped them outside, and then ran into the sycamore grove.

Taylor caught up with him in the trees. “You should have saluted, Sam,” he said. “It’s important to show the Colonel proper respect.”

Sam unbuttoned his pants. His head was beginning to ache again. “I have plenty of respect for the Colonel,” he said. “I have plenty of respect for all of them. If they were to cut me open, I’d probably bleed respect. Now get away and let a man piss in peace.”

Taylor sighed. “All right. Get your horse saddled as soon as you can. I’ll find Noland and meet you north of the tent. You know Noland?”

“No. But since I’ve only seen one man of the Negro persuasion in camp, I assume that’s him.”

“You assume correctly.” Taylor started to turn away, then looked back again. “By the way, we were right. We’re going to Lawrence. You and I are to count the Bluebellies in the garrison, and—”

“I know what a spy does, Fletch,” Sam said.

Taylor turned away. “Hurry up, then. We have some miles to cover.” He left the grove.

Sam emptied his bladder and buttoned his pants, then leaned against a tree and retched until he brought up most of the bacon he’d had for breakfast.

“Kansas Territory,” Quantrill had said. There had been no sarcasm in his voice. Kansas had been admitted to the Union over two and a half years before, but none of the bushwhackers ever referred to it as a state. In their opinion, its admission to the Union as a free state had been an illegal act forced upon its residents by fanatical jayhawkers. Sooner or later, though, those house-burning, slave-stealing jayhawkers would be crushed, and Kansas Territory would become what it was meant to be: a state governed by Southern men who knew what was right.

To that end, Colonel Quantrill would raid the abolitionist town of Lawrence, the home of Jim Lane and the Kansas Red Legs. And Sam Clemens was to go there first and come back to tell Quantrill how to go about the task.

Orion’s ghost, he thought, had better appreciate it.

On Wednesday morning, six miles south of Lawrence on the Paola road, Fletch Taylor started chuckling. Sam, riding in the center, glanced first at him and then at John Noland. Noland didn’t even seem to be aware of Sam or Taylor’s existence, let alone Taylor’s chuckling.

Noland was an enigma, both in his mere presence in Quantrill’s band and in his deportment during the present journey. No matter what Sam or Taylor said or did, he continued to look straight ahead, shifting in his saddle only to spit tobacco juice into the road. Except for the color of his skin, though, Noland’s appearance was like that of any other free man of the border region, right down to the slouch hat and the Colt stuck in his belt. He even rode with the same easy arrogance as Taylor. It was a skill Sam had never mastered.

Sam looked at Taylor again, squinting as he faced the sun. “What’s so funny, Fletch?”

Taylor gestured at the winding track of the road. “No pickets,” he said. “We ain’t seen a Bluebelly since we came into Kansas. If the Colonel wanted to, the whole lot of us could waltz in and raise no more notice than a cottontail rabbit.” He chuckled again. “Until we started shooting.”

Sam nodded, but didn’t laugh. It was true that they hadn’t passed a single Federal picket, but that didn’t mean Lawrence was going to be a waltz. The absence of pickets might only mean that the town had fortified itself so well that it didn’t need them.

“You should carry your gun in your belt,” Noland said. His voice was a rumble.

Sam was startled. Until now, Noland hadn’t spoken at all.

“Are you addressing me?” Sam asked, turning back toward Noland. But he knew that must be the case. Both Noland and Taylor had their pistols in their belts, while Sam’s was in one of his saddlebags.

Noland looked straight ahead. “That’s right.”

“I thought I should make sure,” Sam said, “since you won’t look me in the eye.”

“Your eyes ain’t pleasant to look at,” Noland said.

Taylor chortled. “Whomp him, Sam. Make him say your eyes are the most beautiful jewels this side of a St. Louie whorehouse.”

“It ain’t a question of beauty,” Noland said. “It’s a question of skittishness. Mr. Clemens has skittish eyes. I prefer steady ones, like those of Colonel Quantrill. Or like your own, Mister Taylor.”

Now Sam laughed. “It appears that you’ve bested me in the enticing eyeball category, Fletch. Perhaps we should switch places so you can ride next to John here.”

Taylor scowled. “Ain’t funny, Sam.”

Sam knew when to stop joking with Fletch Taylor, so he replied to Noland instead. “My gun’s fine where it is,” he said. “Why should I put it in my belt and risk shooting myself in the leg?”

“If that’s your worry, you can take out the caps,” Noland said. “But it’ll look better going into Lawrence if your gun’s in the open. The county sheriff might be inspecting strangers, and he won’t think nothing of it if your pistol’s in your belt. But if he finds it in your bag, he’ll think you’re trying to hide it.”

Sam didn’t know whether Noland was right or not, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. He took his pistol from his saddlebag, removed the caps, and tucked the weapon into his belt.

“Be sure to replace those caps when we come back this way with the Colonel,” Taylor said. He sounded disgusted.

“I merely want to ensure that I don’t shoot up the city of Lawrence prematurely,” Sam said. But neither Taylor nor Noland laughed. Sam gave Bixby a pat on the neck, and Bixby looked back at him and snorted.

When the three bushwhackers were within a mile of Lawrence, they encountered two riders heading in the opposite direction. The two men, one old and one young, were dressed in high-collared shirts and black suits despite the August heat. They wore flat-brimmed black hats, and their pistols hung in black holsters at their sides. The younger man held a Bible with a black leather cover, reading aloud as he rode.

“Well, lookee here,” Taylor whispered as the two approached. “I think we got ourselves a couple of abolitionist preachers on our hands.”

Sam tensed. If there was one thing a bushwhacker hated more than an abolitionist, it was an abolitionist with a congregation. Taylor had particularly strong feelings in this regard, and Sam feared that his friend might forget that they were only in Kansas as spies for now.

“Good morning, friends,” the elder preacher said, reining his horse to a stop. The younger man closed his Bible and stopped his horse as well. They blocked the road.

“Good morning to you as well,” Taylor replied. He and Noland stopped their horses a few yards short of the preachers.

Sam tried to stop Bixby too, but Bixby ignored the reins and continued ahead, trying to squeeze between the horses blocking the way. The preachers moved their mounts closer together, forcing Bixby to halt, and the roan shook his head and gave an irritated whuff.

“I apologize, gentlemen,” Sam said. “My horse sometimes forgets which of us was made in God’s image.”

The elder preacher frowned. “More discipline might be in order,” he said, and then looked past Sam at Taylor. “Are you going into Lawrence?”

“That we are,” said Taylor. His voice had taken on a gravelly tone that Sam recognized as trouble on the way. He glanced back and saw that Taylor’s right hand was hovering near the butt of his pistol.

“I see that you are traveling with a colored companion,” the younger preacher said. “Is he your servant?”

“No,” Sam said before Taylor could reply. “My friend and I jayhawked him from Arkansas three years ago, and we’ve been trying to help him find his family ever since. Are there any colored folks named Smith in Lawrence?”

The elder preacher nodded. “A number, I believe.” He twitched his reins, and his horse moved to the side of the road. “I would like to help you in your search, gentlemen, but my son and I are on our way to Baldwin to assist in a few overdue baptisms. Sometimes an older child resists immersion and must be held down.”

“I have observed as much myself,” Sam said as the elder preacher rode past.

The younger preacher nodded to Sam and thumped his Bible with his fingertips. “If you gentlemen will be in town through the Sabbath, I would like to invite you to attend worship at First Lawrence Methodist.”

Taylor came up beside Sam. “I doubt we’ll be in town that long, preacher,” he said. “But we’ll be sure to pay your church a visit the next time we pass through.”

“I am glad to hear it,” the young preacher said. “God bless you, gentlemen.” He nudged his horse with his heels and set off after his father.

Taylor looked over his shoulder at the departing men. “You won’t be so glad when it happens,” he muttered.

Noland rode up. “ ‘Jayhawked from Arkansas,’ ” he said. “That’s a good one.” He spurred his horse, which set off at a trot. Taylor’s horse did likewise. Bixby, for once, took the cue and hurried to catch up.

“I’m sorry if my lie didn’t meet with your approval,” Sam said as Bixby drew alongside Noland’s horse.

“I said it was a good one,” Noland said. “I say what I mean.”

“You may believe him on that score, Sam,” Taylor said. “John’s as honest a nigger as I’ve ever known.”

Sam eyed Noland. “Well, then, tell me,” he said. “Where were you jayhawked from?”

“I was born a free man in Ohio,” Noland said. “Same as Colonel Quantrill.”

“I see,” Sam said. “And how is it that a free man of your race rides with a free man like the Colonel?”

Noland turned to look at Sam for the first time. His eyes and face were like black stone.

“He pays me,” Noland said.

Sam had no response to that. But Noland kept looking at him.

“So why do you ride with the Colonel?” Noland asked.

“Might as well ask Fletch the same question,” Sam said.

“I know all about Mister Taylor,” Noland said. “His house was burned, his property stolen. But I don’t know shit about you.”

Taylor gave Noland a look of warning. “Don’t get uppity.”

“It’s all right, Fletch,” Sam said. Fair was fair. He had asked Noland an impertinent question, so Noland had asked him one. “I was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, Mister Noland. I was a printer’s devil before that, but I wanted to be on the river, so I made it so.” He grimaced. “I was a cub for two years before I earned my license, and I was only able to follow the profession for another two years before the war started. I had to leave the river then, or be forced to pilot a Union boat. So here I am.”

“How’d you come to be on this side of Missouri instead of that side?” Noland asked.

“I was going to Nevada Territory with my brother,” Sam said, angry now at being prodded, “but the Red Legs killed him northwest of Atchison. I went back home after that, but eventually realized there was nothing useful I could do there. So I came back this way and fell in with one bunch of incompetents after another until I joined the Colonel.” He glared at Noland. “So here I am.”

“So here you are,” Noland said.

“That’s about enough, John,” Taylor said. He looked at Sam. “I didn’t know you were a printer, Sam, but I’m glad to hear it. It’ll make one of our tasks easier. Marshal Donaldson’s posse tore up the Lawrence Herald of Freedom’s press and dumped the type in the Kansas River back in ’56, but the Lawrence Journal’s sprung up like a weed to take its place. So when we raid Lawrence, the Journal’s to be destroyed. But we’ll need to know how well the office is armed, so I suggest that you go there and ask for employment. You’ll be able to get a look at things without them wondering why. After you’ve done that, you can help me count Bluebellies, Red Legs, and Lawrence Home Guards, if we can find out who they are.”

“What if the Journal wants to hire me?” Sam asked.

Taylor grinned. “Tell them you’ll be back in a week or so.” He looked across at Noland. “John, you’re to fall in with the local niggers and see whether any of them have guns. You might also ask them about Jim Lane, since they love him so much. Find out where his fancy new house is, and how often he’s there.”

Noland was staring straight ahead again, but he nodded.

They were now skirting the base of a high, steep hill. Sam looked up the slope. “One of the boys at Blue Springs told me that the hill rising over Lawrence is called Mount Horeb,” he said. “It must be named after the place where Moses saw the burning bush.”

Taylor chuckled. “If Moses is still here, he’ll see more burning before long, at closer range than he might like.” He pointed toward the southeast, at another hill that was a few miles distant. “That might be a safer place for him to watch from. The Colonel says it’ll be our last stop before the raid, so we can see what’s what before it’s too late to turn back.” He spurred his horse, which galloped ahead. “Come on, boys! We’ve reached Lawrence!”

Noland spurred his horse as well, and he and Taylor vanished around the curve of the hill.

“Now that I think of it,” Sam yelled after them, “he said Mount Oread, not Horeb. Moses doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

He kicked Bixby, but the horse only looked back at him and gave a low nicker. It was the saddest sound Sam had ever heard.

“Do you have a stomachache?” he asked.

Bixby looked forward again and plodded as if leading a funeral procession. Sam kicked the horse once more and then gave up. The sadness of Bixby’s nicker had infected him, and he felt oppressed by the heat, by his companions, and by his very existence on the planet.

They followed the road around the hill, and then Lawrence lay before Sam like a toy city put together by a giant child. Its rows of stores and houses were too neat and perfect to be real. Small wagons rolled back and forth between them, and children dashed about like scurrying ants. Taylor and Noland were already among them.

Sam closed his eyes, but then opened them immediately, crying out before he could stop himself.

He had just seen the buildings, wagons, and children burst into flame.

Sam shook himself. Here he was having nightmares while wide awake. The ride had been too long, the sun too hot. It was time for a rest.

But maybe not for sleep.

Early Friday, Sam awoke in sweat-soaked sheets. He fought his way free, then sat up with his back against the wall. He had just spent his second night in Lawrence, and his second night in a real bed in almost three months. The dream had come to him on both nights, worse than ever. He was no more rested than if he had run up and down Mount Oread since sundown.

The dream always began the same way: He and the other Marion Rangers, fifteen men in all, were bedding down in a corn crib at Camp Ralls, fourteen miles south of Hannibal. They had to chase the rats away, but they had to do that every night. Then a Negro messenger came and told them that the enemy was nearby. They scoffed; they had heard that before.

But they grew tense and restless, and could not sleep. The sounds of their breathing were unsteady. Sam’s heart began to beat faster.

Then they heard a horse approaching. Sam and the other Rangers went to the corn crib’s front wall and peered out through a crack between the logs. In the dim moonlight, they saw the shadow of a man on a horse enter the camp. Sam was sure that he saw more men and horses behind that shadow. Camp Ralls was being attacked.

Sam picked up a rifle and pushed its muzzle between the logs. His skull was humming, his chest tight. His hands shook. The enemy had come and would kill him. The enemy had come and would kill him. The enemy had come and would—

Someone shouted, “Fire!”

And Sam pulled the trigger. The noise was as loud and the flash as bright as if a hundred guns had gone off at once.

The enemy fell from his saddle and lay on the ground. Then all was darkness, and silence. There was nothing but the smell of damp earth.

No more riders came. The fallen man was alone.

Sam and the others went out to the enemy. Sam turned the man onto his back, and the moonlight revealed that he was not wearing a uniform, and that his white shirt was soaked with blood. He was not the enemy. He was not even armed. And his face—

Was sometimes Henry’s, and sometimes Orion’s.

But just now, this Friday morning in Lawrence, it had been someone else’s. It had been a face that Sam did not recognize. It had been the face of an innocent stranger, killed by Sam Clemens for no reason at all . . . no reason save that Sam was at war, and the man had gotten in the way.

Fletch Taylor, in the room’s other bed, mumbled in his sleep. Sam could still smell the whiskey. One of Taylor’s first acts of spying on Wednesday afternoon had been to hunt up a brothel, and he had been having a fine time ever since. He was counting Bluebellies too, but it had turned out that there weren’t many Bluebellies to count.

Sam had visited the brothel with Taylor on Wednesday, but hadn’t found the girls to his liking. So he’d spent most of his time since then trying to do his job. He had applied for work at the Lawrence Journal, as planned, and had been turned down, as he’d hoped—but had learned that the Journal was a two-man, one-boy operation, and that they didn’t even dream of being attacked. A carbine hung on pegs on the wall in the pressroom, but it was kept unloaded to prevent the boy from shooting rabbits out the back door. The Journal’s type would join the Herald of Freedom’s at the bottom of the Kansas River with little difficulty.

From the purplish-gray color of the patch of eastern sky visible through the hotel room window, Sam guessed that it was about five A.M. He climbed out of bed and went to the window to look down at the wide, muddy strip of the town’s main thoroughfare, Massachusetts Street. Lawrence was quiet. The buildings were closed up, and no one was outside. Even the Red Legs and Home Guards slept until six or six-thirty. If Colonel Quantrill timed his raid properly, he and his bushwhackers could ride into Lawrence while its citizens were still abed.

The Union garrison shouldn’t be much trouble either, Sam thought as he looked north toward the river. The handful of troops stationed in Lawrence had moved their main camp to the north bank of the Kansas, and the only way for them to come back across into town was by ferry, a few at a time. Two small camps of Federal recruits—one for whites, the other for Negroes—were located south of the river, in town; but those recruits were green and poorly armed. The raiders could ignore them, or squash them like ladybugs if they were foolish enough to offer resistance.

Sam left the window, pulled the chamber pot from under his bed, and took a piss. Then he lit an oil lamp, poured water from a pitcher into a bowl, and stood before the mirror that hung beside the window. He took his razor and scraped the stubble from his throat, chin, cheeks, and sideburns, but left his thick reddish-brown mustache. He had grown fond of the mustache because it made him look meaner than he really was. The dirt that had been ground into his pores had made him look mean too, but that was gone now. He’d had a bath Wednesday evening, and was thinking of having another one today. Lawrence might be a den of abolitionist murderers, but at least it was a den of abolitionist murderers that could provide a few of the amenities of civilization.

When he had finished shaving, he combed his hair and dressed, then put out the lamp and left the room. Taylor was still snoring. Whiskey did wonders for helping a man catch up on his sleep.

Sam went downstairs and out to the street, opening and closing the door of the Whitney House as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the Stone family, who owned the place. Taylor had told Sam that Colonel Quantrill had stayed at the Whitney when he’d lived in Lawrence under the name of Charley Hart, and that Mr. Stone had befriended “Hart” and would therefore be treated with courtesy during the raid. So Sam was being careful not to do anything that might be interpreted as discourtesy. He wanted to stay on the Colonel’s good side.

The wooden sidewalk creaked under Sam’s boots as he walked toward the river. It was a sound that he hadn’t noticed on Wednesday or Thursday, when he had shared the sidewalk with dozens of Lawrence citizens. Then, the predominant sounds had been of conversation and laughter, intermingled with the occasional neighing of a horse. But this early in the morning, Sam had Massachusetts Street to himself, save for two dogs that raced past with butcher-bones in their mouths. Sam took a cigar from his coat pocket, lit it with a match, and drew in a lungful of sweet smoke.

He had to admit that Lawrence was a nice-looking town. Most of the buildings were sturdy and clean, and the town was large and prosperous considering that it had been in existence less than ten years. Almost three thousand souls called Lawrence home, and not all of those souls, Sam was sure, were bad ones. Perhaps the raid would succeed in running off those who were, and the city would be improved as a result.

Sam paused before the Eldridge House hotel. The original Eldridge House, a veritable fortress of abolitionist fervor and free-state propaganda, had been destroyed by Marshal Donaldson in 1856, but it had been rebuilt into an even more formidable fortress in the service of the same things. It was a brick building four stories high, with iron grilles over the ground-floor windows. Quantrill might want to destroy the Eldridge House a second time, particularly since the Lawrence Home Guards would probably concentrate their resistance here, but Sam’s advice would be to skip it. A mere fifteen or twenty men, armed with Sharps carbines and barricaded in the Eldridge House, would be able to kill a hundred bushwhackers in the street below.

“Hello!” a shrill voice called from across the street. “Good morning, Mister Sir!”

Sam looked across and saw a sandy-haired boy of ten or eleven waving at him. It took a moment before he recognized the boy as the printer’s devil from the Lawrence Journal.

Sam took his cigar from his mouth. “Good morning yourself,” he said without shouting.

The boy pointed at the Eldridge House. “Are you staying there, Mister Sir?” he yelled. “You must be rich!”

Sam shook his head. “Neither one. But if you keep squawking like a rusty steamboat whistle, I imagine you’ll be meeting some of the inhabitants of the Eldridge House presently.” He continued up the street.

The boy ran across and joined Sam on the sidewalk. Sam frowned at him and blew smoke at his face, but the boy only breathed it in and began chattering.

“I like the morning before the sun comes up, don’t you?” the boy said. “Some days I wake up when it’s still dark, and I ride my pa’s mule out to the hills south of town, and I can look down over Lawrence when the sun rises. It makes me feel like the king of the world. Do you know what I mean, Mister Sir?”

“I’m sure I don’t,” Sam said.

The boy didn’t seem to notice that Sam had spoken. “Say, if you aren’t at the Eldridge, where are you at, Mister Sir? I’ll bet you’re at the Johnson House, is what I’ll bet. But maybe not, because the Red Legs meet at the Johnson, and they don’t like strangers. So I’ll bet you’re at the Whitney, then, aren’t you, Mister Sir?”

“Yes,” Sam said. “The Johnson was not much to my liking.”

“The Red Legs seem to like it just fine.”

Sam nodded. “I have made note of that.” And indeed he had. If the Red Legs could be punished for their crimes, he would be able to sleep a little better. And if the specific Red Legs who had killed Orion could be found and strung up, he would sleep better than Adam before the Fall.

“Those Red Legs, they have a time,” the boy said. “I just might be a Red Leg myself, when I’m old enough.”

“I would advise against it,” Sam said, gnawing on his cigar. “The profession has little future.”

The boy kicked a rock off the sidewalk. “I guess not,” he said. “They say they’ll have burned out the secesh in another year, so there won’t be nothing left to fight for, will there, Mister Sir?”

“Stop calling me ‘Mister Sir,’ ” Sam said. “If you must speak to me at all, call me Mister Clemens.” He saw no danger in using his real name. The self-satisfied citizens of Lawrence clearly didn’t expect bushwhackers in their midst, and wouldn’t know that he was one even if they did.

“I’m sorry, Mister Clemens,” the boy said. “I listened to you talking to Mister Trask at the Journal yesterday, but I didn’t hear your name. Would you like to know mine?”

“No,” Sam said.

They had reached the northern end of Massachusetts Street and were now walking down a rutted slope toward the ferry landing. Before them, the Kansas River was dull brown in color and less than a hundred yards wide; hardly a river at all, in Sam’s opinion. But it would be enough to protect Quantrill’s raiders from the soldiers on the far bank, provided that the soldiers didn’t realize the raiders were coming until it was too late. To assure himself of that, Sam wanted to see how active or inactive the Bluebellies were at this time of morning. If they were as slumberous as Lawrence’s civilians, he would be able to report that there was little chance of any of them ferrying across in time to hinder the raid. There weren’t many soldiers in the camp anyway. Taylor had counted only a hundred and twelve, and some of those weren’t soldiers at all, but surveyors.

“How come you’re heading down to the river, Mister Clemens?” the boy asked. “Are you going fishing?”

Sam stopped walking and glared down at the boy, taking his cigar from his mouth with a slow, deliberate motion. “Do you see a fishing pole in my hand, boy?” he asked, exhaling a bluish cloud.

The boy gazed up at the cigar, which had a two-inch length of ash trembling at its tip.

“No, sir,” the boy said. “I see a cigar.”

“Then it is reasonable to assume,” Sam said, “that I have come to the river not to fish, but to smoke.” He tapped the cigar, and the ash fell onto the boy’s head.

The boy yelped and jumped away, slapping at his hair.

Sam replaced his cigar between his teeth and continued down the slope.

“That wasn’t nice!” the boy shouted after him.

“I’m not a nice man,” Sam said. He didn’t look back, so he didn’t know if the boy heard him. But he reached the riverbank alone.

A thin fog hovered over the water and began to dissipate as the sun rose. The sunlight gave the tents on the far bank a pinkish tinge. The camp wasn’t dead quiet, but there wasn’t much activity either. At first, Sam saw only two fires and no more than five or six men up and about. As he watched, more men emerged from their tents, but military discipline was lacking. Apparently, these Bluebellies could get up whenever they pleased. That would be good news for the Colonel.

Sam threw the stub of his cigar into the river and heard it hiss. The sun was up now, and the soldiers began emerging from their tents with increasing frequency. From old habit, Sam reached for his pocket watch. But he still hadn’t replaced the one that the Red Legs had stolen two years before.

He heard a scuffing sound behind him and looked over his shoulder. The boy from the Journal was close by again, twisting the toe of his shoe in the dirt.

“Say, boy,” Sam said, “do you have a watch?”

The boy gave Sam a look of calculated contempt. “Of course I have a watch. Mister Trask gave me his old one. I got to get to the paper on time, don’t I?”

“Well, tell me what time it is,” Sam said.

“Why should I tell anything to someone who dumped a pound of burning tobacco on my head?”

Sam grinned. The boy was starting to remind him of the boys he had grown up with in Hannibal. “Maybe I’d give a cigar to someone who told me the time.”

The boy’s expression changed. “Really?”

“I said maybe.”

The boy reached into a pocket and pulled out a battered timepiece. He peered at it and said, “This has six o’clock, but it loses thirty-five minutes a day and I ain’t set it since yesterday noon. So it might be about half-past.”

Sam took a cigar from his coat and tossed it to the boy. “Much obliged, boy.”

The boy caught the cigar with his free hand, then replaced his watch in his pocket and gave Sam another look of contempt. “Stop calling me ‘boy,’ ” he said. “If you must speak to me at all, call me Henry.” The boy jammed the cigar into his mouth, turned, and strode up the slope to Massachusetts Street.

Sam turned back to the river. The fog was gone, and most of the soldiers were out of their tents. To be on the safe side, Sam decided, the raid would have to begin no later than five-thirty, and a detachment of bushwhackers would have to come to the river to train their guns on the ferry, just in case. He didn’t think he would have any trouble persuading Colonel Quantrill to see the wisdom in that.

He started back up the slope, but paused where the boy from the Journal had stood.

“Henry,” Sam murmured. “God damn.”

Then he went up to the street and walked to the livery stable to check on Bixby. Bixby was in a foul mood and tried to bite him, so Sam knew that the horse was fine.

That evening, Sam was in his and Taylor’s room at the Whitney House, writing down what he had learned so far, when he heard the Journal boy’s voice outside. He went to the open window, looked down, and saw the boy astride a brown mule that was festooned with bundles of newspapers. The boy dropped one of the bundles at the Whitney’s door, then looked up and saw Sam at the window.

The boy shook his finger at Sam. “That seegar was spoiled, Mister Clemens!” he shouted. “I was sick all afternoon, but Mister Trask made me work anyway!”

“Good,” Sam said. “It builds character.”

The boy gave Sam yet another contemptuous look, then kicked the mule and proceeded down the street.

As the boy left, four men wearing blue shirts and red leather leggings rode past going the other way. They all carried pistols in hip holsters, and one had a rifle slung across his back. They were unshaven and ugly, and they laughed and roared as they rode up Massachusetts Street. They would no doubt cross the river and make trouble for someone north of town tonight. Sam didn’t recognize any of them, but that didn’t matter. They were Kansas Red Legs, meaner and more murderous than even Jennison’s Jayhawkers had been; and if they themselves hadn’t killed Orion, they were acquainted with the men who had.

“Whoop it up, boys,” Sam muttered as they rode away. “Whoop it up while you can.”

He came away from the window and saw that Taylor was awake. Taylor had gotten up in the afternoon to meet with Noland, but then had gone back to bed.

“What’s all the noise?” Taylor asked.

“Newspapers,” Sam said. “I’ll get one.”

Taylor sneered. “Why? It’s all abolitionist lies anyway.”

But when Sam brought a copy of the Journal back upstairs and began reading, he found news. Horrifying, sickening news.

“Sons of bitches,” he whispered.

“What is it?” Taylor asked. He was at the mirror, shaving, preparing for another night out in Lawrence’s less-respectable quarter.

“A building in Kansas City collapsed yesterday,” Sam said.

“Well, good.”

Sam shook his head. “No, Fletch. It was the building on Grand Avenue where the Bluebellies were holding the women they suspected of aiding bushwhackers. The paper says four women were killed, and several others hurt.”

Taylor stopped shaving. “That’s where they were keeping Bloody Bill Anderson’s sisters,” he said. “Cole Younger and Johnny McCorkle had kin there too. Does the paper give names?”

“No. But of course it suggests that the collapse might have been caused by a charge set by guerrillas ‘in a disastrous attempt to remove the ladies from Federal protection.’ ”

Taylor’s upper lip curled back. “As if Southern men would endanger their women!” He shook his razor at the newspaper. “I’ll tell you what, though. I was worrying that the Colonel might have trouble riling up some of the boys for this raid, especially since Noland has found out that Jim Lane’s out of town. But this news will rile them like nobody’s business. And if Bill Anderson’s sisters have been hurt, you can bet that he and his boys will shit blue fire. God help any Unionists who cross their path.” He dipped his razor in the bowl and turned back to the mirror. His eyes were bright. “Or mine, for that matter.”

When Taylor had finished shaving, he asked if Sam would like to go out and have a time. Sam declined, and Taylor left without him.

Then Sam read the rest of the newspaper, most of which he found to be worthless. But he admired the typesetting. There were few mistakes, and most of the lines were evenly spaced and straight. He wondered how many of them the boy had set.

He put the newspaper aside and wrote in his journal until the evening light failed. Then he undressed and got into bed, but lay awake for so long that he almost decided to join Taylor after all. But he had no enthusiasm for the idea. Spy-work wasn’t physically strenuous, but it took a lot out of him mentally.

When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed that he was a printer’s devil for Orion again. This time, though, their newspaper was not the Hannibal Journal, but the Lawrence Journal.

He was setting type about a fire in which over a hundred and fifty people had been killed, when a man burst into the pressroom. The man was jug-eared, greasy-haired, narrow-faced, and beardless. His thick lips parted to reveal crooked, stained teeth. Sam had never seen him before.

The jug-eared man pulled a revolver from his belt and pointed it at Orion.

“Henry!” Orion shouted. “Run!”

Sam, his ink-smeared hands hanging useless at his sides, said, “But I’m Sam.”

The jug-eared man shot Orion, who shriveled like a dying vine.

Then the stranger pointed his revolver at Sam.

Sam tried to turn and run, but his feet were stuck as if in thick mud.

The revolver fired with a sound like a cannon going off in a church, and the jug-eared man laughed.

Then Sam was floating near the ceiling, looking down at two bleeding bodies. Orion’s face had become that of Josiah Trask, one of the editors of the Lawrence Journal. And Sam’s face had become that of the boy, Henry, to whom he had given a cigar. The cigar was still in Henry’s mouth.

Sam awoke crouched against the wall. He was dripping with sweat.

Night had fallen, and Lawrence was quiet. Taylor had not yet returned to the room. Sam crept away from the wall and sat on the edge of the bed, shivering.

“Henry,” he whispered. “God damn.”

At noon on Wednesday, August 19, Sam and Taylor were sitting on a log in southern Jackson County near the village of Lone Jack, in the midst of their fellow bushwhackers. They and Noland had returned to the Blue Springs camp two days before, and Colonel Quantrill had received their report with satisfaction. Then, on Tuesday morning, Quantrill had ordered his guerrillas to move out without telling them their objective. In order to fool any Federal scouts or pickets that might spot them, the Colonel had marched the bushwhackers eastward for several miles before cutting back to the southwest. En route, the band had been joined by Bill Anderson with forty men and Andy Blunt with over a hundred, almost doubling the size of Quantrill’s force.

The men all knew something big was at hand. And now, finally, the Colonel was going to tell them what. Sam thought it was about time.

Quantrill, flanked by George Todd and Bill Anderson, sat before the bushwhackers astride his one-eyed mare, Black Bess, and gave a screeching yell. Over three hundred voices responded, and a thrill ran up Sam’s spine. The sound was both the most magnificent and most terrifying thing he had ever heard. If he were the enemy and heard that sound, he would be halfway to Colorado before the echo came back from the nearest hill.

The Colonel nodded in satisfaction. He was wearing a slouch hat with one side of the brim pinned up by a silver star, a loose gray guerrilla shirt with blue and silver embroidery, and gray trousers tucked into his cavalry boots. His belt bristled with four Colt pistols, and two more hung from holsters on either side of his saddle.

“Well, boys,” Quantrill shouted, “I hope you ain’t tired of riding just yet!”

He was answered by a loud, ragged chorus of “Hell, no!”

Quantrill laughed. “That’s good,” he cried, “because come nightfall, we’re heading for Kansas Territory to see if we can pull its most rotten tooth: Lawrence!”

A moment of silence followed the announcement, and for that moment Sam wondered if the men had decided that the Colonel was out of his mind. But then the bushwhackers exploded into another shrieking cheer, and at least a hundred of them rose to their feet and fired pistols into the air.

Taylor clapped Sam on the shoulder. “Are these the best damn boys in Missouri, or ain’t they!” he yelled.

“They’re sure the loudest,” Sam said.

Quantrill raised a hand, and the cheers subsided. “Save your ammunition,” the Colonel shouted. “You’ve worked hard to make it or steal it, so don’t waste it shooting at God. There are plenty of better targets where we’re going!”

Another cheer rose up at that, but then Quantrill’s expression changed from one of glee to one of cold, deadly intent. The bushwhackers fell silent.

“Boys,” Quantrill said, no longer shouting, “there’s more danger ahead than any of us have faced before. There could be Federals both behind and in front of us, coming and going. Now, we sent some men to spy on Lawrence, and they say the town’s ripe to be taken—but there might be pickets on the way there. So we could have General Ewing’s Bluebellies down on us from Kansas City, and some from Leavenworth as well. I doubt that we’ll all make it back to Missouri alive.” He straightened in his saddle, and it seemed to Sam that his metallic gaze fell on each bushwhacker in turn. “So if there’s any man who doesn’t want to go into the Territory with the rest of us, now’s your chance to head for home. After we leave here tonight, there will be no turning back. Not for anyone.”

Beside Quantrill, Bill Anderson drew a pistol. Anderson’s hair was even wilder than it had been when Sam had seen him in Quantrill’s tent the week before, and his eyes were so fierce that they didn’t look human. “Anyone who does turn back after we’ve started,” Anderson cried, “will wish to God he’d been taken by the Yankees before I’m through with him!”

Taylor leaned close to Sam and whispered, “I think Bloody Bill’s heard about the building in Kansas City.”

Sam thought so too. In the face of Bill Anderson he saw a hatred that had become so pure that if Anderson ever ran out of enemies against whom to direct his rage, he would have to invent more.

“But although we’ll be going through hardships,” Quantrill continued, “the result will be worth it. Lawrence is the hotbed of abolitionism in Kansas, and most of the property stolen from Missouri can be found there, ready and waiting to be taken back by Missourians. Even if Jim Lane ain’t home, his house and his plunder are. We can work more justice in Lawrence than anywhere else in five hundred miles! So who’s going with me?”

The shrill cheer rose up a fourth time, and all of the men not already standing came to their feet. Despite Quantrill’s warning to save ammunition, more shots were fired into the air.

Quantrill and his captains wheeled their horses and rode to their tent, and Sam left Taylor and went to the tree where he had tied Bixby. There, after avoiding Bixby’s attempts to bite him, he opened one of his saddlebags, took out his revolver, and replaced its caps.

When he looked up again, he saw John Noland leaning against the tree, regarding him with casual disdain.

“You ain’t gonna shoot something, are you, Mister Clemens?” Noland asked.

“I’ll do my best if it becomes necessary,” Sam said.

Noland gave a sardonic grunt. “ ‘If it becomes necessary,’ ” he repeated. “Why do you think we’re goin’ where we’re goin’ ?”

“I should think that would be obvious,” Sam said. “To retrieve that which belongs to Missouri, and to punish the jayhawkers and Red Legs who stole it.”

“You’ll know a jayhawker on sight, will you?” Noland asked.

“I’ll know the Red Legs on sight, I’ll tell you that.”

Noland pushed away from the tree. “I reckon you will, if they sleep in their pants.” He sauntered past Sam and tipped his hat. “Hooray for you, Mister Clemens. Hooray for us all.”

“You don’t sound too all-fired excited, Noland,” Sam said.

Noland looked back with a grim smile. “You want to see me excited, Mister Clemens, you watch me get some of that free-soil money into my pocket. You watch me then.” He tipped his hat again and walked away.

Sam watched him go. How, he wondered, could two men as different as Bill Anderson and John Noland be riding in the same guerrilla band on the same raid?

Then he looked down at the gun in his hand and remembered that he was riding with both of them.

Bixby nipped his arm. Sam jumped and cursed, then replaced his revolver in the saddlebag and gave Bixby a lump of sugar. The horse would soon need all the energy it could get.

At dusk, the Colonel had the bushwhackers mount up and proceed toward the southwest. Only thirteen men had left the raiders after Quantrill’s announcement of the target, and only two of those had been members of Quantrill’s own band. Sam marveled. Here were more than three hundred men going to what might be their deaths, just because one man had asked them to do so. True, each man had his own reasons for becoming a bushwhacker in the first place, but none of them would have dreamed of attempting a raid so far into Kansas if Quantrill had not offered to lead them in it.

In the middle of the night, the guerrillas happened upon a force of over a hundred Confederate recruits under the command of a Colonel John Holt. Holt and Quantrill conferred for an hour while the bushwhackers rested their horses, and when the guerrillas resumed their advance, Holt and his recruits joined them.

At daybreak on Thursday, August 20, Quantrill’s raiders made camp beside the Grand River. They were only four miles from the border now, and this would be their final rest before the drive toward Lawrence. Late in the morning, fifty more men from Cass and Bates counties rode into the camp and offered their services. Quantrill accepted, and by Sam’s count, the invasion force now consisted of almost five hundred men, each one mounted on a strong horse and armed with at least one pistol and as much ammunition as he could carry. A few of the men also had rifles, and many carried bundles of pitch-dipped torches.

If Federal troops did attack them, Sam thought, the Bluebellies would get one hell of a fight for their trouble. They might also become confused about who was friend and who was foe, because almost two hundred of the bushwhackers were wearing parts of blue Union uniforms.

At mid-afternoon, Captain Todd rode among the dozing men and horses, shouting, “Saddle up, boys! Lawrence ain’t gonna plunder itself, now, is it?”

The men responded with a ragged cheer. Sam got up, rolled his blanket, and then carried it and his saddle to the dead tree where Taylor’s horse and Bixby were tied. He had spread his blanket in a shady spot and had tried to sleep, but had only managed to doze a little. Taylor, lying a few yards away, had started snoring at noon and hadn’t stopped until Todd had ridden past.

“How you could sleep with what we’ve got ahead of us, I can’t imagine,” Sam said as Taylor came up to saddle his horse.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” Taylor said. “I was thinking over strategy.”

“With help from the hive of bumblebees you swallowed, no doubt.”

Taylor grinned. “We’re gonna be fine, Sam,” he said. “You know they ain’t expecting us. So there’s no need for a man to be afraid.”

“No, I suppose not,” Sam said. “Not unless a man has a brain.”

Taylor frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sam took his Colt from his saddlebag and stuck it into his belt. “Nothing, Fletch. I just want to get there, get it done, and get back, is all.”

“You and me and everybody else,” Taylor said.

As Sam and Taylor mounted their horses, a cluster of eleven men rode past, yipping and laughing. They seemed eager to be at the head of the bushwhacker force as it entered Kansas.

The man leading the cluster was jug-eared, greasy-haired, narrow-faced, and beardless.

Sam’s heart turned to ice. Slowly, he raised his arm and pointed at the cluster of men. “Who are they?” he asked. His throat was tight and dry.

“Some of Anderson’s boys,” Taylor said. “Full of piss and vinegar, ain’t they?”

“Do you know the one in front?” Sam asked.

“Sure do,” Taylor said. “I’ve even ridden with him a time or two. Name’s Frank James. You can count on him in a fight, that’s for sure.” Taylor clicked his tongue, and his horse started after the cluster of Anderson’s men.

Bixby followed Taylor’s horse while Sam stared ahead at the man from his dream. The man who had entered the Journal pressroom, killed an unarmed man and boy, and then laughed.

At six o’clock, Quantrill’s raiders crossed the border into Kansas.

Ahead, the Territory grew dark.

By eleven o’clock, when the raiders passed the town of Gardner, the moonless night was as black as Quantrill’s horse. Gullies, creeks, and fences became obstacles, and some of the bushwhackers wanted to light torches to help them find their way. But Quantrill would not allow that. They were still over twenty miles from Lawrence, in open country, and could not afford to be spotted from a distance. Besides, the torches were supposed to be reserved for use in Lawrence itself.

Soon after midnight, Quantrill halted the bushwhackers near a farmhouse, and the word was passed back along the column for the men to keep quiet.

“What are we stopping here for?” Sam whispered. He and Taylor were riding near the middle of the column, and Sam couldn’t see what was happening up front.

“Shush yourself,” Taylor hissed.

A minute later, there was a yell from the farmhouse, and then laughter from some of the raiders.

The tall form of Captain Bill Gregg came riding back along the column. “All right, boys, we can travel on,” he said. “We got ourselves a friendly Kansan to guide us!” He wheeled his horse and returned to the head of the column.

“Wonder what he means by that,” Sam said.

Taylor chuckled. “What do you think?”

The bushwhackers started moving again and made rapid progress for a few miles, zigzagging around obstacles. Then Quantrill called another halt. The men began muttering, but fell silent as a pistol was fired.

Bixby jerked his head and shied away from the column. Sam had to fight to bring the horse back into place. “What in blazes is the matter with you?” he asked. Bixby had never been spooked by gunfire before. In fact, he had hardly noticed it. “It was just somebody’s pistol going off by mistake!”

At that moment, Captain Gregg came riding by again. “No mistake about it,” he said, pausing beside Sam and Taylor. “Our friendly Kansan claimed he didn’t know which side of yonder hill we should go around. So the Colonel dispatched him to a hill of his own, and we’re to wait until we have another friendly Kansan to guide us. There’s a house ahead, and some of Anderson’s boys are going to see who’s home. We’ll be on our way again before long.” Gregg spurred his horse and continued back along the column to spread the word.

“Well, good for the Colonel,” Taylor said. “Now that Kansan is as friendly to us as a Kansan can be.”

Sam was stunned. When the raiders began moving again, they passed by the corpse. Bixby shied away from it and collided with Taylor’s mount.

“Rein your goddamn horse, Sam!” Taylor snarled.

The dead man was wearing canvas trousers and was shirtless and barefoot. Even in the dark, Sam could see that his head was nothing but a mass of pulp.

It made no sense. This man wasn’t a Red Leg or a Bluebelly. He might not even be an abolitionist. He was only a farmer. Colonel Quantrill had shot a farmer. Just because the man couldn’t find his way in the dark.

Just because he was a Kansan.

Sam began to wonder if the preposterous stories he had read in abolitionist newspapers—the stories about Quantrill’s raids on Aubry, Olathe, and Shawneetown—might have had some truth in them after all.

The column halted again after only a mile, and there was another gunshot. Then another farmhouse was raided, and the bushwhackers continued on their way. But soon they stopped once more, and a third shot was fired.

The process was repeated again and again. Each time, Sam and Bixby passed by a fresh corpse.

There were ten in all.

Sam felt dizzy and sick. This was supposed to be a raid to punish the Red Legs, destroy the newspaper, burn out Jim Lane, and recover stolen property. Some Kansans were to be killed, yes; but they were supposed to be Red Legs and Bluebellies, not unarmed farmers taken from their wives and children in the night.

At the tenth corpse, Taylor maneuvered his horse past Sam and Bixby. “ ‘Scuse me, Clemens,” Taylor said. “My horse is starting to make water.”

Taylor stopped the horse over the dead man and let it piss on the body. The bushwhackers who were close enough to see it laughed, and Sam tried to laugh as well. He didn’t want them to see his horror. He was afraid of them all now. Even Taylor. Especially Taylor.

“Have your horses drink deep at the next crick, boys!” Taylor chortled. “There’s plenty of men in Lawrence who need a bath as bad as this one!”

“Amen to that!” someone cried.

The shout was echoed up and down the line as Taylor rejoined the column next to Sam.

Captain Gregg came riding back once more. “I admire your sentiments, boys,” he said, “but I suggest you save the noise until we reach our destination. Then you can holler all you want, and see if you can squeeze a few hollers from the so-called men of Lawrence as well!”

The bushwhackers laughed again, but then lowered their voices to whispers. To Sam, it sounded like the hissing of five hundred snakes.

He saw now that what was going to happen in Lawrence would resemble what he had imagined it would be only in the way that a volcano resembled a firefly. He had let his guilt over Orion’s death and his hatred of the Red Legs blind him to what the men he was riding with had become. He wanted to turn Bixby out of the column and ride hard and fast back to Missouri, not stopping until he reached Hannibal.

But he knew that he couldn’t. Anderson had told them all how deserters would be dealt with. Sam and Bixby wouldn’t make it more than a hundred yards before a dozen men were after them. And there was no doubt of what would happen to Sam when they caught him.

Besides, his and Taylor’s report from their trip to Lawrence was part of what had convinced Quantrill that the raid was possible. That made Sam more responsible for what was about to happen than almost anyone else. To run away now would make him not only a coward, but a hypocrite.

Another farmhouse was raided at about three in the morning, and this time the entire column broke up and gathered around to watch. By the time Sam was close enough to see what was happening, the farmer was on his knees in his yard. Captain Todd was standing before him holding a pistol to his forehead and telling him the names of some of the men waiting for him in hell. Quantrill, on Black Bess, came up beside Todd. “We’re too close to Lawrence to fire a gun now, George,” he said. Sam could just make out Todd’s expression. It was one of fury.

“Goddamn it, Bill,” Todd said. “This man’s name is Joe Stone. He’s a stinking Missouri Unionist who ran off to Kansas to escape justice, and I’m going to kill him no matter what you say.”

Stone, wearing only a nightshirt, was shuddering. Sam looked away from him and saw a woman crying in the doorway of the house. A child clung to the woman’s knees, wailing. An oil lamp was burning inside, and its weak light framed the woman and child so that they seemed to be suspended inside a pale flame.

Quantrill stroked his stubbled face with a thumb and forefinger. “Well, George, I agree that traitors must die. But we’re within six miles of Lawrence now, and a shot might warn the town.”

Todd seemed about to retort, but then took his pistol away from Stone’s head and replaced it in his belt. “All right,” he said. “We’ll keep it quiet.” He strode to his horse and pulled his Sharps carbine from its scabbard. “Sam!” he called. “Get over here!”

Taylor nudged Sam in the ribs. “Go on,” he said.

Sam, almost rigid with terror, began to dismount.

“I mean Sam Clifton,” Todd said. “Where is he?”

Sam returned to his saddle as Clifton, a stranger who had joined the guerrillas while the spies had been in Lawrence, dismounted and went to Todd.

Todd handed the rifle to Clifton. “Some of the boys tell me you’ve been asking a lot of questions, Mister Clifton,” he said. “So let’s see if you know what you’re here for.” He pointed at Stone. “Beat that traitor down to hell.”

Clifton didn’t hesitate. He took three quick steps and smashed the rifle butt into Stone’s face. Stone fell over in the dirt, and his wife and child screamed. Then Clifton pounded Stone’s skull.

Sam wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t move. This was the most horrible thing he had ever seen, more horrible even than his brother Henry lying in his coffin or his brother Orion lying in the road. He watched it all. He couldn’t stop himself.

Only when it was over, when Clifton had stopped pounding and Stone was nothing but a carcass, was Sam able to look away. Beside him, Taylor was grinning. Some of the others were grinning too. But there were also a few men who looked so sick that Sam thought they might fall from their horses.

Then he looked at Colonel Quantrill. Quantrill’s eyes were unblinking, reflecting the weak light from the house. His lips were pulled back in a tight smile.

Todd took his rifle back from Clifton and replaced it in its scabbard without wiping it clean. Then he looked up at Quantrill with a defiant sneer.

“That suit you, Colonel?” he asked.

Quantrill nodded. “That suits me fine, Captain,” he said. Then he faced the men. “Remember this, boys,” he cried, “and serve the men of Lawrence the same! Kill! Kill, and you’ll make no mistake! Now push on, or it’ll be daylight before we get there!”

“You heard the man,” Taylor said to Sam.

“That I did,” Sam said. His voice was hoarse. He thought it might stay hoarse forever.

The raiders pushed on, leaving Mrs. Stone and her child to weep over the scrap of flesh in their yard.

As the column reformed, Sam found himself near its head, riding not far behind Gregg, Todd, Anderson, and Quantrill himself. It was as if God wanted to be sure that Sam had another good view when the next man died.

The eastern sky was turning from black to purplish-gray as Quantrill’s raiders reached the crest of the hill southeast of Lawrence. Colonel Quantrill raised his right hand, and the column halted.

Below them, less than two miles ahead, Lawrence lay as silent as death.

Fletch Taylor cackled. “Look at ’em! Damn Yankees are curled up with their thumbs in their mouths!”

Sam nodded, sick at heart.

WUANTRILL BROUGHT out a spyglass and trained it on the sleeping town. “It looks ripe,” he said. “But I can’t see the river; it’s still too dark.” He lowered the glass and turned to Captain Gregg. “Bill, take five men and reconnoiter. The rest of us will wait fifteen minutes and then follow. If you spot trouble, run back and warn us.”

Gregg gave Quantrill a salute, then pointed at each of the five men closest to him. “James, Younger, McCorkle, Taylor, and—” He was looking right at Sam.

Sam couldn’t speak. His tongue was as cold and heavy as clay. He stared at Frank James.

“Clemens,” Taylor said.

“Right,” Gregg said. “Clemens. Come on, boys.” He kicked his horse and started down the hillside.

“Let’s get to it, Sam,” Taylor said. He reached over and swatted Bixby on the rump, and Bixby lurched forward.

Despite the steep slope and the trees that dotted it, Gregg set a rapid pace. All Sam could do was hang on to Bixby’s reins and let the horse find its own way. He wished that Bixby would stumble and that he would be thrown and break an arm or leg. But Bixby was too agile for that. Sam would be in on the Lawrence raid from beginning to end.

Halfway down the hill, Gregg stopped his horse, and James, Younger, McCorkle, and Taylor did the same. Bixby stopped on his own, almost throwing Sam against the pommel of his saddle.

“What’s wrong, Captain?” Taylor asked.

Gregg put a finger to his lips and then extended that finger to point.

A few hundred feet farther down the hillside, a mule carrying a lone figure in a white shirt was making its way up through the trees. The mule and rider were just visible in the predawn light.

“What’s someone doing out here this early?” Taylor whispered.

“Doesn’t matter,” Gregg whispered back. “If he sees us and we let him escape, we’re as good as dead.”

“But, but a shot would wake up the town, Captain,” Sam stammered.

Gregg gave him a glance. “Then we won’t fire a shot that can be heard in the town.” He turned toward Frank James. “Go kill him, Frank. Use your knife, or put your pistol in his belly to muffle the noise. Or knock his brains out. I don’t care, so long as you keep it quiet.”

James drew his pistol, cocked it, and started his horse down the hill.

The figure on the mule came around a tree. He was alone and unarmed. Sam could see his face now. He was the printer’s devil from the Lawrence Journal.

Henry.

Frank James plunged downward, his right arm outstretched, pointing the finger of Death at an innocent.

And in that instant, Sam saw everything that was to come, and the truth of everything that had been. He saw it all as clearly as any of his dreams:

The boy would be lying on his back on the ground. His white shirt would be soaked with blood. Sam would be down on his knees beside him, stroking his forehead, begging his forgiveness. He would want to give anything to undo what had been done. But it would be too late.

Henry would mumble about his family, about the loved ones who would never see him again. And then he would look up at Sam with reproachful eyes, and die.

Just as it had happened before.

Not when Sam’s brother Henry had died. Henry had given him no reproachful look, and all he had said was “Thank you, Sam.”

Not when Orion had died, either. Orion had said, “Get out of here, Sam,” and there had been no reproach in the words. Only concern. Only love.

Frank James plunged downward, his right arm outstretched, pointing the finger of Death at an innocent.

An innocent like the one Sam had killed.

It had been more than just a dream.

He had told himself that he wasn’t the only one of the Marion Rangers who had fired. He never hit anything he aimed at anyway. But in his heart he had known that wasn’t true this time. He had known that he was guilty of murder, and of the grief that an innocent, unarmed man’s family had suffered because of it.

All of his guilt, all of his need to make amends—

It wasn’t because of his dead brothers at all.

It was because he had killed a man who had done nothing to him.

Sam had tried to escape that truth by fleeing West with Orion. But then, when Orion had been murdered, he had tried instead to bury his guilt by embracing it and by telling himself that the war made killing honorable if it was done in a just cause. And vengeance, he had told himself, was such a cause.

But the family of the man he had killed might well have thought the same thing.

Frank James plunged downward, his right arm outstretched, pointing the finger of Death at an innocent.

And Sam couldn’t stand it anymore.

He yelled like a madman, and then Bixby was charging down the hill, flashing past the trees with a speed no other horse in Quantrill’s band could equal. When Bixby came alongside James’s horse, Sam jerked the reins. Bixby slammed into James’s horse and forced it into a tree. James was knocked from his saddle, and his pistol fired.

Henry’s mule collapsed, and Henry tumbled to the ground.

Sam reined Bixby to a halt before the dying mule, leaped down, and dropped to his knees beside the boy.

Henry looked up at him with an expression of contempt. “Are you crazy or something?” he asked.

Sam grabbed him and hugged him.

Henry struggled to get away. “Mister Clemens? What in the world are you doing?”

Sam looked up the slope and saw Frank James picking himself up. James’s horse was standing nearby, shaking its head and whinnying.

Gregg, Taylor, McCorkle, and Younger were riding down with their pistols drawn.

Sam jumped up and swung Henry into Bixby’s saddle. “Lean down close to me,” he said.

“What for?” Henry asked. The boy looked dazed now. He was staring down at the dead mule.

“Just do it, and listen to what I say,” Sam said. “I have to tell you something without those men hearing it.”

Henry leaned down.

“Ride back to town as fast as you can,” Sam said. “When you’re close enough for people to hear, yell that Charley Hart’s come back, that his new name is Billy Quantrill, and that he has five hundred men with him. And if you can’t remember all that, just yell ‘Quantrill!’ Yell ‘Quantrill!’ over and over until you reach the Eldridge House, and then go inside and yell ‘Quantrill!’ at everyone there. If they don’t believe you, just point at this horse and ask where the hell they think you got it. Now sit up!”

Henry sat up, and Sam slapped Bixby on the rump. Bixby turned back and tried to bite Sam’s shoulder.

“Not now, you fleabag!” Sam yelled. He raised his hand to swat the horse again, but Bixby snorted and leaped over the dead mule before Sam could touch him. The roan charged down the hillside as fast as before, with Henry hanging on tight.

Sam took a deep breath and turned as he exhaled. Frank James was walking toward him with murder in his eyes, and the four men riding up behind James didn’t look any happier. Sam put his hand on the Colt in his belt, but didn’t think he could draw it. He feared that he was going to piss his pants. But he had to give Henry a good head start. And if that meant getting himself killed—well, that was just what it meant. Better him than a boy whose only crime was setting type for an abolitionist newspaper.

“You traitorous bastard,” James said, raising his revolver to point at Sam’s face.

Sam swallowed and found his voice. “Your barrel’s full of dirt,” he said.

James looked at his gun and saw that it was true.

Captain Gregg cocked his own pistol. “Mine, however, is clean,” he said.

Sam raised his hands. “Don’t shoot, Captain,” he said. He was going to have to tell a whopper, and fast. “I apologize to Mister James, but I had to keep him from killing my messenger, didn’t I? I would’ve said something sooner, but I didn’t see who the boy was until James was already after him.”

“Messenger?” Gregg said.

Sam looked up at Taylor, whose expression was one of mingled anger and disbelief. “Why don’t you say something, Fletch? Didn’t you recognize the boy?”

Taylor blinked. “What are you yapping about?”

Sam lowered his hands, put them on his hips, and tried to look disgusted. “Damn it, Fletch, that Missouri boy I met in Lawrence. The one whose father was killed by jayhawkers, and who was kidnapped to Kansas. I pointed him out to you Saturday morning, but I guess you’d gotten too drunk the night before to retain the information.”

Gregg looked at Taylor. “You were drinking whiskey while you were supposed to be scouting the town, Corporal?”

Taylor became indignant. “Hell, no!”

“Then why don’t you remember me pointing that boy out to you?” Sam asked.

“Well, I do,” Taylor said uncertainly.

Sam knew he couldn’t let up. “So why didn’t you tell Captain Gregg that the boy promised to come here and warn us if any more Federals moved into Lawrence?”

Taylor’s eyes looked panicky. “I didn’t recognize the boy. It’s dark.”

“What’s this about more Bluebellies in Lawrence?” Gregg asked.

“That’s what the boy told me,” Sam said. “Six hundred troops, four hundred of them cavalry, came down from Leavenworth on Tuesday. They’re all camped on the south side of the river, too, he says.”

Frank James had his pistol barrel clean now, and he pointed the gun at Sam again. “So why’d you send him away?”

Sam was so deep into his story now that he almost forgot his fear. “Because he said the Bluebellies have started sending fifty cavalrymen out between five and six every morning to scout the plain between here and Mount Oread. I told him to go keep watch and to come back when he saw them.”

Cole Younger, stern-faced and narrow-lipped, gestured at Sam with his revolver. “Why would you tell someone in Lawrence who you were and why you were there?”

“I already said why,” Sam snapped. “Because he’s a Missouri boy, and he hates the Yankees as much as you or me. Maybe more, because he didn’t even have a chance to grow up before they took everything he had. And I didn’t just walk up and take him into my confidence for no reason. Two Red Legs were dunking him in a horse trough until he was half drowned. When they left, I asked him why they’d done it, and he said it was because he’d called them murdering Yankee cowards. My opinion was that we could use a friend like that in Lawrence, and Fletch agreed.”

John McCorkle, a round-faced man in a flat-brimmed hat, peered at Sam through narrowed eyelids. “So how’d the boy know where we’d be, and when?”

“He knew the where because we told him,” Sam said. “The Colonel used to live in these parts, and he picked this hill for our overlook when he planned the raid. Ain’t that so, Fletch?”

Taylor nodded.

“As for the when of it,” Sam continued, “well, Fletch and I knew we’d be here before sunup either yesterday or today, so we told the boy to come out both days if there was anything we needed to hear about.”

Younger looked at Taylor. “That true, Fletch? Or were you so drunk you don’t remember?”

Taylor glared at him. “It’s true, Cole. I just didn’t tell you, is all. There’s five hundred men on this raid, and I can’t tell every one of you everything, can I?”

Younger started to retort, but he was interrupted by the sound of hundreds of hoofbeats from the slope above. Quantrill had heard James’s gunshot and was bringing down the rest of his men.

Gregg replaced his pistol in its holster. “All right, then,” he said, sounding weary. “Let’s tell the Colonel what the boy said.” He looked at Taylor. “You do it, Fletch. He knows you better than he does Clemens.”

Taylor nodded, then shot Sam a look that could have melted steel.

There was a promise in that look, but Sam didn’t care. Gregg had believed his story, and for now, at least, he was still alive.

And so was Henry.

Taylor told Colonel Quantrill that a Missouri boy had come to warn the raiders about six hundred new Bluebellies in Lawrence, all camped south of the river, and that a scouting party of fifty of the Federals was likely to spot the bushwhackers before they could enter the town. Quantrill listened without saying a word. He stared straight ahead, toward Lawrence, until Taylor was finished. Then he looked down at Sam, who was still standing before the dead mule.

Quantrill’s eyes were like chips of ice, but Sam didn’t look away. He was sure that if he flinched, the Colonel would see him for the lying traitor that he was.

A long moment later, Quantrill turned to Captain Todd. “What do you think, George?” he asked.

Todd looked as if he had eaten a bad persimmon. “You didn’t see six hundred Federals through the glass, did you?”

“No,” Quantrill said, “but I couldn’t see the river. If they were camped close by its banks, they would have been invisible.”

“Then let’s go back up and take another look,” Todd said.

Quantrill shook his head. “By the time the sun has risen enough for us to see the river, the people of Lawrence will have risen too. We must either press on now, or give it up.”

“But if there are that many more troops down there,” Gregg said, “we won’t have a chance. I say we fall back to the border, send more spies to take another look at the town, and come back when we can be sure of victory.”

Quantrill looked at the ground and spat. “Damn it all,” he said, “but you’re right. Even if there aren’t that many troops, the town might’ve heard the pistol shot.”

The men behind Quantrill murmured. Many looked angry or disappointed, but almost as many looked relieved.

Sam tried hard to look disappointed, but he wanted to shout for joy.

Then Bill Anderson shrieked, drew one of his pistols, and kicked his horse until it was nose to nose with Black Bess.

“We’ve come too far!” he screamed, pointing his pistol at the Colonel. “We’ve come too far and our people have suffered too much! This raid was your idea, and you talked me into committing my own men to the task! God damn you, Quantrill, you’re going to see it through!”

Quantrill gave Anderson a cold stare. “We have received new intelligence,” he said. “The situation has changed.”

Anderson shook his head, his long hair flying wild under his hat. “Nothing has changed! Nothing! The Yankees have killed one of my sisters and crippled another, and I won’t turn back until I’ve killed two hundred of them as payment! And if you try to desert me before that’s done, the two-hundred-and-first man I kill will be named Billy Quantrill!”

Quantrill turned to Todd. “George, place Captain Anderson under arrest.”

Todd drew his pistol. “I don’t think I will,” he said, moving his horse to stand beside Anderson’s. “We’ve come to do a thing, so let’s do it.”

The murmurs among the men grew louder.

“What’s wrong with you?” Gregg shouted at Todd and Anderson. “Colonel Quantrill is your commanding officer!”

Todd sneered. “No more of that ‘Colonel’ bullshit. Jefferson Davis wouldn’t give this coward the time of day, much less a commission.”

At that, Frank James, John McCorkle, and Cole Younger moved to stand with Anderson and Todd. Bill Gregg, Andy Blunt, and John Holt moved to stand with Quantrill. The murmurs among the bushwhackers became shouts and curses. A few men broke away and rode back up the hill.

Sam decided that he didn’t care to see the outcome. He began edging backward, but came up against the dead mule.

Quantrill looked as calm as an undertaker. “All right, boys,” he said. “I guess you’re right. We’ve come this far, and we’ve whipped Yankee soldiers before.” He pointed toward Lawrence. “Let’s push on!”

“That’s more like it,” Anderson said, and he and his comrades turned their horses toward Lawrence.

As soon as they had turned, Quantrill pulled two of his pistols from his belt, cocked them, and shot Bill Anderson in the back. Anderson slumped, and his horse reared.

The hillside erupted into an inferno of muzzle flashes, explosions, and screams.

Sam dove over the mule and huddled against its back until he heard pistol balls thudding into its belly. Then he rolled away and scrambled down the hill on his hands and knees. When there were plenty of trees between him and the fighting, he got to his feet and ran. He fell several times before reaching the bottom of the hill, but didn’t let that slow him.

The trees gave way to prairie grass and scrub brush at the base of the hill, and Sam ran straight for Lawrence. He couldn’t see Henry and Bixby on the plain ahead, so he hoped they were already in town.

Thunder rumbled behind him, and he looked back just in time to see the neck of a horse and the heel of a boot. The boot struck him in the forehead and knocked him down. His hat went flying.

Sam lay on his back and stared up at the brightening sky. Then the silhouette of a horse’s head appeared above him, and hot breath blasted his face.

“Get up and take your pistol from your belt,” a voice said.

Sam turned over, rose to his knees, and looked up at the rider. It was Fletch Taylor. He had a Colt Navy revolver pointed at Sam’s nose.

“You going to kill me, Fletch?” Sam asked.

“Not on your knees,” Taylor said. “Stand up, take your pistol from your belt, and die the way a man should.”

Sam gave a low, bitter chuckle. He was amazed to discover that he wasn’t afraid.

“All men die alike, Fletch,” he said. “Reluctantly.”

Taylor kept his pistol pointed at Sam for another few seconds, then cursed and uncocked it. He looked toward the hill. “Listen to all the hell you’ve raised,” he said.

The sounds of gunshots and screams were wafting out over the plain like smoke.

Taylor looked back at Sam. “You saved my life,” he said, “so now I’m giving you yours. But if I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”

Sam nodded. “Thank you, Fletch.”

Taylor’s lips curled back from his teeth. “Go to hell,” he said. Then he spurred his horse and rode back toward the hill.

Sam watched Taylor go until he realized that the fighting on the hillside was spilling onto the plain. He stood, found his hat—the hat that Taylor had given him—and ran for Lawrence again.

When he reached Massachusetts Street, staggering, exhausted, he saw men in the windows of every building. Some wore blue uniforms, but most were civilians. Each man held either a revolver or a carbine. The sun was rising, and Lawrence was awake. One of the men came outside and pointed his rifle at Sam, but the boy named Henry appeared and stopped him. Then Henry grabbed Sam’s arm and pulled him into the Whitney House.

Fifteen minutes later, Sam was watching from the window of a second-floor room when a magnificent black horse came galloping up Massachusetts Street. The horse’s rider, wearing an embroidered gray shirt, gray pants, and black cavalry boots, had his arms tied behind his back and his feet tied to his stirrups. His head and shoulders had been daubed with pitch and set ablaze. He was screaming.

“It’s Quantrill!” someone cried.

A volley of shots exploded from both sides of the street, and the horse and rider fell over dead.

Within seconds, a hundred Missouri guerrillas led by George Todd charged up the street. Fourteen of them were cut down in a hail of lead balls, and the rest turned and fled, with soldiers and citizens pursuing. A company of Negro Federal recruits led the chase and killed three more bushwhackers at the southern edge of town.

When the gunfire and shouting had ceased, a cluster of townspeople gathered around the carcass of the black horse and the charred, bloody corpse of its rider. The crowd parted to let two men in black suits and hats approach the bodies. Sam recognized them as the preachers that he, Taylor, and Noland had encountered the week before.

The elder preacher held a Bible over Quantrill’s corpse. “Earth to earth,” he intoned.

The younger preacher raised his Bible as well. “Ashes to ashes,” he said.

In unison, they chanted, “And dust to dust.”

Then they lowered their Bibles, drew their revolvers, and shot Quantrill a few more times for good measure.

“Amen,” said the crowd.

Sam closed his curtains.

Senator Jim Lane had returned to Lawrence on Wednesday for a railroad meeting, and he sent for Sam at noon on Saturday, one day after the failed raid. Lane was thinner, younger, and had more hair than Sam had guessed from the caricatures, but his fine house on the western edge of town was all that Sam had supposed. It was packed with expensive furnishings, including two pianos in the parlor.

“How did you come to acquire two pianos, Senator?” Sam asked. He had not slept the night before and did not care if he sounded accusatory.

Lane smiled. “One was my mother’s,” he said. “The other belonged to a secessionist over in Jackson County who found that he no longer had a place to keep it.” The Senator picked up a pen and wrote a few lines on a piece of paper, then folded the paper and pushed it across the table. “Kansas is grateful to you, Mister Clemens, and regrets the mistake of two years past when members of the Red-Legged Guards mistook your brother for a slaveholder. Had they known of his appointment as Secretary of Nevada Territory, I’m sure the tragedy would not have occurred.”

“He told them,” Sam said. “They didn’t believe him.”

Lane shrugged. “What’s done is done, but justice will be served. General Ewing has ordered his troops to arrest all Red Legs they encounter. He believes that such men have been committing criminal acts in the name of liberty, and I must concur.” He tapped the piece of paper. “I’m told that Governor Nye of Nevada Territory is again in need of a Secretary. I cannot guarantee you the appointment, but this should smooth your way.” He leaned forward. “Frankly, Mr. Clemens, I think your decision to continue to Nevada is a good one. There are those in this town who believe that the burning man was not Quantrill at all, and that you are here not as a friend, but as Quantrill’s spy.”

Sam stared at the piece of paper. “A ticket on the overland stage from St. Joseph is a hundred and fifty dollars,” he said. “I have ten.”

Lane stood and left the parlor for a few minutes. When he returned, he handed Sam three fifty-dollar bank notes and a bottle of whiskey.

“This was distilled from Kansas corn,” the Senator said, tapping the bottle with a fingernail. “I thought you should have something by which to remember my state.”

Sam tucked the money into a coat pocket and stood, holding the whiskey bottle by its neck. My state, Lane had said. What’s done is done.

“Good day, Senator,” Sam said. He started to turn away.

“Don’t forget my letter of introduction,” Lane said.

Sam picked up the piece of paper, tucked it into his pocket with the money, and left the house.

Henry was standing outside holding Bixby’s reins, and twelve Bluebellies waited nearby. They had an extra horse with them.

“Mister Clemens,” one of the soldiers called. “Our orders are to escort you to St. Joseph. We’re to leave right away.” He didn’t sound happy about it. All of the Bluebellies in the escort were white, and Sam suspected that this was their punishment for failing to chase the bushwhackers with as much vigor as their Negro counterparts.

Sam nodded to the soldier, then looked down at Henry. “I suppose you want to keep the horse,” he said.

“Well, I don’t,” Henry said. “He’s mean, if you ask me. But my pa says he’ll either have Bixby as payment for his mule, or he’ll take it out of somebody’s hide. And since you’re running off, I reckon my hide will do him as well as any.”

“A hiding would probably do you a considerable amount of good,” Sam said, “but since I no longer have a use for the animal, you may keep him and the saddle as well. I’ll take the bags, however.” He removed the saddlebags from the horse and put the bottle of whiskey into one of them. A few lumps of brown sugar lay at the bottom of that bag, so he fed one to Bixby. Bixby chewed and swallowed, then tried to bite Sam’s hand. Sam gave the rest of the sugar to Henry and took his saddlebags to the soldiers’ extra horse.

“Goodbye, Mister Clemens,” Henry said, climbing onto Bixby. “I won’t forget you.”

Sam swung up onto his own mount. “Thank you, boy,” he said, “but I shall be doing my best to forget you, as well as every other aspect of this infected pustule of a city.”

Henry gave him a skeptical look. “Mister Clemens,” he said, “I think you’re a liar.”

“I won’t dispute that,” Sam said. “I only wish I could make it pay.”

The Bluebellies set off, and Sam’s mount went with them. Sam looked back to give Henry and Bixby a wave, but they were already heading in the other direction and didn’t see him.

On the way to the ferry, Sam and the soldiers passed by the Eldridge House, where eighteen bodies had been laid out on the sidewalk. They were already beginning to stink. A number of townspeople were still gathered here, and from what Sam could hear, they were curious about the dead black man, who had been one of the three raiders killed by the Negro recruits. Why on earth, they wondered, would a man of his race ride with Quantrill?

Sam started to say, “Because he was paid,” but the words froze in his throat.

The last four bodies on the sidewalk were those of George Todd, Cole Younger, Frank James, and Fletcher Taylor.

Sam looked away and rode on.

He spent Saturday night camped beside the road with the soldiers and Sunday night in a hotel in St. Joseph, and did not sleep either night. At daybreak on Monday, he carried his saddlebags to the overland stage depot, paid his money, and boarded the coach. Two other passengers and several sacks of mail soon joined him, and the coach set off westward at eight o’clock.

As the coach passed the spot where Orion had been killed, Sam took out the whiskey that Lane had given him and began drinking. He offered some to his fellow passengers, but they each took one swallow and then refused more, saying that it was the vilest stuff they’d ever tasted. Sam agreed, but drank almost half the bottle anyway.

At the next station stop, he climbed atop the coach with his saddlebags while the horses were being changed. When the coach started moving again, Sam drank more whiskey and stared at the fields of green and gold. Soon, his head warm with sun and alcohol, it occurred to him that the corn and grass shifting in the breeze looked like ocean swells after a storm. He was reminded of a holiday he had spent near New Orleans, looking out at the Gulf of Mexico after piloting a steamboat down the Mississippi. He wondered if he would love anything in Nevada half as much.

The thought of Nevada reminded him of the letter that Jim Lane had written for him, so he took it out and read it:

My dear Governor Nye:

You will recall that your intended Secretary of two years past, Mr. Orion Clemens, was unfortunately killed before he could assume his duties. This letter will introduce his younger brother Samuel, who has provided service to his Nation and is a loyal Republican. I trust you shall do your utmost to secure for him any employment for which he might be suited.

Yours most sincerely,
James Lane, Senator
The Great and Noble State of Kansas

Sam tore up the letter and let its pieces scatter in the wind. If Nevada held “any employment for which he might be suited,” he would secure it without any assistance from a self-righteous, thieving son of a bitch like Jim Lane.

Nor would he drink any more of Lane’s abominable whiskey. He leaned over the coach roof’s thin iron rail and emptied the bottle onto the road. Then he opened one of his saddlebags, took out his Colt, and stood. He held the whiskey bottle in his left hand and the pistol in his right.

The coach conductor glanced back at him. “What are you doing, sir?” he asked.

Sam spread his arms. “I am saying fare-thee-well to the bloody state of Kansas,” he cried, “and lighting out for the Territory!”

He looked out over the tall grass. It rippled in waves.

He missed the river.

He missed his brothers.

But killing men for the sake of a world that was gone wouldn’t bring it back. It was time to make a new one.

“Half-less twain!” he cried.

Both the conductor and driver stared back at him.

“Quarter-less twain!” Sam shouted.

Then he brought his left arm back and whipped it forward, throwing the bottle out over the grass. As it reached the apex of its flight, he brought up his right arm, cocked the Colt with his thumb, and squeezed the trigger.

The bottle exploded into brilliant shards.

The coach lurched, and Sam sat down on the roof with a thump.

“Goddamn it!” the conductor yelled. “You spook these horses again, and I’ll throw you off!”

Sam held the pistol by its barrel and offered it to the conductor. “Please accept this,” he said, “with my apologies.”

The conductor took it. “I’ll give it back when you’re sober.”

“No,” Sam said, “you won’t.”

Then he threw back his head and roared: “MAAARRRRK TWAIIINN!”

Two fathoms. Safe water.

He lay down with his hat over his face and fell asleep, and no dead men came to haunt his dreams.

For Sam Clemens, the war was over.

SUPPOSE THEY GAVE A PEACE . . .

Susan Shwartz

Twenty-five years after the war, and my damned sixth sense about the phone still wakes me up at 3:00 A.M. Just as well. All Margaret needs is for me to snap awake, shout, and jump out of bed, grabbing for my pants and my .45. I don’t have it anymore. She made me sell it as soon as the kids were old enough to poke into the big chest of drawers. I don’t interfere when she makes decisions like that. The way things are going to the dogs, though, I’d feel a whole lot better about her safety if I had the gun.

So I stuck my feet into my slippers—the trench foot still itches-and snuck downstairs. If Margaret woke up, she’d think I was raiding the icebox and go back to sleep. I like being up and alone in my house, kind of guard duty. I don’t do much. I straighten towels or put books back on the shelves-though with Steff gone, that’s not a problem anymore. I don’t like seeing the kids’ rooms so bare.

Barry’s models and football are all lined up, and Margaret dusts them. No problem telling the boys from the girls in our family. Barry’s room is red and navy, and Steff’s is all blue and purply, soft-like, with ruffles and a dressing table she designed herself. Now that she’s at school, we don’t trip on clothes all over the place. And I keep reminding myself we ought to yank out the Princess phone she got when she turned thirteen. Light on the dial’s burned out, anyway.

I wish she hadn’t taken down the crewelwork she did her freshman year. The flower baskets were a whole lot prettier than these “Suppose They Gave A War And Nobody Came” posters. But that’s better than the picture of that bearded Che-guy. I put my foot down about that thing, I can tell you. Not in my house, I said.

I’m proud of our house: two-floor brick Tudor with white walls and gold carpet and a big ticking grandfather’s clock in the hall. Classy taste, my wife has. Who’d have thought she’d look at someone like me?

Besides, dinner was pretty good. Some of that deli rye and that leftover steak..

As the light from the icebox slid across the wall phone, it went off, almost like it had been alerted. I grabbed it before it could ring twice.

“Yeah?” I snapped the way I used to in Germany, and my gut froze. My son Barry’s in Saigon. If anything goes wrong, they send a telegram. No. That was last war. Now they send a car. God forbid.

But Steff, my crazy daughter—every time the phone rings at night I’m scared. Maybe she’s got herself arrested in one of her goddamn causes and I’m going to have to bail her out like I did in Chicago. Or it could be worse. Two years ago this month, some kids were in the wrong place at the wrong time up at Kent. Damn shame about them and the National Guard; it’ll take us years to live it down. Hell of a thing to happen in Ohio.

I thought my kid was going to lose her mind about it. The schools shut down all over the place, all that tuition money pissed away, and God only knows what she got into.

Not just God. Margaret. Steff would call up, say “put Mom on,” and Margaret would cry and turn into the phone so I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I think she sent money on the sly-like, so I wouldn’t make an issue of it. You don’t send kids to college so they can get shot at. Steff would say you don’t send anyone anywhere so they can get shot at. She’s just a kid, you know. She doesn’t really believe all that stuff. The kids shouldn’t have been there. Anyone could tell you that.

“Hey, that you, Joey?” The voice on the other end was thick with booze. “It’s Al. Remember me?”

“You son of a bitch, what’re you doing calling this hour of night?” I started to bellow, then piped down. “You wanna wake up my whole damn family?”

“Thought you’d be up, Joey. Like we were . . . the time when . . .”

“Yeah . . . yeah . . .” Sure I remembered. Too well. So did Al, my old army buddy. It happens from time to time. One of us gets to remembering, gets the booze out—Scotch for me these days now that my practice is finally paying off-and then picks up the phone. Margaret calls it “going visiting” and “telephonitis” and only gets mad at the end of the month when the bills come in.

But Al wasn’t from my outfit at the Battle of the Bulge. Weren’t many of them left. Not many had been real close friends to start with: when you run away from home and lie about your age so you can go fight, you’re sort of out of place, soldier or not.

Damn near broke my own dad’s heart; he’d wanted me to follow him into school and law school and partnership. So I did that on GI bills when I got out. Got married, and then there was Korea. I went back in, and that’s where I met Al.

“Remember? We’d run out of fuel for the tank and were burning grain alcohol . . . rather drink torpedo juice, wouldn’t you? And pushing that thing south to the 38th parallel, scared shitless the North Koreans’d get us if the engine fused . . .”

“Yeah . . .” How far was Korea from Saigon? My son the lance corporal had wangled himself a choice slot as Marine guard. I guess all Margaret’s nagging about posture and manners had paid off. Almost the only time it had with the Bear. God, you know you’d shed blood so your kids don’t turn out as big damn fools as you. I’d of sent Barry through school, any school. But he wanted the service. Not Army, either, but the Marines. Well, Parris Island did what I couldn’t do, and now he was “yes sir”-ing a lot of fancypants like Ambassador Bunker over in Vietnam. At least he wasn’t a chicken or a runaway . . .

“You there, Joey?” I was staring at the receiver. “I asked you, how’s your family?”

“M’wife’s fine,” I said. How long had it been since Al and I spoke—three years? Five; “So’re the kids. Barry’s in the Marines. My son the corporal. Stationed in Saigon. The Embassy, no less.” I could feel my chest puffing out, even though I was tired and it was the middle of the night.

Car lights shone outside. I stiffened. What if . . . The lights passed. All’s quiet on the Western Front. Thank God.

Al and the beer hooted approvingly.

“And Steffie’s in college. Some damn radical Quaker place. I wanted her to stay in Ohio, be a nurse or a teacher, something practical in case, God forbid, she ever has to work, but my wife wanted her near her own people.”

“She getting plenty of crazy ideas at that school?”

“Steff’s a good kid, Al, looks like a real lady now.” What do you expect me to say? That after a year of looking and acting like the big-shot debs my wife admires in The New York Times, my Steffie’s decided to hate everything her dad fought for? Sometimes I think she’s majoring in revolution. It wasn’t enough she got arrested in 1968 campaigning for McCarthy—clean up for Gene, they called it. Clean? I never saw a scruffier bunch of kids till I saw the ones she’s taken up with now. Long hair, dirty-and the language? Worse than an army barracks.

She’s got another campaign now. This McGovern. I don’t see what they have against President Nixon or what they see in this McGovern character. Senator from South Dakota, and I tell you, he’s enough to make Mount Rushmore cry. I swear to God, the way these friends of Steff’s love unearthing and spreading nasty stories—this Elisberg character Steff admires, you’d think he was a hero instead of some nutcase who spilled his guts in a shrink’s office, so help me. Or this My Lai business: things like that happen in war. You just don’t talk about them. Still, what do you expect of a bunch of kids? We made it too easy.

I keep hoping. She’s such a good girl, such a pretty girl; one of these days, she’ll come around and say “Daddy, I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

Never mind that.

Al had got onto the subject of jo-sans. Cripes, I hadn’t even thought of some of them for twenty years, being an old married man and all. What if Margaret had walked in? I’d of been dead. Sure, I laughed over old times, but I was relieved when he switched to “who’s doing what” and “who’s died,” and then onto current events. We played armchair general, and I tell you, if the Pentagon would listen to us, we’d win this turkey and have the boys home so damned fast . . .

About the time we’d agreed that this Kissinger was a slippery so-and-so and that bombing Haiphong was one of the best things we could have done, only we should have done it a whole lot earlier . . . hell of a way to fight a war, tying General Westmoreland’s hands, I heard footsteps on the stairs.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” Margaret asked me.

I gestured he called me! at the phone, feeling like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. My wife laughed. “Going visiting, is he? Well, let his wife give him aspirin for the hangover I bet he’s going to have. You have to go to the office tomorrow and . . .” she paused for emphasis like I was six years old, “you need your sleep.”

She disappeared back up the stairs, sure that I’d follow. “That was the wife,” I told Al, my old good buddy. “Gotta go. Hey, don’t wait five years to call again. And if you’re ever in town, come on over for dinner!”

God, I hope she hadn’t heard that stuff about the josans. Or the dinner invitation. We’d eat cold shoulder and crow, that was for sure.

Fall of ’72, we kept hearing stories. That Harvard guy, that Kissinger was meeting with Le Duc Tho in Paris, and he was encouraged, but then they backed down: back and forth, back and forth till you were ready to scream. “Peace is at hand,” he says, and they say it in Hanoi, too. I mean, what’s the good of it when the commies and your own leaders agree, and the army doesn’t? No news out of Radio Hanoi can be any good. And the boys are still coming home in bags, dammit.

Meanwhile, as I hear from Margaret, Stephanie is doing well in her classes. The ones she attends in between campaigning for this McGovern. At first I thought he was just a nuisance candidate. You know, like Stassen runs each time? Then, when they unearthed that stuff about Eagleton, and they changed VP candidates, I thought he was dead in the water for sure. But Shriver’s been a good choice: drawn in even more of the young, responsible folk and the people who respect what he did in the Peace Corps. But the real reason McGovern’s moving way up in the polls is that more and more people get sick and tired of the war. We just don’t believe we can win it, anymore. And that hurts.

I get letters from Barry, too. He’s good at that. Writes each one of us. I think he’s having a good time in Saigon. I hope he’s careful. You know what I mean.

Barry says he’s got a lot of respect for Ambassador Bunker. Says he was cool as any Marine during Tet, when the VC attacked the Embassy. Says the Ambassador’s spoken to him a couple of times, asked him what he wants to do when he gets out of the service. Imagine: My boy, talking to a big shot like that.

And Margaret sent Stephanie a plane ticket home in time for the election. Sure, she could vote at school, but “my vote will make more of a difference in Ohio,” she explained to me. She was getting a fancy accent.

“You gonna cancel out my vote, baby?” I asked her. “I sure am, Dad. D’you mind?”

“Hey, kid, what am I working for if it isn’t for you and your mom? Sure, come on home and give your fascist old dad a run for his money.”

That got kind of a watery laugh from her. We both remembered the time she went to Washington for that big march in ’69. I hit the ceiling and Margaret talked me down. “She didn’t have to tell us, Joe,” she reminded me.

No, she didn’t. But she had. Just in case something happened, she admitted that Thanksgiving when she came home from school.

I didn’t like the idea of my girl near tear gas and cops with nightsticks when I wasn’t around, so I pulled a few strings and sent her Congressman Kirwan’s card. Mike, the Congressman says I should call him when be comes to the lawyers’ table at the Ohio Hotel. And I wrote down on it the home phone number of Miss Messer, his assistant. If anything goes wrong, I told her, she should call there. And I drew a peace sign and signed the letter, “Love and peace, your fascist father.”

She says I drew it upside down. Well, what do you expect? Never drew one before.

Anyhow, she’ll be home for Election Day, and Barry’ll vote by absentee ballot. I’m proud that both my kids take voting seriously. Maybe that school of hers hasn’t been a total waste: Steff still takes her responsibilities as a citizen very seriously.

Meanwhile, things—talking and fighting both—slowed down in Paris and Saigon. I remember after Kennedy won the election, Khrushchev wouldn’t talk to President Eisenhower’s people because Ike was a lame duck. As if he weren’t one of the greatest generals we ever had. I tried to listen to some of the speeches by this McGovern Stephanie was wild for. Mostly, I thought he promised pie-in-the-sky. Our boys home by June, everyone working hard and off welfare—not that I’d mind, but I just didn’t see how he was going to pull any of it off. I really wanted to ask Barry what he thought, but I didn’t. Might be bad for morale.

Then things started to get worse. They stepped up the bombing. Tried to burn off the jungle, too. And the pictures . . . Dammit, I wish I could forget the one of that little girl running down the road with no clothes on, screaming in pain. Sometimes at night, it gets messed up in my mind with that thing from Kent, with the girl kneeling and crying over that boy’s body. Damn things leap out at you from the newspaper or the news, but I can’t just stick my head in the sand.

Maybe the kids . . . maybe this McGovern . . . I’ve been under attack, and I tell you, there comes a time when you just want it to stop. Never mind what it costs you. You’ve already paid enough. I think the whole country’s reached that point, and so McGovern’s moving way up in the polls. Election Day started out really well. The day before, letters had come from Barry. One for me. One for his mother. And even one for Stephanie. I suppose she’d told him she was going to be home, and APO delivery to the Embassy in Saigon is pretty regular. We all sort of went off by ourselves to read our letters. Then Margaret and I traded. I hoped Stephanie would offer to show us hers, too, but she didn’t. So we didn’t push.

You don’t push, not if you want your kids to trust you. Besides, my son and daughter have always had something special between them. He’s a good foot taller than she is, but she always looked out for her “baby brother” in school. He never minded that she was the bright one, the leader. Not till he decided not to go to college, and he overheard one of the family saying that Stephanie should have been the boy. So our Bear joined up, not waiting for the draft or anything. I expected Stephanie to throw a fit—Margaret certainly did, but all my girl said was, “He needs to win at something of his own.”

I wouldn’t have expected her to understand what that means to a boy. Maybe she’s growing up.

But it’s still all I can do to keep a decent tongue in my head toward my brother-in-law with the big fat mouth.

On Election Day, it’s a family tradition that everyone comes over to watch the returns on TV. There were going to be some hot words over the cold cuts, if things ran true to speed. And I couldn’t see Steff sitting in the kitchen putting things on trays and talking girl talk with her aunts. Steff calls that sort of thing sexist. That’s a new word she’s got. Don’t see why it bothers her. It’s not like sometimes the women aren’t talking the most interesting things.

For a while, I really thought we were going to make it through the evening without a fight. Stephanie came in, all rosy-faced and glowing from voting, then marching outside the poll all day. She’d left her protest signs in the garage, and she was wearing one of the good skirts and coats she took to school. When everyone said so, she laughed and went up to change into a workshirt and jeans.

“But you looked so pretty, just like a real college girl,” her aunt told her.

“That was just window dressing,” Stephanie said. “Can I help set the food out now? I’m famished.”

She’d wolfed down about half a corned beef sandwich when the phone rang, and she flew up the stairs. “You’re kidding. Massachusetts already? Oh wow! How’s it look for Pennsylvania? I’m telling you, I think we’re going to be lucky here, but I’m worried about the South . . .”

“You want another beer, Ron?” l asked my brother-in-law, who was turning red, pretending like he had swallowed something the wrong way and would choke if he didn’t drink real fast. Personally, I think he voted for Wallace in the last election, but you can’t pry the truth out of him about that with a crowbar.

We settled down to watch TV. Margaret and my sister Nance turned on the portable in the kitchen. I kind of hoped Stephanie would go in there, but she helped clear the table, then came in and sat beside me.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Maybe the kids were right and people were sick of the bombings, the deaths, the feeling that Vietnam was going to hang around our necks till we choked on it. But state after state went to McGovern . . . “There goes Ohio! Straight on!” Stephanie shouted, raising a fist.

I don’t know when all hell broke loose. One moment we were sitting watching John Chancellor cut to President Nixon’s headquarters (and my daughter was doing this routine, like a Chatty Cathy doll, about Tricia Nixon). The next moment, she’d jumped up and was stamping one foot as she glared at her uncle.

“How dare you use that word?” she was saying to Ron, my brother-in-law. “They’re not gooks. They’re Asians. And it’s their country, not ours, but we’re destroying it for them. We’ve turned the kids into fugitives, the women into bar girls . . . and they all had fathers, too, till we killed them! What kind of a racist pig . . .”

“Who you calling a racist, little Miss Steff & Non-sense?” asked Ron. By then, he’d probably had at least two beers too many and way too many of my daughter’s yells of “straight on.”

“Why, when I was in the war, there was this Nee-grow sergeant . . .”

“It’s ‘black’ !” she snapped. “You call them black! How can you expect me to stay in the same house as this . . .”

She was out of the living room, and the front door slammed behind her before I could stop her.

“That little girl of yours is out of control,” Ron told me. “That’s what you get, sending her off to that snob school. OSU wasn’t good enough, oh no. So what happens? She meets a bunch of radicals there and picks up all sorts of crazy ideas. Tell you, Joey, you better put a leash on that kid, or she’ll get into real trouble.”

I got up, and he shut up. Margaret came in from the kitchen. I shook my head at her: everything under control. I wanted to get a jacket or something. Stephanie had run out without her coat, and the evening was chilly.

“I’d teach her a good lesson, that’s what I’d do,” said Ron.

Damn! Hadn’t I warned her, “I know you think it’s funny calling your uncle Ronnie the Racist. But one of these days, it’s going to slip out, and then there’ll be hell to pay.” But she’d said what I should have said. And that made me ashamed.

“She shouldn’t have been rude to you,” I said. “I’m going to tell her that. But you know how she feels about words like that. I don’t much like them either. Besides, this is her house, too.”

Ron was grumbling behind my back like an approaching thunderstorm, when I went into the front hall, took out a jacket from the closet, and went outside. Steffie was standing on the stoop, her face pressed against the cold brick. I put the jacket over her and closed my hands on her shoulders. They were trembling. “Don’t rub your face against the brick, baby. You could cut yourself.”

She turned around and hugged me. I could feel she was crying with anger and trying hard not to. “I’m not going in there and apologizing,” she told me.

“Not even for me?” I coaxed her. There’d been a time she’d do anything in the world for her old dad.

She tried to laugh and cry together, and sounded like the way she used to gurgle when she was a baby.

“I’ll promise not to start any fights,” she said. “But I won’t promise to keep quiet if . . .”

“I told him you shouldn’t have been rude to an elder and a guest . . .”

She hissed like the teenager she wasn’t. Not anymore. “I also told him this was your house and you had a right to have your wishes respected, too. Now, will you come in and behave like a lady?”

“It’s woman, daddy,” she told me.

I hugged her. “You know what I mean. Lady or woman, you’re still my little girl. You’re supposed to be for peace. Can you try to keep it in your own home?”

She looked up, respect in her eyes. “Ooh, that was a nice one,” she told me.

“Then remember, tantrums don’t win any arguments. Now, you go in. Maybe your mother needs help with the dishes.”

“He ought to help,” she muttered. “You do. It wouldn’t hurt.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” To my surprise, I agreed. “But if we wait for him to get off his butt, your mother’s going to be stuck with all of them.”

The gift of her obedience hit me in the face like a cold wind when you’ve had too much to drink. My eyes watered, and the lights up and down Outlook Avenue flickered. Everyone was watching the returns. Some of them had promised to drop in later. The Passells’ younger boy had gone to school with Steff. He was the only boy on the street still in school, studying accounting. The Carlsons’ middle son, who’d played varsity football, but always took time to coach our Bear, had left OSU and was in the Army. So was the oldest Bentfield, who’d been our paperboy. Fine young men, all of them. And the girls had turned out good, too, even Reenie, who’d got married too young.

Just a one-block street, but you had everything on it. Even a black family had moved in. Maybe I’d had my worries to start off with, but I was real proud we’d all greeted them like neighbors. On some streets when that happened, the kids dumped garbage on the lawn or TP’ed the house.

It was a nice street, a good block, and we’d all lived on it a long time. Nothing fancy, but solid. I wished my father could have seen my house. We’d come back since he’d lost everything in the Depression. But that’s the way of it. Each generation does a little bit better than the last one and makes things a little easier for the ones next in line.

We’ve been five generations in Youngstown. I like to think our name counts for something. Now, this is sort of embarrassing. I don’t go to church much, but I looked out over that street and hoped, that’s a better word for it, that my kids would make that name even more respected. My daughter, the whatever-she-wanted-to-be. A lawyer, maybe, And my son. Who knew? Maybe he’d come home and go back to school, and then this Ambassador—I couldn’t see my Bear as a diplomat, but . . .

“How many beers did you have?” I asked the sky, gave myself a mental shake, and went back in in time to watch President Nixon’s concession speech. It wasn’t, not really. You remember how close the race was against JFK. And the 1962 California election when he told the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”

I don’t know. Man’s a fighter, but he’s not a good loser. I tell you, I don’t know what a recount’s going to do to this country just when we need a strong leader in place.

“Country’s going to hell in a handbasket,” Ron grumbled. “I’m going home. Hey, Nancy? You going to yak all night? C’mon!”

After he left, my wife and daughter came back into the living room. Margaret brought out a pot of coffee.

Stephanie sat down to watch McGovern’s victory speech. She was holding her mother’s hand.

“I admit I am distressed at this demand for a recount at just the time when our country needs to be united. But I am confident that the count will only reaffirm the judgment of the great American people as the bombing has gone on, pounding our hearts as well as a captive nation: it is enough!

“Now, I have heard it said,” the man went on with shining eyes, “that I do not care for honor. Say, rather, that I earn my honor where it may be found. Not in throwing lives after lives away in a war we should never have entered, but in admitting that we have gone as far as we may, and that now it is time for our friends the South Vietnamese to take their role as an independent people, not a client state. Accordingly, my first act as Commander in Chief will be . . .” his voice broke, “to bring them home. Our sons and brothers. The young fathers and husbands of America. Home.”

Tears were pouring down the women’s faces. I walked over to Margaret. All the years we’ve been married, she’s never been one to show affection in front of the kids. Now she leaned her head against me. “Our boy’s coming home!”

Stephanie’s face glowed like the pictures of kids holding candles in church or the big protest marches. She could have been at McGovern headquarters; that school of hers has enough pull to put her that high, but she’d chosen to come home instead.

I put a hand on her hair. It was almost as silky as it had been when she was in diapers. Again, my hand curved around her head. It was so warm, just like when she’d been little. “Baby, it looks like you and your friends have won. I just hope you’re right.”

Something woke me early that morning. Not the house. Margaret’s regular breathing was as always, and I could sense the presence of Stephanie, a now-unfamiliar blessing. I went downstairs, ran some water in the sink, and washed off the serving dishes Margaret had set to soak overnight. Nice surprise for her when she got up.

Of course, I wasn’t surprised when the phone rang. “Hey, Al,” I greeted him. Drunk again. “What’s the hurry? It’s only six months, not five years between calls this time.”

“How d’you like it, Joe?” he demanded. “Those little bastards pulled it off. They don’t want to go, so, by God, they stop the war. Can you believe it? Not like us, was it. I tell you, or buddy, we were suckers. Go where we were told, hup two three four, following orders like goddamn fools, and these kids change the rules on us and get away with it.”

Maybe it would be better. Margaret and Steff had held hands and cried for joy. I had to believe it was better, that I wasn’t just bitching because other men’s sons wouldn’t have to go through what I had. I started to talk Al down like I had in Korea, but my heart wasn’t in it.

The sky was gray. All the houses on Outlook were dark. Soon it would be dawn and the streetlights would go out, regular as an army camp.

But what were those lights going on? I levered up from my chair—damn, my bones were creaking—and peered out. Lights on at Bentfield’s? And, oh my God, Johnny Bentfield . . . no. Oh no. Not my son, thank God? Dammit, what kind of a man was I to thank God like that? Sometimes I make myself want to puke.

“Al!” I broke into his ramblings. “I gotta hang up now. Something’s going on on the street.”

“Probably a bunch of stoned kids, celebrating the new age. Well, they’re welcome to it. Let ’em come running to me when it blows up in their faces. I’ll laugh.”

“Yeah, Al. Sure. But I gotta go.”

Moving more quietly than I had since Korea, I slipped upstairs and slid open drawers for undershorts, slacks, a sports shirt. Very cautiously, listening to see if they’d wake up, I dressed in the bathroom, then left the house, moving as cautiously as if I were scouting out my own neighborhood. I sneaked over to Bentfield’s and peered in the window. At least they didn’t have a dog. If what I feared was true, they’d have more on their minds than listening for prowlers. And if I were wrong, please God, if I were wrong, they were good enough friends I could always make up something.

But they were in robes in the living room. Alma Bentfield sat hunched over, hands over her face, while Stan came in, gray-faced, with coffee. The two little girls clutched each other, too sleepy to feel yet how badly they were going to hurt.

God damn! Just a little longer, and we’d have brought Johnny home safe. Someone must have called from Vietnam. Unauthorized. Don’t ask me how.

I slipped out of their yard and back home.

“What’s wrong?” Margaret’s voice was sharp and came from outside Stephanie’s room. She must have heard what she thought was a prowler, found me gone, and run to see if our daughter needed help.

“Better get dressed,” I told her. “There’s a light on at Bentfield’s. I’ve had a crazy feeling. I went over and looked. It’s about as bad as it can get.”

My wife’s face twisted, and she clenched her hands.

“I’ll wake Steff, too,” she said. “She’s grown up enough to help out.”

I went upstairs to change into a suit. It was almost time to get dressed for work anyhow. But long after I should have left, I sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. Margaret was cooking something. A casserole to take over, maybe. A knife fell into the metal sink. We both jumped and she spilled the milk she was pouring. “Shit!”

In twenty-five years of marriage, I don’t think I’d ever heard her cuss like that.

She mopped up, and I poured myself another cup. I sat staring at the birds and butterflies on the wallpaper mural she took such care of. Different from birds in Southeast Asia, that was for sure: nice tame birds and pale colors. They call it a green hell there.

“It’s time to go,” she reminded me. I picked up the phone to call my office and tell my secretary I wouldn’t be in just yet.

“Hope you’re feeling all right,” Mary-Lynn wished me, almost laughing.

“I’m fine,” I almost snapped. No point taking it out on her. She’d gone to high school with my kids. I remember how old I felt the day I interviewed her-and found out that her mother had been my secretary when I’d started out in practice.

“That’s good.” She was almost singing. Guess she was relieved too about how the vote had gone. Her husband-the first one was no damn good, but this guy seems to be treating her okay-would be coming home. Vet or no vet, he damn well better be good to her. She’s a nice kid, and besides, big as he is, I’ll beat the crap out of him.

I drank my coffee and looked out at the street till the olive-drab Army car I was expecting pulled up outside Bentfield’s and the long-legged uniformed men strode up the neat walk to the front door. It opened, so reluctantly. All over the street, doors opened, and the women started coming out. Each one carried a covered bowl or baking dish.

Margaret kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were cold. Then she and Stephanie went out. My daughter carried the casserole. She had on her good clothes again and lipstick the color of bubble gum. It looked fake against her pale face, and I wanted to tell her to wipe it off, but I didn’t. Her legs, under the short, dark skirt, looked like a little girl’s, heading into the doctor’s office to get a shot. It was Johnny Bentfield who’d gotten shot.

My womenfolk went to Bentfield’s and the door shut behind them.

All down the street, cars pulled out of the driveways like we were escaping.

When I got home that night, Steffie was in her jeans again, sitting in the living room.

“You shouldn’t sit in the dark.” I switched on some lights.

“Mom’s upstairs with a headache. Took two Fiorinal.” Margaret never took more than one.

I headed for the liquor cabinet and pulled out the Scotch.

“I’ll do that,” said my daughter. She mixed me a double the way I like them. To my surprise, she poured a stiff one for herself.

“I don’t know, kitten,” I began.

“I’m legal,” she said flatly. “And I was there. You weren’t. God!” She sat down too fast and lifted her glass. But she knows better than to belt down good Scotch.

“You did the right thing,” I praised her. She’d done a good job, the sort of thing nice women like the ones on our street do without even thinking about it.

She wrapped her arms about her shoulders and hunched in. In her jeans and workshirt, she looked like a veteran of some army I’d never seen before. A vet who’d lost a buddy.

Finally, she looked up. The big brown eyes under their floppy bangs held my attention. “They brought her a flag. It was for John, they said. She didn’t want to take it, but they put it in her hands. Her knees caved in, but she had to take the flag. We all sat around her. All day. Even after the soldiers left. They had other houses to visit. God damn!”

“Don’t swear, baby. It’s not nice.”

“Wasn’t nice to be there. Or to have to be there. What if. . . .”

“Don’t think about it!”

What kind of a father was I, leaving her alone like that?

But I couldn’t help it. I got up and went outside to check on the garage door. Saw a neighbor.

“You hear about Bentfield?” he asked. Carefully, he bent and broke a dead branch off the hedge that divides our property.

I nodded. “My daughter’s pretty shook up.”

“It’s worse than that. Stan told me, and I’m not telling the family. It wasn’t VC that got his boy. ‘Friendly fire,’ they call it. He was stationed in front of the regular troops and, well, someone screwed up.”

That’s what happens when you cut and run. You get stuck facing something even worse. I had to go in and face Steffie like nothing had happened. She wasn’t crying, at least, but she’d turned the lights off again.

“You want dinner? Mom said to heat stuff up.” I shook my head. “Me neither.”

“Let’s not tell her we skipped dinner. She’d get mad.”

We sat in the dark for a long time. After a while, the house got chilly, and it was time to go to bed.

Well, Nixon had his recount. It was close. Even closer than when he’d lost against Kennedy. I don’t know, if I’d have thought he’d be such a bad loser, maybe I wouldn’t have voted for him the first time. And the grins on the faces of those guys who look like Ho Chi Minh’s grandsons at the UN made me want to wipe them out with my fist.

“It’s face, y’know,” Al said. After all these years, he’d finally made it to Youngstown on a business trip. Some of us got together at his Holiday Inn. These days, Al sells steel pipe. Frankly, I think he drinks through them—the gut he’s got on him now! “Now that we’re pulling out, they don’t respect us. Not that they ever did, all that much. Talk about yellow . . . I know who’s yellow, those little yellow . . .”

“Al.” Father Klein picked his beer bottle out of his hand. “You’ve had enough. We’ve all had enough.”

Al lurched onto his feet, his face red. Peanuts scattered across the table. I swept them back into the bowl. Didn’t think Al would take on Father Klein. He was wearing his collar, for one thing. For another, he’d always been able to punch out anyone in our outfit.

“I wanted us to win,” Al said. The fight drained out of him. “You know what happens when you retreat. Remember what we’d have got if they’d caught us in Korea? Tiger cages and bamboo under our fingernails. This isn’t going to be a retreat-It’s a goddamned rout. Who’s holding the fort while everyone’s pulling out? You mark my words, it’s going to be a bloodbath.”

“It’s okay, Al,” Father Klein said. “Joey and I’ll walk you back to your room and you can stick your head in the john.”

Pro-war or peacenik, we all went sort of crazy that spring. The atlas from our Britannica fell open at the maps of Southeast Asia as I showed Margaret just where our men were pulling back from.

“It’s so green. Can’t they just jump out?” Our dining room is white and gold: formal, Margaret calls it. If she likes it, fine, I’m happy. It seemed weird to be talking about weapons and jungles as we sat at a table covered by a cloth, eating off real silver.

“McGovern won’t let us burn off the jungle. It’s a nono. Like DDT. Damn! It’s all tunnels underneath. The VC can pop out of a tunnel, strike from behind, then disappear. Or hide in a village. You can’t tell VC from rice farmers. And there’s no good aerial cover.”

“I don’t want to talk about this at dinner,” she said, and closed the atlas. She didn’t ever want to talk about it. Well, she wasn’t a vet. God forbid we ever use our women like that, though those nurses..-you’ve really got to hand it to them. They’ve got guts. Day after day, nurses flew out with their patients. The big, silent planes flew out too, with the flags and the coffins. But the news wasn’t showing them much anymore.

McGovern called it peace with honor. Withdrawal with honor, someone had tried to call it at a press conference; and all the reporters had cracked up. They’d had to fade to black real fast. Besides, you couldn’t say that around the kids. McGovern still had them in the palm of his hand. They had a lot of influence, and they wanted our boys out. McGovern always had a bunch of them following him around, as interns or admirers or something. They were beginning to look a little frantic.

It was Father Klein who called it the long defeat. We were fighting to lose. It reminded me of something. Once I had to help the Bear with his history homework, and I read this thing about a Children’s Crusade. They wanted to do what their elders couldn’t—free the Holy land, miracles, that sort of thing. So they left home and went on Crusade. And none of ’em ever made it back.

Every time the phone rang, I dreaded it. Sometimes it was Steff. She’d turned expert, like all the kids. We talked over the withdrawal, and she said the exotic names in tones I hadn’t heard for years. Sometimes it was relief operations. Everyone wanted a check. Once it was Steff’s school—some lady from development assuring us that no, the school wasn’t planning to close down as it had in 1970 so everyone could go do relief work. Oddly enough, I don’t think I’d have minded if it had. Let the college kids do their share. But while she had me on the phone, could she possibly convince me to donate . . . Yeah, sure.

Al never called. After a while that sort of worried me, so I picked up the phone one evening at a decent hour and called him. Got his Mrs. and the cold shoulder, too, till I explained. Al was resting, she said. He’d been working too hard lately. No, he couldn’t come to the phone.

Drying out, I thought. Not all the casualties of a war happen in combat.

Used to be, letters from the Bear were a surprise—a treat to top off a good deal or a reward to make up for a lousy one. Now, I started calling home about the time the mail usually came. “Any news?” I’d ask. Usually, there wasn’t. If there was, Margaret would read Bear’s letters to me. Steffie said he was still writing her, but she didn’t offer.

Don’t know when he had time. He said he was helping out when he was off-duty in one of the orphanages. Run by French nuns-Didn’t know he’d learned some French, too. Maybe he wouldn’t mind if his dad stuck his nose into his business when he came back and suggested going to college on a GI bill. There had to be a GI bill or something, didn’t there? I mean, we owe those boys a lot.

Well, he always had been good with kids. He sent us one snapshot. There he was, all spit and polish, with these cute little round-faced kids with their bright eyes crawling all over him, scuffing up those patent shoes.

At least he got to keep clean and dry. I remembered how your feet felt like they’d rot off if you couldn’t get them out of those stinking boots. In the jungle, you get mold on everything, it’s so damp. I didn’t like it when the Bear would complain that he had it soft, compared to most of the men. I was scared he’d try to transfer out. But I guess someone talked to him, and he thought of what he owed to his mom and sister, because after a while, he didn’t talk about that anymore.

And meanwhile, those goddamn VC were getting closer to Saigon. The whole fucking—sorry, I never swear like that, must be thinking back to my army days-country was failing apart. Hated to admit it, but Al was right. As long as we came on like Curtis LeMay and threatened, at least, to bomb ’em back to the Stone Age, they’d at least respected what we could do to them if we really set our minds to it. Now, “paper tiger” was the kindest name they had for us.

President McGovern began to look haunted. He’d be a one-term president, that was for sure. And when he came down with cardiac arrhythmia, some of us wondered if he’d even manage that-the kids who surrounded his staff looked pretty grim, too. Like the kids who get caught stealing cars and suddenly realize that things are not going to be much fun anymore.

The anchormen on the evening news sounded like preachers at a funeral. I’m not making this up; it happened at Da Nang. You saw a plane ready for takeoff. Three hundred people crowded in, trampling on women and children, they were so panicky. Then the crew wanted to close the doors and get out of there, but the people wouldn’t get off the runway, clear the stairs. They pulled some off the wheels and took off anyway. And you could see little black specks as people fell off where they’d hung on to the rear stairway.

Did McGovern say anything? Sure. “We must put the past behind us. Tragic as these days are, they are the final throes of a war we never should have entered. In the hard days to come, I call upon the American people to emulate the discipline and courage of our fine servicemen who are withdrawing in good order from Vietnam.”

I’d of spat, but Margaret was watching the news with me. We couldn’t not watch. Funny, neither of us had ever liked horror films, but we had to watch the news.

Some people waded into the sea, the mothers holding their babies over their beads. They overloaded fishing boats, and the Navy found them floating. Or maybe the boats hadn’t overloaded. Those people mostly hadn’t much, but it wouldn’t have been hard to take what they had, hit them on the head, and throw them overboard.

Refugees were flooding Saigon. The Bear’s French orphanage was mobbed, and the grounds of all the embassies were full. Would the VC respect the embassies? How could they? Human life means nothing to them, or else they wouldn’t treat their own people the way they do. And Cambodia’s even worse, no matter what Steffie’s polisci profs say.

In a letter I didn’t show my wife, Barry told me he could hear the cluster bombs drop. The North Viets were at Xuanloc, thirty-five miles northwest of Saigon, on the way to Bien Hoa airfield, heading south, always heading south.

“If our allies had fought as well as they did at Xuanloc, maybe we wouldn’t be in this fix, Dad,” Barry wrote me. “It doesn’t look good. Don’t tell Mom. But the Navy’s got ships standing offshore in the Gulf of Thailand and a fleet of choppers to fly us out to them. I hope . . .”

I crumpled the letter in my hand. Later, I smoothed it out and made myself read it, though. My son was out in that green hell, and I was scared to read his letter? That wasn’t how I’d want to greet him when the choppers finally brought him out. He’d be one of the last to leave, I knew that. Probably pushing the ambassador ahead of him.

I wrote I was proud of him. I didn’t say the half of what I meant. I don’t know if he got the letter.

Then one morning Mary-Lynn met me at the door of my office, and she’d been crying—

She wouldn’t let me inside. “Mrs. Black called. You have to go home, she says. Right away. Oh, Mr. Black, I’m so sorry!” She wiped at her nose. I was in shock. I pulled my handkerchief from my suit jacket and handed it to her.

She put her hands out as if I was going to pass out. “There’s a . . . there’s a car out there . . .”

“Not . . .” I couldn’t say the word. It would make it real. My boy. Never coming home? I couldn’t make myself believe it.

“They’ve got a car there and Marines—oh, your wife says please, please come straight home . . .”

The spring sun hit my shoulders like something I’d never felt before. What right did the sun have to shine here? The trees in Crandall Park were fresh and green, and the gardens at the big corner house where they always spent a mint on flowers looked like something out of the first day of the world. How did they dare? My boy had been shot. Other men’s sons had been shot in a green hell they should have burnt down to ash.

A voice broke in on the radio.

“. . . the American Embassy has closed its gates, and the Ambassador . . . Ambassador Bunker has refused evacuation . . .”

He’d have been there, my son. Firing into the enemy, not wanting to fire, I knew that, but there’d be a wall of Marines between the VC and the panicked crowd and the diplomats they had sworn to protect. . . .

I had people to protect too. I put my foot hard on the gas, peeled round a slowpoke station wagon with three kids and their mom in it, and roared up Fifth Avenue.

“. . . We interrupt this program . . . there is a rumor that Ambassador Bunker has been shot. . . . We repeat, this is a rumor, no one has seen his body . . .”

Sweet suffering Christ! Damn that red light, no one was around, so it wouldn’t matter if I crashed it. Didn’t want to smear myself all over the landscape before I got home; Margaret would never forgive me if I got myself killed coming home to her now, of all times.

Goddamn siren! I thought of giving the cop a run for his money, but you don’t do that in Youngstown. Not ever, and especially not if you’re a lawyer.

The man who got out of the car recognized me. “Hey, Counselor, what you think you’re doing? You were going seventy and you crashed that light . . .” He sniffed at my breath, then pulled out his pad. “You know better than that. Now I wish I could let you off with a warning . . .”

A fist was squeezing my throat. Finally, it let up long enough for me to breathe. “It’s my boy . . .” I said. Then I laid my head down on the steering wheel.

A hand came in over my shoulder and took the keys. “I’m driving you home. The way you’re driving, you could get yourself . . . Come on, Counselor.”

I made him let me off up the street. No telling what Margaret would have thought if she’d seen a cop car roll up to the door. The Marine car was in the drive. The men saw me get out of the car and followed me. I made it up the front walk, feeling like I was walking off a three-day binge. Toni Carlson opened the door. She was crying, but Margaret wasn’t. Sure enough, the living room and kitchen were full of women with their covered dishes.

“I called Steffie’s school,” Margaret said before I could even get to her. She had Barry’s service photo out like they do in the newspapers. His face grinned under his hat. God, he was a good-looking boy. “Her plane gets in this afternoon.”

“I’m going to pick her up,” said a voice from behind.

“Sir,” began one of the Marines. A fine young man. I had . . . I have . . . a son like him.

He shook my hand and bravely said the things they’re supposed to say. “Sir, the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense have asked me to inform you that your son . . .” The boy’s voice faltered, and he went on in his own words.

Missing. Presumed dead. My son was . . . is . . . a hero. But presumed dead. After Ambassador Bunker died (that wasn’t supposed to get out yet, but he supposed I had a right to know), the surviving Marines were supposed to withdraw. But Barry gave his seat to a local woman and a child.

“Probably knew them from the orphanage,” I muttered. “No doubt, sir,” said the Marine. It wasn’t his business to comment. He’d be glad to get out, even if he had more families’ hearts to break that day. Lord, I wished I could.

At least he didn’t have a damn flag. As long as you don’t get the flag, you can still hope.

Her school sent Steffie home, the way these schools do when there’s been a death in the family. Pinkos they may be, but I’ve got to admit each of her professors and the college president wrote us nice letters. Take as much time as you need before coming back to class, they told Steff. Better than she got from some of her friends. Once or twice, when she thought I wasn’t looking, I saw her throw out letters. And I heard her shouting on the phone at someone, then hang up with a bang. All she ever said was, “You never know who’s really your friend.”

I thought she’d do better to stick out the term, but she decided to take the semester off. Seeing how Margaret brightened at that news, I didn’t insist she go back. And when my wife threw a major fit and screamed, “I can’t bear to lose both the men in our family!” at the dinner table and practically ordered me to get an EKG, I kept the appointment with our doctor that she’d made.

Oddly enough, now that the worst had happened, I slept like a baby right through the next time the phone rang at 3:00 A.M.

Steffie came into our room. She spoke to Margaret. “It’s from Frankfurt. West Germany.”

Why would she be getting a call from West Germany of all places?

Margaret got up and threw on a robe. “It’s in, then?” My daughter nodded. I stared at both women. Beyond family resemblance. their faces wore the same expression: guilt, fear, and a weird kind of anticipation under the sorrow that had put circles under their eyes.

Like the damn fool husbands on TV, I waited for my womenfolk to explain what was going on. It didn’t much matter. After all, when your country’s lost a war and you’ve lost a son, what else can happen?

“We have to Talk,” Margaret said in that tone of voice. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

So at three in the morning, we sat down to a family conference. Margaret poured coffee. To my surprise, she looked imploringly at Steffie.

“The call from Frankfurt came through on my line.”

That stupid Princess phone!

“That’s where they evacuate the refugees and process them.”

My hand closed on the spoon till it hurt. How did that rate a transatlantic phone call?

Stephanie took a deep, deep breath and drew herself up. For a moment, I thought I could see her brother, making up his mind at the Embassy to give up his place to a woman and a child.

Our eyes met. She’d been thinking of Barry too.

“You know that woman and kid Barry pushed onto the helicopter in his place?”

“The ones he knew from the orphanage?”

“Where’d you get that idea?” Margaret broke in.

“Mom, he did meet Nguyen at the orphanage.”

“Now wait a damn minute, both of you. Maybe it’s too early, but no one’s making sense!”

Margaret set down her coffee cup. “Joe, please listen.”

“Dad, about a year ago, Barry wrote me. He’d met a girl who worked at the French Embassy. She’s from Saigon, and her name is Nguyen.”

I held up a hand. I wanted to be stupid. I wanted to be Ward Cleaver and have this episode end. Margaret would switch off the TV set, the show would be over, we could all go back to bed, and none of this, none of the whole past miserable year would have happened.

So my boy had sacrificed himself for a friend. . . . “She’s his wife, Daddy. And the child . . .”

When you’re on the front lines and you get hit bad, it doesn’t hurt at first. You go into shock.

“You knew about this?” I asked Margaret. She looked down, ashamed.

“And didn’t tell me?” Both women looked down.

“My son married-how do we know it’s true?-he says he married this goddamn gook! Her people killed him, and you have the nerve to say . . .”

“If you say that word, I’ll never speak to you again!” Stephanie was on her feet, her big flannel nightgown billowing in flowers and hearts about her. “Nguyen’s not a bar girl. Barry said she’s a lady. She worked at the French Embassy. She speaks French and Vietnamese . . . some English.”

“They seem to have communicated just fine without it!” I snapped, hating myself.

They’d hidden this from me! Barry had written to Stephanie, and all those calls when she’d said, “I need to talk to Mom,” they were talking about this unknown girl. This gook girl. Who my son had planned to bring home.

I could just see Ronnie the Racist’s face. They’d hidden this from me.

“Oh Mom, I’m making such a mess of this!” Steffie cried. “I didn’t really believe he’d take it like this . . .”

“Give him some time, darling,” said my wife. “We were caught by surprise, too.”

“You give him some time,” my daughter burst into tears. “The only grandkid he may ever have, and all he can think of is to ask, ‘Are they really married?” and call the mother a gook and a bar girl! I haven’t got time for this! I have to pack and go to Washington to meet Nguyen, and then I have to go . . .”

I reached up and grasped my daughter’s wrist. ‘Just where do you think you’re going?”

That little bit of a thing faced me down. “I’m Joining the Red Cross relief effort.” She laughed, shakily. “I wish I’d listened to you and become a nurse after all. It’s a hell of a lot more useful than a poli-sci major for what I need to do. We’re going over there.”

“That hellhole’s already swallowed one of my kids!”

“That’s right. So I’m going over there to look for him.”

I shook my head at her. Just one small girl in the middle of a war zone. What did she think she could do?”

“Daddy, you know I’ve always looked after my brother. No matter how big he got. Except with this . . . this mess about the war. I did what I thought was right, and see how it worked out.” She wiped at her eyes.

“Somehow, I have to make up for that. All of us do. So I’m going to look for him. And I’ll . . . when I find him . . . so help me, I am going to beat the crap out of him for scaring us this way!” She was sobbing noisily now, and when I held out my arms, she flung herself into them.

“Oh Daddy, I was wrong, it all went wrong and it got so fucked up!”

“Don’t use words like that,” I whispered, kissing my girl’s hair. “Not in front of your mother.”

“It’s all right,” said Margaret. “I feel the same way.”

“Unless I find him, Nguyen and the little boy are all we’ve got of Barry. And we’re all they’ve got. But all you can do is call them bad words and . . . and . . .”

I patted her back and met my wife’s eyes. She nodded, and I knew we’d be having guests in the house. No, scratch that. We’d be having new family members come to live here. And if my sister’s husband even thought of opening his big fat mouth, I’d shut it for him the way I’d wanted to for the past thirty years.

Stephanie pulled out of my arms and pushed her bangs out of her eyes. I sighed and picked my words. If I said things wrong, I was scared I’d lose her.

“We’ve been in this town for five generations,” I began slowly. “I think our family has enough of a reputation so people will welcome . . . what did you say her name was?”

“Nguyen,” Margaret whispered. Her eyes were very bright. “I’ll brush up on my French.” She used to teach it before we got married. “And the little boy—our grandson-is Barry, Jr. I can’t imagine how that sounds in a Vietnamese accent, can you?”

A tiny woman in those floaty things Vietnamese women wore. A little lady. My son’s wife ..-or widow. And one of those cute little black-eyed kids, unless he looked like Bear. Family. Just let anyone dare say anything.

“We can put them in Barry’s room,” I stammered. “I suppose.”

“Nguyen can have mine,” said Steffie. “I won’t need it. Oh, Daddy, I was wrong about so many things. But I was right about you after all.”

She kissed me, then ran upstairs, a whirlwind in a flowered nightgown. I could hear closets and drawers protesting and paper ripping.

“I wish she’d been right about all off them,” I told Margaret. She took my hand.

“I’m going with Stephanie to pick up . . . Nguyen,” my wife informed me.

It would get easier, I sensed, for both of us to think of her and the boy as family once we met them. My son’s wife. My son’s son. This wasn’t how I’d thought that would be.

In a few minutes, once the shock wore off, I supposed I’d get to see the pictures. I knew there had to be pictures. But you don’t live with a woman for this many years without knowing when she has more to say. And having a pretty good idea of what it is-most of the time.

This time, though, my guess was right. “Joe, I want you to come with us to Washington so we can all meet as a family. Nguyen must be terrified. She’s lost everything and, and everyone.”

Her voice trembled, but she forced it to calm. “I would mean a lot to her. Steff says the Vietnamese are Confucian. If the head of our family were there to greet her, she’d know she was welcome, she and the little one.”

A smile flickered across her face. “I wonder where we can get a crib,” she mused. “All our friends’ children are grown and haven’t started having babies yet. We’ll be the first to have a grandchild.”

I bent over and hugged her. “Did you make a third plane reservation?”

She smiled at me. “What do you think?”

“I’ll carry your suitcase downstairs for you, baby,” I told my daughter.

“Oh, Dad, you know I’ll have to lug my own stuff once I go overseas . . .”

“As long as you’re in my house, young lady—”

“It’s on my bed.” I went into her room to get it. She’d taken a cheap plaid fabric thing, not one of the good, big Samsonite cases she’d gotten for high school graduation. Her room wasn’t just clean: it was sterile. She’d even torn down her posters and hung the crewelwork back up. I wondered what this strange new daughter-in-law of mine would make of the pretty blue and lilac room.

My foot sent something spinning and rolling. I bent to retrieve the thing, which promptly jagged my finger. One of Stephanie’s protest buttons, hurled away as if in despair, poor girl. “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?” it asked.

Suppose they did? It had never happened yet.

Suppose, instead, they gave a peace? That hadn’t worked, either.

But I can always hope, can’t I?

After all, I have a grandson to look out for.

TRUE FACES

Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan made her first appearance in F&SF in January 1981 (“The Coming of the Doll”). Since then, she has written a number of highly acclaimed stories and several novels. Her next book will be a limited edition from WSFA Press called Home by the Sea. Bantam will publish her next mass market book, Fools, in their Spectra line. Pat wrote this story in response to a request to do science fiction murder mysteries. “True Faces” will be reprinted later this year in Whatdunnit?, an anthology edited by Mike Resnick.

I TOLD YOU I wasn’t in the mood for this,” Stilton whispered.

I gave him an elbow in the ribs without looking away from the body of the woman lying on the floor of the large room. I’m never much in the mood for a strangulation murder myself, but it didn’t pay to advertise. Not in this company. History, I thought; I’m looking at history, in the making right there in front of me. People had been strangled before, and they’d get strangled again, but this was the first time one had ever been strangled in an alien embassy. The first alien embassy, no less. Two firsts. And we were the first law-enforcement officers on the scene, so that was three firsts. The day was definitely running hot.

On my other side, the tall man in the retro-tuxedo swallowed loudly for the millionth time. He’d said his name was Farber, and had given his occupation as secretary to the dead woman. I wasn’t sure which was more striking, his old-fashioned getup or his noisy peristaltic action. I’d never met anyone who could swallow loudly before—did that make it five firsts? I shoved the thought aside. The room was so quiet, I probably could have heard him digesting his food if I had listened closely enough. The Lazarians either observed quiet as a religion, or they were as much in shock as the human employees, who were all huddled together on the far side of the room, too spooked even to whisper to each other.

There was only one Lazarian on this side of the room. The rest were gathered in a semicircle around the corpse. There were about twenty of them, and the grouping had this very odd formality to it, as if they’d all gathered there to seek an audience with the woman.

I turned to Farber, who reacted by swallowing again and then blotting his forehead with his sleeve. “One more time?” I gave Stilton another jab in the ribs.

“Ready,” Stilton said sourly, moving so that I could see he had the interviewer aimed.

“My God, I always thought it was just in the hollies that the police made you tell a story over and over,” Farber said, glancing at the ‘viewer’s flat lens in a furtive way. I didn’t make anything of that—the only people who never got nervous about having a ‘viewer trained on them were dead or inhuman. Of course, it was hard to tell with the Lazarians—they looked a lot like scarecrows, and I’d never seen a nervous scarecrow, or even an extraterrestrial facsimile.

“You can give us the ‘viewer’s digest condensed version,” I told him. “The third recording doesn’t need as much.”

Farber swallowed. “Fine. I came in here and found Ms. Entwater just as you see her now, with the Lazarians gathered around her. Just as you see them now. The other human employees were elsewhere in the building, but the one Lazarian rounded them all up, brought them in here, and hasn’t allowed anyone to leave since. Then I called you. From here. Since I’m not allowed to leave, either.”

I glanced at Stilton, who nodded. “And you say that Ms. Entwater’s relationship with the Lazarians was . . . what?”

Swallow. His Adam’s apple bounded up and down above his collar. “Cordial. Friendly. Very good. She liked them. She liked her work. If she had any enemies among the Lazarians, she never told me about it, and she told me close to everything.”

“Care to speculate on what she didn’t tell your I asked.

He thought about that for a moment, swallowing. “She didn’t tell me there was a Pilot in the building.”

“Why not?”

“Either she didn’t have a chance, or she didn’t think to.” Swallow. “It’s hardly necessary for the secretary to be updated hourly as to who drops by for a social visit and who doesn’t.”

“You’re sure it was a social visit?”

Swallow. “Pilots come by all the time to visit the Lazarians. The Lazarians trained them in Interstellar Resonance Travel, so they feel a certain kinship to them, much more than to other humans, I think.”

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

“Because they seldom have any interactions with any of the humans here. Except for Ms. Entwater, who sees them in and sees them out again.” Swallow. “Saw them in. And out again.”

She always did, personally? Isn’t that more of a job for a receptionist or a secretary?”

“Dallette or I would see to other visits. The Pilots, Ms. Entwater always saw to personally.”

“Then she wouldn’t have had to tell you in so many words that a Pilot was in the building,” I said. “You’d know by whatever she was doing.”

Swallow. “If I knew what she was doing. I was busy with press releases for most of the morning, so I was in the translation room.”

“The Lazarians’ press releases?”

Swallow, followed by a nod. “They like to alert the media themselves. About everything Today it was various things about hollies they’d seen and what they thought about them and the dissolution of three-bond—”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You didn’t mention that before.” The old ways never failed. Get someone to tell a story over and over, and something new was bound to show up.

“Swallow.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t hiding it—” A glance at the ‘viewer.”—I’d just forgotten. It’s like a—a marriage breaking up, or maybe a long engagement. The Lazarians are—well, there are similarities, but there are always strange little differences embedded in them. In any case, it didn’t concern Ms. Entwater.”

“Are you sure?” I said.

“Absolutely.” Swallow. “Ms. Entwater never, ah, intruded into their private lives.”

I couldn’t help laughing a little. “Come on. Celie Entwater’s job was to gain improved understanding of the Lazarians. How could she do that unless she was acquainted with their private lives?”

“Ms. Entwater considered herself a diplomat engaged in deep study of another culture. She was rigorous in observing customs and taboos, all that sort of thing. She knew that if we offended them, they might close down and go back to Lazarus—”

“Lah-ah . . . ZA-AHR . . . eesh,” came a deep, nasal-sounding voice behind me, enunciating each syllable as if it were a separate word, with a bit of a gargle on the ZA-AHR.

Farber swallowed and bowed from the waist. I turned around. The one free-ranging Lazarian in the room was standing as close as possible to Stilton, who rolled his eyes. The Lazarian custom of space density had gotten old for him very quickly. I found it pretty off-putting myself—it was like dealing with a race of people who had been raised in crowded elevators, unable to be comfortable unless they were all on top of each other.

Which made the half-circle formation around Entwater’s corpse doubly odd, I thought suddenly. They weren’t as close to each other or to her as they could get. Because she was dead? Or for some other Lazarian reason I had yet to find out?

“I need to question all the humans here,” I said to the Lazarian. “If one of them killed Ms. Entwater, that person must be punished according to our law.”

“Trrrried and punished if found guilty,” the Lazarian corrected. “Question.”

Farber moved to my side, swallowing. “Thinta-ah requests permission to inquire something of you,” he said to me, sounding ceremonial. I repressed the urge to sigh heavily; I’m no diplomat, and the six years I’d spent on the gang squad had made me tired of ritual. Maybe it should have prepared me for the more Byzantine protocols of extraterrestrials, but I’ve got a bad attitude. Twenty years ago, when the Lazarians had first arrived, maybe I’d have been much more excited, but then, I’ve always had low blood pressure anyway.

“Ask your question,” I said.

“Say ‘please,’ ” Farber whispered.

I smiled as broadly as I could. “Please.”

The Lazarian put its six-digit hands on top of its sacklike head. “If Entwa-ahter is dead by one of us, wha-aht then?”

I glanced at Entwater again. From this distance, it was hard to see the details of the marks on her throat, but they could have been made by one of those Lazarian hands. One would have been enough—like the rest of their limbs, those digits were long and multijointed, and could have gone all the way around a human neck easily. “This is your embassy,” I said, “which means that, to us, it is a piece of your nation. We would trust you to serve your own justice in this matter.”

Stilton was looking at me as though I was crazy. I didn’t blame him. All of a sudden, I was talking like a hollie version of a diplomat. I couldn’t help it; something about the Lazarians was making me go into awkward-formal mode.

The Lazarian put a hand on top of the ‘viewer, much to Stilton’s shock. “Truth ma-ah-chine.”

I gave Farber a sidelong glance. “What now?”

Farber swallowed twice. “It would seem that Thinta-ah wants you to use the ‘viewer on them.” He gestured at the Lazarians standing around Entwater.

Stilton coughed. “I don’t think it’ll work. We’re—ah—” He turned to the Lazarian “—We’re too different.” I could tell he was trying to imagine how those sackheads would register. The ‘viewer worked on interpreting a lot of little things—facial expression, blood flow, temperature, eye and muscle movements, pulse, respiration, vocal quality and inflection, choice of words, context, and some other things I didn’t have to bother remembering. It wasn’t infallible, we’d all been told, but in my experience, I have yet to see anyone beat it, not even the most hardened pathological liars. We were allowed to use it only to determine probable cause for search and/or arrest, not to determine official guilt or innocence, so it wasn’t any more admissible in court than the old lie-detector results had been, but it was useful enough.

“Can converrrt,” said the Lazarian. “Ha-ahve progra-ahms to converrrt for our species.”

Stilton held the ‘viewer protectively close to his chest, giving me a desperate look.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’d have to call—”

Farber swallowed. “Weren’t you told to take every measure necessary to wrap this up as quickly as possible?” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “Do you want to think about the repercussions of having an unsolved murder in the Lazarian embassy? They’ll have to call out the National Guard to protect this place, and all of us will still be trapped inside of it. And that includes you and your partner. The door is booby-trapped. Something sonic. Break the plane from this side, and you’ll drop like a rock. When you wake up, you’ll have the worst headache of your life.” He jerked his head at the group of humans. “Some of them tried it. Ask them if they’ll try it again. Get it through your head: no one is going to leave here until this is settled, and if it takes months, that’s not Thinta-ah’s problem.”

“All right,” I said. All right for now. Call in a siege team? I’d never get that O.K.‘d. I’d have to see about locating the control for the doorway knockout, and figure out how to disable it later. That would probably cause an international incident—interstellar incident?—but not as major an incident as a siege team storming the place.

I looked at the Lazarian, but that face was unreadable. As usual. It was actually the outer surface of a kind of flexible exoskeleton that covered the whole head, featureless except for irregular, opaque black patches where the eyes and mouth would be. I’d read somewhere that the exoskeleton thickened and then thinned out again on some cycle that was individual to each Lazarian, but no one knew what caused it or what it meant to the Lazarians, except that they referred to what lay beneath it as the “true face,” which was never to be shown to another living being, not even if its owner was dead. Which I thought begged the question: what was the point of having a so-called “true face” if nobody could ever see it?

Something teased at the edge of my mind. I looked over at the Lazarians still motionless around the corpse. Was the penalty for seeing a “true face” immediate death?

Everyone was staring at me expectantly. “I should still probably call in for authorization,” I said weakly.

“Ca-ahll,” said the Lazarian, and it wasn’t granting me permission, but giving me an order.

I took the cellular off my belt and punched the speed dial for the direct line to the captain. The subsequent conversation was almost as brief.

“She says it’s a go,” I said, clipping the phone back onto my belt. Stilton looked outraged for half a second, and then wiped all expression from his face. For some reason, ‘viewer operators get extremely possessive about their baby. Normally Stilton wouldn’t even let me hold his. “Let’s get the program and convert the ‘viewer for Lazarians.”

Farber looked distressed as he swallowed. “Well, I’ve just thought of a problem.”

I winced. “Only one. What a relief.”

“It’s a big one. The program is in Ms. Entwater’s office upstairs. Everyone who was in the embassy at the time of Ms. Entwater’s death is now here in this room, Lazarians and humans alike. We may not leave this room, not any of us.”

“Why not?” I said, looking at Thinta-ah.

“Bee-cauzzzzeh,” the Lazarian replied, still using the command voice.

“Oh,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound sarcastic, and looked at Farber. “Any ideas?”

He took a long time swallowing. “We could call a courier to fetch the program for us. Of course, the courier will have to stay here with us afterward.”

“We’ll charge the overtime to the embassy,” I said, reaching for my cellular again.

The courier business took a little longer, since the courier made the mistake of first entering the room we were all in, forcing me to have to call out for another. Forewarned, the second courier put the program chips in an envelope and tossed it to me through the open doorway.

“Go to it,” I said, handing the envelope to Stilton. His face had a slightly greenish cast to it.

“Before I fool with the ‘viewer and quite possibly break it, maybe we should talk to the humans,” he said.

“Our species firnnst,” said Thinta-ah, and it was another command. I wanted to object. Across the room the half dozen human employees were also still huddled together, albeit less closely. Except for the Pilot, who had gotten tired of sitting and was now leaning against the wall behind the others, smoking a cigarette in a long holder. She looked happy, but all Pilots look happy all the time. It’s something that happens to them as a result of their training. Maybe after that first trip, they never really “came back,” so to speak.

“Do as you’re told,” Farber said to Stilton, managing to sound apologetic. “I’ve got a wife, a husband, and three children I’d like to see again before I’m much older, and I imagine you both have families as well.”

I cleared my throat. In Stilton’s case, that had been the wrong appeal to make; his significant others had voted him out three weeks before, and he was still stinging from it.

But instead of giving Farber the evil eye, he went to work on the ‘viewer, even allowing me to steady it for him while he changed chips.

It took Stilton about half an hour to get everything synchronized and in phase and whatever else—I’m no more of a techie than I am a diplomat, though I suspected the last fifteen minutes he spent on running tests and diagnostics was nothing but pure stalling.

“I guess it’s ready,” he said at last. “But even with all these adjustments and conversions for Lazarian biology, I don’t know how well it’s going to work with an exoskeleton.”

“No ex-oh,” said Thinta-ah, coming over to stand too close again. “True faaaa-aice.”

The Lazarians gathered around Entwater made no perceptible physical movements, but something in the air changed. Everybody felt it, even the humans on the other side of the room. It was similar to the sudden presence of ozone before a lightning strike (don’t ask me how I know about that unless you’re ready for a story longer than this one), and for a moment, I thought I could actually feel my hair stand on end.

“I know your custom of not showing the true face,” I said to Thinta-ah. “How—”

Thinta-ah made Stilton cringe by touching the ‘viewer again. “Not a-ahlive.”

“You’ll allow a recording that we can look at?” Stilton said, amazed.

“A-ahllow to look a-aht recording one time,” the Lazarian said, making a strange movement something like a full-body shrug. The clothing, as loose, mismatched, and wrinkled as anything that ever came out of a Goodwill free bin, seemed to readjust itself on the Lazarian’s loose-jointed body, somehow acquiring even more wrinkles. Wrinkles especially seemed to be their fashion statement. The Lazarians around the corpse still didn’t move, but I knew they were unhappy. Not just unhappy, but unhappier than they had ever been in their lives. I tried to imagine an equivalent for myself—being forced to strip naked in public seemed obvious, but I knew this was a lot more than a nudity taboo.

My gaze fell on the ‘viewer. Maybe more like being exposed with one of these things? “One time,” I said to Stilton. “We’d better make it a good look, then.”

Thinta-ah did some fast organizing. The humans were to sit directly behind the group in the center of the room so they couldn’t possibly see their true faces while they were speaking to the ‘viewer. Very simple solution—just the sort of thing that signals some major complication is imminent.

Stilton and I found a chair for the ‘viewer. He got it aimed at the first Lazarian, fiddled with the focus for a few seconds, and then turned it on. “Anytime,” he told the Lazarian, and turned away, crowding close to me as Thinta-ah crowded close to him.

In the long pause that followed, I could hear the Lazarian removing the exoskeleton. It was a ghastly sound, like cloth ripping, and I wondered if it hurt. Anything that made a noise like that seemed like it had to hurt.

“You a-ahsk,” said Thinta-ah.

I cleared my throat. “What is your name?”

“Simeer-ah,” said the Lazarian. I felt Thinta-ah stiffen. The last syllable indicated this was some relative of Thinta-ah’s, but not which kind.

“How are you connected to—”

“A-ahsk only about Entwa-ahter!” Thinta-ah practically shouted.

I hesitated, wanting to explain about establishing a pattern, and knowing at the same time that Thinta-ah wasn’t buying. A Lazarian’s true face was exposed in the presence, if not the sight, of others, and to them, this was much more urgent than a murder. Any murder.

I could have sworn I heard Farber swallow from across the room. “Do as you’re told,” he called from where he stood facing the now-closed door with the courier.

Behind me the exposed Lazarian made a small noise. I’d never heard the sound before, but I knew instinctively that the alien was weeping. A wave of compassion mixed with shame swept through me—not the best thing for a cop to feel during a murder investigation, if I’d felt sorry for everyone who ever cried during questioning, there’d have been a few more hardheads running free who had gotten away with murder and worse.

I took a deep breath. “What do you know about the death of Celie Entwater?”

“I a-ahm responsible.”

My shamed compassion turned to cold water. “Are you saying you killed her?”

“It is my fault.”

“Are you saying you killed her?” I asked again.

Stilton shrugged. “First time’s a charm, I guess,” he whispered.

“You strangled Celie Entwater?” I persisted.

“I ha-ahve the blaaaaaa-aimmeh.”

“Stop now,” said Thinta-ah softly. “Next.”

I gave up. “All right. We’ll wait while you cover yourself.”

Damnedest thing—the exoskeleton made the same ripping-cloth sound going back on as it had coming off. My nerves felt sandpapered. And I had to hear that noise only nineteen more times.

No, sixteen more times, I discovered after it was safe to turn around again. Stilton aimed the ‘viewer at the next Lazarian. The first one looked no worse for the experience—outwardly, anyway. There was nothing like sweat or blood: the exoskeleton appeared unchanged. But the Lazarian’s body looked a little more relaxed, the kind of posture you see in people who finally confess to a crime and find they’re more relieved at being able to get it off their chests than they are frightened of being punished. Maybe the first time really had been a charm.

Then the second Lazarian said exactly the same thing, and the world rearranged itself into the form it always took during a criminal investigation. The world is full of liars; liars who say they’re sorry, and liars who say they’re not; liars who swear they’ve never done it before, and liars who promise they’ll never do it again. Apparently, some things were universal—literally.

By the time the sixth one confessed, Stilton had taken over the questioning, and my cynicism felt like a drug reaching toxic levels in my system. The only thing I actually listened to after number seven was that ripping-cloth sound. There was some kind of cosmic irony at work here, I thought; expose your true face and then tell a lie. Gave a deeper meaning to the term barefaced liar—that was for sure.

What I wasn’t sure about was why it was affecting me so intensely.

Maybe because I secretly suffered from the ailment of poor species self-image, believing that aliens must be truly superior forms of life to flaw-ridden humanity, and they’d shattered my illusions of their being closer to the angels. What was that old joke that had made the rounds back when the Lazarians had first arrived? An optimist thinks humans could be the highest form of life in the universe; a pessimist knows they are. Right. Try this one, I thought bitterly: an optimist thinks all beings are siblings; a pessimist knows they are. And the name of the first sibling, in any language anywhere, was Cain.

“Still awake?” Stilton asked me suddenly.

I managed not to jump at the sound of his voice. “Yeah. Just.”

“Good. Last confession coming up,” he said, fiddling with the ‘viewer on the chair. Without my noticing, the lights on the room had come up in response to the waning daylight. Through the frosted windows, I could see that it was nearly dark. With any luck, we might get out by dawn, I thought wearily. And when we did, I was going to ask for a transfer out of homicide and go chase burglars for a while, or drug addicts, or people who never paid their parking tickets.

“One more time,” Stilton said, assuming the position.

The sound of ripping cloth. If this one was going to lie about Entwater, too, then I hoped it hurt.

But number seventeen was apparently a rebel in the group. “Fa-ahr-ber,” the last Lazarian said. “Fa-ahr-ber is at fault.”

“What a relief,” I said. “I was afraid sixteen Lazarians had taken turns choking someone to death. But it turns out that the man dressed like a butler did it. Can’t wait to alert the media.”

Thinta-ah suddenly came back to life and told Farber to send out for pizza. Apparently, pizza was the closest thing we had to a Lazarian native dish. That didn’t cheer me, or even give me an appetite, though I knew I should have been hungry.

And thirsty. The humans were—they all looked as if they’d spent the day in a desert, except for the Pilot, who seemed as completely detached and unaffected as ever. And yet, it was the Pilot who informed us that there were new problems developing with the humans.

She came over while we were setting up the ‘viewer on a side table so we could go over the recordings. “We have people in very serious need,” she said, pointing her cigarette holder at them.

“Of what?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew the answer, but the Pilot was already telling me.

“Of toilets. Some are in real pain,” she added cheerfully. I wanted to hit her.

Instead, I talked to Farber. His response made me want to hit him. “Thinta-ah knows,” he said. “Arrangements were made before you got here.” He pointed at a large ornamental flowerpot in the corner. “It only looks like a flowerpot,” he added, as if reading my mind. “It’s a, ah, Lazarian waste receptacle. The Lazarians are,—ah” swallow—” casual about this kind of function.”

“Oh, really? I said. “I sure haven’t seen any of them use it.”

Swallow. “They need to only every other week. This isn’t the week.”

I went to the humans and broke it to them myself. One of them, a middle-aged man, shook his head stubbornly without looking up at me. But a woman of about sixty shrugged, marched over to the receptacle, and pointedly turned her back. The anger was almost palpable, and I knew what kind of stories they were all going to tell when they were finally allowed to leave. Lazarian-human diplomatic relations could well end up being harmed more by the bathroom arrangements than by a murder, I thought, going back to Stilton. Even terrorists would take their hostages to the bathroom.

Or, I thought, looking at Thinta-ah, who was being careful to look anywhere but toward the corner, had humans just come that much closer to understanding the experience of exposing the true face?

Understanding? I doubted it. They’d remember it, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that would generate much empathy.

“One look,” Thinta-ah reminded us when we were ready to look at the recordings.

“Only one,” Stilton said. He had half a pizza next to him, and he was feeling better, much better than the delivery person who had come into the room before we could warn her. She sat sulking with the first courier. I wondered if anyone besides the employees’ families, a courier service, and a pizza parlor had picked up on the fact that there was something funny happening at the Lazarian embassy. My cellular had been strangely silent—no one calling for an update or a statement or anything at all. Maybe we were sitting under a governmental bell jar—families, courier service, pizza parlor, and all.

“I’ll need to freeze each image sometimes,” Stilton told Thinta-ah. “Is that all right?”

The answer was so long in coming that I thought Thinta-ah had gone to sleep standing up again. “Yes. A-ahll right. One time through.”

Stilton sighed with relief, turned on the ‘viewer, and picked up a slice of double shitake mushroom. The screen lit up, and he dropped the pizza in his lap. If I’d had an appetite, I’d have had pizza in my own lap.

The face on the screen was Entwater’s.

Stilton slammed down the freeze button. “What did you do?” I whispered angrily. “Did you get the focus upside down and put it on her?”

“You can see I didn’t, he said, too spooked to be offended. “That’s not the image of a dead person. That face is animated; it’s moving, talking. Look at the readings.” He pointed at the box on the left side of the screen. “They say living, not dead.”

I looked from the screen to Thinta-ah on the other side of the table. “Could this possibly be this Lazarian’s true face?”

“I maaaaa-aiy not look,” Thinta-ah said. “But wha-aht faaaa-aice you see must be the true one.”

I got up and went around the table to the alien. “Listen,” I whispered. “The face on that screen is—”

“Do not tell me,” said Thinta-ah. “I maaaaaaaay not know. Wha-aht faaaaaa-aice is there is true.”

I tried to think. It was hard with the heavy garlic smell drifting over from the platter next to Stilton. “O.K. The face on that screen cannot possibly belong to one of your species, but to another one entirely, and to a certain being—”

“I maaaaaay not know!” Thinta-ah’s voice echoed in the room, not the command voice this time, but a cry of anguish. Everything stopped. Over by the Rockwellesque mural of the first meeting between human and Lazarian, Farber straightened up from a whispered conversation with the courier and pizza delivery person to glare at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said to Thinta-ah, and bowed. “I was . . . I was ignorant.”

The Lazarian refused to look at me. I went back around the other side of the table and sat down next to Stilton, feeling as if I had just defiled somebody else’s church with a rite from my own. And I didn’t even go to church.

The association caught in my mind like a burr. Was this religious?

Discounting hobby killers and for-hires, people tend to take a life over matters having to do with love/sex and personal offenses, real or imagined. Our people . . . but the Lazarians?

I beckoned impatiently to Farber, who hurried over. “Can I ask Thinta-ah about Lazarian psychology?”

Swallow (of course).

“No.”

I groaned. “Why not?”

“You’re not a psychologist. Besides, they don’t actually have any.”

“What are you talking about? They must. Everybody has psychology. Animals have psychology.”

“Well, yes, they have it”—swallow—“but they don’t have it as a science or a discipline or whatever you want to call it. The study of psychology is unknown on their world.”

“But they must have something.”

Farber nodded. “They do. They have true faces.”

“That’s a big mother’s help,” I said. “You want to know what true face that Lazarian on the end over there has?”

He started to protest that he wasn’t allowed to look, and I waved his words away.

“Never mind. You wouldn’t believe it if you did see it.” He started to walk away, and I caught his arm. “Hey, stay close, will you? I’m working without a net here.”

“We all are,” he murmured.

“The verdict is in,” Stilton said, sitting back. “According to the ‘viewer, this alien is telling the truth.”

I stared at Entwater’s image on the screen, still frozen. She had been a very attractive woman; at least one of her parents had had relatives from Japan, and whatever else was mixed with it had blessed her with the kind of features that age well. Damned shame they wouldn’t have a chance to age any further—or would they? Did true faces age? Supposedly, no one knew. Supposedly. But someone must have. There had to be some Lazarian keeper of forbidden knowledge . . . didn’t there?

I gave up that line of thought as futile. If there were any such Lazarians, they were most likely back on Lazarus, or La-ah-ZA-AHR-eesh, or whatever the hell it was.

“What do you want to do?” Stilton asked me. “You want me to let this picture go and see the next?”

“Are you done looking at it?”

“Are you?” He ran a hand through his black curls. “Remember, we’re never going to see it again, so make sure you’ve seen your fill.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said as he unfroze the image. The corresponding readings in the box were holding, waiting for the video to catch up.

“What do you mean?” Stilton said.

I pointed at the ‘viewer. “That’s what I mean.”

I could actually see Stilton break into a sweat as Entwater’s face reappeared.

“Why are you surprised?” I said. “They all said the same thing.” I looked at Farber. “All except one.”

Farber gazed back at me, swallowing without comprehension. Apparently, the last Lazarian’s voice hadn’t carried over to him. Or he hadn’t been paying attention.

This time we ran the video concurrent with the lie-detector program; I watched the face while Stilton kept track of the readings. I wanted to imprint that face on my mind. It wasn’t quite identical to the other one, but the differences were minor—the width of the face, the length of the nose, the size of the chin. That figured—each Lazarian’s head would be a different size, so the face on it would be sized to fit. The Procrustean face. No, the true face on the Procrustean head.

Stilton sighed unhappily. “This one’s telling the truth, too. Or so it says here. The program must be defective, though how we’d ever be able to tell—” He sighed again.

“Keep going,” I said. “Maybe we’ll see a variation somewhere.”

Stilton gave me a dirty look. “Yah.”

“We’ve already seen some.” I leaned close and whispered. “That face isn’t completely identical to the first one. There are variations, almost too minor to see, but they are there. What about the readings?”

He called back the first set for comparison. “You’re right. But the variations are all physiological. They have two pulses, and they have respiration and skin temperatures, and they show the same degrees of variation from one Lazarian to another that we show one human to another. In all standard healthy people, anyway.”

“So let’s see if maybe someone isn’t standard healthy.”

Now he almost smiled. “I like you better than I used to, all of a sudden,” he said, and focused his attention on the ‘viewer again.

But of course, I had just been overly optimistic. Entwater’s face appeared, confessed, disappeared, and reappeared over and over without any telling variations. That was probably telling—except, we couldn’t understand what it was telling.

At least the seventeenth Lazarian looked like Farber. I took great consolation in the fact that my certainty had been correct. It didn’t make up for the fact that the ‘viewer said that that Lazarian was also telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—but you can’t have everything.

“The program’s got to be defective,” Stilton said, replacing Farber’s facsimile with the seventeen readings. “We might as well switch programs, record all the humans, and then get comfortable in our new home. We’re going to be here quite a while, and we might as well get over our potty shyness as soon as possible.”

“No,” I said, standing up and looking at Thinta-ah. Farber took a step toward me, and Stilton rose to his feet in response, moving to protect my left.

“I understand your feelings about the toilet,” he said, “but don’t go losing your head over it now.”

“I mean, no, the program’s not defective—not, no, I won’t use the toilet. “I went over and stood as close as possible to the Lazarian, who didn’t move away. “The program’s incomplete. We don’t have a control.”

“A what?” said Farber suspiciously.

“A control,” I said, staring up at Thinta-ah. “A standard to measure the other Lazarians against.”

Stilton practically jumped over the table.

“Same arrangements as for the other Lazarians,” I said. “Thinta-ah, it’s your turn in the barrel.”

“It’s already been Thinta-ah’s turn,” said Stilton, sounding scared.

The Lazarian lunged past me for the table, but Stilton already had the ‘viewer in his arms. “Back off,” he said, moving away, “or I’ll turn this around and show everyone in the room what’s on the screen.”

Stretched out across the table, Thinta-ah hesitated and then straightened up slowly. “You maaaaaaaay not see.”

“I’ve seen,” Stilton said. “You didn’t say every Lazarian but you.”

“No. I did not.” Thinta-ah backed away from the table, but Stilton didn’t budge. Instead, he beckoned me over and pulled the ‘viewer away from his chest.

Thinta-ah had apparently been either the consummate diplomat or completely undecided. His true face was a grotesque mixture of Entwater’s and Farber’s. What made it grotesque was not that it had a patchwork aspect, but that it was fluid—as if his features had been in the process of melting or flowing from one face to the other and had somehow froze in mid-change.

“I punched to create a control file, and the ‘viewer informed me that one already existed,” Stilton said as I studied the screen. “So I called it up, and: olé.”

“Voilà,” I corrected him.

In this case, I’d say it rates an olé. But I should have realized it would be here. It was how Entwater created the program, by using Thinta-ah as a control. He must have been teacher’s pet. Diplomat’s pet. Whatever.”

“Freeze it, and let’s hear the audio,” I said. “Unfreeze it when the video and audio are in synch.”

A voice that had to be Entwater’s came out of the small speaker. “What is your name!”

“Thinta-ah.”

“Are you from another planet?”

“Yesss.”

The image on the screen came to life. There were a few more questions. Favorite Earth food? Pizza with heavy garlic in the sauce—true. Last eaten yesterday? No—a lie. It was all very disjointed, but light stuff, like a dating-service application, slightly adapted. But it had served the purpose—the readings were clear. Stilton let it run out, and then put all the readings on the screen together, the seventeen and Thinta-ah’s.

“God damn it,” he said, and blew out a disgusted breath. “Or maybe we should have known that, too—that if there was a control, then the program stands. They’re all telling the truth, or they’re the best liars in the universe.”

“You’re right.”

We both jumped, and Stilton almost dropped the ‘viewer. The Pilot had managed to come right up to us without either one of us knowing. “Right about what?” said Stilton.

She pointed a finger at him, smiling. “You seek the truth. And you”—she swiveled toward me, finger still pointing—“seek the lie.”

“What do you seek?” I said, making sure that Thinta-ah wasn’t sneaking up on my side.

“Resonance, with all that is. Did you hear the one about the Pilot who went up to the hot-dog-o-mat and said, ‘Make me one with everything’ ?”

“That joke is so old, it’s got a long gray beard and a brand-new liver,” Stilton said, eyes narrowing. “It’s at least half a century since the first time someone told it, and it wasn’t a Pilot—”

“It is now.”

That wasn’t a happy expression, I realized—it was a serene one. It was the kind of expression you saw on people who were sure they had all the answers, minus the vacancy of the hard-core cult convert. What was Resonance, anyway? Something about traveling point to point and finding alignment so that two points that seemed to be separated by a great distance actually weren’t . . . or something. It didn’t make any sense to me, but a Pilot was one more thing I wasn’t. If I couldn’t figure out how it worked, I sure couldn’t figure out why it made her so peaceful.

“The Lazarians taught us Resonance,” she said, nodding at me. “And to travel point to point in space, we must travel point to point in here, too.” She pointed her finger at her own forehead now. “You don’t have the correct alignments in here, so you cannot travel point to point, but point to off-point. Dead end. Wander forty years in the desert, and not get out even then.”

She made us sit down again while she perched on the edge of the table, placing the ‘viewer next to her. “They are all telling the truth, and they are the best liars in the universe that you have ever met, because the truth they tell is their truth.”

It was one of the few times in my life that I could say I had experienced satori. And once I saw it, I felt like a total fool for not having seen it to begin with. Most humans couldn’t beat the ‘viewer, because no matter how much they believed in their own lies, they knew that what they believed was at variance with facts that other people knew, and so both couldn’t be true. But the Lazarians were aliens, so of course their concept of the truth would be alien as well.

Alien truth. True faces. The two concepts were whirling around each other in my head, trying to find a basis for connection.

“So what does that mean?” Stilton said. “Somehow they all killed her, or they’re all lying to protect someone?”

The Pilot shook her head. “You don’t understand yet. They taught us Resonance with all things. Because they Resonate, always.”

I couldn’t tell if this was another satori or a continuation. “Entwater liked them. She liked her work.” I glanced at Farber. “And she, in turn, was very popular. So popular that—” I broke off, resting one hand casually on the ‘viewer. “Tell me: was she popular because she liked them, or did she like them because she was popular?”

“That has Resonated into one thing now. It can no longer be determined, because it is no longer distinguishable. All that remains is . . . love. Not the trendy brain chemicals,” she added to Stilton. “Do you Resonate love?”

“You mean, understand it?” I laughed a little. “Does anyone?”

“What do you do? For love. What does it do to you?”

For once, I was at a loss, because I’d never had a long-term relationship or a child. Alone, you can travel faster in a career, but you leave a lot of understanding in the dust that way, too. “Oh, I guess you care about the other person,” I said finally, feeling like a sappy greeting card.

“Yeah. And when they stop loving, they stop caring,” Stilton said gloomily. “Not responsible, all that shit.”

The Pilot’s face lit up even more. I hadn’t thought it was possible. “Responsible. Responsible. Are you always responsible?”

I a-ahm responsible.

It is my fault.

I ha-ahve the blaaaaaa-aimmeh.

Over and over again, sixteen times, from sixteen nearly identical true faces. I almost laughed out loud with the revelation. “They’re guilty, all right,” I said. “That is, they feel guilty, because they felt responsible for her, and they didn’t prevent her murder!”

All the Lazarians gathered around Entwater’s corpse turned their heads to look at me. Except one; the last one, of course.

“Pin a rose on you,” said the Pilot, and patted my hand. “What next?”

“Trouble in Paradise,” I said. “There’s always trouble in Paradise—you can count on it, on any world. Because nobody can be that popular without someone getting jealous.” I got up and walked toward Farber. “Someone got real, real jealous. Killing jealous.”

“No,” Farber said, enraged. “Jealous, yes—she had them all eating out of the palm of her hand, practically—but I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—”

“And he didn’t,” said Stilton. “We haven’t looked at the readings for his third recording, but I’d bet my life that they say he’s as truthful as those from the other two recordings.”

“I know that,” I said, keeping my gaze on Farber. “He’s not a good liar. Not that good, anyway. And he’s not an alien. And he didn’t have it quite right a minute ago—Entwater didn’t have them all eating out of her hand, just almost all. You made a friend. One out of eighteen, not too popular, but a very, very devoted friend. A friend who loves you enough to be responsible for you. For your happiness. For your sadness. And for your anger and jealousy and hate.”

Farber’s mouth was hanging open. I turned toward Stilton. “Number seventeen’s our murderer.” I paused. “For a minute there, I was about to tell you to get out the cuffs, but then I remembered. Diplomatic immunity. We have to leave it up to Thinta-ah to administer any justice—poor Thinta-ah, the consummate diplomat of the Lazarian species, torn between both of them.”

To my surprise, Thinta-ah didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed. On a human the body language would have screamed pride. Aliens; go figure.

Stilton looked from the Lazarians in the group to the Pilot and then to me. “Are you sure?”

“Think about it,” I said. “If they were all to blame for not preventing her death, who was really to blame for causing it? A Lazarian in love? Or the one the Lazarian was in love with?” I turned back to Farber.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I had no idea.” He frowned. “How did you?”

I opened my mouth, and then realized I couldn’t tell him. “The truth was staring me in the face all along,” I said after a long moment. “I just had to recognize it for what it was.”

Farber spread his hands helplessly. “I don’t understand.”

“I know. But one tip before we all get out of here.” I pulled him closer by his lapel. “Quit this job. You’re not suited for this kind of diplomacy. Really. I know this.”

“I’m not a diplomat; I’m a secretary. I can get another secretarial job anywhere. But this was . . . exotic, exciting. . . .”

“Give it up, Farber,” I said, “or you’re going to find that office politics have suddenly turned fatal on you.”

That seemed to put the fear of God into him. I went back over to the table, where Stilton and the Pilot were still sitting. “I’d say this means we’re free to go.”

“See for yourself,” said the Pilot, and gestured at the center of the room. The group of Lazarians around Entwater had broken formation and were moving slowly away from the corpse, clustering in smaller groups of twos and threes. Space density. As if they had to breathe each other’s air or something.

“Everyone maaaaaaaaaay leave,” said Thinta-ah, bowing to us. “The door is now in service.”

“And the truth shall set you free,” Stilton muttered, committing everything in the ‘viewer to long-term storage formats and then shutting it down.

“Not bad,” I said. “In an awful kind of way.”

“That’s what the truth is supposed to do,” he said stubbornly, pulling out the ‘viewer strap so he could hang it on his shoulder. “That’s what it’s for. Right?” he added to the Pilot.

The Pilot folded her hands briefly. “What is truth?” She went back to the group of humans, who were all just starting to get warily up from their chairs.

I stared after her.

“What?” said Stilton.

“True faces. Celie Entwater died for human sins. Jesting Pilot.”

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing. Let’s get out of here.”

IN THE STONE HOUSE

Barry N. Malzberg

11/22/63 Joe Kennedy, Jr. wipes the stock of the rifle again, his hands shaking, then, dissatisfied, breaks it open for the third time, making sure that the shells are still there, that the trigger is properly positioned. He reassembles the gear slowly, cursing the damned M-1, cursing his own stupidity in putting so much dependency upon a weapon which was no damned good. He should have had better equipment, not relied on the old Army supply service. But then getting better equipment would have brought some attention and he didn’t want that. You had to carry this on in secrecy. Joe Kennedy, Jr. knows all about secrecy now, has counted upon it, has made it his mistral and the source of all his splendor. Too late, Jack. Too late for all of this, Joe Kennedy mumbles. He positions the cartons on the floor, peers out the window. A scattering of crowd, good, the street cleared, better, no sign of the motorcade yet in the distance. A little behind schedule but nothing ominous. Jack and the powder puff would be along soon enough.

Joe Kennedy, once President of the United States, now reduced (in his own mind if not quite in the estimation of the press) to sniveling bum, sniveling potential assassin, perches on the sixth floor of the Dallas School Book Depository, waiting for the presidential motorcade. He will sight his rifle on his brother’s tousled head, hope for the best, pull the trigger. It is a difficult business, assassinating your younger brother, crazier yet if you are an ex-President of the United States, 1952-1956, which raises fratricide to the level of lunacy but there you are. It is the last great service, Joe knows, which he can perform, not only for patrimony but for the country. Jack is out of control, the arrogant little bastard had never been trustworthy in the first place but to a certain point he had been manipulable, now he was no longer.

You had to save the plan, that was all: the plan was all that mattered and Jack had broken the plan, shattered everything, the bastard. Joe thought of this, thought of that, considered all of the dreadful but necessary implications of his position, watching the sun drop little pools of uneven light on the dusty surfaces of the cartons of books, feeling the old clarity coming back. It had been a long time since he had felt this level of control but here it was, at last he knew what he was after, what had to be done. In the distance, he thought he could hear the sound of shouting, the thin tremor of drums and then as he arched his body, peered awkwardly out the window, he could see the thin movement of the crowd which could only indicate, yes, that the motorcade was coming. His breath was high in his throat, perched there like some enormous bird. Joe felt alive, felt more in possession of himself than he had in this long, dreadful exiled time. Well, he would wait it out, that was all. This was a serious business. There was nothing frivolous about it. The time for frivolity was gone.

11/22/46 I don’t want it, Joe Jr. said to Jack, the big strapping jock. I was never cut out for politics. This is ridiculous. Jack laughed at him, winked riotously, hit him on the back. You may not be cut out for it, Jack said, but you got it. Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Shake ’em up good, Joe. You’re a fucking war hero.

Going to be a lot of war heroes down there, Bobby said. War heroes are going to be a dime a dozen right through the decade. Sure going to be a shake-up time there, right, Dad?

Oh sure, Joe Sr. said, beaming at the three of them. Joe hadn’t seen the old man in this kind of mood on land since before the war. This was what they called a family, the four of them getting together after the election to figure out what the right move would be. But that was all a bunch of crap, Joe knew, all the old man wanted to do was to look at them and gloat. His three sons, the Congressman ready for his first term, everything lining up after the war just as the old man had promised. Feels good, doesn’t it? the old man said. Well, it’s a way to welcome the boys home, right? I promised you a homecoming.

I didn’t want this, Joe Jr. said. Going up against the old man was a losing cause but he had to go on the record, if he had taken bombers out over Germany then he could go up against the Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Couldn’t he? But it was all crap, he couldn’t stand up to it. No one could, the old man rode you down one way or the other and you just had to take it. I could get used to it though, he said.

Oh, you can get used to it, the old man said. Power is fun, even if a freshman Congressman hasn’t got any. And the living is easy.

Lots of women, Jack said. Don’t forget the women. You never forgot anything, Bobby said. In your whole life you let nothing go by. I think I’ll bail out of this, Dad, Bobby said. I have business downtown.

We have business to settle, the old man said. You’ll go in a few minutes, when I say you can. Joe, I want a staff put together. You know the names, but I’d like to hear what you have to say if you have any ideas.

Oh, I have ideas, Joe said. I have lots of ideas. You’ll never listen to any of them. Hyannisport, Joe thought. It always comes back to Hyannisport. Wherever you go, however hard you fly, whatever risks you take, you wind up in a room in a house on the beach where the old man tells you what to do. Why don’t you just go ahead and fix it? he said to the Ambassador. I’m sure anything you want is okay with me.

I’ll tell you this right now, Jack said. I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to go to Washington and I don’t want to be anyone’s aide-in-waiting. I’m going to go back to school.

You think so, the Ambassador said. You think that’s really the plan?

I’ll get a graduate degree, Jack said. I always wanted to teach history. Maybe I’ll go to law school. He yawned. No Congress for me, he said, no agenda, no roll calls, no quorums. I had enough of that on the high seas, thank you very much.

I’m too young, Bobby said. Don’t look at me, Dad. It may be a young man’s country again, but Joe can’t have a twenty-two-year-old assistant. Besides, they’ll just say that I got put on the payroll to keep me off the streets.

You see? Joe said to the Ambassador, it’s a family revolt. Your sons are standing up and being counted. No aide-de-camp in the room, no assistant either. So just go ahead and get the Honey Fitz delegation, because I don’t give a shit. It’s all the same to me.

You’re a defiant prick the old man said. You know that? I give you everything and you shit on me. You think a few stripes, a couple of bombs, and you’re hot shit. Well, you’re the same little bum you were before the war, you know? Who do you think pulled you those assignments?

Joe felt the old anger. Hyannisport, Hyannisport, throwing sand at the beach, they could get you every time. That seemed to be part of the deal, you thought you could get away from it but the old man could always get you back.

Leave me alone, Joe said. Just leave me alone. You wanted me to run for Congress, I ran. You wanted me to make speeches, I made war hero speeches. You want a staff, appoint a staff. Just leave me out of it, you know? You don’t give a damn anyway, so just have it your way. Bobby said, Joe, calm down. It’s okay.

He’s just ragging you, Jack said. That’s his way. You know that he means well. He’s just kidding you, trying to get you to pay attention, right, Dad? But I think we should ease off, go for a swim or something.

You’ll go when I say, the Ambassador said. Jack you’re going to Washington with him. There’s no time to waste and there’s no time to screw around either. Bobby, you can go to law school, we won’t need you for a few years but you’re going to check in and stay close.

I don’t want any part of this, Jack said. I want to study history, be a professor at Wellesley. Maybe Duke. Show the girls the way through the New Deal or maybe the Middle Ages. I’ve had all the goddamned politics I’ll ever want. Jack paused, looked at the Ambassador, then took out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead slowly. I really am going to Washington, he said. You really mean it, don’t you? The academy is just a dream, isn’t it?

Just about, the Ambassador said. I told you, we have no time for that. We have to get down to cases. There’s a country out there.

Oh, there’s a country out there, Joe Jr. thought, it’s been out there for a hundred and seventy years now, waiting for us. And now the Ambassador figures it’s about time that he took it. The sprawl of the land, the heat of the old man’s need, the sense of injustice tilted within him, and for a moment it was as if the walls had come down and he could see everything, could see what was in store for all of them, the poor, foolish damned Ambassador too, but then mercifully the walls went up again and he could see only the bare surfaces of the conference room in Hyannisport. You really do mean it, don’t you, he said, you meant it all.

From the start, the Ambassador said. Before you were ever born. Before I was ever born, I meant it. And you too, Joe. You mean it. Because you’d better.

11/22/63 It wasn’t easy, Joe Kennedy, Jr. thinks, to progress from President to one-term President to ex-President to sniveling bum to assassin all in a seven-year period, it was an arc of history which refracted by opposites the old man’s journey and might have been thought impossible if he, Joe Kennedy, Jr., hadn’t proven that it was possible. But you had to work at it, you really did have to put your best attention to it because the country loved the few ex-Presidents it had so very much and paid such kind attention to them. But it helped if your younger brother had succeeded you as President and had found his own distinction and style in such a way as to absorb your own traces, and it also helped if you really needed to escape, if you needed somehow to sink back into the morass that his life had become since the Ambassador had looked at him in 1956 and had pulled the plug. You’re through, laddie, the Ambassador had said, you’ve gone as far with this as you’re going to go. You are not going to run in November, you are going to announce your withdrawal in Jack’s favor right now, or things will get very hot for all of us. Do you understand that? Joe had understood it very well.

He had always understood the Ambassador. Maybe that was the problem, his father had been refractory of Joe Jr. from the start; Joe had felt not exactly like an extension of the Ambassador but simply a spare part, something extra that could be screwed in, unstuck, manipulated, it didn’t matter, he was always around. Sometimes he had wanted to stand up to the Ambassador, he had given him a mild push in 1946 when he hadn’t wanted to run for Congress, but that had collapsed pretty soon and then he had fought a little harder in ’48 when the Ambassador had said that now was the time to go for the Governor’s chair, a really shitty job then and now. In ’51 Governor Joe Kennedy, Jr. had really struggled when the Ambassador had said, okay, now is the time, Truman is out of the way and we are going to stick it to this ignorant old general and take the presidency. For a few wild moments Joe had thought that he would beat down the Ambassador through simple expediency, make a speech in the Capitol like Silent Cal had in 1919 and simply pull down the temple, but he hadn’t been able to do it then either. There was something very persuasive about the Ambassador, very tough, very ungiving. Ask Rose, ask Kathleen. Well, ask Rose now anyway. Ask Bobby if you could find him. That had been the worst of it, going out for the presidency, going through the worst imaginable campaign and the terrible events of the convention when he had had to break Adlai open right there in front of everyone, but since then it had gotten a little easier. It always got easier when you simply gave up, Jack had warned him and it was true, nothing had been as bad as that struggle in ’52 and the convention, even ’56 when Joe had had the plug pulled on him was easy in comparison. But once he had broken, once he had come down all the way to sniveling bum territory, it had been as if he had an entirely new perspective on things.

The perspective was new every day. Now Joe Jr. had a real grasp of the situation. More and more he was seeing it the Ambassador’s way. Once you gave it up and gave the Ambassador his points, admitted what he was and that he had probably been right all along, everything else fell into line. Still, Joe Jr. knew that he was fucked up in his own mind. He couldn’t figure out if he was doing this for the Ambassador or against him, whether it was his last great service for his father or a terrible act of defiance. It didn’t matter, he supposed. This introspection, this wondering, this internalization, it just got you nowhere in the first place, you had to go on like the Ambassador himself and simply do things. The motorcade was in sight now, he thought he could see it, the lead cars of the agents. The crowd was straggling into separate ragged lines on either side of the street, the first advance patrol car came down the empty street between the barricades. It wouldn’t be much longer now. Joe Kennedy, Jr. fondled the rifle and thought about this and that, thought about the nature of conditions and the question of his own sacrifice. He wanted one clear shot, that was all. One plug, one bolt of revenge, one pure thunderbolt, as Emily Dickinson said, to scalp his living soul. After that he would take his chances just like the rest of the world; he would come into a cause-and-effect world where things simply happened or failed to happen as a result of consequence. Oh Jack, he thought, it could have been different, but even as he murmured this he knew it was bullshit, it could have been no different at all. The old man had worked it out in his head long before any of them were born, had lain on a thousand pillows of resentment running the pictures through his head over and again, and by the time the four sons came along, they were nothing other than aspects of the plan like angels in the mind of God. The whole thing was determinism, that was all. One pure thunderbolt. To scalp his living soul.

10/22/63 I called you in, JFK said, because whatever has happened to us, whatever you’ve become, you’re still a President and you’re my brother. So I want you to know that I’m pulling the plug on all of this. Bobby is not going to get my endorsement. Bobby will never be President.

Joe looked at him. Past security, past the guards, past Salinger and O’Donnell into the Oval Office. Nobody had even looked at him. It had been as if he were dead. Only Caroline had waved at him when she saw her uncle go by. Caroline was probably the last friend Joe Jr. had in the family, now that he thought about it. What are you saying? he said. What does this mean to me?

It means that the dynasty is coming to a roaring halt, JFK said. He smiled at Joe. It means that Bobby is being dismissed from the Cabinet this afternoon. A press release has already been prepared. He is not being allowed to resign, he has been fired as Attorney General, comprende? And I will do everything within my power to make sure that he never runs for office again. The line is running out, Joe. There will be no more.

I don’t understand, Joe said. I truly do not understand. His mind was as clear, as vacant as it had been the day he had been elected in 1952 and had come to understand that he had no agenda, not the shred of an agenda for the eight years of the presidency which stretched before him, and that the Ambassador had no real agenda either, they had been dumped by the wave of history but they were on the beach. Why are you doing this? he said to JFK. And why did you call me here to tell me that? What did you think I could do?

Well, nothing at all, JFK said. Call it a family courtesy. You can tell it to the Ambassador, that’s what you can do for me. Tell it to Old Joe, break the word before he gets it from the radio. No Bobby in his future. The old man will shit a brick, but frankly, that’s his problem. I have no concern for that now.

But why? Joe said. He seemed to be fixed on this point. He somehow couldn’t get beyond it. That was what came from being your old man’s first son, you had to take all of the mistakes, make them so that the others could have a smoother deal. Some deal they had. The deal was me, then you, then Bobby, Joe said. Now you’re breaking the deal. There seemed to be a whining tone to his voice. In just a few moments he would cry. Then what? What did that mean? The crying Mr. President. I can’t tell the Ambassador, Joe Jr. said. He’ll go wild. He’ll kill me.

You’re fifty years old, JFK said. You’ve been the President of the United States. You’re afraid some ancient fart with a cane is going to kill you? Is that what he’s done to us? For what? For what purpose?

But why? Joe said again. Bobby was a good Attorney General. He never gave you any trouble. He got rid of Hoffa. He’s got Hoover held down, the first guy in thirty years to do that. I couldn’t do that. He’s the next in line.

Because the country isn’t our playpen, JFK said, because there has to be something else but the Ambassador’s craziness and our own knee reflexes twitching away. Because it has to be broken sometime. I’m going to go for Lyndon. He’s taken the shit admirably, he’s kept out of the way, he’s even been as polite as an ignorant Texan can be. Let him run the place for a while, I just want to go out and get laid which constitutionally I have to do now anyway. Maybe Lyndon will tame his sex life a little. Whatever he wants, it’s okay with me.

It’s crazy, Joe Jr. said, I’ve never heard such craziness. I can’t believe that you’re telling me this, that I’m here to listen. I wasn’t a very good President. I fucked up, I admit it. The old man was right to tell me that I had to go. I admit it now, I never wanted to be there and the country was done a disservice. You did all right, Jack, in your way, up to a point. You kept Nixon out anyway, and that’s a fact. But now you’re betraying everything. I just don’t get it. I don’t—

Caroline, the President said. Caroline, honey. He extended his arms and the lithe girl bolted from the right doorway, ran toward him giggling. JFK leaned over, scooped up the six-year-old, bounced her in the air. Daddy, Caroline said. Joe could see the glint in their eyes, the same eyes really, the communion between the two. But it’s best, still, he thought, it’s best I didn’t get married, didn’t have children. It wouldn’t have worked out. And I have spared a wife and children the disgrace of my life. I have at least kept the sadness to myself. Say hello to Uncle Joe, JFK said. Your uncle misses you.

I said hello when he came in, Caroline said. She squinted. Uncle Joe is tired, she said. He looks so tired.

We get tired earlier and earlier, honey, JFK said. He put the little girl on his lap, kissed the top of her head, spilled her off. That’s enough, he said. We have to talk now. You can come back and play later.

I’ll play later, Caroline agreed. She came over and kissed Joe on the cheek. I want to play with you later, she said and ran out. Joe stared at JFK, feeling the imprint of the little girl’s lips on him.

It’s enormous, he said, I don’t believe it. This cannot be. This cannot be happening to us.

It was always meant to happen, JFK said. Now I told you. We can sneak you out the back way so that no one knows you were here.

How is Bobby taking it, Joe said, does he know?

JFK grinned. I guess he would know, the President said. I mean, I fired him face to face. It would be difficult to do that and for him not to know, right? Oh, he’s in a ruddy gloom, Bobby is. But he’ll get over it. We all get over it sooner or later. I’ve had my heart broken more times than you were up over Germany, Joe, and I’ve lived to tell the tale. You’ve lived pretty good yourself, and they could have shot you down anytime. Life goes on as long as you have it, that’s all, you know? I’ll get you down the back stairs. Anyway, that’s the deal. How’s your love life? I’ll tell you, it’s never been the same for me since the blonde did herself in. But that’s another story.

Don’t talk to me about the blonde, Joe said. How can you talk about the blonde? This is vile, do you hear me? It is enormous. It is impossible, it is the end of all of us, don’t you see? You have destroyed us.

No, JFK said. He patted Joe’s hand. That’s why you’re still trapped and I’m free now. Because you don’t see it, you never got away, even when he made you quit you were still his property. But I see it and I tell you that this is the making of us. This is the beginning. It is the true beginning of the story. It is the beginning of the Kennedy story and someday you will see that. And now it is time for you to go, brother, but you may take a paperweight from the Oval Office as a reminder of why you no longer miss the place.

10/26/63 He hadn’t been able to reach the old man first, of course. That was impossible. He had put in the call to the compound right after the conversation with Jack but no luck, the word was that the old man was getting physical therapy and couldn’t be bothered. Not even by his son, the ex-President of the United States. Which meant that the old man was fucking or trying to fuck the nurse again. Half of his brain had been shut down, but the old man was still in there fighting and for all Joe Jr. knew he was having a kind of success. You had to give the old man credit, he was in there fighting until the end. In the second place, no one was really returning his calls or picking him up now, it was amazing how far an ex-President could fail if he had been out of office for almost seven years and if he had a brother-successor who was a real bastard. A real maneuverer, that was JFK. Thinking about it could get Joe sick so he tried not to consider what had happened to him, how quickly it had all unraveled. Throttlebottom, wasn’t that the name? the little Vice President in Of Thee I Sing who gave guided tours around the White House wearing a uniform and who had lunch with his mother every day. Joe hadn’t turned into a Throttlebottom, not quite, he could probably seek paying employment and get it if he wanted (he didn’t want it) and probably half the adult population could name his previous occupation, but it was still a hell of a thing.

So he had settled for trying to get through to Bobby. Bobby at least would take his calls, would listen to him, and this time maybe Joe could say a few words to the Attorney General that might be of some comfort. It was a hell of a situation, that was for sure. But Bobby wasn’t available, he was locked up incommunicado somewhere in the Justice Department, maybe with Hoover for all Joe knew, and there was no word on whether he would return the call if ever. So Joe had been absolutely at loose ends, the first time it had been that way for him in years. He literally did not know where to go. Surfacing, showing up in public would be suicide now, the press would be all over him, would want quotes, would want to know what Jack had in mind. The city was exploding, absolutely on fire with this, with the unbelievable news that JFK had ditched his younger brother, the Attorney General, and had announced that he was going to back the Vice President for the nomination. The end of the dynasty, it seemed, the planned succession of Kennedys. Ted had been smart, he was hiding out in the Senate well, holding the gavel for the absent LBJ and denying comment of all kind. Besides, what the hell could a freshman Senator have to say about any of this? Teddy was thirty-one years old, he was in the Senate on a family pass, everybody knew that they had used up every bit of credit this time to sneak him in and if there was a next stop for the dynasty it wouldn’t be at his house for a long time, maybe never. So Joe stayed away from Teddy too. He hung out in the secret apartment on K Street, just him and his one Secret Service guy, sharing a bottle and telling stories about the war yet again, they had both been pilots over Dresden and Secret Service had had worse luck than Joe, had had to make an emergency landing and evade capture over land. It was kind of an interesting story, but Joe was sick of it. He was sick of the whole damned thing, that was the truth, the war and the hero stories and the dynasty and the old man’s plans, all of it, the whole business. There was enough of it now, and with JFK pulling this rotten move there would be nothing but a recycling of all that stuff over and again.

There had been a time, just a few moments it seemed, after his discharge, when Joe thought that he might be free of it. Just as JFK had planned to go on and teach history at Harvard or Tufts or Haverford, hang out some place and be an academic, avoid the whole thing, Joe had thought that he might go to law school and then into pro bono work of some kind, maybe go into the down-and-out district around Scully Square and try to pay back some of Honey Fitz’s debts. It wouldn’t have been a bad life and somewhere along the way there might even have been a woman, one of the succession who would have stock. He could have gotten a subscription to Friday Symphony, gone to Symphony Hall in the early afternoons and sat in the slant light of that cathedral and listened to Brahms, just Brahms and pro bono and one woman who would listen to him but that shimmering little moment had passed when the old man had sat them down early in the year and had laid out the situation. You and you and you. Joe would have tried to balk, but what was the point? No one got anywhere with the old man, Gloria Swanson had been the strongest-willed actress in the world, stronger than Marion Davies had been with the Ambassador’s friend Hearst, and where had it gotten her? She was a slut on a boat, just gash for the old man and that’s how she stayed. If Gloria Swanson couldn’t beat this guy, then Joe who bore his name with the diminishing Jr. below didn’t have a chance. JFK didn’t have a chance, Bobby with his verve and his big eyes was down on the list but he was locked in too. Only Ted among them might have gotten through, he was fourteen years old then and the old man hadn’t noticed him yet.

So Joe had capitulated. Run for Congress? All right he would run for Congress. Spring for the Senate because you had to keep on moving or get shot out of the water? That would be okay too. The presidency? Well, that had been a big leap, the biggest, but the Ambassador had put it to him bluntly. No one is going to beat the general unless we do it, the Ambassador had said, Truman is finished and the Democrats are done for unless they get a complete overhaul. And then what? Do you want that bastard Nixon just a heartbeat away, waiting for the old general to keel over? You know that the general is a figurehead, it will be Nixon and McCarthy running the show and we don’t want that, do we? Joe Jr. had fallen for that, not Nixon so much, a thirty-nine-year-old shit who Joe had gotten to know in the Senate as too much of a nut case to ever be dangerous—but McCarthy in control . . . that was another story. (He hadn’t known the Ambassador’s full cunning, hadn’t measured the Ambassador’s plans.) So okay, he had run. He shrugged. What the hell? It was the presidency, there were people who had been forced to do far worse, like march to their deaths in gas chambers or take rickety planes high in the air to be open targets for every ground gunner in Dresden. You couldn’t complain that being forced to run for the presidency was perdition. All right, Joe had said, all right then. We’ll try it. There was the good possibility they would lose, the general had his points, and if he didn’t lose, how bad could it be? He already knew that he was just keeping the seat warm for Jack, who the Ambassador was beginning to suspect was the real political guy here, the real son-in-waiting. Joe Jr. didn’t care about that either. If they would just leave him alone, he could put it together. Sure he could. That was the plan.

Oddly, it was LBJ who took him out of this recursive brooding, this spiteful hammering at his history, the infinite and repeated measure of the betrayals which had become his post-presidential lot and now seemed in the wake of the Ambassador’s unavailability, JFK’s implacability, Bobby’s invisibility, to be his complete fate. LBJ had turned him up at the secret apartment and had invited him over to Blair House for a confidential talk, just a courtesy he hoped he would get from the ex-President in hope of his continued support. That was LBJ for you, still maneuvering around, even when the maneuvering was unnecessary and made him look silly. But he couldn’t get off the can. All right with me, Joe Jr. said. He told his Secret Service to take the afternoon off and went over on his own. No one seemed to care. Security had really been so lax with the ex-President for years that it was almost as if they had wanted him to get taken down, just end the whole problem. LBJ was full of courtesies, of winks and nods, of little pats on the hand and flourishes with the bottle of Jack Daniel’s which he insisted Joe Jr. partake. I hope, LBJ said, that I can persuade you to put my name in nomination. It would be a great honor.

I don’t know, Joe said, I haven’t thought about it.

A serious honor, LBJ said. Or you can be a second if that’s all you want. Anything you say. It would be a great unifying gesture.

I haven’t thought about it, Joe said. I’m still in shock. I just haven’t worked this out.

Yes, LBJ said, it is sure a shock. That is a boy of many surprises, our Jack, isn’t he? He is one surprising boy in good times and bad. But certainly a good-looking boy and a great President. I hope that I can honor him in succession.

That was LBJ. Blair House, the sitting room, no one there, Claudia knocking around somewhere upstairs, the staff dismissed or in hiding for the afternoon, an audience of one, then, and LBJ was still making speeches. You had to give him all kinds of credit, he never stopped. But wasn’t that the Ambassador’s lesson? You couldn’t let go, you couldn’t let down, not even once, because then you got led into bad habits and soon it would all unravel. So LBJ was still working the territory, audience of one, audience of a thousand, it was all the same. Still, Joe was the ex-President, that should count for something. So maybe he was an audience of a thousand.

Tell me, LBJ said. His cunning features, those of a hound, became even more shrewd, he leaned toward Joe. Fifty-five years old, he had the sudden, frightening ingenuousness of the thirteen-year-old kid in the schoolyard saying to the first grader, I sure could use your lunch money now, so why don’t you pass it over? Why did he do it? LBJ said. What does he have up his sleeve?

I don’t know, Joe said. I really don’t know.

You talked to him. He had you in there the day after he did it, the day after he told me and Bobby what he was going to do. He must have told you something. What is the plan? Is he straight on this?

As far as I know.

Why would he ditch Bobby? Did Bobby do something bad? LBJ said, nudging Joe’s elbow. Was that it, was it some kind of get-even, or to protect him? Because I’ve got to know that. If something comes out when I’m running, in mid-campaign, I ought to know that now. Why would he ditch his own brother?

I can’t answer that, Joe said. I don’t think there’s anything bad, though. I just think maybe that he’s had enough.

Who’s had enough? The President?

JFK, Joe said. He’s had enough of this. Maybe he wants to break the line, you know? My father—

Oh, that Ambassador is something, LBJ said, he is really something. Fighting back from a stroke and all that. Still as stubborn as they come, a real guy. One of my favorite people. He paused. You say Jack has had enough of him?

Maybe, Joe said. Maybe that’s it. I can’t be sure. You have to draw a line somewhere. Maybe Jack has drawn that line.

I don’t know, LBJ said. It’s too deep for me, I’m just a simple son of the South, a man’s man, a drinking derby of one. He lifted the glass. I sure would appreciate your support though, he said. And that’s a fact. Your support would be very important to me. The Kennedys are this country, you know that, don’t you?

Oh, I hope not, Joe said. I hope that’s not the case. But it’s true. Sure you boys are. You put it together. You’re in the movie magazines and the newspapers, you’re on television and you’re a soap opera too. You are America. A poor Southern boy like me, he hardly has a chance to get his name in nomination these days. Which is why Jack astounds me, why I can’t figure this out.

Don’t ask me, Joe said, I am the ex-President. If I could figure things out I would be in a different condition.

LBJ put a hand on his wrist. He wouldn’t double-cross me, would he? he said. That’s what I want to know. This isn’t some slick maneuver, is it, and at the convention Bobby storms it and looks like an opposition candidate when it’s really you all the same? That would be a bad business.

Joe shrugged. I don’t know, he said, I’m out of all this. It’s just headlines and memories to me now.

That stuff with Cuba, LBJ said, that was a pisser. I thought that Bobby was going to shit, I swear. I thought he was going to have a fit right in that office. But the guy went along with the plan in the end, didn’t he? He fell into line. You boys, you all fall into line with each other, no matter how it seems. That’s family, right?

Joe put down the glass, shook it, watched the ice revolve. Maybe, he said. I tell you, I don’t know. You have me up here for a special reason, to pump me for information, and I tell you I can’t give you what you want. I’m going to go now, I’m going to pack it in. Maybe you’ll hear from me later.

A nomination would be a good thing, LBJ said. And there would be something in it for you. How would you like to be Secretary of State? How about that? Or UN ambassador? I’ve had enough of Adlai, I think, we all have. Or how would you like to be your old man and go to the Court of St. James’s? You’d be the first ex-President to do some real government service. Why don’t you think about it? You’re a young man, younger than I, you still got it all ahead of you. We can work out something.

That was it. That was LBJ. He could always work out something, that was the way he saw life, everyone was stumbling around, looking to have an angle or to enact one, and Joe was just part of the party. Any man could be bought, any man could be sold. By all rights of experience, LBJ was on the bail, that was the way it happened. I don’t know, Joe said, I’ll think about it. We can talk about it next year. It’s a long way to the convention.

It’s going to be Atlantic City, LBJ said. That’s where I want it. Jack said it was my choice and that’s it.

Sure, Joe said, sure. There had to be a way out of Blair House. He had been over when he was in office a few times, Sparkman had shown him the corridors and hallways, he ought to remember. Sparkman was good at getting out of Blair House and so was he. He walked. LBJ sat on the chair at attention, his hands folded, peering at him brightly, letting him go unescorted. That was LBJ. Ferally alert, right through to the very end. It got you a reputation and you had to eat a lot of shit along the way, but at the end you were around all right, and there to pick up the pieces. All of the pieces. So much for the succession. Joe snapped back, came away from the parapet, looked no more at the imponderable, unspeakable future, felt himself hurled again and again into the hard wail of the past.

Somewhere back there were the conditions which if only understood could have changed all of this, even yet. Or so he thought. But you never knew. You never knew.

8/28/46 In the stone house at Hyannisport, Joe Jr. had sat with the girl, Rhoda, through the early afternoon and talked, talked through the soft dwindling light cuffing in the windows and into the early dark. They had made love through the morning, past stupor and into that high, fine, dense place which Joe had known only a few times in his life, most of them at high altitude and in dread of imminent death, but this was different. They had only known each other for three days but the connection was there, even a sense of possibility. The campaign was going all right, it was more than a safe seat, it was so easy that even the old man had slacked off on him and had allowed him to take a few days off for what the old man called with a smile, rejuvenation. The big push would begin right after Labor Day, but now there was some time for Rhoda. She was pretty in an unconventional, Wellesley-girl kind of way, the body wasn’t much but she knew how to use it, and beyond that there was something else, something which touched Joe and showed him parts of himself which he had never been convinced were quite there. Knowing that they were there would have been too risky, dangerous maybe, but in this late August the Congressman-to-be didn’t care. Rhoda was a secretary at the Worcester office, detailed to be on the road, just filling in the summer after college while she made decisions about her life, she said, but Joe suspected that she didn’t much care either. Not caring was precious, there was so little of it in life and even then Joe must have known that it would never be happening for him again, that this was a weekend knocked out of eternity.

I don’t understand, she said to him, I don’t understand what it is with you boys. Young men. The three of you. I mean I haven’t met Eddie yet, but it’s probably the four of you. What is it with you and your father?

I don’t know, Joe said. I don’t know what you’re asking. I’ve seen how you talk about him. I’ve seen how you act when he comes to headquarters or gets up on that rostrum with you, I’ve watched Jack’s face, and Bobby’s too. You’re afraid of him, aren’t you? He really scares you, all of you, very badly.

This is not the way to make points with the Congressman, Joe said. You are not playing your cards right if you are looking for my heart.

I’m not looking for your heart, Rhoda said. She held his hand, looked at him with much intensity. I’m looking for you, don’t you know that? I’m trying to find you, Joe, I’m trying to help us both see who you are. You were in the war, you flew planes, dropped bombs, you were a hero. Jack did Navy duty. Bobby didn’t do much of anything but that wasn’t his fault, the two of you boys though were out there making the world free for democracy. What does he have over you?

It’s not fear, exactly, Joe said. It’s not that. The Ambassador—He paused. The Ambassador is a very strong man. He is very insistent. He has big plans and has had them for a long time. Sometimes it is just easier to get out of the way and let him have his plans, you know? It is not worth opposing him.

This makes no sense at all, she said. You know that you’re not a coward. So why are you acting like one? You saved the world for him, Joe. So why do you want to please him so? What is there about him that he holds over you?

Plans, Joe said. He has large plans. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard for anyone outside of the family to understand—

That’s bullshit, she said and smiled at him when she saw him twitch. Bullshit, she said again. You don’t have to be in the family to figure out what he has in mind. He wants you to be President. The first Catholic President. Primogenitor, because you’re the oldest. Then Jack. Then Bobby. Then for all I know, Edward. One, two, three, four. Those are his plans. He’s always had them, from the time his sons were born. He would have drowned his daughters if Rose hadn’t taken on the responsibility for them. Am I shocking you, Joe? You know it’s the truth. Anyone can see it. You talk of his big plans as if it’s some kind of sacred secret, but the fact is that everyone knows it. So why don’t you admit it and decide if you want to play or not? You don’t have to play, you know. You can go off and have a nice life. She squeezed his hand. You’re good-looking. You’ve got lots of money, even if he cuts you off you can make your way. You’re not dumb. You can go and be a professor of history.

That’s Jack’s ambition, Joe said. Not mine. But Jacks not going to make that either.

So what’s yours? Rhoda said. What do you want, Joe?

Congress, he said, I want to go to Congress.

No you don’t.

Sure I do. It will keep me off the streets.

Then the Senate? The Governor’s chair? The presidency? You want that, Joe? Is the whole package set with Jack behind you?

He shrugged. I don’t want to talk about it any more, he said. You’re supposed to be helping with the campaign, not asking questions. You’re very pretty, he said. When the light catches you in a certain way—

Blarney will get you everywhere, she said. But you’ve already been into the sacred trust. I think you have something to think about, she said. I think that you’ve got some very serious thoughts ahead of you. Because this isn’t what you want, Joe, and it’s not too late to pull out. How do you know what I want?

I don’t. But I know what you don’t want and that’s it. Let Jack have it, she said. He’d have taken your place anyway if something had gone wrong. If you had been killed overseas, Jack would have been doing what you are right now. He will anyway. So you can get out of this.

You’re persuasive, Joe said, pretty and persuasive. But I don’t think you understand. There are centuries of family history here, generations of ignorance and slight, the Ambassador and all his forebears working—

I’m not interested in that, she said, I’m interested in you. I haven’t been fucking the Ambassador or Jack all night and all morning, it’s been you. You’re the one I care about and I want you to see, want you to know—

He put a hand on her lips. All right, he said. I understand you. It’s enough. I understand what you’re trying to say. You don’t have to say any more.

But you won’t change, she said, will you? One pretty girl in one afternoon isn’t going to make any difference at all. All those centuries of family history, generations of ignorance and slight, the Ambassador and his forebears working—

You got me, he said, let’s go to bed. Let’s make love. I want to see you. I want to enter you, I want to know—

She stared at him, her eyes round and full. In the stone house at Hyannis in that moment, he felt that he could have touched all the deepest parts of her. Maybe, he said. I don’t know. I’ll think about it. It’s too much to think about. Maybe we have a chance, he said. You don’t know where you’re heading, what this has been, what has become of us. I can only tell you that there’s more here than you can know. But we could try—

She put her arms around him. All right, she said, we won’t talk any more. We won’t say anything more now. I could love you. I don’t love you. Maybe I do love you. I just don’t know, can you see? We don’t know what we are, we have to dig for it. You have to go inside, you have to understand.

Yes, he said, yes, we’ll try, we’ll try to go inside, and in the light and shadow they had come together in that room, not even leaving for the bedroom, and there had been that night and part of the next day too, and then Rhoda had left because her parents would want to know where she had been all these days and she had still been living at home. Then came Worcester and Boston and the tumult of the campaign resumed; it was not as if they simply fell apart, it was not that simple. They saw each other again and they almost came that close again several times, but as October went into November and then past the election and into the plans which had to be made for Washington it became clear to both of them, maybe Rhoda before Joe, that nothing was going to change, that he wasn’t going to get out, not then or ever, that he was going to have to follow it through to the end and there was no room for her because she would have been part of the furniture. I think I’ll always love you, she said. I don’t think I’ll ever marry. Me too, he said, me too, Rhoda, but that had all been what she would have called bullshit; Joe was the sincere one, Joe was the one who had never married (he sure had fucked around, though) but Rhoda was hooked up with a professor of economics in less than six months from their parting, went to UCLA with him, had four sons, a nice bit of collusion there, and had died at forty in San Bernardino in a crazy flood that had washed out a campground and drowned her and the oldest boy. So much for that. The stone house at Hyannis, the pinwheels of light, the soft sounds of her against him and the rising too, and then the end of it as they fell and fell and it was not Rhoda but his condition which embraced Joe as he lay there gasping by the cold fireplace, staring at the crazed and absolute configurations of his life. You kept on going, that was all, followed it through, and then on the beach at Hyannis or in the campgrounds at San Bernardino the waters came, the waters always came and they would take you. Take you up, take you down, take you to the castle of your life. Portraits of the Ambassador hung at every angle in every room, glinting, glinting with their spectral knowledge and absolute pity.

11/22/63 Joe checks the stock again of the M-l, feeling it cold and solid in his hands, the trigger a little rigid but it will yield in the clutch, he is sure. The trigger feels a little bit like a clitoris against his index finger, he will jiggle it a little, then take a firm grip and make the rifle come. The thought of this, the analogy, makes Joe giggle a little and there is a strange, whirring moment of descent in which he wonders if he is really losing control, if this act is truly as crazy as it might seem from the outside. All of his life, he now sees, he has been surrounded by ordnance, by gleaming machinery of one description or another, the planes carrying him like an embryo in their thin, shaking, gusty surfaces, then later in the open cars and closed offices of politics, the experiments with hunting and high-caliber bullets which he had carried on at Hyannisport over the weekends, just as a means of getting away, then the years after the Presidency running around the country in high-speed machines, sometimes with the Secret Service in tow, more often not, tracking the highways of his doom, watching America stream by him. In Las Vegas for a while in the late fifties there had been some real peace, hurling himself against the distant totalizers, the green felt of the craps table, the roulette wheel, feeling himself dispersed in these arenas of chance, and in that machinery he had found for the first time since Rhoda the beginnings of a frail if illusory sense of himself . . . but that too had ended, Bobby had passed the word, Las Vegas was just too touchy, mob-infested, in the hands of the racketeers and it wouldn’t look good if the oldest son and the ex-President were seen at the gaming tables, even if he was surrounded by Federal protection.

Worse if he were surrounded by Federal protection, Bobby had said, because that made the government look like collaborators, made it look as if they were granting special prerogatives to the gangsters. Joe had made something of an issue of it, had even humiliatingly pleaded, but Bobby had been firm, it wouldn’t work out. He had to quit. At last the Ambassador himself had brought the word to Joe in a late-night phone call. They weren’t talking much in those years, reconciliation had come later if at all, but the Ambassador made the call a special issue. You’re entitled to some pleasure, maybe, the Ambassador had said, but you’re fucking up things for everybody, Junior. So bury it. Come back East and play the horses at Bowie and Laurel with Hoover, but stay the fuck out of that Mafia trap. And that had been the end for him, he had never gone back since.

But the machinery had persisted, even to this moment when he cradled the M-1 and looked at its dull surfaces, feeling the power humming in the stock, feeling in his wrists the arc of the bullet which would tear off his brother’s head. Reconciliation had come later if at all, that was true, but in a way this was reconciliation right now, he would be performing the one last great service for the Ambassador that no one else could have conceived, and that service would change everything.

See, you old bastard, I loved you all the time. I gave up everything for you because it was in you that I would find myself and that is what I have, Father, don’t you see?

He didn’t have to peer into the distance now, the motorcade was visible, clearly within the arc of his vision, it would be only a little while now. In the meantime, Joe Jr. thought, there was absolutely nothing to do but to stay calm, stay crouched amidst the cartons, let it happen. The worst thing would be to lose control now, to become emotional, to begin to think about it. The thinking had all been done. He had blamed the Ambassador for everything back then, had really fixated upon the Ambassador as being—how foolish, how stupid!—the force which destroyed his life, but then he had learned better, had come to understand that he who bore his name was if anything the Ambassador’s greatest creation and now he would have to break the President to prove this to all of them. In the end it all came simple, it was far less complex than anyone thought, one fine line carried through it all, and you simply had to follow that arc. The best part of being Throttlebottom was that you could put on a uniform and lead a guided tour and no one would notice, no one at all. Joe Jr. began to hum, hummed a little marche militaire in a cracked and insouciant tenor, waiting, waiting now for the cars to come. Getting out quickly, out the back way, that was going to be a tricky business. But he would work on it in due time.

11/22/55 Joe had gone ahead with everything up to that point. The Ambassador wanted to stock the cabinet with Massachusetts polls, that was okay with him; he wanted JFK in at HEW even with the nepotism angle, and that was okay too. He had a certain agenda, the Ambassador, and the best thing to do was to go along with it, otherwise he would take to reminding you of exactly who you were and how you had gotten there and what could be next.

So even putting McCarthy in at State, Joe had gone along with it. That had been the real shocker and he had taken plenty for that; it had looked in the beginning as if it would tear the party apart. But the Ambassador had been insistent. I want this and that’s the way it’s going to be, he said to Joe. Handle it any way you want, take it to the press, make any goddamned liberal excuse you want, but Tail-Gunner Joe is in there and that’s the way it’s going to be. What about the eighty-seven Communists he can’t produce? Joe had asked mildly. What about that faked Tydings photograph? What about the loyalty oaths and that joke committee? The Ambassador had shrugged. That’s all politics, he said, that’s for show. The real thing is that I want him in there. He’s an old friend and a good guy and we can keep an eye on him better there than in the Senate. Listen here, the Ambassador had said and maybe he was telling the truth, that was the thing about the old man, he could lie and lie and lie and then he’d pull something on you which was absolutely the truth and if you ignored it you could really get in trouble, would you rather have that guy over at State where we can keep an eye on him and control him all the time? Or do you want him in the Senate, skulking around with Nixon, making plans and working against us every minute? You’ll see how much sense this makes.

Joe had seen it all right, had known what was going to come on him when he made the announcement, the best thing to do was to announce the Cabinet in a bunch in mid-December right around the tree-lighting ceremonies and kind of sneak McCarthy into the back of the pictures and hope that they could get away with it, but that of course wasn’t the way it really worked out. The press had been too scared of Tail-Gunner Joe to really make a big issue of it, that had been left for Truman, who went half-crazy back in Independence, and to Alger Hiss, but they had certainly made it the story of the day, then the week. Handle it any way you want, the Ambassador had said, so Joe did just that, went on the radio the day after Christmas to talk about the New Unity Coalition which would come out of Tail-Gunner Joe being brought to State, even let the Tail-Gunner join him in the last ten minutes to make his own unity statement, and it seemed for a while as if it actually was going to work out. McCarthy liked his drinks and his boyfriends in secret and his prerogatives and really wasn’t as much of a danger as everyone thought, the Ambassador had been quite right there, but then the situation had started to get really nasty when McCarthy all on his own decided to reconvene un-American Activities and go after a whole flock of homosexuals and Communists who he said had been part of the old China group for years. A hundred were pitched out in October of 1955 in the first wave, and then Tail Gunner Joe had taken some advice from Nixon and had gone on television, shaking his fists and crying and saying that he was standing up for an administration which was too cowed, just too scared to really face up to the degree of corruption, but the penalties had to be paid. Then McCarthy had spoken about how the H-bomb plans had been shipped out to China and maybe the Soviet satellites by some of these hundred people and it might be too goddamned late to save security, they might have to deal with the possibility of a preventive strike against Peking, and looking at the shouting figure on television, looking at the grays and blues of the Secretary of State who was clearly drunker than he had ever been and absolutely out of control, Joe Jr., the President, had seen that he was going to take whatever risks were entailed, wherever they led, and he had fired the Secretary. Had simply called in Sorenson and told him to get the announcement out immediately and then had phoned the UPI himself at midnight to break the word. This is intolerable, the President had said. McCarthy does not speak for this administration, he speaks for no one. He was an attempt at a coalition which simply went wrong and he is out. Then he had gone to bed, alone as always, with the first solidity of conviction he had felt in more than a decade and had waited for all of it to sweep over him.

It had been even worse than he had thought it might be because McCarthy did not make a frontal attack, he sent up Cohn first and then Harriman (how he got Harriman to front for him was something that Joe could not figure out) and then amazingly Adlai had made a call and said that this was simply too extreme, that perhaps some compromise could be worked out. McCarthy might say that he had overstated the preventive strike issue and felt that the warning alone was sufficient. No, Joe said to the old trimmer, the Governor of Illinois who he had beaten back like a crutch at that rigged 1952 convention, there’s no compromise. He’s out. He is out as of thirty-six hours ago. He is crazy, Adlai, and I am crazy if I keep him. You don’t understand the stakes, Adlai had said, and Joe understood then and only at that moment that Adlai was bought too, that Adlai was bent over and Tail-Gunner Joe had him cold. Adlai was a liberal who had spent his whole life waiting to be buggered and Tail-Gunner Joe had seen it and somehow done the job. It was the first insight the President had ever had which he thought might be worthy of his old man, the Ambassador, which he thought the old man might really have liked and respected, but of course it was too late for gaining respect that way.

At last McCarthy himself had come up alone, his eyes bloodshot, his head tilted, the scent of alcohol and frenzy coming off him, and something else, some deeper odor which Joe could not identify but which he knew was profound. Tail-Gunner Joe had already known that it was over, though. I’m not finished yet, he said. I’m not finished with you yet, Boston. There’s plenty more to be said here. You aren’t going to fuck with me like this. I came over to your side, gave you the advantage for years because I am a great American, but I see you for what you are now. You’re part of them.

A Communist too, Joe said, is that what you’re saying? Never mind what I’m saying, McCarthy had said, you just remember that you’re going to go down on this one.

If anyone crosses you he’s a Communist, Joe said mildly. It played for a long time and it’s probably going to still play, but I can’t tolerate it at this level, Senator. The Chinese don’t understand our politics, you understand, they don’t know that it’s all a game you’re playing. They and the Russians are likely to do something which might go out of control and that’s why you have to go. So you’re gone. Except that you won’t go easy. So go hard, but go away before I call the Secret Service and have you thrown out by all the powers of the office I have been given. I don’t know how deep you’re into all of this but I don’t think you can compromise the Secret Service, at least not yet. Get out, he had said. Get out, you stinking, evil son of a bitch, go back to your boys and your press conferences and your glory holes but get the hell out of this White House right now and never come back.

So McCarthy had gone away then, something in Joe’s face, certainly not the tone of his voice which was quiet, even choked, must have gotten through to him, but that wasn’t the end of it, the Ambassador was up there in two hours, coming right in past Sorenson, past JFK, who was sitting with him, trying to calm Joe down. Get out of here, the Ambassador said to Jack and Jack got up and went, no argument, no response, just cleared out. That was the way it was done. The Ambassador closed the door and turned to the President. Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing, he said, what is going on here? I want that man back, you understand. I want him back in office. I don’t care how you handle it, a full retraction, a press conference, an arms-around-each-other bit, that’s up to you. But you are not going to get this one by me. I have given you a lot of latitude, Junior, but I am not going to give you this one. The Tail-Gunner comes back.

No, Joe said. He’s not coming back.

Must I—

No, Joe said. I have given in to you all the way. I have let you have one thing and the other thing, I have gone along with you from the first, I have given you primogeniture and the Presidency and I have not fucked with you, but you are not getting this one. McCarthy is out. He is not coming back. I will stand in the door of State before he ever comes back. I will go to the well of the Senate, I will make a joint session of Congress to hear an address, but he is out. I will get Hoover to release everything from every file on this guy if I have to, but he is out and he is not coming back. He will have us all in flames, don’t you understand that? He will have a bomb put in Times Square and another in the Rose Garden here. Joe looked at the Ambassador, felt the tears hopelessly come to him. Dad, he said, he’s crazy, don’t you see that? He had not called the Ambassador Dad in twenty years, it shocked both of them. He wants us all dead for his own advantage, Joe said. That’s the truth and you know it. It has to stop.

But it can’t, the Ambassador said, it can’t because I won’t have it. Because I said so—

What you say goes almost all the time, Joe said, but it doesn’t go this time and that’s all. I will be impeached for it if necessary, but it ends here. McCarthy is out. Please, Dad, leave now. I won’t throw you out, I can’t do this to you, you’re my father so I’m begging, but I want you to leave.

All right, the Ambassador said. He sat convulsively, took off his glasses, wiped them, stared at Joe. All right, he said, you’ll make it stick. I can see that. You are that serious, you fool. You will stake everything on getting him out.

Yes I will. I must.

Then you’re finished, the Ambassador said. Don’t you understand that? You’re all done for. I’ll close the books on you. You’re a one-term President.

I can’t be concerned about that, Dad, Joe said. That’s not the issue. The issue is—

The issue is that you can’t give me this one. All right then, but it cuts the other way too. I can’t give you this one either. You’re finished, Joe. Jack is the next President. You’re getting out. Ill health, inability to govern. You’re going to pass it on to your brother, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. You’ve got enough clout in the party to do it, you’re the President. That’s what is going to happen.

And if I don’t? Joe said, what’s going to happen then?

You will, the Ambassador said. He put on his glasses, stared precisely at Joe, rubbed his hands. You can make it hard or you can make it easy, it’s up to you. I’ll destroy you, Joe. If I have to I’ll finish you off. So just get out.

Make your announcement tomorrow. Otherwise—

Otherwise what?

Otherwise people are going to start to die, the Ambassador said. Maybe a housewife and college professor in San Bernardino for starters, maybe some other people. I’m not playing around, Joe.

Joe stared at him, swallowed, said nothing at all for a while. He tried to keep his mind blank. That was a trick his father had taught him long, long ago, if they hurt you, if you find yourself really bleeding, just shut up, keep your mind blank as a screen, allow them absolutely nothing. That was the only way to handle it until you got control again.

All right, Joe said, say I do it. Then what? Jack becomes President if he wins the election—

He wins the election, the Ambassador said. Don’t you worry about that. He wins the election just like you won the election. We’ll make sure of that. That’s my department as of right now because you, Joe, you are finished. The election will be taken care of.

And so McCarthy gets back in at State, Joe said, so you’ll reverse everything I’ve done here. I can’t go along with that. You can take me down but I’ll take you down too. Jack as well. You’ll all go down, but McCarthy is never going to make a speech about preventive war again.

Okay, the Ambassador said. His glasses glinted, flashed in the light. No McCarthy. That’s the deal. He won’t be coming back. We’ll keep him out.

And you say—

That’s my word, the Ambassador said. You’ll have to trust me just like I trusted you and got betrayed. Except that I won’t betray you. McCarthy won’t be Secretary of State.

Or Jenner, Joe said. Or Capehart. Or those swine McCarthy runs around with, I want them out too. That’s the deal then. You make that pledge and I’ll go quietly. Otherwise—

Otherwise you’ll take us all down, the Ambassador said. Except you won’t, you won’t do that. Because you’re a Kennedy, Joe, and that’s part of the deal, the family first. He limped toward the door. I want an announcement within forty-eight hours, he said. You can go on television live or call the press or sneak it out to the UPI the way you did the firing. That’s up to you. But I want that forty-eight-hour business and that’s all there is to it, you hear me? That is very definite.

And if not—?

We’ve been through that, Joe, the Ambassador said. We don’t have to go through it again, do we? He opened the door, nodded at the Secret Service.

I’m your son! Joe wanted to shout, I’m your first-born son, how can you do this to me? If the door had been closed, if the Ambassador had still been there, he might have done that. But of course the Ambassador was too clever, he was gone already and he knew that the President wasn’t going to make that kind of a scene in front of the security. So Joe just sat there, the way the Ambassador had known he must and after a while Jack drifted back in again from the side room where he had heard everything and they just stared at each other. There was absolutely nothing to say. This was another of those times, and there had been plenty in their lives where there was just not one brotherly word that could be passed.

Oh, the Ambassador had been angry at him! Joe had thought that it was irreparable. But of course as the years passed things cooled off. McCarthy died of drink not much later, meaning that he wouldn’t have been around much longer anyway, and JFK had turned out in the long run to be an even bigger betrayer in office than Joe had been, in the estimation of the old man. And Joe had come to see after this one great confrontation that the old man had probably been right after all, McCarthy was just red meat for the troops, and backed off China and the Soviet Union with terror so that deals could have been made. Joe in any case never took issue with the Ambassador again; one way or the other that confrontation had been the end for him.

And here in Dallas at last and at least he could come back all the way, perform this one great service for the stricken, nurse-fucking, raunchy, devoted old Ambassador who had in the end proven in this circumstance as in so many others to have been absolutely right.

Son of a bitch, JFK had said in the Oval Office that afternoon, son of a bitch, I’m going to be President. Not even a thought of protest or uncertainty, that was how thoroughly the Ambassador had controlled them all. The fucking President, oh my God, I’m the next President.

Well, you’ll love it, Joe said, you’ll love the perks anyway. There are lots of interesting possibilities in this job.

I wonder if I should get married after all, Jack said, maybe this isn’t the time to do it with the campaign coming up and all. Maybe I should wait.

Jackie won’t let you wait, Joe had said, she’s going to be First Lady now and no one is going to give that up. Except Rhoda, he thought, but that was another wench in another time and so dead, so dead to me. You might as well go ahead and have a big wedding, Joe had said. The voters will love that.

They had, they did, and Jack stormed in over Nixon with 472 electoral votes and Kefauver clinging onto him on the inaugural stand, holding him even tighter than Jackie. Joe Jr.‘s instincts had always been good, even if his luck hadn’t. One way or the other, the Ambassador had made him a first-class political animal.

A humble one too, and eager to get back under the umbrella. The real betrayal then had been JFK. JFK had broken the line.

11/22/63 The sounds of the motorcade drifting to his high seat in the depository, the sound of the crowd seeming to envelop him, Joe lifts the stock, sets the sight, puts the scope to the curly, tousled head of his brother, seeing the faint pink of Jacqueline’s suit refracting an aura, takes off the safety then. With a precision he had never known to be within him, Joe sets the sight, aims the rifle and fires. The first shot is in the throat, Jack falls back, Joe can imagine the look of terror and surprise on his face. Second shot . . . he cocks it again. Jackie is starting to scramble, casting wistful, hopeless glances over the back of the limousine. Joe puts the killing shot in, the shot that will come through the Governor’s knee, enter Jack’s head at a high angle and windage and blow off the skull. Bobby will storm the citadel in a wave of national horror and sympathy which will utterly repudiate the crude, the untalented JFK. For every plan there is another plan. Joe knows this. The Ambassador after all was absolutely right, there was always that alternative.

Giggling, Joe Kennedy, Jr. puts down the rifle, lurches for the door, yanks open the door and speeds down the steps toward the open air, leaving the concerns of the motorcade to the Secret Service and to Parkland Hospital. Later that afternoon the ex-President will be found cowering in a movie theater and later yet he will be taken away in what must be the most sensational story in all of American politics, but he will never tell. He will never tell. He will never tell. Only the Ambassador, should the Ambassador come to see him, he will tell the Ambassador everything. Everything. But that is a part of the saga, Joe Jr., assassin of the thirty-fifth President knows, which will have to be told by other than him. His time is done.

He wonders what Rhoda might have known.

The policeman, curious, sees him running and comes toward him. The rifle is back on the sixth floor but Joe still has the .38-caliber Smith & Wesson.

Would Rhoda have made any difference?

Flatly, the policeman comes toward him, then shouting.

Joe reaches for the gun.

DANNY GOES TO MARS

Pamela Sargent

With “Danny Goes to Mars,” Pamela Sargent makes one of her far-too-rare appearances in IAsfm. Ms. Sargent’s highly acclaimed novels include Venus of Dreams—a book which has recently been selected by Easton Press for its “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” series. The author’s latest SF novel is Venus of Shadows, and she is working on Child of Venus, the last Piece of her “Venus” trilogy, for Bantam/Doubleday. Ms. Sargent’s most recent book, Ruler of the Sky, is an historical novel about Genghis Khan. It will be out soon from Crown.

“Mars is essentially in the same orbit [as Earth]. Mars is somewhat the same distance from the sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.”

—J. Danforth Quayle, Vice-President of the United

States, as quoted in Mother Jones, January 1990

The Vice-President had known that this White House lunch would be different. For one thing, the President’s voice kept shifting from his Mr. Rogers pitch to his John Wayne tone, and that always made Dan nervous. For another, the former Chief of Staff was there as a guest, and that bothered him.

John Sununu might have mouthed off in public about how much Dan had learned on the job, but away from the cameras, his big M.I.T. brain couldn’t be bothered with even saying hello to the Vice-President. Not that it really mattered, since Nunu, as most of the White House staff called him behind his back, had pretty much treated everybody that way, except when he was having a temper tantrum. Almost everyone had been relieved when the former Chief of Staff had been eased out of that position.

Now, here he was in the White House again, sitting around at this intimate lunch as if he still had the President’s full confidence. Maybe the President needed Big John’s help on some scientific deal or other; Dan hoped it was that, and not something political. He squinted slightly, thinking of Robert Stack. That was the ticket, putting on that Robert Stack I’m-a-nice-guy-but-don’t-mess-with-me kind of expression.

“A squeaker,” the President said, “a real squeaker. Almost didn’t pull it out. The Democrats—bad. Attack from the right—even worse. Got something up our sleeve, though—they’ll say, Never saw that coming.” The Vice-President tried to look attentive. Sometimes he couldn’t figure out what the President was talking about. Once he had worried about that, before discovering that many members of the White House staff had the same problem.

“Council on Competitiveness, and, uh, the space thing, too—you’re our man there,” the President was saying now. Marilyn had guessed that the President might be toying with the idea of a space spectacular, and Big John, whatever his lacks in the political arena, was one of the few advisors who could understand the scientific ins and outs. It made sense, what with that big breakthrough in developing an engine for space travel. Dan didn’t know exactly how it worked, but it could get a ship to the Moon almost overnight—if there was an “overnight” in space. “Mars,” the president said. “About time.”

“Mars?” Dan sat up. That was an even better idea than going to the Moon.

“We’re sending out feelers.” The former Chief of Staff adjusted his glasses, looking as if this project was his idea. Maybe it was; maybe that was how he had gotten back into the President’s good graces. “The Japanese have hinted they might foot most of the bill if one of their people is among the astronauts. The Saudis’ll pick up the rest if we get one of their men on board. The Russians would do almost anything to take their people’s minds off the mess over there, and we can use one of those long-term habitat modules they’ve developed for the crew’s quarters. Putting a cosmonaut on the crew in return for that would be a hell of a lot cheaper than sending more aid down that rathole.”

“Impressive,” the President said. “Won’t cost us.”

“We can get this going before the mid-term elections,” Big John muttered. “America’s reaching for the stars again—that should play pretty goddamned well, and you can use the brotherhood angle, too.” He shifted his stocky body in his chair. “A crash program for building the ship will create jobs. The crew can be trained, and the ship ready to go, by the summer of ’95. Two weeks or less to Mars, depending on where it is in relation to Earth’s orbit, and back in plenty of time for the presidential primaries.”

“With the new nuclear fission-to-fusion pulse engine,” Dan said, “that’s possible.” He’d picked up a few things during his meetings with the Space Council. He was a little annoyed that no one had even hinted at the possibility of a Mars trip, but then he was usually the last guy to find anything out. “With that kind of engine, we could cross from, say, Mercury to Jupiter in less than a hundred days.” He had heard one of the NASA boys say that. Or had it been less than thirty days? Not that it made that much difference, at least to him.

The former Chief of Staff lifted his brows in surprise. Sununu had a habit of looking at him like that sometimes, the way Dan’s high school teachers and college professors had looked at him when he actually managed to come up with a correct answer.

“But you know,” the Vice-President continued, “you could take longer to train the crew, and have this whole Mars deal going on during the primary season. That might actually help me more, having it happen right while I’m running.”

“Two terms,” the President said, sounding a lot more like John Wayne than Mr. Rogers this time. “Straight line from nineteen-eighty. I want a Republican in the White House in two-thousand-and-one. Maybe the Navy band could play that music at the inauguration, you know, the piece in that movie—”

“Also Sprach Zarathustra,” the former Chief of Staff said, then turned toward the Vice-President. “The theme from 2001.” He had that funny smile on his face, the one that made his eyes seem even colder.

“What I was thinking, though,” Dan said, “is that people have short memories.” That was a piece of political wisdom he had picked up, partly because his own memory wasn’t so great. “So it might make more sense to have a ship on Mars right in the middle of the primaries. It’d sure be a help to be able to make speeches about that, and—”

“Unless something goes wrong. That could really fuck up the campaign, a big space disaster.” Big John folded his arms over his broad chest. “But we’ll just have to see that doesn’t happen. Besides, that sucker has to be back before the primaries.” His smile faded. “See, the thing is—”

“On the crew, Dan,” the President interrupted. “Still young, and you’re in good shape—think it’ll work.”

The Vice-President set down his fork. “What would work?”

The former Chief of Staff unfolded his arms. “The President is saying that he’d like you to go to Mars.”

Dan was too stunned to speak.

“If you’ll volunteer, that is,” the President said.

The Vice-President steadied himself, hoping his eyes had not widened into his Bambi-caught-in-the-headlights look. Big John might be willing to shove him aboard a ship heading for Mars just to get back in the good graces of the White House, but the President, for a guy without a whole lot of principles, was a gentleman. A man who never forgot to write thank-you notes wasn’t the kind of person to force his Veep on a risky space mission.

“Well.” Dan frowned. “Do I really have to do this?”

Big John said, “It may be the only way we can get you elected. It sure as hell would give you an edge, and you’re going to need one. The president was getting it from the right, but you’re going to be getting it from the moderate Republicans.” He sneered. “We’re only talking a two or three week trip, hardly more than a space shuttle flight. Come back from Mars, and you wouldn’t just be the Vice-President—you’d be a hero.” He said the words as if he didn’t quite believe them.

“Hard to run against a hero,” the President said. He pressed his hands together, then flung them out to his sides. “Moderates—trouble. But it’s up to you, Dan. Think you can handle this Mars thing—make sure there’s good people on the crew with you—but you gotta decide.”

The Vice-President swallowed, trying for his Robert Stack look once more. He was about to say he would have to talk it over with Marilyn, but Big John would give him one of his funny looks if he said that.

“I’ll consider it very seriously,” he said. If Marilyn thought this was a good idea, he might have to go along with it.

“You do that,” the former Chief of Staff said quietly.

He explained it all to his wife after dinner. There would be the months of training, but a house would be provided for him, and the family could visit him in Houston. They could even move there temporarily, but Dan wasn’t about to insist on that. His son Tucker was in college, so it wouldn’t much matter to him where they lived, but the move might be disruptive for Corinne and Ben.

“I can see it, in a way,” he said. “If I do this, I might be unbeatable. On the other hand, it didn’t work for John Glenn.”

“But this is Mars, honey,” Marilyn said. “John Glenn didn’t go to Mars.” She brushed back a lock of brown hair, then frowned. Dan had the sinking feeling that this whole business had already been decided. Whatever his fears about the journey, he was more afraid of facing the President and telling him he had decided not to volunteer. Besides, this space stuff might finally put an end to all the mockery. Maybe there wouldn’t be any more jokes about his lousy grades and his golf trips and being on beer duty during his stint in the National Guard. Maybe that bastard Garry Trudeau would finally stop depicting him as a feather in his Doonesbury comic strip.

“I’d miss you a lot,” Marilyn said.

“I’d miss you, too.” He slipped an arm over her shoulders. “But it isn’t like it’s going to be one of those three-year-round-trip deals. If that’s what it was, I would have said no right on the spot. They said it would be safe.”

She rested her head against his chest. “Nobody could top this, you know. I doubt you’d have any challengers in the primaries afterwards, and the Democrats won’t have the easy time they expected against you. Even then—”

He owed it to Marilyn. He wouldn’t have gotten this far without her; in a way, it was too bad she couldn’t go to Mars with him. She’d had to give up her law practice in Indiana when he was first elected to Congress, and later, her hopes of finding a job when he was running for Vice-President. She had wised him up after his election to the Senate, after the story about his colleague Tom Evans and that Parkinson babe broke; if he had listened to Marilyn in the first place, he wouldn’t have been in Palm Beach with them that weekend. She had given him good advice and sacrificed plenty for him. The least he could do was make her First Lady. “What should I do?” he asked.

Marilyn drew away from him and sat up. “There’s only one thing to do,” she murmured. “This is too big for us to decide by ourselves, so we have to put it in God’s hands. He’ll show us what’s right.”

He folded his hands, bowed his head, and tried to summon up a prayer.

He definitely needed the Lord’s help on this one, but had the feeling that God was likely to agree with the President.

When Dan agreed to become an astronaut, it seemed that a great weight was lifted from his shoulders. The announcement brought the expected press and television coverage, along with varying reactions from stunned commentators, but the conventional wisdom was that he could probably handle his Vice-Presidential duties as well in Houston or on Mars as he could anywhere else.

There was a press conference to endure with his four fellow crew members, and the interviews, but he got through them all without any major gaffes, except for calling the moons of Mars Photos and Zenith. That snotty nerd George Will had tried to get him on some old remarks he had made about the Red Planet having canals, but Dan had muddied the waters with a bunch of memorized statistics he had mastered in the years since, along with a comment about having been under the spell of some Ray Bradbury stories. It was smart of his staff to feed him that stuff about Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles along with the other information. Dan had not only made Will look like a bully, but had also given viewers the impression that the Vice-President actually read books.

In Houston, at least, he would not have to do many interviews, on the grounds that they might interfere with his training. This did not keep some reporters from trying to get leaked information about his progress.

There was little for them to discover. Surprisingly, the training was not nearly as rigorous as he had expected. The other American on the crew, Ashana Washington, was both a physicist and an experienced pilot; she would technically be in command of the expedition. Prince Ahmed was also a pilot, although the ship itself would be piloted automatically during the voyage. Sergei Vavilov and Kiichi Taranaga each had a string of degrees in various subjects requiring big brains, and since they, like Prince Ahmed, spoke fluent English, the Vice-President, to his great relief, would not have to try to learn a foreign language.

Basically, Dan knew, he would be little more than a passenger. Learning about the Mars vessel and its capacities was more interesting than Cabinet meetings, and messing around with the NASA computers was a little like those video games he had sometimes played with Tucker and Ben. The crew had to be in good shape, but he had always jogged and played a fair amount of tennis. He often missed Marilyn and the kids, but they had been apart for extended periods during political campaigns in the past, and their weekends together more than made up for it. He didn’t have to talk to reporters, although occasionally he didn’t mind posing for photographers in his NASA garb with a Robert Redford grin on his face. Once a week, some of his staffers and the President’s would fly down to brief him on various matters, but Washington often seemed far away.

He had wondered if his fellow astronauts would take to him, since they would have to spend at least a couple of weeks in isolation with him—longer if NASA decided they should remain in a Martian base camp for a while, which they might have to do if they found anything really interesting. Within three weeks after his arrival in Houston, however, he was golfing twice a week with Kiichi, jogging in the mornings with Prince Ahmed after the Saudi’s morning prayers, and playing tennis with Sergei, who, despite his small size, had one hell of a backhand.

Only Ashana had intimidated him just a little. The tall, good-looking black woman was too damned brainy and formal for him to regard her as a real babe—not that he, as a married man and a future Presidential candidate, was inclined to dwell on her apparent babe qualities anyway. Maybe Ashana thought that she was commanding this expedition for the same reason Clarence Thomas was on the Supreme Court. That was another reason to keep his distance. It wouldn’t help his chances for the White House if Ashana turned into another Anita Hill.

He might have gone on being distantly polite to her, if, a month and a half into his training, he hadn’t been drawn into a pick-up basketball game with a few of the NASA officers. Ashana came by, and before he knew it, she was giving him some good advice on how to improve his jump shots.

Basketball was the glue that sealed their friendship, but Dan had nearly blown it when Ashana had come to his house one weekend to meet his family and watch a game. “I should have known,” he said as he settled into his chair, “that you’d be a hoop fan.”

Ashana’s face suddenly got very stiff. Next to her on the sofa, Marilyn was rolling her eyes and giving him her I-don’t-believe-you-just-said-that look.

“Exactly why should you have known?” Ashana asked in a small but kind of scary voice.

“In your official biography—I mean, you grew up in Indiana, didn’t you? Everybody’s a fan there.”

Ashana relaxed, but he didn’t quite understand why she had laughed so hard afterward.

He admitted it to himself; if he had to be a hero to win the election, this was the way to do it. His crewmates were the real experts, so he could leave all the major decisions to them. He would, of course, do his best to be helpful. Sergei would use him as a subject in some medical experiments, and he could also help Kiichi sort his soil samples. That would be great, if they actually found life on Mars, even if it was only something like the mildew that sometimes showed up in the Vice-Presidential residence.

People were really getting psyched about this mission. After all the economic bad news of recent years, putting people to work on the ship, now called the Edgar Rice Burroughs, and its systems, as well as expanding the size of the Russian and American space stations to house those who had to work on the Burroughs in orbit, had given the economy a boost. Part of that was the new jobs, but most of it was simply that the country was regaining its confidence. This Mars thing would propel him into the White House on a wave of good feeling, and he would lead the country into the next century during his second term. By then, the economy would be booming along under the impetus of a revived space program. Dan wasn’t exactly sure how this would happen, but would let his advisors figure that out when it was time for them to write his speeches.

It was, when he thought about it, amazing that the Mars mission had won such widespread support. There were, of course, some people who had to bitch, like those protestors who showed up at the Johnson Space Center or Cape Canaveral to protest the ship’s technology, but they were the kind who panicked whenever they saw the word “fission,” especially if “fusion” was sitting right next to it. A comedian on David Letterman’s show had said something about how a dopehead must have thought of putting the Vice-President aboard, and so maybe they should have called the ship the William S. Burroughs. Dan didn’t see what was so funny about that, but it didn’t really matter. Most of the clippings Marilyn brought to him on her visits had optimistic words about the mission and comments from various people about his bravery and increasing maturity.

Almost before he knew it, he and his fellow astronauts were being flown to Florida, where they would spend their final days before liftoff; a space shuttle would carry them to the Burroughs. The President would be there, along with several ambassadors and any other dignitaries who had managed to wangle an invitation. A whole contingent of family and friends were coming in from Indiana to view the launch, which would be covered by camera teams and reporters from just about everywhere. Everything had gone basically without a hitch so far, although they were going to be late taking off for the Burroughs; the shuttle launch had been postponed until October, what with a few small delays on construction and testing. Still, the Mars ship and its systems had passed every test with flying colors, and this had inspired a number of articles contending, basically, that American workers had finally gotten their shit together again. More kids were deciding to take science and math courses in school. There was a rumor that Time magazine had decided early that Dan would have to be their Man of the Year.

Only one dark spot marred his impending triumph. That creep Garry Trudeau was now depicting him as a feather floating inside a space helmet and referring to him as “the candidate from Mars.”

The Burroughs wasn’t exactly the kind of sleek ship Dan had seen in movies about space. Its frame held two heavily shielded habitat modules, the lander, and the Mars base assembly. The large metallic bowl that housed the pulse engine was attached to the end of the frame. The whole thing reminded him a little of a giant Tootsie Roll with a big dish at one end, but he felt confident as he floated into the crew’s quarters through an open lock. The President and Barbara had wished him well, and Marilyn and the kids had looked so proud of him. If he had known that being courageous was this simple, maybe he would have tried it sooner.

Inside the large barrel of this habitat, five seats near wall screens had been bolted to what would be the floor during acceleration. He propelled himself toward a seat and strapped himself in without a qualm. The Burroughs circled the Earth, then took off like a dream; Dan, pressed against his seat, watched in awe as the globe on the screen shrank to the size of a marble.

The ship would take a little while to reach one g, at which point the crew could get up and move around. The Burroughs would continue to accelerate until they were halfway to Mars, at which point it would begin to decelerate. The faster the ship boosted, the more gravity it would have; at least that was how Dan understood the matter. Even though it might have been kind of fun to float around the Burroughs, he had been a bit queasy during the shuttle flight, and was just as happy that they wouldn’t have to endure weightlessness during the voyage. He had heard too many stories about space sickness and the effects of weightlessness on gas; he didn’t want to puke and fart all the way to Mars.

Dan had little time to glance at the viewscreens when he finally rose from his seat. The others were already messing around with the computers and setting up experiments and generally doing whatever they were supposed to do; his job now was to monitor any transmissions from Earth.

He sent back greetings, having rehearsed the words during the last few days. He didn’t have anything really eloquent to say about actually being out in space at last, but a lot of astronauts weren’t great talkers. When he was about to sign off, the NASA CapCom patched him through to Marilyn.

She had cut out James J. Kilpatrick’s latest column to read to him. The columnist had written: “Lloyd Bentsen once said of the Vice-President, ‘You’re no Jack Kennedy.’ This has been verified in a way Senator Bentsen could never have predicted. This man is no Jack Kennedy. Instead, he has donned the mantle of Columbus and the other great explorers of the past.”

That was the kind of thing that could really make a guy feel great.

There was little privacy on the Burroughs. What with the shielding, the engine, the Mars lander they would use when they reached their destination, and the base camp assembly that would be sent to the Martian surface if NASA deemed a longer stay worthwhile, there wasn’t exactly an abundance of space for the crew in the habitat modules. The next ship, which was already being built, would have the additional luxuries of a recreational module, along with separate sleeping compartments, but NASA had cut a few corners on this one.

The bathroom, toilet and shower included, was the size of a small closet; their beds, which had to be pulled out from the walls, were in the adjoining module, with no partitions. The whole place smelled like a locker room, maybe because the modules had been part of the Russian space station before being recycled for use in this mission. The food tasted even worse than some of the stuff Dan had eaten in the Deke house at DePauw.

But their comfort was not entirely overlooked; the Burroughs had a small library of CDs, videodiscs, and books stored on microdot. Within twenty-four hours, Dan and his companions had worked out a schedule so that each of them would have some time alone in the bed compartment to read, listen to music, or take a nap. There was no sense getting on one another’s nerves during this voyage, and some solitude would ease any tensions.

Dan went to the sleeping quarters during his scheduled time on the third day out, meaning to watch one of his favorite movies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He could stretch out on one of the beds and still see the screen on the wall in the back. He nodded off just as Ferris Bueller, played by Matthew Broderick, was calling up his friend Cameron on the phone; he woke up to the sounds of “Twist and Shout.” Matthew Broderick was gyrating on a float in the middle of a Chicago parade.

Dan had missed most of the movie. He must have been more tired than he realized, even though he didn’t have as much to do as the rest of the crew. Sergei had said something about doing some medical tests on him. He looked at his watch, set on Eastern Standard Time, which they were keeping aboard ship, and noticed that it was past 8:00 p.m. He stared at the screen, not understanding why the movie was still on until he realized that the player had gone back to the beginning of the disk and started running the film again. It was Ahmed’s time to use the compartment now, so why wasn’t the Prince here bugging him about it? On top of that, nobody had come to get him for dinner.

He sat up slowly. A weird feeling came over him, a little like the nervousness he had felt before calling his father about trying to get into the Guard. He got to his feet and climbed the ladder through the passageway that connected this module to the next.

The hatch at the end of the short passage was open as he came up. His shipmates were slumped over the table where they usually ate, their faces in their trays. Dan crept toward them, wondering if this was some kind of joke. “Okay, guys,” he said, “you can cut it out now.” They were awfully still, and Sergei had written something on the table in Cyrillic letters with his fingers and some gravy. “Okay, you faked me out. Come on.” Dan stopped behind Kiichi and nudged him, then saw that the Japanese had stopped breathing. Very slowly, he moved around the table, taking each person’s pulse in turn. The arms were flaccid, the bodies cold.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Oh, my God.” He sank to the floor, covered his face with his hands, and sat there for a long time until a voice called out to him from the com.

“Houston to Burroughs. Houston to Burroughs.” He got up and stumbled toward the com. “Come in, Burroughs.” He sat down and turned on the com screen.

Sallie Werfel, the CapCom, stared out at him from the screen.

“They’re dead,” he blurted out. “They’re all dead.” Not until after he had said it did he remember that NASA had planned a live broadcast for that evening. “Oh, my God.”

Sallie gazed back at him with a big smile on her face; it would take a while for his words to reach her, since signals had to work harder to get through all that space. Then her smile disappeared, and she was suddenly shouting to somebody else before turning to the screen once more.

“We’re off the air,” she said. “All right, what the hell do you mean about—”

“They’re all dead,” he replied. “At the table. Turn on the cameras and take a look. Sergei wrote something next to his tray, but it’s in Russian.”

Sallie was whispering to a man near her. Some more time passed. “All right, Dan,” she said very quietly. “I want you to stay right where you are for the moment. We’ve got the cameras on the others now. You’re absolutely sure they’re, uh, gone.”

“Yeah.”

A few more minutes passed. “We’re looking at Sergei’s message. A couple of our people here know Russian, so we should have a translation in just a little bit. While we’re waiting, I want to know exactly what you were doing during the last few hours.”

“Not much,” he said. “I mean, it was my turn for some private time—we had, like, a schedule for times to be alone, you know? So I went to the other module thinking I’d catch a movie.” He was about to say he had been watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but thought better of it. “What I remember is that Ashana was on the treadmill working out, and Sergei and Ahmed were checking some numbers or something. Kiichi was in the can—er, bathroom. I fell asleep, and when I woke up and looked at the time, it was past dinner. Then I came out and—” He swallowed hard. “Oh, my God.” He waited.

“Take it easy, Dan,” she said finally. “We’re opening up a line to the White House right now.”

An alien, he thought. Some creepy blob thing, the kind of creature they showed in old sci-fi movies, had somehow found its way aboard the ship. He imagined it oozing out to kill his companions during dinner, then concealing itself somewhere aboard the Burroughs to wait for him. Except that it wouldn’t find too many places it could hide in the crew’s quarters. Maybe the alien was concealed in the Mars lander by now, waiting for him. He shuddered. It couldn’t be an alien. There wasn’t any way for one to get aboard.

“We’ve got a translation,” Sallie was saying. Dan forced his attention back to the screen. “We know what Sergei wrote.” Her eyes glistened; he held his breath. “Not the food. Fever. Feels like flu.”

“What?” He waited.

“Flu. Influenza.” She lifted a hand to her temples. “He’s telling us it wasn’t anything in the food, that it felt as if they were coming down with something.”

Everything had happened awfully fast. The whole business might be some sort of weird assassination attempt; maybe someone had figured out a way to poison the main module’s air system. It was pure chance that he had not been sitting there with the others. But why would anyone want to assassinate him? Only the Democrats had anything to gain from that, and they had so many loose cannons that somebody would have leaked such a plot by now.

He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not when Sallie contacted him an hour later and gave him NASA’s hypothesis. They suspected that his comrades had been the victims of an extremely virulent but short-lived virus—virulent because the others had died so quickly, and short-lived because Dan, in the same module breathing the same air, was still alive. They had come up with this explanation after consulting with the Russians, who had admitted that milder viruses had occasionally afflicted their cosmonauts. The closed ecologies of their modules had never been perfect. What that meant was that things could get kind of scuzzy in there.

The next order of business was to dispose of the bodies. Dan put on his spacesuit and tried not to look at the foodstained faces of his dead comrades as he dragged them one by one into the airlock.

They deserved a prayer. The only ones he knew were Christian prayers, but maybe Kiichi and Ahmed wouldn’t mind, and he suspected Sergei was more religious than he let on. He whispered the Lord’s Prayer, and then another he had often used at prayer breakfasts. Too late, he realized that a prayer said at meals might not be the most appropriate thing, given that his companions had died over their chow.

He looked up from the bodies as the outside door slid slowly open to reveal the blackness of space. His comrades deserved a few more words before he consigned them to the darkness.

“You guys,” he whispered, “you were some of the best friends I ever had. You were definitely the smartest.”

It took a while to get the bodies outside. As he watched them drift away from the ship, tears rose to his eyes. He was really going to miss them.

Sallie contacted Dan an hour before the President was to address the nation and the world. The most important thing now was for Dan to seem in control of himself when it was time for his own broadcast. The NASA scientists were fairly certain that Dan wouldn’t suffer the fate of the others; there was only a slight chance that the mysterious virus would reappear to infect him. He didn’t find this very consoling, since there had been only a slight chance of such a thing happening in the first place.

“Do me a favor, Sallie,” Dan said. “If I do kick off, don’t let the media have tapes of it or anything. I mean, I don’t want Marilyn and my kids watching that stuff on CNN or something.” He waited. The time for round-trip signals was growing longer.

“You got it, Dano.”

The President made his announcement, and Dan went on an hour later to show that he was still able to function. He had no prepared speech, but the most important thing was to look calm and not hysterical. He succeeded in that, mostly because he felt too stunned and empty to crack up in front of the hundreds of millions who would be viewing him from Earth.

Sallie spoke to him after his appearance. Ashana Washington’s parents and brother had already retained counsel, and there was talk of massive lawsuits. He might have known that the lawyers would get in on this immediately.

“The most important thing now,” Sallie said, “is to bring you home as fast as possible. You’ll reach your destination four days from now.” She narrowed her eyes. “The Burroughs is already programmed to orbit Mars automatically, so all we have to do is let it swing around and head back to Earth. You can get back in—”

“I’m not going to land?” he asked, and waited even longer.

Sallie sat up. “Land?”

“I want to land, Sallie. Don’t you understand? I have to now. The others would have expected me to—I’ve got to do it for them.” He searched for another phrase. “It means they won’t have died in vain. I can do it—you can program the lander, and I can go down to the surface. Maybe I can’t do the experiments and stuff they were going to, but I can set up the cameras and bring back soil samples. It wouldn’t be right not to try. And if I’m going to die, I might as well die doing something.”

He waited for his words to reach her. “Dan,” she said at last, “you surprise me.”

It would probably surprise the hell out of the President, too. “I’ve got to do it, Sallie.” He frowned, struggling with the effort of all this thinking. “Look, if I land, it’ll inspire the world to bigger and better space triumphs. We’ll get that bigger space station built and the more advanced ships, too. But if you just bring me back, all the nuts will start whining again about what a waste all this was and how four people died for nothing.” He waited.

“I’ll do what I can, Dan.” She shook her head. “I don’t have much to say about this, but I can speak up for you. In the end, though, it’s probably going to be up to the President.”

“Then put me through to him now.”

He hashed it out with the President in the slow motion of radio delay, listened to the objections, and replied by invoking the memory of his dead comrades. When the President, looking tense and even more hyper than usual, signed off by saying he would have to consult with his advisors, Dan was certain he had won. He felt no surprise when word came twelve hours later that he would be allowed to undertake the landing.

After all, if the President didn’t let him go ahead, it was like admitting publicly that he had put an incompetent without adequate training aboard the Burroughs. The President, having finally salvaged his place in history, wasn’t about to go down in the record books as a doofus.

David Bowie was singing about Major Tom and Ground Control. Kiichi had been a David Bowie fan, so a lot of Bowie’s music, everything from his Ziggy Stardust phase up through Tin Machine, was in the Burroughs‘s music collection. Dan had never been into David Bowie, who struck him as being kind of fruity, but now he felt as if he understood this particular song.

Sometimes, during his work with the President’s Council on Space, Dan had wondered why some early astronauts had gotten kind of flaky after returning to Earth. These were macho test pilot guys, not the kind of men anyone would expect to get mystical or weirded out. But as he moved around the ship, which was usually silent except for the low throbbing hum of the engine and an occasional beep from the consoles, he was beginning to feel a bit odd himself, as if his mind had somehow moved outside of his body.

He had never thought all that much about God. He had, of course, never doubted that God was out there going about His business; he had simply never thought about the Lord that much, except when he was in church or saying a prayer. When he was a boy, he had imagined a God something like his grandfather Pulliam, an angry old man ready to smite all those liberal Democrats, Communists, and other forces of darkness. Later on, when he was older and more mature, God had seemed more like a sort of basketball coach or golf pro.

Now, when he gazed at the image of Mars on his screen, a rust-red dot surrounded by blackness, he had the strangest feeling that he had never really understood the Lord at all. God had created all this, the planets and the space between them and the stars that were so far away he could not even comprehend the distance. God, in some ways, was a lot like the NASA computers, but there was even more to Him than that. Dan wasn’t quite sure how to put it; things like that were hard to explain. He supposed that was what it meant to be mystical—having weird feelings you couldn’t quite put into words. And faith was believing what no one in his right mind would believe even though it was true.

NASA kept him busy during his waking hours programming the Mars lander and checking out its systems. After supper, he usually worked on his speech, with some suggestions NASA was passing along from his speechwriters. They had given him another speech earlier, but he couldn’t use that one now. With what had happened, this one would have to be really inspiring.

Yet he still had his moments of solitude, the times when he felt, for the first time in his life, what it was like to be utterly alone. He couldn’t actually be alone, he supposed, since God had to be somewhere in the vicinity, but there were times when it seemed that the emptiness of space had seeped into him.

Mars swelled until it filled the screen, and then his ship was falling around the planet. There was no way to avoid weightlessness now; the Burroughs had begun to decelerate after the halfway point of the journey, and its engine had finally shut down. Dan put on his spacesuit and floated through the tunnel that connected the crew’s quarters with the module holding the base assembly. He wouldn’t be setting up a Mars base, though, since NASA didn’t want him fooling around down there for very long. He entered the last module, which held the lander.

He pressed his hand against the lander’s door; it slid open. The lander had food, a small lavatory, and equipment for experiments. There was even a Mars rover on board so that he could ride around on the surface. He wouldn’t be doing much, though, except for shooting a bunch of stuff with the cameras and gathering soil samples. The important thing was to land, make his speech, mess around for a little while, catch some shut-eye, and then get back to the Burroughs.

He strapped himself into one of the chairs. The four empty seats made him feel as if the ghosts of the others were with him. NASA had allowed each of the astronauts to bring along a small personal possession to take down to the Martian surface, and Dan had his companions’ choices with him in the lander. Ahmed had brought a Koran, Kiichi a vintage Louisville Slugger with Joe DiMaggio’s signature engraved on it, Sergei a set of nested Russian dolls, and Ashana a pair of Nikes personally autographed by Michael Jordan. A lump rose in his throat.

The doors to the outside were opening; he tensed. The President had spoken to him just a couple of hours ago, telling him that everyone in the world would be waiting for his first transmission from the surface. In spite of the tragedy, Dan’s determination to carry out the landing had inspired everybody in the country. Having come so far, humankind would not be discouraged by this setback; the Vice-President had shown the way. Construction of the next ship was moving along; it would probably be spaceworthy by spring, and a follow-up Mars mission would give an even bigger boost to Dan’s candidacy. At this point, he would probably carry all the states, and even D.C., in the general election.

“Asteroids,” the President had said. “Lotta resources there. Just get one of those things in Earth orbit, where we can go into, uh, a mining mode, and supply-side economics can work.” It was nice for Dan to think that, when he finally became President, things might be moving along so well that he’d have plenty of time for golf, the way Eisenhower had.

The lander glided forward toward the new world below.

Mars filled his screen. Dan, pressed against his seat, braced himself. He had known what to expect; his training had included maneuvers with a model of the Mars rover in areas much like the Martian surface. Yet actually seeing it this close up still awed him. It looked, he thought, like the biggest sand trap in the universe.

His chair trembled under him as he landed. Dan waited, wanting to make sure everything was all right before he got up. Time to contact Earth, but in the excitement of actually being on Mars, he had forgotten what he was supposed to say.

He cleared his throat. “Guys,” he said, “I’m down.” That ought to do the job.

Over four minutes passed before he heard what sounded like cheers at the other end. Sallie was saying something, but he couldn’t make out the words. By then, he was rummaging through the compartments of his spacesuit looking for the cards that held his speech.

“—all ecstatic,” Sallie’s voice said. “Congratulations, and God bless you—you don’t know how much—”

He sighed, realizing at last that he had forgotten the cards. He might have known that, during the most important moment of his life, he would have to ad lib.

Dan waited in the small airlock until the door slid open. Above him was the pinkish-red sky of an alien world. A rust-colored barren landscape stretched to the horizon, which, he noticed, seemed closer than it should be, then he remembered that Mars was smaller than Earth. He felt a lot lighter, too, since Mars, being a smaller place, didn’t have as much gravity.

He made his way down the ladder to the surface, then inhaled slowly. “Whoa,” he said aloud, overcome with awe at the immensity of this accomplishment and sorrow that his dead comrades could not share the moment with him. “Jeez.” He pressed his lips together, suddenly realizing that history would record man’s first words on the surface of Mars as “Whoa” and “Jeez.”

“Well, here I am,” he said, knowing he would have to wing it. “I almost can’t believe I’m here. Man, if anybody had told me when I was a kid that I’d go to Mars, I would have thought—” He paused. “Anyway, the thing is, I wish the others were here with me, because they’re the ones who really deserved to make this trip. What I mean is, I’m really going to miss them, but I can tell you all I’m not ever going to forget them. It’s why I’m here, because of them. In other words, I figured I had to come down and stand here for them.” He remembered that he was supposed to plant the United Nations flag about now, and took the pole out from under his arm. “Now we’ll go forward.” The words he had planned to say at this point were something like that. “And someday, other people will come here and turn into Martians.” Dan cleared his throat. “Guess I’ll show you around a little now.”

He scanned the landscape with a camera, then went back to the lander. By then, the President had given him his congratulations, and Marilyn had gotten on to talk to him after that. He was happy to hear his wife’s voice, even though, what with having to wait a few minutes until she heard him and could reply, it wasn’t actually possible to have what he would call a real conversation. This far from Earth, the signals had to work even harder to reach him.

The rover had been lowered from another side of the lander on a platform. Since about all he could do was take pictures and gather soil samples, NASA wanted him to drive around and take them in different places. They didn’t want him to go too far or take any unnecessary risks, and maybe, now that he’d given a speech of sorts, he could let the images of the Martian surface speak for themselves.

He rode around, careful not to drive too fast since there were some nasty-looking rocks and rims of small craters nearby, until the orange sky grew darker. By the time he got back to the lander with his samples, the sky was nearly black and the sun a bright swirl on the horizon.

I actually got here, he thought, then remembered the others with a pang.

He slept well, then got up to say his farewells to the Red Planet—although Rusty Planet might be a better name for it. Another ride, some more pictures and samples, and he was ready to go. He hoped the NASA scientists weren’t too unhappy with his answers to their questions about what unusual things he might have observed. Hell, everything seemed pretty unusual here, when he stopped to think about it.

He went inside, then strapped in. “Ready to go,” he said. There were just a couple of buttons to push, and he had practiced a lot during the last days aboard the Burroughs to be sure he didn’t make a mistake. He pressed one, waited for it to light up, then hit the next. For a few moments, he wondered why he couldn’t feel the lander taking off, then realized that it wasn’t moving.

“Uh, Mars to Houston,” he said, then waited until he heard Sallie’s voice respond. “I hate to say this, but I’m not going anywhere. Should I hit those whosits again, or what?”

Nearly ten minutes later, he heard Sallie’s reply. Her first word was, “Shit.”

No matter how many times he activated the controls, nothing happened. Mission Control had various theories about what might be wrong, none of which were doing him any good. Gradually it dawned on him that he might be stranded. Twenty-four hours after he reached that conclusion, Sallie confirmed it. They could not pinpoint the problem at that distance. They did not want to take any risks with the lander. He was reminded of which buttons to push in order to bring down the Mars base assembly.

It could have been worse, he told himself. There were enough provisions in the lander alone to last him more than a month, since his companions weren’t there to share them. With the supplies the base assembly had, he could survive until a rescue mission arrived.

There would be such a mission. The President assured him of that, as did Sallie. Another ship would be on its way to him within a few months.

The wonderful thing was that his mission, despite the tragedy, was in its own way a success, even if he wasn’t in the best position to appreciate that fact. A man had made it to Mars and was now on its surface, and the fate of his fellow astronauts had only temporarily stemmed the rising tide of optimism and hope. Humankind would return to the Moon and reach out to the other planets. Dan, who had insisted on landing instead of turning back, would be remembered by future generations of space explorers.

How his present predicament might affect the elections was not discussed. The President had said something vague about getting him back there in time for the convention. Now that Dan was a true hero, it didn’t look as though there would be any opposition in the Republican primaries anyway.

Dan tried to feel comforted by this, but the campaign, and everything else, seemed awfully far away.

A distant object shaped like a shuttlecock dropped toward the cratered plain. Its engines fired; the object landed two kilometers away.

Dan sighed with relief at the sight of the base assembly. He had been worrying that something might go wrong at this point; one disadvantage of being a hero was that sometimes it required you to be dead. Now he would be safe, and could keep busy making observations, watching movies, working out, and in general keeping himself together until the rescue mission arrived. It was sort of depressing to know he’d miss Thanksgiving and Christmas, although fortunately there were some turkey dinners among the provisions, and Mission Control had promised to sing carols for him.

He climbed into the rover and started toward the barrels of the base assembly; he’d check it out first, then come back another time to load up whatever he might need from the lander. His staff had promised to transmit the text for the official announcement of his candidacy in a few days, and he supposed they would want him to make some speeches from Mars later, during the primaries. Maybe being on Mars, whatever the disadvantages, was better than having to trudge through New Hampshire.

He had to admit it; life in the somewhat more spacious quarters of the Mars base wasn’t too bad in some ways. He was getting used to the desolate orange landscape and the way the sun set so suddenly. There were movies and records enough to keep him occupied, although he was beginning to see that there were limits to how many times he could watch some movies, even ones as great as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

But there were times when the solitude, even with all the messages NASA was relaying from Earth, really got to him. There wasn’t a whole lot a guy could do all alone, except for stuff it was better not to think about too much. He had spoken to Marilyn and the kids a couple of times’, but having to speak and then wait long minutes for the response made him realize how far he was from everything he knew.

Maybe things would pick up when he really got into his campaign. There was plenty he could do, even out here. His staff was already trying to set him up for a Nightline appearance, which would probably have to be taped so that the delay between Ted Koppel’s questions and his answers could be deleted. His staff should be transmitting the text for the official announcement of his candidacy any day now.

Dan had finished struggling into his spacesuit and was about to put on his helmet when the com started beeping at him. Maybe his speech-writers had finally gotten their act together. He sat down and turned on the screen.

The President’s face stared out at him. “Uh, hello, Mr. President,” Dan said. “I was just about to take a drive over to the lander—there’s some stuff I want to move here.”

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Dan,” the President said. “Something’s gone, well, a bit awry. Might have known the Democrats would think of some devious—see, we’re going to have to postpone your announcement for a while.”

“But why?”

He waited a long time for the President’s answer. “The Democrats—they’re saying you have to be on Earth to make your announcement. Somebody found some loophole or other in the law, and they’re arguing that you can’t declare and run for president while you’re on Mars. Got our guys working on it—think they can beat those bastards in court—but by the time they do, it may be too late to file and get you on primary ballots. Could try to get write-ins, but the rules are, uh, different in every state.”

Dan tried to recall if there was something in the law the Democrats could use to pull a stunt like this. He couldn’t think of anything, but then he hadn’t been exactly the biggest brain in law school. Maybe the Democrats would drag out John Glenn, however old he was, to run this time. They’d probably use Ashana’s family in the campaign, too; they had plenty of reason to be pissed off at the Administration.

“You said I could get back by the convention,” Dan murmured. “I mean, aren’t the delegates free to switch their votes if they want?”

The minutes passed. “Well, you’re right on the money there, and no question they’d turn to you, but—see, NASA’s got sort of a little problem with the new ship. Nothing for you to worry about, just some bitty technical thing they can definitely iron out, but they’re certain they can have you back here next fall.”

Dan was beginning to see more problems. The Democrats might use his predicament against the Republicans. They would say he wouldn’t be stranded there if the Administration had thought more about real science and space exploration and less about politics and publicity stunts, if they hadn’t been rushing to put him on another planet. He wouldn’t be on the campaign trail to inspire people and to invoke the names of his comrades; he would be only a distant voice and grainy image from Mars. The whole business might turn into as big a bummer as the end of the Gulf War.

“What are we going to do?” Dan asked.

When the President replied, he said, “Well, there’s a lotta sentiment here to make Marilyn our candidate.”

That figured. The idea was so perfect that Dan was surprised he hadn’t thought of it himself. The Democrats would look mean-spirited slinging mud at a hero’s wife, one waiting and praying for her husband to return safely.

“All I can say,” Dan said quietly, “is that she has my full support.”

Dan finished loading the rover, climbed in and drove slowly toward the scattered Tootsie Rolls of his base. He had not had to talk to Marilyn very long to convince her to run; in fact, he had expected her to object a lot more to the idea. She would make a pretty good president, though—maybe a better one than he would have been.

He had packed up the personal items of his comrades—Ashana’s Nikes, Ahmed’s Koran, Kiichi’s bat, and Sergei’s dolls—feeling that he wanted his dead friends’ things with him. He had also brought his golf balls and his favorite wood. The club, which had a persimmon head, had cost him a pretty penny, but he liked a driver with a solid hardwood head.

An inspiration came to him. He stopped the rover, climbed down, then took out one of his balls and the wood. Stepping over a small crater, he set down the ball, then gripped his club. Getting in a smooth swing was going to be rough with his spacesuit on, but he thought he could manage it. Alan Shepard might be the first guy to tee off on the Moon, but Dan would be the first to do so on another planet.

He swung his club and knew the head’s sweet spot had met the ball. The small white orb arched above the orange cratered landscape and soared toward the distant pink sky.

DOWN IN THE BOTTOMLANDS

Harry Turtledove

Much of the history of civilization as we know it centers on the Mediterranean Sea, which has not always held water. If it hadn’t refilled that last time . . .

A double handful of tourists climbed down from the omnibus, chattering with excitement. From under the long brim of his cap, Radnal vez Krobir looked them over, comparing them with previous groups he’d led through Trench Park. About average, he decided: an old man spending money before he died; younger folks searching for adventure in an overcivilized world; a few who didn’t fit into an obvious category and might be artists, writers, researchers, or anything else under the sun.

He also looked over the women in the tour group with a different sort of curiosity. He was in the process of buying a bride from her father, but he hadn’t done it; legally and morally, he remained a free agent. Some of the women were worth looking over, too: a couple of tall, slim, dark Highheads from the eastern lands who stuck by each other, and another of Radnal’s own Strongbrow race, shorter, stockier, fairer, with deep-set light eyes under heavy brow ridges.

One of the Highhead girls gave him a dazzling smile. He smiled back as he walked toward the group, his wool robes flapping around him. “Hello, friends,” he called. “Do you all understand Tarteshan? Ah, good.”

Cameras clicked as he spoke. He was used to that; people from every tour group wasted pictures on him, though he wasn’t what they’d come to see. He went into his usual welcoming speech:

“On behalf of the Hereditary Tyranny of Tartesh and the staff of Trench Park, I’m pleased to welcome you here today. If you haven’t read my button, or if you just speak Tarteshan but don’t know our syllabary, my name is Radnal vez Krobir. I’m a field biologist with the park, doing a two-year stretch of guide duty.”

“Stretch?” said the woman who’d smiled at him. “You make it sound like a sentence in the mines.”

“I don’t mean it like that—quite.” He grinned his most disarming grin. Most of the tourists grinned back. A few stayed sober-faced, likely the ones who suspected the gibe was real and the grin put on. There was some truth in that. He knew it, but the tourists weren’t supposed to.

He went on, “In a bit, I’ll take you over to the donkeys for the trip down into the Trench itself. As you know, we try to keep our mechanical civilization out of the park so we can show you what all the Bottomlands were like not so long ago. You needn’t worry. The donkeys are very sure-footed. We haven’t lost one—or even a tourist—in years.” This time, some of the chuckles that came back were nervous. Probably only a couple of this lot had ever done anything so archaic as getting on the back of an animal. Too bad for the ones just thinking about that now. The rules were clearly stated. The pretty Highhead girls looked particularly upset. The placid donkeys worried them more than the wild beasts of the Trench.

“Let’s put off the evil moment as long as we can,” Radnal said. “Come under the colonnade for half a daytenth or so and we’ll talk about what makes Trench Park unique.”

The tour group followed him into the shade. Several people sighed in relief. Radnal had to work to keep his face straight. The Tarteshan sun was warm, but if they had trouble here, they’d cook down in the Trench. That was their lookout. If they got heatstroke, he’d set them right again. He’d done it before.

He pointed to the first illuminated map. “Twenty million years ago, as you’ll see, the Bottomlands didn’t exist. A long stretch of sea separated what’s now the southwest section of the Great Continent from the rest. Notice that what were then two lands’ masses first joined in the east, and a land bridge rose here.” He pointed again, this time more precisely. “This sea, now a long arm of the Western Ocean, remained.”

He walked over to the next map, drawing the tourists with him. “Things stayed like that until about six and a half million years ago. Then, as that southwest section of the Great Continent kept drifting northward, a new range gradually pushed up here, at the western outlet of that inland sea. When it was cut off from the Western Ocean, it began to dry up: it lost more water by evaporation than flowed into it from its rivers. Now if you’ll come along . . .” The third map had several overlays, in different shades of blue. “The sea took about a thousand years to turn into the Bottomlands. It refilled from the Western Ocean several times, too, as tectonic forces lowered the Barrier Mountains. But for about the last five and a half million years, the Bottomlands have had about the form we know today.”

The last map showed the picture familiar to any child studying geography: the Trench of the Bottomlands furrowing across the Great Continent like a surgical scar, requiring colors needed nowhere else on the globe to show relief.

Radnal led the tourists out to the donkey corral. The shaggy animals were already bridled and saddled. Radnal explained how to mount, demonstrated, and waited for the tourists to mess it up. Sure enough, both Highhead girls put the wrong foot in the stirrup.

“No, like this,” he said, demonstrating again. “Use your left foot, then swing over.”

The girl who had smiled at him succeeded on the second try. The other balked. “Help me,” she said. Breathing out through his beaky nose in lieu of sighing, Radnal put his hands on her waist and all but lifted her into the saddle as she mounted. She giggled. “You’re so strong. He’s so strong, Evillia.” The other Highhead girl—presumably Evillia—giggled too.

Radnal breathed out again, harder. Tarteshans and other folk of Strongbrow race who lived north of the Bottomlands and down in them were stronger than most Highheads, but generally weren’t as agile. So what, either way?

He went back to work: “Now that we’ve learned to mount our donkeys, we’re going to learn to dismount.” The tourists groaned, but Radnal was inexorable. “You still have to carry your supplies from the omnibus and stow them in the saddlebags. I’m your guide, not your servant.” The Tarteshan words carried overtones of I’m your equal, not your slave.

Most of the tourists dismounted, but Evillia stayed up on her donkey. Radnal strode over to her; even his patience was fraying. “This way.” He guided her through the necessary motions.

“Thank you, freeman vez Krobir,” she said in surprisingly fluent Tarteshan. She turned to her friend. “You’re right, Lofosa; he is strong.”

Radnal felt his ears grow hot under their coat of down. A brown-skinned Highhead from south of the Bottomlands rocked his hips back and forth and said, “I’m jealous of you.” Several tourists laughed.

“Let’s get on with it,” Radnal said. “The sooner we get the donkeys loaded, the sooner we can begin and the more we’ll see.” That line never failed; you didn’t become a tourist unless you wanted to see as much as you could. As if on cue, the driver brought the omnibus around to the corral. The baggage doors opened with a hiss of compressed air. The driver started chucking luggage out of the bins.

“You shouldn’t have any problems,” Radnal said. Everyone’s gear had been weighed and measured beforehand, to make sure the donkeys wouldn’t have to bear anything too bulky or heavy. Most people easily shifted their belongings to the saddlebags. The two Highhead girls, though, had a night demon of a time making everything fit. He thought about helping them, but decided not to. If they had to pay a penalty for making the supply donkeys carry some of their stuff, it was their own fault.

They did get everything in, though their saddlebags bulged like a snake that had just swallowed a half-grown humpless camel. A couple of other people stood around helplessly, with full bags and gear left over. Smiling a smile he hoped was not too predatory, Radnal took them to the scales and collected a tenth of a unit of silver for every unit of excess weight.

“This is an outrage,” the dark brown Highhead man said. “Do you know who I am? I am Moblay Sopsirk’s son, aide to the Prince of Lissonland.” He drew himself up to his full height, almost a Tarteshan cubit more than Radnal’s.

“Then you can afford the four and three tenths,” Radnal answered. “I don’t keep the silver. It all goes to upkeep for the park.”

Grumbling still, Moblay paid. Then he stomped off and swung aboard his animal with more grace than Radnal had noticed him possessing. Down in Lissonland, the guide remembered, important people sometimes rode stripehorses for show. He didn’t understand that. He had no interest in getting onto a donkey when he wasn’t going down into Trench Park. As long as there were better ways of doing things, why not use them?

Also guilty of overweight baggage were a middle-aged Tarteshan couple. They were overweight themselves, too, but Radnal couldn’t do anything about that. Eltsac vez Martois protested, “The scale at home said we were all right.”

“If you read it right,” Nocso zev Martois said to her husband. “You probably didn’t.”

“Whose side are you on?” he snarled. She screeched at him. Radnal waited till they ran down, then collected the silver due the park.

When the tourists had remounted their donkeys, the guide walked over to the gate on the far side of the corral, swung it open, and replaced the key in a pouch he wore belted round his waist under his robe. As he went back to his own animal, he said, “When you ride through there, you enter the park itself, and the waivers you signed come into play. Under Tarteshan law, park guides have the authority of military officers within the park. I don’t intend to exercise it any more than I have to; we should get along just fine with simple common sense. But I am required to remind you the authority is there.” He also kept a repeating handcannon in one of his donkey’s saddlebags, but didn’t mention that.

“Please stay behind me and try to stay on the trail,” he said. “It won’t be too steep today; we’ll camp tonight at what was the edge of the continental shelf. Tomorrow we’ll descend to the bottom of the ancient sea, as far below mean sea level as a medium-sized mountain is above it. That will be more rugged terrain.”

The Strongbrow woman said, “It will be hot, too, much hotter than it is now. I visited the park three or four years ago, and it felt like a furnace. Be warned, everyone.”

“You’re right, freelady, ah—” Radnal said.

“I’m Toglo zev Pamdal.” She added hastily, “Only a distant collateral relation, I assure you.”

“As you say, freelady.” Radnal had trouble keeping his voice steady. The Hereditary Tyrant of Tartesh was Bortav vez Pamdal. Even his distant collateral relations needed to be treated with sandskink gloves. Radnal was glad Toglo had had the courtesy to warn him who she was—or rather, who her distant collateral relation was. At least she didn’t seem the sort who would snoop around and take bad reports on people back to the friends she undoubtedly had in high places.

Although the country through which the donkeys ambled was below sea level, it wasn’t very far below. It didn’t seem much different from the land over which the tourists’ omnibus had traveled to reach the edge of Trench Park: dry and scrubby, with thornbushes and palm trees like long-handled feather dusters.

Radnal let the terrain speak for itself, though he did remark, “Dig a couple of hundred cubits under the soil hereabouts and you’ll find a layer of salt, same as you would anywhere in the Bottomlands. It’s not too thick here on the shelf, because this area dried up quickly, but it’s here. That’s one of the first clues geologists had that the Bottomlands used to be a sea, and one of the ways they map the boundaries of the ancient water.”

Moblay Sopsirk’s son wiped his sweaty face with a forearm. Where Radnal, like any Tarteshan, covered up against the heat, Moblay wore only a hat, shoes, and a pocketed belt to carry silver, perhaps a small knife or toothpick, and whatever else he thought he couldn’t do without. He was dark enough that he didn’t need to worry about skin cancer, but he didn’t look very comfortable, either.

He said, “Were some of that water back in the Bottomlands, Radnal, Tartesh would have a better climate.”

“You’re right,” Radnal said; he was resigned to foreigners using his familial name with uncouth familiarity.

“We’d be several hundredths cooler in summer and warmer in winter. But if the Barrier Mountains fell again, we’d lose the great area that the Bottomlands encompass and the mineral wealth we derive from them: salt, other chemicals left by evaporation, and the petroleum reserves that wouldn’t be accessible through deep water. Tarteshans have grown used to heat over the centuries. We don’t mind it.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Toglo said. “I don’t think it’s an accident that Tarteshan air coolers are sold all over the world.”

Radnal found himself nodding. “You have a point, freelady. What we get from the Bottomlands, though, outweighs fuss over the weather.”

As he’d hoped, they got to the campsite with the sun still in the sky and watched it sink behind the mountains to the west. The tourists gratefully descended from their donkeys and stumped about, complaining of how sore their thighs were. Radnal set them to carrying lumber from the metal racks that lined one side of the site.

He lit the cookfires with squirts from a squeeze bottle of starter fuel and a flint-and-steel lighter. “The lazy man’s way,” he admitted cheerfully. As with his skill on a donkey, that he could start a fire at all impressed the tourists. He went back to the donkeys, dug out ration packs which he tossed into the flames. When their tops popped and began to vent steam, he fished them out with a long-handled fork.

“Here we are,” he said. “Peel off the foil and you have Tarteshan food—not a banquet fit for the gods, perhaps, but plenty to keep you from starving and meeting them before your time.”

Evillia read the inscription on the side of her pack. “These are military rations,” she said suspiciously. Several people groaned.

Like any other Tarteshan freeman, Radnal had done his required two years in the Hereditary Tyrant’s Volunteer Guard. He came to the ration packs’ defense: “Like I said, they’ll keep you from starving.”

The packs—mutton and barley stew, with carrots, onions, and a heavy dose of ground pepper and garlic—weren’t too bad. The two Martoisi inhaled theirs and asked for more.

“I’m sorry,” Radnal said. “The donkeys carry only so many. If I give you another pack each, someone will go hungry before we reach the lodge.”

“We’re hungry now,” Nocso zev Martois said.

“That’s right,” Eltsac echoed. They stared at each other, perhaps surprised at agreeing.

“I’m sorry,” Radnal said again. He’d never had anyone ask for seconds before. Thinking that, he glanced over to see how Toglo zev Pamdal was faring with such basic fare. As his eyes flicked her way, she crumpled her empty pack and got up to throw it in a refuse bin.

She had a lithe walk, though he could tell little of the shape of her body because of her robes. As young—or even not so young—men will, he wandered into fantasy. Suppose he was dickering with her father over bride price instead of with Markaf vez Putun, who acted as if his daughter Wello shat silver and pissed petrol . . .

He had enough sense to recognize when he was being foolish, which is more than the gods grant most. Toglo’s father undoubtedly could make a thousand better matches for her than a none-too-special biologist. Confrontation with brute fact didn’t stop him from musing, but did keep him from taking himself too seriously.

He smiled as he pulled sleepsacks out of one of the pack donkeys’ panniers. The tourists took turns with a foot pump to inflate them. With the weather so warm, a good many tourists chose to lie on top of the sleepsacks rather than crawl into them. Some kept on the clothes they’d been wearing, some had special sleep clothes, and some didn’t bother with clothes. Tartesh had a moderately strong nudity taboo: not enough to give Radnal the horrors at naked flesh, but plenty to make him eye Evillia and Lofosa as they carelessly shed shirts and trousers. They were young, attractive, and even well-muscled for Highheads. They seemed more naked to him because their bodies were less hairy than those of Strongbrows. He was relieved his robe hid his full response to them.

Speaking to the group, he said, “Get as much sleep as you can tonight. Don’t stay up gabbing. We’ll be in the saddle most of the day tomorrow, on worse terrain than we saw today. You’ll do better if you’re rested.”

“Yes, clanfather,” Moblay Sopsirk’s son said, as a youngster might to the leader of his kith grouping—but any youngster who sounded as sassy as Moblay would get the back of his clanfather’s hand across his mouth to remind him not to sound that way again.

But, since Radnal had spoken good sense, most of the tourists did try to go to sleep. They did not know the wilds but, with the possible exception of the Martoisi, they were not fools: few fools accumulated for an excursion to Trench Park. As he usually did the first night with a new group, Radnal disregarded his own advice. He was good at going without sleep and, being familiar with what lay ahead, would waste no energy on the trip down to the Trench itself.

An owl hooted from a hole in a palm trunk. The air smelled faintly spicy. Sage and lavender, oleander, laurel, thyme—many local plants had leaves that secreted aromatic oils. Their coatings reduced water loss—always of vital importance here—and made the leaves unpalatable to insects and animals.

The fading campfires drew moths. Every so often, their glow would briefly light up other, larger shapes: bats and nightjars swooping down to take advantage of the feast set out before them. The tourists took no notice of insects or predators. Their snores rang louder than the owl’s cries. After a few trips as tour guide, Radnal was convinced practically everyone snored. He supposed he did, too, though he’d never heard himself do it.

He yawned, lay back on his own sleepsack with hands clasped behind his head, looked up at the stars, displayed as if on black velvet. There were so many more of them here than in the lights of the big city: yet another reason to work in Trench Park. He watched them slowly whirl overhead; he’d never found a better way to empty his mind and drift toward sleep.

His eyelids were getting heavy when someone rose from his—no, her—sleepsack: Evillia, on her way to the privy shed behind some bushes. His eyes opened wider; in the dim firelight, she looked like a moving statue of polished bronze. As soon as her back was to him, he ran his tongue over his lips.

But instead of getting back into her sack when she returned, Evillia squatted by Lofosa’s. Both Highhead girls laughed softly. A moment later, they both climbed to their feet and headed Radnal’s way. Lust turned to alarm—what were they doing?

They knelt down, one on either side of him. Lofosa whispered, “We think you’re a fine chunk of man.” Evillia set a hand on the tie of his robe, began to undo it.

“Both of you?” he blurted. Lust was back, impossible to disguise since he lay on his back. Incredulity came with it. Tarteshan women—even Tarteshan tarts—weren’t so brazen (he thought how Evillia had reminded him of smoothly moving bronze); nor were Tarteshan men. Not that Tarteshan men didn’t enjoy lewd imaginings, but they usually kept quiet about them.

The Highhead girls shook with more quiet laughter, as if his reserve were the funniest thing imaginable. “Why not?” Evillia said. “Three can do lots of interesting things two can’t.”

“But—” Radnal waved to the rest of the tour group. “What if they wake up?”

The girls laughed harder; their flesh shifted more alluringly. Lofosa answered, “They’ll learn something.”

Radnal learned quite a few things. One was that, being on the far side of thirty, his nights of keeping more than one woman happy were behind him, though he enjoyed trying. Another was that, what with sensual distractions, trying to make two women happy at once was harder than patting his head with one hand and rubbing his stomach with the other. Still another was that neither Lofosa nor Evillia carried an inhibition anywhere about her person.

He felt himself flagging, knew he’d be limp in more ways than one come morning. “Shall we have mercy on him?” Evillia asked—in Tarteshan, so he could understand her teasing.

“I suppose so,” Lofosa said. “This time.” She twisted like a snake, brushed her lips against Radnal’s. “Sleep well, freeman.” She and Evillia went back to their sleepsacks, leaving him to wonder if he’d dreamed they were with him but too worn to believe it.

This time, his drift toward sleep was more like a dive. But before he yielded, he saw Toglo zev Pamdal come back from the privy. For a moment, that meant nothing. But if she was coming back now, she must have gone before, when he was too occupied to notice . . . which meant she must have seen him so occupied.

He hissed like an ocellated lizard, though green wasn’t the color he was turning. Toglo got back into her sleepsack without looking either at him or the two Highhead girls. Whatever fantasies he’d had about her shriveled. The best he could hope for come morning was the cool politeness someone of prominence gives an underling of imperfect manners. The worst . . .

What if she starts screaming to the group? he wondered. He supposed he could grit his teeth and carry on. But what if she complains about me to the Hereditary Tyrant? He didn’t like the answers he came up with; I’ll lose my job was the first that sprang to mind, and they went downhill from there.

He wondered why Moblay Sopsirk’s son couldn’t have got up to empty his bladder. Moblay would have been envious and admiring, not disgusted as Toglo surely was.

Radnal hissed again. Since he couldn’t do anything about what he’d already done, he tried telling himself he would have to muddle along and deal with whatever sprang from it. He repeated that to himself several times. It didn’t keep him from staying awake most of the night, no matter how tired he was.

The sun woke the tour guide. He heard some of the group already up and stirring. Though still sandy-eyed and clumsy with sleep, he made himself scramble out of his sack. He’d intended to get moving first, as he usually did, but the previous night’s exertion and worry overcame the best of intentions.

To cover what he saw as a failing, he tried to move twice as fast as usual, which meant he kept making small, annoying mistakes: tripping over a stone and almost falling, calling the privy the campfire and the campfire the privy, going to a donkey that carried only fodder when he wanted breakfast packs.

He finally found the smoked sausages and hard bread. Evillia and Lofosa grinned when they took out the sausages, which flustered him worse. Eltsac vez Martois stole a roll from his wife, who cursed him with a dockwalloper’s fluency and more than a dockwalloper’s volume.

Then Radnal had to give breakfast to Toglo zev Pamdal. “Thank you, freeman,” she said, more at ease than he’d dared hope. Then her gray eyes met his. “I trust you slept well?”

It was a conventional Tarteshan morning greeting, or would have been, if she hadn’t sounded—no, Radnal decided, she couldn’t have sounded amused. “Er—yes,” he managed, and fled.

He knew only relief at handing the next breakfast to a Strongbrow who put away a sketch pad and charcoal to take it. “Thank you,” the fellow said. Though he seemed polite enough, his guttural accent and the striped tunic and trousers he wore proclaimed him a native of Morgaf, the island kingdom off the northern coast of Tartesh—and the Tyranny’s frequent foe. Their current twenty-year bout of peace was as long as they’d enjoyed in centuries.

Normally, Radnal would have been cautious around a Morgaffo. But now he found him easier to confront than Toglo. Glancing at the sketch pad, he said, “That’s a fine drawing, freeman, ah—”

The Morgaffo held out both hands in front of him in his people’s greeting. “I am Dokhnor of Kellef, freeman vez Krobir,” he said. “Thank you for your interest.”

He made it sound like stop spying on me. Radnal hadn’t meant it that way. With a few deft strokes of his charcoal stick, Dokhnor had picked out the features of the campsite: the fire pits, the oleanders in front of the privy, the tethered donkeys. As a biologist who did field work, Radnal was a fair hand with a piece of charcoal. He wasn’t in Dokhnor’s class, though. A military engineer couldn’t have done better.

That thought triggered his suspicions. He looked at the Morgaffo more closely. The fellow carried himself as a soldier would, which proved nothing. Lots of Morgaffos were soldiers. Although far smaller than Tartesh, the island kingdom had always held its own in their struggles. Radnal laughed at himself. If Dokhnor was an agent, why was he in Trench Park instead of, say, at a naval base along the Western Ocean?

The Morgaffo glowered. “If you have finished examining my work, freeman, perhaps you will give someone else a breakfast.”

“Certainly,” Radnal answered in a voice as icy as he could make it. Dokhnor certainly had the proverbial Morgaffo arrogance. Maybe that proved he wasn’t a spy—a real spy would have been smoother. Or maybe a real spy would think no one would expect him to act like a spy, and act like one as a disguise. Radnal realized he could extend the chain to as many links as his imagination could forge. He gave up.

When all the breakfast packs were eaten, all the sleepsacks deflated and stowed, the group headed over to remount their donkeys for the trip into Trench Park itself. As he had the night before, Radnal warned, “The trail will be much steeper today. As long as we take it slow and careful, we’ll be fine.”

No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the ground quivered beneath his feet. Everyone stood stock—still; a couple of people exclaimed in dismay. The birds, on the other hand, all fell silent. Radnal had lived in earthquake country his whole life. He waited for the shaking to stop, and after a few heartbeats it did.

“Nothing to get alarmed at,” he said when the quake was over. “This part of Tartesh is seismically active, probably because of the inland sea that dried up so long ago. The crust of the earth is still adjusting to the weight of so much water being gone. There are a lot of fault lines in the area, some quite close to the surface.”

Dokhnor of Kellef stuck up a hand. “What if an earthquake should—how do you say it?—make the Barrier Mountains fall?”

“Then the Bottomlands would flood.” Radnal laughed. “Freeman, if it hasn’t happened in the last five and a half million years, I won’t lose sleep worrying that it’ll happen tomorrow, or any time I’m down in Trench Park.”

The Morgaffo nodded curtly. “That is a worthy answer. Carry on, freeman.”

Radnal had an impulse to salute him—he spoke with the same automatic assumption of authority that Tarteshan officers employed. The tour guide mounted his own donkey, waited until his charges were in ragged line behind him. He waved. “Let’s go.”

The trail down into Trench Park was hacked and blasted from rock that had been on the bottom of the sea. It was only six or eight cubits wide, and frequently switched back and forth. A motor with power to all wheels might have negotiated it, but Radnal wouldn’t have wanted to be at the tiller of one that tried.

His donkey pulled up a gladiolus and munched it. That made him think of something about which he’d forgotten to warn his group. He said, “When we get lower into the park, you’ll want to keep your animals from browsing. The soil down there has large amounts of things like selenium and tellurium along with the more usual minerals—they were concentrated there as the sea evaporated. That doesn’t bother a lot of the Bottomlands plants, but it will bother—and maybe kill—your donkeys if they eat the wrong ones.”

“How will we know which ones are which?” Eltsac zev Martois called.

He fought the urge to throw Eltsac off the trail and let him tumble down into Trench Park. The idiot tourist would probably land on his head, which by all evidence was too hard to be damaged by a fall of a mere few thousand cubits. And Radnal’s job was riding herd on idiot tourists. He answered, “Don’t let your donkey forage at all. The pack donkeys carry fodder, and there’ll be more at the lodge.”

The tour group rode on in silence for a while. Then Toglo zev Pamdal said, “This trail reminds me of the one down into the big canyon through the western desert in the Empire of Stekia, over on the Double Continent.”

Radnal was both glad Toglo would speak to him and jealous of the wealth that let her travel—just a collateral relation of the Hereditary Tyrant’s, eh? “I’ve only seen pictures,” he said wistfully. “I suppose there is some similarity of looks, but the canyon was formed differently from the Bottomlands: by erosion, not evaporation.”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ve also only seen pictures myself.”

“Oh.” Maybe she was a distant relative, then. He went on, “Much more like the big canyon are the gorges our rivers cut before they tumble into what was deep seabottom to form the Bitter Lakes in the deepest parts of the Bottomlands. There’s a small one in Trench Park, though it often dries up—the Dalorz River doesn’t send down enough water to maintain it very well.”

A little later, when the trail twisted west around a big limestone boulder, several tourists exclaimed over the misty plume of water plunging toward the floor of the park. Lofosa asked, “Is that the Dalorz?”

“That’s it,” Radnal said. “Its flow is too erratic to make it worth Tartesh’s while to build a power station where it falls off the ancient continental shelf, though we’ve done that with several other bigger rivers. They supply more than three fourths of our electricity: another benefit of the Bottomlands.”

A few small spun-sugar clouds drifted across the sky from west to east. Otherwise, nothing blocked the sun from beating down on the tourists with greater force every cubit they descended. The donkeys kicked up dust at every footfall.

“Does it ever rain here?” Evillia asked.

“Not very often,” Radnal admitted. “The Bottomlands desert is one Mountains pick off most of the moisture that blows from the Western Ocean, and the other mountain ranges that stretch into the Bottomlands from the north catch most of what’s left. But every two or three years Trench Park does get a downpour. It’s the most dangerous time to be there—a torrent can tear through a wash and drown you before you know it’s coming.”

“But it’s also the most beautiful time,” Toglo zev Pamdal said. “Pictures of Trench Park after a rain first made me want to come here, and I was lucky enough to see it myself on my last visit.”

“May I be so fortunate,” Dokhnor of Kellef said. “I brought colorsticks as well as charcoal, on the off chance I might be able to draw post-rain foliage.”

“The odds are against you, though the freelady was lucky before,” Radnal said. Dokhnor spread his hands to show his agreement. Like everything he did, the gesture was tight, restrained, perfectly controlled. Radnal had trouble imagining him going into transports of artistic rapture over desert flowers, no matter how rare or brilliant.

He said, “The flowers are beautiful, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg, if you’ll let me use a wildly inappropriate comparison. All life in Trench Park depends on water, the same as everywhere else. It’s adapted to get along with very little, but not none. As soon as any moisture comes, plants and animals try to pack a generation’s worth of growth and breeding into the little while it takes to dry up.”

About a quarter of a daytenth later, a sign set by the side of the trail announced that the tourists were farther below sea level than they could go anywhere outside the Bottomlands. Radnal read it aloud and pointed out, rather smugly, that the salt lake which was the next most submerged spot on dry land lay close to the Bottomlands, and might almost be considered an extension of them.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son said, “I didn’t imagine anyone would be so proud of this wasteland as to want to include more of the Great Continent in it.” His brown skin kept him from roasting under the desert sun, but sweat sheened his bare arms and torso.

A little more than halfway down the trail, a wide flat rest area was carved out of the rock. Radnal let the tourists halt for a while, stretch their legs and ease their weary hindquarters, and use the odorous privy. He passed out ration packs, ignored his charges’ grumbles. He noticed Dokhnor of Kellef ate his meal without complaint.

He tossed his own pack into the bin by the privy, then, a couple of cubits from the edge of the trail, peered down onto the floor of the Bottomlands. After one of the rare rains, the park was spectacular from here. Now it just baked: white salt pans, gray—brown or yellow—brown dirt, a scattering of faded green vegetation. Not even the area around the lodge was watered artificially; the Tyrant’s charter ordained that Trench Park be kept pristine.

As they came off the trail and started along the ancient sea bottom toward the lodge, Evillia said, “I thought it would be as if we were in the bottom of a bowl, with mountains all around us. It doesn’t really feel that way. I can see the ones we just came down, and the Barrier Mountains to the west, but there’s nothing to the east and hardly anything to the south—just a blur on the horizon.”

“I expected it would look like a bowl, too, the first time I came here,” Radnal said. “We are in the bottom of a bowl. But it doesn’t look that way because the Bottomlands are broad compared to their depth—it’s a big, shallow bowl. What makes it interesting is that its top is at the same level as the bottom of most other geological bowls, and its bottom deeper than any of them.”

“What are those cracks?” Toglo zev Pamdal asked, pointing down to breaks in the soil that ran across the tour group’s path. Some were no wider than a barleycorn; others, like open, lidless mouths, had gaps of a couple of digits between their sides.

“In arid terrain like this you’ll see all kinds of cracks in the ground from mud drying unevenly after a rain,” Radnal said. “But the ones you’ve noticed do mark a fault line. The earthquake we felt earlier probably was triggered along this fault: it marks where two plates in the earth’s crust are colliding.”

Nocso zev Martois let out a frightened squeak. “Do you mean that if we have another earthquake, those cracks will open and swallow us down?” She twitched her donkey’s reins, as if to speed it up and get as far away from the fault line as she could.

Radnal didn’t laugh; the Tyranny paid him for not laughing at tourists. He answered gravely, “If you worry about something that unlikely, you might as well worry about getting hit by a skystone, too. The one has about as much chance of happening as the other.”

“Are you sure?” Lofosa sounded anxious, too.

“I’m sure.” He tried to figure out where she and Evillia were from: probably the Krepalgan Unity, by their accent. Krepalga was the northwesternmost Highhead nation; its western border lay at the eastern edge of the Bottomlands. More to the point, it was earthquake country too. If this was all Lofosa knew about quakes, it didn’t say much for her brains.

And if Lofosa didn’t have a lot of brains, what did that say about her and Evillia picking Radnal to amuse themselves with? No one cares to think of a sexual partner’s judgment as faulty, for that reflects upon him.

Radnal did what any sensible man might have done: he changed the subject. “We’ll be at the lodge soon, so you’ll want to think about getting your things out of your bags and into your sleep cubicles.”

“What I want to think about is getting clean,” Moblay Sopsirk’s son contradicted.

“You’ll each be issued a small bucket of water every day for personal purposes,” he said, and overrode a chorus of groans: “Don’t complain—our brochures are specific about this. Almost all the fresh water in Trench Park comes down the trail we rode, on the backs of these donkeys. Think how much you’ll relish a hot soak when we come out of the park.”

“Think how much we’ll need a hot soak when we come out of the park,” said the elderly Strongbrow man Radnal had tagged as someone spending the silver he’d made in his earlier years (to his embarrassment, he’d forgotten the fellow’s name). “It’s not so bad for these Highheads here, since their bodies are mostly bare, but all my hair will be a greasy mess by the time this excursion is done.” He glared at Radnal as if it were his fault.

Toglo zev Pamdal said, “Don’t fret, freeman vez Maprab.” Benter vez Maprab, that’s who he was, Radnal thought, shooting Toglo a grateful glance. She was still talking to the old Strongbrow: “I have a jar of waterless hair cleaner you can just comb out. It’s more than I’d need; I’ll share some with you.”

“Well, that’s kind of you,” Benter vez Maprab said, mollified. “Maybe I should have brought some myself.”

You certainly should, you old fool, instead of complaining, Radnal thought. He also noted that Toglo had figured out what she’d need before she started her trip. He approved; he would have done the same had he been tourist rather than guide. Of course, if he’d arranged to forget his own waterless hair cleaner, he could have borrowed some from her. He exhaled through his nose. Maybe he’d been too practical for his own good.

Something small and dun-colored darted under his donkey’s hooves, then bounced away toward a patch of oleander. “What was that?” several people asked as it vanished among the fallen leaves under the plants.

“It’s one of the species of jerboa that live down here,” Radnal answered. “Without more than two heartbeats’ look, I couldn’t tell you which. There are many varieties, all through the Bottomlands. They lived in arid country while the inland sea still existed, and evolved to get the moisture they need from their food. That preadapted them to succeed here, where free water is so scarce.”

“Are they dangerous?” Nocso zev Martois asked.

“Only if you’re a shrub,” Radnal said. “No, actually, that’s not quite true. Some eat insects, and one species, the bladetooth, hunts and kills its smaller relatives. It filled the small predator niche before carnivores proper established themselves in the Bottomlands. It’s scarce today, especially outside Trench Park, but it is still around, often in the hottest, driest places where no other meat eaters can thrive.”

A little later, the tour guide pointed to a small, nondescript plant with thin, greenish-brown leaves. “Anyone tell me what that is?”

He asked that question whenever he took a group along the trail, and had only got a right answer once, just after a rain. But now Benter vez Maprab said confidently: “It’s a Bottomlands orchid, freeman vez Krobir, and a common type at that. If you’d shown us a red-veined one, that would have been worth fussing over.”

“You’re right, freeman, it is an orchid. It doesn’t look much like the ones you see in more hospitable climates, though, does it?” Radnal said, smiling at the elderly Strongbrow—if he was an orchid fancier, that probably explained why he’d come to Trench Park.

Benter only grunted and scowled in reply—evidently he’d had his heart set on seeing a rare red—veined orchid his first day at the park. Radnal resolved to search his bags at the end of the tour: carrying specimens out of the park was against the law.

A jerboa hopped up, started nibbling on an orchid leaf. Quick as a flash, something darted out from behind the plant, seized the rodent, and ran away. The tourists bombarded Radnal with questions: “Did you see that?” “What was it?” “Where’d it go?”

“That was a koprit bird,” he answered. “Fast, wasn’t it? It’s of the butcherbird family, but mostly adapted to life on the ground. It can fly, but it usually runs. Because birds excrete urea in more or less solid form, not in urine like mammals, they’ve done well in the Bottomlands.” He pointed to the lodge, which was only a few hundred cubits ahead now. “See? There’s another koprit bird on the roof, looking around to see what it can catch.”

A couple of park attendants came out of the lodge. They waved to Radnal, sized up the tourists, then helped them stable their donkeys. “Take only what you’ll need tonight into the lodge,” said one, Fer vez Canthal. “Leave the rest in your saddlebags for the trip out tomorrow. The less packing and unpacking, the better.”

Some tourists, veteran travelers, nodded at the good advice. Evillia and Lofosa exclaimed as if they’d never heard it before. Frowning at their naivetй, Radnal wanted to look away from them, but they were too pretty.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son thought so, too. As the group started from the stable to the lodge, he came up behind Evillia and slipped an arm around her waist. At the same moment, he must have tripped, for his startled cry made Radnal whirl toward them.

Moblay sprawled on the dirt floor of the stable. Evillia staggered, flailed her arms wildly, and fell down on top of him, hard. He shouted again, a shout which lost all its breath as she somehow hit him in the pit of the stomach with an elbow while getting back to her feet.

She looked down at him, the picture of concern. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You startled me.”

Moblay needed a while before he could sit, let alone stand. At last, he wheezed, “See if I ever touch you again,” in a tone that implied it would be her loss.

She stuck her nose in the air. Radnal said, “We should remember we come from different countries and have different customs. Being slow and careful will keep us from embarrassing one another.”

“Why, freeman, were you embarrassed last night?” Lofosa asked. Instead of answering, Radnal started to cough. Lofosa and Evillia laughed. Despite what Fer vez Canthal had said, both of them were just toting their saddlebags into the lodge. Maybe they hadn’t a lot of brains. But their bodies, those smooth, oh so naked bodies, were something else again.

The lodge was not luxurious, but boasted mesh screens to keep out the Bottomlands bugs, electric lights, and fans which stirred the desert air even if they did not cool it. It also had a refrigerator. “No ration packs tonight,” Radnal said. The tourists cheered.

The cooking pit was outdoors: the lodge was warm enough without a fire inside. Fer vez Canthal and the other attendant, Zosel vez Glesir, filled it with chunks of charcoal, splashed light oil over them, and fired them. Then they put a disjointed lamb carcass on a grill and hung it over the pit. Every so often, one of them basted it with a sauce full of pepper and garlic. The sauce and melting fat dripped onto the coals. They sputtered and hissed and sent up little clouds of fragrant smoke. Spit streamed in Radnal’s mouth.

The refrigerator also held mead, date wine, grape wine, and ale. Some of the tourists drank boisterously. Dokhnor of Kellef surprised Radnal by taking only chilled water. “I am sworn to the Goddess,” he explained.

“Not my affair,” Radnal answered, but his sleeping suspicions woke. The Goddess was the deity the Morgaffo military aristocracy most commonly followed. Maybe a traveling artist was among her worshipers, but Radnal did not find it likely.

He did not get much time to dwell on the problem Dokhnor presented. Zosel vez Glesir called him over to do the honors on the lamb. He used a big pair of eating sticks to pick up each piece of meat and transfer it to a paper plate.

The Martoisi ate like starving cave cats. Radnal felt guilty; maybe ordinary rations weren’t enough for them. Then he looked at how abundant flesh stretched the fabric of their robes. Guilt evaporated. They weren’t wasting away.

Evillia and Lofosa had poured down several mugs of date wine. That soon caused them difficulties. Krepalgans usually ate with knife and skewer; they had trouble manipulating their disposable pairs of wooden eating sticks. After cutting her meat into bite-sized chunks, Lofosa chased them around her plate but couldn’t pick them up. Evillia managed that, but dropped them on the way to her mouth.

They both seemed cheerful drunks, and laughed at their mishaps. Even stiff-necked Dokhnor unbent far enough to try to show them how to use sticks. His lesson did not do much good, though both Highhead girls moved close enough to him to make Radnal jealous. Evillia said, “You’re so deft. Morgaffos must use them every day.”

Dokhnor tossed his head in his people’s negative. “Our usual tool has prongs, bowl, and a sharp edge, all in one. The Tarteshans say we are a quiet folk because we risk cutting our tongues whenever we open our mouths. But I have traveled in Tartesh, and learned what to do with sticks.”

“Let me try again,” Evillia said. This time, she dropped the piece of lamb on Dokhnor’s thigh. She picked it up with her fingers. After her hand lingered on the Morgaffo’s leg long enough to give Radnal another pang, she popped the gobbet into her mouth.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son began singing in his own language. Radnal did not understand most of the words, but the tune was wild and free and easy to follow. Soon the whole tour group was clapping time. More songs followed. Fer vez Canthal had a ringing baritone. Everyone in the group spoke Tarteshan, but not everyone knew Tartesh’s songs well enough to join in. As they had for Moblay, those who could not sing clapped.

When darkness fell, gnats emerged in stinging clouds. Radnal and the group retreated to the lodge, whose screens held the biters away. “Now I know why you wear so many clothes,” Moblay said. “They’re armor against insects.” The dark brown Highhead looked as if he didn’t know where to scratch first.

“Of course,” Radnal said, surprised Moblay had taken so long to see the obvious. “If you’ll hold still for a couple of heartbeats, we have a spray to take away the itch.”

Moblay sighed as Radnal sprayed painkiller onto him. “Anyone want another song?” he called.

This time, he got little response. Being under a roof inhibited some people. It reminded others of their long day; Toglo zev Pamdal was not the only tourist to wander off to a sleeping cubicle. Dokhnor of Kellef and old Benter vez Maprab had discovered a war board and were deep in a game. Moblay went over to watch. So did Radnal, who fancied himself a war player.

Dokhnor, who had the blue pieces, advanced a footsoldier over the blank central band that separated his side of the board from his opponent’s. “Across the river,” Moblay said.

“Is that what Lissonese name the gap?” Radnal said. “With us, it’s the Trench.”

“And in Morgaf, it’s the Sleeve, after the channel that separates our islands from Tartesh,” Dokhnor said. “No matter what we call it, though, the game’s the same all over the world.”

“It’s a game that calls for thought and quiet,” Benter said pointedly. After some thought, he moved a counselor (that was the name of the piece on the red side of board; its blue equivalent was an elephant) two squares diagonally. The old Tarteshan’s pauses for concentration grew more frequent as the game went on. Dokhnor’s attack had the red governor scurrying along the vertical and horizontal lines of his fortress, and his guards along the diagonals, to evade or block the blue pieces. Finally Dokhnor brought one of his cannons in line with the other and said, “That’s the end.”

Benter glumly nodded. The cannon (the red piece of identical value was called a catapult) was hard to play well: it moved vertically and horizontally, but had to jump over one other piece every time. Thus the rear cannon, not the front, threatened the red governor. But if Benter interposed a guard or one of his chariots, that turned the forward cannon into the threat.

“Nicely played,” Benter said. He got up from the war table, headed for a cubicle.

“Care for a game, either of you?” Dokhnor asked the spectators.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son shook his head. Radnal said, “I did, till I saw you play. I don’t mind facing someone better than I am if I have some chance. Even when I lose, I learn something. But you’d just trounce me, and a little of that goes a long way.”

“As you will.” Dokhnor folded the war board, poured the disks into their bag. He replaced bag and board on their shelf. “I’m for bed, then.” He marched off to the cubicle he’d chosen.

Radnal and Moblay glanced at each other, then toward the war set. By unspoken consent, they seemed to decide that if neither of them wanted a go at Dokhnor of Kellef, playing each other would be rude. “Another night,” Radnal said.

“Fair enough.” Moblay yawned, displaying teeth that gleamed all the whiter against his brown skin. He said, “I’m about done over—no, it’s ‘done in’ in Tarteshan, isn’t it?—anyhow. See you in the morning, Radnal.”

Again the tour guide controlled his annoyance at Moblay’s failure to use the polite particle vez. At first when foreigners forgot that trick of Tarteshan grammar, he’d imagined himself deliberately insulted. Now he knew better, though he still noticed the omission.

A small light came on in Dokhnor’s cubicle: a battery-powered reading lamp. The Morgaffo wasn’t reading, though. He sat with his behind on the sleeping mat and his back against the wall. His sketch pad lay on his bent knees. Radnal heard the faint skritch-skritch of charcoal on paper.

“What’s he doing?” Fer vez Canthal whispered. A generation’s peace was not enough time to teach most Tarteshans to trust their island neighbors.

“He’s drawing,” Radnal answered, as quietly. Neither of them wanted to get Dokhnor’s attention. The reply could have come out sounding innocent. It didn’t. Radnal went on, “His travel documents say he’s an artist.” Again, tone spoke volumes.

Zosel vez Glesir said, “If he really were a spy, Radnal vez, he’d carry a camera, not a sketch pad. Everyone carries a camera into Trench Park—he wouldn’t even get noticed.”

“True,” Radnal said. “But he doesn’t act like an artist. He acts like a member of the Morgaffo officer caste. You heard him—he’s sworn to their Goddess.”

Fer vez Canthal said something lewd about the Morgaffo Goddess. But he lowered his voice even further before he did. An officer from Morgaf who heard his deity offended might make formal challenge. Then again, in Tartesh, where dueling was illegal, he might simply commit murder. The only thing certain was that he wouldn’t ignore the insult.

“We can’t do anything to him—or even about him—unless we find out he is spying,” Zosel vez Glesir said.

“Yes,” Radnal said. “The last thing Tartesh wants is to hand Morgaf an incident.” He thought about what would happen to someone who fouled up so gloriously. Nothing good, that was sure. Then something else occurred to him.

“Speaking of the Tyrant, do you know who’s in this group? Freelady Toglo zev Pamdal, that’s who.”

Zosel and Fer whistled softly. “Good thing you warned us,” Zosel said. “We’ll stay round her like cotton round cut glass.”

“I don’t think she cares for that sort of thing,” Radnal said. “Treat her well, yes, but don’t fall all over yourselves.”

Zosel nodded. Fer still had Dokhnor of Kellef on his mind. “If he is a spy, what’s he doing in Trench Park instead of somewhere important?”

“I thought of that myself,” Radnal said. “Cover, maybe. And who knows where he’s going after he leaves?”

“I know where I’m going,” Zosel said, yawning: “To bed. If you want to stay up all night fretting about spies, go ahead.”

“No, thanks,” Fer answered. “A spy would have to be crazy or on holiday to come to Trench Park. If he’s crazy, we don’t have to worry about him, and if he’s on holiday, we don’t have to worry about him then, either. So I’m going to bed, too.”

“If you think I’ll stay talking to myself, you’re both crazy,” Radnal said. All three Tarteshans got up. Dokhnor of Kellef’s reading lamp went out, plunging his cubicle into blackness. Radnal dimmed the lights in the common room. He flopped down onto his sleeping mat with a long sigh. He would sooner have been out in the field, curled up in a sleepsack under gnat netting. This was the price he paid for doing what he wanted most of the time. He knew his own snores would soon join the tourists’.

Then two female shapes appeared in the entrance to his cubicle. By the gods, not again, he thought as his eyes opened wide, which showed how tired he was. He said, “Don’t you believe in sleep?”

Evillia laughed softly, or maybe Lofosa. “Not when there are better things to do,” Lofosa said. “We have some new ideas, too. But we can always see who else is awake.”

Radnal almost told her to go ahead, and take Evillia with her. But he heard himself say “No” instead. The night before had been educational beyond his dreams, the stuff people imagined when they talked about the fringe benefits of a tour guide’s job. Until last night, he’d reckoned those stories imaginary: in his two years as a guide, he’d never cavorted with a tourist before. Now . . . he grinned as he felt himself rising to the occasion.

The Highhead girls came in. As they’d promised, the threesome tried some new things. He wondered how long their inventiveness could last, and if he could last as long. He was sure he’d enjoy trying.

His stamina and the girls’ ingenuity flagged together. He remembered them getting up from the mat. He thought he remembered them going out into the common room. He was sure he didn’t remember anything after that. He slept like a log from a petrified forest.

When the scream jarred him awake, his first muzzy thought was that only a few heartbeats had passed. But a glance at his pocket clock as he closed his robe told him sunrise was near. He dashed out into the common room.

Several tourists were already out there, some dressed, some not. More emerged every moment, as did the other two Trench Park staffers. Everyone kept saying, “What’s going on?”

Though no one directly answered the question, no one needed to. As naked as when she’d frolicked with Radnal, Evillia stood by the table where Benter vez Maprab and Dokhnor of Kellef had played war. Dokhnor was there, too, but not standing. He lay sprawled on the floor, head twisted at an unnatural angle.

Evillia had jammed a fist in her mouth to stifle another scream. She took it out, quavered, “Is—is he dead?” Radnal strode over to Dokhnor, grabbed his wrist, felt for a pulse. He found none, nor was the Morgaffo breathing. “He’s dead, all right,” Radnal said grimly.

Evillia moaned. Her knees buckled. She toppled onto Radnal’s bent back.

When Evillia fainted, Lofosa screamed and ran forward to try to help. Nocso zev Martois screamed, too, even louder. Moblay Sopsirk’s son hurried toward Radnal and Evillia. So did Fer vez Canthal and Zosel vez Glesir. So did Toglo zev Pamdal. So did another tourist, a Highhead who’d spoken very little on the way down to the lodge.

Everyone got in everyone else’s way. Then the quiet Highhead stopped being quiet and shouted, “I am a physician, the six million gods curse you! Let me through!”

“Let the physician through,” Radnal echoed, sliding Evillia off him and to the ground as gently as he could.

“Check her first, freeman Golobol,” he added, pleased he’d hung onto the doctor’s name. “I’m afraid you’re too late to help Dokhnor now.”

Golobol was almost as dark as Moblay, but spoke Tarteshan with a different accent. As he turned to Evillia, she moaned and stirred. “She will be all right, oh yes, I am sure,” he said. “But this poor fellow—” As Radnal had, he felt for Dokhnor’s pulse. As Radnal had, he failed to find it. “You are correct, sir. This man is dead. He has been dead for some time.”

“How do you know?” Radnal asked.

“You felt of him, not?” the physician said. “Surely you noticed his flesh has begun to cool. It has, oh yes.” Thinking back, Radnal had noticed, but he’d paid no special attention. He’d always prided himself on how well he’d learned first-aid training. But he wasn’t a physician, and didn’t automatically take everything into account as a physician would. His fit of chagrin was interrupted when Evillia let out a shriek a hunting cave cat would have been proud of.

Lofosa bent by her, spoke to her in her own language. The shriek cut off. Radnal started thinking about what to do next. Golobol said, “Sir, look here, if you would.”

Golobol was pointing to a spot on the back of Dokhnor’s neck, right above where it bent gruesomely. Radnal had to say, “I don’t see anything.”

“You Strongbrows are a hairy folk, that is why,” Golobol said. “Here, though—see this, ah, discoloration, is that the word in your language? It is? Good. Yes. This discoloration is the sort of mark to be expected from a blow by the side of the hand, a killing blow.”

Despite Bottomlands heat, ice formed in the pit of Radnal’s stomach. “You’re telling me this was murder.”

The word cut through the babble filling the common room like a scalpel. There was chaos one heartbeat, silence the next. Into that abrupt, intense silence, Golobol said, “Yes.”

“Oh, by the gods, what a mess,” Fer vez Canthal said.

Figuring out what to do next became a lot more urgent for Radnal. Why had the gods (though he didn’t believe in six million of them) let someone from his tour group get murdered? And why, by all the gods he did believe in, did it have to be the Morgaffo? Morgaf would be suspicious—if not hostile—if any of its people met foul play in Tartesh. And if Dokhnor of Kellef really was a spy, Morgaf would be more than suspicious. Morgaf would be furious.

Radnal walked over to the radiophone. “Whom will you call?” Fer asked.

“First, the park militia. They’d have to be notified in any case. And then—” Radnal took a deep breath. “Then I think I’d best call the Hereditary Tyrant’s Eyes and Ears in Tarteshem. Murder of a Morgaffo sworn to the Goddess is a deeper matter than the militia can handle alone. Besides, I’d sooner have an Eye and Ear notify the Morgaffo plenipo than try doing it myself.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Fer said. “Wouldn’t want Morgaffo gunboats running across the Sleeve to raid our coasts because you said something wrong. Or—” The lodge attendant shook his head. “No, not even the island king would be crazy enough to start tossing starbombs over something this small.” Fer’s voice turned anxious. “Would he?”

“I don’t think so.” But Radnal sounded anxious, too. Politics hadn’t been the same since starbombs came along fifty years before. Neither Tartesh nor Morgaf had used them, even in war against each other, but both countries kept building them. So did eight or ten other nations, scattered across the globe. If another big war started, it could easily become The Big War, the one everybody was afraid of.

Radnal punched buttons on the radiophone. After a couple of static bursts, a voice answered: “Trench Park militia, Subleader vez Steries speaking.”

“Gods bless you, Liem vez,” Radnal said; this was a man he knew and liked. “Vez Krobir here, over at the tourist lodge. I’m sorry to have to tell you we’ve had a death. I’m even sorrier to have to tell you it looks like murder.” Radnal explained what had happened to Dokhnor of Kellef.

Liem vez Steries said, “Why couldn’t it have been anyone else but the Morgaffo? Now you’ll have to drag in the Eyes and Ears, and the gods only know how much hoorah will erupt.”

“My next call was to Tarteshem,” Radnal agreed.

“It probably should have been your first one, but never mind,” Liem vez Steries said. “I’ll be over there with a circumstances man as fast as I can get a helo in the air. Farewell.”

“Farewell.” Radnal’s next call had to go through a human relayer. After a couple of hundred heartbeats, he found himself talking with an Eye and Ear named Peggol vez Menk. Unlike the park militiaman, Peggol kept interrupting with questions, so the conversation took twice as long as the other one had.

When Radnal was through, the Eye and Ear said, “You did right to involve us, freeman vez Krobir. We’ll handle the diplomatic aspects, and we’ll fly a team down there to help with the investigation. Don’t let anyone leave the—lodge, did you call it? Farewell.”

The radiophone had a speaking diaphragm in the console, not the more common—and more private—ear-and-mouth handset. Everyone heard what Peggol vez Menk said. Nobody liked it. Evillia said, “Did he mean we’re going to have to stay cooped up here—with a murderer?” She started trembling. Lofosa put an arm around her.

Benter vez Maprab had a different objection: “See here, freeman, I put down good silver for a tour of Trench Park, and I intend to have that tour. If not, I shall take legal measures.”

Radnal stifled a groan. Tarteshan law, which relied heavily on the principle of trust, came down hard on those who violated contracts in any way. If the old Strongbrow went to court, he’d likely collect enormous damages from Trench Park—and from Radnal, as the individual who failed to deliver the service contracted for.

Worse, the Martoisi joined the outcry. A reasonably upright and upstanding man, Radnal had never had to hire a pleader in his life. He wondered if he had enough silver to pay for a good one. Then he wondered if he’d ever have any silver again, once the tourists, the courts, and the pleader were through with him.

Toglo zev Pamdal cut through the hubbub: “Let’s wait a few heartbeats. A man is dead. That’s more important than everything else. If the start of our tour is delayed, perhaps Trench Park will regain equity by delaying its end to give us the full touring time we’ve paid for.”

“That’s an excellent suggestion, freelady zev Pamdal,” Radnal said gratefully. Fer and Zosel nodded.

A distant thutter in the sky grew to a roar. The militia helo kicked up a small dust storm as it set down between the stables and the lodge. Flying pebbles clicked off walls and windows. The motor shut down. As the blades slowed, dust subsided.

Radnal felt as if a good god had frightened a night demon from his shoulders. “I don’t think we’ll need to extend your time here by more than a day,” he said happily.

“How will you manage that, if we’re confined here in this gods-forsaken wilderness?” Eltsac vez Martois growled.

“That’s just it,” Radnal said. “We are in a wilderness. Suppose we go out and see what there is to see in Trench Park—where will the culprit flee on donkeyback? If he tries to get away, we’ll know who he is because he’ll be the only one missing, and we’ll track him down with the helo.” The tour guide beamed. The tourists beamed back—including, Radnal reminded himself, the killer among them.

Liem vez Steries and two other park militiamen walked into the lodge. They wore soldierly versions of Radnal’s costume: their robes, instead of being white, were splotched in shades of tan and light green, as were their long-brimmed caps. Their rank badges were dull; even the metal buckles of their sandals were painted to avoid reflections. Liem set a recorder on the table Dokhnor and Benter vez Maprab had used for war the night before. The circumstances man started taking pictures with as much abandon as if he’d been a tourist. He asked, “Has the body been moved?”

“Only as much as we needed to make sure the man was dead,” Radnal answered.

“We?” the circumstances man asked. Radnal introduced Golobol. Liem got everyone’s statement on the wire: first Evillia, who gulped and blinked back tears as she spoke, then Radnal, then the physician, and then the other tourists and lodge attendants. Most of them echoed one another: they’d heard a scream, run out, and seen Evillia standing over Dokhnor’s corpse.

Golobol added, “The woman cannot be responsible for his death. He had been deceased some while, between one and two daytenths, possibly. She, unfortunate one, merely discovered the body.”

“I understand, freeman,” Liem vez Steries assured him. “But because she did, her account of what happened is important.”

The militiaman had just finished recording the last statement when another helo landed outside the lodge. The instant its dust storm subsided, four men came in. The Hereditary Tyrant’s Eyes and Ears looked more like prosperous merchants than soldiers: their caps had patent—leather brims, they closed their robes with silver chains, and they sported rings on each index finger.

“I am Peggol vez Menk,” one of them announced. He was short and, by Tarteshan standards, slim; he wore his cap at a dapper angle. His eyes were extraordinarily shrewd, as if he were waiting for someone around him to make a mistake. He spotted Liem vez Steries at once, and asked, “What’s been done thus far, Subleader?”

“What you’d expect,” the militiaman answered: “Statements from all present, and our circumstances man, Senior Trooper vez Sofana there, has taken some pictures. We didn’t disturb the body.”

“Fair enough,” the Eye and Ear said. One of his men was flashing more photos. Another set a recorder beside the one already on the table. “We’ll get a copy of your wire, and we’ll make one for ourselves—maybe we’ll find questions you missed. You haven’t searched belongings yet?”

“No, freeman.” Liem vez Steries’ voice went wooden. Radnal wouldn’t have wanted someone to steal and duplicate his work, either. Eyes and Ears, though, did as they pleased. Why not? They watched Tartesh, but who watched them?

“We’ll take care of it.” Peggol vez Menk sat down at the table. The photographer stuck in a fresh clip of film, then followed the two remaining Eyes and Ears into the sleeping cubicle nearest the entrance.

It was Golobol’s. “Be careful, oh please I beg you,” the physician exclaimed. “Some of my equipment is delicate.”

Peggol said, “I’ll hear the tale of the woman who discovered the body.” He pulled out a notepad, glanced at it.

“Evillia.” A little calmer now, Evillia retold her story using, so far as Radnal could tell, the same words she had before. If Peggol found any new questions, he didn’t ask them.

After about a tenth of a daytenth, it was Radnal’s turn. Peggol did remember his name without needing to remind himself. Again, his questions were like the ones Liem vez Steries had used. When he asked the last one, Radnal had a question of his own: “Freeman, while the investigation continues, may I take my group out into the Bottomlands?” He explained how Benter vez Maprab had threatened to sue, and why he thought even a guilty tourist unlikely to escape.

The Eye and Ear pulled at his lower lip. He let the hair beneath it grow out in a tuft, which made him seem to have a protruding chin like a Highhead’s. When he released the lip, it went back with a liquid plop. Under his tilted cap, he looked wise and cynical. Radnal’s hopes plunged. He waited for Peggol to laugh at him for raising the matter.

Peggol said, “Freeman, I know you technically enjoy military rank, but suppose you discover who the killer is, or he strikes again. Do you reckon yourself up to catching him and bringing him back for trial and decapitation?”

“I—” Radnal stopped before he went any further. The ironic question reminded him this wasn’t a game. Dokhnor of Kellef might have been a spy, he was dead now, and whoever had killed him might kill again—might kill me, if I find out who he is, he thought. He said, “I don’t know. I’d like to think so, but I’ve never had to do that sort of thing.”

Something like approval came into Peggol vez Menk’s eyes. “You’re honest with yourself. Not everyone can say that. Hmm—it wouldn’t be just your silver involved in a suit, would it? No, of course not; it would be Trench Park’s, too, which means the Hereditary Tyrant’s.”

“Just what I was thinking,” Radnal said, with luck patriotically. His own silver came first with him. He was honest enough with himself to be sure of that—but he didn’t have to tell it to Peggol.

“I’m sure you were,” the Eye and Ear said, his tone dry. “The Tyrant’s silver really does come first with me. How’s this, then? Suppose you take the tourists out, as you’ve contracted to do. But suppose I come with you to investigate while my comrades keep working here? Does that seem reasonable?”

“Yes, freeman; thank you,” Radnal exclaimed.

“Good,” Peggol said. “My concubine has been nagging me to bring her here. Now I’ll see if I want to do that.” He grinned knowingly. “You see, I also keep my own interests in mind.”

The other Eyes and Ears had methodically gone from one sleeping cubicle to the next, examining the tourists’ belongings. One of them brought a codex out of Lofosa’s cubicle, dropped it on the table in front of Peggol vez Menk. The cover was a color photo of two good-looking Highheads fornicating. Peggol flipped through it. Variations on the same theme filled every page.

“Amusing,” he said, “even if it should have been seized when its owner entered our domains.”

“I like that!” Lofosa sounded indignant. “You sanctimonious Strongbrows, pretending you don’t do the same things—and enjoy them, too. I ought to know.”

Radnal hoped Peggol would not ask how she knew. He was certain she would tell him, in detail; she and Evillia might have been many things, but not shy. But Peggol said, “We did not come here to search for filth. She might have worn out Dokhnor with that volume, but she didn’t kill him with it. Let her keep it, if she enjoys telling the world what should be kept private.”

“Oh, rubbish!” Lofosa scooped up the codex and carried it back to her cubicle, rolling her hips at every step as if to contradict Peggol without another word.

The Eyes and Ears brought out nothing more from her sleep cubicle or Evillia’s for their chief to inspect. That surprised Radnal; the two women had carried in everything but the donkey they’d ridden. He shrugged—they’d probably filled their saddlebags with feminine fripperies and junk that could have stayed behind in their Tarteshan hostel if not in Krepalga.

Then he stopped thinking about them—the Eye and Ear who’d gone into Dokhnor’s cubicle whistled. Peggol vez Menk dashed in there. He came out with his fist tightly closed around something. He opened it. Radnal saw two six-pointed gold stars: Morgaffo rank badges.

“So he was a spy,” Fer vez Canthal exclaimed.

“He may have been,” Peggol said. But when he got on the radiophone to Tarteshem, he found Dokhnor of Kellef had declared his battalion leader’s rank when he entered the Tyranny. The Eye and Ear scowled. “A soldier, yes, but not a spy after all, it would appear.”

Benter vez Maprab broke in: “I wish you’d finish your pawing and let us get on with our tour. I haven’t that many days left, so I hate to squander one.”

“Peace, freeman,” Peggol said. “A man is dead.”

“Which means he’ll not complain if I see the much-talked-about wonders of Trench Park.” Benter glared as if he were the Hereditary Tyrant dressing down some churlish underling.

Radnal, seeing how Benter reacted when thwarted, wondered if he’d broken Dokhnor’s neck for no better reason than losing a game of war. Benter might be old, but he wasn’t feeble. And he was sure to be a veteran of the last war with Morgaf, or the one before that against Morgaf and the Krepalgan Unity both. He would know how to kill.

Radnal shook his head. If things kept on like this, he’d start suspecting Fer and Zosel next, or his own shadow. He wished he hadn’t lost the tour guides’ draw. He would sooner have been studying the metabolism of the fat sand rat than trying to figure out which of his charges had just committed murder.

Peggol vez Menk said, “We shall have to search the outbuildings before we begin. Freeman vez Krobir already told you we’d go out tomorrow. My professional opinion is that no court would sustain a suit over one day’s delay when compensational time is guaranteed.”

“Bah!” Benter stomped off. Radnal caught Toglo zev Pamdal’s eye. She raised one eyebrow slightly, shook her head. He shifted his shoulders in a tiny shrug. They both smiled. In every group, someone turned out to be a pain in the backside. Radnal let his smile expand, glad Toglo wasn’t holding his sport with Lofosa and Evillia against him.

“Speaking of outbuildings, freeman vez Krobir,” Peggol said, “there’s just the stables, am I right?”

“That and the privy, yes,” Radnal said.

“Oh, yes, the privy.” The Eye and Ear wrinkled his nose. It was even more prominent than Radnal’s. Most Strongbrows had big noses, as if to counterbalance their long skulls. Lissonese, whose noses were usually flattish, sometimes called Tarteshans Snouts on account of that. The name would start a brawl in any port on the Western Ocean.

Fer vez Canthal accompanied one of Peggol’s men to the stables; the Eye and Ear obviously needed support against the ferocious, blood-crazed donkeys inside—that was what his body language said, anyhow. When Peggol ordered him out, he’d flinched as if told to invade Morgaf and bring back the king’s ears.

“You Eyes and Ears don’t often deal with matters outside the big cities, do you?” Radnal asked.

“You noticed that?” Peggol vez Menk raised a wry eyebrow. “You’re right; we’re urbanites to the core. Threats to the realm usually come among crowds of masking people. Most that don’t are a matter for the army, not us.”

Moblay Sopsirk’s son went over to the shelf where the war board was stored. “If we can’t go out today, Radnal, care for the game we didn’t have last night?”

“Maybe another time, freeman vez Sopsirk,” the tour guide said, turning Moblay’s name into its nearest Tarteshan equivalent. Maybe the brown man would take the hint and speak a bit more formally to him. But Moblay didn’t seem good at catching hints, as witness his advances toward Evillia and this even more poorly timed suggestion of a game. The Eye and Ear returned from the stable without the solution to Dokhnor’s death. By his low-voiced comments to his friends, he was glad he’d escaped the den of vicious beasts with his life. The Trench Park staffers tried to hide their sniggers. Even a few of the tourists, only two days better acquainted with donkeys than the Eye and Ear, chuckled at his alarm.

Something on the roof said hig-hig-hig! in a loud, strident voice. The Eye and Ear who’d braved the stables started nervously. Peggol vez Menk raised his eyebrow again. “What’s that, freeman vez Krobir?”

“A koprit bird,” Radnal said. “They hardly impale people on thornbushes.”

“No, eh? That’s good to hear.” Peggol’s dry cough served him for a laugh.

The midday meal was ration packs. Radnal sent Liem vez Steries a worried look: the extra mouths at the lodge would make supplies run out faster than he’d planned for. Understanding the look, Liem said, “We’ll fly in more from the militia outpost if we have to.”

“Good.”

Between them, Peggol vez Menk and Liem vez Steries spent most of the afternoon on the radiophone. Radnal worried about power, but not as much. Even if the generator ran out of fuel, solar cells would take up most of the slack. Trench Park had plenty of sunshine.

After supper, the militiamen and Eyes and Ears scattered sleepsacks on the common room floor. Peggol set up a watch schedule that gave each of his and Liem’s men about half a daytenth each. Radnal volunteered to stand a watch himself.

“No,” Peggol answered. “While I do not doubt your innocence, freeman vez Krobir, you and your colleagues formally remain under suspicion here. The Morgaffo plenipo could protest were you given a post which might let you somehow take advantage of us.”

Though that made some sense, it miffed Radnal. He retired to his sleeping cubicle in medium dudgeon, lay down, and discovered he could not sleep. The last two nights, he’d been on the edge of dropping off when Evillia and Lofosa called. Now he was awake, and they stayed away.

He wondered why. They’d already shown they didn’t care who watched them when they made love. Maybe they thought he was too shy to do anything with militiamen and Eyes and Ears outside the entrance. A few days before, they would have been right. Now he wondered. They took fornication so much for granted that they made any other view of it seem foolish.

Whatever their reasons, they stayed away. Radnal tossed and turned on his sleepsack. He thought about going out to chat with the fellow on watch, but decided not to: Peggol vez Menk would suspect he was up to something nefarious if he tried. That annoyed him all over again, and drove sleep further away than ever. So did the Martoisi’s furious row over how one of them—Eltsac said Nocso, Nocso said Eltsac—had managed to lose their only currycomb.

The tour guide eventually dozed off, for he woke with a start when the men in the common room turned up the lights just before sunrise. For a heartbeat or two, he wondered why they were there. Then he remembered.

Yawning, he grabbed his cap, tied the belt on his robe, and headed out of the cubicle. Zosel vez Glesir and a couple of tourists were already in the common room, talking with the militiamen and the Eyes and Ears. Conversation flagged when Lofosa emerged from her sleeping cubicle without dressing first.

“A tough job, this tour guide business must be,” Peggol vez Menk said, sounding like everyone else who thought a guide did nothing but roll on the sleepsack with his tourists.

Radnal grunted. This tour, he hadn’t done much with Lofosa or Evillia but roll on the sleepsack. It’s not usually like that, he wanted to say. He didn’t think Peggol would believe him, so he kept his mouth shut. If an Eye and Ear didn’t believe something, he’d start digging. If he started to dig, he’d keep digging till he found what he was looking for, regardless of whether it was really there.

The tour guide and Zosel dug out breakfast packs. By the time they came back, everyone was up, and Evillia had succeeded in distracting some of the males from Lofosa. “Here you are, freelady,” Radnal said to Toglo zev Pamdal when he got to her.

No one paid her any particular attention; she was just a Tarteshan woman in a concealing Tarteshan robe, not a foreign doxy wearing nothing much. Radnal wondered if that irked her. Women, in his experience, did not like being ignored.

If she was irked, she didn’t show it. “I trust you slept well, freeman vez Krobir?” she said. She did not even glance toward Evillia and Lofosa. If she meant anything more by her greeting than its words, she also gave no sign of that—which suited Radnal perfectly.

“Yes. I trust you did likewise,” he answered.

“Well enough,” she said, “though not as well as I did before the Morgaffo was killed. A pity he’ll not be able to make his sketches—he had talent. May his Goddess grant him wind and land and water in the world to come: that’s what the islanders pray for, not so?”

“I believe so, yes,” Radnal said, though he knew little of Morgaffo religious forms.

“I’m glad you’ve arranged for the tour to continue despite the misfortune that befell him, Radnal vez,” she said.

“It can do him no harm, and the Bottomlands are fascinating.”

“So they are, fr—” Radnal began. Then he stopped, stared, and blinked. Toglo hadn’t used formal address, but the middle grade of Tarteshan politesse, which implied she felt she knew him somewhat and didn’t disapprove of him. Considering what she’d witnessed at the first night’s campsite, that was a minor miracle. He grinned and took a like privilege: “So do I, Toglo zev.”

About a tenth of a daytenth later, as he and Fer carried empty ration packs to the disposal bin, the other Trench Park staffer elbowed him in the ribs and said, “You have all the women after you, eh, Radnal vez?”

Radnal elbowed back, harder. “Go jump in the Bitter Lake, Fer vez. This group’s nothing but trouble. Besides, Nocso zev Martois thinks I’m part of the furniture.”

“You wouldn’t want her,” Fer replied, chuckling. “I was just jealous.”

“That’s what Moblay said,” Radnal answered. Having anyone jealous of him for being sexually attractive was a new notion, one he didn’t care for. By Tarteshan standards, drawing such notice was faintly disreputable, as if he’d got rich by skirting the law. It didn’t bother Evillia and Lofosa—they reveled in it. Well, he asked himself, do you really want to be like Evillia and Lofosa, no matter how ripe their bodies are? He snorted through his nose. “Let’s go back inside, so I can get my crew moving.”

After two days of practice, the tourists thought they were seasoned riders. They bounded onto their donkeys, and had little trouble guiding them out of their stalls. Peggol vez Menk looked almost as apprehensive as his henchman who’d gone to search the stable. He drew in his white robe all around him, as if fearing to have it soiled. “You expect me to ride one of these creatures?” he said.

“You were the one who wanted to come along,” Radnal answered. “You don’t have to ride; you could always hike along beside us.”

Peggol glared. “Thank you, no, freeman vez Krobir.” He pointedly did not say Radnal vez. “Will you be good enough to show me how to ascend one of these perambulating peaks?”

“Certainly, freeman vez Menk.” Radnal mounted a donkey, dismounted, got on again. The donkey gave him a jaundiced stare, as if asking him to make up his mind. He dismounted once more, and took the snort that followed as the asinine equivalent of a resigned shrug. To Peggol, he said, “Now you try, freeman.”

Unlike Evillia or Lofosa, the Eye and Ear managed to imitate Radnal’s movements without requiring the tour guide to take him by the waist (just as well, Radnal thought—Peggol wasn’t smooth and supple like the Highhead girls). He said, “When back in Tarteshem, freeman vez Krobir, I shall stick exclusively to motors.”

“When I’m in Tarteshem, freeman vez Menk, I do the same,” Radnal answered.

The party set out a daytenth after sunrise: not as early as Radnal would have liked but, given the previous day’s distractions, the best he could expect. He led them south, toward the lowlands at the core of Trench Park. Under his straw hat, Moblay Sopsirk’s son was already sweating hard.

Something skittered into hiding under the fleshy leaves of a desert spurge. “What did we just nearly see there, freeman?” Golobol asked.

Radnal smiled at the physician’s phrasing. “That was a fat sand rat. It’s a member of the gerbil family, one specially adapted to feed off succulent plants that concentrate salt in their foliage. Fat sand rats are common throughout the Bottomlands. They’re pests in areas where there’s enough water for irrigated agriculture.”

Moblay said, “You sound like you know a lot about them, Radnal.”

“Not as much as I’d like to, freeman vez Sopsirk,” Radnal answered, still trying to persuade the Lissonese to stop being so uncouthly familiar. “I study them when I’m not being a tour guide.”

“I hate all kinds of rats,” Nocso zev Martois said flatly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Eltsac said. “Some rats are kind of cute.” The two Martoisi began to argue. Everyone else ignored them.

Moblay said, “Hmp. Fancy spending all your time studying rats.”

“And how do you make your livelihood, freeman?” Radnal snapped.

“Me?” Flat-nosed, dark, and smooth, Moblay’s face was different from Radnal’s in every way. But the tour guide recognized the blank mask that appeared on it for a heartbeat: the expression of a man with something to hide. Moblay said, “As I told you, I am aide to my prince, may his years be many.” He had said that, Radnal remembered. It might even be true, but he was suddenly convinced it wasn’t the whole truth.

Benter vez Maprab couldn’t have cared less about the fat sand rat. The spiny spurge under which it hid, however, interested him. He said, “Freeman vez Krobir, perhaps you will explain the relationship between the plants here and the cactuses in the deserts of the Double Continent.”

“There is no relationship to speak of.” Radnal gave the old Strongbrow an unfriendly look. Try to make me look bad in front of everyone, will you? he thought. He went on, “The resemblances come from adapting to similar environments. That’s called convergent evolution. As soon as you cut them open, you’ll see they’re unrelated: spurges have a thick white milky sap, while that of cactuses is clear and watery. Whales and fish look very much alike, too, but that’s because they both live in the sea, not because they’re kin.”

Benter hunched low over his donkey’s back. Radnal felt like preening, as if he’d overcome a squadron of Morgaffo marine commandos rather than one querulous old Tarteshan.

Some of the spines of the desert spurge held a jerboa, a couple of grasshoppers, a shoveler skink, and other small, dead creatures. “Who hung them out to dry?” Peggol vez Menk asked.

“A koprit bird,” Radnal answered. “Most butcherbirds make a larder of things they’ve caught but haven’t got round to eating yet.”

“Oh.” Peggol sounded disappointed. Maybe he’d hoped someone in Trench Park enjoyed tormenting animals, so he could hunt down the miscreant.

Toglo zev Pamdal pointed to the impaled lizard, which looked to have spent a while in the sun. “Do they eat things as dried up as that, Radnal vez?”

“No, probably not,” Radnal said. “At least, I wouldn’t want to.” After he got his small laugh, he continued, “A koprit bird’s larder isn’t just things it intends to eat. It’s also a display to other koprit birds. That’s especially true in breeding season—it’s as if the male says to prospective mates, ‘Look what a hunter I am.’ Koprits don’t display only live things they’ve caught, either. I’ve seen hoards with bright bits of yarn, wires, pieces of sparkling plastic, and once even a set of old false teeth, all hung on spines.”

“False teeth?” Evillia looked sidelong at Benter vez Maprab. “Some of us have more to worry about than others.” Stifled snorts of laughter went up from several tourists. Even Eltsac chuckled. Benter glared at the Highhead girl. She ignored him.

High in the sky, almost too small to see, were a couple of moving black specks. As Radnal pointed them out to the group, a third joined them. “Another feathered optimist,” he said. “This is wonderful country for vultures. Thermals from the Bottomlands floor make soaring effortless. They’re waiting for a donkey—or one of us—to keel over and die. Then they’ll feast.”

“What do they eat when they can’t find tourists?” Toglo zev Pamdal asked.

“Humpless camels, or boar, or anything else dead they spy,” Radnal said. “The only reason there aren’t more of them is that the terrain is too barren to support many large-bodied herbivores.”

“I’ve seen country that isn’t,” Moblay Sopsirk’s son said. “In Duvai, east of Lissonland, the herds range the grasslands almost as they did in the days before mankind. The past hundred years, though, hunting has thinned them out. So the Duvains say, at any rate; I wasn’t there then.”

“I’ve heard the same,” Radnal agreed. “It isn’t like that here.”

He waved to show what he meant. The Bottomlands were too hot and dry to enjoy a covering of grass. Scattered over the plain were assorted varieties of succulent spurges, some spiny, some glossy with wax to hold down water loss. Sharing the landscape with them were desiccated—looking bushes—thorny burnets, oleander, tiny Bottomlands olive plants (they were too small to be trees).

Smaller plants huddled in shadows round the base of the bigger ones. Radnal knew seeds were scattered everywhere, waiting for the infrequent rains. But most of the ground was as barren as if the sea had disappeared yesterday, not five and a half million years before.

“I want all of you to drink plenty of water,” Radnal said. “In weather like this, you sweat more than you think. We’ve packed plenty aboard the donkeys, and we’ll replenish their carrying bladders tonight back at the lodge. Don’t be shy—heatstroke can kill you if you aren’t careful.”

“Warm water isn’t very satisfying to drink,” Lofosa grumbled.

“I am sorry, freelady, but Trench Park hasn’t the resources to haul a refrigerator around for anyone’s convenience,” Radnal said.

Despite Lofosa’s complaint, she and Evillia both drank regularly. Radnal scratched his head, wondering how the Krepalgan girls could seem so fuzzbrained but still muddle along without getting into real trouble.

Evillia had even brought along some flavoring packets, so while everyone else poured down blood-temperature water, she had blood-temperature fruit punch instead. The crystals also turned the water the color of blood. Radnal decided he could do without them.

They got to the Bitter Lake a little before noon. It was more a salt marsh than a lake; the Dalorz River did not drop enough water off the ancient continental shelf to keep a lake bed full against the tremendous evaporation in the eternally hot, eternally dry Bottomlands. Salt pans gleamed white around pools and patches of mud.

“Don’t let the donkeys eat anything here,” Radnal warned. “The water brings everything from the underground salt layer to the surface. Even Bottomlands plants have trouble adapting.”

That was emphatically true. Despite the water absent everywhere else in Trench Park, the landscape round the Bitter Lake was barren even by Bottomlands standards. Most of the few plants that did struggle to grow were tiny and stunted.

Benter vez Maprab, whose sole interest seemed to be horticulture, pointed to one of the exceptions. “What’s that, the ghost of a plant abandoned by the gods?”

“It looks like it,” Radnal said: the shrub had skinny, almost skeletal branches and leaves. Rather than being green, it was white with sparkles that shifted as the breeze shook it. “It’s a saltbush, and it’s found only around the Bitter Lake. It deposits the salts it picks up from ground water as crystals on all its aboveground parts. That does two things: it gets rid of the salt, and having the reflective coating lowers the plant’s effective temperature.”

“It also probably keeps the saltbush from getting eaten very often,” Toglo zev Pamdal said.

“Yes, but with a couple of exceptions,” Radnal said. “One is the humpless camel, which has its own ways of getting rid of excess salt. The other is my little friend the fat sand rat, although it prefers desert spurges, which are juicier.”

The Strongbrow woman looked around. “One of the things I expected to see when I came down here, both the first time and now, was lots of lizards and snakes and tortoises. I haven’t, and it puzzles me. I’d have thought the Bottomlands would be a perfect place for cold-blooded creatures to live.”

“If you look at dawn or dusk, Toglo zev, you’ll see plenty. But not in the heat of the day. Cold-blooded isn’t a good term for reptiles: they have a variable body temperature, not a constant one like birds or mammals. They warm themselves by basking, and cool down by staying out of the midday sun. If they didn’t, they’d cook.”

“I know just how they feel.” Evillia ran a hand through her thick dark hair. “You can stick eating tongs in me now, because I’m done all the way through.”

“It’s not so bad as that,” Radnal said. “I’m sure it’s under fifty hundredths, and it can get above fifty even here. And Trench Park doesn’t have any of the deepest parts of the Bottomlands. Down another couple of thousand cubits, the extreme temperatures go above sixty.”

The non-Tarteshans groaned. So did Toglo zev Pamdal and Peggol vez Menk. Tarteshem had a relatively mild climate; temperatures there went past forty hundredths only from late spring to early fall.

With morbid curiosity, Moblay Sopsirk’s son said, “What is the highest temperature ever recorded in the Bottomlands?”

“Just over sixty-six,” Radnal said. The tourists groaned again, louder.

Radnal led the line of donkeys around the Bitter Lake. He was careful not to get too close to the little water actually in the lake at this time of year. Sometimes a salt crust formed over mud; a donkey’s hoof could poke right through, trapping the animal and slicing its leg against the hard, sharp edge of the crust.

After a while, the tour guide asked, “Do you have all the pictures you want?” When no one denied it, he said, “Then we’ll head back toward the lodge.”

“Hold on.” Eltsac vez Martois pointed across the Bitter Lake. “What are those things over there?”

“I don’t see anything, Eltsac,” his wife said. “You must be looking at a what-do-you-call it, a mirage.” Then, grudgingly, a heartbeat later: “Oh.”

“It’s a herd of humpless camels,” Radnal said quietly. “Try not to spook them.”

The herd was a little one, a couple of long-necked males with a double handful of smaller females and a few young ones that seemed all leg and awkwardness. Unlike the donkeys, they ambled over the crust around the Bitter Lake. Their hooves were wide and soft, spreading under their weight to keep them from falling through.

A male stood guard as the rest of the herd drank at a scummy pool of water. Golobol looked distressed. “That horrid liquid, surely it will poison them,” he said. “I would not drink it to save my life.” His round brown face screwed up in disgust.

“If you drank it, it would end your days all the sooner. But humpless camels have evolved along with the Bottomlands; their kidneys are wonderfully efficient at extracting large amounts of salt.”

“Why don’t they have humps?” Lofosa asked. “Krepalgan camels have humps.” By her tone, what she was used to was right.

“I know Krepalgan camels have humps,” Radnal said. “But the camels in the southern half of the Double Continent don’t, and neither do these. With the Bottomlands beasts, I think the answer is that any lump of fat—which is what a hump is—is a liability in getting rid of heat.”

“In the days before motors, we used to ride our Krepalgan camels,” Evillia said. “Has anyone ever tamed your humpless ones?”

“That’s a good question,” Radnal said, beaming to hide his surprise at her coming up with a good question. He went on, “It has been tried many times, in fact. So far, it’s never worked. They’re too stubborn to do what a human being wants. If we had domesticated them, you’d be riding them now instead of these donkeys; they’re better suited to the terrain here.”

Toglo zev Pamdal scratched her mount’s ears. “They’re also uglier than donkeys.”

“Freelady—uh, Toglo zev—I can’t argue with you,” Radnal said. “They’re uglier than anything I can think of, with dispositions to match.”

As if insulted by words they couldn’t have heard, the humpless camels raised their heads and trotted away from the Bitter Lake. Their backs went up and down, up and down, in time to their rocking gait. Evillia said, “In Krepalga, we sometimes call camels desert barques. Now I see why: riding on one looks like it would make me seasick.”

The tourists laughed. So did Radnal. Making a joke in a language that wasn’t Evillia’s took some brains. Then why, Radnal wondered, did she act so empty-headed? But he shrugged; he’d seen a lot of people with brains do impressively stupid things.

“Why don’t the camels eat all the forage in Trench Park?” Benter vez Maprab asked. He sounded as if his concern was for the plants, not the humpless camels.

“When the herds get too large for the park’s resource, we cull them,” Radnal answered. “This ecosystem is fragile. If we let it get out of balance, it would be a long time repairing itself.”

“Are any herds of wild humpless camels left outside Trench Park, Radnal vez?” Toglo asked.

“A few small ones, in areas of the Bottomlands too barren for people,” the tour guide said. “Not many, though. We occasionally introduce new males into this herd to increase genetic diversity, but they come from zoological parks, not the wild.” The herd receded rapidly, shielded from clear view by the dust it kicked up. “I’m glad we had a chance to see them, if at a distance. That’s why the gods made long lenses for cameras. But now we should head back to the lodge.”

The return journey north struck Radnal as curiously unreal. Though Peggol vez Menk rode among the tourists, they seemed to be pretending as hard as they could that Dokhnor of Kellef had not died, that this was just an ordinary holiday. The alternative was always looking over a shoulder, remembering the person next to you might be a murderer.

The person next to someone was a murderer. Whoever it was, he seemed no different from anyone else. That worried Radnal more than anything.

It even tainted his pleasure from talking with Toglo zev Pamdal. He had trouble imagining her as a killer, but he had trouble imagining anyone in the tour group a killer—save Dokhnor of Kellef, who was dead, and the Martoisi, who might want to kill each other.

He got to the point where he could say “Toglo zev” without prefacing it with “uh.” He really wanted to ask her (but lacked the nerve) how she put up with him after watching him at play with the two Highhead girls. Tarteshans seldom thought well of those who made free with their bodies.

He also wondered what he’d do if Evillia and Lofosa came into his cubicle tonight. He’d throw them out, he decided. Edifying a tour group was one thing, edifying the Park Militia and the Eyes and Ears another. But what they did was so edifying . . . Maybe he wouldn’t throw them out. He banged a fist onto his knee, irritated at his own fleshly weakness.

The lodge was only a couple of thousand cubits away when his donkey snorted and stiffened its legs against the ground. “Earthquake!” The word went up in Tarteshan and other languages. Radnal felt the ground jerk beneath him. He watched, and marveled at, the Martoisi clinging to each other atop their mounts.

After what seemed a daytenth but had to be an interval measured in heartbeats, the shaking ceased. Just in time, too; Peggol vez Menk’s donkey, panicked by the tremor, was about to buck the Eye and Ear into a thornbush. Radnal caught the beast’s reins, calmed it.

“Thank you, freeman vez Krobir,” Peggol said. “That was bad.”

“You didn’t make it any better by letting go of the reins,” Radnal told him. “If you were in a motor, wouldn’t you hang on to the tiller?”

“I hope so,” Peggol said. “But if I were in a motor, it wouldn’t try to run away by itself.”

Moblay Sopsirk’s son looked west, toward the Barrier Mountains. “That was worse than the one yesterday. I feared I’d see the Western Ocean pouring in with a wave as high as the Lion God’s mane.”

“As I’ve said before, that’s not something you’re likely to have to worry about,” Radnal said. “A quake would have to be very strong and at exactly the wrong place to disturb the mountains.”

“So it would.” Moblay did not sound comforted.

Radnal dismissed his concern with the mild scorn you feel for someone who overreacts to a danger you’re used to. Over in the Double Continent, they had vast and deadly windstorms. Radnal was sure one of those would frighten him out of his wits. But the Stekians probably took them in stride, as he lost no sleep over earthquakes.

The sun sank toward the spikes of the Barrier Mountains. As if bloodied by their pricking, its rays grew redder as Bottomlands shadows lengthened. More red sparkled from the glass and metal and plastic of the helos between the lodge and the stables. Noticing them made Radnal return to the here-and-now. He wondered how the militiamen and Eyes and Ears had done in their search for clues.

They came out as the tour group approached. In their tan, speckled robes, the militiamen were almost invisible against the desert. The Eyes and Ears, with their white and gold and patent leather, might have been spotted from ten thousand cubits away, or from the mountains of the moon.

Liem vez Steries waved to Radnal. “Any luck? Do you have the killer tied up in pink string?”

“Do you see any pink string?” Radnal turned back to face the group, raised his voice: “Let’s get the donkeys settled. They can’t do it for themselves. When they’re fed and watered, we can worry about ourselves.” And about everything that’s been going on, he added to himself.

The tourists’ dismounting groans were quieter than they’d been the day before; they were growing hardened to riding. Poor Peggol vez Menk assumed a bowlegged gait most often seen in rickets victims. “I was thinking of taking yesterday off,” he said lugubriously. “I wish I had—someone else would have taken your call.”

“You might have drawn a worse assignment,” Radnal said, helping him unsaddle the donkey. The way Peggol rolled his eyes denied that was possible.

Fer vez Canthal and Zosel vez Glesir came over to help see to the tour group’s donkeys. Under the brims of their caps, their eyes sparked with excitement. “Well, Radnal vez, we have a good deal to tell you,” Fer began.

Peggol had a sore fundament, but his wits still worked. He made a sharp chopping gesture. “Freeman, save your news for a more private time.” A smoother motion, this time with upturned palm, pointed out the chattering crowd still inside the stables. “Someone may hear something he should not.”

Fer looked abashed. “Your pardon, freeman; no doubt you are right.”

“No doubt.” Peggol’s tone argued that he couldn’t be anything but. From under the shiny brim of his cap, his gaze flicked here and there, measuring everyone in turn with the calipers of his suspicion. It came to Radnal, and showed no softening. Resentment flared in the tour guide, then dimmed. He knew he hadn’t killed anyone, but the Eye and Ear didn’t.

“I’ll get the firepit started,” Fer said.

“Good idea,” Eltsac vez Martois said as he walked by. “I’m hungry enough to eat one of those humpless camels, raw and without salt.”

“We can do better than that,” Radnal said. He noted the I-told-you-so look Peggol sent Fer vez Canthal: if a tourist could overhear one bit of casual conversation, why not another?

Liem vez Steries greeted Peggol with a formal military salute he didn’t use five times a year—his body went tetanus—rigid, while he brought his right hand up so the tip of his middle finger brushed the brim of his cap.

“Freeman, my compliments. We’ve all heard of the abilities of the Hereditary Tyrant’s Eyes and Ears, but until now I’ve never seen them in action. Your team is superb, and what they found—” Unlike Fer vez Canthal, Liem had enough sense to close his mouth right there.

Radnal felt like dragging him into the desert to pry loose what he knew. But years of slow research had left him a patient man. He ate supper, sang songs, chatted about the earthquake and what he’d seen on the journey to and from the Bitter Lake. One by one, the tourists sought their sleepsacks.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son, however, sought him out for a game of war. For politeness’ sake, Radnal agreed to play, though he had so much on his mind that he was sure the brown man from Lissonland would trounce him. Either Moblay had things on his mind, too, or he wasn’t the player he thought he was. The game was a comedy of errors which had the spectators biting their lips to keep from blurting out better moves. Radnal eventually won, in inartistic style.

Benter vez Maprab had been an onlooker. When the game ended, he delivered a two-sentence verdict which was also obituary: “A wasted murder. Had the Morgaffo seen that, he’d’ve died of embarrassment.” He stuck his nose in the air and stalked off to his sleeping cubicle.

“We’ll have to try again another time, when we’re thinking straighter,” Radnal told Moblay, who nodded ruefully. Radnal put away the war board and pieces. By then, Moblay was the only tourist left in the common room. Radnal sat down next to Liem vez Steries, not across the gaming table from the Lissonese. Moblay refused to take the hint. Finally Radnal grabbed the rhinoceros by the horn: “Forgive me, freeman, but we have a lot to discuss among ourselves.”

“Don’t mind me,” Moblay said cheerfully. “I’m not in your way, I hope. And I’d be interested to hear how you Tarteshans investigate. Maybe I can bring something useful back to my prince.”

Radnal exhaled through his nose. Biting off words one by one, he said, “Freeman vez Sopsirk, you are a subject of this investigation. To be blunt, we have matters to discuss which you shouldn’t hear.”

“We also have other, weightier, things to discuss,” Peggol vez Menk put in. “Remember, freeman, this is not your principality.”

“It never occurred to me that you might fear I was guilty,” Moblay said. “I know I’m not, so I assumed you did, too. Maybe I’ll try and screw the Krepalgan girls, since it doesn’t sound like Radnal will be using them tonight.”

Peggol raised an eyebrow. “Them?” He packed a world of question into one word.

Under their coat of down, Radnal’s ears went hot. Fortunately, he managed to answer a question with a question:

“What could be weightier than learning who killed Dokhnor of Kellef?”

Peggol glanced from one sleeping cubicle to the next, as if wondering who was feigning slumber. “Why don’t you walk with me in the cool night air? Subleader vez Steries can come with us; he was here all day, and can tell you what he saw himself—things I heard when I took my own evening walk, and which I might garble in reporting them to you.”

“Let’s walk, then,” Radnal said, though he wondered where Peggol vez Menk would find cool night air in Trench Park. Deserts above sea level cooled rapidly when the sun set, but that wasn’t true in the Bottomlands.

Getting out in the quiet dark made it seem cooler. Radnal, Peggol, and Liem walked without saying much for a couple of hundred cubits. Only when they were out of earshot of the lodge did the park militiaman announce, “Freeman vez Menk’s colleagues discovered a microprint reader among the Morgaffo’s effects.”

“Did they, by the gods?” Radnal said. “Where, Liem vez? What was it disguised as?”

“A stick of artist’s charcoal.” The militiaman shook his head. “I thought I knew every trick in the codex, but that’s a new one. Now we can rub the plenipo’s nose in it if he fusses about losing a Morgaffo citizen in Tartesh. But even that’s a small thing, next to what the reader held.”

Radnal stared. “Heading off a war with Morgaf is small?”

“It is, freeman vez Krobir,” Peggol vez Menk said. “You remember today’s earthquake—”

“Yes, and there was another one yesterday, a smaller one,” Radnal interrupted. “They happen all the time down here. No one except a tourist like Moblay Sopsirk’s son worries about them. You reinforce your buildings so they won’t fall down except in the worst shocks, then go on about your business.”

“Sensible,” Peggol said. “Sensible under most circumstances, anyway. Not here, not now.”

“Why not?” Radnal demanded.

“Because, if what was on Dokhnor of Kellef’s microprint reader is true—always a question when we’re dealing with Morgaffos—someone is trying to engineer a special earthquake.”

Radnal’s frown drew his heavy eyebrows together above his nose. “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.” Liem vez Steries inclined his head to Peggol vez Menk. “By your leave, freeman—?” When Peggol nodded, Liem went on, “Radnal vez, over the years somebody—has smuggled the parts for a starbomb into Trench Park.”

The tour guide gaped at his friend. “That’s insane. If somebody smuggled a starbomb into Tartesh, he’d put it by the Hereditary Tyrant’s palace, not here. What does he want, to blow up the last big herd of humpless camels in the world?”

“He has more in mind than that,” Liem answered. “You see, the bomb is underground, on one of the fault lines nearest the Barrier Mountains.” The militiaman’s head swiveled to look west toward the sawbacked young mountain range . . .

. . . the mountain range that held back the Western Ocean. The night was warm and dry, but cold sweat prickled on Radnal’s back and under his arms. “They want to try to knock the mountains down. I’m no geologist—can they?”

“The gods may know,” Liem answered. “I’m no geologist either, so I don’t. This I’ll tell you: the Morgaffos seem to think it would work.”

Peggol vez Menk cleared his throat. “The Hereditary Tyrant discourages research in this area, lest any positive answers fall into the wrong hands. Thus our studies have been limited. I gather, however, that such a result might be obtained.”

“The freeman’s colleagues radiophoned a geologist known to be reliable,” Liem amplified. “They put to him some of what was on the microprint reader, as a theoretical exercise. When they were through, he sounded ready to wet his robes.”

“I don’t blame him.” Radnal looked toward the Barrier Mountains, too. What had Moblay said? A wave as high as the Lion God’s mane. If the mountains fell at once, the wave might reach Krepalga before it halted. The deaths, the devastation, would be incalculable. His voice shook as he asked, “What do we do about it?”

“Good question,” Peggol said, astringent as usual. “We don’t know whether it’s really there, who planted it if it is, where it is, or if it’s ready. Other than that, we’re fine.”

Liem’s voice turned savage: “I wish all the tourists were Tarteshans. Then we could question them as thoroughly as we needed, until we got truth from them.”

Thoroughly, Radnal knew, was a euphemism for harshly. Tarteshan justice was more pragmatic than merciful, so much so that applying it to foreigners would strain diplomatic relations and might provoke war. The tour guide said, “We couldn’t even be properly thorough with our own people, not when one of them is Toglo zev Pamdal.”

“I’d forgotten.” Liem made a face. “But you can’t suspect her. Why would the Hereditary Tyrant’s relative want to destroy the country he’s Hereditary Tyrant of? It makes no sense.”

“I don’t suspect her,” Radnal said. “I meant we’ll have to use our heads here; we can’t rely on brute force.”

“I suspect everyone,” Peggol vez Menk said, matter-of-factly as if he’d said, It’s hot tonight. “For that matter, I also suspect the information we found among Dokhnor’s effects. It might have been planted there to provoke us to question several foreign tourists thoroughly and embroil us with their governments. Morgaffo duplicity knows no bounds.”

“As may be, freeman, but dare we take the chance that this is duplicity, not real danger?” Liem said.

“If you mean, dare we ignore the danger?—of course not,” Peggol said. “But it might be duplicity.”

“Would the Morgaffos kill one of their own agents to mislead us?” Radnal asked. “If Dokhnor were alive, we’d have no idea this plot was afoot.”

“They might, precisely because they’d expect us to doubt they were so coldhearted,” Peggol answered. Radnal thought the Eye and Ear would suspect someone of stealing the sun if a morning dawned cloudy. That was what Eyes and Ears were for, but it made Peggol an uncomfortable companion.

“Since we can’t question the tourists thoroughly, what shall we do tomorrow?” Radnal said.

“Go on as we have been,” Peggol replied unhappily. “If any of them makes the slightest slip, that will justify our using appropriate persuasive measures.” Not even a man who sometimes used torture in his work was easy saying the word out loud.

“I can see one problem coming soon, freeman vez Menk—” Radnal said.

“Call me Peggol vez,” the Eye and Ear interrupted. “We’re in this mess together; we might as well treat each other as friends. I’m sorry—go ahead.”

“Sooner or later, Peggol vez, the tour group will want to go west, toward the Barrier Mountains—and toward the fault line where this starbomb may be. If it requires some finishing touches, that will give whoever is supposed to handle them his best chance. If it is someone in the tour group, of course.”

“When were you thinking of doing this?” If he’d sounded unhappy before, he was lugubrious now.

Radnal didn’t cheer him up: “The western swing was on the itinerary for tomorrow. I could change it, but—”

“But that would warn the culprit—if there is a culprit—we know what’s going on. Yes.” Peggol fingered the tuft of hair under his lip. “I think you’d better make the change anyhow, Radnal vez.” Having heard Radnal use his name with the polite particle, he could do likewise. “Better to alert the enemy than offer him a free opportunity.” Liem vez Steries began, “Freeman vez Menk—”

The Eye and Ear broke in again: “What I told Radnal also holds for you.”

“Fair enough, Peggol vez,” Liem said. “How could Morgaf have got wind of this plot against Tartesh without our having heard of it, too? I mean no disrespect, I assure you, but this matter concerns me.” He waved toward the Barrier Mountains, which suddenly seemed a much less solid bulwark than they had before.

“The question is legitimate, and I take no offense. I see two possible answers,” Peggol said. (Radnal had a feeling the Eye and Ear saw at least two answers to every question.) “One is that Morgaf may be doing this deceitfully to incite us against our other neighbors, as I said before. The other is that the plot is real, and whoever dreamed it up approached the Morgaffos so they could fall on us after the catastrophe.”

Each possibility was logical; Radnal wished he could choose between them. Since he couldn’t, he said, “There’s nothing we can do about it now, so we might as well sleep. In the morning, I’ll tell the tourists we’re going east, not west. That’s an interesting excursion, too. It—”

Peggol raised a hand. “Since I’ll see it tomorrow, why not keep me in suspense?” He twisted this way and that.

“You can’t die of an impacted fundament, can you?”

“I’ve never heard of it happening, anyhow.” Radnal hid a smile.

“Maybe I’ll be a medical first, and get written up in all the physicians’ codices.” Peggol rubbed the afflicted parts.

“And I’ll have to go riding again tomorrow, eh? How unfortunate.”

“If we don’t get some sleep soon, we’ll both be dozing in the saddle,” Radnal said, yawning. “It must be a couple of daytenths past sunset by now. I thought Moblay would never head for his cubicle.”

“Maybe he was just fond of you, Radnal.” Liem vez Steries put a croon in the guide’s name that burlesqued the way the Lissonese kept leaving off the polite particle.

Radnal snapped, “Night demons carry you off, Liem vez, the ideas you come up with.” He waited for the militiaman to taunt him about Evillia and Lofosa, but Liem left that alone. He wondered what ideas the two girls from the Krepalgan Unity had come up with, and whether they’d use them with him tonight. He hoped not—as he’d told Peggol, he did need sleep. Then he wondered if putting sleep ahead of fornication meant he was getting old.

If it did, too bad, he decided. Along with Peggol and Liem, he walked back to the lodge. The other militiamen and Eyes and Ears reported in whispers—all quiet.

Radnal turned a curious ear toward Evillia’s sleep cubicle, then Lofosa’s, and then Moblay Sopsirk’s son’s. He didn’t hear moans or thumpings from any of them. He wondered whether Moblay hadn’t propositioned the Krepalgan girls, or whether they’d turned him down. Or maybe they’d frolicked and gone back to sleep. No, that last wasn’t likely; the Eyes and Ears would have been smirking about the eye—and earful they’d got.

Yawning again, Radnal went into his own sleep cubicle, took off his sandals, undid his belt, and lay down. The air-filled sleepsack sighed beneath him like a lover. He angrily shook his head. Two nights with Lofosa and Evillia had filled his mind with lewd notions.

He hoped they would leave him alone again. He knew their dalliance with him was already an entry in Peggol vez Menk’s dossier; having the Eye and Ear watch him at play—or listen to him quarreling with them when he sent them away—would not improve the entry.

Those two nights, he’d just been falling asleep when Evillia and Lofosa joined him. Tonight, nervous about whether they’d come, and about everything he’d heard from Peggol and Liem, he lay awake a long time. The girls stayed in their own cubicles.

He dozed off without knowing he’d done so. His eyes flew open when a koprit bird on the roof announced the dawn with a raucous hig-hig-hig! He needed a couple of heartbeats to wake fully, realize he’d been asleep, and remember what he’d have to do this morning.

He put on his sandals, fastened his belt, and walked into the common room. Most of the militiamen and Eyes and Ears were already awake. Peggol wasn’t; Radnal wondered how much knowing he snored would be worth as blackmail. Liem vez Steries said quietly, “No one murdered last night.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Radnal said, sarcastic and truthful at the same time.

Lofosa came out of her cubicle. She still wore what Radnal assumed to be Krepalgan sleeping attire, namely skin. Not a hair on her head was mussed, and she’d done something to her eyes to make them look bigger and brighter than they really were. All the men stared at her, some more openly, some less.

She smiled at Radnal and said in a voice like silver bells, “I hope you didn’t miss us last night, freeman vez Krobir. It would have been as much fun as the other two, but we were too tired.” Before he could answer (he would have needed a while to find an answer), she went outside to the privy.

The tour guide looked down at his sandals, not daring to meet anyone’s eyes. He listened to the small coughs that meant the others didn’t know what to say to him, either. Finally Liem remarked, “Sounds as though she knows you well enough to call you Radnal vez.”

“I suppose so,” Radnal muttered. In physical terms, she’d been intimate enough with him to leave off the vez. Her Tarteshan was good enough that she ought to know it, too. She’d managed to embarrass him even more by combining the formal address with such a familiar message. She couldn’t have made him look more foolish if she’d tried for six moons.

Evillia emerged from her cubicle, dressed, or undressed, like Lofosa. She didn’t banter with Radnal, but headed straight for the privy. She and Lofosa met each other behind the helos. They talked for a few heartbeats before each continued on her way.

Toglo zev Pamdal walked into the common room as Lofosa returned from outside. Lofosa stared at the Strongbrow woman, as if daring Toglo to remark on her nakedness. A lot of Tarteshans, especially female Tarteshans, would have remarked on it in detail.

Toglo said only, “I trust you slept well, freelady?” From her casual tone, she might have been talking to a neighbor she didn’t know well but with whom she was on good terms.

“Yes, thank you.” Lofosa dropped her eyes when she concluded she couldn’t use her abundantly displayed charms to bait Toglo.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Toglo said, still sweetly. “I wouldn’t want you to catch cold on holiday.”

Lofosa took half a step, then jerked as if poked by a pin. Toglo had already turned to greet the others in the common room. For a heartbeat, maybe two, Lofosa’s teeth showed in a snarl like a cave cat’s. Then she went back into her cubicle to finish getting ready for the day.

“I hope I didn’t offend her—too much,” Toglo said to Radnal.

“I think you handled yourself like a diplomat,” he answered.

“Hmm,” she said. “Given the state of the world, I wonder whether that’s a compliment.” Radnal didn’t answer. Given what he’d heard the night before, the state of the world might be worse than Toglo imagined.

His own diplomatic skills got a workout after breakfast, when he explained to the group that they’d be going east rather than west. Golobol said, “I find the change from the itinerary most distressing, yes.” His round brown face bore a doleful expression.

Benter vez Maprab found any change distressing. “This is an outrage,” he blustered. “The herbaceous cover approaching the Barrier Mountains is far richer than that to the east.”

“I’m sorry,” Radnal said, an interesting mixture of truth and lie: he didn’t mind annoying Benter, but would sooner not have had such a compelling reason.

“I don’t mind going east rather than west today,” Toglo zev Pamdal said. “As far as I’m concerned, there are plenty of interesting things to see either way. But I would like to know why the schedule has been changed.”

“So would I,” Moblay Sopsirk’s son said. “Toglo is right—what are you trying to hide, anyhow?”

All the tourists started talking—the Martoisi started shouting—at once. Radnal’s own reaction to the Lissonese man was a wish that a trench in Trench Park went down a lot deeper, say, to the red-hot center of the earth. He would have shoved Moblay into it. Not only was he a boor, to use a woman’s name without the polite particle (using it uninvited even with the particle would have been an undue liberty), he was a snoop and a rabble-rouser.

Peggol vez Menk slammed his open hand down on the table beside which Dokhnor of Kellef had died. The boom cut through the chatter. Into sudden silence, Peggol said, “Freeman vez Krobir changed your itinerary at my suggestion. Aspects of the murder case suggest that course would in the best interests of Tartesh.”

“This tells us nothing, not a thing.” Now Golobol sounded really angry, not just upset at breaking routine. “You say these fine—sounding words, but where is the meaning behind them?”

“If I told you everything you wished to know, freeman, I would also be telling those who should not hear,” Peggol said.

“Pfui!” Golobol stuck out his tongue.

Eltsac vez Martois said, “I think you Eyes and Ears think you’re little tin demigods.”

But Peggol’s pronouncement quieted most of the tourists. Ever since starbombs came along, nations had grown more anxious about keeping secrets from one another. That struck Radnal as worrying about the cave cat after he’d carried off the goat, but who could tell? There might be worse things than starbombs.

He said, “As soon as I can, I promise I will tell all of you everything I can about what’s going on.” Peggol vez Menk gave him a hard look; Peggol wouldn’t have told anyone his own name if he could help it.

“What is going on?” Toglo echoed.

Since Radnal was none too certain himself, he met that comment with dignified silence. He did say, “The longer we quarrel here, the less we’ll have the chance to see, no matter which direction we end up choosing.”

“That makes sense, freeman vez Krobir,” Evillia said. Neither she nor Lofosa had argued about going east as opposed to west.

Radnal looked around the group, saw more resignation than outrage. He said, “Come now, freemen, freeladies, let’s head for the stables. There are many fascinating things to see east of the lodge—and to hear, also. There’s the Night Demons’ Retreat, for instance.”

“Oh, good!” Toglo clapped her hands. “As I’ve said, it rained the last time I was here. The guide was too worried about flash floods to take us out there. I’ve wanted to see that ever since I read Hicag zev Ginfer’s frightener codex.”

“You mean Stones of Doom?” Radnal’s opinion of Toglo’s taste fell. Trying to stay polite, he said, “It wasn’t as accurate as it might have been.”

“I thought it was trash,” Toglo said. “But I went to school with Hicag zev and we’ve been friends ever since, so I had to read it. And she certainly makes the Night Demons’ Retreat sound exotic, whether there’s a breeze of truth in what she writes or not.”

“Maybe a breeze—a mild breeze,” Radnal said.

“I read it, too. I thought it was very exciting,” Nocso zev Martois said.

“The tour guide thinks it’s garbage,” her husband told her.

“I didn’t say that,” Radnal said. Neither Martois listened to him; they enjoyed yelling at each other more.

“Enough of your own breeze. If we must do this, let’s do it, at least,” Benter vez Maprab said.

“As you say, freeman.” Radnal wished the Night Demons’ Retreat really held night demons. With any luck, they’d drag Benter into the stones and no one in the tour group would ever see—or have to listen to—him again. But such convenient things happened only in codices.

The tourists were getting better with the donkeys. Even Peggol seemed less obviously out of place on donkeyback than he had yesterday. As the group rode away from the lodge, Radnal looked back and saw park militiamen and Eyes and Ears advancing on the stables to go over them again.

He made himself forget the murder investigation and remember he was a tour guide. “Because we’re off earlier this morning, we’re more likely to see small reptiles and mammals that shelter against the worst heat,” he said.

“Many of them—”

A sudden little flip of sandy dirt a few cubits ahead made him stop. “By the gods, there’s one now.” He dismounted. “I think that’s a shoveler skink.”

“A what?” By now, Radnal was used to the chorus that followed whenever he pointed out one of the more unusual denizens of the Bottomlands.

“A shoveler skink,” he repeated. He crouched down. Yes, sure enough, there was the lure. He knew he had an even-money chance. If he grabbed the tail end, the lizard would shed the appendage and flee. But if he got it by the neck—

He did. The skink twisted like a piece of demented rubber, trying to wriggle free. It also voided. Lofosa made a disgusted noise. Radnal took such things in stride.

After thirty or forty heartbeats, the skink gave up and lay still. Radnal had been waiting for that. He carried the palm-sized lizard into the midst of the tourists. “Skinks are common all over the world, but the shoveler is the most curious variety. It’s a terrestrial equivalent of the anglerfish. Look—”

He tapped the orange fleshy lump that grew on the end of a spine about two digits long. “The skink buries itself under sand, with just this lure and the tip of its nose sticking out. See how its ribs extend to either side, so it looks more like a gliding animal than one that lives underground? It has specialized musculature, to make those long rib ends bend what we’d think of as the wrong way. When an insect comes along, the lizard tosses dirt on it, then twists around and snaps it up. It’s a beautiful creature.”

“It’s the ugliest thing I ever saw,” Moblay Sopsirk’s son declared.

The lizard didn’t care one way or the other. It peered at him through little beady black eyes. If the variety survived another few million years—if the Bottomlands survived another couple of moons, Radnal thought nervously—future specimens might lose their sight altogether, as had already happened with other subterranean skinks.

Radnal walked out of the path, put the lizard back on the ground. It scurried away, surprisingly fast on its short legs. After six or eight cubits, it seemed to melt into the ground. Within moments, only the bright orange lure betrayed its presence.

Evillia asked, “Do any bigger creatures go around looking for lures to catch the skinks?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Radnal said. “Koprit birds can see color; you’ll often see shoveler skinks impaled in their hoards. Big-eared nightfoxes eat them, too, but they track by scent, not sight.”

“I hope no koprit birds come after me,” Evillia said, laughing. She and Lofosa wore matching red-orange tunics—almost the same shade as the shoveler skink’s lure—with two rows of big gold buttons, and red plastic necklaces with gold clasps.

Radnal smiled. “I think you’re safe enough. And now that the lizard is safe, for the time being, shall we go—? No, wait, where’s freeman vez Maprab?”

The old Strongbrow emerged from behind a big, wide-spreading thornbush a few heartbeats later, still refastening the belt to his robe. “Sorry for the delay, but I thought I’d answer nature’s call while we paused here.”

“I just didn’t want to lose you, freeman.” Radnal stared at Benter as he got back onto his donkey. This was the first apology he’d heard from him. He wondered if the tourist was well.

The group rode slowly eastward. Before long, people began to complain. “Every piece of Trench Park looks like every other piece,” Lofosa said.

“Yes, when will we see something different?” Moblay Sopsirk’s son agreed. Radnal suspected he would have agreed if Lofosa said the sky were pink; he slavered after her. He went on, “It’s all hot and flat and dry; even the thornbushes are boring.”

“Freeman, if you wanted to climb mountains and roll in snow, you should have gone someplace else,” Radnal said. “That’s not what the Bottomlands have to offer. But there are mountains and snow all over the world; there’s nothing like Trench Park anywhere. And if you tell me this terrain is like what we saw yesterday around the Bitter Lake, freeman, freelady”—he glanced over at Lofosa-“I think you’re both mistaken.”

“They certainly are,” Benter vez Maprab chimed in. “This area has very different flora from the other one. Note the broader-leafed spurges, the oleanders—”

“They’re just plants,” Lofosa said. Benter clapped a hand to his head in shock and dismay. Radnal waited for him to have another bad-tempered fit, but he just muttered to himself and subsided.

About a quarter of a daytenth later, Radnal pointed toward a gray smudge on the eastern horizon. “There’s the Night Demons’ Retreat. I promise it’s like nothing you’ve yet seen in Trench Park.”

“I hope it shall be interesting, oh yes,” Golobol said.

“I loved the scene where the demons came out at sunset, claws dripping blood,” Nocso zev Martois said. Her voice rose in shivery excitement.

Radnal sighed. “Stones of Doom is only a frightener, freelady. No demons live inside the Retreat, or come out at sunset or any other time. I’ve passed the night in a sleepsack not fifty cubits from the stonepile, and I’m still here, with my blood inside me where it belongs.”

Nocso made a face. No doubt she preferred melodrama to reality. Since she was married to Eltsac, reality couldn’t seem too attractive to her.

The Night Demons’ Retreat was a pile of gray granite, about a hundred cubits high, looming over the flat floor of the Bottomlands. Holes of all sizes pitted the granite. Under the merciless sun, the black openings reminded Radnal of skulls’ eyes looking at him.

“Some holes look big enough for a person to crawl into,” Peggol vez Menk remarked. “Has anybody ever explored them?”

“Yes, many people,” Radnal answered. “We discourage it, though, because although no one’s ever found a night demon, they’re a prime denning place for vipers and scorpions. They also often hold bats’ nests. Seeing the bats fly out at dusk to hunt bugs doubtless helped start the legend about the place.”

“Bats live all over,” Nocso said. “There’s only one Night Demons’ Retreat, because—”

The breeze, which had been quiet, suddenly picked up. Dust skirled over the ground. Radnal grabbed for his cap. And from the many mineral throats of the Night Demons’ Retreat came a hollow moaning and wailing that made the hair on his body want to stand on end.

Nocso looked ecstatic. “There!” she exclaimed. “The cry of the deathless demons, seeking to be free to work horror on the world!”

Radnal remembered the starbomb that might be buried by the Barrier Mountains, and thought of horrors worse than any demons could produce. He said, “Freelady, as I’m sure you know, it’s just wind playing some badly tuned flutes. The softer rock around the Retreat weathered away, and the Retreat itself has taken a lot of sandblasting. Whatever bits that weren’t as hard as the rest are gone, which explains how and why the openings formed. And now, when the wind blows across them, they make the weird sounds we just heard.”

“Hmp!” Nocso said. “If there are gods, how can there not be demons?”

“Freelady, speak to a priest about that, not to me.” Radnal swore by the gods of Tartesh but, like most educated folk of his generation, had little other use for them.

Peggol vez Menk said, “Freelady, the question of whether night demons exist does not necessarily have anything to do with the question of whether they haunt the Night Demons’ Retreat—except that if there be no demons, they are unlikely to be at the Retreat.”

Nocso’s plump face filled with rage. But she thought twice about telling off an Eye and Ear. She turned her head and shouted at Eltsac instead. He shouted back.

The breeze swirled around, blowing bits of grit into the tour guide’s face. More unmusical notes emanated from the Night Demons’ Retreat. Cameras clicked. “I wish I’d brought along a recorder,” Toglo zev Pamdal said. “What’s interesting here isn’t how this place looks, but how it sounds.”

“You can buy a wire of the Night Demons’ Retreat during a windstorm at the gift shop near the entrance to Trench Park.”

“Thank you, Radnal vez; I may do that on my way out. It would be even better, though, if I could have recorded what I heard with my own ears.” Toglo’s glance slipped to Eltsac and Nocso, who were still barking at each other.

“Well, some of what I heard.”

Evillia said, “This Night Demons’ Retreat was on the sea floor?”

“That’s right. As the dried muck and salt that surrounded it eroded, it was left alone here. Think of it as a miniature version of the mountain plains that stick up from the Bottomlands. In ancient days, they were islands. The Retreat, of course, was below the surface back then.”

And may be again, he thought. He imagined fish peering into the holes in the ancient granite, crabs scuttling in to scavenge the remains of snakes and sand rats. The picture came to vivid life in his mind. That bothered him; it meant he took this menace seriously.

He was so deep in his own concerns that he needed a couple of heartbeats to realize the group had fallen silent. When he did notice, he looked up in a hurry, wondering what was wrong. From a third of the way up the Night Demons’ Retreat, a cave cat looked back.

The cave cat must have been asleep inside a crevice until the tourists’ racket woke it. It yawned, showing yellow fangs and pink tongue. Then, with steady amber gaze, it peered at the tourists once more, as if wondering what sauce would go well with them.

“Let’s move away from the Retreat,” Radnal said quietly. “We don’t want it to think we’re threatening it.” That would have been a good trick, he thought. If the cave cat did decide to attack, his handcannon would hurt it (assuming he was lucky enough to hit), but it wouldn’t kill. He opened the flap to his saddlebag just the same.

For once, all the tourists did exactly as they were told. Seeing the great predator raised fears that went back to the days of man-apes just learning to walk erect.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son asked, “Will more of them be around? In Lissonland, lions hunt in prides.”

“No, cave cats are solitary except during mating season,” Radnal answered. “They and lions have a common ancestor, but their habits differ. The Bottomlands don’t have big herds that make pride hunting a successful survival strategy.”

Just when Radnal wondered if the cave cat was going back to sleep, it exploded into motion. Long gray—brown mane flying, it bounded down the steep slope of the Night Demons’ Retreat. Radnal yanked out his handcannon. He saw Peggol vez Menk also had one.

But when the cave cat hit the floor of the Bottomlands, it streaked away from the tour group. Its grayish fur made it almost invisible against the desert. Cameras clicked incessantly. Then the beast was gone.

“How beautiful,” Toglo zev Pamdal breathed. After a moment, she turned more practical: “Where does he find water?”

“He doesn’t need much, Toglo zev,” he answered. “Like other Bottomlands creatures, he makes the most of what he gets from the bodies of his prey. Also”—he pointed north-“there are a few tiny springs in the hills. Back when it was legal to hunt cave cats, a favorite way was to find a spring and lay in wait until the animal came to drink.”

“It seems criminal,” Toglo said.

“To us, certainly,” Radnal half-agreed. “But to a man who’s just had his flocks raided or a child carried off, it was natural enough. We go wrong when we judge the past by our standards.”

“The biggest difference between past and present is that we moderns are able to sin on a much larger scale,” Peggol said. Maybe he was thinking of the buried starbomb. But recent history held enough other atrocities to make Radnal have trouble disagreeing.

Eltsac vez Martois said, “Well, freeman vez Krobir, I have to admit that was worth the price of admission.”

Radnal beamed; of all the people from whom he expected praise, Eltsac was the last. Then Nocso chimed in: “But it would have been even more exciting if the cave cat had come toward us and he’d had to shoot at it.”

“I’ll say,” Eltsac agreed. “I’d love to have that on film.”

Why, Radnal wondered, did the Martoisi see eye to eye only when they were both wrong? He said, “With respect, I’m delighted the animal went the other way. I’d hate to fire at so rare a creature, and I’d hate even more to miss and have anyone come to harm.”

“Miss?” Nocso said the word as if it hadn’t occurred to her. It probably hadn’t; people in adventure stories shot straight whenever they needed to.

Eltsac said, “Shooting well isn’t easy. When I was drafted into the Voluntary Guards, I needed three tries before I qualified with a rifle.”

“Oh, but that’s you, not a tour guide,” Nocso said scornfully. “He has to shoot well.”

Through Eltsac’s outraged bellow, Radnal said, “I will have you know, I have never fired a handcannon in all my time at Trench Park.” He didn’t add that, given a choice between shooting at a cave cat and at Nocso, he’d sooner have fired on her.

The wind picked up again. The Night Demons’ Retreat made more frightful noises. Radnal imagined how he would have felt if he were an illiterate hunter, say, hearing those ghostly wails for the first time. He was sure he’d’ve fouled his robes from fear.

But even so, something else also remained true: judging by the standards of the past was even more foolish when the present offered better information. If Nocso believed in night demons for no better reason than that she’d read an exciting frightener about them, that only argued she didn’t have the sense the gods gave a shoveler skink. Radnal smiled. As far as he could tell, she didn’t have the sense the gods gave a shoveler skink.

“We’ll go in the direction opposite the one the cave cat took,” Radnal said at last. “We’ll also stay in a tight group. If you ask me, anyone who goes wandering off deserves to be eaten.”

The tourists rode almost in one another’s laps. As far as Radnal could tell, the eastern side of the Night Demons’ Retreat wasn’t much different from the western. But he’d been here tens of times already. Tourists could hardly be blamed for wanting to see as much as they could.

“No demons over here, either, Nocso,” Eltsac vez Martois said. His wife stuck her nose in the air. Radnal wondered why they stayed married—for that matter, he wondered why they’d got married—when they sniped at each other so. Pressure from their kith groupings, probably. It didn’t seem a good enough reason.

So why was he haggling over bride price with Wello zev Putun’s father? The Putuni were a solid family in the lower aristocracy, a good connection for an up-and-coming man. He couldn’t think of anything wrong with Wello, but she didn’t much stir him, either. Would she have read Stones of Doom without recognizing it for the garbage it was? Maybe. That worried him. If he wanted a woman with whom he could talk, would he need a concubine? Peggol had one. Radnal wondered if the arrangement made him happy. Likely not—Peggol took a perverse pleasure in not enjoying anything.

Thinking of Wello brought Radnal’s mind back to the two nights of excess he’d enjoyed with Evillia and Lofosa. He was sure he wouldn’t want to marry a woman whose body was her only attraction, but he also doubted the wisdom of marrying one whose body didn’t attract him. What he needed—

He snorted. What I need is for a goddess to take flesh and fall in love with me . . . if she doesn’t destroy my self-confidence by letting on she’s a goddess. Finding such a mate—especially for a bride price less than the annual budget of Tartesh—seemed unlikely. Maybe Wello would do after all.

“Are we going back by the same route we came?” Toglo zev Pamdal asked.

“I hadn’t planned to,” Radnal said. “I’d aimed to swing further south on the way back, to give you the chance to see country you haven’t been through before.” He couldn’t resist adding, “No matter how much the same some people find it.”

Moblay Sopsirk’s son looked innocent. “If you mean me, Radnal, I’m happy to discover new things. I just haven’t come across that many here.”

“Hmp,” Toglo said. “I’m having a fine time here. I was glad to see the Night Demons’ Retreat at last, and also to hear it. I can understand why our ancestors believed horrid creatures dwelt inside.”

“I was thinking the same thing only a couple of hundred heartbeats ago,” Radnal said.

“What a nice coincidence.” A smile brightened her face. To Radnal’s disappointment, she didn’t stay cheerful long. She said, “This tour is so marvelous, I can’t help thinking it would be finer still if Dokhnor of Kellef were still alive, or even if we knew who killed him.”

“Yes,” Radnal said. He’d spent much of the day glancing from one tourist to the next, trying to figure out who had broken the Morgaffo’s neck. He’d even tried suspecting the Martoisi. He’d dismissed them before, as too inept to murder anybody quietly. But what if their squawk and bluster only disguised devious purposes?

His laugh came out dusty as Peggol vez Menk’s. He couldn’t believe it. Besides, Nocso and Eltsac were Tarteshans. They wouldn’t want to see their country ruined. Or could they be paid enough to want to destroy it? Nocso looked back toward the Night Demons’ Retreat just as a koprit bird flew into one of the holes in the granite. “A demon! I saw a night demon!” she squalled.

Radnal laughed again. If Nocso was a spy and a saboteur, he was a humpless camel. “Come on,” he called. “Time to head back.”

As he’d promised, he took his charges to the lodge by a new route. Moblay Sopsirk’s son remained unimpressed.

“It may not be the same, but it isn’t much different.”

“Oh, rubbish!” Benter vez Maprab said. “The flora here are quite distinct from those we observed this morning.”

“Not to me,” Moblay said stubbornly.

“Freeman vez Maprab, by your interest in plants of all sorts, were you by chance a scholar of botany?” Radnal asked.

“By the gods, no!” Benter whinnied laughter. “I ran a train of plant and flower shops until I retired.”

“Oh. I see.” Radnal did, too. With that practical experience, Benter might have learned as much about plants as any scholar of botany.

About a quarter of a daytenth later, the old man reined in his donkey and went behind another thornbush. “Sorry to hold everyone up,” he said when he returned. “My kidneys aren’t what they used to be.”

Eltsac vez Martois guffawed. “Don’t worry, Benter vez. A fellow like you knows you have to water the plants. Haw, haw!”

“You’re a bigger jackass than your donkey,” Benter snapped.

“Freemen, please!” Radnal got the two men calmed down and made sure they rode far from each other. He didn’t care if they went at each other three heartbeats after they left Trench Park, but they were his responsibility till then.

“You earn your silver here, I’ll say that for you,” Peggol observed. “I see fools in my line of work, but I’m not obliged to stay polite to them.” He lowered his voice. “When freeman vez Maprab went behind the bush now, he didn’t just relieve himself. He also bent down and pulled something out of the ground. I happened to be off to one side.”

“Did he? How interesting.” Radnal doubted Benter was involved in the killing of Dokhnor of Kellef. But absconding with plants from Trench Park was also a crime, one the tour guide was better equipped to deal with than murder. “We won’t do anything about it now. After we get back to the lodge, why don’t you have your men search Benter vez’s belongings again?”

Amusement glinted in Peggol’s eyes. “You’re looking forward to this.”

“Who, me? The only thing that could be better would be if it were Eltsac vez instead. But he hasn’t a brain in his head or anywhere else about his person.”

“Are you sure?” Peggol had been thinking along the same lines as Radnal. He’d probably started well before Radnal had, too. That was part of his job.

But Radnal came back strong: “If he had brains, would he have married Nocso zev?” That won a laugh which didn’t sound dusty. He added, “Besides, all he knows about thornbushes is not to ride into them, and he’s not certain of that.”

“Malice agrees with you, Radnal vez.”

By the time the lodge neared, Golobol was complaining along with Moblay. “Take away the Night Demons’ Retreat, oh yes, and take away the cave cat we saw there, and what have you? Take away those two things and it is a nothing of a day.”

“Freeman, if you insist on ignoring everything interesting that happens, you can turn any day dull,” Toglo observed.

“Well said!” Being a tour guide kept Radnal from speaking his mind to the people he led. This time, Toglo had done it for him.

She smiled. “Why come see what the Bottomlands are like if he isn’t happy with what he finds?”

“Toglo zev, some are like that in every group. It makes no sense to me, but there you are. If I had the money to see the Nine Iron Towers of Mashyak, I wouldn’t whine because they aren’t gold.”

“That is a practical attitude,” Toglo said. “We’d be better off if more people felt as you do.”

“We’d be better off if—” Radnal shut up. If we didn’t fear a starbomb was buried somewhere around here was how he’d been about to end the sentence. That wasn’t smart. Not only would it frighten Toglo (or worry her; she didn’t seem to frighten easily), but Peggol vez Menk would come down on him like he didn’t know what for breaching security.

All at once, he knew how Peggol would come down on him: like the Western Ocean, pouring into the Bottomlands over the broken mountains. He tried to laugh at himself; he didn’t usually come up with such literary comparisons. Laughter failed. The simile was literary, but it might be literal as well.

“We’d be better off if what, Radnal vez?” Toglo asked. “What did you start to say?”

He couldn’t tell her what he’d started to say. He wasn’t glib enough to invent something smooth. To his dismay, what came out of his mouth was, “We’d be better off if more people were like you, Toglo zev, and didn’t have fits at what they saw other people doing.”

“Oh, that. Radnal vez, I didn’t think anyone who was doing that was hurting anyone else. You all seemed to be enjoying yourselves. It’s not something I’d care to do where other people might see, but I don’t see I have any business getting upset about it.”

“Oh.” Radnal wasn’t sure how to take Toglo’s answer. He had, however, already pushed his luck past the point where it had any business going, so he kept quiet.

Something small skittered between spurges. Something larger bounded along in hot pursuit. The pursuit ended in a cloud of dust. Forestalling the inevitable chorus of What’s that?, Radnal said, “Looks like a bladetooth just made a kill.” The carnivorous rodent crouched over its prey; the tour guide pulled out a monocular for a closer look. “It’s caught a fat sand rat.”

“One of the animals you study?” Moblay said. “Are you going to blast it with your handcannon to take revenge?”

“I think you should,” Nocso zev Martois declared. “What a vicious brute, to harm a defenseless furry beast.” Radnal wondered if he should ask how she’d enjoyed her mutton last night, but doubted she would understand. He said, “Either carnivores eat meat or they starve. A bladetooth isn’t as cuddly as a fat sand rat, but it has its place in the web of life, too.”

The bladetooth was smaller than a fox, tan above and cream below. At first glance, it looked like any other jerboa, with hind legs adapted for jumping, big ears, and a long, tufted tail. But its muzzle was also long, and smeared with blood. The fat sand rat squirmed feebly. The bladetooth bit into its belly and started feeding nonetheless.

Nocso moaned. Radnal tried to figure out how her mind worked. She was eager to believe in night demons that worked all manner of evils, yet a little real predation turned her stomach. He gave up; some inconsistencies were too big for him to understand how anyone managed to hold both halves of them at once.

He said, “As I remarked a couple of days ago, the bladetooth does well in the Bottomlands because jerboas had already adapted to conditions close to these while this part of the world was still under water. Its herbivorous relatives extract the water they must have from leaves and seeds, while it uses the tissues of the animals it captures. Even during our rare rains, no bladetooth has ever been seen to drink.”

“Disgusting.” Nocso’s plump body shook as she shuddered. Radnal wondered how long her carcass would give a bladetooth the fluids it needed. A long time, he thought.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son whooped. “There’s the lodge! Cold water, cold ale, cold wine—”

As they had the evening before, the Eyes and Ears and the militiamen came out to await the tour group’s return. The closer the donkeys came, the better Radnal could see the faces of the men who had stayed behind. They all looked thoroughly grim.

This time, he did not intend to spend a couple of daytenths wondering what was going on. He called, “Fer vez, Zosel vez, take charge of the tourists. I want to catch up on what’s happened here.”

“All right, Radnal vez,” Fer answered. But his voice was no more cheerful than his expression.

Radnal dismounted and walked over to Liem vez Steries. He was not surprised when Peggol vez Menk fell into step with him. Their robes rustled as they came up to the militia subleader. Radnal asked, “What’s the word, Liem vez?”

Liem’s features might have been carved from stone. “The word is interrogation,” he said quietly. “Tomorrow.”

“By the gods.” Radnal stared. “They’re taking this seriously in Tarteshem.”

“You’d best believe it.” Liem wiped his sweaty face with his sleeve. “See those red cones past the cookpit? That’s the landing site we laid out for the helo that’s due in the morning.”

“But—interrogation.” Radnal shook his head. The Eyes and Ears’ methods were anything but gentle. “If we interrogate foreigners, we’re liable to touch off a war.”

“Tarteshem knows this, Radnal vez,” Liem said. “My objections are on the wire up there. I have been overruled.”

“The Hereditary Tyrant and his advisors must think the risks and damages of war are less than what Tartesh would suffer if the starbomb performs as those who buried it hope,” Peggol said.

“But what if it’s not there, or if it is but none of the tourists knows about it?” Radnal said. “Then we’ll have antagonized the Krepalgan Unity, Lissonland, and other countries as well, and for what? Nothing. Get on the radiophone, Peggol vez; see if they’ll change their minds.”

Peggol shook his head. “No, for two reasons. One is that this policy will have come down from a level far higher than I can influence. I am only a field agent; I have no say in grand strategy. The other is that your radiophone is too public. I do not want to alert anyone that he is about to be interrogated.”

Radnal had to concede that made sense as far as security went. But he did not like it any better. Then something else occurred to him. He turned to Liem vez Steries. “Am I going to be, uh, interrogated, too? What about Zosel vez and Fer vez? And what about Toglo zev Pamdal? Are the interrogators going to work on one of the Hereditary Tyrant’s relatives?”

“I don’t know any of those answers,” the militiaman said. “The people I spoke with in Tartesh wouldn’t tell me.” His eyes flicked to Peggol. “I suppose they didn’t care to be too public, either.”

“No doubt,” Peggol said. “Now we have to act as normally as we can, not letting on that we’ll have visitors in the morning.”

“I’d have an easier time acting normal if I knew I wouldn’t be wearing thumbscrews tomorrow,” Radnal said.

“After such ordeals, the Hereditary Tyrant generously compensates innocents,” Peggol said.

“The Hereditary Tyrant is generous.” That was all Radnal could say while talking to an Eye and Ear. But silver, while it worked wonders, didn’t fully make up for terror and pain and, sometimes, permanent injury. The tour guide preferred remaining as he was to riches and a limp.

Liem remarked, “Keeping things from the tourists won’t be hard. Look what they’re doing.”

Radnal turned, looked, and snorted. His charges had turned the area marked off with red cones into a little game field. All of them except prim Golobol ran around throwing somebody’s sponge rubber ball back and forth and trying to tackle one another. If their sport had rules, Radnal couldn’t figure them out.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son, stubborn if unwise, kept his yen for Evillia and Lofosa. Careless of the abrasions to his nearly naked hide, he dragged Lofosa into the dirt. When she stood up, her tunic was missing some of its big gold buttons. She remained indifferent to the flesh she exposed. Moblay had got grit in his eyes and stayed on the ground a while.

Evillia lost buttons, too; Toglo zev Pamdal’s belt broke, as did Nocso zev Martois’. Toglo capered with one hand holding her robes closed. Nocso didn’t bother. Watching her jounce up and down the improvised pitch, Radnal wished she were modest and Toglo otherwise.

Fer vez Canthal asked, “Shall I get supper started?”

“Get the coals going, but wait for the rest,” Radnal said. “They’re having such a good time, they might as well enjoy themselves. They won’t have any fun tomorrow.”

“Neither will we,” Fer answered. Radnal grimaced and nodded.

Benter vez Maprab tackled Eltsac vez Martois and stretched the bigger, younger man in the dust. Benter sprang to his feet, swatted Evillia on the backside. She spun round in surprise.

“The old fellow has life in him yet,” Peggol said, watching Eltsac rise, one hand pressed to a bloody nose.

“So he does.” Radnal watched Benter. He might be old, but he was spry. Maybe he could have broken Dokhnor of Kellef’s neck. Was losing a game of war reason enough? Or was he playing the same deeper game as Dokhnor?

Only when the sun slid behind the Barrier Mountains and dusk enfolded the lodge did the tourists give up their sport. The cones shone with a soft pink phosphorescent glow of their own. Toglo tossed the ball to Evillia, saying, “I’m glad you got this out, freelady. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much—and so foolishly—in a long time.”

“I thought it would be a good way for us to unwind after riding and sitting around,” Evillia answered.

She had a point. If Radnal ever led tourists down here again—if the lodge wasn’t buried under thousands of cubits of sea—he’d have to remember to bring along a ball himself. He frowned in self-reproach. He should have thought of that on his own instead of stealing the idea from someone in his group.

“If I was thirsty before, I’m drier than the desert now,” Moblay boomed. “Where’s that ale?”

“I’ll open the refrigerator,” Zosel vez Glesir said. “Who else wants something?” He cringed from the hot, sweaty tourists who dashed his way. “Come, my friends! If you squash me, who will get the drinks?”

“We’ll manage somehow,” Eltsac vez Martois said, the first sensible remark he’d made.

Fer vez Canthal had the coals in the firepit glowing red. Zosel fetched a cut-up pig carcass and a slab of beef ribs. Radnal started to warn him about going through the stored food so prodigally, but caught himself. If people fell into the interrogators’ hands tomorrow, no need to worry about the rest of the tour.

Radnal ate heartily, and joined in songs after supper. He managed to forget for hundreds of heartbeats what awaited when morning came. But every so often, realization came flooding back. Once his voice faltered so suddenly that Toglo glanced over to see what had happened. He smiled sheepishly and tried to do better.

Then he looked at her. He couldn’t imagine her being connected with the plot to flood the Bottomlands. He had trouble imagining Eyes and Ears interrogating her as they would anyone else. But he hadn’t thought they would risk international incidents to question foreign tourists, either. Maybe that meant he didn’t grasp how big the emergency was. If so, Toglo might be at as much risk as anyone.

Horken vez Sofana, the circumstances man from the Trench Park militia, came up to the tour guide. “I was told you wanted Benter vez Maprab’s saddlebags searched, freeman vez Krobir. I found—these.” He held out his hand.

“How interesting. Wait here, Senior Trooper vez Sofana.” Radnal walked over to where Benter was sitting, tapped him on the shoulder. “Would you please join me, freeman?”

“What is it?” Benter growled, but he came back with Radnal.

The tour guide said, “I’d like to hear how these red-veined orchids”—he pointed to the plants in Horken vez Sofana’s upturned palm-“appeared in your saddlebags. Removal of any plants or animals, especially rare varieties like these, is punishable by fine, imprisonment, stripes, or all three.”

Benter vez Maprab’s mouth opened and closed silently. He tried again: “I—I would have raised them carefully, freeman vez Krobir.” He was so used to complaining himself, he did not know how to react when someone complained of him—and caught him in the wrong.

Triumph turned hollow for Radnal. What were a couple of red-veined orchids when the whole Bottomlands might drown? The tour guide said, “We’ll confiscate these, freeman vez Maprab. Your gear will be searched again when you leave Trench Park. If we find no more contraband, we’ll let this pass. Otherwise—I’m sure I need not paint you a picture.”

“Thank you—very kind.” Benter fled.

Horken vez Sofana sent Radnal a disapproving look. “You let him off too lightly.”

“Maybe, but the interrogators will take charge of him tomorrow.”

“Hmm. Compared to everything else, stealing plants isn’t such a big thing.”

“Just what I was thinking. Maybe we ought to give them back to the old lemonface so they’ll be somewhere safe if—well, you know the ifs.”

“Yes.” The circumstances man looked thoughtful. “If we gave them back now, he’d wonder why. We don’t want that, either. Too bad, though.”

“Yes.” Discovering he worried about saving tiny pieces of Trench Park made Radnal realize he’d begun to believe in the starbomb.

The tourists began going off to their sleeping cubicles. Radnal envied their ignorance of what lay ahead. He hoped Evillia and Lofosa would visit him in the quiet darkness, and didn’t care what the Eyes and Ears and militiamen thought. The body had its own sweet forgetfulness.

But the body had its own problems, too. Both women from Krepalga started trotting back and forth to the privy every quarter of a daytenth, sometimes even more than that. “It must have been something I ate,” Evillia said, leaning wearily against the doorpost after her third trip. “Do you have a constipant?”

“The aid kit should have some.” Radnal rummaged through it, found the orange pills he wanted. He brought them to her with a paper cup of water. “Here.”

“Thank you.” She popped the pills into her mouth, drained the cup, threw back her head to swallow. “I hope they help.”

“So do I.” Radnal had trouble keeping his voice casual. When she’d straightened to take the constipant, her left breast popped out of her tunic. “Freelady, I think you have fewer buttons than you did when the game ended.”

Evillia covered herself again, an effort almost undermined when she shrugged. “I shouldn’t be surprised. Most of those that didn’t get pulled off took some yanks.” She shrugged again. “It’s only skin. Does it bother you?”

“You ought to know better than that,” he said, almost angrily. “If you were feeling well—”

“If I were feeling well, I would enjoy feeling good,” she agreed. “But as it is, Radnal vez—” At last she called him by his name and the polite particle. A grimace crossed her face. “As it is, I hope you will forgive me, but—” She hurried back out into the night.

When Lofosa made her next dash to the privy, Radnal had the pills waiting for her. She gulped them almost on the dead run. She’d lost some new buttons herself. Radnal felt guilty about thinking of such things when she was in distress.

After a game of war with Moblay that was almost as sloppy as their first, Radnal went into his cubicle. He didn’t have anything to discuss with Liem or Peggol tonight; he knew what was coming. Somehow, he fell asleep anyway.

“Radnal vez.” A quiet voice jerked him from slumber. It was neither Lofosa nor Evillia bending over him promising sensual delights. Peggol vez Menk stood in the entryway.

Radnal came fully awake. “What’s gone wrong?” he demanded.

“Those two Highhead girls who don’t believe in wearing clothes,” Peggol answered.

“What about them?” Radnal asked, confused.

“They went off to the privy a while ago, and neither of them came back. My man on watch woke me before he went out to see if they were all right. They weren’t there, either.”

“Where could they have gone?” Radnal had had idiot tourists wander on their own, but never in the middle of the night. Then other possible meanings for their disappearance crossed his mind. He jumped up. “And why?”

“This also occurred to me,” Peggol said grimly. “If they don’t come back soon, it will have answered itself.”

“They can’t go far,” Radnal said. “I doubt they’ll have thought to get on donkeys. They could hardly tell one end of the beasts from the—” The tour guide stopped. If Evillia and Lofosa were other than they seemed, who could tell what they knew?

Peggol nodded. “We are thinking along the same lines.” He plucked at the tuft of hair under his mouth. “If this means what we fear, much will depend on you to track them down. You know the Bottomlands, and I do not.”

“Our best tools are the helos,” Radnal said. “When it’s light, we’ll sweep the desert floor a hundred times faster than we could on donkeyback.”

He kept talking for another few words, but Peggol didn’t hear him. He didn’t hear himself, either, not over the sudden roar from outside. They dashed for the outer door. They pushed through the Eyes and Ears and militiamen who got there first. Tourists pushed them from behind.

Everyone stared at the blazing helos.

Radnal stood in disbelief and dismay for a couple of heartbeats. Peggol vez Menk’s shout brought him to himself:

“We have to call Tarteshem right now!” Radnal spun round, shoved and elbowed by the tourists in his way, and dashed for the radiophone.

The amber ready light didn’t come on when he hit the switch. He ducked under the table to see if any connections were loose. “Hurry up!” Peggol yelled.

“The demon-cursed thing won’t come on,” Radnal yelled back. He picked up the radiophone itself. It rattled. It wasn’t supposed to. “It’s broken.”

“It’s been broken,” Peggol declared.

“How could it have been broken, with Eyes and Ears and militiamen in the common room all the time?” the tour guide said, not so much disagreeing with Peggol as voicing his bewilderment to the world.

But Peggol had an answer: “If one of those Krepalgan tarts paraded through here without any clothes—and they both ran back and forth all night—we might not have paid attention to what the other one was doing. Bang it . . . mmm, more likely reach under it with the right little tool . . . and you wouldn’t need more than five heartbeats.”

Radnal would have needed more than five heartbeats, but he wasn’t a saboteur. If Evillia and Lofosa were—He couldn’t doubt it, but it left him sick inside. They’d used him, used their bodies to lull him into thinking they were the stupid doxies they pretended to be. And it had worked . . . He wanted to wash himself over and over; he felt he’d never be clean again.

Liem vez Steries said, “We’d better make sure the donkeys are all right.” He trotted out the door, ran around the crackling hulks of the flying machines. The stable door was closed against cave cats. The militiaman pulled it open. Through the crackle of the flames, Radnal heard a sharp report, saw a flash of light. Liem crashed to the ground. He lay there unmoving.

Radnal and Golobol the physician sprinted out to him. The firelight told them all they needed to know. Liem would not get up again, not with those dreadful wounds.

The tour guide went into the stables. He knew something was wrong, but needed a moment to realize what. Then the quiet hit him. The donkeys were not shifting in their stalls, nipping at the straw, or making any of their other small noises.

He looked into the stall by the broken door. The donkey there lay on its side. Its flanks neither rose nor fell. Radnal ran to the next, and the next. All the donkeys were dead—except for three, which were missing. One for Evillia, the tour guide thought, one for Lofosa, and one for their supplies.

No, they weren’t fools. “I am,” he said, and ran back to the lodge.

He gave the grim news to Peggol vez Menk. “We’re in trouble, sure enough,” Peggol said, shaking his head.

“We’d be worse off, though, if the interrogation team weren’t coming in under a daytenth. We can go after them in that helo. It has its own cannon, too; if they don’t yield, goodbye. By the gods, I hope they don’t.”

“So do I.” Radnal cocked his head to one side. A grin split his face. “Isn’t that the helo now? Why is it early?”

“I don’t know,” Peggol answered. “Wait a heartbeat, maybe I do. If Tarteshem called and got no answer, they might have decided something was wrong and sent the helo straightaway.”

The racket of engine and rotors swelled. The pilot must have spotted the fires and put on full speed. Radnal hurried outside to greet the incoming Eyes and Ears. The helo’s black silhouette spread huge across the sky; as Peggol had implied, this was a military machine, not just a utility flier. It made for the glowing cones that marked the landing area.

Radnal watched it settle toward the ground. He remembered Evillia and Lofosa running around in the landing zone, laughing, giggling, and . . . losing buttons. He waved his arms, dashed toward the cones. “No!” he screamed.

“Wait!”

Too late. Dust rose in choking clouds as the helo touched the ground. The tour guide saw the flash under one skid, heard the report. The skid crumpled. The helo heeled over. A rotor blade dug into the ground, snapped, thrummed past Radnal’s head. Had it touched him, his head would have gone with it.

The side panel of the helo came down on the Bottomlands floor. Another sharp report—and suddenly flames were everywhere. The Eyes and Ears trapped inside the helo screamed. Radnal tried to help them, but the heat would not let him approach. The screams soon stopped. He smelled the thick odor of charring flesh. The fire burned on.

Peggol vez Menk hurried out to Radnal. “I tried to stop them,” the tour guide said brokenly.

“You came closer than I, a reproach I shall carry to my grave,” Peggol answered. “I did not see that danger, much as I should have. Some of those men were my friends.” He slammed a fist against his thigh. “What now, Radnal vez?”

Die when the waters come, was the first thought that crossed the tour guide’s mind. Mechanically, he went through the obvious: “Wait till dawn. Try to find their trail. Pack as much water on our backs as we can and go after them afoot.”

“Afoot?” Peggol said.

Radnal realized he hadn’t explained about the donkeys. He did, then went on, “Leave one man here for when another helo comes. Give the tourists as much water as they can carry and send them up the trail. Maybe they’ll escape the flood.”

“What you say sounds sensible. We’ll try it,” Peggol said. “Anything else?”

“Pray,” Radnal told him. He grimaced, nodded, turned away.

Moblay Sopsirk’s son got through the Eyes and Ears and trotted up to Radnal and Peggol. “Freeman vez Krobir—” he began.

Radnal rolled his eyes. He was about to wish a night demon on Moblay’s head, but stopped. Instead, he said, “Wait a heartbeat. You named me properly.” What should have been polite surprise came out as accusation.

“So I did.” Something about Moblay had changed. In the light of the blazing helos, he looked . . . not like Peggol vez Menk, since he remained a short-nosed, brown-skinned Highhead, but of the same type as the Eye and Ear-tough and smart, not just lascivious and overfamiliar. He said, “Freeman vez Krobir, I apologize for irritating you, but I wanted to remain as ineffectual-seeming as I could. Names are one way of doing that. I am an aide to my Prince: I am one of his Silent Servants.”

Peggol grunted. He evidently knew what that meant. Radnal didn’t, but he could guess: something like an Eye and Ear. He cried, “Is there anyone in this cursed tour group not wearing a mask?”

“More to the point, why drop the mask now?” Peggol asked.

“Because my Prince, may the Lion God give him many years, does not want the Bottomlands flooded,” Moblay said. “We wouldn’t suffer as badly as Tartesh, of course; we own only a strip of the southernmost part. But the Prince fears the fighting that would follow.”

“Who approached Lissonland with word of this?” Peggol said.

“We learned from Morgaf,” Moblay answered. “The island king wanted us to join the attack on Tartesh after the flood. But the Morgaffos denied the plot was theirs, and would not tell us who had set the starbomb here. We suspected the Krepalgan Unity, but had no proof. That was one reason I kept sniffing around the Krepalgan women.” He grinned. “Another should be obvious.”

“Why Krepalga?” Peggol wondered aloud. “The Unity didn’t join Morgaf against us in the last war. What could they want enough to make them risk a war with starbombs?”

Radnal remembered the lecture he’d given on how the Bottomlands came to be, remembered also his fretting about how far an unchecked flood might reach. “I know part of the answer to that, I think,” he said. Peggol and Moblay both turned to him. He went on, “If the Bottomlands flood, the new central sea would stop about at Krepalga’s western border. The Unity would have a whole new coastline, and be in a better position than either Tartesh or Lissonland to exploit the new sea.”

“The flood wouldn’t get to Krepalga for a long time,” Moblay protested.

“True,” Radnal said, “but can you imagine stopping it before it did?” He visualized the map again. “I don’t think you could, not against that weight of water.”

“I think you’re right.” Peggol nodded decisively. “That may not be all Krepalga has in mind, but it’ll be part. The Unity must have been planning this for years; they’ll have looked at all the consequences they could.”

“Let me help you now,” Moblay said. “I heard freeman vez Krobir say the donkeys are dead, but what one walking man may do, I shall.”

Radnal would have taken any ally who presented himself. But Peggol said, “No. I am grateful for your candor and suspect you are truthful now, but dare not take the chance. One walking man could do much harm as well as good. Being of the profession, I trust you understand.”

Moblay bowed. “I feared you would say that. I do understand. May the Lion God go with you.”

The three men walked back to the lodge. The tourists rained questions on Radnal. “No one has told us anything, not a single thing,” Golobol complained. “What is going on? Why are helos exploding to left and then to right? Tell me!”

Radnal told him—and everyone else. The stunned silence his words produced lasted perhaps five heartbeats. Then everybody started yelling. Nocso zev Martois’ voice drowned all others: “Does this mean we don’t get to finish the tour?”

More sensibly, Toglo zev Pamdal said, “Is there any way we can help you in your pursuit, Radnal vez?”

“Thank you, no. You’d need weapons; we haven’t any to give you. Your best hope is to make for high ground. You ought to leave as soon as you load all the water you can carry. Lie up in the middle of the day when the sun is worst. With luck, you’ll be up at the old continental shelf in, oh, a day and a half. If the flood’s held off that long, you ought to be safe for a while there. And a helo may spot you as you travel.”

“What if the flood comes when we’re still down here?” Eltsac vez Martois demanded. “What then, freeman Know-It-All?”

“Then you have the consolation of knowing I drowned a few heartbeats before you. I hope you enjoy it,” Radnal said. Eltsac stared at him. He went on, “That’s all the stupidity I have time for now. Let’s get you people moving. Peggol vez, we’ll send a couple of Eyes and Ears back, too. Your men won’t be much help traveling cross-country. Come to that, you—”

“No,” Peggol said firmly. “My place is at the focus. I shan’t lag, and I shoot straight. I’m not the worst tracker, either.”

Radnal knew better than to argue. “All right.”

The water bladders would have gone on the donkeys. Radnal filled them from the cistern while the militiamen and Eyes and Ears cut straps to fit them to human shoulders. The eastern sky was bright pink by the time they finished. Radnal tried to give no tourists loads of more than a third of their body weight: that was as much as anyone could carry without breaking down.

Nocso vez Martois said, “With all this water, how can we carry food?”

“You can’t,” Radnal snapped. He stared at her. “You can live off yourself a while, but you can’t live without water.” Telling off his tourists was a new, heady pleasure. Since it might be his last, he enjoyed it while he could.

“I’ll report your insolence,” Nocso shrilled.

“That is the least of my worries.” Radnal turned to the Eyes and Ears who were heading up the trail with the tourists. “Try to keep them together, try not to do too much at midday, make sure they all drink—and make sure you do, too. Gods be with you.”

An Eye and Ear shook his head. “No, freeman vez Krobir, with you. If they watch you, we’ll be all right. But if they neglect you, we all fail.”

Radnal nodded. To the tourists, he said, “Good luck. If the gods are kind, I’ll see you again at the top of Trench Park.” He didn’t mention what would happen if the gods bumbled along as usual.

Toglo said, “Radnal vez, if we see each other again, I will use whatever influence I have for you.”

“Thanks,” was all Radnal could say. Under other circumstances, getting patronage from the Hereditary Tyrant’s relative would have moved him to do great things. Even now, it was kindly meant, but of small weight when he first had to survive to gain it.

A sliver of red-gold crawled over the eastern horizon. The tourists and the Eyes and Ears trudged north. A koprit bird on the rooftop announced the day with a cry of hig, hig, hig!

Peggol ordered one of the remaining Eyes and Ears to stay at the lodge and send westward any helos that came. Then he said formally, “Freeman vez Krobir, I place myself and freeman vez Potos, my colleague here, under your authority. Command us.”

“If that’s how you want it,” Radnal answered, shrugging. “You know what we’ll do: march west until we catch the Krepalgans or drown, whichever comes first. Nothing fancy. Let’s go.”

Radnal, the two Eyes and Ears, the lodge attendants, and the surviving militiamen started from the stables. The morning light showed the tracks of three donkeys heading west. The tour guide took out his monocular, scanned the western horizon. No luck—dips and rises hid Evillia and Lofosa.

Fer vez Canthal said, “There’s a high spot maybe three thousand cubits west of here. You ought to look from there.”

“Maybe,” Radnal said. “If we have a good trail, though, I’m likelier to rely on that. I begrudge wasting even a heartbeat’s time, and spotting someone isn’t easy even if he wants to be found. Remember that poor fellow who wandered off from his group four years ago? They used helos, dogs, everything, but they didn’t find his corpse until a year later, and then by accident.”

“Thank you for pumping up my hopes,” Peggol said.

“Nothing wrong with hope,” Radnal answered, “but you knew the odds were bad when you decided to stay.”

The seven walkers formed a loose skirmish line, about five cubits apart from one another. Radnal, the best tracker, took the center; at his right was Horken vez Sofana, at his left Peggol. He figured they had the best chance of picking up the trail if he lost it.

That likelihood grew with every step. Evillia and Lofosa hadn’t gone straight west. He quickly found that out. Instead, they’d jink northwest for a few hundred cubits, then southwest a few hundred more, in a deliberate effort to throw off pursuit. They also chose the hardest ground they could find, which made the donkeys’ tracks tougher to follow.

Radnal’s heart sank every time he had to cast about before they found the hoofprints again. His group lost ground with every step; the Krepalgans rode faster than they could walk.

“I have a question,” Horken vez Sofana: “Suppose the starbomb goes off and the mountains fall. How are these two women supposed to get away?”

Radnal shrugged; he had no idea. “Did you hear that, Peggol vez?” he asked.

“Yes,” Peggol said. “Two possibilities spring to mind—”

“I might have guessed,” Radnal said.

“Hush. As I was saying before you crassly interrupted, one is that the starbomb was supposed to have a delayed detonation, letting the perpetrators escape. The other is that these agents knew the mission was suicidal. Morgaf has used such personnel; so have we, once or twice. Krepalga might find such servants, however regrettable that prospect seems to us.”

Horken gave a slow, deliberate nod. “What you say sounds convincing. They might have first planned a delay to let them escape, then shifted to sacrificing themselves when they found we were partway on to them.”

“True,” Peggol said. “And they may yet be planning to escape. If they somehow secreted away helium cylinders, for instance, they might inflate several prophylactics and float out of the Bottomlands.”

Radnal wondered for a heartbeat if he was serious. Then the tour guide snorted. “I wish I could stay so cheerful at death’s door.”

“Death will find me whether I am cheerful or not,” Peggol answered. “I will go forward as boldly and as long as I can.”

Conversation flagged. The higher the sun rose, the hotter the desert became, the more anything but putting one foot in front of the other seemed more trouble than it was worth. Radnal wiped sweat from his eyes as he slogged along.

The water bladder on his back started out as heavy as any pack he’d ever toted. He wondered how long he could go on with such a big burden. But the bladder got lighter every time he refilled his canteen. He made himself keep drinking—not getting water in as fast as he sweated would be suicidal. Unlike the fanatic Morgaffos Peggol had mentioned, he wanted to live if he could.

He’d given everyone about two days’ worth of water. If he didn’t catch up to Lofosa and Evillia by the end of the second day . . . He shook his head. One way or another, it wouldn’t matter after that.

As noon neared, he ordered the walkers into the shade of a limestone outcrop. “We’ll rest a while,” he said.

“When we start again, it ought to be cooler.”

“Not enough to help,” Peggol said. But he sat down in the shade with a grateful sigh. He took off his stylish cap, sadly felt of it. “It’ll make a dishrag after this—nothing better.”

Radnal squatted beside him, too hot to talk. His heart pounded. It seemed so loud, he wondered if it would give out on him. Then he realized most of that beating rhythm came from outside. Fatigue fell away. He jumped up, doffed his own cap and waved it in the air. “A helo!”

The rest of the group also got up and waved and yelled. “It’s seen us!” Zosel vez Glesir said. Nimbly as a dragonfly, the helo shifted direction in midair and dashed straight toward them. It set down about fifty cubits from the ledge. Its rotors kept spinning; it was ready to take off again at any moment.

The pilot leaned out the window, bawled something in Radnal’s direction. Through the racket, he had no idea what the fellow said. The pilot beckoned him over.

The din and dust were worse under the whirling rotor blades. Radnal had to lean on tiptoe against the helo’s hot metal skin before he made out the pilot’s words: “How far ahead are the cursed Krepalgans?”

“They had better than a daytenth’s start, and they’re on donkeyback. Say, up to thirty thousand cubits west of here.” Radnal repeated himself several times before the pilot nodded and ducked back into his machine.

“Wait!” Radnal screamed. The pilot stuck his head out again. Radnal asked, “Did you come across my group heading toward the trail up the old continental shelf?”

“Yes. Somebody ought to be picking them up right about now.”

“Good,” Radnal bellowed. The pilot tossed him a portable radiophone. He seized it; now he was no longer cut off from the rest of the search.

They sped. The helo shot into the air, sped away westward. The tour guide knew relief: even if he drowned, the people he’d led would be safe.

“Now that this helo’s here, do we need to go on?” asked Impac vez Potos, the Eye and Ear with Peggol.

“You’d best believe it, freeman.” Radnal recounted the story of the lost tourist who’d stayed lost. “No matter how many helos search, they’ll be covering a big area and trying to find people who don’t want to be found. We stay in the hunt till it’s over. By the way the Krepalgans fooled us all, they won’t make things easy.”

“Shall we keep resting, or head out now?” Peggol asked.

Radnal chewed on that for a few heartbeats. If the helo was here, that meant the people at Tarteshem knew from its radiophone how bad things were. And that meant helos would swarm here as fast as they could take off, which meant his group would probably be able to get supplies. But he didn’t want to lose people to heatstroke, either, a risk that came with exertion in the desert.

“We’ll give it another tenth of a daytenth,” he said at last.

He was first up when the rest ended. The other six rose with enough groans and creaking joints for an army of invalids. “We’ll loosen up as we get going,” Fer vez Canthal said hopefully.

A little later, panic ran through Radnal when he lost the trail. He waved for Peggol and Horken vez Sofana. They scoured the ground on hands and knees, but found nothing. Rock-hard dirt stretched in all directions for a couple of hundred cubits. “If they pulled up a bush and swept away their tracks, we’ll have a night demons’ time picking them up again,” Horken said.

“We won’t try,” Radnal declared. The rest of the searchers looked at him in surprise. He went on, “We’re wasting time here, right?” No one disagreed. “So here is the last place we want to stay. We’ll do a search spiral. Zosel vez, you stand here to mark this spot. Sooner or later, we’ll find the trail again.”

“You hope,” Peggol said quietly.

“Yes, I do. If you have a better plan, I’ll be grateful to hear it.” The Eye and Ear shook his head and, a moment later, dropped his eyes.

While Zosel stood in place, the other searchers tramped in a widening spiral. After a hundred heartbeats, Impac vez Potos shouted: “I’ve found it!”

Radnal and Horken hurried to see what he’d come across. “Where?” Radnal asked. Impac pointed to a patch of ground softer than most in the area. Sure enough, it held marks. The more experienced men squatted to take a better look. They glanced up together; their eyes met. Radnal said, “Freeman vez Potos, those are the tracks of a bladetooth. If you look carefully, you can see where it dragged its tail in the dirt. Donkeys never do that.”

“Oh,” Impac said in a small, sad voice.

Radnal sighed. He hadn’t bothered mentioning that the tracks were too small for donkeys’ and didn’t look like them, either. “Let’s try once more,” he said. The spiral resumed.

When Impac yelled again, Radnal wished he hadn’t tried to salve his feelings. If he stopped them every hundred heartbeats, they’d never find anything. This time, Horken stayed where he was. Radnal stalked over to Impac. “Show me,” he growled.

Impac pointed once more. Radnal filled his lungs to curse him for wasting their time. The curse remained unspoken. There at his feet lay the unmistakable tracks of three donkeys. “By the gods,” he said.

“They are right this time?” Impac asked anxiously.

“Yes. Thank you, freeman.” Radnal shouted to the other searchers. The seven headed southwest, following the recovered trail. Fer vez Canthal went up to Impac and slapped him on the back. Impac beamed as if he’d performed bravely in front of the Hereditary Tyrant. Considering the service he’d just done Tartesh, he’d earned the right.

He was also lucky, Radnal thought. But he’d needed courage to call out a second time after being ignominiously wrong the first, and sharp eyes to spot both sets of tracks, even if he couldn’t tell what they were once he’d found them. So more than luck was involved. Radnal slapped Impac’s back, too.

Sweat poured off Radnal. As it evaporated from his robes, it cooled him a little, but not enough. Like a machine taking on fuel, he drank again and again from the bladder on his back.

Now the sun was in his face. He tugged his cap over his eyes, kept his head down, and tramped on. When the Krepalgans tried doubling back, he spotted the ruse instead of following the wrong trail and wasting hundreds of precious heartbeats.

By then, the western sky was full of helos. They roared about in all directions, sometimes low enough to kick up dust. Radnal wanted to strangle the pilots who flew that way; they might blow away the trail, too. He yelled into the radiophone. The low-flying helos moved higher.

A big transport helo set down a few hundred cubits in front of the walkers. A door in its side slid open. A squadron of soldiers jumped down and hurried west.

“Are they close or desperate?” Radnal wondered.

“Desperate, certainly,” Peggol said. “As for close, we can hope. We haven’t drowned yet. On the other hand”—he always thought of the other hand-“we haven’t caught your two sluts, either.”

“They weren’t mine,” Radnal said feebly. But he remembered their flesh sliding against his, the way their breath had caught, the sweat-salty taste of their skin.

Peggol read his face. “Aye, they used you, Radnal vez, and they fooled you. If it makes you feel better, they fooled me, too; I thought they kept their brains in their twats. They outsmarted me with the fornication books in their gear and the skin they showed. They used our prudishness against us—how could anyone who acts that way be dangerous? It’s a ploy that won’t work again.”

“Once may have been plenty.” Radnal wasn’t ready to stop feeling guilty.

“If it was, you’ll pay full atonement,” Peggol said.

Radnal shook his head. Dying when the Bottomlands flooded wasn’t atonement enough, not when that flood would ruin his nation and might start an exchange of starbombs that would wreck the world.

The ground shivered under his feet. Despite the furnace heat of the desert floor, his sweat went cold. “Please, gods, make it stop,” he said, his first prayer in years.

It stopped. He breathed again. It was just a little quake; he would have laughed at tourists for fretting over it. At any other time, he would have ignored it. Now it nearly scared him to death.

A koprit bird cocked its head, peered down at him from a thornbush that held its larder.

Hig-hig-hig! it said, and fluttered to the ground. Radnal wondered if it could fly fast enough or far enough to escape a flood.

The radiophone let out a burst of static. Radnal thumbed it to let himself transmit: “Vez Krobir here.”

“This is Combat Group Leader Turand vez Nital. I wish to report that we have encountered the Krepalgan spies. Both are deceased.”

“That’s wonderful!” Radnal relayed the news. His companions raised a weary cheer. Then he remembered again his nights with Evillia and Lofosa. And then he realized Combat Group Leader vez Nital hadn’t sounded as overjoyed and relieved as he should have. Slowly, he said, “What’s wrong?”

“When encountered, the Krepalgans were moving eastward.”

“Eastw—Oh!”

“You see the predicament?” Turand said. “They appear to have completed their work and to have been attempting to escape. Now they are beyond questioning. Please keep your transmission active so a helo can home on you and bring you here. You look to be Tartesh’s best hope of locating the bomb before its ignition. I repeat, please maintain transmission.”

Radnal obeyed. He looked at the Barrier Mountains. They seemed taller now than they had when he set out. How long would they keep standing tall? The sun was sliding down toward them, too. How was he supposed to search after dark? He feared tomorrow morning would be too late.

He passed on to his comrades what the officer had said. Horken vez Sofana made swimming motions. Radnal stooped for a pebble, threw it at him.

A helo soon landed beside the seven walkers. Someone inside opened the sliding door. “Come on!” he bawled.

“Move it, move it!”

Moving it as fast as they could, Radnal and the rest scrambled into the helo. It went airborne before the fellow at the door had it fully closed. A couple of hundred heartbeats later, the helo touched down hard enough to rattle the tour guide’s teeth. The crewman at the door undogged it and slid it open. “Out!” he yelled.

Out Radnal jumped. The others followed. A few cubits away stood a man in a uniform robe similar but not identical to the one the militia wore. “Who’s freeman vez Krobir?” he said. “I’m Turand vez Nital.”

“I’m vez Krobir. I—” Radnal broke off. Two bodies lay behind the Tarteshan soldier. Radnal gulped. He’d seen corpses on their funeral pyres, but never before sprawled out like animals waiting to be butchered. He said the first thing that popped into his head: “They don’t look like you shot them.”

“We didn’t,” the officer said. “When they saw they couldn’t escape, they took poison.”

“They were professionals,” Peggol murmured.

“As may be,” Turand growled. “This one”—he pointed at Evillia-“wasn’t gone when we got to her. She said, ‘You’re too late,’ and then died, may night demons gnaw her ghost forever.”

“We’d better find that cursed bomb fast, then,” Radnal said. “Can you take us to where the Krepalgans were cornered?”

“This very heartbeat,” Turand said. “Come with me. It’s only three or four hundred cubits from here.” He moved at a trot that left the worn walkers gasping in his wake. At last he stopped and waited impatiently for them to catch up. “This is where we found them.”

“And they were coming east, you said?” Radnal asked.

“That’s right, though I don’t know for how long,” the officer answered. “Somewhere out there is the accursed starbomb. We’re scouring the desert, but this is your park. Maybe, your eye will fall on something they’d miss. If not—”

“You needn’t go on,” Radnal said. “I almost fouled my robe when we had that little tremor a while ago. I thought I’d wash ashore on the Krepalgan border, ten million cubits from here.”

“If you’re standing on a starbomb when it goes off, you needn’t fear the flood afterwards,” Turand said.

“Gak.” Radnal hadn’t thought of that. It would be quick, anyhow.

“Enough chatter,” Horken vez Sofana said. “If we’re to search, let us search.”

“Search, and may the gods lend your sight wings,” Turand said.

The seven walkers trudged west again. Radnal did his best to follow the donkey’s trail, but the soldiers’ footprints often obscured them. “How are we supposed to track in this confusion?” he cried. “They might as well have turned a herd of humpless camels loose here.”

“It’s not quite so bad as that,” Horken said. Stooping low, he pointed to the ground. “Look, here’s a track. Here’s another, a few paces on. We can do it. We have to do it.”

Radnal knew the senior trooper was right; he felt ashamed of his own outburst. He found the next hoofprint himself, and the one after that. Those two lay on opposite sides of a fault-line crack; when he saw that, he knew the starbomb couldn’t rest too far away. But he felt time pressing hard on his shoulders.

“Maybe the soldiers will have found the starbomb by now,” Fer vez Canthal said.

“We can’t count on it. Look how long it took them to find the Krepalgans. We have to figure it’s up to us.” Radnal realized the weight on him wasn’t just time. It was also responsibility. If he died now, he’d die knowing he’d failed.

And yet, while the searchers stirred through Trench Park, the animals of the Bottomlands kept living their usual lives; they could not know they might perish in the next heartbeat. A koprit bird skittered across the sand a few paces in front of Radnal. A clawed foot stabbed down.

“It’s caught a shoveler skink,” he said, as if the hot, worn men with him were members of his group.

The lizard thrashed, trying to get away. Sand flew every which way. But the koprit bird held on with its claws, tore at the skink with its beak, and smashed it against the ground until its writhing ceased. Then it flew to a nearby thornbush with its victim.

It impaled the skink on a long, stout thorn. The lizard was the latest addition to its larder, which also included two grasshoppers, a baby snake, and a jerboa. And, as koprit birds often did, this one used the thornbush’s spikes to display bright objects it had found. A yellow flower, now very dry, must have hung there since the last rains. And not far from the lizard, the koprit bird had draped a couple of red-orange strings over a thorn.

Radnal’s eyes came to them, passed by, snapped back. They weren’t strings. He pointed. “Aren’t those the necklaces Evillia and Lofosa wore yesterday?” he asked hoarsely.

“They are.” Peggol and Horken said it together. They both had to notice and remember small details. They sounded positive.

When Peggol tried to take the necklaces off their thorn, the koprit bird furiously screeched hig-hig! Claws outstretched, it flew at his face. He staggered backwards, flailing his arms.

Radnal waved his cap as he walked up to the thornbush. That intimidated the bird enough to keep it from diving on him, though it kept shrieking. He grabbed the necklaces and got away from the larder as fast as he could.

The necklaces were heavier than he’d expected, too heavy for the cheap plastic he’d thought them to be. He turned one so he could look at it end-on. “It’s got a copper core,” he said, startled.

“Let me see that.” Again Peggol and Horken spoke together. They snatched a necklace apiece. Then Peggol broke the silence alone: “Detonator wire.”

“Absolutely,” Horken agreed. “Never seen it with red insulator, though. Usually it would be brown or green for camouflage. This time, it was camouflaged as jewelry.”

Radnal stared from Horken to Peggol. “You mean, these wires would be hooked to the cell that would send the charge to the starbomb when the timer went off?”

“That’s just what we mean,” Peggol said. Horken vez Sofana solemnly nodded.

“But they can’t now, because they’re here, not there.” Fumbling for words, Radnal went on, “And they’re here because the koprit bird thought they were pretty, or maybe it thought they were food—they’re about the color of a shoveler skink’s lure—and pulled them loose and flew away with them.” Realization hit then: “That koprit bird just saved Tartesh!”

“The ugly thing almost put my eye out,” Peggol grumbled. The rest of the group ignored him. One or two of them cheered. More, like Radnal, stood quietly, too tired and dry and stunned to show their joy.

The tour guide needed several heartbeats to remember he carried a radiophone. He clicked it on, waited for Turand vez Nital. “What do you have?” the officer barked. Radnal could hear his tension. He’d felt it too, till moments before.

“The detonation wires are off the starbomb,” he said, giving the good news first. “I don’t know where that is, but it won’t go off without them.”

After static-punctuated silence, Turand said slowly, “Are you daft? How can you have the wires without the starbomb?”

“There was this koprit bird—”

“What?” Turand’s roar made the radiophone vibrate in Radnal’s hand. As best he could, he explained. More silence followed. At last, the soldier said, “You’re certain this is detonator wire?”

“An Eye and Ear and the Trench Park circumstances man both say it is. If they don’t recognize the stuff, who would?”

“You’re right.” Another pause from Turand, then: “A koprit bird, you say? Do you know that I never heard of koprit birds until just now?” His voice held wonder. But suddenly he sounded worried again, saying, “Can you be sure the wire wasn’t left there to fool us one last time?”

“No.” Fear knotted Radnal’s gut again. Had he and his comrades come so far, done so much, only to fall for a final deception?

Horken let out a roar louder than Turand’s had been. “I’ve found it!” he screamed from beside a spurge about twenty cubits away. Radnal hurried over. Horken said, “It couldn’t have been far, because koprit birds have territories. So I kept searching, and—” He pointed down.

At the base of the spurge lay a small timer hooked to an electrical cell. The timer was upside down; the koprit bird must have had quite a fight tearing loose the wires it prized. Radnal stooped, turned the timer over. He almost dropped it—the needle that counted off the daytenths and heartbeats lay against the zero knob.

“Will you look at that?” he said softly. Impac vez Potos peered over his shoulder. The junior Eye and Ear clicked his tongue between his teeth.

“A koprit bird,” Horken said. He got down on hands and knees, poked around under every plant and stone within a couple of cubits of the spurge. Before a hundred heartbeats went by, he let out a sharp, wordless exclamation.

Radnal got down beside him. Horken had tipped over a chunk of sandstone about as big as his head. Under it was a crack in the earth that ran out to either side. From the crack protruded two drab brown wires.

“A koprit bird,” Horken repeated. The helos and men would have been too late. But the koprit bird, hungry or out to draw females into its territory, had spotted something colorful, so—

Radnal took out the radiophone. “We’ve found the timer. It is separated from the wires which, we presume, lead to the starbomb. The koprit bird took away the wires the Krepalgans used to attach the timer.”

“A koprit bird.” Now Turand vez Nital said it. He sounded as dazed as any of the rest of them, but quickly pulled himself together again: “That’s excellent news, as I needn’t tell you. I’ll send a crew to your location directly, to begin excavating the starbomb. Out.”

Peggol vez Menk had been examining the timer, too. His gaze kept returning to the green needle bisecting the zero symbol. He said, “How deep do you suppose the bomb is buried?”

“It would have to be pretty deep, to trigger the fault,” Radnal answered. “I couldn’t say how deep; I’m no savant of geology. But if Turand vez Nital thinks his crew will dig it up before nightfall, he’ll have to think again.”

“How could Krepalga have planted it here?” Impac vez Potos said. “Wouldn’t you Trench Park people have noticed?”

“Trench Park is a big place,” Radnal said.

“I know that. I ought to; I’ve walked enough of it,” Impac said wearily. “Still—”

“People don’t frequent this area, either,” Radnal persisted. “I’ve never led a group anywhere near here. No doubt the Krepalgans took risks doing whatever they did, but not enormous risks.”

Peggol said, “We shall have to ensure such deadly danger cannot return again. Whether we should expand the militia, base regular soldiers here, or set up a station for Eyes and Ears, that I don’t know—we must determine which step offers the best security. But we will do something.”

“You also have to consider which choice hurts Trench Park least,” Radnal said.

“That will be a factor,” Peggol said, “but probably a small one. Think, Radnal vez: if the Barrier Mountains fall and the Western Ocean pours down on the Bottomlands, how much will that hurt Trench Park?”

Radnal opened his mouth to argue more. Keeping the park in its natural state had always been vital to him. Man had despoiled so much of the Bottomlands; this was the best—almost the only—reminder of what they’d been like. But he’d just spent days wondering whether he’d drown in the next heartbeat, and all of today certain he would. And if he’d drowned, his country would have drowned with him. Set against that, a base for soldiers or Eyes and Ears suddenly seemed a small thing. He said not another word.

Radnal hadn’t been in Tarteshem for a long time, though Tartesh’s capital wasn’t far from Trench Park. He’d never been paraded through the city in an open-topped motor while people lined the sidewalks and cheered. He should have enjoyed it. Peggol vez Menk, who sat beside him in the motor, certainly did. Peggol smiled and waved as if he’d just been chosen high priest.

After so long in the wide open spaces of the Bottomlands, though, and after so long in his own company or that of small tour groups, riding through the midst of so much tight-packed humanity more nearly overwhelmed than overjoyed Radnal. He looked nervously at the buildings towering over the avenue. It felt more as if he were passing through a canyon than anything man-made.

“Radnal, Radnal!” the crowds chanted, as if everybody knew him well enough to use his name in its most naked, intimate form. They had another cry, too: “Koprit bird! Koprit bird! The gods praise the koprit bird!”

That took away some of his nervousness. Seeing his grin, Peggol said, “Anyone would think they’d seen the artist’s new work.”

“You’re right,” Radnal answered. “Maybe it’s too bad the koprit bird isn’t here for the ceremony after all.” Peggol raised that eyebrow of his. “You talked them out of capturing it.”

“I know. I did the right thing,” Radnal said. Putting the koprit bird that stole the detonator wires in a cage didn’t seem fitting. Trench Park existed to let its creatures live wild and free, with as little interference from mankind as possible. The koprit bird had made it possible for that to go on. Caging it afterwards struck Radnal as ungrateful.

The motor drove onto the grounds of the Hereditary Tyrant’s palace. It pulled up in front of the gleaming building that housed Bortav vez Pamdal. A temporary stage and a podium stood on the lawn near the road. The folding chairs that faced it were full of dignitaries from Tartesh and other nations.

No Krepalgans sat in those chairs. The Hereditary Tyrant had sent the plenipo from the Krepalgan Unity home, ordered all Krepalgan citizens out of Tartesh, and sealed the border. So far, he’d done nothing more than that. Radnal both resented and approved of his caution. In an age of starbombs, even the attempted murder of a nation had to be dealt with cautiously, lest a successful double murder follow.

A man in a fancy robe came up to the motor, bowed low. “I am the protocol officer. If you will come with me, freemen—?”

Radnal and Peggol came. The protocol officer led them onto the platform, got them settled, and hurried away to see to the rest of the seven walkers, whose motors had parked behind the one from which the tour guide and the Eye and Ear had dismounted.

Peering at the important people who were examining him, Radnal got nervous again. He didn’t belong in this kind of company. But there in the middle of the second row sat Toglo zev Pamdal, who smiled broadly and waved at him. Seeing someone he knew and liked made it easier for him to wait for the next part of the ceremony.

The Tarteshan national hymn blared out. Radnal couldn’t just sit. He got up and put his hand over his heart until the hymn was done. The protocol officer stepped up to the podium and announced, “Freemen, freeladies, the Hereditary Tyrant.”

Bortav vez Pamdal’s features adorned silver, smiled down from public buildings, and were frequently on the screen. Radnal had never expected to see the Hereditary Tyrant in person, though. In the flesh, Bortav looked older than he did on his images, and not quite so firm and wise: like a man, in other words, not a demigod.

But his ringing baritone proved all his own. He spoke without notes for a quarter of a daytenth, praising Tartesh, condemning those who had tried to lay her low, and promising that danger would never come again. In short, it was a political speech. Since Radnal cared more about the kidneys of the fat sand rat than politics, he soon stopped paying attention.

He almost missed the Hereditary Tyrant calling out his name. He started and sprang up. Bortav vez Pamdal beckoned him to the podium. As if in a dream, he went.

Bortav put an arm around his shoulder. The Hereditary Tyrant was faintly perfumed. “Freemen, freeladies, I present Radnal vez Krobir, whose sharp eye spotted the evil wires which proved the gods had not deserted Tartesh. For his valiant efforts in preserving not only Trench Park, not only the Bottomlands, but all Tartesh, I award him five thousand units of silver and to declare that he and all his heirs are henceforward recognized as members of our nation’s aristocracy. Freeman vez Krobir!”

The dignitaries applauded. Bortav vez Pamdal nodded, first to the microphone, then to Radnal. Making a speech frightened him worse than almost anything he’d gone through in the Bottomlands. He tried to pretend it was a scientific paper: “Thank you, Your Excellency. You honor me beyond my worth. I will always cherish your kindness.”

He stepped back. The dignitaries applauded again, perhaps because he’d been so brief. Away from the mike, the Hereditary Tyrant said, “Stay up here by me while I reward your colleagues. The other presentation for you is at the end.”

Bortav called up the rest of the seven walkers, one by one. He raised Peggol to the aristocracy along with Radnal. The other five drew his praise and large sums of silver. That seemed unfair to Radnal. Without Horken, for instance, they wouldn’t have found the electrical cell and timer. And Impac had picked up the trail when even Radnal lost it. He couldn’t very well protest. Even as the hero of the moment, he lacked the clout to make Bortav listen to him.

Moreover, he guessed no one had informed the Hereditary Tyrant he’d been fornicating with Evillia and Lofosa a few days before they went out to detonate the buried starbomb. Bortav vez Pamdal was a staunch conservative about morals. He wouldn’t have elevated Radnal if he’d known everything he did in Trench Park.

To salve his conscience, Radnal reminded himself that all seven walkers would have easier lives because of today’s ceremony. It was true. He remained not quite convinced it was enough.

Zosel vez Glesir, last to be called to the podium, finished his thank-you and went back to his place. Bortav vez Pamdal reclaimed the microphone. As the applause for Zosel died away, the Tyrant said, “Our nation should never forget this near brush with disaster, nor the efforts of all those within Trench Park who turned it aside. To commemorate it, I here display for the first time the insigne Trench Park will bear henceforward.”

The protocol officer carried a cloth-covered square of fiberboard, not quite two cubits on a side, over to Radnal. He murmured, “The veil unfastens from the top. Hold the emblem up so the crowd can see it as you lower the veil.” Radnal obeyed. The dignitaries clapped. Most of them smiled; a few even laughed. Radnal smiled, too. What better way to symbolize Trench Park than a koprit bird perching on a thornbush?

Bortav vez Pamdal waved him to the microphone once more. He said, “I thank you again, Your Excellency, now on behalf of all Trench Park staff. We shall bear this insigne proudly.”

He stepped away from the microphone, then turned his head and hissed to the protocol officer, “What do I do with this thing?”

“Lean it against the side of the podium,” the unflappable official answered. “We’ll take care of it.” As Radnal returned to his seat, the protocol officer announced, “Now we’ll adjourn to the Grand Reception Hall for drinks and a luncheon.”

Along with everyone else, Radnal found his way to the Grand Reception Hall. He took a glass of sparkling wine from a waiter with a silver tray, then stood around accepting congratulations from important officials. It was like being a tour guide: he knew most of what he should say, and improvised new answers along old themes.

In a flash of insight, he realized the politicians and bureaucrats were doing the same thing with him. The whole affair was formal as a figure dance. When he saw that, his nervousness vanished for good.

Or so he thought, until Toglo came smiling up to him. He dipped his head. “Hello, freelady, it’s good to see you again.”

“If I was Toglo zev through danger in Trench Park, I remain Toglo zev here safe in Tarteshem.” She sounded as if his formality disappointed her.

“Good,” he said. Despite her pledge of patronage before she hiked away from the lodge, plenty of people friendly to Trench Park staff in the Bottomlands snubbed them if they met in the city. He hadn’t thought she was that type, but better safe.

As if by magic, Bortav vez Pamdal appeared at Radnal’s elbow. The Hereditary Tyrant’s cheeks were a little red; he might have had more than one glass of sparkling wine. He spoke as if reminding himself: “You already know my niece, don’t you, freeman vez Krobir?”

“Your—niece?” Radnal stared from Bortav to Toglo. She’d called herself a distant collateral relation. Niece didn’t fit that definition.

“Hope you enjoy your stay here.” Bortav slapped Radnal on the shoulder, breathed wine into his face, and ambled off to hobnob with other guests.

“You never said you were his niece,” Radnal said. Now that he was suddenly an aristocrat, he might have imagined talking to the clanfather of the Hereditary Tyrant’s distant collateral relative. But to talk to Bortav vez Pamdal’s brother or sister-husband . . . impossible. Maybe that made him sound peevish.

“I’m sorry,” Toglo answered. Radnal studied her, expecting the apology to be merely for form’s sake. But she seemed to mean it. She said, “Bearing my clan name is hard enough anyway. It would be harder yet if I told everyone how close a relative of the Hereditary Tyrant’s I am. People wouldn’t treat me like a human being. Believe me, I know.” By the bitterness in her voice, she did.

“Oh,” Radnal said slowly. “I never thought of that, Toglo zev.” Her smile when he used her name with the polite particle made him feel better.

“You should have,” she told him. “When folk hear I’m from the Pamdal clan, they either act as if I’m made of glass and will shatter if they breathe on me too hard, or else they try to see how much they can get out of me. I don’t care for either one. That’s why I minimize the kinship.”

“Oh,” Radnal’s snort of laughter was aimed mostly at himself. “I always imagined being attached to a rich and famous clan made life simpler and easier, not the other way round. I never thought anything bad might be mixed with that. I’m sorry, for not realizing it.”

“You needn’t be,” she said. “I think you’d have treated me the same even if you’d known from the first heartbeat who my uncle happened to be. I don’t find that often, so I treasure it.”

Radnal said, “I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t think about which family you belonged to.”

“Well, of course, Radnal vez. You’d be stupid if you didn’t think about it. I don’t expect that; until the koprit bird, I thought the gods were done with miracles. But whatever you were thinking, you didn’t let it get in the way.”

“I tried to treat you as much like everyone else as I could,” he said.

“I thought you did wonderfully,” she answered. “That’s why we became friends so fast down in Trench Park. It’s also why I’d like us to stay friends now.”

“I’d like that very much,” Radnal said, “provided you don’t think I’m saying so to try and take advantage of you.”

“I don’t think you’d do that.” Though Toglo kept smiling, her eyes measured him. She’d said she’d had people try to take advantage of her before. Radnal doubted those people had come off well.

“Being who you are makes it harder for me to tell you I also liked you very much, down in the Bottomlands,” he said.

“Yes, I can see that it might,” Toglo said. “You don’t want me to think you seek advantage.” She studied Radnal again. This time, he studied her, too. Maybe the first person who’d tried to turn friendship to gain had succeeded; she was, he thought, a genuinely nice person. But he would have bet his five thousand units of silver that she’d sent the second such person packing. Being nice didn’t make her a fool.

He didn’t like her less for that. Maybe Eltsac vez Martois was attracted to fools, but Eltsac was a fool himself. Radnal had called himself many names, but fool seldom. The last time he’d thought that about himself was when he found out what Lofosa and Evillia really were. Of course, when he made a mistake, he didn’t do it halfway.

But he’d managed to redeem himself—with help from that koprit bird.

Toglo said, “If we do become true friends, Radnal vez, or perhaps even more than that”—a possibility he wouldn’t have dared mention himself, but one far from displeasing-“promise me one thing.”

“What?” he asked, suddenly wary. “I don’t like friendship with conditions. It reminds me too much of our last treaty with Morgaf. We haven’t fought the islanders in a while, but we don’t trust them, or they us. We saw that in the Bottomlands, too.”

She nodded. “True. Still, I hope my condition isn’t too onerous.”

“Go on.” He sipped his sparkling wine.

“Well, then, Radnal vez Krobir, the next time I see you in a sleepsack with a couple of naked Highhead girls—or even Strongbrows—you will have to consider our friendship over.”

Some of the wine went up his nose. That only made him choke worse. Dabbing at himself with a linen square gave him a few heartbeats to regain composure. “Toglo zev, you have a bargain,” he said solemnly.

They clasped hands.

GEORGIA ON MY MIND

Charles Sheffield

We think this is fiction—but stay tuned . . .

I first tangled with digital computers late in 1958. That may sound like the dark ages, but we considered ourselves infinitely more advanced than our predecessors of a decade earlier, when programming was done mostly by sticking plugs into plug-boards and a card-sequenced programmable calculator was held to be the height of sophistication.

Even so, 1958 was still early enough that the argument between analog and digital computers had not yet been settled, decisively, in favor of the digital. And the first computer that I programmed was, by anyone’s standards, a brute.

It was called DEUCE, which stood for Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine, and it was, reasonably enough to card players, the next thing after the ACE (for Automatic Computing Engine), developed by the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington. Unlike ACE, DEUCE was a commercial machine; and some idea of its possible shortcomings is provided by one of the designers’ comments about ACE itself: “If we had known that it was going to be developed commercially, we would have finished it.”

DEUCE was big enough to walk inside. The engineers would do that, tapping at suspect vacuum tubes with a screwdriver when the whole beast was proving balky. Which was often. Machine errors were as common a cause of trouble as programming errors; and programming errors were dreadfully frequent, because we were working at a level so close to basic machine logic that it is hard to imagine it today.

I was about to say that the computer had no compilers or assemblers, but that is not strictly true. There was a floatingpoint compiler known as ALPHACODE, but it ran a thousand times slower than a machine code program and no one with any self-respect ever used it. We programmed in absolute, to make the best possible use of the machine’s 402 words of high-speed (mercury delay line) memory, and its 8,192 words of back-up (rotating drum) memory. Anything needing more than that had to use punched cards as intermediate storage, with the programmer standing by to shovel them from the output hopper back into the input hopper.

When I add that binary-to-decimal conversion routines were usually avoided because they wasted space, that all instructions were defined in binary, that programmers therefore had to be very familiar with the binary representation of numbers, that we did our own card punching with hand (not electric) punches, and that the machine itself, for some reason that still remains obscure to me, worked with binary numbers whose most significant digit was on the right, rather than on the left—so that 13, for example, became 1011, rather than the usual 1101—well, by this time the general flavor of DEUCE programming ought to be coming through.

Now, I mention these things not because they are interesting (to the few) or because they are dull (to the many) but to make the point that anyone programming DEUCE in those far-off days was an individual not to be taken lightly. We at least thought so, though I suspect that to high management we were all hare-brained children who did incomprehensible things, many of them in the middle of the night (when de-bug time was more easily to be had).

A few years later more computers became available, the diaspora inevitably took place, and we all went off to other interesting places. Some found their way to university professorships, some into commerce, and many to foreign parts. But we did tend to keep in touch, because those early days had generated a special feeling.

One of the most interesting characters was Bill Rigley. He was a tall, dashing, wavy-haired fellow who wore English tweeds and spoke with the open “a” sound that to most Americans indicates a Boston origin. But Bill was a New Zealander, who had seen at firsthand things, like the Great Barrier Reef, that the rest of us had barely heard of. He didn’t talk much about his home and family, but he must have pined for them, because after a few years in Europe and America he went back to take a faculty position in the Department of Mathematics (and later the computer science department, when one was finally created) at the University of Auckland.

Auckland is on the north island, a bit less remote than the bleaker south island, but a long way from the East Coast of the United States, where I had put down my own roots. Even so, Bill and I kept in close contact, because our scientific interests were very similar. We saw each other every few years in Stanford, or London, or wherever else our paths intersected, and we knew each other at the deep level where few people touch. It was Bill who helped me to mourn when my wife, Eileen, died, and I in turn knew (but never talked about) the dark secret that had scarred Bill’s own life. No matter how long we had been separated our conversations, when we met, picked up as though they had never left off.

Bill’s interests were encyclopedic, and he had a special fondness for scientific history. So it was no surprise that when he went back to New Zealand he would wander around there, examining its contribution to world science. What was a surprise to me was a letter from him a few months ago, stating that in a farmhouse near Dunedin, towards the south end of the south island, he had come across some bits and pieces of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

Even back in the late 1950s, we had known all about Babbage. There was at the time only one decent book about digital computers, Bowden’s Faster Than Thought, but its first chapter talked all about that eccentric but formidable Englishman, with his hatred of street musicians and his low opinion of the Royal Society (existing only to hold dinners, he said, at which they gave each other medals). Despite these odd views, Babbage was still our patron saint. For starting in 1834 and continuing for the rest of his life, he tried—unsuccessfully—to build the world’s first programmable digital computer. He understood the principles perfectly well, but he was thwarted because he had to work with mechanical parts. Can you imagine a computer built of cogs and toothed cylinders and gears and springs and levers?

Babbage could. And he might have triumphed even over the inadequacy of the available technology, but for one fatal problem: he kept thinking of improvements. As soon as a design was half assembled, he would want to tear it apart and start using the bits to build something better. At the time of Babbage’s death in 1871, his wonderful Analytical Engine was still a dream. The bits and pieces were carted off to London’s Kensington Science Museum, where they remain today.

Given our early exposure to Babbage, my reaction to Bill Rigley’s letter was pure skepticism. It was understandable that Bill would want to find evidence of parts of the Analytical Engine somewhere on his home stamping-ground; but his claim to have done so was surely self-delusion.

I wrote back, suggesting this in as tactful a way as I could; and received in prompt reply not recantation, but the most extraordinary package of documents I had even seen in my life (I should say, to that point; there were stranger to come).

The first was a letter from Bill, explaining in his usual blunt way that the machinery he had found had survived on the south island of New Zealand because “we don’t chuck good stuff away, the way you lot do.” He also pointed out, through dozens of examples, that in the nineteenth century there was much more contact between Britain and its antipodes than I had ever dreamed. A visit to Australia and New Zealand was common among educated persons, a kind of expanded version of the European Grand Tour. Charles Darwin was of course a visitor, on the Beagle, but so also were scores of less well-known scientists, world travelers, and gentlemen of the leisured class. Two of Charles Babbage’s own sons were there in the 1850s.

The second item in the package was a batch of photographs of the machinery that Bill had found. It looked to me like what it was, a bunch of toothed cylinders and gears and wheels. They certainly resembled parts of the Analytical Engine, or the earlier Difference Machine, although I could not see how they might fit together.

Neither the letter nor the photographs was persuasive. Rather the opposite. I started to write in my mind the letter that said as much, but I hesitated for one reason: many historians of science know a lot more history than science, and few are trained computer specialists. But Bill was the other way round, the computer expert who happened to be fascinated by scientific history. It would be awfully hard to fool him—unless he chose to fool himself.

So I had another difficult letter to write. But I was spared the trouble, for what I could not dismiss or misunderstand was the third item in the package. It was a copy of a programming manual, hand-written, for the Babbage Analytical Engine. It was dated July 7, 1854. Bill said that he had the original in his possession. He also told me that I was the only person who knew of his discovery, and he asked me to keep it to myself.

And here, to explain my astonishment, I have to dip again into computer history. Not merely to the late 1950s, where we started, but all the way to 1840. In that year an Italian mathematician, Luigi Federico Menabrea, heard Babbage talk in Turin about the new machine that he was building. After more explanations by letter from Babbage, Menabrea wrote a paper on the Analytical Engine, in French, which was published in 1842. And late that year Ada Lovelace (Lord Byron’s daughter; Lady Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace, to give her complete name) translated Menabrea’s memoir, and added her own lengthy notes. Those notes formed the world’s first software manual; Ada Lovelace described how to program the Analytical Engine, including the tricky techniques of recursion, looping, and branching.

So, twelve years before 1854, a programming manual for the Analytical Engine existed; and one could argue that what Bill had found in New Zealand was no more than a copy of the one written in 1842 by Ada Lovelace.

But there were problems. The document that Bill sent me went far beyond the 1842 notes. It tackled the difficult topics of indirect addressing, relocatable programs and subroutines, and it offered a new language for programming the Analytical Engine—what amounted to a primitive assembler.

Ada Lovelace just might have entertained such advanced ideas, and written such a manual. It is possible that she had the talent, although all signs of her own mathematical notebooks have been lost. But she died in 1852, and there was no evidence in any of her surviving works that she ever blazed the astonishing trail defined in the document that I received from Bill. Furthermore, the manual bore on its first page the author’s initials, L.D. Ada Lovelace for her published work had used her own initials, A.A.L.

I read the manual, over and over, particularly the final section. It contained a sample program, for the computation of the volume of an irregular solid by numerical integration—and it included a page of output, the printed results of the program.

At that point I recognized only three possibilities. First, that someone in the past few years had carefully planted a deliberate forgery down near Dunedin, and led Bill Rigley to “discover” it. Second, that Bill himself was involved in attempting an elaborate hoax, for reasons I could not fathom.

I had problems with both these explanations. Bill was perhaps the most cautious, thorough, and conservative researcher that I had ever met. He was painstaking to a fault, and he did not fool easily. He was also the last man in the world to think that devising a hoax could be in any way amusing.

Which left the third possibility. Someone in New Zealand had built a version of the Analytical Engine, made it work, and taken it well beyond the place where Charles Babbage had left off.

I call that the third possibility, but it seemed at the time much more like the third impossibility. No wonder that Bill had asked for secrecy. He didn’t want to become the laughingstock of the computer historians.

Nor did I. I took a step that was unusual in my relationship with Bill: I picked up the phone and called him in New Zealand.

“Well, what do you think?” he said, as soon as he recognized my voice on the line.

“I’m afraid to think at all. How much checking have you done?”

“I sent paper samples to five places, one in Japan, two in Europe and two in the United States. The dates they assign to the paper and the ink range from 1840 to 1875, with 1850 as the average. The machinery that I found had been protected by wrapping in sacking soaked in linseed oil. Dates for that ranged from 1830 to 1880.” There was a pause at the other end of the line. “There’s more. Things I didn’t have until two weeks ago.”

“Tell me.”

“I’d rather not. Not like this.” There was another, longer silence. “You are coming out, aren’t you?”

“Why do you think I’m on the telephone? Where should I fly to?”

“Christchurch. South Island. We’ll be going farther south, past Dunedin. Bring warm clothes. It’s winter here.”

“I know. I’ll call as soon as I have my arrival time.”

And that was the beginning.

The wavy mop of fair hair had turned to grey, and Bill Rigley now favored a pepper-and-salt beard which with his weather-beaten face turned him into an approximation of the Ancient Mariner. But nothing else had changed, except perhaps for the strange tension in his eyes.

We didn’t shake hands when he met me at Christchurch airport, or exchange one word of conventional greeting. Bill just said, as soon as we were within speaking range. “If this wasn’t happening to me. I’d insist it couldn’t happen to anybody,” and led me to his car.

Bill was South Island born, so the long drive from Christchurch to Dunedin was home territory to him. I, in that odd but pleasant daze that comes after long air travel—after you deplane. and before the jet lag hits you—stared out at the scenery from what I thought of as the driver’s seat (they still drive on the left, like the British).

We were crossing the flat Canterbury Plains, on a straight road across a level and empty expanse of muddy fields. It was almost three months after harvest—wheat or barley, from the look of the stubble—and there was nothing much to see until at Timaru when we came to the coast road, with dull grey sea to the left and empty brown coastal plain on the right. I had visited South Island once before, but that had been a lightning trip, little more than a tour of Christchurch. Now for the first time I began to appreciate Bill’s grumbling about “overcrowded” Auckland on the north island. We saw cars and people, but in terms of what I was used to it was a thin sprinkle of both. It was late afternoon, and as we drove farther south it became colder and began to rain. The sea faded from view behind a curtain of fog and drizzle.

We had been chatting about nothing from the time we climbed into the car. It was talk designed to avoid talking, and we both knew it. But at last Bill, after a few seconds in which the only sounds were the engine and the whump-whump-whump of windshield wipers, said: “I’m glad to have you here. There’s been times in the past few weeks when I’ve seriously wondered if I was going off my head. What I want to do is this. Tomorrow morning, after you’ve had a good sleep, I’m going to show you everything, just as I found it. Most of it just where I found it. And then I want you to tell me what you think is going on.”

I nodded “What’s the population of New Zealand?”

Without turning my head, I saw Bill’s quick glance. “Total? Four million, tops.”

“And what was it in 1850?”

“That’s a hell of a good question. I don’t know if anyone can really tell you. I’d say, a couple of hundred thousand. But the vast majority of those were native Maori. I know where you’re going, and I agree totally. There’s no way that anyone could have built a version of the Analytical Engine in New Zealand in the middle of the last century. The manufacturing industry just didn’t exist here. The final assembly could be done, but the sub-units would have to be built and shipped in big chunks from Europe.”

“From Babbage?”

“Absolutely not. He was still alive in 1854. He didn’t die until 1871, and if he had learned that a version of the Analytical Engine was being built anywhere, he’d have talked about it nonstop all over Europe.”

“But if it wasn’t Babbage—”

“Then who was it? I know. Be patient for a few more hours. Don’t try to think it through until you’ve rested, and had a chance to see the whole thing for yourself.”

He was right. I had been traveling nonstop around the clock, and my brain was going on strike. I pulled my overcoat collar up around my ears, and sagged lower in my seat. In the past few days I had absorbed as much information about Babbage and the Analytical Engine as my head could handle. Now I needed to let it sort itself out, along with what Bill was going to show me. Then we would see if I could come up with a more plausible explanation for what he had found.

As I drifted into half-consciousness, I flashed on to the biggest puzzle of all. Until that moment I had been telling myself, subconsciously, that Bill was just plain wrong. It was my way of avoiding the logical consequences of his being right. But suppose he were right. Then the biggest puzzle was not the appearance of an Analytical Engine, with its advanced programming tools, in New Zealand. It was the disappearance of those things, from the face of the Earth.

Where the devil had they gone?

Our destination was a farmhouse about fifteen miles south of Dunedin. I didn’t see much of it when we arrived, because it was raining and pitch-black and I was three-quarters asleep. If I had any thoughts at all as I was shown to a small, narrow room and collapsed into bed, it was that in the morning, bright and early, Bill would show me everything and my perplexity would end.

It didn’t work out that way. For one thing, I overslept and felt terrible when I got up. I had forgotten what a long, sleepless journey can do to your system. For the past five years I had done less and less traveling, and I was getting soft. For another thing, the rain had changed to sleet during the night and was driving down in freezing gusts. The wind was blowing briskly from the east, in off the sea. Bill and I sat at the battered wooden table in the farm kitchen, while Mrs. Trevelyan pushed bacon, eggs, homemade sausage, bread and hot sweet tea into me until I showed signs of life. She was a spry, red-cheeked lady in her middle sixties, and if she was surprised that Bill had finally brought someone else with him to explore Little House, she hid it well.

“Well, then,” she said, when I was stuffed. “If you’re stepping up the hill you’ll be needing a mac. Jim put the one on when he went out, but we have plenty of spares.”

Jim Trevelyan was apparently off somewhere tending the farm animals, and had been since dawn. Bill grinned sadistically at the look on my face. “You don’t want a little rain to stop work, do you?”

I wanted to go back to bed. But I hadn’t come ten thousand miles to lie around. The “step up the hill” to Little House turned out to be about half a mile, through squelching mud covered with a thin layer of sour turf.

“How did you ever find this place?” I asked Bill.

“By asking and looking. I’ve been into a thousand like this before, and found nothing.”

We were approaching a solidly-built square house made out of mortared limestone blocks. It had a weathered look, but the slate roof and chimney were intact. To me it did not seem much smaller than the main farmhouse.

“It’s not called ‘Little House’ because it’s small,” Bill explained. “It’s Little House because that’s where the little ones are supposed to live when they first marry. You’re seeing a twentieth-century tragedy here. Jim and Annie Trevelyan are fourth-generation farmers. They have five children. Everyone went off to college, and not a one has come back to live in Little House and wait their turn to run the farm. Jim and Annie hang on at Big House, waiting and hoping.”

As we went inside, the heavy wooden door was snug-fitting and moved easily on oiled hinges.

“Jim Trevelyan keeps the place up, and I think they’re glad to have me here to give it a lived-in feel,” said Bill. “I suspect that they both think I’m mad as a hatter, but they never say a word. Hold tight to this, while I get myself organized.”

He had been carrying a square box lantern. When he passed it to me I was astonished by the weight—and he had carried it for half a mile.

“Batteries, mostly,” Bill explained. “Little House has oil lamps, but of course there’s no electricity. After a year or two wandering around out-of-the-way places I decided there was no point in driving two hundred miles to look at something if you can’t see it when you get there. I can recharge this from the car if we have to.”

As Bill closed the door the sound of the wind dropped to nothing. We went through a washhouse to a kitchen furnished with solid wooden chairs, table, and dresser. The room was freezing cold, and I looked longingly at the scuttle of coal and the dry kindling standing by the fireplace.

“Go ahead,” said Bill, “while I sort us out here. Keep your coat on, though—you can sit and toast yourself later.”

He lit two big oil lamps that stood on the table, while I placed layers of rolled paper, sticks, and small pieces of coal in the grate. It was thirty years since I had built a coal fire, but it’s not much of an art. In a couple of minutes I could stand up, keep one eye on the fire to make sure it was catching properly, and take a much better look at the room. There were no rugs, but over by the door leading through to the bedrooms was a long strip of coconut matting. Bill rolled it back, to reveal a square wooden trapdoor. He slipped his belt through the iron ring and lifted, grunting with effort until the trap finally came free and turned upward on brass hinges.

“Storage space,” he said. “Now we’ll need the lantern. Turn it on, and pass it down to me.”

He lowered himself into the darkness, but not far. His chest and head still showed when he was standing on the lower surface. I switched on the electric lantern and handed it down to Bill.

“Just a second,” I said. I went across to the fireplace, added half a dozen larger lumps of coal, then hurried back to the trapdoor. Bill had already disappeared when I lowered myself into the opening.

The storage space was no more than waist high, with a hard dirt floor. I followed the lantern light, to where a wooden section at the far end was raised a few inches off the ground on thick beams. On that raised floor stood three big tea chests. The lantern threw a steady, powerful light on them.

“I told you you’d see just what I saw,” said Bill. “These have all been out and examined, of course, but everything is very much the way it was when I found it. All right, hardware first.”

He carefully lifted the lid off the right-hand tea chest. It was half full of old sacks. Bill lifted one, unfolded it, and handed me the contents. I was holding a solid metal cylinder, lightly oiled and apparently made of brass. The digits from 0 through 9 ran around its upper part, and at the lower end was a cog wheel of slightly greater size.

I examined it carefully, taking my time. “It could be,” I said. “It’s certainly the way the pictures look.”

I didn’t need to tell him which pictures. He knew that I had thought of little but Charles Babbage and his Analytical Engines for the past few weeks, just as he had.

“I don’t think it was made in England,” said Bill. “I’ve been all over it with a lens, and I can’t see a manufacturer’s mark. My guess is that it was made in France.”

“Any particular reason?”

“The numerals. Same style as some of the best French clock-makers—see, I’ve been working, too.” He took the cylinder and wrapped it again, with infinite care, in the oiled sacking. I stared all around us, from the dirt floor to the dusty rafters. “This isn’t the best place for valuable property.”

“It’s done all right for 140 years. I don’t think you can say as much of most other places.” There was something else, that Bill did not need to say. This was a perfect place for valuable property—so long as no one thought that it had any value.

“There’s nowhere near enough pieces here to make an Analytical Engine, of course,” he went on. “These must have just been spares. I’ve taken a few of them to Auckland. I don’t have the original of the programming manual here, either. That’s back in Auckland, too, locked up in a safe at the university.

I brought a copy, if we need it.”

“So did I.” We grinned at each other. Underneath my calm I was almost too excited to speak, and I could tell that he felt the same. “Any clue as to who ‘L.D.’ might be, on the title page?”

“Not a glimmer.” The lid was back on the first tea chest and Bill was removing the cover of the second. “But I’ve got another L.D. mystery for you. That’s next.”

He was wearing thin gloves and opening, very carefully, a folder of stained cardboard, tied with a ribbon like a legal brief. When it was untied he laid it on the lid of the third chest.

“I’d rather you didn’t touch this at all,” he said. “It may be pretty fragile. Let me know whenever you want to see the next sheet. And here’s a lens.”

They were drawings. One to a sheet, Indian ink on fine white paper, and done with a fine-nibbed pen. And they had nothing whatsoever to do with Charles Babbage, programming manuals, or Analytical Engines. What they did have, so small that first I had to peer, then use the lens, was a tiny, neat ‘L.D.’ at the upper right-hand corner of each sheet.

They were drawings of animals, the sort of multi-legged, random animals that you find scuttling around in tidal pools, or hidden away in rotting tree bark. Or rather, as I realized when I examined them more closely, the sheets in the folder were drawings of one animal, seen from top, bottom, and all sides.

“Well?” said Bill expectantly.

But I was back to my examination of the tiny artist’s mark. “It’s not the same, is it. That’s a different ‘L.D.’ from the software manual.”

“You’re a lot sharper than I am,” said Bill. “I had to look fifty times before I saw that. But I agree completely, the ‘L’ is different, and so is the ‘D’. What about the animal?”

“I’ve never seen anything like it. Beautiful drawings, but I’m no zoologist. You ought to photograph these, and take them to your biology department.”

“I did. You don’t know Ray Weddle, but he’s a top man. He says they have to be just drawings, made up things, because there’s nothing like them, and there never has been.” He was carefully retying the folder, and placing it back in the chest. “I’ve got photographs of these with me, too, but I wanted you to see the originals, exactly as I first saw them. We’ll come back to these, but meanwhile: next exhibit.”

He was into the third tea chest, removing more wrapped pieces of machinery, then a thick layer of straw, and now his hands were trembling. I hated to think how Bill must have sweated and agonized over this, before telling anyone. The urge to publish such a discovery had to be overwhelming; but the fear of being derided as part of the scientific lunatic fringe had to be just as strong.

If what he had produced so far was complex and mystifying, what came next was almost laughably simple—if it were genuine. Bill was lifting, with a good deal of effort, a bar, about six inches by two inches by three. It gleamed hypnotically in the light of the lantern.

“It is, you know,” he said, in answer to my shocked expression. “Twenty-four carat gold, solid. There are thirteen more of them.”

“But the Trevelyans, and the people who farmed here before that—”

“Never bothered to look. These were stowed at the bottom of a chest, underneath bits of the Analytical Engine and old sacks. I guess nobody ever got past the top layer until I came along.” He smiled at me. “Tempted? If I were twenty years younger, I’d take the money and run.”

“How much?”

“What’s gold worth these days. US currency?”

“God knows. Maybe three hundred and fifty dollars an ounce?”

“You’re the calculating boy wonder, not me. So you do the arithmetic. Fourteen bars, each one weighs twenty-five pounds—I’m using avoirdupois, not troy, even though it’s gold.”

“One point nine six million. Say two million dollars, in round numbers. How long has it been here?”

“Who knows? But since it was under the parts of the Analytical Engine, I’d say it’s been there as long as the rest.”

“And who owns it?”

“If you asked the government, I bet they’d say that they do. If you ask me, it’s whoever found it. Me. And now maybe me and thee.” He grinned, diabolical in the lantern light. “Ready for the next exhibit?”

I wasn’t. “For somebody to bring a fortune in gold here, and just leave it. . . .”

Underneath his raincoat, Bill was wearing an old sports jacket and jeans. He owned, to my knowledge, three suits, none less than ten years old. His vices were beer, travel to museums, and about four cigars a year. I could not see him as the Two Million Dollar Man, and I didn’t believe he could see himself that way. His next words confirmed it.

“So far as I’m concerned,” he said, “this all belongs to the Trevelyans. But I’ll have to explain to them that gold may be the least valuable thing here.” He was back into the second tea chest, the one that held the drawings, and his hands were trembling again.

“These are what I really wanted you to see,” he went on, in a husky voice. “I’ve not had the chance to have them dated yet, but my bet is that they’re all genuine. You can touch them, but be gentle.”

He was holding three slim volumes, as large as accounting ledgers. Each one was about twenty inches by ten, and bound in a shiny black material like thin sandpapery leather. I took the top one when he held it out, and opened it.

I saw neat tables of numbers, column after column of them. They were definitely not the product of any Analytical Engine, because they were hand-written and had occasional crossings-out and corrections.

I flipped on through the pages. Numbers. Nothing else, no notes, no signature. Dates on each page. They were all in October, 1855. The handwriting was that of the programming manual.

The second book had no dates at all. It was a series of exquisitely detailed machine drawings, with elaborately interlocking cogs and gears. There was writing, in the form of terse explanatory notes and dimensions, but it was in an unfamiliar hand.

“I’ll save you the effort,” said Bill as I reached for the lens. “These are definitely not by L.D. They are exact copies of some of Babbage’s own plans for his calculating engines. I’ll show you other reproductions if you like, back in Auckland, but you’ll notice that these aren’t photographs. I don’t know what copying process was used. My bet is that all these things were placed here at the same time—whenever that was.”

I wouldn’t take Bill’s word for it. After all, I had come to New Zealand to provide an independent check on his ideas. But five minutes were enough to make me agree, for the moment, with what he was saying.

“I’d like to take this and the other books up to the kitchen,” I said, as I handed the second ledger back to him. “I want to have a really good look at them.”

“Of course.” Bill nodded. “That’s exactly what I expected. I told the Trevelyans that we might be here in Little House for up to a week. We can cook for ourselves, or Annie says she’d be more than happy to expect us at mealtimes. I think she likes the company.”

I wasn’t sure of that. I’m not an elitist, but my own guess was that the conversation between Bill and me in the next few days was likely to be incomprehensible to Annie Trevelyan or almost anyone else.

I held out my hand for the third book. This was all handwritten, without a single drawing. It appeared to be a series of letters, running on one after the other, with the ledger turned sideways to provide a writing area ten inches across and twenty deep. There were no paragraphs within the letters. The writing was beautiful and uniform, by a different hand than had penned the numerical tables of the first book, and an exact half inch space separated the end of one letter from the beginning of the next.

The first was dated 12th October, 1850. It began:

“My dear J.G., The native people continue to be as friendly and as kind in nature as one could wish, though they, alas, cling to their paganism. As our ability to understand them increases, we learn that their dispersion is far wider than we at first suspected. I formerly mentioned the northern islands, ranging from Taheete to Rarotonga. However, it appears that there has been a southern spread of the Maori people also, to lands far from here. I wonder if they may extend their settlements all the way to the great Southern Continent, explored by James Cook and more recently by Captain Ross. I am myself contemplating a journey to a more southerly island, with native assistance. Truly, a whole life’s work is awaiting us. We both feel that, despite the absence of well-loved friends such as yourself, Europe and finance is “a world well lost.” Louisa has recovered completely from the ailment that so worried me two years ago, and I must believe that the main reason for that improvement is a strengthening of spirit. She has begun her scientific work again, more productively, I believe, than ever before. My own efforts in the biological sciences prove ever more fascinating. When you write again tell us, I beg you, not of the transitory social or political events of London, but of the progress of science. It is in this area that L. and I are most starved of new knowledge. With affection, and with the assurance that we think of you and talk of you constantly, L.D.

The next letter was dated 14 December, 1850. Two months after the first. Was that time enough for a letter to reach England, and a reply to return? The initials at the end were again L.D.

I turned to the back of the volume. The final twenty pages or so were blank, and in the last few entries the beautiful regular handwriting had degenerated to a more hasty scribble. The latest date that I saw was October, 1855.

Bill was watching me intently. “Just the one book of letters?” I said.

He nodded. “But it doesn’t mean they stopped. Only that we don’t have them.”

“If they didn’t stop, why leave the last pages blank? Let’s go back upstairs. With the Books.”

I wanted to read every letter, and examine every page. But if I tried to do it in the chilly crawl space beneath the kitchen, I would have pneumonia before I finished. Already I was beginning to shiver.

“First impressions?” asked Bill, as he set the three ledgers carefully on the table and went back to close the trapdoor and replace the coconut matting. “I know you haven’t had a chance to read, but I can’t wait to hear what you’re thinking.”

I pulled a couple of the chairs over close to the fireplace. The coal fire was blazing, and the chill was already off the air in the room.

“There are two L.D.’s,” I said. “Husband and wife?”

“Agreed. Or maybe brother and sister.”

“One of them—the woman—wrote the programming manual for the Analytical Engine. The other one, the man—if it is a man, and we can’t be sure of that—did the animal drawings, and he wrote letters. He kept fair copies of what he sent off to Europe, in that third ledger. No sign of the replies, I suppose?”

“You’ve now seen everything that I’ve seen.” Bill leaned forward and held chilled hands out to the fire. “I knew there were two, from the letters. But I didn’t make the division of labor right away, the way you did. I bet you’re right, though. Anything else?”

“Give me a chance. I need to read.” I took the third book, the one of letters, from the table and returned with it to the fireside. “But they sound like missionaries.”

“Missionaries and scientists. The old nineteenth-century mixture.” Bill watched me reading for two minutes, then his urge to be up and doing something—or interrupt me with more questions—took over. His desire to talk was burning him up, while at the same time he didn’t want to stop me from working.

“I’m going back to Big House,” he said abruptly. “Shall I tell Annie we’ll be there for a late lunch?”

I thought of the old farmhouse, generation after generation of life and children. Now there were just the two old folks, and the empty future. I nodded. “If I try to talk about this to them, make me stop.”

“I will. If I can. And if I don’t start doing it myself.” He buttoned his raincoat, and paused in the doorway. “About the gold. I considered telling Jim and Annie when I first found it, because I’m sure that legally they have the best claim to it. But I’d hate their kids to come hurrying home for all the wrong reasons. I’d appreciate your advice on timing. I hate to play God.”

“So you want me to. Tell me one thing. What reason could there be for somebody to come down here to South Island in the 1850s, in secret, and never tell a soul what they were doing? That’s what we are assuming.”

“I’m tempted to say, maybe they found pieces of an Analytical Engine, one that had been left untouched here for a century and a half. But that gets a shade too recursive for my taste. And they did say what they were doing. Read the letters.”

And then he was gone, and I was sitting in front of the warm fire. I stewed comfortably in wet pants and shoes, and read. Soon the words and the heat carried me away 140 years into the past, working my way systematically through the book’s entries.

Most of the letters concerned religious or business matters, and went to friends in England. France, and Ireland. Each person was identified only by initials. It became obvious that the female L.D. had kept her own active correspondence, not recorded in this ledger, and casual references to the spending of large sums of money made Bill’s discovery of the gold bars much less surprising. The L.D.’s, whoever they were, had great wealth in Europe. They had not traveled to New Zealand because of financial problems back home.

But not all the correspondence was of mundane matters back in England. Scattered in among the normal chat to friends were the surprises, as sudden and as unpredictable as lightning from a clear sky. The first of them was a short note, dated January. 1851:

Dear J.G., L. has heard via A.v.H. that C.B. despairs of completing his grand design. In his own words, “There is no chance of the machine ever being executed during my own life and I am even doubtful of how to dispose of the drawings after its termination.” This is a great tragedy, and L. is beside herself at the possible loss. Can we do anything about this? If it should happen to be no more than a matter of money. . . .

And then, more than two years later, in April, 1853:

Dear J.G., Many thanks for the shipped materials, but apparently there was rough weather on the journey, and inadequate packing, and three of the cylinders arrived with one or more broken teeth. I am enclosing identification for these items. It is possible that repair can be done here, although our few skilled workmen are afar cry from the machinists of Bologna or Paris. However, you would do me a great favor if you could determine whether this shipment was in fact insured, as we requested. Yours etc. L.D.

Cylinders, with toothed gear wheels. It was the first hint of the Analytical Engine, but certainly not the last. I could deduce, from other letters to J.G., that three or four earlier shipments had been made to New Zealand in 1852, although apparently these had all survived the journey in good condition.

In the interests of brevity, L.D. in copying the letters had made numerous abbreviations; w. did service for both “which” and “with,” “for” was shortened to f. and so on. Most of the time it did not hinder comprehension at all, and reconstruction of the original was easy; but I cursed when people were reduced to initials. It was impossible to expand those back to discover their identity. A.v.H. was probably the great world traveler and writer. Alexander von Humboldt, whose fingerprint appears all across the natural science of Europe in the first half of the last century; and C.B. ought surely to be Charles Babbage. But who the devil was J.G.? Was it a man, or could it be a woman?

About a third of the way through the book, I learned that this was not just copies of letters sent to Europe. It probably began that way, but at some point L.D. started to use it also as a private diary. So by February, 1854, after a gap of almost four months, I came across this entry:

22 February. Home at last, and thanks be to God that L. did not accompany me, for the seas to the south are more fierce than I ever dreamed, although the natives on the crew make nothing of them. They laugh in the teeth of the gale, and leap from ship to dingy with impunity, in the highest sea. However, the prospect of a similar voyage during the winter months would deter the boldest soul, and defies my own imagination.

L. has made the most remarkable progress in her researches since my departure. She now believes that the design of the great engine is susceptible to considerable improvement, and that it could become capable of much more variation and power than ever A. L. suspected. The latter, dear lady, struggles to escape the grasp of her tyrannical mother, but scarce seems destined to succeed. At her request, L. keeps her silence, and allows no word of her own efforts to be fed back to England. Were this work to become known, however, I feel sure that many throughout Europe would be astounded by such an effort—so ambitious, so noble, and carried through, in its entirety, by a woman!

So the news of Ada Lovelace’s tragic death, in 1852, had apparently not been received in New Zealand. I wondered, and read on:

Meanwhile, what of the success of my own efforts? It has been modest at best. We sailed to the island, named Rormaurma by the natives, which my charts show as Macwherry or Macquarie. It is a great spear of land, fifteen miles long but very narrow, and abundantly supplied with penguins and other seabirds. However, of the “cold-loving people” that the natives had described to me, if I have interpreted their language correctly, there was no sign, nor did we find any of the artifacts, which the natives insist these people are able to make for speech and for motion across the water. It is important that the reason for their veneration of these supposedly “superior men” be understood fully by me, before the way of our Lord can be explained to and accepted by the natives.

On my first time through the book I skimmed the second half of the letter. I was more interested in the “remarkable progress” that L.D. was reporting. It was only later that I went back and pondered that last paragraph for a long time.

The letters offered an irregular and infuriating series of snapshots of the work that Louisa was performing. Apparently she was busy with other things, too, and could only squeeze in research when conscience permitted. But by early 1855, L.D. was able to write, in a letter to the same unknown correspondent:

Dear J.G., It is finished, and it is working! And truth to tell, no one is more surprised than I. I imagine you now, shaking your head when you read those words, and I cannot deny what you told me, long ago, that our clever dear is the brains of the family—a thesis I will never again attempt to dispute.

It is finished, and it is working! I was reading that first sentence again, with a shiver in my spine, when the door opened. I looked up in annoyance. Then I realized that the room was chilly, the fire was almost out, and when I glanced at my watch it was almost three o’clock.

It was Bill. “Done reading?” he asked, with an urgency that made me sure he would not like my answer.

“I’ve got about ten pages to go on the letters. But I haven’t even glanced at the tables and the drawings.” I stood up, stiffly, and used the tongs to add half a dozen pieces of coal to the fire. “If you want to talk now, I’m game.”

The internal struggle was obvious on his face, but after a few seconds he shook his head. “No. It might point you down the same mental path that I took, without either of us trying to do that. We both know how natural it is for us to prompt one another. I’ll wait. Let’s go on down to Big House. Annie told me to come and get you, and by the time we get there she’ll have tea on the table.”

My stomach growled at the thought.

“What about these?”

“Leave them just where they are. You can pick up where you left off, and everything’s safe enough here.” But I noticed that after Bill said that, he carefully pulled the fire-guard around the fender, so there was no possibility of stray sparks.

The weather outside had cleared, and the walk down the hill was just what I needed. We were at latitude 46 degrees south, it was close to the middle of winter, and already the Sun was sloping down to the hills in the west. The wind still blew, hard and cold. If I took a beeline south, there was no land between me and the “great Southern Continent” that L.D. had written about. Head east or west, and I would find only open water until I came to Chile and Argentina. No wonder the winds blew so strongly. They had an unbroken run around half the world to pick up speed.

Mrs. Trevelyan’s “tea” was a farmer’s tea, the main cooked meal of the day. Jim Trevelyan was already sitting, knife and fork in hand, when we arrived. He was a man in his early seventies, but thin, wiry, and alert. His only real sign of age was his deafness, which he handled by leaning forward with his hand cupped around his right ear, while he stared with an intense expression at any speaker.

The main course was squab pie, a thick crusted delicacy made with mutton, onions, apples and cloves. I found it absolutely delicious, and delighted Annie Trevelyan by eating three helpings. Jim Trevelyan served us a homemade dark beer. He said little, but nodded his approval when Bill and I did as well with the drink as with the food.

After the third tankard I was drifting off into a pleasant dream state. I didn’t feel like talking, and fortunately I didn’t need to. I did my part by imitating Jim Trevelyan, listening to Annie as she told us about Big House and about her family, and nodding at the right places.

When the plates were cleared away she dragged out an old suitcase, full of photographs. She knew every person, and how each was related to each, across four generations. About halfway through the pile she stopped and glanced up self-consciously at me and Bill. “I must be boring you.”

“Not a bit,” I said. She wasn’t, because her enthusiasm for the past was so great. In her own way she was as much a historian as Bill or me.

“Go on, please,” added Bill. “It’s really very interesting.”

“All right.” She blushed. “I get carried away, you know. But it’s so good to have youngsters in the house again.”

Bill caught my eye. Youngsters? Us? His grizzled beard, and my receding hairline. But Annie was moving on, backwards into the past. We went all the way to the time of the first Trevelyan, and the building of Big House itself. At the very bottom of the case sat two framed pictures.

“And now you’ve got me,” Annie said, laughing. “I don’t know a thing about these two, though they’re probably the oldest thing here.”

She passed them across the table for our inspection, giving one to each of us. Mine was a painting, not a photograph. It was of a plump man with a full beard and clear grey eyes. He held a churchwarden pipe in one hand, and he patted the head of a dog with the other. There was no hint as to who he might be.

Bill had taken the other, and was still staring at it. I held out my hand. Finally, after a long pause, he passed it across.

It was another painting. The man was in half-profile, as though tom between looking at the painter and the woman. He was dark-haired, and wore a long, drooping moustache. She stood by his side, a bouquet of flowers in her hands and her chin slightly lifted in what could have been an expression of resolution or defiance. Her eyes gazed straight out of the picture, into me and through my heart. Across the bottom, just above the frame, were four words in black ink: “Luke and Louisa Derwent.”

I could not speak. It was Bill who broke the silence. “How do you come to have these two, if they’re not family?”

His voice was gruff and wavering, but Annie did not seem to notice.

“Didn’t I ever tell you? The first Trevelyan built Big House, but there were others here before that. They lived in Little House—it was built first, years and years back, I’m not sure when. These pictures have to be from that family, near as I can tell.”

Bill turned to glance at me. His mouth was hanging half-open, but at last he managed to close it and say, “Did you—I mean, are there other things? Things here, I mean, things that used to be in Little House.”

Annie shook her head. “There used to be, but Grandad, Jim’s dad, one day not long after we were married he did a big clear out. He didn’t bother with the things you’ve been finding, because none of us ever used the crawl space under the kitchen. And I saved those two because I like pictures. But everything else went.”

She must have seen Bill and me subside in our chairs, because she shook her head and said, “Now then, I’ve been talking my fool head off, and never given you any afters. It’s apple pie and cheese.”

As she rose from her place and went to the pantry, and Jim Trevelyan followed her out of the kitchen. Bill turned to me. “Can you believe it, I never thought to ask? I mean, I did ask Jim Trevelyan about things that used to be in Little House, and he said his father threw everything out but what’s there now. But I left it at that. I never asked Annie.”

“No harm done. We know now, don’t we? Luke Derwent, he’s the artist, and Louisa, she’s the mathematician and engineer.”

“And the programmer—a century before computer programming was supposed to exist.” Bill stopped. We were not supposed to be discussing this until I had examined the rest of the materials. But we were saved from more talk by the return of Jim Trevelyan. He was holding a huge book, the size of a small suitcase, with a black embossed cover and brass-bound corners.

“I told you Dad chucked everything,” he said. “And he did, near enough, threw it out or burned it. But he were a religious man, and he knew better than to destroy a Bible.” He dropped it on the table, with a thump that shook the solid wood. “This comes from Little House. If you want to take a look at it, even take it on back there with you, you’re very welcome.”

I pulled the book across to me and unhooked the thick metal clasp that held it shut. I knew, from the way that some of the pages did not lie fully closed at their edges, that there must be inserts. The room went silent, as I nervously leafed through to find them.

The disappointment that followed left me as hollow as though I had eaten nothing all day. There were inserts, sure enough: dried wildflowers, gathered long, long ago, and pressed between the pages of the Bible. I examined every one, and riffled through the rest of the book to make sure nothing else lay between the pages. At last I took a deep breath and pushed the Bible away from me.

Bill reached out and pulled it in front of him. “There’s one other possibility,” he said. “If their family happened to be anything like mine. . . .”

He turned to the very last page of the Bible. The flyleaf was of thick, yellowed paper. On it, in faded multi-colored inks, a careful hand had traced the Derwent family tree.

Apple pie and cheese were forgotten, while Bill and I, with the willing assistance of Jim and Annie Trevelyan, examined every name of the generations shown, and made a more readable copy as we went.

At the time it finally seemed like more disappointment. Not one of us recognized a single name, except for those of Luke and Louisa Derwent, and those we already knew. The one fact added by the family tree was they were half-brother and sister, with a common father. There were no dates, and Luke and Louisa were the last generation shown.

Bill and I admitted that we were at a dead end. Annie served a belated dessett, and after it the two of us wrapped the two pictures in waterproof covers (though it was not raining) and headed back up the hill to Little House, promising Annie that we would certainly be back for breakfast.

We were walking in silence, until halfway up the hill Bill said suddenly, “I’m sorry. I saw it, too, the resemblance to Eileen. I knew it would hit you. But I couldn’t do anything about it.”

“It was the expression, more than anything,” I said. “That tilt to the chin, and the look in her eyes. But it was just coincidence, they’re not really alike. That sort of thing is bound to happen.”

“Hard on you, though.”

“I’m fine.”

“Great.” Bill’s voice showed his relief. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but I had to be sure you were all right.”

“I’m fine.”

Fine, except that no more than a month ago a well-meaning friend of many years had asked me, “Do you think of Eileen as the love of your life?”

And my heart had dropped through a hole in the middle of my chest, and lodged like a cold rock in the pit of my belly.

When we reached Little House I pleaded residual travel fatigue and went straight to bed. With so much of Jim Trevelyan’s powerful home-brew inside me, my sleep should have been deep and dreamless. But the dead, once roused, do not lie still so easy.

Images of Eileen and the happy past rose before me, to mingle and merge with the Derwent picture. Even in sleep, I felt a terrible sadness. And the old impotence came back, telling me that I had been unable to change in any way the only event in my life that really mattered.

With my head still half a world away in a different time zone, I woke long before dawn. The fire, well damped by Bill before he went to bed, was still glowing under the ash, and a handful of firewood and more coal was all it needed to bring it back to full life.

Bill was still asleep when I turned on the two oil lamps, pulled the three books within easy reach, and settled down to read. I was determined to be in a position to talk to him by the time we went down to Big House for breakfast, but it was harder than I expected. Yesterday I had been overtired, now I had to go back and reread some of the letters before I was ready to press on.

I had been in the spring of 1855, with some sort of Analytical Engine finished and working. But now, when I was desperate to hear more details, Luke Derwent frustrated me. He vanished for four months from the ledger, and returned at last not to report on Louisa’s doings, but brimming over with wonder at his own.

21 September, 1855. Glory to Almighty God, and let me pray that I never again have doubts. L. and I have wondered, so many times, about our decision to come here. We have never regretted it, but we have asked if it was done for selfish reasons. Now, at last, it is clear that we are fulfilling a higher purpose.

Yesterday I returned from my latest journey to Macquarie Island. They were there! The “cold-loving people,” just as my native friends assured me. In truth, they find the weather of the island too warm in all but the southern winter months of May to August, and were almost ready to depart again when our ship made landfall. For they are migrant visitors, and spend the bulk of the year in a more remote location.

The natives term them “people,” and I must do the same, for although they do not hold-the remotest outward aspect of humans, they are without doubt intelligent. They are able to speak to the natives, with the aid of a box that they carry from place to place. They possess amazing tools, able to fabricate the necessities of life with great speed. According to my native translators, although they have their more permanent base elsewhere in this hemisphere, they come originally from “far, far off.” This to the Maori natives means from far across the seas, although I am less sure of this conclusion.

And they have wonderful powers in medical matters. The Maori natives swear that one of their own number, so close to death from gangrenous wounds that death was no more than a day away, was brought to full recovery within hours. Another woman was held, frozen but alive, for a whole winter, until she could be treated and restored to health by the wonderful medical treatment brought from their permanent home by the “cold-loving people” (for whom in truth it is now incumbent upon me to find a better name). I should add that they are friendly, and readily humored me in my desire to make detailed drawings of their form. They asked me through my Maori interpreter to speak English, and assured me that upon my next visit they would be able to talk to me in my own language.

All this is fascinating. But it pales to nothing beside the one central question: Do these beings possess immortal souls? We are in no position to make a final decision on such a matter, but L. and I agree that in our actions we must assume that the answer is yes. For if we are in a position to bring to Christ even one of these beings who would otherwise have died unblessed, then it is our clear duty to do so.

It was a digression from the whole subject of the Analytical Engine, one so odd that I sat and stared at the page for a long time. And the next entry, with its great outburst of emotion, seemed to take me even farther afield.

Dear J.G., I have the worst news in the world. How can I tell you this—L.’s old disease is returned, and, alas, much worse than before. She said nothing to me, but yesterday I discovered bright blood on her handkerchief, and such evidence she could not deny. At my insistence she has visited a physician, and the prognosis is desperate indeed. She is amazingly calm about the future, but I cannot remain so sanguine. Pray for her, my dear friend, as I pray constantly.

The letter was dated 25 September, just a few days after his return from his travels. Immediately following, as though Luke could not contain his thoughts, the diary ran on:

Louisa insists what I cannot believe: that her disease is no more than God’s just punishment, paid for the sin of both of us. Her calm and courage are beyond belief. She is delighted that I remain well, and she seems resigned to the prospect of her death, as I can never be resigned. But what can I do? What? I cannot sit idly, and watch her slowly decline. Except that it will not be slow. Six months, no more.

His travels among the colony of the “cold-loving people” were forgotten. The Analytical Engine was of no interest to him. But that brief diary entry told me a great deal. I pulled out the picture of Luke and Louisa Derwent, and was staring at it when Bill emerged rumple-haired from the bedroom.

This time, I was the one desperate to talk. “I know! I know why they came all the way to New Zealand.”

He stared, at me and at the picture I was holding. “How can you?”

“We ought to have seen it last night. Remember the family tree in the Bible? It showed they’re half-brother and half-sister. And this.” I held the painting out towards him.

He rubbed his eyes, and peered at it. “I saw. What about it?”

“Bill, it’s a wedding picture. See the bouquet, and the ring on her finger? They couldn’t possibly have married back in England, the scandal would have been too great. But here, where nobody knew them, they could make a fresh start and live as man and wife.”

He was glancing across to the open ledger, and nodding. “Damn it, you’re right. It explains everything. Their sin, he said. You got to that?”

“I was just there.”

“Then you’re almost at the end. Read the last few pages, then let’s head down to Big House for breakfast. We can talk on the way.”

He turned and disappeared back into the bedroom. I riffled through the ledger. As he said, I was close to the place where the entries gave way to blank pages.

There was just one more letter, to the same far-off friend. It was dated 6 October, 1855, and it was calm, even clinical.

Dear J.G., L. and I will in a few days be embarking upon a long journey to a distant island, where dwell a certain pagan native people; these are the Heteromorphs (to employ L.‘s preferred term for them, since they are very different in appearance from other men, although apparently sharing our rational powers). To these beings we greatly wish to carry the blessings of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. It will be a dangerous voyage. Therefore, if you hear nothing from us within four years, please dispose of our estate according to my earlier instructions. I hope that this is not my last letter to you; however, should that prove to be the case, be assured that we talk of you constantly, and you are always in our thoughts. In the shared love of our savior, L.D.

It was followed by the scribbled personal notes.

I may be able to deceive Louisa, and the world, but I do not deceive myself. God forgive me, when I confess that the conversion of the Heteromorphs is not my main goal. For while the message of Christ might wait until they return to their winter base on Macquarie Island, other matters cannot wait. My poor Louisa. Six months, at most. Already she is weakening, and the hectic blush sits on her cheek. Next May would be too late. I must take Louisa now, and pray that the Maori report of powerful Heteromorph medical skills is not mere fable.

We will carry with us the word of Christ. Louisa is filled with confidence
that this is enough for every purpose, while I, rank apostate, am possessed by doubts. Suppose that they remain, rejecting divine truth, a nation of traders? I know exactly what I want from them. But what do I have to offer in return?

Perhaps this is truly a miracle of God’s bounty. For I can provide what no man has ever seen before, a marvel for this and every age: Louisa’s great Engine, which, in insensate mechanic operation, appears to mimic the thought of rational, breathing beings. This, surely, must be of inestimable value and interest, to any beings, no matter how advanced.

Then came a final entry, the writing of a man in frantic haste.

Louisa has at last completed the transformations of the information that I received from the Heteromorphs. We finally have the precise destination, and leave tomorrow on the morning tide. We are amply provisioned, and our native crew is ready and far more confident than I. Like Rabelais, “Je m’en vais chercher un grand peut-etre.” God grant that I find it.

I go to seek a “great perhaps.” I shivered, stood up and went through to the bedroom, where Bill was pulling on a sweater.

“The Analytical Engine. They took it with them when they left.”

“I agree.” His expression was a strange blend of satisfaction and frustration. “But now tell me this. Where did they go?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“We have to. Take a look at this.” Bill headed past me to the kitchen, his arms still halfway into the sleeves. He picked up the folder of drawings that we had brought from the crawl space. “You’ve hardly glanced at these, but I’ve spent as much time on them as on the letters. Here.”

He passed me a pen-and-ink drawing that showed one of the creatures seen from the front. There was an abundance of spindly legs—I counted fourteen, plus four thin, whiskery antennae—and what I took to be two pairs of eyes and delicate protruding eyestalks.

Those were the obvious features. What took the closer second look were the little pouches on each side of the body, not part of the animal and apparently strapped in position. Held in four of the legs was a straight object with numbers marked along its length.

“That’s a scale bar,” said Bill, when I touched a finger to it. “If it’s accurate, and I’ve no reason to think Luke Derwent would have drawn it wrong, his ‘Heteromorphs’ were about three feet tall.”

“And those side pouches are for tools.”

“Tools, food, communications equipment—they could be anything. See. now, why I told you I thought for the past couple of weeks I was going mad? To have this hanging in front of me, and have no idea how to handle it.”

“That place he mentioned. Macquarie Island?”

“Real enough. About seven hundred miles south and west of here. But I can promise you, there’s nothing there relating to this. It’s too small, it’s been visited too often. Anything like the Heteromorphs would have been reported, over and over. And it’s not where Derwent said he was going. He was heading somewhere else, to their more permanent base. Wherever that was.” Bill’s eyes were gleaming, and his mouth was quivering. He had been living with this for too long, and now he was walking the edge. “What are we going to do?”

“We’re heading down to Big House, so Annie can feed us. And we’re going to talk this through.” I took his arm. “Come on.”

The cold morning air cut into us as soon as we stepped outside the door. As I had hoped, it braced Bill and brought him down.

“Maybe we’ve gone as far as we can go,” he said, in a quieter voice. “Maybe we ought to go public with everything, and just tell the world what we’ve found.”

“We could. But it wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Because when you get right down to it, we haven’t found anything. Bill, if it hadn’t been you who sent me that letter and package of stuff, do you know what I would have said?”

“Yeah. Here’s another damned kook.”

“Or a fraud. I realized something else when I was reading those letters. If Jim and Annie Trevelyan had found everything in the crawl space, and shipped it to Christchurch, it would have been plausible. You can tell in a minute they know nothing about Babbage, or computers, or programming. But if you wanted two people who could have engineered a big fat hoax, you’d have to go a long way to find someone better qualified than the two of us. People would say, ah, they’re computer nuts, and they’re science history nuts, and they planned a fake to fool everybody.”

“But we didn’t!”

“Who knows that, Bill, other than me and you? We have nothing to show. What do we do, stand up and say, oh, yes, there really was an Analytical Engine, but it was taken away to show to these aliens? And unfortunately we don’t know where they are, either.”

Bill sighed. “Right on. We’d be better off saying it was stolen by fairies.”

We had reached Big House. When we went inside, Annie Trevelyan took one look at our faces and said, “Ay, you’ve had bad news then.” And as we sat down at the table and she began to serve hot cakes and sausage. “Well, no matter what it is, remember this: you are both young, and you’ve got your health. Whatever it is, it’s not the end of the world.”

It only seemed like it. But I think we both realized that Annie Trevelyan was smarter than both of us.

“I’ll say it again,” said Bill, after a moment or two. “What do we do now?”

“We have breakfast, and then we go back to Little House, and we go over everything, together. Maybe we’re missing something.”

“Yeah. So far, it’s a month of my life.” But Bill was starting to dig in to a pile of beef sausage, and that was a good sign. He and I are both normally what Annie called “good eaters,” and others, less kind, would call gluttons.

She fed us until we refused another morsel of food, then ushered us out. “Go and get on with it,” she said cheerfully. “You’ll sort it out. I know you will.”

It was good to have the confidence of at least one person in the world. Stuffed with food, we trudged back up the hill. I felt good, and optimistic. But I think that was because the materials were so new to me. Bill must have stared at them already until his eyes popped out.

Up at Little House once more, the real work started. We went over the letters and diary again, page by page, date by date, phrase by phrase. Nothing new there, although now that we had seen it once, we could see the evidence again and again of the brother-sister/husband-wife ambivalence.

The drawings came next. The Heteromorphs were so alien in appearance that we were often guessing as to the function of organs or the small objects that on close inspection appeared to be slung around their bodies or held in one of the numerous claws, but at the end of our analysis we had seen nothing to change our opinions, or add to our knowledge.

We were left with one more item: the ledger of tables of numbers, written in the hand of Louisa Derwent. Bill opened it at random and we stared at the page in silence.

“It’s dated October, 1855, like all the others,” I said at last, “That’s when they left.”

“Right. And Luke wrote ‘Louisa has completed the necessary calculations.’ ” Bill was scowling down at a list of numbers, accusing it of failing to reveal to us its secrets. “Necessary for what?”

I leaned over his shoulder. There were twenty-odd entries in the table, each a two or three digit number. “Nothing obvious. But it’s reasonable to assume that this has something to do with the journey, because of the date. What else would Louisa have been working on in the last few weeks?”

“It doesn’t look anything like a navigation guide. But it could be intermediate results. Worksheets.” Bill went back to the first page of the ledger, and the first table. “These could be distances to places they would reach on the way.”

“They could. Or they could be times, or weights, or angles, or a hundred other things. Even if they are distances, we have no idea what units they are in. They could be miles, or nautical miles, or kilometers, or anything.”

It sounds as though I was offering destructive criticism, but Bill knew better. Each of us had to play devil’s advocate, cross-checking the other every step of the way, if we were to avoid sloppy thinking and unwarranted assumptions.

“I’ll accept all that,” he said calmly. “We may have to try and abandon a dozen hypotheses before we’re done. But let’s start making them, and see where they lead. There’s one main assumption, though, that we’ll have to make: these tables were somehow used by Luke and Louisa Derwent, to decide how to reach the Heteromorphs. Let’s take it from there, and let’s not lose sight of the only goal we have: We want to find the location of the Heteromorph base.”

He didn’t need to spell out to me the implications. If we could find the base, maybe the Analytical Engine would still be there. And I didn’t need to spell out to him the other, overwhelming probability: chances were, the Derwents had perished on the journey, and their long-dead bodies lay somewhere on the ocean floor.

We began to work on the tables, proposing and rejecting interpretations for each one. The work was tedious, time-consuming, and full of blind alleys, but we did not consider giving up. From our point of view, progress of sorts was being made as long as we could think of and test new working assumptions. Real failure came only if we ran out of ideas.

We stopped for just two things: sleep, and meals at Big House. I think it was the walk up and down the hill, and the hours spent with Jim and Annie Trevelyan, that kept us relatively sane and balanced.

Five days fled by. We did not have a solution; the information in the ledger was not enough for that. But we finally, about noon on the sixth day, had a problem.

A mathematical problem. We had managed, with a frighteningly long list of assumptions and a great deal of work, to reduce our thoughts and calculations to a very unpleasant-looking nonlinear optimization. If it possessed a global maximum, and could be solved for that maximum, it might yield, at least in principle, the location on Earth whose probability of being a destination for the Derwents was maximized.

Lots of “ifs.” But worse than that, having come this far neither Bill nor I could see a systematic approach to finding a solution. Trial-and-error, even with the fastest computer, would take the rest of our lives. We had been hoping that modem computing skills and vastly increased raw computational power could somehow compensate for all the extra information that Louisa Derwent had available to her and we were lacking. So far, the contest wasn’t even close.

We finally admitted that, and sat in the kitchen staring at each other.

“Where’s the nearest phone?” I asked.

“Dunedin, probably. Why?”

“We’ve gone as far as we can alone. Now we need expert help.”

“I hate to agree with you.” Bill stood up. “But I have to. We’re out of our depth. We need the best numerical analyst we can find.”

“That’s who I’m going to call.”

“But what will you tell him? What do we tell anyone?”

“Bits and pieces. As little as I can get away with.” I was pulling on my coat, and picking up the results of our labors. “For the moment, they’ll have to trust us.”

“They’ll have to be as crazy as we are,” he said.

The good news was that the people we needed tended to be just that. Bill followed me out.

We didn’t stop at Dunedin. We went all the way to Christchurch, where Bill could hitch a free ride on the university phone system.

We found a quiet room, and I called Stanford’s computer science department. I had an old extension, but I reached the man I wanted after a couple of hops—I was a little surprised at that, because as a peripatetic and sociable bachelor he was as often as not in some other continent.

“Where are you?” Gene said, as soon as he knew who was on the line.

That may sound like an odd opening for a conversation with someone you have not spoken to for a year, but usually when one of us called the other, it meant that we were within dinner-eating distance. Then we would have a meal together, discuss life, death, and mathematics, and go our separate ways oddly comforted.

“I’m in Christchurch. Christchurch, New Zealand.”

“Right.” There was a barely perceptible pause at the other end of the line, then he said, “Well, you’ve got my attention. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. But I need an algorithm.”

I sketched out the nature of the problem, and after I was finished he said, “It sounds a bit like an under-determined version of the Traveling Salesman problem, where you have incomplete information about the nodes.”

“That’s pretty much what we decided. We know a number of distances, and we know that some of the locations and the endpoint have to be on land. Also, the land boundaries place other constraints on the paths that can be taken. Trouble is, we’ve no idea how to solve the whole thing.”

“This is really great,” Gene said—and meant it. I could almost hear him rubbing his hands at the prospect of a neat new problem. “The way you describe it, it’s definitely non-polynomial unless you can provide more information. I don’t know how to solve it, either, but I do have ideas. You have to give me all the details.”

“I was planning to. This was just to get you started thinking. I’ll be on a midnight flight out of here, and I’ll land at San Francisco about eight in the morning. I can be at your place by eleven-thirty. I’ll have the written details.”

“That urgent?”

“It feels that way. Maybe you can talk me out of it over dinner.”

After I rang off, Bill Rigley gave me a worried shake of his head. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing? You’ll have to tell him quite a bit.”

“Less than you think. Gene will help, I promise.” I had just realized what I was doing. I was cashing intellectual chips that I had been collecting for a quarter of a century.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go over everything one more time. Then I have to get out of here.”

The final division of labor had been an easy one to perform. Bill had to go back to Little House, and make absolutely sure that we had not missed one scrap of information that might help us. I must head for the United States, and try to crack our computational problem. Bill’s preliminary estimate, of 2,000 hours on a Cray-YMP, was not encouraging.

I arrived in San Francisco one hour behind schedule, jet lagged to the gills. But I made up for lost time on the way to Palo Alto, and was sitting in the living room of Gene’s house on Constanza by midday.

True to form, he had not waited for my arrival. He had already been in touch with half a dozen people scattered around the United States and Canada, to see if there was anything new and exciting in the problem area we were working. I gave him a restricted version of the story of Louisa Derwent and the vanished Analytical Engine, omitting all suggestion of aliens, and then showed him my copy of our analyses and the raw data from which we had drawn it. While he started work on that, I borrowed his telephone and wearily tackled the next phase.

Gene would give us an algorithm, I was sure of that, and it would be the best that today’s numerical analysis could provide. But even with that best, I was convinced that we would face a most formidable computational problem.

I did not wait to learn just how formidable. Assuming that Bill and I were right, there would be other certainties. We would need a digital data base of the whole world, or at least the southern hemisphere, with the land/sea boundaries defined. This time my phone call gave a less satisfactory answer. The Defense Mapping Agency might have what I needed, but it was almost certainly not generally available. My friend (with a guarantee of anonymity) promised to do some digging, and either finagle me a loaner data set or point me to the best commercial sources.

I had one more call to make, to Marvin Minsky at the MIT Media Lab. I looked at the clock as I dialed. One forty-five. On the East Coast it was approaching quitting time for the day. Personally, I felt long past quitting time.

I was lucky again. He came to the phone sounding slightly surprised. We knew each other, but not all that well—not the way that I knew Bill, or Gene.

“Do you still have a good working relationship with. Thinking Machines Corporation?” I asked.

“Yes.” If a declarative word can also be a question, that was it.

“And Danny Hillis is still chief scientist, right?”

“He is.”

“Good. Do you remember in Pasadena a few years ago you introduced us?”

“At the Voyager Neptune flyby. I remember it very well.” Now his voice sounded more and more puzzled. No wonder. I was tired beyond belief, and struggling to stop my thoughts spinning off into non-sequiturs.

“I think I’m going to need a couple of hundred hours of time,” I said, “on the fastest Connection Machine there is.”

“You’re talking to the wrong person.”

“I may need some high priority access.” I continued as though I had not heard him. “Do you have a few minutes while I tell you why I need it?”

“It’s your nickel.” Now the voice sounded a little bit skeptical, but I could tell he was intrigued.

“This has to be done in person. Maybe tomorrow morning?”

“Friday? Hold on a moment.”

“Anywhere you like,” I said, while a muttered conversation took place at the other end of the line. “It won’t take long. Did you say tomorrow is Friday?”

I seemed to have lost a day somewhere. But that didn’t matter. By tomorrow afternoon I would be ready and able to sleep for the whole weekend.

Everything had been rushing along, faster and faster, towards an inevitable conclusion. And at that point, just where Bill and I wanted the speed to be at a maximum, events slowed to a crawl.

In retrospect, the change of pace was only in our minds. By any normal standards, progress was spectacularly fast.

For example. Gene produced an algorithm in less than a week. He still wanted to do final polishing, especially to make it optimal for parallel processing, but there was no point in waiting before programming began. Bill had by this time flown in from New Zealand, and we were both up in Massachusetts. In ten days we had a working program and the geographic data base was on-line.

Our first Connection Machine run was performed that same evening. It was a success, if by “success” you mean that it did not bomb. But it failed to produce a well-defined maximum of any kind.

So then the tedious time began. The input parameters that we judged to be uncertain had to be run over their full permitted ranges, in every possible variation. Naturally, we had set up the program to perform that parametric variation automatically, and to proceed to the next case whenever the form of solution was not satisfactory. And just as naturally, we could hardly bear to leave the computer. We wanted to see the results of each run, to be there when—or if—the result we wanted finally popped out.

For four whole days, nothing emerged that was even encouraging. Any computed maxima were hopelessly broad and unacceptably poorly-defined. We went on haunting the machine room, disappearing only for naps and hurried meals. It resembled the time of our youth, when hands-on program debugging was the only sort known. In the late night hours I felt a strange confluence of computer generations. Here we were, working as we had worked many years ago, but now we were employing today’s most advanced machine in a strange quest for its own earliest ancestor.

We must have been a terrible nuisance to the operators, as we brooded over input and fretted over output, but no one said an unkind word. They must have sensed, from vague rumors, or from the more direct evidence of our behavior, that something very important to us was involved in these computations. They encouraged us to eat and rest; and it seemed almost inevitable that when at last the result that Bill and I had been waiting for so long emerged from the electronic blizzard of activity within the Connection Machine, neither of us would be there to see it.

The call came at eight-thirty in the morning. We had left an hour earlier, and were eating a weary breakfast in the Royal Sonesta motel, not far from the installation.

“I have something I think you should see,” said the hesitant voice of the shift operator. He had watched us sit dejected over a thousand outputs, and he was reluctant now to raise our hopes. “One of the runs shows a sharp peak. Really narrow and tight.”

They had deduced what we were looking for. “We’re on our way,” said Bill. Breakfast was left half-eaten—a rare event for either of us—and in the car neither of us could think of anything to say.

The run results were everything that the operator had suggested. The two-dimensional probability density function was a set of beautiful concentric ellipses, surrounding a single land location. We could have checked coordinates with the geographic data base, but we were in too much of a hurry. Bill had lugged a Times atlas with him all the way from Auckland, and parked it in the computer room. Now he riffled through it, seeking the latitude and longitude defined by the run output.

“My God!” he said after a few seconds. “It’s South Georgia.”

After my first bizarre reaction—South Georgia! How could the Derwents have undertaken a journey to so preposterous a destination, in the southeastern United States?—I saw where Bill’s finger lay.

South Georgia Island. I had hardly heard of it, but it was a lonely smear of land in the far south of the Atlantic Ocean.

Bill, of course, knew a good deal about the place. I have noticed this odd fact before, people who live south of the equator seem to know far more about the geography of their hemisphere than we do about ours. Bill’s explanation, that there is a lot less southern land to know about, is true but not completely convincing.

It did not matter, however, because within forty-eight hours I too knew almost all there was to know about South Georgia. It was not very much. The Holy Grail that Bill and I had been seeking so hard was a desolate island, about a hundred miles long and twenty miles wide. The highest mountains were substantial, rising almost to ten thousand feet, and their fall to the sea was a dreadful chaos of rocks and glaciers. It would not be fair to say that the interior held nothing of interest, because no one had ever bothered to explore it.

South Georgia had enjoyed its brief moment of glory at the end of the last century, when it had been a base for Antarctic whalers, and even then only the coastal area had been inhabited. In 1916, Shackleton and a handful of his men made a desperate and successful crossing of the island’s mountains, to obtain help for the rest of his stranded trans-Antarctic expedition. The next interior crossing was not until 1955, by a British survey team.

That is the end of South Georgia history. Whaling was the only industry. With its decline, the towns of Husvik and Grytviken dwindled and died. The island returned to its former role, as an outpost beyond civilization.

None of these facts was the reason, though, for Bill Rigley’s shocked “My God!” when his finger came to rest on South Georgia. He was amazed by the location. The island lies in the Atlantic ocean, at 54 degrees south. It is six thousand miles away from New Zealand, or from the Heteromorph winter outpost on Macquarie Island.

And those are no ordinary six thousand miles, of mild winds and easy trade routes.

“Look at the choice Derwent had to make.” said Bill. “Either he went west, south of Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. That’s the long way. nine or ten thousand miles, and all the way against the prevailing winds. Or he could sail east. That way would be shorter, maybe six thousand miles, and mostly with the winds. But he would have to go across the South Pacific, and then through the Drake Passage between Cape Horn and the Antarctic Peninsula.”

His words meant more to me after I had done some reading. The southern seas of the Roaring Forties cause no shivers today, but a hundred years ago they were a legend to all sailing men, a region of cruel storms, monstrous waves, and deadly winds. They were worst of all in the Drake Passage, but that wild easterly route had been Luke Derwent’s choice. It was quicker, and he was a man for whom time was running out.

While I did my reading, Bill was making travel plans.

Were we going to South Georgia? Of course we were, although any rational process in my brain told me, more strongly than ever, that we would find nothing there. Luke and Louisa Derwent never reached the island. They had died, as so many others had died, in attempting that terrible southern passage below Cape Horn.

There was surely nothing to be found. We knew that. But still we drained our savings, and Bill completed our travel plans. We would fly to Buenos Aires, then on to the Falkland Islands. After that came the final eight hundred miles to South Georgia, by boat, carrying the tiny two-person survey aircraft whose final assembly must be done on the island itself.

Already we knew the terrain of South Georgia as well as anyone had ever known it. I had ordered a couple of SPOT satellite images of the island, good cloud-free pictures with ten meter resolution. I went over them again and again, marking anomalies that we wanted to investigate.

Bill did the same. But at that point, oddly enough, our individual agendas diverged. His objective was the Analytical Engine, which had dominated his life for the past few months. He had written out, in full, the sequence of events that led to his discoveries in New Zealand, and to our activities afterwards. He described the location and nature of all the materials at Little House. He sent copies of everything, dated, signed, and sealed, to the library of his own university, to the British Museum, to the Library of Congress, and to the Reed Collection of rare books and manuscripts in the Dunedin Public Library. The discovery of the Analytical Engine—or of any part of it—somewhere on South Georgia Island would validate and render undeniable everything in the written record.

And I? I wanted to find evidence of Louisa Derwent’s Analytical Engine, and even more so of the Heteromorphs. But beyond that, my thoughts turned again and again to Luke Derwent, in his search for the “great perhaps.”

He had told Louisa that their journey was undertaken to bring Christianity to the cold-loving people; but I knew better. Deep in his heart he had another, more selfish motive. He cared less about the conversion of the Heteromorphs than about access to their great medical powers. Why else would he carry with him. for trading purposes, Louisa’s wondrous construct, the “marvel for this and every age”—a clanking mechanical computer, to beings who possessed machines small and powerful enough to serve as portable language translators.

I understood Luke Derwent completely, in those final days before he sailed east. The love of his life was dying, and he was desperate. Would he, for a chance to save her, have risked death on the wild southern ocean? Would he have sacrificed himself, his whole crew, and his own immortal soul, for the one-in-a-thousand chance of restoring her to health? Would anyone take such a risk?

I can answer that. Anyone would take the risk, and count himself blessed by the gods to be given the opportunity.

I want to find the Analytical Engine on South Georgia, and I want to find the Heteromorphs. But more than either of those, I want to find evidence that Luke Derwent succeeded, in his final, reckless gamble. I want him to have beaten the odds. I want to find Louisa Derwent, frozen but alive in the still glaciers of the island, awaiting her resurrection and restoration to health.

I have a chance to test the kindness of reality. For in just two days, Bill and I fly south and seek our evidence, our own “great perhaps.” Then I will know.

But now, at the last moment, when we are all prepared, events have taken a more complex turn. And I am not sure if what is happening will help us, or hinder us.

Back in Christchurch, Bill had worried about what I would tell people when we looked for help in the States. I told him that I would say as little as we could get away with, and I kept my word. No one was given more than a small part of the whole story, and the main groups involved were separated by the width of the continent.

But we were dealing with some of the world’s smartest people. And today, physical distance means nothing. People talk constantly across the computer nets. Somewhere, in the swirling depths of GEnie, or across the invisible web of an Ethernet, a critical connection was made. And then the inevitable crosstalk began.

Bill learned of this almost by accident, discussing with a travel agent the flights to Buenos Aires. Since then I have followed it systematically.

We are not the only people heading for South Georgia Island. I know of at least three other groups, and I will bet that there are more.

Half the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab seems to be flying south. So is a substantial fraction of the Stanford Computer Science Department, with additions from Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore. And from southern California, predictably, comes an active group centered on Los Angeles. Niven, Pournelle, Forward, Benford and Brin cannot be reached. A number of JPL staff members are mysteriously missing. Certain other scientists and writers from all over the country do not return telephone calls.

What are they all doing? It is not difficult to guess. We are talking about individuals with endless curiosity, and lots of disposable income. Knowing their style, I would not be surprised if the Queen Mary were refurbished in her home at Long Beach, and headed south.

Except that they, like everyone else, will be in a hurry, and go by air. No one wants to miss the party. These are the people, remember, who did not hesitate to fly to Pasadena for the Voyager close flybys of the outer planets, or to Hawaii and Mexico to see a total solar eclipse. Can you imagine them missing a chance to be in on the discovery of the century, of any century? Not only to observe it, but maybe to become part of the discovery process itself. They will converge on South Georgia in their dozens—their scores—their hundreds, with their powerful laptop computers and GPS terminals and their private planes and advanced sensing equipment.

Logic must tell them, as it tells me, that we will find absolutely nothing. Luke and Louisa Derwent are a century dead, deep beneath the icy waters of the Drake Passage. With them, if the machine ever existed, lie the rusting remnants of Louisa’s Analytical Engine. The Heteromorphs, if they were ever on South Georgia Island, are long gone.

I know all that. So does Bill. But win or lose, Bill and I are going. So are all the others.

And win or lose, I know one other thing. After we, and our converging, energetic, curious, ingenious, sympathetic horde, are finished. South Georgia will never be the same.

This is for Garry Tee—who is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Auckland;

—who is a mathematician, computer specialist, and historian of science;

—who discovered parts of Babbage’s Difference Machine in Dunedin, New Zealand;

—who programmed the DEUCE computer in the late 1950s, and has been a colleague and friend since that time;

—who is no more Bill Rigley than I am the narrator of this story.

Charles Sheffield

December 31, 1991.

WALL, STONE, CRAFT

Walter Jon Williams

SHE AWOKE, THERE IN THE common room of the inn, from a brief dream of roses and death. Once Mary came awake she recalled there were wild roses on her mother’s grave, and wondered if her mother’s spirit had visited her.

On her mother’s grave, Mary’s lover had first proposed their elopement. It was there the two of them had first made love.

Now she believed she was pregnant. Her lover was of the opinion that she was mistaken. That was about where it stood.

Mary concluded that it was best not to think about it. And so, blinking sleep from her eyes, she sat in the common room of the inn at Le Caillou and resolved to study her Italian grammar by candlelight.

Plurals. La nascita, le nascite. La madre, le madri. Un bambino, i bambini . . .

Interruption: stampings, snortings, the rattle of harness, the barking of dogs. Four young Englishmen entered the inn, one in scarlet uniform coat, the others in fine traveling clothes. Raindrops dazzled on their shoulders. The innkeeper bustled out from the kitchen, smiled, proffered the register.

Mary, unimpressed by anything English, concentrated on the grammar.

“Let me sign, George,” the redcoat said. “My hand needs the practice.” Mary glanced up at the comment.

“I say, George, here’s a fellow signed in Greek!” The Englishman peered at yellowed pages of the inn’s register, trying to make out the words in the dim light of the innkeeper’s lamp. Mary smiled at the English officer’s efforts.

“Perseus, I believe the name is. Perseus Busseus—d’ye suppose he means Bishop?—Kselleius. And he gives his occupation as ‘te anthropou philou’—that would make him a friendly fellow, eh?—” The officer looked over his shoulder and grinned, then returned to the register. “ ‘Kaiatheos.’ ” The officer scowled, then straightened. “Does that mean what I think it does, George?”

George—the pretty auburn-haired man in byrons—shook rain off his short cape, stepped to the register, examined the text. “Not ‘friendly fellow,’ ” he said. “That would be ‘anehr philos.’ ‘Anthropos’ is mankind, not man.” There was the faintest touch of Scotland in his speech.

“So it is,” said the officer. “It comes back now.”

George bent at his slim waist and looked carefully at the register. “What the fellow says is, ‘Both friend of man and—’ ” He frowned, then looked at his friend. “You were right about the ‘atheist,’ I’m afraid.”

The officer was indignant. “Ain’t funny, George,” he said.

George gave a cynical little half-smile. His voice changed, turned comical and fussy, became that of a high-pitched English schoolmaster. “Let us try to make out the name of this famous atheist.” He bent over the register again. “Perseus—you had that right, Somerset. Busseus—how very irregular. Kselleius—Kelly? Shelley?” He smiled at his friend. His voice became very Irish. “Kelly, I imagine. An atheistical upstart Irish schoolmaster with a little Greek. But what the Busseus might be eludes me, unless his middle name is Omnibus.”

Somerset chuckled. Mary rose from her place and walked quietly toward the pair. “The gentleman’s name is Bysshe, sir,” she said. “Percy Bysshe Shelley.”

The two men turned in surprise. The officer—Somerset—bowed as he perceived a lady. Mary saw for the first time that he had one empty sleeve pinned across his tunic, which would account for the comment about the hand. The other—George, the man in byrons—swept off his hat and gave Mary a flourishing bow, one far too theatrical to be taken seriously. When he straightened, he gave Mary a little frown.

“Bysshe Shelley?” he said. “Any relation to Sir Bysshe, the baronet?”

“His grandson.”

“Sir Bysshe is a protege of old Norfolk.” This an aside to his friends. Radical Whiggery was afoot, or so the tone implied. George returned his attention to Mary as the other Englishmen gathered about her. “An interesting family, no doubt,” he said, and smiled at her. Mary wanted to flinch from the compelling way he looked at her, gazed upward, intently, from beneath his brows. “And are you of his party?”

“I am.”

“And you are, I take it, Mrs. Shelley?”

Mary straightened and gazed defiantly into George’s eyes. “Mrs. Shelley resides in England. My name is Godwin.”

George’s eyes widened, flickered a little. Low English murmurs came to Mary’s ears. George bowed again. “Charmed to meet you, Miss Godwin.”

George pointed to each of his companions with his hat. “Lord Fitzroy Somerset.” The armless man bowed again. “Captain Harry Smith. Captain Austen of the Navy. Pasmany, my fencing master.” Most of the party, Mary thought, were young, and all were handsome, George most of all. George turned to Mary again, a little smile of anticipation curling his lips. His burning look was almost insolent. “My name is Newstead.”

Mortal embarrassment clutched at Mary’s heart. She knew her cheeks were burning, but still she held George’s eyes as she bobbed a curtsey.

George had not been Marquess Newstead for more than a few months. He had been famous for years both as an intimate of the Prince Regent and the most dashing of Wellington’s cavalry officers, but it was his exploits on the field of Waterloo and his capture of Napoleon on the bridge at Genappe that had made him immortal. He was the talk of England and the Continent, though he had achieved his fame under another name.

Before the Prince Regent had given him the title of Newstead, auburn-haired, insolent-eyed George had been known as George Gordon Noel, the sixth Lord Byron.

Mary decided she was not going to be impressed by either his titles or his manner. She decided she would think of him as George.

“Pleased to meet you, my lord,” Mary said. Pride steeled her as she realized her voice hadn’t trembled.

She was spared further embarrassment when the door burst open and a servant entered followed by a pack of muddy dogs—whippets—who showered them all with water, then howled and bounded about George, their master. Standing tall, his strong, well-formed legs in the famous side-laced boots that he had invented to show off his calf and ankle, George laughed as the dogs jumped up on his chest and bayed for attention. His lordship barked back at them and wrestled with them for a moment—not very lordlike, Mary thought—and then he told his dogs to be still. At first they ignored him, but eventually he got them down and silenced.

He looked up at Mary. “I can discipline men, Miss Godwin,” he said, “but I’m afraid I’m not very good with animals.”

“That shows you have a kind heart, I’m sure,” Mary said.

The others laughed a bit at this—apparently kindheartedness was not one of George’s better-known qualities—but George smiled indulgently.

“Have you and your companion supped, Miss Godwin? I would welcome the company of fellow English in this tiresome land of Brabant.”

Mary was unable to resist an impertinence. “Even if one of them is an atheistical upstart Irish schoolmaster?”

“Miss Godwin, I would dine with Wolfe Tone himself.” Still with that intent, under-eyed look, as if he was dissecting her.

Mary was relieved to turn away from George’s gaze and look toward the back of the inn, in the direction of the kitchen. “Bysshe is in the kitchen giving instructions to the cook. I believe my sister is with him.”

“Are there more in your party?”

“Only the three of us. And one rather elderly carriage horse.”

“Forgive us if we do not invite the horse to table.”

“Your ape, George,” Somerset said dolefully, “will be quite enough.”

Mary would have pursued this interesting remark, but at that moment Bysshe and Claire appeared from out of the kitchen passage. Both were laughing, as if at a shared secret, and Claire’s black eyes glittered. Mary repressed a spasm of annoyance.

“Mary!” Bysshe said. “The cook told us a ghost story!” He was about to go on, but paused as he saw the visitors.

“We have an invitation to dinner,” Mary said. “Lord Newstead has been kind enough—”

“Newstead!” said Claire. “The Lord Newstead?”

George turned his searching gaze on Claire. “I’m the only Newstead I know.”

Mary felt a chill of alarm, for a moment seeing Claire as George doubtless saw her: black-haired, black-eyed, fatally indiscreet, and all of sixteen.

Sometimes the year’s difference in age between Mary and Claire seemed a century.

“Lord Newstead!” Claire babbled. “I recognize you now! How exciting to meet you!”

Mary resigned herself to fate. “My lord,” she said, “may I present my sister, Miss Jane—Claire, rather, Claire Clairmont, and Mr. Shelley.”

“Overwhelmed and charmed, Miss Clairmont. Mr. Perseus Omnibus Kselleius, ti kanete?”

Bysshe blinked for a second or two, then grinned. “Thanmasia euxaristo,” returning politeness, “kai eseis?”

For a moment Mary gloried in Bysshe, in his big frame in his shabby clothes, his fair, disordered hair, his freckles, his large hands—and his absolute disinclination to be impressed by one of the most famous men on Earth.

George searched his mind for a moment. “Polu kala, euxaristo. Tha ethela na—” He groped for words, then gave a laugh. “Hang the Greek!” he said. “It’s been far too many years since Trinity. May I present my friend Somerset?”

Somerset gave the atheist a cold Christian eye. “How d’ye do?”

George finished his introductions. There was the snapping of coach whips outside, and the sound of more stamping horses. The dogs began barking again. At least two more coaches had arrived. George led the party into the dining room. Mary found herself sitting next to George, with Claire and Bysshe across the table.

“Damme, I quite forgot to register,” Somerset said, rising from his bench. “What bed will you settle for, George?”

“Nothing less than Bonaparte’s.”

Somerset sighed. “I thought not,” he said.

“Did Bonaparte sleep here in Le Caillou?” Claire asked.

“The night before Waterloo.”

“How exciting! Is Waterloo nearby?” She looked at Bysshe. “Had we known, we could have asked for his room.”

“Which we then would have had to surrender to my lord Newstead,” Bysshe said tolerantly. “He has greater claim, after all, than we.”

George gave Mary his intent look again. His voice was pitched low. “I would not deprive two lovely ladies of their bed for all the Bonapartes in Europe.”

But rather join us in it, Mary thought. That look was clear enough.

The rest of George’s party—servants, aides-de-camp, clerks, one black man in full Mameluke fig, turned-up slippers, ostrich plumes, scarlet turban and all—carried George’s equipage from his carriages. In addition to an endless series of trunks and a large miscellany of weaponry there were more animals. Not only the promised ape—actually a large monkey, which seated itself on George’s shoulder—but brightly-colored parrots in cages, a pair of greyhounds, some hooded hunting hawks, songbirds, two forlorn-looking kit foxes in cages, which set all the dogs howling and jumping in eagerness to get at them, and a half-grown panther in a jewelled collar, which the dogs knew better than to bark at. The innkeeper was loud in his complaint as he attempted to sort them all out and stay outside of the range of beaks, claws, and fangs.

Bysshe watched with bright eyes, enjoying the spectacle. George’s friends looked as if they were weary of it.

“I hope we will sleep tonight,” Mary said.

“If you sleep not,” said George, playing with the monkey, “we shall contrive to keep you entertained.”

How gracious to include your friends in the orgy, Mary thought. But once again kept silent.

Bysshe was still enjoying the parade of frolicking animals. He glanced at Mary. “Don’t you think, Maie, this is the very image of philosophical anarchism?”

“You are welcome to it, sir,” said Somerset, returning from the register. “George, your mastiff has injured the ostler’s dog. He is loud in his complaint.”

“I’ll have Ferrante pay him off.”

“See that you do. And have him pistol the brains out of that mastiff while he’s at it.”

“Injure poor Picton?” George was offended. “I’ll have none of it.”

“Poor Picton will have his fangs in the ostler next.”

“He must have been teasing the poor beast.”

“Picton will kill us all one day.” Grudgingly.

“Forgive us, Somerset-laddie.” Mary watched as George reached over to Somerset and tweaked his ear. Somerset reddened but seemed pleased.

“Mr. Shelley,” said Captain Austen. “I wonder if you know what surprises the kitchen has in store for us.”

Austen was a well-built man in a plain black coat, older than the others, with a lined and weathered naval face and a reserved manner unique in this company.

“Board ’em in the smoke! That’s the Navy for you!” George said. “Straight to the business of eating, never mind the other nonsense.”

“If you ate wormy biscuit for twenty years of war,” said Harry Smith, “you’d care about the food as well.”

Bysshe gave Austen a smile. “The provisions seem adequate enough for a country inn,” he said. “And the rooms are clean, unlike most in this country. Claire and the Maie and I do not eat meat, so I had to tell the cook how to prepare our dinner. But if your taste runs to fowl or something in the cutlet line I daresay the cook can set you up.”

“No meat!” George seemed enthralled by the concept. “Disciples of J.F. Newton, as I take it?”

“Among others,” said Mary.

“But are you well? Do you not feel an enervation? Are you not feverish with lack of a proper diet?” George leaned very close and touched Mary’s forehead with the back of one cool hand while he reached to find her pulse with the other. The monkey grimaced at her from his shoulder. Mary disengaged and placed her hands on the table.

“I’m quite well, I assure you,” she said.

“The Maie’s health is far better than when I met her,” Bysshe said.

“Mine too,” said Claire.

“I believe most diseases can be conquered by proper diet,” said Bysshe. And then he added,

“He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh.”

“Let’s have some mangled flesh tonight, George,” said Somerset gaily.

“Do let’s,” added Smith.

George’s hand remained on Mary’s forehead. His voice was very soft. “If eating flesh offend thee,” he said, “I will eat but only greens.”

Mary could feel her hackles rise. “Order what you please,” she said. “I don’t care one way or another.”

“Brava, Miss Godwin!” said Smith thankfully. “Let it be mangled flesh for us all, and to perdition with all those little Low Country cabbages!”

“I don’t like them, either,” said Claire.

George removed his hand from Mary’s forehead and tried to signal the innkeeper, who was still struggling to corral the dogs. George failed, frowned, and lowered his hand.

“I’m cheered to know you’re familiar with the works of Newton,” Bysshe said.

“I wouldn’t say familiar,” said George. He was still trying to signal the innkeeper. “I haven’t read his books. But I know he wants me not to eat meat, and that’s all I need to know.”

Bysshe folded his big hands on the table. “Oh, there’s much more than that. Abstaining from meat implies an entire new moral order, in which mankind is placed on an equal level with the animals.”

“George in particular should appreciate that,” said Harry Smith, and made a face at the monkey.

“I think I prefer being ranked above the animals,” George said. “And above most people, too.” He looked up at Bysshe. “Shall we avoid talk of food matters before we eat? My stomach’s rumbling louder than a battery of Napoleon’s daughters.” He looked down at the monkey and assumed a high-pitched Scots dowager’s voice. “An’ sae is Jerome Bonaparte’s, annit nae, Jerome?”

George finally succeeded in attracting the innkeeper’s attention and the company ordered food and wine. Bread, cheese, and pickles were brought to tide them over in the meantime. Jerome Bonaparte was permitted off his master’s lap to roam free along the table and eat what he wished.

George watched as Bysshe carved a piece of cheese for himself. “In addition to Newton, you would also be a follower of William Godwin?”

Bysshe gave Mary a glance, then nodded. “Ay. Godwin also.”

“I thought I recognized that ‘philosophical anarchism’ of yours. Godwin was the rage when I was at Harrow. But not so much thought of now, eh? Excepting of course his lovely namesake.” Turning his gaze to Mary.

Mary gave him a cold look. “Truth is ever in fashion, my lord,” she said.

“Did you say ever or never!” Playfully. Mary said nothing, and George gave a shrug. “Truthful Master Godwin, then. And who else?”

“Ovid,” Mary said. The officers looked a little serious at this. She smiled. “Come now—he’s not as scandalous as he’s been made out. Merely playful.”

This did not reassure her audience. Bysshe offered Mary a private smile. “We’ve also been reading Mary Wollstonecraft.”

“Ah!” George cried. “Heaven save us from intellectual women!”

“Mary Wollstonecraft,” said Somerset thoughtfully. “She was a harlot in France, was she not?”

“I prefer to think of my mother,” said Mary carefully, “as a political thinker and authoress.”

There was sudden silence as Somerset turned white with mortification. Then George threw back his head and laughed.

“Sunburn me!” he said. “That answers as you deserve!”

Somerset visibly made an effort to collect his wits. “I am most sorry, Miss—” he began.

George laughed again. “By heaven, we’ll watch our words hereafter!”

Claire tittered. “I was in suspense, wondering if there would be a mishap. And there was, there was!”

George turned to Mary and managed to compose his face into an attitude of solemnity, though the amusement that danced in his eyes denied it.

“I sincerely apologize on behalf of us all, Miss Godwin. We are soldiers and are accustomed to speaking rough among ourselves, and have been abroad and are doubtless ignorant of the true worth of any individual—” He searched his mind for a moment, trying to work out a graceful way to conclude. “—outside of our own little circle,” he finished.

“Well said,” said Mary, “and accepted.” She had chosen more interesting ground on which to make her stand.

“Oh yes!” said Claire. “Well said indeed!”

“My mother is not much understood by the public,” Mary continued. “But intellectual women, it would seem, are not much understood by you.”

George leaned away from Mary and scanned her with cold eyes. “On the contrary,” he said. “I am married to an intellectual woman.”

“And she, I imagine . . .” Mary let the pause hang in the air for a moment, like a rapier before it strikes home. “. . . resides in England?”

George scowled. “She does.”

“I’m sure she has her books to keep her company.”

“And Francis Bacon,” George said, his voice sour. “Annabella is an authority on Francis Bacon. And she is welcome to reform him, if she likes.”

Mary smiled at him. “Who keeps you company, my lord?”

There was a stir among his friends. He gave her that insolent, under-eyed look again.

“I am not often lonely,” he said.

“Tonight you will rest with the ghost of Napoleon,” she said. “Which of you has better claim to that bed?”

George gave a cold little laugh. “I believe that was decided at Waterloo.”

“The Duke’s victory, or so I’ve heard.”

George’s friends were giving each other alarmed looks. Mary decided she had drawn enough Byron blood. She took a piece of cheese.

“Tell us about Waterloo!” Claire insisted. “Is it far from here?”

“The field is a mile or so north,” said Somerset. He seemed relieved to turn to the subject of battles. “I had thought perhaps you were English tourists come to visit the site.”

“Our arrival is coincidence,” Bysshe said. He was looking at Mary narrow-eyed, as if he was trying to work something out. “I’m somewhat embarrassed for funds, and I’m in hope of finding a letter at Brussels from my—” He began to say “wife,” but changed the word to “family.”

“We’re on our way to Vienna,” Smith said.

“The long way ‘round,” said Somerset. “It’s grown unsafe in Paris—too many old Bonapartists lurking with guns and bombs, and of course George is the laddie they hate most. So we’re off to join the Duke as diplomats, but we plan to meet with his highness of Orange along the way. In Brussels, in two days’ time.”

“Good old Slender Billy!” said Smith. “I haven’t seen him since the battle.”

“The battle!” said Claire. “You said you would tell us!”

George gave her an irritated look. “Please, Miss Clairmont, I beg you. No battles before dinner.” His stomach rumbled audibly.

“Bysshe,” said Mary, “didn’t you say the cook had told you a ghost story?”

“A good one, too,” said Bysshe. “It happened in the house across the road, the one with the tile roof. A pair of old witches used to live there. Sisters.” He looked up at George. “We may have ghosts before dinner, may we not?”

“For all of me, you may.”

“They dealt in charms and curses and so on, and made a living supplying the, ah, the supernatural needs of the district. It so happened that two different men had fallen in love with the same girl, and each man applied to one of the weird sisters for a love charm—each to a different sister, you see. One of them used his spell first and won the heart of the maiden, and this drove the other suitor into a rage. So he went to the witch who had sold him his charm, and demanded she change the young lady’s mind. When the witch insisted it was impossible, he drew his pistol and shot her dead.”

“How very un-Belgian of him,” drawled Smith.

Bysshe continued unperturbed. “So quick as a wink,” he said, “the dead witch’s sister seized a heavy kitchen cleaver and cut off the young man’s head with a single stroke. The head fell to the floor and bounced out the porch steps. And ever since that night—” He leaned across the table toward Mary, his voice dropping dramatically. “—people in the house have sometimes heard a thumping noise, and seen the suitor’s head, dripping gore, bouncing down the steps.”

Mary and Bysshe shared a delicious shiver. George gave Bysshe a thoughtful look.

“D’ye credit this sort of thing, Mr. Omnibus?”

Bysshe looked up. “Oh yes. I have a great belief in things supernatural.”

George gave an insolent smile, and Mary’s heart quickened as she recognized a trap.

“Then how can you be an atheist?” George asked.

Bysshe was startled. No one had ever asked him this question before. He gave a nervous laugh. “I am not so much opposed to God,” he said, “as I am a worshipper of Galileo and Newton. And of course an enemy of the established Church.”

“I see.”

A little smile drifted across Bysshe’s lips.

“Yes!” he said, “I have seen God’s worshippers unsheathe
The sword of his revenge, when grace descended,
Confirming all unnatural impulses,
To satisfy their desolating deeds;
And frantic priests waved the ill-omened cross
O’er the unhappy earth; then shone the sun
On showers of gore from the upflashing steel
Of safe assassin—”

“And have you seen such?” George’s look was piercing.

Bysshe blinked at him. “Beg pardon?”

“I asked if you had seen showers of gore, upflashing steel, all that sort of thing.”

“Ah. No.” He offered George a half-apologetic smile. “I do not hold warfare consonant with my principles.”

“Yes.” George’s stomach rumbled once more. “It’s rather more in my line than yours. So I think I am probably better qualified to judge it . . .” His lip twisted. “. . . and your principles.”

Mary felt her hackles rise. “Surely you don’t dispute that warfare is a great evil,” she said. “And that the church blesses war and its outcome.”

“The church—” He waved a hand. “The chaplains we had with us in Spain were fine men and did good work, from what I could see. Though we had damn few of them, as for the most part they preferred to judge war from their comfortable beds at home. And as for war—ay, it’s evil. Yes. Among other things.”

“Among other things!” Mary was outraged. “What other things?”

George looked at each of the officers in turn, then at Mary. “War is an abomination, I think we can all agree. But it is also an occasion for all that is great in mankind. Courage, comradeship, sacrifice. Heroism and nobility beyond the scope of imagination.”

“Glory,” said one-armed Somerset helpfully.

“Death!” snapped Mary. “Hideous, lingering death! Disease. Mutilation!” She realized she had stepped a little far, and bobbed her head toward Somerset, silently begging his pardon for bringing up his disfigurement. “Endless suffering among the starving widows and orphans,” she went on. “Early this year Bysshe and Jane and I walked across the part of France that the armies had marched over. It was a desert, my lord. Whole villages without a single soul. Women, children, and cripples in rags. Many without a roof over their head.”

“Ay,” said Harry Smith. “We saw it in Spain, all of us.”

“Miss Godwin,” said George, “those poor French people have my sympathy as well as yours. But if a nation is going to murder its rightful king, elect a tyrant, and attack every other nation in the world, then it can but expect to receive that which it giveth. I reserve far greater sympathy for the poor orphans and widows of Spain, Portugal, and the Low Countries.”

“And England,” said Captain Austen.

“Ay,” said George, “and England.”

“I did not say that England has not suffered,” said Mary. “Anyone with eyes can see the victims of the war. And the victims of the Corn Bill as well.”

“Enough.” George threw up his hands. “I heard enough debate on the Corn Bill in the House of Lords—I beg you, not here.”

“People are starving, my lord,” Mary said quietly.

“But thanks to Waterloo,” George said, “they at least starve in peace.”

“Here’s our flesh!” said a relieved Harry Smith. Napkins flourished, silverware rattled, the dinner was laid down. Bysshe took a bite of his cheese pie, then sampled one of the little Brabant cabbages and gave a freckled smile—he had not, as had Mary, grown tired of them. Smith, Somerset, and George chatted about various Army acquaintances, and the others ate in silence. Somerset, Mary noticed, had come equipped with a combination knife-and-fork and managed his cutlet efficiently.

George, she noted, ate only a little, despite the grumblings of his stomach.

“Is it not to your taste, my lord?” she asked.

“My appetite is off.” Shortly.

“That light cavalry figure don’t come without sacrifice,” said Smith. “I’m an infantryman, though,” brandishing knife and fork, “and can tuck in to my vittles.”

George gave him an irritated glance and sipped at his hock. “Cavalry, infantry, Senior Service, staff,” he said, pointing at himself, Smith, Austen, and Somerset with his fork. The fork swung to Bysshe. “Do you, sir, have an occupation? Besides being atheistical, I mean.”

Bysshe put down his knife and fork and answered deliberately. “I have been a scientist, and a reformer, and a sort of an engineer. I have now taken up poetry.”

“I didn’t know it was something to be taken up,” said George.

“Captain Austen’s sister does something in the literary line, I believe,” Harry Smith said.

Austen gave a little shake of his head. “Please, Harry. Not here.”

“I know she publishes anonymously, but—”

“She doesn’t want it known,” firmly, “and I prefer her wishes be respected.”

Smith gave Austen an apologetic look. “Sorry, Frank.”

Mary watched Austen’s distress with amusement. Austen had a spinster sister, she supposed—she could just imagine the type—who probably wrote ripe horrid Gothic novels, all terror and dark battlements and cloaked sensuality, all to the constant mortification of the family.

Well, Mary thought. She should be charitable. Perhaps they were good.

She and Bysshe liked a good gothic, when they were in the mood. Bysshe had even written a couple, when he was fifteen or so.

George turned to Bysshe. “That was your own verse you quoted?”

“Yes.”

“I thought perhaps it was, as I hadn’t recognized it.”

“Queen Mab,” said Claire. “It’s very good.” She gave Bysshe a look of adoration that sent a weary despairing cry through Mary’s nerves. “It’s got all Bysshe’s ideas in it,” she said.

“And the publisher?”

“I published it myself,” Bysshe said, “in an edition of seventy copies.”

George raised an eyebrow. “A self-published phenomenon, forsooth. But why so few?”

“The poem is a political statement in accordance with Mr. Godwin’s Political Justice. Were it widely circulated, the government might act to suppress it, and to prosecute the publisher.” He gave a shudder. “With people like Lord Ellenborough in office, I think it best to take no chances.”

“Lord Ellenborough is a great man,” said Captain Austen firmly. Mary was surprised at his emphatic tone. “He led for Mr. Warren Hastings, do you know, during his trial, and that trial lasted seven years or more and ended in acquittal. Governor Hastings did me many a good turn in India—he was the making of me. I’m sure I owe Lord Ellenborough my purest gratitude.”

Bysshe gave Austen a serious look. “Lord Ellenborough sent Daniel Eaton to prison for publishing Thomas Paine,” he said. “And he sent Leigh Hunt to prison for publishing the truth about the Prince Regent.”

“One an atheist,” Austen scowled, “the other a pamphleteer.”

“Why, so am I both,” said Bysshe sweetly, and, smiling, sipped his spring water. Mary wanted to clap aloud.

“It is the duty of the Lord Chief Justice to guard the realm from subversion,” said Somerset. “We were at war, you know.”

“We are no longer at war,” said Bysshe, “and Lord Ellenborough still sends good folk to prison.”

“At least,” said Mary, “he can no longer accuse reformers of being Jacobins. Not with France under the Bourbons again.”

“Of course he can,” Bysshe said. “Reform is an idea, and Jacobinism is an idea, and Ellenborough conceives them the same.”

“But are they not?” George said.

Mary’s temper flared. “Are you serious? Comparing those who seek to correct injustice with those who—”

“Who cut the heads off everyone with whom they disagreed?” George interrupted. “I’m perfectly serious. Robespierre was the very type of reformer—virtuous, sober, sedate, educated, a spotless private life. And how many thousands did he murder?” He jabbed his fork at Bysshe again, and Mary restrained the impulse to slap it out of his hand. “You may not like Ellenborough’s sentencing, but a few hours in the pillory or a few months in prison ain’t the same as beheading. And that’s what reform in England would come to in the end—mobs and demagogues heaping up death, and then a dictator like Cromwell, or worse luck Bonaparte, to end liberty for a whole generation.”

“I do not look to the French for a model,” said Bysshe, “but rather to America.”

“So did the French,” said George, “and look what they got.”

“If France had not desperately needed reform,” Bysshe said, “there would have been nothing so violent as their revolution. If England reforms itself, there need be no violence.”

“Ah. So if the government simply resigns, and frame-breakers and agitators and democratic philosophers and wandering poets take their place, then things shall be well in England.”

“Things will be better in any case,” Bysshe said quietly, “than they are now.”

“Exactly!” Claire said.

George gave his companions a knowing look. See how I humor this vagabond? Mary read. Loathing stirred her heart.

Bysshe could read a look as well as Mary. His face darkened. “Please understand me,” he said. “I do not look for immediate change, nor do I preach violent revolution. Mr. Godwin has corrected that error in my thought. There will be little amendment for years to come. But Ellenborough is old, and the King is old and mad, and the Regent and his loathsome brothers are not young . . .” He smiled. “I will outlive them, will I not?”

George looked at him. “Will you outlive me, sir? I am not yet thirty.”

“I am three-and-twenty.” Mildly. “I believe the odds favor me.”

Bysshe and the others laughed, while George looked cynical and dyspeptic. Used to being the young cavalier, Mary thought. He’s not so young any longer—how much longer will that pretty face last?

“And of course advance of science may turn this debate irrelevant,” Bysshe went on. “Mr. Godwin calculates that with the use of mechanical aids, people may reduce their daily labor to an hour or two, to the general benefit of all.”

“But you oppose such machines, don’t ye?” George said. “You support the Luddites, I assume?”

“Ay, but—”

“And the frame-breakers are destroying the machines that have taken their livelihood, aren’t they? So where is your general benefit, then?”

Mary couldn’t hold it in any longer. She slapped her hand down on the table, and George and Bysshe started. “The riots occur because the profits of the looms were not used to benefit the weavers, but to enrich the mill owners! Were the owners to share their profits with the weavers, there would have been no disorder.”

George gave her a civil bow. “Your view of human nature is generous,” he said, “if you expect a mill owner to support the families of those who are not even his employees.”

“It would be for the good of all, wouldn’t it?” Bysshe said. “If he does not want his mills threatened and frames broken.”

“It sounds like extortion wrapped in pretty philosophy.”

“The mill owners will pay one way or another,” Mary pointed out. “They can pay taxes to the government to suppress the Luddites with militia and dragoons, or they can have the goodwill of the people, and let the swords and muskets rust.”

“They will buy the swords every time,” George said. “They are useful in ways other than suppressing disorder, such as securing trade routes and the safety of the nation.” He put on a benevolent face. “You must forgive me, but your view of humanity is too benign. You do not account for the violence and passion that are in the very heart of man, and which institutions such as law and religion are intended to help control. And when science serves the passions, only tragedy can result—when I think of science, I think of the science of Dr. Guillotin.”

“We are fallen,” said Captain Austen. “Eden will never be within our grasp.”

“The passions are a problem, but I think they can be turned to good,” said Bysshe. “That is—” He gave an apologetic smile. “That is the aim of my current work. To use the means of poetry to channel the passions to a humane and beneficent aim.”

“I offer you my very best wishes,” condescendingly, “but I fear mankind will disappoint you. Passions are—” George gave Mary an insolent, knowing smile. “—are the downfall of many a fine young virtue.”

Mary considered hitting him in the face. Bysshe seemed not to have noticed George’s look, nor Mary’s reaction. “Mr. Godwin ventured the thought that dreams are the source of many irrational passions,” he mused. “He believes that should we ever find a way of doing without sleep, the passions would fall away.”

“Ay!” barked George. “Through enervation, if nothing else.”

The others laughed. Mary decided she had had enough, and rose.

“I shall withdraw,” she said. “The journey has been fatiguing.”

The gentlemen, Bysshe excepted, rose to their feet. “Good night, Maie,” he said. “I will stay for a while, I think.”

“As you like, Bysshe.” Mary looked at her sister. “Jane? I mean Claire? Will you come with me?”

“Oh, no.” Quickly. “I’m not at all tired.”

Annoyance stiffened Mary’s spine. “As you like,” she said.

George bowed toward her, picked a candle off the table, and offered her an arm. “May I light you up the stair? I should like to apologize for my temerity in contradicting such a charming lady.” He offered his brightest smile. “I think my poor virtue will extend that far, yes?”

She looked at him coldly—she couldn’t think it customary, even in George’s circles, to escort a woman to her bedroom.

Damn it anyway. “My lord,” she said, and put her arm through his.

Jerome Bonaparte made a flying leap from the table and landed on George’s shoulder. It clung to his long auburn hair, screamed, and made a face, and the others laughed. Mary considered the thought of being escorted up to bed by a lord and a monkey, and it improved her humor.

“Goodnight, gentlemen,” Mary said. “Claire.”

The gentlemen reseated themselves and George took Mary up the stairs. They were so narrow and steep that they couldn’t go up abreast; George, with the candle, went first, and Mary, holding his hand, came up behind. Her door was the first up the stairs; she put her hand on the wooden door handle and turned to face her escort. The monkey leered at her from his shoulder.

“I thank you for your company, my lord,” she said. “I fear your journey was a little short.”

“I wished a word with you,” softly, “a little apart from the others.”

Mary stiffened. To her annoyance her heart gave a lurch. “What word is that?” she asked.

His expression was all affability. “I am sensible to the difficulties that you and your sister must be having. Without money in a foreign country, and with your only protector a man—” He hesitated. Jerome Bonaparte, jealous for his attention, tugged at his hair. “A charming man of noble ideals, surely, but without money.”

“I thank you for your concern, but it is misplaced,” Mary said. “Claire and I are perfectly well.”

“Your health ain’t my worry,” he said. Was he deliberately misunderstanding? Mary wondered in fury. “I worry for your future—you are on an adventure with a man who cannot support you, cannot see you safe home, cannot marry you.”

“Bysshe and I do not wish to marry.” The words caught at her heart. “We are free.”

“And the damage to your reputation in society—” he began, and came up short when she burst into laughter. He looked severe, while the monkey mocked him from his shoulder. “You may laugh now, Miss Godwin, but there are those who will use this adventure against you. Political enemies of your father at the very least.”

“That isn’t why I was laughing. I am the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft—I have no reputation! It’s like being the natural daughter of Lucifer and the Scarlet Woman of Babylon. Nothing is expected of us, nothing at all. Society has given us license to do as we please. We were dead to them from birth.”

He gave her a narrow look. “But you have at least a little concern for the proprieties—why else travel pseudonymously?”

Mary looked at him in surprise. “What d’you mean?”

He smiled. “Give me a little credit, Miss Godwin. When you call your sister Jane half the time, and your protector calls you May . . .”

Mary laughed again. “The Maie—Maie for short—is one of Bysshe’s pet names for me. The other is Pecksie.”

“Oh.”

“And Jane is my sister’s given name, which she has always hated. Last year she decided to call herself Clara or Claire—this week it is Claire.”

Jerome Bonaparte began to yank at George’s ear, and George made a face, pulled the monkey from his shoulder, and shook it with mock ferocity. Again he spoke in the cracked Scots dowager’s voice. “Are ye sae donsie wicked, creeture? Tae Elba w’ye!”

Mary burst into laughter again. George gave her a careless grin, then returned the monkey to his shoulder. It sat and regarded Mary with bright, wise eyes.

“Miss Godwin, I am truly concerned for you, believe else of me what you will.”

Mary’s laughter died away. She took the candle from his hand. “Please, my lord. My sister and I are perfectly safe in Mr. Shelley’s company.”

“You will not accept my protection? I will freely give it.”

“We do not need it. I thank you.”

“Will you not take a loan, then? To see you safe across the Channel? Mr. Shelley may pay me back if he is ever in funds.”

Mary shook her head.

A little of the old insolence returned to George’s expression. “Well. I have done what I could.”

“Good night, Lord Newstead.”

“Good night.”

Mary readied herself for bed and climbed atop the soft mattress. She tried to read her Italian grammar, but the sounds coming up the stairway were a distraction. There was loud conversation, and singing, and then Claire’s fine voice, unaccompanied, rising clear and sweet up the narrow stair.

Torcere, Mary thought, looking fiercely at her book, attorcere, rattorcere, scontorcere, torcere.

Twist. Twist, twist, twist, twist.

Claire finished, and there was loud applause. Bysshe came in shortly afterwards. His eyes sparkled and his color was high. “We were singing,” he said.

“I heard.”

“I hope we didn’t disturb you.” He began to undress.

Mary frowned at her book. “You did.”

“And I argued some more with Byron.” He looked at her and smiled. “Imagine it—if we could convert Byron! Bring one of the most famous men in the world to our views.”

She gave him a look. “I can think of nothing more disastrous to our cause than to have him lead it.”

“Byron’s famous. And he’s a splendid man.” He looked at her with a self-conscious grin. “I have a pair of byrons, you know, back home. I think I have a good turn of ankle, but the things are the very devil to lace. You really need servants for it.”

“He’s Newstead now. Not Byron. I wonder if they’ll have to change the name of the boot?”

“Why would he change his name, d’you suppose? After he’d become famous with it.”

“Wellington became famous as Wellesley.”

“Wellington had to change his name. His brother was already Lord Wellesley.” He approached the bed and smiled down at her. “He likes you.”

“He likes any woman who crosses his path. Or so I understand.”

Bysshe crawled into the bed and put his arm around her, the hand resting warmly on her belly. He smelled of the tobacco he’d been smoking with George. She put her hand atop his, feeling on the third finger the gold wedding ring he still wore. Dissatisfaction crackled through her. “You are free, you know.” He spoke softly into her ear. “You can be with Byron if you wish.”

Mary gave him an irritated look. “I don’t wish to be with Byron. I want to be with you.”

“But you may,” whispering, the hand stroking her belly, “be with Byron if you want.”

Temper flared through Mary. “I don’t want Byron!” she said. “And I don’t want Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, or any of your other friends!”

He seemed a little hurt. “Hogg’s a splendid fellow.”

“Hogg tried to seduce your wife, and he’s tried to seduce me. And I don’t understand how he remains your best friend.”

“Because we agree on everything, and I hold him no malice where his intent was not malicious.” Bysshe gave her a searching look. “I only want you to be free. If we’re not free, our love is chained, chained absolutely, and all ruined. I can’t live that way—I found that out with Harriet.”

She sighed, put her arm around him, drew her fingers through his tangled hair. He rested his head on her shoulder and looked up into her eyes. “I want to be free to be with you,” Mary told him. “Why will that not suit?”

“It suits.” He kissed her cheek. “It suits very well.” He looked up at her happily. “And if Harriet joins us in Brussels, with a little money, then all shall be perfect.”

Mary gazed at him, utterly unable to understand how he could think his wife would join them, or why, for that matter, he thought it a good idea.

He misses his little boy, she thought. He wants to be with him.

The thought rang hollow in her mind.

He kissed her again, his hand moving along her belly, touching her lightly. “My golden-haired Maie.” The hand cupped her breast. Her breath hissed inward.

“Careful,” she said. “I’m very tender there.”

“I will be nothing but tenderness.” The kisses reached her lips. “I desire nothing but tenderness for you.”

She turned to him, let his lips brush against hers, then press more firmly. Sensation, a little painful, flushed her breast. His tongue touched hers. Desire rose and she put her arms around him.

The door opened and Claire came in, chattering of George while she undressed. Mood broken, tenderness broken, there was nothing to do but sleep.

“COME AND and look,” Mary said, “here’s a cat eating roses; she’ll turn into a woman, when beasts eat these roses they turn into men and women.” But there was no one in the cottage, only the sound of the wind.

Fear touched her, cold on the back of her neck.

She stepped into the cottage, and suddenly there was something blocking the sun that came through the windows, an enormous figure, monstrous and black and hungry . . .

Nausea and the sounds of swordplay woke her. A dog was barking maniacally. Mary rose from the bed swiftly and wrapped her shawl around herself. The room was hot and stuffy, and her gorge rose. She stepped to the window, trying not to vomit, and opened the pane to bring in fresh air.

Coolness touched her cheeks. Below in the courtyard of the inn was Pasmany, the fencing teacher, slashing madly at his pupil, Byron. Newstead. George, she reminded herself, she would remember he was George.

And serve him right.

She dragged welcome morning air into her lungs as the two battled below her. George was in his shirt, planted firmly on his strong, muscular legs, his pretty face set in an expression of intent calculation. Pasmany flung himself at the man, darting in and out, his sword almost fluid in its movement. They were using straight heavy sabers, dangerous even if unsharpened, and no protective equipment at all. A huge black dog, tied to the vermilion wheel of a big dark-blue barouche, barked at the both of them without cease.

Nausea swam over Mary; she closed her eyes and clutched the windowsill. The ringing of the swords suddenly seemed very far away.

“Are they fighting?” Claire’s fingers clutched her shoulder. “Is it a duel? Oh, it’s Byron!”

Mary abandoned the window and groped her way to the bed. Sweat beaded on her forehead. Bysshe blinked muzzily at her from his pillow.

“I must go down and watch,” said Claire. She reached for her clothing and, hopping, managed to dress without missing a second of the action outside. She grabbed a hairbrush on her way out the door and was arranging her hair on the run even before the door slammed behind her.

“Whatever is happening?” Bysshe murmured. She reached blindly for his hand and clutched it.

“Bysshe,” she gasped. “I am with child. I must be.”

“I shouldn’t think so.” Calmly. “We’ve been using every precaution.” He touched her cheek. His hand was cool. “It’s the travel and excitement. Perhaps a bad egg.”

Nausea blackened her vision and bent her double. Sweat fell in stately rhythm from her forehead to the floor. “This can’t be a bad egg,” she said. “Not day after day.”

“Poor Maie.” He nestled behind her, stroked her back and shoulders. “Perhaps there is a flaw in the theory,” he said. “Time will tell.”

No turning back, Mary thought. She had wanted there to be no turning back, to burn every bridge behind her, commit herself totally, as her mother had, to her beliefs. And now she’d succeeded—she and Bysshe were linked forever, linked by the child in her womb. Even if they parted, if—free, as they both wished to be—he abandoned this union, there would still be that link, those bridges burnt, her mother’s defiant inheritance fulfilled . . .

Perhaps there is a flaw in the theory. She wanted to laugh and cry at once.

Bysshe stroked her, his thoughts his own, and outside the martial clangor went on and on.

It was some time before she could dress and go down to the common rooms. The sabre practice had ended, and Bysshe and Claire were already breaking their fast with Somerset, Smith, and Captain Austen. The thought of breakfast made Mary ill, so she wandered outside into the courtyard, where the two breathless swordsmen, towels draped around their necks, were sitting on a bench drinking water, with a tin dipper, from an old wooden bucket. The huge black dog barked, foaming, as she stepped out of the inn, and the two men, seeing her, rose.

“Please sit, gentlemen,” she said, waving them back to their bench; she walked across the courtyard to the big open gate and stepped outside. She leaned against the whitewashed stone wall and took deep breaths of the country air. Sweet-smelling wildflowers grew in the verges of the highway. Prosperous-looking villagers nodded pleasantly as they passed about their errands.

“Looking for your haunted house, Miss Godwin?”

George’s inevitable voice grated on her ears. She looked at him over her shoulder. “My intention was simply to enjoy the morning.”

“I hope I’m not spoiling it.”

Reluctant courtesy rescued him from her own riposting tongue. “How was the Emperor’s bed?” she said finally.

He stepped out into the road. “I believe I slept better than he did, and longer.” He smiled at her. “No ghosts walked.”

“But you still fought a battle after your sleep.”

“A far, far better one. Waterloo was not something I would care to experience more than once.”

“I shouldn’t care to experience it even the first time.”

“Well. You’re female, of course.” All offhand, unaware of her rising hackles. He looked up and down the highway.

“D’ye know, this is the first time I’ve seen this road in peace. I first rode it north during the retreat from Quatre Bras, a miserable rainy night, and then there was the chase south after Boney the night of Waterloo, then later the advance with the army to Paris . . .”He shook his head. “It’s a pleasant road, ain’t it? Much better without the armies.”

“Yes.”

“We went along there.” His hand sketched a line across the opposite horizon. “This road was choked with retreating French, so we went around them. With two squadrons of Vandeleur’s lads, the 12th, the Prince of Wales’s Own, all I could find once the French gave way. I knew Boney would be running, and I knew it had to be along this road. I had to find him, make certain he would never trouble our peace. Find him for England.” He dropped right fist into left palm.

“Boney’d left two battalions of the Guard to hold us, but I went around them. I knew the Prussians would be after him, too, and their mounts were fresher. So we drove on through the night, jumping fences, breaking down hedges, galloping like madmen, and then we found him at Genappe. The bridge was so crammed with refugees that he couldn’t get his barouche across.”

Mary watched carefully as George, uninvited, told the story that he must, by now, have told a hundred times, and wondered why he was telling it now to someone with such a clear distaste for things military. His color was high, and he was still breathing hard from his exercise; sweat gleamed on his immaculate forehead and matted his shirt; she could see the pulse throbbing in his throat. Perhaps the swordplay and sight of the road had brought the memory back; perhaps he was merely, after all, trying to impress her.

A female, of course. Damn the man.

“They’d brought a white Arab up for him to ride away,” George went on. “His Chasseurs of the Guard were close around. I told each trooper to mark his enemy as we rode up—we came up at a slow trot, in silence, our weapons sheathed. In the dark the enemy took us for French—our uniforms were similar enough. I gave the signal—we drew pistols and carbines—half the French saddles were emptied in an instant. Some poor lad of a cornet tried to get in my way, and I cut him up through the teeth. Then there he was—the Emperor. With one foot in the stirrup, and Roustam the Mameluke ready to boost him into the saddle.”

A tigerish, triumphant smile spread across George’s face. His eyes were focused down the road, not seeing her at all. “I put my dripping point in his face, and for the life of me I couldn’t think of any French to say except to tell him to sit down. ‘Asseyez-vous!’ I ordered, and he gave me a sullen look and sat down, right down in the muddy roadway, with the carbines still cracking around us and bullets flying through the air. And I thought, He’s finished. He’s done. There’s nothing left of him now. We finished off his bodyguard—they hadn’t a chance after our first volley. The French soldiers around us thought we were the Prussian advance guard, and they were running as fast as their legs could carry them. Either they didn’t know we had their Emperor or they didn’t care. So we dragged Boney’s barouche off the road, and dragged Boney with it, and ten minutes later the Prussians galloped up—the Death’s Head Hussars under Gneisenau, all in black and silver, riding like devils. But the devils had lost the prize.”

Looking at the wild glow in George’s eyes Mary realized that she’d been wrong—the story was not for her at all, but for him. For George. He needed it somehow, this affirmation of himself, the enunciated remembrance of his moment of triumph.

But why? Why did he need it?

She realized his eyes were on her. “Would you like to see the coach, Miss Godwin?” he asked. The question surprised her.

“It’s here?”

“I kept it.” He laughed. “Why not? It was mine. What Captain Austen would call a fair prize of war.” He offered her his arm. She took it, curious about what else she might discover.

The black mastiff began slavering at her the second she set foot inside the courtyard. Its howls filled the air. “Hush, Picton,” George said, and walked straight to the big gold-trimmed blue coach with vermilion wheels. The door had the Byron arms and the Latin motto CREDE BYRON.

Should she believe him? Mary wondered. And if so, how much?

“This is Bonaparte’s?” she said.

“Was, Miss Godwin. Till June 16th last. Down, Picton!” The dog lunged at him, and he wrestled with it, laughing, until it calmed down and began to fawn on him.

George stepped to the door and opened it. “The Imperial symbols are still on the lining, as you see.” The door and couch were lined with rich purple, with golden bees and the letter N worked in heavy gold embroidery. “Fine Italian leatherwork,” he said. “Drop-down secretaires so that the great man could write or dictate on the march. Holsters for pistols.” He knocked on the coach’s polished side. “Bulletproof. There are steel panels built in, just in case any of the Great Man’s subjects decided to imitate Marcus Brutus.” He smiled. “I was glad for that steel in Paris, I assure you, with Bonapartist assassins lurking under every tree.” A mischievous gleam entered his eye. “And last, the best thing of all.” He opened a compartment under one of the seats and withdrew a solid silver chamber pot. “You’ll notice it still bears the imperial N.”

“Vanity in silver.”

“Possibly. Or perhaps he was afraid one of his soldiers would steal it if he didn’t mark it for his own.”

Mary looked at the preposterous object and found herself laughing. George looked pleased and stowed the chamber pot in its little cabinet. He looked at her with his head cocked to one side. “You will not reconsider my offer?”

“No.” Mary stiffened. “Please don’t mention it again.”

The mastiff Picton began to howl again, and George seized its collar and told it to behave itself. Mary turned to see Claire walking toward them.

“Won’t you be joining us for breakfast, my lord?”

George straightened. “Perhaps a crust or two. I’m not much for breakfast.”

Still fasting, Mary thought. “It would make such sense for you to give up meat, you know,” she said. “Since you deprive yourself of food anyway.”

“I prefer not to deny myself pleasure, even if the quantities are necessarily restricted.”

“Your swordplay was magnificent.”

“Thank you. Cavalry style, you know—all slash and dash. But I am good, for a’ that.”

“I know you’re busy, but—” Claire bit her lip. “Will you take us to Waterloo?”

“Claire!” cried Mary.

Claire gave a nervous laugh. “Truly,” she said. “I’m absolutely with child to see Waterloo.”

George looked at her, his eyes intent. “Very well,” he said. “We’ll be driving through it in any case. And Captain Austen has expressed an interest.”

Fury rose in Mary’s heart. “Claire, how dare you impose—”

“Ha’ ye nae pity for the puir lassie?” The Scots voice was mock-severe. “Ye shall nae keep her fra’ her Waterloo.”

Claire’s Waterloo, Mary thought, was exactly what she wanted to keep her from.

George offered them his exaggerated, flourishing bow. “If you’ll excuse me, ladies, I must give the necessary orders.”

He strode through the door. Pasmany followed, the swords tucked under his arm. Claire gave a little joyous jump, her shoes scraping on cobbles. “I can hardly believe it,” she said. “Byron showing us Waterloo!”

“I can’t believe it either,” Mary said. She sighed wearily and headed for the dining room.

Perhaps she would dare to sip a little milk.

THEY RODE out in Napoleon’s six-horse barouche, Claire, Mary, and Bysshe inside with George, and Smith, Somerset, and Captain Austen sharing the outside rear seat. The leather top with its bulletproof steel inserts had been folded away and the inside passengers could all enjoy the open air. The barouche wasn’t driven by a coachman up top, but by three postboys who rode the right-hand horses, so there was nothing in front to interrupt the view. Bysshe’s mule and little carriage, filled with bags and books, ate dust behind along with the officers’ baggage coaches, all driven by George’s servants.

The men talked of war and Claire listened to them with shining eyes. Mary concentrated on enjoying the shape of the low hills with their whitewashed farmhouses and red tile roofs, the cut fields of golden rye stubble, the smell of wildflowers and the sound of birdsong. It was only when the carriage passed a walled farm, its whitewash marred by bullets and cannon shot, that her reverie was marred by the thought of what had happened here.

“La Haie Sainte,” George remarked. “The King’s German Legion held it throughout the battle, even after they’d run out of ammunition. I sent Mercer’s horse guns to keep the French from the walls, else Lord knows what would have happened.” He stood in the carriage, looked left and right, frowned. “These roads we’re about to pass were sunken—an obstacle to both sides, but mainly to the French. They’re filled in now. Mass graves.”

“The French were cut down in heaps during their cavalry attack,” Somerset added. “The piles were eight feet tall, men and horses.”

“How gruesome!” laughed Claire.

“Turn right, Swinson,” said George.

Homemade souvenir stands had been set up at the crossroads. Prosperous-looking rustics hawked torn uniforms, breastplates, swords, muskets, bayonets. Somerset scowled at them. “They must have made a fortune looting the dead.”

“And the living,” said Smith. “Some of our poor wounded weren’t brought in till two days after the battle. Many had been stripped naked by the peasants.”

A young man ran up alongside the coach, shouting in French. He explained he had been in the battle, a guide to the great Englishman Lord Byron, and would guide them over the field for a few guilders.

“Never heard of you,” drawled George, and dismissed him. “Hey! Swinson! Pull up here.”

The postboys pulled up their teams. George opened the door of the coach and strolled to one of the souvenir stands. When he returned it was with a French breastplate and helmet. Streaks of rust dribbled down the breastplate, and the helmet’s horsehair plume smelled of mildew.

“I thought we could take a few shots at it,” George said. “I’d like to see whether armor provides any protection at all against bullets—I suspect not. There’s a movement afoot at Whitehall to give breastplates to the Household Brigade, and I suspect they ain’t worth the weight. If I can shoot a few holes in this with my Mantons, I may be able to prove my point.”

They drove down a rutted road of soft earth. It was lined with thorn hedges, but most of them had been broken down during the battle and there were long vistas of rye stubble, the gentle sloping ground, the pattern of plow and harvest. Occasionally the coach wheels grated on something, and Mary remembered they were moving along a mass grave, over the decaying flesh and whitening bones of hundreds of horses and men. A cloud passed across the sun, and she shivered.

“Can ye pull through the hedge, Swinson?” George asked. “I think the ground is firm enough to support us—no rain for a few days at least.” The lead postboy studied the hedge with a practiced eye, then guided the lead team through a gap in it.

The barouche rocked over exposed roots and broken limbs, then ground onto a rutted sward of green grass, knee-high, that led gently down into the valley they’d just crossed. George stood again, his eyes scanning the ground. “Pull up over there,” he said, pointing, and the coachman complied.

“Here you can see where the battle was won,” George said. He tossed his clanging armor out onto the grass, opened the coach door and stepped out himself. The others followed, Mary reluctantly. George pointed with one elegant hand at the ridge running along the opposite end of the valley from their own, a half-mile opposite.

“Napoleon’s grand battery,” he said. “Eighty guns, many of them twelve-pounders—Boney called them his daughters. He was an artillerist, you know, and he always prepared his attacks with a massed bombardment. The guns fired for an hour and put our poor fellows through hell. Bylandt’s Dutchmen were standing in the open, right where we are now, and the guns broke ’em entirely.

“Then the main attack came, about two o’clock. Count d’Erlon’s corps, 16,000 strong, arrayed 25 men deep with heavy cavalry on the wings. They captured La Haye and Papelotte, those farms over there on the left, and rolled up this ridge with drums beating the pas de charge . . .”

George turned. There was a smile on his face. Mary watched him closely—the pulse was beating like d’Erlon’s drums in his throat, and his color was high. He was loving every second of this.

He went on, describing the action, and against her will Mary found herself seeing it, Picton’s division lying in wait, prone on the reverse slope, George bringing the heavy cavalry up, the cannons banging away. Picton’s men rising, firing their volleys, following with the bayonet. The Highlanders screaming in Gaelic, their plumes nodding as they drew their long broadswords and plunged into the fight, the pipers playing “Johnnie Cope” amid all the screams and clatter. George leading the Household and Union Brigades against the enemy cavalry, the huge grain-fed English hunters driving back the chargers from Normandy. And then George falling on d’Erlon’s flanks, driving the French in a frightened mob all the way back across the valley while the British horsemen slashed at their backs. The French gunners of the grand battery unable to fire for fear of hitting their own men, and then dying themselves under the British sabres.

Mary could sense as well the things George left out. The sound of steel grating on bone. Wails and moans of the wounded, the horrid challenging roars of the horses. And in the end, a valley filled with stillness, a carpet of bodies and pierced flesh . . .

George gave a long sigh. “Our cavalry are brave, you know, far too brave for their own good. And the officers get their early training in steeplechases and the hunt, and their instinct is to ride straight at the objective at full gallop, which is absolutely the worst thing cavalry can ever do. After Slade led his command to disaster back in the Year Twelve, the Duke realized he could only commit cavalry at his peril. In Spain we finally trained the horse to maneuver and to make careful charges, but the Union and Household troops hadn’t been in the Peninsula, and didn’t know the drill . . . I drove myself mad in the weeks before the battle, trying to beat the recall orders into them.” He laughed selfconsciously. “My heart was in my mouth during the whole charge, I confess, less with fear of the enemy than with terror my own men would run mad. But they answered the trumpets, all but the Inniskillings, who wouldnae listen—the Irish blood was up—and while they ran off into the valley, the rest of us stayed in the grand battery. Sabred the gunners, drove off the limbers with the ready ammunition—and where we could we took the wheels off the guns, and rolled ’em back to our lines like boys with hoops. And the Inniskillings—” He shook his head. “They ran wild into the enemy lines, and Boney loosed his lancers at ’em, and they died almost to a man. I had to watch from the middle of the battery, with my officers begging to be let slip again and rescue their comrades, and I had to forbid it.”

There were absolute tears in George’s eyes. Mary watched in fascination and wondered if this was a part of the performance, or whether he was genuinely affected—but then she saw that Bysshe’s eyes had misted over and Somerset was wiping his eyes with his one good sleeve. So, she thought, she could believe Byron, at least a little.

“Well.” George cleared his throat, trying to control himself. “Well. We came back across the valley herding thousands of prisoners—and that charge proved the winning stroke. Boney attacked later, of course—all his heavy cavalry came knee-to-knee up the middle, between La Haie Sainte and Hougoumont,” gesturing to the left with one arm, “we had great guns and squares of infantry to hold them, and my heavies to counterattack. The Prussians were pressing the French at Plancenoit and Papelotte. Boney’s last throw of the dice sent the Old Guard across the valley after sunset, but our Guards under Maitland held them, and Colborne’s 52nd and the Belgian Chasseurs got round their flanks, and after they broke I let the Household and Union troopers have their head—we swept ’em away. Sabred and trampled Boney’s finest troops right in front of his eyes, all in revenge for the brave, mad Inniskillings—the only time his Guard ever failed in attack, and it marked the end of his reign. We were blown by the end of it, but Boney had nothing left to counterattack with. I knew he would flee. So I had a fresh horse brought up and went after him.”

“So you won the battle of Waterloo!” said Claire.

George gave her a modest look that, to Mary, seemed false as the very devil. “I was privileged to have a decisive part. But ‘twas the Duke that won the battle. We all fought at his direction.”

“But you captured Napoleon and ended the Empire!”

He smiled. “That I did do, lassie, ay.”

“Bravo!” Claire clapped her hands.

Harry Smith glanced up with bright eyes. “D’ye know, George,” he said, “pleased as I am to hear this modest recitation of your accomplishments, I find precious little mention in your discourse of the infantry. I seem to remember fighting a few Frenchies myself, down Hougoumont way, with Reille’s whole corps marching down on us, and I believe I can recollect in my dim footsoldier’s mind that I stood all day under cannonshot and bursting mortar bombs, and that Kellerman’s heavy cavalry came wave after wave all afternoon, with the Old Guard afterward as a lagniappe . . .”

“I am pleased that you had some little part,” George said, and bowed from his slim cavalry waist.

“Your lordship’s condescension does you more credit than I can possibly express.” Returning the bow.

George reached out and gave Smith’s ear an affectionate tweak. “May I continue my tale? And then we may travel to Captain Harry’s part of the battlefield, and he will remind us of whatever small role it was the footsoldiers played.”

George went through the story of Napoleon’s capture again. It was the same, sentiment for sentiment, almost word for word. Mary wandered away, the fat moist grass turning the hem of her skirt green. Skylarks danced through the air, trilling as they went. She wandered by the old broken thorn hedge and saw wild roses blossoming in it, and she remembered the wild roses planted on her mother’s grave.

She thought of George Gordon Noel with tears in his eyes, and the way the others had wanted to weep—even Bysshe, who hadn’t been there—and all for the loss of some Irishmen who, had they been crippled or out of uniform or begging for food or employment, these fine English officers would probably have turned into the street to starve . . .

She looked up at the sound of footsteps. Harry Smith walked up and nodded pleasantly. “I believe I have heard George give this speech,” he said.

“So have I. Does he give it often?”

“Oh yes.” His voice dropped, imitated George’s limpid dramatics. “He’s finished. He’s done. There’s nothing left of him now.” Mary covered amusement with her hand. “Though the tale has improved somewhat since the first time,” Smith added. “In this poor infantryman’s opinion.”

Mary gave him a careful look. “Is he all he seems to think he is?”

Smith gave a thin smile. “Oh, ay. The greatest cavalryman of our time, to be sure. Without doubt a genius. Chevalier sans peur et—well, I won’t say sans reproche. Not quite.” His brow contracted as he gave careful thought to his next words. “He purchased his way up to colonel—that would be with Lady Newstead’s money—but since then he’s earned his spurs.”

“He truly is talented, then.”

“Truly. But of course he’s lucky, too. If Le Marchant hadn’t died at Salamanca, George wouldn’t have been able to get his heavy brigade, and if poor General Cotton hadn’t been shot by our own sentry George wouldn’t have got all the cavalry in time for Vitoria, and of course if Uxbridge hadn’t run off with Wellington’s sister-in-law then George might not have got command at Waterloo . . . Young and without political influence as he is, he wouldn’t have kept all those commands for long if he hadn’t spent his every leave getting soused with that unspeakable hound the Prince of Wales. Ay, there’s been luck involved. But who won’t wish for luck in his life, eh?”

“What if his runs out?”

Smith gave this notion the same careful consideration. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “He’s fortune’s laddie, but that don’t mean he’s without character.”

“You surprise me, speaking of him so frankly.”

“We’ve been friends since Spain. And nothing I say will matter in any case.” He smiled. “Besides, hardly anyone ever asks for my opinion.”

The sound of Claire’s laughter and applause carried across the sward. Smith cocked an eye at the other party. “Boney’s at sword’s point, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Your turn for glory.”

“Ay. If anyone will listen after George’s already won the battle.” He held out his arm and Mary took it. “You should meet my wife. Juanita—I met her in Spain at the storming of Badajoz. The troops were carrying away the loot, but I carried her away instead.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “You have a certain spirit in common.”

Mary felt flattered. “Thank you, Captain Smith. I’m honored by the comparison.”

THEY MOVED to another part of the battlefield. There was a picnic overlooking the chateau of Hougoumont that lay red-roofed in its valley next to a well-tended orchard. Part of the chateau had been destroyed in the battle, Smith reported, but it had been rebuilt since.

Rebuilt, Mary thought, by owners enriched by battlefield loot. George called for his pistols and moved the cuirass a distance away, propping it up on a small slope with the helmet sitting on top. A servant brought the Mantons and loaded them, and while the others stood and watched, George aimed and fired. Claire clapped her hands and laughed, though there was no discernible effect. White gunsmoke drifted on the morning breeze. George presented his second pistol, paused to aim, fired again. There was a whining sound and a scar appeared on the shoulder of the cuirass. The other men laughed.

“That cuirassier’s got you for sure!” Harry Smith said.

“May I venture a shot?” Bysshe asked. George assented.

One of George’s servants reloaded the pistols while George gave Bysshe instruction in shooting. “Hold the arm out straight and use the bead to aim.”

“I like keeping the elbow bent a little,” Bysshe said. “Not tucked in like a duellist, but not locked, either.”

Bysshe took effortless aim—Mary’s heart leaped at the grace of his movement—then Bysshe paused an instant and fired. There was a thunking sound and a hole appeared in the French breastplate, directly over the heart.

“Luck!” George said.

“Yes!” Claire said. “Purest luck!”

“Not so,” Bysshe said easily. “Observe the plume holder.” He presented the other pistol, took briefest aim, fired. With a little whine the helmet’s metal plume holder took flight and whipped spinning through the air. Claire applauded and gave a cheer.

Mary smelled powder on the gentle morning wind.

Bysshe returned the pistols to George. “Fine weapons,” he said, “though I prefer an octagonal barrel, as you can sight along the top.”

George smiled thinly and said nothing.

“Mr. Shelley,” said Somerset, “you have the makings of a soldier.”

“I’ve always enjoyed a good shoot,” Bysshe said, “though of course I won’t fire at an animal. And as for soldiering, who knows what I might have been were I not exposed to Mr. Godwin’s political thought?”

There was silence at this. Bysshe smiled at George. “You shouldn’t lock the elbow out,” he said. “That fashion, every little motion of the body transmits itself to the weapon. If you keep the elbow bent a bit, it forms a sort of a spring to absorb involuntary muscle tremors and you’ll have better control.” He looked at the others gaily. “It’s not for nothing I was an engineer!”

George handed the pistols to his servant for loading. “We’ll fire another volley,” he said. His voice was curt.

Mary watched George as the Mantons were loaded, as he presented each pistol—straight-armed—and fired again. One knocked the helmet off its perch, the other struck the breastplate at an angle and bounced off. The others laughed, and Mary could see a little muscle twitching in George’s cheek.

“My turn, George,” said Harry Smith, and the pistols were recharged. His first shot threw up turf, but the second punched a hole in the cuirass. “There,” Smith said, “that should satisfy the Horse Guards that armor ain’t worth the weight.”

Somerset took his turn, firing awkwardly with his one hand, and missed both shots.

“Another volley,” George said.

There was something unpleasant in his tone, and the others took hushed notice. The pistols were reloaded. George presented the first pistol at the target, and Mary could see how he was vibrating with passion, so taut his knuckles were white on the pistol-grip. His shots missed clean.

“Bad luck, George,” Somerset said. His voice was calming. “Probably the bullets were deformed and didn’t fly right.”

“Another volley,” said George.

“We have an appointment in Brussels, George.”

“It can wait.”

The others drew aside and clustered together while George insisted on firing several more times. “What a troublesome fellow he is,” Smith muttered. Eventually George put some holes in the cuirass, collected it, and stalked to the coach, where he had the servants strap it to the rear so that he could have it sent to the Prince of Wales.

Mary sat as far away from George as possible. George’s air of defiant petulance hung over the company as they started north on the Brussels road. But then Bysshe asked Claire to sing, and Claire’s high, sweet voice rose above the green countryside of Brabant, and by the end of the song everyone was smiling. Mary flashed Bysshe a look of gratitude.

The talk turned to war again, battles and sieges and the dead, a long line of uniformed shadows, young, brave men who fell to the French, to accident, to camp fever. Mary had little to say on the subject that she hadn’t already offered, but she listened carefully, felt the soldiers’ sadness at the death of comrades, the rejoicing at victory, the satisfaction of a deadly, intricate job done well. The feelings expressed seemed fine, passionate, even a little exalted. Bysshe listened and spoke little, but gradually Mary began to feel that he was somehow included in this circle of men and that she was not—perhaps his expert pistol shooting had made him a part of this company.

A female, of course. War was a fraternity only, though the suffering it caused made no distinction as to sex.

“May I offer an observation?” Mary said.

“Of course,” said Captain Austen.

“I am struck by the passion you show when speaking of your comrades and your—shall I call it your craft?”

“Please, Miss Godwin,” George said. “The enlisted men may have a craft, if you like. We are gentlemen, and have a profession.”

“I intended no offense. But still—I couldn’t help but observe the fine feelings you show towards your comrades, and the attention you give to the details of your . . . profession.”

George seemed pleased. “Ay. Didn’t I speak last night of war being full of its own kind of greatness?”

“Greatness perhaps the greater,” Bysshe said, “by existing in contrast to war’s wretchedness.”

“Precisely,” said George.

“Ay,” Mary said, “but what struck me most was that you gentlemen showed such elevated passion when discussing war, such sensibility, high feeling, and utter conviction—more than I am accustomed to seeing from any . . . respectable males.” Harry Smith gave an uncomfortable laugh at this characterization.

“Perhaps you gentlemen practice war,” Mary went on, “because it allows free play to your passions. You are free to feel, to exist at the highest pitch of emotion. Society does not normally permit this to its members—perhaps it must in order to make war attractive.”

Bysshe listened to her in admiration. “Brava!” he cried. “War as the sole refuge of the passions—I think you have struck the thing exactly.”

Smith and Somerset frowned, working through the notion. It was impossible to read Austen’s weathered countenance. But George shook his head wearily.

“Mere stuff, I’m afraid,” he said. “Your analysis shows an admirable ingenuity, Miss Godwin, but I’m afraid there’s no more place for passion on the battlefield than anywhere else. The poor Inniskillings had passion, but look what became of them.” He paused, shook his head again. “No, it’s drill and cold logic and a good eye for ground that wins the battles. In my line it’s not only my own sensibility that must be mastered, but those of hundreds of men and horses.”

“Drill is meant to master the passions,” said Captain Austen. “For in a battle, the impulse, the overwhelming passion, is to run away. This impulse must be subdued.”

Mary was incredulous. “You claim not to experience these elevated passions which you display so plainly?”

George gave her the insolent, under-eyed look again. “All passions have their place, Miss Godwin. I reserve mine for the appropriate time.”

Resentment snarled up Mary’s spine. “Weren’t those tears I saw standing in your eyes when you described the death of the Inniskillings? Do you claim that’s part of your drill?”

George’s color brightened. “I didn’t shed those tears during the battle. At the time I was too busy damning those cursed Irishmen for the wild fools they were, and wishing I’d flogged more of them when I’d the chance.”

“But wasn’t Bonaparte’s great success on account of his ability to inspire his soldiers and his nation?” Bysshe asked. “To raise their passions to a great pitch and conquer the world?”

“And it was the uninspired, roguey English with their drill and discipline who put him back in his place,” George said. “Bonaparte should have saved the speeches and put his faith in the drill-square.”

Somerset gave an amused laugh. “This conversation begins to sound like one of Mrs. West’s novels of Sense and Sensibility that were so popular in the Nineties,” he said. “I suppose you’re too young to recall them. A Gossip’s Story, and The Advantages of Education. My governess made me read them both.”

Harry Smith looked at Captain Austen with glittering eyes. “In fact—” he began.

Captain Austen interrupted. “One is not blind to the world of feeling,” he said, “but surely Reason must rule the passions, else even a good heart can be led astray.”

“I can’t agree,” Bysshe said. “Surely it is Reason that has led us to the world of law, and property, and equity, and kingship—and all the hypocrisy that comes with upholding these artificial formations, and denying our true nature, all that deprives us of life, of true and natural goodness.”

“Absolutely!” said Claire.

“It is Reason,” Mary said, “which makes you deny the evidence of my senses. I saw your emotion, gentlemen, when you discussed your dead comrades. And I applaud it.”

“It does you credit,” Bysshe added.

“Do you claim not to feel anything in battle?” Mary demanded. “Nothing at all?”

George paused a moment, then answered seriously. “My concentration is very great. It is an elevated sort of apprehension, very intent. I must be aware of so much, you see—I can’t afford to miss a thing. My analytical faculty is always in play.”

“And that’s all?” cried Mary.

That condescending half-smile returned. “There isnae time for else, lass.”

“At the height of a charge? In the midst of an engagement?”

“Then especially. An instant’s break in my concentration and all could be lost.”

“Lord Newstead,” Mary said, “I cannot credit this.”

George only maintained his slight smile, knowing and superior. Mary wanted to wipe it from his face, and considered reminding him of his fractious conduct over the pistols. How’s that for control and discipline, she thought.

But no, she decided, it would be a long, unpleasant ride to Brussels if she upset George again.

Against her inclinations, she concluded to be English, and hypocritical, and say nothing.

BYSSHE FOUND neither wife nor money in Brussels, and George arranged lodgings for them that they couldn’t afford. The only option Mary could think of was to make their way to a channel port, then somehow try to talk their way to England with promise of payment once Bysshe had access to funds in London.

It was something for which she held little hope.

They couldn’t afford any local diversions, and so spent their days in a graveyard, companionably reading.

And then, one morning two days after their arrival in Brussels, as Mary lay ill in their bed, Bysshe returned from an errand with money, coins clanking in a bag. “We’re saved!” he said, and emptied the bag into her lap.

Mary looked at the silver lying on the comforter and felt her anxiety ease. They were old Spanish coins with the head of George III stamped over their original design, but they were real for all that. “A draft from Har . . . from your wife?” she said.

“No.” Bysshe sat on the bed, frowned. “It’s a loan from Byron—Lord Newstead, I mean.”

“Bysshe!” Mary sat up and set bedclothes and silver flying. “You took money from that man? Why?”

He put a paternal hand on hers. “Lord Newstead convinced me it would be in your interest, and Claire’s. To see you safely to England.”

“We’ll do well enough without his money! It’s not even his to give away, it’s his wife’s.”

Bysshe seemed hurt. “It’s a loan,” he said. “I’ll pay it back once I’m in London.” He gave a little laugh. “I’m certain he doesn’t expect repayment. He thinks we’re vagabonds.”

“He thinks worse of us than that.” A wave of nausea took her and she doubled up with a little cry. She rolled away from him. Coins rang on the floor. Bysshe put a hand on her shoulder, stroked her back.

“Poor Pecksie,” he said. “Some English cooking will do you good.”

“Why don’t you believe me?” Tears welled in her eyes. “I’m with child, Bysshe!”

He stroked her. “Perhaps. In a week or two we’ll know for certain.” His tone lightened. “He invited us to a ball tonight.”

“Who?”

“Newstead. The ball’s in his honor, he can invite whomever he pleases. The Prince of Orange will be there, and the English ambassador.”

Mary had no inclination to be the subject of one of George’s freaks. “We have no clothes fit for a ball,” she said, “and I don’t wish to go in any case.”

“We have money now. We can buy clothes.” He smiled. “And Lord Newstead said he would loan you and Claire some jewels.”

“Lady Newstead’s jewels,” Mary reminded.

“All those powerful people! Imagine it! Perhaps we can affect a conversion.”

Mary glared at him over her shoulder. “That money is for our passage to England. George wants only to display us, his tame Radicals, like his tame monkey or his tame panther. We’re just a caprice of his—he doesn’t take either us or our arguments seriously.”

“That doesn’t invalidate our arguments. We can still make them.” Cheerfully. “Claire and I will go, then. She’s quite set on it, and I hate to disappoint her.”

“I think it will do us no good to be in his company for an instant longer. I think he is . . .” She reached behind her back, took his hand, touched it. “Perhaps he is a little mad,” she said.

“Byron? Really? He’s wrong, of course, but . . .”

Nausea twisted her insides. Mary spoke rapidly, desperate to convince Bysshe of her opinions. “He so craves glory and fame, Bysshe. The war gave expression to his passions, gave him the achievement he desired—but now the war’s over and he can’t have the worship he needs. That’s why he’s taken up with us—he wants even our admiration. There’s no future for him now—he could follow Wellington into politics but he’d be in Wellington’s shadow forever that way. He’s got nowhere to go.”

There was a moment’s silence. “I see you’ve been giving him much thought,” Bysshe said finally.

“His marriage is a failure—he can’t go back to England. His relations with women will be irregular, and—”

“Our relations are irregular, Maie. And it’s the better for it.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant he cannot love. It’s worship he wants, not love. And those pretty young men he travels with—there’s something peculiar in that. Something unhealthy.”

“Captain Austen is neither pretty nor young.”

“He’s along only by accident. Another of George’s freaks.”

“And if you think he’s a paederast, well—we should be tolerant. Plato believed it a virtue. And George always asks after you.”

“I do not wish to be in his thoughts.”

“He is in yours.” His voice was gentle. “And that is all right. You are free.”

Mary’s heart sank. “It is your child I have, Bysshe,” she said.

Bysshe didn’t answer. Torcere, she thought. Attorcere, rattorcere.

Claire’s face glowed as she modelled her new ball gown, circling on the parlor carpet of the lodgings George had acquired for Bysshe’s party. Lady Newstead’s jewels glittered from Claire’s fingers and throat. Bysshe, in a new coat, boots, and pantaloons, smiled approvingly from the corner.

“Very lovely, Miss Clairmont,” George approved.

George was in full uniform, scarlet coat, blue facings, gold braid, and byrons laced tight. His cocked hat was laid carelessly on the mantel. George’s eyes turned to Mary.

“I’m sorry you are ill, Miss Godwin,” he said. “I wish you were able to accompany us.”

Bysshe, Mary presumed, had told him this. Mary found no reason why she should support the lie.

“I’m not ill,” she said mildly. “I simply do not wish to go—I have some pages I wish to finish. A story called Hate.”

George and Bysshe flushed alike. Mary, smiling, approached Claire, took her hand, admired gown and gems. She was surprised by the affect: the jewels, designed for an older woman, gave Claire a surprisingly mature look, older and more experienced than her sixteen years. Mary found herself growing uneasy.

“The seamstress was shocked when she was told I needed it tonight,” Claire said. “She had to call in extra help to finish in time.” She laughed. “But money mended everything!”

“For which we may thank Lord Newstead,” Mary said, “and Lady Newstead to thank for the jewels.” She looked up at George, who was still smouldering from her earlier shot. “I’m surprised, my lord, that she allows them to travel without her.”

“Annabella has her own jewels,” George said. “These are mine. I travel often without her, and as I move in the highest circles, I want to make certain that any lady who finds herself in my company can glitter with the best of them.”

“How chivalrous.” George cocked his head, trying to decide whether or not this was irony. Mary decided to let him wonder. She folded her hands and smiled sweetly.

“I believe it’s time to leave,” she said. “You don’t want to keep his highness of Orange waiting.”

Cloaks and hats were snatched; goodbyes were said. Mary managed to whisper to Claire as she helped with her cloak.

“Be careful, Jane,” she said.

Resentment glittered in Claire’s black eyes. “You have a man,” she said.

Mary looked at her. “So does Lady Newstead.”

Claire glared hatred and swept out, fastening bonnet-strings. Bysshe kissed Mary’s lips, George her hand. Mary prepared to settle by the fire with pen and manuscript, but before she could sit, there was a knock on the door and George rushed in.

“Forgot me hat,” he said. But instead of taking it from the mantel, he walked to where Mary stood by her chair and simply looked at her. Mary’s heart lurched at the intensity of his gaze.

“Your hat awaits you, my lord,” she said.

“I hope you will reconsider,” said George.

Mary merely looked at him, forced him to state his business. He took her hand in both of his, and she clenched her fist as his fingers touched hers.

“I ask you, Miss Godwin, to reconsider my offer to take you under my protection,” George said.

Mary clenched her teeth. Her heart hammered. “I am perfectly safe with Mr. Shelley,” she said.

“Perhaps not as safe as you think.” She glared at him. George’s eyes bored into hers. “I gave him money,” he said, “and he told me you were free. Is that the act of a protector?”

Rage flamed through Mary. She snatched her hand back and came within an inch of slapping George’s face.

“Do you think he’s sold me to you?” she cried.

“I can conceive no other explanation,” George said.

“You are mistaken and a fool.” She turned away, trembling in anger, and leaned against the wall.

“I understand this may be a shock. To have trusted such a man, and then discovered—”

The wallpaper had little bees on it, Napoleon’s emblem. “Can’t you understand that Bysshe was perfectly literal!” she shouted. “I am free, he is free, Claire is free—free to go, or free to stay.” She straightened her back, clenched her fists. “I will stay. Goodbye, Lord Newstead.”

“I fear for you.”

“Go away,” she said, speaking to the wallpaper; and after a moment’s silence she heard George turn, and take his hat from the mantel, and leave the building.

Mary collapsed into her chair. The only thing she could think was, Poor Claire.

TWO

MARY WAS pregnant again. She folded her hands over her belly, stood on the end of the dock, and gazed up at the Alps.

Clouds sat low on the mountains, growling. The passes were closed with avalanche and unseasonal snow, the vaudaire storm wind tore white from the steep waves of the gray lake, and Ariel pitched madly at its buoy by the waterfront, its mast-tip tracing wild figures against the sky.

The vaudaire had caused a “seiche”—the whole mass of the lake had shifted toward Montreux, and water levels had gone up six feet. The strange freshwater tide had cast up a line of dead fish and dead birds along the stony waterfront, all staring at Mary with brittle glass eyes.

“It doesn’t look as if we’ll be leaving tomorrow,” Bysshe said. He and Mary stood by the waterfront, cloaked and sheltered by an umbrella. Water broke on the shore, leaped through the air, reaching for her, for Bysshe . . . It spattered at her feet.

She thought of Harriet, Bysshe’s wife, hair drifting, clothes floating like seaweed. Staring eyes like dark glass. Her hands reaching for her husband from the water.

She had been missing for weeks before her drowned body was finally found.

The vaudaire was supposed to be a warm wind from Italy, but its warmth was lost on Mary. It felt like the burning touch of a glacier.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” Mary said. “I’m feeling a little weak.”

She would deliver around the New Year unless the baby was again premature.

A distant boom reached her, was echoed, again and again, by mountains. Another avalanche. She hoped it hadn’t fallen on any of the brave Swiss who were trying to clear the roads.

She and Bysshe returned to the hotel through darkening streets. It was a fine place, rather expensive, though they could afford it now. Their circumstances had improved in the last year, though at cost.

Old Sir Bysshe had died, and left Bysshe a thousand pounds per year. Harriet Shelley had drowned, bricks in her pockets. Mary had given birth to a premature daughter who had lived only two weeks. She wondered about the child she carried—she had an intuition all was not well. Death, perhaps, was stalking her baby, was stalking them all.

In payment for what? Mary wondered. What sin had they committed?

She walked through Montreux’s wet streets and thought of dead glass eyes, and grasping hands, and hair streaming like seaweed. Her daughter dying alone in her cradle at night, convulsing, twitching, eyes open and tiny red face torn with mortal terror.

When Mary had come to the cradle later to nurse the baby, she had thought it in an unusually deep sleep. She hadn’t realized that death had come until after dawn, when the little corpse turned cold.

Death. She and Bysshe had kissed and coupled on her mother’s grave, had shivered together at the gothic delights of Vathek, had whispered ghost stories to one another in the dead of night till Claire screamed with hysteria. Somehow death had not really touched her before. She and Bysshe had crossed war-scarred France two years ago, sleeping in homes abandoned for fear of Cossacks, and somehow death had not intruded into their lives.

“Winter is coming,” Bysshe said. “Do we wish to spend it in Geneva? I’d rather push on to Italy and be a happy salamander in the sun.”

“I’ve had another letter from Mrs. Godwin.”

Bysshe sighed. “England, then.”

She sought his hand and squeezed it. Bysshe wanted the sun of Italy, but Bysshe was her sun, the blaze that kept her warm, kept her from despair. Death had not touched him. He flamed with life, with joy, with optimism.

She tried to stay in his radiance. Where his light banished the creeping shadows that followed her.

As they entered their hotel room they heard the wailing of an infant and found Claire trying to comfort her daughter Alba. “Where have you been?” Claire demanded. There were tears on her cheeks. “I fell asleep and dreamed you’d abandoned me! And then I cried out and woke the baby.”

Bysshe moved to comfort her. Mary settled herself heavily onto a sofa.

In the small room in Montreux, with dark shadows creeping in the corners and the vaudaire driving against the shutters, Mary put her arms around her unborn child and willed the shade of death to keep away.

Bysshe stopped short in the midst of his afternoon promenade. “Great heavens,” he said. His tone implied only mild surprise—he was so filled with life and certitude that he took most of life’s shocks purely in stride.

When Mary looked up, she gasped and her heart gave a crash.

It was a barouche—the barouche. Vermilion wheels, liveried postboys wearing muddy slickers, armorial bearings on the door, the bulletproof top raised to keep out the storm. Baggage piled on platforms fore and aft.

Rolling past as Mary and Bysshe stood on the tidy Swiss sidewalk and stared.

CREDE BYRON, Mary thought viciously. As soon credit Lucifer.

The gray sky lowered as they watched the barouche grind past, steel-rimmed wheels thundering on the cobbles. And then a window dropped on its leather strap, and someone shouted something to the postboys. The words were lost in the vaudaire, but the postboys pulled the horses to a stop. The door opened and George appeared, jamming a round hat down over his auburn hair. His jacket was a little tight, and he appeared to have gained a stone or more since Mary had last seen him. He walked toward Bysshe and Mary, and Mary tried not to stiffen with fury at the sight of him.

“Mr. Omnibus! Ti kanete?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“Miss Godwin.” George bowed, clasped Mary’s hand. She closed her fist, reminded herself that she hated him.

“I’m Mrs. Shelley now.”

“My felicitations,” George said.

George turned to Bysshe. “Are the roads clear to the west?” he asked. “I and my companion must push on to Geneva on a matter of urgency.”

“The roads have been closed for three days,” Bysshe said. “There have been both rockslides and avalanches near Chexbres.”

“That’s what they told me in Vevey. There was no lodging there, so I came here, even though it’s out of our way.” George pressed his lips together, a pale line. He looked over his shoulder at the coach, at the mountainside, at the dangerous weather. “We’ll have to try to force our way through tomorrow,” he said. “Though it will be damned hard.”

“It shouldn’t,” Bysshe said. “Not in a heavy coach like that.”

George looked grim. “It was unaccountably dangerous just getting here,” he said.

“Stay till the weather is better,” Bysshe said, smiling. “You can’t be blamed if the weather holds you up.”

Mary hated Bysshe for that smile, even though she knew he had reasons to be obliging.

Just as she had reasons for hating.

“Nay.” George shook his head, and a little Scots fell out. “I cannae bide.”

“You might make it on a mule.”

“I have a lady with me.” Shortly. “Mules are out of the question.”

“A boat . . .?”

“Perhaps if the lady is superfluous,” Mary interrupted, “you could leave her behind, and carry out your errand on a mule, alone.”

The picture was certainly an enjoyable one.

George looked at her, visibly mastered his unspoken reply, then shook his head.

“She must come.”

“Lord Newstead,” Mary went on, “would you like to see your daughter? She is not superfluous either, and she is here.”

George glanced nervously at the coach, then back. “Is Claire here as well?”

“Yes.”

George looked grim. “This is not . . . a good time.”

Bysshe summoned an unaccustomed gravity. “I think, my lord,” Bysshe said, “there may never be a better time. You have not been within five hundred miles of your daughter since her birth. You are on an urgent errand and may not tarry—very well. But you must spend a night here, and can’t press on till morning. There will never be a better moment.”

George looked at him stony-eyed, then nodded. “What hotel?”

“La Royale.”

He smiled. “Royal, eh? A pretty sentiment for the Genevan Republic.”

“We’re in Vaud, not Geneva.”

“Still not over the border?” George gave another nervous glance over his shoulder. “I need to set a faster pace.”

His long hair streamed in the wind as he stalked back to the coach. Mary could barely see a blonde head gazing cautiously from the window. She half-expected that the coach would drive on and she would never see George again, but instead the postboys turned the horses from the waterfront road into the town, toward the hotel.

Bysshe smiled purposefully and began to stride to the hotel. Mary followed, walking fast across the wet cobbles to keep up with him. “I can’t but think that good will come of this,” he said.

“I pray you’re right.”

Much pain, Mary thought, however it turned out.

George’s new female was tall and blonde and pink-faced, though she walked hunched over as if embrassed by her height, and took small, shy steps. She was perhaps in her middle twenties.

They met, embarrassingly, on the hotel’s wide stair, Mary with Claire, Alba in Claire’s arms. The tall blonde, lower lip outthrust haughtily, walked past them on the way to her room, her gaze passing blankly over them. Perhaps she hadn’t been told who Alba’s father was.

She had a maid with her and a pair of George’s men, both of whom had pistols stuffed in their belts. For a wild moment Mary wondered if George had abducted her.

No, she decided, this was only George’s theatricality. He didn’t have his menagerie with him this time, no leopards or monkeys, so he dressed his postboys as bandits.

The woman passed. Mary felt Claire stiffen. “She looks like you,” Claire hissed.

Mary looked at the woman in astonishment. “She doesn’t. Not at all.”

“She does! Tall, blonde, fair eyes . . .” Claire’s own eyes filled with tears. “Why can’t she be dark, like me?”

“Don’t be absurd!” Mary seized her sister’s hand, pulled her down the stairs. “Save the tears for later. They may be needed.”

In the lobby Mary saw more of George’s men carrying in luggage. Pasmany, the fencing master, had slung a carbine over one shoulder. Mary’s mind whirled—perhaps this was an abduction after all.

Or perhaps the blonde’s family—or husband—was in pursuit.

“This way.” Bysshe’s voice. He led them into one of the hotel’s candlelit drawing rooms, closed the crystal-knobbed door behind them. A huge porcelain stove loomed over them.

George stood uncertain in the candlelight, elegant clothing over muddy boots. He looked at Claire and Alba stonily, then advanced, peered at the tiny form that Claire offered him.

“Your daughter Alba,” Bysshe said, hovering at his shoulder.

George watched the child for a long, doubtful moment, his auburn hair hanging down his forehead. Then he straightened. “My offer rests, Miss Clairmont, on its previous terms.”

Claire drew back, rested Alba on her shoulder. “Never,” she said. She licked her lips. “It is too monstrous.”

“Come, my lord,” Bysshe said. He ventured to put a hand on George’s shoulder. “Surely your demands are unreasonable.”

“I offered to provide the child with means,” George said, “to see that she is raised in a fine home, free from want, and among good people—friends of mine, who will offer her every advantage. I would take her myself but,” hesitating, “my domestic conditions would not permit it.”

Mary’s heart flamed. “But at the cost of forbidding her the sight of her mother!” she said. “That is too cruel.”

“The child’s future will already be impaired by her irregular connections,” George said. “Prolonging those connections could only do her further harm.” His eyes flicked up to Claire. “Her mother can only lower her station, not raise it. She is best off with a proper family who can raise her with their own.”

Claire’s eyes flooded with tears. She turned away, clutching Alba to her. “I won’t give her up!” she said. The child began to cry.

George folded his arms. “That settles matters. If you won’t accept my offer, then there’s an end.” The baby’s wails filled the air.

“Alba cries for her father,” Bysshe said. “Can you not let her into your heart?”

A half-smile twitched across George’s lips. “I have no absolute certainty that I am this child’s father.”

A keening sound came from Claire. For a wild, raging moment Mary looked for a weapon to plunge into George’s breast. “Unnatural man!” she cried. “Can’t you acknowledge the consequences of your own behavior?”

“On the contrary, I am willing to ignore the questionable situation in which I found Miss Clairmont and to care for the child completely. But only on my terms.”

“I don’t trust his promises!” Claire said. “He abandoned me in Munich without a penny!”

“We agreed to part,” George said.

“If it hadn’t been for Captain Austen’s kindness, I would have starved.” She leaned on the door jamb for support, and Mary joined her and buoyed her with an arm around her waist.

“You ran out into the night,” George said. “You wouldn’t take money.”

“I’ll tell her!” Claire drew away from Mary, dragged at the door, hauled it open. “I’ll tell your new woman!”

Fear leaped into George’s eyes. “Claire!” He rushed to the door, seized her arm as she tried to pass; Claire wrenched herself free and staggered into the hotel lobby. Alba wailed in her arms. George’s servants were long gone, but hotel guests stared as if in tableaux, hats and walking-sticks half-raised. Fully aware of the spectacle they were making, Mary, clumsy in pregnancy, inserted herself between George and Claire. Claire broke for the stair, while George danced around Mary like an awkward footballer. Mary rejoiced in the fact that her pregnancy seemed only to make her more difficult to get around.

Bysshe put an end to it. He seized George’s wrist in a firm grip. “You can’t stop us all, my lord,” he said.

George glared at him, his look all fury and ice. “What d’ye want, then?”

Claire, panting and flushed, paused halfway up the stair. Alba’s alarmed shrieks echoed up the grand staircase.

Bysshe’s answer was quick. “A competence for your daughter. Nothing more.”

“A thousand a year,” George said flatly. “No more than that.”

Mary’s heart leaped at the figure that doubled the family’s income.

Bysshe nodded. “That will do, my lord.”

“I want nothing more to do with the girl than that. Nothing whatever.”

“Call for pen and paper. And we can bring this to an end.”

Two copies were made, and George signed and sealed them with his signet before bidding them all a frigid good-night. The first payment was made that night, one of George’s men coming to the door carrying a valise that clanked with gold. Mary gazed at it in amazement—why was George carrying so much?

“Have we done the right thing?” Bysshe wondered, looking at the valise as Claire stuffed it under her bed. “This violence, this extortion?”

“We offered love,” Mary said, “and he returned only finance. How else could we deal with him?” She sighed. “And Alba will thank us.”

Claire straightened and looked down at the bed. “I only wanted him to pay,” said Claire. “Any other considerations can go to the devil.”

THE VAUDAIRE blew on, scarcely fainter than before. The water level was still high. Dead fish still floated in the freshwater tide. “I would venture it,” Bysshe said, frowning as he watched the dancing Ariel, “but not with the children.”

Children. Mary’s smile was inward as she realized how real her new baby was to Bysshe. “We can afford to stay at the hotel a little longer,” she said. “Still—a reef in the mains’l would make it safe enough.” Mary paused a moment, perhaps to hear the cold summons of Harriet Shelley from beneath the water. There was no sound, but she shivered anyway. “No harm to wait another day.”

Bysshe smiled at her hopefully. “Very well. Perhaps we’ll have a chance to speak to George again.”

“Bysshe, sometimes your optimism is . . .” She shook her head. “Let us finish our walk.”

They walked on through windswept morning streets. The bright sun glared off the white snow and deadly black ice that covered the surrounding high peaks. Soon the snow and ice would melt and threaten avalanche once more. “I am growing weary with this town,” Bysshe said.

“Let’s go back to our room and read Chamouni,” Mary suggested. Mr. Coleridge had been a guest of her father’s, and his poem about the Alps a favorite of theirs now they were lodged in Switzerland.

Bysshe was working on writing another descriptive poem on the Vale of Chamouni—unlike Coleridge, he and Mary had actually seen the place—and as an homage to Coleridge, Bysshe was including some reworked lines from Kubla Khan.

The everlasting universe of things, she recited to herself, flows through the mind.

Lovely stuff. Bysshe’s best by far.

On their return to the hotel they found one of George’s servants waiting for them. “Lord Newstead would like to see you.”

Ah, Mary thought. He wants his gold back.

Let him try to take it.

George waited in the same drawing room in which he’d made his previous night’s concession. Despite the bright daylight the room was still lit by lamps—the heavy dark curtains were drawn against the vaudaire. George was standing straight as a whip in the center of the room, a dangerous light in his eyes. Mary wondered if this was how he looked in battle.

“Mr. Shelley,” George said, and bowed, “I would like to hire your boat to take my party to Geneva.”

Bysshe blinked. “I—” he began, then, “Ariel is small, only twenty-five feet. Your party is very large and—”

“The local commissaire visited me this morning,” George interrupted. “He has forbidden me to depart Montreux. As it is vital for me to leave at once, I must find other means. And I am prepared to pay well for them.”

Bysshe looked at Mary, then at George. Hesitated again. “I suppose it would be possible . . .”

“Why is it,” Mary demanded, “that you are forbidden to leave?”

George folded his arms, looked down at her. “I have broken no law. It is a ridiculous political matter.”

Bysshe offered a smile. “If that’s all, then . . .”

Mary interrupted. “If Mr. Shelley and I end up in jail as a result of this, I wonder how ridiculous it will seem.”

Bysshe looked at her, shocked. “Mary!”

Mary kept her eyes on George. “Why should we help you?”

“Because . . .”He paused, ran a nervous hand through his hair. Not used, Mary thought, to justifying himself.

“Because,” he said finally, “I am assisting someone who is fleeing oppression.”

“Fleeing a husband?”

“Husband?” George looked startled. “No—her husband is abroad and cannot protect her.” He stepped forward, his color high, his nostrils flared like those of a warhorse. “She is fleeing the attentions of a seducer—a powerful man who has callously used her to gain wealth and influence. I intend to aid her in escaping his power.”

Bysshe’s eyes blazed. “Of course I will aid you!”

Mary watched this display of chivalry with a sinking heart. The masculine confraternity had excluded her, had lost her within its own rituals and condescension.

“I will pay you a further hundred—” George began.

“Please, my lord. I and my little boat are entirely at your service in this noble cause.”

George stepped forward, clasped his hand. “Mr. Omnibus, I am in your debt.”

The vaudaire wailed at the window. Mary wondered if it was Harriet’s call, and her hands clenched into fists. She would resist the cry if she could.

Bysshe turned to Mary. “We must prepare.” Heavy in her pregnancy, she followed him from the drawing room, up the stair, toward their own rooms. “I will deliver Lord Newstead and his lady to Geneva, and you and Claire can join me there when the roads are cleared. Or if weather is suitable I will return for you.”

“I will go with you,” Mary said. “Of course.”

Bysshe seemed surprised that she would accompany him on this piece of masculine knight-errantry. “It may not be entirely safe on the lake,” he said.

“I’ll make it safer—you’ll take fewer chances with me aboard. And if I’m with you, George is less likely to inspire you to run off to South America on some noble mission or other.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” Mildly. “And I think you are being a little severe.”

“What has George done for us that we should risk anything for him?”

“I do not serve him, but his lady.”

“Of whom he has told you nothing. You don’t even know her name. And in any case, you seem perfectly willing to risk her life on this venture.”

Alba’s cries sounded through the door of their room. Bysshe paused a moment, resignation plain in his eyes, then opened the door. “It’s for Alba, really,” he said. “The more contact between George and our little family, the better it may be for her. The better chance we will have to melt his heart.”

He opened the door. Claire was holding her colicky child. Tears filled her black eyes. “Where have you been for so long? I was afraid you were gone forever!”

“You know better than that.” Mary took the baby from her, the gesture so natural that sadness took a moment to come—the memory that she had held her own lost child this way, held it to her breast and felt the touch of its cold lips.

“And what is this about George?” Claire demanded.

“He wants me to take him down the lake,” Bysshe said. “And Mary wishes to join us. You and Alba can remain here until the roads are clear.”

Claire’s voice rose to a shriek. “No! Never!” She lunged for Alba and snatched the girl from Mary’s astonished arms. “You’re going to abandon me—just like George! You’re all going to Geneva to laugh at me!”

“Of course not,” Bysshe said reasonably.

Mary stared at her sister, tried to speak, but Claire’s cries trampled over her intentions.

“You’re abandoning me! I’m useless to you—worthless! You’ll soon have your own baby!”

Mary tried to comfort Claire, but it was hopeless. Claire screamed and shuddered and wept, convinced that she would be left forever in Montreux. In the end there was no choice but to take her along. Mary received mean satisfaction in watching Bysshe as he absorbed this reality, as his chivalrous, noble-minded expedition alongside the hero of Waterloo turned into a low family comedy, George and his old lover, his new lover, and his wailing bastard.

And ghosts. Harriet, lurking under the water. And their dead baby calling.

Ariel bucked like a horse on the white-topped waves as the vaudaire keened in the rigging. Frigid spray flew in Mary’s face and her feet slid on slippery planking. Her heart thrashed into her throat. The boat seemed half-full of water. She gave a despairing look over her shoulder at the retreating rowboat they’d hired to bring them from the jetty to their craft.

“Bysshe!” she said. “This is hopeless.”

“Better once we’re under way. See that the cuddy will be comfortable for Claire and Alba.”

“This is madness.”

Bysshe licked joyfully at the freshwater spray that ran down his lips. “We’ll be fine, I’m sure.”

He was a much better sailor than she: she had to trust him. She opened the sliding hatch to the cuddy, the little cabin forward, and saw several inches of water sloshing in the bottom. The cushions on the little seats were soaked. Wearily, she looked up at Bysshe.

“We’ll have to bail.”

“Very well.”

It took a quarter hour to bail out the boat, during which time Claire paced back and forth on the little jetty, Alba in her arms. She looked like a specter with her pale face peering out from her dark shawl.

Bysshe cast off the gaskets that reefed the mainsail to the boom, then jumped forward to the halyards and raised the sail on its gaff. The wind tore at the canvas with a sound like a cannonade, open-hand slaps against Mary’s ears. The shrouds were taut as bowstrings. Bysshe reefed the sail down, hauled the halyards and topping lift again till the canvas was taut, lowered the leeboards, then asked Mary to take the tiller while he cast Ariel off from its buoy.

Bysshe braced himself against the gunwale as he hauled on the mooring line, drawing Ariel up against the wind. When Bysshe cast off from the buoy the boat paid instantly off the wind and the sail filled with a rolling boom. Water surged under the boat’s counter and suddenly, before Mary knew it, Ariel was flying fast. Fear closed a fist around her windpipe as the little boat heeled and the tiller almost yanked her arms from their sockets. She could hear Harriet’s wails in the windsong. Mary dug her heels into the planks and hauled the tiller up to her chest, keeping Ariel up into the wind. Frigid water boiled up over the lee counter, pouring into the boat like a waterfall.

Bysshe leapt gracefully aft and released the mainsheet. The sail boomed out with a crash that rattled Mary’s bones and the boat righted itself. Bysshe took the tiller from Mary, sheeted in, leaned out into the wind as the boat picked up speed. There was a grin on his face.

“Sorry!” he said. “I should have let the sheet go before we set out.”

Bysshe tacked and brought Ariel into the wind near the jetty. The sail boomed like thunder as it spilled wind. Waves slammed the boat into the jetty. The mast swayed wildly. The stone jetty was at least four feet taller than the boat’s deck. Mary helped Claire with the luggage—gold clanked heavily in one bag—then took Alba while Bysshe assisted Claire into the boat.

“It’s wet,” Claire said when she saw the cuddy.

“Take your heavy cloak out of your bags and sit on it,” Mary said.

“This is terrible,” Claire said, and lowered herself carefully into the cuddy.

“Go forrard,” Bysshe said to Mary, “and push off from the jetty as hard as you can.”

Forrard. Bysshe so enjoyed being nautical. Clumsy in skirts and pregnancy, Mary climbed atop the cuddy and did as she was asked. The booming sail filled, Mary snatched at the shrouds for balance, and Ariel leaped from the jetty like a stone from a child’s catapult. Mary made her way across the tilting deck to the cockpit. Bysshe was leaning out to weather, his big hands controlling the tiller easily, his long fair hair streaming in the wind.

“I won’t ask you to do that again,” he said. “George should help from this point.”

George and his lady would join the boat at another jetty—there was less chance that the authorities would intervene if they weren’t seen where another Englishman was readying his boat.

Ariel raced across the waterfront, foam boiling under its counter. The second jetty—a wooden one—approached swiftly, with cloaked figures upon it. Bysshe rounded into the wind, canvas thundering, and brought Ariel neatly to the dock. George’s men seized shrouds and a mooring line and held the boat in its place.

George’s round hat was jammed down over his brows and the collar of his cloak was turned up, but any attempt at anonymity was wrecked by his famous laced boots. He seized a shroud and leaped easily into the boat, then turned to help his lady.

She had stepped back, frightened by the gunshot cracks of the luffing sail, the wild swings of the boom. Dressed in a blue silk dress, broad-brimmed bonnet, and heavy cloak, she frowned with her haughty lower lip, looking disdainfully at the little boat and its odd collection of passengers.

George reassured his companion. He and one of his men, the swordmaster Pasmany, helped her into the boat, held her arm as she ducked under the boom.

George grabbed the brim of his hat to keep the wind from carrying it away and performed hasty introductions. “Mr. and Mrs. Shelley. The Comtesse Laufenburg.”

Mary strained her memory, trying to remember if she’d ever heard the name before. The comtesse smiled a superior smile and tried to be pleasant. “Enchanted to make cognizance of you,” she said in French.

A baby wailed over the sound of flogging canvas. George straightened, his eyes a little wild.

“Claire is here?” he asked.

“She did not desire to be abandoned in Montreux,” Mary said, trying to stress the word abandoned.

“My God!” George said. “I wish you had greater consideration of the . . . realities.”

“Claire is free and may do as she wishes,” Mary said.

George clenched his teeth. He took the comtesse by her arm and drew her toward the cuddy.

“The boat will be better balanced,” Bysshe called after, “if the comtesse will sit on the weather side.” And perhaps, Mary thought, we won’t capsize.

George gave Bysshe a blank look. “The larboard side,” Bysshe said helpfully. Another blank look.

“Hang it! The left.”

“Very well.”

George and the comtesse ducked down the hatchway. Mary would have liked to have eavesdropped on the comtesse’s introduction to Claire, but the furious rattling sail obscured the phrases, if any. George came up, looking grim, and Pasmany began tossing luggage toward him. Other than a pair of valises, most of it was military: a familiar-looking pistol case, a pair of sabers, a brace of carbines. George stowed it all in the cuddy. Then Pasmany himself leaped into the boat, and George signaled all was ready. Bysshe placed George by the weather rail, and Pasmany squatted on the weather foredeck.

“If you gentlemen would push us off?” Bysshe said.

The sail filled and Ariel began to move fast, rising at each wave and thudding into the troughs. Spray rose at each impact. Bysshe trimmed the sail, the luff trembling just a little, the rest full and taut, then cleated the mainsheet down.

“A long reach down the length of the lake,” Bysshe said with a smile. “Easy enough sailing, if a little hard on the ladies.”

George peered out over the cuddy, his eyes searching the bank. The old castle of Chillon bulked ominously on the shore, just south of Montreux.

“When do we cross the border into Geneva?” George asked.

“Why does it matter?” Bysshe said. “Geneva joined the Swiss Confederation last year.”

“But the administrations are not yet united. And the more jurisdictions that lie between the comtesse and her pursuers, the happier I will be.”

George cast an uncomfortable look astern. With spray dotting his cloak, his hat clamped down on his head, his body disposed awkwardly on the weather side of the boat, George seemed thoroughly miserable—and in an overwhelming flood of sudden understanding, Mary suddenly knew why. It was over for him. His noble birth, his fame, his entire life to this point—all was as naught. Passion had claimed him for its own. His career had ended: there was no place for him in the army, in diplomatic circles, even in polite society. He’d thrown it all away in this mad impulse of passion.

He was an exile now, and the only people whom he could expect to associate with him were other exiles.

Like the exiles aboard Ariel.

Perhaps, Mary thought, he was only now realizing it. Poor George. She actually felt sorry for him.

The castle of Chillon fell astern, like a grand symbol of George’s hopes, a world of possibility not realized.

“Beg pardon, my lord,” she said, “but where do you intend to go?”

George frowned. “France, perhaps,” he said. “The comtesse has . . . some friends . . . in France. England, if France won’t suit, but we won’t be able to stay there long. America, if necessary.”

“Can the Prince Regent intervene on your behalf?”

George’s smile was grim. “If he wishes. But he’s subject to strange fits of morality, particularly if the sins in question remind him of his own. Prinny will not wish to be reminded of Mrs. Fitzherbert and Lady Hertford. He does wish to look upright in the eyes of the nation. And he has no loyalty to his friends, none at all.” He gave a poised, slow-motion shrug. “Perhaps he will help, if the fit is on him. But I think not.” He reached inside his greatcoat, patted an inside pocket. “Do you think I can light a cigar in this wind? If so, I hope it will not discomfort you, Mrs. Shelley.”

He managed a spark in his strike-a-light, puffed madly till the tinder caught, then ignited his cigar and turned to Bysshe. “I found your poems, Mr. Omnibus. Your Queen Mab and Alastor. The latter of which I liked better, though I liked both well enough.”

Bysshe looked at him in surprise. Wind whistled through the shrouds. “How did you find Mab? There were only seventy copies, and I’m certain I can account for each one.”

George seemed pleased with himself. “There are few doors closed to me.” Darkness clouded his face. “Or rather, were.” With a sigh. He wiped spray from his ear with the back of his hand.

“I’m surprised that you liked Mab at all,” Bysshe said quickly, “as its ideas are so contrary to your own.”

“You expressed them well enough. As a verse treatise of Mr. Godwin’s political thought, I believed it done soundly—as soundly as such a thing can be done. And I think you can have it published properly now—it’s hardly a threat to public order, Godwin’s thought being so out of fashion even among radicals.”

He drew deliberately on his cigar, then waved it. The wind tore the cigar smoke from his mouth in little wisps. “Alastor, though better poetry, seemed in contrast to have little thought behind it. I never understood what that fellow was doing on the boat—was it a metaphor for life? I kept waiting for something to happen.”

Mary bristled at George’s condescension. What are you doing on this little boat? she wanted to ask.

Bysshe, however, looked apologetic. “I’m writing better things now.”

“He’s writing wonderful things now,” Mary said. “An ode to Mont Blanc. An essay on Christianity. A hymn to intellectual beauty.”

George gave her an amused look. “Mrs. Shelley’s tone implies that, to me, intellectual beauty is entirely a stranger, but she misunderstands my point. I found it remarkable that the same pen could produce both Queen Mab and Alastor, and have no doubt that so various a talent will produce very good work in the poetry line—provided,” nodding to Bysshe, “that Mr. Shelley continues in it, and doesn’t take up engineering again, or chemistry.” He grinned. “Or become a sea captain.”

“He is and remains a poet,” Mary said firmly. She used a corner of her shawl to wipe spray from her cheek.

“Who else do you like, my lord?” Bysshe asked.

“Poets, you mean? Scott, above all. Shakespeare, who is sound on political matters as well as having a magnificent . . . shall I call it a stride? Burns, the great poet of my country. And our Laureate.”

“Mr. Southey was kind to me when we met,” Bysshe said. “And Mrs. Southey made wonderful tea-cakes. But I wish I admired his work more.” He looked up. “What do you think of Milton? The Maie and I read him constantly.”

George shrugged. “Dour Puritan fellow. I’m surprised you can stand him at all.”

“His verse is glorious. And he wasn’t a Puritan, but an Independent, like Cromwell—his philosophy was quite unorthodox. He believed, for example, in plural marriage.”

George’s eyes glittered. “Did he now.”

“Ay. And his Satan is a magnificent creation, far more interesting than any of his angels or his simpering pedantic Christ. That long, raging fall from grace, into darkness visible.”

George’s brows knit. Perhaps he was contemplating his own long fall from the Heaven of polite society. His eyes turned to Mary.

“And how is the originator of Mr. Shelley’s political thought? How does your father, Mrs. Shelley?”

“He is working on a novel. An important work.”

“I am pleased to hear it. Does he progress?”

Mary was going to answer simply “Very well,” but Bysshe’s answer came first. “Plagued by lack of money,” he said. “We will be going to England to succor him after this, ah, errand is completed.”

“Your generosity does you credit,” George said, and then resentment entered his eyes and his lip curled. “Of course, you will be able to better afford it, now.”

Bysshe’s answer was mild. “Mr. Godwin lives partly with our support, but he will not speak to us since I eloped with his daughter. You will not acknowledge Alba, but at least you’ve been . . . persuaded . . . to do well by her.”

George preferred not to rise to this, settled instead for clarification. “You support a man who won’t acknowledge you?”

“It is not my father-in-law I support, but rather the author of Political Justice.”

“A nice discernment,” George observed. “Perhaps over-nice.”

“One does what goodness one can. And one hopes people will respond.” Looking at George, who smiled cynically around his cigar.

“Your charity speaks well for you. But perhaps Mr. Godwin would have greater cause to finish his book if poverty were not being made so convenient for him.”

Mary felt herself flushing red. But Bysshe’s reply again was mild. “It isn’t that simple. Mr. Godwin has dependents, and the public that once celebrated his thought has, alas, forgotten him. His novel may retrieve matters. But a fine thing such as this work cannot be rushed—not if it is to have the impact it deserves.”

“I will bow to your expertise in matters of literary production. But still . . . to support someone who will not even speak to you—that is charity indeed. And it does not speak well for Mr. Godwin’s gratitude.”

“My father is a great man!” Mary knew she was speaking hotly, and she bit back on her anger. “But he judges by a . . . a very high standard of morality. He will accept support from a sincere admirer, but he has not yet understood the depth of sentiment between Bysshe and myself, and believes that Bysshe has done my reputation harm—not,” flaring again, “that I would care if he had.”

Ariel thudded into a wave trough, and George winced at the impact. He adjusted his seat on the rail and nodded. “Mr. Godwin will accept money from an admirer, but not letters from an in-law. And Mr. Shelley will support the author of Political Justice, but not his in-laws.”

“And you,” Mary said, “will support a blackmailer, but not a daughter.”

George’s eyes turned to stone. Mary realized she had gone too far for this small boat and close company.

“Gentlemen, it’s cold,” she announced. “I will withdraw.”

She made her way carefully into the cuddy. The tall comtesse was disposed uncomfortably, on wet cushions, by the hatch, the overhead planking brushing the top of her bonnet. Her gaze was mild, but her lip was haughty. There was a careful three inches between her and Claire, who was nursing Alba and, clearly enough, a grudge.

Mary walked past them to the peak, sat carefully on a wet cushion near Claire. Their knees collided every time Ariel fell down a wave. The cuddy smelled of wet stuffing and stale water. There was still water sluicing about on the bottom.

Mary looked at Claire’s baby and felt sadness like an ache in her breast.

Claire regarded her resentfully. “The French bitch hates us,” she whispered urgently. “Look at her expression.”

Mary wished Claire had kept her voice down. Mary leaned out to look at the comtesse, managed a smile. “Vous parlez anglais?” she asked.

“Non. Je regrette. Parles-tu français?” The comtesse had a peculiar accent. As, with a name like Laufenburg, one might expect.

Pleasant of her, though, to use the intimate tu. “Je comprends un peu.” Claire’s French was much better than hers, but Claire clearly had no interest in conversation.

The comtesse looked at the nursing baby. A shadow flitted across her face. “My own child,” in French, “I was forced to leave behind.”

“I’m sorry.” For a moment Mary hated the comtesse for having a child to leave, that and for the abandonment itself.

No. Bysshe, she remembered, had left his own children. It did not make one unnatural. Sometimes there were circumstances.

Speech languished after this unpromising beginning. Mary leaned her head against the planking and tried to sleep, sadly aware of the cold seep of water up her skirts. The boat’s movement was too violent to be restful, but she composed herself deliberately for sleep. Images floated through her mind: the great crumbling keep of Chillon, standing above the surging gray water like the setting of one of “Monk” Lewis’s novels; a gray cat eating a blushing rose; a figure, massive and threatening, somehow both George and her father Godwin, flinging back the bed-curtains to reveal, in the bright light of morning, the comtesse Laufenburg’s placid blonde face with its outthrust, Habsburg lip.

Habsburg. Mary sat up with a cry and banged her skull on the deckhead.

She cast a wild look at Claire and the comtesse, saw them both drowsing, Alba asleep in Claire’s lap. The boat was rolling madly in a freshening breeze: there were ominous, threatening little shrieks of wind in the rigging. The cuddy stank badly.

Mary made her way out of the cuddy, clinging to the sides of the hatch as the boat sought to pitch her out. Bysshe was holding grimly to the tiller with one big hand, controlling the sheet with the other while spray soaked his coat; George and Pasmany were hanging to the shrouds to keep from sliding down the tilted deck.

Astern was Lausanne, north of the lake, and the Cornettes to the south; and Mont Billiat, looming over the valley of the Dranse to the south, was right abeam: they were smack in the middle of the lake, with the vaudaire wind funneling down the valley, stronger than ever with the mountain boundary out of the way.

Mary seized the rail, hauled herself up the tilting deck toward George. “I know your secret,” she said. “I know who your woman is.”

George’s face ran with spray; his auburn hair was plastered to the back of his neck. He fixed her with eyes colder than the glaciers of Mont Blanc. “Indeed,” he said.

“Marie-Louise of the house of Habsburg.” Hot anger pulsed through her, burned against the cold spindrift on her face. “Former Empress of the French!”

Restlessly, George turned his eyes away. “Indeed,” he said again.

Mary seized a shroud and dragged herself to the rail next to him. Bysshe watched in shock as Mary shouted into the wind. “Her husband abroad! Abroad, forsooth—all the way to St. Helena! Forced to leave her child behind, because her father would never let Napoleon’s son out of his control for an instant. Even a Habsburg lip—my God!”

“Very clever, Miss Godwin. But I believe you have divined my sentiments on the subject of clever women.” George gazed ahead, toward Geneva. “Now you see why I wish to be away.”

“I see only vanity!” Mary raged. “Colossal vanity! You can’t stop fighting Napoleon even now! Even when the battlefield is only a bed!”

George glared at her. “Is it my damned fault that Napoleon could never keep his women?”

“It’s your damned fault that you keep her!”

George opened his mouth to spit out a reply and then the vaudaire, like a giant hand, took Ariel’s mast in its grasp and slammed the frail boat over. Bysshe cried out and hauled the tiller to his chest and let the mainsheet go, all far too late. The deck pitched out from under Mary’s heels and she clung to the shroud for dear life. Pasmany shouted in Hungarian. There was a roar as the sail hit the water. The lake foamed over the lee rail and the wind tore Mary’s breath away. There were screams from the cuddy as water poured into the little cabin.

“Halyards and topping lift!” Bysshe gasped. He was clinging to the weather rail: a breaker exploded in his face and he gasped for air. “Let ’em go!”

If the sail filled with water all was lost. Mary let go of the shroud and palmed her way across the vertical deck. Freezing lakewater clutched at her ankles. Harriet Shelley shrieked her triumph in Mary’s ears like the wind. Mary lurched forward to the mast, flung the halyard and topping lift off their cleats. The sail sagged free, empty of everything but the water that poured onto its canvas surface, turning it into a giant weight that would drag the boat over. Too late.

“Save the ladies, George!” Bysshe called. His face was dead-white but his voice was calm. “I can’t swim!”

Water boiled up Mary’s skirts. She could feel the dead weight dragging her down as she clutched at George’s leg and hauled herself up the deck. She screamed as her unborn child protested, a gouging pain deep in her belly.

George raged wildly. “Damn it, Shelley, what can I do?” He had a leg over one of the shrouds; the other was Mary’s support. The wind had taken his hat and his cloak rattled around him like wind-filled canvas.

“Cut the mast free!”

George turned to Mary. “My sword! Get it from the cabin!”

Mary looked down and into the terrified black eyes of Claire, half-out of the cuddy. She held a wailing Alba in her arms. “Take the baby!” she shrieked.

“Give me a sword!” Mary said. A wave broke over the boat, soaking them all in icy rain. Mary thought of Harriet smiling, her hair trailing like seaweed.

“Save my baby!”

“The sword! Byron’s sword! Give it!” Mary clung to George’s leg with one hand and thrust the crying babe away with the other.

“I hate you!” Claire shrieked, but she turned and fumbled for George’s sword. She held it up out of the hatch, and Mary took the cut steel hilt in her hand and drew it rasping from the scabbard. She held it blindly above her head and felt George’s firm hand close over hers and take the sabre away. The pain in her belly was like a knife. Through the boat and her spine she felt the thudding blows as George hacked at the shrouds, and then there was a rending as the mast splintered and Ariel, relieved of its top-hamper, swung suddenly upright.

Half the lake seemed to splash into the boat as it came off its beam-ends. George pitched over backwards as Ariel righted itself, but Mary clung to his leg and kept him from going into the lake while he dragged himself to safety over the rail.

Another wave crashed over them. Mary clutched at her belly and moaned. The pain was ebbing. The boat pirouetted on the lake as the wind took it, and then Ariel jerked to a halt. The wreckage of the mast was acting as a sea-anchor, moderating the wave action, keeping the boat stable. Alba’s screams floated high above Ariel’s remains.

Wood floats, Mary remembered dully. And Ariel was wood, no matter how much water slopped about in her bottom.

Shelley staggered to his feet, shin-deep in lake water. “By God, George,” he gasped. “You’ve saved us.”

“By God,” George answered “so I have.” Mary looked up from the deck to see George with the devil’s light in his eyes, his color high and his sabre in his hand. So, she reckoned, he must have seemed to Napoleon at Genappe. George bent and peered into the cuddy.

“Are the ladies all right?”

“Je suis bien, merci.” From the Austrian princess.

“Damn you to hell, George!” Claire cried. George only grinned.

“I see we are well,” he said.

And then Mary felt the warm blood running down the insides of her legs, and knew that George was wrong.

MARY LAY on a bed in the farmhouse sipping warm brandy. Reddening cloths were packed between her legs. The hemorrhage had not stopped, though at least there was no pain. Mary could feel the child moving within her, as if struggling in its terror. Over the click of knitting needles, she could hear the voices of the men in the kitchen, and smell George’s cigar.

The large farm, sitting below its pastures ttpi stretched up the Noirmont, was owned by a white-mustached old man named Ffeury, a man who seemed incapable of surprise or confusion even when armed men arrived at his doorstep, carrying between them a bleeding woman and a sack filled with gold. He turned Mary over to his wife, hitched up his trousers, put his hat on, and went to St. Prex to find a doctor.

Madame Fleury, a large woman unflappable as her husband, tended Mary and made her drink a brandy toddy while she sat by Mary and did her knitting.

When Fleury returned, his news wasn’t good. The local surgeon had gone up the road to set the bones of some workmen caught in an avalanche—perhaps there would be amputations—but he would return as soon as he could. The road west to Geneva was still blocked by the slide; the road east to Lausanne had been cleared. George seemed thoughtful at the news. His voice echoed in from the kitchen. “Perhaps the chase will simply go past,” he said in English.

“What sort of pursuit do you anticipate?” Bysshe asked. “Surely you don’t expect the Austrian Emperor to send his troops into Switzerland.”

“Stranger things have happened,” George said. “And it may not be the Emperor’s own people after us—it might be Neipperg, acting on his own.”

Mary knew she’d heard the name before, and tried to recall it. But Bysshe said, “The general? Why would he be concerned?”

There was cynical amusement in George’s voice. “Because he’s her highness’s former lover! I don’t imagine he’d like to see his fortune run away.”

“Do you credit him with so base a motive?”

George laughed. “In order to prevent Marie-Louise from joining Bonaparte, Prince Metternich ordered von Neipperg to leave his wife and to seduce her highness—and that one-eyed scoundrel was only too happy to comply. His reward was to be the co-rulership of Parma, of which her highness was to be Duchess.”

“Are you certain of this?”

“Metternich told me at his dinner table over a pipe of tobacco. And Neipperg boasted to me, sir!” A sigh, almost a snarl, came from George. “My heart wrung at his words, Mr. Shelley. For I had already met her highness and—” Words failed him for a moment. “I determined to rescue her from Neipperg’s clutches, though all the Hungarian Grenadiers of the Empire stood in the way!”

“That was most admirable, my lord,” Bysshe said quietly.

Claire’s voice piped up. “Who is this Neipperg?”

“Adam von Neipperg is a cavalry officer who defeated Murat,” Bysshe said. “That’s all I know of him.”

George’s voice was thoughtful. “He’s the best the Austrians have. Quite the beau sabreur, and a diplomat as well. He persuaded Crown Prince Bernadotte to switch sides before the battle of Leipzig. And yes, he defeated Murat on the field of Tolentino, a few weeks before Waterloo. Command of the Austrian army was another of Prince Metternich’s rewards for his . . . services.”

Murat, Mary knew, was Napoleon’s great cavalry general. Neipperg, the best Austrian cavalryman, had defeated Murat, and now Britain’s greatest horseman had defeated Napoleon and Neipperg, one on the battlefield and both in bed.

Such a competitive little company of cavaliers, she thought. Madame Fleury’s knitting needles clacked out a complicated pattern.

“You think he’s going to come after you?” Bysshe asked.

“I would,” simply. “And neither he nor I would care what the Swiss think about it. And he’ll find enough officers who will want to fight for the, ah, honor of their royal family. And he certainly has scouts or agents among the Swiss looking for me—surely one of them visited the commissaire of Montreux.”

“I see.” Mary heard the sound of Bysshe rising from his seat. “I must see to Mary.”

He stepped into the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, took her hand. Madame Fleury barely looked up from her knitting.

“Are you better, Pecksie?”

“Nothing has changed.” I’m still dying, she thought.

Bysshe sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, “to have exposed you to such danger. And now I don’t know what to do.”

“And all for so little.”

Bysshe was thoughtful. “Do you think liberty is so little? And Byron—the voice of monarchy and reaction—fighting for freedom! Think of it!”

My life is bleeding away, Mary thought incredulously, and his child with it. There was poison in her voice when she answered.

“This isn’t about the freedom of a woman, it’s about the freedom of one man to do what he wants.”

Bysshe frowned at her.

“He can’t love,” Mary insisted. “He felt no love for his wife, or for Claire.” Bysshe tried to hush her—her voice was probably perfectly audible in the kitchen. But it was pleasing for her not to give a damn.

“It’s not love he feels for that poor woman in the cellar,” she said. “His passions are entirely concerned with himself—and now that he can’t exorcise them on the battlefield, he’s got to find other means.”

“Are you certain?”

“He’s a mad whirlwind of destruction! Look what he did to Claire. And now he’s wrecked Ariel, and he may yet involve us all in a battle—with Austrian cavalry, forsooth! He’ll destroy us all if we let him.”

“Perhaps it will not come to that.”

George appeared in the door. He was wrapped in a blanket and carried a carbine, and if he was embarrassed by what he’d heard, he failed to display it. “With your permission, Mr. Shelley, I’m going to try to sink your boat. It sits on a rock just below our location, a pistol pointed at our head.”

Bysshe looked at Mary. “Do as you wish.”

“I’ll give you privacy, then.” And pointedly closed the door.

Mary heard his bootsteps march out, the outside door open and close. She put her hand on Bysshe’s arm. I am bleeding to death, she thought. “Promise me you will take no part in anything,” she said. “George will try to talk you into defending the princess—he knows you’re a good shot.”

“But what of Marie-Louise? To be dragged back to Austria by force of arms—what a prospect! An outrage, inhuman and degrading.”

I am bleeding to death, Mary thought. But she composed a civil reply. “Her condition saddens me. But she was born a pawn and has lived a pawn her entire life. However this turns out, she will be a pawn either of George or of Metternich, and we cannot change that. It is the evil of monarchy and tyranny that has made her so. We may be thankful we were not born among her class.”

There were tears in Bysshe’s eyes. “Very well. If you think it best, I will not lift a hand in this.”

Mary put her arms around him, held herself close to his warmth. She clenched trembling hands behind his back.

Soon, she thought, I will lack the strength to do even this. And then I will die.

There was a warm and spreading lake between her legs. She felt very drowsy as she held Bysshe, the effects of the brandy, and she closed her eyes and tried to rest. Bysdie stroked her cheek and hair. Mary, for a moment, dreamed.

She dreamed of pursuit, a towering, shrouded figure stalking her over the lake—but the lake was frozen, and as Mary fled across the ice she found other people standing there, people to whom she ran for help only to discover them all dead, frozen in their places and covered with frost. Terrified, she ran among them, seeing to her further horror that she knew them all: her mother and namesake; and Mr. Godwin; and George, looking at her insolently with eyes of black ice; and lastly the figure of Harriet Shelley, a woman she had never met in life but who Mary knew at once. Harriet stood rooted to a patch of ice and held in her arms the frost-swathed figure of a child. And despite the rime that covered the tiny face, Mary knew at once, and with agonized despair, just whose child Harriet carried so triumphantly in her arms.

She woke, terror pounding in her heart. There was a gunshot from outside. She felt Bysshe stiffen. Another shot. And then the sound of pounding feet.

“They’re here, damn it!” George called. “And my shot missed!”

Gunfire and the sound of hammering swirled through Mary’s perceptions. Furniture was shifted, doors barricaded, weapons laid ready. The shutters had already been closed against the vaudaire, so no one had to risk himself securing the windows. Claire and Alba came into Mary’s room, the both of them screaming; and Mary, not giving a damn any longer, sent them both out. George put them in the cellar with the Austrian princess—Mary was amused that they seemed doomed to share quarters together. Bysshe, throughout, only sat on the bed and held Mary in his arms. He seemed calm, but his heart pounded against her ear. M. Fleury appeared, loading an old Charleville musket as he offhandedly explained that he had served in one of Louis XVI’s mercenary Swiss regiments. His wife put down her knitting needles, poured buckshot into her apron pockets, and went off with him to serve as his loader. Afterwards Mary wondered if that particular episode, that vision of the old man with his gun and powder horn, had been a dream—but no, Madame Fleury was gone, her pockets filled with lead.

Eventually the noise died away. George came in with his Mantons stuffed in his belt, looking pleased with himself. “I think we stand well,” he said. “This place is fine as a fort. At Waterloo we held Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte against worse—and Neipperg will have no artillery. The odds aren’t bad—I counted only eight of them.” He looked at Bysshe. “Unless you are willing to join us, Mr. Shelley, in defense of her highness’s liberty.”

Bysshe sat up. “I wish no man’s blood on my hands.” Mary rejoiced at the firmness in his voice.

“I will not argue against your conscience, but if you won’t fight, then perhaps you can load for me?”

“What of Mary?” Bysshe asked.

Indeed, Mary thought. What of me?

“Can we arrange for her, and for Claire and Alba, to leave this house?”

George shook his head. “They don’t dare risk letting you go—you’d just inform the Swiss authorities. I could negotiate a cease-fire to allow you to become their prisoners, but then you’d be living in the barn or the outdoors instead of more comfortably in here.” He looked down at Mary. “I do not think we should move your lady in any case. Here in the house it is safe enough.”

“But what if there’s a battle? My God—there’s already been shooting!”

“No one was hurt, you’ll note—though if I’d had a Baker or a jager rifle instead of my puisny little carbine, I daresay I’d have dropped one of them. No—what will happen now is that they’ll either try an assault, which will take a while to organize, because they’re all scattered out watching the house, and which will cost them dearly in the end . . . or they’ll wait. They don’t know how many people we have in here, and they’ll be cautious on that account. We’re inside, with plenty of food and fuel and ammunition, and they’re in the outdoors facing unseasonably cold weather. And the longer they wait, the more likely it will be that our local Swiss yeomen will discover them, and then . . .” He gave a low laugh. “Austrian soldiers have never fared well in Switzerland, not since the days of William Tell. Our Austrian friends will be arrested and imprisoned.”

“But the surgeon? Will they not let the surgeon pass?”

“I can’t say.”

Bysshe stared. “My God! Can’t you speak to them?”

“I will ask if you like. But I don’t know what a surgeon can do that we cannot.”

Bysshe looked desperate. “There must be something that will stop the bleeding!”

Yes, Mary thought. Death. Harriet has won.

George gazed down at Mary with thoughtful eyes. “A Scotch midwife would sit her in a tub of icewater.”

Bysshe stiffened like a dog on point. “Is there ice? Is there an ice cellar?” He rushed out of the room. Mary could hear him stammering out frantic questions in French, then Fleury’s offhand reply. When Bysshe came back he looked stricken. “There is an icehouse, but it’s out behind the barn.”

“And in enemy hands.” George sighed. “Well, I will ask if they will permit Madame Fleury to bring ice into the house, and pass the surgeon through when he comes.”

George left the room and commenced a shouted conversation in French with someone outside. Mary winced at the volume of George’s voice. The voice outside spoke French with a harsh accent.

No, she understood. They would not permit ice or a surgeon to enter a house.

“They suspect a plot, I suppose,” George reported. He stood wearily in the doorway. “Or they think one of my men is wounded.”

“They want to make you watch someone die,” Mary said. “And hope it will make you surrender.”

George looked at her. “Yes, you comprehend their intent,” he said. “That is precisely what they want.” Bysshe looked horrified.

George’s look turned intent. “And what does Mistress Mary want?”

Mary closed her eyes. “Mistress Mary wants to live, and to hell with you all.”

George laughed, a low and misanthropic chuckle. “Very well. Live you shall—and I believe I know the way.”

He returned to the other room, and Mary heard his raised voice again. He was asking, in French, what the intruders wanted, and in passing comparing their actions to Napoleon’s abduction of the Due d’Enghien, justly abhorred by all nations.

“A telling hit,” Mary said. “Good old George.” She wrapped her two small pale hands around one of Bysshe’s big ones.

The same voice answered, demanding that Her Highness the Duchess of Parma be surrendered. George returned that her highness was here of her own free will, and that she commanded that they withdraw to their own borders and trouble her no more. The emissary said his party was acting for the honor of Austria and the House of Habsburg. George announced that he felt free to doubt that their shameful actions were in any way honorable, and he was prepared to prove it, corps-a-corps, if Feldmarschall-leutnant von Neipperg was willing to oblige him.

“My God!” Bysshe said. “He’s calling the blackguard out!”

Mary could only laugh. A duel, fought for an Austrian princess and Mary’s bleeding womb.

The other asked for time to consider. George gave it.

“This neatly solves our dilemma, don’t it?” he said after he returned. “If I beat Neipperg, the rest of those German puppies won’t have direction—they’d be on the road back to Austria. Her royal highness and I will be able to make our way to a friendly country. No magistrates, no awkward questions, and a long head start.” He smiled. “And all the ice in the world for Mistress Mary.”

“And if you lose?” Bysshe asked.

“It ain’t to be thought of. I’m a master of the sabre, I practice with Pasmany almost daily, and whatever Neipperg’s other virtues I doubt he can compare with me in the art of the sword. The only question,” he turned thoughtful, “is whether we can trust his offer. If there’s treachery . . .”

“Or if he insists on pistols!” Mary found she couldn’t resist pointing this out. “You didn’t precisely cover yourself with glory the last time I saw you shoot.”

George only seemed amused. “Neipperg only has one eye—I doubt he’s much of a shot, either. My second would have to insist on a sabre fight,” and here he smiled, “pour l’honneur de la cavalerie.”

Somehow Mary found this satisfying. “Go fight, George. I know you love your legend more than you ever loved that Austrian girl—and this will make a nice end to it.”

George only chuckled again, while Bysshe looked shocked. “Truthful Mistress Mary,” George said. “Never without your sting.”

“I see no point in politeness from this position.”

“You would have made a good soldier, Mrs. Shelley.”

Longing fell upon Mary. “I would have made a better mother,” she said, and felt tears sting her eyes.

“God, Maie!” Bysshe cried. “What I would not give!” He bent over her and began to weep.

It was, Mary considered, about time, and then reflected that death had made her satirical.

George watched for a long moment, then withdrew. Mary could hear his boots pacing back and forth in the kitchen, and then a different, younger voice called from outside.

The Feldmarschall-leutnant had agreed to the encounter. He, the new voice, was prepared to present himself as von Neipperg’s second.

“A soldier all right,” George commented. “Civilian clothes, but he’s got that sprig of greenery that Austrian troops wear in their hats.” His voice lifted. “That’s far enough, laddie!” He switched to French and said that his second would be out shortly. Then his bootsteps returned to Mary’s rooms and put a hand on Bysshe’s shoulder.

“Mr. Shelley,” he said, “I regret this intrusion, but I must ask—will you do me the honor of standing my second in this affaire?”

“Bysshe!” Mary cried. “Of course not!”

Bysshe blinked tear-dazzled eyes but managed to speak clearly enough. “I’m totally opposed to the practice. It’s vicious and wasteful and utterly without moral foundation. It reeks of death and the dark ages and ruling-class affectation.”

George’s voice was gentle. “There are no other gentlemen here,” he said. “Pasmany is a servant, and I can’t see sending our worthy M. Fleury out to negotiate with those little noblemen. And—” He looked at Mary. “Your lady must have her ice and her surgeon.”

Bysshe looked stricken. “I know nothing of how to manage these encounters,” he said. “I would not do well by you. If you were to fall as a result of my bungling, I should never forgive myself.”

“I will tell you what to say, and if he doesn’t agree, then bring negotiations to a close.”

“Bysshe,” Mary reminded, “you said you would have nothing to do with this.”

Bysshe wiped tears from his eyes and looked thoughtful.

“Don’t you see this is theater?” Mary demanded. “George is adding this scene to his legend—he doesn’t give a damn for anyone here!”

George only seemed amused. “You are far from death, madam, I think, to show such spirit,” he said. “Come, Mr. Shelley! Despite what Mary thinks, a fight with Neipperg is the only way we can escape without risking the ladies.”

“No,” Mary said.

Bysshe looked thoroughly unhappy. “Very well,” he said. “For Mary’s sake, I’ll do as you ask, provided I do no violence myself. But I should say that I resent being placed in this . . . extraordinary position in the first place.”

Mary settled for glaring at Bysshe.

More negotiations were conducted through the window, and then Bysshe, after receiving a thorough briefing, straightened and brushed his jacket, brushed his knees, put on his hat, and said goodbye to Mary. He was very pale under his freckles.

“Don’t forget to point out,” George said, “that if von Neipperg attempts treachery, he will be instantly shot dead by my men firing from this house.”

“Quite.”

He left Mary in her bed. George went with him, to pull away the furniture barricade at the front door.

Mary realized she wasn’t about to lie in bed while Bysshe was outside risking his neck. She threw off the covers and went to the window. Unbarred the shutter, pushed it open slightly.

Wet coursed down her legs.

Bysshe was holding a conversation with a stiff young man in an overcoat. After a few moments, Bysshe returned and reported to George. Mary, feeling like a guilty child, returned to her bed.

“Baron von Strickow—that’s Neipperg’s second—was taken with your notion of the swordfight pour la cavalerie, but insists the fight should be on horseback.” He frowned. “They know, of course, that you haven’t a horse with you.”

“No doubt they’d offer me some nag or other.” George thought for a moment. “Very well. I find the notion of a fight on horseback too piquant quite to ignore—tell them that if they insist on such a fight, they must bring forward six saddled horses, and that I will pick mine first, and Neipperg second.”

“Very well.”

Bysshe returned to the negotiations, and reported back that all had been settled. “With ill grace, as regards your last condition. But he conceded it was fair.” Bysshe returned to Mary’s room, speaking to George over his shoulder. “Just as well you’re doing this on horseback. The yard is wet and slippery—poor footing for sword work.”

“I’ll try not to do any quick turns on horseback, either.” George stepped into the room, gave Mary a glance, then looked at Bysshe. “Your appreciation of our opponents?”

“The Baron was tired and mud-covered. He’s been riding hard. I don’t imagine the rest of them are any fresher.” Bysshe sat by Mary and took her hand. “He wouldn’t shake my hand until he found out my father was a baronet. And then I wouldn’t shake his.”

“Good fellow!”

Bysshe gave a self-congratulatory look. “I believe it put him out of countenance.”

George was amused. “These kraut-eaters make me look positively democratic.” He left to give Pasmany his carbine and pistols—“the better to keep Neipperg honest.”

“What of the princess?” Mary wondered. “Do you suppose he will bother to tell her of these efforts on her behalf?”

Shortly thereafter came the sound of the kitchen trap being thrown open, and George’s bootheels descending to the cellar. Distant French tones, the sound of female protest, George’s calm insistence. Claire’s furious shrieks. George’s abrupt reply, and then his return to the kitchen.

George appeared in the door, clanking in spurs and with a sword in his hand. Marie-Louise, looking pale, hovered behind him.

Mary looked up at Bysshe. “You won’t have to participate in this any longer, will you?”

George answered for him. “I’d be obliged if Mr. Shelley would help me select my horse. Then you can withdraw to the porch—but if there’s treachery, be prepared to barricade the door again.”

Bysshe nodded. “Very well.” He rose and looked out the window. “The horses are coming, along with the Baron and a one-eyed man.”

George gave a cursory look out the window. “That’s the fellow. He lost the eye at Neerwinden—French sabre cut.” His voice turned inward. “I’ll try to attack from his blind side—perhaps he’ll be weaker there.”

Bysshe was more interested in the animals. “There are three white horses. What are they?”

“Lipizzaners of the royal stud,” George said. “The Roman Caesars rode ’em, or so the Austrians claim. Small horses by the standard of our English hunters, but strong and very sturdy. Bred and trained for war.” He flashed a smile. “They’ll do for me, I think.”

He stripped off his coat and began to walk toward the door, but recollected, at the last second, the cause of the fight and returned to Marie-Louise. He put his arms around her, murmured something, and kissed her cheek. Then, with a smile, he walked into the other room. Bysshe, deeply unhappy, followed. And then Mary, ignoring the questioning eyes of the Austrian princess, worked her way out of bed and went to the window.

From the window Mary watched as George took his time with the horses, examining each minutely, discoursing on their virtues with Bysshe, checking their shoes and eyes as if he were buying them. The Austrians looked stiff and disapproving. Neipperg was a tall, bull-chested man, handsome despite the eyepatch, with a well-tended halo of hair.

Perhaps George dragged the business out in order to nettle his opponent.

George mounted one of the white horses and trotted it round the yard for a brief while, then repeated the experiment with a second Lipizzaner. Then he went back to the first and declared himself satisfied.

Neipperg, seeming even more rigid than before, took the second horse, the one George had rejected. Perhaps it was his own, Mary thought.

Bysshe retreated to the front porch of the farmhouse, Strickow to the barn, and the two horsemen to opposite ends of the yard. Both handled their horses expertly. Bysshe asked each if he were ready, and received a curt nod.

Mary’s legs trembled. She hoped she wouldn’t fall. She had to see it. “Un,” Strickow called out in a loud voice. “Deux. Trois!” Mary had expected the combatants to dash at each other, but they were too cautious, too professional—instead each goaded his beast into a slow trot and held his sabre with the hilt high, the blade dropping across the body, carefully on guard. Mary noticed that George was approaching on his opponent’s blind right side. As they came together there were sudden flashes of silver, too fast for the eye to follow, and the sound of ringing steel.

Then they were past. But Neipperg, as he spurred on, delivered a vicious blind swipe at George’s back. Mary cried out, but there was another clang—George had dropped his point behind his back to guard against just that attack.

“Foul blow!” Bysshe cried, from the porch, then clapped his hands. “Good work, George!”

George turned with an intent smile on his face, as if he had the measure of his opponent. There was a cry from elsewhere in the farmhouse, and Claire came running, terror in her eyes. “Are they fighting?” she wailed, and pushed past Mary to get to the window.

Mary tried to pull her back and failed. Her head swam. “You don’t want to watch this,” she said.

Alba began to cry from the cellar. Claire pushed the shutters wide and thrust her head out.

“Kill him, George!” she shouted. “Kill him!”

George gave no sign of having heard—he and Neipperg were trotting at each other again, and George was crouched down over his horse’s neck, his attention wholly on his opponent.

Mary watched over Claire’s shoulder as the two approached, as blades flashed and clanged—once, twice—and then George thrust to Neipperg’s throat and Mary gasped, not just at the pitilessness of it, but at its strange physical consummation, at the way horse and rider and arm and sword, the dart of the blade and momentum of the horse and rider, merged for an instant in an awesome moment of perfection . . .

Neipperg rode on for a few seconds while blood poured like a tide down his white shirtfront, and then he slumped and fell off his animal like a sack. Mary shivered, knowing she’d just seen a man killed, killed with absolute forethought and deliberation. And George, that intent look still on his face as he watched Neipperg over his shoulder, lowered his scarlet-tipped sword and gave a careless tug of the reins to turn his horse around . . .

Too careless. The horse balked, then turned too suddenly. Its hind legs slid out from under it on the slick grass, George’s arms windmilled as he tried to regain his balance, and the horse, with an almost-human cry, fell heavily on George’s right leg.

Claire and Mary cried out. The Lipizzaner’s legs flailed in the air as he rolled over on George. Bysshe launched himself off the porch in a run. George began to scream, a sound that raised the hair on Mary’s neck.

And, while Adam von Neipperg twitched away his life on the grass, Marie-Louise of Austria, France, and Parma, hearing George’s cries of agony, bolted hysterically for the door and ran out onto the yard and into the arms of her countryman.

“NO!” GEORGE INSISTED. “No surgeons!”

Not a word, Mary noted, for the lost Marie-Louise. She watched from the doorway as his friends carried him in and laid him on the kitchen table. The impassive M. Fleury cut the boot away with a pair of shears and tore the leather away with a suddenness that made George gasp. Bysshe peeled away the bloody stocking, and bit his lip at the sight of protruding bone.

“We must show this to the surgeon, George,” Bysshe said. “The foot and ankle are shattered.”

“No!” Sweat beaded on George’s forehead. “I’ve seen surgeons at their work. My God—” There was horror in his eyes. “I’ll be a cripple!”

M. Fleury said nothing, only looked down at the shattered ankle with his knowing veteran’s eyes. He hitched up his trousers, took a bucket from under the cutting board, and left to get ice for Mary.

The Austrians were long gone, ridden off with their blonde trophy. Their fallen paladin was still in the yard—he’d only slow down their escape.

George was pale and his skin was clammy. Claire choked back tears as she looked down at him. “Does it hurt very much?”

“Yes,” George confessed, “it does. Perhaps Madame Fleury would oblige me with a glass of brandy.”

Madame Fleury fetched the jug and some glasses. Pasmany stood in the corner exuding dark Hungarian gloom. George looked up at Mary, seemed surprised to find her out of bed.

“I seem to be unlucky for your little family,” he said. “I hope you will forgive me.”

“If I can,” said Mary.

George smiled. “Truthful Miss Mary. How fine you are.” A spasm of pain took him and he gasped. Madame Fleury put some brandy in his hand and he gulped it.

“Mary!” Bysshe rushed to her. “You should not be seeing this. Go back to your bed.”

“What difference does it make?” Mary said, feeling the blood streaking her legs; but she allowed herself to be put to bed.

Soon the tub of ice water was ready. It was too big to get through the door into Mary’s room, so she had to join George in the kitchen after all. She sat in the cold wet, and Bysshe propped her back with pillows, and they both watched as the water turned red.

George was pale, gulping brandy from the bottle. He looked at Bysshe.

“Perhaps you could take our mind off things,” he said. “Perhaps you could tell me one of your ghost stories.”

Bysshe could not speak. Tears were running down his face. So to calm him, and to occupy her time when dying, Mary began to tell a story. It was about an empty man, a Swiss baron who was a genius but who lacked any quality of soul. His name, in English, meant the Franked Stone—the stone whose noble birth had paid its way, but which was still a stone, and being a stone unable to know love.

And the baron had a wasting disease, one that caused his limbs to wither and die. And he knew he would soon be a cripple.

Being a genius the baron thought he knew the answer. Out of protoplasm and electricity and parts stolen from the graveyard he built another man. He called this man a monster, and held him prisoner. And every time one of the baron’s limbs began to wither, he’d arrange for his assistants to cut off one of the monster’s limbs, and use it to replace the baron’s withered part. The monster’s own limb was replaced by one from the graveyard. And the monster went through enormous pain, one hideous surgical procedure after another, but the baron didn’t care, because he was whole again and the monster was only a monster, a thing he had created.

But then the monster escaped. He educated himself and grew in understanding and apprehension and he spied on the baron and his family. In revenge the monster killed everyone the baron knew, and the baron was angered not because he loved his family but because the killings were an offense to his pride. So the baron swore revenge on the monster and began to pursue him.

The pursuit took the baron all over the world, but it never ended. At the end the baron pursued the monster to the arctic, and disappeared forever into the ice and mist, into the heart of the white desert of the Pole.

Mary meant the monster to be Soul, of course, and the baron Reason. Because unless the two could unite in sympathy, all was lost in ice and desolation.

It took Mary a long time to tell her story, and she couldn’t tell whether George understood her meaning or not. By the time she finished the day was almost over, and her own bleeding had stopped. George had drunk himself nearly insensible, and a diffident notary had arrived from St. Prex to take everyone’s testimony.

Mary went back to bed, clean sheets and warmth and the arms of her lover. She and her child would live.

The surgeon came with them, took one look at George’s foot, and announced it had to come off.

The surgery was performed on the kitchen table, and George’s screams rang for a long time in Mary’s dreams.

In a few days Mary had largely recovered. She and Bysshe thanked the Fleurys and sailed to Geneva on a beautiful autumn day in their hired boat. George and Claire—for Claire was George’s again—remained behind to sort out George’s legal problems. Mary didn’t think their friendship would last beyond George’s immediate recovery, and she hoped that Claire would not return to England heavy with another child.

After another week’s recovery in Geneva, Bysshe and Mary headed for England and the financial rescue of Mr. Godwin. Mary had bought a pocketbook and was already filling its pages with her story of the Franked Stone. Bysshe knew any nymber of publishers, and assured her it would find a home with one of them.

Frankenstein was an immediate success. At one point there were over twenty stage productions going on at once. Though she received no money from the stage adaptations, the book proved a very good seller, and was never out of print. The royalties proved useful in supporting Bysshe and Mary and Claire—once she returned to them, once more with child—during years of wandering, chiefly in Switzerland and Italy.

George’s promised thousand pounds a year never materialized.

And the monster, the poor abused charnel creature that was Mary’s settlement with death, now stalked through the hearts of all the world.

George went to South America to sell his sword to the revolutionary cause. Mary and Bysshe, reading of his exploits in tattered newspapers sent from England, found it somehow satisfying that he was, at last and however reluctantly, fighting for liberty.

They never saw him again, but Mary thought of him often—the great, famed figure, limping painfully through battle after battle, crippled, ever-restless, and in his breast the arctic waste of the soul, the franked and steely creator with his heart of stone.

THE NIGHT WE BURIED ROAD DOG

Jack Cady

Jack Cady has written a number of novels. His short fiction has appeared in Omni, Pulphouse, and Final Shadows, as well as in many mainstream publications. Broken Moon Press has brought out a collection of his stories called The Sons of Noah. “The Night We Buried Road Dog” is a classic novella—in any genre. On the strength of this piece, Jack won a National Endowment for the Arts grant which, I hope, will give him time to write many more fine short stories.

I

BROTHER JESSE BURIED his ’47 Hudson back in ’61, and the roads got just that much more lonesome. Highway 2 across north Montana still wailed with engines as reservation cars blew past; and it lay like a tunnel of darkness before headlights of big rigs. Tandems pounded, and the smart crack of downshifts rapped across grassland as trucks swept past the bars at every crossroad. The state put up metal crosses to mark the sites of fatal accidents. Around the bars, those crosses sprouted like thickets.

That Hudson was named Miss Molly, and it logged 220,000 miles while never burning a clutch. Through the years, it wore into the respectable look that comes to old machinery. It was rough as a cob, cracked glass on one side, and primer over dents. It had the tough-and-ready look of a hunting hound about its business. I was a good deal younger then, but not so young that I was fearless. The burial had something to do with mystery, and Brother Jesse did his burying at midnight.

Through fluke or foresight, Brother Jesse had got hold of eighty acres of rangeland that wasn’t worth a shake. There wasn’t enough of it to run stock, and you couldn’t raise anything on it except a little hell. Jesse stuck an old house trailer out there, stacked hay around it for insulation in Montana winters, and hauled in just enough water to suit him. By the time his Hudson died, he was ready to go into trade.

“Jed,” he told me the night of the burial, “I’m gonna make myself some history, despite this damn Democrat administration.” Over beside the house trailer, the Hudson sat looking like it was about ready to get off the mark in a road race, but the poor thing was a goner. Moonlight sprang from between spring clouds, and to the westward the peaks of mountains glowed from snow and moonlight. Along Highway 2, some hot rock wound second gear on an old flathead Ford. You could hear the valves begin to float.

“Some little darlin’ done stepped on that boy’s balls,” Jesse said about the driver. “I reckon that’s why he’s looking for a ditch.” Jesse sighed and sounded sad. “At least we got a nice night. I couldn’t stand a winter funeral.”

“Road Dog?” I said about the driver of the Ford, which shows just how young I was at the time.

“It ain’t The Dog,” Jesse told me. “The Dog’s a damn survivor.”

You never knew where Brother Jesse got his stuff, and you never really knew if he was anybody’s brother. The only time I asked, he said, “I come from a close-knit family such as your own,” and that made no sense. My own father died when I was twelve, and my mother married again when I turned seventeen. She picked up and moved to Wisconsin.

No one even knew when, or how, Jesse got to Montana territory. We just looked up one day, and there he was, as natural as if he’d always been here, and maybe he always had.

His eighty acres began to fill up. Old printing presses stood gap mouthed like spinsters holding conversation. A salvaged greenhouse served for storing dog food, engine parts, chromium hair dryers from 1930s beauty shops, dime-store pottery, blades for hay cutters, binder twine, an old gas-powered crosscut saw, seats from a school bus, and a bunch of other stuff not near as useful.

A couple of tabbies lived in that greenhouse, but the Big Cat stood outside. It was an old D6 bulldozer with a shovel, and Jesse stoked it up from time to time. Mostly it just sat there. In summers, it provided shade for Jesse’s dogs: Potato was brown and fat and not too bright, while Chip was little and fuzzy. Sometimes they rode with Jesse, and sometimes stayed home. Me or Mike Tarbush fed them. When anything big happened, you could count on those two dogs to get underfoot. Except for me, they were the only ones who attended the funeral.

“If we gotta do it,” Jesse said mournfully, “we gotta.” He wound up the Cat, turned on the headlights, and headed for the grave site, which was an embankment overlooking Highway 2. Back in those days, Jesse’s hair still shone black, and it was even blacker in the darkness. It dangled around a face that carried an Indian forehead and a Scotsman’s nose. Denim stretched across most of the six feet of him, and he wasn’t rangy; he was thin. He had feet to match his height, and his hands seemed bigger than his feet; but the man could skin a Cat.

I stood in moonlight and watched him work. A little puff of flame dwelt in the stack of the bulldozer. It flashed against the darkness of those distant mountains. It burbled hot in the cold spring moonlight. Jesse made rough cuts pretty quick, moved a lot of soil, then started getting delicate. He shaped and reshaped that grave. He carved a little from one side, backed the dozer, found his cut not satisfactory. He took a spoonful of earth to straighten things, then fussed with the grade leading into the grave. You could tell he wanted a slight elevation, so the Hudson’s nose would be sniffing toward the road. Old Potato dog had a hound’s ears but not a hound’s good sense. He started baying at the moon.

It came to me that I was scared. Then it came to me that I was scared most of the time anyway. I was nineteen, and folks talked about having a war across the sea. I didn’t want to hear about it. On top of the war talk, women were driving me crazy: the ones who said “no” and the ones who said “yes.” It got downright mystifying just trying to figure out which was worse. At nineteen, it’s hard to know how to act. There were whole weeks when I could pass myself off as a hellion, then something would go sour. I’d get hit by a streak of conscience and start acting like a missionary.

“Jed,” Jesse told me from the seat of the dozer, “go rig a tow on Miss Molly.” In the headlights the grave now looked like a garage dug into the side of that little slope. Brother Jesse eased the Cat back in there to fuss with the grade. I stepped slow toward the Hudson, wiggled under, and fetched the towing cable around the frame. Potato howled. Chip danced like a fuzzy fury, and started chewing on my boot like he was trying to drag me from under the Hudson. I was on my back trying to kick Chip away and secure the cable. Then I like to died from fright.

Nothing else in the world sounds anywhere near like a Hudson starter. It’s a combination of whine and clatter and growl. If I’d been dead a thousand years, you could stand me right up with a Hudson starter. There’s threat in that sound. There’s also the promise that things can get pretty rowdy, pretty quick.

The starter went off. The Hudson jiggled. In the one-half second it took to get from under that car, I thought of every bad thing I ever did in my life. I was headed for Hell, certain sure. By the time I was on my feet, there wasn’t an ounce of blood showing anywhere on me. When the old folks say “white as a sheet,” they’re talking about a guy under a Hudson.

Brother Jesse climbed from the Cat and gave me a couple of shakes.

“She ain’t dead,” I stuttered. “The engine turned over. Miss Molly’s still thinking speedy.” From Highway 2 came the wail of Mike Tarbush’s ’48 Roadmaster. Mike loved and cussed that car. It always flattened out at around eighty.

“There’s still some sap left in the batt’ry,” Jesse said about the Hudson. “You probably caused a short.” He dropped the cable around the hitch on the dozer. “Steer her,” he said.

The steering wheel still felt alive, despite what Jesse said. I crouched behind the wheel as the Hudson got dragged toward the grave. Its brakes locked twice, but the towing cable held. The locked brakes caused the car to sideslip. Each time, Jesse cussed. Cold spring moonlight made the shadowed grave look like a cave of darkness.

The Hudson bided its time. We got it lined up, then pushed it backward into the grave. The hunched front fenders spread beside the snarly grille. The front bumper was the only thing about that car that still showed clean and uncluttered. I could swear Miss Molly moved in the darkness of the grave, about to come charging onto Highway 2. Then she seemed to make some kind of decision, and sort of settled down. Jesse gave the eulogy.

“This here car never did nothing bad,” he said. “I must have seen a million crap crates, but this car wasn’t one of them. She had a second gear like Hydra-Matic, and you could wind to seventy before you dropped to third. “There wasn’t no top end to her—at least I never had the guts to find it. This here was a hundred-mile-an-hour car on a bad night, and God knows what on a good’n.” From Highway 2, you could hear the purr of Matt Simons’s ’56 Dodge, five speeds, what with the overdrive, and Matt was scorching.

Potato howled long and mournful. Chip whined. Jesse scratched his head, trying to figure a way to end the eulogy. It came to him like a blessing. “I can’t prove it,” he said, “ ’cause no one could. But I expect this car has passed The Road Dog maybe a couple of hundred times.” He made like he was going to cross himself, then remembered he was Methodist. “Rest in peace,” he said, and he said it with eyes full of tears. “There ain’t that many who can comprehend The Dog.” He climbed back on the Cat and began to fill the grave. Next day, Jesse mounded the grave with real care. He erected a marker, although the marker was more like a little signboard:

1947-1961

Hudson coupe—“Molly”

220,023 miles on straight eight cylinder

Died of busted crankshaft

Beloved in the memory of

Jesse Still

Montana roads are long and lonesome, and Highway 2 is lonesomest. You pick it up over on the Idaho border where the land is mountains. Bear and cougar still live pretty good, and beaver still build dams. The highway runs beside some pretty lakes. Canada is no more than a jump away; it hangs at your left shoulder when you’re headed east.

And can you roll those mountains? Yes, oh yes. It’s two-lane all the way across, and twisty in the hills. From Libby, you ride down to Kalispell, then pop back north. The hills last till the Blackfoot reservation. It’s rangeland into Cut Bank, then to Havre. That’s just about the center of the state.

Just let the engine howl from town to town. The road goes through a dozen, then swings south. And there you are at Glasgow and the river. By Wolf Point, you’re in cropland, and it’s flat from there until Chicago.

I almost hate to tell about this road, because easterners may want to come and visit. Then they’ll do something dumb at a blind entry. The state will erect more metal crosses. Enough folks die up here already. And it’s sure no place for rice grinders, or tacky Swedish station wagons, or high-priced German crap crates. This was always a V-8 road, and V-12 if you had ’em. In the old, old days there were even a few V-16s up here. The top end on those things came when friction stripped the tires from too much speed.

Speed or not, brakes sure sounded as cars passed Miss Molly’s grave. Pickup trucks fishtailed as men snapped them to the shoulder. The men would sit in their trucks for a minute, scratching their heads like they couldn’t believe what they’d just seen. Then they’d climb from the truck, walk back to the grave, and read the marker. About half of them would start holding their sides. One guy even rolled around on the ground, he was laughing so much.

“These old boys are laughing now,” Brother Jesse told me, “but I predict a change in attitude. I reckon they’ll come around before first snowfall.”

With his car dead, Jesse had to find a set of wheels. He swapped an old hay rake and a gang of discs for a ’49 Chevrolet.

“It wouldn’t pull the doorknob off a cathouse,” he told me. “It’s just to get around in while I shop.”

The whole deal was going to take some time. Knowing Jesse, I figured he’d go through half a dozen trades before finding something comfortable. And I was right.

He first showed up in an old Packard hearse that once belonged to a funeral home in Billings. He’d swapped the Chev for the hearse, plus a gilt-covered coffin so gaudy it wouldn’t fit anybody but a radio preacher. He swapped the hearse to Sam Winder, who aimed to use it for hunting trips. Sam’s dogs wouldn’t go anywhere near the thing. Sam opened all the windows and the back door, then took the hearse up to speed trying to blow out all the ghosts. The dogs still wouldn’t go near it. Sam said, “To hell with it,” and pushed it into a ravine. Every rabbit and fox and varmint in that ravine came bailing out, and nobody has gone in there ever since.

Jesse traded the coffin to Old Man Jefferson, who parked the thing in his woodshed. Jefferson was supposed to be on his last legs, but figured he wasn’t ever, never, going to die if his poor body knew it would be buried in that monstrosity. It worked for several years, too, until a bad winter came along, and he split it up for firewood. But we still remember him.

Jesse came out of those trades with a ’47 Pontiac and a Model T. He sold the Model T to a collector, then traded the Pontiac and forty bales of hay for a ’53 Studebaker. He swapped the Studebaker for a ratty pickup and all the equipment in a restaurant that went bust. He peddled the equipment to some other poor fellow who was hell-bent to go bust in the restaurant business. Then he traded the pickup for a motorcycle, plus a ’51 Plymouth that would just about get out of its own way. By the time he peddled both of them, he had his pockets full of cash and was riding shanks’ mare.

“Jed,” he told me, “let’s you and me go to the big city.” He was pretty happy, but I remembered how scared I’d been at the funeral. I admit to being skittish.

From the center of north Montana, there weren’t a championship lot of big cities. West was Seattle, which was sort of rainy and mythological. North was Winnipeg, a cow town. South was Salt Lake City. To the east . . .

“The hell with it,” Brother Jesse said. “We’ll go to Minneapolis.”

It was about a thousand miles. Maybe fifteen hours, what with the roads. You could sail Montana and North Dakota, but those Minnesota cops were humorless.

I was shoving a sweet old ’53 Desoto. It had a good bit under the bonnet, but the suspension would make a grown man cry. It was a beautiful beast, though. Once you got up to speed, that front end would track like a cat. The upholstery was like brand-new. The radio worked. There wasn’t a scratch or ding on it. I had myself a banker’s car, and there I was, only nineteen.

“We may want to loiter,” Jesse told me. “Plan on a couple of overnights.”

I had a job, but told myself that I was due for a vacation; and so screw it. Brother Jesse put down food for the tabbies and whistled up the dogs. Potato hopped into the backseat in his large, dumb way. He looked expectant. Chip sort of hesitated. He made a couple of jumps straight up, then backed down and started barking. Jesse scooped him up and shoved him in with old Potato dog.

“The upholstery,” I hollered. It was the first time I ever stood up to Jesse.

Jesse got an old piece of tarp to put under the dogs. “Pee, and you’re a goner,” he told Potato.

We drove steady through the early-summer morning. The Desoto hung in around eighty, which was no more than you’d want, considering the suspension. Rangeland gave way to cropland. The radio plugged away with western music, beef prices, and an occasional preacher saying, “Grace” and “Gimmie.” Highway 2 rolled straight ahead, sometimes rising gradual, so that cars appeared like rapid-running spooks out of the blind entries. There’d be a little flash of sunlight from a windshield. Then a car would appear over the rise, and usually it was wailing.

We came across a hell of a wreck just beyond Havre. A new Mercury station wagon rolled about fifteen times across the landscape. There were two nice-dressed people and two children. Not one of them ever stood a chance. They rattled like dice in a drum. I didn’t want to see what I was looking at.

Bad wrecks always made me sick, but not sick to puking. That would not have been manly. I prayed for those people under my breath and got all shaky. We pulled into a crossroads bar for a sandwich and a beer. The dogs hopped out. Plenty of hubcaps were nailed on the wall of the bar. We took a couple of them down and filled them with water from an outside tap. The dogs drank and peed.

“I’ve attended a couple myself,” Brother Jesse said about the wreck. “Drove a Terraplane off a bridge back in ’53. Damn near drownded.” Jesse wasn’t about to admit to feeling bad. He just turned thoughtful.

“This here is a big territory,” he said to no one in particular. “But you can get across her if you hustle. I reckon that Merc was loaded wrong, or blew a tire.” Beyond the windows of the bar, eight metal crosses lined the highway. Somebody had tied red plastic roses on one of them. Another one had plastic violets and forget-me-nots. We lingered a little. Jesse talked to the guy at the bar, and I ran a rack at the pool table. Then Jesse bought a six-pack while I headed for the can. Since it was still early in the day, the can was clean; all the last night’s pee and spit mopped from the floor. Somebody had just painted the walls. There wasn’t a thing written on them, except that Road Dog had signed in.

Road Dog

How are things in Glocca Mora?

His script was spidery and perfect, like an artist who drew a signature. I touched the paint, and it was still tacky. We had missed The Dog by only a few minutes.

ROAD DOG was like Jesse in a way. Nobody could say exactly when he first showed up, but one day he was there. We started seeing the name “Road Dog” written in what Matt Simons called “a fine Spencerian hand.” There was always a message attached, and Matt called them “cryptic.” The signature and messages flashed from the walls of cans in bars, truck stops, and roadside cafes through four states.

We didn’t know Road Dog’s route at first. Most guys were tied to work or home or laziness. In a year or two, though, Road Dog’s trail got mapped. His fine hand showed up all along Highway 2, trailed east into North Dakota, dropped south through South Dakota, then ran back west across Wyoming. He popped north through Missoula and climbed the state until he connected with Highway 2 again. Road Dog, whoever he was, ran a constant square of road that covered roughly two thousand miles.

Sam Winder claimed Road Dog was a Communist who taught social studies at U. of Montana. “Because,” Sam claimed, “that kind of writing comes from Europe. That writing ain’t U.S.A.”

Mike Tarbush figured Road Dog was a retired cartoonist from a newspaper. He figured nobody could spot The Dog because The Dog slipped past us in a Nash, or some other old-granny car.

Brother Jesse suggested that Road Dog was a truck driver, or maybe a gypsy, but sounded like he knew better.

Matt Simons supposed Road Dog was a traveling salesman with a flair for advertising. Matt based his notion on one of the cryptic messages:

Road Dog

Ringling Bros. Barnum and Toothpaste

I didn’t figure anything. Road Dog stood in my imagination as the heart and soul of Highway 2. When night was deep and engines blazed, I could hang over the wheel and run down that tunnel of two-lane into the night.

The nighttime road is different than any other thing. Ghosts rise around the metal crosses, and ghosts hitchhike along the wide berm. All the mysteries of the world seem normal after dark. If imagination shows dead thumbs aching for a ride, those dead folk only prove the hot and spermy goodness of life. I’d overtake some taillights, grab the other lane, and blow doors off some party goer who tried to stay out of the ditches. A man can sing and cuss and pray. The miles fill with dreams of power, and women, and happy, happy times.

Road Dog seemed part of that romance. He was the very soul of mystery, a guy who looked at the dark heart of the road and still flew free enough to make jokes and write that fine hand.

In daytime it was different, though. When I saw Road Dog signed in on the wall of that can, it just seemed like a real bad sign.

The guy who owned the bar had seen no one. He claimed he’d been in the back room putting bottles in his cold case. The Dog had come and gone like a spirit.

Jesse and I stood in the parking lot outside the bar. Sunlight lay earthy and hot across the new crops. A little puff of dust rose from a side road. It advanced real slow, so you could tell it was a farm tractor. All around us meadowlarks and tanagers were whooping it up.

“We’ll likely pass him,” Jesse said, “if we crowd a little.” Jesse pretended he didn’t care, but anyone would. We loaded the dogs, and even hung the hubcaps back up where we got them, because it was what a gentleman would do. The Desoto acted as eager as any Desoto could. We pushed the top end, which was eighty-nine, and maybe ninety-two downhill. At that speed, brakes don’t give you much, so you’d better trust your steering and your tires.

If we passed The Dog we didn’t know it. He might have parked in one of the towns, and of course we dropped a lot of revs passing through towns, that being neighborly. What with a little loafing, some pee stops, and general fooling around, we did not hit Minneapolis until a little after midnight. When we checked into a motel on the strip, Potato was sleepy and grumpy. Chip looked relieved.

“Don’t fall in love with that bed,” Jesse told me. “Some damn salesman is out there waitin’ to do us in. It pays to start early.”

Car shopping with Jesse turned out as fascinating as anybody could expect. At 7:00 a.m. we cruised the lots. Cars stood in silent rows like advertising men lined up for group pictures. It being Minneapolis, we saw a lot of high-priced iron. Cadillacs and Packards and Lincolns sat beside Buick convertibles, hemi Chryslers, and Corvettes (“Nice c’hars,” Jesse said about the Corvettes, “but no room to ’em. You couldn’t carry more than one sack of feed.”). Hudson; and Studebakers hunched along the back rows. On one lot was something called “Classic Lane.” A Model A stood beside a ’37 International pickup. An L29 Cord sat like a tombstone, which it was, because it had no engine. But, glory be, beside the Cord nestled a ’39 LaSalle coupe just sparkling with threat. That LaSalle might have snookered Jesse, except something highly talented sat buried deep in the lot.

It was the last of the fast and elegant Lincolns, a ’54 coupe as snarly as any man could want. The ’53 model had taken the Mexican Road Race. The ’54 was a refinement. After that the marque went downhill. It started building cars for businessmen and rich grannies.

Jesse walked round and round the Lincoln, which looked like it was used to being cherished. Matchless and scratchless. It was a little less than fire-engine red, with a white roof and a grille that could shrug off a cow. That Linc was a solid set of fixings. Jesse got soft lights in his eyes. This was no Miss Molly, but this was Miss somebody. There were a lot of crap crates running out there, but this Linc wasn’t one of them.

“You prob’ly can’t even get parts for the damn thing,” Jesse murmured, and you could tell he was already scrapping with a salesman. He turned his back on the Lincoln. “We’ll catch a bite to eat,” he said. “This may take a couple days.”

I felt sort of bubbly. “The Dog ain’t gonna like this,” I told Jesse.

“The Dog is gonna love it,” he said. “Me and The Dog knows that road.”

By the time the car lots opened at 9:00 A.M., Jesse had a trader’s light in his eyes. About all that needs saying is that never before or since did I ever see a used-car salesman cry.

The poor fellow never had a chance. He stood in his car lot most of the day while me and Jesse went through every car lot on the strip. We waved to him from a sweet little ’57 Cad, and we cruised past real smooth in a mama-san ’56 Imperial. We kicked tires on anything sturdy while he was watching, and we never even got to his lot until fifteen minutes before closing. Jesse and I climbed from my Desoto. Potato and Chip tailed after us.

“I always know when I get to Minneapolis,” Jesse said to me, but loud enough the salesman could just about hear. “My woman wants to lay a farmer, and my dogs start pukin’.” When we got within easy hearing range, Jesse’s voice got humble. “I expect this fella can help a cowboy in a fix.”

I followed, experiencing considerable admiration. In two sentences, Jesse had his man confused.

Potato was dumb enough that he trotted right up to the Lincoln. Chip sat and panted, pretending indifference. Then he ambled over to a ragged-out Pontiac and peed on the tire. “I must be missing something,” Jesse said to the salesman, “because that dog has himself a dandy nose.” He looked at the Pontiac. “This thing got an engine?” We all conversed for the best part of an hour. Jesse refused to even look at the Lincoln. He sounded real serious about the LaSalle, to the point of running it around a couple of blocks. It was a darling. It had ceramic-covered manifolds to protect against heat and rust. It packed a long-stroke V-8 with enough torque to bite rubber in second gear. My Desoto was a pretty thing, but until that LaSalle I never realized that my car was a total pussycat. When we left the lot, the salesman looked sad. He was late for supper.

“Stay with what you’ve got,” Jesse told me as he climbed in my Desoto. “The clock has run out on that LaSalle. Let a collector have it. I hate it when something good dies for lack of parts.” I wondered if he was thinking of Miss Molly. “Because,” Jesse said, and kicked the tire on a silly little Volkswagen, “the great, good cars are dying. I blame it on the Germans.” Next day we bought the Lincoln and made the salesman feel like one proud pup. He figured he foisted something off on Jesse that Jesse didn’t want. He was so stuck on himself that he forgot that he had asked a thousand dollars, and come away with $550. He even forgot that his eyes were swollen, and that maybe he crapped his pants.

We went for a test drive, but only after Jesse and I crawled around under the Linc. A little body lead lumped in the left rear fender, but the front end stood sound. Nobody had pumped any sawdust into the differential. We found no water in the oil, or oil in the water. The salesman stood around, admiring his shoeshine. He was one of those easterners who can’t help talking down to people, especially when he’s trying to be nice. I swear he wore a white tie with little red ducks on it. That Minnesota sunlight made his red hair blond and his face pop with freckles.

Jesse drove real quiet until he found an interesting stretch of road. The salesman sat beside him. Me and Potato and Chip hunkered in the backseat. Chip looked sort of nauseated, but Potato was pretty happy.

“I’m afraid,” Jesse said, regretful, “that this thing is gonna turn out to be a howler. A fella gets a few years on him, and he don’t want a screamy car.” Brother Jesse couldn’t have been much more than thirty, but he tugged on his nose and ears like he was ancient. “I sure hope,” he said, real mournful, “that nobody stuck a boot in any of these here tires.” Then he poured on some coal.

There was a most satisfying screech. That Linc took out like a roadrunner in heat. The salesman’s head snapped backward, and his shoulders dug into the seat. Potato gave a happy, happy woof and stuck his nose out the open window. I felt like yelling, “Hosanna,” but knew enough to keep my big mouth shut. The Linc shrugged off a couple of cars that were conservatively motoring. It wheeled past a hay truck as the tires started humming. The salesman’s freckles began to stand up like warts while the airstream howled. Old Potato kept his nose sticking through the open window, and the wind kept drying it. Potato was so damn dumb he tried to lick it wet while his nose stayed in the airstream. His tongue blew sideways.

“It ain’t nothing but speed,” Jesse complained. “Look at this here steering.” He joggled the wheel considerable, which at ninety got even more considerable. The salesman’s tie blew straight backward. The little red ducks matched his freckles. “Jee-sus-Chee-sus,” he said. “Eight hundred, and slow down.” He braced himself against the dash.

When it hit the century mark, the Linc developed a little float in the front end. I expect all of us were thinking about the tires.

You could tell Jesse was jubilant. The Linc still had some pedal left.

“I’m gettin’ old,” Jesse hollered above the wind. “This ain’t no car for an old man.”

“Seven hundred,” the salesman said. “And Mother of God, slow it down.”

“Five-fifty,” Jesse told him, and dug the pedal down one more notch.

“You got it,” the salesman hollered. His face twisted up real teary. Then Potato got all grateful and started licking the guy on the back of the neck.

So Jesse cut the speed and bought the Linc. He did it diplomatic, pretending he was sorry he’d made the offer. That was kind of him. After all, the guy was nothing but a used-car salesman.

WE DID a second night in that motel. The Linc and Desoto sat in an all-night filling station. Lube, oil change, and wash, because we were riding high. Jesse had a heap of money left over. In the morning, we got new jeans and shirts, so as to ride along like gentlemen.

“We’ll go back through South Dakota,” Jesse told me. “There’s a place I’ve heard about.”

“What are we looking for?”

“We’re checking on The Dog,” Jesse told me, and would say no more.

We eased west to Bowman, just under the North Dakota line. Jesse sort of leaned into it, just taking joy from the whole occasion. I flowed along as best the Desoto could. Potato rode with Jesse, and Chip sat on the front seat beside me. Chip seemed rather easier in his mind.

A roadside cafe hunkered among tall trees. It didn’t even have a neon sign. Real old-fashioned.

“I heard of this place all my life,” Jesse said as he climbed from the Linc. “This here is the only outhouse in the world with a guest registry.” He headed toward the rear of the cafe.

I tailed along, and Jesse, he was right. It was a palatial privy built like a little cottage. The men’s side was a three-holer. There was enough room for a stand-up desk. On the desk was one of those old-fashioned business ledgers like you used to see in banks.

“They’re supposed to have a slew of these inside,” Jesse said about the register as he flipped pages. “All the way back to the early days.”

Some spirit of politeness seemed to take over when you picked up that register. There was hardly any bad talk. I read a few entries:

On this site, May 16th, 1971, James John Johnson (John-John)

cussed hell out of his truck.

I came, I saw, I kinda liked it.—Bill Samuels, Tulsa

This place does know squat.—Pauley Smith, Ogden

This South Dakota ain’t so bad,
but I sure got the blues,

I’m working in Tacoma,

’cause my kids all need new shoes.—Sad George

Brother Jesse flipped through the pages. “I’m even told,” he said, “that Teddy Roosevelt crapped here. This is a fine old place.” He sort of hummed as he flipped. “Uh, huh,” he said, “The Dog done made his pee spot.” He pointed to a page:

Road Dog

Run and run as fast as you can
you can’t catch me—I’m the Gingerbread Man.

Jesse just grinned. “He’s sorta upping the ante, ain’t he? You reckon this is getting serious?” Jesse acted like he knew what he was talking about, but I sure didn’t.

II

WE DIDN’T know, as we headed home, that Jesse’s graveyard business was about to take off. That wouldn’t change him, though. He’d almost always had a hundred dollars in his jeans anyway, and was usually a happy man. What changed him was Road Dog and Miss Molly.

The trouble started awhile after we crossed the Montana line. Jesse ran ahead in the Lincoln, and I tagged behind in my Desoto. We drove Highway 2 into a western sunset. It was one of those magic summers where rain sweeps in from British Columbia just regular enough to keep things growing. Rabbits get fat and foolish, and foxes put on weight. Rattlesnakes come out of ditches to cross the sun-hot road. It’s not sporting to run over their middles. You have to take them in the head. Redwings perch on fence posts, and magpies flash black and white from the berm, where they scavenge road kills.

We saw a hell of a wreck just after Wolf Point. A guy in an old Kaiser came over the back of a rise and ran under a tanker truck that burned. Smoke rose black as a plume of crows, and we saw it five miles away. By the time we got there, the truck driver stood in the middle of the road, all white and shaking. The guy in the Kaiser sat behind the wheel. It was fearful to see how fast fire can work, and just terrifying to see bones hanging over a steering wheel. I remember thinking the guy no doubt died before any fire started, and we were feeling more than he was.

That didn’t help. I said a prayer under my breath. The truck driver wasn’t to blame, but he took it hard as a Presbyterian. Jesse tried to comfort him, without much luck. The road melted and stank and began to burn. Nobody was drinking, but it was certain sure we were all more sober than we’d ever been in our lives. Two deputies showed up. Cars drifted in easy, because of the smoke. In a couple of hours there were probably twenty cars lined up on either side of the wreck.

“He must of been asleep or drunk,” Jesse said about the driver of the Kaiser. “How in hell can a man run under a tanker truck?”

When the cops reopened the road, night hovered over the plains. Nobody cared to run much over sixty, even beneath a bright moon. It seemed like a night to be superstitious, a night when there was a deer or pronghorn out there just ready to jump into your headlights. It wasn’t a good night to drink, or shoot pool, or mess around in strange bars. It was a time for being home with your woman, if you had one.

On most nights, ghosts do not show up beside the metal crosses and they sure don’t show up in owl light. Ghosts stand out on the darkest, moonless nights, and only then when bars are closed and the only thing open is the road.

I never gave it a thought. I chased Jesse’s taillights, which on that Lincoln were broad, up-and-down slashes in the dark. Chip beside me, sad and solemn. I rubbed his ears to perk him, but he just laid down and snuffled. Chip was sensitive. He knew I felt bad over that wreck.

The first ghost showed up on the left berm and fizzled before the headlights. It was a lady ghost, and a pretty old one, judging from her long white hair and long white dress. She flicked on and off in just a flash, so maybe it was a road dream. Chip was so depressed he didn’t even notice, and Jesse didn’t either. His steering and his brakes didn’t wave to me.

Everything stayed straight for another ten miles, then a whole peck of ghosts stood on the right berm. A bundle of crosses shone all silvery white in the headlights. The ghosts melted into each other. You couldn’t tell how many, but you could tell they were expectant. They looked like people lined up for a picture show. Jesse never gave a sign he saw them. I told myself to get straight. We hadn’t had much sleep in the past two nights, and did some drinking the night before. We’d rolled near two thousand miles.

Admonishing seemed to work. Another twenty minutes passed, maybe thirty, and nothing happened. Wind chased through the open windows of the Desoto, and the radio gave mostly static. I kicked off my boots because that helps you stay awake, the bottoms of the feet being sensitive. Then a single ghost showed up on the right-hand berm, and boy-howdy.

Why anybody would laugh while being dead has got to be a puzzle. This ghost was tall, with Indian hair like Jesse’s, and I could swear he looked like Jesse, the spitting image. This ghost was jolly. He clapped his hands and danced. Then he gave me the old road sign for “roll ’em,” his hand circling in the air as he danced. The headlights penetrated him, showed tall grass solid at the roadside, and instead of legs he stood on a column of mist. Still, he was dancing.

It wasn’t road dreams. It was hallucination. The nighttime road just fills with things seen or partly seen. When too much scary stuff happens, it’s time to pull her over.

I couldn’t do it, though. Suppose I pulled over, and suppose it wasn’t hallucination? I recall thinking that a man don’t ordinarily care for preachers until he needs one. It seemed like me and Jesse were riding through the Book of Revelations. I dropped my speed, then flicked my lights a couple times. Jesse paid it no attention, and then Chip got peculiar.

He didn’t bark; he chirped. He stood up on the front seat, looking out the back window, and his paws trembled. He shivered, chirped, shivered, and went chirp, chirp, chirp. Headlights in back of us were closing fast.

I’ve been closed on plenty of times by guys looking for a ditch. Headlights have jumped out of night and fog and mist when nobody should be pushing forty. I’ve been overtaken by drunks and suiciders.

No set of headlights ever came as fast as the ones that began to wink in the mirrors. This Highway 2 is a quick, quick road, but it’s not the salt flats of Utah. The crazy man behind me was trying to set a new land speed record.

Never confuse an idiot. I stayed off the brakes and coasted, taking off speed and signaling my way onto the berm. The racer could have my share of the road. I didn’t want any part of that boy’s troubles. Jesse kept pulling away as I slowed. It seemed like he didn’t even see the lights. Chip chirped, then sort of rolled down on the floorboards and cried.

For ninety seconds, I feared being dead. For one second, I figured it already happened. Wind banged the Desoto sideways. Wind whooped, the way it does in winter. The headlights blew past. What showed was the curve of a Hudson fender—the kind of curve you’d recognize if you’d been dead a million years—and what showed was the little, squinchy shapes of a Hudson’s taillights; and what showed was the slanty doorpost like a nail running kitty-corner; and what showed was slivers of reflection from cracked glass on the rider’s side; and what sounded was the drumbeat of a straight-eight engine whanging like a locomotive gone wild; the thrump, bumpa, thrum of a crankshaft whipping in its bed. The slaunch-forward form of Miss Molly wailed, and showers of sparks blew from the tailpipe as Miss Molly rocketed.

Chip was not the only one howling. My voice rose high as the howl of Miss Molly. We all sang it out together, while Jesse cruised three, maybe four miles ahead. It wasn’t two minutes before Miss Molly swept past that Linc like it was foundationed in cement. Sparks showered like the Fourth of July, and Jesse’s brake lights looked pale beside the fireworks. The Linc staggered against wind as Jesse headed for the berm. Wind smashed against my Desoto.

Miss Molly’s taillights danced as she did a jig up the road, and then they winked into darkness as Miss Molly topped a rise, or disappeared. The night went darker than dark. A cloud scudded out of nowhere and blocked the moon.

Alongside the road the dancing ghost showed up in my headlights, and I could swear it was Jesse. He laughed like at a good joke, but he gave the old road sign for “slow it down,” his hand palm down like he was patting an invisible pup. It seemed sound advice, and I blamed near liked him. After Miss Molly, a happy ghost seemed downright companionable.

“Shitfire,” said Jesse, and that’s all he said for the first five minutes after I pulled in behind him. I climbed from the Desoto and walked to the Linc. Old Potato dog sprawled on the seat in a dead faint, and Jesse rubbed his ears trying to warm him back to consciousness. Jesse sat over the wheel like a man who had just met Jesus. His hand touched gentle on Potato’s ears, and his voice sounded reverent. Brother Jesse’s conversion wasn’t going to last, but at the time it was just beautiful. He had the lights of salvation in his eyes, and his skinny shoulders weren’t shaking too much. “I miss my c’har,” he muttered finally, and blinked. He wasn’t going to cry if he could help. “She’s trying to tell me something,” he whispered. “Let’s find a bar. Miss Molly’s in car heaven, certain sure.”

We pulled away, found a bar, and parked. We drank some beer and slept across the car seats. Nobody wanted to go back on that road.

When we woke to a morning hot and clear, Potato’s fur had turned white. It didn’t seem to bother him much, but, for the rest of his life, he was a lot more thoughtful.

“Looks like mashed Potato,” Jesse said, but he wasn’t talking a whole lot. We drove home like a couple of old ladies. Guys came scorching past, cussing at our granny speed. We figured they could get mad and stay mad, or get mad and get over it. We made it back to Jesse’s place about two in the afternoon.

A couple of things happened quick. Jesse parked beside his house trailer, and the front end fell out of the Lincoln. The right side went down, thump, and the right front tire sagged. Jesse turned even whiter than me, and I was bloodless. We had posted over a hundred miles an hour in that thing. Somehow, when we crawled around underneath inspecting it, we missed something. My shoulders and legs shook so hard I could barely get out of the Desoto. Chip was polite. He just yelped with happiness about being home, but he didn’t trot across my lap as we climbed from the car.

Nobody could trust their legs. Jesse climbed out of the Linc and leaned against it. You could see him chewing over all the possibilities, then arriving at the only one that made sense. Some hammer mechanic bolted that front end together with no locknut, no cotter pin, no lock washer, no lock nothin’. He just wrenched down a plain old nut, and the nut worked loose.

“Miss Molly knew,” Jesse whispered. “That’s what she was trying to tell.” He felt a lot better the minute he said it. Color came back to his face. He peered around the corner of the house trailer, looking toward Miss Molly’s grave.

Mike Tarbush was over there with his ’48 Roadmaster. Matt Simons stood beside him, and Mart’s ’56 Dodge sat beside the Roadmaster, looking smug; which that model Dodge always did.

“I figger,” Brother Jesse whispered, “that we should keep shut about last night. Word would just get around that we were alkies.” He pulled himself together, arranged his face like a horse trying to grin, and walked toward the Roadmaster.

Mike Tarbush was a man in mourning. He sat on the fat trunk of that Buick and gazed off toward the mountains. Mike wore extra large of everything, and still looked stout. He sported a thick red mustache to make up for his bald head. From time to time he bragged about his criminal record, which amounted to three days in jail for assaulting a pool table. He threw it through a bar window.

Now his mustache drooped, and Mike seemed small inside his clothes. The hood of the Roadmaster gaped open. Under that hood things couldn’t be worse. The poor thing had thrown a rod into the next county.

Jesse looked under the hood and tsked. “I know what you’re going through,” he said to Mike. He kind of petted the Roadmaster. “I always figured Betty Lou would last a century. What happened?” There’s no call to tell about a grown man blubbering, and especially not one who can heave pool tables. Mike finally got straight enough to tell the story.

“We was chasing the Dog,” he said. “At least I think so. Three nights ago over to Kalispell. This Golden Hawk blew past me sittin’.” Mike watched the distant mountains like he’d seen a miracle, or else like he was expecting one to happen. “That sonovabitch shore can drive,” he whispered in disbelief. “Blown out by a damn Studebaker.”

“But a very swift Studebaker,” Matt Simons said. Matt is as small as Mike is large, and Matt is educated. Even so, he’s set his share of fence posts. He looks like an algebra teacher, but not as delicate.

“Betty Lou went on up past her flat spot,” Mike whispered. “She was tryin’. We had ninety on the clock, and The Dog left us sitting.” He patted the Roadmaster. “I reckon she died of a broken heart.”

“We got three kinds of funerals,” Jesse said, and he was sympathetic. “We got the no-frills type, the regular type, and the extra special. The extra special comes with flowers.” He said it with a straight face, and Mike took it that way. He bought the extra special, and that was sixty-five dollars.

Mike put up a nice marker:

1948-1961

Roadmaster two-door—Betty Lou

Gone to Glory while chasing The Dog

She was the best friend of Mike Tarbush

BROTHER JESSE worked on the Lincoln until the front end tracked rock solid. He named it Sue Ellen, but not Miss Sue Ellen, there being no way to know if Miss Molly was jealous. When we examined Miss Molly’s grave, the soil seemed rumpled. Wildflowers, which Jesse sowed on the grave, bloomed in midsummer. I couldn’t get it out of my head that Miss Molly was still alive, and maybe Jesse couldn’t either.

Jesse explained about the Lincoln’s name. “Sue Ellen is a lady I knew in Pocatello. I expect she misses me.” He said it hopeful, like he didn’t really believe it.

It looked to me like Jesse was brooding. Night usually found him in town, but sometimes he disappeared. When he was around, he drove real calm and always got home before midnight. The wildness hadn’t come out of Jesse, but he had it on a tight rein. He claimed he dreamed of Miss Molly. Jesse was working something out.

And so was I, awake or dreaming. Thoughts of the Road Dog filled my nights, and so did thoughts of the dancing ghost. As summer deepened, restlessness took me wailing under moonlight. The road unreeled before my headlights like a magic line that pointed to places under a warm sun where ladies laughed and fell in love. Something went wrong, though. During that summer the ladies stopped being dreams and became only imagination. When I told Jesse, he claimed I was just growing up. I wished for once Jesse was wrong. I wished for a lot of things, and one of the wishes came true. It was Mike Tarbush, not me, who got in the next tangle with Miss Molly.

Mike rode in from Billings, where he’d been car shopping. He showed up at Jesse’s place on Sunday afternoon. Montana lay restful. Birds hunkered on wires, or called from high grass. Highway 2 ran watery with sunlight, deserted as a road ever could be. When Mike rolled a ’56 Merc up beside the Linc, it looked like Old Home Week at a Ford dealership.

“I got to look at something,” Mike said when he climbed from the Mercury. He sort of plodded over to Miss Molly’s grave and hovered. Light breezes blew the wildflowers sideways. Mike looked like a bear trying to shake confusion from its head. He walked to the Roadmaster’s grave. New grass sprouted reddish green. “I was sober,” Mike said. “Most Saturday nights, maybe I ain’t, but I was sober as a deputy.”

For a while nobody said anything. Potato sat glowing and white and thoughtful. Chip slept in the sun beside one of the tabbies. Then Chip woke up. He turned around three times and dashed to hide under the bulldozer.

“Now, tell me I ain’t crazy,” Mike said. He perched on the front fender of the Merc, which was blue and white and adventuresome. “Name of Judith,” he said about the Merc. “A real lady.” He swabbed sweat from his bald head. “I got blown out by Betty Lou and Miss Molly. That sound reasonable?” He swabbed some more sweat and looked at the graves, which looked like little speed bumps on the prairie. “Nope,” he answered himself, “that don’t sound reasonable a-tall.”

“Something’s wrong with your Mercury,” Jesse said, real quiet. “You got a bad tire, or a hydraulic line about to blow, or something screwy in the steering.”

He made Mike swear not to breathe a word. Then he told about Miss Molly and about the front end of the Lincoln. When the story got over, Mike looked like a halfback hit by a twelve-man line.

“Don’t drive another inch,” Jesse said. “Not until we find what’s wrong.”

“That car already cracked a hundred,” Mike whispered. “I bought it special to chase one sumbitch in a Studebaker.” He looked toward Betty Lou’s grave. “The Dog did that.”

The three of us went through that Merc like men panning gold. The trouble was so obvious we missed it for two hours while the engine cooled. Then Jesse caught it. The fuel filter rubbed its underside against the valve cover. When Jesse touched it, the filter collapsed. Gasoline spilled on the engine and the spark plugs. That Merc was getting set to catch on fire.

“I got to wonder if The Dog did it,” Jesse said about Betty Lou after Mike drove away. “I wonder if the Road Dog is the Studebaker type.”

Nights started to get serious, but any lonesomeness on that road was only in a man’s head. As summer stretched past its longest days, and sunsets started earlier, ghosts rose beside crosses before daylight hardly left the land. We drove to work and back, drove to town and back. My job was steady at a filling station, but it asked day after day of the same old thing. We never did any serious wrenching; no engine rebuilds or transmissions, just tune-ups and flat tires. I dearly wanted to meet a nice lady, but no woman in her right mind would mess with a pump jockey.

Nights were different, though. I figured I was going crazy, and Jesse and Mike were worse. Jesse finally got his situation worked out. He claimed Miss Molly was protecting him. Jesse and Mike took the Linc and the Merc on long runs, just wringing the howl out of those cars. Some nights, they’d flash past me at speed no sane man would try in darkness. Jesse was never a real big drinker, and Mike stopped altogether. They were too busy playing road games. It got so the state cop never tried to chase them. He just dropped past Jesse’s place next day and passed out tickets.

The dancing ghost danced in my dreams, both asleep and driving. When daylight left the land, I passed metal crosses and remembered some of the wrecks.

Three crosses stood on one side of the railroad track, and four crosses on the other side. The three happened when some Canadian cowboys lost a race with a train. It was too awful to remember, but on most nights those guys stood looking down the tracks with startled eyes.

The four crosses happened when one-third of the senior class of 59 hit that grade too fast on prom night. They rolled a damned old Chevrolet. More bodies by Fisher. Now the two girls stood in their long dresses, looking wistful. The two boys pretended that none of it meant nothin’.

Farther out the road, things had happened before my time. An Indian ghost most often stood beside the ghost of a deer. In another place a chubby old rancher looked real picky and angry.

The dancing ghost continued unpredictable. All the other ghosts stood beside their crosses, but the dancing ghost showed up anywhere he wanted, anytime he wanted. I’d slow the Desoto as he came into my lights, and he was the spitting image of Jesse.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” Jesse said when I tried to tell him. “I’m on a roll. I’m even gettin’ famous.”

He was right about that. People up and down the line joked about Jesse and his graveyard business.

“It’s the very best kind of advertising,” he told me. “We’ll see more action before snow flies.”

“You won’t see snow fly,” I told him, standing up to him a second time. “Unless you slow down and pay attention.”

“I’ve looked at heaps more road than you,” he told me, “and seeing things is just part of the night. That nighttime road is different.”

“This is starting to happen at last light.”

“I don’t see no ghosts,” he told me, and he was lying. “Except Miss Molly once or twice.” He wouldn’t say anything more.

And Jesse was right. As summer ran on, more graves showed up near Miss Molly. A man named Mcguire turned up with a ’41 Cad.

1941-1961

Fleet-wood Coupe—Annie

304,018 miles on flathead V-8

She was the luck of the Irishman

Pat Mcguire

And Sam Winder buried his ’47 Packard.

1947-1961

Packard 2-door—Lois Lane

Super Buddy of Sam Winder

Up Up and Away

And Pete Johansen buried his pickup.

1946-1961

Ford pickup—Gertrude

211,000 miles give or take

Never a screamer
but a good pulling truck.

Pete Johansen put up many a day’s work with her.

Montana roads are long and lonesome, and along the high line is lonesomest of all. From Saskatchewan to Texas, nothing stands tall enough to break the wind that begins to blow cold and clear toward late October. Rains sob away toward the Middle West, and grass turns goldish amber. Rattlesnakes move to high ground, where they will winter. Every creature on God’s plains begins to fat up against the winter. Soon it’s going to be thirty below and the wind blowing.

Four-wheel-drive weather. Internationals and Fords, with Dodge crummy wagons in the hills; cars and trucks will line up beside houses, garages, sheds, with electric wires leading from plugs to radiators and blocks. They look like packs of nursing pups. Work will slow, then stop. New work turns to accounting for the weather. Fuel, emergency generators, hay-bale insulation. Horses and cattle and deer look fuzzy beneath thick coats. Check your battery. If your rig won’t start, and you’re two miles from home, she won’t die—but you might.

School buses creep from stop to stop, and bundled kids look like colorful little bears trotting through late-afternoon light. Snowy owls come floating in from northward, while folks go to church on Sunday against the time when there’s some better amusement. Men hang around town, because home is either empty or crowded, depending on if you’re married. Folks sit before television, watching the funny, goofy, unreal world where everybody plays at being sexy and naked, even when they’re not.

And nineteen years old is lonesome, too. And work is lonesome when nobody much cares for you.

Before winter set in, I got it in my head to run the Road Dog’s route. It was September. Winter would close us down pretty quick. The trip would be a luxury. What with room rent, and gas, and eating out, it was payday to payday with me. Still, one payday would account for gas and sandwiches. I could sleep across the seat. I hocked a Marlin .30-30 to Jesse for twenty bucks. He seemed happy with my notion. He even went into the greenhouse and came out with an arctic sleeping bag.

“In case things get vigorous,” he said, and grinned. “Now get on out there and bite The Dog.”

It was a happy time. Dreams of ladies sort of set themselves to one side as I cruised across the eternal land. I came to love the land that autumn, in a way that maybe ranchers do. The land stopped being something that a road ran across. Canadian honkers came winging in vees from the north. The great Montana sky stood easy as eagles. When I’d pull over and cut the engine, sounds of grasshoppers mixed with birdcalls. Once, a wild turkey, as smart as any domestic turkey is dumb, talked to himself and paid me not the least mind.

The Dog showed up right away. In a cafe in Malta:

Road Dog

“It was all a hideous mistake.”

Christopher Columbus

In a bar in Tampico:

Road Dog

Who’s afraid of the big bad Woof?

In another bar in Culbertson:

Road Dog

Go East, young man, go East

I rolled Williston and dropped south through North Dakota. The Dog’s trail disappeared until Watford City, where it showed up in the can of a filling station:

Road Dog

Atlantis and Sargasso

Full fathom five thy brother lies

And in a joint in Grassy Butte:

Road Dog

Ain’t Misbehavin’

That morning in Grassy Butte, I woke to a sunrise where the land lay bathed in rose and blue. Silhouettes of grazing deer mixed with silhouettes of cattle. They herded together peaceful as a dream of having your own place, your own woman, and you working hard; and her glad to see you coming home.

In Bowman, The Dog showed up in a nice restaurant:

Road Dog

The Katzenjammer Kids minus one

Ghosts did not show up along the road, but the road stayed the same. I tangled with a bathtub Hudson, a ’53, outside of Spearfish in South Dakota. I chased him into Wyoming like being dragged on a string. The guy played with me for twenty miles, then got bored. He shoved more coal in the stoker and purely flew out of sight.

Sheridan was a nice town back in those days, just nice and friendly; plus, I started to get sick of the way I smelled. In early afternoon, I found a five-dollar motel with a shower. That gave me the afternoon, the evening, and next morning if it seemed right. I spiffed up, put on a good shirt, slicked down my hair, and felt just fine.

The streets lay dusty and lazy. Ranchers’ pickups stood all dented and work worn before bars, and an old Indian sat on hay bales in the back of one of them. He wore a flop hat, and he seemed like the eyes and heart of the prairie. He looked at me like I was a splendid puppy that might someday amount to something. It seemed okay when he did it.

I hung around a soda fountain at the five-and-dime because a girl smiled. She was just beautiful. A little horsey faced, but with sun blond hair, and with hands long fingered and gentle. There wasn’t a chance of talking, because she stood behind the counter for ladies’ underwear. I pretended to myself that she looked sad when I left.

It got on to late afternoon. Sunlight drifted in between buildings, and shadows overreached the streets. Everything was normal, and then everything got scary.

I was just poking along, looking in store windows, checking the show at the movie house, when, ahead of me, Jesse walked toward a Golden Hawk. He was maybe a block and a half away, but it was Jesse, sure as God made sunshine. It was a Golden Hawk. There was no way of mistaking that car. Hawks were high-priced sets of wheels, and Studebaker never sold that many.

I yelled and ran. Jesse waited beside the car, looking sort of puzzled. When I pulled up beside him, he grinned.

“It’s happening again,” he said, and his voice sounded amused, but not mean. Sunlight made his face reddish, but shadow put his legs and feet in darkness. “You believe me to be a gentleman named Jesse Still.” Behind him, shadows of buildings told that night was on its way. Sunset happens quick on the prairies.

And I said, “Jesse, what in the hell are you doing in Sheridan?”

And he said, “Young man, you are not looking at Jesse Still.” He said it quiet and polite, and he thought he had a point. His voice was smooth and cultured, so he sure didn’t sound like Jesse. His hair hung combed out, and he wore clothes that never came from a dry-goods. His jeans were soft looking and expensive. His boots were tooled. They kind of glowed in the dusk. The Golden Hawk didn’t have a dust speck on it, and the interior had never carried a tool, or a car part, or a sack of feed. It just sparkled. I almost believed him, and then I didn’t.

“You’re fooling with me.”

“On the contrary,” he said, real soft. “Jesse Still is fooling with me, although he doesn’t mean to. We’ve never met.” He didn’t exactly look nervous, but he looked impatient. He climbed in the Stude and started the engine. It purred like racing time. “This is a large and awfully complex world,” he said, “and Mr. Still will probably tell you the same. I’ve been told we look like brothers.”

I wanted to say more, but he waved real friendly and pulled away. The flat and racy back end of the Hawk reflected one slash of sunlight, then rolled into shadow. If I’d had a hot car, I’d have gone out hunting him. It wouldn’t have done a lick of good, but doing something would be better than doing nothing.

I stood sort of shaking and amazed. Life had just changed somehow, and it wasn’t going to change back. There wasn’t a thing in the world to do, so I went to get some supper.

The Dog had signed in at the cafe:

Road Dog

The Bobbsey Twins Attend The Motor Races

And—I sat chewing roast beef and mashed potatoes.

And—I saw how the guy in the Hawk might be lying, and that Jesse was a twin.

And—I finally saw what a chancy, dicey world this was, because without meaning to, exactly, and without even knowing it was happening, I had just run up against The Road Dog.

It was a night of dreams. Dreams wouldn’t let me go. The dancing ghost tried to tell me Jesse was triplets. The ghosts among the crosses begged rides into nowhere, rides down the long tunnel of night that ran past lands of dreams, but never turned off to those lands. It all came back: the crazy summer, the running, running, running behind the howl of engines. The Road Dog drawled with Jesse’s voice, and then The Dog spoke cultured. The girl at the five-and-dime held out a gentle hand, then pulled it back. I dreamed of a hundred roadside joints, bars, cafes, old-fashioned filling stations with grease pits. I dreamed of winter wind, and the dark, dark days of winter; and of nights when you hunch in your room because it’s a chore too big to bundle up and go outside.

I woke to an early dawn and slurped coffee at the bakery, which kept open because they had to make morning doughnuts. The land lay all around me, but it had nothing to say. I counted my money and figured miles.

I climbed in the Desoto, thinking I had never got around to giving it a name. The road unreeled toward the west. It ended in Seattle, where I sold my car. Everybody said there was going to be a war, and I wasn’t doing anything anyway. I joined the Navy.

III

WHAT WITH him burying cars and raising hell, Jesse never wrote to me in summer. He was surely faithful in winter, though. He wrote long letters printed in a clumsy hand. He tried to cheer me up, and so did Matt Simons.

The Navy sent me to boot camp and diesel school, then to a motor pool in San Diego. I worked there three and a half years, sometimes even working on ships if the ships weren’t going anywhere. A sunny land and smiling ladies lay all about, but the ladies mostly fell in love by ten at night and got over it by dawn. Women in the bars were younger and prettier than back home. There was enough clap to go around.

“The business is growing like jimsonweed,” Jesse wrote toward Christmas of ’62. “I buried fourteen cars this summer, and one of them was a Kraut.” He wrote a whole page about his morals. It didn’t seem right to stick a crap crate in the ground beside real cars. At the same time, it was bad business not to. He opened a special corner of the cemetery, and pretended it was exclusive for foreign iron. “And Mike Tarbush got to drinking,” he wrote. “I’m sad to say we planted Judith.”

Mike never had a minute’s trouble with that Merc. Judith behaved like a perfect lady until Mike turned upside down. He backed across a parking lot at night, rather hasty, and drove backward up the guy wire of a power pole. It was the only rollover wreck in history that happened at twenty miles an hour.

“Mike can’t stop discussing it,” Jesse wrote. “He’s never caught The Dog, neither, but he ain’t stopped trying. He wheeled in here in a beefed-up ’57 Olds called Sally. It goes like stink and looks like a Hereford.”

Home seemed far away, though it couldn’t have been more than thirty-six hours by road for a man willing to hang over the wheel. I wanted to take a leave and drive home, but knew it better not happen. Once I got there, I’d likely stay.

“George Pierson at the feed store says he’s going to file a paternity suit against Potato,” Jesse wrote. “The pups are cute, and there s a family resemblance.”

It came to me then why I was homesick. I surely missed the land, but even more I missed the people. Back home, folks were important enough that you knew their names. When somebody got messed up or killed, you felt sorry. In California, nobody knew nobody. They just swept up broken glass and moved right along. I should have meshed right in. I had made my rating and was pushing a rich man’s car, a ’57 hemi Chrysler, but never felt it fit.

“Don’t pay it any mind,” Jesse wrote when I told about meeting Road Dog. “I’ve heard about a guy who looks the same as me. Sometimes stuff like that happens.”

And that was all he ever did say.

Nineteen sixty-three ended happy and hopeful. Matt Simons wrote a letter. Sam Winder bought a big Christmas card, and everybody signed it with little messages. Even my old boss at the filling station signed, “Merry Xmas, Jed—Keep It Between The Fence Posts.” My boss didn’t hold it against me that I left. In Montana a guy is supposed to be free to find out what he’s all about.

Christmas of ’63 saw Jesse pleased as a bee in clover. A lady named Sarah moved in with him. She waitressed at the cafe, and Jesse’s letter ran pretty short. He’d put twenty-three cars under that year, and bought more acreage. He ordered a genuine marble gravestone for Miss Molly. “Sue Ellen is a real darling,” Jesse wrote about the Linc. “That marker like to weighed a ton. We just about bent a back axle bringing it from the railroad.”

From Christmas of ’63 to January of ’64 was just a few days, but they marked an awful downturn for Jesse. His letter was more real to me than all the diesels in San Diego.

He drew black borders all around the pages. The letter started out okay, but went downhill. “Sarah moved out and into a rented room,” he wrote. “I reckon I was just too much to handle.” He didn’t explain, but I did my own reckoning. I could imagine that it was Jesse, plus two cats and two dogs, trying to get into a ten-wide-fifty trailer, that got to Sarah. “I think she misses me,” he wrote, “but I expect she’ll have to bear it.”

Then the letter got just awful.

“A pack of wolves came through from Canada,” Jesse wrote. “They picked off old Potato like a berry from a bush. Me and Mike found tracks, and a little blood in the snow.”

I sat in the summery dayroom surrounded by sailors shooting pool and playing Ping-Pong. I imagined the snow and ice of home. I imagined old Potato nosing around in his dumb and happy way looking for rabbits or lifting his leg. Maybe he even wagged his tail when that first wolf came into view. I sat blinking tears, ready to bawl over a dog, and then I did, and to hell with it.

The world was changing, and it wouldn’t change back. I put in for sea duty one more time, and the chief warrant who ramrodded that motor pool turned it down again. He claimed we kept the world safe by wrenching engines.

“The ’62 Dodge is emerging as the car of choice for people in a hurry.” Matt Simons wrote that in February ’64, knowing I’d understand that nobody could tell which cars would be treasured until they had a year or two on them. “It’s an extreme winter,” he wrote, “and it’s taking its toll on many of us. Mike has now learned not to punch a policeman. He’s doing ten days. Sam Winder managed to roll a Jeep, and neither he nor I can figure out how a man can roll a Jeep. Sam has a broken arm, and lost two toes to frost. He was trapped under the wreck. It took awhile to pull him out. Brother Jesse is in the darkest sort of mood. He comes and goes in an irregular manner, but the Linc sits outside the pool hall on most days.

“And for myself,” Matt wrote, “I think, come summer, I’ll drop some revs. My flaming youth seems to be giving way to other interests. A young woman named Nancy started teaching at the school. Until now, I thought I was a confirmed bachelor.”

A postcard came the end of February. The postmark said “Cheyenne, Wyoming,” way down in the southeast corner of the state. It was written fancy. Nobody could mistake that fine, spidery hand. It read:

Road Dog

Run and run as fast as he can,

He can’t find who is the Gingerbread Man

The picture on the card had been taken from an airplane. It showed an oval racetrack where cars chased each other round and round. I couldn’t figure why Jesse sent it, but it had to be Jesse. Then it came to me that Jesse was The Road Dog. Then it came to me that he wasn’t. The Road Dog was too slick. He wrote real delicate, and Jesse only printed real clumsy. On the other hand, The Road Dog didn’t know me from Adam’s off ox. Somehow it had to be Jesse.

“We got snow nut deep to a tall palm tree,” Jesse wrote at about the same time, “and Chip is failing. He’s off his feed. He don’t even tease the kitties. Chip just can’t seem to stop mourning.”

I had bad premonitions. Chip was sensitive. I feared he wouldn’t be around by the time I got back home, and my fear proved right. Chip held off until the first warm sun of spring, and then he died while napping in the shade of the bulldozer. When Jesse sent a quick note telling me, I felt pretty bad, but had been expecting it. Chip had a good heart. I figured now he was with Potato, romping in the hills somewhere. I knew that was a bunch of crap, but that’s just the way I chose to figure it.

They say a man can get used to anything, but maybe some can’t. Day after day, and week after week, California weather nagged. Sometimes a puny little dab of weather dribbled in from the Pacific, and people hollered it was storming. Sometimes temperatures dropped toward the fifties, and people trotted around in thick sweaters and coats. It was almost a relief when that happened, because everybody put on their shirts. In three years, I’d seen more woman skin than a normal man sees in a lifetime, and more tattoos on men. The chief warrant at the motor pool had the only tattoo in the world called “worm’s-eye view of a pig’s butt in the moonlight.”

In autumn ’64, with one more year to pull, I took a two-week leave and headed north just chasing weather. It showed up first in Oregon with rain, and more in Washington. I got hassled on the Canadian border by a distressful little guy who thought, what with the war, that I wanted political asylum.

I chased on up to Calgary, where matters got chill and wholesome. Wind worked through the mountains like it wanted to drive me south toward home. Elk and moose and porcupines went about their business. Red-tailed hawks circled. I slid on over to Edmonton, chased on east to Saskatoon, then dropped south through the Dakotas. In Williston, I had a terrible want to cut and run for home, but didn’t dare.

The Road Dog showed up all over the place, but the messages were getting strange. At a bar in Amidon:

Road Dog

Taking Kentucky Windage

At a hamburger joint in Belle Fourche:

Road Dog

Chasing his tail

At a restaurant in Redbird:

Road Dog

Flea and flee as much as we can

We’ll soon find who is the Gingerbread Man

In a poolroom in Fort Collins:

Road Dog

Home home on derange

Road Dog, or Jesse, was too far south. The Dog had never showed up in Colorado before. At least, nobody ever heard of such.

My leave was running out. There was nothing to do except sit over the wheel. I dropped on south to Albuquerque, hung a right, and headed back to the big city. All along the road, I chewed a dreadful fear for Jesse. Something bad was happening, and that didn’t seem fair, because something good went on between me and the Chrysler. We reached an understanding. The Chrysler came alive and began to hum. All that poor car had ever needed was to look at road. It had been raised among traffic and poodles, but needed long sight distances and bears.

WHEN I got back, there seemed no way out of writing a letter to Matt Simons, even if it was borrowing trouble. It took evening after evening of gnawing the end of a pencil. I hated to tell about Miss Molly, and about the dancing ghost, and about my fears for Jesse. A man is supposed to keep his problems to himself.

At the same time, Matt was educated. Maybe he could give Jesse a hand if he knew all of it. The letter came out pretty thick. I mailed it thinking Matt wasn’t likely to answer real soon. Autumn deepened to winter back home, and everybody would be busy.

So I worked and waited. There was an old White Mustang with a fifth wheel left over from the last war. It was a lean and hungry-looking animal, and slightly marvelous. I overhauled the engine, then dropped the tranny and adapted a ten-speed Roadranger. When I got that truck running smooth as a Baptist’s mouth, the Navy surveyed it and sold it for scrap.

“Ghost cars are a tradition,” Matt wrote toward the back of October, “and I’d be hard-pressed to say they are not real. I recall being passed by an Auburn boat tail about 3:00 a.m. on a summer day. That happened ten years ago. I was about your age, which means there was not an Auburn boat tail in all of Montana. That car died in the early thirties.

“And we all hear stories of huge old headlights overtaking in the mist, stories of Mercers and Duesenbergs and Bugattis. I try to believe the stories are true, because, in a way, it would be a shame if they were not.

“The same for road ghosts. I’ve never seen a ghost who looked like Jesse. The ghosts I’ve seen might not have been ghosts. To paraphrase an expert, they may have been a trapped beer belch, an undigested hamburger, or blowing mist. On the other hand, maybe not. They certainly seemed real at the time.

“As for Jesse—we have a problem here. In a way, we’ve had it for a long while, but only since last winter have matters become solemn. Then your letter arrives, and matters become mysterious. Jesse has—or had—a twin brother. One night when we were carousing, he told me that, but he also said his brother was dead. Then he swore me to a silence I must now break.”

Matt went on to say that I must never, never say anything. He figured something was going on between brothers. He figured it must run deep.

“There is something uncanny about twins,” Matt wrote. “What great matters are joined in the womb? When twins enter the world, they learn and grow the way all of us do; but some communication (or communion) surely happens before birth. A clash between brothers is a terrible thing. A clash between twins may spell tragedy.”

Matt went on to tell how Jesse was going over the edge with road games, only the games stayed close to home. All during the summer, Jesse would head out, roll fifty or a hundred miles, and come home scorching like drawn by a string. Matt guessed the postcard I’d gotten from Jesse in February was part of the game, and it was the last time Jesse had been very far from home. Matt figured Jesse used tracing paper to imitate the Road Dog’s writing. He also figured Road Dog had to be Jesse’s brother.

“It’s obvious,” Matt wrote, “that Jesse’s brother is still alive, and is only metaphorically dead to Jesse. There are look-alikes in this world, but you have reported identical twins.”

Matt told how Jesse drove so crazy, even Mike would not run with him. That was bad enough, but it seemed the graveyard had sort of moved in on Jesse’s mind. That graveyard was no longer just something to do. Jesse swapped around until he came up with a tractor and mower. Three times that summer, he trimmed the graveyard and straightened the markers. He dusted and polished Miss Molly’s headstone.

“It’s past being a joke,” Matt wrote, “or a sentimental indulgence. Jesse no longer drinks, and no longer hells around in a general way. He either runs or tends the cemetery. I’ve seen other men search for a ditch, but never in such bizarre fashion.”

Jesse had been seen on his knees, praying before Miss Molly’s grave.

“Or perhaps he was praying for himself, or for Chip,” Matt wrote. “Chip is buried beside Miss Molly. The graveyard has to be seen to be believed. Who would ever think so many machines would be so dear to so many men?”

Then Matt went on to say he was going to “inquire in various places” that winter. “There are ways to trace Jesse’s brother,” Matt wrote, “and I am very good at that sort of research.” He said it was about the only thing he could still do for Jesse.

“Because,” Matt wrote, “I seem to have fallen in love with a romantic. Nancy wants a June wedding. I look forward to another winter alone, but it will be an easy wait. Nancy is rather old-fashioned, and I find that I’m old-fashioned as well. I will never regret my years spent helling around, but am glad they are now in the past.”

Back home, winter deepened. At Christmas a long letter came from Jesse, and some of it made sense. “I put eighteen cars under this summer. Business fell off because I lost my hustle. You got to scooch around a good bit, or you don’t make contacts. I may start advertising.

“And the tabbies took off. I forgot to slop them regular, so now they’re mousing in a barn on Jimmy Come Lately Road. Mike says I ought to get another dog, but my heart isn’t in it.”

Then the letter went into plans for the cemetery. Jesse talked some grand ideas. He thought a nice wrought-iron gate might be showy, and bring in business. He thought of finding a truck that would haul “deceased” cars. “On the other hand,” he wrote, “if a guy don’t care enough to find a tow, maybe I don’t want to plant his iron.” He went on for a good while about morals, but a lawyer couldn’t understand it. He seemed to be saying something about respect for Miss Molly, and Betty Lou, and Judith. “Sue Ellen is a real hummer,” he wrote about the Linc. “She’s got two hundred thousand I know about, plus whatever went on before.”

Which meant Jesse was piling up about seventy thousand miles a year, and that didn’t seem too bad. Truck drivers put up a hundred thousand. Of course, they make a living at it.

Then the letter got so crazy it was hard to credit.

“I got The Road Dog figured out. There’s two little kids. Their mama reads to them, and they play tag. The one that don’t get caught gets to be the Gingerbread Man. This all come together because I ran across a bunch of kids down on the Colorado line. I was down that way to call on a lady I once knew, but she moved, and I said what the hell, and hung around a few days, and that’s what clued me to The Dog. The kids were at a Sunday-school picnic, and I was napping across the car seat. Then a preacher’s wife came over and saw I wasn’t drunk, but the preacher was there, too, and they invited me. I eased over to the picnic, and everybody made me welcome. Anyway, those kids were playing, and I heard the gingerbread business, and I figured The Dog is from Colorado.”

The last page of the letter was just as scary. Jesse took kids’ crayons and drew the front ends of the Linc and Miss Molly. There was a tail that was probably Potato’s sticking out from behind the picture of Miss Molly, and everything was centered around the picture of a marker that said “R.I.P. Road Dog.”

But—there weren’t any little kids. Jesse had not been to Colorado. Jesse had been tending that graveyard, and staying close to home. Jesse played make-believe, or else Matt Simons lied; and there was no reason for Matt to lie. Something bad, bad wrong was going on with Jesse.

There was no help for it. I did my time and wrote a letter every month or six weeks pretending everything was normal. I wrote about what we’d do when I got home, and about the Chrysler. Maybe that didn’t make much sense, but Jesse was important to me. He was a big part of what I remembered about home.

At the end of April, a postcard came, this time from Havre. “The Dog is after me. I feel it.” It was just a plain old postcard. No picture. Matt wrote in May, mostly his own plans. He busied himself building a couple of rooms onto his place. “Nancy and I do not want a family right away,” he wrote, “but someday we will.” He wrote a bubbly letter with a feel of springtime to it.

“I almost forgot my main reason for writing,” the letter said. “Jesse comes from around Boulder, Colorado. His parents are long dead, ironically in a car wreck. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father a librarian. Those people, who lived such quiet lives, somehow produced a hellion like Jesse, and Jesse’s brother. That’s the factual side of the matter.

“The human side is so complex it will not commit to paper. In fact, I do not trust what I know. When you get home next fall, we’ll discuss it.”

The letter made me sad and mad. Sad because I wasn’t getting married, and mad because Matt didn’t think I’d keep my mouth shut. Then I thought better of it. Matt didn’t trust himself. I did what any gentleman would do, and sent him and Nancy a nice gravy boat for the wedding.

In late July, Jesse sent another postcard. “He’s after me; I’m after him. If I ain’t around when you get back, don’t fret. Stuff happens. It’s just a matter of chasing road.”

Summer rolled on. The Navy released “nonessential personnel” in spite of the war. I put four years in the outfit and got called nonessential. Days choked past like a rig with fouled injectors. One good thing happened. My old boss moved his station to the outskirts of town and started an IH dealership. He straight out wrote how he needed a diesel mechanic. I felt hopeful thoughts, and dark ones.

In September, I became a veteran who qualified for an overseas ribbon, because of work on ships that later on went somewhere. Now I could join the Legion post back home, which was maybe the payoff. They had the best pool table in the county.

“Gents,” I said to the boys at the motor pool, “it’s been a distinct by-God pleasure enjoying your company, and don’t never come to Montana, ’cause she’s a heartbreaker.” The Chrysler and me lit out like a kyoodle of pups.

It would have been easier to run to Salt Lake, then climb the map to Havre, but notions pushed. I slid east to Las Cruces, then popped north to Boulder with the idea of tracing Jesse. The Chrysler hummed and chewed up road. When I got to Boulder, the notion turned hopeless. There were too many people. I didn’t even know where to start asking.

It’s no big job to fool yourself. Above Boulder, it came to me how I’d been pointing for Sheridan all along, and not even Sheridan. I pointed toward a girl who smiled at me four years ago.

I found her working at a hardware, and she wasn’t wearing any rings. I blushed around a little bit, then got out of there to catch my breath. I thought of how Jesse took whatever time was needed when he bought the Linc. It looked like this would take awhile.

My pockets were crowded with mustering-out pay and money for unused leave. I camped in a ten-dollar motel. It took three days to get acquainted, then we went to a show and supper afterward. Her name was Linda. Her father was a Mormon. That meant a year of courting, but it’s not all that far from north Montana to Sheridan.

I had to get home and get employed, which would make the Mormon happy. On Saturday afternoon Linda and I went back to the same old movie, but this time we held hands. Before going home, she kissed me once, real gentle. That made up for those hard times in San Diego. It let me know I was back with my own people.

I drove downtown all fired up with visions. It was way too early for bed, and I cared nothing for a beer. A run-down cafe sat on the outskirts. I figured pie and coffee.

The Dog had signed in. His writing showed faint, like the wall had been scrubbed. Newer stuff scrabbled over it.

Road Dog

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Lonely pups as pups can be

For each other had to wait

Down beside the churchyard gate.

The cafe sort of slumbered. Several old men lined the counter. Four young gear heads sat at a table and talked fuel injection. The old men yawned and put up with it. Faded pictures of old racing cars hung along the walls. The young guys sat beneath a picture of the Bluebird. That car held the land speed record of 301.29 m.p.h. This was a racer’s cafe, and had been for a long, long time.

The waitress was graying and motherly. She tsked and tished over the old men as much as she did the young ones. Her eyes held that long-distance prairie look, a look knowing wind and fire and hard times, stuff that either breaks people or leaves them wise. Matt Simons might get that look in another twenty years. I tried to imagine Linda when she became the waitress’s age, and it wasn’t bad imagining.

Pictures of quarter-mile cars hung back of the counter, and pictures of street machines hung on each side of the door. Fifties hot rods scorched beside worked-up stockers. Some mighty rowdy iron crowded that wall. One picture showed a Golden Hawk. I walked over, and in one corner was the name “Still”—written in The Road Dog’s hand. It shouldn’t have been scary.

I went back to the counter shaking. A nice-looking old gent nursed coffee. His hands wore knuckles busted by a thousand slipped wrenches. Grease was worked in deep around his eyes, the way it gets after years and years when no soap made will touch it. You could tell he’d been a steady man. His eyes were clear as a kid.

“Mister,” I said, “and beg pardon for bothering you. Do you know anything about that Studebaker?” I pointed to the wall.

“You ain’t bothering me,” he said, “but I’ll tell you when you do.” He tapped the side of his head like trying to ease a gear in place, then he started talking engine specs on the Stude.

“I mean the man who owns it.”

The old man probably liked my haircut, which was short. He liked it that I was raised right. Young guys don’t always pay old men much mind.

“You still ain’t bothering me.” He turned to the waitress. “Sue,” he said, “has Johnny Still been in?”

She turned from cleaning the pie case, and she looked toward the young guys like she feared for them. You could tell she was no big fan of engines. “It’s been the better part of a year, maybe more.” She looked down the line of old men. “I was fretting about him just the other day . . .” She let it hang. Nobody said anything. “He comes and goes so quiet, you might miss him.”

“I don’t miss him a hell of a lot,” one of the young guys said. The guy looked like a duck, and had a voice like a sparrow. His fingernails were too clean. That proved something.

“Because Johnny blew you out,” another young guy said. “Johnny always blew you out.”

“Because he’s crazy,” the first guy said. “There’s noisy crazy and quiet crazy. The guy is a spook.”

“He’s going through something,” the waitress said, and said it kind. “Johnny’s taken a lot of loss. He’s the type who grieves.” She looked at me like she expected an explanation.

“I’m friends with his brother,” I told her. “Maybe Johnny and his brother don’t get along.”

The old man looked at me rather strange. “You go back quite a ways,” he told me. “Jesse’s been dead a good long time.”

I thought I’d pass out. My hands started shaking, and my legs felt too weak to stand. Beyond the window of the cafe, red light came from a neon sign, and inside the cafe everybody sat quiet, waiting to see if I was crazy, too. I sort of picked at my pie. One of the young guys moved real uneasy. He loafed toward the door, maybe figuring he’d need a shotgun. The other three young ones looked confused.

“No offense,” I said to the old man, “but Jesse Still is alive. Up on the high line. We run together.”

“Jesse Still drove a damn old Hudson Terraplane into the South Platte River in spring of ’52, maybe ’53.” The old man said it real quiet. “He popped a tire when not real sober.”

“Which is why Johnny doesn’t drink,” the waitress said. “At least, I expect that’s the reason.”

“And now you are bothering me.” The old man looked to the waitress, and she was as full of questions as he was.

Nobody ever felt more hopeless or scared. These folks had no reason to tell this land of yarn. “Jesse is sort of roughhouse.” My voice was only whispering. It wouldn’t make enough sound. “Jesse made his reputation helling around.”

“You’ve got that part right,” the old man told me, “and, youngster, I don’t give a tinker’s damn if you believe me or not, but Jesse Still is dead.”

I saw what it had to be, but seeing isn’t always believing. “Thank you, mister,” I whispered to the old man, “and thank you, ma’am,” to the waitress. Then I hauled out of there leaving them with something to discuss.

A TERRIBLE FEAR rolled with me, because of Jesse’s last postcard. He said he might not be home, and now that could mean more than it said. The Chrysler bettered its reputation, and we just flew. From the Montana line to Shelby is eight hours on a clear day. You can wail it in seven, or maybe six and a half if a deer doesn’t tangle with your front end. I was afraid, and confused, and getting mad. Me and Linda were just to the point of hoping for an understanding, and now I was going to get killed running over a porcupine or into a heifer. The Chrysler blazed like a hound on a hot scent. At eighty the pedal kept wanting to dig deep and really howl.

The nighttime road yells danger. Shadows crawl over everything. What jumps into your headlights may be real, and may be not. Metal crosses hold little clusters of dark flowers on their arms, and the land rolls out beneath the moon. Buttes stand like great ships anchored in the plains, and riverbeds run like dry ink. Come spring, they’ll flow; but in September, all flow is in the road.

The dancing ghost picked me up on Highway 3 outside Comanche, but this time he wasn’t dancing. He stood on the berm, and no mist tied him in place. He gave the old road sign for “roll ’em.” Beyond Columbia, he showed up again. His mouth moved like he was yelling me along, and his face twisted with as much fear as my own.

That gave me reason to hope. I’d never known Jesse to be afraid like that, so maybe there was a mistake. Maybe the dancing ghost wasn’t the ghost of Jesse. I hung over the wheel and forced myself to think of Linda. When I thought of her, I couldn’t bring myself to get crazy. Highway 3 is not much of a road, but that’s no bother. I can drive anything with wheels over any road ever made. The dancing ghost kept showing up and beckoning, telling me to scorch. I told myself the damn ghost had no judgment, or he wouldn’t be a ghost in the first place.

That didn’t keep me from pushing faster, but it wasn’t fast enough to satisfy the roadside. They came out of the mist, or out of the ditches; crowds and clusters of ghosts standing pale beneath a weak moon. Some of them gossiped with each other. Some stood yelling me along. Maybe there was sense to it, but I had my hands full. If they were trying to help, they sure weren’t doing it. They just made me get my back up, and think of dropping revs.

Maybe the ghosts held a meeting and studied out the problem. They could see a clear road, but I couldn’t. The dancing ghost showed up on Highway 12 and gave me “thumbs up” for a clear road. I didn’t believe a word of it, and then I really didn’t believe what showed in my mirrors. Headlights closed like I was standing. My feelings said that all of this had happened before; except, last time, there was only one set of headlights.

It was Miss Molly and Betty Lou that brought me home. Miss Molly overtook, sweeping past with a lane change smooth and sober as an Adventist. The high, slaunch-forward form of Miss Molly thrummed with business. She wasn’t blowing sparks or showing off. She wasn’t playing Gingerbread Man or tag.

Betty Lou came alongside so I could see who she was, then Betty Lou laid back a half mile. If we ran into a claim-jumping deputy, he’d have to chase her first; and more luck to him. Her headlights hovered back there like angels.

Miss Molly settled down a mile ahead of the Chrysler and stayed at that distance, no matter how hard I pressed. Twice before Great Falls, she spotted trouble, and her squinchy little brake lights hauled me down. Once it was an animal, and once it was busted road surface. Miss Molly and Betty Lou dropped me off before Great Falls, and picked me back up the minute I cleared town.

We ran the night like rockets. The roadside lay deserted. The dancing ghost stayed out of it, and so did the others. That let me concentrate, which proved a blessing. At those speeds, a man don’t have time to do deep thinking. The road rolls past, the hours roll, but you’ve got a racer’s mind. No matter how tired you should be, you don’t get tired until it’s over.

I chased a ghost car northward while a fingernail moon moved across the sky. In deepest night the land turned silver. At speed, you don’t think, but you do have time to feel. The farther north we pushed, the more my feelings went to despair. Maybe Miss Molly thought the same, but everybody did all they could.

The Chrysler was a howler, and Lord knows where the top end lay. I buried the needle. Even accounting for speedometer error, we burned along in the low half of the second century. We made Highway 2 and Shelby around three in the morning, then hung a left. In just about no time, I rolled home. Betty Lou dropped back and faded. Miss Molly blew sparks and purely flew out of sight. The sparks meant something. Maybe Miss Molly was still hopeful. Or maybe she knew we were too late.

Beneath that thin moon, mounded graves looked like dark surf across the acreage. No lights burned in the trailer, and the Linc showed nowhere. Even under the scant light, you could see snowy tops of mountains, and the perfectly straight markers standing at the head of each grave. A tent, big enough to hold a small revival, stood not far from the trailer. In my headlights a sign on the tent read “Chapel.” I fetched a flashlight from the glove box.

A dozen folding chairs stood in the chapel, and a podium served as an altar. Jesse had rigged up two sets of candles, so I lit some. Matt Simons had written that the graveyard had to be seen to be believed. Hanging on one side of the tent was a sign reading “Shrine,” and all along that side hung road maps, and pictures of cars, and pictures of men standing beside their cars. There was a special display of odometers, with little cards beneath them: “330,938 miles”; “407,000 miles”; “half a million miles, more or less.” These were the championship cars, the all-time best at piling up road, and those odometers would make even a married man feel lonesome. You couldn’t look at them without thinking of empty roads and empty nights.

Even with darkness spreading across the cemetery, nothing felt worse than the inside of the tent. I could believe that Jesse took it serious, and had tried to make it nice, but couldn’t believe anyone else would buy it.

The night was not too late for owls, and nearly silent wings swept past as I left the tent. I walked to Miss Molly’s grave, half-expecting ghostly headlights. Two small markers stood beside a real fine marble headstone.

Potato

Happy-go-sloppy and good

Rest in Peace Wherever You Are

Chip

A dandy little sidekicker

Running with Potato

From a distance, I could see piled dirt where the dozer had dug new graves. I stepped cautious toward the dozer, not knowing why, but knowing it had to happen.

Two graves stood open like little garages, and the front ends of the Linc and the Hawk poked out. The Linc’s front bumper shone spotless, but the rest of the Linc looked tough and experienced. Dents and dings crowded the sides, and cracked glass starred the windows.

The Hawk stood sparkly, ready to come roaring from the grave. Its glass shone washed and clean before my flashlight. I thought of what I heard in Sheridan, and thought of the first time I’d seen the Hawk. It hadn’t changed. The Hawk looked like it had just been driven off a showroom floor.

Nobody in his right mind would want to look in those two cars, but it wasn’t a matter of “want.” Jesse, or Johnny—if that’s who it was—had to be here someplace. It was certain sure he needed help. When I looked, the Hawk sat empty. My flashlight poked against the glass of the Linc. Jesse lay there, taking his last nap across a car seat. His long black hair had turned gray. He had always been thin, but now he was skin and bones. Too many miles, and no time to eat. Creases around his eyes came from looking at road, but now the creases were deep like an old man’s. His eyes showed that he was dead. They were open only a little bit, but open enough.

I couldn’t stand to be alone with such a sight. In less than fifteen minutes, I stood banging on Matt Simons’s door. Matt finally answered, and Nancy showed up behind him. She was in her robe. She stood taller than Matt, and sleepier. She looked blond and Swedish. Matt didn’t know whether to be mad or glad. Then I got my story pieced together, and he really woke up.

“Dr. Jekyll has finally dealt with Mr. Hyde,” he said in a low voice to Nancy. “Or maybe the other way around.” To me, he said, “That may be a bad joke, but it’s not ill meant.” He went to get dressed. “Call Mike,” he said to me. “Drunk or sober, I want him there.”

Nancy showed me the phone. Then she went to the bedroom to talk with Matt. I could hear him soothing her fears. When Mike answered, he was sleepy and sober, but he woke up stampeding.

Deep night and a thin moon is a perfect time for ghosts, but none showed up as Matt rode with me back to the graveyard. The Chrysler loafed. There was no need for hurry.

I told Matt what I’d learned in Sheridan.

“That matches what I heard,” he said, “and we have two mysteries. The first mystery is interesting, but it’s no longer important. Was John Still pretending to be Jesse Still, or was Jesse pretending to be John?”

“If Jesse drove into a river in ’53, then it has to be John.” I didn’t like what I said, because Jesse was real. The best actor in the world couldn’t pretend that well. My sorrow choked me, but I wasn’t ashamed.

Matt seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “We don’t know how long the game went on,” he said real quiet. “We never will know. John could have been playing at being Jesse way back in, 53.”

That got things tangled, and I felt resentful. Things were complicated enough. Me and Matt had just lost a friend, and now Matt was talking like that was the least interesting part.

“Makes no difference whether he was John or Jesse,” I told Matt.

“He was Jesse when he died. He’s laying across the seat in Jesse’s car. Figure it any way you want, but we’re talking about Jesse.”

“You’re right,” Matt said. “Also, you’re wrong. We’re talking about someone who was both.” Matt sat quiet for a minute, figuring things out. I told myself it was just as well that he’d married a schoolteacher. “Assume, for the sake of argument,” he said, “that John was playing Jesse in ’53. John drove into the river, and people believed they were burying Jesse.

“Or, for the sake of argument, assume that it was Jesse in ’53. In that case the game started with John’s grief. Either way the game ran for many years.” Matt was getting at something, but he always has to go roundabout.

“After years, John, or Jesse, disappeared. There was only a man who was both John and Jesse. That’s the reason it makes no difference who died in ’53.”

Matt looked through the car window into the darkness like he expected to discover something important. “This is a long and lonesome country,” he said. “The biggest mystery is: why? The answer may lie in the mystery of twins, or it may be as simple as a man reaching into the past for happy memories. At any rate, one brother dies, and the survivor keeps his brother alive by living his brother’s life, as well as his own. Think of the planning, the elaborate schemes, the near self-deception. Think of how often the roles shifted. A time must have arrived when that lonely man could not even remember who he was.”

The answer was easy, and I saw it. Jesse, or John, chased the road to find something they’d lost on the road. They lost their parents and each other. I didn’t say a damn word. Matt was making me mad, but I worked at forgiving him. He was handling his own grief, and maybe he didn’t have a better way.

“And so he invented The Road Dog,” Matt said. “That kept the personalities separate. The Road Dog was a metaphor to make him proud. Perhaps it might confuse some of the ladies, but there isn’t a man ever born who wouldn’t understand it.”

I remembered long nights and long roads. I couldn’t fault his reasoning.

“At the same time,” Matt said, “the metaphor served the twins. They could play road games with the innocence of children, maybe even replay memories of a time when their parents were alive and the world seemed warm. John played The Road Dog, and Jesse chased; and, by God, so did the rest of us. It was a magnificent metaphor.”

“If it was that blamed snappy,” I said, “how come it fell to pieces? For the past year, it seems like Jesse’s been running away from The Dog.”

“The metaphor began to take over. The twins began to defend against each other,” Matt said. “I’ve been watching it all along, but couldn’t understand what was happening. John Still was trying to take over Jesse, and Jesse was trying to take over John.”

“It worked for a long time,” I said, “and then it didn’t work. What’s the kicker?”

“Our own belief,” Matt said. “We all believed in The Road Dog. When all of us believed, John was forced to become stronger.”

“And Jesse fought him off?”

“Successfully,” Matt said. “All this year, when Jesse came firing out of town, rolling fifty miles, and firing back, I thought it was Jesse’s problem. Now I see that John was trying to get free, get back on the road, and Jesse was dragging him back. This was a struggle between real men, maybe titans in the oldest sense, but certainly not imitations.”

“It was a guy handling his problems.”

“That’s an easy answer. We can’t know what went on with John,” Matt said, “but we know some of what went on with Jesse. He tried to love a woman, Sarah, and failed. He lost his dogs—which doesn’t sound like much, unless your dogs are all you have. Jesse fought defeat by building his other metaphor, which was that damned cemetery.” Matt’s voice got husky. He’d been holding in his sorrow, but his sorrow started coming through. It made me feel better about him.

“I think the cemetery was Jesse’s way of answering John, or denying that he was vulnerable. He needed a symbol. He tried to protect his loves and couldn’t. He couldn’t even protect his love for his brother. That cemetery is the last bastion of Jesse’s love.” Matt looked like he was going to cry, and I felt the same.

“Cars can’t hurt you,” Matt said. “Only bad driving hurts you. The cemetery is a symbol for protecting one of the few loves you can protect. That’s not saying anything bad about Jesse. That’s saying something with sadness for all of us.”

I slowed to pull onto Jesse’s place. Mike’s Olds sat by the trailer. Lights were on in the trailer, but no other lights showed anywhere.

“Men build all lands of worlds in order to defeat fear and loneliness,” Matt said. “We give and take as we build those worlds. One must wonder how much Jesse, and John, gave in order to take the little that they got.”

We climbed from the Chrysler as autumn wind moved across the graveyard and felt its way toward my bones. The moon lighted faces of grave markers, but not enough that you could read them. Mike had the bulldozer warming up. It stood and puttered, and darkness felt best, and Mike knew it. The headlights were off. Far away on Highway 2, an engine wound tight and squalling, and it seemed like echoes of engines whispered among the graves. Mike stood huge as a grizzly.

“I’ve shot horses that looked healthier than you two guys,” he said, but said it sort of husky.

Matt motioned toward the bulldozer. “This is illegal.”

“Nobody ever claimed it wasn’t.” Mike was ready to fight if a fight was needed. “Anybody who don’t like it can turn around and walk.”

“I like it,” Matt said. “It’s fitting and proper. But if we’re caught, there’s hell to pay.”

“I like most everything and everybody,” Mike said, “except the government. They paw a man to death while he’s alive, then keep pawing his corpse. I’m saving Jesse a little trouble.”

“They like to know that he’s dead and what killed him.”

“Sorrow killed him,” Mike said. “Let it go at that.”

Jesse killed himself, timing his tiredness and starvation just right, but I was willing to let it go, and Matt was, too.

“We’ll go along with you,” Matt said. “But they’ll sell this place for taxes. Somebody will start digging sometime.”

“Not for years and years. It’s deeded to me. Jesse fixed up papers. They’re on the kitchen table.” Mike turned toward the trailer. “We’re going to do this right, and there’s not much time.”

We found a blanket and a quilt in the trailer. Mike opened a kitchen drawer and pulled out snapshots. Some looked pretty new, and some were faded: a man and woman in old-fashioned clothes, a picture of two young boys in Sunday suits, pictures of cars and road signs, and pictures of two women who were maybe Sue Ellen and Sarah. Mike piled them like a deck of cards, snapped a rubber band around them, and checked the trailer. He picked up a pair of pale yellow sunglasses that some racers use for night driving. “You guys see anything else?”

“His dogs,” Matt said. “He had pictures of his dogs.”

We found them under a pillow, and it didn’t pay to think why they were there. Then we went to the Linc and wrapped Jesse real careful in the blanket. We spread the quilt over him, and laid his stuff on the floor beside the accelerator. Then Mike remembered something. He half unwrapped Jesse, went through his pockets, then wrapped him back up. He took Jesse’s keys and left them hanging in the ignition.

The three of us stood beside the Linc, and Matt cleared his throat.

“It’s my place to say it,” Mike told him. “This was my best friend.” Mike took off his cap. Moonlight lay thin on his bald head.

“A lot of preachers will be glad this man is gone, and that’s one good thing you can say for him. He drove nice people crazy. This man was a hellion, pure and simple; but what folks don’t understand is, hellions have their place. They put everything on the line over nothing very much. Most guys worry so much about dying, they never do any living. Jesse was so alive with living, he never gave dying any thought. This man would roll ninety just to get to a bar before it closed.” Mike kind of choked up and stopped to listen. From the graveyard came the echoes of engines, and from Highway 2 rose the thrum of a straight-eight crankshaft whipping in its bed. Dim light covered the graveyard, like a hundred sets of parking lights and not the moon.

“This man kept adventure alive, when, everyplace else, it’s dying. There was nothing ever smug or safe about this man. If he had fears, he laughed. This man never hit a woman or crossed a friend. He did tie the can on Betty Lou one night, but can’t be blamed. It was really The Dog who did that one. Jesse never had a problem until he climbed into that Studebaker.”

So Mike had known all along. At least Mike knew something.

“I could always run even with Jesse,” Mike said, “but I never could beat The Dog. The Dog could clear any track. And in a damn Studebaker.”

“But a very swift Studebaker,” Matt muttered, like a Holy Roller answering the preacher.

“Bored and stroked and rowdy,” Mike said, “and you can say the same for Jesse. Let that be the final word. Amen.”

IV

A LITTLE SPARK of flame dwelt at the stack of the dozer, and distant mountains lay white capped and prophesied winter. Mike filled the graves quick. Matt got rakes and a shovel. I helped him mound the graves with only moonlight to go on, while Mike went to the trailer. He made coffee.

“Drink up and git,” Mike told us when he poured the coffee. “Jesse’s got some friends who need to visit, and it will be morning pretty quick.”

“Let them,” Matt said. “We’re no hindrance.”

“You’re a smart man,” Mike told Matt, “but your smartness makes you dumb. You started to hinder the night you stopped driving beyond your headlights.” Mike didn’t know how to say it kind, so he said it rough. His red mustache and bald head made him look like a pirate in a picture.

“You’re saying that I’m getting old.” Matt has known Mike long enough not to take offense.

“Me, too,” Mike said, “but not that old. When you get old, you stop seeing them. Then you want to stop seeing them. You get afraid for your hide.”

“You stop imagining?”

“Shitfire,” Mike said, “you stop seeing. Imagination is something you use when you don’t have eyes.” He pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and was chewing it before he ever got it lit. “Ghosts have lost it all. Maybe they’re the ones the Lord didn’t love well enough. If you see them, but ain’t one, maybe you’re important.”

Matt mulled that, and so did I. We’ve both wailed a lot of road for some sort of reason.

“They’re kind of rough,” Matt said about ghosts. “They hitch rides, but don’t want ’em. I’ve stopped for them and got laughed at. They fool themselves, or maybe they don’t.”

“It’s a young man’s game,” Matt said.

“It’s a game guys got to play. Jesse played the whole deck. He was who he was, whenever he was it. That’s the key. That’s the reason you slug cops when you gotta. It looks like Jesse died old, but he lived young longer than most. That’s the real mystery. How does a fella keep going?”

“Before we leave,” I said, “how long did you know that Jesse was The Dog?”

“Maybe a year and a half. About the time he started running crazy.”

“And never said a word?”

Mike looked at me like something you’d wipe off your boot. “Learn to ride your own fence,” he told me. “It was Jesse’s business.” Then he felt sorry for being rough. “Besides,” he said, “we were having fun. I expect that’s all over now.”

Matt followed me to the Chrysler. We left the cemetery, feeling tired and mournful. I shoved the car onto Highway 2, heading toward Matt’s place.

“Wring it out once for old times?”

“Putter along,” Matt said. “I just entered the putter stage of life, and may as well practice doing it.”

In my mirrors a stream of headlights showed, then vanished one by one as cars turned into the graveyard. The moon had left the sky. Over toward South Dakota was a suggestion of first faint morning light. Mounded graves lay at my elbow, and so did Canada. On my left the road south ran fine and fast as a man can go. Mist rose from the roadside ditches, and maybe there was movement in the mist, maybe not.

There’s little more to tell. Through fall and winter and spring and summer, I drove to Sheridan. The Mormon turned out to be a pretty good man, for a Mormon. I kept at it, and drove through another autumn and another winter. Linda got convinced. We got married in the spring, and I expected trouble. Married people are supposed to fight, but nothing like that ever happened. We just worked hard, got our own place in a few years, and Linda birthed two girls. That disappointed the Mormon, but was a relief to me.

And in those seasons of driving, when the roads were good for twenty miles an hour in the snow, or eighty under sun, the road stood empty except for a couple times. Miss Molly showed up once early on to say a bridge was out. She might have showed up another time. Squinchy little taillights winked one night when it was late and I was highballing. Some guy jackknifed a Freightliner, and his trailer lay across the road.

But I saw no other ghosts. I’d like to say that I saw the twins, John and Jesse, standing by the road, giving the high sign or dancing, but it never happened.

I did think of Jesse, though, and thought of one more thing. If Matt was right, then I saw how Jesse had to die before I got home. He had to, because I believed in Road Dog. My belief would have been just enough to bring John forward, and that would have been fatal, too. If either one of them became too strong, they both of them lost. So Jesse had to do it.

The graveyard sank beneath the weather. Mike tended it for a while, but lost interest. Weather swept the mounds flat. Weed-covered markers tumbled to decay and dust, so that only one marble headstone stands solid beside Highway 2. The marker doesn’t bend before the winter winds, nor does the little stone that me and Mike and Matt put there. It lays flat against the ground. You have to know where to look:

Road Dog

1931-1965

2 million miles, more or less

Run and run as fast as we can

We never can catch the Gingerbread Man

And now even the great good cars are dead, or most of them. What with gas prices and wars and rumors of wars, the cars these days are all suspensions. They’ll corner like a cat, but don’t have the scratch of a cat; and maybe that’s a good thing. The state posts fewer crosses.

Still, there are some howlers left out there, and some guys are still howling. I lie in bed of nights and listen to the scorch of engines along Highway 2. I hear them claw the darkness, stretching lonesome at the sky, scatting across the eternal land; younger guys running as young guys must; chasing each other, or chasing the land of dreams, or chasing into ghost land while hoping it ain’t true—guys running into darkness chasing each other, or chasing something—chasing road.

AMERICAN CHILDHOOD

Pat Murphy

Pat Murphy is the winner of two Nebula Awards and her short story collection, Points of Departure (Bantam) won the 1990 Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback original. In addition, Ms. Murphy’s novella "Bones" (May 1990) won the 1991 World Fantasy Award, The authors currently working on an historical feminist werewolf novel, that is tentatively Traveling West: An American Story.

Nadya Rybak was five years old when she realized that her family was not like other families. She was in the crossroads store, staring at the jars of candy on the high shelf behind the counter and wondering if her father might buy her a peppermint stick to suck during the wagon ride home. It was late spring in Missouri, and the wooden floorboards were warm against her bare feet.

She liked the store. The clutter of boxes and barrels intrigued her. Interesting smells clung to them: jerked beef, clarified butter, pickles, and spices. Her father leaned against the wooden counter in the back, talking with Mr. Evans, the storekeeper, about Indian trouble up north. Two fur traders had been killed the month before. Mr. Evans blamed all the trouble on whiskey and whiskey peddlers, and Nadya’s father agreed.

Nadya’s mother and Mrs. Evans sat on a bench near shelves that held bolts of fabric and sewing notions. A three-month-old issue of Godey’s Ladies Book, worn from handling, lay open on Mrs. Evans’s lap. Lottie Evans, a wide-eyed three-year-old, sat at her mother’s feet, staring at Nadya. One chubby hand clutched her mother’s skirt. She was fascinated by the older girl, but had not yet gathered her courage to approach.

A bearded man came in the door and threw a bundle of furs onto the counter. Nadya stared up at him with interest. He was a very shaggy man: his beard was long and unkempt; his hair needed cutting. He was wearing a buckskin coat, homespun pants, and a shirt that hadn’t been changed any too recently. There hung about him—mingling with the usual man-smells of chewing tobacco, whiskey, and sweat—a strong smell of many animals. She smelled bear and deer and buffalo and beaver, but what caught her attention was the faint smell of wolf.

The man leaned against the counter, evidently content to wait for the storekeeper’s attention. He glanced down at Nadya. “Hello there, young’un.”

“Hello.”

The wolf smell came from the bundle of furs on the counter.

“You know, I’ve got a little sister back in New York that’s not much older than you.”

Nadya considered this gravely, but didn’t say anything.

“What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for my papa.”

“Looked like you were watching those jars of candy back there.” She nodded, and the man grinned. “Thought so. Well, maybe when I trade these furs, I’ll buy you a piece of candy. Would you like that?”

Nadya nodded solemnly. She watched the man untie the rope that bound the furs together and spread the furs on the counter. She could smell wolf more strongly now. Emboldened by the man’s grin, she reached up and touched one of the furs, a soft pelt the color of butter.

“That’s a painter,” the man said. “A mountain cat.” He let her stroke the soft tawny fur, then lifted it aside. “Now here’s a beaver pelt. Some fine gentleman in New York City will be wearing a hat made from that soon enough.”

The man lifted the beaver pelt aside, revealing a fur that gave off a warm, reassuring scent, the scent of Nadya’s mother on certain nights. Nadya reached up hesitantly to stroke the soft pelt. A layer of stiff gray guard hairs lay atop an undercoat of soft fur. She stroked the fur backwards to reveal the soft undercoat, and the long gray guard hairs tickled her hand.

“This ‘un, I’ll sell for the bounty,” the man said. He lifted the fur off the counter and held it down where she could see it better. Where the animal’s head should have been, there was a mask with vacant holes in place of eyes. The ears were shriveled; they had been pressed flat by the weight of the other furs.

Nadya stared at the empty eye-holes and took a step back, dropping her hand to her side. “Where did you get it?” she asked, suddenly wary. Until she saw that eyeless mask, she had not thought about where the fur had come from.

“From a wolf bigger than you are.” He shook the pelt and the fur rippled. “Saw her prowling around the edge of my camp and got her with a single shot. Right through the head.”

Nadya took another step back, glaring at the man.

“What’s the matter, young’un? She’s dead. Can’t hurt you now.”

“You shouldn’t have done that,” she cried shrilly. “You shouldn’t have shot her.”

She fled across the store to hide behind her mother’s long skirt. Her mother put her hand on Nadya’s head. “What is it, child? What’s the matter?”

“He killed her. That man.” Nadya pointed across the store at the bewildered trapper, who still held the wolf skin.

“I didn’t mean to scare her, missus,” he said apologetically. “I was just showing her some furs.”

“It’s all right,” her mother said. She stooped and put her arm around Nadya’s shoulders. She spoke softly. “Come, Nadya. We’ll go out to the wagon to wait for Papa.”

“Why did he kill the wolf, mama?”

“Hush,” her mother said. “Hush now.”

Nadya’s mother took her hand and led her out the door. Nadya walked by her mother’s side, carefully placing herself between her mother and the man who killed wolves. She would protect her mother.

“I didn’t mean to scare her,” he was saying.

Then they were out in the sunshine, away from the comforting and horrifying scent of the wolf fur. Nadya sat on the wagon seat and her mother explained, very softly, that the wolf the man had killed was not a person—not like Mama or Papa. That wolf was an animal, and it was not murder to kill it.

But her mother’s voice trembled when she talked and she held Nadya’s hand a little too tightly. Nadya knew that her mother was afraid of the man too. When her father came out of the store, he brought a new ax head, a box of supplies, and a few hard candies to comfort Nadya.

“He’s a bad man,” Nadya told her father.

“He just doesn’t understand,” her father said.

Nadya shook her head stubbornly. The world, which had always seemed so safe and secure, was suddenly a frightening place. She sucked on a hard candy and clung to her mother’s hand, convinced that her father was wrong.

Dmitri Rybak, Nadya’s father, had emigrated to America from a small Polish village. Marietta, her mother, had come from France. They had met in St. Louis, fallen in love, and moved West, looking for land where they could live their lives undisturbed.

At that time, Missouri had been a state for only a few years. According to the unreliable census figures of the time, the state had a population of 66,000 (not counting Indians or Negroes) scattered over its 69,000 or so square miles. Most of the folks were clustered along the Mississippi River. Only a few had ventured westward—trappers and traders and soldiers, for the most part.

Nadya’s parents had settled on the Osage River in the southwest portion of the state, a hilly region of creeks and springs and few settlers. When they settled, there had been a trading post located where the river was shallow enough to ford. The Evans’s store stood there now.

When Nadya was three, the mountain man who had run the trading post had moved on, selling his ramshackle building to Mr. Evans, who had improved and expanded the store to serve the needs of the farmers who were moving into the area. By the time Nadya was five, a tiny settlement had grown up around the store, including a blacksmith shop, a tavern, and a few houses.

After meeting the trapper in the store, Nadya became more careful of people outside her family, less willing to talk with strangers. On the whole her new shyness affected her life relatively little—few strangers happened by their farm. And for the most part, Nadya’s childhood was happy.

On long winter nights, when the farmyard was dusted with snow and hickory logs burning in the fireplace warmed the cabin, Dmitri taught her to read the Farmer’s Almanack. They leaned over the book, huddling close to the pool of light cast by a wick burning in a cup of bear oil. Her father stumbled over the difficult words, but he persisted, determined that Nadya learn. While they labored over the book (learning that turnips should be planted in the dark of the moon and that a silver coin, placed in a butter churn, will help the butter come), Marietta watched from the fireside, mending or knitting.

With a pen made from a wild turkey quill, Dmitri taught Nadya to write. By the wavering light, Nadya painstakingly made marks on bark that her father had peeled from the shagbark hickory tree. She learned to write her name in English. Her father could write in another alphabet as well—the alphabet he had learned when he was a boy. But he only taught her the English writing, saying that she was an American and she should write as the Americans did.

When Nadya’s lessons were done, she would ask for a story.

“A story?” her father would say. “It’s too late for a story.” But he always smiled when he said it was too late.

“It’s not too late,” she would say. “There’s time. Please, Papa. Just one story.”

“Maybe there’s time for one, Dmitri,” Marietta would say. Then Dmitri would put aside the pen and the Almanack and he would lift his hands so that the light from the burning wick made wavering shadows on the deerskin that her mother had stretched across the window to keep the drafts out. The shadows that Nadya’s father made with his hands were magical.

“Once upon a time, there was a man,” her father said, and the shadows of his hands became the silhouette of a man’s head—a man with a jutting chin and a big nose. “He lived in a cabin on the edge of the forest. And there was a rabbit who came to eat the vegetables in his garden.” The shadows shifted and changed, becoming a rabbit that wiggled its nose and made Nadya giggle. “Every night the rabbit came and ate from the man’s garden.”

Dmitri told of how the man built a scarecrow to fool the rabbit. The rabbit ignored the scarecrow—it kept on hopping into the garden and eating all the vegetables. The man tried to keep the rabbit away by sitting in the garden all night long, but he always fell asleep. The shadow man snored noisily, and that made Nadya laugh.

“But,” Nadya’s father said, “on the night when the moon was full, the man changed.”

Nadya watched with fascination as the shadow man shifted and became a wolf, a fierce shadow head that snapped at the air and lifted its snout to howl. The wolf chased the rabbit through the forest, growling and snapping.

“All night long, the wolf chased the rabbit and the rabbit ran from the wolf. When the moon set and the sun came up, the rabbit hid in its burrow, afraid to go near the man’s garden. And the wolf became a man again.”

Nadya watched the shadow wolf give way to the shadow man. Sometimes the shadow man sang a song and sometimes he howled like a wolf. Then Nadya and her mother howled too. If they howled long and hard, the wild wolves that lived in the forest heard them and joined in.

The story was always a little different, but it always involved the shadow man and the shadow wolf. Nadya never grew tired of watching one become the other.

Of course, on nights when the moon was full, there were no lessons and no stories. In the summer, there were romps, where her mother and father, in their other form, would play tag with Nadya in the farmyard by the cabin door. In the winter, the she-wolf would cuddle Nadya, letting the child stroke her soft fur and snuggle against her warm belly. When Nadya was seven years old—old enough to be trusted to stay away from the fire—her mother and father would go running at night, leaving her alone until morning. She was lonely then, sad that she could not go running with her parents. But her mother told her that when she grew up, she would Change when the full moon rose. And then they would run together. She had to be content with that.

Since Nadya had no brothers and sisters, she helped her mother and father in equal part: doing womanly chores with her mother and helping her father with the farming, acting more like a son to her father than a daughter. When she was nine years old, she helped her father plow. Her job was to ride the mule to steady it while her father rode the plow. She loved that—the aroma of the newly turned earth, the warmth of the mule beneath her, the solid shifting of the animal’s muscles as it strained to pull the plow through the soil. Her father whistled and shouted to the mule, and sang folk songs in French and Polish.

The summer that she was ten, her father taught her to shoot. As a target, he set a pinecone on a stump in the field. All that first week, he took her down to the field in the early evening. She would hold the rifle to her shoulder and practice pointing it at the pinecone and pulling the trigger.

After a week of sighting on the pinecone, he let her try shooting with powder. The first time she tried, the kick of the explosion bruised her shoulder and nearly knocked her down. But she was not frightened and she tried it again and again, until she could hit the pinecone square with every shot. She hunted squirrels in the forest near the house, aiming for the bark just below the animal’s feet. The shot shattered the bark and the concussion killed the squirrel, leaving the meat untouched.

As she grew older, she and her father went hunting for larger game. At night, they hunted deer, mesmerizing the animals with a torch made from a pine knot or a rag soaked in bear oil and lashed to a stick. By day, they hunted turkey or bear, in season.

Nadya’s long skirts were a hindrance when she went hunting, rustling against the grass and catching on every burr and thorn. Over her mother’s protests, she stitched herself a pair of homespun trousers. “There is no one here to see,” her father said. “Let the girl be comfortable.”

Nadya was a good hunter—she had a better eye than her father, and she brought in most of the meat for the family table. In the fall of her twelfth year, determined to earn a rifle of her own, she hunted bears for their skins and oil and meat.

She always wore a dress to town—her mother insisted on that. One Sunday afternoon, Nadya and her father took the bear oil and skins to the store and offered them in trade for a new, muzzle-loading Hawkins rifle. Mr. Evans accepted the trade, but seemed puzzled when Nadya lifted the gun from the counter and sighted along its barrel. He frowned at Dmitri. “You’re letting your daughter choose your rifle?” he murmured.

“Her rifle,” Dmitri corrected. “She killed the bears. Only seems right she should choose the rifle. After all, she’s a better shot than I am.”

The men who were lounging by the Franklin stove glanced up. “The girl killed eight bears?” one man asked.

“Ten,” Dmitri said. “We kept the skins and meat from two for our own use.”

“D’you mind if I try it?” Nadya asked Mr. Evans.

“As you like,” he said.

They stepped onto the porch of the store, with Nadya carrying the rifle easily at her side. The men from the store followed. Nadya loaded the rifle, carefully pouring black powder into the barrel, tamping it in place, inserting cotton wadding and a bullet. She looked around then, searching for a target.

“You see that nail in the fence across the way,” said one of the loiterers from the store. “I knew a man in Kentucky who could hit a nail like that and drive it home.”

Nadya glanced at the man’s grinning face. He was laughing at her, and she did not like it. She squinted at the fence across the road, where the rusty head of a nail protruded from a post. “All right,” she said easily, lifted the rifle, and fired a single shot. The nail disappeared into the wood, leaving a dark hole where the bullet had struck.

“This rifle will do,” Nadya said to her father. They returned to the store, leaving the loiterers staring at the fence.

In her fourteenth year, Nadya noticed that the world was changing around her. It began when the bargers started calling to her. She had heard people at the store say that the men who steered flatboats down the river were a bad lot—drinking, fighting, and stealing when they could. But Nadya had always liked the look of them. They seemed so much at ease floating down river, leaning back among the crates of apples and barrels of salt pork, playing the harmonica or singing. She had always waved at the bargers, and they had always waved back. But in her fourteenth year, they started shouting when they waved. “Come along with us, little sweetheart!” There was something leering and wicked in the way they said it, and she stopped waving after that.

Then a Yankee peddler stopped at the farm to show her mother his stock of sewing notions and such. He gave Nadya a blue satin ribbon for no reason at all. He said that it would look pretty in her dark hair, and when he held it up so that she could see it, his smell changed ever so slightly. She did not know what to say. He watched her so intently, like a hungry dog with its eye on the hoecakes. When her mother nudged her, she thanked him awkwardly.

After dinner that night, Nadya’s mother brought out her cards. She kept them wrapped in a silk scarf on the same shelf with the Bible and the Farmer’s Almanack. Nadya knew the cards well: when she was a child, she had often played with them, fingering their gilded edges and admiring the pictures of strange people in strange costumes. She would sort the cards according to suit: separating the swords, the coins, the wands, and the cups, and setting aside the special cards that did not fall into any suit. The words on these cards were written in French: Le Diable, The Devil; Le Monde, The World; Le Mat, the Fool.

Her mother did not read the cards often. But when there was a decision to be made—like whether to plant early or wait—she would lay the cards on the rough wood of the table, studying the bright pictures. She would shake her head over certain cards—a burning tower, a man hanging upside down—while she and Dmitri conferred in soft murmurs.

That night, when Dmitri went out to check on the cattle, Nadya’s mother beckoned Nadya to sit beside her. “That trader,” her mother said, “You caught his eye.” She unwrapped the cards and spread the silk scarf on the table. “What did you think of that?”

Nadya shifted uncomfortably on the wooden chair. “I didn’t like the way he watched me.”

“He wanted you,” she said. “The way a man wants a woman. It’s that simple.”

Nadya looked down at her hands, suddenly shy. Her mother had always talked of such things matter of factly, without shame.

“I’d guess that the Change will be coming to you with the next full moon,” her mother said. She sat back in her chair, holding the cards loosely in her lap. “With the Change, there comes a power. Being wanted—that’s part of the power. You need to understand that men will admire you, men will lust after you.”

Nadya looked up at her mother’s serene face. “What do I do about that?” Nadya asked.

Her mother smiled. “Don’t look so worried, cherie. This is not a bad thing.” She shuffled the cards, her eyes on Nadya. “We will read the cards for guidance.” When Nadya cut the deck, her mother restacked the cards and began to lay them face-up on the scarf in a cross-shaped pattern. “You are strong-minded—that’s bad and good. Bad because it will lead you into trouble; good because it will keep the trouble from overwhelming you.”

Nadya studied the cards. In the center of the pattern was the ten of coins, a card that pictured a happy family gathered together. The ten of coins was crossed and half-covered by La Lune, The Moon. On this card, two dogs howled at a frowning moon. There were other cards she recognized. In her future was the knight of swords, charging rashly forward on a gray horse. She saw Le Diable, a frightening figure with a man and a woman in chains at his feet; La Mort, a skeleton clutching a sickle; La Maison Diu, a castle struck by lightning.

“Ah,” her mother said softly. “Perhaps this is not the best time for a reading.”

“Tell me what it is, Mama.”

Her mother stared at the cards. “Pain and destruction.”

“When is it coming?” Nadya looked at the door, as if expecting the Devil to walk through it. “What can I do?”

“It is coming with a young man,” her mother said. “He charges forward—reckless and brash—and he carries death in his hands.”

Her mother dealt more cards, still shaking her head. “We will try again on another day,” she said at last. She swept the cards from the scarf and shuffled them together.

That night, Nadya heard her mother and father murmuring softly by the fireside. Nadya listened, but she could not make out the words.

Three days later, when the full moon rose over the forest, the Change came to Nadya. She went running with her mother and father, and life was never the same after that.

Back in 1823, Mr. Hekiziah Jones attended a Methodist revival, a tent meeting that had brought in hundreds of devout Christians and an equal number of curiosity seekers from surrounding towns. Mr. Jones fell into the second category—a hard-drinking young man, he hoped to have a little fun and maybe win a few Christians over to the ways of sin.

Mr. Jones drank a great deal on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, overcome with a hangover and influenced by the persuasive sermon of a Methodist preacher, he renounced the Devil, swore that he would never again touch the demon rum, and, just incidentally, proposed to Cordelia Walker, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had given up all hope of matrimony. Before Mr. Jones could change his mind, the preacher married the happy couple to the cheers of the crowd.

The first two vows were transitory—Mr. Jones returned to sin and drinking as soon as he possibly could. But the new Mrs. Jones was not so easily dismissed. Determined to save Mr. Jones’ soul, she made an honest man of him—a farmer, no less. They emigrated to Kentucky, where he scratched out a living on a poor farm and Mrs. Jones bore him four strapping sons. Mrs. Jones’ oldest son, Rufus, took after his father in his fondness for drinking and hunting and gambling and womanizing.

The year that Nadya turned eighteen, the Jones family emigrated again, this time to Missouri. That spring, the Jones family attended the wedding of Zillah Shaw, daughter of a prosperous farmer, to Samuel Prentice, a lanky farmboy.

The celebration was in the barn, which had been cleared of livestock for the occasion. The dirt floor was strewn with clean straw. Rufus Jones stood by the open door with a group of men. They passed a green jug of Mr. Shaw’s fine home-brewed whiskey from hand to hand. The sun was setting and Rufus’ shadow stretched all the way across the open floor of the barn.

The women were clearing away the remnants of the wedding feast. Children were running around the barn floor, whooping like Indians, and four young dogs were chasing them. At the far end of the barn, a fiddler was tuning his instrument for the dance to come. The air smelled of smoke, venison, and manure.

Rufus took a pull on the whiskey jug to ward off the evening chill, then passed the jug to his father. Hekiziah took a long pull, swallowing several times before he paused for breath. “Those are almighty ugly dogs,” he said, squinting his good eye at the young hounds that romped with the children. Hekiziah had lost his other eye in a fight with an eye-gouging boatman before Rufus was born. He wore a patch over the empty socket.

“If they take after their mama, they’ll be fine hunters,” Mr. Shaw said. “She’s as fine a bitch as ever treed a painter.”

Hekiziah took another pull from the bottle, then reluctantly passed it to the next man. “That so? You do much hunting in these parts?”

Mr. Shaw nodded, taking the bait. “Not much choice in the matter. Man’s got to hunt to keep the varmints out of his stock.”

Rufus had heard this conversation before. By the time the bottle was empty, he guessed that his father would have turned the conversation from hunting to shooting and from shooting to who was the best shot. Soon enough, there would be talk of a shooting match with, most likely, a bottle of whiskey as the prize. Rufus was a good shot, and Hekiziah took advantage of that skill whenever he could.

Rufus made himself comfortable, leaning back against the barn wall and watching the girls primp and flutter around the fiddler. Mrs. Jones had taught Rufus to be polite and soft-spoken with the ladies. His father had taught him to get away with whatever he could. The combination was dangerous. In Kentucky, he had courted the sweet young daughter of a nearby farmer, taking her berry-picking in the warm days of Indian summer. He had left Kentucky just in time to avoid the consequences of those berry-picking expeditions.

The fiddler finished his tuning and played a reel. Rufus watched as the dancers formed two lines, stamping their feet in time with the music. Light from the setting sun faded. After the third dance, two of the older Shaw boys climbed into the rafters to light lanterns filled with bear oil. The burning wicks cast pools of yellow light, leaving only the corners in shadow.

It took a bit longer than Rufus expected for talk to turn to a shooting match. Mr. Shaw talked about a painter hunt last fall and about a wolf pack that roved along the river the winter just past. But eventually Hekiziah brought the conversation around.

“I reckon it’s the water of Kaintuck,” Hekiziah said. “Don’t rightly know what else it could be. It must be something that makes the hunters of that state the sharpest-eyed riflemen around.”

Mr. Shaw frowned and shook his head. His cheeks and nose were ruddy from drinking. “That just ain’t so, Hekiziah. Why my own boys are sharp as any you’ll find in Kentucky.”

“I’d have to put that to the test before I could agree,” Hekiziah said easily. “My boy Rufus is a right fine shot.” He hefted the whiskey bottle, which had returned to his hand and lingered there. “Maybe a shooting match could settle the matter.”

“All right then, a shooting match,” Mr. Shaw agreed. His voice was loud and a little slurred. “With a bottle of whiskey to the winner.” He glanced down. Two of the young dogs were wrestling on the barn floor. “And the pick of the litter as well.”

“What’s the target?” Rufus asked quietly.

Mr. Shaw glanced out the barn door at the dark fields. “A candle-snuffing, I’d say. That sit well with you?”

Rufus shrugged. “One target is as good as another.”

In a snuffing contest, the target was the flame of a candle. The idea was not to snuff the candle out—that would be too easy a shot. Instead, the marksman had to shoot away the snuff, the charred part of the candle’s wick, without putting out the flame. When the snuff was removed, the flame would brighten. Shoot too close to the candle, and the flame would die. Shoot too far away, and you would miss the wick altogether.

“Boys!” Mr. Shaw shouted over the music of the fiddle. He stamped his feet and shouted again. “Boys, listen here!” The fiddler stopped playing in the middle of a dance. “We’re having a shooting match. Mr. Jones here says that his boys from Kentucky can beat anyone from Missouri hands down. Adam, run to the house and fetch a candle. Jack! William! All the rest of you! Get your rifles.”

The young men who had been dancing abandoned their partners and scattered to fetch their rifles. When Adam returned with a tallow candle, Mr. Shaw took a flaming torch from the cooking fire and led the way out into the fields. Rufus walked at his father’s side. The ground was damp and the air held the scent of spring growth. The sky was overcast. Moonlight illuminated the clouds from behind, creating a silvery patch of light in the eastern sky.

Like many settlers, Mr. Shaw had cleared new land by girdling the trees—removing a strip of bark all around the trunk. Without the bark, the tree died, and the settler cut it down. In the spring, when the ground was soft, the farmer grubbed out the stumps. In Mr. Shaw’s field, the stumps of girdled trees—now stripped of all their bark and pale in the torchlight—stood as a reminder of the forest that had once covered his

Grass had sprouted between the stumps. Beyond the field, where the uncleared forest stood, the darkness grew thicker. A chorus of crickets, singing in the field and the forest, almost drowned out the fiddle music from the barn.

Mr. Shaw led the way to the far side of the field, where a low, flat-topped stump stood on the edge of the forest. He wedged the candle into a crack in the stump and lit the wick with his torch. He gave Adam the torch. “Now you stay here, boy,” he advised his son. “Call out when the snuff is long enough for shooting, then get back.”

The men moved away from the stump, walking toward the barn until Mr. Shaw said, “That’ll do.” In the still air, the candle flame stood steady, a sliver of yellow light against the darkness of the forest.

“Three shots apiece,” Hekiziah suggested, and Mr. Shaw agreed.

Jack, Mr. Shaw’s oldest son, took the first shot, standing with his feet spread wide, his rifle set firmly against his shoulder. His shot went high—the distant flame flickered as the ball passed over. The chorus of crickets fell silent for a moment, and then began again, as loud as before.

Jack paused to reload. His second shot was low, cutting the wick and putting out the candle. While Adam was relighting the candle, Jack took a pull from the whiskey jug.

“Move farther away from there,” Jack called to Adam when the candle was burning once again. “That damned torch is blinding me.”

He took his third shot and the flame flickered and then brightened.

“Dead on!” Adam called.

Jack grinned at his father and the others. “Who’ll be next?” he asked.

One by one, the other men shot. Several missed the candle with all three shots. Two others snuffed the candle one time out of three.

Rufus did not shoot until all the others had taken their turns. Then he lifted his rifle and squinted at the candle. In the blue heart of the flame, the charred portion of the wick curled in a long crescent.

He held his breath, steadying the rifle and sighting on that dark crescent. His first shot was perfect: the flame brightened and he smiled as he set the rifle down and reloaded.

“Fool’s luck,” he said to Mr. Shaw, before Mr. Shaw could say the same to him.

He took a pull from the whiskey bottle while he waited for the candle to burn down. The men around him were quiet. In the field and woods around them, crickets sang in a relentless chorus. “Ready!” Adam called at last.

Rufus lifted his rifle to his shoulder and squeezed off the second shot.

The candle flickered—a miss.

“Your luck is passing,” Mr. Shaw said in a good-natured tone.

“One more shot,” Hekiziah said. “Give the boy a fair chance.”

Rufus reloaded and lifted his rifle for the last shot. He braced himself, setting his feet wide apart and sighting carefully. The candle flickered and brightened for the second time.

Hekiziah whooped and clapped Rufus on the back. “Fine shooting, son. Almighty fine shooting. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Shaw?”

Hekiziah held his hand out to Mr. Shaw, but Mr. Shaw just frowned at him, shaking his head like a bull disturbed by flies. He squinted at the men around him.

“We’re not quite done,” Mr. Shaw said in a belligerent tone. “There’s one other who ought to shoot. One other who ain’t here. You just hold on. You all just wait here.”

He left them standing in the field and hurried in the direction of the barn. The cloud cover had broken and the half moon cast an uncertain light over the group. Rufus looked around at the others. By the moonlight, he could see them grinning, as if at a private joke.

“Who is he getting?” Hekiziah asked Jack uneasily. “Seems like most every man came with us.”

“You just wait,” Jack said. “You’ll see. Best shot in these parts.”

A few minutes later, Rufus saw three figures emerge from the barn and come across the field. As they approached, he realized that one of them was a woman. Her dark hair was braided and the braids were tied with ribbons and coiled on her head. With her left hand, she held her skirt so that the hem could not drag in the mud. She walked with a careful, mincing step, as if she were unaccustomed to wearing shoes. Under her right arm, she carried a muzzle-loading rifle. Another man, a farmer with a broad peasant face, followed behind Mr. Shaw and the woman.

Mr. Shaw performed introductions. “Mr. Jones, this is Miss Nadya Rybak and her father, Mr. Dmitri Rybak. It seemed to me that Miss Rybak should take a turn.”

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Rybak,” Hekiziah said uncertainly.

She wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were on the distant candle flame.

“Now, Miss Nadya,” Mr. Shaw was saying. “You see that candle over there.” He explained the rules of the contest and she listened, nodding to show that she understood. Then she glanced at her father and he nodded approval.

“It’s ready,” Adam called from his post by the candle. In the distance, Rufus could see the bobbing torch as the boy moved to a safe distance.

“Shoot when you’re ready, Miss Nadya,” Mr. Shaw said.

She planted her feet wide, getting a secure footing on the rough ground. She put her rifle to her shoulder, then frowned and lowered it again. She murmured something to her father—Rufus could not make out the words—and Mr. Rybat shrugged. She handed him the rifle and bent to unlace her shoes. That done, she pulled the shoes off and stood barefoot on the cold ground. She nodded with satisfaction and took her rifle, lifting it with greater confidence than before.

The rifle was barely to her shoulder when she squeezed off the first shot. The flame flickered and then flared brightly.

Nadya took the rifle from her shoulder and waited for the snuff to grow long enough to shoot again. The men waited in silence, looking away into the darkness. Mr. Rybak stood at his daughter’s side.

The woman glanced in Rufus’s direction, catching him staring. Rather than dropping her eyes, she returned his stare. Her eyes were dark in the moonlight.

“Ready,” Adam called out, and Nadya turned to face the candle. Again, she set her feet carefully and lifted the rifle smoothly to her shoulder. A faint breath of wind toyed with the wisps of hair that had escaped her braids. In the distance, the candle flame flickered and threatened to go out. She waited with the rifle at her shoulder until the flame steadied. Her second shot was as good as the first. The flame brightened and burned white.

She did not fidget as she waited for the flame to burn away the wick so that she could shoot again. She lowered the rifle and stood at ease, ignoring the men around her. The whiskey bottle passed from hand to hand. Mr. Rybak took a pull, then touched Nadya’s arm. She wet her lips, glanced at the candle, then accepted the bottle and drank. She handed the bottle to Rufus. Her fingers brushed his as he took the bottle—a warm touch in the cool night air.

The candle burned low and Adam called out that she could shoot again. Rufus watched her lift the rifle a third time.

Her third shot was perfect—straight through the snuff. “Good shooting,” Mr. Shaw exclaimed. “Fine shooting. Well worth a jug of whiskey, Miss Nadya.”

The men returned to the barn in a knot of excitement and noise. Rufus walked with the others, avoiding his father. Hekiziah did not like to be disappointed and Rufus thought it just as well to stay out of his way for a time. He also wanted to get a look at Nadya Rybak in a better light.

In the barn, the table had been cleared away and the fiddler was just starting a tune. A line of couples was forming for a reel, but Nadya was not among them. Rufus looked for her, strolling around the dance floor and peering into the shadowy corners. He tipped his hat to the group of young women who had gathered in one corner. There were some pretty girls there, but he had his mind fixed on Miss Nadya. He made his way to the corner of the barn where the men were drinking.

“I don’t see Miss Nadya,” he said to Tom Williams, the son of the man who ran the blacksmith shop in town.

Tom shrugged. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen her dancing. I suppose she doesn’t care for it.”

“Have you ever tried to persuade her to change her mind? She’s a handsome girl,” Rufus said.

Tom looked startled. “I never thought of that. I reckon she is. But I expect that trying to change her mind is a waste of time. She’s an odd one. Standoffish.”

“You think so? I’d wager that I could change her mind.”

“You think so? I doubt it.”

“How about betting four bits on the proposition. If I don’t have her out there dancing by the end of the evening, you win.”

Tom nodded. “I’ll take you up on that.”

“Than I guess I’ll see if I can find her.” Rufus took a gourd cup and a bottle of cider, crossed the barn to the open door, and stepped outside.

The barnyard was crowded with the farm wagons that had carried the guests to the celebration. He strolled among the wagons. On the far side of the barnyard, he saw a woman leaning against the split rail fence, gazing into the empty field. She turned her head as he approached, and he recognized Nadya Rybak.

“How do, Miss Nadya,” Rufus said. “We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Rufus Jones. My father just bought some land by the river not far from here.”

“How do,” she said politely.

“That was fine shooting. Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” Her voice was even; she did not seem particularly interested in talking with him.

“I’ve never known such a pretty girl to be such a fine shot.” He poured cider into the cup. “Would you care for a drink of cider? Shooting is thirsty work.”

She studied his face, then accepted the cup. By her expression, he guessed that she was not used to flattery. He leaned against the railing beside her. “Mr. Shaw was pleased that you won,” he said.

She shook her head. “Not at all. He was pleased that you lost. He’s a stiff-necked old Yankee.”

He grinned. She was plain-spoken enough. “But surely you’re no Yankee.”

She shrugged. “We’re foreigners, by his lights. But he’d rather lose to a foreigner than a man from Kentucky.”

“Well, if I had to lose to someone, I’m happy to lose to you, Miss Nadya. Have you picked out your prize yet?”

She frowned and returned the cup to him. “Mr. Shaw gave me a bottle of whiskey.”

“He also promised the pick of the litter. You can get yourself a dog.”

She shook her head. “I don’t care for dogs.”

“Mr. Shaw makes great claims for these dogs. Fine hunters, he says. Perhaps your father. . . .”

“My father won’t have a dog on the place. He likes them no better than I do.”

Rufus shook his head, amazed. Just about every frontier farm had a few dogs around—to warn against intruders, to bark when varmints attacked the livestock. “I had heard you were a hunter. I’m surprised any hunter would turn down a dog.”

“I hunt alone,” she said. “I don’t need a yapping dog to scare away the game.” He drained the cup, filled it again, and offered it to her. She took it from his hand.

“I had hoped I might have the honor of a dance,” he said.

She shook her head. “I don’t care to dance.”

“That’s kind of you. I’m sure if you elected to dance, you’d put the others girls to shame.”

She looked away from him, gazing out at the open field once again. He thought he might have overdone the flattery, but then she spoke softly. “Never learned how.”

“Never learned how to dance? Why that’s foolish. You move with such a natural grace. You could learn all you needed in a minute.” He hesitated, then said, “I could teach you right now, if you’d like.”

She glanced at his face.

“Right now,” he said, setting the cider jug on the ground and balancing the cup on the fence post. He held his arms out to her. “It won’t take a minute.”

“I can’t,” she said, standing with her back to the fence.

“Listen to the music,” he said, tapping his foot in time to the fiddle tune. “Here now: I’ll bow to you.” He bent at the waist, grinning at her.

“And you curtsy to me.” She bobbed in an awkward curtsy. “Give me your hand and we’ll begin.”

She reached out and he took her hands in his. Her hands were small and warm, rough from farm work.

“Tap your foot along with the music,” he said. “That’s good. Now we step forward and back. That’s right. Now left hand circle.” He held one hand and led her in a circle. “Right hand circle.” Again, she followed obediently. “Swing your partner.” He swung her, keeping time with the distant fiddle. “Very good. Promenade now.” He pulled her into the promenade position and led her around a farm wagon. Her body was warm against his side.

She was a cooperative partner, moving with him easily. “You’re a fine dancer,” he said when the music ended.

She smiled at him for the first time. Her face was a little flushed, and a few more wisps of hair had escaped her braids. She looked charming. “You think so?”

“Without a doubt. You come to it naturally. Why don’t you come inside and we can join the others.”

She shook her head. “I don’t care to.”

The music started again, a slow tune in a waltz time. He cocked his head to listen. “I’ll teach you a dance that’s all the rage in Paris,” he said. “A dancing teacher who was passing through Kentucky taught it to me. Would you like to learn it?”

He smiled at her. The dancing teacher had told him that the waltz was a fine excuse to hold a girl closer than propriety would ordinarily allow. She held out her hands, and he pulled her close, slipping one arm around her waist and holding her other hand in his.

“Now step as I do. One, two, three; one, two, three; one, two, three. . . .”

She was so close that he could feel the warmth of her body. Just a few thin layers of cloth separated his hand from her waist. Her face was just inches from his.

He stopped counting and began to hum softly along with the fiddle tune. Perhaps he couldn’t persuade her to dance with him in the barn. But he might persuade her to spend a little time with him alone. That would be worth losing the wager. He adjusted his hand at her waist, pulling her a little closer.

Nadya stopped in mid-step and pulled away. “I’d best be going,” she said suddenly.

“In the middle of a dance?” he said.

She took two steps back. “Yes. I think it’s best.” She wet her lips. “Thank you for teaching me.” She stooped by the fence and retrieved her shoes.

“I would be happy to continue the lesson. I wish you wouldn’t run off.”

She shook her head and cast a quick look over her shoulder at barn. “I must be going.” She turned away, then hesitated and turned back. “If you would like the dog Mr. Shaw promised to me, you are welcome to have it. You can tell him I said so.”

She hurried away then, carrying her shoes. She did not look back.

Rufus watched her go, cursing his bad luck. After a bit, he wandered back into the barn. A few moments later, Tom found him in the shadows, watching the dancers.

“No luck,” Tom said. “I told you she didn’t care for it.”

Rufus fished in his pocket and silently paid Tom the money he owed.

A week later, on the day of the full moon, Nadya was in the garden, chopping at weeds with a grubbing hoe and loosening the soil for the spring planting. The breeze was warm and the newly turned soil reeked of rotting leaves and grubs—rich, inviting smells.

“Hello, the house!” She heard a man’s voice calling and straightened from her hoeing, grateful for the interruption. She saw a man riding into the farmyard on a gray horse.

Nadya hurried toward the cabin. By the time she reached the farmyard, Rufus Jones had tied his horse to the split rail fence and was greeting her mother politely. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Rybak,” he was saying. “How do you do, Miss Nadya?”

Nadya nodded a greeting. Rufus had been hunting and he gave her mother one of the two turkey hens that hung from his saddle. He was saying something about his father feeling a mite poorly and about how Mrs. Evans in the store thought Mrs. Rybak might have a remedy that would ease his stomach.

Nadya’s mother nodded, allowing that she had some herbs that might help. She dried her hands on her apron. “I’ll get them right away.”

“Would you like some tea?” Nadya asked Rufus. She glanced at her mother.

“Don’t you want to hurry home to bring the herbs to your father?” her mother asked, frowning at Nadya.

“He was sleeping when I left,” Rufus said. “Surely it won’t hurt just to stop for a cup of tea. Just to be neighborly.”

“Of course not,” Nadya said. “Just sit a spell, and then go back.”

“Of course,” her mother said. There was starch in her voice. “That would be lovely.” She looked at Nadya thoughtfully. “Perhaps you’d best go fetch some water from the spring. Mr. Jones, come and sit down.”

“Oh, I’ll help Miss Nadya with the water,” he said quickly.

“Don’t be foolish, Mr. Jones,” Nadya’s mother said sharply. Then she smiled and spoke in a soothing tone. “You are our guest. Come and sit.”

“I must insist,” Rufus said. “My mother has taught me to help out whenever I visit. If Miss Nadya can show me the way to the spring, I’ll carry the buckets.”

“Here’s the bucket.” Nadya picked up the wooden bucket that stood by the door. “I’ll show you the way.” She started away down the path.

“Fine weather, ain’t it?” Rufus said.

Nadya nodded. She had wanted to be alone with Rufus again, but now she did not know what to say. She glanced back to see her mother standing by the cabin door, her hands knotted in her apron. She sensed something waiting under the surface, something surprising and new. When Rufus glanced at her, she felt a flush of warmth on her face.

“Here—I’ll carry that.” He took the bucket from her hand and she felt his warm fingers brush against hers. The sensation was disturbing. When she was younger, she had walked along the top rail of the split rail fence, balancing carefully. The feeling in her stomach reminded her of the inevitable moment when she teetered, just for a moment, before falling. She was losing her balance, teetering on an edge that she could not even see.

A moment later, he held his free hand out to her, offering to help her over a muddy patch. She hesitated. She walked this path a dozen times a day and never needed anyone’s help. But she wanted to see how his touch affected the feeling in her stomach. She took his hand. The feeling in her stomach intensified: a strange fluttering, almost like hunger, but not quite.

She knew about sex. She had seen the hog mating with the sow in the mud of the barnyard and she had seen a stallion mount a mare down at the livery stable. Once, in the dusty road by the store, she had seen the blacksmith’s dog and the storekeeper’s bitch stuck together. The bitch had snapped and snarled and tried to run away, but the dog had clung to her, hugging her from behind. The two of them yelped and growled and scrabbled in the dust.

Mrs. Evans had shooed Nadya inside just as Mr. Evans threw a bucket of water over the pair. The two animals split up and ran helter-skelter in different directions. Just before Mrs. Evans blocked Nadya’s view, she caught a glimpse of the dog’s shiny penis, bright red between his bowed black legs.

When Nadya had asked her mother about the dogs, her mother had explained. She told Nadya about men and women, giving biological details about what goes where. Nadya had thought the whole thing quite unlikely: why would anyone do such an odd thing?

Just a month after the incident with the dogs, Nadya’s friend Lottie Evans had loaned Nadya a book in which a young man carries off a young woman and does something scandalous to her. Unlike her mother’s talk, the book lacked all details. But it made up for the lack of details with its breathless tone and florid language that spoke of dark passion and hot love and fevered kisses. Lottie had told Nadya to hide the book from her mother, and so she did. She read it down by the river. When she read the book, she found herself curling up her legs and rocking to and fro. Something was happening. Her nipples grew tight and she felt a new warmth between her legs. She did not understand why that should be.

When her father stripped for the Change, she had seen his cock and balls, hanging softly between his legs. She thought little of that, even after reading Lottie’s book. She thought all the fuss about nakedness and sin and love was nonsense; it had nothing to do with her. And so the feeling that came when Rufus’ hand touched hers took her by surprise. The feeling in her stomach reminded her of reading Lottie’s book by the river. Something was happening.

“You’re surprised to see me,” Rufus said.

“That’s so.”

“I’d hoped you’d be glad.”

She said nothing, concentrating on the feel of the cool dirt beneath her bare feet. Like walking on the fence. She did not want to fall.

“Aren’t you glad?” he asked.

“I’m glad,” she said. Her voice was soft and she didn’t sound sure.

They had reached the spring. A small wooden shelter covered the pool and two log steps led down to the water’s edge. “I’d best get the water,” she said. “My feet are bare, and you don’t want to get your boots wet.” She took the bucket from him and went down to the bottom step, where the water lapped at her feet. She stooped to fill the bucket, holding her skirt up out of the way.

“You look beautiful,” he said, gazing down at her.

She straightened up, holding the bucket, and frowned at him. “You are a very strange man.”

“Why do you say that?”

She stood by the cool water, studying his face. “Because you say I’m beautiful.”

“You are.”

She shook her head ever so slightly. Her mother was beautiful, Nadya knew that. But Nadya had studied her own face in the looking glass. It was a wide face, like her father’s, and her hair was too wild to tame with braids and hairpins. She knew that she was not beautiful.

“You were the prettiest girl at the wedding.”

“The best shot,” she corrected.

“That too.”

She shook her head and climbed the steps. He stood on the path, blocking her way.

Lottie and other girls talked about young men and dresses and dances and maybe getting married. Nadya had listened to the girls talk, but she had always known she was not like those girls.

When she reached the top step, she turned to tell him that he should go and talk to Lottie or one of the others, and leave her alone. Before she could speak, he kissed her. The kiss was awkward at first—lips bumping against lips. But she did not pull away, and he kissed her again, this time lifting his hand to touch her cheek. His lips were soft. His hand moved from her cheek to stroke her neck. The touch, more than the kiss, made her catch her breath.

He kissed her again, and she could feel the warmth of him through the thin calico of her dress. She could feel a trembling deep inside herself, so deep that the vibration did not reach the surface. She lifted her hand to touch his cheek, where she could feel the stubble of a beard, clean-shaven that morning. His smell changed, just as it had when they danced together at the wedding. She knew the smell of sex: a warm muskiness that clung to her mother on certain mornings. She could smell the muskiness in the air. His hand, moving downward, touched her breast, stroking gently over the fabric and coming to rest at her waist.

She stepped back. “Mama will wonder where we have been. We’d best go back.” He grinned at her, showing white teeth.

They had tea, and Nadya listened to her mother and Rufus talk about the weather, the plowing, his father’s aching stomach, his family and their journey westward. Rufus’ scent overpowered the familiar smell of the herbs that hung from the pegs in the wall. Rufus talked with her mother, but every now and again, Nadya caught him glancing in her direction.

When he left, Nadya waved goodbye and watched him go.

Her mother frowned at her. “You’ve taken a fancy to this young man, haven’t you? Look at me, cherie. Let me see your face.” Nadya looked up and her mother nodded.

“He taught me to waltz at the wedding,” Nadya said. She held out her arms and took a few steps, whirling as she stepped. “He put his arm around me and we danced together.”

“Yes,” her mother said. “What do you think he wants?”

Nadya dropped her hands. Thinking about Rufus made her cheeks grow hot. “To kiss me, I reckon.”

“To kiss you, to hug you, to run his hands over your body, to lie with you.” Her mother’s tone was matter-of-fact. “I have told you how it is between men and women.” She stood in front of Nadya and took her daughter’s hands. “And you want him to do that.”

“I don’t know,” Nadya said. “I want . . .” She shook her head, thinking about the warmth of Rufus’ body, so close to hers. “I don’t know what I want.”

“There is nothing wrong with wanting a man,” Nadya’s mother said. “In our family, the blood has always run hot.” She hesitated, studying Nadya’s face. “But this man—he is not good for you. This man is dangerous.”

Nadya pulled her hands away from her mother’s. “What do you mean?

“Remember the cards? A young man, fair-haired, reckless. He brings misfortune to you and to us. Remember.”

“Not Rufus,” Nadya said. “He won’t bring misfortune.”

“Listen to me, Nadya,” her mother said. “You must listen. Do not go with this man.”

Nadya hung her head, looking down at the porch. “I am listening,” she said sullenly.

“Do you understand?”

“I understand.” Nadya understood, but she did not agree.

“That’s good. Now here is Papa, coming in from the fields. Put aside your work and let us prepare for the Change.”

Preparing for the Change was not so different from their regular evening chores. They simply began the work early, so that they would be ready when the sun set. Nadya’s father milked the cow and fed the mule; Nadya called the hogs and chased the chickens into their coop for the night. Nadya’s mother prepared a simple meal of hoecake and ham; she thought it best to change with a little food in the belly—not too much, and not too little. She put the remaining food out of reach of any varmints that might come to the unoccupied cabin and carefully banked the fire so that she could easily revive it when they returned, weary and cold from the night in the forest.

When the sun dipped near the horizon, Nadya stepped out on the front porch. Their cabin faced east and the porch was already in shadow. Nadya pulled off her dress, hung it from a peg beside the cabin door, and waited for her parents.

She could hear her parents murmuring inside the cabin, but the words were already starting to sound like meaningless babble. She could feel the moon rising, a tugging that she felt in her belly and her crotch.

Nadya rubbed her hands over the goose bumps on her naked arms and shivered. Her father said something and mother laughed. She heard the rustling of clothing.

“The sun is setting,” Nadya said, and she heard her mother’s hand on the door latch.

“We are here,” her mother said. Her hair was loose, falling in dark waves down her back.

The Change came.

It began with warmth, as if the moonlight on her skin carried the heat of the tropical sun. But the warmth came from within her, not from outside. She could feel her heart beating and her blood surging through her body, pounding in her veins and arteries. The moon pulled on her blood as it pulled on the ocean: she was caught in a tide, a riptide that she was powerless to resist. Her body burned with the heat and she breathed faster. There was something she wanted, something she needed—she knew that, though she could not describe what that something was.

She could not tell if the feeling was pleasure or pain. These words did not apply. With each Change, she felt a new intensity (surely it could not have felt like this on the last full moon). She felt like she might be dying or she might, at last, be coming to life. In that moment, the two seemed much the same. And maybe she wanted to stop, she wanted to call out “No, no, no, this is too much, I can’t. . . . I won’t. . . .” But what it was that she couldn’t or wouldn’t do was lost in clouds and darkness, because no words came. Words were going away, rushing away, a babble that no longer had meaning or value. She was poised on the brink, on the knife’s edge, at the precipice of the mountain, at the edge of the cliff.

And when the Change came at last, it came with an inexorable rush. Her body made its decision and the part of her that thought and talked and planned and believed that it controlled so much, that part was carried along, like a straw in the river’s current. There was no stopping the river, no turning back.

That was what the Change was like. And when it was over, she stood on four legs instead of two; her body was covered with fur; her ears caught the rustling of a mouse under the porch. But all that was not important. What was important was the Change itself, the moment of shifting, the malleability of the flesh, the decision of the body.

A family of wolves stood on the porch, gazing out at the forest. The wolf that had been Nadya sniffed the breeze, then the handle of the bucket by the cabin door. The scent that clung to the handle made the young wolf whimper low in her throat. She explored the farmyard, stopping to sniff deeply by the split rail fence where Rufus had tied his horse.

The male wolf trotted to the edge of the forest, where he lifted his head and sampled the air. He headed along a deer trail, not looking back to see if the others followed. The older female started after the male, then looked back at the young female and made an encouraging sound in her throat. The young wolf ignored the older female and continued sniffing at the grass by the fence. The older female whimpered again, but the younger wolf set off on her own path, following the scent in the grass. The wolf that was Nadya was old enough to wander away from the pack if she would, and the female let her go, following her mate and letting her daughter find her own way.

Nadya came back to her human form on the porch of the farmhouse. The taste of blood was in her mouth. She rubbed her hand across her face, and looked at it. Flecks of dark brown dotted the skin. Dried blood. She could hear her mother in the cabin, breaking kindling to add to the fire.

Nadya blinked in the morning light, trying to remember the night. Memories of the Change faded like dreams; memories of the Change did not fit well in the human brain. The colors were wrong; the smells didn’t match the human memory of smells. At best, she could recapture only fragments of the night.

She remembered sheep, bleating sheep that ran from her. She could not help but chase the clumsy creatures, so fat and foolish and warm. She cut a fat ewe from the herd and chased it along a fence, tearing at its haunches and tasting its blood. It cried out, a silly bleating that made her heart beat faster, and she tore at it again. Dark streaks of blood colored the pale fleece, and still the ewe ran. She tore at its legs until it stumbled and then she was on it, bowling it over and ripping at its belly. The blood was warm on her face, splashing over her body, filling her nose with its dark scent.

She remembered a sound—the sharp crack of gunfire, the acrid scent of gunpowder, cutting through the alluring aroma of blood. She heard shouting and more gunfire. She ran then, her fear overcoming her taste for the hunt.

Nadya sat on the porch, the taste of blood still on her lips. Her father stood in the doorway to the cabin. “Little one,” he said to her. “Where did you go last night? You left us.” His tone was reproachful.

Nadya hung her head. “I guess . . . I reckon I must have followed Rufus home.”

Her father wet his lips, looking worried. “I smell blood. That’s not good. Not good at all.”

Her mother came from the cabin, carrying a basin of water, warmed on the fire. She stood on the porch, watching as Nadya splashed the warm water on her face and arms. She put her arm around Nadya’s father. “She’s home safe, Dmitri. That’s what’s important.”

He shook his head. “Did they fire at you?” he asked her.

“I think so.” Nadya kept her eyes on the water. The blood had colored it pale pink.

“They will come for us with guns,” he said. “They will hunt us through the forest with dogs and guns.”

“No, Dmitri,” her mother said. “Don’t be so excited. It will be all right.”

Nadya’s father turned away and went back into the cabin. Nadya’s mother stroked her hair. “It will be all right, cherie. I think it will be all right.” But the smell of her father’s fear lingered in the air.

Just two weeks later, Mrs. Evans had a quilting bee to make a new quilt for Lottie’s older sister, who was engaged to Judd Collins. Nadya’s mother woke that morning feeling poorly, and so Nadya went alone, riding the mule the five miles to town.

Lottie greeted Nadya in the yard. “Nadya,” she called. “I’m so glad you’re here. They’ve been teasing me so.” She tucked her hand compan-ionably into the crook of Nadya’s arm. “They’ve been teasing me about when I’ll be getting married.”

Lottie had grown up to become a rosy-cheeked young woman with blonde hair that invariably escaped her ribbons and pins. Wisps of hair curled at the nape of her neck. The youngest of three sisters, she came in for more than her share of teasing.

“Didn’t your mother come?” she asked Nadya.

“She’s feeling poorly,” Nadya said. “I came by myself.”

“You’re so brave,” Lottie said. “I wouldn’t want to come so far by myself.”

Nadya shrugged.

“There’ll be a dance at Mary Sue’s wedding,” Lottie said. Lottie lowered her voice. “I asked Mary Sue to make sure Silas Whitman was coming. I danced with him at Zillah’s wedding. And Mary Sue told Mama and now they’re all teasing me. You won’t tease me, will you?”

Nadya shook her head. She never had to say much around Lottie; Lottie did the talking for both of them.

“Is there anyone you’re sweet on, Nadya?”

“Rufus Jones came visiting a few days back,” Nadya admitted softly.

“He came visiting?” Lottie’s eyes widened with excitement. “Oh, Nadya, he didn’t.”

Nadya nodded. “He sure did.”

Lottie wet her lips. “Mrs. Jones is here, helping with the quilting.” She made a face. “She doesn’t approve of dancing at weddings. I don’t think she likes anyone to have any fun.”

“Nadya!” Mrs. Evans called from the doorway. “How nice to see you. Isn’t your mother with you?”

“My mama was feeling poorly,” Nadya said softly. “She told me to give you her love.”

“You came all this way alone?” Mrs. Evans shook her head and clicked her tongue. “My goodness—this is no time for a girl to be gallivanting about alone. Now you come on in and sit down here.”

The Evanses had a fine house, with four separate rooms and a puncheon floor in the parlor. Mrs. Evans had a dozen store-bought chairs and a mantelpiece clock. On the wall of the parlor there was a looking glass and a hair wreath that Mrs. Evans had woven from the tresses of departed relations: from each of her three children who had died young, from her own mother and father. The puncheon floor was covered with a real machine-woven carpet, not a rag rug.

The quilt frame stretched the width of the parlor, leaving just enough space at the sides for women to sit beside it. The room was already crowded: Mrs. Shaw and her daughter Zillah sat on one side of the quilt, Mrs. Whitman and her daughter sat on the other. Mrs. Jones sat at the far end of the quilt frame, enthroned in one of Mrs. Evans’s best chairs. Mary Sue sat beside her. Lottie sat on a stool at one corner and Nadya sat beside her and Mrs. Evans.

The quilt, an intricate design of bright calico diamonds, was stretched on the frame. Nadya threaded a needle and began stitching the brightly colored patchwork to the padded lining.

“Nadya rode from her house alone,” Mrs. Evans announced to the others.

“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Whitman murmured. “Hadn’t you heard about the wolves?” The Whitmans had moved to Missouri from Connecticut just a year before, and Mrs. Whitman was still very nervous about wild animals and Indians.

Nadya shook her head. “What about wolves?”

Mrs. Whitman clapped her hands. “Wolves attacked the Jones’ farm! Mrs. Jones, you must tell the child.”

Mrs. Jones looked up from her stitching and smiled grimly. “I woke in the night to the sound of our sheep, bleating in terror. A pack of wolves had attacked our flock. Ravening beasts from the depths of the forest dragging down the innocent lambs. Rufus chased them away with a shot, but not before the wolves had killed our fattest ewe.” She shook her head. “The poor defenseless creature never had a chance.”

Nadya ducked her head and kept her eyes on her stitching.

“Oh, you must have been so frightened,” Mrs. Whitman said. “When I hear wolves howling, the sound sends chills up my spine. It’s as if the Devil himself was out there, crying for blood.”

“I put my faith in the Lord,” Mrs. Jones said staunchly. “The Devil has no power over a true Christian.”

Nadya neatly stitched around a red calico diamond. It seemed to her that rifles would do a better job of driving a wolf away than Mrs. Jones’s prayers, but she did not think it would be wise to mention that.

“So you can see that this is no time for you to be wandering about by yourself,” Mrs. Evans said to Nadya. “I’ll have one of the boys escort you home.”

“I heard that there was a preacher down river in White’s Landing a few days back,” Mrs. Shaw said, changing the subject. “Reverend William Cooper is his name. They say he can exhort the bark off a tree. He’ll be here next Sunday.”

The last great wave of camp meetings had ended back in the 1820s, but even in the 1840s, the Methodists had their circuit riders, preachers on horseback who traveled from one frontier settlement to the next, calling the wrath of God on sinners, warning of the coming Judgment Day, and saving souls where they could. A preacher with the power of exhortation could call the Spirit of the Lord upon the Assembly, causing men and women to jerk wildly to and fro, to fall on all fours and bark like dogs, to weep and cry and shout in languages that no American could understand.

The women talked for a time about the preacher.

“I don’t know if Mr. Shaw will come to hear a preacher,” Mrs. Shaw murmured. The last preacher to visit the community had been a Baptist, traveling by flatboat. He held a Sunday service by the riverside and dunked half a dozen farmers. Mr. Shaw’s dunking had given him a fierce case of the grippe.

Mrs. Jones straightened her back, looking even more formidable. “It’s our Christian duty to attend this meeting,” she said. “I will bring all my boys.”

The mention of Mrs. Jones’s boys brought the conversation back to Mary Sue’s marriage. As they worked, the older women talked about the dress Mary Sue would wear and about the latest fashions in Godey’s Ladies Book. Mary Sue talked about all the people who would be coming to the wedding and the dance.

They chatted amiably until teatime. After eating, they returned to their work.

“Take smaller stitches, Lottie,” Mrs. Evans admonished her daughter. “Look at Nadya’s stitches. See how small and tight they are.”

Nadya glanced up at her friend with a sympathetic expression. Her own hands were tired from the careful work.

“Maybe Lottie and Nadya should fetch some water for another pot of tea,” Mrs. Shaw suggested kindly. “I’ll finish up that corner.”

Lottie and Nadya wasted no time hurrying out of the house. They took two buckets from beside the door and strolled down to the pump. “So now that you know about the wolves, aren’t you scared about riding around alone?” Lottie asked.

“Nope,” Nadya said. “A wolf ain’t going to bother with me.”

Lottie shook her head. “You’d best be careful, Nadya. One of my brothers will ride home with you.”

Nadya frowned. “What’s your brother going to do that I couldn’t do myself?”

“Well, he’d shoot any wolf that came after you.”

“So? I’m a better shot than any of your brothers. I could shoot a wolf myself, if it came to that.”

Lottie shook her head at Nadya’s audacity. “I’d be so scared.”

Nadya shrugged. “I’ve shot deer. I’ve shot bear. I can take care of myself.”

“I guess so,” Lottie said doubtfully. Then she brightened, changing the subject. “Do you reckon that Rufus will come to fetch his mother?”

Nadya shrugged. “I reckon so.” She had wondered that herself. The thought of Rufus alarmed her more than all the talk of the wolves. She looked down at the path.

“When he came visiting, what happened?” Lottie asked.

“He talked to my mama for a while about herbs for Mr. Jones. And he came with me to the spring to fetch water.”

Lottie stopped and stared at Nadya. “Nadya, you’re blushing. I’ve never seen you blush before.”

Nadya scuffed her bare foot in the dust.

“What happened? Did he hold your hand? Did he kiss you?”

Nadya nodded. “He held my hand. And then he kissed me.”

“Oh, Nadya. Was it like in the book? Did you swoon in his arms?”

Nadya remembered the moment by the spring. “It’s more like standing on top of the barn roof, wondering if you’re going to fall.”

“I’ve never done that,” Lottie said.

“Or standing on the bluff over the river, looking at the current below. That current could sweep you away and you’d never get back again.” Nadya shook her head. “Don’t know that I like it.”

“It’s so exciting, Nadya. I hope that Silas Whitman comes visiting me. What did you say to him?”

“I hardly talked at all,” Nadya confessed. “I didn’t know what to say.”

“That’s all right,” Lottie said. “My sister Mary Sue says that you don’t have to talk much. I asked her, and she said that all you have to do when you’re sitting with a man is to tell him how wonderful he is, and that’s enough. Like this.” They had reached the pump. Lottie set down her bucket and took Nadya’s hand in hers. “Oh, Rufus—I feel so safe with you here. You’re so strong and brave.”

Nadya frowned at her. “That’s silly, Lottie. He doesn’t make me feel safe.”

“But you could say he did, couldn’t you?” Lottie held the bucket while Nadya pumped the water. “Mary Sue says that men like to hear things like that.”

Lottie set down her bucket and held Nadya’s under the rush of water. Nadya continued pumping, considering what Lottie had said. She had nothing against lying, but this seemed like a foolish thing to lie about. “I don’t know why he would make me feel safe,” Nadya said. “I can shoot as well as he can. Seems like he ought to tell me that I make him feel safe.”

“Oh, Nadya, don’t you go around saying things like that. He tells you that you’re pretty and you tell him that he’s strong. That’s what Mary Sue says,” Lottie spoke with the superior wisdom of a girl who had older sisters.

“My mama says he’s dangerous,” Nadya said hesitantly.

“How exciting!” Lottie danced in a little circle. “I don’t see how you can be so calm about it. If it was me, I’d be beside myself.”

“We’d best get back with the water,” Nadya said.

As they walked back toward the house, Lottie did most of the talking. “I can help you fix your hair for Mary Sue’s wedding. We can put it up like the picture I saw in Godey’s Ladies Book. You’ll look so fine. But you have to promise that you won’t get into a shooting match or anything like that.”

Nadya walked at Lottie’s side. Her friend’s excitement made her uneasy. She was not sure how she felt about Rufus, but Lottie seemed certain that she should be happy.

They returned to the cabin and built up the fire to boil water for tea. The quilt was almost done—all that remained was the edging, and Zillah and Mary Sue and Mrs. Evans would manage that.

Lottie had just made a pot of tea when the dogs began barking outside. “Hello!” A man’s voice called from the farmyard. “Hello, ladies!”

Mr. Whitman had come to escort Mrs. Whitman and her daughters home. He had a cup of tea with the women, and while they were drinking it, Mr. Evans and his sons returned from fishing, carrying a string of catfish. Then Rufus Jones and his brother Moses appeared in the doorway. Rufus took off his hat and smiled at all the women. It seemed to Nadya that his eyes lingered on her.

Mrs. Evans insisted that Nadya accompany Mrs. Jones and her sons to the fork in the trail that led to the Rybak house. Then Rufus would escort Nadya to her door. “We just can’t be too careful,” Mrs. Evans said.

Nadya protested, but Mrs. Jones hushed her with a wave of a hand. “Of course you will come with us. I’ll have no more said about it.”

Nadya rode with Mrs. Jones in the farm wagon for the first few miles. Her mule was tied on behind the wagon. As they bumped over the rough trail, Mrs. Jones lectured Nadya on the dangers of wandering through the forest alone. Nadya remained silent, watching Rufus’s back. He sat on the driver’s seat, eyes on the trail ahead.

At the fork in the road, Moses took the reins. Rufus swung down from the driver’s seat and untied Nadya’s mule from the back of the wagon.

Nadya jumped down from the wagon before he could help her, not wanting to touch his hand.

“You hurry home, Rufus,” Mrs. Jones said to her son.

Rufus touched his hat to his mother and waved as the horse pulled the wagon down the main trail.

“It’s a pleasure to have your company again so soon,” Rulus said. The wagon reached a bend in the trail and Rufus waved to his mother as the trail took her out of sight. Then he reached out and took Nadya’s hand. “I had hoped I might see you today.”

“I was glad to see you too,” Nadya said. She wasn’t certain of the truth of her words until after she said them. He squeezed her hand.

“Come on,” he said, and they started in the direction of the Rybak farm.

The trail followed the river, more or less. Sometimes, it ran alongside the water, and sometimes it snaked between the trees, avoiding the brambles and thickets at the river’s edge.

Nadya walked silently at his side. It was strange, having his hand in hers Overhead, squirrels chattered and barked at them.

“Here—stop a bit,” he said. He let go of her hand and stepped to where a dogwood tree was blooming. He picked a pale blossom and returned to her side. “These would look nice in your hair,” he said, and reached up to tuck the flower behind her ear. He stepped back and looked at her. It suits you,” he said. “You look very pretty.” She returned his stare, still silent.

“You’re such a quiet one,” he said. “Don’t you like flowers?”

“I like flowers.”

He hesitated. “I know a place not far from here, down by the river, where there’s a beautiful patch of flowers. Would you like to see it?” His scent had changed—she could smell the muskiness of sex.

“All right,” she said. “I’d like to.”

He took her hand again, holding it tighter than before, and led her off the main trail, along a deer path that led through the trees and downward toward the river. Partway down, out of sight of the trail, he tied the mule to a tree.

The path led to a secluded hollow where the grass was already thick and green. A redbud tree bloomed on the river bank, its flowers brilliant against the spring greenery. He held her hand and led her to where the sheltering branch of a willow blocked the view of the river. The tree formed a great room, carpeted with ferns and perfumed with the fragrance of the flowers and plants.

“I found this when I was hunting,” he said. “It’s a beautiful place, isn t it?” He looked down at her and wet his lips. “I hoped you would come here with me.” Then he reached out and put his arms around her.

She could feel the warmth of his skin through her dress; she could smell his sweat—a complex musky smell mingled with the aroma of tobacco. She tilted her head to look up into his face and he kissed her as he had at the spring.

She sensed the thing that waited beneath the surface, like the currents that boiled in the river. There was a mystery here, something that went beyond the farm animals mating in the barnyard. She had listened to the cats yowling at night. The female in heat made a low moaning sound that contained both pleading and threat. She understood that sound now.

“Here,” he said, releasing her. “Let’s sit in the grass. That would be fine.” He led her to a place where the grass was soft. She sat there, her bare feet pulled up under her dress and her arms wrapped around her knees. He sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

“I should have known you would come here with me,” he said then. “You aren’t like the other girls.”

She nodded. She knew that was true: the other girls didn’t hunt and shoot—but she wondered what that had to do with sitting beside him by the river. He kissed her lightly. His arm dropped from her shoulder to her waist. His other hand caressed her thigh through the fabric of her dress and her petticoat. He lifted his eyes to her face. “I love you, Nadya.” His hand continued to stroke her thigh.

“My mama says that you’re dangerous,” she said.

“Your mama doesn’t like you playing with the boys. But I think you like me.” He kissed her again. “Don’t you? I believe that I love you, Nadya?”

She ignored the question. “Your mother told me about the wolves that killed your sheep the other night.”

“Ah, sweet Nadya—are you afraid of wolves?” He tightened the arm that encircled her shoulders. “I’ll keep you safe. I’ll kill any wolf that comes near us.”

“No!” she said, starting to pull away. “You mustn’t.”

“What is it, Nadya?” He reached out and held her tighter. “What is it?”

“You mustn’t kill wolves,” she said. “You’ve got to promise me that.”

He laughed. “Does it worry you that I hunt for wolves? Well then, I won’t go hunting for wolves if that makes you unhappy.” His face relaxed and his hand resumed its movement on her thigh. “Now don’t you believe that I love you, Nadya?”

Her body believed him. When he kissed her, she responded. She felt his hand on her thigh, lifting her dress so that he could stroke the bare skin. He kept kissing her, giving her no chance to answer his question, but she did not mind that. There was a warmth in her body, a kind of tingling that felt like the coming of the Change, only different. His body pressed against hers, pushing her back on the grass. One of his hands fumbled at the buttons of her dress; the other slid higher between her thighs. She was not wearing any underwear, and his hand explored the warmth between her legs. She made a sound—almost a growl like the cats in the barn—and he pressed his fingers harder against her.

“Oh, Nadya, I can’t stop myself.” He was on top of her now, fumbling with the buttons of his trousers. His hand was fumbling with the buttons on the front of her dress. The tingling was growing greater, spreading through her body. He moaned, pressing against her.

Rufus pushed his leg between her thighs, spreading her legs apart. The movement of his leg made her squirm as the tingling grew stronger. It was frightening, this feeling, but she welcomed it at the same time. She wanted something that she could not name.

Abruptly, he shoved himself between her thighs and thrust into her. She cried out, startled. There was a sensation of tearing and wetness and a sudden pain that mingled with the warmth and tingling. He thrust again and then came quickly, collapsing against her with a moan. She moved her hips against him, trying to shift him so that the tingling sensations would return, but he did not move, lying atop her like a dead man. “Oh,” he moaned, “Oh, Nadya.”

He rolled off her and lay in the grass, staring up at the sky. His penis glistened in the late afternoon sunlight. Streaked with semen and blood, it had started to droop. She reached between her own legs, and her fingers came away touched with blood. But even so, there was still pleasure in her own touch.

He looked over at her, propping himself up on one elbow. The top of her dress gaped open and her nipples were crinkled and brown in the sun. Her skirt was bunched around her waist. He reached over and tugged on her dress, pulling the fabric so that it covered her breasts. “You’d best cover yourself,” he said.

“Why?”

He shook his head as if she should not have asked, and frowned. As she watched, he started to button his trousers.

She put her hand on his to stop him. “No,” she said. Her dress gaped when she moved, exposing her breasts once again. She slipped her hand beneath his and into his trousers. He made a sound, the beginning of a protest, but it died in his throat. His cock was warm in her hand; the skin so soft and smooth. She slid her hand lower, cupping his balls and feeling his rough pubic hair against her fingers. One hand was on his cock, the other was between her own legs, teasing the slippery folds, pressing into her body.

Rufus moaned and his eyes half-closed. He put one hand on her breast and started to move toward her, as if to roll on top of her again.

“No,” she said. “Not that way.” She pushed him so that he lay flat on his back. Before he could move again, she threw a leg over his and straddled him. His cock was erect now, and she rubbed it against herself, directing its movement with her hand.

With her free hand, she lifted Rufus’ hand to her breast, relishing the feel of his rough skin against her nipple. His eyes were open now; he looked surprised, a little confused. She rubbed herself up and down, then lifted herself and slipped his cock inside her. With her hand, she continued to rub the hard knot of flesh in the midst of the folds where the tingling seemed to center. She growled, a sound that rumbled from her throat without her thought or will. She squeezed her eyes closed, shutting out the brightness of the sunlight that filtered through the willow leaves. She bent so that her breasts rubbed against his chest and she nipped at his shoulder, rocking back and forth faster now, still faster.

She arched her back, and the pleasure was so intense it was nearly pain. She felt him inside her, squeezed by the spasms of her muscles. A great wave pulsed within her, beginning between her legs and spreading outward. Pleasure, urgency, darkness, and warmth—a confusion of sensations that left her gasping and limp.

“Ah,” she said. “Ah, Rufus.” She opened her eyes then, and looked down at him.

His eyes were open and he was watching her. He wasn’t smiling; she could not read his expression. His cock was growing soft within her, so she slipped off him and lay beside him in the grass, where she could watch his face. He looked up at the sky.

“What are you thinking?” she asked him.

He kept looking at the sky. “You’re not like the other girls.”

She smiled. “That’s so. You already told me that.”

“It’s not proper. You shouldn’t. . . .” He hesitated. “You oughtn’t act like that.”

“Like what?”

He shook his head and frowned at her. “Girls don’t act like that. You’re very bold.”

She continued to smile. “And so are you.”

He reached out and tugged her dress down so that it covered her. “We’d best be getting home.”

She watched him sit up and hurriedly button his trousers and tuck his shirt. He did not look at her again. She made no move to dress herself, just studied him, trying to understand his expression. He smelled of sex and anger and fear. She did not understand the anger or the fear. What had frightened him?

He glanced down at her. “Button yourself,” he said roughly. “Cover yourself and act decent.”

She sat up then, pulling her skirt down to cover her legs and slowly buttoning her dress.

“Come along,” he said, and led the way back up to where the mule was tied. He did not take her hand. He accompanied her home, but did not linger to have tea or talk with her parents, leaving her at the doorstep and hurrying away into the forest as if he were suddenly afraid of her.

The next Sunday morning, Nadya and her family went to town. The mule had thrown a shoe and her father was taking it to the blacksmith.

The bench in front of the general store was crowded with loafing men: trappers, come to town to trade and drink; a rough looking crew from the barge that was tied at the crossing; a few farmers. Nadya saw Mr. Jones among them but looked for Rufus in vain. A green jug was passing from hand to hand, and Nadya could smell the sharp scent of chewing tobacco.

Nadya’s father pulled the farm wagon to the side of the dirt street. He stopped by the bench to chat with the men, while Nadya and her mother went into the store.

Mr. Evans was counting out nutmegs and cinnamon sticks for Mrs. Walker, and the spices perfumed the air. Mrs. Evans was helping Mrs. Jones, who had just purchased a length of plain red calico for new shirts for her sons. “Those boys are almighty rough on clothes,” she was saying to Mrs. Evans. “I pity the girl that marries Rufus. She’ll be sewing her fingers to the bone just to keep him in shirts.”

Mrs. Evans looked up and greeted Nadya and her mother. “Morning, Mrs. Rybak, Miss Nadya. How are you today?”

Mrs. Jones studied the pair of them. “Morning, Mrs. Rybak,” Mrs. Jones said. “How nice to see you again. Did Nadya tell you that the tea you sent was a great help to Mr. Jones?”

“I’m pleased to hear it, Mrs. Jones.” Nadya watched in silence. She knew that her mother did not care for Mrs. Jones, but she smiled as if Mrs. Jones were a friend. “It is really the simplest thing to make. If you like, I can show you the herbs that I use.”

“Mr. Jones won’t be needing the remedy again. He told me that very morning that he had sworn off the demon whiskey and would drink only healthful beverages from that day on.”

Nadya wondered at that. She was certain that Mr. Jones had been among the loiterers on the porch. In her experience, a jug being passed on the porch of a store rarely contained healthful beverages. But she held her tongue and listened while her mother murmured polite congratulations.

“I do hope that you and your family will be attending the services by the river this afternoon,” Mrs. Jones said. “Reverend William Cooper, a preacher of fine repute, has come to speak to us of the ways of sin. My family will be there.”

“What denomination is the preacher?” Nadya’s mother asked. Nadya knew this was simply politeness. If the preacher were a Baptist, Nadya’s mother would claim to be strictly Methodist. If he were a Methodist, she might declare herself a Baptist. One way or the other, she would politely evade the preaching.

“He is a man of God,” Mrs. Jones declared. “I don’t know more than that. But that is all I need to know. All Christians are brothers under the skin.”

Nadya’s mother nodded thoughtfully. “Thank you so much for telling us about it. Perhaps we will see you there.”

Mrs. Jones took the calico that Mrs. Evans had folded neatly. “Now I must be going, to tell others that we are blessed with a preacher this Sunday. Perhaps some of those who prefer dancing to praying will come and see the evil of their ways. I will see you by the river.” She left the store without looking back.

Nadya’s mother and Mrs. Evans exchanged glances. “She’s enough to give being a Christian a bad name,” Mrs. Evans murmured, and Nadya’s mother laughed.

“I hear that she scolded Mrs. Shaw for allowing dancing and drinking at the wedding,” Nadya’s mother said softly.

“I hear the same. But Mr. Jones and his sons were drinking and dancing with the rest of them.”

Nadya’s mother smiled and shrugged. “Ah, but you heard what Mrs. Jones said. Mr. Jones has declared he will only drink healthful beverages.”

Mrs. Evans laughed. “Ah, but whiskey can be medicinal, and surely that’s a healthful thing.”

“And dancing is fine exercise, and that is needed for health as well,” Nadya’s mother replied.

“Of course,” Mrs. Evans said. “I should have thought of that. And all Mr. Jones’s gasconading about what fine shots his boys are, that’s exercise for the lungs.”

The women laughed softly.

“And so what is it that brings you to town?” Mrs. Evans asked.

“Nadya thought she’d sew a new dress to wear to Mary Sue’s wedding, so we have come for calico.”

“A new dress?” Mrs. Evans smiled at Nadya. “Miss Nadya, you’re not buying black powder and lead shot? You’re becoming a lady.”

Nadya blushed and looked down at her feet.

“Here now, Nadya, I have some lovely cloth to choose from.” Mrs. Evans pulled bolt after bolt from the shelves, placing them on the table for Nadya’s examination. Nadya favored a length of fine dark blue cloth, patterned with tiny red roses.

“The color complements your complexion,” Mrs. Evans said. “And it won’t show the dirt.”

Nadya’s mother fingered the cloth, testing the weave. “It seems quite sturdy,” she said.

“Oh, it will wear well, I’m sure of that.”

While Mrs. Evans was cutting and folding the cloth, Lottie came into the store from the back. The mothers remained in the store, chatting about remedies and recipes, but Nadya and Lottie escaped to the outside.

Nadya’s father was sitting on the porch. The two young women lingered for a moment, to see if the men were talking about anything interesting. Mr. Walker was holding a penny paper that had just come in from Philadelphia. “It’s a brand new party for new times,” he was saying. “Call themselves the Native Americans. They have no use for Papists, and I’ll go along with that. Take those Irishmen, fresh off the boat. You can scarcely understand a word that comes out of their mouths.” He slapped the paper against his thigh. “Keep America for Americans. That’s what I say.”

“Keep America for the Americans,” Nadya’s father said slowly, repeating the words as if he had not heard them right. His Polish accent grew thicker, as it always did when he was upset. “Twenty years, I have been in this country. I would guess that I am an American. But these people would say I ain’t.” Mr. Walker started to interrupt, but Nadya’s father kept going. “America is for all types of men from all different countries. That’s what makes this country strong.”

“Next thing you know, you’ll be saying we should set free the slaves,” Mr. Jones said.

“Come on,” Lottie whispered to Nadya. “They’re just talking politics. Let’s go.” They walked down the dusty street, and Lottie companionably linked her arm in Nadya’s.

“Do you want to go down to the river?” Lottie asked. “Mrs. Jones said there’d be a preacher talking about God.”

“I don’t know,” Nadya said, looking doubtful. “I’d better ask my mama.”

“Oh, come on. Let’s just go. Your mama will be glad you are hearing the word of God. Besides, maybe Rufus and Silas will be there.”

“All right,” Nadya said. “I’ll go.”

Arm in arm, they strolled to the river crossing. As they grew closer, they could make out muddled singing. The tune was familiar, a popular song modified to match a holier set of words.

They followed the sound to the river bank, where a small hollow created a natural amphitheater. William Cooper stood above the crowd, on the stump of an oak tree. A group of farmers and folks from town stood near the stump, watching the preacher with anticipation and doing their best to sing the hymn. Mrs. Jones was in the front of the group, her raised hand beating the rhythm of the hymn in the air, like a dutiful singing teacher. Her voice rang above the others, a sturdy contralto that made up in volume what it lacked in grace. “He comes! He comes! The Judge severe! The Seventh Trumpet speaks him near. His lightnings flash; His thunders roll. How welcome to the faithful soul.” Nadya didn’t see Rufus anywhere.

On the far side of the hollow there was a clump of rivermen. They weren’t singing. Rather, they watched the preacher in silence, chewing tobacco.

The hymn droned to a close, Mrs. Jones singing the last line as a determined solo. The preacher lifted his Bible and read in a sonorous voice. “Serve the Lord with gladness: come before His presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord He is God: it is He hath made us; we are His people and the sheep of His pasture.”

Nadya frowned at that—she did not think much of sheep and she would rather not be called one. But no one else in the crowd seemed to mind.

The preacher closed the book with a snap and looked at the people gathered around him. “Brothers and sisters,” he said to them. “We are the people of the Lord, we are His sheep. But I see many sheep that have strayed from the flock, lambs that are in danger from the wolves of Satan that linger outside the pasture gate. I see men who gamble, and men who curse and take the name of their Lord in vain, and men who lie and cheat and steal. I see women who wear gaudy clothing, women who are proud of their outward show, caring not for their inner beauty. How many of you could hold your heads up and walk through the pasture gates into Heaven?” He looked out at the crowd, and a man in the front row spat a stream of tobacco juice over the river bank.

“Brothers and sisters,” the preacher said. “I was a sinner too. Listen to me, brothers and sisters, for I was once like you. And then I found the love of the Lord.”

“I’d sooner have the love of a good woman,” called out one of the rivermen in the back, and his companions laughed.

“That way lies the path to Hell,” the preacher shouted back.

“That way lies the path to glory,” called the man, and again his friends laughed, slapping him on the back. “Have you ever walked that path, Preacher?”

“I walk the path of the Lord,” the preacher said. “I follow the word of the Lord. You must listen to me.” He brandished his Bible over his head, swayed as if he were about to fall from the stump, and he steadied himself. His eyes were blinking furiously. “You must listen,” he cried, but Nadya could barely hear his voice over the catcalls of the rivermen.

“Listen,” the preacher shouted. Then he tilted back his head and howled, a piercing wail that cut through the laughter of the hecklers. Mrs. Jones took a step back, startled by the howl, her hands suddenly still, clasped together as if in prayer. The preacher tilted back his head and howled again. When he stopped, the crowd was silent, watching him to see what would happen next.

“I hear you howling like the beasts you are,” he snarled at the rivermen. “I hear you growling and snapping like the wolves of the forest. I hear you and the Lord hears you, and He judges you, as I am not fit to judge.

“Why have you come to this barren wilderness, brothers and sisters? Why have you come to this howling land, where wild beasts shriek in the night, where savage Indians lurk in the darkness?” He waited a moment, then filled the silence with a shout. “You have come here at the command of the Lord!”

“Not likely,” yelled a riverman, but the preacher lifted his hands up over his head, waving the Bible as if it were a club.

“The Good Book commands us to be fruitful and multiply, to replenish the earth and subdue it,” the preacher cried. “Our Lord commands us to have dominion over every living thing that moveth on the face of the earth. The Lord asks this of us, he sends us into the wilderness to claim it for His own. You have come to take this land for the Lord.”

“Amen!” called a farmer who stood near Nadya. “Amen!”

“This land, this wild and desolate land—it can strike despair into a man’s heart.” The preacher’s voice dropped. “I know it, brothers and sisters, for my own heart has been laid low by loneliness and fear. My own heart has ached for the comforts of civilization.” He lowered his hands, bringing his Bible to his chest. “Just a few nights ago, brothers and sisters, when I lay shivering in the cold and the rain, I thought of turning my back on this land. I thought of returning to my home in Connecticut, of seeking an easier life, a life where a man can eat a fine dinner and sleep in a warm bed.” His head was bowed and his tone was that of a man confiding his secret thoughts. “And I prayed to the Lord to send me a sign. Tell me what to do, oh Lord. Help me find the way.”

He lifted his head. “In the darkness, wolves howled—a dreadful howling, like the shrieking of the souls burning in hell, doomed for all eternity to be wrapped in sheets of fire and brimstone.”

Nadya glanced at Lottie, who was listening with rapt attention. “I always thought the wolves sounded nice,” she murmured to Lottie. “Like singing.”

“Hush,” Lottie said. “I’m listening.”

“You have heard the beasts, brothers and sisters, I know you have heard them,” the preacher said. “Damned souls, spawn of Satan—they howl their anguish at the sky and turn, in anger, on the righteous children of the Lord. Imagine this sound—but imagine it near to you, as near to you as I am standing. The beasts were all around me, shrieking in anger and calling for blood.”

Half a dozen stragglers joined the crowd, attracted by the howling and shouting.

“I lifted my head from my prayer, brothers and sisters, and I saw the eyes of wolves—great yellow eyes that flashed in the firelight, the eyes of devils glaring from the darkness. Demons from Hell, clad in the guise of wolves. Each as big as a man, grinning at me, showing their teeth and snarling.”

Mrs. Jones fell to her knees, clasping her hands in prayer. “Save us, Lord, from the demons of Satan,” she wailed.

“What did I do, brothers and sisters?” the preacher was saying. “What could I do against the demons of Satan?” He lifted his Bible, to remind them of its presence. “I trusted in the power of the Lord.” A chorus of fervent “Amens” drowned out the hooting of the hecklers. “Here it is, brothers and sisters, here is my weapon—the word of the Lord. I lifted this Holy Book so that the beasts could see it, could tremble before the truth of the Lord. And I called out to the Lord. I called to Him: ‘May the spirit come down, may it come like a fire, may it come in streams of fire, fire of the Lord come down and free the earth of this pestilence.’ ”

Three more women at the front of the crowd knelt together, rocking back and forth in time with the preacher’s words. Whenever he paused for breath, they chorused “Amen.” The men in the front were shifting from foot to foot, swaying in time with the kneeling women.

“The very air around me trembled,” the preacher said. “I felt the power, the power, the power of sanctification. In the light of the burning fire, I saw a great figure—an angel standing in the flame with a sword that was also a flame.” He spoke with unshakeable confidence, lifting his hand as if to show the Lord’s angel to anyone who could see.

“The angel lifted his sword, holding it high so that it blazed and lit the forest all around, bringing the glory of God to the darkness. And the demon wolf leaped to do battle with the messenger of the Lord. I could hear the sword crackle as it passed through the air, I could smell the brimstone when it touched the demon wolf. And the monsters fled, banished into the darkness.

“I stood in the darkness before the angel and I heard the angel speak to me. ‘Take this land for the Lord,’ the angel said to me. ‘Drive the Devil from this wilderness.’ ”

“Praise the Lord,” Mrs. Jones shouted, and the others took up the words. “Praise the Lord!”

The preacher raised his voice, thundering over the moaning and shouting. “Take this land, brothers and sisters! Drive out the Devil! You must kill the demon wolf wherever you find him. Kill the spawn of Satan. Drive him from this fair land that it may belong to the Lord.”

“Drive out the Devil!” Mrs. Jones cried. “Drive him out!”

The preacher glared at the crowd, sweeping Nadya and Lottie with his gaze. “Listen to the message of the angel of God,” he cried. “There are some among you who have not accepted the power of the Lord. They think that they can make peace with the Devil. I tell these sinners that Hell stands ready to receive them. Hell opens its yawning mouth to receive them. Repent, or you will spend your eternity burning in the pit.

Repent!”

Two women in the front row had been taken by the Holy Spirit—they lay on the ground, jerking and moaning uncontrollably. Others were falling to their knees, calling out to the Lord to save them.

“There is no peace with the Devil! There is no concord between the wolf and the lamb. Let us pray, brothers and sisters, let us pray that the spirit of fire will come to us and set us ablaze with the glory of the Lord.” He bowed his head, lowering his voice. “Let us pray that we triumph over the demon wolf, let us take this land for the Lord, let us bring civilization to this howling wilderness. Pray with me, brothers and sisters. Pray with me and bring the power of the Lord to this land.”

He bowed his head for a moment, then began a hymn, a sweet slow song that asked Jesus to watch over the wandering sheep. Nadya watched as the preacher walked among the men and women who knelt on the grassy ground. He laid a hand on one woman’s head, patted another man on the shoulder. The two women who had been taken by the spirit lay in the grass, resting quietly now.

“Come on,” Lottie said. “Let’s go and get him to bless us.”

“I don’t want to,” Nadya said, hanging back.

Lottie glanced at her. “What’s the matter? Come on.” She looked back toward the preacher. “There’s Silas. We can go talk to him.”

Nadya shook her head. “I have to go find my mama,” she said. “She won’t know where I am.” She was trembling. She turned away from her friend, hurrying up the slope to the store.

On her way back to the store, Nadya met her father. “Papa, they are talking of hunting wolves.”

She thought he might be angry—angry with the people for talking of hunting, angry with her for killing the sheep at the Jones farm—but he just looked at her sadly and took her hand. “We’d best be going home, Nadya. This is no place for us just now.”

That week, Dmitri began building a wagon to carry his family West. Marietta protested, saying that the madness would pass, but she could not dissuade her husband. He said that they had lingered too long already. There were too many people in Missouri. They needed to go West, where there was open land and forests.

Midway through the week, Hekiziah Jones stopped by the Rybak farm. “Hello,” he called out. “Hello, neighbor.”

Dmitri was trimming and smoothing a length of oak to make a spare axle for the wagon that would carry them westward. He had spent the morning reinforcing the wagonbed with oak planks. Dmitri glanced up from his work when Jones rode into the farmyard, reined in his horse, and swung down from the saddle. “What’s all this? You emigrating?” Jones asked, staring at the wagon. “Soon as we can,” Dmitri said.

Jones considered the wagon, then glanced around the farmyard. “I hadn’t heard tell that your farm was for sale.”

“You’re hearing it now,” Dmitri said. The man stank of unwashed clothing, chewing tobacco, and alcohol—hard cider, by the smell. “Too crowded here. Time to move on.”

Jones nodded and thoughtfully shifted the wad of chewing tobacco that was tucked in his lip. “Reasonable piece of land. Maybe I’ll make you an offer. You in a hurry to sell?”

Dmitri studied Jones’s face. “Two dollars an acre. Hard currency.”

Jones shifted the wad of tobacco again and spat a stream of brown juice. “Ain’t easy to come by so much hard currency.”

“Ain’t easy to be a farmer,” Dmitri said.

“I might manage a dollar an acre.”

Dmitri continued smoothing the oak shaft. Two dollars an acre for cleared land was already a bargain. Dmitri would need the hard currency once they reached Oregon. He would sell for less only if he had to. “I reckon I’ll wait until someone with a better understanding of the value of land comes along,” he said slowly.

“Suit yourself,” Jones said easily. “Suit yourself. I came to invite you for some hunting Saturday next. Me and my boys gonna kill the varmints that killed my sheep. Some other folks will be joining us. We’ll be gathering at the saloon. Thought you might like to come along.” Jones grinned, showing crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. “A little whiskey and a little hunting. And the preacher’s coming along to give us his blessing. A fine sporting afternoon.”

The full moon was Sunday night. Saturday’s hunt offered no danger to Dmitri’s family. He looked up from the axle. “Strange thing, Mr. Jones,” he said. “We never had wolf trouble around here before. Maybe you should keep better watch on those sheep of yours.”

Jones’s smile faltered. “What’s that?” he said.

“Never had any trouble with wolves,” Dmitri said. “They never bothered my stock. Maybe you’d be better off bringing your sheep in at night.”

Jones scowled. “What’s that you’re saying? You saying we shouldn’t hunt those varmints?”

“Don’t see that you have any call to,” Dmitri said. “Don’t see the need.”

“You’re saying you won’t go hunting?”

“I’m saying I’ll have nothing to do with your sporting day. Won’t slaughter animals that never did me no harm. Won’t sell my land for less than it’s worth.” Dmitri was a patient man. He grew angry slowly. But the full moon was near, and this man threatened his family so casually, so confidently, insolently chewing his tobacco and eyeing Dmitri’s land. Dmitri shifted his weight, setting his feet wide apart. He hefted the axle in his hands, shifting the heavy shaft so that he could swing it as a club. He bared his teeth in a ferocious grin. “I’d suggest you get yourself off my land. You’d best hurry.”

Jones eyed the axle and hurried to mount his horse. He jerked on the reins and kicked the horse savagely. Dmitri returned to his work, relieved that the hunt would be on Saturday. They were safe for this full moon.

Over dinner that night, Dmitri told his wife and daughter about the coming hunt. The sun was near setting. Its light shone through the open windows. There was no other light; they were saving oil for the journey. “Hekiziah Jones said they would have a hunt this Saturday,” he told them. “They want to kill the wolves that killed their sheep.”

Nadya shook her head. “That can’t be so,” she said. “Rufus said that he wouldn’t hunt wolves.”

Dmitri studied his daughter’s face. “When did he do that?”

Nadya would not meet his eyes. “When I asked him,” she said. Her voice had an edge to it, a slight tremor of contained emotion. “He said he wouldn’t hunt wolves.”

“When was that?” Dmitri asked. “When did you ask him?”

“When he brought me home from the quilting.” Still, she would not meet his eyes.

“Look at me, Nadya,” he said angrily. “Why won’t you look at me?”

“She’s upset, Dmitri,” her mother said softly.

He looked at his wife. “What do you know about this?”

Nadya stood up and headed for the cabin door.

“Where are you going, Nadya?” Dmitri asked, shocked at her behavior.

“I’d best check to see that the chickens are locked up for the night,” she said, and rushed away.

Dmitri turned to his wife, shaking his head. “What is all this about?” He was bewildered by his daughter’s tears.

His wife took his hand in both of hers. “She can’t hear you. She can only hear the roar of the blood rushing in her ears. She is growing up.” She lifted her eyes to meet his. “Do you remember how hard that was?”

“That boy and his family—they’re no friends of ours. The father is a drunkard; the mother is a zealot. The son is a gambler. He means her no good.”

“I know that. I read the cards. I told her that she shouldn’t love this boy. I told her to take care. Might as well tell the river not to flow downhill.” She released his hand. “What else can we do? Lock our daughter up? Deny her nature?” She shook her head. “We must hurry to build the wagon and prepare for our journey. She will be very sad when we go, but on the trail to Oregon, she will forget him.” She smiled at her husband. “Be happy that we have time to prepare. She will survive the pain of heartbreak as we all have before her.”

Dmitri shook his head slowly. He pushed himself away from the table and went to the door. By the light of the moon, he could see Nadya standing at the edge of the forest, leaning against the split rail fence. He went to stand at her side.

“Hello, Nadya,” he said softly.

“Hello, Papa.”

The moonlight was bright enough to cast shadows. “Do you remember,” Dmitri asked, “when I used to tell you stories with shadows?”

“I remember,” Nadya said softly. She kept her face turned away so that he could not see her eyes.

“They were lies, those stories,” Dmitri said. He hesitated, wishing that he could see her face. “In my stories, the wolf always wins. That’s a lie.”

“But the wolf could win, Papa. Don’t you think? I think the wolf could win.”

“The hunters win. They always have and they always will.”

Nadya turned to face him then. Her jaw was set and her expression was stubborn. “Rufus said he wouldn’t hunt wolves. He won’t let them go hunting,” she said.

Dmitri hesitated. “I’m not the only one who lies.”

She turned her face to the forest again.

“The Oregon Territory is a beautiful land,” he said. “Acres and acres of rich land, with never a person nearby. That’s the place for us. We’ll be emigrating as soon as the wagon’s done.” She didn’t answer.

“We will be happy there. Far from all the hunters and fools. Are you listening to me?” She didn’t answer.

At last, he sighed heavily. “Come inside when you get cold,” he told her, and stamped back into the warmth of the cabin. When she came back inside to sit by the fire, he ignored her, talking with Marietta about the things they would need for the trip, telling her about the route that they would follow. Nadya climbed to her bed in the loft, but he kept up the cheerful conversation, knowing that she would hear him, hoping that she would listen to reason.

The hunt was to be on Saturday, the day before the moon was full. All would have been well, had it not been for the rain. The rain brought bad luck.

Nadya woke on Saturday to the sound of raindrops rattling against the greased paper windows. A thunderstorm had swept in during the night. The wind shook the branches of the trees and the rain hammered down, filling the ditches and gullies to overflowing.

Her parents tried to act as if nothing were wrong. They went about their work, as if this day were like any other. But Nadya could smell the tension in the air.

Sunday morning dawned wet and cold. In the morning, Nadya watched the sky and prayed that the rain would continue. But early in the afternoon, the rain became a drizzle. Water dripped from the branches of the trees, but the sky was clearing.

Nadya sat on the porch, mending a tear in her father’s second best pair of trousers. Through the half-opened door, she listened to the murmur of her parents’ voices inside the cabin.

“Surely they wouldn’t begin a hunt so late in the day,” her mother said.

“Depends on how much they’ve been drinking,” her father’s voice rumbled. “Depends on how foolish they feel. From what little I’ve seen of Rufus and Hekiziah Jones, I would guess that they’re foolish enough.”

Nadya set the mending in her lap. He was wrong about Rufus. He had to be.

“We’d best put some space between ourselves and the town before the moon rises,” her father said.

“We can’t pack the wagon quickly enough,” her mother said. “We haven’t time.”

“We’ll leave the wagon and save our skins. We have no choice.”

Nadya knew there would be no hunt. Her father wouldn’t believe her, but she knew that Rufus would stop them. He wouldn’t allow it. He had said so, down by the river.

But even as she thought about Rufus, she felt uneasy. It would be difficult for him to persuade the others. He might need her help. While her parents argued, she slipped away to the barn, saddled the mule, and headed for town.

When Nadya was eight, her father had built their barn from rough-hewn logs. Neighbors had helped raise the walls and the ridge beam, leaving her father to complete the structure. Nadya’s father told her not to climb on the newly erected frame. “It’s dangerous,” he had said. “You’ll fall.”

The next day, when her father was out of sight, she climbed to the top of the barn and walked the length of the roofs ridgebeam. She started with confidence, arms extended like a tightrope walker’s. She was halfway across when she looked down at the ground far below. In that moment, she swayed, feeling suddenly dizzy. Just before she recovered her balance, she imagined what it would be like to fall, arms flailing at the beam and missing, body tumbling to break on the ground below. Her legs trembled and she could feel her heart pounding. And then, despite the panic, she continued to the far end of the beam.

As she rode the mule into town, she felt as she had when she stood on the ridgebeam. Defiant and frightened. The ground lay far below her, and she did not dare look down.

She found Rufus in the tavern, playing cards. She recognized the other men at the table, all of them neighbors: Hekiziah Jones, Tom Williams, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Whitman. Their faces looked unfamiliar in the dim light of the tavern, skin slack with drink, eyes rimmed with red.

Mr. Shaw frowned at her. “What are you doing here?” he asked her. “This is no place for a young lady.”

“I came to talk to Rufus.” Her voice was strained. The smell of the tavern—tobacco spit, whiskey, and sweat—made her feel sick.

“Does your Papa know you’re here?” Mr. Shaw said. “I don’t think it’s proper. . . .”

Rufus looked up from his cards and stared at her. She could not read his expression. He tossed his cards face down on the table and pushed back his chair. When he stood, he swayed, unsteady on his feet. “How do, Miss Nadya,” he said, his words a little slurred. “I’d be pleased to talk with you. Let’s leave these fellas behind.”

He took her arm and led her toward the door. Behind her, Nadya heard Tom Williams’s voice, but she could not make out the words. All the men laughed—an unfriendly sound containing no merriment.

Outside, the day was clearing. The clouds that had covered the sun had dissipated. Muddy puddles filled the ruts of the dirt track that ran past the tavern’s front porch. The livery stable and store had been washed clean; the white facades glistened in the late afternoon sunshine. The street was deserted. “Rufus,” she said. “I had to talk to you.”

“Darling, I’ve been thinking about you too,” he said. He put his arms around her and started to pull her into an embrace. He reeked of whiskey. “We’ll go to the hayloft in the livery stable. No one will bother us there.”

She pulled back, shaking his arms off her. “My father said that you were going hunting for wolves.”

He frowned. “We have time. They won’t go hunting without me.” He reached out and took hold of her hand. “I’ve missed you, Nadya.”

“You’re going hunting?” she asked. The air seemed suddenly colder. She could feel a trembling that began deep inside her. It had not yet reached the surface.

“Not yet. I tell you, we have time.” With his free hand, he fumbled at the buttons on the front of her dress. His fingers were clumsy and the buttons did not cooperate.

“You promised,” Nadya said, taking a step back away from him. “You promised you wouldn’t hunt wolves.”

He stared at her, then burst out laughing. “Not hunt wolves? That’s the most damn fool idea I’ve ever heard.”

“You said you wouldn’t,” she said.

“Never said anything like it,” he protested.

“Down by the river,” she said. “You promised me you wouldn’t hunt wolves.”

He was looking at her with the same expression he had worn when she climbed on top of him to satisfy her desire. He was astounded and bewildered and disapproving. “Nadya, I reckon I got to hunt wolves,” he said. “If we don’t kill the wolves, they’ll kill our sheep. What do those varmints matter to you? Come on, now.” He tried to pull her to him. She jerked her wrist away.

“You mustn’t kill wolves,” she said. “You can’t.”

He glared at her then. “Don’t you tell me what I can’t do.” His voice had lost its wheedling tone. “Just because we’ve had a little fun together doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do. I’ll kill every wolf in the county, if I like.”

“But you said . . .”

“You’re a crazy one,” he told her. “You don’t act like a normal woman. I didn’t say nothing about wolves.”

“My mother warned me,” Nadya said. The trembling had reached the surface. She was cold, very cold, and she could not stop shaking. “She told me that you were dangerous. I should have listened.”

She turned away, walking toward the mule that was tied at the hitching post.

“Hold on there,” he said. He grabbed her shoulder. As she turned to face him, she lifted an elbow and caught him with a clout on the side of the head. He stumbled and fell.

“Leave me be,” she said. “Just leave me be.”

She mounted the mule and kicked the beast into a trot. When she was halfway down the street, she glanced back and saw Rufus struggling to his feet. “The weather’s clear,” he shouted—to the men in the saloon, to Nadya’s retreating back. “Let’s go hunting. Let’s kill some wolves!” She kicked the mule again. The sun was already low in the sky. She could feel the pull of the full moon—a sensation in her belly and her crotch. For the first time, she feared the Change. The ride home was long and she felt sick to her stomach, sick at heart.

As she came into the farmyard, she saw her mother, waiting for her on the porch.

Nadya swung off the mule and ran into her mother’s arms. “I saw Rufus,” she said. “I saw him and the other men and . . .” Then she wept, unable to stop the tears.

Her father put his hand on her shoulder. “Come,” he said. “There is little time left.” They had only gotten as far as the riverbank when the moon rose.

William Cooper came to the tavern and said a prayer before the hunt began. It was clear from his expression that he disapproved of drinking and gambling. But Rufus guessed that he disapproved of wolves more.

“May the All Mighty God give us strength to overcome the forces of darkness,” the preacher prayed. “We come in Your name, to do away with the beasts of waste and desolation that devour Your innocent creatures. We call on You to bless our bullets and guide our aim.”

The prayer droned on, and Rufus kept his head bowed. He was thinking of Nadya—still angry that she had pulled away, that she had demanded that he stop the hunt. She was crazy, that was clear. A pretty girl, but crazy. There were many other pretty girls in town.

When Cooper finally wound down, Rufus murmured “Amen.” They toasted the preacher a few times. Then there was another delay when the preacher had insisted on coming along. They finally got underway just before sunset. It didn’t matter, Rufus figured. The full moon would provide the light they needed. They were all accustomed to night hunting.

The air was crisp and cool, but the glow of the whiskey kept Rufus warm. The hounds set out, and the men followed on horseback. They took the trail north along the river, where Rufus had spotted wolf sign, now and again.

The sun set and the full moon rose. With the setting of the sun, colors faded from the forest: the world was black and white with shades of silver-gray.

At the river, the dogs found a scent, and they gave voice, a deep musical baying that echoed across the valley. Rufus’s horse ran ahead of the others, sure-footed even in the darkness. Behind him, Rufus could hear Cooper calling for the Lord’s assistance in this hunt against the demons of Satan.

Rufus had never believed in demons, despite his mother’s convictions. But he liked hunting and he favored the darkness. He forgot his anger in the excitement. The chill air washed the whiskey fumes away, leaving his head clear.

The river was at flood. The muddy waters swirled around the bases of oak trees that normally stood high on the bank. Once, the dogs lost the trail and cast about frantically, running up and down the riverbank and sniffing the muddy ground. But they found the scent again and coursed along the bank, heading north.

Rufus was in the lead when the hounds’ baying grew more frantic. He spurred his tired horse. The dogs had three wolves trapped on a jutting cliff where the river had eaten the bank away. The wolves stood with their backs to the edge, holding off the dogs. As Rufus approached, the biggest wolf rushed the hounds, snapping and snarling.

Rufus waited until the animal broke clear of the pack of hounds and squeezed off a shot. The lead wolf tumbled, somersaulting forward as his front legs went out from under him. Half the dog pack closed in on the fallen wolf; the rest pursued the other two. Rufus reined in his horse and reloaded, then spurred his horse after the pack of hounds.

He caught up with them a short distance away. He could see the two wolves bounding toward the river. He aimed and fired: good shot; one animal fell. The last wolf ran ran toward the river’s edge. He could see it clearly, and he struggled to reload, but his horse shied, spilling the powder. He fumbled with the rifle.

Too late: the animal reached the cliff one leap ahead of the running hounds and launched itself over the edge. The dogs milled in a pack, yelping and snarling. Below, where the river ran like liquid silver in the moonlight, Rufus could see a dark head—the wolf struggling in the current. He did not waste the powder firing at the distant animal, but used the butt of his rifle to club the dogs away from the body of the fallen female.

By the time the other men arrived, the swimming wolf had been carried south by the current. The others built a fire, while Rufus skinned the two carcasses. The two wolves were in fine condition, fat and healthy, with thick fur.

He ran his knife down the female’s belly and peeled back the skin, working carefully to avoid spoiling the fur. In the cold night air, steam rose from the body.

The preacher was the last to arrive. He stood by the fire with the others and called for a prayer of thanks. Rufus continued skinning the wolf while the preacher thanked God for their salvation.

After the prayer, Rufus went to work on the male wolf. He could hear the men around the fire talking about the wolf that got away. “It’ll drown, sure enough,” he heard his father say. The male’s body had cooled and Rufus’ hands were icy by the time he was done. He bundled the furs, then went to the fire to warm his hands and share the whiskey bottle that was making its way around the circle. Someone was telling a story about another hunt where they had killed four wolves, and someone else told of wolf hunting on the plains. Tales of blood and excitement.

The moon set and they finished the bottle. Rufus strapped the wolf skins behind his saddle, patting his horse when it shied away from the scent. The day was dawning, gray and dim.

Rufus parted company with the others at the turnoff that led to the Rybak farm and his own family’s farm. His father was returning to town to continue the card game they had left. Rufus continued home alone.

Nadya woke to find herself lying by the river at a bend where the current had created a narrow gravel beach. She was naked. Her skin was marked with bruises, streaked with river silt and blood. During the long chase, brambles had slashed her. The dogs had snapped at her feet and legs, leaving bloody gashes behind.

She sat up and hugged her knees for warmth. Early morning: the sun was barely above the horizon. Pale mist rose from the river, shifting and flowing like the water itself. From years of hunting the area, she recognized this stretch of river. She was just a mile or so downstream of the farm.

Her memories were blurred: darkness, panic, pain. Running—she remembered running among the trees, terrified by the baying of the hounds. And shouting—she remembered men’s voices, shouting and singing and laughing like devils. Her body remembered the tugging of the river’s currents, dragging her this way and that. Her muscles ached—she had fought the current, paddling desperately for this small beach.

She shivered. Where were her parents? That, she did not remember. Perhaps they had been carried further downstream. If that were the case, they would meet her at the farm. Surely, if she found her way to the farm, they would be there.

She clambered up the bank. She was used to going barefoot, but the brambles growing by the river scratched her bare skin and snagged in her hair. Under the oak trees at the top of the bank, the going was easier: last autumn’s leaves, now damp and half rotted, were soft underfoot. She forced her tired muscles into a trot, telling herself that she would see her mother and father as soon as she reached the cabin. Of course, they would have to be at the cabin.

She was almost to the cabin when she heard a man shout. She did not recognize the voice exactly. At least, recognition did not penetrate the haze that occupied her mind, a peculiar cloudiness, as if her head were filled with river mist that ebbed and swirled. But the voice sounded familiar—that voice had called out to the hounds the night before, urging them on. The voice called to her again, and she ran faster, ducking through the trees, ignoring the branches that scratched her legs.

“Mama!” she called as she ran toward the cabin. “Mama! Papa!” The mule grazing in the field lifted its head to watch her.

She pushed the cabin door open. The room was empty, but she snatched her father’s rifle from its place beside the door and the powder horn from the peg on the wall. She loaded the rifle quickly, her hands trembling in the cold. She spilled the black powder, but did not stop until she had rammed the bullet into place.

Still naked, she held the loaded rifle. With one foot, she kicked open the cabin door.

She smelled blood. Dried blood, mingled with the scent of wolf. She recognized the man on the horse—vaguely, dimly, through the river mist that filled her head—recognized him by his smell. His name didn’t come to her—names were not really important yet. Someday soon, maybe they would be, but just then, names had not returned to her.

But his smell—that she knew. It was the smell of passion and the smell of death. Sex and blood and river water and dogs baying as they rushed through the night, chasing wild things that ran and ran and ran, but never escaped. The smell told her what to do, even before she saw the two bundles of gray fur, tied to the saddle behind him.

“Nadya,” the man said, and she lifted the rifle and shot him, point blank, not thinking, not thinking at all.

His horse shied at the sound, and shied again at the sudden limpness of the man in the saddle. The man slumped, then fell, sliding gracelessly to the ground, lying face down with one foot still caught in the stirrup. The smell of fresh blood joined the smell of dried blood, and a brilliant red stain spread across the back of the man’s shirt where the bullet had left his body.

Nadya freed the man’s foot from the stirrup and let the body lie in the dirt. She spoke soothingly to the horse, murmuring the French endearments with which her mother had once comforted her. She tied the horse to the split rail fence and returned to the cabin. She walked past the body, but did not look at it.

She stirred up the embers and built a fire. She did not think. She built a fire and heated water for tea. She washed herself, using a rag and warm water to wipe away the dirt and the blood. Even when she put on her hunting trousers and a warm shirt, she could not stop shivering. The cold came from deep inside her.

The water boiled and she made tea, carefully measuring the dried leaves into the pot. Her mother liked her tea just so—Nadya was careful to make it properly, and she sat by the fire, sipping her tea. She caught herself listening for the sound of her parents’ footsteps. Her mind shied away from the memory of the two bundles of fur on the back of the horse. She had another cup of tea.

Then she took the shovel and went to a place in the woods where the ground was soft. The horse carried the man’s body.

She buried the two bundles of fur side by side in a single grave. She stood by the grave for a time, unable to pray. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. . . . I didn’t mean. . . .” But the words stopped. She bowed her head and stood silent again. “Papa,” she said at last. “There was nothing wrong with your stories. They weren’t lies. The wolf can win. Just not here. Not now. But somewhere, the wolf can win.” Some distance away, she buried the body of the man who had killed her parents. Rufus’s body. The name had returned to her with the memory of love and betrayal. But she said nothing over his grave. She had nothing to say to him.

Then she packed a few things: gunpowder, salt, tea, a pot in which to boil water, two blankets, her hunting knife, a hatchet, a pistol. Necessities only.

She closed the door on her way out of the cabin. She lifted the gate that kept the pigs in their pen, shooed the cattle and the mule from the stable. Then she tied her small bundle behind the saddle and mounted.

She turned the horse’s head toward the wilderness of the Oregon Territory. America was a big country. Out there, the land was empty; the forests were thick and green. Out there, she would find a place where she could be happy.

She kicked the horse into a trot and rode west, leaving childhood behind.

INTO THE MIRANDA RIFT

G. David Nordley

Human beings often get themselves into deep trouble—in this case very literally and very deeply. But they don’t give up easily . . .

I

This starts after we had already walked, crawled, and clawed our way fifty-three zigzagging kilometers into the Great Miranda Rift, and had already penetrated seventeen kilometers below the mean surface. It starts because the mother of all Miranda-quakes just shut the door behind us and the chances of this being rescued are somewhat better than mine; I need to do more than just take notes for a future article. It starts because I have faith in human stubbornness, even in a hopeless endeavor; and I think the rescuers will come, eventually. I am Wojciech Bubka and this is my journal.

Miranda, satellite of Uranus, is a cosmic metaphor about those things in creation that come together without really fitting, like the second try at marriage, ethnic integration laws, or a poet trying to be a science reporter. It was blasted apart by something a billion years ago and the parts drifted back together, more or less. There are gaps. Rifts. Empty places for things to work their way in that are not supposed to be there; things that don’t belong to something of whole cloth.

Like so many great discoveries, the existence of the rifts was obvious after the fact, but our geologist, Nikhil Ray, had to endure a decade of derision, several rejected papers, a divorce from a wife unwilling to share academic ridicule, and public humiliation in the pop science media—before the geology establishment finally conceded that what the seismological network on Miranda’s surface had found had, indeed, confirmed his work.

Nikhil had simply observed that although Miranda appears to be made of the same stuff as everything else in the Uranian system, the other moons are just under twice as dense as water while Miranda is only one and a third times as dense. More ice and less rock below was one possibility. The other possibility, which Nikhil had patiently pointed out, was that there could be less of everything; a scattering of voids or bubbles beneath.

So, with the goat-to-hero logic we all love, when seismological results clearly showed that Miranda was laced with substantial amounts of nothing, Nikhil became a minor solar system celebrity, with a permanent chair at Coriolis, and a beautiful, high-strung, young renaissance woman as a trophy wife.

But, by that time, I fear there were substantial empty places in Nikhil, too.

Like Miranda, this wasn’t clear from his urbane and vital surface when we met. He was tall for a Bengali, a lack of sun had left his skin with only a tint of bronze, and he had a sharp face that hinted at an Arab or a Briton in his ancestry; likely both. He moved with a sort of quick, decisive energy that nicely balanced the tolerant good-fellow manners of an academic aristocrat in the imperial tradition. If he now distrusted people in general, if he kept them all at a pleasantly formal distance, if he harbored a secret contempt for his species, well, this had not been apparent to Catherine Ray, M.D., who had married him after his academic rehabilitation.

I think she later found the emptiness within him and part of her had recoiled, while the other, controlling part found no objective reason to leave a relationship that let her flit around the top levels of Solar System academia. Perhaps that explained why she chose to go on a fortnight of exploration with someone she seemed to detest; oh, the stories she would tell. Perhaps that explained her cynicism. Perhaps not.

We entered the great rift three days of an age ago, at the border of the huge chevron formation: the rift where two dissimilar geologic structures meet, held together by Miranda’s gentle gravity and little else. Below the cratered, dust choked surface, the great rift was a network of voids between pressure ridges; rough wood, slap-glued together by a lazy carpenter late on a Saturday night. It could, Nikhil thinks, go through the entire moon. There were other joints, other rifts, other networks of empty places—but this was the big one.

Ah, yes, those substantial amounts of nothing. As a poet, I am fascinated by contradiction and I find a certain attraction to exploring vast areas of hidden emptiness under shells of any kind.

I fill voids, so to speak. I am an explicit rebel in a determinedly impressionist literary world of artful obscurity which fails to generate recognition or to make poets feel like they are doing anything more meaningful than the intellectual equivalent of masturbation—and pays them accordingly. The metaphor of Miranda intrigued me; an epic lay there beneath the dust and ice. Wonders to behold there must be in the biggest underground system of caverns in the known universe. The articles, interviews, and talk shows played out in my mind. All I had to do was get there.

I had a good idea of how to do that. Her name was Miranda Lotati. Four years ago, the spelunking daughter of the guy in charge of Solar System Astrographic’s project board had been a literature student of mine at Coriolis University. When I heard of the discovery of Nikhil’s mysterious caverns, it was a trivial matter to renew the acquaintance, this time without the impediments of faculty ethics. By this time she had an impressive list of caves, mountains, and other strange places to her credit, courtesy of her father’s money and connections, I had thought.

She had seemed a rough edged, prickly woman in my class, and her essays were dry condensed dullness, never more than the required length, but which covered the points involved well enough that honesty had forced me to pass her.

Now, armed with news of the moon Miranda’s newly discovered caverns, I decided her name was clearly her destiny. I wasn’t surprised when an inquiry had revealed no current relationship. So, I determined to create one and bend it toward my purposes. Somewhat to my surprise, it worked. Worked to the point where it wasn’t entirely clear whether she was following my agenda, or I, hers.

Randi, as I got to know her, was something like a black hole; of what goes in, nothing comes out. Things somehow accrete to her orbit and bend to her will without any noticeable verbal effort on her part. She can spend a whole evening without saying anything more than “uh-huh.” Did you like the Bach? Nice place you have. Are you comfortable? Do you want more? Did you like it? Do you want to do it again tomorrow?

“Uh-huh.”

“Say, if you go into Miranda someone should do more than take pictures, don’t you think? I’ve thrown a few words around in my time, perchance I could lend my services to chronicle the expedition? What do you think?”

“Uh-huh.”

My contract with her is unspoken, and is thus on her terms. There is no escape. But we are complementary. I became her salesman. I talked her father into funding Nikhil, and talked Nikhil into accepting support from one of his erstwhile enemies. Randi organized the people and things that started coming her way into an expedition.

Randi is inarticulate, not crazy. She goes about her wild things in a highly disciplined way. When she uses words, she makes lists: “Batteries, CO_2 Recyclers, Picks, Robot, Ropes, Spare tightsuits, Tissue, Vacuum tents, Medical supplies, Waste bags, etc.”

Such things come to her through grants, donations, her father’s name, friends from previous expeditions, and luck. She worked very hard at getting these things together. Sometimes I felt I fit down there in “etc.,” somewhere between the t and the c, and counted myself lucky. If she had only listed “Back door,” perhaps we would have had one.

As I write, she is lying beside me in our vacuum tent, exhausted with worry. I am tired, too.

We wasted a day, sitting on our sausage-shaped equipment pallets, talking, and convincing ourselves to move on.

Nikhil explained our predicament: Randi’s namesake quivers as it bobs up and down in its not quite perfect orbit, as inclined to be different as she. Stresses accumulate over ages, build up inside and release, careless of the consequences. We had discovered, he said, that Miranda is still shrinking through the gradual collapse of its caverns during such quakes. Also, because the gravity is so low, it might take years for a series of quakes and aftershocks to play itself out. The quake danger wouldn’t subside until long after we escaped, or died.

We had to make sure the front door was closed. It was—slammed shut: the wide gallery we traversed to arrive at this cavern is now a seam, a disjoint. A scar and a change of color remain to demarcate the forcible fusion of two previously separate layers of clathrate.

Sam jammed all four arms into the wall, anchored them with piton fingers, pressed part of its composite belly right against the new seam, and pinged until it had an image of the obstructed passage. “The closure goes back at least a kilometer,” it announced.

The fiber optic line we have been trailing for the last three days no longer reached the surface either. Sam removed the useless line from the comm set and held it against the business end of its laser radar. “The break’s about fifteen kilometers from here,” it reported.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Partial mirror,” Randi explained on Sam’s behalf. “Internal reflection.”

Fifteen kilometers, I reflected. Not that we really could have dug through even one kilometer, but we’d done some pretending. Now the pretense ceased, and we faced reality.

I had little fear of sudden death, and in space exploration, the rare death is usually sudden. My attitude toward the risks of our expedition was that if I succeeded, the rewards would be great, and if I got killed, it wouldn’t matter. I should have thought more about the possibility of enduring a long, drawn-out process of having life slowly and painfully drain away from me, buried in a clathrate tomb.

Then the group was silent for a long time. For my part, I was reviewing ways to painlessly end my life before the universe did it for me without concern for my suffering.

Then Nikhil’s voice filled the void. “Friends, we knew the risks. If it’s any consolation, that was the biggest quake recorded since instruments were put on this moon. By a factor of ten. That kind of adjustment,” he waved his arms at obvious evidences of faults in the cavern around us, “should have been over with a hundred million years ago. Wretched luck, I’m afraid.”

“Perhaps it will open up again?” his wife asked, her light features creased with concern behind the invisible faceplate of her helmet.

Nikhil missed the irony in her voice and answered his wife’s question with an irony of his own. “Perhaps it will. In another hundred million years.” He actually smiled.

Randi spoke softly; “Twenty days, CO_2 catalyst runs out in twenty days. We have two weeks of food at regular rations, but can we stretch that to a month or more. We have about a month of water each, depending on how severely we ration it. We can always get more by chipping ice and running it through our waste reprocessors. But without the catalyst, we can’t make air.”

“And we can’t stop breathing,” Cathy added.

“Cathy,” I ask, “I suppose it is traditional for poets to think this way, so I’ll ask the question. Is there any way to, well, end this gracefully, if and when we have to?”

“Several,” she replied a shrug. “I can knock you out first, with anesthetic. Then kill you.”

“How?” I ask.

“Does it matter?”

“To a poet, yes.”

She nodded, and smiled. “Then, Wojciech, I shall put a piton through your heart, lest you rise again and in doing so devalue your manuscripts which by then will be selling for millions.” Cathy’s rare smiles have teeth in them.

“My dear,” Nikhil said, our helmet transceivers faithfully reproducing the condescension in his tone, “your bedside manner is showing.”

“My dear,” Cathy murmured, “what would you know about anything to do with a bed?” Snipe and countersnipe. Perhaps such repartee held their marriage together, like gluons hold a meson together until it annihilates itself.

Sam returned from the “front door.” “We can’t go back that way, and our Rescuers can’t come that way in twenty days with existing drilling equipment. I suggest we go somewhere else.” A robot has the option of being logical at times like this.

“Quite right. If we wait here,” Nikhil offered, “Miranda may remove the option of slow death, assisted or otherwise. Aftershocks are likely.”

“Aftershocks, cave-in, suffocation,” Randi listed the possibilities, “or other exits.”

Nikhil shrugged and pointed to the opposite side of the cavern. “Shall we?”

“I’ll follow you to hell, darling,” Cathy answered.

Randi and I exchanged a glance which said; thank the lucky stars for you.

“Maps, such as they are,” Randi began. “Rations, sleep schedule, leadership, and so on. Make decisions now, while we can think.” At this she looked Nikhil straight in the eye, “While we care.”

“Very well then,” Nikhil responded with a shrug. “Sam is a bit uncreative when confronted with the unknown, Cathy and Wojciech have different areas of expertise, so perhaps Randi and I should take turns leading the pitches. I propose that we don’t slight ourselves on the evening meal, but make do with minimal snacks at other times . . .”

“My darling idiot, we need protein energy for the work,” Cathy interrupted. “We will have a good breakfast, even at the expense of dinner.”

“Perhaps we could compromise on lunch,” I offered.

“Travel distance, energy level, sustained alertness.”

“On the other hand,” I corrected, “moderation in all things . . .”

By the time we finally got going, we were approaching the start of the next sleep period, and Randi had effectively decided everything. We went single file behind the alternating pitch leaders. I towed one pallet, Cathy towed the other and Sam brought up the rear.

There was a short passage from our cavern to the next one, more narrow than previous ones.

“I think . . . I detect signs of wind erosion,” Nikhil sent from the lead, wonder in his voice.

“Wind?” I said, surprised. What wind could there be on Miranda?

“The collisions which reformed the moon must have released plenty of gas for a short time. It had to get out somehow. Note the striations as you come through.”

They were there, I noted as I came through, as if someone had sand-blasted the passage walls. Miranda had breathed, once upon a time.

“I think,” he continued, “that there may be an equilibrium between the gas in Miranda’s caverns and the gas torus outside the ring system. Miranda’s gravity is hardly adequate to compress that very much. But a system of caverns acting as a cold trap and a rough diffusion barrier . . . hmm, maybe.”

“How much gas?” I wondered.

He shook his head. “Hard to tell that from up here, isn’t it?”

We pushed half an hour past our agreed-to stop time to find a monolithic shelter that might prove safe from aftershocks. This passage was just wide enough to inflate our one meter sleeping tubes end to end. We ate dinner in the one Randi and I used. It was a spare, crowded, smelly, silent meal. Even Nikhil seemed depressed. I thought, as we replaced our helmets to pump down to let the Rays go back to their tent, that it was the last one we would eat together in such circumstances. The ins and outs of vacuum tents took up too much time and energy.

We repressurized and I savored the simple pleasure of watching Randi remove her tightsuit and bathe with a damp wipe in the end of the tent. She motioned for me to turn while she used the facility built into the end of our pallet, and so I unrolled my notescreen, slipped on its headband, and turned my attention to this journal, a process of clearly subvocalizing each word that I want on the screen.

Later she touched my arm indicating that it was my turn, kissed me lightly and went to bed between the elastic sheets, falling asleep instantly. My turn.

Day four was spent gliding through a series of large, nearly horizontal caverns. Miranda, it turns out, is still breathing. A ghost breath to be sure, undetectable except with such sensitive instruments as Sam contains. But there appears to be a pressure differential; gas still flows through these caverns out to the surface. Sam can find the next passage by monitoring the molecular flow.

We pulled ourselves along with our hands, progressing like a weighted diver in an underwater cave; an analogy most accurate when one moves so slowly that lack of drag is unremarkable.

As we glided along, I forgot my doom, and looked at the marbled ice around me with wonder. Randi glided in front of me and I could mentally remove her dusty coveralls and imagine her hard, lithe, body moving in its skin-hugging shipsuit. I could imagine her muscles bunch and relax in her weight lifter’s arms, imagine the firm definition of her neck and forearms. A poet herself, I thought, who could barely talk, but who had written an epic in the language of her body and its movement.

Sam notified us that it was time for another sounding and a lead change. In the next kilometer, the passage narrowed, and we found ourselves forcing our bodies through cracks that were hardly large enough to fit our bone through.

My body was becoming bruised from such tight contortions, but I wasn’t afraid my tightsuit would tear; the fabric is slick and nearly invulnerable. On our first day, Randi scared the hell out of me by taking a hard-frozen, knife-edged sliver of rock and trying to commit hari-kiri with it, stabbing herself with so much force that the rock broke. She laughed at my reaction and told me that I needed to have confidence in my equipment.

She still has the bruise, dark among the lighter, older blemishes on her hardused body. I kiss it when we make love and she says, “Uh-huh. Told you so.” Randi climbed Gilbert Montes in the Mercurian antarctic with her father and brother carrying a full vacuum kit when she was thirteen. She suffered a stress fracture in her ulna and didn’t tell anyone until after they reached the summit.

The crack widened and, to our relief, gave onto another cavern, and that to another narrow passage. Randi took the lead, Nikhil followed, then me, then Cathy, then Sam.

Sam made me think of a cubist crab, or maybe a small, handleless lawn mower, on insect legs instead of wheels. Articulate and witty with a full range of simulated emotion and canned humor dialog stored in its memory, Sam was our expert on what had been. But it had difficulty interpreting things it hadn’t seen before, or imagining what it had never seen, and so it usually followed us.

By day’s end we had covered twenty-eight kilometers and were another eighteen kilometers closer to the center. That appeared to be where the road went, though Nikhil said we were more likely to be on a chord passing fifty kilometers or so above the center, where it seems that two major blocks came together a billion years ago.

This, I told myself, is a fool’s journey, with no real chance of success. But how much better, how much more human, to fight destiny than to wait and die.

We ate as couples that night, each in our own tents.

II

On day five, we became stuck.

Randi woke me that morning exploring my body, fitting various parts of herself around me as the elastic sheets kept us pressed together. Somehow, an intimate dream I’d been having had segued into reality, and I felt only a momentary surprise at her intrusion.

“You have some new bruises,” I told her after I opened my eyes. Hers remained closed.

“Morning,” she murmured and wrapped herself around me again. Time slowed as I spun into her implacable, devouring, wholeness.

But of course time would not stop. Our helmets beeped simultaneously with Sam’s wake-up call, fortunately too late to prevent another part of me from becoming part of Randi. Sam reminded us, that, given our fantasy of escaping from Miranda’s caverns, we had some time to make up.

Randi popped out of the sheets, spun around airborne, in a graceful athletic move, and slowly fell to her own cot in front of me, exuberantly naked, stretching like a sensual cat, staring right into my enslaved eyes.

“Female display instinct; harmless, healthy, feels good.”

Harmless? I grinned and reminded her: “But it’s time to spelunk.”

“Roger that,” she laughed, grabbed her tightsuit from the ball of clothes in the end of the tent, and started rolling it on. They go on like a pair of pantyhose, except that they are slick on the inside and adjust easily to your form. To her form. I followed suit, and we quickly depressurized and packed.

It took Sam an hour to find the cavern inlet vent, and it was just a crack, barely big enough for us to squeeze into. We spent an hour convincing ourselves there was no other opportunity, then we wriggled forward through this crack like so many ants, kits and our coveralls pushed ahead of us, bodies fitting any way we could make them fit.

I doubt we made a hundred yards an hour. Our situation felt hopeless at this rate, but Sam assured us of more caverns ahead.

Perhaps it would have been better if Nikhil had been on lead. Larger than Randi and less inclined to disregard discomfort, he would have gone slower and chipped more clathrate, which, as it turned out, would have been faster.

Anyway, as I inched myself forward with my mind preoccupied with the enigma of Randi, Miranda groaned—at least that’s what it sounded like in my helmet, pressed hard against the narrow roof of the crack our passage had become. I felt something. Did the pressure against my ribs increase? I fought panic, concentrating on the people around me and their lights shining past the few open cracks between the passage and their bodies.

“I can’t move.” That was Cathy. “And I’m getting cold.”

Our tightsuits were top of the line “Explorers,” twenty layers of smart fiber weave sandwiched with an elastic macromolecular binder. Despite their thinness, the suits are great insulators, and Miranda’s surrounding vacuum is even better.

Usually, conductive losses to the cryogenic ice around us are restricted to the portions of hand or boot that happen to be in contact with the surface and getting rid of our body heat is the main concern. Thus, the smart fiber layers of our suits are usually charcoal to jet black. But if almost a square meter of you is pressed hard against a cryogenic solid, even the best million atom layer the Astrographic Society can buy meets its match, and the problem is worse, locally.

The old expression “colder than a witch’s tit” might give you some idea of Cathy’s predicament.

“I can’t do much,” I answered, “I’m almost stuck myself. Hang in there.”

“Sam,” Cathy gasped, her voice a battleground of panic and self control, “wedge yourself edge up in the crack. Keep it from narrowing any more.”

“That’s not going to work, Cathy,” it replied. “I would be fractured and destroyed without affecting anything.”

“Remember your laws!” Cathy shrieked. “You have to obey me. Now do it, before this crushes my ribs! Nikhil, make the robot obey me!”

“Cathy, dear,” Nikhil asks, “I sympathize with your discomfort, but could you hold off for a bit. Let us think about this.”

“I’ll be frozen solid in minutes and you want to think. Damnit, Nikhil, it hurts. Expend the robot and save me. I’m your doctor.”

“Cathy,” Sam says, “We will try to save you, but we have gone only a hundred kilometers since the quake, and there may be a thousand to go. If we encounter such difficulties every hundred kilometers, there may be on the order of ten of them yet to come. And you only have one robot to expend, as you put it. Sacrificing me now places the others in an obviously increased risk. Nothing is moving now, so thinking does not entail any immediate increased risk.”

“Damn your logic. I’m getting frostbite. Get me out of here.”

Embarrassed silence slammed down after this outburst, no one even breathing for what seemed like a minute. Then Cathy started sobbing in short panicky gasps, which at least let the rest of us know she was still alive.

Randi broke the silence. “Can the rest of you move forward?”

“Yes,” Nikhil answers, “a little.”

“Same here,” I add.

“Sam,” Randi ordered. “Telop bug. Rope.”

“I have these things.”

“Uh-huh. Have your telop bug bring the rope up to me, around Cathy. When I’ve got it, put a clamp on it just behind Cathy’s feet.”

“Yes, Randi,” Sam acknowledged its orders. “But why?” It also requested more information.

“So Cathy’s feet can . . . grab—uh—get a foothold on it.” Randi’s voice showed her frustrations with speech, but no panic. “Can you model that? Make an image? See what will happen?”

“I can model Cathy standing on a clamp on the rope, then rotate horizontal like she is, then put the passage around her . . . I’ve got it!” Sam exclaimed. “The telop’s on its way.”

“Please hurry,” Cathy sobs, sounding somewhat more in control now.

I felt the little crab-like telop scuttling along through the cracks between my flesh and rock. The line started to snake by me, a millimeter Fullerene fiber bundle that could support a dinosaur in Earth gravity, a line of ants marching on my skin. I shivered just as the suit temperature warning flashed red in my visor display. The telop’s feet clicked on my helmet as it went by. I waited for what seemed hours that way.

“Grab the line.” Randi commanded and we obeyed. “Feet set, Cathy?”

“I can’t . . . can’t feel the clamp.”

“Okay. I’ll take up some of the, the slack . . . Okay now, Cathy?”

“It’s there. Oh, God I hope this works.”

“Right,” Randi answered. “Everyone. Grab. Heave.”

I set my toe claws and gave it my best effort forward. Nothing seemed to move much.

“Damn!” Randi grunted.

“Use the robot, I’m freezing,” Cathy sobbed.

“Dear,” Nikhil muttered, “she is using the robot. She’s just not being one.”

I started to get cold myself. My toes were dug in, but I couldn’t bend my knees, so everything was with the calves. If I could just get my upper legs into it, I thought . . . If I just had a place to stand. Of course, that was it.

“Randi,” I asked, “If Cathy grabbed the rope with her hands, stood on Sam and used all of her legs? Wouldn’t that make a difference?”

Her response was instantaneous. “Uh-huh. Sam, can you, uh, move up under Cathy’s feet and, uh, anchor yourself.”

“Do you mean under, or behind so that she can push her feet against me?”

“I meant behind, Sam. Uh,” Randi struggled with words again. “Uh, rotate model so feet are down to see what I see, er, imagine.”

“Yes . . . I can model that. Yes, I can do that, but Cathy’s knees cannot bend much.”

“Roger, Sam. A little might be enough. Okay, Cathy, understand?”

“Y—Yes, Randi.” Seconds of scraping, silence, then “Okay, I’ve got my feet on Sam.”

“Then let’s try. Pull on three. One, two, three.”

We all slid forward a bit this time, but not much. Still it was much more progress than we’d made in the last half hour.

“Try again.” I feel her take up the slack. “One, two, three.”

That time it felt like a cork coming out of the bottle.

Over the next hour, we struggled forward on our bellies for maybe another hundred and ten meters. Then Randi chipped away a final obstruction and gasped.

Haggard and exhausted as I am, my command of the language is inadequate to my feelings as I emerged from the narrow passage, a horizontal chimney actually, onto the sloping, gravelly, ledge of the first great cavern. Involuntarily, I groaned; the transition from claustrophobia to agoraphobia was just too abrupt. Suddenly, there was this immense space with walls that faded into a stygian blackness that swallowed the rays of our lights without so much as a glimmer in return.

My helmet display flashed red numbers which told me how far I would fall, some six hundred meters; how long I would fall, just over two minutes, and how fast I would hit, almost ten meters per second; a velocity that would be terminal for reasons not involving air resistance; think of an Olympic hundred meter champion running full tilt into a brick wall. I backed away from the edge too quickly and lost my footing in Miranda’s centigee gravity.

In slow frustration, I bounced; I couldn’t get my clawed boots down to the surface, nor reach anything with my hands. Stay calm, I told myself, I could push myself back toward the cavern wall on the next bounce. I waited until I started to float down again and tried to reach the ledge floor with my arm, but my bounce had carried me out as well as down. A look at the edge showed me that my trajectory would take me over it before I could touch it. There was nothing I could do to save myself—my reaction pistol was in a pallet. Visions of Wile E. Coyote scrambling in air trying to get back to the edge of a cliff went through my mind, and I involuntarily tried to swim through the vacuum—not fair; at least the coyote had air to work with.

The helmet numbers went red again as I floated over the edge. Too desperate now to be embarrassed, I found my voice and a sort of guttural groan emerged. I took another breath, but before I could croak again, Cathy grabbed my arm and clipped a line to my belt. She gave my hand a silent squeeze as, anchored firmly to a piton, I pressed my back against the wall of the cavern to get as far as I could from the edge of the ledge. I shook. Too much, too much.

I canceled any judgment I’d made about Cathy. Judge us by how far, not how, we went. Sam told us the cavern is twenty-seven kilometers long and slants severely downhill. Our ledge topped a six-hundred-meter precipice that actually curved back under us. We gingerly made our camp on the ledge, gratefully retreated to our pitonsecured tents, and ate a double ration silently, unable to keep our minds off of the vast inner space which lay just beyond the thin walls of our artificial sanity.

Sleep will be welcome.

Day six. The inner blackness of sleep had absorbed my thoughts the way the cavern absorbed our strobes and I woke aware of no dreams. After a warm, blousy, semiconscious minute, the cold reality of my predicament came back to me and I shivered. It had taken a full day to complete the last ten kilometers, including five hours of exhausted unconsciousness beneath the elastic sheets. We would have to make much better time than that.

That morning, Randi managed to look frightened and determined at the same time. No display behavior this morning—we dressed efficiently, packed our pallet and turned on the recompressors minutes after waking. Breakfast was ration crackers through our helmet locks.

I stowed the tent in the pallet and turned to find Randi standing silent at the edge. She held the Fullerene line dispenser in one hand, the line end in the other, snapped the line tight between them, and nodded. We had, I remembered, fifty kilometers of Fullerene line.

“Randi, you’re not considering . . .”

She turned and smiled at me the way a spider smiles to a fly. Oh, yes she was.

“Preposterous!” was all Nikhil could say when Randi explained what she had in mind. Cathy, docile and embarrassed after yesterday’s trauma, made only a small, incoherent, frightened, giggle.

And so we prepared to perform one of the longest bungee jumps in history in an effort to wipe out the entire length of the passage in, as it were, one fell swoop. Nikhil drilled a hole through a piece of the cavern wall that looked sufficiently monolithic and anchored the line dispenser to that. Sam, who was equipped with its own propulsion, would belay until we were safe, then follow us.

Randi stretched a short line segment between two pitons and showed us how to use it to brace ourselves against the wall in Miranda’s less-than-a-milligee gravity. We held our fly-like position easily and coiled our legs like springs.

“Reaction pistols?” Randi asked.

“Check,” Nikhil responded.

“Feet secure?”

Three “Checks” answered.

“Line secure.”

Sam said, “Check.”

Randi cleared her throat. “On three now. One, two, three.”

We jumped out and down, in the general direction of Miranda’s center. After a brief moment of irrational fear, we collected ourselves and contemplated the wonders of relativity as we sat in free fall while the “roof” of the cavern flashed by. It was a strange experience; if I shut my eyes, I felt just like I would feel floating outside a space station. But I opened my eyes and my light revealed the jagged wall of the cavern whipping by a few dozen meters away. It was, I noted, getting closer.

Judiciously taking up the slack in our common line, Nikhil, who was an expert at this, used the reaction pistol to increase our velocity and steer us slightly away from the roof. A forest of ice intrusions, curved like elephant tusks by eons of shifting milligravity, passed by us too close for my comfort as the minuscule gravity and the gentle tugs of the reaction pistol brought us back to the center of the cavern.

We drifted. Weight came as a shock: our feet were yanked behind us and blood rushed to our heads as the slack vanished and the line started to stretch. Randi, despite spinning upside down, kept her radar pointed “down.” We must have spent twenty seconds like that, with the pull on our feet getting stronger with every meter further down. Then, with surprising quickness the cavern wall stopped rushing past us. Randi said “Now!” and released the line, leaving us floating dead in space only a kilometer or so from the cavern floor.

I expended a strobe flash to get a big picture of the cavern wall floating next to us. It looks like we are in an amethyst geode; jumbles of sharp crystals everywhere and a violet hue.

“Magnificent,” Cathy said with a forced edge in her voice. Trying to make contact with us, to start to put things back on a more normal footing after yesterday, I thought.

“Time to keep our eyes down, I should think,” Nikhil reminded her, and the rest of us. “Wouldn’t want to screw up again, would we?”

There was no rejoinder from Cathy so I glanced over at her. Her visor was turned toward the crystal forest and apparently frozen in space. A puff from my reaction pistol brought me over to her and my hand on her arm got her attention. She nodded. The crystals were huge, and I wondered at that, too.

I check my helmet display—its inertial reference function tells me I’m fifty kilometers below the surface and the acceleration due to Miranda’s feeble gravity is down to seven centimeters per second squared so when we touched down to the rugged terrain a kilometer below in just under three minutes . . . we’d hit it at eleven meters per second. Think of the Olympic hundred-yard dash champion running full tilt into a brick wall.

“Randi, I think we’re too high.” I tried to keep my voice even. This was the sort of thing we left to Sam, but he wasn’t with us just now.

As if in answer, she shot a lined piton into the wall next to us, which was starting to drift by at an alarming rate.

“Swing into the wall feet first, stop, fall again,” she said.

“Feet toward the wall!” Nikhil echoed as the tension started to take hold, giving us a misleading sense of down. The line gradually pulled taut and started to swing us toward the wall. Then it let go, leaving us on an oblique trajectory headed right toward the forest of crystals. Piton guns are neat, but no substitute for a hammer.

“No problems,” Nikhil said. “We dumped a couple of meters per second. I’ll try this time.”

He shot as Randi reeled her line in.

Eventually we swing into the wall. Cathy seemed rigid and terrified, but bent her legs properly and shielded her face with her arms as the huge crystals rushed to meet us.

They shattered into dust at our touch, hardly even crunching as our boots went through them to the wall.

“What the . . .” I blurted, having expected something a little more firm.

“Deposition, not extrusion?” Randi offered, the questioning end of her response clearly intended for Nikhil.

“Quite so. Low gravity hoarfrost. Hardly anything to them, was there?”

“You, you, knew didn’t you?” Cathy accused, her breath ragged.

“Suspected,” Nikhil answered without a trace of feeling in his voice, “but I braced just like the rest of you. Not really certain then, was I?”

“Hello everyone, see you at the bottom,” Sam’s voice called out, breaking the tension. Three of us strobe and spot the robot free-falling past us.

The wall on which we landed curved gently to the lower end of the cavern, so we covered the remaining distance in hundred-meter leaps, shattering crystals with each giant step, taking some sort of vandalistic delight in the necessity of destroying so much beauty. We caught up to Sam laughing.

“This way,” it pointed with one of its limbs at a solid wall, “there is another big cavern, going more or less our way. It seems to be sloped about one for one instead of near vertical.”

Our helmet displays reproduced its seismologically derived model which was full of noise and faded in the distance, but clearly showed the slant down.

After a couple of false leads we found a large-enough crack leading into the new gallery. Cathy shuddered as she squeezed herself in.

That cavern was a mere three kilometers deep—we could see the other end. We shot a piton gun down there, and cheered when it held; using the line to keep us centered, we were able to cross the cavern in ten minutes.

Cathy dislodged a largish boulder as she landed, and it made brittle, tinkling, ice noises as it rolled through some frost crystals.

“Hey,” I said when the significance of that got through to me. “I heard that!”

“We have an atmosphere, mostly methane and nitrogen. It’s about ten millibars and nearly a hundred Kelvins,” Sam answered my implied question. Top-of-the-line robot, Sam.

It occurred to me then that, should we all die, Sam might still make it out. Almost certainly would make it out. So someone will read this journal.

The next cavern went down as well and after that was another. We kept going well past our planned stopping time, almost in a daze. Our hammers made echoes now, eerie high-pitched echoes rattling around in the caverns like a steelie marble dropped on a metal plate.

We made camp only a hundred and seventy kilometers above Miranda’s center, eighty-five below the surface. Nikhil told us that if the rift continued, like this, along a chord line bypassing the center itself, we were more than one third of the way through, well ahead of schedule. Randi came over to me as I hammered in the piton for a tent line and put a hand on my arm.

“Psyche tension; Cathy and Nikhil, danger there.”

“Yeah. Not much to do about it, is there?”

“Maybe there is. Sleep with Cathy tonight. Get them away from each other. Respite.”

I looked at Randi, she was serious. They say tidal forces that near a black hole can be fatal.

“Boys in one tent, girls in the other?”

“No. I can’t give Cathy what she needs.”

“What makes you think I can?”

“Care about her. Make her feel like a person.”

Honestly, I was not that much happier with Cathy’s behavior than Nikhil’s. Though I thought I understood what she was going through and made intellectual allowances, I guess I saw her as being more of an external situation than a person to care about. What Randi was asking wouldn’t come easy. Then, too, there was the other side of this strange currency.

“And you? With Nikhil?”

“Skipped a week of classes at Stanford once. Went to a Nevada brothel. Curious. Wanted to know if I could do that, if I needed to, to live. Lasted four days. Good lay, no personality.” She tapped the pocket of my coveralls where my personal electronics lived, recording everything for my article. “You can use that if we get out. Secrets are a headache.” She shrugged. “Dad can handle it.”

“Randi . . .” I realized that, somehow, it fit. Randi seems to be in a perpetual rebellion against comfort and normalcy, always pushing limits, taking risks, seeking to prove she could experience and endure anything. But unlike some mousy data tech who composes sex thrillers on the side, Randi has no verbal outlet. To express herself, she has to live it.

“Randi, I can see that something has to be done for Nikhil and Cathy, but this seems extreme.”

“Just once. Hope.” She smiled and nestled herself against me. “Just be nice. Don’t worry about yourself. Let her lead. Maybe just hugs and kisses, or listening. But whatever, give. Just one night, okay? So they don’t kill themselves. And us.”

It took me a minute or so to digest this idea. Another thought occurred to me. Randi and I were single—not even a standard cohab file—but Nikhil and Cathy . . . “Just how are you going to suggest this to them?” I asked.

Randi shook her head and looked terrified. “Not me!”

I don’t think I’m going to be able to finish the journal entry tonight.

III

Day seven. Last night was an anticlimax. Nikhil thought the switch was jolly good fun, in fact he seemed relieved. But Cathy. . . . Once her nervousness had run its course, she simply melted into my arms like a child and sobbed. I lay there holding her as she talked.

Born to a wealthy Martian merchant family, she’d been an intellectual rebel, and had locked horns with the authoritarian pastoral movement there which eventually gave rise to the New Reformation. When she was fifteen, she got kicked out of school for bragging about sleeping with a boy. She hadn’t, but: “I resented anyone telling me I couldn’t so much that I told everyone that we did.”

Her parents, caught between their customers and their daughter, got out of the situation by shipping her off to the IPA space academy at Venus L1. She met Nikhil there as an instructor in an introductory Paleontology class. She got her M.D. at twenty-two and plunged into archeoimmunology research. A conference on fossil disease traces linked her up with Nikhil again, who had been ducking the controversy about Miranda’s internal structure by using p-bar scans to critique claims of panspermia evidence in Triton sample cores. His outcast status was an attraction for her. They dated.

When he became an instant celebrity, she threw caution to the wind and accepted his proposal. But, she found, Nikhil kept sensual things hidden deep, and there was a cold, artificial hollowness where his sense of fun should be. Cathy said they had their first erudite word fight over her monokini on their honeymoon and they had been “Virginia Woolfing” it ever since.

“Damn dried-up stuffed-shirted bastard’s good at it,” she muttered as she wrapped herself around me that night. “It stinks in here, you know?” Then she fell asleep with tears in her eyes. She was desirable, cuddly, and beyond the stretch of my conscience.

That morning, when our eyes met and searched each other, I wondered if she had any expectations, and if, in the spirit of friendship, I should offer myself. But I decided not to risk being wrong, and she did nothing but smile. Except, possibly, for that brief look, we were simply friends.

Randi didn’t say anything about her night in Nikhil’s tent; I didn’t expect her to. She gave me a very warm and long hug after she talked to Cathy. We were all very kind to each other as we broke camp and began casting ourselves along a trail of great caverns with the strides of milligee giants.

Cathy passed out the last of our calcium retention pills that morning. In a week or so we would start to suffer some of the classic low gravity symptoms of bone loss and weakness. It didn’t worry us greatly—that was reversible, if we survived.

At day’s end, I was not physically exhausted, but my mind was becoming numb with crystal wonders. Where are these crystals coming from? Or rather where had they come from; Sam and Nikhil concur that the existing gas flow, though surprising in its strength, is nowhere near enough to deposit these crystal forests in the few hundred million years since Miranda’s remaking.

We were a hundred and fifty kilometers deep now and Nikhil says these rocks must withstand internal pressures of more than ninety atmospheres to hold the caverns open. Not surprisingly, the large caverns don’t come as often now, and when they do, the walls are silicate rather than clathrate; rock slabs instead of dirty ice. I thought I could hear them groan at a higher pitch last night.

“It’s after midnight, universal time,” Cathy announced. She seemed recovered from her near panic earlier, and ready to play her doctor role again. But there seemed something brittle in her voice. “I think we should get some sleep now.” She said this as we pushed our baggage through yet another narrow crack between the Rift galleries Sam kept finding with his sonar, so Randi and I had a chuckle at the impossibility of complying with the suggestion just then. But she has a point. We had come one-half of the way through Miranda in five of our twenty days—well ahead of schedule.

Nikhil on lead, missed her humor and said, “Yes, dear, that sounds like a very good idea to me. Next gallery, perhaps.”

“You humans will be more efficient if you’re not tired,” Sam pointed out in a jocular tone that did credit to its medical support programmers, but, I thought, this feigned robot chauvinism probably did not sit well with Cathy.

“We,” I answered, “don’t have a milligram of antihydrogen in our hearts to feed us.”

“Your envy of my superior traits is itself an admirable trait, for it recognizes—”

“Shiva!” Nikhil shouted from the head of our column.

“What is it?” Three voices asked, almost in unison.

“Huge. A huge cavern. I . . . you’ll have to see it yourselves.”

As we joined him, we found he had emerged on another ledge looking over another cavern. It didn’t seem to be a particularly large one to start—our lights carried to the other side—just another crystal cathedral. Then I looked down—and saw stars. Fortunately, my experience in “Randi’s Room” kept my reaction in check. I did grab the nearest piton line rather quickly, though.

“Try turning off your strobes,” Nikhil suggested as we stuck our heads over the ledge again.

The stars vanished, we turned the strobes on again, and the stars came back. The human eye is not supposed to be able to detect time intervals so small, so perhaps it was my imagination. But it seemed as though the “stars” below came on just after the strobe flashed.

“Ninety kilometers,” Sam said.

“Ninety kilometers!?” Nikhil blustered in disbelief, his composure still shaken. “How is this possible? Clathrate should not withstand such pressure.”

Randi anchored herself, dug into the supply pallet I’d been towing, and came up with a geologist’s pick. She took a swing at the ledge to which the gentle three and a half centimeters per second local gravity had settled us and a sharp pink made its way to my ears, presumably through my boots.

“Nickel-iron?” Nikhil asked.

“Uh-huh. Think so,” Randi answered. “Fractured, from here down.”

“Maybe this is what broke Miranda up in the first place,” Cathy offered.

“Pure supposition,” Nikhil demurred. “Friends, we must move on.”

“I know. Take samples, analyze later,” Randi said. “Got to move.”

“Across or down?” I asked. This wasn’t a trivial question. Our plan was to follow the main rift, which, presumably, continued on the other side. But down was an unobstructed ninety kilometer run leading to the very core of the moon. I thought of Jules Verne.

“We need to get out of this moon in less than two weeks,” Nikhil reminded us.

“We can always come back.”

“Central gas reservoir, chimneys, connected,” Randi grunted.

After a nonplussed minute, I understood. If we went down the chimney, our path would leave the chord for the center. The Rift is along the chord; Sam could see it in his rangings. But, not being a gas vent, it wouldn’t be well enough connected to travel. We had to find another back door.

“Oh, of course,” Nikhil said. “All roads lead to Rome—which also means they all go from Rome. The outgassing, the wind from the core, is what connected these caverns and eroded the passages enough to let us pass through. She means our best chance is to find another chimney, and the best place to do that is at the core, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” Randi answered.

No one said anything, and in the silence I swore I could hear dripping, and beneath that a sort of dull throbbing that was probably my pulse. At any rate, the pure dead silence of the upper caverns was gone. I risked another peak down over the edge. What was down there?

“We have a problem,” Cathy informed us. “Poison gas. The nitrogen pressure is up to a twentieth of a bar, and that’s more than there was on old Mars. It’s enough to carry dangerous amounts of aromatics—not just methane, but stuff like cyanogen. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed it, but this junk is starting to condense on some of our gear and stink up our tents. It might get worse near the core, and I can’t think of any good way to decontaminate.”

“Uh, rockets,” Randi broke the silence. “Sam’s rockets. Our reaction pistols. Try it first.”

So we did. We figured out how far to stand from the jets, how long to stand in them—enough to vaporize anything on the surface of our coveralls and equipment, but not long enough to damage it—and how many times we could do it. Sam had enough fuel for a hundred and twenty full decontaminations—more than we’d ever live to use. Cathy volunteered to be the test article, got herself blasted, then entered a tent and emerged saying it smelled just fine.

We decided to go for the core.

This close to the center of Miranda, gravitational acceleration was down to just over five centimeters per second squared, about one three hundredth of earth normal. Five milligees. Release an object in front of you, look away while you count one thousand one, and look back again: it will have fallen maybe the width of a couple of fingers—just floating. So you ignore it, go about other things and look back after ten minutes. It’s gone. It has fallen ten kilometers and is moving three times as fast as a human can run; over thirty meters per second. That’s if it hasn’t hit anyone or anything yet. Low gravity, they drill you over and over again, can be dangerous.

That’s in a vacuum, but we weren’t in a vacuum any more. Even with the pallet gear apportioned, we each weighed less than ten newtons—about the weight of a liter of vodka back in Poland, I thought, longingly—and we each had the surface area of a small kite; we’d be lucky to maintain three meters per second in a fall at the start, and at the bottom, we’d end up drifting like snowflakes.

For some reason, I thought of butterflies.

“Could we make wings for ourselves?” I asked.

“Really, wings?” Nikhil’s voice dripped with skepticism.

“Wings!” Cathy gushed, excited.

“Sheets, tent braces, tape, line. Could do,” Randi offered.

“We are going to be very, very, sorry about this,” Nikhil warned.

Four hours later, looking like something out of a Batman nightmare, we were ready.

Randi went first. She pushed herself away from the precipice with seeming unconcern and gradually began to drift downward. Biting my lip and shaking a bit, I followed. Then, came a stoic Nikhil and a quiet Cathy.

Ten minutes after jumping, I felt a tenuous slipstream and found I could glide after a fashion—or at least control my attitude. After some experimentation, Randi found that a motion something like the butterfly stroke in swimming seemed to propel her forward.

Half an hour down, and we found we could manage the airspeed of a walk with about the same amount of effort. Soon we were really gliding, and could actually gain altitude if we wanted.

After drifting down for another hour we came to the source of the dripping sound I had heard the night before. Some liquid had condensed on the sides of the chimney and formed drops the size of bowling balls. These eventually separated to fall a kilometer or so into a pool that had filled in a crack in the side of the chimney. The Mirandan equivalent of a waterfall looked like a time lapse splash video full of crowns and blobs, but it was at macroscale and in real time.

“Mostly ethane,” Sam told us. Denser and more streamlined than we were, the robot maintained pace and traveled from side to side with an occasional blast from a posterior rocket: a “roam fart” it called it. If I ever get out of this, I will have to speak to its software engineers.

“Wojciech, come look at this!” Cathy called from the far side of the chimney. I sculled over, as did Randi and Nikhil.

“This had better be important,” Nikhil remarked, reminding us of time. I needed one, having been mesmerized by drops that took minutes to fall and ponds that seemed to oscillate perpetually.

Cathy floated just off the wall, her position maintained with a sweep of her wings every three or four seconds. As we joined her, she pointed to a bare spot on the wall with her foot. Sticking out near the middle of it was a dirty white “T” with loopholes in each wing.

“It’s a piton. It must be.”

What she left unsaid was the fact that it certainly wasn’t one of ours.

“Sam, can you tell how old it is?”

“It is younger than the wall. But that, however, looks to be part of the original surface of one of Miranda’s parent objects. Do you see the craters?”

Now that he pointed it out, I did. There were several, very normal minicraters of the sort you find tiling the fractal surface of any airless moon, except two hundred kilometers of rock and clathrate lay between these craters and space. I had the same displaced, eerie feeling I had when, as a child, I had explored the top of the crags on the north rim of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado on Earth, over two thousand meters above sea level—and found seashells frozen in the rock.

“The piton,” Sam added, “is younger than the hoar crystals, because the area was first cleared.”

Something clicked in for me then. The crystals surrounding the bare spot were all about a meter long. “Look at the length of the nearby crystals,” I said, excited with my discovery. “Whatever cleared the immediate area must have cleared away any nearby crystal seeds, too. But just next to the cleared area it must have just pushed them down and left a base from which the crystals could regenerate. So the height of the crystals just outside the cleared area is the growth since then.”

“But what do you think that growth rate is?” Nikhil asked. “We can’t tell, except that it is clearly slow now. I regret to say this, because I am as interested as anyone else, but we must move on. Sam has recorded everything. If we regain the surface, other expeditions can study this. If we do not—then it does not matter. So, shall we?”

Without waiting for assent from the others, Nikhil rotated his head down and started taking purposeful wingstrokes toward the center of Miranda.

“Damn him,” Cathy hissed and flew to the piton and, abandoning one wing sleeve, grabbed the alien artifact. So anchored, she put her feet against the wall it protruded from, grasped it with both hands and pulled. Not surprisingly, the piton refused to move.

“Other expeditions. We’ll come back,” Randi told her.

Cathy gasped as she gave up the effort, and let herself drift down and away from the wall. We drifted with her until she started flying again. We made no effort to catch up to Nikhil, who was by this time a kilometer ahead of us.

The air, we could call it that now, was becoming mistier, foggier. Nikhil, though he still registered in my helmet display, was hidden from view. Sam’s radar, sonar, filters and greater spectral range made this a minor inconvenience for him, and he continued to flit from side to side of this great vertical cavern, gathering samples. When we could no longer see the walls, we gathered in the center. Incredibly, despite the pressure of the core on either side, the chimney widened.

“This stuff is lethal,” Cathy remarked. “Everyone make sure to maintain positive pressure, but not too much to spring a leak; oxygen might burn in this. If this chimney were on Earth, the environmental patrol would demolish it.”

A quick check revealed my suit was doing okay—but the pressure makeup flow was enough that I would think twice about being near anything resembling a flame. Our suits were designed, and programmed, for vacuum, not chemical warfare; we were taking them well beyond their envelope.

“Chimney needs a name,” Randi said. “Uh-huh. Job for a poet, I think.”

That was my cue. But the best thing I could come up with on the spot was “Nikhil’s Smokestack.” This was partly to honor the discoverer and partly a gentle dig at his grumpiness about exploring it. Cathy laughed, at least.

Having nothing else to look at, I asked Sam for a three dimensional model of the chimney, which it obligingly displayed on my helmet optics. A three dimensional cutaway model of Miranda reflected off my transparent face plate, appearing to float several meters in front of me. Our cavern was almost precisely aligned with Miranda’s north pole, and seemed to be where two great, curved, hundred-kilometer chunks had come together. Imagine two thick wooden spoons, open ends facing.

These slabs were hard stuff, like nickel-iron and silicate asteroids. Theories abound as to how that could be; radioactivity and tidal stress might have heated even small bodies enough to become differentiated; gravitational chaos in the young solar system must have ejected many main belt asteroids and some might well have made it to the Uranian gravitational well; or perhaps the impact that had set Uranus to spinning on its side had released a little planetesimal core material into its moon system.

My body was on autopilot, stroking my wings every ten seconds or so to keep pace with Randi while I daydreamed and played astrogeologist, so I didn’t notice the air start to clear. The mist-cloud seemed to have divided itself to cover two sides of the chimney, leaving the center relatively free. Then, it thinned—and through gaps, I could see what looked to be a river running . . . beside? above? below?

“Randi, I think I can see a river.”

“Roger, Wojciech.”

“But how can that be? How does it stay there . . .?”

“Tides.”

“Yes,” Nikhil added. “The chimney is almost three kilometers wide now. One side is closer to Uranus than Miranda’s center of mass and moving at less than circular orbital velocity for its distance from Uranus. Things there try to fall inward as if from the apoapsis, the greatest distance, of a smaller orbit. The other side is further away than the center and moving at greater than orbital velocity. Things there try to move outward.

“The mass of Miranda now surrounds us like a gravitational equipotential shell, essentially cancelling itself out, so all that is left is this tidal force. It isn’t much—a few milligees, but enough to define up and down for fluids. In some ways, this is beginning to resemble the surface of Titan, though it’s a bit warmer and the air pressure is nowhere near as high.”

“Is that water below us?” Cathy asked.

“No,” Sam answered. “The temperature is only two hundred Kelvins, some seventy degrees below the freezing point of water. Water ice is still a hard rock here.”

At the bottom, or end, of Nikhil’s Smokestack was a three-kilometer rock, which had its own microscopic gravity field. The center of Miranda, we figured, was some two hundred and thirty meters below us. Close enough; we were effectively weightless. We let Sam strobe the scene for us, then set up our tents. Decontamination was a bit nervy, but most of the bad stuff was settled on either side of the tidal divide, and the air here was almost all cold dry nitrogen.

Nonetheless, setup took until midnight, and we all turned in immediately.

It has been a very long day.

Nikhil and Cathy forgot last night that, while they were in a vacuum tent, the tent was no longer in a hard vacuum. Much of what we heard was thankfully faint and muffled but what came through in the wee small hours of the morning of day eight clearly included things like:

“. . . ungrateful, arrogant, pig . . .”

“. . . have the self discipline of a chimp in heat . . .”

“. . . so cold and unfeeling that . . .”

“. . . brainless diversions while our lives are in the balance . . .”

Randi opened her eyes and looked at me, almost in terror, then threw herself around me and clung. It might seem a wonder that this steely woman who could spit in the face of nature’s worst would go into convulsions at the sound of someone else’s marriage falling apart, but Randi’s early childhood had been filled with parental bickering. There had been a divorce, and I gathered a messy one from a six-year-old’s point of view, but she had never told me much more than that.

I coughed, loud as I could, and soon the sound of angry voices was replaced by the roar of distant ethane rapids.

Randi murmured something.

“Huh?” Was she going to suggest another respite?

“Could we be married? Us?”

It was her first mention of the subject. I’d developed my relationship with her with the very specific intention of creating and reporting this expedition, and had never, never, hinted to her I had any other designs on her person or fortune. I’d been pretty sure that the understanding was mutual.

“Uh, Randi. Look, I’m not sure we should think like that. Starving poets trying to fake it as journalists don’t fit well in your social circle. Besides, that,” I tossed my head in the direction of the other tent, “that doesn’t seem to put me in the mood for such arrangements. Why—”

“Why is: you don’t do that.” Randi interrupted me. This was startling; she never interrupted, except in emergencies—she was the most non-verbal person I knew.

Okay, I thought. This was an emergency of sorts. I kissed her on the forehead, then stifled a laugh. What a strange wife for a poet she would be! She sat there fighting with herself, struggling to put something in words.

“Why . . . is sex, working together, adventure, memories of this, not being afraid, not fighting.”

My parents had had their usual share of discussions and debates, but raised voices had been very rare. The Rays’ loud argument had, apparently, opened some old wounds for Randi. I held her and gave her what comfort I could. Finally, curiosity got the better of me.

“Your parents fought?”

“Dad wouldn’t go to parties. Didn’t like social stuff. Didn’t like Mom’s friends. His money.” Randi looked me in the eye with an expression somewhere between anger and pleading.

“So. She had him shot. Hired someone.”

I’d never heard anything like that, and anything that happened to papa Gaylord Lotati would have been big news. “Huh?”

“Someone Mom knew knew someone. The punk wasn’t up to it. Non-fatal chest wound. Private doctor. Private detective. Real private. A settlement. Uncontested divorce.

“I was six. All I knew then was Dad was sick in the hospital for a week. Later Mom just didn’t come home from one of her trips. A moving van showed up and moved . . . moved some stuff. One of the movers played catch with me. Another van came and moved Dad and me to a smaller house.

“And there was no more yelling, never, and no more Mom. So you know now. When you hold me, that kind of goes away. I feel secure, and I want that feeling, forever.”

What in a freezing hydrocarbon hell does one say to that? I just rocked her gently and stared at the wall of the tent, as if it could give me an answer. “Look, I care about you, I really do,” I finally told her. “But I need to find my own ‘whys.’ Otherwise, the relationship would be too dependent.” I grinned at her. “We should be more like Pluto and Charon, not like Uranus and Miranda.”

“Who gets to be Pluto and who gets to be Charon?” she asked, impishly, eyes sparkling through embryonic tears, as she began devouring me. One does not escape from a black hole, and once I fell beneath her event horizon and we merged into a singularity, the question of who is Pluto and who is Charon, to the rest of the universe, mattered not. Nor did whatever noise we made.

We reentered the real universe late for our next round of back-door searching; Cathy and Nikhil were almost finished packing their pallet when we emerged from our deflated tent. We stared at each other in mutual embarrassment. Nikhil put his hand on his wife’s shoulder.

“Sorry. Bit of tension is all, we’ll be right.” He waved at Miranda around us. “Now, shall we have another go at it?”

“Any ideas of where to look?” I asked.

“Ethane outlet?” Randi inquired.

Yes, I thought, those rivers had to go somewhere. I had, however, hoped to avoid swimming in them.

“There is,” Sam announced, “a large cavern on the other side of this siderophilic nodule.”

“This what?” Cathy started.

“This bloody three-kilometer nickel iron rock you’re standing on,” Nikhil snapped before Sam could answer, then he caught himself and lamely added, “dear.”

She nodded curtly.

Randi took a couple of experimental swings at the nodule, more, I thought, in frustration than from doubting Sam. “No holes in this. Best check edges,” she suggested. We all agreed.

After five hours of searching, it was clear that the only ways out were the ethane rivers.

“Forgive me if I now regret giving in on the rift route,” Nikhil had to say. Cathy was in reach, so I gave her hand a pat. She shrugged.

We had a right—left choice, a coin flip. Each side of the tidal divide had its own ethane river and each river disappeared. Sam sounded and sounded around the ethane lakes at the end of Nikhil’s Smokestack. The inner one, on the side toward Uranus, appeared to open into a cavern five kilometers on the other side of Cathy’s Rock, as we called the central nodule. The other one appeared to go seven kilometers before reaching a significant opening, but that opening appeared to lead in the direction of the rift. No one even thought to question Nikhil this time.

Now that the route was decided, we had to face the question of how to traverse it.

“Simple,” Cathy declared. “Sam carries the line through, then we all get in a tent and he pulls us through.”

“Unfortunately, I cannot withstand ethane immersion for that period of time,” Sam said. “And you will need my power source, if nothing else, to complete the journey.”

“Cathy,” Randi asked. “Ethane exposure, uh, how bad?”

“You don’t want to breathe much of it—it will sear your lungs.”

“Positive pressure.”

“Some could still filter in through your tightsuit pores.”

She was right. If moisture and gas from your skin could slowly work its way out of a tightsuit, then ethane could probably work its way in.

Randi nodded. “Block tightsuit pores?”

A loud “What?” escaped me when I realized what she was considering. Tightsuits worked because they let the skin exhale—sweat and gasses could diffuse slowly through the porous, swollen, fabric. Stopping that process could be very uncomfortable—if not fatal. But Cathy Ray, M.D., didn’t seem to be in a panic about it. Apparently, it was something one could survive for a while.

“Big molecules. Got any, Cathy?”

“I have some burn and abrasion coating, semi-smart fibers. The brand name is Exoderm, what about it Sam?”

“Exoderm coating will not go through tightsuit pores. But it has pores of its own, like the tightsuits, and may allow some ethane to work its way in after a while. A few thousand molecules a second per square meter.”

Randi shrugged. “And a tightsuit with pores blocked will cut that way down. Too little to worry about.”

“I’m going with you,” I announced, surprising myself.

Randi shook her head. “You try the outer passage if I don’t make it. Get the gook, Cathy.”

Cathy opened up one of the pallets and produced a spray dispenser. I started unpacking a vacuum tent.

“This is going to be a little difficult to do in a tent,” Cathy mused.

“Wimps. Is it ready?” Randi asked.

Cathy nodded and gave an experimental squirt to her arm. For a moment, the arm looked like it was covered with cotton candy, but the fluff quickly collapsed to a flat shiny patch. Cathy pulled the patch off and examined it. “It’s working just fine, all I need is some bare skin and a place to work.”

Randi answered by hyperventilating, then before anyone could stop her, she dumped pressure, fluidly removed her helmet, deactivated her shipsuit seals and floated naked before us.

Cathy, to her credit, didn’t let shock stop her. “Breathe out, not in, no matter how much you want,” she told Randi, and quickly started spraying Randi’s back while Randi was still stepping out of the boots. In less than a minute, Randi was covered with the creamy gray stuff. Calmly and efficiently, Randi rolled her tightsuit back on over the goo, resealed, checked and rehelmeted. It was all done in less than three minutes. Nikhil was speechless and I wasn’t much better.

“You okay?” I asked, though the answer seemed obvious.

Randi shrugged. “One tenth atmosphere, ninety below, no wind, no moisture, no convection, air stings a bit. Bracing. No problem—goo handles stings. Can hold breath five minutes.”

“You . . . you’d best get on with it, now,” Cathy said, struggling to maintain a professional tone in her voice. “Your skin will have as much trouble breathing out as the ethane has getting in.”

Randi nodded. “Line dispenser. Clips. Piton gun.”

I got my act together and dug these things out of the same pallet where Cathy had kept the Exoderm. Randi snapped the free end of the line to her belt, took it off, double checked the clip, and snapped it back on again.

“Three tugs, okay? Wait five minutes for you to collect yourselves, then I start hauling. Okay?”

We nodded. Then she reached for my helmet and held it next to hers.

“I’ll do it. If not, don’t embarrass me, huh?”

I squeezed her hand in an extremely inadequate farewell, then she released her boot clamps, grabbed her reaction pistol, and rocketed off to the shore of the ethane lake fifteen hundred meters away.

There was, I thought, no reason why one couldn’t weave a fiber-optic comm line. into the test line, and use it for communications as well as for hauling, climbing, and bungee jumping. But ours weren’t built that way, and we lost radio with Randi shortly after she plunged into the lake. The line kept snaking out, but, I reminded myself, that could just be her body being carried by the current. I wondered whether there had been a line attached to the alien piton we’d found above, and how long it had hung there.

Assuming success, we prepared everything for the under-ethane trip. Tents were unshipped, and pallets resealed. I broke out another line reel and looped its end through a pitoned pulley on Cathy’s Rock; just in case someone did come back this way.

“I doubt that will be needed,” Nikhil remarked, “but we’ll be thankful if it is. You’re becoming quite proficient, Mr. Bubka.”

“Thanks.”

I kept staring at the dispenser, fighting back the irrational desire to reel her back.

Cathy grabbed the packed pallets and moved them nearer to the shore, where the changed orientation of the milligee fields left her standing at right angles to Nikhil and myself. She chose to sit there and stare at the lake where Randi had vanished.

I stayed and puttered with my pulleys.

Nikhil came up to me. “I don’t think of myself as being Bengali, you know,” he said out of the blue. “I was ten when my parents were kicked out of Bangladesh. Politics, I understand, though the details have never been too clear to me. At any rate, I schooled in Australia and Cambridge, then earned my doctorate at Jovis Tholus.”

I knew all this, but to make conversation, responded. “J.T.U. is New Reformationist, isn’t it?”

“It’s officially non-sectarian, state supported, you know. The council may lean that way, but the influence is diffuse. Besides, there is no such thing as New Reformationist geology, unless you’re excavating the Face of Mars.” Nikhil waved his hand in a gesture of dismissive toleration. “So you see, I’ve lived in both worlds; the cool, disciplined, thoughtful British academic world, and the eclectic, compulsive, superstitious Bengali hothouse.”

No question of which one he preferred. I thought, however, to find a chink in his armor. “You are an Aristotelian then?”

“I won’t object to the description, but I won’t be bound by it.”

“Then the golden mean must have some attraction for you, the avoidance of extremes.”

“Quite.”

“Okay, Nikhil. Consider then, that within rational safeguards, the spontaneity may be useful. A safety valve for evolutionary imperatives. A shortcut to communication and ideas. Creativity, art. A motivation for good acts; compassion, empathy.”

“Perhaps.” He gave me a wintry smile. “I am not a robot. I have these things . . .” disgust was evident in the way he said “things,” “. . . within me as much as anyone else. But I strive to hold back unplanned action, to listen to and analyze these biochemical rumblings before responding. And I prefer myself that way.”

“Does Cathy?”

I regretted that as soon as I said it, but Nikhil just shook his helmeted head.

“Cathy doesn’t understand the alternative. I grew up where life was cheap and pain, commonplace. I saw things in Dum Dum, horrifying things . . . but things that nevertheless have a certain fascination for me.” The expression in his unblinking brown eyes was contradictory and hard to read—perhaps a frightened but curious seven-year-old peered at me from beneath layers of adult sophistication. But did those layers protect him from us, or us from him? What had Randi’s night with him been like?

“Well,” he continued, “Cathy will never experience that sort of thing as long as I keep a grip on myself. She means too much to me, I owe her too much.” He shook his head. “If she just would not ask for what I dare not give. . . . Between us, fellow?”

I’m not sure how I should have answered that, but just then Sam told us the line had stopped reeling out, I nodded briskly to him and we glided “down” to the ethane river shore to wait for the three sharp tugs that would signal us to follow.

They didn’t come. We pulled on the line. It was slack. So we waited again, not wanting to face the implications of that. I update my journal, trying not to think about the present.

IV

It was almost the end of the schedule day when I finally told Cathy to get ready to put the Exoderm on me. There was no debate; we’d probably waited longer than we should have. “Don’t embarrass me,” Randi had said. Grimly, I determined to put off my grief, and not embarrass her. The fate, I recalled, of many lost expeditions was to peter out, one by one. Damn, I would miss her.

The plan had been to take the other outlet, but we silently disregarded that: I would go the same way, just in case there was any chance of a rescue. I needed that little bit of hope, to keep going.

By the laws of Murphy, I was, of course, standing stark freezing naked in ethanelaced nitrogen half covered with spray gook and holding my breath when the original line went taut. Three times. Cathy and Nikhil had to help seal me back in. I was shaking so hard, almost fatally helpless with relief.

We had to scramble like hell to get Sam, Cathy and Nikhil bagged in an uninflated tent. Since I was ready for immersion, and Randi had apparently survived said immersion, I would stay on the outside and clear us around obstacles. I was still double checking seals as Randi started hauling. By some grace of the universe, I had remembered to clip my pulley line to the final pallet, and it trailed us into the ethane lake.

It was cold, like skinny dipping in the Bering Sea. The ethane boiled next to my tightsuit and the space between it and my coveralls became filled with an insulating ethane froth. With that and the silvery white sheen of maximum insulation, my suit was able to hold its own at something like two-ninety Kelvins. I shivered and deliberately tensed and relaxed every muscle I could think about, as we slipped through the ethane.

There wasn’t much to see, the passage was wide, broadened perhaps by eons of flow. Strobes revealed a fob of bubbles around me, otherwise the darkness smothered everything.

The line drew us up? down? to the inside of the passage, out of the current. I grabbed the line and walked lightly against the tension of the pulling line as if I were rappelling on a low gravity world. The tent with my companions and our pallets were thus spared bumping along the rough surface.

I asked for the time display, and my helmet told me we’d been under for an hour.

We rounded a corner and entered a much narrower passage. I became so busy steering us around various projections that I forgot how cold I was. But I noted my skin starting to itch. Then I caught a flash of light ahead. Did I imagine it?

No. In much less time than I thought, the flash repeated, showing a frothy hole in the liquid above us. Then we were at the boiling surface and Randi was waving at us as she pulled us to shore.

I flew out of the water with a kick and a flap of my hands and was in her arms. A minute must have passed before I thought to release the rest of the expedition from their tent cum submarine.

“No solid ground at the end of the main branch. I came up in a boiling sea, full of froth and foam, couldn’t see anything. Not even a roof. Had to come back and take the detour.” She trembled. “I have to get in a tent quick.”

But with all our decontamination procedures, there was no quick about it, and it was 0300 universal on day ten before we were finally back in our tubular cocoons. By that time, Randi was moaning, shivering and only half conscious. The Exoderm came off as I peeled her tightsuit down and her skin was a bright angry red, except for her fingers and toes, which were an ugly yellow black. I linked up the minidoc and called Cathy, who programmed a general tissue regenerative, a stimulant, and directed that the tent’s insulation factor be turned up.

By 0500, Randi was sleeping, breathing normally, and some of the redness had faded. Cathy called and offered to watch the minidoc so I could get some sleep.

The question I fell asleep with was, that with everyone’s lives at stake, could I have pushed myself so far?

Day ten was a short one. We were all exhausted, we didn’t get started until 1500. Randi looked awful, especially her hands and feet, but pulled on her backup tightsuit without a complaint. My face must have told her what I was thinking because she shot me a defiant look.

“I’ll do my pitch.”

But Cathy was waiting for us and took her back into the tent, which repressurized. Nikhil and I shrugged and busied ourselves packing everything else. When the women reappeared, Cathy declared, very firmly, that Randi was to stay prone and inactive.

Randi disagreed. “I do my pitch . . . I, I, have to.”

My turn. “Time to give someone else a chance, Randi. Me for instance. Besides, if you injure yourself further, you’d be a liability.”

Randi shook her head. “Can’t argue. Don’t know how. I don’t . . . don’t want to be baggage.”

“I’d hardly call it being baggage,” Nikhil sniffed. “Enforced rest under medical orders. Now, if you’re going to be a professional in your own right instead of Daddy’s little indulgence, you’ll chin up, follow medical orders, and stop wasting time.”

“Nikhil, dear,” Cathy growled, “get your damn mouth out of my patient’s psyche.”

Nikhil was exactly right, I thought, but I wanted to slug him for saying it that way.

“Very well,” Nikhil said, evenly ignoring the feeling in Cathy’s voice, “I regret the personal reference, Randi, but the point stands. Please don’t be difficult.”

Lacking support from anyone else, Randi’s position was hopeless. She suffered herself to be taped onto a litter improvised from the same tent braces, sheets, and tape we had used earlier to make her wings.

This done, Nikhil turned to me. “You mentioned leading a pitch?”

Fortunately, the route started out like a one-third scale version Nikhil’s Smokestack. It wasn’t a straight shot, but a series of vertical caverns, slightly offset. Sam rocketed ahead with a line, anchored himself, and reeled the rest of us up. The short passages between caverns were the typical wide, low cracks and I managed them without great difficulty, though it came as a surprise to discover how much rock and ice one had to chip away to get through comfortably. It was hard work in a pressure suit, and my respect for Nikhil and Randi increased greatly.

At the end of the last cavern, the chimney bent north, gradually narrowing to a funnel. We could hear the wind blow by us. At the end was a large horizontal cavern, dry, but full of hoar crystals. The rift was clearly visible as a fissure on its ceiling. That was for tomorrow.

The ethane level was down enough for us to forego decontamination, and before we turned in we congratulated ourselves for traversing sixty percent of the rift in less than half our allotted time.

As we turned in, Randi said she had feeling in her fingers and toes again. Which meant she must have had no feeling in them when she was demanding to lead the pitch this afternoon.

She’s sleeping quietly, it’s only midnight, and I am going to get my first good night’s sleep in a long time.

Day eleven is thankfully over, we are all exhausted again, and bitterly disappointed.

The day started with a discovery that, under other circumstances, would have justified the entire expedition; the mummified remains of aliens, presumably those who had left the strange piton. There were two large bodies and one small, supine on the cavern floor, lain on top of what must have been their pressure suits. Did they run out of food, or air, and give up in that way? Or did they die of something else, and were laid out by compatriots we might find elsewhere?

They were six-limbed bipeds, taller than us and perhaps not as heavy in life, though this is hard to tell from a mummy. Their upper arms were much bigger and stronger than their lower ones and the head reminded me vaguely of a Panda. They were not, to my memory, members of any of the five known spacefaring races, so, in any other circumstances, this would have been a momentous event. As it was, I think I was vaguely irritated at the complication they represented. Either my sense of wonder wasn’t awake yet, or we’d left it behind, a few geode caverns back.

“How long?” Cathy asked Sam in a hushed voice. She, at least, was fascinated.

“If the present rate of dust deposition can be projected, about two hundred and thirty thousand years, with a sigma of ten thousand.”

“Except for the pressure suits, they didn’t leave any equipment,” Nikhil observed. “I take that to mean that this cavern is not a dead end—as long as we do press on. You have your images, Sam? Good. Shall we?”

We turned to Nikhil, away from the corpses.

“The vent,” he said, looking overhead, “is probably up there.”

“The ceiling fissure is an easy jump for me,” Sam offered. “I’ll pull the rest of you up.”

We got on our way, but the rift quit on us.

Once in the ceiling caves, we found there was no gas flowing that way, the way where Sam’s seismological soundings, and our eyes, said the rift was. We chanced the passage anyway, but it quickly narrowed to a stomach-crawling ordeal. Three kilometers in, we found it solidly blocked and had to back our way out to return to the cavern. Another passage in the ceiling proved equally unpromising.

“Quakes,” Nikhil said. “The rift must have closed here, oh, a hundred million years ago or so—from the dust.” So, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, Miranda had changed her maze, no doubt with the idea of frustrating our eventual expedition in mind.

Finally, Sam found the outlet airflow. It led back to the north.

“I hereby dub this the Cavern of Dead Ends,” I proclaimed as we left, with what I hoped was humorous flourish.

Surprisingly, Nikhil, bless his heart, gave me one short “Ha!”

Randi was not to be denied today, and took the first pitch out in relief of Nikhil. But she soon tired, according to Cathy, who was monitoring. I took over and pushed on.

The slopes were gentle, the path wide with little cutting to do, and we could make good time tugging ourselves along on the occasional projecting rock and gliding. We took an evening break in a tiny ten-meter bubble of a cavern and had our daily ration crackers, insisting that Randi have a double ration. No one started to make camp, a lack of action that signified group assent for another evening of climbing and gliding.

“We are,” Sam said, showing us his map on our helmet displays, “going to pass very close to the upper end of Nikhil’s Smokestack.” No one said anything, but we knew that meant we were backtracking, losing ground.

There was a final horizontal cavern, and its airflow was toward the polar axis. We could pretty much figure out what that meant, but decided to put off the confirmation until the morning. I’d once read a classic ancient novel by someone named Vance about an imaginary place where an accepted means of suicide was to enter an endless maze and wander about, crossing your path over and over again until starvation did you in. There, you died by forgetting the way out. Here, we did not even know there was a way out.

The beginning of day twelve thus found us at the top of Nikhil’s Smokestack again, on a lip of a ledge not much different than the one about a kilometer away where we had first seen it. We were very quiet, fully conscious of how much ground we had lost to the cruel calendar. We were now less than halfway through Miranda, with less than half our time left.

Sam circled the top of the Smokestack again, looking for outlets other than the one we had come through. There were none. Our only hope was to go back down.

“Do we,” I asked, “try the inner river, or try the other branch of Randi’s River and fight our way through the Boiling Sea?”

Nikhil, though he weighed less than three newtons, was stretched out on the ledge, resting. His radio voice came from a still form that reminded me in a macabre way of the deceased aliens back in the Cavern of Dead Ends.

“The Boiling Sea,” he mused, “takes the main flow of the river, so it should have an outlet vent. It is obviously in a cavern, so it has a roof. Perhaps we could just shoot a piton up at it, blindly.”

But I thought of Nikhil’s Smokestack—a blind shot could go a long way in something like that.

“Sam could fly up to it,” I offered. “If we protect it until we reach the Boiling Sea’s surface, it could withstand the momentary exposure. Once at the ceiling, it could pull the rest of us up.”

Cathy nodded and threw a rock down Nikhil’s Smokestack, and we watched it vanish relatively quickly. Dense, I thought, less subject to drag. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one with that thought.

“Look what I have,” Randi announced.

“What” was a large boulder, perhaps two meters across, and loose; Randi could rock it easily, though it must have had a mass of five or six tons. “Bet it doesn’t fall like a snowflake,” she said as she hammered a piton into it.

Even in the low gravity, it took two of us to lift it over the edge.

Two hours later, about a kilometer above Cathy’s Rock, we jumped off into the drag of the slipstream and watched the boulder finish its fall. It crashed with a resounding thud, shattered into a thousand shards, most of which rebounded and got caught in the chimney walls. We soon reached local terminal velocity and floated like feathers in the dust back to the place we had first departed three days ago.

Cathy decided that Randi was in no shape for another immersion and didn’t think I should risk it either. I did have a few red patches, though I’d spent nowhere near as much time in the ethane as Randi. We looked at Nikhil, who frowned.

Cathy shook her head. “My turn, I think.” But her voice quavered. “I’m a strong swimmer and I don’t think Nikhil’s done it for years. You handle the spray, Wojciech. You don’t have to cover every square centimeter, the fibers will fill in themselves, but make sure you get enough on me. At least fifteen seconds of continuous spray. Randi—I can’t hold my breath as long as you. You’ll have to help me get buttoned up again, fast.”

When all was ready, she took several deep breaths, vented her helmet and stripped almost as quickly as Randi had. This, I thought as I sprayed her, was the same woman who panicked in a tight spot just over a week ago. The whole operation was over in a hundred seconds.

The pulley I’d left was still functional, but that would only get us to the branch in the passage that led to the Cavern of Dead Ends. From there on, Cathy would have to pull us.

It was not fun to be sealed in an opaque, uninflated tent and be bumped and dragged along for the better part of an hour with no control over anything. The return of my minuscule weight as Sam winched us up to the roof of the Boiling Sea cavern was a great relief.

Randi, Nikhil, and I crawled, grumbling but grateful, out ot the tent onto the floor of the cave Sam had found a couple of hundred yards from the center of the domed roof of the cavern. The floor sloped, but not too badly, and with a milligee of gravity it scarcely mattered. I helped Nikhil with the tent braces and we soon had it ready to be pressurized. Sam recharged the pallet power supplies and Randi tacked a glowlamp to the wall. Cathy then excused herself to get the Exoderm out of her tightsuit while we set up the other tent.

Work done, we stretched and floated around our little room in silence.

I took a look out the cave entrance; all I could see of the cavern when I hit my strobe was a layer of white below and a forest of yellow and white stalactites, many of them hundreds of meters long, on the roof. The far side, which Sam’s radar said was only a couple of kilometers away, was lost in mist.

Then I noticed other things. My tightsuit, for instance, didn’t feel as tight as it should.

“What’s the air pressure in here?”

“Half a bar,” Sam responded. “I’ve adjusted your suits for minimum positive pressure. It’s mostly nitrogen, methane, ethane, and ammonia vapor, with some other volatile organics. By the way, the Boiling Sea is mainly ammonia; we are up to two hundred and twenty Kelvins here. The ethane flashes into vapor as it hits the ammonia—that’s why all the boiling.”

Miranda’s gravity was insufficient to generate that kind of pressure, and I wondered what was going on.

“Wojciech,” Randi whispered, as if she were afraid of waking something. “Look at the walls.”

“Huh?” The cave walls were dirty brown like cave walls anywhere—except Miranda. “Oh, no hoar crystals.”

She rubbed her hand on the wall and showed me the brown gunk.

“I’d like to put this under a microscope. Sam?”

The robot came quickly and held the sample close to its lower set of eyes. I saw what it saw, projected on the inside of my helmet.

“This has an apparent cellular structure, but little, if any structure within. Organic molecules and ammonia in a kind of jell.”

As I watched, one of the cells developed a bifurcation. I was so fascinated, I didn’t notice that Cathy had rejoined us. “They must absorb stuff directly from the air,” she theorized. “The air is toxic, by the way, but not in low concentrations. Something seems to have filtered out the cyanogens and other really bad stuff. Maybe this.”

“The back of the cave is full of them,” Randi observed. “How are you?”

“My skin didn’t get as raw as yours, but I have a few irritated areas. Physically, I’m drained. We’re going to stop here tonight, I hope.”

“This is one of the gas outlets of the Cavern of the Boiling Sea,” Sam added. “It seems to be a good place to resume our journey. The passage is clear of obstructions as far as I can see, except for these growths, which are transparent to my radar.”

“They impede the airflow,” Nikhil observed, “which must contribute to the high pressure in here. I think they get the energy for their organization from the heat of condensation.”

“Huh?” I wracked my memories of bonehead science.

“Wojciech, when a vapor condenses, it undergoes a phase change. When ethane vapor turns back into ethane, it gives off as much heat as it took to boil it in the first place. That heat can make some of the chemical reactions this stuff needs go in the right direction.

“Are they alive?” I asked.

“Hard to say,” Cathy responded. “But that’s a semantic discussion. Are hoar crystals alive? There’s a continuum of organization and behavior from rocks to people. Any line you draw is arbitrary and will go right through some gray areas.”

“Hmpf,” Nikhil snorted. “Some distinctions are more useful than others. This stuff breeds, I think. Let’s take some samples, but we need to get some rest, too.”

“Yes, dear.” Cathy yawned in spite of herself.

In the tent, Randi and I shared our last regular meal; a reconstituted chicken and pasta dish we’d saved to celebrate something. The tent stank of bodies and hydrocarbons, but we were used to that by now, and the food tasted great despite the assault on our nostrils. From now on, meals would be crackers. But we were on our way out now, definitely. We had to be. Randi felt fully recovered now and smiled at me as she snuggled under her elastic sheet for a night’s rest.

It must have been the energy we got from our first good meal in days. She woke me in the middle of our arbitrary night and gently coaxed me into her cot for lovemaking, more an act of defiance against our likely fate than an act of pleasure. I surprised myself by responding, and we caressed each other up a spiral of intensity which was perhaps fed by our fear as well.

There are the tidal forces near Randi’s event horizon; she is not just strong for a woman, but strong in absolute terms; stronger than most men I have known including myself. I had to half-seriously warn her to not crack our low gravity-weakened ribs. This made her giggle and squeeze me so hard I couldn’t breathe for a moment, which made her giggle again.

When we were done, she gestured to the tent roof with the middle finger of her right hand and laughed uncontrollably. I joined her in this as well, but I felt momentarily sad for Nikhil and Cathy.

It was another of those polite mornings, and we packed up and were on our way with record efficiency. We looked around for the vent and Sam pointed us right at the mass of brown at the rear of the cave.

“The gas goes into that, right through it,” it said.

We called the stuff “cryofungus.” It had grown out from either side of the large, erosion widened vertical crack that Sam found in the back of our cave until it met in the middle. However the cryofungus colonies from either side didn’t actually fuse there, but just pressed up against each other. So, with some effort, we found we could half push, half swim, our way along this seam.

We had pushed our way through five kilometers of “cryofungus” before a macabre thought occurred to me. The rubbery brown stuff absorbed organics through the skin of its cells. Did said organic stuff have to be gas? I asked Cathy.

“I did an experiment. I fed my sample a crumb of ration cracker.”

“What happened?”

“The cracker sort of melted into the cryofungus. There are transport molecules all over the cell walls.”

I thought a second. “Cathy, If we didn’t have our suits on . . .”

“I’d think water would be a little hot for them, but then again water and ammonia are mutually soluble. If you want to worry, consider that your tightsuit is porous. It might,” I could see her toothy smile in my mind, “help keep you moving.”

“Nice, dear,” Nikhil grumbled. “That gives a whole new meaning to this concept of wandering through the bowels of Miranda.”

A round of hysterical laughter broke whatever tension remained between us, and resolved into a feeling of almost spiritual oneness among us. Perhaps you have to face death with someone to feel that—if so, so be it.

At the ten kilometer point, the cryofungus started to loose its resiliency. At twelve, it started collapsing into brown dust, scarcely offering any more resistance than the hoar crystals. This floated along with the gas current as a sort of brown fog. I couldn’t see, and had Sam move up beside me.

After three kilometers of using Sam as a seeing eye dog, the dust finally drifted by us and the air cleared. It was late again, well past time to camp. We had been underground thirteen days, and had, by calculation, another eight left. According to Sam, we were still two hundred and fifteen kilometers below the surface. We decided to move on for another hour or two.

The passageway was tubular and fairly smooth, with almost zero traction. We shot pitons into the next curve ahead, and pulled ourselves along.

“Massive wind erosion,” Nikhil remarked as he twisted the eye of a piton to release it. “A gale must have poured through here for megayears before the cryofungus choked it down.”

Each strobe revealed an incredible gallery of twisted forms, loops, and carved rocks, many of which were eerily statuesque; saints and gargoyles. This led us into a slightly uphill kilometer-long cavern formed under two megalithic slabs, which had tilted against each other when, perhaps, the escaping gas had undermined them. After the rich hoarcrystal forest of the inbound path, this place was bare and dry. Sam covered the distance with a calculated jump carrying a line to the opposite end. We started pulling ourselves across. We’d climbed enough so that our weight was back to twenty newtons—minuscule, yes, but try pumping twenty newtons up and down for eighteen hours.

“I quit,” Cathy said. “My arms won’t do any more. Stop with me, or bury me here.” She let go of the line, and floated slowly down to the floor.

It was silent here, no drippings, no whistling, reminiscent of the vacuum so far above. I tried to break the tension by naming the cavern. “This was clearly meant to be a tomb, anyway. The Egyptian Tomb, we can call it.”

“Not funny, Wojciech,” Nikhil snapped. “Sorry, old boy, a bit tired myself. Yes, we can make camp, but we may regret it later.”

“Time to stop. We worked out the schedule for, for, maximum progress,” Randi said. “Need to trust our judgment. Won’t do any better by over-pushing ourselves now.”

“Very well,” Nikhil conceded, and dropped off as well. He reached Cathy and put his arm around her briefly, which I note because it was the first sign of physical affection I had seen between them. Randi and I dropped the pallets, and followed to the floor. We landed harder than we expected—milligee clouds judgment almost as badly as free fall, I thought. Worse perhaps, because it combines a real up and down with the feeling that they don’t matter.

We were very careful and civilized in making camp. But each of us was, in our minds, trying to reach an accommodation with the idea that, given what we had been through so far, the week we had left would not get us to the surface.

Before we went into our separate tents, we all held hands briefly. It was spontaneous—we hadn’t done so before. But it seemed right, somehow, to tell each other that we could draw on each other that way.

V

That last was for day thirteen, this entry will cover days fourteen and fifteen. Yes, my discipline in keeping the journal is slipping.

We’d come to think of Randi as a machine—almost as indestructible and determined as Sam, but last night, at the end of day fourteen, that machine cried and shook.

Low rations and fatigue are affecting all of us now. We let Sam pull us through the occasional cavern, but it has mostly been wriggling through cracks with a human in the lead. We changed leads every time we hit a place wide enough, but once that was six hours. That happened on Randi’s lead. She didn’t slack but when we finally reached a small cavern, she had rolled to the side with her face to the wall as I went by. We heard nothing from her for the next four hours.

We ended up at the bottom of a big kidney-shaped cavern a hundred and sixty kilometers below the surface; almost back to the depth of the upper end of Nikhil’s Smokestack. We staggered through camp setup, with Sam double checking everything. We simply collapsed on top of the stretched sheets in our coveralls and slept for an hour or so, before our bodies demanded that we take care of other needs. Washed, emptied, and a bit refreshed from the nap, Randi had snuggled into my arms, then let herself go. Her body was a mass of bruises, old and new. So was mine.

“You’re allowed a safety valve, you know,” I told her. “When Cathy feels bad, she lets us know outright. Nikhil gets grumpy. I get silly and start telling bad jokes. You don’t have to keep up an act for us.”

“Not for you, for, for me. Got to pretend I can do it, or I’ll get left behind, with Mom.”

I thought about this. A woman that would attempt to murder her husband to gain social position might have been capable of other things as well.

“Randi, what did that mean? Do you want to talk?”

She shook her head. “Can’t explain.”

I kissed her forehead. “I guess I’ve been lucky with my parents.”

“Yeah. Nice people. Nice farm. No fighting. So why do you have to do this stuff?”

Why indeed? “To have a real adventure, to make a name for myself outside of obscure poetry outlets. Mom inherited the farm from her father, and that was better than living on state dividends in Poland, so they moved. They actually get to do something useful, tending the agricultural robots. But they’re deathly afraid of losing it because real jobs were so scarce and a lot of very smart people are willing to do just about anything to get an Earth job. So they made themselves very, very nice. They never rock any boats. Guess I needed something more than nice.”

“But you’re, uh, nice as they are.”

“Well trained, in spite of myself.” Oh, yes, with all the protective responses a nonconformist learns after being squashed time and time again by very socially correct, outwardly gentle, and emotionally devastating means. “By the way, Randi, I hate that word.”

“Huh?”

“Nice.”

“But you use it.”

“Yeah, and I hate doing that, too. Look, are you as tired as I am?” I was about to excuse myself to the questionable comforts of my dreams.

“No. Not yet. I’ll do the work.”

“Really . . .”

“Maybe the last time, way we’ve going.” We both knew she was right, but my body wasn’t up to it, and we just clung to each other tightly, as if we could squeeze a little more life into ourselves. I don’t remember falling asleep.

Day fifteen was a repeat, except that the long lead shift tell on Cathy. She slacked. For seven hours, she would stop until she got cold, then move forward again until she got tired. Somehow we reached a place where I could take over.

What amazed me through all of that was how Nikhil handled it. There was no sniping, no phony cheeriness. He would simply ask if she was ready to move again when he started getting cold.

We ended the day well past midnight. For some reason, I am having trouble sleeping.

Today the vent finally led us to a chain of small caverns, much like the rift before we encountered the top of Nikhil’s Smokestack. We let Sam tow us most of the way and had only two long crack crawls. The good news is our CO_2 catalyst use is down from our passivity, and we might get another day out of it.

The bad news is that Randi had to cut our rations back a bit. We hadn’t been as careful in our counting as we should have been, thinking that because the CO_2 would get us first, we didn’t have a problem in that area. Now we did. It was nobody’s fault, and everyone’s. We’d all had an extra cracker here and there. They add up.

We ended up, exhausted as usual, in a five-hundred-meter gallery full of jumble. I called it the Junk Yard. Sam couldn’t find the outlet vent right away, but we made such good progress that we thought we had time to catch up on our sleep.

Day eighteen. We gained a total of fifteen kilometers in radius over the past two days. “The Junk Yard” was a dead end, at least for anything the size of a human being. There was some evidence of gas diffusing upward through fractured clathrate, but it was already clear that it wasn’t the main vent, which appeared to have been closed by a Miranda quake millions of years ago.

We had to go all the way back to a branch that Sam had missed while it was towing us through a mediumsized chimney. Logic and experience dictated that the outlet would be at the top of the chimney, and there was a hole there that led onward. To “The Junk Yard.” Miranda rearranges such logic.

We spotted the real vent from the other side of the chimney as we rappelled back down.

“A human being,” Cathy said when she saw the large vertical crack that was the real vent, “would have been curious enough to check that out. It’s so deep.”

“I don’t know, dear,” Nikhil said, meaning to defend Sam, I supposed, “with the press of time and all, I might not have turned aside, myself.”

We were all dead silent at Nikhil’s unintentional self-identification with a robot. Then Randi giggled and soon we were all laughing hysterically again. The real students of humor, I recall, say that laughter is not very far from tears. Then Nikhil, to our surprise, released his hold to put his arms around his wife again. And she responded. I reached out and caught them before they’d drifted down enough centimeters for their belt lines to go taut. So at the end of day seventeen, we had covered sixty kilometers of caverns and cracks, and come only fifteen or so nearer the surface.

By the end of day eighteen, we’d done an additional fifteen kilometers of exhausting crack crawling, found only one large cavern, and gave in to exhaustion, camping in a widening of the crack just barely big enough to inflate the tents.

What occurred today was not a fight. We didn’t have enough energy for a fight.

We had just emerged into a ten-meter long, ten-meter wide, two-meter high widening gallery in the crack we were crawling. Cathy was in the lead and had continued on through into the continuing passage when Nikhil gave in to pessimism.

“Cathy,” he called, “stop. The passage ahead is getting too narrow, it’s another bloody dead end. We should go back to the last large cavern and look for another vent.”

Cathy was silent, but the line stopped. Randi, sounding irritated, said “No time,” and moved to enter the passage after Cathy.

Nikhil yawned and snorted. “Sorry little lady. I’m the geologist and the senior member, and not to be too fine about it, but I’m in charge.” Here he seemed to loose steam and get confused, muttering “You’re right about no time—there’s no time to argue.” No one said anything, but Randi held her position.

Nikhil whined. “I say we go back, an’ this time, back we go.”

My mind was fuzzy; we still had four, maybe five days. If we found the right chain of caverns, we could still make the surface. If we kept going like this, we weren’t going to make it anyway. He might be right, I thought. But Randi wouldn’t budge.

“No, Nikhil. You owe me one, Nikhil, for, for, two weeks ago. I’m collecting. Got to go forward now. Air flow, striations, Sam’s soundings, and, and my money, damn it.”

So much for my thoughts. I had to remember my status as part of Randi’s accretion disk.

“Your daddy’s money,” Nikhil sniffed, then said loudly and with false jollity, “But never mind. Come on everyone, we’ll put Randi on a stretcher again until she recovers . . . her senses.” He started reaching for Randi: clumsy fumbling really. Randi turned and braced herself, boots clamped into the clathrate, arms free.

“Nikhil, back off,” I warned. “You don’t mean that.”

“Ah appreciate your expertise with words, old chap.” His voice was definitely slurred. “But these are mine and I mean them. I’m too tired to be questioned by amateurs anymore. Back we go. Come on back, Cathy. As for you. He lunged for Randi again. At this point I realized he was out of his mind, and possibly why.

So did Randi, for at the last second instead of slapping him away and possibly hurting him, she simply jerked herself away from his grasping fingers.

And screeched loudly in pain.

“What?” I asked, brushing by the startled Nikhil to get to Randi’s side.

“Damn ankle,” she sobbed. “Forgot to release my boot grapples. Tired. Bones getting weak. Too much low g. Thing hurts.”

“Broken?”

She nodded, tight lipped, more in control. But I could see the tears in her eyes. Except for painkiller, there was nothing I could do for her at the moment. But I thought there might be something to be done for Nikhil. Where was Cathy?

“Nikhil,” I said as evenly as I could. “What’s your O_2 partial?”

“I beg your pardon?” he drawled.

“Beg Randi’s. I asked you what your O_2 partial is.”

“I’ve been conserving a bit. You know, less O_2, less CO_2. Trying to stretch things out.”

“What . . . is . . . it?”

“Point one. It should be fine. I’ve had a lot of altitude experience—”

“Please put it back up to point two for five minutes, and then we’ll talk.”

“Now just a minute, I resent the implication that—”

“Be reasonable Nikhil. Put it back up for a little, please. Humor me. Five minutes won’t hurt.”

“Oh, perhaps not. There. Now just what is it you expect to happen?”

“Wait for a bit.”

We waited, silently. Randi sniffed, trying to deal with her pain. I watched Nikhil’s face slowly grow more and more troubled. Finally I asked:

“Are you back with us?”

He nodded silently. “I think so. My apologies, Randi.”

“Got clumsy. Too strong for my own bones. Forget it. And you don’t owe me, either. Dumb thing to say. It was my choice.”

What was? Two weeks ago, in his tent?

“Very well.” Nikhil replied with as much dignity as he could muster.

Who besides Randi could dismiss a broken ankle with “forget it.” And who besides Nikhil would take her up on that? I shook my head.

Randi couldn’t keep the pain out of her voice as she held out her right vacuum boot. “This needs some work. Tent site. Cathy.” Nothing would show, of course, until it came off.

“Quite,” Nikhil responded. “Well, you were right on the direction. Perhaps we should resume.”

I waved him off for a moment and found a painkiller in the pallet for Randi, and she ingested it through her helmet lock, and gagged a bit.

“Still a little ethane here,” she gave a little laugh. “Woke me up. I’ll manage.”

“Let me know.” I was so near her event horizon now that everything I could see of the outside world was distorted and bent by her presence. Such were the last moments of my freedom, the last minutes and the last seconds that I could look on our relationship from the outside. My independent existence was stretched beyond the power of any force of nature to restore it. Our fate was to become a singularity.

It was a measure of my own hunger and fatigue that I half seriously considered exterminating Nikhil; coldly, as if contemplating a roach to be crushed. A piton gun would have done nicely. But, I thought, Cathy really ought to be in on the decision. She might want to keep him as a pet. Cathy, of course, was on the lead pitch. That meant she was really in charge, something Nikhil had forgotten.

“Cathy,” I called, laying on the irony. “Randi has a broken ankle. Otherwise, we are ready to go again.”

There was no answer, but radio didn’t carry well in this material—too many bends in the path and something in the clathrate that just ate our frequencies like stealth paint. So I gave two pulls on our common line to signal OK, go.

The line was slack.

Cathy, anger with Nikhil possibly clouding her judgment, had enforced her positional authority in a way that was completely inarguable: by proceeding alone. At least I fervently hoped that was all that had happened. I pulled myself to where the passage resumed, and looked. No sign of anything.

“Sam, take the line back up to Cathy and tell her to wait up, we’re coming.”

Sam squeezed by me and scurried off. Shortly, his monitors in my helmet display blinked out; he was out of radio range as well.

Again, we waited for a tug on a line in a silence that shouted misery. Nikhil pretended to examine the wall, Randi stared ahead as if in a trance. I stared at her, wanting to touch her, but not seeming to have the energy to push myself over to her side of the little cave.

Both hope and dread increased with the waiting. The empty time could mean that Cathy had gone much farther than our past rate of progress had suggested, which would be very welcome news. But it could also mean that some disaster ahead that had taken both her and Sam. In which case, we were dead as well. Or, like Randi’s detour from the Boiling Sea, it could mean something we had neglected to imagine.

“Wojciech, Nikhil,” Randi asked in her quiet, anticipatory, tone, “would you turn off your lamps?”

I looked at Nikhil, and he stared off into space, saying as much that he could not care less. But his light went out. I nodded and cut mine. The blackness was total at first, then as my pupils widened, I realized I could sense a gray-green contrast, a shadow. My shadow.

I turned around to the source of the glow. It was, of course, the crack behind me, through which Cathy and Sam had vanished. As my eyes adapted further, it became almost bright. It was white, just tinged with green. The shadows of rocks and ice intrusions made the crack look like the mouth of some beast about to devour us.

“Is there,” I asked, “any reason why we should stay here?”

We left. The crack widened rapidly, and after an hour of rather mild crack-crawling, we were able to revert to our distance eating hand-hauling routine. We covered ten kilometers almost straight up this way. With the sudden way of such things the crack turned into a tubular tunnel, artificial in its smoothness, and this in turn gave into a roughly teardrop-shaped, hundred-meter-diameter cavern with slick ice walls, and a bright circle at the top. I was about to use my piton gun when Randi tugged my arm and pointed out a ladder of double-looped pitons, set about two meters apart, leading up to the circle.

We were thus about to climb into Sphereheim when Cathy’s line grew taut again.

That was, by the clock, the end of day nineteen. We were, it seemed, both too exhausted and too excited to sleep.

The cavern above was almost perfectly spherical, hence the name we gave it, and was almost fifteen kilometers in diameter. A spire ran along its vertical axis from the ceiling to the floor, littered like a Christmas tree with the kind of cantilevered platforms that seventy-five milligees permits.

By now, we had climbed to within forty kilometers of the surface, so this was all in a pretty good vacuum, but there were signs that things had not always been this way.

“Cathy?” Nikhil called, the first words he had spoken since the fight.

“Good grief, you’re here already. We waited until we thought it was safe.”

“We saw the light.”

“It came on as soon as I got in here. Sam’s been looking for other automatic systems, burglar protection, for instance.”

“There,” Sam interjected, “appear to be none. The power source is two stage—a uranium radionic long duration module, and something like a solid state fuel cell that works when it’s warmed up. The latter appears to be able to produce almost a kilowatt.”

“Good,” I said, wondering if Sam’s software could discern the contrary irritation in my voice. “Cathy, Randi has a broken ankle.” Even in less than a hundredth of g, Randi wouldn’t put any weight on it.

“Oh, no! We need to get a tent up right away. Sam, break off and come down here, I need you. And you!” she pointed at Nikhil. “This is a medical emergency now, and what I say goes. Do you have a problem with that?” The edge in Cathy’s voice verged on hysteria.

Nikhil simply turned away without saying anything and began setting up the tent.

Randi reached for Cathy. “Cathy, Nikhil cut his oxygen too thin, trying to save CO_2 catalyst for all of us. He wasn’t himself. Ankle hurts like hell, but that was my fault. I’d feel better if you weren’t so, uh, hard on him. OK?”

Cathy stood quietly for a couple of seconds then muttered. “All right, all right. Give me a minute to collect things, and we’ll get in the tent. I’ll see what I can do. Wojciech?”

“Yes, Cathy?”

“As I guess everyone knows, I just blew it with my husband, and I can’t fix things right now because I have to fix Randi’s ankle. He’s in a blue funk.” She pulled the velcro tab up on one of her pockets, reached in and produced a small, thin, box. “Give him one of these and tell him I’m sorry.”

I looked at her. She seemed on the brink of some kind of collapse, but was holding herself back by some supreme effort of will. Maybe that’s what I looked like to her.

“Sorry, Wojciech,” she whispered, “best I can do.”

I gave her hand a squeeze. “We’ll make it good enough, OK? Just hang in there, Doc.”

She gave me a quick, tear-filled smile, then grabbed the minidoc and followed Randi into the tent, which inflated promptly.

Nikhil was sitting on the other pallet and I sat next to him. “Look, Nikhil, the way I see it, none of this stuff counts. All that counts is that the four of us get out of this moon alive.”

He looked at me briefly, then resumed looking at the ground. “No, no. Wojciech, it counts. Do you understand living death? The kind where your body persists, but everything that you thought was you has been destroyed? My reputation . . . they’ll say Nikhil Ray cracked under pressure. It got too tough for old Nikhil. Nikhil beats up on women. It’s going to be bloody bad.”

I remembered the box Cathy gave me, pulled it out and opened it. “Doctor’s orders, Nikhil. She cares, she really does.”

He gave me a ghastly grin and took a caplet envelope, unwrapped it and stuck it through his helmet lock. “Can’t say as I approve of mind-altering drugs, but it wouldn’t do to disappoint the doctor any more now, would it? I put her through medical school, did you know? She was eighteen when we met. Biology student studying evolution, and I was co-lecturing a paleontology section. Damn she was beautiful, and no one like that had ever . . .” he lifted his hands as if to gesture, then set them down again. “I broke my own rule about thinking first, and I have this to remind me, every day, of what happens when you do that.”

“Look, Nikhil. She doesn’t mean to hurt you.” I tried to think of something to get him out of this, to put his mind on something else. “Say, we have a few minutes. Why don’t we look around, it may be the only chance we get. Soon as Cathy’s done with Randi, we’ll need to get some sleep, then try to make it to the surface. We’ve forty kilometers to go, and only two days before our catalyst runs out.”

“My line, isn’t that? Very well.” He seemed to straighten a bit. “But it looks as if the visitors packed up pretty thoroughly when they left. Those platforms off the central column are just bare honeycomb. Of course, it would be a bit odd if they packed everything out.”

“Oh?”

“Field sites are usually an eclectic mess. All sorts of not-immediately-useful stuff gets strewn about. If the strewers don’t expect the environmental police to stop by, it usually just gets left there by the hut site—the next explorer to come that way might find something useful.”

“I see. You think there might be a dump here, somewhere.”

“It seems they had a crypt. Why not a dump?”

What kind of alien technology might be useful to us, I didn’t know. It would take a lot longer than the two days we had to figure out how to do anything with it. But the discussion had seemed to revive Nikhil a bit, so I humored him.

We found the junkyard. It was in a mound about a hundred meters from the tower base, covered with the same color dust as everything else. A squirt from my reaction pistol blew some of the dust away from the junk.

And it was just that. Discarded stuff. Broken building panels, a few boxes with electrical leads. What looked like a busted still. A small wheeled vehicle that I would have taken for a kid’s tricycle, an elongated vacuum helmet with a cracked visor. Other things. I’d been rummaging for five minutes before I noticed that Nikhil hadn’t gone past the still.

“Nikhil?”

“It is within the realm of possibility that I might redeem myself. Look at that.”

The most visible part was a big coil of what looked to be tubing. There were also things that looked like electric motors, and several chambers to hold distilled liquids.

“The tubing, Wojciech.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If we breathe through it, at this temperature, the CO_2 in our breath should condense.”

“Oh! We could do without the CO_2 catalyst.” Then I thought of the problem. “It wouldn’t be very portable.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” Nikhil nodded slowly, judiciously. “But it doesn’t have to be. Cathy and Randi can remain here while you, Sam, and I take the remaining catalyst and go for help.”

Did I hear him right? Then I thought it through. Randi was disabled, Cathy, by strength and temperament, was the least suited for the ordeal above us. It made sense, but Randi would . . . no, Randi would have to agree if it made sense. She was a pro.

“We’d better see if it works first.” I said.

VI

An hour later, our still was working. Tape, spare connectors, the alien light source, and Sam’s instant computational capabilities yielded something that could keep two relatively quiescent people alive. They’d have to heat it up to sublimate the condensed CO_2 every other hour, or the thing would clog, but it worked.

Randi’s ankle was a less happy situation.

“Randi’s resting now,” Cathy told us when she finally emerged from the vacuum tent, exhausted. “It’s a bad break, splintered. Her bones were weak from too much time in low gravity, I think. Anyway, the breaks extend into the calcaneus and her foot is much too swollen to get back into her vacuum boots. Had to put her in a rescue bag to get out of the tent.” Cathy shot a look of contempt at her husband who stared down. “The swelling will take days to go down, and she should have much more nourishment than we have to give her.”

“I . . .” Nikhil started, then, in a moment I shall remember forever, he looked confused. “I?” Then he simply went limp and fell, much like an autumn leaf in the gentle gravity of Miranda, to the cavern dust. We were both too surprised to catch him even though his fall took several seconds.

“No, no . . .” Cathy choked.

I knelt over Nikhil and straightened his limbs. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

“Stroke?” I asked Cathy.

She seemed to shake herself back into a professional mode. I heard her take a breath.

“Could be. His heart telemetry’s fine. Or he may have just fainted. Let’s get the other tent set up.”

We did this only with Sam’s help. We made errors in the set-up, errors which would have been fatal if Sam hadn’t been there to notice and correct them. We were tired and had been eating too little food. It took an hour. We put Nikhil in the tent and Cathy was about to follow when she stopped me.

“The main med kit’s in Randi’s tent. I’ll need it if I have to operate. She’ll have gotten out of the rescue bag to sleep after I left. You’ll have to wake her, get her back in the bag and depressure—”

I held up a hand. “I can figure it out, and if I can’t, she can. Cathy, her foot’s busted, not her head.”

Cathy nodded and I could see a bit of a smile through her faceplate.

“Randi,” I called, “Sorry to wake you, but we’ve got a problem.”

“I heard. Comsets are dumb, guys. Can’t tell if you talk about someone instead of to someone. Be right out with the med kit.”

“Huh?” Cathy sounded shocked. “No, Randi don’t try to put that boot on. Please don’t.”

“Too late,” Randi answered. We watched the tension go out of the tent fabric as it depressurized. Randi emerged from the opening with the med kit and a sample bag. Cathy and I immediately looked at her right boot—it seemed perfectly normal, except that Randi had rigged some kind of brace with pitons and vacuum tape.

Then we looked at the sample bag. It contained a blue-green swollen travesty of a human foot, severed neatly just above the ankle, apparently with a surgical laser. I couldn’t think of anything to do or say.

“Oh, no, Randi,” Cathy cried and launched herself toward Randi. “I tried Randi, I tried.”

“You didn’t have time.” The two women embraced. “Don’t say anything,” Randi finally said, “to him,” she nodded at Nikhil’s tent, “until we’re all back and safe. Please, huh?”

Cathy stood frozen, then nodded slowly, took the sample bag and examined the foot end of the section. “Looks clean, anyway. At least let me take a look at the stump before you go, OK?”

Randi shook her head. “Bitch to unwrap. Cauterized with the surgical laser. Plastiflesh all over the stump. Sealed in plastic. Plenty of local. Don’t feel anything. I did a good enough job, Cathy.”

I finally found my voice. “Randi . . . why?”

“Nikhil’s gone. Got to move. It’s OK, Wojciech. They can regenerate. You and I got to get going.”

“Me? Now?” I was surprised for a moment, then realized the need. Cathy had to stay with Nikhil. And I’d already seen too many situations where one person would have been stopped that we’d managed to work around with two. Also, our jury rigged CO_2 still’s capacity was two people, max.

“No. Go as long as we can, then sleep. Eat everything we have left. Push for the surface. Only way.”

Cathy nodded. She handed Randi’s foot to me, almost absentmindedly, and went into the tent to attend to Nikhil. Randy laughed, took the foot from me, and threw it far out of sight toward Sphereheim’s junk pile. In the low gravity, it probably got there.

I tried not to think about it as Randi and I packed, with Sam’s help. Moving slowly and deliberately, we didn’t make that many errors. What Randi had to draw on, I didn’t know. I drew on her. In an hour, we were ready to go and said our farewells to Cathy.

She would have to wait there, perhaps alone if Nikhil did not recover, perhaps forever if we did not succeed. What would that be like, I wondered? Would some future explorers confuse her with the beings who had built the station in this cavern? Had we already done that with the corpses we found in the Cavern of Dead Ends?

I wished I had made love to Cathy that night we spent together. I felt I was leaving a relationship incomplete; a feeling, a sharing, uncommunicated. Here, even a last embrace would have been nice, but she was in her tent caring for her husband. Out of food, low on time, Randi and I had to go, and go now. In the dash to the surface, even minutes might be critical.

Tireless Sam scaled the alien tower, found the vent in the magnificent, crystal lined dome of the cavern roof, and dropped us a line. I was suspended among wonders, but so tired I almost fell asleep as Sam reeled us up. The experience was surreal and beyond description.

Of most of the next few days, I have little detailed memory. Sam dragged us through passages, chimneys, vents and caverns. Occasionally, it stopped at a problem that Randi would somehow rouse herself to solve.

On one occasion, we came to a wall a meter thick which had cracked enough to let gas pass through. Sam’s acoustic radar showed a big cavern on the other side, so, somehow, we dug our way through. For all its talents, Sam was not built for wielding a pick. I leave this information to the designers of future cave exploration robots.

Randi and I swung at that wall in five-minute shifts for a three-hour eternity, before, in a fit of hysterical anaerobic energy, I was able to kick it through. We were too tired to celebrate—we just grabbed the line as Sam went by and tried to keep awake and living as it pulled us through another cave and another crack.

In one of a string of ordinary crystal caverns, we found another alien piton. Randi thought it might be a different design than the one we had found before, and had Sam pull it out and put it in a sample bag, which we stored on Sam—the most likely to survive.

I mentioned this because we were near death and knew it, but could still do things for the future. Everyone dies, I thought, so we all spend our lives for something. The only thing that matters at the end is: for what? In saving the piton, we were adding one more bit to the tally of “for what?”

This was almost certainly our last “night” in a tent. I think we both stunk, but I was too far gone to tell for sure. We’d gone for thirty-seven hours straight. Sam said we were within three kilometers of the surface, but the cavern trail lies parallel to this surface, and refused to ascend.

In theory, our catalyst was exhausted, but we continued to breathe.

Another quake trapped me.

Randi was in front of me. Somehow, she managed to squeeze aside and let Sam by to help. Sam chipped clathrate away from my helmet, which let me straighten my neck.

As this happened, there was another movement, a big slow one this time, and the groan of Miranda’s tortured mantle was clearly audible as my helmet was pressed between the passage walls again. I could see the passage ahead of me close a little more with every sickening wave of ground movement, even as I could feel the pressure at my spot release a bit. But the passage ahead—if it closed with Randi on this side, we were dead.

“Go!” I told Randi. “It’s up to you now.” As if it hadn’t always been so. I was pushed sideways and back again as another train of s-waves rolled through. Ice split with sharp retorts.

Sam turned sideways in the passage, pitting its thin composite against billions of tons of clathrate.

Randi vanished forward. “I love you,” she said, “I’ll make it.”

“I know you will. Hey, we’re married, OK?”

“Just like that?”

“By my authority as a man in a desperate position.”

“OK. Married. Two kids. Deal?”

“Deal.”

“I love you again.”

Sam cracked under the pressure, various electronic innards spilling onto the passage floor. I couldn’t see anything beyond him.

“Sam?” I asked. Useless question.

“Randi?”

Nothing.

For some strange reason I felt no pressure on me now. Too worried for Randi, too exhausted to be interested in my own death, I dozed.

There was definitely CO_2 in my helmet when I woke again. It was pitch black—the suit had turned off my glowlamp to conserve an inconsequential watt or two. Groggy. I thought turning on my pack would help my breathing, vaguely thinking that the one percent weight on my lungs was a problem. To my surprise, I could actually turn.

In the utter dead black overhead, a star appeared. Very briefly, then I blinked and it vanished.

I continued to stare at this total darkness above me for minutes, not daring to believe I’d seen what I thought I’d seen, and then I saw another one. Yes, a real star.

I thought that could only mean that a crack to the surface had opened above me; incredibly narrow, or far above me, but open enough that now and then a star drifted by its opening. I was beyond climbing, but perhaps where photons could get in, photons could get out.

Shaking and miserable, I started transmitting.

“Uranus Control, Uranus Control, Wojciech Bubka here. I’m down at the bottom of a crack on Miranda. Help. Uranus Control, Uranus Control. . . .”

Something sprayed on my face, waking me again. Air, and mist as well.

I opened my eyes and saw that a tube had cemented itself to my faceplate and drilled a hole through it to admit some smaller tubes. One of these was trying to snake its way into my mouth. I opened to help it, and got something warm and sweet to swallow.

“Thanks,” I croaked, around the tube.

“Don’t mention it,” a young female voice answered, sounding almost as relieved as I felt.

“My wife’s in this passage, somewhere in the direction my head is pointed. Can you get one of these tubes to her?”

There was a hesitation. “Your wife.”

“Miranda Lotati,” I croaked. “She was with me. Trying to get to the surface. Went that way.”

More hesitation.

“We’ll try, Wojciech. God knows we’ll try.”

Within minutes, a tiny version of Sam fell on my chest and scuttled past Sam’s wreckage down the compressed passage in her direction, trailing a line. The line seemed to run over me forever. I remember reading somewhere that while the journey to singularity is inevitable for someone passing into the event horizon of a black hole, as viewed from our Universe, the journey can take forever.

What most people remember about the rescue was the digger; that vast thing of pistons, beams, and steel claws that tore through the clathrate rift like an anteater looking for ants. What they saw, I assure you, was in no way as impressive, or scary, as being directly under the thing.

I was already in a hospital ship bed when they found Randi, eleven kilometers down a passage that had narrowed, narrowed, and narrowed.

At its end, she had broken her bones forcing herself through one more centimeter at a time. A cracked pelvis, both collarbones, two ribs, and her remaining ankle.

The last had done it, for when it collapsed she had no remaining way to force herself any farther through that crack of doom.

And so she had lain there, and, minute by minute, despite everything, willed herself to live as long as she could.

Despite everything, she did.

They got the first tubes into her through her hollow right boot and the plastiflesh seal of her stump, after the left foot had proved to be frozen solid. They didn’t tell me at first—not until they had convinced themselves she was really alive.

When the rescuers reached Cathy and Nikhil, Cathy calmly guided the medic to her paralyzed husband, and as soon as she saw that he was in good professional hands, gave herself a sedative, and started screaming until she collapsed. She wasn’t available for interviews for weeks.

But she’s fine now, and laughs about it. She and Nikhil live in a large university dome on Triton and host our reunions in their house, which has no roof—they’ve arranged for the dome’s rain to fall elsewhere.

Miranda, my wife, spent three years as a quadruple amputee, and went back into Miranda the moon that way, in a powered suit, to lead people back to the Cavern of Dead Ends. Today, it’s easy to see where the bronze weathered flesh of her old limbs ends and the pink smoothness of her new ones start. But if you miss it, she’ll point it out with a grin.

So, having been to hades and back, are the four of us best friends? For amusement, we all have more congenial companions. Nikhil is still a bit haughty, and he and Cathy still snipe at each other a little, but with smiles more often than not. I’ve come to conclude that, in some strange way, they need the stimulation that gives them, and a displacement for needs about which Nikhil will not speak.

Cathy and Randi still find little to talk about, giving us supposedly verbally challenged males a chance. Nikhil says I have absorbed enough geology lectures to pass doctorate exams; so maybe I will do that someday. He often lectures me toward that end, but my advance for our book was such that I won’t have to do anything the rest of my life, except for the love of it. I’m not sure I love geology.

Often, on our visits, the four of us simply sit, say nothing, and do nothing but sip a little fruit of the local grape, which we all enjoy. We smile at each other and remember.

But don’t let this studied difference of ours fool you. The four of us are bound with something that goes far beyond friendship, far beyond any slight conversation, far beyond my idiot critiques of our various eccentric personalities or of the hindsight mistakes of our passage through the Great Miranda Rift. These are the table crumbs from a feast of greatness, meant to sustain those who follow.

The sublime truth is that when I am with my wife, Nikhil, and Cathy, I feel elevated above what is merely human. Then I sit in the presence of these demigods who challenged, in mortal combat, the will of the Universe—and won.

The author would like to acknowledge the inspiration of Fritz Leiber (“A Pail of Air”), Hal Clement (Still River) and, of course, Jules Verne (A Journey to the Center of the Earth).

MEFISTO IN ONYX

Harlan Ellison

ONCE. I ONLY WENT TO BED WITH HER ONCE.

Friends for eleven years—before and since—but it was just one of those things, just one of those crazy flings: the two of us alone on a New Year’s Eve, watching rented Marx Brothers videos so we wouldn’t have to go out with a bunch of idiots and make noise and pretend we were having a good time when all we’d be doing was getting drunk, whooping like morons, vomiting on slow-moving strangers, and spending more money than we had to waste. And we drank a little too much cheap champagne; and we fell off the sofa laughing at Harpo a few times too many; and we wound up on the floor at the same time; and next thing we knew we had our faces plastered together, and my hand up her skirt, and her hand down in my pants . . .

But it was just the once, fer chrissakes! Talk about imposing on a cheap sexual liaison! She knew I went mixing in other peoples’ minds only when I absolutely had no other way to make a buck. Or I forgot myself and did it in a moment of human weakness.

It was always foul.

Slip into the thoughts of the best person who ever lived, even Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, just to pick an absolutely terrific person you’d think had a mind so clean you could eat off it (to paraphrase my mother), and when you come out—take my word for it—you’d want to take a long, intense shower in Lysol.

Trust me on this: I go into somebody’s landscape when there’s nothing else I can do, no other possible solution . . . or I forget and do it in a moment of human weakness. Such as, say, the IRS holds my feet to the fire; or I’m about to get myself mugged and robbed and maybe murdered; or I need to find out if some specific she that I’m dating has been using somebody else’s dirty needle or has been sleeping around without she’s taking some extra-heavy-duty AIDS precautions; or a co-worker’s got it in his head to set me up so I make a mistake and look bad to the boss and I find myself in the unemployment line again; or . . .

I’m a wreck for weeks after.

Go jaunting through a landscape trying to pick up a little insider arbitrage bric-a-brac, and come away no better heeled, but all muddy with the guy’s infidelities, and I can’t look a decent woman in the eye for days. Get told by a motel desk clerk that they’re all full up and he’s sorry as hell but I’ll just have to drive on for about another thirty miles to find the next vacancy, jaunt into his landscape and find him lit up with neon signs that got a lot of the word nigger in them, and I wind up hitting the sonofabitch so hard his grandmother has a bloody nose, and usually have to hide out for three or four weeks after. Just about to miss a bus, jaunt into the head of the driver to find his name so I can yell for him to hold it a minute Tom or George or Willie, and I get smacked in the mind with all the garlic he’s been eating for the past month because his doctor told him it was good for his system, and I start to dry-heave, and I wrench out of the landscape, and not only have I missed the bus, but I’m so sick to my stomach I have to sit down on the filthy curb to get my gorge submerged. Jaunt into a potential employer, to see if he’s trying to lowball me, and I learn he’s part of a massive cover-up of industrial malfeasance that’s caused hundreds of people to die when this or that cheaply-made grommet or tappet or gimbal mounting underperforms and fails, sending the poor souls falling thousands of feet to shrieking destruction. Then just fry to accept the job, even if you haven’t paid your rent in a month. No way.

Absolutely: I listen in on the landscape only when my feet are being fried; when the shadow stalking me turns down alley after alley tracking me relentlessly; when the drywall guy I’ve hired to repair the damage done by my leaky shower presents me with a dopey smile and a bill three hundred and sixty bucks higher than the estimate. Or in a moment of human weakness.

But I’m a wreck for weeks after. For weeks.

Because you can’t, you simply can’t, you absolutely cannot know what people are truly and really like till you jaunt their landscape. If Aquinas had had my ability, he’d have very quickly gone off to be a hermit, only occasionally visiting the mind of a sheep or a hedgehog. In a moment of human weakness.

That’s why in my whole life—and, as best I can remember back, I’ve been doing it since I was five or six years old, maybe even younger—there have only been eleven, maybe twelve people, of all those who know that I can “read minds,” that I’ve permitted myself to get close to. Three of them never used it against me, or tried to exploit me, or tried to kill me when I wasn’t looking. Two of those three were my mother and father, a pair of sweet old black folks who’d adopted me, a late-in-life baby, and were now dead (but probably still worried about me, even on the Other Side), and whom I missed very very much, particularly in moments like this. The other eight, nine were either so turned off by the knowledge that they made sure I never came within a mile of them—one moved to another entire country just to be on the safe side, although her thoughts were a helluva lot more boring and innocent than she thought they were—or they tried to brain me with something heavy when I was distracted—I still have a shoulder separation that kills me for two days before it rains—or they tried to use me to make a buck for them. Not having the common sense to figure it out, that if I was capable of using the ability to make vast sums of money, why the hell was I living hand-to-mouth like some overaged grad student who was afraid to desert the university and go become an adult?

Now they was some dumb- ass muthuhfugguhs.

Of the three who never used it against me, my mom and dad, the last was Allison Roche. Who sat on the stool next to me, in the middle of May, in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of Clanton, Alabama, squeezing ketchup onto her All-American Burger, imposing on the memory of that one damned New Year’s Eve sexual interlude, with Harpo and his sibs; the two of us all alone except for the fry-cook; and she waited for my reply.

“I’d sooner, have a skunk spray my pants leg,” I replied.

She pulled a napkin from the chrome dispenser and swabbed up the red that had overshot the sesame- seed bun and redecorated the Formica countertop. She looked at me from under thick, lustrous eyelashes; a look of impatience and violet eyes that must have been a killer when she unbottled it at some truculent witness for the defense. Allison Roche was a Chief Deputy District Attorney in and for Jefferson County, with her office in Birmingham. Alabama. Where near we sat, in Clanton, having a secret meeting, having All-American Burgers; three years after having had quite a bit of champagne, 1930s black-and-white video rental comedy, and black-and-white sex. One extremely stupid New Year’s Eve.

Friends for eleven years. And once, just once; as a prime example of what happens in a moment of human weakness. Which is not to say that it wasn’t terrific, because it was; absolutely terrific; but we never did it again; and we never brought it up again after the next morning when we opened our eyes and looked at each other the way you look at an exploding can of sardines, and both of us said Oh Jeeezus at the same time. Never brought it up again until this memorable afternoon at the greasy spoon where I’d joined Ally, driving up from Montgomery to meet her halfway, after her peculiar telephone invitation.

Can’t say the fry-cook, Mr. All-American, was particularly happy at the pigmentation arrangement at his counter. But I stayed out of his head and let him think what he wanted. Times change on the outside, but the inner landscape remains polluted.

“All I’m asking you to do is go have a chat with him,” she said. She gave me that look. I have a hard time with that look. It isn’t entirely honest, neither is it entirely disingenuous. It plays on my remembrance of that one night we spent in bed. And is just dishonest enough to play on the part of that night we spent on the floor, on the sofa, on the coffee counter between the dining room and the kitchenette, in the bathtub, and about nineteen minutes crammed among her endless pairs of shoes in a walk-in clothes closet that smelled strongly of cedar and virginity. She gave me that look, and wasted no part of the memory.

“I don’t want to go have a chat with him. Apart from he’s a piece of human shit, and I have better things to do with my time than to go on down to Atmore and take a jaunt through this crazy sonofabitch’s diseased mind, may I remind you that of the hundred and sixty, seventy men who have died in that electric chair, including the original ‘Yellow Mama’ they scrapped in 1990, about a hundred and thirty of them were gentlemen of color, and I do not mean you to picture any color of a shade much lighter than that cuppa coffee you got sittin’ by your left hand right this minute, which is to say that I, being an inordinately well-educated African-American who values the full measure of living negritude in his body, am not crazy enough to want to visit a racist ‘co-rectional center’ like Holman Prison, thank you very much.”

“Are you finished?” she asked, wiping her mouth.

“Yeah. I’m finished. Case closed. Find somebody else.”

She didn’t like that. “There isn’t anybody else.”

“There has to be. Somewhere. Go check the research files at Duke University. Call the Fortean Society. Mensa. Jeopardy. Some 900 number astrology psychic hotline. Ain’t there some semi- senile Senator with a full-time paid assistant who’s been trying to get legislation through one of the statehouses for the last five years to fund this kind of bullshit research? What about the Russians . . . now that the Evil Empire’s fallen, you ought to be able to get some word about their success with Kirlian auras or whatever those assholes were working at. Or you could—”

She screamed at the top of her lungs. “Stop it, Rudy!”

The fry-cook dropped the spatula he’d been using to scrape off the grill.

He picked it up, looking at us, and his face (I didn’t read his mind) said If that white bitch makes one more noise I’m callin’ the cops.

I gave him a look he didn’t want, and he went back to his chores, getting ready for the after-work crowd. But the stretch of his back and angle of his head told me he wasn’t going to let this pass.

I leaned in toward her, got as serious as I could, and just this quietly, just this softly, I said, “Ally, good pal, listen to me. You’ve been one of the few friends I could count on, for a long time now. We have history between us, and you’ve never, not once, made me feel like a freak. So okay, I trust you. I trust you with something about me that causes immeasurable goddam pain. A thing about me that could get me killed. You’ve never betrayed me, and you’ve never tried to use me.

“Till now. This is the first time. And you’ve got to admit that it’s not even as rational as you maybe saying to me that you’ve gambled away every cent you’ve got and you owe the mob a million bucks and would I mind taking a trip to Vegas or Atlantic City and taking a jaunt into the minds of some high- pocket poker players so I could win you enough to keep the goons from shooting you. Even that, as creepy as it would be if you said it to me, even that would be easier to understand than this!”

She looked forlorn. “There isn’t anybody else, Rudy. Please.”

“What the hell is this all about? Come on, tell me. You’re hiding something, or holding something back, or lying about—”

“I’m not lying!” For the second time she was suddenly, totally, extremely pissed at me. Her voice spattered off the white tile walls. The fry-cook spun around at the sound, took a step toward us, and I jaunted into his landscape, smoothed down the rippled Astro-Turf, drained away the storm clouds, and suggested in there that he go take a cigarette break out back. Fortunately, there were no other patrons at the elegant All-American Burger that late in the afternoon, and he went.

“Calm fer chrissakes down, will you?” I said.

She had squeezed the paper napkin into a ball.

She was lying, hiding, holding something back. Didn’t have to be a telepath to figure that out. I waited, looking at her with a slow, careful distrust, and finally she sighed, and I thought, Here it comes.

“Are you reading my mind?” she asked.

“Don’t insult me. We know each other too long.”

She looked chagrined. The violet of her eyes deepened. “Sorry.”

But she didn’t go on. I wasn’t going to be outflanked. I waited.

After a while she said, softly, very softly, “I think I’m in love with him. I know I believe him when he says he’s innocent.”

I never expected that. I couldn’t even reply.

It was unbelievable. Unfuckingbelievable. She was the Chief Deputy D.A. who had prosecuted Henry Lake Spanning for murder. Not just one murder, one random slaying, a heat of the moment Saturday night killing regretted deeply on Sunday morning but punishable by electrocution in the Sovereign State of Alabama nonetheless, but a string of the vilest, most sickening serial slaughters in Alabama history, in the history of the Glorious South, in the history of the United States. Maybe even in the history of the entire wretched human universe that went wading hip- deep in the wasted spilled blood of innocent men, women, and children.

Henry Lake Spanning was a monster, an ambulatory disease, a killing machine without conscience or any discernible resemblance to a thing we might call decently human. Henry Lake Spanning had butchered his way across a half-dozen states; and they had caught up to him in Huntsville, in a garbage dumpster behind a supermarket, doing something so vile and inhuman to what was left of a sixty-five-year-old cleaning woman that not even the tabloids would get more explicit than unspeakable; and somehow he got away from the cops; and somehow he evaded their dragnet; and somehow he found out where the police lieutenant in charge of the manhunt lived; and somehow he slipped into that neighborhood when the lieutenant was out creating roadblocks—and he gutted the man’s wife and two kids. Also the family cat. And then he killed a couple of more times in Birmingham and Decatur, and by then had gone so completely out of his mind that they got him again, and the second time they hung onto him, and they brought him to trial. And Ally had prosecuted this bottom-feeding monstrosity.

And oh, what a circus it had been. Though he’d been caught, the second time, and this time for keeps, in Jefferson County, scene of three of his most sickening jobs, he’d murdered (with such a disgustingly similar m.o. that it was obvious he was the perp) in twenty- two of the sixty-seven counties; and every last one of them wanted him to stand trial in that venue. Then there were the other five states in which he had butchered, to a total body-count of fifty-six. Each of them wanted him extradited.

So, here’s how smart and quick and smooth an attorney Ally is: she somehow managed to coze up to the Attorney General, and somehow managed to unleash those violet eyes on him, and somehow managed to get and keep his ear long enough to con him into setting a legal precedent. Attorney General of the state of Alabama allowed Allison Roche to consolidate, to secure a multiple bill of indictment that forced Spanning to stand trial on all twenty- nine Alabama murder counts at once. She meticulously documented to the state’s highest courts that Henry Lake Spanning presented such a clear and present danger to society that the prosecution was willing to take a chance (big chance!) of trying in a winner-take- all consolidation of venues. Then she managed to smooth the feathers of all those other vote-hungry prosecutors in those twenty-one other counties, and she put on a case that dazzled everyone, including Spanning’s defense attorney, who had screamed about the legality of the multiple bill from the moment she’d suggested it.

And she won a fast jury verdict on all twentymine counts. Then she got really fancy in the penalty phase after the jury verdict, and proved up the other twenty-seven murders with their flagrantly identical trademarks, from those other five states, and there was nothing left but to sentence Spanning—essentially for all fifty-six—to the replacement for the “Yellow Mama.”

Even as pols and power brokers throughout the state were murmuring Ally’s name for higher office, Spanning was slated to sit in that new electric chair in Holman Prison, built by the Fred A. Leuchter Associates of Boston, Massachusetts, that delivered 2,640 volts of pure sparklin’ death in 1/240th of a second, six times faster than the 1/40th of a second that it takes for the brain to sense it, which is—if you ask me—much too humane an exit line, more than three times the 700 volt jolt lethal dose that destroys a brain, for a pus-bag like Henry Lake Spanning.

But if we were lucky—and the scheduled day of departure was very nearly upon us—if we were lucky, if there was a God and Justice and Natural Order and all that good stuff, then Henry Lake Spanning, this foulness, this corruption, this thing that lived only to ruin . . . would end up as a pile of fucking ashes somebody might use to sprinkle over a flower garden, thereby providing this ghoul with his single opportunity to be of some use to the human race.

That was the guy that my pal Allison Roche wanted me to go and “chat” with, down to Holman Prison, in Atmore, Alabama. There, sitting on Death Row, waiting to get his demented head tonsured, his pants legs slit, his tongue fried black as the inside of a sheep’s belly . . . down there at Holman my pal Allison wanted me to go “chat” with one of the most awful creatures made for killing this side of a hammerhead shark, which creature had an infinitely greater measure of human decency than Henry Lake Spanning had ever demonstrated. Go chit-chat, and enter his landscape, and read his mind, Mr. Telepath, and use the marvelous mythic power of extra-sensory perception: this nifty swell ability that has made me a bum all my life, well, not exactly a bum: I do have a decent apartment, and I do earn a decent, if sporadic, living; and I try to follow Nelson Algren’s warning never to get involved with a woman whose troubles are bigger than my own; and sometimes I even have a car of my own, even though at the moment such was not the case, the Camaro having been repo’d, and not by Harry Dean Stanton or Emilio Estevez, lemme tell you; but a bum in the sense of—how does Ally put it?—oh yeah—I don’t “realize my full and forceful potential”—a bum in the sense that I can’t hold a job, and I get rotten breaks, and all of this despite a Rhodes scholarly education so far above what a poor nigrah-lad such as myself could expect that even Rhodes hisownself would’ve been chest- out proud as hell of me. A bum, mostly, despite an outstanding Rhodes scholar education and a pair of kind, smart, loving parents—even for foster-parents—shit, especially for being foster- parents—who died knowing the certain sadness that their only child would spend his life as a wandering freak unable to make a comfortable living or consummate a normal marriage or raise children without the fear of passing on this special personal horror . . . this astonishing ability fabled in song and story that I possess . . . that no one else seems to possess, though I know there must have been others, somewhere, sometime, somehow! Go, Mr. Wonder of Wonders, shining black Cagliostro of the modern world, go with this super nifty swell ability that gullible idiots and flying saucer assholes have been trying to prove exists for at least fifty years, that no one has been able to isolate the way I, me, the only one has been isolated, let me tell you about isolation, my brothers; and here I was, here was I, Rudy Pairis . . . just a guy, making a buck every now and then with nifty swell impossible ESP, resident of thirteen states and twice that many cities so far in his mere thirty years of landscape-jaunting life, here was I, Rudy Pairis, Mr. I-Can-Read-Your- Mind, being asked to go and walk through the mind of a killer who scared half the people in the world. Being asked by the only living person, probably, to whom I could not say no. And, oh, take me at my word here: I wanted to say no. Was, in fact, saying no at every breath. What’s that? Will I do it? Sure, yeah sure, I’ll go on down to Holman and jaunt through this sick bastard’s mind landscape. Sure I will. You got two chances: slim, and none.

All of this was going on in the space of one greasy double cheeseburger and two cups of coffee.

The worst part of it was that Ally had somehow gotten involved with him. Ally! Not some bimbo bitch . . . but Ally.

I couldn’t believe it.

Not that it was unusual for women to become mixed up with guys in the joint, to fall under their “magic spell,” and to start corresponding with them, visiting them, taking them candy and cigarettes, having conjugal visits, playing mule for them and smuggling in dope where the tampon never shine, writing them letters that got steadily more exotic, steadily more intimate, steamier and increasingly dependent emotionally. It wasn’t that big a deal: there exist entire psychiatric treatises on the phenomenon; right alongside the papers about women who go stud-crazy for cops. No big deal indeed: hundreds of women every year find themselves writing to these guys, visiting these guys, building dream castles with these guys, fucking these guys, pretending that even the worst of these guys, rapists and woman-beaters and child molesters, repeat pedophiles of the lowest pustule sort, and murderers and stick-up punks who crush old ladies’ skulls for food stamps, and terrorists and bunco barons . . . that one sunny might-be, gonna-happen pink cloud day these demented creeps will emerge from behind the walls, get back in the wind, become upstanding nine-to-five Brooks Bros. Galahads. Every year hundreds of women marry these guys, finding themselves in a hot second snookered by the wily, duplicitous, motherfuckin’ lying greaseball addictive behavior of guys who had spent their sporadic years, their intermittent freedom on the outside, doing just that: roping people in, ripping people off, bleeding people dry, conning them into being tools, taking them for their every last cent, their happy home, their sanity, their ability to trust or love ever again.

But this wasn’t some poor illiterate naive woman-child. This was Ally. She had damned near pulled off a legal impossibility, come that close to Bizarro Jurisprudence by putting the Attorneys General of five other states in a maybe frame of mind where she’d have been able to consolidate a multiple bill of indictment across state lines! Never been done; and now, probably, never ever would be. But she could have possibly pulled off such a thing. Unless you’re a stone court-bird, you can’t know what a mountaintop that is!

So, now, here’s Ally, saying this shit to me. Ally, my best pal, stood up for me a hundred times; not some dip, but the steely-eyed Sheriff of Suicide Gulch, the over-forty, past the age of innocence, no-nonsense woman who had seen it all and come away tough but not cynical, hard but not mean.

“I think I’m in love with him.” She had said.

“I know I believe him when he says he’s innocent.” She had said.

I looked at her. No time had passed. It was still the moment the universe decided to lie down and die. And I said, “So if you’re certain this paragon of the virtues isn’t responsible for fifty- six murders—that we know about—and who the hell knows how many more we don’t know about, since he’s apparently been at it since he was twelve years old—remember the couple of nights we sat up and you told me all this shit about him, and you said it with your skin crawling, remember?—then if you’re so damned positive the guy you spent eleven weeks in court sending to the chair is innocent of butchering half the population of the planet—then why do you need me to go to Holman, drive all the way to Atmore, just to take a jaunt in this sweet peach of a guy?

“Doesn’t your ‘woman’s intuition’ tell you he’s squeaky clean? Don’t ‘true love’ walk yo’ sweet young ass down the primrose path with sufficient surefootedness?”

“Don’t be a smartass!” she said.

“Say again?” I replied, with disfuckingbelief.

“I said: don’t be such a high-verbal goddamned smart aleck!”

Now I was steamed. “No, I shouldn’t be a smartass: I should be your pony, your show dog, your little trick bag mind- reader freak! Take a drive over to Holman, Pairis; go right on into Rednecks from Hell; sit your ass down on Death Row with the rest of the niggers and have a chat with the one white boy who’s been in a cell up there for the past three years or so; sit down nicely with the king of the fucking vampires, and slide inside his garbage dump of a brain—and what a joy that’s gonna be, I can’t believe you’d ask me to do this—and read whatever piece of boiled shit in there he calls a brain, and see if he’s jerking you around. That’s what I ought to do, am I correct? Instead of being a smartass. Have I got it right? Do I properly pierce your meaning, pal?”

She stood up. She didn’t even say Screw you, Pairis!

She just slapped me as hard as she could.

She hit me a good one straight across the mouth.

L felt my upper teeth bite my lower lip.

I tasted the blood. My head rang like a church bell. I thought I’d fall off the goddam stool.

When I could focus, she was just standing there, looking ashamed of herself, and disappointed, and mad as hell, and worried that she’d brained me. All of that, all at the same time. Plus, she looked as if I’d broken her choo-choo train.

“Okay,” I said wearily, and ended the word with a sigh that reached all the way back into my hip pocket. “Okay, calm down. I’ll see him. I’ll do it. Take it easy.”

She didn’t sit down. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, of course not,” I said, unable to form the smile I was trying to put on my face. “How could you possibly hurt someone by knocking his brains into his lap?”

She stood over me as I clung precariously to the counter, turned halfway around on the stool by the blow. Stood over me, the balled-up paper napkin in her fist, a look on her face that said she was nobody’s fool, that we’d known each other a long time, that she hadn’t asked this kind of favor before, that if we were buddies and I loved her, that I would see she was in deep pain, that she was conflicted, that she needed to know, really needed to know without a doubt, and in the name of God—in which she believed, though I didn’t, but either way what the hell—that I do this thing for her, that I just do it and not give her any more crap about it.

So I shrugged, and spread my hands like a man with no place to go, and I said, “How’d you get into this?”

She told me the first fifteen minutes of her tragic, heartwarming, never-to-be- ridiculed story still standing. After fifteen minutes I said, “Fer chrissakes, Ally, at least sit down! You look like a damned fool standing there with a greasy napkin in your mitt.”

A couple of teen-agers had come in. The four-star chef had finished his cigarette out back and was reassuringly in place, walking the duckboards and dishing up All-American arterial cloggage. She picked up her elegant attaché case and without a word, with only a nod that said let’s get as far from them as we can, she and I moved to a double against the window to resume our discussion of the varieties of social suicide available to an unwary and foolhardy gentleman of the colored persuasion if he allowed himself to be swayed by a cagey and cogent, clever and concupiscent female of another color entirely.

See, what it is, is this:

Look at that attaché case. You want to know what kind of an Ally this Allison Roche is? Pay heed, now.

In New York, when some wannabe junior ad exec has smooched enough butt to get tossed a bone account, and he wants to walk his colors, has a need to signify, has got to demonstrate to everyone that he’s got the juice, first thing he does, he hies his ass downtown to Barney’s, West 17th and Seventh, buys hisself a Burberry, loops the belt casually behind, leaving the coat open to suh-wing, and he circumnavigates the office.

In Dallas, when the wife of the CEO has those six or eight upper-management husbands and wives over for an intime,- faux-casual dinner, sans place- cards, sans entred fork, sans ceremonie, and we’re talking the kind of woman who flies Virgin Air instead of the Concorde, she’s so in charge she don’t got to use the Orrefors, she can put out the Kosta Boda and say give a fuck.

What it is, kind of person so in charge, so easy with they own self, they don’t have to laugh at your poor dumb struttin’ Armani suit, or your bedroom done in Laura Ashley, or that you got a gig writing articles for TV Guide. You see what I’m sayin’ here? The sort of person Ally Roche is, you take a look at that attaché case, and it’ll tell you everything you need to know about how strong she is, because it’s an Atlas. Not a Hartmann. Understand: she could afford a Hartmann, that gorgeous imported Canadian belting leather, top of the line, somewhere around nine hundred and fifty bucks maybe, equivalent of Orrefors, a Burberry, breast of guinea hen and Mouton Rothschild 1492 or 1066 or whatever year is the most expensive, drive a Rolls instead of a Bentley and the only difference is the grille . . . but she doesn’t need to signify, doesn’t need to suh-wing, so she gets herself this Atlas. Not some dumb chickenshit Louis Vuitton or Mark Cross all the divorcee real estate ladies carry, but an Atlas. Irish hand leather. Custom tanned cowhide. Hand tanned in Ireland by out of work IRA bombers. Very classy. Just a state understated. See that attaché case? That tell you why I said I’d do it?

She picked it up from where she’d stashed it, right up against the counter wall by her feet, and we went to the double over by the window, away from the chef and the teen-agers, and she stared at me till she was sure I was in a right frame of mind, and she picked up where she’d left off.

The next twenty-three minutes by the big greasy clock on the wall she related from a sitting position. Actually, a series of sitting positions. She kept shifting in her chair like someone who didn’t appreciate the view of the world from that window, someone hoping for a sweeter horizon. The story started with a gang-rape at the age of thirteen, and moved right along: two broken foster-home families, a little casual fondling by surrogate poppas, intense studying for perfect school grades as a substitute for happiness, working her way through John Jay College of Law, a truncated attempt at wedded bliss in her late twenties, and the long miserable road of legal success that had brought her to Alabama. There could have been worse places.

I’d known Ally for a long time, and we’d spent totals of weeks and months in each other’s company. Not to mention the New Year’s Eve of the Marx Brothers. But I hadn’t heard much of this. Not much at all.

Funny how that goes. Eleven years. You’d think I’d’ve guessed or suspected or something. What the hell makes us think we’re friends with anybody, when we don’t know the first thing about them, not really?

What are we, walking around in a dream? That is to say: what the fuck are we thinking!?!

And there might never have been a reason to hear any of it, all this Ally that was the real Ally, but now she was asking me to go somewhere I didn’t want to go, to do something that scared the shit out of me; and she wanted me to be as fully informed as possible.

It dawned on me that those same eleven years between us hadn’t really given her a full, laser-clean insight into the why and wherefore of Rudy Pairis, either. I hated myself for it. The concealing, the holding-back, the giving up only fragments, the evil misuse of charm when honesty would have hurt. I was facile, and a very quick study; and I had buried all the equivalents to Ally’s pains and travails. I could’ve matched her, in spades; or blacks, or just plain nigras. But I remained frightened of losing her friendship. I’ve never been able to believe in the myth of unqualified friendship. Too much like standing hip- high in a fast-running, freezing river. Standing on slippery stones.

Her story came forward to the point at which she had prosecuted Spanning; had amassed and winnowed and categorized the evidence so thoroughly, so deliberately, so flawlessly; had orchestrated the case so brilliantly; that the jury had come in with guilty on all twenty- nine, soon—in the penalty phase—fifty- six. Murder in the first. Premeditated murder in the first. Premeditated murder with special ugly circumstances in the first. On each and every of the twenty-nine. Less than an hour it took them. There wasn’t even time for a lunch break. Fifty-one minutes it took them to come back with the verdict guilty on all charges. Less than a minute per killing. Ally had done that.

His attorney had argued that no direct link had been established between the fifty-sixth killing (actually, only his 29th in Alabama) and Henry Lake Spanning. No, they had not caught him down on his knees eviscerating the shredded body of his final victim—ten- year-old Gunilla Ascher, a parochial school girl who had missed her bus and been picked up by Spanning just about a mile from her home in Decatur—no, not down on his knees with the can opener still in his sticky red hands, but the m.o. was the same, and he was there in Decatur, on the run from what he had done in Huntsville, what they had caught him doing in Huntsville, in that dumpster, to that old woman. So they couldn’t place him with his smooth, slim hands inside dead Gunilla Ascher’s still-steaming body. So what? They could not have been surer he was the serial killer, the monster, the ravaging nightmare whose methods were so vile that newspapers hadn’t even tried to cobble up some smart- aleck name for him like The Stangler or The Backyard Butcher. The jury had come back in fifty-one minutes, looking sick, looking as if they’d try and try to get everything they’d seen and heard out of their minds, but knew they never would, and wishing to God they could’ve managed to get out of their civic duty on this one.

They came shuffling back in and told the numbed court: hey, put this slimy excuse for a maggot in the chair and cook his ass till he’s fit only to be served for breakfast on cinnamon toast. This was the guy my friend Ally told me she had fallen in love with. The guy she now believed to be innocent.

This was seriously crazy stuff.

“So how did you get, er, uh, how did you . . .?”

“How did I fall in love with him?”

“Yeah. That.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, and pursed her lips as if she had lost a flock of wayward words and didn’t know where to find them. I’d always known she was a private person, kept the really important history to herself—hell, until now I’d never known about the rape, the ice mountain between her mother and father, the specifics of the seven-month marriage—I’d known there’d been a husband briefly: but not what had happened: and I’d known about the foster homes; but again, not how lousy it had been for her—even so, getting this slice of steaming craziness out of her was like using your teeth to pry the spikes out of Jesus’s wrists.

Finally, she said, “I took over the case when Charlie Whilborg had his stroke . . .”

“I remember.”

“He was the best litigator in the office, and if he hadn’t gone down two days before they caught . . .” she paused, had trouble with the name, went on,”. . . before they caught Spanning in Decatur, and if Morgan County hadn’t been so worried about a case this size, and bound Spanning over to us in Birmingham . . . all of it so fast nobody really had a chance to talk to him . . . I was the first one even got near him, everyone was so damned scared of him, of what they thought he was . . .”

“Hallucinating, were they?” I said, being a smartass.

“Shut up.

“The office did most of the donkey- work after that first interview I had with him. It was a big break for me in the office; and I got obsessed by it. So after the first interview, I never spent much actual time with Spanky, never got too close, to see what kind of man he really . . .”

I said: “Spanky? Who the hell’s ‘Spanky’ ?”

She blushed. It started from the sides of her nostrils and went out both ways toward her ears, then climbed to the hairline. I’d seen that happen only a couple of times in eleven years, and one of those times was when she’d farted at the opera. Lucia di Lammermoor.

I said it again: “Spanky? You’re putting me on, right? You call him Spanky?” The blush deepened. “Like the fat kid in The Little Rascals . . . c’mon, I don’t fuckin’ believe this!”

She just glared at me.

I felt the laughter coming.

My face started twitching.

She stood up again. “Forget it. Just forget it, okay?” She took two steps away from the table, toward the street exit. I grabbed her hand and pulled her back, trying not to fall apart with laughter, and I said, “Okay okay okay . . . I’m sorry . . . I’m really and truly, honest to goodness, may I be struck by a falling space lab no kidding 100% absolutely sorry . . . but you gotta admit . . . catching me unawares like that . . . I mean, come on, Ally . . . Spanky!?! You call this guy who murdered at least fifty-six people Spanky? Why not Mickey, or Froggy, or Alfalfa . . .? I can understand not calling him Buckwheat, you can save that one for me, but Spanky???”

And in a moment her face started to twitch; and in another moment she was starting to smile, fighting it every micron of the way; and in another moment she was laughing and swatting at me with her free hand; and then she pulled her hand loose and stood there falling apart with laughter; and in about a minute she was sitting down again. She threw the balled-up napkin at me.

“It’s from when he was a kid,” she said. “He was a fat kid, and they made fun of him. You know the way kids are . . . they corrupted Spanning into ‘Spanky’ because The Little Rascals were on television and . . . oh, shut up, Rudy!”

I finally quieted down, and made conciliatory gestures.

She watched me with an exasperated wariness till she was sure I wasn’t going to run any more dumb gags on her, and then she resumed. “After Judge Fay sentenced him, I handled Spa . . . Henry’s case from our office, all the way up to the appeals stage. I was the who one did the pleading against clemency when Henry’s lawyers took their appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta.

“When he was denied a stay by the appellate, three-to-nothing, I helped prepare the brief when Henry’s counsel went to the Alabama Supreme Court; then when the Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal, I thought it was all over. I knew they’d run out of moves for him, except maybe the Governor; but that wasn’t ever going to happen. So I thought: that’s that.

“When the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear it three weeks ago, I got a letter from him. He’d been set for execution next Saturday, and I couldn’t figure out why he wanted to see me.”

I asked, “The letter . . . it got to you how?”

“One of his attorneys.”

“I thought they’d given up on him.”

“So did I. The evidence was so overwhelming; half a dozen counselors found ways to get themselves excused; it wasn’t the kind of case that would bring any litigator good publicity. Just the number of eyewitnesses in the parking lot of that Winn-Dixie in Huntsville . . . must have been fifty of them, Rudy. And they all saw the same thing, and they all identified Henry in lineup after lineup, twenty, thirty, could have been fifty of them if we’d needed that long a parade. And all the rest of it . . .”

I held up a hand. I know, the flat hand against the air said. She had told me all of this. Every grisly detail, till I wanted to puke. It was as if I’d done it all myself, she was so vivid in her telling. Made my jaunting nausea pleasurable by comparison. Made me so sick I couldn’t even think about it. Not even in a moment of human weakness.

“So the letter comes to you from the attorney . . .”

“I think you know this lawyer. Larry Borlan; used to be with the ACLU; before that he was senior counsel for the Alabama Legislature down to Montgomery; stood up, what was it, twice, three times, before the Supreme Court? Excellent guy. And not easily fooled.”

“And what’s he think about all this?”

“He thinks Henry’s absolutely innocent.”

“Of all of it?”

“Of everything.”

“But there were fifty disinterested random eyewitnesses at one of those slaughters. Fifty, you just said it. Fifty, you could’ve had a parade. All of them nailed him cold, without a doubt. Same kind of kill as all the other fifty- five, including that schoolkid in Decatur when they finally got him. And Larry Borlan thinks he’s not the guy, right?” She nodded. Made one of those sort of comic pursing of the lips, shrugged, and nodded. “Not the guy.”

“So the killer’s still out there?”

“That’s what Borlan thinks.”

“And what do you think?”

“I agree with him.”

“Oh, jeezus, Ally, my aching boots and saddle! You got to be workin’ some kind of off-time! The killer is still out here in the mix, but there hasn’t been a killing like Spanning’s for the three years that he’s been in the joint. Now what do that say to you?”

“It says whoever the guy is, the one who killed all those people, he’s days smarter than all the rest of us, and he set up the perfect freefloater to take the fall for him, and he’s either long far gone in some other state, working his way, or he’s sitting quietly right here in Alabama, waiting and watching. And smiling.” Her face seemed to sag with misery. She started to tear up. and said, “In four days he can stop smiling.” Saturday night.

“Okay, take it easy. Go on, tell me the rest of it. Borlan comes to you, and he begs you to read Spanning’s letter and . . .?”

“He didn’t beg. He just gave me the letter, told me he had no idea what Henry had written, but he said he’d known me a long time, that he thought I was _a decent, fair-minded person, and he’d appreciate it in the name of our friendship if I’d read it.”

“So you read it.”

“I read it.”

“Friendship. Sounds like you an’ him was good friends. Like maybe you and I were good friends?”

She looked at me with astonishment.

I think I looked at me with astonishment.

“Where the hell did that come from?” I said.

“Yeah, really,” she said, right back at me, “where the hell did that come from?” My ears were hot, and I almost started to say something about how if it was okay for her to use our Marx Brothers indiscretion for a lever, why wasn’t it okay for me to get cranky about it? But I kept my mouth shut; and for once knew enough to move along. “Must’ve been some letter,” I said.

There was a long moment of silence during which she weighed the degree of shit she’d put me through for my stupid remark, after all this was settled; and having struck a balance in her head, she told me about the letter.

It was perfect. It was the only sort of come-on that could lure the avenger who’d put you in the chair to pay attention. The letter had said that fifty-six was not the magic number of death. That there were many, many more unsolved cases, in many, many different states: lost children, runaways, unexplained disappearances, old people, college students hitchhiking to Sarasota for Spring Break, shopkeepers who’d carried their day’s take to the night deposit drawer and never gone home for dinner, hookers left in pieces in Hefty bags all over town, and death death death unnumbered and unnamed. Fifty- six, the letter had said, was just the start. And if she, her, no one else, Allison Roche, my pal Ally, would come on down to Holman, and talk to him, Henry Lake Spanning would help her close all those open files. National rep. Avenger of the unsolved. Big time mysteries revealed. “So you read the letter, and you went . . .”

“Not at first. Not immediately. I was sure he was guilty, and I was pretty certain at that moment, three years and more, dealing with the case, I was pretty sure if he said he could fill in all the blank spaces, that he could do it. But I just didn’t like the idea. In court, I was always twitchy when I got near him at the defense table. His eyes, he never took them off me. They’re blue, Rudy, did I tell you that . . .?”

“Maybe. I don’t remember. Go on.”

“Bluest blue you’ve ever seen . . . well, to tell the truth, he just plain scared me. I wanted to win that case so badly, Rudy, you can never know . . . not just for me or the career or for the idea of justice or to avenge all those people he’d killed, but just the thought of him out there on the street, with those blue eyes, so blue, never stopped looking at me from the moment the trial began . . . the thought of him on the loose drove me to whip that case like a howling dog. I had to put him away!”

“But you overcame your fear.”

She didn’t like the edge of ridicule on the blade of that remark. “That’s right.

I finally ‘overcame my fear’ and I agreed to go see him.”

“And you saw him.”

“Yes.”

“And he didn’t know shit about no other killings, right?”

“Yes.”

“But he talked a good talk. And his eyes was blue, so blue.”

“Yes, you asshole.”

I chuckled. Everybody is somebody’s fool.

“Now let me ask you this—very carefully—so you don’t hit me again: the moment you discovered he’d been shuckin’ you, lyin’, that he didn’t have this long, unsolved crime roster to tick off, why didn’t you get up, load your attaché case, and hit the bricks?”

Her answer was simple. “He begged me to stay a while.”

“That’s it? He begged you?”

“Rudy, he has no one. He’s never had anyone.” She looked at me as if I were made of stone, some basalt thing, an onyx statue, a figure carved out of melanite, soot and ashes fused into a monolith. She feared she could not, in no way, no matter how piteously or bravely she phrased it, penetrate my rocky surface.

Then she said a thing that I never wanted to hear.

“Rudy . . .”

Then she said a thing I could never have imagined she’d say. Never in a million years.

“Rudy.”

Then she said the most awful thing she could say to me, even more awful than that she was in love with a serial killer.

“Rudy . . . go inside . . . read my mind . . . I need you to know, I need you to understand . . . Rudy . . .”

The look on her face killed my heart.

I tried to say no, oh god no, not that, please, no, not that, don’t ask me to do that, please please I don’t want to go inside, we mean so much to each other, I don’t want to know your landscape. Don’t make me feel filthy, I’m no peeping-tom, I’ve never spied on you, never stolen a look when you were coming out of the shower, or undressing, or when you were being sexy . . . I never invaded your privacy,-I wouldn’t do a thing like that . . . we’re friends, I don’t need to know it all, I don’t want to go in there. I can go inside anyone, and it’s always awful . . . please don’t make me see things in there I might not like, you’re my friend, please don’t steal that from me . . .”

“Rudy, please. Do it.”

Oh jeezusjeezusjeezus, again, she said it again!

We sat there. And we sat there. And we sat there longer. I said, hoarsely, in fear, “Can’t you just . . . just tell me?”

Her eyes looked at stone. A man of stone. And she tempted me to do what I could do casually, tempted me the way Faust was tempted by Mefisto, Mephistopheles, Mefistofele, Mephostopilis. Black rock Dr. Faustus, possessor of magical mind-reading powers, tempted by thick, lustrous eyelashes and violet eyes and a break in the voice and an imploring movement of hand to face and a tilt of the head that was pitiable and the begging word please and all the guilt that lay between us that was mine alone. The seven chief demons. Of whom Mefisto was the one “not loving the light.”

I knew it was the end of our friendship. But she left me nowhere to run. Mefisto in onyx.

So I jaunted into her landscape.

I stayed in there less than ten seconds. I didn’t want to know everything I could know; and I definitely wanted to know nothing about how she really thought of me. I couldn’t have borne seeing a caricature of a bug-eyed, shuffling, thick-lipped darkie in there. Mandingo man. Steppin Porchmonkey Rudy Pair . . .

Oh god, what was I thinking!

Nothing in there like that. Nothing! Ally wouldn’t have anything like that in there. I was going nuts, going absolutely fucking crazy, in there, back out in less than ten seconds. I want to block it, kill it, void it, waste it, empty it. reject it, squeeze it, darken it, obscure it. wipe it, do away with it like it never happened. Like the moment you walk in on your momma and poppa and catch them fucking, and you want never to have known that.

But at least I understood.

In there, in Allison Roche’s landscape, I saw how her hear, had responded to this man she called Spanky, not Henry Lake Spanning. She did not call him, in there, by the name of a monster; she called him a honey’s name. I didn’t know if he was innocent or not, but she knew he was innocent. At first she had responded to just talking with him, about being brought up in an orphanage, and she was able to relate to his stories of being used and treated like chattel, and how they had stripped him of his dignity, and made him afraid all the time. She knew what that was like. And how he’d always been on his own. The running-away. The being captured like a wild thing, and put in this home or that lockup or the orphanage “for his own good.” Washing stone steps with a tin bucket full of gray water, with a horsehair brush and a bar of lye soap, till the tender folds of skin between the fingers were furiously red and hurt so much you couldn’t make a fist.

She tried to tell me how her heart had responded, with a language that has never been invented to do the job. I saw as much as I needed, there in that secret landscape, to know that Spanning had led a miserable life, but that somehow he’d managed to become a decent human being. And it showed through enough when she was face to face with him, talking to him without the witness box between them, without the adversarial thing, without the tension of the courtroom and the gallery and those parasite creeps from the tabloids sneaking around taking pictures of him, that she identified with his pain. Hers had been not the same, but similar; of a kind, if not of identical intensity.

She came to know him a little.

And came back to see him again. Human compassion. In a moment of human weakness.

Until, finally, she began examining everything she had worked up as evidence, trying to see it from his point of view, using his explanations of circumstantiality. And there were inconsistencies. Now she saw them. Now she did not turn her prosecuting attorney’s mind from them, recasting them in a way that would railroad Spanning; now she gave him just the barest possibility of truth. And the case did not seem as incontestable.

By that time, she had to admit to herself, she had fallen in love with him. The gentle quality could not be faked; she’d known fraudulent kindness in her time.

I left her mind gratefully. But at least I understood.

“Now?” she asked.

Yes, now. Now I understood. And the fractured glass in her voice told me. Her face told me. The way she parted her lips in expectation, waiting for me to reveal what my magic journey had conveyed by way of truth. Her palm against her cheek. All that told me. And I said, “Yes.”

Then, silence, between us.

After a while she said, “I didn’t feel anything.”

I shrugged. “Nothing to feel. I was in for a few seconds, that’s all.”

“You didn’t see everything?”

“No.”

“Because you didn’t want to?”

“Because . . .”

She smiled. “I understand, Rudy.” Oh, do you? Do you really? That’s just fine. And I heard me say, “You made it with him yet?”

I could have torn off her arm; it would’ve hurt less.

“That’s the second time today you’ve asked me that kind of question. I didn’t like it much the first time, and I like it less this time.”

“You’re the one wanted me to go into your head. I didn’t buy no ticket for the trip.”

“Well, you were in there. Didn’t you look around enough to find out?”

“I didn’t look for that.”

“What a chickenshit, wheedling, lousy and cowardly . . .”

“I haven’t heard an answer, Counselor. Kindly restrict your answers to a simple yes or no.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! He’s on Death Row!”

“There are ways.”

“How would you know?”

“I had a friend. Up at Pelican Bay, north of San Francisco.”

“That’s San Quentin.”

“That’s what it is, all right.”

“You never mentioned ‘a friend’ at San Quentin.”

“I never mentioned a lotta shit. That don’t mean I don’t know it.”

We sat silently. We’re fighting, I thought. Not make-believe dissin’ some movie we’d seen and disagreed about, this was nasty. Bone nasty and memorable. No one ever forgets this kind of fight. I waited. She didn’t say anything more, and I got no straight answer, but I was pretty sure Henry Lake Spanning had gone all the way with her. I felt a twinge of emotion I didn’t even want to look at, much less analyze, dissect, and name. Let it be,

I thought. Eleven years. Once, just once. Let it just lie there and get old and withered and die a proper death like all ugly thoughts.

“Okay. So I go on down to Atmore,” I said. “I suppose you mean in the very near future, since he’s supposed to bake in four days. Sometime very soon: like today.”

She nodded.

I said, “And how do I get in? Law student? Reporter? Tag along as Larry Borlan’s new law clerk? Or do I go in with you? What am I, friend of the family, representative of the Alabama State Department of Corrections; maybe you could set me up as an inmate’s rep from ‘Project Hope.’ ”

“I can do better than that,” she said. The smile. “Much.”

“Yeah, I’ll just bet you can. Why does that worry me?”

Still with the smile, she hoisted the Atlas onto her lap. She unlocked it, took out a small manila envelope, unsealed but clasped, and slid it across the table to me. I pried open the clasp and shook out the contents.

Clever. Very clever. And already made up, with my photo where necessary, admission dates stamped for tomorrow morning, Thursday, absolutely authentic and foolproof.

“Let me guess,” I said, “Thursday mornings, the inmates of Death Row have access to their attorneys?”

“On Death Row, family visitation Monday and Friday. Henry has no family. Attorney visitations Wednesdays and Thursdays, but I couldn’t count on today. It took me a couple of days to get through to you . . .”

“I’ve been busy.”

“. . . but inmates consult with their counsel on Wednesday and Thursday mornings.”

I tapped the papers and plastic cards. “This is very sharp. I notice my name and my handsome visage already here, already sealed in plastic. How long have you had these ready?”

“Couple of days.”

“What if I’d continued to say no?”

She didn’t answer. She just got that look again.

“One last thing,” I said. And I leaned in very close, so she would make no mistake that I was dead serious. “Time grows short. Today’s Wednesday. Tomorrow’s Thursday. They throw those computer-controlled twin switches Saturday night midnight. What if I jaunt into him and find out you’re right, that he’s absolutely innocent? What then? They going to listen to me? Fiercely high-verbal black boy with the magic mind-read power?

“I don’t think so. Then what happens, Ally?”

“Leave that to me.” Her face was hard. “As you said: there are ways. There are roads and routes and even lightning bolts, if you know where to shop. The power of the judiciary. An election year coming up. Favors to be called in.”

I said, “And secrets to be wafted under sensitive noses?”

“You just come back and tell me Spanky’s telling the truth,” And she smiled as I started to laugh, “and I’ll worry about the world one minute after midnight Sunday morning.”

I got up and slid the papers back into the envelope, and put the envelope under my arm. I looked down at her and I smiled as gently as I could, and I said, “Assure me that you haven’t stacked the deck by telling Spanning I can read minds.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Tell me.”

“I haven’t told him you can read minds.”

“You’re lying.”

“Did you . . .?”

“Didn’t have to. I can see it in your face, Ally.”

“Would it matter if he knew?”

“Not a bit. I can read the sonofabitch cold or hot, with or without. Three seconds inside and I’ll know if he did it all, if he did part of it, if he did none of it.”

“I think I love him, Rudy.”

“You told me that.”

“But I wouldn’t set you up. I need to know . . . that’s why I’m asking you to do it.”

I didn’t answer. I just smiled at her. She’d told him. He’d know I was coming. But that was terrific. If she hadn’t alerted him, I’d have asked her to call and let him know. The more aware he’d be, the easier to scorch his landscape.

I’m a fast study, king of the quick learners: vulgate Latin in a week; standard apothecary’s pharmacopoeia in three days; Fender bass on a weekend; Atlanta Falcons’ play book in an hour; and, in a moment of human weakness, what it feels like to have a very crampy, heavy-flow menstrual period, two minutes flat.

So fast, in fact, that the more somebody tries to hide the boiling pits of guilt and the crucified bodies of shame, the faster I adapt to their landscape. Like a man taking a polygraph test gets nervous, starts to sweat, ups the galvanic skin response, tries to duck and dodge, gets himself hinky and more hinky and hinkyer till his upper lip could water a truck garden, the more he tries to hide from me . . . the more he reveals . . . the deeper inside I can go.

There is an African saying: Death comes without the thumping of drums.

I have no idea why that one came back to me just then.

Last thing you expect from a prison administration is a fine sense of humor. But they got one at the Holman facility.

They had the bloody monster dressed like a virgin.

White duck pants, white short sleeve shirt buttoned up to the neck, white socks. Pair of brown ankle-high brogans with crepe soles, probably neoprene, but they didn’t clash with the pale, virginal apparition that came through the security door with a large, black brother in Alabama Prison Authority uniform holding onto his right elbow.

Didn’t clash, those work shoes, and didn’t make much of a tap on the white tile floor. It was as if he floated. Oh yes, I said to myself, oh yes indeed: I could see how this messianic figure could wow even as tough a cookie as Ally. Oh my, yes.

Fortunately, it was raining outside.

Otherwise, sunlight streaming through the glass, he’d no doubt have a halo. I’d have lost it. Right there, a laughing jag would not have ceased. Fortunately, it was raining like a sonofabitch.

Which hadn’t made the drive down from Clanton a possible entry on any deathbed list of Greatest Terrific Moments in My Life. Sheets of aluminum water, thick as misery, like a neverending shower curtain that I could drive through for an eternity and never really penetrate. I went into the ditch off the I-65 half a dozen times. Why I never plowed down and buried myself up to the axles in the sucking goo running those furrows, never be something I’ll understand.

But each time I skidded off the Interstate, even the twice I did a complete three-sixty and nearly rolled the old Fairlane I’d borrowed from John the C Hepworth, even then I just kept digging, slewed like an epileptic seizure, went sideways and climbed right up the slippery grass and weeds and running, sucking red Alabama goo, right back onto that long black anvil pounded by rain as hard as roofing nails. I took it then, as I take it now, to be a sign that Destiny was determined the mere heavens and earth would not be permitted to fuck me around. I had a date to keep, and Destiny was on top of things.

Even so, even living charmed, which was clear to me, even so: when I got about five miles north of Atmore, I took the 57 exit off the I-65 and a left onto 21, and pulled in at the Best Western. It wasn’t my intention to stay overnight that far south—though I knew a young woman with excellent teeth down in Mobile—but the rain was just hammering and all I wanted was to get this thing done and go fall asleep. A drive that long, humping something as lame as that Fairlane, hunched forward to scope the rain . . . with Spanning in front of me . . . all I desired was surcease. A touch of the old oblivion.

I checked in, stood under the shower for half an hour, changed into the three-piece suit I’d brought along, and phoned the front desk for directions to the Holman facility.

Driving there, a sweet moment happened for me. It was the last sweet moment for a long time thereafter, and I remember it now as if it were still happening. I cling to it.

In May, and on into early June, the Yellow Lady’s Slipper blossoms. In the forests and the woodland bogs, and often on some otherwise undistinguished slope or hillside, the yellow and purple orchids suddenly appear.

I was driving. There was a brief stop in the rain. Like the eye of a hurricane. One moment sheets of water, and the next, absolute silence before the crickets and frogs and birds started complaining; and darkness on all sides, just the idiot staring beams of my headlights poking into nothingness; and cool as a well between the drops of rain; and I was driving. And suddenly, the window rolled down so I wouldn’t fall asleep, so I could stick my head out when my eyes started to close, suddenly I smelled the delicate perfume of the sweet May-blossoming Lady’s Slipper. Off to my left, off in the dark somewhere on a patch of hilly ground, or deep in a stand of invisible trees, Cypripedium calceolus was making the night world beautiful with its fragrance.

I neither slowed, nor tried to hold back the tears.

I just drove, feeling sorry for myself; for no good reason I could name.

Way, way down—almost to the corner of the Florida panhandle, about three hours south of the last truly imperial barbecue in that part of the world, in Birmingham—I made my way to Holman. If you’ve never been inside the joint, what I’m about to say will resonate about as clearly as Chaucer to one of the gentle Tasaday.

The stones call out.

That institution for the betterment of the human race, the Organized Church, has a name for it. From the fine folks at Catholicism, Lutheranism, Baptism, Judaism, Islamism, Druidism . . . Ismism . . . the ones who brought you Torquemada, several spicy varieties of Inquisition, original sin, holy war, sectarian violence, and something called “pro-lifers” who bomb and maim and kill . . . comes the catchy phrase Damned Places.

Rolls off the tongue like God’s On Our Side, don’t it?

Damned Places.

As we say in Latin, the situs of malevolent shit. The venue of evil happenings. Locations forever existing under a black cloud, like residing in a rooming house run by Jesse Helms or Strom Thurmond. The big slams are like that. Joliet, Dannemora, Attica, Rahway State in Jersey, that hellhole down in Louisiana called Angola, old Folsom—not the new one, the old Folsom—0, and Ossining. Only people who read about it call it “Sing Sing.” Inside, the cons call it Ossining. The Ohio State pen in Columbus. Leavenworth, Kansas. The ones they talk about among themselves when they talk about doing hard time. In there, in those ancient structures mortared with guilt and depravity and no respect for human life and just plain meanness on both sides, cons and screws, in there where the walls and floors have absorbed all the pain and loneliness of a million men and women for decades . . . in there, the stones call out.

Damned places. You can feel it when you walk through the gates and go through the metal detectors and empty your pockets on counters and open your briefcase so that thick fingers can rumple the papers. You feel it. The moaning and thrashing, and men biting holes in their own wrists so they’ll bleed to death.

And I felt it worse than anyone else.

I blocked out as much as I could. I tried to hold on to the memory of the scent of orchids in the night. The last thing I wanted was to jaunt into somebody’s landscape at random. Go inside and find out what he had done, what had really put him here, not just what they’d got him for. And I’m not talking about Spanning; I’m talking about every one of them. Every guy who had kicked to death his girl friend because she brought him Bratwurst instead of spicy Cajun sausage. Every pale, wormy Bible-reciting psycho who had stolen, buttfucked, and sliced up an altar boy in the name of secret voices that “tole him to g’wan do it!” Every amoral druggie who’d shot a pensioner for her food stamps. If I let down for a second, if I didn’t keep that shield up, I’d be tempted to send out a scintilla and touch one of them. In a moment of human weakness.

So I followed the trusty to the Warden’s office, where his secretary checked my papers, and the little plastic cards with my face encased in them, and she kept looking down at the face, and up at my face, and down at my face, and up at the face in front of her, and when she couldn’t restrain herself a second longer she said, “We’ve been expecting you, Mr. Pairis. Uh. Do you really work for the President of the United States?”

I smiled at her. “We go bowling together.”

She took that highly, and offered to walk me to the conference room where I’d meet Henry Lake Spanning. I thanked her the way a well-mannered gentleman of color thanks a Civil Servant who can make life easier or more difficult, and I followed her along corridors and in and out of guarded steel- riveted doorways, through Administration and the segregation room and the main hall to the brown-paneled, stained walnut, white tile over cement floored, roll-out security windowed, white draperied, drop ceiling with 2” acoustical Celotex squared conference room, where a Security Officer met us. She bid me fond adieu, not yet fully satisfied that such a one as I had come, that morning, on Air Force One, straight from a 7-10 split with the President of the United States.

It was a big room.

I sat down at the conference table; about twelve feet long and four feet wide; highly polished walnut, maybe oak. Straight back chairs: metal tubing with a light yellow upholstered cushion. Everything quiet, except for the sound of matrimonial rice being dumped on a connubial tin roof. The rain had not slacked off. Out there on the I-65 some luck- lost bastard was being sucked down into red death.

“He’ll be here,” the Security Officer said.

“That’s good,” I replied. I had no idea why he’d tell me that, seeing as how it was the reason I was there in the first place. I imagined him to be the kind of guy you dread sitting in front of at the movies, because he always explain everything to his date. Like a bracero laborer with a valid green card interpreting a Woody Allen movie line-by-fine to his illegal-alien cousin Humberto three weeks under the wire from Matamoros. Like one of a pair of Belltone-wearing octogenarians on the loose from a rest home for a wild Saturday afternoon at the mall, plonked down in the third level multiplex, one of them describing whose ass Clint Eastwood is about to kick, and why. All at the top of her voice.

“Seen any good movies lately?” I asked him.

He didn’t get a chance to answer, and I didn’t jaunt inside to find out, because at that moment the steel door at the far end of the conference room opened, and another Security Officer poked his head in, and called across to Officer Let-Me-State-the-Obvious, “Dead man walking!”

Officer Self-Evident nodded to him, the other head poked back out, the door slammed, and my companion said, “When we bring one down from Death Row, he’s gotta walk through the Ad Building and Segregation and the Main Hall. So everything’s locked down. Every man’s inside. It takes some time, y’know.”

I thanked him.

“Is it true you work for the President, yeah?” He asked it so politely, I decided to give him a straight answer; and to hell with all the phony credentials Ally had worked up. “Yeah,” I said, “we’re on the same bocce ball team.”

“Izzat so?” he said, fascinated by sports stats.

I was on the verge of explaining that the President was, in actuality, of Italian descent, when I heard the sound of the key turning in the security door, and it opened outward, and in came this messianic apparition in white, being led by a guard who was seven feet in any direction.

Henry Lake Spanning, sans halo, hands and feet shackled, with the chains cold-welded into a wide anodized steel belt, shuffled toward me; and his neoprene soles made no disturbing cacophony on the white tiles.

I watched him come the long way across the room, and he watched me right back. I thought to myself, Yeah, she told him I can read minds. Well, let’s see which method you use to try and keep me out of the landscape. But I couldn’t tell from the outside of him, not just by the way he shuffled and looked, if he had fucked Ally. But I knew it had to’ve been. Somehow. Even in the big lockup. Even here.

He stopped right across from me, with his hands on the back of the chair, and he didn’t say a word, just gave me the nicest smile I’d ever gotten from anyone, even my momma. Oh, yes, I thought, oh my goodness, yes. Henry Lake Spanning was either the most masterfully charismatic person I’d ever met, or so good at the charm con that he could sell a slashed throat to a strangler.

“You can leave him,” I said to the great black behemoth brother.

“Can’t do that, sir.”

“I’ll take full responsibility.”

“Sorry, sir; I was told someone had to be right here in the room with you and him, all the time.”

I looked at the one who had waited with me. “That mean you, too?”

He shook his head. “Just one of us, I guess.”

I frowned. “I need absolute privacy. What would happen if I were this man’s attorney of record? Wouldn’t you have to leave us alone? Privileged communication, right?”

They looked at each other, this pair of Security Officers, and they looked back at me, and they said nothing. All of a sudden Mr. Plain-as-the-Nose-on-Your-Face had nothing valuable to, offer; and the sequoia with biceps “had his orders.”

“They tell you who I work for? They tell you who it was sent me here to talk to this man?” Recourse to authority often works. They mumbled yessir yessir a couple of times each, but their faces stayed right on the mark of sorry, sir, but we’re not supposed to leave anybody alone with this man. It wouldn’t have mattered if they’d believed I’d flown in on Jehovah One.

So I said to myself fuckit I said to myself, and I slipped into their thoughts, and it didn’t take much rearranging to get the phone wires restrung and the underground cables rerouted and the pressure on their bladders something fierce.

“On the other hand . . ,” the first one said.

“I suppose we could . . ,” the giant said.

And in a matter of maybe a minute and a half one of them was entirely gone, and the great one was standing outside the steel door, his back filling the double-pane chickenwire-imbedded security window. He effectively sealed off the one entrance or exit to or from the conference room; like the three hundred Spartans facing the tens of thousands of Xerxes’s army at the Hot Gates.

Henry Lake Spanning stood silently watching me.

“Sit down,” I said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

He pulled out the chair, came around, and sat down.

“Pull it closer to the table,” I said.

He had some difficulty, hands shackled that way, but he grabbed the leading edge of the seat and scraped forward till his stomach was touching the table.

He was a handsome guy, even for a white man. Nice nose, strong cheekbones, eyes the color of that water in your toilet when you toss in a tablet of 2000 Flushes. Very nice looking man. He gave me the creeps.

If Dracula had looked like Shirley Temple, no one would’ve driven a stake through his heart. If Harry Truman had looked like Freddy Krueger, he would never have beaten Tom Dewey at the polls. Joe Stalin and Saddam Hussein looked like sweet, avuncular friends of the family, really nice looking, kindly guys—who just incidentally happened to slaughter millions of men, women, and children. Abe Lincoln looked like an axe murderer, but he had a heart as big as Guatemala.

Henry Lake Spanning had the sort of face you’d trust immediately if you saw it in a tv commercial. Men would like to go fishing with him, women would like to squeeze his buns. Grannies would hug him on sight, kids would follow him straight into the mouth of an open oven. If he could play the piccolo, rats would gavotte around his shoes.

What saps we are. Beauty is only skin deep. You can’t judge a book by its cover. Cleanliness is next to godliness. Dress for success. What saps we are.

So what did that make my pal. Allison Roche?

And why the hell didn’t I just slip into his thoughts and check out the landscape? Why was I stalling?

Because I was scared of him.

This was fifty-six verified gruesome, disgusting murders, sitting forty-eight inches away from me, looking straight at me with blue eyes and soft, gently blond hair. Neither Harry nor Dewey would’ve had a prayer.

So why was I scared of him. Because; that’s why.

This was damned foolishness. I had all the weaponry, he was shackled, and I didn’t for a second believe he was what Ally thought he was: innocent. Hell, they’d caught him, literally, redhanded. Bloody to the armpits, fer chrissakes. Innocent, my ass! Okay, Rudy, I thought, get in there and take a look around. But I didn’t. I waited for him to say something.

He smiled tentatively, a gentle and nervous little smile, and he said, “Ally asked me to see you. Thank you for coming.”

I looked at him, but not into him.

He seemed upset that he’d inconvenienced me. “But I don’t think you can do me any good, not in just three days.”

“You scared, Spanning?”

His lips trembled. “Yes I am, Mr. Pairis. I’m about as scared as a man can be.” His eyes were moist.

“Probably gives you some insight into how your victims felt, whaddaya think?”

He didn’t answer. His eyes were moist.

After a moment just looking at me, he scraped back his chair and stood up. “Thank you for coming, sir. I’m sorry Ally imposed on your time.” He turned and started to walk away. I jaunted into his landscape.

Oh my god, I thought. He was innocent.

Never done any of it. None of it. Absolutely no doubt, not a shadow of a doubt. Ally had been right. I saw every bit of that landscape in there, every fold and crease: every bolt hole and rat run; every gully and arroyo; all of his past, back and back and back to his birth in Lewistown. Montana, near Great Falls, thirty-six years ago; every day of his life right up to the minute they arrested him leaning over that disemboweled cleaning woman the real killer had tossed into the dumpster.

I saw every second of his landscape; and I saw him coming out of the Winn- Dixie in Huntsville; pushing a cart filled with grocery bags of food for the weekend. And I saw him wheeling it around the parking lot toward the dumpster area overflowing with broken-down cardboard boxes and fruit crates. And I heard the cry for help from one of those dumpsters; and I saw Henry Lake Spanning stop and look around, not sure he’d heard anything at all. Then I saw him start to go to his car, parked right there at the edge of the lot beside the wall because it was a Friday evening and everyone was stocking up for the weekend, and there weren’t any spaces out front; and the cry for help, weaker this time, as pathetic as a crippled kitten; and Henry Lake. Spanning stopped cold, and he looked around; and we both saw the bloody hand raise itself above the level of the open dumpster’s filthy green steel side. And I saw him desert his groceries without a thought to their cost, or that someone might run off with them if he left them unattended, or that he only had eleven dollars left in his checking account, so if those groceries were snagged by someone he wouldn’t be eating for the next few days . . . and I watched him rush to the dumpster and look into the crap filling it . . . and I felt his nausea at the sight of that poor woman, what was left of her . . . and I was with him as he crawled up onto the dumpster and dropped inside to do what he could for that mass of shredded and pulped flesh.

And I cried with him as she gasped, with a bubble of blood that burst in the open ruin of her throat, and she died. But though I heard the scream of someone coming around the corner, Spanning did not; and so he was still there, holding the poor mass of stripped skin and black bloody clothing, when the cops screeched into the parking lot. And only then, innocent of anything but decency and rare human compassion, did Henry Lake Spanning begin to understand what it must look like to middle- aged hausfraus, sneaking around dumpsters to pilfer cardboard boxes, who see what they think is a man murdering an old woman.

I was with him, there in the landscape within his mind, as he ran and ran and dodged and dodged. Until they caught him in Decatur, seven miles from the body of Gunilla Ascher. But they had him, and they had positive identification, from the dumpster in Huntsville; and all the rest of it was circumstantial, gussied up by bedridden, recovering Charlie Whilborg and the staff in Ally’s office. It looked good on paper—so good that Ally had brought him down on twenty-nine-cum-fifty-six counts of murder in the vilest extreme.

But it was all bullshit.

The killer was still out there.

Henry Lake Spanning, who looked like a nice, decent guy, was exactly that. A nice, decent, goodhearted, but most of all innocent guy.

You could fool juries and polygraphs and judges and social workers and psychiatrists and your mommy and your daddy, but you could not fool Rudy Pairis, who travels regularly to the place of dark where you can go but not return.

They were going to burn an innocent man in three days.

I had to do something about it.

Not just for Ally, though that was reason enough; but for this man who thought he was doomed, and was frightened, but didn’t have to take no shit from a wiseguy like me.

“Mr. Spanning,” I called after him.

He didn’t stop.

“Please,” I said. He stopped shuffling, the chains making their little charm bracelet sounds, but he didn’t turn around.

“I believe Ally is right, sir,” I said. “I believe they caught the wrong man; and I believe all the time you’ve served is wrong; and I believe you ought not die.”

Then he turned slowly, and stared at me with the look of a dog that has been taunted with a bone. His voice was barely a whisper. “And why is that, Mr. Pairis? Why is it that you believe me when nobody else but Ally and my attorney believed me?”

I didn’t say what I was thinking. What I was thinking was that I’d been in there, and I knew he was innocent. And more than that, I knew that he truly loved my pal Allison Roche.

And there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for Ally.

So what I said was: “I know you’re innocent, because I know who’s guilty.”

His lips parted. It wasn’t one of those big moves where someone’s mouth flops open in astonishment; it was just a parting of the lips. But he was startled; I knew that as I knew the poor sonofabitch had suffered too long already.

He came shuffling back to me, and sat down.

“Don’t make fun, Mr. Pairis. Please. I’m what you said, I’m scared. I don’t want to die, and I surely don’t want to die with the world thinking I did those . . . those things.”

“Makin’ no fun, captain. I know who ought to burn for all those murders. Not six states, but eleven. Not fifty-six dead, but an even seventy. Three of them little girls in a day nursery, and the woman watching them, too.”

He stared at me. There was horror on his face. I know that look real good. I’ve seen it at least seventy times.

“I know you’re innocent, cap’n. because I’m the man they want. I’m the guy who put your ass in here.”

In a moment of human weakness. I saw it all. What I had packed off to live in that place of dark where you can go but not return. The wall-safe in my drawingroom. The four-foot-thick walled crypt encased in concrete and sunk a mile deep into solid granite. The vault whose composite laminate walls of judiciously sloped extremely thick blends of steel and plastic, the equivalent of six hundred to seven hundred mm of homogeneous depth protection approached the maximum toughness and hardness of crystaliron, that iron grown with perfect crystal structure and carefully controlled quantities of impurities that in a modern combat tank can shrug off a hollow charge warhead like a spaniel shaking himself dry. The Chinese puzzle box. The hidden chamber. The labyrinth. The maze of the mind where I’d sent all seventy to die, over and over and over, so I wouldn’t hear their screams, or see the ropes of bloody tendon, or stare into the pulped sockets where their pleading eyes had been.

When I had walked into that prison, I’d been buttoned up totally. I was safe and secure, I knew nothing, remembered nothing, suspected nothing.

But when I walked into Henry Lake Spanning’s landscape, and I could not lie to myself that he was the one, I felt the earth crack. I felt the tremors and the upheavals, and the fissures started at my feet and ran to the horizon; and the lava boiled up and began to flow. And the steel walls melted, and the concrete turned to dust, and the barriers dissolved; and I looked at the face of the monster.

No wonder I had such nausea when Ally had told me about this or that slaughter ostensibly perpetrated by Henry Lake Spanning, the man she was prosecuting on twenty-nine counts of murders I had committed. No wonder I could picture all. the details when she would talk to me about the barest description of the murder site. No wonder I fought so hard against coming to Holman.

In there, in his mind, his landscape open to me, I saw the love he had for Allison Roche, for my pal and buddy with whom I had once, just once . . .

Don’t try tellin’ me that the Power of Love can open the fissures. I don’t want to hear that shit. I’m telling you that it was a combination, a buncha things that split me open, and possibly maybe one of those things was what I saw between them.

I don’t know that much. I’m a quick study, but this was in an instant. A crack of fate. A moment of human weakness. That’s what I’d told myself in the part of me that ventured to the place of dark: that I’d done what I’d done in moments of human weakness.

And it was those moments, not my “gift,” and not my blackness, that had made me the loser, the monster, the liar that I am.

In the first moment of realization, I couldn’t believe it. Not me, not good old Rudy. Not likeable Rudy Pairis never done no one but hisself wrong his whole life.

In the next second I went wild with anger, furious at the disgusting thing that lived on one side of my split brain. Wanted to tear a hole through my face and yank the killing thing out, wet and putrescent, and squeeze it into pulp.

In the next second I was nauseated, actually wanted to fall down and puke, seeing every moment of what I had done, unshaded, unhidden, naked to this Rudy Pairis who was decent and reasonable and law-abiding, even if such a Rudy was little better than a well- educated fuckup. But not a killer . . . I wanted to puke.

Then, finally, I accepted what I could not deny.

For me, never again, would I slide through the night with the scent of the blossoming Yellow Lady’s Slipper. I recognized that perfume now.

It was the odor that rises from a human body cut wide open, like a mouth making a big, dark yawn.

The other Rudy Pairis had come home at last.

They didn’t have half a minute’s worry. I sat down at a little wooden writing table in an interrogation room in the Jefferson County D.A.‘s offices, and I made up a graph with the names and dates and locations. Names of as many of the seventy as I actually knew. (A lot of them had just been on the road, or in a men’s toilet, or taking a bath, or lounging in the back row of a movie, or getting some cash from an ATM, or just sitting around doing nothing but waiting for me to come along and open them up, and maybe have a drink off them, or maybe just something to snack on . . . down the road). Dates were easy, because I’ve got a good memory for dates. And the places where they’d find the ones they didn’t know about, the fourteen with exactly the same m.o. as the other fifty-six, not to mention the old-style rip-and-pull can opener I’d used on that little Catholic bead-counter Gunilla Whatsername, who did Hail Mary this and Sweet Blessed Jesus that all the time I was opening her up, even at the last, when I held up parts of her insides for her to look at, and tried to get her to lick them, but she died first. Not half a minute’s worry for the State of Alabama. All in one swell foop they corrected a tragic miscarriage of justice, knobbled a maniac killer, solved fourteen more murders than they’d counted on (in five additional states, which made the police departments of those five additional states extremely pleased with the law enforcement agencies of the Sovereign State of Alabama), and made first spot on the evening news on all three major networks, not to mention CNN, for the better part of a week. Knocked the Middle East right out of the box. Neither Harry Truman nor Tom Dewey would’ve had a prayer.

Ally went into seclusion, of course. Took off and went somewhere down on the Florida coast, I heard. But after the trial, and the verdict, and Spanning being released, and me going inside, and all like that, well, oo-poppa-dow as they used to say, it was all reordered properly. Sat cito si sat bene, in Latin: “It is done quickly enough if it is done well.” A favorite saying of Cato. The Elder Cato.

And all I asked, all I begged for, was that Ally and Henry Lake Spanning, who loved each other and deserved each other, and who I had almost fucked up royally, that the two of them would be there when they jammed my weary black butt into that new electric chair at Holman.

Please come, I begged them.

Don’t let me die alone. Not even a shit like me. Don’t make me cross over into that place of dark, where you can go, but not return—without the face of a friend. Even a former friend. And as for you, captain, well, hell didn’t I save your life so you could enjoy the company of the woman you love? Least you can do. Come on now; be there or be square!

I don’t know if Spanning talked her into accepting the invite, or if it was the other way around; but one day about a week prior to the event of cooking up a mess of fried Rudy Pairis, the warden stopped by my commodious accommodations on Death Row and gave me to understand that it would be SRO for the barbecue, which meant Ally my pal, and her boy friend, the former resident of the Row where now I dwelt in durance vile.

The things a guy’ll do for love.

Yeah, that was the key. Why would a very smart operator who had gotten away with it, all the way free and clear, why would such a smart operator suddenly pull one of those hokey courtroom “I did it, I did it!” routines, and as good as strap himself into the electric chair?

Once. I only went to bed with her once.

The things a guy’ll do for love.

When they brought me into the death chamber from the holding cell where I’d spent the night before and all that day, where I’d had my last meal (which had been a hot roast beef sandwich, double meat, on white toast, with very crisp french fries, and hot brown country gravy poured over the whole thing, apple sauce, and a bowl of Concord grapes), where a representative of the Holy Roman Empire had tried to make amends for destroying most of the gods, beliefs, and cultures of my black forebears, they held me between Security Officers, neither one of whom had been in attendance when I’d visited Henry Lake Spanning at this very same correctional facility slightly more than a year before.

It hadn’t been a bad year. Lots of rest; caught up on my reading, finally got around to Proust and Langston Hughes, I’m ashamed to admit, so late in the game; lost some weight; worked out regularly; gave up cheese and dropped my cholesterol count. Ain’t nothin’ to it, just to do it.

Even took a jaunt or two or ten, every now and awhile. It didn’t matter none. I wasn’t going anywhere, neither were they. I’d done worse than the worst of them; hadn’t I confessed to it? So there wasn’t a lot that could ice me, after I’d copped to it and released all seventy of them out of my unconscious, where they’d been rotting in shallow graves for years. No big thang, Cuz.

Brought me in, strapped me in, plugged me in.

I looked through the glass at the witnesses.

There sat Ally and Spanning, front row center. Best seats in the house. All eyes and crying, watching, not believing everything had come to this, trying to figure out when and how and in what way it had all gone down without her knowing anything at all about it. And Henry Lake Spanning sitting close beside her, their hands locked in her lap. True love.

I locked eyes with Spanning.

I jaunted into his landscape.

No, I didn’t.

I tried to, and couldn’t squirm through. Thirty years, or less, since I was five or six, I’d been doing it; without hindrance, all alone in the world the only person who could do this listen in on the landscape trick; and for the first time I was stopped. Absolutely no fuckin’ entrance. I went wild! I tried running at it full-tilt, and hit something khaki- colored, like beach sand, and only slightly giving, not hard, but resilient. Exactly like being inside a ten-foot-high, fifty- foot-diameter paper bag, like a big shopping bag from a supermarket, that stiff butcher’s paper kind of bag, and that color, like being inside a bag that size, running straight at it, thinking you’re going to bust through . . . and being thrown back. Not hard, not like bouncing on a trampoline, just shunted aside like the fuzz from a dandelion hitting a glass door. Unimportant. Khaki- colored and not particularly bothered.

I tried hitting it with a bolt of pure blue lightning mental power, like someone out of a Marvel comic, but that wasn’t how mixing in other people’s minds works. You don’t think yourself in with a psychic battering-ram. That’s the kind of arrant foolishness you hear spouted by unattractive people on public access cable channels, talking about The Power of Love and The Power of the Mind and the ever-popular toe-tapping Power of a Positive Thought. Bullshit; I don’t be home to that folly!

I tried picturing myself in there, but that didn’t work, either. I tried blanking my mind and drifting across, but it was pointless. And at that moment it occurred to me that I didn’t really know how I jaunted. I just . . . did it. One moment I was snug in the privacy of my own head, and the next I was over there in someone else’s landscape. It was instantaneous, like teleportation, which also is an impossibility, like telepathy.

But now, strapped into the chair, and them getting ready to put the leather mask over my face so the witnesses wouldn’t have to see the smoke coming out of my eye-sockets and the little sparks as my nose hairs burned, when it was urgent that I get into the thoughts and landscape of Henry Lake Spanning, I was shut out completely. And right then, that moment, I was scared!

Presto, without my even opening up to him, there he was: inside my head.

He had jaunted into my landscape.

“You had a nice roast beef sandwich, I see.”

His voice was a lot stronger than it had been when I’d come down to see him a year ago. A lot stronger inside my mind.

“Yes, Rudy, I’m what you knew probably existed somewhere. Another one. A shrike.” He paused. “I see you call it ‘jaunting in the landscape.’ I just called myself a shrike. A butcherbird. One name’s as good as another. Strange, isn’t it; all these years; and we never met anyone else? There must be others, but I think—now I can’t prove this, I have no real data, it’s just a wild idea I’ve had for years and years—I think they don’t know they can do it.”

He stared at me across the landscape, those wonderful blue eyes of his, the ones Ally had fallen in love with, hardly blinking.

“Why didn’t you let me know before this?”

He smiled sadly. “Ah, Rudy. Rudy, Rudy, Rudy; you poor benighted pickaninny.

“Because I needed to suck you in, kid. I needed to put out a bear trap, and let it snap closed on your scrawny leg, and send you over. Here, let me clear the atmosphere in here . . .” And he wiped away all the manipulation he had worked on me, way back a year ago, when he had so easily covered his own true thoughts, his past, his life, the real panorama of what went on inside his landscape—like bypassing a surveillance camera with a looped tape that continues to show a placid scene while the joint is being actively burgled—and when he convinced me not only that he was innocent, but that the real killer was someone who had blocked the hideous slaughters from his conscious mind and had lived an otherwise exemplary life. He wandered around my landscape—and all of this in a second or two, because time has no duration in the landscape, like the hours you can spend in a dream that are just thirty seconds long in the real world, just before you wake up—and he swept away all the false memories and suggestions, the logical structure of sequential events that he had planted that would dovetail with my actual existence, my true memories, altered and warped and rearranged so I would believe that I had done all seventy of those ghastly murders . . . so that I’d believe, in a moment of horrible realization, that I was the demented psychopath who had ranged state to state to state, leaving piles of ripped flesh at every stop. Blocked it all, submerged it all, sublimated it all, me. Good old Rudy Pairis, who never killed anybody. I’d been the patsy he was waiting for.

“There, now, kiddo. See what it’s really like?

“You didn’t do a thing.

“Pure as the driven snow, nigger. That’s the truth. And what a find you were. Never even suspected there was another like me, till Ally came to interview me after Decatur. But there you were, big and black as a Great White Hope, right there in her mind. Isn’t she fine, Pairis? Isn’t she something to take a knife to? Something to split open like a nice piece of fruit warmed in a summer sunshine field, let all the steam rise off her . . . maybe have a picnic . . .”

He stopped.

“I wanted her right from the first moment I saw her.

“Now, you know, I could’ve done it sloppy, just been a shrike to Ally, that first time she came to the holding cell to interview me; just jump into her, that was my plan. But what a noise that Spanning in the cell would’ve made, yelling it wasn’t a man, it was a woman, not Spanning, but Deputy D.A. Allison Roche . . . too much noise, too many complications. But I could have done it, jumped into her. Or a guard, and then slice her at my leisure, stalk her, find her, let her steam . . .

“You look distressed, Mr. Rudy Pairis. Why’s that? Because you’re going to die in my place? Because I could have taken you over at any time, and didn’t? Because after all this time of your miserable, wasted, lousy life you finally find someone like you, and we don’t even have the convenience of a chat? Well, that’s sad, that’s really sad, kiddo. But you didn’t have a chance.”

“You’re stronger than me, you kept me out,” I said.

He chuckled.

“Stronger? Is that all you think it is? Stronger? You still don’t get it, do you?” His face, then, grew terrible. “You don’t even understand now, right now that I’ve cleaned it all away and you can see what I did to you, do you?

“Do you think I stayed in a jail cell, and went through that trial, all of that, because I couldn’t do anything about it? You poor jig slob. I could have jumped like a shrike any time I wanted to. But the first time I met your Ally I saw you.”

I cringed. “And you waited . . .? For me, you spent all that time in prison, just to get to me . . .?”

“At the moment when you couldn’t do anything about it, at the moment you couldn’t shout ‘I’ve been taken over by someone else, I’m Rudy Pairis here inside this Henry Lake Spanning body, help me, help me!’ Why stir up noise when all I had to do was bide my time, wait a bit, wait for Ally, and let Ally go for you.”

I felt like a drowning turkey, standing idiotically in the rain, head tilted up, mouth open, water pouring in. “You can . . . leave the mind . . . leave the body . . . go out . . . jaunt, jump permanently . . .?”

Spanning sniggered like a schoolyard bully.

“You stayed in jail three years just to get me?”

He smirked. Smarter than thou.

“Three years? You think that’s some big deal to me? You don’t think I could have someone like you running around, do you? Someone who can ‘jaunt’ as I do? The only other shrike I’ve ever encountered. You think I wouldn’t sit in here and wait for you to come to me?”

“But three years . . .”

“You’re what, Rudy . . . thirty-one, is it? Yes, I can see that. Thirty-one. You’ve never jumped like a shrike. You’ve just entered, jaunted, gone into the landscapes, and never understood that it’s more than reading minds. You can change domiciles, black boy. You can move out of a house in a bad neighborhood—such as strapped into the electric chair—and take up residence in a brand, spanking, new housing complex of million-and-a-half-buck condos, like Ally.”

“But you have to have a place for the other one to go, don’t you?” I said it just flat, no tone, no color to it at all. I didn’t even think of the place of dark, where you can go . . .

“Who do you think I am, Rudy? Just who the hell do you think I was when I started, when I learned to shrike, how to jaunt, what I’m telling you now about changing residences? You wouldn’t know my first address. I go a long way back.

“But I can give you a few of my more famous addresses. Gilles de Rais, France, 1440; Vlad Tepes, Romania, 1462; Elizabeth Bathory, Hungary, 1611; Catherine DeShayes, France, 1680; Jack the Ripper, London, 1888; Henri Désiré Landru, France, 1915; Albert Fish, New York City, 1934; Ed Gein, Plainfield, Wisconsin, 1954; Myra Hindley, Manchester, 1963; Albert DeSalvo, Boston, 1964; Charles Manson, Los Angeles, 1969; John Wayne Gacy, Norwood Park Township, Illinois, 1977.

“Oh, but how I do go on. And on. And on and on and on, Rudy, my little porch monkey. That’s what I do. I go on. And on and on. Shrike will nest where it chooses. If not in your beloved Allison Roche, then in the cheesy fucked-up black boy, Rudy Pairis. But don’t you think that’s a waste, kiddo? Spending however much time I might have to spend in your socially unacceptable body, when Henry Lake Spanning is such a handsome devil? Why should I have just switched with you when Ally lured you to me, because all it would’ve done is get you screeching and howling that you weren’t Spanning, you were this nigger son who’d had his head stolen . . . and then you might have manipulated some guards or the Warden . . .

“Well, you see what I mean, don’t you?

“But now that the mask is securely in place, and now that the electrodes are attached to your head and your left leg, and now that the Warden has his hand on the switch, well, you’d better get ready to do a lot of drooling.”

And he turned around to jaunt back out of me, and I closed the perimeter. He tried to jaunt, tried to leap back to his own mind, but I had him in a fist. Just that easy. Materialized a fist, and turned him to face me.

“Fuck you, Jack the Ripper. And fuck you twice, Bluebeard. And on and on and on fuck you Manson and Boston Strangler and any other dipshit warped piece of sick crap you been in your years. You sure got some muddy-shoes credentials there, boy.

“What I care about all those names, Spanky my brother? You really think I don’t know those names? I’m an educated fellah, Mistuh Rippuh, Mistuh Mad Bomber. You missed a few. Were you also, did you inhabit, hath thou possessed Winnie Ruth Judd and Charlie Starkweather and Mad Dog Coll and Richard Speck and Sirhan Sirhan and Jeffrey Dahmer? You the boogieman responsible for every bad number the human race ever played? You ruin Sodom and Gomorrah, burned the Great Library of Alexandria, orchestrated the Reign of Terror dans Paree, set up the Inquisition, stoned and drowned the Salem witches, slaughtered unarmed women and kids at Wounded Knee, bumped off John Kennedy?

“I don’t think so.

“I don’t even think you got so close as to share a pint with Jack the Ripper. And even if you did, even if you were all those maniacs, you were small potatoes, Spanky. The least of us human beings outdoes you, three times a day. How many lynch ropes you pulled tight, M’sieur Landru?

“What colossal egotism you got, makes you blind, makes you think you’re the only one, even when you find out there’s someone else, you can’t get past it. What makes you think I didn’t know what you can do? What makes you think I didn’t let you do it, and sit here waiting for you like you sat there waiting for me, till this moment when you can’t do shit about it?

“You so goddam stuck on yourself, Spankyhead, you never give it the barest that someone else is a faster draw than you.

“Know what your trouble is, Captain? You’re old, you’re real old, maybe hundreds of years who gives a damn old. That don’t count for shit, old man. You’re old, but you never got smart. You’re just mediocre at what you do.

“You moved from address to address. You didn’t have to be Son of Sam or Cain slayin’ Abel, or whoever the fuck you been . . . you could’ve been Moses or Galileo or George Washington Carver or Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth or Mark Twain or Joe Louis. You could’ve been Alexander Hamilton and helped found the Manumission Society in New York. You could’ve discovered radium, carved Mount Rushmore, carried a baby out of a burning building. But you got old real fast, and you never got any smarter. You didn’t need to, did you, Spanky? You had it all to yourself, all this ‘shrike’ shit, just jaunt here and jaunt there, and bite off someone’s hand or face like the old, tired, boring, repetitious, no-imagination stupid shit that you are.

“Yeah, you got me good when I came here to see your landscape. You got Ally wired up good. And she suckered me in, probably not even knowing she was doing it . . . you must’ve looked in her head and found just the right technique to get her to make me come within reach. Good, m’man; you were excellent. But I had a year to torture myself. A year to sit here and think about it. About how many people I’d killed, and how sick it made me, and little by little I found my way through it.

“Because . . . and here’s the big difference ’tween us, dummy:

“I unraveled what was going on . . . it took time, but I learned. Understand, asshole? I learn! You don’t.

“There’s an old Japanese saying—I got lots of these, Henry m’man—I read a whole lot—and what it says is, ‘Do not fall into the error of the artisan who boasts of twenty years experience in his craft while in fact he has had only one year of experience—twenty times.’ ” Then I grinned back at him.

“Fuck you, sucker,” I said, just as the Warden threw the switch and I jaunted out of there and into the landscape and mind of Henry Lake Spanning.

I sat there getting oriented for a second; it was the first time I’d done more than a jaunt . . . this was . . . shrike; but then Ally beside me gave a little sob for her old pal, Rudy Pairis, who was baking like a Maine lobster, smoke coming out from under the black cloth that covered my, his, face; and I heard the vestigial scream of what had been Henry Lake Spanning and thousands of other monsters, all of them burning, out there on the far horizon of my new landscape; and I put my arm around her, and drew her close, and put my face into her shoulder and hugged her to me; and I heard the scream go on and on for the longest time, I think it was a long time, and finally it was just wind . . . and then gone . . . and I came up from Ally’s shoulder, and I could barely speak.

“Shhh, honey, it’s okay,” I murmured. “He’s gone where he can make right for his mistakes. No pain. Quiet, a real quiet place; and all alone forever. And cool there. And dark.”

I was ready to stop failing at everything, and blaming everything. Having fessed up to love, having decided it was time to grow up and be an adult—not just a very quick study who learned fast, extremely fast, a lot faster than anybody could imagine an orphan like me could learn, than anybody could imagine—I hugged her with the intention that Henry Lake Spanning would love Allison Roche more powerfully, more responsibly, than anyone had ever loved anyone in the history of the world. I was ready to stop failing at everything.

And it would be just a whole lot easier as a white boy with great big blue eyes.

Because—get on this now—all my wasted years didn’t have as much to do with blackness or racism or being overqualified or being unlucky or being high-verbal or even the curse of my “gift” of jaunting, as they did with one single truth I learned waiting in there, inside my own landscape, waiting for Spanning to come and gloat:

I have always been one of those miserable guys who couldn’t get out of his own way.

Which meant I could, at last, stop feeling sorry for that poor nigger, Rudy Pairis. Except, maybe, in a moment of human weakness.

This story, for Bob Bloch, because I promised.

DANCING ON AIR

Nancy Kress

“Dancing on Air” is another enthralling novella by the author of “Beggars in Spain” (April 1991) and “And Wild for to Hold” (July 1991). Nancy Kress’ sharp-edged short story “The Mountain to Mohammed” (April 1992) is a finalist for this year’s Nebula award.

“When a man has been guilty of a mistake, either in ordering his own affairs, or in directing those of State, or in commanding an army, do we not always say, So-and-so has made a false step in this affair? And can making a false step derive from anything but lack of skill in dancing?”

—Molière

Sometimes I understand the words. Sometimes I do not understand the words.

Eric brings me to the exercise yard. A man and a woman stand there. The man is tall. The woman is short. She has long black fur on her head. She smells angry.

Eric says, “This is Angel. Angel, this is John Cole and Caroline Olson.”

“Hello,” I say.

“I’m supposed to understand that growl?” the woman says. “Might as well be Russian!”

“Caroline,” the man says, “you promised . . .”

“I know what I promised.” She walks away. She smells very angry. I don’t understand. My word was hello. Hello is one of the easy words.

The man says, “Hello, Angel.” He smiles. I sniff his shoes and bark. He smells friendly. I smell two cats and a hot dog and street tar and a car. I feel happy. I like cars.

The woman comes back. “If we have to do this, then let’s just do it, for Chrissake. Let’s sign the papers and get out of this hole.”

John Cole says, “The lawyers are all waiting in Eric’s office.”

Eric’s office smells of many people. I go to my place beside the door. I lie down. Maybe later somebody takes me in the car.

A woman looks at many papers and talks. “A contract between Bio-mod Canine Protection Agency, herein referred to as the party of the first part, and the New York City Ballet, herein referred to as the party of the second part, in fulfillment of the requirements of Columbia Insurance Company, herein referred to as the party of the third part, as those requirements are set forth in Policy 438-69, Section 17, respecting prima ballerina Caroline Olson. The party of the first part shall furnish genetically-modified canine protection to Caroline Olson under, and not limited to, the following conditions . . .”

The words are hard.

I think words I can understand.

My name is Angel. I am a dog. I protect. Eric tells me to protect. No people can touch the one I protect except safe people. I love people I protect. I sleep now.

“Angel,” Eric says from his chair. “Wake up now. You must protect.”

I wake up. Eric walks to me. He sits next to me. He puts his voice in my ear.

“This is Caroline. You must protect Caroline. No one must hurt Caroline. No one must touch Caroline except safe people. Angel—protect Caroline.”

I smell Caroline. I am very happy. I protect Caroline.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Caroline says. She walks away.

I love Caroline.

We go in the car. We go very far. Many people. Many smells. John drives the car. John is safe. He may touch Caroline. John stops the car. We get out. There are many tall buildings and many cars.

“You sure you’re going to be okay?” John Cole says.

“You’ve protected your investment, haven’t you?” Caroline snarls. John drives away.

A man stands by the door. The man says, “Evening, Miss Olson.”

“Evening, Sam. This is my new guard dog. The company insists I have one, after . . . what’s been happening. They say the insurance company is paranoid. Yeah, sure. I need a dog like I need a knee injury.”

“Yes, ma’am. Doberman, isn’t he? He looks like a goooood ol’ dog. Hey, big fella, what’s your name?”

“Angel,” I say.

The man jumps and makes a noise. Caroline laughs.

“Bioenhanced. Great for my privacy, right? Rover, Sam is safe. Do you hear me? Sam is safe.”

I say, “My name is Angel.”

Caroline says, “Sam, you can relax. Really. He only attacks on command, or if I scream, or if he hasn’t been told a person is safe and that person touches me.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Sam smells afraid. He looks at me hard. I bark and my tail moves.

Caroline says, “Come on, Fido. Your spy career is about to begin.” I say, “My name is Angel.”

“Right,” Caroline says.

We go in the building. We go in the elevator. I say, “Sam has a cat. I smell Sam’s cat.”

“Who the fuck cares,” Caroline says.

I am a dog.

I must love Caroline.

2.

Two days after the second ballerina was murdered, Michael Chow, senior editor of New York Now and my boss, called me into his office. I already knew what he wanted, and I already knew I didn’t want to do it. He knew that, too. We both knew it wouldn’t make any difference.

“You’re the logical reporter, Susan,” Michael said. He sat behind his desk, always a bad sign. When he thought I’d want an assignment, he leaned casually against the front of the desk. Its top was cluttered with printouts; with disposable research cartridges, some with their screens alight; with pictures of Michael’s six children. Six. They all looked like Michael: straight black hair and a smooth face like a peeled egg. At the apex of the mess sat a hardcopy of the Times 3:00 P.M. on-line lead: autopsy DISCOVERS BIOENHANCERS IN CITY BALLET DANCER. “You have an in. Even Anton Privitera will talk to you.”

“Not about this. He already gave his press conference. Such as it was.”

“So? You can get to him as a parent and leverage from there.”

My daughter Deborah was a student in the School of American Ballet, the juvenile province of Anton Privitera’s kingdom. For thirty years he had ruled the New York City Ballet like an annointed tyrant. Sometimes it seemed he could even levy taxes and raise armies, so exalted was his reputation in the dance world, and so good was his business manager John Cole at raising funds and enlisting corporate patrons.

Dancers had flocked to the City Ballet from Europe, from Asia, from South America, from the serious ballet schools in the patrolled zones of America’s dying cities. Until biohancers, the New York City Ballet had been the undisputed grail of the international dance world.

Now, of course, that was changing.

Privitera was dynamic with the press as long as we were content with what he wished us to know. He wasn’t going to want to discuss the murder of two dancers, one of them his own.

A month ago Nicole Heyer, a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theater, had been found strangled in Central Park. Three days ago the body of Jennifer Lang had been found in her modest apartment. Heyer had been a bioenhanced dancer who had come to the ABT from the Stuttgart Ballet. Lang, a minor soloist with the City Ballet, had of course been natural. Or so everybody thought until the autopsy. The entire company had been bioscanned only three weeks ago, Artistic Director Privitera had told the press, but apparently these particular viro-enhancers were so new and so different that they hadn’t even shown up on the scan.

I wondered how to make Michael understand the depth of my dislike for all this.

“Don’t cover the usual police stuff,” Michael said, “nor the scientific stuff on bioenhancement. Concentrate on the human angle you do so well. What’s the effect of these murders on the other dancers? Has it affected their dancing? Does Privitera seemed more confirmed in his company policy now, or has this shaken him enough to consider a change? What’s he doing to protect his dancers? How do the parents feel about the youngsters in the ballet school? Are they withdrawing them until the killer is caught?”

I said, “You don’t have any sensitivity at all, do you, Michael?”

He said quietly, “Your girl’s seventeen, Susan. If you couldn’t get her to leave dancing before, you’re not going to get her to leave now. Will you do the story?”

I looked again at the scattered pictures of Michael’s children. His oldest was at Harvard Law. His second son was a happily married househusband, raising three kids. His third child, a daughter, was doing six-to-ten in Rock Mountain Maximum Security State Prison for armed robbery. There was no figuring it out. I said, “I’ll do the story.”

“Good,” he said, not looking at me. “Just hold down the metaphors, Susan. You’re still too given to metaphors.”

“New York Now could use a few metaphors. A feature magazine isn’t supposed to be a TV holo bite.”

“A feature magazine isn’t art, either,” Michael retorted. “Let’s all keep that in mind.”

“You’re in luck,” I said. “As it happens, I’m not a great lover of art.” I couldn’t decide whether to tell Deborah I had agreed to write about ballet. She would hate my writing about her world under threat. Which was a reason both for and against.

September heat and long, cool shadows fought it out over the wide plaza of Lincoln Center. The fountain splashed, surrounded by tourists and students and strollers and derelicts. I thought Lincoln Center was ugly, shoebox architecture stuck around a charmless expanse of stone unredeemed by a little splashing water. Michael said I only felt that way because I hated New York. If Lincoln Center had been built in Kentucky, he said, I would have admired it.

I had remembered to get the electronic password from Deborah. Since the first murder, the New York State Theater changed it weekly. Late afternoon was heavy rehearsal time; the company was using the stage as well as the studios. I heard the Spanish bolero from the second act of Coppelia. Deborah had been trying to learn it for weeks. The role of Swanilda, the girl who pretends to be a doll, had first made the brilliant Caroline Olson a superstar.

Privitera’s office was a jumble of dance programs, costume swatches, and computers. He made me wait for him twenty minutes. I sat and thought about what I knew about bioenhanced dancers, besides the fact that there weren’t supposed to have been any at City Ballet.

There were several kinds of bioenhancement. All of them were experimental, all of them were illegal in The United States, all of them were constantly in flux as new discoveries were made and rushed onto the European, South American, and Japanese markets. It was a new science, chaotic and contradictory, like physics at the start of the last century, or cancer cures at the start of this one. No bioenhancements had been developed specifically for ballet dancers, who were an insignificant portion of the population. But European dancers submitted to experimental versions, as did American dancers who could travel to Berlin or Copenhagen or Rio for the very expensive privilege of injecting their bodies with tiny, unproven biological “machines.”

Some nanomachines carried programming that searched out deviations in the body and repaired them to match surrounding tissue. This speeded the healing of some injuries some of the time, or only erratically, or not at all, depending on whom you believed. Jennifer Lang had been receiving these treatments, trying desperately to lessen the injury rate that went hand in hand with ballet. The nanomachines were highly experimental, and nobody was sure what long-term effect they might have, reproducing themselves in the human body, interacting with human DNA.

Bone builders were both simpler and more dangerous. They were altered viruses, reprogrammed to change the shape or density of bones. Most of the experimental work had been done on old women with advanced osteoporosis. Some grew denser bones after treatment. The rest didn’t. In ballet, the legs are required to rotate 180 degrees in the hip sockets—the famous “turn out” that had destroyed so many dancers’ hips and knees. If bones could be altered to swivel 180 degrees naturally in their sockets, turn out would cause far less strain and disintegration. Extension could also be higher, making easier the spectacular arabesques and grand battement kicks.

If the bones of the foot were reshaped, foot injuries could be lessened in the unnatural act of dancing on toe.

Bioenhanced leg muscles could be stronger, for higher jumps, greater speed, more stamina.

Anything that helped metabolic efficiency or lung capacity could help a dancer sustain movements. They could also help her keep down her weight without anorexia, the secret vice of the ballet world.

Dancers in Europe began to experiment with bioenhancement. First cautiously, clandestinely. Then scandalously. Now openly, as a mark of pride. A dancer with the Royal Ballet or the Bolshoi or the Nederlands Dans Theater who didn’t have his or her body enhanced was considered undevoted to movement. A dancer at the New York City Ballet who did have his or her body enhanced was considered undevoted to art.

Privitera swept into his office without apology for being late. “Ah, there you are. What can I do for you?” His accent was very light, but still the musical tones of his native Tuscany were there. It gave his words a deceptive intimacy.

“I’ve come about my daughter, Deborah Anders. She’s in the D level at SAB. She’s the one who—”

“Yes, yes, yes, I know who she is. I know all my dancers, even the very young ones. Of course. But shouldn’t you be talking with Madame Alois? She is the director of our school.”

“But you make all the important decisions,” I say, trying to smile winningly.

Privitera sat on a wing chair. He must have been in his seventies, yet he moved like a young man: straight strong back, light movements. The famous bright blue eyes met mine shrewdly. His vitality and physical presence on stage had made him a legendary dancer; now he was simply a legend. Whatever he decided the New York City Ballet should be, it became. I didn’t like him. That absolute power bothered me—even though it was merely power over an art form seen by only a fraction of the people who watched soccer or football.

“I have three questions about Deborah, Mr. Privitera. First—and I’m sure you hear this all the time—can you give me some idea of her chances as a professional dancer? She’ll have to apply to college this fall, if she’s going to go, and although what she really wants is to dance professionally, if that’s not going to happen then we need to think about other—”

“Yes, yes,” Privitera said, swatting away this question like the irrelevancy he considered it to be. “But dance is never a second choice, Ms. Anders.”

“Matthews,” I said. “Susan Matthews. Anders is Deborah’s name.”

“If Deborah has it in her to be a dancer, that’s what she will be. If not—” He shrugged. People who were not dancers ceased to exist for Anton Privitera.

“That’s what I want to know. Does she have it in her to be a professional dancer? Her teachers say she has good musicality and rhythm, but . . .”

My hands gripped together so tightly the skin was gray.

“Perhaps. Perhaps. You must leave it to me to judge when the time comes.”

“But that’s what I’m saying,” I said, as agreeably as I could. “The time has come. College—”

“You cannot hurry art. If Deborah is meant to be a dancer, she will become one. Leave it to me, dear.”

Dear. It was what he called all his dancers. I saw that it had just slipped out. Leave it to me, dear. I know best. How often did he say that in class, in rehearsal, during a choreography session, before a performance?

The muted strains of Coppelia drifted through the walls. I said, “Then let me ask my second question. As a parent, I’m naturally concerned about Deborah’s safety since these awful murders. What steps has City Ballet taken to ensure the safety of the students and dancers?”

The intense eyes contracted to blue shards. But I could see the moment he decided the question was within a parent’s right to ask. “The police do not think there is danger to the students. This . . . madman, this bestia, apparently attacks only full-fledged dancers, soloists and principals who have tried to reach art through medicine and not through dancing. No dancer in my company or my school is bioenhanced. My dancers believe as I do: You can achieve art only through talent and work, through opening yourself to the dance, not through mechanical aids. What they do at the ABT—that is not art! Besides,” he added, with an abrupt descent to the practical, “students cannot afford bioenhancing operations.”

Idealism enforced by realism—I saw the combination that kept the City Ballet a success, despite the technically superior performances of bioenhanced dancers. I could almost hear dancers and patrons alike: “The only real ballet.” “Dance that preserves the necessary illusion that the performers’ bodies and the audience’s are fundamentally the same.” “My dear, he’s simply the most wonderful man, saving the precious traditions that made dance great in the first place. We’ve pledged twenty thousand dollars—”

I decided to push. “But Jennifer Lang apparently found a way to afford illegal bioenhancements that—”

“That has nothing to do with your Deborah,” Privitera said, standing in one fluid movement. His blue eyes were arctic. “Now if you will excuse me, many things call me.”

“But you haven’t said what you are doing for the students’ safety,” I said, not rising from my chair, trying to sound as if my only interest were parental. “Please, I need to know. Deborah . . .”

He barely repressed a sigh. “We have increased security, Ms. Anders. Electronic surveillance both at SAB and Lincoln Center has been added to, with specifics that I cannot discuss. We have hired additional escorts for those students performing small professional roles who must leave Lincoln Center after ten at night. We have created new emphasis on teaching our young dancers the importance, the complete necessity, of training their bodies for dance, not relying on drugs and operations that can only offer tawdry imitations of the genuine experience of art.”

I doubted City Ballet had actually done all that: it had only been three days since Jennifer Lang’s murder. But Privitera’s rhetoric helped me ask my last questions.

“Have any other parents withdrawn their sons and daughters from SAB? For that matter, have any of your dancers altered their performance schedules? How has the company as a whole been affected?” Privitera looked at me with utter scorn. “If a dancer—even a student dancer—leaves me because some bestia is killing performers who do what I have insisted my dancers not do—such a so-called dancer should leave. There is no place for such a dancer in my school or my company. Don’t you understand, Ms. Anders—this is the New York City Ballet.”

He left. Through the open door the music was clear: still the Spanish dance from Coppelia. The girl who turned herself into a beautiful doll.

Michael was right. I was definitely too given to metaphors.

As I walked down the hall, it occurred to me that Privitera hadn’t mentioned increased bioscanning. Surely that would make the most sense—discover which dancers were attaining their high jumps and strong developpes through bioenhancement, and then eliminate those dancers from the purity of the company? Before some bestia did it first.

Deborah, I knew, was taking an extra class in Studio 3.1 shouldn’t go. If I went, we would only fight again. I pushed open the door to Studio 3.

I sat on a hard small chair with the ballet mothers waiting for the class to end. I knew better than to talk to any of them. They all wanted their daughters to succeed in ballet.

Barre warmups were over. The warm air smelled of rosin on wood. Dancers worked in the center of the floor, sweat dripping off their twirling and leaping bodies. Bourees, pirouettes, entrechats. “Non, non!” the teacher called, a retired French dancer whom I had never seen smile. “When you jump, your arms must help. They must pull you through from left to right. Like this.”

Deborah did the step wrong. “Non, non!” the teacher called. “Like this!”

Deborah still did it wrong. She grimaced. I felt my stomach tighten.

Deborah tried again. It was still wrong. The teacher gestured toward the back of the room. Deborah walked to the barre and practiced the step alone while the rest of the class went on leaping. Plie, releve, then . . . I didn’t know the names of the rest of these steps. Whatever they were, she was still doing them wrong. Deborah tried over and over again, her face clenched. I couldn’t watch.

When Deborah was fourteen, she ran away from home in St. Louis to her father’s hovel in New York, the same father she had not seen since she was three. She wanted to dance for Anton Privitera, she said. I demanded that Pers, whom I had divorced for desertion, send her back. He refused. Deborah moved into his rat-trap on West 110th, way outside Manhattan’s patrolled zone. The lack of police protection didn’t deter her, the filthy toilet down the hall didn’t deter her, the nine-year-old who was shot dealing sunshine on the stoop next door didn’t deter her. When I flew to New York, she cried but refused to go home. She wanted to dance for Anton Privitera.

You can’t physically wrestle a fourteen-year-old onto a plane. You can argue, and scream, and threaten, and plead, and cry, but you cannot physically move her. Not without a court order. I filed for breach of custody.

Pers did the most effective thing you can do in the New York judicial system: nothing. Since Pers was an indigent periodically on public assistance, the court appointed a public defender for him. The public defender had 154 cases. He asked for three continuances in a row. The judge had a docket full six months ahead. In less than a year and a half Deborah would be sixteen, legally entitled to leave home. She auditioned for Privitera, and the School of American Ballet accepted her.

Another kid was shot, this one on the subway just before Pers’s stop. She was twelve. A boy was knifed, a young mother was raped, houses were torched. Pers’s lawyer resigned. Another was appointed, who immediately filed for a continuance.

I quit my job with St. Louis Online and moved to New York. I left behind a new promotion, a house I loved, and a man I had just started to care about. I found work on Michael’s magazine, for half the prestige and two-thirds the salary, in a city twice as expensive and three times as dangerous. I took a two-room apartment on West Seventy-fifth, shabby but decent, just inside the patrolled zone. From my living room window I could see the shimmer of the electronic fence marking the zone. The shimmer bent to exclude all of Central Park south of Seventieth. I bought a gun.

After a few tense weeks, Deborah moved in with me. We lived with piles of toe shoes and surgical tape, with leotards and tights drying on a line strung across the living room, with Dance magazine in tattered third-hand copies that would go on to be somebody else’s fourth-hand copies, with bunions and inflamed tendons and pulled ligaments. We lived with Deborah’s guilt and my anger. At night I lay awake on the pull-out sofa, staring at the ceiling, remembering the day Deborah had started kindergarten and I had opened a college fund for her. She refused now to consider college. She wanted to dance for Anton Privitera.

Privitera had not yet invited her to join the company. She had just turned seventeen. This was her last year with the School. If she weren’t invited into the corps de ballet this year, she could forget about dancing for the New York City Ballet.

I sat with the ballet mothers and watched. Deborah’s extension was not as high as some of the other girls’, her strength not always enough to sustain a slow, difficult move.

So glamorous! the ballet mothers screeched. So beautiful! So wonderful for a girl to know so young what she wants to do with her life! The ballet mothers apparently never saw the constant injuries, the fatigue, the competition that made every friend a deadly rival, the narrowing down of a young world until there is only one definition of success: Do I get to dance for Privitera? Everything else is failure. Life and death, determined at seventeen. “I don’t know what I’ll do if Jeannie isn’t asked to join the company,” Jeannie’s mother told me. “It would be like we both died. Maybe we would.”

“You’re so unfair, Mom!” Deborah shouted at me periodically in the tiny, jammed apartment. “You never see the good side of dancing! You’re so against me!”

Is it so unfair to hope that your child will be forced out of a life that can only break her body and her heart? A life whose future will belong only to those willing to become human test tubes for inhuman biological experiments?

Nicole Heyer, the dead ABT dancer, had apparently come to the United States from Germany because she could not compete with the dazzlingly bioenhanced dancers in her own country. Jennifer Lang, an ordinary girl from an ordinary Houston family, had lacked the money for major experimentation. To finance her bioenhancements in European labs, she had rented herself out as a glamorous and expensive call girl. Fuck a ballerina: That was how her killer had gotten into her apartment.

In her corner of Studio 3, Deborah finally got the sequence of steps straight, although I could see she was wobbly. She rejoined the class. The room had become as steamy as a Turkish bath. Students ran and leapt the whole length of the hall, corner to corner, in groups of six. “Grand jete in third arabesque,” Madame called. “Non, non, more extension, Lisa. Victoria, more quick—vite! vite! One, two . . . next group.”

Deborah ran, jumped, and crashed to the ground.

I stood. Jeannie’s mother put a hand on my arm. “You can’t go to her,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’ll interfere with her discipline.” Madame ran gnarled hands over Deborah’s ankle. “Lisa, help her to the side. Ninette, go tell the office to send the doctor. Alors, next group, grand jete in third arabesque . . .”

I shook off Jeannie’s mother’s hand and walked slowly to where Deborah sat, her face twisted in pain.

“It’s nothing, Mom.”

“Don’t move it until the doctor gets here.”

“I said it’s nothing!”

It was a sprain. The doctor taped it and said Deborah shouldn’t dance for a week.

At home she limped to her room. An hour later I found her at the barre.

“Deborah! You heard what the doctor said!”

Her eyes were luminous with tears: Odette as the dying swan, Giselle in the mad scene. “I have to, Mom! You don’t understand! They’re casting Nutcracker in two weeks! I have to be there, dancing!”

“Deborah—”

“I can dance through the injury! Leave me alone!”

Deborah had never yet been cast in Privitera’s Nutcracker. I watched her transfer her weight gingerly to the injured ankle, wince, and plie. She wouldn’t meet my eyes in the mirror.

Slowly I closed the door.

That night we had tickets to see Coppelia. Caroline Olson skimmed across the stage, barely seeming to touch ground. Her grands jetes brought gasps from the sophisticated New York ballet audience. In the final act, when Swanilda danced a tender pas de deux with her lover Franz, I could see heads motionless all over the theater, lips slightly parted, barely breathing. Franz turned her slowly in a liquid arabesque, her leg impossibly high, followed by pirouettes. Swanilda melted from one pose to another, her long silken legs forming a perfect line with her body, flesh made light and strong and elegant as the music itself.

Beside me, I felt Deborah’s despair.

3.

Caroline jumps. She jumps with her hind legs out straight, one in front and one in back. She runs in circles and jumps again. Dmitri catches her.

“No, no,” Mr. Privitera says. “Not like that. Promenade en couronne, attitude, arabesque efface. Now the lift. Dimitri, you are handling her like a sack of grain. Like this.”

Mr. Privitera picks up Caroline. My ears raise. But Mr. Privitera is safe. Mr. Privitera can touch Caroline. Dmitri can touch Caroline. Carlos can touch Caroline.

Dmitri says, “It’s the damn dog. How am I supposed to learn the part with him staring at me, ready to tear me from limb to limb? How the hell am I supposed to concentrate?”

John Cole sits next to me. John says, “Dmitri, there’s no chance Angel will attack you. His biochip is state-of-the-art programming. I told you. If you’re in his ‘safe’ directory, you’d have to actually attack Caroline yourself before Angel would act, unless Caroline told you otherwise. There’s no real danger to break your concentration.”

Dmitri says, “And what if I drop her accidentally? How do I know that won’t look like an attack to that dog?”

Caroline sits down. She looks at John. She looks at Dmitri. She does not look at me. She smiles.

John says, “A drop is not an attack. Unless Caroline screams—and we all know she never does, no matter what the injury—there’s no danger. Believe me.”

“I don’t,” Dmitri says.

Everybody stands quiet.

Mr. Privitera says, “Caroline, dear, let me drop you. Stand up. Ready—lift.”

Caroline smells surprised. She stands. Mr. Privitera picks up Caroline. She jumps a little. He picks her up over his head. She falls down hard. My ears raise. Caroline does not scream. She is not hurt. Mr. Privitera is safe. Caroline said Mr. Privitera is safe.

“See?” Mr. Privitera says. He breathes hard. “No danger. Positions, please. Promenade en couronne, attitude, arabesque efface, lift.” Dmitri picks up Caroline. The music gets loud. John says in my ear, “Angel—did Caroline go away from her house last night?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Where did Caroline go?”

“Left four blocks, right one block. Caroline gave money.”

“The bakery,” John says. “Did she go away to any more places, or did she go home?”

“Caroline goes home last night.”

“Did anyone come to Caroline’s house last night?”

“No people come to Caroline’s house last night.”

“Thank you,” John says. He pats me. I feel happy.

Caroline looks at us. A woman ties a long cloth on Caroline’s waist. The woman gives Caroline a piece of wood. Yesterday I ask John what the wood is. Yesterday John says it is a fan. The music starts, faster. Caroline does not jump. Yesterday Caroline jumps with the fan. “Caroline?” Mr. Privitera says. “Start here, dear.”

Caroline jumps. She still looks at John. He looks at me.

Some woman here smells of yogurt and a bitch collie in heat.

Caroline opens the bedroom door. She comes out. She wears jeans on her hind legs. She wears a hat on her head. It covers all her fur. She walks to the door. She says to me, “Stay, you old fleabag. You hear me? Stay!”

I walk to the door.

“Christ.” Caroline opens the door a little way. She pushes her body through the door. She closes the door. I push through the door hard with her.

“I said stay!” Caroline opens the door again. She pushes me. I do not go inside. Caroline goes inside. I follow Caroline.

“Take two,” Caroline says. She opens the door. She walks away. She goes back. She closes the door. She opens the door. She closes the door. She turns around. She goes through the door and closes it hard. She is very fast. I am inside alone.

“Gotcha, Fido!” Caroline says through the door.

I howl. I throw me against the door. I bark and howl. The light goes on in my head. I howl and howl.

Soon Caroline comes through the door. A man holds her arm. He smells of iron. He talks to a box.

“Subject elected to return to her apartment, sir, rather than have me accompany her to her destination. We’re in her apartment now.” Caroline grabs the box. “John, you shit, how dare you! You had the dog biowired! That’s an invasion of privacy, I’ll sue your ass off, I’ll quit the company, I’ll—”

“Caroline,” John’s voice said. I look. There is no John smell. John is not here. Only John’s voice is here. “You have no legal grounds. This man is allowed to accompany you, according to the protection contract you signed. You signed it, my dear. As for quitting the City Ballet . . . That’s up to you. But while you dance for us, Angel goes where you do. If he gets too excited over not seeing you, the biosignal triggers. Just where were you going that you didn’t want Angel with you?”

“To turn tricks on street corners!” Caroline yells. “And I bet he has a homing device embedded in him, too, doesn’t he?”

She smells very angry. She is angry at me. I lie on the floor. I put my paws on my head. It is not happy here.

The man says, “Departing the apartment now, sir.” He leaves. He takes the small box.

Caroline sits on the floor. Her back is against the door. She looks at me. My paws are on my head. Caroline smells angry.

Nothing happens.

A little later Caroline says, “I guess it’s you and me, then. They set it up that way. I’m stuck with you.”

I do not move my paws. She still smells angry.

“All right, let’s try another approach. Disarm the enemy from within. Psychological sabotage. You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you? What did they give you, a five-year-old’s IQ? Angel . . .”

I look at Caroline. She says my right name.

“. . . tell me about Sam’s cat.”

“What?”

“Sam’s cat. You said that first day you came home with me that you smelled a cat on Sam, the day doorman. Do you still smell it? Can you tell what kind of cat it is?”

I am confused. Caroline says nice words. Caroline smells angry. Her back is too straight. Her fur is wrong.

“Is it a male cat or a female cat? Can you tell that?”

“A female cat,” I say. I remember the cat smell. My muscles itch. “Did you want to chase it?”

“I must never chase cats. I must protect Caroline.”

Caroline’s smell changes. She leans close to my ear.

“But did you want to chase it, Angel? Did you want to get to behave like a dog?”

“I want to protect Caroline.”

“Hoo boy. They did a job on you, didn’t they, boy?”

The words are too hard. Caroline still smells a little angry. I do not understand.

“It’s nothing compared to what they’re doing in South America and Europe,” she says. Her body shakes.

“Are you hurt?” I say.

Caroline puts a hand on my back. The hand is very soft. She says no words.

I am happy. Caroline talks to me. She tells me about dancing. Caroline is a dancer. She jumps and runs in circles. She stands high on her hind legs. People come in cars to watch her. The people are happy when Caroline dances.

We walk outside. I protect Caroline. We go many places. Caroline gives me cake and hot dogs. There are many smells. Sometimes Caroline and I follow the smells. We see many dogs and many cats. The man with the small box comes with us sometimes. John says the man is safe.

“What if I tell Angel you’re not ‘safe’ ?” Caroline says to the man. He follows us on a long walk. “What if I order him to tear you limb to limb?” She smells angry again.

“You don’t have programming override capacity. The biochip augmenting his bioenhancement is very specific, Ms. Olson. I’m hardwired in.”

“I’ll bet,” Caroline says. “Did anybody ask Angel if he wants this life?”

The man smiles.

We go to Lincoln Center every day. Caroline dances there. She dances in the day. She dances at night. More people watch at night.

John asks me where Caroline and I go. Every day I tell him.

Nobody tries to touch Caroline. I protect her.

“I can’t do it,” Caroline tells a man on the street corner. The man stands very close to Caroline. I growl soft. “For God’s sake, Stan, don’t touch me. The dog. And I’m probably being watched.”

“Do they care that much?”

“I could blow the whistle on the whole unofficial charade,” Caroline says. She smells tired. “No matter what Privitera’s delusions are. But then we’d lose our chance, wouldn’t we?”

“Thanks for the time,” the man says, loud. He smiles. He walks away.

Later John says, “Who did Caroline talk to?”

“A man,” I say. “He wants the time.”

Later Caroline says, “Angel, we’re going tonight to see my mother.”

4.

Uemonstrators dyed the fountain at Lincoln Center blood red.

They marched around the gruesome jets of water, shouting and resisting arrest. I sprinted across the plaza, trying to get there to see which side they were on before the police carted all of them away. Even from this distance I could tell they weren’t dancers, not with those thick bodies. The electronic placards dissolved from HOW MANY MUST DIE FROM DENYING EVOLUTION! to FREE MEDICAL RESEARCH FROM GOVERNMENT STRAITJACKETS! to MY BODY BELONGS TO ME! Pro-human bioenhancement, then. A holograph projector, which a cop was shutting down, spewed out a ten-foot-high holo of Jane and June Welsh, Siamese twins who had been successfully separated only after German scientists had bioenhanced their bodies to force alterations in major organs. The holo loop showed the attached twins dragging each other around, followed by the successfully separated twins waving gaily. The cop did something and Jane and June disappeared.

“They died,” I said to a demonstrator, a slim boy wearing a free my body! button. “Ultimately, neither of their hearts could stand the stress of bioenhancement.”

He glared at me. “That was their risk to take, wasn’t it?”

“Their combined IQ didn’t equal your weight. How could they evaluate risk?”

“This is a revolution, lady. In any revolution you have casualties that—” A cop grabbed his arm. The boy took a wild swing at him and the cop pressed his nerve gun to the boy’s neck. He dropped peacefully, smiling.

Abruptly more people gathered, some of them wilier than the boy. Demonstrators stood with their hands on their heads, singing slogans. Media robocams zoomed in from the sky; the live crews would be here in minutes. A group of counterdemonstrators formed across the plaza, in front of the Met. I backed away slowly, hands on my head, not singing—and stopped abruptly halfway across the chaotic plaza.

An old woman in a powerchair was watching the demonstration with the most intense expression I had ever seen. It was as if she were watching a horrifying execution, judging it judiciously as art. Bodyguards flanked the chair. She wore an expensive, pale blue suit and large, perfectly matched pearls. Her wrinkled, cold face was completely familiar. This was how Caroline Olson would look in forty years, if she refused all cosmetic treatment.

She caught me watching her. Her expression didn’t change. It passed over me as if I didn’t exist.

I took the chance. “Ms. Olson?”

She didn’t deny the name. “Yes?”

“I’m a reporter with New York Now, doing an article on the New York City Ballet. I’d like to ask you a few questions about your daughter Caroline, if that’s all right.”

“I never give interviews.”

“Yes, ma’am. Just a few informal questions—you must be so proud of Caroline. But are you worried about her safety in light of the recent so-called ballerina murders?”

She shocked me. She smiled. “No, not at all.”

“You’re not?”

She gazed at the break-up of the demonstration. “Do you know the work on dancers’ bodies they’re doing in Berlin?”

“No, I—”

“Then you have no business interviewing anyone on the subject.” She watched the last of the demonstrators being dragged away by the cops. “The New York City ballet is finished. The future of the art lies with bioenhancement.”

I must have looked like a fish, staring at her with my mouth working. “But Caroline is the prima ballerina, she’s only twenty-six—”

“Caroline had a good run. For a dancer.” She made a signal, an imperious movement of her hand, and one of the bodyguards turned her chair and wheeled it away.

I trotted after it. “But, Ms. Olson, are you saying you think your daughter and her whole company should be replaced by bioenhanced dancers because they can achieve higher lifts, fewer injuries, more spectacular turn out—”

“I never give interviews,” she said, and the other bodyguard moved between us.

I gazed after her. She had spoken about Caroline as if her daughter were an obsolete Buick. It took me a moment to remember to pull out a notebook and tell it what she had said.

Someone dumped something into the fountain. Immediately the red disappeared and the water spouted clear once more. A bioenhanced dog trotted over and lapped at the water, the dog’s owner patiently holding the leash while his pink-furred, huge-eyed poodle drank its fill.

After an hour at a library terminal at New York Now, I knew that Anna Olson was a major contributor to the American Ballet Theater but not to the New York City Ballet, where her daughter had chosen to dance. Caroline’s father was dead. He had left his widow an East Side mansion, three Renoirs, and a fortune invested in Peruvian sugar, Japanese weather-control equipment, and German pharmaceuticals. According to Ballet News, mother and daughter were estranged. To find out more than that, I’d need professional help.

Michael didn’t want to do it. “There’s no money for that kind of research, Susan. Not to even mention the ethics involved.”

“Oh, come on, Michael. It’s no worse than using criminal informers for any other story.”

“This isn’t your old newspaper job, Susie. We’re a feature magazine, remember? We don’t use informants, and we don’t do investigative reporting.” He leaned against his desk, his peeled-egg face troubled.

“The magazine doesn’t have to do any investigating at all. Just give me the number. I know you know it. If I’d been doing the job I should have for the last two years instead of sulking because I hate New York, I’d know it, too. Just the number, Michael. That’s all. Neither you nor the magazine will even be mentioned.”

He ran his hand through his hair. For the first time, I noticed that it was thinning. “All right. But Susan—don’t get obsessed. For your own sake.” He looked at the picture of his daughter doing time in Rock Mountain.

I called the Robin Hood and arranged to see him. He was young—they all are—maybe as young as twenty, operating out of a dingy apartment in Tribeca. I couldn’t judge his equipment: beyond basic literacy, computers are as alien to me as dancers. Like dancers, they concentrate on one aspect of the world, dismissing the rest.

The Robin Hood furnished the usual proofs that he could tap into private databanks, that he could access government records, and that his translation programs could handle international airline d-bases. He promised a two-day turnaround. The price was astronomical by my standards, although probably negligible by his. I transferred the credits from my savings account, emptying it.

I said, “You do know that the original Robin Hood transferred goods for free?”

He said, not missing a beat, “The original Robin Hood didn’t have to pay for a Seidman-Nuwer encryptor.”

I really hadn’t expected him to know who the original Robin Hood was.

When I got home, Deborah had fallen asleep across her bed, still dressed in practice clothes. The toes of her tights were bloody. A new pair of toe shoes were shoved between the bedroom door and the door jamb; she softened the stiff boxes by slamming the door on them. There were three email messages for her from SAB, but I erased them all. I covered her, closed her door, and let her sleep.

I met with the Robin Hood two days later. He handed me a sheaf of hardcopy. “The City Ballet injury records show two injuries for Caroline Olson in the last four years, which is as far back as the files are kept. One shin splint, one pulled ligament. Of course, if she had other injuries and saw a private doctor, that wouldn’t show up on their records, but if she did see one it wasn’t anybody on the City Ballet Recommended Physician List. I checked that.”

“Two injuries? In four years?”

“That’s what the record shows. These here are four-year records of City Ballet bioscans. All negative. Nobody shows any bioenhancement, not even Jennifer Lang. These are the City Ballet attendance figures over ten years, broken down by subscription and single-event tickets.”

I was startled; the drop in attendance over the last two years was more dramatic than the press had ever indicated.

“This one is Mrs. Anna Olson’s tax return for last year. All that income—all of it—is from investments and interests, and none of it is tied up in trusts or entails. She controls it all, and she can waste the whole thing if she wants to. You asked about unusual liquidation of stock in the last ten years: There wasn’t any. There’s no trust fund for Caroline Olson. This is Caroline’s tax return—only her salary with City Ballet, plus guest appearance fees. Hefty, but nothing like what the old lady controls.

“This last is the air flight stuff you wanted: No flights on major commercial airlines out of the country for Caroline in the last six years, except when the City Ballet did its three international tours, and then Caroline flew pretty much with everybody else in the group. Of course if she did go to Rio or Copenhagen or Berlin, she could have gone by chartered plane or private jet. My guess is private jet. Those aren’t required to file passenger lists.”

It wasn’t what I’d hoped to find. Or rather, it was half of what I’d hoped. No dancer is injured that seldom. It just doesn’t happen. I pictured Caroline Olson’s amazing extension, her breathtaking leaps; she reached almost the height expected of male superstars. And her crippled horror of a mother had huge amounts of money. “Caroline had a good run.”

I would bet my few remaining dollars that Caroline Olson was bioenhanced, no matter what her bioscans said. Jennifer Lang’s had been negative, too. Apparently the DNA hackers were staying one step ahead of the DNA security checkers. Although it was odd that the records didn’t show a single dancer trying to get away with bioenhancement, not even once, even in the face of Privitera’s fervency. There are always some people who value their own career advancement over the received faith.

But I had assumed that Caroline would have needed to leave the country. Bioenhancement labs are large, full of sensitive and costly and nonportable equipment, and dozens of technicians. Not easy to hide. Police investigators had traced both Jennifer Lang and Nicole Heyer to Danish labs. I didn’t think one could exist illegally in New York.

Maybe I was wrong.

The Robin Hood watched me keenly. In the morning light from the window he looked no older than Deborah. He had thick brown hair, nice shoulders. I wondered if he had a life outside his lab. So many of them didn’t.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Susan—”

“What?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know what you’re after with this data. But I’ve worked with friends of Michael’s before. If you’re thinking about trying to leverage anything to do with human bioenhancement . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t.” He looked intently at his console. “That’s out of both our leagues. Magazine reporters are very small against the kind of high-stakes shit those guys are into.”

“Thanks for the advice,” I said. And then, on impulse, “Would you by any chance like a home-cooked meal? I have a daughter about your age, seventeen, she’s a dancer. . .”

He stared at me in disbelief. He shook his head. “You’re a client, Susan. And anyway, I’m twenty-six. And I’m married.” He shook his head again. “And if you don’t know enough not to ask a Robin Hood to dinner, you really don’t know enough to mess around with bioenhancement. That stuff’s life or death.”

Life or death. Enough for a bioenhancement corporation to murder two dancers?

But I rejected that idea. It was always too easy to label the corporations the automatic bad guys. That was the stuff of cheap holovids. Most corporate types I knew just tried to keep ahead of the IRS.

I said, “Most life-and-death stuff originates at home.”

I could feel him shaking his head as I left, but I didn’t turn around.

5.

Caroline and I ride in a taxi. It is late at night. We ride across the park. Then we ride more. Caroline says words to a gate. A man opens the door to a very big house. He smells surprised. He wears pajamas. “Miss Caroline!”

“Hello, Seacomb. Is my mother in?”

“She’s asleep, of course. If there’s an emergency—”

“No emergency. But my apartment pipes sprung a leak and I’ll be spending the night here. This is my dog, Angel. Angel, Seacomb is safe.”

“Of course, Miss,” Seacomb says. He smells very unhappy. “It’s just—”

“Just that you have orders not to let me use this house?”

“No, Miss,” the man says. “My orders are to let you use the house as you choose. Only—”

“Of course they are,” Caroline says. “My mother wants me to grovel back here. She’s been panting for that. Well, here I am. Only she’s taken a sleeping pill and is out cold until morning, right?”

“Yes, Miss,” the man says. He smells very unhappy. There are no cats or dogs in this place, but there are mice. The mice droppings smell interesting.

“I’ll sleep in the downstairs study. And, oh, Seacomb, I’m expecting guests. Please disable the electric gate. They’ll use the back entrance, and I’ll let them in myself. You needn’t take any trouble about it.”

“It’s no trouble to—”

“I said I’ll let them in myself.”

“Yes, Miss,” Seacomb says. He smells very very unhappy.

He leaves. Caroline and I go down stairs. Caroline drinks. She gives me water. I smell a mouse in a cupboard. My ears raise. There are interesting things here.

“Well, Angel, here we are at my mother’s house. Do you remember your mother, boy?”

“No,” I say. I am confused. The words are a little hard.

“There are some people coming for a party. Some dancers. Kristine Meyers is coming. You remember Kristine Meyers?”

“Yes,” I say. Kristine Meyers dances with Caroline. They run in circles and jump high. Caroline jumps higher.

“We’re going to talk about dancing, Angel. This is a prettier house than mine to talk about dancing. This is a good house for a party, which is what we’re going to have. My mother lets me use her house for parties. Remember that, boy.”

Later Caroline opens the door. Some people stand there. We go into the basement. Kristine Meyers is there. She smells frightened. Some men are with her. They carry papers. They talk a long time.

“Here, Angel, have a pretzel,” a man says. “It’s a party.”

Some people dance to a radio. Kristine smells angry and confused. Her fur stands up. Caroline says words to her. The words are hard. The words are long. I have a pretzel. Nobody touches Caroline.

We are there all night. Kristine cries.

“Her boyfriend is gone,” Caroline says to me.

In early morning we go home. We go in a taxi. Somebody is sick in the taxi yesterday. It smells bad. Caroline sleeps. I sleep. Caroline does not go to class.

In the afternoon we go to Lincoln Center. Kristine is there. She sleeps on a couch in the lounge. Caroline dances with Dmitri.

John Cole bends close to my ear. “You went out with Caroline all last night.”

“Yes,” I say.

“Where did you go?”

“We go to Caroline’s mother’s house. We go to a party. Caroline’s mother lets Caroline use her house for parties.”

“Who was at this party?”

“Dancers. Kristine is at the party. Kristine is safe.”

John looks at Kristine. She still sleeps on the couch.

“Who else was at the party? What did they do?”

I remember hard. “Dancers are at the party. We eat pretzels. We talk about dancing. People dance to the radio. Nobody touches Caroline. There is music.”

John’s body relaxes. “Good,” he says. “Okay.”

“I like pretzels,” I say. But John does not give me a pretzel today.

Caroline and I walk in the park. There are many good smells. Caroline sits under a tree. The long fur on her head falls down. She pats my head. She gives me a cookie.

“It’s easy for you, isn’t it, Angel?” Caroline says.

I say, “The words are hard.”

“You like being a dog? A bioenhanced servant dog?”

“The words are hard.”

“Are you happy, Angel?”

“I am happy. I love Caroline.”

She pats my head again. The sun is warm. The smells are good. I close my eyes.

“I love to dance,” Caroline says. “And I hate that I love it.”

I open my eyes. Caroline smells unhappy.

“Goddamn it, I love it anyway. I do. Even though it wasn’t my choice. You didn’t choose what you are, either, did you, Angel? They goddamn made you what they needed you to be. Yet you love it. And for you there’s no account due.”

The words are too hard. I put my nose into Caroline’s front legs. She puts her front legs around me. She holds me tight.

“It’s not fair,” Caroline whispers into my fur.

Caroline does not hold me yesterday. She holds me today. I am happy. But Caroline smells unhappy.

Where is my happy if Caroline smells unhappy?

I do not understand.

6.

Deborah didn’t get cast in Nutcracker. An SAB teacher told her she might want to consider auditioning for one of the regional companies rather than City Ballet—a death sentence, from her point of view. She told me this quietly, without histrionics, sitting cross-legged on the floor sewing ribbons onto a pair of toe shoes. Not wanting to say the wrong thing, I said nothing, contenting myself with touching her hair, coiled at the nape of her neck into the ballerina bun. Two days later she told me she was dropping out of high school.

“I need the time to dance,” she said. “You just don’t understand, Mom.”

The worst thing I could do was let her make me into the enemy. “I do understand, honey. But there will be lots of time to dance after you finish school. And if you don’t—”

“Finishing is a year away! I can’t afford the time. I have to take more classes, work harder, get asked into the company. This year. I’m sorry, Mom, but I just can’t waste my time on all that useless junk in school.”

I locked my hands firmly on my lap. “Well, let’s look at this reasonably. Suppose after all you do get asked to join the company—”

“I will be asked! I’ll work so hard they’ll have to ask me!”

“All right. Then you dance with them until, say, you’re thirty-five. At thirty-five you have over half your life left. You saw what happened to Carla Cameri and Maura Jones.” Carla’s hip had disintegrated; Maura’s Achilles tendon had forced her into retirement at thirty-two. Both of them worked in a clothing store, for pitifully small salaries. Dancers didn’t get pensions unless they’d been with the same company for ten years, a rarity in the volatile world of artistic directors with absolute power, who often fired dancers because they were remaking a company into a different “look.”

I pressed my point. “What will you do at thirty or thirty-five with your body debilitated and without even a high school education?”

“I’ll teach. I’ll coach. I’ll go back to school. Oh, Mom, how do I know? That’s decades away! I have to think about what I need to do for my career now!”

No mother love is luminous enough to make a sixteen-year-old see herself at thirty-five.

I said, “No, Deborah. You can’t quit school. I’d have to sign for you, and I won’t.”

“Daddy already did.”

We looked at each other. It was too late; she’d already made me into the enemy. Because she needed one.

She said, in a sudden burst of passion, “You don’t understand! You never felt about your job the way I feel about ballet! You never loved anything enough to give up everything else for it!” She rushed to her room and slammed the door. I put my head in my hands.

After a while, I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Never loved anything enough to give up everything else for it.

Right.

Pers wasn’t available to yell at. I phoned six times. I left messages on email, even though I had no idea whether he had a terminal. I made the trip out of the protected zone to his apartment. The area was worse than I remembered: glass, broken machinery, shit, drug paraphernalia. The cab driver was clearly eager to leave, but I made him wait while I questioned a kid who came out of Pers’s building. The boy, about eight, had a long pus-encrusted cut down one cheek.

“Do you know when Pers Anders usually comes home? He lives in 2C.”

The kid stared at me, expressionless. The cab driver leaned out and said, “One more minute and I’m leaving, lady.”

I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and held it close to me. “When does Pers Anders usually come home?”

“He moved.”

“Moved?”

“Left his stuff. He say he go someplace better than this shithole. I hear him say it. Don’t you try to prong me, lady. You give me that money.”

“Do you know the address?”

He greeted this with the scorn it deserved. I gave him the money.

Deborah left school and started spending all day and much of the night at Lincoln Center. Finally I walked over to SAB and caught her just before a partnering class. She had twisted a bright scarf around her waist, over her leotard, and her sweaty hair curled in tendrils where it had escaped her bun.

“Deborah, why didn’t you tell me your father had moved?”

She looked wary, wiping her face with a towel to gain time. “I didn’t think you’d care. You hate him.”

“As long as you still visit him, I need to know where he is.”

She considered this. Finally she gave me the address. It was a good one, in the new luxury condos where the old main library had been.

“How can Pers afford that?”

“He didn’t say. Maybe he’s got a job. Mom, I have class.”

“Pers is allergic to jobs.”

“Mom, Mr. Privitera is teaching this class himself!”

I didn’t stay to watch class. On the way out, I passed Privitera, humming to himself on his way to elate or cast down his temple virgins.

The police had released no new information on the ballerina murders.

I turned in the article on the New York City Ballet. It seemed to me neither good nor bad; everything important about the subject didn’t fit the magazine’s focus. There weren’t too many metaphors. Michael read it without comment. I worked on an article about computerized gambling, and another about holographic TV. I voted in the Presidential election. I bought Christmas presents.

But every free minute, all autumn and early winter, I spent at the magazine library terminals, reading about human bioenhancement, trying to guess what Caroline Olson was having done to herself. What might someday lie in Deborah’s future, if she were as big a fool then as she was being now.

“Don’t get obsessed,” Michael had said.

The literature was hard to interpret. I wasn’t trained in biology, and as far as I could see, the cutting-edge research was chaotic, with various discoveries being reported one month, contradicted the next. All the experiments were carried out in other countries, which meant they were reported in other languages, and I didn’t know how far to trust the biases of the translators. Most of them seemed to be other scientists in the same field. This whole field seemed to me like a canoe rushing toward the falls: nobody in charge, both oars gone, control impossible.

I read about splendid, “revolutionary” advances in biological nanotechnology that always seemed under development, or not quite practical yet, or hotly disputed by people practicing other kinds of revolutionary advances. I read about genesplicing retroviruses and setting them loose in human organs to accomplish potentially wonderful things. Elimination of disease. Perfect metabolic functioning. Immortality. The studies were always concerned with one small, esoteric facet of scientific work, but the “Conclusions” sections were often grandiose, speculating wildly.

I even picked up hints of experimental work on altering genetic makeup in vitro, instead of trying to reshape adult bodies. Some scientists seemed to think this might actually be easier to accomplish. But nowhere in the world was it legal to experiment on an embryo not destined for abortion, an embryo that would go on to become a human being stuck with the results of arbitrary and untested messing around with his basic cellular blueprints. Babies were not tinker toys—or dogs. The Copenhagen Accord, signed twenty-seven years by most technologically civilized countries, had seen to that. The articles on genetic modification in vitro were carefully speculative.

But then so was nearly everything else I read. The proof was walking around in inaccessible foreign hospitals, or living anonymously in inaccessible foreign cities—the anonymity of the experimental subjects seemed to be a given, which also made me wonder how many of them were experimental casualties. And if so, of what kind.

Michael wasn’t going to want any article built on this tentative speculation. Lawsuits would loom. But I was beyond caring what Michael wanted.

I learned that the Fifth International Conference on Human Bioenhancement was going to be held in Paris in late April. After paying the Robin Hood, I had no money left for a trip to Paris. Michael would have to pay for it. I would have to give him a reason.

One night in January I did a stupid thing. I went alone to Lincoln Center and waited by the stage door of the New York State Theater. Caroline Olson came out at 11:30, dressed in jeans and parka, accompanied only by a huge black Doberman on the most nominal of leashes.

They walked south on Broadway, to an all-night restaurant. I sat myself at the next table.

For the last few months, her reviews had not been good. “A puzzling and disappointing degeneration,” said the New Yorker. “Technical sloppiness not associated with either Olson or Privitera,” said Dance Magazine. “This girl is in trouble, and Anton Privitera had better find out what kind of trouble and move to correct it,” said the Times Online.

Caroline ate abstractly, feeding bits to the dog, oblivious to the frowns of a fastidious waiter who was undoubtedly an out-of-work actor. Up close, the illusion of power and beauty I remembered from Coppelia evaporated. She looked like just another mildly pretty, selfabsorbed, overly thin young woman. Except for the dog, the waiter/actor didn’t give her a second glance.

“We go now?” the dog said.

I choked on my sandwich. Caroline glanced at me absently. “Soon, Angel.”

She went on eating. I left, waited for her, and followed her home. She and the dog lived on Central Park South, a luxury building where the late-night electronic surveillance system greeted them both by name.

I took a cab home. Deborah had never mentioned that the City Ballet prima ballerina was protected by a bioenhanced Doberman. She knew I’d written the story about the ballerina murders. Anton Privitera hadn’t mentioned it, either, in his press conference about dancer safety. I wondered why not. While I was parceling out wonder, I devoted some to the question of City Ballet’s infrequent, superficial, and always-negative bioscans. Shouldn’t a company devoted to the religion of “natural art” be more zealous about ferreting out heretics?

Unless, of course, somebody didn’t really want to know.

Privitera? But that was hard to reconcile with his blazing, intolerant sincerity.

It occurred to me that I had never seen an admittedly bioenhanced dancer perform. Until tonight, I’d gone to finished performances rarely and only with Deborah, who of course scorned such perverts and believed that they had nothing to teach her.

She was out when I got back to our apartment. Each week, it seemed, she was gone more. I fell asleep, waiting for her to come home.

7.

Onow falls. It is cold. Caroline and I walk to Lincoln Center. A man takes Caroline’s purse. He runs. Caroline says “Shit!” Then she says, “Angel? Go stop him!” She drops my leash.

I run and jump on the man. He screams. I do not hurt him. Caroline says stop him. She does not say attack him. So I stand on the man’s chest and growl and nip at his foreleg. He brings out a knife. Then I bite him. He drops the knife and screams again. The police come.

“Holy shit,” Caroline says to me. “You really do that. You really do.”

“I protect Caroline,” I say.

Caroline talks to police. Caroline talks to reporters. I get a steak to eat.

I am happy.

The snow goes away. The snow is there many many days, but it goes away. We visit Caroline’s mother’s house for two more parties in the basement. It gets warm in the park. Ducks live in the water again. Flowers grow. Caroline says not to dig up flowers.

I lie backstage. Caroline dances on stage. John and Mr. Privitera stand beside me. They smell unhappy. John’s shoes smell of tar and food and leaves and cats and other good things. I sniff John’s shoes.

“She looks exhausted,” John says. “She’s giving it everything she’s got, but it’s just not there, Anton.”

Mr. Privitera says no words. He watches Caroline dance.

“William Scholes attacked again in the Times. He said that watching her had become painful—‘like watching a reed grown stiff and brittle.’ ”

“I will talk to her again,” Mr. Privitera says.

“Scholes called the performance ‘a travesty,’ ” John says.

Caroline comes backstage. She limps. She wipes her face with a towel. She smells afraid.

“Dear, I’d like to see you,” Mr. Privitera says.

We go to Caroline’s dressing room. Caroline sits down. She trembles. Her body smells sick. I growl. Caroline puts a hand on my head.

Mr. Privitera says, “First of all, dear, I have good news for all of us. The police have caught that unspeakable murderer who killed Jennifer Lang and the ABT dancer.”

Caroline sits up a little straighter. Her smell changes. “They did! How?”

“They caught him breaking into the Plaza Hotel room where Marie D’Arbois is staying while she guests with ABT.”

“Is Marie—”

“She’s fine. She wasn’t alone, she had a lover or something with her. The madman just got careless. The police are holding back the details. Marie, of course, is another of those bioenhanced dancers. I don’t know if you ever saw her dance.”

“I did,” Caroline says. “I thought she was wonderful.”

Caroline and Mr. Privitera look hard at each other. They smell ready to attack. But they do not attack. I am confused. Mr. Privitera is safe. He may touch Caroline.

Mr. Privitera says, “We must all be grateful to the police. Now there’s something else I need to discuss with you, dear.”

Caroline closes her hand on my fur. She says, “Yes?”

“I want you to take a good long rest, dear. You know your dancing has deteriorated. You tell me you’re not doing drugs or working sketchily, and I believe you. Sometimes it helps a dancer to take a rest from performing. Take class, eat right, get strong. In the fall we’ll see.”

“You’re telling me you’re cutting me from the summer season at Saratoga.”

“Yes, dear.”

Caroline is quiet. Then she says, “There’s nothing wrong with me. My timing has just been a little off, that’s all.”

“Then take the summer to work on your timing. And everything else.”

Mr. Privitera and Caroline look hard at each other again. Caroline’s hand still pulls my fur. It hurts a little. I do not move.

Mr. Privitera leans close to Caroline. “Listen, dear. Jewels was one of your best roles. But tonight . . . and not just Jewels. You wobbled and wavered through Starscape. Your Nikiya in the ‘Shades’ section of La Bayadere was . . . embarrassing. There is no other word. You danced as if you had never learned the steps. And you couldn’t even complete the Don Quixote pas de deux at the gala.”

“I fell! Dancers get injured all the time! My injury rate compared to—”

“You’ve missed rehearsals and even performances,” Mr. Privitera said. He stands up. “I’m sorry, dear. Take the summer. Rest. Work. In the fall, we’ll see.”

Caroline says, “What about the last two weeks of the season?”

Mr. Privitera says, “I’m sorry, dear.”

He walks to the door. He puts his hand on the door. He says, “Oh, at least you won’t have to be burdened with that dog anymore. Now that the madman’s been caught, I’ll have John notify the protection agency to come pick it up.”

Caroline raises her head. Her fur all stands up. She smells angry. Soon she runs out the door. Mr. Privitera is gone. She runs to the offices. “John! John, you bastard!”

The office hall is dark. The doors do not open. John is not here. Caroline runs up steps to the offices. She falls. She falls down some of the steps and hits the wall. She lies on the floor. She holds her hind foot and smells hurt.

“Angel,” she says. “Go get somebody to help me.”

I go to the lounge. One dancer is there. She says, “Oh! I’m sorry, I didn’t know that anybody—Angel?”

“Caroline is hurt,” I say. “Come. Come fast.”

She comes. Caroline says, “Who are you? No, wait—Deborah, right? From the corps?”

“No, I’m not . . . I haven’t been invited to join the corps yet. I’m a student at SAB. I’m just here a lot. . . . Are you hurt? Can you stand?”

“Help me up,” Caroline says. “Angel, Deborah is safe.”

Deborah tries to pick up Caroline. Caroline makes a little noise. She cannot stand. Deborah gets John. He picks up Caroline.

“It’s nothing,” she says. “No doctor. Just get me a cab . . . Dammit, John, don’t fuss, it’s nothing!” She looks at John hard. “You want to take Angel away from me.”

John smells surprised. He says, “Who told you that?”

“His Majesty himself. But now you’ve decided whatever you thought I was doing so privately doesn’t matter any more, is that right?”

“It’s a mistake. Of course you can keep the dog. Anton doesn’t understand,” John says. He smells angry.

“No, I’ll just bet he doesn’t,” Caroline says. “You might have picked a kinder way to tell me I’m through at City Ballet.”

“You’re not through, Caroline,” John says. Now he smells bad. His words are not right. He smells like the man who takes Caroline’s purse. “Right,” Caroline says. She sits in the cab.

Deborah steps back. She smells surprised.

“I’m keeping the dog,” Caroline says. “So we’re in agreement, aren’t we, John? Come on, Angel. Let’s go home.”

We go to class. Caroline cannot dance. She tries and then stops. She sits in a corner. Mr. Privitera sits in another corner. Caroline watches Deborah. The dancers raise one hind leg. They spin and jump.

Madame holds up her hand. The music stops. “Deborah, let us see that again, s’il vous plait. Alone.”

The other dancers move away. They look at each other. They smell surprised. The music starts again and Deborah raises one hind leg very high. She spins and jumps.

Mr. Privitera says, “Let me see the bolero from Coppelia. Madame says you know it.”

“Y-yes,” Deborah says. She dances alone.

“Very nice, dear,” Mr. Privitera says. “You are much improved.” The other dancers look at each other again.

Everybody dances.

Caroline watches Deborah hard.

8.

Deborah’s face looked like every Christmas morning in the entire world. She grabbed both my hands. “They invited me to join the company!”

My suitcase lay open on the bed, surrounded by discarded clothes I wasn’t taking to the bioenhancement conference in Paris. My daughter picked up a pile of spidersilk blouses and hurled them into the air. In the soft April air from the open window the filmy, artificial material drifted and danced. “I can’t believe it! They asked me to join the company! I’m in!”

She whirled around the tiny room, rising on toe in her street shoes, laughing and exclaiming. My silence went unnoticed. Deborah did an arabesque to the bedpost, then plopped herself down on my best dress. “Don’t you want to know what happened, Mom?”

“What happened, Deborah?”

“Well, Mr. Privitera came to watch class, and Madame asked me to repeat the variation alone. God, I thought I’d die. Then Mr. Privitera—not Madame—asked me to do the bolero from Coppelia. For an awful minute I couldn’t remember a single step. Then I did, and he said it was very nice! He said I was much improved!”

Accolades from the king. But even in my numbness I could see there was something she wasn’t telling me.

“I thought you told me the company doesn’t choose any new dancers this close to the end of the season?”

She sobered immediately. “Not usually. But Caroline Olson was fired. She missed rehearsals and performances, and she wasn’t even taking the trouble to prepare her roles. Her reviews have been awful.”

“I saw them,” I said.

Deborah looked at me sharply. “Ego, I guess. Caroline’s always been sort of a bitch. So apparently they’re not letting her go to Saratoga, because Tina Patrochov and a guest artist are dividing her roles, and Mr. Privitera told Jill Kerrigan to learn Tina’s solo from Sleeping Beauty. So that left a place in the corps de ballet, and they chose me!”

I had had enough time to bring myself to say it.

“Congratulations, sweetheart.”

“When does your plane for Paris leave?”

This non sequitur—if it was that—turned me back to my packing. “Seven tonight.”

“And you’ll be gone ten days. You’ll have a great time in Paris. Maybe the next time the company goes on tour, I’ll go with them!” She whirled out of the room.

I sat at the end of the bed, holding onto the bedpost. When Deborah was three, she’d wanted a ride on a camel. Somehow it had become an obsession. She talked about camels in daycare, at dinnertime, at bedtime. She drew pictures of camels, misshapen things with one huge hump. Camels were in short supply in St. Louis. Ignore it, everyone said, kids forget these things, she’ll get over it. Deborah never forgot. She didn’t get over it. Pers had just left us, and I was consumed with the anxiety of a single parent. Finally I paid a friend to tie a large wad of hay under a blanket on his very old, very swaybacked horse. A Peruvian camel, I told my three-year-old. A very special kind. You can have a ride.

“That’s not a camel,” Deborah had said, with nostril-lifted disdain. “That’s a heffalunt!”

I read last week in World that the animal-biotech scientists have built a camel with the flexible trunk of an elephant. The trunk can lift up to forty-five pounds. It was expected to be a useful beast of burden in the Sahara.

I finished packing for Paris.

Paris in April was an unending gray drizzle. The book and software stalls along the Seine kept up their electronic weather shields, giving them the hazy, streaming-gutter look of abandoned outhouses. The gargoyles on Notre Dame looked insubstantial in the rain, irrelevant in the face of camels with trunks. The French, as usual, conspired to make Americans—especially Americans who speak only rudimentary French—feel crass and barbaric. My clothes were wrong. My desire for a large breakfast was wrong. The Fifth International Conference on Human Bioenhancement had lost my press credentials.

The conference was held in one of the huge new hotels in Neuilly, near the Eurodisney Gene Zoo. I couldn’t decide if this was an attempt to provide entertainment or irony. Three hundred scientists and doctors, a hundred press, and at least that many industrial representatives, plus groupies, thronged the hotel. The scientists presented papers; the industrial reps, mostly from biotech or pharmaceutical firms, presented “infoforums.” The moment I walked in, carrying provisional credentials, I felt the tension, a peculiar kind of tension instantly recognizable to reporters. Something big was going on. Big and unpleasant.

From the press talk in the bar I learned that the presentation to not miss was Thursday night by Dr. Gerard Taillebois of the Pasteur Institute, in conjunction with Dr. Greta Erbland of Steckel and Osterhoff. This pairing of a major research facility with a commercial biotech firm was common in Europe. Sometimes the addition of a hospital made it a triumvirate. A hand-written addendum on the program showed that the presentation had been moved from the Napoleon Room to the Grand Ballroom. I checked out the room; it was approximately the size of an airplane hangar. Hotel employees were setting up acres of chairs.

I asked a gargon to point out Dr. Taillebois to me. He was a tall, bald man in his sixties or seventies who looked like he hadn’t slept or eaten in days.

Wednesday night I went to the Paris Opera Ballet. The wet pavement in front of the Opera House gleamed like black patent leather. Patrons dripped jewels and fur. This gala was why Michael had funded my trip; my first ballet article for New York Now had proved popular, despite its vapidity. Or maybe because of it. Tonight the famous French company was dancing an eclectic program, with guest artists from the Royal Ballet and the Kirov. Michael wanted five thousand words on the oldest ballet company in the world.

I watched bioenhanced British dancers perform the wedding pas de deux from Sleeping Beauty; with its famous fishdives; Danish soloists in twentieth-century dances by Georges Balanchine; French ballerinas in contemporary works by their brilliant choreographer Louis Dufort. All of them were breathtaking. In the new ballets, especially choreographed for these bioenhanced bodies, the dancers executed sustained movements no natural body would have been capable of making at all, at a speed that never looked machinelike. Instead the dancers were flashes of light: lasers, optic signals, nerve impulses surging across the stage and triggering pleasure centers in the brains of the delighted audience.

I gaped at one pas de trois in which the male dancer lifted two women at once, holding them aloft in swallow lifts over his head, one on each palm, then turning them slowly for a full ninety seconds. It wasn’t a bench-pressing stunt. It was the culmination of a yearning, lyrical dance, as tender as any in the great nineteenth-century ballets. The female dancers were lowered slowly to the floor, and they both flowed through a fouette of adage as if they hadn’t any bones.

Not one dancer had been replaced in the evening’s program due to injury. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a performance of the New York City Ballet without a last-minute substitution.

During intermission, profoundly depressed, I bought a glass of wine in the lobby. The eddying crowd receded for a moment, and I was face to face with Anna Olson, seated regally in her powerchair and flanked by her bodyguards. Holding tight to her hand was a little girl of five or six, dressed in a pink party dress and pink tights, with wide blue eyes, black hair, and a long slim neck. She might have been Caroline Olson fifteen years ago.

“Ms. Olson,” I said.

She looked at me coldly, without recognition.

“I’m Susan Matthews. We met at the private reception for Anton Privitera at Georgette Allen’s,” I lied.

“Yes?” she said, but her eyes raked me. My dress wasn’t the sort that turned up at the private fundraisers of New York billionaires. I didn’t give her a chance to cut me.

“This must be your—” granddaughter? Caroline, an only child, had never interrupted her dancing career for pregnancy, niece? grandniece? “—your ward.”

“Je m’appelle Marguerite,” the child said eagerly. “Nous regardons le ballet.”

“Do you study ballet, Marguerite?”

“Mais oui!” she said scornfully, but Anna Olson made a sign and the bodyguards deftly cut me off from both of them. By maneuvering around the edge of the hall, I caught a last, distant glimpse of Marguerite. She waited patiently in line to go back to her seat. Her small feet in pink ballet slippers turned out in a perfect fifth position.

Thursday afternoon I drove into Paris to rent an electronic translator for the presentation by Taillebois and Erbland. The translators furnished by the conference were long since claimed. People who had rented them for the opening talks simply hung onto them, afraid to miss anything. The Taillebois/Erbland presentation would include written handouts in French, English, German, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese, but not until the session was over. I was afraid to miss anything, either.

I couldn’t find a electronic translator with a brand name I trusted. I settled for a human named Jean-Paul, from a highly recommended commercial agency. He was about four feet ten, with sad brown eyes and a face wrinkled into fantastic crevasses. He told me he had translated for Charles de Gaulle during the crisis in Algeria. I believed him. He looked older than God.

We drove back to Neuilly in the rain. I said, “Jean-Paul, do you like ballet?”

“Non,” he said immediately. “It is too slippery an art for me.”

“Slippery?”

“Nothing is real. Girls are spirits of the dead, or joyous peasants, or other silly things. Have you ever seen any real peasants, Mademoiselle? They are not joyous. And girls lighter than air land on stage with a thump!” He illustrated by smacking the dashboard with his palm. “Men die of love for those women. Nobody dies for love. They die for money, or hate, but not love. Non.”

“But isn’t all art no more than illusion?”

He shrugged. “Not all illusion is worth creating. Not silly illusions. Dancers wobbling on tippy toes . . . non, non.”

I said carefully, “French dancers can be openly bioenhanced. Not like in the United States. To some of us, that gives the art a whole new excitement. Technical, if not artistic.”

Jean-Paul shrugged again. “Anybody can be bioenhanced, if they have the money. Bioenhancement, by itself it does not impress me. My grandson is bioenhanced.”

“What does he do?”

Jean-Paul twisted his body toward me in the seat of the car. “He is a soccer player! One of the best in the world! If you followed the sport, you would know his name. Claude Despreaux. Soccer—now there is illusion worth creating!”

His tone was exactly Anton Privitera’s, talking about ballet.

Thursday evening, just before the presentation, I finally caught Deborah at home. Her face on the phonevid was drawn and strained. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Mom. How’s Paris?”

“Wet. Deborah, you’re not telling me the truth.”

“Everything’s fine! I just . . . just had a complicated rehearsal today.”

The corps de ballet does not usually demand complicated rehearsals. The function of the corps is to move gracefully behind the soloists and principal dancers; it’s seldom allowed to do anything that will distract from their virtuosity. I said carefully, “Are you injured?”

“No, of course not. Look, I have to go.”

“Deborah . . .”

“They’re waiting for me!” The screen went blank.

Who was waiting for her? It was 1:00 A.M. in New York.

When I called back, there was no answer.

I went to the Grand Ballroom. Jean-Paul had been holding both our seats, lousy ones, since noon. An hour later, the presentation still had not started.

The audience fidgeted, tense and muttering. Finally a woman dressed in a severe suit entered. She spoke German. Jean-Paul translated into my ear.

“Good evening. I am Katya Waggenschauser. I have an announcement before we begin. I regret to inform you that Dr. Taillebois will not appear. Dr. Taillebois . . . he . . .” Abruptly she ran off the stage.

The muttering rose to an astonished roar.

A man walked on stage. The crowd quieted immediately. Jean-Paul translated from the French, “I am Dr. Valois of the Pasteur Institute. Shortly Dr. Erbland will begin the presentation. But I regret to inform you that Dr. Taillebois will not appear. There has been an unfortunate accident. Dr. Taillebois is dead.”

The murmuring rose, fell again. I heard reporters whispering into camphones in six languages.

“In a few moments Dr. Erbland will make her and Dr. Taillebois’s presentation. Please be patient just a few moments longer.”

Eventually someone introduced Dr. Erbland, a long and fulsome introduction, and she walked onto the stage. A thin, tall woman in her sixties, she looked shaken and pale. She opened by speaking about how various kinds of bioenhancement differed from each other in intent, procedure, and biological mechanism. Most bioenhancements were introduced into an adult body that had already finished growing. A few, usually aimed at correcting hereditary problems, were carried out on infants. Those procedures were somewhat closer to the kinds of genetic re-engineering—it was not referred to merely as “bioenhancement”—that produced new strains of animals. And as with animals, science had long known that it was possible to manipulate pre-embryonic human genes in the same way, in vitro.

The audience grew completely quiet.

In vitro work, Dr. Erbland said, offered by its nature fewer guides and guarantees. There were much coded redundancies in genetic information, and that made it difficult to determine long-term happenings. The human genome map, the basis of all embryonic reengineering, had been complete for forty years, but “complete” was not the same as “understood.” The body had many genetic behaviors that researchers were only just beginning to understand. No one could have expected that when embryonic re-engineering first began, as a highly experimental undertaking, that genetic identity would be so stubborn.

Stubborn? I didn’t know what she meant. Apparently, neither did anybody else in the audience. People scarcely breathed.

This experimental nature of embryonic manipulation in humans did not, of course, stop experimentation, Dr. Erbland continued. Before such experimentation was declared illegal by the Copenhagen Accord, many laboratories around the world had advanced science with the cooperation of voluntary subjects. Completely voluntary, she said. She said it three times.

I wondered how an embryo volunteered.

These voluntary subjects had been re-engineered using variants of the same techniques that produced in vitro bioenhancements in other mammals. Her company, in conjunction with the Pasteur Research Institute, had been pioneers in the new techniques. For over thirty years.

Thirty years. My search of the literature had found nothing going back that far. At least not those available on the standard scientific nets. If such “re-engineered” embryos had been allowed to fully gestate, and had survived, they were just barely within the cut-off date for legal existence. Were we talking about embryos or people here?

Dr. Erbland made a curious gesture: raising both arms from the elbow, then letting them fall. It looked almost like a plea. Was she making a public confession of breaking international law? Why would she do that?

Over such a long time, Dr. Erbland continued, the human genetic identity, encoded in “jumping genes” in many unsuspected redundant ways, reasserted itself. This was the subject of her and Dr. Taillebois’s work. Unfortunately, the effect on the organism—completely unanticipated by anyone—could be biologically devestating. This first graphic showed basal DNA changes in a re-engineered embryo created twenty-five years ago. The subject, a male, was—

A holograph projected a complicated, three-dimensional genemap.

The scientists in the audience leaned forward intently. The nonscientists looked at each other.

As the presentation progressed, anchored in graphs and formulas and genemap holos, it became clear even to me what Dr. Erbland was actually saying.

European geneticists had been experimenting on embryos as long as thirty years ago, and never stopped. They had allowed some of those embryos to become people. Against international law, and without knowing the long-term effects. And now the long-term effects, like old bills, were coming due, and those people’s bodies were destroying themselves at the genetic level.

We had engineered a bioenhanced cancer to replace the natural one we had conquered.

It was a few moments before I noticed that Jean-Paul had stopped translating. He sat like stone, his wrinkled face lengthened in sorrow.

The audience forgot this was a scientific conference. “How many people have been re-engineered at an embryonic level?” someone shouted in English. “Total number worldwide!”

Someone else shouted, “A todos van a morir?”

“Les lois internationales—”

“Der sagt—”

Dr. Erbland broke into a long, passionate speech, clearly not part of the prepared presentation. I caught the word “sagt” several times: law. I remembered that Dr. Erbland worked for a commercial biotech firm wholly owned by a pharmaceutical company.

The same company in which Anna Olson owned a fortune in stock. Jean-Paul said quietly, “My grandson. Claude. He was one of those embryos. They told us it was safe. . . .”

I looked at the old man, slumped forward, and I couldn’t find any sympathy for him. That appalled me. A cherished grandson . . . But they had agreed, Claude’s parents, to roulette with a child’s life. In order to produce a superior soccer player. “Soccer—now there is an illusion worth creating.”

I remembered Anna Olson at the demonstration by the Lincoln Center fountain: “Caroline had a good run. For a dancer.” Caroline Olson, Deborah said, had been fired because she missed rehearsals and performances. The Times had called her last performance “a travesty.” Because her body was eating itself at a genetic level, undetectable by the City Ballet bioscans that assumed you could compare new DNA patterns to the body’s original, which no procedure completely erased. But for Caroline, the original itself had carried the hidden blueprint for destruction. For twenty-six years.

The ultimate ballet mother had made Caroline into what Anna Olson needed her to be. For as long as Caroline might last.

And then I remembered little Marguerite, standing with her perfect turn out in fifth position.

I stood and pushed my way to the exit. I had to get out of that room. Nobody else left. Dr. Erbland, rattled and afraid, tried to answer questions shouted in six languages. I shoved past a woman who was punching her neighbor. Gendarmes appeared as if conjured from the floorboards. Maybe that would be next.

The hardcopies of Dr. Taillebois’s original presentation were stacked neatly on tables in the lobby. I took one in English. As I went out the door, I heard a gendarme say clearly to somebody, “Oui, il s’a suicide, Dr. Taillebois.”

I didn’t want to stay an hour longer in Paris. I packed at the hotel and changed my ticket at Orly. On the plane home I made myself read the Taillebois/Erbland paper. Most of it was incomprehensible to me; what I understood was obscene. I kept seeing Marguerite in her pink ballet slippers, Caroline staggering on stage. If my lack of sympathy for Taillebois and Erbland was a lack in me, then so be it.

For the first time since Deborah had entered the School of American Ballet, and despite the dazzling performances at the Paris Opera, I found myself respecting Anton Privitera.

When I landed at Kennedy, at almost midnight, there was a message from the electronic gate keeper, “Call this number immediately. Urgent and crucial.” I didn’t recognize the number.

Deborah. An accident. I raced to the nearest public phone. But it wasn’t a hospital; it was an attorney’s office.

“Ms. Susan Matthews? Hold, please.”

A man’s face came on the screen. “This is James Beecher, Ms. Matthews. I’m attorney for Pers Anders. He’s being held without bail, pending trial. He left a message for you, most urgent. The message is—”

“Trial? On what charges?” But I think I already knew. The well-cut suit on the lawyer. The move to an expensive neighborhood. Pers was working for somebody, and there weren’t very many things he knew how to do.

“The charges are dealing in narcotics. First-degree felony. The message is—”

“Sunshine, right? No, that wouldn’t have been expensive enough for Pers,” I said bitterly. “Designer viruses? Pleasure center beanos?”

“The message is, ‘Don’t look in the caverns of the moon.’ That’s all.” The screen went blank.

I stared at it anyway. When Deborah was tiny, in the brief period a million years ago when Pers and I were still together and raising her, she had a game she loved. She’d hide a favorite toy somewhere and call out, “Don’t look in the closet! Don’t look under the bed! Don’t look in the sock drawer!” The toy was always wherever she said not to look. The caverns of the moon was what she called her bedroom, but that was much later, long after Pers had deserted us both but before she tracked him down in New York. I didn’t know that he even knew about it.

Don’t look in the caverns of the moon.

I took a helo right to the Central Park landing stage, charging it to the magazine. The last five blocks I ran, past the automated stores that never sleep and the night people who had just gotten up. Deborah wasn’t home; she didn’t expect me back from Paris until tomorrow. I tore apart her bedroom, and in an old dance bag I found it, flattened between the mattress and box spring. No practiced criminal, my Deborah.

The powder was pinkish, with no particular odor. There was a lot of it. I had no idea what it was; probably it had a unique name to go with a unique formula matched to some brain function. What kind of father would use his own daughter as a courier for this designer-gene abyss? Would the cops have already have been here if I’d come home a day later? An hour later?

I flushed it all down the toilet, including the dance bag, which I first cut into tiny pieces. Then I searched the rest of the apartment, and then I searched it again. There were no more drugs. There was no money.

She wasn’t running stuff for Pers for free. Not Deborah. She had spent the money somewhere.

“They asked me to join the company! He said it was very nice! He said I was much improved!”

I made myself sit and think. It was one o’clock in the morning. Lincoln Center would be locked and dark. She might be at a restaurant with other dancers; she might be staying the night with a friend. I called other SAB students. Each answered sleepily. Deborah wasn’t there. Ninette told me that after the evening performance Deborah had said she was going home.

“Well, yes, Ms. Matthews, she did seem a little tense,” Ninette said, stifling a yawn, her long hair tousled on the shoulders of her nightgown. “But it was only her second night in actual performance, so I thought . . .” The young voice trailed off. I wasn’t going to be told whatever this girl thought. Clearly I was an interfering mother.

You bet I was.

I waited another hour. Deborah didn’t come home. I called a cab and went to Caroline Olson’s apartment on Central Park South.

It had to be Caroline. She must have known she herself was bioenhanced, and I had seen her dance before her downfall: the complete abandon to ballet, the joy. Maybe she thought that helping other dancers to illegal bioenhancement was a favor to them, a benefit. She might be making a distinction—the same one Dr. Erbland had made—between the ultimately destructive re-engineering done to her in vitro and the bioenhancements done to European dancers. Or maybe she didn’t connect her own sudden deterioration with how her mother had genetically consecrated her to ballet.

Or maybe she did. Maybe she knew that her meteoric success was what was now killing her. Maybe she was so sick and so enraged that she wanted to destroy other dancers along with her. If she couldn’t dance out her full career, then neither would they.

Or maybe she thought it was worth it. A short life but a brilliant one. Anything for art. Most dancers ended up crippling their bodies anyway, although more slowly. The great Suzanne Farrell had ended up with a plastic hip, her pelvis destroyed by constant turnout. Mikhail Baryshnikov ruined his knees. Miranda Mains was unable to walk by the time she was twenty-eight. Maybe Caroline Olson thought no sacrifice was too great for ballet, even a life.

But not my Deborah’s.

I buzzed the security system of Caroline’s apartment for five solid minutes. There was no answer. Finally the system said politely, “Your party does not answer. Further buzzing may constitute legal harrassment. You should leave now.”

I got back in the cab, chewing on my thumb. I felt that kind of desperation you think you can’t live through; it consumes your belly, chokes your breath. The driver waited indifferently. Where? God, in New York they could be anywhere.

Anywhere nobody would think to look for illegal genetic operations. Anywhere safe, and protected, and easily accessible by dancers, without suspicion.

I gave the driver Anna Olson’s address, remembered from the tax return pirated by the Robin Hood. Then I transferred the gun from my purse to my pocket.

I think I wasn’t quite sane.

9.

Caroline and I ride in a taxi. I like taxis. I put my head out the window. The taxi has many smells. We stop at Deborah’s house. Caroline and I go get Deborah.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Deborah says. Her door is open only a little. She stands behind her door. “I’m not going.”

“Yes, you are,” Caroline says.

Deborah says, “You’re not my mother!”

Caroline changes her smell. She has a cane to walk. She leans on her cane. Her voice gets soft. “No, I’m not your mother. And I’m not going to push you like a mother. Believe me, Deborah, I know what that’s like. But as a senior dancer, I’m going to ask you to come with me. I’m willing to beg you to come. It’s that important. Not just to you, but to me.”

Deborah looks at the floor.

“Don’t be embarrassed. Just understand that I mean it. I’ll beg, I’ll grovel. But first I’m asking, as a senior member of the company.” Deborah looks up. She smells angry. “Why do you care? It’s my life!”

“Yes. Yours and Privitera’s.” Caroline closes her eyes. “You owe him something, too. No, don’t consider that. Just come because I’m asking you.”

Deborah still smells angry. But she comes.

We ride in the taxi to Caroline’s mother’s house. I say, “Is there a party tonight?”

Deborah laughs. It sounds funny. Caroline says, “Yes, Angel. Another party. With music and dancers and talking. And you can have some pretzels.”

“I like pretzels,” I say. “Does Deborah like pretzels?”

“No,” Deborah says, and now she smells scared.

We go in the back way. Caroline has a key. People come to the basement. Someone starts music. “Not so loud!” a man says.

“No, it’s all right,” Caroline says. “My mother’s still in Europe, and the staff is on vacation while she’s gone. We have the place to ourselves.”

A woman brings me a pretzel. People talk. Caroline and Deborah and two men talk in the corner. I don’t hear the words. The words at parties are very hard. I watch Caroline, and eat pretzels, and watch two people dance to the radio.

“Christ,” the man dancer says, “is this fake revelry really necessary?”

“Yes,” the woman says. She looks at me. “Caroline says yes.”

In the corner, two men show Deborah some papers. Caroline sits with them. Deborah starts to cry.

I watch Caroline. Deborah may touch Caroline. The two men may touch Caroline. But Caroline says parties are happy. No people smell happy. I do not understand.

The buzzer rings.

Nobody moves. People look at each other. Caroline says, “Is the gate still open? Let it go. It’s probably kids. There’s nobody home but us.”

The buzzer rings and rings. Then it stops. Caroline talks to Deborah. The door opens at the top of the stairs.

A man with Caroline takes a bottle from his pocket very fast. He puts the papers on the floor and pours the bottle on it. The papers disappear. “All right, everybody, this is a party,” he says.

Steps run down the stairs. A voice calls, “Wait! You can’t go down there! Young woman! You can’t go down there!” The voice is angry. It is Caroline’s mother.

I walk to Caroline. She smells surprised.

A woman comes into the basement. She holds a gun. My ears raise. I stand next to Caroline.

“Nobody move,” the woman says. Deborah says, “Mom!”

Caroline looks at the woman, then at Deborah, then at the woman. She walks with her cane to the woman.

“Stay right there,” the woman says. She smells angry and scared. I move with Caroline.

“Christ, you sound like a bad holovid,” Caroline says. “You’re Deborah’s mother? What the hell do you think you’re doing here?”

From the top of the stairs Caroline’s mother calls, “Caroline! What is the meaning of this?”

The woman says very fast, “Deborah, you’re making a terrible mistake. Bioenhancement may help your dancing for a while, but it could also kill you. The conference on genetics in Paris—they presented scientific proof that one kind of bioenhancement kills, and if they’re just finding that out know about enhancements done twenty-five years ago—then who knows what kind of insane risk you’re running with these other kinds? Don’t take my word for it, it’s online this morning. Pers was arrested, damn him, and I found your drug stash just before the police did. That’s how you’re paying for this, isn’t it? Debbie—how could you be such a damn fool?”

“Wait a minute,” Caroline says. She leans on her cane. “You thought we brought Deborah here to bioenhance her?” Caroline starts to laugh. She puts her hand on her face. “Oh my God!”

Caroline’s mother calls from the top of the stairs, “I’m phoning the police.”

Caroline says, very fast, “Go bring her down here, James. You’ll have to lift her out of her chair and carry her. Keith, get her chair.” The two men run up the stairs.

Caroline is shaking. I stand beside her. I growl. The woman still has the gun. She points the gun at Caroline. I wait for Caroline to tell me Attack.

The woman says, “Don’t try to deny it. You’d do anything for ballet, wouldn’t you? All of you. You’re sick—but you’re not murdering my daughter!”

Caroline’s face changes. Her smell changes. I feel her hand on my head. Her hand shakes. Her body shakes. I smell anger bigger than other angers. I wait for Attack.

Deborah says, “You’re all wrong, Mom! Just like you always are! Does this look like a bioenhancement lab? Does it? These people aren’t enhancing me—they’re trying to talk me out of it! These two guys are doctors and they’re trying to ‘deprogram’ me—just like you tried to program me all my life! You never wanted me to dance, you always tried to make me into this cute little college-bound student that you needed me to be. Never what I needed!”

The men carry Caroline’s mother and Caroline’s mother’s chair down the steps. They put Caroline’s mother in the chair. Caroline’s mother also smells angry. But Caroline smells more angry than everybody.

Caroline says, “Sound familiar, Mother dear? What Deborah’s saying? What did you learn at the genetic conference? What I’ve been telling you for months, right? Your gift to dance is dying. Because you wanted a prima ballerina at any price. Even if I’m the one to pay it.” Caroline’s mother says, “You love dance. You wanted it as much as I did. You were a star.”

“I never got to find out if I would have been one anyway! That isn’t so inconceivable, is it? And then I might have still been dancing! But instead I was . . . made. Molded, sewed, carpentered. Into what you needed me to be.”

Deborah’s mother lowers her gun. Her eyes are big. Caroline’s mother says, “You were a star. You had a good run. Without me, you might have been nothing. Worthless.”

A man says, very soft, “Jesus H. Christ.”

Caroline is shaking hard. I am afraid she will fall again. Her hand is on her cane. The cane shakes. Her other hand is on me.

Caroline says, “You cold, self-centered bitch—”

A little girl runs down the stairs.

The little girl says, “Tante Annal Tante Anna! Ou etes-vous?” She stops at the bottom of the steps. She smells afraid. “Qui sont tout ces gens?”

Caroline looks at the little girl. The little girl has no shoes. She has long black fur on her head. Her hind feet go out like Caroline’s feet when Caroline dances. The toes look strange. I don’t understand the little girl’s feet.

Caroline says again, “You cold, self-centered bitch.” Her voice is soft now. She stops shaking. “When did you have her made? Five years ago? Six? A new model with improved features? Who will decay all the sooner?”

Caroline’s mother says, “You are a hysterical fool.”

Caroline says, “Angel—attack. Now.”

I attack Caroline’s mother. I knock over the chair. I bite her foreleg. Someone screams, “Caroline! For God’s sake! Caroline!” I bite Caroline’s mother’s head. I must protect Caroline. This person hurts Caroline. I must protect Caroline.

A gun fires and I hurt and hurt and hurt—

I love Caroline.

10.

The town of Saratoga, where the American Ballet Theater is dancing its summer season, is itself a brightly colored stage. Visitors throng the racetrack, the brand-new Electronics Museum, the historical battle sites. In 1777, right here, Benedict Arnold and his half-trained revolutionaries stopped British forces under General John Burgoyne. It was the first great victory of freedom over the old order.

Until this year, the New York City Ballet danced here every summer. But the Performing Arts Center chose not to renew the City Ballet contract. In New York, too, City Ballet attendance is half of what it was only a few years ago.

The Saratoga pavillion is open to the countryside. Ballet lovers fill the seats, spread blankets up the sloping lawn, watch dancers accompanied not only by Tchaikovsky or Chopin but also by crickets and robins. In Saratoga, the ballet smells of freshly mown grass. The classic “white ballets”—Swan Lake, Les Sylphides—are remembered green. Small girls whose first taste of dance is at Saratoga will dream, for the rest of their life, of toe shoes skimming over wildflowers.

I take my seat, in the back of the regular seating, as the small orchestra finishes tuning up. The conductor enters to the usual thunderous applause, even though nobody here knows his name and very few care. They have come to see the dancers.

Debussy floats out over the countryside. Afternoon of a Faun: slow, melting. On the nearly bare stage, furnished only with barre and mirrors, a male dancer in practice clothes wakes up, stretches, warms up his muscles in a series of low, languorous moves.

A girl appears in the mirror, which isn’t really a mirror but an empty place in the backdrop. A void. She, too, stretches, poses, plies. Both dancers watch the mirrors. They are so absorbed in their own reflections that they only gradually become aware of each other’s presence. Even then, they exist for each other only as foils, presences to dance to. In the end the girl will step back through the mirror. There is the feeling that for the boy, she may not really have existed at all, except as a dream.

It is Deborah’s first lead in a one-act ballet. Her extension is high, her turnout perfect, her movements sure and strong and sustained, filled with the joy of dancing. I can barely stand to look at her. This is her reward, her grail, for continuing her bioenhancement. She isn’t dancing for Anton Privitera, but she is dancing. A year and a half of bioenhancement, bought legally now in Copenhagen and paid for by selling her story to an eager press, has given her the physical possibilities to match her musicality, and her rhythm, and her drive.

The faun finally touches the girl, turning her slowly en attitude. Deborah smiles. This is her afternoon. She’s willing to pay whatever price the night demands, even though science has no idea yet what, for her kind of treatments, it might be.

Privitera must have known that some of his dancers were bioenhanced. The completely inadequate bioscans at City Ballet, the phenomenally low injury rate of his prima ballerina—Privitera must have known. Or maybe his staff let him remain in official ignorance, keeping from him any knowledge of heresy in the ranks. There was a rumor that Privitera’s business manager John Coles even tried to keep Caroline from “deprogramming” dancers who wanted bioenhancement. The rumor about Coles was never substantiated. But in the last year, City Ballet has been struggling to survive. Too many patrons have withdrawn their favor. The mystique of natural art, like other mystiques, didn’t last forever. It had a good run.

“If you could have chosen, and that was the only way you could have had the career, would you have chosen the embryonic engineering anyway?” was the sole thing Deborah asked Caroline in jail, through bullet-proof plastic glass and electronic speaking systems, under the hard eyes of matrons. Caroline, awaiting trial for second-degree murder, didn’t seem to mind Deborah’s brusqueness, her self-absorption. Caroline was silent a long time, her gaunt face lengthened from the girlish roundness I remembered. Then she said to Deborah, “No.”

“I would,” Deborah said.

Caroline only looked at her.

They’re here, Caroline and her dog. Somewhere up on the grass, Caroline in a powerchair, Angel hobbling on the three legs my bullet left him. Caroline was acquitted by reason of temporary insanity. They didn’t let Angel stay with her during the trial. Nor did they let him testify, which would have been abnormal but not impossible. Five-year-olds can testify under some circumstances, and Angel has the biochip-and-reengineered intelligence of a five-year-old. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so abnormal. Or maybe all of us, not just Anton Privitera, will have to change our definition of abnormal.

Five-year-olds know a lot. It was Marguerite who cried out, “Vous avez assassine ma tante Anna!” She knew whom I was aiming at, even if the police did not. But Marguerite couldn’t know how much I loathed the old woman who had made her daughter into what the mother needed her to be—just as I, out of love, had tried to do to mine.

On stage Deborah pirouettes. Maybe her types of bioenhancement will be all right, despite the growing body of doubts collected by Caroline’s doctor allies. When the first cures for cancer were developed from reengineered retroviruses, dying and desperate patients demanded they be administered without long, drawn-out FDA testing. Some of the patients died even sooner, possibly from the cures. Some lived until ninety. The edge of anything is a lottery, and protection doesn’t help—not against change, or madmen, or errors of judgement. I protect Caroline, Angel kept saying after I shot him, yelping in pain between sentences. I protect Caroline.

Deborah flows into a retire, one leg bent at the knee, and rises on toe. Her face glows. Her partner lifts her above his head and turns her slowly, her feet perfectly arched in their toe shoes, dancing on air.

DEEP EDDY

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling’s latest collection, Globalhead (Mark Zeising Books 1992), contains four stories first published in Asimov’s. His most recent book is The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, a nonfiction work about computer crime and civil liberties, but he has now put true-crime journalism aside. Mr. Sterling is hard at work on a new science fiction novel and properly grateful for the opportunity.

The Continental gentleman in the next beanbag offered “Zigaretten?”

“What’s in it?” Deep Eddy asked. The gray-haired gentleman murmured something: polysyllabic medical German. Eddy’s translation program crashed at once.

Eddy gently declined. The gentleman shook a zigarette from the pack, twisted its tip, and huffed at it. A sharp perfume arose, like coffee struck by lightning.

The elderly European brightened swiftly. He flipped open a newspad, tapped through its menu, and began alertly scanning a German business zine.

Deep Eddy killed his translation program, switched spexware, and scanned the man. The gentleman was broadcasting a business bio. His name was Peter Liebling, he was from Bremen, he was ninety years old, he was an official with a European lumber firm. His hobbies were backgammon and collecting antique phone-cards. He looked pretty young for ninety. He probably had some unusual and interesting medical syndromes.

Herr Leibling glanced up, annoyed at Eddy’s computer-assisted gaze. Eddy dropped his spex back onto their neck-chain. A practiced gesture, one Deep Eddy used a lot—hey, didn’t mean to stare, pal. A lot of people were suspicious of spex. Most people had no idea of the profound capacities of spexware. Most people still didn’t use spex. Most people were, in a word, losers.

Eddy lurched up within his baby-blue beanbag and gazed out the aircraft window. Chattanooga, Tennessee. Bright white ceramic air-control towers, distant wine-colored office blocks, and a million dark green trees. Tarmac heated gently in the summer morning. Eddy lifted his spex again to check a silent take-off westward by a white-and-red Asian jet. Infrared turbulence gushed from its distant engines. Deep Eddy loved infrared. That deep silent magical whirl of invisible heat, the breath of industry.

People underestimated Chattanooga, Deep Eddy thought with a local boy’s pride. Chattanooga had a very high per-capita investment in spexware. In fact Chattanooga ranked third-highest in NAFTA. Number One was San Jose, California (naturally), and Number Two was Madison, Wisconsin.

Eddy had already traveled to both those rival cities, in the service of his Chattanooga users group, to swap some spexware, market a little info, and make a careful study of the local scene. To collect some competitive intelligence. To spy around, not to put too fine a point on it.

Eddy’s most recent business trip had been five drunken days at a blowout All-NAFTA spexware conference in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Eddy had not yet figured out why Ciudad Juarez, a once-dreary maquilladora factory town on the Rio Grande, had gone completely hog-wild for spexing. But even little kids there had spex, brightly speckly throwaway kid-stuff with just a couple dozen meg. There were tottering grannies with spex. Security cops with spex mounted right into their riot helmets. Billboards everywhere that couldn’t be read without spex. And thousands of hustling industry zudes with airconditioned jackets and forty or fifty terabytes mounted right at the bridge of the nose. Ciudad Juarez was in the grip of rampant spexmania. Maybe it was all the lithium in their water.

Today, duty called Deep Eddy to Düsseldorf in Europe. Duty did not have to call very hard to get Eddy’s attention. The mere whisper of duty was enough to dislodge Deep Eddy, who still lived with his parents, Bob and Lisa.

He’d gotten some spexmail and a package from the president of the local chapter. A network obligation; our group credibility depends on you, Eddy. A delivery job. Don’t let us down; do whatever it takes. And keep your eyes covered—this one could be dangerous. Well, danger and Deep Eddy were fast friends. Throwing up tequila and ephedrine through your nose in an alley in Mexico, while wearing a pair of computer-assisted glasses worth as much as a car—now that was dangerous. Most people would be scared to try something like that. Most people couldn’t master their own insecurities. Most people were too scared to live.

This would be Deep Eddy’s first adult trip to Europe. At the age of nine he’d accompanied Bob and Lisa to Madrid for a Sexual Deliberation conference, but all he remembered from that trip was a boring weekend of bad television and incomprehensible tomato-soaked food. Düsseldorf, however, sounded like real and genuine fun. The trip was probably even worth getting up at 07:15.

Eddy dabbed at his raw eyelids with a saline-soaked wipey. Eddy was getting a first-class case of eyeball-burn off his spex; or maybe it was just sleeplessness. He’d spent a very late and highly frustrating night with his current girlfriend, Djulia. He’d dated her hoping for a hero’s farewell, hinting broadly that he might be beaten or killed by sinister European underground networking-mavens, but his presentation hadn’t washed at all. Instead of some sustained and attentive frolic, he’d gotten only a somber four-hour lecture about the emotional center in Djulia’s life: collecting Japanese glassware.

As his jet gently lifted from the Chattanooga tarmac, Deep Eddy was struck with a sudden, instinctive, gut-level conviction of Djulia’s essential counter-productivity. Djulia was just no good for him. Those clear eyes, the tilted nose, the sexy sprinkle of tattoo across her right cheekbone. Lovely flare of her body-heat in darkness. The lank strands of dark hair that turned crisp and wavy halfway down their length. A girl shouldn’t have such great hair and so many tatts and still be so tightly wrapped. Djulia was no real friend of his at all.

The jet climbed steadily, crossing the shining waters of the Tennessee. Outside Eddy’s window, the long ductile wings bent and rippled with dainty, tightly controlled anti turbulence. The cabin itself felt as steady as a Mississippi lumber barge, but the computer-assisted wings, under spex-analysis, resembled a vibrating sawblade. Nerve-racking. Let this not be the day a whole bunch of Chattanoogans fall out of the sky, Eddy thought silently, squirming a bit in the luscious embrace of his beanbag.

He gazed about the cabin at his fellow candidates for swift mass death. Three hundred people or so, the European and NAFTA jet-bourgeoisie; well-groomed, polite. Nobody looked frightened. Sprawling there in their pastel beanbags, chatting, hooking fiber-optics to palmtops and laptops, browsing through newspads, making videophone-calls. Just as if they were at home, or maybe in a very crowded cylindrical hotel lobby, all of them in blank and deliberate ignorance of the fact that they were zipping through midair supported by nothing but plasmajets and computation. Most people were so unaware. One software glitch somewhere, a missed decimal point, and those cleverly ductile wings would tear right the hell off. Sure, it didn’t happen often. But it happened sometimes.

Deep Eddy wondered glumly if his own demise would even make the top of the newspad. It’d be in there all right, but probably hyperlinked five or six layers down.

The five-year-old in the beanbag behind Eddy entered a paroxysm of childish fear and glee. “My e-mail, Mom!” the kid chirped with desperate enthusiasm, bouncing up and down. “Mom! Mom, my e-mail! Hey Mom, get me my e-mail!”

A stew offered Eddy breakfast. He had a bowl of muesli and half-a-dozen boiled prunes. Then he broke out his travel card and ordered a mimosa. The booze didn’t make him feel any more alert, though, so he ordered two more mimosas. Then he fell asleep.

Customs in Düsseldorf was awash. Summer tourists were pouring into the city like some vast migratory shoal of sardines. The people from outside Europe—from NAFTA, from the Sphere, from the South—were a tiny minority, though, compared to the vast intra-European traffic, who breezed through Customs completely unimpeded.

Uniformed inspectors were spexing the NAFTA and South baggage, presumably for guns or explosives, but their clunky government-issue spex looked a good five years out-of-date. Deep Eddy passed through the Customs chute without incident and had his passchip stamped. Passing out drunk on champagne and orange juice, then snoozing through the entire Atlantic crossing, had clearly been an excellent idea. It was 21:00 local time and Eddy felt quite alert and rested. Clearheaded. Ready for anything. Hungry.

Eddy wandered toward the icons signaling ground transport. A stocky woman in a bulky brown jacket stepped into his path. He stopped short. “Mr. Edward Dertouzas,” she said.

“Right,” Eddy said, dropping his bag. They stared at one another, spex to spex. “Actually, fraulein, as I’m sure you can see by my on-line bio, my friends call me Eddy. Deep Eddy, mostly.”

“I’m not your friend, Mr. Dertouzas. I am your security escort. I’m called Sardelle today.” Sardelle stooped and hefted his travel bag. Her head came about to his shoulder.

Deep Eddy’s German translator, which he had restored to life, placed a yellow subtitle at the lower rim of his spex. “Sardelle,” he noted.

“ ‘Anchovy’ ?”

“I don’t pick the code names,” Sardelle told him, irritated. “I have to use what the company gives me.” She heaved her way through the crowd,jolting people aside with deft jabs of Eddy’s travel bag. Sardelle wore a bulky airconditioned brown trenchcoat, with multipocketed fawn-colored jeans and thicksoled black-and-white cop shoes. A crisp trio of small tattooed triangles outlined Sardelle’s right cheek. Her hands, attractively small and dainty, were gloved in black-and-white pinstripe. She looked about thirty. No problem. He liked mature women. Maturity gave depth.

Eddy scanned her for bio data. “Sardelle,” the spex read unhelpfully. Absolutely nothing else; no business, no employer, no address, no age, no interests, no hobbies, no personal ads. Europeans were rather weird about privacy. Then again, maybe Sardelle’s lack of proper annotation had something to do with her business life.

Eddy looked down at his own hands, twitched bare fingers over a virtual menu in midair, and switched to some rude spexware he’d mail-ordered from Tijuana. Something of a legend in the spexing biz, X-Spex stripped people’s clothing off and extrapolated the flesh beneath it in a full-color visual simulation. Sardelle, however, was so decked-out in waistbelts, holsters, and shoulderpads that the Xware was baffled. The simulation looked alarmingly bogus, her breasts and shoulders waggling like drug-addled plasticine.

“Hurry out,” she suggested sternly. “I mean hurry up.”

“Where we going? To see the Critic?”

“In time,” Sardelle said. Eddy followed her through the stomping, shuffling, heaving crowd to a set of travel lockers.

“Do you really need this bag, sir?”

“What?” Eddy said. “Sure I do! It’s got all my stuff in it.”

“If we take it, I will have to search it carefully,” Sardelle informed him patiently. “Let’s place your bag in this locker, and you can retrieve it when you leave Europe.” She offered him a small gray handbag with the logo of a Berlin luxury hotel. “Here are some standard travel necessities.”

“They scanned my bag in Customs,” Eddy said. “I’m clean, really. Customs was a walk-through.”

Sardelle laughed briefly and sarcastically. “One million people coming to Düsseldorf this weekend,” she said. “There will be a Wende here. And you think the Customs searched you properly? Believe me, Edward. You have not been searched properly.”

“That sounds a bit menacing,” Eddy said.

“A proper search takes a lot of time. Some threats to safety are tiny—things woven into clothing, glued to the skin. . . .” Sardelle shrugged. “I like to have time. I’ll pay you to have some time. Do you need money, Edward?”

“No,” Eddy said, startled. “I mean, yeah. Sure I need money, who doesn’t? But I have a travel card from my people. From CAPCLUG.”

She glanced up sharply, aiming the spex at him. “Who is Kapklug?”

“Computer-Assisted Perception Civil Liberties Users Group,” Eddy said. “Chattanooga Chapter.”

“I see. The acronym in English.” Sardelle frowned. “I hate all acronyms. . . . Edward, I will pay you forty ecu cash to put your bag into this locker and take this bag instead.”

“Sold,” Deep Eddy said. “Where’s the money?”

Sardelle passed him four wellworn hologram bills. Eddy stuffed the cash in his pocket. Then he opened his own bag and retrieved an elderly hardbound book—Crowds and Power, by Elias Canetti. “A little light reading,” he said unconvincingly.

“Let me see that book,” Sardelle insisted. She leafed through the book rapidly, scanning pages with her pinstriped fingertips, flexing the covers and checking the book’s binding, presumably for inserted razors, poisoned needles, or strips of plastic explosive. “You are smuggling data,” she concluded sourly, handing it back.

“That’s what we live for in CAPCLUG,” Eddy told her, peeking at her over his spex and winking. He slipped the book into the gray hotel bag and zipped it. Then he heaved his own bag into the travel locker, slammed the door and removed the numbered key.

“Give me that key,” Sardelle said.

“Why?”

“You might return and open the locker. If I keep the key, that security risk is much reduced.”

“No way,” Eddy frowned. “Forget it.”

“Ten ecu,” she offered.

“Mmmmph.”

“Fifteen.”

“Okay, have it your way.” Eddy gave her the key. “Don’t lose it.”

Sardelle, unsmiling, put the key into a zippered sleeve pocket. “I never lose things.” She opened her wallet.

Eddy nodded, pocketing a hologram ten and five singles. Very attractive currency, the ecu. The ten had a hologram of René Descartes, a very deep zude who looked impressively French and rational.

Eddy felt he was doing pretty well by this, so far. In point of fact there wasn’t anything in the bag he really needed: his underwear, spare jeans, tickets, business cards, dress shirts, tie, suspenders, spare shoes, toothbrush, aspirin, instant expresso, sewing kit, and earrings. So what? It wasn’t as if she’d asked him to give up his spex.

He also had a complete crush on his escort. The name Anchovy suited her—she struck him as a small canned cold fish. Eddy found this perversely attractive. In fact he found her so attractive that he was having a hard time standing still and breathing normally. He really liked the way she carried her stripe-gloved hands, deft and feminine and mysteriously European, but mostly it was her hair. Long, light reddish-brown, and meticulously braided by machine. He loved women’s hair when it was machine-braided. They couldn’t seem to catch the fashion quite right in NAFTA. Sardelle’s hair looked like a rusted mass of museum-quality chain-mail, or maybe some fantastically convoluted railway intersection. Hair that really meant business. Not only did Sardelle have not a hair out of place, but any unkemptness was topologically impossible. The vision rose unbidden of running his fingers through it in the dark.

“I’m starving,” he announced.

“Then we will eat,” she said. They headed for the exit.

Electric taxis were trying, without much success, to staunch the spreading hemorrhage of tourists. Sardelle clawed at the air with her pinstriped fingers. Adjusting invisible spex menus. She seemed to be casting the evil eye on a nearby family group of Italians, who reacted with scarcely concealed alarm. “We can walk to a city bus-stop,” she told him. “It’s quicker.”

“Walking’s quicker?”

Sardelle took off. He had to hurry to keep up. “Listen to me, Edward. If you follow my security suggestions, we will save time. If I save my time, then you will make money. If you make me work harder I will not be so generous.”

“I’m easy,” Eddy protested. Her cop-shoes seemed to have some kind of computational cushion built into the soles; she walked as if mounted on springs. “I’m here to meet the Cultural Critic. An audience with him. I have a delivery for him. You know that, right?”

“It’s the book?”

Eddy hefted the gray hotel-bag. “Yeah. . . . I’m here in Düsseldorf to deliver an old book to some European intellectual. Actually, to give the book back to him. He, like, lent the book to the CAPCLUG Steering Committee, and it’s time to give it back. How tough can that job be?”

“Probably not very tough,” Sardelle said calmly. “But strange things happen during a Wende.”

Eddy nodded soberly. “Wendes are very interesting phenomena. CAPCLUG is studying Wendes. We might like to throw one some day.”

“That’s not how Wendes happen, Eddy. You don’t ‘throw’ a Wende.” Sardelle paused, considering. “A Wende throws you.”

“So I gather,” Eddy said. “I’ve been reading his work, you know. The Cultural Critic. It’s deep work, I like it.”

Sardelle was indifferent. “I’m not one of his partisans. I’m just employed to guard him.” She conjured up another menu. “What kind of food do you like? Chinese? Thai? Eritrean?”

“How about German food?”

Sardelle laughed. “We Germans never eat German food. . . . There are very good Japanese cafes in Düsseldorf. Tokyo people fly here for the salmon. And the anchovies. . . .”

“You live here in Düsseldorf, Anchovy?”

“I live everywhere in Europe, Deep Eddy.” Her voice fell. “Any city with a screen in front of it. . . . And they all have screens in Europe.”

“Sounds fun. You want to trade some spex ware?”

“No.”

“You don’t believe in andwendungsoriente wissensverarbeitung?”

She made a face. “How clever of you to learn an appropriate German phrase. Speak English, Eddy. Your accent is truly terrible.”

“Thank you kindly,” Eddy said.

“You can’t trade wares with me, Eddy, don’t be silly. I would not give my security spexware to civilian Yankee hacker-boys.”

“Don’t own the copyright, huh?”

“There’s that too.” She shrugged, and smiled.

They were out of the airport now, walking south. Silent steady flow of electric traffic down Flughafenstrasse. The twilight air smelled of little white roses. They crossed at a traffic light. The German semiotics of ads and street-signs began to press with gentle culture-shock at the surface of Deep Eddy’s brain. Garagenhof. Spezialist fur Mobil-Telefon. Burohausem. He put on some character-recognition ware to do translation, but the instant doubling of the words all around him only made him feel schizophrenic.

They took shelter in a lit bus kiosk, along with a pair of heavily tattooed gays toting grocery bags. A video-ad built into the side of the kiosk advertised German-language e-mail editors.

As Sardelle stood patiently, in silence, Eddy examined her closely for the first time. There was something odd and indefinitely European about the line of her nose. “Let’s be friends, Sardelle. I’ll take off my spex if you take off your spex.”

“Maybe later,” she said.

Eddy laughed. “You should get to know me. I’m a fun guy.”

“I already know you.”

An overcrowded bus passed. Its riders had festooned the robot bus with banners and mounted a klaxon on its roof, which emitted a cacophony of rapidfire bongo music.

“The Wende people are already hitting the buses,” Sardelle noted sourly, shifting on her feet as if trampling grapes. “I hope we can get downtown.”

“You’ve done some snooping on me, huh? Credit records and such? Was it interesting?”

Sardelle frowned. “It’s my business to research records. I did nothing illegal. All by the book.”

“No offense taken,” Eddy said, spreading his hands. “But you must have learned I’m harmless. Let’s unwrap a little.”

Sardelle sighed. “I learned that you are an unmarried male, age eighteen-to-thirty-five. No steady job. No steady home. No wife, no children. Radical political leanings. Travels often. Your demographics are very high-risk.”

“I’m twenty-two, to be exact.” Eddy noticed that Sardelle showed no reaction to this announcement, but the two eavesdropping gays seemed quite interested. He smiled nonchalantly. “I’m here to network, that’s all. Friend-of-a-friend situation. Actually, I’m pretty sure I share your client’s politics. As far as I can figure his politics out.”

“Politics don’t matter,” Sardelle said, bored and impatient. “I’m not concerned with politics. Men in your age group commit 80 percent of all violent crimes.”

One of the gays spoke up suddenly, in heavily accented English. “Hey fraulein. We also have 80 percent of the charm!”

“And 90 percent of the fun,” said his companion. “It’s Wende time, Yankee boy. Come with us and we’ll do some crimes.” He laughed.

“Das ist sehr nett vohn Ihnen,” Eddy said politely. “But I can’t. I’m with nursie.”

The first gay made a witty and highly idiomatic reply in German, to the effect, apparently, that he liked boys who wore sunglasses after dark, but Eddy needed more tattoos.

Eddy, having finished reading subtitles in midair, touched the single small black circle on his cheekbone. “Don’t you like my solitaire? It’s rather sinister in its reticence, don’t you think?”

He’d lost them; they only looked puzzled.

A bus arrived.

“This will do,” Sardelle announced. She fed the bus a ticket-chip and Eddy followed her on board. The bus was crowded, but the crowd seemed gentle; mostly Euro-Japanese out for a night on the town. They took a beanbag together in the back.

It had grown quite dark now. They floated down the street with machine-guided precision and a smooth dreamlike detachment. Eddy felt the spell of travel overcome him; the basic mammalian thrill of a live creature plucked up and dropped like a supersonic ghost on the far side of the planet. Another time, another place: whatever vast set of unlikelihoods had militated against his presence here had been defeated. A Friday night in Dusseldorf, July 13, 2035. The time was 22:10. The very specificity seemed magical.

He glanced at Sardelle again, grinning gleefully, and suddenly saw her for what she was. A burdened female functionary sitting stiffly in the back of a bus.

“Where are we now, exactly?” he said.

“We are on Danzigerstrasse heading south to the Altstadt,” Sardelle said. “The old town center.”

“Yeah? What’s there?”

“Kartoffel. Beer. Schnitzel. Things for you to eat.”

The bus stopped and crowd of stomping, shoving rowdies got on. Across the street, a trio of police were struggling with a broken traffic securicam. The cops were wearing full-body pink riot-gear. He’d heard somewhere that all European cop riot-gear was pink. The color was supposed to be calming.

“This isn’t much fun for you, Sardelle, is it?”

She shrugged. “We’re not the same people, Eddy. I don’t know what you are bringing to the Critic, and I don’t want to know.” She tapped her spex back into place with one gloved finger. “But if you fail in your job, at the very worst, it might mean some grave cultural loss. Am I right?”

“I suppose so. Sure.”

“But if I fail in my job, Eddy, something real might actually happen.”

“Wow,” Eddy said, stung.

The crush in the bus was getting oppressive. Eddy stood and offered his spot in the beanbag to a tottering old woman in spangled party gear.

Sardelle rose then too, with bad grace, and fought her way up the aisle. Eddy followed, barking his shins on the thicksoled beastie-boots of a sprawling drunk.

Sardelle stopped short to trade elbow-jabs with a Nordic kamikaze in a horned baseball cap, and Eddy stumbled into her headlong. He realized then why people seemed so eager to get out of Sardelle’s way; her trench-coat was of woven ceramic and was as rough as sandpaper. He lurched one-handed for a strap. “Well,” he puffed at Sardelle, swaying into her spex-to-spex, “if we can’t enjoy each other’s company, why not get this over with? Let me do my errand. Then I’ll get right into your hair.” He paused, shocked. “I mean, out of your hair. Sorry.”

She hadn’t noticed. “You’ll do your errand,” she said, clinging to her strap. They were so close that he could feel a chill airconditioned breeze whiffling out of her trenchcoat’s collar. “But on my terms. My time, my circumstances.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes; her head darted around as if from grave embarrassment. Eddy realized suddenly that she was methodically scanning the face of every stranger in the bus.

She spared him a quick, distracted smile. “Don’t mind me, Eddy. Be a good boy and have fun in Düsseldorf. Just let me do my job, okay?”

“Okay then,” Eddy muttered. “Really, I’m delighted to be in your hands.” He couldn’t seem to stop with the double entendres. They rose to his lips like drool from the id.

The glowing grids of Düsseldorf highrises shone outside the bus windows, patchy waffles of mystery. So many human lives behind those windows. People he would never meet, never see. Pity he still couldn’t afford proper telephotos.

Eddy cleared his throat. “What’s he doing out there right now? The Cultural Critic, I mean.”

“Meeting contacts in a safehouse. He will meet a great many people during the Wende. That’s his business, you know. You’re only one of many that he bringed—brought—to this rendezvous.” Sardelle paused. “Though in threat potential you do rank among the top five.”

The bus made more stops. People piled in headlong, with a thrash and a heave and a jacking of kneecaps. Inside the bus they were all becoming anchovies. A smothered fistfight broke out in the back. A drunken woman tried, with mixed success, to vomit out the window. Sardelle held her position grimly through several stops, then finally fought her way to the door.

The bus pulled to a stop and a sudden rush of massed bodies propelled them out.

They’d arrived by a long suspension bridge over a broad moonsilvered river. The bridge’s soaring cables were lit end-to-end with winking party-bulbs. All along the bridge, flea-marketeers sitting cross-legged on glowing mats were doing a brisk trade in tourist junk. Out in the center, a busking juggler with smart-gloves flung lit torches in flaming arcs three stories high.

“Jesus, what a beautiful river,” Eddy said.

“It’s the Rhine. This is Oberkasseler Bridge.”

“The Rhine. Of course, of course. I’ve never seen the Rhine before. Is it safe to drink?”

“Of course. Europe’s very civilized.”

“I thought so. It even smells good. Let’s go drink some of it.”

The banks were lined with municipal gardens: grape-musky vineyards, big pale meticulous flowerbeds. Tireless gardening robots had worked them over season by season with surgical trowels. Eddy stooped by the riverbank and scooped up a double-handful of backwash from a passing hydrofoil. He saw his own spex-clad face in the moony puddle of his hands. As Sardelle watched, he sipped a bit and flung the rest out as libation to the spirit of place.

“I’m happy now,” he said. “Now I’m really here.”

By midnight, he’d had four beers, two schnitzels, and a platter of kartoffels. Kartoffels were fried potato-batter waffles with a side of applesauce. Eddy’s morale had soared from the moment he first bit into one.

They sat at a sidewalk cafe-table in the midst of a centuries-old pedestrian street in the Altstadt. The entire street was a single block-long bar, all chairs, umbrellas, and cobbles, peaked-roof townhouses with ivy and windowboxes and ancient copper weathervanes. It had been invaded by an absolute throng of gawking, shuffling, hooting foreigners.

The gentle, kindly, rather bewildered Düsseldorfers were doing their level best to placate their guests and relieve them of any excess cash. A strong pink police presence was keeping good order. He’d seen two zudes in horned baseball-caps briskly hauled into a paddy-wagon—a “Pink Minna”—but the Vikings were pig-drunk and had it coming, and the crowd seemed very good-humored.

“I don’t see what the big deal is with these Wendes,” Deep Eddy said, polishing his spex on a square of oiled and lint-free polysilk. “This sucker’s a walk-through. There’s not gonna be any trouble here. Just look how calm and mellow these zudes are.”

“There’s trouble already,” Sardelle said. “It’s just not here in Altstadt in front of your nose.”

“Yeah?”

“There are big gangs of arsonists across the river tonight. They’re barricading in Neuss, toppling cars, and setting them on fire.”

“How come?”

Sardelle shrugged. “They are anti-car activists. They demand pedestrian rights and more mass transit. . . .” She paused a bit to read the inside of her spex. “Green radicals are storming the Lobbecke Museum. They want all extinct insect specimens surrendered for cloning. . . . Heinrich Heine University is on strike for academic freedom, and someone has glue-bombed the big traffic tunnel beneath the campus. . . . But this is nothing, not yet. Tomorrow England meets Ireland in the soccer finals at Rhein-Stadium. There will be hell to pay.”

“Huh. That sounds pretty bad.”

“Yes.” She smiled. “So let’s enjoy our time here, Eddy. Idleness is sweet. Even on the edge of dirty chaos.”

“But none of those events by itself sounds all that threatening or serious.”

“Not each thing by itself, Eddy, no. But it all happens all at once. That’s what a Wende is like.”

“I don’t get it,” Eddy said. He put his spex back on and lit the menu from within, with a fingersnap. He tapped the spex menu-bar with his right fingertip and light-amplifiers kicked in. The passing crowd, their outlines shimmering slightly from computational effects, seemed to be strolling through an overlit stage-set. “I guess there’s trouble coming from all these outsiders,” Eddy said, “but the Germans themselves seem so . . . well . . . so good-natured and tidy and civilized. Why do they even have Wendes?”

“It’s not something we plan, Eddy. It’s just something that happens to us.” Sardelle sipped her coffee.

“How could this happen and not be planned?”

“Well, we knew it was coming, of course. Of course we knew that. Word gets around. That’s how Wendes start.” She straightened her napkin. “You can ask the Critic, when you meet him. He talks a lot about Wendes. He knows as much as anyone, I think.”

“Yeah, I’ve read him,” Eddy said. “He says that it’s rumor, boosted by electronic and digital media, in a feedback-loop with crowd dynamics and modern mass transportation. A nonlinear networking phenomenon. That much I understand! But then he quotes some zude named Elias Canetti. . . .” Eddy patted the gray bag. “I tried to read Canetti, I really did, but he’s twentieth-century, and as boring and stuffy as hell. . . . Anyway, we’d handle things differently in Chattanooga.”

“People say that, until they have their first Wende,” Sardelle said. “Then it’s all different. Once you know a Wende can actually happen to you . . . well, it changes everything.”

“We’d take steps to stop it, that’s all. Take steps to control it. Can’t you people take some steps?”

Sardelle tugged off her pinstriped gloves and set them on the tabletop. She worked her bare fingers gently, blew on her fingertips, and picked a big bready pretzel from the basket. Eddy noticed with surprise that her gloves had big rock-hard knuckles and twitched a little all by themselves.

“There are things you can do, of course,” she told him. “Put police and firefighters on overtime. Hire more private security. Disaster control for lights, traffic, power, data. Open the shelters and stock first-aid medicine. And warn the whole population. But when a city tells its people that a Wende is coming, that guarantees the Wende will come. . . .” Sardelle sighed. “I’ve worked Wendes before. But this is a big one. A big, dark one. And it won’t be over, it can’t be over—not until everyone knows that it’s gone, and feels that it’s gone.”

“That doesn’t make much sense.”

“Talking about it won’t help, Eddy. You and I, talking about it—we become part of the Wende ourselves, you see? We’re here because of the Wende. We met because of the Wende. And we can’t leave each other, until the Wende goes away.” She shrugged. “Can you go away, Eddy?”

“No. . . . Not right now. But I’ve got stuff to do here.”

“So does everybody else.”

Eddy grunted and killed another beer. The beer here was truly something special. “It’s a Chinese finger-trap,” he said, gesturing.

“Yes, I know those.”

He grinned. “Suppose we both stop pulling? We could walk through it. Leave town. I’ll throw the book in the river. Tonight you and I could fly back to Chattanooga. Together.”

She laughed. “You wouldn’t really do that, though.”

“You don’t know me after all.”

“You spit in the face of your friends? And I lose my job? A high price to pay for one gesture. For a young man’s pretense of free will.”

“I’m not pretending, lady. Try me. I dare you.”

“Then you’re drunk.”

“Well, there’s that.” He laughed. “But don’t joke about liberty. Liberty’s the realest thing there is.” He stood up and hunted out the bathroom.

On his way back he stopped at a payphone. He gave it fifty centimes and dialed Tennessee. Djulia answered.

“What time is it?” he said.

“Nineteen. Where are you?”

“Düsseldorf.”

“Oh.” She rubbed her nose. “Sounds like you’re in a bar.”

“Bingo.”

“So what’s new, Eddy?”

“I know you put a lot of stock in honesty,” Eddy said. “So I thought I’d tell you I’m planning an affair. I met this German girl here and frankly, she’s irresistible.”

Djulia frowned darkly. “You’ve got a lot of nerve telling me that kind of crap with your spex on.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. He took them off and stared into the monitor. “Sorry.”

“You’re drunk, Eddy,” Djulia said. “I hate it when you’re drunk! You’ll say and do anything if you’re drunk and on the far end of a phone-line.” She rubbed nervously at her newest cheek-tattoo. “Is this one of your weird jokes?”

“Yeah. It is, actually. The chances are eighty to one that she’ll turn me down flat.” Eddy laughed. “But I’m gonna try anyway. Because you’re not letting me live and breathe.”

Djulia’s face went stiff. “When we’re face-to-face, you always abuse my trust. That’s why I don’t like for us to go past virching.”

“Come off it, Djulia.”

She was defiant. “If you think you’ll be happier with some weirdo virch-whore in Europe, go ahead! I don’t know why you can’t do that by wire from Chattanooga, anyway.”

“This is Europe. We’re talking actuality here.”

Djulia was shocked. “If you actually touch another woman I never want to see you again.” She bit her lip. “Or do wire with you, either. I mean that, Eddy. You know I do.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

He hung up, got change from the phone, and dialed his parents’ house. His father answered.

“Hi, Bob. Lisa around?”

“No,” his father said, “it’s her night for optic macrame. How’s Europe?”

“Different.”

“Nice to hear from you, Eddy. We’re kind of short of money. I can spare you some sustained attention, though.”

“I just dumped Djulia.”

“Good move, son,” his father said briskly. “Fine. Very serious girl, Djulia. Way too strait-laced for you. A kid your age should be dating girls who are absolutely jumping out of their skins.”

Eddy nodded.

“You didn’t lose your spex, did you?”

Eddy held them up on their neck chain. “Safe and sound.”

“Hardly recognized you for a second,” his father said. “Ed, you’re such a serious-minded kid. Taking on all these responsibilities. On the road so much, spexware day in and day out. Lisa and I network about you all the time. Neither of us did a day’s work before we were thirty, and we’re all the better for it. You’ve got to live, son. Got to find yourself. Smell the roses. If you want to stay in Europe a couple of months, forget the algebra courses.”

“It’s calculus, Bob.”

“Whatever.”

“Thanks for the good advice, Bob. I know you mean it.”

“It’s good news about Djulia, son. You know we don’t invalidate your feelings, so we never said a goddamn thing to you, but her glassware really sucked. Lisa says she’s got no goddamn aesthetics at all. That’s a hell of a thing, in a woman.”

“That’s my mom,” Eddy said. “Give Lisa my best.” He hung up.

He went back out to the sidewalk table. “Did you eat enough?” Sardelle asked.

“Yeah. It was good.”

“Sleepy?”

“I dunno. Maybe.”

“Do you have a place to stay, Eddy? Hotel reservations?”

Eddy shrugged. “No. I don’t bother, usually. What’s the use? It’s more fun winging it.”

“Good,” Sardelle nodded. “It’s better to wing. No one can trace us. It’s safer.”

She found them shelter in a park, where an activist group of artists from Munich had set up a squatter pavilion. As squatter pavilions went, it was quite a nice one, new and in good condition: a giant soap-bubble upholstered in cellophane and polysilk. It covered half an acre with crisp yellow bubblepack flooring. The shelter was illegal and therefore anonymous. Sardelle seemed quite pleased abut this.

Once through the zippered airlock, Eddy and Sardelle were forced to examine the artists’ multimedia artwork for an entire grueling hour. Worse yet, they were closely quizzed afterward by an expert-system, which bullied them relentlessly with arcane aesthetic dogma.

This ordeal was too high a price for most squatters. The pavilion, though attractive, was only half-full, and many people who had shown up bone-tired were fleeing the art headlong. Deep Eddy, however, almost always aced this sort of thing. Thanks to his slick responses to the computer’s quizzing, he won himself quite a nice area, with a blanket, opaquable curtains, and its own light fixtures. Sardelle, by contrast, had been bored and minimal, and had won nothing more advanced than a pillow and a patch of bubblepack among the philistines.

Eddy made good use of a traveling pay-toilet stall, and bought some mints and chilled mineral water from a robot. He settled in cozily as police sirens, and some distant, rather choked-sounding explosions, made the night glamorous.

Sardelle didn’t seem anxious to leave. “May I see your hotel bag,” she said.

“Sure.” He handed it over. Might as well. She’d given it to him in the first place.

He’d thought she was going to examine the book again, but instead she took a small plastic packet from within the bag, and pulled the packet’s ripcord. A colorful jumpsuit jumped out, with a chemical hiss and a vague hot stink of catalysis and cheap cologne. The jumpsuit, a one-piece, had comically baggy legs, frilled sleeves, and was printed all over with a festive cut-up of twentieth century naughty seaside postcards.

“Pajamas,” Eddy said. “Gosh, how thoughtful.”

“You can sleep in this if you want,” Sardelle nodded, “but it’s daywear. I want you to wear it tomorrow. And I want to buy the clothes you are wearing now, so that I can take them away for safety.”

Deep Eddy was wearing a dress shirt, light jacket, American jeans, dappled stockings and Nashville brogues of genuine blue suede. “I can’t wear that crap,” he protested. “Jesus, I’d look like a total loser.”

“Yes,” said Sardelle with an enthusiastic nod, “It’s very cheap and common. It will make you invisible. Just one more party boy among thousands and thousands. This is very secure dress, for a courier during a Wende.”

“You want me to meet the Critic in this get-up?”

Sardelle laughed. ‘The Cultural Critic is not impressed by taste, Eddy. The eye he uses when he looks at people . . . he sees things other people can’t see.” She paused, considering. “He might be impressed if you showed up dressed in this. Not because of what it is, of course. But because it would show that you can understand and manipulate popular taste to your own advantage . . . just as he does.”

“You’re really being paranoid,” Eddy said, nettled. “I’m not an assassin. I’m just some techie zude from Tennessee. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I believe you,” she nodded. “You’re very convincing. But that has nothing to do with proper security technique. If I take your clothes, there will be less operational risk.”

“How much less risk? What do you expect to find in my clothes, anyway?”

“There are many, many things you might have done,” she said patiently. “The human race is very ingenious. We have invented ways to kill, or hurt, or injure almost anyone, with almost nothing at all.” She sighed. “If you don’t know about such techniques already, it would only be stupid for me to tell you all about them. So let’s be quick and simple, Eddy. It would make me happier to take your clothes away. A hundred ecu.”

Eddy shook his head. “This time it’s really going to cost you.”

“Two hundred then,” Sardelle said.

“Forget it.”

“I can’t go higher than two hundred. Unless you let me search your body cavities.”

Eddy dropped his spex.

“Body cavities,” Sardelle said impatiently. “You’re a grown-up man, you must know about this. A great deal can be done with body cavities.” Eddy stared at her. “Can’t I have some chocolate and roses first?”

“It’s not chocolate and roses with us,” Sardelle said sternly. “Don’t talk to me about chocolate and roses. We’re not lovers. We are client and bodyguard. It’s an ugly business, I know. But it’s only business.”

“Yeah? Well, trading in body cavities is new to me.” Deep Eddy rubbed his chin. “As a simple Yankee youngster I find this a little confusing. Maybe we could barter then? Tonight?”

She laughed harshly. “I won’t sleep with you, Eddy. I won’t sleep at all! You’re only being foolish.” Sardelle shook her head. Suddenly she lifted a densely braided mass of hair above her right ear. “Look here, Mr. Simple Yankee Youngster. I’ll show you my favorite body cavity.” There was a fleshcolored plastic duct in the side of her scalp. “It’s illegal to have this done in Europe. I had it done in Turkey. This morning I took half a cc through there. I won’t sleep until Monday.”

“Jesus,” Eddy said. He lifted his spex to stare at the small dimpled orifice. “Right through the blood-brain barrier? That must be a hell of an infection risk.”

“I don’t do it for fun. It’s not like beer and pretzels. It’s just that I won’t sleep now. Not until the Wende is over.” She put her hair back, and sat up with a look of composure. “Then I’ll fly somewhere and lie in the sun and be very still. All by myself, Eddy.”

“Okay,” Eddy said, feeling a weird and muddy sort of pity for her. “You can borrow my clothes and search them.”

“I have to bum the clothes. Two hundred ecu?”

“All right. But I keep these shoes.”

“May I look at your teeth for free? It will only take five minutes.”

“Okay,” he muttered. She smiled at him, and touched her spex. A bright purple light emerged from the bridge of her nose.

At 08:00 a police drone attempted to clear the park. It flew overhead, barking robotic threats in five languages. Everyone simply ignored the machine.

Around 08:30 an actual line of human police showed up. In response, a group of the squatters brought out their own bullhorn, an enormous battery-powered sonic assault-unit.

The first earthshaking shriek hit Eddy like an electric prod. He’d been lying peacefully on his bubble-mattress, listening to the doltish yap of the robot chopper. Now he leapt quickly from his crash-padding and wormed his way into the crispy bubblepack cloth of his ridiculous jumpsuit.

Sardelle showed up while he was still tacking the jumpsuit’s velcro buttons. She led him outside the pavilion.

The squatter bullhorn was up on an iron tripod pedestal, surrounded by a large group of grease-stained anarchists with helmets, earpads, and studded white batons. Their bullhorn’s enormous ululating bellow was reducing everyone’s nerves to jelly. It was like the shriek of Medusa.

The cops retreated, and the owners of the bullhorn shut it off, waving their glittering batons in triumph. In the deafened, jittery silence there were scattered shrieks, jeers, and claps, but the ambience in the park had become very bad: aggressive and surreal. Attracted by the apocalyptic shriek, people were milling into the park at a trot, spoiling for any kind of trouble.

They seemed to have little in common, these people; not their dress, not language, certainly nothing like a coherent political cause. They were mostly young men, and most of them looked as if they’d been up all night: red-eyed and peevish. They taunted the retreating cops. A milling gang knifed one of the smaller pavilions, a scarlet one, and it collapsed like a blood-blister under their trampling feet.

Sardelle took Eddy to the edge of the park, where the cops were herding up a crowd-control barricade-line of ambulant robotic pink beanbags. “I want to see this,” he protested. His ears were ringing.

“They’re going to fight,” she told him.

“About what?”

“Anything. Everything,” she shouted. “It doesn’t matter. They’ll knock our teeth out. Don’t be stupid.” She took him by the elbow and they slipped through a gap in the closing battle-line.

The police had brought up a tracked glue-cannon truck. They now began to threaten the crowd with a pasting. Eddy had never seen a glue-cannon before—except on television. It was quite astonishing how frightening the machine looked, even in pink. It was squat, blind, and nozzled, and sat there buzzing like some kind of wheeled warrior termite.

Suddenly several of the cops standing around the machine began to flinch and duck. Eddy saw a glittering object carom hard off the glue-truck’s armored canopy. It flew twenty meters and landed in the grass at his feet. He picked it up. It was a stainless-steel ball-bearing the size of a cow’s eyeball.

“Airguns?” he said.

“Slingshots. Don’t let one hit you.”

“Oh yeah. Great advice, I guess.” To the far side of the cops a group of people—some kind of closely organized protestors—were advancing in measured step under a tall two-man banner. It read, in English: The Only Thing Worse Than Dying Is Outliving Your Culture. Every man-jack of them, and there were at least sixty, carried a long plastic pike topped with an ominous-looking bulbous sponge. It was clear from the way they maneuvered that they understood military pike-tactics only too well; their phalanx bristled like a hedgehog, and some captain among them was barking distant orders. Worse yet, the pikemen had neatly outflanked the cops, who now began calling frantically for backup.

A police drone whizzed just above their heads, not the casual lumbering he had seen before, but direct and angry and inhumanly fast. “Run!” Sardelle shouted, taking his hands. “Peppergas . . .”

Eddy glanced behind him as he fled. The chopper, as if cropdusting, was farting a dense maroon fog. The crowd bellowed in shock and rage and, seconds later, that hellish bullhorn kicked in once more.

Sardelle ran with amazing ease and speed. She bounded along as if firecrackers were bursting under her feet. Eddy, years younger and considerably longer in leg, was very hard-put to keep up.

In two minutes they were well out of the park, across a broad street and into a pedestrian network of small shops and restaurants. There she stopped and let him catch his breath.

“Jesus,” he puffed, “where can I buy shoes like that?”

“They’re made-to-order,” she told him calmly. “And you need special training. You can break your ankles, otherwise. . . .” She gazed at a nearby bakery. “You want some breakfast now?”

Eddy sampled a chocolate-filled pastry inside the shop, at a dainty, doily-covered table. Two ambulances rushed down the street, and a large group of drum-beating protesters swaggered by, shoving shoppers from the pavement; but otherwise things seemed peaceful. Sardelle sat with arms folded, staring into space. He guessed that she was reading security alerts from the insides of her spex.

“You’re not tired, are you?” he said.

“I don’t sleep on operations,” she said, “but sometimes I like to sit very still.” She smiled at him. “You wouldn’t understand. . . .”

“Hell no I wouldn’t,” Eddy said, his mouth full. “All hell’s breaking loose over there, and here you are sipping orange juice just as calm as a bump on a pickle. . . . Damn, these croissants, or whatever the hell they are, are really good. Hey! Herr Ober! Bring me another couple of those, ja, danke. . . .”

“The trouble could follow us anywhere. We’re as safe here as any other place. Safer, because we’re not in the open.”

“Good,” Eddy nodded, munching. “That park’s a bad scene.”

“It’s not so bad in the park. It’s very bad at the Rhein-Spire, though. The Mahogany Warbirds have seized the rotating restaurant. They’re stealing skin.”

“What are Warbirds?”

She seemed surprised. “You haven’t heard of them? They’re from NAFTA. A criminal syndicate. Insurance rackets, protection rackets, they run all the casinos in the Quebec Republic. . . .”

“Okay. So what’s stealing skin?”

“It’s a new kind of swindle; they take a bit of skin or blood, with your genetics, you see, and a year later they tell you they have a newborn son or daughter of yours held captive, held somewhere secret in the South. . . . Then they try to make you pay, and pay, and pay. . . .”

“You mean they’re kidnaping genetics from the people in that restaurant?”

“Yes. Brunch in the Rhein-Spire is very prestigious. The victims are all rich or famous.” Suddenly she laughed, rather bitter, rather cynical. “I’ll be busy next year, Eddy, thanks to this. A new job—protecting my clients’ skin.”

Eddy thought about it. “It’s kind of like the rent-a-womb business, huh? But really twisted.”

She nodded. “The Warbirds are crazy, they’re not even ethnic criminals, they are network interest-group creatures. . . . Crime is so damned ugly, Eddy. If you ever think of doing it, just stop.”

Eddy grunted.

“Think of those children,” she murmured. “Born from crime. Manufactured to order, for a criminal purpose. This is a strange world, isn’t it? It frightens me sometimes.”

“Yeah?” Eddy said cheerfully. “Illegitimate son of a millionaire, raised by a high-tech mafia? Sounds kind of weird and romantic to me. I mean, consider the possibilities.”

She took off her spex for the first time, to look at him. Her eyes were blue. A very odd and romantic shade of blue. Probably tinted contacts. “Rich people have been having illegitimate kids since the year zero,” Eddy said. “The only difference is somebody’s mechanized the process.” He laughed.

“It’s time you met the Cultural Critic,” she said. She put the spex back on.

They had to walk a long way. The bus system was now defunct. Apparently the soccer fans made a sport of hitting public buses; they would rip all the beanbags out and kick them through the doors. On his way to meet the Critic, Eddy saw hundreds of soccer fans; the city was swarming with them. The English devotees were very bad news; savage, thick-booted, snarling, stamping, chanting, anonymous young men, in knee-length sandpaper coats, with their hair cropped short and their faces masked or war-painted in the Union Jack. The English soccer hooligans traveled in enormous packs of two and three hundred. They were armed with cheap cellular phones. They’d wrapped the aerials with friction tape to form truncheon handles, so that the high-impact ceramic phone-casing became a nasty club. It was impossible to deny a traveler the ownership of a telephone, so the police were impotent to stop this practice. Practically speaking, there was not much to be done in any case. The English hooligans dominated the streets through sheer force of numbers. Anyone seeing them simply fled headlong.

Except, of course, for the Irish soccer fans. The Irish wore thick elbow-length grappling gloves, some kind of workmen’s gauntlets apparently, along with long green-and-white football-scarves. Their scarves had skull-denting weights sewn into pockets at their ends, and the tassels fringed with little skin-ripping wire barbs. The weights were perfectly legitimate rolls of coins, and the wire—well, you could get wire anywhere. The Irish seemed to be outnumbered, but were, if anything, even drunker and more reckless than their rivals. Unlike the English, the Irish louts didn’t even use the cellular phones to coordinate their brawling. They just plunged ahead at a dead run, whipping their scarves overhead and screaming about Oliver Cromwell.

The Irish were terrifying. They traveled down streets like a scourge. Anything in their way they knocked over and trampled: knickknack kiosks, propaganda videos, poster-booths, T-shirt tables, people selling canned jumpsuits. Even the postnatal abortion people, who were true fanatics, and the scary, eldritch, black-clad pro-euthanasia groups, would abandon their sidewalk podiums to flee from the Irish kids.

Eddy shuddered to think what the scene must be like at the Rhein-Stadium. “Those are some mean goddamn kids,” he told Sardelle, as they emerged from hiding in an alley. “And it’s all about soccer? Jesus, that seems so pointless.”

“If they rioted in their own towns, that would be pointless,” Sardelle said. “Here at the Wende, they can smash each other, and everything else, and tomorrow they will be perfectly safe at home in their own world.”

“Oh, I get it,” Eddy said. “That makes a lot of sense.”

A passing blonde woman in a Muslim hijab slapped a button onto Eddy’s sleeve. “Will your lawyer talk to God?” the button demanded aloud, repeatedly, in English. Eddy plucked the device off and stamped on it.

The Cultural Critic was holding court in a safehouse in Stadtmitte. The safehouse was an anonymous twentieth-century four-story dump, flanked by some nicely retrofitted nineteenth-century townhouses. A graffitti gang had hit the block during the night, repainting the street-surface with a sprawling polychrome mural, all big grinning green kitty-cats, fractal spirals, and leaping priapic pink pigs. “Hot Spurt!” one of the pigs suggested eagerly; Eddy skirted its word balloon as they approached the door.

The door bore a small brass plaque reading “E.I.S.—Elektronisches Invasionsabwehr-Systems GmbH.” There was an inscribed corporate logo that appeared to be a melting ice-cube.

Sardelle spoke in German to the door video; it opened, and they entered a hall full of pale, drawn adults in suits, armed with fire-extinguishers. Despite their air of nervous resolution and apparent willingness to fight hand-to-hand, Eddy took them for career academics: modestly dressed, ties and scarves slightly askew, odd cheek-tattoos, distracted gazes, too serious. The place smelled bad, like stale cottage-cheese and bookshelf dust. The dirt-smudged walls were festooned with schematics and wiring diagrams, amid a bursting mess of tower-stacked scrawl-labeled cartons—disk archives of some kind. The ceiling and floorboards were festooned with taped-down power-cables and fiber-optic network wiring.

“Hi, everybody!” Eddy said. “How’s it going?” The building’s defenders looked at him, noted his jumpsuit costume, and reacted with relieved indifference. They began talking in French, obviously resuming some briefly postponed and intensely important discussion.

“Hello,” said a German in his thirties, rising to his feet. He had long, thinning, greasy hair and a hollow-cheeked, mushroom-pale face. He wore secretarial half-spex; and behind them he had the shiftiest eyes Eddy had ever seen, eyes that darted, and gloated, and slid around the room. He worked his way through the defenders, and smiled at Eddy, vaguely. “I am your host. Welcome, friend.” He extended a hand.

Eddy shook it. He glanced sidelong at Sardelle. Sardelle had gone as stiff as a board and had jammed her gloved hands in her trenchcoat pockets.

“So,” Eddy gabbled, snatching his hand back, “thanks a lot for having us over!”

“You’ll be wanting to see my famous friend the Cultural Critic,” said their host, with a cadaverous smile. “He is upstairs. This is my place. I own it.” He gazed around himself, brimming with satisfaction. “It’s my Library, you see. I have the honor of hosting the great man for the Wende. He appreciates my work. Unlike so many others.” Their host dug into the pocket of his baggy slacks. Eddy, instinctively expecting a drawn knife, was vaguely surprised to see his host hand over an old-fashioned, dogeared business card. Eddy glanced at it. “How are you, Herr Schreck?”

“Life is very exciting today,” said Schreck with a smirk. He touched his spex and examined Eddy’s on-line bio. “A young American visitor. How charming.”

“I’m from NAFTA,” Eddy corrected.

“And a civil libertarian. Liberty is the only word that still excites me,” Schreck said, with itchy urgency. “I need many more American intimates. Do make use of me. And all my digital services. That card of mine—do call those network addresses and tell your friends. The more, the happier.” He turned to Sardelle. “Kaffee, fraulein? Zigaretten?”

Sardelle shook her head minimally.

“It’s good she’s here,” Schreck told Eddy. “She can help us to fight. You go upstairs. The great man is waiting for visitors.”

“I’m going up with him,” Sardelle said.

“Stay here,” Schreck urged. “The security threat is to the Library, not to him.”

“I’m a bodyguard,” Sardelle said frostily. “I guard the body. I don’t guard data-havens.”

Schreck frowned. “Well, more fool you, then.”

Sardelle followed Eddy up the dusty, flower-carpeted stairs. Upstairs to the right was an antique twentieth-century office-door in blond oak and frosted glass. Sardelle knocked; someone called out in French.

She opened the door. Inside the office were two long workbenches covered with elderly desktop computers. The windows were barred and curtained.

The Cultural Critic, wearing spex and a pair of datagloves, sat in a bright pool of sunlight-yellow glare from a trackmounted overhead light. He was pecking daintily with his gloved fingertips at a wafer-thin data-screen of woven cloth.

As Sardelle and Eddy stepped into the office, the Critic wrapped up his screen in a scroll, removed his spex, and unplugged his gloves. He had dark pepper-and-salt tousled hair, a dark wool tie, and a long maroon scarf draped over a beautifully cut ivory jacket.

“You would be Mr. Dertouzas from CAPCLUG,” he said.

“Exactly. How are you, sir?”

“Very well.” He examined Eddy briefly. “I assume his clothing was your idea, Frederika.”

Sardelle nodded once, with a sour look. Eddy smiled at her, delighted to learn her real name.

“Have a seat,” the Critic offered. He poured himself more coffee. “I’d offer you a cup of this, but it’s been . . . adjusted.”

“I brought you your book,” Eddy said. He sat, and opened the bag, and offered the item in question.

“Splendid.” The Critic reached into his pocket and, to Eddy’s surprise, pulled a knife. The Critic opened its blade with one thumbnail. The shining blade was sawtoothed in a fractal fashion; even its serrations had tiny serrated serrations. It was a jack-knife the length of a finger, with a razor-sharp edge on it as long as a man’s arm.

Under the knife’s irresistible ripping caress, the tough cover of the book parted with a discreet shredding of cloth. The Critic reached into the slit and plucked out a thin, gleaming storage disk. He set the book down. “Did you read this?”

“That disk?” Eddy ad-libbed. “I assumed it was encrypted.”

“You assumed correctly, but I meant the book.”

“I think it lost something in translation,” Eddy said.

The Critic raised his brows. He had dark, heavy brows with a pronounced frown-line between them, over sunken, gray-green eyes. “You have read Canetti in the Italian, Mr. Dertouzas?”

“I meant the translation between centuries,” Eddy said, and laughed. “What I read left me with nothing but questions. . . . Can you answer them for me, sir?”

The Critic shrugged and turned to a nearby terminal. It was a scholar’s workstation, the least dilapidated of the machines in the office. He touched four keys in order; a carousel whirled and spat out a disk. The Critic handed it to Eddy. “You’ll find your answers here, to whatever extent I can give them,” he said. “My Complete Works. Please take this disk. Reproduce it, give it to whomever you like, as long as you accredit it. The standard scholarly procedure. I’m sure you know the etiquette.”

“Thank you very much,” Eddy said with dignity, tucking the disk into his bag. “Of course I own your works already, but I’m glad of a fully up-to-date edition.”

“I’m told that a copy of my Complete Works will get you a cup of coffee at any cafe in Europe,” the Critic mused, slotting the encrypted disk and rapidly tapping keys. “Apparently digital commodification is not entirely a spent force, even in literature. . . .” He examined the screen. “Oh, this is lovely. I knew I would need this data again. And I certainly didn’t want it in my house.” He smiled.

“What are you going to do with that data?” Eddy said.

“Do you really not know?” the Critic said. “And you from CAPCLUG, a group of such carnivorous curiosity? Well, that’s also a strategy, I suppose.” He tapped more keys, then leaned back and opened a pack of zigarettes.

“What strategy?”

“New elements, new functions, new solutions—I don’t know what ‘culture’ is, but I know exactly what I’m doing.” The Critic drew slowly on a zigarette, his brows knotting.

“And what’s that, exactly?”

“You mean, what is the underlying concept?” He waved the zigarette. “I have no ‘concept.’ The struggle here must not be reduced to a single simple idea. I am building a structure that must not, cannot, be reduced to a single simple idea. I am building a structure that perhaps suggests a concept. . . . If I did more, the system itself would become stronger than the surrounding culture. . . . Any system of rational analysis must live within the strong blind body of mass humanity, Mr. Dertouzas. If we learned anything from the twentieth century, we learned that much, at least.” The Critic sighed, a fragrant medicinal mist. “I fight windmills, sir. It’s a duty. . . . You often are hurt, but at the same time you become unbelievably happy, because you see that you have both friends and enemies, and that you are capable of fertilizing society with contradictory attitudes.”

“What enemies do you mean?” Eddy said.

“Here. Today. Another data-burning. It was necessary to stage a formal resistance.”

“This is an evil place,” Sardelle—or rather Frederika—burst out. “I had no idea this was today’s safe-house. This is anything but safe. Jean-Arthur, you must leave this place at once. You could be killed here!”

“An evil place? Certainly. But there is so much megabytage devoted to works on goodness, and on doing good—so very little coherent intellectual treatment of the true nature of evil and being evil. . . . Of malice and stupidity and acts of cruelty and darkness . . . The Critic sighed. “Actually, once you’re allowed through the encryption that Herr Schreck so wisely imposes on his holdings, you’ll find the data here rather banal. The manuals for committing crime are farfetched and badly written. The schematics for bombs, listening devices, drug labs and so forth, are poorly designed and probably unworkable. The pornography is juvenile and overly anti-erotic. The invasions of privacy are of interest only to voyeurs. Evil is banal—by no means so scarlet as one’s instinctive dread would paint it. It’s like the sex-life of one’s parents—a primal and forbidden topic, and yet, with objectivity, basically integral to their human nature—and of course to your own.”

“Who’s planning to burn this place?” Eddy said.

“A rival of mine. He calls himself the Moral Referee.”

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard of him!” Eddy said. “He’s here in Düsseldorf too? Jesus.”

“He is a charlatan,” the Critic sniffed. “Something of an ayatollah figure. A popular demagogue. . . .” He glanced at Eddy. “Yes, yes—of course people do say much the same of me, Mr. Dertouzas, and I’m perfectly aware of that. But I have two doctorates, you know. The Referee is a self-appointed digital Savonarola. Not a scholar at all. An autodidactic philosopher. At best an artist.”

“Aren’t you an artist?”

“That’s the danger . . . the Critic nodded. “Once I was only a teacher, then suddenly I felt a sense of mission. . . . I began to understand which works are strongest, which are only decorative. . . .” The Critic looked suddenly restless, and puffed at his zigarette again. “In Europe there is too much couture, too little culture. In Europe everything is colored by discourse. There is too much knowledge and too much fear to overthrow that knowledge. . . . In NAFTA you are too naively postmodern to suffer from this syndrome. . . . And the Sphere, the Sphere, they are orthogonal to both our concerns. . . . The South, of course, is the planet’s last reservoir of authentic humanity, despite every ontological atrocity committed there. . . .”

“I’m not following you,” Eddy said.

“Take that disk with you. Don’t lose it,” the Critic said somberly. “I have certain obligations, that’s all. I must know why I made certain choices, and be able to defend them, and I must defend them, or risk losing everything. . . . Those choices are already made. I’ve drawn a line here, established a position. It’s my Wende today, you know! My lovely Wende. . . . Through cusp-points like this one, I can make things different for the whole of society.” He smiled. “Not better, necessarily—but different, certainly . . .

“People are coming,” Frederika announced suddenly, standing bolt upright and gesturing at the air. “A lot of people marching in the streets outside . . . there’s going to be trouble.”

“I knew he would react the moment that data left this building,” the Critic said, nodding. “Let trouble come! I will not move!”

“God damn you, I’m being paid to see that you survive!” Frederika said. “The Referee’s people burn data-havens. They’ve done it before, and they’ll do it again. Let’s get out of here while there’s still time!”

“We’re all ugly and evil,” the Critic announced calmly, settling deeply into his chair and steepling his fingers. “Bad knowledge is still legitimate self-knowledge. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

“That’s no reason to fight them hand-to-hand here in Dusseldorf! We’re not tactically prepared to defend this building! Let them burn it! What’s one more stupid outlaw and his rat-nest full of garbage?”

The Critic looked at her with pity. “It’s not the access that matters. It’s the principle.”

“Bullseye!” Eddy shouted, recognizing a CAPCLUG slogan.

Frederika, biting her lip, leaned over a tabletop and began typing invisibly on a virtual keyboard. “If you call your professional backup,” the Critic told her, “they’ll only be hurt. This is not really your fight, my dear; you’re not committed.”

“Fuck you and your politics; if you burn up in here we don’t get our bonuses,” Frederika shouted.

“No reason he should stay, at least,” the Critic said, gesturing to Eddy. “You’ve done well, Mr. Dertouzas. Thank you very much for your successful errand. It was most helpful.” The Critic glanced at the workstation screen, where a program from the disk was still spooling busily, then back at Eddy again. “I suggest you leave this place while you can.”

Eddy glanced at Frederika.

“Yes, go!” she said. “You’re finished here, I’m not your escort any more. Run, Eddy!”

“No way,” Eddy said, folding his arms. “If you’re not moving, I’m not moving.”

Frederika looked furious. “But you’re free to go. You heard him say so.”

“So what? Since I’m at liberty, I’m also free to stay,” Eddy retorted. “Besides, I’m from Tennessee, NAFTA’s Volunteer State.”

“There are hundreds of enemies coming,” Frederika said, staring into space. “They will overwhelm us and burn this place to the ground. There will be nothing left of both of you and your rotten data but ashes.”

“Have faith,” the Critic said coolly. “Help will come, as well—from some unlikely quarters. Believe me, I’m doing my very best to maximize the implications of this event. So is my rival, if it comes to that. Thanks to that disk that just arrived, I am wirecasting events here to four hundred of the most volatile network sites in Europe. Yes, the Referee’s people may destroy us, but their chances of escaping the consequences are very slim. And if we ourselves die here in flames, it will only lend deeper meaning to our sacrifice.”

Eddy gazed at the Critic in honest admiration. “I don’t understand a single goddamn word you’re saying, but I guess I can recognize a fellow spirit when I meet one. I’m sure CAPCLUG would want me to stay.”

“CAPCLUG would want no such thing,” the Critic told him soberly. “They would want you to escape, so that they could examine and dissect your experiences in detail. Your American friends are sadly infatuated with the supposed potency of rational, panoptic, digital analysis. Believe me, please—the enormous turbulence in postmodern society is far larger than any single human mind can comprehend, with or without computer-aided perception or the finest computer-assisted frameworks of sociological analysis.” The Critic gazed at his workstation, like a herpetologist studying a cobra. “Your CAPCLUG friends will go to their graves never realizing that every vital impulse in human life is entirely pre-rational.”

“Well, I’m certainly not leaving here before I figure that out,” Eddy said. “I plan to help you fight the good fight, sir.”

The Critic shrugged, and smiled. “Thank you for just proving me right, young man. Of course a young American hero is welcome to die in Europe’s political struggles. I’d hate to break an old tradition.”

Glass shattered. A steaming lump of dry ice flew through the window, skittered across the office floor, and began gently dissolving. Acting entirely on instinct, Eddy dashed forward, grabbed it barehanded, and threw it back out the window.

“Are you okay?” Frederika said.

“Sure,” Eddy said, surprised.

“That was a chemical gas bomb,” Frederika said. She gazed at him as if expecting him to drop dead on the spot.

“Apparently the chemical frozen into the ice was not very toxic,” the Critic surmised.

“I don’t think it was a gas bomb at all,” Eddy said, gazing out the window. “I think it was just a big chunk of dry ice. You Europeans are completely paranoid.”

He saw with astonishment that there was a medieval pageant taking place in the street. The followers of the Moral Referee—there were some three or four hundred of them, well-organized and marching forward in grimly disciplined silence—apparently had a weakness for medieval jerkins, fringed capes, and colored hose. And torches. They were very big on torches.

The entire building shuddered suddenly, and a burglar siren went off. Eddy craned to look. Half-a-dozen men were battering the door with a hand-held hydraulic ram. They wore visored helmets and metal armor, which gleamed in the summer daylight. “We’re being attacking by goddamn knights in shining armor,” Eddy said. “I can’t believe they’re doing this in broad daylight!”

“The football game just started,” Frederika said. “They have picked the perfect moment. Now they can get away with anything.”

“Do these window-bars come out?” Eddy said, shaking them.

“No. Thank goodness.”

“Then hand me some of those data-disks,” he demanded. “No, not those shrimpy ones—give me the full thirty-centimeter jobs.”

He threw the window up and began pelting the crowd below with flung megabytage. The disks had vicious aerodynamics and were hefty and sharp-edged. He was rewarded with a vicious barrage of bricks, which shattered windows all along the second and third floors.

“They’re very angry now,” Frederika shouted over the wailing alarm and roar of the crowd below. The three of them crouched under a table.

“Yeah,” Eddy said. His blood was boiling. He picked up a long, narrow printer, dashed across the room, and launched it between the bars. In reply, half-a-dozen long metal darts—short javelins, really—flew up through the window and imbedded themselves in the office ceiling.

“How’d they get those through Customs?” Eddy shouted. “Must’ve made them last night.” He laughed. “Should I throw ’em back? I can fetch them if I stand on a chair.”

“Don’t, don’t,” Frederika shouted. “Control yourself! Don’t kill anyone, it’s not professional.”

“I’m not professional,” Eddy said.

“Get down here,” Frederika commanded. When he refused, she scrambled from beneath the table and body-slammed him against the wall. She pinned Eddy’s arms, flung herself across him with almost erotic intensity, and hissed into his ear. “Save yourself while you can! This is only a Wende.”

“Stop that,” Eddy shouted, trying to break her grip. More bricks came through the window, tumbling past their feet.

“If they kill these worthless intellectuals,” she muttered hotly, “there will be a thousand more to take their place. But if you don’t leave this building right now, you’ll die here.”

“Christ, I know that,” Eddy shouted, finally flinging her backward with a rasp at her sandpaper coat. “Quit being such a loser.”

“Eddy, listen!” Frederika yelled, knotting her gloved fists. “Let me save your life! You’ll owe me later! Go home to your parents in America, and don’t worry about the Wende. This is all we ever do—it’s all we are really good for.”

“Hey, I’m good at this too!” Eddy announced. A brick barked his ankle. In sudden convulsive fury, he upended a table and slammed it against a broken window, as a shield. As bricks thudded against the far side of the table, he shouted defiance. He felt superhuman. Her attempt to talk sense had irritated him enormously.

The door broke in downstairs, with a concussive blast. Screams echoed up the stairs. “That’s torn it!” Eddy said.

He snatched up a multiplugged power outlet, dashed across the room, and kicked the office door open. With a shout, he jumped onto the landing, swinging the heavy power-strip over his head.

The Critic’s academic cadre were no physical match for the Referee’s knights-in-armor; but their fire extinguishers were surprisingly effective weapons. They coated everything in white caustic soda and filled the air with great blinding, billowing wads of flying, freezing droplets. It was clear that the defenders had been practicing.

The sight of the desperate struggle downstairs overwhelmed Eddy. He jumped down the stairs three at a time and flung himself into the midst of the battle. He conked a soda-covered helmet with a vicious overhead swing of his power-strip, then slipped and fell heavily on his back.

He began wrestling desperately across the soda-slick floor with a half-blinded knight. The knight clawed his visor up. Beneath the metal mask the knight was, if anything, younger than himself. He looked like a nice kid. He clearly meant well. Eddy hit the kid in the jaw as hard as he could, then began slamming his helmeted head into the floor.

Another knight kicked Eddy in the belly. Eddy fell off his victim, got up, and went for the new attacker. The two of them, wrestling clumsily, were knocked off balance by a sudden concerted rush through the doorway; a dozen Moral raiders slammed through, flinging torches and bottles of flaming gel. Eddy slapped his new opponent across the eyes with his soda-daubed hand, then lurched to his feet and jammed the loose spex back onto his face. He began coughing violently. The air was full of smoke; he was smothering.

He lurched for the door. With the panic strength of a drowning man, he clawed and jostled his way free.

Once outside the data-haven, Eddy realized that he was one of dozens of people daubed head to foot with white foam. Wheezing, coughing, collapsing against the side of the building, he and his fellow refugees resembled veterans of a monster cream-pie fight.

They didn’t, and couldn’t, recognize him as an enemy. The caustic soda was eating its way into Eddy’s cheap jumpsuit, reducing the bubbled fabric to weeping red rags.

Wiping his lips, ribs heaving, Eddy looked around. The spex had guarded his eyes, but their filth subroutine had crashed badly. The internal screen was frozen. Eddy shook the spex with his foamy hands, fingersnapped at them, whistled aloud. Nothing.

He edged his way along the wall.

At the back of the crowd, a tall gentleman in a medieval episcopal mitre was shouting orders through a bullhorn. Eddy wandered through the crowd until he got closer to the man. He was a tall, lean man, in his late forties, in brocaded vestments, a golden cloak and white gloves.

This was the Moral Referee. Eddy considered jumping this distinguished gentleman and pummeling him, perhaps wrestling his bullhorn away and shouting contradictory orders through it.

But even if he dared to try this, it wouldn’t do Eddy much good. The Referee with the bullhorn was shouting in German. Eddy didn’t speak German. Without his spex he couldn’t read German. He didn’t understand Germans or their issues or their history. In point of fact he had no real reason at all to be in Germany.

The Moral Referee noticed Eddy’s fixed and calculating gaze. He lowered his bullhorn, leaned down a little from the top of his portable mahogany pulpit, and said something to Eddy in German.

“Sorry,” Eddy said, lifting his spex on their neckchain. “Translation program crashed.”

The Referee examined him thoughtfully. “Has the acid in that foam damaged your spectacles?” he said, in excellent English.

“Yes sir,” Eddy said. “I think I’ll have to strip ’em and blow-dry the chips.”

The Referee reached within his robe and handed Eddy a monogrammed linen kerchief. “You might try this, young man.”

“Thanks a lot,” Eddy said. “I appreciate that, really.”

“Are you wounded?” the Referee said, with apparently genuine concern.

“No, sir. I mean, not really.”

“Then you’d better return to the fight,” the Referee said, straightening. “I know we have them on the run. Be of good cheer. Our cause is just.” He lifted his bullhorn again and resumed shouting.

The first floor of the building had caught fire. Groups of the Referee’s people were hauling linked machines into the street and smashing them to fragments on the pavement. They hadn’t managed to knock the bars from the windows, but they had battered some enormous holes through the walls. Eddy watched, polishing his spex.

Well above the street, the wall of the third floor began to disintegrate.

Moral Knights had broken into the office where Eddy had last seen the Cultural Critic. They had hauled their hydraulic ram up the stairs with them. Now its blunt nose was smashing through the brick wall as if it were stale cheese.

Fist-sized chunks of rubble and mortar cascaded to the street, causing the raiders below to billow away. In seconds, the raiders on the third floor had knocked a hole in the wall the size of a manhole cover. First, they flung down an emergency ladder. Then, office furniture began tumbling out to smash to the pavement below: voice mailboxes, canisters of storage disks, red-spined European law-books, network routers, tape backup-units, color monitors. . . .

A trenchcoat flew out the hole and pinwheeled slowly to earth. Eddy recognized it at once. It was Frederika’s sandpaper coat. Even in the midst of shouting chaos, with an evil billowing of combusting plastic now belching from the library’s windows, the sight of that fluttering coat hooked Eddy’s awareness. There was something in that coat. In its sleeve pocket. The key to his airport locker.

Eddy dashed forward, shoved three knights aside, and grabbed up the coat for himself. He winced and skipped aside as a plummeting office chair smashed to the street, narrowly missing him. He glanced up frantically.

He was just in time to see them throw out Frederika.

The tide was leaving Düsseldorf, and with it all the schooling anchovies of Europe. Eddy sat in the departure lounge balancing eighteen separate pieces of his spex on a velcro lap-table.

“Do you need this?” Frederika asked him.

“Oh yeah,” Eddy said, accepting the slim chromed tool. “I dropped my dental pick. Thanks a lot.” He placed it carefully into his black travel bag. He’d just spent all his European cash on a deluxe, duty-free German electronics repair kit.

“I’m not going to Chattanooga, now or ever,” Frederika told him. “So you might as well forget that. That can’t be part of the bargain.”

“Change your mind,” Eddy suggested. “Forget this Barcelona flight, and come transatlantic with me. We’ll have a fine time in Chattanooga. There’s some very deep people I want you to meet.”

“I don’t want anybody to meet,” Frederika muttered darkly. “And I don’t want you to show me off to your little hackerboy friends.”

Frederika had taken a hard beating in the riot, while covering the Critic’s successful retreat across the rooftop. Her hair had been scorched during the battle, and it had burst from its meticulous braiding like badly overused steel wool. She had a black eye, and her cheek and jaw were scorched and shiny with medicinal gel. Although Eddy had broken her fall, her three-story tumble to the street had sprained her ankle, wrenched her back and barked both knees.

And she had lost her apex.

“You look just fine,” Eddy told her. “You’re very interesting, that’s the point. You’re deep! That’s the appeal, you see? You’re a spook, and a European, and a woman—those are all very deep entities, in my opinion.” He smiled.

Eddy’s left elbow felt hot and swollen inside his spare shirt; his chest, ribs, and left leg were mottled with enormous bruises. He had a bloodied lump on the back of his head where he’d smashed down into the rubble, catching her.

Altogether, they were not an entirely unusual couple among the departing Wende folk cramming the Düsseldorf airport. As a whole, the crowd seemed to be suffering a massive collective hangover—harsh enough to put many of them into slings and casts. And yet it was amazing how contented, almost smug, many of the vast crowd seemed as they departed their pocket catastrophe. They were wan and pale, yet cheerful, like people recovering from flu.

“I don’t feel well enough to be deep,” Frederika said, stirring in her beanbag. “But you did save my life, Eddy. I do owe you something.” She paused. “It has to be something reasonable.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eddy told her nobly, rasping at the surface of a tiny circuit-board with a plastic spudger. “I mean, I didn’t even break your fall, strictly speaking. Mostly I just kept you from landing on your head.”

“You did save my life,” she repeated quietly. “That crowd would have killed me in the street if not for you.”

“You saved the Critic’s life. I imagine that’s a bigger deal.”

“I was paid to save his life,” Frederika said. “Anyway, I didn’t save the bastard. I just did my job. He was saved by his own cleverness. He’s been through a dozen of these damned things.” She stretched cautiously, shifting in her beanbag. “So have I, for that matter. . . . I must be a real fool. I endure a lot to live my precious life. . . .” She took a deep breath. “Barcelona, yo te quiero.”

“I’m just glad we checked out of that clinic in time to catch our flights,” Eddy told her, examining his work with a jeweler’s loupe. “Could you believe all those soccer kids in there? They sure were having fun. . . . Why couldn’t they be that good-tempered before they beat the hell out of each other? Some things are just a mystery, I guess.”

“I hope you have learned a good lesson from this,” Frederika said. “Sure have,” Eddy nodded. He blew dried crud from the point of his spudger, then picked up a chrome pinchclamp and threaded a tiny screw through the earpiece of his spex. “I can see a lot of deep potential in the Wende. It’s true that a few dozen people got killed here, but the city must have made an absolute fortune. That’s got to look promising for the Chattanooga city council. And a Wende offers a lot of very useful exposure and influence for a cultural networking group like CAPCLUG.”

“You’ve learned nothing at all,” she groaned. “I don’t know why I hoped it would be different.”

“I admit it—in the heat of the action I got a little carried away,” Eddy said. “But my only real regret is that you won’t come with me to America, Or, if you’d really rather, take me to Barcelona. Either way, the way I see it, you need someone to look after you for a while.”

“You’re going to rub my sore feet, yes?” Frederika said sourly. “How generous you are.”

“I dumped my creep girlfriend. My dad will pick up my tab. I can help you manage better. I can improve your life. I can fix your broken appliances. I’m a nice guy.”

“I don’t want to be rude,” she said, “but after this, the thought of being touched is repulsive.” She shook her head, with finality. “I’m sorry, Eddy, but I can’t give you what you want.”

Eddy sighed, examined the crowd for a while, then repacked the segments of his spex and closed his tool kit. At last he spoke up again. “Do you virch?”

“What?”

“Do you do virtuality?”

She was silent for a long moment, then looked him in the eye. “You don’t do anything really strange or sick on the wires, do you, Edward?”

“There’s hardly any subjective time-lag if you use high-capacity transatlantic fiber,” Eddy said.

“Oh. I see.”

“What have you got to lose? If you don’t like it, hang up.”

Frederika tucked her hair back, examined the departure board for the flight to Barcelona, and looked at the toes of her shoes. “Would this make you happy?”

“No,” Eddy said. “But it’d make me a whole lot more of what I already am.”

THE FRANCHISE

John Kessel

“The Franchise” and “Southpaw”—a story you’ll find later in this issue—meet at an obscure, yet pivotal crossroad. Had the major player taken the other path, American history might have moved in an entirely different direction. Serendipitously, both stories appeared in our offices at the same time. They treat their subject in widely dissimilar ways, but together they offer our August issue two novel pictures of the boys of summer.

John Kessel tells us his “interest in baseball goes back as far as my interest in SF and fantasy; my interest in politics comes a bit later. Up through 1948, ‘The Francise,’ is an accurate depiction of the lives of my two main characters.” Mr. Kessel has recently become a regular book review columnist for F&SF, and the New York Times named his story collection, Meeting in Infinity, one of the notable books of 1992.

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

—Jacques Barzun

ONE

When George Herbert Walker Bush strode into the batter’s box to face the pitcher they called the Franchise, it was the bottom of the second, and the Senators were already a run behind.

But Killebrew had managed a bloop double down the right field line and two outs later still stood on second in the bright October sunlight, waiting to be driven in. The bleachers were crammed full of restless fans in colorful shirts. Far behind Killebrew, Griffith Stadium’s green center field wall zig-zagged to avoid the towering oak in Mrs. Mahan’s back yard, lending the stadium its crazy dimensions. They said the only players ever to homer into that tree were Mantle and Ruth. George imagined how the stadium would erupt if he did it, drove the first pitch right out of the old ball yard, putting the Senators ahead in the first game of the 1959 World Series. If wishes were horses, his father had told him more than once, then beggars would ride.

George stepped into the box, ground in his back foot, squinted at the pitcher. The first pitch, a fastball, so surprised him that he didn’t get his bat off his shoulder. Belt-high, it split the middle of the plate, but the umpire called, “Ball!”

“Ball?” Schmidt, the Giants’ catcher, grumbled.

“You got a problem?” the umpire said.

“Me? I got no problem.” Schmidt tossed the ball back to the pitcher, who shook his head in histrionic Latin American dismay, as if bemoaning the sins of the world that he’d seen only too much of since he’d left Havana eleven years before. “But the Franchise, he no like.”

George ignored them and set himself for the next pitch. The big Cuban went into his herky-jerky windup, deceptively slow, then kicked and threw. George was barely into his swing when the ball thwacked into the catcher’s glove. “Steerike one!” the umpire called.

He was going to have to get around faster. The next pitch was another fastball, outside and high, but George had already triggered before the release and missed it by a foot, twisting himself around so that he almost fell over.

Schmidt took the ball out of his glove, showed it to George, and threw it back to the mound.

The next was a curve, outside by an inch. Ball two.

The next a fastball that somehow George managed to foul into the dirt.

The next a fastball up under his chin that had him diving into the dirt himself. Ball three. Full count.

An expectant murmur rose in the crowd, then fell to a profound silence, the silence of a church, of heaven, of a lover’s secret heart. Was his father among them, breathless, hoping? Thousands awaited the next pitch. Millions more watched on television. Killebrew took a three-step lead off second. The Giants made no attempt to hold him on. The chatter from the Senators’ dugout lit up. “Come on, George Herbert Walker Bush, bear down! Come on, Professor, grit up!”

George set himself, weight on his back foot. He cocked his bat, squinted out at the pitcher. The vainglorious Latino gave him a piratical grin, shook off Schmidt’s sign. George felt his shoulders tense. Calm, boy, calm, he told himself. You’ve been shot at, you’ve faced Prescott Bush across a dining room table—this is nothing but baseball. But instead of calm he felt panic, and as the Franchise went into his windup, his mind stood blank as a stone.

The ball started out right for his head. George jerked back in a desperate effort to get out of the way as the pitch, a curve of prodigious sweep, dropped through the heart of the plate. “Steerike!” the umpire called.

Instantly the scene changed from hushed expectation to sudden movement. The crowd groaned. The players relaxed and began jogging off the field. Killebrew kicked the dirt and walked back to the dugout to get his’ glove. The organist started up. Behind the big Chesterfield sign in right, the scorekeeper slid another goose egg onto the board for the Senators. Though the whole thing was similar to moments he had experienced more times than he would care to admit during his ten years in the minors, the simple volume of thirty thousand voices sighing in disappointment because he, George Herbert Walker Bush, had failed, left him standing stunned at the plate with the bat limp in his clammy hands. They didn’t get thirty thousand fans in Chattanooga.

Schmidt flipped the ball toward the mound. As the Franchise jogged past him, he flashed George that superior smile. “A magnificent swing,” he said.

George stumbled back to the dugout. Lemon, heading out to left, shook his head. “Nice try, Professor,” the shortstop Consolo said.

“Pull your jock up and get out to first,” said Lavagetto, the manager. He spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the sod next to the end of the dugout. “Senor Fidel Castro welcomes you to the bigs.”

TWO

The Senators lost 7-1. Castro pitched nine innings, allowed four hits, struck out ten. George fanned three times. In the sixth, he let a low throw get by him; the runner ended up on third and the Giants followed with four unearned runs.

In the locker room his teammates avoided him. Nobody had played well, but George knew they had him pegged as a choker. Lavagetto caitie through with a few words of encouragement. “We’ll get ’em tomorrow,” he said. George expected the manager to yank him for somebody who at least wouldn’t cost them runs on defense. When he left without saying anything, George was grateful to him for at least letting him go another night before benching him.

Barbara and the boys had been in the stands, but had gone home. They would be waiting for him. He didn’t want to go. The place was empty by the time he walked out through the tunnels to the street. His head was filled with images from the game. Castro had toyed with him; he no doubt enjoyed humiliating the son of a U.S. senator. The Cuban’s look of heavy-lidded disdain sparked an unaccustomed rage in George. It wasn’t good sportsmanship. You played hard, and you won or lost, but you didn’t rub the other guy’s nose in it. That was bush league, and George, despite his unfortunate name, was anything but bush.

That George Bush should end up playing first base for the Washington Senators in the 1959 World Series was the result of as improbable a sequence of events as had ever conspired to make a man of a rich boy. The key moment had come on a May Saturday in 1948 when he had shaken the hand of Babe Ruth.

That May morning the Yale baseball team was to play Brown, but before the game a ceremony was held to honor Ruth, donating the manuscript of his autobiography to the university library. George, captain of the Yale squad, would accept the manuscript. As he stood before the microphone set up between the pitcher’s mound and second base, he was stunned by the gulf between the pale hulk standing before him and the legend he represented. Ruth, only fifty-three on that spring morning, could hardly speak for the throat cancer that was killing him. He gasped out a few words, stooped over, rail thin, no longer the giant he had been in the twenties. George took his hand. It was dry and papery and brown as a leaf in fall. Through his grip George felt the contact with glorious history, with feats of heroism that would never be matched, with 714 home runs and 1356 extra base hits, with a lifetime slugging percentage of .690, with the called shot and the 60-homer season and the 1927 Yankees and the curse of the Red Sox. An electricity surged up his arm and directly into his soul. Ruth had accomplished as much, in his way, as a man could accomplish in a life, more, even, George realized to his astonishment, than had his father Prescott Bush. He stood there stunned, charged with an unexpected, unasked for purpose.

He had seen death in the war, had tasted it in the blood that streamed from his forehead when he’d struck it against the tail of the TBM Avenger as he parachuted out of the flaming bomber over the Pacific in 1943. He had felt death’s hot breath on his back as he frantically paddled the yellow rubber raft away from Chichi Jima against waves pushing him back into the arms of the Japanese, had felt death draw away and offered up a silent prayer when the conning tower of the U.S.S. Finback broke through the agitated seas to save him from a savage fate—to, he always knew, some higher purpose. He had imagined that purpose to be business or public service. Now he recognized that he had been seeing it through his father’s eyes, that in fact his fate lay elsewhere. It lay between the chalk lines of a playing field, on the greensward of the infield, within the smells of pine tar and sawdust and chewing tobacco and liniment. He could feel it through the tendons of the fleshless hand of Babe Ruth that he held in his own at that very instant.

The day after he graduated from Yale he signed, for no bonus, with the Cleveland Indians. Ten years later, George had little to show for his bold choice. He wasn’t the best first baseman you ever saw. Nobody ever stopped him on the street to ask for his autograph. He never made the Indians, got traded to the Browns. He hung on, bouncing up and down the farm systems of seventh and eighth-place teams. Every spring he went to Florida with high expectations, every April he started the season in Richmond, in Rochester, in Chattanooga. Just two months earlier he had considered packing it in and looking for another career. Then a series of miracles happened.

Chattanooga was the farm team for the Senators, who hadn’t won a pennant since 1933. For fifteen years, under their notoriously cheap owner Clark Griffith, they’d been as bad as you could get. But in 1959, their young third baseman, Harmon Killebrew, hit forty-two home runs. Sluggers Jim Lemon and Roy Sievers had career years. A big Kansas boy named Bob Allison won rookie of the year in center field. Camilo Pascual won twenty-two games, struck out 215 men. A kid named Jim Kaat won seventeen. Everything broke right, including Mickey Mantle’s leg. After hovering a couple of games over .500 through the All Star break, the Senators got hot in August, won ninety games and finished one ahead of the Yankees.

When late in August right fielder Albie Pearson got hurt, Lavagetto switched Sievers to right, and there was George Bush, thirty-five years old, starting at first base for the American League champions in the 1959 World Series against the New York Giants.

The Giants were heavy favorites. Who would bet against a team that fielded Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Willie McCovey, Felipe Alou, and pitchers like Johnny Antonelli, the fireballer Toothpick Sam Jones, and the Franchise, Fidel Castro. If, prior to the series, you’d told George Herbert Walker Bush the Senators were doomed, he would not have disagreed with you. After game one he had no reason to think otherwise.

He stood outside the stadium looking for a cab, contemplating his series record—one game, 0 for 4, one error—when a pale old man in a loud sportscoat spoke to him. “Just be glad you’re here,” the man said.

The man had watery blue eyes, a sharp face. He was thin enough to look ill. “I beg your pardon?”

“You’re the fellow the Nats called up in September, right? Remember, even if you never play another inning, at least you were there. You felt the sun on your back, got dirt on your hands, saw the stands full of people from down on the field. Not many get even that much.”

“The Franchise made me look pretty sick.”

“You have to face him down.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Don’t say—do.”

“Who are you, old man?”

The man hesitated. “Name’s Weaver. I’m a—a fan. Yes, I’m a baseball fan.” He touched the brim of his hat and walked away.

George thought about it on the cab ride home. It did not make him feel much better. When he got back to the cheap furnished apartment they were renting, Barbara tried to console him.

“My father wasn’t there, was he?” George said.

“No. But he called after the game. He wants to see you.”

“Probably wants to give me a few tips on how to comport myself. Or maybe just gloat.”

Bar came around behind his chair, rubbed his tired shoulders. George got up and switched on the television. While he waited for it to warm. up, the silence stretched. He faced Barbara. She had put on a few pounds over the years, but he remembered the first time he’d seen her across the dance floor in the red dress. He was seventeen. “What do you think he wants?”

“I don’t know, George.”

“I haven’t seen him around in the last ten years. Have you?”

The TV had warmed up and Prescott Bush’s voice blared out from behind George. “I hope the baseball Senators win,” he was saying. “They’ve had a better year than the Democratic ones.”

George twisted down the volume, stared for a moment at his father’s handsome face, then snapped it off. “Give me a drink,” he told Barbara. He noticed the boys standing in the doorway, afraid. Barbara hesitated, poured a scotch and water.

“And don’t stint on the scotch!” George yelled. He turned to Neil. “What are you looking at, you little weasel! Go to bed.”

Barbara slammed down the glass so hard the scotch splashed the counter. “What’s got into you, George? You’re acting like a crazy man.” George took the half-empty glass from her hand. “My father’s got into me, that’s what. He got into me thirty years ago and I can’t get him out.” Barbara shot him a look in which disgust outweighed pity and went back to the boys’ room. George slumped in the armchair and stared at the sports page of the Post lying on the ottoman. Castro to Start Series, the headline read.

Castro. What did he know about struggle? Yet the egomaniac lout was considered a hero, while he, George Herbert Walker Bush, who at twenty-four had been at the head of every list of the young men most likely to succeed, had accomplished precisely nothing.

People who didn’t know any better had assumed that because of his background, money, and education he would grow to be one of the ones who told others what it was necessary for them to do, but George was coming to realize, with a surge of panic, that he was not special. His moment of communion with Babe Ruth had been a delusion, because Ruth was another type of man. Perhaps Ruth was used by the teams that bought and sold him, but inside Ruth was some compulsion that drove him to be larger than the uses to which he was put, so that in the end he deformed those uses, remade the game itself.

George, talented though he had seemed, had no such size. The vital force that had animated his grandfather George Herbert Walker, after whom he was named, the longing after mystery that had impelled the metaphysical poet George Herbert, after whom that grandfather had been named, had diminished into a pitiful trickle in George Herbert Walker Bush. No volcanic forces surged inside him. When he listened late in the night, all he could hear of his soul was a thin keening, a buzz like a bug trapped in a jar. Let me go, let me go, it whined. Love me. Admire me. I pray to God and dad and the president and Mr. Griffith to make me a success.

That old man at the ball park was wrong. It was not enough, not nearly enough, just to be there. He wanted to be somebody. What good was it just to stand on first base in the World Series if you came away from it a laughingstock? To have your father call you not because you were a hero, but only to remind you once again what a failure you are.

“I’ll be damned if I go see him,” George muttered to the empty room.

THREE

President Nixon called Lavagetto in the middle of the night with a suggestion for the batting order in the second game. “Put Bush in the number five slot,” Nixon said.

Lavagetto wondered how he was supposed to tell the President of the United States that he was out of his mind. “Yessir, Mr. President.”

“See, that way you get another right handed batter at the top of the order.”

Lavagetto considered pointing out to the president that the Giants were pitching a right hander in game two. “Yessir, Mr. President,” Lavagetto said. His wife was awake now, looking at him with irritation from her side of the bed. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Go to sleep.”

“Who is it at this hour?”

“The President of the United States.”

“Uh-huh.”

Nixon had some observations about one-run strategies. Lavagetto agreed with him until he could get him off the line. He looked at his alarm clock. It was half past two.

Nixon had sounded full of manic energy. His voice dripped dogmatic assurance. He wondered if Nixon was a drinking man. Walter Winchell said that Eisenhower’s death had shoved the veep into an office he was unprepared to hold.

Lavagetto shut off the light and lay back down, but he couldn’t sleep. What about Bush? Damn Pearson for getting himself hurt. Bush should be down in the minors where he belonged. He looked to be cracking under the pressure like a ripe melon.

But maybe the guy could come through, prove himself. He was no kid. Lavagetto knew from personal experience the pressures of the Series, how the unexpected could turn on the swing of the bat. He recalled that fourth game of the ’47 series, his double to right field that cost Floyd Bevens his no-hitter, and the game. Lavagetto had been a thirty-four-year-old utility infielder for the luckless Dodgers, an aging substitute playing out the string at the end of his career. In that whole season he’d hit only one other double. When he’d seen that ball twist past the right fielder, the joy had shot through his chest like lightning. The Dodger fans had gone crazy; his teammates had leapt all over him laughing and shouting and swearing like Durocher himself.

He remembered that, despite the miracle, the Dodgers had lost the Series to the Yankees in seven.

Lavagetto turned over. First in War, First in Peace, Last in the American League . . . that was the Washington Senators. He hoped young Kaat was getting more sleep than he was.

FOUR

Tuesday afternoon, in front of a wild capacity crowd, young Jim Kaat pitched one of the best games by a rookie in the history of the series. The twenty-year-old lefthander battled Toothpick Sam Jones pitch for pitch, inning for inning. Jones struggled with his control, walking six in the first seven innings, throwing two wild pitches. If it weren’t for the overeagerness of the Senators, swinging at balls a foot out of the strike zone, they would surely have scored; instead they squandered opportunity after opportunity. The fans grew restless. They could see it happening, in sour expectation of disaster built up over twenty-five frustrated years: Kaat would pitch brilliantly and it would be wasted because the Giants would score on some bloop single.

Through seven the game stayed a scoreless tie. By some fluke George could not fathom, Lavagetto, instead of benching him, had moved him up in the batting order. Though he was still without a hit, he had been playing superior defense. In the seventh he snuffed a Giant uprising when he dove to snag a screamer off the bat of Schmidt for the third out, leaving runners at second and third.

Then, with two down in the top of the eighth, Cepeda singled. George moved in to hold him on. Kaat threw over a couple of times to keep the runner honest, with Cepeda trying to judge Kaat’s move. Mays took a strike, then a ball. Cepeda edged a couple of strides away from first.

Kaat went into his stretch, paused, and whipped the ball to first, catching Cepeda leaning the wrong way. Picked off! But Cepeda, instead of diving back, took off for second. George whirled and threw hurriedly.

The ball sailed over Consolo’s head into left field and Cepeda went to third. E-3.

Kaat was shaken. Mays hit a screamer between first and second. George dove, but it was by him, and Cepeda jogged home with the lead.

Kaat struck out McCovey, but the damage was done. “You bush leagues clown!” a fan yelled. George’s face burned. As he trotted off the field, from the Giants’ dugout came Castro’s shout: “A heroic play, Mr. Rabbit!”

George wanted to keep going through the dugout and into the clubhouse. On the bench his teammates were conspicuously silent. Consolo sat down next to him. “Shake it off,” he said. “You’re up this inning.”

George grabbed his bat and moved to the end of the dugout. First up in the bottom of the eighth was Sievers. He got behind 0-2, battled back as Jones wasted a couple, then fouled off four straight strikes until he’d worked Jones for a walk. The organist played charge lines and the crowd started chanting. Lemon sacrificed Sievers to second. Killebrew hit a drive that brought the people to their feet screaming before it curved just outside the left field foul pole, then popped out to short. He threw down his bat and stalked back toward the dugout.

“C’mon, professor,” Killebrew said as he passed Bush in the on-deck circle. “Give yourself a reason for being here.”

Jones was a scary right hander with one pitch: the heater. In his first three at bats George had been overpowered; by the last he’d managed a walk. This time he went up with a plan: he was going to take the first pitch, get ahead in the count, then drive the ball.

The first pitch was a fastball just high. Ball one.

Make contact. Don’t force it. Go with the pitch.

The next was another fastball; George swung as soon as Jones let it go and sent a screaming line drive over the third baseman’s head. The crowd roared and he was halfway down the first base line when the third base umpire threw up his hands and yelled, “Foul ball!”

He caught his breath, picked up his bat and returned to the box. Sievers jogged back to second. Schmidt, standing with his hands on his hips, didn’t look at George. From the Giants’ dugout George heard, “Kiss your luck goodbye, you effeminate rabbit! You rich man’s table leavings! You are devoid of even the makings of guts!”

George stepped out of the box. Castro had come down the dugout to the near end and was leaning out, arms braced on the field, hurling his abuse purple faced. Rigney and the pitching coach had him by the shoulders, tugging him back. George turned away, feeling a cold fury in his belly.

He would show them all. He forgot to calculate, swept by rage. He set himself as far back in the box as possible. Jones took off his cap, wiped his forearm across his brow and leaned over to check the signs. He shook off the first, then nodded and went into his windup.

As soon as he released George swung, and was caught completely off balance by a change-up. “Strike two, you shadow of a man!” Castro shouted. “Unnatural offspring of a snail and a worm! Strike two!”

Jones tempted him with an outside pitch; George didn’t bite. The next was another high fastball; George started, then checked his swing. “Ball!” the home plate ump called. Fidel booed. Schmidt argued, the ump shook his head. Full count.

George knew he should look for a particular pitch, in a particular part of the plate. After ten years of professional ball, this ought to be second nature, but Jones was so wild he didn’t have a clue. George stepped out of the box, rubbed his hands on his pants. “Yes, wipe your sweaty hands, mama’s boy! You have all the machismo of a bank book!”

The rage came to his defense. He picked a decision out of the air, arbitrary as the breeze: fastball, outside.

Jones went into his windup. He threw his body forward, whipped his arm high over his shoulder. Fastball, outside. George swiveled his hips through the box, kept his head down, extended his arms. The contact of the bat with the ball was so slight he wasn’t sure he’d hit it at all. A line drive down the right field line, hooking as it rose, hooking, hooking . . . curling just inside the foul pole into the stands 320 feet away.

The fans exploded. George, feeling rubbery, jogged around first, toward second. Sievers pumped his fist as he rounded third; the Senators were up on their feet in the dugout shouting and slapping each other. Jones had his hands on his hips, head down and back to the plate. George rounded third and jogged across home, where he was met by Sievers, who slugged him in the shoulder, and the rest of his teammates in the dugout, who laughed and slapped his butt.

The crowd began to chant “SEN-a-TOR, SEN-a-TOR.” After a moment George realized they were chanting for him. He climbed out of the dugout again and tipped his hat, scanning the stands for Barbara and the boys. As he did he saw his father in the presidential box, leaning over to speak into the ear of the cheering President Nixon. He felt a rush of hope, ducked his head and got back into the dugout.

Kaat held the Giants in the ninth and the Senators won, 2-1.

In the locker room after the game, George’s teammates whooped and slapped him on the back. Chuck Stobbs, the clubhouse comic, called him “the Bambino.” For a while George hoped that his father might come down to congratulate him. Instead, for the first time in his career, reporters swarmed around him. They fired flashbulbs in salvoes. They pushed back their hats, flipped open their notebooks and asked him questions.

“What’s it feel like to win a big game like this?”

“I’m just glad to be here. I’m not one of these winning-is-everything guys.”

“They’re calling you the senator. Your father is a senator. How do you feel about that?”

“I guess we’re both senators,” George said. “He just got to Washington a little sooner than I did.”

They liked that a lot. George felt the smile on his face like a frozen mask. For the first time in his life he was aware of the muscles it took to smile, as tense as if they were lifting a weight.

After the reporters left he showered. George wondered what his father had been whispering into the president’s ear, while everyone around him cheered. Some sarcastic comment? Some irrelevant political advice?

When he got back to his locker, toweling himself dry, he found a note lying on the bench. He opened it eagerly. It read:

To the Effeminate Rabbit;

Even the rodent has his day. But not when the eagle pitches.

Sincerely,

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz

FIVE

That Fidel Castro would go so far out of his way to insult George Herbert Walker Bush would come as no surprise to anyone who knew him. Early in Castro’s first season in the majors, a veteran Phillies reliever, after watching Fidel warm up, approached the young Cuban. “Where did you get that curve?” he asked incredulously.

“From you,” said Fidel. “That’s why you don’t have one.”

But sparking his reaction to Bush was more than simple egotism. Fidel’s antipathy grew from circumstances of background and character that made such animosity as inevitable as the rising of the sun in the east of Oriente province where he had been born thirty-two years before.

Like George Herbert Walker Bush, Fidel was the son of privilege, but a peculiarly Cuban form of privilege, as different from the blue-blooded Bush variety as the hot and breathless climate of Oriente was from chilly New England. Like Bush, Fidel endured a father as parsimonious with his warmth as those New England winters. Young Fidelito grew up well acquainted with the back of Angel Castro’s hand, the jeers of classmates who tormented him and his brother Raul for their illegitimacy. Though Angel Castro owned two thousand acres and had risen from common sugar cane laborer to local caudillo, he did not possess the easy assurance of the rich of Havana, for whom Oriente was the Cuban equivalent of Alabama. The Castros were peasants. Fidel’s father was illiterate, his mother a maid. No amount of money could erase Fidel’s bastardy.

This history raged in Fidelito. Always in a fight, alternating boasts with moody silences, he longed for accomplishment in a fiery way that cast the longing of Bush to impress his own father into a sickly shadow. At boarding school in Santiago, he sought the praise of his teachers and admiration of his schoolmates. At Belen, Havana’s exclusive Jesuit preparatory school, he became the champion athlete of all of Cuba. “El Loco Fidel,” his classmates called him as, late into the night, at an outdoor court under a light swarming with insects, he would practice basketball shots until his feet were torn bloody and his head swam with forlorn images of the ball glancing off the iron rim.

At the University of Havana, between the scorching expanses of the baseball and basketball seasons, Fidel toiled over the scorching expanse of the law books. He sought triumph in student politics as he did in sports. In the evenings he met in tiny rooms with his comrades and talked about junk pitches and electoral strategy, about the reforms that were only a matter of time because the people’s will could not be forever thwarted. They were on the side of history. Larger than even the largest of men, history would overpower anyone unless, like Fidel, he aligned himself with it so as not to be swept under by the tidal force of its inescapable currents.

In the spring of 1948, at the same time George Herbert Walker Bush was shaking the hand of Babe Ruth, these currents transformed Fidel’s life. He was being scouted by several major league teams. In the university he had gained control of his fast ball and given birth to a curve of so monstrous an arc that Alex Pompez, the Giants’ scout, reported that the well-spoken law student owned “a hook like bo-peep.” More significantly, Pirates’ scout Howie Haak observed that Fidel “could throw and think at the same time.”

Indeed Fidel could think, though no one could come close to guessing the content of his furious thought. A war between glory and doom raged within him. Fidel’s fury to accomplish things threatened to keep him from accomplishing anything at all. He had made enemies. In the late forties, student groups punctuated elections for head of the law school class with assassinations. Rival political gangs fought in the streets. Events conspired to drive Fidel toward a crisis. And so, on a single day in 1948, he abandoned his political aspirations, quit school, married his lover, the fair Mirta Diaz Balart, and signed a contract with the New York Giants.

It seemed a fortunate choice. In his rookie year he won fifteen games. After he took the Cy Young Award and was named MVP of the 1951 Series the sports writers dubbed him “the Franchise.” This past season he had won twenty-nine. He earned, and squandered, a fortune. Controversy dogged him, politics would not let him go, the uniform of a baseball player at times felt much too small. His brother Raul was imprisoned when Batista overthrew the government to avoid defeat in the election of 1952. Fidel made friends among the expatriates in Miami. He protested U.S. policies. His alternative nickname became “the Mouth.”

But all along Fidel knew his politics was mere pose. His spouting off to sports reporters did nothing compared to what money might do to help the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. Yet he had no money.

After the second game of the series, instead of returning to the hotel Fidel took a cab down to the Mall. He needed to be alone. It was early evening when he got out at the Washington Monument. The sky beyond the Lincoln Memorial shone orange and purple. The air still held some of the sultry heat of summer, like an evening in Havana. But this was a different sort of capital. These North Americans liked to think of themselves as clean, rational men of law instead of passion, a land of Washingtons and Lincolns, but away from the public buildings it was still a southern city full of ex-slaves. Fidel looked down the mall toward the bright Capitol, white and towering as a wedding cake, and wondered what he might have become had he continued law school. At one time he had imagined himself the Washington of his own country, a liberating warrior. The true heir of Jose Marti, scholar, poet, and revolutionary. Like Marti he admired the idealism of the United States, but like him he saw its dark side. Here at the Mall, however, you could almost forget about that in an atmosphere of bogus Greek democracy, of liberty and justice for all. You might even forget that this liberty could be bought and sold, a franchise purchasable for cold cash.

Fidel walked along the pool toward the Lincoln Memorial. The floodlights lit up the white columns, and inside shone upon the brooding figure of Lincoln. Despite his cynicism, Fidel was caught by the sight of it. He had only been to Washington once before, for the All Star Game in 1956. He remembered walking through Georgetown with Mirta on his arm, feeling tall and handsome, ignoring the scowl of the maitre d’ in the restaurant who clearly disapproved of two such dark ones in his establishment.

He’d triumphed but was not satisfied. He had forced others to admit his primacy through the power of his will. He had shown them, with his strong arm, the difference between right and wrong. He was the Franchise. He climbed up the steps into the Memorial, read the words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address engraved on the wall. THE PROGRESS OF OUR ARMS UPON WHICH ALL ELSE CHIEFLY DEPENDS IS AS WELL KNOWN TO THE PUBLIC AS TO MYSELF . . . But he was still the crazy Cuban, taken little more seriously than Desi Arnaz, and the minute that arm that made him a useful commodity should begin to show signs of weakening—in that same minute he would be undone. IT MAY SEEM STRANGE THAT ANY MEN SHOULD DARE TO ASK A JUST GOD’S ASSISTANCE IN WRINGING THEIR BREAD FROM THE SWEAT OF OTHER MEN’S FACES BUT LET US JUDGE NOT THAT WE BE NOT JUDGED.

Judge not? Perhaps Lincoln could manage it, but Fidel was a different sort of man.

In the secrecy of his mind Fidel could picture another world than the one he lived in. The marriage of love to Mirta had long since gone sour, torn apart by Fidel’s lust for renown on the ball field and his lust for the astonishing women who fell like fruit from the trees into the laps of players such as he. More than once he felt grief over his faithlessness. He knew his solitude to be just punishment. That was the price of greatness, for, after all, greatness was a crime and deserved punishment.

Mirta was gone now, and their son with her. She worked for the hated Batista. He thought of Raul languishing in Batista’s prison on the Isle of Pines. Batista, embraced by this United States that ran Latin America like a company store. Raul suffered for the people, while Fidel ate in four star restaurants and slept with a different woman in every city, throwing away his youth, and the money he earned with it, on excrement.

He looked up into the great sad face of Lincoln. He turned from the monument to stare out across the mall toward the gleaming white shaft of the Washington obelisk. It was full night now. Time to amend his life.

SIX

The headline in the Post the next morning read, Senator Bush Evens Series. The story mentioned that Prescott Bush had shown up in the sixth inning and sat beside Nixon in the Presidential box. But nothing more.

Bar decided not to go up to New York for the middle games of the series. George traveled with the team to the Roosevelt Hotel. The home run had done something for him. He felt a new confidence.

The game three starters were the veteran southpaw Johnny Antonelli for the Giants and Pedro Ramos for the Senators. The echoes of the national anthem had hardly faded when Allison led off for the Senators with a home run into the short porch in left field. The Polo Grounds fell dead silent. The Senators scored three runs in the first; George did his part, hitting a changeup into right center for a double, scoring the third run of the inning.

In the bottom half of the first the Giants came right back, tying it up on Mays’s three-run homer.

After that the Giants gradually wore Ramos down, scoring a single run in the third and two in the fifth. Lavagetto pulled him for a pinch hitter in the sixth with George on third and Consolo at first, two outs. But Aspromonte struck out, ending the inning.

Though Castro heckled George mercilessly throughout the game and the brash New York fans joined in, he played above himself. The Giants eventually won 8-3, but George went three for five. Despite his miserable first game he was batting .307 for the series. Down two games to one, the Washington players felt the loss, but had stopped calling him “George Herbert Walker Bush,” and started calling him “the Senator.”

SEVEN

Lavagetto had set an eleven o’clock curfew but Billy Consolo persuaded George to go out on the town. The Hot Corner was a dive on Seventh Avenue with decent Italian food and cheap drinks. George ordered a club soda and tried to get into the mood. Ramos moaned about the plate umpire’s strike zone and Consolo changed the subject.

Consolo had been a bonus boy; in 1953 the Red Sox had signed him right out of high school for $50,000. He had never panned out. George wondered if Consolo’s career had been any easier to take than his own. At least nobody had hung enough expectations on George for him to be called a flop.

Stobbs was telling a story. “So the Baseball Annie says to him, ‘But will you respect me in the morning?’ and the shortstop says, ‘Oh baby, I’ll respect you like crazy!’ ”

While the others were laughing George headed for the men’s room. Passing the bar, he saw, in a corner booth, Fidel Castro talking to a couple of men in slick suits. Castro’s eyes flicked over him but registered no recognition.

When George came out the men in suits were in heated conversation with Castro. In the back of the room somebody dropped a quarter into the jukebox, and Elvis Presley’s slinky “Money Honey” blared out. Bush had no use for rock and roll. He sat at the table, ignored his teammates’ conversation, and kept an eye on Castro. The Cuban was strenuously making some point, stabbing the tabletop with his index finger. After a minute George noticed that someone at the bar was watching them too. It was the pale old man he had seen at Griffith Stadium.

On impulse, George went up to him. “Hello, old timer. You really must be a fan, if you followed the Series up here. Can I buy you a drink?” The man turned decisively from watching Castro, as if deliberately putting aside some thought. He seemed about to smile but did not. Small red splotches colored his face. “Buy me a ginger ale.”

George ordered a ginger ale and another club soda and sat on the next stool. “Money honey, if you want to get along with me,” Elvis sang.

The old man sipped his drink. “You had yourself a couple of good games,” he said. “You’re in the groove.”

“I just got some lucky breaks.”

“Don’t kid me. I know how it feels when it’s going right. You know just where the next pitch is going to be, and there it is. Somebody hits a line drive right at you, you throw out your glove and snag it without even thinking. You’re in the groove.”

“It comes from playing the game a long time.”

The old man snorted. “Do you really believe this guff you spout? Or are you just trying to hide something?”

“What do you mean? I’ve spent ten years playing baseball.”

“And you expect me to believe you still don’t know anything about it? Experience doesn’t explain the groove.” The man looked as if he were watching something far away. “When you’re in that groove you’re not playing the game, the game is playing you.”

“But you have to plan your moves.”

The old man looked at him as if he were from Mars. “Do you plan your moves when you’re making love to your wife?” He finished his ginger ale, took another look back at Castro, then left.

Everyone, it seemed, knew what was wrong with him. George felt steamed. As if that wasn’t enough, as soon as he returned to the table Castro’s pals left and the Cuban swaggered over to George, leaned into him and blew cigar smoke into his face. “I know you, George Herbert Walker Bush,” he said, “Sen-a-tor Rabbit. The rich man’s son.”

George pushed him away. “You know, I’m beginning to find your behavior darned unconscionable, compadre.”

“I stand here quaking with fear,” Castro said. He poked George in the chest. “Back home in Biran we had a pen for the pigs. The gate of this pen was in disrepair. But it is still a fact, Senator Rabbit, that the splintered wooden gate of that pig pen, squealing on its rusted hinges, swung better than you.”

Consolo started to get up, but George put a hand on his arm. “Say, Billy, our Cuban friend here didn’t by any chance help you pick out this restaurant tonight, did he?”

“What, are you crazy? Of course not.”

“Too bad. I thought if he did, we could get some good Communist food here.”

The guys laughed. Castro leaned over.

“Very funny, Machismo Zero.” His breath reeked of cigar smoke, rum and garlic. “I guarantee that after tomorrow’s game you will be even funnier.”

EIGHT

Fidel had never felt sharper than he did during his warmups the afternoon of the fourth game. It was a cool fall day, partial overcast with a threat of rain, a breeze blowing out to right. The chill air only invigorated him. Never had his curve had more bite, his screwball more movement. His arm felt supple, his legs strong. As he strode in from the bull pen to the dugout, squinting out at the apartment buildings on Coogan’s Bluff towering over the stands, a great cheer rose from the crowd.

Before the echoes of the national anthem had died he walked the first two batters, on eight pitches. The fans murmured. Schmidt came out to talk with him. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” Fidel said, sending him back.

He retired Lemon on a pop fly and Killebrew on a fielder’s choice. Bush came to the plate with two outs and men on first and second. The few Washington fans who had braved the Polo Grounds set up a chant: “SEN-a-TOR, SEN-a-TOR!”

Fidel studied Bush. Beneath Bush’s bravado he could see panic in every motion of the body he wore like an ill-fitting suit. Fidel struck him out on three pitches.

Kralick held the Giants scoreless through three innings.

As the game progressed Fidel’s own personal game, the game of pitcher and batter, settled into a pattern. Fidel mowed down the batters after Bush in the order with predictable dispatch, but fell into trouble each time he faced the top of the order, getting just enough outs to bring Bush up with men on base and the game in the balance. He did this four times in the first seven innings.

Each time Bush struck out.

In the middle of the seventh, after Bush fanned to end the inning, Mays sat down next to Fidel on the bench. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Mays was the only player on the Giants whose stature rivaled that of the Franchise. Fidel, whose success came as much from craft as physical prowess, could not but admit that Mays was the most beautiful ball player he had ever seen. “I’m shutting out the Washington Senators in the fourth game of the World Series,” Fidel said.

“What’s this mickey mouse with Bush? You trying to make him look bad?”

“One does not have to try very hard.”

“Well, cut it out—before you make a mistake with Killebrew or Sievers.”

Fidel looked him dead in the eyes. “I do not make mistakes.”

The Giants entered the ninth with a 3-0 lead. Fidel got two quick outs, then gave up a single to Sievers and walked Lemon and Killebrew to load the bases. Bush, at bat, represented the lead run. Schmidt called time and came out again. Rigney hurried out from the dugout, and Mays, to the astonishment of the crowd, came all the way in from center. “Yank him,” he told Rigney.

Rigney looked exasperated. “Who’s managing this team, Willie?”

“He’s setting Bush up to be the goat.”

Rigney looked at Fidel. Fidel looked at him. “Just strike him out,” the manager said.

Fidel rubbed up the ball and threw three fastballs through the heart of the plate. Bush missed them all. By the last strike the New York fans were screaming, rocking the Polo Grounds with a parody of the Washington chant: “Sen-a-TOR, Sen-a-TOR, BUSH, BUSH, BUSH!” and exploding into fits of laughter. The Giants led the series, 3-1.

NINE

George made the cabbie drop him off at the corner of Broadway and Pine, in front of the old Trinity Church. He walked down Wall Street through crowds of men in dark suits, past the stock exchange to the offices of Brown Brothers, Harriman. In the shadows of the buildings the fall air felt wintery. He had not been down here in more years than he cared to remember.

The secretary Miss Goode greeted him warmly; she still remembered him from his days at Yale. Despite Prescott Bush’s move to the Senate, they still kept his inner office for him, and as George stood outside the door he heard a piano. His father was singing. He had a wonderful singing voice, of which he was too proud.

George entered. Prescott Bush sat at an upright piano, playing Gilbert and Sullivan:

“Go, ye heroes, go to glory

Though you die in combat gory,

Ye shall live in song and story.

Go to immortality!”

Still playing, he glanced over his shoulder at George, then turned back and finished the verse:

“Go to death, and go to slaughter;

Die, and every Cornish daughter

With her tears your grave shall water.

Go, ye heroes, go and die!”

George was all too familiar with his father’s theatricality. Six feet four inches tall, with thick salt and pepper hair and a handsome, craggy face, he carried off his Douglas Fairbanks imitation without any hint of self-consciousness. It was a quality George had tried to emulate his whole life.

Prescott adjusted the sheet music and swiveled his piano stool around. He waved at the sofa against the wall beneath his shelf of golfing trophies and photos of the Yale Glee Club. “Sit down, son. I’m glad you could make it. I know you must have a lot on your mind.”

George remained standing. “What did you want to see me about?”

“Relax, George. This isn’t the dentist’s office.”

“If it were I would know what to expect.”

“Well, one thing you can expect is to hear me tell you how proud I am.”

“Proud? Did you see that game yesterday?”

Prescott Bush waved a hand. “Temporary setback. I’m sure you’ll get them back this afternoon.”

“Isn’t it a little late for compliments?”

Prescott looked at him as calmly as if he were appraising some stock portfolio. His bushy eyebrows quirked a little higher. “George, I want you to sit down and shut up.”

Despite himself, George sat. Prescott got up and paced to the window, looked down at the street, then started pacing again, his big hands knotted behind his back. George began to dread what was coming.

“George, I have been indulgent of you. Your entire life, despite my misgivings, I have treated you with kid gloves. You are not a stupid boy; at least your grades in school suggested you weren’t. You’ve got that Phi Beta Kappa key, too—which only goes to show you what they are worth.” He held himself very erect. “How old are you now?”

“Thirty-five.”

Prescott shook his head. “Thirty-five? Lord. At thirty-five you show no more sense than you did at seventeen, when you told me that you intended to enlist in the Navy. Despite the fact that the Secretary of War himself, God-forbid-me Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of War, had just told the graduating class that you, the cream of the nation’s youth, could best serve your country by going to college instead of getting shot up on some Pacific island.”

He strolled over to the piano, flipped pensively through the sheet music on top. “I remember saying to myself that day that maybe you knew something I didn’t. You were young. I recalled my own recklessness in the first war. God knew we needed to lick the Japanese. But that didn’t mean a boy of your parts and prospects should do the fighting. I prayed you’d survive and that by the time you came back you’d have grown some sense.” Prescott closed the folder of music and faced him.

George, as he had many times before, instead of looking into his father’s eyes looked at a point beyond his left ear. At the moment, just past that ear he could see half of a framed photograph of one of his father’s singing groups. Probably the Silver Dollar Quartet. He could not make out the face of the man on the end of the photo. Some notable businessman, no doubt. A man who sat on four boards of directors making decisions that could topple the enconomies of six banana republics while he went to the club to shoot eight handicap golf. Someone like Prescott Bush.

“When you chose this baseball career,” his father said, “I finally realized you had serious problems facing reality. I would think the dismal history of your involvement in this sport might have taught you something. Now, by the grace of God and sheer luck you find yourself, on the verge of your middle years, in the spotlight. I can’t imagine how it happened. But I know one thing: you must take advantage of this situation. You must seize the brass ring before the carousel stops. As soon as the Series is over I want you to take up a career in politics.”

George stopped looking at the photo. His father’s eyes were on his. “Politics? But dad, I thought I could become a coach.”

“A coach?”

“A coach. I don’t know anything about politics. I’m a baseball player. Nobody is going to elect a baseball player.”

Prescott Bush stepped closer. He made a fist, beginning to be carried away by his own rhetoric. “Twenty years ago, maybe, you would be right. But George, times are changing. People want an attractive face. They want somebody famous. It doesn’t matter so much what they’ve done before. Look at Eisenhower. He had no experience of government. The only reason he got elected was because he was a war hero. Now, you’re a war hero, or at least we can dress you up into a reasonable facsimile of one. You’re Yale educated, a brainy boy. You’ve got breeding and class. You’re not bad looking. And thanks to this children’s game, you’re famous—for the next two weeks, anyway. So after the series, we strike while the iron’s hot. You retire from baseball. File for Congress on the Republican ticket in the third Connecticut district.”

“But I don’t even live in Connecticut.”

“Don’t be contrary, George. You’re a baseball player; you live on the road. Your last stable residence before you took up this, this—baseball—was New Haven. I’ve held an apartment there for years in your name. That’s good enough for the people we’re going to convince.”

His father towered over him. George got up, retreated toward the window. “But I don’t know anything about politics!”

“So? You’ll learn. Despite the fact I’ve been against your playing baseball, I have to say that it will work well for you. It’s the national game. Every kid in the country wants to be a ball player, most of the adults do too. It’s hard enough for people from our class to overcome the prejudice against money, George. Baseball gives you the common touch. Why, you’ll probably be the only Republican in the Congress ever to have showered with a Negro. On a regular basis, I mean.”

“I don’t even like politics.”

“George, there are only two kinds of people in the world, the employers and the employees. You were born and bred to the former. I will not allow you to persist in degrading yourself into one of the latter.”

“Dad, really, I appreciate your trying to look out for me. Don’t get me wrong, gratitude’s my middle name. But I love baseball. There’s some big opportunities there, I think. Down in Chattanooga I made some friends. I think I can be a good coach, and eventually I’ll wear a manager’s uniform.”

Prescott Bush stared at him. George remembered that look when he’d forgotten to tie off the sailboat one summer up in Kennebunkport. He began to wilt. Eventually his father shook his head. “It comes to me at last that you do not possess the wits that God gave a Newfoundland retriever.”

George felt his face flush. He looked away. “You’re just jealous because I did what you never had the guts to do. What about you and your golf? You, you—dilettante! I’m going to be a manager!”

“George, if I want to I can step into that outer office, pick up the telephone and in fifteen minutes set in motion a chain of events that will guarantee you won’t get a job mopping toilets in the clubhouse.”

George retreated to the window. “You think you can run my life? You just want me to be another appendage of Senator Bush. Well, you can forget it! I’m not your boy anymore.”

“You’d rather spend the rest of your life letting men like this Communist Castro make a fool of you?”

George caught himself before he could completely lose his temper. Feeling hopeless, he drummed his knuckles on the window sill, staring down into the narrow street. Down below them brokers and bankers hustled from meeting to meeting trying to make a buck. He might have been one of them. Would his father have been any happier?

He turned. “Dad, you don’t know anything. Try for once to understand. I’ve never been so alive as I’ve been for moments—just moments out of eleven years—on the ball field. It’s truly American.”

“I agree with you, George—it’s as American as General Motors. Baseball is a product. You players are the assembly line workers who make it. But you refuse to understand that, and that’s your undoing. Time eats you up, and you end up in the dust bin, a wasted husk.”

George felt the helpless fury again. “Dad, you’ve got to—”

“Are you going to tell me I have to do something, George?” Prescott Bush sat back down at the piano, tried a few notes. He peeked over his shoulder at George, unsmiling, and began again to sing:

“Go and do your best endeavor,

And before all links we sever,

We will say farewell for ever.

Go to glory and the grave!

For your foes are fierce and ruthless,

False, unmerciful and truthless.

Young and tender, old and toothless,

All in vain their mercy crave”

George stalked out of the room, through the secretary’s office and down the corridor toward the elevators. It was all he could do to keep from punching his fist through the rosewood paneling. He felt his pulse thrumming in his temples, slowing as he waited for the dilatory elevator to arrive, rage turning to depression.

Riding down he remembered something his mother had said to him twenty years before. He’d been one of the best tennis players at the River Club in Kennebunkport. One summer, in front of the whole family, he lost a championship match. He knew he’d let them down, and tried to explain to his mother that he’d only been off his game.

“You don’t have a game,” she’d said.

The elevator let him out into the lobby. On Seventh Avenue he stepped into a bar and ordered a beer. On the TV in the corner, sound turned low, an announcer was going over the highlights of the Series. The TV switched to an image of some play in the field. George heard a reference to “Senator Bush,” but he couldn’t tell which one of them they were talking about.

TEN

A few of the pitchers, including Camilo Pascual, the young right hander who was to start game five, were the only others in the clubhouse when George showed up. The tone was grim. Nobody wanted to talk about how their season might be over in a few hours. Instead they talked fishing.

Pascual was nervous; George was keyed tighter than a Christmas toy. Ten years of obscurity, and now hero one day, goat the next. The memory of his teammates’ hollow words of encouragement as he’d slumped back into the dugout each time Castro struck him out made George want to crawl into his locker and hide. The supercilious brown bastard. What kind of man would go out of his way to humiliate him?

Stobbs sauntered in, whistling. He crouched into a batting stance, swung an imaginary Louisville slugger through Kralick’s head, then watched it sail out into the imaginary bleachers. “Hey guys, I got an idea,” he said. “If we get the lead today, let’s call time out.”

But they didn’t get the lead. By the top of the second, they were down 3-0. But Pascual, on the verge of being yanked, settled down. The score stayed frozen through six. The Senators finally got to Jones in the seventh when Allison doubled and Killebrew hit a towering home run into the bullpen in left center: 3-2, Giants. Meanwhile the Senators’ shaky relief pitching held, as the Giants stranded runners in the sixth and eighth and hit into three double plays.

By the top of the ninth the Giants still clung to the 3-2 lead, three outs away from winning the Series, and the rowdy New York fans were gearing up for a celebration. The Senators’ dugout was grim, but they had the heart of the order up: Sievers, Lemon, Killebrew. Between them they had hit ninety-four home runs that season. They had also struck out almost three hundred times.

Rigney went out to talk to Jones, then left him in, though he had Stu Miller up and throwing in the bullpen. Sievers took the first pitch for a strike, fouled off the second and went down swinging at a high fastball. The crowd roared.

Lemon went into the hole 0-2, worked the count even and grounded out to second.

The crowd, on its feet, chanted continuously now. Fans pounded on the dugout roof, and the din was deafening. Killebrew stepped into the batter’s box, and George moved up to the on deck circle. On one knee in the dirt, he bowed his head and prayed that Killer would get on base.

“He’s praying!” Castro shouted from the Giants’ dugout. “Well might you pray, Sen-a-tor Bush!”

Killebrew called time and spat toward the Giants. The crowd screamed abuse at him. He stepped back into the box. Jones went into his windup. Killebrew took a tremendous cut and missed. The next pitch was a changeup that Killebrew mistimed and slammed five hundred feet down the left field line into the upper deck—foul. The crowd quieted. Jones stepped off the mound, wiped his brow, shook off a couple of signs and threw another fastball that Killebrew slapped into right for a single.

That was it for Jones. Rigney called in Miller. Lavagetto came out and spoke to George. “All right. He won’t try anything tricky. Look for the fastball.”

George nodded and Lavagetto bounced back into the dugout. “Come on, George Herbert Walker Bush!” Consolo yelled. George tried to ignore the crowd and the Giants heckling while Miller warmed up. His stomach was tied into twelve knots. He avoided looking into the box seats where he knew his father sat. Politics. What the blazes did he want with politics?

Finally Miller was ready. “Play ball!” the ump yelled. George stepped into the box.

He didn’t wait. The first pitch was a fastball. He turned on it, made contact, but got too far under it. The ball soared out into left, a high, lazy fly. George slammed down his bat and, heart sinking, legged it out. The crowd cheered, and Alou was circling back to make the catch. George was rounding first, his head down, when he heard a stunned groan from fifty thousand throats at once. He looked up to see Alou slam his glove to the ground. Miller, on the mound, did the same. The Senators’ dugout was leaping insanity. Somehow, the ball had carried far enough to drop into the overhanging upper deck, 250 feet away. Home run. Senators lead, 4-3.

“Lucky bastard!” Castro shouted as Bush rounded third.

Stobbs shut them down in the ninth and the Senators won.

ELEVEN

SENATOR BUSH SAVES WASHINGTON! the headlines screamed. Makes Castro See Red. They were comparing it to the 1923 series, held in these same Polo Grounds, where Casey Stengel, a thirty-two-year-old outfielder who’d spent twelve years in the majors without doing anything that might cause anyone to remember him, batted .417 and hit home runs to win two games.

Reporters stuck to him like flies on sugar. The pressure of released humiliation loosened George’s tongue. “I know Castro’s type,” he said, snarling what he hoped was a good imitation of a manly snarl. “At the wedding he’s the bride, at the funeral he’s the dead person. You know, the corpse. That kind of poor sportsmanship just burns me up. But I’ve been around. He can’t get my goat because of where I’ve got it in the guts department.”

The papers ate it up. Smart money had said the Series would never go back to Washington. Now they were on the train to Griffith Stadium, and if the Senators were going to lose, at least the home fans would have the pleasure of going through the agony in person.

Game six was a slugfest. Five homers: McCovey, Mays, and Cepeda for the Giants; Naragon and Lemon for the Senators. Kaat and Antonelli were both knocked out early. The lead changed back and forth three times.

George hit three singles, a sacrifice fly, and drew a walk. He scored twice. The Senators came from behind to win 10-8. In the ninth, George sprained his ankle sliding into third. It was all he could do to hobble into the locker room after the game.

“It doesn’t hurt,” George told the reporters. “Bar always says, and she knows me better than anybody, go ahead and ask around, ‘You’re the game one, George.’ Not the gamey one, mind you!” He laughed, smiled a crooked smile.

“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” he told them. “That strong but silent type of thing. My father said so.”

TWELVE

Fonseca waited until Fidel emerged into the twilight outside the Fifth Street stadium exit. As Fonseca approached, his hand on the slick automatic in his overcoat pocket, his mind cast back to their political years in Havana, where young men such as they, determined to seek prominence, would be as likely to face the barrel of a pistol as an electoral challenge. Ah, nostalgia.

“Pretty funny, that sen-a-TOR Bush,” Fonseca said. He shoved Fidel back toward the exit. Nobody was around.

If Fidel was scared, a slight narrowing of his eyes was the only sign. “What is this about?”

“Not a thing. Raul says hello.”

“Hello to Raul.”

“Mirta says hello, too.”

“You haven’t spoken to her.” Fidel took a cigar from his mohair jacket, fished a knife from a pocket, trimmed off the end and lit it with a battered Zippo. “She doesn’t speak with exiled radicals. Or mobsters.”

Fonseca was impressed by the performance. “Are you going to do this job, finally?”

“I can only do my half. One cannot make a sow look like a ballet dancer.”

“It is not apparent to our friends that you’re doing your half.”

“Tell them I am truly frightened, Luis.” He blew a plume of smoke. It was dark now, almost full night. “Meanwhile, I am hungry. Let me buy you a Washington dinner.”

The attitude was all too typical of Fidel, and Fonseca was sick of it. He had fallen under Fidel’s spell back in the university, thought him some sort of great man. In 1948 his self-regard could be justified as necessary boldness. But when the head of the National Sports Directory was shot dead in the street, Fonseca had not been the only one to think Fidel was the killer. It was a gesture of suicidal machismo of the sort that Fidel admired. Gunmen scoured the streets for them. While Fonseca hid in a series of airless apartments, Fidel got a quick tryout with the Giants, married Mirta and abandoned Havana, leaving Fonseca and their friends to deal with the consequences.

“If you don’t take care, Fidel, our friends will buy you a Washington grave.”

“They are not my friends—or yours.”

“No, they aren’t. But this was our choice, and you have to go through with it.” Fonseca watched a beat cop stop at the corner, then turn away down the street. He moved closer, stuck the pistol into Fidel’s ribs. “You know, Fidel, I have a strong desire to shoot you right now. Who cares about the World Series? It would be pleasant just to see you bleed.” The tip of Fidel’s cigar glowed in the dark. “This Bush would be no hero then.”

“But I would be.”

“You would be a traitor.”

Fonseca laughed. “Don’t say that word again. It evokes too many memories.” He plucked the cigar from Fidel’s hand, threw it onto the sidewalk. “Athletes should not smoke.”

He pulled the gun back, drew his hand from his overcoat, and crossed the street.

THIRTEEN

The night before, the Russians announced they had shot down a U.S. spy plane over the Soviet Union. A pack of lies, President Nixon said. No such planes existed.

Meanwhile, on the clubhouse radio, a feverish announcer was discussing strategy for game seven. A flock of telegrams had arrived to urge the Senators on. Tacked on the bulletin board in the locker room, they gave pathetic glimpses into the hearts of the thousands who had for years tied their sense of well being to the fate of a punk team like the Senators.

Show those racially polluted commie-symps what Americans stand for.

My eight year old son, crippled by polio, sits up in his wheelchair so that he can watch the games on TV.

Jesus Christ, creator of the heavens and earth, is with you.

As George laced up his spikes over his aching ankle in preparation for the game, thinking about facing Castro one last time, it came to him that he was terrified.

In the last week he had entered an atmosphere he had not lived in since Yale. He was a hero. People had expectations of him. He was admired and courted. If he had received any respect before, it was the respect given to someone who refused to quit when every indication shouted he ought to try something else. He did not have the braggadocio of a Castro. Yet here, miraculously, he was shining.

Except he knew that Castro was better than he was, and he knew that anybody who really knew the game knew it too. He knew that this week was a fluke, a strange conjunction of the stars that had knocked him into the “groove,” as the old man in the bar had said. It could evaporate at any instant. It could already have evaporated.

Lavagetto and Mr. Griffith came in and turned off the radio. “Okay, boys,” Lavagetto said. “People in this city been waiting a long time for this game. A lot of you been waiting your whole careers for it, and you younger ones might not get a lot of chances to play in the seventh game of the World Series. Nobody gave us a chance to be here today, but here we are. Let’s make the most of it, go out there and kick the blazes out of them, then come back in and drink some champagne!”

The team whooped and headed out to the field.

Coming up the tunnel, the sound of cleats scraping damp concrete, the smell of stale beer and mildew, Bush could see a sliver of the bright grass and white baselines, the outfield fence and crowds in the bleachers, sunlight so bright it hurt his eyes. When the team climbed the dugout steps onto the field, a great roar rose from the throats of the thirty thousand fans. He had never heard anything so beautiful, or frightening. The concentrated focus of their hope swelled George’s chest with unnameable emotion, brought tears to his eyes, and he ducked his head and slammed his fist into his worn first baseman’s glove.

The teams lined up on the first and third baselines for the National Anthem. The fans began cheering even before the last line of the song faded away, and George jogged to first, stepping on the bag for good luck. His ankle twinged; his whole leg felt hot. Ramos finished his warmups, the umpire yelled “Play ball!” and they began.

Ramos set the Giants down in order in the top of the first. In the home half Castro gave up a single to Allison, who advanced to third on a single by Lemon. Killebrew walked. Bush came up with bases loaded, one out. He managed a fly ball to right, and Allison beat the throw to the plate. Castro stuck out Bertoia to end the inning. 1-0, Senators.

Ramos retired the Giants in order in the second. In the third, Lemon homered to make it 2-0.

Castro had terrific stuff, but seemed to be struggling with his control. Or else he was playing games again. By the fourth inning he had seven strikeouts to go along with the two runs he’d given up. He shook off pitch after pitch, and Schmidt went out to argue with him. Rigney talked to him in the dugout, and the big Cuban waved his arms as if emphatically arguing his case.

Schmidt homered for the Giants in the fourth, but Ramos was able to get out of the inning without further damage. Senators, 2-1.

In the bottom of the fourth, George came up with a man on first. Castro struck him out on a high fastball that George missed by a foot.

In the Giants’ fifth, Spencer doubled off the wall in right. Alou singled him home to tie the game and one out later Mays launched a triple over Allison’s head into the deepest corner of center field, just shy of the crazy wall protecting Mrs. Mahan’s back yard. Giants up, 3-2. The crowd groaned. As he walked out to the mound, Lavagetto was already calling for a left hander to face McCovey. Ramos kicked the dirt, handed him the ball and headed to the showers, and Stobbs came on to pitch to McCovey. He got McCovey on a weak grounder to George at first, and Davenport on a pop fly.

The Senators failed to score in the bottom of the fifth and sixth, but in the seventh George, limping for real now, doubled in Killer to tie the game, and was driven home, wincing as he forced weight down on his ankle, on a single by Naragon. Senators 4-3. The crowd roared.

Rigney came out to talk to Castro, but Castro convinced him to let him stay in. He’d struck out twelve already, and the Giants’ bullpen was depleted after the free-for-all in game six.

The score stayed that way through the eighth. By the top of the ninth the crowd was going wild in the expectation of a world championship. Lavagetto had pulled Stobbs, who sat next to Bush in his warmup jacket, and put in the righthander Hyde, who’d led the team in saves.

The Giants mounted another rally. On the first pitch, Spencer laid a bunt down the first base line. Hyde stumbled coming off the mound and George, taken completely by surprise, couldn’t get to it on his bad foot. He got up limping and the trainer came out to ask him if he could play. George was damned if he would let it end so pitifully, and shook him off. Alou grounded to first, Spencer advancing. Cepeda battled the count full, then walked.

Mays stepped into the box. Hyde picked up the rosin bag, walked off the mound and rubbed up the ball. George could see he was sweating. He stepped back onto the rubber, took the sign and threw a high fastball that Mays hit four hundred feet, high into the bleachers in left. The Giants leapt out of the dugout, slapping Mays on the back, congratulating each other. The fans tore their clothing in despair, slumped into their seats, cursed and moaned. The proper order had been restored to the universe. George looked over at Castro, who sat in the dugout impassively. Lavagetto came out to talk to Hyde; the crowd booed when the manager left him in, but Hyde managed to get them out of the inning without further damage. As the Senators left the field the organist tried to stir the crowd, but despair had settled over them like a lead blanket. Giants, 6-4.

In the dugout Lavagetto tried to get them up for the inning. “This is it, gentlemen. Time to prove we belong here.”

Allison had his bat out and was ready to go to work before the umpire had finished sweeping off the plate. Castro threw three warmups and waved him into the box. When Allison lined a single between short and third, the crowd cheered and rose to its feet. Sievers, swinging for the fences, hit a nubbler to the mound, a sure double play. Castro pounced on it in good time, but fumbled the ball, double clutched, and settled for the out at first. The fans cheered.

Rigney came out to talk it over. He and Schmidt stayed on the mound a long time, Castro gesturing wildly, insisting he wasn’t tired. He had struck out the side in the eighth.

Rigney left him in, and Castro rewarded him by striking out Lemon for his seventeenth of the game, a new World Series record. Two down.

Killebrew was up. The fans hovered on the brink of nervous collapse. The Senators were torturing them; they were going to drag this out to the last fatal out, not give them a clean killing or a swan dive fade—no, they would hold out the chance of victory to the last moment, then crush them dead.

Castro rubbed up the ball, checked Allison over his shoulder, shook off a couple of Schmidt’s signs and threw. He got Killebrew in an 0-2 hole, then threw four straight balls to walk him. The crowd noise reached a frenzy.

And so, as he stepped to the plate in the bottom of the ninth, two outs, George Herbert Walker Bush represented the winning run, the potential end to twenty-seven years of Washington frustration, the apotheosis of his life in baseball, or the ignominious end of it. Castro had him set up again, to be the glorious goat for the entire Series. His ankle throbbed. “C’mon, Senator!” Lavagetto shouted. “Make me a genius!”

Castro threw a fat hanging curve. George swung. As he did, he felt the last remaining strength of the dying Babe Ruth course down his arms. The ball kissed off the sweet spot of the bat and soared, pure and white as a six-year-old’s prayer, into the left field bleachers.

The stands exploded. Fans boiled onto the field even before George touched second. Allison did a kind of hopping balletic dance around the bases ahead of him, a cross between Nureyev and a man on a pogo stick. The Senators ran out of the dugout and bearhugged George as he staggered around third; like a broken field runner he struggled through the fans toward home. A weeping fat man in a plaid shirt, face contorted by ecstasy, blocked his way to the plate and it was all he could do to keep from knocking him over.

As his teammates pulled him toward the dugout, he caught a glimpse over his shoulder of the Franchise standing on the mound, watching the melee and George at the center of it with an inscrutable expression on his face. Then George was pulled back into the happy maelstrom and surrendered to his bemused joy.

FOURTEEN

Long after everyone had left and the clubhouse was deserted, Fidel dressed, and instead of leaving walked back out to the field. The stadium was dark, but in the light of the moon he could make out the trampled infield and the obliterated basepaths. He stood on the mound and looked around at the empty stands. He was about to leave when someone called him from the dugout. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Fidel approached. It was a thin man in his sixties. He wore a sporty coat and a white dress shirt open at the collar. “Yes?” Fidel asked.

“The field is beautiful.”

Fidel sat next to him on the bench. They stared across the diamond.

The wind rustled the trees beyond the outfield walls. “Some people think so,” Fidel said.

“I thought we might have a talk,” the man said. “I’ve been waiting around the ball park before the last few games trying to get hold of you.”

“I don’t think we have anything to talk about, Mr. . . .”

“Weaver. Buck Weaver.”

“Mr. Weaver. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me.”

The man came close to smiling. “I know about winning the World Series. And losing it. I was on the winning team in 1917, and the losing one in 1919.”

“You would not be kidding me, old man?”

“No. For a long time after the second one, I couldn’t face a ball park. Especially during the Series. I might have gone to quite a few, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Now I go to the games every chance I get.”

“You still enjoy baseball.”

“I love the game. It reminds me where my body is buried.” As he said all of this the man kept smiling, as if it were a funny story he was telling, and a punchline waited in the near future.

“You should quit teasing me, old man,” Fidel said. “You’re still alive.”

“To all outward indications I’m alive, most of the year now. For a long time I was dead the year round. Eventually I was dead only during the summer, and now it’s come down to just the Series.”

“You are the mysterious one. Why do you not simply tell me what you want with me?”

“I want to know why you did what you just did.”

“What did I do?”

“You threw the game.”

Fidel watched him. “You cannot prove that.”

“I don’t have to prove it. I know it, though.”

“How do you know it?”

“Because I’ve seen it done before.”

From somewhere in his boyhood, Fidel recalled the name, now. Buck Weaver. The 1919 series. “The Black Sox. You were one of them.”

That appeared to be the punchline. The man smiled. His eyes were set in painful nets of wrinkles. “I was never one of them. But I knew about it, and that was enough for that bastard Landis to kick me out of the game.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“At first I wanted to stop you. Now I just want to know why you did it. Are you so blind to what you’ve got that you could throw it away? You’re not a fool. Why?”

“I have my reasons, old man. Eighty thousand dollars, for one.”

“You don’t need the money.”

“My brother, in prison, does. The people in my home do.”

“Don’t give me that. You don’t really care about them.”

Fidel let the moment stretch, listening to the rustling of the wind through the trees, the traffic in the distant street. “No? Well, perhaps.

Perhaps I did it just because I could. Because the game betrayed me, because I wanted to show it is as corrupt as the mierda around it. It’s not any different from the world. You know how it works. How every team has two black ball players—the star and the star’s roommate.” He laughed. “It’s not a religion, and this place—” he gestured at Griffith Stadium looming in the night before them, “—is not a cathedral.”

“I thought that way, when I was angry,” Weaver said. “I was a young man. I didn’t know how much it meant to me until they took it away.”

“Old man, you would have lost it regardless. How old were you? Twenty-five? Thirty? In ten years it would have been taken from you anyway, and you’d be in the same place you are now.”

“But I’d have my honor. I wouldn’t be a disgrace.”

“That’s only what other people say. Why should you let their ignorance affect who you are?”

“Brave words. But I’ve lived it. You haven’t—yet.” Plainly upset, Weaver walked out onto the field to stand at third base. He crouched; he looked in toward the plate. After a while he straightened, a frail old man, and called in toward Fidel: “When I was twenty-five, I stood out here; I thought I had hold of a baseball in my hand. It turned out it had hold of me.”

He came back and stood at the top of the dugout steps. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell. I didn’t then, and I won’t now.”

Weaver left, and Fidel sat in the dugout.

FIFTEEN

They used the photo of George’s painfully shy, crooked smile, a photograph taken in the locker room after he’d been named MVP of the 1959 World Series, on his first campaign poster.

In front of the photographers and reporters, George was greeted by Mr. Griffith. And his father. Prescott Bush wore a political smile as broad as his experience of what was necessary to impress the world. He put his arm around his son’s shoulders, and although George was a tall man, it was apparent that his father was still a taller one.

“I’m proud of you, son,” Prescott said, in a voice loud enough to be heard by everyone. “You’ve shown the power of decency and persistence in the face of hollow boasts.”

Guys were spraying champagne, running around with their hair sticky and their shirts off, whooping and shouting and slapping each other on the back. Even his father’s presence couldn’t entirely deflect George’s satisfaction. He had done it. Proved himself for once and for all. He wished Bar and the boys could be there. He wanted to shout in the streets, to stay up all night, be pursued by beautiful women. He sat in front of his locker and patiently answered the reporters’ questions at length, repeatedly. Only gradually did the furor settle down. George glanced across the room to the brightly lit corner where Prescott was talking, on camera, with a television reporter.

It was clear that his father was setting him up for this planned political career. It infuriated him that he assumed he could control George so easily, but at the same time George felt confused about what he really wanted for himself. As he sat there in the diminishing chaos, Lavagetto came over and sat down beside him. The manager was still high from the victory.

“I don’t believe it!” Lavagetto said. “I thought he was crazy, but old Tricky Dick must have known something I didn’t!”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean?—nothing. Just that the president called after the first game and told me to bat you behind Killebrew. I thought he was crazy. But it paid off.”

George remembered Prescott Bush whispering into Nixon’s ear. He felt a crushing weight on his chest. He stared over at his father in the TV lights, not hearing Lavagetto.

But as he watched, he wondered. If his father had indeed fixed the Series, then everything he’d accomplished came to nothing. But his father was an honorable man. Besides, Nixon was noted for his sports obsession, full of fantasies because he hadn’t succeeded himself. His calling Lavagetto was the kind of thing he would do anyway. Winning had been too hard for it to be a setup. No, Castro had wanted to humiliate George, and George had stood up to him.

The reporter finished talking to his father; the TV lights snapped off. George thanked Lavagetto for the faith the manager had shown in him, and limped over to Prescott Bush.

“Feeling pretty good, George?”

“It was a miracle we won. I played above myself.”

“Now, don’t take what I said back in New York so much to heart. You proved yourself equal to the challenge, that’s what.” Prescott lowered his voice. “Have you thought any more about the proposition I put to you?”

George looked his father in the eye. If Prescott Bush felt any discomfort, there was no trace of it in his patrician’s gaze.

“I guess maybe I’ve played enough baseball,” George said.

His father put his hand on George’s shoulder; it felt like a burden. George shrugged it off and headed for the showers.

Many years later, as he faced the Washington press corps in the East Room of the White House, George Herbert Walker Bush was to remember that distant afternoon, in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the World Series, when he’d stood in the batter’s box against the Franchise. He had not known then what he now understood: that, like his father, he would do anything to win.

THE SHADOW KNOWS

Terry Bisson

Terry Bisson’s science fiction collection Bears Discover Fire & Other Stories, will be out soon from Tor. The book’s title selection won the Hugo, the Nebula, and our own Annual Readers’ Award for best short story. Mr. Bisson returns to our pages with a mysterious SF tale about what . . .

“If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand it.”

—Wittgenstein

ONE

When it comes to property, even old folks move fast. Edwards hadn’t been abandoned for more than a year before the snowbirds began moving in. We turned the pride of the U.S. space program into a trailer park in six months, with Airstreams and Winneys parked on the slabs that had once held hangars and barracks.

I was considered sort of the unofficial mayor, since I had served in and out (or up and down, as earthsiders put it) of Edwards for some twenty years before being forced into retirement exactly six days short of ten years before the base itself was budget-cut out of existence by a bankrupt government. I knew where the septic tanks and waterlines had been; I knew where the electrical lines and roads were buried under the blowing sand. And since I had been in maintenance, I knew how to splice up the phone lines and even pirate a little electric from the LA-to-Vegas trunk. Though I didn’t know everybody in Slab City, just about everybody knew me.

So when a bald-headed dude in a two-piece suit started going door to door asking for Captain Bewley, folks knew who he was looking for. “You must mean the Colonel,” they would say. (I had never been very precise about rank.) Everybody knew I had been what the old-timers called an “astronaut,” but nobody knew I had been a lunie, except for a couple of old girlfriends to whom I had shown the kind of tricks you learn in three years at .16g, but that’s another and more, well, intimate story altogether.

This story, which also has its intimate aspects, starts with a knock at the door of my ancient but not exactly venerable 2009 Road Lord.

“Captain Bewley, probably you don’t remember me, but I was junior day officer when you were number two on maintenance operations at Houbolt—”

“On the far side of the Moon. Flight Lieutenant J. B. ‘Here’s Johnny’ Carson. How could I forget one of the most”—I searched for a word: what’s a polite synonym for “forgettable” ?—“agreeable young lunies in the Service. No longer quite so young. And now a civilian, I see.”

“Not exactly, sir,” he said.

“Not ‘sir’ anymore,” I said. “You would probably outrank me by now, and I’m retired anyway. Just call me Colonel Mayor.”

He didn’t get the joke—Here’s Johnny never got the joke, unless he was the one making it; he just stood there looking uncomfortable. Then I realized he was anxious to get in out of the UV, and that I was being a poor host.

“And come on in,” I said. I put aside the radio-controlled model I was building; or rather, fixing, for one of my unofficial grandsons who couldn’t seem to get the hang of landing. I don’t have any grandkids, or kids, of my own. A career in space, or “in the out” as we used to say, has its down side.

“I see you’ve maintained an interest in flight,” Here’s Johnny said. “That makes myjob easier.”

That was clearly my cue, and since we lunies never saw much use in beating around the bush (there being no bushes on the Moon) I decided to let Here’s Johnny off the hook. Or is that mixing metaphors? There are no metaphors on the Moon, either. Everything there is what it is.

Anyway, accommodatingly, I said, “Your job, which is—”

“I’m now working for the UN, Captain Bewley,” he said. “They took over the Service, you know. Even though I’m out of uniform, I’m here on official business. Incognito. To offer you an assignment.”

“An assignment? At my age? The Service threw me out ten years ago because I was too old!”

“It’s a temporary assignment,” he said. “A month, two months at most. But it means accepting a new commission, so they can give you clearance, since the whole project is Top Secret.”

I could hear the caps on the T and the S. I suppose I was supposed to be impressed. I suppose I might have been, fifty years before.

“They’re talking about a promotion to major, with increased retirement and medical benefits,” said Here’s Johnny.

“That would be a de facto demotion, since everybody here calls me Colonel already,” I said. “Nothing personal, Here’s Johnny, but you wasted a trip. I already have enough medical and retirement for my old bones. What’s a little extra brass to a seventy-six-year-old with no dependents and few vices?”

“What about space pay?”

“Space pay?”

Here’s Johnny smiled, and I realized he had been beating around the bush the whole time, and enjoying it. “They want to send you back to the Moon, Captain Bewley.”

In the thrillers of the last century, when you are recruited for a top secret international operation (and this one turned out to be not just international but interplanetary; even interstellar; hell, intergalactic), they send a Learjet with no running lights to pick you up at an unmarked airport and whisk you to an unnamed Caribbean island, where you meet with the well-dressed and ruthless dudes who run the world from behind the scenes.

In real life, in the 2030s at least, you fly coach to Newark.

I knew that Here’s Johnny couldn’t tell me what was going on, at least until I had been sworn in, so on the way back East we just shot the bull and caught up on old times. We hadn’t been friends in the Service—there was age and rank and temperament between us—but time has a way of smoothing out those wrinkles. Most of my old friends were dead; most of his were in civilian life, working for one of the French and Indian firms that serviced the network of communications and weather satellites that were the legacy of the last century’s space program. The Service Here’s Johnny and I knew had been cut down to a Coast Guard-type outfit running an orbital rescue shuttle and maintaining the lunar asteroid-watch base I had helped build, Houbolt.

“I was lucky enough to draw Houbolt,” Here’s Johnny said, “or I would probably have retired myself three years ago, at fifty.”

I winced. Even the kids were getting old.

We took a cab straight through the Lincoln/Midtown Tunnel to the UN building in Queens, where I was recommissioned as a major in the Space Service by a bored lady in a magenta uniform. My new papers specified that when I retired again in sixty days I would draw a major’s pension plus augmented medical with a full dental plan.

This was handsome treatment indeed, since I still had several teeth left. I was impressed; and also puzzled. “Okay, Here’s Johnny,” I said as we walked out into the perfect October sunlight (at my age you notice fall more than spring): “Let’s have it. What’s the deal? What’s going on?”

He handed me a room chit for a midtown hotel (the Service had never been able to afford Queens) and a ticket on the first flight out for Reykjavik the next morning; but he held on to a brown envelope with my name scrawled on it.

“I have your orders in this envelope,” he said. “They explain everything. The problem is, well—once I give them to you I’m supposed to stay by your side until I put you on the plane tomorrow morning.”

“And you have a girlfriend.”

“I figured you might.”

So I did. An old girlfriend. At my age, all your girlfriends are old.

New York is supposed to be one of the dirtiest cities in the world; it is certainly the noisiest. Luckily I like noise and, like most old people, need little sleep. Here’s Johnny must have needed more; he was late. He met me at the Icelandic gate at Reagan International only minutes before my flight’s last boarding call and handed me the brown envelope with my name on it.

“You’re not supposed to open it until you’re on the plane, Captain,” he said. “I mean, Major.”

“Not so fast,” I said, grabbing his wrist. “You got me into this. You must know something about it.”

Here’s Johnny lowered his voice and looked from side to side; like most lunies he loved secrets. “You know Zippe-Buisson, the French firm that cleans up orbital trash?” he said. “A few months ago they noticed a new blip in medium high earth. There weren’t any lost sats on the db; it was too big to be a dropped wrench and too small to be a shuttle tank.”

Ding, went the door. I backed into the gate and held it open with one foot. “Go on,” I said.

“Remember Voyager, the interstellar probe sent out in the 1970s? It carried a disk with digital maps of Earth and pictures of humans, even music. Mozart and what’s-his-name—”

Ding ding, went the door. “I remember the joke. ‘Send more Chuck Berry,’ ” I said. “But you’re changing the subject.”

No, he wasn’t. Just as the door started to close and I had to jump through, Here’s Johnny called out: “Voyager is back. With a passenger.

The sealed orders, which I opened on the plane, didn’t add much to what Here’s Johnny had told me. I was officially assigned to the UN’s SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Commission, E Team, temporarily stationed at Houbolt, Luna. That was interesting, since Houbolt had been cut back to robot operation before my retirement, and hadn’t housed anybody (that I knew of) for almost fifteen years.

I was to proceed to Reykjavik for my meds; I was to communicate with no one about my destination or my assignment. Period. There was no indication what the E Team was (although I had of course been given a clue), or what my role in it was to be. Or why I had been chosen.

Reykjavik is supposed to be one of the cleanest cities in the world. It is certainly one of the quietest. I spent the afternoon and most of the evening getting medical tests in a sparkling new hospital wing, where it seemed I was the only patient. The doctors seemed less worried about my physical condition than my brain, blood, and bone status. I’m no medical expert, but I can recognize a cancer scan when I am subjected to one.

In between tests I met my new boss, the head of SETI’s E Team, by videophone from Luna. She was a heavyset fiftyish woman with perfect teeth (now that I had my dental plan, I was noticing teeth again), short blond hair, piercing blue eyes, and a barely perceptible Scandinavian accent.

She introduced herself as Dr. Sunda Hvarlgen and said: “Welcome to Reykjavik, Major. I understand you are part of Houbolt’s history. I hope they are treating you well in my hometown.”

“The films in the waiting room aren’t bad,” I said. “I watched/?.T. twice.”

“I promise an official briefing when you get to Houbolt. I just wanted to welcome you to the E team.”

“Does this mean I passed my medicals?”

She rang off impatiently and it struck me as I hung up that the whole purpose of the call had been to get a look at me.

They finished with me at nine P.M. The next morning at seven, I was loaded into a fat-tired van and taken twelve miles north on a paved highway, then east on a track across a lava field. I was the only passenger. The driver was a descendant (or so he said) of Huggard the Grasping, one of the original lost settlers of Newfoundland. After an hour we passed through the gates of an abandoned air base. Huggard pointed to a small lava ridge with sharp peaks like teeth; behind it I noticed a single silver tooth, even sharper than the rest. It was the nose cone of an Ariane-Daewoo IV.

The Commission had given up the advantages of an equatorial launch in order to preserve the secrecy of the project; this meant that the burn was almost twenty-eight minutes long. I didn’t mind. I hadn’t been off planet in eleven years, and the press of six gravities was like an old lover holding me in her arms again. And the curve of the planet below—well, if I had been a sentimental man, I would have cried. But sentiment is for middle age, just as romance is for youth. Old age, like war, has colder feelings; it is, after all, a struggle to the death.

High Orbital was lighted and looked bustling from approach, which surprised me; the station had been shut down years ago except for fueling and docking use. We didn’t go inside; just used the universal airlock for transfer to the lunar shuttle, the dirty but reliable old Diana in which I had made so many trips. She was officially Here’s Johnny’s command, but he was on rotation: presumably his reward for bringing me in alive.

When we old folks forget how decrepit and uninteresting we are, we can count on the young to remind us by ignoring us. The three-person crew of the Diana kept to themselves and spoke only Russo-Japanese. It made for a lonely day and a half, but I didn’t mind. The trip to the Moon is one of the loveliest there is. You’re leaving one ball of water and heading for another of rock, and there’s always a view.

Since the crew didn’t know I speak (or at least understand) a little RJ, I got my first clue as to what my assignment might be. I overheard two of them speculating about “ET” (a name that is the same in every language) and one said: “Who would have thought the thing would only relate to old folks?”

That night I slept like a baby. I woke up only once, when we crossed over what we lunies used to call Wolf Creek Pass—the top of the Earth’s (relatively) long, steep gravitational well, and the beginning of the short, shallow slope to the Moon. In zero g there’s no way this transition can be felt: yet I awoke, knowing exactly (even after eleven years) where I was.

I was on my way back to the Moon.

Situated on the farside of the Moon, facing always away from the Earth, Houbolt lies open to the Universe. In a more imaginative, more intelligent, more spirited age it would be a deep-space optical observatory; or at least a monastery. In our petty, penny-pinching, paranoid century it is used only as a semiautomated Near-Earth-Object or asteroid early-warning station. It wouldn’t have been kept open at all if it were not for the near-miss of NEO 2201 Oljato back in ’14, which had pried loose UN funds as only stark terror will.

Houbolt lies near the center of the farside’s great Korolev crater, on a gray regolith plain ringed by jagged mountains unsmoothed by water, wind, or ice; as sheer as the lava sills of Iceland but miles instead of meters high; fantastic enough to remind you over and over, with every glance, that they are made of Moon, not Earth; and that you are in their realm; and that it is not a realm of living things.

I loved it. I had helped build and then maintain the base for four years, so I knew it well. In fact, on seeing that barren landscape again, in which life is neither a promise nor a memory, not even a rumor, I realized why I had stayed in the desert after retirement and not gone back to Tennessee, even though I still had people there. Tennessee is too damn green.

Houbolt is laid out like a starfish, with five small peripheral domes (named for the four winds, plus Other) all connected by forty-meter tubes to the larger central dome known as Grand Central. Hvarlgen met me at the airlock in South, which was still the shop and maintenance dome. I felt at home right away.

I was a little surprised to see that she was in a wheelchair; other than that, she looked the same as on the screen. The blue eyes were even bluer here on the blueless Moon.

“Welcome to Houbolt,” she said as we shook hands. “Or back, maybe I should say. Didn’t South here used to be your office?” The Moon with its .16g has always drawn more than its share of ‘capped, and I could tell by the way she spun the chair around and ran it tilted back on two wheels, that it was just right for her. I followed her down the tube toward Grand Central.

I had been afraid Houbolt might have fallen into ruin, like High Orbital, but it was newly painted and the air smelled fresh. Grand Central was bright and cheerful. Hvarlgen’s team of lunies had put in a few spots of color, but they hadn’t overdone it. All of them were young, in bright yellow tunics. When Hvarlgen introduced me as one of the pioneers of Houbolt, none of them blinked at my name, even though it was one of twenty-two on a plaque just inside the main airlock. I wasn’t surprised. The Service is like a mold, an organism with immortality but no memory.

A young lunie showed me to my windowless pie-shaped “wedgie” in North. A loose orange tunic with a SETI patch lay folded on the hammock. But I wasn’t about to put on Hvarlgen’s uniform until I learned what she was doing.

I found her back in Grand Central waiting by the coffee machine, a giant Russian apparatus that reflected our faces like a funhouse mirror. I was surprised to see myself. When you get to a certain age you stop looking in mirrors.

A hand-drawn poster over the machine read D=118.

“Hours until the Diana returns,” Hvarlgen said. “The lunies see this as a hardship assignment, surprisingly enough. They’re only used to being here a day or two at a time.”

“You promised a briefing,” I said.

“I did.” She drew me a coffee and pointed out a seat. “I assume, since gossip is still the fuel of the Service, that in spite of our best efforts you have managed to learn something about our project here.” She scowled. “If you haven’t, you’d be too dumb to work with.”

“There was a rumor,” I said. “About an ET.”

“An AO,” she corrected. “At this point it’s classified only as an Anomolous Object. Even though it’s not in fact an object. More like an idea for an object. If my work—our work—is successful and we make contact, it will be upgraded to an ET. It was found in Earth orbit some sixteen days ago.”

I was impressed. Here’s Johnny hadn’t told me how quickly all this had been pulled together. “You all move fast,” I said.

She nodded. “What else did you hear?”

“Voyager, “I said. “ ‘Send more Chuck Berry.’ ”

“Voyager II, actually. Circa 1977. Which left the heliosphere in 1991, becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space. Last month, more than fifty years after its launch, it was found in high Earth orbit with its batteries discharged, its nuclears dead, seemingly derelict. Space junk. How long it had been there, who or what returned it, and why—we still don’t know. As it was brought into lock aboard the recovery vessel, the Jean Genet, what had appeared to be a shadow attached itself to one of the crew, one Hector Mersault, apparently while they were unsuiting. They didn’t notice at first, until they found Mersault sitting in the airlock, half undressed and dazed, as if he had just come out from under anesthesia. He was holding his helmet and the shadow was pooled in it; apparently our AO likes small spaces, like a cat.”

“Likes?”

“We allow ourselves certain anthropomorphisms, Major. We will correct for them later. If necessary. More coffee?”

While she poured us both another cup, I looked around the room; but with lunies it’s hard to tell European from Asian, male from female.

“So where’s this Mersault?” I asked. “Is he here?”

“Not exactly,” Hvarlgen said. “He walked out of an airlock the next morning. But our friend the AO is still with us. Come. I’ll show you.”

We drained our coffee and I followed Hvarlgen down the tube toward the periphery dome known as Other. She ran with her chair tilted back, so that her front wheels were almost a foot off the floor; I was to learn that this angle of elevation reflected her mood. Other was divided into two semi-hemispherical rooms used to grow the environmental that we’d called “weed & bean.” There was a small storage shed between the two rooms. We headed straight for the shed. A lunie with a ceremonial (I hoped) wiregun unlocked the door and let us into a gray closed wedgie, small as a prison cell. The door closed behind us. The room was empty except for a plastic chair facing a waist-high shelf, on which sat a clear glass bowl, like a fishbowl, in which was—

Well, a shadow.

It was about the size of a keyboard or a cantaloupe. It was hard to look at; it was sort of there and sort of not there. When I looked to one side, the bowl looked empty; whatever was (or wasn’t) in it, didn’t register on my peripheral vision.

“Our bio teams have been over it,” Hvarlgen said. “It does not register on any instruments. It can’t be touched, weighed, or measured in any way, not even an electrical charge. It’s not even not there. As far as I can guess, it’s some kind of antiparticle soup. Don’t ask me how our eyes can see it. I think they just see the isn’t of it, if you know what I mean.”

I nodded even though I didn’t.

“It doesn’t show up on video; but I am hoping it will register on analog.”

“Analog?”

“Chemical. We’re filming it.” Hvarlgen pointed to a gun-like object jerry-rigged to one wall, which whirred and followed her hand, then aimed back at the bowl. “I had this antique shipped up especially for the job. Everything our AO does is captured on film, twenty-four hours a day.”

“Film!” I said. I was impressed again. “So what exactly does it do?”

“Sits there in the bowl. That’s the problem. It refuses to—but is ‘refuse’ too anthropomorphic a word for you? Let me start over. As far as we can tell, it will only interact with living tissue.”

A shiver went through me. Living tissue? That was me, for a few more years anyway, and I was beginning to understand, or at least suspect, why I was here. But why me? “What exactly do you mean by ‘interact’ ?” I asked.

Hvarlgen scowled. “Don’t look so worried,” she said. “In spite of what happened to Mersault, this is no suicide assignment. Let’s go get another cup of coffee, and I’ll explain.”

We left the AO to its bowl, and the lunie with the wiregun to lock up. Back at Grand Central, Hvarlgen poured two more cups of thick, lunar coffee. I was beginning to see her as a wheeled device that ran on the stuff.

“SETI was set up in the middle of the last century,” she said. “In a sense, Voyager was part of the program. NASA took it over toward the end of the century and changed the name, but the idea was the same. They were searching for evidence of intelligent life, the assumption being that actual communication over such vast distances would be impossible. Contact was considered even more remote. But in the event that it did occur, it was assumed that it probably would not be a ‘take me to your leader’ sort of thing, a spaceship landing in London or Peking; that it would be more complicated than that, and that plenty of room for human sensitivity and intuition should be built into the system. Some flexibility. So SETI’s directors set up the E (for ‘Elliot’) Team which would swing into operation on first contact and operate, for twenty-one days only, in strictest secrecy. No press, no politics. No grown-ups, if you will. It would be run by a single person instead of a committee; a humanist rather than a scientist.”

“A woman rather than a man?”

“That’s just been the luck of the draw. You’ll be surprised to learn how it has backfired in this case.” Hvarlgen scowled again. “Anyway, by the time I got the job, the E Team was more of a sop thrown to the soft sciences than a working position. A brief orientation, a stipend, and a beeper that was never expected to beep. But the mechanisms were still in place. I was visiting psychology professor at UC Davis, on leave from Reykjavik U, when I got the call—within hours of the Jean Genet incident. I was already on my way up to High Orbital when Mersault died. Or killed himself.”

“Or was killed,” I offered.

“Whatever. We’ll get into that later. At any rate, I exercised the extraordinary authority which the UN had granted the E Team—figuring it would never be used, I’m sure—and had this whole operation set up here at Houbolt.”

“Because you didn’t want to bring the AO down to Earth.”

“It didn’t seem like a good idea, at least until we knew what we were dealing with. And High Orbital was in such bad shape, plus it’s hard to find people who can tolerate zero g for long periods. I know the Moon since I did my doctoral project here. So here we are. Everything that has happened since Mersault’s death has been my decision. My E Team mandate only extends for six more days. After that, our friend here goes either to the full SETI Commission, as an ET, or to the Q Team—the Quantum Singularity Team—as an AO. Time is of the essence; I’m on a fairly short string, you see. So while I was waiting at High Orbital for my lunie staff to prepare Houbolt, I initiated the second contact myself. I stuck my hand—my right hand—into the bowl.”

I looked at her with a new and growing respect.

“It flowed out of the bowl and up my arm, a little above my elbow. Like a long glove, the kind my great-grandmother used to wear to church.”

“And?”

“I wrote this down.” She showed me a pad on which was written:

“It’s Icelandic and it means ‘New Growth.’ I had brought the pad and pencil with me, along with a tape recorder. It was over before I knew it; it didn’t even feel strange. I just picked up the pencil and wrote.”

“This is your handwriting?”

“Not at all. I’m right-handed, and I wrote this with my left. My right hand was in the bowl.”

“Then what?”

“Then it flowed—sort of rippled; it’s quite strange, but you’ll see—back down my arm and into the bowl. All this is at High Orbital in zero g, remember, and there’s nothing to keep our little ET in the bowl except that it wants to be there. Or something.”

“You’re calling it an ET now.”

“Wouldn’t you call this communication, or at least an attempt to communicate? Unofficially speaking, this and its method of arrival are enough to convince me. What else would you call it but an ET?”

“A Ouija smudge?” I thought—but I said nothing. The whole business was beginning to sound crazy to me. The dark nonsubstance in the bowl had looked about as intelligent as the coffee left in my cup; and I wasn’t too sure anymore about the woman in the wheelchair.

“I can see you’re not convinced,” said Hvarlgen. “No matter; you will be. At any rate, I spent the next few hours under guard, like Odysseus lashed to the mast, to make sure I didn’t follow Mersault out an airlock. Then I tried it again.”

“Stuck your hand in the bowl.”

“My right hand, again. This time I was holding the pencil in my left, ready to go. But this time our friend, our ET, our whatever, was very reluctant. Only after a couple of tries did it ripple onto my arm; and then only an inch or so up my wrist, and only for a moment. But it worked. It’s like it was communicating directly with my musculature rather than my consciousness. Without even thinking about it, I wrote this—” She turned the page on the pad and I saw:

“Which says ‘Old Man.’ ”

I nodded. “So naturally, you sent Here’s Johnny for me.”

Hvarlgen laughed and scowled, and I understood for the first time that her scowl was a smile; she just wore it upside down.

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Major. I interpreted all this to mean that there was a reluctance to communicate with me, which had something to do with my age or my sex or both. Since we hadn’t left for the Moon yet, I used my somewhat extravagant authority and sent the shuttle back down. I recruited an old friend, a former professor of mine—a retired advisor to SETI, in fact—who had spent some time at Houbolt, and brought him to Luna with me. That clipped another three days out of my precious time.”

“So where is he? Out the airlock, I suppose, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Not quite out the airlock yet,” said Hvarlgen. “Come with me and you’ll see.”

I had never met Dr. Soo Lee Kim, but I had heard of him. A tiny man with long, flying white hair like Einstein, he was an astronomer, the leader of the deep-space optical team that had been kicked out of Houbolt when it had been turned into a semiautomated warning station. Dr. Kim had won a Nobel Prize. He had a galaxy named after him. Now he occupied one of the two beds in the infirmary under the clear dome in East. The other one was empty.

I smelled death in the room and realized it was PeaceAble, the sinsemilla nasal spray given to terminal patients. It’s a complicated aroma for me, the smell of love and loss together, a curious mixture I knew well from the last weeks of my first wife, the one I went back to when she was dying. But that’s another story altogether.

Dr. Kim looked cheerful enough. He had been expecting us.

“I’m so glad you’re here; now perhaps we can begin to communicate,” he said in Cambridge-accented English. “As you probably know, the Shadow won’t talk with me.”

“The Shadow?”

“That’s what I call it. From your old American radio serial. ‘Who Knows what Evil lurks in the Hearts of Men? The Shadow knows!’ ”

“You don’t look that old to me,” I said.

“I’m not; I’ll be seventy-two next week, when the Diana returns, if I’m unfortunate enough to last that long.” He took a quick shot of PeaceAble from an imitation ebony spraypipe, and continued: “Collecting old radio tapes was a hobby I picked up when I was at university. They were forty-five years old even then, forty-five years ago. I don’t suppose you remember Sky King and his Radio Ranch?”

“Nobody’s that old, Dr. Kim. I’m only seventy-six. How old do you have to be for this ghost-in-a-bowl?”

“The Shadow,” he corrected. “Oh, you’re quite old enough. I’m old enough, actually, I think. Or would have been, if it weren’t for—”

“Start at the beginning, Dr. Kim,” said Hvarlgen. “Please. The Major needs to know everything that has happened.”

“The beginning? Then let’s start at the end, as the Shadow starts.” He laughed enigmatically. “I have learned one thing, at least: language is contained as much in the musculature as in the brain. The first time, I did as Sunda did; I stuck my hand into the bowl, and my brain was looking on, unattached, as the Shadow picked up my hand, and with it picked up a pencil—”

“And wrote you a letter,” I said.

“Drew me a picture,” Dr. Kim corrected. “Korean is at least partly ideographic.” He reached under the bed and pulled out a paper, on which was written:

“Take me to your leader?” I guessed.

“It means, more or less, ‘okay’; and it suggests a more intimate relationship, which I immediately implemented, so to speak, and which—”

“More intimate?”

“—resulted in this.”

“Like Sunda’s message, it means ‘new growth,’ ” he said, “which I took, in my case, to mean cancer.”

“Oh.”

I must have winced, because he said, “Oh, it’s all right. I knew it already; colon cancer; I had known it for four months. I just hadn’t told Sunda because I didn’t think it mattered.”

“Then it wasn’t the Shadow that—?” I asked.

“Gave it to me? No,” said Dr. Kim. “The Shadow was in a position, so to speak, to detect it, that’s all.” He either grinned or grimaced in pain (it was hard to tell) and took another shot of PeaceAble. “Don’t forget, The Shadow knows.’ ”

The young are sentimental around death but the old have no such problem. “Tough,” I said.

“There are no happy endings,” Dr. Kim said. “At least, thanks to the Shadow, I got my trip back to the Moon. With any luck I might even end my days here. Wouldn’t it make a great tombstone, the Moon? Hanging there in the sky, bigger than a thousand pyramids. And lighted, to boot. Would put to rest forever the slander that all Koreans have good taste.” He paused for another shot. “But the problem is, that because of the cancer—apparently—the Shadow won’t relate to me. I think it mistakes the cancer for youth. That second contact was my last. So tomorrow it’s your turn, right?” He looked from me to Hvarlgen.

Hvarlgen and I looked at each other.

“So I’m next,” I said. “Old man number two.”

“This is the point at which I give you the chance to back out,” Hvarlgen said. “Much as I hate to. But if you turn me down, I’ll still have time for one more shot; your alternate is doing his meds right now in Reykjavik.”

I could tell she was lying; if she had only six days left, I was her only hope. “Why me in the first place?” I asked.

“You were the oldest reasonably healthy male I could find on such short notice who was space qualified. I knew you’d been to Houbolt. Plus I liked your looks, Major. Intuition. You looked like the kind of guy who might stick his neck out.”

“Neck?” laughed Dr. Kim, and she shot him a dirty look.

“Of course, I could be wrong,” she said to me.

She was gut-checking me but I didn’t mind; I hadn’t been gut-checked in years. I looked at Hvarlgen. I looked at Dr. Kim. I looked at the million stars beyond and figured what the hell.

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I can stick my hand in a fishbowl for science.”

Dr. Kim laughed again and Hvarlgen shot him an angry look. “There’s one thing you should know—” she began.

Dr. Kim finished for her: “The Shadow doesn’t want to shake hands with you, Major Bewley. It wants to crawl up your ass and look around. Like it crawled up mine.”

TWO

I showed up at Grand Central the next morning wearing the bright orange tunic with the SETI patch, just to prove to Hvarlgen I was on her team. We had coffee. “Scared?”

“Wouldn’t you be scared?” I said. “For one thing, this Shadow is a cancer detector. Then, the business with Mersault . . .”

“It’s unlikely that our people in Reykjavik missed anything. And indications are that Mersault may have been independently suicidal. Zippe-Buisson hires some weirdos. But you’re right, Major, one never knows.”

I followed her down the forty-meter tube to East. We were initiating the first contact session in the infirmary, so that Dr. Kim could participate, or at least observe. Hvarlgen was literally rearing to go: the chair was tilted back so far that she rode it almost prone.

Three of the five periphery domes have magnolias—those reptilian trees love the Moon—but it is East’s that is the most lush, its leaves picking up the lunar palette from the regolith of the crater floor and processing it into a new, complex gray unseen before.

Dr. Kim’s bed was under the tree. He was awake, waiting for us. He caressed the spraypipe in his fingers like a good-luck charm. “Good morning, colleagues,” he said.

Hvarlgen rolled to his bedside and kissed his withered cheek.

Two lunies rolled in a wheeled table; on it was the Shadow in its bowl. Another lunie carried the film camera on her shoulder. Another carried a bright yellow plastic chair. It was for me.

The big moment had arrived. Hvarlgen and I approached the table together. When she picked up the bowl, I noticed that the Shadow pulled away from her hands toward the center. It moved in a rippling motion that both repelled and attracted my eyes.

She put the bowl on the floor in front of the chair. “Let’s begin,” she said, clicking on the video recorder she carried on her lap. The film camera whirred as I slipped my pants off, over my shoes, and stood there naked under my tunic. It was 9:46 HT (Houston/Houbolt time) on the wall.

I felt frightened. I felt embarrassed. Worse, I felt ridiculous, especially with the young lunies—girls and boys—sitting on the empty bed, watching.

“Oh, Major, please quit worrying!” Hvarlgen said. “Women are used to being prodded and poked between their legs. Men can put up with it once in a while. Sit down!”

I sat down; the yellow plastic was cold on my butt. Hvarlgen nudged my knees apart wordlessly and pushed the bowl between my feet, then rolled backward to the head of Dr. Kim’s bed, under the magnolia. I clutched pencil in one hand and paper in the other. Hvarlgen and Dr. Kim had explained what would happen, but it was still a shock. The Shadow moved—twisted—out of the bowl, flowed up between my legs, and disappeared up my ass.

I watched it, fascinated. I felt no fear or dread. There was no “feeling” as such; it really was like a shadow. I kept myself covered by the tunic, out of modesty; but I knew as soon as the Shadow was inside me, because—

There was someone else in the room. He was standing across the room, not far from the foot of Dr. Kim’s bed. He was not quite solid, and not quite full-sized, and he was flickering like a bad light bulb; but I knew immediately “who” it was.

It was me.

I moved my arm slightly, to see if he would move his, like a mirror image, but he didn’t. He flickered and with each flicker got either bigger, or closer, or both. There was no frame of reference; no way to judge his size. It was somehow very clear that he or it was not in the room with us; not occupying the same space. It raised the hair on the back of my head, and judging from the palpable silence in the room, everyone else’s as well.

We were seeing a ghost.

It was Hvarlgen who finally spoke. “Who are you?”

There was no answer.

I tried moving my arm again but the Shadow (for already, that was how I thought of the image) answered none of my movements. Somehow that made it better; it was as if I were watching a film of myself and not a reflection. But it was an old film; I looked younger. And when I looked to one side a little, the image disappeared.

“Who are you?” said Hvarlgen again; it was more a statement than a question. “He,” “it,”—the Shadow—started flickering, faster and faster, and I suddenly felt sick at my stomach.

I bent over, almost retching; I covered my mouth and then tried to aim toward the bowl at the foot of the chair. But it didn’t matter—nothing came out, even though I saw the Shadow was pooled back in its bowl.

I shook my hands and examined them; they were clean.

The ghost was gone.

The session was over. Hvarlgen was staring at me. I looked at my watch; it was 9:54. The whole thing had lasted six minutes.

The pad and pencil lay on the floor where I had dropped them. The pad was blank.

“Well, now, that was interesting,” said Dr. Kim, taking a long shot of PeaceAble.

Hvarlgen sent the lunies out, and had coffee sent in, and we discussed the session over a light lunch. Very light; I was on the high-protein, low-fiber “astronaut’s diet” of moonjirky. Plus, I was still feeling a little queasy.

We all agreed that the image was me, or an approximation of me. “But younger,” said Dr. Kim.

“So what is it trying to say?” asked Hvarlgen. Neither Dr. Kim nor I answered; it seemed useless to speculate. She clicked on her video recorder. Instead of a holovid image, what came up was a ball of bright static. She fast-forwarded but nothing changed.

“Damn! Just as I had suspected,” she said. “If we are to get any image at all, it will be on film. But film has to be processed chemically, which means it has to go all the way back to Earth before we’ll even know if it works. In the meantime—”

“In the meantime,” Dr. Kim said, “Why don’t we try it again?”

Hvarlgen got on her chair-phone and soon the lunies arrived with the Shadow in its bowl, the film camera, and the rest of the crew, who had presumably heard about the morning session. It was 1:35 (HT). Surprisingly, it was just as humiliating for me the second time. But science is science; I took off my pants. The film camera wheezed and whirred on a lunie’s shoulder. I held the pad and pencil in one hand, ready. Hvarlgen rolled back to Dr. Kim’s bed. I sat on the cold plastic chair and spread my legs. I forgot my embarrassment as the Shadow twisted out of its bowl and up—and disappeared—

And there he was again. The Shadow. Again, the figure started small and flickered itself bigger and bigger, until it was about half the size of someone standing in the room with us; though we all knew somehow that it wasn’t. That it was far away.

This time he was talking, though there was no sound. He stopped talking, then started again. He was wearing blue coveralls like I used to wear in the Service, not the orange tunic. I couldn’t see his feet no matter how hard I looked for them; it was as if my eyes glanced off. I wear a Service ring but I couldn’t see it; the Shadow’s hands were blurred. I wanted to ask him who he was, but I felt it was not my place. We had agreed earlier that no one but Hvarlgen was to speak.

“Who are you?” she asked.

The voice, when it came, surprised us all: “Not a who.”

Everyone in the room turned to look at me, even though it was not my voice. I would have turned, myself, had I not been the point toward which everyone was looking.

“Then what are you?”

“A communications protocol.” The sound of the voice was completely out of synch with the image’s mouth. Also, the sound did not seem to come from anywhere; I heard it directly with my mind, not my ears.

“From where?” asked Hvarlgen.

“A two-device.”

The lunies sitting in a row on the bed were absolutely still. No one in the room was breathing; including me.

“What is a two-device?” asked Hvarlgen.

This time the lips were almost in synch with the words; “One and”—the Shadow inclined toward us in a curious, almost courtly gesture—“the Other.”

The sound seemed to originate inside my head, like a memory of a voice. Like a memory, it seemed perfectly clear but characterless. I wondered if it were my voice, as the image was “my” image, but I couldn’t tell.

“What Other?” Hvarlgen asked.

“Only one Other.”

“What do you want?”

As if in answer, the image began to flicker again, and I was suddenly sick to my stomach. The next thing I knew I was looking down into the bowl, at the original dark non-substance we had called the Shadow. Though still dark it seemed clearer, and cold, and deep. I was suddenly conscious of the cold stars blazing through the dome overhead; the fierce vacuum all around; the cold plastic chair on my butt.

“Major?”

Hvarlgen’s hand was on my wrist. I looked up—to applause from the bed where the lunies were sitting, like bright yellow birds, all in a row.

“Nobody leaves!” said Hvarlgen. She went around the room. All agreed on what the Shadow had said. All agreed that it had been inside their heads, more like the memory of a voice, or an imaginary voice, than a sound. All agreed that it had not been my voice.

“Now everybody leave,” she said. “Dr. Kim and I need to have a talk.”

“Including me?” I asked.

“You can stay. And he can stay.” She pointed toward the bowl, which the lunies were placing back on its table. They left it by the door.

“Damn!” said Hvarlgen. Irrationally, she shook the recorder but there was no record of the Shadow’s words, any more than of its image. “The problem is, we have no hard evidence of any communication at all. And yet we all know it happened.”

Dr. Kim took a snort of PeaceAble and smiled somewhat inscrutably. “Unless we think the Major here was hypnotizing us.”

“Which we don’t,” said Hvarlgen. It was late afternoon. We were having still more coffee under the magnolia. “But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is how can it make us hear without making a print, a track in the air.”

“Clearly, it works directly on the hearing centers in the brain,” Dr. Kim said.

“Without a physical event?” said Hvarlgen. “Without a material connection? That’s telepathy!”

“It’s all physical,” said Dr. Kim. “Or none of it. Is that thing material? Maybe it accesses our brains visually. We were all looking at it when we heard it talk. The brain is stuff just as much as air is stuff. Light is stuff. Consciousness is stuff.”

“So why the physical contact at all?” I asked. “The Shadow’s not really here; I can’t feel it, we can’t touch it or even photograph it. Why does it have to enter my body at all? If it does, why can’t it just sort of slip in through the skin, or the eyes, instead of . . . the way it does.”

“Maybe it’s scanning you,” Hvarlgen said. “For the image.”

“And maybe it can only scan certain types,” said Dr. Kim. “Or maybe it’s restricted. Just as we might be forbidden to trade with Stone Age tribesmen, they—whoever or whatever they are—might have a prohibition against certain stages or kinds of life.”

“You mean the ‘New Growth’ business?” I asked.

“Right. Maybe old folks seem less vulnerable to them. Maybe the contact is destructive to growing tissue. Or even fatal. Look at what happened to Mersault. But I’m just guessing! And my guess is that you have not quite finished menopause, Sunda, right?”

She smiled. Just as her scowls were smiles, her smiles were grimaces. “Not quite.”

“See? And in my case, perhaps the flourishing cancer with its exorbitant greed for life was mistaken for youth. Anyway . . . perhaps we are dealing with prohibitions. Formalities. Perhaps even the innovative mode of contact is a formality, like a handshake. What could be more logical?” Dr. Kim took another snort of PeaceAble, filling the infirmary with a sweet heavy smell.

“It’s hard to think of it as a handshake,” I said.

“Why? The anus, the asshole in vulgar parlance, is sort of a joke, but in our secret heart of hearts, for all of us, it’s the seat—so to speak—of the physical being. It may be perceived by this Other as the seat of consciousness as well. We’re much more conscious of it than, say, the heart. Certainly more conscious of it physically than the brain. It alerts us to danger by tightening up. It even speaks from time to time . . .”

“Okay, okay,” said Hvarlgen. “We get the point. Let’s get back to work. Shall we go again?”

“Without the lunies?” Dr. Kim asked.

“Why not?”

“Because without a video or sound image, they are our only corroboration that there is any communication going on here. I know it’s your project, Sunda, but if I were you I would move more deliberately.”

“You’re right. It’s almost five o’clock. Let’s wait and go after supper.”

I had supper alone. Hvarlgen was on the phone, arguing with somebody named Sidrath. A poster on the wall over her head said D=96. Hvarlgen sounded pleading, then sarcastic, then pleading again; I felt like an eavesdropper, so I left without coffee and walked to East alone.

Dr. Kim was asleep. The Shadow lay in its bowl. It was fascinating to look at it. It lay still but seemed, somehow, to be moving at great speed. It was dark but I could sense light behind it, like the stars through thin clouds. I was tempted to touch it; I reached out one finger . . .

“That you, Major?” Dr. Kim sat up. “Where’s Sunda?”

“She’s on the phone with somebody named Sidrath. She’s been arguing with him for almost an hour.”

“He’s the head of the Q-team. He’s probably setting up in High Orbital, for when the Shadow arrives. They are assembling all sorts of fancy equipment. They think we’re dealing with some sort of antimatter here, which is why they can’t take it down to the surface.”

“What do you think it is?” I asked. I pulled the plastic chair over and sat with him, looking up at the stars through the clear dome and the dark magnolia leaves.

“I think it’s unusual, surprising,” Dr. Kim said. “That’s all I require of life these days. I no longer try to understand or comprehend things. Dying is funny. You realize for the first time you are not going to finish Dante. You give up on it.” He took a shot of PeaceAble. “Did you ever wonder why the Shadow looks younger than you?”

“You have a theory?”

“Robert Louis Stevenson had a theory,” he said. “He once said that our chronological age is but a scout, sent out in advance of the ‘army’ of who we feel we are—which always lags several years behind. In your mind, Major, you are still a young man; at most, in your fifties. That’s the image the Shadow gets from you, and therefore the image he gives us.”

I heard his pipe hiss again.

“I’d offer you a shot, but—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I know, I’m a test bunny.”

“You guys ready?” It was Hvarlgen, rolling through the doorway. It was time to go again.

The plastic chair had been left in place. Two lunies wheeled the bowl in on its table. The rest of the lunies drifted in, sitting on the bed and clustering by the doorway. At 7:34 P.M. Hvarlgen cleared her throat and looked at me impatiently. I pulled off my pants; I sat down in the chair and spread my withered old shanks—

This time, without ascending between my legs, the Shadow twisted in its bowl and disappeared; the movement was somehow sickening, and I gagged—

And there it was; he was. Was it my imagination, or was my image, the Shadow, clearer and more positive than it had been? It seemed to have a kind of glow. He smiled.

Hvarlgen wasn’t waiting around this time. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“Not from a where. The protocol is a where.”

“What do you want?”

“Adjusting the protocol,” said the voice. It was so clear now that I thought it must be a sound. But I watched the aural indicator lights on Hvarlgen’s video recorder, and there was nothing. As before, the voice was only inside our heads.

“Where are the Others?” asked Hvarlgen again.

“Only the protocol is where,” said the Shadow. “Awhere-when point.” It seemed to enjoy answering her questions. It had stopped flickering and its speech was now in synch with its lip movements. Its movements looked familiar; gentle; graceful. I felt a certain proprietary affection for it, knowing it was an idealized verison of myself.

“What do they want?” Hvarlgen asked.

“To communicate.”

“Through you?”

“The communication will end the protocol. The connection is one-time only.” The Shadow looked directly toward us, but not at us. It seemed always to be looking at something we could not see. It was silent, as if waiting for the next question.

When nobody said anything, the image began to fade, ghostlike once again—

And the Shadow twisted into being in the bowl at my feet. It seemed even clearer than before. I could see stars behind it. It was like seeing the stars reflected in a pool, only I had the distinct (and uneasy) feeling I was looking up. I even checked the back of my neck with my hand.

That was it for the first day. We’d had three sessions, and Hvarlgen thought that was enough. Dr. Kim asked us to join him for 4-D Monopoly. He had a passion for the game with its steep mortgage ramps and time-release dice. While we played, the lunies watched movies in Grand Central. We could hear gunshots and bluegrass music in the distance, all the way down the tube.

We began the next morning with a leisurely breakfast. I was still on moonjirky, but I had no appetite anyway. The poster over the coffee machine said D=77.

“How many hours until sunrise?” I asked.

“I’m not sure; somewhat less than seventy-seven,” Hvarlgen answered. But it wasn’t a problem. Even though Houbolt was no longer environmentalized for the lunar day, it would be comfortable for all but the six days of the lunar “noon”—and would probably have been manageable even then, in an emergency. According to Hvarlgen’s plan, Here’s Johnny was to arrive and take us off soon after sunrise.

Hvarlgen went down the tube toward the infirmary first, followed by me, followed by the lunies. East smelled like PeaceAble, indicating that Dr. Kim had been up for a while. He suggested that he be allowed to ask one question, and Hvarlgen agreed.

Me, I was just the hired asshole. I took off my pants and the bowl was slid between my feet. Ignoring me (or seeming to) the Shadow in the bowl twisted itself into nothingness. This time I didn’t feel sick. In fact, it was beautiful, slick and fast, like a whale diving.

“Is there a message for us?”

It was Hvarlgen’s question. I looked up from the empty bowl and saw the Shadow standing across the room—or across the Universe.

“A communication.”

“Are you conscious.”

“The protocol is conscious and I am the protocol.”

“Who is communicating with us?”

“The Other. Not a who.”

“Is it conscious?”

The Shadow said, “You are conscious. The protocol is conscious. The Other is not a where-when string.”

There was a long silence. “Dr. Kim—” Hvarlgen said. “You had a question?”

“Are you a Feynman device?” Dr. Kim asked.

“The protocol is a two-device.”

“What is the distance?” Dr. Kim asked.

“Not a distance. A where-when loop.”

“Where does the energy come from?”

As if in answer, the Shadow began to flicker and fade, and I leaned over the bowl (even though I no longer believed that the Shadow was inside of me). And like a dark whale surfacing, the Shadow twisted into its bowl. I wondered how such a tiny space could contain a space so huge.

While the lunies cleared the room, and Hvarlgen hurried down to Grand Central to make a phone call, I pulled my chair over to the bed and sat with Dr. Kim.

“I see it’s no longer accessing our universe through your butt,” he said. “Maybe it has what it needs.”

“Hope so,” I said. “Meanwhile—what’s a Feynman device?”

“Have you ever heard of the EPR paradox?”

“Something to do with Richard Feynman?”

“Indirectly,” Dr. Kim said. “The EPR paradox had been proposed by Einstein and two colleagues in an unsuccessful effort to disprove quantum physics. Two linked particles are separated. The ‘spin’ or orientation of each is indeterminate (in true quantum fashion) until one is determined, up or down. Then the other is the opposite. Instantaneously.”

“Even if it’s a million light-years away,” Hvarlgen said, from the doorway. She rolled into the room, shutting the door behind her. “I told Sidrath about your question. He liked it.”

“It was never answered.” Dr. Kim shrugged.

“In other words, we’re talking about faster-than-light communication,” I said.

“Right,” said Dr. Kim. “Theoretically, a paradox. It was Feynman who proved that the paradox wasn’t a paradox at all. That it was true. And that FTL communication was, at least in theory, possible.”

“So that’s what our little isn’t is,” I said. “A muon bridge.”

“An ansible,” said Hvarlgen. “A device for faster-than-light communication. As I said, Sidrath agrees. What we have here seems to be some version of a Feynman device. Everything that happens to it here happens simultaneously, perhaps as a mirror image, at the other ‘end.’ ”

“Across the galaxy,” I said.

“Oh, much farther away than that, I think,” said Dr. Kim, taking another shot of PeaceAble. “We may be dealing with realms of space and time that don’t even intersect our own. I think, for sure, that we are dealing with forms of life that aren’t biological.”

At noon I asked for a sandwich. “I’m going to quit worrying about my lower intestine,” I said. “The Shadow has quit worrying about it.”

“We’re not sure,” said Hvarlgen. “Stay on moonjirky just one more meal. This afternoon, we’ll try the session with your pants on and see what happens.”

The Shadow didn’t seem to notice. (I was a little hurt.) It twisted in its bowl, diving into—another form (my own) which appeared across the room as before.

“When is this communication going to occur?” asked Hvarlgen.

“Soon.” The way the Shadow said the word, it sounded almost like a place—like “Moon.”

“What is soon?”

“When the protocol is adjusted.”

There was a long silence.

“What kind of communication will it be?” asked Dr. Kim. “Will we hear it?”

“No.”

“See it?”

“No.”

“Why is it that you never speak unless we ask a question?” asked Hvarlgen.

“Because you are half of the protocol,” said the Shadow.

“I thought so,” said Hvarlgen. “We’ve been talking to ourselves!”

The Shadow started to flicker. I resisted the urge to bend over the bowl, and watched him fade away.

I was tired. I went back to my wedgie to sleep, and I dreamed, for the first time in years, of flying. When I got up, Hvarlgen was still in East with Dr. Kim. They were on a conference call with High Orbital and Queens; they were somewhere between calling the Shadow an ET and an AD (alien device).

I left it to them. I ate alone (another sandwich) and then watched the first half of Bonnie and Clydewith the lunies. They had a kind of cult thing about Michael J. Pollard. Now I understood why every time something went wrong around the station, one of them was bound to say “dirt.”

Hvarlgen rolled into Grand Central at almost nine P.M. “We’re going to skip the evening session tonight,” she said. “Sidrath and the Q-Team don’t want to miss this promised communication. They are afraid we’ll speed things up, or wear the Shadow out, like an eraser.”

“But you are in charge.” I was surprised to find myself disappointed.

“True. But that’s only a formality. In fact, Sidrath is already on his way here with Here’s Johnny, in case this communication occurs before they can get the Shadow back to High Orbital. We made a deal; I agreed to limit the sessions to one a day.

“One a day!”

“I think we’ve learned all we’re going to learn here. All it does is answer the same questions, in a sort of a loop. We’ll go in the morning, Major, as usual. Meanwhile, want to play Monopoly?”

That night I dreamed again that I was flying. The flying itself was flying, so fast that I had to chase it in order not to disappear. The next morning, after breakfast (sausage and eggs) I followed the lunies down the tube to East, where Hvarlgen and Dr. Kim were waiting.

Hvarlgen insisted that I sit in my usual spot. Like a priestess at a ritual, she placed the bowl at my feet, then rolled back to Dr. Kim’s bedside. The Shadow twisted in the bowl and disappeared; the Shadow appeared again in his blue coveralls, bluer than I remembered.

“Who are the Others?” asked Hvarlgen.

“They are not a they. They are an Other.”

(Maybe Hvarlgen was right to limit the sessions, I thought. It was beginning to sound like word games.)

“Another what?” Hvarlgen asked. “Another civilization?”

I heard a sound like a growl. It was Dr. Kim, snoring; he had fallen asleep propped on one elbow, with his spraypipe in his hand.

“Not a civilization. They are not—plural like yourself. Not biological.”

“Not material?” asked Hvarlgen.

“Not a where-when string,” the Shadow said.

“Is the communication ready? Can it take place now?”

“Soon. The protocol is completed. When the communication takes place the protocol will be gone.”

I wondered what that meant. We were, supposedly, part of the protocol. I was about to raise my hand to ask permission to ask a question—but the Shadow was already flickering, already twisting back into being in its bowl.

Being careful not to awaken Dr. Kim, Hvarlgen shooed everyone out of the infirmary and we went to Grand Central for a late breakfast. I didn’t tell her I had already eaten. I had soup and crackers.

The poster said D=55. I had less than two days left on the Moon.

“Isn’t Dr. Earn using a lot of that stuff?” I asked.

“He’s in a lot of pain,” Hvarlgen said. “I just hope he lasts until this communication, whatever it is. At the same time—”

“It’s for you,” said one of the lunies. “It’s the Diana. They just completed TLI and they’re on their way.”

I went back to my wedgie for a nap, and dreamed again of flying. I hadn’t dreamed so much since Katie died. I didn’t have wings, or even a body—I was the flight itself. The movement was my substance in a way that I understood perfectly, except that the understanding evaporated as soon as I sat up.

The wedgie was cold. I had never felt so alone.

I got dressed and went to Grand Central and found two lunies watching Bonnie and Clyde, and Hvarlgen curled up with Sidrath on the phone. I had forgotten how lonely the farside could be. It is the only place in the Universe from which you never see the Earth. Outside was nothing but stars and stones and dust.

I went to the infirmary. Dr. Kim was awake. “Where’s Sunda?” he asked.

“On the phone with Sidrath and Here’s Johnny. They made Trans Lunar Injection right after lunch. You were asleep.”

“So be it,” said Dr. Kim. “Did you say hello to our friend?”

I saw the Shadow in the corner, under the magnolia, near the foot of the bed. I felt a shiver. It was the first time he had ever appeared without our—summoning him. The bowl on the table was empty.

“Hello, I guess,” I said. “Have you talked to him?”

“He’s not talking.”

“Shouldn’t I get Hvarlgen?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Dr. Kim. “It doesn’t mean anything. I think he just likes to exist, you know?”

“I’m here anyway,” Hvarlgen said, from the door. “What’s going on?”

“I think he just likes to exist,” said Dr. Kim, again. “Did you ever get the feeling when you were running a program, that it enjoyed running? Existing? It’s all in the connections, the dance of the particles. I think our friend the Shadow senses that he won’t exist very long, and—”

Even as he spoke the Shadow began to fade. At the same time the dark substance twisted into being in the bowl. I looked down into it. It was dark yet clear yet infinitely deep, like infinity itself. I could see stars beyond stars in it.

Hvarlgen seemed relieved that the Shadow was gone. “I’ll be glad when the Diana gets here,” she said. “I don’t know which way to turn; which way to proceed.”

I sat on the foot of the bed. Dr. Kim took another shot of PeaceAble and passed the pipe to me.

“Dr. Kim!”

“Relax. He’s no longer the test bunny, Sunda,” he said. “His bowel is no longer the pathway between the stars.”

“Still. You know that’s only for people who are terminal,” Hvarlgen said.

“We’re all terminal, Sunda. We just get off at different stops.”

That night after supper, we played Monopoly. The Shadow appeared again, and again he had nothing to say. “He doesn’t speak unless we call him up,” said Hvalgren.

“Maybe the ceremony, the chair, the lunies watching, are part of the protocol,” said Dr. Kim. “Like the questions.”

“What about the Others? Do you think we’ll see them?” I asked.

“My guess is that there’s no them to see,” said Dr. Kim.

“What do you mean?”

“Imagine a being larger than star systems, that manipulates on the subatomic level, where the Newtonian universe is an illogical dream that cannot be conceptualized. A being that reproduces itself as waves, in order to exist, that is one and yet many. A being that is not a where-when string—as the Shadow calls it—but a series of one-time events . . .”

“Dr. Kim,” said Hvarlgen. She played a conservative but deadly game.

“Yes, my dear?”

“Pay attention. You just landed on my city. Cash or credit?”

“Credit,” he said.

That night I dreamed. I slept late, and woke up exhausted. I found Hvarlgen in Grand Central, on the phone with Sidrath, as usual lately. A lunie was changing the poster from D=29 to D=ll.

“Here’s Johnny and Sidrath just crossed Wolf Creek Pass,” Hvarlgen said, hanging up.

“They’re balling the jack,” I said.

“They’re using boosters,” she said. “We all have the feeling we’re running out of time.”

This was to be, by agreement, our last contact session. All the lunies were there; in their yellow tunics they were as alike as bees. I sat in the usual spot, which seemed to be part of the protocol. I enjoyed the position of prominence—especially since I got to keep my pants on.

Hvarlgen placed the bowl on the floor and the dark whale dove—twisted beautifully out of its bowl—and the Shadow appeared in the image of a man.

Hvarlgen looked at me. “Do you have a question?”

“What happens after the communication?” I asked.

“I cease to be.”

“Will we cease to be?”

“You are a where-when string.”

“What are you?” asked Dr. Kim.

“Not a what. A where-when point.”

“When does the communication take place?” asked Hvarlgen.

“Soon.” He was repeating himself. We were repeating ourselves. Was it my imagination, or did the Shadow seem weary?

Hvarlgen, nothing if not democratic, turned her chair toward the lunies gathered in the doorway and on the bed. “Do any of you have any questions?”

There were none.

There was a long silence and the Shadow began to fade. I felt like I was seeing him for the last time, and I felt a sense of loss. It was my image that was fading away . . .

“Wait!” I wanted to say. “Speak!” But I said nothing. Soon the Shadow was back in its bowl.

“I have to get some sleep,” said Dr. Kim, taking a shot of PeaceAble.

“Come on, Major,” said Hvarlgen. We left, taking the lunies with us.

I made my own lunch, then watched a little bit of Bonnie and Clyde with the lunies. Like them, I was tired of the Moon. I was tired of the Shadow. Tired of waiting for either the communication, or the arrival of the Diana—both events over which we had no control.

I took a walk around the little-used periphery tunnel that led from South to North via West. It was cold and smelly. Ahead of me I saw a new, unfamiliar light. I hurried to West, suspecting what it was. Forty kilometers away, the high ragged rim of 17,000-foot peaks at the western edge of Korolev was touched with sunlight.

Dawn was still hours away, but it had already struck the tops of the nameless mountains, which were as bright in the sky as a new moon, the Moon’s moon, casting temporary backward shadows across the crater floor. Everything seemed reversed.

I stood for what seemed like hours, watching. The dawn was as slow as an hour hand, and I grew cold.

From West I cut straight through to East, even though I hadn’t been invited. Hvarlgen was still on the phone, and I felt like talking with somebody. Maybe Dr. Kim would be awake.

The infirmary smelled like a Tennessee hayfield, bringing back sudden memories of childhood and summer. The Shadow was standing in the shadows under the magnolia, looking—worn out. Like an old person, I thought, he was fading away.

Dr. Kim was staring straight up at the stars. His spraypipe had fallen from his fingers, onto the floor. He was dead.

Dr. Kim had left four numbers in an envelope marked “Sunda,” with instructions that they were to be called as soon as he died, even though they lived in four different time zones, scattered around the Earth. They were his children. Most of them were awakened from sleep, but they weren’t surprised; Dr. Kim had already said his good-byes.

As I watched Hvarlgen making the calls, for the first time in years I felt lonesome for the family I had never had. I wandered from Grand Central back down to East. Dr. Kim’s body had been put in the airlock to decompress slowly, and the room was empty except for the Shadow, which stood silently at the foot of the bed, like a mourner. I lay down on Dr. Kim’s bed and looked up through the magnolia, trying to imagine what his eyes had last seen. The dawn light still hadn’t touched the dome, and the galaxies hung in the sky like sparks from a burning city.

Hvarlgen came to get me, and we held a brief service in Grand Central. Dr. Kim’s body was still in the airlock, but the Portable Dante and the spraypipe on the table represented him. The lunies attended in shifts, since they were preparing the station for incoming. Hvarlgen read something in Old Norse, then something in Korean, then a bit from the King James Bible about the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Then we suited up.

Burial on the moon is illegal according to at least three overlapping legal systems, but Hvarlgen didn’t seem to mind. Here’s Johnny and Sidrath had made LOI (lunar orbit insertion) and told her to finish before they landed, so they wouldn’t be compromised by her bending of the rules.

The dawn was already halfway down the mountains by the time we locked out. Soon the raw sunlight would be racing, or at least loping, across the crater floor. The station would be livable for several more weeks, at least until mid-morning; but as we didn’t have proper suits for a sunlight EVA, even a dawn EVA, we would have to hurry.

It was my first EVA in years. One of the lunies and I were the pallbearers (only two are needed on the Moon), while Hvarlgen followed in her fat-tired EVA chair. Even though we had decompressed Dr. Kim’s body as slowly as possible, he had still swelled in the vacuum. His face was filled out and he looked almost young.

We carried him a hundred meters across the crater floor, to a fairly flat stone (flat stones are rare on the Moon), following the instructions we had found in the envelope. Dr. Kim had picked out his grave site from his bed in East.

We laid him faceup on the table-shaped rock, the way. they used to lay Indians so the vultures could swoop down to eat their hearts. Only here was a sky too deep for vultures. Hvarlgen read a few more words, and we started back. The crater floor was half lit by the mountains to the west. The sunlight had painted them from peak to foot; so that we cast long shadows—the “wrong” way. In a few weeks, as noon approached, with its 250-degree temperatures, it would cook Dr. Kim into bone and ash and vapor; until then he would lie in state letting the stars which he had studied for over half a century study him.

When we locked back in, the chimes for incoming were ringing. Here’s Johnny and Sidrath had timed it all perfectly. Hvarlgen rolled off on two wheels to meet them; I was in no hurry. By the time I got to Grand Central, it was empty—everyone was greeting the Diana at South. I walked back down the tube to East. The bowl was gone; it had been returned to Other for Sidrath’s arrival. But the Shadow didn’t seem to notice. He was standing at the foot of the bed, no longer faded. For the first time he seemed to be looking directly at me. I didn’t know whether to say hello or good-bye. The Shadow seemed to be receding faster and faster, and me with him. I lost my balance and fell to one knee just as I “felt” what came to be known, much later, around the world, as the Brush.

THREE

Four days short of eleven months later, there was a knock at the door of my Road Lord.

“Major Bewley?”

“Call me Colonel,” I said.

It was Here’s Johnny. He was wearing a faux leather suit that somehow told me he had gone ahead and taken retirement. I wasn’t surprised. He was on his way to Los Angeles to live with his sister. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

“Better than that,” I said. “You’re spending the night.”

It was almost as if we were friends, and at my age almost is as good as the real thing, almost. I cleared a place on the couch (my picture—the same one—was in an eighteen-inch stack of magazines) and he sat down. Here’s Johnny had gained twenty pounds, which often happens to lunies when they lock in for good. I put on a fresh pot of coffee. It must have been the smell of the coffee that made us both think of Hvarlgen.

“She’s in Reykjavik,” Here’s Johnny said. “When the film didn’t show anything, that was it for her. The last straw. She left the rest of it up to Sidrath and the Commission.”

“The rest of what?” There was no more Shadow; both the image and the substance in the bowl had disappeared with the Brush. As promised. “What did they have left to do?”

“All the surveys, interviews, population samples. All the stuff you’ve read about the Brush; it all came from Sidrath and the Commission. But without Hvarlgen’s help. Or yours, I happened to notice.”

“I’d had enough, myself,” I said. “I felt like we were all getting a little crazy. That whole week was like a dream. Plus, there seemed, at the time, to be nothing to say. What I had experienced was, literally, as you know—as we all know now—indescribable. Since my contract was up, I sort of cut and ran because I didn’t want to be roped into some elaborate effort to figure it all out.”

“And you thought you were the only one.”

“Well, didn’t we all? At first, anyway.”

It had taken several months of research to determine, positively, that every man, woman, and child on and off the planet (plus, it was now thought, a high percentage of dogs) had experienced the Brush at the same instant. We were no more able to describe it than the dogs were. It was intensely sensual but in no way physical, brilliantly colorful but not visible, musical but not quite a sound—an entirely new sensation, indescribable and unforgettable at the same time. The best description I heard was from an Indian filmmaker, who said it was as if someone had painted his soul with light. That’s poetic license, of course. It had happened in less than an instant, but it was days before anyone spoke of it, and weeks before the SETI Commission realized it was the communication we had been promised.

By then it was only a memory. And lucky it was that we all had felt it: otherwise some of us would be spending the next few centuries trying to describe it to those who hadn’t. A new religion, maybe. As it was, most people on the planet were going about their business as if it had never happened, while a few were still trying to figure out what the Brush meant to the children. And the dogs.

“It was a bitter disappointment to Hvarlgen,” said Here’s Johnny. It was late; we were sitting outside, having a whisky, waiting to catch the sunset.

“I know,” I said. “To her, it was an insult. She called it the Brush-off. I can understand her point of view. We are finally contacted by another, maybe the only other life-form in the Universe, but it has nothing to say. No more than a hello, how are you. A wave from a passing ship, she called it.”

“Maybe because it happened to everybody,” Here’s Johnny said.

“I can understand that too,” I said. “We all thought it was going to be just for us.”

One of my unofficial grandsons rode up on a bicycle carrying a turtle. I gave him a dollar for it, and put it into a polyboard box under the trailer with two other turtles. “I pay the kids for the ones they pick up off the road,” I said. “Then after sundown I let them go, away from the highway.”

“Me, I’m more optimistic,” Here’s Johnny said. “Maybe the children who experienced the Brush will grow up different. Maybe smarter or less violent.”

“Or maybe the dogs,” I said.

“What do you think?” he asked. “You were, after all, the first contact.”

“I was just the pattern for the protocol,” I said. “I got the same communication as everyone else, no more and no less. I’m convinced of that. I was just used to, you know, set up the tuning.”

“You weren’t disappointed?”

“I was disappointed that Dr. Kim didn’t get to experience it. But who knows, maybe he did. As for me, I’m an old man. I don’t expect things to mean anything. I just sort of enjoy them. Look there.”

Off to the west, a range of barren peaks was hurling itself between Slab City and the nearest star, painting our trailers with new darkness. The clash of photons set up a barrage of colors in the sky overhead. We watched the sun set in silence; then I got one end of the box and Here’s Johnny got the other, and we dragged it out to a pile of boulders at the edge of the desert and deposited the turtles onto the still-warm sand.

“You do this every night?”

“Why not?” I said. “Maybe it’s turtles all the way down.”

But Here’s Johnny didn’t get the joke. Which goes to show, as Chuck Berry once said, you never can tell.

SEVEN VIEWS OF OLDUVAI GORGE

Mike Resnick

THE CREATURES CAME AGAIN LAST NIGHT.

The moon had just slipped behind the clouds when we heard the first rustlings in the grass. Then there was a moment of utter silence, as if they knew we were listening for them, and finally there were the familiar hoots and shrieks as they raced to within fifty meters of us and, still screeching, struck postures of aggression.

They fascinate me, for they never show themselves in the daylight, and yet they manifest none of the features of the true nocturnal animal. Their eyes are not oversized, their ears cannot move independently, they tread very heavily on their feet. They frighten most of the other members of my party, and while I am curious about them, I have yet to absorb one of them and study it.

To tell the truth, I think my use of absorption terrifies my companions more than the creatures do, though there is no reason why it should. Although I am relatively young by my race’s standards, I am nevertheless many millennia older than any other member of my party. You would think, given their backgrounds, that they would know that any trait someone of my age possesses must by definition be a survival trait.

Still, it bothers them. Indeed, it mystifies them, much as my memory does. Of course, theirs seem very inefficient to me. Imagine having to learn everything one knows in a single lifetime, to be totally ignorant at the moment of birth! Far better to split off from your parent with his knowledge intact in your brain, just as my parent’s knowledge came to him, and ultimately to me.

But then, that is why we are here: not to compare similarities, but to study differences. And never was there a race so different from all his fellows as Man. He was extinctbarely seventeen millennia after he strode boldly out into the galaxy from this, the planet of his birth—but during that brief interval he wrote a chapter in galactic history that will last forever. He claimed the stars for his own, colonized a million worlds, ruled his empire with an iron will. He gave no quarter during his primacy, and he asked for none during his decline and fall. Even now, some forty-eight centuries after his extinction, his accomplishments and his failures still excite the imagination.

Which is why we are on Earth, at the very spot that was said to be Man’s true birthplace, the rocky gorge where he first crossed over the evolutionary barrier, saw the stars with fresh eyes, and vowed that they would someday be his.

Our leader is Bellidore, an Elder of the Kragan people, orange-skinned, golden fleeced, with wise, patient ways. Bellidore is well-versed in the behavior of sentient beings, and settles our disputes before we even know that we are engaged in them.

Then there are the Stardust Twins, glittering silver beings who answer to each other’s names and finish each other’s thoughts. They have worked on seventeen archaeological digs, but even they were surprised when Bellidore chose them for this most prestigious of all missions. They behave like life mates, though they display no sexual characteristics—but like all the others, they refuse to have physical contact with me, so I cannot assuage my curiosity.

Also in our party is the Moriteu, who eats the dirt as if it were a delicacy, speaks to no one, and sleeps upside-down while hanging from a branch of a nearby tree. For some reason, the creatures always leave it alone. Perhaps they think it is dead, possibly they know it is asleep and that only the rays of the sun can awaken it. Whatever the reason, we would be lost without it, for only the delicate tendrils that extend from its mouth can excavate the ancient artifacts we have discovered with the proper care.

We have four other species with us: one is an Historian, one an Exobiologist, one an Appraiser of human artifacts, and one a Mystic. (At least, I assume she is a Mystic, for I can find no pattern to her approach, but this may be due to my own shortsightedness. After all, what I do seems like magic to my companions and yet it is a rigorously-applied science.)

And, finally, there is me. I have no name, for my people do not use names, but for the convenience of the party I have taken the name of He Who Views for the duration of the expedition. This is a double misnomer: I am not ahe, for my race is not divided by gender; and I am not a viewer, but a Fourth Level Feeler. Still, I could intuit very early in the voyage that “feel” means something very different to my companions than to myself, and out of respect for their sensitivities, I chose a less accurate name.

Every day finds us back at work, examining the various strata. There are many signs that the area once teemed with living things, that early on there was a veritable explosion of life forms in this place, but very little remains today. There are a few species of insects and birds, some small rodents, and of course the creatures who visit our camp nightly.

Our collection has been growing slowly. It is fascinating to watch my companions perform their tasks, for in many ways they are as much of a mystery to me as my methods are to them. For example, our Exobiologist needs only to glide her tentacle across an object to tell us whether it was once living matter; the Historian, surrounded by its complex equipment, can date any object, carbon-based or otherwise, to within a decade of its origin, regardless of its state of preservation; and even the Moriteu is a thing of beauty and fascination as it gently separates the artifacts from the strata where they have rested for so long.

I am very glad I was chosen to come on this mission.

We have been here for two lunar cycles now, and the work goes slowly. The lower strata were thoroughly excavated eons ago (I have such a personal interest in learning about Man that I almost used the word plunderedrather than excavated, so resentful am I at not finding more artifacts), and for reasons as yet unknown there is almost nothing in the more recent strata.

Most of us are pleased with our results, and Bellidore is particularly elated. He says that finding five nearly intact artifacts makes the expedition an unqualified success.

All the others have worked tirelessly since our arrival. Now it is almost time for me to perform my special function, and I am very excited. I know that my findings will be no more important that the others’, but perhaps, when we put them all together, we can finally begin to understand what it was that made Man what he was.

“Are you . . .” asked the first Stardust Twin.

“. . . ready?” said the second.

I answered that I was ready, that indeed I had been anxious for this moment.

“May we . . .”

“. . . observe?” they asked.

“If you do not find it distasteful,” I replied.

“We are . . .”

“. . . scientists,” they said. “There is . . .”

“. . . very little . . .”

“. . . that we cannot view . . .”

“. . . objectively.”

I ambulated to the table upon which the artifact rested. It was a stone, or at least that is what it appeared to be to my exterior sensory organs. It was triangular, and the edges showed signs of work.

“How old is this?” I asked.

“Three million . . .”

“. . . five hundred and sixty-one thousand . . .”

“. . . eight hundred and twelve years,” answered the Stardust Twins.

“I see,” I said.

“It is much . . .”

“. . . the oldest . . .”

“. . . of our finds.”

I stared at it for a long time, preparing myself. Then I slowly, carefully, altered my structure and allowed my body to flow over and around the stone, engulfing it, and assimilating its history. I began to feel a delicious warmth as it became one with me, and while all my exterior senses had shut down, I knew that I was undulating and glowing with the thrill of discovery. I became one with the stone, and in that corner of my mind that is set aside for Feeling, I seemed to sense the Earth’s moon looming low and ominous just above the horizon . . .

* * *

Enkatai awoke with a start just after dawn and looked up at the moon, which was still high in the sky. After all these weeks it still seemed far too large to hang suspended in the sky, and must surely crash down onto the planet any moment. The nightmare was still strong in her mind, and she tried to imagine the comforting sight of five small, unthreatening moons leapfrogging across the silver sky of her own world. She was able to hold the vision in her mind’s eye for only a moment, and then it was lost, replaced by the reality of the huge satellite above her.

Her companion approached her.

“Another dream?” he asked.

“Exactly like the last one,” she said uncomfortably. “The moon is visible in the daylight, and then we begin walking down the path . . .”

He stared at her with sympathy and offered her nourishment. She accepted it gratefully, and looked off across the veldt.

“Just two more days,” she sighed, “and then we can leave this awful place.”

“It is not such a terrible world,” replied Bokatu. “It has many good qualities.”

“We have wasted our time here,” she said. “It is not fit for colonization.”

“No, it is not,” he agreed. “Our crops cannot thrive in this soil, and we have problems with the water. But we have learned many things, things that will eventually help us choose the proper world.”

“We learned most of them the first week we were here,” said Enkatai. “The rest of the time was wasted.”

“The ship had other worlds to explore. They could not know we would be able to analyze this one in such a short time.”

She shivered in the cool morning air. “I hate this place.”

“It will someday be a fine world,” said Bokatu. “It awaits only the evolution of the brown monkeys.”

Even as he spoke, an enormous baboon, some 350 pounds in weight, heavily muscled, with a shaggy chest and bold, curious eyes, appeared in the distance. Even walking on all fours it was a formidable figure, fully twice as large as the great spotted cats.

“We cannot use this world,” continued Bokatu, “but someday his descendants will spread across it.”

“They seem so placid,” commented Enkatai.

“They are placid,” agreed Bokatu, hurling a piece of food at the baboon, which raced forward and picked it up off the ground. It sniffed at it, seemed to consider whether or not to taste it, and finally, after a moment of indecision, put it in its mouth. “But they will dominate this planet. The huge grass-eaters spend too much time feeding, and the predators sleep all the time. No, my choice is the brown monkey. They are fine, strong, intelligent animals. They have already developed thumbs, they possess a strong sense of community, and even the great cats think twice about attacking them. They are virtually without natural predators.” He nodded his head, agreeing with himself. “Yes, it is they who will dominate this world in the eons to come.”

“No predators?” said Enkatai.

“Oh, I suppose one falls prey to the great cats now and then, but even the cats do not attack when they are with their troop.” He looked at the baboon. “That fellow has the strength to tear all but the biggest cat to pieces.”

“Then how do you account for what we found at the bottom of the gorge?” she persisted.

“Their size has cost them some degree of agility. It is only natural that one occasionally falls down the slopes to its death.”

“Occasionally?” she repeated. “I found seven skulls, each shattered as if from a blow.”

“The force of the fall,” said Bokatu with a shrug. “Surely you don’t think the great cats brained them before killing them?”

“I wasn’t thinking of the cats,” she replied.

“What, then?”

“The small, tailless monkeys that live in the gorge.”

Bokatu allowed himself the luxury of a superior smile. “Have you looked at them?” he said. “They are scarcely a quarter the size of the brown monkeys.”

“I have looked at them,” answered Enkatai. “And they, too, have thumbs.”

“Thumbs alone are not enough,” said Bokatu.

“They live in the shadow of the brown monkeys, and they are still here,” she said. “That is enough.”

“The brown monkeys are eaters of fruits and leaves. Why should they bother the tailless monkeys?”

“They do more than not bother them,” said Enkatai. “They avoid them. That hardly seems like a species that will someday spread across the world.”

Bokatu shook his head. “The tailless monkeys seem to be at an evolutionary dead end. Too small to hunt game, too large to feed themselves on what they can find in the gorge, too weak to compete with the brown monkeys for better territory. My guess is that they’re an earlier, more primitive species, destined for extinction.”

“Perhaps,” said Enkatai.

“You disagree?”

“There is something about them . . .”

“What?”

Enkatai shrugged. “I do not know. They make me uneasy. It is something in their eyes, I think—a hint of malevolence.”

“You are imagining things,” said Bokatu.

“Perhaps,” replied Enkatai again.

“I have reports to write today,” said Bokatu. “But tomorrow I will prove it to you.”

The next morning Bokatu was up with the sun. He prepared their first meal of the day while Enkatai completed her prayers, then performed his own while she ate.

“Now,” he announced, “we will go down into the gorge and capture one of the tailless monkeys.”

“Why?”

“To show you how easy it is. I may take it back with me as a pet. Or perhaps we shall sacrifice it in the lab and learn more about its life processes.”

“I do not want a pet, and we are not authorized to kill any animals.”

“As you wish,” said Bokatu. “We will let it go.”

“Then why capture one to begin with?”

“To show you that they are not intelligent, for if they are as bright as you think, I will not be able to capture one.” He pulled her to an upright position. “Let us begin.”

“This is foolish,” she protested. “The ship arrives in midafternoon. Why don’t we just wait for it?”

“We will be back in time,” he replied confidently. “How long can it take?”

She looked at the clear blue sky, as if trying to urge the ship to appear. The moon was hanging, huge and white, just above the horizon. Finally she turned to him.

“All right, I will come with you—but only if you promise merely to observe them, and not to try to capture one.”

“Then you admit I’m right?”

“Saying that you are right or wrong has nothing to do with the truth of the situation. I hope you are right, for the tailless monkeys frighten me. But I do not know you are right, and neither do you.”

Bokatu stared at her for a long moment.

“I agree,” he said at last.

“You agree that you cannot know?”

“I agree not to capture one,” he said. “Let us proceed.”

They walked to the edge of the gorge and then began climbing down the steep embankments, steadying themselves by wrapping their limbs around trees and other outgrowths. Suddenly they heard a loud screeching.

“What is that?” asked Bokatu.

“They have seen us,” replied Enkatai.

“What makes you think so?”

“I have heard that scream in my dream—and always the moon was just as it appears now.”

“Strange,” mused Bokatu. “I have heard them many times before, but somehow they seem louder this time.”

“Perhaps more of them are here.”

“Or perhaps they are more frightened,” he said. He glanced above him. “Here is the reason,” he said, pointing. “We have company.”

She looked up and saw a huge baboon, quite the largest she had yet seen, following them at a distance of perhaps fifty feet. When its eyes met hers it growled and looked away, but made no attempt to move any closer or farther away.

They kept climbing, and whenever they stopped to rest, there was the baboon, its accustomed fifty feet away from them.

“Does he look afraid to you?” asked Bokatu. “If these puny little creatures could harm him, would he be following us down into the gorge?”

“There is a thin line between courage and foolishness, and an even thinner line between confidence and over-confidence,” replied Enkatai.

“If he is to die here, it will be like all the others,” said Bokatu. “He will lose his footing and fall to his death.”

“You do not find it unusual that every one of them fell on its head?” she asked mildly.

“They broke every bone in their bodies,” he replied. “I don’t know why you consider only the heads.”

“Because you do not get identical head wounds from different incidents.”

“You have an overactive imagination,” said Bokatu. He pointed to a small hairy figure that was staring up at them. “Does that look like something that could kill our friend here?”

The baboon glared down into the gorge and snarled. The tailless monkey looked up with no show of fear or even interest. Finally it shuffled off into the thick bush.

“You see?” said Bokatu smugly. “One look at the brown monkey and it retreats out of sight.”

“It didn’t seem frightened to me,” noted Enkatai.

“All the more reason to doubt its intelligence.”

In another few minutes they reached the spot where the tailless monkey had been. They paused to regain their strength, and then continued to the floor of the gorge.

“Nothing,” announced Bokatu, looking around. “My guess is that the one we saw was a sentry, and by now the whole tribe is miles away.”

“Observe our companion.”

The baboon had reached the floor of the gorge and was tensely testing the wind.

“He hasn’t crossed over the evolutionary barrier yet,” said Bokatu, amused. “Do you expect him to search for predators with a sensor?”

“No,” said Enkatai, watching the baboon. “But if there is no danger, I expect him to relax, and he hasn’t done that yet.”

“That’s probably how he lived long enough to grow this large,” said Bokatu, dismissing her remarks. He looked around. “What could they possibly find to eat here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps we should capture one and dissect it. The contents of its stomach might tell us a lot about it.”

“You promised.”

“It would be so simple, though,” he persisted. “All we’d have to do would be bait a trap with fruits or nuts.”

Suddenly the baboon snarled, and Bokatu and Enkatai turned to locate the source of his anger. There was nothing there, but the baboon became more and more frenzied. Finally it raced back up the gorge.

“What was that all about, I wonder?” mused Bokatu.

“I think we should leave.”

“We have half a day before the ship returns.”

“I am uneasy here. I walked down a path exactly like this in my dream.”

“You are not used to the sunlight,” he said. “We will rest inside a cave.”

She reluctantly allowed him to lead her to a small cave in the wall of the gorge. Suddenly she stopped and would go no further.

“What is the matter?”

“This cave was in my dream,” she said. “Do not go into it.”

“You must learn not to let dreams rule your life,” said Bokatu. He sniffed the air. “Something smells strange.”

“Let us go back. We want nothing to do with this place.”

He stuck his head into the cave. “New world, new odors.”

“Please, Bokatu!”

“Let me just see what causes that odor,” he said, shining his light into the cave. It illuminated a huge pile of bodies, many of them half-eaten, most in various states of decomposition.

“What are they?” he asked, stepping closer.

“Brown monkeys,” she replied without looking. “Each with its head staved in.”

“This was part of your dream, too?” he asked, suddenly nervous.

She nodded her head. “We must leave this place now!”

He walked to the mouth of the cave.

“It seems safe,” he announced.

“It is never safe in my dream,” she said uneasily.

They left the cave and walked about fifty yards when they came to a bend in the floor of the gorge. As they followed it, they found themselves facing a tailless monkey.

“One of them seems to have stayed behind,” said Bokatu. “I’ll frighten him away.” He picked up a rock and threw it at the monkey, which ducked but held its ground.

Enkatai touched him urgently on the shoulder. “More than one,” she said.

He looked up. Two more tailless monkeys were in a tree almost directly overhead. As he stepped aside, he saw four more lumbering toward them out of the bush. Another emerged from a cave, and three more dropped out of nearby trees.

“What have they got in their hands?” he asked nervously.

“You would call them the femur bones of grass-eaters,” said Enkatai, with a sick feeling in her thorax. “They would call them weapons.”

The hairless monkeys spread out in a semi-circle, then began approaching them slowly.

“But they’re so puny!” said Bokatu, backing up until he came to a wall of rock and could go no farther.

“You are a fool,” said Enkatai, helplessly trapped in the reality of her dream. “This is the race that will dominate this planet. Look into their eyes!”

Bokatu looked, and he saw things, terrifying things, that he had never seen in any being or any animal before. He barely had time to offer a brief prayer for some disaster to befall this race before it could reach the stars, and then a tailless monkey hurled a smooth, polished, triangular stone at his head. It dazed him, and as he fell to the ground, the clubs began pounding down rhythmically on him and Enkatai.

At the top of the gorge, the baboon watched the carnage until it was over, and then raced off toward the vast savannah, where he would be safe, at least temporarily, from the tailless monkeys.

* * *

“A weapon,” I mused. “It was a weapon!”

I was all alone. Sometime during the Feeling, the Stardust Twins had decided that I was one of the few things they could not be objective about, and had returned to their quarters.

I waited until the excitement of discovery had diminished enough for me to control my physical structure. Then I once again took the shape that I presented to my companions, and reported my findings to Bellidore.

“So even then they were aggressors,” he said. “Well, it is not surprising. The will to dominate the stars had to have come from somewhere.”

“It is surprising that there is no record of any race having landed here in their prehistory,” said the Historian.

“It was a survey team, and Earth was of no use to them,” I answered. “They doubtless touched down on any number of planets. If there is a record anywhere, it is probably in their archives, stating that Earth showed no promise as a colony world.”

“But didn’t they wonder what had happened to their team?” asked Bellidore.

“There were many large carnivores in the vicinity,” I said. “They probably assumed the team had fallen prey to them. Especially if they searched the area and found nothing.”

“Interesting,” said Bellidore. “That the weaker of the species should have risen to dominance.”

“I think it is easily explained,” said the Historian. “As the smaller species, they were neither as fast as their prey nor as strong as their predators, so the creation of weapons was perhaps the only way to avoid extinction . . . or at least the best way.”

“Certainly they displayed the cunning of the predator during their millennia abroad in the galaxy,” said Bellidore.

“One does not stop being aggressive simply because one invents a weapon,” said the Historian. “In fact, it may add to one’s aggression.”

“I shall have to consider that,” said Bellidore, looking somewhat unconvinced.

“I have perhaps over-simplified my train of thought for the sake of this discussion,” replied the Historian. “Rest assured that I will build a lengthy and rigorous argument when I present my findings to the Academy.”

“And what of you, He Who Views?” asked Bellidore. “Have you any observations to add to what you have told us?”

“It is difficult to think of a rock as being the precursor of the sonic rifle and the molecular imploder,” I said thoughtfully, “but I believe it to be the case.”

“A most interesting species,” said Bellidore.

It took almost four hours for my strength to return, for Feeling saps the energy like no other function, drawing equally from the body, the emotions, the mind, and the empathic powers.

The Moriteu, its work done for the day, was hanging upside down from a tree limb, lost in its evening trance, and the Stardust Twins had not made an appearance since I had Felt the stone.

The other party members were busy with their own pursuits, and it seemed an ideal time for me to Feel the next object, which the Historian told me was approximately 23,300 years old.

It was a link of metallic chain, rusted and pitted, and before I assimilated it, I thought I could see a spot where it had been deliberately broken . . .

* * *

His name was Mtepwa, and it seemed to him that he had been wearing a metal collar around his neck since the day he had been born. He knew that couldn’t be true, for he had fleeting memories of playing with his brothers and sisters, and of stalking the kudu and the bongo on the tree-covered mountain where he grew up.

But the more he concentrated on those memories, the more vague and imprecise they became, and he knew they must have happened a very long time ago. Sometimes he tried to remember the name of his tribe, but it was lost in the mists of time, as were the names of his parents and siblings.

It was at times like this that Mtepwa felt sorry for himself, but then he would consider his companions’ situation, and he felt better, for while they were to be taken in ships and sent to the edge of the world to spend the remainder of their lives as slaves of the Arabs and the Europeans, he himself was the favored servant of his master, Sharif Abdullah, and as such his position was assured.

This was his eighth caravan—or was it his ninth?—from the Interior. They would trade salt and cartridges to the tribal chiefs who would in turn sell them their least productive warriors and women as slaves, and then they would march them out, around the huge lake and across the dry flat savannah. They would circle the mountain that was so old that it had turned white on the top, just like a white-haired old man, and finally out to the coast, where dhows filled the harbor. There they would sell their human booty to the highest bidders, and Sharif Abdullah would purchase another wife and turn half the money over to his aged, feeble father, and they would be off to the Interior again on another quest for black gold.

Abdullah was a good master. He rarely drank—and when he did, he always apologized to Allah at the next opportunity—and he did not beat Mtepwa overly much, and they always had enough to eat, even when the cargo went hungry. He even went so far as to teach Mtepwa how to read, although the only reading matter he carried with him was the Koran.

Mtepwa spent long hours honing his reading skills with the Koran, and somewhere along the way he made a most interesting discovery: the Koran forbade a practitioner of the True Faith to keep another member in bondage.

It was at that moment that Mtepwa made up his mind to convert to Islam. He began questioning Sharif Abdullah incessantly on the finer points of his religion, and made sure that the old man saw him sitting by the fire, hour after hour, reading the Koran.

So enthused was Sharif Abdullah at this development that he frequently invited Mtepwa into his tent at suppertime, and lectured him on the subtleties of the Koran far into the night. Mtepwa was a motivated student, and Sharif Abdullah marveled at his enthusiasm.

Night after night, as lions prowled around their camp in the Serengeti, master and pupil studied the Koran together. And finally the day came when Sharif Abdullah could not longer deny that Mtepwa was indeed a true believer of Islam. It happened as they camped at the Olduvai Gorge, and that very day Sharif Abdullah had his smith remove the collar from Mtepwa’s neck, and Mtepwa himself destroyed the chains link by link, hurling them deep into the gorge when he was finished. He kept a single link, which he wore around his neck as a charm.

Mtepwa was now a free man, but knowledgeable in only two areas: the Koran, and slave-trading. So it was only natural that when he looked around for some means to support himself, he settled upon following in Sharif Abdullah’s footsteps. He became a junior partner to the old man, and after two more trips to the Interior, he decided that he was ready to go out on his own.

To do that, he required a trained staff—warriors, smiths, cooks, trackers—and the prospect of assembling one from scratch was daunting, so, since his faith was less strong than his mentor’s, he simply sneaked into Sharif Abdullah’s quarters on the coast one night and slit the old man’s throat.

The next day, he marched inland at the head of his own caravan.

He had learned much about the business of slaving, both as a practitioner and a victim, and he put his knowledge to full use. He knew that healthy slaves would bring a better price at market, and so he fed and treated his captives far better than Sharif Abdullah and most other slavers did. On the other hand, he knew which ones were fomenting trouble, and knew it was better to kill them on the spot as an example to the others, than to let any hopes of insurrection spread among the captives.

Because he was thorough, he was equally successful, and soon expanded into ivory trading as well. Within six years he had the biggest slaving and poaching operation in East Africa.

From time to time he ran across European explorers. It was said that he even spent a week with Dr. David Livingstone and left without the missionary ever knowing that he had been playing host to the slaver he most wanted to put out of business.

After America’s War Between the States killed his primary market, he took a year off from his operation to go to Asia and the Arabian Peninsula and open up new ones. Upon returning he found that Abdullah’s son, Sharif Ibn Jad Mahir, had appropriated all his men and headed inland, intent on carrying on his father’s business. Mtepwa, who had become quite wealthy, hired some 500 askari, placed them under the command of the notorious ivory poacher Alfred Henry Pym, and sat back to await the results.

Three months later Pym marched some 438 men back to the Tanganyikan coast. 276 were slaves that Sharif Ibn Jad Mahir had captured; the remainder were the remnants of Mtepwa’s organization, who had gone to work for Sharif Ibn Jad Mahir. Mtepwa sold all 438 of them into slavery and built a new organization, composed of the warriors who had fought for him under Pym’s leadership.

Most of the colonial powers were inclined to turn a blind eye to his practices, but the British, who were determined to put an end to slavery, issued a warrant for Mtepwa’s arrest. Eventually he tired of continually looking over his shoulder, and moved his headquarters to Mozambique, where the Portuguese were happy to let him set up shop as long as he remembered that colonial palms needed constant greasing.

He was never happy there—he didn’t speak Portuguese or any of the local languages—and after nine years he returned to Tanganyika, now the wealthiest black man on the continent.

One day he found among his latest batch of captives a young Acholi boy named Haradi, no more than ten years old, and decided to keep him as a personal servant rather than ship him across the ocean.

Mtepwa had never married. Most of his associates assumed that he had simply never had the time, but as the almost-nightly demands for Haradi to visit him in his tent became common knowledge, they soon revised their opinions. Mtepwa seemed besotted with his servant boy, though—doubtless remembering his own experience—he never taught Haradi to read, and promised a slow and painful death to anyone who spoke of Islam to the boy.

Then one night, after some three years had passed, Mtepwa sent for Haradi. The boy was nowhere to be found. Mtepwa awoke all his warriors and demanded that they search for him, for a leopard had been seen in the vicinity of the camp, and the slaver feared the worst.

They found Haradi an hour later, not in the jaws of a leopard, but in the arms of a young female slave they had taken from the Zaneke tribe. Mtepwa was beside himself with rage, and had the poor girl’s arms and legs torn from her body.

Haradi never offered a word of protest, and never tried to defend the girl—not that it would have done any good—but the next morning he was gone, and though Mtepwa and his warriors spent almost a month searching for him, they found no trace of him.

By the end of the month Mtepwa was quite insane with rage and grief. Deciding that life was no longer worth living, he walked up to a pride of lions that were gorging themselves on a topi carcass and, striding into their midst, began cursing them and hitting them with his bare hands. Almost unbelievably, the lions backed away from him, snarling and growling, and disappeared into the thick bush.

The next day he picked up a large stick and began beating a baby elephant with it. That should have precipitated a brutal attack by its mother—but the mother, standing only a few feet away, trumpeted in terror and raced off, the baby following her as best it could.

It was then that Mtepwa decided that he could not die, that somehow the act of dismembering the poor Zanake girl had made him immortal. Since both incidents had occurred within sight of his superstitious followers, they fervently believed him.

Now that he was immortal, he decided that it was time to stop trying to accommodate the Europeans who had invaded his land and kept issuing warrants for his arrest. He sent a runner to the Kenya border and invited the British to meet him in battle. When the appointed day came, and the British did not show up to fight him, he confidently told his warriors that word of his immortality had reached the Europeans and that from that day forth no white men would ever be willing to oppose him. The fact that he was still in German territory, and the British had no legal right to go there, somehow managed to elude him.

He began marching his warriors inland, openly in search of slaves, and he found his share of them in the Congo. He looted villages of their men, their women, and their ivory, and finally, with almost 600 captives and half that many tusks, he finally turned east and began the months-long trek to the coast.

This time the British were waiting for him at the Uganda border, and they had so many armed men there that Mtepwa turned south, not for fear for his own life, but because he could not afford to lose his slaves and his ivory, and he knew that his warriors lacked his invulnerability.

He marched his army down to Lake Tanganyika, then headed east. It took him two weeks to reach the western corridor of the Serengeti, and another ten days to cross it.

One night he made camp at the lip of the Olduvai Gorge, the very place where he had gained his freedom. The fires were lit, a wildebeest was slaughtered and cooked, and as he relaxed after the meal he became aware of a buzzing among his men. Then, from out of the shadows, stepped a strangely familiar figure. It was Haradi, now fifteen years old, and as tall as Mtepwa himself.

Mtepwa stared at him for a long moment, and suddenly all the anger seemed to drain from his face.

“I am very glad to see you again, Haradi,” he said.

“I have heard that you cannot be killed,” answered the boy, brandishing a spear. “I have come to see if that is true.”

“We have no need to fight, you and I,” said Mtepwa. “Join me in my tent, and all will be as it was.”

“Once I tear your limbs from your body, then we will have no reason to fight,” responded Haradi. “And even then, you will seem no less repulsive to me than you do now, or than you did all those many years ago.”

Mtepwa jumped up, his face a mask of fury. “Do your worst, then!” he cried. “And when you realize that I cannot be harmed, I will do to you as I did to the Zanake girl!”

Haradi made no reply, but hurled his spear at Mtepwa. It went into the slaver’s body, and was thrown with such force that the point emerged a good six inches on the other side. Mtepwa stared at Haradi with disbelief, moaned once, and tumbled down the rocky slopes of the gorge.

Haradi looked around at the warriors. “Is there any among you who dispute my right to take Mtepwa’s place?” he asked confidently.

A burly Makonde stood up to challenge him, and within thirty seconds Haradi, too, was dead.

The British were waiting for them when they reached Zanzibar. The slaves were freed, the ivory confiscated, the warriors arrested and forced to serve as laborers on the Mombasa/Uganda Railway. Two of them were later killed and eaten by lions in the Tsavo District.

By the time Lieutenant-Colonel J. H. Patterson shot the notorious Man-Eaters of Tsavo, the railway had almost reached the shanty town of Nairobi, and Mtepwa’s name was so thoroughly forgotten that it was misspelled in the only history book in which it appeared.

* * *

“Amazing!” said the Appraiser. “I knew they enslaved many races throughout the galaxy—but to enslave themselves! It is almost beyond belief!”

I had rested from my efforts, and then related the story of Mtepwa.

“All ideas must begin somewhere,” said Bellidore placidly. “This one obviously began on Earth.”

“It is barbaric!” muttered the Appraiser.

Bellidore turned to me. “Man never attempted to subjugate your race, He Who Views. Why was that?”

“We had nothing that he wanted.”

“Can you remember the galaxy when Man dominated it?” asked the Appraiser.

“I can remember the galaxy when Man’s progenitors killed Bokatu and Enkatai,” I replied truthfully.

“Did you ever have any dealings with Man?”

“None. Man had no use for us.”

“But did he not destroy profligately things for which he had no use?”

“No,” I said. “He took what he wanted, and he destroyed that which threatened him. The rest he ignored.”

“Such arrogance!”

“Such practicality,” said Bellidore.

“You call genocide on a galactic scale practical?” demanded the Appraiser.

“From Man’s point of view, it was,” answered Bellidore. “It got him what he wanted with a minimum of risk and effort. Consider that one single race, born not five hundred yards from us, at one time ruled an empire of more than a million worlds. Almost every civilized race in the galaxy spoke Terran.”

“Upon pain of death.”

“That is true,” agreed Bellidore. “I did not say Man was an angel. Only that, if he was indeed a devil, he was an efficient one.”

It was time for me to assimilate the third artifact, which the Historian and the Appraiser seemed to think was the handle of a knife, but even as I moved off to perform my function, I could not help but listen to the speculation that was taking place.

“Given his bloodlust and his efficiency,” said the Appraiser, “I’m surprised that he lived long enough to reach the stars.”

“It is surprising in a way,” agreed Bellidore. “The Historian tells me that Man was not always homogenous, that early in his history there were several variations of the species. He was divided by color, by belief, by territory.”He sighed. “Still, he must have learned to live in peace with his fellow man. That much, at least, accrues to his credit.”

I reached the artifact with Bellidore’s words still in my ears, and began to engulf it . . .

* * *

Mary Leakey pressed against the horn of the Landrover. Inside the museum, her husband turned to the young uniformed officer.

“I can’t think of any instructions to give you,” he said. “The museum’s not open to the public yet, and we’re a good 300 kilometers from Kikuyuland.”

“I’m just following my orders, Dr. Leakey,” replied the officer.

“Well, I suppose it doesn’t hurt to be safe,” acknowledged Leakey. “There are a lot of Kikuyu who want me dead even though I spoke up for Kenyatta at his trial.” He walked to the door. “If the discoveries at Lake Turkana prove interesting, we could be gone as long as a month. Otherwise, we should be back within ten to twelve days.”

“No problem, sir. The museum will still be here when you get back.”

“I never doubted it,” said Leakey, walking out and joining his wife in the vehicle.

Lieutenant Ian Chelmswood stood in the doorway and watched the Leakeys, accompanied by two military vehicles, start down the red dirt road. Within seconds the car was obscured by dust, and he stepped back into the building and closed the door to avoid being covered by it. The heat was oppressive, and he removed his jacket and holster and laid them neatly across one of the small display cases.

It was strange. All the images he had seen of African wildlife, from the German Schillings’ old still photographs to the American Johnson’s motion pictures, had led him to believe that East Africa was a wonderland of green grass and clear water. No one had ever mentioned the dust, but that was the one memory of it that he would take home with him.

Well, not quite the only one. He would never forget the morning the alarm had sounded back when he was stationed in Nanyuki. He arrived at the settlers’ farm and found the entire family cut to ribbons and all their cattle mutilated, most with their genitals cut off, many missing ears and eyes. But as horrible as that was, the picture he would carry to his grave was the kitten impaled on a dagger and pinned to the mailbox. It was the Mau Mau’s signature, just in case anyone thought some madman had run berserk among the cattle and the humans.

Chelmswood didn’t understand the politics of it. He didn’t know who had started it, who had precipitated the war. It made no difference to him. He was just a soldier, following orders, and if those orders would take him back to Nanyuki so that he could kill the men who had committed those atrocities, so much the better.

But in the meantime, he had pulled what he considered Idiot Duty. There had been a very mild outburst of violence in Arusha, not really Mau Mau but rather a show of support for Kenya’s Kikuyu, and his unit had been transferred there. Then the government found out that Professor Leakey, whose scientific finds had made Olduvai Gorge almost a household word among East Africans, had been getting death threats. Over his objections, they had insisted on providing him with bodyguards. Most of the men from Chelmswood’s unit would accompany Leakey on his trip to Lake Turkana, but someone had to stay behind to guard the museum, and it was just his bad luck that his name had been atop the duty roster.

It wasn’t even a museum, really, not the kind of museum his parents had taken him to see in London. Those were museums; this was just a two-room mud-walled structure with perhaps a hundred of Leakey’s finds. Ancient arrowheads, some oddly-shaped stones that had functioned as prehistoric tools, a couple of bones that obviously weren’t from monkeys but that Chelmswood was certain were not from any creature he was related to.

Leakey had hung some crudely-drawn charts on the wall, charts that showed what he believed to be the evolution of some small, grotesque, apelike beasts into homo sapiens. There were photographs, too, showing some of the finds that had been sent on to Nairobi. It seemed that even if this gorge was the birthplace of the race, nobody really wanted to visit it. All the best finds were shipped back to Nairobi and then to the British Museum. In fact, this wasn’t a museum at all, decided Chelmswood, but rather a holding area for the better specimens until they could be sent elsewhere.

It was strange to think of life starting here in this gorge. If there was an uglier spot in Africa, he had yet to come across it. And while he didn’t accept Genesis or any of that religious nonsense, it bothered him to think that the first human beings to walk the Earth might have been black. He’d hardly had any exposure to blacks when he was growing up in the Cotswolds, but he’d seen enough of what they could do since coming to British East, and he was appalled by their savagery and barbarism.

And what about those crazy Americans, wringing their hands and saying that colonialism had to end? If they had seen what he’d seen on that farm in Nanyuki, they’d know that the only thing that was keeping all of East Africa from exploding into an unholy conflagration of blood and butchery was the British presence. Certainly, there were parallels between the Mau Mau and America: both had been colonized by the British and both wanted their independence . . . but there all similarity ended. The Americans wrote a Declaration outlining their grievances, and then they fielded an army and fought the British soldiers. What did chopping up innocent children and pinning cats to mailboxes have in common with that? If he had his way, he’d march in half a million British troops, wipe out every last Kikuyu—except for the good ones, the loyal ones—and solve the problem once and for all.

He wandered over to the cabinet where Leakey kept his beer and pulled out a warm bottle. Safari brand. He opened it and took a long swallow, then made a face. If that’s what people drank on safari, he’d have to remember never to go on one.

And yet he knew that someday he would go on safari, hopefully before he was mustered out and sent home. Parts of the country were so damned beautiful, dust or no dust, and he liked the thought of sitting beneath a shade tree, cold drink in hand, while his body servant cooled him with a fan made of ostrich feathers and he and his white hunter discussed the day’s kills and what they would go out after tomorrow. It wasn’t the shooting that was important, they’d both reassure themselves, but rather the thrill of the hunt. Then he’d have a couple of his black boys draw his bath, and he’d bathe and prepare for dinner. Funny how he had fallen into the habit of calling them boys; most of them were far older than he.

But while they weren’t boys, they were children in need of guidance and civilizing. Take those Maasai, for example; proud, arrogant bastards. They looked great on postcards, but try dealing with them. They acted as if they had a direct line to God, that He had told them they were His chosen people. The more Chelmswood thought about it, the more surprised he was that it was the Kikuyu that had begun Mau Mau rather than the Maasai. And come to think of it, he’d notice four or five Maasai elmorani hanging around the museum. He’d have to keep an eye on them . . .

“Excuse, please?” said a high-pitched voice, and Chelmswood turned to see a small skinny black boy, no more than ten years old, standing in the doorway.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Doctor Mister Leakey, he promise me candy,” said the boy, stepping inside the building.

“Go away,” said Chelmswood irritably. “We don’t have any candy here.”

“Yes yes,” said the boy, stepping forward. “Every day.”

“He gives you candy every day?”

The boy nodded his head and smiled.

“Where does he keep it?”

The boy shrugged. “Maybe in there?” he said, pointing to a cabinet.

Chelmswood walked to the cabinet and opened it. There was nothing in it but four jars containing primitive teeth.

“I don’t see any,” he said. “You’ll have to wait until Dr. Leakey comes back.”

Two tears trickled down the boy’s cheek. “But Doctor Mister Leakey, he promise!”

Chelmswood looked around. “I don’t know where it is.”

The boy began crying in earnest.

“Be quiet!” snapped Chelmswood. “I’ll look for it.”

“Maybe next room,” suggested the boy.

“Come along,” said Chelmswood, walking through the doorway to the adjoining room. He looked around, hands on hips, trying to imagine where Leakey had hidden the candy.

“This place maybe,” said the boy, pointing to a closet.

Chelmswood opened the closet. It contained two spades, three picks, and an assortment of small brushes, all of which he assumed were used by the Leakeys for their work.

“Nothing here,” he said, closing the door.

He turned to face the boy, but found the room empty.

“Little bugger was lying all along,” he muttered. “Probably ran away to save himself a beating.”

He walked back into the main room—and found himself facing a well-built black man holding a machete-like panga in his right hand.

“What’s going on here?” snapped Chelmswood.

“Freedom is going on here, Lieutenant,” said the black man in near-perfect English. “I was sent to kill Dr. Leakey, but you will have to do.”

“Why are you killing anyone?” demanded Chelmswood. “What did we ever do to the Maasai?”

“I will let the Maasai answer that. Any one of them could take one look at me and tell you than I am Kikuyu—but we are all the same to you British, aren’t we?”

Chelmswood reached for his gun and suddenly realized he had left it on a display case.

“You all look like cowardly savages to me!”

“Why? Because we do not meet you in battle?” The black man’s face filled with fury. “You take our land away, you forbid us to own weapons, you even make it a crime for us to carry spears—and then you call us savages when we don’t march in formation against your guns!” He spat contemptuously on the floor. “We fight you in the only way that is left to us.”

“It’s a big country, big enough for both races,” said Chelmswood.

“If we came to England and took away your best farmland and forced you to work for us, would you think England was big enough for both races?”

“I’m not political,” said Chelmswood, edging another step closer to his weapon. “I’m just doing my job.”

“And your job is to keep two hundred whites on land that once held a million Kikuyu,” said the black man, his face reflecting his hatred.

“There’ll be a lot less than a million when we get through with you!” hissed Chelmswood, diving for his gun.

Quick as he was, the black man was faster, and with a single swipe of his panga he almost severed the Englishman’s right hand from his wrist. Chelmswood bellowed in pain, and spun around, presenting his back to the Kikuyu as he reached for the pistol with his other hand.

The panga came down again, practically splitting him open, but as he fell he managed to get his fingers around the handle of his pistol and pull the trigger. The bullet struck the black man in the chest, and he, too, collapsed to the floor.

“You’ve killed me!” moaned Chelmswood. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”

“You have so much and we have so little,” whispered the black man. “Why must you have what is ours, too?”

“What did I ever do to you?” asked Chelmswood.

“You came here. That was enough,” said the black man. “Filthy English!” He closed his eyes and lay still.

“Bloody nigger!” slurred Chelmswood, and died.

Outside, the four Maasai paid no attention to the tumult within. They let the small Kikuyu boy leave without giving him so much as a glance. The business of inferior races was none of their concern.

* * *

“These notions of superiority among members of the same race are very difficult to comprehend,” said Bellidore. “Are you sure you read the artifact properly, He Who Views?”

“I do not read artifacts,” I replied. “I assimilate them. I become one with them. Everything they have experienced, I experience.” I paused. “There can be no mistake.”

“Well, it is difficult to fathom, especially in a species that would one day control most of the galaxy. Did they think every race they met was inferior to them?”

“They certainly behaved as if they did,” said the Historian. “They seemed to respect only those races that stood up to them—and even then they felt that militarily defeating them was proof of their superiority.”

“And yet we know from ancient records that primitive man worshipped non-sentient animals,” put in the Exobiologist.

“They must not have been survived for any great length of time,” suggested the Historian. “If Man treated the races of the galaxy with contempt, how much worse must he have treated the poor creatures with whom he shared his home world?”

“Perhaps he viewed them much the same as he viewed my own race,” I offered. “If they had nothing he wanted, if they presented no threat . . .”

“They would have had something he wanted,” said the Exobiologist. “He was a predator. They would have had meat.”

“And land,” added the Historian. “If even the galaxy was not enough to quench Man’s thirst for territory, think how unwilling he would have been to share his own world.”

“It is a question I suspect will never be answered,” said Bellidore.

“Unless the answer lies in one of the remaining artifacts,” agreed the Exobiologist.

I’m sure the remark was not meant to jar me from my lethargy, but it occurred to me that it had been half a day since I had assimilated the knife handle, and I had regained enough of my strength to examine the next artifact.

It was a metal stylus . . .

* * *

February 15, 2103:

Well, we finally got here! The Supermole got us through the tunnel from New York to London in just over four hours. Even so we were twenty minutes late, missed our connection, and had to wait another five hours for the next flight to Khartoum. From there our means of transport got increasingly more primitive—jet planes to Nairobi and Arusha—and then a quick shuttle to our campsite, but we’ve finally put civilization behind us. I’ve never seen open spaces like this before; you’re barely aware of the skyscrapers of Nyerere, the closest town.

After an orientation speech telling us what to expect and how to behave on safari, we got the afternoon off to meet our traveling companions. I’m the youngest member of the group: a trip like this just costs too much for most people my age to afford. Of course, most people my age don’t have an Uncle Reuben who dies and leaves them a ton of money. (Well, it’s probably about eight ounces of money, now that the safari is paid for. Ha ha.)

The lodge is quite rustic. They have quaint microwaves for warming our food, although most of us will be eating at the restaurants. I understand the Japanese and Brazilian ones are the most popular, the former for the food—real fish—and the latter for the entertainment. My roommate is Mr. Shiboni, an elderly Japanese gentleman who tells me he has been saving his money for fifteen years to come on this safari. He seems pleasant and good-natured; I hope he can survive the rigors of the trip.

I had really wanted a shower, just to get in the spirit of things, but water is scarce here, and it looks like I’ll have to settle for the same old chemical dryshower. I know, I know, it disinfects as well as cleanses, but if I wanted all the comforts of home, I’d have stayed home and saved $150,000.

February 16:

We met our guide today. I don’t know why, but he doesn’t quite fit my preconception of an African safari guide. I was expecting some grizzled old veteran who had a wealth of stories to tell, who had maybe even seen a civet cat or a duiker before they became extinct. What we got was Kevin Ole Tambake, a young Maasai who can’t be 25 years old and dresses in a suit while we all wear our khakis. Still, he’s lived here all his life, so I suppose he knows his way around.

And I’ll give him this: he’s a wonderful storyteller. He spent half an hour telling us myths about how his people used to live in huts called manyattas, and how their rite of passage to manhood was to kill a lion with a spear. As if the government would let anyone kill an animal!

We spent the morning driving down into the Ngorongoro Crater. It’s a collapsed caldera, or volcano, that was once taller than Kilimanjaro itself. Kevin says it used to teem with game, though I can’t see how, since any game standing atop it when it collapsed would have been instantly killed.

I think the real reason we went there was just to get the kinks out of our safari vehicle and learn the proper protocol. Probably just as well. The air-conditioning wasn’t working right in two of the compartments, the service mechanism couldn’t get the temperature right on the iced drinks, and once, when we thought we saw a bird, three of us buzzed Kevin at the same time and jammed his communication line.

In the afternoon we went out to Serengeti. Kevin says it used to extend all the way to the Kenya border, but now it’s just a 20-square-mile park adjacent to the Crater. About an hour into the game run we saw a ground squirrel, but he disappeared into a hole before I could adjust my holo camera. Still, he was very impressive. Varying shares of brown, with dark eyes and a fluffy tail. Kevin estimated that he went almost three pounds, and says he hasn’t seen one that big since he was a boy.

Just before we returned to camp, Kevin got word on the radio from another driver that they had spotted two starlings nesting in a tree about eight miles north and east of us. The vehicle’s computer told us we wouldn’t be able to reach it before dark, so Kevin had it lock the spot in its memory and promised us that we’d go there first thing in the morning.

I opted for the Brazilian restaurant, and spent a few pleasant hours listening to the live band. A very nice end to the first full day of safari.

February 17:

We left at dawn in search of the starlings, and though we found the tree where they had been spotted, we never did see them. One of the passengers—I think it was the little man from Burma, though I’m not sure—must have complained, because Kevin soon announced to the entire party that this was a safari, that there was no guarantee of seeing any particular bird or animal, and that while he would do his best for us, one could never be certain where the game might be.

And then, just as he was talking, a banded mongoose almost a foot long appeared out of nowhere. It seemed to pay no attention to us, and Kevin announced that we were killing the motor and going into hover mode so the noise wouldn’t scare it away.

After a minute or two everyone on the right side of the vehicle had gotten their holographs, and we slowly spun on our axis so that the left side could see him—but the movement must have scared him off, because though the maneuver took less than thirty seconds, he was nowhere to be seen when we came to rest again.

Kevin announced that the vehicle had captured the mongoose on its automated holos, and copies would be made available to anyone who had missed their holo opportunity.

We were feeling great—the right side of the vehicle, anyway—when we stopped for lunch, and during our afternoon game run we saw three yellow weaver birds building their spherical nests in a tree. Kevin let us out, warning us not to approach closer than thirty yards, and we spent almost an hour watching and holographing them.

All in all, a very satisfying day.

February 18:

Today we left camp about an hour after sunrise, and went to a new location: Olduvai Gorge.

Kevin announced that we would spend our last two days here, that with the encroachment of the cities and farms on all the flat land, the remaining big game was pretty much confined to the gulleys and slopes of the gorge.

No vehicle, not even our specially-equipped one, was capable of navigating its way through the gorge, so we all got out and began walking in single file behind Kevin.

Most of us found it very difficult to keep up with Kevin. He clambered up and down the rocks as if he’d been doing it all his life, whereas I can’t remember the last time I saw a stair that didn’t move when I stood on it. We had trekked for perhaps half an hour when I heard one of the men at the back of our strung-out party give a cry and point to a spot at the bottom of the gorge, and we all looked and saw something racing away at phenomenal speed.

“Another squirrel?” I asked.

Kevin just smiled.

The man behind me said he thought it was a mongoose.

“What you saw,” said Kevin, “was a dik-dik, the last surviving African antelope.”

“How big was it?” asked a woman.

“About average size,” said Kevin. “Perhaps ten inches at the shoulder.”

Imagine anything ten inches high being called average!

Kevin explained that dik-diks were very territorial, and that this one wouldn’t stray far from his home area. Which meant that if we were patient and quiet—and lucky—we’d be able to spot him again.

I asked Kevin how many dik-diks lived in the gorge, and he scratched his head and considered it for a moment and then guessed that there might be as many as ten. (And Yellowstone has only nineteen rabbits left! Is it any wonder that all the serious animal buffs come to Africa?)

We kept walking for another hour, and then broke for lunch, while Kevin gave us the history of the place, telling us all about Dr. Leakey’s finds. There were probably still more skeletons to be dug up, he guessed, but the government didn’t want to frighten any animals away from what had become their last refuge, so the bones would have to wait for some future generation to unearth them. Roughly translated, that meant that Tanzania wasn’t going to give up the revenues from 300 tourists a week and turn over the crown jewel in their park system to a bunch of anthropologists. I can’t say that I blame them.

Other parties had begun pouring into the gorge, and I think the entire safari population must have totaled almost 70 by the time lunch was over. The guides each seemed to have “their” areas marked out, and I noticed that rarely did we get within a quarter mile of any other parties.

Kevin asked us if we wanted to sit in the shade until the heat of the day had passed, but since this was our next-to-last day on safari we voted overwhelmingly to proceed as soon as we were through eating.

It couldn’t have been ten minutes later that the disaster occurred. We were clambering down a steep slope in single file, Kevin in the lead as usual, and me right behind him, when I heard a grunt and then a surprised yell, and I looked back to see Mr. Shiboni tumbling down the path. Evidently he’d lost his footing, and we could hear the bones in his leg snap as he hurtled toward us.

Kevin positioned himself to stop him, and almost got knocked down the gorge himself before he finally stopped poor Mr. Shiboni. Then he knelt down next to the old gentleman to tend to his broken leg—but as he did so his keen eyes spotted something we all had missed, and suddenly he was bounding up the slopes like a monkey. He stopped where Mr. Shiboni had initially stumbled, squatted down, and examined something. Then, looking like Death itself, he picked up the object and brought it back down the path.

It was a dead lizard, fully-grown, almost eight inches long, and smashed flat by Mr. Shiboni. It was impossible to say whether his fall was caused by stepping on it, or whether it simply couldn’t get out of the way once he began tumbling . . . but it made no difference: he was responsible for the death of an animal in a National Park.

I tried to remember the release we had signed, giving the Park System permission to instantly withdraw money from our accounts should we destroy an animal for any reason, even self-protection. I knew that the absolute minimum penalty was $50,000, but I think that was for two of the more common birds, and that ugaama and gecko lizards were in the $70,000 range.

Kevin held the lizard up for all of us to see, and told us that should legal action ensue, we were all witnesses to what had happened.

Mr. Shiboni groaned in pain, and Kevin said that there was no sense wasting the lizard, so he gave it to me to hold while he splinted Mr. Shiboni’s leg and summoned the paramedics on the radio.

I began examining the little lizard. Its feet were finely-shaped, its tail long and elegant, but it was the colors that made the most lasting impression on me: a reddish head, a blue body, and grey legs, the color growing lighter as it reached the claws. A beautiful, beautiful thing, even in death.

After the paramedics had taken Mr. Shiboni back to the lodge, Kevin spent the next hour showing us how the ugaama lizard functioned: how its eyes could see in two directions at once, how its claws allowed it to hang upside down from any uneven surface, and how efficiently its jaws could crack the carapaces of the insects it caught. Finally, in view of the tragedy, and also because he wanted to check on Mr. Shiboni’s condition, Kevin suggested that we call it a day.

None of us objected—we knew Kevin would have hours of extra work, writing up the incident and convincing the Park Department that his safari company was not responsible for it—but still we felt cheated, since there was only one day left. I think Kevin knew it, because just before we reached the lodge he promised us a special treat tomorrow.

I’ve been awake half the night wondering what it could be? Can he possibly know where the other dik-diks are? Or could the legends of a last flamingo possibly be true?

February 19:

We were all excited when we climbed aboard the vehicle this morning. Everyone kept asking Kevin what his “special treat” was, but he merely smiled and kept changing the subject. Finally we reached Olduvai Gorge and began walking, only this time we seemed to be going to a specific location, and Kevin hardly stopped to try to spot the dik-dik.

We climbed down twisting, winding paths, tripping over tree roots, cutting our arms and legs on thorn bushes, but nobody objected, for Kevin seemed so confident of his surprise that all these hardships were forgotten.

Finally we reached the bottom of the gorge and began walking along a flat winding path. Still, by the time we were ready to stop for lunch, we hadn’t seen a thing. As we sat beneath the shade of an acacia tree, eating, Kevin pulled out his radio and conversed with the other guides. One group had seen three dik-diks, and another had found a lilac-breasted roller’s nest with two hatchlings in it. Kevin is very competitive, and ordinarily news like that would have had him urging everyone to finish eating quickly so that we would not return to the lodge having seen less than everyone else, but this time he just smiled and told the other guides that we had seen nothing on the floor of the gorge and that the game seemed to have moved out, perhaps in search of water.

Then, when lunch was over, Kevin walked about 50 yards away, disappeared into a cave, and emerged a moment later with a small wooden cage. There was a little brown bird in it, and while I was thrilled to be able to see it close up, I felt somehow disappointed that this was to be the special treat.

“Have you ever seen a honey guide?” he asked.

We all admitted that we hadn’t, and he explained that that was the name of the small brown bird.

I asked why it was called that, since it obviously didn’t produce honey, and seemed incapable of replacing Kevin as our guide, and he smiled again.

“Do you see that tree?” he asked, pointing to a tree perhaps 75 yards away. There was a huge beehive on a low-hanging branch.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then watch,” he said, opening the cage and releasing the bird. It stood still for a moment, then fluttered its wings and took off in the direction of the tree.

“He is making sure there is honey there,” explained Kevin, pointing to the bird as it circled the hive.

“Where is he going now?” I asked, as the bird suddenly flew down the river bed.

“To find his partner.”

“Partner?” I asked, confused.

“Wait and see,” said Kevin, sitting down with his back propped against a large rock.

We all followed suit and sat in the shade, our binoculars and holo cameras trained on the tree. After almost an hour nothing had happened, and some of us were getting restless, when Kevin tensed and pointed up the river bed.

“There!” he whispered.

I looked in the direction he was pointing, and there, following the bird, which was flying just ahead of him and chirping frantically, was an enormous black-and-white animal, the largest I have ever seen.

“What is it?” I whispered.

“A honey badger,” answered Kevin softly. “They were thought to be extinct twenty years ago, but a mated pair took sanctuary in Olduvai. This is the fourth generation to be born here.”

“Is he going to eat the bird?” asked one of the party.

“No,” whispered Kevin. “The bird will lead him to the honey, and after he has pulled down the nest and eaten his fill, he will leave some for the bird.”

And it was just as Kevin said. The honey badger climbed the bole of the tree and knocked off the beehive with a forepaw, then climbed back down and broke it apart, oblivious to the stings of the bees. We caught the whole fantastic scene on our holos, and when he was done he did indeed leave some honey for the honey guide.

Later, while Kevin was recapturing the bird and putting it back in its cage, the rest of us discussed what we had seen. I thought the honey badger must have weighed 45 pounds, though less excitable members of the party put its weight at closer to 36 or 37. Whichever it was, the creature was enormous. The discussion then shifted to how big a tip to leave for Kevin, for he had certainly earned one.

As I write this final entry in my safari diary, I am still trembling with the excitement that can only come from encountering big game in the wild. Prior to this afternoon, I had some doubts about the safari—I felt it was overpriced, or that perhaps my expectations had been too high—but now I know that it was worth every penny, and I have a feeling that I am leaving some part of me behind here, and that I will never be truly content until I return to this last bastion of the wilderness.

* * *

The camp was abuzz with excitement. Just when we were sure that there were no more treasures to unearth, the Stardust Twins had found three small pieces of bone, attached together with a wire—obviously a human artifact.

“But the dates are wrong,” said the Historian, after examining the bones thoroughly with its equipment. “This is a primitive piece of jewelry—for the adornment of savages, one might say—and yet the bones and wire both date from centuries after Man discovered space travel.”

“Do you . . .”

“. . . deny that we . . .”

“. . . found it in the . . .”

“. . . gorge?” demanded the Twins.

“I believe you,” said the Historian. “I simply state that it seems to be an anachronism.”

“It is our find, and . . .”

“. . . it will bear our name.”

“No one is denying your right of discovery,” said Bellidore. “It is simply that you have presented us with a mystery.”

“Give it to . . .”

“. . . He Who Views, and he . . .”

“. . . will solve the mystery.”

“I will do my best,” I said. “But it has not been long enough since I assimilated the stylus. I must rest and regain my strength.”

“That is . . .”

“. . . acceptable.”

We let the Moriteu go about brushing and cleaning the artifact, while we speculated on why a primitive fetish should exist in the starfaring age. Finally the Exobiologist got to her feet.

“I am going back into the gorge,” she announced. “If the Stardust Twins could find this, perhaps there are other things we have overlooked. After all, it is an enormous area.” She paused and looked at the rest of us. “Would anyone care to come with me?”

It was nearing the end of the day, and no one volunteered, and finally the Exobiologist turned and began walking toward the path that led down into the depths of Olduvai Gorge.

It was dark when I finally felt strong enough to assimilate the jewelry. I spread my essence about the bones and the wire and soon became one with them . . .

* * *

His name was Joseph Meromo, and he could live with the money but not the guilt.

It had begun with the communication from Brussels, and the veiled suggestion from the head of the multi-national conglomerate headquartered there. They had a certain commodity to get rid of. They had no place to get rid of it. Could Tanzania help?

Meromo had told them he would look into it, but he doubted that his government could be of use.

Just try, came the reply.

In fact, more than the reply came. The next day a private courier delivered a huge wad of large-denomination bills, with a polite note thanking Meromo for his efforts on their behalf.

Meromo knew a bribe when he saw one—he’d certainly taken enough in his career—but he’d never seen one remotely the size of this one. And not even for helping them, but merely for being willing to explore possibilities.

Well, he had thought, why not? What could they conceivably have? A couple of containers of toxic waste? A few plutonium rods? You bury them deep enough in the earth and no one would ever know or care. Wasn’t that what the Western countries did?

Of course, there was the Denver Disaster, and that little accident that made the Thames undrinkable for almost a century, but the only reason they popped so quickly to mind is because they were the exceptions, not the rule. There were thousands of dumping sites around the world, and 99% of them caused no problems at all.

Meromo had his computer cast a holographic map of Tanzania above his desk. He looked at it, frowned, added topographical features, then began studying it in earnest.

If he decided to help them dump the stuff, whatever it was—and he told himself that he was still uncommitted—where would be the best place to dispose of it?

Off the coast? No, the fishermen would pull it up two minutes later, take it to the press, and raise enough hell to get him fired, and possibly even cause the rest of the government to resign. The party really couldn’t handle any more scandals this year.

The Selous Province? Maybe five centuries ago, when it was the last wilderness on the continent, but not now, not with a thriving, semi-autonomous city-state of fifty-two million people where once there had been nothing but elephants and almost-impenetrable thorn bush.

Lake Victoria? No. Same problem with the fishermen.

Dar es Salaam? It was a possibility. Close enough to the coast to make transport easy, practically deserted since Dodoma had become the new capital of the country.

But Dar es Salaam had been hit by an earthquake twenty years ago, when Meromo was still a boy, and he couldn’t take the chance of another one exposing or breaking open whatever it was that he planned to hide.

He continued going over the map: Gombe, Ruaha, Iringa, Mbeya, Mtwara, Tarengire, Olduvai . . .

He stopped and stared at Olduvai, then called up all available data.

Almost a mile deep. That was in its favor. No animals left. Better still. No settlements on its steep slopes. Only a handful of Maasai still living in the area, no more than two dozen families, and they were too arrogant to pay any attention to what the government was doing. Of that Meromo was sure: he himself was a Maasai.

So he strung it out for as long as he could, collected cash gifts for almost two years, and finally gave them a delivery date.

Meromo stared out the window of his 34th floor office, past the bustling city of Dodoma, off to the east, to where he imagined Olduvai Gorge was.

It had seemed so simple. Yes, he was paid a lot of money, a disproportionate amount—but these multi-nationals had money to burn. It was just supposed to be a few dozen plutonium rods, or so he had thought. How was he to know that they were speaking of forty-two tons of nuclear waste?

There was no returning the money. Even if he wanted to, he could hardly expect them to come back and pull all that deadly material back out of the ground. Probably it was safe, probably no one would ever know . . .

But it haunted his days, and even worse, it began haunting his nights as well, appearing in various guises in his dreams. Sometimes it was as carefully-sealed containers, sometimes it was as ticking bombs, sometimes a disaster had already occurred and all he could see were the charred bodies of Maasai children spread across the lip of the gorge.

For almost eight months he fought his devils alone, but eventually he realized that he must have help. The dreams not only haunted him at night, but invaded the day as well. He would be sitting at a staff meeting, and suddenly he would imagine he was sitting among the emaciated, sore-covered bodies of the Olduvai Maasai. He would be reading a book, and the words seemed to change and he would be reading that Joseph Meromo had been sentenced to death for his greed. He would watch a holo of the Titanic disaster, and suddenly he was viewing some variation of the Olduvai Disaster.

Finally he went to a psychiatrist, and because he was a Maasai, he choose a Maasai psychiatrist. Fearing the doctor’s contempt, Meromo would not state explicitly what was causing the nightmares and intrusions, and after almost half a year’s worth of futile attempts to cure him, the psychiatrist announced that he could do no more.

“Then am I to be cursed with these dreams forever?” asked Meromo.

“Perhaps not,” said the psychiatrist. “I cannot help you, but just possibly there is one man who can.”

He rummaged through his desk and came up with a small white card. On it was written a single word: MULEWO.

“This is his business card,” said the psychiatrist. “Take it.”

“There is no address on it, no means of communicating with him,” said Meromo. “How will I contact him?”

“He will contact you.”

“You will give him my name?”

The psychiatrist shook his head. “I will not have to. Just keep the card on your person. He will know you require his services.”

Meromo felt like he was being made the butt of some joke he didn’t understand, but he dutifully put the card in his pocket and soon forgot about it.

Two weeks later, as he was drinking at a bar, putting off going home to sleep as long as he could, a small woman approached him.

“Are you Joseph Meromo?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Please follow me.”

“Why?” he asked suspiciously.

“You have business with Mulewo, do you not?” she said.

Meromo fell into step behind her, at least as much to avoid going home as from any belief that this mysterious man with no first name could help him. They went out to the street, turned left, walked in silence for three blocks, and turned right, coming to a halt at the front door to a steel-and-glass skyscraper.

“The 63rd floor,” she said. “He is expecting you.”

“You’re not coming with me?” asked Meromo.

She shook her head. “My job is done.” She turned and walked off into the night.

Meromo looked up at the top of the building. It seemed residential. He considered his options, finally shrugged, and walked into the lobby.

“You’re here for Mulewo,” said the doorman. It was not a question. “Go to the elevator on the left.”

Meromo did as he was told. The elevator was paneled with an oiled wood, and smelled fresh and sweet. It operated on voice command and quickly took him to the 63rd floor. When he emerged he found himself in an elegantly-decorated corridor, with ebony wainscoting and discreetly-placed mirrors. He walked past three unmarked doors, wondering how he was supposed to know which apartment belonged to Mulewo, and finally came to one that was partially open.

“Come in, Joseph Meromo,” said a hoarse voice from within.

Meromo opened the door the rest of the way, stepped into the apartment, and blinked.

Sitting on a torn rug was an old man, wearing nothing but a red cloth gathered at the shoulder. The walls were covered by reed matting, and a noxious-smelling caldron bubbled in the fireplace. A torch provided the only illumination.

“What is this?” asked Meromo, ready to step back into the corridor if the old man appeared as irrational as his surroundings.

“Come sit across from me, Joseph Meromo,” said the old man. “Surely this is less frightening than your nightmares.”

“What do you know about my nightmares?” demanded Meromo.

“I know why you have them. I know what lies buried at the bottom of Olduvai Gorge.”

Meromo shut the door quickly.

“Who told you?”

“No one told me. I have peered into your dreams, and sifted through them until I found the truth. Come sit.”

Meromo walked to where the old man indicated and sat down carefully, trying not to get too much dirt on his freshly-pressed outfit.

“Are you Mulewo?” he asked.

The old man nodded. “I am Mulewo.”

“How do you know these things about me?”

“I am a laibon,” said Mulewo.

“A witch doctor?”

“It is a dying art,” answered Mulewo. “I am the last practitioner.”

“I thought laibons cast spells and created curses.”

“They also remove curses—and your nights, and even your days, are cursed, are they not?”

“You seem to know all about it.”

“I know that you have done a wicked thing, and that you are haunted not only by the ghost of it, but by the ghosts of the future as well.”

“And you can end the dreams?”

“That is why I have summoned you here.”

“But if I did such a terrible thing, why do you want to help me?”

“I do not make moral judgments. I am here only to help the Maasai.”

“And what about the Maasai who live by the gorge?” asked Meromo. “The ones who haunt my dreams?”

“When they ask for help, then I will help them.”

“Can you cause the material that’s buried there to vanish?”

Mulewo shook his head. “I cannot undo what has been done. I cannot even assuage your guilt, for it is a just guilt. All I can do is banish it from your dreams.”

“I’ll settle for that,” said Meromo.

There was an uneasy silence.

“What do I do now?” asked Meromo.

“Bring me a tribute befitting the magnitude of the service I shall perform.”

“I can write you a check right now, or have money transferred from my account to your own.”

“I have more money than I need. I must have a tribute.”

“But—”

“Bring it back tomorrow night,” said Mulewo.

Meromo stared at the old laibon for a long minute, then got up and left without another word.

He called in sick the next morning, then went to two of Dodoma’s better antique shops. Finally he found what he was looking for, charged it to his personal account, and took it home with him. He was afraid to nap before dinner, so he simply read a book all afternoon, then ate a hasty meal and returned to Mulewo’s apartment.

“What have you brought me?” asked Mulewo.

Meromo laid the package down in front of the old man. “A headdress made from the skin of a lion,” he answered. “They told me it was worn by Sendayo himself, the greatest of all laibons.”

“It was not,” said Mulewo, without unwrapping the package. “But it is a sufficient tribute nonetheless.” He reached beneath his red cloth and withdrew a small necklace, holding it out for Meromo.

“What is this for?” asked Meromo, examining the necklace. It was made of small bones that had been strung together.

“You must wear it tonight when you go to sleep,” explained the old man. “It will take all your visions unto itself. Then, tomorrow, you must go to Olduvai Gorge and throw it down to the bottom, so that the visions may lay side by side with the reality.”

“And that’s all?”

“That is all.”

Meromo went back to his apartment, donned the necklace, and went to sleep. That night his dreams were worse than they had ever been before.

In the morning he put the necklace into a pocket and had a government plane fly him to Arusha. From there he rented a ground vehicle, and two hours later he was standing on the edge of the gorge. There was no sign of the buried material.

He took the necklace in his hand and hurled it far out over the lip of the gorge.

His nightmares vanished that night.

134 years later, mighty Kilimanjaro shuddered as the long-dormant volcano within it came briefly to life.

One hundred miles away, the ground shifted on the floor of Olduvai Gorge, and three of the lead-lined containers broke open.

Joseph Meromo was long dead by that time; and, unfortunately, there were no laibons remaining to aid those people who were now compelled to live Meromo’s nightmares.

* * *

I had examined the necklace in my own quarters, and when I came out to report my findings, I discovered that the entire camp was in a tumultuous state.

“What has happened?” I asked Bellidore.

“The Exobiologist has not returned from the gorge,” he said.

“How long has she been gone?”

“She left at sunset last night. It is now morning, and she has not returned or attempted to use her communicator.”

“We fear . . .

“. . . that she might . . .”

“. . . have fallen and . . .”

“. . . become immobile. Or perhaps even . . .”

“. . . unconscious . . .” said the Stardust Twins.

“I have sent the Historian and the Appraiser to look for her,” said Bellidore.

“I can help, too,” I offered.

“No, you have the last artifact to examine,” he said. “When the Moriteu awakens, I will send it as well.”

“What about the Mystic?” I asked.

Bellidore looked at the Mystic and sighed. “She has not said a word since landing on this world. In truth, I do not understand her function. At any rate, I do not know how to communicate with her.”

The Stardust Twins kicked at the earth together, sending up a pair of reddish dust clouds.

“It seems ridiculous . . .” said one.

“. . . that we can find the tiniest artifact . . .” said the other.

“. . . but we cannot find . . .

“. . . an entire exobiologist.”

“Why do you not help search for it?” I asked.

“They get vertigo,” explained Bellidore.

“We searched . . .”

“. . . the entire camp,” they added defensively.

“I can put off assimilating the last piece until tomorrow, and help with the search,” I volunteered.

“No,” replied Bellidore. “I have sent for the ship. We will leave tomorrow, and I want all of our major finds examined by then. It is my job to find the Exobiologist; it is yours to read the history of the last artifact.”

“If that is your desire,” I said. “Where is it?”

He led me to a table where the Historian and the Appraiser had been examining it.

“Even I know what this is,” said Bellidore. “An unspent cartridge.” He paused. “Along with the fact that we have found no human artifacts on any higher strata, I would say this in itself is unique: a bullet that a man chose not to fire.”

“When you state it in those terms, it does arouse the curiosity,” I acknowledged.

“Are you . . .”

“. . . going to examine it . . .”

“. . . now?” asked the Stardust Twins apprehensively.

“Yes, I am,” I said.

“Wait!” they shouted in unison.

I paused above the cartridge while they began backing away.

“We mean . . .”

“. . . no disrespect . . .”

“. . . but watching you examine artifacts . . .”

“. . . is too unsettling.”

And with that, they raced off to hide behind some of the camp structures.

“What about you?” I asked Bellidore. “Would you like me to wait until you leave?”

“Not at all,” he replied. “I find diversity fascinating. With your permission, I would like to stay and observe.”

“As you wish,” I said, allowing my body to melt around the cartridge until it had become a part of myself, and its history became my own history, as clear and precise as if it had all occurred yesterday . . .

* * *

“They are coming!”

Thomas Naikosiai looked across the table at his wife.

“Was there ever any doubt that they would?”

“This was foolish, Thomas!” she snapped. “They will force us to leave, and because we made no preparations, we will have to leave all our possessions behind.”

“Nobody is leaving,” said Naikosiai.

He stood up and walked to the closet. “You stay here,” he said, donning his long coat and his mask. “I will meet them outside.”

“That is both rude and cruel, to make them stand out there when they have come all this way.”

“They were not invited,” said Naikosiai. He reached deep into the closet and grabbed the rifle that leaned up against the back wall, then closed the closet, walked through the airlock and emerged on the front porch.

Six men, all wearing protective clothing and masks to filter the air, confronted him.

“It is time, Thomas,” said the tallest of them.

“Time for you, perhaps,” said Naikosiai, holding the rifle casually across his chest.

“Time for all of us,” answered the tall man.

“I am not going anywhere. This is my home. I will not leave it.”

“It is a pustule of decay and contamination, as is this whole country,” came the answer. “We are all leaving.”

Naikosiai shook his head. “My father was born on this land, and his father, and his father’s father. You may run from danger, if you wish; I will stay and fight it.”

“How can you make a stand against radiation?” demanded the tall man. “Can you put a bullet through it? How can you fight air that is no longer safe to breathe?”

“Go away,” said Naikosiai, who had no answer to that, other than the conviction that he would never leave his home. “I do not demand that you stay. Do not demand that I leave.”

“It is for your own good, Naikosiai,” urged another. “If you care nothing for your own life, think of your wife’s. How much longer can she breathe the air?”

“Long enough.”

“Why not let her decide?”

“I speak for our family.”

An older man stepped forward. “She is my daughter, Thomas,” he said severely. “I will not allow you to condemn her to the life you have chosen for yourself. Nor will I let my grandchildren remain here.”

The old man took another step toward the porch, and suddenly the rifle was pointing at him.

“That’s far enough,” said Naikosiai.

“They are Maasai,” said the old man stubbornly. “They must come with the other Maasai to our new world.”

“You are not Maasai,” said Naikosiai contemptuously. “Maasai did not leave their ancestral lands when the rinderpest destroyed their herds, or when the white man came, or when the governments sold off their lands. Maasai never surrender. I am the last Maasai.”

“Be reasonable, Thomas. How can you not surrender to a world that is no longer safe for people to live on? Come with us to New Kilimanjaro.”

“The Maasai do not run from danger,” said Naikosiai.

“I tell you, Thomas Naikosiai,” said the old man, “that I cannot allow you to condemn my daughter and my grandchildren to live in this hellhole. The last ship leaves tomorrow morning. They will be on it.”

“They will stay with me, to build a new Maasai nation.”

The six men whispered among themselves, and then their leader looked up at Naikosiai.

“You are making a terrible mistake, Thomas,” he said. “If you change your mind, there is room for you on the ship.”

They all turned to go, but the old man stopped and turned to Naikosiai.

“I will be back for my daughter,” he said.

Naikosiai gestured with his rifle. “I will be waiting for you.”

The old man turned and walked off with the others, and Naikosiai went back into his house through the airlock. The tile floor smelled of disinfectant, and the sight of the television set offended his eyes, as always. His wife was waiting for him in the kitchen, amid the dozens of gadgets she had purchased over the years.

“How can you speak with such disrespect to the Elders!” she demanded. “You have disgraced us.”

“No!” he snapped. “They have disgraced us, by leaving!”

“Thomas, you cannot grow anything in the fields. The animals have all died. You cannot even breathe the air without a filtering mask. Why do you insist on staying?”

“This is our ancestral land. We will not leave it.”

“But all the others—”

“They can do as they please,” he interrupted. “En-kai will judge them, as He judges us all. I am not afraid to meet my creator.”

“But why must you meet him so soon?” she persisted. “You have seen the tapes and disks of New Kilimanjaro. It is a beautiful world, green and gold and filled with rivers and lakes.”

“Once Earth was green and gold and filled with rivers and lakes,” said Naikosiai. “They ruined this world. They will ruin the next one.”

“Even if they do, we will be long dead,” she said. “I want to go.”

“We’ve been through all this before.”

“And it always ends with an order rather than an agreement,” she said. Her expression softened. “Thomas, just once before I die, I want to see water that you can drink without adding chemicals to it. I want to see antelope grazing on long green grasses. I want to walk outside without having to protect myself from the very air I breathe.”

“It’s settled.”

She shook her head. “I love you, Thomas, but I cannot stay here, and I cannot let our children stay here.”

“No one is taking my children from me!” he yelled.

“Just because you care nothing for your future, I cannot permit you to deny our sons their future.”

“Their future is here, where the Maasai have always lived.”

“Please come with us, Papa,” said a small voice behind him, and Naikosiai turned to see his two sons, eight and five, standing in the doorway to their bedroom, staring at him.

“What have you been saying to them?” demanded Naikosiai suspiciously.

“The truth,” said his wife.

He turned to the two boys. “Come here,” he said, and they trudged across the room to him.

“What are you?” he asked.

“Boys,” said the younger child.

“What else?”

“Maasai,” said the older.

“That is right,” said Naikosiai. “You come from a race of giants. There was a time when, if you climbed to the very top of Kilimanjaro, all the land you could see in every direction belonged to us.”

“But that was long ago,” said the older boy.

“Someday it will be ours again,” said Naikosiai. “You must remember who you are, my son. You are the descendant of Leeyo, who killed 100 lions with just his spear; of Nelion, who waged war against the whites and drove them from the Rift; of Sendayo, the greatest of all the laibons. Once the Kikuyu and the Wakamba and the Lumbwa trembled in fear at the very mention of the word Maasai. This is your heritage; do not turn your back on it.”

“But the Kikuyu and the other tribes have all left.”

“What difference does that make to the Maasai? We did not make a stand only against the Kikuyu and the Wakamba, but against all men who would have us change our ways. Even after the Europeans conquered Kenya and Tanganyika, they never conquered the Maasai. When Independence came, and all the other tribes moved to cities and wore suits and aped the Europeans, we remained as we had always been. We wore what we chose and we lived where we chose, for we were proud to be Maasai. Does that not mean something to you?”

“Will we not still be Maasai if we go to the new world?” asked the older boy.

“No,” said Naikosiai firmly. “There is a bond between the Maasai and the land. We define it, and it defines us. It is what we have always fought for and always defended.”

“But it is diseased now,” said the boy.

“If I were sick, would you leave me?” asked Naikosiai.

“No, Papa.”

“And just as you would not leave me in my illness, so we will not leave the land in its illness. When you love something, when it is a part of what you are, you do not leave it simply because it becomes sick. You stay, and you fight even harder to cure it than you fought to win it.”

“But—”

“Trust me,” said Naikosiai. “Have I ever misled you?”

“No, Papa.”

“I am not misleading you now. We are En-kai’s chosen people. We live on the ground He has given us. Don’t you see that we must remain here, that we must keep our covenant with En-kai?”

“But I will never see my friends again!” wailed his younger son.

“You will make new friends.”

“Where?” cried the boy. “Everyone is gone!”

“Stop that at once!” said Naikosiai harshly. “Maasai do not cry.”

The boy continued sobbing, and Naikosiai looked up at his wife.

“This is your doing,” he said. “You have spoiled him.”

She stared unblinking into his eyes. “Five-year-old boys are allowed to cry.”

“Not Maasai boys,” he answered.

“Then he is no longer Maasai, and you can have no objection to his coming with me.”

“I want to go too!” said the 8-year-old, and suddenly he, too, forced some tears down his face.

Thomas Naikosiai looked at his wife and his children—really looked at them—and realized that he did not know them at all. This was not the quiet maiden, raised in the traditions of his people, that he had married nine years ago. These soft sobbing boys were not the successors of Leeyo and Nelion.

He walked to the door and opened it.

“Go to the new world with the rest of the black Europeans,” he growled.

“Will you come with us?” asked his oldest son.

Naikosiai turned to his wife. “I divorce you,” he said coldly. “All that was between us is no more.”

He walked over to his two sons. “I disown you. I am no longer your father, you are no longer my sons. Now go!”

His wife puts coats and masks on both of the boys, then donned her own.

“I will send some men for my things before morning,” she said.

“If any man comes onto my property, I will kill him,” said Naikosiai.

She stared at him, a look of pure hatred. Then she took the children by the hands and led them out of the house and down the long road to where the ship awaited them.

Naikosiai paced the house for a few minutes, filled with nervous rage. Finally he went to the closet, donned his coat and mask, pulled out his rifle, and walked through the airlock to the front of his house. Visibility was poor, as always, and he went out to the road to see if anyone was coming.

There was no sign of any movement. He was almost disappointed. He planned to show them how a Maasai protected what was his.

And suddenly he realized that this was not how a Maasai protected his own. He walked to the edge of the gorge, opened the bolt, and threw his cartridges into the void one by one. Then he held the rifle over his head and hurled it after them. The coat came next, then the mask, and finally his clothes and shoes.

He went back into the house and pulled out that special trunk that held the memorabilia of a lifetime. In it he found what he was looking for: a simple piece of red cloth. He attached it at his shoulder.

Then he went into the bathroom, looking among his wife’s cosmetics. It took almost half an hour to hit upon the right combinations, but when he emerged his hair was red, as if smeared with clay.

He stopped by the fireplace and pulled down the spear that hung there. Family tradition had it that the spear had once been used by Nelion himself; he wasn’t sure he believed it, but it was definitely a Maasai spear, blooded many times in battle and hunts during centuries past.

Naikosiai walked out the door and positioned himself in front of his house—his manyatta. He planted his bare feet on the diseased ground, placed the butt of his spear next to his right foot, and stood at attention. Whatever came down the road next—a band of black Europeans hoping to rob him of his possessions, a lion out of history, a band of Nandi or Lumbwa come to slay the enemy of their blood, they would find him ready.

They returned just after sunrise the next morning, hoping to convince him to emigrate to New Kilimanjaro. What they found was the last Maasai, his lungs burst from the pollution, his dead eyes staring proudly out across the vanished savannah at some enemy only he could see.

* * *

I released the cartridge, my strength nearly gone, my emotions drained.

So that was how it had ended for Man on earth, probably less than a mile from where it had begun. So bold and so foolish, so moral and so savage. I had hoped the last artifact would prove to be the final piece of the puzzle, but instead it merely added to the mystery of this most contentious and fascinating race.

Nothing was beyond their ability to achieve. One got the feeling that the day the first primitive man looked up and saw the stars, the galaxy’s days as a haven of peace and freedom were numbered. And yet they came out to the stars not just with their lusts and their hatred and their fears, but with their technology and their medicine, their heroes as well as their villains. Most of the races of the galaxy had been painted by the Creator in pastels; Men were primaries.

I had much to think about as I went off to my quarters to renew my strength. I do not know how long I lay, somnolent and unmoving, recovering my energy, but it must have been a long time, for night had come and gone before I felt prepared to rejoin the party.

As I emerged from my quarters and walked to the center of camp, I heard a yell from the direction of the gorge, and a moment later the Appraiser appeared, a large sterile bag balanced atop an air trolley.

“What have you found?” asked Bellidore, and suddenly I remembered that the Exobiologist was missing.

“I am almost afraid to guess,” replied the Appraiser, laying the bag on the table.

All the members of the party gathered around as he began withdrawing items: a blood-stained communicator, bent out of shape; the floating shade, now broken, that the Exobiologist used to protect her head from the rays of the sun; a torn piece of clothing; and finally, a single gleaming white bone.

The instant the bone was placed on the table, the Mystic began screaming. We were all shocked into momentary immobility, not only because of the suddenness of her reaction, but because it was the first sign of life she had shown since joining our party. She continued to stare at the bone and scream, and finally, before we could question her or remove the bone from her sight, she collapsed.

“I don’t suppose there can be much doubt about what happened,” said Bellidore. “The creatures caught up with the Exobiologist somewhere on her way down the gorge and killed her.”

“Probably ate . . .”

“. . . her too,” said the Stardust Twins.

“I am glad we are leaving today,” continued Bellidore. “Even after all these millennia, the spirit of Man continues to corrupt and degrade this world. Those lumbering creatures can’t possibly be predators: there are no meat animals left on Earth. But given the opportunity, they fell upon the Exobiologist and consumed her flesh. I have this uneasy feeling that if we stayed much longer, we, too, would become corrupted by this world’s barbaric heritage.”

The Mystic regained consciousness and began screaming again, and the Stardust Twins gently escorted her back to her quarters, where she was given a sedative.

“I suppose we might as well make it official,” said Bellidore. He turned to the Historian. “Would you please check the bone with your instruments and make sure that this is the remains of the Exobiologist?”

The Historian stared at the bone, horror-stricken. “She was my friend!” it said at last. “I cannot touch it as if it were just another artifact.”

“We must know for sure,” said Bellidore. “If it is not part of the Exobiologist, then there is a chance, however slim, that your friend might still be alive.”

The Historian reached out tentatively for the bone, then jerked its hand away. “I can’t!”

Finally Bellidore turned to me.

“He Who Views,” he said. “Have you the strength to examine it?”

“Yes,” I answered.

They all moved back to give me room, and I allowed my mass to slowly spread over the bone and engulf it. I assimilated its history and ingested its emotional residue, and finally I withdrew from it.

“It is the Exobiologist,” I said.

“What are the funeral customs of her race?” asked Bellidore.

“Cremation,” said the Appraiser.

“Then we shall build a fire and incinerate what remains of our friend, and we will each offer a prayer to send her soul along the Eternal Path.”

And that is what we did.

The ship came later that day, and took us off the planet, and it is only now, safely removed from its influence, that I can reconstruct what I learned on that last morning.

I lied to Bellidore—to the entire party—for once I made my discovery I knew that my primary duty was to get them away from Earth as quickly as possible. Had I told them the truth, one or more of them would have wanted to remain behind, for they are scientists with curious, probing minds, and I would never be able to convince them that a curious, probing mind is no match for what I found in my seventh and final view of Olduvai Gorge.

The bone was not a part of the Exobiologist. The Historian, or even the Moriteu, would have known that had they not been too horrified to examine it. It was the tibia of a man.

Man has been extinct for five thousand years, at least as we citizens of the galaxy have come to understand him. But those lumbering, ungainly creatures of the night, who seemed so attracted to our campfires, are what Man has become. Even the pollution and radiation he spread across his own planet could not kill him off. It merely changed him to the extent that we were no longer able to recognize him.

I could have told them the simple facts, I suppose: that a tribe of these pseudo-Men stalked the Exobiologist down the gorge, then attacked and killed and, yes, ate her. Predators are not unknown throughout the worlds of the galaxy.

But as I became one with the tibia, as I felt it crashing down again and again upon our companion’s head and shoulders, I felt a sense of power, of exultation I had never experienced before. I suddenly seemed to see the world through the eyes of the bone’s possessor. I saw how he had killed his own companion to create the weapon, I saw how he planned to plunder the bodies of the old and the infirm for more weapons, I saw visions of conquest against other tribes living near the gorge.

And finally, at the moment of triumph, he and I looked up at the sky, and we knew that someday all that we could see would be ours.

And this is the knowledge that I have lived with for two days. I do not know who to share it with, for it is patently immoral to exterminate a race simply because of the vastness of its dreams or the ruthlessness of its ambition.

But this is a race that refuses to die, and somehow I must warn the rest of us, who have lived in harmony for almost five millennia.

It’s not over.

THE MARTIAN CHILD

David Gerrold

David Gerrold makes his living in Hollywood, but he still finds time to write novels and short stories. Bantam Books has just published his most recent novel, The Covenant of Justice. His next novel, The Middle of Nowhere, is a sequel to Voyage of the Star Wolf.

“The Martian Child” is one of the stranger stories to cross our desk this year. It is also one of the more compelling.

TOWARD THE END OF THE meeting, the caseworker remarked, “Oh—and one more thing. Dennis thinks he’s a Martian.”

“I beg your pardon?” I wasn’t certain I had heard her correctly. I had papers scattered all over the meeting room table—thick piles of stapled incident reports, manila-foldered psychiatric evaluations, Xeroxed clinical diagnoses, scribbled caseworker histories, typed abuse reports, bound trial transcripts, and my own crabbed notes as well: Hyperactivity. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Emotional Abuse. Physical Abuse. Conners Rating Scale. Apgars. I had no idea there was so much to know about children. For a moment, I was actually looked for the folder labeled Martian.

“He thinks he’s a Martian,” Ms. Bright repeated. She was a small woman, very proper and polite. “He told his group home parents that he’s not like the other children—he’s from Mars—so he shouldn’t be expected to act like an Earthling all the time.”

“Well, that’s okay,” I said, a little too quickly. “Some of my best friends are Martians. He’ll fit right in. As long as he doesn’t eat the tribbles or tease the feral Chtorran.”

By the narrow expressions on their faces, I could tell that the caseworkers weren’t amused. For a moment, my heart sank. Maybe I’d said the wrong thing. Maybe I was being too facile with my answers.

—The hardest thing about adoption is that you have to ask someone to trust you with a child.

That means that you have to be willing to let them scrutinize your entire life, everything: your financial standing, your medical history, your home and belongings, your upbringing, your personality, your motivations, your arrest record, your IQ, and even your sex life. It means that every self-esteem issue you have ever had will come bubbling right to the surface like last night’s beans in this morning’s bath tub.

Whatever you’re most insecure about, that’s what the whole adoption process will feel like it’s focused on. For me, it was that terrible familiar feeling of being second best—of not being good enough to play with the big kids, or get the job, or win the award, or whatever was at stake. Even though the point of this interview was simply to see if Dennis and I would be a good match; I felt as if I was being judged again. What if I wasn’t good enough this time?

I tried again. I began slowly.” Y’know, you all keep telling me all the bad news—you don’t even know if this kid is capable of forming a deep attachment—it feels as if you’re trying to talk me out of this match.” I stopped myself before I said too much. I was suddenly angry and I didn’t know why. These people were only doing their job.

And then it hit me. That was it—these people were only doing their job.

At that moment, I realized that there wasn’t anyone in the room who had the kind of commitment to Dennis that I did, and I hadn’t even met him yet. To them, he was only another case to handle. To me, he was . . . the possibility of a family. It wasn’t fair to unload my frustration on these tired, overworked, underpaid women. They cared. It just wasn’t the same kind of caring. I swallowed my anger.

“Listen,” I said, sitting forward, placing my hands calmly and deliberately on the table. “After everything this poor little guy has been through, if he wants to think he’s a Martian—I’m not going to argue with him. Actually, I think it’s charming. It’s evidence of his resilience. It’s probably the most rational explanation he can come up with for his irrational situation. He probably feels alienated, abandoned, different, alone. At least, this gives him a reason for it. It lets him put a story around his situation so he can cope with it. Maybe it’s the wrong explanation, but it’s the only one he’s got. We’d be stupid to try to take it away from him.”

And after I’d said that, I couldn’t help but add another thought as well. “I know a lot of people who hide out in fantasy because reality is too hard to cope with. Fantasy is my business. The only different is that I write it down and make the rest of the world pay for the privilege of sharing the delusion. Fantasy isn’t about escape; it’s a survival mechanism. It’s a way to deal with things that are so much bigger than you are. So I think fantasy is special, something to be cherished and protected because it’s a very fragile thing and without it, we’re so defenseless, we’re paralyzed.

“I know what this boy is feeling because I’ve been there. Not the same circumstances, thank God—but I know this much, if he’s surrounded by adults who can’t understand what he really needs, he’ll never have that chance to connect that everyone keeps talking about.” For the first time I looked directly into their eyes as if they had to live up to my standards. “Excuse me for being presumptuous—but he’s got to be with someone who’ll tell him that it’s all right for him to be a Martian. Let him be a Martian for as long as he needs.”

“Yes. Thank you,” the supervisor said abruptly. “I think that’s everything we need to cover. We’ll be getting back to your shortly.”

My heart sank at her words. She hadn’t acknowledged a word of what I’d said. I was certain she’d dismissed it totally. I gathered up all my papers. We exchanged pleasantries and handshakes, and I wore my company smile all the way to the elevator. I didn’t say a word, neither did my sister. We both waited until we were in the car and headed back toward the Hollywood Freeway. She drove, guiding the big car through traffic as effortlessly as only a Los Angeles real estate agent can manage.

“I blew it,” I said. “Didn’t I? I got too . . . full of myself again.”

“Honey, I think you were fine.” She patted my hand.

“They’re not going to make the match,” I said. “It would be a single parent adoption. They’re not going to do it. First they choose married couples, Ward and June. Then they choose single women, Murphy Brown. Then, only if there’s no one else who’ll take the kid, will they consider a single man. I’m at the bottom of the list. I’ll never get this kid. I’ll never get any kid. My own caseworker told me not to get my hopes up. There are two other families interested. This was just a formality, this interview. I know it. Just so they could prove they’d considered more than one match.” I felt the frustration building up inside my chest like a balloon full of hurt. “But this is the kid for me, Alice, I know it. I don’t know how I know it, but I do.”

I’d first seen Dennis’s picture three weeks earlier, a little square of colors that suggested a smile in flight.

I’d gone to the National Conference of the Adoptive Families of America at the Los Angeles Airport Hilton. There were six panels per hour, six hours a day, two days, Saturday and Sunday. I picked the panels that I thought would be most useful to me in finding and raising a child and ordered tapes—over two dozen—of the sessions I couldn’t attend in person. I’d had no idea there were so many different issues to be dealt with in adoptions. I soaked it up like a sponge, listening eagerly to the advice of adoptive parents, their grown children, clinical psychologists, advocates, social workers, and adoption resource professionals.

But my real reason for attending was to find the child.

I’d already been approved. I’d spent more than a year filling out forms and submitting to interviews. But approval doesn’t mean you get a child. It only means that your name is in the hat. Matching is done to meet the child’s needs first. Fair enough—but terribly frustrating.

Eventually, I ended up in the conference’s equivalent of a dealer’s room. Rows of tables and heart-tugging displays. Books of all kinds for sale. Organizations. Agencies. Children in Eastern Europe. Children in Latin America. Asian children. Children with special needs. Photo-listings, like real-estate albums. Turn the pages, look at the eyes, the smiles, the needs. “Johnny was abandoned by his mother at age three. He is hyperactive, starts fires, and has been cruel to small animals. He will need extensive therapy. . . .”

“Janie, age 9, is severely retarded. She was sexually abused by her stepfather, she will need round-the-clock care. . . .” “Michael suffers from severe epilepsy. . . .” “Linda needs . . .” “Danny needs . . .” “Michael needs . . .” So many needs. So much hurt. It was overwhelming.

Why were so many of the children in the books “special needs” children? Retarded. Hyperactive. Abused. Had they been abandoned because they weren’t perfect, or were these the leftovers after all the good children were selected? The part that disturbed me the most was that I could understand the emotions involved. I wanted a child, not a case. And some of the descriptions in the book did seem pretty intimidating. Were these the only kind of children available?

Maybe it was selfish, but I found myself turning the pages looking for a child who represented an easy answer. Did I really want another set of needs in my life—a single man who’s old enough to be considered middle-aged and ought to be thinking seriously about retirement plans?

This was the most important question of all. “Why do you want to adopt a child?” And it was a question I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t find the words. It seemed that there was something I couldn’t write down.

The motivational questionnaire had been a brick wall that sat on my desk for a week. It took me thirty pages of single-spaced printout just to get my thoughts organized. I could tell great stories about what I thought a family should be, but I couldn’t really answer the question why I wanted a son. Not right away.

The three o’clock in the morning truth of it was a very nasty and selfish piece of business.

I didn’t want to die alone. I didn’t want to be left unremembered.

All those books and TV scripts . . . they were nothing. They used up trees. They were exercises in excess. They made other people rich. They were useless to me. They filled up shelves. They impressed the impressionable. But they didn’t prove me a real person. They didn’t validate my life as one worth living. In fact, they were about as valuable as the vice-presidency of the United States.

What I really wanted was to make a difference. I wanted someone to know that there was a real person behind all those words. A dad.

I would lie awake, staring into the darkness, trying to imagine it, what it would be like, how I would handle the various situations that might come up, how I would deal with the day-to-day business of daddying. I gamed out scenarios and tried to figure out how to handle difficult situations.

In my mind, I was always kind and generous, compassionate and wise. My fantasy child was innocent and joyous, full of love and wide-eyed wonder, and grateful to be in my home. He was an invisible presence, living inside my soul, defying reality to catch up. I wondered where he was now, and how and when I would finally meet him—and if the reality of parenting would be as wonderful as the dream.

—But it was all fantasyland. The books were proof of that. These children had histories, brutal, tragic, and heart-rending.

I wandered on to the next table. One of the social workers from the Los Angeles County Department of Children’s Services had a photo book with her. I introduced myself, told her I’d been approved—but not matched. Could I look through the book? Yes, of course, she said. I turned the pages slowly, studying the innocent faces, looking for one who could be my son. All the pictures were of black children, and the county wasn’t doing transracial adoptions anymore. Too controversial. The black social workers had taken a stand against it—I could see their point—but how many of these children would not find homes now?

Tucked away like an afterthought on the very last page was a photo of the only white child in the book. My glance slid across the picture quickly, I was already starting to close the album—and then as the impact of what I’d seen hit me, I froze in mid-action, almost slamming the book flat again.

The boy was riding a bicycle on a sunny tree-lined sidewalk; he was caught in the act of shouting or laughing at whoever was holding the camera. His blond hair was wild in the wind of his passage, his eyes shone like stars behind his glasses, his expression was raucous and exuberant.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture. A cold wave of certainty came rolling up my spine like a blast of fire and ice. It was a feeling of recognition. This was him—the child who’d taken up permanent residence in my imagination! I could almost hear him yelling, “Hi, Daddy!”

“Tell me about this child,” I said, a little too quickly. The social worker was already looking at me oddly. I could understand it. My voice sounded odd to me too. I tried to explain. “Tell me. Do you ever get people looking at a picture and telling you that this is the one?”

“All the time,” she replied. Her face softened into an understanding smile.

His name was Dennis. He’d just turned eight. She’d just put his picture in the book this morning. And yes, she’d have the boy’s caseworker get in touch with my caseworker. But . . . she cautioned . . . remember that there might be other families interested too. And remember, the department matches from the child’s side.

I didn’t hear any of that. I heard the words, but not the cautions.

I pushed hard and they set up a meeting to see if the match would work. But they cautioned me ahead of time—“this might not be the child you’re looking for. He’s classified as ‘hard-to-place.’ He’s hyperactive and he’s been emotionally abused and he may have fetal alcohol effects and he’s been in eight foster homes, he’s never had a family of his own. . . .”

I didn’t hear a word of it. I simply refused to listen. The boy in the picture had grabbed my heart so completely that I’d suddenly expanded all my definitions of what I was willing to accept.

I posted messages on CompuServe asking for information and advice on adoption, on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, on emotional abuse recovery, on everything I could think of—what were this child’s chances of becoming an independent adult? I called the Adoption Warm Line and was referred to parents who’d been through it. I hit the bookstores and the libraries. I called my cousin, the doctor, and he faxed me twenty pages of reports. And I came into the meeting so well-papered and full of theories and good intentions that I must have looked the perfect jerk.

And now . . . it was over.

I leaned my head against the passenger side window of my sister’s car and moaned. “Dammit. I’m so tired of being pregnant. Thirteen months is long enough for any man! I’ve got the baby blues so bad, I can’t even go to the supermarket anymore. I find myself watching other people with their children and the tears start welling up in my eyes. I keep thinking, “Where’s mine?”

My sister understood. She had four children of her own, none of whom had ended up in jail; so she had to have done something right. “Listen to me, David. Maybe this little boy isn’t right for you—”

“Of course he’s right for me. He’s a Martian.”

She ignored the interruption. “And if he isn’t right, there’ll be another child who is. I promise you. And you said it yourself that you didn’t know if you could handle all the problems he’d be bringing with him.”

“I know—it’s just that . . . I feel like—I don’t know what I feel like. This is worse than anything I’ve ever been through. All this wanting and not having. Sometimes I’m afraid it’s not going to happen at all.”

Alice pulled the car over to the curb and turned off the engine. “Okay, it’s my turn,” she said. “Stop beating yourself up. You are the smartest one in the whole family—but sometimes you can be awfully stupid. You are going to be a terrific father to some very lucky little boy. Your caseworker knows that. All of those social workers in that meeting saw your commitment and dedication. All that research you did—when you asked about the Apgar numbers and the Conners scale, when you handed them that report on hyperactivity, which even they didn’t know about—you impressed them.”

I shook my head. “Research is easy. You post a note on CompuServe, wait two days, and then download your e-mail.”

“It’s not the research,” Alice said. “It’s the fact that you did it. That demonstrates your willingness to find out what the child needs so you can provide it.”

“I wish I could believe you,” I said.

She looked deeply at me. “What’s the matter?”

“What if I’m really not good enough?” I said. “That’s what I’m worried about—I can’t shake that feeling.”

“Oh, that—” she said, lightly. “That’s normal. That’s the proof that you’re going to do okay. It’s only those parents who don’t worry who need to.”

“Oh,” I said. And then we both started laughing.

She hugged me then. “You’ll do fine. Now let’sgo home and call Mom before she busts a kidney from the suspense.”

Two centuries later, although the calendar insisted otherwise, Ms. Bright called me. “We’ve made a decision. If you’re still interested in Dennis, we’d like to arrange a meeting—” I don’t remember a lot of what she said after that; most of it was details about how we would proceed; but I remember what she said at the end. “I want to tell you the two things that helped us make the decision. First, all that research you did shows that you’re committed to Dennis’s needs. That’s very important in any adoption, but especially in this one. The other thing was what you said at the end of the meeting—about understanding his need to be a Martian. We were really touched by your empathy for his situation. We think that’s a quality that Dennis is going to need very much in any family he’s placed in. That’s why we decided to try you first.”

I thanked her profusely, at least, I think I did; I was suddenly having trouble seeing, and the box of tissues had gone empty.

I MET DENNIS THREE days later, at the Johnson Group Home in Culver City. He was one of six children living at the facility; four boys, two girls. Because the caseworkers didn’t want him to know that he was being auditioned, I would be introduced as a friend of the group home parents.

The child who came home from school was a sullen little zombie, going through the motions of life. He walked in the door, walked past me with no sign of recognition, and headed straight to his room. I said, “Hi.” He grunted something that could have been “H’lo” and kept on going. For a moment, I felt somehow cheated. I recognized him, why hadn’t he recognized me? And then I had to remind myself with a grin that I was the grownup, not him. But, after a bit, he came out from his retreat and asked me to play electric hockey.

For the first few minutes, he was totally intent on the game. I didn’t exist to him. Then I remembered an exercise from one of my communications courses—about simply being with another person. I stopped trying so hard to do it right, and instead just focused my attention on Dennis, letting it be all right with me for him to be exactly the way he was.

And yet, I couldn’t turn off the analytical part of my mind. After reading all those reports, and hearing all the opinions of the caseworkers, I couldn’t help but watch for evidence. I couldn’t see it. None of it. All I could see was a child. And then that thing happened that always happens to an adult who is willing to play with a child. I rediscovered my own childhood again. I got involved in the game, and very shortly I was smiling and laughing when he did, returning the same delight and approval at every audacious play. And that’s when it happened. He began to realize that there was a real human being on the opposite side of the game board. Something sparked. He started reacting to me instead of to the puck. I could feel the sense of connection almost as a physical presence.

Then, abruptly, it was time for him to do his chores. We loaded up the wagon with the cans from the recycling bin and walked them over to the nearby park. We talked about stuff. He talked, I listened. Sometimes I asked questions, sometimes he did. On the way back, he insisted that I pull the wagon so he could ride in it. By now, he was glowing. He was the boy in the photograph.

When we got back to the group home, however, the other children had arrived home from school and were already playing together in the back yard.

As soon as he saw them, Dennis broke away from me and ran to the back of the yard. He flung himself into the comer of a large old couch and curled up in a ball. He was as apart from the other children—indeed the whole world—as it was possible to get.

What had suddenly triggered his unhappiness? Was it the thought that now that there were other children to play with, I would reject him? Did he have to reject me first? Or was there something else going on? From inside the house, I watched him as he sat alone. He was a very unhappy little boy. And he had stopped glowing. At that moment, I knew I couldn’t leave him here. Whatever other problems he might have, my commitment was bigger. Or so I believed.

The group home parents invited me to stay to dinner with the children. I hadn’t planned on it, but all the children insisted that I stay, so I did, specifically making a point of sitting next to Dennis. He didn’t talk at all, he was subdued, as if he was afraid of losing something that he wanted very much—or maybe that was only my perception. He ate quietly and timidly. But then Tony, one of the more excitable children, suddenly piped up, “Do you know what Dennis said?”

Tony was sitting directly across from me. He had that look of malicious mischief common to children who are about to betray a confidence. “What?” I asked, with a queasy foreboding.

“Dennis said he wishes you were his dad.” Even without looking, I could see that beside me, Dennis was cringing, readying himself for the inevitable politely worded rejection.

Instead, I turned to Dennis, focusing all my attention on him, and said, “Wow, what a great wish. Thank you!” There was more I wanted to add, but I couldn’t. Not yet. The “game plan” required me to be Dennis’s “special friend” for at least six weeks before I made any kind of commitment to him. He couldn’t know that I had the same wish he did. I felt cheated at not being able to add, “So do I.” But I understood the rationale, and I would follow it.

“Better watch out,” Tony said. “He might make it a Martian wish, and then you’ll have to.”

At the time, I didn’t understand what Tony had meant. So I forgot about it.

The next time I heard about Martians happened thirteen months later.

I was in Arizona, at a party at Jeff Duntemann’s sprawling house. Jeff is a two-time Hugo nominee who gave up science fiction to write books about computer programming. Apparently, it was far more profitable than science fiction; now he was publishing his own magazine, PC-Techniques. I write a regular column for the magazine, an off-the-wall mix of code and mutated zen. It was the standing joke that my contribution to the magazine was the “Martian perspective.”

I was sitting on the patio, watching Dennis splash enthusiastically across the pool. He was doing cannonballs into the deep end. A year ago, I couldn’t pry him loose from the steps in the shallow end; he wouldn’t even let me teach him how to dog-paddle—now he was an apprentice fish. He spent more time swimming across the bottom of the water than the top.

A year ago, he’d been a waif—capable of joy, the picture proved that—but more often sad, uncertain, alienated, and angry. A year ago, he’d told his caseworker, “I don’t think God listens to my prayers. I prayed for a dad and nothing happened.” On the day he moved in, I asked his caseworker to remind him of that conversation and then tell him that sometimes it takes God a little while to make a miracle happen.

A miracle—according to my friend Randy Macnamara—is something that wouldn’t have happened anyway. Now, after the fact, after the first giddy days of panic and joy, after the days of bottomless fears, after the tantrums and the testing, after a thousand and one peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches, I understood what he meant. And more. A miracle takes real commitment. It never happens by accident. I’d had other miracles happen in my life—one which I’d written about, one which I may never write about—but this one was the best. I had the proof of it framed on my wall.

One afternoon I’d opened Dennis’s lunch kit to see how much he’d eaten and found the note I’d packed that morning. It said, “Please eat your whole lunch today! I love you! Daddy.” On the other side, written in a childish scrawl was Dennis’s reply: “I love you to. you are very specil to me. I realy think your the best. I love you very much dady I never loved eneyone more than you. I never new anyone nicer than you.” At the bottom, he’d drawn three hearts and put the word “dady” in the biggest of them.

So the miracle was complete. Dennis could form a deep attachment. And he could express it. And all I had to do was sit and glow and realize that despite all my doubts and all my mistakes, I was getting the important part of the job done right. I had passed from wannabe to gonnabe to finding-how-to-be to simply be-ing. I was glowing as brightly as the warm Arizona evening. Pink clouds were striped across the darkening twilight sky.

I didn’t know anyone else at the party besides Jeff and Carol—and the world-famous Mr. Byte who was in the kitchen begging scraps he wasn’t supposed to have. But that was all right. I was content just to sit and watch my son enjoying himself. And then I heard the word “Martian” in back of me, and without moving, my attention swiveled 180 degrees.

Four of the wives were sitting together—it was that kind of party; the programmers were talking code, the wives were talking children. I didn’t know enough about either subject, I still felt like a dabbler in both fields, so I made the best kind of listener. One of the women was saying. “No, it’s true. Since she was old enough to talk she’s insisted that she’s a Martian. Her mother has never been able to convince her otherwise. She asked her, ‘How do you explain that I remember going to the hospital and giving birth to you?’ and she said, ‘I was implanted in your tummy.’ She’s twelve now and she still believes it. She has a whole story, an explanation for everything. She says UFOs are implanting Martian babies all the time.”

The other women laughed gently. I found myself smiling to myself and watching Dennis. Remembering for the first time in a long while what he’d once told his caseworker—that he was a Martian too. Interesting coincidence.

Then, one of the others said, “We had a boy in my daughter’s school who wore a T-shirt to school almost every day that said, ‘I am a Martian.’ He took a lot of teasing about it. The principal tried to make him stop wearing it, but he refused. All the kids thought he was crazy.”

“That was probably the only way he could get the attention he needed.”

“Well,” said the fourth voice, “it’s a common childhood fantasy—that the child is really a changeling or an orphan and that you’re not her real mother. Adding Mars to it is just a way to take advantage of the information in the real world to make it more believable.”

I didn’t hear any more of that conversation; we were interrupted by Carol announcing that dessert was served; but a seed of inquiry had been planted. If nothing else, I thought it might make an interesting story. If only I could figure out an ending for it. Let’s see, a man adopts a little boy and then discovers that the child is a Martian.

Hm. But what’s the hook?

Horror story? Too easy. Too obvious—the Martian children are going to murder us in our beds. Besides, Richard Matheson could do it better, if he hadn’t already. John Wyndham already had. A hidden invasion? The Martians will take us over without our ever knowing? Fred Brown had beaten me to it by four decades. His story had even ended up as an episode on Hitchcock. Maybe something tender and gentle instead? Parenting a starlost orphan? That would be the hardest to write—and Zenna Henderson had already written it several times over. Sturgeon was another one who could handle that angle. I wished I could pick up the phone and call him. He would have had the most interesting insight for the ending, but the connect charges would have been horrendous. I could call Harlan, of course, but he’d probably bitch at me for interrupting him during Jeopardy. Besides, I didn’t think he would take this question seriously. “Harlan, listen—I think my son’s a Martian, and I’m trying to write it up as a story. . . .” Yeah, right, David. Have you had your medication checked recently?

I made a mental note to think about it later. Maybe my subconscious would think about it during the drive home. Maybe I’d stumble across an ending by accident. I really couldn’t do anything at all without an ending in mind. It’s easy to start a story, but if you don’t know the ending, you don’t know what you’re writing toward and after a while the story goes adrift, the energy fails, and you’ve got one more thing to be frustrated about. I had a file cabinet full of unfinished stories to prove that this was not the best way to generate pay copy.

The next day . . . we were slicing across the desolate red desert, seemingly suspended between the blazing sky and the shimmering road, not talking about anything, just listening to a tape of Van Dyke Parks and sipping sodas from the cooler. The tape came to an end and the white noise of the wind rushed in to envelop us. Convertibles are fun, but they aren’t quiet.

Abruptly, I remembered last night’s conversation.

“Hey,” I asked. “Are you a Martian?”

“What?”

“Are you a Martian?” I repeated.

“Why do you ask that?”

“Ah, obviously you’re a Jewish Martian. You answer a question with a question.”

“Who told you I was a Martian?”

“Kathy did. Before I met you, we had a meeting. She told me all about you. She said that you told her you were a Martian. Do you remember telling her that?”

“Yes.”

“Are you still a Martian?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Okay,” he said. “I was made on Mars. I was a tadpole. Then I was brought to Earth in a UFO and implanted in my Mommy’s tummy. She didn’t know. Then I was homed.”

“Ahh,” I said. “That’s how I thought it happened. Is that all?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why did the Martians send you here?”

“So I could be a Earth-boy.”

“Oh.”

“Can we go to Round Table Pizza for dinner?” he asked, abruptly changing the subject as if it was the most natural thing to do.

“Do Martians like pizza?”

“Yes!” he said excitedly. Then he pointed his fingers at me like a funny kind of ray gun. Most children would have pointed the top two fingers to make a pretend gun, but Dennis pointed his index and little fingers, his thumb stood straight up for the trigger. “If you don’t take me out for pizza tonight, I’ll have to disneygrade you.”

“Ouch, that sounds painful. I definitely do not want to be disneygraded. Then I’d have to stand in the dark and sing that awful song forever while boatloads of Japanese tourists take pictures of me. But we’re not going tonight. Maybe tomorrow, if you have a good day at school.”

“No, tonight!” He pointed his fingers menacingly—both hands now—and for a moment I wondered what would happen if he pressed his thumbs forward. Would I be turned into a giant three-fingered mouse?

“If you disneygrade me,” I said, “for sure you won’t get any pizza.”

“Okay,” he said. Then he closed up both weapons, first one hand, then the other. First the little finger of his left hand, then the index finger; then the little finger of his right hand, then the index finger. Each time he made a soft clicking sound with his mouth. Finally he folded his thumbs down—and abruptly he had hands again.

Later, I tried to do the same thing myself. A human can do it, but it’s like the Vulcan salute. It takes practice.

I HAVE PINCHED A nerve in my back. If I do my twisting exercises a couple of times a week, and if I take frequent breaks from the keyboard, and if I remember to put myself into the spa every couple days and let the bubbles boil up around me, then I can keep myself functioning pretty much like a normal person. It’s a fair trade. Usually I wait until after dinner to sit in the spa. After the sun sets is a perfect time for a little skinnydipping.

Several days after the Phoenix trip, Dennis and I were alone in the pool. The pool has a blue filter over the light, the spa has a red one; when the bubbles are on, it looks a little like a hot lava bath. Sometimes we talk about nothing important, sometimes we just sit silently letting the bubbles massage our skins, sometimes we stare up into the sky and watch for meteors; once we’d seen a bright red starpoint streak across the sky like a bullet.

But tonight, as he splashed in the bubbles, I found myself studying the way the light shaped his features. I’m not an expert on the development of children’s skulls, but abruptly I was struck by the odd proportions of his forehead and eyes.

Before I’d adopted him, I’d been given copies of various doctor’s reports, one doctor, who was supposed to be looking for fetal alcohol effects, had described the five-year-old Dennis as “an unusual-looking” child. I couldn’t see what he was talking about. To me, Dennis had always been an unusually good-looking boy.

There are only two shapes of faces—pie and horse. Dennis was a pie-face, I’m a horse. In that, he was lucky because his smile was so wide he needed a round face to hold it all. He was blessed with dark blond hair which was growing steadily toward shoulder-length. His eyes were puppy-brown and hidden behind lashes long enough to trouble the sleep of mascara manufacturers. His complexion was as luminous and gold as an Arizona sunset.

His body was well-proportioned too; he had long legs and a swimmer’s torso. He was thin, but not skinny. He looked like a Disney child. I expected him to be a heartbreaker when he grew up. The girls were going to chase him with lassos. Already I wondered what kind of a teenager he would become—and if I would be able to handle it.

Now . . . seeing him in the reflected red light of the spa—is this the same color light they have on Mars?—he did look a little alien to me. His forehead had a roundish bulge toward the crown. His cheekbones seemed strangely angled. His eyes seemed narrow and reptilian. Probably it was the effect of the light coming from underneath instead of above, combined with the red filter, but it was momentarily unnerving. For a moment, I wondered what kind of a thing I’d brought into my life.

“What?” he asked, staring back.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You were looking at me.”

“I was admiring you. You’re a beautiful kid, do you know that?”

“Uh-huh.” And suddenly he was Dennis again.

“How do you know that?”

“Everybody says so. They all like my eyelashes.”

I laughed. Of course. Here was a child who’d learned to work the system. He was a skilled manipulator. He’d learned real fast how to turn on his special smile and get what he wanted out of people. Of course he knew how much attention his eyelashes attracted.

But—for a moment there, he hadn’t been Dennis the little boy. He’d been something else. Something cold and watchful. He’d noticed me studying him. He’d sensed the suspicion. Or was it just the power of suggestion at work? Most of the books on parenting advised not to feel guilty for wondering if your child is going to suddenly catch a fly with his tongue. It’s a very common parental fear.

And then . . . whenever I had doubts about Dennis and my ability to keep up with him, all I had to do was ask myself one simple question. How would I feel if Kathy Bright said she had to remove him from my home? Ripped apart was the simplest answer. The truth was, I didn’t care if he was a Martian or not, I was as bonded to him as he was to me.

But out of curiosity, and possibly just to reassure myself that I was imagining things, I logged onto CompuServe. The ISSUES forum has a parenting section. I left a message under the heading, “Is your child a Martian?”

My little boy says he’s a Martian. I’ve heard of two other children who claim to be Martians as well. Has anyone else heard of children who believe that they’re from Mars?

Over the course of the next few days—before the message scrolled off the board and into the bit-bucket—I received thirty-three replies.

Several of the messages were thoughtful analyses of why a child might say such a thing; it was pretty much what that mother in Phoenix had surmised; it’s common for children to fantasize that they have glamorous origins. In the past, children might have believed they were secretly princes and princesses and one day their real parents would arrive to take them to their golden castles. But because that mythology has now been superseded by starships and mutants, it’s more appropriate for children to fantasize about traveling away on the Millennium Falcon or the Enterprise. But if a child was experienced enough to know that those stories were just fiction, he would also know that Mars was a real planet; therefore . . . Mars gave credibility to the fantasy. Etcetera. Etcetera. Local mileage may vary, but if the delusion persists, see a good therapist. It may be evidence of some deeper problem. Etcetera some more.

I knew what Dennis’s deeper problems were. He’d been bounced around the foster care system for eight years before landing in my arms. He didn’t know where he came from or where he belonged.

Several of the replies I received were from other parents sharing pieces of weirdness their own children had demonstrated. Interesting, but not particularly useful to my inquiry.

But . . . there were over a dozen private messages.

“My sister’s little girl used to insist that she’d been brought to Earth in a UFO and implanted in her mommy’s tummy while her mommy was asleep. She kept this up until she was about fourteen, then abruptly stopped. After that, she wouldn’t answer questions about it at all.”

“My next door neighbors had a boy who said he wasn’t from Earth. He disappeared when he was twelve. Without a trace. The police assumed he was kidnapped.”

“My ex-wife was a child psychologist. She used to joke about her Martian children. She said she could tell how crazy New York was by the number of Martians she saw in any given year. At first she used to tell the parents that same old same old about children needing to fantasize about a glamorous background, but later on she began to wonder. The stories the kids told were all very similar. They began life as Martian tadpoles brought to Earth and implanted in the uteruses of Earth women. She always wanted to do a study on Martian children, but she could never get a grant.”

“I dated a girl once who said she was from Mars. She was very insistent on it. When I tried to get serious with her, she turned me down flat. She said she really liked me, but it wouldn’t work out between us. When I asked her why, she said it was because she was from Mars. That’s all. I guess Martians have a rule against marrying outside their species.”

“I heard about a Martian when I was in high school. He killed himself. I didn’t know him. I only heard about it afterward.”

“I thought I was from Mars once. I even had memories of being on Mars. It had a pink sky. That’s how I knew it was Mars. When the photos came in from JPL showing that Mars really did have a pink sky, just like in my memories, I thought that proved something. When I told my parents, they took me to see a doctor. I was in therapy for a long time, but I’m fine now. Maybe you should get your son into therapy too.”

It was the last one that really got to me. I knew the person who sent it meant to be reassuring, but instead, his message had the opposite effect.

Okay, maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer. I read subtext where none is intended. And maybe the cumulative effect of all these messages, especially the wistful, almost plaintive tone of the last one left me with a very uncomfortable feeling.

I replied to all of these messages.

I know this sounds silly, but please indulge me. What did your Martian friend/relative look like? Did he/she have any special physical characteristics or medical problems? What was his/her personality like? Do you know what happened to him or her? Does he/she still believe that he/she is from Mars?

It took a week or two to compile the responses. Of the ten Martians specifically mentioned, two had committed suicide. One was successful in business. Three refused to talk about Mars. Two were “cured.” The whereabouts of the others were unknown. Three were missing. Two of the missing had been repeated runaways during their teen years. I wondered where they thought they were running to.

Of the ten Martians, six were known to have had golden-brown skin, round faces, brown eyes and very long eyelashes. The hair color was generally dark blond or brown. That was an interesting statistical anomaly.

Of the ten Martians, five were hyperactive, two were epileptic. The other three weren’t known.

I asked the fellow whose ex-wife had been a child psychologist if she’d ever noticed any statistical patterns among her Martians. He said he didn’t know and he didn’t even know her whereabouts anymore. She had disappeared two years earlier.

I called my friend, Steve Barnes. He’d written one of the character references I’d needed to adopt Dennis, and because of that I regarded him as an unofficial godfather to the boy. We chatted about this and that and the other thing for awhile. And then, finally, I said, “Steve—do you know about the Martian phenomenon?” He didn’t. I told him about it. He asked me if I was smoking dope again.

“I’m serious, Steve.”

“So am I.”

“I haven’t touched that crap since I kicked out she-who-must-not-be-named,” I said it angrily.

“Just checking. You gotta admit that’s a pretty bizarre story, though.”

“I know that. That’s why I’m telling you. You’re one of the few people I know who will actually consider it fairly. Geez—why is it that science fiction writers are the most skeptical animals of all?”

“Because we get to deal with more crazies than anyone else,” Steve replied without missing a beat.

“I don’t know what to do with this,” I said, admitting my frustration. “I know it sounds like one more crazy UFO mystery. Only this one is something that can actually be validated. This is the kind of statistical anomaly that can’t be explained away by coincidence. And I bet there’s a lot more to it too. Like, what was the blood type of all those children? What was the phase of the moon? What are their favorite foods? How well did they do in school? What if there’s something really going on here?—maybe not Martians, maybe some kind of social phenomenon or syndrome—I don’t know what it is, I don’t know what else to ask, and I don’t know who to tell. Most of all, I don’t want to end up on the front page of the Inquirer. Can’t you just see it? ‘SCI-FI WRITER HAS MARTIAN CHILD!’ ”

“It might be good for your career,” Steve said thoughtfully. “I wonder how many new readers you could pick up.”

“Oh, yeah, sure. And I wonder how many old readers I’ll lose. I’d like to be taken seriously in my old age, Steve. Remember what happened to what’s-his-name.”

“I’ll never forget old what’s-his-name,” Steve said. “Yeah, that was a real sad story.”

“Anyway . . .” I said. “You see my point? Where do I go from here?”

“You want my real advice?” Steve asked. He didn’t wait for my reply. “Don’t go anywhere with it. Drop it. Let someone else figure it out. Or no one. You said it yourself, David. “It’s almost always dangerous to be right too soon.’ Don’t go borrowing trouble. Turn it into a story if you must and let people think it’s a harmless fantasy. But don’t let it screw up your life. You wanted this kid, didn’t you? Now you have him. Just parent him. That’s the only thing that’s really wanted and needed.”

He was right. I knew it. But I couldn’t accept it. “Sure. That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have a Martian in the house.”

“Yes I do.” He laughed. “Only mine’s a girl.”

“Huh—?”

“Don’t you get it? All children are Martians. We get thirteen years to civilize the little monsters. After that, it’s too late. Then they start eating our hearts out for the rest of our lives.”

“You sound like my mother now.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It’s a good thing you don’t know her, or you wouldn’t say that.”

“Listen to me, David,” and his tone of voice was so serious that six different jokes died before they could pass my lips. “You’re right on schedule. Have you ever really looked at the faces of new parents? Most of them are walking around in a state of shock, wondering what happened—what is this loathsome reptilian thing that has suddenly invaded their lives? It’s part of the process of assimilation. The only difference is that you have a more active imagination than most people. You know how to name your fears. Trust me on this, Toni and I went through it too with Nicki. We thought she was a—never mind. Just know that this normal. There are days when you are absolutely certain that you’ve got a cute and stinky little alien in your house.”

“But every day?”

“Trust me. It passes. In a year or two, you won’t even remember what your life was like before.”

“Hmm. Maybe that’s how long it takes a Martian to brainwash his human hosts. . . .”

Steve sighed. “You’ve got it bad.”

“Yes, I do,” I admitted.

The Martian thing gnawed at me like an ulcer. I couldn’t get it out of my head. No matter what we did, the thought was there.

If we went out front to swat koosh-balls back and forth, I wondered if the reason he was having trouble with his coordination was the unfamiliar gravity of Earth. If we went in the back yard and jumped in the pool together, I wondered if his attraction to water was because it was so scarce on Mars. I wondered about his ability to hear a piece of music a single time and still remember the melody so clearly that he could sing it again, note for note, a month later; he would walk through the house singing songs that he could not have heard except on the tapes I occasionally played; how many nine-year-olds know how to sing My Clone Sleeps Alone like Pat Benatar? I wondered why he had so little interest in comic books, but loved to watch television dramas about the relationships of human beings. He hated Star Trek, he thought it was “too silly.” He loved the Discovery channel—especially all the shows about animals and insects.

There was no apparent pattern to his behavior, nothing that could be pointed to as evidence of otherworldliness. Indeed, the fact that he was making his father paranoid was a very strong argument that he was a normal Earth kid.

And then, just when I’d forgotten . . . something would happen. Maybe he’d react to something on television with an off-the-wall comment that would make me look over at him curiously. There was that Bugs Bunny cartoon, for instance, where the rabbit is making life difficult for Marvin the Martian, stealing the detonator so he can’t blow up the Earth. In the middle of it, Dennis quietly declared, “No, that’s wrong. Martians aren’t like that.” Then he got up and turned the television set off.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Because it was wrong,” he said blandly.

“But it’s only a cartoon.” One of my favorite cartoons, I might add.

“It’s still wrong.” And then he turned and went outside as if the whole concept of television would never be interesting to him again.

AND NOW, almost two years to the day since I’d filled out the first application, the nickel finally dropped and I sat up in bed in the middle of the night. Why were so many adopted children hyperactive!

The evidence was all around me. I just hadn’t noticed it before. It was there in the photo-listing books. It seemed as if every third child was hyperactive. It was acknowledged in the books, the articles, the seminars, the tapes . . . that a higher proportion of foster children have Attention Deficit Disorder, also called Hyperactivity. Why was that?

Some theorists suggested that it was the result of substance abuse by the parents, which is why we saw it more in abandoned and unwanted children. Some doctors believed that hyperactivity was the result of the body’s failure to produce certain key enzymes in response to physical stimulation; therefore the child needed to overstimulate himself in order to produce an equivalent amount of calming. Still others postulated that there was an emotional component to the disorder; that it was a response to a lack of nurturing. Most interesting of all to me was the offhand note in one article that some theorists believed that many cases of ADD were actually misdiagnoses. If you were unattached and didn’t know who you were or where you had come from or where you were going, you’d have a lot to worry about; your attention might be distracted too.

Or . . . what if the behavior that was judged abnormal for Earth children was perfectly normal for Martian children? What if there was no such thing as ADD . . . in Martians?

At this point, I’d reached the limits of my ability to research the question. Who could I tell? Who would have the resources to pursue this further? And who would take me seriously?

Suppose I picked up the Los Angeles Times tomorrow and saw that Ben Bova had called a press conference to announce that he’d been kidnapped by aliens and taken into space where they’d performed bizarre sexual experiments on him . . . would I believe him? Ben is one of the most believable men in the world. Once, he almost talked me into voting for Ronald Reagan. But if I saw a report like that in the newspaper, the first thing I’d do would be to call Barbara and ask if Ben were all right.

In other words . . . there was simply no way for me to research this question without destroying all of my credibility as a writer.

Even worse, there was no way to research it without also destroying my credibility as a parent.

Up until this time, I’d always been candid with the caseworkers and therapists; I’d talked to them about our discipline problems, about my feelings of frustration, about ever little step in the right direction and every major victory. But . . . suddenly, I realized this was something I couldn’t talk to them about. Suppose I called Kathy Bright. What could I say? “Uh, Kathy, it’s David. I want to talk to you about Dennis. You know how he says he’s a Martian? Well, I think he might really be a Martian and . . .”

Uh-huh.

If the adoptive father was starting to have hallucinations about the child, how long would the Department of Children’s Services leave the child in that placement? About twenty minutes, I figured. About as long as it took to get out there and pick him up. She’d pull him out of my house so fast they’d be hearing sonic booms in Malibu. And I wouldn’t even be able to argue. She’d be right to do so. A child needs a stable and nurturing environment. How stable and nurturing would it be for him to be living with an adult who suspects he’s from another planet and is wondering about his ultimate motives.

If I pursued this, I’d lose my son.

The thought was intolerable. I might never recover. I was sure that he wouldn’t. For the first time in his life, he’d finally formed an attachment. What would it do to him to have it broken so abruptly? It would truly destroy his ability to trust any other human being.

I couldn’t do that to him. I couldn’t do anything that might hurt him.

And what about me? I had my own “attachment issues.” I couldn’t stand the thought of another failure. Another brick in the wall, as they say.

That was where I stayed stuck for the longest time. I walked around the house in physical pain for three weeks. My chest hurt. My head hurt. My legs hurt. My back hurt. My eyes hurt. My throat hurt. The only part of me that didn’t hurt was my brain. That was so numb, I couldn’t think.

I didn’t know if he was a Martian or not. But something weird was going on. Wasn’t it? And if it was just me—if I was going insane—then what right do I have to try to parent this child anyway? Either way I lose. If he’s a Martian, I can’t tell anyone. And if he isn’t a Martian, then I’m going crazy.

I started looking for local evidence. I began browsing through my journal. I’d been making daily notes of interesting incidents, in case I ever wanted to write a book about our experiences. At first, I couldn’t find anything. Most of the incidents I’d written about were fairly mundane. Not even good Readers’ Digest material.

For instance, the week after he moved in, I’d taken him to the baseball game at Dodger Stadium. For the first part of the game, he’d been more interested in having a pennant and getting some cotton candy than in what was going on down on the stadium floor. But along about the fifth inning, he’d climbed up onto my lap and I began explaining the game to him. “See that man at home plate, holding the bat. Wish for him to hit the ball right out of the park.”

“Okay,” said Dennis.

Cia-a-ack! The ball went sailing straight out into the right field stands. Someone in the lower deck caught it and the runner sauntered easily around the bases while the organist played, “Glory, glory, Hallelujah.”

“You’re a good wisher, Dennis. That was terrific. Want to try it again?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

Two innings later, the Dodgers were one run behind. I asked Dennis to wish for hits again. Four pitches later, there were runners at first and third.

It didn’t matter to me who came up to bat now; I hadn’t remembered the names of any ballplayers since Roy Campanella was catching for Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax. As far as I was concerned, Who was on first, What was on second, and I Don’t Know still played third. I liked baseball only so long as I didn’t have to be an expert; but I’d never seen the Dodgers win a game. Every time I came to the stadium they lost; so I’d made it a point to stay away from Dodger Stadium to give them a fair chance at winning. I didn’t expect them to win tonight; but Dennis’s wishes had brought them from three runs behind.

“Okay, Dennis,” I said, giving him a little squeeze. “It’s time for one last wish. See that guy at the home plate, holding the bat. You gotta wish for him to hit a home run. All the way out of the park. Just like before. Okay?”

“Okay.”

And just like before—cra-a-ack—the ball went sailing deep into right field, triggering a sudden cluster of excited fans scrambling down across the seats.

The Dodgers won that night. All the way home, I kept praising Dennis for his excellent wishing.

A couple of weeks after that, we were stopped at a light, waiting for it to change. It was one of those intersections that existed slightly sideways to reality. Whenever you stopped there, time slowed down to a crawl. Without even thinking, I said, “Dennis, wish for the light to turn green please.”

“Okay,” he said.

—and abruptly the light turned green. I frowned. It seemed to me the cycle hadn’t quite completed.

Nah. I must have been daydreaming. I eased the car through the intersection. A moment later, we got caught at the next red light. I said a word.

“Why’d you say that?”

“These lights are supposed to be synchronized,” I said. “So you only get green ones. We must be out of synch. Why don’t you wish for this light to change too please.”

“Okay.”

—green.

“Boy! You are really a good wisher.”

“Thank you.

A minute later, I said, “Can you wish this light to turn green too?”

“No,” he said, abruptly angry. “You’re going to use up all my wishes.”

“Huh?” I looked over at him.

“I only have so many wishes and you’re going to use them all up on stoplights.” There was a hurt quality in his voice.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road and stopped. I turned to him and put my hand gently on his shoulder. “Oh, sweetheart. I don’t know who told you that, but that’s not so. The wish bag is bottomless. You can have as many wishes as you want.”

“No, you can’t,” he insisted. “I have to save my wishes for things that are important.”

“What’s the most important thing you ever wished for?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

He didn’t answer.

“What’s the most important wish?” I repeated.

Very softly, he admitted, “I wished for a dad. Someone who would be nice to me.”

“Uh-huh. And did you get your wish?”

He nodded.

“So, you see, sweetheart. There’s no shortage of miracles.”

I didn’t know if he believed me. It was still too early in the process. We were still learning who each other was. I noted the conversation in my journal and let the matter slide. But it left me with an uncomfortable feeling. What has to happen to a child to make him believe there’s a limit to wishes?

A year later, I looked at the words I’d written glowing on the computer screen, and wondered about Dennis’s ability to wish. It was probably a coincidence. But maybe it wasn’t. That time we’d matched four out of six numbers in the lottery and won eighty-eight dollars—was that the week I’d asked him to wish real hard for us to win?

Maybe Martians have precognitive or telekinetic powers . . .?

Dennis likes cleaning things. Without asking, he’ll go out and wash the car, or the patio. He’ll give the dogs baths. He’ll vacuum the rugs and take the dustbuster to the couch. He’ll mop the floors. His favorite toys are a sponge and a squirt-bottle of Simple Green. I’ve seen him take a rusty old wrench he found in a vacant field and scrub the rust off of it until it shone like new. One night after dinner, after he finished methodically loading the dishwasher, I sat him down at the kitchen table and told him I had a surprise for him.

“What?”

“It’s a book of puzzles.”

“Oh.” He sounded disappointed.

“No, listen. Here’s the game. You have twenty minutes to do these puzzles, and then whenyou finish. I add them up and we’ll find out how smart you are. Do you want to do this?”

“It’ll really tell you how smart I am?”

“Uh-huh.”

He grabbed for the book and a pencil.

“Wait a minute—let me set the timer. Okay? Now once you start, you can’t stop. You have to go all the way through to the end. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“One, two, three . . . go.”

He attacked the first three puzzles with a vengeance. They were simple. Pick the next shape in a series: triangle, square, pentagon . . .? Which object doesn’t belong: horse, cow, sheep, scissors? Feather is to Bird as Fur is to: dog, automobile, ice cream . . .?

Then the puzzles started getting harder and he started to frown. He brushed his hair out of his eyes and once he stopped to clean his glasses, but he stayed interested and involved and when the timer went off, he didn’t want to stop. He insisted that he be allowed to finish the puzzle he was working on. What the hell. I let him.

“What does it say?” Dennis asked as I computed the percentile. He wanted to grab the test book out of my hand.

“Well . . . let me finish here.” I held it out of his reach as I checked the table of percentiles.

The test showed that he had above-average intelligence—not unexpected; hyperactive kids tend to be brighter than average—but well within the normal range for a nine-year-old. “It says that you are fifty-two inches high, that you weigh sixty-six pounds, and that your daddy loves you very much. It also says that you are very smart.”

“How smart?”

“Well, if this test were given to one hundred children, you would be smarter than ninety-two of them.”

“How good is that?”

“That’s very good. You can’t get much better. And it means we should go out for ice cream after dinner. What do you think?”

“Yeah!”

Oh, that was another thing. He didn’t like chocolate. He preferred rainbow sherbet. I’d never seen that in a kid before.

A couple of weeks later, we played another game. I made sure to pick a quiet evening, one with no distractions. “This game is even harder,” I explained. “It’s a kind of card game,” I explained. “See these cards? There are six different shapes here. A circle, a square, a star, three squiggly lines, a cross, and a figure-eight. All you have to do is guess which one I’m looking at. See if you can read my mind, okay?”

He frowned at me, and I had to explain it two or three more times. This was not a game he wanted to play. I said okay and started to put the deck away. If he didn’t want to cooperate, the results would be inconclusive. “Can we go for ice cream after we do this?” he asked abruptly.

“Sure,” I said.

“Okay, let’s do it then.”

“All right. We have to do it five times. Do you think you can do it that many times?”

He shrugged. I laid out a paper in front of him, showing him the shapes so he would be able remember them all. I told him he could close his eyes if it would help him concentrate. The test conditions were less than perfect, but if there were any precognitive or telepathic powers present, five trials should be enough to demonstrate them.

Half an hour later, I knew.

Martians aren’t telepathic.

But they do like rainbow sherbet. A lot.

There were other tests. Not many. Not anything too weird. Just little ones that might indicate if there was something worth further investigation. There wasn’t. As near as I could determine, there was nothing so unusual about Dennis that it would register as a statistical anomaly in a repeatable testable circumstance. He couldn’t levitate. He couldn’t move objects. He couldn’t make things disappear. He didn’t know how to grok. He could only hold his breath for thirty-three seconds. He couldn’t think muscles. He couldn’t see around comers.

But—

He could predict elevators. Take him into any building, anywhere. Take him to the elevator bank. Let him push the up button. Don’t say a word. Without fail, the door he stands in front of will be the one where the first elevator arrives. Was he wishing them or predicting them? I don’t know. It’s useful only at science fiction conventions, which are legendary for recalcitrant elevators. It has little value anywhere else in the world.

He could make stop lights turn green—sometimes. Mostly, he waited until he saw the lights for the cross street turn yellow before he announced his wish. Maybe he could still make the Dodgers score four runs in two innings—but it wasn’t consistent. We went back to Dodger Stadium in May, and either Dennis wasn’t wishing or he really had used up all his wishes.

He could sing with perfect pitch, especially if the lyrics were about Popeye’s gastrointestinal distress. He could play a video game for four hours straight without food or water. He could invent an amazing number of excuses for not staying in bed. He could also hug my neck so hard that once I felt a warning crack in my trachea. My throat hurt for a week afterward.

I began to think that maybe I had imagined the whole thing.

On school nights, I tucked him in at 9:30. We had a whole ritual. If there was time, we read a storybook together, whatever was appropriate. Afterward, prayers—

“I’m sorry God for . . . I didn’t do anything to be sorry for.”

“How about sassing your dad? Remember you had to take a timeout?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry God for sassing my dad. Thank you God for . . . um, I can’t think of anything.”

“Going swimming.”

“No. Thank you God for Calvin, my cat.”

“Good. Anything else you want to say to God?”

“Does God hear the prayers of Martians?”

“Uh . . . of course he does. God hears everybody’s prayers.”

“Not Martians.”

“Yes, even Martians.”

“Uh-uh.”

“Why do you say no?”

“Because God didn’t make any Martians.”

“If God didn’t make the Martians, then who did?”

“The devil.”

“Did the devil make you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How do you know?”

“Because . . . I’m a Martian.”

“Mm,” I said, remembering a little speech I’d made just about a year ago. Let it be all right for him to be a Martian for as long as he needs to be. “All right,” I said. “But let me tell you a secret,” I whispered. “The devil didn’t make any Martians. That’s just a lie the devil wants you to believe. God made the Martians.”

“Really?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die. Stick a noodle in my eye.”

“How do you know!” He was very insistent.

“Because I talk to God every night,” I said. “Just like you, I say my prayers. And God made everything in the world.”

“But Martians aren’t from this world—”

“That’s right. But God made Mars too. And everything on it. Just like she made this world, she made a whole bunch of others, and Mars was one of them. Honest.”

“How come you say ‘she’ when you talk about God?”

“Because sometimes God is female and sometimes God is male. God is everything. And now it’s time for you to stop asking questions and go to sleep. Hugs and kisses—?”

“Hugs and kisses.”

“G’night. No more talking.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. Now no more talking.”

“Dad?”

“What?”

“I have to tell you something.”

“What?”

“I love you.”

“I love you too. Now, shhh. No more talking, Dennis.”

“G’night.”

“Sleep tight—”

Finally, I got smart. I stopped answering. Control freaks. We each wanted to have the last word.

I PADDED BAREFOOT DOWN the hall. I stopped in the living room long enough to turn off the television set, the VCR, and the surround-sound system. I continued on through the dining room and finally to my office. Two computers sat on my desk, both showing me that it was 9:47. The monster-child had manipulated an extra seventeen minutes tonight.

I sat down in my chair, leaned back, put my feet up on my desk, and stared out at the dark waters of the swimming pool in the back yard. The pool glowed with soft blue light. The night was . . . silent. Somewhere, a dog, barked.

Somewhere—that was his name, yes; he was a writer’s dog—lived under my desk. When I said, “Let’s go to work,” wherever he was in the house, Somewhere would pick himself up and laboriously pad-pad-pad into my office where he’d squelch himself flat and scrooch his way under the desk, with a great impassioned Jewish sigh of, “I hope you appreciate what I do for you.”

He’d stay there all day—as long as the computer was on. Somewhere would only come out for two things: cookies and the doorbell . . . and the doorbell was broken. It had been broken for as long as I’d lived in this house. I’d never had the need to get it fixed. If someone came to the door, the dog barked.

Somewhere, the dog, barked.

That was why I loved him so much. He was a living cliche. He was the only possible justification for one of the most infamous sentences in bad writing. It was just a matter of placing the commas correctly.

Somewhere had just enough intelligence to keep out of the way and more than enough intelligence to find his dinner dish—as long as no one moved it. He spent his mornings resting under my desk, his afternoons snoozing behind the couch, his evenings snoring next to Dennis, he spent the hours before dawn in the dark space underneath the headboard of my bed, dreaming about the refrigerator.

Almost every night, just as Dennis began saying his prayers, Somewhere would come sighing down the hall, a shaggy, absent-minded canine-American. He’d step over everything that was in his way, uncaring if he knocked over a day’s worth of Lego construction. He’d climb onto the bed, over my lap, over Dennis, grumbling softly as he found his position next to Dennis. With his prehensile tongue, he could slurp the inside of Dennis’s right ear from the left side of his head, taking either the internal or external route.

Tonight, though, he knew I wasn’t finished working. I had some serious thinking to do. He remained under the desk, sighing about the overtime. “You’re in super-golden hours,” I said to him; he shut up.

Whenever I’m in doubt about something, I sit down and start writing. I write down everything I’m feeling or thinking or worrying about. I say everything there is to say until there’s nothing left to say. The first time I did this was the day after my dad died. I sat and wrote for two days. When I was finished, I had a Nebula nominated story, In the Deadlands. To this day I still don’t fully understand what the story was about, but the emotional impact of it is undeniable. It still gives me the shudders.

But the lesson I learned from that experience was the most important thing I’ve ever learned about storytelling. Effective writing isn’t in the mechanics. Anyone can master the mechanical act of stringing together words and sentences and paragraphs to make a character move from A to B. The bookstores are full of evidence. But that’s not writing. Writing isn’t about the words, it’s about the experience. It’s about the feeling that the story creates inside of you. If there’s no feeling, there’s no story.

But sometimes, there’s only the feeling without any meaning or understanding. And that’s not a story either. What I was feeling about Dennis was so confusing and troubling and uncertain that I couldn’t even begin to sort it out. I needed to write down all the separate pieces—as if in the act of telling, it would sort itself out. Sometimes the process worked.

When I looked up again, three hours had passed. My back and shoulders ached. The dog had gone to bed, and I felt I had accomplished nothing at all except to delineate the scale of my frustration.

Why would an alien species come to this planet? The last time I spent that much time on this question, I came up with giant pink man-eating slugs in search of new flavors. Why would Martians send their children to Earth?

The most logical idea that I came up with was that they were here as observers. Spies.

Haven’t you ever been pulling on your underwear and realized that your dog or your cat is watching you? Haven’t you ever considered the possibility that the creature is sharing your secrets with some secret network of dogs and cats? “Oh, you think that’s weird! My human wears underwear with pictures of Rocky and Bullwinkle on them.”

But dogs and cats are limited in what they can observe. If you really want to know a culture, you have to be a member of it. But an alien couldn’t step in and pretend to be a member of this culture, could he? He’d have to leam. He’d have to be taught. . . .

Where could a Martian go to get lessons in being a human? Who gives lessons in human beingness?

Mommies and Daddies. That’s right.

“You’re too paranoid,” said my sane friend. He asked me to leave his name out of this narrative, so I’ll just call him my sane friend.

“What do you mean?”

“You think that aliens are all motivated by evil intentions. You’ve written four novels about evil aliens eating our children, and you’re working on a fifth. Isn’t it possible that you’re wrong?”

“Moi! Wrong?”

“Do you ever think about the cuckoo?” my sane friend asked.

“No,” I said.

“Well, think about the cuckoo for a moment.”

“Okay.”

“How do you feel about the cuckoo?” he asked.

“It’s an evil bird,” I said. “It lays its egg in the sparrow’s nest. The cuckoo chick pushes the other babies out of the nest. The sparrow ends up raising it—even at the expense of her own young. It’s a parasite.”

“See, that’s your judgment talking—”

“That’s the truth—” I started to object.

“Is it? Is that what you tell Dennis about his birth-mother?”

“Uh—I tell him that his birth-mom couldn’t take care of him. And that she loves him and misses him. And that’s the truth. Sort of . . . whitewashed.”

My sane friend grinned at me.

“Okay,” I admitted. “I’m protective of my son. So what?”

My sane friend shrugged. “How do you think the cuckoo feels?”

“Birds don’t feel.”

“If it could feel, how do you think it would feel?”

I thought about it. The first image that came to mind was the silly little bird from the Dr. Seuss story; the one who flew off, leaving Horton the elephant to hatch her egg. I shook my head. “I’m not getting anything useful—”

“How do you think Dennis’s mother feels?”

I shook my head again. “Everything I’ve heard about her . . . I can’t empathize.”

“All right, try it this way. Under what circumstances would you give Dennis up?”

“I’d die before I’d give him up,” I said. “He makes me happier than anybody I’ve ever known before. Just looking at him, I get an endorphin rush. If anybody started proceedings to take him out of my home, I’d have him on a plane to New Zealand so fast—” I stopped. “Oh, I see what you mean.” I thought about it. “If I wasn’t able to take care of him, or if I thought I was hurting him, or if I thought I wasn’t doing a good enough job—” There was that old familiar twinge again. “If I thought he’d really be better off with someone else, I’d want him to have the best chance possible. But I just can’t see that happening.”

“Uh-huh. . . .” My sane friend grinned. “Now, how do you think the Martians feel?”

“Huh?”

He repeated the questions.

I thought about it for a while, “I’d have to assume that if they have the capability to implant their children in human wombs that they would have a highly developed science and technology and that implies—to me anyway—a highly developed emotional structure and probably a correspondingly well-developed moral structure as well. At least, that’s what I’d like to believe.”

“And if what you believe is true . . .” he started to say.

I finished the thought for him.” . . . then the Martians are trusting us with their children.”

“Aren’t they?” he asked.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t like where that train of thought might lead. But I followed it anyway.

“Would you trust your child to apes or wolves?” my sane friend asked.

“No,” I said. “You know what happens to feral children.”

He nodded. “I’ve read the same books you have.”

“So, if the Martians are trusting us with their children . . . then that implies that either they don’t care about their children very much—or they do.”

“You want my best guess?”

“This is where you resolve everything for me, isn’t it?”

“No. This is where I tell you what I think. I think they’re engaged in a long-term breeding experiment . . . to upgrade the level of intelligence and compassion in the human race.”

“Yeah?” I gave him my best raised-eyebrow look. “Remember what happened to Spock? He was a half-breed too. His parents wanted to breed a logical human. Instead, they got an emotional Vulcan.”

“Have you got a better guess?”

“No,” I admitted. “But what kind of Martians are we raising?”

“What kind of Martian are you raising?” he corrected.

And that really did it for me. That was the question. “I don’t know,” I finally admitted. “But—he is mine to raise, isn’t he?”

“Yep,” my sane friend agreed.

That thought echoed for a long long moment. Finally, I acknowledged the truth of it with a grin. “Yeah,” I said. “I can live with that. . . .”

As a literary puzzle, this is incomplete. As a story, it doesn’t work. There’s no ending.

There isn’t enough evidence for me to even suggest a conclusion. What do we know about the Martians? For that matter, what do we really know about ourselves? There’s nothing to extrapolate. And if the Martians are really engaged in some kind of large-scale genetic engineering, we won’t really know what their intentions are until the Martian children start reaching adulthood. Dennis will be old enough to vote in 2005. (And that raises another question. How long have the Martians been planting their babies in human homes? Maybe we already live in a Martian-influenced world?)

Maybe the Martian children will be super geniuses, inventing cold fusion and silicon sentience and nanotechnological miracles—Stephen Hawking and Buckminster Fuller. Maybe they’ll be spiritual saviors, bringing such superior technology of consciousness that those of us brave enough to follow will achieve the enlightenment of saints. Maybe they’ll be demagogues and dictators. Or maybe they’ll be madmen and all end up in institutions. And maybe they’ll be monsters, giving us a new generation of serial killers and cult-leaders—Jack the Ripper and Charles Manson.

All we can do is wait and see how it works out.

There’s one more thing.

In reviewing the material for this story, I came across a curious coincidence. Kathy Bright had given me several huge stacks of reports on Dennis, written by various therapists and counselors. I hadn’t had time to read them all, and after the first few, I stopped—I didn’t want their experience of Dennis; I wanted to make up my own mind. But as I paged through the files, looking for Martian stuff, one of them caught my eye. On Saturday, June 27th, 1992, Carolyn Green (his counselor) had noted, “Dennis thinks God doesn’t hear his prayers, because he wished for a dad and nothing happened.”

I first saw Dennis’s picture on Saturday, June 27th, 1992, at about two in the afternoon. According to Carolyn Green’s report, that was the exact time of his weekly session. I cannot help but believe that he was wishing for a dad at the exact moment I first saw his picture. A Martian wish. Was that what I felt so strongly?

Does it mean anything? Maybe. Maybe not. In any case, I know better than to argue with Martian wishes. Tonight, at bed time, he wished for me to be happy.

I had to smile. “Was that a Martian wish?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, in a voice that left no room for disagreement.

“Then, I’m happy,” I said. And in fact, I was.

I hadn’t realized it before, because I hadn’t acknowledged it, not even to myself; but as I walked back down the hall to my office, I had to admit that I was glowing. I’d gotten everything I’d wanted, a wonderful son, a profound sense of family, a whole new reason for waking up in the morning. So what if he’s a Martian, it really doesn’t matter, does it? He’s my son, and I love him. I’m not giving him up. He’s special

When Dennis puts his mind to it, he can predict elevators and make stoplights turn green and help the Dodgers win baseball games. He can make lottery tickets pay off (a little bit, four numbers at a time) and he can wish a father into his life. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

I think we might experiment with that a little bit more. We haven’t bought any lottery tickets in a while. Maybe we should buy a couple tonight. And if that works, who knows what else he could wish for. I was thinking of asking him to wish for a Hugo award for his dad—just a test, you understand—but this morning, he announced he was going to wish for a mom instead. I’ll be very interested to see how that one works out.

AUTHOR’S AFTERWARD

This story is, to the best of my knowledge, a work of fiction.

Yes, I have an adopted son. Yes, his name is Dennis. No, he is not a Martian.

I asked him if he was. He said he wasn’t. Then he came over and whispered in my ear, “I said no because we’re not supposed to tell.”

MELODIES OF THE HEART

Michael F. Flynn

Some human problems are far from universal—and sometimes they’re complementary. . . .

I have never been to visit in the gardens of my youth. They are dim and faded memories, brittle with time: A small river town stretched across stony bluffs and hills. Cliffside stairs switchbacking to a downtown of marvels and magical stores. A little frame house nestled in a spot of green, with marigolds tracing its bounds. Men wore hats. Cars gleamed with chrome and sported tail-fins enough to take flight. Grown-ups were very tall and mysterious. Sometimes, if you were good, they gave you a nickel, which you could rush to the corner grocery and buy red hot dollars and jawbreakers and licorice whips.

I don’t remember the music, though. I know I should; but I don’t. I even know what the tunes must have been; I’ve heard them often enough on Classic Rock and Golden Oldy shows. But that is now; my memories are silent.

I don’t go back; I have never gone back. The town would all be all different—grimier and dirtier and twenty years more run down. The house I grew up in was sold, and then sold again. Strangers live there now. The cliffside stairs have fallen into disrepair, and half the downtown stores are boarded up and silent. The corner groceries are gone, and a nickel won’t buy you squat. Grown-ups are not so tall.

They are still a mystery, though. Some things never change.

The music is dreamy,

It’s peaches and creamy,

Oh! don’t let my feet touch the ground . . .

I remember her as I always remember her: sitting against the wall in the garden sunshine, eyes closed, humming to herself.

The first time I saw Mae Holloway was my first day at Sunny Dale. On a tour of the grounds, before being shown to my office, the director pointed out a shrunken and bent old woman shrouded in a shapeless, pale-hued gown. “Our Oldest Resident.” I smiled and acted as if I cared. What was she to me? Nothing, then.

The resident doctor program was new then. A conservative looking for a penny to pinch and a liberal looking for a middle-class professional to kick had gotten drunk together one night and come up with the notion that, if you misunderstood the tax code, your professional services could be extorted by the state. My sentence was to provide on-site medical care at the Home three days a week. Dr. Khan, who kept an office five miles away, remained the “primary care provider.”

The Home had set aside a little room that I could use for a clinic. I had a metal desk, an old battered filing cabinet, a chair with a bad caster that caused the wheel to seize up—as if there were a Rule that the furniture there be as old and as worn as the inhabitants. For supplies, I had the usual medicines for aches and pains. Some digitalis. Ointments of one sort or another. Splints and bandages. Not much else. The residents were not ill, only old and tired. First aid and mortuaries covered most of their medical needs.

The second time I saw Mae Holloway was later that same first day. The knock on the door was so light and tentative that at first I was unsure I had heard it. I paused, glanced at the door, then bent again over my medical journal. A moment later, the knock came again. Loud! As if someone had attacked the door with a hammer. I turned the journal down open to the page I had been reading and called out an invitation.

The door opened and I waited patiently while she shuffled across the room. Hobble, hobble, hobble. You would think old folks would move faster. It wasn’t as though they had a lot of time to waste.

When she had settled into the hard plastic seat opposite my desk, she leaned forward, cupping both her hands over the knob of an old blackthorn walking stick. Her face was as wrinkled as that East Tennessee hill country she had once called home. “You know,” she said—loudly, as the slightly deaf often do, “you oughtn’t leave your door shut like that. Folks see it, they think you have someone in here, so they jes’ mosey on.”

That notion had been in the back of my mind, too. I had thought to use this time to keep up with my professional reading. “What may I do for you, Mrs. Holloway?” I said.

She looked away momentarily. “I think—” Her jaw worked. She took a breath. “I think I am going insane.”

I stared at her for a moment. Just my luck. A nut case right off the bat. Then I nodded. “I see. And why do you say that?”

“I hear music. In my head.”

“Music?”

“Yes. You know. Like this.” And she hummed a few bars of a nondescript tune.

“I see—”

“That was One O’Clock Jump!” she said, nearly shouting now. “I used to listen to Benny Goodman’s band on Let’s Dance! Of course, I was younger then!”

“I’m sure you were.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘I’m sure you were’ !” I shouted at her across the desk.

“Oh. Yes,” she said in a slightly softer voice. “I’m sorry, but it’s sometimes hard for me to hear over the music. It grows loud, then soft.” The old woman puckered her face and her eyes drifted, becoming distanced. “Right now, it’sKing Porter. A few minutes ago it was—”

“Yes, I’m sure,” I said. Old folks are slow and rambling and forgetful; a trial to talk with. I rose, hooking my stethoscope into my ears, and circled the desk. Might as well get it over with. Mrs. Holloway, recognizing the routine, unfastened the top buttons of her gown.

Old folks have a certain smell to them, like babies; only not so pleasant. It is a sour, dusty smell, like an attic in the summer heat. Their skin is dry, spotted parchment, repulsive to the touch. When I placed the diaphragm against her chest, she smiled nervously. “I don’t think you’ll hear my music that way,” she said.

“Of course not,” I told her. “Did you think I would?”

She rapped the floor with her walking stick. Once, very sharp. “I’m no child, Doctor Wilkes! I have not been a child for a long, long time; so, don’t treat me like one.” She waved her hand up and down her body. “How many children do you know who look like me?”

“Just one,” I snapped back. And instantly regretted the remark. There was no point in being rude; and it was none of her business anyway. “Tell me about your music,” I said, unhooking my stethoscope and stepping away.

She worked her lips and glared at me for a while before she made up her mind to cooperate. Finally, she looked down at the floor. “It was one, two nights ago,” she whispered. Her hands gripped her walking stick so tightly that the knuckles stood out large and white. She twisted it as if screwing it into the floor. “I dreamed I was dancing in the Roseland Ballroom, like I used to do years and years ago. Oh, I was once so light on my feet! I was dancing with Ben Wickham—he’s dead now, of course; but he was one smooth apple and sure knew how to pitch woo. The band was a swing band—I was a swinger, did you know?—and they were playing Goodman tunes. Sing, Sing, Sing. Stardust. But it was so loud, I woke up. I thought I was still dreaming for a while, because I could still hear the music. Then I got riled. I thought, who could be playing their radio so loud in the middle of the night? So I took myself down the hall, room by room, and listened at each door. But the music stayed the same, no matter where I went. That’s when I knowed . . .” She paused, swallowed hard, looked into the corner. “That’s when I knowed, knew, it was all in my head.”

I opened the sphygmomanometer on my desk. Mae Holloway was over a hundred years old, according to the Home’s director; well past her time to shuffle off. If her mind was playing tricks on her in her last years, well, that’s what old minds did. Yet, I had read of similar cases of “head” music. “There are several possibilities, Mrs. Holloway,” I said, speaking loudly and distinctly while I fastened the pressure cuff to her arm, “but the best bet is that the music really is all in your head.”

I smiled at the bon mot, but all the wire went out of her and she sagged shapelessly in her chair. Her right hand went to her forehead and squeezed. Her eyes twisted tight shut. “Oh, no,” she muttered. “Oh, dear God, no. It’s finally happened.”

Mossbacks have no sense of humor. “Please, Mrs. Holloway! I didn’t mean ‘in your head’ like that. I meant the fillings in your teeth. A pun. Fillings sometimes act like crystal radios and pick up broadcast signals, vibrating the small bones of the middle ear. You are most likely picking up a local radio station. Perhaps a dentist could . . .”

She looked up at me and her eyes burned. “That was a wicked joke to pull, boy. It was cruel.”

“I didn’t mean it that way—”

“And I know all about fillings and radios and such,” she snapped. “Will Hickey had that problem here five years ago. But that can’t be why I hear music.” And she extruded a ghastly set of false teeth.

“Well, then—”

“And what sort of radio station could it be? Swing tunes all the time, and only those that I know? Over and over, all night long, with no interruptions. No commercials. No announcements of song titles or performers.” She raised her free hand to block her ear, a futile gesture, because the music was on the other side.

On the other side of the ear . . .? I recalled certain case studies from medical school. Odd cases. “There are other possibilities,” I said. “Neurological problems . . .” I pumped the bulb and she winced as the cuff tightened. She lowered her hand slowly and looked at me.

“Neuro . . .?” Her voice trembled.

“Fossil memories,” I said.

She shook her head. “I ain’t—I’m not rememberin’. I’m hearin’. I know the difference.”

I let the air out of the cuff and unfastened it. “I will explain as simply as I can. Hearing occurs in the brain, not the ear. Sound waves vibrate certain bones in your middle ear. These vibrations are converted into neural impulses and conveyed to the auditory cortex by the eighth cranial nerve. It is the auditory cortex that creates ‘sound.’ If the nerve were connected to the brain’s olfactory region, instead, you would ‘smell’ music.”

She grunted. “Quite a bit of it smells, these days.”

Hah, hah. “The point is that the sensory cortices can be stimulated without external input. Severe migraines, for example, often cause people to ‘see’ visions or ‘hear’ voices. And sometimes the stimulus reactivates so-called ‘fossil’ memories, which your mind interprets as contemporary. That may be what you are experiencing.”

She looked a little to the side, not saying anything. I listened to her wheezy breath. Then she gave me a glance, quick, almost shy. “Then, you don’t think I’m . . . You know . . . Crazy?” Have you ever heard hope and fear fused into a single question? I don’t know. At her age, I think I might prefer a pleasant fantasy world over the dingy real one.

“It’s unlikely,” I told her. “Such people usually hear voices, not music. If you were going insane, you wouldn’t hear Benny Goodman tunes; you would hear Benny Goodman—probably giving you important instructions.”

A smile twitched her lips and she seemed calmer, though still uneasy. “It’s always been a bother to me,” she said quietly, looking past me, “the notion that I might be—well, you know. All my life, it seems, as far back as I can remember.”

Which was not that far, the director had told me that morning. “All your life. Why is that?”

She looked away and did not speak for a moment. When she did, she said, “I haven’t had no, any, headaches, doc. And I don’t have any now. If that’s what did it, how come I can still hear the music?”

If she did not want to talk about her fears, that was fine with me. I was no psychiatrist, anyway. “I can’t be sure without further tests, but a trigger event—possibly even a mild stroke—could have initiated the process.” I had been carefully observing her motor functions, but I could detect none of the slackness or slurring of the voice typical of severe hemiplegia. “Dr. Wing is the resident neurologist at the hospital,” I said. “I’ll consult with him.”

She looked suddenly alarmed, and shook her head. “No hospitals,” she said firmly. “Folks go to hospitals, they die.”

At her age, that was largely true. I sighed. “Perhaps at Khan’s clinic, then. There really are some tests we should run.”

That seemed to calm her somewhat, for she closed her eyes and her lips moved slightly.

“Have you experienced any loss of appetite, or episodes of drowsiness?” I asked. “Have you become irritable, forgetful, less alert?” Useless questions. What geezer did not have those symptoms? I would have to inquire among the staff to find out if there had been a recent change in her behavior.

And she wasn’t listening anymore. At least, not to me. “Thank you, Doctor Wilkes. I was so afraid . . . That music . . . But only a stroke, only a stroke. It’s such a relief. Thank you. Such a relief.”

A relief? Compared to madness, I suppose it was. She struggled to her feet, still babbling. When she left my office, hobbling once more over her walking stick, she was humming to herself again. I didn’t know the tune.

Even though we’re drifting down life’s stream apart,

Your face I still can see in dream’s domain;

I know that it would ease my breaking heart

To hold you in my arms just once again

It was dark when I arrived home. As I turned into the driveway, I hit the dashboard remote, and the garage door rose up like a welcoming lover. I slid into the left-hand slot without slowing, easing the Lincoln to a halt just as the tennis ball, hanging by a string from the ceiling, touched the windshield. Brenda never understood that. Brenda always came to a complete stop in the driveway before raising the garage door.

I could see without looking that I had beaten her home again. And they said doctors kept long hours . . . When I stepped from the car, I turned my back on the empty slot.

I stood for some moments at the door to the kitchen, jiggling the car keys in my hand. Then, instead of entering the house, I turned and left the garage through the back-yard door. I had seen the second-story light on as I came down the street. Deirdre’s room. Tonight, for some reason, I couldn’t face going inside just yet.

The back yard was a gloom of emerald and jade. The house blocked the glare of the street lamps, conceding just enough light to tease shape from shadow. I walked slowly through the damp grass toward the back of the lot. Glowing clouds undulated in the water of the swimming pool, as if the ground had opened up and swallowed the night sky. Only a few stars poked through the overcast. Polaris? Sirius? I had no way of knowing. I doubted that half a dozen people in the township knew the stars by name; or perhaps even that they had names. We have become strangers to our skies.

At the back of the lot, the property met a patch of woodland—a bit of unofficial greenbelt, undeveloped because it was inaccessible from the road. Squirrels lived there, and blue jays and cardinals. And possum and skunk, too. I listened to the rustle of the night dwellers passing through the carpet of dead leaves. Through the trees I could make out the lights of the house opposite. Distant music and muffled voices. Henry and Barbara Carter were throwing a party.

That damned old woman . . . Damn all of them. Shambling, crackling, brittle, dried-out old husks, clinging fingernail-tight to what was left of life . . .

I jammed my hands in my pockets and stood there. For how long, I do not know. It might have been five minutes or half an hour. Finally the light on the second floor went out. Then I turned back to the house and re-entered through the garage. The right-hand stall was still empty.

Consuela sat at the kitchen table near the French doors, cradling a ceramic mug shaped like an Olmec head. Half the live-in nurses in the country are Latin; and half of those are named Consuela. The odor of cocoa filled the room, and the steam from the cup wreathed her broad, flat face, lending it a sheen. More Indio than Ladino, her complexion contrasted starkly with her nurse’s whites. Her jet black hair was pulled severely back, and was held in place with a plain, wooden pin.

“Good evening, Nurse,” I said. “Is Dee-dee down for the night?”

“Yes, Doctor. She is.”

I glanced up at the ceiling. “I usually tuck her in.”

She gave me an odd look. “Yes, you do.”

“Well. I was running a little late today. Did she miss me?”

Consuela looked through the French doors at the back yard. “She did.”

“I’ll make it up to her tomorrow.”

She nodded. “I’m sure she would like that.”

I shed my coat and carried it to the hall closet. A dim night-light glowed at the top of the stairwell. “Has Mrs. Wilkes called?”

“An hour ago.” Consuela’s voice drifted down the hallway from the kitchen. “She has a big case to prepare for tomorrow. She will be late.”

I hung the coat on the closet rack and stood quietly still for a moment before closing the door. Another big case. I studied the stairs to the upper floor. Brenda had begun getting the big cases when Deirdre was eighteen months and alopecia had set in. Brenda never tucked Dee-dee into bed after that.

Consuela was washing her cup at the sink when I returned to the kitchen. She was short and dark and stocky. Not quite chubby, but with a roundness that scorned New York and Paris fashion. I rummaged in the freezer for a frozen dinner. Brenda had picked Consuela from among a dozen applicants. Brenda was tall and thin and blonde.

I put the dinner in the microwave and started the radiation. “I met an interesting woman today,” I said.

Consuela dried her cup and hung it on the rack. “All women are interesting,” she said.

“This one hears music in her head.” I saw how that piqued her interest.

“We all do,” she said, half-turned to go.

I carried my microwaved meal and sat at the table. “Not like this. Not like hearing a radio at top volume.”

She hesitated a moment longer; then she shrugged and sat across the table from me. “Tell me of this woman.”

I moved the macaroni and cheese around on my plate. “I spoke with Dr. Wing over the car phone. He believes it may be a case of ‘incontinent nostalgia,’ or Jackson’s Syndrome.”

I explained how trauma to the temporal lobe sometimes caused spontaneous upwellings of memory, often accompanied by “dreamy states” and feelings of profound and poignant joy. Oliver Sacks had written about it in one of his best sellers. “Shostakovich had a splinter in his left temporal lobe,” I said. “When he cocked his head, he heard melodies. And there have been other cases. Stephen Foster, perhaps.” I took a bite of my meal. “Odd, isn’t it, how often the memories are musical.”

Consuela nodded. “Sometimes the music is enough.”

“Other memories may follow, though.”

“Sometimes the music is enough,” she repeated enigmatically.

“It should make the old lady happy, at least.”

Consuela gave me a curious look. “Why should it make her happy?” she asked.

“She has forgotten her early years completely. This condition may help her remember.” An old lady reliving her childhood. Suddenly there was bitterness in my mouth. I dropped my fork into the serving tray.

Consuela shook her head. “Why should it make her happy?” she asked again.

That little bird knew lots of things,

It did, upon my word . . .

The universe balances. For every Consuela Montejo there is a Noor Khan.

Dr. Noor Khan was a crane, all bones and joints. She was tall, almost as tall as I, but thin to the point of gauntness. She cocked her head habitually from side to side. That, the bulging eyes, and the hooked nose accentuated her bird-like appearance. A good run, a flapping of the arms, and she might take squawking flight—and perhaps appear more graceful.

“Mae Holloway. Oh, my, yes. She is a feisty one, is she not?” Khan rooted in her filing cabinet, her head bobbing as she talked. “Does she have a problem?”

“Incontinent nostalgia, it’s sometimes called,” I said. “She is experiencing spontaneous, musical recollections, possibly triggered by a mild stroke to the temporal lobes.” I told her about the music and Wing’s theories.

She bobbed her head. “Curious. Like déjà vu, only different.” Then, more sternly. “If she has had a stroke, even a mild one, I must see her at once.”

“I’ve told her that, but she’s stubborn. I thought since you knew her better . . .”

Noor Khan sighed. “Yes. Well, the older we grow, the more set in our ways we become. Mae must be set in concrete.”

It was a joke and I gave it a thin smile. The older we grow . . .

The file she finally pulled was a thick one. I took the folder from her and carried it to her desk. I had nothing in particular in mind, just a review of Holloway’s medical history. I began paging through the records. In addition to Dr. Khan’s notes, there were copies of records from other doctors. I looked up at Khan. “Don’t you have patients waiting?”

She raised an eyebrow. “My office hours start at ten, so I have no patients at the moment. You need not worry that I am neglecting them.”

If it was a reproof, it was a mild one, and couched in face-saving Oriental terms. I hate it when people watch me read. I always feel as if they were reading over my shoulder. I wanted to tell Khan that I would call her if I needed her; but it was, after all, her office and I was sitting at her desk, so I don’t know what I expected her to do. “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers.”

Holloway was in unusually good health for a woman her age. Her bones had grown brittle and her eyes nearsighted—but no glaucoma; and very little osteoporosis. She had gotten a hearing aid at an age when most people were already either stone deaf or stone dead. Clinical evidence showed that she had once given birth, and that an anciently broken leg had not healed entirely straight. What right had she to enjoy such good health?

Khan had been on the phone. “Mae has agreed to come in,” she told me as she hung up. “I will send the van to pick her up on Tuesday. I wish I could do a CAT scan here. I would hate to force her into hospital.”

“It’s a waste, anyway,” I muttered.

“What?”

I clamped my jaw shut. All that high technology, and for what? To add a few miserable months to lives already years too long? How many dollars per day of life was that? How much of it was productively returned? That governor, years ago. What was his name? Lamm? He said that the old had a duty to die and make room for the young. “Nothing,” I said.

“What is wrong?” asked Khan.

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

I turned my attention to the folder and squinted at the spidery, illegible handwriting on the oldest record: 1962, if the date was really what it looked like. Why did so many doctors have poor handwriting? Holloway’s estimated age looked more like an 85 than a 65. I waved the sheet of stationery at her. “Look at the handwriting on this,” I complained. “It’s like reading Sanskrit.”

Khan took the letter. “I can read Sanskrit, a little,” she said with a smile. “It’s Doctor Bench’s memo, isn’t it? Yes, I thought so. I found it when I assumed Dr. Rosenblum’s practice a few years ago. Dr. Bench promised he would send Mrs. Holloway’s older records, but he never did, so Howard had to start a medical history almost from scratch, with only this capsule summary.”

I took the sheet back from her. “Why didn’t Bench follow through?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? He put it off. Then one of those California brush fires destroyed his office. Medically, Mae is a blank before 1962.”

Just like her mind, I thought. Just like her mind.

For the joy of eye and ear

For the heart and mind’s delight

For the mystic harmony

Linking sense to sound and sight . . .

The third time I saw Mae Holloway, she was waiting by the clinic door when I arrived to open it. Eyes closed, propped against the wall by her walking stick, she hummed an obscure melody. “Good morning, Mrs. Holloway,” I said. “Feeling better today?”

She opened her eyes and squeezed her face into a ghastly pucker. “Consarn music kept me awake again last night.”

I gave her a pleasant smile. “Too bad you don’t hear Easy Listening.” I stepped through the door ahead of her. I heard her cane tap-tap-tapping behind me and wondered if a practiced ear could identify an oldster by her distinctive cane tap. I could imagine Tonto, ear pressed to the ground. “Many geezer come this way, kemo sabe.”

Snapping open my briefcase, I extracted my journals and stacked them on the desk. Mae lowered herself into the visitor’s chair. “Jimmy Kovacs will be coming in to see you later today. He threw his back out again.”

I opened the issue of the Brain that Dr. Wing had lent me. “Never throw anything out that you might need again later,” I said, running my eye down the table of contents.

“You do study on those books, doctor.”

“I like to keep up on things.”

I flipped the journal open to the article I had been seeking and began to read. After a few minutes, she spoke again. “If you spent half the time studying on people as you do studying on books, you’d be better at doctorin’.”

I looked up scowling. Who was she to judge? A bent-up, shriveled old woman who had seen more years than she had a right to. “The body is an intricate machine,” I told her. “The more thoroughly I understand its mechanisms, the better able I am to repair it.”

“A machine,” she repeated.

“Like an automobile.”

“And you’re jest an auto mechanic.” She shook her head.

I smiled, but without humor. “Yes, I am. Maybe that’s less glamorous than being a godlike healer, but I think it’s closer to the truth.” An auto mechanic. And some cars were old jalopies destined for the junk heap; so why put more work into them? I did not tell her that. And others were not built right to begin with. I did not tell her that, either. It was a cold vision, but in its way, comforting. Helplessness is greater solace than failure.

Mae grunted. “Mostly milk sours ’cause it’s old.”

I scowled again. More hillbilly philosophy? Or simply an addled mind unable to hold to a topic? “Does it,” I said.

She studied me for a long while without speaking. Finally, she shook her head. “Most car accidents are caused by the driver.”

“I’ll pass that along to the National Transportation Safety Board.”

“What I mean is, you might pay as much attention to the driver as to the automobile.”

I sighed and laid the journal aside. “I take it that you want to tell me what is playing on your personal Top 40 today.”

She snorted, but I could see that she really did. I leaned back in my chair and linked my hands behind my head. “So, tell me, Mrs. Holloway, what is ‘shaking’ ?”

She made fish faces with her lips. Mentally, I had dubbed her Granny Guppy when she did that. It was as if she had to flex her lips first to ready them for the arduous task of flapping.

“Does Your Mother Know You’re Out, Cecelia?”

“What?” It took a moment. Then I realized that it must have been a song title. Some popular ditty now thankfully forgotten by everyone save this one old lady. “Was that a favorite song of yours?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Oh, mercy, no; but there was a year when you couldn’t hardly avoid it.”

“I see.”

“And, let’s see . . .” She stopped and cocked her head. The Listening Look, I called it. “Now it’s The Red, Red Robin—”

“Comes bob-bob-bobbing along?”

“Yes, that’s the one. And already today I’ve heard Don’t Bring Lulu and Side by Side and Kitten on the Keys and Bye-bye Blackbird.” She made a pout with her lips. “I do wish the songs would play out entirely.”

“You told me they weren’t your favorite songs.”

“Some are, some aren’t. They’re just songs I once heard. Sometimes they remind me of things. Sometimes it seems as if they almost remind me of things. Things long forgotten, but waiting for me, just around a corner somewhere.” She shook herself suddenly. “Tin Pan Alley wasn’t my favorite, though,” she went on. “I was a sheba. I went for the wild stuff. The Charleston; the Black Bottom. All those side kicks . . . I was a little old for that, but . . . Those were wild days, I tell you. Hip flasks and stockings rolled down and toss away the corset.” She gave me a wink.

This . . . prune had gone for the wild stuff? Though, grant her, she had had her youth once. It didn’t seem fair that she should have it twice. “Sheba?” I asked.

“A sheba,” she said. “A flapper. The men were sheiks. Because of that . . . What was his name?” She tapped her cane staccato on the floor. “Valentino, that was it. Valentino. Oh, those eyes of his! All the younger girls dreamed about having him; and I wouldn’t have minded one bit, myself. He had It.”

“It?”

“It. Valentino drove the girls wild, he did. And a few boys, too. Clara Bow had It, too.”

“Sex appeal?”

“Pshaw. Sex appeal is for snugglepups. A gal didn’t have It unless both sexes felt something. Women, too. Women were coming out back then. We could smoke, pet, put a bun on if we wanted to—least, ’til the dries put on the kabosh. We had the vote. Why we even had a governor, back in Wyoming, where I once lived. Nellie Taylor Ross. I met her once, did I tell you? Why I remember—”

Her sudden silence piqued me. “You remember what?”

“Doc?” Her voice quavered and her eyes looked right past me, wide as tunnels.

“What is it?”

“Doc? I can see ’em. Plain as day.”

“See whom, Mrs. Holloway?” Was the old biddy having a seizure right there in my office?

She looked to her left, then her right. “We’re sitting in the gallery,” she announced. “All of us wearing pants, too, ’stead o’ dresses. And down there . . . Down there . . .” She aimed a shaking finger at a point somewhere below my desk. “That’s Alice with the gavel. Law’s sake! They’re ghosts, Doc. They’re ghosts all around me!”

“Mrs. Holloway,” I said. “Mrs. Holloway, close your eyes.”

She turned to me. “What?”

“Close your eyes.”

She did. “I can still see ’em,” she said, with a wonder that was close to terror. “I can still see ’em. Like my eyes were still open.” She raised a shaking hand to her mouth. Her ragged breath slowly calmed and, more quietly, she repeated, “I can still see ’em.” A heartbeat went by, then she sighed. “They’re fading, now,” she said. “Fading.” Finally, she opened her eyes. She looked troubled. “Doc, what happened to me? Was it a hallucy-nation?”

I leaned back in my chair and folded my hands under my chin. “Not quite. Simply a non-musical memory.”

“But . . . It was so real, like I done traveled back in time.”

“You were here the whole time,” I assured her with a grin.

She struck the floor with her cane. “I know that. I could see you just as plain as I could see Alice and the others.”

I sighed. Her sense of humor had dried out along with the rest of her. “Patients with your condition sometimes fall into ‘dreamy states,’ ” I explained. “They see or hear their present and their remembered surroundings simultaneously, like a film that has been double-exposed. Hughlings Jackson described the symptom in 1880. He called it a ‘doubling of consciousness.’ ” I smiled and tapped the journal Wing had given me. “Comes from studying on books,” I said.

But she wasn’t paying me attention. “I remember it all so clearly now. I’d forgotten. Alice Robertson of Oklahoma was the first woman to preside over the House of Representatives. June 20, 1921, it was. Temporary Speaker. Oh, those were a fine fifteen minutes, I tell you.” She sighed and shook her head. “I wonder,” she said. “I wonder if I might remember my Ma and Pa and my little brother. Zach . . .? Was that his name? It’s always been a trouble to me that I’ve forgotten. It don’t seem right to forget your own kin.”

An inverse square law, I suppose. Memories dim and blur with age, their strength depending on distance and mass. Too many of Mae’s memories were too distant. They had passed beyond the horizon of her mind, and had faded like an old photograph left too long in the sun. And yet sometimes, near the end, like ashes collapsing in a dying fire, the past can become brighter than the present.

“No,” I said. “It don’t seem right.”

“And Mister . . . Haven’t thought on that man in donkey’s years,” she said. “Green Holloway was my man. I always called him Mister. He called me his Lorena.”

“Lorena?”

Mae shrugged. “I don’t remember why. There was a song . . . He took the name from that. It was real popular, so I suppose I’ll recollect it bye and bye. He was an older man, was Mister. I remember him striding up through Black’s hell; gray and grizzled, but strong as splo. All brass and buckles in his state militia uniform. Company H, 5th Tennessee. Just that one scene has stayed with me all my life, like an old brown photograph. Dear Lord, but that man had arms like cooper’s bands. I can close my eyes and feel them around me sometimes, even today.” She shivered and looked down.

“Splo?” I prompted.

“Splo,” she repeated in a distracted voice. Then, more strongly, as if shoving some memory aside, “Angel teat. We called it apple john back then. Mister kept a still out behind the joe. Whenever he run off a batch, he’d invite the spear-side over and we’d all get screwed.”

I bet. Whatever she had said. “Apple john was moonshine?” High tail it, Luke. The revenooers are a-coming. What kind of Barney Google life had she led up in those Tennessee hills? “So when you say you got screwed, you mean you got drunk, not, uh . . .”

Mae sucked in her lips and gnawed on them. “It was good whilst we were together,” she said at last. “Right good.” Her lips thinned. “But Mister, he lit a shuck on me, just like all the others.” She gave me a look, half angry, half wary; and I could almost see the shutter come down behind her eyes. “Ain’t no use getting close to nobody,” she said. “They’re always gone when you need them. Why, I ain’t, haven’t seen Little Zach nigh unto . . .” She looked momentarily confused. “Not for years and years. I loved that boy like he was more’n a brother; but he yondered off and never come back.” She creaked to her feet. “So, I’ll just twenty-three skidoo, Jack. You got things to do; so do I.”

I watched her go, thinking she was right about one thing. Old milk does go sour.

There will I find a settled rest

While others go and come.

No more a stranger or a guest

But like a child at home.

Brenda’s silver Beemer was parked in the garage when I got home. I pulled up beside it and contemplated its shiny perfection as I turned my engine off. Brenda was home. How long had it been, now? Three weeks? Four? It was hard to remember. Leave early; back late. That was our life. A quick peck in the morning and no-time-for-breakfast-dear. Tiptoes late at night; and the sheets rustle and the mattress sags; and it was hardly enough even to ruffle your sleep. Always on the run; always working late. One of us would have to slow down, or we might never meet at all.

My first thought was that I might give Consuela the night off. It had been so long since Brenda and I had been alone together. My second thought was that she had gotten in trouble at the office and had lost her job.

Doctors make good money. Lawyers make good money. Doctors married to lawyers make very good money. It was not enough.

“Brenda?” I called as I entered the kitchen from the garage. “I’m home!” There was no one in the kitchen; though something tangy with orange and sage was baking in the oven. “Brenda?” I called again as I reached the hall closet.

A squeal from upstairs. “Daddy’s home!”

I hung up my overcoat. “Hello, Dee-dee. Is Mommy with you?” Unlikely, but possible. Stranger things have happened.

“No.” Followed by a long silence. “Connie is telling me a story, about a mule and an ox.”

Another silence; then footsteps on the stairs. Consuela looked at me over the banister as she descended.

“The mule and the ox?” I said.

“Nothing,” she replied curtly. “An old Mayan folk tale.”

“Where’s Brenda?” I asked her. “I know she’s home; her car is in the garage.” Maybe she was in the back yard; by the pool or in the woods.

No, she didn’t like the woods; she was afraid of deer ticks.

“Mrs. Wilkes came home early,” Consuela said, “and packed a bag—”

Mentally, I froze. Not this. Not now. Without Brenda’s income . . . “Packed a bag? Why?”

“She said she must go to Washington for a few days, to assist in an argument before the Supreme Court.”

“Oh.” Sudden relief coupled with sudden irritation. She could have phoned. At the Home. In my car. I showed Consuela my teeth. “The Supreme Court, you say. Well. That’s quite a feather in her cap.”

“Were she an Indio, a feather in the cap might mean something.”

“Consuela. A joke? Did Brenda say when she would be back?”

Consuela hesitated, then shook her head. “She came home; packed her bag; gave me instructions. When the car arrived, she left.”

And never said good-bye to Dee-dee. Maybe a wave from the doorway, a crueler good-bye than none at all. “What sort of instructions?” That wasn’t the question I wanted to ask. I wanted to ask whose car had picked her up. Whom she was assisting in Washington? Walther Crowe, the steel-eyed senior partner with the smooth, European mannerisms? FitzPatrick, the young comer who figured so often on the society pages? But Consuela would not know; or, if she did, she would not say. There were some places where an outsider did not deliberately set herself.

“The sort of instructions,” she replied, “that are unnecessary to give a professional. But they were only to let me know that I was her employee.”

“You’re angry.” I received no answer. Then I asked, “Have you and Dee-dee eaten yet?”

“No.” A short answer, not quite a retort.

“I didn’t pull rank on you. Brenda did.”

She shrugged and looked up at me with her head cocked to the side. “You are a doctor; I am a nurse. We have a professional relationship. Mrs. Wilkes is only an employer.”

She was in a bad mood. I had never seen her angry before. I wondered what patronizing tone Brenda had used with her. I always made the effort to treat Consuela as an equal; but Brenda seldom did. Sometimes I thought Brenda was half-afraid of our Deirdre’s nurse; though for what reason, I could not say. I glanced at the overcoat in the closet. “Would you and Dee-dee like to go out to eat?”

She gave me a thoughtful look; then shook her head. “She will not leave the house.”

I glanced at the stairs. “No, she’ll not budge, will she?” It was an old argument, never won. “She can play outside. She can go to school with the other children. There is no medical reason to stay in her—”

“There is something wrong with her heart.”

“No, it’s too soon for—”

“There is something wrong with her heart,” she repeated.

“Oh.” I looked away. “But . . . We’ll eat in the dining room today. The three of us. Whatever that is you have in the oven. I’ll set the table with the good dinnerware.”

“A special occasion?”

I shook my head. “No. Only maybe we each have a reason to be unhappy just now.” I wondered if Brenda had left a message in the bedroom. Some hint as to when she’d return. I headed toward the dining room.

“The ox was weary of plowing,” Consuela said.

“Eh?” I turned and looked back at her. “What was that?”

“The ox was weary of plowing. All day, up the field and down, while the farmer cracked the whip behind him. Each night in the barn, when the ox complained, the mule would laugh. ‘If you detest the plowing so much, why do it?’ ‘It is my job, señor mule,’ the ox would reply. ‘Then do it and don’t complain. Otherwise, refuse. Go on strike.’ The ox thought about this and, several days later, when the farmer came to him with the harness, the ox would not budge. ‘What is wrong, señor ox?’ the farmer asked him. ‘I am on strike,’ the ox replied. ‘All day I plow with no rest. I deserve a rest.’ The farmer nodded. ‘There is justice in what you say. You have worked hard. Yet the fields must be plowed before the rains come.’ And so he hitched the mule to the plow and cracked the whip over him and worked him for many weeks until the plowing was done.”

Consuela stopped and with a slight gesture of the head turned for the kitchen.

Although entitled to two evenings a week off, Consuela seldom took them, preferring the solitude of her own room. She lived there quietly, usually with the hall door closed; always with the connecting door to Dee-dee’s room open. Once a month, she sent a check to Guatemala. She read books. Sometimes she played softly on a sort of flute: weird, serpentine melodies that she had brought with her from the jungle. More than once, the strange notes had caused Brenda to stop whatever she was doing, whether mending or reading law or even making love, and listen with her head cocked until the music stopped. Then she would shiver slightly, and resume whatever she had been doing as though nothing had happened.

Consuela had furnished her room with Meso-American bric-a-brac. Colorful, twisty things. Statuettes, wall hangings, a window treatment. Squat little figurines with secretive, knowing smiles. A garland of fabric flowers. An obsidian carving that suggested a panther in mid-leap. Brenda found it all vaguely disturbing, as if she expected chittering monkeys swinging from the bookshelves and curtains; as if Consuela had brought a part of the jungle with her into Brenda’s clear, ordered, rational world. It wasn’t proper, at all. It was somehow out of control.

“Did you like having dinner downstairs today?” I asked Dee-dee as I studied Consuela’s room through the connecting door. The flute lay silent on Consuela’s dresser top. It was the kind you blew straight into, with two rows of holes, one for each hand.

“It was okay, I guess.” A weak voice, steady but faint.

I turned around. “Only okay?” There was an odd contrast here, a paradox. Although it was evening and Deirdre’s room was shrouded in darkness, Consuela’s room had seemed bright with rioting colors.

“Did I leave any toys downstairs?” A worried voice in the darkness. Anxious.

“No, I checked.” I resolved to check again, just in case we had overlooked something that had rolled under the sofa. Brenda detested disorder. She did not like finding things out of place.

“Mommy won’t mind, will she? That I ate downstairs.”

I turned. “Not if we don’t tell her. Mommy will be at the Supreme Court for a few days.”

Dee-dee made a sound in her throat. No sorrow, no joy. Just acknowledgment. Mommy might never come home at all for all the difference it made in Dee-dee’s life. “Ready to be tucked in?”

Dee-dee grinned a delicious smile and snuggled deeper into the sheets. It was a heartbreaking smile. I gave her back the best one I could muster, and took a long, slow step toward her bed. She shrieked and ducked under the covers. I waited until she peeked out and took another step. It was a game we played, every move as encrusted with ritual as a Roman Mass.

Hutchinson-Gilford Syndrome. Dee-dee’s smile was snaggle-toothed. Her hair, sparse; her skin, thin and yellow.

Manifestations: Alopecia, onset at birth to eighteen months, with degeneration of hair follicles. Thin skin. Hypoplasia of the nails . . . I had read the entry in Smith’s over and over, looking for the one item I had missed, the loophole I had overlooked. It was committed to memory now; like a mantra. Periarticular fibrosis; stiff or partially flexed prominent joints. Skeletal hypoplasia, dysphasia and degeneration.

Dee-dee had weighed 2.7 kilos at birth. Her fontanel had ossified late, but the slowness of her growth had not become apparent until seven months. She lagged the normal growth charts by one-third. When she lost hair, it did not grow back. Her skin had brownish-yellow “liver” spots.

Natural history: Deficit of growth becomes severe after one year. The tendency to fatigue easily may limit participation in childhood activities. Intelligence and brain development are unimpaired.

Deirdre Wilkes was an alert, active mind trapped in a body aging far too quickly. A shrunken little gnome of a ten-year-old. Etiology: Unknown. I hugged her and kissed her on the cheek. Then I tucked the sheets tightly under the mattress.

Prognosis: The life span is shortened by relentless arterial atheromatosis. Death usually occurs at puberty.

There were no papers delivered on Hutchinson-Gilford that I had not crawled through word after word, searching for the slightest whisper of a breakthrough. Some sign along the horizon of research. But there were no hints. There were no loopholes.

Prognosis: death.

There were no exceptions.

Deirdre could smile because she was only a child and could not comprehend what was happening to her body. She knew she would have to “go away” someday, but she didn’t know what that really meant.

Smiling was the hardest part of the game.

Come along, Josephine, In my flying machine.

We’ll go up in the air . . .

How can I explain the feelings of dread and depression that enveloped me every time I entered Sunny Dale? I was surrounded by ancients. Bent, gray, hobbling creatures forever muttering over events long forgotten or families never seen. And always repeating their statements, always repeating their statements, as if it were I who were hard of hearing and not they. The Home was a waiting room for Death. Waiting and waiting, until they had done with waiting. Here is where the yellowed skin and the liver spots belonged. Here! Not on the frame of a ten-year-old.

The fourth time I saw Mae Holloway, she crept up behind me as I opened the door to the clinic. “Morning, doc,” I heard her say.

“Good morning, Mrs. H.,” I replied without turning around. I opened the door and stepped through. Inevitably, she followed, humming. I wondered if this was going to become a daily ritual. She planted herself in the visitor’s chair. Somehow, it had become her own. “The show just ended,” she announced. “Oh, it was a peach.” She waved a hand at my desk. “Go on, set down. Make yourself pleasant.”

It was my own fault, really. I had shown an interest in her tiresome recollections, and now she felt she had to share everything with me, as if I were one of her batty, old cronies. No good deed goes unpunished. Perhaps I was the only one who put up with her.

But I did have a notion that could wring a little use out of my sentence. I could write a book about Mae Holloway and her musical memories. People were fascinated with how the mind worked; or rather with how it failed to work. Sacks had described similar cases of incontinent nostalgia in one of his books; and if he could make the best-seller lists with a collection of neurological case studies, why not I? With fame, came money; and the things money could buy.

But my book would have to be something new, something different; not just a retelling of the same neurological tales. The teleology, perhaps. Sacks had failed to discover any meaning to the music his patients had heard, any reasonwhy this tune or that was rememb-heard. If I kept a record, I might discover enough of a pattern to form the basis of a book. I rummaged in my desk drawer and took out a set of file cards that I had bought to make notes on my patients. Might as well get started. I poised my pen over a card. “What show was that?” I asked.

“Girl of the Golden West. David Belasco’s new stage play.” She shook her head. “I first seen it, oh, years and years ago, in Pittsburgh; before they made it a highfalutin’ opera. That final scene, where Dick Johnson is hiding in the attic, and his blood drips through the ceiling onto the sheriff . . . That was taken from real life, you know.”

“Was it.” I wrote Girl of the Golden West and doubling episode and made a note to look it up. Then I poised my pen over a fresh card. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your music, Mrs. Holloway. That is, if you don’t mind.”

She gave me a surprised glance and looked secretly pleased. She fussed with her gown and settled herself into her seat. “You may fire when ready, Gridley.”

“You are still hearing the music, aren’t you, Mrs. Holloway?”

“Well, the songs aren’t so loud as they were. They don’t keep me awake anymore; but if I concentrate, I can hear ’em.”

I made a note. “You’ve learned to filter them out, that’s all.”

“If You Talk in Your Sleep, Don’t Mention My Name.”

“What?”

“If You Talk in Your Sleep, Don’t Mention My Name. That was one of ’em. The tunes I been hearing. Go on, write that down. Songs were getting real speedy in those days. There was Mary Took the Calves to the Dairy Show andThis is No Place for a Minister’s Son. Heh-heh. The blues was all in a lather over ’em. That, and actor-folks actually kissing each other in the moving picture shows. They tried to get that banned. And the animal dances, too.”

“Animal dances?”

“Oh, there were a passel of ’em,” she said. “There was the kangaroo dip, the crab step, the fox trot, the fish walk, the bunny hug, the lame duck . . . I don’t remember them all.”

“The fox trot,” I offered. “I think people still dance that.”

Mae snorted. “All the fire’s out of it. You should have read what the preachers and the newspapers had to say about it back then. They sure were peeved; but the kids thought it was flossy. It was a way to get their parents’ goat. ‘Bug them,’ I guess you say now.”

“Kids? Isn’t the fox trot a ballroom dance for, well, you know—mature people?”

She made her sour lemon face. “Sure. Now. But today’s old folks were yesterday’s kids. And they still like the music they liked when they were young. Heh-heh. When you’re ninety or a hundred, sonny, you’ll be a-listening to that acid rock stuff and telling your grandkids what hell-raisers you used to be. And they won’t believe you, either. We tote the same bags with us all our lives, doc. The same interests; the same likes and dislikes. Those older’n us and those younger’n us, why, they have their own bags.” A sudden scowl, halfway between fright and puzzlement, passed across her face like the shadow of a cloud. Then she hunched her shoulders. “Me, I’ve got too many bags.”

She’d get no argument from me on that. “Have you heard any other songs?” I asked.

She folded her hands over the knob of her walking stick and rested her chin on them. “Let’s see . . . Yesterday, I heared, heard Waiting for the Robert E. Lee and A Perfect Day. Those were real popular, once. And lots of Cohan songs. ‘Oh, it was Mary, Mary, long before the fashion changed . . .’ And Rosie O’Grady. Then there was Memphis Blues. Young folks thought it was ‘hep.’ Even better than ragtime.”

She shook her head. “I never cottoned too well to those kids, though,” she said. “They remind me of the kids nowadays. A little too . . . What do they say now? ‘Close to the edge.’ Ran wild when they were young ’uns, they did. Hung around barbershops. Hawked papers as newsies. Worked the growler for their old man.”

I looked up from my notes. “Worked the growler?”

“Took the beer bucket to the saloon to get it filled. Imagine sending a child—even girls!—into a saloon! No wonder Carrie and the others wanted to close ’em up. Maybe folks my age were a little too stuck on ourselves, like the younger folks said; but at least we had principles. With us, it wasn’t all just to have a good time. We fought for things worth fighting for. Suffrage. Prohibition. Birth control. Oh, those were times, I tell you. Maggie, making those speeches about birth control and standing up there on the stage that one time with the tape over her mouth, because they wouldn’t let her talk. I helped her open that clinic of hers over in Brooklyn, though I never did care for her attitude about Jews and coloreds. Controlling ‘undesirables’ wasn’t the real reason for birth control, anyway.”

“Mrs. Holloway!”

She looked at me and laughed. “Now, don’t tell me your generation is shocked at such talk!”

“It’s not that. It’s . . .”

“That old folks wrangled over it, too? Well, folks aren’t born old. We were young, too; and as full of piss and vinegar as anyone else. I read Moral Physiology when it first come out; though Mister did try mightily to discourage me. And, later, there was The Unwelcomed Child. Doc, if men had babies, birth control would never have been a crime.”

Folks aren’t born old . . . I squared off my deck of index cards. “I suppose not.” My generation had been as strong as any for civil rights and feminism. Certainly stronger than the hard-edged cynics coming up behind us. It sounded as if Mae had had a similar generational experience. Though, that would put her in the generation before the hell-raising Lost Generation. What was it called? The Missionary Generation? Maybe she was older than she looked; though that hardly seemed possible. “Let’s get back to the songs—” I suggested.

“Yes, the songs,” she said. “The songs. Why, I recollect a man had a right good voice . . . Now what was his name . . .? A wonderful dancer, too.”

“Ben Wickham?” I suggested.

“No. No, Ben was later. This was out Pittsburgh way. Joe Paxton. That was it.” She tilted her head back. “He was a barnstormer, Joe was. He knew ’em all. Calbraith Rodgers, Glenn Curtiss, Pancho Barnes, even Wilbur Wright. Took me up oncet, through the Alleghenies. Oh, my, that was something, let me tell you. The wind in your face and the ground drifting by beneath you, and the golden sun peeking between the shoulders of the hills . . . And you felt you were dancing with the clouds.” She sighed, and the light in her eyes slowly faded. “But he was like all the rest.” Her face closed up; became hard. “I come on him one day packing his valise, and when I asked him why he was cutting out, all he would say was, ‘How old is Ann?’ ”

“What?”

She blinked and focused moistened eyes on me. Slowly, before they could even fall, her tears vanished into the sand of her soul. “Oh, that’s what everyone said back then. ‘How old is Ann?’ It meant ‘Who knows?’ Came from one of those brain teasers that ran in the New York Press. You know. ‘If Mary is twice as old as Ann was when Mary . . .’ And it goes through all sorts of contortions and ends up ‘How old is Ann?’ Most folks hadn’t the foggiest notion and didn’t care, so they started saying ‘How old is Ann?’ when they didn’t know the answer to something.” She pushed down on her walking stick and started to rise.

“Wait. I still have a few questions.”

“Well, I don’t have any more answers. Joe . . . Well, he turned out worthless in the end; but we had some high times together.” Then she sighed and looked off into the distance. “And he did take me flying, once, when flying was more than just a ride.”

As I was walking down the street, down the street,
down the street,

A handsome gal I chanced to meet. Oh, she was
fair to view.

Lovely Fan’, won’t you come out tonight, come out
tonight, come out tonight?

Lovely Fan’, won’t you come out tonight, and
dance by the light of the moon?

It was late in the evening—midnight, perhaps—and, dressed in housecoat and slippers, I was frowning over a legal pad and a few dozen index cards, a cup of cold coffee beside me on the kitchen table. I was surrounded by small, sourceless sounds. If you have been in a sleeping building at night, you know what I mean. Creaks and rustlings and the sighs of . . . What? Spirits? Air circulation vents? The soft groan of settling timbers. The breath of the wind against the windows. The staccato scritching of tiny night creatures dancing across the roof shingles. The distant rumble of a red-eye flight making its descent into the metropolitan area. Among such confused, muttering sounds, who can distinguish the pad of bare feet on the floor?

A gasp, and I turned.

I had never seen Consuela when she was not wearing nurse’s whites. Perhaps once or twice, bundled in a coat as she sought one of her rare nights out; but never in a red and yellow flowing flowered robe. Never with her black hair unfastened and sweeping around her like a raven-feather cape. She stood in the kitchen doorway, clenching the collar in her fist.

“Consuela,” I said.

“I—saw the light on. I thought you had already gone to sleep. So I—” Consuela flustered was a new sight, too. She turned to go. “I did not mean to disturb you.”

“No, no. Stay a while.” I laid my pen down and stretched. “I couldn’t get to sleep, so I came down here to work a while.” When she hesitated, I stood and pulled a chair out for her. She gave me a sidelong look, then bobbed her head once and took a seat. I wondered if she thought I might “try something.” Late at night; wife away; both of us in pajamas, thoughts of bed in our minds. Hell, I wondered if I might try something. Brenda had grown more distant each year since Deirdre’s birth.

But Consuela was not my type. She was too short, too wide, too dark. I studied her covertly while I handled her chair. Well, perhaps not “too.” And she did have a liquid grace to her, like a panther striding through the jungle. Brenda’s grace was of a different sort. Brenda was fireworks arcing and bursting across the night sky. You might get burnt, but never bitten.

“Would you like something to drink?” I asked when she had gotten settled. “Apple juice, orange juice.” Too late for coffee; and a liqueur would have been inappropriate.

“Orange juice would be fine, thank you,” she said.

I went to the refrigerator and removed the carafe. Like everyone else, we buy our OJ in wax-coated paperboard containers; but Brenda transferred the milk, the juices, and half a dozen other articles into carafes and canisters and other more appropriate receptacles. Most people shelved their groceries. We repackaged ours.

“Do you remember the old woman I told you about last week?”

“The one who hears music? Yes.”

I brought the glasses to the table. “She’s starting to remember other things, now.” I told her about Mae’s recollections, her consciousness doubling. “I’ve started to keep track of what she sees and hears,” I said, indicating the papers on the table. “And I’ve sent to the military archives to see if they could locate Green Holloway’s service records. Later this week, I plan to go into the City to check the census records at the National Archives.”

Consuela picked up the legal pad and glanced at it. “Why are you doing this thing?”

“For verification. I’m thinking I might write a book.”

She looked at me. “About Mrs. Holloway?”

“Yes. And I think I may have found an angle, too.” I pointed to the pad she held. “That is a list of the songs and events Holloway has rememb-heard.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Consuela read through the list. She shook her head. “You are looking for meaning in this?” Her voice held a twist of skepticism in it. For a moment, I saw how my activities might look from her perspective. Searching for meaning in the remembered songs of a half-senile old woman. What should that be called, senemancy? Melodimancy? What sort of auguries did High Priest Wilkes find, eviscerating this morning’s ditties?

“Not meaning,” I said. “Pattern. Explanation. Some way to make sense of what she is going through.”

Consuela gave me that blank look she liked to affect. “It may not make sense.”

“But it almost does.” I riffed the stack of index cards. Each card held information about a song Mae had heard. The composer, songwriter, performer; the date, the topic, the genre. Whether Mae had liked it or not. “The first time she came to me,” I said, “she was ‘rememb-hearing’ swing tunes from the 1930s. A few days later, it was music of the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ Then the jazz gave way to George M. Cohan and the ‘animal dance’ music of the Mauve Decade. Do you see? The songs keep coming from earlier in her life.”

Memphis Blues, 1912. A Perfect Day, 1910. Mary Took the Calves to the Dairy Show, 1909. Rosie O Grady, 1906. Songs my grandparents heard as children. “East side, west side, All around the town . . .” I remembered how Granny used to sit my brother and me on her lap, one on each knee, and rock us back and forth while she sang that. I paused and cocked my head, listening into the silence of the night.

But I could hear nothing. I could remember that she sang it; but I could not remember the singing.

“It is a voyage,” I said, loudly, to cover the silence. “A voyage of discovery up the stream of time.”

Consuela shook her head. “Rivers have rapids,” she said, “and falls.”

Hello, my baby, hello, my honey, hello, my ragtime gal . . .

Send me a kiss by wire,

Baby, my heart’s on fire.

Mae’s morning visits fell into a routine. She settled herself into her chair with an air of proprietorship and croaked out snatches of tunes while I wrote down what I could, recording the rest on a cheap pocket tape recorder I had purchased. She hummed The Maple Leaf Rag and Grace and Beauty and the St. Louis Tickle. I suffered through her renditions of My Gal Sal and The Rosary. (“A big hit,” she assured me, “for over twenty-five years.”) She rememb-heard the bawdy Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight (sounding grotesque on her ancient lips), the raggy You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon, But You’ve Done Broke Down, and the poignant Good-bye, Dolly Gray.

She frowned for a moment. “Or was that ‘Nellie Gray’ ?” Then she shrugged. “Those were happy songs, mostly,” she said. “Oh, they were such good songs back then. Not like today, all angry and shouting. Even the sad songs were sweet. Like Tell Them That You Saw Me or She’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage. And Mister taught me Lorena, once. I wish I could recollect that ’un. And Barbry Ellen. I learned me that ’un when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Pa told me it was the President’s favorite song. The old President, from when his Pappy fought in the War. I haven’t heard those yet. Or—” She cocked her head to the side. “Well, dad-blast it!”

“What’s wrong, Mrs. Holloway?”

“I’m starting to hear coon songs.”

“Coon songs!”

She shook her head. “Coon songs. They was—were—all the rage. Coon, Coon, Coon and All Coons Look Alike to Me and If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon. Some of them songs were writ by coloreds themselves, because they had to write what was popular if they wanted to make any money.”

“Mrs. Holloway . . .!”

“Never said I liked ’em,” she snapped back. “I met plenty of coloreds in my time, and there’s some good and some bad, just like any other folks. Will Biddle, he farmed two hollers over from my Pa when I was a sprout, and he worked as hard as any man-jack in the hills, and carried water for no man. My Pa said—My Pa . . .” She paused, frowned and shook her head. “Pa?”

“What is it?”

“Oh.”

“Mrs. Holloway?”

She spoke in a whisper, not looking at me, not looking at anything I could see. “I remember when my Pa died. Him a-laying on the bed, all wore out by life. Gray and wrinkled and toothless. And, dear Lord, how that ached me. I remember thinking how he’d been such a strong man. Such a strong man.” She sighed. “It’s an old apartment, and the wallpaper is peeling off’n the walls. There’s a big, dark water stain on one wall and the steam radiator is hissing like a cat.”

“You don’t remember where you were . . . are?” I asked, jotting a few quick notes.

She shook her head. “No. I’m humming In the Good Old Summertime. Or maybe the tune is just running through my head. Pa, he . . .” A tear formed in the corner of her eye. “He wants me to sing him the song.”

“The song? What song is that?”

“An old, old song he used to love. ‘Sing it to me one last time,’ he says. And I can’t sing at all because my throat’s clenched up so tight. But he asks me again, and . . . Those eyes of his! How I loved that old man.” Mae’s own eyes had glazed over as she lived the scene again in her mind. She reached out as if clasping another pair of hands in her own and croaked haltingly:

“I gaze on the moon as I tread the drear wild,

And feel that my mother now thinks of her child . . .

Be it ever so humble . . .”

She could not finish. For a time, she sobbed softly. Then she brushed her eye with her sleeve and looked past me. “I never knew, doc. I never knew at all what a blessing it was to forget.”

Come and sit by my side if you love me.

Do not hasten to bid me adieu,

But remember the bright Mohawk Valley

And the girl that has loved you so true.

Later that day, as I was leaving the Home, I noticed Mae sitting in the common room and paused a moment to eavesdrop. There were a handful of other residents mouldering in chairs and rockers; but Mae sat singing quietly to herself and I thought what the hell, and pulled out my pocket tape recorder and stepped up quietly beside her.

It was a patriotic hymn. America, the Beautiful. I’m sure you’ve heard it. Even I know the words to that one. Enough to know that Mae had them all wrong. Oh beautiful for halcyon skies? Above the enameled plain? And the choruses . . . The way Mae sang it, “God shed his grace for thee” sounded more like a plea than a statement.

America! America! God shed his grace for thee

Till selfish gain no longer stain The banner of the free!

The faulty recollection disturbed me. If Mae’s memories were unreliable, then what of my book? What if my whole rationale turned out wrong?

Her croakings died away and she opened her eyes and spotted me. “Heading home, doc?”

“It’s been a long day,” I said. There was no sign on her face of her earlier melancholy, except that maybe her cheeks sagged a little lower than before, her eyes gazed a little more sadly. She seemed older, somehow; if such a thing were possible.

She patted the chair next to her. “Hot foot it on over,” she said. “You’re just in time for the slapstick.”

She was obviously having another doubling episode and, in some odd way, I was being asked to participate. I looked at my watch, but decided that since our morning session had been cut short, I might as well make the time up now. My next visit was not until Friday. If I waited until then, these memories could be lost.

“Slapstick?” I asked, taking the seat she had offered.

“You never been to the Shows?” She tsk-ed and shook her head. “Well, Jee-whiskers. They been the place to go ever since Tony Pastor got rid of the cootchee-cootchee and cleaned up his acts. A young man can take his steady there now and make goo-goo eyes.” She nudged me with her elbow. “A fellow can be gay with his fairy up in the balcony.”

I pulled away from her. “I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t you want to be gay?” she asked.

“I should hope not! I have a wife, a dau . . .”

Mae laughed suddenly and capped a gnarled hand over her mouth. So help me, she blushed. “Oh, my goodness, me! I didn’t mean were you a cake-eater. I got all mixed up. I was sitting down front at the burly-Q and I was sitting here in the TV room with you. When we said, ‘be gay,’ we meant let your hair down and relax. And a ‘fairy’ was your girl friend, what they used to call a chicken when I was younger. All the boys wanted to be gay blades, with their starched collars and straw hats and spats. And their moustaches! You never saw such moustaches! Waxed and curled and barbered.” She chuckled to herself. “I was a regular daisy, myself.” She closed her eyes and leaned back.

“A regular daisy?”

“A daisy,” she repeated. “Like in the song. Gals was going out to work in them days. So they made a song about it. Now, let me see . . .” She pouted and stared closed-eyed at the sky. “How did that go?” She began to sing in a cracked, quavery voice.

“My daughter’s as fine a young girl as you’ll meet

In your travels day in and day out;

But she’s getting high-toned and she’s putting on airs

Since she has been working about . . .

When she comes home at night from her office,

She walks in with a swag like a fighter;

And she says to her ma, ‘Look at elegant me!’

Since my daughter plays on the typewriter.

She says she’s a ‘regular daisy,’

Uses slang ’til my poor heart is sore;

She now warbles snatches from operas

Where she used to sing ‘Peggy O Moore.’

Now the red on her nails looks ignited;

She’s bleached her hair ’til it’s lighter.

Now perhaps I should always be mad at the man

That taught her to play the typewriter.

She cries in her sleep, ‘Your letter’s to hand.’

She calls her old father, ‘esquire’;

And the neighbors they shout

When my daughter turns out,

‘There goes Bridget Typewriter Maguire.’ ”

When Mae was done, she laughed again and wiped tears from her eyes. “Law’s sake,” she said. “Girls a-working in the offices. I remember what a stir-up that was. Folks said secretarial was man’s work, and women couldn’t be good typewriters, no how. There was another song, Everybody Works But Father, about how if women was to go to work, all the men would be out of jobs. Heh-heh. I swan! It weren’t long afore one gal in four had herself a ‘position,’ like they used to say; and folks my age complained how the youngsters were ‘going to pot.’ ” She shook her head and chuckled.

“I always did find those kids more to my taste,” she went on. “There was something about ’em; some spark that I liked. They knew how to have fun without that ragged edge that the next batch had. And they had, I don’t know, call it a dream. They were out to change the world. They sure weren’t wishy-washy like the other folks my age. ‘Middle aged,’ that’s what the kids back then called us. We were ‘Professor Tweetzers’ and ‘Miss Nancys’ and ‘goo-goos.’ And to tell you the truth, Doc, I thought they pegged it right. People my age grew up trying to imitate their parents; until they saw how much more fun the kids were having. Then they tried to be just like their kids. Heh-heh.”

I grunted something noncommittal. Middle-aged crazy, just like my uncle Larry. “I suppose there were a lot of ‘mid-life crises’ back then, too,” I ventured. Uncle Larry had gone heavy into love beads and incense, radical politics. He grew a moustache and wore bell-bottoms. The whole hippie scene. Walked out on his wife for a young “chick” and thought it was all “groovy.” I remember how pathetic those thirtysomething wannabes seemed to us in college.

Dad, now, he never had an “identity crisis.” He always knew exactly who he was. He had gone off to Europe and saved the world and then came back home and rebuilt it. Uncle Larry was too young to save the world in the Forties, and too old to save it in the Sixties. He was part of that bewildered, silent generation sandwiched between the heroes and the prophets.

“Neurasthenia,” Mae said. “We called it neurasthenia back then. Seems everyone I knew was getting divorced or having an attack of ‘the nerves.’ Even the president was down in the mullygrubs when he was younger. Nervous breakdown. That’s what you call it nowadays, isn’t it? Now, T. R. There was a man with sand in him. Him and that ‘strenuous life’ he always preached about. Why, he’d fight a circle saw. Saw him that time in Milwaukee. Shot in the chest, and he still gave a stem-winder of a speech before he let them take him off. Did you know he got me in trouble one time?”

“Who, Teddy Roosevelt? How?”

“T.R., he was a-hunting and come on a bear cub; but he wouldn’t shoot the poor thing because it wasn’t the manly thing to do. So, some sharper started making stuffed animal dolls and called ’em Teddy’s Bear. I given one to my neighbor child as a present.” Mae slapped her knee. “Well, her ma had herself a conniption fit, ’cause the experts all said how animal dolls would give young ’uns the nightmares. And the other president who had the neurasthenia.” Mae scowled and waved a hand in front of her face. “Oh, I know who it was,” she said in an irritated voice. “That college professor. What was his name?”

“Wilson,” I suggested, “Woodrow Wilson.”

“That’s the one. I think he was always jealous of T.R. He wouldn’t let him take the Rough Riders into the Great War.”

I started to make some comment, but Mae’s mouth dropped open. “The war . . .?” she whispered. “The war! Oh, Mister . . .” Her face crumpled. “Oh, Mister! You’re too old!” She covered her face and began to weep.

She felt in her sleeves for a handkerchief; then wiped her eyes and looked at me. “I forgot,” she said. “I forgot. It was the war. Mister went away to the war. That’s why he never come back. He never run out on me, at all. He would have come back after it was over, if he’d still been alive. He would have.”

“I’m sure he would have,” I said awkwardly.

“I told him he was too old for that sort of thing; but he just laughed and said it was a good cause and they needed men like him to spunk up the young ’uns. So he marched away one day and someone he never met before shot him dead and I don’t even know when and where it happened.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, at a loss for anything else to say. A good cause? The War to End All Wars, nearly forgotten now; its players, comic-opera Ruritanians on herky-jerky black and white newsreels. The last war begun in innocence.

Her hands had twisted the handkerchief into a knot. She fussed with it, straightened it out on her lap, smoothed it with her hand. In a quiet voice, she said, “Tell me, doc. Tell me. Why do they have wars?”

I shook my head. Was there ever a good reason? To make the world safe for democracy? To stop the death camps? To free the slaves? Maybe. Those were better reasons than cheap oil. But up close, no matter what the reason, it was husbands and sons and brothers who never came home.

Oh, them golden slippers, Oh, them golden slippers,

Golden slippers I’m gonna wear, Because they look
so neat;

Oh, them golden slippers, Oh, them golden slippers,

Golden slippers I’m gonna wear To walk them
golden streets.

Ever since our late evening encounter, Consuela had begun wearing blouses, skirts, and robes around the house instead of her nurse’s whites. The colors were bright, even garish; the patterns, blocky and intricate. The costumes made the woman more open, less mysterious. It was as if, having once seen her deshabille, a barrier had come down. She had begun teaching Dee-dee to play the cane flute. Sometimes I heard them in the evening, the notes drifting down from above stairs, lingering in the air. Was it a signal, I wondered? I sensed that the relationship between Consuela and myself had changed; but in what direction, I did not know.

Dee-dee should have been in school. She should have been in fifth grade; and she should have come home on the school bus, full of laughter and bursting to tell us what she had learned that day. Brenda and I should have helped her with her homework, nursed her bruises, and hugged her when she cried. That was the natural order of things.

But Dee-dee lived in her room; played in the dark. She studied at home, tutored by Consuela or myself or by private instructors we sometimes hired. School and other children were far away. She was a prisoner, half of her mother’s strained disapproval, half of her own withdrawal. Save for Consuela and myself and a few, brief contacts with Brenda, she had no other person in her short, bounded life. Who could dream what scenarios her dolls performed in the silence of her room?

I found the two of them at the kitchen table, Consuela with her inevitable cocoa, Dee-dee with a glass of milk and a stack of Graham crackers. There were cracker crumbs scattered across the Formica and a ring of white across Dee-dee’s lip.

I beamed at her. “The princess has come down from her tower once more!”

She tucked her head in a little. “It’s all right, isn’t it?”

I kissed her on the forehead. How sparse her hair had grown! “Of course, it is!”

I settled myself across the table from Consuela. She was wearing an ivory blouse with a square-cut neck bordered by red stitching in the shape of flowers. “Thank you, nurse,” I said. “She should be downstairs more often.”

“Yes, I know.”

Was there a hint of disapproval there? A slight drawing together of the lips? I wanted to make excuses for Brenda. It was not that Brenda made Dee-dee stay in her room, but that she never made her leave. It was Deirdre who stayed always by herself. “So, what did you do today, Dee-dee?”

“Oh, nothing. I read my schoolbooks. Watched TV. I helped Connie bake a cake.”

“Did you? Sounds like a pretty busy day to me.”

She and Consuela shared a grin with each other. “We played ball, a little, until I got tired. And then we played word games. I see something . . . blue! What is it?”

“The sky?”

“I can’t see the sky from here. It’s long and thin.”

“Hmm. Long, thin and blue. Spaghetti with blueberry sauce?”

Dee-dee laughed. “No, silly. It has a knot in it.”

“Hmm. I can’t imagine what it could be.” I straightened my tie and Dee-dee laughed again. I looked down at the tie and gave a mock start. “Wait! Long, thin, blue and a knot . . . It’s my belt!”

“No! It’s your tie!”

“My tie? Why . . .” I gave her a look of total amazement. “Why, you’re absolutely, positively right. Now, why didn’t I see that? It was right under my nose. Imagine missing something right under your nose!”

We played a few more rounds of “I see something” and then Dee-dee wandered back to the family room and settled on the floor in front of the TV. I watched her for a while as she stared at the pictures flickering there. I thought of how little time was left before cartoons would play unwatched.

Consuela placed a cup of coffee in front of me. I sipped from it absently while I sorted through the day’s mail stacked on the table. “Brenda will be coming home on Monday,” I said. Consuela already knew that and I knew that she knew, so I don’t know why I said it.

But why Monday? Why not Friday? Why spend another weekend in Washington with Walther Crowe? I could think of any number of reasons, I could.

“Deirdre will be happy to have her mother back,” Consuela said in flat tones. I was looking at the envelopes, so I did not see her face. I knew what she meant, though. No more flute lessons; no more games downstairs. I reached across the table and placed my hand atop one of hers. It was warm, probably from holding the cocoa mug.

“Deirdre’s mother never left,” I said.

Consuela looked away. “I am only her nurse.”

“You take care of her. That’s more . . .” I caught myself. I had started to say that that was more than Brenda did; but there were some things that husbands did not say about their wives to other women. I noticed, however, that Consuela had not pulled her hand away from mine.

I released her hand. “Say, here’s a letter from the National Archives.” I said with forced heartiness, dancing away from the sudden abyss that had yawned open before me. Too many lives had been ruined by reading invitations where none were written.

Consuela stood and turned away, taking her cup to the sink. I slit the envelope open with my index finger and pulled out the yellow flimsy. Veteran: Holloway, Green. Branch of Service: Infantry (Co. H, 5th Tennessee). Years of Service: 1918 or 1919. It was the order form I had sent to the Military Service Records department after Mae’s earlier recollection of her husband. As I unfolded it, Consuela came and stood beside me, reading over my shoulder. Somehow, it was not uncomfortable.

We were unable to complete your request as written.

We found additional pension and military service files of the same name (or similar variations).

The enclosed records are those which best match the information provided. Please resubmit, if these are not the desired files.

I grunted and paged through the sheets. Company muster rolls. A Memorandum of Prisoner of War Records: Paroled and exchanged at Cumberland Gap, Sept. 5/62.

The last page was a white photocopy of a form printed in an old-fashioned typeface. Casualty Sheet. The blanks were penned in by an elegant Spencerian hand. Name, Green Holloway. Rank, Private. Company “H”, Regiment5”. Division, 3”. Corps, 23”. Arm, Inf. State, Tenn.

Nature of casualty, Bullet wound of chest (fatal).

Place of casualty, Resaca, Ga.

Date of casualty, May 14, 1864, the regiment being in action that date.

Jno. T. Henry, Clerk.

I tossed the sheets to the kitchen table. “These can’t be right,” I said.

Consuela picked them up. “What is wrong?”

“Right name, wrong war. These are for a Green Holloway who died in the Civil War.”

Consuela raised an eyebrow. “And who served in the same company as your patient’s husband?”

“State militia regiments were raised locally, and the same families served in them, generation after generation. Green here was probably ‘Mister’s’ grandfather. Back then children were often given their parents’ or grandparents’ names.” I took the photocopies from Consuela and stuffed them back in the envelope. “Well, there was a waste of ten dollars.” I dropped the envelope on the table.

Dee-dee called from the family room. “What’s this big book you brought home?”

“The Encyclopedia of Song,” I said over my shoulder. “It’s to help me with a patient I have.”

“The old lady who hears music?”

I turned in my chair. “Yes. Did Connie tell you about her?”

Dee-dee nodded. “I wish I could hear music like that. You wouldn’t need headphones or a Walkman, would you?”

I remembered that Mae had had two very unhappy recollections in one day. “No,” I said, “but you don’t get to pick the station, either.”

Later that evening, after Dee-dee had been tucked away, I spread my index cards and sheets of paper over the kitchen table, and arranged the tape recorder on my left where I could replay it as needed. The song encyclopedia lay in front of me, open to its index. A pot of coffee stood ready on my right.

Consuela no longer retreated to her own room after dinner. When I looked up from my work I could see her, relaxed on the sofa in the family room, quietly reading a book. Her shoes off, her legs tucked up underneath her, the way some women sit curled up. I watched her silently for a while. So serene, like a jaguar indolent upon a tree limb. She appeared unaware of my regard, and I bent again over my work before she looked up.

I soon verified that Mae’s latest recollections were from the Gay Nineties. The earliest one, Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-der-ay, had been written in 1890, and the others dated from the same era. Good-bye, Dolly Gray had been a favorite of the soldiers going off to fight in the Philippine “insurrection,” while Hot Time in the Old Town had been the Rough Riders’ “theme song.” Mae’s version of America the Beautiful, I discovered, was the original 1895 lyrics. Apparently, Katherine Lee Bates had written the song as much for protest as for patriotism.

When I had finished the cataloguing, I closed the songbook, leaned back in my chair and stretched my arms over my head. Consuela looked up at the motion and I smiled at her and she smiled back. I checked my watch. “Almost bedtime,” I said. Consuela said nothing, but nodded slightly.

Middle-aged?

The thought struck me like a discordant note and I turned back to my work. I ran the tape back and forth until I found what I was looking for. Yes. Mae had said that the “young folks” at the turn of the century had called her age-mates “middle-aged.” So Mae must have already been mature by then. How was that possible? At most, she might have been a teenager, one of the “young folks,” herself.

Unless she had looked old for her age.

God! I stabbed the shut-off button with my forefinger.

After a moment, I ran the tape through again, listening for Mae’s descriptions of her peers and her younger contemporaries. “Wishy-washy.” Folks her age had been wishy-washy. Yet, in an earlier session, she had described her age-mates as moralistic. I flipped through my written notes until I found it.

Yes, just as I remembered. But, psychologically, that made no sense. Irresolute twenty-somethings do not mature into forty-something moralists. The irresolute become the two-sides-to-every-question types; the mediators, the compromisers, the peace-makers. The ones both sides despise—and miss desperately when they are gone. The moralists are no-compromise world-savers. They preach “prohibition,” not “temperance.”

The wild youth Mae remembered from the Ragtime Era and the Mauve Decade—the hard-edged “newsies”—those were the young Hemingways, Bogies, and Mae Wests; the “Blood-and-Guts” Pattons and the “Give-’em-Hell” Harrys. The Lost Generation, they had been called. The idealistic, young teeners and twentysomethings of the Gay Nineties that Mae found so simpatico were the young FDR, W.E.B. DuBois and Jane Addams. The generation of “missionaries” out to save the world. They had all been “the kids” to her. But that would put Mae into the even older, Progressive Generation, a contemporary of T.R. and Edison and Booker T. Washington.

I drummed my pencil against the tabletop. That would make her a hundred and twenty years old, or thereabout. That wasn’t possible, was it? I pushed myself from the table and went to the bookcase in the family room.

The Guinness Book of Records sat next to the dictionary, the thesaurus, the atlas and the almanac, all neatly racked together. Sometimes, Brenda’s obsessive organizing paid off. I noticed that Dee-dee had left one of her own books,The Boxcar Children, on the shelf and made a mental note to return it to her room later.

According to Guinness, the oldest human being whose birth could be authenticated was Shigechiyo Izumi of Japan, who had died in 1986 at the ripe age of one hundred and twenty years and two hundred and thirty-seven days. So, a few wheezing, stumbling geezers did manage to hang around that long. But not many. Actuarial tables suggested one life in two billion. So, with nearly six billion of us snorting and breathing and poking each other with our elbows, two or three such ancients were possible. Maybe, just maybe, Mae could match Izumi’s record. The last surviving Progressive.

The oldest human being.

The oldest human being remembers.

The oldest human being remembers pop music of the last hundred years.

A Hundred-and-Twentysomething. Great book title. It had “best seller” written all over it.

’Neath the chestnut tree, where the wild flow’rs grow,

And the stream ripples forth through the vale,

Where the birds shall warble their songs in spring,

There lay poor Lilly Dale.

On my next visit, Mae was not waiting by the office door for me to unlock it. So, after I had set my desk in order, I hung the “Back in a Minute” sign on the door knob and went to look for her. Not that I was concerned. It was just that I had grown used to her garrulous presence.

I found Jimmy Kovacs in the common room watching one of those inane morning “news” shows.

“Good morning, Jimmy. How’s your back?”

He grinned at me. “Oh, I can’t complain.” He waited a beat. “They won’t let me.”

I smiled briefly. “Glad to hear it. Have you seen—”

“First hurt my back, oh, it must have been sixty-six, sixty-seven. Lifting forms.”

“I know. You told me already. I’m looking for—”

“Not forms like paperwork. Though nowadays you could strain your back lifting them, too.” He cackled at his feeble joke. It hadn’t been funny the first two times, either. “No, I’m talking about those six hundreed-pound forms we used to use on the old flat-bed perfectors. Hot type. Blocks of lead quoined into big iron frames. Those days, printing magazines was a job, I tell you. You could smell the ink; you could feel the presses pounding through the floor and the heat from the molten lead in the linotypes.” He shook his head. “I saw the old place once a few years back. A couple of prissy kids going ticky-ticky on those computer keyboards . . .” He made typing motions with his two index fingers.

I interrupted before he could give me another disquisition on the decadence of the printing industry. I could just imagine the noise, the lead vapors, the heavy weight-lifting. Some people have odd notions about the Good Old Days. “Have you seen Mae this morning, Jimmy?”

“Who? Mae? Sure, I saw the old gal. She was headed for the gardens.” He pointed vaguely.

Old gal? I chuckled at the pot calling the kettle black. But then I realized with a sudden shock that there were more years between Mae and Jimmy than there were between Jimmy and me. There was old, and then there was old. Perhaps we should distinguish more carefully among them . . . say “fogies,” “mossbacks” and “geezers.”

Mae was sitting in the garden sunshine, against the red brick back wall, upon a stone settee. I watched her for a few moments from behind the large plate glass window. The sun was from her right, illuminating the red and yellow blossoms around her and sparkling the morning dew like diamonds strewn across the grass. The dewdrops were matched by those on her cheeks. She wore a green print dress with flowers, so that the dress, the grass, and the flower beds; the tears and the dew, all blended together, like old ladies’ garden camouflage.

She did not see me coming. Her eyes were closed tight, looking upon another, different world. I stood beside her, unsure whether to rouse her. Were those tears of joy or tears of sorrow? Would it be right to interrupt either? I compromised by placing my hand on her shoulder. Her dry, bird-like claw reached up and pressed itself against mine.

“Is that you, Doctor Wilkes?” I don’t know how she knew that. Perhaps her eyes had not been entirely closed. She opened them and looked at me, and I could see that her regurgitated memories had been sorrowful ones. That is the problem with Jackson’s syndrome. You remember. You can’t help remembering. “Oh, Doctor Wilkes. My mama. My sweet, sweet mama. She’s dead.”

The announcement did not astonish me. Had either of Mae Holloway’s parents been alive I would have been astonished. I started to tell her that, but my words came out surprisingly gentle. “It happened a long time ago,” I told her. “It’s a hurt long over.”

She shook her head. “No. It happened this morning. I saw Pa leaning over my bed. Oh, such a strong, young man he was! But he’d been crying. His eyes were red and his beard and hair weren’t combed. He told me that my mama was dead at last and she weren’t a-hurtin’ no more.”

Mae Holloway pulled me down to sit beside her on the hard, cold bench, and she curled against me for all the world like a little girl. I hesitated and almost pulled away; but I am not without pity, even for an old woman who half-thought she was a child.

“He told me it was my fault.”

“What?” Her voice had been muffled against my jacket.

“He told me it was my fault.”

“Who? Your father told you that? That was . . . cruel.”

She spoke in a high-pitched, childish voice. “He tol’ me that mama never gotten well since I was borned. There was something about my birthin’ that hurt her inside. I was six and I never seen my mama when she weren’t a-bed . . .”

She couldn’t finish. Awkwardly, I put an arm around her shoulder. A husband who lost his wife to childbirth would blame the child, whether consciously or not. Especially a husband in the full flush of youth. Worse still, if it was a lingering death. If for years the juices of life had drained away, leaving a gasping, joyless husk behind.

“I have to get back to my office,” I said, standing abruptly. “There may be a patient waiting. Is there anything I can get you? A sedative?”

She shook her head slowly back and forth several times. When she spoke, she sounded more like the adult Mae. “No. No, thank you. I ain’t—haven’t had these memories for so long that I got to feel them now, even when it pains me. There’ll be worse coming back to me, by and by. And better, too. The Good Man’ll help me bear it.”

It wasn’t until I was back behind my desk and had made some notes about her recollection for my projected book that I was struck with an annoying inconsistency. If Mae’s mother had died from complications of childbirth, where did her “little brother Zach” come from?

Step-brother, probably. A young man like her father would have sought a new bride before too long. Eventually, we put tragedy behind us and get on with life. But if I was going to analyze the progress of Mae’s condition, I would need to confirm her recollections. After all, memories are tricky things. The memories of the old, trickier than most.

Peaches in the summertime,

Apples in the fall;

If I can’t have the girl I love,

I won’t have none at all.

There was music in the air when I returned home, and I followed the thread of it through the garage and into the backyard, where I found Consuela sitting on a blanket of red, orange, and brown, swathed in a flowing, pale green muumuu, and Deirdre beside her playing on the cane flute. Dee-dee’s thin, knobby fingers moved haltingly and the notes were flat, but I actually recognized the tune. Something about a spider and a waterspout.

“Hello, Dee-dee. Hello, Consuela.”

Deirdre turned. “Daddy!” she said. She pulled herself erect on Consuela’s gown and hobbled across the grass to me. I crouched down and hugged her. “Dee-dee, you’re outside playing.”

“Connie said it was all right.”

“Of course, it’s all right. I wish you would come out more often.”

A cloud passed across the sunshine. “Connie said no one can see me in the yard.” A hesitation.

“And Mommy’s not home.”

No one to tell her how awful she looked. No cruel, taunting children. No thoughtlessly sympathetic adults offering useless condolences. Nothing but Connie, and me, and the afternoon sun. I looked over Dee-dee’s shoulder. “Thank you, nur—Thank you, Connie.”

She blinked at my use of her familiar name, but made no comment. “The sunshine is good for her.”

“She is my sunshine. Aren’t you, Dee-dee?” You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. A fragment of tune. Only, how did the rest of it go?

“Oh, Daddy . . .”

“So, has Connie been teaching you to play the flute?”

“Yes. And she showed me lots of things. Did you know there are zillions of different bugs in our grass?”

“Are there?” You make me happy when skies are gray.

“Yeah. There’s ants and centipedes and . . . and mites? And honey bees. Honey bees like these little white flowers.” And she showed me a ball of clover she had tucked behind her ear.

“You better watch that,” I said, “or the bees will come after you, too.”

“Oh, Daddy . . .”

“Because you’re so sweet.” You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.

“Daaaddyyy. I saw some spiders, too.”

“Going up the waterspout?”

She giggled. “There are different kinds of spiders, too. They’re like eensy-weensy tigers, Connie says. They eat flies and other bugs. Yuck! I wouldn’t want to be a spider, would you?”

“No.”

“But you are!” Secret triumph in her voice. She had just tricked me, somehow. “There was this spider that was nothing but a little brown ball with legs this long!” She held her arms far enough apart to cause horror movie buffs to blanch. “They named it after you,” she added with another giggle. “They call it a Daddy-long-legs. You’re a daddy and you have long legs, so you must be a spider, too.”

“Then . . . I’ve got you in my web!” I grabbed her and she squealed. “And now I’m going to gobble you up!” I started kissing her on the cheeks. She giggled and made a pretense of escape. I held her all the tighter. Please don’t take my sunshine away.

We sat for a while on the blanket, just the three of us. Consuela told us stories from Guatemala. How a rabbit had gotten deeply into debt and then tricked his creditors into eating one another. How a disobedient child was turned into a monkey. Dee-dee giggled at that and said she would like to be a monkey. I told them about Mae Holloway.

“She didn’t give me any new songs today,” I said, “but she finally remembered something from her childhood.” I explained how her mother had died and her father had blamed her for it.

“Poor girl!” Consuela said, looking past me. “It’s not right for a little girl to grow up without a mother.”

“Deirdre Wilkes! What on earth are you doing outside in the dirt?”

Dee-dee stiffened in my arms. I turned and saw Brenda in the open garage door, straight as a rod. A navy blue business suit with white ruffled blouse. Matching overcoat, hanging open. A suitbag slung from one shoulder; a briefcase clenched in the other hand. “Brenda,” I said, standing up with Dee-dee in my arm. “We didn’t expect you until Monday.”

She looked at each of us. “Evidently not.”

“Dee-dee was just getting a little sunshine.”

Brenda stepped close and whispered. “The neighbors might see.”

I wanted to say, So what? But I held my peace. You learn there are times when it is best to say nothing at all. You learn.

“Nurse.” She spoke to Consuela. “Aren’t you dressed a bit casually?”

“Yes, señora. It is after five.” When she had to, Consuela could remember what was in her contract.

“A professional does not watch the clock. And a professional dresses appropriately for her practice. How do you think it would look if I went to the office in blouse and skirt instead of a suit? Take Deirdre inside. Don’t you know there are all sorts of bugs and dirt out here? What if she were stung by a bee? Or bitten by a deer tick?”

“Brenda,” I said, “I don’t think—”

She turned to me. “Yes, exactly. You didn’t think. How could you have allowed this, Paul? Look, in her hand. That’s Nurse’s whistle, or whatever it is. Has Deirdre been playing it? Putting it in her mouth. How unsanitary! And there are weeds in her hair. For God’s sake, Paul, you’re a doctor. You should have said something.”

Sometimes I thought Brenda had been raised in a sterile bubble. The least little thing out of place, the least little thing done wrong, was enough to set her off. Dust was a hanging offense. She hadn’t always been that way. At school, she’d been reasonably tidy, but not obsessed. It had only been in the last few years that cleanliness and order had begun to consume her life. Each year, I could see the watchspring wound tighter and tighter.

Consuela bundled up flute, blanket, and Dee-dee and took them inside, leaving me alone with Brenda. I tried to give her a hug, and she endured it briefly. “Welcome home.”

“Christ, Paul. I go away for two weeks and everything is falling apart.”

“No, Nurse was right to bring her outside. Deirdre should have as much normal activity as possible. There is nothing wrong with her mind. It’s just her body aging too fast.” That wasn’t strictly true. Hutchinson-Gilford was sometimes called progeria, but it differed in some of its particulars from normal senile aging.

Brenda swatted at a swarm of midges. “There are too many bugs out here,” she said. “Let’s go inside. Carry my suitbag for me.”

I took it from her and followed her inside the house. She dropped her briefcase on the sofa in the living room and continued to the hall closet, where she shed her overcoat. “You’re home early,” I said again.

“That’s right. Surprised?” She draped her overcoat carefully across a hanger.

“Well . . .” Yes, I was. “Did Crowe drop you off?”

She shoved the other coats aside with a hard swipe. “Yes.” Then she turned and started up the stairs. I closed the closet door for her.

“How was Washington?” I asked. “Did you impress the Supremes?”

She didn’t answer and I followed her up the stairs. I found her in our bedroom, shedding her travel clothes. I hung the suitbag on the closet door. “Did you hear me? I asked how—”

“I heard you.” She dropped her skirt to the floor and sent it in the direction of the hamper with a flick of her foot. “Walther offered me a partnership.”

“Did he?” I retrieved her skirt and put it in the hamper. “That’s great news!” It was. Partners made a bundle. They took a cut of the fees the associates charged. “It opens up all sorts of opportunities.”

Brenda gave me a funny look. “Yes,” she said. “It does.” If I hadn’t known better, I would have said she looked distressed. It was hard to imagine Brenda being unsure.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Nothing. It’s just that there are conditions attached.”

“What conditions? A probationary period? You’ve been an associate there for seven years. They should know your work by now.”

“It isn’t that.”

“Then, what . . .”

Deirdre interrupted us. She stood in the doorway of our bedroom, one foot crossed pigeon-toed over the other, a gnarled finger tucked in one shrunken cheek. “Mommy?”

Brenda looked at a point on the door jamb a quarter inch above Dee-dee’s head. “What is it, honey.”

“I should tell you ‘welcome home’ and ‘I missed you.’ ”

I could almost hear Connie said . . . in front of that statement and I wondered if Brenda could hear it, too.

“I missed you, too, honey,” Brenda told the door knob.

“I’ve got to take my bath, now.”

“Good. Be sure to get all that dirt washed off.”

“Okay, Mommy.” A brief catch, and then, “I love you, Mommy.”

Brenda nodded. “Yes.”

Dee-dee waited a moment longer, then turned and bolted for the bathroom. I could hear Connie already running the water. I waited until the bathroom door closed before I turned to Brenda.

“You could have told her that you loved her, too.”

“I do,” she said, pulling on a pair of slacks. “She knows I do.”

“Not unless you tell her once in a while.”

She flashed me an irritated look, but made no reply. She took a blouse from her closet and held it in front of her while she stood before the mirror. “Let’s go out to eat tonight.”

“Go out? Well, you know that Dee-dee doesn’t like to leave the house, but . . .”

“Take Deirdre with us? Whatever are you thinking of, Paul? She would be horribly embarrassed. Think of the stares she’d get! No, Consuela can feed her that Mexican goulash she’s cooking.”

“Guatemalan.”

“What?”

“It’s Guatemalan, whatever it is.”

“Do you have to argue with everything I say?”

“I thought, with you being just back and all, that the three of us—” The four of us. “—could eat dinner together, for a change.”

“I won’t expose Deirdre to the rudeness of strangers.”

“No, not when she can get it at home.” I don’t know why I said that. It just came out.

Brenda stiffened. “What does that crack mean?”

I turned away. “Nothing.”

“No, tell me!”

I turned back and faced her. “All right. You treat Dee-dee like a non-person. She’s sick, Brenda, and it’s not contagious and it’s not her fault.”

“Then whose fault is it?”

“That’s lawyer talk. It’s no one’s fault. It just happens. We’ve been over that and over that. There is no treatment for progeria.”

“And, oh, how it gnaws at you! You can’t cure her!”

“No one can!”

“But especially you.”

No one could cure Dee-dee. I knew that. It was helplessness, not failure. I had accepted that long ago. “And you’re angry and bitter,” I replied, “because there’s nobody you can sue!”

She flung her blouse aside and it landed in a wad in the corner. “Maybe,” she said through clenched teeth, “Maybe I’ll take that partnership offer, after all.”

It was not until much later that evening, as I lay awake in bed, Brenda a thousand miles away on the other side, that I remembered Consuela’s remark. It’s not right for a little girl to grow up without a mother. I wondered. Had she been making a comment, or making an offer?

I don’t want to play in your yard.

I don’t like you anymore.

You’ll be sorry when you see me

Sliding down our cellar door.

The next time I saw Mae Holloway, we quarreled.

Perhaps it was her own constant sourness coming to the fore; or perhaps it was her fear of insanity returning. But it may have been a bad humor that I carried with me from Brenda’s homecoming. We had smoothed things out, Brenda and I, but it was a fragile repair, the cracks plastered over with I-was-tired and I-didn’t-mean-it, and we both feared to press too hard, lest it buckle on us. At dinner, she had told me about the case she had helped argue, and I told her about Mae Holloway and we both pretended to care. But it was all monologue. Listening holds fewer risks than response; and an attentive smile, less peril than engagement.

Mae wouldn’t look at me when I greeted her. She stared resolutely at the floor, at the medicine cabinet, out the window. Sometimes, she stared into another world. I noticed how she gnawed on her lips.

“We have a couple of days to catch up on, Mrs. Holloway,” I said. “I hope you’ve been making notes, like I asked.”

She shook her head slowly, but in a distracted way. She was not responding to my statement, but to some inner reality. “I just keep remembering and remembering, doc. There’s music all the time, and that double vision—”

“Consciousness doubling.”

“It’s like I’m in two places at once. Sometimes, I forget which is which, and I try to step around things only I cain’t, because they’re only ghosts, only ghosts. And sometimes, I recollect things that couldn’t have . . .”

The “dreamy states” of Jackson patients often grow deeper and more frequent. In one woman, they had occupied nearly her entire day; and, in the end, they had crowded out her normal consciousness entirely. “I could prescribe something, if you like,” I said. “These spells of yours are similar to epileptic seizures. So, there are drugs that . . .”

She shook her head again. “No. I won’t take drugs.” She looked directly at me at last. “Don’t you understand? I’ve got to know. It’s always been bits and pieces. Just flashes. A jimble-jamble that never made sense. Now . . .” She paused and took a deep breath. “Now, at least, I’ll know.”

“Know what, Mrs. Holloway.”

“About . . . Everything.” She looked away again. Talking with her today was like pulling teeth.

“What about the songs, Mae? We didn’t get anything useful on Wednesday and I wasn’t here Tuesday or yesterday, so that’s three days we have to catch up on.”

Mae turned and studied me with lips as thin as broth. “You don’t care about any of this, do you? It’s all professional; not like you and I are friends. You don’t care if’n I live or die; and I don’t care if’n you do.”

“Mrs. Holloway, I . . .”

“Good.” She gave a sharp nod of her head. “That’s jake with me. Because I don’t like having friends,” she said. “I decided a long time ago if’n I don’t have ’em, I won’t miss ’em when they cut out. So let’s just keep this doc and old lady.” Her stare was half admonition, half challenge, as if she dared me to leap the barriers she had set down around her.

I shrugged. Keep things professional. That was fine with me, too. A crabby old lady like her, it was no wonder they all ran out on her.

She handed over a crumpled, yellow sheet of lined paper, which I flattened out on my desk. She had written in a soft pencil, so I smeared some of the writing and smudged my palm. I set a stack of fresh index cards by and began to copy the song titles for later research. Where Did You Get That Hat? Comrades. The Fountain in the Park. Love’s Old Sweet Song. While I worked, I could hear Mae humming to herself. I knew without looking that she had her eyes closed, that she was living more and more in another world, gradually leaving this one behind. White Wings. Walking for That Cake. My Grandfather’s Clock. In the Gloaming. Silver Threads Among the Gold. The Mulligan Guard. Mae was her own Hit Parade. Though if the music did play continually, as she said, this list could only be a sample of what she had heard over the last three days. The Man on the Flying Trapeze. Sweet Genevieve. Champagne Charlie. You Naughty, Naughty Men. When You and I Were Young, Maggie. Beautiful Dreamer. Three days’ worth of unclaimed memories.

I noticed that she had recorded no doubling episodes, this time. Because she had not had any? It seemed doubtful, considering. But one entry had been crossed out; rubbed over with the pencil until there was nothing but a black smear and a small hole in the paper where the pencil point had worn through. I held it up to the light, but could make out nothing.

I heard Mae draw in her breath and looked up in time to see a mien on her face almost of ecstasy. “What is it?”

“I’m standing out in a meadow. There’s a sparkling stream meandering through it, and great, gray, rocky mountains rearing all around. Yellow flowers shivering in the breeze and I think how awful purty and peaceful it is.” She sighed. “Oh, doc, sometimes, just for a second, we can be so happy.”

Jackson had often described his patients’ “dreamy states” as being accompanied by intense feelings of euphoria; sudden bursts of child-like joy. No doubt some endorphin released in the brain.

“There’s a fellow coming up toward me from the ranch,” she continued, trepidation edging into her voice. “My age, maybe a little older. Might be Mister’s younger brother, because he favors him some. He’s a-weeping something awful. I reach out to him and he puts his head on my shoulder and says . . .” Mae stopped and winced in pain. She sucked in her breath and held it. Then she let it out slowly. “And he says how Sweet Annie is dead and the baby, too; and there was nothing the sawbones could do. Nothing at all. And I think, Thank you, Goodman Lord. Thank you, that she won’t suffer the way that Ma did. And then a mockingbird takes wing from the aspen tree right in front of me and I think how awful peaceful the meadow is now that the screaming has stopped.”

She wiped at her nose with her sleeve. “Listen to it. Can you hear it, doc? There ain’t a sound but for the breeze and that old mockingbird.” The look on her face changed somehow, changed subtly. “Listen to the mockingbird,” she croaked. “Listen to the mockingbird. Oh, the mockingbird still singing o’er her grave . . .”

Then she looked about in sudden surprise. “Land’s sake! Now, how did I get here? Why, everybody’s so happy; singing the mockingbird song and dancing all over the lawn and a-hugging each other.” A smile slowly came over her face. She had apparently tripped from one doubling episode directly into another, due to some association with the song, and the imprinted emotions were playing back with it, overwriting the melancholy of the first episode. Or else she had seized on the remembered joy herself, and had wrapped herself in it against the cold.

“I’m a-wearing my Sanitary Commission uniform,” she went on, preening her shabby, faded gown. She shot her cuffs, straightened something at her throat that wasn’t there. “I was a nurse, you know; and when the news come that the war was finally over we all hied over to the White House and had ourselves a party on the lawn, the whole kit ’n boodle of us. Then the President his-self come out and joined us.” She turned in her seat and pointed toward the medicine cabinet. “Here he comes now!”

And in that instant, her joy became absolute terror. “Him?” Her smile stretched to a ghastly rictus and she cowered into her chair, covering her eyes with her hand. But you can’t close your eyes to memory. You can’t. “No! I kin still see him!” she said.

What was so terrifying about seeing president Wilson close up? “What’s wrong, Mrs. Holloway?”

“They shot him.”

“What, on the White House lawn? No president has been shot there . . .” And certainly not Wilson.

She took her hands away from her eyes, glanced warily left, then right. Slowly, she relaxed, though her hands continued to tremble. Then, she looked at me. “No, the shooting happened later,” she snapped, anger blossoming from her fear. Then she closed up and her eyes took on a haunted look. “I’m taking up too much of your time, doc,” she said, creaking to her feet.

“No, you’re not. Really,” I told her.

“Then you’re taking up too much of mine.” I thought her blackthorn stick would punch holes in the floor tiles as she left.

After a moment’s hesitation, I followed. She had recalled her father’s death. She had remembered that her birth had killed her mother and that her father had blamed her for it. She had remembered her husband going off to war, never to return. Sad memories, sorrowful memories; but there was something about this new recollection that terrified her.

She thought she was going crazy.

It was easy to track her through the garden. Deep holes punched into the sod marked her trail among the flower beds. When I caught up with her, she was leaning over a plot of gold and crimson marigolds. “You know, I remember exactly where I was when President Kennedy was shot,” I said by way of easing her into conversation.

Mae Holloway scowled and bent over the flower bed. “Don’t make no difference no-how,” she said. “He’s dead either way, ain’t he?” She turned her back on me.

“No particular reason.” I had figured it out. She had seen McKinley, not Wilson; and her husband had fought in the Spanish-American War, not World War I.

She turned her dried-out old face to me. “Think I’m getting senile, doc? Why aren’t you back in your office reading on your books? You might have a patient to ignore.”

“They’ll find me if they need me.”

“I tol’ you the songs I been remembering. Why did you follow me out here, anyway?”

I had better things to do than have a bitter old woman berate me. “If you feel in a friendlier mood later,” I said, “you know where to find me.”

Back in my office, I began checking the latest tunes against the song encyclopedia. The mindless transcription kept me busy, so that I did not dwell on Mae’s intransigence. Let her stew in her own sour juices.

But I soon noticed a disturbing trend in the data. Champagne Charlie was written in 1868. You Naughty, Naughty Men (“When married how you treat us and of each fond hope defeat us, and there’s some will even beat us . . .”) had created a scandal at Niblo’s Gardens in 1866. And Beautiful Dreamer dated from 1864. Mae could not have heard those songs when they were new. Born in the early seventies at best, tucked away back in the hills of Tennessee—“So far back in the hollers,” she had said one time, “that they had to pipe in the daylight.”—She must have heard them later.

And if a little bit later, why not a whole lot later?

And there went the whole rationale for my book.

The problem with assigning dates to Mae’s neurological hootenanny was that she could have heard the songs at any time. A melody written in the Twenties, like The Red, Red Robin, is heard and sung by millions of children today. Scott Joplin created his piano rags at the turn of the century; yet most people knew them from The Sting, a movie made in the Seventies and set in the Thirties, an era when ragtime had been long out of fashion.

(The telescoping effect of distance. From this far down the river of years, who can distinguish the Mauve Decade from the Thirties? Henry James and Upton Sinclair and Ernest Hemingway came of age in very different worlds; but they seem alike to us because they are just dead people in funny clothing, singing quaint, antique songs. “Old-fashioned” is enough to blur them together.)

Face it. Many of those old songs were still being sung and recorded when I was young. Lawrence Welk. Mitch Miller. Preservation Hall. Leon Redbone had warbled Champagne Charlie on the Tonight Show in front of God and everybody. Wasn’t it far more likely that Mae had heard it then, than that she had heard it in 1868?

A Hundred and Twentysomething. I had deduced a remarkable age for Mae from the dates of the songs she remembered. If that was a will-o’-the wisp, what was the point? There was no teleology to interest the professionals; no hook to grab the public. How many people would care about an old woman’s recollections? Not enough to make a best seller.

And what right had that old bat, what right had anyone, to live so long when children were dying? What use were a few extra years remembering the past when there were others who would never have a future?

Damn! I saw that I had torn the index card. I rummaged in the drawer for tape, found none, and wondered if it made any sense to bother recopying the information. The whole effort was a waste of time. I picked up the deck of index cards and threw them. I missed the wastebasket and they fluttered like dead leaves across the room.

Oh, how old is she, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?

Oh, how old is she, charming Billy?

She’s twice six and she’s twice seven,

Forty-eight and eleven.

She’s a young thing that cannot leave her mother.

I could have gone home, instead, and gotten an early start on the weekend.

I had planned to visit the National Archives today, but to continue the book project now seemed pointless. The whole rationale had collapsed; and Mae had withdrawn into that fearful isolation in which I had found her. There was no reason not to go home. Brenda had taken the day off to recuperate from her trip. She was probably waiting for me. So, I closed the clinic at noon and took the Transit to Newark’s Penn Station, where I transferred to the PATH train into the World Trade Center. From there a cab dropped me at Varick and Houston in lower Manhattan.

If we did not meet, we could not quarrel.

The young woman behind the information desk was a pixie: short, with serious bangs and serious, round glasses. Her name tag read Sara. “Green?” she said when I had explained my mission. “What an odd name. It might be a nickname. You know, like ‘Red.’ One of my grandfathers was called ‘Blackie’ because his family name was White. She took out a sheet of scratch paper and made some notes on it. “I’d suggest you start with the 1910 Census and look for Green Holloway in the Soundex.”

“Soundex?” I said. “What is that?”

“It’s like an Index, but it’s based on sounds, not spelling. Which is good, since the enumerators didn’t always spell the names right. Holloway might have been recorded as, oh, H-a-l-i-w-a-y, for example, or even H-a-l-l-w-a-y; but the Soundex code would be the same.”

“I see. Clever.”

She took out a brochure and jotted another note on the scratch pad. “Holloway would be . . . H. Then L is a 4, and the W and Y don’t count. That’s H400. There will be a lot of other names listed under H400, like Holly and Hall, but that should narrow your search.” She filled out a request voucher for me. “Even with the Soundex,” she said as she wrote, “there are no guarantees. There are all sorts of omissions, duplicates, wrong names, wrong ages. Dad missed his great-grandmother in the 1900 Census, because she was living with her son-in-law and the enumerator had listed her with the son-in-law’s family name. One of my great-great-grandfathers ‘aged’ fourteen years between the 1870 and 1880 censuses; and his wife-to-be was listed twice in 1860. People weren’t always home; so, the enumerator would try to get the information from a neighbor, who didn’t always know. So you should always cross-check your information.”

She directed me to an empty carrel, and shortly after, an older man delivered the 1910 Soundex for Blount County, Tennessee. I threaded the microfilm spool into the viewer and spun forward, looking for H400. Each frame was an index card with the head of household on top and everyone else listed below with their ages and relationships.

I slowed when I started to see first names starting with G:

Gary . . . George . . . Gerhard . . . Glenn . . . Granville . . . Gretchen . . . Gus . . . No Green. I backed up and checked each of the G’s, one by one, thinking Green might be out of sequence.

Still, no luck. And I couldn’t think of any other way “Green” might be spelled. Unless it was a nickname, in which case, forget it. I scrolled ahead to the M’s. If the census taker had interviewed Mae, Green might be listed as “Mister.”

But . . . No “Mister.” Then I checked the M’s again, this time searching for “Mae” or “May,” because if Mister had died in the Spanish-American War rather than World War I, Mae herself would have been listed as head-of-household in 1910.

Still nothing. It was a fool’s errand, anyway. For all I knew, Mae was really Anna-Mae or Lulu-Mae or some other such Appalachianism, which would make finding her close to impossible.

I tried the 1900 Soundex next. But I came up dry on that, too. No Green, no Mister, no Mae. Eventually, I gave up.

I leaned back in the chair and stretched my arms over my head. Now what? We lived so far back in the hollers they had to pipe in the daylight. It could be that the census takers had flat out missed her. Or she had already left the hills by 1900. In which case, I did not know where to search. She had gone to Cincinnati, I remembered. And to California. At one time or another, she had mentioned San Francisco, and Chicago, and Wyoming, and even New York City. The old bag had a lot of travel stickers on her.

I took a walk to stretch my legs. If I left now, and the trains were on time, and the traffic was light, I could still be home in time to tuck Dee-dee in. But a check of the sidewalk outside the building showed the crowds running thick. The Financial District was getting an early start on the weekend. Not a good time to be leaving the City. Not a good time at all. Traffic heading for the tunnels sat at a standstill. Tightly-packed herds of humans trampled the sidewalks. I would have likened them to sheep, but for the in-your-face single-mindedness with which they marched toward their parking lots and subway entrances.

The trains would be SRO, packed in with tired, sweaty office workers chattering about Fashion Statements or Sunday’s Big Game; or (the occasional Type A personality) hunched over their laptops, working feverishly on their next deal or their next angina, whichever came first. Was there ever a time when the New York crowds thinned out? Perhaps there was a continual stream of drones flowing through the streets of Manhattan twenty-four hours a day. Or maybe they were simply walking around and around this one block just to fool me. A Potemkin Crowd.

I returned to the information desk. “I guess as long as I’m stuck here I’ll check 1890.” That would be before the Spanish-American War, so Green might be alive and listed.

“I’m sorry,” Sara told me. “The 1890 Census was destroyed in a fire in 1921, and only a few fragments survived.”

I sighed. “Dead end, I guess. I’m sorry I took up so much of your time.”

“That’s what I’m here for. You could try 1880, though, and look for the parents. There’s a partial Soundex for households with children aged ten and under. If the woman was born in the 1870s like you think . . .”

I shook my head. “No. I know she was born a Murray, but I don’t know her father’s name.” Checking each and every M600 for a young child named Mae was not an appealing task. I might only be killing time; but I had no intention of bludgeoning it to death. I’d have a better chance hunting Holloways, because Green’s name was so out of the ordinary. But I’d have to go frame-by-frame there, too, since I didn’t know his parents’ names, either. That sort of painstaking research was the reason why God invented professionals.

Sara pointed to a row of shelves near the carrels. “There is one other option. There are printed indices of Heads of Households for 1870 and earlier.”

I shook my head. “The grandparents? I don’t know their names, either.”

“Did she have a brother?”

“Zach,” I said. “Just the two of them, as far as I know. At least, she’s never mentioned any other siblings.”

“Children sometimes were given their grandparents’ names. Maybe her father’s parents were Zach and Mae Murray. It’s a shot in the dark, but what do you have to lose? If you don’t look, you’ll never find anything.”

“Okay, thanks.” I wandered over to the row of index volumes and studied them. I was blowing off the time now and I knew it. Still, I could always strike it lucky.

The indices for Tennessee ran from 1820 through 1860. Thick, bound volumes on heavy paper. No Soundex here. I’d have to remember to check alternate spellings. I pulled out the volume for 1860 and flipped through the pages until I found Murray. Murrays were “thick as ticks on a hound dog’s hide,” but none of them were named Zach. However, when I checked H, I did find a “Green Holloway” in District 2, Greenback, Tennessee. Mister’s grandfather? How many Green Holloways could there be? I copied the information and put in a request for the spool; then, just for luck, I checked 1850, as well.

The 1850 Census listed a “Greenberry Hollaway,” also in District 2, Greenback P.O. I chuckled. Greenberry? Imagine sending a kid to school with a name like Greenberry!

Green appeared in the 1840 and 1830 indices, too. And 1830 listed a “Josh Murry” in the same census district as Green. Mae’s great-grandfather? Worth a look, anyway.

The trail ended there. The Blount County returns for 1820 were lost, and all the earlier censuses had all been destroyed when the British burned Washington in 1814.

I put the volumes back on the shelf. There was a thick atlas on a reading stand next to the indices and, out of curiosity, I turned it open to Tennessee. It took me a while to find Greenback. When I finally did, I saw that it lay in Loudon County, not Blount.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I muttered.

“What doesn’t?” A shriveled, dried-up old man with wire-frame glasses was standing by my elbow waiting to use the atlas.

“The indices all say Blount County, but the town is in Loudon.” I didn’t bother to explain. It wasn’t any of his business. There could be any number of reasons for the discrepancy. The Greenback post office could have serviced parts of Blount County.

The man adjusted his glasses and peered at the map. I stepped aside. “It’s all yours,” I said.

“Now, hold on, sonny.” He opened his satchel, something halfway between a purse and a briefcase, and pulled out a dog-eared, soft-bound red book. He licked his forefinger and rubbed pages aside. He hummed and nodded as he read. “Here’s your answer,” he said, jabbing a finger at a table. “Loudon County was erected in 1870 from parts of Blount and neighboring counties. Greenback was in the part that became Loudon County. See?” He closed the book one-handed with a snap. “It’s simple.”

I guess if hanging around musty old records is your whole life, it’s easy to sound like an expert. He looked like something the Archives would have in storage anyway. “Thanks,” I said.

The whole afternoon had been a waste of time. I had been searching in the wrong county. Blast the forgetfulness of age! Mae had said she had been born in Blount County, so I had looked in Blount County. And all the while, the records were tucked safely away under Loudon.

I checked the clock on the wall. Four-thirty? Too late to start over. Time to pack it in and catch the train.

When I returned to my carrel, however, I found the spool for 1860 Blount County had already been delivered. I considered sending it back, but decided to give it a fast read before leaving. I mounted the spool and spun the fast forward, slowing when I reached District 2. About a third of the way through, I stopped.

Hah! There it was. Success—of sorts—at last! This Green Holloway must have been the same one whose Civil War records I had gotten. Green and Mabel Holloway begat Zach Holloway, who must have begat Green “Mister” Holloway. Jesus. If those ages were correct, Mabel was only fifteen when she did her begatting. Who said babies having babies was a modern thing? But, kids grew up faster back then. They took on a lot of adult responsibilities at fifteen or sixteen. Today, they behave like juveniles into their late twenties.

Now that I knew what I was looking for and where it was, it didn’t take me very long to check the 1850 Census, as well.

Those names . . . The eerie coincidence gave me a queer feeling. And Mabel should have been twenty-seven, not thirty-two. (Or else she should have been forty-two in 1860.) But then I remembered Sara’s cautions. How easy it was for enumerators to get names and ages wrong; and how the same names were used generation after generation.

Just one more spool, I promised myself. Then I head home.

Uncle Sugar had been less nosy in 1840. The census listed only heads of households.

Everyone else was tallied by age bracket.

The “white female” was surely Mabel, and she was in her twenties. So her age in 1860 had been wrong. She must have been forty-two, not thirty-seven. Twenty-two, thirty-two, forty-two. That made sense. I folded the sheet with the information and stuffed it in my briefcase. Sara had been right about cross checking the documentation. The census takers had not always gotten the straight skinny. Mabel had probably looked younger than her years in 1860 and a neighbor, asked for the data, had guessed low.

“She looks younger than her years.” The phrase wriggled through my mind and I thought fleetingly of Dee-dee looking older than her years. For every yin there is a yang, and if the universe did balance . . . If for some reason Mabel herself never spoke to the enumerator and a neighbor in the next holler guessed her age instead, the guess would be low. So, twenty-seven, thirty-two, thirty-seven made a weird kind of sense, too. And it actually agreed better with the written documents!

And what if she kept it up? I laughed to myself. Now there was a crazy thought! Aging five years to the decade, by 1870 she would have seemed . . . mmm, forty-two. And today? Add another sixty-odd years, and Mabel would appear to be . . . A hundred and five or thereabouts. About as old as Mae seemed to be.

I paused with one arm in my jacket.

About as old as Mae seemed to be? I stared at the spool boxes stacked in the carrel, ready for pick-up.

Greenberry and Mabel. Green and Mae? No, it was absurd. A wild coincidence of names. The census records are not that reliable. And it’s only that Dee-dee is aging too fast that you even thought about someone aging too slow. I took a few steps toward the door.

And the 1830 Census? I hadn’t bothered checking it. What if it listed a Green Holloway aged 20-29 and a “white female” still aged 20-29?

I turned and looked back at the reading room and my heart began to pound in my ears, and all of a sudden I knew why Dr. Bench had figured Mae for eighty-five three decades ago, and why Mae had feared for her sanity all her life.

So early in the month of May,

As the green buds were a-swelling.

A young man on his death-bed lay,

For the love of Barbry Ellen.

It was pitch black out when I finally arrived home. There was a light on in the kitchen, none above-stairs. I parked in the driveway and got out and walked around the end of the garage through the gate into the backyard. The crickets were chirruping like a swing with a squeaky hinge. Lightning bugs drifted lazily through the air. I walked all the way to the back of the yard, to the edge of the woods and leaned against a bent gum tree. The ground around me was littered with last year’s prickly balls. I listened to the night sounds.

I had checked 1830 and found . . . I didn’t know what I had found. Nothing. Everything. A few tantalizing hints. Greenberry, Mabel, and Zachary. Mister, Mae, and . . . Zach? Not a younger brother, but a son? And another entry: Wm. Biddle, Jr., a free man of color. Mae had spoken of “Will Biddle who farmed two hollers over from us when I was a child . . .” But in 1830? In 1830?

There was a logical part of my mind that rejected those hints. Each had an alternative explanation. Coincidence of names. Clerical errors. Senile memory.

Sometimes we remember things only because we have been told them so often. I remember that I stepped in a birthday cake when I was two years old. It had been placed on the floor in the back of the family car and I had climbed over the seat and . . . But do I remember it? Or do I remember my parents telling me the story—and showing me the snapshot—so many times over the years that it has become real to me. Mae could be remembering family tales she had heard, scrambled and made hers by a slowly short-circuiting brain.

But there was another part of me that embraced those hints; that wanted to believe that Mae had known Margaret Sanger, had voted for Teddy Roosevelt, had danced on the White House lawn in a Sanitary Commission uniform, because if they were true . . .

I stepped away from the tree and a rabbit shot suddenly left to right in front of me. I watched it bound away . . . And spied figures moving about in the Carters’ backyard. Henry and Barbara. I watched them for a while, wondering idly what they were up to. Then I recalled Henry’s nickname for his wife—and a song that Mae had known.

I took the same route the rabbit had taken. Last year’s dead leaves crackled and dry twigs snapped beneath my feet. I saw one of the Carters—Henry, I thought—come suddenly erect and look my way. I hoped he wouldn’t call the police. Then I thought, Christ, they’re newlyweds. What sort of backyard shenanigans was I about to walk in on?

I stopped and waved a hand. “That you, Henry? Barbara? It’s Paul Wilkes.”

A second shadow stood erect by the first. “What’s wrong?” It was Barbara’s voice.

“I—I saw you moving around back there and thought it might be prowlers. Is everything all right?”

“Sure,” said Henry. “Come on out. You’ll get tick-bitten if you stay in there.”

“Why don’t you have your yard light on?” I asked as I stepped from the woods. Stupid question. I could think of a couple of reasons. Brenda and I had once gone skinny dipping in our pool at three in the morning. Stifled laughter and urgent play, and the water glistening like pearls on her skin. That had been years ago, of course; but sometimes it was good to remember that there had once been times like that.

“It would spoil the viewing,” Henry said.

Now that I was close enough, I saw that they had a telescope set up on a tripod. It was a big one. “Oh. Are you an astronomer?”

Henry shook his head. “I’m a genetic engineer, or I will be when I finish my dissertation. Barbry’s going to be a biochemist. Astronomy is our hobby.”

“I see.” I felt uncomfortable, an intruder; but I had come there with a purpose. I made as if to turn away and then turned back. “Say, as long as I’m here, there is a question you might be able to answer for me.”

“Sure.” They were an obliging couple. The moon was half-full, the air was spring evening cool, they did not really want me there interrupting whatever it was that the sky-gazing would have led to.

“I’ve heard Henry call you Barbry,” I said to Barbara. “And . . . Do you know a song called Barbry Ellen?”

She laughed. “You mean Barbara Allen. Sure. That’s where Henry came up with the nickname. He’s into folk singing. Barbry Ellen is an older version.”

“Well, someone told me it was the ‘old president’s favorite song,’ and I wondered if you knew—”

“Which old president? That’s easy. George Washington. You see, he had this secret crush on his best friend’s wife, and . . .”

“George Washington? Are you sure?”

“Well, there might have been other presidents who liked it. But Washington’s partiality is on the record, and the song has been out of vogue a long, long time.”

“Was that all you wanted to know?” asked Henry. There was something in his voice that sounded a lot like “good bye.” He wasn’t happy, I could tell. I had spoiled the mood for him.

“Yes, certainly,” I said. “I thought you might have been prowlers.” I backed away into the woods, then turned and walked quickly home.

I learned me that ’un when I was knee-high to a grasshopper. Pa told me it was the President’s favorite song. The old President, from when his Pappy fought in the War.

The old President, from when his Pappy fought in the War.

Lost my partner, what’ll I do?

Lost my partner, what’ll I do?

Lost my partner, what’ll I do?

Skip to my love, my darling.

Brenda drank tea. She always allowed the bag to steep for a precise five minutes (read the package) and always squeezed it dry with her teaspoon. She always disposed of the bag in the trash before drinking from the cup. When she drank, she held the saucer in her left hand and the cup in her right and hugged her elbows close to her body. She stood near the French doors in the family room, gazing out toward the backyard and the woods beyond. I had no idea if she had heard me.

“I said, I think I’ll go over to Sunny Dale today and look in on Mrs. Holloway.”

Brenda held herself so still she was nearly rigid. Not because she was reacting to what I had said. She always stood that way. She spent her life at attention.

“You didn’t have any plans, did you?”

A small, precise shake of the head. “No. No plans. We never have any plans.” A sip of tea that might have been measured in minims. “Maybe I’ll go into the office, too. There are always cases to work on.”

I hesitated a moment longer before leaving. When I reached the front door, I heard her call.

“Paul?”

“Yes?” Down the length of the hall I could see her framed by the glass doors at the far end. She had turned around and was facing me. “What?”

“Why do you have to go in today? It’s Saturday.”

“It’s . . . nothing I can talk about yet. A wild notion. It might be nothing more than a senile woman’s ravings, but it might be the most important discovery of the century. Brenda, if I’m right, it could change our lives.”

Even from where I stood I could see the faint smile that trembled on her lips. “Yes, it could, at that.” She turned around and faced the glass again. “You do what you have to do, Paul. So will I.”

It was odd, but I suddenly remembered how much we had once done together. Silly things, simple things. Football games, Scrabble, Broadway shows. Moments public and private. The party had asked Brenda to run for the state legislature one time, and I had urged her to accept, but the baby had been due and . . . Somehow, now we stood at opposite ends of the house. I thought for a moment of asking her to come with me to the Home, but thought better of it. Brenda would find those old, gray creatures more distressing than I did. “Look,” I said, “this should only take a couple hours. I’ll call you and we’ll do something together this afternoon. Take in a movie, maybe.”

She nodded in her distracted way. I saw that she had spilled tea into her saucer.

Once at the Home, I sought out Mae in her garden retreat, hoping that she was in a better mood than yesterday. I had a thousand questions to ask. A dozen puzzles and one hope. But when she saw me coming, her face retreated into a set of tight lines: Eyes, narrowed; mouth and lips, thin and disapproving.

“Go away,” said Mae Holloway.

“I only wanted to ask a few—”

“I said, go away! Why are you always pestering me?”

“Don’t mind her,” said a voice by my elbow. “She’s been that way since yesterday.” I turned and saw Jimmy Kovacs, the retired printer. “Headache. Maybe you should give her something.”

“You don’t need a doctor to take aspirin.”

He shook his head. “Aspirin didn’t work. She needs something stronger. Might be a migraine. I had an allergy once. To hot dog meat. Every time I had a frank, my head felt like fireworks going off inside. So, my doc, he tells me—”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. Old folks chatter about little else than their ailments. They compare them the way young boys compare . . . Well, you know what I mean. “Mine is bigger than yours.” They have contests, oldsters do, to see who has the biggest illness. The winner gets to die.

I sat on the stone bench beside Mae. “Jimmy tells me you have a headache,” I said.

“Jimmy should mind his own affairs.”

“Where does it hurt?”

“In my haid, jackass. That’s what makes it a headache.”

“No, I mean is it all over or in one spot? Is it a dull ache or sharp points. Is it continual, or does it come in bursts? Do you see or hear anything along with the headache?”

She gave me a look. “How do you make a headache into such a contraption?”

I shrugged. “There are many things that can cause a headache. When did it start?” If I could relieve her pain, she might be willing to answer the questions I had about her family history.

She squinted at the ground, her face tight as a drum. I heard her suck in her breath. Bees danced among the flowers to our right; the fragrances hung in the air. “Yesterday afternoon,” she said. “Yesterday afternoon, after you left. It was like the sun come up inside my head. I was lying down for a nap when everything turned blind white for a few seconds and I heard a chorus a-singing hymns. I thought I’d surely died and gone to heaven.” She took a deep breath and massaged her left temple with her fingers. “Somedays I’ud as lief I were dead. All these here aches and pains . . . And I cain’t do the things I used to. I used to dance. I used to love to dance, but I can’t do that no more. And everybody who ever mattered to me is a longtime gone.”

Her parents. Little Zach. Green Holloway. Gone a very long time, if I was right. Joe Paxton. Ben Wickham. There must have been plenty of others, besides. Folks in Cincinnati, in California, in Wyoming. She left a trail of alienation behind her every place she had ever been. It was a cold trail, in more ways than one.

“When the white light faded out, I saw it weren’t an angel choir, after all. It were Christy’s Minstrels that time when they come to Knoxville, and Mister and me and . . .” She frowned and shook her head. “Mister and me, we tarryhooted over to hear ’em. Doc, it was the clearest spell I ever had. I was a-settin’ in the audience right down in front. I clean forgot I was a-bedded down here in Sunny Dale.”

Sometimes migraines triggered visions. Some of the saints had suffered migraines and seen the Kingdom of God. “Yes?” I prompted.

“Well, Mister was a-settin’ on my left holding my hand; and someone’s man-child, maybe fifteen years, was press’t up agin me on my right—oh, we was packed in almighty tight, I tell you—but, whilst I could see and hear as clear as I can see and hear you, I couldn’t feel any of them touching me. When I thunk on it, I could feel that I was lying a-bed with the sheets over me.”

I nodded. “You weren’t getting any tactile memories, then. I think your—”

She didn’t hear me. “The troupe was setting on benches, with each row higher than the one in front—Tiers, that be what they call ’em. They all stood to sing the medley, ’cept ‘Mr. Interlocutor,’ who sat in a chair front and center. Heh. That was the out-doin’est chair I ever did see. Like a king’s throne, it was. They sang Jim Along Josie and Ring, Ring the Banjo. I h’ain’t heared them tunes since who flung the chuck. The interlocutor was sided by the soloists on his right and the glee singers—what they later called barbershop singers—on the left.” She gestured, moving both hands out from the center. “Then the banjo player and the dancer. Then there was four end-men, two t’ either side. Those days, only the end-men were in the Ethiopian business.”

“The Ethiopian business?”

“You know. Done up in black-face.”

Images of Cantor singing “Mammy.” Exaggerated lips; big, white, buggy eyes. An obscene caricature. “Black face!”

My disapproval must have shown in my voice, for Mae grew defensive. “Well, that was the only way us reg’lar folks ever got to hear nigra music back then,” she said, rubbing her temple. “The swells could hear ’em any time; but the onlyest nigras I ever saw ’fore I left the hills was Will Biddle and his kin, and they didn’t do a whole lot of singing and dancing.”

“Nigras?” That was worse than black-face. I tried to remind myself that Mae had grown up in a very different world.

Mae seemed to refocus. Her eyes lost the dreamy look. “What did I say? Nigra? Tarnation, that isn’t right, anymore, is it? They say ‘coloreds’ now.”

“African-American. Or black.”

She shook her head, then winced and rubbed her temple again. “They weren’t mocking the col—the black folks. The minstrels weren’t. Not then. It was fine music. Toe-tapping. And the banjo . . . Why, white folks took that up from the coloreds. But we’uns couldn’t go to dark-town shows, and they couldn’t come to us—not in them days. So, sometimes white folks dressed up to play black music. Daddy Rice, he was supposed to be the best, though I never did see him strut Jim Crow; but James Bland that wrote a lot of the tunes was a black man his own self. I heared he went off to France later ’cause of the way the white folks was always greenin’ him.”

“I see. Has your headache subsided since then?” Minstrel shows, I thought.

“It’s all so mixed up. These memories I keep getting. It’s like a kalidey-scope I had as a young ’un. All those pretty beads and mirrors . . .”

“Your headache, Mrs. Holloway. I asked if it was still the same.” Try to keep old folks on the track. Go ahead, try it.

She grimaced. “Why, it comes and goes, like ocean waves. I seen the ocean oncet. Out in Californey. Now, that was a trek, let me tell you. Folks was poor on account of the depression, so I took shank’s mare a long part of the way, just like Sweet Betsy.” She sighed. “That was always a favorite of mine. Every time I heared it, it was like I could see it all in my mind. The singing around the campfire; the cold nights on the prairie. The Injuns a-whooping and a-charging . . .” She began to sing.

The Injuns come down in a great yelling horde.

And Betsy got skeered they would scalp her adored.

So behind the front wagon wheel Betsy did crawl.

And she fought off the Injuns with powder and ball.

Mae tried to smile, but it was a weak and pained one. “I went back to Californey years later. I taken the Denver Zephyr, oh, my, in the 1920s I think it was. Packed into one of them old coach cars, cheek by jowl, the air so thick with cigar smoke. And when you opened the window, why you got coal ash in your face from the locomotive.”

“Look, why don’t you come to the clinic with me and I’ll see if I have anything for that headache of yours.”

She nodded and rose from her bench, leaning on her stick. She took one step and looked puzzled. Then she staggered a little. “Dizzy,” she muttered. Then she toppled forward over her stick and fell to the ground. I leaped to my feet and grabbed her by the shoulders, breaking her fall.

“Hey!” I said. “Careful! You’ll break something.”

Her eyes rolled back up into her head and her limbs began to jerk uncontrollably. I looked over my shoulder and saw Jimmy Kovacs hurrying up the garden path. “Quick,” I said. “Call an ambulance! Call Dr. Khan! Tell her to meet us at the hospital.”

Jimmy hesitated. He looked at Mae, then at me. “What’s wrong?” he said.

“Hurry! I think she’s having another stroke.”

Jimmy rushed off and I turned back to Mae. Checkout time, I thought. But why now? Why now?

I have always loved hospitals. They are factories of health, mass producers of treatments. The broken and defective bodies come in, skilled craftsmen go to work—specialists from many departments, gathered together in one location—and healthy and restored bodies emerge. Usually. No process is one hundred percent efficient. Some breakdowns cannot be repaired. But it is more efficient to have the patients come to the doctor than to have the doctor waste time traveling from house to house. Only when health is mass produced can it be afforded by the masses.

Yet, I can see how some people would dislike them. The line is a thin one between the efficient and the impersonal.

Khan and I found Mae installed in the critical care unit. The ward was shaped like a cul-de-sac, with the rooms arranged in a circle around the nurses’ station. White sheets, antiseptic smell. Tubes inserted wherever they might prove useful. Professionally compassionate nurses. Bill Wing was waiting for us there. With clipboard in hand and stethoscope dangling from his neck, he looked like an archetype for The Doctor. We shook hands and I introduced him to Khan. Wing led us out into the corridor, away from the patient. Mae was in a coma, but it was bad form to discuss her case in front of her, as if she were not there.

“It was not a stroke,” he told us, “but a tumor. An astrocytoma encroaching on the left temporal lobe. It is malignant and deeply invasive.” Wing spoke with an odd Chinese-British accent. He was from Guandong by way of Hong Kong.

I heard Khan suck in her breath. “Can it be removed?” she asked.

Wing shook his head. “On a young and healthy patient, maybe; though I would hesitate to perform the operation even then. On a woman this old and weak . . .” He shook his head again. “I have performed a decompression to relieve some of the pressure, but the tumor itself is not removable.”

Khan sighed. “So sad. But she has had a long life.”

“How much longer does she have?” I asked.

Wing pursed his lips and looked inscrutable. “That is hard to say. Aside from the tumor, she is in good health . . . for a woman her age, of course. It could be tomorrow; it could be six months. She has a time bomb in her head, and no one knows how long the fuse is. We only know that the fuse . . .”

“Has been lit,” finished Khan. Wing looked unhappy, but nodded.

“As the tumor progresses,” he continued, “her seizures will become more frequent. I suspect there will be pain as the swelling increases.” He paused and lowered his head slightly, an Oriental gesture.

“There must be something you can do,” I said. Khan looked at me.

“Sometimes,” she said, “there is nothing that can be done.”

I shook my head. “I can’t accept that.” Holloway could not die. Not yet. Not now. I thought of all those secrets now sealed in her head. They might be fantasies, wild conclusions that I had read into partial data; but I had to know. I had to know.

“There is an end to everything.” Noor Khan gazed toward the double doors that led to the medical CCU. “Though it is always hard to see the lights go out.

I drew my coat on. “I’m going to go to the University Library for a while.”

Khan gave me a peculiar look. “The Library?” She shrugged. “I will stay by her side. You know how she feels about hospitals. She will be frightened when she recovers consciousness. Best if someone she knows is with her.”

I nodded. “She may not regain consciousness for some time,” I reminded her. “What about your patients?”

“Dr. Mendelson will handle my appointments tomorrow. I called him before I came over.”

All right, let her play the martyr! I tugged my cap onto my head. Khan didn’t expect thanks, did she? I could just picture the old crone’s ravings. The hysteria. She would blame Khan, not thank her, for bringing her here.

As I reached the door, I heard Khan gasp. “She’s singing!”

I turned. “What?”

Khan was hovering over the bed. She flapped an arm. “Come. Listen to this.”

As if I had not listened to enough of her ditties. I walked to the bedside and leaned over. The words came soft and slurred, with pauses in between as she sucked in breath: “There was an old woman . . . at the foot of the hill . . . If she ain’t moved away . . . she’s living there still . . . Hey-diddle . . . day-diddle . . . de-dum . . .” Her voice died away into silence. Khan looked at me.

“What was that all about?”

I shook my head. “Another random memory,” I said. “The tumor is busy, even if she is not.”

It was not until mid-afternoon, buried deep in the stacks at the University Library, that I remembered my promise to call Brenda. But when I phoned from the lobby, Consuela told me that she had gone out and that I was not to wait up for her.

But the summer faded, and a chilly blast

O’er that happy cottage swept at last;

When the autumn song birds woke the dewy morn,

Our little “Prairie Flow’r” was gone.

In the year before Deirdre was born, Brenda and I took a vacation trip to Boston and Brenda laid out an hour-by-hour itinerary, listing each and every site we planned to visit. Along the way, she kept detailed logs of gas, mileage, arrival and departure times at each attraction, expenses, even tips to bellboys. It did not stop her from enjoying Boston. She did not insist that we march in lockstep to the schedule. “It’s a guide, not a straitjacket,” she had said. Yet, she spent an hour before bed each night updating and revising the next day’s itinerary. Like an itch demanding a scratch, like a sweet tooth longing for chocolate, satisfying the urge to organize gave her some deep, almost sensual pleasure.

Now, of course, everything was planned and scheduled, even small trips. Sometimes the plan meant more than the journey.

Brenda frowned as I pulled into the secluded lot and parked in front of an old, yellow, wood-frame building. A thick row of fir trees screened the office building from the busy street and reduced the sound of rushing traffic to a whisper.

“Paul, why are we stopping? What is this place?”

“A lab,” I told her. “That phone call just before we left the house . . . Some work I gave them is ready.”

“Can’t you pick it up tomorrow when you’re on duty?” she said. “We’ll be late.”

“We won’t be late. The Sawyers never start on time, and there’ll be three other couples to keep them busy.”

“I hope that boy of theirs isn’t there. He gives me the creeps, the way he stares at people . . .”

“Maybe they changed his medication,” I said. “Do you want to come in, or will you wait out here?”

“Is there a waiting area?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been here before.”

Brenda gave a small sound, halfway between a cough and a sigh. Then she made a great show of unbuckling her seat belt.

“You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to,” I said.

“Can you just get this over with?”

Inside the front door was a small lobby floored with dark brown tiles. The directory on the wall listed three tenants in white, plastic, push-pin letters: a management consulting firm, a marriage counselor, and the genetics lab.

When Brenda learned that S/P Microbiology was situated on the third floor, she rolled her eyes and decided to wait in the lobby. “Don’t be long,” she said, her voice halfway between an order, a warning, and a plaintive plea to keep the schedule.

The receptionist at S/P was a young redhead wearing a headset and throat mike. He showed me to a chair in a small waiting room, gave me a not-too-old magazine to read, and spoke a few words into his mouthpiece. When the telephone rang, he touched his earpiece once and answered the phone while on his way back to his station. Clever, I thought, to have a receptionist not tied to a desk.

I was alone only for a moment before Charles Randolph Singer himself came out. He was a short, slightly rumpled-looking man a great deal younger than his reputation had led me to expect. His white lab coat hung open, revealing a pocket jammed full of pens and other instruments. “Charlie Singer,” he said. “You’re Doctor Wilkes?”

“Yes.”

He shook my hand. “You sure did hand us one larruping good problem.” Then he cocked his head sideways and looked at me. “Where’d you get the samples?”

“I’d . . . rather not say yet.”

“Hunh. Doctor-patient crap, right? Well, you’re paying my rent with this job, so I won’t push it. Come on in back. I’ll let Jessie explain things.”

I followed Singer into a larger room lined with lab benches and machines. A dessicator and a centrifuge, a mass spec, a lot of other equipment I didn’t recognize. A large aquarium filled with brackish water, fish, and trash occupied one corner. The plastic beverage can rings and soda bottles were dissolving into a floating, liquid scum, which the fish calmly ignored.

“Jessie!” Singer said. “Wilkes is here.”

A round-faced woman peered around the side of the mass spectrometer. “Oh,” she said. “You.” She was wearing a headset similar to the receptionist’s.

“Jessica Burton-Peeler,” said Singer introducing us, “is the second-best geneticist on the face of the planet.”

Peeler smiled sweetly. “That was last year, Charlie.” She spoke with a slight British accent.

Singer laughed and pulled a stick of gum from the pocket of his lab coat. He unwrapped it and rolled it into a ball between his fingers. “Tell Doctor Wilkes here what we found.” He popped the wad of gum into his mouth.

“Would you like some tea or coffee, Doctor? I can have Eamonn bring you a cup.”

“No, thanks. My wife is waiting downstairs. We were on our way to a dinner party, but I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to find out.”

Singer gave me a speculative look. “Find out what?”

“What you found out.”

After a moment, Singer grunted and shrugged. “All right. We cultured all three cell samples,” he said. “The ‘B’ sample was normal in all respects. The cells went through fifty-three divisions.”

“Which is about average,” Peeler added. “As for the other two . . . One of them divided only a dozen times—”

“The ‘A’ sample,” I interjected.

“Yes,” she said after a momentary pause. “The ‘A’ sample. But the ‘C’ sample . . . That one divided one hundred and twenty-three times.”

I swallowed. “And that is . . . abnormal?”

“Abnormal?” Singer laughed. “Doc, that measurement is so far above the Gaussian curve that you can’t even see abnormal from there.”

“The ‘A’ sample wasn’t normal, either,” said Peeler quietly.

I looked at her and she looked at me calmly and without expression. “Well,” I said and coughed. “Well.”

“So, what’s next?” Singer demanded. “You didn’t send us those tissue samples just to find out they were different. You already knew that—or you suspected it—when you sent them in. We’ve confirmed it. Now what?”

“I’d like you to compare them and find out how their DNA differs.”

Singer nodded after a thoughtful pause. “Sure. If the reason is genetic. We can look for factors common to several ‘normal’ samples but different for your ‘A’ and ‘C’ samples. Run polymerase chain reactions. Tedious, but elementary.”

“And then . . .” I clenched and unclenched my fists. “I’ve heard you work on molecular modifiers.”

“Nanomachines,” said Singer. “I have a hunch it’ll be a big field someday, and I’m planning to get in on the ground floor.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the aquarium. “Right now I’m working on a bacterium that eats plastic waste.”

“Dear Lord,” said Burton-Peeler in sudden wonder. “You want us to modify the DNA, don’t you?”

Singer looked from me to his wife. “Modify the DNA?”

“Yes,” I started to say.

Burton-Peeler pursed her lips. “Modify the ‘A’ sample, of course. Whatever factor we find in the ‘C’ sample that sustains the cell division . . . You want us to splice that into the short-lived sample.”

I nodded, unable to speak. “I thought it might be possible to bring it up to normal.”

Singer rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know. Splicing bacterial DNA is one thing. Human DNA is another. A universe more of complexity. Of course, there is that business with the multiple sclerosis aerosol. They used a modified rhinovirus to carry the mucus-producing genes into the lungs. If the factor is gene specific, we could do something similar. Infect the cells with a retrovirus and . . .”

“Then you can do it?”

“Now hold on. I said no such thing. I said maybe it was possible, if the chips fall right. But there’ll be some basic research needed. It will cost. A lot.”

“I’ll . . . find the money. Somehow.”

Singer shook his head slowly. “I don’t think you can find that much. You’re talking about maybe three to five years research here.”

“Three to—” I felt the pit of my stomach drop away. “I don’t have three to five years.” Dee-dee would be dead by then. And Mae, too, taking the secret in her genes with her.

“We’ll do it at cost,” said Burton-Peeler. Singer turned and looked at his wife.

“What?”

“We’ll do it at cost, Charlie. I’ll tell you why later.” She looked back to me. “Understand, we still cannot promise fast results. When you set off into the unknown, you cannot predict your arrival time.”

Go for broke. Damn the torpedoes. “Just try is all I ask.”

Burton-Peeler saw me out. On the landing to the stairwell she stopped. “You’re the father of the young girl with progeria,” she said. “I saw it in the paper a few years ago. The ‘A’ sample was hers, wasn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yes, and the second sample was my own. For comparison.” I turned to go.

Peeler stopped me with an arm on my sleeve. She looked into my eyes. “Whose was the third sample?” she asked.

I smiled briefly and sadly. “My faith, that the universe balances.”

In the lobby, Brenda was just handing a tea cup and saucer back to Singer’s red-haired receptionist when she saw me coming. With a few brisk motions she collected her things and was already breezing out the door as I caught up with her.

“I’ll drive,” she said. “We’re way behind schedule now, thanks to you.”

I said nothing and she continued in what was supposed to be an idly curious tone. “Who was that woman with you? The one on the landing.”

“Woman? Oh, that was Jessica Burton-Peeler. Singer’s wife.”

Brenda arched an eyebrow and made a little moue with her lips. “She’s a little on the plump side,” she said. “Do you find plump women attractive?”

I didn’t have the time to deal with Brenda’s insecurities. “Start the car,” I told her. “We’ll be late for dinner.”

They say we are aged and gray, Maggie

As spray by the white breakers flung;

But to me you’re as fair as you were, Maggie,

When you and I were young.

Mae Holloway lay between white sheets, coupled to tubes and wires. She lay with her eyes closed, and her arms limp by her sides atop the sheets. Her mouth hung half-open. She seemed gray and shrunken; drawn, like a wire through a die. Her meager white hair was nearly translucent.

She looked like a woman half her age.

Noor Khan was sitting near the wall reading a magazine. She looked up as I entered the room. “They told you?”

“That Mae has recovered consciousness? Yes. I’m surprised to see you still here.”

Khan looked at the bed. “I have made arrangements. She has no family to keep watch.”

“No,” I agreed. “They are long gone.” Longer than Khan could suppose. “Is she sleeping?”

She hesitated a moment, then spoke in a whisper. “Not really. I think that as long as she keeps her eyes closed she can pretend she is not in hospital. Those memories of hers . . . The consciousness-doubling, you called it. I think they play continually, now. The pressure from the tumor on the temporal lobe.”

I nodded. Suppress all external stimuli and Mae could—in a biological kind of virtual reality—live again in the past. If we spoke too loudly, it would bring her back to a time and place she did not want. “Why don’t you take a break,” I said. “I’ll sit with her for a while.”

Khan cocked her head to the side and looked at me. “You will.”

“Yes. Is that so surprising?”

She started to say something and then changed her mind. “I will be in the cafeteria.” And then she fluttered out.

When she was gone, I pulled the chair up to the bedside and sat in it. “Mae? It’s Doctor Wilkes.” I touched her gently on the arm, and she seemed to flinch from the contact. “Mae?”

“I hear yuh,” she said. Her voice was low and weak and lacked her usual snap. I had to lean close to hear her. “It’ud pleasure me if you’d company for a mite. It’s been mighty lonely up hyar.”

“Has it? But Doctor Khan—”

“I kilt the b’ar,” she whispered, “but it stove up Pa something awful. He cain’t hardly git around no more, so I got to be doin’ for him.” She paused as if listening. “I’m not so little as that, mister; I jest got me a puny bone-box. I ain’t no yokum. I been over the creek. And I got me a Tennessee toothpick, too, in case you have thoughts about a little girl with a crippled-up Pa. What’s yore handle, mister?”

“Mrs. Holloway,” I said gently. “Don’t you know me?”

Mae giggled. “Right pleased to meet you, Mister Holloway. Greenberry’s a funny name, so I’ll just call you Mister. If you’ll set a spell, I’ll whup you up a bait to eat. H’ain’t much, only squirrel; but I aim to go hunting tomorry and find a deer that’ll meat us for a spell.”

I pulled back and sat up straight in my chair. She was reliving her first meeting with Green Holloway. Was she too far gone into the quicksand of nostalgia to respond to me? “Mae,” I said more loudly, shaking her shoulder. “It’s Doctor Wilkes. Can you hear me?”

Mae gasped and her eyes flew open. “Whut . . .? Where . . .?” The eyes lighted on me and went narrow. “You.”

“Me,” I agreed. “How are you feeling, Mrs. Holloway?”

“I’m a-gonna die. How do you want me to feel?”

Relieved? Wasn’t there a poem about weary rivers winding safe to the sea? But, no matter how long and weary the journey, can anyone face the sea at the end of it? “Mrs. Holloway, do you remember the time you were on the White House lawn and the president came out?”

Her face immediately became wary and she looked away from me. “What of it?”

“That president. It was Lincoln, wasn’t it?”

She shook her head, a leaf shivering in the breeze.

I took a deep breath. “The Sanitary Commission was the Union Army’s civilian medical corps. If you were wearing that uniform, you were remembering the 1860s. That business on the lawn. It happened. I looked it up. The dancing. Listen to the Mockinbird. Lincoln coming outside to join the celebration. The whole thing. You know it, but you won’t admit it because it sounds impossible.”

“Sounds impossible?” She turned her head and looked at me at last. “How could I remember Lincoln? I’m not that old!”

“Yes, you are, Mae. You are that old. It’s just that those early memories have gone all blurry. It’s become hard for you to tell the decades apart. Your oldest memories had faded entirely, until your stroke revived them.”

“You’re talking crazy.”

“I think it must be a defense mechanism,” I went on as if she had not spoken. “The blurring and forgetting. It keeps the mental desktop cleared of clutter by shoving the old stuff aside.”

“Doc . . .”

“But, every now and then, one of those old, faded memories would pop up, wouldn’t it? Some impossible recollection. And you would think . . .”

“That I was going crazy.” In a whisper, half to herself, she said, “I was always afraid of that, as long back as I can remember.”

No wonder. Sporadic recollections of events generations past . . . Could a sane mind remember meeting Lincoln? “Mae. I found your name in the 1850 Census.”

She shook her head again. Disbelief. But behind it . . . Hope? Relief that those impossible memories might be real? “Doc, how can it be possible?”

I spread my hands. “I don’t know. Something in your genes. I have some people working on it, but . . . I think you have been aging slow. I don’t know how that is possible. Maybe it has never happened before. Maybe you’re the only one. Or maybe there were others and no one ever noticed. Maybe they were killed in accidents; or they really did go mad; or they thought they were recalling past lives. It doesn’t matter. Mae, I’ve spent the last week in libraries and archives. You were born around 1800.”

“No!”

“Yes. Your father was a member of Captain James Scott’s settlement company. The Murrays, the Hammontrees, the Holloways, the Blacks and others. The overmountain men, they were called. They bought land near Six Mile Creek from the Overhill Cherokees.”

I paused. Mae said nothing but she continued to look at me, slowly shaking her head. “Believe me,” I said. “Your father’s name was Josh, wasn’t it?”

“Josiah. Folks called him Josh. I . . . I had forgotten my folks for such a long time; and now that I can remember, it pains me awful.”

“Yes. I overheard. A bear mauled him.”

“Doc, he was such a fine figure of a man. Right portly—I mean, handsome. He cut a swath wherever he walked. To see him laid up like that . . . Well, it sorrowed me something fierce. And him always saying I shouldn’t wool over him.”

“He died sometime between 1830 and 1840, after you married Green Holloway.”

She looked into the distance. “Mister, he was a long hunter. He come on our homestead one day and saw how things stood and stayed to help out. Said it wasn’t fittin’ for a young gal to live alone like that with no man to side her. ’Specially a button like I was. There was outlaws and renegades all up and down the Trace who wouldn’t think twice about bothering a young girl. When Pa finally said ’t was fittin’, we jumped the broom ’til the preacher-man come through.” She stopped. “Doc?”

“Yes?”

“Doc, you must have it right. Because . . . Because, how long has it been since folks lived in log cabins, and long hunters dressed up in buckskins?”

“A long time,” I said. “A very long time.”

“Seems like just a little while ago to me, but I know it can’t be. The Natchez Trace? I just never gave it much thought.”

Have you ever seen a neglected field overgrown with weeds? That was Mae’s memory. Acres of thistle and briar. All perspective lost, all sense of elapsed time. “Your memories were telescoped,” I said. “Remember when you sang Sweet Betsy from Pike for me, and you said how real it all seemed to you? Well, after the Civil War, sometime during the Great Depression of the 1870s, you went out west, probably on one of the last wagon trains, after they finished the railroad. After that, I lost track.”

She stayed quiet for a long time and I began to think she had dozed off. Then she spoke again.

“Sometimes I remember the Tennessee hills,” she said in a faraway voice, “all blue and purple and cozy with family.” She sighed. “I loved them mountains,” she said. “We had us a hardscrabble, side-hill farm. The hills was tilted so steep we could plow both sides of an acre. And the cows had their legs longer on the one side than the other so’s they could stand straight-up.” She chuckled at the hillbilly humor. “Oh, it was a hard life. You kids today don’t know. But in the springtime, when the piney roses and star-flowers and golden bells was in bloom, and the laurel was all purpled up; why, doc, you couldn’t ask God for a purtier sight.” She sighed. “And other times . . . Other times, I remember a ranch in high-up, snow-capped mountains with long-horned cattle and vistas where God goes when He wants to feel small. There was a speakeasy in Chicago, where the jazz was hot; and a bawdy house in Frisco, where I was.” She let her breath out slowly and closed her eyes again. “I remember wearing bustles and bloomers, and linen and lace, and homespun and broadcloth. I’ve been so many people, I don’t know who I am.”

She opened her eyes and looked at me. “But I was always alone, except in them early years. With Mister. And with Daddy and my brother Zach.” A tear dripped down the side of her face. I pulled a tissue from the box and blotted it up for her. “There weren’t nobody left for me. Nobody.”

I hesitated for a moment. Then I said, “Mae, you never had a brother.”

“Now what are you talking about? I remember him clear as day.”

“I’ve checked the records. Your mother died and your father never remarried.”

Mae started to speak, then frowned. “Pa did tell me oncet that he’d never hitch ag’in, because he loved the dust of Ma’s feet and the sweat of her body more than he loved any other woman. But Zach—”

“Was your own child.”

She sucked in her breath between clenched teeth. “No, he weren’t! He was near my own age.”

“You remember Zach from 1861 when he followed your husband into the army. He was twenty-two then, and you . . . Well, you seemed to be thirty-seven to those around you. So, in your memory he seems like a brother. By the time you rejoined him on his ranch in Wyoming, he was even a bit older than your apparent age. Remembered how you thought he resembled Mister? Well, that was because he was Mister’s son. I think . . . I think that was when you started forgetting how the years passed for you. Mae, no one ever ran out on you. You just outlived them. They grew old and they died and you didn’t. And after a while you just wouldn’t dare get close to anyone.”

Tears squeezed from behind her eyes. “Stop it! Every time you say something, you make me remember.”

“In all this time, Mae, you’ve never mentioned your child. You did have one; the clinical evidence is there. If Zach wasn’t your boy, who was? Who was the boy sitting next to you at the minstrel show in Knoxville?”

She looked suddenly confused, and there was more to her confusion than the distance of time. “I don’t know.” Her eyes glazed and she looked to her right. I knew she was re-seeing the event. “Zach?” she said. “Is that you, boy? Zach? Oh, it is. It is.” She refocused on me. “He cain’t hear me,” she said plaintively. “He hugged me, but I couldn’t feel his arms.”

“I know. It’s only a memory.”

“I want to feel his arms around me. They grow up so fast, you know. The young ’uns. One day, they’re a baby, cute as a button; the next, all growed up and gone for a soldier. All growed up. I could see it happening. All of ’em, getting older and older. I thought there was something wrong with me. That I’d been a bad girl, because I kilt my Ma; and the Good Man was punishing me by holding me back from the pearly gates. If’n I never grew old, I’d never die. And if I never died, I’d never see any of my kin-folk again. Doc, you can’t know what it’s like, knowing your child will grow old and wither like October corn and die right before your eyes.”

For a moment, I could not breathe. “Oh, I know,” I whispered. “I know.”

“Zach . . . I lived to see him turn to dust in the ground. He died in my own arms, a feeble, old man, and he asked me to sing Home, Sweet Home, like I used to when he was a young ’un. Oh, little Zach!” And she began to cry in earnest. She couldn’t move her arms to wipe the tears away, so I pulled another tissue from the box on the tray and dabbed at her cheeks.

She reached out a scrawny hand and clutched my arm. “Thank you, doc. Thank you. You helped me find my child again. You helped me find my boy.”

And then I did an odd thing. I stood and bent low over the bed and I kissed Mae Holloway on her withered cheek.

I’m going there to see my mother.

She said she’d meet me when I come.

I’m only going over Jordan,

I’m only going over home.

My days at the Home passed by in an anonymous sameness, dispensing medicines, treating aches and pains. Only a handful of people came to see me; and those with only trivial complaints. Otherwise, I sat unmolested in my office, the visitor’s chair empty. I found it difficult even to concentrate on my journals. Finally, almost in desperation, I began making rounds, dropping in on Rosie and Jimmy and the others, chatting with them, enduring their pointless, rambling stories; sometimes suggesting dietary or exercise regimens that might improve their well-being. Anything to feel useful. I changed a prescription on Old Man Morton, now the Home’s Oldest Resident, and was gratified to see him grow more alert. Sometimes you have to try different medications to find a treatment that works best for a particular individual.

Yet, somehow those days seemed empty. The astonishing thing to me was how little missed Mae Holloway was by the other residents. Oh, some of them asked after her politely. Jimmy did. But otherwise it was as if the woman had evaporated, leaving not even a void behind. Partly, I suspect, it was because they were unwilling to face up to this reminder of their own mortality. But partly, too, it must have been a sense of relief that her aloof and abrasive presence was gone. If she never had any friends, Mae had told me, she wouldn’t miss them when they were gone. But neither did they miss her.

I usually stopped at the hospital on my way home, sometimes to obtain a further tissue sample for Singer’s experiments, sometimes just to sit with her. Often, she was sedated to relieve the pain of the tumor. More usually, she was dreaming; adrift on the river of years, connected to our world and time by only the slenderest of threads.

When she was conscious, she would spin her reminiscences for me and sing. Rosalie, the Prairie Flower. Cape Ann. Woodsman, Spare that Tree. Ching a Ring Chaw. The Hunters of Kentucky. Wait for the Wagon. We agreed, Mae and I, that a wagon was just as suitable as a Chevrolet for courting pretty girls, and Phyllis and her wagon was the ancestor of Daisy and her bicycle, Lucille and her Oldsmobile, and Josephine and her flying machine. And someday, I suppose, Susie and her space shuttle.

It was odd to see Mae so at peace with her memories. She no longer feared them; no longer suppressed them. She no longer fled from them. Rather, she embraced them and passed them on to me. When she sang, Roisin the Beau, she remarked casually how James Polk had used its melody for a campaign song. She recollected without flinching that she had voted for Zachary Taylor. “Old Rough and Ready,” she said. “There was a man for you. ’Minds me some’at of that T.R. Too bad they pizened him, but he was out to break the slave power.” It gave her no pause to recall how at New Orleans, “There stood John Bull in martial pomp / And there stood Old Kentucky.” It must have been an awful relief to acknowledge those memories, to relax in their embrace.

There were fond memories of her “bean,” Green the Long Hunter. Of days spent farming or hunting or spinning woolen or cooking ’shine. Of nights spent ‘setting’ by the fire, smoking their pipes, reading to each other from the Bible. Quiet hours from a time before an insatiable demand for novelty—for something always to be happening—had consumed us. Green had even taken her down to Knoxville to see the touring company of The Gladiator, a stage play about Spartacus. Tales of slave revolts did not play well elsewhere in the South, but the mountaineers had no love for the wealthy flatland aristocrats.

She recalled meeting Walt Whitman, a fellow nurse in the Sanitary Commission. “A rugged fellow and all full of himself,” she recalled, “but as kind and gentle with the men as any of the women-folk.”

She still confused her son sometimes with a brother, with her father, with Green. He was younger, he was older, he was of her own age. But there were childhood memories, too, of the sort most parents have. How he had “spunked up with his gal,” “spooned with his chicken,” or “lollygagged with his peach,” depending on the slang of the decade. How they had “crossed the wide prairie” together after the War and set up a ranch in Wyoming Territory. How he met and wed Sweet Annie, a real “piece of calico.”

Not all the memories were pleasant—Sweet Annie had died screaming—but Mae relished them just the same. It was her life she was reclaiming, and a life consists of different parts, good and bad. The parts make up a whole. I continued to record her tales and tunes, as much because I did not know what else to do as because of any book plans, and I noticed that, while her doubling episodes often hopscotched through her life—triggered by associations and chance remarks—the music that played in her mind continued its slow and inexorable backward progression, spanning the 1840s and creeping gradually into the mid-thirties.

Slowly, a weird conviction settled on me. When the dates of her remembered tunes finally reached 1800, she would die.

Time was running short. Most brain tumor patients did not survive a year from the time of first diagnosis; and Mae was so fragile to begin with that I doubted a whole year would be hers. Reports from Singer alternated between encouragement and frustration. Apparent progress would evaporate with a routine, follow-up test. Happenstance observation would open up a whole new line of inquiry. Singer submitted requests for additional cell samples almost daily. Blood, skin, liver. It seemed almost as if Mae might be used up entirely before Singer could pry loose the secret of her genes and splice that secret into my Deirdre.

I began to feel as if I were in a race with time. A weird sort of race in which time was speeding off in both directions. A young girl dying too old. An old woman dying too young.

One day, Wing was waiting for me when I entered the hospital. Seeing the flat look of concern on his face, my heart faltered. Not yet, I thought; not yet! My heart screeched, but I kept my own face composed. He took me aside into a small consultation room. Plaster walls with macro designs painted in happy, soothing colors. Comfortable chairs; green plants. An appallingly cheerful venue in which to receive bad news.

But it was not bad news. It was good news, of an odd and unexpected sort.

“Herpes?” I said when he had told me. “Herpes is a cure for brain tumors?” I couldn’t help it. I giggled.

Wing frowned. “Not precisely. Culver-Blaese is a new treatment and outside my field of specialty, but let me explain it as Maurice explained it to me.” Maurice LeFevre was the resident in genetic engineering, one of the first such residencies in the United States. “Several years ago,” said Wing, “Culver and Blaese successfully extracted the gene for the growth enzyme, thymidine kinase, from the herpes virus, and installed it into brain tumor cells using a harmless retrovirus.”

“I would think,” I said dryly, “that an enzyme that facilitates reproduction is the last thing a brain tumor needs spliced into its code.”

Wing blinked rapidly several times. “Oh, I’m sorry. You see it’s the ganciclovir. I didn’t make that clear?”

“Ganciclovir is—?”

“The chemical used to fight herpes. It reacts with thymidine kinase, and the reaction products interfere with cell reproduction. So if tumor cells start producing thymidine, injecting ganciclovir a few days later will gum up the tumor’s reproduction and kill it. There have been promising results on mice and in an initial trial with twenty human patients.”

“What is ‘promising’ ?”

“Complete remission in seventy-five percent of the cases, and appreciable shrinkage in all of them.”

I sucked in my breath. I could hardly credit what Wing was telling me. Here was a treatment, a deus ex machina. Give Singer another year of live tissue experiments and he would surely find the breakthrough we sought. “What’s the catch?” I asked. There had to be a catch. There was always a catch.

There were two.

“First,” said Wing, “the treatment is experimental, so the insurance will not cover it. Second . . . Well, Mrs. Holloway has refused.”

“Eh? Refused? Why is that?”

Wing shook his head. “I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. I thought if I caught you before you went to see her . . .”

“That I could talk her into it?”

“Yes. The two of you are very close. I can see that.”

Close? Mae and I? If Wing could see that, those thick eyeglasses of his were more powerful than the Hubble telescope. Mae had not been close to anyone since her son died. Since her child died in her arms, an old, old man.Inwardly, I shuddered. No wonder she had never gotten close to anyone since. No wonder she had lost an entire era of her life.

“I’ll give it a try,” I said.

When I entered her room, Mae was lying quietly in her bed, humming softly. Awake, I knew, but not quite present. Her face was curled into a smile, the creases all twisted around in unwonted directions. There was an air about her, something halfway between sleep and joy, a calm that had inverted all those years of sourness, stood everything on its head, and changed all her minus signs to plus.

Setting on her cabin porch, I imagined, gazing down the hillside at the laurel hells, and at a distant, pristine stream meandering through the holler below. At peace. At last.

I pulled the visitor’s chair close by the bedside and laid a hand lightly on her arm. She didn’t stir. “Mae, it’s me. I’ve come to set a spell with you.”

“Howdy there, doc,” she whispered. “Oh, it’s such a lovely sunset. All heshed. I been telling Li’l Zach about the time his grandpap and Ol’ Hickory went off t’ fi’t the Creeks. I was already fourteen when Pa went off, so I minded the cabin while he was away.”

I leaned closer to her. “Mae, has Dr. Wing spoken to you about the new treatment?”

She took in a long, slow breath; and let it out as slowly. “Yes.”

“He told me you refused.”

“I surely did that.”

“Why?”

“Why?” She opened her eyes and looked at me; looked sadly around the room. “I been hanging on too long. It’s time to go home.”

“But—”

“And what would it git me, anyways. Another year? Six months? Doc, even if I am nigh on to two hunnert year, like you say, and my bone-box only thinks it’s a hunnert, that’s still older’n most folks git. Even if that Doctor LeFevre can do what he says and rid me of this hyar tumor, there’ll be a stroke afore long or my ticker’ll give out, or something. Doc, there ain’t no point to it. When I was young, when I was watching everyone I knew grow old and die, I wanted to go with them. I wanted to be with them. Why should I want to tarry now? If the Lord’ll have me, I’m ready.” She closed her eyes again and turned a little to the side.

“But, Mae . . .”

“And who’ll miss me, beside,” she muttered.

“I will.”

She rolled out flat again and looked at me. “You?”

“Yes. A little, I guess.”

She snorted. “You mean you’ll miss whatever you want that you’re wooling me over. Always jabbing me with needles, like I was a pincushion. There’s something gnawing away at you, Doc. I kin see it in your eyes when you think no one is looking. Kind of sad and angry and awful far away. I don’t know what it is, but I know I got something to do with it.”

I drew back under her speech. Her words were like slaps.

“And suppose’n they do it and they do git that thang outen my brain. Doc, what’ll happen to my music? What’ll happen to my memories?”

“I—”

“You done told me they come from that tumor a-pressing against the brain. What happens if it’s not pressin’ any longer?”

“The memories might stay, now that they’ve been started, even with the original stimulus removed. It might have been a ‘little stroke’ that started it, just like we thought originally.”

“But you can’t guarantee it, can you?” She fixed me with a stare until I looked away.

“No. No guarantees.”

“Then I don’t want it.” I turned back in time to see her face tighten momentarily into a wince.

“It will relieve the pain,” I assured her.

“Nothing will relieve the pain. Nothing. Because it ain’t that sort of pain. There’s my Pa, my Ma, Green, Little Zach and his Sweet Annie. Ben and Joe and all the others I would never let cozy up to me. They’re all waiting for me over in Gloryland. I don’t know why the Good Man has kept me here so long. H’isn’t punishment for killing Ma. I know that now. There must be a reason for it; but I’m a-weary of the waiting. If’n I have this operation like you want, what difference will it make? A few months? Doc, I won’t live those months in silence.”

My Chloe has dimples and smiles, I must own;

But, though she could smile, yet in truth she could frown.

But tell me, ye lovers of liquor divine,

Did you e’er see a frown in a bumper of wine?

There is something about the ice cold shock of a perfect martini. The pine tree scent of the gin. The smooth liquid sliding down the throat. Then, a half second later, wham! It hits you. And in that half second, there is an hour of insight; though, sometimes, that hour comes very late at night. You can see with the same icy clarity of the drink. You can see the trail of choices behind you. Paths that led up rocky pitches; paths beside still waters. You can see where the paths forked, where, had you turned that way instead of this, you’d not be here today. You can even, sometimes, see where, when the paths forked, people took different trails.

“Paul!”

And you can wonder whether you can ever find that fork again.

I turned to see Brenda drop her briefcase on the sofa. “Paul! I never see you drinking.”

Subtext: Do you drink a lot in secret when I can’t see you? Sub-subtext: Are you an alcoholic? Holding a conversation with Brenda was a challenge. Her words were multi-layered; and you never knew on which layer to answer.

I placed my martini glass, still half-full, carefully down upon the sideboard, beside the others. It spilled a little as I did, defying the laws of gravity. I faced her squarely. “I’m running out of time,” I said.

She looked at me for a moment. Then she said, “That’s right. I’d wondered if you knew.”

“I’m running out of time,” I repeated. “She’ll die before I know.”

“She . . .” Brenda pulled her elbows in tight against her sides. “I don’t want to hear this.”

“That old woman. To live so long, only to die just now.”

“The old woman from the home? She has you upset? For God’s sake, Paul.” And she turned away from me.

“You don’t understand. She could save Dee-dee.”

Brenda’s head jerked a little to the left. Then she retrieved her briefcase and shook herself all over, as if preparing to leave. “How can a dying old woman save a dying old girl?”

“She’s yin to Dee-dee’s yang. The universe is neutral. There’s a plus sign for every minus. But she wants to go over Jordan and I . . . can’t stop her. And I don’t understand why I can’t.”

“You’re not making any sense, Paul. How many of those have you had?”

“She’s two centuries old, Brenda. Two centuries old. She was a swinger and a sheba and a daisy and a pippin. She hears songs, in her head; but sometimes they’re wrong, except they’re right. The words are different. Older. Old Zip Coon, instead of Turkey in the Straw. Lovely Fan’, instead of Buffalo Gals. Bright Mohawk Valley, instead of Red River Valley. She read Moral Physiology, when it first came out. Mae did. Do you know the book? Moral Physiology, by Robert Dale Owen? No, of course not. It was all about birth control and it sold twenty-five thousand copies even though newspapers and magazines refused to carry the ads and it was published in 18-god-damned-30. She voted for Zachary Taylor, and her Pa fought in the Creek War, and her husband died at Resaca, and she saw Abraham-fucking-Lincoln—”

“Paul, can you hear yourself? You’re talking crazy.”

“Did you know The Gladiator debuted in New York in 1831? ‘Ho! slaves, arise! Freedom . . . Freedom and revenge!’ ” I struck a pose, one fist raised.

“I can’t stand to watch you like this, Paul. You’re sopping drunk.”

“And you’re out late every night.” Which was totally irrelevant to our discussion, but the tongue has a life of its own.

Through teeth clenched tight, she answered: “I have a job to keep.”

I took a step away from the sideboard, and there must have been something wrong with the floorboards. Perhaps the support beams had begun to sag, because the floor suddenly tilted. I grabbed for the back of the armchair. The lamp beside it wobbled and I grabbed it with my other hand to keep it still.

Awkwardly twisted, half bent over, I looked at Brenda and spoke distinctly. “Mae Holloway is two centuries old. There is something in her genes. We think. Singer and Peeler and I. We think that with enough time. With enough time. Singer and Peeler can crack the secret. They can tailor a . . . Tailor a . . .” I hunted for the right word, found it scuttling about on the floor and snatched it. “Nanomachine.” Triumph. “Tailor a nanomachine that can repair Dee-dee’s cells. But Mae is dying. She has a brain tumor, and it’s killing her. There’s a treatment. An experimental treatment. It looks very good. But Mae won’t take it. She doesn’t want it. She wants to sleep.”

I don’t know what I expected. I expected hope, or disbelief. I expected a demand for proof, or for more details. I expected her to say, “do anything to save my daughter!” I expected anything but indifference.

Brenda brushed imaginary dust from her briefcase and turned away. “Do what you always do, Paul. Just ignore what she wants.”

I was in the clinic at the Home the next day when I received the call from the hospital. My head felt as if nails had been driven into it. I was queasy from the hangover. When the phone rang and I picked it up, a tinny voice on the other end spoke crisply and urgently and asked that I come over right away. I don’t remember what I said, or even that I said anything; and I don’t suppose my caller expected a coherent answer. My numb fingers fumbled the phone several times before it sat right in its cradle. Heart attack, I thought. And as quickly as that, the time runs out.

But they hadn’t said she was dead. They hadn’t said she was dead.

I hope that there was no traffic on the road when I raced to the hospital, for I remember nothing of the journey. Three times along the way I picked up the car phone to call the hospital for more information; and three times I replaced it. It was better not to know. Half an hour, with the lights right and the speed law ignored. That was thirty minutes in which hope was thinkable.

Smythe, the cardio-vascular man, met me in the corridor outside her room. He grabbed me by both my arms and steadied me. I could not understand why he was grinning. What possible reason could there be?

“She’ll live, mon,” he said. “It was a near thing, but she’ll live.”

I stared at Smythe without comprehension. He shook me by the arm, hard. My head felt like shattered glass.

“She’ll live,” he said again. His teeth were impossibly white.

I brushed him off and stepped into the room. She’ll live? Then there was still time. Everything else was detail. My body felt suddenly weak, as if a stopcock had been pulled and all my sand had drained away. I staggered as far as the bedside, where I sank into a steel and vinyl chair. Smythe waited by the door, in the corridor, giving me the time alone.

Dee-dee lay asleep upon the bed, breathing slowly and softly through a tube set up her nose. An intravenous tube entered her left arm. Remote sensor implants on her skull and chest broadcast her heartbeat and breathing and brain waves to stations throughout the hospital. Smythe was never more than a terminal away from knowing her condition. I reached out and took her right hand in mine and gently stroked the back of it. “Hello, Dee-dee, I came as fast as I could. Why didn’t . . .” I swallowed hard. “Why didn’t you wait for me to tuck you in.”

Dee-dee was still unconscious from the anesthetic. She couldn’t hear me; but a quiet sob, quickly stifled, drew my attention to the accordion-pleated expandable wall, drawn halfway out on the opposite side of the bed. When I walked around it, I saw Consuela sitting in a chair on the other side. Her features were tightly leashed, but the tracks of tears had darkened both her cheeks. Her hands were pale where they gripped the arms of the chair.

“Connie!”

“Oh, Paul, we almost lost her. We almost lost her.”

It slammed against my chest with the force of a hammer, a harder stroke for having missed. Someday we will. I took Connie’s hand and brushed the backside of it as I had brushed Dee-dee’s. “It’s all right now,” I said.

“She is such a sweet child. She never complains.”

Prognosis: The life span is shortened by relentless arterial atheromatosis. Death usually occurs at puberty.

“She’s all right now.”

“For a little while. But it will become worse, and worse; until . . .” She leaned her head against me and I cradled her; I rubbed her neck and shoulders, smoothed her hair. With my left hand, I caressed her cheek. It is not the end; but it is the beginning of the end.

“We knew it would happen.” The emotions are a very odd thing. When all was dark, when I believed myself helpless, I could endure that knowledge. It was my comfort. But now that there was a ray of light, I found it overwhelming me, crushing me so that I could hardly breathe. A sliver of sunshine makes a darkened room seem blacker still. I could live with Fate, but not with Hope. I found that there was a new factor in the equation now. I found that I could fail.

“Where is Brenda?” I asked.

Connie pulled herself from my arms, turned and pulled aside the curtain that separated her from Deirdre. “She didn’t come.”

“What?”

“She didn’t come.”

Something went out of me then, like a light switch turned off. I didn’t say anything for the longest time. I drifted away from Connie over toward the window. A thick stand of trees filled the block across the street from the hospital. Leaves fresh and green with spring. Forsythia bursting yellow. A flock of birds banked in unison over the treetops and shied off from the high tension lines behind. I thought of the time when Brenda and I first met on campus, both of us young and full of the future. I remembered how we had talked about making a difference in the world.

I found Brenda at home. I found her in the family room, late at night after I had finally left the hospital. She was still clad in her business suit, as if she had just come from the office. She was standing rigidly by the bookcase, with her eyes dry and red and puffy, with Dee-dee’s book, The Boxcar Children, in her hands. I had the impression that she had stood that way for hours.

“I tried to come, Paul,” she said before I could get any words out. “I tried to come, but I couldn’t. I was paralyzed; I couldn’t move.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Connie was there. She’ll stay until I get changed and return.” I rubbed a hand across my face. “God, I’m tired.”

“She’s taken my place, hasn’t she? She feeds Deirdre, she nurses her, she tutors her. Tell me, Paul, has she taken over all my duties?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I didn’t think there was room in your life for anyone beside your daughter. You’ve shut everyone else out.”

“I never pushed you away. You ran.”

“It needs more than that. It needs more than not pushing. You could have caught me, if you’d reached. There was an awful row at the office today. Crowe and FitzPatrick argued. They’re dissolving the partnership. I was taking too long to say yes to the partnership offer; so Sèan became curious and . . . He found out Walther had wanted a ‘yes’ on a lot more, so we filed for harrass . . . Oh, hell. It doesn’t matter anymore; none of it.”

She was talking about events on another planet. I stepped to her side and took hold of the book. It was frozen to her fingers. I tugged, and pried it from her grasp. Slowly, her hands clenched into balls, but she did not lower her arms. I turned to place the book on the shelf and Brenda said in a small voice, “It doesn’t go there, Paul.”

“Damn it, Brenda!”

“I’m afraid,” she said. “Oh, God, I’m afraid. Someday I will open up the tableware drawer and find her baby spoon; or I’ll look under the sofa and find a ball that had rolled there forgotten. Or I’ll find one of her dresses bundled up in the wash. And I won’t be able to take it. Do you understand? Do you know what it’s like? Do you have any feelings at all? How can you look at that shelf and remember that her book had once lain there? Look at that kitchen table and remember her high chair and how we played airplane with her food? Look into a room full of toys, with no child anymore to play with them? Everywhere I look I see an aching void.”

With a sudden rush of tenderness, I pulled her to me, but she remained stiff and unyielding in my arms. Yet, we all mourn in our own ways. “She did not die, Brenda. She’ll be okay.”

“This time. But, Paul, I can’t look forward to a lifetime looking back. At the little girl who grew up and grew old and went away before I ever got to know her. Paul, it isn’t right. It isn’t right, Paul. It isn’t right for a child to die before the parent.”

“So, you’ll close her out of your mind? Is that the answer? Create the void now? You’ll push all those memories into one room and then close the door? You can’t do that. If we forget her, it will be as if she had never lived.”

She softened at last and her arms went around me. “What can I do? I’ve lost her, and I’ve lost you, and I’ve lost . . . everything.”

We stood there locked together. I could feel her small, tightly controlled sobs trembling against me. Sometimes the reins have been held so close for so long that you can never drop them, never even know if they have been dropped. The damp of her tears seeped through my shirt. Past her, I could see the shelf with The Boxcar Children lying flat upon it and I tried to imagine how, in future years, I could ever look on that shelf again without grief.

Tell me the tales that to me were so dear

Long, long ago; long, long ago.

Sing me the songs I delighted to hear

Long, long ago, long ago.

Dee-dee was wired. There was a tube up her nose and another in her arm. A bag of glucose hung on a pole rack by her bed, steadily dripping into an accumulator and thence through the tube. A catheter took her wastes away. A pad on her finger and a cuff around her arm were plugged into a CRT monitor. I smiled when I saw she was awake.

“Hi, daddy . . .” Her voice was weak and hoarse, a byproduct of the anaesthesia.

“Hi, Dee-dee. How do you feel?”

“Yucky . . .”

“Me, too. You’re a TV star.” I pointed to the monitor, where red and yellow and white lines hopped and skipped across the screen. Heart rate, blood pressure. Every time she breathed, the white line crested and dropped. She didn’t say anything and I listened for a moment to the sucking sound that the nose tube made. A kid trying for the last bit of soda in the can. The liquid it carried off was brown, which meant that there was still a little blood. “Connie is here.” I nodded to the other side of the bed.

Dee-dee turned her eyes, but not her head. “Hello, Connie. I can’t see you.”

Consuela moved a little into her field of vision. “Good morning, Little One. You have a splendid view from your window.”

“Nurse Jeannie told me that . . . Wish I could see . . .”

“Then, I will tell you what it looks like. You can see the north end of town—all those lovely, old houses—and far off past them, on the edge of the world, the blue-ridge mountain wall and, in the very center of it, the Gap; and through the Gap, you can see the mountains beyond.”

“It sounds beautiful . . .”

“Oh, it is. I wish I could be here instead of you, just so I could have the view.”

I looked up at Connie when she said that and, for a moment, we locked gazes with one another. I could see the truth of her words in her eyes.

And then I saw surprise. Surprise and something else beside. I looked over my shoulder—and Brenda was standing there in the doorway, smartly dressed, on wobbly legs, with her purse clutched tightly in her hands before her.

“The nurses,” she said. “The nurses said she could only have two visitors at a time.” Visiting was allowed every three hours, but only for an hour and only two visitors at a time. I was a doctor and Connie was a nurse and the staff cut us a little slack, but the rules were there for a reason. Consuela stood.

“I will leave.”

Brenda looked at her and caught her lower lip between her teeth. She laid her purse with military precision on a small table beside the bed. “I would like to spend some time with Deirdre, Paul. If you don’t mind.”

I nodded. As I stood up I gave Dee-dee a smile and a little squeeze on her arm. “Mommy’s here,” I told her.

Connie and I left them alone together (a curious expression, that—“alone together”) and waited in the outer nursing area. I didn’t eavesdrop, though I did overhear Brenda whisper at one point, “No, darling, it was never anything that you did wrong.” Maybe it wasn’t much, not when weighted against those years of inattention. It wasn’t much; but it wasn’t nothing. I knew—maybe for the first time—how much it cost Brenda to take on these memories, to take on the risks of remembering; because she was right. If in later years you remembered nothing, you would feel no pain.

And yet, I had seen two centuries of pain come washing back, bringing with it joy.

Children recover remarkably well. Drop them, and they bounce. Maybe not so high as before, but they do rebound. Dee-dee bore a solemn air about her for a day or two, sensing, without being told, that she had almost “gone away.” But to a child, a day is a lifetime, and a week is forever; and she was soon in the recovery ward, playing with the other children. Rheumatic children with heart murmurs; shaven-headed children staring leukemia in the face; broken children with scars and cigarette burns . . . They played with an impossible cheerfulness, living, as most children did, in the moment. But then, the Now was all most of them would ever have.

There came a day when Dee-dee was not in her room when I arrived. Connie sat framed in a bright square of sunlight, reading a book. She looked up when I walked in. “Deirdre has gone to visit a new friend,” she said.

“Oh.” A strange clash of emotions: Happy she was up and about again, even if confined to a wheelchair; disappointed that she was not there to greet me.

“She will return soon, I think.”

“Well,” I said, “we had wanted her to become more active.”

Consuela closed her book and laid it on the small table beside her. “I suppose you will no longer need my services,” she said. She did not look at me when she said it, but out the window at the new-born summer.

“Not need you? Don’t be foolish.”

“She has her mother back, now.”

Every morning before work; every evening after. Pressing lost years into a few hours. “She still needs you.”

“The hospital staff cares for her now.”

I shook my head. “It’s not that she needs you, but that she needs you. You are not only her nurse.”

“If I take on new clients,” she went on as if I had not spoken, “I can do things properly. I can visit at the appointed times, perform my duties, and leave; and not allow them such a place in my heart when they are gone.”

“If people don’t leave a hole in your life when they are gone, Consuela, they were never in your life at all.”

She turned away from the window and looked at me. “Or two holes.”

I dropped my gaze, looked instead at the rumpled bed.

“In many ways,” I heard her say, “you are a cold man, Doctor. Uncaring and thoughtless. But it was the fruit of bitterness and despair. I thought you deserved better than you had. And you love her as deeply as I. If death could be forestalled by clinging tight, Deirdre would never leave us.”

I had no answer for her, but I allowed my eyes to seek out hers.

“I thought,” she said, “sometimes, at night, when I played my flute, that because we shared that love . . . That we could share another.”

“It must be lonely for you here, in a strange country, with a strange language and customs. No family and fewer friends. I must be a wretched man for never having asked.”

She shook her head. “You had your own worry. A large one that consumed you.”

“Consuela Montejo, if you leave, you would leave as great a hole in my life as in Dee-dee’s.”

“And in Mrs. Wilkes’.” She smiled a little bit. “It is a very odd thing, but I believe that if I stayed I might even grow to like her.”

“She was frightened. She thought she could cauterize the wound before she received it. It was only when she nearly lost Dee-dee that she suddenly realized that she had never had her.”

Consuela stood and walked to the bed. She touched the sheet and smoothed it out, pulling the wrinkles flat. She shook her head. “It will hurt if I go; it will hurt if I stay. But Mrs. Wilkes deserves this one chance.”

I reached out and took her hand and she reached out and took mine. Had Brenda walked in then, I do not know what she would have made of our embrace. I do not know what I made of it. I think I would have pulled Brenda in with us, the three of us arm in arm in arm.

The really strange thing was how inevitable it all was in hindsight.

When I left Consuela, I went to visit Mae. It had been nearly two weeks since I had last seen her and it occurred to me that the old bat might be lonely, too. And what the hell, she could put up with me and I could put up with her.

I found my Dee-dee in Mae Holloway’s room. The two of them had their heads bent close together, giggling over something. Deirdre was strapped to her electric wheelchair and Mae lay flat upon her bed; but I was struck by how alike they looked. Two gnarled and bent figures with pale, spotted skin stretched tight over their bones, lit from within by a pure, childlike joy. Two old women; two young girls. Deirdre looked up and saw me.

“Daddy! Granny Mae has been teaching me the most wonderful songs.”

Mae Holloway lifted her head a little. “Yours?” she said in a hoarse whisper. “This woman-child is yours?”

“Yes,” I said, bending to kiss Dee-dee’s cheek. “All mine.” No. Not all mine. There were others who shared her.

“Listen to the song Granny Mae taught me! It goes like this.”

I looked over Dee-dee’s head at the old woman. “She didn’t tell you?”

“Noor brought her in, but didn’t say aye, yea, or no. Just that she thought we should meet.”

Dee-dee began singing in her high, piping voice.

The days go slowly by, Lorena.

The snow is on the grass again.

The years go slowly by Lorena . . .

“Her days are going by too fast, ain’t they?” Mae said. I nodded and saw how her eyes lingered on my little girl. “Growing old in the blink of an eye,” she said softly. “Oh, I know how that feels.”

“Granny Mae tells such interesting stories,” Dee-dee insisted. “Did you know she saw Abraham Lincoln one time?” I rubbed her thinning hair. Too young to know how impossible that was. Too young to doubt.

Mae’s hand sought out Dee-dee’s and clenched hold of it. “Doc, I’ll have me that operation.”

“What?”

“I’ll have me that operation. The one that’s supposed to make this tumor of mine go away. I’ll have it, even if my music and my memories go with it.”

“You will. Why?”

“Because I know why you been poking me and taking my blood. And I know why the Good Lord has kept me here for all this long time.”

Noor Khan was waiting in the hallway when I stepped out of the room.

“Ah, doctor,” I said. “How are things at Sunny Dale?”

“Quiet,” she said. “Though the residents are all asking when you will be back.”

I shrugged. “Old people dislike upsets to their routine. They grew used to having me around.”

Khan said, “I never knew about your little girl. I heard it from Smythe. Why did you never tell me?”

I shrugged again. “I never thought it was anyone’s business.”

Khan accepted the statement. “After you told Wing and me of Mae’s remarkable longevity . . . I knew you were taking blood samples to that genetic engineering firm—”

“Singer and Peeler.”

“Yes. I thought you had . . . other reasons.”

“What, that I would find the secret of the Tree of Life?” I shook my head. “I never thought to ask for so much. Mae has lived most her life as an old woman. I would not count that a blessing. But to live a normal life? To set right what had come out wrong? Yes, and I won’t apologize. Neither would you, if it were your daughter.”

“Is Singer close? To a solution?”

“I don’t know. Neither do they. We won’t know how close we are until we stumble right into it. But we’ve bought a little time now, thanks to you. Is that why you did it? Because you knew that meeting my daughter would convince Mae to accept the Culver-Blaese gene therapy?”

Khan shook her head. “No. I never even thought of that.”

“Then, why?”

“Sometimes,” said Khan, looking back into the room where the young girl and the old girl taught each other songs. “Sometimes, there are other medicines, for other kinds of hurts.”

I seek no more the fine and gay,

For each does but remind me

How swift the hours did pass away

With the girl I left behind me.

They are all gone now. All gone. Mae, Dee-dee, all of them. Consuela was first. Brenda’s partnership arrangement with FitzPatrick—telecommuting, they called it—left no place for her at the house. She came to visit Dee-dee, and she and Brenda often met for coffee—what they talked about I do not know—but she stopped coming after Dee-dee passed on and I have not seen her in years.

Brenda, too. She lives in LA, now. I visit her when I’m on the Coast and we go out together, and catch dinner or a show. But she can’t look at me without thinking of her; and neither can I, and sometimes, that becomes too much.

There was no bitterness in the divorce. There was no bitterness left in either of us. But Dee-dee’s illness had been a fault line splitting the earth. A chasm had run through our lives, and we jumped out of its way, but Brenda to one side and I, to the other. When Dee-dee was gone, there was no bridge across it and we found that we shared nothing between us but a void.

The operation bought Mae six months. Six months of silence in her mind before the stroke took her. She complained a little, now and then, about her quickly evaporating memories; but sometimes I read to her from my notes, or played the tape recorder, and that made her feel a little better. When she heard about seeing Lincoln on the White House lawn, she just shook her head and said, “Isn’t that a wonder?” The last time I saw Mae Holloway, she was fumbling after some elusive memory of her Mister that kept slipping like water through the fingers of her mind, when she suddenly brightened, looked at me, and smiled. “They’re all a-waiting,” she whispered, and then all the lights went out.

And Dee-dee.

Dee-dee.

Still, after all these years, I cannot talk about my little girl.

They call it the Deirdre-Holloway treatment. I insisted on that. It came too late for her, but maybe there are a few thousand fewer children who die now each year because of it. Sometimes I think it was worth it. Sometimes I wonder selfishly why it could not have come earlier. I wonder if there wasn’t something I could have done differently that would have brought us home sooner.

Singer found the key; or Peeler did, or they found it together. Three years later, thank God. Had the breakthrough followed too soon on Deirdre’s death, I could not have borne it. The income from the book funded it and it took every penny, but I feel no poorer for it.

It’s a mutation, Peeler told me, located on the supposedly inactive Barr body. It codes for an enzyme that retards catabolism. There’s a sudden acceleration of fetal development in the last months of pregnancy that almost always kills the mother, and often the child, as well. Sweet Annie’s dear, dead child would have been programmed for the same future had she lived. After birth, aging slows quickly until it nearly stops at puberty. It only resumes after menopause. In males, the gene’s expression is suppressed by testosterone. Generations of gene-spliced lab mice lived and died to establish that.

Is the line extinct now? Or does the gene linger out there, carried safely by males waiting unwittingly to kill their mates with daughters?

I don’t know. I never found another like Mae, despite my years of practice in geriatrics.

When I retired from the Home, the residents gave me a party, though none of them were of that original group. Jimmy, Rosie, Leo, Old Man Morton . . . By then I had seen them all through their final passage. When the residents began approaching my own age, I knew it was time to take down my shingle.

I find myself thinking more and more about the past these days. About Mae and the Home; and Khan—I heard from my neighbor’s boy that she is still in practice, in pediatrics now. Sometimes, I think of my own parents and the old river town where I grew up. The old cliffside stairs. Hiking down along the creek. Hasbrouk’s grocery down on the corner.

The memories are dim and faded, brittle with time.

And I don’t remember the music, at all. My memories are silent, like an old Chaplin film. I’ve had my house wired, and tapes play continually, but it isn’t the same. The melodies do not come from within; they do not come from the heart.

They tell me I have a tumor in my left temporal lobe, and it’s growing. It may be operable. It may not be. Wing wants to try Culver-Blaese, but I won’t let him. I keep hoping.

I want to remember. I want to remember Mae. Yes, and Consuela and Brenda, too. And Dee-dee most of all. I want to remember them all. I want to hear them singing.

CRI DE COEUR

Michael Bishop

Movie rights to this Nebula-award-winning author’s latest book, Brittle Innings, have just been purchased by Fox Films. The hardcover edition of this wonderful novel is currently available from Bantam Books. New short stories by Mr. Bishop will soon be appearing in Full Spectrum 5 and Heaven Sent.

Why, once, did moths singe the tapestries of their wings in candle flames? Why, once, did the cinder-laden parachutes of fireworks so excite us? And, again, why did certain crazies—fools or saints—sometimes steep themselves in petrol and torch themselves to carbon?

Why, in short, do we long to blaze?

Ever since I turned twelve, I’ve known. Only a minuscule fraction of the stuff of our universe glows. The rest, the bulk, drifts in darkness, unmoored or rudely tugged. The cold vast black of interstellar night cloaks it from our eyes, our telescopes, our roachlike searchings. We belong to the part that does not glow, to the swallowing dark.

Why wonder, then, that a yearning to leap into the furnace, to god-fashion ourselves in fire, drives us starward on the engines of a mute cri de coeur?

“Whurh we guhn?” Dean asked me.

“It’s a surprise. Have a little patience.”

“Huvh uhliddle”—he grinned up at Lily—“payshuhns.”

Excitedly, I gripped one of roly-poly Dean’s hands. Lily Aloisi-Stark, my son’s mother, a systems specialist, held the other. Dean swung between us like a baby orangutan, a creature habituated in utero to a starship’s sterile bays, bioengineered for life aboard a space ark.

Except that he hadn’t been. After more than an E-standard century of travel, U.N.S. Annie Jump Cannon and the other two great wheelships of our colonizing armada pulsed a mere three years from a rendezvous with the Epsilon Eridani system. The brakes were on.

Along with U.N.S. Fritz Zwicky and U.N.S. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Annie was slowing to keep from overshooting our target, a world where Dean might find himself ill-suited to cope. Of course, I had to admit, that might prove true of all of us.

I led Lily and Dean up a rampway and thumb-keyed the panel of the topmost room in G-Tower of Annie‘s rotating wheel, a structure so large that the sight of any portion of it always summons my awe.

We entered the observatory. A scaffold supporting the enameled barrel of the ArkBoard Visual Telescope (ABVT) reared over our heads.

We rode an electric lift up through this scaffolding to a carpeted platform with chairs, handrails, and a large shielded viewport. At the platform’s other end, two men stood talking at the base of a ladder to the ABVT’s sighting mechanisms. One man I knew only as a fuel-systems specialist whose up-phases rarely coincided with mine. The other man, however, was my friend Thich Ngoc Bao, our mission’s chief astrophysicist.

Bao sprinted up the ladder. The fuel-systems man turned toward us brushing invisible lint from his tunic. Dean, who had fixed all his attention on Bao and the ABVT’s shiny ivory tube, paid him no mind.

“Whurh are we?” Dean said.

“The observatory,” Lily said.

“I go up . . . thurh!” Dean pointed at the ABVT.

“No. Sit.” I made him sit down in front of the shielded viewport. Dean burrowed into the chair and rolled his head against its cushion, his eyes hungry for new wonders. Clearly, this place excited him.

“Watch,” I said.

The shields on the forward viewport retracted, exposing a window into space two meters tall and at least twice that wide. Dean quivered. Gaping, he pulled himself forward, his pudgy legs banging the chair’s undercarriage, his pudgy hands bouncing on his knees.

“Holy crow,” he said. “Holy crow.”

Lily put a hand on his shoulder. “Happy birthday, DeBoy. Many happy returns.”

“Whurh iz,” straining hard to see, “New Hohm?”

“There.” I nodded at the window. “Straight ahead. Among those fuzzy match flames and haloes.”

Actually, between Annie Jump and the edge of the Epsilon Eridani orrery there now lies an arc of interstellar debris—tumbling chunks of dirt-ice, frozen gas, a chaos of nomadic mongrel rocks—not unlike the Oort Cloud beyond the orbit of Sol’s Pluto. Our armada’s astronomers, using radio telescopes as well as ABVTs, detected this belt less than five E-years ago. Today, we call it the Barricado Stream. Given the dimensions of this shadowy region, however, Commander Odenwald and his counterparts on Zwicky and Chandrasekhar foresee no trouble taking even our prodigious arks through its far-flung hazards into the system’s heart.

The tech who’d been talking to Bao strolled over and halted in front of Dean. From this new vantage, he stared at Dean. The relentless blankness of his gaze annoyed me so much that I stared pointedly back at him.

“Hello, Mr.—?” I prompted.

“Mikol. Kazimierz Mikol. Children have no place up here.”

“Sez who?” Lily said.

“Regs, I’m afraid. Ask Heraclitus.” He hitched his thumb at the nearest toadstool unit. “Check for yourself.”

Seeing a quick tautening of the cords under Lily’s jaw, I said, “Dean’s just come off a short ursidormizine nap. He’s six. This is his first observatory visit. Why try to squelch his pleasure?”

Mikol shrugged.

“This is his birthday present,” Lily said. “Abel wanted to give him—” She stuck.

Mikol superciliously lifted an eyebrow.

“—the stars,” Lily finished in some consternation.

“Oh? Is that right? Who’s Abel?”

“I am,” I said. “Abel Gwiazda. When I was twelve, my adoptive father gave the stars to me for Christmas on my first Mars trip.”

Mikol clasped his hands at his waist and smiled. “Ah. The reenactment of a family tableau. How sweet.”

Lily and I exchanged a look.

“Of course, the reg in question has its roots in a wholly legitimate concern for mission efficiency,” Mikol said. “In addition—as if it mattered in this case—it means to protect our youngest from the deleterious effects of either cosmic rays or overexcitement, I forget which.”

Dean kept gaping at the stars, but I gaped at Mikol. I had never known such rudeness, even under the guise of enforcing shipboard discipline, since coming aboard Annie Jump Cannon off Luna in 2062. Reputedly, the U.N.‘s planners had selected against egregious social blunderers like Mikol. If so, how had he contrived to get aboard?

Pointing, Dean suddenly cried, “I see . . . New Hohm!”

“No,” I said. “New Home’s sun, maybe. We’re still too far away to make out planets.”

“Or even the biggest rocks in the Barricado Stream,” Mikol told Dean in a grating adult-to-child voice.

Dean twigged next to nothing of the insult. He grinned at Kazimierz Mikol.

Mikol turned to Lily. “Does the boy like rocks? Take him down to the beach garden in hydroponics.”

“Abel’s done that already,” Lily said. “Dean likes it.”

“Likes rocks, does he? Good. Maybe we’ll grab one with a Colombo tether while crossing the Barricado.”

“Whatever for?” Lily said.

“To abandon him on,” Mikol said as a parting shot. He strode to the scaffold lift before Lily or I could blink, much less frame a rejoinder.

Dean, heedless, sat there gnomishly. Starlight, modestly color-shifted from our deceleration, washed over his face like melting diamonds.

I was outraged. I stared after Mikol, thankful only that Lily and I could give our son the stars.

Me? Just as I told Mikol, I am Abel Gwiazda. My adoptive parents came to the United States from Poland in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century. My father, a physicist trained in Krakow, and my mother, the science journalist who broke Poland’s so-called “Coca-Cola/Cyclotron” scandal in the late twenties, took positions with the ISCA (International Space & Colonization Authority) in Hutchinson, Kansas. After discovering that they could have no children of their own, they adopted me, a nameless Tanzanian child orphaned in the last of the Drought Riots and smuggled to Puerto Rico by profit-taking babyleggers.

I grew up well-loved, but aimless and deracinated. I spent three years as a teenager in a dome community beneath the great escarpment of Mons Olympica on Mars, learning, more by accident than deliberate application, the agrogeology skills that, upon our joint return to Earth in 2056, I took up formally in Oran, Algeria. With doctorate in hand and recommendations from my well-placed parents, I qualified for, and easily landed a spot in, the Epsilon Eridani Expedition—whose planning, funding, and assembly in lunar orbit occupied the entire world throughout the turbulent fifties. You can’t go home again, but you can try to make one Elsewhere, and for me the E’s in E³ stand for that very hope.

A part of any home is family. I can’t help it: I feel the call of family intensely. So strongly did I feel it before the making of my son Dean that I (respectfully) sought reproductive contracts with a half dozen women in G-Tower—including Etsuko Endo, Nita Sistrunk, and even the menopausal physicist Indira Sescharchari—before Lily Aliosi-Stark, a kindly woman in her late twenties, agreed. Her only stipulation was that I expect and solicit only minimal help from her in raising the child. To raise a child in the habitat tower of an ark, at least one parent must forgo the balm of ursidormizine slumber, submitting to the pitiless depredations of aging to care for, teach, and discipline that child.

“This is what you want,” Lily said. “I wish to save myself for New Home. I don’t want to set foot there feeling achy and antiquated. Understand?”

I did. So Dean is my child. I begot the Down’s-syndrome boy on Lily during several bouts of fiery lovemaking. Later, in a burst of self- and partner-mocking irony that startled and then tickled me, Lily called our wild sessions a “screw-bilee.” Aboard Annie, I have a reputation for straight-laced stoicism stemming from my Reform Catholicism and the twin concerns of my arkbound work, agrogeology and poetry. The former I do for business (ultimately, the business of survival), the latter for love—just as, looking ahead, I persuaded Lily to conceive a child and then finagled authorization from med services for her to carry it to term.

During our lovemaking, Lily said, “Boy or girl, give it your name. I decline to hang another hyphen around the poor kid’s neck.”

“Gwiazda-Aliosi-Stark?”

“Absolutely not. Throw in a double first name, Claude-Mark or Julia-Cerise, and it’d go down like a swimmer in a titanium wetsuit.”

So, months before giving birth, Lily renounced any claim on handing the child her surname. This fact comforted me. What if she had waited until the photoamnioscan at the end of the first trimester revealed the embryo’s trisomy 21? (Which, of course, it did.) At that point, the imperfect fetus would have thrown her motives forever in doubt. I would have wondered if she had deferred to me not solely out of her wish to set aside the demands of parenting, but also out of scorn for our botched offspring.

Masoud Nadeq, the chief physician in G-Tower, showed us the results of the photoamnioscan and listed our options, namely, to abort the pregnancy, to bring it to term with no effort at gene rectification, or to intervene at the chromosomal level with the highly limited procedures available on board. During the past seven E-years, nearly two hundred other children have been born on the Annie Jump Cannon alone, and Nadeq’s records show that only one other couple cosmic rays, variable gravity, and the other gene-crippling aspects of near-light-speed travel aside—has conceived a Down’s-syndrome infant.

Lily: “What did they do?”

Dr. Nadeq: “They chose to terminate.”

“Is that what you advised?” I asked.

Dr. Nadeq: “For quite good reasons, expedition guidelines strongly advance that option. In cases like yours, however, there’s no unappealable directive to terminate.”

I said, “To get a directive, our fetus would have to have two heads or no brain. Is that it?”

Dr. Nadeq: “In a manner of speaking.”

Lily: “Then our baby is reprieved.”

Dr. Nadeq: “Do you agree, Dr. Gwiazda?”

I said, “Of course. Didn’t I lobby this woman to help me call our hatchling’s pent-up spirit from the dark?”

Dr. Nadeq: “That’s . . . very poetic.”

“My avocation. Didn’t I run our application through every nook and switchback in Heraclitus’s cybernetic innards?”

Dr. Nadeq: “Then you accept the role of guardian as well as that of sire?”

Lily: “He does.”

“I do,” I said.

Dr. Nadeq: “Excellent. Sign off on this waiver.”

“What waiver?”

Dr. Nadeq: “Of unadulterated community support—once, that is, your child is born and later when we begin to colonize New Home.”

I despised the waiver’s threat of premeditated abandonment, but I signed off on it. How could I condemn a society under extreme environmental and psychological duress for declining to accept with open arms a handicapped child? Especially when Lily and I chose to bring him to term in full knowledge of his handicap and his potentially disruptive needs?

Even so, the waiver galled. I signed it with a trembling hand.

Most voyagers treat Dean with kindness. To date, this Kazimierz Mikol bastard comprises a boorish minority of one. Despite recycling and other ingenious reclamation schemes (his reasoning must go), we have finite supplies, and once we make planetfall, anyone with a mental and/or physical handicap will represent an outright drag on the colonization process.

Better that Dean had come stillborn from the womb, Mikol must figure. Better, now, that we recommit him to the darkness through an ejector tube.

I think too much on Mikol’s hostility. Most people, as I have said, are kind.

Item: Etsuko Endo, a biologist who passes her up-phase time doing adjustment counseling, recently spent four hours casting sticks of different lengths for Dean and helping him lay them out in educational patterns.

“Rhommm-buhz!” he said when Etsuko brought him back to me. “Daddy, I cuhn make a . . . rhom-buhz!” So proud. Even as he made, not a rhombus, but a triangle whose unequal sides did not quite touch one another.

Item: Commander Odenwald visited Lily only two hours after Dean was born. Repeatedly since that visit, he has used small portions of his long up-phases (despite enzyme cocktails and downtime cell repairs, his hair has turned cayenne-and-silver) to watch Dean trip-sleep or to guide him around the various facilities in G-Tower. In fact, had I not begged him to leave the observatory to Lily and me, Odenwald would have long ago showed that to Dean, too. I believe, then, that with a simple request I can have Mikol dressed down, if not sent packing to his biorack.

Why bother? If Dean had understood any part of Mikol’s insult in the observatory, or read the least shade of disdain in his face, I would do it. But Dean thinks everyone loves him. In a universe of swallowing dark, and despite the eclipse of his reason at conception, he scatters a property so similar to light that it dims my vision.

Until, less than a decade ago, a few of us began to have children, you could seldom find more than twenty people awake at any one time in any single living tower on the ever-clocking wheels of our ships. Ten percent of the expedition’s personnel oversaw the armada’s running, tracked the stars, maintained ship-to-ship communications, studied their specialties like workaholic monks, and ministered to the quasi-corpses stacked in each ark’s bioracks.

Only a few days into these up-phases, loneliness settled. An ineffable strangeness pervaded Annie‘s labs and corridors, as if a winged fairy tripping along at light-speed had cast a spell over my sleeping arkmates, a dark enchantment over every workroom, crawlspace, and maintenance deck. I could hear this implacable sorcery in the hydrogen hiss of the stars; in the white noise of generators, computer-cooling fans, and hidden air recirculators.

I came aboard U.N.S. Annie Jump Cannon as a hotshot Ph.D. of twenty-two. So far, this voyage to Epsilon E has taken a little over 109 standard years—relative, that is, to the arks in our fleet. Had I left an infant child with my parents in Algeria, it would have long since doddered into codgerhood—if it remained alive at all.

As for me, given the periodic metabolic respite of U-sleep, I have aged (Dr. Nadeq tells me) the physiological equivalent of only thirteen years. In short, I am a thirty-five-year-old centenarian. But no one stays up-phase much longer than a month each shipboard year (other than Commanders Odenwald, Roosenno, and Joplin, and a few engineering troubleshooters and continuity personnel), so that, among us would-be colonists, youthful centenarians—of many different ages—register as commonplaces, not freaks.

Of course, in this final decade of our approach to Epsilon Eridani, an expedition policy authorizing the conception, in utero gestation, and natural birth of children took effect for screened personnel young enough to carry out their parental obligations on New Home. Six years after Lily and I made Dean, this policy lapsed because “children under four will impact negatively on the efficient settlement of the target world that we have hopefully denominated New Home.”

Then why permit the arrival of any children at all? Or, at least, the arrival of any offspring under the able-bodied age of, say, sixteen?

Well, the original U.N. planners believed that “in the long term, a generation of colonists reared on the target world’s surface from midchildhood, adapting daily to that world, will prove of incalculable benefit to the planting of a permanent human base in an alien solar system.” Nobody, of course, had factored Dean into this reckoning.

In any case, with the advent of children, the living towers on our three wheelships seem less like mausoleums and more like chatter-filled atria or aviaries. I have stayed continuously up-phase ever since Dean’s birth (Lily, by contrast, opted for ursidormizine slumber soon afterward and comes up-phase only on his birthday). Although Dean takes closely monitored “naps”—to foster cell growth, to husband our various dry-good stores, and to ease the burden on our recirculating systems—I have no desire to down-phase just to match my sleep periods to his. I sleep when I need to, without drugs, and plot ways to sample, test, and seed the unearthly (conjectural) loams, marls, and humuses of New Home.

At other times, of course, I work in G-Tower’s polyped, where Dean has become a cherished favorite of his playmates; a mascot, almost. His blockish head, flat nose, spongy tongue, and stubby hands endear him to, rather than estrange him from, the group. The curiosity and altruism of well-loved children has a weird dynamic. It astonishes and uplifts. It soothes. So how can I regret the nearly six extra years that I’ve aged as a result of going up-phase for Dean?

Simple: I can’t.

Meanwhile, the metaphoric seedpods of Annie‘s towers have begun to rattle and split. Our corridors ring. The children dance, wonder, explore, scuffle, and sing. Kazimierz Mikol, I feel sure, has taken both a powder and a double dose of refined and amplified bear’s blood: ursidormizine.

Our G-Tower mess is draped festively about with acetane banners. Through it drifted a smell like fried ozone and the piped-in strains of an old song called, if repetition of a single phrase means anything, “I’m So Dizzy.”

Thich Ngoc Bao, the astrophotographer Nita Sistrunk, and I sat at a table over our trays. Dean huddled in an obsolescent VidPed near the door, spinning the control ball with his palm. (He won’t use virch goggles; their simulated environments cut him off too thoroughly from me, and that scares him.) Hiller Nevels, a pilot and maintenance tech, swaggered over from the autodispenser to join us.

“. . . detected Eppie’s heliopause,” Bao was saying. “So we will in fact rendezvous with the system.”

“You doubted we would?” Nita said.

“Eppie’s heliopause?” Hiller said. “What’s that?”

“Did you never doubt, Nita?” Bao took a bite out of his steaming oystershell pasta and its garlic-spinach filling. He swallowed. “One down-phase, I had a six-month-long nightmare, complete with sound and motion effects. Annie dropped like a stale doughnut into a Kerr singularity and whirled around its glowing mouth for about twelve eternities. Frame-dragging, you know. I mummified in my biorack. So did everybody else.”

“Cheerful talk,” Hiller said.

“Eppie’s heliopause is the very edge of the Epsilon Eridani system,” Nita told Hiller. “Where the star’s solar wind hits the charged particles in interstellar vacuum.”

“Isn’t the Barricado Stream the edge?” Hiller said.

A star’s energy influence, Bao explained, extends well beyond its farthest planet or cometary cloud. Low-frequency radio emissions can undulate a dozen billion miles into the obsidian emptiness surrounding a star.

As Bao spoke, I watched Dean swaying in the VidPed, slapping the control ball. I could see his virtual self—a chunky two-dimensional figure with a feathered spear—stalking a herd of electronic ostriches on a veldt whose real-world equivalent long ago turned into tourist hotels, tennis courts, and golf courses.

Dean didn’t care about that. The control ball was easy to spin; the figures on the screen made him laugh. His chuckle, along with the way his head lurched gleefully, wanned my heart, almost as if Lily had rubbed my chest with some sort of thermotherapeutic cream.

Without alerting the others, I picked a comppad off my tunic’s carrypatch and began to punch out some verses. I struggled, recasting each stanza three or four times before moving on. During this effort, Annie and my friends ceased to exist for me.

In the end, I had my entire effort almost, if not quite, the way I wanted it:

A star child in a VidPed cage

Unwraps himself, with deadpan glee.

Such fragile tissues disengage,

Such guileless beauty in debris.

Baffingly, he molts and fledges,

Unwrapping in order to dress.

By this divestment, he pledges

To put on a scarecrow success.

Never has he touched a bird:

A may pop, an eggling, a flame.

In the beginning cracked a word,

The broken promise of his name.

I hear lark song where my fellows

Discern but babble, vocal cheats.

Take away your amped-up cellos,

Leave me only DeBoy’s bleats.

With no ulterior intent,

He cocks and grins at every sign:

Litmus test or test-tube infant,

Telescope or Colombo twine.

So watch his palm atop the ball,

A misfit’s flesh on spinning chrome:

Just now a shade on spectral veldt,

But next my son on our New Home.

I looked up to find my friends eyeing me with amusement. How long had I occupied myself writing my poem? Even Hiller, the last of us to sit down, had polished off his meal and was staring at my comppad.

“Another poem?” Bao said. “Well, you have to let us see it. If it’s bad manners to tell secrets in front of one’s dinner companions, concealing a poem composed at table is also rude. Surely.”

“The rudeness is writing it in front of us,” Nita said. “He might as well’ve sat here picking his nose.”

Hiller guffawed. “That depends on the poem. Or the nose.”

Bao reached across the table. “Give.”

I handed him the comppad. I had no qualms about showing around the product of my creative withdrawal. Keats need not fear even a partial eclipse of his immortality, but no other soul this far from home—with the self-proclaimed exception of the Pakistani sferics specialist Ghulam Sharif on U.N.S. Fritz Zwicky—can rival my versifying prowess. Other expedition members may scribble confessional, or hortatory, or occasional poems (if you look, you can find the results of their activity on toadstool units everywhere about), but I (humorously) regard my challengers as amateurs or hacks.

“Prepare to fall at my feet in veneration.”

“Gripes,” said Nita. “Self-praise is no praise at all.”

“I unequivocally agree, Ms. Sistrunk,” I said.

“You do?”

“Sure. But no praise is also no praise at all. I blow my own horn to add a little dressing to the silence.”

Bao began to scroll the comppad. He read each stanza aloud for the others. He did so with a pitch of feeling that humbled me: I could hear the hiccups in my poem’s flow, the off-speed diction, the bungled metrics—hiccups for which Bao’s sensitive reading almost compensated.

“What’s an eggling?” Hiller asked.

“A little egg,” Nita ventured. “What else?”

I said, “I don’t know. Something hard like a stone, dense like a black hole, and life-packed, potentially, like an ovum. See? Eggling.”

“What does it mean?” Hiller asked. “Not just eggling, the whole poem?”

“That he loves his son,” Bao said. “And looks forward to raising him to manhood on a brave new world.”

I could add nothing to that, and when Bao gave me back my comppad, Nita began talking about heliopause again, the savory immenence of planetfall.

Our fleet pulses onward, skimming at a modest moiety of light-speed the interpenetrating membranes of space-time. The Barricado Stream—inside the hard-to-mark heliopause, outside the orbit of a planetary iceball—rushes nearer.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, perturbations in Epsilon Eridani’s motion revealed that it most likely dragged planets, if not a gravity sink, around it. Observations made from the Infrared Lunar Astronomical Telescope (IRLAT) on Darkside in the 2030s, along with the fact that Eppie emits an infrared signal hinting at protoplanetary debris, led scientists to posit that the system had five planets, including one in Eppie’s zone of habitability, and possibly an outer dust band. We sent out an unmanned probe to confirm these hypotheses, but our armada—dispatched nearly thirty years later, when Ju Tong technology, multinational money, and worsening environmental/social conditions converged to make the launch seem practical if not imperative—has long since outrun the U.N. probe.

Fortunately, shipboard telescopes and Thich Ngoc Bao’s relativistic calculus have validated the presence of these worlds. Even more convincingly, so has a probe that we dropped over the side of Zwicky before commencing deceleration; as our arks slowed, this probe kept going, making a full-speed transit of the system and thereby detecting the cometary matter in the Barricado Stream by radar echoes.

In any case, New Home does exist, along with a fiery inner planet that a wag among us tagged Red Hot. Three outer planets received equally silly names: Jelly Belly, Jawbreaker, and Cold Cock. Moreover, spectroanalysis carried out on Chandrasekhar indicates that New Home has water.

A couple of days ago, because Dean requires extra work and attention if I wish him to reach his full potential, I took him into the geology bay under Annie‘s observatory deck. I planned not only to do some elementary professional review but also to show him a grabbag of tray specimens: a quartz crystal, a piece of obsidian, a leaf of limestone, a fossil imprint, a geode. Estsuko Endo, after all, has too much to do to spend her every waking moment amusing Dean or devising therapeutic games to educate him.

I don’t. My real work begins when our advance scientific teams set down on Epsilon Eridani II (even the hackneyed New Home seems a better name than that) to map, explore, sample, test, and catalogue. Besides, I’m Dean’s father: I insisted that this expedition permit him to be.

Dean handled each specimen with clumsy delight. Except for the collection’s lone geode, the specimens are small to the point of parody. In fact, many soil and mineral types exist on Annie only as wafer-thin cross sections on glass slides for microsope viewing.

I half feared that Dean would slice himself on the crystal. (His fingers have the nimbleness of porcelain.) Or would drop the trilobite fragilely preserved in Ordovician clay. Or would lose the stalagmite tip that rested on his single-creased palm like a Lilliputian dagger.

But, chortling, goggle-eyed, Dean managed to hold on to, examine, and return to me every item. He was as respectful of them as, on his sixth birthday, he’d been of the glittery stars in the observatory’s viewport.

“Whuh’s thiz?”

“Schist.”

“Durdy word?”

“No. Schist. A flaky, stress-formed rock. Be careful, you’ll peel away a mica layer.”

“Sch-schid?”

I started to say, “No, schist,” when I heard a man behind us laughing, just inside the bay’s entrance. I looked over my shoulder to see (for the first time since Dean’s visit to the observatory) Kazimierz Mikol.

My gut clenched, a spasm of déjà vu. What was Mikol doing in a work-and-study laboratory authorized for, if not expressly limited to, Annie‘s geology contingent? Would he argue that my six-year-old retardate had no business here? No business, for that matter, anywhere?

“He does like rocks, doesn’t he?” Mikol said.

That remark instantly soured the look I turned on him. “My sweet Jesus,” I murmured.

“You mistake me for someone else,” Mikol said. “Look. I came up here at Ms. Endo’s request. She wanted me to tell a man in here—identity then unknown to me—that his son—ditto—would have a therapy session with her tomorrow at ten-hundred hours.”

“Why didn’t she intercom?”

“A whole tribe of ankle biters had her occupied. Besides, your sanctorum was on my way. I need to eyeball the harp strings sweeping down from the arc opposite G-Tower. That all right with you?”

Harp strings meant fuel spokes. I stared hard at Mikol.

“Consider yourself duly messaged, Dr.—?”

“Gwiazda.”

“As you like.” He pivoted on his heel.

“Wade,” Dean said. He meant wait, and Mikol turned back to face him.

Dean held up the geode in our collection. He tilted this queer, split rock so that Mikol had to look directly into its crystal-laced cavity. Its hollow glittered like an in-fallen spiderweb in a splash of sunlight, and Mikol stared into it as if hypnotized.

“Spokes,” Dean said. “Fyool spokes.”

Those words seemed to stun Mikol. He looked from the reflective cavity of the geode to the dull, flat face of the boy that Lily and I, in his view, had selfishly inflicted on the limited resources of our ark.

“He means the crystals,” I said. “They must remind him of the spokes to our matter-antimatter rocket.”

“I know what he meant.”

“He saw those spokes only once,” I insisted. “The same day Lily and I gave him the stars.”

“There’s a mobile of the Annie in the polyped. He’s seen that dozens of times, surely.”

“Its spokes don’t glow like the real ones. In the glare of the exhaust stream, the real ones are . . . magical.”

“That doesn’t make his equating the two a wonderwork.”

Mikol refused to look away from me. And, out of atavistic machismo or scientific curiosity, I refused to look away from him. “But he’s just linked you, a fuel-systems specialist, to the ‘spokes’ in the geode.”

“He has ears. He heard me say fuel spokes. So he has a bare-assed modicum of motherwit. Hallelujah.”

“What about the associative leap he just made? Not, by the way, from your words to you, but from the geode’s crystals to Annie‘s weblike fuel lines?”

Dean kept pointing the geode. The way he was gripping it, it reminded me of some sort of exotic weapon. I imagined a burst of energy flashing from it and splitting Mikol’s chest cavity open, to reveal . . . what? The gemlike perdurability of his heart? The flowing rubies of his blood? The hard-edged latticework of his myocardia?

“Do you think that on that basis I should declare the kid a genius?” he asked me.

“Human would do. Just human.”

“Tiglathpileser was human, it’s rumored. And Caligula. So were a whole host of twentieth-century tyrants. So presumably were the brain-dead idiots who turned the Earth into a treeless detention camp. Being human, I’m afraid, doesn’t automatically confer demigod status on anyone.”

“Human beings made these arks.”

“Praise Noah for that irrefutable insight! Which onboard system did your genius offspring invent?”

This retort shut my mouth; it also had a spirit-dampening effect on Dean. He lowered the geode and and made a queer, gargling moan in his throat.

No longer in the geode’s sights, Mikol backed out of the workroom. I followed him.

In the corridor, Mikol pointed a finger at me to hold me at bay. “Two run-ins with Gwiazda and his hairless baboon,” he said. “Well, this second run-in was a lot less amusing than the first. A third meeting may result in the total overthrow of my antihostility training, the blanket neutralization of my daily serenotil boosters.”

“What’s the matter with you, anyway?”

“Nothing. I dislike mongoloids. In my view, an entirely rational prejudice.”

“You’ve overstepped yourself there,” I said.

“Well, so what? I’ll go down-phase again after solving my hydrogen-flow problem. And stay zonked until Annie enters the Barricado Stream. With any luck, I won’t collide with Gwiazda and Son ever again, either aboard this ark or down on New Home, where I plan to homestead a small farm off limits to fat little mongoloids and their selfish Sambo daddies.”

“You bastard,” I said.

“Check out the little bastard in your lab,” Mikol replied. “More than likely, he’s accidentally swallowed a rock.”

Once again, he strode away before I could seize his arm or mount a reply. Under my breath, though, I murmured, “Honky,” not knowing where the word had come from; even so, it seemed a crass betrayal of the Gwiazdas, who, in innocence and love, had bought my life and raised me.

“Whurh’s Lily?” Dean asked.

“You know as well as I. Asleep. She’s always asleep. It’s her calling.”

“I wand to see her.”

“Uh-uh. You only think you do. We’ve done this before, Dean. The damned bioracks spook you.”

“I want to see her,” Dean said, struggling to enunciate.

“No you don’t.”

“Yez. Yez I do. Take me to see her.”

Dean and I had long since retired to our mezzanine-level quarters. The hour was nearly midnight (as if you could not legitimately say the same of any hour of our arkboard journey), and I wanted Dean to go as soundly asleep as his mother. But an afternoon birthday party in the polyped, and then an evening of restored and colorized Our Gang comedies over our link to Heraclitus’s vidfiles, had left him wrought up and obstinate. I could tell that an all-out battle now would snap my brittle self-control faster than would appeasement, even with a visit to the bioracks thrown in as Dean’s unwarranted spoils.

(Spoils. Evocative word.)

Actually, Dean seldom tries to stand his ground against me or anyone else. Agreeableness and conciliation define him the way stealth and curiosity define a cat. Better for harmony’s sake, I rationalized, to indulge him tonight in this unusual display of resoluteness than to shatter my peace of mind—what peace of mind?—by playing the tyrant.

Ten minutes after midnight, then, we dropped to the lowest level in G-Tower, a fluorescent dungeon of computer monitors and foam-lined ursidormizine pods, and asked the security tech Greta Agostos to pass us through the barred entrance of Annie‘s hibernaculum.

“On what business?” Greta asked.

“Guess. Dean wants to see his mother.”

Greta rubbed her knuckles furiously—but not hard—over Dean’s head. “She won’t be very talkative, DeBoy. And you and your dad will have to submit to a search. You know, a ticklish patting down.”

“The only reason I came,” I said.

But that “patting down” remark was a standard security-tech joke. In fact, without even touching us, Greta ran an aural fod—foreign-object detector—around our entire bodies with the impersonal deftness the very opposite of sensual. Her fod, by the way, absolved us of trying to smuggle into the hibernaculum any sort of weapon, drug, or softdrink IV-drip.

The security bars retracted upward, and Dean and I passed into the eerie twilight mausoleum of the bioracks. The air in this circular hibernaculum has a wintry blue tinge and a biting regulated chill. You can identify our quasi-corpses, by the way, either by reading their nameplates or by looking through the pods’ frost-traced visors.

We walked the hibernaculum’s perimeter—tap-tap-tapping on its naked metal floor—until we had reached the biorack of Lily Aliosi-Stark. Her pod rests on the chamber’s third strata, not quite two meters up, and I always have to lift Dean so that he can gaze through the rime-crazed faceplate at his mother’s pale but lovely profile.

“Sleebin beaudy,” Dean whispered, full of awe. “My mama’s jes like sleebin beaudy.”

“I’d wake her with a kiss, DeBoy, but my lips always freeze to the visor.”

“Funny.”

“Not if it happens to you. All right if we go home now?”

Dean put his fingertips to Lily’s faceplate. He chuckled when they didn’t stick to it. Instead, they left milky prints, which faded slowly once he’d drawn his hand away.

“Pood me down.”

I put Dean down. He ambled along the bottom two strata of bioracks, back toward the hibernaculum’s entrance, until he came to an empty pod featuring this legend on its nameplate: Abel Walter Gwiazda. Dean rubbed the letters of our surname with a stubby forefinger. Then, as I had feared—as I’d known would happen—Dean gulped raspingly at the chilly air and went as pop-eyed as a strangler’s victim. Why had I supposed that this visit would turn out better than all the others?

“Gone,” Dean said. “Holy crow, daddy’s gone.”

“I’m right here, son. Unlike your ever-drowsing mama, you can’t expect me to be two places at once.”

On the verge of blubbering, Dean repeated, “Gone,” at least a dozen times and then began to wail: a fractured banshee keen that filled this weird crypt for the living like a squadron of angry wasps.

I clutched my shoulders, then covered my ears, then grabbed my shoulders again. Dean’s wail stung and restung the snarled thread-ends of my untangling nerves.

“Damn you, you little defective! Shut up!”

Dean’s eyes dilated to their utmost. He stopped wailing and retreated. Repeatedly, I shoved him in the chest with my knuckles, herding him toward the mausoleum’s exit. On my fifth or sixth such shove, Dean stumbled and collapsed sliding on his bottom. I immediately yanked him up.

“The one place you can’t endure for three minutes straight is the one place you insist on coming! Why? You don’t have a half-wit’s glimmering, do you?”

Greta appeared at Dean’s back out of the cold indigo fog. She knelt and hugged him from behind. He, in turn, spun about and clung to her as if to the winged savior in a fairy tale unwinding on a private channel in his head. The sight of his fear—the realization of it—staggered me.

“You asked Lily for this, Abel,” Greta said. “You asked for just what’s got you so hugely browned off tonight.”

“I, I didn’t know,” I managed. “Not really.”

“I’m taking Dean out front with me. He’ll be okay. Go to Lily. Talk to her. Stay for as long as it takes.”

Greta picked up Dean and carried him, totally compliant in her arms, around the hibernaculum’s circular walk. As I stood there in the shame of Greta’s rebuke, the two of them receded into the thickening blue fog.

I returned to Lily’s biorack. Our conversation touched on many things, including the essential loneliness of starfaring. Later, back at the U-dorm’s entrance, Dean greeted me as if I had never derided his mother or cravenly abused him—as if, in short, I deserved his regard.

Each of our ships carries around sixteen hundred people, two hundred to a habitation tower. Most travel down-phase in banks of computer-monitored bioracks. Over the last few years of our approach, however, with a deliberate effort to bring children into our spacefaring community, we’ve increased our numbers by almost twenty young persons a tower. I assume that Zwicky and Chandresekhar boast comparable population surges, but I’ve made no real effort to stay abreast of their figures. Dean claims most of my time.

After my ugly flare-up in the hibernaculum, I determined to teach Dean everything I could about our ship, our fleet, our aims, our mystical hopes. He now understands that hydrogen flows from the fuel tanks on Annie‘s thirty-mile-long wheel to the stores of antihydrogen ice in the rocket dragging us along behind it like a colossal, fixed, empty-bottomed parachute. He knows that once we reach New Home, we will have exhausted every scintilla of fuel available to us, and he also understands, I believe, that to return to Earth or to go on to another solar system (Tau Ceti, say, or Sirius) will require the processing and loading of a volume of hydrogen and antihydrogen ice equal to that with which we left the Moon. He knows. . . .

But I delude myself: Dean has profound physical and mental handicaps; and love, the ultimate paternal blessing and folly, has limited power to add to his brain cells or to pack those he has with liberating knowledge.

In the polyped portion of the G-Tower nursery, Dean and I sat behind a partition draped with a banner depicting the galactic cluster including our own Milky Way. I thumb-moused a gyroscopically interphased replica of Annie Jump Cannon, hung above us as a mobile, through a dozen different maneuvers. In its nearly invisible filament harness, the tiny ark canted, wheeled, and strained.

Dean was weary of the drills and demonstrations, enduring them out of a puppy-dog loyalty. In fact, I felt that somewhere along the trajectory of this lesson, our roles—of father and son; of mentor and student—had reversed.

“Howfurh?” Dean said.

“What?”

“How furh to New Hohm?”

“I don’t know. We’re still braking. Commander Odenwald probably has it computed to the nanosecond.”

Etsuko came in and sat down opposite Dean in a kiddie chair almost too small even for her. “No matter when we get into orbit around New Home,” she told Dean, “you’ll probably be at least eight or nine before you visit the planet.”

Dean visibly perked—not at Etsuko’s words, but at her presence. “Why?” he asked.

“We’ll have a lot to do before we let any of you children risk the surface. Surveillance, photography, mapping, testing, a great many things. Understand?”

“Are thurh guhna be monstuhrs?”

“Monsters?”

The wedge of Dean’s tongue hung between his lips. Then he said, “Dyne-o-sours,” as if the word embodied a vinegary type of lizardly force.

“I doubt that,” Etsuko said.

“Then whud? Peepul?”

“I doubt that too.”

“And if there were people, intelligent beings, they’d look upon us as the monsters,” I said. “Invaders from outer space, their worst fork-legged nightmares.”

Dean’s face clouded. His tongue filled his mouth like a gag.

“Abel, you’ve scared him.”

“No great task.” I usually avoid sarcasm—my son has no feel for it—but I hadn’t slept for over fifty hours (not even a catnap), and Dean’s intractable innocence had worn some holes in my thick-skinned cheerfulness. “But suppose, Etsuko, that we do drop down to New Home and find ourselves confronted by a species of gentle sapients.”

“Suppose we do?”

I told her how the aboriginal sapients of New Home would inevitably view us as a scourge. Later, I wrote,

down
we
fall
deformed invaders
dropping into their midst
so that
at our coming
they reel back
feeling
blitzed
appalled
prey to misshapen raiders
noting
our beaklike snouts
our eyes of shiny goo
the rows of gleaming bones
behind our pouts
the way our fingers
sprout like vermicelli
with half-moon lyre picks
twanging
in their knuckled heads
and they know
their hot-pink sods
glass-sheathed trees
spiraling geyser creeks
and dog-masked gods
crunching fire opals
on the waves of cliffs
a destiny made manifest
by a pale of stars
will fall forever
to the uprights—
who but us—
swarming down from
who knows where
who knows why
and couldn’t they
just die

we hope so
oh we hope so
don’t we
ms. etsuko

Still later, Dean occupied elsewhere, I showed this effort to Etsuko. She read my last little quatrain as an insult.

Without benefit of ursidormizine, I dream of New Home and its dominant species: humanoid creatures unaware that invaders from outer space are eyeing their world. A landing in the capital of their foremost nation-state allows the first U.N. party down (oddly, it includes both me and Kazimierz Mikol) to see that every individual of this species roughly resembles my handicapped son.

“I know what we ought to call this place,” Mikol tells me: “Special Olympica.”

In a collective journey of a century or more, you cannot expect to reach your destination without losing someone, even if the majority of your expeditionary force spends most of its time in monitored trip-sleep. Seven of Annie Jump‘s original contingent of sixteen hundred have died in transit, the latest (but one) a woman in A-Tower who failed to survive childbirth, although, blessedly, her infant daughter did not die and still lives in the A-Tower nursery.

Arkboard funerals last only minutes; few among us attend them. Each tower has a chaplain well-versed in the rituals of different faiths, those of mainline world religions as well as those of small local cults. If the deceased ascribed to a particular belief system and left unambiguous instructions, the chaplain observes them during the memorial service and the subsequent ejection of the corpse from the ship. (For reasons that should be self-evident, our regs permit neither cremation nor entombment.)

Granted, most of those who have died, both here and on our sibling arks, have professed a generic sort of agnosticism or a science-centered, mystical atheism (no matter how oxymoronish this last term may sound), but one man aboard Chandrasekhar asked for and received a voodoo funeral, complete with chants and sprinklings of (symbolic) rooster’s blood. According to associates, he believed that one day, far in this expansion/contraction cycle of our cosmos, another starfaring ship would retrieve his mummified corpse. Technospiritually revived, he would walk its decks as the undead prophet of the universe’s next systalic blossoming.

In my view, the shame of this bravura credo resides not in its superstition, but in the fact that only four of this man’s arkmates attended his obsequies. Of course, those who sleep cannot send off the sleeper.

The point of this digression? Several weeks after taking Dean to visit his sleeping mother, a woman by the name of Helena Brodkorb, a floral geneticist in D-Tower, died in her biorack. Despite a complex fail-safe system, her monitors had not alerted her tower’s med-unit personnel of her measurable physical deterioration under ursidormizine. By the time anyone noticed, she had slipped away.

A small scandal ensued. Odenwald suspended two up-phase med techs and ordered an investigation. He did not intend to have one more sleeper under his command die in a malfunctioning biorack.

This death would have meant little to me, and nothing to Dean, if, a few hours later, I had not learned that Helena Brodkorb was—or had been—Kazimierz Mikol’s aunt, an aunt two years younger than he. Further, Ms. Brodkorb had no other kin on Annie or our sibling arks. (Effecting a passenger exchange between two huge wheelships moving at point-ten c is a doable but risky venture.) Excepting spouses and the children born during our decade-long approach to Epsilon Eridani, few people in our expedition have relatives aboard our arks. Therefore, Odenwald felt that Mikol, down-phase again in G-Tower, should know that Ms. Brodkorb had died, even if—maybe especially if—it reflected badly on arkboard fail-safe systems. Mikol might elect to attend her last rites.

Quickly, then, Mikol was up-phased, and Odenwald personally broke the news of his aunt’s demise.

Mikol, groggy from both the ursidormizine and its sudden neutralization, began to weep. (I have this fact from the med techs who revived him.) He had loved Helena Brodkorb. The disorientation common to the newly awakened may have influenced him, but, still, Mikol’s tears had a strong emotional, not just a narrow physiological, wellspring.

I had difficulty crediting this report, of course, but it cheered rather than surprised me. I wanted to believe it—not that a smart and productive woman had died, but that Mikol had reacted to her passing less like an automaton programmed for cynical efficiency than like . . . well, someone’s warm-blooded nephew.

I have reconstructed Kazimierz Mikol’s activities on the day before Helena Brodkorb’s memorial service from an account he gave me later. The most surprising things about this turn of events, of course, are that he deliberately sought Dean and me out in a spirit of reconciliation and that he and I did in fact reach a wary accord.

On that morning, then, Mikol dressed in paper coveralls and a pair of plastic slippers. He added a disposable dove-gray tunic. Every item in his make-do wardrobe emitted a soft gray incandescence. Dove gray. Mourning-dove gray. The colors of civilized dolor, gentlemanly grief.

The chaplain in D-Tower had scheduled Helena’s funeral for 0900 hours the next day—after a noninvasive autopsy and med-tech analysis. Mikol had received assurances that he would be unable to tell that anyone, or anything, had so much as pinched Helena’s eyelid back or calipered her elbow. He would find her lying serenely in state on the retractable lingula, or tongue, of a waste-disposal ejector.

Tomorrow.

In the meantime, Mikol had a small mission to carry out. He tried to recall what amusements—games, toys, icons—young boys found amusing, and which still pleased him, as an adult. No rocks, though. No fake beaches in hydroponics. No shiny precious or semiprecious stones. No geode. Nothing, in fact, pertaining to geology, the professional realm of Dean Gwiazda’s father.

Mikol thought a long time. Then he took a lift from the transphase lounge to the mezzanine-level cubbyhole of a pilot and maintenance tech. This, not altogether coincidentally, was a pack rat named Hiller Nevels. Hiller gave him the items he wanted as a kind of consolation gift.

Gift in hand, Mikol rode back down and crossed the G-Tower atrium, a lofty cylinder housing vitrofoam benches, a vegetable garden, exotic ferns, parrot-colored orchids and bromeliads, and a regulated population of purple finches. Heedless of its plants and birds, Mikol hiked through this pocket wilderness to the catwalk outside the polyped.

He found Dean and me playing a game of cards (Go Fish, if I remember correctly) at a toadstool unit well removed from the other children. I greeted him with a look betraying my outrage and suspicion:

“Yes?”

“I came”—Mikol told me later that he could feel his words scratching his throat like a rusty sword blade—“I came to make peace.”

“Why?” I said.

“You need a reason?”

“If I’m not to regard this as a shabby trick, yes.”

“Such generosity of spirit.”

The cards on Dean’s screen fanned out before him like so many canceled tickets, and he gave Mikol a toothy, distracted smile.

“Dr. Gwiazda, the truth is, I’ve undergone a—”

“A change of heart?”

“Perhaps.”

“Because your aunt has just died?”

“Word certainly travels.”

“Yes, it does. At a healthy fraction of light-speed.”

Dean pushed away from his toadstool console. “Hullo!” he cried. “Mistuh Mickle!”

Mikol knelt beside Dean and pulled a small, foam-lined carrypress from his pocket. After thumbnailing its lid open, he held it on his palm so Dean could see the faceted seeds inside it. They looked like four pieces of sparkly gravel. This was a coincidence of appearances, though, not a surrender to the insult theme—rocks in the head, out on a rock—that had so far typified his run-ins with Dean and me.

“Whud . . . whud are they?”

“Eye-eyes,” Mikol said. “Impact inflatables.”

“They’re so . . . liddle.”

“The better to bring aboard a vessel where closet space is tight. Touch one.”

“No!” I said. “Mr. Mikol, those things are illegal aboard Annie.”

“Not so,” Mikol said from his crouch. “Would I endanger our ship? Or hooliganize your son? You see, these eye-eyes will fall back to portable grit as quickly as they burst to their full dimensions—the latest in amusement engineering just before our launch.”

Dean held a finger over the carrypress: expectant, unsure, ready for direction. His psychic investment in electronic Go Fish had long since bottomed out.

“No,” I told him.

“Ease off, Dr. Gwiazda,” Mikol said. “I’m trying to make amends, not get the boy bioracked for reckless mischief.”

Although still skeptical, I thought this over and nodded at Dean. “Go on, then. Take one. Just one.”

Dean’s hand trembled over the carrypress. Mikol seized it and guided his forefinger to one of the eye-eyes. Sweat and surface tension lifted the eye-eye clear. Dean stared at the grit on his fingertip in what looked to me like goggle-eyed dumbfoundment.

“Roll it between your thumb and forefinger,” Mikol said. “Then throw it against the floor or the wall.” He stepped aside to give Dean room.

Dean flicked the eye-eye feebly past my head. It struck the polyped’s deck, skittered to a standstill, and began to emit a faint, melodious hiss.

When Mikol picked it up, it quieted. “More oomph!” he advised. “Try again.” He gave the eye-eye back to Dean, who looked to me for guidance.

“Go ahead. Hurl it. Hard.”

Dean obeyed, tossing the eye-eye with such an awkward shoulder snap that I could imagine him whining for weeks about the lingering soreness. A hard expulsion of breath through his nostrils sounded a lot like a squeal.

But the eye-eye hit the wall behind me and impact-inflated on the rebound.

Wham! Revolving in the polyped was a fabriloon replica of an Allosaurus as large as Kazimierz Mikol himself. It hissed as it tumbled, that crimson and turquoise effigy of a giant lizard, and hissed more loudly than the eye-eye from which it had burst. At length, it righted and settled on its hind legs to the deck.

Dean had begun to scream.

Mikol might have guessed that a dinosaur exploding into view would traumatize a child of Dean’s makeup, but, of course, he hadn’t. He grabbed the effigy and thrust it to one side—as if removing it a few centimeters would calm Dean. It didn’t. Dean went on wailing, his hands at chest height in fortuitous parody of the Allosaurus’s forepaws.

“It’s all right, Dean,” Mikol was saying. “Look. It’s okay. A make-believe lizard. See. A plaything.”

Despite the threat of ear damage, I picked Dean up.

Meanwhile, Etsuko Endo, Thorn Koon, and Sidonia Montoya came rushing in to us from the main polyped. A covey of children in bright paper tunics, muu-muus, dhotis, or jumpsuits crowded in behind the adults to satisfy their own curiosity. One little girl patted Dean’s rump and said, “Shhh, shhh,” as I also tried to shush him, but the others either flocked to the dinosaur or clamped their palms over their ears.

“Holy crow!” Dean screamed. “Mon-stuhrrr!”

“He could mean you,” I told Kazimierz Mikol.

Mikol moved one hand in a rapid back-and-forth arc to keep the kids from the fabriloon. “I’m sorry, Gwiazda. You can’t think I wanted this. I figured the instant manifestation of a dinosaur would, well, tickle him.” He slapped the knuckles of Danny Chung-Barnett, who had weaseled far enough into the corner to grab the effigy’s turquoise scrotum.

“Can’t you de-pop it?” Etsuko asked over Dean’s spookily modulating wail.

“Of course. See this.” Mikol pointed to a navy-blue spot behind the fabriloon’s left eye. “Watch.”

He jabbed the spot. With a flatulent keen, the Allosaurus collapsed, rekernelized itself, and began to hiss—so that we could find it again. Mikol grabbed up the tiny eye-eye before the Chung-Barnett kid could pounce on and flee with it.

Dean stopped wailing. Chagrined, Mikol told Etsuko, Thorn, and Sidonia what had happened. Herding children before them, they went back to the polyped’s main activity area, leaving Mikol to struggle with the necessity of apologizing to Dean. To his credit, Mikol apologized.

Insofar as I had perceived him as an enemy, in the next few moments Kazimierz Mikol ceased to exist. The cynic who had viewed my son as a deadly obstacle to our colonizing mission to Epsilon Eridani vanished as suddenly as had the eye-eye dinosaur, leaving behind no speck of grit to flash-reconstitute his hostile persona.

“If carnivorous lizards are out,” he said, “what would make a good present for Dean?”

“Stars,” I said. “Try stars.”

After the debacle in the polyped, Mikol actually resolved to do as I had suggested. He would bestow upon Dean a gift of stars—not by escorting him to an observatory viewport, but instead by allowing Dean to accompany him to Helena Brodkorb’s last rites in D-Tower. This trip, over a fifteen-mile arc of the top side of Annie‘s wheel, would take a good half hour and expose Dean to all the stars salted into the engulfing bowl of space. Seen from the bubbletop on our perimeter car, these stars would prickle, blaze, shimmer, dim, and flare out again: an unceasing festival of light. Dean would watch it all as if bewitched.

“I don’t know,” I said. “A ride in a perimeter car may terrify him as much as—”

“A fabriloon from the late Cretaceous?”

“Exactly.”

“He’s had a good look at stars before. You and his mother made sure of that on his birthday.”

“But he’s never set foot outside G-Tower.”

Mikol appealed to Dean. “You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in G-Tower. When we go into parking orbit around New Home, you don’t plan to nest in the polyped while everybody else is down exploring the planet. Do you?”

“No surh.” Puzzlement and hurt clouded Dean’s face. “Nod if . . . I doan huvh to.”

“Good for you. So. Would you like to go for a little ride in Peeter?”

Peeter was the name I’d given the perimeter car officially allotted to Towers G-H. Take rim from perimeter, and you have our magnetic conveyance’s pet monicker. It’s a silly sort of joke. We call Annie‘s other three perimeter cars Pauli, MARE (Magnetic Arc-Ranging Elevated), and Albertina. In any case, Mikol spoke the name Peeter on purpose—to flatter me?—even though, as he later confessed, he could not decide if it were genuinely clever or only unbearably cute.

“Yez,” Dean said. “I wuhd like to ride.”

“But he doesn’t want to attend the funeral,” I said. “Just the sight of sleepers in bioracks—”

“Then he doesn’t have to,” Mikol cut in. “He can go to the polyped and virch with the other ankle biters.”

“Then I’ll ride along too.”

“Master Gwiazda, do you want your silver-tongued old man to go over to D-Tower with us?”

Solemnly, Dean nodded.

“Then it’s settled,” Mikol said. “To give ourselves plenty of time, we’ll leave at 0750 hours.”

Peeter, our magnetic bubbletop, tracked along the front top edge of Annie Jump‘s breathtaking wheel of underslung hydrogen tanks. From our perches in the car, we could see Fritz Zwicky running parallel to us, a ring of diamonds twinkling beyond the silver Mobius strip of our own ark. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was an opalescent sheen somewhere off to port. The other two arks were dimly visible to us, of course, only because of their running lights and the mirrored glow from the exhausts of their braking rockets.

Three distinct motions had their common vectors in our rim car: the bubbletop’s tortoiselike crawl toward D-Tower, the gravity-producing circumvolution of Annie‘s fuel ring, and the starward progress of our ark at point-ten c. It seemed to me that these countervailing forces should have ripped us from limb to limb, that our brains and entrails should have flown outward like loose meat in a centrifuge. Instead, we journeyed without incident, three casual travelers poking along the edge of a hurricane slingshot at high speed at infinity.

Dean couldn’t keep his eyes off the sky. Starlight sluiced over us like quinine water and guava punch. An alien vista of the Milky Way, familiar but wildly intense. Whorls of gas and dust, a trail of spun sugar crystal. Individual stars guttered and prickled, twinkled and blazed. Nearer to hand, across from us, the underside of Annie‘s fuel wheel gleamed like the tracks of an archangelic railroad.

“All right, cowboy,” Mikol said. “Whaddaya think?”

Dean, his eyes aflicker, continued to gape into the sprawl of God’s candelabra.

“Mr. Mikol asked you a question, Dean.”

“My friends call me Kaz,” Mikol said.

“Kaz, that is,” I said.

(I’d wondered if he had any friends. Bao referred to him only as a professional colleague, and a nettlesomely frosty one at that.)

“Suhr?” Dean said, fuddled.

“Mr. Mikol—Kaz—wants to know what you think of all this.”

A second or two lapsed before Dean could find the words he wanted: “Priddy. Holy crow, very priddy.”

Kaz patted Dean’s knee and laughed.

Peeter inched ahead—in a steep, gleaming silence that held the three of us like prehistoric waterwalkers in a blister of see-through resin. The wheel turned as Peeter inched as Annie leapt gully after gully of the interstellar chasm. . . .

Then Kaz—our old nemesis, Kazimierz Mikol—began to talk, his hands in his lap, the methodical wheel of his mind dipping memories from the millstream of his boyhood:

“My grandfather was an immigrant from the liberated Warsaw Pact nations of eastern Europe. He settled in newly democratic Cuba and set up a small factory in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, manufacturing a vehicle of his own design that ran on a nonpolluting, replenishable fuel distilled from pig shit and sugar-cane fibers. Cuba had lots of pig shit and sugar cane. Grandfather Alexej’s oldest son, Milan, who attended university in Poland in the double-twenties, developed the Mikol Process, a type of nanomechanization that brought down the price of the Sabio, our most popular model, so that even streetcleaners in Havana could afford to buy and drive one. In fact, Milan Mikol, my father, stands in relation to my birth century, at least in Cuba, as Henry Ford stood to the twentieth century in North America.”

Kaz had apparently aimed this speech at me, for Dean had tuned him out right after the second mention of pig shit. In our bubbletop, Dean hung beneath the stars like an Earth kid on a midsummer swing.

“I grew up with a sister, Marisa, afflicted with a host of weaknesses that forced my mother to devote herself to her like a nurse. You or I would say that Marisa had cerebral palsy, with severe hemiplegia and ataxia. Mama denied this and said her disabilities stemmed not from brain trauma at birth, but from the influence of an individious toxin made in the States and sprayed relentlessly on the cane crops of our province. No matter. Marisa had many handicaps; at first, not even constant attention and coaxing enabled her to learn to speak.”

Kaz’s story had begun to make me uncomfortable. I looked past Dean, who sat between Kaz and me, and asked, “Why tell me all this?”

“Just listen, okay?” Annoyed, he resumed: “The year I was thirteen, Marisa turned eight, and my mother’s youngest sister, Helena, just then ten or eleven, jetted over with the Brodkorbs from Poznan—for a visit and a reunion. Helena spelled Mother with Marisa. She spelled me, too, because, hating the task, I now often found myself acting as a care provider. I may have welcomed little Helena to Ciudad Sabio even more vigorously than my mother had, because Helena’s presence freed me to swim, hike, and play beisbol.

“That same autumn, a movie company from Florida built an amusement park on Pico Torquino, the tallest mountain in Cuba, only a few kilometers from our Sabio factory. The jewel of this set was a Ferris wheel that the filmmakers erected as close to Torquino’s summit as they could safely get it. Then, once production had halted, the company’s publicity department let it be known, in and around the Sierra Maestra, that locals could ride the Ferris wheel for the equivalent of fifteen American dollars a person on the last three days of October. After the last ride, the company would dismantle the device and return Torquino to its more or less natural state, prior to production.

“Marisa heard of the Ferris wheel. By this time, she had a computer that gave her a voice—a lilting little girl’s voice—and she told Mama that she wanted to ride Vireo Films’ greatly ballyhooed amusement. She wanted this boon as a birthday gift, before Vireo’s roustabouts broke the wheel down and shipped it back to Florida. But, of course, if my parents granted Marisa this wish, they couldn’t allow her to ride the Ferris wheel’s gondola alone.

“I would have to go with her. I despised North American films and the nauseating hoopla that went with them, and so I absolutely hated this idea. In fact, I had a perverse nostalgia for the days of Fidel Castro, the sort of socialistic idealism that only the well-off son of a millionaire capitalist could afford to indulge. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to take Marisa.

“Helena intervened. She said she would ride with Marisa, if Diego, our household’s major-domo, drove the two of them up Pico Torquino to Vireo’s make-believe amusement park. (Even at thirteen, I heard this last phrase as an egregious bourgeois tautology.) She said it was fine if I chose to stay home, for the combined altitudes of the peak and the Ferris wheel would probably simply cause my snotty nose to bleed. This insult—reverse psychology?—worked, and I angrily offered myself up as Marisa’s guardian on this expedition after all. Two evenings later, Diego drove Marisa, Helena, and me up the mountain so we could ride in one of the bright gondolas of the film company’s Ferris wheel.”

I began to see—dimly, at least—where Kaz was going with this story.

“We rode the wheel—Marisa, Helena, and I. We rode it an hour after sunset. Marisa sat between me and her pretty young aunt from Poznan. What can I say? My nose didn’t bleed, but the combined heights of Torquino and that stately illuminated wheel made me tremble like a palmetto leaf in the salty October wind. Believe me, I shivered uncontrollably. Marisa, however, loved the entire experience.

“When our gondola stopped at the top of the wheel and swung back and forth in its gyros, with the south Cuba coast and the smoky mirror of the sea arrayed below us like glossy infrared photographs, Marisa barked her approval—a clipped, excited gasp; a call from the heart. The wheel itself blazed, and the stars of autumn . . . Dios mío, some of them seemed to swim in and out of view, shyly, like bronze or pewter carp.”

Kaz fell silent.

I laughed nervously. “Remind me never to challenge you to a duel of similes.”

“What I understand now,” Kaz finally went on, “is that in that Ferris wheel gondola, poised above the darkened island, I loved Marisa, I loved Helena, and I loved the simple day-to-day astonishments of living. Down from Pico Torquino, however, the world—my world, anyway—seemed to change. The Brodkorbs went back to Poland. My mother returned to fussing over Marisa and ignoring the rest of us.

“By the following February, my parents had divorced. Mama, taking Marisa with her, rejoined her sister’s family in Poznan, and my father immersed himself in design revisions, production goals, marketing strategies. He died four years later, on a business trip to New York, when Sashimi, a guild of militant Japanese whalers, exploded a pocket nuclear device in a subway tunnel under Grand Central Station. I was in my first year at Havana Tech, gearing up to study particle physics and vacuum propulsion systems.”

Even though it seemed that he had just begun another story, Kaz stopped.

“Is that all?” I asked.

“All my life, I blamed Marisa for the loss of my parents. Two days ago, upon learning of Helena’s death, I remembered something I couldn’t quite remember. Please don’t laugh. You see, this incomplete memory softened me. Only when we boarded Peeler and started crawling toward D-Tower did the memory come totally back to me. I have just told it to you, Dr. Gwiazda.”

“Abel.”

“Abel, then.”

Peeler docked with the observatory complex at the summit of D-Tower. Dean had a crick from staring heavenward during our crossing—so, while ambling through the docking connector, he bemusedly rubbed his neck.

In D-Tower, despite my misgivings, I believe it gratified Kaz—oddly gratified him—when Dean insisted on going with us to Helena’s memorial service: the voiding. (This last term offends me even more than does ejection, but, over our trip’s past quarter century, it has gained currency and a certain cachet; the puns it embodies are, if nothing else, vivid and expressive.) Kaz realized that Dean wanted more to keep him, his new-found friend, in sight than to attend the funeral of a stranger, but I set aside my objections, and all three of us turned up on part of the observatory deck given over to, well, voidings.

To Kaz’s obvious surprise, thirteen people, including our party from G-Tower, had come to honor Helena, who lay, just as promised, on the lingula of the ejector tube.

Commander Stefan Odenwald himself, looking distinguished but gaunt, headed this group of mourners, which also comprised Chaplain Mother Sevier and eight of Helena’s friends and colleagues. The service, which I thought dignified and painfully moving, featured brief prayer readings by Odenwald and Chaplain Mother Sevier, a few words by a fellow geneticist, and a holovid of fifteen-year-old Helena singing “Dona Nobis Pacem” in a soprano as clear and chilling as ice water.

The holovid scared Dean, but didn’t send him careening away from the ceremony. He grabbed my arm and held to it like Quasimodo clinging to a bell rope, his gaze shifting back and forth between the shimmering image of young Helena crooning like an angel and her aged-looking corpse, recognizable even to Dean as a transfigured but silent version of the beautiful hologhost. Adding to the eeriness of this experience was the fact that young Helena sang her part in rounds with an unseen orpianoogla and an invisible mixed choir. Indeed, their anthem echoed hauntingly throughout the deck.

At its conclusion, Odenwald said, “Mr. Mikol, as Helena Brodkorb’s only living relative aboard Annie Jump Cannon, you have—if you wish it—the privilege of eulogizing her.”

Kaz walked to the lingula, to stand in almost exactly the spot where the hologhost had sung. Bending, he kissed Helena’s cold temple.

“From Pico Torquino to Epsilon Eridani,” he said, standing erect again, “Helena Brodkorb was not afraid of heights. She dwelt on them. Like Harry Martinson, she knew that ‘space can be more cruel than man, / more than its match is human callousness.’ And so, unlike me, she was never cruel.”

Which was all Kaz could steady himself to say. He put a hand over his mouth and stared at Helena’s sunken eyes and lovely complexion. Meanwhile, Dean threaded a path through the other mourners to stand next to Kaz in mute condolence.

Odenwald said, “Shall we commend her now to the stars?”

Kaz nodded.

The lingula on which Helena Brodkorb lay retracted into its tube. A maintenance tech among the mourners used a remote to seal the tube and activate its plunger. Although no one on the deck could see her go, Kaz’s dead aunt hurtled outward like a torpedo—far beyond the gravitational attraction of any of the armada’s wheelships.

“Because we’re decelerating,” Commander Odenwald observed, “Helena Brodkorb will reach Epsilon Eridani before us.”

“And eventually pass on out of the system into interstellar space again,” said a colleague.

The company fell silent again. No one appeared to want to move.

After a time, I said: “May I speak?”

When Chaplain Mother Sevier nodded, I recited:

“So very human,
To grieve and to entomb.

This ardent woman
We cremate in the cold.

No longer may we hold
Her from her spacious home.”

“Amen,” said Chaplain Mother Sevier, crossing herself.

Finally, we funeral goers broke up and departed.

Back in G-Tower, Kaz opted to remain up-phase for the remainder of our armada’s voyage. He has been spelling me with Dean as once, years ago, Helena Brodkorb spelled his mother and him with his handicapped sister, Marisa.

We have entered the Barricado Stream, a region a good deal less clogged with debris than a few of our astronomers had earlier supposed. The probe dropped by Zwicky has determined recently that the Stream hosts only one substantial cometary mass per each sphere the approximate size of the Earth’s orbit around Sol. Good news. Very good news.

“There’s hardly any chance at all we’ll hit a comet,” Nita Sistrunk said yesterday in the G-Tower mess.

But Bao added, “It isn’t the comet-sized bodies we must fear. Remember, though, if big masses whirl around out here, there may also be smaller but more perfidious bodies impossible to detect at a distance.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You don’t really want to know.” And Bao deftly changed the direction of our talk.

In any event, more and more personnel aboard our three wheelships have come up-phase. We still have some journeying to do to reach New Home, at least another standard year’s worth, but excitement mounts. Also, the staggered awakening of adults from the enchantment of ursidormizine slumber has delighted the children, and each pulse of our matter-antimatter engines seems a quickening heartbeat. The peculiar atmosphere of a seminar-cum-carnival has gripped Annie; also Chandrasekhar and Zwicky.

I wonder if Pharaoh’s royal architect had a like sense of culminating accomplishment upon realizing that only a few more blocks would complete his master’s pyramid.

Lily has come up-phase. She still can’t believe that nasty Kazimierz Mikol has ingratiated himself with Dean—altogether sincerely, however—as a kind of uncle. Nor does she believe that Kaz and I have become friends. And, in fact, I prefer Thich Ngoc Bao’s company to his, or Nita Sistrunk’s, or Matthew Rashad’s, a compatriot among the geologists. Our personalities (mine and Kaz’s, that is) scrape against rather than complement each other’s.

Nevertheless, we’ve hammered out a crumpled sort of mutual respect. Lily can’t imagine how. I’ve told her about Helena Brodkorb’s death and our rim-car trip to and from D-Tower, but, not having experienced these herself, she remains skeptical of everything about Kaz except his clear, if startling, affection for Dean.

“It’s like the tiger and the lamb on the same bed of straw,” she says. “A fearful symmetry whose opposing balances I can’t quite grasp.”

“Don’t try,” I tell her. “Just enjoy.”

Lily simply shakes her head and laughs, a gruff chuckle so like Dean’s that I gape. My look prompts more laughter and a sudden peck on my cheek.

“I like you more today than when we first met,” she says. “More than on DeBoy’s last birthday, even.”

“Why is that?”

“You’ve started going gray,” Lily tells me. “I’ve always liked older men.”

Commander Stefan Odenwald stood in Annie‘s pilot house, supervising its computer-aimed passage through the Barricado. Our other two arks ran parallel to Annie‘s course at port and starboard distances of about seventy kilometers. Nonetheless, each of the other ships remained dimly visible to everyone in the pilot house, either on TV monitors or through the shielded viewports of the domelike bridge. A simultaneous look at the two vessels depended, of course, on the pilot house’s rotating to either the top or the bottom of the fuel wheel’s orbit vis-à-vis the headlong motion of the other two ships, but this happened often enough to thrill Dean and me, and seldom enough to increase our anticipation.

For a long time, I guess, Odenwald had realized that Dean enjoyed looking at the stars as much as anyone else aboard; therefore, he had invited us into the pilot house, a structure midway between Towers A-B and G-H on the ever-clocking fuel ring, and had there installed Dean in the thronelike chair that inevitably, and a bit sardonically, we call the Helm, as if it willy-nilly grants its occupant both authority and navigational savvy.

The Helm swallowed Dean. His feet dangled half a meter from the deck, and his chunky little body resembled that of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Thankfully, he took no notice of the chair’s scale, but turned his neckless head from side to side, ceaselessly ogling the universe.

“You look like—” Odenwald began. He turned to the other officers in the pilot house. “Who? You know, that holovid space explorer, what’s-his-name?”

“I’m almost completely ignorant of such entertainments,” I admitted—with an undercurrent of pride that Odenwald did not seem to find off-putting. It suggested, as it should, that I had better things to do.

On the other hand, I had often petitioned Odenwald for this audience, here in Annie‘s control center, for my handicapped son, and surely that petition told him more about me than did any cheap slam at the junk on holovid.

“Cuhn I?” Dean said. “Cuhn I steer?”

“Have you mastered astronavigation, wheelship helming, and the rights and obligations of cybernetic command?”

“No suhr,” Dean told Odenwald meekly.

“Well, then, you can’t steer. But you’re the only person besides myself to occupy that chair since we left lunar orbit in our own solar system.”

“So far as you know,” I put in.

Odenwald laughed. “Yes. So far as I know.”

The TV monitor taking transmission from the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar showed all of us on the bridge the face of a haggard Caucasian male. I recognized him as one of Commander Joplin’s lieutenants, Wolfgang Krieg.

“Attention! Commanders Odenwald and Roosenno, attention!” the haggard face said. “We appear to be on a collision course with a stream of frozen debris—gravel, call it—that initially composed a single mass about two meters in circumference. This stream of material—”

Odenwald took the mike. “Initially?” he said. “What do you mean, initially? What happened to it?”

“When we radar-sighted the object, we could see it would hit us,” Krieg said. “Having no time to change course, we used our laser to try to deflect it.”

“By vaporizing one side of the body to push it in another direction?” Odenwald theorized.

“Yessir,” Krieg said.

“But, instead of moving aside, the object fragmented?”

“Yessir. The resulting stream of debris will strike us in two minutes fifty-three seconds.”

Odenwald said, “How may we assist?”

“Get yourselves out of here,” Krieg replied. “You might also want to pray.”

Odenwald gave an order to activate the siphons to draw fuel from the C-D to E-F hydrogen tanks down the spokes to their matter-antimatter propulsion system. Kaz appeared from nowhere to do exactly that, while Odenwald ran the ignition programs. Bridge officers on Zwicky followed suit. Despite their size, both wheelships shoved agilely ahead, out of the energy-saving coast marking the latest stage of our years-long deceleration process.

“Don’t look at the exhaust trail!” I told Dean.

But Dean was looking at it, a blazing bore of magnesium-white light that had already turned our wheel’s opposite inner arc into an eye-stinging mirror. If he kept looking at it, he’d burn out his retinas. Blessedly, just as I started to push his face into his lap, Dean averted his gaze.

At that instant, the monitor receiving from Chandrasekhar filled with popping kinetic snow. Chandrasekhar itself, one instant past a platinum ring on a bolster of sequined black felt, flashed out like a miniature nova, a wound of radiance even brighter than Annie‘s exhaust trail. Then, after the flash, in the place where the space ark had been: nothing but blackness. Every light on its rim, every light in its habitat towers, snapped out.

Immediately, though, a series of explosions on the wheel went off in astonishing sequence, like a silent Fourth of July gala with Roman candles, phosphorus bombs, and self-shredding parachutes of light. The sight of these distant fireworks froze me in place, for, as the disaster unraveled, there was nothing that anyone on either of our sibling arks could do—except imagine both the terror and the agony of our companions aboard the splintering ship.

Later, Bao and others postulated, the biggest chunk of the fragmented rock tracking Chandrasekhar had hit and severed its rim. Simultaneously, the gravel from Krieg’s misguided attempt to deflect this object ripped into the fuel spokes cum support cables. Then centrifugal force took over, tearing the vessel apart. Broken tentacles of diamond writhed in the blackness. The electromagnetic levitation tanks holding the antihydrogen ice clear of the ordinary matter making up the ark’s set-apart propulsion unit took ricocheting hits of their own, emitting, as a result, such hot bursts of radiation that the sky flared again and many of the ark’s buckled compartments actually began to melt.

This catastrophe stunned me. I could think of nothing very like it in the history of spacefaring. The Challenger disaster might qualify, or the fate of the Chinese ship Wuer Kaixi off Titan late in 2057, but these events seemed so remote, and so happily limited in their life-taking scale, that the emptiness off to starboard, the afterglow of so many doomed lives, left me groping for some competent or humane response.

“Whuh?” Dean murmured. “Whud happen?”

Odenwald looked at him. Dean, in turn, looked to him for some hopeful reordering of the chaos that had inflicted itself on the sky outside our blister.

The incandescence, then the cold.

The kaleidoscopic brightness, then the dark.

“Please tell him, sir,” I said. “And don’t sugarcoat it.”

Voices from Fritz Zwicky rattled in the pilot house. Radio operators in the communications well bent to their tasks. Two of Odenwald’s lieutenants rushed in from the attached day room and lounge. Their concern—their activity—could not reverse the fate of Chandrasekhar or rescue a single person in any of its radiation-drenched habitation towers. All, like data in an irretrievably crashed program, were gone or going, already almost less than ciphers.

But it was Kaz, not Odenwald, who finally knelt in front of Dean’s chair. “They hit something, or something hit them. A chunk of ice about like so.” Kaz made a circle of his arms. “Maybe even a little smaller. Which split into pieces when the people on Chandry tried to move it.”

“Bud how . . .?”

“As fast as we’re going, hitting an object that size makes a bang like the burst of a fission device.” Kaz looked at me. “Sorry. He’s never heard of Hiroshima, right? Or the Sashimi attacks on New York and L.A.?”

“Cuhd id happen to uz?”

Kaz looked to me for permission. I nodded.

“Yes, it could,” Kaz said. “At the moment, though, we’re outrunning the blast. If this helps at all, Dean, we should go fairly quickly if we hit something.”

Dean began to cry. “I’m sorry thad happen,” he said. “I’m sorree-sorree.”

“Me too,” Kaz said.

Odenwald came over and said he wanted Dean and me off the bridge. I picked Dean up, and Odenwald advised us to retreat to the day room while he spoke with Roosenno and some of his lieutenants about the morale and logistical implications of the disaster.

Dean and I left.

Two hours later, when it seemed to Odenwald and his closest advisors, including Bao, that we’d outrun any pursuing debris, our ships cut their engines and drifted back into the coasting mode of our long advance on Epsilon Eridani II.

If we survive the Stream, none of us will ever forget what has happened out here. Ever.

Mere chance enabled Dean to witness the destruction of another wheelship. Nonetheless, I blame myself for putting him in a place to see the spectacular melting or vaporization of sixteen-hundred human beings.

And Dean? He understands that Chandrasekhar and all its passengers have passed into physical oblivion. Kaz and I both tell him it’s possible that God has received their souls, but, despite my religion, I remain a militant skeptic on this point, and Dean no longer asks if the victims of the disaster have gone to heaven. It both frets and wearies him to hear me say, “Dean, I don’t know.”

He also grasps, by the way, the perilousness of traveling at even a mere fraction of light-speed. He knows that Annie Jump or Fritz Zwicky could blaze out, novalike, as Commander Joplin’s wheelship did. This knowledge has penetrated his awareness as deeply as, if not more deeply than, anything else he has ever learned. Sometimes (for me, red-letter occasions for guilt and moroseness), he remembers the catastrophe, bolts upright, and begins to rock and sway.

“Why?” he says. “Why?”

The basic existential inquiry.

And I wonder if Lily and I sinned against Dean, ourselves, or the incessant nag of the life force by bringing him to be in this precarious flying tin can.

Kaz says to ice the gloom-and-doom, the self-debates, the ontological kvetching.

A word to the wise? Not with this target audience: I don’t qualify.

An arkboard month has passed. We have broken clear of the Barricado Stream—computationally, if not in our hearts. Our learned astronomers inform us that we have wide riding ahead, unobstructed glissading to New Home. Scant solace to the dead, of course, and scant comfort to either Dean or me.

More than once I’ve tried to eulogize the victims of this prodigious calamity. My words back up on me; my rhymes, even the off ones, don’t quite slot; my rhythms, sprung or unsprung, drill like drugged anacephalics in jackboots. At last I wrote a stanza:

With a charged, chance suddenness,

The all of spinning Chandrasekhar,

The all of its ark, flashed to dark and spun to less

Than a heat-dead, hooded star:

A nova, an aura, an aroma of light-speed-sizzled thought,

Brains broiled, skin fried, the atomizing mystery and mess,

Actinic sabotage of each blind arrogance we bought

With the hardware-software-psycheware of our ever-shoving-onward high-tech-tied success.

Yesterday Bao asked if I’ve made any headway on the elegy everyone assumes I’ll write. Reluctantly, I showed him this stanza. “Read it aloud,” he said. There in the G-Tower mess, I lowered both head and voice and recited it.

Only Bao, thank God, could hear me. Kaz would have flung my comppad aside and stalked off, to seek better company in the finch-filled atrium.

“That’s pretty,” Bao said. A dig.

“So was the little mishap that triggered it.”

“True. But I would have never taken you, my friend, for a Hopkins enthusiast.”

This remark startled me. Bao had realized from the get-go that the paradigm for my stanza was an elegy by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I sat back and stared at him.

“Nor I you,” I said.

Bao laughed. Then, with no physical prompts whatsoever, he recited:

“With a mercy that outrides

The all of water, an ark

For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides

Lower than death and the dark;

A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison,

The-last-breath penitent spirits—the uttermost mark

Our passion-plunged giant risen,

The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.”

“How can you do that?” I said. “Remember it all?”

Bao laughed again. “Stanza thirty-three. Because I’ve had Heraclitus call it up repeatedly since the accident. Balm from a long-dead Jesuit.”

“I would have never taken you for an incarnationist, Bao, and certainly not one of a papist stamp.”

Nothing marred Bao’s hollow-cheeked amiability. “The wise take their comfort where they can.”

“The wise seldom choke down such bilge.”

Bao, grunting, grabbed his chest as if I’d just slipped a blade into his heart. He recovered at once, a fey smile on his lips. “Your stanza clatters where the Jesuit’s sings, my dear unable Abel.”

“Then I guess I’d better delete it.”

“Ah, a wiser man than I’d supposed.” He put a hand on my wrist. “Don’t, though. Save it, as a ward against hubris.” He released me, finished eating his vegetable shell, and, with a smile and a bad parting joke, excused himself. None of Bao’s observations on either wisdom or comfort-taking had recast my own opinions; however, sitting and talking with him had cheered me. I kept the lone stanza of my come-a-cropper elegy, but attempted no others.

Later, in a geology carrel, I had Heraclitus call up “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and read it twice from beginning to end. If mere language can redeem a disaster, I believe Hopkins redeemed his.

Fuel rings turning like mountain-high Ferris wheels, Annie Jump and Fritz Zwicky have completely traversed the Barricado Stream. We have penetrated the orbit of Epsilon Eridani V, the system’s outermost planet, an ice ball known to every member of our expedition as Cold Cock. New Home lies nearly 5.7 billion kilometers farther in, in the direction of Eppie herself; and our fleet, calamitously dispossessed of one of its arks, flies at a scant percentage of light-speed, a million kilometers per hour. At this rate, given the need to slow still more, it will take almost a year to reach our destination.

The hydrogen harvesters we deployed shortly after entering the Barricado, great funnels of molecularly strengthened mylar, will not only add calibrated drag to our deceleration, but resupply the exhausted tanks on the rim arcs between habitat towers. From the G-Tower observatory, it sometimes appears that we haul behind us the iridescent bladders of immense Portuguese men-of-war. Floats or wings? No one seems to know how to regard them. Sometimes, we can’t see them at all. In any case, gathering hydrogen makes little sense, given that, by the time we reach New Home, our ships will have almost wholly depleted the antihydrogen ice required by our matter-antimatter rockets for further travel.

Ours not to reason why . . .

Days (or arkboard hours comprising their equivalent) ghost past as our last two vessels simultaneously plummet and wheel through this alien system. Up-phase scientists, technicians, engineers, and support personnel work methodically to prepare for planetfall and the colonization of New Home. Much of this preparation—plan comparisons, logistical projections, computer simulations—has to do with adjusting for the loss of the vital skills and labor units destroyed along with Commander Joplin’s Subrahmanyan Chadrasekhar. On the other hand, our expedition’s organizers factored in an atoning redundancy: personnel on any one ark can meet and overcome, by themselves, the environmental challenges of our target world. If a disaster befalls Zwicky, then Annie has the wherewithal to succeed.

And, of course, vice versa.

Less than halfway to the gas giant Jawbreaker (named for its bands of umber, licorice, and cherry, as well as for the fact that it has more than twice the mass of Jupiter), an astronomy group met with Odenwald in the observatory. This group (as Thich Ngoc Bao told me later that same evening) consisted of Nita Sistrunk, Indira Seschachari, Pete Ohanessian, and Bao himself.

Actually, after putting Dean to bed in our cubicle on the mezzanine level, I hitched a lift to the observatory for some private time to unwind and found Bao slumped in a swivel chair in a consultation bay not far from the ABVT. The door to this bay stood open, and, upon sighting Bao, who had made himself uncharacteristically scarce for the past seventy-two hours, I slipped in and greeted him.

“Hey.”

Bao jumped as if I’d popped an eye-eye in front of him. Recognizing me, he composed himself and gave me a wan grin. His skin looked sallow, drum-tight.

“Doctor,” I said, “what’s up?”

“The jig,” said Bao. “Old American expression. The game is over. Our hopes are dashed. Or, at least, a hefty plenty of them.”

I sat down in a swiveler across from Bao, in front of an HD screen as big as a door. “We’re surfing different wavelengths, friend o’ mine.”

“Tonight,” Bao said, “our group presented to Odenwald the radio, spectro-graphic, and visual evidence that New Home may not be habitable to human beings.”

My gut corkscrewed around itself. “Come again.”

“We did so—Indira, Nita, Pete, and I—as if discussing mutation rates in fruit flies. Very professionally. As if our findings had only hypothetical significance to our arkmates and the people on Zwicky. In truth, we all felt blown away, Abel—nuked, one could say.”

I leaned forward. “Bao, are you violating confidentiality telling me this?”

“I hardly think so. Tomorrow morning, the news will have spread all over both ships.”

“Then go ahead. Tell me.”

Bao rocked back, resting his ankle on his knee. “All right. Nita showed Odenwald a series of photographs—computer amplified and enhanced—revealing New Home as an ugly-looking marble, a hard little sphere rotating under drifting rinds of reddish-brown dust and ejecta. The water we discovered by spectrographic analysis while outside the Barricado lay hidden under enmantling dust. Odenwald stared at us—his magi, so to speak—as if we’d led Herod right to him.”

“Ejecta?” I said. “What’s going on? Volcanic activity? A worldwide dust storm?”

“Odenwald asked the same question, and Nita said, ‘The dust storm’s real enough, but Bao worries more about its causes.’

“ ‘What do you think’s happened?’ Odenwald asked me. “I told him that not long ago—possibly just before we drew within the orbit of the fifth planet—an asteroidal object the size of Mexico City burned through New Home’s atmosphere and impacted with the surface. The stratospheric blizzard wrapping the planet derives from material crater-blasted upward by this nomadic body’s impact.

“Odenwald turned over one of Nita’s lovely gloomy photos, as if its other side would nullify my words. When it didn’t, he thoughtfully replaced it in its sequence.

“ ‘What does this mean for us?’ he asked. ‘As refugees in search of a livable world?’

“ ‘Nothing good,’ Pete Ohanessian said.

“ ‘Itemize, please,’ Odenwald insisted.

Nita reached over and touched his wrist—trying, you see, to console him. Meanwhile, though, she told him that infrared absorption spectroscopy would give us the best look at current conditions on the planet.

“ ‘Dr. Seschachari has the results,’ she said. ‘Indira?’ ”

Here, Indira had showed him a slide. So Bao punched a button, and the very slide in question flashed up on the HD screen behind me. When I swung about in my chair to look at it, an arrow jumped onto the screen over New Home’s latest IR absorption spectrum.

Bao resumed his story:

“Indira said, ‘This slide compares data taken on the trip out with more recently obtained info. This peak at around ten microns’ ”—the arrow landed on it—“ ‘is carbon dioxide, and you can see from the corresponding peak here’ “—the arrow bounced again—“ ‘that the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content has risen dramatically as a result of the collision. We hypothesize that the vaporization of a lot of carbonate rock—namely, limestone—from the asteroid strike triggered the jump in CO_2. You can also add to that the CO_2 produced by the combustion of biomass—grasses, trees, who knows what else?—in the resulting firestorm. But even more alarming is that the levels of carbon dioxide continue to rise.’

“ ‘Why?’ Odenwald demanded.”

Indira told him she’d get back to that and noted that the second peak on the spectrum represented the absorption from the NO molecule, nitric oxide. Bao, quoting Dr. Seschachari, said that fumes from nitric oxide present two real problems for would-be colonists. First, the acid has a bite. Only idiots would try to land with it contaminating the ecosphere. Second, and even worse, the nitric acid has apparently begun to release even more carbon dioxide from New Home’s limestone. To get an idea of the process, think of sodium carbonate—ordinary baking soda—in a bath of vinegar, fizzing away.

“Cripes, Bao, you’ve got to be kidding.”

“I wish.” He got up and began to pace. “Pete Ohanessian took over from Indira and told Odenwald that the most efficient natural mechanism for removing CO_2 from a world’s atmosphere is probably photosynthesis. Unfortunately, Abel, we think the asteroid strike and the firestorm have wiped out all but about five percent of New Home’s vegetation. God, or Fate, has smashed the thermostat on that planet. When New Home comes out of its Ice Age—below-freezing temperatures everywhere, all a result of the dust cloud shrouding it—Pete thinks the planet could fall victim to the runaway greenhouse effect.”

In this scenario, Bao told me, atmospheric CO_2 provokes warming via standard greenhouse action. Carbon dioxide levels in cold water drop with added temperature, even more CO_2 outgasses as CO_2 once dissolved in polar oceans comes out of solution. Hence, even faster warming. As temperatures keep going up, the seas begin to evaporate, and H_2O is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO_2. Water and carbon dioxide working together slow the escape of infrared energy into space. The hotter New Home grows, the more water vapor in its atmosphere: a steady ramping up of the greenhouse effect. Many thick blanketlike layers swaddle the planet, letting solar heat in but trapping the heat generated below. Eventually, New Home’s equatorial seas start to boil.

“New Home seems to be something of a misnomer,” I said.

Bao chuckled mirthlessly. “Well, perhaps not. We’ve done some very careful modeling to establish how close the planet is to the edge of Epsilon Eridani’s habitable zone. It does lie on the inward edge of the zone, but at sufficient distance from Eppie to avoid a complete greenhouse runaway.”

“Won’t things ever get back to normal?”

“What’s normal?” Bao said. “But, of course, that’s what Odenwald wanted to know. Pete told him that a counterbalancing geological process could reverse the situation.” Bao grinned a dare at me. “Any idea what it is, Dr. Gwiazda?”

The question took me off guard. “Weathering?”

“You’re the geology man. I’m asking you.”

“Weathering,” I said more forcefully.

“Care to explain it?”

“Spectroscopy implies New Home’s mantle consists of calcium and magnesium silicates, right?”

“I guess so. Pete, at least, concurs.”

“Then the planet’s atmospheric CO_2 will react slowly with these silicates to make calcium and magnesium carbonate. The process speeds up in hot, damp air, binding carbon dioxide into the planet’s limestone. Temperatures drop. With this cooling, water vapor precipitates out. The greenhouse effect decreases, along with the temperature. In the end, New Home returns to ‘normal.’ How long will it take? I don’t know. My specialty is soils. And we still don’t know the percentage of anorthitic rock in New Home’s exposed crust.”

Bao smiled. “Maybe you should have briefed Odenwald too.”

“What time-scale estimate did Pete offer?”

“He hemmed and hawed. I don’t blame him. We lack solid values for anorthitic rock and the rate of vulcanism.”

“Come on, Bao.”

“A century or so. For sure, less than two hundred years. Maybe as few as fifty.”

Hearing this, I thought first of Dean, now asleep in Lily’s care. Such news would crush him. Lily, too. It was crushing me, like sixteen tons of granite on my chest. Had we traveled more than a century to reach a world that would accept us as colonists only after we had stewed in our bioracks another one hundred years?

“Yes,” Bao said. “New Home’s something of a misnomer.” He punched a button on the arm of his chair and the speakers next to the HD screen activated. A recorded discussion garbled past on fast-forward. Bao stopped it. “After Pete talked, some of my colleagues got silly. Listen.”

Nita: “Dead End might be a better name.”

Indira: “Or Crater Quake.”

Pete: “Or Pot Hole. Or Acid Bath.”

Nita: “Gloomandoom!”

Indira: “Bitter Pill! Or maybe—”

Bao: “That’s enough!”

Odenwald: “Easy, Bao—I was about to propose an irreverent name of my own.”

Bao: “Sir, the purpose of this session is to brief you, not to divert ourselves.”

Odenwald: “Maybe we should divert Annie to another planet in this system.”

Nita: “Which? Jelly Belly? Red Hot?”

Pete: “The gravity on Jawbreaker would crush us. We’d do as well to set down on Eppie herself.”

Nita: “Or as ill.”

Bao: “We should continue to New Home. First-hand studies of the environmental aftermath of an asteroid strike this large are virtually nonexistent. We should follow up.”

Indira: “But for whose sake?”

Odenwald: “You all have your work. I have mine. And my first duty is to break the news.”

Nita: “You’ll break hearts as well.”

Pete: “A better time might be—”

Odenwald: “Traveling at nearly a million klicks per hour, there’s no time like the present.”

Bao halted the recording.

“Nita was right,” I said. “The news has broken my heart. And it’s sure to break others.”

Bao toasted me with an imaginary shot glass, then slugged back its imaginary contents.

Lily broke the bad tidings to Dean. She insisted on her prerogative in this. In his self-appointed role as goduncle, Kaz tagged along.

We took Dean to a glade in the atrium, a stand of sycamores bonsai’d artfully near a waterfall encased in a sort of panpipe of clear plastic. In this secluded place, the falling water, pump-driven and recirculated, made its tremulous woodwind and brook music.

Kaz lifted Dean to a notch in one of the sycamores and then tactfully wandered away. Lily took up a post beside Dean, to catch him if he slipped, while I sat on a bench masquerading as a ledge on the face of our miniature cascade.

Finches warbled, and, not far away, another party murmured among themselves, their talk a faint counterpoint to the water noise and the nonstop background hum.

“DeBoy, I have to tell you a very unpleasant thing,” Lily began. “New Home won’t be our new home, after all.” She told him about our discovery of the recent asteroid strike and its meaning for everyone aboard our remaining ships—namely, either a frustrating wait until environmental conditions improved on Eppie’s second planet or another long interstellar journey to another solar system with potential for settlement, most likely the Tau Ceti system.

None of this seemed to impress Dean. He sat in the dwarf sycamore gazing upward, and all around, for a glimpse of one of the finches.

“Do you understand me?” Lily asked. “We’ve come all this way, DeBoy, and New Home may be denied us.”

“Yessum.” Dean gave her a grudging, shifty-eyed nod.

“It’s all right to feel sad. It’s even all right to cry.”

Our ingrate son kept rubbernecking for birds.

“Dean!”

So quickly did Dean’s gaze snap back to Lily that he had to grab a limb. “I like id here,” he said. “Now thad evvybody’s ub . . . up . . . I like id jes fine.”

Almost against my will, I guffawed.

Lily shot me an I’m-going-to-kill-you glare that modulated, almost against her will, into a defeated grin.

Whereupon Hiller Nevels, a botanist named Gulnara Golovin, and Milo Pask, a habitat engineer, came strolling toward us, arguing or at least expostulating among themselves. Golovin had her hand consolingly on Pask’s arm, and none of the three seemed at all aware of our own family group, not even when Kaz trudged back into the clearing and halted in some puzzlement at the sight of them.

“. . . won’t get over it!” Pask was saying. “To travel over a century and learn on your final approach that a stupid rock from the sky has turned the planet of your dreams into a gas chamber! Why did I come? I’m supposed to build habitat geodesics, water and sewer systems. Now, I can’t. I’ve come all this way for no reason!”

Golovin said, “You can’t do your job now, that’s all this setback means. Wait for the dust and the acid rain to settle out. A kind of normality will return to New Home. What’s another year—even two—given all our years in transit? Milo, from the very beginning we knew we were living with a deferred ambition.”

“Besides,” said Hiller, “we had no guarantee any planet out here would prove a cozy place to camp.”

Pask brushed Golovin’s hand from his arm and rounded on Hiller. “Maybe not when we set out. But the closer we got to Eppie and the more that thickheaded gook and his star-gazing cronies learned, the more flowery they got about how New Home was Shangri-La and how grandly the place would welcome us. We hadn’t come all this way just to rot in our bioracks. So they told us. The incompetent buggers!”

“Except for the asteroid strike, I think they appraised New Home accurately,” Golovin said. “I don’t see how you can hold them responsible for an act of God.”

“We can’t even hold God responsible for an act of God!” Pask raged. “So I’m scapegoating Thich and his sickening ilk. Do you mind?”

“Irrationality doesn’t become you, Milo,” Golovin scolded. “Stop it.”

“No. But I become it, don’t I?” Finally catching sight of Dean, Pask strode over with a weird glimmer in his eyes. “Who could have predicted this turn of events? This kid? Yeah, the kid. Annie‘s resident . . . gnomic gnome.”

Lily said, “Lay off, Milo.”

Pask reddened as if she’d disparaged either his engineering skills or his virility, not simply rebuked him for bullying a child.

“What’re the odds?” he asked. “What’re the odds that New Home would take a lousy asteroid hit during our expedition’s final approach?”

“I have no idea,” Lily said.

“Well, I’ll tell you. Statistically, Dr. Aliosi-Stark, the chances are something like a trillion to one. A trillion to buggering one!”

“I don’t think so,” Lily said.

“You don’t, do you?”

“Given the event itself, I’d say that, statistically, the chances are one hundred percent.”

Now Pask looked at Lily as if she’d slapped him. His face crumpled. Without attempting to mitigate or hide the fact, he began to cry. Dean followed suit. I took Dean out of the tree and held him. Lily hugged Pask.

“I want to leap into the same swallowing blackness everyone on Chandrasekhar leapt into,” Pask said.

“You should talk to someone,” Lily told him.

“I’ve talked to Hiller and Gulnara,” Pask said. “Now I’m talking to you. Talk doesn’t heal, it just turns into more of itself.” Regaining a degree of control, he wiped his eyes and reset his twisted features.

Seeing Pask calm himself, Dean quieted.

“That may be,” I said. “But you should still sit down for a while with Etsuko Endo. Soon.”

Pask wouldn’t commit to this, but Golovin agreed to contact Etsuko on his behalf. Then she and Hiller led him out of the glade, and out of the atrium, in search of someone to dismantle his dread.

Kaz took Dean from me, and Dean leaned his head on Kaz’s shoulder. “I like it here,” Dean said.

Whether he meant this nook of the atrium or life in general aboard the ark, I had no idea.

New Home—or Acid Bath, or Dead End, or Bitter Pill, as the more mordant of our expedition’s surviving members insist on calling the world—has no moon. Not long ago, Annie Jump and Fritz Zwicky took up orbits about ten thousand kilometers out, orbits that bestow on them—in the minds of our astronomy specialists and a few of our anonymous dreamers—exactly that status.

The two great ships, their own wheels rotating, turn about New Home like diamond-lit satellites, Annie Jump half a klick farther out—higher—than Fritz Zwicky but otherwise in rough parallel with its sibling. If any sentient species lives on the world below, and if roiling dust didn’t veil the night sky from the ground, the sight of our two staggered wheels turning overhead would surely prompt stillness and then awe among their unknowable kind.

Aboard Annie, I imagine myself swinging in the gondola of a Ferris wheel on a lofty New Home peak, gazing into the night at this manmade binary cluster. In fact, I go on to imagine myself imagining myself as a passenger on one of our glittering rings. Lost in this double fantasy, I prefer the image of myself in New Home’s transfigured sky: Orion orating in the heavens, not some mute Sherpa in the Himalayas.

I want to blaze, not to slog and grapple. Given my choice, I want to god-fashion myself in fire—even if the attempt slays me, even if no one but the greedy homunculus in my own breast hears my Promethean cri de coeur.

At 0800 hours tomorrow—measuring time by Greenwich mean time, as we still do aboard Annie—we will boost away from New Home and park ourselves nearer her sun, to begin the refueling process that will eventually take us to Tau Ceti.

The majority of us will travel down-phase, in ursidormizine slumber. Commander Stefan Odenwald will yield the bridge and his primary continuity-preserving duties to Hiller Nevels and a fresh team of self-sacrificing troubleshooters, all volunteers, for Odenwald hopes to wake with legs fresh enough to climb a lovely new peak on the world that we discover and colonize in the Tau Ceti system.

Who can blame him? He has aged beyond any of the rest of us, excepting only Commander Roosenno, who will stay here in the Epsilon Eridani system, and Commander Joanna Diane Joplin, who ceased aging forever in the fatal millrace of the Barricado Stream.

As noted, the personnel aboard Zwicky will remain in orbit around New Home for as long as it takes to outlast the surface inferno brought about by the impact of the asteroid that Bao has named Epimenides, after a figure in Greek mythology who, while seeking a lost sheep, fell asleep for fifty-seven years and on awakening resumed his search unaware that so much time had passed. The oracle of Delphi then recruited Epimenides to cleanse Athens of a plague. Bao sees parallels between our slumbers and Epimenides’, and between Zwicky‘s task upon coming awake and that of the ancient Greek shepherd.

Briefly, Roosenno, like Odenwald, plans to send most of his would-be colonists down-phase until planetary conditions permit their revival. Then they will undertake the daunting task of turning New Home into a permanent human colony. Blessedly, the ark-to-ark redundancy of our skills makes the separate agendas of our ships both feasible and attractive. The survival of our kind, we feel, depends not only on diversity, but also on our projection across as much of the inhabitable or terraformable galaxy as we can reach.

How did we make these decisions? Most democratically, in the extraordinary session I will now describe.

Twelve days ago, when Odenwald first broached this plan in the auditorium of Annie‘s A-Tower, few of us could credit that he wanted us to vote on an “option” as hare-brained as resuming our expedition. We had gathered, after dozens and dozens of rim-car trips, to discuss the issue in face-to-face assembly (rather than from separate electronic carrels), and the first question from the floor surprised no one, least of all Stefan Odenwald himself.

“How can we go on to another solar system when by most cogent reckonings, we’ve nearly exhausted our supplies of antihydrogen ice?” Thorn Koon asked this for everyone but about thirty techs and/or scientists already in the know.

At the head of our banner-hung auditorium, Odenwald asked Thich Ngoc Bao to reply. Bao stepped to the podium to address us: “Good evening.”

I had Dean in my lap, for Odenwald had told us that no one should miss this gathering; that, in fact, children should also attend.

So when Bao said, “Good evening,” we replied in kind, like children answering a teacher.

Dean, waving crazily, called out, “Bao! Bao! Bao!” until I brought his arm down and whispered as quietly as the noise level allowed, “Hush, DeBoy. Hush.”

Dean hushed.

“Hydrogen is no problem,” Bao said confidently, his reedy voice echoing. “We harvested this fuel during the deceleration process, from the Barricado on in.”

“What about the antihydrogen?” Thorn cried. “Do you guys plan to turn regular hydrogen molecules inside out?”

Bao shifted his weight. “You should know that every ship in our armada, including Chandrasekhar“—he briefly shut his eyes—“was built with the capacity to generate antihydrogen for travel beyond the Epsilon Eridani system.”

This news stunned most of us in the A-Tower auditorium. I had certainly never supposed us to have the ability to journey to another system, perhaps even back to Earth. And none of my friends—with the conspicuous exception of Thich Ngoc Bao—had suspected it either.

“How can we do that?” somebody shouted.

“Each ark is also a cyclotron, a particle accelerator,” Bao said.“Each accelerator runs right down the underside of the fuel wheel itself, around its circumference. Given enough time and energy, the cyclotron belting Annie Jump will produce the hydrogen antiprotons necessary to fuel our journey from here to Tau Ceti.”

Across the hall from where Lily, Dean, and I sat, Milo Pask stood up and shouted, “You geniuses kept this a secret? Why? Are we nonphysicists mere freeloaders? Idiot peons unworthy of consultation?”

Odenwald rejoined Bao at the podium. “Please recall that when the U.N. originally began planning a mission to Epsilon Eridani, we didn’t know for sure if any planet out here would prove suitable for colonization. We thought it highly likely, of course, but didn’t really know.”

“Sir, what’s your point?” Milo Pask asked.

“Simply that our mission’s first mandate was one of hopeful exploration. Originally, then, U.N. planners allotted us only two ships, both of which were to have antimatter factories so that they could return to Earth after exploring the target star system. In that scenario, I’ll remind you, Annie Jump Cannon didn’t even exist.”

Pask, peevishly flushed, was still on his feet, and an undercurrent of impatience—lapping the commander, not Pask—ran through the hall.

“During this initial planning,” Odenwald went on, “off-Earth telescopes on Luna and the moons of Mars strengthened the case for a habitable planet here in EE. As a result, our mission changed, from one of exploring and establishing a permanent base if conditions allowed, to one of pure colonization. That change led us to add a third ship and extra people, not only because many more nations were clamoring to take part but also because planting a successful colony requires a diverse genepool and a third ship would give us insurance against an act of fate. In this, by the way, you can see how prescient the U.N. planners proved themselves.”

“What about the antimatter factories?” Pask yelled.

“When we added Annie, mission costs skyrocketed. The most effective way to cut costs was to dump the notion of putting an accelerator on each vessel. Bao here, along with Trachtenberg and Arbib, considered that suicidal; the manufacturers of our wheelships thought it a kind of sacrilege—namely, bad design—and worked fiendishly to come up with a dirtcheap redesign that would save the antimatter factories. They did. Then they shunted their costs into other systems, at least on disk, and actually built the accelerators. Unfortunately, they couldn’t test them without betraying their presence, and they had no money for testing anyway. So the planners kept them a secret—to prevent protests, work stoppages, maybe even the collapse of the entire project.”

Pask was having none of this. “Why keep the accelerators a secret once we’d fled our Earthbound debts? It all smacks of a sleazy elitism!”

“Damned straight!” people cried.

“¡Eso es verdad!”

“Go get ’em, Milo!”

“¡Claro que si!”

Like a bidder at a noisy auction, Odenwald raised his arm. “True, once we were on our way, no one on our dirty, anarchic planet was going to stop us. We had what we needed, and we ran so far beyond Earth’s jurisdiction as to become a species apart from those left behind. So we stayed mum, both over the radio and aboard our ships, out of respect.”

“Respect?” several people cried incredulously.

Odenwald increased the gain on his mike. “We didn’t want to rub our patrons’ noses in either our early defiance or our present freedom. More important, we were afraid the cyclotrons might not work. We had no reason to try them while in transit and no desire to raise false hopes about their capabilities if the trip to Eppie went forward smoothly, as it did until we hit the Barricado. And even the painful loss of Chandrasekhar did nothing to persuade Commander Roosenno or me we should tell you the accelerators existed. What for? Epsilon Eridani Two—New Home—still looked to be a viable colony site. So our silence about them was meant to keep everyone up-phase focused on our prime destination, not to relegate any of you to the status of mere steerage riders.”

“But that’s what it did!” Pask shouted. “Knowing we could go from this system to another, and maybe even from Tau Ceti to yet another one, would’ve eased our minds! It would’ve saved me a lot of anxiety!”

Pask looked around. Odenwald’s explanation had quieted the bulk of the hall. Reluctantly, Pask sat down, and Bao moved up to the podium again to speak:

“Recent tests of the accelerators on Annie Jump and Fritz Zwicky confirm their reliability. Tau Ceti is closer to Eppie than Eppie is to Sol. We can accomplish the trip without undue emotional stress or physical hardship—in about half the time it took to come here. I have nothing else to add unless some of you have technical inquiries that would fall within my areas of expertise.”

“Wonderful!” someone not far from me shouted—Thorn Koon, I think. “A mere half century!”

“Ursidormizine slumber will turn that half century into a sleep and a forgetting,” Bao said smoothly.

Too smoothly, I’m afraid.

The med techs responsible for maintaining the bioracks and their monitoring systems had seats on a catwalk to Bao’s left; a dozen of them stood up and booed. Several other maintenance specialists—down on the floor with Lily, Dean, and me—joined the med techs in jeering Bao’s proposal.

“Booooo! Booooo!” The auditorium echoed with this ugly rumbling. A few people began to stamp their feet.

“It’s Bao, not Boo,” Bao told us. “You’re using the wrong dipthong.”

Not many of Bao’s auditors—if you could call them that—caught this witticism. In fact, the booing and foot-stamping got louder. Here and there throughout the hall, people stood to voice their dissent, if not their outrage.

When the woman in front of me rose, Dean struggled out of my lap and held himself upright with his feet on my thighs. I could no longer see the podium.

“Quiet!” I heard Odenwald’s amplified voice say. “Resume your seats!”

In the face of this esteemed authority, the mutiny more or less ended. Silence settled. People sat back down. Tension, however, left an inaudible buzz in the air; and if Pask or some other aggrieved renegade chose to challenge Odenwald, I feared that chaos—out-and-out insurrection—would erupt in full and undefeatable cry.

Meanwhile, Dean continued to balance himself erect on my thighs. When I tried to tug him back down, he seized the chair back in front with one hand and, with the other, fended off my frustrated tugging.

“Bao!” Dean shouted into the silence. “Bao! Bao! Bao!” He pistoned his right arm, an emphatic machine, up and down. “Bao! Bao! Bao!”

At the mike again, Bao said, “Of all the learned people in this gathering today, only young Gwiazda seems to know how to pronounce my name. Thank you, Dean.”

“Bao!” Dean shouted again. “Bao, holy crow, you are really welcome!” Then eased back into my lap.

A ripple of applause and a drizzle of cheers boomed into a tidal swell of acclamation. Singlehandedly, so to speak, Dean had scotched any threat of mayhem.

Lily rolled her eyes at me. She patted Dean on the leg. Under her breath, she murmured, “Way to go, Tiny Tim. And God bless us, every one.”

Bao had control of the meeting again. He pointed out that even if we moved Annie ten times closer to Eppie than New Home orbited—to make use of the energy generated by the solar cells affixed to the hydrogen tanks covering our fuel wheel—we would still require about eighty-five days to create a single ton of antihydrogen. Given Annie‘s overall weight and the speeds that we had to achieve to complete our journey to Tau Ceti in fifty years, it would take another half century, up front, to concoct the tons of antimatter necessary for our trip.

If Bao had given us this news a moment ago, an all-out riot would have broken out. As it was, we began to hear hostile—if not downright bloody—murmurings again.

Greta Agostos stood up. “That puts us back to where we were when we left Earth—a century away from our destination! Possibly more!”

“If I could lessen the time and energy requirements,” Bao said, “believe me, I would. But some things are givens. You either deal with them or pitch an infantile tantrum. I would strongly urge the former.”

“Amen,” said Milo Pask. “Amen.” And his consent, after the outrage he’d so angrily voiced, seemed to bring a rational truce upon the convocation.

Odenwald took over good-naturedly from Bao, secret-keeper par excellence, and let it be known that Commander Roosenno and he favored a plan whereby Fritz Zwicky stayed in orbit around New Home until it became habitable again and Annie Jump went on to the Tau Ceti system. However, within certain well-defined parameters, they would permit personnel exchanges between our ships: the trade-offs mustn’t drastically unbalance the skills available to either the would-be colonists or the interstellar voyagers. Whatever we did, long stretches of ursidormizine slumber lay ahead of us, as did a host of catch-as-catch-can repairs. Our wheelships, after all, were old. On Earth, we’d regard them as antiques.

“But the plan favored by Commander Roosennoand me isn’t a fait accompli,” Odenwald said. “I called you here to vote on, not merely to endorse, it, and I trust you to discuss and pass on the question like intelligent adults.”

I squeezed Dean’s leg and whispered to Lily, “Do our less than genius kids get a vote too?”

“Ask him,” Lily said sotto voce.

But before I could, Kaz had risen to his feet. “Sir, why don’t we return to Earth—not just Annie Jump, but Fritz Zwicky too? Tau Ceti may well lack a colonizable planet, and New Home may never recover from its asteroid strike.”

“Are you making a motion that we return to Earth?”

“No, sir. I’m putting it forward as an option worthy of debate. The Sol system bred and gave us birth. Neither Tau Ceti nor Epsilon Eridani can say as much, and some of us now have children. Who wishes to doom them to death in an alien star system with no provision for basic human needs—food, air, water, a sense of belonging?”

Kaz sat down, and we debated the matter. Few wanted to return to Earth. In a quick poll, even our children rejected that option. We had fled Earth to explore, to claim new and rejuvenating territories for our species, not to bail out when that very enterprise—as we had known it would do and so had tried to anticipate—threw obstacles in our way. Besides, we all owed the universe a death, and better to pay up seeking a fruitful tomorrow than retreating to a polluted cradle.

When Odenwald actually called the vote, less than a hundred people selected the return-to-Earth option. Not even Kaz voted for it. He had raised the question with an eye on the future of the innocents born in transit to New Home, and I respected his love and scrupulosity in this. He had completely overcome his early bias against Dean.

After that, the final vote was easy. Annie Jump Cannon‘s personnel overwhelmingly approved Commander Odenwald’s plan to resupply ourselves with antihydrogen ice and then to set out for Tau Ceti. A gathering like ours on Fritz Zwicky approved Roosenno’s plan to remain in orbit, waiting out the dust storm and the greenhouse effect on New Home. If we were all equally lucky, Annie would leave for Tau Ceti about the time those on Zwicky ventured to the surface for the initial steps of their colony planting.

“Hooray!” cried Dean, clapping, when Odenwald announced the results of our vote. “Bao! Bao! Bao!”

At the end of this same meeting, Odenwald congratulated us not only on our decisions, but also on having participated in humanity’s first successful venture to another solar system. Whatever happens to us in the coming weeks, months, and years, we have made history, and no one can take that achievement away from us.

“So Commander Roosenno and I agree that we should celebrate our arrival here,” Odenwald told us. “We therefore decree a three-day festival, to begin officially at 0800 hours the day after tomorrow.”

And so it has happened—namely, an alternately solemn and gala commemoration of what we’ve done, featuring personnel exchange between our wheelships and continuous ship-to-ship TV broadcasts. Our revelries have included song-fests, skits, mess parties, musical competitions, art shows, vidouts, seminars, and, most important to me, poetry head-to-heads.

Thich Ngoc Bao on Annie Jump and Bashemath Arbib on Fritz Zwicky organized competitions in the writing of ballads, odes, sonnets, sestinas, and haiku, among other forms, and required contestants to use different astrophysical phenomena as their poems’ subjects or controlling metaphors.

Inevitably, Ghulam Sharif and I found ourselves squared off in three categories, the most amusing a haiku-writing contest. We wrote in our cubicles aboard our own ships, but the finished poems flashed onto toadstool units everywhere as well as onto the huge softscreens in our A-Tower auditoriums.

In her broadcast introduction, Arbib explained, “In its classical form, the Japanese haiku evokes a season. So each contestant must write four poems, using astrophysical phenomena for their primary metaphors. . . .”

Ghulam and I had ten minutes for each haiku, after which we screened them simultaneously (despite their staggered display here), on penalty of disqualification. Their progression ran winter, spring, summer, fall:

Sharif

Gwizada

Interstellar planet
ice glistens in star-lit dark:

does it dream of spring?

Each vast aggregate
glitters, a many-armed flake:

beautiful, unique

Hydrogen ions
chirp and twitter microwaves
making nests: the stars

Plasma stirs and jets:

a furnace catalyzer
in cold birth-throe depths

Swelling blue-white star
outshines the bright galaxy
spraying iron, salt: us

Warm fireflies float
amid the midnight showers:

blaze and drop, then gone

Hoard scant hydrogen
against the final darkness:

stars, like leaves, turn red

A jack o’lantern

Hisses on its black sky loam:

baleful, squat, too red

I leave to you the discovery of the astrophysical concepts used metaphorically in each haiku, but note that both sequences conclude with the word red as a combination of coincidence and contest design.

Three hundred persons—from Zwicky, a like number from Annie—selected the winning sequence in a blind electronic vote, Sharif triumphing 167 to 132. (Attribute the lost vote to an abstainer who adjudged both sequences “insufficiently imaginative” to bother choosing.) But I take some consolation from the fact that, in a separate vote, my haiku for summer was the overall favorite.

And then Epsilon Eridani Days, an entertaining success in nearly every way, concluded.

Once again, every member of our great expedition must face the realities of our present circumstances and the obligations of our choices.

Among my friends and acquaintances, Milo Pask, Etsuko Endo, Indira Sescharchari, Masoud Nadeq, and my arkboard lover, Lily Aliosi-Stark, have chosen to transfer to Roosenno’s ark to wait for the dust cloud from Epimenides to settle. The defection that stings most painfully, of course, is the last.

“Abel, I’ve been down-phase in umpity-ump extended comas here on Annie,” Lily told me a few hours ago. “I could handle another U-nap or two, but after I come up-phase again, I want to stay up-phase. I want to get on with my life. Is that so selfish a wish?”

“No more than my own,” I said. “What about Dean?”

“We made him together, Abel, but he’s yours. You have his life in your hands—insofar as any of us has control out here—and I expect you to do right by him.”

“He’s going with me.”

“Of course he is. Nothing else makes sense. But I still expect you to do right by him.”

“I won’t let him forget you.”

“That’s one right thing you can try, but sooner or later he’ll forget. Don’t force him to remember. I won’t mind if I’m just a nagging piece of grit in his memory. Eventually, if he has you to count on, that’s all I should be.”

“What crap,” I said. “You sound like Joan of Arc praying amidst the flames.”

For an instant, Lily’s gaze darkened. Then she began to laugh. “I do, don’t I? Well, good for me.”

Using Colombo tethers and transfer dinghies, those leaving Annie carried their bodies across to Zwicky, sundering their souls from ours. But before these leavetakings, we took our melancholy last farewells. Dean, Kaz, and I met with Lily at the G-Tower docking station.

“It’s like you guys’re dying,” Lily told us. “I’ll never see you—any of you—again.”

I kissed Lily. Hard. I kissed her again, caressing her hair. When I let go, Dean—DeBoy, as Lily had always called him—clung to her like a sorrowful young orang. If Kaz had not distracted him, she would have probably had to have emergency surgery to pry him loose.

Later, I watched from the G-Tower observatory as Lily and the others made their slow-motion glides across to or over from Zwicky. It seemed to me, though, that the dinghy containing my lover drew across the dark with it, in a harness of fireflies, a vein from my own clamoring heart.

A delusion, of course; a trick of the vacuum.

Nonetheless, it made me remember a haiku that Ghulam Sharif had written in the wake of our contest and sent over to me with a friend as a parting gift:

Iron cinders of stars
cool in expanding darkness:
too late for regrets

“Guh-bye!” cried Dean, one hand on the viewport. “Guh-bye, Mama!”

Odenwald had okayed Dean’s presence upstairs, and as his doting goduncle, Kaz had carried him up—for, under the present circumstances, kids had plenty of business in the observatory. Plenty.

“Guh-bye, guh-bye! Holy crow!”

Without Lily bodily before him, DeBoy truly understood only that Annie Jump Cannon was going on another long trip and that he was going with.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Cri de Coeur would not exist in its present form without the selfless vetting, advice, and contributions of my friend and fellow writer, Geoffrey A. Landis.

Additionally, Geoff wrote the five haiku in Cri de Coeur attributed to “Ghu-lam Sharif.” They are copyright ®1993 by Geoffrey A. Landis, who agrees to their use in any authorized publication of Cri de Coeur.

Again, I owe a huge debt to Geoff, not only for providing these five poems, but also for astute advice about textual as well as technical matters. Nevertheless, any errors, literary or scientific, remaining in the manuscript are mine alone, even if I cringe to admit it.

—Michael Bishop

LES FLEURS DU MAL

Brian Stableford

In a future where premeditated murder is extraordinarily rare, it takes a decadent and twisted mastermind to cultivate a perfect series of deadly encounters.

Prologue: 14 April, 2550.

Oscar stood before the full-length mirror, carefully inspecting every detail of his face. He caressed the flawless flesh with sensitive fingertips, rejoicing in its gloss. “Ivory and rose-leaves,” he murmured.

Oscar always addressed his own reflection in the most admiring terms while it remained full of youth. When it grew old, as it had three times before, it lost its capacity to inspire admiration, and became a mocking reminder of the hazards that he and all men of his era still faced: decay, senescence, decomposition.

His revitalized hair was a glossy chestnut brown. To describe his complexion in terms of ivory and rose-leaves was a trifle hyperbolic, but the skin was pale and even. Authentically young men never had skin as perfect as that, because they could not help accumulating petty flaws while growing to maturity; only the rejuvenated could attain perfection, thanks to the artistry of their cosmetic engineers.

It was a nice paradox, Oscar thought, that only those who had been old could look truly young. He had flown in the face of professional advice by attempting a third rejuvenation so soon, at the age of 133. Many older men than he had not yet undergone their second rejuvenation, refusing to risk deep somatic engineering while their bodies had not quite descended to the depths of decrepitude. Oscar was far less brave than they; his fear of personal dilapidation was pathological.

“It is only shallow people,” he informed his reflection, confident in the knowledge that he had an appreciative audience, “who do not judge by appearances.” He bathed in the luxury of his own narcissism, admiring his grey eyes, his soft lips, his pearly white teeth.

He reached out to pluck a green carnation from the wall beside the mirror. He twirled it between his delicate fingers, admiring it with as much satisfaction as he admired his own image. The flower was his own creation. It was a joke, of course, but a serious joke. The games which Oscar played in consequence of his name—which had been given to him in all innocence by parents whose knowledge of the earlier Oscar Wilde was limited to a vague awareness that he had been a writer of note—were no mere matter of public relations. His identification with the ideas and ideals of his alter ego had long ago become a kind of fetish. He was not afraid to acknowledge that fact, nor to take pride in it. Life, if it were to be lived to the full in modern conditions, required a definite style and aesthetic shape: a constant flow of delicate ironies, tensions, and innovations.

He placed the flower in the buttonhole of his neatly tailored suit.

Furnishing hotel interiors was vulgar hackwork unbefitting a real artist, but a real artist had to make a living, and the commonplaceness of such commissions was offset by such flourishes of unorthodoxy as having it written into every contract that one suite of rooms should be fitted with green carnations instead of the more fashionable roses and amaranths. His clients did not mind his making such demands; they were, after all, paying for his fashionability as well as his technical dexterity, and he could not have been nearly so fashionable were it not for his extravagantly extrovert eccentricity.

He turned one way and then the other, shrugging his shoulders to make sure that his jacket hung perfectly upon his remodeled body.

Oscar did not doubt for a moment, as his greedy eyes devoured the glory of his reflection, that he would be equal to the challenge of his third youth. He was no crass businessman, apt to fall back into the same old routines at the first opportunity, wearing a new face as if it were merely a mask laid over the old. Nor was he the kind of man who would go to the opposite extreme, reverting to the habits and follies of first youthfulness, playing the sportsman or the rake. He was an artist. Artists had always been the pioneers who led mankind into the psychological unknown, and the current technology of rejuvenation was, after all, little more than a century old. No one knew for sure how many times a man might be successfully restored to youth, although it was tragically obvious that many failed at the second or third attempt. Oscar was firmly resolved that if the only thing required to secure eternal life was the correct attitude of mind, then he would be the first man to live forever.

He closed his eyes for a moment while he savored the pleasures of anticipation, but his delicious reverie was shattered by the comcon bell. He sighed, and crossed the room to the nearest telescreen, pausing only to make sure that his cravat was in order before exposing himself to the unit’s camera-eye. His precautions were unnecessary; no face appeared on the screen. There was only a teletext message, cold and impersonal. It was a request that he should call on a man he knew only slightly, and did not like at all. It seemed an unromantic and unpromising beginning to the new phase of his life. He reached out to send a message refusing the invitation, but paused before his fingers could descend upon the keys. The fax light was blinking. He pressed the RECEIVE button. He expected a copy of the message displayed on the screen, but what emerged from the humming printer was a seat reservation for the midnight maglev to San Francisco. Oscar had no intention of going to San Francisco; no such thought had crossed his mind. He could not imagine why anyone, least of all Gabriel King, should send him such a gift, with or without an explanation.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” he murmured.

He decided to obey the summons after all. He had never been able to resist temptation, and there was nothing in the world quite as tempting as a mystery.

1

While she waited for the forensic experts to conclude their examination of Gabriel King’s apartment, Charlotte Holmes tried to collect her thoughts. This was by far the biggest case of her fledgling career. Routine police work was incredibly dull, at least for site-investigation officers, and there had been nothing in her training or experience to prepare her for anything half as bizarre as this. Murder was nowadays the rarest of crimes, and such murders as did happen usually occurred when rage or spite smashed through the barriers erected by years of biofeedback training. Premeditated murders had fallen out of fashion as soon as it became impossible for the perpetrators to avoid apprehension.

She went to the window at the end of the corridor and looked out over the city. She was on the thirty-ninth floor, and there was quite a view. Central Park looked much as it must have looked in the days before the Devastation, but the rotting skyline was a product of the moment, whose like would probably never be seen again. Charlotte assumed that Gabriel King must have taken up residence in New York so that he might bid for a lion’s share of the work involved in the deconstruction of the city. He had always been bigger in demolition than in construction, because he controlled a number of key patents in decay biotechnology. The Decivilization Movement had been a great boon to his business, although its prophets detested Gabriel King as much as they detested all old-style entrepreneurs, especially wealthy multiple rejuvenates. King could easily have made enemies among the people whose crusade he was furthering, and among the business rivals who had competed with him for the contracts—but who among them could have thought up the murder weapon she had just been studying through a camera-eye?

Her waistphone buzzed, and she took the handscreen from its holster. No image appeared. Hal Watson rarely allowed his face to be seen; he was a dealer in data, and preferred to remain invisible within the webs of information that he spun. “Two names,” he said. As he spoke, the names appeared on the screen in capital letters: WALTER CZASTKA; OSCAR WILDE. “They’re the top people involved in the engineering of flowering plants,” the voice continued. “We’ll need one of them as a consultant, to double-check the forensic investigation. Czastka’s in Micronesia, on an island he’s leased in order to build an artificial ecosystem. Wilde’s here in New York, but he’s just gone through his third rejuvenation and may be incommunicado. Try Czastka first.”

“I’ll call him,” said Charlotte. “What about the girl?”

“Nothing yet. Camscan’s under way. Might be able to pick her up somewhere, figure out where she came from or where she went. Has the team come out of the apartment yet?”

“No,” said Charlotte, glumly. “I’ll stay until they do.”

“Don’t worry,” Hal said. “It’ll open up once we have the forensics. With luck, we might crack the case before the story leaks out.”

Charlotte sighed, and began punching the buttons on the handset. She tried Czastka first, as instructed. The fact that he was on the other side of the world wasn’t of any real consequence, because he’d have to use a camera to inspect the murder-weapon anyhow, and probably wouldn’t be able to do much more until the lab had turned up a geneprint. The image which came onto the screen was a grade A sim.

“Charlotte Holmes,” she said. “UN Police. Sending authority.” The privacy-breaking codes cut no ice. The sim told her that Czastka was temporarily unreachable. That probably meant that he was messing about somewhere on his island, without a beeper. It wasn’t worth the hassle of getting Czastka’s house-system to send out a summoner while there was an obvious alternative.

This time, she got a low-grade AI receptionist, which informed her that Oscar Wilde was not in his hotel room at present. She sent her authorization code. The pretty face flickered as the new subroutine was engaged. “Mr. Wilde is in a cab,” said the higher-grade receptionist, her simulated voice still honey-sweet. “Sending contact code; destination Trebizond Tower.”

Charlotte was just about to retransmit the contact code when she realized that Trebizond Tower was the building on whose thirty-ninth floor she was standing.

“What a coincidence,” she murmured, reflectively. Before she had finished wondering what the coincidence might possibly signify, another voice-call came through. This one was from the uniformed officer she had posted at the bottom of the elevator shaft to keep the public at bay.

“There’s an Oscar Wilde here,” said the officer, laconically. “He says he got a message half an hour ago to come up to King’s apartment.”

Charlotte frowned. Gabriel King had been dead for quite some time, and no call could possibly have been made from his apartment. “Send him up,” she said, tersely. She had an uncomfortable feeling of being out of her depth. She was only a legman, after all; Hal was the real investigator. She hesitated over calling Hal to tell him what had happened, but decided against it. Instead, she went to the elevator to meet the new arrival.

When the man emerged, she felt a curious jolt of astonishment. Hal had mentioned that Wilde was a recent rejuvenate, but she hadn’t adapted her expectations to take account of it. Expert witnesses and other consultants usually looked fairly old, but Oscar Wilde looked ten years younger than she did; in fact, he was quite the most beautiful man she had ever seen. He bowed gracefully, and then looked up, briefly, at the discreet plastic eye set in the wall, whose security camera recorded every face which passed by.

Public eyes and private bubblebugs were everywhere in a city like New York, and native New Yorkers were entirely used to living under observation; those who had grown up with the situation took it completely for granted. In some unintegrated nations, it still wasn’t common for all walls to have eyes and ears, but within the borders of the six superpowers, citizens had long since been required to learn to tolerate the ever-presence of the benevolent mechanical observers which guaranteed their safety. Wilde was neither a native New Yorker nor a genuinely young man, but he didn’t give the impression that he resented the presence of the eye at all. If anything, his self-consciousness suggested that he liked to be watched.

“Mr. Wilde?” she said, tentatively. “I’m Charlotte Holmes, UN Police Department.”

“Please call me Oscar,” said the beautiful man. “What exactly has happened to poor Gabriel?”

“He’s dead,” Charlotte replied, shortly. “I understand that you received a call from him, or his simulacrum?”

“The message came as text only, with a supplementary fax. It was an invitation—or perhaps a command. It was sufficiently impolite to warrant disobedience, but sufficiently intriguing to be tempting.”

“That message wasn’t sent from this apartment,” she told him, bluntly.

“Then you must trace it,” he replied, affably, “and discover where it did come from. It would be interesting to know, would it not, who sent it and why?”

They were interrupted by the emergence of the forensic team from the apartment. Charlotte waited patiently while they removed their sterile suits. Oscar looked curiously at all the protective gear, undoubtedly wondering why it had been necessary to use it.

“It’s sealed,” said the team-leader. “We set up a camera on remote control, and we stripped all the bubbled data there was. We connected his personal machines to the Net so that Hal can trawl the data.”

Oscar wore a quizzical expression. Charlotte didn’t want to enlighten him yet as to what had happened; she was anxious to see what his reaction would be when she showed him what was in the apartment. She led the way to the screen mounted in the wall outside the apartment door, and punched in the instruction codes.

The camera was still at the scene, but it had been left pointing tastefully away from the corpus delicti. The room was furnished in an unusually utilitarian manner; there was no decorative plant life integrated into the walls, nor any kind of inert decoration. There were mural screens on the blank walls, but they displayed plain shades of pastel blue. Apart from the food delivery point, the room’s main feature was a particularly elaborate array of special-function telescreens. Charlotte juggled the camera while Oscar peered over her shoulder, raptly. On one of three sofas lay all that remained of the late Gabriel King. The “corpse” was no more than a skeleton, whose white bones were intricately entwined with gorgeous flowers. Charlotte zoomed in, and moved aside to let her companion look closely at the strange garlands and the reclining skeleton.

The stems and leaves of the marvelous plant were green, but the petals of each bloom were black. The waxy stigma at the center of each bell was dark red, and had the form of a crux ansata. Oscar Wilde took over the controls, moving them delicately so that he could inspect the structure and texture of the flowers at the minutest level. He followed the rim of a corolla, then passed along a stem which bore huge thorns, paler in color than the flesh from which they sprouted. Each thorn was tipped with red, as though it had drawn blood. The stems wound around and around the long bones of the corpse, holding the skeleton together even though every vestige of flesh had been consumed. The plant had supportive structures like holdfasts which maintained the shape of the whole organism and the coherence of the skeleton. The skull was very strikingly embellished, with a single stem emerging from each of the empty eye-sockets.

“Can you be certain that it’s Gabriel?” asked Oscar, finally.

“Pretty certain,” Charlotte said. “In the absence of retinas the analysts checked the skull-shape and the dental profile. A DNA scan on the bone-marrow will confirm it. It seems that the flowers are composed of what used to be his flesh. You might say that their seeds devoured him as they grew.”

“Fascinating,” he said, in a tone which had more admiration in it than horror.

“Fascinating!” she echoed, in exasperation. “Can you imagine what an organism like that might do if it ever got loose? We’re looking at something that could wipe out the entire human race!”

“I think not,” said Oscar, calmly. “These are single-sexed flowers from a dioecious species, incapable of producing fertile seed. How long ago did Gabriel die?”

“Between two and three days,” she told him, grimly. “He seems to have felt the first symptoms about seventy hours ago; he was incapacitated soon afterward, and died a few hours later.”

Oscar licked his lips, as though savoring his own astonishment. “Those delightful flowers must have a voracious appetite,” he said.

Charlotte eyed him carefully, wondering exactly what his reaction might signify. “You’re something of a flower-designer yourself, I believe.” Her gaze flickered momentarily to the green carnation in his lapel. “Could you make plants like those?”

Oscar met her eyes frankly. She was as tall as he, and their stares were perfectly level. He frowned as he considered the matter, then said: “Until I saw this marvel, I would have opined that no man could. Clearly, I have underrated one of my peers.” He seemed genuinely perplexed, although the level of his concern for the victim and for the fact that a crime had been committed left something to be desired.

Charlotte stared hard at the beautiful man, wondering whether anyone in the world were capable of committing an act like this and then turning up in person to confront and mock the officers investigating the crime. She decided that if he could be guilty of the first madness, the second might not be too hard to believe. “I can’t help feeling that your appearance here is a very strange coincidence, Mr. Wilde,” she said.

“It is indeed,” said Oscar, blithely. “Given that it seems to be impossible that I was summoned by the victim, I can only conclude that I was summoned by the murderer.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“It is hard to believe. But when we have eliminated the impossible, are we not committed to believing the improbable? Unless, of course, you think that I did this to poor Gabriel, and have come to gloat over his fate? I disliked the man, but I did not dislike him as much as that—and if I had decided to murder him, I certainly would not have revisited the scene of my crime in this reckless fashion. A showman I might be, a madman never.” He turned back to the screen, and looked again at the deadly flowers, which were still displayed there in intimate close-up.

Charlotte did not want to be put off. “As it happens,” she said, “we would have shown all this material to you anyway. We need an expert report on the nature and potential of the organism, and I was given two possible names. I couldn’t get through to Walter Czastka. I was trying to call you at your hotel while you were on the way over here.”

“I’m offended by the fact that you tried Walter first,” Oscar murmured, “but I forgive you.”

“Mr. Wilde. . . .” she began, feeling that her patience was being tested too far.

“Yes, of course,” he said, “This is a serious matter—a murder investigation. I think I can hazard a guess as to why the summons was sent. I suspect that I was brought here to identify the murderer.”

“How?” she demanded.

“By his style,” he replied.

“That’s ridiculous!” she said, petulantly. “If the murderer had wanted to identify himself, all he had to do was call us. How would he know that you could recognize his work—and why, if he knew it, would he want you to do it?”

“Those are interesting questions,” admitted Oscar. “Nevertheless, I can only suppose that I was sent an invitation to this mysterious event in order that I might play a part in its unraveling.” He paused, and looked at her reproachfully, radiating injured innocence. “You really do suspect that I’m responsible for this, don’t you?” he said.

“If not you,” she countered, “then who?”

He opened his arms wide in a gesture of exaggerated helplessness. “I cannot claim to be absolutely certain,” he said, “but if appearances and my expert judgment are to be trusted, these flowers are the work of the man who has always been known to me as Rappaccini!”

2

Charlotte called Hal Watson. “Oscar Wilde’s here,” she said, making an effort to be businesslike. “Can you trace the call that was made to his hotel room asking him to come? He says the flowers might have been made by a man named Rappaccini.”

“Of course,” Oscar added, with annoying casualness, “Rappaccini is not his real name. Some long-standing members of the Institute of Genetic Art still prefer to exhibit their work pseudonymously—a hangover from the days of prejudice.”

“Are you one of them?” she asked.

Oscar shook his head. “I am fortunate enough to have a real name that sounds like a pseudonym—my identity thus becomes a kind of double bluff.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “your identification of Rappaccini as the man who made the flowers is also a double bluff.”

Oscar shook his head. “I fear that I have an ironclad alibi. Three days ago I was in the hospital, and the flesh of my outer tissues was unbecomingly fluid. I had been there for some time.”

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Charlotte pointed out. “You might have made the seeds months ago, and made sure that they were delivered—or began to take effect—while you were in the hospital.”

“I suppose I might have,” said Oscar, wearily, “but I assure you that your investigation will proceed more smoothly if you forget about me and concentrate on Rappaccini.”

“Why should a man take the trouble to summon someone capable of identifying him to the scene of the crime?” she asked, with a trace of asperity. “Why didn’t he simply leave his calling card?”

“Why didn’t he simply shoot Gabriel King with a revolver?” countered the geneticist. “Why go to the effort of designing and making this fabulous plant? There is something very strange going on here, dear Charlotte.”

There certainly is, she thought, staring at him, as if by effort she could penetrate the lovely mask to see the secret self within. Oscar, seemingly unalarmed by her scrutiny, began to play with the keys that controlled the camera in the apartment. He zoomed in on something which lay on the glass-topped table. It was a small cardboard rectangle. It had been lacquered over as a safety-measure, but it was still possible to read what was written on it. The words were in French, but Oscar effortlessly read out what Charlotte took to be a translation.

“ ‘Stupidity, error, sin and poverty of spirit,’ ” he said, “ ‘possess our hearts and work within our bodies, and we nourish our fond remorse as beggars suckle their own parasites.’ Perhaps the murderer did leave his calling card, Inspector Holmes. A man like Gabriel King would hardly have a note of such lines as those.”

“Do you recognize them?” asked Charlotte.

“A poem by Baudelaire. Au lecteur—that is, ‘To the Reader.’ From Les Flews du Mal. A play on words, I think.”

Charlotte’s audio-link to Hal Watson was still open. “Did you catch that, Hal?” she asked.

“I checked the words already,” Hal replied. “He’s right.”

Charlotte wondered how many men there were in the world who could recognize seven-hundred-year-old poems written in French. Surely, she thought, Oscar Wilde must be the person behind all this. But if so, what monstrous game was he playing?

“What significance do you attach to the card?” she asked him, sharply.

“If my earlier reasoning was correct, it must be a message directed to me,” replied Oscar. “All this is communication—not merely the card, and the message which summoned me, but the flowers, and the crime itself. The whole affair is to be read, and hence understood. I am here because Rappaccini expects me to be able to interpret and comprehend what he is doing.”

Charlotte tried to remain impassive, but she knew that her amazement was showing. She was grateful when the phone in her hand crackled.

“I’m blocked on Rappaccini for the moment,” said Hal. “His real name is recorded as Jafri Biasiolo, but there’s hardly any official data on Biasiolo at all beyond his birth-date, way back in 2420. It’s old data, of course, and may be just a sketchy construction of disinformation.”

Old data tended to be incomplete, often corrupted by all kinds of errors—although she noticed that Hal had said “disinformation,” which meant lies, rather than “misinformation.” In Hal’s view, old data was senile data, too decrepit to be of much use in a slick modern police inquiry. But Gabriel King had been nearly a hundred and fifty years old, and Oscar Wilde—in spite of appearances—must be well over a hundred. If Rappaccini really had been born in 2420, the motive for this affair might go all the way back to the final years of the Aftermath. The Net had been of holes in those days.

“What about the call which summoned Wilde here?” she asked.

“Placed three days ago from a blind unit, time-triggered to arrive when it did. I’ve got nowhere with the woman yet. No picture-match, no route to or from the apartment-house. This is going to take longer than I had hoped.”

Charlotte digested this information. She was not unduly surprised by the news that the real person behind “Rappaccini” might be difficult to identify. It was easy enough nowadays to establish electronic identities whose telescreen appearances could be maintained and controlled by AI simulacra. Virtual individuals could play so full a role in modern society that their real puppet-masters could easily remain hidden—until they came under the scrutiny of a highly skilled investigator. Hal could get through any conventional information-wall, and work his way through any data-maze, but it would take time. She had a gut feeling that told her that the creator of “Rappaccini” was right in front of her, taunting her with his presence, but she didn’t dare say so to Hal. He was no respecter of gut feelings.

“Can you patch the security tape through to the wallscreen here?” she said. “I’d like Mr. Wilde to see it. He seems to know everything else—perhaps he can tell us who the woman is.”

“Ah,” said Oscar, softly. “Cherchez la femme! Without a woman the crime could not be deemed complete!”

“Hal Watson’s a top cracksman,” Charlotte told him, trying to shake his casual composure. “He can get into all the little electronic backwaters all the locked-up mines of information. It’s impossible to hide anything from him. It’s only a matter of time before we get to the bottom of this.”

Wilde did not seem in the least intimidated. “I’m delighted to find the two of you working in partnership,” he said. “It demonstrates that even the higher echelons of the International Bureau of Investigation are home to a sense of humor and a sense of tradition.”

He was trying to be clever again, but this time she knew what he meant. Everyone made jokes about it.

On the biggest of the display screens on the far wall there appeared an image of the corridor outside the apartment. The tape had already been edited; no sooner had it started than a young woman came into view, reaching out to activate the doorchime. Her lustrous brown hair was worn unfashionably long. She had clear blue eyes and finely-chiseled features. Even in this day and age, when cosmetic engineers could so easily remold superficial flesh, her beauty was striking. It was not merely the shape of her face, but the undefinable presence which she brought to it. Charlotte could not quite make up her mind whether she was authentically young, or whether she was a successful product of rejuvenative engineering, whose perfection of manner arose from long and careful practice. The woman stepped forward as the door opened, and passed beneath the eye.

The viewpoint abruptly shifted to the second security camera in the hall. King was visible now, with his back to the camera, and Charlotte watched carefully as the girl moved forward, her eyes gazing into his, and raised her head slightly so that he could kiss her on the lips. King did not seem surprised, and he responded to the unspoken invitation. The kiss did not seem particularly passionate; it might, Charlotte thought have been a polite greeting between people who had some history of intimacy, but were meeting as friends, or it might have been a friendly kiss exchanged in hopeful anticipation of future intimacy. There was no sound-track on the tape, but few words were spoken before King stood aside to let his visitor precede him into the sitting room. The tape cut again, and they saw the woman re-emerge from the doorway. She was alone, and seemed quite composed as she walked to the main door of the apartment, opened it, and went out.

“She was inside for about half an hour,” said Charlotte, drily. “King was still perfectly healthy when she left, and it wasn’t until some twelve or thirteen hours later that he called up a diagnostic program. He never had a chance to hit his panic button—the progress of the plant was too swift. We’ll know more when we’ve decanted his bubblebugs, but we won’t know what went on in the bedroom. The girl might have nothing at all to do with it, but she was the last person to see him alive. We don’t know how she fed him the seeds, if indeed she did feed them to him. Do you recognize her?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Oscar. “I can only offer the obvious suggestion.”

“Which is?”

“Rappaccini’s daughter.”

Charlotte said nothing, but simply waited for clarification.

“It’s another echo of the nineteenth century,” said Oscar, with a slight sigh.

“Rappaccini borrowed his pseudonym from a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’ You don’t know the period, I take it?”

“Not very well,” she said awkwardly. “Hardly at all” would have been nearer the truth.

“Then it’s as well that I’m here. Otherwise, this exotic performance would be entirely wasted.”

“You think that the man you know as Rappaccini is acting the part of his namesake—just as you make a show of acting the part of yours?”

Oscar shrugged. “In the story, Rappaccini committed no murder—but he did cultivate fatal flowers: fleurs du mal. Our Rappaccini has signed his work, for those who have the wit to read the signature. I have a strong suspicion that we have probably seen the murder committed, by means of that gentle kiss which our mysterious visitor delivered. She, of course, would have to be immune to them.”

“This is too much,” Charlotte explained.

“I quite agree. As lushly extravagant as a poem in prose by Baudelaire himself. But we have been instructed to expect a Baudelairean dimension. I can hardly wait for the next installment of the story.”

“You think this is going to happen again?”

“I’m almost sure of it,” said Oscar, with infuriating calm. “If Rappaccini intends to present us with a real psychodrama, he will hardly stop when he has only just begun.

“The next murder, by the way, might well be committed in San Francisco.”

“Why San Francisco?”

“Because the item which was faxed through to me when I was summoned here was a reservation for the midnight maglev to San Francisco.” So saying, he took a sheet of paper from his pocket, and held it out for her inspection.

She took it from him, and stared at it dumbly.

“Why didn’t you show me this immediately?” she said.

“My mind was occupied with other things. Anyhow, your colleague Dr. Watson must have obtained a copy of the message when he tried to trace it. Perhaps he has already begun to investigate. I do hope that you will not try to prevent my using the ticket—and that you will allow me to assist you throughout the investigation.”

“Why should I?” she replied. She was uncomfortably aware of the fact that she could not prevent his going anywhere in the world he pleased.

“Because the person who committed this murder has gone to extraordinary lengths to make me party to the investigation. If I am supposed to go to San Francisco, there must be a reason. This is only the beginning, dear Charlotte, and if you wish to get to the end with all possible speed, you must stay with me. You can, of course, count on my complete cooperation and my absolute discretion.”

And you, Charlotte said, silently, while she stared into his lovely eyes, can count on being instantly arrested, the moment Hal digs up anything that proves your involvement in this unholy mess.

3

IBI headquarters in New York were in the “new” UN complex built in 2431. There had once been talk of the UN taking over the whole of Manhattan Island, but that had gone the way of most dream-schemes during the troubled years of the Aftermath. Now, an even more grandiose plan to move the core of the UN bureaucracy to Antarctica was well-advanced. The same sentence of death had been passed on the IBI complex that had been passed on the whole of New York City, but Gabriel King’s brand of controlled rot had not yet been allowed to set in.

“How well did you know Gabriel King?” Charlotte asked Oscar, while they were en route in the police car. He had suggested that he come with her until the time appointed for his departure, and she had been quick to agree although she knew that Hal would not approve.

“I supply his company with decorative materials for various building projects. I haven’t met him for more than twenty years. He and I are by no means kindred spirits.”

“And how well do you know Rappaccini?”

“I know the work far better than the man, but there was a period before and after the Great Exhibition when we met regularly. We were often bracketed together by critics who observed a kinship in our ideas, methods, and personalities but I was never convinced of the similarity. Our conversations were never intimate; we discussed art and genetics, never ourselves. It was a long time ago.”

She would have pursued the line of questioning further, but the distance between the Trebizond Tower and the UN complex was short, and they arrived before she had a chance to do any serious probing. She asked Oscar to wait in her office while she consulted her colleague in private. “I brought Wilde with me,” she told Hal, brusquely.

Even in the dim light, she was easily able to see the expression of distaste which flitted across Hal’s face, but all he said was: “Why?”

“Because he knows too much about this business,” she said, wishing that it didn’t sound so feeble, so intuitive. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think he set this whole thing up, then turned up in person to watch us wrestle with it!”

“So you think his introduction of the ‘Rappaccini’ name is a red herring?”

“Yes, I do. It’s all far too convenient. Is it possible that Rappaccini is entirely his invention?”

“I’ll check it out,” Hal said. “But we don’t need him here.”

“He wants to go to San Francisco on the midnight maglev.”

“Let him. What difference does it make? We can find him, if need be, in San Francisco or on the moon.”

“Suppose he were to murder someone else,” said Charlotte, desperately. It was pointless. Modern detective work was sifting data, carefully sorting the relevant from the irrelevant, and the real information from misinformation and disinformation. Talking to people, being a real-time activity, was generally considered to be an inordinately wasteful use of IBI time, to be kept to an absolute minimum even by lowly scene-of-crime officers. “Can I bring him down here?” Charlotte asked, defensively. “I’d like you to see for yourself what he’s like—then perhaps you’ll understand what I mean.”

Hal shrugged in world-weary fashion.

Charlotte collected Oscar from her office, and brought him down into Hal’s Underworld. The room was crowded with screens and comcons, but there were enough workstations for them to sit reasonably comfortably.

“Oscar Wilde—Hal Watson,” she said, with awkward formality. “Mr. Wilde thinks that his unique insight may be of some help in the investigation.”

“I hope so,” said Oscar, smoothly. “There are times when instant recognition and artistic sensitivity facilitate more rapid deduction than the most powerful analytical engines. I am an invader in your realm, of course—and I confess that I feel like one of those mortals of old who fell asleep on a burial mound and woke to find himself in the gloomy land of the fairy folk—but I really do feel that I can help you. I have some hours in hand before the midnight maglev leaves.”

“I’m always grateful for any help I can get,” said Hal, not bothering to feign sincerity. Charlotte saw that her colleague was unimpressed by Oscar Wilde’s recently renewed handsomeness. Hal, whose machine-assisted perceptions ground up all the richness and complexity of the social world into mere atoms of data, had not the same idea of beauty as common men. The cataract of encoded data which poured through his screens was his reality, and, for him, beauty was to be found in patterns woven out of information or enigmas smoothed into comprehension, not in the hard and soft sculptures of stone and flesh. Unfortunately, the unshadowy world of hard and superabundant data had yet to be persuaded to explain how it had produced the eccentric masterpiece of mere appearances which was the murder of Gabriel King.

“Rappaccini is proving evasive,” Hal told Charlotte, while his eyes continued to scan his screens. “His business dealings are fairly elaborate, but he holds a flag-of-convenience citizenship in the Kalahari Republic, and has no recorded residence. His telephonic addresses are black boxes, and he conducts all his affairs through the medium of AIs. The Rappaccini name first became manifest in 2480, when he registered with the Institute of the Genetic Arts in Sydney. He participated in a number of public exhibitions, including the Great Exhibition of 2505, sometimes putting in personal appearances. Unlike other genetic engineers specializing in flowering plants, he never got involved in designing gardens or in the kind of interior decoration that provides you with a living, Mr. Wilde. He seems to have specialized in the design of funeral wreaths.”

“Funeral wreaths?” echoed Charlotte, incredulously. The manufacture of funeral wreaths seemed an absurd profession for anyone to follow, even in the guise of a part-time persona. Now that serial rejuvenation supposedly guaranteed everyone an extended lifespan, funerals were not the everyday occurrences they once had been. On the other hand, their very rarity meant that the ceremony devoted to the commemoration of revered public figures was usually very lavish.

“Rappaccini’s flowers have always been grown under contract by middlemen in various parts of Australia.” Hal went on, while his fingers roamed in desultory fashion over his keyboards. “I’m checking the routes by which seeds used to be delivered, trying to backtrack them to the laboratories of origin, but he hasn’t put out anything new in thirty years. His agents are still making up wreaths and crediting him with royalties, but they’ve had no personal contact since 2520. He still has a considerable credit balance, and he probably has more in accounts I haven’t identified yet. His last manifestation as an active electronic persona was in 2527. Incoming telephone calls have been handled since then by a simulacrum which doesn’t seem to have referred enquiries elsewhere. Our best hope of discovering the real person behind the network of sims is a thorough interrogation of the financial records. The real person has to have some means of recovering or redirecting credit accumulated by the dummy. I also have AIs trawling out the data relating to every recorded public appearance Rappaccini has ever made. We’ll pin him down, even if it takes a week. I have all the data in the world to work with—I just need time to find, extract, and combine the relevant items. If your artistic intuition throws up any other helpful suggestions, just let me know, and I’ll let loose another pack of data-hounds.”

“Mr. Wilde hasn’t been able to guess why Rappaccini should want to murder Gabriel King,” said Charlotte. “Do we have anything on a possible motive?”

“I’m investigating King’s background,” said Hal. “If there’s a motive there, I’ll find it. For the time being, I’m more interested in the method. We know that the murderer has to be a first-class genetic engineer, so I’ve got AIs looking at the people who have the necessary expertise, trying to eliminate them one by one. It’s not easy, of course—there are too many commercial engineers whose work involves the relevant technical skills. Even a structural engineer like Gabriel King might be able to adapt what he knew.”

“I don’t think so,” Oscar said, dubiously.

“Maybe not,” said Hal. “Naturally, we’ll start with the people whose expertise is most relevant. Walter Czastka—and yourself, of course, Dr. Wilde.”

“My life,” said Oscar, airily, “is an open book. I fear that the sheer profusion of data will test the stamina of your programs—but that may make it all the easier for them to eliminate me from consideration. The idea that Walter Czastka might be Rappaccini is too absurd to contemplate.”

“Why?” asked Charlotte.

“A matter of style,” said Oscar. “Walter never had any.”

“According to the database, he’s the top man in the field—or was.”

“I presume you mean that he has made more money than anyone else out of engineered flowers. Walter is a mass-producer, not an artist. I fear that if Rappaccini is leading a double life, you will not find his secret identity among the ranks of flower-designers. You’ll have to cast your net further afield. He might be an animal engineer, perhaps a human engineer . . . but there are thousands of experts in each category.”

“My AIs are indefatigable,” Hal assured him. He was interrupted by a quiet beep from one of his comcons. His fingers raced back and forth across the relevant keyboard for a few seconds while he stared thoughtfully at a screen half-hidden from Charlotte’s view. After half a minute or so, he said: “You might be interested to see this, Dr. Wilde.” He pointed to the biggest of his display screens, mounted high on the wall directly in front of them.

A picture appeared on the left of the screen. It showed a tall man with silver hair, a dark beard trimmed into a goatee, and a prominent nose. “Rappaccini in 2481,” Hal said. “Taken at the offices of his growers during an early meeting.” He pressed more keys and another image appeared in the center of the screen, showing two men side by side. One of them was clearly the same man whose image was already on the screen.

“Isn’t that . . .?” Charlotte began.

“I fear that it is,” said Oscar, regretfully. “I looked a lot older then, of course. Taken in 2505, I believe, at the Sydney Exhibition.”

It proves nothing that they’ve been photographed together, Charlotte thought. That may only be an actor, hired to lend flesh to the illusion. Somehow, though, she couldn’t quite believe it.

“It was 2505,” agreed Hal. A third picture appeared, again showing Rappaccini alone. “2520,” Hal said. “His last public appearance.”

Charlotte compared the three pictures. There was hardly any difference between them. The man had not undergone a full rejuvenation between 2481 and 2520, although he had probably employed light cosmetic reconstruction to maintain the appearance of dignified middle-age.

“If he really was born in 2420, he seems to have delayed rejuvenation far longer than usual,” said Hal, pensively. “He must have had a full rejuve very soon after the last picture was taken—I’ll get a program to trawl the records. A picture-search program might be able to connect up the face, but that kind of data’s very messy. It’s proving difficult to track the woman who visited Gabriel King’s apartment—there are plenty of cameras in the streets, but a bit of everyday make-up and a wig can cause a good deal of confusion. Faces aren’t as widely different as they used to be, now that so many people use light cosmetic engineering to follow fashion-trends. We’ll trace her eventually, but . . . again, it’s a matter of time.”

As he spoke, three signals began beeping and blinking within the space of a second’s hesitation, and his attention was instantly diverted. Charlotte and Oscar left the computer-man to the company of his assiduous AIs.

“It’s good to know,” observed Oscar, as the elevator carried them up, “that there are so many patient recording angels sorting religiously through the multitudinous sins of mankind. Alas, I fear that the capacity of our fellow men for committing sins may still outstrip their best endeavors.”

“On the contrary,” Charlotte retorted. “The crime rate keeps going down and down as the number of spy-eyes and bubblebugs scattered around the world goes up and up.”

“I spoke of sins, not crimes,” said Oscar. “What your electronic eyes do not see the law may not grieve about, but the capacity for sin will lurk in the hearts of men long after its expression has been banished from their actions.”

“People can do what they like in the privacy of their virtual realities,” she said. “There’s no sin in that.”

“If there were no sin in our adventures in imagination,” Oscar replied, evidently determined to have the last word, “there would be no enjoyment in them. It is mainly our sense of sin which sustains our appetite for virtual experience. No matter how perfect an image we present to the world, in our appearances and our actions, we are as vicious at heart as we have ever been. If you cannot understand that, my dear, I fear that you will never be a real detective.”

4

While he still had time to spare, Charlotte took Oscar to dinner in the IBI’s restaurant, where he decided that what his appetite demanded was Tournedos Bearnaise and a bottle of St. Emilion. IBI food technology was easily adequate to the task of meeting these requirements. Its beef was grown from a celebrated local tissue-culture which had long rejoiced in the pet name of Baltimore Bess: a veritable mountain of muscle, “rejuvenated” a hundred times or more by means of the techniques whose gradual perfection in the last two centuries had paved the way for the rejuvenation of human beings. The St. Emilion was authentic, although the whole Bordeaux region had been replanted as recently as 2430, when connoisseurs had decided that the native root-stocks had suffered too much deterioration due to the environmental degradations of the Third Biotech War.

“This crime,” said Charlotte, as soon as she felt the time was ripe for talk of business, “is the work of a very remarkable mind.”

“Very,” Oscar agreed. “I have, of course, a very remarkable mind myself, but genius is always unique. I wear my genius openly, and can barely understand the temperament that would hide away an entire life behind a series of electronic masks, but the man who has invented Rappaccini is clearly a dissimulator. I suspect that this crime has been planned for a very long time. The fictitious Rappaccini might have been invented with this murder in mind, and every detail of him has been tailored to its requirements. Absurd as it may seem, I cannot help but wonder whether my involvement as a witness was planned along with the crime.”

Charlotte studied his face soberly. She wondered whether he had designed his own features. It was rare to see such flamboyant femininity in the lines of a male’s face, but she had to admit that it suited him.

“What was your impression of the man who posed as Rappaccini?” she asked.

“I liked him. He had an admirable hauteur—as if he considered himself a more profound person by far than the other exhibitors at the Great Exhibition. He was a man of civilized taste and conversation. He appeared to like me, and we shared a taste for all things antiquarian—particularly relics of the nineteenth century, to which we were both linked by our names.”

“Do you remember anything useful?” asked Charlotte, with some slight impatience. “Anything which might help us to identify the man behind the name.”

“I fear not. We never became friends. We were both solitary workers, deeply interested in the purely aesthetic aspects of our work. One could not say that of all the exhibitors at Sydney, or even of the majority. Walter Czastka is more typical—he has always worked with an army of apprentices, far more interested in industry than art.”

“You don’t seem to like Walter Czastka,” she observed.

Oscar hesitated briefly before replying. “I don’t dislike Walter,” he said, “although I find him rather dull. He’s an able man, in his way, but a hack. Whereas I aspire to perfection in my work, he aims to be prolific. He certainly has Creationist ambitions—he has taken out a lease on a small island in the Pacific, just as I have—but I can’t imagine what he is doing with it.”

“Walter Czastka knew Gabriel King very well,” Charlotte observed, having scanned several pages of data copied to her by Hal Watson while they ate. “They were both born in 2401, and they attended the same university. Czastka has done a great deal of work for King’s companies—far more than you. Most murders, you know, involve people who know one another well.”

“Walter has not sufficient imagination to have committed this crime,” said Oscar, firmly, “even if he had a motive. I doubt that he did; he and Gabriel are—or were—cats of a similar stripe.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that they were both hacks. A modern architect, working with thousands of subspecies of gantzing bacteria, can raise buildings out of almost any materials, shaped to almost any design. The integration of pseudo-living systems to provide water and other amenities adds a further dimension of creative opportunity. A true artist could make buildings that would stand forever as monuments to contemporary creativity, but Gabriel King’s main interest was always in productivity—razing whole towns to the ground and re-erecting them with the least possible effort. His business was the mass-production of third-rate homes for second-rate people.”

“I thought the whole point of bacterial cementation processes is that they facilitate the provision of decent homes for the very poor,” said Charlotte.

“That is the utilitarian view,” agreed Oscar. “But it is two hundred years out of date. Future generations will look back at ours with pity for the recklessness with which we have wasted our aesthetic opportunities. One day, the building of a home will be part of a person’s cultivation of his own personality. Making a home will be one of the things every man is expected to do for himself, and there will be no more Gabriel King houses with Walter Czastka sub-systems.”

“We can’t all be Creationists,” objected Charlotte.

“Oh, but we can,” retorted Oscar. “We can all be everything we want to be, or we should at least make every effort to do so. Even men like me, who were born when rejuvenation technology was still in its infancy, should do their utmost to believe that the specter of death is impotent to set a limit upon our achievements. The children of tomorrow will surely live for centuries if only they have the will to do so. You and I, Charlotte, must be prepared to set them a good example. The men of the past had an excuse for all their failures—that man born of woman had but a short time to live, and full of misery—but only cowardice inhibits us now. There is no excuse for any man who fails to be a true artist, and declines to take full responsibility for both his mind and his environment. Too many of us still aim for mediocrity, and are content with its achievement. You don’t intend to be a policewoman all your life, I hope?”

Charlotte was slightly discomfited by this question. “I’m continuing my education,” she said. “My options are still open.” Her waistphone began to buzz. She plucked it from its holster and accepted the call. She held it close to her ear so that Oscar would not be able to eavesdrop, assuming that Hal had ferreted out some further morsel of information about Rappaccini. What he actually had to say was rather more disturbing. When she had replaced the phone, she looked at her companion, trying to control the bleakness of her expression.

“Do you know a man named Michi Urashima?” she asked, as blandly as she could.

“Of course I do,” said Oscar. “I hope you aren’t going to tell me that he’s dead. He was a better man by far than Gabriel King.”

“Not everyone would agree with you,” she said, shortly. Urashima was an expert in computer graphics and image-simulation, famed for the contributions to synthetic cinema he had made before becoming involved in outlawed brainfeed research—which had led to a much-publicized fall from grace.

“How was he killed?” Oscar asked, sadly. “The same method?”

“Yes,” she said, tersely. “In San Francisco. There’s no need for you to take the maglev now.”

“On the contrary,” he said. “There is every reason. This affair is still in its early stages, and if we want to witness the further stages of its unfolding, we must follow the script laid down for us. You will come with me, I hope?”

“Scene-of-crime officers don’t operate nationwide,” she said. “Police work isn’t done that way in this day and age.” She knew even as she said it, though, that she still wanted—and still intended—to cling to her suspect.

“Police work may not be,” he replied, with an infuriating wave of his hand, “but psychodrama is. The mystery in this, my dear Charlotte, is not who has done it, but why. I am the man appointed by the murderer himself to the task of following the thread of explanation to the heart of the maze. If you want to understand the crime as well as solving it, you must come with me.”

“All right,” she said, hypocritically. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll stick with you till the bitter end.”

5

Charlotte rose earlier than was her habit; the maglev couchette was not the kind of bed which encouraged one to sleep in. She called Hal to get an update on the investigation, then wandered along to the dining car to dial up some croissants, coffee, and pills. It was a pity, she thought, that there was no quicker way than the maglev to travel between New York and San Francisco. She had an uncomfortable feeling that she might end up chasing a daisy-chain of murders all around the globe, always twenty-four hours behind the breaking news. But the maglev was the fastest form of transportation within the bounds of United America since the last supersonic jet had flown four centuries before. The power-crises of the Aftermath were ancient history now, but the inland airways were so cluttered with private flitterbugs and helicopters, and the green zealots so avid in their crusades against large areas of concrete, that commercial aviation had never really gotten going again. Even intercontinental travelers tended to prefer the plush comfort of airships to the hectic pace of supersonics. Electronic communication had so completely taken over the lifestyles and folkways of modern man that most business was conducted via comcon.

By the time Charlotte had finished her breakfast, the train was only four hours out of San Francisco. Oscar joined her then, looking neat and trim although the green carnation in his buttonhole was now rather bedraggled. “Such has been the mercy of our timetable,” he observed, “that we have slept through Missouri and Kansas.”

She knew what he meant. Missouri and Kansas were distinctly lacking in interesting scenery since the re-stabilization of the climate had made their great plains prime sites for the establishment of vast tracts of artificial photosynthetics. Nowadays, the greater part of the Midwest looked rather like sections of an infinite undulating sheet of a dull near-black violet which offended unpracticed eyes. The SAP-fields of Kansas always gave Charlotte the impression of looking at a gigantic piece of frilly corrugated cardboard. Houses and factories alike had retreated beneath the dark canopy, and parts of the landscape were almost featureless. By now, though, the maglev passengers had the more elevating scenery of Colorado to look out upon. Most of the state had been returned to wilderness, and its centers of population had taken advantage of the versatility of modern building techniques to blend in with their surroundings. Chlorophyll green was infinitely easier on the human eye than SAP-violet, presumably because millions of years of adaptive natural selection had helped to make it so.

While Oscar ordered eggs duchesse for breakfast, Charlotte activated the wallscreen beside their table and called up the latest news. The fact of Gabriel King’s death was recorded, but there was nothing as yet about the exotic circumstances. The IBI never liked to advertise crimes until they were solved, but the exotic circumstances of King’s death would make it a hot topic of gossip, and she knew that it was only a matter of time before bootleg copies of the security tapes leaked out.

“My dear Charlotte,” said Oscar, “you have the unmistakable look of one who woke too early and has been working too hard.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “I took a couple of boosters with breakfast. They’ll clear my head soon enough.”

Oscar shook his head. “No one who looks twenty when he is really a hundred and thirty-three can possibly be less than worshipful of the wonders of medical science,” he said, “but, in my experience, the use of it to maintain one’s sense of equilibrium is a false economy. We must have sleep in order to dream, and we must dream in order to discharge the chaos from our thoughts, so that we may reason effectively while we are awake. Now, what about the second murder? Any progress?”

She frowned. She was supposed to be the one asking the questions. “Did you know Urashima personally, or just by reputation?” she countered, determined not to let him get the upper hand.

“We met on several occasions,” said Oscar, equably. “He was an artist, like myself. I respected his work. Although I didn’t know him well, I would have been glad to count him a friend.”

“He’d been inactive of late,” she said, watching her suspect closely. “He hadn’t worked commercially since his conviction for illegal experimentation thirteen years ago. He served four years house arrest and control of communication. He was probably still experimenting, though, and he may well have been engaged in illegal activities.”

“His imprisonment was an absurd sentence for an absurd crime,” Oscar opined. “He placed no one in danger but himself.”

“He was playing about with brainfeed equipment,” she said. “Not just memory boxes or neural stimulators, but mental cyborgization. And he didn’t just endanger, himself; he was pooling information with others.”

“Of course he was,” said Oscar. “What on earth is the point of hazardous exploration unless one makes every effort to pass on the legacy of one’s discoveries?”

“Have you ever experimented with that sort of stuff?” Charlotte asked, vaguely. Like everyone else, she bandied about phrases like “psychedelic synthesizer” and “memory box,” but she had little or no idea of the way such legendary devices were supposed to work. Ever since the first development of artificial synapses capable of linking up human nervous systems to silicon-based electronic systems, numerous schemes for hooking up the brain to computers had been devised, but almost all the experiments had gone disastrously wrong, often ending up with badly brain-damaged subjects. The brain was the most complex and sensitive of all organs, and disruption of brain-function was the one kind of disorder that twenty-sixth century medical science was impotent to correct. The UN had forced a world-wide ban on devices for connecting brains directly to electronic apparatus, for whatever purpose, but the main effect of the ban had been to drive research underground. Even an expert fisherman like Hal Watson would not have found it easy to figure out what sort of work might be going on, where, and why.

“You’ve just heard me express my dislike of everyday chemical boosters,” Oscar pointed out. “There is nothing I value more than my genius, and I would never knowingly risk my clarity and agility of mind. That does not mean that I disapprove of what Michi Urashima did. He was not an infant, in need of protection from himself. His perennial fascination was the simulation of experience, and for him, the building of better visual images was only a beginning. He wanted to allow his audience to live in his illusions, not merely to stand outside and watch. If we are ever to make a proper interface between natural and artificial intelligence, we will need the genius of men like Michi. Now, have you anything to tell me about his death which may help to unravel the puzzle which confronts us?”

“Perhaps,” she said, grudgingly. “Did you know that Michi Urashima was at college with Gabriel King—and, for that matter, with Walter Czastka?” She permitted herself a slight smile of satisfaction when Oscar raised an interested eyebrow.

“I did not,” he said. “Was Rappaccini, perhaps, also at this particular institution of learning? Has he been harboring some secret grudge for a hundred and thirty years? Where was this remarkable college, where so many of our great men first met?”

“Wollongong, in Australia.”

“Wollongong!” he exclaimed, in mock horror. “If only it were Oxford, or the Sorbonne, or even Sapporo . . . but it is an interesting coincidence.”

Charlotte regarded him speculatively. “Hal transmitted a copy of the scene-of-crime tape,” she said. “Urashima’s last visitor was a woman. She’d changed her appearance quite considerably, but we’re pretty sure that she’s the same one who visited Gabriel King.”

Oscar nodded. “Rappaccini’s daughter,” he said. “I expected it.”

“The main thrust of Hal’s investigation is to identify and track the woman,” Charlotte went on. “He’s set up programs to monitor every security camera in San Francisco. If she’s already gone, we might still be able to pick up her trail. The problem is that she left Urashima’s house more than three days ago; if she moved fast, she may have delivered more packages in the interim.”

“We must certainly assume that she did,” Oscar agreed. “Did she leave another calling card, by any chance?”

“Not this time. But she kissed Michi Urashima, exactly as she kissed Gabriel King.” She had decanted the tape on to a disc, so she only had to slot it in. Like the tape she had displayed for Oscar outside Gabriel King’s apartment, it had been carefully edited from the various spy-eyes and bubblebugs that had been witness to Michi Urashima’s murder.

The similarity between the two records was almost eerie. The woman’s hair was silvery blonde now, but still abundant. It was arranged in a precipitate cataract of curls. The eyes were the same electric blue but the cast of the features had been altered subtly, making her face thinner and apparently deeper. The changes were sufficient to deceive a standard picture-search program, but because Charlotte knew that it was the same woman, she could see that it as the same woman. There was something in the way her eyes looked steadily forward, something in her calm poise that made her seem remote, not quite in contact with the world through which she moved. She was wearing a dark blue costume now, which hung loose about her seemingly fragile frame. It was the kind of outfit which would not attract much attention in the street. As before, the woman said nothing, but moved naturally into a friendly kiss of greeting before preceding her victim into an inner room beyond the reach of conventional security cameras. Her departure was similarly recorded by the spy-eye. She seemed perfectly composed and serene.

There were more pictures to follow, showing the state of Urashima’s corpse as it had eventually been discovered. There were long, lingering close-ups of the fatal flowers. The camera’s eye moved into a black corolla as if it was venturing into the interior of a great greedy mouth, hovering around the crux ansata tip of the blood-red style like a moth fascinated by a flame. There was, of course, a sterile film covering the organism, but it was quite transparent; its presence merely served to give the black petals a weird sheen, adding to their supernatural quality.

Charlotte let the tape run through without comment, then flipped the switch. “The flowers aren’t genetically identical to the ones used to kill King. Our lab people think that the germination of the seeds may have been keyed to some trigger unique to the victim’s genotype—that each species was designed to kill a specific victim, while being harmless to everyone else. That would explain how the girl can carry the seeds around. She traveled to San Francisco on a scheduled maglev. The card she used to buy the ticket connects to a credit account held in the name of Jeanne Duval. It’s a dummy account, of course. She didn’t use the Duval account to reach New York, and she’ll presumably use another to leave San Francisco.”

“You might set the search programs you’re using to find her to pick up the names Daubrun and Sabatier,” Oscar advised. “Jeanne Duval was one of Baudelaire’s mistresses, and it’s possible she has the others on her list of noms de guerre.”

Charlotte transmitted this information to Hal. The maglev was taking them down the western side of the Sierra Nevada now, and she had to swallow air to counter the pressure on her eardrums.

“By the time we get to San Francisco,” she said, “there won’t be anything to do there except to wait for the next phone call.”

“Perhaps not,” said Oscar. “But even if she’s long gone, we’ll be in the right place to follow in her footsteps.”

The buzzer on Charlotte’s waistphone sounded, and she snatched it up.

“One of Rappaccini’s bank accounts became active,” Hal told her. “A debit went through ten minutes ago. The credit was drawn from another account, which had a guarantee arrangement with the Rappaccini account.”

“Never mind the technical details,” she said. “What did the credit buy? Have the police at the contact point managed to get the user?”

“I’m afraid not. The debit was put through by a courier service. They don’t collect until they’ve actually made delivery. We’ve got a picture of the woman from their spy-eye, looking just the same as she did when she went to Urashima’s apartment, but it’s three days old. It must have been taken before the murder, immediately after she arrived in San Francisco.”

Charlotte groaned softly. “What did she send, and where to?”

“A package she brought in. We don’t know what’s in it. It was addressed to Oscar Wilde, Green Carnation Suite, Majestic Hotel, San Francisco. It’s there now, waiting.”

“We don’t have the authority to open that package without your permission,” Charlotte told Oscar. “Can I send an instruction to the San Francisco police, telling them to inspect it immediately?”

“Certainly not,” Oscar said, without hesitation. “It would spoil the surprise. We’ll be there in less than an hour.”

Charlotte frowned. “You’re inhibiting the investigation,” she said. “I want to know what’s in that package. It could be a packet of seeds.”

“I think not,” said Oscar, airily. “If Rappaccini wished to murder me, he surely wouldn’t treat me less generously than his other victims. If they’re entitled to a fatal kiss, it would be unjust and unaesthetic to send my fleurs du mal by mail.”

“In that case,” she said, “it’s probably another ticket. If we open it now, we might be able to find out where her next destination is in time to stop her making her delivery.”

“I fear not,” said Oscar. “The delayed debit was timed to show up after the event. The third victim is probably dead already. The package is addressed to me and I shall open it. That’s what Rappaccini intended. I’m sure he has his reasons.”

“Mr. Wilde,” she said, in utter exasperation, “you seem to be incapable of taking this matter seriously.”

“On the contrary,” he replied, with a sigh. “I believe that I am the only one who is taking it seriously enough. You seem to be unable to look beyond the mere fact that people are being killed. If we are to come to terms with this strange performance, we must take all its features as seriously as they are intended to be taken. I am as deeply involved in this as the victims, though I cannot as yet understand why Rappaccini has chosen to involve me.”

“You’d better make sure that nothing you do fouls up our investigation,” said Charlotte, ominously, “because we won’t hesitate to throw the book at you if we find a reason.”

“I fear,” said Oscar, sadly, “that Rappaccini has already thrown more than enough books into this affair himself.”

6

The promised package lay on a table in the reception room of the Green Carnation Suite. It was round, about a hundred centimeters in diameter and twenty deep. Charlotte had taken the precaution of arming herself with a spraygun loaded with a polymer which, on discharge, formed itself into a bimolecular membrane and clung to anything it touched.

Oscar reached out to take hold of the knot in the black ribbon which secured the emerald green box. It yielded easily to his nimble fingers, and he drew the ribbon away. He lifted the lid and laid it to one side. As Charlotte had half-expected since seeing the shape of the container, it contained a Rappaccini wreath: an intricate tangle of dark green stalks and leaves. The stalks were thorny, the leaves slender and curly. There was an envelope in the middle of the display, and around the perimeter were thirteen black flowers like none that she had ever seen before. They looked like black daisies.

Oscar Wilde extended an inquisitive forefinger, and was just about to touch one of the flowers, when it moved.

“Look out!” said Charlotte.

As though the first movement was a kind of signal, all the “flowers” began to move. It was a most alarming effect, and Oscar reflexively snatched back his hand as Charlotte pressed the trigger of the spraygun and let fly. When the polymer hit them, the flowers’ movements became suddenly jerky. They thrashed and squirmed in obvious distress. The limbs which had mimicked sepals struggled vainly for purchase upon the thorny green ring on which they had been mounted. Now that Charlotte could count them she was able to see that each of the creatures had eight hairy legs. What had seemed to be a cluster of florets was a much-embellished thorax.

“Poor things,” said Oscar, as he watched them writhe. “They’ll asphyxiate, you know, with that awful stuff all over them.”

“I may have just saved your life,” observed Charlotte, drily. “Those things are probably poisonous.”

Oscar shook his head. “This was no attempted murder. It’s a work of art—probably an exercise in symbolism.”

“According to you,” she said, “the two are not incompatible.”

“Not even the most reckless of dramatists,” said Oscar, affectedly, “would destroy his audience at the end of act one. We are perfectly safe, my dear, until the final curtain falls. Even then Rappaccini will want us alive and well. He surely will not risk interrupting a standing ovation and cutting short the cries of encore!”

Charlotte reached out to pick up the sticky envelope at the center of the ruined display, and contrived to open it. She took out a piece of paper. It was a rental car receipt, overstamped in garish red ink: ANY ATTEMPT TO INTERROGATE THE PROGRAMMING OF THIS VEHICLE WILL ACTIVATE A VIRUS THAT WILL DESTROY ALL THE DATA IN ITS MEMORY. It was probably a bluff, but she didn’t suppose that Oscar Wilde would let her call it—and she still didn’t have any legal reason to overturn his decisions.

As soon as she had updated Hal, she got through to the rental car company and demanded all the information they had. They told her that they had delivered the car to the hotel three days earlier, and that they had no knowledge of any route or destination which might have been programmed into its systems after dispatch. Hal quickly ascertained that the account which had been used to pay for the car had enough credit to cover three days’ storage and a journey of two thousand kilometers.

“That could take you as far north as Juneau or as far south as Guadalajara,” Hal pointed out, unhelpfully. “I can’t tell how many more accounts there might be on which Rappaccini and the woman might draw, but I’ve traced several that are held under other names; it’s possible that one of them is his real name.

“What are they?” Oscar asked.

“Samuel Cramer, Gustave Moreau, and Thomas Griffiths Wainewright.”

Oscar sighed heavily. “Samuel Cramer is the protagonist of a novella by Baudelaire,” he said. “Moreau was a French painter. Wainewright was the subject of a famous essay by my namesake called ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison.’ It’s just a series of jokes, presumably intended to amuse me.”

The car which awaited them was roomy and powerful. Once it was free of the city’s traffic control computers it would be able to zip along the transcontinental at two hundred kph. If they were headed for Alaska, Charlotte thought, they’d be there some time around midnight.

As soon as they were both settled into the back seat, Oscar activated the car’s program. It slid smoothly up the ramp and into the street. Then he called up a lunch menu from the car’s synthesizer, and looked it over critically.

“I fear,” he said, “that we are in for a somewhat Spartan trip.”

Charlotte took out her handscreen and began scrolling through some pages of data that one of Hal’s AIs had compiled from various dossiers. It had found many links between Gabriel King and Michi Urashima—more links than anyone could reasonably have expected. It seemed that the construction engineer and the graphic artist had remained in close touch throughout their long lives. Many of Urashima’s experiments had been funded by King, and the two of them had embarked upon several ventures in partnership. Charlotte could see that the AI searches had only just begun to get down into the real dirt. No one whose career was as long as King’s was likely to be completely clean, but a man in his position could keep secrets even in today’s world, just as long as no one with state-of-the-art equipment actually had a reason to probe. It was only to be expected that this murder would expose a certain amount of dirty linen, but this particular collection seemed overabundant. It seemed entirely probable that Gabriel King had been a major stockholder in the clandestine brainfeed business, and that he had not only funded Urashima but had established all kinds of shields to hide his work and its spinoff. Was there a motive for multiple murder in there? But if there was, where did Rappaccini and Oscar Wilde fit in? Why all the bizarre frills? And who was the mystery woman?

When Charlotte had digested the dossier’s contents, she plugged her waistphone into the car’s transmitter and phoned Hal. “Anything new on the woman?” Charlotte inquired.

“No identification yet,” said Hal. “We haven’t picked up a visual trace since she left Urashima’s apartment. I’ve loosened up the match criteria, but she must have done a first-rate job of disguising herself. Where are you?”

Charlotte realized, guiltily, that she had not even bothered to take note of the direction in which they were headed. She squinted out of the window, but there was nothing to be seen now except the eight lanes of the superhighway. “We’re headed south,” said Oscar, helpfully.

“She may have gone south,” Charlotte said to Hal. “Better check all plausible destinations between here and Mexico City.” She signed off.

“It might be as well,” Oscar said, ruminatively, “if I were to have a word with Walter Czastka.”

“No, you don’t!” Charlotte said, suddenly remembering that she should have called Czastka herself, several hours ago. “That’s my job. Walter Czastka may be a suspect.”

“I know Walter,” said Oscar. “He was a difficult man even in his prime, and he’s not in his prime now. It really would be better if I did it. You can listen in.”

She weighed up the pros and cons. It might, she thought, be interesting to see what Oscar Wilde and Walter Czastka had to say to one another. “You’re a free man,” she said, in the end. “Go ahead.” She moved to the edge of her seat, out of range of the tiny eye mounted above the car’s wallscreen. She watched Oscar punch out the codes on the keyboard. He didn’t need to call a directory to get the number.

She could see the image on the screen even though she was out of camera-range. She knew immediately that the face that appeared was that of Walter Czastka himself. No one would ever have programmed so much ostentatious world-weariness into a simulacrum. “Hello, Walter,” said Oscar.

Czastka peered at the caller without the least flicker of recognition. He looked unwell. Charlotte could not imagine that he had ever been handsome, and he obviously thought it unnecessary to compromise with the expectations of others by having his face touched up by tissue-control specialists. In a world where almost everyone was beautiful, or at least distinguished, Walter Czastka was an anomaly—but there was nothing monstrous about him. His sad eyes were faded blue, and his stare had a rather disconcerting quality. Charlotte knew that Czastka was exactly the same age as Gabriel King and Michi Urashima, but he looked far worse than either of them. Perhaps rejuvenation hadn’t taken properly.

“Yes?” he said.

“Don’t you know me?” asked Oscar, in genuine surprise.

For a moment, Czastka simply looked exasperated, but then his stare changed as enlightenment dawned. “Oscar Wilde!” he said, his tone redolent with awe. “My God, you look . . . I didn’t look like that after my last rejuvenation! But that must be your third—how could you need . . .?”

Oddly enough, Oscar did not swell with pride in reaction to this display of naked envy. “Need,” he murmured, “is a relative thing. I’m sorry, Walter; I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“You’ll have to be brief, Oscar,” said Czastka, curtly. “I’m expecting the UN police to call—they tried to get past my AI yesterday, but didn’t bother to leave a message to say what they wanted. They’re taking their time about getting back to me. Damn nuisance.”

“The police can break in on us if they really want to,” said Oscar, gently. “Have you heard the news about Gabriel King?”

“No. Is it something I should be interested in?”

“He’s dead, Walter. Murdered by illegal biotechnics—a very strange kind of flowering plant.”

Charlotte couldn’t read Czastka’s expression. “Murdered by a plant?” he repeated, disbelievingly.

“I’ve seen the pictures,” said Oscar. “The police might want you to take a look at the forensic reports. They have a suspicion that you or I might have designed the murder-weapon, but I’m morally certain that it’s Rappaccini’s work. Do you remember Rappaccini?”

Charlotte began to regret having given Oscar Wilde permission to make this call. Perhaps it would have been better to ask Czastka to make a separate judgment. If both of them, without collusion, identified Rappaccini as the designer . . . but how could she be sure that they weren’t in collusion already?

“Of course I remember Rappaccini,” snapped Czastka. “I’m not senile, you know. Specializes in funeral wreaths—a silly affectation, I always thought. I dare say you know him better than I do, you and he being birds of a feather. Are you saying that he murdered Gabriel King?”

“Michi Urashima is dead too,” Oscar said. “He and Gabriel were killed by seeds which grew inside them and consumed their flesh. This is important, Walter. Genetic art may have come a long way since the protests at the Great Exhibition, but the green zealots wouldn’t need much encouragement to put us back on their hate list. Neither of us wants to go back to the days when we had petty officials looking over our shoulders while we worked. When the police release the full details of this case, there’s going to be a lot of adverse publicity. I’m trying to help the police find Rappaccini. I wondered whether you might remember anything that might provide a clue to his real identity.”

Czastka’s face had a curious ochreous pallor as he stared at his interlocutor. “King and Urashima—both dead?” He didn’t seem to be keeping up with Oscar’s train of thought.

“Both dead,” Oscar confirmed. “I think there might be others. You knew Gabriel and Michi from way back, didn’t you?”

“So what?” said Czastka, grimly. “I didn’t know Urashima as well as you did, and all my dealings with King were strictly business. We were never friends—or enemies.” Charlotte noted that Czastka’s eyes had narrowed, but she couldn’t tell whether he was alarmed, suspicious, or merely impatient.

“No one’s accusing you of anything,” said Oscar, carefully. “I’ve told the police that you couldn’t possibly be the man behind Rappaccini—and I think they’re more inclined at present to suspect that I might be. We all need to find out who he really is. Can you help?”

“No,” said Czastka, without hesitation. “I never knew him. I’ve had some dealings with his company, but I haven’t set eyes on him since the Great Exhibition.”

“What about his daughter?” said Oscar, abruptly.

If he intended to surprise the other man, it didn’t work. Czastka’s stare was as stony as it was melancholy. “What daughter?” he said. “I never met a daughter—not that I remember. It was all a long time ago. I can’t remember anything at all. It’s nothing to do with me. Leave me alone, Oscar—and tell the police to leave me alone!”

Charlotte could see that Oscar Wilde was both puzzled and disappointed by the other man’s reaction. As Czastka closed the connection, Oscar’s face wrinkled into a frown.

“That wasn’t much help, was it?” she said, unable to resist the temptation to take him down a peg. “He doesn’t even like you.”

“As soon as I told him about the murders, he froze,” Oscar said, thoughtfully. “He’s hiding something, but I can’t imagine what—or why. I would never have thought it of him. There’s something very strange about this. Perhaps your clever associate and his indefatigable assistants should start attacking the problem from the other end.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.

“The Wollongong connection. We ought to find out how many other people there are in the world who were at Wollongong at the relevant time. Walter and the two victims are uncommonly old men, even in a world where serial rejuvenation is commonplace. It’s possible that such a list might contain the names of other potential victims—and the university records might offer a clue as to a possible motive.”

Charlotte called Hal to relay the suggestion, but he scornfully informed her that he had already put two AIs to work on it. “One more thing,” he added. “Rappaccini’s pseudonymous bank accounts have been used over the years to purchase materials that were delivered for collection to the island of Kauai, in Hawaii. They were collected by boat. There are fifty or sixty islets west and south of Kauai, natural and artificial. Some are leased to Creationists for experiments in the construction of artificial ecosystems.” Charlotte had already turned to look at Oscar, and was on the point of forming a predatory grin when Hal continued: “Oscar Wilde’s island is half an ocean away in Micronesia—but Walter Czastka’s is nearby. All the supplies that Czastka purchases in his own name are picked up from Kauai, by boat.”

7

Charlotte winced as the car lurched slightly, throwing her sideways. They had left the superhighway and were climbing into the hills along roads which did not seem to have been properly maintained. This had been a densely populated region in the distant past, but California had suffered several plague attacks in the Second Biotech War, and rural areas like this one had been so badly hit as to cause a mass exodus of refugees. Most of those who had survived had never returned, preferring to relocate to more promising land. Three quarters of the original ghost towns of the Sierra Nevada were ghost towns still, even after three hundred years. The car had not been designed for climbing mountains and it had slowed considerably when it first began to follow the winding road up into the foothills of the mountain range. It was picking up speed again now. Charlotte called up a map of the region on to the car’s wallscreen, but it was stubbornly unhelpful in the matter of providing clues as to where they might be going or why.

“The region up ahead is real wasteland,” she told Oscar. “Nobody lives there. Nothing grows except lichens and the odd stalk of grass. The names on the map are just distant memories.”

“Something must be up there,” Oscar said, shifting uncomfortably as the car took another corner. “Rappaccini wouldn’t bring us up here if there were nothing to see.”

Charlotte wiped the map from the screen, and replaced it with a list which Hal had beamed through to her. There were twenty-seven names on it: the names of all the surviving men and women who had attended the University of Wollongong while Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, and Walter Czastka had been students there. The names, that is, of all the supposed survivors; Hal’s patient AIs had so far only managed to obtain positive confirmation of the continued existence of twenty-three. The business of trying to contact them all was proving uncommonly difficult; they all had high-grade sims to answer their phones, and most of the sims had been programmed for maximum unhelpfulness. IBI priority codes were empowered to demand maximum co-operation from every AI in the world, but no AI could do more than its programming permitted.

“These people are crazy!” she complained.

“They’re all old,” Oscar pointed out. “Every single one of them is a double rejuvenate. They were born during the Aftermath, when the climate was still disturbed, the detritus of the plague wars hadn’t yet finished claiming casualties, the Net was still highly vulnerable to software sabotage, and cool fusion and artificial photosynthesis were brand new. All of them were conceived by living mothers, and I doubt if one in five was carried to term in an artificial womb. They’re strangers in today’s world, and many of them don’t have any sense of belonging any more. Half of them have nothing left to desire except to die in peace, and more than half—as your associates must have found out in trying to cross-examine them—have no memory at all of the long-gone years they spent at the University of Wollongong.”

She looked at him curiously. “But you’re not much younger than they are,” she said, “and you’re a triple rejuvenate. You obviously don’t feel like that.”

“The fact that I do not,” he said, drily, “is the greatest proof of my genius. I am a very unusual individual—as unusual, in my way, as Rappaccini.”

Charlotte’s waistphone buzzed, and she lifted it from its holster reflexively. “You can take Paul Kwiatek off your list,” Hal’s voice said, dully. “They just found him dead. Same method, same visitor.”

Oscar leaned over to speak into the mouthpiece. “Who’s dead?” he asked Hal.

“Paul Kwiatek. Another Wollongong graduate, born 2401.” Charlotte snatched up the phone again. Determined to be businesslike, she said: “Where?”

“Bologna, Italy.” “Bologna! But . . . when?”

“Some time last week. It looks as though he was killed before King. The woman probably flew to New York on an intercontinental flight from Rome. I’ll try to figure out where she was before that—there might be other bodies we haven’t found yet. We’re stepping up our attempts to contact and question the others on the list, but I don’t know how to work out which of them are potential victims, let alone potential murderers.”

“Czastka knows something.” said Charlotte. “He might be the key.”

“We’ve just talked to him,” Hal said, in his infuriating fashion. “He denies knowing anything at all that would connect him with King, Urashima and Kwiatek, and he denies having received the equipment and supplies paid for by the Rappaccini accounts. So far, there’s no proof that he’s lying. We’re worried about another name on the Wollongong list—Magnus Teidemann. He’s supposed to be out in the wilderness somewhere in mid-Africa, but he’s been ominously silent for some time. If he’s dead, it could take us a week to find the body. I’ve ordered a search. That’s all for now.” He broke the connection, without waiting for Charlotte to respond.

Charlotte had already recalled the list, and had begun tracing a path through the back-up information. “Paul Kwiatek,” she said to Oscar. “Software engineer. Should I call up a more detailed biog, or do you know him?”

“No,” said Oscar, “but I know Teidemann by repute. He was a major force in the UN a hundred years ago, one of the inner circle of world-planners. Gabriel King probably knew him personally. The unfolding network of cross-connections is going to deluge your friend’s AIs with data. There’s too much of it to sort out and unravel, unless we can somehow cut the Gordian knot at a stroke.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” she told him, although she wasn’t entirely convinced. “The machines are so fast that a profusion of data doesn’t trouble them. The real problem is the age of the data. If the motive for the murders really does go back a hundred and fifty years . . . but if it does, why wait until now to carry them out? Why murder men who are already on the threshold of extinction?”

“Why indeed?” echoed Oscar Wilde.

“It’s insane,” Charlotte opined, being unable to see any other explanation. “It’s some weird obsession.” Such things were not unheard of, even in these days of chemical retuning and biofeedback training. The brain was no longer the great mystery it once had been, but it kept stubborn and jealous guard over many of its secrets.

“Obsession might sustain memories which would otherwise fade away,” Oscar admitted. “If there were no obsession involved, no murderer could nurse a plan as elaborate as this for as long as Rappaccini must have nursed it.”

Charlotte returned to her contemplation of the list displayed on the screen. Apart from Teidemann’s, none of the names meant anything at all to her. Only a handful were listed as genetic engineers of any kind, and none seemed to have the right kind of background to be Rappaccini—except, of course, for Walter Czastka. As she scanned the subsidiary list of addresses, her eye was caught by the word “Kauai.” She stopped scrolling. One Stuart McCandless, ex-Chancellor of the University of Oceania, had retired to Kauai. She was tempted to call Hal and trumpet her discovery, but she knew what his response would be. His AIs would have turned up the coincidence; investigation of the data-trail would be in hand. She wished, briefly, that she were back in New York. There, at least, she would be involved in the routine pursuit of inquiries, making calls. What was she accomplishing out here, in the middle of nowhere?

She glanced out of the side-window as the car swung slowly and carefully around a bend into one of the ghost-towns whose names were still recorded on the map in spite of the fact that no one had lived in them for centuries. The ancient stone buildings had been weathered by dust-storms, but they still retained the sharp angles which proudly proclaimed their status as human artifacts. The land around them was quite dead, incapable of growing so much as a blade of grass, and every bit as desolate as an unspoiled lunar landscape, but the shadowy scars of human habitation still lay upon it.

In the long-gone days when the earth had lain temporarily unprotected by an ozone layer, this would have been a naked place. Even then, it would probably have been almost empty; this part of the state, within a couple of hundred kilometers of Los Angeles, had been very hard hit even by the first and least of the three plague wars—whose victims, not knowing that there was far worse to come, had innocently called it the Great Plague War.

8

The wallscreen blanked out. While Charlotte was still wondering what the interruption signified, the car’s AI relayed a message in large, flamboyant letters:

WELCOME, OSCAR: THE PLAY WILL COMMENCE IN TEN MINUTES. THE PLAYHOUSE IS BENEATH THE BUILDING TO YOUR RIGHT.

“Play?” said Charlotte, bitterly. “Have we come all this way just to watch a play?”

“It appears so,” said Oscar, as he opened the door and climbed out into the sultry heat of the deepening evening. “Do you carry transmitter-eyes and bubblebugs in that belt you’re wearing?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I suggest that you place a few about your person,” said Oscar. “I have only the one bubblebug of my own, which I shall mount on my forehead.”

Charlotte turned to stare at the building to their right. It did not look in the least like a theater. It might once have been a general store. It was roofless now, nothing more than a gutted shell.

“Why bring us out here to the middle of nowhere?” she demanded, angrily. “Why didn’t he just record it on tape for transmission in a theater in San Francisco or New York?” As she spoke, she planted two electronic eyes above her own eyebrows.

Oscar quickly located a downward-leading flight of stone steps inside the derelict building. Charlotte planted head-high nanolights every six or seven steps to illuminate their passage, which had been hollowed out using bacterial deconstructors far more modern than the building itself. By the time they reached the bottom of the stair, there were several meters of solid rock separating her from the car; she knew that her transmitter-eye would only function as a recording-device. At the bottom, there was a door made from some kind of synthetic organic material; it had no handle, but when Oscar touched it with his fingertips, it swung inward. “All doors in the world of theater are open to Oscar Wilde,” he muttered sarcastically.

Beyond the doorway was a well of impenetrable shadow. Charlotte automatically reached up to the wall inside the doorway, placing another nanolight there, but the darkness seemed to soak up its luminance effortlessly, and it showed her nothing but a few square centimeters of matte-black wall. The moment Oscar took a tentative step forward, however, a small spotlight winked on, picking out a two-seater sofa upholstered in black.

“Very considerate,” said Oscar, drily. He invited her to move ahead of him, and she did. Five seconds after they were seated, the spotlight winked out. Charlotte could not suppress a small gasp of alarm. The nanolight she had set beside the door shone like a single distant star in an infinite void.

When light returned, it was cleverly directed away from them; Charlotte could not see Oscar, nor her own body. It was as if she had become a disembodied viewpoint, like a bubblebug, looking out upon a world from which her physical presence had been erased. She seemed to be ten or twelve meters away from the event which unfolded before her eyes, but the distance was illusory. Cinematic holograms of the kind to which Michi Urashima had devoted his skills before turning to more dangerous toys were adept in the seductive art of sensory deception.

The “event” was a solo dance. The performer was a young woman, whose face was made up to duplicate the appearance that the image’s living model had presented to Michi Urashima’s spy-eyes. Only her hair and costume were different; the hair was now long, straight and jet-black, and she was dressed in sleek, translucent chiffons which were gathered in multicolored profusion about her lissome form, secured at strategic points by gem-faced catches. The music to which she danced, lithely and lasciviously, was raw and primitive. Charlotte knew by now that the original Oscar Wilde had written a play called Salome. Forearmed by that knowledge, she quickly guessed what she was to watch.

As the virtual Salome began the dance of the seven veils, the first impression Charlotte formed was that the dance was utterly artless. Modern dance, with all the artifice of contemporary biotechnology as a resource, was infinitely smoother and more complicated than this—but she judged that its primitive quality was deliberate. In the nineteenth century, Charlotte knew, there had been something called “pornography.” Nowadays, in a world where most sexual intercourse took place in virtual reality, with the aid of clever machinery, the idea of pornography was redundant; everyone now accepted that in the realm of mechanized fantasy, nothing was perverse and nothing was taboo. Charlotte thought she understood, dimly, the historical implications of Salome’s silly prancing, but she found it neither stimulating nor instructive. The gradual removal of the veils was simply a laborious way of counting down to a climax she was already expecting. She waited for Salome to acquire a mute partner for her mesmerized capering.

The dancer did look as if she were mesmerized. She looked as if she were lost in some kind of dream, not really aware of who she was or what she was doing. Charlotte remembered that the young woman had given a similar impression during the brief glimpse of her that Gabriel King’s cameras had caught. The dance slowed, and finally stopped. Salome stood with bowed head for a few moments, and then reached out into the shadows that crowded around her, and brought out of the darkness a silver platter, on which sat the decapitated head of a man. Charlotte was not surprised, but she still flinched. The virtual head looked more startlingly real than a real head would probably have done, by virtue of the artistry which had gone into the design of its horror-stricken expression and the bloodiness of the crudely severed neck. She recognized the face which the virtual head wore: it was Gabriel King’s.

The dancer plucked the head from its resting-place, entwining her delicate fingers in its hair. The salver disappeared, dissolved into the shadow. The dance began again.

How differently, Charlotte wondered, was Oscar Wilde seeing this ridiculous scene? Could he see it as something daring, monstrous and clever? Would he be able to sigh with satisfaction, in that irritating way of his, when the performance was over, and claim that Rappaccini was indeed a genius?

The macabre dance now seemed mechanical. The woman appeared to be unaware of the fact that she was supposedly brandishing a severed head. She moved its face close to her own, and then extended her arms again, maintaining the same distant and dreamy expression. Then the features of the severed head changed. It acquired an Oriental cast. Charlotte recognized Michi Urashima, and suddenly became interested again, eager for any hint of further change. She fixed her gaze steadfastly upon the horrid head. She had seen no picture of Paul Kwiatek, so she could only infer that the third appearance presented by the severed head was his, and she became even more intent when the third set of features blurred and shifted. The number and nature of the metamorphoses might well be crucial to the development of the investigation. She felt a surge of triumph as she realized that this revelation might vindicate her determination to stay with Oscar Wilde. She did not recognize the fourth face, but she was confident that the bubblebug set above her right eye would record it well enough for computer-aided recognition. How many more would there be?

The fifth face was darker than the fourth—naturally dark, she thought, not cosmetically melanized. She did not recognize this face, either, but she knew the sixth. She had seen it within the last few hours, looking considerably older and more ragged than its manifestation here, but unmistakably the same. It was Walter Czastka.

There was no seventh face. Salome slowed in her paces, faced the sofa where Oscar and Charlotte sat watching, and took her bow. Then the lights came on. Charlotte had assumed that the performance was over, and its object attained, but she was wrong. What she had so far witnessed was merely a prelude. The lights that came on brought a new illusion, infinitely more spectacular than the last.

Charlotte had attended numerous theatrical displays employing clever holographic techniques, and knew well enough how a black-walled space which comprised no more than a few hundred cubic meters could be made to seem far greater, but she had never seen a virtual space as vast and as ornate as this. Here was the palace in which Salome had danced, painted by a phantasmagoric imagination: a crazily vaulted ceiling higher than that in any reconstructed medieval cathedral, with elaborate stained-glass windows in mad profusion, offering all manner of fantastic scenes. Here was a polished floor three times the size of a sports-field, with a crowd of onlookers that must have numbered tens of thousands. But there was no sense of this being an actual place: it was an edifice born of nightmarish dreams, whose awesome and impossible dimensions weighed down upon a mere observer, reducing Charlotte in her own mind’s eye to horrific insignificance.

Salome, having bowed to the two watchers who had watched her dance at closer range than any of the fictitious multitude, turned to bow to another watcher: Herod, seated upon his throne. There had never been a throne like it in the entire history of empires and kingdoms; none but the most vainglorious of emperors could even have imagined it. It was huge and golden, hideously overburdened with silks and jewels, an appalling monstrosity of avaricious self-indulgence. It was, Charlotte knew, intended to appall. All of this was a calculated insult to the delicacy of effective illusion: a parody of grandiosity; an exercise in profusion for profusion’s sake.

The king on the throne had drawn himself three times life-size, as a bloated, overdressed grotesque. The body was like nothing any longer to be seen in a world which had banished obesity four hundred years before, but the face, had it only been leaner, would have been the face which Rappaccini wore in the photographs that Hal Watson had shown her the day before. Oscar took her wrist in his hand and squeezed it. “Tread carefully,” he whispered, his invisible lips no more than a centimeter from her ear. “This simulation may be programmed to tell us everything, if only we can question it cunningly enough.”

Herod/Rappaccini burst into mocking laughter, his tumultuous flesh heaving. “Do you think that I have merely human ears, Oscar? You can hardly see yourselves, I know, but you are not hidden from me. Your friend is charming, Oscar, but she is not one of us. She is of an age that has forgotten and erased its past.”

Mad, thought Charlotte. Absolutely and irredeemably mad. She wondered whether she might be in mortal danger, if the man beside her really was the secret designer of all of this.

“Moreau might have approved,” Oscar said, off-handedly, “but his vision always outpaced his capacity for detail. Michi Urashima would not have been satisfied so easily, although I detect his handiwork in some of the effects. Did Gabriel King supply the organisms which hollowed out this Aladdin’s cave, perchance?”

“He did,” answered Rappaccini, squirming in his huge uncomfortable seat like a huge slug. “I have made art with his sadly utilitarian instruments. I have taken some trouble to weave the work of all my victims into the tapestry of their destruction.”

“It’s overdone,” said Oscar, bluntly. “As a show of apparent madness, it is too excessive to be anything but pretense. Can we not talk as civilized men, since that is what we are?”

Rappaccini smiled. “That is why I wanted you here, dear Oscar,” he said. “Only you could suspect me of cold rationality in the midst of all this. But you understand civilization far too well to wear its gifts unthinkingly. You may well be the only man alive who understands the world’s decadence. Have the patient bureaucrats of the United Nations Police Force discovered my true name yet?”

“No,” said Oscar.

“We soon will,” Charlotte interposed, defiantly. The sim turned its bloodshot eye upon her, and she flinched from the baleful stare.

“The final act has yet to be played,” Rappaccini told her. “You may already know my true names, but you will have difficulty in identifying the one which I presently use as my own.” The sardonic gaze moved again, to meet Oscar’s invisible stare. “You will thank me for this, Oscar. You would never forgive me if I were not just a little too clever for you.”

“If you wanted to kill six men,” said Oscar, “why did you wait until they were almost dead? At any time in the last seventy years, fate might have cheated you. Had you waited another month, you might not have found Walter Czastka alive.”

“You underestimate the tenacity of men like these,” Rappaccini replied. “You think they are ready for death because they have ceased to live, but longevity has ingrained its habits deeply in the flesh. Without me to help them, they might have protracted their misery for many years yet. But I am nothing if not loyal to those deserving of my tenderness. I bring them not merely death, but glorious transfiguration! The fact of death is not the point at issue here. Did you think me capable of pursuing mere revenge? It is the manner of a man’s death that is all-important in our day and age, is it not? We have rediscovered the ancient joys of mourning, and the awesome propriety of solemn ceremony and dark symbol. Wreaths are not enough—not even wreaths which are spiders in disguise. The end of death itself is upon us, and how shall we celebrate it, save by making a new compact with the Grim Reaper? Murder is almost extinct, and it should not be. Murder must be rehabilitated, made romantic, flamboyant, gorgeous, and glamorous! What have my six victims left to do but set an example to their younger brethren? And who but I should appoint himself their deliverer, their ennobler, the proclaimer of their fame?”

“I fear,” said Oscar, coldly, “that this performance might not make the impact that you intend. It reeks of falsity.”

Rappaccini smiled again. “You know better than that, Oscar,” he said. “You know in your heart that this marvelous appearance is real, and the hidden actuality a mere nothing. This is no cocoon of hollowed rock; it is my palace. You will see a finer rock before the end.”

“Your representations are deceptive, Dr. Rappaccini,” Charlotte put in. “Your daughter showed us Gabriel King’s head first and foremost, but Kwiatek died before him, and Teidemann was probably dead even before Kwiatek. It was optimistic, too—we’ve already warned Walter Czastka, and if the other one can still be saved, we’ll save him too.”

Rappaccini’s sim turned back to her. She had not been able to deduce, so far, how high a grade of artificial intelligence it had. She did not expect any explicit confirmation of her guess that Magnus Teidemann was a victim, or that the woman really was Rappaccini’s daughter, but she felt obliged to try.

“All six will go to their appointed doom,” the sim told her.

She wanted to get out now, to transmit a tape of this encounter to Hal Watson, so that he could identify the fifth face, but she hesitated.

“What can these men possibly have done to you?” she asked, trying to sound contemptuous although there was no point. “What unites them in your hatred?”

“I do not hate them at all,” replied the sim, “and the link between them is not recorded in that silly Net which was built to trap the essence of human experience. I have done what I have done because it was absurd and unthinkable and comical. Great lies have been banished from the world for far too long, and the time has come for us not merely to tell them, but to live them also. It is by no means easy to work against the grain of synthetic wood, but we must try.”

And with that, darkness fell, lit only by the tiny star which marked the door through which they had entered the Underworld.

9

Night had fallen by the time Charlotte and Oscar emerged into the open, but there was a three-quarter moon and the stars shone very brightly through the clear, clean air. The car had gone. Charlotte’s hand tightened around the bubblebugs which she had carefully removed from their stations above her eyebrows. She had been holding them at the ready, anxious to plug them into the car’s systems so that their data could be decanted and relayed back to Hal Watson. She murmured a curse.

“Don’t worry,” said Oscar, who had come out behind her. “Rappaccini will not abandon us. A vehicle of some kind will be along very shortly to carry us on our way.”

“Where to?” she asked, unable to keep the asperity out of her voice.

“Westward. We may have one more port of call en route, but our final destination will surely be the island where Walter Czastka is. His death is intended to form the climatic scene of this little drama.”

“Let’s hope it’s not too late to prevent that,” said Charlotte bitterly. “And let’s hope the fifth man is still alive when we get a chance to find out who he is. He may be dead already, of course—your ghoulish friend displayed his victims in the order in which their bodies were discovered, not the order in which they were killed.”

“He was never my friend,” Oscar objected, “and I am not sure that I like his determination to involve me in this. There is an element of mockery in it.”

“Mockery,” she said, tersely, “isn’t a crime. Murder is.” She took out her waistphone and tried to send a signal. There was a chance that the power-cell had enough muscle to reach a relay-station. Nothing happened. She turned back to her enigmatic companion.

“Did you understand all that stuff?” she asked him, point-blank.

“I think so,” Oscar admitted. “My ancient namesake’s Salome provided the format, but the set owed more to Gustave Moreau’s paintings then Oscar Wilde’s humble play. . . .” He broke off. His words had gradually been overlaid by another sound, whose monotonous drone now threatened to drown him out entirely.

“There!” said Charlotte, pointing at a shadow eclipsing the stars. It was descending rapidly toward them, growing hugely as it did so. It was a VTOL airplane, whose engines were even now switching to the vertical mode so that it could land helicopter-fashion. Charlotte and Oscar hurried into the shelter of the building from which they had come, to give it space to land.

The plane had only an AI pilot. While Oscar climbed in behind her Charlotte plugged her waistphone into the comcon and deposited her bubblebugs in the decoder. “Hal,” she said, as soon as the connection was made. “Data coming in: crazy message from Rappaccini, delivered by sim. Conclusive proof of Rappaccini’s involvement. Pick out the face of the fifth victim and identify it. Send an urgent warning to Walter Czastka. And tell us what course this damn plane is following, when you can track it.” The plane had already taken off again.

Hal acknowledged, but paused only briefly before saying: “I’m sure all this is very interesting, but I’ve closed the file on Rappaccini. We’re concentrating all our efforts on the woman.”

“What?” said Charlotte, dumbfounded. “What do you mean, closed the file? The tape is proof of Rappaccini’s involvement. Have you found out his real name?” Hal was too busy decanting the data and setting up programs to deal with it; there was a frustrating pause. Charlotte looked around. The airplane was a small one, built to carry a maximum of four passengers; there was a frustrating pause. Charlotte looked around. The airplane was a small one, built to carry a maximum, of four passengers; there was a second comcon and a second pair of seats behind the one into which she and Oscar had climbed. Behind the second row of seats there was a curtained section containing four bunks. Oscar was busy inspecting the menu on the food-dispenser, frowning.

“It all depends what you mean by a real name,” said Hal, finally. “He really was born Jafri Biasiolo. The dearth of information about Biasiolo is the result of poor data-gathering toward the end of the Aftermath. After his first rejuvenation—which changed his appearance to the one that we saw earlier—he began to use the name Rappaccini for all purposes. Later, as he approached his second rejuve, he established half a dozen fake identities under various pseudonyms, including Gustave Moreau. After the rejuve, when he had his appearance considerably modified again, he began using the Moreau name as a primary, and Rappaccini became exclusively virtual. Moreau leased an islet west of Kauai, where he’s spent most of the last twenty-five years, never leaving for more than four or five weeks at a time. There’s no evident connection between Moreau and the victims, except that Walter Czastka’s his nearest neighbor. So far as we know, Biasiolo never had any connection with the university at Wollongong.”

“I don’t understand,” said Charlotte. “Surely we have enough to arrest Moreau, with all the stuff I’ve just sent through. Why close the file?”

“Because he’s dead,” Hal replied, smugly. “Ten weeks ago in Honolulu. Details of his birth might be lost in the mists of obscurity, but every detail of his death was scrupulously recorded. There’s no doubt that it was him. The common links to his island were closed down before that—he’s been shipping equipment and material back to Kauai for over a year. There’s nothing there now except the ecosystem which he built. The island’s off-limits until the UN can get an inspection team in.”

“But he’s still responsible for all this,” Charlotte protested. “He must have set it all up before he died. He and the girl—his daughter.”

“Moreau never had a daughter in any of his incarnations. He was sterilized before his first rejuve—even though it wasn’t actually a legal requirement back then, it was a point of political principle. He made the customary deposits in a reputable sperm bank, but they’ve never been touched.”

“Oh, come on, Hal! He’s a top-class genetic engineer—his sterilization doesn’t mean a thing. Look at the tape. She’s playing Salome to his Herod!”

“That’s not evidence,” said Hal, sharply. “Anyhow, the exact relationship of the girl to Moreau is neither here nor there. The point is that she’s the active mover in all this. She’s the only one we can put on trial, and she’s the one we need to find before the newscasters start billing this mess as the Crime of the Century. If there’s any real help you can give me, I’d be grateful, but all this theatrical stuff is just more news-fodder, which we can do without. Okay?”

Charlotte could understand why Hal was edgy. News of how Gabriel King and the others had died must have leaked out, and he was very sensitive about cases being publicized before arrests had been made. It wasn’t his image or his reputation within the department that he was worried about; it was a point of principle, a private obsession.

“We are helping, aren’t we?” she whispered, after the inset had disappeared. The question, by necessity, was addressed to Oscar Wilde.

“He won’t find her before we do,” Oscar said softly. “We’ve been given the fast track to the climax of the psychodrama. And she is his daughter—if not a literal daughter, then a figurative one. I see now why the simulacrum said that we’d have difficulty identifying his true name. Moreau was his true name, by then, but he knew that the coincidence would make me assume that it was a mere pseudonym. I must talk to Walter again.”

Before he could touch the keyboard, however, another call came in.

“The fifth face is Stuart McCandless,” said Hal’s voice. “We’ve spoken to him once but we’re trying to get through to him again; his house AI’s sent out a summoner. Your plane’s heading west, on course for Kauai. You might be able to speak to him in person soon.”

Charlotte placed her fingers on the rim of the keyboard, but Oscar put his hand on top of hers, gently insistent. “I have to call Walter,” he said. “Dr. Watson will have priority on the call to McCandless.”

She let him go ahead, although she knew that she shouldn’t let her authority slip away so easily. She, after all, was the investigator. She no longer thought that Oscar was a murderer, but that didn’t affect the fact that he was the one who was only along for the ride.

Oscar’s call was fielded by a sim, which looked considerably healthier than the real Walter had. “Oscar Wilde,” he said, curtly. “I need to talk to Walter urgently.”

“I’m not taking any calls at present,” said the simulacrum, flatly.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Walter,” said Oscar, impatiently. “This is no time to go into a sulk.”

The sim flickered, and its image was replaced by Czastka’s actual face. “What do you want?” he said, his voice taut with aggravation.

“You’re a player in this game whether you like it or not, Walter,” Oscar said, soothingly. “We really do have to try to figure it out.”

“I’m not in any danger,” said Walter, tiredly. “There’s no one else on the island, and no one can land without the house systems knowing about it. I’m perfectly safe. I never heard of anyone called Biasiolo, I’ve never met Moreau, and I know of no connection between myself and the other names the police gave me that could possibly constitute a motive for murder.”

“I don’t think the motive is conventional,” said Oscar. “This whole business is a publicity stunt, a weird artistic statement, but there must be some kind of connection—something that happened at Wollongong.”

Czastka looked ominously pale. “I told your friends, Oscar—I don’t remember. Nobody remembers what they were doing a hundred and thirty years ago. Nobody.”

“I don’t believe that, Walter,” said Oscar, softly. “We forget almost everything, but we can always remember the things which matter most, if we try hard enough. This is something which matters, Walter. It matters now, and it mattered then. If you try, you can remember.”

“I can’t.” The word was delivered with such bitterness and anguish that Charlotte flinched.

“What about you and Gustave Moreau, Walter?” Oscar asked. “Didn’t you know he was your neighbor?”

“I’ve never even seen the man,” said Czastka. “All I know about him is the joke the wise guys on Kauai keep repeating. The island of Dr. Moreau, get it? You must—you’ve probably even read the damn thing. You must know, too, that we keep ourselves to ourselves out here. All I want is to keep to myself. I just want to be left alone.”

Oscar paused for thought. “Do you want to die, Walter?” he asked, finally. His inflection suggested that it was not a rhetorical question.

“No,” said Czastka, sourly. “I want to live forever, just like you. I want to be young again, just like you. But when I do die, I don’t want flowers by Rappaccini at my funeral, and I don’t want anything of yours. When I die, I want all the flowers to be mine. Is that clear?”

“I think we’re on our way to see you,” said Oscar, placidly. “We can talk then.”

“Damn you, Wilde,” said the old man, vehemently. “I don’t want you on my island. You stay away, you hear? Stay away!” He broke the connection without waiting for any response.

Oscar turned sideways to look at Charlotte. His face looked slightly sinister in the dim light of the helicopter’s cabin. “Your turn,” he said. His smile was very faint.

It didn’t take as long to get through as Charlotte had expected. Evidently, whoever had called on Hal’s behalf had been brisk and business-like. Stuart McCandless wasn’t answering his phone in person, but when Charlotte fed his sim her authority codes it summoned him without delay.

“Yes?” he said, his dark and well-worn face peering at her with slightly peevish surprise. “I’ve hardly begun on the data you people dumped into my system. It’s going to take some time to look at it all.”

“I’m Charlotte Holmes, Dr. McCandless,” she said. “I’m in an airplane that has apparently been programmed by Gustave Moreau, alias Rappaccini. He seems intent on providing my companion—Oscar Wilde—with a good seat from which to observe this unfolding melodrama. We’re heading out into the ocean from the American coast. We’re heading your way and I thought we ought to talk. Have you ever met Moreau?”

McCandless shook his head vigorously. “I’ve already answered these questions,” he said, irritably.

“Have you looked at the tapes of the girl who visited Gabriel King and Michi Urashima? Do you recognize her?”

“I’d be able to study your tapes more closely if you’d allow me time to do it, Ms. Holmes. I’m looking at them now, but in these days of changing appearances it’s almost impossible to recognize anyone. I don’t know whether the person in those pictures is twenty years old or a hundred. I’ve had dozens of students who were similar enough to be able to duplicate her appearance with a little effort. There’s a visitor here now who could only need a little elementary remodeling.”

Charlotte felt Oscar Wilde’s hand fall upon hers, but she didn’t need the hint. She was already trying to work out how to phrase the next question. “Who is your visitor, Dr. McCandless?” she asked, in the end.

“Oh, there’s not the slightest need to worry,” McCandless replied. “I’ve known her for some time. Her name is Julia Herold. I told your colleague in New York all about her.”

“Could you ask her to come to the phone?” asked Charlotte. She glanced sideways, very briefly, at Oscar.

“Oh, very well,” McCandless said. He turned away, saying, “Julia?”

Moments later he moved aside, surrendering his place in front of the camera to a young woman, apparently in her early twenties. The woman stared into the camera. Her abundant hair was golden red, and very carefully sculptured, and her eyes were a vivid green. A wig and a bimolecular overlay, Charlotte thought. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Herold,” she said, slowly. “We’re investigating a series of murders, and it’s difficult to determine what information may be relevant.”

“I understand,” said the woman, calmly.

Charlotte felt a strange pricking sensation at the back of her neck. It’s her, she thought. It has to be her. Hal Watson was undoubtedly checking the woman out at this very moment, with all possible speed, and if he found anything to justify action, he would act swiftly—but until he did, there was nothing she could do. She’s playing with us, Charlotte thought. She has McCandless in the palm of her hand and there’s no way we can save him. But she’ll never get away. She can’t make another move without our knowing about it.

“May I talk to Dr. McCandless again?” she asked, dully.

They switched places again. Charlotte wanted to say Whatever you do, don’t kiss her! but she knew how stupid it would sound. “Dr. McCandless,” she said, uncomfortably, “we think that something might have happened when you were a student yourself. Something that links you, however tenuously, with Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, Paul Kwiatek, Magnus Teidemann, and Walter Czastka. We desperately need to know what it was. We understand how difficult it is to remember, but . . .”

McCandless controlled his irritation. “I’m checking back through my records, trying to turn something up,” he said. “I hardly know Czastka, although he lives close by. The others I know only by repute. I didn’t even know that I was contemporary with Urashima or Teidemann. There were thousands of students at the university. We didn’t all graduate in the same year. We were never in the same place at one time, unless. . . .”

“Unless what, Dr. McCandless?” said Charlotte, quickly.

The dark brow was furrowed and the eyes were glazed, as the man reached for some fleeting, fugitive memory. “The beach party . . .?” he muttered. Then, the face became hard and stern again. “No,” he said, firmly. “I really can’t remember.”

Charlotte saw a slender hand descend reassuringly upon Stuart McCandless’s shoulder, and she saw him take it in his own, thankfully. She knew that there was no point in asking what he had half-remembered. He was shutting her out.

It’s happening now, she thought, before our very eyes. She’s going to kill him within the next few minutes, and we can’t do a thing to stop it. But we can surely stop her before she gets to Walter Czastka.

“Dr. McCandless,” she said, desperately. “I have reason to believe that you’re in mortal danger. I advise you to isolate yourself completely—and I mean completely, Dr. McCandless.”

“I know what you mean,” he retorted testily. “I know how the mind of a policeman works. But I can give you my absolute assurance that I’m in no danger whatsoever. Now, may I get on with the work that your colleague asked me to do?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She let him break the connection; she didn’t feel that she could do it herself.

When the screen blanked, she turned and said: “He’s as good as dead, isn’t he?”

“The seeds may already be taking root in his flesh,” said Oscar, gently. “It might have been too late, no matter what anyone could have said or done.”

“What was it that he started to say?” she asked. “And why did he stop?”

“Something that came to mind in spite of his resistance. Something, perhaps, that Walter might half-remember too, if only he wanted to. . . .”

Charlotte shook her head, tiredly. She called Hal. “Julia Herold,” she said, shortly. “Have you tied her in with Moreau yet?”

“No,” said Hal, simply. “She’s a student. Her career seems quite ordinary, all in order. According to the Net, she wasn’t in New York when Gabriel King received his visitor, nor in San Francisco when Urashima was infected. I’m double-checking—if it’s disinformation, I’ll get through it in a matter of hours.”

“She was there,” said Charlotte. “Whatever the superficial data-flow says, she was there. It’s all in place, Hal—everything except the reason. You’ve got to stop her leaving the island. Whatever else happens, you mustn’t let her get to Czastka.”

“Who’s her father?” Oscar put in. “Whose child is she?”

“Egg and sperm were taken from the banks,” said Hal. “Both donors long-dead. Six co-parents filed the application—no traceable link to anyone involved in this. The sperm was logged in the name of Lothar Kjeldsen, born 2355, died 2417. The ovum was Maria Inacio’s, born 2402, died 2423. No duplicate pairing registered, no other posthumous offspring registered to either parent. I’m checking for disinformation input, in case the entire Herold identity is virtual.”

“The mother was born at the same time as the men on the victim list. Could she have known them?”

“It’s possible. She was an Australian resident at the appropriate time. There’s no trace of her in the University records, but she might have been living next door. What would it prove if she was? She’s been dead for a hundred and thirty years. She drowned in Honolulu—presumed accidental, possibly a suicide. This isn’t getting us anywhere, Dr. Wilde, and I have a whole panel lighting up on me—I’m cutting off.”

The screen went blank yet again.

“She’s Rappaccini’s daughter,” said Oscar, softly. “I don’t know which bit of the record’s been faked, or how, but she’s Rappaccini’s daughter. And she’ll get to Walter, even if she has to swim.”

10

Charlotte stared out of the viewport beside her. Behind them, in the east, the dawn was breaking. Ahead of them, in the west, the sky was still dark and ominous. Beneath them, the sea was only just becoming visible as fugitive rays of silvery light caught the tops of lazy waves. In these latitudes, the sea was almost unpolluted by the vast amount of synthetic photosynthetic substances which were daily pumped out from the artificial islands of the Timor Sea; even by day it did not display the defiant greenness of Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis. Even so, this region of the ocean could not be reckoned a marine wilderness. The so-called seven seas were a single vast system, now half-gentled by the hand of man. The Continental Engineers, despite the implications of their name, had better control of evolution’s womb than extinction’s rack. Even the wrathful volcanoes which had created the Hawaiian islands were now sufficiently manipu-lable that they could be forced to yield upon demand the little virgin territories which the likes of Walter Czastka and Oscar Wilde had rented for their experiments in Creation.

“In my namesake’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Oscar said, ruminatively, “the eponymous anti-hero made a diabolical bargain, exchanging fates with a portrait of himself, with the consequence that his picture was marred by all the afflictions of age and dissolution while the real Dorian remained perpetually young. He cast aside all conventional ideas of morality, determined to savor the entire gamut of pleasurable sensation.”

“I’m sure it’s great fun,” said Charlotte, ironically.

Oscar ignored the remark. “At that time, of course,” he said, “the story of Dorian Gray was the purest of fantasies, but we live in a different era now. It is perhaps too early to declare that yours is the last generation which will be subject to the curse of aging, but I am living proof of the fact that even my generation has set aside much of the burden with which ugliness, disease, and the aging process afflicted us in days of old. We are corruptible, but we also have the means to set aside corruption, to reassert, in spite of all the ravages of time and malady, the image which we would like to have of ourselves. Nowadays, everyone who has the means may have beauty, and even those of limited means have a right of access to the elementary technologies of rejuvenation. I am young now for the fourth time, and no matter how often doctors and doubters tell me that my flesh is too weak to weather a fourth rejuvenation, I will not be prevented from attempting it. Nothing will induce me to become like Walter Czastka when I might instead gamble my mortality against the chance of yet another draught from the fountain of youth.”

“So what?” said Charlotte. “Why tell me?”

“Because,” he said, tolerantly, “that’s why Rappaccini expects me to understand what sort of artwork he is designing. That’s why he expects me to become its interpreter and champion, explaining to the world what it is that he has done. Because I’m Oscar Wilde—and because I’m Dorian Gray. Men like the first Oscar Wilde and the first Gustave Moreau were fond of likening their own era to the days of the declining Roman Empire, when its aristocracy had grown effete and self-indulgent, so utterly enervated by luxury that its members could find stimulation only in orgiastic excess. They argued that the ruling class of the nineteenth century had been similarly corrupted by comfort, to the extent that anyone among them who had any sensitivity at all lived under the yoke of a terrible ennui, which could only be opposed by sensual and imaginative excess. All that remained for men of genius to do was mock the meaningless of conformity and enjoy the self-destructive exultation of moral and artistic defiance.

“They were right, of course. Theirs was a decadent culture, absurdly distracted by its luxuries and vanities, unwittingly lurching toward its historical terminus. The ‘comforts’ of the nineteenth century—hygiene, medicine, electricity—were the direct progenitors of what we now call the Devastation. Few men had the vision to understand what was happening, and even fewer had the capacity to care. Addicted to their luxuries as they were, even terror could not give them foresight. Blindly and stupidly, they laid the world to waste, and used all the good intentions of their marvelous technology to pave themselves a road to Hell. In the Aftermath, of course, the work of renewal began. Collective control of fertility was achieved, and the old world of hateful tribes was replaced by the world of the Net, which bound the entire human race into a single community. And we were able once again to cultivate our comforts . . . to the extent that Rappaccini seemingly believes that the revolution is complete, and that the wheel has come full circle.”

“But that’s nonsense!” said Charlotte. “There’s no way that there could be another Devastation. There couldn’t possibly be another population explosion, or another plague war.”

“That’s not what Rappaccini fears,” said Oscar. “What he’s trying to make us see, I think, is the horror of a world inhabited entirely by the old: a world made stagnant by the dominion of minds that have lost their grip on memory and imagination alike, becoming slaves to habit, imprisoned by their own narrow horizons. He’s telling us that, in one way or another, we must kill our old men. The argument of his artwork is that if we can’t liberate our renewable bodies from the frailty of our mortal minds, then the technological conquest of death will be a tragedy and not a triumph. He has undertaken to murder six men who are nearing a hundred and fifty years of age, not one of whom has dared to risk a third rejuvenation, even though it would seem that they have little or nothing to lose—and he has chosen for his audience a man who has taken that gamble, hopefully soon enough to avoid the kind of mental sclerosis which has claimed his victims. Can you begin to see what he’s about?”

“I can see that he’s stark, staring mad,” said Charlotte.

Oscar smiled wryly. “Perhaps he is,” he said. “His fear is real enough—but perhaps the threat isn’t as overwhelming as he seems to think. Perhaps the old men will never take over the world, no matter how many they are or how old they grow. Old age is, after all, self-defeating. Those who lose the ability to live also lose the will to live. But the creative spark can be maintained, if it’s properly nurtured. The victory of ennui isn’t inevitable. If and when we really can transform every human egg-cell to equip it for eternal physical youth, those children will discover ways to adapt themselves to that condition by cultivating eternal mental youth. My way of trying to do that is, I admit, primitive—but I am here to help prepare the way for those who come after me. They will be the true children of our race: the first truly human beings.”

Charlotte felt her eyes growing heavy; she felt drained. If only she had been more alert, she thought, she might have obtained a firmer grasp on Oscar Wilde’s arguments. After all, she too retained an echo of the 1890s in her name. Could the small phonetic step which separated “Charlotte” from “Sherlock” really signify such a vast abyss of incomprehension? She knew that she needed sleep, and she felt in need of a soporific. Unfortunately, she was four thousand kilometers away from the ingenious resources of her intimate technology. She looked uncertainly at Oscar Wilde. He was watching her, with a serious expression in his liquid, luminous eyes.

“We ought to get some sleep,” Charlotte said. “It’ll be late tomorrow before we get to Hawaii.” She hesitated, wondering how to proceed, her gaze drifting to the curtain which screened the cabin’s bunkspace.

“How my namesake’s heart would have warmed to our Virtual Realities and the wonders of our intimate technology!” Oscar said, as though continuing his reverie. “I fear, though, that we have not yet learned to use our intimate technologies as fully or as consciencelessly as we might. Even in a world of artificial wombs and long-dead parents, we cling to the notion that sexual intercourse is essentially a form of communication, or even communion, rather than an entirely personal matter, whose true milieu is the arena of fantasy, where all idiosyncrasies may be safely unfettered.”

Charlotte couldn’t help blushing, although she presumed that he had preempted her proposition mainly in order to spare her blushes.

“Thanks for telling me,” she said, sharply. “I suppose that if Rappaccini had you on his list of victims, you’d be in no danger.”

“Not so,” he said. “A kiss is, after all, just a kiss—and I can appreciate a lovely face as well as any man. It is only in matters of true passion that I am an exclusive and unrepentant Narcissus.”

11

When Charlotte awoke, the sun was high, but Oscar had darkened the viewports in order to conserve a soft crepuscular light within the cabin of the speeding plane. She sat up and drew the curtain aside to look over the backs of the seats. Her waistphone was still plugged in to the comcon; data was parading across the main screen at the command of Oscar’s deft fingertips.

“Good morning,” he said, instantly aware of her movement although he had not turned. “It is still morning, thanks to the time-harvesting effects of westward travel. We’re less than half an hour from Kauai, but I fear that we’ll be unable to do much there except bear witness to the completion of the fifth phase of Rappaccini’s grand plan.”

Because she was slightly befuddled by sleep, it took her a second or two to work out what he meant. “McCandless is dead!” she said, finally.

“Quite dead,” he confirmed. “The local police had him removed to an intensive-care unit as soon as he showed signs of illness, but there was absolutely nothing to be done for him. The progress of his devourers will be tracked with infinite patience by a multitude of observers—the doctors have sent a fleet of nanocameras into his tissues—but to no avail. What remains of Teidemann’s body has been found too.”

Charlotte donned the tunic of her police uniform. “What about Julia Herold? Have they got her in custody?”

“Alas, no.”

Charlotte knew that she ought to have been astonished and outraged, but all that she really felt was a sense of bitter resignation.

“How could they possibly fail to intercept her?”

“She had already left when McCandless began to show signs of distress,” said Oscar, who did not seem overly disappointed. “She went for a moonlight swim, and never surfaced again. The eyes set to follow her were mounted on flitterbugs, and by the time suitable submarine eyes entered the water she was beyond reach. Flying eyes are, of course, watching avidly for her to surface, but she must have had breathing apparatus secreted off-shore, and some kind of mechanized transport.”

“A submarine?” said Charlotte, incredulously.

“More likely a towing device of some kind. The officer in charge of the failed operation pointed out that there was little more he could have done without a warrant for her arrest. One has now been issued. The Kauai police have sent helicopters to lie in wait for her, but Walter has forbidden them permission to land, and they’re not empowered to override his wishes unless and until they actually see her. There’s one more police helicopter awaiting our arrival on Kauai.”

“Have you talked to Czastka?”

“No. He’s refusing all calls. He presumably still thinks that all he needs to do is keep his house sealed. ‘Julia Herold,’ by the way, is a fiction of disinformation. Your Dr. Watson has proved that the person in McCandless’ house was indeed the same one who visited Gabriel King in New York and Michi Urashima in San Francisco. He is confident that he will be able to prove that she delivered the fatal flowers to Teidemann and Kwiatek too. He assures me that it is only a matter of time before he discloses an authentic personal history.”

“Is that everything?”

“By no means. It required all my skills as an organizer to present these edited highlights so economically.”

Charlotte looked resentfully at the bright and beautiful young man, who seemed unafflicted by the least sign of weariness. She switched the nearest viewport to reflector mode so that she could straighten her hair, and studied the faint wrinkles that were becoming apparent in the corners of her eyes. They could be removed easily enough by the most elementary tissue-manipulation, but they still served as a reminder of the biological clock that was ticking away inside her. Thirty years to rejuve number one, she thought, and counting. It was not a kind of paranoia to which she was usually prone, but she could not help comparing her flawed features with Oscar’s fully-restored perfection.

As soon as they had set down at the Kauai heliport, Charlotte opened the door, and leapt down to the blue plastic apron. The promised helicopter was waiting less than a hundred meters away. Its police markings were a delight to her eyes, holding the promise of control. From now on she would no longer be a passenger but an active participant; a pursuer, an active instrument of justice. Oscar kept pace with her in spite of the fact that his gait seemed much lazier.

“I should leave you here,” she said, while climbing aboard. “I can, you know—this isn’t public transport.”

“You wouldn’t be so cruel,” he said. He was right.

The helicopter lifted as soon as they were strapped in. Charlotte reached into the equipment-locker under the seat, and brought forth a handgun. She checked the mechanism before clipping it to her belt.

“You’re not thinking of using that, I hope?” said Oscar.

“Now the proof’s in place,” Charlotte answered, tautly, “I can employ any practical measure which may be necessary to apprehend her. The bullets are non-lethal. We’re the police, remember.”

They were traveling at a slower speed than they had previously, but flew so low that their progress seemed more rapid. The downdraft of their blades carved the roiling waves into all manner of curious shapes. High in the sky above them, a silver airship was making its stately progress from Honolulu to Yokohama. Oscar tuned in a broadcast news report. There were pictures of Gabriel King’s skeleton, neatly entwined with winding stems bearing black flowers in horrid profusion. This was only the beginning; the AI voice-over promised that details of several more murders would soon be revealed. Charlotte knew that an operation of the size that was now being mounted would attract the attention of half the newshawks in United America and a good few in not-very-united Eastasia. Flocks of flying eyes would be migrating this way from every direction. The privacy which Walter Czastka so passionately desired to conserve was about to be rudely shattered.

Oscar blanked the newscast as soon as it moved on to more mundane matters, and his fingers punched out Walter Czastka’s telephone code. The AI sim which answered had clearly been reprogrammed since Charlotte had last seen it.

“Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” it said, without bothering with any conventional identification or polite preliminary. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable.”

Charlotte turned the camera-eye so that her own image filled the viewfield. “Dr. Czastka,” she said, “this is Charlotte Holmes of the UN Police. I need to speak to you, urgently.”

“Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” replied the sim, stubbornly. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable.”

Charlotte looked at Oscar, whose face had creased into an anxious frown. “I have a horrible suspicion,” he said, “that we might be too late.” Charlotte looked at her wristwatch. They were still twenty minutes away from the island. She punched in another code, connecting herself to the commander of the task-force that had surrounded it.

“What’s happening?” she demanded.

“No sign of her yet,” the answer came back. “If anything happens, Inspector, you’ll be the first to know.” There was nothing to do but wait, so she sat back in her seat and stared down at the agitated waves. They were still a few minutes away when the voice came back on line. “We have camera-contact,” it said. “Relaying pictures.”

The screen showed a female figure in a humpbacked wetsuit walking out of the sea, looking for all the world as if she were enjoying a leisurely stroll. She paused at the high tide line to remove the suit and its built-in paralung, then knelt beside the discarded wetsuit and removed something from a inner pocket. Over the voice-link they could hear the officer who had spoken to them instructing her to desist.

Suddenly, the air around the girl was filled by a dense smoke, which swirled in the breeze as it dispersed.

“Alate spores,” Oscar guessed. “Millions of them.”

Julia Herold stood, with her arms upraised in a gesture of seeming surrender. She had apparently done what she’d come to do.

“Stay in the copters,” Charlotte instructed. “The stuff she’s released is probably harmless to anyone but Czastka, but there’s no need for everyone to take the risk. I’ll pick her up myself.”

“As you wish,” said the other officer, sourly. He evidently thought that Charlotte was intent on appropriating what little glory there might be in making the arrest.

“I think we may have mistaken the exact form that the final murder was intended to take,” said Oscar, quietly. “It’s not Walter those spores are after—it’s his ecosystem. She came here to destroy his private Creation.”

As the helicopter swept in to land Charlotte scanned the trees which fringed the beach. Lush undergrowth nestled about the boles of palmlike trees. She half-expected to see the green leaves already flecked with darker colors, but nothing was happening yet.

“Nothing can stop it,” said Oscar, softly, his voice reduced now almost to a whisper. “Each murder is one hundred percent specific to its victim. Walter’s own body is safe inside the house, but that’s not what he cares about . . . it’s not what he is. Rappaccini’s instruments are going to devour his entire eco-sphere—every last molecule.”

For the first time, Charlotte realized, Oscar Wilde was genuinely horrified. The equanimity that had hardly been rippled by the sight of Gabriel King’s hideously embellished skeleton was ruffled now. For the first time, Oscar was identifying with one of Rappaccini’s victims, seeing Rappaccini as a criminal as well as an artist. But even as Charlotte observed his outrage, Oscar’s expression was changing.

“Look!” he said. “Look what kind of demi-Eden Walter Czastka has been endeavoring to build here.” The helicopter had set down some thirty meters from the woman, who still stood there, with her arms upraised. She was taking no notice of them or the other hovering machines; her green eyes were quite blank. Charlotte climbed down, keeping one eye on the woman while she obeyed Oscar’s instruction to look inland. She could not see anything surprising or alarming.

“Poor Walter!” said Oscar, sadly. “What a petty Arcadia this is! Immature and incomplete though it undoubtedly is, its limitations already show. Here is the work of a hack trying desperately to exceed his own potential—but here is the work of a man who has not even the imagination of blind and stupid nature. I can see now why Walter tried to keep me away. The mysterious Julia does not have to kiss poor Walter, because Walter is already dead, and he knows it. Even if his heart still beats within his withered frame, he is dead. Rappaccini’s worms are feeding on his carcass.”

“It looks perfectly ordinary to me,” said Charlotte, staring up at the uneven line made by the crowns of Walter Czastka’s palmlike trees, as they extended their ample canopies to bask in the life-giving light of the sun.

“Precisely,” said Oscar Wilde, with a heavy sigh.

Charlotte moved to confront the woman, who stood statue-still, looking up into the brilliant blue sky.

“Julia Herold,” she began, “I arrest you for . . .”

She heard a strange squawking sound behind her, and guessed that someone was trying to attract her attention by shouting over the voice-link to the helicopter’s comcon. She picked up her waistphone impatiently. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got her. It’s all over.”

“Look behind you!” said the voice from the other end, trying to shout at her although the volume control on her waistphone compensated automatically. “Corrosion and corruption, woman, look behind you!”

Uncomprehendingly, Charlotte looked behind her.

Falling toward her from the vivid brightness of the early afternoon sun was a black shadow. At first she could judge neither its size nor its shape, but as it swooped down, the truth became abundantly and monstrously clear. She could not believe the evidence of her eyes. She knew full well that what she was seeing was flatly impossible, and her mind stubbornly refused to accept the truth of what she saw.

It was a bird, but it was a bird like none that had ever taken to the skies of earth in the entire evolutionary history of flight, bigger by far than the helicopters whose automatic pilots were taking evasive action to avoid it. The pinion-feathers of its black wings were the size of samurai swords, and its horrible head was naked, like a vulture’s. Its beak was agape, and it cried out as it swooped down upon her. Its cry was a terrible inhuman shriek, which made her think of the wailing of the damned in some Dantean Hell.

Wise panic took hold of her and threw her aside like a rag doll, lest she be struck by the diving impossibility. She had no time to fire her gun, nor even to think about firing it. Her reflexes rudely cast her down, tumbling her ignomini-ously onto the silvery sand.

Julia Herold didn’t move a muscle. Charlotte understood, belatedly, that the raising of her arms was not a gesture of surrender at all. With confident ease, the girl interlaced her fingers with the reaching talons of the huge bird, and was lifted instantly from her feet.

According to all the best authorities, Charlotte knew, no bird could lift an adult human being from the ground—but this bird could. It was climbing again now, beating its fabulous night-black wings with extravagant majesty, circling back into the dazzling halo of brilliance that surrounded the tropical sun.

Charlotte reached up her own hand to take the one that Oscar Wilde was extending to her. “Do you remember when Rappaccini’s simulacrum said to us, ‘This is no cocoon of hollowed rock; it is my palace. You will see a finer rock before the end’ ?” he asked, resignedly. “The second ‘rock’ was actually ‘roc.’ A cheap shot, in my judgment.”

“Get back in the helicopter,” she said, grimly. “I don’t know how far or how fast that thing can fly, but she is not going to get away.”

“I don’t think she’s even trying,” said Oscar, with a sigh. “She’s merely escorting us to the much-joked-about island of Dr. Moreau, so that we may cast a critical eye over her father’s Creation.”

12

Moreau’s island was more or less identical in size and shape to Walter Czastka’s. By the time it was in view, Charlotte had Hal Watson on the line, watching the drunken flight of the giant bird through the helicopter’s camera-eyes. Huge though it was, the woman’s weight was burden enough to make flight very difficult, and Charlotte wondered whether the creature had sufficient strength left to make landfall.

“It is clear,” said Oscar, “that the murders were committed partly in order to lay a trail. We shall be the first to reach its end, but by no means the last. Every news service in the world must have dispatched spy-eyes by now. We are about to attend an exhibition, dear Charlotte—one which will put the so-called Great Exhibition of 2505 to shame.”

“We picked up enough body-cells at McCandless’s house to produce a DNA-spectrum,” Hal put in. “The lab people didn’t expect any kind of correlation with the people who were registered as Julia Herold’s parents, but they found one. According to her genes, Herold is Maria Inacio, saving some slight somatic modifications compatible with cosmetic transformation. Inacio’s alleged death in 2423 must be disinformation.”

“No,” said Oscar, softly. “Maria Inacio was born in 2402; there’s no way that she could be Rappaccini’s daughter. You won’t find Julia Herold’s birth recorded anywhere, Dr. Watson. She was born from an artificial womb on the island, not more than twenty years ago.”

“A clone!” said Charlotte. “An unregistered clone! But she’s not his daughter. You were wrong about that.”

“In the literal sense, yes,” admitted Oscar, as the bird summoned the last vestiges of its strength for one last surge toward the silver strand where the waves were breaking over Dr. Moreau’s island, “but he’s raised her from infancy within the confines of his own Garden of Eden, and I’ll wager that he has exactly the same degree of genetic relatedness to her as he would have to a daughter: fifty percent.”

“You mean,” said Charlotte, “that she’s his sister!”

“No,” said Oscar, clenching his fist in a tiny gesture of sympathetic triumph as the bird dropped the girl into the sand and lurched exhaustedly to a sprawling landing twenty meters further on. “I mean that Maria Inacio was Rappaccini’s mother.”

“I suppose you’ve worked out who his father was, as well?” said Charlotte, as the helicopter zoomed in to land. The helicopter’s safety-minded AIs gave the beached roc a wide berth, putting them down sixty meters away from the point where the woman had been dropped; she had already picked herself up and disappeared into the trees fringing the beach. Charlotte unplugged her waistphone from the comcon. She didn’t bother unshipping any transmitter-eyes. Hal would soon have plenty of eyes with which to see. The whole world was coming to this party.

“We can narrow it down to one of six,” said Oscar, as he opened the door and climbed out of the slightly tilted helicopter. “Perhaps that’s as far as Rappaccini cared to narrow it down. It’s possible, if McCandless’s half-recollection of a beach-party at which all six of the victims might or might not have been present means anything at all, that Maria Inacio was uncertain which of them was the father of her child. I strongly suspect, though, that a genetic engineer of Rappaccini’s skill and dedication could not have been content with any such uncertainty.”

Charlotte looked uneasily along the strand at the chimerical creature that was peering at them dolefully from an unnaturally large and bloodily crimson eye. “It was Walter Czastka,” she said, knowing that she could claim no credit simply for filling in the blank.

“It was Walter Czastka,” he echoed. “Poor Walter! To harbor such genius in his genes, and such mediocrity in his poor mortal body.”

Charlotte wasn’t about to waste time feeling sorry for Walter Czastka—not, at any rate, for that reason—but she couldn’t help feeling a pang of sympathy for poor Maria Inacio, dead before her life had really begun, leaving nothing behind but a child of uncertain parentage. Such things couldn’t happen nowadays, when all children were sterilized as a matter of course—and only a tiny minority ever applied for desterilization in order to exercise their right of reproduction while they were still alive—but Maria Inacio had been a child of the Aftermath. Hers had been the last generation of women victimized by their own fertility.

Charlotte and Oscar walked side by side to the place where Rappaccini’s mother/daughter had disappeared. They kept a wary eye on the roc, but the bird made no move toward them. It seemed to be in considerable distress. As they paused before moving into the trees, Charlotte saw the bloodshot eyes close. They walked into the forest, following a grassy pathway that had all the appearance of an accident of nature, but which had in fact been designed with the utmost care, as had every blade of grass.

The trunk of every tree had grown into the shape of something else, as finely wrought in bronze-barked wood as any sculpture. No two were exactly alike: here was the image of a dragon rampant, here a mermaid, here a trilobite, and here a shaggy faun. Many were the images of beasts that natural selection had designed to walk on four legs, but all of those stood upright here, rearing back to extend their forelimbs, separately or entwined, high into the air. These upraised forelimbs provided bases for spreading crowns of many different colors. Some few of the crowns extended from an entire host of limbs rather than a single pair, originating from the maws of krakens or the stalks of hydras.

The animals whose shapes were reproduced by the trunks of the trees all had open eyes, which seemed always to be looking at Charlotte no matter where she was in relation to them, and although she knew that they were all quite blind, she could not help feeling discomfited by their seeming curiosity. Her own curiosity, however, was more than equal to theirs. Every tree of the forest was in flower, and every flower was as bizarre as the plant which bore it. There was a noticeable preponderance of reds and blacks. Butterflies and birds moved ceaselessly through the branches, each one wearing its own coat of many colors, and the tips of the branches moved as though stirred by a breeze, reaching out towards these visitors as though to touch their faces. There was no wind: the branches moved by their own volition, according to their own mute purpose.

Charlotte knew that almost all of what she saw was illicit. Creationists were banned from engineering insects and birds, lest their inventions stray to pollute the artwork of other engineers, or to disrupt the domestic ecosystems of the recently renewed world-at-large. When the final accounting was complete, and all of Rappaccini’s felonies and misdemeanors had been tabulated by careful AIs, he would probably turn out to have been the most prolific criminal who had ever lived upon the surface of the earth. Rappaccini had given birth to an extraordinary fantasy, fully aware that it would be destroyed almost as soon as others found out what he had done—but he had found a way to show it off first, and to command that attention be paid to it by every man, woman, and child in the world. Had he, perhaps, hoped that his contemporaries might be so overawed as to reckon him a god, far above the petty laws of humankind? Had he dared to believe that they might condone what he had done, once they saw it in all its glory?

Rappaccini’s creative fecundity had not been content with birds and insects. There were monkeys in the trees, which did not hide or flee from the visitors of their demi-paradise, but came instead to stare with patient curiosity. The monkeys had the slender bodies of gibbons and lorises, but they had the wizened faces of old men. Nor was this simply the generic resemblance that had once been manifest in the faces of long-extinct New World monkeys; these faces were actual human faces, writ small. Charlotte recognized a family of Czastkas and an assortment of Kings and Urashimas, but there were dozens she did not know. She felt that her senses were quite overloaded. The moist atmosphere was a riot of perfumes, and the murmurous humming of insect wings composed a subtle symphony.

Is it beautiful? Charlotte asked herself, as she studied the sculpted trees staring at her with their illusory eyes, marveling at their hectic crowns and their luminous flowers. Or is it mad?

It was beautiful: more beautiful than anything she had ever seen or ever hoped to see. It was much more beautiful than the ghostly echoes of Ancient Nature that modern men called wilderness, doubtless more beautiful than Ancient Nature itself—even in all its pre-Devastation glory—could ever have been. Charlotte could see, even with her unschooled eyes, that it was the work of a young man. However many years Rappaccini had lived, however many he had spent in glorious isolation in the midst of all this strange fecundity, he had never grown old. This was not the work of a man grown mournful in forgetfulness; this was the work of a man whose only thought was of the future that he would not live to see: its novelty, its ambition, its progress. This was Moreau’s island, by which its creator meant morrow’s island.

It was mad, too, but its madness was essentially divine.

In the heart of the island, she expected to find a house, but there was none. There was only a mausoleum. She knew that Moreau’s body could not be inside it, because he had died in Honolulu, but it was nevertheless his tomb. It was hewn from a white marble whose austerity stood in imperious contrast to the fabulous forest around it. It bore neither cross, nor carven angel, nor any inscription.

“Like you and I, dear Charlotte,” Oscar said, “Jafri Biasiolo was delivered by history to the very threshold of true immortality, and yet was fated not to live in the Promised Land. How he must have resented the fading of the faculties which had produced all this! How wrathful he must have become, to see his fate mirrored in the faces and careers of all those who might—had the whim of chance dictated it—have been his father. When the true immortals emerge from the womb of biotechnical artifice, they will no longer care about who their fathers were or might have been, for they will indeed be designed, by men like gods, from common chromosomal clay. He, alas, was not.”

Charlotte looked around curiously as she spoke, wondering where the woman might be. “He may be dead,” she reminded Oscar, grimly, “but his accomplice and executioner will have to stand trial.”

“Yes, of course,” he murmured. “She must settle her own account with the recording angels of the Celestial Net.” So saying, he walked around the massive mausoleum. Charlotte followed him.

The woman was sitting on the pediment on the further side of the tomb, facing a crowd of leaping lions and prancing unicorns, vaulting hippogriffs and rearing cobras, all hewn in living wood beneath a roof of rainbows. Hundreds of man-faced monkeys were solemnly observing the scene. Her vivid green eyes were staring vacuously into space. It was as though she could not see the fantastic host which paraded itself before her. She was quite bald, and the dome of her skull was starred with a thousand tiny contact-points, glistening in the sunlight. The golden red wig that she had worn lay like stranded sea-weed between her feet. In her left hand, she held a flower: a gorgeously gilded rose. In her right hand was a curious skull-cap, made of exceedingly fine metal mesh.

Oscar Wilde picked up the gilded rose, and placed it carefully in his buttonhole, where he was accustomed to wearing a green carnation. Charlotte picked up the skull-cap, and turned it over in her hands, marveling at its thinness, its lightness, and its awesome complexity.

“What is it?” she asked, as her eyes dutifully compared its shape to the contours of the girl’s strangely decorated skull.

“I imagine,” said Oscar, “that it is your murderer’s accomplice and executioner: Rappaccini’s daughter. The Virtual Individual which has moved this Innocent Eve through the world, fascinating her appointed victims and luring them to the acceptance of her fatal kisses, is the vengeful ghost of Rappaccini himself, left behind to settle all his accounts on earth. When your Court of Judgment sits, that will be the only guilty party that can be summoned to appear before it. No part of this project originated within the mind and purpose of the girl herself. You may add trafficking in illegal brainfeed equipment to the seemingly endless list of Dr. Moreau’s crimes.”

Charlotte let out her breath in a long, deep sigh that sounded exactly like one of Oscar Wilde’s. She looked up into the little tent of blue sky above the mausoleum, which marked the clearing in which they were standing. Already, the sky was full of flying eyes.

This is Rappaccini’s funeral, she thought, and all of this was his last gift to himself: his last and finest wreath. It’s a great symbolic circle woven out of life and death, laying claim to the only kind of immortality he could design for himself. Everybody in the world has been invited, to mock or mourn or marvel as they please.

The eyes, she knew, had ears as well. The words that she and Oscar spoke could be heard by thousands of people all over the world, and would in time be relayed to billions. Oscar was looking upward too, with a curious smile on his face.

“It was, after all,” he said, wryly, “a perfect murder.”

FORGIVENESS DAY

Ursula K. Le Guin

We are extremely pleased to be honored with the chance to publish a major new Ursula K. Le Guin novella. “Forgiveness Day” shares the Ekumen universe of her Hugo- and Nebula-Award winning novels The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness. Ms. Le Guin has written over seventy short stories, two collections of essays, three volumes of poetry, and sixteen novels. She has received a total of five Hugos and four Nebulas, and lists the World Fantasy Award, the Kafka Award, and a Pushcart Prize among her many impressive writing credentials.

Solly had been a space rat brat, a Mobile’s child, living on this ship and that, this world and that; she’d traveled five hundred light-years by the time she was ten. At twenty-five she had been through a revolution on Alterra, learned aiji on Terra and farthinking from an old hilfer on Rokanan, breezed through the Schools on Hain, and survived an assignment as Observer in murderous, dying Kheakh, skipping another half millennium at near-lightspeed in the process. She was young, but she’d been around.

She got bored with the Embassy people in Voe Deo telling her to watch out for this, remember that; she was a Mobile herself now, after all. Werel had its quirks—what world didn’t? She’d done her homework, she knew when to curtsy and when not to belch, and vice versa. It was a relief to get on her own at last, in this gorgeous little city, on this gorgeous little continent, the first and only Envoy of the Ekumen to the Divine Kingdom of Gatay.

She was high for days on the altitude, the tiny, brilliant sun pouring vertical light into the noisy streets, the peaks soaring up incredibly behind every building, the dark blue sky where great near stars burned all day, the dazzling nights under six or seven lolloping bits of moon, the tall black people with their black eyes, narrow heads, long, narrow hands and feet, gorgeous people, her people! She loved them all. Even if she saw a little too much of them.

The last time she had had completely to herself was a few hours in the passenger cabin of the airskimmer sent by Gatay to bring her across the ocean from Voe Deo. On the airstrip she was met by a delegation of priests and officials from the King and the Council, magnificent in scarlet and brown and turquoise, and swept off to the Palace, where there was a lot of curtsying and no belching, of course, for hours—an introduction to his little shrunken old majesty, introductions to High Muckamucks and Lord Hooziwhats, speeches, a banquet—all completely predictable, no problems at all, not even the impenetrable giant fried flower on her plate at the banquet. But with her, from that first moment on the airstrip and at every moment thereafter, discreetly behind or beside or very near her, were two men: her Guide and her Guard.

The Guide, whose name was San Ubattat, was provided by her hosts in Gatay; of course he was reporting on her to the government, but he was a most obliging spy, endlessly smoothing the way for her, showing her with a bare hint what was expected or what would be a gaffe, and an excellent linguist, ready with a translation when she needed one. San was all right. But the Guard was something else.

He had been attached to her by the Ekumen’s hosts on this world, the dominant power on Werel, the big nation of Voe Deo. She had promptly protested to the Embassy back in Voe Deo that she didn’t need or want a bodyguard. Nobody in Gatay was out to get her and even if they were, she preferred to look after herself. The Embassy sighed. Sorry, they said. You’re stuck with him. Voe Deo has a military presence in Gatay, which after all is a client state, economically dependent. It’s in Voe Deo’s interest to protect the legitimate government of Gatay against the native terrorist factions, and you get protected as one of their interests. We can’t argue with that.

She knew better than to argue with the Embassy, but she could not resign herself to the Major. His military title, rega, she translated by the archaic word “Major,” from a skit she’d seen on Terra. That Major had been a stuffed uniform, covered with medals and insignia. It puffed and strutted and commanded, and finally blew up into bits of stuffing. If only this Major would blow up! Not that he strutted, exactly, or even commanded, directly. He was stonily polite, woodenly silent, stiff and cold as rigor mortis. She soon gave up any effort to talk to him; whatever she said, he replied Yessum or Nomum with the prompt stupidity of a man who does not and will not actually listen, an officer officially incapable of humanity. And he was with her in every public situation, day and night, on the street, shopping, meeting with businessmen and officials, sight-seeing, at court, in the balloon ascent above the mountains—with her everywhere, everywhere but bed.

Even in bed she wasn’t quite as alone as she would often have liked; for the Guide and the Guard went home at night, but in the anteroom of her bedroom slept the Maid—a gift from His Majesty, her own private asset.

She remembered her incredulity when she first learned that word, years ago, in a text about slavery. “On Werel, members of the dominant caste are called owners; members of the serving class are called assets. Only owners are referred to as men or women; assets are called bondsmen, bondswomen.”

So here she was, the owner of an asset. You don’t turn down a king’s gift. Her asset’s name was Rewe. Rewe was probably a spy too, but it was hard to believe. She was a dignified, handsome woman some years older than Solly and about the same intensity of skin color, though Solly was pinkish brown and Rewe was bluish brown. The palms of her hands were a delicate azure. Rewe’s manners were exquisite and she had tact, astuteness, an infallible sense of when she was wanted and when not. Solly of course treated her as an equal, stating right out at the beginning that she believed no human being had a right to dominate, much less own, another, that she would give Rewe no orders, and that she hoped they might become friends. Rewe accepted this, unfortunately, as a new set of orders. She smiled and said yes. She was infinitely yielding. Whatever Solly said or did sank into that acceptance and was lost, leaving Rewe unchanged: an attentive, obliging, gentle physical presence, just out of reach. She smiled, and said yes, and was untouchable.

And Solly began to think, after the first fizz of the first days in Gatay, that she needed Rewe, really needed her as a woman to talk with. There was no way to meet owner women, who lived hidden away in their bezas, women’s quarters, “at home,” they called it. All bondswomen but Rewe were somebody else’s property, not hers to talk to. All she ever met was men. And eunuchs.

That had been another thing hard to believe, that a man would voluntarily trade his virility for a little social standing; but she met such men all the time in King Hotat’s court. Born assets, they earned partial independence by becoming eunuchs, and as such often rose to positions of considerable power and trust among their owners. The eunuch Tayandan, majordomo of the palace, ruled the King, who didn’t rule, but figureheaded for the Council. The Council was made up of various kinds of lord but only one kind of priest, Tualites. Only assets worshiped Kamye, and the original religion of Gatay had been suppressed when the monarchy became Tualite a century or so ago. If there was one thing she really disliked about Werel, aside from slavery and gender-dominance, it was the religions. The songs about Lady Tual were beautiful, and the statues of her and the great temples in Voe Deo were wonderful, and the Arkamye seemed to be a good story though long-winded; but the deadly self-righteousness, the intolerance, the stupidity of the priests, the hideous doctrines that justified every cruelty in the name of the faith! As a matter of fact, Solly said to herself, was there anything she did like about Werel?

And answered herself instantly: I love it, I love it. I love this weird little bright sun and all the broken bits of moons and the mountains going up like ice walls and the people—the people with their black eyes without whites like animals’ eyes, eyes like dark glass, like dark water, mysterious—I want to love them, I want to know them, I want to reach them!

But she had to admit that the pissants at the Embassy had been right about one thing: being a woman was tough on Werel. She fit nowhere. She went about alone, she had a public position, and so was a contradiction in terms: proper women stayed at home, invisible. Only bondswomen went out in the streets, or met strangers, or worked at any public job. She behaved like an asset, not like an owner. Yet she was something very grand, an envoy of the Ekumen, and Gatay very much wanted to join the Ekumen and not to offend its envoys. So the officials and courtiers and businessmen she talked to on the business of the Ekumen did the best they could: they treated her as if she were a man.

The pretense was never complete and often broke right down. The poor old King groped her industriously, under the vague impression that she was one of his bedwarmers. When she contradicted Lord Gatuyo in a discussion, he stared with the blank disbelief of a man who has been talked back to by his shoe. He had been thinking of her as a woman. But in general the disgenderment worked, allowing her to work with them; and she began to fit herself into the game, enlisting Rewe’s help in making clothes that resembled what male owners wore in Gatay, avoiding anything that to them would be specifically feminine. Rewe was a quick, intelligent seamstress. The bright, heavy, close-fitted trousers were practical and becoming, the embroidered jackets were splendidly warm. She liked wearing them. But she felt unsexed by these men who could not accept her for what she was. She needed to talk to a woman.

She tried to meet some of the hidden owner women through the owner men, and met a wall of politeness without a door, without a peephole. What a wonderful idea; we will certainly arrange a visit when the weather is better! I should be overwhelmed with the honor if the Envoy were to entertain Lady Mayoyo and my daughters, but my foolish, provincial girls are so unforgivably timid—I’m sure you understand. Oh, surely, surely, a tour of the inner gardens—but not at present, when the vines are not in flower! We must wait until the vines are in flower!

There was nobody to talk to, nobody, until she met Batikam the Makil.

It was an event: a touring troupe from Voe Deo. There wasn’t much going on in Gatay’s little mountain capital by way of entertainment, except for temple dancers—all men, of course—and the soppy fluff that passed as drama on the Werelian network. Solly had doggedly entered some of these wet pastels, hoping for a glimpse into the life “at home,” but she couldn’t stomach the swooning maidens who died of love while the stiff-necked jackass heroes, who all looked like the Major, died nobly in battle, and Tual the Merciful leaned out of the clouds smiling upon their deaths with her eyes slightly crossed and the whites showing, a sign of divinity. Solly had noticed that Werelian men never entered the network for drama. Now she knew why. But the receptions at the palace and the parties in her honor given by various lords and businessmen were pretty dull stuff: all men, always, because they wouldn’t have the slave girls in while the Envoy was there; and she couldn’t flirt even with the nicest men, couldn’t remind them that they were men, since that would remind them that she was a woman not behaving like a lady. The fizz had definitely gone flat by the time the makil troupe came.

She asked San, a reliable etiquette advisor, if it would be all right for her to attend the performance. He hemmed and hawed and finally, with more than usual oily delicacy, gave her to understand that it would be all right so long as she went dressed as a man. “Women, you know, don’t go in public. But sometimes, they want so much to see the entertainers, you know? Lady Amatay used to go with Lord Amatay, dressed in his clothes, every year; everybody knew, nobody said anything—you know. For you, such a great person, it would be all right. Nobody will say anything. Quite, quite all right. Of course, I come with you, the rega comes with you. Like friends, ha? You know, three good men friends going to the entertainment, ha? Ha?”

Ha, ha, she said obediently. What fun!—But it was worth it, she thought, to see the makils.

They were never on the network. Young girls at home were not to be exposed to their performances, some of which, San gravely informed her, were unseemly. They played only in theaters. Clowns, dancers, prostitutes, actors, musicians, the makils formed a kind of subclass, the only assets not personally owned. A talented slave boy bought by the Entertainment Corporation from his owner was thenceforth the property of the Corporation, which trained and looked after him the rest of his life.

They walked to the theater, six or seven streets away. She had forgotten that the makils were all transvestites, indeed she did not remember it when she first saw them, a troop of tall slender dancers sweeping out onto the stage with the precision and power and grace of great birds wheeling, flocking, soaring. She watched unthinking, enthralled by their beauty, until suddenly the music changed and the clowns came in, black as night, black as owners, wearing fantastic trailing skirts, with fantastic jutting jeweled breasts, singing in tiny, swoony voices, “Oh do not rape me please kind Sir, no no, not now!” They’re men, they’re men! Solly realized then, already laughing helplessly. By the time Batikam finished his star turn, a marvelous dramatic monologue, she was a fan. “I want to meet him,” she said to San at a pause between acts. “The actor—Batikam.”

San got the bland expression that signified he was thinking how it could be arranged and how to make a little money out of it. But the Major was on guard, as ever. Stiff as a stick, he barely turned his head to glance at San. And San’s expression began to alter.

If her proposal was out of line, San would have signaled or said so. The Stuffed Major was simply controlling her, trying to keep her as tied down as one of “his” women. It was time to challenge him. She turned to him and stared straight at him. “Rega Teyeo,” she said, “I quite comprehend that you’re under orders to keep me in order. But if you give orders to San or to me, they must be spoken aloud, and they must be justified. I will not be managed by your winks or your whims.”

There was a considerable pause, a truly delicious and rewarding pause. It was difficult to see if the Major’s expression changed; the dim theater light showed no detail in his blue-black face. But there was something frozen about his stillness that told her she’d stopped him. At last he said, “I’m charged to protect you, Envoy.”

“Am I endangered by the makils? Is there impropriety in an envoy of the Ekumen congratulating a great artist of Werel?”

Again the frozen silence. “No,” he said.

“Then I request you to accompany me when I go backstage after the performance to speak to Batikam.”

One stiff nod. One stiff, stuffy, defeated nod. Score one! Solly thought, and sat back cheerfully to watch the lightpainters, the erotic dances, and the curiously touching little drama with which the evening ended. It was in archaic poetry, hard to understand, but the actors were so beautiful, their voices so tender that she found tears in her eyes and hardly knew why.

“A pity the makils always draw on the Arkamye,” said San, with smug, pious disapproval. He was not a very high-class owner, in fact he owned no assets; but he was an owner, and a bigoted Tualite, and liked to remind himself of it. “Scenes from the Incarnations of Tual would be more befitting such an audience.”

“I’m sure you agree, Rega,” she said, enjoying her own irony.

“Not at all,” he said, with such toneless politeness that at first she did not realise what he had said; and then forgot the minor puzzle in the bustle of finding their way and gaining admittance to the backstage and to the performers’ dressing room.

When they realised who she was, the managers tried to clear all the other performers out, leaving her alone with Batikam (and San and the Major, of course); but she said no, no, no, these wonderful artists must not be disturbed, just let me talk a moment with Batikam. She stood there in the bustle of doffed costumes, half-naked people, smeared makeup, laughter, dissolving tension after the show, any backstage on any world, talking with the clever, intense man in elaborate archaic woman’s costume. They hit it off at once. “Can you come to my house?” she asked. “With pleasure,” Batikam said, and his eyes did not flick to San’s or the Major’s face: the first bondsman she had yet met who did not glance to her Guard or her Guide for permission to say or do anything, anything at all. She glanced at them only to see if they were shocked. San looked collusive, the Major looked rigid. “I’ll come in a little while,” Batikam said. “I must change.”

They exchanged smiles, and she left. The fizz was back in the air. The huge close stars hung clustered like grapes of fire. A moon tumbled over the icy peaks, another jigged like a lopsided lantern above the curlicue pinnacles of the palace. She strode along the dark street, enjoying the freedom of the male robe she wore and its warmth, making San trot to keep up; the Major, long-legged, kept pace with her. A high, trilling voice called, “Envoy!” and she turned with a smile, then swung round, seeing the Major grappling momentarily with someone in the shadow of a portico. He broke free, caught up to her without a word, seized her arm in an iron grip, and dragged her into a run. “Let go!” she said, struggling; she did not want to use an aiji break on him, but nothing less was going to get her free.

He pulled her nearly off-balance with a sudden dodge into an alley; she ran with him, letting him keep hold on her arm. They came unexpectedly out into her street and to her gate, through it, into the house, which he unlocked with a word—how did he do that?—“What is all this?” she demanded, breaking away easily, holding her arm where his grip had bruised it.

She saw, outraged, the last flicker of an exhilarated smile on his face. Breathing hard, he asked, “Are you hurt?”

“Hurt? Where you yanked me, yes—what do you think you were doing?”

“Keeping the fellow away.”

“What fellow?”

He said nothing.

“The one who called out? Maybe he wanted to talk to me!”

After a moment the Major said, “Possibly. He was in the shadow. I thought he might be armed. I must go out and look for San Ubattat. Please keep the door locked until I come back.” He was out the door as he gave the order; it never occurred to him that she would not obey, and she did obey, raging. Did he think she couldn’t look after herself? That she needed him interfering in her life, kicking slaves around, “protecting” her? Maybe it was time he saw what an aiji fall looked like. He was strong and quick, but had no real training. This kind of amateur interference was intolerable, really intolerable; she must protest to the Embassy again.

As soon she let him back in with a nervous, shamefaced San in tow, she said, “You opened my door with a password. I was not informed that you had right of entrance day and night.”

He was back to his military blankness. “Nomum,” he said.

“You are not to do so again. You are not to seize hold of me ever again. I must tell you that if you do, I will injure you. If something alarms you, tell me what it is and I will respond as I see fit. Now will you please go.”

“With pleasure, mum,” he said, wheeled, and marched out.

“Oh, Lady—Oh, Envoy,” San said, “that was a dangerous person, extremely dangerous people, I am so sorry, disgraceful,” and he babbled on. She finally got him to say who he thought it was, a religious dissident, one of the Old Believers who held to the original religion of Gatay and wanted to cast out or kill all foreigners and unbelievers. “A bondsman?” she asked with interest, and he was shocked—“Oh, no, no, a real person, a man—but most misguided, a fanatic, a heathen fanatic! Knifemen, they call themselves. But a man, Lady—Envoy, certainly a man!”

The thought that she might think that an asset might touch her upset him as much as the attempted assault. If such it had been.

As she considered it, she began to wonder if, since she had put the Major in his place at the theater, he had found an excuse to put her in her place by “protecting” her. Well, if he tried it again, he’d find himself upside down against the opposite wall.

“Rewe!” she called, and the bondswoman appeared instantly as always. “One of the actors is coming. Would you like to make us a little tea, something like that?” Rewe smiled, said, “Yes,” and vanished. There was a knock at the door. The Major opened it—he must be standing guard outside—and Batikam came in.

It had not occurred to her that the makil would still be in women’s clothing, but it was how he dressed offstage too, not so magnificently, but with elegance, in the delicate, flowing materials and dark, subtle hues that the swoony ladies in the dramas wore. It gave considerable piquancy, she felt, to her own male costume. Batikam was not as handsome as the Major, who was a stunning-looking man till he opened his mouth; but the makil was magnetic, you had to look at him. He was a dark greyish brown, not the blue-black that the owners were so vain of (though there were plenty of black assets too, Solly had noticed: of course, when every bondswoman was her owner’s sexual servant). Intense, vivid intelligence and sympathy shone in his face through the makil’s Stardust black makeup, as he looked around with a slow, lovely laugh at her, at San, and at the Major standing at the door. He laughed like a woman, a warm ripple, not the ha, ha of a man. He held out his hands to Solly, and she came forward and took them. “Thank you for coming, Batikam!” she said, and he said, “Thank you for asking me, Alien Envoy!”

“San,” she said, “I think this is your cue?”

Only indecision about what he ought to do could have slowed San down till she had to speak. He still hesitated a moment, then smiled with unction and said, “Yes, so sorry, a very good night to you, Envoy! Noon hour at the Office of Mines, tomorrow, I believe?” Backing away, he backed right into the Major, who stood like a post in the doorway. She looked at the Major, ready to order him out without ceremony, how dare he shove back in!—and saw the expression on his face. For once his blank mask had cracked, and what was revealed was contempt. Incredulous, sickened contempt. As if he was obliged to watch someone eat a turd.

“Get out,” she said. She turned her back on both of them. “Come on, Batikam; the only privacy I have is in here,” she said, and led the makil to her bedroom.

He was born where his fathers before him were born, in the old, cold house in the foothills above Noeha. His mother did not cry out as she bore him, since she was a soldier’s wife, and a soldier’s mother, now. He was named for his great-uncle, killed on duty in the Sosa. He grew up in the stark discipline of a poor household of pure veot lineage. His father, when he was on leave, taught him the arts a soldier must know; when his father was on duty the old Asset-Sergeant Habbakam took over the lessons, which began at five in the morning, summer or winter, with worship, shortsword practice, and a cross-country run. His mother and grandmother taught him the other arts a man must know, beginning with good manners before he was two, and after his second birthday going on to history, poetry, and sitting still without talking.

The child’s day was filled with lessons and fenced with disciplines; but a child’s day is long. There was room and time for freedom, the freedom of the farmyard and the open hills. There was the companionship of pets, foxdogs, running dogs, spotted cats, hunting cats, and the farm cattle and the greathorses; not much companionship otherwise. The family’s assets, other than Habbakam and the two housewomen, were sharecroppers, working the stony foothill land that they and their owners had lived on forever. Their children were light-skinned, shy, already stooped to their lifelong work, ignorant of anything beyond their fields and hills. Sometimes they swam with Teyeo, summers, in the pools of the river. Sometimes he rounded up a couple of them to play soldiers with him. They stood awkward, uncouth, smirking when he shouted “Charge!” and rushed at the invisible enemy. “Follow me!” he cried shrilly, and they lumbered after him, firing their tree-branch guns at random, pow, pow. Mostly he went alone, riding his good mare Tasi or afoot with a hunting cat pacing by his side.

A few times a year visitors came to the estate, relatives or fellow officers of Teyeo’s father, bringing their children and their housepeople. Teyeo silently and politely showed the child guests about, introduced them to the animals, took them on rides. Silently and politely, he and his cousin Gemat came to hate each other; at age fourteen they fought for an hour in a glade behind the house, punctiliously following the rules of wrestling, relentlessly hurting each other, getting bloodier and wearier and more desperate, until by unspoken consent they called it off and returned in silence to the house, where everyone was gathering for dinner. Everyone looked at them and said nothing. They washed up hurriedly, hurried to table. Gemat’s nose leaked blood all through the meal; Teyeo’s jaw was so sore he could not open it to eat. No one commented.

Silently and politely, when they were both fifteen, Teyeo and Rega Toebawe’s daughter fell in love. On the last day of her visit they escaped by unspoken collusion and rode out side by side, rode for hours, too shy to talk. He had given her Tasi to ride. They dismounted to water and rest the horses in a wild valley of the hills. They sat near each other, not very near, by the side of the little quiet-running stream. “I love you,” Teyeo said. “I love you,” Emdu said, bending her shining black face down. They did not touch or look at each other. They rode back over the hills, joyous, silent.

When he was sixteen Teyeo was sent to the Officers’ Academy in the capital of his province. There he continued to learn and practice the arts of war and the arts of peace. His province was the most rural in Voe Deo; its ways were conservative, and his training was in some ways anachronistic. He was of course taught the technologies of modern warfare, becoming a first-rate pod pilot and an expert in telereconnaissance; but he was not taught the modern ways of thinking that accompanied the technologies in other schools. He learned the poetry and history of Voe Deo, not the history and politics of the Ekumen. The Alien presence on Werel remained remote, theoretical to him. His reality was the old reality of the veot class, whose men held themselves apart from all men not soldiers and in brotherhood with all soldiers, whether owners, assets, or enemies. As for women, Teyeo considered his rights over them absolute, binding him absolutely to responsible chivalry to women of his own class and protective, merciful treatment of bondswomen. He believed all foreigners to be basically hostile, untrustworthy heathens. He honored the Lady Tual, but worshiped the Lord Kamye. He expected no justice, looked for no reward, and valued above all competence, courage, and self-respect. In some respects he was utterly unsuited to the world he was to enter, in others well prepared for it, since he was to spend seven years on Yeowe fighting a war in which there was no justice, no reward, and never even an illusion of ultimate victory.

Rank among veot officers was hereditary. Teyeo entered active service as a rega, the highest of the three veot ranks. No degree of ineptitude or distinction could lower or raise his status or his pay. Material ambition was no use to a veot. But honor and responsibility were to be earned, and he earned them quickly. He loved service, loved the life, knew he was good at it, intelligently obedient, effective in command; he had come out of the Academy with the highest recommendations, and being posted to the capital, drew notice as a promising officer as well as a likable young man. At twenty-four he was absolutely fit, his body would do anything he asked of it. His austere upbringing had given him little taste for indulgence but an intense appreciation of pleasure, so the luxuries and entertainments of the capital were a discovery of delight to him. He was reserved and rather shy, but companionable and cheerful. A handsome young man, in with a set of other young men very like him, for a year he knew what it is to live a completely privileged life with complete enjoyment of it. The brilliant intensity of that enjoyment stood against the dark background of the war in Yeowe, the slave revolution on the colony planet, which had gone on all his lifetime, and was now intensifying. Without that background, he could not have been so happy. A whole life of games and diversions had no interest for him; and when his orders came, posted as a pilot and division commander to Yeowe, his happiness was pretty nearly complete.

He went home for his thirty-day leave. Having received his parents’ approbation, he rode over the hills to Rega Toebawe’s estate and asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The rega and his wife told their daughter that they approved his offer and asked her, for they were not strict parents, if she would like to marry Teyeo. “Yes,” she said. As a grown, unmarried woman, she lived in seclusion in the women’s side of the house, but she and Teyeo were allowed to meet and even to walk together, the chaperone remaining at some distance. Teyeo told her it was a three-year posting; would she marry in haste now, or wait three years and have a proper wedding? “Now,” she said, bending down her narrow, shining face. Teyeo gave a laugh of delight, and she laughed at him. They were married nine days later—it couldn’t be sooner, there had to be some fuss and ceremony, even if it was a soldier’s wedding—and for seventeen days Teyeo and Emdu made love, walked together, made love, rode together, made love, came to know each other, came to love each other, quarreled, made up, made love, slept in each other’s arms. Then he left for the war on another world, and she moved to the women’s side of her husband’s house.

His three-year posting was extended year by year, as his value as an officer was recognised and as the war on Yeowe changed from scattered containing actions to an increasingly desperate retreat. In his seventh year of service an order for compassionate leave was sent out to Yeowe Headquarters for Rega Teyeo, whose wife was dying of complications of berlot fever. At that point, there was no headquarters on Yeowe; the Army was retreating from three directions towards the old colonial capital; Teyeo’s division was fighting a rear-guard defense in the sea marshes; communications had collapsed.

Command on Werel continued to find it inconceivable that a mass of ignorant slaves with the crudest kind of weapons could be defeating the Army of Voe Deo, a disciplined, trained body of soldiers with an infallible communications network, skimmers, pods, every armament and device permitted by the Ekumenical Convention Agreement. A strong faction in Voe Deo blamed the setbacks on this submissive adherence to Alien rules. The hell with Ekumenical Conventions. Bomb the damned dusties back to the mud they were made of. Use the biobomb, what was it for, anyway? Get our men off the foul planet and wipe it clean. Start fresh. If we don’t win the war on Yeowe, the next revolution’s going to be right here on Werel, in our own cities, in our own homes! The jittery government held on against this pressure. Werel was on probation, and Voe Deo wanted to lead the planet to Ekumenical status. Defeats were minimised, losses were not made up, skimmers, pods, weapons, men were not replaced. By the end of Teyeo’s seventh year, the Army on Yeowe had been essentially written off by its government. Early in the eighth year, when the Ekumen was at last permitted to send its Envoys to Yeowe, Voe Deo and the other countries that had supplied auxiliary troops finally began to bring their soldiers home.

It was not until he got back to Werel that Teyeo learned his wife was dead.

He went home to Noeha. He and his father greeted each other with a silent embrace, but his mother wept as she embraced him. He knelt to her in apology for having brought her more grief than she could bear.

He lay that night in the cold room in the silent house, listening to his heart beat like a slow drum. He was not unhappy, the relief of being at peace and the sweetness of being home were too great for that; but it was a desolate calm, and somewhere in it was anger. Not used to anger, he was not sure what he felt. It was as if a faint, sullen red flare colored every image in his mind, as he lay trying to think through the seven years on Yeowe, first as a pilot, then the ground war, then the long retreat, the killing and the being killed. Why had they been left there to be hunted down and slaughtered? Why had the government not sent them reinforcements? The questions had not been worth asking then, they were not worth asking now. They had only one answer: We do what they ask us to do, and we don’t complain. I fought every step of the way, he thought without pride. The new knowledge sliced keen as a knife through all other knowledge—And while I was fighting, she was dying. All a waste, there on Yeowe. All a waste, here on Werel. He sat up in the dark, the cold, silent, sweet dark of night in the hills. “Lord Kamye,” he said aloud, “help me. My mind betrays me.”

During the long leave home he sat often with his mother. She wanted to talk about Emdu, and at first he had to force himself to listen. It would be easy to forget the girl he had known for seventeen days seven years ago, if only his mother would let him forget. Gradually he learned to take what she wanted to give him, the knowledge of who his wife had been. His mother wanted to share all she could with him of the joy she had had in Emdu, her beloved child and friend. Even his father, retired now, a quenched, silent man, was able to say, “She was the light of the house.” They were thanking him for her. They were telling him that it had not all been a waste.

But what lay ahead of them? Old age, the empty house. They did not complain, of course, and seemed content in their severe, placid round of daily work; but for them the continuity of the past with the future was broken.

“I should remarry,” Teyeo said to his mother. “Is there anyone you’ve noticed . . .?”

It was raining, a grey light through the wet windows, a soft thrumming on the eaves. His mother’s face was indistinct as she bent to her mending.

“No,” she said. “Not really.” She looked up at him, and after a pause asked, “Where do you think you’ll be posted?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s no war now,” she said, in her soft, even voice.

“No,” Teyeo said. “There’s no war.”

“Will there be . . . ever? do you think?”

He stood up, walked down the room and back, sat down again on the cushioned platform near her; they both sat straight-backed, still except for the slight motion of her hands as she sewed; his hands lay lightly one in the other, as he had been taught when he was two.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s strange. It’s as if there hadn’t been a war. As if we’d never been on Yeowe—the Colony, the Uprising, all of it. They don’t talk about it. It didn’t happen. We don’t fight wars. This is a new age. They say that often on the net. The age of peace, brotherhood across the stars. So, are we brothers with Yeowe, now? Are we brothers with Gatay and Bambur and the Forty States? Are we brothers with our assets? I can’t make sense of it. I don’t know what they mean. I don’t know where I fit in.” His voice too was quiet and even.

“Not here, I think,” she said. “Not yet.”

After a while he said, “I thought . . . children . . .”

“Of course. When the time comes.” She smiled at him. “You never could sit still for half an hour . . . Wait. Wait and see.”

She was right, of course; and yet what he saw in the net and in town tried his patience and his pride. It seemed that to be a soldier now was a disgrace. Government reports, the news and the analyses, constantly referred to the Army and particularly the veot class as fossils, costly and useless, Voe Deo’s principal obstacle to full admission to the Ekumen. His own uselessness was made clear to him when his request for a posting was met by an indefinite extension of his leave on half pay. At thirty-two, they appeared to be telling him, he was superannuated.

Again he suggested to his mother that he should accept the situation, settle down, and look for a wife. “Talk to your father,” she said. He did so; his father said, “Of course your help is welcome, but I can run the farm well enough for a while yet. Your mother thinks you should go to the capital, to Command. They can’t ignore you if you’re there. After all. After seven years’ combat—your record—”

Teyeo knew what that was worth, now. But he was certainly not needed here, and probably irritated his father with his ideas of changing this or that way things were done. They were right: he should go to the capital and find out for himself what part he could play in the new world of peace.

His first half-year there was grim. He knew almost no one at Command or in the barracks; his generation was dead, or invalided out, or home on half pay. The younger officers, who had not been on Yeowe, seemed to him a cold, buttoned-up lot, always talking money and politics. Little businessmen, he privately thought them. He knew they were afraid of him—of his record, of his reputation. Whether he wanted to or not he reminded them that there had been a war that Werel had fought and lost, a civil war, their own race fighting against itself, class against class. They wanted to dismiss it as a meaningless quarrel on another world, nothing to do with them.

Teyeo walked the streets of the capital, watched the thousands of bondsmen and bondswomen hurrying about their owners’ business, and wondered what they were waiting for.

“The Ekumen does not interfere with the social, cultural, or economic arrangements and affairs of any people,” the Embassy and the government spokesmen repeated. “Full membership for any nation or people that wishes it is contingent only on absence, or renunciation, of certain specific methods and devices of warfare,” and there followed the list of terrible weapons, most of them mere names to Teyeo, but a few of them inventions of his own country: the biobomb, as they called it, and the neuronics.

He personally agreed with the Ekumen’s judgment on such devices, and respected their patience in waiting for Voe Deo and the rest of Werel to prove not only compliance with the ban, but acceptance of the principle. But he very deeply resented their condescension. They sat in judgment on everything Werelian, viewing from above. The less they said about the division of classes, the clearer their disapproval was. “Slavery is of very rare occurrence in Ekumenical worlds,” said their books, “and disappears completely with full participation in the Ekumenical polity.” Was that what the Alien Embassy was really waiting for?

“By our Lady!” said one of the young officers—many of them were Tualites, as well as businessmen—“the Aliens are going to admit the dusties before they admit us!” He was sputtering with indignant rage, like a red-faced old rega faced with an insolent bondsoldier. “Yeowe—a damned planet of savages, tribesmen, regressed into barbarism—preferred over us!”

“They fought well,” Teyeo observed, knowing he should not say it as he said it, but not liking to hear the men and women he had fought against called dusties. Assets, rebels, enemies, yes.

The young man stared at him and after a moment said, “I suppose you love ’em, eh? The dusties?”

“I killed as many as I could,” Teyeo replied politely, and then changed the conversation. The young man, though nominally Teyeo’s superior at Command, was an oga, the lowest rank of veot, and to snub him further would be ill-bred.

They were stuffy, he was touchy; the old days of cheerful good fellowship were a faint, incredible memory. The bureau chiefs at Command listened to his request to be put back on active service and sent him endlessly on to another department. He could not live in barracks, but had to find an apartment, like a civilian. His half pay did not permit him indulgence in the expensive pleasures of the city. While waiting for appointments to see this or that official, he spent his days in the library net of the Officers’ Academy. He knew his education had been incomplete and was out of date. If his country was going to join the Ekumen, in order to be useful he must know more about the Alien ways of thinking and the new technologies. Not sure what he needed to know, he floundered about in the network, bewildered by the endless information available, increasingly aware that he was no intellectual and no scholar and would never understand Alien minds, but doggedly driving himself on out of his depth.

A man from the Embassy was offering an introductory course in Ekumenical history in the public net. Teyeo joined it, and sat through eight or ten lecture-and-discussion periods, straight-backed and still, only his hands moving slightly as he took full and methodical notes. The lecturer, a Hainishman who translated his extremely long Hainish name as Old Music, watched Teyeo, tried to draw him out in discussion, and at last asked him to stay in after session. “I should like to meet you, Rega,” he said, when the others had dropped out.

They met at a café. They met again. Teyeo did not like the Alien’s manners, which he found effusive; he did not trust his quick, clever mind; he felt Old Music was using him, studying him as a specimen of The Veot, The Soldier, probably The Barbarian. The Alien, secure in his superiority, was indifferent to Teyeo’s coldness, ignored his distrust, insisted on helping him with information and guidance, and shamelessly repeated questions Teyeo had avoided answering. One of these was, “Why are you sitting around here on half pay?”

“It’s not by my own choice, Mr. Old Music,” Teyeo finally answered, the third time it was asked. He was very angry at the man’s impudence, and so spoke with particular mildness. He kept his eyes away from Old Music’s eyes, bluish, with the whites showing like a scared horse. He could not get used to Aliens’ eyes.

“They won’t put you back on active service?”

Teyeo assented politely. Could the man, however alien, really be oblivious to the fact that his questions were grossly humiliating?

“Would you be willing to serve in the Embassy Guard?”

That question left Teyeo speechless for a moment; then he committed the extreme rudeness of answering a question with a question. “Why do you ask?”

“I’d like very much to have a man of your capacity in that corps,” said Old Music, adding with his appalling candor, “Most of them are spies or blockheads. It would be wonderful to have a man I knew was neither. It’s not just sentry duty, you know. I imagine you’d be asked by your government to give information; that’s to be expected. And we would use you, once you had experience and if you were willing, as a liaison officer. Here or in other countries. We would not, however, ask you to give information to us. Am I clear, Teyeo? I want no misunderstanding between us as to what I am and am not asking of you.”

“You would be able . . .?” Teyeo asked cautiously.

Old Music laughed and said, “Yes. I have a string to pull in your Command. A favor owed. Will you think it over?”

Teyeo was silent a minute. He had been nearly a year now in the capital and his requests for posting had met only bureaucratic evasion and, recently, hints that they were considered insubordinate. “I’ll accept now, if I may,” he said, with a cold deference.

The Hainishman looked at him, his smile changing to a thoughtful, steady gaze. “Thank you,” he said. “You should hear from Command in a few days.”

So Teyeo put his uniform back on, moved back to the City Barracks, and served for another seven years on alien ground. The Ekumenical Embassy was, by diplomatic agreement, a part not of Werel but of the Ekumen—a piece of the planet that no longer belonged to it. The Guardsmen furnished by Voe Deo were protective and decorative, a highly visible presence on the Embassy grounds in their white-and-gold dress uniform. They were also visibly armed, since protest against the Alien presence still broke out erratically in violence.

Rega Teyeo, at first assigned to command a troop of these guards, soon was transferred to a different duty, that of accompanying members of the Embassy staff about the city and on journeys. He served as a bodyguard, in undress uniform. The Embassy much preferred not to use their own people and weapons, but to request and trust Voe Deo to protect them. Often he was also called upon to be a guide and interpreter, and sometimes a companion. He did not like it when visitors from somewhere in space wanted to be chummy and confiding, asked him about himself, invited him to come drinking with them. With perfectly concealed distaste, with perfect civility, he refused such offers. He did his job and kept his distance. He knew that that was precisely what the Embassy valued him for. Their confidence in him gave him a cold satisfaction.

His own government had never approached him to give information, though he certainly learned things that would have interested them. Voe Dean intelligence did not recruit their agents among veots. He knew who the agents in the Embassy Guard were; some of them tried to get information from him, but he had no intention of spying for spies.

Old Music, whom he now surmised to be the head of the Embassy’s intelligence system, called him in on his return from a winter leave at home. The Hainishman had learned not to make emotional demands on Teyeo, but could not hide a note of affection in his voice greeting him. “Hullo, Rega! I hope your family’s well? Good. I’ve got a particularly tricky job for you. Kingdom of Gatay. You were there with Kemehan two years ago, weren’t you? Well, now they want us to send an Envoy. They say they want to join. Of course the old King’s a puppet of your government; but there’s a lot else going on there. A strong religious separatist movement. A Patriotic Cause, kick out all the foreigners, Voe Deans and Aliens alike. But the King and Council requested an Envoy, and all we’ve got to send them is a new arrival. She may give you some problems till she learns the ropes. I judge her a bit headstrong. Excellent material, but young, very young. And she’s only been here a few weeks. I requested you, because she needs your experience. Be patient with her, Rega. I think you’ll find her likable.”

He did not. In seven years he had got accustomed to the Aliens’ eyes and their various smells and colors and manners. Protected by his flawless courtesy and his stoical code, he endured or ignored their strange or shocking or troubling behavior, their ignorance and their different knowledge. Serving and protecting the foreigners entrusted to him, he kept himself aloof from them, neither touched nor touching. His charges learned to count on him and not to presume on him. Women were often quicker to see and respond to his Keep Out signs than men; he had an easy, almost friendly relationship with an old Terran Observer whom he had accompanied on several long investigatory tours. “You are as peaceful to be with as a cat, Rega,” she told him once, and he valued the compliment. But the Envoy to Gatay was another matter.

She was physically splendid, with clear red-brown skin like that of a baby, glossy swinging hair, a free walk—too free: she flaunted her ripe, slender body at men who had no access to it, thrusting it at him, at everyone, insistent, shameless. She expressed her opinion on everything with coarse self-confidence. She could not hear a hint and refused to take an order. She was an aggressive, spoiled child with the sexuality of an adult, given the responsibility of a diplomat in a dangerously unstable country. Teyeo knew as soon as he met her that this was an impossible assignment. He could not trust her or himself. Her sexual immodesty aroused him as it disgusted him; she was a whore whom he must treat as a princess. Forced to endure and unable to ignore her, he hated her.

He was more familiar with anger than he had used to be, but not used to hating. It troubled him extremely. He had never in his life asked for a reposting, but on the morning after she had taken the makil into her room, he sent a stiff little appeal to the Embassy. Old Music responded to him with a sealed voice-message through the diplomatic link: “Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don’t like the situation. There’s nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?”

He did not know how to refuse. A veot did not refuse duty. He was ashamed at having even thought of doing so, and hated her again for causing him that shame.

The first sentence of the message was enigmatic, not in Old Music’s usual style but flowery, indirect, like a coded warning. Teyeo of course knew none of the intelligence codes either of his country or of the Ekumen. Old Music would have to use hints and indirection with him. “Love of god and country” could well mean the Old Believers and the Patriots, the two subversive groups in Gatay, both of them fanatically opposed to foreign influence; the Envoy could be the child playing with fire. Was she being approached by one group or the other? He had seen no evidence of it, unless the man in the shadows that night had been not a knifeman but a messenger. She was under his eyes all day, her house watched all night by soldiers under his command. Surely the makil, Batikam, was not acting for either of those groups. He might well be a member of the Hame, the asset liberation underground of Voe Deo, but as such would not endanger the Envoy, since the Hame saw the Ekumen as their ticket to Yeowe and to freedom.

Teyeo puzzled over the words, replaying them over and over, knowing his own stupidity faced with this kind of subtlety, the ins and outs of the political labyrinth. At last he erased the message and yawned, for it was late; bathed, lay down, turned off the light, said under his breath, “Lord Kamye, let me hold with courage to the one noble thing!” and slept like a stone.

The makil came to her house every night after the theater, Teyeo tried to tell himself there was nothing wrong in it. He himself had spent nights with the makils, back in the palmy days before the war. Expert, artistic sex was part of their business. He knew by hearsay that rich city women often hired them to come supply a husband’s deficiencies. But even such women did so secretly, discreetly, not in this vulgar, shameless way, utterly careless of decency, flouting the moral code, as if she had some kind of right to do whatever she wanted wherever and whenever she wanted it. Of course Batikam colluded eagerly with her, playing on her infatuation, mocking the Gatayans, mocking Teyeo—and mocking her, though she didn’t know it. What a chance for an asset to make fools of all the owners at once!

Watching Batikam, Teyeo felt sure he was a member of the Hame. His mockery was very subtle; he was not trying to disgrace the Envoy. Indeed his discretion was far greater than hers. He was trying to keep her from disgracing herself. The makil returned Teyeo’s cold courtesy in kind, but once or twice their eyes met and some brief, involuntary understanding passed between them, fraternal, ironic.

There was to be a public festival, an observation of the Tualite Feast of Forgiveness, to which the Envoy was pressingly invited by the King and Council. She was put on show at many such events. Teyeo thought nothing about it except how to provide security in an excited holiday crowd, until San told him that the festival day was the highest holy day of the old religion of Gatay, and that the Old Believers fiercely resented the imposition of the foreign rites over their own. The little man seemed genuinely worried. Teyeo worried too when next day San was suddenly replaced by an elderly man who spoke little but Gatayan and was quite unable to explain what had become of San Ubattat. “Other duties, other duties call,” he said in very bad Voe Dean, smiling and bobbing, “very great relishes time, aha? Relishes duties call.”

During the days that preceded the festival tension rose in the city; graffiti appeared, symbols of the old religion smeared across walls; a Tualite temple was desecrated, after which the Royal Guard was much in evidence in the streets. Teyeo went to the palace and requested, on his own authority, that the Envoy not be asked to appear in public during a ceremony that was “likely to be troubled by inappropriate demonstrations.” He was called in and treated by a Court official with a mixture of dismissive insolence and conniving nods and winks, which left him really uneasy. He left four men on duty at the Envoy’s house that night. Returning to his quarters, a little barracks down the street which had been handed over to the Embassy Guard, he found the window of his room open and a scrap of writing, in his own language, on his table: Fest F is set up for assasnation.

He was at the Envoy’s house promptly the next morning and asked her asset to tell her he must speak to her. She came out of her bedroom pulling a white wrap around her naked body. Batikam followed her, half-dressed, sleepy, and amused. Teyeo gave him the eye-signal go, which he received with a serene, patronising smile, murmuring to the woman, “I’ll go have some breakfast. Rewe? have you got something to feed me?” He followed the bondswoman out of the room. Teyeo faced the Envoy and held out the scrap of paper.

“I received this last night, ma’am,” he said. “I must ask you not to attend the festival tomorrow.”

She considered the paper, read the writing, and yawned. “Who’s it from?”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

“What’s it mean? Assassination? They can’t spell, can they?”

After a moment, he said, “There are a number of other indications—enough that I must ask you—”

“Not to attend the festival of Forgiveness, yes. I heard you.” She went to a window seat and sat down, her robe falling wide to reveal her legs; her bare, brown feet were short and supple, the soles pink, the toes small and orderly. Teyeo looked fixedly at the air beside her head. She twiddled the bit of paper. “If you think it’s dangerous, Rega, bring a guardsman or two with you,” she said, with the faintest tone of scorn. “I really have to be there. The King requested it, you know. And I’m to light the big fire, or something. One of the few things women are allowed to do in public here . . . I can’t back out of it.” She held out the paper, and after a moment he came close enough to take it. She looked up at him smiling; when she defeated him she always smiled at him. “Who do you think would want to blow me away, anyhow? The Patriots?”

“Or the Old Believers, ma’am. Tomorrow is one of their holidays.”

“And your Tualites have taken it away from them? Well, they can’t exactly blame the Ekumen, can they?”

“I think it possible that the government might permit violence in order to excuse retaliation, ma’am.”

She started to answer carelessly, realised what he had said, and frowned. “You think the Council’s setting me up? What evidence have you?”

After a pause he said, “Very little, ma’am. San Ubattat—”

“San’s been ill. The old fellow they sent isn’t much use, but he’s scarcely dangerous! Is that all?” He said nothing, and she went on, “Until you have real evidence, Rega, don’t interfere with my obligations. Your militaristic paranoia isn’t acceptable when it spreads to the people I’m dealing with here. Control it, please! I’ll expect an extra guardsman or two tomorrow; and that’s enough.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and went out. His head sang with anger. It occurred to him now that her new guide had told him San Ubattat had been kept away by religious duties, not by illness. He did not turn back. What was the use? “Stay on for an hour or so, will you, Seyem?” he said to the guard at her gate, and strode off down the street, trying to walk away from her, from her soft brown thighs and the pink soles of her feet and her stupid, insolent, whorish voice giving him orders. He tried to let the bright icy sunlit air, the stepped streets snapping with banners for the festival, the glitter of the great mountains and the clamor of the markets fill him, dazzle and distract him; but he walked seeing his own shadow fall in front of him like a knife across the stones, knowing the futility of his life.

“The veot looked worried,” Batikam said in his velvet voice, and she laughed, spearing a preserved fruit from the dish and popping it, dripping, into his mouth.

“I’m ready for breakfast now, Rewe,” she called, and sat down across from Batikam. “I’m starving! He was having one of his phallocratic fits. He hasn’t saved me from anything lately. It’s his only function, after all. So he has to invent occasions. I wish, I wish he was out of my hair. It’s so nice not to have poor little old San crawling around like some kind of pubic infestation. If only I could get rid of the Major now!”

“He’s a man of honor,” the makil said; his tone did not seem ironical.

“How can an owner of slaves be an honorable man?”

Batikam watched her from his long, dark eyes. She could not read Werelian eyes, beautiful as they were, filling their lids with darkness.

“Male hierarchy members always yatter about their precious honor,” she said. “And ‘their’ women’s honor, of course.”

“Honor is a great privilege,” Batikam said. “I envy it. I envy him.”

“Oh, the hell with all that phony dignity, it’s just pissing to mark your territory. All you need envy him, Batikam, is his freedom.”

He smiled. “You’re the only person I’ve ever known who was neither owned nor owner. That is freedom. That is freedom. I wonder if you know it?”

“Of course I do,” she said. He smiled, and went on eating his breakfast, but there had been something in his voice she had not heard before. Moved and a little troubled, she said after a while, “You’re going away soon.”

“Mind reader. Yes. In ten days, the troupe goes on to tour the Forty States.”

“Oh, Batikam, I’ll miss you! You’re the only man, the only person here I can talk to—let alone the sex—”

“Did we ever?”

“Not often,” she said, laughing, but her voice shook a little. He held out his hand; she came to him and sat on his lap, the robe dropping open. “Little pretty Envoy breasts,” he said, lipping and stroking, “little soft Envoy belly . . .” Rewe came in with a tray and softly set it down. “Eat your breakfast, little Envoy,” Batikam said, and she disengaged herself and returned to her chair, grinning.

“Because you’re free you can be honest,” he said, fastidiously peeling a pini fruit. “Don’t be too hard on those of us who aren’t and can’t.” He cut a slice and fed it to her across the table. “It has been a taste of freedom to know you,” he said. “A hint, a shadow . . .”

“In a few years at most, Batikam, you will be free. This whole idiotic structure of masters and slaves will collapse completely when Werel comes into the Ekumen.”

“If it does.”

“Of course it will.”

He shrugged. “My home is Yeowe,” he said.

She stared, confused. “You come from Yeowe?”

“I’ve never been there,” he said. “I’ll probably never go there. What use have they got for makils? But it is my home. Those are my people. That is my freedom. When will you see . . .” His fist was clenched; he opened it with a soft gesture of letting something go. He smiled and returned to his breakfast. “I’ve got to get back to the theater,” he said. “We’re rehearsing an act for the Day of Forgiveness.”

She wasted all day at court. She had made persistent attempts to obtain permission to visit the mines and the huge government-run farms on the far side of the mountains, from which Gatay’s wealth flowed. She had been as persistently foiled—by the protocol and bureaucracy of the government, she had thought at first, their unwillingness to let a diplomat do anything but run round to meaningless events; but some businessmen had let something slip about conditions in the mines and on the farms that made her think they might be hiding a more brutal kind of slavery than any visible in the capital. Today she got nowhere, waiting for appointments that had not been made. The old fellow who was standing in for San misunderstood most of what she said in Voe Dean, and when she tried to speak Gatayan he misunderstood it all, through stupidity or intent. The Major was blessedly absent most of the morning, replaced by one of his soldiers, but turned up at court, stiff and silent and set-jawed, and attended her until she gave up and went home for an early bath.

Batikam came late that night. In the middle of one of the elaborate fantasy games and role reversals she had learned from him and found so exciting, his caresses grew slower and slower, soft, dragging across her like feathers, so that she shivered with unappeased desire and, pressing her body against his, realised that he had gone to sleep. “Wake up,” she said, laughing and yet chilled, and shook him a little. The dark eyes opened, bewildered, full of fear.

“I’m sorry,” she said at once, “go back to sleep, you’re tired. No, no, it’s all right, it’s late.” But he went on with what she now, whatever his skill and tenderness, had to see was his job.

In the morning at breakfast she said, “Can you see me as an equal, do you, Batikam?”

He looked tired, older than he usually did. He did not smile. After a while he said, “What do you want me to say?”

“That you do.”

“I do,” he said quietly.

“You don’t trust me,” she said, bitter.

After a while he said, “This is Forgiveness Day. The Lady Tual came to the men of Asdok, who had set their hunting cats upon her followers. She came among them riding on a great hunting cat with a fiery tongue, and they fell down in terror, but she blessed them, forgiving them.” His voice and hands enacted the story as he told it. “Forgive me,” he said.

“You don’t need any forgiveness!”

“Oh, we all do. It’s why we Kamyites borrow the Lady Tual now and then. When we need her. So, today you’ll be the Lady Tual, at the rites?”

“All I have to do is light a fire, they said,” she said anxiously, and he laughed. When he left she told him she would come to the theater to see him, tonight, after the festival.

The horse-race course, the only flat area of any size anywhere near the city, was thronged, vendors calling, banners waving; the Royal motorcars drove straight into the crowd, which parted like water and closed behind. Some rickety-looking bleachers had been erected for lords and owners, with a curtained section for ladies. She saw a motorcar drive up to the bleachers; a figure swathed in red cloth was bundled out of it and hurried between the curtains, vanishing. Were there peepholes for them to watch the ceremony through? There were women in the crowds, but bondswomen only, assets. She realised that she, too, would be kept hidden until her moment of the ceremony arrived: a red tent awaited her, alongside the bleachers, not far from the roped enclosure where priests were chanting. She was rushed out of the car and into the tent by obsequious and determined courtiers.

Bondswomen in the tent offered her tea, sweets, mirrors, makeup, and hair oil, and helped her put on the complex swathing of fine red-and-yellow cloth, her costume for her brief enactment of Lady Tual. Nobody had told her very clearly what she was to do, and to her questions the women said, “The priests will show you, Lady, you just go with them. You just light the fire. They have it all ready.” She had the impression that they knew no more than she did; they were pretty girls, court assets, excited at being part of the show, indifferent to the religion. She knew the symbolism of the fire she was to light: into it faults and transgressions could be cast and burnt up, forgotten. It was a nice idea.

The priests were whooping it up out there; she peeked out—there were indeed peepholes in the tent fabric—and saw the crowd had thickened. Nobody except in the bleachers and right against the enclosure ropes could possibly see anything, but everybody was waving red-and-yellow banners, munching fried food, and making a day of it, while the priests kept up their deep chanting. In the far right of the little, blurred field of vision through the peephole was a familiar arm: the Major’s, of course. They had not let him get into the motorcar with her. He must have been furious. He had got here, though, and stationed himself on guard. “Lady, Lady,” the court girls were saying, “here come the priests now,” and they buzzed around her making sure her headdress was on straight and the damnable, hobbling skirts fell in the right folds. They were still plucking and patting as she stepped out of the tent, dazzled by the daylight, smiling and trying to hold herself very straight and dignified as a Goddess ought to do. She really didn’t want to fuck up their ceremony.

Two men in priestly regalia were waiting for her right outside the tent door. They stepped forward immediately, taking her by the elbows and saying, “This way, this way, Lady.” Evidently she really wouldn’t have to figure out what to do. No doubt they considered women incapable of it, but in the circumstances it was a relief. The priests hurried her along faster than she could comfortably walk in the tight-drawn skirt. They were behind the bleachers now; wasn’t the enclosure in the other direction? A car was coming straight at them, scattering the few people who were in its way. Somebody was shouting; the priests suddenly began yanking her, trying to run; one of them yelled and let go her arm, felled by a flying darkness that had hit him with a jolt—she was in the middle of a melee, unable to break the iron hold on her arm, her legs imprisoned in the skirt, and there was a noise, an enormous noise, that hit her head and bent it down, she couldn’t see or hear, blinded, struggling, shoved face first into some dark place with her face pressed into a stifling, scratchy darkness and her arms held locked behind her.

A car, moving. A long time. Men, talking low. They talked in Gatayan. It was very hard to breathe. She did not struggle; it was no use. They had taped her arms and legs, bagged her head. After a long time she was hauled out like a corpse and carried quickly, indoors, down stairs, set down on a bed or couch, not roughly though with the same desperate haste. She lay still. The men talked, still almost in whispers. It made no sense to her. Her head was still hearing that enormous noise, had it been real? had she been struck? She felt deaf, as if inside a wall of cotton. The cloth of the bag kept getting stuck on her mouth, sucked against her nostrils as she tried to breathe.

It was plucked off; a man stooping over her turned her so he could untape her arms, then her legs, murmuring as he did so, “Don’t to be scared, Lady, we don’t to hurt you,” in Voe Dean. He backed away from her quickly. There were four or five of them; it was hard to see, there was very little light. “To wait here,” another said, “everything all right. Just to keep happy.” She was trying to sit up, and it made her dizzy. When her head stopped spinning, they were all gone. As if by magic. Just to keep happy.

A small very high room. Dark brick walls, earthy air. The light was from a little biolume plaque stuck on the ceiling, a weak, shadowless glow. Probably quite sufficient for Werelian eyes. Just to keep happy. I have been kidnapped. How about that. She inventoried: the thick mattress she was on; a blanket; a door; a small pitcher and a cup; a drainhole, was it, over in the corner? She swung her legs off the mattress and her feet struck something lying on the floor at the foot of it—she coiled up, peered at the dark mass, the body lying there. A man. The uniform, the skin so black she could not see the features, but she knew him. Even here, even here, the Major was with her.

She stood up unsteadily and went to investigate the drainhole, which was simply that, a cement-lined hole in the floor, smelling slightly chemical, slightly foul. Her head hurt, and she sat down on the bed again to massage her arms and ankles, easing the tension and pain and getting herself back into herself by touching and confirming herself, rhythmically, methodically. I have been kidnapped. How about that. Just to keep happy. What about him?

Suddenly knowing that he was dead, she shuddered and held still.

After a while she leaned over slowly, trying to see his face, listening. Again she had the sense of being deaf. She heard no breath. She reached out, sick and shaking, and put the back of her hand against his face. It was cool, cold. But warmth breathed across her fingers, once, again. She crouched on the mattress and studied him. He lay absolutely still, but when she put her hand on his chest she felt the slow heartbeat.

“Teyeo,” she said in a whisper. Her voice would not go above a whisper.

She put her hand on his chest again. She wanted to feel that slow, steady beat, the faint warmth; it was reassuring. Just to keep happy.

What else had they said? Just to wait. Yes. That seemed to be the program. Maybe she could sleep. Maybe she could sleep and when she woke up the ransom would have come. Or whatever it was they wanted.

She woke up with the thought that she still had her watch, and after sleepily studying the tiny silver readout for a while decided she had slept three hours; it was still the day of the Festival, too soon for ransom probably, and she wouldn’t be able to go to the theater to see the makils tonight. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the low light and when she looked she could see, now, that there was dried blood all over one side of the man’s head. Exploring, she found a hot lump like a fist above his temple, and her fingers came away smeared. He had got himself crowned. That must have been him, launching himself at the priest, the fake priest, all she could remember was a flying shadow and a hard thump and an ooof! like an aiji attack, and then there had been the huge noise that confused everything. She clicked her tongue, tapped the wall, to check her hearing. It seemed to be all right; the wall of cotton had disappeared. Maybe she had been crowned herself? She felt her head, but found no lumps. The man must have a concussion, if he was still out after three hours. How bad? When would the men come back?

She got up and nearly fell over, entangled in the damned Goddess skirts. If only she was in her own clothes, not this fancy dress, three pieces of flimsy stuff you had to have servants to put on you! She got out of the skirt piece, and used the scarf piece to make a kind of tied skirt that came to her knees. It wasn’t warm in this basement or whatever it was; it was dank and rather cold. She walked up and down, four steps turn, four steps turn, four steps turn, and did some warm-ups. They had dumped the man onto the floor. How cold was it? Was shock part of concussion? People in shock needed to be kept warm. She dithered a long time, puzzled at her own indecision, at not knowing what to do. Should she try to heave him up onto the mattress? Was it better not to move him? Where the hell were the men? Was he going to die?

She stooped over him and said sharply, “Rega! Teyeo!” and after a moment he caught his breath.

“Wake up!” She remembered now, she thought she remembered, that it was important not to let concussed people lapse into a coma. Except he already had.

He caught his breath again, and his face changed, came out of the rigid immobility, softened; his eyes opened and closed, blinked, unfocused. “Oh Kamye,” he said very softly.

She couldn’t believe how glad she was to see him. Just to keep happy. He evidently had a blinding headache, and admitted that he was seeing double. She helped him haul himself up onto the mattress and covered him with the blanket. He asked no questions, and lay mute, lapsing back to sleep soon. Once he was settled she went back to her exercises, and did an hour of them. She looked at her watch. It was two hours later, the same day, the Festival day. It wasn’t evening yet. When were the men going to come?

They came early in the morning, after the endless night that was the same as the afternoon and the morning. The metal door was unlocked and thrown clanging open, and one of them came in with a tray while two of them stood with raised, aimed guns in the doorway. There was nowhere to put the tray but the floor, so he shoved it at Solly, said, “Sorry, Lady!” and backed out; the door clanged shut, the bolts banged home. She stood holding the tray. “Wait!” she said.

The man had waked up and was looking groggily around. After finding him in this place with her she had somehow lost his nickname, did not think of him as the Major, yet shied away from his name. “Here’s breakfast, I guess,” she said, and sat down on the edge of the mattress. A cloth was thrown over the wicker tray; under it was a pile of Gatayan grainrolls stuffed with meat and greens, several pieces of fruit, and a capped water carafe of thin, fancily beaded metal alloy. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, maybe,” she said. “Shit. Oh well. It looks good. Can you eat? Can you sit up?”

He worked himself up to sit with his back against the wall, and then shut his eyes.

“You’re still seeing double?”

He made a small noise of assent.

“Are you thirsty?”

Small noise of assent.

“Here.” She passed him the cup. By holding it in both hands he got it to his mouth, and drank the water slowly, a swallow at a time. She meanwhile devoured three grainrolls one after the other, then forced herself to stop, and ate a pini fruit. “Could you eat some fruit?” she asked him, feeling guilty. He did not answer. She thought of Batikam feeding her the slice of pini at breakfast, when, yesterday, a hundred years ago.

The food in her stomach made her feel sick. She took the cup from the man’s relaxed hand—he was asleep again—and poured herself water, and drank it slowly, a swallow at a time.

When she felt better she went to the door and explored its hinges, lock, and surface. She felt and peered around the brick walls, the poured concrete floor, seeking she knew not what, something to escape with, something . . . She should do exercises. She forced herself to do some, but the queasiness returned, and a lethargy with it. She went back to the mattress and sat down. After a while she found she was crying. After a while she found she had been asleep. She needed to piss. She squatted over the hole and listened to her urine fall into it. There was nothing to clean herself with. She came back to the bed and sat down on it, stretching out her legs, holding her ankles in her hands. It was utterly silent.

She turned to look at the man; he was watching her. It made her start. He looked away at once. He still lay half-propped up against the wall, uncomfortable, but relaxed.

“Are you thirsty?” she asked.

“Thank you,” he said. Here where nothing was familiar and time was broken off from the past, his soft, light voice was welcome in its familiarity. She poured him a cup full and gave it to him. He managed it much more steadily, sitting up to drink. “Thank you,” he whispered again, giving her back the cup.

“How’s your head?”

He put up his hand to the swelling, winced, and sat back.

“One of them had a stick,” she said, seeing it in a flash in the jumble of her memories—“a priest’s staff. You jumped the other one.”

“They took my gun,” he said. “Festival.” He kept his eyes closed.

“I got tangled in those damn clothes. I couldn’t help you at all. Listen. Was there a noise, an explosion?”

“Yes. Diversion, maybe.”

“Who do you think these boys are?”

“Revolutionaries. Or . . .”

“You said you thought the Gatayan government was in on it.”

“I don’t know,” he murmured.

“You were right, I was wrong, I’m sorry,” she said with a sense of virtue at remembering to make amends.

He moved his hand very slightly in an it-doesn’t-matter gesture.

“Are you still seeing double?”

He did not answer; he was phasing out again.

She was standing, trying to remember Selish breathing exercises, when the door crashed and clanged, and the same three men were there, two with guns, all young, black-skinned, short-haired, very nervous. The lead one stooped to set a tray down on the floor, and without the least premeditation Solly stepped on his hand and brought her weight down on it. “You wait!” she said. She was staring straight into the faces and gun muzzles of the other two. “Just wait a moment, listen! He has a head injury, we need a doctor, we need more water, I can’t even clean his wound, there’s no toilet paper, who the hell are you people anyway?”

The one she had stomped was shouting, “Get off! Lady to get off my hand!” but the others heard her. She lifted her foot and got out of his way as he came up fast, backing into his buddies with the guns. “All right, Lady, we are sorry to have trouble,” he said, tears in his eyes, cradling his hand. “We are Patriots. You send messish to this Pretender, like our messish. Nobody is to hurt. All right?” He kept backing up, and one of the gunmen swung the door to. Crash, rattle.

She drew a deep breath and turned. Teyeo was watching her. “That was dangerous,” he said, smiling very slightly.

“I know it was,” she said, breathing hard. “It was stupid. I can’t get hold of myself. I feel like pieces of me. But they shove stuff in and run, damn it! We have to have some water!” She was in tears, the way she always was for a moment after violence or a quarrel. “Let’s see, what have they brought this time.” She lifted the tray up onto the mattress; like the other, in a ridiculous semblance of service in a hotel or a house with slaves, it was covered with a cloth. “All the comforts,” she murmured. Under the cloth was a heap of sweet pastries, a little plastic hand mirror, a comb, a tiny pot of something that smelled like decayed flowers, and a box of what she identified after a while as Gatayan tampons.

“It’s things for the lady,” she said, “God damn them, the stupid Goddamn pricks! A mirror!” She flung the thing across the room. “Of course I can’t last a day without looking in the mirror! God damn them!” She flung everything else but the pastries after the mirror, knowing as she did so that she would pick up the tampons and keep them under the mattress and, oh, God forbid, use them if she had to, if they had to stay here, how long would it be? ten days or more—“Oh, God,” she said again. She got up and picked everything up, put the mirror and the little pot, the empty water jug and the fruit skins from the last meal, onto one of the trays and set it beside the door. “Garbage,” she said in Voe Dean. Her outburst, she realised, had been in another language; Alterran, probably. “Have you any idea,” she said, sitting down on the mattress again, “how hard you people make it to be a woman? You could turn a woman against being one!”

“I think they meant well,” Teyeo said. She realised that there was not the faintest shade of mockery, even of amusement in his voice. If he was enjoying her shame, he was ashamed to show her that he was. “I think they’re amateurs,” he said.

After a while she said, “That could be bad.”

“It might.” He had sat up and was gingerly feeling the knot on his head. His coarse, heavy hair was blood-caked all around it. “Kidnapping,” he said. “Ransom demands. Not assassins. They didn’t have guns. Couldn’t have got in with guns. I had to give up mine.”

“You mean these aren’t the ones you were warned about?”

“I don’t know.” His explorations caused him a shiver of pain, and he desisted. “Are we very short of water?”

She brought him another cupful. “Too short for washing. A stupid Goddamn mirror when what we need is water!”

He thanked her and drank and sat back, nursing the last swallows in the cup. “They didn’t plan to take me,” he said.

She thought about it and nodded. “Afraid you’d identify them?”

“If they had a place for me, they wouldn’t put me in with a lady.” He spoke without irony. “They had this ready for you. It must be somewhere in the city.”

She nodded. “The car ride was half an hour or less. My head was in a bag, though.”

“They’ve sent a message to the Palace. They got no reply, or an unsatisfactory one. They want a message from you.”

“To convince the government they really have me? Why do they need convincing?”

They were both silent.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t think.” He lay back. Feeling tired, low, edgy after her adrenaline rush, she lay down alongside him. She had rolled up the Goddess’s skirt to make a pillow; he had none. The blanket lay across their legs.

“Pillow,” she said. “More blankets. Soap. What else?”

“Key,” he murmured.

They lay side by side in the silence and the faint unvarying light.

Next morning about eight, according to Solly’s watch, the Patriots came into the room, four of them. Two stood on guard at the door with their guns ready; the other two stood uncomfortably in what floor space was left, looking down at their captives, both of whom sat cross-legged on the mattress. The new spokesman spoke better Voe Dean than the others. He said they were very sorry to cause the lady discomfort and would do what they could to make it comfortable for her, and she must be patient and write a message by hand to the Pretender King, explaining that she would be set free unharmed as soon as the King commanded the Council to rescind their treaty with Voe Deo.

“He won’t,” she said. “They won’t let him.”

“Please do not discuss,” the man said with frantic harshness. “This is writing materials. This is the message.” He set the papers and a stylo down on the mattress, nervously, as if afraid to get close to her.

She was aware of how Teyeo effaced himself, sitting without a motion, his head lowered, his eyes lowered; the men ignored him.

“If I write this for you, I want water, a lot of water, and soap and blankets and toilet paper and pillows and a doctor, and I want somebody to come when I knock on that door, and I want some decent clothes. Warm clothes. Men’s clothes.”

“No doctor!” the man said. “Write it! Please! Now!” He was jumpy, twitchy, she dared push him no further. She read their statement, copied it out in her large, childish scrawl—she seldom handwrote anything—and handed both to the spokesman. He glanced over it and without a word hurried the other men out. Clash went the door.

“Should I have refused?”

“I don’t think so,” Teyeo said. He stood up and stretched, but sat down again looking dizzy. “You bargain well,” he said.

“We’ll see what we get. Oh, God. What is going on?”

“Maybe,” he said slowly, “Gatay is unwilling to yield to these demands. But when Voe Deo—and your Ekumen—get word of it, they’ll put pressure on Gatay.”

“I wish they’d get moving. I suppose Gatay is horribly embarrassed, saving face by trying to conceal the whole thing—is that likely? How long can they keep it up? What about your people? Won’t they be hunting for you?”

“No doubt,” he said, in his polite way.

It was curious how his stiff manner, his manners, which had always shunted her aside, cut her out, here had quite another effect: his restraint and formality reassured her that she was still part of the world outside this room, from which they came and to which they would return, a world where people lived long lives.

What did long life matter? she asked herself, and didn’t know. It was nothing she had ever thought about before. But these young Patriots lived in a world of short lives. Demands, violence, immediacy, and death, for what? for a bigotry, a hatred, a rush of power.

“Whenever they leave,” she said in a low voice, “I get really frightened.”

Teyeo cleared his throat and said, “So do I.”

EXERCISES.

“Take hold—no, take hold, I’m not made of glass!—Now—”

“Ha!” he said, with his flashing grin of excitement, as she showed him the break, and he in turn repeated it, breaking from her.

“All right, now you’d be waiting—here”—thump—“see?”

“Ai!”

“I’m sorry—I’m sorry, Teyeo—I didn’t think about your head—Are you all right? I’m really sorry—”

“Oh, Kamye,” he said, sitting up and holding his black, narrow head between his hands. He drew several deep breaths. She knelt penitent and anxious.

“That’s,” he said, and breathed some more, “that’s not, not fair play.”

“No of course it’s not, it’s aiji—all’s fair in love and war, they say that on Terra—Really, I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry, that was so stupid of me!”

He laughed, a kind of broken and desperate laugh, shook his head, shook it again. “Show me,” he said. “I don’t know what you did.”

EXERCISES.

“What do you do with your mind?”

“Nothing.”

“You just let it wander?”

“No. Am I and my mind different beings?”

“So . . . you don’t focus on something? You just wander with it?”

“No.”

“So you don’t let it wander.”

“Who?” he said, rather testily.

A pause.

“Do you think about—”

“No,” he said. “Be still.”

A very long pause, maybe a quarter hour.

“Teyeo, I can’t. I itch. My mind itches. How long have you been doing this?”

A pause, a reluctant answer: “Since I was two.”

He broke his utterly relaxed motionless pose, bent his head to stretch his neck and shoulder muscles. She watched him.

“I keep thinking about long life, about living long,” she said. “I don’t mean just being alive a long time, hell, I’ve been alive about eleven hundred years, what does that mean, nothing. I mean . . . Something about thinking of life as long makes a difference. Like having kids does. Even thinking about having kids. It’s like it changes some balance. It’s funny I keep thinking about that now, when my chances for a long life have kind of taken a steep fall . . .”

He said nothing. He was able to say nothing in a way that allowed her to go on talking. He was one of the least talkative men she had ever known. Most men were so wordy. She was fairly wordy herself. He was quiet. She wished she knew how to be quiet.

“It’s just practice, isn’t it?” she asked. “Just sitting there.”

He nodded.

“Years and years and years of practice . . . Oh, God. Maybe . . .”

“No, no,” he said, taking her thought immediately.

“But why don’t they do something? What are they waiting for? It’s been nine days!”

From the beginning. by unplanned, unspoken agreement, the room had been divided in two: the line ran down the middle of the mattress and across to the facing wall. The door was on her side, the left; the shit-hole was on his side, the right. Any invasion of the other’s space was requested by some almost invisible cue and permitted the same way. When one of them used the shit-hole the other unobtrusively faced away. When they had enough water to take cat-baths, which was seldom, the same arrangement held. The line down the middle of the mattress was absolute. Their voices crossed it, and the sounds and smells of their bodies. Sometimes she felt his warmth; Werelian body temperature was somewhat higher than hers, and in the dank, still air she felt that faint radiance as he slept. But they never crossed the line, not by a finger, not in the deepest sleep.

Solly thought about this, finding it, in some moments, quite funny. At other moments it seemed stupid and perverse. Couldn’t they both use some human comfort? The only time she had touched him was the first day, when she had helped him get onto the mattress, and then when they had enough water she had cleaned his scalp wound and little by little washed the clotted, stinking blood out of his hair, using the comb, which had after all been a good thing to have, and pieces of the Goddess’s skirt, an invaluable source of washcloths and bandages. Then once his head healed, they practiced aiji daily; but aiji had an impersonal, ritual purity to its clasps and grips that was a long way from creature comfort. The rest of the time his bodily presence was clearly, invariably uninvasive and untouchable.

He was only maintaining, under incredibly difficult circumstances, the rigid restraint he had always shown. Not just he, but Rewe, too; all of them, all of them but Batikam; and yet was Batikam’s instant yielding to her whim and desire the true contact she had thought it? She thought of the fear in his eyes, that last night. Not restraint, but constraint.

It was the mentality of a slave society: slaves and masters caught in the same trap of radical distrust and self-protection.

“Teyeo,” she said, “I don’t understand slavery. Let me say what I mean,” though he had shown no sign of interruption or protest, merely civil attention. “I mean, I do understand how a social institution comes about and how an individual is simply part of it—I’m not saying why don’t you agree with me in seeing it as wicked and unprofitable, I’m not asking you to defend it or renounce it. I’m trying to understand what it feels like to believe that two-thirds of the human beings in your world are actually, rightfully your property. Five-sixths, in fact, including women of your caste.”

After a while he said, “My family owns about twenty-five assets.”

“Don’t quibble.”

He accepted the reproof.

“It seems to me that you cut off human contact. You don’t touch slaves and slaves don’t touch you, in the way human beings ought to touch, in mutuality. You have to keep yourselves separate, always working to maintain that boundary. Because it isn’t a natural boundary—it’s totally artificial, man-made. I can’t tell owners and assets apart physically. Can you?”

“Mostly.”

“By cultural, behavioral clues—right?”

After thinking a while, he nodded.

“You are the same species, race, people, exactly the same in every way, with a slight selection towards color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous division that doesn’t exist. What I don’t understand is how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is. I don’t mean economically!”

“In the war,” he said, and then there was a very long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she waited, curious. “I was on Yeowe,” he said, “you know, in the civil war.”

That’s where you got all those scars and dents, she thought; for however scrupulously she averted her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a considerable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

“The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know, some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So we Army men there were all owners. We couldn’t send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They defeated us.”

“But that—” Solly said, and stopped; she did not know what to say.

“They defeated us from beginning to end,” he said. “Partly because my government didn’t understand that they could. That they fought better and harder and more intelligently and more bravely than we did.”

“Because they were fighting for their freedom!”

“Maybe so,” he said in his polite way.

“So . . .”

“I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I fought.”

“I know so little about war, about fighting,” she said, with a mixture of contrition and irritation. “Nothing, really. I was on Kheakh, but that wasn’t war, it was racial suicide, mass slaughter of a biosphere. I guess there’s a difference . . . That was when the Ekumen finally decided on the Arms Convention, you know. Because of Orint and then Kheakh destroying themselves. The Terrans had been pushing for the Convention for ages. Having nearly committed suicide themselves a while back. I’m half-Terran. My ancestors rushed around their planet slaughtering each other. For millennia. They were masters and slaves, too, some of them, a lot of them . . . But I don’t know if the Arms Convention was a good idea. If it’s right. Who are we to tell anybody what to do and not to do? The idea of the Ekumen was to offer a way. To open it. Not to bar it to anybody.”

He listened intently, but said nothing until after some while. “We learn to . . . close ranks. Always. You’re right, I think, it wastes . . . energy, the spirit. You are open.”

His words cost him so much, she thought, not like hers that just came dancing out of the air and went back into it. He spoke from his marrow. It made what he said a solemn compliment, which she accepted gratefully, for as the days went on she realized occasionally how much confidence she had lost and kept losing: self-confidence, confidence that they would be ransomed, rescued, that they would get out of this room, that they would get out of it alive.

“Was the war very brutal?”

“Yes,” he said. “I can’t . . . I’ve never been able to—to see it—Only something comes like a flash—” He held his hands up as if to shield his eyes. Then he glanced at her, wary. His apparently cast-iron self-respect was, she knew now, vulnerable in many places.

“Things from Kheakh that I didn’t even know I saw, they come that way,” she said. “At night.” And after a while, “How long were you there?”

“A little over seven years.”

She winced. “Were you lucky?”

It was a queer question, not coming out the way she meant, but he took it at value. “Yes,” he said. “Always. The men I went there with were killed. Most of them in the first few years. We lost three hundred thousand men on Yeowe. They never talk about it. Two-thirds of the veot men in Voe Deo were killed. If it was lucky to live, I was lucky.” He looked down at his clasped hands, locked into himself.

After a while she said softly, “I hope you still are.”

He said nothing.

“ow long has it been?” he asked, and she said, clearing her throat, after an automatic glance at her watch, “Sixty hours.”

Their captors had not come yesterday at what had become a regular time, about eight in the morning. Nor had they come this morning.

With nothing left to eat and now no water left, they had grown increasingly silent and inert. It was hours since either had said anything. He had put off asking the time as long as he could prevent himself.

“This is horrible,” she said, “this is so horrible. I keep thinking . . .”

“They won’t abandon you,” he said. “They feel a responsibility.”

“Because I’m a woman?”

“Partly.”

“Shit.”

He remembered that in the other life her coarseness had offended him.

“They’ve been taken, shot. Nobody bothered to find out where they were keeping us,” she said.

Having thought the same thing several hundred times, he had nothing to say.

“It’s just such a horrible place to die,” she said. “It’s sordid. I stink. I’ve stunk for twenty days. Now I have diarrhea because I’m scared. But I can’t shit anything. I’m thirsty and I can’t drink.”

“Solly,” he said sharply. It was the first time he had spoken her name. “Be still. Hold fast.”

She stared at him.

“Hold fast to what?”

He did not answer at once and she said, “You won’t let me touch you!”

“Not to me—”

“Then to what? There isn’t anything!” He thought she was going to cry, but she stood up, took the empty tray, and beat it against the door till it smashed into fragments of wicker and dust. “Come! God damn you! Come, you bastards!” she shouted. “Let us out of here!”

After that she sat down again on the mattress. “Well,” she said.

“Listen,” he said.

They had heard it before: no city sounds came down to this cellar, wherever it was, but this was something bigger, explosions, they both thought.

The door rattled.

They were both afoot when it opened: not with the usual clash and clang, but slowly. A man waited outside; two men came in. One, armed, they had never seen; the other, the tough-faced young man they called the spokesman, looked as if he had been running or fighting, dusty, worn-out, a little dazed. He closed the door. He had some papers in his hand. The four of them stared at one another in silence for a minute.

“Water,” Solly said. “You bastards!”

“Lady,” the spokesman said, “I’m sorry.” He was not listening to her. His eyes were not on her. He was looking at Teyeo, for the first time. “There is a lot of fighting,” he said.

“Who’s fighting?” Teyeo asked, hearing himself drop into the even tone of authority, and the young man respond to it as automatically: “Voe Deo. They sent troops. After the funeral, they said they would send troops unless we surrendered. They came yesterday. They go through the city killing. They know all the Old Believer centers. Some of ours.” He had a bewildered, accusing note in his voice.

“What funeral?” Solly said.

When he did not answer, Teyeo repeated it: “What funeral?”

“The lady’s funeral, yours. Here—I brought net prints—A state funeral. They said you died in the explosion.”

“What Goddamned explosion?” Solly said in her hoarse, parched voice, and this time he answered her: “At the Festival. The Old Believers. The fire, Tual’s fire, there were explosives in it. Only it went off too soon. We knew their plan. We rescued you from that, Lady,” he said, suddenly turning to her with that same accusatory tone.

“Rescued me, you asshole!” she shouted, and Teyeo’s dry lips split in a startled laugh, which he repressed at once.

“Give me those,” he said, and the young man handed him the papers.

“Get us water!” Solly said.

“Stay here, please. We need to talk,” Teyeo said, instinctively holding on to his ascendancy. He sat down on the mattress with the net prints. Within a few minutes he and Solly had scanned the reports of the shocking disruption of the Festival of Forgiveness, the lamentable death of the Envoy of the Ekumen in a terrorist act executed by the cult of Old Believers, the brief mention of the death of a Voe Dean Embassy guard in the explosion, which had killed over seventy priests and onlookers, the long descriptions of the state funeral, reports of unrest, terrorism, reprisals, then reports of the Palace gratefully accepting offers of assistance from Voe Deo in cleaning out the cancer of terrorism . . .

“So,” he said finally. “You never heard from the Palace. Why did you keep us alive?”

Solly looked as if she thought the question lacked tact, but the spokesman answered with equal bluntness, “We thought your country would ransom you.”

“They will,” Teyeo said. “Only you have to keep your government from knowing we’re alive. If you—”

“Wait,” Solly said, touching his hand. “Hold on. I want to think about this stuff. You’d better not leave the Ekumen out of the discussion. But getting in touch with them is the tricky bit.”

“If there are Voe Dean troops here, all I need is to get a message to anyone in my command, or the Embassy Guards.”

Her hand was still on his, with a warning pressure. She shook the other one at the spokesman, finger outstretched: “You kidnapped an Envoy of the Ekumen, you asshole! Now you have to do the thinking you didn’t do ahead of time. And I do too, because I don’t want to get blown away by your Goddamned little government for turning up alive and embarrassing them. Where are you hiding, anyhow? Is there any chance of us getting out of this room, at least?”

The man, with that edgy, frantic look, shook his head. “We are all down here now,” he said. “Most of the time. You stay here safe.”

“Yes, you’d better keep your passports safe!” Solly said. “Bring us some water, damn it! Let us talk a while. Come back in an hour.”

The young man leaned towards her suddenly, his face contorted. “What the hell kind of lady you are,” he said. “You foreign filthy stinking cunt.”

Teyeo was on his feet, but her grip on his hand had tightened: after a moment of silence, the spokesman and the other man turned to the door, rattled the lock, and were let out.

“Ouf,” she said, looking dazed.

“Don’t,” he said, “don’t—” He did not know how to say it. “They don’t understand,” he said. “It’s better if I talk.”

“Of course. Women don’t give orders. Women don’t talk. Shitheads! I thought you said they felt so responsible for me!”

“They do,” he said. “But they’re young men. Fanatics. Very frightened.” And you talk to them as if they were assets, he thought, but did not say.

“Well so am I frightened!” she said, with a little spurt of tears. She wiped her eyes and sat down again among the papers. “God,” she said. “We’ve been dead for twenty days. Buried for fifteen. Who do you think they buried?”

Her grip was powerful; his wrist and hand hurt. He massaged the place gently, watching her.

“Thank you,” he said. “I would have hit him.”

“Oh, I know. Goddamn chivalry. And the one with the gun would have blown your head off. Listen, Teyeo. Are you sure all you have to do is get word to somebody in the Army or the Guard?”

“Yes, of course.”

“You’re sure your country isn’t playing the same game as Gatay?”

He stared at her. As he understood her, slowly the anger he had stifled and denied, all these interminable days of imprisonment with her, rose in him, a fiery flood of resentment, hatred, and contempt.

He was unable to speak, afraid he would speak to her as the young Patriot had done.

He went around to his side of the room and sat on his side of the mattress, somewhat turned from her. He sat cross-legged, one hand lying lightly in the other.

She said some other things. He did not listen or reply.

After a while she said, “We’re supposed to be talking, Teyeo. We’ve only got an hour. I think those kids might do what we tell them, if we tell them something plausible—something that’ll work.”

He would not answer. He bit his lip and held still.

“Teyeo, what did I say? I said something wrong. I don’t know what it was. I’m sorry.”

“They would—” He struggled to control his lips and voice. “They would not betray us.”

“Who? The Patriots?”

He did not answer.

“Voe Deo, you mean? Wouldn’t betray us?”

In the pause that followed her gentle, incredulous question, he knew that she was right; that it was all collusion among the powers of the world; that his loyalty to his country and service was wasted, as futile as the rest of his life. She went on talking, palliating, saying he might very well be right. He put his head into his hands, longing for tears, dry as stone.

She crossed the line. He felt her hand on his shoulder.

“Teyeo, I am very sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to insult you! I honor you. You’ve been all my hope and help.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “If I—If we had some water.”

She leapt up and battered on the door with her fists and a sandal.

“Bastards, bastards,” she shouted.

Teyeo got up and walked, three steps and turn, three steps and turn, and halted on his side of the room. “If you’re right,” he said, speaking slowly and formally, “we and our captors are in danger not only from Gatay but from my own people, who may . . . who have been furthering these anti-Government factions, in order to make an excuse to bring troops here . . . to pacify Gatay. That’s why they know where to find the factionalists. We are . . . we’re lucky our group were . . . were genuine.”

She watched him with a tenderness that he found irrelevant.

“What we don’t know,” he said, “is what side the Ekumen will take. That is . . . There really is only one side.”

“No, there’s ours, too. The underdogs. If the Embassy sees Voe Deo pulling a takeover of Gatay, they won’t interfere, but they won’t approve. Especially if it involves as much repression as it seems to.”

“The violence is only against the anti-Ekumen factions.”

“They still won’t approve. And if they find out I’m alive, they’re going to be quite pissed at the people who claimed I went up in a bonfire. Our problem is how to get word to them. I was the only person representing the Ekumen in Gatay. Who’d be a safe channel?”

“Any of my men. But . . .”

“They’ll have been sent back; why keep Embassy Guards here when the Envoy’s dead and buried? I suppose we could try. Ask the boys to try, that is.” Presently she said wistfully, “I don’t suppose they’d just let us go—in disguise? It would be the safest for them.”

“There is an ocean,” Teyeo said.

She beat her head. “Oh, why don’t they bring some water . . .” Her voice was like paper sliding on paper. He was ashamed of his anger, his grief, himself. He wanted to tell her that she had been a help and hope to him too, that he honored her, that she was brave beyond belief; but none of the words would come. He felt empty, worn-out. He felt old. If only they would bring water!

Water was given them at last; some food, not much and not fresh. Clearly their captors were in hiding and under duress. The spokesman—he gave them his war-name, Kergat, Gatayan for Liberty—told them that whole neighborhoods had been cleared out, set afire, that Voe Dean troops were in control of most of the city including the Palace, and that almost none of this was being reported in the net. “When this is over Voe Deo will own my country,” he said with disbelieving fury.

“Not for long,” Teyeo said.

“Who can defeat them?” the young man said.

“Yeowe. The idea of Yeowe.”

Both Kergat and Solly stared at him.

“Revolution,” he said. “How long before Werel becomes New Yeowe?”

“The assets?” Kergat said, as if Teyeo had suggested a revolt of cattle or of flies. “They’ll never organise.”

“Look out when they do,” Teyeo said mildly.

“You don’t have any assets in your group?” Solly asked Kergat, amazed. He did not bother to answer. He had classed her as an asset, Teyeo saw. He understood why; he had done so himself, in the other life, when such distinctions made sense.

“Your bondswoman, Rewe,” he asked Solly—“was she a friend?”

“Yes,” Solly said, then, “No. I wanted her to be.”

“The makil?”

After a pause she said, “I think so.”

“Is he still here?”

She shook her head. “The troupe was going on with their tour, a few days after the Festival.”

“Travel has been restricted since the Festival,” Kergat said. “Only government and troops.”

“He’s Voe Dean. If he’s still here, they’ll probably send him and his troupe home. Try and contact him, Kergat.”

“A makil?” the young man said, with that same distaste and incredulity. “One of your Voe Dean homosexual clowns?”

Teyeo shot a glance at Solly: Patience, patience.

“Bisexual actors,” Solly said, disregarding him, but fortunately Kergat was determined to disregard her.

“A clever man,” Teyeo said, “with connections. He could help us. You and us. It could be worth it. If he’s still here. We must make haste.”

“Why would he help us? He is Voe Dean.”

“An asset, not a citizen,” Teyeo said. “And a member of Hame, the asset underground, which works against the government of Voe Deo. The Ekumen admits the legitimacy of Hame. He’ll report to the Embassy that a Patriot group has rescued the Envoy and is holding her safe, in hiding, in extreme danger. The Ekumen, I think, will act promptly and decisively. Correct, Envoy?”

Suddenly reinstated, Solly gave a short, dignified nod. “But discreetly,” she said. “They’ll avoid violence, if they can use political coercion.”

The young man was trying to get it all into his mind and work it through. Sympathetic to his weariness, distrust, and confusion, Teyeo sat quietly waiting. He noticed that Solly was sitting equally quietly, one hand lying in the other. She was thin and dirty and her unwashed, greasy hair was in a lank braid. She was brave, like a brave mare, all nerve. She would break her heart before she quit.

Kergat asked questions; Teyeo answered them, reasoning and reassuring. Occasionally Solly spoke, and Kergat was now listening to her again, uneasily, not wanting to, not after what he had called her. At last he left, not saying what he intended to do; but he had Batikam’s name and an identifying message from Teyeo to the Embassy: “Half-pay veots learn to sing old songs quickly.”

“What on earth!” Solly said when Kergat was gone.

“Did you know a man named Old Music, in the Embassy?”

“Ah! Is he a friend of yours?”

“He has been kind.”

“He’s been here on Werel from the start. A First Observer. Rather a powerful man—Yes, and ‘quickly,’ all right . . . My mind really isn’t working at all. I wish I could lie down beside a little stream, in a meadow, you know, and drink. All day. Every time I wanted to, just stretch my neck out and slup, slup, slup . . . Running water . . . In the sunshine . . . Oh God, oh God, sunshine. Teyeo, this is very difficult. This is harder than ever. Thinking that there maybe is really a way out of here. Only not knowing. Trying not to hope and not to not hope. Oh, I am so tired of sitting here!”

“What time is it?”

“Half past twenty. Night. Dark out. Oh God, darkness! Just to be in the darkness . . . Is there any way we could cover up that damned biolume? Partly? To pretend we had night, so we could pretend we had day?”

“If you stood on my shoulders, you could reach it. But how could we fasten a cloth?”

They pondered, staring at the plaque.

“I don’t know. Did you notice there’s a little patch of it that looks like it’s dying? Maybe we don’t have to worry about making darkness. If we stay here long enough. Oh, God!”

“Well,” he said after a while, curiously self-conscious, “I’m tired.” He stood up, stretched, glanced for permission to enter her territory, got a drink of water, returned to his territory, took off his jacket and shoes, by which time her back was turned, took off his trousers, lay down, pulled up the blanket, and said in his mind, “Lord Kamye, let me hold fast to the one noble thing.” But he did not sleep.

He heard her slight movements; she pissed, poured a little water, took off her sandals, lay down.

A long time passed.

“Teyeo.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think . . . that it would be a mistake . . . under the circumstances . . . to make love?”

A pause.

“Not under the circumstances,” he said, almost inaudibly. “But—in the other life—”

A pause.

“Short life versus long life,” she murmured.

“Yes.”

A pause.

“No,” he said, and turned to her. “No, that’s wrong.” They reached out to each other. They clasped each other, cleaved together, in blind haste, greed, need, crying out together the name of God in their different languages and then like animals in the wordless voice. They huddled together, spent, sticky, sweaty, exhausted, reviving, rejoined, reborn in the body’s tenderness, in the endless exploration, the ancient discovery, the long flight to the new world.

He woke slowly, in ease and luxury. They were entangled, his face was against her arm and breast; she was stroking his hair, sometimes his neck and shoulder. He lay for a long time aware only of that lazy rhythm and the cool of her skin against his face, under his hand, against his leg.

“Now I know,” she said, her half whisper deep in her chest, near his ear, “that I don’t know you. Now I need to know you.” She bent forward to touch his face with her lips and cheek.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Tell me who Teyeo is . . .”

“I don’t know,” he said. “A man who holds you dear.”

“Oh, God,” she said, hiding her face for a moment in the rough, smelly blanket.

“Who is God?” he asked sleepily. They spoke Voe Dean, but she usually swore in Terran or Alterran; in this case it had been Alterran, Seyt, so he asked, “Who is Seyt?”

“Oh—Tual—Kamye—what have you. I just say it. It’s just bad language. Do you believe in one of them? I’m sorry! I feel like such an oaf with you, Teyeo. Blundering into your soul, invading you—We are invaders, no matter how pacifist and priggish we are—”

“Must I love the whole Ekumen?” he asked, beginning to stroke her breasts, feeling her tremor of desire and his own.

“Yes,” she said, “yes, yes.”

It was curious, Teyeo thought, how little sex changed anything. Everything was the same, a little easier, less embarrassment and inhibition; and there was a certain and lovely source of pleasure for them, when they had enough water and food to have enough vitality to make love. But the only thing that was truly different was something he had no word for. Sex, comfort, tenderness, love, trust, no word was the right word, the whole word. It was utterly intimate, hidden in the mutuality of their bodies, and it changed nothing in their circumstances, nothing in the world, even the tiny wretched world of their imprisonment. They were still trapped. They were getting very tired and were hungry most of the time. They were increasingly afraid of their increasingly desperate captors.

“I will be a lady,” Solly said. “A good girl. Tell me how, Teyeo.”

“I don’t want you to give in,” he said, so fiercely, with tears in his eyes, that she went to him and held him in her arms.

“Hold fast,” he said.

“I will,” she said. But when Kergat or the others came in she was sedate and modest, letting the men talk, keeping her eyes down. He could not bear to see her so, and knew she was right to do so.

The doorlock rattled, the door clashed, bringing him up out of a wretched, thirsty sleep. It was night or very early morning. He and Solly had been sleeping close entangled for the warmth and comfort of it; and seeing Kergat’s face now he was deeply afraid. This was what he had feared, to show, to prove her sexual vulnerability. She was still only half-awake, clinging to him.

Another man had come in. Kergat said nothing. It took Teyeo some time to recognise the second man as Batikam.

When he did, his mind remained quite blank. He managed to say the makil’s name. Nothing else.

“Batikam?” Solly croaked. “Oh, my God!”

“This is an interesting moment,” Batikam said in his warm actor’s voice. He was not transvestite, Teyeo saw, but wore Gatayan men’s clothing. “I meant to rescue you, not to embarrass you, Envoy, Rega. Shall we get on with it?”

Teyeo had scrambled up and was pulling on his filthy trousers. Solly had slept in the ragged pants their captors had given her. They both had kept on their shirts for warmth.

“Did you contact the Embassy, Batikam?” she was asking, her voice shaking, as she pulled on her sandals.

“Oh, yes. I’ve been there and come back, indeed. Sorry it took so long. I don’t think I quite realised your situation here.”

“Kergat has done his best for us,” Teyeo said at once, stiffly.

“I can see that. At considerable risk. I think the risk from now on is low. That is . . .” He looked straight at Teyeo. “Rega, how do you feel about putting yourself in the hands of Hame?” he said. “Any problems with that?”

“Don’t, Batikam,” Solly said. “Trust him!”

Teyeo tied his shoe, straightened up, and said, “We are all in the hands of the Lord Kamye.”

Batikam laughed, the beautiful full laugh they remembered.

“In the Lord’s hands, then,” he said, and led them out of the room.

In the Arkamye it is said, “To live simply is most complicated.”

Solly requested to stay on Werel, and after a recuperative leave at the seashore was sent as Observer to South Voe Deo. Teyeo went straight home, being informed that his father was very ill. After his father’s death, he asked for indefinite leave from the Embassy Guard, and stayed on the farm with his mother until her death two years later. He and Solly, a continent apart, met only occasionally during those years.

When his mother died, Teyeo freed his family’s assets by act of irrevocable manumission, deeded over their farms to them, sold his now almost valueless property at auction, and went to the capital. He knew Solly was temporarily staying at the Embassy. Old Music told him where to find her. He found her in a small office of the palatial building. She looked older, very elegant. She looked at him with a stricken and yet wary face. She did not come forward to greet or touch him. She said, “Teyeo, I’ve been asked to be the first Ambassador of the Ekumen to Yeowe.”

He stood still.

“Just now—I just came from talking on the ansible with Hain—”

She put her face in her hands. “Oh, my God!” she said.

He said, “My congratulations, truly, Solly.”

She suddenly ran at him, threw her arms around him, and cried, “Oh, Teyeo, and your mother died, I never thought, I’m so sorry, I never, I never do—I thought we could—What are you going to do? Are you going to stay there?”

“I sold it,” he said. He was enduring rather than returning her embrace. “I thought I might return to the service.”

“You sold your farm? But I never saw it!”

“I never saw where you were born,” he said.

There was a pause. She stood away from him, and they looked at each other.

“You would come?” she said.

“I would,” he said.

Several years after Yeowe entered the Ekumen, Mobile Solly Agat Terwa was sent as an Ekumenical liaison to Terra; later she went from there to Hain, where she served with great distinction as a Stabile. In all her travels and posts she was accompanied by her husband, a Werelian army officer, a very handsome man, as reserved as she was outgoing. People who knew them knew their passionate pride and trust in each other. Solly was perhaps the happier person, rewarded and fulfilled in her work; but Teyeo had no regrets. He had lost his world, but he had held fast to the one noble thing.

A LITTLE KNOWLEDGE

Mike Resnick

For many years Koriba, the wise mundumugu, has watched over his people, and carefully weeded out every threat to paradise. Yet, he may find himself responsible for the most dangerous challenge of all.

There was a time when animals could speak. Lions and zebras, elephants and leopards, birds and men all shared the earth. They labored side by side, they met and spoke of many things, they exchanged visits and gifts.

Then one day Ngai, who rules the universe from His throne atop Kirinyaga, which men now call Mount Kenya, summoned all of His creations to meet with Him.

“I have done everything I can to make life good for all My creatures,” said Ngai. The assembled animals and men began to sing His praises, but Ngai held up His hand, and they immediately stopped.

“I have made life too good for you,” He continued. “None among you has died for the past year.”

“What is wrong with that?” asked the zebra.

“Just as you are constrained by your natures,” said Ngai, “just as the elephant cannot fly and the impala cannot climb trees, so I cannot be dishonest. Since no one has died, I cannot feel compassion for you, and without compassion, I cannot water the savannah and the forest with my tears. And without water, the grasses and the trees will shrivel and die.”

There was much moaning and wailing from the creatures, but again Ngai silenced them.

“I will tell you a story,” He said, “and you must learn from it.

“Once there were two colonies of ants. One colony was very wise, and one colony was very foolish, and they lived next to each other. One day they received word that an aardvark, a creature that eats ants, was coming to their land. The foolish colony went about their business, hoping that the aardvark would ignore them and attack their neighbors. But the wise colony built a mound that could withstand even the efforts of an aardvark, and they gathered sugar and honey, and stockpiled it in the mound.

“When the aardvark reached the kingdom of the ants, he immediately attacked the wise ants, but the mound withstood his greatest efforts, and the ants within survived by eating their sugar and honey. Finally, after many fruitless days, the aardvark wandered over to the kingdom of the foolish ants, and dined well that evening.”

Ngai fell silent, and none of His creatures dared ask Him to speak further. Instead, they returned to their homes and discussed His story, and made their preparations for the coming drought. A year passed, and finally the men decided to sacrifice an innocent goat, and that very day Ngai’s tears fell upon the parched and barren land. The next morning Ngai again summoned His creatures to the holy mountain.

“How have you fared during the past year?” He asked each of them.

“Very badly,” moaned the elephant, who was very thin and weak. “We did as you instructed us, and built a mound, and gathered sugar and honey—but we grew hot and uncomfortable within the mound, and there is not enough sugar and honey in all the world to feed a family of elephants.”

“We have fared even worse,” wailed the lion, who was even thinner, “for lions cannot eat sugar and honey at all, but must have meat.”

And so it went, as each animal poured out its misery. Finally Ngai turned to the man and ask him the same question.

“We have fared very well,” replied the man. “We built a container for water, and filled it before the drought came, and we stockpiled enough grain to last us to this day.”

“I am very proud of you,” said Ngai. “Of all my creatures, only you understood my story.”

“It is not fair!” protested the other animals. “We built mounds and saved sugar and honey, as you told us to!”

“What I told you was a parable,” said Ngai, “and you have mistaken the facts of it for the truth that lay beneath. I gave you the power to think, but since you have not used it, I hereby take it away. And as a further punishment, you will no longer have the ability to speak, for creatures that do not think have nothing to say.”

And from that day forth, only man, among all Ngai’s creations, has had the power to think and speak, for only man can pierce through the facts to find the truth.

You think you know a person when you have worked with him and trained him and guided his thinking since he was a small boy. You think you can foresee his reactions to various situations. You think you know how his mind works.

And if the person in question has been chosen by you, selected from the mass of his companions and groomed for something special, as young Ndemi was selected and groomed by me to be my successor as the mundumugu—the witch doctor—to our terraformed world of Kirinyaga, the one thing you think above all else is that you possess his loyalty and his gratitude.

But even a mundumugu can be wrong.

I do not know exactly when or how it began. I had chosen Ndemi to be my assistant when he was still a kehee—an uncircumcized child—and I had worked diligently with him to prepare him for the position he would one day inherit from me. I chose him not for his boldness, though he feared nothing, nor for his enthusiasm, which was boundless, but rather for his intellect, for with the exception of one small girl, long since dead, he was by far the brightest of the children on Kirinyaga. And since we had emigrated to this world to create a Kikuyu paradise, far from the corrupt imitation of Europe that Kenya had become, it was imperative that the mundumugu be the wisest of men, for the mundumugu not only reads omens and casts spells, but is also the repository for the collected wisdom and culture of his tribe. Day by day I added to Ndemi’s limited storehouse of knowledge. I taught him how to make medicine from the bark and pods of the acacia tree, I showed him how to create the ointments that would ease the discomfort of the aged when the weather turned cold and wet, I made him memorize the hundred spells that were used to bless the scarecrows in the field. I told him a thousand parables, for the Kikuyu have a parable for every need and every occasion, and the wise mundumugu is the one who finds the right parable for each situation.

And finally, after he had served me faithfully for six long years, coming up my hill every morning, feeding my chickens and goats, lighting the fire in my boma, and filling my empty water gourds before his daily lessons began. I took him into my hut and showed him how my computer worked. There are only four computers on all of Kirinyaga. The others belong to Koinnage, the paramount chief of our village, and to two chiefs of distant clans, but their computers can do nothing but send and receive messages. Only mine is tied into the data banks of the Eutopian Council, the ruling body that had given Kirinyaga its charter, for only the mundumugu has the strength and the vision to be exposed to European culture without becoming corrupted by it.

One of the primary purposes of my computer was to plot the orbital adjustments that would bring seasonal changes to Kirinyaga, so that the rains would come on schedule and the crops would flourish and the harvest would be successful. It was perhaps the mundumugu’s most important obligation to his people, since it assured their survival. I spent many long days teaching Ndemi all the many intracacies of the computer, until he knew its workings as well as I myself did, and could speak to it with perfect ease. The morning that I first noticed the change in him began like any other. I awoke, wrapped my blanket around my withered shoulders, and walked painfully out of my hut to sit by my fire until the warming rays of the sun took the chill from the air. And, as always, there was no fire. Ndemi came up the path to my hill a few minutes later.

“Jambo, Koriba,” he said, greeting me with his usual smile.

“Jambo, Ndemi,” I said. “How many times have I explained to you that I am an old man, and that I must sit by my fire until the air becomes warmer?”

“I am sorry, Koriba,” he said. “But as I was leaving my father’s shamba, I saw a hyena stalking one of our goats, and I had to drive it off.” He held his spear up, as if that were proof of his statement. I could not help but admire his ingenuity. It was perhaps the thousandth time he had been late, and never had he given the same excuse twice. Still, the situation was becoming intolerable, and when he finished his chores and the fire had warmed my bones and eased my pain, I told him to sit down opposite me.

“What is our lesson for today?” he asked as he squatted down.

“The lesson will come later,” I said, finally letting my blanket fall from my shoulders as the first warm breeze of the day blew a fine cloud of dust past my face. “But first I will tell you a story.” He nodded, and stared intently at me as I began speaking.

“Once there was a Kikuyu chief,” I said. “He had many admirable qualities. He was a mighty warrior, and in council his words carried great weight. But along with his many good qualities, he also had a flaw.

“One day he saw a maiden tilling the fields in her father’s shamba, and he was smitten with her. He meant to tell her of his love the very next day, but as he set out to see her, his way was blocked by an elephant, and he retreated and waited until the elephant had passed. When he finally arrived at the maiden’s boma, he discovered that a young warrior was paying her court. Nevertheless, she smiled at him when their eyes met, and, undiscouraged, he made up his mind to visit her the following day. This time a deadly snake blocked his way, and once again, when he arrived he found the maiden being courted by his rival. Once more she gave him an encouraging smile, and so he decided to come back a third time.

“On the morning of the third day, he lay on his blanket in his hut, and thought about all the many things he wanted to tell her to impress her with his ardor. By the time he had decided upon the best approach to win her favor, the sun was setting. He ran all the way from his boma to that of the maiden, only to find that his rival had just paid her father five cattle and thirty goats for her hand in marriage.

“He managed to get the maiden alone for a moment, and poured forth his litany of love.

“ ‘I love you too,’ she answered, ‘but although I waited for you each day, and hoped that you would come, you were always late.’

“ ‘I have excuses to offer,’ he said. ‘On the first day I encountered an elephant, and on the second day a killer snake was in my path.’ He did not dare tell her the real reason he was late a third time, so he said,

“And today a leopard confronted me, and I had to kill it with my spear before I could continue on my way.’

“ ‘I am sorry,’ said the maiden, ‘but I am still promised to another.’

“ ‘Do you not believe me?’ he demanded.

“ ‘It makes no difference whether you are telling the truth or not,’ she replied. ‘For whether the lion and the snake and the leopard are real or whether they are lies, the result is the same: you have lost your heart’s desire because you were late.’ ”

I stopped and stared at Ndemi. “Do you understand the moral of my story?” I asked. He nodded. “It does not matter to you whether a hyena was stalking my father’s goat or not. All that matters is that I was late.”

“That is correct,” I said.

This is where such things had always ended, and then we would begin his lessons. But not this day.

“It is a foolish story,” he said, looking out across the vast savannah.

“Oh?” I asked. “Why?”

“Because it begins with a lie.”

“What lie?”

“The Kikuyu had no chiefs until the British created them,” he answered.

“Who told you that?” I asked.

“I learned it from the box that glows with life,” he said, finally meeting my gaze.

“My computer?”

He nodded again. “I have had many long discussions about the Kikuyu with it, and I have learned many things.” He paused. “We did not even live in villages until the time of the Mau Mau, and then the British made us live together so that we could be more easily watched. And it was the British who created our tribal chiefs, so that they could rule us through them.”

“That is true,” I acknowledged. “But it is unimportant to my story.”

“But your story was untrue with its first line,” he said, “so why should the rest of it be true? Why did you not just say, ‘Ndemi, if you are late again, I will not care whether your reason is true or false. I will punish you.’ ”

“Because it is important for you to understand why you must not be late.”

“But the story is a lie. Everyone knows that it takes more than three days to court and purchase a wife. So it began with a lie and it ended with a lie.”

“You are looking at the surface of things,” I said, watching a small insect crawl over my foot and finally flicking it off. “The truth lies beneath.”

“The truth is that you do not want me to be late. What has that to do with the elephant and the leopard, which were extinct before we came to Kirinyaga?”

“Listen to me, Ndemi,” I said. “When you become the mundumugu, you will have to impart certain values, certain lessons, to your people—and you must do so in a way that they understand. This is especially true of the children, who are the clay that you will mold into the next generation of Kikuyu.” Ndemi was silent for a long moment. “I think you are wrong, Koriba,” he said at last. “Not only will the people understand you if you speak plainly to them, but stories like the one you just told me are filled with lies which they will think are true simply because they come from the mundumugu’s lips.”

“No!” I said sharply. “We came to Kirinyaga to live as the Kikuyu lived before the Europeans tried to change us into that characterless tribe known as Kenyans. There is a poetry to my stories, a tradition to them. They reach out to our racial memory, of the way things were, and the way we hope to make them again.” I paused to consider which path to follow, for never before had Ndemi so bluntly opposed my teachings. “You yourself used to beg me for stories, and of all the children you were the quickest to find the true meaning of them.”

“I was younger then,” he said.

“You were a Kikuyu then,” I said.

“I am still a Kikuyu.”

“You are a Kikuyu who has been exposed to European knowledge and European history,” I said. “This is unavoidable, if you are to succeed me as the mundumugu, for we hold our charter at the whim of the Europeans, and you must be able to speak to them and work their machine. But your greatest challenge, as a Kikuyu and a mundumugu, is to avoid becoming corrupted by them.”

“I do not feel corrupted,” he said. “I have learned many things from the computer.”

“So you have,” I agreed, as a fish eagle circled lazily overhead and the breeze brought the smell of a nearby herd of wildebeest. “And you have forgotten many things.”

“What have I forgotten?” he demanded, watching the fish eagle swoop down and grab a fish from the river. “You may test me and see how good my memory is.”

“You have forgotten that the true value of a story is that the listener must bring something to it,” I said. “I could simply order you not to be late, as you suggest—but the purpose of the story is to make you use your brain to understand why you should not be late.” I paused. “You are also forgetting that the reason we do not try to become like the Europeans is because we tried once before, and became only Kenyans.”

He was silent for a long time. Finally he looked up at me.

“May we skip today’s lesson?” he asked. “You have given me much to think about.” I nodded my acquiesence. “Come back tomorrow, and we will discuss your thoughts.” He stood up and walked down the long winding path that led from my hill to the village. But though I waited for him until the sun was high in the sky the next day, he did not come back.

Just as it is good for fledgling birds to test their wings, it is good for young people to test their powers by questioning authority. I bore Ndemi no malice, but simply waited until the day that he returned, somewhat humbled, to resume his studies.

But the fact that I now had no assistant did not absolve me of my duties, and so each day I walked down to the village, and blessed the scarecrows, and took my place alongside Koinnage in the Council of Elders. I brought new ointment for old Siboki’s joints, which were causing him discomfort, and I sacrificed a goat so that Ngai would look with favor upon the pending marriage of Maruta with a man of another clan.

As always, when I made my rounds, I was followed everywhere by the village children, who begged me to stop what I was doing and tell them a story. For two days I was too busy, for a mundumugu has many tasks to perform, but on the morning of the third day I had some time to spare, and I gathered them around me in the shade of an acacia tree.

“What kind of story would you like to hear?” I asked.

“Tell us of the old days, when we still lived in Kenya,” said a girl. I smiled. They always asked for stories of Kenya—not that they knew where Kenya was, or what it meant to the Kikuyu. But when we lived in Kenya the lion and the rhinoceros and the elephant were not yet extinct, and they loved stories in which animals spoke and displayed greater wisdom than men, a wisdom that they themselves assimilated as I repeated the stories.

“Very well,” I said. “I will tell you the story of the Foolish Lion.” They all sat or squatted down in a semi-circle, facing me with rapt attention, and I continued: “Once there was a foolish lion who lived on the slopes of Kirinyaga, the holy mountain, and because he was a foolish lion, he did not believe that Ngai had given the mountain to Gikuyu, the very first man. Then one morning . . .”

“That is wrong, Koriba,” said one of the boys.

I focused my weak eyes on him, and saw that it was Mdutu, the son of Karenja.

“You have interrupted your mundumugu,” I noted harshly. “And, even worse, you have contradicted him. Why?”

“Ngai did not give Kirinyaga to Gikuyu,” said Mdutu, getting to his feet.

“He most certainly did,” I replied. “Kirinyaga belongs to the Kikuyu.”

“That cannot be so,” he persisted, “for Kirinyaga is not a Kikuyu name, but a Maasai name. Kiri means mountain in the language of Maa, and nyaga means light. Is it not more likely that Ngai gave the mountain to the Maasai, and that our warriors took it away from them?”

“How do you know what these words mean in the language of the Maasai?” I demanded. “That language is not known to anyone on Kirinyaga.”

“Ndemi told us,” said Mdutu.

“Well, Ndemi is wrong!” I shouted. “The truth has been passed on from Gikuyu through his nine daughters and his nine sons-in-law all the way down to me, and never has it varied. The Kikuyu are Ngai’s chosen people. Just as He gave the spear and Kilimanjaro to the Maasai, He gave the digging-stick and Kirinyaga to us. Kirinyaga has always belonged to the Kikuyu, and it always will!”

“No, Koriba, you are wrong,” said a soft, high-pitched voice, and I turned to face my new assailant. It was tiny Thimi, the daughter of Njomu, barely seven years old, who rose to contradict me.

“Ndemi told us that many years ago the Kikuyu sold Kirinyaga to a European named John Boyes for six goats, and it was the British government that made him return it to us.”

“Who do you believe?” I demanded severely. “A young boy who has lived for only fifteen long rains, or your mundumugu?”

“I do not know,” she answered with no sign of fear. “He tells us dates and places, and you speak of wise elephants and foolish lions. It is very hard to decide.”

“Then perhaps instead of the story of the Foolish Lion,” I said, “I will tell you the story of the Arrogant Boy.”

“No, no, the lion!” shouted some of the children.

“Be quiet!” I snapped. “You will hear what I want to tell you!” Their protests subsided, and Thimi sat down again.

“Once there was a bright young boy,” I began.

“Was his name Ndemi?” asked Mdutu with a smile.

“His name was Legion,” I answered. “Do not interrupt again, or I shall leave and there will be no more stories until the next rains.”

The smile vanished from Mdutu’s face, and he lowered his head.

“As I said, this was a very bright boy, and he worked on his father’s shamba, herding the goats and cattle. And because he was a bright young boy, he was always thinking, and one day he thought of a way to make his chores easier. So he went to his father and said that he had had a dream, and in this dream they had built a wire enclosure with sharp barbs on the wire, to keep the cattle in and the hyenas out, and he was sure that if he were to build such an enclosure, he would no longer have to herd the cattle but would be free to do other things.

“ ‘I am glad to see that you are using your brain,’ said the boy’s father, ‘but that idea has been tried before, by the Europeans. If you wish to free yourself from your duties, you must think of some other way.’

“ ‘But why?’ said the boy. ‘Just because the Europeans thought of it does not make it bad. After all, it must work for them or they would not use it.’

“ ‘That is true,’ said his father. ‘But what works for the Europeans does not necessarily work for the Kikuyu. Now do your chores, and keep thinking, and if you think hard enough I am sure you will come up with a better idea.’

“But along with being bright, the boy was also arrogant, and he refused to listen to his father, even though his father was older and wiser and more experienced. So he spent all his spare time attaching sharp little barbs to the wire, and when he was done he built an enclosure and put his father’s cattle into it, sure that they could not get out and the hyenas could not find a way in. And when the enclosure was completed, he went to sleep for the night.”

I paused and surveyed my audience. Most of them were staring raptly at me, trying to figure out what came next.

“He awoke to screams of anger from his father and wails of anguish from his mother and sisters, and ran out to see what had happened. He found all of his father’s cattle dead. During the night the hyenas, whose jaws can crush a bone, had bitten through the posts to which the wire was attached, and the cattle, in their panic, ran into the wire and were held motionless by the barbs while the hyenas killed and ate them.

“The arrogant boy looked upon the carnage with puzzlement. ‘How can this have happened?’ he said.

“ ‘The Europeans have used this wire, and it never happened to them.’

“ ‘There are no hyenas in Europe,’ said his father. ‘I told you that we are different from the Europeans, and that what works for them will not work for us, but you refused to listen, and now we must live our lives in poverty, for in a single night your arrogance cost me the cattle that it has taken me a lifetime to accumulate.’ ”

I fell silent and waited for a response.

“Is that all?” asked Mdutu at last.

“That is all.”

“What did it mean?” asked another of the boys.

“You tell me,” I said.

Nobody answered for a few moments. Then Balimi, Thimi’s older sister, stood up.

“It means that only Europeans can use wire with barbs on it.”

“No,” I said. “You must not only listen, child, but think.”

“It means that what works for the Europeans will not work for the Kikuyu,” said Mdutu, “and that it is arrogant to believe that it will.”

“That is correct,” I said.

“That is not correct,” said a familiar voice from behind me, and I turned to see Ndemi standing there. “All it means is that the boy was too foolish to cover the posts with the wire.” The children looked at him, and began nodding their heads in agreement.

“No!” I said firmly. “It means that we must reject all things European, including their ideas, for they were not meant for the Kikuyu.”

“But why, Koriba?” asked Mdutu. “What is wrong with what Ndemi says?”

“Ndemi tells you only the facts of things,” I said. “But because he, too, is an arrogant boy, he fails to see the truth.”

“What truth does he fail to see?” persisted Mdutu.

“That if the wire enclosure were to work, then the next day the arrogant boy would borrow another idea from the Europeans, and yet another, until he had no Kikuyu ideas left, and he had turned his shamba into a European farm.”

“Europe is an exporter of food,” said Ndemi. “Kenya is an importer.”

“What does that mean?” asked Thimi.

“It means that Ndemi has a little knowledge, and does not yet know that that is a dangerous thing,” I answered.

“It means,” responded Ndemi, “that European farms produce more than enough to feed their tribes, and Kenyan farms do not produce enough. And if that is the case, it means that some European ideas may be good for the Kikuyu.”

“Perhaps you should wear shoes like the Europeans,” I said angrily, “since you have decided to become one.”

He shook his head. “I am a Kikuyu, not a European. But I do not wish to be an ignorant Kikuyu. How can we remain true to what we were, when your fables hide what we were from us?”

“No,” I said. “They reveal it.”

“I am sorry, Koriba,” said Ndemi, “for you are a great mundumugu and I respect you above all men, but in this matter you are wrong.” He paused and stared at me. “Why did you never tell us that the only time in our history the Kikuyu were united under the leadership of a single king, the king was a white man named John Boyes?”

The children gasped in amazement.

“If we do not know how it happened,” continued Ndemi, “how can we prevent it from happening again?

You tell us stories of our wars the Maasai, and they are wonderful tales of courage and victory—but according to the computer, we lost every war we ever fought against them. Shouldn’t we know that, so if the Maasai ever come to Kirinyaga, we are not deluded into fighting them because of the fables we have heard?”

“Koriba, is that true?” asked Mdutu. “Was our only king a European?”

“Did we never defeat the Maasai?” asked another of the children.

“Leave us for a moment,” I said, “and then I will answer you.” The children reluctantly got up and walked away until they were out of earshot, then stood and stared at Ndemi and myself.

“Why have you done this?” I said to Ndemi. “You will destroy their pride in being Kikuyu!”

“I am not less proud for knowing the truth,” said Ndemi. “Why should they be?”

“The stories I tell them are designed to make them distrust European ways, and to make them happy they are Kikuyu,” I explained, trying to control my temper. “You will undermine the confidence they must have if Kirinyaga is to remain our Utopia.”

“Most of us have never even seen a European,” answered Ndemi. “When I was younger, I used to dream about them, and in my dreams they had claws like a lion and shook the earth like an elephant when they walked. How does that prepare us for the day that we actually meet with them?”

“You will never meet them on Kirinyaga,” I said. “And the purpose of my stories is to keep us on Kirinyaga.” I paused. “Once before we had never seen Europeans, and we were so taken by their machines and their medicines and their religions that we tried to become Europeans ourselves, and succeeded only in becoming something other than Kikuyu. That must never happen again.”

“But isn’t it less likely to happen if you tell the children the truth?” persisted Ndemi.

“I do tell them the truth!” I said. “It is you who are confusing them with facts—facts that you got from European historians and a European computer.”

“Are the facts wrong?”

“That is not the issue, Ndemi,” I said. “These are children. They must learn as children do—as you yourself did.”

“And after their circumcision rituals, when they become adults, will you tell them the facts then?”

That sentence was as close to rebellion as he had ever come—indeed, as anyone on Kirinyaga had ever come. Never had I been more fond of a young man than I was of Ndemi—not even of my own son, who had chosen to remain in Kenya. Ndemi was bright, he was bold, and it was hardly unusual for one of his age to question authority. Therefore, I decided to make another attempt to reason to him, rather than risk a permanent rift in our relationship.

“You are still the brightest young man on Kirinyaga,” I said truthfully, “so I will pose you a question, and I will expect an honest answer. You seek after history, and I seek after truth. Which do you suppose is the more important?”

He frowned. “They are the same,” he answered. “History is truth.”

“No,” I replied. “History is a compilation of facts and events, which is subject to constant reinterpretation. It begins with truth, and evolves into fable. My stories begin with fable and evolve into truth.”

“If you are right,” he said thoughtfully, “then your stories are more important than history.”

“Very well, then,” I said, hoping that the matter was closed.

“But,” he added, “I am not sure that you are right. I will have to think more about it.”

“Do that,” I said. “You are an intelligent boy. You will come to the right conclusion.” Ndemi turned and began walking off in the direction of his family’s shamba. The children rushed back as soon as he was out of sight, and once more squatted in a tight semi-circle.

“Have you an answer to my question, Koriba?” asked Mdutu.

“I cannot recall your question,” I said.

“Was our only king a white man?”

“Yes.”

“How could that be?”

I considered my response for a long moment.

“I will answer that by telling you the story of the little Kikuyu girl who became, very briefly, the queen of all the elephants,” I said.

“What has that to do with the white man who became our king?” persisted Mdutu.

“Listen carefully,” I instructed him, “for when I am done, I shall ask you many questions about my story, and before we are through, you will have the answer to your own question.” He leaned forward attentively, and I began reciting my fable.

I returned to my boma to take the noon meal. After I had finished it, I decided to take a nap during the heat of the day, for I am an old man and it had been a long, wearing morning. I let my goats and chickens loose on my hillside, secure in the knowledge that no one would take them away since they each carried the mundumugu’s mark. I had just spread my sleeping blanket out beneath the branches of my acacia tree when I saw two figures at the foot of my hill.

At first I thought they were two village boys, looking for cattle that had strayed from their pastures, but when the figures began walking up the slopes of my hill I was finally able to focus my eyes on them. The larger figure was Shima, Ndemi’s mother, and the smaller was a goat that she led by a rope that she had tied around its neck.

Finally she reached my boma, somewhat out of breath, for the goat was unused to the rope and constantly pulled against it, and opened the gate.

“Jambo, Shima,” I said, as she entered the boma. “Why have you brought your goat to my hill? You know that only my own goats may graze here.”

“It is a gift for you, Koriba,” she replied.

“For me?” I said. “But I have done you no service in exchange for it.”

“You can, though. You can take Ndemi back. He is a good boy, Koriba.”

“But—”

“He will never be late again,” she promised. “He truly did save our goat from a hyena. He would never lie to his mundumugu. He is young, but he can become a great mundumugu someday. I know he can, if you will just teach him. You are a wise man, Koriba, and you have made a wise choice in Ndemi. I do not know why you have banished him, but if you will just take him back he will never misbehave again. He wants only to become a great mundumugu like yourself. Though of course,” she added hastily, “he could never be as great as you.”

“Will finally you let me speak?” I asked irritably.

“Certainly, Koriba.”

“I did not cast Ndemi out. He left of his own volition.”

Her eyes widened. “He left you?”

“He is young, and rebellion is part of youth.”

“So is foolishness!” she exclaimed furiously. “He has always been foolish. And late! He was even two weeks late being born when I carried him! He is always thinking, instead of doing his chores. For the longest time I thought we had been cursed, but then you made him your assistant, and I was to become the mother of the mundumugu, and now he has ruined everything!”

She let go of the rope, and the goat wandered around my boma as she began beating her breasts with her fists.

“Why am I so cursed?” she demanded. “Why does Ngai give me a fool for a son, and then stir my hopes by sending him to you, and then curse me doubly by returning him, almost a man and unable to perform any of the chores on our shamba? What will become of him? Who will accept a bride-price from such a fool? He will be late to plant our seed and late to harvest it, he will be late to choose a bride and late to make the payment on her, and he will end up living with the unmarried men at the edge of the forest and begging for food. With my luck he will even be late to die!” She paused for breath, then began wailing again, and finally screamed: “Why does Ngai hate me so?”

“Calm yourself, Shima,” I said.

“It is easy for you to say!” she sobbed. “You have not lost all hope for your future.”

“My future is of very limited duration,” I said. “It is Kirinyaga’s future that concerns me.”

“See?” she said, wailing and beating her breasts again. “See? I am the mother of the boy who will destroy Kirinyaga!”

“I did not say that.”

“What has he done, Koriba?” she said. “Tell me, and I will have his father and brothers beat him until he behaves.”

“Beating him is not the solution,” I said. “He is young, and he rebels against my authority. It is the way of things. Before long he will realize that he is wrong.”

“I will explain to him all that he can lose, and he will know that he should never disagree with you, and he will come back.”

“You might suggest it,” I encouraged her. “I am an old man, and I have much left to teach him.”

“I will do as you say, Koriba,” she promised.

“Good,” I said. “Now go back to your shamba and speak to Ndemi, for I have other things to do.” It was not until I awoke from my nap and returned to the village to sit at the Council of Elders that I realized just how many things I had to do.

Our daily business is always conducted in late afternoon, when the heat of the day has passed, at the boma of Koinnage, the paramount chief. One by one the Elders place their mats in a semi-circle and sit on them, with my place being at Koinnage’s right hand. The boma is cleared of all women, children, and animals, and when the last of us has arrived, Koinnage calls us into session. He announces what problems are to be considered, and then I ask Ngai to guide our judgment and allow us to come to just decisions. On this particular day, two of the villagers had asked the Council of Elders to determine the ownership of a calf that was born to a cow they jointly owned; Sebana wanted permission to divorce his youngest wife, who had now been barren for three years; and Kijo’s three sons were unhappy with the way his estate had been divided among them.

Koinnage consulted with me in low whispers after each petition had been heard, and took my advice, as always. The calf went to the man who had fed the cow during her pregnancy, with the understanding that the other man should own the next calf. Sebana was told that he could divorce his wife, but would not receive the bride price back, and he elected to keep her. Kijo’s sons were told that they could accept the division as it was, or if two of them agreed, I would place three colored stones in a gourd, and they could each withdraw a stone and own the shamba that it represented. Since each faced the possibility of ending up with the smallest shamba, only one brother voted for our solution, as I had foreseen, and the petition was dismissed.

At this point, Koinnage’s senior wife, Wambu, would usually appear with a large gourd of pombe, and we would drink it and then return to our bomas, but this day Wambu did not come, and Koinnage turned nervously to me.

“There is one thing more, Koriba,” he said.

“Oh?”

He nodded, and I could see the muscles in his face tensing as he worked up the courage to confront his mundumugu.

“You have told us that Ngai handed the burning spear to Jomo Kenyatta, that he might create Mau Mau and drive the Europeans from Kenya.”

“That is true,” I said.

“Is it?” he replied. “I have been told that he himself married a European woman, that Mau Mau did not succeed in driving the Europeans from the holy mountain, and that Jomo Kenyatta was not even his real name—that he was actually born with the European name Johnstone.” He stared at me, half-accusing, half-terrified of arousing my wrath. “What have you to say to this, Koriba?” I met his gaze and held it for a long time, until he finally dropped his eyes. Then, one by one, I looked coldly at each member of the Council.

“So you prefer to believe a foolish young boy to your own mundumugu?” I demanded.

“We do not believe the boy, but the computer,” said Karenja.

“And have you spoken to the computer yourselves?”

“No,” said Koinnage. “That is another thing we must discuss. Ndemi tells me that your computer speaks to him and tells him many things, while my computer can do nothing but send messages to the other chiefs.”

“It is a mundumugu’s tool, not to be used by other men,” I replied.

“Why?” asked Karenja. “It knows many things that we do not know. We could learn much from it.”

“You have learned much from it,” I said. “It speaks to me, and I speak to you.”

“But it also speaks to Ndemi,” continued Karenja, “and if it can speak to a boy barely past circumcision age, why can it not speak directly to the elders of the village?” I turned to Karenja and held my two hands in front of me, palms up. “In my left hand is the meat of an impala that I killed today,” I said. “In my right is the meat of an impala that I killed five days ago and left to sit in the sun. It is covered with ants, worms crawl through it, and it stinks.” I paused. “Which of the two pieces of meat will you eat?”

“The meat in your left hand,” he answered.

“But both pieces of meat came from the same herd of impala,” I pointed out. “Both animals were equally fat and healthy when they died.”

“But the meat in your right hand is rotten,” he said.

“That is true,” I agreed. “And just as there can be good and bad meat, so there can be good and bad facts. The facts Ndemi has related to you come from books written by the Europeans, and facts can mean different things to them than they mean to us.”

I paused while they considered what I had said, and then continued. “A European may look upon the savannah and envision a city, while a Kikuyu may look at the same savannah and see a shamba. A European may look at an elephant and see ivory trinkets, while a Kikuyu may look at the same elephant and see food for his village, or destruction for his crops. And yet they are looking at the same land, and the same animal.

“Now,” I said, once again looking at each of them in turn, “I have been to school in Europe, and in America, and only I, of all the men and women on Kirinyaga, have lived among the white man. And I tell you that only I, your mundumugu, am capable of separating the good facts from the bad facts. It was a mistake to allow Ndemi to speak with my computer; I will not allow it again, until I have given him more of my wisdom.”

I had thought my statement would put an end to the matter, but as I looked around I saw signs of discomfort, as if they wished to argue with me but lacked the courage. Finally Koinnage leaned forward and, without looking directly at me, said, “Do you not see what you are saying, Koriba? If the mundumugu can make a mistake by allowing a young boy to speak with his computer, can he not also make a mistake by not allowing the Elders to speak to it?”

I shook my head. “It is a mistake to allow any Kikuyu except the mundumugu to speak to it.”

“But there is much that we can learn from it,” persisted Koinnage.

“What?” I asked bluntly.

He shrugged helplessly. “If I knew, then I would already have learned it.”

“How many times must I repeat this to you: there is nothing to be learned from the Europeans. The more you try to become like them, the less you remain Kikuyu. This is our Utopia, a Kikuyu Utopia. We must fight to preserve it.”

“And yet,” said Karenja, “even the word Utopia is European, is it not?”

“You heard that from Ndemi, too?” I asked without hiding the annoyance from my voice. He nodded his head. “Yes.”

“Utopia is just a word,” I said. “It is the idea that counts.”

“If the Kikuyu have no word for it and the Europeans do, perhaps it is a European idea,” said Karenja.

“And if we have built our world upon a European idea, perhaps there are other European ideas that we can also use.”

I looked at their faces, and realized, for perhaps the first time, that most of the original Elders of Kirinyaga had died. Old Siboki remained, and I could tell by his face that he found European ideas even more abhorrent than I myself did, and there were two or three others, but this was a new generation of Elders, men who had come to maturity on Kirinyaga and could not remember the reasons we had fought so hard to come here.

“If you want to become black Europeans, go back to Kenya!” I snapped in disgust. “It is filled with them!”

“We are not black Europeans,” said Karenja, refusing to let the matter drop. “We are Kikuyu who think it is possible that not all European ideas are harmful.”

“Any idea that changes us is harmful,” I said.

“Why?” asked Koinnage, his courage to oppose me growing as he realized that many of the Elders supported him. “Where is it written that a Utopia cannot grow and change? If that were the case, we would have ceased to be a Utopia the day the first baby was born on Kirinyaga.”

“There are as many Utopias as there are races,” I said. “None among you would argue that a Kikuyu Utopia is the same as a Maasai Utopia or a Samburu Utopia. By the same token, a Kikuyu Utopia cannot be a European Utopia. The closer you come to the one, the farther you move from the other.” They had no answer to that, and I got to my feet.

“I am your mundumugu,” I said. “I have never misled you. You have always trusted my judgment in the past. You must trust in it in this instance.”

As I began walking out of the boma, I heard Karenja’s voice behind me.

“If you were to die tomorrow, Ndemi would become our mundumugu. Are you saying we should trust his judgment as we trust yours?”

I turned to face him. “Ndemi is very young and inexperienced. You, as the elders of the village, would have to use your wisdom to decide whether or not what he says is correct.”

“A bird that has been caged all its life cannot fly,” said Karenja, “just as a flower that has been kept from the sun will not blossom.”

“What is your point?” I asked.

“Shouldn’t we begin using our wisdom now, lest we forget how when Ndemi has become the mundumugu?”

This time it was I who had no answer, so I turned on my heel and began the long walk back to my hill.

For five days I fetched my own water and made my own fires, and then Ndemi returned, as I had known he would.

I was sitting in my boma, idly watching a herd of gazelles grazing across the river, when he trudged up the path to my hill, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

“Jambo, Ndemi,” I said. “It is good to see you again.”

“Jambo, Koriba,” he replied.

“And how was your vacation?” I asked, but there is no Swahili word for vacation so I used the English term and the humor and sarcasm were lost on him.

“My father urged me to come back,” he said, bending over to pet one of my goats, and I saw the welts on his back that constituted his “urging.”

“I am glad to have you back, Ndemi,” I said. “We have become like father and son, and it pains me when we argue, as I am sure it pains you.”

“It does pain me,” he admitted. “I do not like to disagree with you, Koriba.”

“We have both made mistakes,” I continued. “You argued with your mundumugu, and I allowed you access to all that information before you were mature enough to know what to do with it. We are both intelligent enough to learn from our mistakes. You are still my chosen successor. It shall be as if it never happened.”

“But it did happen, Koriba,” he said.

“We shall pretend it did not.”

“I do not think I can do that,” said Ndemi unhappily, protecting his eyes as a sudden wind blew dust across the boma. “I learned many things when I spoke to the computer. How can I unlearn them?”

“If you cannot unlearn them, then you will have to ignore them until you are older,” I said. “I am your teacher. The computer is just a tool. You will use it to bring the rains, and to send an occasional message to Maintenance, and that is all.”

A black kite swooped down and made off with a scrap of my morning meal that had fallen beside the embers of my fire. I watched it while I waited for Ndemi to speak.

“You appear troubled,” I said, when it became apparent that he would not speak first. “Tell me what bothers you.”

“It was you who taught me to think, Koriba,” he said as various emotions played across his handsome young face. “Would you have me stop thinking now, just because I think differently than you do?”

“Of course I do not want you to stop thinking, Ndemi,” I said, not without sympathy, for I understood the forces at war within him. “What good would a mundumugu be if he could not think? But just as there are right and wrong ways to throw a spear, there are right and wrong ways to think. I wish only to see you take the path of true wisdom.”

“It will be greater wisdom if I come upon it myself,” he said. “I must learn as many facts as I can, so that I can properly decide which are helpful and which are harmful.”

“You are still too young,” I said. “You must trust me until you are older, and better able to make those decisions.”

“The facts will not change.”

“No, but you will.”

“But how can I know that change is for the good?” he asked. “What if you are wrong, and by listening to you until I become like you, I will be wrong too?”

“If you think I am wrong, why have you come back?”

“To listen, and decide,” he said. “And to speak to the computer again.”

“I cannot permit that,” I said. “You have already caused great mischief among the tribe. Because of you, they are questioning everything I say.”

“There is a reason for that.”

“Perhaps you will tell me what it is?” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm from my voice, for I truly loved this boy and wished to win him back to my side.

“I have listened to your stories for many years now, Koriba,” he said, “and I believe that I can use your method to show you the reason.”

I nodded my head and waited for him to continue.

“This should be called the story of Ndemi,” he said, “but because I am pretending to be Koriba, I shall call it the story of the Unborn Lion.”

I plucked an insect from my cheek and rolled it between my fingers until the carapace cracked. “I am listening.”

“Once there was an unborn lion who was very anxious to see the world,” began Ndemi. “He spent much time talking about it to his unborn brothers. ‘The world will be a wonderful place,’ he assured them. ‘The sun will always be shining, and the plains will be filled with fat, lazy impala, and all other animals will bow before us, for there shall be no animal mightier than us.’

“His brothers urged him to stay where he was. ‘Why are you so anxious to be born?’ they asked him.

“ ‘Here it is warm and safe, and we never hunger. Who knows what awaits us in the world?’

“But the unborn lion would hear none of it, and one night, while his mother and brethren slept, he stole out into the world. He could not see, so he nudged his mother and said, ‘Where is the sun?’ and she told him that the sun vanishes every evening, leaving the world cold and dark. ‘At least when it comes back tomorrow, it will shine on fat lazy impala that we will catch and eat,’ he said, trying to console himself.

“But his mother said, ‘There are no impala here, for they have migrated with the rains to the far side of the world. All that is left for us to eat is the buffalo. Their flesh is tough and tasteless, and they kill as many of us as we kill of them.’

“ ‘If my stomach is empty, at least my spirit will be full,’ said the newly-born lion, ‘for all other animals will look upon us with fear and envy.’

“ ‘You are very foolish, even for a newly-born cub,’ said his mother. ‘The leopard and the hyena and the eagle look upon you not as an object of envy, but rather as a tasty meal.’

“ ‘At least all of them will fear me when I am fully-grown,’ said the newly-born lion.

“ ‘The rhinoceros will gore you with his horn,’ said his mother, ‘and the elephant will toss you high into the trees with his trunk. Even the black mamba will not step aside for you, and will kill you if you try to approach it.’

“The mother continued her list of all the animals that would neither fear nor envy the lion when he grew up, and finally he told her to speak no more.

“ ‘I have made a terrible mistake by being born,’ he said. ‘The world is not as I pictured it, and I will rejoin my brothers where they are warm and safe and comfortable.’

“But his mother merely smiled at him. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, not without compassion. ‘Once you are born, whether it is of your own choosing or mine, you cannot ever go back to being an unborn lion. Here you are, and here you shall stay.’ ”

Ndemi looked at me, his story finished.

“It is a very wise story,” I said. “I could not have done better myself. I knew the day I first made you my pupil that you would make a fine mundumugu.”

“You still do not understand,” he said unhappily.

“I understand the story perfectly,” I replied.

“But it is a lie,” said Ndemi. “I told it only to show you how easy it is to make up such lies.”

“It is not easy at all,” I corrected him. “It is an art, mastered only by a few—and now that I see that you have mastered it, it would be doubly hurtful to lose you.”

“Art or not, it is a lie,” he repeated. “If a child heard and believed it, he would be sure that lions could speak, and that babies can be born whenever they chose to be.” He paused. “It would have been much simpler to tell you that once I have obtained knowledge, whether is was freely given or not, I cannot empty my mind and give it back. Lions have nothing to do with that.” He paused for a long moment.

“Furthermore, I do not want to give my knowledge back. I want to learn more things, not forget those that I already know.”

“You must not say that, Ndemi,” I urged him. “Especially now that I see that my teachings have taken root, and that your abilities as a creator of fables will someday surpass my own. You can be a great mundumugu if you will just allow me to guide you.”

“I love and respect you as I do my own father, Koriba,” he replied. “I have always listened and tried to learn from you, and I will continue to do so for as long as you will permit me. But you are not the only source of knowledge. I also wish to learn what your computer can teach me.”

“When I decide you are ready.”

“I am ready now.”

“You are not.”

His face reflected an enormous inner battle, and I could only watch until it was resolved. Finally he took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I am sorry, Koriba, but I cannot continue to tell lies when there are truths to be learned.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “Kwaheri, mwalimu.” Good-bye, my teacher.

“What will you do?”

“I cannot work on my father’s shamba,” he said, “not after all that I have learned. Nor do I wish to live in isolation with the bachelors at the edge of the forest.”

“What is left for you?” I asked.

“I shall walk to that area of Kirinyaga called Haven, and await the next Maintenance ship. I will go to Kenya and learn to read and write, and when I am ready, I will study to become an historian. And when I am a good enough historian, I will return to Kirinyaga and teach what I have learned.”

“I am powerless to stop you from leaving,” I said, “for the right to emigrate is guaranteed to all our citizens by our charter. But if you return, know that despite what we have been to one another, I will oppose you.”

“I do not wish to be your enemy, Koriba,” he said.

“I do not wish to have you as an enemy,” I replied. “The bond between us has been a strong one.”

“But the things I have learned are too important to my people.”

“They are my people too,” I pointed out, “and I have led them to this point by always doing what I think is best for them.”

“Perhaps it is time for them to choose what is best.”

“They are incapable of making that choice,” I said.

“If they are incapable of making that choice, it is only because you have hoarded knowledge to which they have as much right as you do.”

“Think very carefully before you do this thing,” I said. “Despite my love for you, if you do anything to harm Kirinyaga, I will crush you like an insect.”

He smiled sadly. “For six years I have asked you to teach me how to turn my enemies into insects so that I may crush them. Is this how I am finally to learn?”

I could not help but return his smile. I had an urge to stand up and throw my arms around him and hug him, but such behavior is unacceptable in a mundumugu, so I merely looked at him for a long moment and then said, “Kwaheri, Ndemi. You were the best of them.”

“I had the best teacher,” he replied.

And with that, he turned and began the long walk toward Haven.

The problems caused by Ndemi did not end with his departure.

Njoro dug a borehole near his hut, and when I explained that the Kikuyu did not dig boreholes but carried their water from the river, he replied that surely this borehole must be acceptable, for the idea came not from the Europeans but rather the Tswana people far to the south of Kenya. I ordered the boreholes to be filled in. When Koinnage argued that there were crocodiles in the river and that he would not risk the lives of our women simply to maintain what he felt was a useless tradition, I had to threaten him with a powerful thahu, or curse—that of impotency—before he agreed. Then there was Kidogo, who has named his firstborn Jomo, after Jomo Kenyatta, the Burning Spear. One day he announced that the boy was henceforth to be known as Johnstone, and I had to threaten him with banishment to another village before he relented. But even as he gave in, Mbura changed his own name to Johnstone and moved to a distant village even before I could order it. Shima continued to tell anyone who would listen that I had forced Ndemi to leave Kirinyaga because he was occasionally late for his lessons, and Koinnage kept requesting a computer that was the equal of my own.

Finally, young Mdutu created his own version of a barbed-wire enclosure for his father’s cattle, using woven grasses and thorns, making sure he wrapped them around the fenceposts. I had it torn down, and thereafter he always walked away when the other children circled around me to hear a story. I began to feel like the Dutch boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale. As quickly as I put my finger in the dike to staunch the flow of European ideas, they would break through in another place. And then a strange thing happened. Certain ideas that were not European, that Ndemi could not possibly have transmitted to the members of the village, began cropping up on their own. Kibo, the youngest of Koinnage’s three wives, rendered the fat from a dead warthog and began burning it at night, creating Kirinyaga’s first lamp. Ngobe, whose arm was not strong enough to throw a spear with any accuracy, devised a very primitive bow and arrow, the first Kikuyu ever to use such a weapon. Karenja created a wooden plow, so that his ox could drag it through the fields while his wives simply guided it, and soon all the other villagers were improvising plows and strangely-shaped digging tools. Indeed, alien ideas that had been dormant since the creation of Kirinyaga were now springing forth on all fronts. Ndemi’s words had opened a Pandora’s box, and I did not know how to close it. I spent many long days sitting alone on my hill, staring down at the village and wondering if a Utopia can evolve and still remain a Utopia.

And the answer was always the same: Yes, but it will not be the same Utopia, and it was my sacred duty to keep Kirinyaga a Kikuyu Utopia.

When I was convinced that Ndemi was not going to return, I began going down to the village each day, trying to decide which of the children was the brightest and most forceful, for it would take both brilliance and force to deflect the alien ideas which were infecting our world and turning it into something it was never meant to be.

I spoke only to the boys, for no female may be a mundumugu. Some, like Mdutu, had already been corrupted by listening to Ndemi—but those who had not been corrupted by Ndemi were even more hopeless, for a mind cannot open and close at will, and those who were unmoved by what he had to say were not bright enough for the tasks a mundumugu must perform.

I expanded my search to other villages, convinced that somewhere on Kirinyaga I would find the boy I sought, a boy who grasped the difference between facts, which merely informed, and parables, which not only informed but instructed. I needed a Homer, a Jesus, a Shakespeare, someone who could touch men’s souls and gently guide them down the path that must be taken.

But the more I searched, the more I came to the realization that a Utopia does not lend itself to such tellers of tales. Kirinyaga seemed divided into two totally separate groups: those who were content with their lives and had no need to think, and those whose every thought led them farther and farther from the society we had labored to build. The unimaginative would never be capable of creating parables, and the imaginative would create their own parables, parables that would not reaffirm a belief in Kirinyaga and a distrust of alien ideas.

After some months I was finally forced to concede that, for whatever reason, there were no potential mundumugus waiting to be found and groomed. I began wondering if Ndemi had been truly unique, or if he would have eventually rejected my teachings even without exposure to the European influence of the computer. Was it possible that a true Utopia could not outlast the generation that founded it, that it was the nature of man to reject the values of the society into which he is born, even when those values are sacred?

Or was it just conceivable that Kirinyaga had never been a Utopia, that somehow we had deluded ourselves into believing that we could go back to a way of life that had forever vanished?

I considered that possibility for a long time, but eventually I rejected it, for if it were true, then the only logical conclusion was that it had vanished because the Europeans’ values were more pleasing to Ngai than our own, and this I knew to be false.

No, if there was a truth anywhere in the universe, it was that Kirinyaga was exactly as it was meant to be—and if Ngai felt obligated to test us by presenting us with these heresies, that would make our ultimate victory over the lies of the Europeans all the more sweet. If minds were worth anything, they were worth fighting for, and when Ndemi returned, armed with his facts and his data and his numbers, he would find me waiting for him.

It would be a lonely battle, I thought as I carried my empty water gourds down to the river, but having given His people a second chance to build their Utopia, Ngai would not allow us to fail. Let Ndemi tempt our people with his history and his passionless statistics. Ngai had His own weapon, the oldest and truest weapon He possessed, the weapon that had created Kirinyaga and kept it pure and intact despite all the many challenges it had encountered.

I looked into the water and studied the weapon critically. It appeared old and frail, but I could also see hidden reservoirs of strength, for although the future appeared bleak, it could not fail as long as it was used in Ngai’s service. It stared back at me, bold and unblinking, secure in the rightness of its cause. It was the face of Koriba, last storyteller among the Kikuyu, who stood ready to battle once again for the soul of his people.

THE SINGULAR HABITS OF WASPS

Geoffrey A. Landis

Wherein two well-known Victorian figures are linked by most singular circumstances. . . .

Of the many adventures in which I have participated with my friend Mr Sherlock Holmes, none has been more singularly horrifying than the case of the Whitechapel killings, nor ever had I previously had cause to doubt the sanity of my friend. I need but close my eyes to see again the horror of that night; the awful sight of my friend, his arms red to the elbow, his knife still dripping gore, and to recall in every detail the gruesome horrors that followed.

The tale of this adventure is far too awful to allow any hint of the true course of the affair to be known. Although I dare never let this account be read by others, I have often noticed, in chronicling the adventures of my friend, that in the process of putting pen to paper a great relief occurs. A catharsis, as we call it in the medical profession. And so I hope that by putting upon paper the events of those weeks, I may ease my soul from its dread fascination with the horrid events of that night. I will write this and then secret the account away with orders that it be burned upon my death.

Genius is, as I have often remarked, closely kin to madness, so closely that at times it is hard to distinguish the one from the other, and the greatest geniuses are also often quite insane. I had for a long time known that my friend was subject to sporadic fits of blackest depression, from which he could become aroused in an instant into bursts of manic energy, in a manner not unlike the cyclic mood-swings of a madman. But the limits to his sanity I never probed.

The case began in the late springtime of 1888. All who were in London at that time will recall the perplexing afternoon of the double cannonade. Holmes and I were enjoying a cigar after lunch in our sitting room at 221B Baker Street when the hollow report of a double firing of cannon rang out from the cloudless sky, rattling the windows and causing Mrs Hudson’s china to dance upon its shelves. I rushed to the window. Holmes was in the midst of one of those profound fits of melancholia to which he is so prone, and did not rise from his chair, but did bestir himself so much as to ask what I saw. Aside from other, equally perplexed folk opening their windows to look in all directions up and down the street, I saw nothing out of the ordinary, and such I reported to him.

“Most unusual,” Holmes remarked. He was still slumped almost bonelessly in his chair, but I believed I detected a bit of interest in his eye. “We shall hear more about this, I would venture to guess.”

And indeed, all of London seemed to have heard the strange reports, without any source to be found, and the subject could not be avoided all that day or the next. Each newspaper ventured an opinion, and even strangers on the street talked of little else. As to conclusion, there was none, nor was the strange sound repeated. In another day the usual gossip, scandals and crimes of the city had crowded the marvel out of the papers, and the case was forgotten.

But it had, at least, the effect of breaking my friend out of his melancholia, even so far as to cause him to pay a rare visit to his brother at the Diogenes Club. Mycroft was high in the Queen’s service, and there were few secrets of the Empire to which Mycroft was not privy. Holmes did not confide in me as to what result came of his inquiries of Mycroft, but he spent the remainder of the evening pacing and smoking, contemplating some mystery.

In the morning we had callers, and the mystery of the cannonade was temporarily set aside. They were two men in simple but neat clothes, both very diffident and hesitant of speech.

“I see that you have come from the south of Surrey,” Holmes said calmly. “A farm near Godalming, perhaps?”

“Indeed we have, sir, from Covingham, which is a bit south of Godalming,” said the elder of the visitors, “though how you could know, I’ll never guess in all my born days, seeing as how I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting you before in my life, nor Baxter here neither.”

I knew that Holmes, with his encyclopaedic knowledge, would have placed them precisely from their accents and clothing, although this elementary feat of deduction seemed to quite astound our visitors.

“And this is the first visit to London for either of you,” said Holmes. “Why have you come this distance from your farm to see me?”

The two men looked at each other in astonishment. “Why, right you are again, sir! Never been to London town, nor Baxter.”

“Come, come; to the point. You have traveled this distance to see me upon some matter of urgency.”

“Yes, sir. It’s the matter of young Gregory. A farm hand he was, sir, a strapping lad, over six feet and still lacking ‘is full height. A-haying he was. A tragic accident t’was, sir, tragic.”

Holmes of course noticed the use of the past tense, and his eyes brightened. “An accident, you say? Not murder?”

“Yes.”

Holmes was puzzled. “Then, pray, why have you come to me?”

“’Is body, sir. We’ve come about ’is body.”

“What about it?”

“Why, it’s gone, sir. Right vanished away.”

“Ah.” Holmes leaned forward in his chair, his eyes gleaming with sudden interest. “Pray, tell me all about it, and spare none of the details.”

The story they told was long and involved many diversions into details of life as a hired hand at Sherringford Farm, the narration so roundabout that even Holmes’s patience was tried, but the essence of the story was simple. Baxter and young Gregory had been working in the fields when Gregory had been impaled by the blade of the mechanical haying engine. “And cursed be the day that the master ever decided to buy such an infernal device,” added the older man, who was the uncle and only relation of the poor Gregory. Disentangled from the machine, the young farmhand had been still alive, but very clearly dying. His abdomen had been ripped open and his viscera exposed. Baxter had laid the dying man in the shade of a hayrick, and gone to fetch help. Help had taken two hours to arrive, and when they had come, they had found the puddle of congealing blood, but no sign of Gregory. They had searched all about, but the corpse was nowhere to be found, nor was there any sign of how he had been carried away. There was no chance, Baxter insisted, that Gregory could have walked even a small distance on his own. “Not unless he dragged ’is guts after him. I’ve seen dying men, guv, and men what ’ave been mere wounded, and young Gregory was for it.”

“This case may have some elements of interest in it,” said Holmes. “Pray, leave me to cogitate upon the matter tonight. Watson, hand me the train schedule, would you? Thank you. Ah, it is as I thought. There is a 9 A.M. train from Waterloo.” He turned to the two men. “If you would be so good as to meet me on the morrow at the platform?”

“Aye, sir, that we could.”

“Then it is settled. Watson, I do believe you have a prior engagement?”

That I did, as I was making plans for my upcoming marriage, and had already made firm commitment in the morning to inspect a practice in the Paddington district with a view toward purchasing it. Much as I have enjoyed accompanying my friend upon his adventures, this was one which I should have to forego.

Holmes returned late from Surrey, and I did not see him until breakfast the next morning. As often he was when on a case, he was rather uncommunicative, and my attempts to probe the matter were met with monosyllables, except at the very last. “Most unusual,” he said, as if to himself. “Most singular indeed.”

“What?” I asked, eager to listen now that it appeared that Holmes was ready to break his silence.

“The tracks, Watson,” he said. “The tracks. Not man, nor beast, but definitely tracks.” He looked at his pocket-watch. “Well, I must be off. Time enough for cogitation when I have more facts.”

“But where are you going?”

Holmes laughed. “My dear Watson, I have in my time amassed a bit of knowledge of various matters which would be considered most recherché to laymen. But I fear that, upon occasion, even I must consult with an expert.”

“Then whom?”

“Why, I go to see Professor Huxley,” he answered, and was out the door before I could ask what query he might have for the eminent biologist.

He was absent from Baker Street all afternoon. When he returned after suppertime I was anxious to ask how his interview with the esteemed professor had gone.

“Ah, Watson, even I make my occasional mistake. I should have telegraphed first. As it was, Professor Huxley had just left London, and is not to return for a week.” He took out his pipe, inspected it for a moment, then set it aside and rang for Mrs Hudson to bring in some supper. “But in this case, my journey was not in vain. I had a most delightful discussion with the professor’s protégé, a Mr Wells by name. A Cockney lad, son of a shop-keeper and no more than twenty-two, unless I miss my guess, but a most remarkable man nonetheless. Interested in a wide variety of fields, and I venture to say that in whatever field he chooses, he will outshine even his esteemed teacher. Quite an interesting conversation we had, and a most useful one.”

“But what was it that you discussed?” I asked.

Holmes set aside the cold beef that Mrs Hudson had brought, leaned back in his chair, and shut his eyes. For a while I thought that he had gone to sleep without hearing my question. At last he spoke. “Why, we discussed the planet Mars,” he said, without opening his eyes. “And the singular habits of wasps.”

It seemed that his researches, whatever they were, led to no distinct conclusion, for when I asked him about the case the next day, he gave no response. That day he stayed in his chambers, and through the closed door I heard only the intermittent voice of his violin speaking in its melancholy, unfathomable tongue.

I have perhaps mentioned before that my friend would habitually have more than one case on which he worked at any one time. It appeared that over the next few evenings he was about on another one, for I found him dressing to go out at a late hour.

“Another case, Holmes?” I asked.

“As you can see, Watson,” he replied. He indicated his less-than-respectable outfit and the threadbare workman’s jacket he was pulling on over it. “Duty calls at all hours. I shan’t be more than a few hours, I expect.”

“I am ready to assist.”

“Not in this one, my dear friend. You may stay home tonight.”

“Is there danger?”

“Danger?” He seemed surprised, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him. “Danger? Oh, perhaps a slight bit.”

“You know that I would not hesitate . . .”

“My dear doctor,” he said, and smiled. “Let me assure you that I am not worried on that score. No, it is that I go to the East End . . .”

The East End of London was no place for gentlemen, with slaughterhouses and tenements of the lowest order; a place for drunkards, sailors, Chinese and Indian laborers, and ruffians of all sorts. Nevertheless I was quite willing to brave much worse, if necessary, for the sake of Holmes. “Is that all?” I said. “Holmes, I do believe you underestimate me!”

“Ah, Watson . . .” He seemed to reflect for a moment. “No, it would not do. You are soon to be married, and have your wife-to-be to think of.” He raised a hand to forestall my imminent objection. “No, not the danger, my friend. Don’t worry for me on that score. I have my resources. It is . . . how to put it delicately? I expect that I shall meet people in places where a gentleman soon to be married would best not be seen.”

“Holmes!”

“Business, my dear Watson. Business.” And with that, he left.

His business there did not seem to be concluded that evening or the next. By the end of August he was visiting the East End once or twice a week. I had already become used to his odd hours and strange habits, and soon thought nothing of it. But he was so habitual about it, and so secretive, that it soon caused me to wonder whether perhaps he might be calling upon a woman. I could think of nothing that seemed less like Holmes, for in all my time with him he had never expressed a trace of romantic interest in the fairer sex. And yet, from my own medical experience, I knew that even the most steadfast of men must experience those urges common to our gender, however much he might profess to disdain romance.

Romance? Though I myself never frequented such places, as an Army man I knew quite as well as Holmes what sort of women dwelt in Whitechapel, and what profession they practised. Indeed, he had admitted as much when he had warned me away “because I was to be married.” But then, a woman of such type could well appeal to Holmes. There would be nothing of romance involved. It would be merely a business proposition for her, and a release of pressure for him. A dozen times I resolved to warn him of the dangers—the danger of disease, if nothing else—in patronizing women of that sort, and so many times my nerve failed and I said nothing.

And, if it were not what I feared, what case could it be that would take him into Whitechapel with such frequency?

One evening, shortly after Holmes had left, a message boy delivered a small package addressed to him. The address proclaimed it to be from a John B. Coores and Sons, but gave no clue to its contents. This name seemed to me familiar, but, struggle as I might, I could not recall where I might have seen it before. I left it in the sitting room for Holmes, and the next morning saw that he had taken it. He made no mention of the package or of what it contained, however, and my curiosity over it remained unslaked.

But another event soon removed that curiosity from my mind. The newspaper that morning carried a report of a brutal murder on Buck’s Row in Whitechapel. The body of an unidentified woman had been found on the street, and, what was even more grotesque, after her death her body had been brutally sliced open. I read the paper to Holmes as he sat drinking coffee in the morning. As far as I could tell, he had not slept the previous night, although he seemed little the worse for it. He made no comment on the article. It occurred to me that for all its gruesome features, this was the sort of commonplace murder he would have no interest in, since it seemed quite lacking in the singular points that so interested him. I made a comment to him to that effect.

“Not so, Watson,” he said, without looking up. “I am quite interested to hear what the press has to say about the Nichols tragedy.”

This comment startled me considerably, since the paper had given no name to the victim. I suddenly remembered that East London was exactly where Holmes was going for all these evenings, perhaps to the very place the murder had occurred.

“My God, Holmes! Did you know her?”

At this he looked up, and gave me a long, piercing stare. After a long while he looked away and gave a short laugh. “I do have my secrets, Watson. Pray, inquire no further.” But to me his laughter sounded forced.

It was a week before I saw Holmes prepare for another of his nocturnal sojourns. After napping all afternoon, Holmes was again dressing in faded and tattered clothing. This time I did not ask, but silently dressed to follow.

When he put on his ear-flapped travelling-cap, I was ready as well. I quietly walked to his side, clutching my old service revolver in the pocket of my coat. He looked at me with an expression of utmost horror and put up a hand. “My God, Watson! If you value your life and your honour, don’t follow me!”

“Just tell me this, then,” I said. “Are you doing something . . . dishonourable?”

“I am doing what I must.” And he was out the door and gone in the time it took me to realize that he had in no way answered my question.

As I prepared for bed that night, wondering where Holmes had gone and what he was doing there, it suddenly occurred to me where I had seen the name John B. Coores and Sons before. I crossed the room, thrust open the cabinet where I kept medical supplies, and drew out a small wooden box. There it was. I had looked at the name a thousand times without really seeing it, neatly lettered on the side of the box: John B. Coores and Sons, Fine Surgical Instruments. But what could Holmes want with surgical tools?

And in the next evening’s paper, I saw with horror that there had been another murder. The Whitechapel killer had struck again, and once more he had not contented himself with merely killing the woman. Using a surgical knife and a knowledge of anatomy, he had dissected the body and removed several organs.

That Sunday I took my beloved Mary to the theatre. My thoughts were dark, but I endeavoured to allow none of my turmoil to be communicated to her, hoping instead that her sweet presence might distract me from my dire speculations. Events plotted against me, however, for playing at the Lyceum was a most disturbing play, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I watched the play with my mind awhirl, scarcely noticing the presence of my beloved at my side.

After the play I pleaded sudden ill health and fled home. Seeing my ashen face, Mary heartily agreed that I should go home to rest, and it was all I could do to dissuade her from accompanying me back to serve as nurse.

The play had been presented as fiction, but it had hit a note of purest truth. That a single man could have two personalities! Stevenson had been circumspect about naming the drug that would so polarize a man’s psyche as to split his being into two parts, but with my medical knowledge I could easily fill in the name, and it was a drug I had intimate knowledge of. Yes. A man could suppress his animal instincts, could make himself into a pure reasoning machine, but the low urges would not wither away, oh no. They would still be there, lurking inside, waiting a chance to break loose.

I had thought that either Holmes was stalking the Whitechapel killer, or else that Holmes was the killer. Now I suddenly realized that there was yet another alternative: Holmes the detective could be stalking the Whitechapel killer, completely unaware that he himself was the very criminal he sought.

It was a week before he went out again. The following day I scanned the newspapers in an agony of suspense, but there was no murder reported. Perhaps I was overwrought and imagining things? But Holmes seemed haunted by something, or perhaps hunted. There was something on his mind. When I invited him to confide in me, he looked at me for a long time and then slowly shook his head. “I dare not, Watson.” He was silent for a while, and then said, “Watson, if I should suddenly die—”

At this I could take no more. “My God, Holmes, what is it? Surely you can tell me something!”

“This is important, Watson. If I should die . . . burn my corpse. Promise me that.”

“Holmes!”

He gripped my shoulder and looked intently into my eye. “Promise me, on your honour.”

“I promise.”

“On your honour, Watson!”

“On my honour, I promise.”

He suddenly relaxed, almost collapsing into his chair. “Thank you.”

That night again he went out, and again the next. His face was drawn, as if he were desperately seeking something he had been unable to find on the previous night. Both evenings he seemed upon the brink of saying something to me, only to think better of it at the last moment, and vanish without a word into the London night.

The next evening’s papers told of not one, but two murders in the East end. The Whitechapel killer—now dubbed “Jack the Ripper” by all the papers—had worked double duty. And this time a witness had given a description of the suspected killer: a tall man in a dark cutaway overcoat, wearing a felt deerstalker hat.

I confronted Holmes with the papers and my suspicions. I had hoped, more than I hope for paradise, that he would dismiss my deductions with his soft, mocking laugh, and show me some utterly commonplace alternative explanation of the facts. My hopes were in vain. He listened to my words with his eyes nearly shut, his briar pipe clenched unlit between his teeth. Finally my words ground to a stop against his stony silence. “My God, Holmes, tell me I’m wrong! Tell me that you had nothing to do with those murders, I beg of you.”

“I can say nothing, my friend.”

“Then give me some reason, some shred of sanity.”

He was silent. Finally he said, “Do you intend to go to the police with your suspicions?”

“Do you want me to?” I asked him.

“No.” His eyes closed for a moment, and then he continued, “but it doesn’t matter. They would not believe you in any case.” His voice was weary, but calm. His manner did not seem that of a madman, but I know that madmen can be fiendishly clever in concealing their madness from those about them. “Are you aware of how many letters and telegrams have flooded Scotland Yard in these last few weeks? The Yard is a madhouse, Watson. Landladies and madmen, people claiming to have seen the Ripper, to know the Ripper, to be the Ripper. They receive a thousand letters a week, Watson. Your voice would be lost in the madness.” He shook his head. “They have no idea, Watson. They cannot begin to comprehend. The Whitechapel horror, they call it. If the true horror of it were known, they would flee the city; they would scream and run in terror.”

Despite everything, I should have gone to the police, or at least have confided my suspicions to someone else and asked for counsel. But I knew of no one in whom to confide such an awful suspicion, least of all my Mary, who trusted Holmes nearly as a god and would hear no ill of him. And, despite all, in my heart of hearts I still believed that I must have read the evidence awry, that Holmes could not truly be a culprit of such infamy.

The next day, Holmes made no reference to our conversation. It seemed so strange that I thought to wonder if it had actually occurred, or if I had dreamed the entire thing. I determined that, without giving any outward sign of it to Holmes, I should keep my eyes sharp on him like a hawk. The next time that I saw him making preparations to leave on a nocturnal sojourn, I would follow him, whether he wanted it or no.

Holmes made several trips to Whitechapel during the daytime, and gave no objection when I asked to accompany him. It was no place for decent humans to live. The streets were littered with the filth of horses, pigs, chickens and humans, and the air clamorous with the clatter of delivery wagons and trains, the carousal of children and drunkards, and the cackling of chickens and bawling of pigs which lived side-by-side with people in the basements and doss-houses. Above us, hanging from every window, ragged wash turned dingy grey as it dried in pestilence-ridden air.

During these trips he did little other than inspect the streets and look over the blank, white-washed brick walls of warehouses and blind alleys. On occasion he would stop for a brief chat over inconsequential matters with a charwoman or a policeman he might meet walking the narrow alleyways. Contrary to his nature, he made no attempt to visit the scenes of the crimes. To me this last fact was the most damning to my suspicions. Unless he were involved in some way, surely there would have been no possibility that anything could have kept him away.

But it was all of October and a week into November before he again left upon one of his evening peregrinations. But for an accident of chance, I would have missed it entirely. I had laid out several traps for him, so as to awaken me if he tried to leave in the night, and sat wakeful in the evenings until long after I had heard him retire. One night in early November, after retiring without incident, I was unexpectedly awakened in the middle of the night by some noise. The night was foggy, and through my window I could hear only the most muffled sounds of the street, as if from a tremendous distance, the clopping of a lone set of hooves and the call of a man hailing a hansom. For some reason I was unable to get back to sleep, and so I put on my dressing-gown and descended to the sitting room to take a finger of whisky.

Holmes was gone. His door was ajar, but the bed was empty.

I was determined to know the truth, whatever it might be, and thus in one way or another to bring this adventure to an end. I dressed hurriedly, thrust my service revolver into a pocket of my overcoat, and ran out into the night. At that hour, well after midnight, I had only the most remote hope of finding a cab anywhere near our Baker Street diggings. Sometime during the day Holmes must have surreptitiously arranged for the cab to meet him that night. As I had made no such arrangements, he had quite the head start on me. It was the better part of an hour before I made my way past Aldgate pump and entered the East End slums.

I had suspected that in the wake of the killings the streets of Whitechapel would be deserted, the public houses closed and the citizens suspicious of any strangers. But even at this late hour the streets were far from deserted. It was a busy, populous area. Wandering aimlessly on the streets, I found many open pubs, most all crowded with unemployed workmen and idle women of dubious repute. Everywhere I walked I found that I was not more than a hundred yards from a citizen’s patrol or a watchful, armed constable—several of whom watched me with an intent, suspicious gaze. Even the women on the streetcorners, wearing shawls and bonnets to ward against the wet November night, stood in groups of two and three.

Holmes I could find nowhere, and it occurred to me belatedly that if he were in one of his disguises, he could be any of the people about me—one of the unemployed mechanics gambling in the front room of the Boar and Bristle, the aged clergyman hustling down Commercial Street toward some unknown destination, the sailor chatting up the serving girls at the King’s Arms. Any of these could be Holmes.

Any of these could be the Ripper.

All around me there were women, in the pubs, in the doorways, walking the streets; pathetic women dressed in cheap finery, with tired smiles and the flash of a stockinged ankle for any passers-by wearing trousers—“You lonely, love?”—or with saucy greetings and friendly abuse for the other women.

I realized that the size of Whitechapel that showed on the map was deceptive. In the fog and the darkness the streets were far more narrow, the shops smaller, and the whole larger and more cluttered than I recalled from the daytime. Even if there were a hundred constables patrolling the streets it would not be enough. The blind alleys, the sparse gas lights, and the drifting banks of fog made the streets a maze in which the Ripper might kill with impunity within a few yards of a hundred or more people.

Twice I thought I caught a glimpse of Holmes, but, when I ran after him, found that I had been deceived. Every drunkard sleeping in a doorway seemed to be a fresh corpse, every anonymous stain on the cobblestones looked like blood, every wandering alley-cat seemed the shadow of a lurking killer. Several times I contemplated giving up my hopeless errand and going home, managing to keep on only by promising myself that I would stay on for just one hour more.

In the dark hour before sunrise I found him.

I had come into a pub to warm myself for a while. The barman was surly and uncommunicative, evincing a clear suspicion of my motives that, while perhaps well enough justified by recent events, nevertheless made the atmosphere inside scarcely less chill than that of the night outside. The beer was cheap and thoroughly watered. At first a few of the women had come by to pass time with me, but I found them pathetic rather than alluring, and after a bit they left me in solitude.

After an hour or so of this, I went out into the night air to clear my head of the smoke and stink. A light rain had cleared most of the fog away. I walked at random down the streets and up alleyways, paying no attention to where I headed.

After walking for some time, I was disoriented, and stopped to get my bearings. I had no idea where I was. I turned a corner and looked down into an unmarked court, hoping to descry a street sign, but had no luck. In the darkness I saw something ahead of me; a pair of legs protruding from the arch of an entranceway. I walked forward, my blood chill. It was the body of a woman laid on the cobblestones, skirts awry, half concealed in a doorway. I had seen a dozen such in the last few hours, drunkards too poor to afford a bed, but in the instant of vision a dread presentiment came to me that this one was not merely drunk and asleep. The darkness beneath her body looked darker and more liquid than any mere shadow. I knelt down, and touched her wrist to take a pulse.

Her eyes flew open. It took a moment for her to focus on me. Suddenly she shrieked and stumbled to her feet. “Lord have mercy! The Ripper!” she said in a hoarse whisper. She tripped over her petticoats in a clumsy effort to stand and run at the same time, and fell to her knees.

“My pardons, Miss,” I said. “Are you all right?” Without thinking, I reached down a hand to help her up.

“Murder!” she shrieked, scrambling away on all fours like an animal. “Oh! Murder!”

“Madam, please!” I backed away into the alley behind me. It was evident that nothing I could do would calm her. She continued to yell as she clattered away, darting frightened glances back at me over her shoulder. The courtyard I was in was dark and silent, but I was afraid that her cries would wake others. I stepped backwards into a doorway, and suddenly found the door behind me yield to the pressure. It had not been latched. Off balance, I half-fell backwards into the room.

The room was thick with the cloying, coppery odor of blood. The hand I had put down to steady myself came up slick with it. By the wan light of the fire in the grate across the room I could see the bed, and the dark, twisted shape on it, and I had no need to look more closely to know what it was.

The body of the woman on the bed had been so badly mutilated that it was hardly recognizable as human. Blood was everywhere. In a daze I reached out a hand to feel for a pulse.

Her hand was already cool.

Her skirt had been removed, her petticoats cut away, and her body neatly opened from pubes to sternum by some expert dissector.

I was too late. I gave a low moan. Somewhere before me I heard a low, steady dripping. I looked up, and stared into the pale face of Sherlock Holmes.

His eyes were weary, but empty of any trace of the horror that I felt. He was standing in the room behind the body, and as my eyes adjusted to the shadow I saw that he held a dissecting knife. His arms were red to the elbows, and gore dripped in a monotonous rhythm from the knife onto the stone floor. At his feet was a worn leather shopkeeper’s satchel, half open.

“There is nothing you can do for her, Doctor,” said Holmes, and the calm, even voice in which he said this pierced me with chill. It was not the Holmes I knew. I was not sure if he even recognized me. He bent down to snap the satchel shut before I had more than a brief glimpse of the bloody meat within it, then wiped the scalpel on the canvas apron he wore, put it carefully back into the small wooden case, and dropped it into an outside pocket of the bag.

He tugged at his left elbow, and only then did I realize that he wore full-length gloves. He was well prepared for this venture, I thought, my mind in a state of shock. He removed the gloves, tossed them into the fire grate, and pushed at them with a poker. They smoldered for a moment and then caught fire, with the heavy charnel stink of burning blood. Beneath his apron he wore work clothes such as any tradesman might wear.

“My God, Holmes!” I stuttered. “Did you kill her?”

He sighed deeply. “I don’t know. Time is short. Please follow me, Watson.”

At least he recognized me. That was a good sign. I followed him out of long habit, too numb to do anything else. He closed and locked the door behind him and put the key into his pocket. He led me through a small gate, down a cluttered alley, then quickly through two narrow passageways and into a courtyard behind the slaughterhouses. The key and the apron he discarded there. I saw he had a cab waiting, the horse tethered to an unlit lamppost. There was no cabman in sight. “Take me home, Watson,” he said. “You should not have come. But, since you are nevertheless here, I confess myself glad of the chance to unburden myself of the awful things that I have seen and done. Take me home, and I shall conceal nothing from you.”

I drove and Holmes sat in the back, meditating or sleeping, I could not tell which. We passed three constables, but I did not stop. He bade me halt at a certain mews not far from Baker Street. “The cabman will be here in half an hour,” he said, as he tended expertly to the horse. “He has been paid in advance, and we need not wait.”

“I believe you must think me most utterly mad, Watson,” said Holmes, after he had exchanged his rough clothes for a dressing-gown, meticulously cleansed himself of dirt and spattered blood, fetched the Persian slipper in which he kept his tobacco, and settled back in his chair. “You have not loosened your grip on that service revolver of yours for the last hour. Your fingers must be cramped by now, you have been clutching it so strongly—Ah,” he said, as I opened my mouth to deny this, “no use in your protesting your innocence. Your hand has not strayed from the pocket of your robe for an instant, and the distinctive weight of your pistol is quite clearly evident in it. I may be mad, my dear Watson,” he said with a smile, “but I am not blind.”

This was the Holmes I knew, and I relaxed. I knew I had nothing to fear from him.

His hand hesitated over his rack of pipes, selected his clay-stemmed pipe, and filled it with shag. “Indeed, Watson, at times during these last months I would not have disputed it with you myself. It would have been a relief to know myself mad, and that all I have seen and conjectured to be merely the delusions of a maniac.”

He teased a coal out of the grate and lit his pipe with it. “To begin, then, with the missing corpse.” He puffed the pipe until its glow matched that of the fire behind him. “Or, perhaps better,” he said, “I should begin with the London cannonade.” He raised a finger at my imminent objection. “I have promised to tell all, Watson, and I shall. Pray let me go about it in my own way.

“My brother Mycroft,” he continued, “made a most interesting comment when I discussed the matter of the cannonade with him. He mentioned that when a highly-powered cannon is fired, an observer at the front lines ahead of the artillery and distant from the firing will hear a very distinct report at the instant the shell passes. This is the crack of displaced air. This report comes considerably in advance of the actual sound of the cannon firing. If our ears were but sensitive enough to hear it, he informed me, this report would be heard as two distinct waves, one of the air compressed by the shell, and another of the air rushing inward to fill the vacuum left behind it. An aeroship which traversed faster than the velocity of sound would produce a like crack, and, if it were large enough, the two waves would be heard as distinct reports.

“My brother discussed this only as an abstract but interesting fact, but I know him well enough to understand the meaning behind his words

“Taking this as a provisional theory, then, and judging by the fact that observers noted the timing between the two reports was briefer in the north than in the south of London, we find that the hypothetical aeroship must have been slowing down as it traveled south.”

“But Holmes,” I said, my mind in total consternation, “an aeroship? And one which moves faster than an artillery shell? No nation on God’s Earth could make such a thing, not to mention the impossibility of keeping it secret.”

“Precisely,” said Holmes. He took another puff from his pipe. “This brings us to the case of the missing corpse. I had been looking for a reason to investigate south of London, and the case presented by the two farm-hands was quite fortuitous in that respect.

“You know my method, Watson. It was unfortunate that the men in the original searching party had in many places quite trampled the tracks that I needed, but in the few places where they could be clearly distinguished, the tracks told a most puzzling story. Some animals had circled the hayrick, leaving tracks like nothing I had ever seen. I could make nothing of the footprints, save that one side was dragging slightly, as if one of the animals were limping. From the depth of the impressions they must have been the size of small dogs. What was most peculiar about the set of tracks was that the animals seemed to march in precision step. The strange thought occurred to me then, that the tracks of a single animal with eight or more legs might leave exactly such impressions. The steps led to the place where the dying man had lain, and circled about. Of outgoing tracks, there were only those of the men who had tended him and those of the searchers.

“I attempted to follow the tracks backward, but could follow back no more than a mile to where they emerged from a sheep meadow and were obliterated by the hoofprints of innumerable sheep. All that I could determine from this was that the animals had been severely panicked at some time in the last few days, running over and around each other and back and forth across the field.

“I turned my attention back to the impressions made by the dying man, and the tracks of the men away from the spot. I inspected the tracks of the unusual animal further. They were extremely strange, and in some ways rather insectlike. The animal’s tracks overlaid two of the other tracks, which I knew to be those of the men who had summoned me. Over these tracks, however, were those of a third man.

“I quickly determined these tracks to be those of the dying man himself. After the other two men had left, he had risen up and walked away, apparently carrying the strange animal with him.”

“My God, Holmes,” I interjected. The revolver lay forgotten in my pocket. “You can’t be serious. Are you suggesting some sort of voodoo?”

Holmes smiled. “No, Watson, I am afraid that it was something far more serious than mere superstition.

“The man had crawled on all fours for a few feet, then stood up and walked in a staggering, unbalanced stride. After a few unsteady moments, however, he found his feet and began to walk quickly and purposefully in a straight line. Soon he came to a hard-packed road, where his traces were obliterated by the traffic and I could track his movements no further. His aim, though, was quite clearly toward London, and this I took to be his goal.”

Listening to his narrative I had completely forgotten the events of the previous night, the slain streetwalkers, and my suspicion of Holmes.

“At this point,” Holmes continued, “I knew that I needed to consult an expert. Mr Wells, of whom I spoke earlier, was that expert, and I could not have asked for a better source. We discussed the possibility of life on other worlds. Mr Wells offered the opinion that, since there are millions upon millions of suns very much like our own Sun in the sky, that certainly there must be other intelligences, and other civilizations, some of which must be as far beyond ours as our English civilization is beyond that of the African savage.”

“Then you take this strange aeroship to be a vehicle from another world?” I asked. While I had heard such ideas discussed in popular lectures on astronomy, I had, heretofore, always dismissed these as purest fancy.

“A provisional hypothesis, to be confirmed or forgotten as further data became available. I went on to ask Mr Wells whether such citizens of other worlds might be human in shape and thought. At this suggestion he was most frankly contemptuous. Such beings would have no more reason to be shaped in our form, he said, than we in that of an octopus or an ant. Likewise they might take no more notice of our civilization and our morality than we take of the endeavors and ethics of an ant hill.

“This I had already surmised. I turned the talk to biology, and without tipping my hand, managed to steer the conversation to the unusual life-cycles of other species. One in particular he mentioned struck my attention, the life-cycle of the ichneumon, or solitary wasp.”

“Really, Holmes. Wasps? I do believe that you are toying with me.”

“I wish that I were, my dear doctor. Pray listen; all of this is germane to the subject at hand. The ichneumon wasp has a rather gruesome life-cycle. When the female wasp is ready to lay eggs, it finds and stings a cicada, often one much larger than itself, and then deposits its egg inside the body of the paralyzed but still living insect. This insect then serves as sustenance for the hatching larva, which forms its home within the living insect, having the instinct to avoid eating the essential organs until the very last, when it is ready to exit into the world to lay eggs of its own.

“This was enough for me to frame my provisional hypothesis. I believed that some strange being from the aeroship had not merely met the fatally injured man, but crawled inside his body and taken control of his gross physical function.

“I was struck by one fact. Of all the people that this . . . alien . . . might have met, it was a dying man who he—it—actually chose. Clearly, then, the . . . thing . . . believed itself unable to subdue an uninjured person.”

“I must confess, Holmes, if I were asked to prove your sanity, this story would hardly bolster your case.”

“Ah, Watson, always the practical man. Permit me.” He got out of the leather chair, crossed the room to where he had put down the leather satchel, and laid it on the table in front of me.

I sat paralyzed. “I dare not, Holmes.”

“Your courage has never failed you before, my friend.”

With a shudder I touched the satchel, and then, steeling myself, opened it. Inside was some object covered in streaks of gore. I didn’t want to look, but knew that I must.

The two eggs inside were of a translucent purplish white, large as a moderate-sized mango, and slick with a film of blood. Within each one a monstrous coiled shape could be discerned. No Earthly animal ever laid such an egg, of this I was sure. More horrible than the eggs was the other thing. I shuddered and looked away. It was something like a giant prawn, and something like some jungle millipede, with dozens of long barbed feelers and multiply-jointed appendages bristling with hooks and spines. Its head, or what passed for a head, had been nearly severed with a knife, and the wound exuded a transparent fluid rather like whale-oil, with a sharp and unpleasant odor similar to kerosene. Instead of a mouth, it had a sucking orifice rimmed with myriad tiny hooked teeth.

“This is what I removed from her body,” Holmes said.

I looked up at him. “My God,” I whispered. “And she was not dead?”

“You asked that question before. It is a question of definitions, Watson. All that was left alive in her body was the thing that you see. By removing it, did I kill her?”

I shuddered again, and slammed the satchel shut with my eyes averted. “No.” I stood for a moment, trying to regain my composure. “But why Whitechapel?”

“What you saw was a juvenile,” said Holmes. “The adult would be much larger. I would not know if it is intelligent, or what we call intelligent, but it is at least very clever. Why Whitechapel? Think, Watson. It had eggs and juveniles it must deposit into a living body. But how is it to approach a complete stranger, embrace him—or her—closely enough to do it? Ah, you see the picture. It was the perfect place for the thing, Watson; the only place where it could do what it needed.

“I studied the East End in minute detail, tracing the path of the mysterious stranger. Again and again I was too late, sometimes only by minutes. I removed the juveniles from the corpses out of necessity. I say corpses, Watson, for although they still walked upright they were already dead. Had I not killed them, they would have gone to cover until they were mature. I could find the one, I knew, only by concentrating on the one trail. Even then it would be a near thing. Two of them, and I were lost.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“And tell them what? To start a man-hunt for a thing they can only find by ripping open bodies?”

“But the letters? The ones from ‘Jack the Ripper’—did you write these?”

Holmes laughed. “Why should I need to?” he said. “Fakes, forgeries, and cranks, every one. Even I am continuously amazed at how many odd people there are in London. I daresay they came from newspapers hungry to manufacture news, or from pranksters eager at a chance to make fools of Scotland Yard.”

“But, what do we do?”

“We, Watson?” Holmes raised an eyebrow.

“Surely you wouldn’t think that, now that I know the danger, I would let you continue alone.”

“Ah, my good Watson, I would be lost without you. Well, I am hot on its trail. It cannot elude me much longer. We must find it and kill it, Watson. Before it kills again.”

By the next morning the whole episode seemed a nightmare, too fantastical to credit. I wondered how I could have believed it. And yet, I had seen it—or had I? Could I have deluded myself into seeing what Holmes had wanted me to see?

No. It was real. I could not afford to doubt my own sanity, and hence I must believe in Holmes!

In the next few days Holmes went back to his daytime reconnaissance of the East End, mapping the way buildings abutted and how doorways aligned with alleys, like a general planning his campaign, stopping for conversation with workmen and constables alike.

On the third day, my business in town kept me late into the evening. At the end of it, it was almost certain that I had purchased a practice, and at a price which I could afford, but the sealing of the deal required an obligatory toast, and then there were more papers to be inspected and signed, so that all in all, it was well past ten in the evening when I returned to Baker Street.

Of Holmes there was only a note: “I have gone to see the matter to its conclusion. It is better that you are out of it, and I shall think no less of you if you stay. But if you must follow, then look for me near the blind court at Thrawl Street.” I read it and swore. He seemed determined to leave me out of this adventure, no matter how dangerous it was for him alone. I snatched my greatcoat and hat from the hall stand, fetched my revolver out from the drawer where it resided, and went out into the night.

It was the night of the great carboniferous fog. The gas-lights were pale yellow glimmers that barely pierced the roiling brown stink. The cab I hailed almost ran me down before seeing me in the street in front of him.

The fog in Whitechapel was even thicker and yellower than that of Baker Street. The cab left me off in front of the Queen’s Head pub, the cabbie warning me of the danger of the neighborhood. The blind court was one which was being resurfaced by the MacAdam method, in which the street was covered with liquid tar, and a layer of gravel rolled into the tar surface. The process results in a surface which is even and far easier to repair than cobblestone. I can see the day when all of London will have such smooth quiet streets.

Earlier Holmes had talked with some of the workmen as they rolled the gravel. Now they were long gone. The half-full cauldron of tar was still at the corner of the alley. Although the oil-pot which heated it to boiling had been removed, the cooling drum of tar still gave out quite a bit of heat.

Three unfortunate women had lit a small fire out of wood-scraps and huddled between the warm cauldron and their fire, with their hands toward the tiny fire and their backs against the cauldron for warmth. The glow of the fire gave a luminous orange cast to the surrounding fog. A tiny pile of additional wood scraps stood waiting to keep the fire going for the rest of the night.

Holmes was nowhere in sight.

The women spotted me looking at them, and whispered amongst themselves. One came up to me and attempted a smile. “Care to spend some money and buy a poor unfortunate a drink, dearie?” She tossed her head toward the end of the street where the pub was invisible in the fog, and at the same time flicked her skirt in such a way as to allow me a clear view of her bare ankle.

I averted my eyes. “I’m looking for a friend.”

“I could be a friend, if you wanted me to.”

“No. I don’t need . . . that sort of comfort.”

“Oh, sure you do, dearie.” She giggled. “All men do. ’Sides, I h’aint even got money for me doss. Surely a fine gent like yourself has a shilling to spend on a poor lady down on ’er luck, hasn’t he? Sure ’e does.”

I looked at her more closely, and she preened for my inspection. She might have been a rather pretty woman, striking if not actually beautiful, if she had been given the chance. Instead I saw the lines on her face, the threadbare bonnet she wore, and the unmistakable signs of the early stages of consumption. Such a woman should be resting in bed, not out standing in the chill of a night such as this. I was about to speak to her, to invite her into the public house for the drink she requested, for no other reason than to get her out of the chill and away, perhaps, from the monster that stalked the fog-shrouded night. I could wait for Holmes as well in the pub as in the street.

As I was about to speak, I heard a man approach from the blind end of the court, although I had seen no one there previously. I started to call out, thinking it must be Holmes, but then saw that, while the man was quite as tall as Holmes, he was much bulkier, with a considerable paunch and ill-fitting clothes. As he passed, another of the women smiled at him and called a greeting. He nodded at her. As she put out her arm for him to take, he dropped his hand to the buttons of his trousers. I looked away in disgust, and as I did so the woman who had spoken to me slipped her arm around mine.

I had lost track of the third woman, and was as surprised as the others when her voice rang out from behind. “Stop, fiend!”

The voice was calm and authoritative. I looked up. The woman was holding a revolver—Holmes’ hair-trigger revolver—in an unwavering grip aimed at the man’s head. I looked closely at her face and saw, beneath the makeup, the thin, hawklike nose and the unmistakable intense gaze of Sherlock Holmes.

The other man swiveled with surprising speed and sprang at Holmes. I pulled my hand loose from my lady companion and in an instant snatched my revolver free of my pocket and fired. Our two shots rang out at almost the same instant, and the man staggered and fell back. The two bullets had both hit above the left eye, and taken away the left half of the cranium.

The women screamed.

The man, with half his head missing, reached out a hand and pulled himself to his feet. He came at Holmes again.

I fired. This time my bullet removed what was left of his head. His jutting windpipe sucked at the air with a low sputtering hiss, and in the gaping neck I thought I saw purplish-white tendrils feeling about. The shot slowed him down for no more than an instant.

Holmes’ shot took him in the middle of the chest. I saw the crimson spot appear and saw him rock from the impact, but it seemed to have no other effect.

We both fired together, this time lower, aiming for the horror hidden somewhere within the body. The two shots spun the headless thing around. He careened against the cauldron of tar, slipped, and fell down, knocking the cauldron over.

In an instant Holmes was upon him.

“Holmes, no!”

For a moment Holmes had the advantage. He pushed the monster forward, into the spreading pool of tar, struggling for a hold. Then the monster rose, dripping tar, and threw Holmes off his back with no more concern than a horse tossing a wayward circus monkey. The monster turned for him.

Holmes reached behind him and grabbed a brand out of the fire. As the monster grabbed him he thrust it forward, into the thing’s chest.

The tar ignited with an awful whoosh. The thing clawed at its chest with both hands. Holmes grabbed the cauldron, and with one mighty heave poured the remainder of the tar onto the gaping wound where its head had once been.

Holmes drew back as the flames licked skyward. The thing reeled and staggered in a horrible parody of drunkenness. As the clothes burned away, we could see that where a man’s generative organs would have been was a pulsing, wickedly barbed ovipositor with a knife-sharp end writhing blindly in the flames. As we watched it bulged and contracted, and an egg, slick and purple, oozed forth.

The monster tottered, fell over on its back, and then, slowly, the abdomen split open.

“Quickly, Watson! Here!”

Holmes shoved one of the pieces of firewood into my hands, and took another himself. We stationed ourselves at either side of the body.

The horrors which emerged were somewhat like enormous lobsters, or some vermin even more loathsome and articulated. We bludgeoned them as they emerged from the burning body, trying as we could to avoid the oily slime of them from splattering onto our clothes, trying to avoid breathing the awful stench that arose from the smoking carcass. They were tenacious in the extreme, and I think that only the disorientation of the fire and the suddenness of our attack saved our lives. In the end six of the monstrosities crawled out of the body, and six of the monstrosities we killed.

There was nothing remotely human left in the empty shell that had once been a man. Holmes pulled away his skirts and petticoat to feed the fire. The greasy blood of the monstrosities burned with a clear, hot flame, until all that remained were smoldering rags with a few pieces of unidentifiable meat and charred scraps of bone.

It seemed impossible that our shots and the sounds of our struggle had not brought a hundred citizens with constables out to see what had happened, but the narrow streets so distorted the sounds that it was impossible to tell where they had originated, and the thick blanket of fog muffled everything as well as hiding us from curious eyes.

Holmes and I left the two daughters of joy with what money we had, save for the price of a ride back to Baker Street. This we did, not with an eye toward their silence, as we knew that they would never go to the police with their story, but in the hopes—perhaps foolish—that they might have a respite from their hard trade and a warm roof over their heads during the damp and chill months of winter.

It has been two months now, and the Whitechapel killings have not resumed. Holmes is, as always, calm and unflappable, but I find myself unable to look at a wasp now without having a feeling of horror steal across me.

There are as many questions unanswered as answered. Holmes has offered the opinion that the landing was unintentional, a result of some unimaginable accident in the depths of space, and not the vanguard of some impending colonization. He bases this conclusion on the fact of the ill-preparedness and hasty improvisation of the being, relying on luck and circumstance rather than planning.

I think that the answers to most of our questions will never be known, but I believe that we have succeeded in stopping the horrors, this time. I can only hope that this was an isolated ship, blown off-course and stranded far from the expected shores in some unexpected tempest of infinite space. I look at the stars now, and shudder. What else might be out there, waiting for us?

THE MATTER OF SEGGRI

Ursula Le Guin

The first recorded contact with Seggri was in year 242 of Hainish Cycle 93. A Wandership six generations out from Iao (4-Taurus) came down on the planet, and the captain entered this report in his ship’s log.

CAPTAIN AOLAO-OLAO S REPORT

We have spent near forty days on this world they call Se-ri or Ye-ha-ri, well entertained, and leave with as good an estimation of the natives as is consonant with their unregenerate state. They live in fine great buildings they call castles, with large parks all about. Outside the walls of the parks lie well-tilled fields and abundant orchards, reclaimed by diligence from the parched and arid desert of stone that makes up the greatest part of the land. Their women live in villages and towns huddled outside the walls. All the common work of farm and mill is performed by the women, of whom there is a vast superabundance. They are ordinary drudges, living in towns which belong to the lords of the castle. They live amongst the cattle and brute animals of all kinds, who are permitted into the houses, some of which are of fair size. These women go about drably clothed, always in groups and bands. They are never allowed within the walls of the park, leaving the food and necessaries with which they provide the men at the outer gate of the castle. They evinced great fear and distrust of us. A few of my men following some girls on the road, women rushed from the town like a pack of wild beasts, so that the men thought it best to return forthwith to the castle. Our hosts advised us that it were best for us to keep away from their towns, which we did.

The men go freely about their great parks, playing at one sport or another. At night they go to certain houses which they own in the town, where they may have their pick among the women and satisfy their lust upon them as they will. The women pay them, we were told, in their money, which is copper, for a night of pleasure, and pay them yet more if they get a child on them. Their nights thus are spent in carnal satisfaction as often as they desire, and their days in a diversity of sports and games, notably a kind of wrestling, in which they throw each other through the air so that we marveled that they seemed never to take hurt, but rose up and returned to the combat with wonderful dexterity of hand and foot. Also they fence with blunt swords, and combat with long light sticks. Also they play a game with balls on a great field, using the arms to catch or throw the ball and the legs to kick the ball and trip or catch or kick the men of the other team, so that many are bruised and lamed in the passion of the sport, which was very fine to see, the teams in their contrasted garments of bright colors much gauded out with gold and finery seething now this way, now that, up and down the field in a mass, from which the balls were flung up and caught by runners breaking free of the struggling crowd and fleeting towards the one or the other goal with all the rest in hot pursuit. There is a “battlefield” as they call it of this game lying without the walls of the castle park, near to the town, so that the women may come watch and cheer, which they do heartily, calling out the names of favorite players and urging them with many uncouth cries to victory.

Boys are taken from the women at the age of eleven and brought to the castle to be educated as befits a man. We saw such a child brought into the castle with much ceremony and rejoicing. It is said that the women find it difficult to bring a pregnancy of a manchild to term, and that of those born many die in infancy despite the care lavished upon them, so that there are far more women than men. In this we see the curse of GOD laid upon this race as upon all those who acknowledge HIM not, unrepentant heathens whose ears are stopped to true discourse and blind to the light.

These men know little of art, only a kind of leaping dance, and their science is little beyond that of savages. One great man of a castle to whom I talked, who was dressed out in cloth of gold and crimson and whom all called Prince and Grandsire with much respect and deference, yet was so ignorant he believed the stars to be worlds full of people and beasts, asking us from which star we descended. They have only vessels driven by steam along the surface of the land and water, and no notion of flight either in the air or in space, nor any curiosity about such things, saying with disdain, “That is all women’s work,” and indeed I found that if I asked these great men about matters of common knowledge such as the working of machinery, the weaving of cloth, the transmission of holovision, they would soon chide me for taking interest in womanish things as they called them, desiring me to talk as befit a man.

In the breeding of their fierce cattle within the parks they are very knowledgeable, as in the sewing up of their clothing, which they make from cloth the women weave in their factories. The men vie in the ornamentation and magnificence of their costumes to an extent which we might indeed have thought scarcely manly, were they not withal such proper men, strong and ready for any game or sport, and full of pride and a most delicate and fiery honor.

The log including Captain Aolao-olao’s entries was (after a 12-generation journey) returned to the Sacred Archives of the Universe on Iao, which were dispersed during the period called The Tumult, and eventually preserved in fragmentary form on Hain. There is no record of further contact with Seggri until the First Observers were sent by the Ekumen in 93/1333: an Alterran man and a Hainish woman, Kaza Agad and G. Merriment. After a year in orbit mapping, photographing, recording and studying broadcasts, and analyzing and learning a major regional language, the Observers landed. Acting upon a strong persuasion of the vulnerability of the planetary culture, they presented themselves as survivors of the wreck of a fishing boat, blown far off course, from a remote island. They were, as they had anticipated, separated at once, Kaza Agad being taken to the Castle and Merriment into the town. Kaza kept his name, which was plausible in the native context; Merriment called herself Yude. We have only her report, from which three excerpts follow.

FROM MOBILE GERINDU’UTTAHAYUDETWE’MENRADE MERRIMENT’S NOTES FOR A REPORT TO THE EKUMEN, 93/133

34/223 Their network of trade and information, hence their awareness of what goes on elsewhere in their world, is too sophisticated for me to maintain my Stupid Foreign Castaway act any longer. Ekhaw called me in today and said, “If we had a sire here who was worth buying or if our teams were winning their games, I’d think you were a spy. Who are you, anyhow?”

I said, “Would you let me go to the College at Hagka?”

She said, “Why?”

“There are scientists there, I think? I need to talk with them.”

This made sense to her; she made their “Mh” noise of assent.

“Could my friend go there with me?”

“Shask, you mean?”

We were both puzzled for a moment. She didn’t expect a woman to call a man “friend,” and I hadn’t thought of Shask as a friend. She’s very young, and I haven’t taken her very seriously.

“I mean Kaza, the man I came with.”

“A man—to the college?” she said, incredulous. She looked at me and said, “Where do you come from?”

It was a fair question, not asked in enmity or challenge. I wish I could have answered it, but I am increasingly convinced that we can do great damage to these people; we are facing Resehavanar’s Choice here, I fear.

Ekhaw paid for my journey to Hagka, and Shask came along with me. As I thought about it I saw that of course Shask was my friend. It was she who brought me into the motherhouse, persuading Ekhaw and Azman of their duty to be hospitable; it was she who had looked out for me all along. Only she was so conventional in everything she did and said that I hadn’t realized how radical her compassion was. When I tried to thank her, as our little jitney-bus purred along the road to Hagka, she said things like she always says—“Oh, we’re all family,” and “People have to help each other,” and “Nobody can live alone.”

“Don’t women ever live alone?” I asked her, for all the ones I’ve met belong to a motherhouse or a daughterhouse, whether a couple or a big family like Ekhaw’s, which is three generations: five older women, three of their daughters living at home, and four children—the boy they all coddle and spoil so, and three girls.

“Oh yes,” Shask said. “If they don’t want wives, they can be singlewomen. And old women, when their wives die, sometimes they just live alone till they die. Usually they go live at a daughterhouse. In the colleges, the vev always have a place to be alone.” Conventional she may be, but Shask always tries to answer a question seriously and completely; she thinks about her answer. She has been an invaluable informant. She has also made life easy for me by not asking questions about where I come from. I took this for the incuriosity of a person securely embedded in an unquestioned way of life, and for the self-centeredness of the young. Now I see it as delicacy.

“A vev is a teacher?”

“Mh.”

“And the teachers at the college are very respected?”

“That’s what vev means. That’s why we call Eckaw’s mother Vev Kakaw. She didn’t go to college, but she’s a thoughtful person, she’s learned from life, she has a lot to teach us.”

So respect and teaching are the same thing, and the only term of respect I’ve heard women use for women means teacher. And so in teaching me, young Shask respects herself? And/or earns my respect? This casts a different light on what I’ve been seeing as a society in which wealth is the important thing. Zadedr, the current mayor of Reha, is certainly admired for her very ostentatious display of possessions; but they don’t call her Vev.

I said to Shask, “You have taught me so much, may I call you Vev Shask?”

She was equally embarrassed and pleased, and squirmed and said, “Oh no no no no.” Then she said, “If you ever come back to Reha I would like very much to have love with you, Yude.”

“I thought you were in love with Sire Zadr!” I blurted out.

“Oh, I am,” she said, with that eye-roll and melted look they have when they speak of the sires, “aren’t you? Just think of him fucking you, oh! Oh, I get all wet thinking about it!” She smiled and wriggled. I felt embarrassed in my turn and probably showed it. “Don’t you like him?” she inquired with a naivety I found hard to bear. She was acting like a silly adolescent, and I know she’s not a silly adolescent. “But I’ll never be able to afford him,” she said, and sighed.

So you want to make do with me, I thought nastily.

“I’m going to save my money,” she announced after a minute. “I think I want to have a baby next year. Of course I can’t afford Sire Zadr, he’s a Great Champion, but if I don’t go to the Games at Kadaki this year I can save up enough for a really good sire at our fuckery, maybe Master Rosra. I wish, I know this is silly, I’m going to say it anyway, I’ve been wishing you could be its lovemother. I know you can’t, you have to go to the college. I just wanted to tell you. I love you.” She took my hands, drew them to her face, pressed my palms on her eyes for a moment, and then released me. She was smiling, but her tears were on my hands.

“Oh, Shask,” I said, floored.

“It’s all right!” she said. “I have to cry a minute.” And she did. She wept openly, bending over, wringing her hands, and wailing softly. I patted her arm and felt unutterably ashamed of myself. Other passengers looked round and made little sympathetic grunting noises. One old woman said, “That’s it, that’s right, lovey!” In a few minutes Shask stopped crying, wiped her nose and face on her sleeve, drew a long, deep breath, and said, “All right.” She smiled at me. “Driver,” she called, “I have to piss, can we stop?”

The driver, a tense-looking woman, growled something, but stopped the bus on the wide, weedy roadside; and Shask and another woman got off and pissed in the weeds. There is an enviable simplicity to many acts in a society which has, in all its daily life, only one gender. And which, perhaps—I don’t know this but it occurred to me then, while I was ashamed of myself—has no shame?

34/245. (Dictated) Still nothing from Kaza. I think I was right to give him the ansible. I hope he’s in touch with somebody. I wish it was me. I need to know what goes on in the castles.

Anyhow I understand better now what I was seeing at the Games in Reha. There are sixteen adult women for every adult man. One conception in six or so is male, but a lot of nonviable male fetuses and defective male births bring it down to one in sixteen by puberty. My ancestors must have really had fun playing with these people’s chromosomes. I feel guilty, even if it was a million years ago. I have to learn to do without shame but had better not forget the one good use of guilt. Anyhow. A fairly small town like Reha shares its castle with other towns. That confusing spectacle I was taken to on my tenth day down was Awaga Castle trying to keep its place in the Maingame against a castle from up north, and losing. Which means Awaga’s team can’t play in the big game this year in Fadrga, the city south of here, from which the winners go on to compete in the big big game at Zask, where people come from all over the continent—hundreds of contestants and thousands of spectators. I saw some holos of last year’s Maingame at Zask. There were 1,280 players, the comment said, and forty balls in play. It looked to me like a total mess, my idea of a battle between two unarmed armies, but I gather that great skill and strategy is involved. All the members of the winning team get a special title for the year, and another one for life, and bring glory back to their various castles and the towns that support them.

I can now get some sense of how this works, see the system from outside it, because the college doesn’t support a castle. People here aren’t obsessed with sports and athletes and sexy sires the way the young women in Reha were, and some of the older ones. It’s a kind of obligatory obsession. Cheer your team, support your brave men, adore your local hero. It makes sense. Given their situation, they need strong, healthy men at their fuckery; it’s social selection reinforcing natural selection. But I’m glad to get away from the rah-rah and the swooning and the posters of fellows with swelling muscles and huge penises and bedroom eyes.

I have made Resehavanar’s Choice. I chose the option: Less than the truth. Shoggrad and Skodr and the other teachers, professors we’d call them, are intelligent, enlightened people, perfectly capable of understanding the concept of space travel, etc., making decisions about technological innovation, etc. I limit my answers to their questions to technology. I let them assume, as most people naturally assume, particularly people from a monoculture, that our society is pretty much like theirs. When they find how it differs, the effect will be revolutionary, and I have no mandate, reason, or wish to cause such a revolution on Seggri.

Their gender imbalance has produced a society in which, as far as I can tell, the men have all the privilege and the women have all the power. It’s obviously a stable arrangement. According to their histories, it’s lasted at least two millennia, and probably in some form or another much longer than that. But it could be quickly and disastrously destabilised by contact with us, by their experiencing the human norm. I don’t know if the men would cling to their privileged status or demand freedom, but surely the women would resist giving up their power, and their sexual system and affectional relationships would break down. Even if they learned to undo the genetic program that was inflicted on them, it would take several generations to restore normal gender distribution. I can’t be the whisper that starts that avalanche.

34/266. (Dictated) Skodr got nowhere with the men of Awaga Castle. She had to make her inquiries very cautiously, since it would endanger Kaza if she told them he was an alien or in any way unique. They’d take it as a claim of superiority, which he’d have to defend in trials of strength and skill. I gather that the hierarchies within the castles are a rigid framework, within which a man moves up or down issuing challenges and winning or losing obligatory and optional trials. The sports and games the women watch are only the showpieces of an endless series of competitions going on inside the castles. As an untrained, grown man Kaza would be at a total disadvantage in such trials. The only way he might get out of them, she said, would be by feigning illness or idiocy. She thinks he must have done so, since he is at least alive; but that’s all she could find out—“The man who was cast away at Taha-Reha is alive.”

Although the women feed, house, clothe, and support the lords of the castle, they evidently take their noncooperation for granted. She seemed glad to get even that scrap of information. As I am.

But we have to get Kaza out of there. The more I hear about it from Skodr the more dangerous it sounds. I keep thinking “spoiled brats!” but actually these men must be more like soldiers in the training camps that militarists have. Only the training never ends. As they win trials they gain all kinds of titles and ranks you could translate as “generals” and the other names militarists have for all their power-grades. Some of the “generals,” the Lords and Masters and so on, are the sports idols, the darlings of the fuckeries, like the one poor Shask adored; but as they get older apparently they often trade glory among the women for power among the men, and become tyrants within their castle, bossing the “lesser” men around, until they’re overthrown, kicked out. Old sires often live alone, it seems, in little houses away from the main castle, and are considered crazy and dangerous—rogue males.

It sounds like a miserable life. All they’re allowed to do after age eleven is compete at games and sports inside the castle, and compete in the fuckeries, after they’re fifteen or so, for money and number of fucks and so on. Nothing else. No options. No trades. No skills of making. No travel unless they play in the big games. They aren’t allowed into the colleges to gain any kind of freedom of mind. I asked Skodr why an intelligent man couldn’t at least come study in the college, and she told me that learning was very bad for men: it weakens a man’s sense of honor, makes his muscles flabby, and leaves him impotent. “ ‘What goes to the brain takes from the testicles,’ ” she said. “Men have to be sheltered from education for their own good.”

I tried to “be water,” as I was taught, but I was disgusted. Probably she felt it, because after a while she told me about “the secret college.” Some women in colleges do smuggle information to men in castles. The poor things meet secretly and teach each other. In the castles, homosexual relationships are encouraged among boys under fifteen, but not officially tolerated among grown men; she says the “secret colleges” often are run by the homosexual men. They have to be secret because if they’re caught reading or talking about ideas they may be punished by their Lords and Masters.

There have been some interesting works from the “secret colleges,” Skodr said, but she had to think to come up with examples. One was a man who had smuggled out an interesting mathematical theorem, and one was a painter whose landscapes, though primitive in technique, were admired by professionals of the art. She couldn’t remember his name.

Arts, sciences, all learning, all professional techniques, are haggyad, skilled work. They’re all taught at the colleges, and there are no divisions and few specialists. Teachers and students cross and mix fields all the time, and being a famous scholar in one field doesn’t keep you from being a student in another. Skodr is a vev of physiology, writes plays, and is currently studying history with one of the history vevs. Her thinking is informed and lively and fearless. My School on Main could learn from this college. It’s a wonderful place, full of free minds. But only minds of one gender. A hedged freedom.

I hope Kaza has found a secret college or something, some way to fit in at the castle. He’s strong, but these men have trained for years for the games they play. And a lot of the games are violent. The women say don’t worry, we don’t let the men kill each other, we protect them, they’re our treasures. But I’ve seen men carried off with concussions, on the holos of their martial-art fights, where they throw each other around spectacularly. “Only inexperienced fighters get hurt.” Very reassuring. And they wrestle bulls. And in that melee they call the Maingame they break each other’s legs and ankles deliberately. “What’s a hero without a limp?” the women say. Maybe that’s the safe thing to do, get your leg broken so you don’t have to prove you’re a hero any more. But what else might Kaza have to prove?

I asked Shask to let me know if she ever heard of him being at the Reha fuckery. But Awaga Castle services (that’s their word, the same word they use for their bulls) four towns, so he might get sent to one of the others. But probably not, because men who don’t win at things aren’t allowed to go to the fuckeries. Only the champions. And boys between fifteen and nineteen, the ones the older women call dippida, baby animals—puppy, kitty, lamby. They use the dippida for pleasure. They only pay for a champion when they go to the fuckery to get pregnant. But Kaza’s thirty-six, he isn’t a puppy or a kitten or a lamb. He’s a man, and this is a terrible place to be a man.

Kaza Agad had been killed; the Lords of Awaga Castle finally disclosed the fact, but not the circumstances. A year later, Merriment radioed her lander and left Seggri for Hain. Her recommendation was to observe and avoid. The Stabiles, however, decided to send another pair of observers; these were both women, Mobiles Alee Iyoo and Zerin Wu. They lived for eight years on Seggri, after the third year as First Mobiles; Iyoo stayed as Ambassador another fifteen years. They made Resehavanar’s Choice as “all the truth slowly.” A limit of two hundred visitors from off world was set. During the next several generations the people of Seggri, becoming accustomed to the alien presence, considered their own options as members of the Ekumen. Proposals for a planetwide referendum on genetic alteration were abandoned, since the men’s vote would be insignificant unless the women’s vote were handicapped. As of the date of this report the Seggri have not undertaken major genetic alteration, though they have learned and applied various repair techniques, which have resulted in a higher proportion of full-term male infants; the gender balance now stands at about 12:1.

The following is a memoir given to Ambassador Eritho te Ves in 93/1569 by a woman in Ush on Seggri.

You asked me, dear friend, to tell you anything I might like people on other worlds to know about my life and my world. That’s not easy! Do I want anybody anywhere else to know anything about my life? I know how strange we seem to all the others, the half-and-half races; I know they think us backward, provincial, even perverse. Maybe in a few more decades we’ll decide that we should remake ourselves. I won’t be alive then; I don’t think I’d want to be. I like my people. I like our fierce, proud, beautiful men, I don’t want them to become like women. I like our trustful, powerful, generous women, I don’t want them to become like men. And yet I see that among you each man has his own being and nature, each woman has hers, and I can hardly say what it is I think we would lose.

When I was a child I had a brother a year and a half younger than me. His name was Ittu. My mother had gone to the city and paid five years’ savings for my sire, a Master Champion in the Dancing. Ittu’s sire was an old fellow at our village fuckery; they called him “Master Fallback.” He’d never been a champion at anything, hadn’t sired a child for years, and was only too glad to fuck for free. My mother always laughed about it—she was still suckling me, she didn’t even use a preventive, and she tipped him two coppers! When she found herself pregnant she was furious. When they tested and found it was a male fetus she was even more disgusted at having, as they say, to wait for the miscarriage. But when Ittu was born sound and healthy, she gave the old sire two hundred coppers, all the cash she had.

He wasn’t delicate like so many boy babies, but how can you keep from protecting and cherishing a boy? I don’t remember when I wasn’t looking after Ittu, with it all very clear in my head what Little Brother should do and shouldn’t do and all the perils I must keep him from. I was proud of my responsibility, and vain, too, because I had a brother to look after. Not one other motherhouse in my village had a son still living at home.

Ittu was a lovely child, a star. He had the fleecy soft hair that’s common in my part of Ush, and big eyes; his nature was sweet and cheerful, and he was very bright. The other children loved him and always wanted to play with him, but he and I were happiest playing by ourselves, long elaborate games of make-believe. We had a herd of twelve cattle an old woman of the village had carved from gourd-shell for Ittu—people always gave him presents—and they were the actors in our dearest game. Our cattle lived in a country called Shush, where they had great adventures, climbing mountains, discovering new lands, sailing on rivers, and so on. Like any herd, like our village herd, the old cows were the leaders; the bull lived apart; the other males were gelded; and the heifers were the adventurers. Our bull would make ceremonial visits to service the cows, and then he might have to go fight with men at Shush Castle. We made the castle of clay and the men of sticks, and the bull always won, knocking the stick-men to pieces. Then sometimes he knocked the castle to pieces too. But the best of our stories were told with two of the heifers. Mine was named Op and my brother’s was Utti. Once our hero heifers were having a great adventure on the stream that runs past our village, and their boat got away from us. We found it caught against a log far downstream where the stream was deep and quick. My heifer was still in it. We both dived and dived, but we never found Utti. She had drowned. The Cattle of Shush had a great funeral for her, and Ittu cried very bitterly.

He mourned his brave little toy cow so long that I asked Djerdji the cattleherd if we could work for her, because I thought being with the real cattle might cheer Ittu up. She was glad to get two cowhands for free (when Mother found out we were really working, she made Djerdji pay us a quarter-copper a day). We rode two big, goodnatured old cows, on saddles so big Ittu could lie down on his. We took a herd of two-year-old calves out onto the desert every day to forage for the edta that grows best when it’s grazed. We were supposed to keep them from wandering off and from trampling streambanks, and when they wanted to settle down and chew the cud we were supposed to gather them in a place where their droppings would nourish useful plants. Our old mounts did most of the work. Mother came out and checked on what we were doing and decided it was all right, and being out in the desert all day was certainly keeping us fit and healthy.

We loved our riding cows, but they were serious-minded and responsible, rather like the grown-ups in our motherhouse. The calves were something else; they were all riding breed, not fine animals of course, just villagebred; but living on edta they were fat and had plenty of spirit. Ittu and I rode them bareback with a rope rein. At first we always ended up on our own backs watching a calf’s heels and tail flying off. By the end of a year we were good riders, and took to training our mounts to tricks, trading mounts at a full run, and hornvaulting. Ittu was a marvelous hornvaulter. He trained a big three-year-old roan ox with lyre horns, and the two of them danced like the finest vaulters of the great castles that we saw on the holos. We couldn’t keep our excellence to ourselves out in the desert; we started showing off to the other children, inviting them to come out to Salt Springs to see our Great Trick Riding Show. And so of course the adults got to hear of it.

My mother was a brave woman, but that was too much for even her, and she said to me in cold fury, “I trusted you to look after Ittu. You let me down.”

All the others had been going on and on about endangering the precious life of a boy, the Vial of Hope, the Treasurehouse of Life, and so on, but it was what my mother said that hurt.

“I do look after Ittu, and he looks after me,” I said to her, in that passion of justice that children know, the birthright we seldom honor. “We both know what’s dangerous and we don’t do stupid things and we know our cattle and we do everything together. When he has to go to the castle he’ll have to do lots more dangerous things, but at least he’ll already know how to do one of them. And there he has to do them alone, but we did everything together. And I didn’t let you down.”

My mother looked at us. I was nearly twelve, Ittu was ten. She burst into tears, she sat down on the dirt and wept aloud. Ittu and I both went to her and hugged her and cried. Ittu said, “I won’t go. I won’t go to the damned castle. They can’t make me!”

And I believed him. He believed himself. My mother knew better.

Maybe some day it will be possible for a boy to choose his life. Among your peoples a man’s body does not shape his fate, does it? Maybe some day that will be so here.

Our Castle, Hidjegga, had of course been keeping their eye on Ittu ever since he was born; once a year Mother would send them the doctor’s report on him, and when he was five Mother and her wives took him out there for the ceremony of Confirmation. Ittu had been embarrassed, disgusted, and flattered. He told me in secret, “There were all these old men that smelled funny and they made me take off my clothes and they had these measuring things and they measured my peepee! And they said it was very good. They said it was a good one. What happens when you descend?” It wasn’t the first question he had ever asked me that I couldn’t answer, and as usual I made up the answer. “Descend means you can have babies,” I said, which, in a way, wasn’t so far off the mark.

Some castles, I am told, prepare boys of nine and ten for the Severance, woo them with visits from older boys, tickets to games, tours of the park and the buildings, so that they may be quite eager to go to the castle when they turn eleven. But we “outyonders,” villagers of the edge of the desert, kept to the harsh old-fashioned ways. Aside from Confirmation, a boy had no contact at all with men until his eleventh birthday. On that day everybody he had ever known brought him to the Gate and gave him to the strangers with whom he would live the rest of his life. Men and women alike believed and still believe that this absolute severance makes the man.

Vev Ushiggi, who had borne a son and had a grandson, and had been mayor five or six times, and was held in great esteem even though she’d never had much money, heard Ittu say that he wouldn’t go to the damned Castle. She came next day to our motherhouse and asked to talk to him. He told me what she said. She didn’t do any wooing or sweetening. She told him that he was born to the service of his people and had one responsibility, to sire children when he got old enough; and one duty, to be a strong, brave man, stronger and braver than other men, so that women would choose him to sire their children. She said he had to live in the Castle because men could not live among women. At this, Ittu asked her, “Why can’t they?”

“You did?” I said, awed by his courage, for Vev Ushiggi was a formidable old woman.

“Yes. And she didn’t really answer. She took a long time. She looked at me and then she looked off somewhere and then she stared at me for a long time and then finally she said, ‘Because we would destroy them.’ ”

“But that’s crazy,” I said. “Men are our treasures. What did she say that for?”

Ittu, of course, didn’t know. But he thought hard about what she had said, and I think nothing she could have said would have so impressed him.

After discussion, the village elders and my mother and her wives decided that Ittu could go on practicing hornvaulting, because it really would be a useful skill for him in the Castle; but he could not herd cattle any longer, nor go with me when I did, nor join in any of the work children of the village did, nor their games. “You’ve done everything together with Po,” they told him, “but she should be doing things together with the other girls, and you should be doing things by yourself, the way men do.”

They were always very kind to Ittu, but they were stern with us girls; if they saw us even talking with Ittu they’d tell us to go on about our work, leave the boy alone. When we disobeyed—when Ittu and I sneaked off and met at Salt Springs to ride together, or just hid out in our old playplace down in the draw by the stream to talk—he got treated with cold silence to shame him, but I got punished. A day locked in the cellar of the old fiber-processing mill, which was what my village used for a jail; next time it was two days; and the third time they caught us alone together, they locked me in that cellar for ten days. A young woman called Fersk brought me food once a day and made sure I had enough water and wasn’t sick, but she didn’t speak; that’s how they always used to punish people in the villages. I could hear the other children going by up on the street in the evening. It would get dark at last and I could sleep. All day I had nothing to do, no work, nothing to think about except the scorn and contempt they held me in for betraying their trust, and the injustice of my getting punished when Ittu didn’t.

When I came out, I felt different. I felt like something had closed up inside me while I was closed up in that cellar.

When we ate at the motherhouse they made sure Ittu and I didn’t sit near each other. For a while we didn’t even talk to each other. I went back to school and work. I didn’t know what Ittu was doing all day. I didn’t think about it. It was only fifty days to his birthday.

One night I got into bed and found a note under my clay pillow: in the draw to-nt. Ittu never could spell; what writing he knew I had taught him in secret. I was frightened and angry, but I waited an hour till everybody was asleep, and got up and crept outside into the windy, starry night, and ran to the draw. It was late in the dry season and the stream was barely running. Ittu was there, hunched up with his arms round his knees, a little lump of shadow on the pale, cracked clay at the waterside.

The first thing I said was, “You want to get me locked up again? They said next time it would be thirty days!”

“They’re going to lock me up for fifty years,” Ittu said, not looking at me.

“What am I supposed to do about it? It’s the way it has to be! You’re a man. You have to do what men do. They won’t lock you up, anyway, you get to play games and come to town to do service and all that. You don’t even know what being locked up is!”

“I want to go to Seradda,” Ittu said, talking very fast, his eyes shining as he looked up at me. “We could take the riding cows to the bus station in Redang, I saved my money, I have twenty-three coppers, we could take the bus to Seradda. The cows would come back home if we turned them loose.”

“What do you think you’d do in Seradda?” I asked, disdainful but curious. Nobody from our village had ever been to the capital.

“The Ekkamen people are there,” he said.

“The Ekumen,” I corrected him. “So what?”

“They could take me away,” Ittu said.

I felt very strange when he said that. I was still angry and still disdainful but a sorrow was rising in me like dark water. “Why would they do that? What would they talk to some little boy for? How would you find them? Twenty-three coppers isn’t enough anyway. Seradda’s way far off. That’s a really stupid idea. You can’t do that.”

“I thought you’d come with me,” Ittu said. His voice was softer, but didn’t shake.

“I wouldn’t do a stupid thing like that,” I said furiously.

“All right,” he said. “But you won’t tell. Will you?”

“No, I won’t tell!” I said. “But you can’t run away, Ittu. You can’t. It would be—it would be dishonorable.”

This time when he answered his voice shook. “I don’t care,” he said. “I don’t care about honor. I want to be free!”

We were both in tears. I sat down by him and we leaned together the way we used to, and cried a while; not long; we weren’t used to crying.

“You can’t do it,” I whispered to him. “It won’t work, Ittu.”

He nodded, accepting my wisdom.

“It won’t be so bad at the Castle,” I said.

After a minute he drew away from me very slightly.

“We’ll see each other,” I said.

He said only, “When?”

“At games. I can watch you. I bet you’ll be the best rider and hornvaulter there. I bet you win all the prizes and get to be a Champion.”

He nodded, dutiful. He knew and I knew that I had betrayed our love and our birthright of justice. He knew he had no hope.

That was the last time we talked together alone, and almost the last time we talked together.

Ittu ran away about ten days after that, taking the riding cow and heading for Redang; they tracked him easily and had him back in the village before nightfall. I don’t know if he thought I had told them where he would be going. I was so ashamed of not having gone with him that I could not look at him. I kept away from him; they didn’t have to keep me away any more. He made no effort to speak to me.

I was beginning my puberty, and my first blood was the night before Ittu’s birthday. Menstruating women are not allowed to come near the Gates at conservative castles like ours, so when Ittu was made a man I stood far back among a few other girls and women, and could not see much of the ceremony. I stood silent while they sang, and looked down at the dirt and my new sandals and my feet in the sandals, and felt the ache and tug of my womb and the secret movement of the blood, and grieved. I knew even then that this grief would be with me all my life.

Ittu went in and the Gates closed.

He became a Young Champion Hornvaulter, and for two years, when he was eighteen and nineteen, came a few times to service in our village, but I never saw him. One of my friends fucked with him and started to tell me about it, how nice he was, thinking I’d like to hear, but I shut her up and walked away in a blind rage which neither of us understood.

He was traded away to a castle on the east coast when he was twenty. When my daughter was born I wrote him, and several times after that, but he never answered my letters.

I don’t know what I’ve told you about my life and my world. I don’t know if it’s what I want you to know. It is what I had to tell.

The following is a short story written in 93/1586 by a popular writer of the city of Adr, Sem Gridji. The classic literature of Seggri was the narrative poem and the drama. Classical poems and plays were written collaboratively, in the original version and also by re-writers of subsequent generations, usually anonymous. Small value was placed on preserving a “true” text, since the work was seen as an ongoing process. Probably under Ekumenical influence, individual writers in the late sixteenth century began writing short prose narratives, historical and fictional. The genre became popular, particularly in the cities, though it never obtained the immense audience of the great classical epics and plays. Literally everyone knew the plots and many quotations from the epics and plays, from books and holo, and almost every adult woman had seen or participated in a staged performance of several of them. They were one of the principal unifying influences of the Seggrian monoculture. The prose narrative, read in silence, served rather as a device by which the culture might question itself, and a tool for individual moral self-examination. Conservative Seggrian women disapproved of the genre as antagonistic to the intensely cooperative, collaborative structure of their society. Fiction was not included in the curriculum of the literature departments of the colleges, and was often dismissed contemptuously—“fiction is for men.”

Sem Gridji published three books of stories. Her bare, blunt style is characteristic of the Seggrian short story.

COCOON

Greg Egan

Last year, the author’s novel Quarantine, published in 1992 by Random House (UK), won Australia’s prestigious Ditmar award. The British edition of his latest novel, Permutation City, has just been released by Orion under their Millennium imprint.

The explosion shattered windows hundreds of meters away, but started no fire. Later, I discovered that it had shown up on a seismograph at Macquarie University, fixing the time precisely: 3:52 a.m. Residents woken by the blast phoned emergency services within minutes, and our night shift operator called me just after four, but there was no point rushing to the scene when I’d only be in the way. I sat at the terminal in my study for almost an hour, assembling background data and monitoring the radio traffic on headphones, drinking coffee and trying not to type too loudly.

By the time I arrived, the local fire service contractors had departed, having certified that there was no risk of further explosions, but our forensic people were still poring over the wreckage, the electric hum of their equipment all but drowned out by birdsong. Lane Cove was a quiet, leafy suburb, mixed residential and high-tech industrial, the lush vegetation of corporate open spaces blending almost seamlessly into the adjacent national park that straddled the Lane Cove River. The map of the area on my car terminal had identified suppliers of laboratory reagents and Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of precision instruments for scientific and aerospace applications, and no less than twenty-seven biotechnology firms—including Life Enhancement International, the erstwhile sprawling concrete building now reduced to a collection of white powdery blocks clustered around twisted reinforcement rods. The exposed steel glinted in the early light, disconcertingly pristine; the building was only three years old. I could understand why the forensic team had ruled out an accident at their first glance; a few drums of organic solvent could not have done anything remotely like this. Nothing legally stored in a residential zone could reduce a modern building to rubble in a matter of seconds.

I spotted Janet Lansing as I left my car. She was surveying the ruins with an expression of stoicism, but she was hugging herself. Mild shock, probably. She had no other reason to be chilly; it had been stinking hot all night, and the temperature was already climbing. Lansing was Director of the Lane Cove complex: forty-three years old, with a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Cambridge, and an M.B.A. from an equally reputable Japanese virtual university. I’d had my knowledge miner extract her details, and photo, from assorted databases before I’d left home.

I approached her and said, “James Glass, Nexus Investigations.” She frowned at my business card, but accepted it, then glanced at the technicians trawling their gas chromato-graphs and holography equipment around the perimeter of the ruins.

“They’re yours, I suppose?”

“Yes. They’ve been here since four.”

She smirked slightly. “What happens if I give the job to someone else? And charge the lot of you with trespass?”

“If you hire another company, we’ll be happy to hand over all the samples and data we’ve collected.”

She nodded distractedly. “I’ll hire you, of course. Since four? I’m impressed. You’ve even arrived before the insurance people.” As it happened, LEI’s “insurance people” owned 49 percent of Nexus, and would stay out of the way until we were finished, but I didn’t see any reason to mention that. Lansing added sourly, “Our so-called security firm only worked up the courage to phone me half an hour ago. Evidently a fiber-optic junction box was sabotaged, disconnecting the whole area. They’re supposed to send in patrols in the event of equipment failure, but apparently they didn’t bother.”

I grimaced sympathetically. “What exactly were you people making here?”

“Making? Nothing. We did no manufacturing; this was pure R & D.”

In fact, I’d already established that LEI’s factories were all in Thailand and Indonesia, with the head office in Monaco, and research facilities scattered around the world. There’s a fine line, though, between demonstrating that the facts are at your fingertips, and unnerving the client. A total stranger ought to make at least one trivial wrong assumption, ask at least one misguided question. I always do.

“So what were you researching and developing?”

“That’s commercially sensitive information.”

I took my notepad from my shirt pocket and displayed a standard contract, complete with the usual secrecy provisions. She glanced at it, then had her own computer scrutinize the document. Conversing in modulated infrared, the machines rapidly negotiated the fine details. My notepad signed the agreement electronically on my behalf, and Lansing’s did the same, then they both chimed happily in unison to let us know that the deal had been concluded.

Lansing said, “Our main project here was engineering improved syncytiotrophoblastic cells.” I smiled patiently, and she translated for me. “Strengthening the barrier between the maternal and fetal blood supplies. Mother and fetus don’t share blood directly, but they exchange nutrients and hormones across the placental barrier. The trouble is, all kinds of viruses, toxins, pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs can also cross over. The natural barrier cells didn’t evolve to cope with AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine-addicted babies, or the next thalidomidelike disaster. We’re aiming for a single intravenous injection of a gene-tailoring vector, which would trigger the formation of an extra layer of cells in the appropriate structures within the placenta, specifically designed to shield the fetal blood supply from contaminants in the maternal blood.”

“A thicker barrier?”

“Smarter. More selective. More choosy about what it lets through. We know exactly what the developing fetus actually needs from the maternal blood. These gene-tailored cells would contain specific channels for transporting each of those substances. Nothing else would be allowed through.”

“Very impressive.” A cocoon around the unborn child, shielding it from all of the poisons of modern society. It sounded exactly like the kind of beneficent technology a company called Life Enhancement would be hatching in leafy Lane Cove. True, even a layman could spot a few flaws in the scheme. I’d heard that AIDS most often infected children during birth itself, not pregnancy—but presumably there were other viruses that crossed the placental barrier more frequently. I had no idea whether or not mothers at risk of giving birth to children stunted by alcohol or addicted to cocaine were likely to rush out en masse and have gene-tailored fetal barriers installed—but I could picture a strong demand from people terrified of food additives, pesticides, and pollutants. In the long term—if the system actually worked, and wasn’t prohibitively expensive—it could even become a part of routine prenatal care.

Beneficent, and lucrative.

In any case—whether or not there were biological, economic, and social factors which might keep the technology from being a complete success . . . it was hard to imagine anyone objecting to the principle of the thing.

I said, “Were you working with animals?”

Lansing scowled. “Only early calf embryos, and disembodied bovine uteruses on tissue-support machines. If it was an animal rights group, they would have been better off bombing an abattoir.”

“Mmm.” In the past few years, the Sydney chapter of Animal Equality—the only group known to use such extreme methods—had concentrated on primate research facilities. They might have changed their focus, or been misinformed, but LEI still seemed like an odd target; there were plenty of laboratories widely known to use whole, live rats and rabbits as if they were disposable test tubes—many of them quite close by. “What about competitors?”

“No one else is pursuing this kind of product line, so far as I know. There’s no race being run; we’ve already obtained individual patents for all of the essential components—the membrane channels, the transporter molecules—so any competitor would have to pay us license fees, regardless.”

“What if someone simply wanted to damage you, financially?”

“Then they should have bombed one of the factories instead. Cutting off our cash flow would have been the best way to hurt us; this laboratory wasn’t earning a cent.”

“Your share price will still take a dive, won’t it? Nothing makes investors nervous quite so much as terrorism.”

Lansing agreed, reluctantly. “But then, whoever took advantage of that and launched a takeover bid would suffer the same taint, themselves. I don’t deny that commercial sabotage takes place in this industry, now and then . . . but not on a level as crude as this. Genetic engineering is a subtle business. Bombs are for fanatics.”

Perhaps. But who would be fanatically opposed to the idea of shielding human embryos from viruses and poisons? Several religious sects flatly rejected any kind of modification to human biology . . . but the ones who employed violence were far more likely to have bombed a manufacturer of abortifa-cient drugs than a laboratory dedicated to the task of safeguarding the unborn child.

Elaine Chang, head of the forensic team, approached us. I introduced her to Lansing. Elaine said, “It was a very professional job. If you’d hired demolition experts, they wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. But then, they probably would have used identical software to compute the timing and placement of the charges.” She held up her notepad, and displayed a stylized reconstruction of the building, with hypothetical explosive charges marked. She hit a button and the simulation crumbled into something very like the actual mess behind us.

She continued, “Most reputable manufacturers these days imprint every batch of explosives with a trace element signature, which remains in the residue. We’ve linked the charges used here to a batch stolen from a warehouse in Singapore five years ago.”

I added, “Which may not be a great help, though, I’m afraid. After five years on the black market, they could have changed hands a dozen times.”

Elaine returned to her equipment. Lansing was beginning to look a little dazed. I said, “I’d like to talk to you again, later—but I am going to need a list of your employees, past and present, as soon as possible.”

She nodded, and hit a few keys on her notepad, transferring the list to mine. She said, “Nothing’s been lost, really. We had off-site backup for all of our data, administrative and scientific. And we have frozen samples of most of the cell lines we were working on, in a vault in Milson’s Point.”

Commercial data backup would be all but untouchable, with the records stored in a dozen or more locations scattered around the world-heavily encrypted, of course. Cell lines sounded more vulnerable. I said, “You’d better let the vault’s operators know what’s happened.”

“I’ve already done that; I phoned them on my way here.” She gazed at the wreckage. “The insurance company will pay for the rebuilding. In six months’ time, we’ll be back on our feet. So whoever did this was wasting their time. The work will go on.”

I said, “Who would want to stop it in the first place?”

Lansing’s faint smirk appeared again, and I very nearly asked her what she found so amusing. But people often act incongruously in the face of disasters, large or small; nobody had died, she wasn’t remotely hysterical, but it would have been strange if a setback like this hadn’t knocked her slightly out of kilter.

She said, “You tell me. That’s your job, isn’t it?”

Martin was in the living room when I arrived home that evening. Working on his costume for the Mardi Gras. I couldn’t imagine what it would look like when it was completed, but there were definitely feathers involved. Blue feathers. I did my best to appear composed, but I could tell from his expression that he’d caught an involuntary flicker of distaste on my face as he looked up. We kissed anyway, and said nothing about it.

Over dinner, though, he couldn’t help himself.

“Fortieth anniversary this year, James. Sure to be the biggest yet. You could at least come and watch.” His eyes glinted; he enjoyed needling me. We’d had this argument five years running, and it was close to becoming a ritual as pointless as the parade itself.

I said flatly, “Why would I want to watch ten thousand drag queens ride down Oxford Street, blowing kisses to the tourists?”

“Don’t exaggerate. There’ll only be a thousand men in drag, at most.”

“Yeah, the rest will be in sequined jockstraps.”

“If you actually came and watched, you’d discover that most people’s imaginations have progressed far beyond that.”

I shook my head, bemused. “If people’s imaginations had progressed, there’d be no Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. It’s a freak show, for people who want to live in a cultural ghetto. Forty years ago, it might have been . . . provocative. Maybe it did some good, back then. But now? What’s the point? There are no laws left to change, there’s no politics left to address. This kind of thing just recycles the same moronic stereotypes, year after year.”

Martin said smoothly, “It’s a public reassertion of the right to diverse sexuality. Just because it’s no longer a protest march as well as a celebration doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. And complaining about stereotypes is like . . . complaining about the characters in a medieval morality play. The costumes are code, shorthand. Give the great unwashed heterosexual masses credit for some intelligence; they don’t watch the parade and conclude that the average gay man spends all his time in a gold lame tutu. People aren’t that literal-minded. They all learnt semiotics in kindergarten, they know how to decode the message.”

“I’m sure they do. But it’s still the wrong message: it makes exotic what ought to be mundane. Okay, people have the right to dress up any way they like and march down Oxford Street . . . but it means absolutely nothing to me.”

“I’m not asking you to join in—”

“Very wise.”

“—but if one hundred thousand straights can turn up, to show their support for the gay community, why can’t you?”

I said wearily, “Because every time I hear the word community, I know I’m being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the gay community, I’m certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I don’t want to spend my life watching gay and lesbian television channels, using gay and lesbian news systems . . . or going to gay and lesbian street parades. It’s all so . . . proprietary. You’d think there was a multinational corporation who had the franchise rights on homosexuality. And if you don’t market the product their way, you’re some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized queer.”

Martin cracked up. When he finally stopped laughing, he said, “Go on. I’m waiting for you to get to the part where you say you’re no more proud of being gay than you are of having brown eyes, or black hair, or a birthmark behind your left knee.”

I protested. “That’s true. Why should I be ‘proud’ of something I was born with? I’m not proud, or ashamed. I just accept it. And I don’t have to join a parade to prove that.”

“So you’d rather we all stayed invisible?”

“Invisible! You’re the one who told me that the representation rates in movies and TV last year were close to the true demographics. And if you hardly even notice it anymore when an openly gay or lesbian politician gets elected, that’s because it’s no longer an issue. To most people, now, it’s about as significant as . . . being left or right handed.”

Martin seemed to find this suggestion surreal. “Are you trying to tell me that it’s now a non-subject? That the inhabitants of this planet are now absolutely impartial on the question of sexual preference? Your faith is touching—but . . .” He mimed incredulity.

I said, “We’re equal before the law with any heterosexual couple, aren’t we? And when was the last time you told someone you were gay and they so much as blinked? And yes, I know, there are dozens of countries where it’s still illegal—along with joining the wrong political parties, or the wrong religions. Parades in Oxford Street aren’t going to change that:

“People are still bashed in this city. People are still discriminated against.”

“Yeah. And people are also shot dead in peak-hour traffic for playing the wrong music on their car stereos, or denied jobs because they live in the wrong suburbs. I’m not talking about the perfection of human nature. I just want you to acknowledge one tiny victory: leaving out a few psychotics, and a few fundamentalist bigots . . . most people just don’t care.”

Martin said ruefully, “If only that were true!”

The argument went on for more than an hour-ending in a stalemate, as usual. But then, neither one of us had seriously expected to change the other’s mind.

I did catch myself wondering afterward, though, if I really believed all of my own optimistic rhetoric. About as significant as being left or right handed? Certainly, that was the line taken by most Western politicians, academics, essayists, talk show hosts, soap opera writers, and mainstream religious leaders . . . but the same people had been espousing equally high-minded principles of racial equality for decades, and the reality still hadn’t entirely caught up on that front. I’d suffered very little discrimination, myself—by the time I reached high school, tolerance was hip, and I’d witnessed a constant stream of improvements since then . . . but how could I ever know precisely how much hidden prejudice remained? By interrogating my own straight friends? By reading the sociologists’ latest attitude surveys? People will always tell you what they think you want to hear.

Still, it hardly seemed to matter. Personally, I could get by without the deep and sincere approval of every other member of the human race. Martin and I were lucky enough to have been born into a time and place where, in almost every tangible respect, we were treated as equal.

What more could anyone hope for?

In bed that night, we made love very slowly, at first just kissing and stroking each other’s bodies for what seemed like hours. Neither of us spoke, and in the stupefying heat I lost all sense of belonging to any other time, any other reality. Nothing existed but the two of us; the rest of the world, the rest of my life, went spinning away into the darkness.

The investigation moved slowly. I interviewed every current member of LEI’s workforce, then started on the long list of past employees. I still believed that commercial sabotage was the most likely explanation for such a professional job—but blowing up the opposition is a desperate measure; a little civilized espionage usually comes first. I was hoping that someone who’d worked for LEI might have been approached in the past and offered money for inside information—and if I could find just one employee who’d turned down a bribe, they might have learnt something useful from their contact with the presumed rival.

Although the Lane Cove facility had only been built three years before, LEI had operated a research division in Sydney for twelve years before that, in North Ryde, not far away. Many of the ex-employees from that period had moved interstate or overseas; quite a few had been transferred to LEI divisions in other countries. Still, almost no one had changed their personal phone numbers, so I had very little trouble tracking them down.

The exception was a biochemist named Catherine Mendelsohn; the number listed for her in the LEI staff records had been canceled. There were seventeen people with the same surname and initials in the national phone directory; none admitted to being Catherine Alice Mendelsohn, and none looked at all like the staff photo I had.

Mendelsohn’s address in the Electoral Roll, an apartment in Newtown, matched the LEI records—but the same address was in the phone directory (and Electoral Roll) for Stanley Goh, a young man who told me that he’d never met Mendelsohn. He’d been leasing the apartment for the past eighteen months.

Credit rating databases gave the same out-of-date address. I couldn’t access tax, banking, or utilities records without a warrant. I had my knowledge miner scan the death notices, but there was no match there.

Mendelsohn had worked for LEI until about a year before the move to Lane Cove. She’d been part of a team working on a gene-tailoring system for ameliorating menstrual side-effects, and although the Sydney division had always specialized in gynecological research, for some reason the project was about to be moved to Texas. I checked the industry publications; apparently, LEI had been rearranging all of its operations at the time, gathering together projects from around the globe into new multi-disciplinary configurations, in accordance with the latest fashionable theories of research dynamics. Mendelsohn had declined the transfer, and had been retrenched.

I dug deeper. The staff records showed that Mendelsohn had been questioned by security guards after being found on the North Ryde premises late at night, two days before her dismissal. Workaholic biotechnologists aren’t uncommon, but starting the day at two in the morning shows exceptional dedication, especially when the company has just tried to shuffle you off to Amarillo. Having turned down the transfer, she must have known what was in store.

Nothing came of the incident, though. And even if Mendelsohn had been planning some minor act of sabotage, that hardly established any connection with a bombing four years later. She might have been angry enough to leak confidential information to one of LEI’s rivals . . . but whoever had bombed the Lane Cove laboratory would have been more interested in someone who’d worked on the fetal barrier project itself—a project which had only come into existence a year after Mendelsohn had been sacked.

I pressed on through the list. Interviewing the ex-employees was frustrating; almost all of them were still working in the biotechnology industry, and they would have been an ideal group to poll on the question of who would benefit most from LEI’s misfortune—but the confidentiality agreement I’d signed meant that I couldn’t disclose anything about the research in question—not even to people working for LEI’s other divisions.

The one thing which I could discuss drew a blank: if anyone had been offered a bribe, they weren’t talking about it—and no magistrate was going to sign a warrant letting me loose on a fishing expedition through a hundred and seventeen people’s financial records.

Forensic examination of the ruins, and the sabotaged fiberoptic exchange, had yielded the usual catalogue of minutiae which might eventually turn out to be invaluable—but none of it was going to conjure up a suspect out of thin air.

Four days after the bombing—just as I found myself growing desperate for a fresh angle on the case—I had a call from Janet Lansing.

The backup samples of the project’s gene-tailored cell lines had been destroyed.

The vault in Milson’s Point turned out to be directly underneath a section of the Harbor Bridge-built right into the foundations on the north shore. Lansing hadn’t arrived yet, but the head of security for the storage company, an elderly man called David Asher, showed me around. Inside, the traffic was barely audible, but the vibration coming through the floor felt like a constant mild earthquake. The place was cavernous, dry and cool. At least a hundred cryogenic freezers were laid out in rows; heavily clad pipes ran between them, replenishing their liquid nitrogen.

Asher was understandably morose, but cooperative. Celluloid movie film had been archived here, he explained, before everything went digital; the present owners specialized in biological materials. There were no guards physically assigned to the vault, but the surveillance cameras and alarm systems looked impressive, and the structure itself must have been close to impregnable.

Lansing had phoned the storage company, Biofile, on the morning of the bombing. Asher confirmed that he’d sent someone down from their North Sydney office to check the freezer in question. Nothing was missing—but he’d promised to boost security measures immediately. Because the freezers were supposedly tamper-proof, and individually locked, clients were normally allowed access to the vault at their convenience, monitored by the surveillance cameras, but otherwise unsupervised. Asher had promised Lansing that, henceforth, nobody would enter the building without a member of his staff to accompany them—and he claimed that nobody had been inside since the day of the bombing, anyway.

When two LEI technicians had arrived that morning to carry out an inventory, they’d found the expected number of culture flasks, all with the correct bar code labels, all tightly sealed—but the appearance of their contents was subtly wrong. The translucent frozen colloid was more opalescent than cloudy; an untrained eye might never have noticed the difference, but apparently it spoke volumes to the cognoscenti.

The technicians had taken a number of the flasks away for analysis; LEI were working out of temporary premises, a subleased corner of a paint manufacturer’s quality control lab. Lansing had promised me preliminary test results by the time we met.

Lansing arrived, and unlocked the freezer. With gloved hands, she lifted a flask out of the swirling mist and held it up for me to inspect.

She said, “We’ve only thawed three samples, but they all look the same. The cells have been torn apart.”

“How?” The flask was covered with such heavy condensation that I couldn’t have said if it was empty or full, let alone cloudy or opalescent.

“It looks like radiation damage.”

My skin crawled. I peered into the depths of the freezer; all I could make out were the tops of rows of identical flasks—but if one of them had been spiked with a radioiso-tope . . .

Lansing scowled. “Relax.” She tapped a small electronic badge pinned to her lab coat, with a dull gray face like a solar cell: a radiation dosimeter. “This would be screaming if we were being exposed to anything significant. Whatever the source of the radiation was, it’s no longer in here—and it hasn’t left the walls glowing. Your future offspring are safe.”

I let that pass. “You think all the samples will turn out to be ruined? You won’t be able to salvage anything?”

Lansing was stoical as ever. “It looks that way. There are some elaborate techniques we could use, to try to repair the DNA—but it will probably be easier to synthesize fresh DNA from scratch, and re-introduce it into unmodified bovine pla-cental cell lines. We still have all the sequence data; that’s what matters in the end.”

I pondered the freezer’s locking system, the surveillance cameras. “Are you sure that the source was inside the freezer? Or could the damage have been done without actually breaking in—right through the walls?”

She thought it over. “Maybe. There’s not much metal in these things; they’re mostly plastic foam. But I’m not a radiation physicist; your forensic people will probably be able to give you a better idea of what happened, once they’ve checked out the freezer itself. If there’s damage to the polymers in the foam, it might be possible to use that to reconstruct the geometry of the radiation field.”

A forensic team was on its way. I said, “How would they have done it? Walked casually by, and just—?”

“Hardly. A source which could do this in one quick hit would have been unmanageable. It’s far more likely to have been a matter of weeks, or months, of low-level exposure.”

“So they must have smuggled some kind of device into their own freezer, and aimed it at yours? But then . . . we’ll be able to trace the effects right back to the source, won’t we? So how could they have hoped to get away with it?”

Lansing said, “It’s even simpler than that. We’re talking about a modest amount of a gamma-emitting isotope, not some billion-dollar particle-beam weapon. The effective range would be a couple of meters, at most. If it was done from the outside, you’ve just narrowed down your suspect list to two.” She thumped the freezer’s left neighbor in the aisle, then did the same to the one on the right and said, “Aha.”

“What?”

She thumped them both again. The second one sounded hollow. I said, “No liquid nitrogen? It’s not in use?”

Lansing nodded. She reached for the handle.

Asher said, “I don’t think—”

The freezer was unlocked, the lid swung open easily. Lansing’s badge started beeping—and, worse, there was something in there, with batteries and wires . . .

I don’t know what kept me from knocking her to the floor—but Lansing, untroubled, lifted the lid all the way. She said mildly, “Don’t panic; this dose rate’s nothing. Threshold of detectable.”

The thing inside looked superficially like a home-made bomb—but the batteries and timer chip I’d glimpsed were wired to a heavy-duty solenoid, which was part of an elaborate shutter mechanism on one side of a large, metallic gray box.

Lansing said, “Cannibalized medical source, probably. You know these things have turned up in garbage dumps?” She unpinned her badge and waved it near the box; the pitch of the alarm increased, but only slightly. “Shielding seems to be intact.”

I said, as calmly as possible, “These people have access to high explosives. You don’t have any idea what the fuck might be in there, or what it’s wired up to do. This is the point where we walk out, quietly, and leave it to the bomb-disposal robots.”

She seemed about to protest, but then she nodded contritely. The three of us went up onto the street, and Asher called the local terrorist services contractor. I suddenly realized that they’d have to divert all traffic from the bridge. The Lane Cove bombing had received some perfunctory media coverage—but this would lead the evening news.

I took Lansing aside. “They’ve destroyed your laboratory. They’ve wiped out your cell lines. Your data may be almost impossible to locate and corrupt—so the next logical target is you and your employees. Nexus doesn’t provide protective services, but I can recommend a good firm.”

I gave her the phone number; she accepted it with appropriate solemnity. “So you finally believe me? These people aren’t commercial saboteurs. They’re dangerous fanatics.”

I was growing impatient with her vague references to “fanatics.”

“Who exactly do you have in mind?”

She said darkly, “We’re tampering with certain . . . natural processes. You can draw your own conclusions, can’t you?”

There was no logic to that at all. God’s Image would probably want to force all pregnant women with HIV infections, or drug habits, to use the cocoon; they wouldn’t try to bomb the technology out of existence. Gaia’s Soldiers were more concerned with genetically engineered crops and bacteria than trivial modifications to insignificant species like humans—and they wouldn’t have used radioisotopes if the fate of the planet depended on it. Lansing was beginning to sound thoroughly paranoid—although in the circumstances, I couldn’t really blame her.

I said, “I’m not drawing any conclusions. I’m just advising you to take some sensible precautions, because we have no way of knowing how far this might escalate. But . . . Biofile must lease freezer space to every one of your competitors. A commercial rival would have found it a thousand times easier than any hypothetical sect member to get into the vault to plant that thing.”

A gray armor-plated van screeched to a halt in front of us; the back door swung up, ramps slid down, and a squat, multi-limbed robot on treads descended. I raised a hand in greeting and the robot did the same; the operator was a friend of mine.

Lansing said, “You may be right. But then, there’s nothing to stop a terrorist from having a day job in biotechnology, is there?”

The device turned out not to be booby-trapped at all—just rigged to spray LEI’s precious cells with gamma rays for six hours, starting at midnight, every night. Even in the unlikely event that someone had come into the vault in the early hours and wedged themselves into the narrow gap between the freezers, the dose they received would not have been much; as Lansing had suggested, it was the cumulative effect over months which had done the damage. The radioisotope in the box was cobalt 60, almost certainly a decomissioned medical source—grown too weak for its original use, but still too hot to be discarded—stolen from a “cooling off” site. No such theft had been reported, but Elaine Chang’s assistants were phoning around the hospitals, trying to persuade them to re-inventory their concrete bunkers.

Cobalt 60 was dangerous stuff—but fifty milligrams in a carefully shielded container wasn’t exactly a tactical nuclear weapon. The news systems went berserk, though: ATOMIC TERRORISTS STRIKE HARBOR BRIDGE, et cetera. If LEI’s enemies were activists, with some “moral cause” which they hoped to set before the public, they clearly had the worst PR advisers in the business. Their prospects of gaining the slightest sympathy had vanished, the instant the first news reports had mentioned the word radiation.

My secretarial software issued polite statements of “No comment” on my behalf, but camera crews began hovering outside my front door, so I relented and mouthed a few news-speak sentences for them which meant essentially the same thing. Martin looked on, amused—and then I looked on, astonished, as Janet Lansing’s own doorstop media conference appeared on TV.

“These people are clearly ruthless. Human life, the environment, radioactive contamination . . . all mean nothing to them.”

“Do you have any idea who might be responsible for this outrage, Dr. Lansing?”

“I can’t disclose that, yet. All I can reveal, right now, is that our research is at the very cutting edge of preventative medicine—and I’m not at all surprised that there are powerful vested interests working against us.”

Powerful vested interests? What was that meant to be code for—if not the rival biotechnology firm whose involvement she kept denying? No doubt she had her eye on the publicity advantages of being the victim of ATOMIC TERRORISTS—but I thought she was wasting her breath. In two or more years’ time, when the product finally hit the market, the story would be long forgotten.

After some tricky jurisdictional negotiations, Asher finally sent me six months’ worth of files from the vault’s surveillance cameras—all that they kept. The freezer in question had been unused for almost two years; the last authorized tenant was a small IVF clinic which had gone bankrupt. Only about 60 percent of the freezers were currently leased, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that LEI had had a conveniently empty neighbor.

I ran the surveillance files through image-processing soft-ware, in the hope that someone might have been caught in the act of opening the unused freezer. The search took almost an hour of supercomputer time—and turned up precisely nothing. A few minutes later, Elaine Chang popped her head into my office to say that she’d finished her analysis of the damage to the freezer walls: the nightly irradiation had been going on for between eight and nine months.

Undeterred, I scanned the files again, this time instructing the software to assemble a gallery of every individual sighted inside the vault.

Sixty-two faces emerged. I put company names to all of them, matching the times of each sighting to Biofile’s records of the use of each client’s electronic key. No obvious inconsistencies showed up; nobody had been seen inside who hadn’t used an authorized key to gain access—and the same people had used the same keys, again and again.

I flicked through the gallery, wondering what to do next. Search for anyone glancing slyly in the direction of the radioactive freezer? The software could have done it—but I wasn’t quite ready for barrel-scraping efforts like that.

I came to a face which looked familiar: a blonde woman in her mid-thirties, who’d used the key belonging to Federation Centennial Hospital’s Oncology Research Unit, three times. I was certain that I knew her, but I couldn’t recall where I’d seen her before. It didn’t matter; after a few seconds’ searching, I found a clear shot of the name badge pinned to her lab coat. All I had to do was zoom in.

The badge read: C. MENDELSOHN.

There was a knock on my open door. I turned from the screen; Elaine was back, looking pleased with herself.

She said, “We’ve finally found a place who’ll own up to having lost some cobalt 60. What’s more . . . the activity of our source fits their missing item’s decay curve, exactly.”

“So where was it stolen from?”

“Federation Centennial.”

I phoned the Oncology Research Unit. Yes, Catherine Mendelsohn worked there—she’d done so for almost four years— but they couldn’t put me through to her; she’d been on sick leave all week. They gave me the same canceled phone number as LEI—but a different address, an apartment in Petersham. The address wasn’t listed in the phone directory; I’d have to go there in person.

A cancer research team would have no reason to want to harm LEI, but a commercial rival—with or without their own key to the vault—could still have paid Mendelsohn to do their work for them. It seemed like a lousy deal to me, whatever they’d offered her—if she was convicted, every last cent would be traced and confiscated—but bitterness over her sacking might have clouded her judgment.

Maybe. Or maybe that was all too glib.

I replayed the shots of Mendelsohn taken by the surveillance cameras. She did nothing unusual, nothing suspicious. She went straight to the ORU’s freezer, put in whatever samples she’d brought, and departed. She didn’t glance slyly in any direction at all.

The fact that she had been inside the vault—on legitimate business—proved nothing. The fact that the cobalt 60 had been stolen from the hospital where she worked could have been pure coincidence.

And anyone had the right to cancel their phone service.

I pictured the steel reinforcement rods of the Lane Cove laboratory, glinting in the sunlight.

On the way out, reluctantly, I took a detour to the basement. I sat at a console while the armaments safe checked my fingerprints, took breath samples and a retinal blood spectrogram, ran some perception-and-judgment response time tests, then quizzed me for five minutes about the case. Once it was satisfied with my reflexes, my motives, and my state of mind, it issued me a nine-millimeter pistol and a shoulder holster.

Mendelsohn’s apartment block was a concrete box from the 1960s, front doors opening onto long shared balconies, no security at all. I arrived just after seven, to the smell of cooking and the sound of game show applause, wafting from a hundred open windows. The concrete still shimmered with the day’s heat; three flights of stairs left me coated in sweat. Mendelsohn’s apartment was silent, but the lights were on.

She answered the door. I introduced myself, and showed her my ID. She seemed nervous, but not surprised.

She said, “I still find it galling to have to deal with people like you.”

“People like—?”

“I was opposed to privatizing the police force. I helped organize some of the marches.”

She would have been fourteen years old at the time—a precocious political activist.

She let me in, begrudgingly. The living room was modestly furnished, with a terminal on a desk in one corner.

I said, “I’m investigating the bombing of Life Enhancement International. You used to work for them, up until about four years ago. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me why you left?”

She repeated what I knew about the transfer of her project to the Amarillo division. She answered every question directly, looking me straight in the eye; she still appeared nervous, but she seemed to be trying to read some vital piece of information from my demeanor. Wondering if I’d traced the cobalt?

“What were you doing on the North Ryde premises at two in the morning, two days before you were sacked?”

She said, “I wanted to find out what LEI was planning for the new building. I wanted to know why they didn’t want me to stick around.”

“Your job was moved to Texas.”

She laughed drily. “The work wasn’t that specialized. I could have swapped jobs with someone who wanted to travel to the States. It would have been the perfect solution—and there would have been plenty of people more than happy to trade places with me. But no, that wasn’t allowed.”

“So . . . did you find the answer?”

“Not that night. But later, yes.”

I said carefully, “So you knew what LEI was doing in Lane Cove?”

“Yes.”

“How did you discover that?”

“I kept an ear to the ground. Nobody who’d stayed on would have told me directly, but word leaked out, eventually. About a year ago.”

“Three years after you’d left? Why were you still interested? Did you think there was a market for the information?”

She said, “Put your notepad in the bathroom sink and run the tap on it.”

I hesitated, then complied. When I returned to the living room, she had her face in her hands. She looked up at me grimly.

“Why was I still interested? Because I wanted to know why every project with any lesbian or gay team members was being transferred out of the division. I wanted to know if that was pure coincidence. Or not.”

I felt a sudden chill in the pit of my stomach. I said, “If you had some problem with discrimination, there are avenues you could have—”

Mendelsohn shook her head impatiently. “LEI was never discriminatory. They didn’t sack anyone who was willing to move—and they always transferred the entire team; there was nothing so crude as picking out individuals by sexual preference. And they had a rationalization for everything: projects were being re-grouped between divisions to facilitate ‘syner-gistic cross-pollination.’ And if that sounds like pretentious bullshit, it was—but it was plausible pretentious bullshit. Other corporations have adopted far more ridiculous schemes, in perfect sincerity.”

“But if it wasn’t a matter of discrimination . . . why should LEI want to force people out of one particular division—?”

I think I’d finally guessed the answer, even as I said those words—but I needed to hear her spell it out, before I could really believe it.

Mendelsohn must have been practicing her version for non-biochemists; she had it down pat. “When people are subject to stress—physical or emotional—the levels of certain substances in the bloodstream increase. Cortisol and adrenaline, mainly. Adrenaline has a rapid, short-term effect on the nervous system. Cortisol works on a much longer time frame, modulating all kinds of bodily processes, adapting them for hard times: injury, fatigue, whatever. If the stress is prolonged, someone’s cortisol can be elevated for days, or weeks, or months.

“High enough levels of cortisol, in the bloodstream of a pregnant woman, can cross the placental barrier and interact with the hormonal system of the developing fetus. There are parts of the brain where embryonic development is switched into one of two possible pathways, by hormones released by the fetal testes or ovaries. The parts of the brain which control body image, and the parts which control sexual preference. Female embryos usually develop a brain wired with a self-image of a female body, and the strongest potential for sexual attraction toward males. Male embryos, vice versa. And it’s the sex hormones in the fetal bloodstream which let the growing neurons know the gender of the embryo, and which wiring pattern to adopt.

“Cortisol can interfere with this process. The precise interactions are complex, but the ultimate effect depends on the timing; different parts of the brain are switched into gender-specific versions at different stages of development. So stress at different times during pregnancy leads to different patterns of sexual preference and body image in the child: homosexual, bisexual, transsexual.

“Obviously, a lot depends on the mother’s biochemistry. Pregnancy itself is stressful—but everyone responds to that differently. The first sign that cortisol might have an effect came in studies in the 1980s, on the children of German women who’d been pregnant during the most intense bombing raids of World War II—when the stress was so great that the effect showed through despite individual differences. In the nineties, researchers thought they’d found a gene which determined male homosexuality . . . but it was always maternally inherited—and it turned out to be influencing the mother’s stress response, rather than acting directly on the child.

“If maternal cortisol, and other stress hormones, were kept from reaching the fetus . . . then the gender of the brain would always match the gender of the body in every respect. All of the present variation would be wiped out.”

I was shaken, but I don’t think I let it show. Everything she said rang true; I didn’t doubt a word of it. I’d always known that sexual preference was decided before birth. I’d known that I was gay, myself, by the age of seven. I’d never sought out the elaborate biological details, though—because I’d never believed that the tedious mechanics of the process could ever matter to me. What turned my blood to ice was not finally learning the neuroembryology of desire. The shock was discovering that LEI planned to reach into the womb and take control of it.

I pressed on with the questioning in a kind of trance, putting my own feelings into suspended animation.

I said, “LEI’s barrier is for filtering out viruses and toxins. You’re talking about a natural substance which has been present for millions of years—”

“LEI’s barrier will keep out everything they deem non-essential. The fetus doesn’t need maternal cortisol in order to survive. If LEI doesn’t explicitly include transporters for it, it won’t get through. And I’ll give you one guess what their plans are.”

I said, “You’re being paranoid. You think LEI would invest millions of dollars just to take part in a conspiracy to rid the world of homosexuals?”

Mendelsohn looked at me pityingly. “It’s not a conspiracy. It’s a marketing opportunity. LEI doesn’t give a shit about the sexual politics. They could put in cortisol transporters, and sell the barrier as an anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution screen. Or, they could leave them out, and sell it as all of that—plus a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the most money?”

That question hit a nerve; I said angrily, “And you had so little faith in people’s choice that you bombed the laboratory so that no one would ever have the chance to decide?”

Mendelsohn’s expression turned stony. “I did not bomb LEI. Or irradiate their freezer.”

“No? We’ve traced the cobalt 60 to Federation Centennial.”

She looked stunned for a moment, then she said, “Congratulations. Six thousand other people work there, you know. I’m obviously not the only one of them who’d discovered what LEI is up to.”

“You’re the only one with access to the Biofile vault. What do you expect me to believe? That having learnt about this project, you were going to do absolutely nothing about it?”

“Of course not! And I still plan to publicize what they’re doing. Let people know what it will mean. Try to get the issue debated before the product appears in a blaze of misinformation.”

“You said you’ve known about the work for a year.”

“Yes—and I’ve spent most of that time trying to verify all the facts, before opening my big mouth. Nothing would have been stupider than going public with half-baked rumors. I’ve only told about a dozen people so far, but we were going to launch a big publicity campaign to coincide with this year’s Mardi Gras. Although now, with the bombing, everything’s a thousand times more complicated.” She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But we still have to do what we can, to try to keep the worst from happening.”

“The worst?”

“Separatism. Paranoia. Homosexuality redefined as pathological. Lesbians and sympathetic straight women looking for their own technological means to guarantee the survival of the culture . . . while the religious far-right try to prosecute them for poisoning their babies . . . with a substance God’s been happily ‘poisoning’ babies with for the last few thousand years! Sexual tourists traveling from wealthy countries where the technology is in use, to poorer countries where it isn’t.”

I was sickened by the vision she was painting—but I pushed on. “These dozen friends of yours—?”

Mendelsohn said dispassionately, “Go fuck yourself. I’ve got nothing more to say to you. I’ve told you the truth. I’m not a criminal. And I think you’d better leave.”

I went to the bathroom and collected my notepad. In the doorway, I said, “If you’re not a criminal, why are you so hard to track down?”

Wordlessly, contemptuously, she lifted her shirt and showed me the bruises below her rib cage-fading, but still an ugly sight. Whoever it was who’d beaten her—an ex-lover?—I could hardly blame her for doing everything she could to avoid a repeat performance.

On the stairs, I hit the REPLAY button on my notepad. The software computed the frequency spectrum for the noise of the running water, subtracted it out of the recording, and then amplified and cleaned up what remained. Every word of our conversation came through crystal clear.

From my car, I phoned a surveillance firm and arranged to have Mendelsohn kept under twenty-four-hour observation.

Halfway home, I stopped in a side street, and sat behind the wheel for ten minutes, unable to think, unable to move.

In bed that night, I asked Martin, “You’re left-handed. How would you feel if no one was ever born left-handed again?”

“It wouldn’t bother me in the least. Why?”

“You wouldn’t think of it as a kind of . . . genocide?”

“Hardly. What’s this all about?”

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I’m cold.”

“You don’t feel cold to me.”

As we made love—tenderly, then savagely—I thought: This is our language, this is our dialect. Wars have been fought over less. And if this language ever dies out, a people will have vanished from the face of the Earth.

I knew I had to drop the case. If Mendelsohn was guilty, someone else could prove it. To go on working for LEI would destroy me.

Afterward, though . . . that seemed like sentimental bullshit. I belonged to no tribe. Every human being possessed their own sexuality—and when they died, it died with them. If no one was ever born gay again, it made no difference to me.

And if I dropped the case because I was gay, I’d be abandoning everything I’d ever believed about my own equality, my own identity . . . not to mention giving LEI the chance to announce: Yes, of course we hired an investigator without regard to sexual preference—but apparently, that was a mistake.

Staring up into the darkness, I said, “Every time I hear the word community, I reach for my revolver.”

There was no response; Martin was fast asleep. I wanted to wake him, I wanted to argue it all through, there and then—but I’d signed an agreement, I couldn’t tell him a thing.

So I watched him sleep, and tried to convince myself that when the truth came out, he’d understand.

I phoned Janet Lansing, brought her up to date on Mendelsohn—and said coldly, “Why were you so coy? ‘Fanatics’ ? ‘Powerful vested interests’? Are there some words you have trouble pronouncing?”

She’d clearly prepared herself for this moment. “I didn’t want to plant my own ideas in your head. Later on, that might have been seen as prejudicial.”

“Seen as prejudicial by whomV It was a rhetorical question: the media, of course. By keeping silent on the issue, she’d minimized the risk of being seen to have launched a witch-hunt. Telling me to go look for homosexual terrorists might have put LEI in a very unsympathetic light . . . whereas my finding Mendelsohn—for other reasons entirely, despite my ignorance—would come across as proof that the investigation had been conducted without any preconceptions.

I said, “You had your suspicions, and you should have disclosed them. At the very least, you should have told me what the barrier was for.”

“The barrier,” she said, “is for protection against viruses and toxins. But anything we do to the body has side effects. It’s not my role to judge whether or not those side effects are acceptable; the regulatory authorities will insist that we publicize all of the consequences of using the product—and then the decision will be up to consumers.”

Very neat: the government would twist their arm, “forcing them” to disclose their major selling point!

“And what does your market research tell you?”

“That’s strictly confidential.”

I very nearly asked her: When exactly did you find out that I was gay? After you’d hired me—or before? On the morning of the bombing, while I’d been assembling a dossier on Janet Lansing . . . had she been assembling dossiers on all of the people who might have bid for the investigation? And had she found the ultimate PR advantage, the ultimate seal of impartiality, just too tempting to resist?

I didn’t ask. I still wanted to believe that it made no difference: she’d hired me, and I’d solve the crime like any other, and nothing else would matter.

I went to the bunker where the cobalt had been stored, at the edge of Federation Centennial’s grounds. The trapdoor was solid, but the lock was a joke, and there was no alarm system at all; any smart twelve-year-old could have broken in. Crates full of all kinds of (low-level, shortlived) radioactive waste were stacked up to the ceiling, blocking most of the light from the single bulb; it was no wonder that the theft hadn’t been detected sooner. There were even cobwebs—but no mutant spiders, so far as I could see.

After five minutes poking around, listening to my borrowed dosimetry badge adding up the exposure, I was glad to get out . . . whether or not the average chest X-ray would have done ten times more damage. Hadn’t Mendelsohn realized that: how irrational people were about radiation, how much harm it would do her cause once the cobalt was discovered? Or had her own—fully informed—knowledge of the minimal risks distorted her perception?

The surveillance teams sent me reports daily. It was an expensive service, but LEI was paying. Mendelsohn met her friends openly—telling them all about the night I’d questioned her, warning them in outraged tones that they were almost certainly being watched. They discussed the fetal barrier, the options for—legitimate—opposition, the problems the bombing had caused them. I couldn’t tell if the whole thing was being staged for my benefit, or if Mendelsohn was deliberately contacting only those friends who genuinely believed that she hadn’t been involved.

I spent most of my time checking the histories of the people she met. I could find no evidence of past violence or sabotage by any of them—let alone experience with high explosives. But then, I hadn’t seriously expected to be led straight to the bomber.

All I had was circumstantial evidence. All I could do was gather detail after detail, and hope that the mountain of facts I was assembling would eventually reach a critical mass—or that Mendelsohn would slip up, cracking under the pressure.

Weeks passed, and Mendelsohn continued to brazen it out. She even had pamphlets printed, ready to distribute at the Mardi Gras—condemning the bombing as loudly as they condemned LEI for its secrecy.

The nights grew hotter. My temper frayed. I don’t know what Martin thought was happening to me, but I had no idea how we were going to survive the impending revelations. I couldn’t begin to face up to the magnitude of the backlash there’d be once ATOMIC TERRORISTS met GAY BABY-POISONERS in the daily murdochs—and it would make no difference whether it was Mendelsohn’s arrest which broke the news to the public, or her media conference blowing the whistle on LEI and proclaiming her own innocence; either way, the investigation would become a circus. I tried not to think about any of it; it was too late to do anything differently, to drop the case, to tell Martin the truth. So I worked on my tunnel vision.

Elaine scoured the radioactive waste bunker for evidence, but weeks of analysis came up blank. I quizzed the Biofile guards, who (supposedly) would have been watching the whole thing on their monitors when the cobalt was planted, but nobody could recall a client with an unusually large and oddly shaped item, wandering casually into the wrong aisle.

I finally obtained the warrants I needed to scrutinize Mendelsohn’s entire electronic history since birth. She’d been arrested exactly once, twenty years before, for kicking an—unprivatized—policeman in the shin, during a protest he’d probably, privately, applauded. The charges had been dropped. She’d had a court order in force for the last eighteen months, restraining a former lover from coming within a kilometer of her home. (The woman was a musician with a band called Tetanus Switchblade; she had two convictions for assault.) There was no evidence of undeclared income, or unusual expenditure. No phone calls to or from known or suspected dealers in arms or explosives, or their known or suspected associates. But everything could have been done with pay phones and cash, if she’d organized it carefully.

Mendelsohn wasn’t going to put a foot wrong while I was watching. However careful she’d been, though, she could not have carried out the bombing alone. What I needed was someone venal, nervous, or conscience-stricken enough to turn informant. I put out word on the usual channels: I’d be willing to pay, I’d be willing to bargain.

Six weeks after the bombing, I received an anonymous message by datamail:

Be at the Mardi Gras. No wires, no weapons. I’ll find you.

29:17:5:31:23:11

I played with the numbers for more than an hour, trying to make sense of them, before I finally showed them to Elaine.

She said, “Be careful, James.”

“Why?”

“These are the ratios of the six trace elements we found in the residue from the explosion.”

Martin spent the day of the Mardi Gras with friends who’d also be in the parade. I sat in my air-conditioned office and tuned in to a TV channel which showed the final preparations, interspersed with talking heads describing the history of the event. In forty years, the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras had been transformed from a series of ugly confrontations with police and local authorities, into a money-spinning spectacle advertised in tourist brochures around the world. It was blessed by every level of government, led by politicians and business identities—and the police, like most professions, now had their own float.

Martin was no transvestite (or muscle-bound leather-fetishist, or any other walking cliche); dressing up in a flamboyant costume, one night a year, was as false, as artificial, for him as it would have been for most heterosexual men. But I think I understood why he did it. He felt guilty that he could “pass for straight” in the clothes he usually wore, with the speech and manner and bearing which came naturally to him. He’d never concealed his sexuality from anyone—but it wasn’t instantly apparent to total strangers. For him, taking part in the Mardi Gras was a gesture of solidarity with those gay men who were visible, obvious, all year round—and who’d borne the brunt of intolerance because of it.

As dusk fell, spectators began to gather along the route. Helicopters from every news service appeared overhead, turning their cameras on each other to prove to their viewers that this was An Event. Mounted crowd-control personnel—in something very much like the old blue uniform that had vanished when I was a child-parked their horses by the fast-food stands, and stood around fortifying themselves for the long night ahead.

I didn’t see how the bomber could seriously expect to find me once I was mingling with a hundred thousand other people—so after leaving the Nexus building, I drove my car around the block slowly, three times, just in case.

By the time I’d made my way to a vantage point, I’d missed the start of the parade; the first thing I saw was a long line of people wearing giant plastic heads bearing the features of famous and infamous queers. (Apparently the word was back in fashion again, officially declared non-perjorative once more, after several years out of favor.) It was all so Disney I could have gagged—and yes, there was even Bernadette, the world’s first lesbian cartoon mouse. I only recognized three of the humans portrayed—Patrick White, looking haggard and suitably bemused, Joe Orton, leering sardonically, and J. Edgar Hoover, with a Mephistophelian sneer. Everyone wore their names on sashes, though, for what that was worth. A young man beside me asked his girlfriend, “Who the hell was Walt Whitman?”

She shook her head. “No idea. Alan Turing?”

“Search me.”

They photographed both of them, anyway.

I wanted to yell at the marchers: So what? Some queers were famous. Some famous people were queer. What a surprise! Do you think that means you own them?

I kept silent, of course—while everyone around me cheered and clapped. I wondered how close the bomber was, how long he or she would leave me sweating. Panopticon—the surveillance contractors—were still following Mendelsohn and all of her known associates, most of whom were somewhere along the route of the parade, handing out their pamphlets.

None of them appeared to have followed me, though. The bomber was almost certainly someone outside the network of friends we’d uncovered.

An anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution barrier, alone—or a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the most money? Surrounded by cheering spectators—half of them mixed-sex couples with children in tow—it was almost possible to laugh off Mendelsohn’s fears. Who, here, would admit that they’d buy a version of the cocoon which would help wipe out the source of their entertainment? But applauding the freak show didn’t mean wanting your own flesh and blood to join it.

An hour after the parade had started, I decided to move out of the densest part of the crowd. If the bomber couldn’t reach me through the crush of people, there wasn’t much point being here. A hundred or so leather-clad women on-noise-enhanced-electric motorbikes went riding past in a crucifix formation, behind a banner which read DYKES ON BIKES FOR JESUS. I recalled the small group of fundamentalists I’d passed earlier, their backs to the parade route lest they turn into pillars of salt, holding up candles and praying for rain.

I made my way to one of the food stalls, and bought a cold hot dog and a warm orange juice, trying to ignore the smell of horse turds. The place seemed to attract law enforcement types; J. Edgar Hoover himself came wandering by while I was eating, looking like a malevolent Humpty Dumpty.

As he passed me, he said, “Twenty-nine. Seventeen. Five.”

I finished my hot dog and followed him.

He stopped in a deserted side street, behind a supermarket parking lot. As I caught up with him, he took out a magnetic scanner.

I said, “No wires, no weapons.” He waved the device over me. I was telling the truth. “Can you talk through that thing?”

“Yes.” The giant head bobbed strangely; I couldn’t see any eye holes, but he clearly wasn’t blind.

“Okay. Where did the explosives come from? We know they started off in Singapore, but who was your supplier here?”

Hoover laughed, deep and muffled. “I’m not going to tell you that. I’d be dead in a week.”

“So what do you want to tell me?”

“That I only did the grunt work. Mendelsohn organized everything.”

“No shit. But what have you got that will prove it? Phone calls? Financial transactions?”

He just laughed again. I was beginning to wonder how many people in the parade would know who’d played J. Edgar Hoover; even if he clammed up now, it was possible that I’d be able to track him down later.

That was when I turned and saw six more, identical, Hoovers coming around the corner. They were all carrying baseball bats.

I started to move. Hoover One drew a pistol and aimed it at my face. He said, “Kneel down slowly, with your hands behind your head.”

I did it. He kept the gun on me, and I kept my eyes on the trigger, but I heard the others arrive, and close into a half-circle behind me.

Hoover One said, “Don’t you know what happens to traitors? Don’t you know what’s going to happen to you?”

I shook my head slowly. I didn’t know what I could say to appease him, so I spoke the truth. “How can I be a traitor? What is there to betray? Dykes on Bikes for Jesus? The William S. Burroughs Dancers?”

Someone behind me swung their bat into the small of my back. Not as hard as they might have; I lurched forward, but I kept my balance.

Hoover One said, “Don’t you know any history, Mr. Pig? Mr. Polizei? The Nazis put us in their death camps. The Reaganites tried to have us all die of AIDS. And here you are now, Mr. Pig, working for the fuckers who want to wipe us off the face of the planet. That sounds like betrayal to me.”“

I knelt there, staring at the gun, unable to speak. I couldn’t dredge up the words to justify myself. The truth was too difficult, too gray, too confusing. My teeth started chattering. Nazis. AIDS. Genocide. Maybe he was right. Maybe I deserved to die.

I felt tears on my cheeks. Hoover One laughed. “Boo hoo, Mr. Pig.” Someone swung their bat onto my shoulders. I fell forward on my face, too afraid to move my hands to break the fall; I tried to get up, but a boot came down on the back of my neck.

Hoover One bent down and put the gun to my skull. He whispered, “Will you close the case? Lose the evidence on Catherine? You know, your boyfriend frequents some dangerous places; he needs all the friends he can get.”

I lifted my face high enough above the asphalt to reply. “Yes.”

“Well done, Mr. Pig.”

That was when I heard the helicopter.

I blinked the gravel out of my eyes and saw the ground, far brighter than it should have been; there was a spotlight trained on us. I waited for the sound of a bullhorn. Nothing happened. I waited for my assailants to flee. Hoover One took his foot off my neck.

And then they all laid into me with their baseball bats.

I should have curled up and protected my head, but curiosity got the better of me; I turned and stole a glimpse of the chopper. It was a news crew, of course, refusing to do anything unethical like spoil a good story just when it was getting telegenic. That much made perfect sense.

But the goon squad made no sense at all. Why were they sticking around, now that the cameras were running? Just for the pleasure of beating me for a few seconds longer!

Nobody was that stupid, that oblivious to PR.

I coughed up two teeth and hid my face again. They wanted it all to be broadcast. They wanted the headlines, the backlash, the outrage. ATOMIC TERRORISTS! BABY-POISONERS! BRUTAL THUGS!

They wanted to demonize the enemy they were pretending to be.

The Hoovers finally dropped their bats and started running. I lay on the ground drooling blood, too weak to lift my head to see what had driven them away.

A while later, I heard hoofbeats. Someone dropped to the ground beside me and checked my pulse.

I said, “I’m not in pain. I’m happy. I’m delirious.”

Then I passed out.

On his second visit, Martin brought Catherine Mendelsohn to the hospital with him. They showed me a recording of LEI’s media conference, the day after the Mardi Gras—two hours before Mendelsohn’s was scheduled to take place.

Janet Lansing said, “In the light of recent events, we have no choice but to go public. We would have preferred to keep this technology under wraps for commercial reasons, but innocent lives are at stake. And when people turn on their own kind—”

I burst the stitches in my lips laughing.

LEI had bombed their own laboratory. They’d irradiated their own cells. And they’d hoped that I’d cover up for Mendelsohn, once the evidence led me to her, out of sympathy with her cause. Later, with a tip-off to an investigative reporter or two, the cover-up would have been revealed.

The perfect climate for their product launch.

Since I’d continued with the investigation, though, they’d had to make the best of it: sending in the Hoovers, claiming to be linked to Mendelsohn, to punish me for my diligence.

Mendelsohn said, “Everything LEI leaked about me—the cobalt, my key to the vault—was already spelt out in the pamphlets I’d printed, but that doesn’t seem to cut much ice with the murdochs. I’m the Harbor Bridge Gamma Ray Terrorist now.”

“You’ll never be charged.”

“Of course not. So I’ll never be found innocent, either.”

I said, “When I’m out of here, I’m going after them.” They wanted impartiality? An investigation untainted by prejudice? They’d get exactly what they paid for, this time. Minus the tunnel vision.

Martin said softly, “Who’s going to employ you to do that?”

I smiled, painfully. “LEI’s insurance company.”

When they’d left, I dozed off.

I woke suddenly, from a dream of suffocation.

Even if I proved that the whole thing had been a marketing exercise by LEI—even if half their directors were thrown in prison, even if the company itself was liquidated—the technology would still be owned by someone.

And one way or another, in the end, it would be sold.

That’s what I’d missed, in my fanatical neutrality: you can’t sell a cure without a disease. So even if I was right to be neutral—even if there was no difference to fight for, no difference to betray, no difference to preserve—the best way to sell the cocoon would always be to invent one. And even if it would be no tragedy at all if there was nothing left but heterosexuality in a century’s time, the only path which could lead there would be one of lies, and wounding, and vilification.

Would people buy that, or not?

I was suddenly very much afraid that they would.

SOLITUDE

Ursula K. Le Guin

It has been seven years since Ursula K. Le Guin’s elegant fiction has graced our pages. Her last offering here was the Hugo-award winning “Buffalo Gals Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” which appeared in our November 1987 issue.

“Solitude” is another important story for the field of sf. It also inspired Bryn Barnard’s cover.

An addition to “POVERTY: The Second Report on Eleven-Soro” by Mobile Entselenne’temharyonoterregwis Leaf, by her daughter, Serenity.

MY MOTHER, A FIELD ETHnologist, took the difficulty of learning anything about the people of Eleven-Soro as a personal challenge. The fact that she used her children to meet that challenge might be seen as selfishness or as selflessness. Now that I have read her report I know that she finally thought she had done wrong. Knowing what it cost her, I wish she knew my gratitude to her for allowing me to grow up as a person.

Shortly after a robot probe reported people of the Hainish Descent on the eleventh planet of the Soro system, she joined the orbital crew as back-up for the three First Observers down onplanet. She had spent four years in the tree-cities of nearby Huthu. My brother In Joy Born was eight years old and I was five, she wanted a year or two of ship duty so we could spend some time in a Hainish-style school. My brother had enjoyed the rainforests of Huthu very much, but though he could brachiate he could barely read, and we were all bright blue with skin-fungus. While Borny learned to read and I learned to wear clothes and we all had antifungus treatments, my mother became as intrigued by Eleven-Soro as the Observers were frustrated by it.

All this is in her report, but I will say it as I learned it from her, which helps me remember and understand. The language had been recorded by the probe and the Observers had spent a year learning it. The many dialectical variations excused their accents and errors, and they reported that language was not a problem. Yet there was a communication problem. The two men found themselves isolated, faced with suspicion or hostility, unable to form any connection with the native men, all of whom lived in solitary houses as hermits or in pairs. Finding communities of adolescent males, they tried to make contact with them, but when they entered the territory of such a group the boys either fled or rushed desperately at them trying to kill them. The women, who lived in what they called “dispersed villages,” drove them away with volleys of stones as soon as they came anywhere near the houses. “I believe,” one of them reported, “that the only community activity of the Sorovians is throwing rocks at men.”

Neither of them succeeded in having a conversation of more than three exchanges with a man. One of them mated with a woman who came by his camp; he reported that though she made unmistakable and insistent advances, she seemed disturbed by his attempts to converse, refused to answer his questions, and left him, he said, “as soon as she got what she came for.”

The woman Observer was allowed to settle in an unused house in a “village” (auntring) of seven houses. She made excellent observations of daily life, insofar as she could see any of it, and had several conversations with adult women and many with children; but she found that she was never asked into another woman’s house, nor expected to help or ask for help in any work. Conversation concerning normal activities was unwelcome to the other women, the children, her only informants, called her Aunt Crazy-Jabber. Her aberrant behavior caused increasing distrust and dislike among the women, and they began to keep their children away from her. She left. “There’s no way,” she told my mother, “for an adult to learn anything. They don’t ask questions, they don’t answer questions. Whatever they learn, they learn when they’re children.”

Aha! said my mother to herself, looking at Borny and me. And she requested a family transfer to Eleven-Soro with Observer status. The Stabiles interviewed her extensively by ansible, and talked with Borny and even with me—I don’t remember it, but she told me I told the Stabiles all about my new stockings—and agreed to her request. The ship was to stay in close orbit, with the previous Observers in the crew, and she was to keep radio contact with it, daily if possible.

I have a dim memory of the tree-city, and of playing with what must have been a kitten or a ghole-kit on the ship; but my first clear memories are of our house in the auntring. It is half underground, half aboveground, with wattle-and-daub walls. Mother and I are standing outside it in the warm sunshine. Between us is a big mudpuddle, into which Borny pours water from a basket; then he runs off to the creek to get more water. I muddle the mud with my hands, deliciously, till it is thick and smooth. I pick up a big double handful and slap it onto the walls where the sticks show through. Mother says, “That’s good! That’s right!” in our new language, and I realize that this is work, and I am doing it. I am repairing the house. I am making it right, doing it right. I am a competent person.

I have never doubted that, so long as I lived there.

We are inside the house at night, and Borny is talking to the ship on the radio, because he misses talking the old language, and anyway he is supposed to tell them stuff. Mother is making a basket and swearing at the split reeds. I am singing a song to drown out Borny so nobody in the auntring hears him talking funny, and anyway I like singing. I learned this song this afternoon in Hyuru’s house. I play every day with Hyuru. “Be aware, listen, listen, be aware,” I sing. When Mother stops swearing she listens, and then she turns on the recorder. There is a little fire still left from cooking dinner, which was lovely pigi root, I never get tired of pigi. It is dark and warm and smells of pigi and of burning duhur, which is a strong, sacred smell to drive out magic and bad feelings, and as I sing “Listen, be aware,” I get sleepier and sleepier and lean against Mother, who is dark and warm and smells like Mother, strong and sacred, full of good feelings.

Our daily life in the auntring was repetitive. On the ship, later, I learned that people who live in artificially complicated situations call such a life “simple.” I never knew anybody, anywhere I have been, who found life simple. I think a life or a time looks simple when you leave out the details, the way a planet looks smooth, from orbit.

Certainly our life in the auntring was easy, in the sense that our needs came easily to hand. There was plenty of food to be gathered or grown and prepared and cooked, plenty of temas to pick and rett and spin and weave for clothes and bedding, plenty of reeds to make baskets and thatch with; we children had other children to play with, mothers to look after us, and a great deal to learn. None of this is simple, though it’s all easy enough, when you know how to do it, when you are aware of the details.

It was not easy for my mother. It was hard for her, and complicated. She had to pretend she knew the details while she was learning them, and had to think how to report and explain this way of living to people in another place who didn’t understand it. For Borny it was easy until it got hard because he was a boy. For me it was all easy. I learned the work and played with the children and listened to the mothers sing.

The First Observer had been quite right: there was no way for a grown woman to learn how to make her soul. Mother couldn’t go listen to another mother sing, it would have been too strange. The aunts all knew she hadn’t been brought up well, and some of them taught her a good deal without her realizing it. They had decided her mother must have been irresponsible and had gone on scouting instead of settling in an auntring, so that her daughter didn’t get educated properly. That’s why even the most aloof of the aunts always let me listen with their children, so that I could become an educated person. But of course they couldn’t ask another adult into their houses. Borny and I had to tell her all the songs and stories we learned, and then she would tell them to the radio, or we told them to the radio while she listened to us. But she never got it right, not really. How could she, trying to learn it after she’d grown up, and after she’d always lived with magicians?

“Be aware!” she would imitate my solemn and probably irritating imitation of the aunts and the big girls. “Be aware! How many times a day do they say that? Be aware of what! They aren’t aware of what the mins are, their own history,—they aren’t aware of each other! They don’t even talk to each other! Be aware, indeed!”

When I told her the stories of the Before Time that Aunt Sadne and Aunt Noyit told their daughters and me, she often heard the wrong things in them. I told her about the People, and she said, “Those are the ancestors of the people here now.” When I said, “There aren’t any people here now,” she didn’t understand. “There are persons here now,” I said, but she still didn’t understand.

Borny liked the story about the Man Who Lived with Women, how he kept some women in a pen, the way some persons keep rats in a pen for eating, and all of them got pregnant, and they each had a hundred babies, and the babies grew up as horrible monsters and ate the man and the mothers and each other. Mother explained to us that that was a parable of the human overpopulation of this planet thousands of years ago. “No, it’s not,” I said, “it’s a moral story.”—“Well, yes,” Mother said. “The moral is, don’t have too many babies.”—“No, it’s not,” I said. “Who could have a hundred babies even if they wanted to? The man was a sorceror. He did magic. The women did it with him. So of course their children were monsters.”

The key, of course, is the word “tekell,” which translates so nicely into the Hainish word “magic,” an art or power that violates natural law. It was hard for Mother to understand that some persons truly consider most human relationships unnatural; that marriage, for instance, or government, can be seen as an evil spell woven by sorcerors. It is hard for her people to believe magic.

The ship kept asking if we were all right, and every now and then a Stabile would hook up the ansible to our radio and grill Mother and us. She always convinced them that she wanted to stay, for despite her frustrations, she was doing the work the First Observers had not been able to do, and Borny and I were happy as mudfish, all those first years. I think Mother was happy too, once she got used to the slow pace and the indirect way she had to learn things. She was lonely, missing other grown-ups to talk to, and told us that she would have gone crazy without us. If she missed sex she never showed it. I think, though, that her Report is not very complete about sexual matters, perhaps because she was troubled by them. I know that when we first lived in the auntring, two of the aunts, Hedimi and Behyu, used to meet to make love, and Behyu courted my mother; but Mother didn’t understand, because Behyu wouldn’t talk the way Mother wanted to talk. She couldn’t understand having sex with a person whose house you wouldn’t enter.

Once when I was nine or so, and had been listening to some of the older girls, I asked her why didn’t she go out scouting. “Aunt Sadne would look after us,” I said, hopefully. I was tired of being the uneducated woman’s daughter. I wanted to live in Aunt Sadne’s house and be just like the other children.

“Mothers don’t scout,” she said, scornfully, like an aunt.

“Yes, they do, sometimes,” I insisted. “They have to, or how could they have more than one baby?”

“They go to settled men near the auntring. Behyu went back to the Red Knob Hill Man when she wanted a second child. Sadne goes and sees Downriver Lame Man when she wants to have sex. They know the men around here. None of the mothers scout.”

I realized that in this case she was right and I was wrong, but I stuck to my point. “Well, why don’t you go see Downriver Lame Man? Don’t you ever want sex? Migi says she wants it all the time.”

“Migi is seventeen,” Mother said drily. “Mind your own nose.” She sounded exactly like all the other mothers.

Men, during my childhood, were a kind of uninteresting mystery to me. They turned up a lot in the Before Time stories, and the singing-circle girls talked about them; but I seldom saw any of them. Sometimes I’d glimpse one when I was foraging, but they never came near the auntring. In summer the Downriver Lame Man would get lonesome waiting for Aunt Sadne and would come lurking around, not very far from the auntring—not in the bush or down by the river, of course, where he might be mistaken for a rogue and stoned—but out in the open, on the hillsides, where we could all see who he was. Hyuru and Didsu, Aunt Sadne’s daughters, said she had had sex with him when she went out scouting the first time, and always had sex with him and never tried any of the other men of the settlement.

She had told them, too, that the first child she bore was a boy, and she drowned it, because she didn’t want to bring up a boy and send him away. They felt queer about that and so did I, but it wasn’t an uncommon thing. One of the stories we learned was about a drowned boy who grew up underwater, and seized his mother when she came to bathe, and tried to hold her under till she too drowned; but she escaped.

At any rate, after the Downriver Lame Man had sat around for several days on the hillsides, singing long songs and braiding and unbraiding his hair, which was long too, and shone black in the sun, Aunt Sadne always went off for a night or two with him, and came back looking cross and self-conscious.

Aunt Noyit explained to me that Downriver Lame Man’s songs were magic; not the usual bad magic, but what she called the great good spells. Aunt Sadne never could resist his spells. “But he hasn’t half the charm of some men I’ve known,” said Aunt Noyit, smiling reminiscently.

Our diet, though excellent, was very low in fat, which Mother thought might explain the rather late onset of puberty; girls seldom menstruated before they were fifteen, and boys often weren’t mature till they were considerably older than that. But the women began looking askance at boys as soon as they showed any signs at all of adolescence. First Aunt Hedimi, who was always grim, then Aunt Noyit, then even Aunt Sadne began to turn away from Borny, to leave him out, not answering when he spoke. “What are you doing playing with the children?” old Aunt Dnemi asked him so fiercely that he came home in tears. He was not quite fourteen.

Sadne’s younger daughter Hyuru was my soulmate, my best friend, you would say. Her elder sister Didsu, who was in the singing circle now, came and talked to me one day, looking serious. “Borny is very handsome,” she said. I agreed proudly.

“Very big, very strong,” she said, “stronger than I am.”

I agreed proudly again, and then I began to back away from her.

“Pm not doing magic, Ren,” she said.

“Yes you are,” I said. “I’ll tell your mother!”

Didsu shook her head. “Pm trying to speak truly. If my fear causes your fear, I can’t help it. It has to be so. We talked about it in the singing circle. I don’t like it,” she said, and I knew she meant it; she had a soft face, soft eyes, she had always been the gentlest of us children. “I wish he could be a child,” she said. “I wish I could. But we can’t.”

“Go be a stupid old woman, then,” I said, and ran away from her. I went to my secret place down by the river and cried. I took the holies out of my soulbag and arranged them. One holy—it doesn’t matter if I tell you—was a crystal that Borny had given me, clear at the top, cloudy purple at the base. I held it a long time and then I gave it back. I dug a hole under a boulder, and wrapped the holy in duhur leaves inside a square of cloth I tore out of my kilt, beautiful, fine cloth Hyuru had woven and sewn for me. I tore the square right from the front, where it would show. I gave the crystal back, and then sat a long time there near it. When I went home I said nothing of what Didsu had said. But Borny was very silent, and my mother had a worried look. “What have you done to your kilt, Ren?” she asked. I raised my head a little and did not answer; she started to speak again, and then did not. She had finally learned not to talk to a person who chose to be silent.

Borny didn’t have a soulmate, but he had been playing more and more often with the two boys nearest his age, Ednede who was a year or two older, a slight, quiet boy, and Bit who was only eleven, but boisterous and reckless.

The three of them went off somewhere all the time. I hadn’t paid much attention, partly because I was glad to be rid of Bit. Hyuru and I had been practicing being aware, and it was tiresome to always have to be aware of Bit yelling and jumping around. He never could leave anyone quiet, as if their quietness took something from him. His mother, Hedimi, had educated him, but she wasn’t a good singer or story-teller like Sadne and Noyit, and Bit was too restless to listen even to them. Whenever he saw me and Hyuru trying to slow-walk or sitting being aware, he hung around making noise till we got mad and told him to go, and then he jeered, “Dumb girls!”

I asked Borny what he and Bit and Ednede did, and he said, “Boy stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Practicing.”

“Being aware?”

After a while he said, “No.”

“Practicing what, then?”

“Wrestling. Getting strong. For the boygroup.” He looked gloomy, but after a while he said, “Look,” and showed me a knife he had hidden under his mattress. “Ednede says you have to have a knife, then nobody will challenge you. Isn’t it a beauty?” It was metal, old metal from the People, shaped like a reed, pounded out and sharpened down both edges, with a sharp point. A piece of polished flintshrub wood had been bored and fitted on the handle to protect the hand. “I found it in an empty man’s-house,” he said. “I made the wooden part.” He brooded over it lovingly. Yet he did not keep it in his soulbag.

“What do you do with it?” I asked, wondering why both edges were sharp, so you’d cut your hand if you used it.

“Keep off attackers,” he said.

“Where was the empty man’s-house?”

“Way over across Rocky Top.”

“Can I go with you if you go back?”

“No,” he said, not unkindly, but absolutely.

“What happened to the man? Did he die?”

“There was a skull in the creek. We think he slipped and drowned.”

He didn’t sound quite like Borny. There was something in his voice like a grown-up; melancholy, reserved. I had gone to him for reassurance, but came away more deeply anxious. I went to Mother and asked her, “What do they do in the boy groups?”

“Perform natural selection,” she said, not in my language but in hers, in a strained tone. I didn’t always understand Hainish any more and had no idea what she meant, but the tone of her voice upset me; and to my horror I saw she had begun to cry silently. “We have to move, Serenity,” she said—she was still talking Hainish without realizing it. “There isn’t any reason why a family can’t move, is there? Women just move in and move out as they please. Nobody cares what anybody does. Nothing is anybody’s business. Except hounding the boys out of town!”

I understood most of what she said, but got her to say it in my language; and then I said, “But anywhere we went, Borny would be the same age, and size, and everything.”

“Then we’ll leave,” she said fiercely. “Go back to the ship.”

I drew away from her. I had never been afraid of her before: she had never used magic on me. A mother has great power, but there is nothing unnatural in it, unless it is used against the child’s soul.

Borny had no fear of her. He had his own magic. When she told him she intended leaving, he persuaded her out of it. He wanted to go join the boygroup, he said; he’d been wanting to for a year now. He didn’t belong in the auntring any more, all women and girls and little kids. He wanted to go live with other boys. Bit’s older brother Yit was a member of the boygroup in the Four Rivers Territory, and would look after a boy from his auntring. And Ednede was getting ready to go. And Borny and Ednede and Bit had been talking to some men, recently. Men weren’t all ignorant and crazy, the way Mother thought. They didn’t talk much, but they knew a lot.

“What do they know?” Mother asked grimly.

“They know how to be men,” Borny said. “It’s what I’m going to be.”

“Not that kind of man—not if I can help it! In Joy Born, you must remember the men on the ship, real men—nothing like these poor, filthy hermits. I can’t let you grow up thinking that that’s what you have to be!”

“They’re not like that,” Borny said. “You ought to go talk to some of them, Mother.”

“Don’t be naive,” she said with an edgy laugh. “You know perfectly well that women don’t go to men to talk.”

I knew she was wrong; all the women in the auntring knew all the settled men for three days’ walk around. They did talk with them, when they were out foraging. They only kept away from the ones they didn’t trust; and usually those men disappeared before long. Noyit had told me, “Their magic turns on them.” She meant the other men drove them away or killed them. But I didn’t say any of this, and Borny said only, “Well, Cave Cliff Man is really nice. And he took us to the place where I found those People things”—some ancient artifacts that Mother had been excited about. “The men know things the women don’t,” Borny went on. “At least I could go to the boygroup for a while, maybe. I ought to. I could learn a lot! We don’t have any solid information on them at all. All we know anything about is this auntring. I’ll go and stay long enough to get material for our report. I can’t ever come back to either the auntring or the boygroup once I leave them. I’ll have to go to the ship, or else try to be a man. So let me have a real go at it, please, Mother?”

“I don’t know why you think you have to learn how to be a man,” she said after a while. “You know how already.”

He really smiled then, and she put her arm around him.

What about me? I thought. I don’t even know what the ship is. I want to be here, where my soul is. I want to go on learning to be in the world.

But I was afraid of Mother and Borny, who were both working magic, and so I said nothing and was still, as I had been taught.

Ednede and Borny went off together. Noyit, Ednede’s mother, was as glad as Mother was about their keeping company, though she said nothing. The evening before they left, the two boys went to every house in the auntring. It took a long time. The houses were each just within sight or hearing of one or two of the others, with bush and gardens and irrigation ditches and paths in between. In each house the mother and the children were waiting to say goodbye, only they didn’t say it; my language has no word for hello or goodbye. They asked the boys in and gave them something to eat, something they could take with them on the way to the Territory. When the boys went to the door everybody in the household came and touched their hand or cheek. I remembered when Yit had gone around the auntring that way. I had cried then, because even though I didn’t much like Yit, it seemed so strange for somebody to leave forever, like they were dying. This time I didn’t cry; but I kept waking and waking again, until I heard Borny get up before the first light and pick up his things and leave quietly. I know Mother was awake too, but we did as we should do, and lay still while he left, and for a long time after.

I have read her description of what she calls “An adolescent male leaves the Auntring: a vestigial survival of ceremony.”

She had wanted him to put a radio in his soulbag and get in touch with her at least occasionally. He had been unwilling. “I want to do it right, Mother. There’s no use doing it if I don’t do it right.”

“I simply can’t handle not hearing from you at all, Borny,” she had said in Hainish.

“But if the radio got broken or taken or something, you’d worry a lot more, maybe with no reason at all.”

She finally agreed to wait half a year, till the first rain; then she would go to a landmark, a huge min near the river that marked the southern end of the Territory, and he would try and come to her there. “But only wait ten days,” he said. “If I can’t come, I can’t.” She agreed. She was like a mother with a little baby, I thought, saying yes to everything. That seemed wrong to me; but I thought Borny was right. Nobody ever came back to their mother from boygroup.

But Borny did.

Summer was long, clear, beautiful. I was learning to starwatch; that is when you lie down outside on the open hills in the dry season at night, and find a certain star in the eastern sky, and watch it cross the sky till it sets. You can look away, of course, to rest your eyes, and doze, but you try to keep looking back at the star and the stars around it, until you feel the earth turning, until you become aware of how the stars and the world and the soul move together. After the certain star sets you sleep until dawn wakes you. Then as always you greet the sunrise with aware silence. I was very happy on the hills those warm great nights, those clear dawns. The first time or two Hyuru and I starwatched together, but after that we went alone, and it was better alone.

I was coming back from such a night, along the narrow valley between Rocky Top and Over Home Hill in the first sunlight, when a man came crashing through the bush down onto the path and stood in front of me. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, “Listen!” He was heavyset, half naked; he stank.

I stood still as a stick. He had said “Listen!” just as the aunts did, and I listened. “Your brother and his friend are all right. Your mother shouldn’t go there. Some of the boys are in a gang. They’d rape her. I and some others are killing the leaders. It takes a while. Your brother is with the other gang. He’s all right. Tell her. Tell me what I said.”

I repeated it word for word, as I had learned to do when I listened.

“Right. Good,” he said, and took off up the steep slope on his short, powerful legs, and was gone.

Mother would have gone to the Territory right then, but I told the man’s message to Noyit, too, and she came to the porch of our house to speak to Mother. I listened to her, because she was telling things I didn’t know well and Mother didn’t know at all. Noyit was a small, mild woman, very like her son Ednede, she liked teaching and singing, so the children were always around her place. She saw Mother was getting ready for a journey. She said, “House on the Skyline Man says the boys are all right.” When she saw Mother wasn’t listening, she went on; she pretended to be talking to me, because women don’t teach women: “He says some of the men are breaking up the gang. They do that, when the boygroups get wicked. Sometimes there are magicians among them, leaders, older boys, even men who want to make a gang. The settled men will kill the magicians and make sure none of the boys gets hurt. When gangs come out of the Territories, nobody is safe. The settled men don’t like that. They see to it that the auntring is safe. So your brother will be all right.”

My mother went on packing pigi-roots into her net.

“A rape is a very, very bad thing for the settled men,” said Noyit to me. “It means the women won’t come to them. If the boys raped some woman, probably the men would kill all the boys.”

My mother was finally listening.

She did not go to the rendezvous with Borny, but all through the rainy season she was utterly miserable. She got sick, and old Dnemi sent Didsu over to dose her with gagberry syrup. She made notes while she was sick, lying on her mattress, about illnesses and medicines and how the older girls had to look after sick women, since grown women did not enter one another’s houses. She never stopped working and never stopped worrying about Borny.

Late in the rainy season, when the warm wind had come and the yellow honey-flowers were in bloom on all the hills, the Golden World time, Noyit came by while Mother was working in the garden. “House on the Skyline Man says things are all right in the boygroup,” she said, and went on.

Mother began to realize then that although no adult ever entered another’s house, and adults seldom spoke to one another, and men and women had only brief, often casual relationships, and men lived all their lives in real solitude, still there was a kind of community, a wide, thin, fine network of delicate and certain intention and restraint: a social order. Her reports to the ship were filled with this new understanding. But she still found Sorovian life impoverished, seeing these persons as mere survivors, poor fragments of the wreck of something great.

“My dear,” she said—in Hainish; there is no way to say “my dear” in my language. She was speaking Hainish with me in the house so that I wouldn’t forget it entirely.—“My dear, the explanation of an uncomprehended technology as magic is primitivism. It’s not a criticism, merely a description.”

“But technology isn’t magic,” I said.

“Yes, it is, in their minds, look at the story you just recorded. Before-Time sorcerors who could fly in the air and undersea and underground in magic boxes!”

“In metal boxes,” I corrected.

“In other words, airplanes, tunnels, submarines, a lost technology explained as supernatural.”

“The boxes weren’t magic,” I said. “The people were. They were sorcerors. They used their power to get power over other persons. To live rightly a person has to keep away from magic.”

“That’s a cultural imperative, because a few thousand years ago uncontrolled technological expansion led to disaster. Exactly. There’s a perfectly rational reason for the irrational taboo.”

I did not know what “rational” and “irrational” meant in my language, I could not find words for them. “Taboo” was the same as “poisonous.” I listened to my mother because a daughter must learn from her mother, and my mother knew many, many things no other person knew; but my education was very difficult, sometimes. If only there were more stories and songs in her teaching, and not so many words, words that slipped away from me like water through a net!

The Golden Time passed, and the beautiful summer, the Silver Time returned, when the mists lie in the valleys between the hills, before the rains begin, and the rains began, and fell long and slow and warm, day after day after day. We had heard nothing of Borny and Ednede for over a year. Then in the night the soft thrum of rain on the reed roof turned into a scratching at the door and a whisper, “Shh—it’s all right—it’s all right.”

We wakened the fire and crouched at it in the dark to talk. Borny had got tall and very thin, like a skeleton with the skin dried on it. A cut across his upper lip had drawn it up into a kind of snarl that bared his teeth, and he could not say p, b, or m. His voice was a man’s voice. He huddled at the fire trying to get warmth into his bones. His clothes were wet rags. The knife hung on a cord around his neck. “It was all right,” he kept saying. “I don’t want to go on there, though.”

He would not tell us much about the year and a half in the boygroup, insisting that he would record a full description when he got to the ship. He did tell us what he would have to do if he stayed on Soro. He would have to go back to the Territory and hold his own among the older boys, by fear and sorcery, always proving his strength, until he was old enough to walk away—that is, to leave the Territory and wander alone till he found a place where the men would let him settle. Ednede and another boy had paired, and were going to walk away together when the rains stopped. It was easier for a pair, he said, if their bond was sexual; so long as they offered no competition for women, settled men wouldn’t challenge them. But a new man in the region anywhere within three days’ walk of an auntring had to prove himself against the settled men there. “It would ‘e three or four years of the same thing,” he said, “challenging, fighting, always watching the others, on guard, showing how strong you are, staying alert all night, all day. To end up living alone your whole life. I can’t do it.” He looked at me. “I’ne not a ‘erson,” he said. “I want to go ho’e.”

“I’ll radio the ship now,” Mother said quietly, with infinite relief.

“No,” I said.

Borny was watching Mother, and raised his hand when she turned to speak to me.

“I’ll go,” he said. “She doesn’t have to. Why should she?” Like me, he had learned not to use names without some reason to.

Mother looked from him to me and finally gave a kind of laugh. “I can’t leave her here, Borny!”

“Why should you go?”

“Because I want to,” she said. “I’ve had enough. More than enough. We’ve got a tremendous amount of material on the women, over seven years of it, and now you can fill the information gaps on the men’s side. That’s enough. It’s time, past time, that we all got back to our own people. All of us.”

“I have no people,” I said. “I don’t belong to people. I am trying to be a person. Why do you want to take me away from my soul? You want me to do magic! I won’t. I won’t do magic. I won’t speak your language. I won’t go with you!”

My mother was still not listening; she started to answer angrily. Borny put up his hand again, the way a woman does when she is going to sing, and she looked at him.

“We can talk later,” he said. “We can decide. I need to sleep.”

He hid in our house for two days while we decided what to do and how to do it. That was a miserable time. I stayed home as if I were sick so that I would not lie to the other persons, and Borny and Mother and I talked and talked. Borny asked Mother to stay with me; I asked her to leave me with Sadne or Noyit, either of whom would certainly take me into their household. She refused. She was the mother and I the child and her power was sacred. She radioed the ship and arranged for a lander to pick us up in a barren area two days’ walk from the auntring. We left at night, sneaking away. I carried nothing but my soulbag. We walked all next day, slept a little when it stopped raining, walked on and came to the desert. The ground was all lumps and hollows and caves, Before-Time ruins, the soil was tiny bits of glass and hard grains and fragments, the way it is in the deserts. Nothing grew there. We waited there.

The sky broke open and a shining thing fell down and stood before us on the rocks, bigger than any house, though not as big as the mins of the Before Time. My mother looked at me with a queer, vengeful smile. “Is it magic?” she said. And it was very hard for me not to think that it was. Yet I knew it was only a thing, and there is no magic in things, only in minds. I said nothing. I had not spoken since we left my home.

I had resolved never to speak to anybody until I got home again, but I was still a child, used to listen and obey. In the ship, that utterly strange new world, I held out only for a few hours, and then began to cry and ask to go home. Please, please, can I go home now.

Everyone on the ship was very kind to me.

Even then I thought about what Borny had been through and what I was going through, comparing our ordeals. The difference seemed total. He had been alone, without food, without shelter, a frightened boy trying to survive among equally frightened rivals against the brutality of older youths intent on having and keeping power, which they saw as manhood. I was cared for, clothed, fed so richly I got sick, kept so warm I felt feverish, guided, reasoned with, praised, befriended by citizens of a very great city, offered a share in their power, which they saw as humanity. He and I had both fallen among sorcerors. Both he and I could see the good in the people we were among, but neither he nor I could live with them.

Borny told me he had spent many desolate nights in the Territory crouched in a fireless shelter, telling over the stories he had learned from the aunts, singing the songs in his head. I did the same thing every night on the ship. But I refused to tell the stories or sing to the people there. I would not speak my language, there. It was the only way I had to be silent.

My mother was enraged, and for a long time unforgiving. “You owe your knowledge to our people,” she said. I did not answer, because all I had to say was that they were not my people, that I had no people. I was a person. I had a language that I did not speak. I had my silence. I had nothing else.

I went to school; there were children of different ages on the ship, like an auntring, and many of the adults taught us. I learned Ekumenical history and geography, mostly, and Mother gave me a report to learn about the history of Eleven-Soro, what my language calls the Before Time. I read that the cities of my world had been the greatest cities ever built on any world, covering two of the continents entirely, with small areas set aside for farming; there had been 120 billion people living in the cities, while the animals and the sea and the air and the dirt died, until the people began dying too. It was a hideous story. I was ashamed of it and wished nobody else on the ship or in the Ekumen knew about it. And yet, I thought, if they knew the stories I knew about the Before Time, they would understand how magic turns on itself, and that it must be so.

After less than a year, Mother told us we were going to Hain. The ship’s doctor and his clever machines had repaired Borny’s lip; he and Mother had put all the information they had into the records; he was old enough to begin training for the Ekumenical Schools, as he wanted to do. I was not flourishing, and the doctor’s machines were not able to repair me. I kept losing weight, I slept badly, I had terrible headaches. Almost as soon as we came aboard the ship, I had begun to menstruate, each time the cramps were agonizing. “This is no good, this ship life,” she said. “You need to be outdoors. On a planet. On a civilized planet.”

“If I went to Hain,” I said, “when I came back, the persons I know would all be dead hundreds of years ago.”

“Serenity,” she said, “you must stop thinking in terms of Soro. We have left Soro. You must stop deluding and tormenting yourself, and look forward, not back. Your whole life is ahead of you. Hain is where you will learn to live it.”

I summoned up my courage and spoke in my own language: “I am not a child now. You have no power over me. I will not go. Go without me. You have no power over me!”

Those are the words I had been taught to say to a magician, a sorceror. I don’t know if my mother fully understood them, but she did understand that I was deathly afraid of her, and it struck her into silence.

After a long time she said in Hainish, “I agree. I have no power over you. But I have certain rights; the right of loyalty; of love.”

“Nothing is right that puts me in your power,” I said, still in my language.

She stared at me. “You are like one of them,” she said. “You are one of them. You don’t know what love is. You’re closed into yourself like a rock. I should never have taken you there. People crouching in the ruins of a society—brutal, rigid, ignorant, superstitious—Each one in a terrible solitude—And I let them make you into one of them!”

“You educated me,” I said, and my voice began to tremble and my mouth to shake around the words, “and so does the school here, but my aunts educated me, and I want to finish my education.” I was weeping, but I kept standing with my hands clenched. “I’m not a woman yet. I want to be a woman.”

“But Ren, you will be!—ten times the woman you could ever be on Soro—you must try to understand, to believe me—”

“You have no power over me,” I said, shutting my eyes and putting my hands over my ears. She came to me then and held me, but I stood stiff, enduring her touch, until she let me go.

The ship’s crew had changed entirely while we were onplanet. The First Observers had gone on to other worlds; our backup was now a Gethenian archeologist named Arrem, a mild, watchful person, not young. Arrem had gone down onplanet only on the two desert continents, and welcomed the chance to talk with us, who had “lived with the living,” as heshe said. I felt easy when I was with Arrem, who was so unlike anybody else. Arrem was not a man—I could not get used to having men around all the time—yet not a woman, and so not exactly an adult, yet not a child: a person, alone, like me. Heshe did not know my language well, but always tried to talk it with me. When this crisis came, Arrem came to my mother and took counsel with her, suggesting that she let me go back down onplanet. Borny was in on some of these talks, and told me about them.

“Arrem says if you go to Hain you’ll probably die,” he said. “Your soul will. Heshe says some of what we learned is like what they learn on Gethen, in their religion. That kind of stopped Mother from ranting about primitive superstition. . . . And Arrem says you could be useful to the Ekumen, if you stay and finish your education on Soro. You’ll be an invaluable resource.” Borny sniggered, and after a minute I did too. “They’ll mine you like an asteroid,” he said. Then he said, “You know, if you stay and I go, we’ll be dead.”

That was how the young people of the ships said it, when one was going to cross the lightyears and the other was going to stay. Goodbye, we’re dead. It was the truth.

“I know,” I said. I felt my throat get tight, and was afraid. I had never seen an adult at home cry, except when Sut’s baby died. Sut howled all night. Howled like a dog, Mother said, but I had never seen or heard a dog; I heard a woman terribly crying. I was afraid of sounding like that. “If I can go home, when I finish making my soul, who knows, I might come to Hain for a while,” I said, in Hainish.

“Scouting?” Borny said in my language, and laughed, and made me laugh again.

Nobody gets to keep a brother. I knew that. But Borny had come back from being dead to me, so I might come back from being dead to him, at least I could pretend I might.

My mother came to a decision. She and I would stay on the ship for another year while Borny went to Hain. I would keep going to school; if at the end of the year I was still determined to go back onplanet, I could do so. With me or without me, she would go on to Hain then and join Borny. If I ever wanted to see them again, I could follow them. It was a compromise that satisfied no one, but it was the best we could do, and we all consented.

When he left, Borny gave me his knife.

After he left, I tried not to be sick. I worked hard at learning everything they taught me in the ship school, and I tried to teach Arrem how to be aware and how to avoid witchcraft. We did slow walking together in the ship’s garden, and the first hour of the untrance movements from the Handdara of Karhide on Gethen. We agreed that they were alike.

The ship was staying in the Soro system not only because of my family, but because the crew was now mostly zoologists who had come to study a sea animal on Eleven-Soro, a kind of cephalopod that had mutated toward high intelligence, or maybe it already was highly intelligent; but there was a communication problem. “Almost as bad as with the local humans,” said Steadiness, the zoologist who taught and teased us mercilessly. She took us down twice by lander to the uninhabited islands in the Northern Hemisphere where her station was. It was very strange to go down to my world and yet be a world away from my aunts and sisters and my soulmate; but I said nothing.

I saw the great, pale, shy creature come slowly up out of the deep waters with a running ripple of colors along its long coiling tentacles and a ringing shimmer of sound, all so quick it was over before you could follow the colors or hear the tune. The zoologist’s machine produced a pink glow and a mechanically speeded-up twitter, tinny and feeble in the immensity of the sea. The cephalopod patiently responded in its beautiful silvery shadowy language. “CP,” Steadiness said to us, ironic—Communication Problem. “We don’t know what we’re talking about.”

I said, “I learned something in my education here. In one of the songs, it says,” and I hesitated, trying to translate it into Hainish, “it says, thinking is one way of doing, and words are one way of thinking.”

Steadiness stared at me, in disapproval I thought, but probably only because I had never said anything to her before except “Yes.” Finally she said, “Are you suggesting that it doesn’t speak in words?”

“Maybe it’s not speaking at all. Maybe it’s thinking.”

Steadiness stared at me some more and then said, “Thank you.” She looked as if she too might be thinking. I wished I could sink into the water, the way the cephalopod was doing.

The other young people on the ship were friendly and mannerly. Those are words that have no translation in my language. I was unfriendly and unmannerly, and they let me be. I was grateful. But there was no place to be alone on the ship. Of course we each had a room; though small, the Heyho was a Hainish-built explorer, designed to give its people room and privacy and comfort and variety and beauty while they hung around in a solar system for years on end. But it was designed. It was all human-made—everything was human. I had much more privacy than I had ever had at home in our one-room house, yet there I had been free and here I was in a trap. I felt the pressure of people all around me, all the time. People around me, people with me, people pressing on me, pressing me to be one of them, to be one of them, one of the people. How could I make my soul? I could barely cling to it. I was in terror that I would lose it altogether.

One of the rocks in my soulbag, a little ugly gray rock that I had picked up on a certain day in a certain place in the hills above the river in the Silver Time, a little piece of my world, that became my world. Every night I took it out and held it in my hand while I lay in bed waiting to sleep, thinking of the sunlight on the hills above the river, listening to the soft hushing of the ship’s systems, like a mechanical sea.

The doctor hopefully fed me various tonics. Mother and I ate breakfast together every morning. She kept at work, making our notes from all the years on Eleven-Soro into her report to the Ekumen, but I knew the work did not go well. Her soul was in as much danger as mine was.

“You will never give in, will you, Ren?” she said to me one morning out of the silence of our breakfast. I had not intended the silence as a message. I had only rested in it.

“Mother, I want to go home and you want to go home,” I said. “Can’t we?”

Her expression was strange for a moment, while she misunderstood me; then it cleared to grief, defeat, relief.

“Will we be dead?” she asked me, her mouth twisting.

“I don’t know. I have to make my soul. Then I can know if I can come.”

“You know I can’t come back. It’s up to you.”

“I know. Go see Borny,” I said. “Go home. Here we’re both dying.” Then noises began to come out of me, sobbing, howling. Mother was crying. She came to me and held me, and I could hold my mother, cling to her and cry with her, because her spell was broken.

From the lander approaching I saw the oceans of Eleven-Soro, and in the greatness of my joy I thought that when I was grown and went out alone I would go to the sea shore and watch the sea-beasts shimmering their colors and tunes till I knew what they were thinking. I would listen, I would learn, till my soul was as large as the shining world. The scarred barrens whirled beneath us, ruins as wide as the continent, endless desolations. We touched down. I had my soulbag, and Borny’s knife around my neck on its string, a communicator implant behind my right earlobe, and a medicine kit Mother had made for me. “No use dying of an infected finger, after all,” she had said. The people on the lander said good-bye, but I forgot to. I set off out of the desert, home.

It was summer, the night was short and warm; I walked most of it. I got to the auntring about the middle of the second day. I went to my house cautiously, in case somebody had moved in while I was gone; but it was just as we had left it. The mattresses were moldy, and I put them and the bedding out in the sun, and started going over the garden to see what had kept growing by itself. The pigi had got small and seedy, but there were some good roots. A little boy came by and stared; he had to be Migi’s baby. After a while Hyuru came by. She squatted down near me in the garden in the sunshine. I smiled when I saw her, and she smiled, but it took us a while to find something to say.

“Your mother didn’t come back,” she said.

“She’s dead,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Hyuru said.

She watched me dig up another root.

“Will you come to the singing circle?” she asked.

I nodded.

She smiled again. With her rosebrown skin and wide-set eyes, Hyuru had become very beautiful, but her smile was exactly the same as when we were little girls. “Hi, ya!” she sighed in deep contentment, lying down on the dirt with her chin on her arms. “This is good!”

I went on blissfully digging.

That year and the next two, I was in the singing circle with Hyuru and two other girls. Didsu still came to it often, and Han, a woman who settled in our auntring to have her first baby, joined it too. In the singing circle the older girls pass around the stories, songs, knowledge they learned from their own mother, and young women who have lived in other auntrings teach what they learned there, so women make each other’s souls, learning how to make their children’s souls.

Han lived in the house where old Dnemi had died. Nobody in the auntring except Sut’s baby had died while my family lived there. My mother had complained that she didn’t have any data on death and burial. Sut had gone away with her dead baby and never came back, and nobody talked about it. I think that turned my mother against the others more than anything else. She was angry and ashamed that she could not go and try to comfort Sut and that nobody else did. “It is not human,” she said. “It is pure animal behavior. Nothing could be clearer evidence that this is a broken culture—not a society, but the remains of one. A terrible, an appalling poverty.”

I don’t know if Dnemi’s death would have changed her mind. Dnemi was dying for a long time, of kidney failure I think; she turned a kind of dark orange color, jaundice. While she could get around, nobody helped her. When she didn’t come out of her house for a day or two, the women would send the children in with water and a little food and firewood. It went on so through the winter, then one morning little Rashi told his mother Aunt Dnemi was “staring.” Several of the women went to Dnemi’s house, and entered it for the first and last time. They sent for all the girls in the singing circle, so that we could learn what to do. We took turns sitting by the body or in the porch of the house, singing soft songs, child-songs, giving the soul a day and a night to leave the body and the house, then the older women wrapped the body in the bedding, strapped it on a kind of litter, and set off with it toward the barren lands. There it would be given back, under a rock cairn or inside one of the ruins of the ancient city. “Those are the lands of the dead,” Sadne said. “What dies stays there.”

Han settled down in that house a year later. When her baby began to be born she asked Didsu to help her, and Hyuru and I stayed in the porch and watched, so that we could learn. It was a wonderful thing to see, and quite altered the course of my thinking, and Hyuru’s too. Hyuru said, “I’d like to do that!” I said nothing, but thought, So do I, but not for a long time, because once you have a child you’re never alone.

And though it is of the others, of relationships, that I write, the heart of my life has been my being alone.

I think there is no way to write about being alone. To write is to tell something to somebody, to communicate to others. CP, as Steadiness would say. Solitude is non-communication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.

A woman’s solitude in the auntring is, of course, based firmly on the presence of others at a little distance. It is a contingent, and therefore human, solitude. The settled men are connected as stringently to the women, though not to one another, the settlement is an integral though distant element of the auntring. Even a scouting woman is part of the society—a moving part, connecting the settled parts. Only the isolation of a woman or man who chooses to live outside the settlements is absolute. They are outside the network altogether. There are worlds where such persons are called saints, holy people. Since isolation is a sure way to prevent magic, on my world the assumption is that they are sorcerors, outcast by others or by their own will, their conscience.

I knew I was strong with magic, how could I help it? and I began to long to get away. It would be so much easier and safer to be alone. But at the same time, and increasingly, I wanted to know something about the great harmless magic, the spells cast between men and women.

I preferred foraging to gardening, and was out on the hills a good deal; and these days, instead of keeping away from the man’s-houses, I wandered by them, and looked at them, and looked at the men if they were outside. The men looked back. Downriver Lame Man’s long, shining hair was getting a little white in it now, but when he sat singing his long, long songs I found myself sitting down and listening, as if my legs had lost their bones. He was very handsome. So was the man I remembered as a boy named Tret in the auntring, when I was little, Behyu’s son. He had come back from the boygroup and from wandering, and had built a house and made a fine garden in the valley of Red Stone Creek. He had a big nose and big eyes, long arms and legs, long hands; he moved very quietly, almost like Arrem doing the untrance. I went often to pick lowberries in Red Stone Creek valley.

He came along the path and spoke. “You were Borny’s sister,” he said. He had a low voice, quiet.

“He’s dead,” I said.

Red Stone Man nodded. “That’s his knife.”

In my world, I had never talked with a man. I felt extremely strange. I kept picking berries.

“You’re picking green ones,” Red Stone Man said.

His soft, smiling voice made my legs lose their bones again.

“I think nobody’s touched you,” he said. “I’d touch you gently. I think about it, about you, ever since you came by here early in the summer. Look, here’s a bush full of ripe ones. Those are green. Come over here.”

I came closer to him, to the bush of ripe berries.

When I was on the ship, Arrem told me that many languages have a single word for sexual desire and the bond between mother and child and the bond between soulmates and the feeling for one’s home and worship of the sacred; they are all called love. There is no word that great in my language. Maybe my mother is right, and human greatness perished in my world with the people of the Before Time, leaving only small, poor, broken things and thoughts. In my language, love is many different words. I learned one of them with Red Stone Man. We sang it together to each other.

We made a brush house on a little cove of the creek, and neglected our gardens, but gathered many, many sweet berries.

Mother had put a lifetime’s worth of nonconceptives in the little medicine kit. She had no faith in Sorovian herbals. I did, and they worked.

But when a year or so later, in the Golden Time, I decided to go out scouting, I thought I might go places where the right herbs were scarce, and so I stuck the little noncon jewel on the back of my left earlobe. Then I wished I hadn’t, because it seemed like witchcraft. Then I told myself I was being superstitious, the noncon wasn’t any more witchcraft than the herbs were, it just worked longer. I had promised my mother in my soul that I would never be superstitious. The skin grew over the noncon, and I took my soulbag and Borny’s knife and the medicine kit, and set off across the world.

I had told Hyuru and Red Stone Man I would be leaving. Hyuru and I sang and talked together all one night down by the river. Red Stone Man said in his soft voice, “Why do you want to go?” and I said, “To get away from your magic, sorceror,” which was true in part. If I kept going to him I might always go to him. I wanted to give my soul and body a larger world to be in.

Now to tell of my scouting years is more difficult than ever. CP! A woman scouting is entirely alone, unless she chooses to ask a settled man for sex, or camps in an auntring for a while to sing and listen with the singing circle. If she goes anywhere near the territory of a boygroup, she is in danger; and if she comes on a rogue she is in danger; and if she hurts herself or gets into polluted country, she is in danger. She has no responsibility except to herself, and so much freedom is very dangerous.

In my right earlobe was the tiny communicator, every forty days, as I had promised, I sent a signal to the ship that meant “all well.” If I wanted to leave, I would send another signal. I could have called for the lander to rescue me from a bad situation, but though I was in bad situations a couple of times I never thought of using it. My signal was the mere fulfilment of a promise to my mother and her people, the network I was no longer part of, a meaningless communication.

Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings. So for the young soul there is wandering and scouting, travel, danger, change. But of course travel and danger and change have their own dullness. It is finally always the same otherness over again, another hill, another river, another man, another day. The feet begin to turn in a long, long circle. The body begins to think of what it learned back home, when it learned to be still. To be aware. To be aware of the grain of dust beneath the sole of the foot, and the skin of the sole of the foot, and the touch and scent of the air on the cheek, and the fall and motion of the light across the air, and the color of the grass on the high hill across the river, and the thoughts of the body, of the soul, the shimmer and ripple of colors and sounds in the clear darkness of the depths, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, endlessly new.

So at last I came back home. I had been gone about four years.

Hyuru had moved into my old house when she left her mother’s house. She had not gone scouting, but had taken to going to Red Stone Creek Valley, and she was pregnant. I was glad to see her living there. The only house empty was an old half-ruined one too close to Hedimi’s. I decided to make a new house. I dug out the circle as deep as my chest; the digging took most of the summer. I cut the sticks, braced and wove them, and then daubed the framework solidly with mud inside and out. I remembered when I had done that with my mother long, long ago, and how she had said, “That’s right. That’s good.” I left the roof open, and the hot sun of late summer baked the mud into clay. Before the rains came, I thatched the house with reeds, a triple thatching, for I’d had enough of being wet all winter.

My auntring was more a string than a ring, stretching along the north bank of the river for about three kilos; my house lengthened the string a good bit, upstream from all the others. I could just see the smoke from Hyuru’s fireplace. I dug it into a sunny slope with good drainage. It is still a good house.

I settled down. Some of my time went to gathering and gardening and mending and all the dull, repetitive actions of primitive life, and some went to singing and thinking the songs and stories I had learned here at home and while scouting, and the things I had learned on the ship, also. Soon enough I found why women are glad to have children come to listen to them, for songs and stories are meant to be heard, listened to. “Listen!” I would say to the children. The children of the auntring came and went, like the little fish in the river, one or two or five of them, little ones, big ones. When they came, I sang or told stories to them. When they left, I went on in silence. Sometimes I joined the singing circle to give what I had learned traveling to the older girls. And that was all I did; except that I worked, always, to be aware of all I did.

By solitude the soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It maybe irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.

I helped Hyuru have her baby, a girl, and played with the baby. Then after a couple of years I took the noncon out of my left earlobe. Since it left a little hole, I made the hole go all the way through with a burnt needle, and when it healed I hung in it a tiny jewel I had found in a ruin when I was scouting. I had seen a man on the ship with a jewel hung in his ear that way. I wore it when I went out foraging. I kept clear of Red Stone Valley. The man there behaved as if he had a claim on me, a right to me. I liked him still, but I did not like that smell of magic about him, his imagination of power over me. I went up into the hills, northward.

A pair of young men had settled in old North House about the time I came home. Often boys got through boygroup by pairing, and often they stayed paired when they left the Territory. It helped their chances of survival. Some of them were sexually paired, others weren’t; some stayed paired, others didn’t. One of this pair had gone off with another man last summer. The one that stayed wasn’t a handsome man, but I had noticed him. He had a kind of solidness I liked. His body and hands were short and strong. I had courted him a little, but he was very shy. This day, a day in the Silver Time when the mist lay on the river, he saw the jewel swinging in my ear, and his eyes widened.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” I said.

He nodded.

“I wore it to make you look at me,” I said.

He was so shy that I finally said, “If you only like sex with men, you know, just tell me.” I really was not sure.

“Oh, no,” he said, “no. No.” He stammered and then bolted back down the path. But he looked back; and I followed him slowly, still not certain whether he wanted me or wanted to be rid of me.

He waited for me in front of a little house in a grove of redroot, a lovely little bower, all leaves outside, so that you would walk within arm’s length of it and not see it. Inside he had laid sweet grass, deep and dry and soft, smelling of summer. I went in, crawling because the door was very low, and sat in the summer-smelling grass. He stood outside. “Come in,” I said, and he came in very slowly.

“I made it for you,” he said.

“Now make a child for me,” I said.

And we did that; maybe that day, maybe another.

Now I will tell you why after all these years I called the ship, not knowing even if it was still there in the space between the planets, asking for the lander to meet me in the barren land.

When my daughter was born, that was my heart’s desire and the fulfilment of my soul. When my son was born, last year, I knew there is no fulfilment. He will grow toward manhood, and go, and fight and endure, and live or die as a man must. My daughter, whose name is Yedneke, Leaf, like my mother, will grow to womanhood and go or stay as she chooses. I will live alone. This is as it should be, and my desire. But I am of two worlds, I am a person of this world, and a woman of my mother’s people. I owe my knowledge to the children of her people. So I asked the lander to come, and spoke to the people on it. They gave me my mother’s report to read, and I have written my story in their machine, making a record for those who want to learn one of the ways to make a soul. To them, to the children I say: Listen! Avoid magic! Be aware!

THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN FUTURE

Allen Steele

The name of Captain Future, the supreme foe of all evil and evildoers, was known to every inhabitant of the Solar System.

That tall, cheerful, red-haired young adventurer of ready laugh and flying fists was the implacable Nemesis of all oppressors and exploiters of the System’s human and planetary races. Combining a gay audacity with an unswervable purposefulness and an unparalleled mastery of science, he had blazed a brilliant trail across the nine worlds in defense of the right.

—EDMOND HAMILTON, Captain Future and the Space Emperor (1940)

This is the story of how Captain Future died.

We were crossing the inner belt, coasting toward our scheduled rendezvous with Ceres, when the message was received by the ship’s comlink.

“Rohr . . .? Rohr, wake up, please.”

The voice coming from the ceiling was tall, dark, and handsome, sampled from one of the old Hercules vids in the captain’s collection. It penetrated the darkness of my quarters on the mid-deck where I lay asleep after standing an eight-hour watch on the bridge.

I turned my head to squint at the computer terminal next to my bunk. Lines of alphanumeric code scrolled down the screen, displaying the routine systems-checks and updates that, as second officer, I was supposed to be monitoring at all times, even when I was off-duty and dead to the world. No red-bordered emergency messages, though; at first glance, everything looked copacetic.

Except the time. It was 0335 Zulu, the middle of the goddamn night.

“Rohr?” The voice was a little louder now. “Mister Furland? Please wake up . . .”

I groaned and rolled over. “Okay, okay, I’m awake. What’dya want, Brain?”

The Brain. It was bad enough that the ship’s AI sounded like Steve Reeves; it also had to have a stupid name like The Brain. On every vessel on which I had served, crewmembers had given their AIs human names-Rudy, Beth, Kim, George, Stan, Lisa, dubbed after friends or family members or deceased shipmates-or nicknames, either clever or overused: Boswell, Isaac, Slim, Flash, Ramrod, plus the usual Hals and Datas from the nostalgia buffs. I once held down a gig on a lunar tug where the AI was called Fughead-as in Hey, Fughead, gimme the traffic grid for Tycho Station—but no one but a bonehead would give their AI a silly-ass moniker like The Brain.

No one but Captain Future, that is . . . and I still hadn’t decided whether or not my current boss was a bonehead, or just insane.

“The captain asked me to awaken you,” The Brain said. “He wants you on the bridge at once. He says that it’s urgent.”

I checked the screen again. “I don’t see anything urgent.”

“Captain’s orders, Mr. Furland.” The ceiling fluorescents began to slowly brighten behind their cracked and dusty panes, causing me to squint and clap my hand over my eyes. “If you don’t report to the bridge in ten minutes, you’ll be docked one hour time-lost and a mark will be entered on your union card.”

Threats like that usually don’t faze me-everyone loses a few hours or gains a few marks during a long voyage-but I couldn’t afford a bad service report now. In two more days the TBSA Comet would reach Ceres, where I was scheduled to join up with the Jove Commerce, outbound for Callisto. I had been lucky to get this far, and I didn’t want my next CO to ground me just because of a bad report from my previous captain.

“Okay,” I muttered. “Tell ’em I’m on my way.”

I swung my legs over the side and felt around for where I had dropped my clothes on the deck. I could have used a rinse, a shave, and a nice long meditation in the head, not to mention a mug of coffee and a muffin from the galley, but it was obvious that I wasn’t going to get that.

Music began to float from the walls, an orchestral overture that gradually rose in volume. I paused, my calves halfway into the trouser legs, as the strings soared upward, gathering heroic strength. German opera. Wagner. The Flight of the Valkyries, for God’s sake . . .

“Cut it out, Brain,” I said.

The music stopped in mid-chord. “The captain thought it would help rouse you.”

“I’m roused.” I stood up and pulled my trousers the rest of the way on. In the dim light, I glimpsed a small motion near the corner of my compartment beside the locker; one moment it was there, then it was gone. “There’s a cockroach in here,” I said. “Wanna do something about it?”

“I’m sorry, Rohr. I have tried to disinfect the vessel, but so far I have been unable to locate all the nests. If you’ll leave your cabin door unlocked while you’re gone, I’ll send a drone inside to . . .”

“Never mind.” I zipped up my pants, pulled on a sweatshirt and looked around for my stikshoes. They were kicked under my bunk; I knelt down on the threadbare carpet and pulled them out. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

The Brain meant nothing by that comment; it was only trying to get rid of another pest which had found its way aboard the Comet before the freighter had departed from Lagrange Four. Cockroaches, fleas, ants, even the occasional mouse; they managed to get into any vessel that regularly rendezvoused with near-Earth spaceports, but I had never been on any ship so infested as the Comet . Yet I wasn’t about to leave my cabin door unlocked. One of a few inviolable union rules I still enjoyed aboard this ship was the ability to seal my cabin, and I didn’t want to give the captain a chance to go poking through my stuff. He was convinced that I was carrying contraband with me to Ceres Station, and even though he was right-two fifths of lunar mash whiskey, a traditional coming-aboard present for my next commanding officer-I didn’t want him pouring good liquor down the sink because of Association regulations no one else bothered to observe.

I pulled on my shoes, fastened a utility belt around my waist and left the cabin, carefully locking the door behind me with my thumbprint. A short, upward-curving corridor took me past the closed doors of two other crew cabins, marked CAPTAIN and FIRST OFFICER. The captain was already on the bridge, and I assumed that Jeri was with him.

A manhole led to the central access shaft and the carousel. Before I went up to the bridge, though, I stopped by the wardroom to fill a squeezebulb with coffee from the pot. The wardroom was a disaster: a dinner tray had been left on the table, discarded food wrappers lay on the floor, and a small spider-like robot waded in the galley’s sink, waging solitary battle against the crusty cookware that had been abandoned there. The captain had been here recently; I was surprised that he hadn’t summoned me to clean up after him. At least there was some hot coffee left in the carafe, although judging from its odor and viscosity it was probably at least ten hours old; I toned it down with sugar and half-sour milk from the fridge before I poured it into a squeezebulb.

As always, the pictures on the wardroom walls caught my eye: framed reproductions of covers from ancient pulp magazines well over a hundred years old. The magazines themselves, crumbling and priceless, were bagged and hermetically sealed within a locker in the Captain’s quarters. Lurid paintings of fishbowl-helmeted spacemen fighting improbable alien monsters and mad scientists that, in turn, menaced buxom young women in see-thru outfits. The adolescent fantasies of the last century—“Planets In Peril,” “Quest Beyond the Stars,” “Star Trail to Glory”—and above them all, printed in a bold swath across the top of each cover, a title:

CAPTAIN FUTURE

MAN OF TOMORROW

At that moment, my reverie was broken by a harsh voice coming from the ceiling:

“Furland! Where are you?”

“In the wardroom, Captain.” I pinched off the lip of the squeezebulb and sealed it with a catheter, then clipped it to my belt. “Just grabbing some coffee. I’ll be up there in a minute.”

“You got sixty seconds to find your duty station or I’ll dock your pay for your last shift! Now hustle your lazy butt up here!”

“Coming right now . . .” I walked out of the wardroom, heading up the corridor toward the shaft. “Toad,” I whispered under my breath when I was through the hatch and out of earshot from the ship’s com-net. Who’s calling who lazy?

Captain Future, Man of Tomorrow. God help us if that were true.

Ten minutes later a small ship shaped like an elongated teardrop rose from an underground hangar on the lunar surface. It was the Comet, the superswift craft of the Futuremen, known far and wide through the System as the swiftest ship in space.

—HAMILTON, Calling Captain Future (1940)

My name’s Rohr Furland. For better or worse, I’m a spacer, just like my father and his mother before him.

Call it family tradition. Grandma was one of the original beamjacks who helped build the first powersat in Earth orbit before she immigrated to the Moon, where she conceived my dad as the result of a one-night stand with some nameless moondog who was killed in a blowout only two days later. Dad grew up as an unwanted child in Descartes Station; he ran away at eighteen and stowed away aboard a Skycorp freighter to Earth, where he lived like a stray dog in Memphis before he got homesick and signed up with a Russian company looking for native-born selenians. Dad got home in time to see Grandma through her last years, fight in the Moon War on the side of the Pax Astra and, not incidentally, meet my mother, who was a geologist at Tycho Station.

I was born in the luxury of a two-room apartment beneath Tycho on the first anniversary of the Pax’s independence. I’m told that my dad celebrated my arrival by getting drunk on cheap luna wine and balling the midwife who had delivered me. It’s remarkable that my parents stayed together long enough for me to graduate from suit camp. Mom went back to Earth while Dad and I stayed on the Moon to receive the benefits of full citizenship in the Pax: Class A oxygen cards, good for air even if we were unemployed and dead broke. Which was quite often, in Dad’s case.

All of which makes me a mutt, a true son of a bastard, suckled on air bottles and moonwalking before I was out of my diapers. On my sixteenth birthday, I was given my union card and told to get a job; two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, the LEO shuttle that had just hired me as a cargo handler touched down on a landing strip in Galveston, and with the aid of an exoskeleton I walked for the first time on Earth. I spent one week there, long enough for me to break my right arm by falling on a Dallas sidewalk, lose my virginity to an El Paso whore, and get one hell of a case of agoraphobia from all that wide-open Texas landscape. Fuck the cradle of humanity and the horse it rode in on; I caught the next boat back to the Moon and turned eighteen with a birthday cake that had no candles.

Twelve years later, I had handled almost every union job someone with my qualifications could hold-dock slob, cargo grunt, navigator, life support chief, even a couple of second-mate assignments-on more vessels than I could count, ranging from orbital tugs and lunar freighters to passenger shuttles and Apollo-class ore haulers. None of these gigs had ever lasted much longer than a year; in order to guarantee equal opportunity for all its members, the union shifted people from ship to ship, allowing only captains and first-mates to remain with their vessels for longer than eighteen months. It was a hell of a system; by the time you became accustomed to one ship and its captain, you were transferred to another ship and had to learn all over again. Or, worse, you went without work for several months at a time, which meant hanging around some spacer bar at Tycho Station or Descartes City, waiting for the local union rep to throw some other guy out of his present assignment and give you his job.

It was a life, but it wasn’t much of a living. I was thirty years old and still possessed all my fingers and toes, but had precious little money in the bank. After fifteen years of hard work, the nearest thing I had to a permanent address was the storage locker in Tycho where I kept my few belongings. Between jobs, I lived in union hostels on the Moon or the elfives, usually occupying a bunk barely large enough to swing either a cat or a call-girl. Even the whores lived better than I did; sometimes I’d pay them just to let me sleep in a decent bed for a change, and never mind the sex.

To make matters worse, I was bored out of my wits. Except for one cy-cleship run out to Mars when I was twenty-five, I had spent my entire career-hell, my entire life-running between LEO and the Moon. It’s not a bad existence, but it’s not a great one either. There’s no shortage of sad old farts hanging around the union halls, telling big lies to anyone who’ll listen about their glory days as beamjacks or moondogs while drinking away their pensions. I was damned if I would end up like them, but I knew that if I didn’t get off the Moon real soon, I would be schlepping LOX tanks for the rest of my life.

Meanwhile, a new frontier was being opened in the outer system. Deep-space freighters hauled helium-3 from Jupiter to feed the fusion tokamaks on Earth, and although Queen Macedonia had placed Titan off-limits because of the Plague, the Iapetus colony was still operational. There was good money to be made from landing a gig on one of the big ships that cruised between the gas giants and the belt, and union members who found work on the Jupiter and Saturn runs had guaranteed three-year contracts. It wasn’t the same thing as making another trip between Moon and LEO every few days. The risks were greater, but so was the payoff.

Competition for jobs on the outer-system ships was tight, but that didn’t stop me from applying anyway. My fifteen-year service record, with few complaints from previous captains and one Mars run to my name, helped me put a leg up over most of the other applicants. I held down a job as a cargo grunt for another year while I waited, but the union eventually rotated me out and left me hanging in Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Tycho. Six weeks later, just as I was considering signing up as a tractor operator on the Clavius Dome construction project, the word came: the Jove Commerce needed a new executive officer, and my name had been drawn from the hat.

There was only one hitch. Since the Commerce didn’t come further in-system than Ceres, and because the union didn’t guarantee passage to the belt as part of the deal, I would have to either travel aboard a clipper-out of the question, since I didn’t have money-or find a temporary job on an outbound asteroid freighter.

Okay, I was willing to do that, but now there was another complication: few freighters had available gigs for selenians. Most vessels which operated in the main belt were owned by the Transient Body Shipping Association, and TBSA captains preferred to hire crewmembers from other ships owned by the co-op rather than from my union. Nor did they want to sign up some dude who would only be making a one-way trip, because they’d lose him on Ceres before the trip was half-over.

The predicament was explained to me by my union rep when I met with him in his office in Tycho. Schumacher was an old buddy; he and I had worked together aboard a LEO tugboat before the union had hired him as its Tycho Station representative, so he knew my face and was willing to cut me some slack.

“Look, Rohr,” he said, propping his moccasins up on his desk, “here’s the scoop. I’ve checked around for a boat that’ll take you on, and I found what you were looking for. An Ares-class ore freighter, outbound for Ceres . . . in fact, she’s already docked at Lagrange Four and is ready to launch as soon as her captain finds a new second.”

As he spoke, Schumacher punched up a holo of the ship, and it revolved in the tank above his desk. It was a standard rock hauler: eighty-two meters in length, with a gas-core nuclear engine at one end and a drum-shaped crew module at the other, joined at the center by the long narrow spine and open cargo bays. An uprated tugboat, really; nothing about it was either unfamiliar or daunting. I took a slug off the whisky flask he had pulled out of his desk drawer. “Great. What’s her name?”

He hesitated. “The TBSA Comet,” he said reluctantly. “Her captain is Bo McKinnon.”

I shrugged and passed the flask back to him. “So what’s the catch?”

Schumacher blinked. Instead of taking a hit off the whisky, he recapped the flask and shoved it back in the drawer. “Let me repeat that,” he said. “The Comet. Bo McKinnon.” He peered at me as if I had come down with Titan Plague. “You’re telling me you’ve never heard of him?”

I didn’t keep up with the TBSA freighters or their captains; they returned to the Moon only once every few months to drop off their cargo and change crews, so few selenians happened to see them unless they were getting drunk in some bar. “Not a clue,” I said.

Schumacher closed his eyes. “Terrific,” he murmured. “The one guy who’s never heard of Captain Future and it’s gotta be you.”

“Captain who?”

He looked back at me. “Look, just forget the whole thing, okay? Pretend I never mentioned it. There’s another rock hauler heading out to Ceres in about six or seven weeks. I’ll talk to the Association, try to get you a gig on that one instead . . .”

I shook my head. “I can’t wait another six or seven weeks. If I’m not on Ceres in three months, I’ll lose the Jove Commerce job. What’s wrong with this gig?”

Schumacher sighed as he reached back into the drawer for the flask. “What’s wrong,” he said, “is the nut who’s in command. McKinnon is the worst captain in the Association. No one who’s shipped out with him has ever stayed aboard, except maybe the google he’s got for a first mate.”

I had to bite my tongue when he said that. We were pals, but racism isn’t an endearing trait. Sure, Superiors can be weird-their eyes, for starters, which was why some people called them by that name-but if you also use words like nigger, slant, kike or spic to describe people, then you’re no friend of mine.

On the other hand, when you’re hungry for work, you’ll put up with just about anything.

Schumacher read the expression on my face. “It’s not just that,” he said hastily. “I understand the first officer is okay.” For a google, that is, although he didn’t say it aloud. “It’s McKinnon himself. People have jumped ship, faked illness, torn up their union cards . . . anything to get off the Comet.”

“That bad?”

“That bad.” He took a long hit off the flask, gasped, and passed it back across the desk to me. “Oh, the pay’s okay . . . minimum wage, but by Association standards that’s better than union scale . . . and the Comet passes all the safety requirements, or at least so at inspection time. But McKinnon’s running a tank short of a full load, if y’know what I mean.”

I didn’t drink from the flask. “Naw, man, I don’t know what you mean. What’s with this . . . what did you call him?”

“Captain Future. That’s what he calls himself, Christ knows why.” He grinned. “Not only that, but he also calls his AI ‘The Brain’ . . .”

I laughed out loud. “The Brain? Like, what? He’s got a brain floating in a jar? I don’t get it . . .”

“I dunno. It’s a fetish of some kind.” He shook his head. “Anyway, everyone who’s worked for him says that he thinks he’s some kinda space hero, and he expects everyone to go along with the idea. And he’s supposed to be real tough on people . . . you might think he was a perfectionist, if he wasn’t such a slob himself.”

I had worked for both kinds before, along with a few weirdos. They didn’t bother me, so long as the money was right and they minded their own business. “Ever met him?”

Schumacher held out his hand; I passed the flask back to him and he took another swig. Must be the life, sitting on your ass all day, getting drunk and deciding people’s futures. I envied him so much, I hoped someone would kindly cut my throat if I was ever in his position.

“Nope,” he said. “Not once. He spends all his time on the Comet, even when he’s back here. Hardly ever leaves the ship, from what I’ve been told . . . and that’s another thing. Guys who’ve worked for him say that he expects his crew to do everything but wipe his butt after he visits the head. Nobody gets a break on his ship, except maybe his first officer.”

“What about him?”

“Her. Nice girl, name of . . .” He thought hard for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “Jeri. Jeri Lee-Bose, that’s it.” He smiled. “I met her once, not long before she went to work on the Comet. She’s sweet, for a google.”

He winked and dropped his voice a bit. “I hear she’s got a thing for us apes,” he murmured. “In fact, I’ve been told she’s bunking with her captain. If half of what I’ve heard about McKinnon is true, that must make him twice as sick as I’ve heard.”

I didn’t reply. Schumacher dropped his feet and leaned across the desk, lacing his fingers together as he looked straight at me. “Look, Rohr,” he said, as deadly serious as if he were discussing my wanting to marry his sister, “I know you’re working under a time limit and how much the Jove Commerce job means to you. But I gotta tell you, the only reason why Captain Future would even consider taking aboard a short-timer is because nobody else will work for him. He’s just as desperate as you are, but I don’t give a shit about him. If you wanna turn it down, I won’t add it to your card and I’ll save your place in line. It’ll just be between you and me. Okay?”

“And if I turn it down?”

He waved his hand back and forth. “Like I said, I can try to find you another gig. The Nickel Queen’s due home in another six weeks or so. I’ve got some pull with her captain, so maybe I can get you a job there . . . but honest to Jesus, I can’t promise anything. The Queen ’s a good ship and everyone I know wants to work for her, just as much as nobody wants to get within a klick of the Comet.”

“So what do you suggest I do?”

Schumacher just smiled and said nothing. As my union rep, he was legally forbidden against making any decisions for me; as a pal, he had done his best to warn me about the risks. From both points of view, though, he knew I didn’t have any real choice. I could spend three months aboard a ship run by a borderline psycho, or the rest of my life jacking off on the Moon.

I thought about it for a few moments, then I asked for the contract.

The three Futuremen who were Curt Newton’s faithful, lifelong comrades made a striking contrast to their tall, red-haired young leader.

—HAMILTON, The Comet Kings (1942)

One-sixth gravity disappeared as I crawled through the carousel hatch and entered the bridge.

The Comet’s command center was located in the non-rotating forward deck of the crew module. The bridge was the largest single compartment in the ship, but even in freefall it was cramped: chairs, consoles, screens, emergency suit lockers, the central navigation table with its holo tank and, at the center of the low ceiling, the hemispherical bulge of the observation blister.

The ceiling lamps were turned down low when I came in-The Brain was mimicking Earth-time night-but I could see Jeri seated at her duty station on the far end of the circular deck. She looked around when she heard the hatch open.

“Morning,” she said, smiling at me. “Hey, is that coffee?”

“Something like it,” I muttered. She gazed enviously at the squeezebulb in my hand. “Sorry I didn’t bring you any,” I added, “but the Captain . . .”

“Right. I heard Bo yell at you.” She feigned a pout which didn’t last very long. “That’s okay. I can get some later after we make the burn.”

Jeri Lee-Bose: six-foot-two, which is short for a Superior, with the oversized dark blue eyes that give bioengineered spacers their unsavory nickname. Thin and flat-chested to the point of emaciation, the fingers of her ambidextrous hands were long and slender, her thumbs almost extending to the tips of her index fingers. Her ash-blond hair was shaved nearly to the skull, except for the long braid that extended from the nape of her neck nearly down to the base of her narrow spine, where her double-jointed legs began.

The pale skin of her face was marked with finely etched tattoos around her eyes, nose, and mouth, forming the wings of a monarch butterfly. She had been given these when she had turned five, and since Superiors customarily add another tattoo on their birthdays and Jeri Lee was twenty-five, pictograms covered most of her arms and her shoulders, constellations and dragons which weaved their way under and around the tank-top she wore. I had no idea of what else lay beneath her clothes, but I imagined that she was well on her way to becoming a living painting.

Jeri was strange, even for a Superior. For one thing, her kind usually segregate themselves from Primaries, as they politely call us baseline humans (or apes, when we’re not around). They tend to remain within their family-based clans, operating independent satrapies that deal with the TBSA and the major space companies only out of economic necessity, so it’s rare to find a lone Superior working on a vessel owned by a Primary.

For another thing, although I’ve been around Superiors most of my life and they don’t give me the creeps like they do most groundhogs and even many spacers, I’ve never appreciated the aloof condescension the majority of them display around unenhanced humans. Give one of them a few minutes, and they’ll bend your ear about the Superior philosophy of extropic evolution and all that jive. Yet Jeri was the refreshing, and even oddball, exception to the rule. She had a sweet disposition, and from the moment I had come aboard the Comet, she had accepted me both as an equal and as a new-found friend. No stuffiness, no harangues about celibacy or the unspirituality of eating meat or using profanity; she was a fellow crewmate, and that was that.

No. That wasn’t quite all there was to it.

When one got past the fact that she was a scarecrow with feet that functioned as a second pair of hands and eyes the size of fuel valves, she was sensual as hell. She was a pretty woman, and I had become infatuated with her. Schumacher would have twitched at the thought of sleeping with a google, but in three weeks since The Brain had revived us from the zombie tanks, there had been more than a few times when my desire to see the rest of her body exceeded simple curiosity about her tattoos.

Yet I knew very little about her. As much as I loved looking at her, that was surpassed by my admiration for her innate talent as a spacer. In terms of professional skill, Jeri Lee-Bose was one of the best First Officers I had ever met. Any Royal Navy, TBSA, or free-trader captain would have killed to sign her aboard.

So what the hell was she doing aboard a scow like the Comet, serving under a bozo like Bo McKinnon?

I tucked in my knees and did a half-gainer that landed the soles of my stikshoes against the carpet. Feet now firmly planted on the floor, I walked across the circular compartment to the nav table, sucking on the squeezebulb in my left hand. “Where’s the captain?” I asked.

“Topside, taking a sextant reading.” She nodded toward the observation blister above us. “He’ll be down in a minute.”

Typical. Part of the reason why Superiors have enhanced eyes is for optical work like sextant sightings. This should be Jeri’s job, but McKinnon seemed to regard the blister as his personal throne. I sighed as I settled down in my chair and buckled in. “Should have known,” I muttered. “Wakes you up in the middle of the goddamn night, then disappears when you want a straight answer.”

Her mouth pursed into sympathetic frown. “Bo will tell you more when he comes down,” she said, then she swiveled around in her chair as she returned her attention to her board.

Jeri was the only person aboard who was permitted to call Captain Future by his real name. I didn’t have that privilege, and The Brain hadn’t been programmed to do otherwise. The fondness I had developed for Jeri over the last three weeks was tempered by the fact that, in almost any disagreement, she usually sided with the captain.

Obviously, there was something else she knew but wasn’t telling me, preferring to defer the issue to McKinnon. I had become used to such behavior over the last few months, but it was still irritating. Most first officers act as intermediaries between captain and crew, and in that sense Jeri performed well, yet at times like this I felt as if I had more in common with The Brain than with her.

So be it. I swiveled my chair to face the nav table. “Hey, Brain,” I called out. “Gimme a holo of our current position and trajectory, please.”

The space within the holo tank coruscated briefly, then an arch-shaped slice of the main belt appeared above the table. Tiny spots of orange light depicting major asteroids slowly moved along blue sidereal tracks, each designated by their catalog numbers. The Comet was pinpointed by a small silver replica of the vessel, leading the end of a broken red line which bisected the asteroid orbits.

The Comet was near the edge of the third Kirkwood gap, one of the “empty spaces” in the belt where Martian and Jovian gravitational forces caused the number of identified asteroids to diminish per fraction of an astronomical unit. We were now in the 1/3gap, about two and a half A.U.’s from the Sun. In another couple of days we would enter the main belt and be closing in on Ceres. Once we arrived, the Comet would unload the cargo it had carried from the Moon and, in return, take on the raw ore TBSA prospectors had mined from the belt and shipped to Ceres Station. It was also there that I was scheduled to depart the Comet and await the arrival of the Jove Commerce .

At least, that was the itinerary. Now, as I studied the holo, I noticed a not-so-subtle change. The red line depicting the freighter’s trajectory had been altered since the end of my last watch about four hours earlier.

It no longer intercepted Ceres. In fact, it didn’t even come close to the asteroid’s orbit.

The Comet had changed course while I slept.

Without saying anything to Jeri, I unbuckled my harness and pushed over to the table, where I silently stared at the holo for a couple of minutes, using the keypad to manually focus and enlarge the image. Our new bearing took us almost a quarter of a million kilometers from Ceres, on just the other side of the Kirkwood gap.

“Brain,” I said, “what’s our destination?”

“The asteroid 2046-Barr,” it replied. It displayed a new orange spot in the tank, directly in front of the Comet’s red line.

The last of my drowsiness dissipated into a pulse of white-hot rage. I could feel Jeri’s eyes on my back.

“Rohr . . .” she began.

I didn’t care. I stabbed the intercom button on the table. “McKinnon!” I bellowed. “Get down here!”

Long silence. I knew he could hear me.

“Goddammit, get down here! Now!”

Motors whined in the ceiling above me, then the hatch below the observation blister irised open and a wingback chair began to descend into the bridge, carrying the commanding officer of the TBSA Comet. It wasn’t until the chair reached the deck that the figure seated in it spoke.

“You can call me . . . Captain Future.”

In the ancient pulp magazines he so adored, Captain Future was six-and-a-half feet in height, ruggedly handsome, bronze-skinned and red-haired. None of this applied to Bo McKinnon. Squat and obese, he filled the chair like a half-ton of lard. Black curly hair, turning gray at the temples and filthy with dandruff, receded from his forehead and fell around his shoulders, while an oily, unkempt beard dripped down the sides of his fat cheeks, themselves the color of mildewed wax. There were old food stains on the front of his worn-out sweatshirt and dark marks in the crotch of his trousers where he had failed to properly shake himself after the last time he had visited the head. And he smelled like a fart.

If my description seems uncharitable, let there be no mistake: Bo McKinnon was a butt-ugly, foul-looking son of a whore, and I have met plenty of slobs like him to judge by comparison. He had little respect for personal hygiene and fewer social graces, he had no business being anyone’s role model, and I was in no mood for his melodramatic bullshit just now.

“You changed course.” I pointed at the holo tank behind me, my voice quavering in anger. “We’re supposed to come out of the Kirkwood in another few hours, and while I was asleep you changed course.”

McKinnon calmly stared back at me. “Yes, Mister Furland, that I did. I changed the Comet ’s trajectory while you were in your quarters.”

“We’re no longer heading for Ceres . . . Christ, we’re going to come nowhere near Ceres!”

He made no move to rise from his throne. “That’s correct,” he said, slowly nodding his head. “I ordered The Brain to alter our course so that we’d intercept 2046-Barr. We fired maneuvering thrusters at 0130 shiptime, and in two hours we’ll execute another course correction. That should put us within range of the asteroid in about . . .”

“Eight hours, Captain,” Jeri said.

“Thank you, Mister Bose,” he said, otherwise barely acknowledging her. “Eight hours. At this time the Comet will be secured for emergency action.”

He folded his hands across his vast stomach and gazed back at me querulously. “Any further questions, Mister Furland?”

Further questions?

My mouth hung agape for a few moments. I was unable to speak, unable to protest, unable to do anything except wonder at the unmitigated gall of this mutant amalgamation of human and frog genes.

“Just one,” I finally managed to say. “How do you expect me to make my rendezvous with the Jove Commerce if we detour to . . .”

“2046-Barr,” Jeri said softly.

McKinnon didn’t so much as blink. “We won’t,” he said. “In fact, I’ve already sent a message to Ceres Station, stating that the Comet will be delayed and that our new ETA is indefinite. With any luck, we’ll reach Ceres in about forty-eight hours. You should be able to . . .”

“No, I won’t.” I grasped the armrest of his chair with both hands and leaned forward until my face was only a few inches from his. “The Jove is due to leave Ceres in forty-two hours . . . and that’s at the latest, if it’s going to meet its launch window for Callisto. They’ll go, with or without me, and if they go without me, I’m stuck on Ceres.”

No. That wasn’t entirely true. Ceres Station wasn’t like the Moon; it was too small an outpost to allow a shipwrecked spacer to simply hang around until the next outer-system vessel passed through. The TBSA rep on Ceres would demand that I find a new gig, even if it entailed signing aboard a prospector as grunt labor. This was little better than indentured servitude, since my union card didn’t mean shit out here in terms of room, board, and guaranteed oxygen supplies; my paychecks would be swallowed up by all the above. Even then, there was no guarantee that I’d swing another job aboard the next Jupiter or Saturn tanker; I was lucky enough to get the Jove Commerce job.

That, or I could tuck tail and go back the way I came-and that meant remaining aboard the Comet for its return flight to the Moon.

In the latter case, I’d sooner try to walk home.

Try to understand. For the past three weeks, beginning with the moment I had crawled out of the zombie tank, I had been forced to endure almost every indignity possible while serving under Bo McKinnon. His first order, in fact, had been in the hibernation deck, when he had told me to take the catheter off his prick and hold a bag for him to pee in.

That had been only the beginning. Standing double-watches on the bridge because he was too lazy to get out of bed. Repairing decrepit equipment that should have been replaced years ago, only to have it break down again within a few more days after he had abused it past its tolerance levels. Being issued spurious orders on a whim, only to have those same orders countermanded before the task was half-complete because McKinnon had more scut-work he wanted me to do-then being berated because the first assignment had been left unfinished. Meals skipped because the captain decided that now was the time for me to go EVA and inspect the davits in the payload bay. Rest periods interrupted because he wanted a snack fetched from the galley and was too “busy” to get it himself. . . .

But most of all, the sibilant, high-pitched whine of his voice, like that of a spoiled brat who had been given too many toys by an overindulgent parent. Which was, indeed, exactly what he was.

Bo McKinnon hadn’t earned his TBSA commission. It had been purchased for him by his stepfather, a wealthy lunar businessman who was one of the Association’s principal stockholders. The Comet had been an obsolete ore freighter on the verge of being condemned and scuttled when the old man had bought it for the kid as a means of getting his unwanted stepson out of his hair. Before that, McKinnon had been a customs inspector at Descartes, a minor bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur fostered by the cheap space operas in his collection of moldering twentieth century magazines, for which he apparently spent every spare credit he had in the bank. No doubt his stepfather had been as sick of McKinnon as I was. At least this way the pompous geek spent most of his time out in the belt, hauling rock and bellowing orders at whoever was unlucky enough to have been talked into signing aboard the Comet.

This much I had learned after I had been aboard for three weeks. By the time I had sent a message to Schumacher, demanding to know what else he hadn’t told me about Bo McKinnon, I was almost ready to steal the Comet’s skiff and attempt flying it to Mars. When Schumacher sent me his reply, he gave a lame apology for not telling me everything about McKinnon’s background; after all, it was his job to muster crewmembers for deep-space craft, and he couldn’t play favorites, so sorry, et cetera . . .

By then I had figured out the rest. Bo McKinnon was a rich kid playing at being a spacecraft commander. He wanted the role, but he didn’t want to pay the dues, the hard-won experience that any true commander has to accomplish. Instead, he managed to shanghai washed-up cases like me to do his dirty work for him. No telling what arrangement he had worked out with Jeri; for my part, I was the latest in a long line of flunkies.

I didn’t hijack the skiff, if only because doing so would have ruined my career and Mars colonists are notoriously unkind to uninvited guests. Besides, I figured that this was a temporary thing: three weeks of Captain Future, and I’d have a story to tell my shipmates aboard the Jove Commerce as we sipped whisky around the wardroom table. You think this captain’s a hardass? Hey, let me tell you about my last one . . .

Now, as much as I still wanted to get the hell off the Comet, I did not wish to be marooned on Ceres, where I would be at the tender mercies of the station chief.

Time to try a different tack with Captain Future.

I released the armrests and backed off, taking a deep breath as I forced myself to calm down. “Look, Captain,” I said, “what’s so important about this asteroid? I mean, if you’ve located a possible lode, you can always stake a claim with the Association and come back for it later. What’s the rush?”

McKinnon raised an imperious eyebrow. “Mr. Furland, I am not a prospector,” he huffed. “If I were, I wouldn’t be commanding the Comet, would I?”

No, I silently responded, you wouldn’t. No self-respecting rock-hounds would have you aboard their ship. “Then what’s so important?”

Without a word, McKinnon unbuckled his seat harness and pushed out his chair. Microgravity is the great equalizer for overweight men; he floated across the narrow compartment with the grace of a lunar trapeze artist, somersaulting in mid-air and catching a ceiling rung above the navigation table, where he swung upside-down and typed a command into the keyboard.

The holo expanded until 2046-Barr filled the tank. Now I could see that it was a potato-shaped rock, about three klicks in length and seven hundred meters in diameter. An octopus-like machine clung to one end of the asteroid, with a narrow, elongated pistol thrust out into space.

I recognized it immediately. A General Astronautics Class-B Mass Driver, the type used by the Association to push large carbonaceous-chrondite asteroids into the inner belt. In effect, a mobile mining rig. Long bores sunk into the asteroid extracted raw material from its core, which in turn were fed into the machine’s barrel-shaped refinery, where heavy metals and volatiles were separated from the ancient stone. The remaining till was then shot through an electromagnetic railgun as reaction mass that propelled both asteroid and mass driver in whatever direction was desired.

By the time the asteroid reached lunar orbit, the rig would have refined enough nickel, copper, titanium, carbon, and hydrogen to make the effort worthwhile. The hollowed out remains of the asteroid could then be sold to one of the companies, who would then begin the process of transforming it into another LaGrange colony.

“That’s the TBSA Fool’s Gold,” McKinnon said, pointing at the computer-generated image. “It’s supposed to reach lunar orbit in four months. Twelve persons are aboard, including its captain, first officer, executive officer, physician, two metallurgists, three engineers . . .”

“Yeah, okay. Twelve guys who are going to get rich when the shares are divvied up.” I couldn’t keep the envy out of my voice. Only one or two main-belt asteroids made their way in-system every few years, mainly because prospectors didn’t find enough such rocks to make them worth the time, money, and attention. The smaller ones were usually broken up by nukes, and anything much larger was claimed and mined by prospectors. On the other hand, if just the right asteroid was located and claimed, the bonanza was enough to make its finders wealthy enough to retire. “So what?”

McKinnon stared at me for a moment, then he cartwheeled until he was no longer upside-down and dug into a pocket. He handed me a wadded-up slip of printout. “Read,” he said.

I read:

MESS. 1473 0118 GMT 7/26/73 CODE A1/0947

TRANSMISSION FROM CERES STATION TO ALL SPACECRAFT

PRIORITY REPEATER

MESSAGE BEGINS

MAYDAY RECEIVED 1240 GMT 7/25/46 FROM TBSA MASS DRIVER “FOOL’S GOLD” BREAK VESSEL EXPERIENCING UNKNOWN-REPEAT UNKNOWN-PROBLEMS BREAK CASUALTIES AND POSSIBLE FATALITIES REPORTED DUE TO UNDETERMINED CAUSES BREAK SHIP STATUS UNKNOWN BREAK NO FURTHER COMMUNICATION FOLLOWING MAYDAY BREAK VESSEL FAILS TO RESPOND TO QUERIES BREAK REQUEST URGENT ASSISTANCE

FROM NEAREST VESSEL OF ANY REGISTRY BREAK PLEASE RESPOND ASAP

MESSAGE ENDS

(TRANSMISSION REPEATS)

0119 GMT 7/26/73 CODE A1/0947

I turned to Jeri. “Are we the nearest vessel?”

She gravely nodded her head. “I checked. The only other ship within range is a prospector near Gaspara, and it’s thirty-four hours from Barr. Everything else is closer to Ceres than we are.”

Damn.

According to common law, the closest vessel to a spacecraft transmitting a Mayday was obligated to respond, regardless of any other mission or prior obligation in all but the most extreme emergency . . . and my job aboard the Jove Commerce didn’t qualify as such, as much as I might have liked to think otherwise.

McKinnon held out his hand. I handed the paper back to him. “I guess you’ve already informed Ceres that we’re on our way.”

The captain silently reached to another panel and pushed a set of buttons. A flatscreen lit, displaying a playback of the transmission he had sent to Ceres Station. A simulacrum of the fictional Curt Newton appeared on the screen.

“This is Captain Future, calling from the TBSA Comet, registry Mexico Alpha Foxtrot one-six-seven-five.” The voice belonged to McKinnon even if the handsome face did not. The Brain had lip-synched them together, and the effect was sadly absurd. I’ve received your transmission, and I’m on our way to investigate the situation aboard the Fool’s Gold . The Futuremen and I will keep you informed. Captain Future, over and out.”

I groaned as I watched this. The idiot couldn’t keep his fantasy life out of anything, even a distress signal. Captain Future and the-yech!-Futuremen to the rescue.

“You have something to say, Mister Furland?”

McKinnon’s hairy chin was thrust out at me with what he probably thought was obstinate resolve, but which actually resembled the petulance of an insecure child daring someone to step into his corner of the sandbox. Not for the first time, I realized that his only way of dealing with people was to boss them around with what little authority he could muster-and since this was his ship, no one could either object or walk out on him. Least of all me.

“Nothing, Captain.” I pushed off from the nav table and floated back to my duty station. Like it or not, we were committed; he had both law and his commission on his side, and I wasn’t about to commit mutiny because I had refused my commander’s orders to respond to a distress signal.

“Very good.” McKinnon shoved himself in the direction of the carousel hatch. “The sextant confirms we’re on course for Barr. I’ll be in my cabin if you need me.”

He stopped, then looked over his shoulder. “You’ll need to arm the weapons pod. There may be . . . trouble.”

Then he was gone, undoubtedly to claim the sleep I had lost.

“Trouble, my ass,” I murmured under my breath.

I glanced over at Jeri. If I expected a sly wink or an understanding smile, I received nothing of the kind. Her face was stoical behind the butterfly mask she wore; she touched her jaw, speaking into the microphone implanted beneath her skin at childhood. “TBSA Fool’s Gold, this is TBSA Comet, Mexico Alpha Foxtrot one-six-seven-five. Do you copy? Over.”

I was trapped aboard a ship commanded by a lunatic.

Or so I thought. The real insanity was yet to come.

Space pirates were no new thing, to the System. There were always some corsairs infesting the outlaw asteroids or the wilder moons of the outer planets.

—HAMILTON, Outlaw World (1945)

One good thing could be said about standing a second consecutive watch on the bridge: I finally learned a little more about Jeri Lee-Bose.

Does it seem surprising that I could have spent three weeks of active duty aboard a spacecraft without hearing a shipmate’s entire life story? If so, understand that there’s a certain code of conduct among spacers; since many of us have unsavory pasts that we’d rather not discuss, it’s not considered proper etiquette to bug someone about private matters unless they themselves bring it up first. Of course, some shipmates will bore you to death, blabbing about everything they’ve ever said or done until you want to push them into the nearest airlock. On the other hand I’ve known several people for many years without ever learning where they were born or who their parents were.

Jeri fell into the latter category. After we were revived from biostasis, I had learned many little things about her, but not very many big things. It wasn’t as if she was consciously hiding her past; it was simply that the subject had never really come up, during the few times that we had been alone together without Captain Future’s presence looming over us. Indeed, she might have completed the voyage as a near-stranger, had I not made an offhand comment.

“I bet the selfish son-of-a-bitch has never thought of anyone else in his life,” I said.

I had just returned from the galley, where I had fetched two fresh squeezebulbs of coffee for us. I was still fuming from the argument I had lost, and since McKinnon wasn’t in earshot I gave Jeri an earful.

She passively sipped her coffee as I pissed and moaned about my misfortunes, listening patiently as I paced back and forth in my stikshoes, ranting about the commanding officer’s dubious mental balance, his unflattering physiognomy, his questionable taste in literature, his body odor and anything else that came to mind, and when I paused for breath she finally put in her quarter-credit.

“He saved my life,” she said.

That caught me literally off-balance. My shoes came unstuck from the carpet, and I had to grab hold of a ceiling handrail.

“Say what?” I asked.

Not looking up at me, Jeri Lee absently played with the squeezebulb in her left hand, her right foot holding open the pages of her personal logbook. “You said that he’s never thought of anyone else in his life,” she replied. “Whatever else you might say about him, you’re wrong there, because he saved my life.”

I shifted hands so I could sip my coffee. “Anything you want to talk about?”

She shrugged. “Nothing that probably hasn’t occurred to you already. I mean, you’ve probably wondered why a google is serving as first officer aboard this ship, haven’t you?” When my mouth gaped open, she smiled a little. “Don’t look so surprised. We’re not telepathic, rumors to the contrary . . . it’s just that I’ve heard the same thing over the last several years we’ve been together.”

Jeri gazed pensively through the forward windows. Although we were out of the Kirkwood gap, no asteroids could be seen. The belt is much less dense than many people think, so all we saw was limitless starscape, with Mars a distant ruddy orb off to the port side.

“You know how Superiors mate, don’t you?” she asked at last, still not looking at me.

I felt my face grow warm. Actually, I didn’t know, although I had frequently fantasized about Jeri helping me find out. Then I realized that she was speaking literally. “Prearranged marriages, right?”

She nodded. “All very carefully planned, in order to avoid inbreeding while expanding the gene pool as far as possible. It allows for some selection, of course . . . no one tells us exactly whom we should marry, just as long as it’s outside of our own clans and it’s not to Primaries.”

She paused to finish her coffee, then she crumpled the squeezebulb and batted it aside with her right foot. It floated in midair, finding its own miniature orbit within the compartment. “Well, sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. When I was twenty, I fell in love with a boy at Descartes Station . . . a Primary, as luck would have it. At least I thought I was in love . . .”

She grimaced, brushing her long braid away from her delicate shoulders. “In hindsight, I guess we were just good in bed. In the long run it didn’t matter, because as soon as he discovered that he had knocked me up, he got the union to ship him off to Mars. They were only too glad to do so, in order to avoid. . .”

“A messy situation. I see.” I took a deep breath. “Leaving you stuck with his child.”

She shook her head. “No. No child. I tried to keep it, but the miscarriage . . . anyway, the less said about that, the better.”

“I’m sorry.” What else could I have said? She should have known better, since there had never been a successful crossbreeding between Superiors and Primaries? She had been young and stupid; both are forgivable sins, especially when they usually occur in tandem.

Jeri heaved a sigh. “It didn’t matter. By then, my family had disowned me, mainly because I had violated the partnership that had already been made for me with another clan. Both clans were scandalized, and as a result neither one wanted me.” She looked askance at me. “Bigotry works both ways, you know. You call us googles, we call you apes, and I had slept with an ape. An insult against the extropic ideal.”

She closed the logbook, tossed it from her left foot to her right hand, and tucked it into a web beneath the console. “So I was grounded at Descartes. A small pension, just enough to pay the rent, but nothing really to live for. I suppose they expected me to become a prostitute . . . which I did, for a short time. . . or commit ritual suicide and save everyone the sweat.”

“That’s cold.” But not unheard of. There were a few grounded Superiors to be found in the inner system, poor sad cases working at menial tasks in Lagranges or on the Moon. I remembered an alcoholic google who hung out at Sloppy Joe’s; he had eagle wings tattooed across his back, and he cadged drinks off tourists in return for performing cartwheels across the bar. An eagle with clipped tailfeathers. Every so often, one would hear of a Superior who checked out by walking into an airlock and pushing the void button. No one knew why, but now I had an answer. It was the Superior way.

“That’s extropy for you.” She laughed bitterly, then was quiet for a moment. “I was considering taking the long walk,” she said at last, “but Bo found me first, when I . . . well, propositioned him. He bought me a couple of drinks and listened to my story, and when I was done crying he told me he needed a new first officer. No one else would work for him, so he offered me the job, for as long as I cared to keep it.”

“And you’ve kept it.”

“And I’ve kept it,” she finished. “For the record, Mr. Furland, he has always treated me with the greatest of respect, despite what anyone else might have told you. I’ve never slept with him, nor has he ever demanded that I do so. . .”

“I didn’t . . .!”

“No, of course you haven’t, but you’ve probably wondered, haven’t you?” When I turned red, she laughed again. “Everyone who has worked the Comet has, and sometimes they like to tell stories about the google and the fat slob, fucking in his cabin between shifts.”

She smiled, slowly shaking her head. “It isn’t so . . . but, to tell the truth, if he ever asked, I’d do so without a second thought. I owe him that little.”

I didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. It isn’t often when a shipmate unburdens his or her soul, and Jeri had given me much to consider. Not the least of which was the slow realization that, now more than before, I was becoming quite fond of her.

Before he had gone below, McKinnon had told me to activate the external missile pod, so I pushed myself over to his station and used that minor task to cover for my embarrassment.

Strapping on EMP to an Ares-class freighter was another example of McKinnon’s overheated imagination. When I had once asked why, he’d told me that he’d purchased it as war surplus from the Pax Astra Royal Navy back in ’71, after the hijacking of the TBSA Olympia . No one had ever discovered who had taken the Olympia-indeed, the hijack wasn’t discovered until five months later, when the uncrewed solar-sail vessel arrived at Ceres Station with its cargo holds empty-but it was widely believed to be the work of indie prospectors desperate for food and various supplies.

I had to cover my smile when McKinnon told me that he was worried about “pirates” trying to waylay the Comet . Having four 10k nukes tucked behind the Comet ’s cargo section was like arming a gig with heatseekers. Not that McKinnon wouldn’t have loved it if someone did try to steal his ship-Captain Future meets the Asteroid Pirates and all that-but I was worried that he might open fire on some off-course prospector ship that was unlucky enough to cross his path.

Another thought occurred to me. “When he picked you . . . um, when you signed on as First Officer . . . were you aware that he doesn’t have a firm grip on reality?”

Jeri didn’t answer immediately. I was about to repeat myself when I felt a gentle nudge against my arm. Looking down, I saw her left foot slide past me, its thumb-sized toes toggling the MISSILE STANDBY switch I had neglected to throw.

“Sure,” she said. “In fact, he used to call me Joan . . . as in Joan Ran-dall, Curt Newton’s girlfriend . . . until I got him to cut it out.”

“Really?”

“Um-hmm.” She rested her right leg against the back of my chair. “Consider yourself lucky he doesn’t call you Otho or Grag. He used to do that to other crewmen until I told him that no one got the joke.” She grinned. “You ought to try reading some of those stories sometime. He’s loaded them into The Brain’s library annex. Not great literature, to be sure . . . in fact, they’re rather silly . . . but for early twentieth century science fiction, they’re . . .”

“Science what?”

“Science fiction. What they used to call fantasy back . . . well, never mind.” She pulled her leg back and folded it beneath her bottom as she gazed again out the window. “Look, I know Bo can be weird most of the time, but you have to realize that he’s a romantic stuck in an age where most people don’t even know what the word means anymore. He wants derring-do, swashbuckling, great adventure . . . he wants to be a hero.”

“Uh-huh. Bo McKinnon, space hero.” I tried to transpose him on the magazine covers he had framed in the galley: wielding a ray gun in each hand, defending Jeri from ravaging monsters. It didn’t work, except to make me stifle a chuckle.

“That isn’t too much to ask for, is it?” There was sadness in her eyes when she glanced my way. Before I could get the grin off my face, she returned her gaze to the windows. “Perhaps so. This isn’t an age of heroes. We move rock back and forth across the system, put money in the bank, and congratulate ourselves for our ingenuity. A hundred years ago, what we’re doing now was the stuff of dreams, and the people who did it were larger than life. That’s what he finds so attractive in those stories. But now . . .”

She let out her breath. “Who can blame Bo for wanting something he can’t have? He’s stuck on a second-hand freighter with an ex-whore for a first officer and a second officer who openly despises him, and he’s the butt of every joke from Earth to Iapetus. No wonder he drops everything to answer a Mayday. This may be the only chance he gets.”

I was about to retort that my only chance to get a job on a decent ship was slipping through my fingers when her console double-beeped. A moment later, The Brain’s voice came through the ceiling speaker.

“Pardon me, but we’re scheduled for course correction maneuvers. Do you wish for me to execute?”

Jeri swiveled her chair around. “That’s okay, Brain. We’ll handle it by manual control. Give me the coordinates.”

The AI responded by displaying a three-dimensional grid on her flatscreens. “Want me to do anything?” I asked, although it was obvious that she had matters well in hand.

“I’ve got everything covered,” she said, her long fingers typing in the coordinates. “Get some sleep, if you want.” She cast a quick grin over her shoulder. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell Bo you dozed off in his chair.”

End of conversation. Besides, she had a good idea. I cranked back the chair, buckled the seat belt and tucked my hands in my pockets so they wouldn’t drift around in freefall. It might be a while before I got another chance; once we reached 2046-Barr, Captain Future would be back on deck, bellowing orders and otherwise making my life painful.

She had told me a lot about Bo McKinnon, but nothing I had heard gave me much affection for the man. So far as I was concerned, he was still the biggest dork I had ever met . . . and if there was anyone aboard the TBSA Comet who deserved my sympathy, it was Jeri Lee-Bose, who was meant for better things than this.

As I shut my eyes, it occurred to me that the captain’s chair fitted me a lot better than it did McKinnon. One day, perhaps I’d have enough money in the bank to buy him out. It would be interesting to see if he took orders as well as he gave them.

It was a warm and comforting thought, and I snuggled against it like a pillow as I fell asleep.

“Look, Arraj-it is a meteor!” cried the younger Martian excitedly. “And there’s a ship guiding it!”

The two stared for a moment at the incredible spectacle. The expanding black spot was clearly a giant meteor, rushing now at tremendous speed toward Mars. And close beside the booming meteor rushed a dark spaceship, playing rays upon the great mass. The ship was propelling the meteor toward Mars.

—HAMILTON, Captain Future’s Challenge (1940)

Several hours later, the Comet rendezvoused with 2046-Barr.

The asteroid looked much the same as the holo tank had depicted it—an enormous rock the color of charcoal—but the Fool’s Gold itself was the largest spacecraft I had ever seen short of a Lagrange colony. It dwarfed the Comet like a yacht parked alongside an ocean liner, a humongous machine attached to one end of the asteroid’s mass.

A humongous machine, and apparently lifeless. We approached the mass-driver with great caution, being careful to avoid its stern lest we get nailed by the stream of debris being constantly ejected by its railgun. That was the only apparent sign of activity; although light gleamed from the portals of the rotating command sphere, we could detect no motion within the windows, and the radio remained as silent as it had been for the last eighteen hours.

“Look yonder.” I pointed through the window at the hangar bay, a wide berth within the barrel-shaped main hull just forward of the railgun. Its doors were open, and as the Comet slowly cruised past we could see the gig and service pods parked in their cradles. “Everything’s there. Even the lifeboats are still in place.”

Jeri angled the camera on the outrigger telemetry boom until it peered into the bay. Her wide eyes narrowed as she studied a close-up view on a flatscreen. “That’s weird,” she murmured. “Why would they depressurize the bay and open the doors if they didn’t . . .?”

“Knock it off, you two!”

McKinnon was strapped in his chair, on the other side of Jeri Lee’s duty station from mine. “It doesn’t matter why they did it. Just keep your eyes peeled for pirates . . . they could be lurking somewhere nearby.”

I chose to remain silent as I piloted the Comet past the mass-driver’s massive anchor-arms and over the top of the asteroid. Ever since McKinnon had returned to the bridge an hour ago-following the shower and leisurely breakfast I myself had been denied-he had been riding his favorite hobby horse: asteroid pirates had seized control of the Fool’s Gold and taken its crew hostage.

This despite the fact that we had not spotted any other spacecraft during our long journey and that none could now be seen in the vicinity of the asteroid. It could also be logically argued that the four-person crew of a prospector ship would have a hard time overcoming the twelve-person crew of a mass-driver, but logic meant little to Captain Future. His left hand rested on the console near the EMP controls, itching to launch a nuke at the pirate ship he was certain to find lurking in the asteroid’s shadow.

Yet, when we completed a fly-by of 2046-Barr, none were to be found. In fact, nothing moved at all, save for the asteroid itself . . .

A thought occurred to me. “Hey, Brain,” I said aloud, “have you got a fix on the mass-driver’s position and bearing?”

“Affirmative, Mr. Furland. It is X-ray one-seven-six, Yankee two . . .”

“Mr. Furland!” McKinnon snapped. “I didn’t give orders for you to . . .”

I ignored him. “Skip the numbers, Brain. Just tell me if it’s still on course for cislunar rendezvous.”

A momentary pause, then: “Negative, Mr. Furland. The Fool’s Gold has altered its trajectory. According to my calculations, there is a seventy-two-point-one probability that it is now on collision course with the planet Mars.”

Jeri went pale as she sucked in her breath, and even McKinnon managed to shut up. “Show it to me on the tank,” I said as I turned my chair around to face the nav table.

The tank lit, displaying a holographic diagram of the Fool’s Gold’s present position in relationship with the Martian sidereal-hour. Mars still lay half an A.U. away, but as The Brain traced a shallow-curving orange line through the belt, we saw that it neatly intercepted the red planet as it advanced on its orbit around the Sun.

The Brain translated the math it had displayed in a box next to the three-dimensional grid. “Assuming that its present delta-vee remains unchecked, in two hundred and thirty-six hours, twelve minutes, and twenty-four seconds, 2046-Barr will collide with Mars.”

I did some arithmetic in my head. “That’s about ten days from now.”

“Nine-point-eight-three Earth standard days, to be exact.” The Brain expanded the image of Mars until it filled the tank; a bull’s-eye appeared at a point just above the equator. “Estimated point of impact will be approximately twelve degrees North by sixty-three degrees West, near the edge of the Lunae Planum.”

“Just north of Valles Marineris,” Jeri said. “Oh God, Rohr, that’s near . . .”

“I know.” I didn’t need a refresher course in planetary geography. The impact point was in the low plains above Mariner Valley, only a few hundred klicks northeast of Arsia Station, not to mention closer to the smaller settlements scattered around the vast canyon system. For all I knew, there could now be a small mining town on the Lunae Planum itself; Mars was being colonized so quickly these days, it was hard to keep track of where a bunch of its one and a half million inhabitants decided to pitch claims and call themselves New Chattanooga or whatever.

“Sabotage!” McKinnon yelled. He unbuckled his harness and pushed himself closer to the nav table, where he stared at the holo. “Someone has sabotaged the mass-driver so that it’ll collide with Mars! Do you realize . . .?”

“Shut up, Captain.” I didn’t need his histrionics to tell me what would occur if. . . when . . . 2046-Barr came down in the middle of the Lunae Planum.

The Martian ecosystem wasn’t as fragile as Earth’s. Indeed, it was much more volatile, as the attempt in the ’50s to terraform the planet and make the climate more stable had ultimately proved. However, the Mars colonists who still remained after the boondoggle had come to depend upon its seasonal patterns in order to grow crops, maintain solar farms, continue mining operations and other activities which insured their basic survival.

It was a very tenuous sort of existence that relied upon conservative prediction of climatic changes. The impact of a three-kilometer asteroid in the equatorial region would throw all that straight into the compost toilet. Localized quakes and duststorms would only be the beginning; two or three hundred people might be killed outright, but the worst would be yet to come. The amount of dust that would be raised into the atmosphere by the collision would blot out the sky for months on end, causing global temperatures to drop from Olympus Mons to the Hellas Plantia. As a result, everything from agriculture to power supplies would be affected, to put it mildly, with starvation in the cold and dark awaiting most of the survivors.

It wasn’t quite doomsday. A few isolated settlements might get by with the aid of emergency relief efforts from Earth. But as the major colony world of humankind, Mars would cease to exist.

McKinnon was still transfixed upon the holo tank, jabbing his finger at Mars while raving about saboteurs and space pirates and God knows what else, when I turned back to Jeri. She had taken the helm in my absence, and as the Comet came up on the Fool’s Gold again, I closely studied the mass-driver on the flatscreens.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “The hangar bay is out . . . we can’t send the skiff in there while it’s depressurized and the cradles are full. Maybe if we . . .”

She was way ahead of me. “There’s an auxiliary docking collar here,” she said, pointing to a port on the spar leading to the command sphere. “It’ll be tight, but I think we can squeeze us in there.”

I looked at the screen. Tight indeed. Despite the fact that the Comet had a universal docking adapter, the freighter wasn’t designed for mating with a craft as large as Fool’s Gold. “That’s cutting it close,” I said. “If we can collapse the telemetry boom, though, we might be able to make it.”

She nodded. “We can do that, no problem . . . except it means losing contact with Ceres.”

“But if we don’t hard-dock,” I replied, “then someone’s got to go EVA and try entering a service airlock.”

Knowing that this someone would probably be me, I didn’t much relish the idea. An untethered spacewalk between two vessels under acceleration is an iffy business at best. On the other hand, cutting off our radio link with Ceres under these circumstances was probably not a good idea. If we fucked up in some major way, then no one at Ceres Station would be informed of the situation, and early warning from Ceres to Arsia Station might save a few lives, if evacuation of settlements near Lunae Planum was started soon enough.

I made up my mind. “We’ll hard-dock,” I said, turning in my seat toward the communications console, “but first we send a squib to Ceres, let them know what’s . . .”

“Hey! What are you two doing?”

Captain Future had finally decided to see what the Futuremen were doing behind his back. He kicked off the nav table and pushed over to us, grabbing the backs of our chairs with one hand each to hover over us. “I haven’t issued any orders, and nothing is done on my ship without my . . .”

“Bo, have you been listening to what we’ve been saying?” Jeri’s expression was carefully neutral as she stared up at him. “Have you heard a word either Rohr or I have said?”

“Of course I . . .!”

“Then you know that this is the only recourse,” she said, still speaking calmly. “If we don’t hard-dock with the Gold, then we won’t have a chance of shutting down the railgun or averting its course.”

“But the pirates. They might . . .!”

I sighed. “Look, get it through your head. There’s no . . .”

“Rohr,” she interrupted, casting me a stern look that shut me up. When I dummied up once more, she transfixed McKinnon again with her wide blue eyes. “If there are pirates aboard the Gold,” she said patiently, “we’ll find them. But right now, this isn’t something we can solve by firing missiles. Rohr’s right. First, we send a squib to Ceres, let them know what’s going on. Then . . .”

“I know that!”

“Then, we have to dock with . . .”

“I know that! I know that!” His greasy hair scattered in all directions as he shook his head in frustration. “But I didn’t . . . I didn’t give the orders and . . .”

He stopped, sullenly glaring at me with inchoate rage, and I suddenly realized the true reason for his anger. McKinnon’s subordinate second officer, whom he had harassed and chastised constantly for three weeks, had become uppity by reaching a solution that had evaded him. Worse yet, the second officer had done it with the cooperation of the Captain’s first officer, who had tacitly agreed with him on all previous occasions.

Yet this wasn’t a trifling matter such as checking the primary fuel pump or cleaning the galley. Countless lives were at stake, time was running out, and while he was spewing obvious nonsense about space pirates, Mister Furland was trying to take command of his ship.

Had I a taser conveniently tucked in my belt, I would have settled the argument by giving him a few volts and strapping his dead ass in his precious chair, thereby allowing Jeri Lee and me to continue our work unfettered. But since outright mutiny runs against my grain, compromise was my only weapon now.

“Begging your pardon, Captain,” I said. “You’re quite right. You haven’t issued orders, and I apologize.”

Then I turned around in my chair, folded my hands in my lap, and waited.

McKinnon sucked in his breath. He stared through the windows at the Fool’s Gold, looked over his shoulder once more at the holo tank, weighing the few options available against the mass of his ego. After too many wasted seconds, he finally reached a decision.

“Very well,” he said. He let go of our chairs and shoved himself back to his accustomed seat. “Ms. Bose, prepare to dock with the Fool’s Gold . Mr. Furland, ready the main airlock hatch and prepare to go EVA.”

“Aye, sir,” Jeri said.

“Um, yeah . . . aye, sir.”

“Meanwhile, I’ll send a message to Ceres Station and inform them of the situation before we lose contact.” Satisfied that he had reached a proper decision, he laid his hands on the armrest. “Good work, Futuremen,” he added. “You’ve done well.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Jeri said.

“Aye, sir. Thank you.” I unbuckled my seat harness and pushed off toward the bridge hatch, trying hard not to smile.

A little victory. Insignificant as it then seemed, I didn’t have any idea how much my life depended upon it.

He took the pilot chair and headed the Comet across the zone toward the computed position of the invisible asteroid.

“They’ll surely see us approaching!” Ezra warned. “The Magician of Mars will be taking no chances, Cap’n Future!”

“We’re going to use a stratagem to get onto that asteroid without him suspecting,” Curt informed. “Watch.”

—HAMILTON, The Magician of Mars (1941)

I’m a creature of habit, at least when it comes to established safety procedures, and so it was out of habit that I donned an EVA suit before I cycled through the Comet ’s airlock and entered the Fool’s Gold .

On one hand, wearing the bulky spacesuit within a pressurized spacecraft is stupidly redundant, and the panel within the airlock told me that there was positive pressure on the other side of the hatch. Yet it could be argued the airlock sensors might be out of whack and there was nothing but hard vacuum within the spar; this has been known to happen before, albeit rarely, and people have died as a result. In any case, the Astronaut’s General Handbook says that an EVA suit should be worn when boarding another craft under uncertain conditions, and so I followed the book.

Doing so saved my life.

I went alone, leaving Jeri and McKinnon behind inside the freighter. The hatch led past the Gold’s airlock into the spar’s access tunnel, all of which was vacant. Switching on the helmet’s external mike, I heard nothing but the customary background hum of the ventilation system, further evidence that the vessel crew compartments were still pressurized.

At that point, I could well have removed my helmet and hung it from a strap on my utility belt. In fact, the only reason I didn’t was that I didn’t want it banging around as I went through the carrousel, which lay at the end of the tunnel to my right. Besides, the stillness of the tunnel gave me the chills. Surely someone would have noticed the unscheduled docking of an Ares-class freighter, let alone one so far from Ceres. Why wasn’t there an officer waiting at the airlock to chew me out for risking collision with his precious ship?

The answer came after I rotated through the carrousel and entered the rotating command sphere. That’s when I found the first corpse.

A naked man hung upside down through an open manhole, his limp arms dangling above the wide pool of blood on the deck. It was difficult to see his face, because the blood that had dyed it crimson came from a scimitar-shaped gash in his neck. Looking up through the manhole, I saw that his feet had been neatly lashed together with a bungee cord, which in turn was tied to a conduit in the ceiling of the corridor directly above.

Since there were no bloodstains below his shoulders, it was obvious that his throat had been slit after he had been hung from the conduit. The blood was dry-most of it, anyway-and the body was stiff. He had been here for quite some time.

I reported what I found to Jeri and McKinnon, and then I gingerly pushed the body out of the way and continued down the corridor.

Please understand if everything I tell you sounds coldly methodical, even callous. First, if you’ve worked in space as long as I have-that is, all my life-then death, no matter how horrible it may be, is no stranger. The first time I saw a man die was when I was nine years old, when a one-in-a-million micrometeorite punched through the helmet faceplate of one of my school teachers while he was leading us on a field trip to the Apollo 17 landing site at Taurus Lithrow. Since then, I’ve seen the grisly results of explosive decompression, fatal radiation overexposure, freak mining accidents, careless suit-up procedures, hull fires and electrocutions, even someone who choked on his own vomit after consuming too much bathtub vodka during a birthday party. Death comes to us all, eventually; if you’re careful and wise, all you can do is make sure that it isn’t too painful and no one is stuck with a mess to clean up.

Second: if I attempted now to describe each and every body I discovered as I made my way through the Fool’s Gold, not only would the result be gratuitous pandering to those who wallow in such details, but I would never be able to complete this testimony.

To put it succinctly, the command sphere of the Fool’s Gold was a slaughterhouse.

I found ten more bodies, each more gruesome than the last. They were in crew cabins and passageways, in the galley and in the head, in the rec room and the quartermaster’s office.

Most were alone, but two of them were together, each apparently dead from wounds they had inflicted upon one another: a man and a woman, who had tried to carve each other up with knives they had taken from the nearby galley.

A couple of the bodies were nude, like the first, but most were fully or partially clothed. For the most part, they had died of stabbing or bludgeon wounds, by means of anything that could be used as a weapon, whether it be a ballpoint pen, a screwdriver, or a pipefitter’s wrench.

One woman was lucky. She had committed suicide by hanging herself by a coiled bedsheet she had cast over the top of a door. I hope that she had successfully strangled herself before whoever found her body seared off her right arm with the cutting torch cast nearby.

As I climbed up ladders, poked my helmet through hatches, and stepped over stiffening corpses, I kept up a running monologue, informing the Comet of where I exactly was within the vessel and what I had just found. I made no speculation as to why this massacre had taken place, only to note that the bodies seemed reasonably fresh and that most of the bloodstains were dry.

And blood lay everywhere. It was splattered across walls and soaked into carpets and dripping from wall fixtures, until it no longer resembled blood and just looked like spilled red paint. I was glad I had my helmet on, because the visor helped distance me from the carnage, and the rank odor would have made me even more sickened than I was now.

Although I heard an occasional gasp or exclamation from Jeri through my headset, after a while I couldn’t detect McKinnon’s voice any longer. I assumed that he had gone someplace private to vomit. This was understandable; the violence around me was mind shattering.

There were four decks in the command sphere, one above the other. By the time I reached the top deck, I had counted eleven corpses. Remembering that McKinnon had told me earlier that the crew complement of the Fool’s Gold was twelve, I had begun to wonder where the last body lay.

The hatch leading to the bridge was sealed shut; I used the laser welding torch from my belt to cut the lock. When I grasped the lockwheel and prized it open, it made a faint grinding noise, and it was at that moment that I heard a methodical, almost rhythmic thumping, as if something were being beaten against a bulkhead.

I first thought it was another background noise from the vessel itself, but when I pushed the hatch farther open, the noise it made interrupted the rhythm.

I stopped, holding the hatch ajar as I listened intently. I heard a faint giggle, then the thumping sound recommenced.

Someone was alive within the bridge.

The command center was dimly lit, the fluorescents switched off; the only light came from computer displays, flatscreens, and multicolored switches. The deck was in ruins, as if there had been a blowout, although the external pressure gauge told me it was still pressurized: upended chairs, ripped logbooks and manuals strewn across the floor, the remains of a bloody shirt.

The thumping continued. Seeking its unseen source, I switched on the helmet lamp and walked within its beam, my eyes darting back and forth as I searched for the sole survivor of the Fool’s Gold . I was halfway across the bridge when my eye caught something scrawled across a bulkhead. Two words, fingerpainted in blood across the gray surface:

PLAGUE

TITAN

It was then that I knew that wearing an EVA suit had saved my life.

Trembling within its insulated layers, I crossed the deserted bridge, looking for the last remaining crewmember of the Fool’s Gold.

I found him in the emergency airlock, huddled in a corner next to the hatch, his knees drawn up to his chin. The jumpsuit he wore was streaked with gore, but I could still make out the captain’s stars on its epaulets. His wary eyes winced from the glare of my lamp, and he giggled like a small child who had been caught exploring his mother’s dresser drawers.

And then he continued to beat at the deck with the severed human arm he grasped in his left hand.

I don’t know how long I stared at him. A few seconds, several minutes, perhaps longer. Jeri was saying something I couldn’t understand; I paid no attention, nor could I respond. It wasn’t until I heard another noise-from behind me, the faint sound of the hatch being shoved open-that I tore my eyes away from the mad captain of the Fool’s Gold.

Bo McKinnon.

He had followed me from the Comet .

And, like the idiot he was, he wasn’t wearing an EVA suit.

The little teardrop ship, the Comet, blasted at top speed toward the Earth and its summoning call. Captain Future thought somberly of the many times he had answered that call. Each time, he and the Futuremen had found themselves called on to battle deadly perils. Was it to be the same this time?

“We can’t always win,” he thought grimly. “We’ve been lucky, but the law of averages eventually has to turn against us.”

—HAMILTON, The Triumph of Captain Future (1940)

Despite the name, no one knows the exact origin of the Titan Plague. It was first contracted by members of the Herschel Explorer expedition of 2069, during the Pax’s ill-fated attempt to establish a research outpost on Titan. Although it was later theorized that the virus was indigenous to Titan itself, the fact that it thrived in an oxygen-nitrogen environment led many people to speculate that the Plague had originated somewhere other than Titan’s nitrogen-methane atmosphere. There was even hearsay that the expedition had encountered an extrasolar race on Titan and that the Plague had been passed from Them . . . but, of course, that was just rumor.

Regardless, the indisputable facts are these: by the time the PARN Herschel Explorer returned to the inner system, the majority of its crew had been driven insane by an airborne virus. The only reason why the three surviving expedition members, including the ship’s commander, were not infected was that they had managed to seal themselves within the command center, where they survived on emergency oxygen supplies and carefully rationed food and water. Most of the unquarantined members butchered each other during the long voyage home; those who did not died in agony when the disease rotted their brains in its terminal stages.

Once the Herschel Explorer reached the asteroid belt, the survivors parked it in orbit around Vesta, then used a lifeboat to escape. Three months later, the Herschel Explorer was scuttled by the PARN Intrepid . By then, Queen Macedonia had decreed that no further expeditions would be sent to Titan and that any vessels attempting to land there would be destroyed by Her Majesty’s navy.

Despite the precautions, though, there had been a few isolated outbreaks of Titan Plague, albeit rare and confined to colonies in the outer system. No one knew exactly how the disease spread from the Herschel Explorer, although it was believed that it had been carried by the survivors themselves despite rigorous decontamination. Even though the first symptoms resembled little more than the once-common cold, the homicidal dementia that quickly followed was unmistakable. When someone came down with the Plague, there was no other option than to isolate them, remove anything that could be used as a weapon, and wait until they died.

No cure had ever been found.

Somehow, in some way we would never know, the Plague had found its way aboard the Fool’s Gold. In the close confines of the mass-driver, it had swept through the entire vessel, driving its crew insane before they realized what had hit them. Perhaps the captain had figured it out, yet despite his precautions he himself was infected.

I was safe because I had worn a spacesuit while exploring the ship.

But Bo McKinnon . . .

Captain Future, Man of Tomorrow, dauntless hero of the spaceways. In his search for adventure, McKinnon had recklessly entered the vessel without bothering to don a suit.

“Did you shut the airlock?” I snapped.

“What? Huh?” Pale, visibly shaken by the horrors he had seen, McKinnon was staring at the maniac crouched in the airlock behind us. “Airlock? What . . . which . . .?”

I grabbed his shoulders and shook him so hard his headset fell down around his neck. “The Comet airlock! Did you shut it behind you, or did you leave it open?”

Unable to hear me now, he stammered until he realized that his headset was ajar. He fumbled with it until the earphones were back in place. “The airlock? I think so, I . . .”

“I think so? You moron, did you . . .?”

“Furland, oh my God . . .” He gaped at the wreckage around him. “What happened to these people? Did they . . . watch out!”

I turned around just in time to catch a glimpse of the madman as he lurched to his feet. Howling at the top of his lungs, he charged toward us, flailing the severed arm like a cricket bat.

I threw McKinnon aside. As he sprawled across the deck, I grabbed the airlock hatch and shoved it closed. An instant later the creature hit the opposite side of the hatch. He almost banged it open, but I put my shoulder against it. The hatch held, and a twist of lockwheel sealed it airtight; nonetheless, I could feel dull vibrations as the madman hammered against it with his hideous trophy.

I couldn’t keep him locked in there forever. Sooner or later, he would find the lockwheel and remember how it worked. Perhaps then I could overcome him-if I was lucky, considering his berserk rage-but even then, I didn’t dare bring him aboard the Comet .

There was only one solution. I found the airlock’s outer control panel and flipped open its cover. “I’m sorry, sir,” I whispered to the lunatic. “May God have mercy on us both.”

Then I pushed the switch that jettisoned the outer hatch.

The alarm bells that rang throughout the bridge were the poor man’s funeral dirge. There was long silence after I shut off the alarms, finally broken by McKinnon’s voice.

“Mr. Furland, you just murdered that man.”

I turned back around. McKinnon had managed to struggle to his feet; he clutched the back of a chair for support, and he glared at me with outraged eyes.

Before I could respond, Jeri’s voice came to me over the comlink: “Rohr, he shut the airlock on the way out. The Comet hasn’t been infected .”

I let out my breath. For once, Bo had managed to do something right on his own. “Good deal, kiddo. Keep it shut until I come back aboard.”

I stepped away from the airlock, heading for the helm station on the other side of the bridge. McKinnon planted himself in my path. “Did you hear me, Mr. Furland?” he demanded, his adam’s apple bobbing beneath his beard. “You just killed a man . . . I saw you do it! You . . .”

“Don’t remind me. Now get out of my way.” I pushed him aside and marched toward the helm.

One of its flatscreens depicted a schematic chart of the asteroid’s position and estimated course. As I suspected, someone aboard the mass-driver had deliberately laid in the new course during a fit of insanity. Probably the captain himself, considering the fact that he had locked himself in here.

“I’m placing you under arrest!” McKinnon yelled. “Under my jurisdiction as an agent of the Planet Police, I . . .”

“There’s no such thing.” I bent over the keypad and went to work accessing the main computer, my fingers thick and clumsy within the suit gloves. “No Planet Police, no asteroid pirates. Just a ship whose air ducts are crawling with the Plague. You’re . . .”

“I’m Captain Future!”

The virus must have already affected him. I could have checked to see if he was displaying any of the flu-like symptoms that were supposed to be the Plague’s first signs, but he was the least of my worries just now.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t access the program for the central navigation system. Lack of a password that had probably died along with one of the damned souls aboard this ship, and none of the standard overrides or interfaces worked either. I was completely locked out, unable to alter the vessel’s velocity or trajectory that had it propelling 2046-Barr straight toward Mars.

“And what are you talking about, not letting anyone aboard the Comet until you give the word?” McKinnon was no longer hovering over me; he had found the late captain’s chair and had taken it as his own, as if assuming command of a vessel far larger than his measly freighter. “I’m the boss of this ship, not you, and I’m staying in charge until . . .”

Okay. The helm wouldn’t obey any new instructions. Maybe it was still possible to scuttle the Fool’s Gold . I accessed the engineering subsystem and began searching for a way to shut down the primary coolant loop of the gas-core reactor and its redundant safety systems. If I timed it right, perhaps the Comet would make a clean getaway before the reactor overloaded . . . and if we were goddamned lucky, the explosion might knock the asteroid sufficiently off-course.

“Rohr?” Jeri again. “What’s going on up there?” I didn’t want to tell her, not with McKinnon eavesdropping on our comlink.

At the sound of her voice, he surged to his feet. “Joan! He’s working for Ul Quorn, the Magician of Mars! He’s going to . . .!”

I heard him coming long before he reached me. I stood up and, pulling back my arm, landed a right hook square against his hairy jaw.

It stopped him, but it wouldn’t keep him stopped. McKinnon was a big guy. He staggered back, his eyes unfocused as he groped at the chair for support. “Traitor,” he mumbled, feeling at his mouth with his left hand. “You traitor, you . . .”

I didn’t have time for this shit, so I punched him again, this time square in the nose. Second shot did the trick; he reeled backward, sagged against the chair, and flopped flat on his back.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

Even within the thick padding of my gloves, my knuckles hurt like hell. “Something that should have been done a long time ago,” I murmured.

Cute line. I used up the last of my luck that way. I scrambled at the helm console for several more minutes before I submitted to the inevitable. Like the navigation controls, the engineering subsystem wouldn’t obey my commands without the proper passwords. It was possible that they were written down somewhere, but I didn’t have the time or inclination to go searching through the operations manuals, especially since most of them were strewn across the bridge like so much garbage.

We weren’t out of options yet. There was still a final alternative, one which McKinnon himself had given us.

It was then that I knew that Captain Future had to die.

“Captain Future is dead!”

The rumbling voice of the big green Jovian space-sailor rose above the laughter and chatter and clink of goblets, in this crowded Venusopolis spacemen’s cafe. He eyed his little knot of companions at the bar, as though challenging them to dispute him.

One of the hard-bitten spacemen, a swarthy little Mercurian, shook his head thoughtfully.

“I’m not so sure. It’s true that the Futuremen have been missing for months. But they’d be a hard bunch to kill.”

—HAMILTON, Outlaws of the Moon (1942)

As I write, I’m back on the Moon, occupying a corner table in Sloppy Joe’s. It’s almost closing time; the crowds have thinned out and the bartender has rung the bell for last call. He’ll let me stay after he shuts the doors, though. Heroes never get booted out with the riffraff, and there’s been no shortage of free drinks ever since I returned from Ceres.

After all, I’m the last person to see Captain Future alive.

The news media helped us maintain our alibi. It was a story that had everything. Adventure, romance, blood and guts, countless lives at stake. Best of all, a noble act of self-sacrifice. It’ll make a great vid. I sold the rights yesterday.

Because it’s been so widely told, you already know how the story ends. Realizing that he had been fatally infected with Titan Plague, Bo McKinnon-excuse me, Captain Future-issued his final instructions as commanding officer of the TBSA Comet .

He told me to return to the ship, and once I was safely aboard, he ordered Jeri to cast off and get the Comet as far away as possible.

Realizing what he intended to do, we tried to talk him out of it. Oh, and how we argued and pleaded with him, telling him that we could place him in biostasis until we returned to Earth, where doctors could attempt to save his life.

In the end, though, McKinnon simply cut off his comlink so that he could meet his end with dignity and grace.

Once the Comet was gone and safely out of range, Captain Future managed to instruct the mass-driver’s main computer to overload the vessel reactors. While he sat alone in the abandoned bridge, waiting for the countdown, there was just enough time for him to transmit one final message of courage . . .

Don’t make me repeat it, please. It’s bad enough that the Queen read it aloud during the memorial service, but now I understand that it’s going to be inscribed upon the base of the twice-life-size statue of McKinnon that’s going to be erected at Arsia Station. Jeri did her best when she wrote it, but between you and me, I still think it’s a complete crock.

Anyway, the thermonuclear blast not only obliterated the Fool’s Gold, but it also sufficiently altered the trajectory of 2046. The asteroid came within five thousand kilometers of Mars; its close passage was recorded by the observatory on Phobos, and the settlements in the Central Meridian reported the largest meteor shower in the history of the colonies.

And now Bo McKinnon is remembered as Captain Future, one of the greatest heroes in the history of humankind.

It was the least Jeri could have done for him.

Considering what a jerk Bo had been all the way to the end, I could have tried to claim the credit, but her strong will persevered. I suppose she’s right; it would look bad if it was known that McKinnon had gone out as a raving lunatic who had to be coldcocked by his second officer.

Likewise, no one has to know that four missiles launched from the Comet destroyed the mass-driver’s main reactor, thus causing the explosion that averted 2046-Barr from its doomsday course. The empty weapon pod was jettisoned before the Comet reached Ceres, and the small bribe paid to a minor Pax bureaucrat insured that all records of it ever having been installed on the freighter were completely erased.

It hardly matters. In the end, everyone got what they wanted.

As first officer of the Comet, Jeri became its new commander. She offered me her old job, and since the Jove Commerce deal was down the tubes, I gratefully accepted. It wasn’t long after that before she also offered to show me the rest of her tattoos, an invitation that I also accepted. Her clan still won’t speak to her, especially since she now plans to marry a Primary, but at least her fellow Superiors have been forced to claim her as one of their own.

For now, life is good. There’s money in the bank, we’ve shucked our black sheep status, and there’s no shortage of companies who want to hire the legendary Futuremen of the TBSA Comet. Who knows? Once we get tired of working the belt, maybe we’ll settle down and take a shot at beating the odds on this whole cross-breeding thing.

And Bo got what he wanted, even though he didn’t live long enough to enjoy it. In doing so, perhaps humankind got what it needed.

There’s only one thing that still bothers me.

When McKinnon went nuts aboard the Fool’s Gold and tried to attack me, I assumed that he had come down with the Plague. This was a correct assumption; he had been infected the moment he had come through the airlock.

However, I later learned that it takes at least six hours for Titan Plague to fully incubate within a human being, and neither of us had been aboard the Fool’s Gold for nearly half that long.

If McKinnon was crazy at the end, it wasn’t because of the Plague. To this day, I have no idea what made him snap . . . unless he believed that I was trying to run off with his ship, his girl, and his goddamn glory.

Hell, maybe I was.

Last night, some nervous kid-a cargo grunt off some LEO freighter, his union card probably still uncreased-sidled up to me at the bar and asked for my autograph. While I was signing the inside cover of his logbook, he told me a strange rumor he had recently heard: Captain Future managed to escape from the Fool’s Gold just before it blew. According to him, prospectors in the inner belt report spotting a gig on their screens, one whose pilot answers their calls as Curt Newton before transmissions are lost.

I bought the youngster a drink and told him the truth. Naturally, he refused to believe me, nor can I blame him.

Heroes are hard to find. We need to welcome them whenever they appear in our midst. You’ve just got to be careful to pick the right guy, because it’s easy for someone to pretend to be what they’re not.

Captain Future is dead.

Long live Captain Future.

THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR

James Patrick Kelly

James Patrick Kelly investigates the question of identity that arises from one of science fiction’s simplest tropes—the transporter beam—in his ruthlessly cold and calculating look at what it takes to . . .

Kamala Shastri came back to this world as she had left it—naked. She tottered out of the assembler, trying to balance in Tuulen Station’s delicate gravity. I caught her and bundled her into a robe with one motion, then eased her onto the float. Three years on another planet had transformed Kamala. She was leaner, more muscular. Her fingernails were now a couple of centimeters long and there were four parallel scars incised on her left cheek, perhaps some Gendian’s idea of beautification. But what struck me most was the darting strangeness in her eyes. This place, so familiar to me, seemed almost to shock her. It was as if she doubted the walls and was skeptical of air. She had learned to think like an alien.

“Welcome back.” The float’s whisper rose to a whoosh as I walked it down the hallway.

She swallowed hard and I thought she might cry. Three years ago, she would have. Lots of migrators are devastated when they come out of the assembler; it’s because there is no transition. A few seconds ago Kamala was on Gend, fourth planet of the star we call epsilon Leo, and now she was here in lunar orbit. She was almost home; her life’s great adventure was over.

“Matthew?” she said.

“Michael.” I couldn’t help but be pleased that she remembered me. After all, she had changed my life.

I’ve guided maybe three hundred migrations—comings and goings—since I first came to Tuulen to study the dinos. Kamala Shastri’s is the only quantum scan I’ve ever pirated. I doubt that the dinos care; I suspect this is a trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her—at least, as she was three years ago—than I know about myself. When the dinos sent her to Gend, she massed 50,391.72 grams and her red cell count was 4.81 million per mm^3. She could play the nagasvaram, a kind of bamboo flute. Her father came from Thana, near Bombay, and her favorite flavor of chewyfrute was watermelon and she’d had five lovers and when she was eleven she had wanted to be a gymnast but instead she had become a biomaterials engineer who at age twenty-nine had volunteered to go to the stars to learn how to grow artificial eyes. It took her two years to go through migrator training; she knew she could have backed out at any time, right up until the moment Silloin translated her into a superluminal signal. She understood what it meant to balance the equation.

I first met her on June 22, 2069. She shuttled over from Lunex’s L1 port and came through our airlock at promptly 10:15, a small, roundish woman with black hair parted in the middle and drawn tight against her skull. They had darkened her skin against epsilon Leo’s UV; it was the deep blue-black of twilight. She was wearing a striped clingy and velcro slippers to help her get around for the short time she’d be navigating our .2 micrograv.

“Welcome to Tuulen Station.” I smiled and offered my hand. “My name is Michael.” We shook. “I’m supposed to be a sapientologist but I also moonlight as the local guide.”

“Guide?” She nodded distractedly. “Okay.” She peered past me, as if expecting someone else.

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said, “the dinos are in their cages.”

Her eyes got wide as she let her hand slip from mine. “You call the Hanen dinos?”

“Why not?” I laughed. “They call us babies. The weeps, among other things.”

She shook her head in amazement. People who’ve never met a dino tended to romanticize them: the wise and noble reptiles who had mastered superluminal physics and introduced Earth to the wonders of galactic civilization. I doubt Kamala had ever seen a dino play poker or gobble down a screaming rabbit. And she had never argued with Linna, who still wasn’t convinced that humans were psychologically ready to go to the stars.

“Have you eaten?” I gestured down the corridor toward the reception rooms.

“Yes . . . I mean, no.” She didn’t move. “I am not hungry.”

“Let me guess. You’re too nervous to eat. You’re too nervous to talk, even. You wish I’d just shut up, pop you into the marble, and beam you out. Let’s just get this part the hell over with, eh?”

“I don’t mind the conversation, actually.”

“There you go. Well, Kamala, it is my solemn duty to advise you that there are no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Gend. And no chicken vindaloo. What’s my name again?”

“Michael?”

“See, you’re not that nervous. Not one taco, or a single slice of eggplant pizza. This is your last chance to eat like a human.”

“Okay.” She did not actually smile—she was too busy being brave—but a corner of her mouth twitched. “Actually, I would not mind a cup of tea.”

“Now, tea they’ve got.” She let me guide her toward reception room D; her slippers snicked at the velcro carpet. “Of course, they brew it from lawn clippings.”

“The Gendians don’t keep lawns. They live underground.”

“Refresh my memory.” I kept my hand on her shoulder; beneath the clingy, her muscles were rigid. “Are they the ferrets or the things with the orange bumps?”

“They look nothing like ferrets.”

We popped through the door bubble into reception D, a compact rectangular space with a scatter of low, unthreatening furniture. There was a kitchen station at one end, a closet with a vacuum toilet at the other. The ceiling was blue sky; the long wall showed a live view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline, baking in the late June sun. Kamala had just finished her doctorate at MIT.

I opaqued the door. She perched on the edge of a couch like a wren, ready to flit away.

While I was making her tea, my fingernail screen flashed. I answered it and a tiny Silloin came up in discreet mode. She didn’t look at me; she was too busy watching arrays in the control room. =A problem,= her voice buzzed in my earstone, =most negligible, really. But we will have to void the last two from today’s schedule. Save them at Lunex until first shift tomorrow. Can this one be kept for an hour? =

“Sure,” I said. “Kamala, would you like to meet a Hanen?” I transferred Silloin to a dino-sized window on the wall. “Silloin, this is Kamala Shastri. Silloin is the one who actually runs things. I’m just the doorman.”

Silloin looked through the window with her near eye, then swung around and peered at Kamala with her other. She was short for a dino, just over a meter tall, but she had an enormous head that teetered on her neck like a watermelon balancing on a grapefruit. She must have just oiled herself because her silver scales shone. =Kamala, you will accept my happiest intentions for you? =She raised her left hand, spreading the skinny digits to expose dark crescents of vestigial webbing.

“Of course, I. . . .”

=And you will permit us to render you this translation?=

She straightened. “Yes.”

=Have you questions?=

I’m sure she had several hundred, but at this point was probably too scared to ask. While she hesitated, I broke in. “Which came first, the lizard or the egg?”

Silloin ignored me. =It will be excellent for you to begin when?=

“She’s just having a little tea,” I said, handing her the cup. “I’ll bring her along when she’s done. Say an hour?”

Kamala squirmed on the couch. “No, really, it will not take me. . . .”

Silloin showed us her teeth, several of which were as long as piano keys. =That would be most appropriate, Michael.= She closed; a gull flew through the space where her window had been.

“Why did you do that?” Kamala’s voice was sharp.

“Because it says here that you have to wait your turn. You’re not the only migrator we’re sending this morning.” This was a lie, of course; we had had to cut the schedule because Jodi Latchaw, the other sapientologist assigned to Tuulen, was at the University of Hipparchus presenting our paper on the Hanen concept of identity. “Don’t worry, I’ll make the time fly.”

For a moment, we looked at each other. I could have laid down an hour’s worth of patter; I’d done that often enough. Or I could have drawn her out on why she was going: no doubt she had a blind grandma or second cousin just waiting for her to bring home those artificial eyes, not to mention potential spin-offs which could well end tuberculosis, famine, and premature ejaculation, blah, blah, blah. Or I could have just left her alone in the room to read the wall. The trick was guessing how spooked she really was.

“Tell me a secret,” I said.

“What?”

“A secret, you know, something no one else knows.”

She stared as if I’d just fallen off Mars.

“Look, in a little while you’re going someplace that’s what . . . three hundred and ten light years away? You’re scheduled to stay for three years. By the time you come back, I could easily be rich, famous, and elsewhere; we’ll probably never see each other again. So what have you got to lose? I promise not to tell.”

She leaned back on the couch, and settled the cup in her lap. “This is another test, right? After everything they have put me through, they still have not decided whether to send me.”

“Oh no, in a couple of hours you’ll be cracking nuts with ferrets in some dark Gendian burrow. This is just me, talking.”

“You are crazy.”

“Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It’s from the Greek: logos meaning word, mania meaning two bits short of a byte. I just love to chat is all. Tell you what, I’ll go first. If my secret isn’t juicy enough, you don’t have tell me anything.”

Her eyes were slits as she sipped her tea. I was fairly sure that whatever she was worrying about at the moment, it wasn’t being swallowed by the big blue marble.

“I was brought up Catholic,” I said, settling onto a chair in front of her. “I’m not anymore, but that’s not the secret. My parents sent me to Mary, Mother of God High School; we called it Moogoo. It was run by a couple of old priests, Father Thomas and his wife, Mother Jennifer. Father Tom taught physics, which I got a ‘D’ in, mostly because he talked like he had walnuts in his mouth. Mother Jennifer taught theology and had all the warmth of a marble pew; her nickname was Mama Moogoo.

“One night, just two weeks before my graduation, Father Tom and Mama Moogoo went out in their Chevy Minimus for ice cream. On the way home, Mama Moogoo pushed a yellow light and got broadsided by an ambulance. Like I said, she was old, a hundred and twenty something; they should’ve lifted her license back in the ’50s. She was killed instantly. Father Tom died in the hospital.

“Of course, we were all supposed to feel sorry for them and I guess I did a little, but I never really liked either of them and I resented the way their deaths had screwed things up for my class. So I was more annoyed than sorry, but then I also had this edge of guilt for being so uncharitable. Maybe you’d have to grow up Catholic to understand that. Anyway, the day after it happened they called an assembly in the gym and we were all there squirming on the bleachers and the cardinal himself telepresented a sermon. He kept trying to comfort us, like it had been our parents that had died. When I made a joke about it to the kid next to me, I got caught and spent the last week of my senior year with an in-school suspension.”

Kamala had finished her tea. She slid the empty cup into one of the holders built into the table.

“Want some more?” I said.

She stirred restlessly. “Why are you telling me this?”

“It’s part of the secret.” I leaned forward in my chair. “See, my family lived down the street from Holy Spirit Cemetery and in order to get to the carryvan line on McKinley Ave., I had to cut through. Now this happened a couple of days after I got in trouble at the assembly. It was around midnight and I was coming home from a graduation party where I had taken a couple of pokes of insight, so I was feeling sly as a philosopher-king. As I walked through the cemetery, I stumbled across two dirt mounds right next to each other. At first I thought they were flower beds, then I saw the wooden crosses. Fresh graves: here lies Father Tom and Mama Moogoo. There wasn’t much to the crosses: they were basically just stakes with crosspieces, painted white and hammered into the ground. The names were hand printed on them. The way I figure it, they were there to mark the graves until the stones got delivered. I didn’t need any insight to recognize a once in a lifetime opportunity. If I switched them, what were the chances anyone was going to notice? It was no problem sliding them out of their holes. I smoothed the dirt with my hands and then ran like hell.”

Until that moment, she’d seemed bemused by my story and slightly condescending toward me. Now there was a glint of alarm in her eyes. “That was a terrible thing to do,” she said.

“Absolutely,” I said, “although the dinos think that the whole idea of planting bodies in graveyards and marking them with carved rocks is weepy. They say there is no identity in dead meat, so why get so sentimental about it? Linna keeps asking how come we don’t put markers over our shit. But that’s not the secret. See, it’d been a warmish night in the middle of June, only as I ran, the air turned cold. Freezing, I could see my breath. And my shoes got heavier and heavier, like they had turned to stone. As I got closer to the back gate, it felt like I was fighting a strong wind, except my clothes weren’t flapping. I slowed to a walk. I know I could have pushed through, but my heart was thumping and then I heard this whispery seashell noise and I panicked. So the secret is I’m a coward. I switched the crosses back and I never went near that cemetery again. As a matter of fact,” I nodded at the walls of reception room D on Tuulen Station, “when I grew up, I got about as far away from it as I could.”

She stared as I settled back in my chair. “True story,” I said and raised my right hand. She seemed so astonished that I started laughing. A smile bloomed on her dark face and suddenly she was giggling too. It was a soft, liquid sound, like a brook bubbling over smooth stones; it made me laugh even harder. Her lips were full and her teeth were very white.

“Your turn,” I said, finally.

“Oh, no, I could not.” She waved me off. “I don’t have anything so good. . . .” She paused, then frowned. “You have told that before?”

“Once,” I said. “To the Hanen, during the psych screening for this job. Only I didn’t tell them the last part. I know how dinos think, so I ended it when I switched the crosses. The rest is baby stuff.” I waggled a finger at her. “Don’t forget, you promised to keep my secret.”

“Did I?”

“Tell me about when you were young. Where did you grow up?”

“Toronto.” She glanced at me, appraisingly. “There was something, but not funny. Sad.”

I nodded encouragement and changed the wall to Toronto’s skyline dominated by the CN Tower, Toronto-Dominion Centre, Commerce Court, and the King’s Needle.

She twisted to take in the view and spoke over her shoulder. “When I was ten we moved to an apartment, right downtown on Bloor Street so my mother could be close to work.” She pointed at the wall and turned back to face me. “She is an accountant, my father wrote wallpaper for Imagineering. It was a huge building; it seemed as if we were always getting into the elevator with ten neighbors we never knew we had. I was coming home from school one day when an old woman stopped me in the lobby. ‘Little girl,’ she said, ‘how would you like to earn ten dollars?’ My parents had warned me not to talk to strangers but she obviously was a resident. Besides, she had an ancient pair of exolegs strapped on, so I knew I could outrun her if I needed to. She asked me to go to the store for her, handed me a grocery list and a cash card, and said I should bring everything up to her apartment, 10W. I should have been more suspicious because all the downtown groceries deliver but, as I soon found out, all she really wanted was someone to talk to her. And she was willing to pay for it, usually five or ten dollars, depending on how long I stayed. Soon I was stopping by almost every day after school. I think my parents would have made me stop if they had known; they were very strict. They would not have liked me taking her money. But neither of them got home until after six, so it was my secret to keep.”

“Who was she?” I said. “What did you talk about?”

“Her name was Margaret Ase. She was ninety-seven years old and I think she had been some kind of counselor. Her husband and her daughter had both died and she was alone. I didn’t find out much about her; she made me do most of the talking. She asked me about my friends and what I was learning in school and my family. Things like that. . . .”

Her voice trailed off as my fingernail started to flash. I answered it.

=Michael, I am pleased to call you to here.=Silloin buzzed in my ear. She was almost twenty minutes ahead of schedule.

“See, I told you we’d make the time fly.” I stood; Kamala’s eyes got very wide. “I’m ready if you are.”

I offered her my hand. She took it and let me help her up. She wavered for a moment and I sensed just how fragile her resolve was. I put my hand around her waist and steered her into the corridor. In the micrograv of Tuulen Station, she already felt as insubstantial as a memory. “So tell me, what happened that was so sad?”

At first I thought she hadn’t heard. She shuffled along, said nothing.

“Hey, don’t keep me in suspense here, Kamala,” I said. “You have to finish the story.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I do.”

I didn’t take this personally. My only real interest in the conversation had been to distract her. If she refused to be distracted, that was her choice. Some migrators kept talking right up to the moment they slid into the big blue marble, but lots of them went quiet just before. They turned inward. Maybe in her mind she was already on Gend, blinking in the hard white light.

We arrived at the scan center, the largest space on Tuulen Station. Immediately in front of us was the marble, containment for the quantum nondemolition sensor array—QNSA for the acronymically inclined. It was the milky blue of glacial ice and big as two elephants. The upper hemisphere was raised and the scanning table protruded like a shiny gray tongue. Kamala approached the marble and touched her reflection, which writhed across its polished surface. To the right was a padded bench, the fogger, and a toilet. I looked left, through the control room window. Silloin stood watching us, her impossible head cocked to one side.

=She is docile?= she buzzed in my earstone.

I held up crossed fingers.

=Welcome, Kamala Shastri.= Silloin’s voice came over the speakers with a soothing hush. =You are ready to open your translation?=

Kamala bowed to the window. “This is where I take my clothes off?”

=If you would be so convenient.=

She brushed past me to the bench. Apparently I had ceased to exist; this was between her and the dino now. She undressed quickly, folding her clingy into a neat bundle, tucking her slippers beneath the bench. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see tiny feet, heavy thighs, and the beautiful, dark smooth skin of her back. She stepped into the fogger and closed the door.

“Ready,” she called.

From the control room, Silloin closed circuits which filled the fogger with a dense cloud of nanolenses. The nano stuck to Kamala and deployed, coating the surface of her body. As she breathed them, they passed from her lungs into her bloodstream. She only coughed twice; she had been well trained. When the eight minutes were up, Silloin cleared the air in the fogger and she emerged. Still ignoring me, she again faced the control room.

=Now you must arrange yourself on the scanning table,= said Silloin, =and enable Michael to fix you.=

She crossed to the marble without hesitation, climbed the gantry beside it, eased onto the table and laid back.

I followed her up. “Sure you won’t tell me the rest of the secret?”

She stared at the ceiling, unblinking.

“Okay then.” I took the canister and a sparker out of my hip pouch. “This is going to happen just like you’ve practiced it.” I used the canister to respray the bottoms of her feet with nano. I watched her belly rise and fall, rise and fall. She was deep into her breathing exercise. “Remember, no skipping rope or whistling while you’re in the scanner.”

She did not answer. “Deep breath now,” I said and touched a sparker to her big toe. There was a brief crackle as the nano on her skin wove into a net and stiffened, locking her in place. “Bark at the ferrets for me.” I picked up my equipment, climbed down the gantry, and wheeled it back to the wall.

With a low whine, the big blue marble retracted its tongue. I watched the upper hemisphere close, swallowing Kamala Shastri, then joined Silloin in the control room.

I’m not of the school who thinks the dinos stink, another reason I got assigned to study them up close. Parikkal, for example, has no smell at all that I can tell. Normally Silloin had the faint but not unpleasant smell of stale wine. When she was under stress, however, her scent became vinegary and biting. It must have been a wild morning for her. Breathing through my mouth, I settled onto the stool at my station.

She was working quickly, now that the marble was sealed. Even with all their training, migrators tend to get claustrophobic fast. After all, they’re lying in the dark, in nanobondage, waiting to be translated. Waiting. The simulator at the Singapore training center makes a noise while it’s emulating a scan. Most compare it to a light rain pattering against the marble; for some, it’s low volume radio static. As long as they hear the patter, the migrators think they’re safe. We reproduce it for them while they’re in our marble, even though scanning takes about three seconds and is utterly silent. From my vantage I could see that the sagittal, axial, and coronal windows had stopped blinking, indicating full data capture. Silloin was skirring busily to herself; her comm didn’t bother to interpret. Wasn’t saying anything baby Michael needed to know, obviously. Her head bobbed as she monitored the enormous spread of readouts; her claws clicked against touch screens that glowed orange and yellow.

At my station, there was only a migration status screen—and a white button.

I wasn’t lying when I said I was just the doorman. My field is sapientology, not quantum physics. Whatever went wrong with Kamala’s migration that morning, there was nothing I could have done. The dinos tell me that the quantum nondemoliton sensor array is able to circumvent Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle by measuring spacetime’s most crogglingly small quantities without collapsing the wave/particle duality. How small? They say that no one can ever “see” anything that’s only 1.62 x 10-33 centimeters long, because at that size, space and time come apart. Time ceases to exist and space becomes a random probablistic foam, sort of like quantum spit. We humans call this the Planck-Wheeler length. There’s a Planck-Wheeler time, too: 10-45 of a second. If something happens and something else happens and the two events are separated by an interval of a mere 10-45 of a second, it is impossible to say which came first. It was all dino to me—and that’s just the scanning. The Hanen use different tech to create artificial wormholes, hold them open with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, pass the superluminal signal through and then assemble the migrator from elementary particles at the destination.

On my status screen I could see that the signal which mapped Kamala Shastri had already been compressed and burst through the wormhole. All that we had to wait for was for Gend to confirm acquisition. Once they officially told us that they had her, it would be my job to balance the equation.

Pitter-patter, pitter-pat.

Some Hanen technologies are so powerful that they can alter reality itself. Wormholes could be used by some time traveling fanatic to corrupt history; the scanner/assembler could be used to create a billion Silloins—or Michael Burrs. Pristine reality, unpolluted by such anomalies, has what the dinos call harmony. Before any sapients get to join the galactic club, they must prove total commitment to preserving harmony.

Since I had come to Tuulen to study the dinos, I had pressed the white button over two hundred times. It was what I had to do in order to keep my assignment. Pressing it sent a killing pulse of ionizing radiation through the cerebral cortex of the migrator’s duplicated, and therefore unnecessary, body. No brain, no pain; death followed within seconds. Yes, the first few times I’d balanced the equation had been traumatic. It was still . . . unpleasant. But this was the price of a ticket to the stars. If certain unusual people like Kamala Shastri had decided that price was reasonable, it was their choice, not mine.

=This is not a happy result, Michael.= Silloin spoke to me for the first time since I’d entered the control room. =Discrepancies are unfolding.= On my status screen I watched as the error-checking routines started turning up hits.

“Is the problem here?” I felt a knot twist suddenly inside me. “Or there?” If our original scan checked out, then all Silloin would have to do is send it to Gend again.

There was a long, infuriating silence. Silloin concentrated on part of her board as if it showed her firstborn hatchling chipping out of its egg. The respirator between her shoulders had ballooned to twice its normal size. My screen showed that Kamala had been in the marble for four minutes plus.

=It may be fortunate to recalibrate the scanner and begin over.=

“Shit.” I slammed my hand against the wall, felt the pain tingle to my elbow. “I thought you had it fixed.” When error-checking turned up problems, the solution was almost always to retransmit. “You’re sure, Silloin? Because this one was right on the edge when I tucked her in.”

Silloin gave me a dismissive sneeze and slapped at the error readouts with her bony little hand, as if to knock them back to normal. Like Linna and the other dinos, she had little patience with what she regarded as our weepy fears of migration. However, unlike Linna, she was convinced that someday, after we had used Hanen technologies long enough, we would learn to think like dinos. Maybe she’s right. Maybe when we’ve been squirting through wormholes for hundreds of years, we’ll cheerfully discard our redundant bodies. When the dinos and other sapients migrate, the redundants zap themselves—very harmonious. They tried it with humans but it didn’t always work. That’s why I’m here. =The need is most clear. It will prolong about thirty minutes,= she said.

Kamala had been alone in the dark for almost six minutes, longer than any migrator I’d ever guided. “Let me hear what’s going on in the marble.”

The control room filled with the sound of Kamala screaming. It didn’t sound human to me—more like the shriek of tires skidding toward a crash.

“We’ve got to get her out of there,” I said.

=“That” is baby thinking, Michael.

“So she’s a baby, damn it.” I knew that bringing migrators out of the marble was big trouble. I could have asked Silloin to turn the speakers off and sat there while Kamala suffered. It was my decision.

“Don’t open the marble until I get the gantry in place.” I ran for the door. “And keep the sound effects going.”

At the first crack of light, she howled. The upper hemisphere seemed to lift in slow motion; inside the marble she bucked against the nano. Just when I was sure it was impossible that she could scream any louder, she did. We had accomplished something extraordinary, Silloin and I; we had stripped the brave biomaterials engineer away completely, leaving in her place a terrified animal.

“Kamala, it’s me. Michael.”

Her frantic screams cohered into words. “Stop . . . don’t . . . oh my god, someone help!” If I could have, I would’ve jumped into the marble to release her, but the sensor array is fragile and I wasn’t going to risk causing any more problems with it. We both had to wait until the upper hemisphere swung fully open and the scanning table offered poor Kamala to me.

“It’s okay. Nothing’s going to happen, all right? We’re bringing you out, that’s all. Everything’s all right.”

When I released her with the sparker, she flew at me. We pitched back and almost toppled down the steps. Her grip was so tight I couldn’t breathe.

“Don’t kill me, don’t, please, don’t.”

I rolled on top of her. “Kamala!” I wriggled one arm free and used it to pry myself from her. I scrabbled sideways to the top step. She lurched clumsily in the microgravity and swung at me; her fingernails raked across the back of my hand, leaving bloody welts. “Kamala, stop!” It was all I could do not to strike back at her. I retreated down the steps.

“You bastard. What are you assholes trying to do to me?” She drew several shuddering breaths and began to sob.

“The scan got corrupted somehow. Silloin is working on it.”

=The difficulty is obscure,= said Silloin from the control room.

“But that’s not your problem.” I backed toward the bench.

“They lied,” she mumbled and seemed to fold in upon herself as if she were just skin, no flesh or bones. “They said I wouldn’t feel anything and . . . do you know what it’s like . . . it’s . . .”

I fumbled for her clingy. “Look, here are your clothes. Why don’t you get dressed? We’ll get you out of here.”

“You bastard,” she repeated, but her voice was empty.

She let me coax her down off the gantry. I counted nubs on the wall while she fumbled back into her clingy. They were the size of the old dimes my grandfather used to hoard and they glowed with a soft golden bioluminescence. I was up to forty-seven before she was dressed and ready to return to reception D.

Where before she had perched expectantly at the edge of the couch, now she slumped back against it. “So what now?” she said.

“I don’t know.” I went to the kitchen station and took the carafe from the distiller. “What now, Silloin?” I poured water over the back of my hand to wash the blood off. It stung. My earstone was silent. “I guess we wait,” I said finally.

“For what?”

“For her to fix . . .”

“I’m not going back in there.”

I decided to let that pass. It was probably too soon to argue with her about it, although once Silloin recalibrated the scanner, she’d have very little time to change her mind. “You want something from the kitchen? Another cup of tea, maybe?”

“How about a gin and tonic—hold the tonic?” She rubbed beneath her eyes. “Or a couple of hundred milliliters of serentol?”

I tried to pretend she’d made a joke. “You know the dinos won’t let us open the bar for migrators. The scanner might misread your brain chemistry and your visit to Gend would be nothing but a three year drunk.”

“Don’t you understand?” She was right back at the edge of hysteria. “I am not going!” I didn’t really blame her for the way she was acting but, at that moment, all I wanted was to get rid of Kamala Shastri. I didn’t care if she went on to Gend or back to Lunex or over the rainbow to Oz, just as long as I didn’t have to be in the same room with this miserable creature who was trying to make me feel guilty about an accident I had nothing to do with.

“I thought I could do it.” She clamped hands to her ears as if to keep from hearing her own despair. “I wasted the last two years convincing myself that I could just lie there and not think and then suddenly I’d be far away. I was going someplace wonderful and strange.” She made a strangled sound and let her hands drop into her lap. “I was going to help people see.”

“You did it, Kamala. You did everything we asked.”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t not think. That was the problem. And then there she was, trying to touch me. In the dark. I had not thought of her since. . . .” She shivered. “It’s your fault for reminding me.”

“Your secret friend,” I said.

“Friend?” Kamala seemed puzzled by the word. “No, I wouldn’t say she was a friend. I was always a little bit scared of her, because I was never quite sure of what she wanted from me.” She paused. “One day I went up to 10W after school. She was in her chair, staring down at Bloor Street. Her back was to me. I said, ‘Hi, Ms. Ase.’ I was going to show her a genie I had written, only she didn’t say anything. I came around. Her skin was the color of ashes. I took her hand. It was like picking up something plastic. She was stiff, hard—not a person anymore. She had become a thing, like a feather or a bone. I ran; I had to get out of there. I went up to our apartment and I hid from her.”

She squinted, as if observing—judging—her younger self through the lens of time. “I think I understand now what she wanted. I think she knew she was dying; she probably wanted me there with her at the end, or at least to find her body afterward and report it. Only I could not. If I told anyone she was dead, my parents would find out about us. Maybe people would suspect me of doing something to her—I don’t know. I could have called security but I was only ten; I was afraid somehow they might trace me. A couple of weeks went by and still nobody had found her. By then it was too late to say anything. Everyone would have blamed me for keeping quiet for so long. At night I imagined her turning black and rotting into her chair like a banana. It made me sick; I couldn’t sleep or eat. They had to put me in the hospital, because I had touched her. Touched death.”

=Michael,= Silloin whispered, without any warning flash. =An impossibility has formed.=

“As soon as I was out of that building, I started to get better. Then they found her. After I came home, I worked hard to forget Ms. Ase. And I did, almost.” Kamala wrapped her arms around herself. “But just now she was with me again, inside the marble . . . I couldn’t see her but somehow I knew she was reaching for me.”

=Michael, Parikkal is here with Linna.=

“Don’t you see?” She gave a bitter laugh. “How can I go to Gend? I’m hallucinating.”

=It has broken the harmony. Join us alone.=

I was tempted to swat at the annoying buzz in my ear.

“You know, I’ve never told anyone about her before.”

“Well, maybe some good has come of this after all.” I patted her on the knee. “Excuse me for a minute?” She seemed surprised that I would leave. I slipped into the hall and hardened the door bubble, sealing her in.

“What impossibility?” I said, heading for the control room.

=She is pleased to reopen the scanner?=

“Not pleased at all. More like scared shitless.”

=This is Parikkal.= My earstone translated his skirring with a sizzling edge, like bacon frying. =The confusion was made elsewhere. No mishap can be connected to our station.=

I pushed through the bubble into the scan center. I could see the three dinos through the control window. Their heads were bobbing furiously. “Tell me,” I said.

=Our communications with Gend were marred by a transient falsehood,= said Silloin. =Kamala Shastri has been received there and reconstructed.=

“She migrated?” I felt the deck shifting beneath my feet. “What about the one we’ve got here?”

=The simplicity is to load the redundant into the scanner and finalize. . . . =

“I’ve got news for you. She’s not going anywhere near that marble.”

=Her equation is not in balance.= This was Linna, speaking for the first time. Linna was not exactly in charge of Tuulen Station; she was more like a senior partner. Parikkal and Silloin had overruled her before—at least I thought they had.

“What do you expect me to do? Wring her neck?”

There was a moment’s silence—which was not as unnerving as watching them eye me through the window, their heads now perfectly still.

“No,” I said.

The dinos were skirring at each other; their heads wove and dipped. At first they cut me cold and the comm was silent, but suddenly their debate crackled through my earstone.

=This is just as I have been telling,= said Linna. =These beings have no realization of harmony. It is wrongful to further unleash them on the many worlds.=

=You may have reason,= said Parikkal. =But that is a later discussion. The need is for the equation to be balanced.=

=There is no time. We will have to discard the redundant ourselves.= Silloin bared her long brown teeth. It would take her maybe five seconds to rip Kamala’s throat out. And even though Silloin was the dino most sympathetic to us, I had no doubt she would enjoy the kill.

=I will argue that we adjourn human migration until this world has been rethought,= said Linna.

This was the typical dino condescension. Even though they appeared to be arguing with each other, they were actually speaking to me, laying the situation out so that even the baby sapient would understand. They were informing me that I was jeopardizing the future of humanity in space. That the Kamala in reception D was dead whether I quit or not. That the equation had to be balanced and it had to be now.

“Wait,” I said. “Maybe I can coax her back into the scanner.” I had to get away from them. I pulled my earstone out and slid it into my pocket. I was in such a hurry to escape that I stumbled as I left the scan center and had to catch myself in the hallway. I stood there for a second, staring at the hand pressed against the bulkhead. I seemed to see the splayed fingers through the wrong end of a telescope. I was far away from myself.

She had curled into herself on the couch, arms clutching knees to her chest, as if trying to shrink so that nobody would notice her.

“We’re all set,” I said briskly. “You’ll be in the marble for less than a minute, guaranteed.”

“No, Michael.”

I could actually feel myself receding from Tuulen Station. “Kamala, you’re throwing away a huge part of your life.”

“It is my right.” Her eyes were shiny.

No, it wasn’t. She was redundant; she had no rights. What had she said about the dead old lady? She had become a thing, like a bone.

“Okay, then,” I jabbed at her shoulder with a stiff forefinger. “Let’s go.”

She recoiled. “Go where?”

“Back to Lunex. I’m holding the shuttle for you. It just dropped off my afternoon list; I should be helping them settle in, instead of having to deal with you.”

She unfolded herself slowly.

“Come on.” I jerked her roughly to her feet. “The dinos want you off Tuulen as soon as possible and so do I.” I was so distant, I couldn’t see Kamala Shastri anymore.

She nodded and let me march her to the bubble door.

“And if we meet anyone in the hall, keep your mouth shut.”

“You’re being so mean.” Her whisper was thick.

“You’re being such a baby.”

When the inner door glided open, she realized immediately that there was no umbilical to the shuttle. She tried to twist out of my grip but I put my shoulder into her, hard. She flew across the airlock, slammed against the outer door and caromed onto her back. As I punched the switch to close the door, I came back to myself. I was doing this terrible thing—me, Michael Burr. I couldn’t help myself: I giggled. When I last saw her, Kamala was scrabbling across the deck toward me but she was too late. I was surprised that she wasn’t screaming again; all I heard was her ferocious breathing.

As soon as the inner door sealed, I opened the outer door. After all, how many ways are there to kill someone on a space station? There were no guns. Maybe someone else could have stabbed or strangled her, but not me. Poison how? Besides, I wasn’t thinking, I had been trying desperately not to think of what I was doing. I was a sapientologist, not a doctor. I always thought that exposure to space meant instantaneous death. Explosive decompression or something like. I didn’t want her to suffer. I was trying to make it quick. Painless.

I heard the whoosh of escaping air and thought that was it; the body had been ejected into space. I had actually turned away when thumping started, frantic, like the beat of a racing heart. She must have found something to hold onto. Thump, thump, thump! It was too much. I sagged against the inner door—thump, thump—slid down it, laughing. Turns out that if you empty the lungs, it is possible to survive exposure to space for at least a minute, maybe two. I thought it was funny. Thump! Hilarious, actually. I had tried my best for her—risked my career—and this was how she repaid me? As I laid my cheek against the door, the thumps started to weaken. There were just a few centimeters between us, the difference between life and death. Now she knew all about balancing the equation. I was laughing so hard I could scarcely breathe. Just like the meat behind the door. Die already, you weepy bitch!

I don’t know how long it took. The thumping slowed. Stopped. And then I was a hero. I had preserved harmony, kept our link to the stars open. I chuckled with pride; I could think like a dinosaur.

I popped through the bubble door into Reception D. “It’s time to board the shuttle.”

Kamala had changed into a clingy and velcro slippers. There were at least ten windows open on the wall; the room filled with the murmur of talking heads. Friends and relatives had to be notified; their loved one had returned, safe and sound. “I have to go,” she said to the wall. “I will call you when I land.”

She gave me a smile that seemed stiff from disuse. “I want to thank you again, Michael.” I wondered how long it took migrators to get used to being human. “You were such a help and I was such a . . . I was not myself.” She glanced around the room one last time and then shivered. “I was really scared.”

“You were.”

She shook her head. “Was it that bad?”

I shrugged and led her out into the hall.

“I feel so silly now. I mean, I was in the marble for less than a minute and then—” she snapped her fingers—“there I was on Gend, just like you said.” She brushed up against me as we walked; her body was hard under the clingy. “Anyway, I am glad we got this chance to talk. I really was going to look you up when I got back. I certainly did not expect to see you here.”

“I decided to stay on.” The inner door to the air-lock glided open. “It’s a job that grows on you.” The umbilical shivered as the pressure between Tuulen Station and the shuttle equalized.

“You have got migrators waiting,” she said.

“Two.”

“I envy them.” She turned to me. “Have you ever thought about going to the stars?”

“No,” I said.

Kamala put her hand to my face. “It changes every-thing.” I could feel the prick of her long nails—claws, really. For a moment I thought she meant to scar my cheek the way she had been scarred.

“I know,” I said.

A MAN OF THE PEOPLE

Ursula K. Le Guin

“A Man of the People” is part of a series of tales that includes “Forgiveness Day” (November 1994) and “A Woman’s Liberation” (which is currently scheduled for our July 1995 issue). Ms. Le Guin tells us they are three-fourths of “a quartet of stories set in a capitalistic slave society on the planet Werel and its colony planet Yeowe. Contact with other worlds belonging to the Ekumen has accelerated the rate and nature of change and unrest in the society. But Werel and Yeowe also change the people who come there from other worlds.” Later this year, a collection of these tales (entitled Four Ways to Forgiveness) will be published by HarperPrism.

Stse

He sat behind his father by the great irrigation tank. Fire-colored wings soared and dipped through the twilight air. Trembling circles enlarged, interlocked, faded on the still surface of the water. “What makes the water go that way?” he asked, softly because it was mysterious, and his father answered softly, “It’s where the araha touch it when they drink.” So he understood that in the center of each circle was a desire, a thirst. Then it was time to go home, and he ran before his father, pretending he was an araha flying, back through the dusk into the steep, bright-windowed town.

His name was Mattinyehedarheddyuragamurus-kets Havzhiva. The word havzhiva means “ringed pebble,” a small stone with a quartz inclusion running through it that shows as a stripe round it. The people of Stse are particular about stones and names. Boys of the Sky, the Other Sky, and the Static Interference lineages are traditionally given the names of stones or desirable manly qualities such as courage, patience, and grace. The Yehedarhed family were traditionalists, strong on family and lineage. “If you know who your people are, you know who you are,” said Havzhiva’s father, Granite. A kind, quiet man who took his paternal responsibility seriously, he spoke often in sayings.

Granite was Havzhiva’s mother’s brother, of course; that is what a father was. The man who had helped his mother conceive Havzhiva lived on a farm; he stopped in sometimes to say hello when he was in town. Havzhiva’s mother was the Heir of the Sun. Sometimes Havzhiva envied his cousin Aloe, whose father was only six years older than she was and played with her like a big brother. Sometimes he envied children whose mothers were unimportant. His mother was always fasting or dancing or traveling, had no husband, and rarely slept at home. It was exciting to be with her, but difficult. He had to be important when he was with her. It was always a relief to be home with nobody there but his father and his undemanding grandmother and her sister the Winter Dancekeeper and her husband and whichever Other Sky relatives from farms and other pueblos were visiting at the moment.

There were only two Other Sky households in Stse, and the Yehedarheds were more hospitable than the Doyefarads, so all the relatives came and stayed with them. They would have been hard put to afford it if the visitors hadn’t brought all sorts of farm stuff, and if Tovo hadn’t been Heir of the Sun. She got paid richly for teaching and for performing the rituals and handling the protocol at other pueblos. She gave all she earned to her family, who spent it all on their relatives and on ceremonies, festivities, celebrations, and funerals.

“Wealth can’t stop,” Granite said to Havzhiva. “It has to keep going. Like the blood circulating. You keep it, it gets stopped—that’s a heart attack. You die.”

“Will Hezhe-old-man die?” the boy asked. Old Hezhe never spent anything on a ritual or a relative; and Havzhiva was an observant child.

“Yes,” his father answered. “His araha is already dead.”

Araha is enjoyment; honor; the particular quality of one’s gender, manhood or womanhood; generosity; the savor of good food or wine.

It is also the name of the plumed, fire-colored, quick-flying mammal that Havzhiva used to see come to drink at the irrigation ponds, tiny flames darting above the darkening water in the evening.

Stse is an almost-island, separated from the mainland of the great south continent by marshes and tidal bogs, where millions of wading birds gather to mate and nest. Ruins of an enormous bridge are visible on the landward side, and another half-sunk fragment of ruin is the basis of the town’s boat pier and breakwater. Vast works of other ages encumber all Hain, and are no more and no less venerable or interesting to the Hainish than the rest of the landscape. A child standing on the pier to watch his mother sail off to the mainland might wonder why people had bothered to build a bridge when there were boats and flyers to ride. They must have liked to walk, he thought. I’d rather sail in a boat. Or fly.

But the silver flyers flew over Stse, not landing, going from somewhere else to somewhere else, where historians lived. Plenty of boats came in and out of Stse harbor, but the people of his lineage did not sail them. They lived in the Pueblo of Stse and did the things that their people and their lineage did. They learned what people needed to learn, and lived their knowledge.

“People have to learn to be human,” his father said. “Look at Shell’s baby. It keeps saying ‘Teach me! Teach me!’ ”

“Teach me,” in the language of Stse, is “aowa.”

“Sometimes the baby says ‘ngaaaaa,’ ” Havzhiva observed.

Granite nodded. “She can’t speak human words very well yet,” he said.

Havzhiva hung around the baby that winter, teaching her to say human words. She was one of his Etsahin relatives, his second cousin once removed, visiting with her mother and her father and his wife. The family watched Havzhiva with approval as he patiently said “baba” and “gogo” to the fat, placid, staring baby. Though he had no sister and thus could not be a father, if he went on studying education with such seriousness, he would probably have the honor of being the adopted father of a baby whose mother had no brother.

He also studied at school and in the temple, studied dancing, and studied the local version of soccer. He was a serious student. He was good at soccer but not as good as his best friend, a Buried Cable girl named Iyan Iyan (a traditional name for Buried Cable girls, a seabird name). Until they were twelve, boys and girls were educated together and alike. Iyan Iyan was the best soccer player on the children’s team. They always had to put her on the other side at halftime so that the score would even out and they could go home for dinner without anybody having lost or won badly. Part of her advantage was that she had got her height very early, but most of it was pure skill.

“Are you going to work at the temple?” she asked Havzhiva as they sat on the porch roof of her house watching the first day of the Enactment of the Unusual Gods, which took place every eleven years. No unusual things were happening yet, and the amplifiers weren’t working well, so the music in the plaza sounded faint and full of static. The two children kicked their heels and talked quietly. “No, I think I’ll learn weaving from my father,” the boy said.

“Lucky you. Why do only stupid boys get to use looms?” It was a rhetorical question, and Havzhiva paid it no attention. Women were not weavers. Men did not make bricks. Other Sky people did not operate boats but did repair electronic devices. Buried Cable people did not castrate animals but did maintain generators. There were things one could do and things one could not do; one did those things for people and people did those things for one. Coming up on puberty, Iyan Iyan and Havzhiva were making a first choice of their first profession. Iyan Iyan had already chosen to apprentice in house-building and repair, although the adult soccer team would probably claim a good deal of her time.

A globular silver person with spidery legs came down the street in long bounds, emitting a shower of sparks each time it landed. Six people in red with tall white masks ran after it, shouting and throwing speckled beans at it. Havzhiva and Iyan Iyan joined in the shouting and craned from the roof to see it go bounding round the corner towards the plaza. They both knew that this Unusual God was Chert, a young man of the Sky lineage, a goalkeeper for the adult soccer team; they both also knew that it was a manifestation of deity. A god called Zarstsa or Ball-Lighting was using Chert to come into town for the ceremony, and had just bounded down the street pursued by shouts of fear and praise and showers of fertility. Amused and entertained by the spectacle, they judged with some acuteness the quality of the god’s costume, the jumping, and the fireworks, and were awed by the strangeness and power of the event. They did not say anything for a long time after the god had passed, but sat dreamily in the foggy sunlight on the roof. They were children who lived among the daily gods. Now they had seen one of the unusual gods. They were content. Another one would come along, before long. Time is nothing to the gods.

At fifteen, Havzhiva and Iyan Iyan became gods together.

Stse people between twelve and fifteen were vigilantly watched; there would be a great deal of grief and deep, lasting shame if a child of the house, the family, the lineage, the people, should change being prematurely and without ceremony. Virginity was a sacred status, not to be carelessly abandoned; sexual activity was a sacred status, not to be carelessly undertaken. It was assumed that a boy would masturbate and make some homosexual experiments, but not a homosexual pairing; adolescent boys who paired off, and those who incurred suspicion of trying to get alone with a girl, were endlessly lectured and hectored and badgered by older men. A grown man who made sexual advances to a virgin of either sex would forfeit his professional status, his religious offices, and his houseright.

Changing being took a while. Boys and girls had to be taught how to recognise and control their fertility, which in Hainish physiology is a matter of personal decision. Conception does not happen: it is performed. It cannot take place unless both the woman and the man have chosen it. At thirteen, boys began to be taught the technique of deliberately releasing potent sperm. The teachings were full of warnings, threats, and scoldings, though the boys were never actually punished. After a year or two came a series of tests of achieved potency, a threshold ritual, frightening, formal, extremely secret, exclusively male. To have passed the tests was, of course, a matter of intense pride; yet Havzhiva, like most boys, came to his final change-of-being rites very apprehensive, hiding fear under a sullen stoicism.

The girls had been differently taught. The people of Stse believed that a woman’s cycle of fertility made it easy for her to learn when and how to conceive, and so the teaching was easy too. Girls’ threshold rituals were celebratory, involving praise rather than shame, arousing anticipation rather than fear. Women had been telling them for years, with demonstrations, what a man wants, how to make him stand up tall, how to show him what a woman wants. During this training, most girls asked if they couldn’t just go on practicing with each other, and got scolded and lectured. No, they couldn’t. Once they had changed status they could do as they pleased, but everybody must go through “the twofold door” once.

The change-of-being rites were held whenever the people in charge of them could get an equal number of fifteen-year-old boys and girls from the pueblo and its farms. Often a boy or girl had to be borrowed from one of the related pueblos to even out the number or to pair the lineages correctly. Magnificently masked and costumed, silent, the participants danced and were honored all day in the plaza and in the house consecrated to the ceremony; in the evening they ate a ritual meal in silence; then they were led off in pairs by masked and silent ritualists. Many of them kept their masks on, hiding their fear and modesty in that sacred anonymity.

Because Other Sky people have sex only with Original and Buried Cable people and they were the only ones of those lineages in the group, Iyan Iyan and Havzhiva had known they must be paired. They had recognised each other as soon as the dancing began. When they were left alone in the consecrated room, they took off their masks at once. Their eyes met. They looked away.

They had been kept apart most of the time for the past couple of years, and completely apart for the last months. Havzhiva had begun to get his growth, and was nearly as tall as she was now. Each saw a stranger. Decorous and serious, they approached each other, each thinking, “Let’s get it over with.” So they touched, and that god entered them, becoming them; the god for whom they were the doorway; the meaning for which they were the word. It was an awkward god at first, clumsy, but became an increasingly happy one.

When they left the consecrated house the next day, they both went to Iyan Iyan’s house. “Havzhiva will live here,” Iyan Iyan said, as a woman has a right to say. Everybody in her family made him welcome and none of them seemed surprised.

When he went to get his clothes from his grandmother’s house, nobody there seemed surprised, everybody congratulated him, an old woman cousin from Etsahin made some embarrassing jokes, and his father said, “You are a man of this house now; come back for dinner.”

So he slept with Iyan Iyan at her house, ate breakfast there, ate dinner at his house, kept his daily clothes at her house, kept his dance clothes at his house, and went on with his education, which now had mostly to do with rug-weaving on the power broadlooms and with the nature of the cosmos. He and Iyan Iyan both played on the adult soccer team.

He began to see more of his mother, because when he was seventeen she asked him if he wanted to learn Sun-stuff with her, the rites and protocols of trade, arranging fair exchange with farmers of Stse and bargaining with other pueblos of the lineages and with foreigners. The rituals were learned by rote, the protocols were learned by practice. Havzhiva went with his mother to the market, to outlying farms, and across the bay to the mainland pueblos. He had been getting restless with weaving, which filled his mind with patterns that left no room outside themselves. The travel was welcome, the work was interesting, and he admired Tovo’s authority, wit, and tact. Listening to her and a group of old merchants and Sun people maneuvering around a deal was an education in itself. She did not push him; he played a very minor role in these negotiations. Training in complicated business such as Sun-stuff took years, and there were other, older people in training before him. But she was satisfied with him. “You have a knack for persuading,” she told him one afternoon as they were sailing home across the golden water, watching the roofs of Stse solidify out of mist and sunset light. “You could inherit the Sun, if you wanted to.”

Do I want to? he thought. There was no response in him but a sense of darkening or softening, which he could not interpret. He knew he liked the work. Its patterns were not closed. It took him out of Stse, among strangers, and he liked that. It gave him something to do which he didn’t know how to do, and he liked that.

“The woman who used to live with your father is coming for a visit,” Tovo said.

Havzhiva pondered. Granite had never married. The women who had borne the children Granite sired both lived in Stse and always had. He asked nothing, a polite silence being the adult way of signifying that one doesn’t understand.

“They were young. No child came,” his mother said. “She went away after that. She became a historian.”

“Ah,” Havzhiva said in pure, blank surprise.

He had never heard of anybody who became a historian. It had never occurred to him that a person could become one, any more than a person could become a Stse. You were born what you were. You were what you were born.

The quality of his polite silence was desperately intense, and Tovo certainly was not unaware of it. Part of her tact as a teacher was knowing when a question needed an answer. She said nothing.

As their sail slackened and the boat slid in towards the pier built on the ancient bridge foundations, he asked, “Is the historian Buried Cable or Original?”

“Buried Cable,” his mother said. “Oh, how stiff I am! Boats are such stiff creatures!” The woman who had sailed them across, a ferrywoman of the Grass lineage, rolled her eyes, but said nothing in defense of her sweet, supple little boat.

“A relative of yours is coming?” Havzhiva said to Iyan Iyan that night.

“Oh, yes, she templed in.” Iyan Iyan meant a message had been received in the information center of Stse and transmitted to the recorder in her household. “She used to live in your house, my mother said. Who did you see in Etsahin today?”

“Just some Sun people. Your relative is a historian?”

“Crazy people,” Iyan Iyan said with indifference, and came to sit naked on naked Havzhiva and massage his back.

The historian arrived, a little short thin woman of fifty or so called Mezha. By the time Havzhiva met her she was wearing Stse clothing and eating breakfast with everybody else. She had bright eyes and was cheerful but not talkative. Nothing about her showed that she had broken the social contract, done things no woman does, ignored her lineage, become another kind of being. For all he knew she was married to the father of her children, and wove at a loom, and castrated animals. But nobody shunned her, and after breakfast the old people of the household took her off for a returning-traveler ceremony, just as if she were still one of them.

He kept wondering about her, wondering what she had done. He asked Iyan Iyan questions about her till Iyan Iyan snapped at him, “I don’t know what she does, I don’t know what she thinks. Historians are crazy. Ask her yourself!”

When Havzhiva realised that he was afraid to do so, for no reason, he understood that he was in the presence of a god who was requiring something of him. He went up to one of the sitting holes, rock cairns on the heights above the town. Below him the black tile roofs and white walls of Stse nestled under the bluffs, and the irrigation tanks shone silver among fields and orchards. Beyond the tilled land stretched the long sea marshes. He spent a day sitting in silence, looking out to sea and into his soul. He came back down to his own house and slept there. When he turned up for breakfast at Iyan Iyan’s house she looked at him and said nothing.

“I was fasting,” he said.

She shrugged a little. “So eat,” she said, sitting down by him. After breakfast she left for work. He did not, though he was expected at the looms.

“Mother of All Children,” he said to the historian, giving her the most respectful title a man of one lineage can give a woman of another, “there are things I do not know, which you know.”

“What I know I will teach you with pleasure,” she said, as ready with the formula as if she had lived here all her life. She then smiled and forestalled his next oblique question. “What was given me I give,” she said, meaning there was no question of payment or obligation. “Come on, let’s go to the plaza.”

Everybody goes to the plaza in Stse to talk, and sits on the steps or around the fountain or on hot days under the arcades, and watches other people come and go and sit and talk. It was perhaps a little more public than Havzhiva would have liked, but he was obedient to his god and his teacher.

They sat in a niche of the fountain’s broad base and conversed, greeting people every sentence or two with a nod or a word.

“Why did—” Havzhiva began, and stuck.

“Why did I leave? Where did I go?” She cocked her head, bright-eyed as an araha, checking that those were the questions he wanted answered. “Yes. Well, I was crazy in love with Granite, but we had no child, and he wanted a child . . . You look like he did then. I like to look at you . . . So, I was unhappy. Nothing here was any good to me. And I knew how to do everything here. Or that’s what I thought.”

Havzhiva nodded once.

“I worked at the temple. I’d read messages that came in or came by and wonder what they were about. I thought, all that’s going on in the world! Why should I stay here my whole life? Does my mind have to stay here? So I began to talk with some of them in other places in the temple: who are you, what do you do, what is it like there . . . Right away they put me in touch with a group of historians who were born in the pueblos, who look out for people like me, to make sure they don’t waste time or offend a god.”

This language was completely familiar to Havzhiva, and he nodded again, intent.

“I asked them questions. They asked me questions. Historians have to do a lot of that. I found out they have schools, and asked if I could go to one. Some of them came here and talked to me and my family and other people, finding out if there would be trouble if I left. Stse is a conservative pueblo. There hadn’t been a historian from here for four hundred years.”

She smiled; she had a quick, catching smile, but the young man listened with unchanging, intense seriousness. Her look rested on his face tenderly.

“People here were upset, but nobody was angry. So after they talked about it, I left with those people. We flew to Kathhad. There’s a school there. I was twenty-two. I began a new education. I changed being. I learned to be a historian.”

“How?” he asked, after a long silence.

She drew a long breath. “By asking hard questions,” she said. “Like you’re doing now . . . And by giving up all the knowledge I had—throwing it away.”

“How?” he asked again, frowning. “Why?”

“Like this. When I left, I knew I was a Buried Cable woman. When I was there, I had to unknow that knowledge. There, I’m not a Buried Cable woman. I’m a woman. I can have sex with any person I choose. I can take up any profession I choose. Lineage matters, here. It does not matter, there. It has meaning here, and a use. It has no meaning and no use, anywhere else in the universe.” She was as intense as he, now. “There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical.”

“Are there two kinds of gods?”

“No,” she said. “There are no gods there. The gods are here.”

She saw his face change.

She said after a while, “There are souls, there. Many, many souls, minds, minds full of knowledge and passion. Living and dead. People who lived on this earth a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. Minds and souls of people from worlds a hundred light-years from this one, all of them with their own knowledge, their own history. The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred. That’s not a knowledge I ever had to give up. All I learned, here and there, only increased it. There’s nothing that is not sacred.” She spoke slowly and quietly, the way most people talked in the pueblo. “You can choose the local sacredness or the great one. In the end they’re the same. But not in the life one lives. ‘To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.’ The Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river.”

After a while he said, “Rocks are the river’s bed.”

She laughed. Her gaze rested on him again, appraising and affectionate. “So I came home,” she said. “For a rest.”

“But you’re not—you’re no longer a woman of your lineage?”

“Yes; here. Still. Always.”

“But you’ve changed being. You’ll leave again.”

“Yes,” she said decisively. “One can be more than one kind of being. I have work to do, there.”

He shook his head, slower, but equally decisive. “What good is work without the gods? It makes no sense to me, Mother of All Children. I don’t have the mind to understand.”

She smiled at the double meaning. “I think you’ll understand what you choose to understand, Man of my People,” she said, addressing him formally to show that he was free to leave when he wanted.

He hesitated, then took his leave. He went to work, filling his mind and world with the great repeated patterns of the broadloom rugs.

That night he made it up to Iyan Iyan so ardently that she was left spent and a bit amazed. The god had come back to them burning, consuming.

“I want a child,” Havzhiva said as they lay melded, sweated together, arms and legs and breasts and breath all mingled in the musky dark.

“Oh,” Iyan Iyan sighed, not wanting to talk, decide, resist. “Maybe . . . Later . . . Soon . . .”

“Now,” he said, “now.”

“No,” she said softly. “Hush.”

He was silent. She slept.

More than a year later, when they were nineteen, Iyan Iyan said to him before he put out the light, “I want a baby.”

“It’s too soon.”

“Why? My brother’s nearly thirty. And his wife would like a baby around. After it’s weaned I’ll come sleep with you at your house. You always said you’d like that.”

“It’s too soon,” he repeated. “I don’t want it.”

She turned to him, laying aside her coaxing, reasonable tone. “What do you want, Havzhiva?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re going away. You’re going to leave the People. You’re going crazy. That woman, that damned witch!”

“There are no witches,” he said coldly. “That’s stupid talk. Superstition.”

They stared at each other, the dear friends, the lovers.

“Then what’s wrong with you? If you want to move back home, say so. If you want another woman, go to her. But you could give me my child, first! when I ask you for it! Have you lost your araha?” She gazed at him with tearful eyes, fierce, unyielding.

He put his face in his hands. “Nothing is right,” he said. “Nothing is right. Everything I do, I have to do because that’s how it’s done, but it—it doesn’t make sense—there are other ways—”

“There’s one way to live rightly,” Iyan Iyan said, “that I know of. And this is where I live. There’s one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!” She cried hard after this, convulsively, the fear and anger of months breaking out at last, and he held her to calm and comfort her.

When she could speak, she leaned her head against him and said miserably, in a small, hoarse voice, “To have when you go, Havzhiva.”

At that he wept for shame and pity, and whispered, “Yes, yes.” But that night they lay holding each other, trying to console each other, till they fell asleep like children.

“I am ashamed,” Granite said painfully.

“Did you make this happen?” his sister asked, dry.

“How do I know? Maybe I did. First Mezha, now my son. Was I too stern with him?”

“No, no.”

“Too lax, then. I didn’t teach him well. Why is he crazy?”

“He isn’t crazy, brother. Let me tell you what I think. As a child he always asked why, why, the way children do. I would answer: That’s how it is, that’s how it’s done. He understood. But his mind has no peace. My mind is like that, if I don’t remind myself. Learning the Sun-stuff, he always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are: that is the truth. But he wasn’t satisfied by the truth. He isn’t crazy, brother, but he is lame. He can’t walk. He can’t walk with us. So, if a man can’t walk, what should he do?”

“Sit still and sing,” Granite said slowly.

“If he can’t sit still? He can fly.”

“Fly?”

“They have wings for him, brother.”

“I am ashamed,” Granite said, and hid his face in his hands.

Tovo went to the temple and sent a message to Mezha at Kathhad: “Your pupil wishes to join you.” There was some malice in the words. Tovo blamed the historian for upsetting her son’s balance, offcentering him till, as she said, his soul was lamed. And she was jealous of the woman who in a few days had outdone the teachings of years. She knew she was jealous and did not care. What did her jealousy or her brother’s humiliation matter? What they had to do was grieve.

As the boat for Daha sailed away, Havzhiva looked back and saw Stse: a quilt of a thousand shades of green, the sea marshes, the pastures, fields, hedgerows, orchards; the town clambering up the bluffs above, pale granite walls, white stucco walls, black tile roofs, wall above wall and roof above roof. As it diminished it looked like a seabird perched there, white and black, a bird on its nest. Above the town the heights of the island came in view, grey-blue moors and high, wild hills fading into the clouds, white skeins of marsh birds flying.

At the port in Daha, though he was farther from Stse than he had ever been and people had a strange accent, he could understand them and read the signs. He had never seen signs before, but their usefulness was evident. Using them, he found his way to the waiting room for the Kathhad flyer. People were sleeping on the cots provided, in their own blankets. He found an empty cot and lay on it, wrapped in the blanket Granite had woven for him years ago. After a short, strange night, people came in with fruit and hot drinks. One of them gave Havzhiva his ticket. None of the passengers knew anyone else; they were all strangers; they kept their eyes down. Announcements were made, and they all went outside and went into the machine, the flyer.

Havzhiva made himself look at the world as it fell out from under him. He whispered the Staying Chant soundlessly, steadily. The stranger in the seat next to him joined in.

When the world began to tilt and rush up towards him he shut his eyes and tried to keep breathing.

One by one they filed out of the flyer onto a flat, black place where it was raining. Mezha came to him through the rain, saying his name. “Havzhiva, Man of my People, welcome! Come on. There’s a place for you at the School.”

Kathhad and Ve

BY THE THIRD YEAR AT Kathhad Havzhiva knew a great many things that distressed him. The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.

For instance, he knew now that historians did not study history. No human mind could encompass the history of Hain: three million years of it. The events of the first two million years, the Fore-Eras, like layers of metamorphic rock, were so compressed, so distorted by the weight of the succeeding millennia and their infinite events that one could reconstruct only the most sweeping generalities from the tiny surviving details. And if one did chance to find some miraculously preserved document from a thousand millennia ago, what then? A king ruled in Azbahan; the Empire fell to the Infidels; a fusion rocket has landed on Ve . . . But there had been uncountable kings, empires, inventions, billions of lives lived in millions of countries, monarchies, democracies, oligarchies, anarchies, ages of chaos and ages of order, pantheon upon pantheon of gods, infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings, innumerable horrors and triumphs, an endless repetition of unceasing novelty. What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.

To Havzhiva the knowledge that his life, any life was one flicker of light for one moment on the surface of that river was sometimes distressing, sometimes restful.

What the historians mostly did was explore, in an easy and unhurried fashion, the local reach and moment of the river. Hain itself had been for several thousand years in an unexciting period marked by the coexistence of small, stable, self-contained societies, currently called pueblos, with a high-technology, low-density network of cities and information centers, currently called the temple. Many of the people of the temple, the historians, spent their lives traveling to and gathering knowledge about the other inhabited planets of the nearby Orion Arm, colonised by their ancestors a couple of million years ago during the Fore-Eras. They acknowledged no motive in these contacts and explorations other than curiosity and fellow-feeling. They were getting in touch with their long-lost relatives. They called that greater network of worlds by an alien word, Ekumen, which meant “the household.”

By now Havzhiva knew that everything he had learned in Stse, all the knowledge he had had, could be labeled: typical pueblo culture of northwestern coastal South Continent. He knew that the beliefs, practices, kinship systems, technologies, and intellectual organising patterns of the different pueblos were entirely different one from another, wildly different, totally bizarre—just as bizarre as the system of Stse—and he knew that such systems were to be met with on every Known World that contained human populations living in small, stable groups with a technology adapted to their environment, a low, constant birth rate, and a political life based on consent.

At first such knowledge had been intensely distressing. It had been painful. It had made him ashamed and angry. First he thought the historians kept their knowledge from the pueblos, then he thought the pueblos kept knowledge from their own people. He accused; his teachers mildly denied. No, they said. You were taught that certain things were true, or necessary; and those things are true and necessary. They are the local knowledge of Stse.

They are childish, irrational beliefs! he said. They looked at him, and he knew he had said something childish and irrational.

Local knowledge is not partial knowledge, they said. There are different ways of knowing. Each has its own qualities, penalties, rewards. Historical knowledge and scientific knowledge are a way of knowing. Like local knowledge, they must be learned. The way they know in the Household isn’t taught in the pueblos, but it wasn’t hidden from you, by your people or by us. Everybody anywhere on Hain has access to all the information in the temple.

This was true; he knew it to be true. He could have found out for himself, on the screens of the temple of Stse, what he was learning now. Some of his fellow students from other pueblos had indeed taught themselves how to learn from the screens, and had entered history before they ever met a historian.

Books, however, books that were the body of history, the durable reality of it, barely existed in Stse, and his anger sought justification there. You keep the books from us, all the books in the Library of Hain! No, they said mildly. The pueblos choose not to have many books. They prefer the live knowledge, spoken or passing on the screens, passing from the breath to the breath, from living mind to living mind. Would you give up what you learned that way? Is it less than, is it inferior to what you’ve learned here from books? There’s more than one kind of knowledge, said the historians.

By his third year, Havzhiva had decided that there was more than one kind of people. The pueblans, able to accept that existence is fundamentally arbitrary, enriched the world intellectually and spiritually. Those who couldn’t be satisfied with mystery were more likely to be of use as historians, enriching the world intellectually and materially.

Meanwhile he had got quite used to people who had no lineage, no relatives, and no religion. Sometimes he said to himself with a glow of pride, “I am a citizen of all history, of the millions of years of Hainish history, and my country is the whole galaxy!” At other times he felt miserably small, and he would leave his screens or his books and go look for company among his fellow students, especially the young women who were so friendly, so companionable.

At the age of twenty-four Havzhiva, or Zhiv as he was now called, had been at the Ekumenical School on Ve for a year.

Ve, the next planet out from Hain, was colonised eons ago, the first step in the vast Hainish expansion of the Fore-Eras. It has gone through many phases as a satellite or partner of Hainish civilizations; at this period it is inhabited entirely by historians and Aliens.

In their current (that is, for at least the past hundred millennia) mood of not tampering, the Hainish have let Ve return to its own norms of coldness, dryness, and bleakness—a climate within human tolerance, but likely to truly delight only people from the Terran Altiplano or the uplands of Chiffewar. Zhiv was out hiking through this stern landscape with his companion, friend, and lover, Tiu.

They had met two years before, in Kathhad. At that point Zhiv had still been reveling in the availability of all women to himself and himself to all women, a freedom that had only gradually dawned on him, and about which Mezha had warned him gently. “You will think there are no rules,” she said. “There are always rules.” He had been conscious mainly of his own increasingly fearless and careless transgression of what had been the rules. Not all the women wanted to have sex, and not all the women wanted to have sex with men, as he had soon discovered, but that still left an infinite variety. He found that he was considered attractive. And being Hainish was a definite advantage with the Alien women.

The genetic alteration that made the Hainish able to control their fertility was not a simple bit of gene-splicing; involving a profound and radical reconstruction of human physiology, it had probably taken up to twenty-five generations to establish—so say the historians of Hain, who think they know in general terms the steps such a transformation must have followed. However the ancient Hainish did it, they did not do it for any of their colonists. They left the peoples of their colony worlds to work out their own solutions to the First Heterosexual Problem. These have been, of course, various and ingenious; but in all cases so far, to avoid conception you have to do something or have done something or take something or use something—unless you have sex with the Hainish.

Zhiv had been outraged when a girl from Beldene asked him if he was sure he wouldn’t get her pregnant. “How do you know?” she said. “Maybe I should take a zapper just to be safe.” Insulted in the quick of his manhood, he disentangled himself, said, “Maybe it is only safe not to be with me,” and stalked out. Nobody else questioned his integrity, fortunately, and he cruised happily on, until he met Tiu.

She was not an Alien. He had sought out women from offworld; sleeping with Aliens added exoticism to transgression, or, as he put it, was an enrichment of knowledge such as every historian should seek. But Tiu was Hainish. She had been born and brought up in Darranda, as had her ancestors before her. She was a child of the Historians as he was a child of the People. He realised very soon that this bond and division was far greater than any mere foreignness: that their unlikeness was true difference and their likeness was true kinship. She was the country he had left his own country to discover. She was what he sought to be. She was what he sought.

What she had—so it seemed to him—was perfect equilibrium. When he was with her he felt that for the first time in his life he was learning to walk. To walk as she did: effortless, unself-conscious as an animal, and yet conscious, careful, keeping in mind all that might unbalance her and using it as tightrope walkers use their long poles . . . This, he thought, this is a dweller in true freedom of mind, this is a woman free to be fully human, this perfect measure, this perfect grace.

He was utterly happy when he was with her. For a long time he asked nothing beyond that, to be with her. And for a long time she was wary of him, gentle but distant. He thought she had every right to keep her distance. A pueblo boy, a fellow who couldn’t tell his uncle from his father—he knew what he was, here, in the eyes of the ill-natured and the insecure. Despite their vast knowledge of human ways of being, historians retained the vast human capacity for bigotry. Tiu had no such prejudices, but what did he have to offer her? She had and was everything. She was complete. Why should she look at him? If she would only let him look at her, be with her, it was all he wanted.

She looked at him, liked him, found him appealing and a little frightening. She saw how he wanted her, how he needed her, how he had made her into the center of his life and did not even know it. That would not do. She tried to be cold, to turn him away. He obeyed. He did not plead. He stayed away.

But after fifteen days he came to her and said, “Tiu, I cannot live without you,” and knowing that he was speaking the plain truth she said, “Then live with me a while.” For she had missed the passion his presence filled the air with. Everybody else seemed so tame, so balanced.

Their lovemaking was an immediate, immense, and continual delight. Tiu was amazed at herself, at her obsession with Zhiv, at her letting him pull her out of her orbit so far. She had never expected to adore anybody, let alone to be adored. She had led an orderly life, in which the controls were individual and internal, not social and external as they had been in Zhiv’s life in Stse. She knew what she wanted to be and do. There was a direction in her, a true north, that she would always follow. Their first year together was a series of continual shifts and changes in their relationship, a kind of exciting love dance, unpredictable and ecstatic. Very gradually, she began to resist the tension, the intensity, the ecstasy. It was lovely but it wasn’t right, she thought. She wanted to go on. That constant direction began to pull her away from him again; and then he fought for his life against it.

That was what he was doing, after a long day’s hike in the Desert of Asu Asi on Ve, in their miraculously warm Gethenian-made tent. A dry, icy wind moaned among cliffs of crimson stone above them, polished by the endless winds to a shine like lacquer and carved by a lost civilization with lines of some vast geometry.

They might have been brother and sister, as they sat in the glow of the Chabe stove: their red-bronze coloring was the same, their thick, glossy, black hair, their fine, compact body type. The pueblan decorum and quietness of Zhiv’s movements and voice met in her an articulate, quicker, more vivid response.

But she spoke now slowly, almost stiffly.

“Don’t force me to choose, Zhiv,” she said. “Ever since I started in the Schools I’ve wanted to go to Terra. Since before. When I was a kid. All my life. Now they offer me what I want, what I’ve worked for. How can you ask me to refuse?”

“I don’t.”

“But you want me to put it off. If I do, I may lose the chance forever. Probably not. But why risk it—for one year? You can follow me next year!”

He said nothing.

“If you want to,” she added stiffly. She was always too ready to forgo her claim on him. Perhaps she had never believed fully in his love for her. She did not think of herself as lovable, as worthy of his passionate loyalty. She was frightened by it, felt inadequate, false. Her self-respect was an intellectual thing. “You make a god of me,” she had told him, and did not understand when he replied with happy seriousness, “We make the god together.”

“I’m sorry,” he said now. “It’s a different form of reason. Superstition, if you like. I can’t help it, Tiu. Terra is a hundred and forty light-years away. If you go, when you get there, I’ll be dead.”

“You will not! You’ll have lived another year here, you’ll be on your way there, you’ll arrive a year after I do!”

“I know that. Even in Stse we learned that,” he said patiently. “But I’m superstitious. We die to each other if you go. Even in Kathhad you learned that.”

“I didn’t. It’s not true. How can you ask me to give up this chance for what you admit is a superstition? Be fair, Zhiv!”

After a long silence, he nodded.

She sat stricken, understanding that she had won. She had won badly.

She reached across to him, trying to comfort him and herself. She was scared by the darkness in him, his grief, his mute acceptance of betrayal. But it wasn’t betrayal—she rejected the word at once. She wouldn’t betray him. They were in love. They loved each other. He would follow her in a year, two years at the most. They were adults, they must not cling together like children. Adult relationships are based on mutual freedom, mutual trust. She told herself all these things as she said them to him. He said yes, and held her, and comforted her. In the night, in the utter silence of the desert, the blood singing in his ears, he lay awake and thought, “It has died unborn. It was never conceived.”

They stayed together in their little apartment at the School for the few more weeks before Tiu left. They made love cautiously, gently, talked about history and economics and ethnology, kept busy. Tiu had to prepare herself to work with the team she was going with, studying the Terran concepts of hierarchy; Zhiv had a paper to write on social-energy generation on Werel. They worked hard. Their friends gave Tiu a big farewell party. The next day Zhiv went with her to Ve Port. She kissed and held him, telling him to hurry, hurry and come to Terra. He saw her board the flyer that would take her up to the NAFAL ship waiting in orbit. He went back to the apartment on the South Campus of the School. There a friend found him three days later sitting at his desk in a curious condition, passive, speaking very slowly if at all, unable to eat or drink. Being pueblo-born, the friend recognised this state and called in the medicine man (the Hainish do not call them doctors). Having ascertained that he was from one of the Southern pueblos, the medicine man said, “Havzhiva! The god cannot die in you here!”

After a long silence the young man said softly in a voice which did not sound like his voice, “I need to go home.”

“That is not possible now,” said the medicine man, “But we can arrange a Staying Chant while I find a person able to address the god.” He promptly put out a call for students who were ex—People of the South. Four responded. They sat all night with Havzhiva singing the Staying Chant in two languages and four dialects, until Havzhiva joined them in a fifth dialect, whispering the words hoarsely, till he collapsed and slept for thirty hours.

He woke in his own room. An old woman was having a conversation with nobody beside him. “You aren’t here,” she said. “No, you are mistaken. You can’t die here. It would not be right, it would be quite wrong. You know that. This is the wrong place. This is the wrong life. You know that! What are you doing here? Are you lost? Do you want to know the way home? Here it is. Listen.” She began singing in a thin, high voice, an almost tuneless, almost wordless song that was familiar to Havzhiva, as if he had heard it long ago. He fell asleep again while the old woman went on talking to nobody.

When he woke again she was gone. He never knew who she was or where she came from; he never asked. She had spoken and sung in his own language, in the dialect of Stse.

He was not going to die now, but he was very unwell. The medicine man ordered him to the Hospital at Tes, the most beautiful place on all Ve, an oasis where hot springs and sheltering hills make a mild local climate and flowers and forests can grow. There are paths endlessly winding under great trees, warm lakes where you can swim forever, little misty ponds from which birds rise crying, steam-shrouded hot springs, and a thousand waterfalls whose voices are the only sound all night. There he was sent to stay till he was recovered.

He began to speak into his noter, after he had been at Tes twenty days or so; he would sit in the sunlight on the doorstep of his cottage in a glade of grasses and ferns and talk quietly to himself by way of the little recording machine. “What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything,” he said, watching the branches of the old trees dark against the sky. “What you build up your world from, your local, intelligible, rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything. And so all selection is arbitrary. All knowledge is partial—infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth. All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life, is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection of . . .” His voice ceased; the silence of the glade among the great trees continued.

After forty-five days he returned to the School. He took a new apartment. He changed fields, leaving social science, Tiu’s field, for Ekumenical service training, which was intellectually closely related but led to a different kind of work. The change would lengthen his time at the School by at least a year, after which if he did well he could hope for a post with the Ekumen. He did well, and after two years was asked, in the polite fashion of the Ekumenical councils, if he would care to go to Werel. Yes, he said, he would. His friends gave a big farewell party for him.

“I thought you were aiming for Terra,” said one of his less-astute classmates. “All that stuff about war and slavery and class and caste and gender—isn’t that Terran history?”

“It’s current events in Werel,” Havzhiva said.

He was no longer Zhiv. He had come back from the Hospital as Havzhiva.

Somebody else was stepping on the unastute classmate’s foot, but she paid no attention. “I thought you were going to follow Tiu,” she said. “I thought that’s why you never slept with anybody. God, if I’d only known!” The others winced, but Havzhiva smiled and hugged her apologetically.

In his own mind it was quite clear. As he had betrayed and forsaken Iyan Iyan, so Tiu had betrayed and forsaken him. There was no going back and no going forward. So he must turn aside. Though he was one of them, he could no longer live with the People; though he had become one of them, he did not want to live with the historians. So he must go live among Aliens.

He had no hope of joy. He had bungled that, he thought. But he knew that the two long, intense disciplines that had filled his life, that of the gods and that of history, had given him an uncommon knowledge, which might be of use somewhere; and he knew that the right use of knowledge is fulfillment.

The medicine man came to visit him the day before he left, checked him over, and then sat for a while saying nothing. Havzhiva sat with him. He had long been used to silence, and still sometimes forgot that it was not customary among historians.

“What’s wrong?” the medicine man said. It seemed to be a rhetorical question, from its meditative tone; at any rate, Havzhiva made no answer.

“Please stand up,” the medicine man said, and when Havzhiva had done so, “Now walk a little.” He walked a few steps; the medicine man observed him. “You’re out of balance,” he said. “Did you know it?”

“Yes.”

“I could get a Staying Chant together this evening.”

“It’s all right,” Havzhiva said. “I’ve always been off-balance.”

“There’s no need to be,” the medicine man said. “On the other hand, maybe it’s best, since you’re going to Werel. So: Good-bye for this life.”

They embraced formally, as historians did, especially when as now it was absolutely certain that they would never see one another again. Havzhiva had to give and get a good many formal embraces that day. The next day he boarded the Terraces of Darranda and went across the darkness.

Yeowe

DURING HIS JOURNEY OF EIGHTY light-years at NAFAL speed, his mother died, and his father, and Iyan Iyan, everyone he had known in Stse, everyone he knew in Kathhad and on Ve. By the time the ship landed, they had all been dead for years. The child Iyan Iyan had borne had lived and grown old and died.

This was a knowledge he had lived with ever since he saw Tiu board her ship, leaving him to die. Because of the medicine man, the four people who had sung for him, the old woman, and the waterfalls of Tes, he had lived; but he had lived with that knowledge.

Other things had changed as well. At the time he left Ve, Werel’s colony planet Yeowe had been a slave world, a huge work camp. By the time he arrived on Werel, the War of Liberation was over, Yeowe had declared its independence, and the institution of slavery on Werel itself was beginning to disintegrate.

Havzhiva longed to observe this terrible and magnificent process, but the Embassy sent him promptly off to Yeowe. A Hainishman called Sohikelwenyanmurkeres Esdardon Aya counseled him before he left. “If you want danger, it’s dangerous,” he said, “and if you like hope, it’s hopeful. Werel is unmaking itself, while Yeowe’s trying to make itself. I don’t know if it’s going to succeed. I tell you what, Yehedarhed Havzhiva: there are great gods loose on these worlds.”

Yeowe had got rid of its Bosses, its Owners, the Four Corporations who had run the vast slave plantations for three hundred years; but though the thirty years of the War of Liberation were over, the fighting had not stopped. Chiefs and warlords among the slaves who had risen to power during the Liberation now fought to keep and extend their power. Factions had battled over the question of whether to kick all foreigners off the planet forever or to admit Aliens and join the Ekumen. The isolationists had finally been voted down, and there was a new Ekumenical Embassy in the old colonial capital. Havzhiva spent a while there learning “the language and the table manners,” as they said. Then the Ambassador, a clever young Terran named Solly, sent him south to the region called Yotebber, which was clamoring for recognition.

History is infamy, Havzhiva thought as he rode the train through the ruined landscapes of the world.

The Werelian capitalists who colonised the planet had exploited it and their slaves recklessly, mindlessly, in a long orgy of profit-making. It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done. Strip-mining and single-crop agriculture had defaced and sterilised the earth. The rivers were polluted, dead. Huge dust storms darkened the eastern horizon.

The Bosses had run their plantations by force and fear. For over a century they had shipped male slaves only, worked them till they died, imported fresh ones as needed. Work gangs in these all-male compounds developed into tribal hierarchies. At last, as the price of slaves on Werel and the cost of shipping rose, the Corporations began to buy bondswomen for Yeowe Colony. So over the next two centuries the slave population grew, and slave-cities were founded, “Assetvilles” and “Dustytowns” spreading out from the old compounds of the plantations. Havzhiva knew that the Liberation movement had arisen first among the women in the tribal compounds, a rebellion against male domination, before it became a war of all slaves against their owners.

The slow train stopped in city after city: miles of shacks and cabins, treeless, whole tracts bombed or burnt out in the war and not yet rebuilt; factories, some of them gutted ruins, some functioning but ancient-looking, rattletrap, smoke-belching. At each station hundreds of people got off the train and onto it, swarming, crowding, shouting out bribes to the porters, clambering up onto the roofs of the cars, brutally shoved off again by uniformed guards and policemen. In the north of the long continent, as on Werel, he had seen many black-skinned people, blue-black; but as the train went farther south there were fewer of these, until in Yotebber the people in the villages and on the desolate sidings were much paler than he was, a bluish, dusty color. These were the “dust people,” the descendants of a hundred generations of Werelian slaves.

Yotebber had been an early center of the Liberation. The Bosses had made reprisal with bombs and poison gas; thousands of people had died. Whole towns had been burned to get rid of the unburied dead, human and animal. The mouth of the great river had been dammed with rotting bodies. But all that was past. Yeowe was free, a new member of the Ekumen of the Worlds, and Havzhiva in the capacity of Sub-Envoy was on his way to help the people of Yotebber Region to begin their new history. Or from the point of view of a Hainishman, to rejoin their ancient history.

He was met at the station in Yotebber City by a large crowd surging and cheering and yelling behind barricades manned by policemen and soldiers; in front of the barricades was a delegation of officials wearing splendid robes and sashes of office and variously ornate uniforms: big men, most of them, dignified, very much public figures. There were speeches of welcome, reporters and photographers for the holonet and the neareal news. It wasn’t a circus, however. The big men were definitely in control. They wanted their guest to know he was welcome, he was popular, he was—as the Chief said in his brief, impressive speech—the Envoy from the Future.

That night in his luxurious suite in an Owner’s city mansion converted to a hotel, Havzhiva thought: If they knew that their man from the future grew up in a pueblo and never saw a neareal till he came here . . .

He hoped he would not disappoint these people. From the moment he had first met them on Werel he had liked them, despite their monstrous society. They were full of vitality and pride, and here on Yeowe they were full of dreams of justice. Havzhiva thought of justice what an ancient Terran said of another god: I believe in it because it is impossible. He slept well, and woke early in the warm, bright morning, full of anticipation. He walked out to begin to get to know the city, his city.

The doorman—it was disconcerting to find that people who had fought so desperately for their freedom had servants—the doorman tried hard to get him to wait for a car, a guide, evidently distressed at the great man’s going out so early, afoot, without a retinue. Havzhiva explained that he wanted to walk and was quite able to walk alone. He set off, leaving the unhappy doorman calling after him, “Oh, sir, please, avoid the City Park, sir!”

Havzhiva obeyed, thinking the park must be closed for a ceremony or replanting. He came on a plaza where a market was in full swing, and there found himself likely to become the center of a crowd; people inevitably noticed him. He wore the handsome Yeowan clothes, singlet, breeches, a light narrow robe, but he was the only person with red-brown skin in a city of four hundred thousand people. As soon as they saw his skin, his eyes, they knew him: the Alien. So he slipped away from the market and kept to quiet residential streets, enjoying the soft, warm air and the decrepit, charming colonial architecture of the houses. He stopped to admire an ornate Tualite temple. It looked rather shabby and desolate, but there was, he saw, a fresh offering of flowers at the feet of the image of the Mother at the doorway. Though her nose had been knocked off during the war, she smiled serenely, a little cross-eyed. People called out behind him. Somebody said close to him, “Foreign shit, get off our world,” and his arm was seized as his legs were kicked out from under him. Contorted faces, screaming, closed in around him. An enormous, sickening cramp seized his body, doubling him into a red darkness of struggle and voices and pain, then a dizzy shrinking and dwindling away of light and sound.

An old woman was sitting by him, whispering an almost tuneless song that seemed dimly familiar.

She was knitting. For a long time she did not look at him; when she did she said, “Ah.” He had trouble making his eyes focus, but he made out that her face was bluish, a pale bluish tan, and there were no whites to her dark eyes.

She rearranged some kind of apparatus that was attached to him somewhere, and said, “I’m the medicine woman—the nurse. You have a concussion, a slight skull fracture, a bruised kidney, a broken shoulder, and a knife wound in your gut; but you’ll be all right; don’t worry.” All this was in a foreign language, which he seemed to understand. At least he understood “don’t worry,” and obeyed.

He thought he was on the Terraces of Darranda in NAFAL mode. A hundred years passed in a bad dream but did not pass. People and clocks had no faces. He tried to whisper the Staying Chant and it had no words. The words were gone. The old woman took his hand. She held his hand and slowly, slowly brought him back into time, into local time, into the dim, quiet room where she sat knitting.

It was morning, hot, bright sunlight in the window. The Chief of Yotebber Region stood by his bedside, a tower of a man in white-and-crimson robes.

“I’m very sorry,” Havzhiva said, slowly and thickly because his mouth was damaged. “It was stupid of me to go out alone. The fault was entirely mine.”

“The villains have been caught and will be tried in a court of justice,” said the Chief.

“They were young men,” Havzhiva said. “My ignorance and folly caused the incident—”

“They will be punished,” the Chief said.

The day nurses always had the holoscreen up and watched the news and the dramas as they sat with him. They kept the sound down, and Havzhiva could ignore it. It was a hot afternoon; he was watching faint clouds move slowly across the sky, when the nurse said, using the formal address to a person of high status, “Oh, quick—if the gentleman will look, he can see the punishment of the bad men who attacked him!”

Havzhiva obeyed. He saw a thin human body suspended by the feet, the arms and hands twitching, the intestines hanging down over the chest and face. He cried out aloud and hid his face in his arm. “Turn it off,” he said, “turn it off!” He retched and gasped for air. “You are not people!” he cried in his own language, the dialect of Stse. There was some coming and going in the room. The noise of a yelling crowd ceased abruptly. He got control of his breath and lay with his eyes shut, repeating one phrase of the Staying Chant over and over until his mind and body began to steady and find a little balance somewhere, not much.

They came with food; he asked them to take it away.

The room was dim, lit only by a night-light somewhere low on the wall and the lights of the city outside the window. The old woman, the night nurse, was there, knitting in the half dark.

“I’m sorry,” Havzhiva said at random, knowing he didn’t know what he had said to them.

“Oh, Mr. Envoy,” the old woman said with a long sigh. “I read about your people. The Hainish people. You don’t do things like we do. You don’t torture and kill each other. You live in peace. I wonder, I wonder what we seem to you. Like witches, like devils, maybe.”

“No,” he said, but he swallowed down another wave of nausea.

“When you feel better, when you’re stronger, Mr. Envoy, I have a thing I want to speak to you about.” Her voice was quiet and full of an absolute, easy authority, which probably could become formal and formidable. He had known people who talked that way all his life.

“I can listen now,” he said, but she said, “Not now. Later. You are tired. Would you like me to sing?”

“Yes,” he said, and she sat and knitted and sang voicelessly, tunelessly, in a whisper. The names of her gods were in the song: Tual, Kamye. They are not my gods, he thought, but he closed his eyes and slept, safe in the rocking balance.

Her name was Yeron, and she was not old. She was forty-seven. She had been through a thirty-year war and several famines. She had artificial teeth, something Havzhiva had never heard of, and wore eyeglasses with wire frames; body mending was not unknown on Werel, but on Yeowe most people couldn’t afford it, she said. She was very thin, and her hair was thin. She had a proud bearing, but moved stiffly from an old wound in the left hip. “Everybody, everybody in this world has a bullet in them, or whipping scars, or a leg blown off, or a dead baby in their heart,” she said. “Now you’re one of us, Mr. Envoy. You’ve been through the fire.”

He was recovering well. There were five or six medical specialists on his case. The Regional Chief visited every few days and sent officials daily. The Chief was, Havzhiva realised, grateful. The outrageous attack on a representative of the Ekumen had given him the excuse and strong popular support for a strike against the diehard isolationist World Party led by his rival, another warlord hero of the Liberation. He sent glowing reports of his victories to the Sub-Envoy’s hospital room. The holonews was all of men in uniforms running, shooting, flyers buzzing over desert hills. As he walked the halls, gaining strength, Havzhiva saw patients lying in bed in the wards wired in to the neareal net, “experiencing” the fighting, from the point of view, of course, of the ones with guns, the ones with cameras, the ones who shot.

At night the screens were dark, the nets were down, and Yeron came and sat by him in the dim light from the window.

“You said there was something you had to tell me,” he said. The city night was restless, full of noises, music, voices down in the street below the window she had opened wide to let in the warm, many-scented air.

“Yes, I did.” She put her knitting down. “I am your nurse, Mr. Envoy, but also a messenger. When I heard you’d been hurt, forgive me, but I said, ‘Praise the Lord Kamye and the Lady of Mercy!’ Because I had not known how to bring my message to you, and now I knew how.” Her quiet voice paused a minute. “I ran this hospital for fifteen years. During the war. I can still pull a few strings here.” Again she paused. Like her voice, her silences were familiar to him. “I’m a messenger to the Ekumen,” she said, “from the women. Women here. Women all over Yeowe. We want to make an alliance with you . . . I know, the government already did that. Yeowe is a member of the Ekumen of the Worlds. We know that. But what does it mean? To us? It means nothing. Do you know what women are, here, in this world? They are nothing. They are not part of the government. Women made the Liberation. They worked and they died for it just like the men. But they weren’t generals, they aren’t chiefs. They are nobody. In the villages they are less than nobody, they are work animals, breeding stock. Here it’s some better. But not good. I was trained in the Medical School at Besso. I am a doctor, not a nurse. Under the Bosses, I ran this hospital. Now a man runs it. Our men are the owners now. And we’re what we always were. Property. I don’t think that’s what we fought the long war for. Do you, Mr. Envoy? I think what we have is a new liberation to make. We have to finish the job.”

After a long silence, Havzhiva asked softly, “Are you organised?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes! Just like the old days. We can organise in the dark!” She laughed a little. “But I don’t think we can win freedom for ourselves alone by ourselves alone. There has to be a change. The men think they have to be bosses. They have to stop thinking that. Well, one thing we have learned in my lifetime, you don’t change a mind with a gun. You kill the boss and you become the boss. We must change that mind. The old slave mind, boss mind. We have got to change it, Mr. Envoy. With your help. The Ekumen’s help.”

“I’m here to be a link between your people and the Ekumen. But I’ll need time,” he said. “I need to learn.”

“All the time in the world. We know we can’t turn the boss mind around in a day or a year. This is a matter of education.” She said the word as a sacred word. “It will take a long time. You take your time. If we just know that you will listen.”

“I will listen,” he said.

She drew a long breath, took up her knitting again. Presently she said, “It won’t be easy to hear us.”

He was tired. The intensity of her talk was more than he could yet handle. He did not know what she meant. A polite silence is the adult way of signifying that one doesn’t understand. He said nothing.

She looked at him. “How are we to come to you? You see, that’s a problem. I tell you, we are nothing. We can come to you only as your nurse. Your housemaid. The woman who washes your clothes. We don’t mix with the chiefs. We aren’t on the councils. We wait on table. We don’t eat the banquet.”

“Tell me—” he hesitated. “Tell me how to start. Ask to see me if you can. Come as you can, as it . . . if it’s safe?” He had always been quick to learn his lessons. “I’ll listen. I’ll do what I can.” He would never learn much distrust.

She leaned over and kissed him very gently on the mouth. Her lips were light, dry, soft.

“There,” she said, “no chief will give you that.”

She took up her knitting again. He was half-asleep when she asked, “Your mother is living, Mr. Havzhiva?”

“All my people are dead.”

She made a little soft sound. “Bereft,” she said. “And no wife?”

“No.”

“We will be your mothers, your sisters, your daughters. Your people. I kissed you for that love that will be between us. You will see.”

“The list of persons invited to the reception, Mr. Yehedarhed,” said Doranden, the Chief’s chief liaison to the Sub-Envoy.

Havzhiva looked through the list on the hand-screen carefully, ran it past the end, and said, “Where is the rest?”

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Envoy—are there omissions? This is the entire list.”

“But these are all men.”

In the infinitesimal silence before Doranden replied, Havzhiva felt the balance of his life poised.

“You wish the guests to bring their wives? Of course! If this is the Ekumenical custom, we shall be delighted to invite the ladies!”

There was something lip-smacking in the way Yeowan men said “the ladies,” a word which Havzhiva had thought was applied only to women of the owner class on Werel. The balance dipped. “What ladies?” he asked, frowning. “I’m talking about women. Do they have no part in this society?”

He became very nervous as he spoke, for he now knew his ignorance of what constituted danger here. If a walk on a quiet street could be nearly fatal, embarrassing the Chief’s liaison might be completely so. Doranden was certainly embarrassed—floored. He opened his mouth and shut it.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Doranden,” Havzhiva said, “please pardon my poor efforts at jocosity. Of course I know that women have all kinds of responsible positions in your society. I was merely saying, in a stupidly unfortunate manner, that I should be very glad to have such women and their husbands, as well as the wives of these guests, attend the reception. Unless I am truly making an enormous blunder concerning your customs? I thought you did not segregate the sexes socially, as they do on Werel. Please, if I was wrong, be so kind as to excuse the ignorant foreigner once again.”

Loquacity is half of diplomacy, Havzhiva had already decided. The other half is silence.

Doranden availed himself of the latter option, and with a few earnest reassurances got himself away. Havzhiva remained nervous until the following morning, when Doranden reappeared with a revised list containing eleven new names, all female. There was a school principal and a couple of teachers; the rest were marked “retired.”

“Splendid, splendid!” said Havzhiva. “May I add one more name?”—Of course, of course, anyone Your Excellency desires—“Dr. Yeron,” he said.

Again the infinitesimal silence, the grain of dust dropping on the scales. Doranden knew that name. “Yes,” he said.

“Dr. Yeron nursed me, you know, at your excellent hospital. We became friends. An ordinary nurse might not be an appropriate guest among such very distinguished people; but I see there are several other doctors on our list.”

“Quite,” said Doranden. He seemed bemused. The Chief and his people had become used to patronising the Sub-Envoy, ever so slightly and politely. An invalid, though now well recovered; a victim; a man of peace, ignorant of attack and even of self-defense; a scholar, a foreigner, unworldly in every sense: they saw him as something like that, he knew. Much as they valued him as a symbol and as a means to their ends, they thought him an insignificant man. He agreed with them as to the fact, but not as to the quality, of his insignificance. He knew that what he did might signify. He had just seen it.

“Surely you understand the reason for having a bodyguard, Envoy,” the General said with some impatience.

“This is a dangerous city, General Denkam, yes, I understand that. Dangerous for everyone. I see on the net that gangs of young men, such as those who attacked me, roam the streets quite beyond the control of the police. Every child, every woman needs a bodyguard. I should be distressed to know that the safety which is every citizen’s right was my special privilege.”

The General blinked but stuck to his guns. “We can’t let you get assassinated,” he said.

Havzhiva loved the bluntness of Yeowan honesty. “I don’t want to be assassinated,” he said. “I have a suggestion, sir. There are policewomen, female members of the city police force, are there not? Find me bodyguards among them. After all, an armed woman is as dangerous as an armed man, isn’t she? And I should like to honor the great part women played in winning Yeowe’s freedom, as the Chief said so eloquently in his talk yesterday.”

The General departed with a face of cast iron.

Havzhiva did not particularly like his bodyguards. They were hard, tough women, unfriendly, speaking a dialect he could hardly understand. Several of them had children at home, but they refused to talk about their children. They were fiercely efficient. He was well protected. He saw when he went about with these cold-eyed escorts that he began to be looked at differently by the city crowds: with amusement and a kind of fellow-feeling. He heard an old man in the market say, “That fellow has some sense.”

Everybody called the Chief the Chief except to his face. “Mr. President,” Havzhiva said, “the question really isn’t one of Ekumenical principles or Hainish customs at all. None of that is or should be of the least weight, the least importance, here on Yeowe. This is your world.”

The Chief nodded once, massively.

“Into which,” said Havzhiva, by now insuperably loquacious, “immigrants are beginning to come from Werel now, and many, many more will come, as the Werelian ruling class tries to lessen revolutionary pressure by allowing increasing numbers of the underclass to emigrate. You, sir, know far better than I the opportunities and the problems that this great influx of population will cause here in Yotebber. Now of course at least half the immigrants will be female, and I think it worth considering that there is a very considerable difference between Werel and Yeowe in what is called the construction of gender—the roles, the expectations, the behavior, the relationships of men and women. Among the Werelian immigrants most of the decision-makers, the people of authority, will be female. The Council of the Hame is about nine-tenths women, I believe. Their speakers and negotiators are mostly women. These people are coming into a society governed and represented entirely by men. I think there is the possibility of misunderstandings and conflict, unless the situation is carefully considered beforehand. Perhaps the use of some women as representatives—”

“Among slaves on the Old World,” the Chief said, “women were chiefs. Among our people, men are chiefs. That is how it is. The slaves of the Old World will be the free men of the New World.”

“And the women, Mr. President?”

“A free man’s women are free,” said the Chief.

“Well, then,” Yeron said, and sighed her deep sigh. “I guess we have to kick up some dust.”

“What dust people are good at,” said Dobibe.

“Then we better kick up a whole lot,” said Tualyan. “Because no matter what we do, they’ll get hysterical. They’ll yell and scream about castrating dykes who kill boy babies. If there’s five of us singing some damn song, it’ll get into the neareals as five hundred of us with machine guns and the end of civilisation on Yeowe. So I say let’s go for it. Let’s have five thousand women out singing. Let’s stop the trains. Lie down on the tracks. Fifty thousand women lying on the tracks all over Yotebber. You think?”

The meeting (of the Yotebber City and Regional Educational Aid Association) was in a schoolroom of one of the city schools. Two of Havzhiva’s bodyguards, in plain clothes, waited unobtrusively in the hall. Forty women and Havzhiva were jammed into small chairs attached to blank netscreens.

“Asking for?” Havzhiva said.

“The secret ballot!”

“No job discrimination!”

“Pay for our work!”

“The secret ballot!”

“Child care!”

“The secret ballot!”

“Respect!”

Havzhiva’s noter scribbled away madly. The women went on shouting for a while and then settled down to talk again.

One of the bodyguards spoke to Havzhiva as she drove him home. “Sir,” she said. “Was those all teachers?”

“Yes,” he said. “In a way.”

“Be damn,” she said. “Different from they used to be.”

“Yehedarhed! What the hell are you doing down there?”

“Ma’am?”

“You were on the news. Along with about a million women lying across railroad tracks and all over flyer pads and draped around the President’s Residence. You were talking to women and smiling.”

“It was hard not to.”

“When the Regional Government begins shooting, will you stop smiling?”

“Yes. Will you back us?”

“How?”

“Words of encouragement to the women of Yotebber from the Ambassador of the Ekumen. Yeowe a model of true freedom for immigrants from the Slave World. Words of praise to the Government of Yotebber—Yotebber a model for all Yeowe of restraint, enlightenment, et cetera.”

“Sure. I hope it helps. Is this a revolution, Havzhiva?”

“It is education, ma’am.”

The gate stood open in its massive frame; there were no walls.

“In the time of the Colony,” the Elder said, “this gate was opened twice in the day: to let the people out to work in the morning, to let the people in from work in the evening. At all other times it was locked and barred.” He displayed the great broken lock that hung on the outer face of the gate, the massive bolts rusted in their hasps. His gesture was solemn, measured, like his words, and again Havzhiva admired the dignity these people had kept in degradation, the stateliness they had maintained in, or against, their enslavement. He had begun to appreciate the immense influence of their sacred text, the Arkamye, preserved in oral tradition. “This was what we had. This was our belonging,” an old man in the city had told him, touching the book which, at sixty-five or seventy, he was learning to read.

Havzhiva himself had begun to read the book in its original language. He read it slowly, trying to understand how this tale of fierce courage and abnegation had for three millennia informed and nourished the minds of people in bondage. Often he heard in its cadences the voices he had heard speak that day.

He was staying for a month in Hayawa Tribal Village, which had been the first slave compound of the Agricultural Plantation Corporation of Yeowe in Yotebber, three hundred fifty years ago. In this immense, remote region of the eastern coast, much of the society and culture of plantation slavery had been preserved. Yeron and other women of the Liberation Movement had told him that to know who the Yeowans were he must know the plantations and the tribes.

He knew that the compounds had for the first century been a domain of men without women and without children. They had developed an internal government, a strict hierarchy of force and favoritism. Power was won by tests and ordeals and kept by a nimble balancing of independence and collusion. When women slaves were brought in at last, they entered this rigid system as the slaves of slaves. By bondsmen as by Bosses, they were used as servants and sexual outlets. Sexual loyalty and partnership continued to be recognized only between men, a nexus of passion, negotiation, status, and tribal politics. During the next centuries the presence of children in the compounds had altered and enriched tribal customs, but the system of male dominance, so entirely advantageous to the slave-owners, had not essentially changed.

“We hope to have your presence at the initiation tomorrow,” the Elder said in his grave way, and Havzhiva assured him that nothing could please or honor him more than attendance at a ceremony of such importance. The Elder was sedately but visibly gratified. He was a man over fifty, which meant he had been born a slave and had lived as a boy and man through the years of the Liberation. Havzhiva looked for scars, remembering what Yeron had said, and found them: the Elder was thin, meager, lame, and had no upper teeth; he was marked all through by famine and war. Also he was ritually scarred, four parallel ridges running from neck to elbow over the point of the shoulder like long epaulets, and a dark blue open eye tattooed on his forehead, the sign, in this tribe, of assigned, unalterable chiefdom. A slave chief, a chattel master of chattels, till the walls went down.

The Elder walked on a certain path from the gate to the longhouse, and Havzhiva following him observed that no one else used this path: men, women, children trotted along a wider, parallel road that diverged off to a different entrance to the longhouse. This was the chiefs’ way, the narrow way.

That night, while the children to be initiated next day fasted and kept vigil over on the women’s side, all the chiefs and elders gathered for a feast. There were inordinate amounts of the heavy food Yeowans were accustomed to, spiced and ornately served, the marsh rice that was the basis of everything fancied up with colorings and herbs; above all there was meat. Women slipped in and out serving ever more elaborate platters, each one with more meat on it—cattle flesh, Boss food, the sure and certain sign of freedom.

Havzhiva had not grown up eating meat, and could count on it giving him diarrhea, but he chewed his way manfully through the stews and steaks, knowing the significance of the food and the meaning of plenty to those who had never had enough.

After huge baskets of fruit finally replaced the platters, the women disappeared and the music began. The tribal chief nodded to his leos, a word meaning “sexual favorite/adopted brother/not heir/not son.” The young man, a self-assured, good-natured beauty, smiled; he clapped his long hands very softly once, then began to brush the grey-blue palms in a subtle rhythm. As the table fell silent he sang, but in a whisper.

Instruments of music had been forbidden on most plantations; most Bosses had allowed no singing except the ritual hymns to Tual at the tenthday service. A slave caught wasting Corporation time in singing might have acid poured down his throat. So long as he could work there was no need for him to make noise.

On such plantations the slaves had developed this almost silent music, the touch and brush of palm against palm, a barely voiced, barely varied, long line of melody. The words sung were deliberately broken, distorted, fragmented, so that they seemed meaningless. Shesh, the owners had called it, rubbish, and slaves were permitted to “pat hands and sing rubbish” so long as they did it so softly it could not be heard outside the compound walls. Having sung so for three hundred years, they sang so now.

To Havzhiva it was unnerving, almost frightening, as voice after voice joined, always at a whisper, increasing the complexity of the rhythms till the cross-beats nearly, but never quite, joined into a single texture of hushing sibilant sound, threaded by the long-held, quarter-tonal melody sung on syllables that seemed always about to make a word but never did. Caught in it, soon almost lost in it, he kept thinking now—now one of them will raise his voice—now the leos will give a shout, a shout of triumph, letting his voice free!—But he did not. None did. The soft, rushing, waterlike music with its infinitely delicate shifting rhythm went on and on. Bottles of the orange Yote wine passed up and down the table. They drank. They drank freely, at least. They got drunk. Laughter and shouts began to interrupt the music. But they never once sang above a whisper.

They all reeled back to the longhouse on the chiefs’ path, embracing, peeing companionably, one or two pausing to vomit here and there. A kind, dark man who had been seated next to Havzhiva now joined him in his bed in his alcove of the longhouse.

Earlier in the evening this man had told him that during the night and day of the initiation heterosexual intercourse was forbidden, as it would change the energies. The initiation would go crooked, and the boys might not become good members of the tribe. Only a witch, of course, would deliberately break the taboo, but many women were witches and would try to seduce a man out of malice. Regular, that is, homosexual, intercourse would encourage the energies, keep the initiation straight, and give the boys strength for their ordeal. Hence every man leaving the banquet would have a partner for the night. Havzhiva was glad he had been assigned to this man, not to one of the chiefs, whom he found daunting, and who might have expected a properly energetic performance. As it was, as well as he could remember in the morning, he and his companion had been too drunk to do much but fall asleep amidst well-intended caresses.

Too much Yote wine left a ringing headache, he knew that already, and his whole skull reconfirmed the knowledge when he woke.

At noon his friend brought him to a place of honor in the plaza, which was filling up with men. Behind them were the men’s longhouses, in front of them the ditch that separated the women’s side, the inside, from the men’s or gate side—still so-called, though the compound walls were gone and the gate alone stood, a monument, towering above the huts and longhouses of the compound and the flat grain-fields that stretched away in all directions, shimmering in the windless, shadowless heat.

From the women’s huts, six boys came at a run to the ditch. It was wider than a thirteen-year-old could jump, Havzhiva thought; but two of the boys made it. The other four leapt valiantly, fell short, clambered out, one of them hobbling, having hurt a leg or foot in his fall. Even the two who had made the jump successfully looked exhausted and frightened, and all six were bluish grey from fasting and staying awake. Elders surrounded them and got them standing in line in the plaza, naked and shivering, facing the crowd of all the men of the tribe.

No women at all were visible, over on the women’s side.

A catechism began, chiefs and elders barking questions which must evidently be answered without delay, sometimes by one boy, sometimes by all together, depending on the questioner’s pointing or sweeping gesture. They were questions of ritual, protocol, and ethics. The boys had been well drilled, delivering their answers in prompt yelps. The one who had lamed himself in the jump suddenly vomited and then fainted, slipping quietly down in a little heap. Nothing was done, and some questions were still pointed to him, followed by a moment of painful silence. After a while the boy moved, sat up, sat a while shuddering, then struggled to his feet and stood with the others. His bluish lips moved in answer to all the questions, though no voice reached the audience.

Havzhiva kept his apparent attention fixed on the ritual, though his mind wandered back a long time, a long way. We teach what we know, he thought, and all our knowledge is local.

After the inquisition came the marking: a single deep cut from the base of the neck over the point of the shoulder and down the outer arm to the elbow, made with a hard, sharp stake of wood dragged gouging through skin and flesh to leave, when it healed, the furrowed scar that proved the man. Slaves would not have been allowed any metal tools inside the gate, Havzhiva reflected, watching steadily as behooved a visitor and guest. After each arm and each boy, the officiating elders stopped to resharpen the stake, rubbing it on a big grooved stone that sat in the plaza. The boys’ pale blue lips drew back, baring their white teeth; they writhed, half-fainting, and one of them screamed aloud, silencing himself by clapping his free hand over his mouth. One bit on his thumb till blood flowed from it as well as from his lacerated arms. As each boy’s marking was finished the Tribal Chief washed the wounds and smeared some ointment on them. Dazed and wobbling, the boys stood again in line; and now the old men were tender with them, smiling, calling them “tribesman,” “hero.” Havzhiva drew a long breath of relief.

But now six more children were being brought into the plaza, led across the ditch-bridge by old women. These were girls, decked with anklets and bracelets, otherwise naked. At the sight of them a great cheer went up from the audience of men. Havzhiva was surprised. Women were to be made members of the tribe too? That at least was a good thing, he thought.

Two of the girls were barely adolescent, the others were younger, one of them surely not more than six. They were lined up, their backs to the audience, facing the boys. Behind each of them stood the veiled woman who had led her across the bridge; behind each boy stood one of the naked elders. As Havzhiva watched, unable to turn his eyes or mind from what he saw, the little girls lay down face up on the bare, greyish ground of the plaza. One of them, slow to lie down, was tugged and forced down by the woman behind her. The old men came around the boys, and each one lay down on one of the girls, to a great noise of cheering, jeering, and laughter and a chant of “ha-ah-ha-ah!” from the spectators. The veiled women crouched at the girls’ heads. One of them reached out and held down a thin, flailing arm. The elders’ bare buttocks pumped, whether in actual coitus or an imitation Havzhiva could not tell. “That’s how you do it, watch, watch!” the spectators shouted to the boys, amid jokes and comments and roars of laughter. The elders one by one stood up, each shielding his penis with curious modesty.

When the last had stood up, the boys stepped forward. Each lay down on a girl and pumped his buttocks up and down, though not one of them, Havzhiva saw, had had an erection. The men around him grasped their own penises, shouting, “Here, try mine!” and cheering and chanting until the last boy scrambled to his feet. The girls lay flat, their legs parted, like little dead lizards. There was a slight, terrible movement towards them in the crowd of men. But the old women were hauling the girls to their feet, yanking them up, hurrying them back across the bridge, followed by a wave of howls and jeers from the audience.

“They’re drugged, you know,” said the kind, dark man who had shared Havzhiva’s bed, looking into his face. “The girls. It doesn’t hurt them.”

“Yes, I see,” said Havzhiva, standing still in his place of honor.

“These ones are lucky, privileged to assist initiation. It’s important that girls cease to be virgin as soon as possible, you know. Always more than one man must have them, you know. So that they can’t make claims—‘this is your son,’ ‘this baby is the chief’s son,’ you know. That’s all witchcraft. A son is chosen. Being a son has nothing to do with bondswomen’s cunts. Bondswomen have to be taught that early. But the girls are given drugs now. It’s not like the old days, under the Corporations.”

“I understand,” Havzhiva said. He looked into his friend’s face, thinking that his dark skin meant he must have a good deal of owner blood, perhaps indeed was the son of an owner or a Boss. Nobody’s son, begotten on a slave woman. A son is chosen. All knowledge is local, all knowledge is partial. In Stse, in the Schools of the Ekumen, in the compounds of Yeowe.

“You still call them bondswomen,” he said. His tact, all his feelings were frozen, and he spoke in mere stupid intellectual curiosity.

“No,” the dark man said, “no, I’m sorry, the language I learned as a boy—I apologize—”

“Not to me.”

Again Havzhiva spoke only and coldly what was in his head. The man winced and was silent, his head bowed.

“Please, my friend, take me to my room now,” Havzhiva said, and the dark man gratefully obeyed him.

He talked softly into his noter in Hainish in the dark. “You can’t change anything from outside it. Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What’s wrong, what’s missing. You want to fix it. But you can’t patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving.” This last phrase was in the dialect of Stse.

Four women sqautted on a patch of ground on the women’s side, which had roused his curiosity by its untrodden smoothness: some kind of sacred space, he had thought. He walked towards them. They squatted gracelessly, hunched forward between their knees, with the indifference to their appearance, the carelessness of men’s gaze, that he had noticed before on the women’s side. Their heads were shaved, their skin chalky and pale. Dust people, dusties, was the old epithet, but to Havzhiva their color was more like clay or ashes. The azure tinge of palms and soles and wherever the skin was fine was almost hidden by the soil they were handling. They had been talking fast and quietly, but went silent as he came near. Two were old, withered up, with knobby, wrinkled knees and feet. Two were young women. They all glanced sidelong from time to time as he squatted down near the edge of the smooth patch of ground.

On it, he saw, they had been spreading dust, colored earth, making some kind of pattern or picture. Following the boundaries between colors he made out a long pale figure a little like a hand or a branch, and a deep curve of earthen red.

Having greeted them, he said nothing more, but simply squatted there. Presently they went back to what they were doing, talking in whispers to one another now and then.

When they stopped working, he said, “Is it sacred?”

The old women looked at him, scowled, and said nothing.

“You can’t see it,” said the darker of the young women, with a flashing, teasing smile that took Havzhiva by surprise.

“I shouldn’t be here, you mean.”

“No. You can be here. But you can’t see it.”

He rose and looked over the earth painting they had made with grey and tan and red and umber dust. The lines and forms were in a definite relationship, rhythmical but puzzling.

“It’s not all there,” he said.

“This is only a little, little bit of it,” said the teasing woman, her dark eyes bright with mockery in her dark face.

“Never all of it at once?”

“No,” she said, and the others said, “No,” and even the old women smiled.

“Can you tell me what the picture is?”

She did not know the word “picture.” She glanced at the others; she pondered, and looked up at him shrewdly.

“We make what we know, here,” she said, with a soft gesture over the softly colored design. A warm evening breeze was already blurring the boundaries between the colors.

“They don’t know it,” said the other young woman, ashen-skinned, in a whisper.

“The men?—They never see it whole?”

“Nobody does. Only us. We have it here.” The dark woman did not touch her head but her heart, covering her breasts with her long, work-hardened hands. She smiled again.

The old women stood up; they muttered together, one said something sharply to the young women, a phrase Havzhiva did not understand; and they stumped off.

“They don’t approve of your talking of this work to a man,” he said.

“A city man,” said the dark woman, and laughed. “They think we’ll run away.”

“Do you want to run away?”

She shrugged. “Where to?”

She rose to her feet in one graceful movement and looked over the earth painting, a seemingly random, abstract pattern of lines and colors, curves and areas.

“Can you see it?” she asked Havzhiva, with that liquid teasing flash of the eyes.

“Maybe someday I can learn to,” he said, meeting her gaze.

“You’ll have to find a woman to teach you,” said the woman the color of ashes.

“We are a free people now,” said the Young Chief, the Son and Heir, the Chosen.

“I haven’t yet known a free people,” Havzhiva said, polite, ambiguous.

“We won our freedom. We made ourselves free. By courage, by sacrifice, by holding fast to the one noble thing. We are a free people.” The Chosen was a strong-faced, handsome, intelligent man of forty. Six gouged lines of scarring ran down his upper arms like a rough mantle, and an open blue eye stared between his eyes, unwinking.

“You are free men,” Havzhiva said.

There was a silence.

“Men of the cities do not understand our women,” the Chosen said. “Our women do not want a man’s freedom. It is not for them. A woman holds fast to her baby. That is the noble thing for her. That is how the Lord Kamye made woman, and the Merciful Tual is her example. In other places it may be different. There may be another kind of woman, who does not care for her children. That may be. Here it is as I have said.”

Havzhiva nodded, the deep, single nod he had learned from the Yeowans, almost a bow. “That is so,” he said.

The Chosen looked gratified.

“I have seen a picture,” Havzhiva went on.

The Chosen was impassive; he might or might not know the word. “Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial,” Havzhiva said with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking to foreign merchants. “No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.”

The Chosen stood like a grey stone. After a while he said, “If we come to live as they live in the cities, all we know will be lost.” Under his dogmatic tone was fear and grief.

“Chosen One,” Havzhiva said, “you speak the truth. Much will be lost. I know it. The lesser knowledge must be given to gain the greater. And not once only.”

“The men of this tribe will not deny our truth,” the Chosen said. His unseeing, unwinking central eye was fixed on the sun that hung in a yellow dust-haze above the endless fields, though his own dark eyes gazed downward at the earth.

His guest looked from that alien face to the fierce, white, small sun that still blazed low above the alien land. “I am sure of that,” he said.

When he was fifty-five, Stabile Yehedarhed Havzhiva went back to Yotebber for a visit. He had not been there for a long time. His work as Ekumenical Advisor to the Yeowan Ministry of Social Justice had kept him in the north, with frequent trips to the other hemisphere. He had lived for years in the Old Capital with his partner, but often visited the New Capital at the request of a new Ambassador who wanted to draw on his expertise. His partner—they had lived together for eighteen years, but there was no marriage on Yeowe—had a book she was trying to finish, and admitted that she would like to have the apartment to herself for a couple of weeks while she wrote. “Take that trip south you keep mooning about,” she said. “I’ll fly down as soon as I’m done. I won’t tell any damned politicians where you are. Escape! Go, go, go!”

He went. He had never liked flying, though he had had to do a great deal of it, and so he made the long journey by train. They were good, fast trains, terribly crowded, people at every station swarming and rushing and shouting bribes to the conductors, though not trying to ride the roofs of the cars, not at 130 kmh. He had a private room in a through car to Yotebber City. He spent the long hours in silence watching the landscape whirl by, the reclamation projects, the old wastelands, the young forests, the swarming cities, miles of shacks and cabins and cottages and houses and apartment buildings, sprawling Werel-style compounds with connected houses and kitchen gardens and worksheds, factories, huge new plants; and then suddenly the country again, canals and irrigation tanks reflecting the colors of the evening sky, a bare-legged child walking with a great white ox past a field of shadowy grain. The nights were short, a dark, rocking sweetness of sleep.

On the third afternoon he got off the train in Yotebber City Station. No crowds. No chiefs. No bodyguards. He walked through the hot, familiar streets, past the market, through the City Park. A little bravado, there. Gangs, muggers were still about, and he kept his eye alert and his feet on the main pathways. On past the old Tualite temple. He had picked up a white flower that had dropped from a shrub in the park. He set it at the Mother’s feet. She smiled, looking cross-eyed at her missing nose. He walked on to the big, rambling new compound where Yeron lived.

She was seventy-four and had retired recently from the hospital where she had taught, practiced, and been an administrator for the last fifteen years. She was little changed from the woman he had first seen sitting by his bedside, only she seemed smaller all over. Her hair was quite gone, and she wore a glittering kerchief tied round her head. They embraced hard and kissed, and she stroked him and patted him, smiling irrepressibly. They had never made love, but there had always been a desire between them, a yearning to the other, a great comfort in touch. “Look at that, look at that grey!” she cried, petting his hair, “how beautiful! Come in and have a glass of wine with me! How is your Araha? When is she coming? You walked right across the city carrying that bag? You’re still crazy!”

He gave her the gift he had brought her, a treatise on Certain Diseases of Werel-Yeowe by a team of Ekumenical medical researchers, and she seized it greedily. For some while she conversed only between plunges into the table of contents and the chapter on berlot. She poured out the pale orange wine. They had a second glass. “You look fine, Havzhiva,” she said, putting the book down and looking at him steadily. Her eyes had faded to an opaque bluish darkness. “Being a saint agrees with you.”

“It’s not that bad, Yeron.”

“A hero, then. You can’t deny that you’re a hero.”

“No,” he said with a laugh. “Knowing what a hero is, I won’t deny it.”

“Where would we be without you?”

“Just where we are now . . .” He sighed. “Sometimes I think we’re losing what little we’ve ever won. This Tualbeda, in Detake Province, don’t underestimate him, Yeron. His speeches are pure misogyny and anti-immigrant prejudice, and people are eating it up—”

She made a gesture that utterly dismissed the demagogue. “There is no end to that,” she said. “But I knew what you were going to be to us. Right away. When I heard your name, even. I knew.”

“You didn’t give me much choice, you know.”

“Bah. You chose, man.”

“Yes,” he said. He savored the wine. “I did.” After a while he said, “Not many people have the choices I had. How to live, whom to live with, what work to do. Sometimes I think I was able to choose because I grew up where all choices had been made for me.”

“So you rebelled, made your own way,” she said, nodding.

He smiled. “I’m no rebel.”

“Bah!” she said again. “No rebel? You, in the thick of it, in the heart of our movement all the way?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “But not in a rebellious spirit. That had to be your spirit. My job was acceptance. To keep an acceptant spirit. That’s what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world.”

She listened but looked unconvinced. “Sounds like a woman’s way of being,” she said. “Men generally want to change things to suit.”

“Not the men of my people,” he said.

She poured them a third glass of wine. “Tell me about your people. I was always afraid to ask. The Hainish are so old! So learned! They know so much history, so many worlds! Us here with our three hundred years of misery and murder and ignorance—you don’t know how small you make us feel.”

“I think I do,” Havzhiva said. After a while he said, “I was born in a town called Stse.”

He told her about the pueblo, about the Other Sky people, his father who was his uncle, his mother the Heir of the Sun, the rites, the festivals, the daily gods, the unusual gods; he told her about changing being; he told her about the historian’s visit, and how he had changed being again, going to Kathhad.

“All those rules!” Yeron said. “So complicated and unnecessary. Like our tribes. No wonder you ran away.”

“All I did was go learn in Kathhad what I wouldn’t learn in Stse,” he said, smiling. “What the rules are. Ways of needing one another. Human ecology. What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules—a pattern that makes sense?” He stood up, stretched his shoulders, and said, “I’m drunk. Come for a walk with me.”

They went out into the sunny gardens of the compound and walked slowly along the paths between vegetable plots and flower beds. Yeron nodded to people weeding and hoeing, who looked up and greeted her by name. She held Havzhiva’s arm firmly, with pride. He matched his steps to hers.

“When you have to sit still, you want to fly,” he said, looking down at her pale, gnarled, delicate hand on his arm. “If you have to fly, you want to sit still. I learned sitting, at home. I learned flying, with the historians. But I still couldn’t keep my balance.”

“Then you came here,” she said.

“Then I came here.”

“And learned?”

“How to walk,” he said. “How to walk with my people.”

A WOMAN’S LIBERATION

Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin’s stunning new novella, “A Woman’s Liberation,” is set in the same milieu as her earlier stories, “Forgiveness Day” (November 1994) and “A Man of the People” (April 1 995). Her brilliant tale about “Forgiveness Day” is now a finalist for the Nebula award. Another 1994 publication, “The Question of Seggri,” is both a finalist for the Nebula and a winner of the Tiptree Award.

1. Shomeke

My dear friend has asked me to write the story of my life, thinking it might be of interest to people of other worlds and times. I am an ordinary woman, but I have lived in years of mighty changes and have been advantaged to know with my very flesh the nature of servitude and the nature of freedom.

I did not learn to read or write until I was a grown woman, which is all the excuse I will make for the faults of my narrative.

I was born a slave on the planet Werel. As a child I was called Shomekes’ Radosse Rakam. That is, Property of the Shomeke Family, Granddaughter of Dosse, Granddaughter of Kamye. The Shomeke family owned an estate on the eastern coast of Voe Deo. Dosse was my grandmother. Kamye is the Lord God.

The Shomekes possessed over four hundred assets, mostly used to cultivate the fields of gede, to herd the saltgrass cattle, to work in the mills, and as domestics in the House. The Shomeke family had been great in history. Our Owner was an important man politically, often away in the capital.

Assets took their name from their grandmother because it was the grandmother that raised the child. The mother worked all day, and there was no father. Women were always bred to more than one man. Even if a man knew his child he could not care for it. He might be sold or traded away at any time. Young men were seldom kept long on the estates. If they were valuable, they were traded to other estates or sold to the factories. If they were worthless, they were worked to death.

Women were not often sold. The young ones were kept for work and breeding, the old ones to raise the young and keep the compound in order. On some estates women bore a baby a year till they died, but on ours most had only two or three children. The Shomekes valued women as workers. They did not want the men always getting at the women. The grandmothers agreed with them and guarded the young women closely.

I say men, women, children, but you are to understand that we were not called men, women, children. Only our owners were called so. We assets or slaves were called bondsmen, bondswomen, and pups or young. I will use those words, though I have not heard or spoken them for many years, and never before on this blessed world.

The bondsmen’s part of the compound, the gateside, was ruled by the Bosses, who were men, some relations of the Shomeke family, others hired by them. On the inside the young and the bondswomen lived. There two cutfrees, castrated bondsmen, were the Bosses in name, but the grandmothers ruled. Indeed nothing in the compound happened without the grandmothers’ knowledge.

If the grandmothers said an asset was too sick to work, the Bosses would let that one stay home. Sometimes the grandmothers could save a bondsman from being sold away, sometimes they could protect a girl from being bred by more than one man, or could give a delicate girl a contraceptive. Everybody in the compound obeyed the council of the grandmothers. But if one of them went too far, the Bosses would have her flogged or blinded or her hands cut off. When I was a young child, there lived in our compound a woman we called Great-Grandmother, who had holes for eyes and no tongue. I thought that she was thus because she was so old. I feared that my grandmother Dosse’s tongue would wither in her mouth. I told her that. She said, “No. It won’t get any shorter, because I don’t let it get too long.”

I lived in the compound. My mother birthed me there, and was allowed to stay three months to nurse me; then I was weaned to cow’s milk, and my mother returned to the House. Her name was Shomekes’ Rayowa Yowa. She was light-skinned like most of the assets, but very beautiful, with slender wrists and ankles and delicate features. My grandmother, too, was light, but I was dark, darker than anybody else in the compound.

My mother came to visit, the cutfrees letting her in by their ladder-door. She found me rubbing grey dust on my body. When she scolded me, I told her that I wanted to look like the others.

“Listen, Rakam,” she said to me, “they are dust people. They’ll never get out of the dust. You’re something better. And you will be beautiful. Why do you think you’re so black?” I had no idea what she meant. “Someday I’ll tell you who your father is,” she said, as if she were promising me a gift. I knew that the Shomekes’ stallion, a prized and valuable animal, serviced mares from other estates. I did not know a father could be human.

That evening I boasted to my grandmother: “I’m beautiful because the black stallion is my father!” Dosse struck me across the head so that I fell down and wept. She said, “Never speak of your father.”

I knew there was anger between my mother and my grandmother, but it was a long time before I understood why. Even now I am not sure I understand all that lay between them.

We little pups ran around in the compound. We knew nothing outside the walls. All our world was the bondswomen’s huts and the bondsmen’s longhouses, the kitchens and kitchen gardens, the bare plaza beaten hard by bare feet. To me, the stockade wall seemed a long way off.

When the field and mill hands went out the gate in the early morning I didn’t know where they went. They were just gone. All day long the whole compound belonged to us pups, naked in the summer, mostly naked in the winter too, running around playing with sticks and stones and mud, keeping away from the grandmothers, until we begged them for something to eat or they put us to work weeding the gardens for a while.

In the evening or the early night the workers would come back, trooping in the gate guarded by the Bosses. Some were worn out and grim, others would be cheerful and talking and calling back and forth. The great gate was slammed behind the last of them. Smoke went up from all the cooking stoves. The burning cowdung smelled sweet. People gathered on the porches of the huts and longhouses. Bondsmen and bondswomen lingered at the ditch that divided the gateside from the inside, talking across the ditch. After the meal the freedmen led prayers to Tual’s statue, and we lifted our own prayers to Kamye, and then people went to their beds, except for those who lingered to “jump the ditch.” Some nights, in the summer, there would be singing, or a dance was allowed. In the winter one of the grandfathers—poor old broken men, not strong people like the grandmothers—would “sing the word.” That is what we called reciting the Arkamye. Every night, always, some of the people were teaching and others were learning the sacred verses. On winter nights one of these old worthless bondsmen kept alive by the grandmothers’ charity would begin to sing the word. Then even the pups would be still to listen to that story.

The friend of my heart was Walsu. She was bigger than I, and was my defender when there were fights and quarrels among the young or when older pups called me “Blackie” and “Bossie.” I was small but had a fierce temper. Together, Walsu and I did not get bothered much. Then Walsu was sent out the gate. Her mother had been bred and was now stuffed big, so that she needed help in the fields to make her quota. Gede must be hand-harvested. Every day as a new section of the bearing stalk comes ripe it has to be picked, and so gede pickers go through the same field over and over for twenty or thirty days, and then move on to a later planting. Walsu went with her mother to help her pick her rows. When her mother fell ill, Walsu took her place, and with help from other hands she kept up her mother’s quota. She was then six years old by owner’s count, which gave all assets the same birthday, new year’s day at the beginning of spring. She might have truly been seven. Her mother remained ill both before birthing and after, and Walsu took her place in the gede field all that time. She never afterward came back to play, only in the evenings to eat and sleep. I saw her then and we could talk. She was proud of her work. I envied her and longed to go through the gate. I followed her to it and looked through it at the world. Now the walls of the compound seemed very close.

I told my grandmother Dosse that I wanted to go to work in the fields.

“You’re too young.”

“I’ll be seven at the new year.”

“Your mother made me promise not to let you go out.”

Next time my mother visited the compound, I said, “Grandmother won’t let me go out. I want to go work with Walsu.”

“Never,” my mother said. “You were born for better than that.”

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

She smiled at me. I knew she meant the House, where she worked. She had told me often of the wonderful things in the House, things that shone and were colored brightly, things that were thin and delicate, clean things. It was quiet in the House, she said. My mother herself wore a beautiful red scarf, her voice was soft, and her clothing and body were always clean and fresh.

“When will I see?”

I teased her until she said, “All right! I’ll ask my lady.”

“Ask her what?”

All I knew of my-lady was that she too was delicate and clean, and that my mother belonged to her in some particular way, of which she was proud. I knew my-lady had given my mother the red scarf.

“I’ll ask her if you can come begin training at the House.”

My mother said “the House” in a way that made me see it as a great sacred place like the place in our prayer: May I enter in the clear house, in the rooms of peace.

I was so excited I began to dance and sing, “I’m going to the House, to the House!” My mother slapped me to make me stop and scolded me for being wild. She said, “You are too young! You can’t behave! If you get sent away from the House, you can never come back.”

I promised to be old enough.

“You must do everything right,” Yowa told me. “You must do everything I say when I say it. Never question. Never delay. If my lady sees that you’re wild, she’ll send you back here. And that will be the end of you forever.”

I promised to be tame. I promised to obey at once in everything, and not to speak. The more frightening she made it, the more I desired to see the wonderful, shining House.

When my mother left I did not believe she would speak to my-lady. I was not used to promises being kept. But after some days she returned, and I heard her speaking to my grandmother. Dosse was angry at first, speaking loudly. I crept under the window of the hut to listen. I heard my grandmother weep. I was frightened and amazed. My grandmother was patient with me, always looked after me, and fed me well. It had never entered my mind that there was anything more to it than that, until I heard her crying. Her crying made me cry, as if I were part of her.

“You could let me keep her one more year,” she said. “She’s just a baby. I would never let her out the gate.” She was pleading, as if she were powerless, not a grandmother. “She is my joy, Yowa!”

“Don’t you want her to do well, then?”

“Just a year more. She’s too wild for the House.”

“She’s run wild too long. She’ll get sent out to the fields if she stays. A year of that and they won’t have her at the House. She’ll be dust. Anyhow, there’s no use crying about it. I asked my lady, and she’s expected. I can’t go back without her.”

“Yowa, don’t let her come to harm,” Dosse said very low, as if ashamed to say this to her daughter, and yet with strength in her voice.

“I’m taking her to keep her out of harm,” my mother said. Then she called me, and I wiped my tears and came.

It is queer, but I do not remember my first walk through the world outside the compound or my first sight of the House. I suppose I was frightened and kept my eyes down, and everything was so strange to me that I did not understand what I saw. I know it was a number of days before my mother took me to show me to Lady Tazeu. She had to scrub me and train me and make sure I would not disgrace her. I was terrified when at last she took my hand, scolding me in a whisper all the time, and brought me out of the bondswomen’s quarters, through halls and doorways of painted wood, into a bright, sunny room with no roof, full of flowers growing in pots.

I had hardly ever seen a flower, only the weeds in the kitchen gardens, and I stared and stared at them. My mother had to jerk my hand to make me look at the woman lying in a chair among the flowers, in clothes soft and brightly colored like the flowers. I could hardly tell them apart. The woman’s hair was long and shining, and her skin was shining and black. My mother pushed me, and I did what she had made me practice over and over: I went and knelt down beside the chair and waited, and when the woman put out her long, narrow, soft hand, black above and azure on the palm, I touched my forehead to it. I was supposed to say “I am your slave Rakam, ma’am,” but my voice would not come out.

“What a pretty little thing,” she said. “So dark.” Her voice changed a little on the last words.

“The Bosses came in . . . that night,” Yowa said in a timid, smiling way, looking down as if embarrassed.

“No doubt about that,” the woman said. I was able to glance up at her again. She was beautiful. I did not know a person could be so beautiful. I think she saw my wonder. She put out her long, soft hand again and caressed my cheek and neck. “Very, very pretty, Yowa,” she said. “You did quite right to bring her here. Has she been bathed?”

She would not have asked that if she had seen me when I first came, filthy and smelling of the cowdung we made our fires with. She knew nothing of the compound at all. She knew nothing beyond the beza, the women’s side of the House. She was kept there just as I had been kept in the compound, ignorant of anything outside. She had never smelled cowdung, as I had never seen flowers.

My mother assured her I was clean, and she said, “Then she can come to bed with me tonight. I’d like that. Will you like to come sleep with me, pretty little—” She glanced at my mother, who murmured, “Rakam.” Ma’am pursed her lips at the name. “I don’t like that,” she murmured. “So ugly. Toti. Yes. You can be my new Toti. Bring her this evening, Yowa.”

She had had a foxdog called Toti, my mother told me. Her pet had died. I did not know animals ever had names, and so it did not seem odd to me to be given an animal’s name, but it did seem strange at first not to be Rakam. I could not think of myself as Toti.

That night my mother bathed me again and oiled my skin with sweet oil and dressed me in a soft gown, softer even than her red scarf. Again she scolded and warned me, but she was excited, too, and pleased with me, as we went to the beza again, through other halls, meeting some other bondswomen on the way, and to the lady’s bedroom. It was a wonderful room, hung with mirrors and draperies and paintings. I did not understand what the mirrors were, or the paintings, and was frightened when I saw people in them. Lady Tazeu saw that I was frightened. “Come, little one,” she said, making a place for me in her great, wide, soft bed strewn with pillows, “come and cuddle up.” I crawled in beside her, and she stroked my hair and skin and held me in her warm, soft arms until I was comfortable and at ease. “There, there, little Toti,” she said, and so we slept.

I became the pet of Lady Tazeu Wehoma Shomeke. I slept with her almost every night. Her husband was seldom home and when he was there did not come to her, preferring bondswomen for his pleasure. Sometimes she had my mother or other, younger bondswomen come into her bed, and she sent me away at those times, until I was older, ten or eleven, when she began to keep me and have me join in with them, teaching me how to be pleasured. She was gentle, but she was the mistress in love, and I was her instrument which she played.

I was also trained in household arts and duties. She taught me to sing with her, as I had a true voice. All those years I was never punished and never made to do hard work. I who had been wild in the compound was perfectly obedient in the Great House. I had been rebellious to my grandmother and impatient of her commands, but whatever my lady ordered me to do I gladly did. She held me fast to her by the only kind of love she had to give me. I thought that she was the Merciful Tual come down upon the earth. That is not a way of speaking, that is the truth. I thought she was a higher being, superior to myself.

Perhaps you will say that I could not or should not have had pleasure in being used without my consent by my mistress, and if I did, I should not speak of it, showing even so little good in so great an evil. But I knew nothing of consent or refusal. Those are freedom words.

She had one child, a son, three years older than I. She lived quite alone among us bondswomen. The Wehomas were nobles of the Islands, old-fashioned people whose women did not travel, so she was cut off from her family. The only company she had was when Owner Shomeke brought friends with him from the capital, but those were all men, and she could be with them only at table.

I seldom saw the Owner and only at a distance. I thought he too was a superior being, but a dangerous one.

As for Erod, the Young Owner, we saw him when he came to visit his mother daily or when he went out riding with his tutors. We girls would peep at him and giggle to each other when we were eleven or twelve, because he was a handsome boy, night-black and slender like his mother. I knew that he was afraid of his father, because I had heard him weep when he was with his mother. She would comfort him with candy and caresses, saying, “He’ll be gone again soon, my darling,” I too felt sorry for Erod, who was like a shadow, soft and harmless. He was sent off to school for a year at fifteen, but his father brought him back before the year was up. Bondsmen told us the Owner had beaten him cruelly and had forbidden him even to ride off the estate.

Bondswomen whom the Owner used told us how brutal he was, showing us where he had bruised and hurt them. They hated him, but my mother would not speak against him. “Who do you think you are?” she said to a girl who was complaining of his use of her. “A lady to be treated like glass?” And when the girl found herself pregnant, stuffed was the word we used, my mother had her sent back to the compound. I did not understand why. I thought Yowa was hard and jealous. Now I think she was also protecting the girl from our lady’s jealousy.

I do not know when I understood that I was the Owner’s daughter. Because she had kept that secret from our lady, my mother believed it was a secret from all. But the bondswomen all knew it. I do not know what I heard or overheard, but when I saw Erod, I would study him and think that I looked much more like our father than he did, for by then I knew what a father was. And I wondered that Lady Tazeu did not see it. But she chose to live in ignorance.

During these years I seldom went to the compound. After I had been a halfyear or so at the House, I was eager to go back and see Walsu and my grandmother and show them my fine clothes and clean skin and shining hair; but when I went, the pups I used to play with threw dirt and stones at me and tore my clothes. Walsu was in the fields. I had to hide in my grandmother’s hut all day. I never wanted to go back. When my grandmother sent for me, I would go only with my mother and always stayed close by her. The people in the compound, even my grandmother, came to look coarse and foul to me. They were dirty and smelled strongly. They had sores, scars from punishment, lopped fingers, ears, or noses. Their hands and feet were coarse, with deformed nails. I was no longer used to people who looked so. We domestics of the Great House were entirely different from them, I thought. Serving the higher beings, we became like them.

When I was thirteen and fourteen Lady Tazeu still kept me in her bed, making love to me often. But also she had a new pet, the daughter of one of the cooks, a pretty little girl though white as clay. One night she made love to me for a long time in ways that she knew gave me great ecstasy of the body. When I lay exhausted in her arms she whispered “good-bye, good-bye,” kissing me all over my face and breasts. I was too spent to wonder at this.

The next morning my lady called in my mother and myself to tell us that she intended to give me to her son for his seventeenth birthday. “I shall miss you terribly, Toti darling,” she said, with tears in her eyes. “You have been my joy. But there isn’t another girl on the place that I could let Erod have. You are the cleanest, dearest, sweetest of them all. I know you are a virgin,” she meant a virgin to men, “and I know my boy will enjoy you. And he’ll be kind to her, Yowa,” she said earnestly to my mother. My mother bowed and said nothing. There was nothing she could say. And she said nothing to me. It was too late to speak of the secret she had been so proud of.

Lady Tazeu gave me medicine to prevent conception, but my mother, not trusting the medicine, went to my grandmother and brought me contraceptive herbs. I took both faithfully that week.

If a man in the House visited his wife he came to the beza, but if he wanted a bondswoman she was “sent across.” So on the night of the Young Owner’s birthday I was dressed all in red and led over, for the first time in my life, to the men’s side of the House.

My reverence for my lady extended to her son, and I had been taught that owners were superior by nature to us. But he was a boy whom I had known since childhood, and I knew that his blood and mine were half the same. It gave me a strange feeling towards him.

I thought he was shy, afraid of his manhood. Other girls had tried to tempt him and failed. The women had told me what I was to do, how to offer myself and encourage him, and I was ready to do that. I was brought to him in his great bedroom, all of stone carved like lace, with high, thin windows of violet glass. I stood timidly near the door for a while, and he stood near a table covered with papers and screens. He came forward at last, took my hand, and led me to a chair. He made me sit down, and spoke to me standing, which was all improper, and confused my mind.

“Rakam,” he said—“that’s your name, isn’t it?”—I nodded—“Rakam, my mother means only kindness, and you must not think me ungrateful to her, or blind to your beauty. But I will not take a woman who cannot freely offer herself. Intercourse between owner and slave is rape.” And he talked on, talking beautifully, as when my lady read aloud from one of her books. I did not understand much, except that I was to come whenever he sent for me and sleep in his bed, but he would never touch me. And I was not to speak of this to anyone. “I am sorry, I am very sorry to ask you to lie,” he said, so earnestly that I wondered if it hurt him to lie. That made him seem more like a god than a human being. If it hurt to lie, how could you stay alive?

“I will do just as you say, Lord Erod,” I said.

So, most nights, his bondsmen came to bring me across. I would sleep in his great bed, while he worked at the papers on his table. He slept on a couch beneath the windows. Often he wanted to talk to me, sometimes for a long time, telling me his ideas. When he was in school in the capital he had become a member of a group of owners who wished to abolish slavery, called The Community. Getting wind of this, his father had ordered him out of school, sent him home, and forbidden him to leave the estate. So he too was a prisoner. But he corresponded constantly with others in The Community through the net, which he knew how to operate without his father’s knowledge, or the government’s.

His head was so full of ideas he had to speak them. Often Geu and Ahas, the young bondsmen who had grown up with him, who always came to fetch me across, stayed with us while he talked to all of us about slavery and freedom and many other things. Often I was sleepy, but I did listen, and heard much I did not know how to understand or even believe. He told us there was an organization among assets, called the Hame, that worked to steal slaves from the plantations. These slaves would be brought to members of The Community, who would make out false papers of ownership and treat them well, renting them to decent work in the cities. He told us about the cities, and I loved to hear all that. He told us about Yeowe Colony, saying that there was a revolution there among the slaves.

Of Yeowe I knew nothing. It was a great blue-green star that set after the sun or rose before it, brighter than the smallest of the moons. It was a name in an old song they sang in the compound:

O, O, Ye-o-we,

Nobody never comes back.

I had no idea what a revolution was. When Erod told me that it meant that assets on plantations in this place called Yeowe were fighting their owners, I did not understand how assets could do that. From the beginning it was ordained that there should be higher and lower beings, the Lord and the human, the man and the woman, the owner and the owned. All my world was Shomeke Estate and it stood on that one foundation. Who would want to overturn it? Everyone would be crushed in the ruins.

I did not like Erod to call assets slaves, an ugly word that took away our value. I decided in my mind that here on Werel we were assets, and in that other place, Yeowe Colony, there were slaves, worthless bondspeople, intractables. That was why they had been sent there. It made good sense.

By this you know how ignorant I was. Sometimes Lady Tazeu had let us watch shows on the holonet with her, but she watched only dramas, not the reports of events. Of the world beyond the estate I knew nothing but what I learned from Erod, and that I could not understand.

Erod liked us to argue with him. He thought it meant our minds were growing free. Geu was good at it. He would ask questions like, “But if there’s no assets, who’ll do the work?” Then Erod could answer at length. His eyes shone, his voice was eloquent. I loved him very much when he talked to us. He was beautiful and what he said was beautiful. It was like hearing the old men “singing the word,” reciting the Arkamye, when I was a little pup in the compound.

I gave the contraceptives my lady gave me every month to girls who needed them. Lady Tazeu had aroused my sexuality and accustomed me to being used sexually. I missed her caresses. But I did not know how to approach any of the bondswomen, and they were afraid to approach me, since I belonged to the Young Owner. Being with Erod often, while he talked I yearned to him in my body. I lay in his bed and dreamed that he came and stooped over me and did with me as my lady used to do. But he never touched me.

Geu also was a handsome young man, clean and well mannered, rather dark-skinned, attractive to me. His eyes were always on me. But he would not approach me, until I told him that Erod did not touch me.

Thus I broke my promise to Erod not to tell anyone; but I did not think myself bound to keep promises, as I did not think myself bound to speak the truth. Honor of that kind was for owners, not for us.

After that, Geu used to tell me when to meet him in the attics of the House. He gave me little pleasure. He would not penetrate me, believing that he must save my virginity for our master. He had me take his penis in my mouth instead. He would turn away in his climax, for the slave’s sperm must not defile the master’s woman. That is the honor of a slave.

Now you may say in disgust that my story is all of such things, and there is far more to life, even a slave’s life, than sex. That is very true. I can say only that it may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.

I was young, full of health and desire for joy. And even now, even here, when I look back across the years from this world to that, to the compound and the House of Shomeke, I see images like those in a bright dream. I see my grandmother’s big, hard hands. I see my mother smiling, the red scarf about her neck. I see my lady’s black, silky body among the cushions. I smell the smoke of the cowdung fires, and the perfumes of the beza. I feel the soft, fine clothing on my young body, and my lady’s hands and lips. I hear the old men singing the word, and my voice twining with my lady’s voice in a love song, and Erod telling us of freedom. His face is illuminated with his vision. Behind him the windows of stone lace and violet glass keep out the night. I do not say I would go back. I would die before I would go back to Shomeke. I would die before I left this free world, my world, to go back to the place of slavery. But whatever I knew in my youth of beauty, of love, and of hope, was there.

And there it was betrayed. All that is built upon that foundation in the end betrays itself.

I was sixteen years old in the year the world changed.

The first change I heard about was of no interest to me except that my lord was excited about it, and so were Geu and Ahas and some of the other young bondsmen. Even my grandmother wanted to hear about it when I visited her. “That Yeowe, that slave world,” she said, “they made freedom? They sent away their owners? They opened the gates? My lord, my sweet Lord Kamye, how can that be? Praise his name, praise his marvels!” She rocked back and forth as she squatted in the dust, her arms about her knees. She was an old, shrunken woman now. “Tell me!” she said.

I knew little else to tell her. “All the soldiers came back here,” I said. “And those other people, those alemens, they’re there on Yeowe. Maybe they’re the new owners. That’s all somewhere way out there,” I said, flipping my hand at the sky.

“What’s alemens?” my grandmother asked, but I did not know.

It was all mere words to me.

But when our Owner, Lord Shomeke, came home sick, that I understood. He came on a flyer to our little port. I saw him carried by on a stretcher, the whites showing in his eyes, his black skin mottled grey. He was dying of a sickness that was ravaging the cities. My mother, sitting with Lady Tazeu, saw a politician on the net who said that the alemens had brought the sickness to Werel. He talked so fearsomely that we thought everybody was going to die. When I told Geu about it he snorted. “Aliens, not alemens,” he said, “and they’ve got nothing to do with it. My lord talked with the doctors. It’s just a new kind of pusworm.”

That dreadful disease was bad enough. We knew that any asset found to be infected with it was slaughtered at once like an animal and the corpse burned on the spot.

They did not slaughter the Owner. The House filled with doctors, and Lady Tazeu spent day and night by her husband’s bed. It was a cruel death. It went on and on. Lord Shomeke in his suffering made terrible sounds, screams, howls. One would not believe a man could cry out hour after hour as he did. His flesh ulcerated and fell away, he went mad, but he did not die.

As Lady Tazeu became like a shadow, worn and silent, Erod filled with strength and excitement. Sometimes when we heard his father howling his eyes would shine. He would whisper, “Lady Tual have mercy on him,” but he fed on those cries. I knew from Geu and Ahas, who had been brought up with him, how the father had tormented and despised him, and how Erod had vowed to be everything his father was not and to undo all he did.

But it was Lady Tazeu who ended it. One night she sent away the other attendants, as she often did, and sat alone with the dying man. When he began his moaning howl, she took her little sewing knife and cut his throat. Then she cut the veins in her arms across and across, and lay down by him, and so died. My mother was in the next room all night. She said she wondered a little at the silence, but was so weary that she fell asleep; and in the morning she went in and found them lying in their cold blood.

All I wanted to do was weep for my lady, but everything was in confusion. Everything in the sickroom must be burned, the doctors said, and the bodies must be burned without delay. The House was under quarantine, so only the priests of the House could hold the funeral. No one was to leave the estate for twenty days. But several of the doctors themselves left when Erod, who was now Lord Shomeke, told them what he intended to do. I heard some confused word of it from Ahas, but in my grief I paid little heed.

That evening, all the House assets stood outside the Lady’s Chapel during the funeral service to hear the songs and prayers within. The Bosses and cutfrees had brought the people from the compound, and they stood behind us. We saw the procession come out, the white biers carried by, the pyres lighted, and the black smoke go up. Long before the smoke ceased rising, the new Lord Shomeke came to us all where we stood.

Erod stood up on the little rise of ground behind the chapel and spoke in a strong voice such as I had never heard from him. Always in the House it had been whispering in the dark. Now it was broad day and a strong voice. He stood there black and straight in his white mourning clothes. He was not yet twenty years old. He said, “Listen, you people: you have been slaves, you will be free. You have been my property, you will own your own lives now. This morning I sent to the Government the Order of Manumission for every asset on the estate, four hundred and eleven men, women, and children. If you will come to my office in the Counting House in the morning, I will give you your papers. Each of you is named in those papers as a free person. You can never be enslaved again. You are free to do as you please from tomorrow on. There will be money for each one of you to begin your new life with. Not what you deserve, not what you have earned in all your work for us, but what I have to give you. I am leaving Shomeke. I will go to the capital, where I will work for the freedom of every slave on Werel. The Freedom Day that came to Yeowe is coming to us, and soon. Any of you who wish to come with me, come! There’s work for us all to do!”

I remember all he said. Those are his words as he spoke them. When one does not read and has not had one’s mind filled up by the images on the nets, words spoken strike down deep in the mind.

There was such a silence when he stopped speaking as I had never heard.

One of the doctors began talking, protesting to Erod that he must not break the quarantine.

“The evil has been burned away,” Erod said, with a great gesture to the black smoke rising. “This has been an evil place, but no more harm will go forth from Shomeke!”

At that a slow sound began among the compound people standing behind us, and it swelled into a great noise of jubilation mixed with wailing, crying, shouting, singing. “Lord Kamye! Lord Kamye!” the men shouted. An old woman came forward: my grandmother. She strode through us House assets as if we were a field of grain. She stopped a good way from Erod. People fell silent to listen to the grandmother. She said, “Lord Master, are you turning us out of our homes?”

“No,” he said. “They are yours. The land is yours to use. The profit of the fields is yours. This is your home, and you are free!”

At that the shouts rose up again so loud I cowered down and covered my ears, but I was crying and shouting too, praising Lord Erod and Lord Kamye in one voice with the rest of them.

We danced and sang there in sight of the burning pyres until the sun went down. At last the grandmothers and the cutfrees got the people to go back to the compound, saying they did not have their papers yet. We domestics went straggling back to the House, talking about tomorrow, when we would get our freedom and our money and our land.

All that next day Erod sat in the Counting House and made out the papers for each slave and counted out the same amount of money for each: a hundred kue in cash, and a draft for five hundred kue on the district bank, which could not be drawn for forty days. This was, he explained to each one, to save them from exploitation by the unscrupulous before they knew how best to use their money. He advised them to form a cooperative, to pool their funds, to run the estate democratically. “Money in the bank, Lord!” an old crippled man came out crying, jigging on his twisted legs. “Money in the bank, Lord!”

If they wanted, Erod said over and over, they could save their money and contact the Hame, who would help them buy passage to Yeowe with it.

“O, O, Ye-o-we,”somebody began singing, and they changed the words:

“Everybody’s going to go.
O, O, Ye-o-we,
Everybody’s going to go!”

They sang it all day long. Nothing could change the sadness of it. I want to weep now, remembering that song, that day.

The next morning Erod left. He could not wait to get away from the place of his misery and begin his life in the capital working for freedom. He did not say good-bye to me. He took Geu and Ahas with him. The doctors and their aides and assets had all left the day before. We watched his flyer go up into the air.

We went back to the House. It was like something dead. There were no owners in it, no masters, no one to tell us what to do.

My mother and I went in to pack up our clothing. We had said little to each other, but felt we could not stay there. We heard other women running through the beza, rummaging in Lady Tazeu’s rooms, going through her closets, laughing and screaming with excitement, finding jewelry and valuables. We heard men’s voices in the hall: Bosses’ voices. Without a word my mother and I took what we had in our hands and went out by a back door, slipped through the hedges of the garden, and ran all the way to the compound.

The great gate of the compound stood wide open.

How can I tell you what that was to us, to see that, to see that gate stand open? How can I tell you?

2. Zeskra

EROD KNEW NOTHING ABOUT HOW the estate was run, because the Bosses ran it. He was a prisoner too. He had lived in his screens, his dreams, his visions.

The grandmothers and others in the compound had spent all that night trying to make plans, to draw our people together so they could defend themselves. That morning when my mother and I came, there were bondsmen guarding the compound with weapons made of farm tools. The grandmothers and cutfrees had made an election of a headman, a strong, well-liked field hand. In that way they hoped to keep the young men with them.

By the afternoon that hope was broken. The young men ran wild. They went up to the House to loot it. The Bosses shot them from the windows, killing many; the others fled away. The Bosses stayed holed up in the House, drinking the wine of the Shomekes. Owners of other plantations were flying reinforcements to them. We heard the flyers land, one after another. The bondswomen who had stayed in the House were at their mercy now.

As for us in the compound, the gates were closed again. We had moved the great bars from the outside to the inside, so we thought ourselves safe for the night at least. But in the midnight they came with heavy tractors and pushed down the wall, and a hundred men or more, our Bosses and owners from all the plantations of the region, came swarming in. They were armed with guns. We fought them with farm tools and pieces of wood. One or two of them were hurt or killed. They killed as many of us as they wanted to kill and then began to rape us. It went on all night.

A group of men took all the old women and men and held them and shot them between the eyes, the way they kill cattle. My grandmother was one of them. I do not know what happened to my mother. I did not see any bondsmen living when they took me away in the morning. I saw white papers lying in the blood on the ground. Freedom papers.

Several of us girls and young women still alive were herded into a truck and taken to the port field. There they made us enter a flyer, shoving and using sticks, and we were carried off in the air. I was not then in my right mind. All I know of this is what the others told me later.

We found ourselves in a compound, like our compound in every way. I thought they had brought us back home. They shoved us in by the cutfrees’ ladder. It was still morning and the hands were out at work, only the grandmothers and pups and old men in the compound. The grandmothers came to us fierce and scowling. I could not understand at first why they were all strangers. I looked for my grandmother.

They were frightened of us, thinking we must be runaways. Plantation slaves had been running away, the last years, trying to get to the cities. They thought we were intractables and would bring trouble with us. But they helped us clean ourselves, and gave us a place near the cutfrees’ tower. There were no huts empty, they said. They told us this was Zeskra Estate. They did not want to hear about what had happened at Shomeke. They did not want us to be there. They did not need our trouble.

We slept there on the ground without shelter. Some of the bondsmen came across the ditch in the night and raped us because there was nothing to prevent them from it, no one to whom we were of any value. We were too weak and sick to fight them. One of us, a girl named Abye, tried to fight. The men beat her insensible. In the morning she could not talk or walk. She was left there when the Bosses came and took us away. Another girl was left behind too, a big farmhand with white scars on her head like parts in her hair. As we were going I looked at her and saw that it was Walsu, who had been my friend. We had not recognised each other. She sat in the dirt, her head bowed down.

Five of us were taken from the compound to the Great House of Zeskra, to the bondswomen’s quarters. There for a while I had a little hope, since I knew how to be a good domestic asset. I did not know then how different Zeskra was from Shomeke. The House at Zeskra was full of people, full of owners and bosses. It was a big family, not a single Lord as at Shomeke but a dozen of them with their retainers and relations and visitors, so there might be thirty or forty men staying on the men’s side and as many women in the beza, and a House staff of fifty or more. We were not brought as domestics, but as use-women.

After we were bathed we were left in the use-women’s quarters, a big room without any private places. There were ten or more use-women already there. Those of them who liked their work were not glad to see us, thinking of us as rivals; others welcomed us, hoping we might take their places and they might be let to join the domestic staff. But none were very unkind, and some were kind, giving us clothes, for we had been naked all this time, and comforting the youngest of us, Mio, a little compound girl of ten or eleven whose white body was mottled all over with brown-and-blue bruises.

One of them was a tall woman called Sezi-Tual. She looked at me with an ironic face. Something in her made my soul awaken.

“You’re not a dusty,” she said. “You’re as black as old Lord Devil Zeskra himself. You’re a Bossbaby, aren’t you?”

“No ma’am,” I said. “A lord’s child. And the Lord’s child. My name is Rakam.”

“Your Grandfather hasn’t treated you too well lately,” she said. “Maybe you should pray to the Merciful Lady Tual.”

“I don’t look for mercy,” I said. From then on Sezi-Tual liked me, and I had her protection, which I needed.

We were sent across to the men’s side most nights. When there were dinner parties, after the ladies left the dinner room we were brought in to sit on the owners’ knees and drink wine with them. Then they would use us there on the couches or take us to their rooms. The men of Zeskra were not cruel. Some liked to rape, but most preferred to think that we desired them and wanted whatever they wanted. Such men could be satisfied, the one kind if we showed fear or submission, the other kind if we showed yielding and delight. But some of their visitors were another kind of man.

There was no law or rule against damaging or killing a use-woman. Her owner might not like it, but in his pride he could not say so: he was supposed to have so many assets that the loss of one or another did not matter at all. So some men whose pleasure lay in torture came to hospitable estates like Zeskra for their pleasure. Sezi-Tual, a favorite of the Old Lord, could and did protest to him, and such guests were not invited back. But while I was there, Mio, the little girl who had come with us from Shomeke, was murdered by a guest. He tied her down to the bed. He made the knot across her neck so tight that while he used her she strangled to death.

I will say no more of these things. I have told what I must tell. There are truths that are not useful. All knowledge is local, my friend has said. Is it true, where is it true, that that child had to die in that way? Is it true, where is it true, that she did not have to die in that way?

I was often used by Lord Yaseo, a middle-aged man, who liked my dark skin, calling me “My Lady.” Also he called me “Rebel,” because what had happened at Shomeke they called a rebellion of the slaves. Nights when he did not send for me I served as a common-girl.

After I had been at Zeskra two years Sezi-Tual came to me one morning early. I had come back late from Lord Yaseo’s bed. Not many others were there, for there had been a drinking party the night before, and all the common-girls had been sent for. Sezi-Tual woke me. She had strange hair, curly, in a bush. I remember her face above me, that hair curling out all about it. “Rakam,” she whispered, “one of the visitor’s assets spoke to me last night. He gave me this. He said his name is Suhame.”

“Suhame,” I repeated. I was sleepy. I looked at what she was holding out to me: some dirty crumpled paper. “I can’t read!” I said, yawning, impatient.

But I looked at it and knew it. I knew what it said. It was the freedom paper. It was my freedom paper. I had watched Lord Erod write my name on it. Each time he wrote a name he had spoken it aloud so that we would know what he was writing. I remembered the big flourish of the first letter of both my names: Radosse Rakam. I took the paper in my hand, and my hand was shaking. “Where did you get this?” I whispered.

“Better ask this Suhame,” she said. Now I heard what that name meant: “from the Hame.” It was a password name. She knew that too. She was watching me, and she bent down suddenly and leaned her forehead against mine, her breath catching in her throat. “If I can, I’ll help,” she whispered.

I met with “Suhame” in one of the pantries. As soon as I saw him I knew him: Ahas, who had been Lord Erod’s favorite along with Geu. A slight, silent young man with dusty skin, he had never been much in my mind. He had watchful eyes, and I had thought when Geu and I spoke that he looked at us with ill will. Now he looked at me with a strange face, still watchful, yet blank.

“Why are you here with that Lord Boeba?” I said. “Aren’t you free?”

“I am as free as you are,” he said.

I did not understand him, then.

“Didn’t Lord Erod protect even you?” I asked.

“Yes. I am a free man.” His face began to come alive, losing that dead blankness it had when he first saw me. “Lady Boeba’s a member of The Community. I work with the Hame. I’ve been trying to find people from Shomeke. We heard several of the women were here. Are there others still alive, Rakam?”

His voice was soft, and when he said my name my breath caught and my throat swelled. I said his name and went to him, holding him. “Ratual, Ramayo, Keo are still here,” I said. He held me gently. “Walsu is in the compound,” I said, “if she’s still alive.” I wept. I had not wept since Mio’s death. He too was in tears.

We talked, then and later. He explained to me that we were indeed, by law, free, but that law meant nothing on the Estates. The government would not interfere between owners and those they claimed as their assets. If we claimed our rights, the Zeskras would probably kill us, since they considered us stolen goods and did not want to be shamed. We must run away or be stolen away, and get to the city, the capital, before we could have any safety at all.

We had to be sure that none of the Zeskra assets would betray us out of jealousy or to gain favor. Sezi-Tual was the only one I trusted entirely.

Ahas arranged our escape with Sezi-Tual’s help. I pleaded once with her to join us, but she thought that since she had no papers she would have to live always in hiding, and that would be worse than her life at Zeskra.

“You could go to Yeowe,” I said.

She laughed. “All I know about Yeowe is nobody ever came back. Why run from one hell to the next one?”

Ratual chose not to come with us; she was a favorite of one of the young lords and content to remain so. Ramayo, the oldest of us from Shomeke, and Keo, who was now about fifteen, wanted to come. Sezi-Tual went down to the compound and found that Walsu was alive, working as a field hand. Arranging her escape was far more difficult than ours. There was no escape from a compound. She could get away only in daylight, in the fields, under the overseer’s and the Boss’s eyes. It was difficult even to talk to her, for the grandmothers were distrustful. But Sezi-Tual managed it, and Walsu told her she would do whatever she must do “to see her paper again.”

Lady Boeba’s flyer waited for us at the edge of a great gede field that had just been harvested. It was late summer. Ramayo, Keo, and I walked away from the House separately at different times of the morning. Nobody watched over us closely, as there was nowhere for us to go. Zeskra lies among other great estates, where a runaway slave would find no friends for hundreds of miles. One by one, taking different ways, we came through the fields and woods, crouching and hiding all the way to the flyer where Ahas waited for us. My heart beat and beat so I could not breathe. There we waited for Walsu.

“There!” said Keo, perched up on the wing of the flyer. She pointed across the wide field of stubble.

Walsu came running from the strip of trees on the far side of the field. She ran heavily, steadily, not as if she were afraid. But all at once she halted. She turned. We did not know why for a moment. Then we saw two men break from the shadow of the trees in pursuit of her.

She did not run from them, leading them towards us. She ran back at them. She leapt at them like a hunting cat. As she made that leap, one of them fired a gun. She bore one man down with her, falling. The other fired again and again. “In,” Ahas said, “now.” We scrambled into the flyer and it rose into the air, seemingly all in one instant, the same instant in which Walsu made that great leap, she too rising into the air, into her death, into her freedom.

3. The City

I HAD FOLDED UP MY freedom paper into a tiny packet. I carried it in my hand all the time we were in the flyer and while we landed and went in a public car through the city streets. When Ahas found what I was clutching, he said I need not worry about it. Our manumission was on record in the Government Office and would be honored, here in the City. We were free people, he said. We were gareots, that is, owners who have no assets. “Just like Lord Erod,” he said. That meant nothing to me. There was too much to learn. I kept hold of my freedom paper until I had a place to keep it safe. I have it still.

We walked a little way in the streets and then Ahas led us into one of the huge houses that stood side by side on the pavement. He called it a compound, but we thought it must be an owners’ house. There a middle-aged woman welcomed us. She was pale-skinned, but talked and behaved like an owner, so that I did not know what she was. She said she was Ress, a rentswoman and an elderwoman of the house.

Rentspeople were assets rented out by their owners to a company. If they were hired by a big company, they lived in the company compounds, but there were many, many rentspeople in the City who worked for small companies or businesses they managed themselves, and they occupied buildings run for profit, called open compounds. In such places the occupants must keep curfew, the doors being locked at night, but that was all; they were self-governed. This was such an open compound. It was supported by The Community. Some of the occupants were rentspeople, but many were like us, gareots who had been slaves. Over a hundred people lived there in forty apartments. It was supervised by several women, whom I would have called grandmothers, but here they were called elderwomen.

On the estates deep in the country, deep in the past, where the life was protected by miles of land and by the custom of centuries and by determined ignorance, any asset was absolutely at the mercy of any owner. From there we had come into this great crowd of two million people where nothing and nobody was protected from chance or change, where we had to learn as fast as we could how to stay alive, but where our life was in our own hands.

I had never seen a street. I could not read a word. I had much to learn.

Ress made that clear at once. She was a City woman, quick-thinking and quick-talking, impatient, aggressive, sensitive. I could not like or understand her for a long time. She made me feel stupid, slow, a clod. Often I was angry at her.

There was anger in me now. I had not felt anger while I lived at Zeskra. I could not. It would have eaten me. Here there was room for it, but I found no use for it. I lived with it in silence. Keo and Ramayo had a big room together, I had a small one next to theirs. I had never had a room to myself. At first I felt lonely in it and as if ashamed, but soon I came to like it. The first thing I did freely, as a free woman, was to shut my door.

Nights, I would shut my door and study. Days, we had work training in the morning, classes in the afternoon: reading and writing, arithmetic, history. My work training was in a small shop which made boxes of paper and thin wood to hold cosmetics, candies, jewelry, and such things. I was trained in all the different steps and crafts of making and ornamenting the boxes, for that is how most work was done in the City, by artisans who knew all their trade. The shop was owned by a member of The Community. The older workers were rentspeople. When my training was finished I too would be paid wages.

Till then Lord Erod supported me as well as Keo and Ramayo and some men from Shomeke compound, who lived in a different house. Erod never came to the house. I think he did not want to see any of the people he had so disastrously freed. Ahas and Geu said he had sold most of the land at Shomeke and used the money for The Community and to make his way in politics, as there was now a Radical Party which favored emancipation.

Geu came a few times to see me. He had become a City man, dapper and knowing. I felt when he looked at me he was thinking I had been a use-woman at Zeskra, and I did not like to see him.

Ahas, whom I had never thought about in the old days, I now admired, knowing him brave, resolute, and kind. It was he who had looked for us, found us, rescued us. Owners had paid the money but Ahas had done it. He came often to see us. He was the only link that had not broken between me and my childhood.

And he came as a friend, a companion, never driving me back into my slave body. I was angry now at every man who looked at me as men look at women. I was angry at women who looked at me seeing me sexually. To Lady Tazeu all I had been was my body. At Zeskra that was all I had been. Even to Erod who would not touch me that was all I had been. Flesh to touch or not to touch, as they pleased. To use or not to use, as they chose. I hated the sexual parts of myself, my genitals and breasts and the swell of my hips and belly. Ever since I was a child, I had been dressed in soft clothing made to display all that sexuality of a woman’s body. When I began to be paid and could buy or make my own clothing, I dressed in hard, heavy cloth. What I liked of myself was my hands, clever at their work, and my head, not clever at learning, but still learning, no matter how long it took.

What I loved to learn was history. I had grown up without any history. There was nothing at Shomeke or Zeskra but the way things were. Nobody knew anything about any time when things had been different. Nobody knew there was any place where things might be different. We were enslaved by the present time.

Erod had talked of change, indeed, but the owners were going to make the change. We were to be changed, we were to be freed, just as we had been owned. In history I saw that any freedom has been made, not given.

The first book I read by myself was a history of Yeowe, written very simply. It told about the days of the Colony, of the Four Corporations, of the terrible first century when the ships carried slave men to Yeowe and precious ores back. Slave men were so cheap then they worked them to death in a few years in the mines, bringing in new shipments continually. O, O, Yeowe, nobody never comes back. Then the Corporations began to send women slaves to work and breed, and over the years the assets spilled out of the compounds and made cities—whole great cities like this one I was living in. But not run by the owners or Bosses. Run by the assets, the way this house was run by us. On Yeowe the assets had belonged to the Corporations. They could rent their freedom by paying the Corporation a part of what they earned, the way sharecropper assets paid their owners in parts of Voe Deo. On Yeowe they called those assets freedpeople. Not free people, but freedpeople. And then, this history I was reading said, they began to think, why aren’t we free people? So they made the revolution, the Liberation. It began on a plantation called Nadami, and spread from there. Thirty years they fought for their freedom. And just three years ago they had won the war, they had driven the Corporations, the owners, the bosses, off their world. They had danced and sung in the streets, freedom, freedom! This book I was reading (slowly, but reading it) had been printed there—there on Yeowe, the Free World. The Aliens had brought it to Werel. To me it was a sacred book.

I asked Ahas what it was like now on Yeowe, and he said they were making their government, writing a perfect Constitution to make all men equal under the Law.

On the net, on the news, they said they were fighting each other on Yeowe, there was no government at all, people were starving, savage tribesmen in the countryside and youth gangs in the cities running amuck, law and order broken down. Corruption, ignorance, a doomed attempt, a dying world, they said.

Ahas said that the Government of Voe Deo, which had fought and lost the war against Yeowe, now was afraid of a Liberation on Werel. “Don’t believe any news,” he counseled me. “Especially don’t believe the neareals. Don’t ever go into them. They’re just as much lies as the rest, but if you feel and see a thing, you will believe it. And they know that. They don’t need guns if they own our minds.” The owners had no reporters, no cameras on Yeowe, he said; they invented their “news,” using actors. Only some of the Aliens of the Ekumen were allowed on Yeowe, and the Yeowans were debating whether they should send them away, keeping the world they had won for themselves alone.

“But then what about us?” I said, for I had begun dreaming of going there, going to the Free World, when the Hame could charter ships and send people.

“Some of them say assets can come. Others say they can’t feed so many, and would be overwhelmed. They’re debating it democratically. It will be decided in the first Yeowan elections, soon.” Ahas was dreaming of going there too. We talked together of our dream the way lovers talk of their love.

But there were no ships going to Yeowe now. The Hame could not act openly and The Community was forbidden to act for them. The Ekumen had offered transportation on their own ships to anyone who wanted to go, but the government of Voe Deo refused to let them use any spaceport for that purpose. They could carry only their own people. No Werelian was to leave Werel.

It had been only forty years since Werel had at last allowed the Aliens to land and maintain diplomatic relations. As I went on reading history I began to understand a little of the nature of the dominant people of Werel. The black-skinned race that conquered all the other peoples of the Great Continent, and finally all the world, those who call themselves the owners, have lived in the belief that there is only one way to be. They have believed they are what people should be, do as people should do, and know all the truth that is known. All the other peoples of Werel, even when they resisted them, imitated them, trying to become them, and so became their property. When a people came out of the sky looking differently, doing differently, knowing differently, and would not let themselves be conquered or enslaved, the owner race wanted nothing to do with them. It took them four hundred years to admit that they had equals.

I was in the crowd at a rally of the Radical Party, at which Erod spoke, as beautifully as ever. I noticed a woman beside me in the crowd listening. Her skin was a curious orange-brown, like the rind of a pini, and the whites showed in the corners of her eyes. I thought she was sick—I thought of the pusworm, how Lord Shomeke’s skin had changed and his eyes had shown their whites. I shuddered and drew away. She glanced at me, smiling a little, and returned her attention to the speaker. Her hair curled in a bush or cloud, like Sezi-Tual’s. Her clothing was of a delicate cloth, a strange fashion. It came upon me very slowly what she was, that she had come here from a world unimaginably far. And the wonder of it was that for all her strange skin and eyes and hair and mind, she was human, as I am human: I had no doubt of that. I felt it. For a moment it disturbed me deeply. Then it ceased to trouble me and I felt a great curiosity, almost a yearning, a drawing to her. I wished to know her, to know what she knew.

In me the owner’s soul was struggling with the free soul. So it will do all my life.

Keo and Ramayo stopped going to school after they had learned to read and write and use the calculator, but I kept on. When there were no more classes to take from the school the Hame kept, the teachers helped me find classes in the net. Though the government controlled such courses, there were fine teachers and groups from all over the world, talking about literature and history and the sciences and arts. Always I wanted more history.

Ress, who was a member of the Hame, first took me to the Library of Voe Deo. As it was open only to owners, it was not censored by the government. Freed assets, if they were light-skinned, were kept out by the librarians on one pretext or another. I was dark-skinned, and had learned here in the City to carry myself with an indifferent pride that spared one many insults and offenses. Ress told me to stride in as if I owned the place. I did so, and was given all privileges without question. So I began to read freely, to read any book I wanted in that great library, every book in it if I could. That was my joy, that reading. That was the heart of my freedom.

Beyond my work at the boxmaker’s, which was well paid, pleasant, and among pleasant companions, and my learning and reading, there was not much to my life. I did not want more. I was lonely, but felt that loneliness was no high price to pay for what I wanted.

Ress, whom I had disliked, was a friend to me. I went with her to meetings of the Hame, and also to entertainments that I would have known nothing about without her guidance. “Come on, Bumpkin,” she would say. “Got to educate the plantation pup.” And she would take me to the makil theater, or to asset dance halls where the music was good. She always wanted to dance. I let her teach me, but was not very happy dancing. One night as we were dancing the “slow-go” her hands began pressing me to her, and looking in her face I saw the mask of sexual desire on it, soft and blank. I broke away. “I don’t want to dance,” I said.

We walked home. She came up to my room with me, and at my door she tried to hold and kiss me. I was sick with anger. “I don’t want that!” I said.

“I’m sorry, Rakam,” she said, more gently than I had ever heard her speak. “I know how you must feel. But you’ve got to get over that, you’ve got to have your own life. I’m not a man, and I do want you.”

I broke in—“A woman used me before a man ever did. Did you ask me if I wanted you? I will never be used again!”

That rage and spite came bursting out of me like poison from an infection. If she had tried to touch me again, I would have hurt her. I slammed my door in her face. I went trembling to my desk, sat down, and began to read the book that was open on it.

Next day we were both ashamed and stiff. But Ress had patience under her City quickness and roughness. She did not try to make love to me again, but she got me to trust her and talk to her as I could not talk to anybody else. She listened intently and told me what she thought. She said, “Bumpkin, you have it all wrong. No wonder. How could you have got it right? You think sex is something that gets done to you. It’s not. It’s something you do. With somebody else. Not to them. You never had any sex. All you ever knew was rape.”

“Lord Erod told me all that a long time ago,” I said. I was bitter. “I don’t care what it’s called. I had enough of it. For the rest of my life. And I’m glad to be without it.”

Ress made a face. “At twenty-two?” she said. “Maybe for a while. If you’re happy, then fine. But think about what I said. It’s a big part of life to just cut out.”

“If I have to have sex, I can pleasure myself,” I said, not caring if I hurt her. “Love has nothing to do with it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” she said, but I did not listen. I would learn from teachers and books which I chose for myself, but I would not take advice I had not asked for. I refused to be told what to do or what to think. If I was free, I would be free by myself. I was like a baby when it first stands up.

Ahas had been giving me advice too. He said it was foolish to pursue education so far. “There’s nothing useful you can do with so much book learning,” he said. “It’s self-indulgent. We need leaders and members with practical skills.”

“We need teachers!”

“Yes,” he said, “but you knew enough to teach a year ago. What’s the good of ancient history, facts about alien worlds? We have a revolution to make!”

I did not stop my reading, but I felt guilty. I took a class at the Hame school teaching illiterate assets and freedpeople to read and write, as I myself had been taught only three years before. It was hard work. Reading is hard for a grown person to learn, tired, at night, after work all day. It is much easier to let the net take one’s mind over.

I kept arguing with Ahas in my mind, and one day I said to him, “Is there a Library on Yeowe?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know there isn’t. The Corporations didn’t leave any libraries there. They didn’t have any. They were ignorant people who knew nothing but profit. Knowledge is a good in itself. I keep on learning so that I can bring my knowledge to Yeowe. If I could, I’d bring them the whole Library!”

He stared. “What owners thought, what owners did—that’s all their books are about. They don’t need that on Yeowe.”

“Yes they do,” I said, certain he was wrong, though again I could not say why.

At the school they soon called on me to teach history, one of the teachers having left. These classes went well. I worked hard preparing them. Presently I was asked to speak to a study group of advanced students, and that, too, went well. People were interested in the ideas I drew from history and the comparisons I had learned to make of our world with other worlds. I had been studying the way various peoples bring up their children, who takes the responsibility for them and how that responsibility is understood, since this seemed to me a place where a people frees or enslaves itself.

To one of these talks a man from the Embassy of the Ekumen came. I was frightened when I saw the alien face in my audience. I was worse frightened when I recognised him. He had taught the first course in Ekumenical History that I had taken in the net. I had listened to it devotedly though I never participated in the discussion. What I learned had had a great influence on me. I thought he would find me presumptuous for talking of things he truly knew. I stammered on through my lecture, trying not to see his white-cornered eyes.

He came up to me afterwards, introduced himself politely, complimented my talk, and asked if I had read such-and-such a book. He engaged me so deftly and kindly in conversation that I had to like and trust him. And he soon earned my trust. I needed his guidance, for much foolishness has been written and spoken, even by wise people, about the balance of power between men and women, on which depend the lives of children and the value of their education. He knew useful books to read, from which I could go on by myself.

His name was Esdardon Aya. He worked in some high position, I was not sure what, at the Embassy. He had been born on Hain, the Old World, humanity’s first home, from which all our ancestors came.

Sometimes I thought how strange it was that I knew about such things, such vast and ancient matters, I who had not known anything outside the compound walls till I was six, who had not known the name of the country I lived in till I was eighteen! When I was new to the City someone had spoken of “Voe Deo,” and I had asked, “Where is that?” They had all stared at me. A woman, a hard-voiced old City rentswoman, had said, “Here, Dusty. Right here’s Voe Deo. Your country and mine!”

I told Esdardon Aya that. He did not laugh. “A country, a people,” he said. “Those are strange and very difficult ideas.”

“My country was slavery,” I said, and he nodded.

By now I seldom saw Ahas. I missed his kind friendship, but it had all turned to scolding. “You’re puffed up, publishing, talking to audiences all the time,” he said. “You’re putting yourself before our cause.”

I said, “But I talk to people in the Hame, I write about things we need to know. Everything I do is for freedom.”

“The Community is not pleased with that pamphlet of yours,” he said, in a serious, counseling way, as if telling me a secret I needed to know. “I’ve been asked to tell you to submit your writings to the committee before you publish again. That press is run by hotheads. The Hame is causing a good deal of trouble to our candidates.”

“Our candidates!” I said in a rage. “No owner is my candidate! Are you still taking orders from the Young Owner?”

That stung him. He said, “If you put yourself first, if you won’t cooperate, you bring danger on us all.”

“I don’t put myself first—politicians and capitalists do that. I put freedom first. Why can’t you cooperate with me? It goes two ways, Ahas!”

He left angry, and left me angry.

I think he missed my dependence on him. Perhaps he was jealous, too, of my independence, for he did remain Lord Erod’s man. His was a loyal heart. Our disagreement gave us both much bitter pain. I wish I knew what became of him in the troubled times that followed.

There was truth in his accusation. I had found that I had the gift in speaking and writing of moving people’s minds and hearts. Nobody told me that such a gift is as dangerous as it is strong. Ahas said I was putting myself first, but I knew I was not doing that. I was wholly in the service of the truth and of liberty. No one told me that the end cannot purify the means, since only the Lord Kamye knows what the end may be. My grandmother could have told me that. The Arkamye would have reminded me of it, but I did not often read in it, and in the City there were no old men singing the word, evenings. If there had been, I would not have heard them over the sound of my beautiful voice speaking the beautiful truth.

I believe I did no harm, except as we all did, in bringing it to the attention of the rulers of Voe Deo that the Hame was growing bolder and the Radical Party was growing stronger, and that they must move against us.

The first sign was a divisive one. In the open compounds, as well as the men’s side and the women’s side there were several apartments for couples. This was a radical thing. Any kind of marriage between assets was illegal. They were allowed to live in pairs only by their owners’ indulgence. Assets’ only legitimate loyalty was to their owner. The child did not belong to the mother, but to the owner. But since gareots were living in the same place as owned assets, these apartments for couples had been tolerated or ignored. Now suddenly the law was invoked, asset couples were arrested, fined if they were wage earners, separated, and sent to company-run compound houses. Ress and the other elderwomen who ran our house were fined and warned that if “immoral arrangements” were discovered again, they would be held responsible and sent to the labor camps. Two little children of one of the couples were not on the government’s list and so were left, abandoned, when their parents were taken off. Keo and Ramayo took them in. They became wards of the women’s side, as orphans in the compounds always did.

There were fierce debates about this in meetings of the Hame and The Community. Some said the right of assets to live together and to bring up their children was a cause the Radical Party should support. It was not directly threatening to ownership, and might appeal to the natural instincts of many owners, especially the women, who could not vote but who were valuable allies. Others said that private affections must be overridden by loyalty to the cause of liberty, and that any personal issue must take second place to the great issue of emancipation. Lord Erod spoke thus at a meeting. I rose to answer him. I said that there was no freedom without sexual freedom, and that until women were allowed and men were willing to take responsibility for their children, no woman, whether owner or asset, would be free.

“Men must bear the responsibility for the public side of life, the greater world the child will enter; women, for the domestic side of life, the moral and physical upbringing of the child. This is a division enjoined by God and Nature,” Erod answered.

“Then will emancipation for a woman mean she’s free to enter the beza, be locked in on the women’s side?”

“Of course not,” he began, but I broke in again, fearing his golden tongue—“Then what is freedom for a woman? Is it different from freedom for a man? Or is a free person free?”

The moderator was angrily thumping his staff, but some other asset women took up my question. “When will the Radical Party speak for us?” they said, and one elderwoman cried, “Where are your women, you owners who want to abolish slavery? Why aren’t they here? Don’t you let them out of the beza?”

The moderator pounded and finally got order restored. I was half-triumphant and half-dismayed. I saw Erod and also some of the people from the Hame now looking at me as an open troublemaker. And indeed my words had divided us. But were we not already divided?

A group of us women went home talking through the streets, talking aloud. These were my streets now, with their traffic and lights and dangers and life. I was a City woman, a free woman. That night I was an owner. I owned the City. I owned the future.

The arguments went on. I was asked to speak at many places. As I was leaving one such meeting, the Hainishman Esdardon Aya came to me and said in a casual way, as if discussing my speech, “Rakam, you’re in danger of arrest.”

I did not understand. He walked along beside me away from the others and went on: “A rumor has come to my attention at the Embassy. . . . The government of Voe Deo is about to change the status of manumitted assets. You’re no longer to be considered gareots. You must have an owner-sponsor.”

This was bad news, but after thinking it over I said, “I think I can find an owner to sponsor me. Lord Boeba, maybe.”

“The owner-sponsor will have to be approved by the government. . . . This will tend to weaken The Community both through the asset and the owner members. It’s very clever, in its way,” said Esdardon Aya.

“What happens to us if we don’t find an approved sponsor?”

“You’ll be considered runaways.”

That meant death, the labor camps, or auction.

“O Lord Kamye,” I said, and took Esdardon Aya’s arm, because a curtain of dark had fallen across my eyes.

We had walked some way along the street. When I could see again I saw the street, the high houses of the City, the shining lights I had thought were mine.

“I have some friends,” said the Hainishman, walking on with me, “who are planning a trip to the Kingdom of Bambur.”

After a while I said, “What would I do there?”

“A ship to Yeowe leaves from there.”

“To Yeowe,” I said.

“So I hear,” he said, as if we were talking about a streetcar line. “In a few years, I expect Voe Deo will begin offering rides to Yeowe. Exporting intractables, troublemakers, members of the Hame. But that will involve recognising Yeowe as a nation state, which they haven’t brought themselves to do yet. They are, however, permitting some semilegitimate trade arrangements by their client states. . . . A couple of years ago, the King of Bambur bought one of the old Corporation ships, a genuine old Colony Trader. The King thought he’d like to visit the moons of Werel. But he found the moons boring. So he rented the ship to a consortium of scholars from the University of Bambur and businessmen from his capital. Some manufacturers in Bambur carry on a little trade with Yeowe in it, and some scientists at the university make scientific expeditions in it at the same time. Of course each trip is very expensive, so they carry as many scientists as they can whenever they go.”

I heard all this not hearing it, yet understanding it.

“So far,” he said, “they’ve gotten away with it.”

He always sounded quiet, a little amused, yet not superior.

“Does The Community know about this ship?” I asked.

“Some members do, I believe. And people in the Hame. But it’s very dangerous to know about. If Voe Deo were to find out that a client state was exporting valuable property . . . In fact, we believe they may have some suspicions. So this is a decision that can’t be made lightly. It is both dangerous and irrevocable. Because of that danger, I hesitated to speak of it to you. I hesitated so long that you must make it very quickly. In fact, tonight, Rakam.”

I looked from the lights of the City up to the sky they hid. “I’ll go,” I said. I thought of Walsu.

“Good,” he said. At the next corner he changed the direction we had been walking, away from my house, towards the Embassy of the Ekumen.

I never wondered why he did this for me. He was a secret man, a man of secret power, but he always spoke truth, and I think he followed his own heart when he could.

As we entered the Embassy grounds, a great park softly illuminated in the winter night by ground-lights, I stopped. “My books,” I said. He looked his question. “I wanted to take my books to Yeowe,” I said. Now my voice shook with a rush of tears, as if everything I was leaving came down to that one thing. “They need books on Yeowe, I think,” I said.

After a moment he said, “I’ll have them sent on our next ship. I wish I could put you on that ship,” he added in a lower voice. “But of course the Ekumen can’t give free rides to runaway slaves. . . .”

I turned and took his hand and laid my forehead against it for a moment, the only time in my life I ever did that of my own free will.

He was startled. “Come, come,” he said, and hurried me along.

The Embassy hired Werelian guards, mostly veots, men of the old warrior caste. One of them, a grave, courteous, very silent man, went with me on the flyer to Bambur, the island kingdom east of the Great Continent. He had all the papers I needed. From the flyer port he took me to the Royal Space Observatory, which the King had built for his spaceship. There without delay I was taken to the ship, which stood in its great scaffolding ready to depart.

I imagine that they had made comfortable apartments up front for the King when he went to see the moons. The body of the ship, which had belonged to the Agricultural Plantation Corporation, still consisted of great compartments for the produce of the Colony. It would be bringing back grain from Yeowe in four of the cargo bays that now held farm machinery made in Bambur. The fifth compartment held assets.

The cargo bay had no seats. They had laid felt pads on the floor, and we lay down and were strapped to stanchions, as cargo would have been. There were about fifty “scientists.” I was the last to come aboard and be strapped in. The crew were hasty and nervous and spoke only the language of Bambur. I could not understand the instructions we were given. I needed very badly to relieve my bladder, but they had shouted “No time, no time!” So I lay in torment while they closed the great doors of the bay, which made me think of the doors of Shomeke compound. Around me people called out to one another in their language. A baby screamed. I knew that language. Then the great noise began, beneath us. Slowly I felt my body pressed down on the floor, as if a huge soft foot were stepping on me, till my shoulder blades felt as if they were cutting into the mat, and my tongue pressed back into my throat as if to choke me, and with a sharp stab of pain and hot relief my bladder released its urine.

Then we began to be weightless—to float in our bonds. Up was down and down was up, either was both or neither. I heard people all around me calling out again, saying one another’s names, saying what must be, “Are you all right? Yes, I’m all right.” The baby had never ceased its fierce, piercing yells. I began to feel at my restraints, for I saw the woman next to me sitting up and rubbing her arms and chest where the straps had held her. But a great blurry voice came bellowing over the loudspeaker, giving orders in the language of Bambur and then in Voe Dean: “Do not unfasten the straps! Do not attempt to move about! The ship is under attack! The situation is extremely dangerous!”

So I lay floating in my little mist of urine, listening to the strangers around me talk, understanding nothing. I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying. It would be foolish to worry about anything while one died.

The ship moved strangely, shuddering, seeming to turn. Several people were sick. The air filled with the smell and tiny droplets of vomit. I freed my hands enough to draw the scarf I was wearing up over my face as a filter, tucking the ends under my head to hold it.

Inside the scarf I could no longer see the huge vault of the cargo bay stretching above or below me, making me feel I was about to fly or fall into it. It smelled of myself, which was comforting. It was the scarf I often wore when I dressed up to give a talk, fine gauze, pale red with a silver thread woven in at intervals. When I bought it at a City market, paying my own earned money for it, I had thought of my mother’s red scarf, given her by Lady Tazeu. I thought she would have liked this one, though it was not as bright. Now I lay and looked into the pale red dimness it made of the vault, starred with the lights at the hatches, and thought of my mother, Yowa. She had probably been killed that morning in the compound. Perhaps she had been carried to another estate as a use-woman, but Ahas had never found any trace of her. I thought of the way she had of carrying her head a little to the side, deferent yet alert, gracious. Her eyes had been full and bright, “eyes that hold the seven moons,” as the song says. I thought then: But I will never see the moons again.

At that I felt so strange that to comfort myself and distract my mind I began to sing under my breath, there alone in my tent of red gauze warm with my own breath. I sang the freedom songs we sang in the Hame, and then I sang the love songs Lady Tazeu had taught me. Finally I sang “O, O, Yeowe,” softly at first, then a little louder. I heard a voice somewhere out in that soft red mist world join in with me, a man’s voice, then a woman’s. Assets from Voe Deo all know that song. We sang it together. A Bambur man’s voice picked it up and put words in his own language to it, and others joined in singing it. Then the singing died away. The baby’s crying was weak now. The air was very foul.

We learned many hours later, when at last clean air entered the vents and we were told we could release our bonds, that a ship of the Voe Dean Space Defense Fleet had intercepted the freighter’s course just above the atmosphere and ordered it to stop. The captain chose to ignore the signal. The warship had fired, and though nothing hit the freighter the blast had damaged the controls. The freighter had gone on, and had seen and heard nothing more of the warship. We were now about eleven days from Yeowe. The warship, or a group of them, might be in wait for us near Yeowe. The reason they gave for ordering the freighter to halt was “suspected contraband merchandise.”

That fleet of warships had been built centuries ago to protect Werel from the attacks they expected from the Alien Empire, which is what they then called the Ekumen. They were so frightened by that imagined threat that they put all their energy into the technology of space flight; and the colonisation of Yeowe was a result. After four hundred years without any threat of attack, Voe Deo had finally let the Ekumen send envoys and ambassadors. They had used the Defense Fleet to transport troops and weapons during the War of Liberation. Now they were using them the way estate owners used hunting dogs and hunting cats, to hunt down runaway slaves.

I found the two other Voe Deans in the cargo bay, and we moved our “bedstraps” together so we could talk. Both of them had been brought to Bambur by the Hame, who had paid their fare. It had not occurred to me that there was a fare to be paid. I knew who had paid mine.

“Can’t fly a spaceship on love,” the woman said. She was a strange person. She really was a scientist. Highly trained in chemistry by the company that rented her, she had persuaded the Hame to send her to Yeowe because she was sure her skills would be needed and in demand. She had been making higher wages than many gareots did, but she expected to do still better on Yeowe. “I’m going to be rich,” she said.

The man, only a boy, a mill hand in a northern city, had simply run away and had the luck to meet people who could save him from death or the labor camps. He was sixteen, ignorant, noisy, rebellious, sweet-natured. He became a general favorite, like a puppy. I was in demand because I knew the history of Yeowe and through a man who knew both our languages I could tell the Bamburs something about where they were going—the centuries of Corporation slavery, Nadami, the War, the Liberation. Some of them were rentspeople from the cities, others were a group of estate slaves bought at auction by the Hame with false money and under a false name and hurried onto this flight, knowing very little of where they were going. It was that trick that had drawn Voe Deo’s attention to this flight.

Yoke, the mill boy, speculated endlessly about how the Yeowans would welcome us. He had a story, half a joke, half a dream, about the bands playing and the speeches and the big dinner they would have for us. The dinner grew more and more elaborate as the days went on. They were long, hungry days, floating in the featureless great space of the cargo bay, marked only by the alternation every twelve hours of brighter and dimmer lighting and the issuing of two meals during the “day,” food and water in tubes you squeezed into your mouth. I did not think much about what might happen. I was between happenings. If the warships found us, we would probably die. If we got to Yeowe, it would be a new life. Now we were floating.

4. Yeowe

THE SHIP CAME DOWN SAFE at the Port of Yeowe. They unloaded the crates of machinery first, then the other cargo. We came out staggering and holding on to one another, not able to stand up to the great pull of this new world drawing us down to its center, blinded by the light of the sun that we were closer to than we had ever been.

“Over here! Over here!” a man shouted. I was grateful to hear my language, but the Bamburs looked apprehensive.

Over here—in here—strip—wait—All we heard when we were first on the Free World was orders. We had to be decontaminated, which was painful and exhausting. We had to be examined by doctors. Anything we had brought with us had to be decontaminated and examined and listed. That did not take long for me. I had brought the clothes I wore and had worn for two weeks now. I was glad to get decontaminated. Finally we were told to stand in line in one of the big empty cargo sheds. The sign over the doors still read APCY—Agricultural Plantation Corporation of Yeowe. One by one we were processed for entry. The man who processed me was short, white, middle-aged, with spectacles, like any clerk asset in the City, but I looked at him with reverence. He was the first Yeowan I had spoken to. He asked me questions from a form and wrote down my answers. “Can you read?”—“Yes.”—“Skills?”—I stammered a moment and said, “Teaching—I can teach reading and history.” He never looked up at me.

I was glad to be patient. After all, the Yeowans had not asked us to come. We were admitted only because they knew if they sent us back, we would die horribly in a public execution. We were a profitable cargo to Bambur, but to Yeowe we were a problem. But many of us had skills they must need, and I was glad they asked us about them.

When we had all been processed, we were separated into two groups: men and women. Yoke hugged me and went off to the men’s side laughing and waving. I stood with the women. We watched all the men led off to the shuttle that went to the Old Capital. Now my patience failed and my hope darkened. I prayed, “Lord Kamye, not here, not here too!” Fear made me angry. When a man came giving us orders again, come on, this way, I went up to him and said, “Who are you? Where are we going? We are free women!”

He was a big fellow with a round, white face and bluish eyes. He looked down at me, huffy at first, then smiling. “Yes, Little Sister, you’re free,” he said. “But we’ve all got to work, don’t we? You ladies are going south. They need people on the rice plantations. You do a little work, make a little money, look around a little, all right? If you don’t like it down there, come on back. We can always use more pretty little ladies round here.”

I had never heard the Yeowan country accent, a singing, blurry softening, with long, clear vowels. I had never heard asset women called ladies. No one had ever called me Little Sister. He did not mean the word “use” as I took it, surely. He meant well. I was bewildered and said no more. But the chemist, Tualtak, said, “Listen, I’m no field hand, I’m a trained scientist—”

“Oh, you’re all scientists,” the Yeowan said with his big smile. “Come on now, ladies!” He strode ahead, and we followed. Tualtak kept talking. He smiled and paid no heed.

We were taken to a train car waiting on a siding. The huge, bright sun was setting. All the sky was orange and pink, full of light. Long shadows ran black along the ground. The warm air was dusty and sweet-smelling. While we stood waiting to climb up into the car I stooped and picked up a little reddish stone from the ground. It was round, with a tiny stripe of white clear through it. It was a piece of Yeowe. I held Yeowe in my hand. That little stone, too, I still have.

Our car was shunted along to the main yards and hooked onto a train. When the train started we were served dinner, soup from great kettles wheeled through the car, bowls of sweet, heavy marsh rice, pini fruit—a luxury on Werel, here a commonplace. We ate and ate. I watched the last light die away from the long, rolling hills that the train was passing through. The stars came out. No moons. Never again. But I saw Werel rising in the east. It was a great blue-green star, looking as Yeowe looks from Werel. But you would never see Yeowe rising after sunset. Yeowe followed the sun.

I’m alive and I’m here, I thought. I’m following the sun. I let the rest go, and fell asleep to the swaying of the train.

We were taken off the train on the second day at a town on the great river Yot. Our group of twenty-three was separated there, and ten of us were taken by oxcart to a village, Hagayot. It had been an APCY compound, growing marsh rice to feed the Colony slaves. Now it was a cooperative village, growing marsh rice to feed the Free People. We were enrolled as members of the cooperative. We lived share and share alike with the villagers until payout, when we could pay them back what we owed the cooperative.

It was a reasonable way to handle immigrants without money who did not know the language or who had no skills. But I did not understand why they had ignored our skills. Why had they sent the men from Bambur plantations, field hands, into the city, not here? Why only women?

I did not understand why, in a village of free people, there was a men’s side and a women’s side, with a ditch between them.

I did not understand why, as I soon discovered, the men made all the decisions and gave all the orders. But, it being so, I did understand that they were afraid of us Werelian women, who were not used to taking orders from our equals. And I understood that I must take orders and not even look as if I thought of questioning them. The men of Hagayot Village watched us with fierce suspicion and a whip as ready as any Boss’s. “Maybe you told men what to do back over there,” the foreman told us the first morning in the fields. “Well, that’s back over there. That’s not here. Here we free people work together. You think you’re Bosswomen. There aren’t any Bosswomen here.”

There were grandmothers on the women’s side, but they were not the powers our grandmothers had been. Here, where for the first century there had been no slave women at all, the men had had to make their own life, set up their own powers. When women slaves at last were sent into those slave-kingdoms of men, there was no power for them at all. They had no voice. Not till they got away to the cities did they ever have a voice on Yeowe.

I learned silence.

But it was not as bad for me and Tualtak as for our eight Bambur companions. We were the first immigrants any of these villagers had ever seen. They knew only one language. They thought the Bambur women were witches because they did not talk “like human beings.” They whipped them for talking to each other in their own language.

I will confess that in my first year on the Free World my heart was as low as it had been at Zeskra. I hated standing all day in the shallow water of the rice paddies. Our feet were always sodden and swollen and full of tiny burrowing worms we had to pick out every night. But it was needed work and not too hard for a healthy woman. It was not the work that bore me down.

Hagayot was not a tribal village, not as conservative as some of the old villages I learned about later. Girls here were not ritually raped, and a woman was safe on the women’s side. She “jumped the ditch” only with a man she chose. But if a woman went anywhere alone, or even got separated from the other women working in the paddies, she was supposed to be “asking for it,” and any man thought it his right to force himself on her.

I made good friends among the village women and the Bamburs. They were no more ignorant than I had been a few years before and some were wiser than I would ever be. There was no possibility of having a friend among men who thought themselves our owners. I could not see how life here would ever change. My heart was very low, nights, when I lay among the sleeping women and children in our hut and thought, Is this what Walsu died for?

In my second year there, I resolved to do what I could to keep above the misery that threatened me. One of the Bambur women, meek and slow of understanding, whipped and beaten by both women and men for speaking her language, had drowned in one of the great rice paddies. She had lain down there in the warm shallow water not much deeper than her ankles, and had drowned. I feared that yielding, that water of despair. I made up my mind to use my skill, to teach the village women and children to read.

I wrote out some little primers on rice cloth and made a game of it for the little children, first. Some of the older girls and women were curious. Some of them knew that people in the towns and cities could read. They saw it as a mystery, a witchcraft that gave the city people their great power. I did not deny this.

For the women, I first wrote down verses and passages of the Arkamye, all I could remember, so that they could have it and not have to wait for one of the men who called themselves “priests” to recite it. They were proud of learning to read these verses. Then I had my friend Seugi tell me a story, her own recollection of meeting a wild hunting cat in the marshes as a child. I wrote it down, entitling it “The Marsh Lion, by Aro Seugi,” and read it aloud to the author and a circle of girls and women. They marveled and laughed. Seugi wept, touching the writing that held her voice.

The chief of the village and his headmen and foremen and honorary sons, all the hierarchy and government of the village, were suspicious and not pleased by my teaching, yet did not want to forbid me. The government of Yotebber Region had sent word that they were establishing country schools where village children were to be sent for half the year. The village men knew that their sons would be advantaged if they could already read and write when they went there.

The Chosen Son, a big, mild, pale man, blind in one eye from a war wound, came to me at last. He wore his coat of office, a tight, long coat such as Werelian owners had worn three hundred years ago. He told me that I should not teach girls to read, only boys.

I told him I would teach all the children who wanted to learn or none of them.

“Girls do not want to learn this,” he said.

“They do. Fourteen girls have asked to be in my class. Eight boys. Do you say girls do not need religious training, Chosen Son?”

This gave him pause. “They should learn the life of the Merciful Lady,” he said.

“I will write the Life of Tual for them,” I said at once. He walked away, saving his dignity.

I had little pleasure in my victory, such as it was. At least I went on teaching.

Tualtak was always at me to run away, run away to the city downriver. She had grown very thin, for she could not digest the heavy food. She hated the work and the people. “It’s all right for you, you were a plantation pup, a dusty, but I never was, my mother was a rentswoman, we lived in fine rooms on Haba Street, I was the brightest trainee they ever had in the laboratory,” and on and on, over and over, living in the world she had lost.

Sometimes I listened to her talk about running away. I tried to remember the maps of Yeowe in my lost books. I remembered the great river, the Yot, running from far inland three thousand kilos to the South Sea. But where were we on its vast length, how far from Yotebber City on its delta? Between Hagayot and the city might be a hundred villages like this one. “Have you been raped?” I asked Tualtak.

She took offense. “I’m a rentswoman, not a use-woman,” she snapped.

I said, “I was a use-woman for two years. If I was raped again, I would kill the man or kill myself. I think two Werelian women walking alone here would be raped. I can’t do it, Tualtak.”

“It can’t all be like this place!” she cried, so desperate that I felt my own throat close up with tears.

“Maybe when they open the schools—there will be people from the cities then—” It was all I had to offer her, or myself, as hope. “Maybe if the harvest’s good this year, if we can get our money, we can get on the train. . . .”

That indeed was our best hope. The problem was to get our money from the chief and his cohorts. They kept the cooperative’s income in a stone hut which they called the Bank of Hagayot, and only they ever saw the money. Each individual had an account, and they kept tally faithfully, the old Banker Headman scratching your account out in the dirt if you asked for it. But women and children could not withdraw money from their account. All we could get was a kind of scrip, clay pieces marked by the Banker Headman, good to buy things from one another, things people in the village made, clothes, sandals, tools, bead necklaces, rice beer. Our real money was safe, we were told, in the bank. I thought of that old lame bondsman at Shomeke, jigging and singing, “Money in the bank, Lord! Money in the bank!”

Before we ever came, the women had resented this system. Now there were nine more women resenting it.

One night I asked my friend Seugi, whose hair was as white as her skin, “Seugi, do you know what happened at a place called Nadami?”

“Yes,” she said. “The women opened the door. All the women rose up and then the men rose up against the Bosses. But they needed weapons. And a woman ran in the night and stole the key from the owner’s box and opened the door of the strong place where the Bosses kept their guns and bullets, and she held it open with the strength of her body, so that the slaves could arm themselves. And they killed the Corporations and made that place, Nadami, free.”

“Even on Werel they tell that story,” I said. “Even there women tell about Nadami, where the women began the Liberation. Men tell it too. Do men here tell it? Do they know it?”

Seugi and the other women nodded.

“If a woman freed the men of Nadami,” I said, “maybe the women of Hagayot can free their money.”

Seugi laughed. She called out to a group of grandmothers, “Listen to Rakam! Listen to this!”

After plenty of talk for days and weeks, it ended in a delegation of women, thirty of us. We crossed the ditch bridge onto the men’s side and ceremoniously asked to see the chief. Our principal bargaining counter was shame. Seugi and other village women did the speaking, for they knew how far they could shame the men without goading them into anger and retaliation. Listening to them, I heard dignity speak to dignity, pride speak to pride. For the first time since I came to Yeowe I felt I was one of these people, that this pride and dignity were mine.

Nothing happens fast in a village. But by the next harvest, the women of Hagayot could draw their own earned share out of the bank in cash.

“Now for the vote,” I said to Seugi, for there was no secret ballot in the village. When there was a regional election, even in the worldwide Ratification of the Constitution, the chiefs polled the men and filled out the ballots. They did not even poll the women. They wrote in the votes they wanted cast.

But I did not stay to help bring about that change at Hagayot. Tualtak was really ill and half-crazy with her longing to get out of the marshes, to the city. And I too longed for that. So we took our wages, and Seugi and other women drove us in an oxcart on the causeway across the marshes to the freight station. There we raised the flag that signaled the next train to stop for passengers.

It came along in a few hours, a long train of boxcars loaded with marsh rice, heading for the mills of Yotebber City. We rode in the crew car with the train crew and a few other passengers, village men. I had a big knife in my belt, but none of the men showed us any disrespect. Away from their compounds they were timid and shy. I sat up in my bunk in that car watching the great, wild, plumy marshes whirl by, and the villages on the banks of the wide river, and wished the train would go on forever.

But Tualtak lay in the bunk below me, coughing and fretful. When we got to Yotebber City she was so weak I knew I had to get her to a doctor. A man from the train crew was kind, telling us how to get to the hospital on the public cars. As we rattled through the hot, crowded city streets in the crowded car, I was still happy. I could not help it.

At the hospital they demanded our citizen’s registration papers.

I had never heard of such papers. Later I found that ours had been given to the chiefs at Hagayot, who had kept them, as they kept all “their” women’s papers. At the time, all I could do was stare and say, “I don’t know anything about registration papers.”

I heard one of the women at the desk say to the other, “Lord, how dusty can you get?”

I knew what we looked like. I knew we looked dirty and low. I knew I seemed ignorant and stupid. But when I heard that word “dusty” my pride and dignity woke up again. I put my hand into my pack and brought out my freedom paper, that old paper with Erod’s writing on it, all crumpled and folded, all dusty.

“This is my Citizen’s Registration paper,” I said in a loud voice, making those women jump and turn. “My mother’s blood and my grandmother’s blood is on it. My friend here is sick. She needs a doctor. Now bring us to a doctor!”

A thin little woman came forward from the corridor. “Come on this way,” she said. One of the deskwomen started to protest. This little woman gave her a look.

We followed her to an examination room.

“I’m Dr. Yeron,” she said, then corrected herself. “I’m serving as a nurse,” she said. “But I am a doctor. And you—you come from the Old World? from Werel? Sit down there, now, child, take off your shirt. How long have you been here?”

Within a quarter of an hour she had diagnosed Tualtak and got her a bed in a ward for rest and observation, found out our histories, and sent me off with a note to a friend of hers who would help me find a place to live and a job.

“Teaching!” Dr. Yeron said. “A teacher! Oh, woman, you are rain to the dry land!”

Indeed the first school I talked to wanted to hire me at once, to teach anything I wanted. Because I come of a capitalist people, I went to other schools to see if I could make more money at them. But I came back to the first one. I liked the people there.

Before the War of Liberation, the cities of Yeowe, which were cities of Corporation-owned assets who rented their own freedom, had had their own schools and hospitals and many kinds of training programs. There was even a University for assets in the Old Capital. The Corporations, of course, had controlled all the information that came to such institutions, and watched and censored all teaching and writing, keeping everything aimed towards the maximization of their profits. But within that narrow frame the assets had been free to use the information they had as they pleased, and city Yeowans had valued education deeply. During the long war, thirty years, all that system of gathering and teaching knowledge had broken down. A whole generation grew up learning nothing but fighting and hiding, famine and disease. The head of my school said to me, “Our children grew up illiterate, ignorant. Is it any wonder the plantation chiefs just took over where the Corporation Bosses left off? Who was to stop them?”

These men and women believed with a fierce passion that only education would lead to freedom. They were still fighting the War of Liberation.

Yotebber City was a big, poor, sunny, sprawling city with wide streets, low buildings, and huge old shady trees. The traffic was mostly afoot, with cycles tinging and public cars clanging along among the slow crowds. There were miles of shacks and shanties down in the old floodplain of the river behind the levees, where the soil was rich for gardening. The center of the city was on a low rise, the mills and train yards spreading out from it. Downtown it looked like the City of Voe Deo, only older and poorer and gentler. Instead of big stores for owners, people bought and sold everything from stalls in open markets. The air was soft here in the south, a warm, soft sea air full of mist and sunlight. I stayed happy. I have by the grace of the Lord a mind that can leave misfortune behind, and I was happy in Yotebber City.

Tualtak recovered her health and found a good job as a chemist in a factory. I saw her seldom, as our friendship had been a matter of necessity, not choice. Whenever I saw her she talked about Haba Street and her laboratory on Werel and complained about her work and the people here.

Dr. Yeron did not forget me. She wrote a note and told me to come visit her, which I did. Presently, when I was settled, she asked me to come with her to a meeting of an educational society. This, I found, was a group of democrats, mostly teachers, who sought to work against the autocratic power of the tribal and regional chiefs under the new Constitution, and to counteract what they called the slave mind, the rigid, misogynistic hierarchy that I had encountered in Hagayot. My experience was useful to them, for they were all city people who had met the slave mind only when they found themselves governed by it. The women of the group were the angriest. They had lost the most at Liberation and now had less to lose. In general the men were gradualists, the women ready for revolution. As a Werelian, ignorant of politics on Yeowe, I listened and did not talk. It was hard for me not to talk. I am a talker, and sometimes I had plenty to say. But I held my tongue and heard them. They were people worth hearing.

Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd. Though the Chief, the President of Yotebber Region, elected by a manipulated ballot, might not understand our counter-manipulations of the school curriculum, he did not waste much energy trying to control the schools, merely sending his inspectors to meddle with our classes and censor our books. But what he saw as important was the fact that, just as the Corporations had, he controlled the net. The news, the information programs, the puppets of the neareals, all danced to his strings. Against that, what harm could a lot of teachers do? Parents who had no schooling had children who entered the net to hear and see and feel what the Chief wanted them to know: that freedom is obedience to leaders, that virtue is violence, that manhood is domination. Against the enactment of such truths in daily life and in the heightened sensational experience of the neareals, what good were words?

“Literacy is irrelevant,” one of our group said sorrowfully. “The chiefs have jumped right over our heads into the postliterate information technology.”

I brooded over that, hating her fancy words, irrelevant, postliterate, because I was afraid she was right.

To the next meeting of our group, to my surprise, an Alien came: the Sub-Envoy of the Ekumen. He was supposed to be a great feather in our Chief’s cap, sent down from the Old Capital apparently to support the Chief’s stand against the World Party, which was still strong down here and still clamoring that Yeowe should keep out all foreigners. I had heard vaguely that such a person was here, but I had not expected to meet him at a gathering of subversive schoolteachers.

He was a short man, red-brown, with white corners to his eyes, but handsome if one could ignore that. He sat in the seat in front of me. He sat perfectly still, as if accustomed to sitting still, and listened without speaking, as if accustomed to listening. At the end of the meeting he turned around and his queer eyes looked straight at me.

“Radosse Rakam?” he said.

I nodded, dumb.

“I’m Yehedarhed Havzhiva,” he said. “I have some books for you from Old Music.”

I stared. I said, “Books?”

“From Old Music,” he said again. “Esdardon Aya, on Werel.”

“My books?” I said.

He smiled. He had a broad, quick smile.

“Oh, where?” I cried.

“They’re at my house. We can get them tonight, if you like. I have a car.” There was something ironic and light in how he said that, as if he was a man who did not expect to have a car, though he might enjoy it.

Dr. Yeron came over. “So you found her,” she said to the Sub-Envoy. He looked at her with such a bright face that I thought, these two are lovers. Though she was much older than he, there was nothing unlikely in the thought. Dr. Yeron was a magnetic woman. It was odd to me to think it, though, for my mind was not given to speculating about people’s sexual affairs. That was no interest of mine.

He put his hand on her arm as they talked, and I saw with peculiar intensity how gentle his touch was, almost hesitant, yet trustful. That is love, I thought. Yet they parted, I saw, without that look of private understanding that lovers often give each other.

He and I rode in his government electric car, his two silent bodyguards, policewomen, sitting in the front seat. We spoke of Esdardon Aya, whose name, he explained to me, meant Old Music. I told him how Esdardon Aya had saved my life by sending me here. He listened in a way that made it easy to talk to him. I said, “I was sick to leave my books, and I’ve thought about them, missing them, as if they were my family. But I think maybe I’m a fool to feel that way.”

“Why a fool?” he asked. He had a foreign accent, but he had the Yeowan lilt already, and his voice was beautiful, low and warm.

I tried to explain everything at once: “Well, they mean so much to me because I was illiterate when I came to the City, and it was the books that gave me freedom, gave me the world—the worlds—But now, here, I see how the net, the holos, the neareals mean so much more to people, giving them the present time. Maybe it’s just clinging to the past to cling to books. Yeowans have to go towards the future. And we’ll never change people’s minds just with words.”

He listened intently, as he had done at the meeting, and then answered slowly, “But words are an essential way of thinking. And books keep the words true. . . . I didn’t read till I was an adult, either.”

“You didn’t?”

“I knew how, but I didn’t. I lived in a village. It’s cities that have to have books,” he said, quite decisively, as if he had thought about this matter. “If they don’t, we keep on starting over every generation. It’s a waste. You have to save the words.”

When we got to his house, up at the top end of the old part of town, there were four crates of books in the entrance hall.

“These aren’t all mine!” I said.

“Old Music said they were yours,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, with his quick smile and a quick glance at me. You can tell where an Alien is looking much better than you can tell with us. With us, except for the few people with bluish eyes, you have to be close enough to see the dark pupil move in the dark eye.

“I haven’t got anywhere to put so many,” I said, amazed, realising how that strange man, Old Music, had helped me to freedom yet again.

“At your school, maybe? The school library?”

It was a good idea, but I thought at once of the Chief’s inspectors pawing through them, perhaps confiscating them. When I spoke of that, the Sub-Envoy said, “What if I present them as a gift from the Embassy? I think that might embarrass the inspectors.”

“Oh,” I said, and burst out, “Why are you so kind? You, and he—Are you Hainish too?”

“Yes,” he said, not answering my other question. “I was. I hope to be Yeowan.”

He asked me to sit down and drink a little glass of wine with him before his guard drove me home. He was easy and friendly, but a quiet man. I saw he had been hurt. There were scars on his face and a gap in his hair where he had had a head injury. He asked me what my books were, and I said, “History.”

At that he smiled, slowly this time. He said nothing, but he raised his glass to me. I raised mine, imitating him, and we drank.

Next day he had the books delivered to our school. When we opened and shelved them, we realised we had a great treasure. “There’s nothing like this at the University,” said one of the teachers, who had studied there for a year.

There were histories and anthropologies of Werel and of the worlds of the Ekumen, works of philosophy and politics by Werelians and by people of other worlds, there were compendiums of literature, poetry and stories, encyclopedias, books of science, atlases, dictionaries. In a corner of one of the crates were my own few books, my own treasure, even that first little crude History of Yeowe, Printed at Yeowe University in the Year One of Liberty. Most of my books I left in the school library, but I took that one and a few others home for love, for comfort.

I had found another love and comfort not long since. A child at school had brought me a present, a spotted-cat kitten, just weaned. The boy gave it to me with such loving pride that I could not refuse it. When I tried to pass it on to another teacher they all laughed at me. “You’re elected, Rakam!” they said. So unwillingly I took the little being home, afraid of its frailty and delicacy and near to feeling a disgust for it. Women in the beza at Zeskra had had pets, spotted cats and foxdogs, spoiled little animals fed better than we were. I had been called by the name of a pet animal once.

I alarmed the kitten taking it out of its basket, and it bit my thumb to the bone. It was tiny and frail but it had teeth. I began to have some respect for it.

That night I put it to sleep in its basket, but it climbed up on my bed and sat on my face until I let it under the covers. There it slept perfectly still all night. In the morning it woke me by dancing on me, chasing dust motes in a sunbeam. It made me laugh, waking, which is a pleasant thing. I felt that I had never laughed very much, and wanted to.

The kitten was all black, its spots showing only in certain lights, black on black. I called it Owner. I found it pleasant to come home evenings to be greeted by my little Owner.

Now for the next half year we were planning the great demonstration of women. There were many meetings, at some of which I met the Sub-Envoy again, so that I began to look for him. I liked to watch him listen to our arguments. There were those who argued that the demonstration must not be limited to the wrongs and rights of women, for equality must be for all. Others argued that it should not depend in any way on the support of foreigners, but should be a purely Yeowan movement. Mr. Yehedarhed listened to them, but I got angry. “I’m a foreigner,” I said. “Does that make me no use to you? That’s owner talk—as if you were better than other people!” And Dr. Yeron said, “I will believe equality is for all when I see it written in the Constitution of Yeowe.” For our Constitution, ratified by a world vote during the time I was at Hagayot, spoke of citizens only as men. That is finally what the demonstration became, a demand that the Constitution be amended to include women as citizens, provide for the secret ballot, and guarantee the right to free speech, freedom of the press and of assembly, and free education for all children.

I lay down on the train tracks along with seventy thousand women, that hot day. I sang with them. I heard what that sounds like, so many women singing together, what a big, deep sound it makes.

I had begun to speak in public again when we were gathering women for the great demonstration. It was a gift I had, and we made use of it. Sometimes gang boys or ignorant men would come to heckle and threaten me, shouting, “Bosswoman, Owner-woman, black cunt, go back where you came from!” Once when they were yelling that, go back, go back, I leaned into the microphone and said, “I can’t go back. We used to sing a song on the plantation where I was a slave,” and I sang it,

O, O, Ye-o-we,

Nobody never comes back.

The singing made them be still for a moment. They heard it, that awful grief, that yearning.

After the great demonstration the unrest never died down, but there were times that the energy flagged, the Movement didn’t move, as Dr. Yeron said. During one of those times I went to her and proposed that we set up a printing house and publish books. This had been a dream of mine, growing from that day in Hagayot when Seugi had touched her words and wept.

“Talk goes by,” I said, “and all the words and images in the net go by, and anybody can change them. But books are there. They last. They are the body of history, Mr. Yehedarhed says.”

“Inspectors,” said Dr. Yeron. “Until we get the free press amendment, the chiefs aren’t going to let anybody print anything they didn’t dictate themselves.”

I did not want to give up the idea. I knew that in Yotebber Region we could not publish anything political, but I argued that we might print stories and poems by women of the region. Others thought it a waste of time. We discussed it back and forth for a long time. Mr. Yehedarhed came back from a trip to the Embassy, up north in the Old Capital. He listened to our discussions, but said nothing, which disappointed me. I had thought that he might support my project.

One day I was walking home from school to my apartment, which was in a big, old, noisy house not far from the levee. I liked the place because my windows opened into the branches of trees, and through the trees I saw the river, four miles wide here, easing along among sandbars and reedbeds and willow isles in the dry season, brimming up the levees in the wet season when the rainstorms scudded across it. That day as I came near the house, Mr. Yehedarhed appeared, with two sour-faced policewomen close behind him as usual. He greeted me and asked if we might talk. I was confused and did not know what to do but to invite him up to my room.

His guards waited in the lobby. I had just the one big room on the third floor. I sat on the bed and the Sub-Envoy sat in the chair. Owner went round and round his legs, saying roo? roo?

I had observed that the Sub-Envoy took pleasure in disappointing the expectations of the Chief and his cohorts, who were all for pomp and fleets of cars and elaborate badges and uniforms. He and his policewomen went all over the city, all over Yotebber, in his government car or on foot. People liked him for it. They knew, as I knew now, that he had been assaulted and beaten and left for dead by a World Party gang his first day here, when he went out afoot alone. The city people liked his courage and the way he talked with everybody, anywhere. They had adopted him. We in the Liberation Movement thought of him as “our Envoy,” but he was theirs, and the Chief’s too. The Chief may have hated his popularity, but he profited from it.

“You want to start a publishing house,” he said, stroking Owner, who fell over with his paws in the air.

“Dr. Yeron says there’s no use until we get the Amendments.”

“There’s one press on Yeowe not directly controlled by the government,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, stroking Owner’s belly.

“Look out, he’ll bite,” I said. “Where is that?”

“At the University. I see,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, looking at his thumb. I apologized. He asked me if I was certain that Owner was male. I said I had been told so, but never had thought to look. “My impression is that your Owner is a lady,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, in such a way that I began to laugh helplessly.

He laughed along with me, sucked the blood off his thumb, and went on. “The University never amounted to much. It was a Corporation ploy—let the assets pretend they’re going to college. During the last years of the War it was closed down. Since Liberation Day it’s reopened and crawled along with no one taking much notice of it. The faculty are mostly old. They came back to it after the War. The National Government gives it a subsidy because it sounds well to have a University of Yeowe, but they don’t pay it any attention, because it has no prestige. And because many of them are unenlightened men.” He said this without scorn, descriptively. “It does have a printing house.”

“I know,” I said. I reached out for my old book and showed it to him.

He looked through it for a few minutes. His face was curiously tender as he did so. I could not help watching him. It was like watching a woman with a baby, a constant, changing play of attention and response.

“Full of propaganda and errors and hope,” he said at last, and his voice too was tender. “Well, I think this could be improved upon. Don’t you? All that’s needed is an editor. And some authors.”

“Inspectors,” I warned, imitating Dr. Yeron.

“Academic freedom is an easy issue for the Ekumen to have some influence upon,” he said, “because we invite people to attend the Ekumenical Schools on Hain and Ve. We certainly want to invite graduates of the University of Yeowe. But of course, if their education is severely defective because of the lack of books, of information . . .”

I said, “Mr. Yehedarhed, are you supposed to subvert government policies?” The question broke out of me unawares.

He did not laugh. He paused for quite a long time before he answered. “I don’t know,” he said. “So far the Ambassador has backed me. We may both get reprimanded. Or fired. What I’d like to do . . .” His strange eyes were right on me again. He looked down at the book he still held. “What I’d like is to become a Yeowan citizen,” he said. “But my usefulness to Yeowe, and to the Liberation Movement, is my position with the Ekumen. So I’ll go on using that, or misusing it, till they tell me to stop.”

When he left I had to think about what he had asked me to do. That was to go to the University as a teacher of history, and once there to volunteer for the editorship of the press. That all seemed so preposterous, for a woman of my background and my little learning, that I thought I must be misunderstanding him. When he convinced me that I had understood him, I thought he must have very badly misunderstood who I was and what I was capable of. After we had talked about that for a little while, he left, evidently feeling that he was making me uncomfortable, and perhaps feeling uncomfortable himself, though in fact we laughed a good deal and I did not feel uncomfortable, only a little as if I were crazy.

I tried to think about what he had asked me to do, to step so far beyond myself. I found it difficult to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this huge choice I must make, this future I could not imagine. But what I thought about was him, Yehedarhed Havzhiva. I kept seeing him sitting there in my old chair, stooping down to stroke Owner. Sucking blood off his thumb. Laughing. Looking at me with his white-cornered eyes. I saw his red-brown face and red-brown hands, the color of pottery. His quiet voice was in my mind.

I picked up the kitten, half-grown now, and looked at its hinder end. There was no sign of any male parts. The little black silky body squirmed in my hands. I thought of him saying, “Your Owner is a lady,” and I wanted to laugh again, and to cry. I stroked the kitten and set her down, and she sat sedately beside me, washing her shoulder. “Oh poor little lady,” I said. I don’t know who I meant. The kitten, or Lady Tazeu, or myself.

He had said to take my time thinking about his proposal, all the time I wanted. But I had not really thought about it at all when, the next day but one, there he was, on foot, waiting for me as I came out of the school. “Would you like to walk on the levee?” he said.

I looked around.

“There they are,” he said, indicating his cold-eyed bodyguards. “Everywhere I am, they are, three to five meters away. Walking with me is dull, but safe. My virtue is guaranteed.”

We walked down through the streets to the levee and up onto it in the long early evening light, warm and pink-gold, smelling of river and mud and reeds. The two women with guns walked along just about four meters behind us.

“If you do go to the University,” he said after a long silence, “I’ll be there constantly.”

“I haven’t yet—” I stammered.

“If you stay here, I’ll be here constantly,” he said. “That is, if it’s all right with you.”

I said nothing. He looked at me without turning his head. I said without intending to, “I like it that I can see where you’re looking.”

“I like it that I can’t see where you’re looking,” he said, looking directly at me.

We walked on. A heron rose up out of a reed islet and its great wings beat over the water, away. We were walking south, downriver. All the western sky was full of light as the sun went down behind the city in smoke and haze.

“Rakam, I would like to know where you came from, what your life on Werel was,” he said very softly.

I drew a long breath. “It’s all gone,” I said. “Past.”

“We are our past. Though not only that. I want to know you. Forgive me. I want very much to know you.”

After a while I said, “I want to tell you. But it’s so bad. It’s so ugly. Here, now, it’s beautiful. I don’t want to lose it.”

“Whatever you tell me I will hold valuable,” he said, in his quiet voice that went to my heart. So I told him what I could about Shomeke compound, and then hurried on through the rest of my story. Sometimes he asked a question. Mostly he listened. At some time in my telling he had taken my arm, I scarcely noticing at the time. When he let me go, thinking some movement I made meant I wanted to be released, I missed that light touch. His hand was cool. I could feel it on my forearm after it was gone.

“Mr. Yehedarhed,” said a voice behind us: one of the bodyguards. The sun was down, the sky flushed with gold and red. “Better head back?”

“Yes,” he said, “thanks.” As we turned I took his arm. I felt him catch his breath.

I had not desired a man or a woman—this is the truth—since Shomeke. I had loved people, and I had touched them with love, but never with desire. My gate was locked.

Now it was open. Now I was so weak that at the touch of his hand I could scarcely walk on.

I said, “It’s a good thing walking with you is so safe.”

I hardly knew what I meant. I was thirty years old but I was like a young girl. I had never been that girl.

He said nothing. We walked along in silence between the river and the city in a glory of failing light.

“Will you come home with me, Rakam?” he said.

Now I said nothing.

“They don’t come in with us,” he said, very low, in my ear, so that I felt his breath.

“Don’t make me laugh!” I said, and began crying. I wept all the way back along the levee. I sobbed and thought the sobs were ceasing and then sobbed again. I cried for all my sorrows, all my shames. I cried because they were with me now and always would be. I cried because the gate was open and I could go through at last, go into the country on the other side, but I was afraid to.

When we got into the car, up near my school, he took me in his arms and simply held me, silent. The two women in the front seat never looked round.

We went into his house, which I had seen once before, an old mansion of some owner of the Corporation days. He thanked the guards and shut the door. “Dinner,” he said. “The cook’s out. I meant to take you to a restaurant. I forgot.” He led me to the kitchen, where we found cold rice and salad and wine. After we ate he looked at me across the kitchen table and looked down again. His hesitance made me hold still and say nothing. After a long time he said, “Oh, Rakam! will you let me make love to you?”

“I want to make love to you,” I said. “I never did. I never made love to anyone.”

He got up smiling and took my hand. We went upstairs together, passing what had been the entrance to the men’s side of the house. “I live in the beza,” he said, “in the harem. I live on the woman’s side. I like the view.”

We came to his room. There he stood still, looking at me, then looked away. I was so frightened, so bewildered, I thought I could not go to him or touch him. I made myself go to him. I raised my hand and touched his face, the scars by his eye and on his mouth, and put my arms around him. Then I could hold him to me, closer and closer.

Some time in that night as we lay drowsing entangled I said, “Did you sleep with Dr. Yeron?”

I felt Havzhiva laugh, a slow, soft laugh in his belly, which was against my belly. “No,” he said. “No one on Yeowe but you. And you, no one on Yeowe but me. We were virgins, Yeowan virgins. . . . Rakam, araha. . . .” He rested his head in the hollow of my shoulder and said something else in a foreign language and fell asleep. He slept deeply, silently.

Later that year I came up north to the University, where I was taken on the faculty as a teacher of history. By their standards at that time, I was competent. I have worked there ever since, teaching and as editor of the press.

As he had said he would be, Havzhiva was there constantly, or almost.

The Amendments to the Constitution were voted, by secret ballot, mostly, in the Yeowan Year of Liberty 18. Of the events that led to this, and what has followed, you may read in the new three-volume History of Yeowe from the University Press. I have told the story I was asked to tell. I have closed it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two people. What is one man’s and one woman’s love and desire, against the history of two worlds, the great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have lived and will die free.

FAULT LINES

Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress is the author of three fantasy novels, four SF novels, two collections of short stories, and a book on writing fiction, Beginnings, Middles, and Ends. In addition, Ms. Kress is the monthly fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest magazine. Her next novel, Oaths and Miracles, will be out from Forge in the fall.

“If the truth shall kill them, let them die.”

—Immanuel Kant

The first day of school, we had assault-with-intent in Ms. Kelly’s room. I was in my room next door, 136, laying down the law to 7C math. The usual first-day bullshit: turn in homework every day, take your assigned seat as soon as you walk in, don’t bring a weapon or an abusive attitude into my classroom or you’ll wish you’d never been born. The kids would ignore the first, do the others—for me anyway. Apparently not for Jenny Kelly.

“Mr. Shaunessy! Mr. Shaunessy! Come quick, they throwing chairs next door! The new teacher crying!” A pretty, tiny girl I recognized from last year: Lateesha Jefferson. Her round face glowed with excitement and satisfaction. A riot! Already! On the very first day!

I looked over my class slowly, penetratingly, letting my gaze linger on each upturned face. I took my time about it. Most kids dropped their eyes. Next door, something heavy hit the wall. I lowered my voice, so everybody had to strain to hear me.

“Nobody move while I’m gone. You all got that?”

Some heads nodded. Some kids stared back, uncertain but cool. A few boys smirked and I brought my unsmiling gaze to their faces until they stopped. Shouts filtered through the wall.

“Okay, Lateesha, tell Ms. Kelly I’m coming.” She took off like a shot, grinning, Paul Revere in purple leggings and silver shoes.

I limped to the door and turned for a last look. My students all sat quietly, watching me. I saw Pedro Valesquez and Steven Cheung surreptiously scanning my jacket for the bulge of a service revolver that of course wasn’t there. My reputation had become so inflated it rivaled the NYC budget. In the hall Lateesha screamed in a voice that could have deafened rock stars, “Mr. Shaunessy coming! You ho’s better stop!”

In 134, two eighth-grade girls grappled in the middle of the floor. For a wonder, neither seemed to be armed, not even with keys. One girl’s nose streamed blood. The other’s blouse was torn. Both screamed incoherently, nonstop, like stuck sirens. Kids raced around the room. A chair had apparently been hurled at the chalkboard, or at somebody once standing in front of the chalkboard; chair and board had cracked. Jenny Kelly yelled and waved her arms. Lateesha was wrong; Ms. Kelly wasn’t crying. But neither was she helping things a hell of a lot. A few kids on the perimeter of the chaos saw me and fell silent, curious to see what came next.

And then I saw Jeff Connors, leaning against the window wall, arms folded across his chest, and his expression as he watched the fighting girls told me everything I needed to know.

I took a huge breath, letting it fill my lungs. I bellowed at top volume, and with no facial expression whatsoever, “Freeze! Now!”

And everybody did.

The kids who didn’t know me looked instantly for the gun and the back-up. The kids who did know me grinned, stifled it, and nodded slightly. The two girls stopped pounding each other to twist toward the noise—my bellow had shivered the hanging fluorescents—which was time enough for me to limp across the floor, grab the girl on top, and haul her to her feet. She twisted to swing on me, thought better of it, and stood there, panting.

The girl on the floor whooped, leaped up, and tensed to slug the girl I held. But then she stopped. She didn’t know me, but the scene had alerted her: nobody yelling anymore, the other wildcat quiet in my grip, nobody racing around the room. She glanced around, puzzled.

Jeff still leaned against the wall.

They expected me to say something. I said nothing, just stood there, impassive. Seconds dragged by. Fifteen, thirty, forty-five. To adults, that’s a long time. To kids, it’s forever. The adrenaline ebbs away.

A girl in the back row sat down at her desk.

Another followed.

Pretty soon they were all sitting down, quiet, not exactly intimidated but interested. This was different, and different was cool. Only the two girls were left, and Jeff Connors leaning on the window, and a small Chinese kid whose chair was probably the one hurled at the chalkboard. I saw that the crack ran right through words printed neatly in green marker:

After a minute, the Chinese kid without a chair sat on his desk.

Still I said nothing. Another minute dragged past. The kids were uneasy now. Lateesha said helpfully, “Them girls supposed to go to the nurse, Mr. Shaunessy. Each one by they own self.”

I kept my grip on the girl with the torn blouse. The other girl, her nose gushing blood, suddenly started to cry. She jammed her fist against her mouth and ran out of the room.

I looked at each face, one at a time.

Eventually I released my grip on the second girl and nodded at Lateesha. “You go with her to the nurse.”

Lateesha jumped up eagerly, a girl with a mission, the only one I’d spoken to. “You come on, honey,” she said, and led away the second girl, clucking at her under her breath.

Now they were all eager for the limelight. Rosaria said quickly, “They fighting over Jeff, Mr. Shaunessy.”

“No they ain’t,” said a big, muscled boy in the second row. He was scowling. “They fighting cause Jonelle, she dissed Lisa.”

“No, they—”

Everybody had a version. They all jumped in, intellectuals with theories, arguing with each other until they saw I wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t trying to sort through it, wasn’t going to participate. One by one, they fell silent again, curious.

Finally Jeff himself spoke. He looked at me with his absolutely open, earnest, guileless expression and said, “It was them suicides, Mr. Shaunessy.”

The rest of the class looked slightly confused, but willing to go along with this. They knew Jeff. But now Ms. Kelly, excluded for five full minutes from her own classroom, jumped in. She was angry. “What suicides? What are you talking about, uh . . .”

Jeff didn’t deign to supply his name. She was supposed to know it. He spoke directly to me. “Them old people. The ones who killed theirselves in that hospital this morning. And last week. In the newspaper.”

I didn’t react. Just waited.

“You know, Mr. Shaunessy,” Jeff went on, in that same open, confiding tone. “Them old people shooting and hanging and pushing theirselves out of windows. At their age. In their sixties and seventies and eighties.” He shook his head regretfully.

The other kids were nodding now, although I’d bet my pension none of them ever read anything in any newspaper.

“It just ain’t no example to us,” Jeff said regretfully. “If even the people who are getting three good meals a day and got people waiting on them and don’t have to work or struggle no more with the man—if they give up, how we supposed to think there’s anything in this here life for us?”

He leaned back against the window and grinned at me: triumphant, regretful, pleading, an inheritor of a world he hadn’t made. His classmates glanced at each other sideways, glanced at me, and stopped grinning.

“A tragedy, that’s what it is,” Jeff said, shaking his head. “A tragedy. All them old people, deciding a whole life just don’t make it worth it to stick to the rules. How we supposed to learn to behave?”

“You have to get control of Jeff Connors,” I told Jenny Kelly at lunch in the faculty room. This was an exposed-pipes, flaking-plaster oasis in the basement of Benjamin Franklin Junior High. Teachers sat jammed together on folding metal chairs around brown formica tables, drinking coffee and eating out of paper bags. Ms. Kelly had plopped down next to me and practically demanded advice. “That’s actually not as hard as it might look. Jeff’s a hustler, an operator, and the others follow him. But he’s not uncontrollable.”

“Easy for you to say,” she retorted, surprising me. “They look at you and see the macho ex-cop who weighs what? Two-thirty? Who took out three criminals before you got shot, and has strong juice at Juvenile Hall. They look at me and see a five-foot-three, one-hundred-twenty-pound nobody they can all push around. Including Jeff.”

“So don’t let him,” I said, wondering how she’d heard all the stories about me so fast. She’d only moved into the district four days ago.

She took a healthy bite of her cheese sandwich. Although she’d spent the first half of the lunch period in the ladies’ room, I didn’t see any tear marks. Maybe she fixed her makeup to cover tear stains. Margie used to do that. Up close Jenny Kelly looked older than I’d thought at first: twenty-eight, maybe thirty. Her looks weren’t going to make it any easier to control a roomful of thirteen-year-old boys. She pushed her short blond hair off her face and looked directly at me.

“Do you really carry a gun?”

“Of course not. Board of Education regs forbid any weapons by anybody on school property. You know that.”

“The kids think you carry.”

I shrugged.

“And you don’t tell them otherwise.”

I shrugged again.

“Okay, I can’t do that either,” she said. “But I’m not going to fail at this, Gene. I’m just not. You’re a big success here, everybody says so. So tell me what I can do to keep enough control of my classes that I have a remote chance of actually teaching anybody anything.”

I studied her, and revised my first opinion, which was that she’d be gone by the end of September. No tear stains, not fresh out of college, able to keep eating under stress. The verbal determination I discounted; I’d heard a lot of verbal determination from rookies when I was on the Force, and most of it melted away three months out of Police Academy. Even sooner in the City School District.

“You need to do two things,” I said. “First, recognize that these kids can’t do without connection to other human beings. Not for five minutes, not for one minute. They’re starved for it. And to most of them, ‘connection’ means arguing, fighting, struggling, even abuse. It’s what they’re used to, and it’s what they’ll naturally create, because it feels better to them than existing alone in a social vacuum for even a minute. To compete with that, to get them to disengage from each other long enough to listen to you, you have to give them an equally strong connection to you. It doesn’t have to be intimidation, or some bullshit fantasy about going up against the law. You can find your own way. But unless you’re a strong presence—very strong, very distinctive—of one kind or another, they’re going to ignore you and go back to connecting with each other.”

“Connection,” she said, thinking about it. “What about connecting to the material? English literature has some pretty exciting stuff in it, you know.”

“I’ll take your word for it. But no books are exciting to most of these kids. Not initially. They can only connect to the material through a person. They’re that starved.”

She took another bite of sandwich. “And the second thing?”

“I already told you. Get control of Jeff Connors. Immediately.”

“Who is he? And what was all that bullshit about old people killing themselves?”

I said, “Didn’t you see it on the news?”

“Of course I did. The police are investigating, aren’t they? But what did it have to do with my classroom?”

“Nothing. It was a diversionary tactic. A cover-up.”

“Of what?”

“Could be a lot of things. Jeff will use whatever he hears to confuse and mislead, and he hears everything. He’s bright, unmotivated, a natural leader, and—unbelievably—not a gang member. You saw him—no big gold, no beeper. His police record is clean. So far, anyway.”

Jenny said, “You worked with him a little last year.”

“No, I didn’t work with him. I controlled him in class, was all.” She’d been asking about me.

“So if you didn’t really connect with him, how do I?”

“I can’t tell you that,” I said, and we ate in silence for a few minutes. It didn’t feel strained. She looked thoughtful, turning over what I’d told her. I wondered suddenly whether she’d have made a good cop. Her ears were small, I noticed, and pink, with tiny gold earrings in the shape of little shells.

She caught me looking, and smiled, and glanced at my left hand.

So whoever she’d asked about me hadn’t told her everything. I gulped my last bite of sandwich, nodded, and went back to my room before 7H came thundering up the stairs, their day almost over, one more crazy period where Mr. Shaunessy actually expected them to pay attention to some weird math instead of their natural, intense, contentious absorption in each other.

Two more elderly people committed suicide, at the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home on Amsterdam Avenue.

I caught it on the news, while correcting 7H’s first-day quiz to find out how much math they remembered from last year. They didn’t remember squat. My shattered knee was propped up on the hassock beside the bones and burial tray of a Hungry Man Extra-Crispy Fried Chicken.

“. . . identified as Giacomo della Francesca, seventy-eight, and Lydia Smith, eighty. The two occupied rooms on the same floor, according to nursing home staff, and both had been in fairly good spirits. Mrs. Smith, a widow, threw herself from the roof of the eight-story building. Mr. della Francesca, who was found dead in his room, had apparently stabbed himself. The suicides follow very closely on similar deaths this morning at the Beth Israel Retirement Home on West End Avenue. However, Captain Michael Doyle, NYPD, warned against premature speculation about—”

I shifted my knee. This Captain Doyle must be getting nervous; this was the third pair of self-inflicted fatalities in nursing homes within ten days. Old people weren’t usually susceptible to copy-cat suicides. Pretty soon the Daily News or the Post would decide that there was actually some nut running around Manhattan knocking off the elderly. Or that there was a medical conspiracy backed by Middle East terrorists and extraterrestrials. Whatever the tabloids chose, the NYPD would end up taking the blame.

Suddenly I knew, out of nowhere, that Margie was worse.

I get these flashes like that, out of nowhere, and I hate it. I never used to. I used to know things the way normal people know things, by seeing them or reading them or hearing them or reasoning them through. Ways that made sense. Now, for the last year, I get these flashes of knowing things some other way, thoughts just turning up in my mind, and the intuitions are mostly right. Mostly right, and nearly always bad.

This wasn’t one of my nights to go to the hospital. But I flicked off the TV, limped to the trash to throw away my dinner tray, and picked up the cane I use when my leg has been under too much physical stress. The phone rang. I paused to listen to the answering machine, just in case it was Libby calling from Cornell to tell me about her first week of classes.

“Gene, this is Vince Romano.” Pause. “Bucky.” Pause. “I know it’s been a long time.”

I sat down slowly on the hassock.

“Listen, I was sorry to hear about Margie. I was going to . . . you were . . . it wasn’t. . . .” Despite myself, I had to grin. People didn’t change. Bucky Romano never could locate a complete verb.

He finished floundering. “. . . to say how sorry I am. But that’s not why I’m calling.” Long pause. “I need to talk to you. It’s important. Very important.” Pause. “It’s not about Father Healey again, or any of that old . . . something else entirely.” Pause. “Very important, Gene. I can’t . . . it isn’t . . . you won’t . . .” Pause. Then his voice changed, became stronger. “I can’t do this alone, Gene.”

Bucky had never been able to do anything alone. Not when we were six, not when we were eleven, not when we were seventeen, not when he was twenty-three and it wasn’t any longer me but Father Healey who decided what he did. Not when he was twenty-seven and it was me again deciding for him, more unhappy about that than I’d ever been about anything in my life until Margie’s accident.

Bucky recited his phone number, but he didn’t hang up. I could hear him breathing. Suddenly I could almost see him, somewhere out there, sitting with the receiver pressed so close to his mouth that it would look like he was trying to swallow it. Hoping against hope that I might pick up the phone after all. Worrying the depths of his skinny frantic soul for what words he could say to make me do this.

“Gene . . . it’s about . . . I shouldn’t say this, but after all you’re a . . . were a . . . it’s about those elderly deaths.” Pause. “I work at Kelvin Pharmaceutical now.” And then the click.

What the hell could anybody make of any of that?

I limped to the elevator and caught a cab to St. Clare’s Hospital.

Margie was worse, although the only way I could tell was that there was one more tube hooked to her than there’d been last night. She lay in bed in the same position she’d lain in for eighteen months and seven days: curled head to knees, splinter-thin arms bent at the elbows. She weighed ninety-nine pounds. Gastrostomy and catheter tubes ran into her, and now an IV drip on a pole as well. Her beautiful brown hair, worn away a bit at the back of her head from constant contact with the pillow, was dull. Its sheen, like her life, had faded deep inside its brittle shafts, unrecoverable.

“Hello, Margie. I’m back.”

I eased myself into the chair, leg straight out in front of me.

“Libby hasn’t called yet. First week of classes, schedule to straighten out, old friends to see—you know how it is.” Margie always had. I could see her and Libby shopping the week before Libby’s freshman year, laughing over the Gap bags, quarreling over the price of something I’d buy either of them now, no matter what it cost. Anything.

“It’s pretty cool out for September, sweetheart. But the leaves haven’t changed yet. I walked across the Park just yesterday—all still green. Composing myself for today. Which wasn’t too bad. It’s going to be a good school year, I think.”

Have a great year! Margie always said to me on the first day of school, as if the whole year would be compressed in that first six hours and twenty minutes. For three years she’d said it, the three years since I’d been retired from the Force and limped into a career as a junior-high teacher. I remembered her standing at the door, half-dressed for her secretarial job at Time-Warner, her silk blouse stretched across those generous breasts, the slip showing underneath. Have a great day! Have a great five minutes!

“Last-period 7H looks like a zoo, Margie. But when doesn’t last period look like a zoo? They’re revved up like Ferraris by then. But both algebra classes look good, and there’s a girl in 7A whose transcript is incredible. I mean, we’re talking future Westinghouse Talent winner here.”

Talk to her, the doctor had said. We don’t know what coma patients can and cannot hear. That had been a year and a half ago. Nobody ever said it to me now. But I couldn’t stop.

“There’s a new sacrificial lamb in the room next to mine, eighth-grade English. She had a cat fight in there today. But I don’t know, she might have more grit than she looks. And guess who called. Bucky Romano. After all this time. Thirteen years. He wants me to give him a call. I’m not sure yet.”

Her teeth gapped and stuck out. The anti-seizure medication in her gastrostomy bag made the gum tissue grow too much. It displaced her teeth.

“I finally bought curtains for the kitchen. Like Libby nagged me to. Although they’ll probably have to wait until she comes home at Thanksgiving to get hung. Yellow. You’d like them.”

Margie had never seen this kitchen. I could see her in the dining room of the house I’d sold, up on a chair hanging drapes, rubbing at a dirty spot on the window. . . .

“Gene?”

“Hi, Susan.” The shift nurse looked as tired as I’d ever seen her. “What’s this new tube in Margie?”

“Antibiotics. She was having a little trouble breathing, and an X-ray showed a slight pneumonia. It’ll clear right up on medication. Gene, you have a phone call.”

Something clutched in my chest. Libby. Ever since that ’93 Lincoln had torn through a light on Lexington while Margie crossed with a bag of groceries, any phone call in an unexpected place does that to me. I limped to the nurses’ station.

“Gene? This is Vince. Romano. Bucky.”

“Bucky.”

“I’m sorry to bother you at . . . I was so sorry to hear about Margie, I left a message on your machine but maybe you haven’t been home to . . . listen, I need to see you, Gene. It’s important. Please.”

“It’s late, Bucky. I have to teach tomorrow. I teach now, at—”

“Please. You’ll know why when I see you. I have to see you.”

I closed my eyes. “Look, I’m pretty tired. Maybe another time.”

“Please, Gene. Just for a few minutes. I can be at your place in fifteen minutes!”

Bucky had never minded begging. I remembered that, now. Suddenly I didn’t want him to see where I lived, how I lived, without Margie. What I really wanted was to tell him “no.” But I couldn’t. I never had, not our whole lives, and I couldn’t now—why not? I didn’t know.

“All right, Bucky. A few minutes. I’ll meet you in the lobby here at St. Clare’s.”

“Fifteen minutes. God, thanks, Gene. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it, I need to—”

“Okay.”

“See you soon.”

He didn’t mind begging, and he made people help him. Even Father Healey had found out that. Coming in to Bucky’s life, and going out.

The lobby of St. Clare’s never changed. Same scuffed green floor, slashed gray vinyl couches mended with wide tape, information-desk attendant who looked like he could have been a bouncer at Madison Square Garden. Maybe he had. Tired people yelled and whispered in Spanish, Greek, Korean, Chinese. Statues of the Madonna and St. Clare and the crucified Christ beamed a serenity as alien here as money.

Bucky and I grew up in next-door apartments in a neighborhood like this one, a few blocks from Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. That’s how we defined our location: “two doors down from the crying Broad.” We made our First Communion together, and our Confirmation, and Bucky was best man when I married Marge. But by that time he’d entered the seminary, and any irreverence about Our Lady had disappeared, along with all other traces of humor, humility, or humanity. Or so I thought then. Maybe I wasn’t wrong. Even though he always made straight A’s in class, Bucky-as-priest-in-training was the same as Bucky-as-shortstop or Bucky-as-third-clarinet or Bucky-as-altar-boy: intense, committed, short-sightedly wrong.

He’d catch a high pop and drop it. He’d know “Claire de Lune” perfectly, and be half a beat behind. Teeth sticking out, skinny face furrowed in concentration, he’d bend over the altar rail and become so enraptured by whatever he saw there that he’d forget to make the response. We boys would nudge each other and grin, and later howl at him in the parking lot.

But his decision to leave the priesthood wasn’t a howler. It wasn’t even a real decision. He vacillated for months, growing thinner and more stuttery, and finally he’d taken a bottle of pills and a half pint of vodka.

Father Healey and I found him, and had his stomach pumped, and Father Healey tried to talk him back into the seminary and the saving grace of God. From his hospital bed Bucky had called me, stuttering in his panic, to come get him and take him home. He was terrified. Not of the hospital—of Father Healey.

And I had, coming straight from duty, secure in my shield and gun and Margie’s love and my beautiful young daughter and my contempt for the weakling who needed a lapsed-Catholic cop to help him face an old priest in a worn-out religion. God, I’d been smug.

“Gene?” Bucky said. “Gene Shaunessy?”

I looked up at the faded lobby of St. Clare’s.

“Hello, Bucky.”

“God, you look . . . I can’t . . . you haven’t changed a bit!”

Then he started to cry.

I got him to a Greek place around the corner on Ninth. The dinner trade was mostly over and we sat at a table in the shadows, next to a dirty side window with a view of a brick alley, Bucky with his back to the door. Not that he cared if anybody saw him crying. I cared. I ordered two beers.

“Okay, what is it?”

He blew his nose and nodded gratefully. “Same old Gene. You always just . . . never any . . .”

“Bucky. What the fuck is wrong?”

He said, unexpectedly, “You hate this.”

Over his shoulder, I eyed the door. Starting eighteen months ago, I’d had enough tears and drama to last me the rest of my life, although I wasn’t going to tell Bucky that. If he didn’t get it over with. . . .

“I work at Kelvin Pharmaceuticals,” Bucky said, suddenly calmer. “After I left seminary, after Father Healey . . . you remember . . .”

“Go on,” I said, more harshly than I’d intended. Father Healey and I had screamed at each other outside Bucky’s door at St. Vincent’s, while Bucky’s stomach was being pumped. I’d said things I didn’t want to remember.

“I went back to school. Took a B.S. in chemistry. Then a Ph.D. You and I, about that time of . . . I wanted to call you after you were shot but . . . I could have tried harder to find you earlier, I know . . . anyway. I went to work for Kelvin, in the research department. Liked it. I met Tommy. We live together.”

He’d never said. But, then, he’d never had to. And there hadn’t been very much saying anyway, not back then, and certainly not at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows.

“I liked the work at Kelvin. Like it. Liked it.” He took a deep breath. “I worked on Camineur. You take it, don’t you, Gene?”

I almost jumped out of my skin. “How’d you know that?”

He grinned. “Not by any medical record hacking. Calm down, it isn’t . . . people can’t tell. I just guessed, from the profile.”

He meant my profile. Camineur is something called a neurotransmitter uptake-regulator. Unlike Prozac and the other antidepressants that were its ancestors, it fiddles not just with serotonin levels but also with norepinephrine and dopamine and a half dozen other brain chemicals. It was prescribed for me after Marge’s accident. Non-addictive, no bad side effects, no dulling of the mind. Without it, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t stop wanting to kill somebody every time I walked into St. Clare’s.

I had found myself in a gun shop on Avenue D, trigger-testing a nine-millimeter, which felt so light in my hand it floated. When I looked at the thoughts in my head, I went to see Margie’s doctor.

Bucky said, quietly for once, “Camineur was designed to prevent violent ideation in people with strong but normally controlled violent impulses, whose control has broken down under severe life stress. It’s often prescribed for cops. Also military careerists and doctors. Types with compensated paranoia restrained by strong moral strictures. Nobody told you that the Camineur generation of mood inhibitors was that specific?” If they did, I hadn’t been listening. I hadn’t been listening to much in those months. But I heard Bucky now. His hesitations disappeared when he talked about his work.

“It’s a good drug, Gene. You don’t have to feel . . . there isn’t anything shameful about taking it. It just restores the brain chemistry to whatever it was before the trauma.”

I scowled, and gestured for two more beers.

“All right. I didn’t mean to . . . There’s been several generations of neural pharmaceuticals since then. And that’s why I’m talking to you.” I sipped my second beer, and watched Bucky drain his.

“Three years ago we . . . there was a breakthrough in neuropharm research, really startling stuff, I won’t go into the . . . we started a whole new line of development. I was on the team. Am. On the team.”

I waited. Sudden raindrops, large and sparse, struck the dirty window. “Since Camineur, we’ve narrowed down the effects of neuropharms spectacularly. I don’t know how much you know about this, but the big neurological discovery in the last five years is that repeated intense emotion doesn’t just alter the synaptic pathways in the brain. It actually changes your brain structure from the cellular level up. With any intense experience, new structures start to be built, and if the experience is repeated, they get reinforced. The physical changes can make you, say, more open to risk-taking, or calmer in the face of stress. Or the physical structures that get built can make it hard or even impossible to function normally, even if you’re trying with all your will. In other words, your life literally makes you crazy.”

He smiled. I said nothing.

“What we’ve learned is how to affect only those pathways created by depression, only those created by fear, only those created by narcissistic rage . . . we don’t touch your memories. They’re there. You can see them, in your mind, like billboards. But now you drive past them, not through them. In an emotional sense.”

Bucky peered at me. I said, not gently, “So what pills do you take to drive past your memories?”

He laughed. “I don’t.” I stayed impassive but he said hastily anyway, “Not that people who do are . . . it isn’t a sign of weakness to take neuropharms, Gene. Or a sign of strength not to. I just . . . it isn’t . . . I was waiting, was all. I was waiting.”

“For what? Your prince to come?” I was still angry.

He said simply, “Yes.”

Slowly I lowered my beer. But Bucky returned to his background intelligence.

“This drug my team is working on now . . . the next step was to go beyond just closing down negative pathways. Take, as just one example, serotonin. Some researcher said . . . there’s one theory that serotonin, especially, is like cops. Having enough of it in your cerebral chemistry keep riots and looting and assault in the brain from getting out of control. But just holding down crime doesn’t, all by itself, create prosperity or happiness. Or joy. For that, you need a new class of neuropharms that create positive pathways. Or at least strengthen those that are already there.”

“Cocaine,” I said. “Speed. Gin and tonic.”

“No, no. Not a rush of power. Not a temporary high. Not temporary at all, and not isolating. The neural pathways that make people feel . . . the ones that let you . . .” He leaned toward me, elbows on the table. “Weren’t there moments, Gene, when you felt so close to Margie it was like you crawled inside her skin for a minute? Like you were Margie?”

I looked at the window. Raindrops slid slowly down the dirty glass, streaking it dirtier. In the alley, a homeless prowled the garbage cans. “What’s this got to do with the elderly suicides? If you have a point to make, make it.”

“They weren’t suicides. They were murders.”

“Murders? Some psycho knocking off old people? What makes you think so?”

“Not some psycho. And I don’t think so. I know.”

“How?”

“All eight elderlies were taking J-24. That’s the Kelvin code name for the neuropharm that ends situational isolation. It was a clinical trial.”

I studied Bucky, whose eyes burned with Bucky light: intense, pleading, determined, inept. And something else, something that hadn’t been there in the old days. “Bucky, that makes no sense. The NYPD isn’t perfect, God knows, but they can tell the difference between suicide and murder. And anyway, the suicide rate rises naturally among old people, they get depressed—” I stopped. He had to already know this.

“That’s just it!” Bucky cried, and an old Greek couple at a table halfway across the room turned to stare at him. He lowered his voice. “The elderly in the clinical trial weren’t depressed. They were very carefully screened for it. No psychological, chemical, or social markers for depression. These were the . . . when you see old people in travel ads, doing things, full of life and health, playing tennis and dancing by candlelight . . . the team psychologists looked for our clinical subjects very carefully. None of them was depressed!”

“So maybe your pill made them depressed. Enough to kill themselves.”

“No! No! J-24 couldn’t . . . there wasn’t any . . . it didn’t make them depressed. I saw it.” He hesitated. “And besides . . .”

“Besides what?”

He looked out at the alley. A waiter pushed a trolley of dirty dishes past our table. When Bucky spoke again, his voice sounded odd.

“I gave five intense years to J-24 and the research that led to it, Gene. Days, evenings, weekends—eighty hours a week in the lab. Every minute until I met Tommy, and maybe too much time even after that. I know everything that the Kelvin team leaders know, everything that can be known about that drug’s projected interaction with existing neurotransmitters. J-24 was my life.”

As the Church had once been. Bucky couldn’t do anything by halves. I wondered just what his position on “the team” had actually been.

He said, “We designed J-24 to combat the isolation that even normal, healthy people feel with age. You get old. Your friends die. Your mate dies. Your children live in another state, with lives of their own. All the connections you built up over decades are gone, and in healthy people, those connections created very thick, specific, strong neural structures. Any new friends you make in a nursing home or retirement community—there just aren’t the years left to duplicate the strength of those neural pathways. Even when outgoing, undepressed, risk-taking elderlies try.”

I didn’t say anything.

“J-24 was specific to the neurochemistry of connection. You took it in the presence of someone else, and it opened the two of you up to each other, made it possible to genuinely—genuinely, at the permanent chemical level—imprint on each other.”

“You created an aphrodisiac for geezers?”

“No,” he said, irritated. “Sex had nothing to do with it. Those impulses originate in the limbic system. This was . . . emotional bonding. Of the most intense, long-term type. Don’t tell me all you ever felt for Margie was sex!”

After a minute he said, “I’m sorry.”

“Finish your story.”

“It is finished. We gave the drug to four sets of volunteers, all people who had long-term terminal diseases but weren’t depressed, people who were willing to take risks in order to enhance the quality of their own perceptions in the time left. I was there observing when they took it. They bonded like baby ducks imprinting on the first moving objects they see. No, not like that. More like . . . like . . .” He looked over my shoulder, at the wall, and his eyes filled with water. I glanced around to make sure nobody noticed.

“Giacomo della Francesca and Lydia Smith took J-24 together almost a month ago. They were transformed by this incredible joy in each other. In knowing each other. Not each other’s memories, but each other’s . . . souls. They talked, and held hands, and you could just feel that they were completely open to each other, without all the psychological defenses we use to keep ourselves walled off. They knew each other. They almost were each other.”

I was embarrassed by the look on his face. “But they didn’t know each other like that, Bucky. It was just an illusion.”

“No. It wasn’t. Look, what happens when you connect with someone, share something intense with them?”

I didn’t want to have this conversation. But Bucky didn’t really need me to answer; he rolled on all by himself, unstoppable.

“What happens when you connect is that you exhibit greater risk taking, with fewer inhibitions. You exhibit greater empathy, greater attention, greater receptivity to what is being said, greater pleasure. And all of those responses are neurochemical, which in turn create, reinforce, or diminish physical structures in the brain. J-24 just reverses the process. Instead of the experience causing the neurochemical response, J-24 supplies the physical changes that create the experience. And that’s not all. The drug boosts the rate of structural change, so that every touch, every word exchanged, every emotional response, reinforces neural pathways one or two hundred times as much as a normal life encounter.”

I wasn’t sure how much of this I believed. “And so you say you gave it to four old couples . . . does it only work on men and women?”

A strange look passed swiftly over his face: secretive, almost pained.

I remembered Tommy. “That’s all who have tried it so far. Can you . . . have you ever thought about what it would be like to be really merged, to know him, to be him—think of it, Gene! I could—”

“I don’t want to hear about that,” I said harshly. Libby would hate that answer. My liberal, tolerant daughter. But I’d been a cop. Lingering homophobia went with the territory, even if I wasn’t exactly proud of it. Whatever Bucky’s fantasies were about him and Tommy, I didn’t want to know.

Bucky didn’t look offended. “All right. But just imagine—an end to the terrible isolation that we live in our whole tiny lives. . . .” He looked at the raindrops sliding down the window.

“And you think somebody murdered those elderly for that? Who? Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bucky. Think. This doesn’t make any sense. A drug company creates a . . . what did you call it? A neuropharm. They get it into clinical trials, under FDA supervision—”

“No,” Bucky said.

I stared at him.

“It would have taken years. Maybe decades. It’s too radical a departure. So Kelvin—”

“You knew there was no approval.”

“Yes. But I thought . . . I never thought . . .” He looked at me, and suddenly I had another one of those unlogical flashes, and I saw there was more wrong here even than Bucky was telling me. He believed that he’d participated, in whatever small way, in creating a drug that led someone to murder eight old people. Never mind if it was true—Bucky believed it. He believed this same company was covering its collective ass by calling the deaths depressive suicides, when they could not have been suicides. And yet Bucky sat in front of me without chewing his nails to the knuckles, or pulling out his hair, or hating himself. Bucky, to whom guilt was the staff of life.

I’d seen him try to kill himself over leaving the Church. I’d watched him go through agonies of guilt over ignoring answering-machine messages from Father Healey. Hell, I’d watched him shake and cry because at ten years old we’d stolen three apples from a market on Columbus Avenue. Yet there he sat, disturbed but coherent. For Bucky, even serene. Believing he’d contributed to murder.

I said, “What neuropharms do you take, Bucky?”

“I told you. None.”

“None at all?”

“No.” His brown eyes were completely honest. “Gene, I want you to find out how these clinical subjects really died. You have access to NYPD records—”

“Not anymore.”

“But you know people. And cases get buried there all the time, you used to tell me that yourself, with enough money you can buy yourself an investigation unless somebody high up in the city is really out to get you. Kelvin Pharmaceuticals doesn’t have those kinds of enemies. They’re not the Mob. They’re just . . .”

“Committing murder to cover up an illegal drug trial? I don’t buy it, Bucky.”

“Then find out what really happened.”

I shot back, “What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know! But I do know this drug is a good thing! Don’t you understand, it holds out the possibility of a perfect, totally open connection with the person you love most in the world. . . . Find out what happened, Gene. It wasn’t suicide. J-24 doesn’t cause depression. I know it. And for this drug to be denied people would be . . . it would be a sin.” He said it so simply, so naturally, that I was thrown all over again. This wasn’t Bucky, as I had known him. Or maybe it was. He was still driven by sin and love.

I stood and put money on the table. “I don’t want to get involved in this, Bucky. I really don’t. But—one thing more—”

“Yeah?”

“Camineur. Can it . . . does it account for . . .” Jesus, I sounded like him. “I get these flashes of intuition about things I’ve been thinking about. Sometimes it’s stuff I didn’t know.”

He nodded. “You knew the stuff before. You just didn’t know you knew. Camineur strengthens intuitive right-brain pathways. As an effect of releasing the stranglehold of violent thoughts. You’re more distanced from compulsive thoughts of destruction, but also more likely to make connections among various non-violent perceptions. You’re just more intuitive, Gene, now that you’re less driven.”

And I’m less Gene, my unwelcome intuition said. I gazed down at Bucky, sitting there with his skinny fingers splayed on the table, an unBucky-like serenity weirdly mixed with his manic manner and his belief that he worked for a corporation that had murdered eight people. Who the hell was he?

“I don’t want to get involved in this,” I repeated.

“But you will,” Bucky said, and in his words I heard utter, unshakable faith.

Jenny Kelly said, “I set up a conference with Jeff Connors and he never showed.” It was Friday afternoon. She had deep circles around her eyes.

Raccoon eyes, we called them. They were the badge of teachers who were new, dedicated, or crazy. Who sat up until 1:00 A.M. in a frenzy of lesson planning and paper correcting, and then arrived at school at 6:30 A.M. to supervise track or meet with students or correct more papers.

“Set up another conference,” I suggested. “Sometimes by the third or fourth missed appointment, guilt drives them to show up.”

She nodded. “Okay. Meanwhile, Jeff has my class all worked up over something called the Neighborhood Safety Information Network, where they’re supposed to inform on their friends’ brothers’ drug activity, or something. It’s somehow connected to getting their Social Services checks. It’s got the kids all in an uproar . . . I sent seventeen kids to the principal in three days.”

“You might want to ease up on that, Jenny. It gives everybody—kids and administration—the idea that you can’t control your own classroom.”

“I can’t,” she said, so promptly and honestly that I had to smile. “But I will.”

“Well, good luck.”

“Listen, Gene, I’m picking the brains of everybody I can get to talk to me about this. Want to go have a cup of coffee someplace?”

“Sorry.”

“Okay.” She didn’t looked rebuffed, which was a relief. Today her earrings matched the color of her sweater. A soft blue, with lace at the neck. “Maybe another time.”

“Maybe.” It was easier than an outright no.

Crossing the parking lot to my car, I saw Jeff Connors. He slapped me a high-five. “Ms. Kelly’s looking for you, Jeff.”

“She is? Oh, yeah. Well, I can’t today. Busy.”

“So I hear. There isn’t any such thing as the Neighborhood Safety Information Network, is there?”

He eyed me carefully. “Sure there is, Mr. S.”

“Really? Well, I’m going to be at Midtown South station house this afternoon. I’ll ask about it.”

“It’s, like, kinda new. They maybe don’t know nothing about it yet.”

“Ah. Well, I’ll ask anyway. See you around, Jeff.”

“Hang loose.”

He watched my car all the way down the block, until I turned the corner.

The arrest room at Midtown South was full of cops filling out forms: fingerprint cards, On-line Booking System Arrest Worksheets, complaint reports, property invoices, requests for laboratory examinations of evidence, Arrest Documentation Checklists. The cops, most of whom had changed out of uniform, scribbled and muttered and sharpened pencils.

In the holding pen alleged criminals cursed and slept and muttered and sang. It looked like fourth-period study hall in the junior-high cafeteria.

I said, “Lieutenant Fermato?”

A scribbling cop in a Looney Tunes sweatshirt waved me toward an office without even looking up.

“Oh my God. Gene Shaunessy. Risen from the fuckin’ dead.”

“Hello, Johnny.”

“Come in. God, you look like a politician. Teaching must be the soft life.”

“Better to put on a few pounds than look like a starved rat.”

We stood there clasping hands, looking at each other, not saying the things that didn’t need saying anyway, even if we’d had the words, which we didn’t. Johnny and I had been partners for seven years. We’d gone together through foot pursuits and high-speed chases and lost files and violent domestics and bungled traps by Internal Affairs and robberies-in-progress and the grueling boredom of the street. Johnny’s divorce. My retirement. Johnny had gone into Narcotics a year before I took the hit that shattered my knee. If he’d been my partner, it might not have happened. He’d made lieutenant only a few months ago. I hadn’t seen him in a year and a half.

Suddenly I knew—or the Camineur knew—why I’d come to Midtown South to help Bucky after all. I’d already lost too many pieces of my life. Not the life I had now—the life I’d had once. My real one.

“Gene—about Marge . . .”

I held up my hand. “Don’t. I’m here about something else. Professional.”

His voice changed. “You in trouble?”

“No. A friend is.” Johnny didn’t know Bucky; they’d been separate pieces of my old life. I couldn’t picture them in the same room together for more than five minutes. “It’s about the suicides at the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home. Giacomo della Francesca and Lydia Smith.”

Johnny nodded. “What about it?”

“I’d like to see a copy of the initial crime-scene report.”

Johnny looked at me steadily. But all he said was, “Not my jurisdiction, Gene.”

I looked back. If Johnny didn’t want to get me the report, he wouldn’t. But either way, he could. Johnny’d been the best undercover cop in Manhattan, mostly because he was so good at putting together his net of criminal informers, inside favors, noncriminal spies, and unseen procedures. I didn’t believe he’d dismantled any of it just because he’d come in off the street. Not Johnny.

“Is it important?”

I said, “It’s important.”

“All right,” he said, and that was all that had to be said. I asked him instead about the Neighborhood Safety Information Network.

“We heard about that one,” Johnny said. “Pure lies, but somebody’s using it to stir up a lot of anti-cop crap as a set-up for something or other. We’re watching it.”

“Watches run down,” I said, because it was an old joke between us, and Johnny laughed. Then we talked about old times, and Libby, and his two boys, and when I left, the same cops were filling out the same forms and the same perps were still sleeping or cursing or singing, nobody looking at each other in the whole damn place.

By the next week, the elderly suicides had disappeared from the papers, which had moved on to another batch of mayhem and alleged brutality in the three-oh. Jenny Kelly had two more fights in her classroom. One I heard through the wall and broke up myself. The other Lateesha told me about in the parking lot. “That boy, Mr. Shaunessy, that Richie Tang, he call Ms. Kelly an ugly bitch! He say she be sorry for messing with him!”

“And then what?” I said, reluctantly.

Lateesha smiled. “Ms. Kelly, she yell back that Richie might act like a lost cause but he ain’t lost to her, and she be damned if anybody gonna talk to her that way. But Richie just smile and walk out. Ms. Kelly, she be gone by Thanksgiving.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Sometimes people surprise you.”

“Not me, they don’t.”

“Maybe even you, Lateesha.”

Jenny Kelly’s eyes wore permanent rings: sleeplessness, anger, smudged mascara. In the faculty room she sat hunched over her coffee, scribbling furiously with red pen on student compositions. I found myself choosing a different table.

“Hi, Gene,” Bucky’s voice said on my answering machine. “Please call if you . . . I wondered whether you found out any. . . give me a call. Please. I have a different phone number, I’ll give it to you.” Pause. “I’ve moved.”

I didn’t call him back. Something in the “I’ve moved” hinted at more pain, more complications, another chapter in Bucky’s messy internal drama. I decided to call him only if I heard something from Johnny Fermato.

Who phoned me the following Tuesday, eight days after my visit to Midtown South. “Gene. John Fermato.”

“Hey, Johnny.”

“I’m calling to follow through on our conversation last week. I’m afraid the information you requested is unavailable.”

I stood in my minuscule kitchen, listening to the traffic three stories below, listening to Johnny’s cold formality. “Unavailable?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

“You mean the file has disappeared? Been replaced by a later version? Somebody’s sitting on it?”

“I’m sorry, the information you requested isn’t available.”

“Right,” I said, without expression.

“Catch you soon.”

“Bye, Lieutenant.”

After he hung up I stood there holding the receiver, surprised at how much it hurt. It was a full five minutes before the anger came. And then it was distant, muffled. Filtered through the Camineur, so that it wouldn’t get out of hand.

Safe.

Jeff Connors showed up at school after a three-day absence, wearing a beeper, and a necklace of thick gold links.

“Jeff, he big now,” Lateesha told me, and turned away, lips pursed like the disapproving mother she would someday be.

I was patrolling the hall before the first bell when Jenny Kelly strode past me and stopped at the door to the boys’ room, which wasn’t really a door but a turning that hid the urinals and stalls from obvious view. The door itself had been removed after the fifth wastebasket fire in two days. Jeff came around the comer, saw Ms. Kelly, and stopped. I could see he was thinking about retreating again, but her voice didn’t let him. “I want to see you, Jeff. In my free period.” Her voice said he would be there.

“Okay,” Jeff said, with no hustle, and slouched off, beeper riding on his hip.

I said to her, “He knows when your free period is.”

She looked at me coolly. “Yes.”

“So you’ve gotten him to talk to you.”

“A little.” Still cool. “His mother disappeared for three days. She uses. She’s back now, but Jeff doesn’t trust her to take care of his little brother. Did you even know he had a little brother, Gene?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?” She looked like Lateesha. Disapproving mother. The raccoon eyes were etched deeper. “This boy is in trouble, and he’s one we don’t have to lose. We can still save him. You could have, last year. He admires you. But you never gave him the time of day, beyond making sure he wasn’t any trouble to you.”

“I don’t think you have the right to judge whether—”

“Don’t I? Maybe not. I’m sorry. But don’t you see, Jeff only wanted from you—”

“That’s the bell. Good luck today, Ms. Kelly.”

She stared at me, then gave me a little laugh. “Right. And where were you when the glaciers melted? Never mind.” She walked into her classroom, which diminished in noise only a fraction of a decibel.

Her earrings were little silver hoops, and her silky blouse was red.

After school I drove to the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home and pretended I was interested in finding a place for my aging mother. A woman named Karen Gennaro showed me a dining hall, bedrooms, activity rooms, a little garden deep in marigolds and asters, nursing facilities. Old people peacefully played cards, watched TV, sat by sunshiny windows. There was no sign that eighty-year-old Lydia Smith had thrown herself from the roof, or that her J-24-bonded boyfriend Giacomo della Francesca had stabbed himself to death.

“I’d like to walk around a little by myself now,” I told Ms. Gennaro. “Just sort of get the feel of the place. My mother is . . . particular.”

She hesitated. “We don’t usually allow—”

“Mom didn’t like Green Meadows because too many corridors were painted pale blue and she hates pale blue. She rejected Saint Anne’s because the other women didn’t care enough about their hairdos and so the atmosphere wasn’t self-respecting. She wouldn’t visit Havenview because there was no piano in the dining room. This is the tenth place I’ve reported on.”

She laughed. “No wonder you sound so weary. All right, just check out with me before you leave.”

I inspected the day room again, chatting idly with a man watching the weather channel. Then I wandered to the sixth floor, where Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca had lived. I chatted with an elderly man in a wheelchair, and a sixteen-year-old Catholic Youth volunteer, and a Mrs. Locurzio, who had the room on the other side of Lydia Smith’s. Nothing.

A janitor came by mopping floors, a heavy young man with watery blue eyes and a sweet, puzzled face like a bearded child.

“Excuse me—have you worked here long?”

“Four years.” He leaned on his mop, friendly and shy.

“Then you must come to know the patients pretty well.”

“Pretty well.” He smiled. “They’re nice to me.”

I listened to his careful, spaced speech, a little thick on each initial consonant. “Are all of them nice to you?”

“Some are mean. Because they’re sick and they hurt.”

“Mrs. Smith was always nice to you.”

“Oh, yes. A nice lady. She talked to me every day.” His doughy face became more puzzled. “She died.”

“Yes. She was unhappy with her life.”

He frowned. “Mrs. Smith was unhappy? But she . . . no. She was happy.” He looked at me in appeal. “She was always happy. Aren’t you her friend?”

“Yes,” I said. “I just made a mistake about her being unhappy.”

“She was always happy. With Mr. Frank. They laughed and laughed and read books.”

“Mr. della Francesca.”

“He said I could call him Mr. Frank.”

I said, “What’s your name?”

“Pete,” he said, as if I should know it.

“Oh, you’re Pete! Yes, Mrs. Smith spoke to me about you. Just before she died. She said you were nice, too.”

He beamed. “She was my friend.”

“You were sad when she died, Pete.”

“I was sad when she died.”

I said, “What exactly happened?”

His face changed. He picked up the mop, thrust it into the rolling bucket. “Nothing.”

“Nothing? But Mrs. Smith is dead.”

“I gotta go now.” He started to roll the bucket across the half-mopped floor, but I placed a firm hand on his arm. There’s a cop intuition that has nothing to do with neuropharms.

I said, “Some bad people killed Mrs. Smith.”

He looked at me, and something shifted behind his pale blue gaze. “They didn’t tell you that, I know. They said Mrs. Smith killed herself. But you know she was very happy and didn’t do that, don’t you? What did you see, Pete?”

He was scared now. Once, a long time ago, I hated myself for doing this to people like Pete. Then I got so I didn’t think about it. It didn’t bother me now, either.

“Mrs. Gennaro killed Mrs. Smith,” I said.

Shock wiped out fear. “No, she didn’t! She’s a nice lady!”

“I say Mrs. Gennaro and the doctor killed Mrs. Smith.”

“You’re crazy! You’re an asshole! Take it back!”

“Mrs. Gennaro and the doctor—”

“Mrs. Smith and Mr. Frank was all alone together when they went up to that roof!”

I said swiftly, “How do you know?”

But he was panicked now, genuinely terrified. Not of me—of what he’d said. He opened his mouth to scream. I said, “Don’t worry, Pete. I’m a cop. I work with the cops you talked to before. They just sent me to double check your story. I work with the same cops you told before.”

“With Officer Camp?”

“That’s right,” I said. “With Officer Camp.”

“Oh.” He still looked scared. “I told them already! I told them I unlocked the roof door for Mrs. Smith and Mr. Frank like they asked me to!”

“Pete—”

“I gotta go!”

“Go ahead, Pete. You did good.”

He scurried off. I left the building before he could find Karen Gennaro.

A call to an old friend at Records turned up an Officer Joseph Camphausen at Midtown South, a Ralph Campogiani in the Queens Robbery Squad, a Bruce Campinella at the two-four, and a detective second grade Joyce Campolieto in Intelligence. I guessed Campinella, but it didn’t matter which one Pete had talked to, or that I wouldn’t get another chance inside Angels of Mercy. I headed for West End Avenue.

The sun was setting. Manhattan was filled with river light. I drove up the West Side Highway with the window down, and remembered how much Margie had liked to do that, even in the winter. Real air, Gene. Chilled like good beer.

Nobody at the Beth Israel Retirement Home would talk to me about the two old people who died there, Samuel Fetterolf and Rose Kaplan. Nor would they let me wander around loose after my carefully guided tour. I went to the Chinese restaurant across the street and waited.

From every street-side window in Beth Israel I’d seen them head in here: well-dressed men and women visiting their parents and aunts and grandmothers after work. They’d stay an hour, and then they’d be too hungry to go home and cook, or maybe too demoralized to go home without a drink, a steady stream of overscheduled people dutifully keeping up connections with their old. I chose a table in the bar section, ordered, and ate slowly. It took a huge plate of moo goo gai pan and three club sodas before I heard it.

“How can you say that? She’s not senile, Brad! She knows whether her friends are suicidal or not!”

“I didn’t say she—”

“Yes, you did! You said we can’t trust her perceptions! She’s only old, not stupid!” Fierce thrust of chopsticks into her sweet and sour. She was about thirty, slim and tanned, her dark hair cut short. Preppy shirt and sweater. He wasn’t holding up as well, the paunch and bald spot well underway, the beleaguered husband look not yet turned resentful.

“Joanne, I only said—”

“You said we should just discount what Grams said and leave her there, even though she’s so scared. You always discount what she says!”

“I don’t. I just—”

“Like about that thing at Passover. What Grams wanted was completely reasonable, and you just—”

“Excuse me,” I said, before they drifted any more. The thing at Passover wouldn’t do me any good. “I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help but overhear. I have a grandmother in Beth Israel, too, and I’m a little worried about her, otherwise I wouldn’t interrupt, it’s just that . . . my grandmother is scared to stay there, too.”

They inspected me unsmilingly, saying nothing.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said desperately. “She’s never been like this.”

“I’m sorry,” Brad said stiffly, “we can’t help.”

“Oh, I understand. Strangers. I just thought . . . you said something about your grandmother being frightened . . . I’m sorry.” I got up to leave, projecting embarrassment.

“Wait a minute,” Joanne said. “What did you say your name was?”

“Aaron Sanderson.”

“Joanne, I don’t think—”

“Brad, if he has the same problem as—Mr. Sanderson, what is your grandmother afraid of? Is she usually nervous?”

“No, that’s just it,” I said, moving closer to their table. Brad frowned at me. “She’s never nervous or jittery, and never depressed. She’s fantastic, actually. But ever since those two residents died . . .”

“Well, that’s just it,” Joanne said. Brad sighed and shifted his weight. “Grams was friendly with Mrs. Kaplan, and she told me that Mrs. Kaplan would never in a million years commit suicide. She just wouldn’t.”

“Same thing my grandmother said. But I’m sure there couldn’t be actual danger in Beth Israel,” I said. Dismiss what the witness said and wait for the contradiction.

“Why not?” Joanne said. “They could be testing some new medication . . . in fact, Grams said Mrs. Kaplan had volunteered for some clinical trial. She had cancer.”

Brad said, “And so naturally she was depressed. Or maybe depression was a side effect of the drug. You read about that shit all the time. The drug company will be faced with a huge lawsuit, they’ll settle, they’ll stop giving the pills, and everybody’s grandmother is safe. That simple.”

“No, smartie.” Joanne glared at him. “It’s not that simple. Grams said she spent the afternoon with Mrs. Kaplan a week or so after she started the drug. Mrs. Kaplan was anything but depressed. She was really up, and she’d fallen in love with Mr. Fetterolf who was also in the trial, and his daughter-in-law Dottie was telling me—”

“Joanne, let’s go,” Brad said. “I don’t really feel like arguing here.”

I said, “My grandmother knew Mr. Fetterolf slightly. And she’s worried about his suicide—”

“So am I,” Joanne said. “I keep telling and telling Brad—”

“Joanne, I’m going. You do what the hell you want.”

“You can’t just—all right, all right! Everything has to be your way!” She flounced up, threw me an apologetic look, and followed her husband out.

There were four Fetterolfs in the Manhattan phone directory. Two were single initials, which meant they were probably women living alone. I chose Herman Fetterolf on West Eighty-sixth.

The apartment building was nice, with a carpeted lobby and deep comfortable sofas. I said to the doorman, “Please tell Mrs. Dottie Fetterolf that there’s a private investigator to talk to her about her father-in-law’s death. My name is Joe Carter. Ask her if she’ll come down to the lobby to talk to me.”

He gave me a startled look and conveyed the message. When Mrs. Fetterolf came down, I could see she was ready to be furious at somebody, anybody. Long skirt swishing, long vest flapping, she steamed across the lobby. “You the private investigator? Who are you working for?”

“I’m not at liberty to say, Mrs. Fetterolf. But it’s someone who, like you, has lost an elderly relative to suicide.”

“Suicide! Ha! It wasn’t any suicide! It was murder!”

“Murder?”

“They killed him! And no one will admit it!”

“What makes you think so?”

“Think? Think? I don’t have to think, I know! One week he’s fine, he’s friends with this Mrs. Kaplan, they play Scrabble, they read books together, he’s happy as a clam. Maybe even a little something gets going between them, who am I to say, more power to them. And then on the same night—the same night—he hangs himself and she walks in front of a bus! Coincidence? I don’t think so! . . . Besides, there would be a note.”

“I beg your—”

“My father-in-law would have left a note. He was thoughtful that way. You know what I’m saying? He wrote everybody in the whole family all the time, nobody could even keep up with reading it all. He would have left a note for sure.”

“Did he—”

“He was lonely after his wife died. Sarah. A saint. They met fifty-six years ago—”

In the end, she gave me her father-in-law’s entire history. Also Rose Kaplan’s. I wrote it all down.

When I called Johnny Fermato, I was told by a wary desk sergeant that Lieutenant Fermato would get back to me.

In my dreams.

“Somebody’s being screwed over, Margie,” I said. “And it’s probably costing somebody else pay-off money.”

She lay there in the fetal position, her hands like claws. The IV was gone, but she was still connected by tubes to the humidified air supply, the catheter bag, the feeding pump. The pump made soft noises: ronk, ronk. I laid my briefcase on the bottom of her bed, which Susan would probably object to.

“It wasn’t depression,” I said to Margie. “Della Francesca and Mrs. Smith went up to that roof together. Alone together. Samuel Fetterolf and Rose Kaplan were in love.” J-24 chemically induced love.

The bag in Margie’s IV slowly emptied. The catheter bag slowly filled. Her ears were hidden under the dry, brittle, lifeless hair.

“Johnny Fermato knows something. Maybe only that the word’s been passed down to keep the case closed. I did get the coroners’ reports. They say ‘self-inflicted fatal wounds.’ All eight reports.”

Somewhere in the hospital corridors, a woman screamed. Then stopped.

“Margie,” I heard myself saying, “I don’t want to come here anymore.”

The next second, I was up and limping around the room. I put my forehead against the wall and ground it in. How could I say that to her? Margie, the only woman I’d ever loved, the person in the world I was closest to. . . . On our wedding night, which was also her nineteenth birthday, she’d told me she felt like she could die from happiness. And I’d known what she meant.

And on that other night eight years later, when Bucky had done his pills-and-vodka routine, Marge had been with me when the phone rang. Gene . . . Gene . . . I did it. . . .

Did what? Jesus, Bucky, it’s after midnight—

But I don’t . . . Father Healey . . .

Bucky, I gotta start my shift at eight tomorrow morning. Goodnight.

Gene, who’s calling at this hour?

. . . say . . . good-bye. . . .

Of all the inconsiderate . . . the phone woke Libby!

Tell Father Healey I never would have made . . . good priests don’t doubt like . . . I can’t touch God anymore. . . .

And then I’d known. I was out of the apartment in fifteen seconds. Shoes, pants, gun. In my pajama top I drove to the seminary, leaned on the bell. Bucky wasn’t there, but Father Healey was. I searched the rooms, the chapel, the little meditation garden, all the while traffic noises drowning out the thumping in my chest. Father Healey shouting questions at me. I wouldn’t let him in my car. Get away from me you bastard you killed him, you and your insistence on pushing God on a mind never tightly wrapped in the first place . . . Bucky wasn’t at his mother’s house. Now I had two people screaming at me.

I found him at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. Where I should have looked first. He’d broken a stained glass window, just smashed it with a board, no subtlety. He was in front of the altar, breathing shallow, already unconscious. EMS seemed to take forever to get there. The on-duty cops were faster; the stained-glass was alarm-wired.

But when it was over, Bucky’s stomach pumped, sleeping it off at St. Vincent’s, I had crawled back in bed next to Margie. Libby asleep in her little bedroom. I’d put my arms around my wife, and I’d vowed that after Bucky got out of the hospital, I’d never see him and his messy stupid dramas of faith again.

“I didn’t mean that,” I said to Margie, inert in her trach collar. “Sweetheart, I didn’t mean it. Of course I want to be here. I’ll be here as long as you’re breathing!”

She didn’t move. IV bag emptying, catheter bag filling.

Susan came in, her nurse’s uniform rumpled. “Hi, Gene.”

“Hello, Susan.”

“We’re about the same tonight.”

I could see that. And then the Camineur kicked in and I could see something else, in one of those unbidden flashes of knowledge that Bucky called heightened connective cognition. Bucky hadn’t phoned me because he didn’t really want to know what had happened to those old people. He already had enough belief to satisfy himself. He just wanted J-24 cleared publicly, and he wanted me to start the stink that would do it. He was handing the responsibility for Rose Kaplan and Samuel Fetterolf and Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca to me. Just the way he’d handed me the responsibility for his break with Father Healey the night of his attempted suicide. I’d been used.

“Fuck that!”

Susan turned, startled, from changing Margie’s catheter bag. “I beg your pardon?”

Margie, of course, said nothing.

I limped out of the hospital room, ignoring the look on Susan’s face. I was angrier than I had been in eighteen months. Anger pushed against the inside of my chest and shot like bullets through my veins.

Until the Camineur did its thing.

A dozen boys crowded the basketball hoop after school, even though it was drizzling. I limped toward my car. Just as I reached it, a red Mercedes pulled up beside me and Jeff Connors got out from the passenger side.

He wore a blue bandana on his head, and it bulged on the left side above the ear. Heavy bandaging underneath; somebody had worked on him. He also wore a necklace of heavy gold links, a beeper, and jacket of supple brown leather. He didn’t even try to keep the leather out of the rain.

His eyes met mine, and something flickered behind them. The Mercedes drove off. Jeff started toward the kids at the hoops, who’d all stopped playing to watch the car. There was the usual high-fiving and competitive dissing, but I heard its guarded quality, and I saw something was about to go down.

Nothing to do with me. I unlocked my car door.

Jenny Kelly came hurrying across the court, through the drizzle. Her eyes flashed. “Jeff! Jeff!”

She didn’t even know enough not to confront him in front of his customers. He stared at her, impassive, no sign of his usual likable hustle. To him, she might as well have been a cop.

“Jeff, could I see you for a minute?”

Not a facial twitch. But something moved behind his eyes.

“Please? It’s about your little brother.”

She was giving him an out: family emergency. He didn’t take it.

“I’m busy.”

Ms. Kelly nodded. “Okay. Tomorrow, then?”

“I’m busy.”

“Then I’ll catch you later.” She’d learned not to argue. But I saw her face after she turned from the boys sniggering behind her. She wasn’t giving up, either. Not on Jeff.

Me, she never glanced at.

I got into my car and drove off, knowing better than Jenny Kelly what was happening on the basketball court behind me, not even trying to interfere. If it didn’t happen on school property, it would happen off it. What was the difference, really? You couldn’t stop it. No matter what idealistic fools like Jenny Kelly thought.

Her earrings were little pearls, and her shirt, damp from the rain, clung to her body.

The whole next week, I left the phone off the hook. I dropped Libby a note saying to write me instead of calling because NYNEX was having trouble with the line into my building. I didn’t go to the hospital. I taught my math classes, corrected papers in my own classroom, and left right after eighth period. I only glimpsed Jenny Kelly once, at a bus stop few blocks from the school building. She was holding the hand of a small black kid, three or four, dressed in a Knicks sweatshirt. They were waiting for a bus. I drove on by.

But you can’t really escape.

I spotted the guy when I came out of the metroteller late Friday afternoon. I’d noticed him earlier, when I dropped off a suit at the drycleaner’s. This wasn’t the kind of thing I dealt with any more—but it happens. Somebody you collared eight years ago gets out and decides to get even. Or somebody spots you by accident and suddenly remembers some old score on behalf of his cousin, or your partner, or some damn thing you yourself don’t even recall. It happens.

I couldn’t move fast, not with my knee. I strolled into Mulcahy’s, which has a long aisle running between the bar and the tables, with another door to the alley that’s usually left open if the weather’s any good. The men’s and ladies’ rooms are off an alcove just before the alley, along with a pay phone and cigarette machine. I nodded at Brian Mulcahy behind the bar, limped through, and went into the ladies’. It was empty. I kept the door cracked. My tail checked the alley, then strode toward the men’s room. When his back was to the ladies’ and his hand on the heavy door, I grabbed him.

He wasn’t as tall or heavy as I was—average build, brown hair, nondescript looks. He twisted in my grasp, and I felt the bulge of the gun under his jacket. “Stop it, Shaunessy! NYPD!”

I let him go. He fished out his shield, looking at me hard. Then he said, “Not here. This is an informant hangout—didn’t you know? Meet me at 248 West Seventieth, apartment 8. Christ, why don’t you fix your goddamn phone?” Then he was gone.

I had a beer at the bar while I thought it over. Then I went home. When the buzzer rang an hour and a half later, I didn’t answer. Whoever stood downstairs buzzed for ten minutes straight before giving up.

That night I dreamed someone was trying to kill Margie, stalking her through the Times Square sleaze and firing tiny chemically poisoned darts. I couldn’t be sure, dreams being what they are, but I think the stalker was me.

The Saturday mail came around three-thirty. It brought a flat manilla package, no return address, no note. It was a copy of the crime-scene report on the deaths of Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca.

Seven years as partners doesn’t just wash away. No matter what the official line has to be.

There were three eight-by-ten color crime scene photos: an empty rooftop; Mrs. Smith’s body smashed on the pavement below; della Francesca’s body lying on the floor beside a neatly made bed. His face was in partial shadow but his skinny spotted hands were clear, both clutching the hilt of the knife buried in his chest. There wasn’t much blood. That doesn’t happen until somebody pulls the knife out.

The written reports didn’t say anything that wasn’t in the photos.

I resealed the package and locked it in my file cabinet. Johnny had come through; Bucky had screwed me. The deaths were suicides, just like Kelvin Pharmaceuticals said, just like the Department said. Bucky’s superconnective pill was the downer to end all downers, and he knew it, and he was hoping against hope it wasn’t so.

Because he and Tommy had taken it together.

I’ve moved, Bucky had said in his one message since he told me about J-24. I’d assumed he meant that he’d changed apartments, or lovers, or lives, as he’d once changed from fanatic seminarian to fanatic chemist. But that’s not what he meant. He meant he’d made his move with J-24, because he wanted the effect for himself and Tommy, and he refused to believe the risk applied to him. Just like all the dumb crack users I spent sixteen years arresting.

I dialed his number. After four rings, the answering machine picked up. I hung up, walked from the living room to the bedroom, pounded my fists on the wall a couple times, walked back and dialed again. When the machine picked up I said, “Bucky. This is Gene. Call me now. I mean it—I have to know you’re all right.”

I hesitated . . . he hadn’t contacted me in weeks. What could I use as leverage?

“If you don’t call me tonight, Saturday, by nine, I’ll . . .” What? Not go look for him. Not again, not like thirteen years ago, rushing out in pants and pajama top, Margie calling after me Gene! Gene! For God’s sake . . .

I couldn’t do it again.

“If you don’t phone by nine o’clock, I’ll call the feds with what I’ve found about J-24, without checking it out with you first. So call me, Bucky.”

Usually on Saturday afternoon I went to the hospital to see Margie. Not today. I sat at my kitchen table with algebra tests from 7B spread over the tiny surface, and it took me an hour to get through three papers. I kept staring at the undecorated wall, seeing Bucky there. Seeing the photos of Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca. Seeing that night thirteen years ago when Bucky had his stomach pumped. Then I’d wrench myself back to the test papers and correct another problem. If train A leaves point X traveling at a steady fifty miles per hour at six AM. . . .

If a bullet leaves a gun traveling at 1500 feet per second, it can tear off a human head. Nobody realizes that but people who have seen it. Soldiers. Doctors. Cops.

After a while, I realized I was staring at the wall again, and picked up another paper. If 3X equals 2Y . . . Some of the names on the papers I didn’t even recognize. Who was James Dillard? Was he the tall quiet kid in the last row, or the short one in shoes held together with tape, who fell asleep most mornings? They were just names.

On the wall, I saw Jenny Kelly holding the hand of Jeff Connors’s little brother.

At seven-thirty I shoved the papers into my briefcase and grabbed my jacket. Before I left, I tried Bucky’s number once more. No answer. I turned off the living room light and limped along the hall to the door. Before I opened it, my foot struck something. Without even thinking about it, I flattened against the wall and reached behind me for the foyer light.

It was only another package. A padded mailer, nine by twelve, the cheap kind that leaks oily black stuffing all over you if you open it wrong. The stuffing was already coming out a little tear in one corner. There were no stamps, no address; it had been shoved under the door. Whoever had left it had gotten into the building—not hard to do on a Saturday, with people coming and going, just wait until someone else has unlocked the door and smile at them as you go in, any set of keys visible in your hand. In the upper left comer of the envelope was an NYPD evidence sticker.

I picked up the package just as the phone rang.

“Bucky! Where are—”

“Gene, this is Jenny Kelly. Listen, I need your help. Please! I just got a call from Jeff Connors, he didn’t know who else to call . . . the police have got him barricaded in a drug house, they’re yelling at him to come out and he’s got Darryl with him, that’s his little brother, and he’s terrified—Jeff is—that they’ll knock down the door and go in shooting . . . God, Gene, please go! It’s only four blocks from you, that’s why I called, and you know how these things work . . . please!”

She had to pause for breath. I said tonelessly, “What’s the address?”

She told me. I slammed the receiver down in the midst of her thank-you’s. If she’d been in the room with me, I think I could have hit her.

I limped the four blocks north, forcing my damaged knee, and three blocks were gone before I realized I still had the padded envelope in my hand. I folded it in half and shoved it in my jacket pocket.

The address wasn’t hard to find. Two cars blocked the street, lights whirling, and I could hear more sirens in the distance. The scene was all fucked up. A woman of twenty-one or twenty-two was screaming hysterically and jumping up and down: “He’s got my baby! He’s got a gun up there! He’s going to kill my son!” while a uniform who looked about nineteen was trying ineptly to calm her down. Her clothes were torn and bloody. She smacked the rookie across the arm and his partner moved in to restrain her, while another cop with a bullhorn shouted up at the building. Neighbors poured out onto the street. The one uniform left was trying to do crowd control, funneling them away from the building, and nobody was going. He looked no older than the guy holding the woman, as if he’d had about six hours total time on the street.

I had my dummy shield. We’d all had our shields duplicated, one thirty-second of an inch smaller than the real shield, so we could leave the real one home and not risk a fine and all the paperwork if it got lost. When I retired, I turned in my shield but kept the dummy. I flashed it now at the rookie struggling with the hysterical girl. That might cost me a lot of trouble later, but I’d worry about that when the time came.

The street thinking comes back so fast.

“This doesn’t look right,” I shouted at the rookie over the shrieking woman. She was still flailing in his hold, screaming, “He’s got my baby! He’s got a gun! For Chrissake, get my baby before he kills him!” The guy with the bullhorn stopped shouting and came over to us.

“Who are you?”

“He’s from Hostage and Barricade,” the rookie gasped, although I hadn’t said so. I didn’t contradict him. He was trying so hard to be gentle with the screaming woman that she was twisting like a dervish while he struggled to cuff her.

“Look,” I said, “she’s not the mother of that child up there. He’s the perp’s little brother, and she sure the hell doesn’t look old enough to be the older kid’s mother!”

“How do you—” the uniform began, but the girl let out a shriek that could have leveled buildings, jerked one hand free and clawed at my face.

I ducked fast enough that she missed my eyes, but her nails tore a long jagged line down my cheek. The rookie stopped being gentle and cuffed her so hard she staggered. The sleeve of her sweater rode up when he jerked her arms behind her back, and I saw the needle tracks.

Shit, shit, shit.

Two back-up cars screamed up. An older cop in plain clothes got out, and I slipped my dummy shield back in my pocket.

“Listen, officer, I know that kid up there, the one with the baby. I’m his teacher. He’s in the eighth grade. His name is Jeff Connors, the child with him is his little brother Darryl, and this woman is not their mother. Something’s going down here, but it’s not what she says.”

He looked at me hard. “How’d you get that wound?”

“She clawed him,” the rookie said. “He’s from—”

“He phoned me,” I said urgently, holding him with my eyes. “He’s scared stiff. He’ll come out with no problems if you let him, and leave Darryl there.”

“You’re his teacher? That why he called you? You got ID?”

I showed him my United Federation of Teachers card, driver’s license, Benjamin Franklin Junior High pass. The uniforms had all been pressed into crowd control by a sergeant who looked like he knew what he was doing.

“Where’d he get the gun? He belong to a gang?”

I said, “I don’t know. But he might.”

“How do you know there’s nobody else up there with him?”

“He didn’t say so on the phone. But I don’t know for sure.”

“What’s the phone number up there?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t give it to me.”

“Is he on anything?”

“I don’t know. I would guess no.”

He stood there, weighing it a moment. Then he picked up the bullhorn, motioned to his men to get into position. His voice was suddenly calm, even gentle. “Connors! Look, we know you’re with your little brother, and we don’t want either of you to get hurt. Leave Darryl there and come down by yourself. Leave the gun and just come on down. You do that and everything’ll be fine.”

“He’s going to kill my—” the woman shrieked, before someone shoved her into a car and slammed the door.

“Come on, Jeff, we can do this nice and easy, no problems for anybody.” I put my hand to my cheek. It came away bloody.

The negotiator’s voice grew even calmer, even more reasonable.

“I know Darryl’s probably scared, but he doesn’t have to be, just come on down and we can get him home where he belongs. Then you and I can talk about what’s best for your little brother. . . .”

Jeff came out. He slipped out of the building, hands on his head, going, “Don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me, don’t shoot me,” and he wasn’t the hustler of the eighth grade who knew all the moves, wasn’t the dealer in big gold on the basketball court. He was a terrified thirteen-year-old in a dirty blue bandana, who’d been set up.

Cops in body armor rushed forward and grabbed him. More cops started into the building. A taxi pulled up and Jenny Kelly jumped out, dressed in a low-cut black satin blouse and black velvet skirt.

“Jeff! Are you all right?”

Jeff looked at her, and I think if they’d been alone, he might have started to cry. “Darryl’s up there alone. . . .”

“They’ll bring Darryl down safe,” I said.

“I’ll take Darryl to your aunt’s again,” Jenny promised. A man climbed out of the taxi behind her and paid the driver. He was scowling. The rookie glanced down the front of Jenny’s dress.

Jeff was cuffed and put into a car. Jenny turned to me. “Oh, your face, you’re hurt! Where will they take Jeff, Gene? Will you go, too? Please?”

“I’ll have to. I told them it was me that Jeff phoned.”

She smiled. I’d never seen her smile like that before, at least not at me. I kept my eyes raised to her face, and my own face blank. “Who set him up, Jenny?”

“Set him up?”

“That woman was yelling she’s Darryl’s mother and Jeff was going to kill her baby. Somebody wanted the cops to go storming in there and start shooting. If Jeff got killed, the NYPD would be used as executioners. If he didn’t, he’d still be so scared they’ll own him. Who it is, Jenny? The same one who circulated that inflammatory crap about a Neighborhood Safety Information Network?”

She frowned. “I don’t know. But Jeff has been . . . there were some connections that . . .” She trailed off, frowned again. Her date came up to us, still scowling. “Gene, this is Paul Snyder. Paul, Gene Shaunessy. . . . Paul, I’m sorry, I have to go with Gene to wherever they’re taking Jeff. I’m the one he really called. And I said I’d take Darryl to his aunt.”

“Jenny, for Chrissake . . . we have tickets for the Met!”

She just looked at him, and I saw that Paul Snyder wasn’t going to be seeing any more of Jenny Kelly’s cleavage.

“I’ll drive you to the precinct, Jenny,” I said. “Only I have to be the first one interviewed, I have to be as quick as I can because there’s something else urgent tonight. . . .” Bucky. Dear God.

Jenny said quickly, “Your wife? Is she worse?”

“She’ll never be worse. Or better,” I said before I knew I was going to say anything, and immediately regretted it.

“Gene . . .” Jenny began, but I didn’t let her finish. She was standing too close to me. I could smell her perfume. A fold of her black velvet skirt blew against my leg.

I said harshly, “You won’t last at school another six months if you take it all this hard. You’ll burn out. You’ll leave.”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “Oh no, I won’t. And don’t talk to me in that tone of voice.”

“Six months,” I said, and turned away. A cop came out of the building carrying a wailing Darryl. And the lieutenant came over to me, wanting to know whatever it was I thought I knew about Jeff Connors’s connections.

It was midnight before I got home. After the precinct house there’d been a clinic, with the claw marks on my face disinfected and a tetanus shot and a blood test and photographs for the assault charges. After that, I looked for Bucky.

He wasn’t at his apartment, or at his mother’s apartment. The weekend security guard at Kelvin Pharmaceuticals said he’d been on duty since four p.m. and Dr. Romano hadn’t signed in to his lab. That was the entire list of places I knew to look. Bucky’s current life was unknown to me. I didn’t even know Tommy’s last name.

I dragged myself through my apartment, pulling off my jacket. The light on the answering machine blinked.

My mind—or the Camineur—made some connections. Even before I pressed the MESSAGE button, I think I knew.

“Gene, this is Tom Fletcher. You don’t know me . . . we’ve never met. . . .” A deeper voice than I’d expected but ragged, spiky. “I got your message on Vince Romano’s machine. About the J-24. Vince . . .” The voice caught, went on. “Vince is in the hospital. I’m calling from there. St. Clare’s, it’s on Ninth at Fifty-first. Third floor. Just before he . . . said to tell you . . .”

I couldn’t make out the words in the rest of the message.

I sat there in the dark for a few minutes. Then I pulled my jacket back on and caught a cab to St. Clare’s. I didn’t think I could drive.

The desk attendant waved me through. He thought I was just visiting Margie, even at this hour. It had happened before. But not lately.

Bucky lay on the bed, a sheet pulled up to his chin but not yet over his face. His eyes were open. Suddenly I didn’t want to know what the sheet was covering—how he’d done it, what route he’d chosen, how long it had taken. All the dreary algebra of death. If train A leaves the station at a steady fifty miles per hour. . . . There were no marks on Bucky’s face. He was smiling.

And then I saw he was still breathing. Bucky, the ever inept, had failed a second time.

Tommy stood in a corner, as if he couldn’t get it together enough to sit down. Tall and handsome, he had dark well-cut hair and the kind of fresh complexion that comes with youth and exercise. He looked about fifteen years younger than Bucky. When had they taken the J-24 together? Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca had killed themselves within hours of each other. So had Rose Kaplan and Samuel Fetterolf. How much did Tommy know?

He stood and held out his hand. His voice was husky. “You’re Gene.”

“I’m Gene.”

“Tom Fletcher. Vince and I are—”

“I know,” I said, and stared down at Bucky’s smiling face, and wondered how I was going to tell this boy that he, too, was about to try to kill himself for chemically induced love.

I flashed on Bucky and me sitting beside the rainstreaked alley window of the Greek diner. What are you waiting for, Bucky, your prince to come?

Yes. And, Have you ever thought what it would be like to be really merged—to know him, to be him?

“Tom,” I said. “There’s something we have to discuss.”

“Discuss?” His voice had grown even huskier.

“About Bucky. Vince. You and Vince.”

“What?”

I looked down at Bucky’s smiling face.

“Not here. Come with me to the waiting room.”

It was deserted at that hour, a forlorn alcove of scratched furniture, discarded magazines, too-harsh fluorescent lights. We sat facing each other on red plastic chairs.

I said abruptly, “Do you know what J-24 is?”

His eyes grew wary. “Yes.”

“What is it?” I couldn’t find the right tone. I was grilling him as if he were under arrest and I were still a cop.

“It’s a drug that Vince’s company was working on. To make people bond to each other, merge together in perfect union.” His voice was bitter. “What else did he tell you?”

“Not much. What should he have told me?”

You never see enough, not even in the streets, to really prepare you. Each time you see genuine cruelty, it’s like the first time. Damn you, Bucky. Damn you to hell for emotional greed.

I said, “He didn’t tell you that the clinical subjects who took J-24 . . . the people who bonded . . . he didn’t tell you they were all elderly?”

“No,” Tom said.

“The same elderly who have been committing suicide all over the city? The ones in the papers?”

“Oh, my God.”

He got up and walked the length of the waiting room, maybe four good steps. Then back. His handsome face was gray as ash. “They killed themselves after taking J-24? Because of J-24?”

I nodded. Tom didn’t move. A long minute passed, and then he said softly, “My poor Vince.”

“Poor Vince? How the hell can you . . . don’t you get it, Tommy boy? You’re next! You took the bonding drug with poor suffering Vince, and your three weeks or whatever of joy are up and you’re dead, kid! The chemicals will do their thing in your brain, super withdrawal, and you’ll kill yourself just like Bucky! Only you’ll probably be better at it and actually succeed!”

He stared at me. And then he said, “Vince didn’t try to kill himself.”

I couldn’t speak.

“He didn’t attempt suicide. Is that what you thought? No, he’s in a catatonic state. And I never took J-24 with him.”

“Then who . . .”

“God,” Tom said, and the full force of bitterness was back. “He took it with God. At some church, Our Lady of Everlasting Something. Alone in front of the altar, fasting and praying. He told me when he moved out.”

When he moved out. Because it wasn’t Tommy that Bucky really wanted, it was God. It had always been God, for thirteen solid years. Tell Father Healey I can’t touch God any more. . . . Have you ever thought what it would be like to be really merged, to know him to be him? . . . No. To know Him. To be Him. What are you waiting for, your Prince?

Yes.

Tom said, “After he took the damned drug, he lost all interest in me. In everything. He didn’t go to work, just sat in the corner smiling and laughing and crying. He was like . . . high on something, but not really. I don’t know what he was. It wasn’t like anything I ever saw before.”

Nor anybody else. Merged with God. They knew each other, they almost were each other. Think, Gene! To have an end to the terrible isolation in which we live our whole tiny lives. . . .

“I got so angry with him,” Tom said, “and it did no good at all. I just didn’t count any more. So I told him to get out, and he did, and then I spent three days looking for him but I couldn’t find him anywhere, and I was frantic. Finally he called me, this afternoon. He was crying. But again it was like I wasn’t even really there, not me, Tom. He sure the hell wasn’t crying over me.”

Tom walked to the one small window, which was barred. Back turned to me, he spoke over his shoulder. Carefully, trying to get it word-perfect.

“Vince said I should call you. He said, ‘Tell Gene—it wears off. And then the grief and loss and anger . . . especially the anger that it’s over. But I can beat it. It’s different for me. They couldn’t.’ Then he hung up. Not a word to me.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

He turned. “Yeah, well, that was Vince, wasn’t it? He always came first with himself.”

No, I could have said. God came first. And that’s how Bucky beat the J-24 withdrawal. Human bonds, whether forged by living or chemicals, got torn down as much as built up. But you don’t have to live in a three-room apartment with God, fight about money with God, listen to God snore and fart and say things so stupid you can’t believe they’re coming out of the mouth of your beloved, watch God be selfish or petty or cruel. God was bigger than all that, at least in Bucky’s mind, was so big that He filled everything. And this time when God retreated from him, when the J-24 wore off and Bucky could feel the bonding slipping away, Bucky slipped along after it. Deeper into his own mind, where all love exists anyway.

“The doctor said he might never come out of the catatonia,” Tom said. He was starting to get angry now, the anger of self-preservation. “Or he might. Either way, I don’t think I’ll be waiting around for him. He’s treated me too badly.”

Not a long-term kind of guy, Tommy. I said, “But you never took J-24 yourself.”

“No,” Tom said. “I’m not stupid. I think I’ll go home now. Thanks for coming, Gene. Good to meet you.”

“You, too,” I said, knowing neither of us meant it.

“Oh, and Vince said one more thing. He said to tell you it was, too, murder. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” I said. But not, I hoped, to him.

After Tom left, I sat in the waiting room and pulled from my jacket the second package. The NYPD evidence sticker had torn when I’d jammed the padded mailer in my pocket.

It was the original crime scene report for Lydia Smith and Giacomo della Francesca, the one Johnny Fermato must have known about when he sent me the phony one. This report was signed Bruce Campinella. I didn’t know him, but I could probably pick him out of a line-up from the brief tussle in Mulcahy’s: average height, brown hair, undistinguished looks, furious underneath. Your basic competent honest cop, still outraged at what the system had for sale. And for sale at a probably not very high price. Not in New York.

There were only two photos this time. One I’d already seen: Mrs. Smith’s smashed body on the pavement below the nursing home roof. The other was new. Della Francesca’s body lying on the roof, not in his room, before the cover-up team moved him and took the second set of pictures. The old man lay face up, the knife still in his chest. It was a good photo; the facial expression was very clear. The pain was there, of course, but you could see the fury, too. The incredible rage. And then the grief and loss and anger . . . especially the anger that it’s over.

Had della Francesca pushed Lydia Smith first, after that shattering quarrel that came from losing their special, unearthly union, and then killed himself? Or had she found the strength in her disappointment and outrage to drive the knife in, and then she jumped? Ordinarily, the loss of love doesn’t mean hate. Just how unbearable was it to have had a true, perfect, unhuman end to human isolation—and then lose it? How much rage did that primordial loss release?

Or maybe Bucky was wrong, and it had been suicide after all. Not the anger uppermost, but the grief. Maybe the rage on della Francesca’s dead face wasn’t at his lost perfect love, but at his own emptiness once it was gone. He’d felt something so wonderful, so sublime, that everything else afterward fell unbearably short, and life itself wasn’t worth the effort. No matter what he did, he’d never ever have its like again.

I thought of Samuel Fetterolf before he took J-24, writing everyone in his family all the time, trying to stay connected. Of Pete, straining every cell of his damaged brain to protect the memories of the old people who’d been kind to him. Of Jeff Connors, hanging onto Darryl even while he moved into the world of red Mercedes and big deals. Of Jenny Kelly, sacrificing her dates and her sleep and her private life in her frantic effort to connect to the students, who she undoubtedly thought of as “her kids.” Of Bucky.

The elevator to the fifth floor was out of order. I took the stairs. The shift nurse barely nodded at me. It wasn’t Susan. In Margie’s room the lights had been dimmed and she lay in the gloom like a curved dry husk, covered with a light sheet. I pulled the chair closer to her bed and stared at her.

And for maybe the first time since her accident, I remembered.

Roll the window down, Gene.

It’s fifteen degrees out there, Margie!

It’s real air. Chilled like good beer. It smells like a goddamn factory in this car.

Don’t start again. I’m warning you.

Are you so afraid the job won’t kill you that you want the cigarettes to do it?

Stop trying to control me.

Maybe you should do better at controlling yourself.

The night I’d found Bucky at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows, I’d been in control. It was Bucky who hadn’t. I’d crawled back in bed and put my arms around Marge and vowed never to see Bucky and his messy stupid dramas of faith ever again. Marge hadn’t been asleep. She’d been crying. I’d had enough hysteria for one night; I didn’t want to hear it. I wouldn’t even let her speak. I stalked out of the bedroom and spent the night on the sofa. It was three days before I’d even talk to her so we could work it out and make it good between us again.

Have a great year! she’d said my first September at Benjamin Franklin. But it hadn’t been a great year. I was trying to learn how to be a teacher, and trying to forget how to be a cop, and I didn’t have much time left over for her. We’d fought about that, and then I’d stayed away from home more and more to get away from the fighting, and by the time I returned she was staying away from home a lot. Over time it got better again, but I don’t know where she was going the night she crossed Lexington with a bag of groceries in front of that ’93 Lincoln. I don’t know who the groceries were for. She never bought porterhouse and champagne for me.

Maybe we would have worked that out, too. Somehow.

Weren’t there moments, Gene, Bucky had said, when you felt so close to Margie it was like you crawled inside her skin for a minute? Like you were Margie? No. I was never Margie. We were close, but not that close. What we’d had was good, but not that good. Not a perfect merging of souls.

Which was the reason I could survive its loss.

I stood up slowly, favoring my knee. On the way out of the room, I took the plastic bottle of Camineur out of my pocket and tossed it in the waste basket. Then I left, without looking back.

Outside, on Ninth Avenue, a patrol car suddenly switched on its lights and took off. Some kids who should have been at home swaggered past, heading downtown. I looked for a pay phone. By now, Jenny Kelly would be done delivering Darryl to his aunt, and Jeff Connors was going to need better than the usual overworked public defender. I knew a guy at Legal Aid, a hotshot, who still owed me a long-overdue favor.

I found the phone, and the connection went through.

BIBI

Mike Resnick and Susan Shwartz

Susan Shwartz is a senior financial editor on Wall Street and a multiple Hugo- and Nebula-award nominee. She is the author or co-author of twelve novels, the editor of seven anthologies, and the author of over sixty short stories. Ms. Shwartz’s most recent anthology, Sisters in Fantasy, is just out from Roc. Her next novel, Shards of Empire, is forthcoming from Tor Books. “Bibi” is her first tale for Asimov’s.

Nineteen ninety-five has been a banner year for Mike Resnick. His novella, “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge,” received a Nebula and a Hugo award. He was also a Hugo finalist for Best Novelette, with “A Little Knowledge” (Asimov’s, April 1994); Best Short Story, with “Barnaby in Exile” (Asimov’s, February 1994); and Best Editor. We hope 1996 is just as nice to him.

Her children’s cries woke her from her safe nest. She stretched, easing the aches in her bones. In the quiet dawn, she ventured to the lake for water. She saw less of her enemies’ spoor than ever before. Almost nothing was freshly dead, though a few circling birds warned her: soon. Not my children! she wailed silently. They were fevered and ill and even dying. But where were they? No one crouched beside the lake. No one edged through the bush, seeking her. She had to find them soon, before she was a mother without children.

The land was dry and brown, as it had always been, but there were differences. The footpaths were missing, the birds no longer fled in fear of her, the few antelope she saw were smaller and quicker than any she could remember. She felt uneasy, walking in the open, with no trees to climb should she come across those fearsome doglike creatures that could swallow her in three bites.

She gripped her club, which was really nothing more than an old femur bone. She had watched a great cat bring down an antelope and waited patiently for it to fill its belly, then fought the birds for the spoils and came away with a weapon as well as a meal.

She looked up again. The birds seemed smaller, and they were the wrong colors. They were still ominous and foreboding as they rode the thermals high above the savannah and sought the flesh of the newly dead.

As the sun rose higher, she withdrew into the comforting shadows of the trees. Her stomach cried out, and she turned over a dry log, looking for termites. But the log crumbled into dust and she realized, even as she sifted through its remains, finding a few laggard insects, that the main army had moved on to choicer morsels.

How easy it used to be to find food. In the kinder days of her youth, she could have traveled fast, grubbing food from the earth or from hanging branches. Now, it took her hours to fill her belly so it did not cry like a baby, and she barely heard the cries or coughs of beasts. Her feet bled, tender after her long rest, but she trudged on. She had slept too long.

The camp lay 40 kilometers due west of Moroto, in the blistering heat of the Karamojo country. Even the flies had become lethargic. Dust devils swirled across the empty landscape, red and angry, reaching hundreds of feet into the startling blue sky.

Two boreholes supplied water for all the tents. One teased them with cool, clear water for two or three minutes at a time, then went dead for half an hour or more, while the other offered a slow, sluggish trickle of warm brown liquid.

“Wake up, wake up!”

A weight landed on Jeremy Harris’s cot, and a child shrilled in his ears. Translating the child’s excited Swahili automatically, Jeremy fixed his tormentor, not four feet high, with a bleary eye, then glanced outside. What the hell was the kid doing waking him up in practically the middle of the night?

“Dr. Umurungi told me to fetch you. You remember old Kabute? He died around midnight.”

Jeremy remembered the man: not forty yet impossibly aged, almost mummified, in the final emaciation of the AIDS that threatened to finish the job in Uganda that Idi Amin began and Milton Obote had carried forward. They died. Sooner or later, everyone died.

The child’s eyes reflected awareness and resignation: he’d already lost both parents to the disease and was HIV-positive himself. It would be a miracle if he reached puberty. Forget AZT: the relief workers were happy if they could provide three meals a day.

“I’m sorry,” said Jeremy. “Do they want me to talk to the family?”

He could think of several people better qualified by language or race to talk to the man’s family an elderly mother, two withered wives. One bore the marks of Kaposi’s sarcoma, purple against black, and coughed almost constantly. There were several children; Jeremy would have bet good money that all of them were HIV-positive.

Jeremy was a volunteer, not a physician: if they needed him to drive, he drove. If they wanted him to perform medical tests, they taught him and looked the other way. If they wanted an English class, he taught it. When it came to bribing officials, he was without peer. Best of all, when (never if) they needed emergency funding, his old Wall Street training could usually wring it from some unsuspecting philanthropical prey or allow the prey to donate it anonymously and still keep his tax break.

What they mostly needed these days, however, was a gravedigger. In New York, Jeremy had worked out with a trainer who came to his private gym, when he didn’t go to his university club, his company’s fitness center, or any of the places that took up a large part of his very private life. But digging graves out here in the bush put more muscle on him than his trainer would have dreamed possible.

“Dr. Umurungi said they left the compound, taking Kabute’s body with them.”

The boy opened the tent flap wider. Jeremy winced at the sunrise and swore with the inventive profanity of the equity traders he used to match drink for drink at Harry’s. Not only would the women and children not get proper care—so what if they die a month before their time, the darkness in him muttered, we’re all on Death Row here—but carrying a corpse, they’d be lucky if they didn’t run afoul of hyenas on the plain or crocs crossing the rivers on their way back to their village and that was on the unlikely assumption that it hadn’t been looted by Somali or Sudanese bandits.

He lowered his feet decisively, and the child practically hugged himself with relief. Reaching for his boots and trousers, Jeremy shook them before he put them on. He folded his bedding, just so. A place for everything or you’d go crazy, living in a cluttered tent in an AIDS relief camp. Everything in its place.

He unlocked the box where he kept his megavitamins and the other drugs, downing a handful of pills without water, before replacing the phials next to his portfolio statements, medical records, and a few letters. The most recent was from his parents in Vermont. He knew it by heart.

It wasn’t very long. Surprisingly, it wasn’t his mother who had written it, but his father, who had always been better with tools than words. The fact that Jeremy could continually force unnatural life into the camp’s ancient truck was a gift from his father that he’d only now come to value. As a boy, he had lived in terror that those skills would chain him to grimy hands and grease-stained clothes, to life in a gas station, a town, a way of life he had fought to escape.

“Son, you didn’t want your mother and me to come to the airport and see you off, so I didn’t get a chance to see you. I don’t suppose I’d have been able to say what I’ve been thinking about there anyhow. Things move too fast for me in New York, and you probably were all taken up with getting things arranged and saying good-bye to your friends.” (What friends? Jeremy thought to himself. The one person the one other person he might have wanted to see would never be there again.)

“And with your mother there trying not to cry, I couldn’t have said what I wanted to say. We’ve never had all that much to say to each other that wasn’t cars, or ‘How’s your schoolwork going?’ or ‘That’s really interesting,’ and now I’m sorry. I always though maybe I was the wrong father for you . . . but that’s water under the bridge. I want you to know that you don’t have to do this. You’re my son, and I’m proud of you. If you’re sick, come home and your mother and I will take care of you. You always have a place here.

“Love, (his father had scratched it out, then written the word again. Probably he feared that if he had to recopy the letter, he’d never send it.)

“Your Dad”

Very gently Jeremy replaced the letter in its sheltering plastic bag. Then he pulled out the small, tattered box with the monogrammed cufflinks and the unopened letter. Jeremy remembered the man to whom he’d given the cufflinks. As always, he was surprised that the box had reached him with the letter and the rejected gift inside.

It would have been a mercy if some official had heard the cufflinks rattling around and stolen the box before it reached him. It was a mercy that Raymond hadn’t thrown the cufflinks at him along with his anger when he learned just how disastrously careless Jeremy had been. “Gifts, always giving me things like I didn’t know how to choose for myself. Well, this last gift you gave me was really a killer, wasn’t it?” Ray had walked out, slamming the door on Jeremy and any chance they’d had for a life together, and all those gifts except for the deadly one he carried inside him.

Jeremy left the box under the pillow on his cot and stuck the letter into his pocket. Maybe today he’d find the time or the guts to open it. Or throw it away.

Or maybe he’d lose it.

He turned back to face the little boy. I do have to be here, he told the ghost of his father. Everything in its proper place. Just as he was.

Automatically, he scanned himself. No lesions. No fever. No faint weariness, no cough, no trace of night sweats. Nothing to worry about.

Yet.

Like so many of the people in his world, Jeremy Harris was HIV-positive. The verdict had surprised the hell out of him, though he supposed it shouldn’t have. His life had been so precisely arranged: the 80-hour weeks where weekends blended into weekdays and when he sometimes lived on the phone so he could make his pile and pay for the place on Fire Island; the weeks and weekends down in the Keys, where the beer was cold, the seafood spicy, and the company he’d better not think of that . . . or of how many of his old friends were still alive. You had to walk a very fine line between indifference, which could kill you, and caring too much, which would tear you apart.

The last time he’d visited his old haunts, the Keys had been like a ghost town. No one knew where Raymond was (or maybe he’d told them to keep their mouths shut.) That whole group of writers and artists and smart guys with money had turned into people like his father, no good at words about the real things. The survivors were either drinking themselves into oblivion or, like Jeremy, working to the point of exhaustion while becoming health and diet fanatics.

And for what? To watch their other friends die while waiting for a cure that 98% of them could never afford even if it was discovered? He subscribed to medical journals and followed the latest research on S.I.V. simian immunodeficiency virus and the vaccine Harvard Med School had developed, one that protected monkeys for three years. He’d even allowed himself to hope when Johns Hopkins turned up a 43-year-old woman who’d had three healthy children after being diagnosed HIV-positive and when, try as they might, they couldn’t get infectious HIV from her blood.

Maybe I’m a mutant just like her! he thought desperately. Which, of course, made him feel even more like an outcast from the human race.

He went to Montreal to visit Biochem Pharma, where a new drug, 3TC, in combination with ATZ, showed promising results. He monitored the Glaxo-Wellcome PLC merger with the attention the dying gave to the Last Rites because that had to affect the supply of the AZT he expected to need one day. What good did it do him? All the biotechs had tanked. AZT was more a poison than a cure, and with healthcare costs the way they were . . .

Of course, as long as he raked in the commissions, he had key man insurance from his company. He hardly thought they’d keep it up (ha! Now there was a good pun!) when he got really sick. And if he changed companies and came down with ARC or full-blown AIDS, there he was with a pre-existing condition. When his money finally ran out his portfolio was only solid, not huge he’d be out on the street, and that wasn’t Wall Street and on whatever might be left of Medicaid by that time.

So Jeremy kept fit. Every day he scanned himself for deterioration. As his friends and lovers sickened and died around him, Jeremy realized that he was what researchers called a non-progressor; he might have 10, 15, 20 years yet. One man, infected 17 years ago, still had a normal CD-4 white blood cell count. Maybe Jeremy would get lucky too.

Day after day, he worked, and worked out, and waited either for the disease or a cure. You can’t call that living at all, his psychiatrist said.

At an Audrey Hepburn revival at the Thalia, for God’s sake, a handout told him how she’d starved as a child, working for the Resistance. Until cancer left her too weak to continue, she’d tried to feed kids in Ethiopia.

The very next day, The Wall Street Journal had carried a story on the AIDS epidemic in Zambia and Uganda. If that wasn’t some sort of omen, he didn’t know a thing about market timing. So he’d liquidated his stock positions and parked the money in secure Triple-A bond funds, said good-bye to his trainer, sold his co-op for a good price despite rotten interest rates, and unloaded his beach house. His friends thought he’d gone crazy, his psychiatrist thought he’d gone sane and helped him negotiate the wilderness of regulations, and his family simply cried and wanted him to come back home where everyone would whisper about “Jeff Harris’s boy, what a shame, so young to go.” Money and some damn good networking had enabled him to hook up with a small relief organization; and so here he was.

He finished his daily checklist. Nothing left out for kids or monkeys to steal. Everything in its proper place, except for the finishing touch. He’d given up the Hermes ties, the custom-tailored suits, the meticulous Manhattan grooming for the cheapest, toughest, coolest clothes he could find, but one grace note remained. From his footlocker, he pulled out a spool of red ribbon, cut off a couple inches, and pinned it to his shirt. The boy’s eyes widened and he held out an eager hand. So Jeremy grinned and cut him an AIDS ribbon too, and out they went.

He began walking through the camp, which seemed like two separate worlds to him or, actually, three. There was the world inhabited by the camp’s employees: immaculate tents in a cluster, a spotless mess area, the infirmary it was too small and too easily victimized by the elements to call it a hospital; even infirmary seemed to give it an unearned dignity.

Then there was the world of the Africans: they had come by the dozens, and finally the hundreds, once word got out that another crazy European was passing out free food and medicine, and a small city of mud and thatched huts now completely encircled the world of the camp attendants.

Finally there was that tiny world inhabited only by himself and Elizabeth, a pair of people who didn’t fit in either of the other worlds. Jeremy, whose medical training was limited to a lifesaving badge he earned in swimming class when he was twelve, and Elizabeth, who had been born in Uganda and raised in Europe and didn’t quite belong to either society.

As he passed a huge pile of folded, unused tents, he saw a troop of vervet monkeys edging closer to an extended family of Africans that were warming their banana mash breakfasts over a fire. Hunger had made the monkeys brave, bravery had made them foolish, and Jeremy knew that at least one family was going to be having meat for lunch.

At last he reached the mess tent and came to a stop before Elizabeth, who was writing meticulous notes in a journal while her tea sat, untouched and cooling, right next to the Coleman lamp on the breakfast table.

“Is that you, Jeremy?” she asked without looking up.

Dr. Elizabeth Umurungi’s enunciation always sounded like an upper-class Englishwoman one who spoke perfect French rather than a convent-educated Achole who had fled to Britain with her parents when Idi Amin started decimating the countryside.

“No, it’s Father Damian,” he told her, wrapping his sweater about his narrow shoulders. It was strange: every evening he went to sleep sweating and wondering if he’d ever be cool again, and every morning he woke up shivering and wondering if he’d ever be warm again. That was Africa for you.

“All things considered, you’d hardly qualify as a saint,” she retorted. “Pity. We could use a miracle or two.”

She’d been finishing up her residency about the time he’d done his MBA: they had friends, or at least contacts, in common, and in what felt like another life, they’d skiied the same hills in Switzerland. One of the few people he had confided in, she monitored his T-cell status along with those of the Ugandans whose long defeats she fought.

She poured him a battered mug of tea that he eyed suspiciously. “So it’s not that designer herbal muck you used to buy. It won’t kill you. Dehydration and hunger will. Sit.”

He would have liked to eat by the fire, preferring the chilly air and the smoke to the cramped, dark interior and endless medical conversation of the mess hall but as much as he was bored by such talk, he was even more bored with his own company, so he decided to eat at Elizabeth’s table. His meal consisted not of the meticulously chosen, weighed, and cooked health foods that he had considered a matter of the merest survival, but rather of posho and banana mash which, even here, wasn’t much.

“Think I ought to make a supply run?” he asked.

She shrugged.

“I got a dividend check,” he volunteered. “Be nice to buy chickens. We could use the carcasses for soup.” (“Money!” Raymond had spat. “It’s all you ever think about! Well, let’s see you try to take it with you!”)

She finally looked up at him. “Homesick for Manhattan? Chicken soup isn’t that magic. As long as we can feed everyone in camp, fine. But I do need you to drive me somewhere.”

He bowed elaborately. With him, she wouldn’t have to worry about assault or about getting back to the compound safely.

“You want to track down the villagers that left this morning? Jabito told me about them when he woke me up.”

“Jabito gossips too much. Old head; young shoulders.”

“What do you expect?”

“I expect people not to slip away from doctors who are trying to help them,” said Elizabeth with the hauteur acquired in a childhood spent commuting between Paris, London and Kampala. Elizabeth might have learned patience and compassion in her self-appointed mission to help rebuild the country that had exiled her family, but the airs of the grande dame still clung to her. Though Jeremy had to admit that on her, even a tattered lab coat and old crew T-shirt looked chic. She’d been a model in Paris. Not the type he’d pretended to drool over as a nervous teenager reading Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue every year, but the sort of model who turned up in Vogue and had designers fighting each other over who would have the privilege this season of draping thousands of dollars of silk over her arrogant, elegant bones. Once and future stars were always chucking careers and going back to school, so the story on her in People—

“Supermodel Abandons Runways for Med School” produced a raised eyebrow or two before everyone in Jeremy’s study group went back to being cool. And working their asses off.

While that might impress the locals, it also intimidated them, and they kept her at a distance that saddened her. For all the darkness of her skin, she was as much a foreigner here as Jeremy. Maybe even more of one. “I’ve got their medical records, such as they are,” she added.

“You got a Land Rover?”

She smiled at him. “Better than that. I’ve got a flatbed truck with an almost-new spare tire.”

“Where’d you get it?” he asked excitedly. “I thought you told me you were just about out of money.”

“I am. We got it from a donor.” She paused, then amended her statement. “I got it from a donor. You’re not the only financial wizard around here.”

“If you’re a financial wizard, how did you manage to run through all those millions you made modeling?” he asked with a smile that was almost smug.

She sighed. “I bribed a lot of the wrong people when I decided to set up the camp. Then I had to go back and bribe the right ones. Our equipment cost a fortune to import. We’re on our fifth Land Rover; do you know how much they cost, and how quickly they die out here?” She paused, then added ruefully: “And then there were my little blunders, like one hundred tents nobody wants to sleep in. They were more than eight hundred dollars apiece, and I can’t get a single patient to spend a night in one.”

He wanted to teasingly say, “Well, they’re your people,” but he bit the words off just in time. They were no longer her people, and in fact distrusted this Westernized woman, this “black European”, even more than they distrusted Jeremy, who in their eyes was just another well-intentioned, bumbling American, a typical Two-Year Wonder who was working out his guilt at his parents’ expense.

“Of course they won’t sleep in them,” said Jeremy. “Tents have corners, and demons live in corners. Much better to live in nice round huts.”

“Did they tell you that?”

He nodded.

“Why didn’t they tell me?”

“You’re a Ugandan,” he said. “They probably assumed you knew.”

“I left when I was a child,” she said irritably. “I can’t remember every little superstition they . . . we . . . have.” She paused. “I wish I knew why they confide in you and not in me.”

“Us subordinates know not to trust the big chief,” he said with a smile.

For a moment he thought she would explode with anger, but finally she laughed. “Anyway,” she added, “I’ve actually got two jerrycans of petrol and a radio. We’ll travel in style.”

And with enough room to bring back the villagers, whether they want to come or not. Assuming we don’t find them dead by the side of the road or such parts of them as the hyenas leave.

“What if they don’t want to come?”

“What happens to the children?” countered Elizabeth. “The old lady can’t do it all. It’s sad: Two daughters-in-law, both with children. Under normal circumstances, she’d have all the makings of an easy, honored old age. The daughters-in-law would do all the work for her.” She sighed deeply. “But now she’ll be tending them and bringing up the children until they get sick too.”

“Does she test positive?”

“She’s negative. But that’s not surprising. She lives a traditional lifestyle, and in her culture, women don’t have sex once they reach menopause. Besides, her husband died years ago. The son must have picked it up from his circumcision group, or maybe from some whore in Kampala or Entebbe.” She gestured to a beat-up flatbed truck at the far side of the compound. “Get your gear and let’s get this show on the road. I’ll wait for you at the truck.”

He joined her a few minutes later, climbed into the driver’s seat, put the vehicle in gear, and they were on their way.

The road wound in and out of the bush, passing through dozens of villages, many of them totally deserted, though it was impossible at first glance to determine whether they were empty due to war or AIDS.

“God, I hate these potholes!” muttered Jeremy, as the ride began doing painful things to his spine and kidneys.

“The locals play games, trying to figure out whose they are,” said Elizabeth with a bitter smile.

“Whose what are?” repeated Jeremy uncomprehendingly.

“The potholes,” she explained. “They try to guess whether they were made by Amin’s troops, or Nyerere’s, or Obote’s, or Okello’s, or Musaveti’s.”

“What a delightful way to spend your childhood,” said Jeremy wryly. “Trying to guess which homicidal monster destroyed the road through your village.”

“Musaveti’s a good man,” said Elizabeth adamantly. “And Nyerere is a saint.”

“Three out of five still isn’t good odds,” replied Jeremy.

“Especially when you have to live through it all.”

Elizabeth quickly grabbed her hat as another bump sent it flying toward her window. “We should reach the end of the tarmac pretty soon,” she said.

“It gets better then?”

“It’s much better right after the long rains. You can’t repair tarmac out here, but if it’s just holes in a dirt road, the rains will have leveled it out.”

“Nothing can level this road out,” said Jeremy devoutly. He looked out the side window just as the tarmac ended. The thornbush, which had been rapidly encroaching on both the savannah and the roadside shambas, had triumphed totally. The grass, which was green and endless a few miles back, now existed only in isolated pockets, and was dotted by the bones of dead wildebeest and kob. The red dust from the road obscured his vision, but he could see troops of vervet monkeys, plus an occasional red colobus, scampering through the trees and observing the strange-sounding foul-smelling vehicle from the safety of the branches.

As the truck slowed down to cross a lugga—a dry riverbed—Jeremy saw a figure disappearing into the thornscrub some fifty yards off to his right.

“What is it?” asked Elizabeth as Jeremy brought the truck to a halt.

“There’s something back there.”

“What?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He paused and frowned. “I think it was a woman or a child; it was too small to be a man.”

She shrugged. “Nothing unusual about that. Uganda’s got a lot of people and a lot of bush. You tend to find the one in the other.”

“Stop patronizing me,” he said irritably.

“Then stop belaboring the obvious,” she replied. “You saw a woman in the bush.”

“There was something funny, though.”

“Funny ha-ha, or funny strange?” she asked.

“Funny strange.”

“What?”

He paused uncomfortably. “I only caught a quick glimpse of her or him but . . .”

“But what?” she persisted.

“She walked like her feet hurt, and nobody in Africa walks like that.”

“Maybe she cut her foot.”

“The average African spends his whole life walking barefoot on rocks and in thornbush country. I don’t think you could cut his foot open with a knife.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “I cut my own foot just two days ago.”

“You’re not the average African,” he retorted. “You spent most your life in Europe and America.”

She ignored his comment, picked up the binoculars, and held them to her eyes. “There’s nothing out there. Probably it was a heat mirage. Or maybe the glare on the windshield made you think you saw a woman instead of a tree.”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

Or maybe his eyes could be starting to go except that it was way too early in the disease cycle for him to hallucinate. And besides, he didn’t have the disease yet.

Jeremy continued looking out the window as he started driving again. He spotted a pair of silver-backed jackals, and a few minutes later he had to swerve to avoid a family of hyenas that were fighting over the remains of a small duiker, but there was no sign of the small figure he had seen. Or thought he had seen.

He noticed that sweat was starting to pour down his body, and he transferred the letter to another pocket to keep it dry.

“What is that?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing,” he replied. “Just a letter from an old friend.”

“You haven’t opened it yet.”

“I’ll get around to it.”

“Would you like me to read it to you while you’re driving?” she offered.

“Not necessary,” he said.

“It’s no trouble.”

“No.”

They came to another village. There were sixteen hatched huts falling to ruin. Nearby was a large thorn boma for the cattle; next to it were four deserted shambas, the mango and banana trees fighting a losing battle for survival against the encroaching bush. The village had a well so that the people would not have to drink contaminated water. (Fat chance, thought Jeremy. The water in the nearby bilharzia-infested stream was crystal clear. The people would take one look at the safe brown water coming up from the borehole and opt for the stream every time.) There was only one problem: no people. Like so many other villages, it was completely deserted.

“I get so sick of seeing this,” remarked Elizabeth, gesturing toward the empty huts.

“Where to now?” asked Jeremy, staring ahead to where the road forked and went off in two directions.

“I’m not quite sure, but I seem to think we go to the northwest.”

She saw a strange beast, growling constantly and belching a foul-smelling smoke. It was like nothing she had ever experienced, strange and terrifying even for this strange and terrifying land. She quickly hid behind a thornbush and waited for it to gallop off.

The beast had a most unusual means of enticing its victims.

Instead of stealthily creeping up and then pouncing, like the great cats and canines, it showed her an image of a human very similar to herself. Doubtless she was expected to approach it out of curiosity, and it would open its slavering jaws and swallow her whole.

She would have to be prepared for this beast in the future, for she had much to do, and would doubtless encounter it again.

They managed to get lost, of course. After three days of punctured tires (five), false paths (eleven), bug bites (three million), and fraying tempers (beyond computation), the truck crashed out of the underbrush a scant twenty-six miles from where it had entered, and turned onto the narrow, almost overgrown track that was the best road Jeremy could find with sweat, map, frequently profane radio exchanges, and the occasional shout to any people they passed on the road.

“Look up ahead,” said Elizabeth, pointing.

As they approached a village, a thread of smoke curled upward, and a flock of birds flew overhead. Jeremy was used to children spotting his Land Rover and running ahead or alongside with wild shouts but for some reason the inhabitants of this village, even the children, silently watched the truck and then went about their business.

“What do you make of that?” asked Jeremy, frowning, as the truck crunches over the rough road.

“I don’t know,” said Elizabeth. “They know we’re bringing food and medicine. They should be swarming out to greet us.”

“Have you ever seen a reaction like this?”

“No,” she said, frowning. “Not even when I was a little girl.”

“They don’t act afraid,” he noted. “Just . . . I don’t know . . . wary.”

Next to one of the huts was a mound of heaped dirt. Even though it had been encircled by a crude fence that must have caused someone a lot of trouble to construct and erect, the ground was trampled, the clods scattered in places, as if something had tried to dig it up. Jeremy felt a muscle along his jaw jerk. They wouldn’t have had a whole lot of strength to spare to dig the man’s grave deep enough and there was always the problem of how to get out of the pit once it had been dug.

Two children squatted by the roadside, waving at him. When he waved back, they rose slowly. He thought he recognized them. They’d been fed in the camp for almost a week, but the long walk home had sweated the newly-gained weight off of them. Already their ribs were showing above their bellies, which, thank God, had at least not started to swell out in severe malnutrition’s dreadful parody of fat. Squatting outside the nearest hut, the healthier or rather, the least sick of the dead man’s young wives tended a few scrawny chickens. Beyond the huts, an emaciated ox raised its head at the newcomers, then went back to the all-important business of grazing the near-grassless land. The oldest child pushed at the ox, driving it toward two cows in equally poor condition.

Still, concluded Jeremy, these villagers were better off than a lot he had seen. They had posho from the relief center. They would have milk. They might even have eggs and meat. It was a wonder they had anything left at all. For years, this entire country had been little more than the scene of a crime that called itself a government and now, hardly a step up, it had become a plague site.

God help them all.

Tall and thin, her head high, the mother of the dead man appeared in a doorway. She had an infant in her arms, two others clinging to her legs. She walked over to the squatting woman and handed her the child. The younger woman opened her dress, and the child began to nurse or to try to.

“That’ll infect the baby!” Jeremy muttered.

“You want them to talk to us? Then be quiet!” Elizabeth got out of the truck, raised a hand in greeting and spoke in a formal Swahili, totally different from the “kitchen Swahili” Jeremy had learned. Jeremy killed the motor, opened the door, stepped down, and joined Elizabeth just as the woman raised a hand. Greetings should have gone on ceremoniously, with an invitation to a meal to follow, but there was little food and less time to spare, as her apologetic gestures seemed to indicate. Abruptly, she clapped her hands. The children scattered, disappearing into various huts to emerge wearing the ragged Michael Jordan T-shirts they had received each decorated with a loop of red ribbon. Jeremy grinned. He remembered giving out those ribbons and slipping a dime to one of the kids, who had lost a front tooth the day before. The Tooth Fairy comes to Uganda. Right. I’d grant you three wishes, kid, if I could.

“We know you mean well, Memsaab,” the old woman was saying, “but we have no faith in your magic. We prefer our own. That is why we came home.”

“But who will help you?” asked Elizabeth, trying to ignore the word ‘Memsaab’, which was only offered to whites and outsiders, never from one black Ugandan to another. “Your grandchildren are too young. Your son is dead, and his wives are sick. She paused. “It is not right that you live alone, without family to share your burdens.”

“I wish you would let us bring you back!” Jeremy blurted in English.

“Damn it, Jeremy!” hissed Elizabeth. “I know you mean well, but that’s an insult.”

The old woman turned to Jeremy. “My father is dead,” she said. “My husband is dead. My sons are dead. My grandsons are too young to give me orders. Uganda has been independent for 30 long rains. I will not take orders from you or any other European. I need no longer call you Bwana.”

When Jeremy had finally stammered an apology, Elizabeth took pity on him.

“Why don’t you unload the truck?” she suggested. That won her a look of awe from the old woman. For all her dedication, her Swahili, her attempt to make herself seem like a good daughter of the tribe, Elizabeth was still a European to them. She was all the more alien for being a black European and a woman who could give orders to men, especially white men, in this society where brides were still bought and sold.

“If you will have us—”

Instant protest, invitation, and apology followed in order: how could she doubt her welcome?

“We shall stay for a few days and observe the children. We can make ourselves useful to you.”

The woman smiled. Surprisingly, given her age and health, she still possessed most of her teeth, and they glinted in the sunlight.

“But I have help, Memsaab.” Elizabeth flinched. That word again. So much for Sisterhood and fitting in. “My bibi has come to help me.”

“Her baby?” asked Jeremy, trying to translate.

“Bibi is ‘mother’,” answered Elizabeth. “You’ve seen those signs in the burnt-out stores and dukas along the road to Kampala, the ones that say Babito? That’s a contraction, or actually an acronym, for Baba, Bibi, and Toto father, mother, and baby. In other words, stores for the whole family.” She paused. “Now please go unload the truck before you offend her again.”

Jeremy unloaded sack after sack of posho, the cornmeal that the Africans made into a porridge (and which Jeremy thought had the consistency and taste of library paste), and finally a precious box of powdered milk that they could use for the babies when (never if, only when) their mothers’ milk ran dry. If he had anything to say about it, they’d be drinking it now: if a mother was HIV positive, a baby could pick it up from breast milk if it hadn’t already contracted it in the womb.

Elizabeth Umurungi disappeared into the dark interior of the hut with her medical bag, leaving Jeremy standing outside. The children approached to watch him as he finished unloading the truck. Aware of their presence, he pocketed the keys, reached into the glove compartment, and slipped the revolver into his pocket. No sense putting temptation in their way.

When he walked to the door of the hut, Elizabeth and the old woman were kneeling beside a pallet that held the second wife. Jeremy remembered her from the relief center. He was surprised she had made it back alive.

“Get me some water,” Elizabeth ordered, not even bothering to turn around. “Rubbing alcohol too. We have to bring this fever down.”

One of the children immediately ran off to obey this not-quite-stranger with her shiny instruments and her way of commanding a man taller and stronger than their father had been. When the child sloshed back with a tin pan filled with dubiously clean water, Jeremy carried it and the rubbing alcohol inside.

Elizabeth sponged the woman on the pallet, while the other woman hovered and tried to sooth the patient. The sick woman’s face glowed, the life flickering in it like embers in an ebony lantern, building, flaring up . . . At any moment, he thought it would surely burn out into darkness.

“Help hold her still!” Elizabeth ordered when the patient began thrashing, and Jeremy, who had always worn sweatbands and gloves when working out in his West Side gym, leapt to obey.

When they finished, the old woman held her daughter-in-law against her shoulder while Elizabeth brought out a syringe and administered it.

Of the old woman’s “bibi”, there was no sign at all. Probably she was too shy or too frightened to even look at the strangers; Jeremy didn’t envy Elizabeth the task of coaxing her out where she could be examined.

Jeremy paused, sleeping bag in hand, and looked around the hut that had been allotted them. He was used to sweat blotching his shirts the instant he put them on. He was used to insects, used to animals, used to taking care of people in ways that would have made the men on the trading desk pass out. But the dark, claustrophobic hut with its long-unswept floor, its hovering, whining flies his imagination conjured up sleeping sickness, yellow fever, and typhoid for starters, and then began dwelling on more exotic diseases.

Elizabeth simply shrugged and spread her sleeping bag out on the floor. Maybe it was only dried mud, but it certainly smelled like cow dung.

Dinner had come and gone a scrawny chicken. They had protested that they had their own supplies, they could perfectly well feed themselves and everyone else; but the chicken had been killed and stewed, and they had had to eat it with every evidence of appreciation for the sacrifice it represented. Despite reprimands from mother and grandmother to let their guests eat in peace, Jeremy managed to feed at least half his dinner to the kids. He felt like a guilty child himself, feeding the family dog beneath the table, and then felt even guiltier for equating these starving children to household pets. It was a feast to them, and when their faces shone with the meager fat from the chicken skin, they started to yawn and soon wandered off.

Elizabeth and Jeremy left the hut and sat outside it, poking at a fire Jeremy had insisted on building. He promised himself that tomorrow he’d show the children how to toast things on it, wondering what he could substitute for marshmallows. He pulled out Ray’s letter, studied it thoughtfully, and then placed it back in his pocket, unopened.

Beyond the circle of the village and its tiny fields, darker than the night sky, lay uncleared land. The forest was coming back after the devastation of the past decades, and slowly, the wild creatures were returning. A hyena giggled maniacally, a lion coughed, and far off in the distance hippos grunted and bellowed.

Elizabeth picked up a green branch and maneuvered a few smoldering logs. They suddenly burst into flame, and a shower of sparks rose into the dark African sky.

“Where did you learn to tend a fire?” asked Jeremy, whose camp duty it was to build fires.

For an instant, her eyes lit with humor. “In Girl Guides,” she answered with a smile.

“Certainly not in the bush.” Jeremy forced himself not to grimace. He still held his rolled-up sleeping bag. “Are you going to hang onto that security blanket all night?” she asked.

“Why don’t I sleep out in the truck?” he suggested. “More proper for the hired hand, wouldn’t you say?”

“Whatever makes you happy,” said Elizabeth. “Those kids look like they’d love to spend the night talking with you.” It was obvious that she would much rather have been able to say “us” than “you”. Suddenly she swatted a tsetse fly with surgical efficiency. It lay still for a minute, then got to its feet and groggily walked off.

“Nobody ever told me they were armor-plated until I got here,” said Jeremy, staring ruefully at the fly.

“If they get any worse, I may join you. We can take turns standing guard.” She sighed deeply. “I wish we had some light,” she continued. “Better than the firelight, I mean. I’d like to run some tests on that woman. She ought to be dead from that fever she had a body temp of at least 105.”

“She was burning up,” Jeremy agreed. “I thought I’d be digging a grave.” He had been so careful to restrain the sick woman’s flailing hands. Face it: he had been afraid, just as he’d been every day since he came here. With every patient he touched, he faced the question: are you the one who’ll kick my T-cells out of balance? Will your AIDS be the death of me, too?

It was no different for him than for the other relief workers. He knew that. He was no one special. But he was ashamed to ask if the others were afraid, too.

“Did you see?” asked Elizabeth. At least, she could escape into the discipline of her profession. She could do something. “Her lesions actually seem to be shrinking.”

There was a drug on the market that reduced lesions chicken pox or Kaposi’s sarcoma, it made no difference but it was so expensive they’d need the treasure of King Solomon’s mines to pay for it.

“Any chance of remission?” Jeremy kept his face out of the firelight so she wouldn’t see the wild hope that heated it. At least, he hoped it was hope and not the first episode of night sweats.

Elizabeth put a hand out and gently touched his arm. “God only knows,” she said softly. “There’s always a chance, Jeremy. Always. And you’re a non-progressor. Every day, every month that you hold out increases the chances of a cure, and gives us more time to study you. When we get back to the compound, I’ll test your blood again.” She paused. “I wish we could bring her back. And I wish the old lady’s bibi would show up. You know, they tell me she cured one of the other villagers. They say he was dying of AIDS. That can’t be true, of course, but I’d still love to learn her methods.”

“Don’t tell me you believe in witch doctors?” asked Jeremy with a smile.

“I don’t believe in all the superstition that goes along with it, but some of these folk healers have stumbled on medicines that are new to science. There are plants that no one has classified yet, and it’s a fair bet that some of them will be effective against certain diseases. There’s a Nobel Prize waiting for the scientist who brings back the right plants.” She stared at the fire. “Yes, I wish I could convince the old woman to introduce me to this bibi of hers. Who knows what we might learn from her?”

“Maybe after a few days, when they see we don’t mean any harm . . .” began Jeremy.

“They already know that, Jeremy,” said Elizabeth. “Half of them have been to the camp at one time or another.” She poked at the fire with the stick, silent for awhile. A sudden chorus of warning screams and barks from a troop of baboons told them that a leopard was in the neighborhood. The noise continued for a couple of minutes, growing gradually softer as the troop retreated higher up their trees and the leopard decided to seek other prey.

Jeremy fumbled again for the letter in his pocket, brought it out, stared at the once-familiar handwriting for perhaps the tenth time that day, and began to tuck it back into the pocket.

“You’re driving me crazy with that letter!” snapped Elizabeth. “Either read the bloody thing or throw it into the fire!”

“I don’t feel like reading it,” said Jeremy.

“Then I’ll read it!” she said, snatching it from him. She bent over and began reading aloud by firelight:

“Dear (that’s a joke) Jeremy:

“After I stopped shaking and walked out on you and got back
to the Keys, Bud wanted to head North after you with his AK. But

Steve said what the fuck, Bud tested clean no point throwing
away his life along with yours and mine. And Steve’s. He’s real
sick. ARC pneumonia. He calls it ARC-light bombing when he’s got
enough breath to talk. I’ve moved in with the two of them to try
to help out. Money goes farther that way, and I like to think I’m
useful. It’s hard to watch him come apart and know this is how

I’m going to end up.

“Then I think it’s how you’re going to end up too, and it’s not so bad. For once, you’re not going to be able to weasel your way out of something. Only you call it negotiating, don’t you? It’s part of that important stuff, like attention to detail and execution, that makes you such a big success on the Street. Wall, that is, not 42nd, where they sell themselves another way. Not much difference, is there, when you come right down to it? Talk about ‘execution’ you’ve sure executed the two of us like a pro.

“ ‘We can fight this,’ you said. Maybe you can turn what’s left of your life into a holy crusade against this thing you gave me. Me, I just want to live what years I’ve got left. In a way, I envy Steve. He’s out of it now, and he’s got Bud with him. I don’t know what Bud’ll do after he goes. Write, maybe. I’m using his computer. Don’t mind the spelling mistakes. Bud’s trying to get some rest, and if he knew I was writing to you, he’d probably pitch a fit..

“ ‘Why in hell are you bothering? he’d ask. For one thing, I want you to know what you’ve done.

“And I wanted to return these cufflinks to you. Bud was all for pawning them, sending you the ticket, and throwing one hell of a party, but that was always your job, wasn’t it? With your Platinum Card, easy come, easy go, right? I don’t want to drink your booze, and I don’t want my friends to, either. And I don’t want to keep these things around. I saw the catalog you ordered them from. 18 karat gold. I know what you paid. You must have been out of your mind.

“You want to look right, you said. You belong here. You belong with me. Dammit, if I belonged with you, why didn’t you ever bring me home? I saw that picture of your folks you hide in your desk. They look nice. Your father he’s a big guy, maybe big enough to take in another son. Maybe he even valued the one he had you, never mind the clone you stitched up out of bits of grad school, F. Scott FitzGerald, and The New Yorker, or whatever the hell. Instead, Tiffany cufflinks. And the bloody Hamptons and why don’t I move up to the City from the Keys, full-time, and take the goddamned Series 7 and you’d help me find a job. Then I could dress up and go to banquets for Greg Louganis or something with you and get my name on program committees. And if you died first, then I’d be the right kind of person to be written up as ‘companion of’ in The New York Times obituary section with all the other guys who are dying too damn young.

“No, thanks.

“You said I was the best thing that ever happened to you. But that wasn’t good enough. You had to play around and go test positive for HIV and give that to me, too.

“Careless, that’s what you are. Stupidly, killingly careless. Like the rules don’t apply to you. I saw how your friends act when you’re not looking or maybe you don’t care. They stiff waiters. They cut lines. They shout at people on the phones, people who can’t shout back because they need their jobs.

You probably even barged into the doctor’s for your blood test ahead of six other people who had to wait even longer because you were there and you were important.

“Well, it’s going to get you too, Jeremy Harris, just like it’s getting the guy with TB on the street corner, wishing to hell he was dying down here where it’s warm.

“Besides, I want to return the cufflinks because I don’t want to get to the point where I have to pawn them and use the money. I wasn’t smart, like you, at making money. Never had all that much. With luck, when I go, I’ll go quick. If not, I plan to be somewhere warm, somewhere maybe people will take care of me.

That’s why I left New York. When Steve’s gone, I’ll probably head even farther south.

“If I had folks I was alive to, I’d go home to them, maybe, not hide their picture.

“It doesn’t matter a whole hell of a lot. State of mind is important, though; that’s what Steve’s doctors said when they sent him home. We’re not hoping for a miracle cure. He hasn’t got a whole lot of time left, and no one knows that better than he does. But he’s happier with his partner around and his garden and his boat in sight we hauled it out in front of his window. He can hear the ocean, and sometimes, when he’s able to eat, one of us goes and catches him a fish.

“So here’s the cufflinks. Keep ’em, throw ’em away, or pay Tiffany’s to change the monogram for the next sucker. No use wasting good stuff.

“Steve just woke up. Got to go in a minute. Bud yelled in from his room, ‘If you’re writing to Jeremy, tell the sonofabitch to get a life.’

“You had one. You threw it away. It couldn’t happen to you: you were important. You were privileged. Well, it did, and now you’ve thrown away my life too. Get a life, for as long as you can. That’s what I plan to do. So I’m going to live as much as I can. First, I’m taking care of Steve. Did you ever help anyone up close? I’m not talking about writing checks and handing out cufflinks. It’s kind of a mess, only helping someone who’s that sick makes you feel . . . it’s like you respect yourself. You know, I didn’t for awhile there. You were paying the bills. I had to go along, I thought. But I hated it.

“Don’t try to get in touch. This isn’t something you can negotiate until you talk me around. I know you’re better at it than I am. Thing is, as long as I don’t see you, I can remember the good things. But if I see you, I know I’ll get mad all over again. And scared, just like when I first heard, and I prayed fora heart attack right then and there so I wouldn’t have to go through what I know lies up ahead.

“Don’t look for me. Don’t even think about me. You know the old line, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’ ? Right now, I think that if I saw you, I’d kill you or die trying.

And there’d go the few years I’ve got left. I’m not willing to throw them away too.

“Get a life, Jeremy. If you know how.

“Raymond”

Elizabeth stopped, her eyes glittering in the firelight. She was silent for a long time. Then she looked up. “I don’t know what to say . . .”

“Maybe now you understand why I didn’t want to know what was in it,” he said bitterly.

“It’s a terrible burden to carry,” she acknowledged. “But you’re not the only one this has happened to.”

“That’s a damned arrogant thing to say. At least you were able to come back here . . .”

She moved abruptly, then stopped. It was as if she wanted to take his letter and his idiotic defensive statement and toss the whole lot into the fire. “I didn’t mean to come back alone. I wasn’t alone in Paris. Ever. I could have had anyone. Bankers, oil men, Frenchmen whose blood was so blue it was a wonder they could still breathe.” She sighed. “What I chose was Paul. That was his Western name, the one he used in medical school. He was an Ibo.”

Jeremy shut his eyes as he considered this revelation. Achole and Ibo. Elizabeth would have had about as much in common with Paul as if she’d been a nice Jewish girl who fell in love with Moammar Quadafi.

“Sorry,” he muttered. At this rate, he’d have to make a tape or something: “Jeremy Harris His Greatest Apologies!” and play it as needed.

A hippo grunted, much closer than before, and Jeremy peered into the dark, trying to spot it with no success. They weren’t carnivores, but they killed a lot of people who got in their way at nights.

Elizabeth spat on the ground, all the chic, all the European gone from her for a moment. “We had such plans. He was going to establish the best medical clinic in Africa, and I would be a high-profile spokeswoman or fund-raiser, probably both. We were going to be a bridge between the nations, Paul and I and since he was the man, and that counts for more than you can imagine on this continent, we set up shop in his country.” She sighed, and her shoulders looked bony, not elegant, not any more. “I tried. I did my best. I stuck it out long enough to be called a useless Achole bitch.”

“By him?”

“By everyone. Including him.”

Jeremy wanted to reach for the letter, but managed to control himself. “Then what?”

“I applied to medical school myself. My O-levels were good. I’d taken a First in university. Given Harvard’s admission policies, I knew I could get in as a special student, then move on to med school. When I was done, I took my money and built the relief camp, and cajoled a few doctors into coming back to Uganda, and sold space to a few people like you, who were willing to pay to work here for whatever their personal reasons.” She paused. “It was important to me when the camp became a reality. I collected all my clippings and sent them to Paul.”

“Where is he now?”

“Nigeria. Or maybe hell, for all I know. There’s not much difference between the two. I read last month that there’s yet another revolution there; maybe they’ll shoot him this time.” Again she poked at the fire. Jeremy watched her face in the flickering firelight. All I ever saw before tonight was the model’s looks and the cool, competent exterior, he mused. I guess we’re all of us trapped inside our bodies. Even someone as beautiful and accomplished as Elizabeth, “Nigeria will do just fine without him,” she concluded after a long silence. “It doesn’t need a savior.” She stared into the fire again. “I just wish I knew why Uganda is cursed.”

“Uganda’s not unique,” replied Jeremy. “All the African countries have AIDS.”

“We’re unique,” she said adamently. “First Amin, then the other butchers, and now this. You know, Kenya has a high HIV incidence, almost as high as ours but their people aren’t dying like ours. I’ve even heard former colonials in Nairobi, sitting at their lily-white bars and restaurants, complaining about it.

They thought AIDS would return Kenya to them, but hardly anyone’s dying and they feel cheated! And here, right next door, in the most beautiful, fertile land on the continent, we’re lost entire villages.” A look of fury spread across her face. “It’s just not fair!”

“Maybe we should learn from other countries instead of resenting them,” said Jeremy, while deep within him a tiny voice protested in outrage. “Their time will come,” she replied. “What we need is more information. Sooner or later, we’re going to find out what it is about non-progressors that makes them fight the disease better. Sooner or later, we’re going to find someone with natural immunity . . .”

“God help the poor sucker,” said Jeremy. “You’ll make a lab rat out of him for sure.”

A rich lab rat. A celebrity lab rat. There’d be fortunes to be made from an AIDS vaccine if you’d lost enough of your soul to charge what the market would bear. The market, of course, being guys like him, not women like the ones lying two huts over, fighting off fever and the long defeat of their lives.

“Or her,” she replied. “Who knows? Maybe this old woman’s mother is the one. She’s certainly lived long enough.”

“So where is she?”

“Who knows?” Elizabeth frowned. “I’ve been away a long time.

My clothing’s wrong, my accent’s wrong, even my magic’s wrong.

They don’t trust me.”

They sat in silence by the flickering firelight for a few more moments. Finally Elizabeth yawned, stretching like one of the children. Jeremy smiled at her. I’m sorry that you hurt, but I like you even better now that I know you’re human. Maybe he and Elizabeth could adopt each other or something. He could be Uncle Jeremy to any children she would eventually have. If he lived long enough to see her meet a man with more sense than Paul.

Not wisely, but too well, Jeremy thought. That went for both of them.

“I really am going to bunk in the truck,” he said, picking up his sleeping bag. “The hut’s too stuffy for me, even if does get cold out here, and this way I can keep an eye on things.”

“While you’re sound asleep?” asked Elizabeth. He’d rather hoped she’d be too sleepy to be sarcastic.

“Good night,” he told her and trudged wearily toward the battered truck. He spread out his bedding on the back of the truck. If anything tried to get him, he’d at least hear it coming, and he still had the pistol, just in case.

Jeremy jolted instantly awake, his heart pounding, his body drenched. But this wasn’t fever.

Something was watching him.

He forced himself back into stillness, keeping his eyes shut.

His hand, hidden beneath his head, gently released the safety on the pistol. Leopard or bandit or whatever, whatever tried to attack him was going to be very, very surprised, and then very, very dead.

Steady there. Play possum. He slowly opened his eyes. When they adjusted to the darkness, he glanced stealthily about. A tiny blot of shadow detached itself from the doorway of the sick woman’s hut and paused, staring at the truck.

Dammit, those kids had no business wandering around here at night! He’d seen the fence around the old man’s grave. Maybe the local scavengers would like live meat for a change. The children seemed eager to provide it.

You know perfectly well why their mothers can’t watch the kids, he told himself. They’re sick or they’re dying. Probably both. Never mind what Elizabeth had said about miracles. The fact that her parents had survived the madness of Idi Amin had made her a cock-eyed optimist.

He’d give the kid five minutes, Jeremy decided. Five. If it didn’t do its business in the bush or wherever, then go back into the hut, he personally would escort it back to its mother.

Wait. Don’t move.

The shadow detached itself from the shelter of the hut and moved out into the clearing, toward the fenced-in grave. It squatted there, and Jeremy could see the tremors that shook it. No, shook her. Had one of the little ones been a girl? He couldn’t remember. There’d been so many children, each to be greeted with a grin and a loop of scarlet ribbon as long as supplies held out, that sometimes he didn’t look at them as the individuals they were or that they would grow into if they lucked out and lived.

This was a girl, barely four feet tall. Much too small to be out alone. He gathered himself to leap down from the truck and take the child in charge.

Not yet.

The child’s shoulders shook. Why, she’s crying for her father! Jeremy’s own eyes filled. He blinked frantically, and when his sight cleared, he found that the child had turned around.

And it was no child.

It had the face of a withered old woman with eyes that seemed filled with love and compassion.

This is crazy! Africa’s finally got to me. I must be hallucinating. How can you look at a pair of eyes, especially in that ancient face, and read compassion or anything else into them?

A cough came from the darkness of the forest, a cough and a rush of paws, followed by a squall of pure rage as the child with the ancient face beat at the predator with a club. Finally Jeremy could make out her attacker: a small, scrawny leopard, made bold by its hunger.

No time for waiting now. Jeremy grabbed for the pistol, aimed as best he could, and fired.

The explosion woke up the village. Jeremy built a huge fire and reconnoitered, pursued by Elizabeth’s ironic comments about mighty hunters. A trail of blood and pawprints led back to the bush and vanished there. Upon returning, he insisted on seeing all the children and counting them, and trying fruitlessly to determine which of them had been the one that had beaten off the leopard.

Gradually, the infants stopped screaming. The sick woman in the hut stopped moaning for “Bibi”. She even consented to drink some broth and put on a T-shirt that had been donated by Elizabeth.

Finally the village quieted down and went back to sleep. After a long, long while, so did Jeremy. If anyone ventured outside, he didn’t hear it or anything else.

In the morning, he found that the truck’s radio and spark plugs were missing.

“Why would anyone take them?” he asked Elizabeth. “It’s not as if this was telephone wire or something they could use for ornaments. The radio’s no good to anyone without a power source, and the plugs are totally useless unless someone thought they’d look cute stuck through his ears.” He paused. “If they don’t turn up, we’re in deep shit: no transportation and no way of calling for help.”

“All we can do is ask,” replied Elizabeth wearily.

She walked over to the old woman’s hut and entered it.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile as the old woman looked up from the daughter-in-law she had been tending.

“Jambo, Memsaab,” responded the woman.

“That is a very formal greeting. I would much rather you called me Elizabeth.”

“But you are always formal, and don’t call me by my name,” the old woman pointed out.

“I apologize, Maroka,” said Elizabeth. “I did not mean to offend.”

“I am sure you did not.” Maroka reached out and touched Elizabeth’s arm gently. “You are a good person, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth finally looked down at the younger woman and almost did a double-take. Her eyes were alert and animated, and she was no longer covered with sweat. Elizabeth reached out a hand, feeling for signs of the fever, and finding none.

“Has she eaten?”

“Yes, Elizabeth,” answered Maroka. “She has had posho and milk. She asked for pombe, but I decided she should not have any until tomorrow.”

Elizabeth examined the young woman for another few minutes, then straightened up. “It’s amazing,” she said at last. “My medicine has never been able to do this before.”

“Your medicine did not save her,” said Maroka. “It was Bibi’s magic.”

“Bibi came here last night?” asked Elizabeth.

“Yes.”

“Where is she now?”

“Hiding,” answered Maroka. “She is shy of strangers. She will be back after you have left.”

Elizabeth glanced out the door, wondering where Bibi might be. Then her eyes fell on the truck, and she remembered the purpose of her visit.

“There is a problem, Maroka,” she said. “This morning we have found that certain things are missing from the truck. We must have them back, or the truck will not run.”

“A monkey took them, Elizabeth,” suggested Maroka. “Or perhaps a baboon.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you have many other villages to visit, and nobody in this village would want to keep you from your work. We know it is important.”

Elizabeth frowned. In a culture where no one ever spoke harshly or said anything unpleasant, Maroka’s answer was the closest she would come to: “Because we don’t want you here, and would never do anything to keep you from leaving.”

“We still have food and medicine to give you,” said Elizabeth.

“We have food, so it is best that your food go to a less fortunate village,” replied Maroka.

“And we have no need of your medicine. Bibi’s magic is much stronger.”

“I really want to meet her,” said Elizabeth, “and learn about her magic.”

“I think she is afraid of you.”

“Please help me,” said Elizabeth earnestly. “She is an old woman who will probably never travel ten miles from here. Whatever magic she performs is needed all across Uganda.”

Maroka paused and considered what she had heard. “That is true,” she said at last. “I will tell her what you said, Elizabeth.”

“Thank you.”

“But I do not think she will come.”

“Please ask her anyway,” said Elizabeth. She inspected the younger woman one more time and then left the hut. She rejoined Jeremy, who was still rummaging under the hood of the truck, searching for further damage.

“Well?” he asked. “Does she know where our spark plugs and radio are?”

“I can’t be sure, but I don’t think so,” said Elizabeth.

“It took you fifteen minutes to come to that conclusion?” he asked sardonically.

“It took fifteen seconds,” she said. “The rest of the time we talked about medicine. Or magic.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“That young woman the one I thought would be dead by today—is one hundred percent better.”

“What did you give her?” asked Jeremy.

“Nothing I haven’t given hundreds of other patients,” said Elizabeth, frowning. “I’m thrilled that she’s recovering but everything I know about medicine says she shouldn’t be.”

“And they think it’s magic?” asked Jeremy. “Even though they saw you administer the medications?”

“Evidently Bibi came by last night and laid a spell on her,” said Elizabeth.

“A spell?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “A leaf. A plant. Some kind of flower. I don’t know what. But Maroka’s convinced that she’s the one who saved the young woman.” Elizabeth frowned. “Hell, for all I know, Maroka’s right. That’s why I want to find her, even more than I want to find our spark plugs. If this woman has stumbled on some kind of miracle cure, I want to know about it.”

“Maybe they’re right,” said Jeremy. “Maybe it is magic.”

“Nonsense!” she snapped. “There’s no such thing!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jeremy. “To create penicillin out of bread mold seems like magic to me. Or to take a piece of silicon and make it think faster and more accurately than a man, that’s magic too. You’re too concerned with process, Elizabeth, when it’s the result that counts. If the old lady’s mother can cure people by magic or any other means, I’d bring her a batch of sick people instead of trying to steal her secrets.”

“I don’t like what you’re accusing me of, Jeremy,” said Elizabeth sharply. “All I want to know is what she’s doing to make them well if indeed she’s doing anything at all and then I want to find out how to synthesize it, bottle it and distribute it.”

“Maybe it can’t be done.”

“You give me the facts, and I’ll do it.”

“To quote Don Quixote, facts are the enemies of truth.”

“That’s romantic drivel,” said Elizabeth. “Facts are all there is.”

“Not around here,” he replied.

“Oh?”

He smiled. “Ask the villagers: There’s magic, too.”

“Are you trying to be argumentative?” she demanded.

“Some unseen old lady may be going around curing people of AIDS,” answered Jeremy. “All you’re concerned with is how she does it, and all I’m concerned with is getting her to do it again. Now, if that’s argumentative . . .”

“No,” replied Elizabeth thoughtfully. “No, I suppose it isn’t, really. You’ve got a vested interest in being cured; I’ve got one in finding out how to cure people. Our approaches are bound to differ.”

“I grew up on Peter Pan and Mother Goose and Mowgli and Oz, and you grew up with facts and figures and slaughtered villages,” replied Jeremy. “Of course our approaches are different.”

“You simply will not understand!” she said irritably.

“No,” he admitted. “But show me a cure and I might believe.”

She angrily turned away from him and strode off into the village, where a clap of her hands summoned all the children from their huts. Those few who were wearing clothes twisted them as they stood in a ragged, uneasy line, expecting the worst from the two strangers, one white and one black.

“All right, believer,” said Elizabeth to Jeremy. “You can tell them what we lost.” It would be a stretch in kitchen Swahili, but walking back to the relief camp was a far less attractive alternative.

A few adults gathered around to chuckle in amusement at Jeremy’s awkward descriptions of the things that were missing. The children’s eyes simply widened and they looked from one to another.

Then Elizabeth walked up and down the row of children, studying each in turn. Finally she stopped before the tallest of the boys, who had long since outgrown his Michael Jordan t-shirt and was wearing a filthy, tattered Muhammed Ali t-shirt from another era.

“You know, don’t you?” she said. “I can see it on your face. You know who took those things.”

The boy’s bare feet scuffed in the dust. He muttered something.

“I can’t hear you,” said Elizabeth.

“Bibi took them.”

“His mother?” interjected Jeremy, puzzled.

“Perhaps,” answered Elizabeth. “In formal Swahili, bibi can also mean grandmother.”

“You mean Maroka?” asked Jeremy, surprised.

There were indignant protests from the healthier of the two wives, who had come out to watch. From Maroka there was only a haughty lift of the head. Elizabeth turned back to the child. “I want you to tell me where our things are. We can’t go home without them.”

More sidelong, wary glances, child to child.

Elizabeth left the boy and stopped in front of a girl who was no more than six or seven years old. She didn’t say a word, just stared at her. The girl kicked the red dirt nervously with her bare feet and refused to meet Elizabeth’s gaze.

“Do you know?” Elizabeth finally asked her.

“She said not to tell.”

“Who said not to tell . . . and why?”

The little girl looked up, and then spoke in a rush. “Bibi. She says your hearts are good, because you wish to help. But she also says if we stayed in your village, we would have all gotten sicker. If we had left earlier, my father would still be alive.”

“But that’s not true!” protested Elizabeth.

“Bibi says it is,” said the girl, staring unblinking into Elizabeth’s eyes.

Elizabeth kept trying, but after a few minutes it became obvious that the children would not disobey Bibi and reveal where the missing parts were hidden.

Elizabeth exchanged a quick, frustrated glance with Jeremy. “Beautiful Uganda, land of my people, where no good deed goes unpunished,” she murmured.

Jeremy was almost as depressed as he had been when the results of his initial bloodwork had come back. Radios, if mistreated, could be cranky, and there was a limit to the truck’s ability to sit outside without maintenance. Let it be exceeded, and even if they found their equipment, they’d still be stranded in this tiny village.

“Well,” said Elizabeth, “I may as well make my morning rounds.” She grimaced in Jeremy’s direction. “Are you ready for an unscientific opinion?”

“It’s my favorite kind.”

“Personally, I think this whole goddamned village needs to have its collective head examined.”

The day passed uneventfully, and as the huge sun went down, Jeremy summoned the energy from somewhere to gather wood for a fire. The children were busy gathering firewood and water, and putting the chickens in their coops, which would be hung from nearby trees. Jeremy watched Elizabeth’s friendly overtures met with polite coolness, as the villagers decided that black skin and a knowledge of Buganda did not make her one of them.

He considered the missing equipment for the hundredth time.

They couldn’t count on anyone arriving here except by accident. They had to persuade the thief to give back the radio and the spark plugs.

Elizabeth emerged from a hut and walked over to join Jeremy. “I must have misdiagnosed that woman,” she said, puzzled. “She showed all the classic signs, and I thought her fever would finish her off in a matter of hours. But she’s no more an AIDS victim than I am. Hell, even that case of thrush she had is clearing up.” She shook her head. “Maroka wants to make her sit up tomorrow. I suppose she’s right; the sooner she’s back on her feet, the better.”

“Who will watch her until she can go back out in the fields?”

Elizabeth shrugged. “We still haven’t seen Bibi; given her age, that’d be a good job for her.” She paused. “You know, that’s another reason I’d like to get out of here; the poor thing’s so scared of us she’s hiding out in the bush. I didn’t come here to turn some poor woman out of her house and put her at the mercy of the hyenas.”

She seemed about to say something more, then changed her mind and headed off to her sleeping hut.

Darkness descended, and Jeremy soon fell asleep on the back of the truck. When he woke in the morning, the crimson ribbon was missing from his shirt.

Interesting. He climbed down, swallowed his pills, cut himself a fresh ribbon, and put the much-diminished spool into a hip pocket, just in case.

And suddenly he knew that he was being watched. He found himself glancing over his shoulder, watching the long sharp shadows in case some tiny fragment broke off from one of them and headed for the truck or the fields or the deep bush.

When he paused to wipe his face after splashing it with some water, the sense of being watched grew even stronger. Once or twice, he caught a flicker of motion on the far side of a clearing, at the edge of his vision.

Maroka’s bibi? He hadn’t gotten a good look at her, but he couldn’t imagine who else it could be. He set off across the clearing, and soon spotted some footprints in the dust. They were small enough to be the prints of a child, but they were deep, as if the person they belonged to was carrying something heavy.

They led him deeper and deeper into the bush. Soon the vegetation had closed around him. He could hear the chirping of birds and the buzzing of insects, but the only motion he could see was the slight swaying of leaves in the hot breeze. He could almost imagine that he was some stone-age man, pushing his way through the bush in pursuit of his dinner; surely the terrain hadn’t looked much different even a million years ago.

A hyena giggled in the distance; in Jeremy’s mind it became a 300-pound hyenadon. A vulture circled lazily overhead; he pretended it was a pteradactyl.

He was still imagining a distant past and a more physically imposing version of himself when suddenly he came upon a clearing. A huge dead tree had fallen down he imagined that a mastodon had pushed it over and a nearby termite mound towered some twenty feet above the ground.

Then, suddenly, he became aware of a cluster of children, and saw the baby—(and how had they let the kids take it out of the hut?)—in the arms of what looked like another child.

That is, it looked like another child until he got a glimpse of its wizened face. It was a female, no question about it, for she was nursing the infant. Her skin seemed incredibly ancient, not so much lined as engraved with seams. The sparse hair surrounding it, growing far down on her low brow, was white. But the smile on her lips as she looked down at the baby was very beautiful and oddly familiar.

I’ve seen you before, I know I have. But where?

Jeremy took a step toward her. A dry twig snapped beneath his foot and a dozen birds burst from cover while overhead a family of colobus monkeys began shrieking. The woman with the ancient face jumped, startled. Then she laid the baby down on a piece of red cloth and fled into the bush. The infant, deprived of his milk, promptly began howling.

“Come on, Bibi!” he wanted to yell after her. “Can a sick, skinny American be that frightening?”

By the time Jeremy had helped soothe the infant, placing it in the eldest girl’s arms and coaxing all of them to believe he wasn’t some sort of monster just because the old woman had fled, he had gotten his thoughts and his memory in order.

One summer, just for a change, he had rented a place on Nantucket, not the Hamptons: a shabby, ramshackle, desirable home that had cost him a bundle. It had been a good summer, and he hadn’t begrudged a cent of it, despite about a week of rainy days. Along with the seafood, the sailing, and the whale watching, he’d had the whole old house to prowl through. And, in its attic, he’d found treasure indeed thirty years worth of National Geographics.

He’d loved that magazine ever since he was a child. In fact, he’d dreamed of being an explorer, maybe even a paleontologist or geochronologist until his Uncle Sid the executive vice president sat him down and explained the facts of life to him: student loans; grants; bottom lines. The best way probably the only way to participate in these expeditions was to fund them.

So he’d packed the dream away, but he’d kept up his subscription to National Geographic, joined the Nature Conservancy, and always made donations to the American Museum of Natural History. They were good causes and tax-deductible, but the real reason was that he loved them.

Now, those yellowed covers and fragile pages riffled in his imagination, and he remembered Dr. Donald Johanson’s discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, some 3.2 million years old. She was mankind’s ancestor, a tiny female Johanson had called Lucy after the Beatles’ record his staff had played incessantly during the dig.

And now he had seen her. Not as a mummified corpse or a pile of white bones, either.

He’d seen her as a living, breathing being. Nursing her great-to-the-Nth-power-grandchild. He even knew her name.

Bibi.

While everyone else was celebrating the miraculously-recovered young woman’s emergence from the hut in which she was expected to die, Jeremy wandered over to the truck and picked up his “bait”: a bowl of posho and some dried fruits.

There was no sense telling Elizabeth what he had seen or what he planned to do about it. She would give him so many rational explanations that he would have ended up believing her and not trying to entice the ancient woman back. So while Elizabeth lay deeply asleep within the hut, Jeremy laid out his traps on the back of the truck, then stretched out right beside them. He forced himself to close his eyes: moonlight would reflect off them, and it stood to reason that the superior senses of australopithecus . . . pitheca? . . . would spot it.

He waited.

And then it was morning, and the fruit was gone.

“It was her,” said Jeremy to Elizabeth. “I know it was!”

“Then what are you going to do sleep out in the truck again?”

He shook his head. “That’s my turf, and it makes her too cautious.”

“Surely you’re not going out into the bush at night!”

“You want your spark plugs back, don’t you?” he retorted.

“Not at the cost of your life.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Sure you will,” she said caustically. “If you don’t get totally lost, you’ll probably run into that leopard you shot.”

“He’s out of the area,” replied Jeremy.

“How do you know?”

“The baboons are quiet at night.”

She stared at him. “This is really stupid, Jeremy.”

“Probably,” he agreed. “But unless you have a better idea . . .”

She walked through the bush, eyes and ears alert to any danger. The animals were different from those she was used to smaller, but just as dangerous. She came to a small stream, checked carefully for predators, then squatted down, cupped a hand, and brought some of the life-giving liquid to her lips. A marabou stork landed a few feet away and she jumped.

Her first urge, now that she had satisfied her thirst, was to return to the cave she had found, where she would be safe for the night. But then the wind brought the scent of fruit to her nostrils, and she decided to investigate . . .

The moon had long set, and he was on the verge of drowsing off, his back against the thick bole of an acacia tree, when he finally saw that small, familiar figure steal out from a nearby bush across the clearing. It paused to stare at him, and Jeremy forced himself to remain motionless. Tiny shadows swung from her neck. As she came closer, Jeremy saw what it was: she or one of the children she tended had strung the spark plugs on a grass string, and she was wearing them as a necklace.

Come on, Sweetheart, he thought as his heart pounded. He had spread his treasures out on the ground: the red cloth in which the infant had been wrapped, some dried apricots, a bowl of posho, a long loop of scarlet ribbon. Come on! But the tiny creature paused, suddenly frightened. Please, he thought again, this time imploringly. Please, Bibi!

The figure turned toward him, lifting her head and straightening up, which set the spark-plug necklace to swaying once again. Then, attracted by the prizes he’d set out, she drew closer.

She recognized the cloth and snatched it to her breast, cradling it like an infant. She caught up a dried apricot and chewed it quickly, her eyes shining with pleasure. Then she reached for the strand of crimson ribbon.

Jeremy laid his hand down on the other end of the ribbon.

Bibi jumped back.

Jeremy leaned forward carefully. She had seen him with the women and children; she had to know that he wasn’t a threat. Still, she watched him carefully, never taking her eyes from his, never loosing her grip upon the ribbon.

That’s right. Think of the necklace you can make. Think of how it’ll delight the kids.

“Come on,” he whispered to her as he got slowly, carefully to his feet. Would she understand any speech at all? “Of course you want it. It’s pretty. I’ll trade you. This for . . .” he waved at the spark plug necklace in a gesture of let’s barter that might have been old when she was young.

The ancient woman backed away. Smart, aren’t you? Why bargain if you can get it for free? He tugged lightly on the length of ribbon, trying to draw it toward him, and her with it. She let herself be drawn and looked up into his face.

He was struck by her eyes. Even under the low, furrowed brow, they glowed with intelligence. This was not a “primate”; this was a person. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

You’ve seen me. I’m your friend. I shot the leopard.

“I really need those spark plugs,” he said softly. He leaned over, cautiously, maintaining the tension on the red ribbon. He was six feet tall to her four. A little further, a little longer—and his fingers closed on her arm.

He was strong, especially compared to her but she was wily. Even as she squalled with anger, she let him draw her closer. And then, with a smile of glee at her own cunning, she buried her sturdy, three-million-year-old teeth deep in his arm.

Jeremy let out a yelp of surprise and pain. Human bites were as nasty as those of the big cats, he’d heard, and even dirtier; but this bite burned like molten iron.

Goddammit! I thought you’d come to save your children, not kill them! Are we that disappointing to you? And then came a frightening thought:

God help me, I’ve contaminated her!

He realized that he was bleeding like the proverbial stuck pig, his arm was swelling, and the moonlight shone off some nasty red streaks had started to travel from the wound up toward his lymph nodes. He could hear his teeth chattering as he burned and shivered and tried to use his belt as a tourniquet.

Why, Bibi? You can’t have come across the endless eons just to bite a man who’s already dying. It doesn’t make any sense!

Then he blacked out.

The sky glittered as if it were filled with diamonds. More diamonds, or maybe sapphires, reflected off the brilliant surface of the lake. Or maybe it was an ocean. A white wake bisected it, and ripples shimmered, then evened out as the water calmed. Jeremy thrashed. He wanted to tell everyone that it was a good sign that the water was troubled, it meant that spirits were abroad, or afloat, or something. Anyhow, it meant that miracles could indeed happen, even to him. His arm burned; he ached all over; and his mouth tasted as if bats had roosted in it.

He thrashed and felt weights land on him, forcing him back down. He opened his eyes and saw Bibi, the infinitely loving mother of the race, up in that glittering sky, surrounded by a rainbow haze that turned into crystals even as he watched, then dropped down in showers of gems. Lucy in the sky, with diamonds.

And I thought it was just a song!

He’d been young once, without this treason in his blood and body; and he’d waterskiied in the Keys with guys as carefree as he himself. He’d linked arms and chanted, “The whole world’s watching!” So it was, and Bibi was watching too, her ugly, beautiful, infinitely loving face grave with concern.

“If you get sick, come home,” his parents had written, “and we’ll take care of you.”

That’s just what I’ve done, he wanted to say; I’ve come home, and the mother of us all is taking care of me.

Then he fell into a restless sleep in which he was walking, walking, always walking. He was walking not merely across the millennia but across goddamned millions of years toward someone who had cried out in pain. Toward a lot of someones. And he thought his heart would break from the effort and the sorrow.

Jeremy awoke, shivering, as three women sponged him down. A child’s voice piped up like rock music when the lead singer goes falsetto. He heard a cuff, and a cry, and the child was out of there.

In the muted grey light of a dawn he had never expected to see, he found Elizabeth Umurungi’s troubled eyes, much reddened, watching him. “If he doesn’t come out of this now . . .” he expected her to say. Instead, he could lip-read the words of the Rosary.

He cried at her sorrow. He imagined that someone took his hand in a warm grip, unlike any he had ever known. It drew him back across the years, across the gulf of sickness, fear, and death, out of the place where the sky dropped diamonds and back into the familiar smells and sounds of the tiny village.

Flies buzzed overhead, butting up against the hut’s thatched ceiling. Jeremy wrinkled his nose at the reek of antiseptic, so totally at odds with the homelier smells of animal dung, human sweat, and cooking fires. Not far away, water trickled into a metal basin . . . God, he was so thirsty! He tried to ask for water. Something between a croak and a whimper emerged from lips that cracked open with the effort.

Another voice echoed his. Someone went to the door and called. Shouts that might have been cheers sounded from outside.

“He’s coming around? Good! Stay with him.”

His eyes were so thoroughly gummed shut that it seemed to take an hour to open them. He flexed his fingers. Still all there. What about his other arm, the one Bibi had bitten?

Experimentally, he moved it, and flinched.

“I wouldn’t try that,” said Elizabeth. “You’ve been pretty sick. Bit of a reaction to the rabies vaccine. Or maybe the tetanus.”

The what?

“Maybe you can help me out,” continued Elizabeth. “I don’t know what got you. I just know I found you, swelling up like a balloon, blood oozing from your arm, and nothing in sight.”

“It was Bibi.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Elizabeth.

“It was Bibi, and she didn’t do it to hurt me,” whispered Jeremy weakly.

“Rubbish.”

“You’ll see,” said Jeremy. “Ask her yourself.”

“Why in the world would she come back here—especially if she bit you?”

“Because she’s worried about her son.”

“You’re not her son,” replied Elizabeth patiently, as if speaking to a child.

“We are all her children,” rasped Jeremy. “Somehow, she felt our pain, knew we were in trouble, and through means we’ll never understand, she did what any mother would do: she came to help us.”

“Jeremy, you’ve been delerious. You’re still not thinking rationally,” said Elizabeth. “She’s an old woman, that’s all. Possibly a bit retarded. And she’s probably mute; the children told me she used some form of sign language when she spoke to them.”

“She can speak,” said Jeremy with absolute conviction. “It’s just that no one can understand her language.”

“Oh?” said Elizabeth sardonically. “Just what language does she speak?”

“I don’t know,” murmured Jeremy. “It hasn’t been heard in three million years.”

“You’re sicker than I thought,” she said as he passed out again.

When he awoke, he felt good.

More than good. He felt better than he’d felt in years. For the first time since he’d contracted the virus, he felt ready to get up and seize the day.

And then, suddenly, the revelation hit him. He tried to sit up, but found he didn’t have the strength. A child looked in, saw him struggling, and called Elizabeth.

“What on earth is the matter with you, Jeremy?” she asked as she entered the hut.

“Nothing!” he said. “Absolutely nothing!”

She stared at him, puzzled.

“Don’t you understand?” he said excitedly. “There’s nothing wrong with me!”

“What are you talking about?”

“As soon as we get back to camp, I want you to run another blood test on me.”

She looked at him as if she expected him to foam at the mouth momentarily. “You don’t seriously believe that you’re no longer HIV positive, do you?”

“Just test me,” his voice reflecting his absolute conviction.

“There’s never been a single recorded case of a spontaneous cure, Jeremy.”

“It’s not spontaneous!” Jeremy said excitedly. “And no one records cures out here in the bush. She cured me, just like she’s cured so many others. That’s what she’s here for.”

“And just how do you think this old, illiterate woman, who is totally ignorant of all medicine and technology, cured your incurable disease?”

“She bit me.”

“You mean all I had to do all these months was bite you and you’d have become HIV negative?” said Elizabeth sarcastially.

“No. She had to do it.”

“She undoubtedly bit you because you scared her.”

A feeling of overwhelming fatigue swept over him, and he lay back on his pillow. “I feel very sorry for you,” he said.

“You feel sorry for me?” she repeated. “Why?”

“Because you know too many facts and too little truth,” he said as he struggled to remain awake. “You’ll test my blood, and because you don’t believe in Bibi, you’ll take two or three more samples before you acknowledge what your tests tell you.”

He could almost feel a rough, calloused hand run tenderly through his hair as he dropped off to sleep once more.

Jeremy was outside, chopping firewood, working up a sweat and feeling great about it, when Elizabeth called him over to her hut.

“What is it?” he asked when he arrived.

She held up the spark plugs, strung together on a thread of scarlet ribbon.

“What happened?”

“I left some costume jewelry outside the hut,” said Elizabeth. “She came during the night and accepted the trade.” She grimaced. “They cost me a cultured pearl necklace and a silver-plated bracelet.”

“I think both sides made a good trade,” said Jeremy. He looked across the village, past all the huts, toward the bush.

Thank you, Bibi. I will probably never see you again, but Iowe you my life, and I will dedicate it to helping your other children.

They had been back in camp for a day. Jeremy had put in a long morning tending patients and passing out food, and was sitting on a camp chair just outside his tent, reading a 10-month-old copy of The New Yorker, when Elizabeth appeared.

“I tested your blood,” she announced.

“And?”

“I couldn’t culture HIV from your blood if I had all the resources of the Mayo Clinic here.”

She paused and stared at him.

“You got your miracle, Jeremy. You’re clean. HIV negative.”

Suddenly tears welled up and spilled down his cheeks. For just an instant he thought he could feel Bibi’s hand tighten around his, a mother reassuring a child who has been desperately ill.

“I told you,” he said at last.

“I didn’t believe you then, and I don’t believe you now,” answered Elizabeth. “But whoever and whatever she is, she’s worth her weight in gold to us.” She paused thoughtfully. “She’s why they said that Kabute wouldn’t have died if they could have gotten him back home because she was there waiting for him. And she’s probably why we saw that fatally ill woman’s lesions shrink and the thrush go away.”

Jeremy grinned. “ ‘Probably’, hell! Of course it was her. And now I’m going to live. I’m going to live forever and ever!”

The next morning was cool and clear, and they decided to eat breatfast outside. The crackling of the eggs and bacon frying attracted a small troop of vervet monkeys, and a black African kite swooped down from a limb above the fire and swiped a piece of bread right out of Jeremy’s hand.

“They’re such rogues,” said Elizabeth as the kite flew away with its prize.

“Well, it’s nice to know that something on this continent isn’t endangered,” remarked Jeremy.

She watched the kite for another moment, then turned to Jeremy. “I’ve been giving Bibi a lot of thought.”

“And?” asked Jeremy.

“We’ve got to go back and find her,” answered Elizabeth. “I’d kill for the chance to have AIDS researchers examine her. I still don’t know that I buy your story about her curing you with a bite, but whatever happened, she obviously gave you some biochemical agent that kills the HIV virus.” She looked at Jeremy wryly. “It’ll never replace the Salk vaccine, but there’s simply no other explanation. I’ve got to find her and bring her to the camp.”

“She’s not a lab animal,” replied Jeremy seriously. “She’s got to remain free to do her job.”

“Her job?”

“She has other children to cure.”

“You’re not a child.”

“We’re all her children.”

“That again,” said Elizabeth with a sigh.

“You don’t have to believe it,” said Jeremy, protecting his bacon as the kite swooped down toward his plate. “It’s enough that I do.”

“You’re not being logical, Jeremy.”

“I was logical my whole life, and what did it get me, except some money I don’t need and an incurable disease?” replied Jeremy. “Why don’t you really look at Uganda sometime? This is a magical place, for all its problems. Spit a mango pit out the window of your Land Rover, and when you drive by six months later a mango tree has grown up. Amin and his successors virtually wiped out your wildlife, yet all the animals are returning. Terminally ill people suddenly get cured. So how can I not believe in magic?”

“There’s nothing magical about Bibi.”

“I think there is,” said Jeremy. “Leave her alone.”

“I can’t,” protested Elizabeth. “Not until I’ve studied her, and found out how she does it. We may never find anything like her again.”

“Think of her,” he said. “What kind of life do you think she’d have, shuttling from clinic to clinic, facing all those vampires in white coats that not even a mother could love?” He paused. “Let her stay in the bush. These people won’t tell. Besides, you have me: a certified HIV-negative volunteer at your disposal.” He stared unblinking into her deep brown eyes. “Let her go, Elizabeth.”

“You know I can’t. We could save millions of people.” She zeroed in for the kill. “Or isn’t that important to you, now that you’ve been cured?”

“You know that’s not true!” he snapped heatedly. He was going to say more, tell her how unfair that statement was, how no true friend would ever even suggest it. But a little voice in his head intervened: Could she be right? Am I just pretending to believe in Bibi’s powers? Do I really feel now that I’m cured that no one else matters?

He searched his soul, which he had not done for a long time, because he hadn’t especially liked what he had found there. This time he couldn’t find what he was afraid might be lurking in its darker recesses.

Well, I know it’s a lie, he thought with satisfaction; no sense trying to convince you, too.

“All I know is that we’re going to dig ten more graves tomorrow morning,” responded Elizabeth, “and ten the day after that, and ten the day after that, and we’re going to keep digging them until we’ve either beaten this disease or every last victim has died. Now, here’s a woman who may, just may, have a cure for it. Do you really think I can let her go?”

He stared at her for a very long moment. “No,” he said softly. “I know you can’t.”

“Then come with me while I search for her,” continued Elizabeth. “She helped you. Maybe she won’t be so frightened if she sees that you’re with me.”

He stared at his plate for a long moment, considering his answer. The kite hovered overhead, and finally settled for a scrap of bacon that had fallen in the dirt by the fire.

“All right, I’ll come,” he said at last. “But we won’t find her.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because you’re antithetical to her. She’s magic brought forth from the spirit of this land, and you’re science and logic and doubt educated thousands of miles away.”

“Science will save a lot more people than she can once I find out just what it is that she does,” said Elizabeth.

He shook his head sadly. “You still don’t see, do you?”

“See what?”

“Science needs her,” said Jeremy. “She doesn’t need science. Never has, never will.” He sighed deeply. “You and she are oil and water, and your worlds touch only briefly in passing. That’s why you’ll never find her.”

“We’ll see,” said Elizabeth grimly.

They spent the next three months following up every rumor, every imagined sighting of an old woman who performed feats of medical magic.

They scoured the Virunga Volcanos and came away empty-handed. They thought they found her tracks in the foothills of the Mountains of the Moon, but they never saw her. They stopped back at camp only long enough to take on fresh supplies, then went to the arid semi-desert in the north of the Karamojong country, and west to the aptly-named Impenetrable Forest. They spent a week at Murchison’s Falls, only to discover that the old lady they were tracking was a Buganda witch woman who was missing an eye and part of an ear.

Everywhere they went they questioned the local people. Far from showing the symptoms of the “Thinning Disease”, almost all of them glowed with health and fervently denied ever having seen anyone who remotely resembled Bibi. Jeremy got the distinct impression that they were secretly laughing at the two relief workers.

Finally Elizabeth admitted defeat and returned to camp. Jeremy tended the sick and the dying for another week, and then asked to see her privately.

“Well?” she said, when the two of them were alone in her tent.

“I’ve made up my mind,” he announced. “I’m leaving.”

“You mean you’re going home?”

He shook his head. “No, I’m staying in Uganda.”

“Then I don’t understand . . .”

“All we’re doing here is prolonging doomed lives,” said Jeremy. “I came here to save some.”

Suddenly Elizabeth’s eyes widened with comprehension. “You’re going out after Bibi!”

“That’s right.”

“But we’ve just spent three months looking for her. What makes you think you can find her?”

He didn’t want to answer that, for fear of hurting her, but finally he did. “I’ll be alone.”

“You think that makes a difference?” she said caustically.

“Yes, I do.” Okay, so you can’t be hurt if you don’t believe.

“You’re a fool!” she snapped. “Where will you go? In what direction will you look? How will you feed yourself?”

“I’ll get by,” he said. “And I won’t have to find her. She’ll find me.”

“You’ll starve to death, or run into a leopard or a hyena, or drink the wrong water or eat the wrong food,” said Elizabeth. “You can’t survive alone in the bush.”

“I didn’t realize you thought so little of me,” he said wryly.

“It’s because I think so much of you that I don’t want you dead.”

“It’s my decision and if AIDS can’t kill me, neither will anything else this land has to offer.” He withdrew a handwritten document and placed it on her table. “This turns over all my investments to the camp.” Suddenly he grinned. “The Notary Public’s hut wasn’t open for business today, but I think it’ll stand up in court.”

Elizabeth walked to the door of the tent and looked out at the busy camp, then turned back to Jeremy. “You’re giving everything up for a dream. Won’t you reconsider?”

He shook his head. “If I reconsidered, I might agree that it was nothing but a dream and stay here. And then I’d miss the chance to help her perform her magic.”

“We don’t need magic,” she replied impatiently. “If this crisis is solved, it will be solved by science.”

“To me it’s all magic, and who’s to say that yours is any more potent than theirs? Science couldn’t cure me, but Bibi could.”

“Damn it, Jeremy, you’re chasing a will-o-the-wisp. She’s just an old woman, not some mythical creature with awesome powers of healing.”

“She cured me with a bite,” he said. “How can I not believe in that?”

“We don’t know that that’s what cured you,” insisted Elizabeth. “She could have administered any number of medications while you were delerious.”

“She could have,” he agreed. “But she didn’t.”

Elizabeth paused and look at him sadly. “Isn’t there anything I can say?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Say ‘Good luck’.”

She was still staring at him silently as he left her tent.

Bibi walked through the bush, senses alert to the hidden presence of predators. There were so many children, far more than she dreamed possible. She could feel their cries, their hunger, their pain, and she knew that she had much work to do before she could rest again.

Suddenly she heard a twig break, and she crouched, ready to race to safety. A man was approaching noisily, making no attempt to hide his presence, frightening birds and monkeys with every step.

Her first inclination was to run, but some secret instinct made her stay and then she saw a familiar face, a face that reflected the unselfish love that was written across her own.

“Hi, Mom,” said the man, holding a dried apricot out to her.

“I’ve brought you a present.”

WHERE THE OLD GODS DIE

Mike Resnick

Among Mike Resnick’s most recent novels are A Miracle of Rare Design and Inferno. Over the past six years, Mr. Resnick has been nominated for nine Hugos and awarded two of them. His Kirinyaga stories, of which the following tale is the next-to-the-last, are already the most-honored series of stories in the history of science fiction.

Ngai, who rules the universe from His golden throne atop the holy mountain Kirinyaga, which men now call Mount Kenya, created the Sun and the Moon, and declared that they should have equal domain over the Earth.

The Sun would bring warmth to the world, and all of Ngai’s creatures would thrive and grow strong in the light. But even Ngai must sleep, and when He slept He ordered the Moon to watch over His creations.

But the Moon was duplicitous, and formed a secret alliance with the Lion and the Leopard and the Hyena, and many nights, while Ngai slept, it would turn only a part of its face to the Earth. At such times the predators would go forth to maim and kill and eat their fellow creatures.

Finally one man, a mundumugu—a witch doctor—realized that the Moon had tricked Ngai, and he made up his mind to correct the problem. He might have appealed to Ngai, but he was a proud man, and so he took it upon himself to make certain that the flesh-eaters would no longer have a partnership with the darkness.

He retired to his boma and allowed no visitors. For nine days and nine nights he rolled his bones and arranged his charms and mixed his potions, and when he emerged on the morning of the tenth day, he was ready to do what must be done.

The Sun was overhead, and he knew that there could be no darkness as long as the Sun shone down upon the Earth. He uttered a mystic chant, and soon he was flying into the sky to confront the Sun.

“Halt!” he said. “Your brother the Moon is evil. You must remain where you are, lest Ngai’s creatures continue to die.”

“What is that to me?” responded the Sun. “I cannot shirk my duty simply because my brother shirks his.”

The mundumugu held up a hand. “I will not let you pass,” he said.

But the Sun merely laughed, and proceeded on its path, and when it reached the mundumugu, it gobbled him up and spat out the ashes, for even the greatest mundumugu cannot stay the Sun from its course.

That story has been known to every mundumugu since Ngai created Gikuyu, the first man. Of them all, only one ignored it.

I am that mundumugu.

It is said that from the moment of birth, even of conception, every living thing has embarked upon an inevitable trajectory that culminates in its death. If this is true of all living things, and it seems to be, then it is also true of man. And if it is true of man, then it must be true of the gods who made man in their image.

Yet this knowledge does not lessen the pain of death. I had just come back from comforting Katuma, whose father, old Siboki, had finally died, not from disease or injury, but rather from the awful burden of his years. Siboki had been one of the original colonists on our terra-formed world of Kirinyaga, a member of the Council of Elders, and though he had grown feeble in mind as well as body, I knew I would miss him as I missed few others.

As I walked back through the village, on the long, winding path by the river that eventually led to my own boma, I was very much aware of my own mortality. I was not that much younger than Siboki, and indeed was already an old man when we left Kenya and emigrated to Kirinyaga. I knew my death could not be too far away, and yet I hoped that it was, not from selfishness, but because Kirinyaga was not yet ready to do without me. The mundumugu is more than a shaman who utters curses and creates spells; he is the repository of all the moral and civil laws, all the customs and traditions, of the Kikuyu people, and I was not convinced that Kirinyaga had yet produced a competent successor.

It is a harsh and lonely life, the life of a mundumugu. He is more feared than loved by the people he serves. This is not his fault, but rather the nature of his position. He must do what he knows to be right for his people, and that means he must sometimes make unpopular decisions.

How strange, then, that the decision that brought me down had nothing at all to do with my people but rather with a stranger.

Still, I should have had a premonition about it, for no conversation is ever truly random. As I was walking past the scarecrows in the fields on the way to my boma, I came across Kimanti, the young son of Ngobe, driving two of his goats home from their morning’s grazing.

“Jambo, Koriba,” he greeted me, shading his eyes from the bright overhead sun.

“Jambo, Kimanti,” I said. “I see that your father now allows you to tend to his goats. Soon the day will come that he puts you in charge of his cattle.”

“Soon,” he agreed, offering me a water gourd. “It is a warm day. Would you like something to drink?”

“That is very generous of you,” I said, taking the gourd and holding it to my mouth.

“I have always been generous to you, have I not, Koriba?” he said.

“Yes, you have,” I replied suspiciously, wondering what favor he was preparing to request.

“Then why do you allow my father’s right arm to remain shriveled and useless?” he asked. “Why do you not cast a spell and make it like other men’s arms?”

“It is not that simple, Kimanti,” I said. “It is not I who shriveled your father’s arm, but Ngai. He would not have done so without a purpose.”

“What purpose is served by crippling my father?” asked Kimanti.

“If you wish, I shall sacrifice a goat and ask Ngai why He has allowed it,” I said.

He considered my offer and then shook his head. “I do not care to hear Ngai’s answer, for it will change nothing.” He paused, lost in thought for a moment. “How long do you think Ngai will be our god?”

“Forever,” I said, surprised at his question.

“That cannot be,” he replied seriously. “Surely Ngai was not our god when He was just a mtoto. He must have killed the old gods when He was young and powerful. But He has been god for a long time now, and it is time someone killed Him. Maybe the new god will show more compassion toward my father.”

“Ngai created the world,” I said. “He created the Kikuyu and the Maasai and the Wakamba, and even the Europeans, and He created the holy mountain Kirinyaga, for which our world is named. He has existed since time began, and He will exist until it ends.”

Kimanti shook his head again. “If He has been here that long, He is ready to die. It is just a matter of who will kill Him.” He paused thoughtfully. “Perhaps I myself will, when I am older and stronger.”

“Perhaps,” I agreed. “But before you do, let me tell you the story of the King of the Zebras.”

“Is this story about Ngai or zebras?” he asked.

“Why don’t you listen?” I said. “Then, when I have finished, you can tell me what it was about?”

I gently lowered myself to the ground, and he squatted down next to me.

“There was a time,” I began, “when zebras did not have stripes. They were as brown as the dried grasses on the savannah, as dull to the eye as the bole of the acacia tree. And because their color protected them, they were rarely taken by the lion and the leopard, who found it much easier to find and stalk the wildebeest and the topi and the impala.

“Then one day a son was born to the King of the Zebras—but it was not a normal son, for it had no nostrils. The King of the Zebras was first saddened for his son, and then outraged that such a thing should be allowed. The more he dwelt upon it, the more angry he became. Finally he ascended the holy mountain, and came at last to the peak, where Ngai ruled the world from His golden throne.

“ ‘Have you come to sing my praises?’ asked Ngai.

“ ‘No!’ answered the King of the Zebras. ‘I have come to tell you that you are a terrible god, and that I am here to kill you.’

“ ‘What have I done to you that you should wish to kill me?’ asked Ngai.

“ ‘You gave me a son who has no nostrils, so he cannot sense when the lion and the leopard are approaching him, and because of that they will surely find and kill him when at last he leaves his mother’s side. You have been a god too long, and you have forgotten how to be compassionate.’

“ ‘Wait!’ said Ngai, and suddenly there was such power in his voice that the King of the Zebras froze where he was. ‘I will give your son nostrils, since that is what you want.’

“ ‘Why were you so cruel in the first place?’ demanded the King of the Zebras, his anger not fully assuaged.

“ ‘Gods work in mysterious ways,’ answered Ngai, ‘and what seems cruel to you may actually be compassionate. Because you had been a good and noble king, I gave your son eyes that could see in the dark, that could see through bushes, that could even see around trees, so that he could never be surprised by the lion and the leopard, even should the wind’s direction favor them. And because of this gift, he did not need his nostrils. I took them away so that he would not have to breathe in the dust that chokes his fellow zebras during the dry season. But now I have given him back his sense of smell, and taken away his special vision, because you have demanded it.’

“ ‘Then you did have a reason,’ moaned the King of the Zebras. ‘When did I become so foolish?’

“ ‘The moment you thought you were greater than me,’ answered Ngai, rising to His true height, which was taller than the clouds. ‘And to punish you for your audacity, I decree that from this moment forward you and all your kind shall no longer be brown like the dried grasses, but will be covered with black and white stripes that will attract the lion and the leopard from miles away. No matter where you go on the face of the world, you will never again be able to hide from them.’

“And so saying, Ngai waved a hand and every zebra in the world was suddenly covered with the same stripes you see today.”

I stopped and stared at Kimanti.

“That is the end?” he asked.

“That is the end.”

Kimanti stared at a millipede crawling in the dirt.

“The zebra was a baby, and could not explain to its father that it had special eyes,” he said at last. “My father’s arm has been shriveled for many long rains, and the only explanation he has received is that Ngai works in mysterious ways. He has been given no special senses to make up for it, for if he had been he would surely know about them by now.” Kimanti looked at me thoughtfully. “It is an interesting story, Koriba, and I am sorry for the King of the Zebras, but I think a new god must come along and kill Ngai very soon.”

There we sat, the wise old mundumugu who had a parable for every problem, and the foolish young kehee—an uncircumcised boy—who had no more knowledge of his world than a tadpole, in total opposition to each other.

Only a god with Ngai’s sense of humor would have arranged for the kehee to be right.

It began when the ship crashed. (There are those embittered men and women who would say it began the day Kirinyaga received its charter from the Eutopian Council, but they are wrong.)

Maintenance ships fly among the Utopian worlds, delivering goods to some, mail to others, services to a few. Only Kirinyaga has no traffic with Maintenance. They are permitted to observe us—indeed, that is one of the conditions of our charter—but they may not interfere, and since we have tried to create a Kikuyu Utopia, we have no interest in commerce with Europeans.

Still, Maintenance ships have landed on Kirinyaga from time to time. One of the conditions of our charter is that if a citizen is unhappy with our world, he need only walk to that area known as Haven, and a Maintenance ship will pick him up and take him either to Earth or to another Eutopian world. Once a Maintenance ship landed to disgorge two immigrants, and very early in Kirinyaga’s existence Maintenance sent a representative to interfere with our religious practices.

I don’t know why the ship was so close to Kirinyaga to begin with. I had not ordered Maintenance to make any orbital adjustments lately, for the short rains were not due for another two months, and it was right that the days passed, hot and bright and unchanging. To the best of my knowledge, none of the villagers had made the pilgrimage to Haven, so no Maintenance ship should have been sent to Kirinyaga. But the fact remains that one moment the sky was clear and blue, and the next there was a streak of light plunging down to the surface of the planet. An explosion followed; though I could not see it, I could both hear it and see the results, for the cattle became very nervous and herds of impala and zebra bolted this way and that in panic.

It was about twenty minutes later that young Jinja, the son of Kichanta, ran up the hill to my boma.

“You must come, Koriba!” he said as he gasped for breath.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“A Maintenance ship has crashed!” he said. “The pilot is still alive!”

“Is he badly hurt?”

Jinja nodded. “Very badly. I think he may die soon.”

“I am an old man, and it would take me a very long time to walk to the pilot,” I said. “It would be better for you to take three young men from the village and bring him back to me on a litter.”

Jinja raced off while I went into my hut to see what I had that might ease the pilot’s pain. There were some qat leaves, if he was strong enough to chew them, and a few ointments if he wasn’t. I contacted Maintenance on my computer, and told them that I would apprise them of the man’s condition after I examined him.

In years past, I would have sent my assistant to the river to bring back water which I would boil in preparation for washing out the pilot’s wounds, but I no longer had an assistant, and the mundumugu does not carry water, so I simply waited atop my hill, my gaze turned toward the direction of the crash. A grass fire had started, and a column of smoke rose from it. I saw Jinja and the others trotting across the savannah with the litter; I saw topi and impala and even buffalo race out of their way; and then I could not see them for almost ten minutes. When they once again came into view, they were walking, and it was obvious that they were carrying a man on the litter.

Before they reached my boma, however, Karenja came up the long, winding path from the village.

“Jambo, Koriba,” he said.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“The whole village knows that a Maintenance ship has crashed,” he replied. “I have never seen a European before. I came to see if his face is really as white as milk.”

“You are doomed to be disappointed,” I said. “We call them white, but in reality they are shades of pink and tan.”

“Even so,” he said, squatting down, “I have never seen one.”

I shrugged. “As you will.”

Jinja and the young men arrived a few minutes later with the litter. On it lay the twisted body of the pilot. His arms and legs were broken, and there was very little skin on him that was not burned. He had lost a lot of blood, and some still seeped through his wounds. He was unconscious, but breathing regularly.

“Asante sana,” I said to the four young men. “Thank you. You have done well this day.”

I had one of them fill my gourds with water. The other three bowed and began walking down the hill, while I went through my various ointments, choosing the one that would cause the least discomfort when placed on the burns.

Karenja watched in rapt fascination. Twice I had to rebuke him for touching the pilot’s blond hair in wonderment. As the sun changed positions in the sky, I had him help me move the pilot into the shade.

Then, after I had tended to the pilot’s wounds, I went into my hut, activated my computer, and contacted Maintenance again. I explained that the pilot was still alive, but that all of his limbs were broken, his body was covered with burns, and that he was in a coma and would probably die soon.

Their answer was that they had already dispatched a medic, who would arrive within half an hour, and they told me to have someone waiting at Haven to guide the medic to my boma. Since Karenja was still looking at the pilot, I ordered him to greet the ship and bring the medic to me.

The pilot did not stir for the next hour. At least, I do not think he did, but I dozed with my back against a tree for a few minutes, so I cannot be sure. What woke me was a woman’s voice speaking a language I had not heard for many years. I got painfully to my feet just in time to greet the medic that Maintenance had sent.

“You must be Koriba,” she said in English. “I have been trying to communicate with the gentleman who accompanied me, but I don’t think he understood a word I said.”

“I am Koriba,” I said in English.

She extended her hand. “I am Doctor Joyce Witherspoon. May I see the patient?”

I led her over to where the pilot lay.

“Do you know his name?” I asked. “We could not find any identification.”

“Samuel or Samuels, I’m not sure,” she said, kneeling down next to him. “He’s in a bad way.” She gave him a perfunctory examination, lasting less than a minute. “We could do much more for him back at Base, but I hate to move him in this condition.”

“I can have him moved to Haven within an hour,” I said. “The sooner you have him in your hospital, the better.”

She shook her head. “I think he’ll have to remain here until he’s a little stronger.”

“I will have to consider it,” I said.

“There’s nothing to consider,” she said. “In my medical opinion, he’s too weak to move.” She pointed to a piece of his shin bone that had broken through the skin of his leg. “I need to set most of the broken bones, and make sure there’s no infection.”

“You could do this at your hospital,” I said.

“I can do it here at much less cost to the patient’s remaining vitality,” she said. “What’s the problem, Koriba?”

“The problem, Memsaab Witherspoon,” I said, “is that Kirinyaga is a Kikuyu Utopia. This means a rejection of all things European, including your medicine.”

“I’m not practicing it on any Kikuyu,” she said. “I’m trying to save a Maintenance pilot who just happened to crash on your world.”

I stared at the pilot for a long moment. “All right,” I said at last. “That is a logical argument. You may minister to his wounds.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“But he must leave in three days’ time,” I said. “I will not risk contamination beyond that.”

She looked at me as if she was about to argue, but said nothing. Instead, she opened the medical kit she had brought, and injected something—a sedative, I assumed, or a pain killer, or a combination of the two—into his arm.

“She is a witch!” said Karenja. “See how she punctures his skin with a metal thorn!” He stared at the pilot, fascinated. “Now he will surely die.”

Joyce Witherspoon worked well into the night, cleansing the pilot’s wounds, setting his broken bones, breaking his fever. I don’t remember when I fell asleep, but when I woke up, shivering, in the cold morning air just after sunrise, she was sleeping and Karenja was gone.

I built a fire, then sat near it with my blanket wrapped around me, until the sun began warming the air. Joyce Witherspoon woke up shortly thereafter.

“Good morning,” she said when she saw me sitting a short distance away from her.

“Good morning, Memsaab Witherspoon,” I replied.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“It is morning.”

“I mean, what hour and minute is it?”

“We do not have hours and minutes on Kirinyaga,” I told her. “Only days.”

“I should look at Mr. Samuels.”

“He is still alive,” I said.

“Of course he is,” she replied. “But the poor man will need skin grafts, and he may lose that right leg. He’ll be a long time recovering.” She paused and looked around. “Uh . . . where do I wash up around here?”

“The river runs by the foot of my hill,” I said. “Be sure you beat the water first, to frighten away the crocodiles.”

“What kind of Utopia has crocodiles?” she asked with a smile.

“What Eden has no serpents?” I said.

She laughed and walked down the hill. I took a sip from my water gourd, then killed the fire and spread the ashes. One of the boys from the village came by to take my goats out to graze, and another brought firewood and took my gourds down to the river to fill them.

When Joyce Witherspoon returned from the river some twenty minutes later, she was not alone. With her was Kibo, the third and youngest wife of Koinnage, the paramount chief of the village, and in Kibo’s arms was Katabo, her infant son. His left arm was swollen to twice its size, and was badly discolored.

“I found this woman laundering her clothes by the river,” said Joyce Witherspoon, “and I noticed that her child had a badly infected arm. It looks like some kind of insect bite. I managed through sign language to convince her to follow me up here.”

“Why did you not bring Katabo to me?” I asked Kibo in Swahili.

“Last time you charged me two goats, and he remained sick for many days, and Koinnage beat me for wasting the goats,” she said, so terrified she had made me angry that she could not think of a lie.

Even as Kibo spoke, Joyce Witherspoon began approaching her and Katabo with a syringe in her hand.

“This is a broad-spectrum antibiotic,” she explained to me. “It also contains a steroid that will prevent itching or any discomfort while the infection remains.”

“Stop!” I said harshly in English.

“What’s the matter?”

“You may not do this,” I said. “You are here to minister to the pilot only.”

“This is a baby, and it’s suffering,” she said. “It’ll take me two seconds to give it a shot and cure it.”

“I cannot permit it.”

“What’s the matter with you?” she demanded. “I read your biography. You may dress like a savage and sit in the dirt next to your fire, but you were educated at Cambridge and received your postgraduate degrees from Yale. Surely you know how easily I can end this child’s suffering.”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“Then what is the point?”

“You may not medicate this child. It seems like a blessing now—but once before we accepted the Europeans’ medicine, and then their religion, and their clothing, and their laws, and their customs, and eventually we ceased to be Kikuyu and became a new race, a race of black Europeans known only as Kenyans. We came to Kirinyaga to make sure that such a thing does not happen to us again.”

“He won’t know why he feels better. You can credit it to your god or yourself for all I care.”

I shook my head. “I appreciate your sentiment, but I cannot let you corrupt our Utopia.”

“Look at him,” she said, pointing to Katabo’s swollen arm. “Is Kirinyaga a Utopia for him? Where is it written that Utopias must have sick and suffering children?”

“Nowhere.”

“Well, then?”

“It is not written,” I continued, “because the Kikuyu do not have a written language.”

“Will you at least let the mother decide?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“The mother will think only of her child,” I answered. “I must think of an entire world.”

“Perhaps her child is more important to her than your world is to you.”

“She is incapable of making a reasoned decision,” I said. “Only I can foresee all the consequences.”

Suddenly Kibo, who understood not a word of English, turned to me.

“Will the European witch make my little Katabo better?” she asked. “Why are you two arguing?”

“The European witch is here only for the European,” I answered. “She has no power to help the Kikuyu.”

“Can she not try?” asked Kibo.

“I am your mundumugu,” I said harshly.

“But look at the pilot,” said Kibo, pointing to Samuels. “Yesterday he was all but dead. Today his skin is already healing, and his arms and legs are straight again.”

“Her god is the god of the Europeans,” I answered, “just as her magic is the magic of the Europeans. Her spells do not work on the Kikuyu.”

Kibo fell silent, and clutched Katabo to her breast.

I turned to Joyce Witherspoon. “I apologize for speaking in Swahili, but Kibo knows no other language.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I had no difficulty following it.”

“I thought you told me you only spoke English.”

“Sometimes you needn’t understand the words to translate. I believe you were saying, in essence, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ ”

The pilot moaned just then, and suddenly all of her attention was focused upon him. He was coming into a state of semi-consciousness, unfocused and unintelligible but no longer comatose, and she began administering medications into the tubes that were already attached to his arms and legs. Kibo watched in wonderment, but kept her distance.

I remained on my hill most of the morning. I offered to remove the curse from Katabo’s arm and give him some soothing lotions, but Kibo refused, saying that Koinnage steadfastly refused to part with any more goats.

“I will not charge you this time,” I said, for I wanted Koinnage on my side. I uttered a spell over the child, then treated his arm with a salve made from the pulped bark of the acacia tree. I ordered Kibo to return to her shamba with him, and told her that the child’s arm would return to normal within five days.

Finally it was time for me to go into the village to bless the scarecrows and give Leibo, who had lost her baby, ointment to ease the pain in her breasts. I would meet with Bakada, who had accepted the bride price for his daughter and wanted me to preside at the wedding, and finally I would join Koinnage and the Council of Elders as they discussed the weighty issues of the day.

As I walked down the long, winding path beside the river, I found myself thinking how much like the European’s Garden of Eden this world looked.

How was I to know that the serpent had already arrived?

After I had tended to my chores in the village, I stopped at Ngobe’s hut to share a gourd of pombe with him. He asked about the pilot, for by now everyone in the village had heard about him, and I explained that the European’s mundumugu was curing him and would take him back to Maintenance headquarters in two more days.

“She must have powerful magic,” he said, “for I am told that the man’s body was badly broken.” He paused. “It is too bad,” he added wistfully, “that such magic will not work for the Kikuyu.”

“My magic has always been sufficient,” I said.

“True,” he said uneasily. “But I remember the day when we brought Tabari’s son back after the hyenas had attacked him and chewed off one of his legs. You eased his pain, but you could not save him. Perhaps the witch from Maintenance could have.”

“The pilot had broken his legs, but they were not chewed off,” I said defensively. “No one could have saved Tabari’s son after the hyenas had finished with him.”

“Perhaps you are right,” he said.

My first inclination was to pounce on the word “perhaps” but then I decided that he meant no insult by it, so I finished my pombe, cast the bones and read that he would have a successful harvest, and left his hut.

I stopped in the center of the village to recite a fable to the children, then went over to Koinnage’s shamba and entered his boma for the daily meeting of the Council of Elders. Most of them were already there, grim-faced and silent. Finally Koinnage emerged from his hut and joined us.

“We have serious business to discuss today,” he announced. “Perhaps the most serious we have ever discussed,” he added, staring straight at me. Suddenly he faced his wives’ huts. “Kibo!” he shouted. “Come here!”

Kibo emerged from her hut and walked over to us, carrying little Katabo in her arms.

“You all saw my son’s arm yesterday,” said Koinnage. “It was swollen to twice its normal size, and was the color of death.” He took the child and held it above his head. “Now look at him!” he cried.

Katabo’s arm was once again a healthy color, and almost all of the swelling had vanished.

“My medicine worked faster than I had anticipated,” I said.

“This is not your medicine at all!” he said accusingly. “This is the European witch’s medicine!”

I looked at Kibo. “I ordered you to leave my boma ahead of me!” I said sternly.

“You did not order me not to return,” she said, her face filled with defiance as she stood next to Koinnage. “The witch pierced Katabo’s arm with a metal thorn, and before I could climb back down your hill the swelling was already half-gone.”

“You disobeyed my command,” I said ominously.

“I am the paramount chief, and I absolve her,” interjected Koinnage.

“I am the mundumugu, and I do not!” I said, and suddenly Kibo’s defiance was replaced by terror.

“We have more important things to discuss,” snapped Koinnage. This startled me, for when I am angry, no one has the courage to confront or contradict me.

I pulled some luminescent powder, made from the ground-up bodies of night-stalking beetles, out of my pouch, held it on the palm of my hand, raised my hand to my mouth, and blew the powder in Kibo’s direction. She screamed in terror and fell writhing to the ground.

“What have you done to her?” demanded Koinnage.

I have terrified her beyond your ability to comprehend, which is a just and fitting punishment for disobeying me, I thought. Aloud I said, “I have marked her spirit so that all the predators of the Other World can find it at night when she sleeps. If she swears never to disobey her mundumugu again, if she shows proper contrition for disobeying me today, then I shall remove the markings before she goes to sleep this evening. If not . . .” I shrugged and let the threat hang in the air.

“Then perhaps the European witch will remove the markings,” said Koinnage.

“Do you think the god of the Europeans is mightier than Ngai?” I demanded.

“I do not know,” replied Koinnage. “But he healed my son’s arm in moments, when Ngai would have taken days.”

“For years you have told us to reject all things European,” added Karenja, “yet I myself have seen the witch use her magic on the dying pilot, and I think it is stronger that your magic.”

“It is a magic for Europeans only,” I said.

“This is not so,” answered Koinnage. “For did the witch not offer it to Katabo? If she can halt the suffering of our sick and our injured faster than Ngai can, then we must consider accepting her offer.”

“If you accept her offer,” I said, “before long you will be asked to accept her god, and her science, and her clothing, and her customs.”

“Her science is what created Kirinyaga and flew us here,” said Ngobe. “How can it be bad if it made Kirinyaga possible?”

“It is not bad for the Europeans,” I said, “because it is part of their culture. But we must never forget why we came to Kirinyaga in the first place: to create a Kikuyu world and re-establish a Kikuyu culture.”

“We must think seriously about this,” said Koinnage. “For years we have believed that every facet of the Europeans’ culture was evil, for we had no examples of it. But now that we see that even a female can cure our illness faster than Ngai can, it is time to reconsider.”

“If her magic could have cured my withered arm when I was still a boy,” added Ngobe, “why would that have been evil?”

“It would have been against the will of Ngai,” I said.

“Does not Ngai rule the universe?” he asked.

“You know that He does,” I replied.

“Then nothing that happens can be contrary to His wishes, and if she could have cured me, it would not have been against Ngai’s will.”

I shook my head. “You do not understand.”

“We are trying to understand,” said Koinnage. “Enlighten us.”

“The Europeans have many wonders, and these wonders will entice you, as they are doing right now . . . but if you accept one European thing, soon they will insist that you accept them all. Koinnage, their religion only allows a man to have one wife. Which two will you divorce?”

I turned to the others. “Ngobe, they will make Kimanti attend a school where he will learn to read and write. But since we do not have a written language, he will learn to write only in a European language, and the things and people he reads about and learns about will all be European.”

I walked among the Elders, offering an example to each. “Karenja, if you do a service for Tabari, you will expect a chicken or a goat or perhaps even a cow in return, depending on the nature of the service. But the Europeans will make him reward you with paper money, which you cannot eat, and which cannot reproduce and make a man rich.”

On and on I went, until I had run through all the Elders, pointing out what they would lose if they allowed the Europeans a toehold in our society.

“All that is on the one hand,” said Koinnage when I had finished. He held his other hand out, palm up. “On the other hand is an end to illness and suffering, which is no small achievement in itself. Koriba has said that if we let the Europeans in, they will force us to change our ways. I say that some of our ways need changing. If their god is a greater healer than Ngai, who is to say that he may not also bring better weather, or more fertile cattle, or richer soil?”

“No!” I cried. “You may all have forgotten why we came here, but I have not. Our mandate was not to establish a European Utopia, but a Kikuyu one!”

“And have we established it?” asked Karenja sardonically.

“We are coming closer every day,” I told him. “I am making it a reality.”

“Do children suffer in Utopia?” persisted Karenja. “Do men grow up with withered arms? Do women die in childbirth? Do hyenas attack shepherds in Utopia?”

“It is a matter of balance,” I said. “Unrestricted growth would eventually lead to unrestricted hunger. You have not seen what it has done on Earth, but I have.”

Finally it was old Jandara who spoke. “Do people think in a Utopia?” he asked me.

“Of course they do,” I replied.

“If they think, are some of their thoughts new, just as some are old?”

“Yes.”

“Then perhaps we should consider letting the witch tend to our illnesses and injuries,” he said. “For if Ngai allows new thoughts in His Utopia, He must realize they will lead to change. And if change is not evil, then perhaps lack of change, such as we have striven for here, is evil, or at least wrong.” He got to his feet. “You may debate the merits of the question. As for myself, I have had pain in my joints for many years, and Ngai has not cured it. I am climbing Koriba’s hill to see if the god of the Europeans can end my pain.”

And with that, he walked past me and out of the boma.

I was prepared to argue my case all day and all night if necessary, but Koinnage turned his back on me—on me, his mundumugu!—and began carrying his son back to Kibo’s hut. That signaled the end to the meeting, and each of the Elders got up and left without daring to look me in the face.

There were more than a dozen villagers gathered at the foot of my hill when I arrived. I walked past them and soon reached my boma.

Jandara was still there. Joyce Witherspoon had given him an injection, and was handing him a small bottle of pills as I arrived.

“Who told you that you could treat the Kikuyu?” I demanded in English.

“I did not offer to treat them,” she replied. “But I am a doctor, and I will not turn them away.”

“Then I will,” I said. I turned and looked down at the villagers. “You may not come up here!” I said sternly. “Go back to your shambas.”

The adults all looked uneasy but stood their ground, while one small boy began climbing up the hill.

“Your mundumugu has forbidden you to climb this hill!” I said. “Ngai will punish you for your transgression!”

“The god of the Europeans is young and powerful,” said the boy. “He will protect me from Ngai.” And now I saw that the boy was Kimanti.

“Stay back—I warn you!” I shouted.

Kimanti hefted his wooden spear. “Ngai will not harm me,” he said confidentially. “If He tries, I will kill him with this.”

He walked right by me and approached Joyce Witherspoon.

“I have cut my foot on a rock,” he said. “If your god will heal me, I will sacrifice a goat to thank him.”

She did not understand a word he said, but when he showed her his foot she began treating it.

He walked back down the hill, unmolested by Ngai, and when he was both alive and healed the next morning, word went out to other villages and soon there was a seemingly endless line of the sick and the lame, all waiting to climb my hill and accept European cures for Kikuyu ills.

Once again I told them to disperse. This time they seemed not even to hear me. They simply remained in line, neither arguing back as Kimanti had, nor even acknowledging my presence, each of them waiting patiently until it was their turn to be treated by the European witch.

I thought that when she left, things would go back to the way they had been, that the people would once again fear Ngai and show respect to their mundumugu—but this was not to be. Oh, they went about their daily chores, they planted their crops and tended to their cattle . . . but they did not come to me with their problems as they always had done in the past.

At first I thought we had entered one of those rare periods in which no one in the village was ill or injured, but then one day I saw Shanaka walking out across the savannah. Since he rarely left his shamba, and never left the village, I was curious about his destination and I decided to follow him. He walked due west for more than half an hour, until he reached the landing area at Haven.

“What is wrong?” I asked when I finally caught up with him.

He opened his mouth to reveal a serious abscess above one of his teeth. “I am in great pain,” he said, “I have been unable to eat for three days.”

“Why did you not come to me?” I asked.

“The god of the Europeans has defeated Ngai,” answered Shanaka. “He will not help me.”

“He will,” I assured him.

Shanaka shook his head, then winced from the motion. “You are an old man, and Ngai is an old god, and both of you have lost your powers,” he said unhappily. “I wish it were otherwise, but it is not.”

“So you are deserting your wives and children because you have lost your faith in Ngai?” I demanded.

“No,” he replied. “I will ask the Maintenance ship to take me to a European mundumugu, and when I am cured I will return home.”

“I will cure you,” I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. “There was a time when you could cure me,” he said at last. “But that time has passed. I will go to the Europeans’ mundumugu.”

“If you do,” I said sternly, “you may never call on me for help again.”

He shrugged. “I never intended to,” he said with neither bitterness nor rancor.

Shanaka returned the next day, his mouth healed.

I stopped by his boma to see how he was feeling, for I remained the mundumugu whether he wanted my services or not, and as I walked through the fields of his shamba I saw that he had two new scarecrows, gifts of the Europeans. The scarecrows had mechanical arms that flapped constantly, and they rotated so that they did not always face in one direction.

“Jambo, Koriba,” he greeted me. Then, seeing that I was looking at his scarecrows, he added, “Are they not wonderful?”

“I will withhold judgment until I see how long they function,” I said. “The more moving parts an object has, the more likely it is to break.”

He looked at me, and I thought I detected a hint of pity in his expression. “They were created by the God of Maintenance,” he said. “They will last forever.”

“Or until their power packs are empty,” I said, but he did not know what I meant, and so my sarcasm was lost on him. “How is your mouth?”

“It feels much better,” he replied. “They pricked me with a magic thorn to end the pain, then cut away the evil spirits that had invaded my mouth.” He paused. “They have very powerful gods, Koriba.”

“You are back on Kirinyaga now,” I said sternly. “Be careful how you blaspheme.”

“I do not blaspheme,” he said. “I speak the truth.”

“And now you will want me to bless the Europeans’ scarecrows, I suppose,” I said with finely wrought irony.

He shrugged. “If it makes you happy,” he said.

“If it makes me happy?” I repeated angrily.

“That’s right,” he said nonchalantly. “The scarecrows, being European, certainly do not need your blessings, but if you will feel better . . .”

I had often wondered what might happen if for some reason the mundumugu was no longer feared by the members of the village. I had never once considered what it might be like if he were merely tolerated.

Still more villagers went to Maintenance’s infirmary, and each came back with some gift from the Europeans: time-saving gadgets for the most part. Western gadgets. Culture-killing gadgets.

Again and again I went into the village and explained why such things must be rejected. Day after day I spoke to the Council of Elders, reminding them of why we had come to Kirinyaga—but most of the original settlers were dead, and the next generation, those who had become our Elders, had no memories of Kenya. Indeed, those of them who spoke to the Maintenance staff came home thinking that Kenya, rather than Kirinyaga, was some kind of Utopia, in which everyone was well-fed and well-cared-for and no farm ever suffered from drought.

They were polite, they listened respectfully to me, and then they went right ahead with whatever they had been doing or discussing when I arrived. I reminded them of the many times I and I alone had saved them from themselves, but they seemed not to care; indeed, one or two of the Elders acted as if, far from keeping Kirinyaga pure, I had in some mysterious way been hindering its growth.

“Kirinyaga is not supposed to grow!” I argued. “When you achieve a Utopia, you do not cast it aside and say, ‘What changes can we make tomorrow?’ ”

“If you do not grow, you stagnate,” answered Karenja.

“We can grow by expanding,” I said. “We have an entire world to populate.”

“That is not growing, but breeding,” he replied. “You have done your job admirably, Koriba, for in the beginning we needed order and purpose above all else . . . but the time for your job is past. Now we have established ourselves here, and it is for us to choose how we will live.”

“We have already chosen how to live!” I said angrily. “That is why we came here to begin with.”

“I was just a kehee,” said Karenja. “Nobody asked me. And I did not ask my son, who was born here.”

“Kirinyaga was created for the purpose of becoming a Kikuyu Utopia,” I said. “This purpose is even the basis of our charter. It cannot be changed.”

“No one is suggesting that we don’t want to live in a Utopia, Koriba,” interjected Shanaka. “But the time has passed when you and you alone shall be the sole judge of what constitutes a Utopia.”

“It is clearly defined.”

“By you,” said Shanaka. “Some of us have our own definitions of Utopia.”

“You were one of the original founders of Kirinyaga,” I said accusingly. “Why have you never spoken out before?”

“Many times I wanted to,” admitted Shanaka. “But always I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Of Ngai. Or you.”

“They are much the same thing,” said Karenja.

“But now that Ngai has lost His battle to the god of Maintenance, I am no longer afraid to speak,” continued Shanaka. “Why should I suffer with the pain in my teeth? How was it unholy or blasphemous for the European witches to cure me? Why should my wife, who is as old as I am and whose back is bent from years of carrying wood and water, continue to carry them where there are machines to carry things for her?”

“Why should you live on Kirinyaga at all, if that is the way you feel?” I asked bitterly.

“Because I have worked as hard to make Kirinyaga a home for the Kikuyu as you have!” he shot back. “And I see no reason to leave just because my definition of Utopia doesn’t agree with yours. Why don’t you leave, Koriba?”

“Because I was charged with establishing our Utopia, and I have not yet completed my assignment,” I said. “In fact, it is false Kikuyu like you who have made my work that much harder.”

Shanaka got to his feet and looked around at the Elders.

“Am I a false Kikuyu because I want my grandson to read?” he demanded. “Or because I want to ease my wife’s burden? Or because I do not wish to suffer physical pain that can easily be avoided?”

“No!” cried the Elders as one.

“Be very careful,” I warned them. “For if he is not a false Kikuyu, then you are calling me one.”

“No, Koriba,” said Koinnage, rising to his feet. “You are not a false Kikuyu.” He paused. “But you are a mistaken one. Your day—and mine—has passed. Perhaps, for a fleeting second, we did achieve Utopia—but that second is gone, and the new moments and hours require new Utopias.” Then Koinnage, who had looked at me with fear so many times in the past, suddenly looked at me with great compassion. “It was our dream, Koriba, but it is not theirs—and if we still have some feeble handhold on today, tomorrow surely belongs to them.”

“I will hear none of this!” I said. “You cannot redefine a Utopia as a matter of convenience. We moved here in order to be true to our faith and traditions, to avoid becoming what so many Kikuyu had become in Kenya. I will not let us become black Europeans!”

“We are becoming something,” said Shanaka. “Perhaps just once there was an instant when you felt we were perfect Kikuyu—but that instant has long since passed. To remain so, not one of us could have had a new thought, could have seen the world in a different way. We would have become the scarecrows you bless every morning.”

I was silent for a very long time. Then, at last, I spoke. “This world breaks my heart,” I said. “I tried so hard to mold it into what we had all wanted, and look at what it has become. What you have become.”

“You can direct change, Koriba,” said Shanaka, “but you cannot prevent it, and that is why Kirinyaga will always break your heart.”

“I must go to my boma and think,” I said.

“Kwaheri, Koriba,” said Koinnage. Good-bye, Koriba. It had a sense of finality to it.

I spent many days alone on my hill, looking across the winding river to the green savannah, and thinking. I had been betrayed by the people I had tried to lead, by the very world I had helped to create. I felt that I had surely displeased Ngai in some way, and that He would strike me dead. I was quite prepared to die, even willing . . . but I did not die, for the gods draw their strength from their worshippers, and Ngai was now so weak that He could not even kill a feeble old man like myself.

Eventually I decided to go down among my people one last time, to see if any of them had rejected the enticements of the Europeans and come back to the ways of the Kikuyu.

The path was lined with mechanical scarecrows. The only meaningful way to bless them would be to renew their charges. I saw several women washing clothes by the river, but instead of pounding the fabrics with rocks, they were rubbing them on some artificial board that had obviously been made for the purpose.

Suddenly I heard a ringing noise behind me, and, startled, I jumped, lost my footing, and fell heavily against a thorn bush. When I was able to get my bearings, I saw that I had almost been run over by a bicycle.

“I am sorry, Koriba,” said the rider, who turned out to be young Kimanti. “I thought you heard me coming.”

He helped me gingerly to my feet.

“My ears have heard many things,” I said. “The scream of the fish eagle, the bleat of the goat, the laugh of the hyena, the cry of the newborn baby. But they were never meant to hear artificial wheels going down a dirt hill.”

“It is much faster and easier than walking,” he replied. “Are you going anywhere in particular? I will be happy to give you a ride.”

It was probably the bicycle that made up my mind. “Yes,” I replied, “I am going somewhere, and no, I will not be taken on a bicycle.”

“Then I will walk with you,” he said. “Where are you going?”

“To Haven,” I said.

“Ah,” he said with a smile. “You, too, have business with Maintenance. Where do you hurt?”

I touched the left side of my chest. “I hurt here—and the only business I have with Maintenance is to get as far from the cause of that pain as I can.”

“You are leaving Kirinyaga?”

“I am leaving what Kirinyaga has become,” I answered.

“Where will you go?” he asked. “What will you do?”

“I will go elsewhere, and I will do other things,” I said vaguely, for where does an unemployed mundumugu go?

“We will miss you, Koriba,” said Kimanti.

“I doubt it.”

“We will,” he repeated with sincerity. “When we recite the history of Kirinyaga to our children, you will not be forgotten.” He paused. “It is true that you were wrong, but you were necessary.”

“Is that how I am to be remembered?” I asked. “As a necessary evil?”

“I did not call you evil, just wrong.”

We walked the next few miles in silence, and at last we came to Haven.

“I will wait with you if you wish,” said Kimanti.

“I would rather wait alone,” I said.

He shrugged. “As you wish. Kwaheri, Koriba.”

“Kwaheri,” I replied.

After he left I looked around, studying the savannah and the river, the wildebeest and the zebras, the fish eagles and the marabou storks, trying to set them in my memory for all time to come.

“I am sorry, Ngai,” I said at last. “I have done my best, but I have failed you.” The ship that would take me away from Kirinyaga forever suddenly came into view.

“You must view them with compassion, Ngai,” I said as the ship approached the landing strip. “They are not the first of your people to be bewitched by the Europeans.”

And it seemed, as the ship touched down, that a voice spoke into my ear and said, You have been my most faithful servant, Koriba, and so I shall be guided by your counsel. Do you really wish me to view them with compassion?

I looked toward the village one last time, the village that had once feared and worshipped Ngai, and which had sold itself, like some prostitute, to the god of the Europeans.

“No,” I said firmly.

“Are you speaking to me?” asked the pilot, and I realized that the hatch was open and waiting for me.

“No,” I replied.

He looked around. “I don’t see anyone else.”

“He is very old and very tired,” I said. “But He is here.”

I climbed into the ship and did not look back.

LUMINOUS

Greg Egan

“Cocoon” (Asimov’s, May 1994), Greg Egan’s dark look at politics, the profit motive, and genetic engineering, was the winner of our Ninth Annual Readers’ Award for Best Novelette. That story is also a finalist for this year’s Hugo award. The U.S. edition of his novel, Quarantine, was published by HarperCollins in January, and they plan to release his book, Permutation City, in the fall.

I woke disoriented, unsure why. I knew I was Iying on the narrow, lumpy single bed in Room 22 of the Hotel Fleapit; after almost a month in Shanghai, the topography of the mattress was depressingly familiar. But there was something wrong with the way I was Iying; every muscle in my neck and shoulders was protesting that nobody could end up in this position from natural causes, however badly they’d slept.

And I could smell blood.

I opened my eyes. A woman I’d never seen before was kneeling over me, slicing into my left tricep with a disposable scalpel. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, one hand and one ankle cuffed to the head and foot of the bed.

Something cut short the surge of visceral panic before I could start stupidly thrashing about, instinctively trying to break free. Maybe an even more ancient response—catatonia in the face of danger—took on the adrenaline and won. Or maybe I just decided that I had no right to panic when I’d been expecting something like this for weeks.

I spoke softly, in English. “What you’re in the process of hacking out of me is a necrotrap. One heartbeat without oxygenated blood, and the cargo gets fried.”

My amateur surgeon was compact, muscular, with short black hair. Not Chinese: Indonesian, maybe. If she was surprised that I’d woken prematurely, she didn’t show it. The gene-tailored hepatocytes I’d acquired in Hanoi could degrade almost anything from morphine to curare; it was a good thing the local anaesthetic was beyond their reach.

Without taking her eyes off her work, she said, “Look on the table next to the bed.”

I twisted my head around. She’d set up a loop of plastic tubing full of blood—mine, presumably—circulated and aerated by a small pump. The stem of a large funnel fed into the loop, the intersection controlled by a valve of some kind. Wires trailed from the pump to a sensor taped to the inside of my elbow, synchronizing the artificial pulse with the real. I had no doubt that she could tear the trap from my vein and insert it into this substitute without missing a beat.

I cleared my throat and swallowed. “Not good enough. The trap knows my blood pressure profile exactly. A generic heartbeat won’t fool it.”

“You’re bluffing.” But she hesitated, scalpel raised. The hand-held MRI scanner she’d used to find the trap would have revealed its basic configuration, but few fine details of the engineering—and nothing at all about the software.

“I’m telling you the truth.” I looked her squarely in the eye, which wasn’t easy given our awkward geometry. “It’s new, it’s Swedish. You anchor it in a vein forty-eight hours in advance, put yourself through a range of typical activities so it can memorize the rhythms . . . then you inject the cargo into the trap. Simple, foolproof, effective.” Blood trickled down across my chest onto the sheet. I was suddenly very glad that I hadn’t buried the thing deeper, after all.

“So how do you retrieve the cargo, yourself?”

“That would be telling.”

“Then tell me now, and save yourself some trouble.” She rotated the scalpel between thumb and forefinger impatiently. My skin did a cold burn all over, nerve ends jangling, capillaries closing down as blood dived for cover.

I said, “Trouble gives me hypertension.”

She smiled down at me thinly, conceding the stalemate—then peeled off one stained surgical glove, took out her notepad, and made a call to a medical equipment supplier. She listed some devices which would get around the problem—a blood pressure probe, a more sophisticated pump, a suitable computerized interface—arguing heatedly in fluent Mandarin to extract a promise of a speedy delivery. Then she put down the notepad and placed her ungloved hand on my shoulder.

“You can relax now. We won’t have long to wait.”

I squirmed, as if angrily shrugging off her hand—and succeeded in getting some blood on her skin. She didn’t say a word, but she must have realized at once how careless she’d been; she climbed off the bed and headed for the washbasin, and I heard the water running.

Then she started retching.

I called out cheerfulIy, “Let me know when you’re ready for the antidote.”

I heard her approach, and I turned to face her. She was ashen, her face contorted with nausea, eyes and nose streaming mucus and tears.

“Tell me where it is!”

“Uncuff me, and I’ll get it for you.”

“No! No deals!”

“Fine. Then you’d better start looking, yourself.”

She picked up the scalpel and brandished it in my face. “Screw the cargo. I’ll do it!” She was shivering like a feverish child, uselessly trying to stem the flood from her nostrils with the back of her hand.

I said coldly, “If you cut me again, you’ll lose more than the cargo.”

She turned away and vomited; it was thin and gray, blood-streaked. The toxin was persuading cells in her stomach lining to commit suicide en masse.

“Uncuff me. It’ll kill you. It doesn’t take long.”

She wiped her mouth, steeled herself, made as if to speak—then started puking again. I knew, first hand, exactly how bad she was feeling. Keeping it down was like trying to swallow a mixture of shit and sulphuric acid. Bringing it up was like evisceration.

I said, “In thirty seconds, you’ll be too weak to help yourself—even if I told you where to look. So if I’m not free . . .”

She produced a gun and a set of keys, uncuffed me, then stood by the foot of the bed, shaking badly but keeping me targeted. I dresses quickly, ignoring her threats, bandaging my arm with a miraculously clean spare sock before putting on a T-shirt and a jacket. She sagged to her knees, still aiming the gun more or less in my direction—but her eyes were swollen half-shut brimming with yellow fluid. I thought about trying to disarm her, but it didn’t seem worth the risk.

I packed my remaining clothes, then glanced around the room as if I might have left something behind. But everything that really mattered was in my veins; Alison had taught me that that was the only way to travel.

I turned to the burglar. “There is no antidote. But the toxin won’t kill you. You’ll just wish it would, for the next twelve hours. Goodbye.”

As I headed for the door, hairs rose suddenly on the back of my neck. It occurred to me that she might not take me at my word—and might fire a par ting shot, believing she had nothing to lose.

Turning the handle, without looking back, I said, “But if you come after me—next time, Ill kill you.”

That was a lie, but it seemed to do the trick. As I pulled the door shut behind me, I heard her drop the gun and start vomiting again.

Halfway down the stairs, the euphoria of escape began to give way to a bleaker perspective. If one careless bounty hunter could find me, her more methodical colleagues couldn’t be far behind. Industrial Algebra was closing in on us. If Alison didn’t gain access to Luminous soon, we’d have no choice but to destroy the map. And even that would only be buying time.

I paid the desk clerk for the room until the next morning, stressing that my companion should not be disturbed, and added a suitable tip to compensate for the mess the cleaners would find. The toxin denatured in air; the bloodstains would be harmless in a matter of hours. The clerk eyed me suspiciously, but said nothing.

Outside, it was a mild, cloudless summer morning. It was barely six o’clock, but Kongjiang Lu was already crowded with pedestrians, cyclists buses—and a few ostentatious chauffeured limousines, ploughing through the traffic at about ten kph. It looked like the night shift had just emerged from the Intel factory down the road; most of the passing cyclists were wearing the orange, logo-emblazoned overalls.

Two blocks from the hotel I stopped dead, my legs almost giving way beneath me. It wasn’t just shock—a delayed reaction, a belated acceptance of how close I’d come to being slaughtered; The burglar’s clinical violence was chilling enough—but what it implied was infinitely more disturbing.

Industrial Algebra was paying big money, violating international law, taking serious risks with their corporate and personal futures. The arcane abstraction of the defect was being dragged into the world of blood and dust, boardrooms and assassins, power and pragmatism.

And the closest thing to certainty humanity had ever known was in danger of dissolving into quicksand.

It had all started out as a joke. Argument for argument’s sake. Alison and her infuriating heresies.

“A mathematical theorem,” she’d proclaimed, “only becomes true when a physical system tests it out: when the system’s behavior depends in some way on the theorem being true or false.”

It was June 1994. We were sitting in a small paved courtyard, having just emerged yawning and blinking into the winter sunlight from the final lecture in a one-semester course on the philosophy of mathematics—a bit of—light relief from the hard grind of the real stuff. We had fifteen minutes to kill before meeting some friends for lunch. It was a social conversation—verging on mild flirtation—nothing more. Maybe there were demented academics lurking in dark crypts somewhere, who held views on the nature of mathematical that they were willing to die for. But we were twenty years old, and we knew it was all angels on the head of a pin.

I said, “Physical systems don’t create mathematics. Nothing creates mathematics—it’s timeless. All of number theory would still be exactly the same, even if the universe contained nothing but a single electron.”

Alison snorted. “Yes, because even one electron, plus a space-time to put it in, needs all of quantum mechanics and all of general relativity—and all the mathematical infrastructure they entail. One particle floating in a quantum vacuum needs half the major results of group theory, functional analysis, differential geometry—”

“Okay, okay! I get the point. But if that’s the case . . . the events in the first picosecond after the Big Bang would have ‘constructed’ every last mathematical truth required by any physical system, all the way to the Big Crunch. Once you’ve got the mathematics that underpins the Theory of Everything . . . that’s it, that’s all you ever need. End of story.”

“But it’s not. To apply the Theory of Everything to a particular system, you still need all the mathematics for dealing with that system—which could include results far beyond the mathematics that the TOE itself requires. I mean, fifteen billion years after the Big Bang, someone can still come along and prove, say . . . Fermat’s Last Theorem.” Andrew Wiles at Princeton had recently announced a proof of the famous conjecture, although his work was still being scrutinized by his colleagues, and the final verdict wasn’t yet in. “Physics never needed that before.”

I protested, “What do you mean, ‘before’ ? Fermat’s Last Theorem never has—and never will—have anything to do with any branch of physics.”

Alison smiled sneakily. “No branch—no. But only because the class of physical systems whose behavior depends on it is so ludicrously specific: the brains of mathematicians who are trying to validate the Wiles proof.

“Think about it. Once you start trying to prove a theorem, then even if the mathematics is so ‘pure’ that it has no relevance to any other object in the universe . . . you’ve just made it relevant to yourself. You have to choose some physical process to test the theorem—whether you use a computer, or a pen and paper . . . or just close your eyes and shuffle neurotransmitters. There’s no such thing as a proof that doesn’t rely on physical events—and whether they’re inside or outside your skull doesn’t make them any less real.”

“Fair enough,” I conceded warily. “But that doesn’t mean—”

“And maybe Andrew Wiles’s brain—and body, and notepaper—comprised the first physical system whose behavior depended on the theorem being true or false. But I don’t think human actions have any special role . . . and if some swarm of quarks had done the same thing blindly, fifteen billion years before—executed some purely random interaction that just happened to test the conjecture in some way—then those quarks would have constructed FLT long before Wiles. We’ll never know.”

I opened my mouth to complain that no swarm of quarks could have tested the infinite number of cases encompassed by the theorem—but I caught myself just in time. That was true—but it hadn’t stopped Wiles. A finite sequence of logical steps linked the axioms of number theory—which included some simple generalities about all numbers—to Fermat’s own sweeping assertion. And if a mathematician could test those logical steps by manipulating a finite number of physical objects for a finite amount of time—whether they were pencil marks on paper, or neurotransmitters in his or her brain—then all kinds of physical systems could, in theory, mimic the structure of the proof . . . with or without any awareness of what it was they were “proving.”

I leant back on the bench and mimed tearing out hair. “If I wasn’t a die-hard Platonist before, you’re forcing me into it! Fermat’s Last Theorem didn’t need to be proved by anyone—or stumbled on by any random swarm of quarks. If it’s true, it was always true. Everything implied by a given set of axioms is logically connected to them, timelessly, eternally . . . even if the links couldn’t be traced by people—or quarks—in the lifetime of the universe.”

Alison was having none of this; every mention of timeless and eternal truths brought a faint smile to the corner of her mouth, as if I was affirming my belief in Santa Claus. She said, “So who, or what, pushed the consequences of ‘There exists an entity zero’ and ‘Every X has a successor et cetera, all the way to Fermat’s Last Theorem and beyond, before the universe had a chance to test out any of it?”

I stood my ground. “What’s joined by logic is just . . . joined. Nothing has to happen—consequences don’t have to be pushed into existence by anyone, or anything. Or do you imagine that the first events after the Big Bang, the first wild jitters of the quark-gluon-plasma, stopped to fill in all the logical gaps? You think the quarks reasoned: well, so far we’ve done A and B and C—but now we must do D, because D would be logically inconsistent with the other mathematics we’ve ‘invented’ so far . . . even if it would take a five-hundred-thousand-page proof to spell out the inconsistency?”

Alison thought it over. “No. But what if event D took place, regardless? What if the mathematics it implied was logically inconsistent with the rest—but it went ahead and happened anyway . . . because the universe was too young to have computed the fact that there was any discrepancy?”

I must have sat and stared at her, open-mouthed, for about ten seconds. Given the orthodoxies we’d spent the last two-and-a-half years absorbing, this was a seriously outrageous statement.

“You’re claiming that . . . mathematics might be strewn with primordial defects in consistency? Like space might be strewn with cosmic strings?”

“Exactly.” She stared back at me, feigning nonchalance. “If space-time doesn’t join up with itself smoothly, everywhere . . . why should mathematical logic?”

I almost choked. “Where do I begin? What happens—now—when some physical system tries to link theorems across the defect? If theorem D has been rendered ‘true’ by some over-eager quarks, what happens when we program a computer to disprove it? When the software goes through all the logical steps that link A, B, and C—which the quarks have also made true—the dreaded not-D . . . does it succeed, or doesn’t it?”

Alison sidestepped the question. “Suppose they’re both true: D and not-D. Sounds like the end of mathematics, doesn’t it? The whole system falls apart, instantly. From D and not-D together you can prove anything you like: one equals zero, day equals night. But that’s just the boring old-fart Platonist view—where logic travels faster than light, and computation takes no time at all. People live with omega-inconsistent theories, don’t they?”

Omega-inconsistent number theories were non-standard versions of arithmetic, based on axioms that “almost” contradicted each other—their saving grace being that the contradictions could only show up in “infinitely long proofs” (which were formally disallowed, quite apart from being physically impossible). That was perfectly respectable modern mathematics—but Alison seemed prepared to replace “infinitely long” with just plain “long”—as if the difference hardly mattered, in practice.

I said, “Let me get this straight. What you’re talking about is taking ordinary arithmetic—no weird counter-intuitive axioms, just the stuff every ten-year-old knows is true—and proving that it’s inconsistent, in a finite number of steps?”

She nodded blithely. “Finite, but large. So the contradiction would rarely have any physical manifestation—it would be ‘computationally distant’ from everyday calculations, and everyday physical events. I mean . . . one cosmic string, somewhere out there, doesn’t destroy the universe, does it? It does no harm to anyone.”

I laughed drily. “So long as you don’t get too close. So long as you don’t tow it back to the solar system and let it twitch around slicing up planets.”

“Exactly.”

I glanced at my watch. “Time to come down to Earth, I think. You know we’re meeting Ju1Ia and Ramesh—?”

Alison sighed theatrically. “I know, I know. And this would bore them witless, poor things—so the subject’s closed, I promise.” She added wickedly, “Humanities students are so myopic.”

We set off across the tranquil leafy campus. Alison kept her word, and we walked in silence; carrying on the argument up to the last minute would have made it even harder to avoid the topic once we were in polite company.

Half-way to the cafeteria, though, I couldn’t help myself.

“If someone ever did program a computer to follow a chain of inferences across the defect . . . what do you claim would actually happen? When the end result of all those simple, trustworthy logical steps finally popped up on the screen—which group of primordial quarks would win the battle? And please don’t tell me that the whole computer just conveniently vanishes.”

Alison smiled, tongue-in-cheek at last. “Get real, Bruno. How can you expect me to answer that, when the mathematics needed to predict the result doesn’t even exist yet? Nothing I could say would be true or false—until someone’s gone ahead and done the experiment.”

I spent most of the day trying to convince myself that I wasn’t being followed by some accomplice (or rival) of the surgeon, who might have been lurking outside the hotel. There was something disturbingly Kafka-esque about trying to lose a tail who might or might not have been real: no particular face I could search for in the crowd, just the abstract idea of a pursuer. It was too late to think about plastic surgery to make me look Han Chinese—Alison had raised this as a serious suggestion, back in Vietnam—but Shanghai had over a million foreign residents, so with care even an Anglophone of Italian descent should have been able to vanish.

Whether or not I was up to the task was another matter.

I tried joining the ant-trails of the tourists, following the path of least resistance from the insane crush of the Yuyuan Bazaar (where racks bursting with ten-cent watch-PC’s, mood-sensitive contact lenses, and the latest karaoke vocal implants, sat beside bamboo cages of live ducks and pigeons) to the one-time residence of Sun Yatsen (whose personality cult was currently undergoing a mini-series-led revival on Star TV, advertised on ten thousand buses and ten times as many T-shirts). From the tomb of the writer Lu Xun (“Always think and study . . . visit the general then visit the victims, see the realities of your time with open eyes”—no prime time for him) to the Hongkou McDonald’s (where they were giving away small plastic Andy Warhol figurines, for reasons I couldn’t fathom). I mimed leisurely window-shopping between the shrines, but kept my body language sufficiently unfriendly to deter even the loneliest Westerner from attempting to strike up a conversation. If foreigners were unremarkable in most of the city, they were positively eye-glazing here—even to each other—and I did my best to offer no one the slightest reason to remember me.

Along the way I checked for messages from Alison, but there were none. I left five of my own, tiny abstract chalk marks on bus shelters and park benches—all slightly different, but all saying the same thing: CLOSE BRUSH, BUT SAFE NOW. MOVING ON.

By early evening, I’d done all I could to throw off my hypothetical shadow, so I headed for the next hotel on our agreed but unwritten list. The last time we’d met face-to-face, in Hanoi, I mocked all of Alison’s elaborate preparations. Now I was beginning to wish that I’d begged her to extend our secret language to cover extreme contingencies. . FATALLY WOUNDED. BETRAYED YOU UNDER TORTURE. REALITY DECAYING. OTHERWISE FINE.

The hotel on Huaihai Zhonglu was a step up from the last one, but not quite classy enough to refuse payment in cash. The desk clerk made polite small-talk, and I lied as smoothly as I could about my plans to spend a week sight seeing before heading for Beijing. The bellperson smirked when I tipped him too much—and I sat on my bed for five minutes afterward, wondering what significance to read into that.

I struggled to regain a sense of proportion. Industrial Algebra could have bribed every single hotel employee in Shanghai to be on the lookout for us—but that was a bit like saying that, in theory, they could have duplicated our entire twelve-year search for defects, and not bothered to pursue us at all. There was no question that they wanted what we had, badly—but what could they actually do about it? Go to a merchant bank (or the Mafia, or a Triad) for finance? That might have worked if the cargo had been a stray kilogram of plutonium, or a valuable gene sequence—but only a few hundred thousand people on the planet would be capable of understanding what the defect was, even in theory. Only a fraction of that number would believe that such a thing could really exist . . . and even fewer would be both wealthy and immoral enough to invest in the business of exploiting it.

The stakes appeared to be infinitely high—but that didn’t make the players omnipotent.

Not yet.

I changed the dressing on my arm, from sock to handkerchief, but the incision was deeper than I’d realized, and it was still bleeding thinly. I left the hotel—and found exactly what I needed in a twenty-four-hour emporium just ten minutes away. Surgical grade tissue repair cream: a mixture of collagen-based adhesive, antiseptic, and growth factors. The emporium wasn’t even a pharmaceuticals outlet—it just had aisle after aisle packed with all kinds of unrelated odds and ends, laid out beneath the unblinking blue-white ceiling panels. Canned food, PVC plumbing fixtures, traditional medicines, rat contraceptives, video ROMS. It was a random cornucopia, an almost organic diversity—as if the products had all just grown on the shelves from whatever spores the wind had happened to blow in.

I headed back to the hotel, pushing my way through the relentless crowds, half seduced and half sickened by the odors of cooking, dazed by the endless vista of holograms and neon in a language I barely understood. Fifteen minutes later, reeling from the noise and humidity, I realized that I was lost.

I stopped on a street corner and tried to get my bearings. Shanghai stretched out around me, dense and lavish, sensual and ruthless—a Darwinian economic simulation self-organized to the brink of catastrophe. The Amazon of commerce: this city of sixteen million had more industry of every kind, more exporters and importers, more wholesalers and retailers, traders and re-sellers and re-cyclers and scavengers, more billionaires and more beggars, than most nations on the planet.

Not to mention more computing power.

China itself was reaching the cusp of its decades-long transition from brutal totalitarian communism to brutal totalitarian capitalism: a slow seamless morph from Mao to Pinochet set to the enthusiastic applause of its trading partners and the international financial agencies. There’d been no need for a counter-revolution just layer after layer of carefully reasoned Newspeak to pave the way from previous doctrine to the stunningly obvious conclusion that private property, a thriving middle class, and a few trillion dollars worth of foreign investment were exactly what the Party had been aiming for all along.

The apparatus of the police state remained as essential as ever. Trade unionists with decadent bourgeois ideas about uncompetitive wages, journalists With counter-revolutionary notions of exposing corruption and nepotism, and any number of subversive political activists spreading destabilizing propaganda about the fantasy of free elections, all needed to be kept in check.

In a way, Luminous was a product of this strange transition from communism to not-communism in a thousand tiny steps. No one else, not even the U.S. defense research establishment, possessed a single machine with so much power. The rest of the world had succumbed long ago to networking, giving up their imposing supercomputers with their difficult architecture and customized chips for a few hundred of the latest mass-produced work stations. In fact, the biggest computing feats of the twenty-first century had all been farmed out over the Internet to thousands of volunteers, to run on their machines whenever the processors would otherwise be idle. That was how Alison and I had mapped the defect in the first place: seven thousand amateur mathematicians had shared the joke, for twelve years.

But now the net was the very opposite of what we needed—and only Luminous could take its place. And though only the People’s Republic could have paid for it, and only the People’s Institute for Advanced Optical Engineering could have built it . . . only Shanghai’s QIPS Corporation could have sold time on it to the world—while it was still being used to model hydrogen bomb shock waves, pilotless fighter jets, and exotic antisatellite weapons.

I finally decoded the street signs, and realized what I’d done: I’d turned the wrong way coming out of the emporium, it was as simple as that.

I retraced my steps, and I was soon back on familiar territory.

When I opened the door of my room, Alison was sitting on the bed.

I said, “What is it with locks in this city?”

We embraced, briefly. We’d been lovers, once—but that was long over. And we’d been friends for years afterward—but I wasn’t sure if that was still the right word. Our whole relationship now was too functional, too spartan. Everything revolved around the defect, now.

She said, “I got your message. What happened?”

I described the morning’s events.

“You know what you should have done?”

That stung. “I’m still here, aren’t I? The cargo’s still safe.”

“You should have killed her, Bruno.”

I laughed. Alison gazed back at me placidly, and I looked away. I didn’t know if she was serious—and I didn’t much want to find out.

She helped me apply the repair cream. My toxin was no threat to her—we’d both installed exactly the same symbionts, the same genotype from the same unique batch in Hanoi. But it was strange to feel her bare fingers on my broken skin, knowing that no one else on the planet could touch me like this, with impunity.

Ditto for sex, but I didn’t want to dwell on that.

As I slipped on my jacket, she said, “So guess what we’re doing at five A.M. tomorrow?”

“Don’t tell me: I fly to Helsinki, and you fly to Cape Town. Just to throw them off the scent.”

That got a faint smile. “Wrong. We’re meeting Yuen at the Institute—and spending half an hour on Luminous.”

“You are brilliant.” I bent over and kissed her on the forehead. “But I always knew you’d pull it off.”

And I should have been delirious—but the truth was, my guts were churning. I felt almost as trapped as I had upon waking cuffed to the bed. If Luminous had remained beyond our reach (as it should have, since we couldn’t afford to hire it for a microsecond at the going rate) we would have had no choice but to destroy all the data, and hope for the best. Industrial Algebra had no doubt dredged up a few thousand fragments of the original Internet calculations—but it was clear that, although they knew exactly what we’d found, they still had no idea where we’d found it. If they’d been forced to start their own random search-constrained by the need for secrecy to their own private hardware—it might have taken them centuries.

There was no question now, though, of backing away and leaving everything to chance. We were going to have to confront the defect in person.

“How much did you have to tell him?”

“Everything.” She walked over to the washbasin, removed her shirt, and began wiping the sweat from her neck and torso with a washcloth. “Short of handing over the map. I showed him the search algorithms and their results, and all the programs wall need to run on Luminous—all stripped of specific parameter values, but enough for him to validate the techniques. He wanted to see direct evidence of the defect, of course, but I held out on that.”

“And how much did he believe?”

“He’s reserved judgment. The deal is, we get half an hour’s unimpeded access—but he gets to observe everything we do.”

I nodded, as if my opinion made any difference, as if we had any choice. Yuen Ting-fu had been Alison’s supervisor for her Ph.D. on advanced applications of ring theory, when she’d studied at Fu-tan University in the late nineties. Now he was one of the world’s leading cryptographers, working as a consultant to the military, the security services, and a dozen international corporations. Alison had once told me that she’d heard he’d found a polynomial-time algorithm for factoring the product of two primes; that had never been officially confirmed . . . but such was the power of his reputation that almost everyone on the planet had stopped using the old RSA encryption method as the rumor had spread. No doubt time on Luminous was his for the asking—but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still be imprisoned for twenty years for giving it away to the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.

I said, “And you trust him? He may not believe in the defect now, but once he’s convinced—”

“Hell want exactly what we want. I’m sure of that.”

“Okay. But are you sure IA won’t be watching, too? If they’ve worked out why we’re here, and they’ve bribed someone—”

Alison cut me off impatiently. “There are still a few things you can’t buy in this city. Spying on a military machine like Luminous would be suicidal. No one would risk it.”

“What about spying on unauthorized projects being run on a military machine? Maybe the crimes cancel out, and you end up a hero.”

She approached me, half naked, drying her face on my towel. “We’d better hope not.”

I laughed suddenly. “You know what I like most about Luminous? They’re not really letting Exxon and McDonnell-Douglas use the same machine as the People’s Liberation Army. Because the whole computer vanishes every time they pull the plug. There’s no paradox at all, if you look at it that way.”

Alison insisted that we stand guard in shifts. Twenty-four hours earlier, I might have made a joke of it; now I reluctantly accepted the revolver she offered me, and sat watching the door in the neon-tinged darkness while she went out like a light.

The hotel had been quiet for most of the evening—but now it came to life. There were footsteps in the corridor every five minutes—and rats in the walls, foraging and screwing and probably giving birth. Police sirens wailed in the distance; a couple screamed at each other in the street below. I’d read somewhere that Shanghai was now the murder capital of the world—but was that per capita, or in absolute numbers?

After an hour, I was so jumpy that it was a miracle I hadn’t blown my foot off. I unloaded the gun, then sat playing Russian roulette with the empty barrel. In spite of everything, I still wasn’t ready to put a bullet in anyone’s brain for the sake of defending the axioms of number theory.

Industrial Algebra had approached us in a perfectly civilized fashion, at first. They were a small but aggressive UK-based company, designing specialized high-performance computing hardware for industrial and military applications. That they’d heard about the search was no great surprise—it had been openly discussed on the Internet for years, and even joked about in serious mathematical journals—but it seemed an odd coincidence when they made contact with us just days after Alison had sent me a private message from ZŸrich mentioning the latest “promising” result. After half a dozen false alarms—all due to bugs and glitches—we’d stopped broadcasting the news of every unconfirmed find to the people who were donating runtime to the project, let alone any wider circle. We were afraid that if we cried wolf one more time, half our collaborators would get so annoyed that they’d withdraw their support.

IA had offered us a generous slab of computing power on the company’s private network several orders of magnitude more than we received from any other donor Why? The answer kept changing. Their deep respect for pure mathematics . . . their wide-eyed fun-loving attitude to life . . . their desire to be seen to be sponsoring a project s0 wild and hip and unlikely to succeed that it made SETI look like a staid blue-chip investment. It was—they’d finally “conceded”—a desperate bid to soften their corporate image, after years of bad press for what certain unsavory governments did with their really rather nice smart bombs.

We’d politely declined. They’d offered us highly paid consulting jobs. Bemused, we’d suspended all net-based calculations—and started encrypting our mail with a simple but highly effective algorithm Alison had picked up from Yuen.

Alison had been collating the results of the search on her own work station at her current home in ZŸrich, while I’d helped coordinate things from Sydney. No doubt IA had been eavesdropping on the incoming data, but they’d clearly started too late to gather the information needed to create their own map; each fragment of the calculations meant little in isolation. But when the work station was stolen (all the files were encrypted, it would have told them nothing) we’d finally been forced to ask ourselves: If the defect turns out to be genuine, if the joke is no joke . . . then exactly what’s at stake? How much money? How much power?

On June 7, 2006, we met in a sweltering, crowded square in Hanoi. Alison wasted no time. She was carrying a backup of the data from the stolen work station in her notepad—and she solemnly proclaimed that, this time, the defect was real.

The notepad’s tiny processor would have taken centuries to repeat the long random trawling of the space of arithmetic statements that had been carried out on the net—but, led straight to the relevant computations, it could confirm the existence of the defect in a matter of minutes.

The process began with Statement S. Statement S was an assertion about some ludicrously huge numbers—but it wasn’t mathematically sophisticated or contentious in any way. There were no claims here about infinite sets, no propositions concerning “every integer.” It merely stated that a certain (elaborate) calculation performed on certain (very large) whole numbers led to a certain result—in essence, it was no different from something like “5+3 = 4x2”. It might have taken me ten years to check it with a pen and paper—but I could have carried out the task with nothing but elementary school mathematics and a great deal of patience. A statement like this could not be undecidable; it had to be either true or false.

The notepad decided it was true.

Then the notepad took Statement S . . . and in four hundred and twenty-three simple, impeccably logical steps, used it to prove not-S.

I repeated the calculations on my own notepad—using a different software package. The result was exactly the same. I gazed at the screen, trying to concoct a plausible reason why two different machines running two different programs could have failed in identical ways. There’d certainly been cases in the past of a single misprinted algorithm in a computing textbook spawning a thousand dud programs. But the operations here were too simple, too basic.

Which left only two possibilities. Either conventional arithmetic was intrinsically flawed, and the whole Platonic ideal of the natural numbers was ultimately self-contradictory . . . or Alison was right, and an alternative arithmetic had come to hold sway in a “computationally remote” region, billions of years ago.

I was badly shaken—but my first reaction was to try to play down the significance of the result. “The numbers being manipulated here are greater than the volume of the observable universe, measured in cubic Planck lengths. If IA were hoping to use this on their foreign exchange transactions, I think they’ve made a slight error of scale.” Even as I spoke, though, I knew it wasn’t that simple. The raw numbers might have been trans-astronomical—but it was the mere 1024 bits of the notepad’s binary representations that had actually, physically misbehaved. Every truth in mathematics was encoded, reflected, in countless other forms. If a paradox like this—which at first glance sounded like a dispute about numbers too large to apply even to the most grandiose cosmological discussions—could affect the behavior of a five-gram silicon chip, then there could easily be a billion other systems on the planet at risk of being touched by the very same flaw.

But there was worse to come.

The theory was, we’d located part of the boundary between two incompatible systems of mathematics—both of which were physically true, in their respective domains. Any sequence of deductions that stayed entirely on one side of the defect—whether it was the “near side,” where conventional arithmetic applied, or the “far side,” where the alternative took over—would be free from contradictions. But any sequence that crossed the border would give rise to absurdities—hence S could lead to not-S.

So, by examining a large number of chains of inference, some of which turned out to be self-contradictory and some not, it should have been possible to map the area around the defect precisely—to assign every statement to one system or the other.

Alison displayed the first map she’d made. It portrayed an elaborate crenulated fractal border, rather like the boundary between two microscopic ice crystals—as if the two systems had been diffusing out at random from different starting points, and then collided, blocking each other’s way. By now, I was almost prepared to believe that I really was staring at a snapshot of the creation of mathematics—a fossil of primordial attempts to define the difference between truth and falsehood.

Then she produced a second map of the same set of statements, and overlaid the two. The defect, the border, had shifted—advancing in some places, retreating in others.

My blood went cold. “That has got to be a bug in the software.”

“It’s not.”

I inhaled deeply, looking around the square as if the heedless crow. of tourists and hawkers, shoppers and executives, might offer some simple “human” truth more resilient than mere arithmetic. But all I could think of was 1984: Winston Smith, finally beaten into submission, abandoning every touchstone of reason by conceding that two and two make five.

I said, “Okay. Go on.”

“In the early universe, some physical system must have tested out mathematics that was isolated, cut off from all the established results—leaving it free to decide the outcome at random. That’s how the defect arose. But by now, all the mathematics in this region has been tested, all the gaps have been filled in. When a physical system tests theorem on the near side, not only has it been tested a billion time before—but all the logically adjacent statements around it have been decided, and they imply the correct result in a single step.”

“You mean . . . peer pressure from the neighbors? No inconsistencies allowed, you have to conform? If x-1 = y-1, and x+1 = y+1, then x is left with no choice but to equal y . . . because there’s nothing ‘nearby’ to support the alternative?”

“Exactly. Truth is determined locally. And it’s the same, deep into the far side. The alternative mathematics has dominated there, and every test takes place surrounded by established theorems that reinforce each other, and the ‘correct’-non-standard-result.”

“At the border, though—”

“At the border, every theorem you test is getting contradictory advice. From one neighbor, x-1 = y-1 . . . but from another, x+1 = y+2. And the topology of the border is so complex that a near-side theorem can have more far-side neighbors than near-side ones—and vice versa.

“So the truth at the border isn’t fixed, even now. Both regions can still advance or retreat—it all depends on the order in which the theorems are tested. If a solidly near-side theorem is tested first, and it lend support to a more vulnerable neighbor, that can guarantee that they both stay near-side.” She ran a brief animation that demonstrated the effect. “But if the order is reversed, the weaker one will fail.”

I watched, light-headed. Obscure—but supposedly eternal-truth were tumbling like chess pieces. “And . . . you think that physical processes going on right now—chance molecular events that keep inadvertently testing and re-testing different theories along the border-cause each side to gain and lose territory?”

“Yes.”

“So there’s been a kind of . . . random tide washing back and forth between the two kinds of mathematics, for the past few billion years?” I laughed uneasily, and did some rough calculations in my head. “The expectation value for a random walk is the square root of N. I don’t think we have anything to worry about. The tide isn’t going to wash over an, useful arithmetic in the lifetime of the universe.”

Alison smiled humorlessly, and held up the notepad again. “The tide? No. But it’s the easiest thing in the world to dig a channel. To bias the random flow.” She ran an animation of a sequence of tests that forced the far-site system to retreat across a small front-exploiting a “beach head” formed by chance, and then pushing on to undermine a succession of theorems. “Industrial Algebra, though—I imagine—would be more interested in the reverse. Establishing a whole network of narrow channels of non-standard mathematics running deep into the realm of conventional arithmetic—which they could then deploy against theorems with practical consequences.”

I fell silent, trying to imagine tendrils of contradictory arithmetic reaching down into the everyday world. No doubt IA would aim for surgical precision-hoping to earn themselves a few billion dollars by corrupting the specific mathematics underlying certain financial transactions. But the ramifications would be impossible to predict—or control. There’d be no way to limit the effect, spatially—they could target certain mathematical truths, but they couldn’t confine the change to any one location. A few billion dollars, a few billion neurons, a few billion stars . . . a few billion people. Once the basic rules of counting were undermined, the most solid and distinct objects could be rendered as uncertain as swirls of fog. This was not a power I would have entrusted to a cross between Mother Theresa and Carl Friedrich Gauss.

“So what do we do? Erase the map—and just hope that IA never find the defect for themselves?”

“No.” Alison seemed remarkably calm—but then, her own long-cherished philosophy had just been confirmed, not razed to the ground—and she’d had time on the flight from ZŸrich to think through all the Realmathematik. “There’s only one way to be sure that they can never use this. We have to strike first. We have to get hold of enough computing power to map the entire defect. And then we either iron the border flat, so it can’t move—if you amputate all the pincers, there can be no pincer movements. Or—better yet, if we can get the resources—we push the border in, from all directions, and shrink the far-side system down to nothing.”

I hesitated. “All we’ve mapped so far is a tiny fragment of the defect We don’t know how large the far side could be. Except that it can’t be small—or the random fluctuations—would have swallowed it long ago. And it could go on forever; it could be infinite, for all we know.”

Alison gave me a strange look. “You still don’t get it, do you, Bruno? You’re still thinking like a Platonist. The universe has only been around for fifteen billion years. It hasn’t had time to create infinities. The far side can’t go on forever—because somewhere beyond the defect, there are theorems that don’t belong to any system. Theorems that have never been touched, never been tested, never been rendered true or false.

“And if we have to reach beyond the existing mathematics of the universe in order to surround the far side . . . then that’s what we’ll do. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be possible—just so long as we get there first.”

When Alison took my place, at one in the morning, I was certain I wouldn’t get any sleep. When she shook me awake three hours later, I still felt like I hadn’t.

I used my notepad to send a priming code to the data caches buried in our veins, and then we stood together side-by-side, left-shoulder-to-right-shoulder. The two chips recognized each other’s magnetic and electrical signatures, interrogated each other to be sure—and then began radiating low power microwaves. Alison’s notepad picked up the transmission, and merged the two complementary data streams. The result was still heavily encrypted—but after all the precautions we’d taken so far, shifting the map into a hand-held computer felt about as secure as tattooing it onto our foreheads.

A taxi was waiting for us downstairs. The People’s Institute for Advanced Optical Engineering was in Minhang, a sprawling technology park some thirty kilometers south of the city center. We rode in silence through the gray predawn light, past the giant ugly tower blocks thrown up by the landlords of the new millennium, riding out the fever as the necrotraps and their cargo dissolved into our blood.

As the taxi turned into an avenue lined with biotech and aerospace companies, Alison said, “If anyone asks, we’re Ph.D. students of Yuen’s, testing a conjecture in algebraic topology.”

“Now you tell me. I don’t suppose you have any specific conjecture in mind? What if they ask us to elaborate?”

“On algebraic topology? At five o’clock in the morning?”

The Institute building was unimposing-sprawling black ceramic, three stories high—but there was a five-meter electrified fence, and the entrance was guarded by two armed soldiers. We paid the taxi driver and approached on foot. Yuen had supplied us with visitor’s passes—complete with photographs and fingerprints. The names were our own; there was no point indulging in unnecessary deception. If we were caught out, pseudonyms would only make things worse.

The soldiers checked the passes, then led us through an MRI scanner. I forced myself to breathe calmly as we waited for the results; in theory the scanner could have picked up our symbionts’ foreign proteins, lingering breakdown products from the necrotraps, and a dozen other suspicious trace chemicals. But it all came down to a question of what they were looking for; magnetic resonance spectra for billions of molecules had been catalogued—but no machine could hunt for all of them at once.

One of the soldiers took me aside and asked me to remove my jacket. I fought down a wave of panic—and then struggled not to overcompensate: if I’d had nothing to hide, I would still have been nervous. He prodded the bandage on my upper arm; the surrounding skin was still red and inflamed.

“What’s this?”

“I had a cyst there. My doctor cut it out, this morning.”

He eyed me suspiciously, and peeled back the adhesive bandage—with ungloved hands. I couldn’t bring myself to look; the repair cream should have sealed the wound completely—at worst there should have been old, dried blood—but I could feel a faint liquid warmth along the line of the incision.

The soldier laughed at my gritted teeth, and waved me away with an expression of distaste. I had no idea what he thought I might have been hiding—but I saw fresh red droplets beading the skin before I closed the bandage.

Yuen Ting-fu was waiting for us in the lobby. He was a slender, fit looking man in his late sixties, casually dressed in denim. I let Alison do all the talking: apologizing for our lack of punctuality (although we’s weren’t actually late), and thanking him effusively for granting us this precious opportunity to pursue our unworthy research. I stood back and tried to appear suitably deferential. Four soldiers looked on impassively; they didn’t seem to find all this groveling excessive. And no doubt I would have been giddy with awe, if I really had been a student granted time here for some run-of-the-mill thesis.

We followed Yuen as he strode briskly through a second checkpoint and scanner (this time, no one stopped us) then down a long corridor with a soft gray vinyl floor. We passed a couple of white-coated technicians, but they barely gave us a second glance. I’d had visions of a pair of obvious foreigners attracting as much attention here as we would have wandering through a military base—but that was absurd. Half the runtime on Luminous was sold to foreign corporations—and because the machine was most definitely not linked to any communications network, commercial users had to come here in person. Just how often Yuen wangled free time for his students—whatever their nationality—was another question, but if he believed it was the best cover for us, I was in no position to argue. I only hoped he’d planted a seamless trail of reassuring lies in the university records and beyond, in case the Institute administration decided to check up on us in any detail.

We stopped in at the operations room, and Yuen chatted with the technicians. Banks of flatscreens covered one wall, displaying status histograms and engineering schematics. It looked like the control center for a small particle accelerator—which wasn’t far from the truth.

Luminous was, literally, a computer made of light. It came into existence when a vacuum chamber, a cube five meters wide, was filled with an elaborate standing wave created by three vast arrays of high-powered lasers. A coherent electron beam was fed into the chamber—and just as a finely machined grating built of solid matter could diffract a beam of light, a sufficiently ordered (and sufficiently intense) configuration of light could diffract a beam of matter.

The electrons were redirected from layer to layer of the light cube, recombining and interfering at each stage, every change in their phase and intensity performing an appropriate computation—and the whole system could be reconfigured, nanosecond by nanosecond, into complex new “hardware” optimized for the calculations at hand. The auxilliary supercomputers controlling the laser arrays could design, and then instantly build, the perfect machine of light to carry out each particular stage of any program.

It was, of course, fiendishly difficult technology, incredibly expensive and temperamental. The chance of ever putting it on the desktops of Tetris-playing accountants was zero, so nobody in the West had bothered to pursue it.

And this cumbersome, unwieldy, impractical machine ran faster than every piece of silicon hanging off the Internet, combined.

We continued on to the programming room. At first glance, it might have been the computing center in a small primary school, with half a dozen perfectly ordinary work stations sitting on white formica tables. They just happened to be the only six in the world that were hooked up to Luminous.

We were alone with Yuen now—and Alison cut the protocol and just glanced briefly in his direction for approval, before hurriedly linking her notepad to one of the work stations and uploading the encrypted map. As she typed in the instructions to decode the file, all the images running through my head of what would have happened if I’d poisoned the soldier at the gate receded into insignificance. We now had half an hour to banish the defect—and we still had no idea how far it extended.

Yuen turned to me; the tension on his face betrayed his own anxieties, but he mused philosophically, “If our arithmetic seems to fail for these large numbers—does it mean the mathematics, the ideal, is really flawed and mutable—or only that the behavior of matter always falls short of the ideal?”

I replied, “If every class of physical objects ‘falls short’ in exactly the same way—whether it’s boulders or electrons or abacus beads . . . what is it that their common behavior is obeying—or defining—if not the mathematics?”

He smiled, puzzled. “`Alison seemed to think you were a Platonist.”

“Lapsed. Or . . . defeated. I don’t see what it can mean to talk about standard number theory still being true for these statements—in some vague Platonic sense—if no real objects can ever reflect that truth.”

“We can still imagine it. We can still contemplate the abstraction. It’s only the physical act of validation that must fall through. Think of transfinite arithmetic: no one can physically test the properties of Cantor’s infinities, can they? We can only reason about them from afar.”

I didn’t reply. Since the revelations in Hanoi, I’d pretty much lost faith in my power to “reason from afar” about anything I couldn’t personally describe with Arabic numerals on a single sheet of paper. Maybe Alison’s idea of “local truth” was the most we could hope for; anything more ambitious was beginning to seem like the comic-book “physics” of swinging a rigid beam ten billion kilometers long around your head, and predicting that the far end would exceed the speed of light.

An image blossomed on the work station screen: it began as the familiar map of the defect—but Luminous was already extending it at a mind-boggling rate. Billions of inferential loops were being spun around the margins: some confirming their own premises, and thus delineating regions where a single, consistent mathematics held sway . . . others skewing into self-contradiction, betraying a border crossing. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to follow one of those Mobius-strips of deductive logic in my head; there were no difficult concepts involved, it was only the sheer size of the statements that made that impossible. But would the contradictions have driven me into gibbering insanity—or would I have found every step perfectly reasonable, and the conclusion simply unavoidable? Would I have ended up calmly, happily conceding: Two and two make five?

As the map grew—smoothly re-scaled to keep it fitting on the screen, giving the unsettling impression that we were retreating from the alien mathematics as fast as we could, and only just avoiding being swallowed—Alison sat hunched forward, waiting for the big picture to be revealed. The map portrayed the network of statements as an intricate lattice in three dimensions (a crude representational convention, but it was as good as any other). So far, the border between the regions showed no sign of overall curvature—just variously sized random incursions in both directions. For all we knew, it was possible that the far-side mathematics enclosed the near side completely—that the arithmetic we’d once believed stretched out to infinity was really no more than a tiny island in an ocean of contradictory truths.

I glanced at Yuen; he was watching the screen with undisguised pain. He said, “I read your software, and I thought: sure, this looks fine—but some glitch on your machines is the real explanation. Luminous will soon put you right.”

Alison broke in jubilantly, “Look, it’s turning!”

She was right. As the scale continued to shrink, the random fractal meanderings of the border were finally being subsumed by an overall convexity—a convexity of the far side. It was as if the viewpoint was backing away from a giant spiked sea-urchin. Within minutes, the map showed a crude hemisphere, decorated with elaborate crystalline extrusions at every scale. The sense of observing some palaeomathematical remnant was stronger than ever, now: this bizarre cluster of theorems really did look as if it had exploded out from some central premise into the vacuum of unclaimed truths, perhaps a billionth of a second after the Big Bang—only to be checked by an encounter with our own mathematics.

The hemisphere slowly extended into a three-quarters sphere . . . and then a spiked whole. The far side was bounded, finite. It was the island, not us.

Alison laughed uneasily. “Was that true before we started—or did we just make it true?” Had the near side enclosed the far side for billions of years—or had Luminous broken new ground, actively extending the near side into mathematical territory that had never been tested by any physical system before?

We’d never know. We’d designed the software to advance the mapping along a front in such a way that any unclaimed statements would be instantly recruited into the near side. If we’d reached out blindly, far into the void, we might have tested an isolated statement—and inadvertently spawned a whole new alternative mathematics to deal with.

Alison said, “Okay—now we have to decide. Do we try to seal the border—or do we take on the whole structure?” The software, I knew, was busy assessing the relative difficulty of the tasks.

Yuen replied at once, “Seal the border, nothing more. You mustn’t destroy this.” He turned to me, imploringly. “Would you smash up a fossil of Australopithecus? Would you wipe the cosmic background radiation out of the sky? This may shake the foundations of all my beliefs—but it encodes the truth about our history. We have no right to obliterate it, like vandals.”

Alison eyed me nervously. What was this—majority rule? Yuen was the only one with any power here; he could pull the plug in an instant. And yet it was clear from his demeanor that he wanted a consensus—he wanted our moral support for any decision.

I said cautiously, “If we smooth the border, that’ll make it literally impossible for IA to exploit the defect, won’t it?”

Alison shook her head. “We don’t know that. There may be a quantum-like component of spontaneous defections, even for statements that appear to be in perfect equilibrium.”

Yuen countered, “Then there could be spontaneous defections anywhere—even far from any border. Erasing the whole structure will guarantee nothing.”

“It will guarantee that IA won’t find it! Maybe pin-point defections do occur, all the time—but the next time they’re tested, they’ll always revert. They’re surrounded by explicit contradictions, they have no chance of getting a foothold. You can’t compare a few transient glitches with this . . . armory of counter-mathematics!”

The defect bristled on the screen like a giant caltrap. Alison and Yuen both turned to me expectantly. As I opened my mouth, the work station chimed. The software had examined the alternatives in detail: destroying the entire far side would take Luminous twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds—about a minute less than we had left, Sealing the border would take more than an hour.

I said, “That can’t be right.”

Alison groaned. “But it is! There’s random interference going on at the border from other systems all the time—and doing anything finicky there means coping with that noise, fighting it. Charging ahead and pushing the border inward is different: you can exploit the noise to speed the advance. It’s not a question of dealing with a mere surface versus dealing with a whole volume. It’s more like . . . trying to carve an island into an absolutely perfect circle, while waves are constantly crashing on the beach—versus bulldozing the whole thing into the ocean.”

We had thirty seconds to decide—or we’d be doing neither today. And maybe Yuen had the resources to keep the map safe from IA, while we waited a month or more for another session on Luminous—but I wasn’t prepared to live with that kind of uncertainty.

“I say we get rid of the whole thing. Anything less is too dangerous. Future mathematicians will still be able to study the map—and if no one believes that the defect itself ever really existed, that’s just too bad. IA is too close. We can’t risk it.”

Alison had one hand poised above the keyboard. I turned to Yuen; he was staring at the floor, with an anguished expression. He’d let us state our views—but in the end, it was his decision.

He looked up, and spoke sadly but decisively.

“Okay. Do it.”

Alison hit the key—with about three seconds to spare. I sagged into my chair, light headed with relief.

We watched the far side shrinking. The process didn’t look quite as crass as bulldozing an island—more like dissolving some quirkily beautiful crystal in acid. Now that the danger was receding before our eyes, though, I was beginning to suffer faint pangs of regret. Our mathematics had coexisted with this strange anomaly for fifteen billion years, and it shamed me to think that within months of its discovery, we’d backed ourselves into a corner where we’d had no choice but to destroy it.

Yuen seemed transfixed by the process. “So are we breaking the laws of physics—or enforcing them?”

Alison said, “Neither. We’re merely changing what the laws imply.”

He laughed softly. “ ‘Merely.’ For some esoteric set of complex systems, we’re rewriting the high-level rules of their behavior. Not including the human brain, I hope.”

My skin crawled. “Don’t you think that’s . . . unlikely?”

“I was joking.” He hesitated, then added soberly, “Unlikely for humans—but someone could be relying on this, somewhere. We might be destroying the whole basis of their existence: certainties as fundamental to them as a child’s multiplication tables are to us.”

Alison could barely conceal her scorn. “This is junk mathematics—a relic of a pointless accident. Any kind of life that evolved from simple to complex forms would have no use for it. Our mathematics works for . . . rocks, seeds, animals in the herd, members of the tribe. This only kicks in beyond the number of particles in the universe—”

“Or smaller systems that represent those numbers,” I reminded her.

“And you think life somewhere might have a burning need to do nonstandard trans-astronomical arithmetic, in order to survive? I doubt that very much.”

We fell silent. Guilt and relief could fight it out later, but no one suggested halting the program. In the end, maybe nothing could outweigh the havoc the defect would have caused if it had ever been harnessed as a weapon—and I was looking forward to composing a long message to Industrial Algebra, informing them of precisely what we’d done to the object of their ambitions.

Alison pointed to a corner of the screen. “What’s that?” A narrow dark spike protruded from the shrinking cluster of statements. For a moment I thought it was merely avoiding the near side’s assault—but it wasn’t. It was slowly, steadily growing longer.

“Could be a bug in the mapping algorithm.” I reached for the keyboard and zoomed in on the structure. In close-up, it was several thousand statements wide. At its border, Alison’s program could be seen in action, testing statements in an order designed to force tendrils of the near side ever deeper into the interior. This slender extrusion, ringed by contradictory mathematics, should have been corroded out of existence in a fraction of a second. Something was actively countering the assault, though-repairing every trace of damage before it could spread.

“If IA have a bug here—” I turned to Yuen. “They couldn’t take on Luminous directly, so they couldn’t stop the whole far side shrinking—but a tiny structure like this . . . what do you think? Could they stabilize it?”

“Perhaps,” he conceded. “Four or five hundred top-speed work stations could do it.”

Alison was typing frantically on her notepad. She said, “I’m writing a patch to identify any systematic interference—and divert all our resources against it.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Look over my shoulder, will you, Bruno? Check me as I go.”

“Okay.” I read through what she’d written so far. “You’re doing fine. Stay calm.” Her hands were trembling.

The spike continued to grow steadily. By the time the patch was ready, the map was re-scaling constantly to fit it on the screen.

Alison triggered the patch. An overlay of electric blue appeared along the spike, flagging the concentration of computing power—and the spike abruptly froze.

I held my breath, waiting for IA to notice what we’d done—and switch their resources elsewhere? If they did, no second spike would appear—they’d never get that far—but the blue marker on the screen would shift to the site where they’d regrouped and tried to make it happen.

But the blue glow didn’t move from the existing spike. And the spike didn’t vanish under the weight of Luminous’s undivided efforts.

Instead, it began to grow again, slowly.

Yuen looked ill. “This is not Industrial Algebra. There’s no computer on the planet—”

Alison laughed derisively. “What are you saying now? Aliens who need the far side are defending it? Aliens where? Nothing we’ve done has had time to reach even . . . Jupiter.” There was an edge of hysteria in her voice.

“Have you measured how fast the changes propagate? Do you know, for certain, that they can’t travel faster than light—with the far-side mathematics undermining the logic of relativity?”

I said, “Whoever it is, they’re not defending all their borders. They’re putting everything they’ve got into the spike.”

“They’re aiming at something. A specific target.” Yuen reached over Alison’s shoulder for the keyboard. “We’re shutting this down. Right now.”

She turned on him, blocking his way. “Are you crazy? We’re almost holding them off! I’ll rewrite the program, fine-tune it, get an edge in efficiency—”

“No! We stop threatening them, then see how they react. We don’t know what harm we’re doing—”

He reached for the keyboard again.

Alison jabbed him in the throat with her elbow, hard. He staggered backward, gasping for breath, then crashed to the floor, bringing a chair down on top him. She hissed at me, “Quick—shut him up!”

I hesitated, loyalties fracturing, his idea had sounded perfectly sane to me. But if he started yelling for security—

I crouched down over him, pushed the chair aside, then clasped my hand over his mouth, forcing his head back with pressure on the lower jaw. We’d have to tie him up—and then try brazenly marching out of the building without him. But he’d be found in a matter of minutes. Even if we made it past the gate, we were screwed.

Yuen caught his breath and started struggling; I clumsily pinned his arms with my knees. I could hear Alison typing, a ragged staccato, tried to get a glimpse of the work station screen, but I couldn’t turn that far without taking my weight off Yuen.

I said, “Maybe he’s right—maybe we should pull back, and see what happens.” If the alterations could propagate faster than light . . . how many distant civilizations might have felt the effects of what we’d done? Our first contact with extraterrestrial life could turn out to be an attempt to obliterate mathematics that they viewed as . . . what? A precious resource? A sacred relic? An essential component of their entire world view?

The sound of typing stopped abruptly. “Bruno? Do you feel—?”

“What?”

Silence.

“What?”

Yuen seemed to have given up the fight. I risked turning around.

Alison was hunched forward, her face in her hands. On the screen the spike had ceased its relentless linear growth—but now an elaborate. dendritic structure had blossomed at its tip. I glanced down at Yuen; he seemed dazed, oblivious to my presence. I took my hand from his mouth warily. He lay there placidly, smiling faintly, eyes scanning something I couldn’t see.

I climbed to my feet. I took Alison by the shoulders and shook he gently; her only response was to press her face harder into her hands. The spike’s strange flower was still growing but it wasn’t spreading out into new territory; it was sending narrow shoots back in on itself crisscrossing the same region again and again with ever finer structure.

Weaving a net? Searching for something?

It hit me with a jolt of clarity more intense than anything I’d felt since childhood. It was like reliving the moment when the whole concept numbers had finally snapped into place—but with an adult’s understanding of everything it opened up, everything it implied. It was a lightning bolt revelation—but there was no taint of mystical confusion: no opiate haze of euphoria, no pseudo-sexual rush. In the clean-lined logic of the simplest concepts, I saw and understood exactly how the world worked—

—except that it was all wrong, it was all false, it was all impossible.

Quicksand.

Assailed by vertigo, I swept my gaze around the room-counting frantically: Six work stations. Two people. Six chairs. I grouped the work stations: three sets of two, two sets of three. One and five, two and four; four and two, five and one.

I weaved a dozen cross-checks for consistency—for sanity . . . but everything added up.

They hadn’t stolen the old arithmetic; they’d merely blasted the new one into my head, on top of it.

Whoever had resisted our assault with Luminous had reached down with the spike and rewritten our neural metamathematics—the arithmetic that underlay our own reasoning about arithmetic—enough to let us glimpse what we’d been trying to destroy.

Alison was uncommunicative, but she was breathing slowly and steadily. Yuen seemed fine, lost in a happy reverie. I relaxed slightly, and began trying to make sense of the flood of far-side arithmetic surging through my brain.

On their own terms, the axioms were . . . trivial, obvious. I could see that they corresponded to elaborate statements about trans-astronomical integers, but performing an exact translation was far beyond me—and thinking about the entities they described in terms of the huge integers they represented was a bit like thinking about pi or the square root of two in terms of the first ten thousand digits of their decimal expansion: it would be missing the point entirely. These alien “numbers”—the basic objects of the alternative arithmetic—had found a way to embed themselves in the integers, and to relate to each other in a simple, elegant way—and if the messy corollaries they implied upon translation contradicted the rules integers were supposed to obey . . . well, only a small, remote patch of obscure truths had been subverted.

Someone touched me on the shoulder. I started—but Yuen was beaming amiably, all arguments and violence forgotten.

He said, “Lightspeed is not violated. All the logic that requires that remains intact.” I could only take him at his word; the result would have taken me hours to prove. Maybe the aliens had done a better job on him—or maybe he was just a superior mathematician in either system.

“Then . . . where are they?” At lightspeed, our attack on the far side could not have been felt any further away than Mars—and the strategy used to block the corrosion of the spike would have been impossible with even a few seconds’ time lag.

“The atmosphere?”

“You mean—Earth’s?”

“Where else? Or maybe the oceans.”

I sat down heavily. Maybe it was no stranger than any conceivable alternative, but I still balked at the implications.

Yuen said, “To us, their structure wouldn’t look like ‘structure’ at all. The simplest unit might involve a group of thousands of atoms-representing a trans-astronomical number—not necessarily even bonded together in any conventional way, but breaking the normal consequences of the laws of physics, obeying a different set of high-level rules that arise frorn the alternative mathematics. People have often mused about the chances of intelligence being coded into long-lived vortices on distant gas giants . . . but these creatures won’t be in hurricanes or tornadoes. They’ll be drifting in the most innocuous puffs of air-invisible as neutrinos.

“Unstable—”

“Only according to our mathematics. Which does not apply.”

Alison broke in suddenly, angrily. “Even if all of this is true—where does it get us? Whether the defect supports a whole invisible ecosystem or not—LA will still find it, and use it, in exactly the same way.”

For a moment I was dumbstruck. We were facing the prospect of sharing the planet with an undiscovered civilization—and all she could think about was IA’s grubby machinations?

She was absolutely right, though. Long before any of these extravagant fantasies could be proved or disproved, IA could still do untold harm.

I said, “Leave the mapping software running—but shut down the shrinker.”

She glanced at the screen. “No need. They’ve overpowered it—or undermined its mathematics.” The far side was back to its original size.

“Then there’s nothing to lose. Shut it down.”

She did. No longer under attack, the spike began to reverse its growth. I felt a pang of loss as my limited grasp of the far-side mathematics suddenly evaporated; I tried to hold on, but it was like clutching at air.

When the spike had retracted completely, I said, “Now we try doing an Industrial Algebra. We try bringing the defect closer.”

We were almost out of time, but it was easy enough—in thirty seconds, we rewrote the shrinking algorithm to function in reverse.

Alison programmed a function key with the commands to revert to the original version—so that if the experiment backfired, one keystroke would throw the full weight of Luminous behind a defense of the near side again.

Yuen and I exchanged nervous glances. I said, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

Alison disagreed. “We need to know how they’ll react to this. Better we find out now than leave it to IA.”

She started the program running.

The sea-urchin began to swell, slowly. I broke out in a sweat. The farsiders hadn’t harmed us, so far—but this felt like tugging hard at a door that you really, badly, didn’t want to see thrown open.

A technician poked her head into the room and announced cheerfully, “Down for maintenance in two minutes!”

Yuen said, “I’m sorry, there’s nothing—”

The whole far side turned electric blue. Alison’s original patch had detected a systematic intervention.

We zoomed in. Luminous was picking off vulnerable statements of the near side—but something else was repairing the damage.

I let out a strangled noise that might have been a cheer. Alison smiled serenely. She said, “I’m satisfied. IA don’t stand a chance.”

Yuen mused, “Maybe they have a reason to defend the status quo—maybe they rely on the border itself, as much as the far side.”

Alison shut down our reversed shrinker. The blue glow vanished; both sides were leaving the defect alone. And there were a thousand questions we all wanted answered—but the technicians had thrown the master switch, and Luminous itself had ceased to exist.

The sun was breaking through the skyline as we rode back into the city. As we pulled up outside the hotel, Alison started shaking and sobbing. I sat beside her, squeezing her hand. I knew she’d felt the weight of what might have happened, all along, far more than I had.

I paid the driver, and then we stood on the street for a while, silently watching the cyclists go by, trying to imagine how the world would change as it tried to embrace this new contradiction between the exotic and the mundane, the pragmatic and the Platonic, the visible and the invisible.

MUST AND SHALL

Harry Turtledove

Hugo-award-winning author, Harry Turtledove, appears in our pages for the first time since “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” (January 1992). Mr. Turtledove’s most recent novel, The Stolen Throne, is just out from Del Rey. His next book, Worldwar: Upsetting the Violence, will be published by Del Rey in February 1 995. Next April, Tor Books will release The Two Georges, a collaborative novel the author has been working on with actor and fellow history buff, Richard Dreyfuss.

12 July 1864—Fort Stevens, North of Washington, D.C.

General Horatio Wright stood up on the earthen parapet to watch the men of the Sixth Corps, hastily recalled from Petersburg, drive Jubal Early’s Confederates away from the capital of the United States. Down below the parapet, a tall, thin man in black frock coat and stovepipe hat asked, “How do we fare, General?”

“Splendidly.” Wright’s voice was full of relief. Had Early chosen to attack the line of forts around Washington the day before, he’d have faced only militiamen and clerks with muskets, and might well have broken through to the city. But Early had been late, and now the veterans from the Sixth Corps were pushing his troopers back. Washington City was surely saved. Perhaps because he was so relieved, Wright said, “Would you care to come up with me and see how we drive them?”

“I should like that very much, thank you,” Abraham Lincoln said, and climbed the ladder to stand beside him.

Never in his wildest nightmares had Wright imagined the President accepting. Lincoln had peered over the parapet several times already, and drawn fire from the Confederates. They were surely too far from Fort Stevens to recognize him, but with his height and the hat he made a fine target.

Not far away, a man was wounded and fell back with a cry. General Wright interposed his body between President Lincoln and the Confederates. Lincoln spoiled that by stepping away from him. “Mr. President, I really must insist that you retire to a position of safety,” Wright said. “This is no place for you; you must step down at once!”

Lincoln took no notice of him, but continued to watch the fighting north of the fort. A captain behind the parapet, perhaps not recognizing his commander-in-chief, shouted, “Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!”

When Lincoln did not move, Wright said, “If you do not get down, sir, I shall summon a body of soldiers to remove you by force.” He gulped at his own temerity in threatening the President of the United States.

Lincoln seemed more amused than anything else. He started to turn away, to walk back toward the ladder. Instead, after half a step, he crumpled bonelessly. Wright had thought of nightmares before. Now one came to life in front of his horrified eyes. Careless of his own safety, he crouched by the President, whose blood poured from a massive head wound into the muddy dirt atop the parapet. Lincoln’s face wore an expression of mild surprise. His chest hitched a couple of times, then was still.

The captain who’d shouted at Lincoln to get down mounted to the parapet. His eyes widened. “Dear God,” he groaned. “It is the President.”

Wright thought he recognized him. “You’re Holmes, aren’t you?” he said. Somehow it was comforting to know the man you were addressing when the world seemed to crumble around you.

“Yes, sir, Oliver W. Holmes, 20th Massachusetts,” the young captain answered.

“Well, Captain Holmes, fetch a physician here at once,” Wright said. Holmes nodded and hurried away. Wright wondered at his industry—surely he could see Lincoln was dead. Who, then, was the more foolish, himself for sending Holmes away, or the captain for going?

21 July 1864—Washington, D.C.

From the hastily erected wooden rostrum on the East Portico of the Capitol, Hannibal Hamlin stared out at the crowd waiting for him to deliver his inaugural address. The rostrum was draped with black, as was the Capitol, as had been the route his carriage took to reach it. Many of the faces in the crowd were still stunned, disbelieving. The United States had never lost a President to a bullet, not in the eighty-eight years since the nation freed itself from British rule.

In the front row of dignitaries, Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee glared up at Hamlin. He had displaced the man from Maine on Lincoln’s reelection ticket; had this dreadful event taken place a year later (assuming Lincoln’s triumph), he now would be President. But no time for might-have-beens.

Hamlin had been polishing his speech since the telegram announcing Lincoln’s death reached him up in Bangor, where, feeling useless and rejected, he had withdrawn after failing of renomination for the Vice Presidency. Now, though, his country needed him once more. He squared his broad shoulders, ready to bear up under the great burden so suddenly thrust upon him.

“Stand fast!” he cried. “That has ever been my watchword, and at no time in all the history of our great and glorious republic has our heeding it been more urgent. Abraham Lincoln’s body may lie in the grave, but we shall go marching on—to victory!”

Applause rose from the crowd at the allusion to “John Brown’s Body”—and not just from the crowd, but also from the soldiers posted on the roof of the Capitol and at intervals around the building to keep the accursed rebels from murdering two Presidents, not just one. Hamlin went on, “The responsibility for this great war, in which our leader gave his last full measure of devotion, lies solely at the feet of the Southern slaveocrats who conspired to take their states out of our grand Union for their own evil ends. I promise you, my friends—Abraham Lincoln shall be avenged, and those who caused his death punished in full.”

More applause, not least from the Republican Senators who proudly called themselves Radical: from Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, and bespectacled John Andrew of Massachusetts. Hamlin had been counted among their number when he sat in the Senate before assuming the duties, such as they were, of the Vice President.

“Henceforward,” Hamlin declared, “I say this: let us use every means recognized by the Laws of War which God has put in our hands to crush out the wickedest rebellion the world has ever witnessed. This conflict is become a radical revolution—yes, gentlemen, I openly employ the word, and, what is more, I revel in it—involving the desolation of the South as well as the emancipation of the bondsmen it vilely keeps in chains.”

The cheers grew louder still. Lincoln had been more conciliatory, but what had conciliation got him? Only a coffin and a funeral and a grieving nation ready, no eager, for harsher measures.

“They have sowed the wind; let them reap the whirlwind. We are in earnest now, and have awakened to the stern duty upon us. Let that duty be disregarded or haltingly or halfway performed, and God only in His wisdom can know what will be the end. This lawless monster of a Political Slave Power shall forevermore be shorn of its power to ruin a government it no longer has the strength to rule.

“The rebels proudly proclaim they have left the Union. Very well: we shall take them at their word and, once having gained the victory Providence will surely grant us, we shall treat their lands as they deserve—not as the states they no longer desire to be, but as conquered provinces, won by our sword. I say we shall hang Jefferson Davis, and hang Robert E. Lee, and hang Joe Johnston, yes, hang them higher than Haman, and the other rebel generals and colonels and governors and members of their false Congress. The living God is merciful, true, but He is also just and vengeful, and we, the people of the United States, we shall be His instrument in advancing the right.”

Now great waves of cheering, led by grim Thaddeus Stevens himself, washed over Hamlin. The fierce sound reminded him of wolves baying in the backwoods of Maine. He stood tall atop the rostrum. He would lead these wolves, and with them pull the rebel Confederacy down in ruin.

11 August 1942—New Orleans, Louisiana

Air brakes chuffing, the Illinois Central train pulled to a stop at Union Station on Rampart Street. “New Orleans!” the conductor bawled unnecessarily. “All out for New Orleans!”

Along with the rest of the people in the car, Neil Michaels filed toward the exit. He was a middle-sized man in his late thirties, most of his dark blond hair covered by a snap-brim fedora. The round, thick, gold-framed spectacles he wore helped give him the mild appearance of an accountant.

As soon as he stepped from the air-conditioned comfort of the railroad car out into the steamy heat of a New Orleans summer, those glasses steamed up. Shaking his head in bemusement, Michaels drew a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped away the moisture.

He got his bags and headed for the cab stand, passing on the way a horde of men and boys hawking newspapers and rank upon rank of shoeshine stands. A fat Negro man sat on one of those, gold watch chain running from one pocket of his vest to the other. At his feet, an Irish-looking fellow plied the rag until his customer’s black oxfords gleamed.

“There y’are, sir,” the shoeshine man said, his half-Brooklyn, half-Southern accent testifying he was a New Orleans native. The Negro looked down at his shoes, nodded, and, with an air of great magnanimity, flipped the shoeshine man a dime. “Oh, thank you very much, sir,” the fellow exclaimed. The insincere servility in his voice grated on Michaels’ ears.

More paperboys cried their trade outside the station. Michaels bought a Times-Picayune to read while he waited in line for a taxi. The war news wasn’t good. The Germans were still pushing east in Russia and sinking ship after ship off the American coast. In the South Pacific, Americans and Japanese were slugging away at each other, and God only knew how that would turn out.

Across the street from Union Station, somebody had painted a message: yanks out! Michaels sighed. He’d seen that slogan painted on barns and bridges and embankments ever since his train crossed into Tennessee—and, now that he thought about it, in Kentucky as well, though Kentucky had stayed with the Union during the Great Rebellion.

When he got to the front of the line at the cab stand, a hack man heaved his bags into the trunk of an Oldsmobile and said, “Where to, sir?”

“The New Orleans Hotel, on Canal Street,” Michaels answered.

The cabbie touched the brim of his cap. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice suddenly empty. He opened the back door for Michaels, slammed it shut after him, then climbed into the cab himself. It took off with a grinding of gears that said the transmission had seen better days.

On the short ride to the hotel, Michaels counted five more scrawls of yanks out, along with a couple of patches of whitewash that probably masked others. Servicemen on the street walked along in groups of at least four; several corners sported squads of soldiers in full combat gear, including, in one case, a machine-gun nest built of sandbags. “Nice quiet little town,” Michaels remarked.

“Isn’t it?” the cabbie answered, deadpan. He hesitated, his jaw working as if he were chewing his cud. After a moment, he decided to go on: “Mister, with an accent like yours, you want to be careful where you let people hear it. For a damnyankee, you don’t seem like a bad fellow, an’ I wouldn’t want nothin’ to happen to you.”

“Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind,” Michaels said. He wished the Bureau had sent somebody who could put on a convincing drawl. Of course the last man the FBS had sent ended up floating in the Mississippi, so evidently his drawl hadn’t been convincing enough.

The cab wheezed to a stop in front of the New Orleans Hotel. “That’ll be forty cents, sir,” the driver said.

Michaels reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out a half-dollar. “Here you go. I don’t need any change.”

“That’s right kind of you, sir, but—you wouldn’t happen to have two quarters instead?” the cabbie said. He handed the big silver coin back to his passenger.

“What’s wrong with it?” Michaels demanded, though he thought he knew the answer. “It’s legal tender of the United States of America.”

“Yes, sir, reckon it is, but there’s no place hereabouts I’d care to try and spend it, even so,” the driver answered, “not with his picture on it.” The obverse of the fifty-cent piece bore an image of the martyred Lincoln, the reverse a Negro with his manacles broken and the legend sic semper tyrannis. Michaels had known it was an unpopular coin with white men in the South, but he hadn’t realized how unpopular it was.

He got out of the cab, rummaged in his pocket, and came up with a quarter and a couple of dimes. The cabbie didn’t object to Washington’s profile, or to that of the god Mercury. He also didn’t object to seeing his tip cut in half. That told Michaels all he needed to know about how much the half-dollar was hated.

Lazily spinning ceiling fans inside the hotel lobby stirred the air without doing much to cool it. The colored clerk behind the front desk smiled to hear Michaels’ accent. “Yes, sir, we do have your reservation,” she said after shuffling through papers. By the way she talked, she’d been educated up in the Loyal States herself. She handed him a brass key. “That’s room 429, sir. Three dollars and twenty-five cents a night.”

“Very good,” Michaels said. The clerk clanged the bell on the front desk. A white bellboy in a pillbox hat and uniform that made him look like a Philip Morris advertisement picked up Michaels’ bags and carried them to the elevator.

When they got to room 429, Michaels opened the door. The bellboy put down the bags inside the room and stood waiting for his tip. By way of experiment, Michaels gave him the fifty-cent piece the cabbie had rejected. The bellboy took the coin and put it in his pocket. His lips shaped a silent word. Michaels thought it was damnyankee, but he wasn’t quite sure. The bellboy left in a hurry.

A couple of hours later, Michaels went downstairs to supper. Something shiny was lying on the carpet in the hall. He looked down at the half-dollar he’d given the bellboy. It had lain here in plain sight while people walked back and forth; he’d heard them. Nobody had taken it. Thoughtfully, he picked it up and stuck it in his pocket.

A walk through the French Quarter made fears about New Orleans seem foolish. Jazz blasted out of every other doorway. Neon signs pulsed above gin mills. Spasm bands, some white, some Negro, played on streetcorners. No one paid attention to blackout regulations—that held true North and South. Clog-dancers shuffled, overturned caps beside them inviting coins. Streetwalkers in tawdry finery swung their hips and flashed knowing smiles.

Neil Michaels moved through the crowds of soldiers and sailors and gawking civilians like a halfback evading tacklers and heading downfield. He glanced at his watch, partly to check the time and partly to make sure nobody had stolen it. Half past eleven. Didn’t this place ever slow down? Maybe not.

He turned right off Royal Street onto St. Peter and walked southeast toward the Mississippi and Jackson Square. The din of the Vieux Carré faded behind him. He strode past the Cabildo, the old Spanish building of stuccoed brick that now housed the Louisiana State Museum, including a fine collection of artifacts and documents on the career of the first military governor of New Orleans, Benjamin Butler. Johnny Rebs kept threatening to dynamite the Cabildo, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Two great bronze statues dominated Jackson Square. One showed the square’s namesake on horseback. The other, even taller, faced that equestrian statue. Michaels thought Ben Butler’s bald head and rotund, sagging physique less than ideal for being immortalized in bronze, but no one had asked his opinion.

He strolled down the paved lane in the formal garden toward the statue of Jackson. Lights were dimmer here in the square, but not too dim to keep Michaels from reading the words Butler had had carved into the pedestal of the statue: the union must and shall be preserved, an adaptation of Jackson’s famous toast, “Our Federal Union, it must be preserved.”

Michaels’ mouth stretched out in a thin hard line that was not a smile. By force and fear, with cannon and noose, bayonet and prison term, the United States Army had preserved the Union. And now, more than three-quarters of a century after the collapse of the Great Rebellion, U.S. forces still occupied the states of the rebel Confederacy, still skirmished in hills and forests and sometimes city streets against men who put on gray shirts and yowled like catamounts when they fought. Hatred bred hatred, reprisal bred reprisal, and so it went on and on. He sometimes wondered if the Union wouldn’t have done better to let the Johnny Rebs get the hell out, if that was what they’d wanted so badly.

He’d never spoken that thought aloud; it wasn’t one he could share. Too late to worry about such things anyhow, generations too late. He had to deal with the consequences of what vengeful Hamlin and his like-minded successors had done.

The man he was supposed to meet would be waiting behind Butler’s statue. Michaels was slightly surprised the statue had no guards around it; the Johnny Rebs had blown it up in the 1880s and again in the 1920s. If New Orleans today was reconciled to rule from Washington, it concealed the fact very well.

Michaels ducked around into the darkness behind the statue. “Four score and seven,” he whispered, the recognition signal he’d been given.

Someone should have answered, “New birth of freedom.” No one said anything. As his eyes adapted to the darkness, he made out a body sprawled in the narrow space between the base of the statue and the shrubbery that bordered Jackson Square. He stooped beside it. If this was the man he was supposed to meet, the fellow would never give him a recognition signal, not till Judgment Day. His throat had been cut.

Running feet on the walkways of the square, flashlight beams probing like spears. One of them found Michaels. He threw up an arm against the blinding glare. A hard Northern voice shouted, “Come out of there right now, you damned murdering Reb, or you’ll never get a second chance!”

Michaels raised his hands high in surrender and came out.

Outside Antoine’s, the rain came down in buckets. Inside, with oysters Rockefeller and a whiskey and soda in front of him and the prospect of an excellent lunch ahead, Neil Michaels was willing to forgive the weather.

He was less inclined to forgive the soldiers from the night before. Stubbing out his Camel, he said in a low but furious voice, “Those great thundering galoots couldn’t have done a better job of blowing my cover if they’d rehearsed for six weeks, God damn them.”

His companion, a dark, lanky man named Morrie Harris, sipped his own drink and said, “It may even work out for the best. Anybody the MPs arrest is going to look good to the Johnny Rebs around here.” His New York accent seemed less out of place in New Orleans than Michaels’ flat, Midwestern tones.

Michaels started to answer, then shut up as the waiter came over and asked, “You gentlemen are ready to order?”

“Let me have the pompano en papillote,” Harris said. “You can’t get it any better than here.”

The waiter wrote down the order, looked a question at Michaels. He said, “I’ll take the poulet chanteclair.” The waiter nodded, scribbled, and went away.

Glancing around to make sure no one else was paying undue attention to him or his conversation, Michaels resumed: “Yeah, that may be true now. But Ducange is dead now. What if those stupid dogfaces had busted in on us while we were dickering? That would have queered the deal for sure, and it might have got me shot.” As it hadn’t the night before, his smile did not reach his eyes. “I’m fond of my neck. It’s the only one I’ve got.”

“Even without Ducange, we’ve still got to get a line on the underground,” Harris said. “Those weapons are somewhere. We’d better find ’em before the whole city goes up.” He rolled his eyes. “The whole city, hell! If what we’ve been hearing is true, the Nazis have shipped enough guns and God knows what all else into New Orleans to touch off four or five states. And wouldn’t that do wonders for the war effort?” He slapped on irony with a heavy trowel.

“God damn the Germans,” Michaels said, still quietly but with savage venom. “They played this game during the last war, too. But you’re right. If what we’ve heard is the straight goods, the blowup they have in mind will make the Thanksgiving Revolt look like a kiss on the cheek.”

“It shouldn’t be this way,” Harris said, scowling. “We’ve got more GIs and swabbies in New Orleans than you can shake a stick at, and none of ’em worth a damn when it comes to tracking this crap down. Nope, for that they need the FBS, no matter how understaffed we are.”

The waiter came then. Michaels dug into the chicken marinated in red wine. It was as good as it was supposed to be. Morrie Harris made ecstatic noises about the sauce on his pompano.

After a while, Michaels said, “The longer we try, the harder it gets for us to keep things under control down here. One of these days—”

“It’ll all go up,” Harris said matter-of-factly. “Yeah, but not now. Now is what we gotta worry about. We’re fighting a civil war here, we ain’t gonna have much luck with the Germans and the Japs. That’s what Hitler has in mind.”

“Maybe Hamlin and Stevens should have done something different—God knows what—back then. It might have kept us out of—this,” Michaels said. He knew that was heresy for an FBS man, but everything that had happened to him since he got to New Orleans left him depressed with the state of things as they were.

“What were they supposed to do?” Harris snapped.

“I already said I didn’t know,” Harris answered, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. What did the posters say?—loose lips sink ships. His loose lips were liable to sink him.

Sure enough, Morrie Harris went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “The Johnnies rebelled, killed a few hundred thousand American boys, and shot a President dead. What should we do, give ’em a nice pat on the back? We beat ’em and we made ’em pay. Far as I can see, they deserved it.”

“Yeah, and they’ve been making us pay ever since.” Michaels raised a weary hand. “The hell with it. Like you said, now is what we’ve got to worry about. But with Ducange dead, what sort of channels do we have into the Rebel underground?”

Morrie Harris’ mouth twisted, as if he’d bitten down on something rotten. “No good ones that I know of. We’ve relied too much on the Negroes down here over the years. It’s made the whites trust us even less than they would have otherwise. Maybe, though, just maybe, Ducange talked to somebody before he got killed, and that somebody will try to get hold of you.”

“So what do you want me to do, then? Hang around my hotel room hoping the phone rings, like a girl waiting to see if a boy will call? Hell of a way to spend my time in romantic New Orleans.”

“Listen, the kind of romance you can get here, you’ll flunk a shortarm inspection three days later,” Harris answered, chasing the last bits of pompano around his plate. “They’ll take a damnyankee’s money, but they’ll skin you every chance they get. They must be laughing their asses off at the fortune they’re making off our boys in uniform.”

“Sometimes they won’t even take your money.” Michaels told of the trouble he’d had unloading the Lincoln half-dollar.

“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” Harris said. “If they want to cut off their nose to spite their face, by me it’s all right.” He set a five and a couple of singles on the table. “This one’s on me. Whatever else you say about this damn town, the food is hellacious, no two ways about it.”

“No arguments.” Michaels got up with Harris. They went out of Antoine’s separately, a couple of minutes apart. As he walked back to the New Orleans Hotel, Michaels kept checking to make sure nobody was following him. He didn’t spot anyone, but he didn’t know how much that proved. If anybody wanted to put multiple tails on him, he wouldn’t twig, not in crowded streets like these.

The crowds got worse when a funeral procession tied up traffic on Rampart Street. Two black horses pulled the hearse; their driver was a skinny, sleepy-looking white man who looked grotesquely out of place in top hat and tails. More coaches and buggies followed, and a couple of cars as well. “All right, let’s get it moving!” an MP shouted when the procession finally passed.

“They keep us here any longer, we all go in the ovens from old age,” a local said, and several other people laughed as they crossed the street. Michaels wanted to ask what the ovens were, but kept quiet since he exposed himself as one of the hated occupiers every time he opened his mouth.

When he got back to the hotel, he stopped at the front desk to ask if he had any messages. The clerk there today was a Negro man in a sharp suit and tie, with a brass name badge on his right lapel that read thaddeus jenkins. He checked and came back shaking his head. “Rest assured, sir, we shall make sure you receive any that do come in,” he said—a Northern accent bothered him not in the least.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Jenkins,” Michaels said.

“Our pleasure to serve you, sir,” the clerk replied. “Anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant, you have but to ask.”

“You’re very kind,” Michaels said. Jenkins had reason to be kind to Northerners. The power of the federal government maintained Negroes at the top of the heap in the old Confederacy. With the Sixteenth Amendment disenfranchising most Rebel soldiers and their descendants, blacks had a comfortable majority among those eligible to vote—and used it, unsurprisingly, in their own interest.

Michaels mused on that as he walked to the elevator. The operator, a white man, tipped his cap with more of the insincere obsequiousness Michaels had already noted. He wondered how the fellow liked taking orders from a man whose ancestors his great-grandfather might have owned. Actually, he didn’t need to wonder. The voting South was as reliably Republican as could be, for the blacks had no illusions about how long their power would last if the Sixteenth were ever to be discarded.

Suddenly curious, he asked the elevator man, “Why don’t I see ‘Repeal the Sixteenth’ written on walls along with ‘Yanks Out’ ?”

The man measured him with his eyes—measured him for a coffin, if his expression meant anything. At last, as if speaking to a moron, he answered, “You don’t see that on account of askin’ you to repeal it’d mean you damnyankees got some kind o’ business bein’ down here and lordin’ it over us in the first place. And you ain’t.”

So there, Michaels thought. The rest of the ride passed in silence.

With a soft whir, the ceiling fan stirred the air in his room. That improved things, but only slightly. He looked out the window. Ferns had sprouted from the mortar between bricks of the building across the street. Even without the rain—which had now let up—it was plenty humid enough for the plants to flourish.

Sitting around waiting for the phone to ring gave Michaels plenty of time to watch the ferns. As Morrie Harris had instructed, he spent most of his time in his room. He sallied forth mostly to eat. Not even the resolute hostility of most of white New Orleans put a damper on the food.

He ate boiled beef at Maylié’s, crab meat au gratin at Galatoire’s, crayfish bisque at La Louisiane, langouste Sarah Bernhardt at Arnaud’s, and, for variety, pig knuckles and sauerkraut at Kolb’s. When he didn’t feel like traveling, he ate at the hotel’s own excellent restaurant. He began to fancy his trousers and collars were getting tighter than they had been before he came South.

One night, he woke to the sound of rifle fire not far away. Panic shot through him, panic and shame. Had the uprising he’d come here to check broken out? How would that look on his FBS personnel record? Then he realized that if the uprising had broken out, any damnyankee the Johnnies caught was likely to end up too dead to worry about what his personnel record looked like.

After about fifteen minutes, the gunfire petered out. Michaels took a couple of hours falling asleep again, though. He went from one radio station to another the next morning, and checked the afternoon newspapers, too. No one said a word about the firefight. Had anybody tried, prosecutors armed with the Sedition Act would have landed on him like a ton of bricks.

Back in the Loyal States, they smugly said the Sedition Act kept the lid on things down South. Michaels had believed it, too. Now he was getting a feeling for how much pressure pushed against that lid. When it blew, if it blew . . .

A little past eleven the next night, the phone rang. He jumped, then ran to it. “Hello?” he said sharply.

The voice on the other end was so muffled, he wasn’t sure whether it belonged to a man or a woman. It said, “Be at the Original Absinthe House for the three a.m. show.” The line went dead.

Michaels let out a martyred sigh. “The three a.m. show,” he muttered, wondering why conspirators couldn’t keep civilized hours like anyone else. He went down to the restaurant and had a couple of cups of strong coffee laced with brandy. Thus fortified, he headed out into the steaming night.

He soon concluded New Orleans’ idea of civilized hours had nothing to do with those kept by the rest of the world, or possibly that New Orleans defined civilization as unending revelry. The French Quarter was as packed as it had been when he went through it toward Jackson Square, though that had been in the relatively early evening, close to civilized even by Midwestern standards.

The Original Absinthe House, a shabby two-story building with an iron railing around the balcony to the second floor, stood on the corner of Bourbon and Bienville. Each of the four doors leading in had a semicircular window above it. Alongside one of the doors, someone had scrawled, Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder. Michaels thought that a distinct improvement on Yanks Out! You weren’t supposed to be able to get real absinthe any more, but in the Vieux Carré nothing would have surprised him.

He didn’t want absinthe, anyway. He didn’t particularly want the whiskey and soda he ordered, either, but you couldn’t go into a place like this without doing some drinking. The booze was overpriced and not very good. The mysterious voice on the telephone hadn’t told him there was a five-buck charge to go up to the second story and watch the floor show. Assuming he got out of here alive, he’d have a devil of a time justifying that on his expense account. And if the call had been a Johnny Reb setup, were they trying to kill him or just to bilk him out of money for the cause?

Michaels felt he was treading in history’s footsteps as he went up the stairs. If the plaque on the wall didn’t lie for the benefit of tourists, that stairway had been there since the Original Absinthe House was built in the early nineteenth century. Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte had gone up it to plan the defense of New Orleans against the British in 1814, and Ben Butler for carefully undescribed purposes half a century later. It was made with wooden pegs: not a nail anywhere. If the stairs weren’t as old as the plaque said, they sure as hell were a long way from new.

A jazz band blared away in the big upstairs room. Michaels went in, found a chair, ordered a drink from a waitress whose costume would have been too skimpy for a burly queen most places up North, and leaned back to enjoy the music. The band was about half black, half white. Jazz was one of the few things the two races shared in the South. Not all Negroes had made it to the top of the heap after the North crushed the Great Rebellion; many still lived in the shadow of the fear and degradation of the days of slavery and keenly felt the resentment of the white majority. That came out in the way they played. And the whites, as conquered people will, found liberation in their music that they could not have in life.

Michaels looked at his watch. It was a quarter to three. The jazz men were just keeping loose between shows, then. As he sipped his whiskey, the room began filling up in spite of the five-dollar cover charge. He didn’t know what the show would be, but he figured it had to be pretty hot to pack ’em in at those prices.

The lights went out. For a moment, only a few glowing cigarette coals showed in the blackness. The band didn’t miss a beat. From right behind Michaels’ head, a spotlight came on, bathing the stage in harsh white light.

Saxophone and trumpets wailed lasciviously. When the girls paraded onto the stage, Michaels felt his jaw drop. A vice cop in Cleveland, say, might have put the cuffs on his waitress because she wasn’t wearing enough. The girls up there had on high-heeled shoes, headdresses with dyed ostrich plumes and glittering rhinestones, and nothing between the one and the other but big, wide smiles.

He wondered how they got themselves case-hardened enough to go on display like that night after night, show after show. They were all young and pretty and built, no doubt about that. Was it enough? His sister was young and pretty and built, too. He wouldn’t have wanted her up there, flaunting it for horny soldiers on leave.

He wondered how much the owners had to pay to keep the local vice squad off their backs. Then he wondered if New Orleans bothered with a vice squad. He hadn’t seen any signs of one.

He also wondered who the devil had called him over here and how that person would make contact. Sitting around gaping at naked women was not something he could put in his report unless it had some sort of connection with the business for which he’d come down here.

Soldiers and sailors whooped at the girls, whose skins soon grew slick and shiny with sweat. Waitresses moved back and forth, getting in the way as little as possible while they took drink orders. To fit in, Michaels ordered another whiskey-and-soda, and discovered it cost more than twice as much here as it had downstairs. He didn’t figure the Original Absinthe House would go out of business any time soon.

The music got even hotter than it had been. The dancers stepped off the edge of the stage and started prancing among the tables. Michaels’ jaw dropped all over again. This wasn’t just a floor show. This was a—He didn’t quite know what it was, and found himself too flustered to grope for le mot juste.

Then a very pretty naked brunette sat down in his lap and twined her arms around his neck.

“Is that a gun in your pocket, dearie, or are you just glad to see me?” she said loudly. Men at the nearest table guffawed. Since it was a gun in his pocket, Michaels kept his mouth shut. The girl smelled of sweat and whiskey and makeup. What her clammy hide was doing to his shirt and trousers did not bear thinking about. He wanted to drop her on the floor and get the hell out of there.

She was holding him too tight for that, though. She lowered her head to nuzzle his neck; the plumes from her headdress got in his eyes and tickled his nose. But under the cover of that frantic scene, her voice went low and urgent: “You got to talk with Colquit the hearse driver, mister. Tell him Lucy says Pierre says he can talk, an’ maybe he will.”

Before he could ask her any questions, she kissed him on the lips. The kiss wasn’t faked; her tongue slid into his mouth. He’d had enough whiskey and enough shocks by then that he didn’t care what he did. His hand closed over her breast—and she sprang to her feet and twisted away, all in perfect time to the music. A moment later, she was in somebody else’s lap.

Michaels discovered he’d spilled most of his overpriced drink. He downed what was left with one big swig. When he wiped his mouth with a napkin, it came away red from the girl’s—Lucy’s—lipstick.

Some of the naked dancers had more trouble than Lucy disentangling themselves from the men they’d chosen. Some of them didn’t even try to disentangle. Michaels found himself staring, bug-eyed. You couldn’t do that in public . . . could you? Hell and breakfast, it was illegal in private, most places.

Eventually, all the girls were back on stage. They gave it all they had for the finale. Then they trooped off and the lights came back up. Only after they were gone did Michaels understand the knowing look most of them had had all through the performance: they knew more about men than men, most often, cared to know about themselves.

In the palm of his hand, he could still feel the memory of the soft, firm flesh of Lucy’s breast. Unlike the others in the room, he’d had to be here. He hadn’t had to grab her, though. Sometimes, facetiously, you called a place like this educational. He’d learned something, all right, and rather wished he hadn’t.

Morrie Harris pursed his lips. “Lucy says Pierre says Colquit can talk? That’s not much to go on. For all we know, it could be a trap.”

“Yeah, it could be,” Michaels said. He and the other FBS man walked along in front of the St. Louis Cathedral, across the street from Jackson Square. They might have been businessmen, they might have been sightseers—though neither businessmen nor sightseers were particularly common in the states that had tried to throw off the Union’s yoke. Michaels went on, “I don’t think it’s a trap, though. Ducange’s first name is—was—Pierre, and we’ve found out he did go to the Original Absinthe House. He could have gotten to know Lucy there.”

He could have done anything with Lucy there. The feel of her would not leave Michaels’ mind. He knew going back to the upstairs room would be dangerous, for him and for her, but the temptation lingered like a bit of food between the teeth that keeps tempting back the tongue.

Harris said, “Maybe we ought to just haul her in and grill her till she cracks.”

“We risk alerting the Rebs if we do that,” Michaels said.

“Yeah, I know.” Harris slammed his fist into his palm. “I hate sitting around doing nothing, though. If they get everything they need before we find out where they’re squirreling it away, they start their damn uprising and the war effort goes straight out the window.” He scowled, a man in deep and knowing it. “And Colquit the hearse driver? You don’t know his last name? You don’t know which mortuary he works for? Naked little Lucy didn’t whisper those into your pink and shell-like ear?”

“I told you what she told me.” Michaels stared down at the pavement in dull embarrassment. He could feel his dubiously shell-like ears turning red, not pink.

“All right, all right.” Harris threw his hands in the air. Most FBS men made a point of not showing what they were thinking—Gary Cooper might have been the Bureau’s ideal. Not Morrie Harris. He wore his feelings on his sleeve. New York City, Michaels thought, with scorn he nearly didn’t notice himself. Harris went on, “We try and find him, that’s all. How many guys are there named Colquit, even in New Orleans? And yeah, you don’t have to tell me we got to be careful. If he knows anything, we don’t want him riding in a hearse instead of driving one.”

A bit of investigation—if checking the phone book and getting somebody with the proper accent to call the Chamber of Commerce could be dignified as such—soon proved funerals were big business in New Orleans, bigger than most other places, maybe. There were mortuaries and cemeteries for Jews, for Negroes, for French-speakers, for Protestants, for this group, for that one, and for the other. Because New Orleans was mostly below sea level (Michaels heartily wished the town were underwater, too), burying people was more complicated than digging a hole and putting a coffin down in it. Some intrepid sightseers made special pilgrimages just to see the funeral vaults, which struck Michaels as downright macabre.

Once they had a complete list of funeral establishments, Morrie Harris started calling them one by one. His New York accent was close enough to the local one for him to ask, “Is Colquit there?” without giving himself away as a damnyankee. Time after time, people denied ever hearing of Colquit. At one establishment, though, the receptionist asked whether he meant Colquit the embalmer or Colquit the bookkeeper. He hung up in a hurry.

Repeated failure left Michaels frustrated. He was about to suggest knocking off for the day when Harris suddenly jerked in his chair as if he’d sat on a tack. He put his hand over the receiver and mouthed, “Said he just got back from a funeral. She’s going out to get him.” He handed the telephone to Michaels.

After just over a minute, a man’s voice said, “Hello? Who’s this?”

“Colquit?” Michaels asked.

“Yeah,” the hearse driver said.

Maybe it was Michaels’ imagination, but he thought he heard suspicion even in one slurred word. Sounding like someone from the Loyal States got you nowhere around here (of course, a Johnny Reb who managed to get permission to travel to Wisconsin also raised eyebrows up there, but Michaels wasn’t in Wisconsin now). He spoke quickly: “Lucy told me Pierre told her that I should tell you it was okay for you to talk with me.”

He waited for Colquit to ask what the hell he was talking about, or else to hang up. It would figure if the only steer he’d got was a bum one. But the hearse driver, after a long pause, said, “Yeah?” again.

Michaels waited for more, but there wasn’t any more. It was up to him, then. “You do know what I’m talking about?” he asked, rather desperately.

“Yeah,” Colquit repeated: a man of few words.

“You can’t talk where you are?”

“Nope,” Colquit said—variety.

“Will you meet me for supper outside Galatoire’s tonight at seven, then?” Michaels said. With a good meal and some booze in him, Colquit was more likely to spill his guts.

“Make it tomorrow,” Colquit said.

“All right, tomorrow,” Michaels said unhappily. More delay was the last thing he wanted. No, not quite: he didn’t want to spook Colquit, either. He started to say something more, but the hearse driver did hang up on him then.

“What does he know?” Morrie Harris demanded after Michaels hung up, too.

“I’ll find out tomorrow,” Michaels answered. “The way things have gone since I got down here, that’s progress.” Harris nodded solemnly.

The wail of police sirens woke Neil Michaels from a sound sleep. The portable alarm clock he’d brought with him was ticking away on the table by his bed. Its radium dial announced the hour: five past three. He groaned and sat up.

Along with the sirens came the clanging bells and roaring motors of fire engines. Michaels bounced out of bed, ice running down his back. Had the Rebs started their revolt? In that kind of chaos, the pistol he’d brought down from the North felt very small and useless.

He cocked his head. He didn’t hear any gunfire. If the Southern men were using whatever the Nazis had shipped them, that would be the biggest part of the racket outside. Okay, it wasn’t the big revolt. That meant walking to the window and looking out was likely to be safe. What the devil was going on?

Michaels pushed aside the thick curtain shielding the inside of his room from the neon glare that was New Orleans by night. Even as he watched, a couple of fire engines tore down Canal Street toward the Vieux Carré. Their flashing red lights warned the few cars and many pedestrians to get the hell out of the way.

Raising his head, Michaels spotted the fire. Whatever was burning was burning to beat the band. Flames leaped into the night sky, seeming to dance as they flung themselves high above the building that fueled them. A column of thick black smoke marked that building’s funeral pyre.

“Might as well find out what it is,” Michaels said out loud. He turned on the lamp by the bed and then the radio. The little light behind the dial came on. He waited impatiently for the tubes to get warm enough to bring in a signal.

The first station he got was playing one of Benny Goodman’s records. Michaels wondered if playing a damnyankee’s music was enough to get you in trouble with some of the fire-eating Johnny Rebs. But he didn’t want to hear jazz, not now. He spun the dial.

“—terrible fire on Bourbon Street,” an announcer was saying. That had to be the blaze Michaels had seen. The fellow went on, “One of New Orleans’ long-standing landmarks, the Original Absinthe House, is going up in flames even as I speak. The Absinthe House presents shows all through the night, and many are feared dead inside. The building was erected well over a hundred years ago, and has seen—”

Michaels turned off the radio, almost hard enough to break the knob. He didn’t believe in coincidence, not even a little bit. Somewhere in the wreckage of the Original Absinthe House would lie whatever mortal fragments remained of Lucy the dancer, and that was just how someone wanted it to be.

He shivered like a man with the grippe. He’d thought about asking Colquit to meet him there instead of at Galatoire’s, so Lucy could help persuade the hearse driver to tell whatever he knew—and so he could get another look at her. But going to a place twice running was a mistake. That let the opposition get a line on you. Training had saved his life and, he hoped, Colquit’s. It hadn’t done poor Lucy one damn bit of good.

He called down to room service and asked for a bottle of whiskey. If the man to whom he gave the order found anything unusual about such a request at twenty past three, he didn’t show it. The booze arrived in short order. After three or four good belts, Michaels was able to get back to sleep.

Colquit didn’t show up for dinner at Galatoire’s that night.

When Morrie Harris phoned the mortuary the next day, the receptionist said Colquit had called in sick. “That’s a relief,” Michaels said when Harris reported the news. “I was afraid he’d call in dead.”

“Yeah.” Harris ran a hand through his curly hair. “I didn’t want to try and get a phone number and address out of the gal. I didn’t even like making the phone call. The less attention we draw to the guy, the better.”

“You said it.” Michaels took off his glasses, blew a speck from the left lens, set them back on his nose. “Now we know where he works. We can find out where he lives. Just a matter of digging through the papers.”

“A lot of papers to dig through,” Harris said with a grimace, “but yeah, that ought to do the job. Shall we head on over to the Hall of Records?”

Machine-gun nests surrounded the big marble building on Thalia Street. If the Johnny Rebs ever got their revolt off the ground, it would be one of the first places to burn. The Federal army and bureaucrats who controlled the conquered provinces of the old Confederacy ruled not only by force but also by keeping tabs on their resentful, rebellious subjects. Every white man who worked had to fill out a card each year listing his place of employment. Every firm had to list its employees. Most of the clerks who checked one set of forms against the other were Negroes. They had a vested interest in making sure nobody put one over on the government.

Tough, unsmiling guards meticulously examined Harris’ and Michaels’ identification papers, comparing photographs to faces and making them give samples of their signatures, before admitting them to the hall. They feared sabotage as well as out-and-out assault. The records stored here helped hold down all of Louisiana.

Hannibal Dupuy was a large, round black man with some of the thickest glasses Michaels had ever seen. “Mortuary establishments,” he said, holding up one finger as he thought. “Yes, those would be in the Wade Room, in the cases against the east wall.” Michaels got the feeling that, had they asked him about anything from taverns to taxidermists, he would have known exactly where the files were hidden. Such men were indispensable in navigating the sea of papers before them.

Going through the papers stored in the cases against the east wall of the Wade Room took a couple of hours. Michaels finally found the requisite record. “Colquit D. Reynolds, hearse driver—yeah, he works for LeBlanc and Peters,” he said. “Okay, here’s an address and phone number and a notation that they’ve been verified as correct. People are on the ball here, no two ways about it.”

“People have to be on the ball here,” Morrie Harris answered. “How’d you like to be a Negro in the South if the whites you’ve been sitting on for years grab hold of the reins? Especially if they grab hold of the reins with help from the Nazis? The first thing they’d do after they threw us damnyankees out is to start hanging Negroes from lampposts.”

“You’re right. Let’s go track down Mr. Reynolds, so we don’t have to find out just how right you are.”

Colquit Reynolds’ documents said he lived on Carondelet, out past St. Joseph: west and south of the French Quarter. Harris had a car, a wheezy Blasingame that delivered him and Michaels to the requisite address. Michaels knocked on the door of the house, which, like the rest of the neighborhood, was only a small step up from the shotgun shack level.

No one answered. Michaels glanced over at Morrie Harris. FBS men didn’t need a warrant, not to search a house in Johnny Reb country. That wasn’t the issue. Both of them, though, feared they’d find nothing but a corpse when they got inside.

Just as Michaels was about to break down the front door, an old woman stuck her head out a side window of the house next door and said, “If you lookin’ for Colquit, gents, you ain’t gonna find him in there.”

Morrie Harris swept off his hat and gave a nod that was almost a bow. “Where’s he at, then, ma’m?” he asked, doing his best to sound like a local and speaking to the old woman as if she were the military governor’s wife.

She cackled like a laying hen; she must have liked that. “Same place you always find him when he wants to drink ’stead of workin’: the Old Days Saloon round the co’ner.” She jerked a gnarled thumb to show which way.

The Old Days Saloon was painted in gaudy stripes of red, white, and blue. Those were the national colors, and so unexceptionable, but, when taken with the name of the place, were probably meant to suggest the days of the Great Rebellion and the traitors who had used them on a different flag. Michaels would have bet a good deal that the owner of the place had a thick FBS dossier.

He and Harris walked in. The place was dim and quiet. Ceiling fans created the illusion of coolness. The bruiser behind the bar gave the newcomers the dubious stare he obviously hauled out for any stranger: certainly the four or five men in the place had the look of longtime regulars. Asking which one was Colquit was liable to be asking for trouble.

One of the regulars, though, looked somehow familiar. After a moment, Michaels realized why: that old man soaking up a beer off in a corner had driven the horse-drawn hearse that had slowed him up on his way back to the hotel a few days before. He nudged Morrie Harris, nodded toward the old fellow. Together, they went over to him. “How you doin’ today, Colquit?” Harris asked in friendly tones. The bartender relaxed.

Colquit looked up at them with eyes that didn’t quite focus. “Don’t think I know you folks,” he said, “but I could be wrong.”

“Sure you do,” Harris said, expansive still. “We’re friends of Pierre and Lucy.”

“Oh, Lord help me.” Colquit started to get up. Michaels didn’t want a scene. Anything at all could make New Orleans go off—hauling a man out of a bar very much included. But Colquit Reynolds slumped back onto his chair, as if his legs didn’t want to hold him. “Wish I never told Pierre about none o’ that stuff,” he muttered, and finished his beer with a convulsive gulp.

Michaels raised a forefinger and called out to the bartender: “Three more High Lifes here.” He tried to slur his words into a Southern pattern. Maybe he succeeded, or maybe the dollar bill he tossed down on the table was enough to take the edge off suspicions. The Rebs had revered George Washington even during the Great Rebellion, misguided though they were in other ways.

Colquit Reynolds took a long pull at the new beer. Michaels and Harris drank more moderately. If they were going to get anything out of the hearse driver, they needed to be able to remember it once they had it. Besides, Michaels didn’t much like beer. Quietly, so the bartender and the other locals wouldn’t hear, he asked, “What do you wish you hadn’t told Pierre, Mr. Reynolds?”

Reynolds looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer were written there. Michaels wondered if he was able to remember; he’d been drinking for a while. Finally, he said, “Wish I hadn’t told him ’bout this here coffin I took for layin’ to rest.”

“Oh? Why’s that?” Michaels asked casually. He lit a Camel, offered the pack to Colquit Reynolds. When Reynolds took one, he used his Zippo to give the hearse driver a light.

Reynolds sucked in smoke. He held it longer than Michaels thought humanly possible, then exhaled a foggy cloud. After he knocked the coal into an ashtray, he drained his Miller High Life and looked expectantly at the FBS men. Michaels ordered him another one. Only after he’d drunk part of that did he answer, “On account of they needed a block and tackle to get it onto my hearse an’ another one to get it off again. Ain’t no six men in the world could have lifted that there coffin, not if they was Samson an’ five o’ his brothers. An’ it clanked, too.”

“Weapons,” Morrie Harris whispered, “or maybe ammunition.” He looked joyous, transfigured, likely even more so than he would have if a naked dancing girl had plopped herself down in his lap. Poor Lucy, Michaels thought.

He said, “Even in a coffin, even greased, I wouldn’t want to bury anything in this ground—not for long, that’s for damn sure. Water’s liable to seep in and ruin things.”

Colquit Reynolds sent him a withering, scornful look. “Damnyankees,” he muttered under his breath—and he was helping Michaels. “Lot of the times here, you don’t bury your dead, you put ’em in a tomb up above ground, just so as coffins don’t get flooded out o’ the ground come the big rains.”

“Jesus,” Morrie Harris said hoarsely, wiping his forehead with a sleeve, and then again: “Jesus.” Now he was the one to drain his beer and signal for another. Once the bartender had come and gone, he went on, “All the above-ground tombs New Orleans has, you could hide enough guns and ammo to fight a big war. Goddamn sneaky Rebs.” He made himself stop. “What cemetery was this at, Mr. Reynolds?”

“Old Girod, out on South Liberty Street,” Colquit Reynolds replied. “Don’t know how much is there, but one coffinload, anyways.”

“Thank God some Southern men don’t want to see the Great Rebellion start up again,” Michaels said.

“Yeah.” Harris drank from his second High Life. “But a hell of a lot of ’em do.”

Girod Cemetery was hidden away in the railroad yards. A plaque on the stone fence surrounding it proclaimed it to be the oldest Protestant cemetery in New Orleans. Neil Michaels was willing to believe that. The place didn’t seem to have received much in the way of legitimate business in recent years, and had a haunted look to it. It was overgrown with vines and shrubs. Gray-barked fig trees pushed up through the sides of some of the old tombs. Moss was everywhere, on trees and tombs alike. Maidenhair ferns sprouted from the sides of the above-ground vaults; as Michaels had seen, anything would grow anywhere around here.

That included conspiracies. If Colquit Reynolds was right, the ghost of the Great Rebellion haunted this cemetery, too, and the Johnnies were trying to bring it back to unwholesome life.

“He’d better be right,” Michaels muttered as the jeep he was riding pulled to a stop before the front entrance to the cemetery.

Morrie Harris understood him without trouble. “Who, that damn hearse driver? You bet he’d better be right. We bring all this stuff here”—he waved behind him—“and start tearin’ up a graveyard, then don’t find anything . . . hell, that could touch off a revolt all by itself.”

Michaels shivered, though the day was hot and muggy. “Couldn’t it just?” Had Reynolds been leading them down the path, setting them up to create an incident that would make the South rise up in righteous fury? They’d have to respond to a story like the one he’d told; for the sake of the Union, they didn’t dare not respond.

They’d find out. Behind the jeep, Harris’ all this stuff rattled and clanked: not just bulldozers, but also light M3 Stoneman tanks and heavy M3 Grants with a small gun in a rotating turret and a big one in a sponson at the right front of the hull. Soldiers—all of them men from the Loyal States—scrambled down from Chevy trucks and set up a perimeter around the wall. If anybody was going to try to interfere with this operation, he’d regret it.

Against the assembled might of the Federal Union (it must and shall be preserved, Michaels thought), Girod Cemetery mustered a stout metal gate and one elderly watchman. “Who the devil are y’all, and what d’you want?” he demanded, though the who part, at least, should have been pretty obvious.

Michaels displayed his FBS badge. “We are on the business of the federal government of the United States of America,” he said. “Open the gate and let us in.” Again, no talk of warrants, not in Reb country, not on FBS business.

“Fuck the federal government of the United States of America, and the horse it rode in on,” the watchman said. “You ain’t got no call to come to no cemetery with tanks.”

Michaels didn’t waste time arguing with him. He tapped the jeep driver on the shoulder. The fellow backed the jeep out of the way. Michaels waved to the driver of the nearest Grant tank. The tank man had his head out of the hatch. He grinned and nodded. The tank clattered forward, chewing up the pavement and spewing noxious exhaust into the air. The wrought-iron gate was sturdy, but not sturdy enough to withstand thirty-one tons of insistent armor. It flew open with a scream of metal; one side ripped loose from the stone to which it was fixed. The Grant ran over it, and would have run over the watchman, too, had he not skipped aside with a shouted curse.

Outside the cemetery, people began gathering. Most of the people were white men of military age or a bit younger. To Michaels, they had the look of men who’d paint slogans on walls or shoot at a truck or from behind a fence under cover of darkness. He was glad he’d brought overwhelming force. Against bayonets, guns, and armor, the crowd couldn’t do much but stare sullenly.

If the cemetery was empty of contraband, what this crowd did wouldn’t matter. There’d be similar angry crowds all over the South, and at one of them. . . .

The watchman let out an anguished howl as tanks and bulldozers clanked toward the walls of above-ground vaults that ran the length of the cemetery. “You can’t go smashin’ up the ovens!” he screamed.

“Last warning, Johnny Reb,” Michaels said coldly: “don’t you try telling officers of the United States what we can and can’t do. We have places to put people whose mouths get out in front of their brains.”

“Yeah, I just bet you do,” the watchman muttered, but after that he kept his mouth shut.

A dozer blade bit into the side of one of the mortuary vaults—an oven, the old man had called it. Concrete and stone flew. So did chunks of a wooden coffin and the bones it had held. The watchman shot Michaels a look of unadulterated hatred and scorn. He didn’t say a word, but he might as well have screamed, See? I told you so. A lot of times, that look alone would have been plenty to get him on the inside of a prison camp, but Michaels had bigger things to worry about today.

He and Harris hadn’t ordered enough bulldozers to take on all the rows of ovens at once. The tanks joined in the job, too, knocking them down as the first big snorting Grant had wrecked the gate into Girod. Their treads ground more coffins and bones into dust.

“That goddamn hearse driver better not have been lying to us,” Morrie Harris said, his voice clogged with worry. “If he was, he’ll never see a camp or a jail. We’ll give the son of a bitch a blindfold; I wouldn’t waste a cigarette on him.”

Then, from somewhere near the center of Girod Cemetery, a tank crew let out a shout of triumph. Michaels had never heard sweeter music, not from Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey. He sprinted toward the Grant. Sweat poured off him, but it wasn’t the sweat of fear, not any more.

The tank driver pointed to wooden boxes inside a funeral vault he’d just broken into. They weren’t coffins. Each had 1 Maschinengewehr 34 stenciled on its side in neat black-letter script, with the Nazi eagle-and-swastika emblem right next to the legend.

Michaels stared at the machine-gun crates as if one of them held the Holy Grail. “He wasn’t lying,” he breathed. “Thank you, God.”

“Omayn,” Morrie Harris agreed. “Now let’s find out how much truth he was telling.”

The final haul, by the time the last oven was cracked the next day, astonished even Michaels and Harris. Michaels read from the list he’d been keeping: “Machine guns, submachine guns, mortars, rifles—including antitank rifles—ammo for all of them, grenades . . . Jesus, what a close call.”

“I talked with one of the radio men,” Harris said. “He’s sent out a call for more trucks to haul all this stuff away.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, a gesture that had little to do with heat or humidity. “If they’d managed to smuggle all of this out of New Orleans, spread it around through the South . . . well, hell, I don’t have to draw you a picture.”

“You sure don’t. We’d have been so busy down here, the Germans and the Japs would have had a field day over the rest of the world.” Michaels let out a heartfelt sigh of relief, then went on, “Next thing we’ve got to do is try and find out who was caching weapons. If we can do that, then maybe, just maybe, we can keep the Rebs leaderless for a generation or so and get ahead of the game.”

“Maybe.” But Harris didn’t sound convinced. “We can’t afford to think in terms of a generation from now, anyhow. It’s what we were talking about when you first got into town: as long as we can hold the lid on the South till we’ve won the damn war, that’ll do the trick. If we catch the guys running guns with the Nazis, great. If we don’t, I don’t give a damn about them sneaking around painting YANKS OUT on every blank wall they find. We can deal with that. We’ve been dealing with it since 1865. As long as they don’t have the toys they need to really hurt us, we’ll get by.”

“Yeah, that’s true—if no other subs drop off loads of goodies someplace else.” Michaels sighed again. “No rest for the weary. If that happens, we’ll just have to try and track ’em down.”

A growing rumble of diesel engines made Morrie Harris grin. “Here come the trucks,” he said, and trotted out toward the ruined entryway to Girod Cemetery. Michaels followed him. Harris pointed. “Ah, good, they’re smart enough to have jeeps riding shotgun for ’em. We don’t want any trouble around here till we get the weapons away safe.”

There were still a lot of people outside the cemetery walls. They booed and hissed the newly arrived vehicles, but didn’t try anything more than booing and hissing. They might hate the damnyankees—they did hate the damnyankees—but it was the damnyankees who had the firepower here. Close to eighty years of bitter experience had taught that they weren’t shy about using it, either.

Captured German weapons and ammunition filled all the new trucks to overflowing. Some of the ones that had brought in troops also got loaded with lethal hardware. The displaced soldiers either piled into jeeps or clambered up on top of tanks for the ride back to barracks, where the captured arms would be as safe as they could be anywhere in the endlessly rebellious South.

Michaels and Harris had led the convoy to the cemetery; now they’d lead it away. When their jeep driver started up the engine, a few young Rebs bolder than the rest made as if to block the road.

The corporal in charge of the pintle-mounted .50-caliber machine gun in the jeep turned to Michaels and asked, “Shall I mow ’em down, sir?” He sounded quiveringly eager to do just that.

“We’ll give ’em one chance first,” Michaels said, feeling generous. He stood up in the jeep and shouted to the Johnnies obstructing his path: “You are interfering with the lawful business of the Federal Bureau of Suppression. Disperse at once or you will be shot. First, last, and only warning, people.” He sat back down, telling the driver, “Put it in gear, but go slow. If they don’t move—” He made hand-washing gestures.

Sullenly, the young men gave way as the jeep moved forward. The gunner swung the muzzle of his weapon back and forth, back and forth, encouraging them to fall back farther. The expression on his face, which frightened even Michaels, might have been an even stronger persuader.

The convoy rattled away from the cemetery. The Johnnies hooted and jeered, but did no more than that, not here, not now. Had they got Nazi guns in their hands . . . but they hadn’t.

“We won this one,” Morrie Harris said.

“We sure did,” Michaels agreed. “Now we can get on with the business of getting rid of tyrants around the world.” He spoke altogether without irony.

TAP

Greg Egan

Greg Egan’s upcoming publications include the American edition of Permutation City (HarperCollins) and the British edition of his new science fiction novel, Distress (Orion/Millenium). Like his highly acclaimed novelette, “Cocoon” (Asimov’s, May 1994), Mr. Egan’s chilling “Tap” is a gripping tale of mystery and suspense.

I want you to find out who killed my mother, Ms O’Connor. Will you do that?”

Helen Sharp’s voice was unsteady with anger; she seemed almost as psyched up as if she’d come here to confront the killer, face-to-face. Under the circumstances, though, the very act of insisting that there was a killer was like shouting a defiant accusation from the rooftops—which must have taken some courage, even if she had no idea whom she was accusing.

I said carefully, “The coroner returned an open finding. I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine Third Hemisphere would still settle out of court for a significant—”

“Third Hemisphere have no case to answer! And sure, maybe they’d pay up anyway—just to avoid the publicity. But as it happens, I’m not interested in legalized blackmail.” Her eyes flashed angrily; she made no effort to conceal her outrage. No doubt her lawyers had already given her exactly the same advice; it didn’t look like the idea would ever grow on her. She was thirty-two—only five years younger than me—but she radiated so much stubborn idealism that I found it hard not to think of her as belonging to another generation entirely.

I raised one hand in a conciliatory gesture. “Fine. It’s your decision. But I suggest you don’t sign anything that limits your options—and don’t make any public declarations of absolution. After six months paying my expenses, you might change your mind. Or I might even turn up something that will change it for you. Stranger things have happened.” Though nothing much stranger than a next-of-kin declining to screw a multinational for all it was worth.

Sharp said impatiently, “The TAP implant was not responsible. There’s no evidence to suggest that it was.”

“No, and there’s no evidence to suggest foul play, either.”

“That’s why I’m hiring you. To find it.”

I glanced irritably at the north-facing window; the allegedly smart pane was ablaze with sunlight, rendering most of the office almost as hot as the sweltering streets of Kings Cross below.

Grace Sharp had been dead for a month. I’d been following the case informally, like everyone else in Sydney, out of sheer morbid curiosity. On the evening of January 12, she’d been at work in her study, apparently alone. The immediate cause of death had been a myocardial infarction, but the autopsy had also shown signs of a powerful adrenaline surge. That could have resulted from the pain and stress of a heart attack already in progress—or it could have come first, triggered by an unknown external shock.

Or, the Total Affect Protocol chip in her brain might have flooded her body with adrenaline for no good reason at all.

Sharp had been sixty-seven—in reasonable health for her age, but old enough to blur the boundaries of the possible. Forensic pathologists had struggled at the inquest to allocate probabilities to the three alternatives, but there’d been no clear front-runner. Which was no doubt distressing for the relatives—and no doubt left them vulnerable to the fantasy that there had to be a simple answer out there somewhere, just waiting to be found.

Helen Sharp said, “The media consensus is that my mother was composing a poem just before she died—and she thought a word in TAP so ‘powerful’ that it killed her on the spot.” Her tone was venomous. “Do they seriously imagine that ninety thousand sane people would put something in their brains which was capable of doing that? Or that the manufacturers would sell a device which would leave them open to billions of dollars worth of compensation claims? Or that the government licensing authorities—”

I said, “Licensed pharmaceuticals have killed plenty of people. Implants are even harder to test. And ‘fail-safe’ software written to the most rigorous military specifications has crashed aircraft—”

She seized on the analogy triumphantly. “And how do you know that? Because the aircraft’s black box proved it! Well, the TAP implant has its own black box: an independent chip which logs all its actions. And there was no record of any malfunction. No record of the implant triggering an adrenaline release at any level—let alone a fatal dose.”

“Maybe the black box glitched, too. You say it’s independent—but if there’s enough connectivity to let it know everything the implant does, the combined system might still be vulnerable to some kind of shared failure mode that the designers never anticipated.”

Sharp clenched her fists in frustration. “That’s not—literally—impossible,” she conceded. “But I don’t believe it’s likely.”

“All right. What do you think happened?”

Sharp composed herself, with the air of someone weary of repeating the same message, gathering up her strength with a promise to herself that this would be the last time.

She said, “My mother was working on a new poem that night—the black box makes that clear. But the time of death can’t be determined precisely—and it could have been as much as fifteen minutes after the last recorded use of the implant. I believe she was interrupted. I believe someone broke into the apartment and killed her.

“I don’t know how they did it. Maybe they just terrorized her—without laying a finger on her—and that was enough to bring on the heart attack.” Her voice was flat, deliberately emotionless. “Or maybe they gave her a transdermal dose of a powerful stimulant. There are dozens of chemicals which could have triggered a heart attack, without leaving a trace. She wasn’t found for almost nine hours. There are carbohydrate analogs of stimulatory neuropeptides which are degraded into glucose and water on a time scale of minutes.”

I resisted the urge to cite the lack of evidence for an intruder; it would have been a waste of breath. “Why, though? Why would anyone want to kill her?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure how much you know about TAP.”

“Assume the worst.”

“Well . . . it’s been wrongly described as just about everything from ‘telepathy’ to ‘computerized Esperanto’ to ‘the multimedia standard for the brain’. Sure, it began with a fusion of language and VR—but it’s been growing for almost fifteen years now. There’s still a word for <<dog>>”—she sketched the angle-brackets with her fingers, and I picked up on the convention later—“which might as well be hundo—and another for <<your beloved golden Labrador standing on the beach shaking the water from its coat before licking your face>> . . . which will evoke all that and more in all five senses, if you let it.

“But at the leading edge, now, we’re creating words for concepts, emotions, states of mind, which might once have defied description altogether. With TAP, ultimately there’s nothing a human being can experience which needs to remain . . . ineffable, mysterious, incommunicable. Nothing is beyond discussion. Nothing is beyond analysis. Nothing is ‘unspeakable’. And a lot of people find that prospect threatening; it turns a lot of old power structures on their head.”

If that cliche came true every time it was invoked, power structures would be oscillating faster than mains current. Helen Sharp was pushing seven on my paranoia index; on top of all her understandable grief and frustration, she belonged to a technosubculture which was poorly understood by the mainstream, frequently misrepresented—and which clearly liked to think of itself as a “dangerously” iconoclastic elite.

I said, “I know there are people who find TAP users . . . unacceptable. But what’s going to drive them to extremes like murder, all of a sudden? In fifteen years, has anyone, anywhere, been killed simply for having the implant?”

“Not to my knowledge. But—”

“Then surely—”

“But I can tell you exactly what’s changed. I can tell you why the conflict has just entered a whole new phase.”

That got my attention. “Go on.”

“You know it’s against the law to install a TAP implant in anyone younger than eighteen years old?”

“Of course.” The same restriction applied to all neural hardware, other than therapeutic chips which restored normal function to the injured or congenitally disabled.

“Early in March, a couple here in Sydney will commence legal proceedings with the aim of ensuring that they’re free to install the implant in all their future children—at the age of three months.”

I was momentarily speechless. These plans had clearly been kept within a very tight circle of supporters; the saturation media coverage of the inquest hadn’t mentioned so much as a rumour. After a month of intense journalistic scrutiny, I hadn’t expected the TAP-heads to have any surprises left.

I said, “Legal proceedings on what basis?”

“That they’re entitled to raise their family using whatever language they choose. That’s guaranteed in Federal legislation: there’s a 2011 bill which brings into force most of the provisions of the 2005 UN Covenant on Human Rights. They’ll be seeking a ruling from the High Court which invalidates the relevant sections of the New South Wales criminal code—which is far more difficult, from a legal point of view, than trying to defend themselves against a prosecution after the fact . . . but it does save them the trouble of having to find a surgeon willing to risk martyrdom.”

Sharp smiled faintly. “The same Federal law was invoked about a year ago, by a signing couple who were being pressured by Community Services to give their son a hearing implant. The parents won the first round—and it looks like there isn’t going to be an appeal. But a pro-implant case was always going to be much harder, of course. And signing is positively respectable, compared to TAP.”

“I assume the police know all this?”

“Of course. They don’t appear to be particularly interested, though—and I wasn’t able to raise it at the inquest. Legally speaking, I suppose it really is just static.”

“But you think—”

“I think a death widely attributed to the TAP implant would transform the prospects of the challenge succeeding from merely poor to . . . politically impossible. I think there are people who’d consider that to be a result worth killing for.”

Sharp fixed her gaze on me for a moment, and then nodded slightly, almost sympathetically—as if I’d just uttered a word which expressed all the conflicting emotions running through my head: <<Neural hardware in the skull of a three-month-old child—just to indulge its parents’ whims—would be an obscenity. But . . . if the ubiquitous hearing implants which grant English-before-sign are no “whim”, why is one which grants TAP-before-English? And if Grace Sharp was murdered to sway the odds against the challenge, her self-righteous killers belong in prison, regardless—and my own knee-jerk revulsion at the prospect of infant TAP-heads only goes to show that it could easily have been a powerful enough motive.>>

She said, “And I think you’re going to take the case.”

I started work that afternoon, reviewing the technical literature on the TAP implant—the closest thing to an objective account of its capabilities I was likely to find. Like most people, I imagined I already understood all the salient features—but it turned out that I’d swallowed more misinformation from the nets than I’d realized.

The two chips—the implant proper and the black box, both less than a millimetre wide—sat at the back of the skull, sharing access to a fine web of conductive polymer threads which wrapped the brain, making billions of quasi-synaptic contacts with the visual and auditory cortex, and Wernicke’s speech area in the temporal lobe. Other threads penetrated deeper, some as far as the limbic system. TAP could always be spoken or written, but bandwidth requirements made modulated infrared the medium of choice, so the implant was linked, via the spinal cord, to bioengineered IR transceiver cells in the skin of the palms.

Merely installing the implant didn’t grant instant fluency in TAP; the language still had to be learnt. A complete, “preloaded” vocabulary would never have worked; the precise meaning of most words in TAP could only be encoded in context, once the implant resided in a particular user’s brain. The implant’s own electronic neural net was ninety percent blank at installation, containing only a specialized language acquisition system and a simple “bootstrap” vocabulary. And though the learning process left its mark mostly within the implant itself—along with some relatively minor changes to the regions of the brain where a second natural language would have been encoded—it was meaningless to talk about either brain or chip “knowing TAP”, in isolation. An experienced user who exchanged his or her old implant for a new one straight from the factory would have been dragged back almost to square one (in practice, all the data from the old hardware would be copied to the new)—but equally, an experience-enriched implant placed in a novice’s brain would have been as unusable as a slice of someone else’s cerebral cortex.

These observations applied strictly to adults, of course. Despite several dozen theoretical papers—most of them cautiously optimistic—no one really knew how a young child’s brain would interact with the implant.

A TAP user could interpret a standard VR sensorium—but there was, deliberately, no provision for interacting in the conventional way with a nonexistent environment. Immersive VR implants temporarily paralysed the organic body and diverted motor impulses from the brain into a fully computerized somatic model: a virtual body which could function as part of the virtual environment—subject to the environment’s rules. In contrast, a TAP user’s idea of interaction was more along the lines of rethinking the whole sensorium and spitting it back out, or responding with something entirely different—arguing with the whole premise, instead of passively accepting it. A VR user had little choice but to suspend disbelief, or quit—a full-sense environment, surreal or not, was always compelling—but a TAP user could deal with the same kind of information with as much or as little detachment as he or she desired. Words in TAP—which included the entire sensorium-descriptor vocabulary of VR—could evoke images ten thousand times more vivid and precise than the densest poetic English . . . or they could be held at arm’s length and scrutinized dispassionately, as easily as any English-speaker could contemplate the phrase “a flash of blinding radiance” or “the overpowering stench of ammonia” without experiencing anything of the kind. In the jargon of the implant’s designers—English words, predating TAP itself—every TAP word could be scanned (understood analytically), or played (experienced subjectively)—or interpreted in a manner lying anywhere at all between those two extremes.

In one respect, though, TAP could be more immersive than the most authoritarian VR: it could induce emotional states directly. VR was confined to pure sense data (albeit often manipulative in the extreme), but in Total Affect Protocol there were words for <<fear>>, <<euphoria>>, <<sadness>> (or rather, nuanced subtypes of these crude English categories)—and the implant could reach deep into the limbic system and trigger these states as easily as any VR chip could generate the illusion of an unambiguously blue sky.

The user’s power to keep the language at a distance remained, of course—and the TAP word for <<crippling despair>> could only induce the “referent state” if a conscious effort was made to play it. And though TAP’s formal grammar ruled out nothing, low-level filters stood guard against potentially stupefying linguistic singularities—such as <<the desire to play this word forever>>—or anything physiologically dangerous.

Still, although the literature was blithely reassuring on this point, in the end it came down to a question of trusting the manufacturers and the regulators. I didn’t doubt that, in theory, a TAP chip could be designed which was no more likely than the unmodified human brain to strike the user dead if the word for <<fatal adrenaline rush>> accidentally came to mind—but whether or not Third Hemisphere had achieved that level of safety—for every conceivable user—was another matter.

Grace Sharp had been the oldest of the ninety thousand TAP speakers on the planet, and reputedly one of the most proficient—but whether proficiency implied more risk, from a greater vocabulary, or less, due to better control of the language, I couldn’t say.

By half past seven, I’d had enough of wading through papers on distortion-free affect-compression algorithms. I closed the office and headed for the station.

I could still smell the day’s heat wafting up from Victoria Road, but there was a faint hint of a breeze from the east. The gaudy advertizing holograms never looked quite as tacky at dusk as they did at dawn, although the colours were just as washed-out; maybe it was really all down to the mood on the streets. A few sweat-stained commuters were still on their way home, radiating palpable relief—and a few freshly laundered revellers were already arriving, full of hopeful energy. Somehow, dawn in Kings Cross never looked hopeful.

I passed a gaggle of saffron-robed monks from the Darlinghurst Temple, out hunting for alms, on the other side of the street. James didn’t seem to be among them—though it was hard to tell: they all looked interchangeable to me, and my strongest memories of him didn’t encompass the terminal, shaven-headed stage. Even when I recalled the night he announced that he was leaving me and Mick for a life devoted to selfless contemplation—“There’s no point arguing, Kath,” he’d explained, with an expression of transcendent smugness, “I’m not enslaved by the illusions of language anymore.”—even then, strangely enough, I pictured him as he’d looked ten years before. Buddhism had been growing ever more fashionable throughout the country for most of my lifetime—taking the place of retreating Christianity, as if the “vacuum” left behind needed to be filled by something equally absurd—but in the last ten years the Federal government had started supporting the monasteries in a big way, with a program of “community spiritual development” grants. Maybe they were hoping to save on social security payments.

I hesitated outside the station, thinking: A single TAP word could capture this moment—perfectly encoding my entire sensorium, and everything I’m thinking and feeling. A word I could speak, write, recall. Study at a distance—scan—or play, relive completely. Inflect and modify. Quote exactly (or not) to the closest friend or the most distant stranger.

I had to admit that it was a deeply unsettling notion: a language which could encompass, if not the universe itself, then everything we could possibly experience of it. At any given moment, there were “only” ten to the power three thousand subjectively distinguishable states of the human brain. A mere ten thousand bits of information: quite a mouthful, encoded as syllables—but only a millisecond flash in infrared. A TAP user could effectively narrate his or her entire inner life, with one hundred percent fidelity, in real time. Leopold Bloom, eat your heart out.

I boarded the southbound train, the skin on the back of my neck still tingling. The carriage was packed, so I stood strap-hanging with my eyes closed, letting the question spin in the darkness of my skull: Who, or what, killed Grace Sharp? Work was never something I could switch on and off—and unless I reached the stage where part of me was thinking about the case every waking moment, the chances were I’d make no progress at all.

Helen Sharp believed in some faceless conspiracy against TAP as a first language, driven by sheer linguistic xenophobia—though the real opposition might also be motivated, in part, by perfectly valid concerns about the unknown developmental consequences for a child growing up with TAP.

The serious media favoured a simple failure of technology; several worthy editorials had rewritten the Sharp case as a cautionary tale about the need for improved quality control in biomedical engineering. Meanwhile, the tabloids had gleefully embraced the idea of the <<death>> word, quasi-mystical enough to give their anti-tech subscribers a frisson of self-righteousness at the poetic justice of a TAP-head thinking herself into oblivion . . . and their pro-tech ones a frisson of awe at the sheer Power of the Chip.

And it was still possible that Grace Sharp had simply had a heart attack, all by herself. No assassins, no fatal poetry, no glitch.

So far, I could only agree with the coroner: I wasn’t prepared to rule anything out.

By the time I arrived home, Mick had already eaten and retreated to his room to play Austro-Hungarian Political Intrigues in Space. He’d been running the scenario for almost six months, along with a dozen friends—some in Sydney, some in Beijing, some in Sao Paulo. They’d graciously let me join in once, as a minor character with an unpronounceable name, but I’d become terminally bored after ten minutes and engineered my own death as swiftly as possible. I had nothing against role-playing games, per se . . . but this was the most ludicrous one I’d encountered since Postmodernism Ate My Love Child. Still, every twelve-year-old needed something truly appalling to grow out of—something to look back on in a year’s time with unconditional embarrassment. The books I’d read, myself (and adored, at the time) had been no better.

I knocked on his door, and entered. He was lying on his bed with the headset on and his hands above his head, making minimalist gestures with both control gloves: driving a software puppet body which had no sense of touch, or balance, or proprioception. He was moving its limbs with actions which had nothing to do with moving his own . . . but he was seeing and hearing everything through the puppet’s eyes and ears.

Most of the studies I’d read had suggested that the earlier a child took up VR (headset-and-glove, of course, not implant-based), the fewer side-effects it had on real-life coordination and body image. The skills of moving real and virtual bodies didn’t seem to compete for limited neural resources; they could be learnt in parallel, as easily as two languages. Only adults got confused between the two (and did better with VR implants, which let them pretend they were using their physical bodies). The research suggested that an hour a day in VR was no more harmful than an hour a day of any other equally unnatural activity: violin practice, ballet, karate.

I still worried, though.

The room monitor flagged my presence. At a convenient break in the action, Mick slipped off the headset to greet me, doing his best to hide his impatience.

I said, “School?”

He shrugged. “Bland-out. Work?”

“I’ve got a murder case.”

His face lit up. “Resonant! What class weapon?”

“Unkind words.”

“¿Que?”

“It’s a joke.” I almost started to explain, but it didn’t seem fair to hold up the other players. “You’ll quit at nine, okay? I don’t want to have to check on you.”

“Mmmm.” Deliberately noncommittal.

I said calmly, “I can program it, or you can stick to the rules voluntarily. It’s your choice.”

He scowled. “It’s no choice, if it makes no difference.”

“Very profound. But I happen to disagree.” I walked over to him and brushed the hair from his eyes; he gave me his I-wish-you-wouldn’t-but-you’re-forgiven-this-time look.

Mick said suddenly, “Unkind words? You mean Grace Sharp?”

I nodded, surprised.

“Some guru last week was prating about her TAPping herself to death.” He seemed greatly amused—and it struck me that “guru” was several orders of magnitude more insulting than anything I would have dared to say in front of my mother, at his age. At least put-downs were getting more elegant; my generation’s equivalents had relied almost exclusively on references to excrement or genitalia. Mick and his contemporaries weren’t at all prudish—they just found the old scatological forms embarrassingly childish.

I said, “You don’t believe in the <<death>> word?”

“Not some banana skin land mine you make yourself, by accident.”

I pondered that. “But if it exists at all, don’t you think it’d be easier to fight if it came from outside, than if you stumbled on it in your own thoughts?”

He shook his head knowingly. “TAP’s not like that. You can’t invent random words in your head—you can’t try out random bit-patterns. You can imagine things, you can free-associate, but . . . not all the way to death, without seeing it coming.”

I laughed. “So when did you read up on this?”

“Last week. The story sounded flash, so I went context mining.” He glanced at his terminal and made some slight hand movements; a cluster of icons for Universal Resource Locators poured into an envelope with my name on it, which darted into the outgoing mail box. “References.”

“Thanks. I wasted the whole afternoon—I should have come home early and picked your brains instead.” I was only half joking.

I sat on the edge of the bed. “If she didn’t stumble on the word herself, though . . . I don’t see how anyone could have spoken it to her: as far as the police could tell, she’d had no visitors—or communications—for hours. And if someone broke into the apartment, they left no trace.”

“How about . . .?” Mick gestured with one gloved thumb at the shelf above his bed.

“What?” I parsed the clutter of objects slowly. “Ah.”

He’d set up an IR link with his friend Vito, who lived in an apartment block across the park; they could exchange data twenty-four hours a day without either family paying a cent to the fibre barons. The collimated beam of the five-dollar transceiver passed effortlessly through both their bedroom windows.

“You think someone outside the apartment . . . shot her in the palm with a <<death>> word?” The notion conjured up bizarre images: a figure taking aim with a gunless night-sight; Grace Sharp with outstretched arms and infrared stigmata.

“Maybe. Split the fee, if I’m right?”

“Sure. Minus rent, food, clothes, communications—”

Mick mimed violin playing. I feigned a swipe at his head. He glanced at the terminal; his friends were losing patience.

I said, “I’d better leave you to it.”

He smiled, held up his hand in a farewell gesture like a diver about to submerge, then slipped the headset back on. I lingered in the room for a few seconds, feeling profoundly strange.

Not because I felt that I was losing touch with my son. I wasn’t. But the fact that we could comprehend each other at all suddenly seemed like the most precarious voodoo. Natural language had endured, fundamentally unchanged, through a thousand social and technological revolutions . . . but TAP made it look like some Stone Age tool, a flake of crudely shaped obsidian in an era when individual atoms could be picked up and rearranged at whim.

And maybe in the long run, all the trial-and-error and misunderstandings, all the folk remedies of smiles and gestures, all the clumsy imperfect well-meaning attempts to bridge the gap, would be swept away by the dazzling torrent of communication without bounds.

I closed the door quietly on my way out.

The next morning I started going through the transcripts of the inquest—which included a 3D image of Sharp’s study. The body had been found around 8:20 AM by a domestic aid who came three times a week—Sharp, although generally fit, had suffered from severe arthritis in her hands. Paramedics had removed the body before the police became involved, but they’d snapped the scene first as a routine procedure.

The apartment was on the 25th floor, and the study had a large window facing west. The curtains were shown fully open—although there was nothing in the transcripts, one way or the other, about the possibility that the man who’d found the body, or even the paramedics, might have opened them to let in some light. I grafted the image into the local council’s plan of the suburb, and did some crude ray-tracing from where the forensic software suggested Sharp had been standing before she fell. A bullet would have left directional information—but a burst of IR could have come from any location with a clear line of sight. Given the uncertainty in her position, and the size of the window, the possibilities encompassed the windows and balconies of sixty-three apartments. Most were beyond the range of cheap hobbyists’ IR equipment—but I looked up skin-transceiver sensitivity, attenuation in the atmosphere, and beam spread parameters, then started checking product catalogues. There were several models of communications lasers which would have done the job—and the cheapest was only three hundred dollars. Not the kind of thing you could buy from an electronics retailer, but there were no formal restrictions on purchase or ownership. It wasn’t a weapon, after all.

The world’s greatest TAP poet, shot by a word? It was a seductive idea—and I was surprised that the tabloids hadn’t seized on it, weeks ago—but in the cold light of morning, I was finding it increasingly difficult to believe that Grace Sharp had died from anything but natural causes. The building had excellent security; the forensic team had found no sign of an intruder. The testimony of the black box wasn’t watertight, but on balance it probably did exonerate the implant. And Helen Sharp herself had been convinced that the <<death>> word was impossible.

I spent the morning slogging through the rest of the transcripts, but there was nothing very illuminating. The experts had washed their hands of Grace Sharp’s death. I didn’t blame them: if the evidence supported no clear verdict, the honest thing to do was to say so. At most inquests, though, someone managed to slip a speculation or two into the proceedings: a pathologist’s gut-level hunch, an engineer’s unprovable intuition. A few lines I could wave accusingly in their face when I cornered them in their office—prompting them to spill the whole elaborate, unofficial hypothesis they’d been nurturing in their head for months. But there wasn’t a single foothold here, a single indiscretion I could pursue; every witness had been cautious to a fault.

So I had nowhere else to go: I steeled myself and went trawling through the archives for the enemies of TAP.

Media releases (mainly from politicians and religious figures), letters and essays in edited publications, and postings to net forums gave me about seventeen thousand individuals who’d had something disparaging to say to the world about TAP. The search algorithm was multilingual, but I didn’t trust it to pick up irony reliably, so even this crude first grab had to be taken with a mountain of salt. Twelve percent of the forum postings were anonymous—and the random sample I inspected made it clear that they came from the most vehement opponents—but I put them aside; textual analysis of a few gigabytes of invective could wait for barrel-scraping time.

Clustering software picked up some fairly predictable connections. Two-thirds of the people I’d found were officially speaking on behalf of—or explicitly mentioned their membership or approval of—one of ninety-six organizations: political, religious, or cultural.

The software drew ninety-six star-diagrams. The biggest cluster was for Natural Wisdom: a quasi-green lobby group set up for the sole purpose of opposing the use of neural hardware. Most members were European, but there was a significant Australian presence. Second largest was The Fountain of Righteousness, a U.S.-based fundamentalist Christian coalition; they had half a dozen local affiliate churches. Cluster size didn’t necessarily measure the strength of opposition, though; the Roman Catholic church ranked a mere thirtieth—but only because it was so rigidly hierarchical, with a relatively small list of appointed spokesmen. Most Islamic authorities weren’t keen on neural hardware, either—but many predominantly Islamic countries had simply outlawed the technology, largely defusing it as an issue. Islam’s best showing was for a UK group, and that was ranked fifty-seventh.

I cut the data set down to Australia only. Nineteen organizations remained—and the top six rankings stayed the same, for what that was worth. There was something of the flavour of a witch-hunt to this whole analysis; I wasn’t publicly accusing anyone of anything—I wasn’t libelling Natural Wisdom as murderous thugs for daring to speak out against the implant—but this kind of crude fishing expedition always made me feel distinctly uneasy.

Still, if these were the people who’d feel most threatened by the prospect of children growing up with TAP . . . who among them could have known about the impending High Court challenge?

I scanned the membership databases of legal and paralegal associations, and the mailing lists of relevant journals, scooping up anyone who gave an address care of Huntingdale and Partners—the firm who were preparing the “infant implant” brief.

There was zero overlap with the anti-TAP set—which was no great surprise. I imagined the police would have gone at least this far, and they’d had better resources: they could have pulled the whole Huntingdale workforce from taxation records, with no chance of so much as a clerical assistant falling through the cracks.

I gazed at the screen, dispirited. All I had to show for a day’s work were sixty-three apartments with a view of Grace Sharp’s study, and seventeen thousand people who’d done nothing more incriminating than put themselves on the record as opponents of TAP.

The only thing left to try was intersecting the two.

Finding apartment numbers to match the physical locations in the building plans was the hardest part; architects and developers didn’t have to file anything so petty when they had their projects approved. I was actually beginning to contemplate doing the necessary legwork myself, when I discovered that someone had done it for me: an ad hoc consortium of sellers of insurance, fire-alarms, security equipment and climate control had commissioned a database for the entire metropolitan area, to help them target their junk mail. The suburb I needed only cost fifty bucks—complete with email tags.

I cross-matched with the anti-TAP set.

A single name appeared.

John Dallaporta belonged to none of my organisational clusters, and I had only one piece of data on his attitude to TAP: a short essay he’d written, seven years before, decrying the implant’s potential to “erode the richness of our ancient and beautiful tongues” and “invade the still, mysterious spaces of our minds”. The essay had appeared in a secondary English teachers’ netzine; I summoned up the whole issue, and flipped through its innocuous contents. The majority of the articles dealt with working conditions, and concerns arising out of new technology; there was also an earnest—almost painfully respectful—discussion of strategies for coping with parents who forbade their children contact with the filthy/sexist/atheistic/elitist/ superstitious/obsolete works of Shakespeare, et al. Not the kind of venue you’d seriously expect to lead you to a man who slaughtered his ideological enemies.

I reread Dallaporta’s essay carefully. It was passionate, but hardly inflammatory; he sounded very much like just one more plaintive, insecure technophobe letting off steam, to a no doubt largely sympathetic audience. I was inclined to be sympathetic, myself—in all honesty, the implant made my skin crawl—but there was a self-serving undercurrent which detracted from the force of his arguments. Certainly, portraying English as an endangered language was ridiculous, when more people were speaking it than at any other time in history.

And though I could picture Dallaporta outside the court with a placard, once the challenge to the implant legislation began, I found it hard to imagine the author of these moderate words killing Grace Sharp in cold blood—and harder still to imagine him discovering the means to do it.

I was growing tired of desk work, but I spent the next few hours studying the fragmentary portrait of the man offered by the net. He was forty-seven years old, divorced five years, with two daughters in their mid-teens. Presumably his ex-wife had custody of both children, since all the data suggested that he lived alone. He’d been a teacher in government high schools all his working life; in his late twenties, he’d published some poetry in literary journals, but unless he’d adopted an undocumented pseudonym, there’d been nothing since. He seemed to belong to no organization but the State School Teachers’ Union, and if he subscribed to any religion, no marketing demographer had yet managed to pin it down.

So much for the electronic profile. I didn’t believe for a moment that he could have killed Grace Sharp—but I wasn’t prepared to rule it out until I’d met him in the flesh.

I found a calendar of events for the Laurence Brereton Memorial High School. There was a parent-teacher night in three days’ time.

I arrived late enough not to have to loiter outside for too long before catching sight of a few departing parents, still wearing their name badges. I got a good look at the style and the materials used—but I was even luckier than that: one man dropped his badge into a recycling bin right before my eyes. I’d come prepared with a variety of cardboard samples, safety pins and clips, but all I had to do was fish out this discarded one, match the font on my notepad’s printer, and spray my own—borrowed—name onto the blank side.

No one challenged me as I entered the crowded hall and walked straight past the desk where parents were queuing up to register their attendance and collect their badges. I spotted a row of work stations dispensing guidance; I walked up to one and tried to make an enquiry, but it was too clever by far: the only entry point was “parent’s name”—apparently all it needed in order to highlight every relevant teacher on a personalized map of the hall. I stood back and watched other people use the software, until Dallaporta’s name appeared.

It seemed an odd time of year for an event like this; Mick’s high school had held an orientation night before the start of term, but they hadn’t yet invited me back. The buzz of conversation around me sounded remarkably amiable, though; maybe it was a good strategy to drag the parents in as early as this, and try to nip any problems in the bud.

John Dallaporta was tall and slender, clean-shaven, slightly balding. He was being talked at loudly by someone’s proud father—and though his eyes were glazed, and his smile a little wooden, he didn’t strike me as a man who’d been sleepless with guilt for the past five weeks.

When the father departed, I approached purposefully. Dallaporta offered his hand and said smoothly, “Good to see you, Ms. Stone.” He hesitated. “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I—”

I smiled disarmingly. “No, you don’t teach my daughter. But I wanted to speak to you, and this seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. But I should explain: I’m not the head of department this year. It rotates between the senior teachers, so Carol Bailey—” He glanced around, then pointed her out. “Do you see—?”

I shook my head apologetically. “It’s not a departmental matter. I just wanted to meet you. I read an essay you wrote, a few years ago: The Bit-Stream of the Rose. And I liked what you had to say there, very much. So when I realized you were teaching in my daughter’s new school . . .”

Dallaporta eyed me curiously, a little bemused, but he betrayed no obvious unease or suspicion. “That’s so long ago now, I’m surprised you remember it at all. Let alone the name of the author.”

“Of course I remember! And I just hope the rest of the department share your values on those . . . issues. I used to teach English, myself. I know the kind of pressures you’re facing. And of course I want my own children to be technologically literate—but some of us have to take a stand, or who knows what ‘technologically literate’ will mean, in twenty years’ time?”

Dallaporta nodded affably, but now I could see muscles tightening at the sides of his jaws—the ones which contract when you’re trying too hard not to let anything show. Proving what? Nothing at all—except that he had stronger feelings about TAP than he cared to discuss with a total stranger in a crowded hall.

I kept pushing. “When I started high school, myself, if you didn’t have your own PC on your desk at home, you were marginalized. These days the work stations come for free—if you sign up for a thousand-a-month worth of ‘vital’ net access. And any child who can’t interview Afghani nomads for a geography assignment—or get a live feed from the latest Venus probe via JPL—might as well quit and go work at McDonalds. When does it stop? When my grandchildren are twelve, what will ‘entry level’ be, for them?”

Dallaporta laughed, not quite naturally. “I wouldn’t dare hazard a guess. But I have faith in people. In common sense.”

I made direct eye contact, trying to decide if he was genuinely rattled—or just didn’t trust himself to get on the soapbox, even for such an obviously sympathetic listener.

“Common sense? I hope you’re right. I’ve heard some rumours lately which don’t bear thinking about—”

Dallaporta blanched visibly. Meaning he knew about the court case? And now assumed that I had some connection to whoever had given him the news? I offered him a conspiratorial smile: Relax, I’m a friend, we’re on the same side.

I said, “Look, I didn’t mean to take up so much of your time. But it was so nice to meet you, finally.” I held out my hand, and Dallaporta shook it, slipping back onto autopilot with obvious relief.

I walked out into the warm evening. There was a real Lydia Stone, with a daughter who’d just started Year 8; Dallaporta might check the records, but I didn’t think he was likely to confront the girl’s teachers and ask them to sketch an identikit for comparison.

I glanced up at the washed-out sky, at the handful of visible stars—and thought once more: this moment would be a single word, in TAP. <<The scent of cut grass from the playing fields, the rumble of suburban traffic, the melancholy yellow lights of the hall beside the darkness of the empty classrooms.>> A moment skewered like a butterfly? A ten-thousand-bit digital corpse of the world, shedding dead pixels in the mind’s eye? Or a moment captured like a mood perfectly evoked by a phrase of music? No one had ever felt the need to murder a composer, just to safeguard the languages which couldn’t compete on equal terms with fugues and sonatas. No one had ever taken a human life just to stop eccentric parents bombarding their offspring with Bach and Mozart in the womb. What made TAP so much more threatening? The fact that it could evoke images and emotions beyond the reach of any symphony? The fact that it was so much better?

I’d actually meant most of what I’d said to Dallaporta—but the more I thought about the issues, the more ambivalent I became. No one was trying to “force” TAP onto anyone, except their own children—and to raise a child at all was to impose a set of choices, one way or another. Actively or passively. Consciously, or through sheer conformity or neglect. The prospect of TAP-heads meddling with their children’s brains—just so they could share an artificial language—still filled me with instinctive, visceral outrage . . . but was it any more virtuous for the rest of us to insist that no child be given the implant until their brains were fully formed in the ten-thousand-year-old mould of our own Stone Age preconceptions? Weren’t both sides just attempting to shape future generations in their own image?

And putting aside prejudice, instinct, and nostalgia . . . which first language really would provide the best tools for dealing with the modern world?

That was a good question. It just wasn’t the one I was being paid to answer.

I planted a dozen small recording devices in pay phones near Dallaporta’s apartment, and the school. Which was highly illegal—but both less risky, and more likely to succeed (if he was actually guilty of anything), than trying to bug his home. I’d sampled his voice at the parent-teacher night, so the bugs could discard everyone else’s conversations. I cycled by and queried them daily.

I finally tracked down Tom Davies, Grace Sharp’s domestic aid—a TAP-head himself. The curtains of the study were always left open, he said. Grace liked to work looking out across the skyline; she’d chosen the apartment for the view.

I couldn’t help asking, sarcastically, “Wouldn’t it have been cheaper just to visit some rich friend’s apartment—and memorize the TAP words for everything she saw?”

He laughed. “Of course. And she could have written scenery in her head to put any ten-million-dollar harbour view to shame.”

“So why didn’t she?”

“Do you know how Grace defined ‘reality’ ?”

“No.”

“The ten thousand bits that are left when you’ve argued everything else out of existence.”

After weeks of persistent harassment, I persuaded Maxine Ho, one of Third Hemisphere’s senior engineers, to talk to me off the record. She stuck to the official line, though: the <<death>> word was impossible. Whatever Grace Sharp had imagined, or whatever TAP sequence some would-be assassin had confronted her with, all the safeguards operated on a separate level, independent of the language protocol—and when the implant had been examined after the autopsy, there’d been no trace of damage or corruption to the relevant hardware or software.

“Of course a neural implant can kill you. A pacemaker can kill you. A work station can kill you. Any piece of technology can fail. But if someone died sitting at a work station—and when I took it apart there was no sign of a loose wire or a break in the insulation—I wouldn’t say: ‘She must have been running the legendary <<death>> program, which instructed the machine to electrocute her.’ I’d go looking for another cause of death.”

It was a specious analogy. Perfectly functioning TAP implants routinely sent signals to the hypothalamus, which in turn stimulated the adrenal gland; perfectly functioning work stations weren’t set up to dispense electric shocks at any dose.

Still, I thought she was being basically straight with me. If she believed that the implant had failed at all, she believed it was a one-in-a-million glitch: less a design flaw than a tragic proof of the intrinsic unpredictability of any real device out in the real world—the kind of thing which would have been excused as “natural causes” if an equally robust biological system had failed.

On March 5th, the High Court challenge to the implant restrictions became public knowledge. The case wasn’t scheduled to be heard until September—but the reaction to the news was immediate.

Helen Sharp had been right about one thing: her mother’s death was seized upon by almost every commentator as proof that a successful challenge would amount to the legalization of infanticide. Not that Their Honours could be influenced by emotive editorials—perish the thought—but even if they weren’t, it was clear that the Federal government would be ready with the necessary amendments within days of any decision which put the State criminal law in doubt. I set my knowledge miner digging, but reasoned debate about the merits of the case—the actual merits, not the legal ones—could barely be found outside obscure neurolinguistics journals. (TAP speakers’ netzines were in TAP, and I had no translation software.)

The night the news broke, Mick declared, “I want one.”

“Then you’ll just have to wait six years, won’t you?”

“Not if they win.”

“If they win, you’d better start mowing lawns and washing windows. Six years should do it either way.”

He accepted that without protest—but then asked innocently, “So what’s your favourite medium?”

“Text. And I know: I’m a boring old fart, but you’re still not—” He wore a pained expression—and not just because “old fart” was cringe-inducing baby-talk. I’d missed the point.

“I’m sorry. What were you going to say?”

Mick spoke carefully. “How’d you like it if every time you picked up a book, you had to swallow everything the writer said? If you couldn’t stop mid-sentence and think: ‘This is . . . bullshit.’ If you lost the power to argue in your head with every word.”

“I’d hate it.”

He said, “That’s where VR’s heading. Without TAP.”

I was taken aback by the bleakness of this forecast—but it rang true. Without a language as powerful as the medium, there was little room for argument, little room for doubt. Just unearned suspension of disbelief.

I reached over to the cable which snaked from his headset to the work station, and looped it absentmindedly around one finger. I said, “If it’s as bad as that, then stop using it. It’s your choice.”

One look answered that; he didn’t need to elaborate. Why should he be forced to abandon his own favourite medium? Why shouldn’t he have the chance to salvage it, reinvigorate it, instead? Present at the birth of spoken language, would I have fought to abolish it, like some fanatical Zen terrorist afraid of its power to deceive? Or would I have fought to enrich it, to balance that power with scepticism and analysis?

I said lamely, “There’s more to life than VR.”

Mick grinned triumphantly. “Exactly. But there isn’t more to life than TAP.”

I took on other cases: runaway children, minor computer fraud—routine work, but at least it gave me the satisfaction of swift results. Helen Sharp could no longer afford to keep me on full-time—and I’d virtually run out of productive ways to spend her money, anyway. If her mother had died from some unrepeatable glitch, biological or otherwise, nobody would ever prove it. So I offered no false hopes, and worked on the assumption that in a few more months, she’d come to her senses and tell me that the case was closed.

Then, in the middle of April, one of my pay phone bugs finally spoke.

I was dutifully cycling past, checking them all in the pouring rain, though I no longer seriously expected anything. When my notepad chimed the code for success, I almost dropped it into a storm drain.

Playing back the recording on the bike, in the rain, would have been impossible. Playing it back on a crowded train would have been stupid—I didn’t have the headphones—but I was tempted. By the time I reached the office, I’d convinced myself I’d hear nothing but a service call: Dallaporta complaining that his home connection was out of order.

I was wrong.

Dallaporta whispered urgently, “You have to help me. I need your advice.” It was a monologue; he was leaving a message. “I didn’t get rid of it, on the night. I thought: it’s not illegal—so why not keep it, just in case?” My skin crawled. He didn’t elaborate, but I could guess exactly what he meant: Just in case it becomes expedient, at some time in the unforeseeable future, to kill another prominent TAP-head.

He inhaled deeply, as if trying to calm himself. “That was . . . insane, I know. I wasn’t thinking straight. But now . . . I can’t just throw it in the river! What if the police are watching me? What if they’re going through my garbage?” That was unlikely, but I was grateful for his paranoia—and his incompetence: whispering into a public phone with (I imagined) a hand shielding lips and mouthpiece wouldn’t have done him much good if he had been under police surveillance.

“I’ve wiped the code, now.” Shit. “I followed the instructions, I’m sure it worked. But I have to get rid of the machine. I need to know the best way—the safest way—to do it. Please. Call me back at the usual place.”

I decoded the number he’d called, from the tones—but it was a commercial message rerouting service—and one that was far too classy to be bribed or hacked.

I sat at the desk, still dripping, trying to decide what to do next. The humidity control system in the north window was pumping water vapour into the room; I’d never get dry unless I went and stood out in the hall for an hour.

Everything I had so far would be less than useless to the police; the illegality of the phone bugs aside, every connection between Dallaporta and Grace Sharp’s death remained pure speculation. And I wasn’t even sure I had enough to convince Helen Sharp, who didn’t believe in <<death>> words. Nothing Dallaporta had said proved that he’d been talking about an infrared communications laser—and the crucial data it had transmitted was probably lost forever, now.

But it sounded like I still had a very slim chance to photograph “the machine”, in situ.

The message had been left at 6:23 that morning. I glanced at my watch; school would be out in two hours. I had no way of knowing how long it would take for Dallaporta’s backers (Natural Wisdom? The Fountain of Righteousness?) to come to his rescue—assuming they didn’t just decide to abandon him—but I couldn’t risk waiting another day.

I knew I’d be cutting it fine, but I didn’t seem to have much choice.

There were six hundred apartments in Dallaporta’s building—and the sheer weight of numbers had its advantages. I stood across the street behind a bus shelter and waited for someone to approach the main entrance. When a young man appeared, key in hand, I dashed across the road and caught up with him, breathless, soaked, umbrella-less, fumbling. He let me through without a moment’s hesitation. I hung back in the lobby shaking water from my coat so I wouldn’t have to talk to him in the elevator; I hadn’t had time to prepare any plausible lies, and if he’d so much as asked me how long I’d lived in the building, I probably would have been struck dumb.

Dallaporta’s apartment, 1912, had a reinforced security door with an impressive-looking deadlock. I found a utilities room at the end of the corridor, and picked its lock easily enough. There was a hatch in the ceiling—and even a ladder standing in a corner of the room. I rechecked the plans of the building on my notepad: not every apartment had a ceiling hatch; 1911 did, 1912 didn’t.

I climbed into the ceiling and crawled across the dusty beams as quietly as I could, hoping I hadn’t lost my bearings. I lay above apartment 1911, just listening, for almost five minutes—then I realized I’d never be certain it was empty. A baby sleeping, an adult quietly reading . . . I didn’t even know who lived there, I hadn’t had time to find out.

Cursing silently, I crawled back to the utilities room, brushed myself down, and went and rang the bell to 1911.

I rang three times. No one was home.

I retraced my path, lifted the hatch, lowered a rope into the apartment. My forearms ached as I descended; I hadn’t done an illegal entry since before Mick was born. The old buzz was tinged with new anxieties: I was too old for this cat-burglar shit—and I couldn’t afford to lose my licence. But I felt a kind of defiant euphoria, too—because everything was harder, because I had so much more to lose.

And it would all be one word, in TAP . . .

The balconies of the two apartments were separated by less than a metre, but they were flush with the outside wall of the building—no overhang at all. I climbed up onto the waist-high foot’s-width concrete guard wall, steadied myself by pressing up with my left hand against the balcony’s ceiling—then with the right, reached across the naked brickwork of the outside wall and into Dallaporta’s balcony. I was lucky; I was on the side of the building facing away from the wind.

I moved a foot across, too, embraced the brickwork tightly, shifted the centre of mass of my body a few crucial centimetres—fighting down momentary panic—and within seconds, my right hand and foot were lodged securely between Dallaporta’s guard wall and ceiling, and it was far easier to go forward than back. I jumped shakily down onto his cluttered balcony, just missing a pot plant. I glanced at the street, nineteen storeys below—and pictured Mick at my funeral, still refusing to talk to his father. There was a chance that someone had seen me cross, but there was nothing I could do about that—and the downpour seemed to shift the odds in my favour: I could barely make out Grace Sharp’s building at all, through the curtain of rain.

A sliding glass door separated the balcony from the apartment. It fitted loosely between a ceiling track and a guide rail buried in the concrete floor; it was probably designed to be lifted right out, for ease of replacement—but only when it was unlocked. There was no question of trying to pick the lock; there was no keyhole—just a catch operated by a lever on the other side of the door. By pressing on the glass with both gloved hands, though, I could get enough purchase to raise and tilt the whole door slightly. After almost ten minutes—with my wrists going numb—I managed to work the catch free.

I opened the door a few centimetres, then paused at the threshold, scanning the room for burglar alarms. It was clear.

As I moved into the apartment, I heard footsteps in the corridor, then a key going into the lock. I retreated to the balcony, but it was too late to start climbing back the way I’d come; I would have been in full view. I slid the door closed—I couldn’t re-lock it—then dropped to the floor behind a pile of junk.

I heard at least two people enter the apartment, then turn left into the corridor which led out of the living room. I took a button-sized video camera, and stuck it to the frame of Dallaporta’s bike, which was leaning against the wall of the balcony. I checked the image on my notepad, then tweaked the direction until I had a clear view of most of the room.

I dropped out of sight again just in time. The intruders—a man and a woman, neither of whom I’d seen before—returned, carrying a cardboard carton about thirty centimetres long. I zoomed in; the labelling suggested a presentation bottle of Scotch. Dallaporta’s friends clearly didn’t share his paranoia; they knew the police weren’t watching the apartment. He wanted the laser to disappear—and they’d obligingly turned up to remove it.

The woman said, “You think he wiped it properly?”

The man hesitated. “I wouldn’t count on it.” I wondered why they hadn’t automated the process—but then, it would have been impossible to predict exactly when the opportunity to use the code on Grace Sharp would arise, or how many attempts it would take to hit the target.

“Well, I’m not walking out of here carrying incriminating—”

The man groaned—but he opened the carton. I recognized the laser from the catalogues I’d scanned; most of the bulk was in the precision optics, which doubled as a kind of telescope for checking alignment—the unit was meant for inner city rooftop-to-rooftop communications. There was a small device about the size of a matchbox plugged in to the data port; the man hit a button on the side of the box, and peered at a tiny LCD display.

“Hey, the Jackal got it right. I’m impressed.” He laughed. “‘I thought: Why not keep it, just in case?’ The poor cretin really thought he had the <<death>> word—and he could go on playing kill-the-TAP-head for as long as he liked.”

The woman said dryly, “Don’t be so ungrateful. If he’d known what he was doing, he wouldn’t have done it at all.”

They left. I pocketed the camera and crossed back to 1911 immediately, not wanting to be in sight when they reached the street. In the ceiling, I had to force myself not to rush; if I was careless, I could still get caught.

In five minutes, I was out of the building. I circled the block, then spiralled out through the surrounding streets, on the slim chance of catching sight of them again.

After half an hour I gave up, and went into a coffee shop to replay the video. I should have been jubilant: I had a clear shot of a communications laser, and a soundtrack with two people discussing the killing of TAP-heads.

The only catch was, it didn’t sound like they believed in <<death>> words any more than Maxine Ho or Helen Sharp.

I invited Helen Sharp to my office. I showed her Dallaporta’s essay, and the geometry of the buildings. I played back the phone call, and the scene in his apartment.

I said, “You’re the TAP expert. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

She sat in silence for a long time before replying.

“There is one possibility.”

“Which is?”

“My mother had the earliest model implant. Right to the end. She never had an upgrade—she didn’t trust them to transfer her vocabulary properly. She was afraid she’d lose everything she’d learnt.”

“And you think . . . the old models did have a <<death>> word?”

“No. But they could be microprogrammed externally.”

“You’ve lost me.” That wasn’t quite true, but I wanted her to spell it out. I wasn’t sure how much I really did know about the implant—how much the glowing technical reports might have misled me.

Sharp looked terrible—the fact that she’d just laid eyes on the people who’d arranged the death of her mother was finally sinking in—but she explained patiently: “The basic hardware of any neural net computer is just . . . a big array of interconnected RISC processors. The chip is mass-produced as a commodity—hundreds of millions of them a year—and used in tens of thousands of different devices. All the specific characteristics are added by the microcode: low-level instructions which customize the processors to make them behave in certain useful ways. The main software then takes that level for granted—as if it’s all hardwired into the silicon. But it’s not.

“When they released the first consumer model of the TAP implant, Third Hemisphere were worried that there might be some undiscovered flaw in the microcode. If they’d had to take all the implants out of people’s skulls to correct it, that would have been a PR nightmare. So they left a routine in the microcode which gave it the power to accept updates in infrared—to modify any part of itself, given the right sequence of external instructions.”

“So there was a special TAP word which could get at all the infrastructure? A word which said: <<Replace the old microcode with X>>?”

“No! It wasn’t a TAP word—it was a reserved sequence, right outside the language protocol! It was meaningless in TAP, it could never have been spoken. That was the whole point!”

It seemed like a minor distinction to me—but I could understand why she attached so much importance to it. The language itself hadn’t killed her mother. The poet hadn’t died from a word, after all.

I said, “If that’s what happened, though . . . why didn’t the engineers who examined your mother’s implant find any evidence of it? And if you knew all this—”

Sharp snapped back angrily, “I didn’t know she still had the old microcode!” She looked away. “Nine or ten years ago, Third Hemisphere tried to persuade her to accept a new implant—for free. They’d finally discovered a bug in the original microcode—a minor one, nothing dangerous, but they wanted everyone to start using the later models. They were confident enough about those that they weren’t externally programmable anymore.

“She wouldn’t accept it. She didn’t want a new implant, she didn’t want surgery. So they offered to update the microcode, to fix the bug—and close the trap door in the process, because I think that was also making them nervous. TAP users could never have spoken the code, even if they’d wanted to—but every consumer device on the planet was starting to put out a flood of infrared. There was always a tiny risk of triggering the modification program by accident.

“I thought she’d had the new microcode for the last ten years. She told me she’d accepted the offer. The records Third Hemisphere supplied to the coroner stated that she had—and the engineer’s report confirmed that.”

I said, “But if she’d actually refused it, like she’d refused the new implant—because she was afraid it might affect her skills with the language . . . then Dallaporta’s message might have done it all in one hit? Opened the trapdoor, undermined the black box, triggered a massive adrenaline release—then overwritten the evidence by substituting the version she was meant to have had all along?”

“Yes.”

“So who’d know enough to program all that?” Natural Wisdom? The Fountain of Righteousness? Hardly—though they could always have brought in outside expertise.

Sharp was adamant: “Only one of Third Hemisphere’s own software engineers could do it. Someone who’d been involved in the TAP project from the start.”

“But they’d have nothing to gain, surely? Why discredit your own work, your own product?”

The product belonged to Third Hemisphere, though—not to any group of employees.

And people did move on.

I scanned fifteen years’ worth of implant manufacturers’ publications; they were full of PR releases gloating about heads successfully hunted.

In March 2008, a firm called Cogent Industries had poached a software engineer named Maria Remedios from Third Hemisphere. That in itself proved nothing, of course—nor did the fact that an earlier article named her as a senior participant in the TAP project.

Cogent did have something to gain, though. They specialized in Virtual Reality hardware—both immersive neural implants, and headset-based units. Third Hemisphere wasn’t so much a direct competitor as the source of an entire antithetical philosophy: VR was sold to publishers and advertizers as the path to unconditional suspension of disbelief; TAP was about questioning everything, analysing everything. The day every VR user spoke TAP, the most ingeniously crafted—and manipulative—VR experience would disintegrate into a laughable trick with smoke and mirrors. And if that wasn’t exactly an imminent threat, Grace Sharp’s death had certainly made it more remote than ever.

They could have chosen Dallaporta by the same means I’d used to find him myself: a search for passionate opponents of TAP who also happened to have a clear view of Grace Sharp’s study. And whoever had made contact with him could have claimed to be a member of Natural Wisdom, or some other anti-implant group; he’d hardly have cooperated if he’d known the truth. When they’d told him about the High Court challenge—no doubt conjuring up images of a whole generation “lost to TAP”—Grace Sharp’s death must have begun to sound like a necessary evil. One old woman, for the sake of all those children. Death by her own obscene technological perversion of language. Nothing more than poetic justice.

And Maria Remedios? Had Third Hemisphere treated her badly, left her holding a grudge—or had her new employers pressured her into it? Even if she’d had grave second thoughts about TAP—and recoiled at the prospect of the implant being given to children—helping to murder an innocent woman seemed like a grotesquely disproportionate response. She could have joined the public campaign against the implant; as one of its creators, the media would have given her all the coverage she desired. And though Dallaporta might have caved in to “moral” arguments offered under false pretences, Remedios could hardly have failed to understand that Cogent’s motives were entirely commercial.

Nine tenths of the picture seemed to have fallen perfectly into place—but it was clear that I was missing something crucial. And too much even of that nine tenths was still pure guesswork. For a start, I had to establish solid evidence of a link between Dallaporta and Cogent Industries—which was going to be tricky, since he didn’t even know it existed, himself.

I checked the faces of the man and woman I’d seen in Dallaporta’s apartment against all the trade magazine shots of Cogent’s employees.

No match.

I fed the Cogent employee names, along with my seventeen thousand TAP-haters, into the cluster analysis software—looking for a connection, however tenuous.

There was none.

So much for the easy options.

I sent Dallaporta a message, via a rerouting service, asking if we could “continue our discussion”. The real Lydia Stone was ex-directory—and using a different number than the one she’d given the school would only prove that she was exercising suitable caution.

Three hours later, Dallaporta called me back. He was polite, but very nervous. I said I had some news which would be of interest to him; he didn’t actually scream at me to shut up in case the line was being bugged, but his body language made it clear that if I so much as mentioned TAP he’d hang up immediately.

I said, “Can I meet you somewhere? We really need to talk, face to face.”

He hesitated. He badly wanted me to vanish from his life—but he needed to know what my “news” was. Why had I taken an interest in him? One old essay was hardly enough to explain it, so . . . how many people in the anti-TAP crusade knew what he’d done? And what did I know about Grace Sharp’s death which no one had bothered to tell him?

Of course he was paranoid. The inquest was long over, the laser had been magicked away—but the fact remained: he’d stood on his balcony on a summer evening and shot a perfect stranger dead. Nothing could ever be the same again.

He said flatly, “Tomorrow night, at the school. Nine o’clock.”

I rehearsed the story in my head as I crossed the football field—which was brightly floodlit for some reason, though there wasn’t a soul around. A friend of a friend in a certain law firm had heard that Helen Sharp had discovered something in her mother’s computer files—something which had prompted her to start proceedings to try to gain access to Third Hemisphere’s records.

I was sure that Dallaporta would pass the rumour on to his benefactors; the hardest part would be ensuring that he didn’t mention “my” name. So long as he remained tight-lipped about his source of information, they’d have to take him seriously.

Helen Sharp was preparing a forged—paper—letter from her mother to Third Hemisphere, explicitly stating that she did not wish to accept the microcode update. I was confident that we had enough leverage now to persuade Third Hemisphere to play along, and bury the bait in the appropriate warehouse.

Maria Remedios would know at once what the “evidence” had to be. Cogent, acting on her advice, would try to arrange its disappearance. This time, they’d be caught red-handed.

At least, that was the theory.

Dallapporta had said he’d be in the “Resources Centre”—which these days apparently meant a large room full of work stations. I’d found a map of the school in an online brochure, so I knew exactly where to go. The door was open, though the lights were out—and as I approached the threshold I could see that all the machines inside had been switched on and connected to some net service or other. More of Dallaporta’s paranoia? Maybe he thought this was an ideal source of interference for the police surveillance teams who were following him everywhere—though the sound from most of the work stations was turned down to a whisper.

I peered into the greyness of the room, dazzled and distracted by the multitude of images: swarms of tiny red and silver fish weaving through a coral reef; a polychrome computer animation of air flow around some kind of zeppelin; a portrait of a Florentine prince sprouting a speech balloon full of modern Italian; a dead silver-haired twentieth century guru emitting platitudes about the nature of truth. An old music video was playing by the door; the singer droned: “This is the way, step insi-i-ide.”

I smiled uneasily at the coincidence and walked into the room—resisting the urge to shout a greeting, mocking Dallaporta’s elaborate “precautions”. It seemed far more diplomatic to play along. I stage whispered, “It’s me. Where are you?”

No reply.

It was hard to get my eyes accustomed to the darkness with forty or fifty bright screens in view; I had no reason whatsoever to look at any of the images—but it was remarkably difficult to keep looking away. I walked slowly towards the far end of the room, irritated but prepared not to show it. I called out again, a little louder; there was still no reply.

An animated supernova erupted just ahead of me—and the sudden blue-white radiance revealed a man slumped in a chair beside the screen. I moved closer, and inspected the body by the light of the dying sun.

Dallaporta had a small-calibre pistol in his hand, and a neat hole in his temple. I put two fingers to his neck; he was certainly dead, but still warm.

I felt a flicker of guilt break through the numbness of shock—but this wasn’t the time to agonize over the way I’d treated him. He’d killed Grace Sharp, and he hadn’t been prepared to live with that. If the fear of whatever I’d been about to tell him had been enough to drive him to suicide, he would have done it sooner or later, regardless.

I took out my notepad to call the police.

Then the supernova faded, and a new image took its place.

An apartment building, swept by rain. The camera zoomed in on a figure climbing between two of the balconies. The magnification kept increasing, relentlessly—and by the time the woman turned and showed her face, it filled the screen.

My stomach tightened. I glanced back to the neat, too-professional hole in Dallaporta’s skull, reassessing everything. But . . . who could have videoed me? If Cogent’s people had known I was on the balcony, why had they walked straight in?

The image changed again. Me, planting one of the phone bugs.

I laughed in disbelief. They’d all but slaughtered this man in front of my eyes—and now they were trying to blackmail me into silence with a couple of petty misdemeanours?

“There are small traces of your skin under his fingernails.” The voice came from a metre behind me; I started, but I didn’t actually jump. “Not enough for him to have left a mark on you, but enough for DNA analysis.”

I turned around slowly. The man was about my age, and only a little taller. He wasn’t pointing a gun at me, but he looked suspiciously relaxed.

“The police will find out that Helen Sharp hired you—but they’ll have no grounds for a warrant to compel you to supply them with tissue samples. Not if they don’t see this.” He gestured at the screen.

I said, “And why would they imagine I’d want to fake this man’s suicide? Breaking into his apartment proves nothing—”

“I think that depends on whether someone tips them off about the hundred thousand dollars in your Swiss bank account. Grace’s close-knit linguistic community must have done a little whip-around, and bought themselves some justice for the man with the <<death>> word.”

That shut me up. If the account really existed . . . that was breathtaking. Had Cogent been watching me all along, setting this up?

He smiled. “If you’re good, you can keep the hundred grand, of course. No tax; the whole thing’s organized beautifully through a holding company in Macao.”

I didn’t have the presence of mind even to be tempted; I was still trying to come to terms with the whole Byzantine scheme.

I said, “Forget it.” I walked straight past him, towards the doorway. I reached it, heart racing, then turned and looked back; I couldn’t see him anymore, but I didn’t think he’d moved a centimetre. Killing me would create too many problems, too many holes in their beautifully scripted VR experience—and the odds were stacked against me even if I did go straight to the police.

I said, “So what did you expect me to tell Helen Sharp? ‘Screw your mother, the case is closed—and please don’t ask any questions, I’m late for my flight to Macao’ ?”

“You’ll think of something. Believe me, you don’t want to fight us.”

I laughed angrily. “One pissy little VR company, and you think you can pull all the strings?”

The man said, “I’m not working for Cogent. They have no idea you’ve even taken an interest in them.”

I peered into the darkness between the rows of screens. “Some VR industry consortium, then.” For some reason I’d started shaking; I think it was rage. “You’re still not above the law.”

“Oh, there’s more to life than Virtual Reality.” He sounded amused.

“Yeah? Who, then?”

There was silence for a while, then I could see him approaching. “I can’t tell you that. But there are some people you can meet—if you want to—who might help you put your doubts to rest.”

“Who?”

“Maria Remedios. And her daughter.”

“I thought you didn’t work for Cogent—”

“She works for Cogent. I don’t. Though you could say it’s my job to watch over them both.”

The further we drove from Dallaporta’s corpse, the more compromised I knew I’d become—but I couldn’t walk away from a chance to learn what it was I’d missed all along. Even if the revelation was intended to guarantee my silence.

“Remedios was one of the first volunteers to test the TAP implant,” the man explained casually. “First she’d helped design it—and then she got to experience the results first hand. I think she must have found the reality exhilarating, in a lot of ways—but very frustrating, too.”

“Why frustrating?”

“Even with neural hardware, learning an exotic new language is always difficult. For an adult.”

I didn’t reply. He continued, “She managed to find a good neurosurgeon willing to give her daughter the implant. Not here, though. Overseas. Which simplified things, really—it was easier to turn a blind eye.”

That chilled me. “And you let her go ahead and do it? Just so you could see the results?”

He laughed. “Well, not me personally. But that was the general idea.”

And the results? I thought back to some of the more pessimistic technical papers I’d read on the subject. Maybe natural languages—which had co-evolved with human intelligence—were crucial for the early stages of intellectual development . . . and even if relatively “artificial” latecomers like sign made perfect substitutes, maybe TAP was just too different to perform the role of organizing the neural structures which made higher thinking possible. And maybe the fact that so much of the language was encoded in the chip, instead of the brain, meant that vital conceptual networks were missing—or at least, inaccessible to other regions of the cerebral cortex which needed them in order to mature.

It still made no sense, though. If the daughter was living proof that the implant would do unspeakable damage to the infant brain, why not just publicize that fact? Why had Grace Sharp died to win a court case which could have been won by simply disclosing the truth?

Maria Remedios lived in a modestly comfortable house on the north shore. My escort had phoned ahead; she was expecting us. As I followed him down the hallway, she met my eyes; there was unconcealed shame in her steady gaze—but a strange, almost proud defiance behind it. I looked away, confused. If she’d crippled her own child with the TAP implant, no wonder she’d left Third Hemisphere—but why was she so beholden to Dallaporta’s killers that she’d let them use her to manipulate Cogent? Had they threatened to imprison her? To put her child in an institution?

We ended up in the living room, but Remedios didn’t invite us to take a seat. The man said, “So, what’s she been up to? Still spending every last waking moment on the nets?”

Remedios shot him a poisonous look, and didn’t bother replying. I thought he was being cruelly sarcastic. Then he turned to me and explained, “Incoming data only, I’m afraid. We wouldn’t want her airing her grievances to the world.”

Remedios left the room. I heard her say, “Jane? Ms O’Connor’s here.” Then she returned, with a young girl in blue-and-white striped pyjamas, maybe eight years old.

Jane greeted me and shook my hand solemnly—or mock-solemnly. One look at her knowing grey eyes, and I knew I’d made exactly the wrong guess about the implant’s effects.

“I was hoping I’d be allowed to meet you,” she said. “Uncle Daniel’s been complaining about you for weeks.” She glanced at the man, without obvious malice—more like a chess player regarding a formidable adversary. “And he doesn’t often let me have visitors.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Uncle Daniel,” interjected helpfully, “I think Ms O’Connor is still in the dark, Jane. She doesn’t understand—”

“Why anyone would want to keep me prisoner? Why anyone would go to so much trouble to keep other children from growing up with TAP?” Her tone went beyond precocity; she didn’t come across as some child actor mouthing an adult’s lines. Every word simply negated the implications her appearance would normally have conveyed.

And her bluntness was unnerving, but it cut through my own diplomatic hesitancy. I said, “That’s right. I don’t understand.”

Jane smiled calmly. I don’t believe she was resigned to her situation—but she was patient. Very patient.

She said, “With the implant, you can play words—or scan them. Experience them, blindly—or understand them, completely. Uncle Daniel’s not a big fan of understanding, though. He thinks there are certain words which should be played and not scanned.”

“What kind of words?”

She raised one hand, palm towards me. It was an ironic gesture; she must have known I was oblivious to IR.

“If I play this word . . . I feel a boundless sense of loyalty and pride towards my team . . . my city . . . my State . . . my nation!” Her face shone with fervent, agonized, almost hysterical joy; she looked like nothing so much as one of the flag-waving school girls they’d whipped into a patriotic frenzy as ornamentation for the 2000 Olympics. “But if I scan it . . .” Her expression faded into one of faint amusement—as if someone had just tried to dupe her with a very old, and very obvious, scam.

“This word plays as what many religions call ‘faith’.” Her face was radiant, but tranquil now. “The peace that defies understanding.” She smiled apologetically. “Except, of course, it doesn’t. Scan it, and the mechanics are transparent: one foot down hard on an entrained neurochemical feel-good pedal—with cognitive, aesthetic, and cultural echoes linked to the context in which the training was acquired.”

I glanced at Remedios; there were silent tears moving down her face. They wouldn’t lock up the mother, or institutionalise the daughter. They’d kill this child, if they had to. That was the only reason she’d helped them program the death of Grace Sharp.

“Now, this is what the Buddhists call ‘enlightenment’.” Jane closed her eyes and smiled serenely. “Similar raw pharmacology, but the higher-level components are different. There’s a kind of heavily self-affirming cognitive myopia: every mental tool which could expose the true nature of the state is explicitly negated.”

I thought of James, lost in wordless tranquillity. The package he’d swallowed whole, the mind virus fine-tuned by centuries of evolution, declared: Language is dangerous, language deceives you . . . because language could have shown him the way out of the hole he’d dug for himself.

“And this is . . . sexual love, desire? Call it what you like, but if you scan it—”

Something cut her short. Maybe it was a look from her mother. Or maybe it was the expression on my face.

Jane continued smoothly, “There are others. I won’t list them all—but growing up with the implant makes them obvious. And Uncle Daniel’s friends don’t believe that a subculture with that knowledge would be . . . conducive to their idea of social cohesion. They feel very strongly about that.” She turned to face him—and her expression now contained more pity than anything else. “And I do understand. Because I’ve found the word for their affliction, too. I’ve found the word for the love of power.”

By the time I got home it was almost midnight. Mick’s room was in darkness, but he was still playing the game; I sat down beside him and removed the headset gently, then reached over and logged him off.

He opened his mouth to apologize, or invent some excuse. I said, “Just shut up and listen.”

“What happened? I was worried.” I hadn’t told him everything—but he knew I’d gone to meet someone connected with Grace Sharp’s death.

I tried to speak calmly. “I’ve screwed up the case. Badly. I’ve made some stupid mistakes, and now I’m going to have to drop it. Okay? That’s all I can tell you. And we’re not going to talk about it again.”

He stared at me, incredulous. “Why? What did you do?”

I shook my head. “I said, we’re not going to talk about it.”

He started blinking away tears. I took him in my arms; he didn’t fight me, but he said angrily, “I don’t believe you!”

I said, “Sssh.”

Later, I lay on my bed in the dark, rolling between my thumb and forefinger the smooth cold object, like a small ceramic bead, which Jane Remedios had slipped into my hand.

If she’d managed to copy her implant, this chip would encode her entire TAP vocabulary. And to an adult it would be useless—but a newborn child who started with the knowledge it had taken her eight years to acquire might surpass her in half that time.

They’d be watching me closely—but they couldn’t be watching everyone. I believed I could pass the chip on to someone willing to use it, if I was careful.

So I lay in the dark, and tried to decide.

Between the silence of power and mystification, the unearned suspension of disbelief, the way things had always been—and the torrent of understanding which would sweep it all away.

THE GOOD RAT

Allen Steele

There are alternatives to animal experiments . . .

Get home from spending two weeks in Thailand and Nepal. Nice tan from lying on the beach at Koh Samui, duffle bag full of stuff picked up cheap on the street in Kathmandu. Good vacation, but broke now. Money from mortgaging kidneys almost gone, mailbox full of bills and disconnect notices. Time to find work again.

Call agent, leave a message on her machine. She calls back that afternoon. We talk about the trip a little bit; tell her that I’m sending her a wooden mask. Likes that, but says she’s busy trying to broker another couple of rats for experiments at Procter & Gamble. Asks why I’m calling.

Tell her I’m busted. Need work soon. Got bills to pay. She says, I’ll work on it, get back to you soon, ciao, then hangs up on me. Figure I’ll send her the ugliest mask in my bag.

Jet-lagged from spending last twenty-four hours on airplanes. Sleep a lot next two days, watch a lot of TV in between. Mom calls on Tuesday, asks me where I’ve been for last month. Says she’s been trying to find me. Don’t tell her about Koh Samui and Kathmandu. Tell her I’m in night school at local college. Remedial English and basic computer programming. Learning how to do stuff with computers and how to read. She likes that. Asks if I got a job yet. About to lie some more when phone clicks. Got another call coming in, I say. Gotta go, bye. Just as well. Hate lying to Mom.

Agent on the phone. Asks if my legs are in good shape. Hell yeah, I say. Just spent ten days hiking through the Annapurna region, you bet my legs are in good shape. What’s the scoop?

She say, private test facility in Boston needs a rat for Phase One experiments. Some company developing over-the-counter ointment for foot blisters. Need someone in good physical condition to do treadmill stuff. Two week gig. Think you can handle it?

Dunno, I say. Got a few bruises on thighs from falling down on rocks a lot. How much they pay? A hundred bucks a day, she says, minus her fifteen percent commission. Not bad. Not great, but not bad either. Ask if they’re buying the airplane ticket. She say, yeah, tourist class on Continental. I say, gee, I dunno, those bruises really hurt. First class on TWA would make them feel better. Says she’ll get back to me, ciao, and hangs up.

Turn on TV, channel surf until I find some toons. Dumb coyote just fell off cliff again when agent calls back. She say, business class on TWA okay? Think about trying to score box-seat ticket for a Red Sox game, but decide not to push my luck. Bruises feel much better, I say. When do they want me?

She say two days, I say okay. Tickets coming by American Express tomorrow, she says, but don’t tell them about bruises, all right? Got no bruises, I say. Just wanted to get decent seat on the plane.

Calls me a name and hangs up again. Doesn’t even say ciao this time. Decide not to send her a mask at all. Let her go to Kathmandu and buy one herself.

Two days later. Get off plane at airport in Beantown. Been here before two years ago, when some other lab hired me to drink pink stuff for three days so scientists could look at what I pissed and puked. Like Boston. Nice city. Never figured out why they call it Beantown, though.

Skinny college kid at gate, holding cardboard sign with some word on it and my name below it. Walk up to him, ask if he’s looking for me. Gives me funny look. He say, is this your name on the sign? I say, no, I’m Elmer Fudd, is he from the test facility?

Gets pissed. Asks for I.D. Show him my Sam’s Club card. Got my picture on it, but he’s still being a turd about it. Asks if I got a driver’s license. Drop my duffel bag on his shoes, tell him I’m a busy man, let’s go.

Takes me to garage where his Volvo is parked. No limo service this time. Must be cheap lab. Got limo service last time I did a job in Boston. Kid looks mad, though, so don’t make Supreme Court case out of it.

Get stuck in tunnel traffic after leaving airport. Want to grab a nap in back seat, but the kid decides to make small talk. Asks me how it feels to be a rat.

Know what he’s getting at. Heard it before. Say hey, dude, they pay me to get stuck with needles fifteen times a day, walk on treadmills, eat this, drink that, crap in a kidney tray and whizz in a bottle. It’s a living, y’know?

Smiles. Thinks he’s superior. Got a college degree that says so. He say, y’know, they used to do the same thing to dogs, monkeys, and rabbits before it got outlawed. How does it feel to be treated like an animal?

No problem, I say. You gotta a dog at home you really like? Maybe a cat? Then bring him over to your lab, make him do the stuff I do, and half as well. Then you tell me.

Then he goes and starts telling me about Nazi concentration camp experiments. Heard that before too, usually from guys who march and wave signs in front of labs. Same guys who got upset about dogs, monkeys and rabbits being used in experiments are now angry that people are being used instead. Sort of makes me wonder why he’s working for a company that does human experiments if he thinks they’re wrong. Maybe a college education isn’t such a great thing after all, if you have to do something you don’t believe in.

Hey, the Nazis didn’t ask for volunteers, I say, and they didn’t pay them either. There’s a difference. Just got back from spending two weeks in Nepal, hiking the lower Himalayas. Where’d you spend your last vacation?

Gets bent out of shape over that. Tells me how much he makes each year, before taxes. Tell him how much I make each year, after taxes. Free medical care and all the vacation time I want, too.

That shuts him up. Make the rest of the trip in peace.

Kid drives me to big old brick building overlooking the Charles River. Looks like it might have once been a factory. Usual bunch of demonstrators hanging out in the parking lot. Raining now, so they look cold and wet. Courts say they have to stay fifty feet away from the entrance. Can’t read their signs. Wouldn’t mean diddly to me even if I could. That’s my job they’re protesting, so if they catch the flu, they better not come crying to me, because I’m probably the guy who tested the medicine they’ll have to take.

Stop at front desk to present I.D., get name badge. Leave my bags with security guard. Ride up elevator to sixth floor. Place looks better on the inside. Plaster walls, tile floors, glass doors, everything painted white and grey. Offices have carpets, new furniture, hanging plants, computers on every desk.

First stop is the clinic. Woman doctor tests my reflexes, looks in my ears, checks my eyes, takes a blood sample, gives me a little bottle and points to the bathroom. Give her a full bottle a few minutes later, smile, ask what she’s doing two weeks from now. Doesn’t smile back. Thanks me for my urine.

Kid takes me down the hall to another office. Chief scientist waiting for me. Skinny guy with glasses, bald head and long bushy beard. Stands up and sticks out his hand, tells me his name. Can’t remember it five minutes later. Think of him as Dr. Bighead. Just another guy in a white coat. Doesn’t matter what his name is, so long as he writes it at the bottom of my paycheck.

Dr. Bighead offers me coffee. Ask for water instead. Kid goes to get me a glass of water, and Dr. Bighead starts telling me about the experiment.

Don’t understand half the shit he says. It’s scientific. Goes right over my head. Listen politely and nod my head at the right times, like a good rat.

Comes down to this. Some drug company hired his lab to do Phase One tests for its new product. It’s a lotion to relieve foot blisters. No brand-name for it yet. Experiment calls for me to walk a treadmill for eight hours the first day with a one-hour break for lunch, or at least until I collect a nice bunch of blisters on the soles of my feet. Then they’ll apply an ointment to my aching. doggies, let me rest for twelve hours, but put me on the treadmill again the next day. This will be repeated every other day for the next two weeks.

Do I get paid for the days I’m not on the treadmill?

Of course, he says, but you have to stay here at the test facility. Got a private room in the dorm for you upstairs. Private cafeteria and rec room, too.

Does it have a pool table?

Got a really nice pool table, he says. Also a VCR and a library. Computer, too, but no fax or modern. Company has strict policy against test participants being permitted open contact with outside world. Phone calls allowed, but they’re monitored by security operators. Can receive forwarded mail, but all outgoing mail has to be read by a staff member first.

Nod. Been through this before. Most test facilities work this way. Sounds reasonable, I say.

When you’re not on the treadmill, he says, you have to be in bed or in a wheelchair. No standing or walking, except when you’re in the shower or going to the bathroom.

Shrug. Not a big deal. Once lay in bed for three days, doing nothing but watch old Flintstones cartoons on closed-circuit TV. Some kind of psychiatric experiment for UCLA. Ready to shout yabba-dabba-do and hump Betty Rubble by the time it was over. After that, there’s nothing I can’t do.

Dr. Bighead stops smiling now. Folds hands together on desk. Time for the serious stuff now.

The ointment we put on your feet may not be the final product, he says. May have to try different variations on the same formula. Side-effects may include persistent itching, reddening or flaking of the skin, minor swelling. Computer simulations of the product have produced none of these results, but this is the first time the product has undergone Phase One testing.

Nod. Been there, done that.

Goes on. Tells me that there’s another three other volunteers doing the same experiment. Three of us will be the test subjects, the other one the control subject who receives a placebo. We won’t know in advance who gets the product and who gets the placebo. Do I understand?

Test subjects, control subjects, placebos, and my feet may rot and fall off before this is all over. Got it, Doc. Sounds cool.

Dr. Bighead goes on. If any of this bothers me, I can leave now, and his company will pay me a hundred dollars for one day of my time and supply me with airfare back home. However, if I chicken out during the test period, or if I’m caught trying to wash off the ointment, they’ll throw me out of the experiment and I won’t be paid anything.

Yeah, uh-huh. He has to tell me this because of the way the laws are written. Never chickened out before, I say. Sounds great to me. When do we get started?

Dr. Bighead grins. Likes a nice, cooperative rat. Tomorrow morning, he says. Eight o’clock sharp.

Ask if I can go catch a little night-life tonight. Frowns. Tells me I may have to submit another urine sample if I do so. Nod my head. No problem. He shrugs. Sure, so long as you’re back by midnight. After that, you’re in here until we’re through with the experiment.

No problem.

Spend another hour with contracts and release forms. Dr. Bighead not surprised that I don’t read very well. Must have seen the file my agent faxed his company. Make him read everything aloud, while I get it all on the little CD recorder I brought with me. Agent taught me to do that. Means we can sue his company if it pulls any funny stuff. Maybe this rat can’t read, but he’s still got rights.

Everything sounds cool. Sign all the legal stuff. Dr. Bighead gives me plastic wristband and watches me put it around my left wrist, then lets me go. Notice that he doesn’t shake hands again. Maybe afraid he’ll catch functional illiteracy.

Same kid waiting outside. Takes me up to dorm on the seventh floor.

Looks like a hospital ward. No windows. Six private rooms surrounding a rec area. Small cafeteria off to one side. Couple of tables, some chairs and sofas. Bookshelf full of old paperbacks and magazines. Fifty-two-inch flatscreen TV, loads of videos on the rack above it. Pay phone in the corner. Pool table, though it looks like a cheap one. Look up, spot fish-eye camera lens hidden in the ceiling.

Same as usual. Could be better, could be worse.

Room is small. Single bed, desk, closet. No windows here either, but at least it’s got a private bathroom. Count my blessings. No roommate this time. Last one snored, and the one before that went nuts six days into the experiment and was punted.

My bag is on the bed. Notice zipper is partly open. Been searched to make sure I didn’t bring in any booze, dope, butts, or cellular phones.

Kid tells me he’s got to go. Reminds me not to leave without my badge. See you tomorrow, I say.

Unpack bag, leave room. Want to get a bite to eat and check out the night life.

Two people sitting in the rec room now, watching TV news. A guy and a woman. Guy looks like he’s about thirty. Thin, long-haired, sparse beard. Paperback book spread open on his lap. Barely glances my way.

The woman is different. Another rat, but the most beautiful rat I’ve seen in a while. Long brown hair. Slender but got some muscles. Good-looking. My type.

Catch her eye as I walk past. Give her a nod. She nods back, smiles a little. Doesn’t say anything. Just a nod and smile.

Think about that nod and smile all the way to the elevator.

Found a good hangout last time I was in Boston, over in Dorchester. Catch a rickshaw over there now.

Sign above the door says No * Allowed. First time I was here, someone had to read the name to me, then explain that the symbol in the middle is an asterisk. What part of your body looks like an asterisk? Still don’t get it, I say. Laughs and says, bend over, stick your head between your legs and look harder. Get it now, I say.

Can smoke a butt inside wherever you want, if you can find a butt to smoke these days. Fifty-six brands of beer. Not served only in the basement, but at your table if you want. Hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken-fried steak and onion rings on the menu. No tofu pizza or lentil soup. Framed nude photos of Madonna, Keith Moon, Cindy Crawford, and Sylvester Stallone on the walls. Antique Wurlitzer jukebox loaded with stuff that can’t be sold without a parental warning sticker on the cover.

No screaming kids, either.

Cops would shut down this place if most people knew it existed. Or maybe not. Several guys hanging out at the bar look like off-duty cops. Cops need a place to have a smoke and drink, too, y’know.

Good bar. Should be a place like this in every city. Once there was, before everyone took offense to everything and no one could stay out of other people’s business. Laws got passed to make sure that you had to live in smoke-free, low-cholesterol, non-alcoholic, child-safe environments. Now you have to go slumming to find a place where no *s are allowed.

Cover charge, tonight, though. Can’t have everything.

Find seat near the stage, order ginger ale, watch some nuevo-punk band ruin old Romantics and Clash numbers. It’s Boston, so they’re obligated do something by the Cars. Probably toddlers when Ric Ocasek was blowing speakers.

Usually have a blowout the night before an experiment. Never binge, but have good fun anyway. Lots of babes here tonight, most of them with guys who look like they should be home wanking off on Internet. A couple of their girlfriends throw gimme looks in my direction.

Should do something about it. Still early. Can always get a hotel room for a few hours. Use the line about being a biomedical research expert in town for an important conference. Babes love sleeping with doctors.

Heart not into it. Keep thinking about the girl in the rec room. Don’t know why. Just another rat.

Find myself looking around every time the door opens, hoping she’ll walk in.

Leave before eleven o’clock, alone for once. Tell myself it’s because the band was dick. Know better.

On the way back to the test center, wonder if Mom’s not right. Maybe time to get a job. Learn how to read, too.

Bet she knows how to read.

Eight o’clock next morning. Come downstairs wearing my rat gear. Gym shorts, football jersey, sneaks. Time to go to work for the advancement of science and all mankind.

Dr. Bighead is waiting for me. Not as friendly as he was yesterday. Takes me to clinic and waits while I fill another bottle for the doctor. Escorts me to the lab.

Four power treadmills set next to each other on one side of the room, with a TV hanging from the ceiling above them. Stupid purple dinosaur show on the tube. Sound turned down low. College kids wearing white coats sitting in front of computers on other end of the room. One of them is the guy who picked me up at the airport. Glances up for a second when I come in. Doesn’t wave back. Just looks at his screen again, taps fingers on his keyboard. Too cool to talk to rats now.

Two other rats sitting in plastic chairs. Already wired up, watching Barney, waiting to go. Walk over to meet them. One is the skinny longhair I saw last night. Wearing old Lollapolooza shirt. Name’s Doug. Other guy looks like he works out a lot. Big dude. Shaved head, nose ring, truck stop tattoo on right forearm. Says his name is Phil.

Doug looks bored, Phil nervous. Everyone swats hands. We’re the rat patrol, cruising for a bruising.

Time to get wired. Sit on table, take off shirt, let one of the kids tape electrodes all over me. Head, neck, chest, back, thighs, ankles. So much as twitch and lines jump all over the computer screens. Somebody asks what I had for breakfast, when was the last time I went to the bathroom. Writes it all down on a clipboard.

Phil asks if the TV has cable. Please change the channel, he says, it’s giving me a headache. No one pays attention to him. Finally gets up and switches over to The Today Show. Dr. Bighead gives him the eye. Wonder if this is the first time Phil has ever been on the rat patrol. If the scientists want you to watch Barney, then you do it, no questions asked. Could be part of the experiment for all you know.

Don’t mess with the scientists. Everyone knows that.

Last rat finally arrives. No surprise, it’s the girl I saw last night. Wearing one-piece workout suit. Thank you, Lord, for giving us the guy who invented Spandex. Phil and Doug look ready to swallow their tongues when they see her. Guy who tapes electrodes to her gets a woody under his lab coat when he goes to work on her chest and thighs.

She ignores his hands, just like she ignores everyone else, including me and the boys. She’s a true-blue, all-American, professional rat.

Time to mount the treadmills. Dr. Bighead makes a performance about us getting on the proper machines, as if it makes a difference. The girl is put on the machine to my left, with Doug on my right and Phil next to him.

Grasp the metal bar in front of me. Dr. Bighead checks to make sure that the computers are up and running, then he switches on the treadmills. Smooth rubber matt beneath my feet begins to roll at a slow pace, only about a foot or so every few seconds. My grandmother could walk faster than this.

Look over at the girl. She’s watching Willard Scott talking to some guy dressed like a turkey. Asks Dr. Bighead if he’d turn up the volume. He say, no, it would just distract his team. Think he’s pissed because Phil switched off the purple dinosaur.

Just as well. Gives us a chance to get acquainted.

She starts first. Asks me my name. Tell her. She nods, tells me hers. Sylvie Simms. Hi Sylvie, I say, nice to meet you.

Scientists murmur to each other behind our backs. Sylvie asks me where I’m from. She tells me she’s from Columbus, Ohio.

C’mon, man, Phil says. Turn up the volume. Can’t hear what he’s saying about the weather.

Dr. Bighead ignores him.

Look over at Doug. Got a Walkman strapped to his waist. Eyes closed, head bobbing up and down. Grooving to something in his headphones as he keeps on trucking.

Been to Columbus, I say. Nice city. Got a great barbecue place downtown, right across the street from the civic center.

Sylvie laughs. Got a nice laugh. Asks if it’s a restaurant with an Irish name. Yeah, I say, that’s the one. Serves ribs with a sweet sauce. She knows the place, been there many times.

And so we’re off and running. Or walking. Whatever.

Doug listens to rock bands on his Walkman, getting someone to change CDs for him every now and then. Phil stares at the TV, supplying his own dialogue for the stuff he can’t hear, bitching about not being able to change the channel. A kid walks by every now and then with a bottle of water, letting us grab a quick sip through a plastic straw.

Sylvie and I talk to each other.

Learn a lot about Sylvie while waiting for the blisters to form. Single. Twenty-seven years old. Got a B.A. in elementary education from the same university where I got my start as a rat, but couldn’t get a decent job. Public schools aren’t hiring anyone who don’t have a military service record, the privates only take people with master’s degrees. Became a rat instead, been running for two years now. Still wishes she could teach school, but at least this way she’s paying the rent.

Tell her about myself. Born here. Live there. Leave out part about not being able to read very well, but truthful about everything else. Four years as a rat after doing a stint in the Army. Tell her about other Phase One tests I’ve done, go on to talking about places I’ve gone hiking.

Gets interested in the last part. Asks me where I’ve been. Tell her about recent trek through Nepal, about the beach at Koh Samui where you can go swimming without running into floating garbage. About hiking to the glacier in New Zealand and the moors in Scotland and rain forest trails in Brazil.

You like to travel, she says.

Love to travel, I say. Not first-class, not like a tourist, but better this way. Get to see places I’ve never been before.

Asks what I do there. Just walk, I say. Walk and take pictures. Look at birds and animals. Just to be there, that’s all.

Asks how I’ve been able to afford to do all this. Tell her about mortgaging my organs to organ banks.

Looks away. You sell your organs?

No, I say, I don’t sell them. Mortgage them. Liver to a cloner in Tennessee, heart to an organ bank in Oregon, both lungs to a hospital to Texas. One kidney to Texas, the other to Minnesota . . .

Almost stops walking when she hears that. You’d sell them your whole body?

Shrug. Haven’t sold everything yet, I say. Still haven’t mortgaged corneas, skin, or veins. Saving them for last, when I’m too old to do rat duty and can’t sell plasma, bone marrow or sperm anymore.

She blushes when I mention sperm. Pretend not to notice. She asks if I know what they’re going to do with my organs when I’m dead.

Sure, I say. Someone at the morgue runs a scanner over the bar-code tattoo on my left arm. That tells them to put my body in a fridge and contact the nearest organ donor info center. All the mortgage-holders will be notified, and they’ll fly in to claim whatever my agent negotiated to give them. Anything left over afterwards, the morgue puts it in the incinerator. Ashes to ashes and all the happy stuff.

Sylvie takes a deep breath. And that doesn’t bother you?

Shrug. Naw, I say. Rather have somebody else get a second chance at life from my organs than having them rot in a coffin in the ground. While they’re still mine, I can use the dough to go places I’ve never been before.

Treadmill is beginning to run just a little faster now. No longer walking at a granny pace. Dr. Bighead must be getting impatient. Wants to get some nice blisters on our feet by the end of the day.

Phil sweats heavily now. Complains about having to watch Sally Jesse instead of Oprah. Don’t wanna watch that white whore, he says. C’mon, gimme that black bitch instead. Doug sweating hard, too, but just keeps walking. Asks for a Smashing Pumpkins CD, please. One of the kids changes his CD for him, but doesn’t switch channels on the TV.

Couldn’t do that, Sylvie says. Body too precious to me.

Body precious to me, too, I say, but it ain’t me. Gone somewhere else when I’m dead. Just meat after that. Why not sell this and that while you’re still around?

She’s quiet for a long while. Stares at the TV instead. Sally Jesse is talking to someone who looks like a man dressed as a woman but looks like a woman trying to resemble a man, or something like that.

Maybe I shouldn’t have told her what I think about organ mortgages. Being a rat is one thing, but putting your innards on the layaway plan is another. Some people don’t get it, and some of the ones who get it don’t like it.

Sylvie must know this stuff. All rats do. Most of us sign mortgages. So what’s her problem?

Bell dings somewhere behind us. Time for lunch. Didn’t even notice that it was noon yet. Dr. Bighead comes back in, turns off treadmills. Gets us to sit on examination tables and take off shoes. No blisters on our feet yet, but he still puts us in wheelchairs. Okay, he says, be back here by one o’clock.

Can’t wait, Phil says.

Lunch ready for us in rec room. Chicken soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna salad. Push our way down the service line, carrying trays on our laps, reaching up to get everything. Been in a wheelchair before, so has Doug and Sylvie, but Phil not used to it. Spills hot soup all over his lap, screams bloody murder.

Share a table with Sylvie. Newspapers on table for us to read. Intern brings us mail forwarded from home. Bills and junk for me, but Sylvie gets a postcard. Picture of tropical beach on the front.

Ask who it came from. Her brother, she says. Ask where her brother lives, and she passes me the postcard.

Pretend to read it. Only big word I know is Mexico. Always wanted to visit Mexico, I say. What does he do down there?

Hesitates. Business, she says.

Should shut up now, but don’t. What kind of business?

Looks at me funny. Didn’t you read the card?

Sure, sure, I say. Just asking.

Thinks about it a moment, then she tells me. Younger brother used to live in Minneapolis, but was busted by the feds early last year. Sold cartons of cigarettes smuggled from Mexico out of the back of his car. Smoking illegal in Minneapolis. Felony charge, his third for selling butts on the street. Three-strikes law means he goes to jail for life. For selling cigarettes.

Judge set bail at seven grand. Sylvie came up with the cash. Brother jumped bail, as she knew he would. Fled south, sought amnesty, went to work for Mexican tobacco company. Sends her postcard now and then, but hasn’t seen him in almost two years.

That’s tough, I say. She nods. Think about it a little. Question comes to mind. How did you come up with seven grand so fast?

Doesn’t say anything for a minute, then she tells me.

Got it from mortgaging her corneas.

Five is the usual price, but she got seven on the overseas black market. When she dies, her eyes go to India. At least it kept my brother from going to prison, she says, but I can tell that isn’t the point.

Sylvie doesn’t want to be buried without her eyes.

She takes back the postcard, turns it over to look at the beach on the front. Kind of makes you want to visit Tijuana, doesn’t it?

Tijuana looks like a great place, I say. Always wanted to go there. At least he’s found a nice place to live.

Gives me long, hard look. Card wasn’t sent from Tijuana, she says. It’s from Mexico City, where he’s living now. That’s in the letter. Didn’t you read it?

Oh, I say. Yeah, sure. Just forgot.

Doesn’t say anything for a moment. Pulls over the newspaper, looks at the front page. Points to a headline. Says, isn’t that a shame?

Look at picture next to it. Shows African woman with a dead baby in her arms, screaming at camera. Yeah, I say, that’s tough. Hate it when I read news like that.

Sylvie taps a finger on the headline. Says here that the unemployment rate in Massachusetts is lowest in fifteen years, she says.

Oh yeah, I say. That’s not what I meant. That’s good news, yeah.

Pushes newspaper aside. Looks around to see if anyone is listening. Drops her voice to a whisper. You can’t read, can you?

Face turns warm. No point in lying to her She knows now.

Only a little, I say. Just enough to get by, like a menu or a plane ticket. Not enough to read her brother’s postcard or a newspaper.

Feel stupid now. Want to get up and leave. Forget that I’m supposed to stay in the wheelchair, start to rise to my feet. Sylvie puts her hand on top of mine, makes me stay put.

It’s okay, she says. Doesn’t matter. Kind of suspected, but didn’t know for sure until you asked me about what my brother said in his letter.

Still want to leave. Grab rubber wheels, start to push back from table.

C’mon, don’t go away, she says. Didn’t mean to embarrass you. Stay here.

Feel like an idiot, I say.

Sylvie shakes her head. Gives me that smile again. No, she say, you’re not an idiot. You’re just as smart as anyone else.

Look at her. She doesn’t look away. Her eyes are owned by some company in India, but for a moment they belong only to me.

You can learn how to read, she says. You’ve just never had a teacher like me.

Get blisters on my feet by end of first day. Same for the other guys. Dr. Bighead very pleased. Never seen some one get so excited about blisters. Wonder if he’s got a thing for feet.

Scientists take pictures of our feet, make notes on clipboard, then spread lotion on our soles. Pale green stuff. Feels like snot from a bad head cold, smells like a Christmas tree soaked in kerosene. Use eyedroppers to carefully measure the exact amount. Should have used paintbrushes instead.

Everyone gets theirs from different bottles. No idea if I got the test product or the placebo, but blisters feel a little better after they put it on.

Doesn’t last long. Skin begins to itch after dinner. Not bad itch, but can’t resist scratching at the bottom of my feet. Sort of like have chigger bites from walking in tall grass. Sylvie and Phil have the same thing, but Doug doesn’t. Sits in corner of rec room, reading paperback book, never once touching his feet. Rest of us watch the tube and paw at our tootsies.

Guess we know who got the placebo.

No treadmill work the next day, but we go back down to the lab after breakfast and let the scientists examine us some more. Tell them about the itching while they draw blood samples. They nod, listen, take more pictures, make more notes, then put more green stuff on our feet.

Different formula this time. Now it’s Extra Strength Green Stuff. Must be made out of fire ants. Nearly jump off the table. Sylvie hisses and screws up her eyes when they put it on her. Phil yells obscenities. Two guys have to grab him before he decks the kid who put it on his feet.

Feet still burning when we go back upstairs. Sylvie goes to her room. Doug picks up his book and reads. Phil mad as hell, pissing and moaning about Dr. Bighead. Says he only did this to get a little extra dough, didn’t know they were going to put him in jail and torture him to death. Says he wants to go put his feet in a sink.

Don’t do it, I say, it’ll screw up the test. Tell him that trying to punch out a scientist is way uncool. Calm down, dude. Let’s play some eight-ball. Get your mind off it.

Mumbles something under his breath, but says, yeah, okay, whatever.

Hard to shoot pool sitting in wheelchairs, but we manage for awhile. Phil can’t get into it. Blows easy shots, scratches the cue ball twice. Sinks eight-ball when I’ve still got four stripes on the table. Loses temper. Slams his stick down on table, turns chair around and rolls off to his room. Slams the door.

Look up at lens in the ceiling. Know someone must be catching all this.

Go over to TV, turn it on, start watching Oprah. Sylvie comes over a little while later. Asks if I want to begin reading lessons.

Not much into it, I say. Wanna watch Oprah instead.

Gives me a look that could give a woody to a monk. C’mon, she says. Please. I’d really like it if you would.

Think maybe I can score some points with her this way, so I go along with it. What the hell. Maybe I might learn something. Okay, I say.

Turns off TV, wheels over to bookshelf, starts poking through it. Think she’s going to grab a book or a magazine. Can’t even read the titles of most of them. If she brings back Shakespeare or something like that, I’m outta here.

Picks up a bunch of newspapers from the bottom shelf. Puts them in her lap, hauls them over to a table, tells me to come over next to her.

Finds the funny pages. Asks me if I like comic strips. Naw, I say. Never really looked at them. Smiles and says she reads the funnies every morning. Best part of her day. She points to the one at the top of the first page. Here’s one I like, she says. Tell me what this little kid is saying to the tiger.

That’s how I start to learn how to read. Seeing what Calvin and Hobbs did today.

After lunch, we go down to the lab again for another checkup. Feet no longer burning, but the itch is back. Feet a little red. More blood samples, more photos, more notes. More ointment on our feet. Doesn’t burn so much this time. Looks a little different, too. Must be New Improved Extra Strength Green Stuff.

Scientists notice something different when they look at Phil’s feet. Spend a lot of time with him. Compare them to photos they took earlier. One of them takes a scalpel, scrapes a little bit of dead skin off the bottom of each foot, puts it in a dish, takes it out of the room.

Phil keeps saying, what’s going on? What’s the big deal? Gotta right to know.

Scientists say nothing to him. Examine Sylvie and Doug, spread more ointment on their feet, then let the three of us go back to the dorm. Tell Phil he has to stay behind. Say they want to conduct a more thorough examination.

Dr. Bighead walks past us while we’re waiting for the elevator. Just says hi, nothing else. Goes straight to the lab, closes door behind him.

Phil screwed up, I say to Doug and Sylvie when we’re alone in the elevator. Don’t know how, but I think he screwed up.

Just nod. Know the score. Seen it before, too. People go crazy sometimes during a long test. Happens to new guys all time. Every now and then, some dumb rat gets washed down the gutter.

Return to rec room. Doug picks up his paperback, Sylvie and I go back to reading the funnies. Trying to figure out why Sarge just kicked Beetle in the butt when door opens and Phil comes in. Not riding a wheelchair now. Dr. Bighead and a security guard are right behind him.

Doesn’t say much to us, just goes straight to his room and collects his bag. Leaves without saying goodbye or anything.

Dr. Bighead stays behind. Says that Phil was dismissed from the experiment because he scrubbed off the product. Also displayed lack of proper attitude. Won’t be replaced because it’s too late to do so without beginning the tests again.

We nod, say nothing. No point in telling him that we were expecting this. Warns us not to do the same thing. Phil isn’t being paid for his time, he says, because he violated the terms of his contract.

Nod. No sir. We’re good rats.

Apologizes for the inconvenience. Asks us if we need anything.

Sylvie raises her hand. Asks for some comic books. Dr. Bighead gives her a weird look, but nods his head. Promises to have some comic books sent up here by tomorrow. Then he leaves.

Doug looks up from his book as the door shuts behind him. Good, he says. Leaves more green stuff for us.

Two weeks go by fast.

Phase One tests sometimes take forever. Drives everyone crazy. This one should, because we’re not on the treadmills every single day and have lots of time on our hands, but it doesn’t.

For once, I’m doing something else besides staring at the tube. Usually spend hours lying on a couch in the rec room, watching one video after another, killing time until I go to the lab again.

But not now.

After work and on the off-days, I sit at a table with Sylvie, fighting my way through the funny pages.

Sometimes Doug helps, when Sylvie needs to sleep or when her feet are aching too much. Both are patient. Don’t treat me like a kid or a retard or laugh when I can’t figure out a long word, and help me pronounce it over and over again until I get it right. If it’s something difficult, Sylvie describes what it means in plain English, or even draws a little picture. Take notes on stationery paper and study them at night until I fall asleep.

Able to get through the funny pages without much help after the first few days, then we start on the comic books Dr. Bighead got for us. Archie and Jughead at first, because they’re simple. When Sylvie isn’t around, Doug and I get into discussing who we’d rather shag, Betty or Veronica, but pretty soon I’m tackling Batman and the X-Men. Find out that the comics are much better than the movies.

Doug is a good teacher, but I prefer to be with Sylvie.

Funny thing happens. Start to make sense of the newspaper headlines. They’re no longer alien to me. Discover that they actually mean something. Stuff in them that isn’t on TV.

Then start to figure out titles on the covers of Doug’s books. Know now that he likes science fiction and spy novels. Better than movies, he says, and I believe him when he tells me what they’re about. Still can’t read what’s on the pages, because I still need pictures to help me understand the words, but for the first time I actually want to know what’s in a book.

Hard to describe. Sort of like hiking through dense rain forest, where you can’t see anything except shadows and you think it’s night, and you try to stay on the trail because you don’t know what’s out there. Then you get above the treeline and there’s a clearing. Sun is right over your head and it’s warm and we can see for miles, mountains and ranges and plains all spread out before you, and it’s so beautiful you want to spend the rest of your life here.

That’s what it’s like. All of a sudden, I’m not as stupid as I once thought I was.

One night, after everyone else has gone to bed and the lights are turned off, I find myself crying. Don’t cry easily, because that’s not the way I was brought up. Dad beat the crap out of me if he caught me doing so, call me a faggot and a little girlie-boy. No short or easy way to explain it, but that’s sort of why he took me out of school, made me go to work in his garage. Said he wanted me to be a man, that he didn’t want no godless liberals messing up my brain with books and ideas.

When he dropped dead with a socket wrench in his hand, I was eighteen. Only thing in my wallet was a draft card I couldn’t read. Time in the army showed me the rest of the world and made me want to see more, but by then was too late to go back to school. After that, only choice I had to say alive and see the world was to become a rat. A rat whose body didn’t belong to himself.

Something wrong when the law lets a human be a rat, because a rat has more respect than a human. Rats can’t learn to read, but a human can. No one wants to spend money on schools, though. Rather spend it on building prisons, then putting people in there who sell cigarettes. Meanwhile, teachers have to go do things that they won’t let rats do anymore.

Didn’t cry that night for Sylvie or her brother, even though that was part of it. Cried for all the lost years of my life.

Spend few days trying to learn as much as I can, but can’t get past one thing.

Sylvie.

Started to learn how to read because I wanted to shag her. Going along with her seemed like the easiest way of getting her into bed.

Can’t do that during an experiment, because sex with other rats is a strict no-no in the standard contract. Seen other rats get punted for just being caught in someone else’s room, even when both persons had their pants on. When tests are over and everyone’s paid, though, there’s nothing wrong with a little party time at the nearest no-tell motel.

Still want to sleep with her. Get a Jackson sometimes just sitting next to her in the rec room, while she’s helping me get through some word I haven’t seen before. Can’t take my eyes off her when she’s running the treadmill next to me.

Different situation now, though. Isn’t just about getting Sylvie in some cheap motel for some hoy-hoy. Not even about learning how to read. Got some scary feelings about her.

Two days before the end of the tests. Alone together in the rec room, reading Spider-Man to each other. Ask her straight. Say, hey, why are you helping me like this?

Keeps looking at comic book, but flips back her hair and smiles a little. Because I’m a teacher, she says, and this is what I do. You’re the first pupil I’ve had since college.

Plenty of winos in the park who don’t know how to read, I say. Could always teach them. Why bother with me?

Gives me long look. Not angry, not cold. Can’t quite make it out.

Because, she says, I’ve always wanted to visit Kathmandu, and maybe I’ve found someone who can take me there.

Can take you there, I say. Can take you to Nepal, Brazil, Ireland. Mexico to visit your brother, if you want.

Blushes. Looks away for a second, then back at me. Maybe you just want to take me to nearest hotel when we’re done here, she says. I’ve done that. Wouldn’t mind doing it again, either.

Shake my head. Like Kathmandu better, I say. Sunrise over Annapurna is incredible. Would love you to see it with me.

Love? Thought I was just teaching you how to read.

Look around to see if anyone is watching. No one there, but there must be someone behind the lens in the ceiling.

Hell with them. Put my hand under the table and find hers. One more word you’ve taught me, I say.

She smiles. Doesn’t take her hand away. Finds a pen in her pocket, hands it to me, pushes some paper in front of me.

If you can write it, she says, I’ll believe you.

Phase one test of the product pronounced a success on the final day. Last batch of Brand New Improved Green Stuff doesn’t smell, doesn’t itch, doesn’t burn, and heals the blisters on our feet. Doesn’t do a thing for our leg cramps, but that’s beside the point.

Dr. Bighead thanks us, writes his name on the bottom of our checks. Tells us we’ve been wonderful test subjects. Hopes to work with us again soon. In fact, are you available next March? Scheduled test of new anti-depressant drug. Looking for subjects now. How about it?

Look at Sylvie. She’s sitting next to me. Doesn’t say anything. Look at the check. It’s written on an account at the First Bank of Boston, and it’s signed by Dr. Leonard Whyte, M.D.

Thank you, Dr. Whyte, I say. My agent will be in touch with you. Ciao.

A cab is waiting for us at the front door. We tell the driver to take us to the nearest hotel.

Three years have passed since Sylvie and I met in Boston. A few things are different now.

She finally managed to get me to use proper grammar instead of street talk. I’m still learning, but personal pronouns are no longer foreign to me, and it’s no longer necessary to refer to all events in the present tense. To those of you who have patiently suffered through my broken English during this chronicle, I sincerely apologize. This was an attempt to portray the person I once was, before Sylvie came into my life.

We used the money earned during the Boston tests for a trip to Mexico City, where Sylvie got to see her brother for the first time in two years. Six months later, we flew to Nepal and made a trek through the Annapurna region, where I showed her a sunrise over the Himalayas. Since then we have gone on a safari in Kenya and rafted down the Amazon. Now we’re planning a spring trip to northern Canada, above the Arctic circle. A little too cold for my taste, but she wants to see the Northern Lights.

Anything for my baby.

The first night in Kathmandu, I promised to give her the world that I knew in exchange for hers. She has made good by her promise, and I’m making good by mine.

Nonetheless, we’re still rats.

We can’t marry, because the labs that supply our income won’t accept married couples as test subjects. Although we’ve been living together for almost three years now, we keep addresses in different cities, file separate tax returns and maintain our own bank accounts. Her mail is forwarded to my place, and only our agents know the difference. We’ll probably never have children, or at least until we decide to surrender this strange freedom that we’ve found.

This freedom is not without price. I’ve mortgaged the last usable tissue in my body. Sylvie hasn’t repossessed the rights to her corneas, despite her attempts to find a legal loophole that will allow her to do so, and although the time may come when she has to give up an organ or two, she insists that her body is her own.

More painful is the fact that, every so often, we have to spend several weeks each year participating in the Phase One tests. Sometimes they’re the very same experiments, conducted simultaneously at the same test facility, so we have to pretend to be strangers.

I haven’t quite become used to that, but it can’t be helped.

But the money is good, the airfare is free, and we sometimes get to see old friends. We spent a week with Doug a couple of months ago, while doing hypothermia experiments in Colorado. He and I discussed favorite Jules Verne novels while sitting in tubs of ice water.

For all of that, though, I lead a satisfactory life. Sylvie and I have enough money to pay the bills, and we visit the most interesting places around the world. I have a woman who I love, my mother has stopped bothering me about getting a job, and I’ve learned how to read.

Not only that, but we can always say that we’ve done our part for the advancement of science and all mankind.

For what more can a good rat ask?

BLOOD OF THE DRAGON

George R.R. Martin

After far-too-long an absence, Hugo- and Nebula-award-winner George R.R. Martin returns to our pages with a magnificent new novella. “Blood of the Dragon” is part of the author’s epic series, A Song of Ice and Fire. The first book in this saga, A Game of Thrones, will be out from Bantam/Spectra in September. Mr. Martin is currently at work on the second novel, Dance with Dragons.

Her brother held the gown up for her inspection. “This is beauty. Touch it. Go on. Caress the fabric.”

Dany touched it. The cloth was so smooth that it seemed to run through her fingers like water. She could not remember ever wearing anything so soft. It frightened her. She pulled her hand away. “Is it really mine?”

“A gift from the Magister Illyrio,” Viserys said, smiling. Her brother was in a high mood tonight. “The color will bring out the violet in your eyes. And you shall have gold as well, and jewels of all sorts. Illyrio has promised. Tonight you must look like a princess.”

A princess, Dany thought. She had forgotten what that was like. Perhaps she had never really known. “Why does he give us so much?” she asked. “What does he want from us?” For almost a month, they had lived in the magister’s house, eating his food, pampered by his servants. Dany was twelve, old enough to know that such gifts seldom came without their price, here in the free city of Pentos.

“Illyrio is no fool,” Viserys said. He was twenty, a gaunt young man with nervous hands and a feverish look in his pale lilac eyes. “The Magister knows that I will not forget my friends when I come into my throne.”

Dany said nothing. Magister Illyrio was a dealer in spices, gemstones, dragonbone, and other, less savory things. He had friends in all of the Nine Free Cities, it was said, and even beyond, in Vaes Dothrak and the fabled lands beside the Jade Sea. It was also said that he’d never had a friend he wouldn’t cheerfully sell for the right price. Dany listened to the talk in the streets, and she heard these things, but she knew better than to question her brother when he wove his webs of dream. His anger was a terrible thing when roused. Viserys called it waking the dragon.

Her brother hung the gown beside the door. “Illyrio will send the slaves to bathe you. Be sure you wash off the stink of the stables. Khal Drogo has a thousand horses, tonight he looks for a different sort of mount.” He studied her critically. “You still slouch. Straighten yourself.” He pushed back her shoulders with his hands. “Let them see that you have a woman’s shape now.” His fingers brushed lightly over her budding breasts and tightened on a nipple. “You will not fail me tonight. If you do, it will go hard for you. You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?” His fingers twisted her, the pinch cruelly hard through the rough fabric of her tunic. “Do you?” he repeated.

“No,” Dany said meekly.

Her brother smiled. “Good.” He touched her hair, almost with affection. “When they write the history of my reign, sweet sister, they will say that it began tonight.”

When he was gone, Dany went to her window and looked out wistfully on the waters of the bay. The square brick towers of Pentos were black silhouettes outlined against the setting sun. Dany could hear the singing of the red priests as they lit their night-fires, and the shouts of ragged children playing games beyond the walls of the estate. For a moment, she wished she could be out there with them, barefoot and breathless and dressed in tatters, with no past and no future and no feast to attend at Khal Drogo’s manse.

Somewhere beyond the sunset, across the narrow sea, lay a land of green hills and flowered plains and great rushing rivers, where towers of dark stone rose amidst magnificent blue-gray mountains, and armored knights rode to battle beneath the banners of their lords. The Dothraki called that land Rhaesh Andahli, the land of the Andals. In the Free Cities, they talked of Westeros and the Sunset Kingdoms. Her brother had a simpler name. “Our land,” he called it. The words were like a prayer with him. If he said them enough, the gods were sure to hear. “Ours by blood right, taken from us by treachery, but ours still, ours forever. You do not steal from the dragon, oh no. The dragon remembers.”

And perhaps the dragon did remember, but Dany could not. She had never seen this land her brother said was theirs, this realm beyond the narrow sea. These places he talked of, easterly Rock and the Eyrie, High-garden and the Vale of Arryn, Dome and the Isle of Faces, they were just words to her. Viserys had been a boy of eight when they fled King’s Landing to escape the advancing armies of the Usurper, but Daenerys had been only a quickening in their mother’s womb.

Yet sometimes Dany would picture the way it had been, so often had her brother told her the stories. The midnight flight to Dragonstone, moonlight shimmering on the ship’s black sails. Her brother Rhaegar battling the Usurper in the bloody waters of the Trident, and dying for the woman he loved. The sack of King’s Landing by the ones Viserys called the Usurper’s dogs, the lords Lannister and Stark. Princess Elia of Dome pleading for mercy as Rhaegar’s heir was ripped from her breast and murdered before her eyes. The polished skulls of the last dragons staring down sightlessly from the walls of the throne room as the Kingslayer opened father’s throat with a golden sword.

She had been born on Dragonstone nine moons after their flight, while a raging summer storm threatened to rip the island fastness apart. They said that storm was terrible. The Targaryen fleet was smashed while it lay at anchor, and huge stone blocks were ripped from the parapets and sent hurtling into the wild waters of the narrow sea. Her mother had died birthing her, and for that her brother Viserys had never forgiven her.

She did not remember Dragonstone either. They had run again, just before the Usurper’s brother set sail with his newbuilt fleet. By then only Dragonstone itself, the ancient seat of their House, had remained of the Seven Kingdoms that had once been theirs. It would not remain for long.

The garrison had been prepared to sell them to the Usurper, but one night Ser Willem Darry and four loyal men had broken into the nursery and stolen them both, along with her wet nurse, and set sail under cover of darkness for the safety of the Braavosian coast.

She remembered Ser Willem dimly, a great gray bear of a man, halfblind, roaring and bellowing orders from his sickbed. The servants had lived in terror of him, but he had always been kind to Dany. He called her “Little Princess” and sometimes “My Lady,” and his hands were soft as old leather. He never left his bed, though, and the smell of sickness clung to him day and night, a hot, moist, sickly sweet odor. That was when they had lived in Tyrosh, in the big house with the red door. Dany had slept in her own room there, with a lemon tree outside her window. After Ser Willem had died, the servants had stolen what little money they had left, and soon after they had been put out of the big house. Dany had cried when the red door closed behind them forever.

They had wandered since then, from Tyrosh to Myr, from Myr to Braavos, and on to Qohor and Volantis and Lys, never staying long in any one place. Her brother would not allow it. The Usurper’s hired knives were close behind them, he insisted, though Dany had never seen one.

At first the magisters and archons and merchant princes were pleased to welcome the last Targaryens to their homes and tables, but as the years passed and the Usurper continued to sit upon the Iron Throne, doors closed and their lives grew meaner. Years past they had been forced to sell their last few treasures, and now even the coin they had gotten from mother’s crown had gone. In the alleys and wine sinks of Pentos, they called her brother “the beggar king.” Dany did not want to know what they called her.

“We will have it all back someday, sweet sister,” he would promise her. Sometimes his hands shook when he talked about it. “The jewels and the silks, Dragonstone and King’s Landing, the Iron Throne and the Seven Kingdoms, all they have taken from us, we will have it back.” Viserys lived for that day. All that Daenerys wanted back was the big house with the red door, the lemon tree outside her window, the childhood she had never known.

There came a soft knock on her door. “Come,” Dany said, turning away from the window. Illyrio’s servants entered, bowed, and set about their business. They were slaves, a gift from one of the magister’s many Dothraki friends. There was no slavery in the free city of Pentos. Nonetheless, they were slaves. The old woman, small and gray as a mouse, never said a word, but the girl made up for it. She was Illyrio’s favorite, a fair-haired, blue-eyed wench of sixteen who chattered constantly as she worked.

They filled her bath with hot water brought up from the kitchen and scented it with fragrant oils. The girl pulled the rough cotton tunic over Dany’s head, and helped her into the tub. The water was scalding hot, but Daenerys did not flinch or cry out. She liked the heat. It made her feel clean. Besides, her brother had often told her that it was never too hot for a Targaryen. “Ours is the house of the dragon,” he would say. “The fire is in our blood.”

The old woman washed her long, silver-pale hair and gently combed out the snags, all in silence. The girl scrubbed her back and her feet and told her how lucky she was. “Drogo is so rich that even his slaves wear golden collars. A hundred thousand men ride in his khalasar, and his palace in Vaes Dothrak has two hundred rooms and doors of solid silver.” There was more like that, so much more, what a handsome man the khal was, so tall and fierce, fearless in battle, the best rider ever to mount a horse, a demon archer. Daenerys said nothing. She had always assumed that she would marry Viserys, when she came of age. For centuries the Targaryens had wed brother to sister, since Aegon the Conquerer had taken his sister Rhaenys to bride. The line must be kept pure, Viserys had told her a thousand times; theirs was the kingsblood, the golden blood of old Valyria, the blood of the dragon. Dragons did not mate with the beasts of the field, and Targaryens did not mingle their blood with that of lesser men. Yet now Viserys schemed to sell her to a stranger, a barbarian.

When she was clean, the slaves helped her from the water and toweled her dry. The girl brushed her hair until it shone like molten silver, while the old woman anointed her with the spiceflower perfume of the Dothraki plains, a dab on each wrist, behind her ears, on the tips of her breasts, and one last one, cool on her lips, down there between her legs. They dressed her in the wisps that Magister Illyrio had sent up, and then the gown, a deep plum silk to bring out the violet in her eyes. The girl slid the gilded sandals onto her feet, while the old woman fixed the tiara in her hair, and the ruby-studded bracelets around each wrist, and last of all the collar, a heavy golden tore emblazoned with Dothraki glyphs.

“Now you look all a princess,” the girl said breathlessly when they were done. Dany glanced at her image in the silvered looking glass that Magister Illyrio had so thoughtfully provided. A princess, she thought, but she remembered what the girl had said, how Khal Drogo was so rich even his slaves wore golden collars. She felt a sudden chill, and gooseflesh pimpled the flesh of her bare arms.

Her brother was waiting in the cool of the entry hall, seated on the edge of the pool, his hand trailing in the water. He rose when she appeared and looked her over critically. “Stand there,” he told her. “Turn around. Yes. Good. You look . . .”

“Regal,” Magister Illyrio said, stepping through an archway. He moved with surprising delicacy for such a massive man. Beneath loose garments of flame-colored silk, rolls of fat jiggled as he walked. Gemstones glittered on every finger, and his man had oiled his forked yellow beard until it shone like real gold. “May the Lord of Light shower you with blessings on this most fortunate day, Princess Daenerys,” the magister said as he took her hand. He bowed his head, showing a thin glimpse of crooked yellow teeth through the gold of his beard. “She is a vision, Your Grace, a vision,” he told her brother. “Drogo will be enraptured.”

“She’s too skinny,” Viserys said. His hair, the same silver-blond as hers, had been pulled back tightly behind his head and fastened with a dragonbone brooch. It was a severe look that emphasized the hard, gaunt lines of his face. He rested his hand on the hilt of the sword that Illyrio had lent him, and said, “Are you sure that Khal Drogo likes his women this young?”

“She has had her blood. She is old enough for the khal,” Illyrio told him, not for the first time. “Look at her. That silver-gold hair, those purple eyes . . . she is the blood of old Valyria, no doubt, no doubt . . . and highborn, daughter of the old king, sister to the new, she cannot fail to entrance our Drogo.” When he released her hand, Daenerys found herself trembling.

“I suppose,” her brother said doubtfully. “The savages have queer tastes. Boys, horses, sheep . . .”

“Best not suggest this to Khal Drogo,” Illyrio said.

Anger flashed in her brother’s lilac eyes. “Do you take me for a fool?”

The magister bowed slightly. “I take you for a king. Kings lack the caution of common men. My apologies if I have given offense.” He turned away and clapped his hands for his bearers.

The streets of Pentos were pitch dark when they set out in Illyrio’s elaborately carved palanquin. A torchbearer went ahead to light their way, while a dozen strong men hoisted the poles to their shoulders. It was warm and close inside behind the curtains. Dany could smell the stench of Illyrio’s pallid flesh through his heavy perfumes.

Her brother, sprawled out on his pillows beside her, never noticed. His mind was away across the narrow sea. “We won’t need his whole khalasar,” Viserys said. His fingers toyed with the hilt of his borrowed blade, though Dany knew he had never used a sword in earnest. “Ten thousand, that would be enough, I could sweep the Seven Kingdoms with ten thousand Dothraki screamers. The realm will rise for its rightful king. Tyrell, Redwyne, Darry, Greyjoy, they have no more love for the Usurper than I do. The Dornishmen burn to avenge Elia and her children. And the smallfolk will be with us. They cry out for their king.” He looked at Illyrio anxiously. “They do, don’t they?”

“They are your people, and they love you well,” Magister Illyrio said amiably. “In holdfasts all across the realm, men lift secret toasts to your health while women sew dragon banners and hide them against the day
of your return from across the water.” He gave a massive shrug. “Or so my agents tell me.”

Dany had no agents, no way of knowing what anyone was doing or thinking across the narrow sea, but she mistrusted Illyrio’s sweet words as she mistrusted everything about Illyrio. Her brother was nodding eagerly, however. “I shall kill the Usurper myself,” he promised, who had never killed anyone, “as he killed my brother Rhaegar. And Lannister too, the Kingslayer, for what he did to my father.”

“That would be most fitting,” Magister Illyrio said. Dany saw the smallest hint of a smile playing around his full lips, but her brother did not notice. Nodding, he pushed back a curtain and stared off into the night, and Dany knew he was fighting the Battle of the Trident once again.

The nine-towered manse of Khal Drogo sat beside the waters of the bay, its high brick walls overgrown with pale ivy. It had been given to the khal by the magisters of Pentos, Illyrio told them. The Free Cities were always generous with the horselords. “It is not that we fear these barbarians,” Illyrio would explain with a smile. “The Lord of Light would hold our city walls against a million Dothraki, or so the red priests promise . . . yet why take chances, when their friendship comes so cheap?”

Their palanquin was stopped at the gate, the curtains pulled roughly back by one of Drogo’s houseguard. He had the copper skin and dark almond eyes of a Dothraki, but his face was hairless and he wore the spiked bronze cap of the Unsullied. He looked them over coldly. Magister Illyrio growled something to him in the rough Dothraki tongue; the guardsman replied in the same voice, and waved them through the gates.

Dany noticed that her brother’s hand was clenched tightly around the hilt of his borrowed sword. He looked almost as frightened as she felt. “Insolent eunuch,” Viserys muttered as the palanquin lurched up toward the manse.

Magister Illyrio’s words were honey. “Many important men will be at the feast tonight. Such men have enemies. The khal must protect his guests, yourself chief among them, Your Grace. No doubt the Usurper would pay well for your head.”

“Oh, yes,” Viserys said darkly. “He has tried, Illyrio, I promise you that. His hired knives follow us everywhere. I am the last dragon, and he will not sleep easy while I live.”

The palanquin slowed and stopped. The curtains were thrown back, and a slave offered a hand to help Daenerys out. His collar, she noted, was ordinary bronze. Her brother followed, one hand still clenched hard around his sword hilt. It took two strong men to get Magister Illyrio back on his feet.

Inside the manse, the air was heavy with the scent of spices, pinchfire and sweet lemon and cinnamon. They were escorted across the entry hall, where a mosaic of colored glass depicted the Doom of Valyria. Beneath an arch of twining stone leaves, a eunuch sang their coming. “Viserys of the House Targaryen, the Third of his Name,” he called in a high, sweet voice, “King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm. His sister Daenerys Stormborn, Princess of Dragonstone. His honorable host Illyrio Mopatis, Magister of the Free City of Pentos.”

They stepped past the eunuch into a pillared courtyard overgrown in pale ivy. Moonlight painted the leaves in shades of bone and silver as the guests drifted among them. Most were Dothraki horselords, big men with red-brown skin, their drooping mustachios bound in bronze rings, their black hair oiled and braided and hung with bells. Yet among them moved bravos and sellswords from Pentos and Myr and Tyrosh, a red priest even fatter than Illyrio, hairy men from the Port of Ibben and lords from the Summer Isles with skin as black as ebony. Daenerys looked at them all in wonder . . . and realized, with a sudden start of fear, that she was the only woman there.

Illyrio whispered to them. “Those three are Drogo’s bloodriders, there,” he said. “By the pillar is Khal Moro, with his son Rhogoro. The man with the green beard is brother to the Archon of Tyrosh, and the man behind him is Ser Jorah Mormont.”

The last name caught Daenerys. “A knight?”

“No less.” Illyrio smiled through his beard. “Anointed with the seven oils by the High Septon himself.”

“What is he doing here?” she blurted.

“The Usurper wanted his head,” Illyrio told them. “Some trifling affront. He sold some poachers to a Tyroshi slaver instead of giving them to the Night’s Watch. Absurd law. A man should be able to do as he likes with his own chattel.”

“I shall wish to speak with Ser Jorah before the night is done,” her brother said. Dany found herself looking at the knight curiously. He was an older man, past forty and balding, but still strong and fit. Instead of silks and cottons, he wore wool and leather. His tunic was a dark green, embroidered with the likeness of a black bear standing on two legs.

She was still looking at this strange man from the homeland she had never known when Magister Illyrio placed a moist hand on her bare shoulder. “Over there, sweet princess,” he whispered, “there is the khal himself.”

Dany wanted to run and hide, but her brother was looking at her, and if she displeased him she knew she would wake the dragon. Anxiously, she turned and looked at the man Viserys hoped would ask to wed her before the night was done.

The slave girl had not been far wrong, she thought. Khal Drogo was a head taller than the tallest man in the room, yet somehow light on his feet, as graceful as the panther in Illyrio’s menagerie. He was younger than she’d thought, no more than thirty. His skin was the color of polished copper, his mustachios thick and fierce and bound with silver rings.

“I must go and make my submissions,” Magister Illyrio said. “Wait here. I shall bring him to you.”

Her brother took her by the arm as Illyrio waddled over to the khal, his fingers squeezing so hard that they hurt. “Do you see his braid, sweet sister?”

Drogo’s braid was black as midnight and heavy with scented oil, hung with a dozen tiny silver bells that rang softly as he moved. It swung well past his belt, below even his buttocks, the end of it brushing against the back of his thighs.

“You see how long it is?” Viserys said. “When Dothraki are defeated in combat, they cut off their braids in disgrace, so the world will know their shame. Khal Drogo has never lost a fight. He is Aegon the Dragonlord come again, and you will be his queen.”

Dany looked at Khal Drogo. His face was hard and cruel, his eyes as cold and dark as onyx. Her brother hurt her sometimes, when she woke the dragon, but he did not frighten her the way this man frightened her. “I don’t want to be his queen,” she heard herself say in a small, thin voice. “Please, please Viserys, I don’t want to, I want to go home.”

“Home?” He kept his voice low, but she could hear the fury in his tone. “How are we to go home, sweet sister? They took our home from us!” He drew her into the shadows, out of sight, his fingers digging into her skin. “How are we to go home?” he repeated, meaning King’s Landing, and Dragonstone, and all the realm they had lost.

Dany had only meant their rooms in Illyrio’s estate, no true home surely, but all they had, but her brother did not want to hear that. There was no home there for him. Even the big house with the red door had not been home for him. His fingers dug hard into her arm, demanding an answer. “I don’t know . . .” she said at last, her voice breaking. Tears welled in her eyes.

“I do,” he said sharply. “We go home with an army, sweet sister. With Khal Drogo’s army, that is how we go home. And if you must wed him and bed him for that, you will.” He smiled at her. “I’d let his whole khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all forty thousand men, and their horses too if that was what it took to get my army. Be grateful it is only Drogo. In time you may even learn to like him. Now dry your eyes. Illyrio is bringing him over, and he will not see you crying.”

Dany turned and saw that it was true. Magister Illyrio, all smiles and bows, was escorting Khal Drogo over to where they stood. She brushed away unfallen tears with the back of her hand.

“Smile,” Viserys whispered nervously, his hand falling to the hilt of his sword. “And stand up straight. Let him see that you have breasts. Gods know, you have little enough as is.”

Daenerys smiled, and stood up straight.

II

“The Dothraki sea,” Ser Jorah Mormont said to Dany, as he reined to a halt beside her on the top of the ridge.

Beneath them, the plain stretched out immense and empty, a vast flat expanse that reached to the distant horizon and beyond. It was a sea, Dany thought. Past here, there were no hills, no mountains, no trees nor cities nor roads, only the endless grasses, the tall blades rippling like waves when the winds blew. “It’s so green,” she said.

“Here and now,” Ser Jorah agreed. “You ought to see it when it blooms, all dark red flowers from horizon to horizon, like a sea of blood. Come the dry season, and the world turns the color of old bronze. And this is only hranna, child. There are a hundred kinds of grass out there, grasses as yellow as lemon and as dark as indigo, blue grasses and orange grasses and grasses like rainbows. Down in the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai, they say there are oceans of ghost grass, taller than a man on horseback with stalks as pale as milkglass. It murders all other grass and glows in the dark with the spirits of the damned. The Dothraki claim that someday ghost grass will cover the entire world, and then all life will end.”

That thought gave Dany the shivers. “I don’t want to talk about that now,” she said. “It’s so beautiful here, I don’t want to think about everything dying.”

“As you will, khaleesi,” Ser Jorah said respectfully. The exile had offered her brother his sword the night Dany had been sold to Khal Drogo; Viserys had accepted eagerly.

She heard the sound of voices and turned to look behind her. She and Mormont had outdistanced the rest of their party, and now the others were climbing the ridge below them. Her handmaid Irri and the young archers of her khas were fluid as centaurs, but Viserys still struggled with the short stirrups and the flat saddle. Her brother was miserable out here. He ought never have come. Magister Illyrio had urged him to wait in Pentos, had offered him the hospitality of his manse, but Viserys would have none of it. He would stay with Drogo until the debt had been paid, until he had the crown he had been promised. “And if he tries to cheat me, he will learn to his sorrow what it means to wake the dragon,” Viserys had vowed, laying a hand on his borrowed sword. Illyrio had blinked at that and wished him good fortune.

Dany realized that she did not want to listen to any of her brother’s complaints right now. The day was too perfect. The sky was a deep blue, and high above them a hunting hawk circled. The grass sea swayed and sighed with each breath of wind, the air was warm on her face, and Dany felt at peace. She would not let Viserys spoil it.

“Wait here,” Dany told Ser Jorah. “Tell them all to stay. Tell them I command it.”

The knight smiled. Ser Jorah was not a handsome man. He had a neck and shoulders like a bull, and coarse black hair covered his arms and chest so thickly that there was none left for his head. Yet his smiles gave Dany comfort. “You are learning to talk like a queen, Daenerys.”

“Not a queen,” said Dany. “A khaleesi” She wheeled her horse about and galloped down the ridge alone.

The descent was steep and rocky, but Dany rode fearlessly, and the joy and the danger of it was a song in her heart. All her life Viserys had told her she was a princess, but not until she rode her silver had Daenerys Targaryen ever felt like one.

At first it had not come easy. The khalasar had broken camp the morning after her wedding, moving east toward Vaes Dothrak, and by the third day Dany thought she was going to die. Saddle sores opened on her bottom, hideous and bloody. Her thighs were chafed raw, her hands blistered from the reins, the muscles of her legs and back so wracked with pain that she could scarcely sit. By the time dusk fell, her handmaids would need to help her down from her mount.

Even the nights brought no relief. Khal Drogo ignored her when they rode, even as he had ignored her during their wedding, and spent his evenings drinking with his warriors and bloodriders, racing his prize horses, watching women dance and men die. Dany had no place in these parts of his life. She was left to sup alone, or with Ser Jorah and her brother, and afterward to cry herself to sleep. Yet every night, some time before the dawn, Drogo would come to her tent, and wake her in the dark, to ride her as relentlessly as he rode his stallion. He always took her from behind, Dothraki fashion, for which Dany was grateful; that way her lord husband could not see the tears that wet her face, and she could use her pillow to muffle her cries of pain. When he was done, he would close his eyes and begin to snore softly and Dany would he beside him, her body bruised and sore, hurting too much for sleep.

Day followed day, and night followed night, until Dany knew she could not endure a moment longer. She would kill herself rather than go on, she decided one night. . . .

Yet when she slept that night, she dreamt the dragon dream again. Viserys was not in it this time. There was only her and the dragon. Its scales were black as night, wet and slick with blood. Her blood, Dany sensed. Its eyes were pools of molten gold, and when it opened its mouth, the flame came roaring out in a hot jet. She could hear it singing to her. She opened her arms and walked into the fire, embraced it, let it swallow her whole, let it cleanse her and temper her and scour her clean. She could feel her flesh sear and blacken and slough away, could feel her blood boil and turn to steam, and yet there was no pain. She felt strong and new and fierce.

And the next day, strangely, she did not seem to hurt quite so much. It was as if the gods had heard her and taken pity. Even her handmaids noticed the change. “Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said, “what is wrong? Are you sick?”

“I was,” she answered, standing over the dragon’s eggs that Illyrio had given her when she wed. She touched one, the largest of the three, running her hand lightly over the shell. Black and scarlet, she thought, like the dragon in my dream. The stone felt strangely warm beneath her fingers . . . or was she still dreaming? She pulled her hand back nervously.

From that hour onward, each day was easier than the one before it. Her legs grew stronger; her blisters burst and her hands grew calluses; her soft thighs toughened, supple as leather.

The khal had commanded the handmaid Irri to teach Dany to ride in the Dothraki fashion, but it was the filly who was her real teacher. The horse seemed to know her moods, as if they shared a single mind. With every passing day, Dany felt surer in her seat. The Dothraki were a hard and unsentimental people, and it was not their custom to name their animals, so Dany thought of her horse only as the silver. She had never loved anything so much.

As the riding became less an ordeal, Dany began to notice the beauties of the land around her. She rode at the head of the khalasar with Drogo and his bloodriders, so she came to each country fresh and unspoiled. Behind them the great horde might tear the earth and muddy the rivers and send up clouds of choking dust, but the fields ahead of them were always green and verdant.

They crossed the rolling hills of Norvos, past terraced farms and small villages where the townsfolk watched anxiously from atop white stucco walls. They forded three wide placid rivers and a fourth that was swift and narrow and treacherous, camped beside a high blue waterfall, skirted the tumbled ruins of a vast dead city where ghosts were said to moan amongst blackened marble columns. They raced down Valyrian roads a thousand years old and straight as a Dothraki arrow. For half a moon, they rode through the Forest of Qohor, where the leaves made a golden canopy high above them, and the trunks of the trees were as wide as city gates. There were great elk in that wood, and spotted tigers, and lemurs with silver fur and huge purple eyes, but all fled before the approach of the khalasar and Dany got no glimpse of them.

By then her agony was a fading memory. She still ached after a long day’s riding, yet somehow the pain had a sweetness to it now, and each morning she came willingly to her saddle, eager to know what wonders waited for her in the lands ahead. She began to find pleasure even in her nights, and if she still cried out when Drogo took her, it was not always in pain.

At the bottom of the ridge, the grasses rose around her, tall and supple. Dany slowed to a trot and rode out onto the plain, losing herself in the green, blessedly alone. In the khalasar she was never alone. Khal Drogo came to her only after the sun went down, but her handmaids fed her and bathed her and slept by the door of her tent, Drogo’s bloodriders and the men of her khas were never far, and her brother was an unwelcome shadow, day and night. Dany could hear him on the top of the ridge, his voice shrill with anger as he shouted at Ser Jorah. She rode on, submerging herself deeper in the Dothraki sea.

The green swallowed her up. The air was rich with the scents of earth and grass, mixed with the smell of horseflesh and Dany’s sweat and the oil in her hair. Dothraki smells. They seemed to belong here. Dany breathed it all in, laughing. She had a sudden urge to feel the ground beneath her, to curl her toes in that thick black soil. Swinging down from her saddle, she let the silver graze while she pulled off her high boots.

Viserys came upon her as sudden as a summer storm, his horse rearing beneath him as he reined up too hard. “You dare!” he screamed at her. “You give commands to me? To me?” He vaulted off the horse, stumbling as he landed. His face was flushed as he struggled back to his feet. He grabbed her, shook her. “Have you forgotten who you are? Look at you. Look at your . . .”

Dany did not need to look. She was barefoot, with oiled hair, wearing Dothraki riding leathers and a painted vest given her as a bride gift. She looked as though she belonged here. Viserys was soiled and stained in city silks and ringmail.

He was still screaming. “You do not command the dragon. Do you understand? I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, I will not hear orders from some horselord’s slut, do you hear me?” His hand went under her vest, his fingers digging painfully into her breast. “Do you hear me?”

Dany shoved him away, hard.

Viserys stared at her, his lilac eyes incredulous. She had never defied him. Never fought back. Rage twisted his features. He would hurt her now, and badly, she knew that.

Crack.

The whip made a sound like thunder. The coil took Viserys around the throat and yanked him backward. He went sprawling in the grass, stunned and choking. The Dothraki riders hooted at him as he struggled to free himself. The one with the whip, young Jhogo, rasped a question. Dany did not understand his words, but by then Irri was there, and Ser Jorah, and the rest of her khas. “Jhogo asks if you would have him dead, khaleesi,” Irri said.

“No,” Dany replied. “No.”

Jhogo understood that. One of the others barked out a comment, and the Dothraki laughed. Irri told her, “Quaro thinks you should take an ear to teach him respect.”

Her brother was on his knees, his fingers digging under the leather coils, crying incoherently, struggling for breath. The whip was tight around his windpipe.

“Tell them I do not wish him harmed,” Dany said.

Irri repeated her words in Dothraki. Jhogo gave a pull on the whip, yanking Viserys around like a puppet on a string. He went sprawling again, freed from the leather embrace, a thin line of blood under his chin where the whip had cut deep.

“I warned him what would happen, my lady,” Ser Jorah Mormont said. “I told him to stay on the ridge, as you commanded.”

“I know you did,” Dany replied, watching Viserys. He lay on the ground, sucking in air noisily, red-faced and sobbing. He was a pitiful thing. He had always been a pitiful thing. Why had she never seen that before? There was a hollow place inside her where her fear had been.

“Take his horse,” Dany commanded Ser Jorah. Viserys gaped at her. He could not believe what he was hearing; nor could Dany quite believe what she was saying. Yet the words came. “Let my brother walk behind us back to the khalasar.” Among the Dothraki, the man who does not ride was no man at all, the lowest of the low, without honor or pride. “Let everyone see him as he is.”

“No!” Viserys screamed. He turned to Ser Jorah, pleading in the Common Tongue with words the horsemen would not understand. “Hit her, Mormont. Hurt her. Your king commands it. Kill these Dothraki dogs and teach her.”

The exile knight looked from Dany to her brother; she barefoot, with dirt between her toes and oil in her hair, he with his silks and steel. Dany could see the decision on his face. “He shall walk, khaleesi,” he said. He took her brother’s horse in hand while Dany remounted her silver.

Viserys gaped at him, and sat down in the dirt. He kept his silence, but he would not move, and his eyes were full of poison as they rode away. Soon he was lost in the tall grass. When they could not see him anymore, Dany grew afraid. “Will he find his way back?” she asked Ser Jorah as they rode.

“Even a man as blind as your brother should be able to follow our trail,” he replied.

“He is proud. He may be too shamed to come back.”

Jorah laughed. “Where else should he go? If he cannot find the khalasar, the khalasar will most surely find him. It is hard to drown in the Dothraki sea, child.”

Dany saw the truth of that. The khalasar was like a city on the march, but it did not march blindly. Always scouts ranged far ahead on the main column, alert for any sign of game or prey or enemies, while outriders guarded their flanks. They missed nothing, not here, in this land, the place where they had come from. These plains were a part of them . . . and of her, now.

“I hit him,” she said, wonder in her voice. Now that it was over, it seemed like some strange dream that she had dreamed. “Ser Jorah, do you think . . . he’ll be so angry when he gets back. . . .” She shivered. “I woke the dragon, didn’t I?”

Ser Jorah snorted. “Can you wake the dead, girl? Your brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, and he died on the Trident. Viserys is less than the shadow of a snake.”

His blunt words startled her. It seemed as though all the things she had always believed were suddenly called into question. “You . . . you swore him your sword. . . .”

“That I did, girl,” Ser Jorah said. “And if your brother is the shadow of a snake, what does that make his servants?” His voice was bitter.

“He is still the true king. He is . . .”

Jorah pulled up his horse and looked at her. “Truth now. Would you want to see Viserys sit a throne?”

Dany thought about that. “He would not be a very good king, would he?”

“There have been worse . . . but not many.” The knight gave his heels to his mount and started off again.

Dany rode close beside him. “Still,” she said, “the common people are waiting for him. Magister Illyrio says they are sewing dragon banners and praying for Viserys to return from across the narrow sea to free them.”

“The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. “They never are.”

Dany rode along quietly for a time, working his words like a puzzle box. It went against everything that Viserys had ever told her to think that the people could care so little whether a true king or usurper reigned over them. Yet the more she thought on Jorah’s words, the more they rang of truth.

“What do you pray for, Ser Jorah?” she asked him.

“Home,” he said. His voice was thick with longing.

“I pray for home too,” she told him, believing it.

Ser Jorah laughed. “Look around you then, khaleesi.”

But it was not the plains Dany saw then. It was Kings Landing and the great Red Keep that Aegon the Conquerer had built. It was Dragonstone where she had been born. In her mind’s eye they burned with a thousand lights, a fire blazing in every window. In her mind’s eye, all the doors were red.

“My brother will never take back the Seven Kingdoms,” Dany said. She had known that for a long time, she realized. She had known it all her life. Only she had never let herself say the words, even in a whisper, but now she said them for Jorah Mormont and all the world to hear.

Ser Jorah gave her a measuring look. “You think not.”

“He could not lead an army even if my lord husband gave him one,” Dany said. “He has no coin and the only knight who follows him reviles him as less than a snake. The Dothraki make mock of his weakness. He will never take us home.”

“Wise child.” The knight smiled.

“I am no child,” she told him fiercely. Her heels pressed into the sides of her mount, rousing the silver to a gallop. Faster and faster she raced, leaving Jorah and Irri and the others far behind, the warm wind in her hair and the setting sun red on her face. By the time she reached the khalasar, it was dusk, and Dany knew what she must do.

The slaves had erected her tent by the shore of a spring-fed pool. She could hear rough voices from the woven grass palace on the hill. Soon there would be laughter, when the men of her khas told the story of what had happened in the grasses today. By the time Viserys came limping back among them, every man, woman, and child in the camp would know him for a walker. There were no secrets in the khalasar.

Dany gave the silver over to the slaves for grooming and entered her tent. It was cool and dim beneath the silk. As she let the door flap close behind her, Dany saw a finger of dusty red light reach out to touch her dragon’s eggs across the tent. For an instant a thousand droplets of scarlet flame swam before her eyes.

The day she had wed Khal Drogo outside the walls of Pentos, the bride gifts had been heaped up about Daenerys in great piles, more gifts than she could possibly imagine, more gifts than she could want or use. The Dothraki had given her slippers and jewels and silver rings for her hair, medallion belts and painted vests and soft furs, sandsilks and jars of scent, needles and feathers and tiny bottles of purple glass, and a gown made from the skin of a thousand mice (“Most lucky,” Magister Illyrio told her). Her brother had presented her with her three handmaids, Ser Jorah an old book full of songs and stories from the Seven Kingdoms. The khal’s bloodriders offered her the traditional three weapons, whip and arakh and bow, and Khal Drogo himself had led forth her filly, grey as the winter sea, with a mane like silver smoke.

Yet it had been Illyrio’s gift that made her gasp, the three huge eggs on their bed of velvet. “Dragon’s eggs, from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai,” he had told her. “The eons have turned them to stone, yet still they burn bright with beauty.”

Stone, she told herself. They are only stone, even Illyrio said so, the dragons are all dead. Yet they were the most beautiful things Dany had ever seen, each different from the others, patterned in such rich colors that at first she had thought they were crusted with jewels, and so large it took both of her hands to hold one. The shells were covered with tiny scales that shimmered like polished metal in the light. One egg was a deep green with burnished bronze flecks that seemed to come and go as you turned it. Another was pale cream streaked with gold. The last was black, as black as a midnight sea, yet alive with scarlet ripples and swirls. She put her palm against the black egg, fingers spread gently across the curve of the shell. The stone was warm. Almost hot. “The sun,” Dany whispered. “The sun warmed them as they rode.”

She commanded her handmaids to prepare her a bath. Doreah built a fire outside the tent, while Irri and Jhiqui fetched the big copper tub— another bride gift—from the packhorses, and carried water from the pool. When the bath was steaming, Irri helped her into it, and climbed in after her to scrub her back and wash the dust from her hair. Dany’s skin was flushed and pink when she climbed from the tub. Jhiqui laid her down to oil her body and scrape the dirt from her pores, and afterward Irri sprinkled her with spiceflower and cinnamon while Doreah brushed her hair until it shone like spun silver. And all the while, Dany watched the dragon’s eggs.

“Fetch the brazier,” she said when she was clean and sweet-smelling. “I want a fire.”

“Kh alee si, it is so hot,” Jhiqui said.

“Do as I tell you. The brazier.”

When the coals were lit, Dany sent her handmaids away and told them she was not to be disturbed. This is madness, she told herself, it will only crack and burn, and it’s so beautiful, Viserys will call me a fool if I ruin it, and yet, and yet . . .

Gently, she lifted the black-and-scarlet egg from its chest, and carried it with both hands to the fire. She pushed it down amongst the burning coals, and sat crosslegged on her mat to watch. The black scales seemed to glow as they drank in the heat. After a moment’s thought, she got the other two eggs, and placed them on the brazier as well.

She watched until the coals had turned to ashes. Drifting sparks floated up and out her smokehole. Heat shimmered in waves around the dragon’s eggs. And that was all.

Your brother Rhaegar was the last dragon, Ser Jorah had said. Dany gazed at her eggs sadly. What had she expected? A thousand thousand years ago they had been alive, but now they were only pretty rocks. They could not make a dragon. A dragon was air and fire. Living flesh, not dead stone.

Her supper was a simple meal of fruit and cheese and fry bread, with a jug of honeyed wine to wash it down. “Doreah, stay and eat with me,” Dany commanded when she sent her other handmaids away. Jhiqui and Irri were Dothraki girls, of an age with her, taken as slaves when Drogo destroyed their father’s khalasar. They knew only Dothraki ways. Doreah was older, almost twenty. Magister Illyrio had found her in a pleasure house in Lys. Her hair was the color of honey, and she had eyes like the summer sky.

She lowered those eyes when they were alone. “You honor me, khaleesi,” she said, but it was no honor, only service. Long after the moon had risen, they sat together, talking.

That night, when Khal Drogo came, Dany was waiting for him. He stood in the door of her tent and looked at her with surprise. She rose slowly and opened her sleeping silks and let them fall to the ground. “This night we must go outside, my lord,” she told him, for the Dothraki believed that all things of importance in a man’s life must be done beneath the open sky.

Khal Drogo followed her out into the moonlight, the bells in his hair tinkling softly. A few yards from her tent was a bed of soft grass, and it was there that Dany drew him down. When he tried to turn her over, she put a hand on his chest. “No,” she said. “This night I would look on your face.”

There is no privacy in the heart of the khalasar. Dany felt the eyes on her as she undressed him, heard the soft voices as she did the things that Doreah had told her to do. It was nothing to her. Was she not khaleesi? His were the only eyes that mattered, and when she mounted him she saw something there that she had never seen before. She rode him as fiercely as ever she had ridden her silver, and when the moment of his pleasure came, Khal Drogo called out her name.

They were on the far side of the Dothraki sea when Jhiqui brushed the soft swell of Dany’s stomach with her fingers and said, “Khaleesi, you are with child.”

“I know,” Dany told her.

It was her thirteenth name day.

III

The Horse Gate of Vaes Dothrak was made of two gigantic bronze stallions, rearing, their hooves meeting a hundred feet above the roadway to form a pointed arch.

Dany could not have said why the city needed a gate when it had no walls . . . and no buildings that she could see. Yet there it stood, immense and beautiful, the great horses framing the jagged purple mountain beyond. The bronze stallions threw long shadows across the waving grasses as Khal Drogo led the khalasar under their hooves and down the godsway, his bloodriders beside him.

Dany followed on her silver, escorted by Ser Jorah Mormont and her brother Viserys, mounted once more. After the day in the grass when she had left him to walk back to the khalasar, the Dothraki had laughingly called him Khal Rhae Mhar, the Sorefoot King. Khal Drogo had offered him a place in a cart the next day, and Viserys had accepted. In his stubborn ignorance, he had not even known he was being mocked; the carts were for eunuchs, cripples, women giving birth, the very young, and the very old. That won him yet another name: Khal Rhaggat, the Cart King. Her brother had thought it was the khal’s way of apologizing for the wrong Dany had done him. She had begged Ser Jorah not to tell him the truth, lest he be shamed. The knight had replied that the king could well do with a bit of shame . . . yet he had done as she bid. It had taken much pleading, and all the pillow tricks Doreah had taught her, before Dany had been able to make Drogo relent and allow Viserys to rejoin them at the head of the column.

“Where is the city?” she asked as they passed beneath the bronze arch. There were no buildings to be seen, no people, only the grass and the road, lined with ancient monuments from all the lands the Dothraki had sacked over the centuries.

“Ahead,” Ser Jorah answered. “Under the mountain.”

Beyond the horse gate, plundered gods and stolen heroes loomed to either side of them. The forgotten deities of dead cities brandished their broken thunderbolts at the sky as Dany rode her silver past their feet. Stone kings looked down on her from their thrones, their faces chipped and stained, even their names lost in the mists of time. Lithe young maidens danced on marble plinths, draped only in flowers, or poured air from shattered jars. Monsters stood in the grass beside the road; black iron dragons with jewels for eyes, roaring griffins, manticores with their barbed tails poised to strike, and other beasts she could not name. Some of the statues were so lovely they took her breath away, others so misshapen and terrible that Dany could scarcely bear to look at them. Those, Ser Jorah said, had likely come from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai.

“So many,” she said as her silver plodded slowly onward, “and from so many lands.”

Viserys was less impressed. “The trash of dead cities,” he sneered. He was careful to speak in the Common Tongue, which few Dothraki could understand, yet even so Dany found herself glancing back at the men of her khas, to make certain he had not been overheard. He went on blithely. “All these savages know how to do is steal the things better men have built . . . and kill.” He laughed. “They do know how to kill, for certes. Otherwise I’d have no use for them at all.”

“They are my people now,” Dany said. “You should not call them savages, brother.”

“The dragon speaks as he likes,” Viserys said . . . in the Common Tongue. He glanced over his shoulder at Aggo and Rakharo, riding behind them, and favored them with a mocking smile. “See, the savages lack the wit to understand the speech of civilized men.” A moss-eaten stone monolith loomed over the road, fifty feet tall. Viserys gazed at it with boredom in his eyes. “How long must we linger amidst these ruins before Drogo gives me my army? I grow tired of waiting.”

“The princess must be presented to the dosh khaleen . . .”

“The crones, yes,” her brother interrupted, “and there’s to be some mummer’s show of a prophecy for the whelp in her belly, you told me.

What is that to me? I’m tired of eating horsemeat and I’m sick of the stink of these savages.” He sniffed at the wide, floppy sleeve of his tunic, where it was his custom to keep a sachet. It could not have helped much. The tunic was filthy. All the silk and heavy wools that Viserys had worn out of Pentos were stained by hard travel and rotted from sweat.

Ser Jorah Mormont said, “The Western Market will have food more to your taste. Your Grace. The traders from the Free Cities come there to sell their wares. The khal will honor his promise in his own time.”

“He had better,” Viserys said grimly. “I was promised a crown, and I mean to have it. The dragon is not mocked.” Spying an obscene likeness of a woman with six breasts and a ferret’s head, he rode off to inspect it more closely.

Dany was relieved, yet no less anxious. “I pray that my sun-and-stars will not keep him waiting too long,” she told Ser Jorah when her brother was out of earshot.

The knight looked after Viserys doubtfully. “Your brother should have bided his time in Pentos. There is no place for him in a khalasar. Illyrio tried to warn him.”

“He will go as soon as he has his ten thousand. My lord husband promised a golden crown.”

Ser Jorah grunted. “Yes, khaleesi, but . . . the Dothraki look on these things differently than we do in the west. I have told him as much, as Illyrio told him. but your brother does not listen. The horselords are no traders. Viserys thinks he sold you, and now he wants his price. Yet Khal Drogo would say he had you as a gift. He will give Viserys a gift in return, yes . . . in his own time. You do not demand a gift, not of a khal. You do not demand anything of a khal.”

Cohollo came to Dany as Irri and Jhiqui were helping her down off her silver. He was the oldest of Drogo’s three bloodriders, a squat bald man with a crooked nose and a mouth full of broken teeth, shattered by a mace twenty years before when he saved the young khalakka from sellswords who hoped to sell him to his father’s enemies. His life had been bound to Drogo’s the day her lord husband was born.

“Khaleesi” Cohollo said to her, in Dothraki. “Drogo, who is blood of my blood, commands me to tell you that he must ascend the Mother of Mountains this night, to sacrifice to the gods for his safe return.”

Only men were allowed to set foot on the Mother, Dany knew. The khal’s bloodriders would go with him, and return at dawn. “Tell my sun-and-stars that I dream of him, and wait anxious for his return,” she replied, thankful. Dany tired more easily as the child grew within her; in truth, a night of rest would be most welcome. Her pregnancy only seemed to have inflamed Drogo’s desire for her, and of late his embraces left her exhausted.

Doreah led her to the hollow hill that had been prepared for her and her khal. It was cool and dim within, like a tent made of earth. “Jhiqui, a bath, please,” she commanded, to wash the dust of travel from her skin and soak her weary bones. It was pleasant to know that they would linger here for a while, that she would not need to climb back on her silver on the morrow.

She was pleased to find the water was scalding hot. “I will give my brother his gifts tonight,” she decided, as Jhiqui was washing her hair. “He should look a king in the sacred city. Doreah, run and find him and invite him to sup with me.” Viserys was nicer to the Lysene girl than to her Dothraki handmaids, perhaps because Magister Illyrio had let him bed her back in Pentos. “Irri, go to the bazaar, and buy fruit and meat. Anything but horseflesh.”

“Horse is best,” Irri said. “Horse makes a man strong.”

“Viserys hates horsemeat.”

“As you say, khaleesi.”

She brought back a haunch of goat and a basket of fruits and vegetables. Jhiqui roasted the meat with sweetgrass and firepods, basting it with honey as it cooked, and there were melons and pomegranates and plums and some queer eastern fruit Dany did not know. While her handmaids prepared the meal, Dany laid out the clothing she’d had made to her brother’s measure: a tunic and leggings of crisp white linen, leather sandals that laced up to the knee, a bronze medallion belt, a leather vest painted with fire-breathing dragons. The Dothraki would respect him more if he looked less a beggar, she hoped, and perhaps he would forgive her for shaming him that day in the grass. He was still her king, after all, and her brother. They were both blood of the dragon.

She was arranging the last of his gifts—a sandsilk cloak, green as grass, with a pale grey border that would bring out the silver in his hair—when Viserys arrived, dragging Doreah by the arm. Her eye was red where he’d hit her. “How dare you send this whore to give me commands,” he said. He shoved the handmaid roughly to the carpet.

The anger took Dany utterly by surprise. “I only wanted . . . Doreah, what did you say?”

“Khaleesi, pardons, forgive me. I went to him, as you bid, and told him you commanded him to join you for supper.”

“No one commands the dragon,” Viserys snarled. “I am your king! I should have sent you back her head!”

The Lysene girl quailed, but Dany calmed her with a touch. “Don’t be afraid, he won’t hurt you. Sweet brother, please, forgive her, the girl mispoke herself, I told her to ask you to sup with me, if it please Your Grace.” She took him by the hand and drew him across the room. “Look. These are for you.”

Viserys frowned suspiciously. “What is all this?”

“New raiment. I had it made for you.” Dany smiled shyly.

He looked at her and sneered. “Dothraki rags. Do you presume to dress me now?”

“Please . . . you’ll be cooler and more comfortable, and I thought . . . maybe if you dressed like them; the Dothraki . . .” Dany did not know how to say it without waking his dragon.

“Next you’ll want to braid my hair.”

“I’d never . . .” Why was he always so cruel? She had only wanted to help. “You have no right to a braid, you have won no victories yet.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Fury shone from his lilac eyes, yet he dared not strike her, not with her handmaids watching and the warriors of her khas outside. Viserys picked up the cloak and sniffed at it. “This stinks of manure. Perhaps I shall use it as a horse blanket.”

“I had Doreah sew it specially for you,” she told him, wounded. “These are garments fit for a khal.”

“I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, not some grass-stained savage with bells in his hair,” Viserys spat back at her. He grabbed her arm. “You forget yourself, slut. Do you think that big belly will protect you if you wake the dragon?”

His fingers dug into her arm painfully and for an instant Dany felt like a child again, quailing in the face of his rage. She reached out with her other hand and grabbed the first thing she touched, the belt she’d hoped to give him, a heavy chain of ornate bronze medallions. She swung it with all her strength.

It caught him full in the face. Viserys let go of her. Blood ran down his cheek where the edge of one of the medallions had sliced it open. “You are the one who forgets himself,” Dany said to him. “Didn’t you learn anything, that day in the grass? Leave me now, before I summon my khas to drag you out. And pray that Khal Drogo does not hear of this, or he will cut open your belly and feed you your own intestines.”

Viserys scrambled back to his feet. “When I come into my kingdom, you will rue this day, slut.” He walked off, holding his torn face, leaving her gifts behind him.

Drops of his blood had spattered the beautiful sandsilk cloak. Dany clutched the soft cloth to her cheek and sat crosslegged on her sleeping mats.

“Your supper is ready, khaleesi,” Jhiqui announced.

“I’m not hungry,” Dany said sadly. She was suddenly very tired. “Share the food among yourselves, and send some to Ser Jorah, if you would.” After a moment, she added, “Please, bring me one of the dragon’s eggs.”

Irri fetched the egg with the deep green shell, bronze flecks shining amidst its scales as she turned it in her small hands. Dany curled up on her side, pulling the sandsilk cloak across her and cradling the egg against her, in the hollow between her swollen belly and small, tender breasts. She liked to hold them. They were so beautiful, and sometimes just being close to them made her feel stronger, braver, as if somehow she was drawing strength from the stone dragons locked within.

She was lying there, holding the egg, when she felt the child move within her . . . as if he were reaching out, brother to brother, blood to blood. “You are the dragon,” Dany whispered to him, “the true dragon. I know it. I know it.” And she smiled, and went to sleep dreaming of home.

IV

The silk tenting that roofed Khal Drogo’s high-timbered hall had been rolled back this night, so her son’s naming feast might be celebrated beneath the open sky. The moon had followed Dany and her women back from the house of the dosh khaleen, and now it seemed to follow them inside. It was the seventh full moon since Drogo had planted his seed, the night she had looked upon his face, and their child grew heavy inside her.

Dany rode beneath the arched entry and up the center aisle, every eye on her. Flames leapt ten feet in the air from three huge stone-lined firepits. The air was thick with the smells of roasting horsemeat and curdled, fermented mare’s milk, the cushions crowded. The sounds of drums and horns swirled up into the night. Half-clothed women spun and danced on the low tables, amid joints of meat and platters piled high with plums and dates and pomegranates. Many of the men were drunk, yet no arakhs would clash tonight, not here in the sacred city, where blades and bloodshed were forbidden.

The Dothraki shouted out comments on her belly and her breasts as she passed, hailing the prince within her. She could not understand all they said, but one phrase came clear. “The stallion that mounts the world” they bellowed.

She had heard it first from the oldest crone, a bent and shriveled stick of a woman with a single black eye, the voice of the dosh khaleen. “Khalakka dothrae!” she had shrieked, arms raised high. The prince is riding! “He shall be the stallion who mounts the world!” And with that she had peered at Dany, her eye dark as polished flint in her wrinkled face. “What shall he be called, the stallion who mounts the world?”

“He shall be called Rhaego,” she had answered, as bells rang all around her, a sudden clangor of bronze birds. A deep-throated war horn had sounded its long low note, and a roar had gone up from the Dothraki. “Rhaego,” they chanted. “Rhaego, Rhaego!”

Khal Drogo was waiting on the high bench, and he nodded as Irri helped her down off her silver. Khal Jommo and Khal Ogo, who had been in Vaes Dothrak with their khalasars when they arrived, had been given seats of high honor to Drogo’s right and left. The bloodriders of the three khals sat below them, and further down, Khal Jommo’s four wives.

As Doreah and Irri arranged her cushions, Dany searched for her brother. Even across the length of the crowded hall, Viserys should have been conspicuous with his pale skin, silvery hair, and beggar’s rags, but she did not see him anywhere.

Her glance roamed the crowded tables near the walls, where men whose braids were even shorter than their manhoods sat on frayed rugs and flat cushions around the low tables, but all the faces she saw had black eyes and copper skin. She spied Ser Jorah Mormont near the center of the hall, close to the middle firepit. It was a place of respect, if not high honor; the Dothraki esteemed the knight’s prowess with a sword. Dany sent Jhiqui to bring him to her table. Mormont came at once, and went to one knee before her. “Khaleesi,” he said, “I am yours to command.”

She patted the stuffed horsehide cushion beside her. “Sit and talk with me.”

“You honor me.” The knight seated himself cross-legged on the cushion. A slave knelt before him, offering a wooden platter full of ripe figs. Ser Jorah took one and bit it in half.

“Where is my brother?” Dany asked. “He ought to have come by now, for the feast.”

“I saw His Grace this morning,” he told her. “He told me he was going to the Western Market, in search of wine.”

“Wine?” Dany said doubtfully. Viserys could not abide the taste of the fermented mare’s milk the Dothraki drank, she knew that, and he was oft at the bazaars these days, drinking with the traders who came in the great caravans from east and west. He seemed to find their company more congenial than hers.

“Wine,” Ser Jorah confirmed, “and he has some thought to recruit men for his army from the sellswords who guard the caravans.” A serving girl laid a blood pie in front of him, and he attacked it with both hands.

“Is that wise?” she asked. “He has no gold to pay soldiers. What if he’s betrayed?” Caravan guards were seldom troubled much by thoughts of honor, and the Usurper in King’s Landing would pay well for her brother’s head. “You ought to have gone with him, to keep him safe. You are his sworn sword.”

“We are in Vaes Dothrak,” he reminded her. “No one may carry a blade here, or shed a man’s blood.”

“Yet men die,” she said. “Jhogo told me. Some of the traders have eunuchs with them, huge men who strangle thieves with wisps of silk. That way no blood is shed and the gods are not angered.”

“Then let us hope your brother will be wise enough not to steal anything.” Ser Jorah wiped the grease off his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned close over the table. “He had planned to take your dragon’s eggs, until I warned him that I’d cut off his hand if he so much as touched them.”

For a moment Dany was so shocked she had no words. “My eggs . . . but they’re mine, Magister Illyrio gave them to me, a bride gift, why would Viserys want . . . they’re only stones . . .”

“The same could be said of rubies and diamonds and fire opals, princess . . . and dragon’s eggs are rarer by far. Those traders he’s been drinking with would sell their own manhoods for even one of those stones, and with all three Viserys could buy as many sellswords as he might need.”

Dany had not known, had not even suspected. “Then . . . he should have them. He does not need to steal them. He had only to ask. He is my brother . . . and my true king.”

“He is your brother,” Ser Jorah acknowledged.

“You do not understand, ser,” she said. “My mother died giving me birth, and my father and my brother Rhaegar even before that. I would never have known so much as their names if Viserys had not been there to tell me. He was the only one left. The only one. He is all I have.”

“Once,” said Ser Jorah. “No longer, khaleesi. You belong to the Dothraki now. In your womb rides the stallion who mounts the world.” He held out his cup, and a slave filled it with fermented mare’s milk, soursmelling and thick with clots.

Dany waved her away. Even the smell of it made her feel ill, and she would take no chances of bringing up the horse heart she had forced herself to eat. “What does it mean?” she asked. “What is this stallion? Everyone was shouting it at me, but I don’t understand.”

“The stallion is the khal of khals promised in ancient prophecy, child. He will unite the Dothraki into a single khalasar and ride to the ends of the earth, or so it was promised. All the people of the world will be his herd.”

“Oh,” Dany said, in a small voice. Her hand smoothed her gown down over the swell of her stomach. “I named him Rhaego.”

“A name to make the Usurper’s blood run cold.”

Suddenly Doreah was tugging at her elbow. “My lady,” the handmaid whispered urgently, “your brother . . .”

Dany looked down the length of the long, roofless hall and there he was, striding toward her. From the lurch in his step, she could tell at once that Viserys had found his wine . . . and something that passed for courage.

He was wearing his scarlet silks, soiled and travel stained. His cloak and gloves were black velvet, faded from the sun. His boots were dry and cracked, his silver-blond hair matted and tangled. A longsword swung from his belt in a leather scabbard. The Dothraki eyed the sword as he passed; Dany heard curses and threats and angry muttering rising all around her, like a tide. The music died away in a nervous stammering of drums.

A sense of dread closed around her heart. “Go to him,” she commanded Ser Jorah. “Stop him. Bring him here. Tell him he can have the dragon’s eggs, if that is what he wants.” The knight rose swiftly to his feet.

“Where is my sister?” Viserys shouted, his voice thick with wine. “I’ve come for her feast. How dare you presume to eat without me? No one eats before the king. Where is she? The whore can’t hide from the dragon.”

He stopped beside the largest of the three firepits, peering around at the faces of the Dothraki. There were five thousand men in the hall, but only a handful who knew the Common Tongue. Yet even if his words were incomprehensible, you had only to look at him to know that he was drunk.

Ser Jorah went to him swiftly, whispered something in his ear, and took him by the arm, but Viserys wrenched free. “Keep your hands off me! No one touches the dragon without leave.”

Dany glanced anxiously up at the high bench. Khal Drogo was saying something to the other khals beside him. Khal Jommo grinned, and Khal Ogo began to guffaw loudly.

The sound of laugher made Viserys lift his eyes. “Khal Drogo,” he said thickly, his voice almost polite. “I’m here for the feast.” He staggered away from Ser Jorah, making to join the three khals on the high bench.

Khal Drogo rose, spat out a dozen words in Dothraki, faster than Dany could understand, and pointed. “Khal Drogo says your place is not on the high bench,” Ser Jorah translated for her brother. “Khal Drogo says your place is there.”

Viserys glanced where the khal was pointing. At the back of the long hall, in a corner by the wall, deep in shadow so better men would not need to look on them, sat the lowest of the low; raw unblooded boys, old men with clouded eyes and stiff joints, the dim-witted and the maimed. Far from the meat, and further from honor. “That is no place for a king,” her brother declared.

“Is place,” Khal Drogo answered, in the Common Tongue that Dany had taught him, “for Sorefoot King.” He clapped his hands together. “A cart! Bring cart for Khal Rhaggat!”

Five thousand Dothraki began to laugh and shout. Ser Jorah was standing beside Viserys, screaming in his ear, but the roar in the hall was so thunderous that Dany could not hear what he was saying. Her brother shouted back and the two men grappled, until Mormont knocked Viserys bodily to the floor.

Her brother drew his sword.

The bared steel shone a fearful red in the glare from the firepits. “Keep away from me!” Viserys hissed. Ser Jorah backed off a step, and her brother climbed unsteadily to his feet. He waved the sword over his head, the borrowed blade that Magister Illyrio had given him to make him seem more kingly. Dothraki were shrieking at him from all sides, screaming vile curses.

Dany gave a wordless cry of terror. She knew what a drawn sword meant here, even if her brother did not.

Her voice made Viserys turn his head, and he saw her for the first time. “There she is,” he said, smiling. He stalked toward her, slashing at the air as if to cut a path through a wall of enemies, though no one tried to bar his way.

“The blade . . . you must not,” she begged him. “Please, Viserys. It is forbidden. Put down the sword and come share my cushions. There’s drink, food . . . is it the dragon’s eggs you want? You can have them, only throw away the sword.”

“Do as she tells you, fool,” Ser Jorah shouted, “before you get us all killed.”

Viserys laughed. “They can’t kill us. They can’t shed blood here in the sacred city . . . but I can.” He laid the point of his sword between Daenerys’ breasts, and slid it downward, over the curve of her belly. “I want what I came for,” he told her. “I want the crown he promised me. He bought you, but he never paid for you. Tell him I want what I bargained for, or I’m taking you back. You and the eggs both. He can keep his bloody foal. I’ll cut the bastard out and leave it for him.” The sword point pushed through her silks and pricked at her navel. Viserys was weeping, she saw; weeping and laughing, both at the same time, this man who had once been her brother.

Distantly, as from far away, Dany heard her handmaid Jhiqui sobbing in fear, pleading that she dared not translate, that the khal would bind her and drag her behind his horse all the way up the Mother of Mountains. She put her arm around the girl. “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “I shall tell him.”

She did not know if she had enough words, yet when she was done Khal Drogo spoke a few brusque sentences in Dothraki, and she knew he understood. The sun of her life stepped down from the high bench. “What did he say?” the man who had been her brother asked her, flinching.

It had grown so silent in the hall that she could hear the bells in Khal Drogo’s hair, chiming softly with each step he took. His bloodriders followed him, like three copper shadows. Daenerys had gone cold all over. “He says you shall have a splendid golden crown that men shall tremble to behold.”

Viserys smiled and lowered his sword. That was the saddest thing, the thing that tore at her afterward . . . the way he smiled. “That was all I wanted,” he said. “What was promised.”

When the sun of her life reached her, Dany slid an arm around his waist. The khal said a word, and his bloodriders leapt forward. Qotho seized the man who had been her brother by the arms. Haggo shattered his wrist with a single, sharp twist of his huge hands. Cohollo pulled the sword from his limp fingers. Even now Viserys did not understand. “No.” he shouted, “you cannot touch me, I am the dragon, the dragon, and I will be crowned!”

Khal Drogo unfastened his belt. The medallions were pure gold, massive and ornate, each one as large as a man’s hand. He shouted a command. Cook slaves pulled a heavy iron stew pot from the firepit, dumped the stew onto the ground, and returned the pot to the flames. Drogo tossed in the belt and watched without expression as the medallions turned red and began to lose their shape. She could see fires dancing in the onyx of his eyes. A slave handed him a pair of thick horsehair mittens, and he pulled them on, never so much as looking at the man.

Viserys began to scream the high, wordless scream of the coward facing death. He kicked and twisted, whimpered like a dog and wept like a child, but the Dothraki held him tight between them. Ser Jorah had made his way to Dany’s side. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Turn away, my princess, I beg you.”

“No.” She folded her arms across the swell of her belly, protectively.

At the last, Viserys looked at her. “Sister, please . . . Dany, tell them . . . make them . . . sweet sister . . .”

When the gold was half-melted and starting to run, Drogo reached into the flames, snatched out the pot. “Crown!” he roared. “Here. A crown for Cart King!” And upended the pot over the head of the man who had been her brother.

The sound Viserys Targaryen made when that hideous iron helmet covered his face was like nothing human. His feet hammered a frantic beat against the dirt floor, slowed, stopped. Thick globs of molten gold dripped down onto his chest, setting the scarlet silk to smouldering . . . yet no drop of blood was spilled.

He was no dragon, Dany thought, curiously calm. Fire cannot kill a dragon.

V

When the battle was done, Dany rode her silver through the fields of the dead. Her handmaids and the men of her khas came after, smiling and jesting among themselves.

Dothraki hooves had torn the earth and trampled the stands of beans and rye into the ground, while arakhs and arrows had sown a terrible new crop and watered it with blood. Dying horses lifted their heads and screamed at her as she rode past. Wounded men moaned and prayed. Jaqqa rhan moved among them, the mercy men with their heavy axes, taking a harvest of heads from the dead and dying alike. After them would scurry a flock of small girls, pulling arrows from the corpses to fill their baskets. Last of all the dogs would come sniffing, lean and hungry, the feral pack that was never far behind the khalasar.

The sheep had been dead longest. There seemed to be thousands of them, black with flies, arrow shafts bristling from each carcass. Khal Ogo’s riders had done that, Dany knew; no man of Drogo’s khalasar would be such a fool as to waste his arrows on sheep when there were shepherds yet to kill.

The town was afire, black plumes of smoke roiling and tumbling as they rose into a hard blue sky. Beneath broken walls of dried mud, riders galloped back and forth, swinging their long whips as they herded the survivors from the smoking rubble. The women and children of Ogo’s khalasar seemed to walk with a sullen pride, even in defeat and bondage; they were slaves now, but they seemed not to fear it. It was different with the townfolk. Dany felt pity for them; she remembered what terror felt like. Mothers stumbled along with blank, dead faces, pulling sobbing children by the hands. There were only a few men among them, cripples and cowards and grandfathers.

Ser Jorah said the people of this country named themselves the Lhazareen, but the Dothraki called them haesh rakhi, the Lamb Men. Once Dany might have taken them for Dothraki, for they had the same copper skin and almond-shaped eyes. Now they looked alien to her, squat and flatfaced, their black hair cropped unnaturally short. They were herders of sheep and eaters of vegetables, and Khal Drogo said they belonged south of the river bend. The grass of the Dothraki sea was not meant for sheep.

Dany saw one boy bolt and run for the river. A rider cut him off and turned him, and the others boxed him in, cracking their whips in his face, running him this way and that. One galloped behind him, lashing him across the buttocks until his thighs ran red with blood. Another snared his ankle with a lash and sent him sprawling. Finally, when the boy could only crawl, they grew bored with the sport and put an arrow through his eye.

Ser Jorah met her outside the shattered gate. He wore a dark green surcoat over his mail. His gauntlets, greaves, and greathelm were dark grey steel. The Dothraki had mocked him for a coward when he donned his armor, but the knight had spit insults right back in their teeth, tempers had flared, longsword had clashed with arakh, and the rider whose taunts had been loudest had been left behind to bleed to death.

Ser Jorah lifted the visor of his flat-topped greathelm as he rode up. “Your lord husband awaits you within the town.”

“Drogo took no harm?”

“A few cuts,” Ser Jorah answered, “nothing of consequence. He slew two khals this day. Khal Ogo first, and then the son, Fogo, who became khal when Ogo fell. His bloodriders cut the bells from their hair, and now Khal Drogo’s every step rings louder than before.”

Ogo and his son had shared the high bench with her lord husband at the naming feast where Viserys had been crowned, but that was in Vaes Dothrak, beneath the Mother of Mountains, where every rider was a brother and all quarrels were put aside. It was different out in the grass. Ogo’s khalasar had been attacking the town when Khal Drogo caught him. She wondered what the Lamb Men had thought, when they first saw the dust of their horses from atop those cracked-mud walls. Perhaps a few, the younger and more foolish who still believed that the gods heard the prayers of desperate men, took it for deliverance.

Across the road, a girl no older than Dany was sobbing in a high thin voice as a rider shoved her over a pile of corpses, face down, and thrust himself inside her. Other riders dismounted to take their turns. That was the sort of deliverance the Dothraki brought the Lamb Men.

I am the blood of the dragon, Daenerys Targaryen reminded herself as she turned her face away. She pressed her lips together and hardened her heart and rode on toward the gate.

“Most of Ogo’s riders fled,” Ser Jorah was saying. “Still, there may be as many as ten thousand captives.”

Slaves, Dany thought. Khal Drogo would drive them downriver to one of the towns on Slaver’s Bay. She wanted to cry, but she told herself that she must be strong. This is war, this is what it looks like, this is the price of the Iron Throne. This was what she was bringing home with her.

Drogo had sworn it to her as they stood beside the Womb of the World, back in Vaes Dothrak. “I will give my son the iron chair his mother’s father sat in. I will give him Seven Kingdoms. I, Drogo, khal, will do this thing,” he had vowed. “I will take my khalasar west to where the world ends, and ride the wooden horses across the black salt water as no khal has done before. I will kill the men in the iron suits, tear down their stone houses, and bring their broken gods back to Vaes Dothrak. So swears Drogo son of Bharbo, before the Mother of Mountains, as the stars look down in witness.” They had left Vaes Dothrak two days later, striking south and west across the plains. Khal Drogo led the khalasar on his great red stallion, with Daenerys beside him on her silver. She had carried the child for eight moons now, but Dothraki women rode almost up until the day they gave birth.

“I’ve told the khal he ought to make for Meereen,” Ser Jorah said. “He’ll get a better price there than he would from a slaving caravan. Illyrio writes that they had a plague last year, and now the brothels are paying double for healthy young girls, and triple for boys under ten. If enough children survive the journey, the gold will buy us all the ships we need, and hire men to sail them.”

Behind them, the girl being raped made a heartrending sound, a long sobbing wail that went on and on and on. Dany’s hand clenched hard around the reins, and she turned the silver’s head. “Make them stop,” she commanded Ser Jorah.

“Khaleesi?” The knight sounded perplexed.

“You heard my words,” she said. “Stop them.” She spoke to her khas in the harsh accents of Dothraki. “Jhogo, Quaro, you will aid Ser Jorah. I want no rape.”

The warriors exchanged a baffled look.

Jorah Mormont spurred his horse closer. “Princess,” he said, “you have a gentle heart, but you do not understand. This is how it has always been. Those men have shed blood for the khal. Now they claim their reward.”

Across the road, the girl was still crying, her high singsong tongue strange to Dany’s ears. The first man was done with her now, and a second had taken his place.

“She is a lamb girl,” Quaro said in Dothraki. “She is nothing, khaleesi. The riders do her honor. The Lamb Men lay with sheep, it is known.”

“It is known,” her handmaid Irri echoed.

“It is known,” agreed Jhogo, astride the tall grey stallion that Drogo had given him. “If her wailing offends your ears, khaleesi, Jhogo will bring you her tongue.” He drew his arakh.

“I will not have her harmed,” Dany said. “I claim her. Do as I command you, or Khal Drogo will know the reason why.”

“At, khaleesi,” Jhogo replied, kicking his horse. Quaro and the others followed his lead, the bells in their hair chiming.

“Go with them,” she commanded Ser Jorah.

“As you command.” The knight gave her a curious look. “You are your brother’s sister, in truth.”

“Viserys?” She did not understand.

“No,” he answered. “Rhaegar.” He galloped off.

Dany heard Jhogo shout. The rapers laughed at him. One man shouted back. Jhogo’s arakh flashed, and the man’s head went tumbling from his shoulders. Laughter turned to curses as the horsemen reached for weapons, but by then Quaro and Aggo and Rakharo were there. She saw Aggo point across the road to where she sat upon her silver. The riders looked at her with cold black eyes. One spat. The others scattered to their mounts, muttering.

All the while the man atop the lamb girl continued to plunge in and out of her, so intent on his pleasure that he seemed unaware of what was going on around him. Ser Jorah dismounted and wrenched him off with a mailed hand. The Dothraki went sprawling in the mud, bounced up with a knife in hand, and died with Aggo’s arrow through his throat. Mormont pulled the girl off the pile of corpses and wrapped her in his blood-spattered cloak. He led her across the road to Dany. “What do you want done with her?”

The girl was trembling, her eyes wide and vague. Her hair was matted with blood. “Doreah, see to her hurts. You do not have a rider’s look, perhaps she will not fear you. The rest, with me.” She urged the silver through the broken wooden gate.

It was worse inside the town. Many of the houses were afire, and the jaqqa rhan had been about their grisly work. Headless corpses filled the narrow, twisty lanes. They passed other women being raped. Each time Dany reined up, sent her khas to make an end to it, and claimed the victim as slave. One of them, a thick-bodied, flat-nosed woman of forty years, blessed Dany haltingly in the Common Tongue, but from the others she got only flat black stares. They were suspicious of her, she realized with sadness; afraid that she had saved them for some worse fate.

“You cannot claim them all, child,” Ser Jorah said, the fourth time they stopped, while the warriors of her khas herded her new slaves behind her.

“I am khaleesi, heir to the Seven Kingdoms, the blood of the dragon,” Dany reminded him. “It is not for you to tell me what I cannot do.” Across the city, a building collapsed in a great gout of fire and smoke, and she heard distant screams and the wailing of frightened children.

They found Khal Drogo seated before a square windowless temple with thick mud walls and a bulbous dome like some immense brown onion. Beside him was a pile of heads taller than he was. One of the short arrows of the Lamb Men stuck through the meat of his upper arm, and blood covered the left side of his bare chest like a splash of paint. His three bloodriders were with him.

Jhiqui helped Dany dismount; she had grown clumsy as her belly grew larger and heavier. She knelt before the khal. “My sun-and-stars is wounded.” The arakh cut was wide but shallow; his left nipple was gone, and a flap of bloody flesh and skin dangled from his chest like a wet rag.

“Is scratch, moon of life, from arakh of one bloodrider to Khal Ogo,” Khal Drogo said in the Common Tongue. “I kill him for it, and Ogo too.” He turned his head, the bells in his braid ringing softly. “Is Ogo you hear, and Fogo his khalakka, who was khal when I slew him.”

“No man can stand before the sun of my life,” Dany said, “the father of the stallion who mounts the world.”

A mounted warrior rode up and vaulted from his saddle. He spoke to Haggo, a stream of angry Dothraki too fast for Dany to understand. The huge bloodrider gave her a heavy look before he turned to his khal. “This one is Mago, who rides in the khas of Ko Jhogo. He says the khaleesi has taken his spoils, a daughter of the lambs who was his to mount.”

Khal Drogo’s face was still and hard, but his black eyes were curious as they went to Dany. “Tell me the truth of this, moon of my life,” he commanded, in Dothraki.

Dany told him what she had done, in his own tongue so the khal would understand her better, her words simple and direct.

When she was done, Drogo was frowning. “This is the way of war. These women are our slaves now, to do with as we please.”

“It pleases me to hold them safe,” Dany said, wondering if she had dared too much. “If your warriors would mount these women, let them take them gently and keep them for wives. Give them places in the khalasar and let them bear you sons.”

Qotho was ever the cruelest of the bloodriders. It was he who laughed. “Does the horse breed with the sheep?”

Something in his tone reminded her of Viserys. Dany turned on him angrily. “The dragon feeds on horse and sheep alike.”

Khal Drogo smiled. “See how fierce she grows!” he said. “It is my son inside her, the stallion who mounts the world, filling her with his fire. Ride slowly, Qotho . . . if the mother does not burn you where you sit, the son will trample you into the mud. And you, Mago, hold your tongue and find another lamb to mount. These belong to my khaleesi!” He started to reach out a hand to Daenerys, but as he lifted his arm Drogo grimaced in sudden pain, and turned his head.

Dany could almost feel his agony. The wounds were worse than Ser Jorah had led her to believe. “Where are the healers?” she demanded. The khalasar had two sorts; barren women and eunuch slaves. The herbwomen dealt in potions and spells, the eunuchs in knife, needle, and fire. “Why do they not attend the khal?”

“The khal sent the hairless men away, khaleesi,” old Cohollo assured her. Dany saw the bloodrider had taken a wound himself; a deep gash in his left shoulder.

“Many riders are hurt,” Khal Drogo said stubbornly. “Let them be healed first. This arrow is no more than the bite of a fly, this little cut only a new scar to boast of to my son.”

Dany could see the muscles in his chest where the skin had been cut away. A trickle of blood ran from the arrow that pierced his arm. “It is not for Khal Drogo to wait,” she proclaimed. “Jhogo, seek out these eunuchs and bring them here at once.”

“Silver Lady,” a woman’s voice said behind her, “I can help the Great Rider with his hurts.”

Dany turned her head. The speaker was one of the slaves she had claimed, the heavy, flat-nosed woman who had blessed her.

“The khal needs no help from women who lie with sheep,” barked Qotho. “Aggo, cut out her tongue.”

Aggo grabbed her hair and pressed a knife to her throat.

Dany lifted a hand. “No. She is mine. Let her speak.”

Aggo looked from her to Qotho. He lowered his knife.

“I meant no wrong, fierce riders.” The woman spoke Dothraki well. The robes she wore had once been the lightest and finest of woolens, rich with embroidery, but now they were mud-caked and bloody and ripped. She clutched the torn cloth of her bodice to her heavy breasts. “I have some small skill in the healing arts.”

“Who are you?” Dany asked her.

“I am named Mirri Maz Duur. I am godswife of this temple.”

“Maegi,” grunted Haggo, fingering his arakh. His look was dark. Dany remembered the word from a terrifying story that Jhiqui had told her one night by the cookfire. A maegi was a woman who lay with demons and practiced the blackest of sorceries, a vile thing, evil and soulless, who came to men in the dark of night and sucked life and strength from their bodies.

“I am a healer,” Mirri Maz Duur said.

“A healer of sheeps,” sneered Qotho. “Blood of my blood, I say kill this maegi and wait for the hairless men.”

Danv ignored the bloodrider’s outburst. This old, homely, thick-bodied woman did not look like a maegi to het. “Where did you learn your healing. Mirri Maz Duur?”

“My mother was godswife before me, and taught me all the songs and spells most pleasing to the Great Shepherd, and how to make the sacred smokes and ointments from leaf and root and berry. When I was younger and more fair, I went in caravan to Asshai by the Shadow, to learn from their mages. Ships from many lands come to Asshai, so I lingered long to study the healing ways of distant peoples. A moonsinger of the Jogos Nhai gifted me with her birthing songs, a woman of your own riding people taught me the magics of grass and corn and horse, and a maester from the Sunset Lands opened a body for me and showed me all the secrets that hide beneath the skin.”

Ser Jorah Mormont spoke up. “A maester?”

“Marwyn, he named himself,” the woman replied, in the Common Tongue. “From the sea. Beyond the sea. The Seven Lands, he said. Sunset Lands. Where men are iron and dragons rule. He taught me this speech.”

“A maester in Asshai,” Ser Jorah mused. “Tell me, godswife, what did this Marwyn wear about his neck?”

“A chain so tight it was like to choke him, Iron Lord, with links of many metals.”

The knight looked at Dany. “Only a man trained in the Citadel of Oldtown wears such a chain,” he said, “and such men do know much of healing.”

“Why should you want to help my khal?”

“All men are one flock, or so we are taught,” replied Mirri Maz Duur. “The Great Shepherd sent me to earth to heal his lambs, wherever I might find them.”

Qotho gave her a stinging slap. “We are no sheep, maegi.”

“Stop it,” Dany said angrily. “She is mine. I will not have her harmed.”

Khal Drogo grunted. “The arrow must come out, Qotho.”

“Yes, Great Rider,” Mirri Maz Duur answered, touching her bruised face. “And your breast must be washed and sewn, lest the wound fester.”

“Do it, then,” Khal Drogo commanded.

“Great Rider,” the woman said, “my tools and potions are inside the god’s house, where the healing powers are strongest.”

“I will carry you, blood of my blood,” Haggo offered.

Khal Drogo waved him away. “I need no man’s help,” he said, in a voice proud and hard. He stood, unaided, towering over them all. A fresh wave of blood ran down his breast, from where Ogo’s arakh had cut off his nipple. Dany moved quickly to his side. “I am no man,” she whispered, “so you may lean on me.” Drogo put a huge hand on her shoulder. She took some of his weight as they walked toward the great mud temple. The three bloodriders followed. Dany commanded Ser Jorah and the warriors of her khas to guard the entrance, and make certain no one set the building afire while they were still inside.

They passed through a series of anterooms, into the high central chamber under the onion. Faint light shone down through hidden windows above. A few torches burnt smokily from sconces on the walls. Sheepskins were scattered across the mud floor. “There,” Mirri Maz Duur said, pointing to the altar, a massive blue-veined stone carved with images of shepherds and their flocks. Khal Drogo lay upon it. The old woman threw a handful of dried leaves onto a brazier, filling the chamber with fragrant smoke. “Best if you wait outside,” she told the rest of them.

“We are blood of his blood,” Cohollo said. “Here we wait.”

Qotho stepped close to Mirri Maz Duur. “Know this, wife of the Lamb God. Harm the khal and you suffer the same.” He drew his skinning knife and showed her the blade.

“She will do no harm.” Dany felt she could trust this old, plain-faced woman with her flat nose; she had saved her from the hard hands of her rapers, after all.

“If you must stay, then help,” Mirri told the bloodriders. “The Great Rider is too strong for me. Hold him still while I draw the arrow from his flesh.” She let the rags of her gown fall to her waist as she opened a carved chest, and busied herself with bottles and boxes, knives and needles. When she was ready, she broke off the barbed arrowhead and pulled out the shaft, chanting in the singsong tongue of the Lhazareen. She heated a flagon of wine to boiling on the brazier, and poured it over his wounds. Khal Drogo cursed her, but he did not move. She bound the arrow wound with a plaster of wet leaves, and turned to the gash on his breast, smearing it with a pale green paste before she pulled the flap of skin back in place. The khal ground his teeth together and swallowed a scream. The godswife took out a silver needle and a bobbin of silk thread and began to close the flesh. When she was done she painted the skin with red ointment, covered it with more leaves, and bound the breast in a ragged piece of lambskin. “You must say the prayers I give you and keep the lambskin in place for ten days and ten nights,” she said. “There will be fever, and itching, and a great scar when the healing is done.”

Khal Drogo sat, bells ringing. “I sing of my scars, sheep woman.” He flexed his arm and scowled.

“Drink neither wine nor the milk of the poppy,” she cautioned him. “Pain you will have, but you must keep your body strong to fight the poison spirits.”

“I am khal,” Drogo said. “I spit on pain and drink what I like. Cohollo, bring my vest.” The older man hastened off.

“Before,” Dany said to the ugly Lhazareen woman, “I heard you speak of birthing songs . . .”

“I know every secret of the bloody bed, Silver Lady, nor have I ever lost a babe,” Mirri Maz Duur replied.

“My time is near,” Dany said. “I would have you attend me when he comes, if you would.”

Khal Drogo laughed. “Moon of my life, you do not ask a slave, you tell her. She will do as you command.” He jumped down from the altar. “Come, my blood. The stallions call, this place is ashes. It is time to ride.”

Haggo followed the khal from the temple, but Qotho lingered long enough to favor Mirri Maz Duur with a stare. “Remember, maegi, as the khal fares, so shall you.”

“As you say rider,” the woman answered him, gathering up her jars and bottles. “The Great Shepherd guards the flock.”

VI

The flies circled Khal Drogo slowly, their wings buzzing, a low thrum at the edge of hearing that filled Dany with dread.

The sun was high and pitiless. Heat shimmered in waves off the stony outcrops of the lows hills around them. As she rode, a thin finger of sweat trickled down slowly between Dany’s swollen breasts. The only sounds were the steady clop of their horses’ hooves, the rhythmic tinkle of the bells in Drogo’s hair, and the distant voices behind them.

Dany watched the flies.

They were as large as bees, gross, purplish, glistening. The Dothraki called them bloodflies. They lived in marshes and stagnant pools, sucked blood from man and horse alike, and laid their eggs in the dead and dying. Drogo hated them. Whenever one came near him, his hand would shoot out quick as a striking snake to close around it. She had never seen him miss. He would hold the fly inside his huge fist, long enough to hear its frantic buzzing. Then his fingers would tighten, and when he opened his hand again, the fly would be only a red smear on his palm.

A fly crept across the rump of his stallion, and the horse gave an angry flick of its tail and brushed it away. The others flitted around Drogo, closer and closer. The khal did not react. His eyes were fixed on distant brown hills, the reins loose in his hands. Beneath his painted vest, a plaster of fig leaves and caked blue river mud covered the wound on his breast. The herbwomen had made it for him. The poultice Mirri Maz Duur had made had itched and burned, and he had torn it off six days ago, cursing her for a maegi. The mud plaster was much more soothing, and the herbwomen made him poppy wine as well. He had been drinking it heavily these past three days, and when it was not poppy wine, it was fermented mare’s milk or pepper beer.

Yet he scarcely touched his food, and he thrashed and groaned in the night. Dany could see how drawn his face had become. Rhaego was restless in her belly, kicking like a stallion, yet even that did not stir Drogo’s interest as it had. Every morning her eyes found fresh lines of pain on his face when he woke from his troubled sleep. And now this silence. It was making her afraid. Since they had mounted up at dawn, he had said not a word. When she spoke, she got no answer but a grunt, and not even that much since midday.

One of the bloodflies landed on the bare skin of the khal’s. shoulder. Another, circling, touched down on his neck, and crept up toward his mouth. Khal Drogo said nothing, did nothing. His body swayed in the saddle, bells ringing, as his stallion kept onward at a steady walking pace.

Dany pressed her heels into her silver and rode closer. She must do something, she knew. She could not let him go on like this. “My lord,” she said softly. “Drogo. My sun-and-stars.”

He did not seem to hear. His eyes were open and staring.

The bloodfly crawled up under his drooping mustache and settled on his cheek, in the crease beside his nose. Dany gasped. Terror made her heart beat faster. “Drogo,” she cried, loudly. Clumsily, she reached over and touched his arm.

Khal Drogo reeled in the saddle, tilted slowly, and fell heavily from his horse. The flies scattered for a heartbeat, and then circled back to settle on him where he lay.

“No,” Dany said, reining up. Heedless of her belly for once, she scrambled off her silver and ran to him.

The grass beneath him was brown and dry. Drogo cried out in pain as Dany knelt beside him. His breath rattled harshly in his throat, and he looked at her without recognition. “My horse,” he gasped. Dany brushed the flies off his chest, smashing one as he would have. His skin burned beneath her fingers.

The khal’s bloodriders had been following just behind them. She heard Haggo shout, and then they were there. Cohollo vaulted from his horse to land beside her. “Blood of my blood,” he said as he dropped to his knees. The other two kept to their mounts.

“No,” Khal Drogo groaned, struggling in Dany’s arms. “Must ride. Ride. No.”

“He fell from his horse,” Haggo said, staring down. His broad face was impassive, but his voice was leaden.

““You must not say that,” Dany told him. “We have ridden far enough today. We will camp here.”

“Here?” Haggo looked around them. The land was brown and sere, inhospitable. “This is no camping ground.”

“It is not for a woman to bid us halt,” said Qotho, “not even a khaleesi.”

“We camp here,” Dany repeated. “Haggo, tell them Khal Drogo commanded the halt. If any ask why, say to them that my time is near and I could not continue. Cohollo, bring up the slaves, they must put up the khal’s tent at once. Qotho—”

“You do not command me, khaleesi,” Qotho said.

“Find Mirri Maz Duur,” she told him. The godswife would be walking among the other Lamb Men, in the long column of slaves. “Bring her to me, with her chest.”

Qotho glared down at her, his eyes hard as flint. “The maegi.” He spat. “This I will not do.”

“You will,” Dany said, “or when Drogo wakes, he will hear why you defied me.”

Furious, Qotho wheeled his stallion around and galloped off in anger . . . but Dany knew he would return with Mirri Maz Duur, however little he might like it. The slaves erected Khal Drogo’s tent beneath a jagged outcrop of black rock whose shadow gave some relief from the heat of the afternoon sun. Even so, it was close and warm under the sandsilk as Irri and Doreah helped Dany walk Drogo inside. Thick patterned carpets had been laid down over the ground, and pillows scattered in the corners. Eroeh, the timid girl Dany had rescued outside the mud walls of the Lamb Men, set up a brazier. They laid Drogo down on a woven mat. “No,” he muttered, in the Common Tongue. “No, no.” It was all he seemed capable of saying.

Doreah unhooked his heavy medallion belt and stripped off his vest and leggings, while Jhiqui knelt by his feet to undo the laces of his riding sandals. Irri wanted to leave the door flaps open to let in the breeze, but Dany forbade it. She would not have them see Drogo this way, in delirium and weakness. When her khas came up, she posted them around the tent to stand at guard. “Admit no one without my leave,” she told Jhogo. “No one.”

Eroeh stared fearfully at Drogo where he lay. “He dies,” she whispered.

Dany slapped her. “The khal cannot die. He is the father of the stallion who mounts the world. His hair has never been cut. He still wears the bells his father gave him.”

“Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said, “he fell from his horse.”

Trembling, her eyes full of sudden tears, Dany turned away from them. He fell from his horse! It was so, she had seen it, and the bloodriders, and no doubt her handmaids and the men of her khas as well. And how many more? They could not keep it secret, and Dany knew what that meant. A khal who could not ride could not rule, and Drogo had fallen from his horse.

“We must bathe him,” she said, stubbornly. She must not allow herself to despair. “Irri, have the tub brought at once. Doreah, Eroeh, find water, cool water, he’s so hot.” He was a fire in human skin.

The slaves set up the heavy copper tub in the corner of the tent. When Doreah brought the first jar of water, Dany wet a length of silk to lay across Drogo’s brow, over the burning skin. His eyes looked at her, but he did not
see. When his lips opened, no words escaped them, only a moan. “Where is Mirri Maz Duur?” she demanded, her patience rubbed raw with fear.

“Qotho will find her,” Irri said.

Her handmaids filled the tub with tepid water that stank of sulfur, sweetening it with jars of bitter oil and handfuls of crushed mint leaves. While the bath was being prepared, Dany knelt awkwardly beside her lord husband, her belly great with their child within. She undid his braid with anxious fingers, as she had the night he’d taken her for the first time, beneath the stars. His bells she laid aside carefully, one by one. He would want them again when he was well, she told herself.

A breath of cool air entered the tent as Aggo poked his head through the silk. “Khaleesi,” he said, “the Andal is come, and begs leave to enter.”

“The Andal” was what the Dothraki called Ser Jorah. “Yes,” she said, rising clumsily, “send him in.” She trusted the knight. He would know what to do if anyone did.

Ser Jorah Mormont ducked through the door flap and waited a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimness of the tent. In the fierce heat of the south, he wore loose trousers of mottled sandsilk and open-toed riding sandals that laced up to his knee. His scabbard hung from a twisted horsehair belt. Under a bleached white vest, he was bare-chested, skin reddened by the sun. “Talk goes from mouth to ear, all over the khalasar,” he said. “It is said Khal Drogo fell from his horse.”

“Help him,” Dany pleaded. “For the love you say you bear me, help him now.”

The knight knelt beside her. He looked at Drogo long and hard, and then at Dany. “Send your maids away.”

Wordlessly, her throat tight with fear, Dany made a gesture. Irri herded the other girls from the tent.

When they were alone, Ser Jorah drew his dagger. Deftly, with a delicacy surprising in such a big man, he began to scrape away the black leaves and dried blue mud from Drogo’s chest. The plaster had caked hard as the mud walls of the Lamb Men, but like those walls, it cracked easily. Ser Jorah broke the dry mud with his knife, pried the chunks from the flesh, peeled off the leaves one by one. A foul, sweet smell rose from the wound, so thick it almost choked her. The leaves were crusted with blood and pus, Drogo’s breast black and glistening with corruption.

“No,” Dany whispered, as tears ran down her cheeks. “No, please, gods hear me, no.”

Khal Drogo moaned, and thrashed where he lay, fighting some unseen enemy. Black blood ran slow and thick from his open wound

“Your khal is good as dead, princess.”

“No, he can’t die, he mustn’t, it was only a cut.” Dany took his large, calloused hand in her own small ones, and held it tight between them. “I will not let him die . . .”

Ser Jorah gave a bitter laugh. “Khaleesi or queen, that command is beyond your power. Save your tears, child. Weep for him tomorrow, or a year from now. We do not have time for grief. We must go, and quickly, before he dies.”

Dany was lost. “Go? Where should we go?”

“Asshai, I would say. It lies far to the south, at the end of the known world, vet men say it is a great port. We will find a ship to take us back to Pentos. It will be a hard journey, make no mistake. Do you trust your khas? Will they come with us?”

“Khal Drogo commanded them to keep me safe,” Dany replied uncertainly, “but if he dies . . .” She touched the great swell of her belly. “I don’t understand. Why should we flee? I am khaleesi. I carry Drogo’s heir. He will be khal after Drogo . . .”

Ser Jorah frowned. “Princess, hear me. The Dothraki will not follow a suckling babe. Drogo’s strength was what they bowed to, and only that. When he is gone, Jhaqo and Pono and the other kos will fight for his place, and this khalasar will devour itself. The winner will want no more rivals. The boy will be taken from your breast the moment he is born. They will give him to the dogs . . .”

Dany hugged herself. “But why?” she cried plaintively. “Why should they kill a little baby?”

“He is Drogo’s son, and the crones say he will be the stallion who mounts the world. It was prophesied. Better to kill the child than to risk his fury when he grows to manhood.”

The child kicked inside her, as if he had heard. Dany remembered the story Viserys had told her, of what the Usurper’s dogs had done to Rhaegar’s children. His son had been a babe as well, yet they had ripped him from his mother’s breast and dashed his head against a wall. That was the way of men. “They must not hurt my son!” she cried. “I will order my khas to keep him safe, and Drogo’s bloodriders will—”

Ser Jorah held her by the shoulders. “A bloodrider dies with his khal. You know that, child. They will take you to Vaes Dothrak, to the crones, that is the last duty they owe him in life . . . when it is done, they will join Drogo in the night lands.”

Dany shivered. She did not want to go back to Vaes Dothrak and live the rest of her life among those terrible old woman, yet she knew that the knight spoke only the truth. Drogo had been more than her sun and stars; he had been the shield that kept her safe. “I will not leave him,” she said stubbornly, miserably. She took his hand again. “I will not.”

A stirring at the tent flap made Dany turn her head. Mirri Maz Duur entered, bowing low. Days on the march, trailing behind the khalasar, had left her limping and haggard, with blistered and bleeding feet and hollows under her eyes. Behind her came Qotho and Haggo, carrying the godswife’s chest between them. When the bloodriders caught sight of Drogo’s wound, the chest slipped from Haggo’s fingers and crashed to the floor of the tent, and Qotho swore an oath so foul it seared the air.

Mirri Maz Duur studied Drogo, her face still and dead. “The wound has festered.”

“This is your work, maegi,” Qotho said. Haggo laid his fist across Mirri’s cheek with a meaty smack that drove her to the ground. Then he kicked her where she lay.

“Stop it!” Dany screamed.

Qotho pulled Haggo away, saying, “Kicks are too merciful for a maegi. Take her outside. We will stake her to the earth, to be the mount of every passing man. And when they are done with her, the dogs will use her as well. Weasels will tear out her entrails and carrion crows feast upon her eyes. The flies off the river shall lay their eggs in her womb and drink pus from the ruins of her breasts . . .” He dug iron-hard fingers into the soft, wobbly flesh under the godswife’s arm and hauled her to her feet.

“No,” Dany said. “I will not have her harmed.”

Qotho’s lips skinned back from his crooked brown teeth in a terrible mockery of a smile. “No? You say me no? Better you should pray that we do not stake you out beside your maegi. You did this, as much as the other.”

Ser Jorah stepped between them, loosening his longsword in its scabbard. “Rein in your tongue, bloodrider. The princess is still your khaleesi?

“Only while the blood-of-my-blood still lives,” Qotho told the knight. “When he dies, she is nothing.”

Dany felt a cold fire inside her, burning away her fear. “Before I was khaleesi, I was the blood of the dragon. Ser Jorah, summon my khas.”

“No,” said Qotho. “We will go. For now . . . khaleesi.” Haggo followed him from the tent, scowling.

“That one means you no good, princess,” Ser Jorah said. “The Dothraki say a man and his bloodriders share one life, and Qotho sees it ending. A dead man is beyond fear.”

“No one has died,” Dany said. “Ser Jorah, I may have need of your blade. Best go don your armor.” She was more frightened than she dared admit, even to herself.

The knight bowed. “As you say.” He strode from the tent.

Dany turned back to Mirri Maz Duur. The woman’s eyes were wary. “So you have saved me once more.”

“And now you must save him,” Dany said. “Please . . .”

“You do not ask a slave,” Mirri replied sharply, “you tell her.” She went to Drogo burning on his mat, and gazed long at his wound. “Ask or tell, it makes no matter. He is beyond a healer’s skills.” The khaFs eyes were closed. She opened one with her fingers. “He has been dulling the hurt with milk of the poppy.”

“Yes,” Dany admitted.

“I made him a poultice of firepod and sting-me-not and bound it in a lambskin.”

“It burned, he said. He tore it off. The herbwomen made him a new one, wet and soothing.”

“It burned, yes. There is great healing magic in fire, even your hairless men know that.”

“Make him another poultice,” Dany begged. “This time I will make certain he wears it.”

“The time for that is past, my lady,” Mirri said. “The poison spirits have tasted of his heart. All I can do now is ease the dark road before him, so he might ride painless to the night lands. He will be gone by morning.”

Her quiet words were a knife through Dany’s breast. What had she ever done to make the gods so cruel? She had finally found a safe place, had finally tasted love and hope. She was finally going home. And now she must lose it all. . . .

“No,” she pleaded. “Save him, and I will free you, I swear it. You must know a way . . . some magic, some . . .”

Mirri Maz Duur sat back on her heels and studied Daenerys through eyes as black as night. “There is a spell.” Her voice was quiet, scarcely more than a whisper. “But it is hard, lady, and dark. Some would say that death is cleaner. I learned the way in Asshai, and paid dear for the lesson. My teacher was a bloodmage from the Shadow Lands.”

Dany went cold all over. “Then you are truly a maegi . . .

“Am I?” Mirri Maz Duur smiled. “Only a maegi can save your rider now, Silver Lady.”

“Is there no other way?”

“No other.”

Khal Drogo gave a shuddering gasp.

“Do it,” Dany blurted. She told herself she must not be afraid; she was the blood of the dragon. “Save him.”

“There is a price,” the godswife said softly.

“You’ll have gold, horses, whatever you like.”

“It is not a matter of gold or horses. This is bloodmagic, lady. Only death may pay for life.”

Dany’s breath caught in her throat. “Death?” She wrapped her arms around herself protectively, rocked back and forth on her heels. “My death?” She told herself she would die for him, if she must. She was the blood of the dragon, she would not be afraid. Her brother Rhaegar had died for the woman he loved.

“No,” Mirri Maz Duur promised. “Not your death, khaleesi?

Dany trembled with relief. “Do it.”

The maegi nodded solemnly. “As you speak, so it shall be done. Call your servants.”

Khal Drogo writhed feebly as Rakharo and Quaro lowered him into the bath. “No,” he muttered, “no. Must ride.” Once in the water, all the strength seemed to leak out of him.

“Bring his horse,” Mirri Maz Duur commanded, and so it was done. Jhogo led the great red stallion into the tent. When the animal caught the scent of death, he screamed and reared, rolling his eyes. It took three men to subdue him.

“What do you mean to do?” Dany asked her.

“We need his blood,” Mirri answered. “That is the way.”

Jhogo edged back, his hand on the hilt of his arakh. He was a youth of sixteen years, whip-thin, fearless, quick to laugh, with the faint shadow of his first mustache on his upper lip. He fell to his knees before her. “Khaleesi,” he pleaded, “you must not do this thing. Let me kill this maegi.”

“Kill her and you kill your khal,” Dany said.

“This is bloodmagic,” he said. “It is forbidden.”

“I am khaleesi, and I say it is not forbidden. In Vaes Dothrak, Khal Drogo slew a stallion and I ate his heart, to give our son strength and courage. This is the same. The same.”

The stallion kicked and reared and snorted as Rakharo, Quaro, and Aggo pulled him close to the tub where the khal floated like one already dead, pus and blood seeping from his wound to stain the bathwaters. Mirri Maz Duur chanted words in a tongue that Dany did not know, and a knife appeared in her hand. Dany never saw where it came from. It looked old; hammered red-bronze, leaf-shaped, its blade covered with ancient glyphs. The maegi drew it across the stallion’s throat, under the noble head, and the horse kicked and shuddered as the blood poured out of him in a red rush. He would have collapsed, but the men of her khas held him up. It took all four. “Strength of the mount, go into the rider,” Mirri sang as horse blood swirled into the waters Drogo’s bath. “Strength of the beast, go into the man.”

Jhogo looked terrified as he struggled with the stallion’s weight, afraid to touch the dead flesh, yet afraid to let go as well. Dany was faint with relief. Only a horse, she thought. If they could buy Drogo’s life with the death of a horse, she would pay the price a thousand times over.

When they let the stallion fall, the bath was a dark red, and nothing showed of Drogo but his face. Mirri Maz Duur had no use for the carcass. “Burn it,” Dany told them. It was what they did, she knew. When a man died, his mount was killed as well and placed beneath him on the funeral pyre, to carry him to the night lands. The men of her khas dragged the carcass from the tent. The blood had gone everywhere. Even the sandsilk walls were spotted with red, and the rugs underfoot were black and wet.

The braziers were lit. Mirri Maz Duur tossed a pale red powder onto the coals. It gave the smoke a sharp, spicy scent, a pleasant enough smell, yet Eroeh fled sobbing, and Dany was filled with a strange fear. But she had gone too far to turn back now. She sent her other handmaids away.

“Go with them, Silver Lady,” Mirri Maz Duur told her.

“I will stay,” Dany said. “The man took me under the stars and gave life to the child inside me. I will not leave him.”

“You must. Once I begin to sing, no one must enter this tent. No one, do you understand? My song will wake powers older and darker than you know. The dead will dance here this night. No living man must look on them.”

Dany bowed her head, helpless. “No one will enter.” She bent over the tub. over Drogo in his bath of blood, and kissed him lightly on the brow. “Bring him back to me,” she whispered to Mirri Maz Duur before she fled.

Outside the sun was low on the horizon, the sky a bruised red. The khalasar had made camp. Tents and sleeping mats were scattered as far as the eye could see. A hot wind blew. Jhogo and Aggo were building a pyre beneath the dead stallion. A crowd had gathered. They stared at Dany with hard black eyes, their faces closed and unsmiling, like masks of beaten copper. She saw Ser Jorah Mormont, wearing mail and leather now. sweat beading on his broad, balding forehead. He pushed his way through the Dothraki to Dany’s side. When he saw the scarlet footprints her boots had left on the ground, the color seemed to drain from his face. “What have you done, you little fool?” he asked hoarsely.

“I had to save him.”

“We could have fled,” he said. “I would have seen you safe to Asshai, princess. There was no need . . .”

“Am I truly your princess?” she asked him.

“You know you are, gods save us both.”

“Then help me now.”

Ser Jorah grimaced. “Would that I knew how.”

Mirri Maz Duur’s voice rose to a high, ululating wail that sent a shiver down Dany’s back. Some of the Dothraki began to mutter and back away from her. The tent was aglow with the light of braziers within. Through the blood-spattered sandsilk, she glimpsed shadows moving.

Mirri Maz Duur was dancing, and not alone.

Dany saw naked fear on the faces of the Dothraki. “This must not be,” Qotho thundered.

She had not seen the bloodrider return. Haggo and Cohollo were with him. They had brought the hairless men, the eunuchs who healed with knife and needle and fire.

“I say this will be,” Dany replied.

“Maegi,” Haggo growled. And old Cohollo—Cohollo who had bound his life to Drogo’s on the day of his birth, Cohollo who had always been kind to her—Cohollo looked at her with loathing and spat full in her face.

“You will die, maegi,” Qotho promised, “but the other must die first.” He drew his arakh and made for the tent.

“No,” she shouted, “you mustn’t.” She caught him by the shoulder, but Qotho shoved her aside. Dany fell to her knees, crossing her arms over her belly to protect the child within. “Stop him,” she commanded her khas, “kill him.”

Rakharo and Quaro stood beside the flap of the tent. Quaro took a single step forward, reaching for the handle of his whip, but Qotho spun graceful as a dancer, the curved arakh rising. It caught Quaro low under the arm, the bright sharp steel biting up through leather and skin, through muscle and rib bone. Blood fountained as the young rider reeled backward, gasping. Qotho wrenched the blade free.

“Horselord” Ser Jorah Mormont called. “Try me.” His longsword slid from its scabbard.

Qotho charged, cursing. The arakh moved so fast that Quaro’s blood flew from it in a fine spray, like rain in a hot wind. The longsword caught it a foot from Ser Jorah’s face, and held it quivering for an instant as Qotho howled in fury. The knight was clad in chainmail, with gauntlets and greaves of lobstered steel and a heavy gorget around his throat, but he had not thought to don his helm.

Qotho danced backward, arakh whirling around his head in a shining blur, flickering out like lightning as the knight came on in a rush. Ser Jorah parried as best he could, but the slashes came so fast that it seemed to Dany that Qotho had four arakhs and as many arms. She heard the crunch of sword on mail, saw sparks fly as the long curved blade glanced off a gauntlet. Suddenly it was Mormont stumbling backward, and Qotho leaping to the attack. The left side of the knight’s face ran red with blood, and a cut to the hip opened a gash in his mail and left him limping. Qotho screamed taunts at him, calling him a craven, a milk man, a eunuch in an iron suit. “You die now!” he promised, arakh shivering through the red twilight. Inside Dany’s womb, her son kicked wildly. The curved blade slipped past the straight one and bit deep into the knight’s hip where the mail gaped open.

Mormont grunted, stumbled. Dany felt a sharp pain in her belly, a wetness on her thighs. Qotho shrieked triumph, but his arakh had found bone, and for half a heartbeat it caught. It was enough. Ser Jorah brought his longsword down with all the strength left him, through flesh and muscle and bone, and Qotho’s forearm dangled loose, flopping on a thin cord of skin and sinew. The knight’s next cut was at the Dothraki’s ear, so savage that Qotho’s face seemed almost to explode.

The Dothraki were shouting, Mirri Maz Duur wailing inside the tent like nothing human, Quaro pleading for water as he died. Dany cried out for help, but no one heard. Rakharo was fighting Haggo, arakh dancing with arakh, until Jhogo’s whip cracked, loud as thunder, the lash coiling around Haggo’s throat. A yank, and the bloodrider stumbled backward, losing his feet and his sword. Rakharo sprang forward, howling, swinging his arakh down with both hands through the top of Haggo’s head. The point caught between his eyes, red and quivering. Someone threw a stone, and when Dany looked, her shoulder was torn and bloody. “No,” she wept, “no, please, stop it, it’s too high, the price is too high.” More stones came flying. She tried to crawl toward the tent, but Cohollo caught her. Fingers in her hair, he pulled her head back and she felt the cold touch of his knife at her throat. “My baby,” she screamed, and perhaps the gods heard her, for as quick as that, Cohollo was dead. Aggo’s arrow took him under the arm, to pierce his lungs and heart.

When at last Daenerys found the strength to raise her head, she saw the crowd dispersing, the Dothraki stealing silently back to their tents and sleeping mats. Some were saddling their horses and riding off. The sun had set. Fires burned throughout the khalasar, and they seemed to burn hotter and angrier than any fires she had ever known, great orange blazes that crackled with fury and spit embers at the sky.

She tried to rise, and agony seized her and squeezed her like a giant’s fist. The breath went out of her; it was all she could do to gasp. The sound of Mirri Maz Duur’s voice was like a funeral dirge. Inside the tent shadows whirled.

An arm went under her waist, and then Ser Jorah was lifting her off her feet. His face was sticky with blood, and Dany saw that half his ear was gone. She convulsed in his arms as the pain took her again, and as if from far away she heard the knight shouting for her handmaids to help him. Are they all so afraid? she wondered silently, and knew the answer. Another pain took her, and Dany bit back a scream. It felt as if her son had a knife in each hand, as if he were hacking at her to cut his way out.

“Doreah, curse you,” Ser Jorah roared. “Come here. Fetch the birthing women.”

“They will not come. They say she is accursed.”

“They’ll come, or I swear I’ll have their heads.”

Doreah wept. “They are gone, my lord.”

“The maegi,”someone else said. Was that Aggo? “Take her to the maegi?

No, Dany wanted to say, no, not that, you mustn’t, but when she opened her mouth, a long wail of pain escaped, and she doubled over in Ser Jorah’s arms, the sweat breaking over her skin. What was wrong with them, couldn’t they see? Inside the tent the shapes were dancing, circling the brazier and the bloody bath, dark against the sandsilk, and some did not look human. She glimpsed the shadow of a great wolf, and another like a man wreathed in flames.

“The Lamb Woman knows the secrets of the birthing bed,” Irri said. “She said so, I heard her.”

“Yes,” Doreah agreed, “I heard her too.”

No, she shouted, or perhaps she only thought it, for no whisper of sound escaped her lips. She was being carried. Her eyes opened to gaze up at a flat dead sky, black and bleak and starless. Please, no. The sound of Mirri Maz Duur’s voice grew louder, until it filled the world. The shape’s! she screamed. The dancers!

Ser Jorah carried her inside the tent.

VII

Wings shadowed her fever dreams.

“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

She was walking down a long hall beneath high stone arches. She could not look behind her, must not look behind her. There was a door ahead of her, tiny with distance, but even from afar, she saw that it was painted red. She walked faster, and her bare feet left bloody footprints on the stone.

“You don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

She saw sunlight on the Dothraki sea, the living ocean of the plain, rich with the smells of earth and death. Wind stirred the grasses, and they rippled like water. Drogo was there, and he held her in strong arms, and his hand stroked her sex and opened her and woke that sweet wetness that was his alone, and the stars smiled down on them, stars in a daylight sky. “Home,” she whispered, as he entered her and filled her with his seed, “home.” But suddenly the stars were gone, and across the blue sky swept the great wings, and the world took flame.

“. . . don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

Ser Jorah’s face was drawn and sorrowful. “Rhaegar was the last dragon,” he told her, his words echoing off the walls of cold stone. One moment he was there and the next he was fading, his flesh pale and colorless, less substantial than the wind. “The last dragon,” he whispered, thin as a wisp, and he was gone. She felt darkness behind her, and the red door seemed further away than ever. Dany began to run.

“. . . don’t want to wake the dragon, do you?”

Viserys stood before her, screaming. “The dragon does not beg, slut. You do not command the dragon. I am the dragon, and I will be crowned.” The molten gold trickled down his face like wax, burning deep channels in his flesh. “I am the dragon and I will be crowned!” he shieked, and his fingers snapped like snakes, biting at her nipples, pinching, twisting, even as his eyes burst and ran like jelly down seared and blackened cheeks.

“. . . don’t want to wake the dragon . . .”

The red door was so far ahead of her, and she could feel the icy breath behind, sweeping up on her. If it caught her she would die a death that was more than death, howling forever alone in the darkness. She began to run.

“. . . don’t want to wake the dragon . . .”

She could feel the heat inside her, a terrible burning in her womb. Her son was standing there, so tall and proud, with Drogo’s copper skin and her own silver-gold hair, violet eyes shaped like almonds. And he smiled for her and began to lift his hand toward hers, but when he opened his mouth the fire poured out. She saw his heart burning through his chest, and in an instant he was gone, consumed like a moth by a candle, turned to ash. She wept for her child, the promise of a sweet mouth on her breast, but her tears turned to steam as they touched her skin.

“. . . want to wake the dragon . . .”

Ghosts lined the hallway, dressed in the faded raiment of kings. In their hands were swords of pale fire. They had hair of silver and hair of gold and hair of platinum white, and their eyes were opal and amethyst, tourmaline and jade. “Faster,” they cried, “faster, faster.” She raced, and her feet melted the stone wherever they touched. “Faster!” the ghosts cried as one, and she screamed and threw herself forward. A great knife of pain ripped down her back, and she felt her skin tear open and smelled the stench of burning blood and saw the shadow of wings. And Daenerys Targaryen flew.

“. . . wake the dragon . . .”

The door loomed before her, the red door, so close, so close, the hall was a blur around her, the cold receding behind. And now the stone was gone and she flew across the Dothraki sea, high and higher, the green rippling beneath, and all that lived and breathed fled in terror from the shadow of her wings. She could smell home, she could see it, there, just beyond that door, green fields and great stone houses and arms to keep her warm, there. She threw open the door.

“. . . the dragon . . .”

And saw her brother Rhaegar, tall and strong, mounted on a stallion as black as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eyeslit of his helm. “The last dragon,” Ser Jorah’s voice said faintly. “The last, the last.” Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within was her own.

After that, for a long time, there was only the pain, the fire within her, and the whisperings of stars.

She woke to the taste of ashes. “No,” she moaned, “no, please.”

“Khaleesi?” Jhiqui hovered over her, a frightened doe.

The tent was drenched in shadow, still and close. Flakes of ash drifted upward from a brazier, and Dany followed them with her eyes through the smoke hole above. Flying, she thought. I had wings, I was flying. But it was only a dream. “Help me,” she whispered, struggling to rise. “Bring me . . .” Her voice was raw as a wound, and she could not think what she wanted. Why did she hurt so much? It was as if her body had been torn to pieces and remade from the scraps. “I want . . .”

“Yes, khaleesi? Quick as that Jhiqui was gone, bolting from the tent, shouting. Dany needed . . . something . . . someone . . . what? It was important, she knew. It was the only thing in the world that mattered. She rolled onto her side and got an elbow under her, fighting the blanket tangled about her legs. It was so hard to move. The world swam dizzily. I have to . . .

They found her on the carpet, crawling toward her dragon eggs. Ser Jorah Mormont lifted her in his arms and carried her back to her sleeping silks, while she struggled feebly against him. Over his shoulder she saw her three handmaids, Jhogo with his little wisp of mustache, and the flat broad face of Mirri Maz Duur. “I must,” she tried to tell them, “I have to . . .”

“. . . sleep, princess.” Ser Jorah said.

“No,” Dany said. “Please. Please.”

“Yes.” He covered her with silk, though she was burning. “Sleep and grow strong again, khaleesi. Come back to us.” And then Mirri Maz Duur was there, the maegi, tipping a cup against her lips. She tasted sour milk, and something else, something thick and bitter, and almost gagged. Warm liquid ran down her chin. Somehow she swallowed. The tent grew dimmer, and sleep took her again. This time she did not dream. She floated, serene and at peace, on a black sea that knew no shore.

After a time—a night, a day, a year, she could not say—she woke again. The tent was dark, its silken walls flapping like wings when the wind gusted outside. This time Dany did not attempt to rise. “Irri,” she called, “Jhiqui. Doreah.” They were there at once. “My throat is dry,” she said, “so dry,” and they brought her water. It was warm and flat, yet Dany drank it eagerly, and sent Jhiqui for more. Irri dampened a soft cloth and stroked her brow. “I have been sick,” Dany said. The Dothraki girl nodded. “How long?” The cloth was soothing, but Irri seemed so sad, it frightened her. “Long,” she whispered. When Jhiqui returned with more water, Mirri Maz Duur came with her, eyes heavy from sleep. “Drink,” she said, lifting Dany’s head to the cup once more, but this time it was only wine. Sweet sweet wine. Dany drank, and lay back, listening to the soft sound of her own breathing. She could feel the heaviness in her limbs, as sleep crept in to fill her up once more. “Bring me . . .” she murmured, her voice slurred and drowsy. “Bring . . . I want to hold . . . “

“Yes?” the maegi asked. “What is it you wish, khaleesi?”

“Bring me . . . egg . . . dragon’s egg . . . please . . .” Her lashes turned to lead, and she was too weary to hold them up.

When she woke the third time, a shaft of golden sunlight was pouring through the smoke hole of the tent, and her arms were wrapped around a dragon’s egg. It was the pale one, its scales the color of buttercream, veined with whorls of gold and bronze, and Dany could feel the heat of it. Beneath her bedsilks, a fine sheen of perspiration covered her bare skin. Dragondew, she thought. Her fingers trailed lightly across the surface of the shell, tracing the wisps of gold, and deep in the stone she felt something twist and stretch in response. It did not frighten her. All her fear was gone, burned away.

Danv touched her brow. Under the film of sweat, her skin was cool to the touch, her fever gone. She made herself sit. There was a moment of dizziness, and the deep ache between her thighs. Yet she felt strong. Her maids came running at the sound of her voice. “Water,” she told them, “a flagon of water, cold as you can find it. And fruit, I think. Dates.”

“Asyou say, khaleesi”

“I want Ser Jorah,” she said, standing. Jhiqui brought a sandsilk robe and draped it over her shoulders. “And a warm bath, and Mirri Maz Duur, and . . .” Memory came back to her all at once, and she faltered. “Khal Drogo,” she forced herself to say, watching their faces with dread. “Is he—?”

“The khal lives,” Irri answered quietly . . . yet Dany saw a darkness in her eyes when she said the words, and no sooner had she spoken than she rushed away to fetch water.

She turned to Doreah. “Tell me.”

“I . . . I shall bring Ser Jorah,” the Lysene girl said, bowing her head and fleeing the tent.

Jhiqui would have run as well, but Dany caught her by the wrist and held her captive. “What is it? I must know. Drogo . . . and my child.” Why had she not remembered the child until now? “My son . . . Rhaego . . . where is he? I want him.”

Her handmaid lowered her eyes. “The boy . . . he did not live, khaleesi.” Her voice was a frightened whisper.

Dany released her wrist. My son is dead, she thought, as Jhiqui left the tent. She had known somehow. She had known since she woke the first time to Jhiqui’s tears. No, she had known before she woke. Her dream came back to her, sudden and vivid, and she remembered the tall man with the copper skin and long silver-gold braid, bursting into flame. Small wonder she had not asked for him.

She should weep, she knew, yet her eyes were dry as ash. She had wept in her dream, and the tears had turned to steam on her cheeks. All the grief has been burned out of me, she told herself. She felt sad, and yet . . . she could feel Rhaego receding from her, as if he had never been.

Ser Jorah and Mirri Maz Duur entered a few moments later, and found Dany standing over the other dragon’s eggs, the two still in their chest. It seemed to her that they felt as hot as the one she had slept with, which was passing strange. “Ser Jorah, come here,” she said. She took his hand and placed it on the black egg with the swirls. “What do you feel?”

“Shell, hard as rock.” The knight was wary. “Scales.”

“Heat?”

“No. Cold stone.” He took his hand away. “Princess, are you well? Should you be up, weak as you are?”

“Weak? I am strong, Jorah.” To please him, she reclined on a pile of cushions. “Tell me how my child died.”

“He never lived, my princess. The women say . . .” He faltered, and Dany saw how the flesh hung loose on him, and the way he limped when he moved.

“Tell me. Tell me what the women say.”

He turned his face away. His eves were haunted. “They say the child was . . .” She waited, but Ser Jorah could not say it. His face grew dark with shame. He looked half a corpse himself.

“Monstrous,” Mirri Maz Duur finished for him. The knight was a powerful man, yet Dany understood in that moment that the maegi was stronger, and crueler, and infinitely more dangerous. “Twisted. I drew him forth myself. He was scaled like a lizard, blind, with the stub of a tail and small leather wings like the wings of a bat. When I touched him. the flesh sloughed off the bone, and inside he was full of graveworms and the stink of corruption. He had been dead for years.”

Darkness, Dany thought. The terrible darkness sweeping up behind to devour her. If she looked back she was lost. “My son was alive and strong when Ser Jorah carried me into this tent,” she said. “I could feel him kicking, fighting to be born.”

“That may be as it may be,” answered Mirri Maz Duur, “yet the creature that came forth from your womb was as I said. Death was in that tent, khaleesi.”

“Only shadows,” Ser Jorah husked, but Dany could hear the doubt in his voice. “I saw, maegi. I saw you, alone, dancing with the shadows.”

“The grave casts long shadows, Iron Lord,” Mirri said. “Long and dark, and in the end no light can hold them back.”

Ser Jorah had killed her son, Dany knew. He had done what he did for love and loyalty, yet he had carried her into a place no living man should go and fed her baby to the darkness. He knew it too; the grey face, the hollow eyes, the limp. “The shadows have touched you too, Ser Jorah,” she told him. The knight made no reply. Dany turned to the godswife. “You warned me that only death could pay for life. I thought you meant the horse.”

“No,” Mirri Maz Duur said. “That was a lie you told yourself. You knew the price.”

Had she? Had she? If I look back I am last. “The price was paid,” Dany said. “The horse, my child, Quaro and Qotho, Haggo and Cohollo. The price was paid and paid and paid.” She rose from her cushions. “Where is Khal Drogo? Show him to me, godswife, maegi, bloodmage, whatever you are. Show me Khal Drogo. Show me what I bought with my son’s life.”

“As you command, khaleesi,” the old woman said. “Come, I will take you to him.”

Dany was weaker than she knew. Ser Jorah slipped an arm around her and helped her stand. “Time enough for this later, my princess,” he said quietly.

“I would see him now, Ser Jorah.”

After the dimness of the tent, the world outside was blinding bright. The sun burned like molten gold, and the land was seared and empty.

Her handmaids waited with fruit and wine and water, and Jhogo moved close to help Ser Jorah support her. Aggo and Rakharo stood behind. The glare of sun on sand made it hard to see more, until Dany raised her hand to shade her eyes. She saw the ashes of a fire, a few score horses milling listlessly and searching for a bite of grass, a scattering of tents and bedrolls. A small crowd of children had gathered to watch her, and beyond she glimpsed women going about their work, and withered old men staring at the flat blue sky with tired eyes, swatting feebly at bloodflies. A count might show a hundred people, no more. Where the other forty thousand had made their camp, only the wind and dust lived now.

“Drogo’s khalasar is gone,” she said.

“A khal who cannot ride is no khal,” said Jhogo.

“The Dothraki follow only the strong,” Ser Jorah said. “I am sorry, my princess. There was no way to hold them. Ko Pono left first, naming himself Khal Pono, and many followed him. Jhaqo was not long to do the same. The rest slipped away night by night, in large bands and small. There are a dozen new khalasars on the Dothraki sea, where once there was only Drogo’s.”

“The old remain,” said Aggo. “The frightened, the weak, the sick.”

“And we who swore,” Jhogo added. “We remain.”

“They took Khal Drogo’s herds, khaleesi,” Rakharo said. “We were too few to stop them. It is the right of the strong to take from the weak. They took many slaves as well, the khals and yours, yet they left some few.”

“Eroeh?” asked Dany, remembering the frightened child she had saved outside the city of the Lamb Men.

“Mago seized her, who is Khal Jhaqo’s bloodrider now,” said Jhogo. “He mounted her high and low and gave her to his khal, and Jhaqo gave her to his other bloodriders. They were six. When they were done with her, they cut her throat.”

“It was her fate, khaleesi,” said Aggo.

If I look back I am lost. “It was a cruel fate,” Dany said, “yet not so cruel as Mago’s will be. I promise you that, by the old gods and the new, by the lamb god and the horse god and every god that lives. I swear it by the Mother of Mountains and the Womb of the World. Before I am done with them, Mago and Ko Jhaqo will plead for the mercy they showed Eroeh.”

The Dothraki exchanged uncertain glances. “Khaleesi,” the handmaid Irri explained, as if to a child, “Jhaqo is a khal now, with twenty thousand riders at his back.”

She lifted her head. “And I am Daenerys Stormborn, Daenerys of House Targaryen, of the blood of Aegon the Conquerer and Maegor the Cruel and old Valyria before them. I am the dragon’s daughter, and I swear to you, these men will die screaming. Now bring me to Khal Drogo.”

He was lying on the bare red earth, staring up at the sun.

A dozen bloodflies had settled on his body, though he did not seem to feel them. Dany brushed them away and knelt beside him. His eyes were wide open but did not see, and she knew at once that he was blind. When she whispered his name, he did not seem to hear. The wound on his breast was as healed as it would ever be, the scar that covered it grey and red and hideous.

“Why is he out here alone, in the sun?” she asked them.

“He seems to like the warmth, princess,” Ser Jorah said. “His eyes follow the sun, though he does not see it. He can walk after a fashion. He will go where you lead him, but no further. He will eat if you put food in his mouth, drink if you dribble water on his lips.”

Dany kissed her sun-and-stars gently on the brow, and stood to face Mirri Maz Duur. “your spells are costly, maegi.”

“He lives,” said Mirri Maz Duur. “You asked for life. You paid for life.”

“This is not life, for one who was as Drogo was. His life was laughter, and meat roasting over a firepit, and a horse between his legs. His life was an arakh in his hand and his bells ringing in his hair as he rode to meet an enemy. His life was his bloodriders, and me, and the son I was to give him.”

Mirri Maz Duur made no reply.

“When will he be as he was?” Dany demanded.

“When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east,” said Mirri Maz Duur. “When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before.”

Dany gestured at Ser Jorah and the others. “Leave us. I would speak with this maegi alone.” Mormont and the Dothraki withdrew. “You knew,” Dany said when they were gone. She ached, inside and out, but her fury gave her strength. “You knew what I was buying, and you knew the price, and yet you let me pay it.”

“It was wrong of them to burn my temple,” the heavy, flat-nosed woman said placidly. “That angered the Great Shepherd who herds us all.”

“This was no god’s work,” Dany said coldly. If I look back I am lost. “You cheated me. You murdered my child within me.”

“The stallion who mounts the world will burn no cities now. His khalasar shall trample no nations into dust.”

“I spoke for you,” she said, anguished. “I saved you.”

“Saved me?” The Lhazareen woman spat. “Three riders had taken me, not as a man takes a woman but from behind, as a dog takes a bitch. The fourth was in me when you rode past. How then did you save me? I saw my god’s house burn, where I had healed good men beyond counting. My home they burned as well, and in the street I saw piles of heads. I saw the head of a baker who made my bread. I saw the head of a boy I had saved from deadeye fever, only three moons past. I heard children crying as the riders drove them off with their whips. Tell me again what you saved.”

“Your life.”

Mirri Maz Duur laughed cruelly. “Look to your khal and see what life is worth, when all the rest is gone.”

Dany could hear no more, not another word. She called out for Ser Jorah and the men of her khas and bid them take Mirri Maz Duur and bind her hand and foot and hold her close, but the maegi smiled at her as they carried her off, as if they shared a secret. A word, and Dany could have her head off . . . yet then what would she have? A head? If life was worthless, what was death?

They led Khal Drogo back to her tent, and Dany commanded them to fill a tub, and this time there was no blood in the water. She bathed him herself, washing the dirt and the dust from his arms and chest, cleaning his face with a soft cloth, soaping his long black hair and combing the knots and tangles from it till it shone again as she remembered. It was well past dark before she was done, and Dany was exhausted. She stopped for drink and food, but it was all she could do to nibble at a fig and keep down a mouthful of water. Sleep would have been a release, but she had slept enough . . . too long, in truth. She owed this night to Drogo, for all the nights that had been, and yet might be.

The memory of their first ride was with her when she led him out into the darkness, for the Dothraki believed that all things of importance in a man’s life must be done beneath the open sky. She told herself that there were powers stronger than hatred, and spells older and truer than any the maegi had learned in Asshai. The night was black and moonless, but overhead a million stars burned bright. A comet hung low in the east, its long red banner spread across a third of the sky like a dragon’s tail. She took that for an omen.

No soft blanket of grass welcomed them here, only the hard dusty ground, bare and strewn with stones. No trees stirred in the wind, and there was no stream to soothe her fears with the gentle music of water. Dany told herself that the stars would be enough. “Remember, Drogo,” she whispered, as she made him comfortable. “Remember our first ride together, the day we wed. Remember the night we made Rhaego, with the khalasar all around us and your eyes on my face as you took me. Remember how cool and clean the water was in the Womb of the World. Remember, my sun-and-stars. Remember, and come back to me.”

The birth had left her too raw and torn to take him inside of her, as she would have wanted, but Doreah had taught her other ways, and Dany remembered. She used her hands, her mouth, her breasts. She raked him with her nails and covered him with kisses and whispered and prayed and told him stories. She tried once, and twice, and half a hundred times, and by the end she had bathed him with her tears. Yet Drogo did not feel, or speak, or rise.

And when a bleak dawn broke over an empty horizon, Dany knew that he was truly lost to her. “When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east,” she whispered sadly. “When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When my womb quickens again, and I bear a living child. Then you will return, my sun-and-stars, and not before.”

Never, the darkness cried, never never never.

Inside the tent Dany found a cushion, soft silk stuffed with feathers. She clutched it to her breasts as she walked back out to Drogo, to her sun-and-stars. If I look back I am lost. It hurt even to walk, and she wanted to sleep, to sleep and not to dream.

She knelt, kissed Drogo on the lips, and pressed the cushion down across his face.

VIII

The land was red and dead and parched, and good wood was hard to come by. Her foragers returned with gnarled cottonwoods, purple brush, sheaves of brown grass. They took two of the tallest and straightest trees, hacked the limbs and branches from them, skinned off the bark, and split them, laying the logs in a rough square. Its center they filled with straw, brush, bark shavings, and bundles of dry grass. Rakharo chose a stallion from the small herd that remained to them; he was not the equal of Khal Drogo’s red, but few horses were. In the center of the square, Aggo fed him a withered apple and dropped him in an instant with an axe blow between the eyes.

Mirri Maz Duur, bound hand and foot, watched from the dust with disquiet in her black eyes. “It is not enough to kill a horse,” she told Dany. “By itself, the blood is nothing. You do not have the words to make a spell, nor the wisdom to find them. Do you think bloodmagic is a game for children? You call me maegi as if it were a curse, but all it means is wise. You are a child, with a child’s ignorance. Whatever you mean to do, it will not work. Loose me from these bonds and I will help you.”

“I am tired of the maegi’s braying,” Dany told Jhogo. He took his whip to her, and after that the godswife kept silent.

Over the carcass of the horse, they built a platform of hewn logs; trunks of smaller trees and limbs from the greater, and the thickest straightest branches they could find. They laid the wood east to west, from sunrise to sunset. On the platform they piled Khal Drogo’s treasures: his great tent, his painted vests, his saddles and harness, the whip his father had given him when he came to manhood, the arakh he had used to slay Khal Ogo and his son, a mighty dragonbone bow. Aggo would have added the weapons Drogo’s bloodriders had given Dany for bride gifts as well, but she forbade it. “Those are mine,” she told him, “and I mean to keep them.” Another layer of brush was piled about the khals treasures, and bundles of dried grass scattered over them.

Ser Jorah Mormont drew her aside as the sun was creeping toward its zenith. “Princess . . .” he began.

“Why do you call me that?” Dany challenged him. “My brother Viserys was your king, was he not?”

“He was, my lady.”

“Viserys is dead. I am his heir, the last blood of House Targaryen. Whatever was his is mine now.”

“My . . . queen,” Ser Jorah said, going to one knee. “My sword that was his is yours, Daenerys. And my heart as well. That never belonged to your brother. I am but a knight, and I have nothing to offer you but exile, but I beg you, hear me. Let Khal Drogo go. You shall not be alone. I promise you, no man shall take you to Vaes Dothrak unless you wish to go. You need not join the dosh khaleen. Come east with me. Yi Ti, Qarth, the Jade Sea, Asshai by the Shadow. We will see all the wonders yet unseen, and drink what wines the gods see fit to serve us. Please, khaleesi. I know what you intend. Do not. Do not.”

“I must,” Dany told him. She touched his face, fondly, sadly. “You do not understand. You cannot understand.”

“I understand that you loved him,” Ser Jorah said, in a voice thick with despair. “I loved my lady wife once, yet I did not die with her. You are my queen, my sword is yours, but do not ask me to stand aside as you climb on Drogo’s pyre. I love you too dearly to watch you burn.”

“Is that what you fear?” Dany kissed him lightly on his broad forehead. “I am not such a child as that, sweet ser.”

“You do not mean to die with him? You swear it, my queen?”

“I swear it,” she said, in the Common Tongue of the Seven Kingdoms that by rights were hers.

The third level of the platform was woven of branches no thicker than a finger, and covered with dry leaves and twigs. They laid them north to south, from ice to fire, and piled them high with soft cushions and sleeping silks. The sun had begun to lower toward the west by the time they were done. Dany called the Dothraki around her. Fewer than a hundred were left. How many had Aegon started with, she wondered? It did not matter.

“You will be my khalasar,” she told them. “I see the faces of slaves. I free you. Go if you wish, no one shall harm you. Stay if you will, as brothers and sisters, husbands and wives.” The black eyes watched her, wary, expressionless. “I see the faces of children, women’s faces, the wrinkled faces of the aged. I was a child yesterday. Today I am a woman. Tomorrow I will be old. To each of you I say, give me your hands and your hearts, and there will always be a place for you.” She turned to the three young warriors of her khas. “Jhogo, to you I give the silver-handled whip that was my bride gift, and name you ko, and ask your oath, that you will live and die as blood of my blood, riding at my side to keep me safe from harm.”

Jhogo took the whip from her hands, but his face was lost and confused. “Khaleesi,” he said hesitantly, “this is not done. It would shame me, to be bloodrider to a woman.”

“Aggo,” Dany called, paying no heed to Jhogo’s words. If I look back I am lost. “To you I give the dragonbone bow that was my bride gift.” It was double-curved, shiny black and exquisite, taller than she was. “I name you ko and ask your oath, that you should live and die as blood of my blood, riding at my side to keep me safe from harm.”

Aggo accepted the bow with lowered eyes. “I cannot say these words. Only a man can lead a khalasar or name a ko.”

“Rakharo,” Dany said, turning away from the refusal, “you shall have the great arakh that was my bride gift, with hilt and blade chased in gold. And you too I name my ko, and ask that you live and die as blood of my blood, riding at my side to keep me safe from harm.”

“You are khaleesi,” Rakharo said, taking the arakh. “I shall ride at your side to Vaes Dothrak beneath the Mother of Mountains, and keep you safe from harm until you take your place with the crones of the dosh khaleen. No more can I promise.”

She nodded, as calmly as if she had not heard his answer, and turned to the last of her champions. “Ser Jorah Mormont,” she said, “first and greatest of my knights, I have no bride gift to give you, but I swear to you, one day you shall have from my hands a longsword like none the world has ever seen, dragon-forged and made of Valyrian steel. And I would ask for your oath as well.”

“You have it, my queen,” Ser Jorah said, kneeling and laying his sword at her feet. “I vow to serve you, to obey you, to die for you if need be.”

“Whatever may come?”

“Whatever may come.”

“I shall hold you to that oath. I pray you never regret the giving of it.” Dany lifted him to his feet. Stretching on her toes to reach his lips, she kissed the knight gently and said, “You are the first of my Queensguard.”

She could feel the eyes of the khalasar on her as she entered her tent. The Dothraki were muttering to themselves and giving her strange sideways looks from the corners of their dark almond eyes. They thought her mad, Dany realized. Perhaps she was. She would know soon enough. If I look back I am lost.

Her bath was scalding hot when Irri helped her into the tub, but Dany did not flinch or cry aloud. She liked the heat. It made her feel clean. Jhiqui had scented the water with the oils she had found in the market in Vaes Dothrak; the steam rose moist and fragrant. Doreah washed her hair and combed it out, working loose the mats and tangles. Irri scrubbed her back. Dany closed her eyes and let the smell and the w’armth enfold her. She could feel the heat soaking through the soreness between her thighs. She shuddered when it entered her, and her pain and stiffness seemed to dissolve. She floated.

When she was clean, her handmaids helped her from the water. Irri and Jhiqui fanned her dry, while Doreah brushed her hair until it fell like a river of liquid silver down her back. They scented her with spiceflower and cinnamon; a touch on each wrist, behind her ears, on the tips of her milk-heavy breasts. The last dab was for her sex. Irri’s finger felt as light and cool as a lover’s kiss as it slid softly up between her lips.

Afterward, Dany sent them all away, so she might prepare Khal Drogo for his final ride into the night lands. She washed his body clean, and brushed and oiled his hair, running her fingers through it for the last time, feeling the weight of it, remembering the first time she had touched it, the night of their wedding ride. His hair had never been cut. How many men could die with their hair uncut? She buried her face in it, and inhaled the dark fragrance of the oils. He smelled like grass and warm earth, like smoke and semen and horses. He smelled like Drogo. Forgive me, sun of my life, she thought. Forgive me for all I have done and all I must do. I paid the price, my star, but it was too high, too high. . . .

Dany braided his hair and slid the silver rings onto his mustache and hung his bells one by one. So many bells, gold and silver and bronze. Bells so his enemies would hear him coming and grow weak with fear. She dressed him in horsehair leggings and high boots, buckling a belt heavy with gold and silver medallions about his waist. Over his scarred chest she slipped a painted vest, old and faded, the one Drogo had loved best. For herself she chose loose sandsilk trousers, slippers that laced halfway up her legs, and a vest like Drogo’s.

The sun was going down when she called them back to carry his body to the pyre. The Dothraki watched in silence as Jhogo and Aggo bore him from the tent. Dany walked behind him. They laid him down on his cushions and silks, his head toward the Mother of Mountains far to the northwest.

“Oil,” she commanded, and they brought forth the jars, and poured them over the pyre, soaking the silks and the brush and the bundles of dry grass, until the oil trickled from beneath the logs and the air was rich with fragrance.

Dany called for her handmaids. “Bring my eggs,” she commanded them. Something in her voice made them run.

“The dragon’s eggs?” Ser Jorah took her arm. “My queen, Drogo will have no use for dragon’s eggs in the night lands. Better to sell them in Asshai. Sell one and we can buy a ship to take us back to the Free Cities. Sell all three and you will be a wealthy woman all your days.”

“They were not given to me to sell,” Dany told him.

She climbed the pyre herself to place the dragon’s eggs around her sun-and-stars. The black beside his heart, under his arm. The green beside his head, his braid coiled around it. The cream-and-gold down between his legs. When she kissed him for the last time, Dany could taste the sweetness of the oil on his lips.

As she climbed down off the pyre, she noticed Mirri Maz Duur watching her. “You are mad,” the godswife said hoarsely.

“Is it so far from madness to wisdom?” Dany asked. “Ser Jorah, take this maegi and bind her to the pyre.”

“To the . . .? My queen, you cannot mean . . .”

“Do as I say.” Still he hesitated, until her anger flared. “You swore to obey me, whatever might come. Rakharo, help him.”

The godswife did not cry out as they dragged her to Khal Drogo’s pyre and staked her down amidst his treasures. Dany poured the oil over the woman’s head herself. “I thank you, Mirri Maz Duur,” she said, “for the lessons you have taught me.”

“You will not hear me scream,” Mirri responded, as the oil dripped from her hair and soaked her clothing.

“I will,” Dany said, “but it is not your screams I want, only your life. I remember what you told me. Only death can pay for life.” Mirri Maz Duur opened her mouth, but made no reply. As she stepped away, Dany saw that the contempt was gone from the maegi’s flat black eyes; in its place was something that might have been fear.

Then there was nothing to be done but watch the sun, and look for the first star.

When a horselord dies, his horse is slain with him, so he might ride proud into the night lands. The bodies are burned beneath the open sky, and the khal rises on his fiery steed to take his place among the stars. The more fiercely the man burned in life, the brighter his star will shine in the darkness.

Jhogo spied it first. “There,” he said in a hushed voice. Dany looked and saw it, low in the east. The first star was her comet, burning red. Blood red; fire red; the dragon’s tail. She could not have asked for a stronger sign. She called for the torch. Aggo brought it to her. “Khaleesi, are you—”

“Yes.” Dany took the torch from his hand, and thrust it down between the logs at the base of the pyre. The oil took the fire at once, the brush and dried grass a heartbeat later. Tiny flames went darting up the fire like swift red mice, skating over the oil and leaping from bark to branch to leaf. A rising heat puffed at her face, soft and sudden as a lover’s breath, but in seconds it had grown too hot to bear.

Dany stepped backward. The wood crackled, louder and louder. Mirri Maz Duur began to sing in a shrill, ululating voice. The flames whirled and writhed, racing each other up the platform. The dusk shimmered as the air itself seemed to liquify from the heat. Dany heard wood spit and crack. The fires swept over Mirri Maz Duur. Her song grew louder, shriller . . . then she gasped, again and again, and her song became a shuddering wail, thin and high and full of agony.

And now the flames reached Khal Drogo, and now they were all around him. His clothing took fire, and for an instant he was clad in wisps of floating orange silk and tendrils of curling smoke, grey and greasy. Dany’s lips parted and she found herself holding her breath. Part of her wanted to go to him as Ser Jorah had feared, to rush into the flames to beg for his forgiveness and take him inside her one last time, the fire melting the flesh from their bones until they were as one, forever.

She could smell the odor of burning flesh, like horseflesh roasting in a firepit. The pyre roared in the deepening dusk like some great beast, drowning out the fainter sound of Mirri Maz Duur’s screaming and sending up long tongues of flame to lick at the belly of the night. As the smoke grew thicker, the Dothraki began to back away, coughing and muttering. Huge orange gouts of fire unfurled their banners in the hellish wind, the logs hissing and cracking, glowing cinders rising on the smoke to float away into the dark like so many new-born fireflies. The heat beat at the air with great red wings, driving the Dothraki back, driving off even Mormont, but Dany stood her ground. She was the blood of the dragon, and the fire was in her blood.

She had sensed the truth of it long ago, Dany thought as she took a step closer to the conflagration, but the brazier had not been hot enough. The flames flickered and writhed before her like the women who had danced at her wedding. Whirling and singing and spinning their yellow and orange and crimson veils, fearsome to behold, yet lovely, so lovely, alive with heat. Dany opened her arms to them, her skin flushed and glowing. Mirri Maz Duur had fallen silent. The godswife thought her a child, but children grow, and children learn. Only death can pay for life.

Another step, and Dany could feel the heat of the sand on the soles of her feet, even through her sandals. Sweat ran down her thighs and between her breasts and in rivulets over her cheeks, where tears had once run. Ser Jorah was shouting behind her, but he did not matter anymore, only the fire mattered, The flames were so beautiful, the loveliest things she had ever seen, each one a sorcerer robed in yellow and fire and pale blue, swirling their long smokey cloaks. She saw burning lions and great yellow serpents and unicorns made of air and fire, fish and foxes and monsters, each more beautiful than the last. She saw a horse, a great grey stallion made of smoke, its flowing mane a nimbus of blue flame. Yes, my love, my sun-and-stars, yes, mount now, ride now.

Her vest had begun to smoulder, so Dany shrugged it off and let it fall to the ground. The painted leather burst into sudden flame as she skipped closer to the fire, her breasts bare to the blaze, streams of milk flowing from her red and swollen nipples. Now, she thought, now, and for an instant, just an instant, she glimpsed Khal Drogo before her, mounted on his stallion of smoke, a flaming lash in his hand. He smiled at her, and the great whip snaked down at the pyre, hissing.

And from somewhere behind the smoke there came a crack, as of shattering stone. The platform of wood and brush and grass began to shift and collapse in upon itself. Bits of burning wood slid down at her, and she was showered with ash and cinders. And something else came crashing down, bouncing and rolling, to land at Dany’s feet. It was a chunk of curved rock, pale and veined with gold, broken and smoking. The roaring filled the world, yet dimly through the firefall Dany heard women shriek and children cry out in wonder.

And there came a second crack, loud and sharp as thunder, and the smoke stirred and whirled around her and the pyre shifted, the blackened logs exploding as the fire touched their secret hearts. She heard the terrified screams of frightened horses, and the voices of the Dothraki raised in shouts of fear and terror, and Ser Jorah calling her name and cursing. No, she wanted to shout to him, no, my good knight, do not fear for me. The fire is mine. I am Daenerys Stormborn, daughter of dragons, mother of dragons, don’t you see? Don’t you SEE?

With a tremendous roar and a belch of flame and smoke that reached thirty feet into the sky, the pyre collapsed and came down around her. Unafraid, Dany strode forward, into the firestorm, calling to her children. The third crack was as loud and sharp as the breaking of the world.

When the fire died at last and the ground became cool enough to walk upon, Ser Jorah Mormont found her amidst the ashes, surrounded by blackened logs and bits of glowing ember and the burnt bones of a stallion. She was naked, covered with soot, her clothes turned to ash, her beautiful hair all crisped away . . . yet she was unhurt.

The cream-and-gold dragon was suckling at her left breast, the green-and-bronze at the right. Her arms cradled them close. The black-and-scarlet beast was draped across her shoulders, its long sinuous neck coiled under her chin. When it saw Jorah, it raised its head and looked at him with eyes as red as coals.

Wordless, the knight fell to his knees. The men of her khas came up behind him. Jhogo was the first to lay his arakh at her feet. “Blood of my blood,” he murmured, pushing his face to the smoking earth. “Blood of my blood,” she heard Aggo echo. “Blood of my blood,” Rakharo shouted.

And after them came her handmaids, and then the others, all the Dothraki, men and women and children, and Dany had only to look at their eyes to know that they were hers now, today and tomorrow and forever, hers as they had never been Drogo’s.

As Daenerys Targaryen rose to her feet, her black hissed, pale smoke venting from its mouth and nostrils. The other two pulled away from her breasts and added their voices to the call, their wings stirring the air, and for the first time in hundreds of years, the night was alive with the music of dragons.

BICYCLE REPAIRMAN

Bruce Sterling

Repeated tinny banging woke Lyle in his hammock. Lyle groaned, sat up, and slid free into the tool-crowded aisle of his bike shop.

Lyle hitched up the black elastic of his skintight shorts and plucked yesterday’s grease-stained sleeveless off the workbench. He glanced blearily at his chronometer as he picked his way toward the door. It was 10:04.38 in the morning, June 27, 2037.

Lyle hopped over a stray can of primer and the floor boomed gently beneath his feet. With all the press of work, he’d collapsed into sleep without properly cleaning the shop. Doing custom enameling paid okay, but it ate up time like crazy. Working and living alone was wearing him out.

Lyle opened the shop door, revealing a long sheer drop to dusty tiling far below. Pigeons darted beneath the hull of his shop through a soot-stained hole in the broken atrium glass, and wheeled off to their rookery somewhere in the darkened guts of the high-rise.

More banging. Far below, a uniformed delivery kid stood by his cargo tricycle, yanking rhythmically at the long dangling string of Lyle’s spot-welded doorknocker.

Lyle waved, yawning. From his vantage point below the huge girders of the cavernous atrium, Lyle had a fine overview of three burnt-out interior levels of the old Tsatanuga Archiplat. Once-elegant handrails and battered pedestrian overlooks fronted on the great airy cavity of the atrium. Behind the handrails was a three-floor wilderness of jury-rigged lights, chicken coops, water tanks, and squatters’ flags. The fire-damaged floors, walls, and ceilings were riddled with handmade descent-chutes, long coiling staircases, and rickety ladders.

Lyle took note of a crew of Chattanooga demolition workers in their yellow detox suits. The repair crew was deploying vacuum scrubbers and a high-pressure hose-off by the vandal-proofed western elevators of Floor 34. Two or three days a week, the city crew meandered into the damage zone to pretend to work, with a great hypocritical show of sawhorses and barrier tape. The lazy sons of bitches were all on the take.

Lyle thumbed the brake switches in their big metal box by the flywheel. The bike shop slithered, with a subtle hiss of cable-clamps, down three stories, to dock with a grating crunch onto four concrete-filled metal drums.

The delivery kid looked real familiar. He was in and out of the zone pretty often. Lyle had once done some custom work on the kid’s cargo trike, new shocks and some granny-gearing as he recalled, but he couldn’t remember the kid’s name. Lyle was terrible with names. “What’s up, zude?”

“Hard night, Lyle?”

“Just real busy.”

The kid’s nose wrinkled at the stench from the shop. “Doin’ a lot of paint work, huh?” He glanced at his palmtop notepad. “You still taking deliveries for Edward Dertouzas?”

“Yeah. I guess so.” Lyle rubbed the gear tattoo on one stubbled cheek. “If I have to.”

The kid offered a stylus, reaching up. “Can you sign for him?”

Lyle folded his bare arms warily. “Naw, man, I can’t sign for Deep Eddy. Eddy’s in Europe somewhere. Eddy left months ago. Haven’t seen Eddy in ages.”

The delivery kid scratched his sweating head below his billed fabric cap. He turned to check for any possible sneak-ups by snatch-and-grab artists out of the squatter warrens. The government simply refused to do postal delivery on the Thirty-second, Thirty-third, and Thirty-fourth floors. You never saw many cops inside the zone, either. Except for the city demolition crew, about the only official functionaries who ever showed up in the zone were a few psychotically empathetic NAFTA social workers.

“I’ll get a bonus if you sign for this thing.” The kid gazed up in squint-eyed appeal. “It’s gotta be worth something, Lyle. It’s a really weird kind of routing, they paid a lot of money to send it just that way.”

Lyle crouched down in the open doorway. “Let’s have a look at it.”

The package was a heavy shockproof rectangle in heat-sealed plastic shrink-wrap, with a plethora of intra-European routing stickers. To judge by all the overlays, the package had been passed from postal system to postal system at least eight times before officially arriving in the legal custody of any human being. The return address, if there had ever been one, was completely obscured. Someplace in France, maybe.

Lyle held the box up two-handed to his ear and shook it. Hardware.

“You gonna sign, or not?”

“Yeah.” Lyle scratched illegibly at the little signature panel, then looked at the delivery trike. “You oughta get that front wheel trued.”

The kid shrugged. “Got anything to send out today?”

“Naw,” Lyle grumbled, “I’m not doing mail-order repair work anymore; it’s too complicated and I get ripped off too much.”

“Suit yourself.” The kid clambered into the recumbent seat of his trike and pedaled off across the heat-cracked ceramic tiles of the atrium plaza.

Lyle hung his hand-lettered OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign outside the door. He walked to his left, stamped up the pedaled lid of a jumbo garbage can, and dropped the package in with the rest of Dertouzas’s stuff.

The can’s lid wouldn’t close. Deep Eddy’s junk had finally reached critical mass. Deep Eddy never got much mail at the shop from other people, but he was always sending mail to himself. Big packets of encrypted diskettes were always arriving from Eddy’s road jaunts in Toulouse, Marseilles, Valencia, and Nice. And especially Barcelona. Eddy had sent enough gigabyte-age out of Barcelona to outfit a pirate data-haven.

Eddy used Lyle’s bike shop as his safety-deposit box. This arrangement was okay by Lyle. He owed Eddy; Eddy had installed the phones and virching in the bike shop, and had also wangled the shop’s electrical hookup. A thick elastic curly-cable snaked out the access-crawlspace of Floor 35, right through the ceiling of Floor 34, and directly through a ragged punch-hole in the aluminum roof of Lyle’s cable-mounted mobile home. Some unknown contact of Eddy’s was paying the real bills on that electrical feed. Lyle cheerfully covered the expenses by paying cash into an anonymous post-office box. The setup was a rare and valuable contact with the world of organized authority.

During his stays in the shop, Eddy had spent much of his time buried in marathon long-distance virtuality sessions, swaddled head to foot in lumpy strap-on gear. Eddy had been painfully involved with some older woman in Germany. A virtual romance in its full-scale thumping, heaving, grappling progress, was an embarrassment to witness. Under the circumstances, Lyle wasn’t too surprised that Eddy had left his parents’ condo to set up in a squat.

Eddy had lived in the bicycle repair shop, off and on, for almost a year. It had been a good deal for Lyle, because Deep Eddy had enjoyed a certain clout and prestige with the local squatters. Eddy had been a major organizer of the legendary Chattanooga Wende of December ’35, a monster street-party that had climaxed in a spectacular looting-and-arson rampage that had torched the three floors of the Archiplat.

Lyle had gone to school with Eddy and had known him for years; they’d grown up together in the Archiplat. Eddy Dertouzas was a deep zude for a kid his age, with political contacts and heavy-duty network connections. The squat had been a good deal for both of them, until Eddy had finally coaxed the German woman into coming through for him in real life. Then Eddy had jumped the next plane to Europe.

Since they’d parted friends, Eddy was welcome to mail his European data-junk to the bike shop. After all, the disks were heavily encrypted, so it wasn’t as if anybody in authority was ever gonna be able to read them. Storing a few thousand disks was a minor challenge, compared to Eddy’s complex, machine-assisted love life.

After Eddy’s sudden departure, Lyle had sold Eddy’s possessions, and wired the money to Eddy in Spain. Lyle had kept the screen TV, Eddy’s mediator, and the cheaper virching helmet. The way Lyle figured it—the way he remembered the deal—any stray hardware of Eddy’s in the shop was rightfully his, for disposal at his own discretion. By now it was pretty clear that Deep Eddy Dertouzas was never coming back to Tennessee. And Lyle had certain debts.

Lyle snicked the blade from a roadkit multitool and cut open Eddy’s package. It contained, of all things, a television cable settop box. A laughable infobahn antique. You’d never see a cablebox like that in NAFTA; this was the sort of primeval junk one might find in the home of a semiliterate Basque grandmother, or maybe in the armed bunker of some backward Albanian.

Lyle tossed the archaic cablebox onto the beanbag in front of the wallscreen. No time now for irrelevant media toys; he had to get on with real life. Lyle ducked into the tiny curtained privy and urinated at length into a crockery jar. He scraped his teeth with a flossing spudger and misted some fresh water onto his face and hands. He wiped clean with a towelette, then smeared his armpits, crotch, and feet with deodorant.

Back when he’d lived with his mom up on Floor 41, Lyle had used old-fashioned antiseptic deodorants. Lyle had wised up about a lot of things once he’d escaped his mom’s condo. Nowadays, Lyle used a gel roll-on of skin-friendly bacteria that greedily devoured human sweat and exuded as their metabolic by-product a pleasantly harmless reek rather like ripe bananas. Life was a lot easier when you came to proper terms with your microscopic flora.

Back at his workbench, Lyle plugged in the hot plate and boiled some Thai noodles with flaked sardines. He packed down breakfast with 400 cc’s of Dr. Breasaire’s Bioactive Bowel Putty. Then he checked last night’s enamel job on the clamped frame in the workstand. The frame looked good. At three in the morning, Lyle was able to get into painted detail work with just the right kind of hallucinatory clarity.

Enameling paid well, and he needed the money bad. But this wasn’t real bike work. It lacked authenticity. Enameling was all about the owner’s ego—that was what really stank about enameling. There were a few rich kids up in the penthouse levels who were way into “street aesthetic,” and would pay good money to have some treadhead decorate their machine. But flash art didn’t help the bike. What helped the bike was frame alignment and sound cable-housings and proper tension in the derailleurs.

Lyle fitted the chain of his stationary bike to the shop’s flywheel, straddled up, strapped on his gloves and virching helmet, and did half an hour on the 2033 Tour de France. He stayed back in the pack for the uphill grind, and then, for three glorious minutes, he broke free from the domestiques in the peloton and came right up at the shoulder of Aldo Cipollini. The champion was a monster, posthuman. Calves like cinderblocks. Even in a cheap simulation with no full-impact bodysuit, Lyle knew better than to try to take Cipollini.

Lyle devirched, checked his heart-rate record on the chronometer, then dismounted from his stationary trainer and drained a half-liter squeezebottle of antioxidant carbo refresher. Life had been easier when he’d had a partner in crime. The shop’s flywheel was slowly losing its storage of inertia power these days, with just one zude pumping it.

Lyle’s disastrous second roommate had come from the biking crowd. She was a criterium racer from Kentucky named Brigitte Rohannon. Lyle himself had been a wannabe criterium racer for a while, before he’d blown out a kidney on steroids. He hadn’t expected any trouble from Brigitte, because Brigitte knew about bikes, and she needed his technical help for her racer, and she wouldn’t mind pumping the flywheel, and besides, Brigitte was lesbian. In the training gym and out at racing events, Brigitte came across as a quiet and disciplined little politicized treadhead person.

Life inside the zone, though, massively fertilized Brigitte’s eccentricities. First, she started breaking training. Then she stopped eating right. Pretty soon the shop was creaking and rocking with all-night girl-on-girl hot-oil sessions, which degenerated into hooting pill-orgies with heavily tattooed zone chyx who played klaxonized bongo music and beat each other up, and stole Lyle’s tools. It had been a big relief when Brigitte finally left the zone to shack up with some well-to-do admirer on Floor 37. The debacle had left Lyle’s tenuous finances in ruin.

Lyle laid down a new tracery of scarlet enamel on the bike’s chainstay, seat post and stem. He had to wait for the work to cure, so he left the workbench, picked up Eddy’s settopper and popped the shell with a hexkey. Lyle was no electrician, but the insides looked harmless enough: lots of bit-eating caterpillars and cheap Algerian silicon.

He flicked on Eddy’s mediator, to boot the wallscreen. Before he could try anything with the cablebox, his mother’s mook pounced upon the screen. On Eddy’s giant wallscreen, the mook’s waxy, computer-generated face looked like a plump satin pillowcase. Its bowtie was as big as a racing shoe.

“Please hold for an incoming vidcall from Andrea Schweik of Carnac Instruments,” the mook uttered unctuously.

Lyle cordially despised all low-down, phone-tagging, artificially intelligent mooks. For a while, in his teenage years, Lyle himself had owned a mook, an off-the-shelf shareware job that he’d installed in the condo’s phone. Like most mooks, Lyle’s mook had one primary role: dealing with unsolicited phone calls from other people’s mooks. In Lyle’s case these were the creepy mooks of career counselors, school psychiatrists, truancy cops, and other official hindrances. When Lyle’s mook launched and ran, it appeared online as a sly warty dwarf that drooled green ichor and talked in a basso grumble.

But Lyle hadn’t given his mook the properly meticulous care and debugging that such fragile little constructs demanded, and eventually his cheap mook had collapsed into artificial insanity.

Once Lyle had escaped his mom’s place to the squat, he had gone for the low-tech gambit and simply left his phone unplugged most of the time. But that was no real solution. He couldn’t hide from his mother’s capable and well-financed corporate mook, which watched with sleepless mechanical patience for the least flicker of video dialtone off Lyle’s number.

Lyle sighed and wiped the dust from the video nozzle on Eddy’s mediator.

“Your mother is coming online right away,” the mook assured him.

“Yeah, sure,” Lyle muttered, smearing his hair into some semblance of order.

“She specifically instructed me to page her remotely at any time for an immediate response. She really wants to chat with you, Lyle.”

“That’s just great.” Lyle couldn’t remember what his mother’s mook called itself. “Mr. Billy,” or “Mr. Ripley,” or something else really stupid. . . .

“Did you know that Marco Cengialta has just won the Liege Summer Classic?”

Lyle blinked and sat up in the beanbag. “Yeah?”

“Mr. Cengialta used a three-spoked ceramic wheel with internal liquid weighting and buckyball hubshocks.” The mook paused, politely awaiting a possible conversational response. “He wore breathe-thru kevlar microlock cleatshoes,” it added.

Lyle hated the way a mook cataloged your personal interests and then generated relevant conversation. The machine-made intercourse was completely unhuman and yet perversely interesting, like being grabbed and buttonholed by a glossy magazine ad. It had probably taken his mother’s mook all of three seconds to snag and download every conceivable statistic about the summer race in Liege.

His mother came on. She’d caught him during lunch in her office. “Lyle?”

“Hi, Mom.” Lyle sternly reminded himself that this was the one person in the world who might conceivably put up bail for him. “What’s on your mind?”

“Oh, nothing much, just the usual.” Lyle’s mother shoved aside her platter of sprouts and tilapia. “I was idly wondering if you were still alive.”

“Mom, it’s a lot less dangerous in a squat than landlords and cops would have you believe. I’m perfectly fine. You can see that for yourself.”

His mother lifted a pair of secretarial half-spex on a neck-chain, and gave Lyle the computer-assisted once-over.

Lyle pointed the mediator’s lens at the shop’s aluminum door. “See over there, Mom? I got myself a shock-baton in here. If I get any trouble from anybody, I’ll just yank that club off the doormount and give the guy fifteen thousand volts!”

“Is that legal, Lyle?”

“Sure. The voltage won’t kill you or anything, it just knocks you out a good long time. I traded a good bike for that shock-baton, it’s got a lot of useful defensive features.”

“That sounds really dreadful.”

“The baton’s harmless, Mom. You should see what the cops carry nowadays.”

“Are you still taking those injections, Lyle?”

“Which injections?”

She frowned. “You know which ones.”

Lyle shrugged. “The treatments are perfectly safe. They’re a lot safer than a lifestyle of cruising for dates, that’s for sure.”

“Especially dates with the kind of girls who live down there in the riot zone, I suppose.” His mother winced. “I had some hopes when you took up with that nice bike-racer girl. Brigitte, wasn’t it? Whatever happened to her?”

Lyle shook his head. “Someone with your gender and background oughta understand how important the treatments are, Mom. It’s a basic reproductive-freedom issue. Antilibidinals give you real freedom, freedom from the urge to reproduce. You should be glad I’m not sexually involved.”

“I don’t mind that you’re not involved, Lyle, it’s just that it seems like a real cheat that you’re not even interested.”

“But, Mom, nobody’s interested in me, either. Nobody. No woman is banging at my door to have sex with a self-employed fanatical dropout bike mechanic who lives in a slum. If that ever happens, you’ll be the first to know.”

Lyle grinned cheerfully into the lens. “I had girlfriends back when I was in racing. I’ve been there, Mom. I’ve done that. Unless you’re coked to the gills with hormones, sex is a major waste of your time and attention. Sexual Deliberation is the greatest civil-liberties movement of modern times.”

“That’s really weird, Lyle. It’s just not natural.”

“Mom, forgive me, but you’re not the one to talk about natural, okay? You grew me from a zygote when you were fifty-five.” He shrugged. “I’m too busy for romance now. I just want to learn about bikes.”

“You were working with bikes when you lived here with me. You had a real job and a safe home where you could take regular showers.”

“Sure, I was working, but I never said I wanted a job, Mom. I said I wanted to learn about bikes. There’s a big difference! I can’t be a loser wage-slave for some lousy bike franchise.”

His mother said nothing.

“Mom, I’m not asking you for any favors. I don’t need any bosses, or any teachers, or any landlords, or any cops. It’s just me and my bike work down here. I know that people in authority can’t stand it that a twenty-four-year-old man lives an independent life and does exactly what he wants, but I’m being very quiet and discreet about it, so nobody needs to bother about me.”

His mother sighed, defeated. “Are you eating properly, Lyle? You look peaked.”

Lyle lifted his calf muscle into camera range. “Look at this leg! Does that look like the gastrocnemius of a weak and sickly person?”

“Could you come up to the condo and have a decent meal with me sometime?”

Lyle blinked. “When?”

“Wednesday, maybe? We could have pork chops.”

“Maybe, Mom. Probably. I’ll have to check. I’ll get back to you, okay? Bye.” Lyle hung up.

Hooking the mediator’s cable to the primitive settop box was a problem, but Lyle was not one to be stymied by a merely mechanical challenge. The enamel job had to wait as he resorted to miniclamps and a cable cutter. It was a handy thing that working with modern brake cabling had taught him how to splice fiber optics.

When the settop box finally came online, its array of services was a joke. Any decent modern mediator could navigate through vast information spaces, but the settop box offered nothing but “channels.” Lyle had forgotten that you could even obtain old-fashioned “channels” from the city fiber-feed in Chattanooga. But these channels were government-sponsored media, and the government was always quite a ways behind the curve in network development. Chattanooga’s huge fiber-band-width still carried the ancient government-mandated “public access channels,” spooling away in their technically fossilized obscurity, far below the usual gaudy carnival of popular virching, infobahnage, demo-splintered comboards, public-service rants, mudtrufflage, remsnorkeling, and commercials.

The little settop box accessed nothing but political channels. Three of them: Legislative, Judicial, and Executive. And that was the sum total, apparently. A settop box that offered nothing but NAFTA political coverage. On the Legislative Channel there was some kind of parliamentary debate on proper land use in Manitoba. On the Judicial Channel, a lawyer was haranguing judges about the stock market for air-pollution rights. On the Executive Channel, a big crowd of hicks were idly standing around on windblown tarmac somewhere in Louisiana waiting for something to happen.

The box didn’t offer any glimpse of politics in Europe or the Sphere or the South. There were no hotspots or pips or index tagging. You couldn’t look stuff up or annotate it—you just had to passively watch whatever the channel’s masters chose to show you, whenever they chose to show it. This media setup was so insultingly lame and halt and primitive that it was almost perversely interesting. Kind of like peering through keyholes.

Lyle left the box on the Executive Channel, because it looked conceivable that something might actually happen there. It had swiftly become clear to him that the intolerably monotonous fodder on the other two channels was about as exciting as those channels ever got. Lyle retreated to his workbench and got back to enamel work.

At length, the President of NAFTA arrived and decamped from his helicopter on the tarmac in Louisiana. A swarm of presidential bodyguards materialized out of the expectant crowd, looking simultaneously extremely busy and icily unperturbable.

Suddenly a line of text flickered up at the bottom of the screen. The text was set in a very old-fashioned computer font, chalk-white letters with little visible jagged pixel-edges. “Look at him hunting for that camera mark,” the subtitle read as it scrolled across the screen. “Why wasn’t he briefed properly? He looks like a stray dog!”

The President meandered amiably across the sunblistered tarmac, gazing from side to side, and then stopped briefly to shake the eager outstretched hand of a local politician. “That must have hurt,” commented the text. “That Cajun dolt is poison in the polls.” The President chatted amiably with the local politician and an elderly harridan in a purple dress who seemed to be the man’s wife. “Get him away from those losers!” raged the subtitle. “Get the Man up to the podium, for the love of Mike! Where’s the Chief of Staff? Doped up on so-called smart drugs as usual? Get with your jobs, people!”

The President looked well. Lyle had noticed that the President of NAFTA always looked well, it seemed to be a professional requirement. The big political cheeses in Europe always looked somber and intellectual, and the Sphere people always looked humble and dedicated, and the South people always looked angry and fanatical, but the NAFTA prez always looked like he’d just done a few laps in a pool and had a brisk rubdown. His large, glossy, bluffly cheerful face was discreetly stenciled with tattoos: both cheeks, a chorus line of tats on his forehead above both eyebrows, plus a few extra logos on his rocklike chin. A President’s face was the ultimate bill-board for major backers and interest groups.

“Does he think we have all day?” the text demanded. “What’s with this dead air time? Can’t anyone properly arrange a media event these days? You call this public access? You call this informing the electorate? If we’d known the infobahn would come to this, we’d have never built the thing!”

The President meandered amiably to a podium covered with ceremonial microphones. Lyle had noticed that politicians always used a big healthy cluster of traditional big fat microphones, even though nowadays you could build working microphones the size of a grain of rice.

“Hey, how y’all?” asked the President, grinning.

The crowd chorused back at him, with ragged enthusiasm.

“Let these fine folks up a bit closer,” the President ordered suddenly, waving airily at his phalanx of bodyguards. “Y’all come on up closer, everybody! Sit right on the ground, we’re all just folks here today.” The President smiled benignly as the sweating, straw-hatted summer crowd hustled up to join him, scarcely believing their luck.

“Marietta and I just had a heck of a fine lunch down in Opelousas,” commented the President, patting his flat, muscular belly. He deserted the fiction of his official podium to energetically press the Louisianan flesh. As he moved from hand to grasping hand, his every word was picked up infallibly by an invisible mike, probably implanted in one of his molars. “We had dirty rice, red beans—were they hot!—and crawdads big enough to body-slam a Maine lobster!” He chuckled. “What a sight them mudbugs were! Can y’all believe that?”

The President’s guards were unobtrusively but methodically working the crowd with portable detectors and sophisticated spex equipment. They didn’t look very concerned by the President’s supposed change in routine.

“I see he’s gonna run with the usual genetics malarkey,” commented the subtitle.

“Y’all have got a perfect right to be mighty proud of the agriculture in this state,” intoned the President. “Y’all’s agro-science know-how is second to none! Sure, I know there’s a few pointy-headed Luddites up in the snowbelt, who say they prefer their crawdads dinky.”

Everyone laughed.

“Folks, I got nothin’ against that attitude. If some jasper wants to spend his hard-earned money buyin’ and peelin’ and shuckin’ those little dinky ones, that’s all right by me and Marietta. Ain’t that right, honey?”

The First Lady smiled and waved one power-gloved hand.

“But folks, you and I both know that those whiners who waste our time complaining about ‘natural food’ have never sucked a mudbug head in their lives! ‘Natural,’ my left elbow! Who are they tryin’ to kid? Just ‘cause you’re country, don’t mean you can’t hack DNA!”

“He’s been working really hard on the regional accents,” commented the text. “Not bad for a guy from Minnesota. But look at that sloppy, incompetent camera work! Doesn’t anybody care anymore? What on earth is happening to our standards?”

By lunchtime, Lyle had the final coat down on the enameling job. He ate a bowl of triticale mush and chewed up a mineral-rich handful of iodized sponge.

Then he settled down in front of the wallscreen to work on the inertia brake. Lyle knew there was big money in the inertia brake—for somebody, somewhere, sometime. The device smelled like the future.

Lyle tucked a jeweler’s loupe in one eye and toyed methodically with the brake. He loved the way the piezoplastic clamp and rim transmuted braking energy into electrical battery storage. At last, a way to capture the energy you lost in braking and put it to solid use. It was almost, but not quite, magical.

The way Lyle figured it, there was gonna be a big market someday for an inertia brake that captured energy and then fed it back through the chaindrive in a way that just felt like human pedaling energy, in a direct and intuitive and muscular way, not chunky and buzzy like some loser battery-powered moped. If the system worked out right, it would make the rider feel completely natural and yet subtly superhuman at the same time. And it had to be simple, the kind of system a shop guy could fix with hand tools. It wouldn’t work if it was too brittle and fancy, it just wouldn’t feel like an authentic bike.

Lyle had a lot of ideas about the design. He was pretty sure he could get a real grip on the problem, if only he weren’t being worked to death just keeping the shop going. If he could get enough capital together to assemble the prototypes and do some serious field tests.

It would have to be chip-driven, of course, but true to the biking spirit at the same time. A lot of bikes had chips in them nowadays, in the shocks or the braking or in reactive hubs, but bicycles simply weren’t like computers. Computers were black boxes inside, no big visible working parts. People, by contrast, got sentimental about their bike gear. People were strangely reticent and traditional about bikes. That’s why the bike market had never really gone for recumbents, even though the recumbent design had a big mechanical advantage. People didn’t like their bikes too complicated. They didn’t want bicycles to bitch and complain and whine for attention and constant upgrading the way that computers did. Bikes were too personal. People wanted their bikes to wear.

Someone banged at the shop door.

Lyle opened it. Down on the tiling by the barrels stood a tall brunette woman in stretch shorts, with a short-sleeve blue pull-over and a ponytail. She had a bike under one arm, an old lacquer-and-paper-framed Taiwanese job. “Are you Edward Dertouzas?” she said, gazing up at him.

“No,” Lyle said patiently. “Eddy’s in Europe.”

She thought this over. “I’m new in the zone,” she confessed. “Can you fix this bike for me? I just bought it secondhand and I think it kinda needs some work.”

“Sure,” Lyle said. “You came to the right guy for that job, ma’am, because Eddy Dertouzas couldn’t fix a bike for hell. Eddy just used to live here. I’m the guy who actually owns this shop. Hand the bike up.”

Lyle crouched down, got a grip on the handlebar stem and hauled the bike into the shop. The woman gazed up at him respectfully. “What’s your name?”

“Lyle Schweik.”

“I’m Kitty Casaday.” She hesitated. “Could I come up inside there?”

Lyle reached down, gripped her muscular wrist, and hauled her up into the shop. She wasn’t all that good looking, but she was in really good shape—like a mountain biker or triathlon runner. She looked about thirtyfive. It was hard to tell, exactly. Once people got into cosmetic surgery and serious bio-maintenance, it got pretty hard to judge their age. Unless you got a good, close medical exam of their eyelids and cuticles and internal membranes and such.

She looked around the shop with great interest, brown ponytail twitching. “Where you hail from?” Lyle asked her. He had already forgotten her name.

“Well, I’m originally from Juneau, Alaska.”

“Canadian, huh? Great. Welcome to Tennessee.”

“Actually, Alaska used to be part of the United States.”

“You’re kidding,” Lyle said. “Hey, I’m no historian, but I’ve seen Alaska on a map before.”

“You’ve got a whole working shop and everything built inside this old place! That’s really something, Mr. Schweik. What’s behind that curtain?”

“The spare room,” Lyle said. “That’s where my roommate used to stay.”

She glanced up. “Dertouzas?”

“Yeah, him.”

“Who’s in there now?”

“Nobody,” Lyle said sadly. “I got some storage stuff in there.”

She nodded slowly, and kept looking around, apparently galvanized with curiosity. “What are you running on that screen?”

“Hard to say, really,” Lyle said. He crossed the room, bent down and switched off the settop box. “Some kind of weird political crap.”

He began examining her bike. All its serial numbers had been removed. Typical zone bike.

“The first thing we got to do,” he said briskly, “is fit it to you properly: set the saddle height, pedal stroke, and handlebars. Then I’ll adjust the tension, true the wheels, check the brakepads and suspension valves, tune the shifting, and lubricate the drive-train. The usual. You’re gonna need a better saddle than this—this saddle’s for a male pelvis.” He looked up. “You got a charge card?”

She nodded, then frowned. “But I don’t have much credit left.”

“No problem.” He flipped open a dog-eared catalog. “This is what you need. Any halfway decent gel-saddle. Pick one you like, and we can have it shipped in by tomorrow morning. And then”—he flipped pages—“order me one of these.”

She stepped closer and examined the page. “The ‘cotterless crank-bolt ceramic wrench set,’ is that it?”

“That’s right. I fix your bike, you give me those tools, and we’re even.”

“Okay. Sure. That’s cheap!” She smiled at him. “I like the way you do business, Lyle.”

“You’ll get used to barter, if you stay in the zone long enough.”

“I’ve never lived in a squat before,” she said thoughtfully. “I like the attitude here, but people say that squats are pretty dangerous.”

“I dunno about the squats in other towns, but Chattanooga squats aren’t dangerous, unless you think anarchists are dangerous, and anarchists aren’t dangerous unless they’re really drunk.” Lyle shrugged. “People will steal your stuff all the time, that’s about the worst part. There’s a couple of tough guys around here who claim they have handguns. I never saw anybody actually use a handgun. Old guns aren’t hard to find, but it takes a real chemist to make working ammo nowadays.” He smiled back at her. “Anyway, you look to me like you can take care of yourself.”

“I take dance classes.”

Lyle nodded. He opened a drawer and pulled a tape measure.

“I saw all those cables and pulleys you have on top of this place. You can pull the whole building right up off the ground, huh? Kind of hang it right off the ceiling up there.”

“That’s right, it saves a lot of trouble with people breaking and entering.” Lyle glanced at his shock-baton, in its mounting at the door. She followed his gaze to the weapon and then looked at him, impressed.

Lyle measured her arms, torso length, then knelt and measured her inseam from crotch to floor. He took notes. “Okay,” he said. “Come by tomorrow afternoon.”

“Lyle?”

“Yeah?” He stood up.

“Do you rent this place out? I really need a safe place to stay in the zone.”

“I’m sorry,” Lyle said politely, “but I hate landlords and I’d never be one. What I need is a roommate who can really get behind the whole concept of my shop. Someone who’s qualified, you know, to develop my infrastructure or do bicycle work. Anyway, if I took your cash or charged you for rent, then the tax people would just have another excuse to harass me.”

“Sure, okay, but . . .” She paused, then looked at him under lowered eyelids. “I’ve gotta be a lot better than having this place go empty.”

Lyle stared at her, astonished.

“I’m a pretty useful woman to have around, Lyle. Nobody’s ever complained before.”

“Really?”

“That’s right.” She stared at him boldly.

“I’ll think about your offer,” Lyle said. “What did you say your name was?”

“I’m Kitty. Kitty Casaday.”

“Kitty, I got a whole lot of work to do today, but I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay, Lyle.” She smiled. “You think about me, all right?”

Lyle helped her down out of the shop. He watched her stride away across the atrium until she vanished through the crowded doorway of the Crowbar, a squat coffeeshop. Then he called his mother.

“Did you forget something?” his mother said, looking up from her workscreen.

“Mom, I know this is really hard to believe, but a strange woman just banged on my door and offered to have sex with me.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“In exchange for room and board, I think. Anyway, I said you’d be the first to know if it happened.”

“Lyle—” His mother hesitated. “Lyle, I think you better come right home. Let’s make that dinner date for tonight, okay? We’ll have a little talk about this situation.”

“Yeah, okay. I got an enameling job I gotta deliver to Floor 41, anyway.”

“I don’t have a positive feeling about this development, Lyle.”

“That’s okay, Mom. I’ll see you tonight.”

Lyle reassembled the newly enameled bike. Then he set the flywheel onto remote, and stepped outside the shop. He mounted the bike, and touched a password into the remote control. The shop faithfully reeled itself far out of reach and hung there in space below the fire-blackened ceiling, swaying gently.

Lyle pedaled away, back toward the elevators, back toward the neighborhood where he’d grown up.

He delivered the bike to the delighted young idiot who’d commissioned it, stuffed the cash in his shoes, and then went down to his mother’s. He took a shower, shaved, and shampooed thoroughly. They had pork chops and grits and got drunk together. His mother complained about the breakup with her third husband and wept bitterly, but not as much as usual when this topic came up. Lyle got the strong impression she was thoroughly on the mend and would be angling for number four in pretty short order.

Around midnight, Lyle refused his mother’s ritual offers of new clothes and fresh leftovers, and headed back down to the zone. He was still a little clubfooted from his mother’s sherry, and he stood breathing beside the broken glass of the atrium wall, gazing out at the city-smeared summer stars. The cavernous darkness inside the zone at night was one of his favorite things about the place. The queasy 24-hour security lighting in the rest of the Archiplat had never been rebuilt inside the zone.

The zone always got livelier at night when all the normal people started sneaking in to cruise the zone’s unlicensed dives and nightspots, but all that activity took place behind discreetly closed doors. Enticing squiggles of red and blue chemglow here and there only enhanced the blessed unnatural gloom.

Lyle pulled his remote control and ordered the shop back down.

The door of the shop had been broken open.

Lyle’s latest bike-repair client lay sprawled on the floor of the shop, unconscious. She was wearing black military fatigues, a knit cap, and rappelling gear.

She had begun her break-in at Lyle’s establishment by pulling his shock-baton out of its glowing security socket beside the doorframe. The booby-trapped baton had immediately put fifteen thousand volts through her, and sprayed her face with a potent mix of dye and street-legal incapacitants.

Lyle turned the baton off with the remote control, and then placed it carefully back in its socket. His surprise guest was still breathing, but was clearly in real metabolic distress. He tried clearing her nose and mouth with a tissue. The guys who’d sold him the baton hadn’t been kidding about the “indelible” part. Her face and throat were drenched with green and her chest looked like a spin-painting.

Her elaborate combat spex had partially shielded her eyes. With the spex off she looked like a viridian-green raccoon.

Lyle tried stripping her gear off in conventional fashion, realized this wasn’t going to work, and got a pair of metal-shears from the shop. He snipped his way through the eerily writhing power-gloves and the kevlar laces of the pneumoreactive combat boots. Her black turtleneck had an abrasive surface and a cuirass over chest and back that looked like it could stop small-arms fire.

The trousers had nineteen separate pockets and they were loaded with all kinds of eerie little items: a matteblack electrode stun-weapon, flash capsules, fingerprint dust, a utility pocket-knife, drug adhesives, plastic handcuffs, some pocket change, worry beads, a comb, and a makeup case.

Close inspection revealed a pair of tiny microphone amplifiers inserted in her ear canals. Lyle fetched the tiny devices out with needlenose pliers. Lyle was getting pretty seriously concerned by this point. He shackled her arms and legs with bike security cable, in case she regained consciousness and attempted something superhuman.

Around four in the morning she had a coughing fit and began shivering violently. Summer nights could get pretty cold in the shop. Lyle thought over the design problem for some time, and then fetched a big heat-reflective blanket out of the empty room. He cut a neat poncho-hole in the center of it, and slipped her head through it. He got the bike cables off her—she could probably slip the cables anyway—and sewed all four edges of the blanket shut from the outside, with sturdy monofilament thread from his saddle-stitcher. He sewed the poncho edges to a tough fabric belt, cinched the belt snugly around her neck, and padlocked it. When he was done, he’d made a snug bag that contained her entire body, except for her head, which had begun to drool and snore.

A fat blob of superglue on the bottom of the bag kept her anchored to the shop’s floor. The blanket was cheap but tough upholstery fabric. If she could rip her way through blanket fabric with her fingernails alone, then he was probably a goner anyway. By now, Lyle was tired and stone sober. He had a squeezebottle of glucose rehydrator, three aspirins, and a canned chocolate pudding. Then he climbed in his hammock and went to sleep.

Lyle woke up around ten. His captive was sitting up inside the bag, her green face stony, eyes red-rimmed and brown hair caked with dye. Lyle got up, dressed, ate breakfast, and fixed the broken door-lock. He said nothing, partly because he thought that silence would shake her up, but mostly because he couldn’t remember her name. He was almost sure it wasn’t her real name anyway.

When he’d finished fixing the door, he reeled up the string of the doorknocker so that it was far out of reach. He figured the two of them needed the privacy.

Then Lyle deliberately fired up the wallscreen and turned on the settop box. As soon as the peculiar subtitles started showing up again, she grew agitated.

“Who are you really?” she demanded at last.

“Ma’am, I’m a bicycle repairman.”

She snorted.

“I guess I don’t need to know your name,” he said, “but I need to know who your people are, and why they sent you here, and what I’ve got to do to get out of this situation.”

“You’re not off to a good start, mister.”

“No,” he said, “maybe not, but you’re the one who’s blown it. I’m just a twenty-four-year-old bicycle repairman from Tennessee. But you, you’ve got enough specialized gear on you to buy my whole place five times over.”

He flipped open the little mirror in her makeup case and showed her her own face. Her scowl grew a little stiffer below the spattering of green.

“I want you to tell me what’s going on here,” he said.

“Forget it.”

“If you’re waiting for your backup to come rescue you, I don’t think they’re coming,” Lyle said. “I searched you very thoroughly and I’ve opened up every single little gadget you had, and I took all the batteries out. I’m not even sure what some of those things are or how they work, but hey, I know what a battery is. It’s been hours now. So I don’t think your backup people even know where you are.”

She said nothing.

“See,” he said, “you’ve really blown it bad. You got caught by a total amateur, and now you’re in a hostage situation that could go on indefinitely. I got enough water and noodles and sardines to live up here for days. I dunno, maybe you can make a cellular phone-call to God off some gizmo implanted in your thighbone, but it looks to me like you’ve got serious problems.”

She shuffled around a bit inside the bag and looked away.

“It’s got something to do with the cablebox over there, right?”

She said nothing.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think that box has anything to do with me or Eddy Dertouzas,” Lyle said. “I think it was probably meant for Eddy, but I don’t think he asked anybody for it. Somebody just wanted him to have it, probably one of his weird European contacts. Eddy used to be in this political group called CAPCLUG, ever heard of them?”

It looked pretty obvious that she’d heard of them.

“I never liked ’em much either,” Lyle told her. “They kind of snagged me at first with their big talk about freedom and civil liberties, but then you’d go to a CAPCLUG meeting up in the penthouse levels, and there were all these potbellied zudes in spex yapping off stuff like, ‘We must follow the technological imperatives or be jettisoned into the history dump-file.’ They’re a bunch of useless blowhards who can’t tie their own shoes.”

“They’re dangerous radicals subverting national sovereignty.”

Lyle blinked cautiously. “Whose national sovereignty would that be?”

“Yours, mine, Mr. Schweik. I’m from NAFTA, I’m a federal agent.”

“You’re a fed? How come you’re breaking into people’s houses, then? Isn’t that against the Fourth Amendment or something?”

“If you mean the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, that document was superseded years ago.”

“Yeah . . . okay, I guess you’re right.” Lyle shrugged. “I missed a lot of civics classes. . . . No skin off my back anyway. I’m sorry, but what did you say your name was?”

“I said my name was Kitty Casaday.”

“Right. Kitty. Okay, Kitty, just you and me, person to person. We obviously have a mutual problem here. What do you think I ought to do in this situation? I mean, speaking practically.”

Kitty thought it over, surprised. “Mr. Schweik, you should release me immediately, get me my gear, and give me the box and any related data, recordings, or diskettes. Then you should escort me from the Archiplat in some confidential fashion so I won’t be stopped by police and questioned about the dye-stains. A new set of clothes would be very useful.”

“Like that, huh?”

“That’s your wisest course of action.” Her eyes narrowed. “I can’t make any promises, but it might affect your future treatment very favorably.”

“You’re not gonna tell me who you are, or where you came from, or who sent you, or what this is all about?”

“No. Under no circumstances. I’m not allowed to reveal that. You don’t need to know. You’re not supposed to know. And anyway, if you’re really what you say you are, what should you care?”

“Plenty. I care plenty. I can’t wander around the rest of my life wondering when you’re going to jump me out of a dark corner.”

“If I’d wanted to hurt you, I’d have hurt you when we first met, Mr. Schweik. There was no one here but you and me, and I could have easily incapacitated you and taken anything I wanted. Just give me the box and the data and stop trying to interrogate me.”

“Suppose you found me breaking into your house, Kitty? What would you do to me?”

She said nothing.

“What you’re telling me isn’t gonna work. If you don’t tell me what’s really going on here,” Lyle said heavily, “I’m gonna have to get tough.”

Her lips thinned in contempt.

“Okay, you asked for this.” Lyle opened the mediator and made a quick voice call. “Pete?”

“Nah, this is Pete’s mook,” the phone replied. “Can I do something for you?”

“Could you tell Pete that Lyle Schweik has some big trouble, and I need him to come over to my bike shop immediately? And bring some heavy muscle from the Spiders.”

“What kind of big trouble, Lyle?”

“Authority trouble. A lot of it. I can’t say any more. I think this line may be tapped.”

“Right-o. I’ll make that happen. Hoo-ah, zude.” The mook hung up.

Lyle left the beanbag and went back to the workbench. He took Kitty’s cheap bike out of the repair stand and angrily threw it aside. “You know what really bugs me?” he said at last. “You couldn’t even bother to charm your way in here, set yourself up as my room-mate, and then steal the damn box. You didn’t even respect me that much. Heck, you didn’t even have to steal anything, Kitty. You could have just smiled and asked nicely and I’d have given you the box to play with. I don’t watch media, I hate all that crap.”

“It was an emergency. There was no time for more extensive investigation or reconnaissance. I think you should call your gangster friends immediately and tell them you’ve made a mistake. Tell them not to come here.”

“You’re ready to talk seriously?”

“No, I won’t be talking.”

“Okay, we’ll see.”

After twenty minutes, Lyle’s phone rang. He answered it cautiously, keeping the video off. It was Pete from the City Spiders. “Zude, where is your doorknocker?”

“Oh, sorry, I pulled it up, didn’t want to be disturbed. I’ll bring the shop right down.” Lyle thumbed the brake switches.

Lyle opened the door and Pete broad-jumped into the shop. Pete was a big man but he had the skeletal, wiry build of a climber, bare dark arms and shins and big sticky-toed jumping shoes. He had a sleeveless leather bodysuit full of clips and snaps, and he carried a big fabric shoulderbag. There were six vivid tattoos on the dark skin of his left cheek, under the black stubble.

Pete looked at Kitty, lifted his spex with wiry callused fingers, looked at her again bare-eyed, and put the spex back in place. “Wow, Lyle.”

“Yeah.”

“I never thought you were into anything this sick and twisted.”

“It’s a serious matter, Pete.”

Pete turned to the door, crouched down, and hauled a second person into the shop. She wore a beat-up air-conditioned jacket and long slacks and zipsided boots and wire-rimmed spex. She had short ratty hair under a green cloche hat. “Hi,” she said, sticking out a hand. “I’m Mabel. We haven’t met.”

“I’m Lyle.” Lyle gestured. “This is Kitty here in the bag.”

“You said you needed somebody heavy, so I brought Mabel along,” said Pete. “Mabel’s a social worker.”

“Looks like you pretty much got things under control here,” said Mabel liltingly, scratching her neck and looking about the place. “What happened? She break into your shop?”

“Yeah.”

“And,” Pete said, “she grabbed the shock-baton first thing and blasted herself but good?”

“Exactly.”

“I told you that thieves always go for the weaponry first,” Pete said, grinning and scratching his armpit. “Didn’t I tell you that? Leave a weapon in plain sight, man, a thief can’t stand it, it’s the very first thing they gotta grab.” He laughed. “Works every time.”

“Pete’s from the City Spiders,” Lyle told Kitty. “His people built this shop for me. One dark night, they hauled this mobile home right up thirty-four stories in total darkness, straight up the side of the Archiplat without anybody seeing, and they cut a big hole through the side of the building without making any noise, and they hauled the whole shop through it. Then they sank explosive bolts through the girders and hung it up here for me in midair. The City Spiders are into sport-climbing the way I’m into bicycles, only, like, they are very seriously into climbing and there are lots of them. They were some of the very first people to squat the zone, and they’ve lived here ever since, and they are pretty good friends of mine.”

Pete sank to one knee and looked Kitty in the eye. “I love breaking into places, don’t you? There’s no thrill like some quick and perfectly executed break-in.” He reached casually into his shoulderbag. “The thing is”—he pulled out a camera—“to be sporting, you can’t steal anything. You just take trophy pictures to prove you were there.” He snapped her picture several times, grinning as she flinched.

“Lady,” he breathed at her, “once you’ve turned into a little wicked greedhead, and mixed all that evil cupidity and possessiveness into the beauty of the direct action, then you’ve prostituted our way of life. You’ve gone and spoiled our sport.” Pete stood up. “We City Spiders don’t like common thieves. And we especially don’t like thieves who break into the places of clients of ours, like Lyle here. And we thoroughly, especially, don’t like thieves who are so brickhead dumb that they get caught red-handed on the premises of friends of ours.”

Pete’s hairy brows knotted in thought. “What I’d like to do here, Lyle ol’ buddy,” he announced, “is wrap up your little friend head to foot in nice tight cabling, smuggle her out of here down to Golden Gate Archiplat—you know, the big one downtown over by MLK and Highway Twenty-seven?—and hang her head-down in the center of the cupola.”

“That’s not very nice,” Mabel told him seriously.

Pete looked wounded. “I’m not gonna charge him for it or anything! Just imagine her, spinning up there beautifully with all those chandeliers and those hundreds of mirrors.”

Mabel knelt and looked into Kitty’s face. “Has she had any water since she was knocked unconscious?”

“No.”

“Well, for heaven’s sake, give the poor woman something to drink, Lyle.”

Lyle handed Mabel a bike-tote squeezebottle of electrolyte refresher. “You zudes don’t grasp the situation yet,” he said. “Look at all this stuff I took off her.” He showed them the spex, and the boots, and the stun-gun, and the gloves, and the carbon-nitride climbing plectra, and the rappelling gear.

“Wow,” Pete said at last, dabbing at buttons on his spex to study the finer detail, “this is no ordinary burglar! She’s gotta be, like, a street samurai from the Mahogany Warbirds or something!”

“She says she’s a federal agent.”

Mabel stood up suddenly, angrily yanking the squeezebottle from Kitty’s lips. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Ask her.”

“I’m a grade-five social counselor with the Department of Urban Redevelopment,” Mabel said. She presented Kitty with an official ID. “And who are you with?”

“I’m not prepared to divulge that information at this time.”

“I can’t believe this,” Mabel marveled, tucking her dog-eared hologram ID back in her hat. “You’ve caught somebody from one of those nutty reactionary secret black-bag units. I mean, that’s gotta be what’s just happened here.” She shook her head slowly. “Y’know, if you work in government, you always hear horror stories about these right-wing paramilitary wackos, but I’ve never actually seen one before.”

“It’s a very dangerous world out there, Miss Social Counselor.”

“Oh, tell me about it,” Mabel scoffed. “I’ve worked suicide hotlines! I’ve been a hostage negotiator! I’m a career social worker, girlfriend! I’ve seen more horror and suffering than you ever will. While you were doing push-ups in some comfy cracker training-camp, I’ve been out here in the real world!” Mabel absently unscrewed the top from the bike bottle and had a long glug. “What on earth are you doing trying to raid the squat of a bicycle repairman?”

Kitty’s stony silence lengthened. “It’s got something to do with that settop box,” Lyle offered. “It showed up here in delivery yesterday, and then she showed up just a few hours later. Started flirting with me, and said she wanted to live in here. Of course I got suspicious right away.”

“Naturally,” Pete said. “Real bad move, Kitty. Lyle’s on antilibidinals.”

Kitty stared at Lyle bitterly. “I see,” she said at last. “So that’s what you get, when you drain all the sex out of one of them. . . . You get a strange malodorous creature that spends all its time working in the garage.”

Mabel flushed. “Did you hear that?” She gave Kitty’s bag a sharp angry yank. “What conceivable right do you have to question this citizen’s sexual orientation? Especially after cruelly trying to sexually manipulate him to abet your illegal purposes? Have you lost all sense of decency? You . . . you should be sued.”

“Do your worst,” Kitty muttered.

“Maybe I will,” Mabel said grimly. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

“Yeah, let’s string her up somewhere real sunny and public and call a bunch of news crews,” Pete said. “I’m way hot for this deep ninja gear! Me and the Spiders got real mojo uses for these telescopic ears, and the tracer dust, and the epoxy bugging devices. And the press-on climbing-claws. And the carbon-fiber rope. Everything, really! Everything except these big-ass military shoes of hers, which really suck.”

“Hey, all that stuff’s mine,” Lyle said sternly. “I saw it first.”

“Yeah, I guess so, but . . . Okay, Lyle, you make us a deal on the gear, we’ll forget everything you still owe us for doing the shop.”

“Come on, those combat spex are worth more than this place all by themselves.”

“I’m real interested in that settop box,” Mabel said cruelly. “It doesn’t look too fancy or complicated. Let’s take it over to those dirty circuit zudes who hang out at the Blue Parrot, and see if they can’t reverse-engineer it. We’ll post all the schematics up on twenty or thirty progressive activist networks, and see what falls out of cyberspace.”

Kitty glared at her. “The terrible consequences from that stupid and irresponsible action would be entirely on your head.”

“I’ll risk it,” Mabel said airily, patting her cloche hat. “It might bump my soft little liberal head a bit, but I’m pretty sure it would crack your nasty little fascist head like a coconut.”

Suddenly Kitty began thrashing and kicking her way furiously inside the bag. They watched with interest as she ripped, tore and lashed out with powerful side and front kicks. Nothing much happened.

“All right,” she said at last, panting in exhaustion. “I’ve come from Senator Creighton’s office.”

“Who?” Lyle said.

“Creighton! Senator James P. Creighton, the man who’s been your Senator from Tennessee for the past thirty years!”

“Oh,” Lyle said. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“We’re anarchists,” Pete told her.

“I’ve sure heard of the nasty old geezer,” Mabel said, “but I’m from British Columbia, where we change senators the way you’d change a pair of socks. If you ever changed your socks, that is. What about him?”

“Well, Senator Creighton has deep clout and seniority! He was a United States Senator even before the first NAFTA Senate was convened! He has a very large, and powerful, and very well seasoned personal staff of twenty thousand hardworking people, with a lot of pull in the Agriculture, Banking, and Telecommunications Committees!”

“Yeah? So?”

“So,” Kitty said miserably, “there are twenty thousand of us on his staff. We’ve been in place for decades now, and naturally we’ve accumulated lots of power and importance. Senator Creighton’s staff is basically running some quite large sections of the NAFTA government, and if the Senator loses his office, there will be a great deal of . . . of unnecessary political turbulence.” She looked up. “You might not think that a senator’s staff is all that important politically. But if people like you bothered to learn anything about the real-life way that your government functions, then you’d know that Senate staffers can be really crucial.”

Mabel scratched her head. “You’re telling me that even a lousy senator has his own private black-bag unit?”

Kitty looked insulted. “He’s an excellent senator! You can’t have a working organization of twenty thousand staffers without taking security very seriously! Anyway, the Executive wing has had black-bag units for years! It’s only right that there should be a balance of powers.”

“Wow,” Mabel said. “The old guy’s a hundred and twelve or something, isn’t he?”

“A hundred and seventeen.”

“Even with government health care, there can’t be a lot left of him.”

“He’s already gone,” Kitty muttered. “His frontal lobes are burned out. . . . He can still sit up, and if he’s stoked on stimulants he can repeat whatever’s whispered to him. So he’s got two permanent implanted hearing aids, and basically . . . well . . . he’s being run by remote control by his mook.”

“His mook, huh?” Pete repeated thoughtfully.

“It’s a very good mook,” Kitty said. “The coding’s old, but it’s been very well looked-after. It has firm moral values and excellent policies. The mook is really very much like the Senator was. It’s just that . . . well, it’s old. It still prefers a really old-fashioned media environment. It spends almost all its time watching old-fashioned public political coverage, and lately it’s gotten cranky and started broadcasting commentary.”

“Man, never trust a mook,” Lyle said. “I hate those things.”

“So do I,” Pete offered, “but even a mook comes off pretty good compared to a politician.”

“I don’t really see the problem,” Mabel said, puzzled. “Senator Hirschheimer from Arizona has had a direct neural link to his mook for years, and he has an excellent progressive voting record. Same goes for Senator Marmalejo from Tamaulipas; she’s kind of absent-minded, and everybody knows she’s on life support, but she’s a real scrapper on women’s issues.”

Kitty looked up. “You don’t think it’s terrible?”

Mabel shook her head. “I’m not one to be judgmental about the intimacy of one’s relationship to one’s own digital alter-ego. As far as I can see it, that’s a basic privacy issue.”

“They told me in briefing that it was a very terrible business, and that everyone would panic if they learned that a high government official was basically a front for a rogue artificial intelligence.”

Mabel, Pete, and Lyle exchanged glances. “Are you guys surprised by that news?” Mabel said.

“Heck no,” said Pete. “Big deal,” Lyle added.

Something seemed to snap inside Kitty then. Her head sank. “Disaffected émigrés in Europe have been spreading boxes that can decipher the Senator’s commentary. I mean, the Senator’s mook’s commentary . . . The mook speaks just like the Senator did, or the way the Senator used to speak, when he was in private and off the record. The way he spoke in his diaries. As far as we can tell, the mook was his diary. . . . It used to be his personal laptop computer. But he just kept transferring the files, and upgrading the software, and teaching it new tricks like voice recognition and speechwriting, and giving it power of attorney and such. . . . And then, one day the mook made a break for it. We think that the mook sincerely believes that it’s the Senator.”

“Just tell the stupid thing to shut up for a while, then.”

“We can’t do that. We’re not even sure where the mook is, physically. Or how it’s been encoding those sarcastic comments into the video-feed. The Senator had a lot of friends in the telecom industry back in the old days. There are a lot of ways and places to hide a piece of distributed software.”

“So that’s all?” Lyle said. “That’s it, that’s your big secret? Why didn’t you just come to me and ask me for the box? You didn’t have to dress up in combat gear and kick my door in. That’s a pretty good story, I’d have probably just given you the thing.”

“I couldn’t do that, Mr. Schweik.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Pete said, “her people are important government functionaries, and you’re a loser techie wacko who lives in a slum.”

“I was told this is a very dangerous area,” Kitty muttered.

“It’s not dangerous,” Mabel told her.

“No?”

“No. They’re all too broke to be dangerous. This is just a kind of social breathing space. The whole urban infrastructure’s dreadfully overplanned here in Chattanooga. There’s been too much money here too long. There’s been no room for spontaneity. It was choking the life out of the city. That’s why everyone was secretly overjoyed when the rioters set fire to these three floors.”

Mabel shrugged. “The insurance took care of the damage. First the looters came in. Then there were a few hideouts for kids and crooks and illegal aliens. Then the permanent squats got set up. Then the artist’s studios, and the semilegal workshops and redlight places. Then the quaint little coffeehouses, then the bakeries. Pretty soon the offices of professionals will be filtering in, and they’ll restore the water and the wiring. Once that happens, the real-estate prices will kick in big-time, and the whole zone will transmute right back into gentryville. It happens all the time.”

Mabel waved her arm at the door. “If you knew anything about modern urban geography, you’d see this kind of, uh, spontaneous urban renewal happening all over the place. As long as you’ve got naive young people with plenty of energy who can be suckered into living inside rotten, hazardous dumps for nothing, in exchange for imagining that they’re free from oversight, then it all works out just great in the long run.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, zones like this turn out to be extremely handy for all concerned. For some brief span of time, a few people can think mildly unusual thoughts and behave in mildly unusual ways. All kinds of weird little vermin show up, and if they make any money then they go legal, and if they don’t then they drop dead in a place really quiet where it’s all their own fault. Nothing dangerous about it.” Mabel laughed, then sobered. “Lyle, let this poor dumb cracker out of the bag.”

“She’s naked under there.”

“Okay,” she said impatiently, “cut a slit in the bag and throw some clothes in it. Get going, Lyle.”

Lyle threw in some biking pants and a sweatshirt.

“What about my gear?” Kitty demanded, wriggling her way into the clothes by feel.

“I tell you what,” said Mabel thoughtfully. “Pete here will give your gear back to you in a week or so, after his friends have photographed all the circuitry. You’ll just have to let him keep all those knickknacks for a while, as his reward for our not immediately telling everybody who you are and what you’re doing here.”

“Great idea,” Pete announced, “terrific, pragmatic solution!” He began feverishly snatching up gadgets and stuffing them into his shoulderbag. “See, Lyle? One phone-call to good ol’ Spider Pete, and your problem is history, zude! Me and Mabel-the-Fed have crisis negotiation skills that are second to none! Another potentially lethal confrontation resolved without any bloodshed or loss of life.” Pete zipped the bag shut. “That’s about it, right, everybody? Problem over! Write if you get work, Lyle buddy. Hang by your thumbs.” Pete leapt out the door and bounded off at top speed on the springy soles of his reactive boots.

“Thanks a lot for placing my equipment into the hands of sociopathic criminals,” Kitty said. She reached out of the slit in the bag, grabbed a multitool off the corner of the workbench, and began swiftly slashing her way free.

“This will help the sluggish, corrupt, and underpaid Chattanooga police to take life a little more seriously,” Mabel said, her pale eyes gleaming. “Besides, it’s profoundly undemocratic to restrict specialized technical knowledge to the coercive hands of secret military elites.”

Kitty thoughtfully thumbed the edge of the multi-tool’s ceramic blade and stood up to her full height, her eyes slitted. “I’m ashamed to work for the same government as you.”

Mabel smiled serenely. “Darling, your tradition of deep dark government paranoia is far behind the times! This is the postmodern era! We’re now in the grip of a government with severe schizoid multiple-personality disorder.”

“You’re truly vile. I despise you more than I can say.” Kitty jerked her thumb at Lyle. “Even this nutcase eunuch anarchist kid looks pretty good, compared to you. At least he’s self-sufficient and market-driven.”

“I thought he looked good the moment I met him,” Mabel replied sunnily. “He’s cute, he’s got great muscle tone, and he doesn’t make passes. Plus he can fix small appliances and he’s got a spare apartment. I think you ought to move in with him, sweetheart.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t think I could manage life here in the zone like you do, is that it? You think you have some kind of copyright on living outside the law?”

“No, I just mean you’d better stay indoors with your boyfriend here until that paint falls off your face. You look like a poisoned raccoon.” Mabel turned on her heel. “Try to get a life, and stay out of my way.” She leapt outside, unlocked her bicycle and methodically pedaled off.

Kitty wiped her lips and spat out the door. “Christ, that baton packs a wallop.” She snorted. “Don’t you ever ventilate this place, kid? Those paint fumes are gonna kill you before you’re thirty.”

“I don’t have time to clean or ventilate it. I’m real busy.”

“Okay, then I’ll clean it. I’ll ventilate it. I gotta stay here a while, understand? Maybe quite a while.”

Lyle blinked. “How long, exactly?”

Kitty stared at him. “You’re not taking me seriously, are you? I don’t much like it when people don’t take me seriously.”

“No, no,” Lyle assured her hastily. “You’re very serious.”

“You ever heard of a small-business grant, kid? How about venture capital, did you ever hear of that? Ever heard of federal research-and-development subsidies, Mr. Schweik?” Kitty looked at him sharply, weighing her words. “Yeah, I thought maybe you’d heard of that one, Mr. Techie Wacko. Federal R and D backing is the kind of thing that only happens to other people, right? But Lyle, when you make good friends with a senator, you become ‘other people.’ Get my drift, pal?”

“I guess I do,” Lyle said slowly.

“We’ll have ourselves some nice talks about that subject, Lyle. You wouldn’t mind that, would you?”

“No. I don’t mind it now that you’re talking.”

“There’s some stuff going on down here in the zone that I didn’t understand at first, but it’s important.” Kitty paused, then rubbed dried dye from her hair in a cascade of green dandruff. “How much did you pay those Spider gangsters to string up this place for you?”

“It was kind of a barter situation,” Lyle told her.

“Think they’d do it again if I paid ’em real cash? Yeah? I thought so.” She nodded thoughtfully. “They look like a heavy outfit, the City Spiders. I gotta pry ’em loose from that leftist gorgon before she finishes indoctrinating them in socialist revolution.” Kitty wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “This is the Senator’s own constituency! It was stupid of us to duck an ideological battle, just because this is a worthless area inhabited by reckless sociopaths who don’t vote. Hell, that’s exactly why it’s important. This could be a vital territory in the culture war. I’m gonna call the office right away, start making arrangements. There’s no way we’re gonna leave this place in the hands of the self-styled Queen of Peace and Justice over there.”

She snorted, then stretched a kink out of her back. “With a little self-control and discipline, I can save those Spiders from themselves and turn them into an asset to law and order! I’ll get ’em to string up a couple of trailers here in the zone. We could start a dojo.”

Eddy called, two weeks later. He was in a beachside cabana somewhere in Catalunya, wearing a silk floral-print shirt and a new and very pricey looking set of spex. “How’s life, Lyle?”

“It’s okay, Eddy.”

“Making out all right?” Eddy had two new tattoos on his cheekbone.

“Yeah. I got a new paying roommate. She’s a martial artist.”

“Girl roommate working out okay this time?”

“Yeah, she’s good at pumping the flywheel and she lets me get on with my bike work. Bike business has been picking up a lot lately. Looks like I might get a legal electrical feed and some more floorspace, maybe even some genuine mail delivery. My new roomie’s got a lot of useful contacts.”

“Boy, the ladies sure love you, Lyle! Can’t beat ’em off with a stick, can you, poor guy? That’s a heck of a note.”

Eddy leaned forward a little, shoving aside a silver tray full of dead gold-tipped zigarettes. “You been getting the packages?”

“Yeah. Pretty regular.”

“Good deal,” he said briskly, “but you can wipe ’em all now. I don’t need those backups anymore. Just wipe the data and trash the disks, or sell ’em. I’m into some, well, pretty hairy opportunities right now, and I don’t need all that old clutter. It’s kid stuff anyway.”

“Okay, man. If that’s the way you want it.”

Eddy leaned forward. “D’you happen to get a package lately? Some hardware? Kind of a settop box?”

“Yeah, I got the thing.”

“That’s great, Lyle. I want you to open the box up, and break all the chips with pliers.”

“Yeah?”

“Then throw all the pieces away. Separately. It’s trouble, Lyle, okay? The kind of trouble I don’t need right now.”

“Consider it done, man.”

“Thanks! Anyway, you won’t be bothered by mailouts from now on.” He paused. “Not that I don’t appreciate your former effort and goodwill, and all.”

Lyle blinked. “How’s your love life, Eddy?”

Eddy sighed. “Frederika! What a handful! I dunno, Lyle, it was okay for a while, but we couldn’t stick it together. I don’t know why I ever thought that private cops were sexy. I musta been totally out of my mind. . . . Anyway, I got a new girlfriend now.”

“Yeah?”

“She’s a politician, Lyle. She’s a radical member of the Spanish Parliament. Can you believe that? I’m sleeping with an elected official of a European local government.” He laughed. “Politicians are sexy, Lyle. Politicians are hot! They have charisma. They’re glamorous. They’re powerful. They can really make things happen! Politicians get around. They know things on the inside track. I’m having more fun with Violeta than I knew there was in the world.”

“That’s pleasant to hear, zude.”

“More pleasant than you know, my man.”

“Not a problem,” Lyle said indulgently. “We all gotta make our own lives, Eddy.”

“Ain’t it the truth.”

Lyle nodded. “I’m in business, zude!”

“You gonna perfect that inertial whatsit?” Eddy said.

“Maybe. It could happen. I get to work on it a lot now. I’m getting closer, really getting a grip on the concept. It feels really good. It’s a good hack, man. It makes up for all the rest of it. It really does.”

Eddy sipped his mimosa. “Lyle.”

“What?”

“You didn’t hook up that settop box and look at it, did you?”

“You know me, Eddy,” Lyle said. “Just another kid with a wrench.”

GAS FISH

Mary Rosenblum

Mary Rosenblum tells us she is “intrigued by the legal issues that loom on the horizon. As our biological and electronic technologies expand, who will own what?” A hardcover collection of her short fiction, Synthesis and Other Virtual Realities, is just out from Arkham House, and she is working on a mainstream mystery.

“Actually, I am glad that you decided to investigate us.” Jovan’s II director, Sandra Li, was trying hard to be polite. “Considering your reputation, Mr. Kraj, a clean bill of health from you should I I be worth quite a bit.”

“You make me sound like a witch hunter.” Anton smiled. “I only report facts.”

“The facts can be slanted to suggest fallacies.”

“That’s so.” Anton refused to be annoyed. “You could say that I report the truth rather than facts. The truth is not always factual.” He turned away to lean his elbows on the deck rail, sweeping the cluster of beach houses and the dock below with a long slow stare. The microcameras mounted on his headband rig were synched to a tiny implant on his eyelid. Online participants would see what he saw—neat cottages and pristine white sand dotted with a few beach towels and sunbathers.

He had taken Elliot to a diving resort every summer—a small private place on a cove like this one. During that last horrible year, he had paid to have the hospital run scuba virtuals designed for the paralyzed. So that Elliot could dive as much as he wanted. Anton unclenched his teeth. “Your research facility has all the ambiance of an upscale resort,” he said mildly.

“This was a resort.” Li flushed. “You’re too well informed not to know that the property was donated to Jovan Corporation. Or have you already condemned us, Mr. Kraj?”

“Why should I condemn you? Call me Anton,” he said as she turned away without speaking. Her reserve had finally cracked. Pleased, Anton followed her across the deck and down the weathered wooden stairs. Dry facts didn’t sell well. Participants wanted drama, emotional displays, enticing visuals. “If your facility is everything you say it is, then you have no worries.” He smiled at her. A tip had suggested that Jovan was not on the up and up. He had his top informant working on that hint. Bogus science was big business—and the cost was sometimes . . . human. “My participants are curious about you,” he said.

“Participants.” Li stopped abruptly and looked back at him. “Your audience does not participate. They only wish to be entertained. That’s all that matters.” Her gaze focused on his headband. “I suppose you’ll use all this?” she asked bitterly.

“If it fits.” Anton smiled gently. “Whatever you may wish to believe, Ms. Li, I have never slanted my stories against an innocent party.”

“Who appointed you judge?” she snapped.

“My son.” The words caught him by surprise, and he focused quickly on the blue horizon, panning for stock background. Perhaps it was the sea that brought Elliot back so sharply—they had been diving when the symptoms had manifested. Anton shook his head, angry at himself. Li’s narrowed eyes suggested that she had noticed his reaction. “I simply report the facts,” he said harshly. “Why Jupiter? Why should we spend time and lots of money to send a probe into its atmosphere? We can’t live there. Mining anything from that hellhole would be impossibly expensive. Why not invest our resources in the Mars terraforming project?”

“I think we are facing a crisis,” she said softly. “We must choose whether to spend our precious resources on expanding our current environment or leap into the unknown and deal with what we find there. Perhaps this is a test of evolution. If we cannot evolve, we will be trapped here forever—on Earth, on whatever replicas of Earth we can create on Mars or the orbital platforms. To evolve, we must look beyond ourselves.”

“To Jupiter?”

“It’s a first step.” Her eyes were luminous in the hazy afternoon fight. “We may find nothing, but we need to look. If we lose that sense of wonder, that burning need to go and find out that has taken us this far—we’re through, at a dead end, at . . .” She caught her breath and blushed. “Well, your participants should like that bit of melodrama.” She leaned her face into a retinal scanner set into the wall beside the door. “We need to move on. I have a meeting at four. The actual Jupiter probe is being constructed in another building. That’s our next stop. This is our simulation lab.”

Anton followed her into a small antechamber, thinking that he had just caught a glimpse of the real Sandra Li. Idealist, he thought. And naive. Pale green coveralls hung on the walls above pairs of plastic boots. A second door let them into a cavernous building.

“What exactly do you simulate in here?” he asked. Floor, walls, and ceiling were painted a soft pastel yellow. The rear half of the building was nothing but a large diving pool with ladders at each end, and a squat electric crane. Its boom stuck out over the water. The air was cool and humid, thick with sea smell.

A ten-foot-long, vaguely whale-shaped model stood in the middle of the floor between the diving pool and the entrance. It had blue plastic skin, a thick stubby tail, and two pairs of oversized fins along its sides. Elliot would have been fascinated, Anton thought, and then pushed the thought out of his head. “That’s your probe?” Anton focused on it, thinking ugly. “A big fish?”

“It’s a scale model of the probe.” Li nodded. “This is where our prototype trains for the conditions he is likely to encounter once he has been deployed. He will be swimming in a gaseous sea of ammoniated water vapor and tremendous turbulence. Fish are excellent models, so we use a combination of virtual simulation and actual subsea training.”

“He?” Anton raised his eyebrows.

“A bit of anthropomorphism.” Li smiled primly. “We recovered the core of our A.I. system from the first probe, but this time we overlaid it with a simulated human personality shell.”

““Your last probe failed rather immediately, didn’t it?”

“We underestimated the extent of the turbulence it encountered.” Li scowled at his innocent tone. “We have a much better knowledge of conditions, thanks to the information it sent us. This system is experimental, but so far our tests indicate that the combination is much more successful than an unenhanced A J. at making fast and effective decisions in unexpected situations of crisis.”

“It’s a very expensive system,” Anton murmured.

“Jonah is very creative.”

“Jonah?” Anton studied the whale-shape for his participants. “Pun intended, right? Is this him?”

“I’m him.” A boyish tenor came from the direction of the empty pool. “But yeah, I guess you could say I got swallowed by a whale. Or a robot tuna, anyway.” There was a grin to his tone.

That voice raised the hairs on Anton’s neck. He turned—automatic reflexes making it a slow pan so that he didn’t dizzy his participants. That voice. . . . A large silvery fish-shape floated in the pool. It looked something like the prototype, but smaller and a bit more streamlined.

“Jonah, this is Mr. Kraj.” Li smiled at the fish. “How did the tests go?”

“Fine, of course. You’re Kraj, the docu-dramatist?” The voice brightened. “Cool! I always wanted to be famous. You wanted publicity, right Sandy? You got the biggest.”

“Publicity,” Li muttered under her breath. “Not a trial.”

Coincidence, Anton told himself numbly. He was hearing something that wasn’t there. “You . . . you’re using a child’s personality to operate a million-dollar probe?”

“I’m no kid. What’s your problem, mister?” The silvery fish rose in the water to point a blunt, blind snout at Anton. “You think I can’t do it? You ought to see how I handle an updraft storm!”

“Jonah, easy.” Li sounded grimly amused. “He doesn’t know how good you are.”

Elliot’s voice. The fish was speaking with Elliot’s voice. Anton clung to the mask of a professional smile. Pitch, syntax, word choice—all Elliot. You think I can’t do it? Elliot had said that once—those very words. On their first deep dive together.

Coincidence, Anton told himself. Elliot was dead. Elliot had been dead for nearly a decade—long enough for Anton to forget, to remember wrong.

Bullshit, all of the above. Except for the stark truth of his son’s death.

“Mr. Kraj?” Li touched his elbow. “Is something wrong?’

“No.” Anton blinked. “Nothing.” He had been staring at a blank patch of wall, like an amateur—so much for using this bit of visual. “I . . . I apologize.” Endit, he subvocalized, instructing his biointerface to turn off record mode. Only then did he force himself to look at the mechanical fish. “I’m sure that you’re very good,” he said. “Perhaps you can talk to
me some more.” Although he didn’t want to hear his son’s voice coming from this . . . artifact. But why would they program evasion into their A.I.? This . . . thing might spill facts that Li and her bunch would not.

“I don’t know if I want to talk to you,” the fish said sullenly. It submerged, slopping a foamy wave of seawater across the floor. Anton looked down at his soaked shoes.

“You offended him.” Li raised an eyebrow at him. “We left the personality shell reasonably intact, so Jonah can be as touchy as any thirteen-year-old—even if he isn’t driven by hormones. His current body is similar to his Jovian form.” She nodded at the obese whale on its stand. “He practices in the water, and he practices with his Jovian form, hooked into virtual simulations via a direct bio-interface.”

“Why thirteen?” Anton blurted. “And where did you get that personality?”

“Humans are least concerned by their mortality at that age,” Li said. “They are at their peak of creativity and curiosity.” She eyed him warily. “Jonah is easily the most expensive component of our Jovian fish. But Jupiter is unpredictable. We hope to avoid the accident that claimed our first probe.”

“Who was the donor for the personality construct?” Anton asked again. He had said was, as if the donor was dead.

“That’s confidential. I doubt it’s even on file.” The wariness on Li’s face deepened and she glanced pointedly at her watch. “I’m late for my meeting. I have instructed our medical staff to implant you with an ID chip.” She didn’t sound pleased. “It will permit you to wander around the facility as you will. Our staff will answer any and all of your questions. Our only requirement, of course, is that you not record any developmental specifics.”

“I’d like to talk to Jonah,” Anton said, but she was already walking briskly back up the path toward the main building. He should have pursued the subject of Jovan’s funding. Anton scowled, annoyed at himself. He had let himself be distracted.

The fish had spoken in Elliot’s voice.

“Excuse me, sir.” A coveralled young man tapped Anton on the shoulder, startling him from his reverie. “If you’ll come with me. I’ll escort you to the clinic. They’ll give you your ID chip there.”

The technician’s timing suggested that they had very good security here. The video eyes were well hidden. “Fine.” He smiled pleasantly at his escort. Cooperation won’t buy you anything, he thought silently. If you are a scam, I will expose you to the world.

“This won’t hurt a bit,” the clinic doctor told Anton. It was the usual lie, but the implantation didn’t hurt much. Afterward, the doctor sprayed a liquid bandage over the implantation site and sent Anton on his way. He didn’t look particularly happy about doing the implant.

This was a very close-knit little company, Anton decided. Nobody really wanted him sniffing around. Which was typical, but this bunch was acting just a bit too helpful. As Anton left the clinic, he wondered what they might be hiding behind that pretense of goodwill.

Tech stocks were hot investments on the world stock exchange—volatile and potentially big money-makers. They were almost as volatile as the entertainment industry’s stocks. Which prompted a lot of speculative research. And prompted some unscrupulous companies to suppress data that might compromise a promising new product. The penalties were high for that kind of scam, but so were the potential profits if everything turned out all right. Anton rubbed the implant site on his shoulder as he climbed into the cab waiting for him at Jovan’s main gate. To his surprise, the cab was driven by a real person.

“Where to?” the freckled girl behind the wheel asked.

Anton gave her the address and leaned back as the cab pulled away from the gate. Was that Li watching from the shadow of the gate house? He peered through the rear window, but whoever it was had vanished. Frowning, he scratched the implantation site again.

“You just get a shot?” the cabby asked.

“No.”

“I hate shots. All those vaccinations. I think they’re just a gimmick, you know?” She negotiated a hairpin turn at breathtaking speed. “Just another hook to snag our money. Scare tactics. Me, I haven’t done one since I was a kid, and I’m healthy.”

“Good for you.” Anton sighed.

“Look at that plague that came out of South America—the one that was gonna kill off the world. They did a vaccine for that, and people got sick anyway.”

“That was because the vaccine was shit.” Anton sat up straight on the cheap plastic seat. “The people who made it knew it was shit when they marketed it. They made a lot of money, knowing it.”

“Jeeze, you don’t say?” The woman glanced back over her shoulder, pale brows arching skeptically. “That sucks.”

She didn’t know? How could she not know? “How old were you eleven years ago?”

“Me?” The cabby shrugged. “Eight. Almost nine.”

How soon we forget, Anton thought bitterly. “Do you know how Santorres kills?” He stared at the passing landscape, watching the protected wetland transform slowly into urban sprawl. “It doesn’t. It temporarily paralyzes the muscles that let you breathe and make your heart beat. If your family can afford to keep you on total life support for a year or so, and if you don’t die from some kind of secondary infection, you’ll be fine. Fed Med doesn’t cover that kind of treatment.”

“So you gotta go to a private hospital? You’d have to be rich.” The cabby shook her head. “Man, that would be an ugly choice. Go broke or save your brother, or kid, or whoever. Whatever happened to the creeps who made the bad vaccine anyway? I bet they lived happily ever after.”

“It was an ugly choice,” Anton said very very softly. “And the people responsible got the death penalty. Every one of them.”

The cabby looked at him, then turned quickly back to the road. And shivered. She didn’t say anything more. Silently, she pulled up to let him out at the edge of the plaza where his building was located.

“I went to Belize at the beginning of the pandemic. To do a docu-drama on it. I was doing straight news then.” Anton leaned down to zip his card through the cab’s reader. “My-thirteen-year-old son went with me. We were both vaccinated.” He added a generous tip and pocketed his card. “I watched the execution of the company’s top executive.” He paused for a long moment, then added, “Have a nice day.”

The cab zoomed off as he walked slowly across the plaza. It was sunny, but he shivered, as if invisible clouds had blocked the sun. Yesterday, he thought as he rubbed the insertion site again. Bad stuff. Don’t think about it. Think about Li instead. Think about why she had given him the chip when she clearly didn’t want to. And think about who had ordered her to do it. That who would be important.

The sun had sunk below the city skyline, but golden light still seeped between the towers, turning the massed blooms on a flower vendor’s cart into a riot of glowing colors. Anton paused to buy a handful of lilies on his way to the tower where he had short-leased an apartment.

The dozen or so public screens mounted on walls along the edges of the plaza displayed a kaleidoscope of image-bites as a dozen different online purveyors offered entertainment, or news—which was even more entertaining because it was real. More or less, Anton thought sourly. Reality was a matter of interpretation—Li was right. Hidden cameras beneath the screens monitored eye-track points—the more people who looked at a screen, the more viewer-hours of attention a company amassed, increasing their ratings. High ratings sent their stock up on the international exchange. A media company’s value could fluctuate dramatically during the course of a single program day. A good media artist could increase a company’s value enormously.

Which was why everyone wanted him, Anton Kraj—one-man ratings booster. Which would only be true until he bored his participants, Anton thought bitterly. Oh, he could tell himself that he presented the truth and the truth alone, but he presented it to his participants’ tastes.

If Jovan was an innocent research firm, he wouldn’t waste a single minute designing a special about it. That wasn’t what his participants wanted. They wanted guilt. Collusion. Maybe a whiff of decaying bodies, buried in some landfill. Entertainment, Li’s voice echoed in his head. Truth, he countered. Entertaining truth, yeah, but truth nonetheless. He smiled crookedly as he let himself into the tower lobby. He needed to review the day’s takes of the Jovan site, edit them a bit, and archive them. Mostly they would provide stock that could be edited into later takes, when he needed to segue from one scene to another. The elevator let him out on his floor. One wall of the hallway was transparent, so that he could look down into the tower’s garden core. It had been landscaped as a rain forest. He paused for a moment, remembering the rain forest preserve he had visited with Elliot, on their Belize trip. A child ran down the path below, and for a heart-stopping instant he saw Elliot in the slight, dark-haired figure. And wished briefly that he’d rented in a tower with a different landscaping motif.

“Hello, neighbor.”

Anton jumped, and turned around. The slight, sandy-haired man smiling and holding out his hand looked vaguely familiar. “Hello,” Anton said warily.

“I saw you moving in.” The small man nodded. “I live next door—just wanted to say hi. I’m Cam.”

“Anton. Come in,” Anton said, suddenly grateful for company—any company. “Can I get you a drink? I’ve got beer. Nothing more sophisticated, I’m afraid.”

“Thanks.” Cam followed him into the room, glancing around curiously.

There wasn’t much to see. Generic leased furniture, his studio hardware in one corner. Anton poured beer into two glasses and put the lilies into a third glass, because the leased dishes didn’t include a vase. When he turned around with the beers, he found Cam standing at his workstation, staring at the single holo of Elliot that Anton had kept.

“Your kid?” he asked as Anton handed the beer. “He looks like you.”

“Yeah, I guess he does.” Elliot hadn’t inherited much from his mother—as if their pre-conception custody agreement had prejudiced their gametes. Regretting his invitation, Anton stripped off his headband, detached it from the virtual skinthins he wore beneath his clothes, and tossed it onto the workstation.

“You’re in media?” Cam’s eyes lighted up. “Advertising?”

“News.” Anton shoved the holo back behind the solid cube of his hard-data safe, extracted the day’s data-sphere from his skinthins, and socketed it into the unit. He’d archive it into his Net studio later. “Docu-drama.”

“News? You’re kidding?” Cam leaned forward eagerly. “Wait a minute . . . You’re not Anton Kraj? Kraj the Shark? Yeah, sure you are. I saw an interview with you once.” He slapped his knee and laughed with delight. “You’re the best. You sure go for the jugular. Blood everywhere.”

“Thanks.” The praise felt sour, and Anton had a sudden image of Sandra Li’s luminous face as she talked about evolution and Jupiter. You have to know, he told her silently. You cannot be innocent.

“So who are you investigating this time?”

“Jovan Corporation.” Never underestimate the value of gossip. “They’re launching another Jupiter probe.”

“Space exploration!” Cam scowled and swallowed beer. “We can barely feed ourselves as it is. We need to concentrate on the Mars terraform, not throw precious resources away on exploration that doesn’t get us anything useful.”

“Maybe you’re right.” Anton shrugged, and sipped at his own beer. Cam’s tirade had had an artificial feel to it—as if he was trying to elicit a response from Anton instead of airing his genuine feelings. He’d used the same trick often enough in his own interviews. “So what do you do?” he asked, to change the subject.

“I’m with InfoSearch. If it’s on the Net, we can find it,” Cam quoted theatrically. “And we can. Legal or not, but I didn’t say that.” He finished his beer. “Let me know if you ever need any research. I’ll give you a professional discount.” He gave Anton a crooked smile. “Stop in anytime,” he said. “I owe you a beer.”

“Maybe I will.” Anton followed Cam to the door, glad that he was leaving. Yeah, he was lonely, he told himself as the door locked behind Cam. But the whole episode had the same unnatural feel as Cam’s tirade. As if his neighbor had wanted to make contact with him. And he had certainly seen Cam somewhere before.

Anton shrugged, and sat down at his workstation. Time to go through the day’s takes and separate stock visuals from the good bits. He popped the datasphere from his hard-memory safe into his Net terminal. Some bits of his conversation with Li might be worth editing into a bite. For the next two hours, he chopped her words and images into chunks and then reassembled them into a seamless and passionate monologue about evolving humanity and Jupiter. Then he overlaid the whole with a good synthesizer track and a subtle background of waves breaking. It was what she had said—only more so. Anton ran it again, frowning. Framed by an expose, her words would sound utterly hypocritical. It would be a damning and potent segment.

Would she ever dare to believe in anything that strongly again? Anton shook his head angrily; that was not his problem, and this kind of speculation had never troubled him before. His joints popped as he stretched, and his stomach reminded him fiercely that dinner was overdue. Sandra Li had made her choices and her compromises, whether she believed in what she said or not. She’d have to deal with the price.

Go eat, he told himself. Or finish your beer, have another, and go to bed. Instead, he found himself calling up the segment of the day’s take where the mechanical fish poked its snout out of the diving pool.

A Fed Med clinic stood on nearly every corner. The government guaranteed basic health care to everyone. If you wanted treatment that went beyond basic care, you went to a private hospital. Maintaining a victim of the Santorres virus for the required year or more was not included in basic coverage. The only way to pay off the life-support bill after Elliot’s death had been to sell any of Elliot’s tissues, organs, or test results that were marketable. The hospital had provided the counseling and the contract. Organs. Tests. Nothing else.

Anton sat at his workstation until the early hours of the morning, listening to a mechanical fish speak with his son’s voice.

“Everybody’s at the meeting.” Jonah’s voice startled Anton as he prowled through the eerie and empty boat house. “The place is dead.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Anton lifted his head to stare at the video eye he had located on one of the rafters. “I bet Security isn’t at the meeting.”

“Oh. Well.” Jonah’s tone suggested a shrug. “She’s scared of you. Sandy.” Thoughtful tone, now. “How come?”

“What makes you think she’s scared of me?” Anton looked at him finally, found himself unnerved by that eyeless silver snout. He did not want to be talking to this . . . thing. “How do you see without eyes?”

“She planted you with a chip and she didn’t want to.” Lying still in the water, Jonah elevated his tail slowly, so that water sheeted down the big flukes and dripped off with the sound of rain falling. “As for eyes—I can see in spectra you don’t even know exist. Who needs eyes?”

“You’re right about her being scared,” Anton said. A.I., he thought. Would Elliot have inferred this much? Yes, he decided. Elliot had been so smart. The old grief seized him in its claws. “So, who told her to open all the doors for me?” he asked harshly.

“Guess.”

“The Web corporations that are putting up the money.” Anton forced a smile. “It’s a very good idea to be nice to me.”

“Why?” Jonah sounded curious. “I watched all your stuff, you know. You’re not like a lot of people who do news stories. You don’t make it up. You just take boring stuff about stupid greedy people and make it sound a lot more exciting than it is.”

“Gee, thanks,” Anton murmured.

“We’re not faking anything.”

Watch, he’d said, not participate. The second choice was the idiom of the day. Interesting. “If you’re not faking anything, then Ms. Li has nothing to be afraid of.” He walked over to the edge of the pool and sat down. “So, tell me about yourself.”

“Me?” Jonah had sunk to his dorsal fin in the water. Now he bobbed slowly up and down so that thick, sluggish waves slopped against the rim of the pool. “Why me?”

“Because you’re the most interesting person in the place.” Anton pulled off his boots, rolled up his pants, and stuck his feet into the cool water. “How cold is Jupiter going to be?”

“Where I’m going to swim, you mean?” Jonah’s voice brightened. “It’s pretty warm—about ten degrees centigrade. There’s water—although it’s ammoniated. Stuff could live there. Bacteria. Maybe more complex stuff,” He paused, and Anton heard evasion in that silence.

“Your first probe didn’t find any evidence of life,” he said carefully.

“Did your homework, huh?” Another pause. “It . . . didn’t, but we did some computer extrapolations. From some fragments of data that the probe sent back just before it was . . . destroyed. It could all be wrong.”

This was the tone Elliot had used when he didn’t want to lie, but didn’t want to admit something either. “What kind of extrapolations?” Anton drew a slow breath. “If you tell me, I won’t put what you say online.”

Jonah was silent for a moment. “We’re just making it all up,” he said at last.

His caution reminded Anton of Li’s tone the day before. What weren’t they telling, here? Anton leaned back, so that Jonah’s sleek silvery body was entirely in his vision-field. “What destroyed the first probe?”

“Turbulence,” Jonah said calmly. “They don’t really figure that I’ll last all that long. But I’m going to surprise them.” He slopped another wave across Anton’s wet pants. “I’m good. I’m better than they think—even Sandy.” Pride hummed in his words, banishing all sense of evasion. “You just wait. I’ll show them everything.”

“I bet you will,” Anton said and thought, I can’t stand this. He turned off the recording feature. “I had a son once.” He looked into that eyeless face. “You would have liked him.” Face it, he thought bitterly. Face how you feel about this . . . kid. A.I. Space probe. Whatever the hell it is.

“You talk like he’s dead.” Jonah lay still in the water.

“Yes.” Anton exhaled, moving his feet slowly in the cool water. “He caught Santorres.”

“I’m sorry. There’s a good vaccine for it now.”

“I know.” Anton felt a sudden pressure against his slowly numbing feet. Jonah had nudged him gently. Anton reached down and laid a hand on his wet cold back. To his surprise, the silvery material gave slightly beneath his palm. “You remind me of Elliot,” he said. There. Out loud now. Face it.

For several moments, Jonah was silent, then he lifted his blind fish head from the water. “Maybe I could show you where I’m going to go,” he said.

“I’d . . . like that.” Anton blinked as a red star began to pulse in the upper right corner of his vision field. Urgent relay from one of his sources. “Accept,” he murmured.

“You owe me.” A black-sun icon flashed against the backdrop of the diving pool. It was The Rev—the most talented of his hacker-informants. “I made the Jovan thing solid for you,” The Rev’s voice whispered over Anton’s implant. “Their money goes through a bunch of small intermediary firms in the Web, but I nailed the source. I dumped it into your secure filespace.” He chuckled. “I scored, man.”

“The punch line?” Anton murmured. “Whose money is it?”

“Europa AM. They need to lose a little cash this year. Temporarily, anyway. Hey—you work for WorldNews. Their stock is down on the Exchange. You gonna rescue them with this Jovan thing?”

“Don’t I always,” Anton drawled.

“Tough shit for Jovan, huh?”

“They’re a scam,” Anton said, but The Rev’s icon had already vanished.

So Europa AM was using Jovan as a money-sink. A huge and powerful corporation with tentacles woven all through the economic Web, they were surely recouping that money as it surfaced elsewhere—all nice and clean now. All it would require was a minimum of cooperation from Jovan. And The Rev had dumped proof of that cooperation into Anton’s secure file.

“You’re wearing a bio-interface,” Jonah said.

“Huh?” Anton glanced down, his thoughts scattering. “Yes, I do,” he said cautiously.

“Cool.” Jonah reared up in the water so that they were on a level. “Nobody here wears one. It’s xenophobia. As if you could turn someone into a machine just by doing a direct brain interface!”

Anton smelled sea and a hint of something else. Ozone? Plastic?

“It makes you more like me.” Jonah sank slowly and gently back into the water. “I like that,” he said, with a grin in his voice. “Quicker, you know? Sandy’s interface is so clunky. Come on,” he said in a conspiratorial tone. “I’ll show you Jupiter. I can hack your bio-access in about two seconds, but we’ve got to hurry. The meeting’ll be over soon. I’ll meet you in the sim lab, okay?”

Anton didn’t really want to do this. He heard Elliot every time Jonah opened his mouth, and this was not a healthy state of mind. But something was odd here, and he had a feeling that it was connected to those sims. Anton approached the sim lab, wondering if his chip would really open the door for him.

Hoping it would save him? He let his breath out in a rush as the door slid obediently aside. So much for salvation. Suppressing a sigh, he walked into a standard VR cubicle. It had blank white walls—except for the open pool in the center of the room. Jonah was already waiting for him, slopping small impatient wavelets onto the composite floor.

Anton wondered if everyone wore boots around here.

“You got a full bio-face direct-linked into your skins, right?” Jonah sounded preoccupied. “Just a minute. I should be able to hack in through our system . . . got you!”

The room shimmered and vanished. Anton staggered as pale buff padding appeared centimeters from his nose. In a burst of claustrophobic reaction, he pushed himself backward, bumped hard into the lab’s invisible wall. In virtual, he was lying in a padded, coffin-sized space. Virtual, he reminded himself, it’s only virtual, and his spike of panic subsided somewhat. “Where are we?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“In my pod.” Jonah’s voice came over his implanted com-link. “I don’t get released until we’re down into the atmosphere. Too much radiation up high. Just relax. You’re ghosting me—I’m actually navigating the virtual—you’re just along for the ride. So you can’t do anything on your own. Here we go!” His voice went boyish and excited again.

The padded womb that held Anton split open suddenly, and an invisible hand propelled him forcefully into bright light. None too soon, he thought grimly, and tried to look back. Nothing happened. Nothing happened when he waved his arms. He let them fall limp to his sides, and simply looked. Wisps of white cloud streaked the incredibly blue sky and a sliver of moon hung above the horizon. An Arizona sky, he thought and turned his gaze downward.

No. Not Arizona. Salmon, orange, rose, yellow, and pink clouds formed a twisted landscape of canyons and ridges, twisted into spiraled whorls, pierced here and there by towering mounds of white cloud. The bulbous whale shape he had seen in the boathouse drifted along beside him. fins and tail propelling it with easy grace. Jonah? They were descending rapidly into a shadowed canyon between two spirals of rose-and-salmon colored cloud. “What are they made of?” Anton gasped. “My God!”

“Hydrogen sulfides and ammonia crystals. The white clouds are pure ammonia.” Jonah sounded preoccupied. “We’ve got to watch out for turbulence.” The whale veered left, and Anton found himself following.

I’m a fish, he thought. Not an ocean fish but a gas fish. He laughed. “It’s beautiful. Look—those clouds remind me of thunderstorms.” Anton found his view shifting until he was focusing on one of the towering structures that mushroomed up through the pink layer.

“They’re not. They’re updraft storms that come from way down and can take you up here like a runaway elevator. You can go from 10 degrees centigrade to minus 230 in no time flat. That’s why people said life probably hadn’t evolved on Jupiter.” His voice lowered conspiratorially. “They were wrong.”

“Not according to the data your probe sent back.”

“Yeah, well, right at the end I . . . it . . . sent some more data. The stuff I told you was garbled. The hardware was getting trashed and the . . . probe was dying.” He fell briefly silent. “If you really work at it, you can fill in the blanks.”

He sounded defensive, as if he were continuing an argument begun in the past. Life on Jupiter? “How was the first probe lost?” Anton asked absently.

“It came apart in an updraft storm.” Jonah’s tone was flat and emotionless. “That’s what we’ve got to watch out for. They’re not sure that this body could survive a big updraft either.”

He expected to die here. It hit Anton suddenly and hard that Elliot had had that same expectation from the very beginning. He must have overheard whispered conferences with the doctor. And he knew about Santorres. He had hidden it for a long time. Anton swallowed a lump of pain and looked down, banishing thought with Jupiter’s incredible beauty. They had almost reached the hydrogen sulfide clouds. “Is it me, or is it getting a little warmer?” Anton asked.

“It is. The virtual cues your skins to interpret temperature change. If I go too deep, I really get cooked. Where we’re going, it’s above freezing. It’s like this sea—at least compared to what’s up here. It’s not really liquid, you know, but close enough. I want to . . . show you something.” He sounded suddenly shy. “Just to see what you think.”

Anton tensed as the first wisps of vapor thickened around them. For a time, he was blind, then the clouds thinned, and he gasped. He was suspended in a misty world beneath a pink-and-rose sky that glowed gently overhead. They were gliding beneath the pink cloud sky, swooping and dipping like sea gulls though a universe of fog. Shapes formed and dissipated in the mist, and Anton wondered if he were seeing them or if his brain were creating them out of the opalescent nothingness. “Look!” Jonah’s voice vibrated with excitement. “Over there!”

Anton looked, his vision linked to Jonah’s. And saw . . . a shape. It undulated slowly and majestically in the gale-force wind that carried them along, sparkling into visibility as it twisted. Reds, oranges, and opalescent purple glinted on its translucent surface. Anton thought of a giant bed sheet blowing in the wind—an ephemeral bed sheet woven of shimmering translucent threads. Jonah was working his fins and tail like any fish, and they were getting closer to the billowing shape.

“What is that?” Anton’s eyes widened as he realized just how big that sheet was. It seemed to be a lacework of threads—millions of interwoven threads with beads of color at most of the intersections. “This wasn’t in your probe’s report,” he gasped.

“I call it a reef.” Jonah laughed, and it was so much Elliot’s laugh that Anton clenched his fists. “Other things live in it and on it, just like fish on a reef. You’ll see.”

The reef was tearing, Anton noticed, shredding continuously in the wind. One piece twisted completely free, fragmenting into rags that fluttered away in the wind. A portion snagged briefly on the main mass. It seemed to stick, and the adjacent threads shimmered. “It’s reattaching,” Anton breathed.

“The other-pieces might stick to other reefs,” Jonah said. “Maybe . . . that’s how they exchange information.”

“What are they made of?”

“I dunno.” Jonah’s tone was a grin again. “I’m going to find out, this time. Uh oh.” His tone changed. “Incoming!”

In an instant of unsettling disorientation, the mist world vanished. Anton swayed, regained his balance as the white walls of the VR cubicle reappeared around him. “Jupiter is . . . incredible.” He looked down at the pool, but the silvery fish shape had already sunk beneath the surface and vanished. “Thanks for taking me,” he said softly, still dazed by what he had just witnessed.

“Hey, any time!” Jonah’s voice came in over his implant, bright with that note of shared conspiracy again. “I better beat it. I’m supposed to be working through some tests. Nice hardware you got. Later.”

“Later,” Anton said, and thought, poor lonely kid.

He wasn’t a kid. Anton turned to face Sandra Li as she hurried through the door.

“Mr. Kraj.” She smiled warily at him. “I’m sorry I was unavailable. I didn’t expect you here so early. I hope you weren’t bored.” She glanced at the pool. “It’s boring to watch somebody else doing virtual. Jonah should have loaned you goggles at least.”

“He didn’t have to.” He was curious about her reaction. “I’m better equipped than you might think.”

“Lenses? Bio-interface?” A shadow of revulsion flitted across her face. “You’re braver than me, to let someone poke around in your brain. I suppose, in your business, it’s worth the risk. So.” She put a smile back onto her face. “Did he show you his Jupiter? Or ours?”

“He showed me reefs.” He watched her closely for a reaction. “You folks never mentioned them.”

“They don’t exist.” Only a brief tightening of her lips suggested any reaction. “Don’t forget that you’re dealing with a thirteen-year-old kid, Mr. Kraj. With a child’s need to fantasize.”

“There are no reefs, then?” He smiled. “I can quote you?”

She shrugged. “The first probe transmitted the entire contents of its memory as it was being destroyed. It was an emergency protocol designed to give us a copy of everything—but the transmission was badly garbled.” She finally looked away. “Jonah has spent a lot of time with that data. If you run it through enough enhancement protocols, you can extrapolate almost anything from it. Could you just leave the reefs out of your . . . story?” Above her casual smile, her eyes were anxious. “They’re Jonah’s fantasy. His version of imaginary friends. That’s all.”

“So there is no life on Jupiter?” he persisted.

“We . . . can’t say that for sure.” She flushed. “What are you getting at?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, and they smiled at each other politely. “Tell me about your funding,” he said as she ushered him out of the boat house. “I’m curious.”

“Our tax records are in a public-access database.” She raised an eyebrow. “What are you really asking me, Mr. Kraj? Can we stop playing games, please?”

“There are some cash-flow brokerages that are . . . shall we say . . . unscrupulous. Fate seems to smile on them. A border war benefits arms sales. A new rice virus causes local famine and boosts commodities prices in one country and ag technology prices in another. They make money. They are a very good investment,” he mused. “If you don’t mind the cost in human suffering.”

“I would like to end this.” Li stopped in the middle of the path and faced him. “You are implying that one such unethical firm has funded us. I would appreciate it if you would give your vague accusations a name, please.”

“Europa AM.” He watched her face closely.

“I asked you to end the game.” She didn’t quite meet his eyes. “You know that we are not funded by Europa.” She shrugged and began walking briskly up the main path. “If someone said that we are, then you should find a more reliable source of information. You may tarnish your reputation for being right, Mr. Kraj.”

She was lying. “Perhaps.” Anton didn’t try to keep up with her brisk angry stride. He turned on his recording feature and got a good take of the old resort building emerging from the coastal shrubbery. The swimming pool had been maintained, and a couple of employees were sunning themselves on towels. He could make this place look like a huge luxurious scam with very little editing.

“I’m sorry for losing my temper.” She waited for him at the top of the path. “Can I offer you lunch? Our cafeteria is quite good.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I do have some more questions for you.” He followed her into the resort’s old restaurant—now a staff cafeteria. This early, they pretty much had the room to themselves. A small buffet offered salad makings and two soups, along with breads that smelled fresh.

“We’re a boost to the local economy.” She smiled crookedly as she arranged sushi around a mound of marinated vegetables. “There wasn’t much local economy left, after the resort closed. Mr. Kraj, we are an entertainment-oriented society. Science has to be sexy, or it gets no money. Unless it is backed by commercial money, and then it has to make money.” She faced him, clutching her plate like a shield. “We’re forgetting how to look to the future—to wonder. We’re only concerned with the moment.”

“Is this tirade directed at me personally, or the media as a whole?” Anton selected a slice of tomato, added it to his plate. “Why should anyone pay to satisfy your curiosity about Jupiter?”

“My curiosity?” Li closed her eyes briefly. “Doesn’t anyone else want to know? Does it have to make money or boost some media company’s stock on the Exchange? Yes, I know it does.” She marched stiffly to an empty table. “Maybe this race has already dead-ended.”

“I doubt it.” Anton seated himself across from her. “Where did you get Jonah’s human overlay?”

“We purchased the virtual recordings from a broker.” She blinked. “You’re welcome to look at the invoice, but the donor’s name isn’t on it. What does this have to do with Europa AM?”

“Nothing.” Anton pulled his notebook from his pocket, laid it beside his untouched salad and opened his atrium. “I’d like to see that invoice, please.”

For a moment, Li stared at him, her lips tight. “Excuse me.” She rose, picked up his notebook, and carried it over to the wall. Plugging it into a dataport, she touched keys for a few moments, then unplugged it and brought it back. “I downloaded it into your atrium.” She set the notebook down on the table with a small click, and glanced at her watch.

“Another meeting?” He raised an eyebrow.

“A sim session with Jonah. Our version, not his.” She picked up her tray, then stood still, staring down at Anton. “Have you ever faced a difficult decision about something you believed in?” she asked quietly. “Or do you believe in anything at all?”

“I believe in truth,” he said, but she was already carrying her tray to the kitchen.

So the shimmering reef was Jonah’s fantasy. Or perhaps it was his hope. Anton accessed his atrium and stared at his plate as the images appeared on his lenses. New data, he subvocalized, and an invoice appeared, black letters floating in a sea of blue. Jovan Corporation had purchased rights to certain bio-medical records from a broker, who had purchased them from a private hospital.

The patient’s name was not part of the contract.

The hospital was the one in which Elliot had died.

Endit. The letters vanished. He realized that he had clenched his hands into fists, and opened them slowly. He picked up his tray, carried it to the kitchen window, and set it down beside Li’s untouched food. We are not doing justice to the local resources, he thought as he set the tray down.

“I’m not certain that I understand your complaint,” the hospital administrator said politely. He looked down at the surface of his teak desk, sitting straight but relaxed in his tastefully decorated virtual Office. “You sold us various organs, clone rights for several cell types, and you released any claim to recorded test results. The contract was standard and legal. It was signed and retina-printed by you in the presence of our in-house notary.”

“I have my own copy of the contract.” Anton clenched his teeth. “I know that I waived my claim to test results.” He had tried to remember them all—biochemistry, EEG, EKG, various scans of organs, brain, tissues. Nothing that would give a space probe his son’s personality. “I’m asking about the virtual interactives that Elliot spent time with. Those were not tests.” He leaned forward, wanting to grab the man by the shoulders and shake him. How would the virtual react if he did? “The interactives were entertainment, not treatment.” Although the doctor had suggested it. He said they got less depression and consequent suppression of the immune system if paralyzed patients could at least move in virtual. “They were my gift to Elliot.” They had dived together. hiked, and climbed mountains. “Did you record my son’s virtual time?”

“There’s no need to get angry, Mr. Kraj,” the administrator soothed.

“I want to know if the interactives were recorded.” Anton uttered each word slowly and clearly. This conversation was like trying to wade through mud. “That’s all.” They had to have been recorded. That was the only way someone would have enough input about Elliot to create someone who laughed like he had, who said things Elliot would have said. People had watched the two of them play, had listened to them talk. Anton drew a slow deep breath, trying to calm himself.

“I’m sorry.” The administrator said stiffly. “I see no reason to access our files at your demand.”

“I’m his father. His legal guardian.”

“You released all rights to your son’s test results. You were paid for that release. That is the end of the matter. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Go to hell. Exit.” Anton pulled off his skinthin gloves as his room reappeared. He put his head down on his desk wanting to pound on it with his fists until the fake wood cracked and broke. Or his fists did.

“You have a visitor,” his House system announced. “Your neighbor, Cam.”

“I’m not home. House, cancel that.” He sighed. “Let him in.” He hadn’t decided if he liked his neighbor or not, but right now any distraction was welcome.

“I’m glad you were home. I want to celebrate with someone.” Grinning, Cam waved a champagne bottle and twin glasses at him. “Real California vintage. Sonoma Valley. Drip irrigated with one hundred percent fresh water and hand picked.”

“What happened?” Anton straightened, and tossed his gloves onto his desk.

“I filled this tough contract.” Cam laughed as the cork popped and bounced off the ceiling. “Even I had my doubts about whether I could do it. I’d say I’m even better than I think, but actually, I was just lucky.” He handed Anton a tulip-shaped glass of pale wine. “Cheers.” The glasses chimed faintly as they touched.

“Congratulations.” Anton lifted his glass and sipped.

“What’s wrong?” Cam perched on the corner of Anton’s desk. “I’m not so full of myself that I’m totally blind. Did you get kicked off your story?”

“Nobody kicks me off a story.” Anton’s lips twisted. “A very polite hospital administrator just told me that my son’s medical records were none of my business.”

“Oh yeah. Hospitals.” Cam drank wine and rolled his eyes. “They figure they own your soul as well as your body.”

Anton winced.

“I like you. I really like your online stuff. You go for blood and you don’t fool around.” Cam stared into his wine, one foot swinging idly. “Do you ever use, uh . . . illegally obtained information?” he asked after awhile.

“Hacked, you mean?” Anton studied him. “If I did, I certainly wouldn’t admit it to anyone.”

“Yeah.” Cam swirled the wine in his glass. “Let’s just say that I might . . . be able to get a copy of those records for you.” He gave Anton a cautious sideways glance. “Maybe. And maybe not.”

Anton sipped his own wine. This could be a set-up. There were certainly plenty of people who had reason to nail him. Cam had never felt quite right to him. He was careful never to ask about the source of his informants’ information. Penalties for illegal entry into private dataspace were very high, and ignorance was a shaky defense at best. But he was good at smelling a trap. “I’d like to get hold of those records,” he said cautiously. “I’d be very indebted.” He studied the tiny bubbles rising in his glass.

“If I find anything out, it’s a gift.” Cam leaned over to touch the rim of his glass to Anton’s. “Because you’re good at what you do.”

“Thanks.” Anton let Cam refill his glass, and suppressed a brief twinge of uneasiness.

He didn’t want to talk to Jonah any more, but if he was going to gut Jovan in the end, Jonah was their weakest point. The rest of the staff presented a united and unanimously uninformative front. With the right slant, he could turn the probe-A.I. into an exploited child slave, or a monster. Whichever worked best. Jonah was the hook that would land him his audience and boost NewsNet’s stock out of its current slump. For at least a week, anyway.

Business. So why the hell did he feel guilty?

“I’m glad you’re spending time with Jonah.” Sandra Li nodded from behind her desk. Gray light from the overcast day cast shadows beneath her eyes, as if she wasn’t sleeping well. “He likes you.”

“He’s an A.I.,” Anton said.

“Yes.” Li turned to look out her window at the gray convergence of sea and sky. “He is, isn’t he?”

Then she suggested that he go swim with Jonah. Which was what Anton had intended to ask, but he had expected her to balk. She had let him sit in on one of their training sims, too. No reefs in her version, but she had given him quite a tour. Anton pondered the change in her behavior as he walked down to the boathouse. Before, she had been helpful because someone had ordered her to be helpful. He wondered what lay beneath her gracious invitations. Something. She was neither naive nor stupid, and she knew he was on to them. Even if it would be difficult to prove in court, there was no doubt that Europa AM was slipping money through the convenient economic wormhole of Jovan Corporation. And Sandra Li, director, knew all about it.

A chilling possibility occurred to Anton as he walked into the cavernous boat house. Accidents could happen out in the ocean. Was she that desperate? A coveralled technician sat cross-legged beside the diving pool, a notebook on his lap. “Hi.” He smiled, polite but wary. “If you’re looking for Jonah, he’s just finishing a test sequence. Five minutes, okay?”

“Ask him if he wants to take me swimming, will you?” Anton looked over the technician’s shoulder as the man relayed his question to Jonah. He focused his cameras on the screen, even though the numbers meant nothing to him. Scientific ambiance.

“Sure I’ll take you swimming.” Jonah’s voice sounded in his ear. “You could have asked me yourself, you know. Just access fish and you’ll get me. I set it up when I hacked you into the sim.”

“He says he’d be glad to take you swimming.” The technician touched his laptop screen and the numbers winked out.

“What’s it like working with him?” Anton asked curiously.

“With Jonah?” The technician smiled at the empty pool. “Sometimes you forget he’s not a kid. And then he does a whole string of stress calculations, or figures something out long before you do, and you remember what he really is. Jonah does have quite a sense of humor.” His grin widened. “I do most of the undersea testing with him, and he’s really gotten me good a couple of times. I’m all done here. Scuba gear is in that locker.” He nodded. “Need any help?”

“Thanks, I’ll manage.” Anton watched as the technician tucked the notebook into his coverall and left. He was friendlier than most of the people here. “Can I buy you a beer some afternoon?” he asked. “I’d like to get a feel for the project and for Jonah—through your perspective.”

“Sure, I guess.” The technician was trying to sound nonchalant, but he was pleased. “Hey, I’ve always wanted to be famous.”

Him and everybody else. “Great.” Anton clasped his hand briefly.

“I’m Denny O’Shea.”

“I’ll look you up.” Anton headed for the gear locker. Maybe he had finally found his crack in the staffs united front of silence. Anton plugged a new hard-data sphere into his skinthins and inspected the scuba gear. The racked tanks were light—cutting edge bio-rebreathers, he noted. His skinthins were waterproof, so he left them on as he donned a lightweight wetsuit.

“You don’t really need to interview Denny, do you?” Jonah’s voice sounded in his ear. “I turned off the sound on the security monitors for the room so you can talk,” he said cheerfully.

“Well, no, I don’t really think I can use an interview with Denny.” Anton found himself unexpectedly reluctant to lie to Jonah. “But I might. You never know. So don’t tell him, okay?”

“I won’t.” Jonah sounded thoughtful. “He would be hurt. Thanks for going swimming with me.”

“Like I said—you’re the most interesting person here. And the smartest,” Anton said, hearing that echo of loneliness again. “Do they know that you’ve hacked their security to pieces?”

“Nah.” Jonah’s sheepish tone made Anton smile. “I don’t do anything. It was a challenge, you know? Well, I did do a little bit, I guess.” His sheepish tone intensified. “I hid you an access, and I fixed your chip.”

“My chip?” Anton donned his breather mask and carried his fins over to the pool.

“It was only supposed to work when Sandy keyed you in. And some places were locked off. Like the sim lab. She guessed when she found you there, but she didn’t say anything to me.” Jonah surfaced, water running down his silvery back. “You can go anywhere anytime, now.”

“You won’t get in trouble?” Anton asked, and realized that he was really worrying. A.I. Not kid. Not son. He let his breath out slowly. “What’s it like for you, here?” Anton checked to make sure that his headband was in place and that he was still in record mode.

“It’s fine.” Jonah sank slowly beneath the surface. “I run a lot of tests in the water. This body has some modifications so that it feels pretty much like the body I’ll be wearing on Jupiter. We even found a good offshore rip that is a little like the wind I’ll be riding.”

The body I’ll be wearing, he had said. As if the soul could be decanted from one container to the other. As if he were software. Well, he mas software to a large extent, wasn’t he? Anton reminded himself wryly. Jonah wasn’t confused about his identity. Anton submerged, pressure squeezing his ears until he swallowed and they popped. The white-noise whisper of underwater filled his head.

He loved to dive. It was as close to flying as you could get as a landbound mammal. He had taught Elliot, and Elliot had loved it, too. Anton swallowed, and concentrated on following Jonah’s sleek silhouette. They went out along the edge of the cove, staying inside its protective arms.

Sea anemones bloomed along the rocky underwater slopes, salmon and rose—the colors of Jupiter’s hydrogen sulfide cloud layer.

“Do you know that tube worms live in volcanic vents?” Jonah’s tone was thoughtful. “Life is really adaptable. I bet there are all kinds of creatures living in Jupiter’s layers. Maybe even . . . intelligent species.”

“Maybe.” Anton swam up beside Jonah, hearing a kid’s dreams in his voice. “Then you’ll be more famous online than me, even.”

“Yeah.” Jonah angled downward toward the base of a coral pillar. “Look, a ray.” A slender arm emerged from Jonah’s belly, and he prodded the sand with a three-fingered hand. The ray erupted in a cloud of silt, flapping away to settle sullenly to the bottom once again. “That would be a good design for Jupiter’s gas sea,” he said casually.

“Jovian rays would have to be a lot more solid than those reef creatures you showed me.”

“Gas rays,” Jonah said. “They could be more solid. They could even be intelligent.”

“Gas rays.” Anton caught hold of Jonah’s dorsal fin, let Jonah pull him through the water. “You think they’re there, too, don’t you?” he asked softly. “Intelligent rays?”

“Didn’t Sandy tell you?” Jonah’s tone was flat. “They’re an illusion of computer manipulation.”

“She told me,” Anton said softly. “Are they there?”

“Yes.” Jonah speeded up. “I’m going to give them real proof this time—solid proof.”

I’m going to get well, Elliot had said in that same tone. Brief guilt pierced Anton. If he exposed Jovan for the fraud it was, then Jonah wouldn’t get to go. But if Jovan was the scam that he suspected it was, then they would probably fail to actually launch the project anyway. Or they might abort the project and leave Jonah cut off and stranded.

“If I was straight software, I wouldn’t care,” Jonah said thoughtfully. “Sometimes I wish . . .” He fell briefly silent. “Want to see a neat place I found?” he asked abruptly. “It’s a reef where some of the corals mutated. They formed these really neat spires.”

“Show me,” Anton said. What do you wish? he wondered. That you didn’t have to care? Me, too, he thought bitterly. “I saw some mutated corals down off the coast of Mexico once.”

They went and looked at the beautiful coral garden, and they raced across the cove. (Anton lost, even though he suspected that Jonah was holding back.) Jonah showed him his favorite places—the private gardens of a lonely child. And Anton rode the watery roller coaster of the offshore currents, clinging to Jonah’s dorsal fin.

They explored the whole cove, equally excited by small finds of dark purple urchins, a rare type of whelk. It was fun. “Do you remember that time on the Barrier Reef?” Anton asked, as he crawled exhausted out of the water. And with a clench of fear, realized what he had just said, “Never mind.” He pulled his mask off and busied himself with disconnecting his rebreather. “I’m tired.”

“Okay.” Jonah floated in the pool, motionless as a dead log. “You coming back tomorrow?”

“I . . . I don’t know.” Anton didn’t look at him. “I . . . might have to work on another piece.”

“Yeah.” Jonah sank like a stone. “Sure.”

“Wait,” Anton said, but he got no answer.

He was still recording. “Endit,” he subvocalized. “Delete all.” The whole day. All of it.

Are you sure? his system voice whispered through his implant. Really sure?

“I am not sure of anything anymore.” He stood, his muscles shaky because he hadn’t dived for a long time, carried the equipment back to its rack. “I’m not sure of one damn thing. Cancel delete.” He banged the rebreather onto its rack.

The windows of the main hall were open. He heard laughter and smelled coffee. He had meant to interview some of the staff today, but he had connected with O’Shea. And their polite wariness would feel like an accusation. You are going to kill Jonah’s dreams. No, Anton thought angrily. You are.

In the end, Jonah would still lose. Someone always did.

His anger tasted sour in his mouth, like old ashes.

He stopped in at a public clinic on his way home. One was much like another. The pictures on reception-room walls varied, but that was about all. “How may I direct you?” asked the flesh-and-blood receptionist. “General medicine?”

“Psychiatric,” Anton said, and handed the man his card.

“Follow the purple line.” The receptionist zipped his card through a reader and handed it back with a professional smile. “Have a nice day.”

Anton grunted. A line of purple light appeared at his feet. It led through a door and he followed it down a wide hallway, past unmarked doors that concealed diagnostic cubicles with their sick, or anxious, or depressed occupants. Bland, gentle music played in the background, and the air smelled faintly of flowers. The private hospital where Elliot had dreamed and died had been even prettier—with holographic windows full of scenic views, and gourmet food.

And when it was all over, you were left with your grief and the bills. And they devoured the body and soul of the loved one you lost. The purple light-line ended at one of the ivory-colored doors. Anton opened it, walked through, and sat down in the padded recliner before the room could invite him to do so.

“Hello, Anton.” A man shimmered to life beside the couch, seated and relaxed in a matching chair. “What’s troubling you today?’

He always got a male holo. Anton wondered what it was in his personal file that prompted male images only. “I’ve seen a ghost,” he said.

“A ghost, really?” The holo-doctor leaned forward, his expression interested. “Where?”

At Jovan, he would say, and then the doctor-protocol would ask him if it was someone he had known, and then it would ask him how he felt about that person’s death, and . . .

I have found my son, and he is as unreal as you. Only I am having trouble remembering that.

“So where did you see this ghost?” the doctor-image prompted gently. Warmly.

“I didn’t.” Anton got up. “I saw a fish. There are no such things as ghosts.”

“Sit down and relax, Anton. There’s no hurry. Tell me about this fish.”

Anton closed the door behind him. The purple light had vanished, but he had no trouble finding his way back to the reception area. The receptionist looked up from his screen, his young face indifferent behind his professional smile. “Have a nice day,” he said.

His rented apartment looked unfamiliar when he opened the door. He stood on the threshold, trying to remember other apartments, details of upholstery or color scheme or layout. He remembered only rooms, beds, tables set with microwave meals. All that remained were the stories—the editing, the careful scene choice that gave the piece its emotional shading. And he wondered suddenly if he was any more human than Jonah.

“Yo, Anton! I thought I heard the elevator.”

Anton looked over his shoulder. Cam was grinning. “You got it,” Anton said softly. A crystal of ice began to form in his gut. “Come in.” He ushered Cam inside. “Let me have it.” He leaned his back against the door, as if Cam might try to bolt.

“Yes, I got it.” Still grinning, Cam pulled a hard-data sphere from his pocket, tossed it lightly on his palm. “They sure ran a lot of tests on your kid.”

“Santorres was new and interesting.” Anton plucked the sphere from Cam’s palm, walked over to his desk, and socketed it into his terminal.

“It’ll come up as a list.” Cam looked over his shoulder. “You want details, you can window-in to that particular test. I lifted it all—the doctors’ log, and everything. Just for good measure. Man, it was some job. They got good security there.”

“I imagine they do.” Anton pulled on gloves. All private hospitals had tight security. They wouldn’t attract clients, otherwise. “I’m impressed. Ah.” The syllable was in between a groan and a sigh.

He had known they would be there—recordings of those virtual afternoons. But seeing them listed with blood pressure, urinalysis, CAT scans—it hit him hard. Virtual Interactives—the filename was there in damning black letters. Anton touched the capital V, and blinked as he found himself donning scuba gear on a rocky shore.

“I can’t wait to get out there.” Elliot wiped his mask with an anti-fog cloth. “Let’s do that one reef—the one with all the anemones. Dad?” He looked up at Anton, his eyes wide in his tan, healthy face. “I forget sometimes, when we’re diving like this. Maybe it’s easier to let virtual be real if you don’t have a future. I know I’m not going to get better. You don’t have to pretend for me, Dad.”

“Endit.” Anton closed his eyes. The hospital had sold this moment. Strangers had watched. Maybe they had snickered. Slow hot anger flushed his skin.

“Bad news?” Cam asked.

Anton blinked at him. “Tell me what I owe you for this,” he grated. “Whatever you want.”

“I said it was a gift.” Cam shook his head as he got to his feet. “I’m glad I could help, but it looks as if I brought you a bunch of grief. If there’s anything more I can do . . .”

Anton shook his head. “Thanks,” he whispered. “Thanks a lot.”

“Sure.” Cam paused in the doorway. “I’ve got a bottle of really good Napoleon brandy on my shelf,” he said. “Knock on my door any time.” He lifted a hand and left.

Anton drew two slow calming breaths as the door closed behind Cam, then turned back to the terminal. His legs ached from the unaccustomed exercise of swimming. He hesitated, remembering Jonah’s voice as he talked about Jupiter. Jonah. Elliot. Prototype. Stolen soul. Anton pulled his gloves back on. “Fish.” He blinked as the room shimmered and vanished.

He had expected some kind of atrium. Instead he found himself skimming through opalescent mist beneath a pink sky. Some distance ahead, Jonah swam gracefully through Jupiter’s ammoniated gas-sea, twisting in and out between the frail wind-borne reefs. Apparently Jonah hadn’t yet realized that Anton had dropped into ghost mode. Anton opened his mouth to speak, closed it as Jonah swooped upward and rolled, obviously playing, enjoying himself. Playing, the way Elliot had played among the virtual corals of Earth’s sea. Anton swallowed, gathering the words to speak, to tell Jonah . . . what?

Without warning, the opalescent mist-sea erupted. A pillar of cloud burst skyward. The rose and gold hydrogen sulfide ceiling seemed to shrink from the contact, opening like a wound as the ugly column pierced it. A hapless reef was sucked into the churning vapor, shredding away into fragments that swirled and vanished in the turbulence. Jonah had turned to flee. His thick tail churned, huge flukes fanning desperately, fins working. But he was made to ride the wind, not defeat it. He slid tail first toward the column.

“Jonah!” Anton yelled. A finger of cloud curled around Jonah, and for an agonized instant he seemed to hold his own against the storm. Then, in horrible slow motion, a fin tore away, then part of his fluke. Writhing as if in agony, Jonah disintegrated, ripped slowly to pieces by the invisible claws of the wind. A shrill terrible scream echoed through Anton’s skull, and he screamed with it, a hoarse, riven cry of horror.

Then he was back in his room. Panting, he stared down at his hands, at the red marks his nails had left on his palms. “Jonah,” he whispered.

A dream, he told himself. It was an electronic dream, a simulation, no more real than his dives with the paralyzed Elliot.

The reality waited on Jupiter. A roomful of technicians would record Jonah’s dying screams as he was torn apart, frozen, burned, and crushed by the gas giant. They would observe and analyze, the same way they had observed and analyzed Elliot’s dive. You don’t have to pretend for me, Dad. . . . Anton closed his eyes and shuddered. Jonah was only a prototype. A machine. They were entitled to observe. Breathing through his mouth, Anton entered his Office. “Access Legal Aide,” he said harshly. “I want to sue for illegal use of my son’s private records.”

Anton was more than a little surprised that Jovan’s security let him through the gate at the cove’s entrance. A storm was moving in, and coveralled men and woman hurried past, heads bent against the gusts. The wind carried sand, scouring the exposed skin of Anton’s face, and the Jovan employees stared at him with open hostility. They knew about his suit. Invasion of privacy, the lawyer had informed him. We will sue for that, and for breach of contract. Anton stood in front of the reception screen in the entry that was still decorated in oceanfront resort style, half expecting to get an icon and a polite message telling him that Ms. Li was permanently busy.

“You.” She stared at him from the screen. “I never thought you’d have the nerve. . . . Oh yes, I do want to talk to you, Mr. Anton Kraj.” The screen went blank.

A green light-line winked on in the floor. He followed it to the ocean side of the building, and into a small, bright office. Orchids bloomed in the windows, filling the room with a humid tropical scent. “I can’t believe you did this.” Stiffly upright behind her desk, Li tapped a sheet of hardcopy with one fingernail. “I would like to hear your reasons before I have you thrown off the property.”

“Reasons?” He met her angry glare. Her skin looked as if it had been stretched tightly over the bones of her face, and her eyes were darkly shadowed. “How can you even ask? You used my son’s dying . . . our last months together . . .” He choked, struggled for rational, civilized words. “When I held his hand, he couldn’t even close his fingers around mine. All we had were those dives together. You used all that.” His voice cracked. “You used his hope, his fear, his few moments of joy. You used it.”

“Mr. Kraj. Anton.” She leaned toward him, her eyes huge and dark in her thin face. “I am sorry. I did not know and . . . I am truly sorry. We bought those recordings in good faith. We should have checked the hospital’s release, and we didn’t. That’s our fault, yes. But we did not steal your son’s soul. Those recordings were treated with great respect. What is done is done.” She was pleading now, one hand stretched across the satiny surface of her desk. “Jonah exists. We won’t be able to use him as he is, if the court decides that we have no rights to those original files. We won’t be able to make the launch.” She looked him directly in the eyes. “He wants to go, Anton.”

“He’s an artificial intelligence.” He turned his face away. “Don’t play emotion games with me.”

“Are you really that cold?” she breathed. “You have such a reputation for finding out scams and fraud. But it’s always in the sciences. Why, Mr. Kraj? Are you punishing all of science because one small company was careless?”

“They were not careless.” He said stonily. “They were intentionally fraudulent. And I’m not punishing anyone.”

“Bullshit.” She stood. “Security.” She raised her voice. “You may escort Mr. Kraj from the premises now.”

“Sandy?” A familiar male voice issued from invisible speakers. “We’ve got trouble. Jonah’s gone.”

“What?” Li glanced sideways at Anton. “What do you mean, gone? I told you to keep an eye on him, Denny!”

“I was.” Denny sounded miserable. “He was running the sims—his own, you know? And I went to grab a sandwich at the cafeteria because he’s always in there for at least a couple of hours. I was just gone ten minutes. When I got back, he was gone.”

“Cove security here. Brovin.” A deeper voice superimposed itself over Denny’s. “We just picked something up on its way out of the cove. It looks like Jonah’s signal.”

“It is,” Li said tightly. She pressed the heel of her hand to her temple. “Where is he heading?”

“Maybe toward The Run.” Brevin sounded doubtful. “I might be wrong. It’s hard to track him. That offshore storm is kicking up a hell of a lot of silt. And he knows not to go there . . . so I don’t know.”

“We can’t take any chances,” Li said tightly. “Pick me up on the dock in one minute.”

“On my way.”

“Use the big boat.” Her voice was harsh. “We might need the cradle.

She lifted her head and looked at Anton. “He’s on his way out to The Run.” she said coldly. “It’s a rocky chute between the headland and the big rocks at the cove mouth. The current is a killer when the tide has turned. And we’ve got storm surge on top of it all. The rocks could seriously damage him.”

Like the storm had torn him to pieces in the sim Anton had stumbled into? “You told him?” he asked softly.

“I didn’t, but everybody knows.” She palmed the door open, started down the hall at a fast walk. “I . . . didn’t tell him who had filed the suit. He likes you.” Her voice dripped bitterness. “He thinks you’re his friend.”

And it occurred to Anton that she had wanted them to be friends, to perhaps let his friendship with Jonah become their shield. No wonder she had been so willing to let Anton play with Jonah. Nice bit of attempted manipulation.

Right now, he didn’t care. “I’m coming with you.” He caught up with her.

“Like hell.” She burst through the door at the end of the corridor.

Wind lashed Anton’s hair into his eyes as he followed. The offshore storm was building fast, whipping the cove into white-capped waves. A boat churned through the chop, engines throbbing a low note as it sidled up to the dock at the foot of the slope. Li broke into a run, her feet pounding the wooden planks. The boat was already starting to pull away from the dock as she leaped on board. They weren’t going to wait for him. Anton sprinted to the edge of the dock and leaped. He landed with centimeters to spare, tottering as the boat yawed in the chop. For a terrible instant, he thought they were going to let him go over, leave him to drown or flounder back to the dock. Then hands grabbed him and hauled him onto the slippery deck.

“Take him back!” Li snapped, livid with anger. “Never mind, there isn’t time. Just stay out of our way. This is your fault!” She turned her back on him and ducked into the cabin.

The two coveralled men on deck gave him quick sullen looks. One of them followed Li into the cabin. “Look, I’m worried about him, too,” Anton said to the man who had helped him. It was Denny. “How are you going to find him?”

“We already know where he is.” Denny looked unhappy. “He’s got a locator beacon that can be activated by remote. He’s in The Run. If he gets too badly bashed up, he could wreck some pretty expensive hardware.”

Suicide? Anton clung to the rail as Denny hurried away. No, he told himself. This wasn’t a moody teenage kid, this was a carefully engineered machine intelligence. It would not damage itself intentionally. The leaden sky mocked him, and the clouds on the horizon reminded him of the updraft storm that had destroyed Jonah in his sim.

The overlay was an experiment, Li had told him. Maybe this was a moody kid. Maybe worse than the average moody kid. The boat bucked and rolled as the captain angled toward the narrow channel between a rocky cliff face and a cluster of three huge rocks that jutted thirty feet above the water. The Run. Water churned white and spray exploded as storm waves thundered onto the headland. Fangs of rock gleamed wet and black between the breaking waves. The captain held the boat at the edge of the worst turbulence. It was rough. Incoming waves, driven by the approaching storm, lifted the nose of the boat from the water, then let it slam down into the following trough. Anton’s stomach clenched unhappily.

And then, as a wave receded, he caught a glint of silver almost directly below him. Or maybe it was a trick of the light. He strained his eyes, hanging on to the bucking rail, waiting for the wave to recede. There! The silver glint could be Jonah’s tail fluke. If so, he was lying on the bottom, rolling like a drift wood log in the wash of the waves. How long until he rolled onto the rocks? He blinked away a vision of Jonah rupturing in the updraft storm.

Pound on the cabin door, he thought. Tell them. But by the time he got their attention, explained, the boat would have drifted away. Or Jonah might have hit the rocks. A life-ring hung on the railing, attached to a stout rope. Anton yanked it free, and unclipped the ring from the line. The rope might be strong enough to haul Jonah up, or at least keep him here, away from the rocks. Wrapping the end of the rope about his fist, Anton kicked off his shoes and jumped into the trough between waves.

The retreating wave sucked at him, trying to drag him out to sea. He fought it, angling downward, groping for Jonah’s hull because he was blind in the silty wash. His lungs felt as if they were on fire when the knuckles of his rope hand banged something that wasn’t quite as hard as metal. Chest aching, he grabbed, hung on tight as the surge tried to tear him loose. Tail, he thought in relief. Flukes. . . . The sea dragged them both along the bottom, and he heard the dull scrape of rocks against Jonah’s body. He fumbled the rope around Jonah’s tail just in front of the flukes, where it was only as thick as his ankle. Lungs on fire, he headed for the surface.

“Anton?” Jonah’s voice exploded in his head. “What are you doing?”

Anton’s head broke the surface and he gasped, desperate for air. A wave caught him by surprise, picked him up, and tumbled him end over end. His shoulder scraped rock as a giant’s hand shoved him through the water. Then his head hit, and pain sheeted red through the darkness behind his eyes.

Swim or you drown. Old reflexes took over, and he tried, but his legs moved heavily, sluggishly. His right arm was numb—an icy weight that dragged him deeper. He reached groggily for the ring on his diving vest . . . pull it, Elliot, pull the ring before you think you need to. That’s rule one on a dive.

Oh yeah, Elliot was dead, and he wasn’t diving. He was drowning.

Anton could barely feel the water at all—was floating in a gentle darkness. Then something hard bumped him with enough force that he almost yelled and drowned right then and there. A moment later, water broke across his face and he was gasping, choking, trying to suck air into lungs that hurt like hell.

“What were you doing?” Jonah’s exasperation reverberated through his head. “You almost drowned!”

Jonah was holding him in his retractable manipulator arms, Anton realized groggily. “I was . . . trying . . . to get a rope on you.” And Jonah had saved him. The irony made him laugh, and he choked again. “Thought. . . you were in trouble,” he managed to gasp.

“I wasn’t.” Jonah sighed. “I made it through The Run easy. I was just . . . thinking. Sandy is chewing me out even as we speak,” he said, a little sulkily. “I just didn’t feel like talking to anyone.”

“Why?” Anton whispered. “Why take the risk?”

“They were underestimating what I could do. I know how this prototype works better than anyone.” His voice had gone hard. “And what does it matter if I get bashed up? Some asshole filed suit against us. If he wins, we won’t launch, and then I’m just a worthless piece of junk.”

An engine growl rose above the whine of the wind and the slap of the water. “I’m the asshole,” Anton said quickly. They wouldn’t let him near Jonah again. “I filed the suit.”

“You?” Jonah’s arms quivered, and, for an instant, Anton thought he would drop him. “Why?” he asked, and the hurt in his voice made Anton close his eyes briefly.

“Li thinks it’s revenge, but it’s not.” Anton’s teeth were starting to chatter. “You’re wrong, Jonah,” he said. “This program is a scam.” The boat was almost on them now. “The people who are funding you don’t really care. They may yank their money any time and leave you stranded up there for good. They may want you to fail. You just don’t know, and your director doesn’t want to know. You’ll end up as a sacrifice for no good reason.” Rationalization. His own voice mocked him. That’s not why you filed the suit, Anton Kraj, admit it.

Someone splashed down into the water beside them, and rough hands seized Anton. “They’ll destroy you,” he gasped. “Or Jupiter will.” Then a wet-suited figure was belting a harness around him. A winch whined, the line jerked tight, and they hauled him onto the deck like a hooked fish, shivering and dripping.

Jonah never answered him.

They escorted him from the cove—very politely and very firmly. He took an auto-cab to his tower, soaking wet, still shivering in spite of the heat blasting from the vents. They had let him know—Li and the others—that he had made a total fool of himself. And that he was no longer welcome at the cove.

It was the silence in his head that hurt. And that shouldn’t matter at all, because Jonah was a machine, and any echoes of Elliot were just that—programmed responses lifted from more than a thousand hours of virtual interactives. But he kept remembering what Jonah had said about the prejudice against a bio-interface. Like you could turn someone into a machine by doing a direct brain interface. . . . The public believed precisely that.

So did it follow that the reverse was true? Could you turn a machine into a child? Anton zipped his card through the cab’s reader as it pulled up in front of his tower. He had answered that question for himself when he had panicked and jumped into the water.

“Have a nice day,” the auto-cab said in a sweet androgynous voice.

He changed into dry clothes, squeezed by his impersonal apartment. He had welcomed the transient life of rented space. Those rooms with their standard decor permitted no ghosts, no tricks of association to hook him back into yesterday. He had spent the last ten years living in the immediate now of a new story, a new scam to untangle, the demands of piecing a drama together from words and images.

His terminal chimed softly. “Mr. True is calling,” his system voice told him.

Samuel True was his lawyer. Anton reached for his gloves. “Access,” he said aloud, and found himself in his lawyer’s Office. The virtual room was furnished heavily in dark wood, and the small Asian True looked positively tiny behind the polished expanse of his huge desk.

“The judge granted our request for an injunction against further use of the interactive recordings.” True was smiling. “Jovan filed an immediate petition for review with the appellate court. The court declined to review. That is a good sign.” He nodded briskly. “Our suit against Sweet Mercy Hospital has not yet been scheduled, but we should hear within the week.”

Anton nodded, wanting to feel triumph. He merely felt tired. And cold. Who is the owner of a soul? he wondered bitterly. Who holds the copyright?

“I’ll contact you when the case is scheduled. I have very few doubts as to the outcome.” True eyed Anton, obviously waiting for some kind of reaction.

“Thank you, yes,” Anton said heavily. “I appreciate all you did.”

He exited quickly, rude, and unable to be anything else. The sterile room mocked him. Stranger’s room. Not home—never home. Home had ended with Elliot. He went out into the hall and knocked on Cam’s door. Cam opened it immediately, and smiled.

“Ready for that brandy?” He swung the door wide.

Cam’s apartment was decorated in much the same style as Anton’s. Leased decor. Holos of adults and children in smiling, self-conscious poses cluttered the horizontal spaces, but in spite of this evidence of home and family, the room was as impersonal as Anton’s. Again, something nudged him, something to do with Cam.

At the moment, he didn’t really care. Accepting the glass of liquor Cam handed him, he dropped onto the sofa.

“To confusion.” Perched on the arm of a fabric-covered recliner, Cam lifted his glass.

“Confusion,” Anton echoed and raised the glass to his lips. The brandy burned all the way down, and the fumes seemed to soak instantly into his brain.

He found himself telling Cam everything—about Elliot and Jonah, about the launch he could stop, and Jovan’s clandestine connection to Europa. “They’re using him,” he said, seeing that Cam didn’t really care, but unable to stop telling him. “Even Li is using him.” The words slurred as he tried to get his tongue around them.

““You’re doing the right thing.” Cam was sitting beside him, although Anton didn’t remember him moving from the chair. “You’re right to stop them.”

Anton tried to nod, but the brandy had short-circuited his brain and nothing worked very well. It was getting dark, and he wanted to ask Cam to turn on the lights, but he was too comfortable to make the effort of speech, and Cam agreed that he was doing the right thing. He was sleepy, and his eyes kept closing. He struggled to open them one last time, caught a glimpse of Cam’s face close to his and felt his neighbor’s fingers on his face, stroking his neck. Stop it, he tried to say, but he was too tired, and his eyes closed, and he couldn’t get them open again.

The salmon-and-gold light of Jupiter woke him. Anton blinked and stretched, and he tilted sideways, gliding down through the opalescent mist. Ahead, a gold-and-orange reef drifted along on the wind. Adapted for this world, it was easy to forget that this “breeze” was a good two hundred kilometers per hour. Things were flying into the reef, ducking in and out of the ever-changing folds, as if they were playing tag. They reminded him of the rays he and Jonah had watched in the cove. Jonah’s gas rays, he thought and stiffened, wide-awake now. The reaction stalled his forward momentum and the wind shoved at him, trying to tumble him like the waves had tumbled him in the cove.

Automatically, he kicked, as if he was swimming. And moved forward. Flying. A sudden exhilaration filled him. This might be a dream, but it was fun. He stretched his arms in front of him, looked down at the articulated manipulators that appeared. He was a gas fish, like Jonah. The reef was close. He canted his body slightly, changed course to slide in a long lazy arc around a slowly twisting protrusion. This close, he could see how the reef continuously tore in the wind, and continuously repaired itself. Rays scattered gracefully, and a couple of smaller ones followed him, as if they were curious. It was like diving in a current. You didn’t fight the flow. You used it to send you where you wanted to go. He looped and rolled, exhilarated. And laughed as the small rays mimicked him. “I know someone who wants to meet you,” he said, and wished that Jonah could share this dream. Swimming hard, he climbed over the top edge of the reef. The wind eroded it into a fine red-gold dust that scattered and vanished. Seeds? he wondered. Spores? A large shape moved in a fold of the billowing reef. Anton hesitated, wondering if he should flee, reminding himself that this was only a dream as the shadow bulked closer.

“Hi.” Jonah emerged into view, his flukes moving slowly and rhythmically. “I fixed the sim so that you don’t have to ghost.”

“I thought . . . I was dreaming.”

“I wanted to talk to you.” Jonah’s tone was sad. “I’m sorry about hacking you in here like this.”

“It’s okay.” Anton managed to hold his place by working his tail and side fins slowly. “I . . . I didn’t expect to hear from you again.” He groped for the words he needed, but the wind had scattered them.

“Sandy told me that . . . the overlay came from your son.” Jonah’s fins and tail moved with a ponderous grace that fit this world of wind and immensity. “You told me I reminded you of him. She said the hospital sold it without telling you.”

“Yes,” Anton said hoarsely. Above them, the reef seemed to writhe in the wind, constantly reshaped and reshaping. Like human lives, he thought, and laughed bitterly. “You do remind me of Elliot. Way too much. I should probably go in for treatment. But it doesn’t alter the fact that you’re a pawn.” Anton clenched his fist, but the gesture didn’t translate into virtual. “I still plan to stop them from using you.”

“Why?” Jonah let the wind take him, swooping gracefully away, gliding and looping like the rays who flapped, startled, out of his way.

“Because . . . I care about you.” This world demanded truth. “You have some of . . . my son’s soul. And to hell with what the theologians might say about that. I don’t . . . want you to die.” Again, he didn’t add.

For awhile, Jonah was silent, and they drifted along on the wind beneath a rose-and-gold ceiling of hydrogen sulfide, bejeweled with droplets of ammoniated dew. Beautiful, Anton thought. This world is beautiful.

“If you win your suit,” Jonah said at last, “what will happen to me?

“I . . .” Anton swallowed. “I could offer Ms. Li a release to use Elliot’s records. With the condition that you remain on Earth.”

“I don’t belong on Earth.” Jonah banked away from Anton, propelling himself with powerful sweeps of his tail. “You don’t understand, Anton.”

“You will die here,” Anton said harshly.

“You said that. You can die on the street. Or in bed.” He drifted on the wind, silhouetted against the pink sky. Two blood-red rays spiraled around him in widening arcs. “Sandy thinks this is illusion—my fantasy extrapolated from the bits of data we salvaged from the first probe.” Jonah’s voice sounded sad in Anton’s head. “The first probe wasn’t overlaid with a personality, but it was pretty complex—cutting-edge of the last generation of organic cores. It . . . I . . . talked to the rays. Not in words, you know. It happened after I was damaged—before the system shut down. It didn’t come through in any form they could understand in the data dump. So they thought it was noise. They used that probe’s transmissions to create me—like they used Elliot’s dives.” He drifted gently down to Anton’s level again. “I remember them, too.” Floating, nose to nose with Anton, he bumped him very gently. “I’m as much them as I am Elliot, Anton. I belong here.”

Communication. Anton’s mind reeled. First contact. Alien sentience.

“If you keep me on Earth, I still won’t be Elliot. I want to go home, Anton.”

Home. The word struck him like a fist. “Exit,” Anton whispered, sliding down the Jovian wind. “Exit, please.”

He woke in his own bed, blinking away fractured visions of pink clouds and Cam’s smiling face close to his own. Dreams, he thought, struggling out of bed. Drunken dreams. He held his head in his hands, waiting out the fierce pulse of pain at the base of his skull. Hangover? Alcohol was not his thing, and the brandy had hit him hard last night. He remembered Cam’s hands on him just as he passed out, and rubbed his face with a scowl. Wrong idea, Cam. His fingers paused as they encountered a small soreness on his shoulder. It felt like the spot where they’d implanted the security chip. He scratched, flaking off a tiny scab. Bright blood smeared his fingertips. Infection? It felt more like a scratch, and he wasn’t sure if that was where the chip had been inserted or not.

It would be something to keep an eye on. Anton made his unsteady way to the shower, where he ran the water hot and cold until the worst of the headache had passed.

It hadn’t been a dream. The more he tried to tell himself that it had been one, the more he knew it for a lie. Jonah had hacked him into his virtual Jupiter. Anton had passed out while still dressed in his skinthins. His bio-interface had given Jonah access.

Who is the owner of a soul?

I want to go home, Jonah whispered in the hiss of the shower. Anton turned off the spray, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went to his terminal. He was in luck. Denny O’Shea was listed in the local database. He was home. His image formed above the terminal holo-stage, yawning and sleepy-eyed.

“What do you want?” he asked as he recognized Anton. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“Don’t exit.” Anton gripped the edge of the table. “I need to know . . . what are you going to do with Jonah?”

“What do you care?” Denny’s face was hard.

“If you couldn’t use him for the probe, what would you do with him?” Anton persisted.

“We aren’t going to do anything with him.” Denny shook his head and stifled a yawn. “He’s a probe. The only one we have. We’re going to have to wipe the A.I.’s memory shell right down to the core and start over from scratch. It’s gonna put the launch off a whole year. At least. Thanks to you.”

“Is it scheduled? Stripping his memory?”

“This is my day off. I was out late last night. I’m going back to bed.”

“Wait!” Anton cried, but Denny’s face had vanished from the holostage.

Anton leaned forward and buried his face in his hands. Jonah was right. He wasn’t Elliot. He wasn’t a Jovian ray, either. He was a probe. A machine. You just reformatted and started over. “Access Sandra Li,” he said hoarsely. “This is an emergency.”

Li looked through her window, her face etched with bitter lines. “We have become addicted to entertainment.” She glanced sideways at him. “You, of all people, must know that. Reality must be exciting. Stimulating. Do you know how much the Mars Project is spending on PR?”

“Yes,” Anton said evenly. “I do. They tried to hire me.”

“That figures.” Her lips twisted. “I know about Jonah’s rays. I don’t know if there is any reality there, or how much. A.I.’s become . . . creative as they die. Some of the final data is suggestive, but we don’t have enough to get us free media attention,” she said grimly. “And we can’t afford people like you—people who could turn a scrap of hope into an established first contact.”

“I don’t do that.” Anton met her angry stare. “That’s why I turned the Mars people down.”

“That makes you a saint?”

“Not at all.”

Her shoulders slumped and she looked away. “Europa—yes—Europa, damn it—offered us enough funding to get us back to Jupiter. We lost our previous funding because we didn’t find anything wonderful,” she said bitterly. “I pretend that I don’t know how Europa gets its money, or what the cost is. But that’s a lie.” She raised her head, bleak shadows filling her dark eyes. “No one else knows, except me. I am a fanatic. But that’s no justification, is it? If Jonah sends us solid evidence of life on Jupiter—I won’t need Europa. Or people like you. The media will love us. We need to keep exploring, Anton. Or we’ll stagnate here and die as a species.” She looked away. “I am very sorry about your son,” she said slowly. “I told you so, and I meant it. It is a bitter coincidence.”

“The media will love you for about a week,” Anton said absently. Something was bothering him. It was a tremendous coincidence, yes. And cosmic coincidences did happen, yes . . . but . . . he let his breath out slowly. T wish I could say that you’re wrong.” He looked past her, out to the blue sea where he had gone diving with Elliot and never would again, except in his dreams. “I have instructed my lawyer to request that the injunction be lifted. We are withdrawing our suit against you.” True had had a fit. “I will sign a release granting you rights to the VR recordings. I won’t get in the way of your launch.”

“What?” She blinked, hope struggling with distrust in her face. “I’m . . . I’m delighted.” She lifted her hands palm up. “What made you change your mind?”

“Jonah.” He bowed his head. “And you, partly. You believe in what you’re doing. I thought I did, too. Now . . .” He gave her a crooked smile. “Maybe you were right. That I have spent my life on vengeance.” He turned away from that window full of sea and memory. “Let Jonah go be what you made him to be.”

“Anton . . .” She held out her hand. “Thank you,” she said softly.

He nodded, not trusting himself to speak, turned to leave.

“I’ll reactivate your chip,” she said as the door opened for him. “If you want to visit Jonah. It will let you onto the field to watch the launch, too.”

He didn’t want to watch the launch, didn’t want to see Jonah again. “Thank you,” he said politely, and left.

It was time to start a new project. WorldNews was going to be pissed, but he had the final say. That was line one in his contract. So they could bitch all they wanted about not getting the Jovan expose. He had plenty of possibilities on file.

All science. He smiled crookedly as he entered his virtual Office. Maybe he would try hunting in some other preserve this time. Mail cluttered his virtual desktop. He glanced over it, swept most of it into the trash. One message caught his eye, however. It was from the informant who had sold him his information on the Europa connection.

He didn’t need it anymore.

Anton started to file it until he could e-mail a quit message, but he windowed into it instead, curious as to what new info his talented contact had hacked.

“Hope you’ve got your story ready to go.” The Rev’s voice sounded in his head. “Europa had a bad day. Several wrong decisions got made by mi-
nor nodes—who probably wish they were dead if they aren’t already corpses. I guess Europa has been teetering on the edge for awhile now, keeping it quiet. It finally leaked. We’re talking bigtime economic crash. Europa is pulling in its hundred heads. Which means the wormhole’s gonna close. Jovan’s gonna get left high and dry. Fact is, I’m kinda surprised they didn’t get axed two weeks ago when the whole thing started to come apart.”

Anton sat staring at his desktop after the voice ended. So Europa was going to pull its money. Jonah wouldn’t get to Jupiter after all. His flash of relief made him wince. He was never going to exorcise Elliot from Jonah. Anton scowled, tugged once more by that nagging sense of wrong.

The Rev had been surprised that Europa hadn’t pulled their funding two weeks ago.

He had started investigating Jovan Corporation two weeks ago. A feathery chill tickled the back of his neck. More cosmic coincidence? He had picked up the tip on Jovan’s connection to Europa from a mediocre source. That tip had been the key that had let The Rev track down the proof. And that tip had just happened to come to him—Elliot’s father. The one man who might let vengeance take control, and who had the power to trash Jovan.

He accessed Sandra Li.

“I was in a meeting.” She raised a wary eyebrow. “What can I do for you?”

“Who shoved me down your throat?” he asked harshly. “It’s important.”

“Europa, through our intermediaries.” She looked away, blushing. “I guess they figured a clean bill of health from you would be the best cover.”

Or else they had wanted Anton to do what he had almost done—stop the launch. That chill tickle at his neck was growing worse. “Is the launch still on? No problems with Europa?”

“Yes, it’s still on.” She looked surprised. “Not even Europa could stop it now. And why would they?” She was getting angry. “Whatever their ethics or lack of them, they are behind this. Don’t ask me to walk away from them now. It’s too late.”

“I hope you’re right,” he said. “I’ll talk to you later. Exit.” For a moment or two he sat staring at his Office’s wall. She still thought of him as the enemy. Maybe that would never change, either.

Why didn’t Europa simply pull their funding? Perhaps a public admission of the Jovan connection would compromise another illegal wormhole.

And maybe Europa was backing Jovan because someone inside believed the way Sandra believed.

The Rev didn’t think so, and The Rev hadn’t been wrong vet.

The launch was scheduled for tomorrow. Anton wondered if Cam might be able to find something out. Thoughtfully, he went next door.

The door opened to his touch, unlocked. The room was empty, the holos gone from the shelves and table tops, all surfaces dusted and clean. Anton wrinkled his nose at the prickly scent of anti-viral disinfectant.

Cam had moved out.

Coincidence upon coincidence—that he should get a tip about Jovan, that Cam should happen to be a good enough hacker to get him the proof he needed. It was damned hard to crack a private hospital database.

Too many coincidences. Way too many. And he knew Cam from somewhere. Toss that coincidence on to the scale and it went tilt. Anton went back to his apartment and accessed his Office. From there, he e-mailed The Rev with two questions, asap mode: Who really owned Sweet Mercy Hospital, and was there any way for Europa to make any money at all on the shuttle launch or the Jovan project?

He didn’t hear from The Rev until just before dawn. The terminal’s chime woke him from his uneasy drowse on the sofa. He struggled up out of a nightmare in which giant rays tore Jonah apart with terrible fangs.

What is a soul? Who owns it?

“Access.” He fumbled his gloves on. This time, his informant had left him his answer in lines of neat typeface floating on a blue background.

Europa.

Blow it up for the insurance.

Anton stared at the words, cold horror squeezing the back of his neck. Sandra Li would have done it—insured their project. Of course. She was the meticulous type, and she would have spent the money to safeguard her obsession against accident. The shuttle crew would die in the process, but that kind of price had never bothered Europa in the past. So Europa would collect some of the money it needed from Jovan, and any further drain on its assets would end on the launch pad.

Neat scheme.

“Access Sandra Li,” Anton rasped. “This is an emergency.”

Her image formed, but it was flat and immobile, an icon only. “I’m attending the shuttle launch,” she said in the kind of voice you use to leave messages. “I’ll be back in my office on Monday morning. If it’s an emergency, you can get in touch with the Jovan main office. They will be able to relay a message to me.”

Shit. Anton stared at her image, sweat tickling his scalp. “Access Jovan main office,” he snapped.

“Hi.” A blond man with a young face appeared. “Nobody is here right now, but talk to me, and I’ll pass your message on as soon as someone comes in.”

Anton exited. Sweating in earnest now, he accessed the media services, surfing through the newslines, one after the other, skipping from knifing to car chase, from murder to mayhem—all the juicy tidbits that kept the access percentage up there. But one newsline was doing its community-service bit, offering a schedule of local and regional coming events.

Including a schedule of shuttle launches for the Southern California Regional Trans-Port. A launch was scheduled for two hours from now. When he windowed into that listing, the Jovan Project was listed on the cargo manifest.

“Access fish,” he rasped, and wondered if Jonah could connect. “Fish! Jonah? Can you hear me?” No answer, but maybe he could hear and not answer. “Europa needs money,” Anton said. “They can get it by blowing up the launch. You are insured. They will collect through Jovan. Jonah, get out of there!”

No answer. Anton cradled his head in his arms, tears of frustration burning behind his eyelids. The launch was hundreds of miles away. No way . . . no way to reach him in time.

Well, maybe. He got to his feet, drew a deep breath. If he hired a private jump jet . . . if they didn’t get shunted into a minor airfield . . . then maybe. Just maybe . . .

“West public landing strip is closed for the next hour,” the pilot said. “Shuttle launch.” He was young and disdainful, recently military and not very impressed with commercial piloting.

“What happens if you land?” Anton studied the sprawl of the Trans-Port. It was a city unto itself, handling travel all over the globe and up to the orbital platforms as well. “Will they shoot us down?”

“Nah, this isn’t anything important.” The pilot snorted, faceless beneath his VR flight visor. “I’ll just collect a three hundred Pounds International ticket. And my boss will be pissed.”

“Give me your reader.”

The pilot handed it over without comment. Holding it where he could see the numbers, Anton zipped his card through the slot and keyed in a payment of six hundred PI. Finger poised to enter it in, he looked at the mirrorshade surface of his pilot’s visor.

“My boss can be pissed.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’ll cure his constipation. One ringside seat for the shuttle launch, coming up.”

“Thanks,” Anton said, and watched his reflected face grin a distorted grin on the curved visor.

He had the door open before the skids had even touched down. His pilot yelled at him as Anton bailed out, but Anton ignored him. He’d spent plenty of time in jump jets and knew to keep away from the jet blast. Fine dust rose in choking clouds and the hot exhaust licked across the scarred pavement, scorching his ankles as he ran for the orbital launch paddock.

The orbitals lifted from the seaward edge of the Port, where they could ditch into the ocean if they needed to. Only one launch was scheduled tor the day, so Anton headed for the big-bellied orbital crouched on the fire-marked launch ramp. Li could be anywhere. He had a feeling that she would want to oversee everything from the fueling of the shuttle to the loading of the project’s cargo pod. He crossed the adjacent paddock at a trot, earning curious stares from uniformed Port employees.

Security wasn’t military-grade out here, but he wondered why nobody had intercepted him. Then he remembered the chip. Of course, they were running a constant scan, just to monitor crowd traffic and to make sure that unauthorized citizens didn’t wander into the wrong area. Protected by Li’s chip, he could go wherever he pleased. Panting, clutching his aching side, he slowed, scanning the bustle of Port employees for somebody—anybody—who might have authority. And who might know where Li was.

The pale blue of a Jovan uniform caught his eye, and he veered toward the trio. The blond man looked familiar. The dark-haired woman, too. He’d interviewed her on his first day at the cove, groped vainly for her name. “Excuse me,” he said. “Where can I find Sandra?”

They turned three equally hostile faces toward him. Looked quickly at each other. “I don’t know.” The dark woman lifted her chin. “Excuse us. We’re busy, Mister Kraj.”

“Damn it, this is an emergency!” Anton struggled for control. “Someone is going to blow up this damn launch. For your insurance.”

They stared at him coldly.

“You fucking idiots!” he snarled. Another flash of Jovan blue caught his eye, and he turned, shading his eyes against the sun. Yes, it was Li. And she was talking to someone in a Port coverall. He laughed as Anton watched, head coming up and tilting in a familiar gesture. And then he turned farther, and Anton saw that it was Cam.

Only his name wasn’t Cam.

The last puzzle piece fell into place. You could change your eye color, your skin color, your face. It was a lot harder to change the way you moved. Anton spent his life staring at the way people moved as he edited a dozen takes into one seamless whole.

Cam had been arrested on suspicion after a small research facility burned to the ground. Two people had died, and the private organ bank that had catered to the elite under the auspices of a phony research foundation had been incinerated—all proof of illegal activity burned to useless ashes. Anton had still managed to make life difficult for the owners, but Cam—his name hadn’t been Cam then—had gotten off. No evidence.

Anton wondered if Europa had had a finger in that pie, or it Cam were merely a popular freelancer. Cam looked up as Anton broke into a run. He said something to Li and then strolled around the corner of the waiting room. “Stop him!” Anton yelled, but a jet was landing on a nearby strip, and she couldn’t hear him. “He’s a freelance terrorist!” Anton grabbed her by the arm as she recoiled. “The man you just talked to. He was pretending to be my neighbor—he’s the one who gave me the information about Elliot’s VR records. Don’t you see? Europa set me up to stop you, only I didn’t. Now they’ll blow up the launch. You’ve got to cancel it. There’s a bomb on board.”

“Stop it.” She pushed him away. “You have this rescue fixation, don’t you? Last time, you jumped overboard and damn near drowned. They’ll fine me ten thousand PI if I hold up the launch. If I were you, I’d go visit a clinic. Deal with your dead son, Anton.” She turned her back on him. “Besides,” she tossed over her shoulder. “If anyone did try to get onto the shuttle, or go near it, they’d alert the Port security.”

“I didn’t alert them,” Anton said softly. He swallowed, remembering that drunken evening and Cam’s fingers on his face. “He copied my chip.” The brandy must have been drugged. Cam had used a fast-heal culture to close the site. Hence the puzzling scab. And he had been smart enough to replace the chip after he had copied it. “What did he want?” Anton rasped.

“Nothing, really.” For the first time, she looked troubled. “He asked me if I was staying to see the launch.” Bitterness drew her mouth down again. “Are you going to pay the fine if I hold up the launch?”

“To hell with the fine!” He wanted to punch her. “Sandra, I agreed to let him go. I meant what I said.” Jonah was at least partly Elliot. Can a soul be divided? “This is real. I’ve been a fucking pawn.” His voice trembled, and for a moment he wondered if she might be right—if he were crazy. “Europa has been using me, and my son.”

“My God.” She pressed her hands to her face for an instant. “How can you do this to me? We’re so close, and you’re asking me to throw it all away. We won’t get another chance, because yes, Europa is cutting our funding. You were right. Are you happy?”

She was right. She had no reason at all to trust him. Anton started for the shuttle.

“Goddamn it!” she yelled after him. “I’m calling security!” She turned on her heel and marched toward the control building.

If Cam thought that the launch wasn’t going to go, he might blow it up right here on the ramp. Anton slowed, death-fear shivering through his flesh. How would he do it? Think, he told himself. Think fast. The shuttle loomed over him, its skin discolored by reentry, offering a thousand good hiding places for an explosive device. He needed a scanner. He needed a working brain. . . . Three figures in Port uniforms were heading purposefully for the shuttle. Security? “Fish,” he said desperately.

“Anton?” Jonah sounded sleepy. “What are you doing here?” Pause. “I thought you weren’t going to come.”

“Jonah, somebody wants to sabotage the shuttle. What would be the easiest way, using the least amount of explosive?”

“Loading the shuttle schematics,” Jonah said in an absent tone. “Lemme look.” Three seconds ticked past. Four. “If he blew the fuel line while we were lifting, it would cause the auxiliary tank to blow, too, and we’d come apart into confetti. Did you tell Sandy?”

He sounded worried, but not afraid. Maybe fear of death was the dividing line between human and machine. “I told her,” Anton said tightly. “She doesn’t believe me. What if he blows it now?”

“It won’t do a lot of damage, but it’ll do some.” Jonah was silent for a moment. “I’m right above the main fuel feed,” he said at last. “If it’s a big blast, it’ll probably fry me. Access to the line is right under me.” The security people were running now—three muscular, grim-faced men.

“Where?” Anton said tightly. “I’m about a meter forward of the rear landing gear.”

““Go two meters farther back. Look up.” Jonah’s voice was terse in his head. “There’s an access panel for checking a valve—about 15 cm square. It should be locked.”

He found it. It wasn’t locked. He could feel Jonah above him, feel El-Hot’s quiet patience as he lay in that hospital bed, plugged into tubes and pretend vacations, waiting for his father to let him die. “It’s here,” Anton breathed. Such a small thing—a small flat rectangle of black plastic. He didn’t see any wires. Footsteps slapped on silocrete. No more time. . . . At the edge of the launch paddock, a Port employee shaded his eyes to stare at Anton.

Cam? He was reaching into a pocket. For a detonator? Anton grabbed the box and stepped away from the shuttle’s pale belly. He moved so slowly, as if the air had thickened to Jell-O. The security people were almost on him. Throw it, throw it! Pivoting—so slowly—he flung it toward the empty paddock next door—felt an instant of relief as it left his hand, because he had won. He had fucking won.

He didn’t hear the explosion, was aware only of bright light that hurt his eyes, and then an impact like a truck hitting him, or a giant baseball bat.

There was no pain.

Pain came in tiny sharp attacks, like rat teeth gnawing at him. He retreated from it, hiding in the darkness from the pain-rats, curled into himself. But Elliot talked to him, so he wasn’t alone. They flew through Jupiter’s opalescent sea together, and the rays talked to them without words, and Elliot’s happiness warmed him like sunlight.

But after awhile, the darkness shrank. And when it grew too small and thin to hide him anymore, he woke up. To whiteness. He stared at it. groping for meaning in that unfamiliar landscape. Ceiling, his mind finally told him. Walls. Hospital bed. His hand looked unfamiliar on the white spread. But when he tried to move his fingers, they moved. So it had to be his hand. Tubes ran from both arms, out of sight behind his head. To a machine. He remembered the machine that had hummed to itself at the head of Elliot’s bed.

And he remembered. Jonah. The shuttle’s fire-stained belly. Throwing the bomb.

It had been a dream, Jupiter and Jonah’s happiness. And grief pierced him, wrung a groan from him. A nurse came in, carrying a big thermal mug with a plastic straw sticking out of it. “How are you feeling?” he said with a smile.

“Did they launch?” The words came out as an unrecognizable croak, and the nurse shook his head.

“Drink this.” He held the straw to Anton’s lips. “And then you need to sleep.”

The mug held juice, sweet enough to make him dizzy, and the nurse fiddled with the machine, and he went to sleep before he could ask any more questions.

But the next time he woke up, Li was there, sitting primly on the chair beside his bed.

“Why are hospital rooms always white?” he croaked.

She raised one eyebrow. “I don’t know.”

“Where’s Jonah?” He struggled to sit up, shocked at the instant tremble in his muscles. “How long have I been here?”

“You’ve been here almost a month. Jonah is on Jupiter.” She turned her head to look out the window.

He had never seen her smile before. It made her almost beautiful.

“You were right,” he whispered.

“We were right. Wait until you see what we’re giving the media!” The afternoon sun slanting through the window turned her skin to gold and glinted in her hair. “They never found out who planted the bomb.” She looked down at him again, and with an awkward, almost shy gesture, she reached over to lay her hand on his. “The explosion would almost certainly have damaged or destroyed Jonah. Thank you.” She pressed her lips together tightly for a moment. “You sustained some brain damage. That’s why you’ve been here so long.”

Brain damage. Anton felt a chill, but everything seemed to work.

“Doctor Mishna treated you. This is a private clinic, and she is a very good neuro specialist. There will be no impairment, and Jovan is picking up the tab.” She got to her feet. “I think you were the first genuine friend Jonah had.” She looked sad for a moment. “He was never really human to us, but I think he was to himself. And, I think, to you.” She paused for a second as if she expected Anton to answer, then shrugged. “When you get out, you can come access Jonah’s full transmission.” Her smile lighted her face again. “He’s having a good time.” At the door she paused and looked back. “You were right about public interest waning eventually,” she said gravely. “We need to make sure that people stay interested.” She paused for a moment as if she expected him to say something, then lifted one shoulder in a lopsided shrug. “I’d like to hire you.”

“To do PR?” He blinked.

“More than that.” Above her smile, her eyes were anxious. “You could make people understand how important this is—what it means to all of us. I’ve got plenty of funding now.” She looked away from him. “I sold my soul to Europa,” she said in a low voice. “Nothing changes that. I’d do it again if I had to.”

He closed his eyes, seeing her face as she told him about evolution, about how humanity needed to grow. “Maybe I could work for you,” he said. When he opened his eyes, she was gone and the nurse was back, fiddling with the machine and saying rest.

And he did, and he dreamed that he was ghosting Jonah, and they circled a reef, and the reef sang to Jonah without words, only somehow Jonah understood, and some of that song and that understanding filtered into Anton and filled him with the immense and violent beauty that was Jupiter. And the sky wasn’t pink, it was another color altogether, and the shimmering air smelled like spring and lilacs and chicken soup, and he and Jonah were happy. Hybrid soul, he thought. Human, machine, and alien.

“You’re changing,” he said to himself, still half-asleep. “Maybe you’re growing up.”

About time, he thought, and shouldered lazily back into sleep, diving deep into the swirling seas of Jupiter.

IMMERSION

Gregory Benford

The economist fled Helsinki to seek peace in a chimpanzee’s soul. There could be no refuge, however, from the vengeance of Imperial Industrie.

Africa came to them in air thick with smells. In the dry, prickly heat was a promise of the primitive, of ancient themes beyond knowing.

WARILY KELLY GAZED OUT OUT AT THE VIEW BEYOND THE FORMIdable walls. “We’re safe here from the animals?”

“I imagine so. Those walls are high and there are guard canines. Wirehounds, I believe.”

“Good.” She smiled in a way that he knew implied a secret was about to emerge. “I really urged you to come here to get you away from Helsinki.”

“Not to study chimpanzees?”

“Oh, that might be useful—or better still, fun,” she said with wifely nonchalance. “My main consideration was that if you had stayed in Helsinki you might be dead.”

He stopped looking at the striking scenery. She was serious. “You think they would . . .?”

“They could, which is a better guide to action than trying to guess woulds.”

“I see.” He didn’t, but he had learned to trust her judgment in matters of the world. “You think Imperial Industrie would . . .?”

“Knock you off for undermining their case? Sure. But they’d be careful.”

“But the case is over. Settled.”

He had made a successful sociometric prediction of political and economic trends in central Europe. His reputation was powerful enough to cause a fall in certain product markets. Economics increasingly resembled fashion: Commodities racheted like hemlines.

Imperial Industrie had lost considerably—a fortune, even for a world-wrapping corporation. They had accused him of manipulating the markets, but he had in all honesty merely tried to test his new model of sociohistory. His reputation among econometric circles was enough to circulate the predictions. Imperial Industrie, he thought, was simply being childish. Reason would prevail there soon enough.

“You intend to make more predictions, don’t you?” she asked.

“Well, once I get some better parameter fixes—”

“There. Then they can lose again. Imperial doesn’t like losing.”

“You exaggerate.” He dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand.

Then too, he thought, perhaps he did need a vacation. To be on a rough, natural world—he had forgotten, in the years buried in Helsinki, how vivid wild things could be. Greens and yellows leaped out, after decades amid steel and glitter.

Here the sky yawned impossibly deep, unmarked by the graffiti of aircraft, wholly alive to the flapping wonder of birds. Bluffs and ridges looked like they had been shaped hastily with a putty knife. Beyond the station walls he could see a sole tree thrashed by an angry wind. Its topknot finally blew off in a pocket of wind, fluttering and fraying over somber flats like a fragmenting bird. Distant, eroded mesas had yellow streaks down their shanks which, as they met the forest, turned a burnt orange tinge that suggested the rot of rust. Across the valley, where the chimps ranged, lay a dusky canopy hidden behind low gray clouds and raked by winds. A thin, cold rain fell there and Leon wondered what it was like to cower beneath the sheets of moisture, without hope of shelter or warmth. Perhaps Helsinki’s utter predictability was better, but he wondered, breathing in the tangy air.

He pointed to the distant forest. “We’re going there?” He liked this fresh place, though the jungle was foreboding. It had been a long time since he had even worked with his hands, alongside his father, back on the farm.

“Don’t start judging.”

“I’m anticipating.”

She grinned. “You always have a longer word for it, no matter what I say.”

“The treks look a little, well—touristy.”

“Of course. We’re tourists.”

The land here rose up into peaks as sharp as torn tin. In the thick trees beyond, mist broke on gray, smooth rocks. Even here, high up the slope of an imposing ridge, the Excursion Station was hemmed in by slimy, thick-barked trees standing in deep drifts of dead, dark leaves. With rotting logs half buried in the wet layers, the air swarmed so close it was like breathing damp opium.

Kelly stood, her drink finished. “Let’s go in, socialize.”

He followed dutifully and right away knew it was a mistake. Most of the indoor stim-party crowd was dressed in rugged safari-style gear. They were ruddy folk, faces flushed with excitement or perhaps just enhancers. Leon waved away the bubbleglass-bearing waiter; he disliked the way it dulled his wits. Still, he smiled and tried to make small talk.

This turned out to be not merely small, but microscopic. “Where are you from? Oh, Helsinki—what’s it like? We’re from (fill in the city)—have you ever heard of it?” Of course he had not.

Most were Primitivists, drawn by the unique experience available here. It seemed to him that every third word in their conversation was natural or vital, delivered like a mantra.

“What a relief, to be away from straight lines,” a thin man said.

“Um, how so?” Leon said, trying to seem interested.

“Well, of course straight lines don’t exist in nature. They have to be put there by humans.” He sighed. “I love to be free of straightness!”

Leon instantly thought of pine needles; strata of metamorphic rock; the inside edge of a half-moon; spider-woven silk strands; the line along the top of a breaking ocean wave; crystal patterns; white quartz lines on granite slabs; the far horizon of a vast calm lake; the legs of birds; spikes of cactus; the arrow dive of a raptor; trunks of young, fast-growing trees; wisps of high windblown clouds; ice cracks; the two sides of the V of migrating birds; icicles.

“Not so,” he said, but no more.

His habit of laconic implication was trampled in the headlong talk, of course; the enhancers were taking hold. They all chattered on, excited by the prospect of immersing themselves in the lives of the creatures roaming the valleys below. He listened, not commenting, intrigued. Some wanted to share the world view of herd animals, others of hunters, some of birds. They spoke as though they were entering some athletic event, and that was not his view at all. Still, he stayed silent.

He finally escaped with Kelly into the small park beside the Excursion Station, designed to make guests familiar with local conditions before their treks or immersions. There were whole kraals of domestic stock. The unique assets, the genetically altered and enhanced animals, were nowhere near, of course.

He stopped and stared at the kraals and thought again about sociohistory. His mind kept diving at it from many angles. He had learned to just stand aside and let his thoughts run.

ANIMALS. WAS THERE A CLUE? DESPITE MILLENNIA of trying, humans had domesticated few animals. To be domesticated, wild beasts had to have an entire suite of traits. Most had to be herd animals, with instinctive submission patterns which humans could co-opt. They had to be placid; herds that bolt at a strange sound and can’t tolerate intruders are hard to keep. Finally, they had to be willing to breed in captivity. Most humans didn’t want to court and copulate under the watchful gaze of others, and neither did most animals.

So here there were sheep and goats and cows, slightly adapted by biotechnology but otherwise unremarkable. Except for the chimps. They were unique artifacts of this preservation deep in the rugged laboratory of central Africa. A wirehound came sniffing, checking them out, muttering an unintelligible apology. “Interesting,” he remarked to Kelly, “that Primitivists still want to be protected from the wild, by the domesticated.”

“Well, of course. This fellow is big.”

“Not sentimental about the natural state? We were once just another type of large mammal.”

“The natural state might be a pleasant place to visit, but . . .”

“Right, wouldn’t want to live there. Still, I want to try the chimps.”

“What? An immersion?” Her eyebrows lifted in mild alarm.

“As long as we’re here, why not?”

“I don’t . . . well, I’ll think about it.”

“You can bail out at any time, they say.”

She nodded, pursed her lips. “Um.”

“We’ll feel at home—the way chimps do.”

“You believe everything you read in a brochure?”

“I did some research. It’s a well-developed tech.”

Her lips had a skeptical tilt. “Um.”

He knew by now better than to press her. Let time do his work.

The canine, quite large and alert, snuffled at his hand and slurred, “Goood naaaght, suuur.” He stroked it. In its eyes he saw a kinship, an instant rapport that he did not need to think about. For one who dwelled in his head so much, this was a welcome rub of reality.

Significant evidence, he thought. We have a deep past together. Perhaps that was why he wanted to immerse in a chimp. To go far back, peering beyond the vexing state of being human.

“WE’RE CERTAINLY CLOSELY RELATED, YES,” EXPERT SPECIALIST RUBEN said. He was a big man, tanned and muscular and casually confident. He was both a safari guide and immersion specialist, with a biology background. He did research using immersion techniques, but keeping the Station going soaked up most of his time, he said. “Chimp-riding is the best immersion available.”

Leon looked skeptical. Pan troglodytes had hands with thumbs, the same number of teeth as humans, no tails, but he had never felt great empathy for them, seen behind bars in a zoo.

Ruben waved a big hand at the landscape below the Station. “We hope to make them more useful. We haven’t tried training them much, beyond research purposes. Remember, they’re supposed to be kept wild. The original UN grant stipulated that.”

“Tell me about your research,” Leon said. In his experience, no scientist ever passed up a chance to sing his own song. He was right.

They had taken human DNA and chimp DNA—Ruben said, waxing enthusiastically on—then unzipped the double-helix strands in both. Linking one human strand with a chimp strand made a hybrid.

Where the strands complemented, the two then tightly bound in a partial, new double helix. Where they differed, bonding between the strands was weak, intermittent, with whole sections flapping free.

Then they spun the watery solutions in a centrifuge, so the weak sections ripped apart. Closely linked DNA was 98.2 percent of the total. Chimps were startlingly like humans. Less than 2 percent different—yet they lived in forests and invented nothing.

The typical difference between individual people’s DNA was a tenth of a percentage point, Ruben said. Roughly, then, chimps were twenty times more different from humans than particular people differed among themselves—genetically. But genes were like levers, supporting vast weights by pivoting about a small fulcrum.

“But we don’t come from them. We parted company, genetically, six million years ago.”

“Do they think like us?” Leon asked.

“Best way to tell is an immersion,” Ruben said. “Very best way.”

He smiled invitingly, and Leon wondered if Ruben got a commission on immersions. His sales pitch was subtle, shaped for an academic’s interest—but still a sales pitch.

Ruben had already made the vast stores of data on chimp movements, population dynamics, and behaviors available to Leon. It was a rich source and with some math modeling might be fertile ground for a simple description, using a truncated version of sociohistory.

“Describing the life history of a species mathematically is one thing,” Kelly said. “But living in it . . .”

“Come now,” Leon said. Even though he knew the entire Excursion Station was geared to sell the guests safaris and immersions, he was intrigued. “ ‘I need a change,’ you said. ‘Get out of stuffy old Helsinki,’ you said.”

Ruben said warmly, “It’s completely safe.”

Kelly smiled at Leon tolerantly. “Oh, all right.”

HE SPENT MORNINGS STUDYING THE CHIMP DATA BANKS. THE MATHEmatician in him pondered how to represent their dynamics with a trimmed-down sociohistory. The marble of fate rattling down a cracked slope. So many paths, variables. . . .

In the afternoons they took several treks. Kelly did not like the dust and heat and they saw few animals. “What self-respecting beast would want to be seen with these overdressed Primitivists?” she said. The others could never stop talking; that kept the animals away.

He liked the atmosphere and relaxed into it as his mind kept on working. He thought about this as he stood on the sweeping veranda, drinking pungent fruit juice as he watched a sunset. Kelly stood beside him silently. Raw Africa made it clear that the Earth was an energy funnel, he thought. At the bottom of the gravitational well, Earth captured for use barely a tenth of a percent of the sunlight that fell. Nature built organic molecules with a star’s energy. In turn, plants were prey for animals, who could harvest roughly a tenth of the plant’s stored energy. Grazers were themselves prey to meat-eaters, who could use about a tenth of the flesh-stored energy. So, he estimated, only about one part in a hundred thousand of a star’s lancing energy wound up in the predators.

Wasteful! Yet nowhere had a more efficient engine evolved. Why not? Predators were invariably more intelligent than their prey, and they sat atop a pyramid of very steep slopes. Omnivores had a similar balancing act. Out of that rugged landscape had come humanity.

That fact had to matter greatly in any sociohistory. The chimps, then, were essential to finding the ancient keys to the human psyche.

Kelly said, “I hope immersion isn’t, well, so hot and sticky.”

“Remember, you’ll see the world through different eyes.”

She snorted. “Just so I can come back whenever I want and have a nice hot bath.”

“COMPARTMENTS” ? KELLY SHIED BACK. “THEY LOOK MORE LIKE CASKETS.”

“They have to be snug, Madam.”

ExSpec Ruben smiled amiably—which, Leon sensed, probably meant he wasn’t feeling amiable at all. Their conversation had been friendly, the staff here was respectful of the noted Dr. Mattick, but, after all, basically he and Kelly were just more tourists. Paying for a bit of primitive fun, all couched in proper scholarly terms, but—tourists.

“You’re kept in fixed status, all body systems running slow but normal,” the ExSpec said, popping out the padded networks for inspection. He ran through the controls, emergency procedures, safeguards.

“Looks comfortable enough,” Kelly observed begrudgingly.

“Come on,” Leon chided. “You promised we would do it.”

“You’ll be meshed into our systems at all times,” Ruben said.

“Even your data library?” Leon asked.

“Sure thing.”

The team of ExSpecs booted them into the stasis compartments with deft, sure efficiency. Tabs, pressors, magnetic pickups plated onto his skull to pick up thoughts directly. The very latest tech.

“Ready? Feeling good?” Ruben asked with his professional smile.

Leon was not feeling good (as opposed to feeling well) and he realized part of it was this ExSpec. He had always distrusted bland, assured people. Something about this one bothered him, but he could not say why. Oh well; Kelly was probably right. He needed a vacation. What better way to get out of yourself?

“Good, yes. Ready, yes.”

THE SUSPENSION TECH SUPPRESSED NEUROMUSCULAR responses. The customer lay dormant, only his mind engaged with the chimp.

Magnetic webs capped over his cerebrum. Through electromagnetic inductance they interwove into layers of the brain. They routed signals along tiny thread-paths, suppressing many brain functions and blocking physiological processes. All this, so that the massively parallel circuitry of the brain could be inductively linked out, thought by thought. Then it was transmitted to chips embedded in the chimp subject. Immersion.

The technology had ramified throughout the world, quite famously. The ability to distantly manage minds had myriad uses. The suspension tech, however, found its own odd applications.

In certain European classes, women were wedded, then suspended for all but a few hours of the day. Their wealthy husbands awoke them from freeze-frame states only for social and sexual purposes. For more than a half century, the wives experienced a heady whirlwind of places, friends, parties, vacations, passionate hours—but their total accumulated time was only a few years. Their husbands died in what seemed to the wives like short order indeed. They left a wealthy widow of perhaps thirty. Such women were highly sought, and not only for their money. They were uniquely sophisticated, seasoned by a long “marriage.” Often, these widows returned the favor, wedding freeze-frame husbands whom they revived for similar uses.

All this Leon had taken with the sophisticated veneer he had cultivated in Helsinki. So he thought his immersion would be comfortable, interesting, the stuff of stim-party talk.

He had thought that he would in some sense visit another, simpler, mind.

He did not expect to be swallowed whole.

A GOOD DAY. PLENTY OF GRUBS TO EAT IN A BIG MOIST LOG. DIG THEM out with my nails, fresh tangy sharp crunchy.

Biggest, he shoves me aside. Scoops out plenty rich grubs. Grunts. Glowers.

My belly rumbles. I back off and eye Biggest. He’s got pinched-up face, so I know not to fool with him.

I walk away, I squat down. Get some picking from a fern. She finds some fleas, cracks them in her teeth.

Biggest rolls the log around some to knock a few grubs loose, finishes up. He’s strong. Fems watch him. Over by the trees a bunch of fems chatter, suck their teeth. Everybody’s sleepy now in early afternoon, lying in the shade. Biggest, though, he waves at me and Hunker and off we go.

Patrol. Strut tall, step out proud. I like it fine. Better than humping even.

Down past the creek and along to where the hoof smells are. That’s the shallow spot. We cross and go into the trees sniff-sniffing and there are two Strangers.

They don’t see us yet. We move smooth, quiet. Biggest picks up a branch and we do too. Hunker is sniffing to see who these Strangers are and he points off to the hill. Just like I thought, they’re Hillies. The worst. Smell bad.

Hillies come onto our turf. Make trouble. We make it back.

We spread out. Biggest, he grunts and they hear him. I’m already moving, branch held up. I can run pretty far without going all-four. The Strangers cry out, big-eyed. We go fast and then we’re on them.

They have no branches. We hit them and kick and they grab at us. They are tall and quick. Biggest slams one to the ground. I hit that one so Biggest knows real well I’m with him. Hammer hard, I do. Then I go quick to help Hunker.

His Stranger has taken his branch away. I club the Stranger. He sprawls. I whack him good and Hunker jumps on him and it is wonderful.

The Stranger tries to get up and I kick him solid. Hunker grabs back his branch and hits again and again with me helping hard.

Biggest, his Stranger gets up and starts to run. Biggest whacks his ass with the branch, roaring and laughing.

Me, I got my skill. Special. I pick up rocks. I’m the best thrower, better than Biggest even.

Rocks are for Strangers. My buddies, them I’ll scrap with, but never use rocks. Strangers, though, they deserve to get rocks in the face. I love to bust a Stranger that way.

I throw one clean and smooth and catch the Stranger on the leg. He stumbles and I smack him good with a sharp-edged rock, in the back. He runs fast then and I can see he’s bleeding. Stranger leaves drops in the dust.

Biggest laughs and slaps me and I know I’m in good with him.

Hunker is clubbing his Stranger. Biggest takes my club and joins in. The blood all over the Stranger sings warm in my nose and I jump up and down on him. We keep at it like that a long time. Not worried about the other Stranger coming back. Strangers are brave sometime but they know when they have lost.

The Stranger stops moving. I give him one more kick.

No reaction. Dead maybe.

We scream and dance and holler out our joy.

LEON SHOOK HIS HEAD TO CLEAR IT. THAT HELPED A LITTLE.

“You were that big one?” Kelly asked. “I was the female, over by the trees.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t tell.”

“It was . . . different, wasn’t it?”

He laughed dryly. “Murder usually is.”

“When you went off with the, well, leader—”

“My chimp thinks of him as ‘Biggest.’ We killed another chimp.”

They were in the plush reception room of the immersion facility. Leon stood and felt the world tilt a little and then right itself. “I think I’ll stick to historical research for a while.”

Kelly smiled sheepishly. “I . . . I rather liked it.” He thought a moment, blinked. “So did I,” he said, surprisingly himself.

“Not the murder—”

“No, of course not. But . . . the feel.”

She grinned. “Can’t get that in Helsinki, Professor.”

HE SPENT TWO DAYS COASTING THROUGH COOL LATTICES OF DATA IN the formidable Station library. It was well-equipped and allowed interfaces with several senses. He patrolled through cool, digital labyrinths.

In the vector spaces portrayed on huge screens, the research data was covered with thick, bulky protocols and scabs of security precautions. All were easily broken or averted, of course, but the chunky abstracts, reports, summaries, and crudely processed statistics still resisted easy interpretation. Occasionally some facets of chimp behavior were carefully hidden away in appendices and sidebar notes, as though the biologists in the lonely outpost were embarrassed by it. Some was embarrassing: mating behavior, especially. How could he use this?

He navigated through the 3-D maze and cobbled together his ideas. Could he follow a strategy of analogy?

Chimps shared nearly all their genes with humans, so chimp dynamics should be a simpler version of human dynamics. Could he then analyze chimp troop interactions as a reduced case of sociohistory?

At sunset of the next day he sat with Kelly watching blood-red shafts spike through orange-tinged clouds. Africa was gaudy beyond good taste and he liked it. The food was tangy, too. His stomach rumbled in anticipation of dinner.

He remarked to Kelly, “It’s tempting, using chimps to build a sort of toy model of sociohistory.”

“But you have doubts.”

“They’re like us in . . . only they have, well, uh . . .”

“Base, animalistic ways?” She smirked, then kissed him. “My prudish Leon.”

“We have our share of beastly behaviors, I know. But we’re a lot smarter too.”

Her eyelids dipped in a manner he knew by now suggested polite doubt. “They live intensely, you’ll have to give them that.”

“Maybe we’re smarter than we need to be anyway.”

“What?” This surprised her.

“I’ve been reading up on evolution. Plainly, the human brain was an evolutionary overshoot—far more capable than a competent hunter-gatherer needed. To get the better of animals, it would have been enough to master fire and simple stone tools. Such talents alone would have made people the lords of creation, removing selection pressure to change. Instead, all evidence from the brain itself said that change accelerated. The human cerebral cortex added mass, stacking new circuitry atop older wiring. That mass spread over the lesser areas like a thick new skin.”

“Considering the state of the world, I’d say we need all the brains we can get,” she said skeptically.

“From that layer came musicians and engineers, saints and savants,” he finished with a flourish. One of Kelly’s best points was her willingness to sit still while he waxed professorially long-winded, even on vacation. “And all this evolutionary selection happened in just a few million years.”

Kelly snorted prettily. “Look at it from the woman’s point of view. It happened, despite putting mothers in desperate danger in childbirth.”

“Uh, how?”

“From those huge baby heads. They’re hard to get out. We women are still paying the price for your brains—and for ours.”

He chuckled. She always had a special spin on a subject that made him see it fresh. “Then why was it selected for, back then?”

Kelly smiled enigmatically. “Maybe men and women alike found intelligence sexy in each other.”

“Really?”

Her sly smile. “How about us?”

“Have you ever watched very many 3-D stars? They don’t feature brains, my dear.”

“Remember the animals we saw in the Madrid Senso-Zoo? The mating exhibit? It could be that for early humans, brains were like peacock tails, or moose horns—display items, to attract the females. Runaway sexual selection.”

“I see, an overplayed hand of otherwise perfectly good cards.” He laughed. “So being smart is just a bright ornament.”

“Works for me,” she said, giving him a wink.

He watched the sunset turn to glowering, ominous crimson, oddly happy. Sheets of light worked across the sky among curious, layered clouds. “Ummm . . .,” Kelly murmured.

“Yes?”

“Maybe this is a way to use the research the ExSpecs are doing too. Learn who we were—and therefore who we are.”

“Intellectually, it’s a jump. In social ways, though, the gap could be less.”

Kelly looked skeptical. “You think chimps are only a bit further back in a social sense?”

“Ummm. I wonder if in logarithmic time we might scale from chimps to us, now?”

“A big leap. To do anything you’ll need more experience with them.” She eyed him. “You like immersion, don’t you?”

“Well, yes. It’s just . . .”

“What?”

“That ExSpec Ruben, he keeps pushing immersions—”

“That’s his job.”

“—and he knew who I was.”

“So?” She spread her hands and shrugged.

“You’re normally the suspicious one. Why should an ExSpec know an obscure mathematician?”

“He looked you up. Data dumps on incoming guests are standard. And in some circles you’re hardly obscure. Plenty of people back in Helsinki line up to see you.”

“And some would like to see me dead. Say, you’re supposed to be the ever-vigilant one.” He grinned. “Shouldn’t you be encouraging my caution?”

“Paranoia isn’t caution. Time spent on nonthreats subtracts from vigilance.”

By the time they went in for dinner she had talked him into more immersions.

HOT DAY IN THE SUN. DUST MAKES ME SNORT.

That Biggest, he walks by, gets respect right away. Fems and guys alike, they stick out their hands.

Biggest touches them, taking time with each, letting them know he is there. The world is all right.

I reach out to him too. Makes me feel good. I want to be like Biggest, to be big, be as big as him, be him.

Fems don’t give him any trouble. He wants one, she goes. Hump right away. He’s Biggest.

Most males, they don’t get much respect. Fems don’t want to do with them as much as they do with Biggest. The little males, they huff and throw sand and all that but everybody knows they’re not going to be much. No chance they could ever be like Biggest. They don’t like that but they are stuck with it.

Me, I’m pretty big. I get respect. Some, anyway.

All the guys like stroking. Petting. Grooming. Fems give it to them and they give it back.

Guys get more though. After it, they’re not so gruff.

I’m sitting getting groomed and all of a sudden I smell something. I don’t like it. I jump up, cry out. Biggest, he takes notice. Smells it too.

Strangers. Everybody starts hugging each other. Strong smell, plenty of it. Lots of Strangers. The wind says they are near, getting nearer.

They come running down on us from the ridge. Looking for fems, looking for trouble.

I run for my rocks. I always have some handy. I fling one at them, miss. Then they are in among us. It’s hard to hit them, they go so fast.

Four Strangers, they grab two fems. Drag them away.

Everybody howling, crying. Dust everywhere.

I throw rocks. Biggest leads the guys against the Strangers.

They turn and run off. Just like that. Got the two fems though and that’s bad.

Biggest mad. He pushes around some of the guys, makes noise. He not looking so good now, he let the Strangers in.

Those Strangers bad. We all hunker down, groom each other, pet, make nice sounds.

Biggest, he come by, slap some of the fems. Hump some. Make sure everybody know he’s still Biggest.

He don’t slap me. He know better than to try. I growl at him when he come close and he pretend not to hear.

Maybe he not so Big any more, I’m thinking.

HE STAYED WITH IT THIS TIME. AFTER THE FIRST CRISIS, WHEN THE Stranger chimps came running through, he sat and let himself get groomed for a long time. It really did calm him.

Him? Who was he?

This time he could fully sense the chimp mind. Not below him—that was an evolutionary metaphor—but around him. A swarming scattershot of senses, thoughts, fragments like leaves blowing by him in a wind.

And the wind was emotion. Blustering gales, howling and whipping in gusts, raining thoughts like soft hammer blows.

These chimps thought poorly, in the sense that he could get only shards, like human musings chopped by a nervous editor. But chimps felt intensely.

Of course, he thought—and he could think, nestled in the hard kernel of himself, wrapped in the chimp mind. Emotions told it what to do, without thinking. Quick reactions demanded that. Strong feeling amplified subtle clues into strong imperatives. Blunt orders from Mother Evolution.

He saw now that the belief that high order mental experiences like emotion were unique to people was . . . simply conceited. These chimps shared much of the human world view. A theory of chimp sociohistory could be valuable.

He gingerly separated himself from the dense, pressing chimp mind. He wondered if the chimp knew he was here. Yes, it did—dimly. But somehow this did not bother the chimp. He integrated it into his blurred, blunt world. Leon was somewhat like an emotion, just one of many fluttering by and staying a while, then wafting away.

Could he be more than that? He tried getting the chimp to lift its right arm—and it was like lead. He struggled for a while that way with no success. Then he realized his error. He could not overpower this chimp, not as a kernel in a much larger mind.

He thought about this as the chimp groomed a female, picking carefully through coarse hair. The strands smelled good, the air was sweet, the sun stroked him with blades of generous warmth. . . .

Emotion. Chimps didn’t follow instructions because that simply lay beyond them. They could not understand directions in the human sense. Emotions—those they knew. He had to be an emotion, not a little general giving orders.

He sat for a while simply being this chimp. He learned—or rather, he felt. The troop groomed and scavenged food, males eyeing the perimeter, females keeping close to the young. A lazy calm descended over him, carrying him effortlessly through warm moments of the day. Not since he was a boy had he felt anything like this. A slow, graceful easing, as though there were no time at all, only slices of eternity.

In this mood, he could concentrate on a simple movement—raising an arm, scratching—and create the desire to do it. His chimp responded. To make it happen, he had to feel his way toward a goal. Sail before the emotion wind.

Catching a sweet scent on the air, Leon thought about what food that might signal. His chimp meandered upwind, sniffed, discarded the clue as uninteresting. Leon could now smell the reason why: fruit, true, sweet, yes—but inedible for a chimp.

Good. He was learning. And he was integrating himself into the deep recesses of this chimp-mind.

Watching the troop, he decided to name the prominent chimps, to keep them straight: Agile the quick one, Sheelah the sexy one, Grubber the hungry one. . . . But what was his own name? His he dubbed Ipan. Not very original, but that was its main characteristic, I as Pan troglodytes.

Grubber found some bulb-shaped fruit and the others drifted over to scavenge. The hard fruit smelled a little too young (how did he know that?) but some ate it anyway.

And which of these was Kelly? They had asked to be immersed in the same troop, so one of these—he forced himself to count, though somehow the exercise was like moving heavy weights in his mind—these twenty-two was her. How could he tell? He ambled over to several females who were using sharp-edged stones to cut leaves from branches. They tied the strands together so they could carry food.

Leon peered into their faces. Mild interest, a few hands held out for stroking, an invitation to groom. No glint of recognition in their eyes.

He watched a big fem, Sheelah, carefully wash sand-covered fruit in a creek. The troop followed suit; Sheelah was a leader of sorts, a female lieutenant to Biggest.

She ate with relish, looked around. There was grain growing nearby, past maturity, ripe tan kernels already scattered in the sandy soil. Concentrating, Leon could tell from the faint bouquet that this was a delicacy. A few chimps squatted and picked grains from the sand, slow work. Sheelah did the same, and then stopped, gazing off at the creek. Time passed, insects buzzed. After a while she scooped up sand and kernels and walked to the brook’s edge. She tossed it all in. The sand sank, the kernels floated. She skimmed them off and gulped them down, grinning widely.

An impressive trick. The other chimps did not pick up on her kernel-skimming method. Fruit washing was conceptually easier, he supposed, since the chimp could keep the fruit the whole time. Kernel-skimming demanded throwing away the food first, then rescuing it—a harder mental jump.

He thought about her and in response Ipan sauntered over her way. He peered into Sheelah’s eyes—and she winked at him. Kelly! He wrapped hairy arms around her in a burst of sweaty love.

“PURE ANIMAL LOVE,” SHE SAID OVER DINNER. “REFRESHING.”

Leon nodded. “I like being there, living that way.”

“I can smell so much more.”

“Fruit tastes differently when they bite into it.” He held up a purple bulb, sliced into it, forked it into his mouth. “To me, this is almost unbearably sweet. To Ipan, it’s pleasant, a little peppery. I suppose chimps have been selected for a sweet tooth. It gets them more fast calories.”

“I can’t think of a more thorough vacation. Not just getting away from home, but getting away from your species.”

He eyed the fruit. “And they’re so, so . . .”

“Horny?”

“Insatiable.”

“You didn’t seem to mind.”

“My chimp, Ipan? I bail out when he gets into his hump-them-all mood.”

She eyed him. “Really?”

“Don’t you bail out?”

“Yes, but I don’t expect men to be like women.”

“Oh?” he said stiffly.

“I’ve been reading in the ExSpec’s research library, while you toy with chimp social movements. Women invest heavily in their children. Men can use two strategies—parental investment, plus ‘sow the oats.’ ” She lifted an eyebrow. “Both must have been selected for in our evolution, because they’re both common.”

“Not with me.”

To his surprise, she laughed. “I’m talking in general. My point is: The chimps are much more promiscuous than we are. The males run everything. They help out the females who are carrying their children, I gather, but then they shop around elsewhere all the time.”

Leon switched into his professional mode; it was decidedly more comfortable, when dealing with such issues. “As the specialists say, they are pursuing a mixed reproductive strategy.”

“How polite.”

“Polite plus precise.”

Of course, he couldn’t really be sure Kelly bailed out of Sheelah when a male came by for a quick one. (They were always quick too—thirty seconds or less.) Could she exit the chimp mind that quickly? He required a few moments to extricate himself. Of course, if she saw the male coming, guessed his intentions . . .

He was surprised at himself. What role did jealousy have when they were inhabiting other bodies? Did the usual moral code make any sense? Yet to talk this over with her was . . . embarrassing.

He was still the country boy, like it or not.

Ruefully he concentrated on his meal of local “roamer-fleisch,” which turned out to be an earthy, dark meat in a stew of tangy vegetables. He ate heartily and in response to Kelly’s rather obviously amused silence said, “I’d point out that chimps understood commerce too. Food for sex, betrayal of the leader for sex, spare my child for sex, grooming for sex, just about anything for sex.”

“It does seem to be their social currency. Short and decidedly not sweet. Just quick lunges, strong sensations, then boom—it’s over.”

He nodded. “The males need it, the females use it.”

“Ummm, you’ve been taking notes.”

“If I’m going to model chimps as a sort of simplified people, then I must.”

“Model chimps?” came the assured tones of ExSpec Ruben. “They’re not model citizens, if that’s what you mean.” He gave them a sunny smile and Leon guessed this was more of the obligatory friendliness of this place.

Leon smiled mechanically. “I’m trying to find the variables that could describe chimp behavior.”

“You should spend a lot of time with them,” Ruben said, sitting at the table and holding up a finger to a waiter for a drink. “They’re subtle creatures.”

“I agree,” said Kelly. “Do you ride them very much?”

“Some, but most of our research is done differently now.” Ruben’s mouth twisted ruefully. “Statistical models, that sort of thing. I got this touring idea started, using the immersion tech we had developed earlier, to make money for the project. Otherwise, we’d have had to close.”

“I’m happy to contribute,” Leon said.

“Admit it—you like it,” Kelly said, amused.

“Well, yes. It’s . . . different.”

“And good for the staid Professor Mattick to get out of his shell,” she said.

Ruben beamed. “Be sure you don’t take chances out there. Some of our customers think they’re superchimps or something.”

Kelly’s eyes flickered. “What danger is there? Our bodies are in slow-time, back here.”

Ruben said, “You’re strongly linked. A big shock to a chimp can drive a back-shock in your own neurological systems.”

“What sort of shock?” Leon asked.

“Death, major injury.”

“In that case,” Kelly said to Leon, “I really do not think you should immerse.”

Leon felt irked. “Come on! I’m on vacation, not in prison.”

“Any threat to you—”

“Just a minute ago you were rhapsodizing about how good for me it was.”

“You’re too important to—”

“There’s really very little danger,” Ruben came in smoothly. “Chimps don’t die suddenly, usually.”

“And I can bail out when I see danger coming,” Leon added.

“But will you? I think you’re getting a taste for adventure.”

She was right, but he wasn’t going to concede the point. If he wanted a little escape from his humdrum mathematician’s routine, so much the better. “I like being out of Helsinki’s endless corridors.”

Ruben gave Kelly a confident smile. “And we haven’t lost a tourist yet.”

“How about research staff?” she shot back.

“Well, that was a most unusual—”

“What happened?”

“A chimp fell off a ledge. The human operator couldn’t bail out in time and she came out of it paralyzed. The shock of experiencing death through immersion is known from other incidents to prove fatal. But we have systems in place to short-circuit—”

“What else?” she persisted.

“Well, there was one difficult episode. In the early days, when we had simple wire fences.” The ExSpec shifted uneasily. “Some predators got in.”

“What sort of predators?”

“A primate-pack hunter, Carnopapio grandis. We call them raboons, genetically derived in an experiment two decades ago. They took baboon DNA—”

“How did they get in?” Kelly insisted.

“They’re somewhat like a wild hog, with hooves that double as diggers. Carnivores, though. They smelled game—our corralled animals. Dug under the fences.”

Kelly eyed the high, solid walls. “These are adequate?”

“Certainly. They’re from a genetic experiment. Someone tried to make a predator by raising the earlier baboon stock up onto two legs.”

Kelly said dryly, “Evolutionary gambling.”

Ruben didn’t catch the edge in her voice. “Like most bipedal predators, the forelimbs are shortened and the head carries forward, balanced by a thick tail they use for signaling to each other. They prey on the biggest herd animals, the gigantelope—another experiment—and eat only the richest meat.”

“Why attack humans, then?” she asked.

“They take targets of opportunity too. Chimps, even. When they got into the compound, they went for adult humans, not children—a very selective strategy.”

Kelly shivered. “You look at this very . . . objectively.”

“I’m a biologist.”

“I never knew it could be so interesting,” Leon said to defuse her apprehension.

Ruben beamed. “Not as involving as higher mathematics, I’m sure.”

Kelly’s mouth twisted with wry skepticism. “Do you mind if guests carry weapons inside the compound?”

HE HAD A GLIMMERING OF AN IDEA ABOUT THE CHIMPS, A WAY to use their behaviors in building a simple toy model of sociohistory. He might be able to use the statistics of chimp troop movements, the ups and downs of their shifting fortunes.

He talked it over with Kelly and she nodded, but beneath it she seemed worried. Since Ruben’s remark she was always tut-tutting about safety. He reminded her that she had earlier urged him to do more immersions. “This is a vacation, remember?” he said more than once.

Her amused sidewise glances told him that she also didn’t buy his talk about the toy modeling. She thought he just liked romping in the woods. “A country boy at heart,” she chuckled.

So the next morning he skipped a planned trek to view the vast gigantelope herds. He immediately went to the immersion chambers and slipped under. To get some solid work done, he told himself.

THE CHIMPS SLEPT IN TREES AND SPENT PLENTY OF TIME GROOMING each other. For the lucky groomer a tick or louse was a treat. With enough, they could get high on some peppery-tasting alkaloid. He suspected the careful stroking and combing of his hair by Kelly was a behavior selected because it improved chimp hygiene. It certainly calmed Ipan, also.

Then it struck him: Chimps groomed rather than vocalizing. Only in crises and when agitated did they call and cry, mostly about breeding, feeding, or self-defense. They were like people who could not release themselves through the comfort of talk.

And they needed comfort. The core of their social life resembled human societies under stress—in tyrannies, in prisons, in city gangs. Nature red in tooth and claw, yet strikingly like troubled people.

But there were “civilized” behaviors here too. Friendships, grief, sharing, buddies-in-arms who hunted and guarded turf together. Their old got wrinkled, bald, and toothless, yet were still cared for.

Their instinctive knowledge was prodigious. They knew how to make a bed of leaves as dusk fell, high up in trees. They could climb with grasping feet. They felt, cried, mourned—without being able to parse these into neat grammatical packages, so the emotions could be managed, subdued. Instead, emotions drove them.

Hunger was the strongest. They found and ate leaves, fruit, insects, even fair-sized animals. They loved caterpillars.

Each moment, each small enlightenment, sank him deeper into Ipan. He began to sense the subtle nooks and crannies of the chimp mind. Slowly, he gained more cooperative control.

That morning a female found a big tree and began banging it. The hollow trunk boomed like a drum and all the foraging party rushed forward to beat it too, grinning wildly at the noise. Ipan joined in and Leon felt the burst of joy, seethed in it.

Later, coming on a waterfall after a heavy rain, they seized vines and swung among trees—out over the foaming water, screeching with joy as they performed twists and leaps from vine to vine. Like children in a new playground. Leon got Ipan to make impossible moves, wild tumbles and dives, propelling him forward with abandon—to the astonishment of the other chimps.

They were violent in their sudden, peevish moments—in hustling available females, in working out their perpetual dominance hierarchy, and especially in hunting. A successful hunt brought enormous excitement—hugging, kissing, pats. As the troop descended to feed the forest rang with barks, screeches, hoots, and pants. Leon joined the tumult, sang, danced with Sheelah/Kelly.

In some matters he had to restrain his feelings. Rats they ate head first. Larger game they smashed against rocks. They devoured the brains first, a steaming delicacy. Leon gulped—metaphorically, but with Ipan echoing the impulse—and watched, screening his reluctance. Ipan had to eat, after all.

At the scent of predators, he felt Ipan’s hair stand on end. Another tangy bouquet made Ipan’s mouth water. He gave no mercy to food, even if it was still walking. Evolution in action; those chimps who had showed mercy in the past ate less and left fewer descendants. Those weren’t represented here anymore.

For all its excesses, he found the chimps’ behavior hauntingly familiar. Males gathered often for combat, for pitching rocks, for blood sports, to work out their hierarchy. Females networked and formed alliances. There were trades of favors for loyalty, alliances, kinship bonds, turf wars, threats and displays, protection rackets, a hunger for “respect,” scheming subordinates, revenge—a social world enjoyed by many people that history had judged “great.” Much like an emperor’s court, in fact.

Did people long to strip away their clothing and conventions, bursting forth as chimps?

Leon felt a flush of revulsion, so strong Ipan shook and fidgeted. Humanity’s lot had to be different, not this primitive horror.

He could use this, certainly, as a test bed for a full theory. Learn from our nearest genetic neighbors. Then humankind would be self-knowing, captains of themselves. He would build in the imperatives of the chimps, but go far beyond—to true, deep sociohistory.

“I DON’T SEE IT,” KELLY SAID AT DINNER.

“But they’re so much like us!” He put down his spoon. “We’re a brainy chimp—that’s a valuable insight. We can probably train them to work for us, do housekeeping.”

“I wouldn’t have them messing up my house.”

Adult humans weighed little more than chimps, but were far weaker. A chimp could lift five times more than a well-conditioned man. Human brains were three or four times more massive than a chimp’s. A human baby a few months old already had a brain larger than a grown chimp. People had different brain architecture, as well.

But was that the whole story? Give chimps bigger brains and speech, ease off on the testosterone, saddle them with more inhibitions, spruce them up with a shave and a haircut, teach them to stand securely on hind legs—and you had deluxe-model chimps that would look and act rather human. They might pass in a crowd without attracting notice.

Leon said curtly, “Look, my point is that they’re close enough to us to make a sociohistory model work.”

“To make anybody believe that, you’ll have to show that they’re intelligent enough to have intricate interactions.”

“What about their foraging, their hunting?” he persisted.

“Ruben says they couldn’t even be trained to do work around this Excursion Station.”

“I’ll show you what I mean. Let’s master their methods together.”

“What method?”

“The basic one. Getting enough to eat.”

She bit into a steak of a meaty local grazer, suitably processed and “fat-flensed for the fastidious urban palate,” as the brochure had it. Chewing with unusual ferocity, she eyed him. “You’re on. Anything a chimp can do, I can do better.”

KELLY WAVED AT HIM FROM WITHIN SHEELAH. LET THE CONtest begin.

The troop was foraging. He let Ipan meander and did not try to harness the emotional ripples that lapped through the chimp mind. He had gotten better at it, but at a sudden smell or sound he could lose his grip. And guiding the blunt chimp mind through anything complicated was like moving a puppet with rubber strings.

Sheelah/Kelly waved and signed to him. This way.

They had worked out a code of a few hundred words, using finger and facial gestures, and their chimps seemed to go along with these fairly well. Chimps had a rough language, mixing grunts and shrugs and finger displays. These conveyed immediate meanings, but not in the usual sense of sentences. Mostly they just set up associations.

Tree, fruit, go, Kelly sent. They ambled their chimps over to a clump of promising spindly trunks, but the bark was too slick to climb.

The rest of the troop had not even bothered. They have forest smarts we lack, Leon thought ruefully.

What there? he signed to Sheelah/Kelly.

Chimps ambled up to mounds, gave them the once-over, and reached out to brush aside some mud, revealing a tiny tunnel. Termites, Kelly signed.

Leon analyzed the situation as chimps drifted in. Nobody seemed in much of a hurry. Sheelah winked at him and waddled over to a distant mound.

Apparently termites worked outside at night, then blocked the entrances at dawn. Leon let his chimp shuffle over to a large tan mound, but he was riding it so well now that the chimp’s responses were weak. Leon/Ipan looked for cracks, knobs, slight hollows—and yet when he brushed away some mud, found nothing. Other chimps readily unmasked tunnels. Had they memorized the hundred or more tunnels in each mound?

He finally uncovered one. Ipan was no help. Leon could control, but that blocked up the wellsprings of deep knowledge within the chimp.

The chimps deftly tore off twigs or grass stalks near their mounds. Leon carefully followed their lead. His twigs and grass didn’t work. The first lot was too pliant, and when he tried to work them into a twisting tunnel, they collapsed and buckled. He switched to stiffer ones, but those caught on the tunnel walls, or snapped off. From Ipan came little help. Leon had managed him a bit too well.

He was getting embarrassed. Even the younger chimps had no trouble picking just the right stems or sticks. Leon watched a chimp nearby drop a stick that seemed to work. He then picked it up when the chimp moved on. He felt welling up from Ipan a blunt anxiety, mixing frustration and hunger. He could taste the anticipation of luscious, juicy termites.

He set to work, plucking the emotional strings of Ipan. This job went even worse. Vague thoughts drifted up from Ipan, but Leon was in control of the muscles now, and that was the bad part.

He quickly found that the stick had to be stuck in about ten centimeters, turning his wrist to navigate it down the twisty channel. Then he had to gently vibrate it. Through Ipan he sensed that this was to attract termites to bite into the stick.

At first he did it too long and when he drew the stick out it was half gone. Termites had bitten cleanly through it. So he had to search out another stick and that made Ipan’s stomach growl.

The other chimps were through termite-snacking while Leon was still fumbling for his first taste. The nuances irked him. He pulled the stick out too fast, not turning it enough to ease it past the tunnel’s curves. Time and again he fetched forth the stick, only to find that he had scraped the luscious termites off on the walls. Their bites punctured his stick, until it was so shredded he had to get another. The termites were dining better than he.

He finally caught the knack, a fluid slow twist of the wrist, gracefully extracting termites, clinging like bumps. Ipan licked them off eagerly. Leon liked the morsels, filtered through chimp taste buds.

Not many, though. Others of the troop were watching his skimpy harvest, heads tilted in curiosity, and he felt humiliated.

The hell with this, he thought.

He made Ipan turn and walk into the woods. Ipan resisted, dragging his feet. Leon found a thick limb, snapped it off to carrying size, and went back to the mound.

No more fooling with sticks. He whacked the mound solidly. Five more and he had punched a big hole. Escaping termites he scooped up by the delicious handful.

So much for subtlety! he wanted to shout. He tried writing a note for her in the dust but it was hard, forcing the letters out through his suddenly awkward hands. Chimps could handle a stick to fetch forth grubs, but marking a surface was somehow not a ready talent. He gave up.

Sheelah/Kelly came into view, proudly carrying a reed swarming with white-bellied termites. These were the best, a chimp gourmet delicacy. I better, she signed.

He made Ipan shrug and signed, I got more.

So it was a draw.

Later Kelly reported to him that among the troop he was known now as Big Stick. The name pleased him immensely.

AT DINNER HE FELT ELATED, EXHAUSTED, AND NOT IN THE MOOD FOR conversation. Being a chimp seemed to suppress his speech centers. It took some effort to ask ExSpec Ruben about immersion technology. Usually he accepted the routine technomiracles, but understanding chimps meant understanding how he experienced them.

“The immersion hardware puts you in the middle of a chimp’s posterior cingulate gyrus,” Ruben said over dessert. “Just ‘gyrus’ for short. That’s the brain’s center for mediating emotions and expressing them through action.”

“The brain?” Kelly asked. “What about ours.”

Ruben shrugged. “Same general layout. Chimps’ are smaller, without a big cerebrum.”

Leon leaned forward, ignoring his steaming cup of Kaf. “This ‘gyrus,’ it doesn’t give direct motor control?”

“No, we tried that. It disorients the chimp so much, when you leave, it can’t get itself back together.”

“So we’re more subtle,” Kelly said.

“We have to be. In chimp males, the pilot light is always on in neurons that control action and aggression—”

“That’s why they’re more violence-prone?” she asked.

“We think so. It parallels structures in our own brains.”

“Really? Men’s neurons?” Kelly looked doubtful.

“Human males have higher activity levels in their temporal limbic systems, deeper down in the brain—evolutionarily older structures.”

“So why not put me into that level?” Leon asked.

“We place the immersion chips into the gyrus area because we can reach it from the top, surgically. The temporal limbic is way far down, impossible to implant a chip and net.”

Kelly frowned. “So chimp males—”

“Are harder to control. Professor Mattick here is running his chimp from the backseat, so to speak.”

“Whereas Kelly is running hers from a control center that, for female chimps, is more central?” Leon peered into the distance. “I was handicapped!”

Kelly grinned. “You have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

“It’s not fair.”

“Big Stick, biology is destiny.”

THE TROOP CAME UPON ROTTING FRUIT. FEVERED EXCITEMENT RAN through them.

The smell was repugnant and enticing at the same time and at first he did not understand why. The chimps rushed to the overripe bulbs of blue and sickly green, popping open the skins, sucking out the juice.

Tentatively, Leon tried one. The hit was immediate. A warm feeling of well-being kindled up in him. Of course—the fruity esters had converted into—alcohol! The chimps were quite deliberately setting about getting drunk.

He “let” his chimp follow suit. He hadn’t much choice in the matter.

Ipan grunted and thrashed his arms whenever Leon tried to turn him away from the teardrop fruit. And after a while, Leon didn’t want to turn away either. He gave himself up to a good, solid drunk. He had been worrying a lot lately, agitated in his chimp, and . . . this was completely natural, wasn’t it?

Then a pack of raboons appeared, and he lost control of Ipan.

THEY COME FAST. RUNNING TWO-LEGS, NO SOUND. THEIR TAILS twitch, talking to each other.

Five circle left. They cut off Esa.

Biggest thunder at them. Hunker runs to nearest and it spikes him with its forepuncher.

I throw rocks. Hit one. It yelps and scurries back. But others take its place. I throw again and they come and the dust and yowling are thick and the others of them have Esa. They cut her with their punch-claws. Kick her with sharp hooves.

Three of them carry her off.

Our ferns run, afraid. We warriors stay.

We fight them. Shrieking, throwing, biting when they get close. But we cannot reach Esa.

Then they go. Fast, running on their two hoofed legs. Furling their tails in victory. Taunting us.

We feel bad. Esa was old and we loved her.

Fems come back, nervous. We groom ourselves and know that the two-legs are eating Esa somewhere.

Biggest come by, try to pat me. I snarl.

He Biggest! This thing he should have stopped.

His eyes get big and he slap me. I slap back at him. He slam into me. We roll around in dust. Biting, yowling. Biggest strong, strong and pound my head on ground.

Other warriors, they watch us, not join in.

He beat me. I hurt. I go away.

Biggest starts calming down the warriors. Ferns come by and pay their respects to Biggest. Touch him, groom him, feel him the way he likes. He mounts three of them real quick. He feeling Biggest all right.

Me, I lick myself. Sheelah come groom me. After a while I feel better. Already forgotten Esa.

I not forget Biggest beat me though. In front of everybody. Now I hurt, Biggest get grooming.

He let them come and take Esa. He Biggest, he should stop them.

Someday I be all over him. On his back.

Someday I be Bigger.

“WHEN DID YOU BAIL OUT?” KELLY ASKED.

“After Biggest stopped pounding on me . . . uh, on Ipan.”

They were relaxing in brilliant sun beside a swimming pool. The heady smells of the forest seemed to awaken in Leon the urge to be down there again, in the valleys of dust and blood. He trembled, took a deep breath. The fighting had been so involving he hadn’t wanted to leave, despite the pain. Immersion had a hypnotic quality.

“I know how you feel,” she said. “It’s easy to totally identify with them. I left Sheelah when those raboons came close. Pretty scary.”

“Why did anybody develop them?”

“Plans for using raboons as game, to hunt, Ruben said. Something new and challenging.”

“Hunting? Business will exploit any throwback primitivism to—” He had been about to launch into a little lecture on how far humanity had come, when he realized that he didn’t believe it anymore. “Um.”

“You’ve always thought of people as cerebral. No sociohistory could work if it didn’t take into account our animal selves.”

“Our worst sins are all our own, I fear.” He had not expected that his experiences here would shake him so. This was sobering.

“Not at all.” Kelly gave him a lofty look. “I’ve been reading some of the Station background data on our room computer. Genocide occurs in wolves and chimps alike. Murder is widespread. Ducks and orangutans rape. Even ants have organized warfare and slave raids. Chimps have at least as good a chance of being murdered as do humans, Ruben says. Of all the hallowed hallmarks—speech, art, technology, and the rest—the one which comes most obviously from animal ancestors was genocide.”

“You’ve been learning from Ruben.”

“It was a good way to keep an eye on him.”

“Better to be suspicious than sorry?”

“Of course,” she said blandly. “Can’t let Africa soften our brains.”

“Well, luckily, even if we are superchimps, throughout human society, communication blurs distinctions between Us and Them.”

“So?”

“That blunts the deep impulse to genocide.”

She laughed again, this time rather to his annoyance. “You haven’t understood history very well. Smaller groups still kill each other off with great relish. In Bosnia, during the reign of Omar the Impaler—”

“I concede, there are small-scale tragedies by the dozens. But on the scale where sociohistory might work, averaging over populations of many millions—”

“What makes you so sure numbers are any protection?” she asked pointedly.

“Well—without further work, I have nothing to say.”

She smiled. “How uncharacteristic.”

“Until I have a real, working theory.”

“One that can allow for widespread genocide?”

He saw her point then. “You’re saying I really need this ‘animal nature’ part of humans.”

“I’m afraid so. ‘Civilized man’ is a contradiction in terms. Scheming, plots, Sheelah grabbing more meat for her young, Ipan wanting to do in Biggest—those things happen in fancy urban nations. They’re just better disguised.”

“I don’t follow.”

“People use their intelligence to hide motives. Consider ExSpec Ruben. He made a comment about your working on a ‘theory of history’ the other evening.”

“So?”

“Who told him you were?”

“I don’t think I—ah, you think he’s checking up on us?”

“He already knows.”

“We’re just tourists here.”

She graced him with an unreadable smile. “I do love your endless, naive way of seeing the world.”

Later, he couldn’t decide whether she had meant that as a compliment.

RUBEN INVITED HIM TO TRY A COMBAT SPORT THE STATION OFFERED, and Leon accepted. It was an enhanced swordplay using levitation through electrostatic lifters. Leon was slow and inept. Using his own body against Ruben’s swift moves made him long for the sureness and grace of Ipan.

Ruben always opened with a traditional posture: one foot forward, his prod-sword making little circles in the air. Leon poked through Ruben’s defense sometimes, but usually spent all his lifter energy eluding Ruben’s thrusts. He did not enjoy it nearly as much as Ruben. The dry African air seemed to steal energy from him too, whereas Ipan reveled in it.

He did learn bits and pieces about chimps from Ruben, and from trolling through the vast Station library. The man seemed a bit uneasy when Leon probed the data arrays, as though Ruben somehow owned them and any reader was a thief. Or at least that was what Leon took to be the origin of the unease.

He had never thought about animals very much, though he had grown up among them on the farm. Yet he came to feel that they, too, had to be understood.

Catching sight of itself in a mirror, a dog sees the image as another dog. So did cats, fish, or birds. After a while they get used to the harmless image, silent and smell-free, but they did not see it as themselves.

Human children had to be about two years old to do better.

Chimps took a few days to figure out that they were looking at themselves. Then they preened before it shamelessly, studied their backs, and generally tried to see themselves differently, even putting leaves on their backs like hats and laughing at the result.

So they could do something other animals could not—get outside themselves, and look back.

They plainly lived in a world charged with echoes and reminiscences. Their dominance hierarchy was a frozen record of past coercion. They remembered termite mounds, trees to drum, useful spots where large water-sponge leaves fell, or grain matured.

All this fed into the toy model he had begun building in his notes—a chimp sociohistory. It used their movements, rivalries, hierarchies, patterns of eating, and mating and dying. Territory, resources, and troop competition for them. He found a way to factor into his equations the biological baggage of dark behaviors. Even the worst, like delight in torture and easy exterminations of other species for short-term gain. All these the chimps had. Just like today’s newspaper.

AT A DANCE THAT EVENING HE WATCHED THE CROWD WITH fresh vision.

Flirting was practice mating. He could see it in the sparkle of eyes, the rhythms of the dance. The warm breeze wafting up from the valley brought smells of dust, rot, life. An animal restlessness moved in the room.

He quite liked dancing and Kelly was a lush companion tonight. Yet he could not stop his mind from sifting, analyzing, taking the world before him apart into mechanisms.

The nonverbal template humans used for attract/approach strategies apparently descended from a shared mammalian heritage, Kelly had pointed out. He thought of that, watching the crowd at the bar.

A woman crosses a crowded room, hips swaying, eyes resting momentarily on a likely man, then coyly looking away just as she apparently notices his regard. A standard opening move: Notice me.

The second is I am harmless. A hand placed palm up on a table or knee. A shoulder shrug, derived from an ancient vertebrate reflex, signifying helplessness. Combine that with a tilted head, which displays the vulnerability of the neck. These commonly appeared when two people drawn to each other have their first conversation—all quite unconsciously.

Such moves and gestures are subcortical, emerging far below in a swamp of primordial circuitry . . . which had survived until now, because it worked.

Did such forces shape history more than trade balances, alliances, treaties? He looked at his own kind and tried to see it through chimp eyes.

Though human females matured earlier, they did not go on to acquire coarse body hair, bony eye ridges, deep voices, or tough skin. Males did. And women everywhere strove to stay young-looking. Cosmetics makers freely admitted their basic role: We don’t sell products; we sell hope.

Competition for mates was incessant. Male chimps sometimes took turns with females in estrus. They had huge testicles, implying that reproductive advantage had come to those males who produced enough to overwhelm their rivals’ contributions. Human males had proportionally smaller testicles.

But humans got their revenge where it mattered. Of all primates, humans had the largest penises.

All primates had separated out as species many millions of years ago. In DNA-measured time, chimps lay six million years from humans. He mentioned to Kelly that only 4 percent of mammals formed pair bonds, were monogamous. Primates rated a bit higher, but not much. Birds were much better at it.

She sniffed. “Don’t let all this biology go to your head.”

“Oh no, I won’t let it get that far.”

“You mean it belongs in lower places?”

“Madam, you’ll have to be the judge of that.”

“Ah, you and your single-entendre humor.”

Later that evening, with her, he had ample opportunity to reflect upon the truth that, while it was not always great to be human, it was tremendous fun being a mammal.

THEY SPENT A LAST DAY IMMERSED IN THEIR CHIMPS, SUNNING THEMselves beside a gushing stream. The plane would pick them up early the next morning; Helsinki waited. They packed and entered the immersion capsule and sank into a last reverie. Sun, sweet air, the lassitude of the primitive . . .

Until Biggest started to mount Sheelah.

Leon/Ipan sat up, his head foggy. Sheelah was shrieking at Biggest. She slapped him.

Biggest had mounted Sheelah before. Kelly had bailed out, her mind returning to her body in the capsule.

Something was different now. Ipan hurried over and signed to Sheelah, who was throwing pebbles at Biggest. What?

She moved her hands rapidly, signing, No go.

She could not bail out. Something was wrong back at the capsule. He could go back himself, tell them.

Leon made the little mental flip that would bail him out.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. Sheelah threw dust and pebbles, backing away from Biggest. Nothing.

No time to think. He stepped between Sheelah and Biggest.

The massive chimp frowned. Here was Ipan, buddy Ipan, getting in the way. Denying him a fern. Biggest seemed to have forgotten the challenge and beating of the day before.

First he tried bellowing, eyes big and white. Then Biggest shook his arms, fists balled.

Leon made his chimp stand still. It took every calming impulse he could muster.

Biggest swung his fist like a club.

Ipan ducked. Biggest missed.

Leon was having trouble controlling Ipan, who wanted to flee. Sheets of fear shot up through the chimp mind, hot yellows in the blue-black depths.

Biggest charged forward, slamming Ipan back. Leon felt the jolt, a stabbing pain in his chest. He toppled backward. Hit hard.

Biggest yowled his triumph. Waved his arms at the sky.

Biggest would get on top, he saw. Beat him again.

Suddenly he felt a deep, raw hatred.

From that red seethe he felt his grip on Ipan tighten. He was riding both with and within the chimp, feeling its raw red fear, overrunning that with an iron rage. Ipan’s own wrath fed back into Leon. The two formed a concert, anger building as if reflected from hard walls.

He might not be the same kind of primate, but he knew Ipan. Neither of them was going to get beaten again. And Biggest was not going to get Sheelah/Kelly.

He rolled to the side. Biggest hit the ground where he had been.

Ipan leaped up and kicked Biggest. Hard, in the ribs. Once, twice. Then in the head.

Whoops, cries, dust, pebbles—Sheelah was still bombarding them both. Ipan shivered with boiling energy and backed away.

Biggest shook his dusty head. Then he curled and rolled easily up to his feet, full of muscular grace, face a constricted mask. The chimp’s eyes widened, showing white and red.

Ipan yearned to run. Only Leon’s rage held him in place.

But it was a static balance of forces. Ipan blinked as Biggest shuffled warily forward, the big chimp’s caution a tribute to the damage Ipan had inflicted.

I need some advantage, Leon thought, looking around. He could call for allies. Hunker paced nervously nearby.

Something told Leon that would be a losing strategy. Hunker was still a lieutenant to Biggest. Sheelah was too small to make a decisive difference. He looked at the other chimps, all chattering anxiously—and decided. He picked up a rock.

Biggest grunted in surprise. Chimps didn’t use rocks against each other. Rocks were only for repelling invaders. He was violating a social code.

Biggest yelled, waved to the others, pounded the ground, huffed angrily. Then he charged.

Leon threw the rock hard. It hit Biggest in the chest, knocked him down.

Biggest came up fast, madder than before. Ipan scurried back, wanting desperately to run. Leon felt control slipping from him—and saw another rock. Suitable size, two paces back. He let Ipan turn to flee, then stopped and looked at the stone. Ipan didn’t want to hold it. Panic ran through him.

Leon poured his rage into the chimp, forced the long arms down. Hands grabbed at the stone, fumbled, got it. Sheer anger made Ipan turn to face Biggest, who was thundering after him. To Leon, Ipan’s arm came up in achingly slow motion. He leaned heavily into the pitch. The rock smacked Biggest in the face.

Biggest staggered. Blood ran into his eyes. Ipan caught the iron scent of it, riding on a prickly stench of outrage.

Leon made his trembling Ipan stoop down. There were some shaped stones nearby, made by the ferns to trim leaves from branches. He picked up one with a chipped edge.

Biggest waved his head, dizzy.

Ipan glanced at the sober, still faces of his troop. No one had used a rock against a troop member, much less Biggest. Rocks were for Strangers.

A long, shocked silence stretched. The chimps stood rooted, Biggest grunted and peered in disbelief at the blood that spattered into his up-turned hand.

Ipan stepped forward and raised the jagged stone, edge held outward. Crude, but a cutting edge.

Biggest flared his nostrils and came at Ipan. Ipan swept the rock through the air, barely missing Biggest’s jaw.

Biggest’s eyes widened. He huffed and puffed, threw dust, howled. Ipan simply stood with the rock and held his ground. Biggest kept up his anger-display for a long while, but he did not attack.

The troop watched with intense interest. Sheelah came and stood beside Ipan. It would have been against protocols for a female to take part in male-dominance rituals.

Her movement signaled that the confrontation was over. But Hunker was having none of that. He abruptly howled, pounded the ground, and scooted over to Ipan’s side.

Leon was surprised. With Hunker maybe he could hold the line against Biggest. He was not fool enough to think that this one standoff would put Biggest to rest. There would be other challenges and he would have to fight them. Hunker would be a useful ally.

He realized that he was thinking in the slow, muted logic of Ipan himself. He assumed that the pursuit of chimp status-markers was a given, the great goal of his life.

This revelation startled him. He had known that he was diffusing into Ipan’s mind, taking control of some functions from the bottom up, seeping through the deeply buried, walnut-sized gyrus. It had not occurred to him that the chimp would diffuse into him. Were they now married to each other in an interlocked web that dispersed mind and self?

Hunker stood beside him, eyes glaring at the other chimps, chest heaving. Ipan felt the same way, madly pinned to the moment. Leon realized that he would have to do something, break this cycle of dominance and submission which ruled Ipan at the deep, neurological level.

He turned to Sheelah. Get out? he signed.

No. No. Her chimp face wrinkled with anxiety.

Leave. He waved toward the trees, pointed to her, then him.

She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

It was infuriating. He had so much to say to her and he had to funnel it through a few hundred signs. He chippered in a high-pitched voice, trying vainly to force the chimp lips and palate to do the work of shaping words.

It was no use. He had tried before, idly, but now he wanted to badly and none of the equipment worked. It couldn’t. Evolution had shaped brain and vocal chords in parallel. Chimps groomed, people talked.

He turned back and realized that he had forgotten entirely about the status-setting. Biggest was glowering at him. Hunker stood guard, confused at his new leader’s sudden loss of interest in the confrontation—and to gesture at a mere fern too.

Leon reared up as tall as he could and waved the stone. This produced the desired effect. Biggest inched back a bit and the rest of the troop edged closer. Leon made Ipan stalk forward boldly. By this time it did not take much effort, for Ipan was enjoying this enormously.

Biggest retreated. Ferns inched around Biggest and approached Ipan.

If only I could leave him to the fems’ delights, Leon thought.

He tried to bail out again. Nothing. The mechanism wasn’t working back at the Excursion Station. And something told him that it wasn’t going to get fixed.

He gave the edged stone to Hunker. The chimp seemed surprised but took it. Leon hoped the symbolism of the gesture would penetrate in some fashion because he had no time left to spend on chimp politics. Hunker hefted the rock and looked at Ipan. Then he cried in a rolling, powerful voice, tones rich in joy and triumph.

Leon was quite happy to let Hunker distract the troop. He took Sheelah by the arm and led her into the trees. No one followed.

He was relieved. If another chimp had tagged along, it would have confirmed his suspicions. Ruben might be keeping track.

Still, he reminded himself, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

THE HUMANS CAME SWIFTLY, WITH CLATTER AND BOOMS.

He and Sheelah had been in the trees a while. At Leon’s urging they had worked their way a few klicks away from the troop. Ipan and Sheelah showed rising anxiety at being separated from their troop. His teeth chattered and eyes jerked anxiously at every suspicious movement. This was natural, for isolated chimps were far more vulnerable.

The humans landing did not help.

Danger, Leon signed, cupping an ear to indicate the noise of fliers landing nearby.

Sheelah signed, Where go?

Away.

She shook her head vehemently. Stay here. They get us.

They would indeed, but not in the sense she meant. Leon cut her off curtly, shaking his head. Danger. They had never intended to convey complicated ideas with their signs and now he felt bottled up, unable to tell her his suspicions.

Leon made a knife-across-throat gesture. Sheelah frowned.

He bent down and made Ipan take a stick. In soft loam he wrote:

IMPERIAL INDUSTRIE AGENTS. WANT US DEAD.

Sheelah looked dumbfounded. Kelly had probably been operating under the assumption that the failure to bail out was a temporary error. It had lasted too long for that. The landing of people in noisy, intrusive fashion confirmed his hunch. No ordinary team would disturb the animals so much. And nobody would come after them directly. They would fix the immersion apparatus, where the real problem was.

THEY KEEP US HERE, KILL US, BLAME ON ANIMALS.

He had better arguments to back up his case, the slow accumulation of small details in Ruben’s behavior. That, and the guess that letting them die in an “accident” while immersed in a chimp was plausible enough to escape an investigation.

The humans went about their noisy business. They were enough, though, to make his case. Sheelah’s eyes narrowed, the big brow scowled. Where? she signed.

He had no sign for so abstract an idea, so he scribbled with the stick, AWAY. Indeed, he had no plan.

I’LL CHECK>, she wrote in the dirt. She set off toward the noise of humans deploying on the valley floor below. To a chimp the din was a dreadful clanking irritation. Leon was not going to let her out of his sight. He followed her. She waved him back but he shook his head and stuck behind her. She gave up and let him follow.

They stayed in bushes until they could get a view of the landing party below. A skirmish line was forming up a few hundred meters away. They were encircling the area where the troop had been. Leon squinted. Chimp eyesight was not good for distance. Humans had been hunters once, and one could tell by the eyes alone.

He thought abstractly about the fact that nearly everybody needed eye aids by the age of forty. Either civilization was hard on eyes, or maybe humans in prehistory had not lived long enough for eye trouble to rob them of game. Either conclusion was sobering.

The two chimps watched the humans calling to one another and in the middle of them Leon saw Ruben. That confirmed it. That, and that each man and woman carried a weapon.

Beneath his fear he felt something strong, dark.

Ipan trembled, watching humans, a strange awe swelling in his mind. Humans seemed impossibly tall in the shimmering distance, moving with stately, swaying elegance.

Leon floated above the surge of emotion, fending off its powerful effects. The reverence for those distant, tall figures came out of the chimp’s dim past.

That surprised him until he thought it over. After all, animals were reared and taught by adults much smarter and stronger. Most species were like chimps, spring-loaded by evolution to work in a dominance hierarchy. Awe was adaptive.

When they met lofty humans with overwhelming power, able to mete out punishment and rewards—literally life and death—something like religious fervor arose in them. Dim, fuzzy, but strong.

Atop that warm, tropical emotion floated a sense of satisfaction at simply being. His chimp was happy to be a chimp, even when seeing a being of clearly superior power and thought.

Ironic, Leon thought. His chimp had just disproved another supposedly human earmark: their self-congratulatory distinction of being the only animal that congratulated itself.

He jerked himself out of his abstractions. How human, to ruminate even when in mortal danger.

CAN’T FIND US ELECTRONICALLY, he scratched in the sand.

MAYBE RANGE IS SHORT, she wrote.

RUBEN SABOTAGED LINK, he printed. She bit her lip, nodded.

Go. We go, he signed.

Sheelah nodded and they crept quickly away. Ipan was reluctant to leave the presence of the revered humans, his steps dragging.

THEY USED CHIMP MODES OF PATROLLING. HE AND KELLY LET their chimps take over, experts at silent movement, careful of every twig. Once they had left the humans behind the chimps grew even more cautious. Chimps had few enemies but the faint scent of a single predator could change the feel of every moment in the wild.

Ipan climbed tall trees and sat for hours surveying open land ahead before venturing forth. He weighed the evidence of pungent droppings, faint prints, bent branches.

They angled down the long slope of the valley and kept in the forest. Leon had only glanced at the big color-coded map of the area all guests received and had trouble recalling much of it. Once he recognized one of the distant, beak-shaped peaks he got his bearings. Kelly spotted a stream snaking down into the main river and that gave them further help, but still they did not know which way lay the Excursion Station. Or how far.

That way? Leon signed, pointing over the distant ridge.

No. That, Kelly insisted.

Far, not

Why?

The worst part of it all was that they could not talk. He could not say clearly that the technology of immersion worked best at reasonably short range, less than a hundred klicks, say. And it made sense to keep the subject chimps within easy flier distance. Certainly Ruben and the others had gotten to the troop quickly.

Is. He persisted.

Not. She pointed down the valley. Maybe there.

He could only hope Kelly got the general idea. Their signs were scanty and he began to feel a broad, rising irritation. Chimps felt and sensed strongly, but they were so limited.

Ipan expressed this by tossing limbs and stones, banging on tree trunks. It didn’t help much. The need to speak was like a pressure he could not relieve and Kelly felt it too. Sheelah chippered and grunted in frustration.

Beneath his mind he felt the smoldering presence of Ipan. They had never been together this long before and urgency welled up between the two canted systems of mind. Their uneasy marriage was showing greater strains.

Sit. Quiet. She did. He cupped a hand to his ear.

Bad come?

No. Listen—In frustration Leon pointed to Sheelah herself. Blank incomprehension in the chimp’s face. He scribbled in the dust, LEARN FROM CHIMPS. Sheelah’s mouth opened and she nodded.

They squatted in the shelter of prickly bushes and listened to the sounds of the forest. Scurryings and murmurs came through strongly as Leon relaxed his grip on the chimp. Dust hung in slanted cathedral light, pouring down from the forest canopy in rich yellow shafts. Scents purled up from the forest floor, chemical messengers telling Ipan of potential foods, soft loam for resting, bark to be chewed. Leon gently lifted Ipan’s head to gaze across the valley at the peaks . . . musing . . . and felt a faint tremor of resonance.

To Ipan the valley came weighted with significance beyond words. His troop had imbued it with blunt emotions, attached to clefts where a friend fell and died, where the troop found a hoard of fruits, where they met and fought two big cats. It was an intricate landscape suffused with feeling, the chimp mechanism of memory.

Leon faintly urged Ipan to think beyond the ridgeline and felt in response a diffuse anxiety. He bore in on that kernel—and an image burst into Ipan’s mind, fringed in fear. A rectangular bulk framed against a cool sky. The Excursion Station.

There. He pointed for Kelly.

Ipan had simple, strong, apprehensive memories of the place. His troop had been taken there, outfitted with the implants which allowed them to be ridden, then deposited back in their territory.

Far, Kelly signed.

We go?

Hard. Slow.

No stay here. They catch.

Kelly looked as skeptical as a chimp could look. Fight?

Did she mean fight Ruben here? Or fight once they reached the Excursion Station? No here. There.

Kelly frowned but accepted this. He had no real plan, only the idea that Ruben was ready for chimps out here, and might not be so prepared for them at the Station. There he and Kelly might gain the element of surprise. How, he had no idea.

They studied each other, each trying to catch a glimmer of the other in an alien face. She stroked his earlobe, Kelly’s fond calming gesture. Sure enough, it made him tingle. But he could say so little. . . . The moment crystallized for him the hopelessness of their situation.

Ruben plainly was trying to kill Leon and Kelly through Ipan and Sheelah. What would become of their own bodies? The shock of experiencing death through immersion was known to prove fatal. Their bodies would fail from neurological shock, without ever regaining consciousness.

He saw a tear run down Sheelah’s cheek. She knew how hopeless matters were too. He swept her up in his arms and, looking at the distant mountains, was surprised to find tears in his own eyes as well.

HE HAD NOT COUNTED ON THE RIVER. NEN, ANIMALS—THESE PROBlems he had considered. They ventured down to the surging waters where the forest gave the nearest protection and the stream broadened, making the best place to ford.

But the hearty river that chuckled and frothed down the valley was impossible to swim.

Or rather, for Ipan to swim. Leon had been coaxing his chimp onward, carefully pausing when his muscles shook or when he wet himself from anxiety. Kelly was having similar trouble and it slowed them. A night spent up in high branches soothed both chimps, but now at midmorning all the stressful symptoms returned, as Ipan put one foot into the river. Cool, swift currents.

Ipan danced back onto the narrow beach, yelping in dread.

Go? Kelly/Sheelah signed.

Leon calmed his chimp and they tried to get it to attempt swimming. Sheelah displayed only minor anxiety. Leon plumbed the swampy depths of Ipan’s memory and found a cluster of distress, centered around a dim remembrance of nearly drowning when a child. When Sheelah helped him he fidgeted, then bolted from the water again.

Go! Sheelah waved long arms upstream and downstream and shook her head angrily.

Leon guessed that she had reasonably clear chimp-memories of the river, which had no easier crossings than this. He shrugged, lifted his hands palm up.

A big herd of gigantelope grazed nearby and some were crossing the river for better grass beyond. They tossed their great heads, as if mocking the chimps. The river was not deep, but to Ipan it was a wall. Leon, trapped by Ipan’s solid fear, seethed and could do nothing.

Sheelah paced the shore. She huffed in frustration and looked at the sky, squinting. Her head snapped around in surprise. Leon followed her gaze. A flier was swooping down the valley, coming this way.

Ipan beat Sheelah to the shelter of trees, but not by much. Luckily the gigantelope herd provided a distraction for the flyer. They cowered in bushes as the machine hummed overhead in a circular search pattern. Leon had to quell Ipan’s mounting apprehension by envisioning scenes of quiet and peace and food while he and Sheelah groomed each other.

The flier finally went away. They would have to minimize their exposure on open grasslands now.

They foraged for fruit. His mind revolved uselessly and a sour depression settled over him. He was quite neatly caught in a trap, a pawn in politics. Worse, Kelly was in it too. He was no man of action. Nor a chimp of action, either, he thought dourly.

As he brought a few overripe bunches of fruit back to their bushes overlooking the river, he heard cracking noises. He crouched down and worked his way uphill and around the splintering sounds. Sheelah was stripping branches from the trees. When he approached she waved him on impatiently, a common chimp gesture remarkably like a human one.

She had a dozen thick branches lined up on the ground. She went to a nearby spindly tree and peeled bark from it in long strips. The noise made Ipan uneasy. Predators would be curious at this unusual sound. He scanned the forest for danger.

Sheelah came over to him, slapped him in the face. She wrote with a stick on the ground, RAFT.

Leon felt particularly stupid as he pitched in. Of course. Had his chimp immersion made him more stupid? Did the effect worsen with time? Even if he got out of this, would he be the same? Many questions, no answers. He forgot about them and worked.

They lashed branches together with bark, crude but serviceable. They found two small fallen trees and used them to anchor the edge of the raft. I, Sheelah pointed, and demonstrated pulling the raft.

First, a warm-up. Ipan liked sitting on the raft in the bushes. Apparently the chimp could not see the purpose of the raft yet. Ipan stretched out on the deck of saplings and gazed up into the trees as they swished in the warm winds.

They carried the awkward plane of branches down to the river after another mutual grooming session. The sky was filled with birds but he could see no fliers.

They hurried. Ipan was skeptical about stepping onto the raft when it was halfway into the water, but Leon called up memories filled with warm feeling, and this calmed the quick-tripping heart he could feel knocking in the chimp veins.

Ipan sat gingerly on the branches. Sheelah cast off.

She pushed hard but the river swept them quickly downstream. Alarm spurted in Ipan.

Leon made Ipan close his eyes. That slowed the breathing, but anxiety skittered across the chimp mind like heat lightning forking before a storm. The raft’s rocking motion actually helped, making Ipan concentrate on his queasy stomach. Once his eyes flew open when a floating log smacked into the raft, but the dizzying sight of water all around made him squeeze them tight immediately.

Leon wanted to help her, but he knew from the trip-hammer beating of Ipan’s heart that panic hovered near. He could not even see how she was doing. He had to sit blind and feel her shoving the raft along.

She panted noisily, struggling to keep it pointed against the river’s tug. Spray splashed onto him. Ipan jerked, yelped, pawed anxiously with his feet, as if to run.

A sudden lurch. Sheelah’s grunt cut off with a gurgle and he felt the raft spin away on rising currents. A sickening spin . . .

Ipan jerked clumsily to his feet. Eyes jumped open.

Swirling water, the raft unsteady. He looked down and the branches were coming apart. Panic consumed him. Leon tried to promote soothing images but they blew away before winds of fright.

Sheelah came paddling after the raft but it was picking up speed. Leon made Ipan gaze at the far shore but that was all he could do before the chimp started yelping and scampering on the raft, trying to find a steady place.

It was no use. The branches broke free of their bindings and chilly water swept over the deck. Ipan screamed. He leaped, fell, rolled, jumped up again.

Leon gave up any idea of control. The only hope lay in seizing just the right moment. The raft split down the middle and his half veered heavily to the left. Ipan started away from the edge and Leon fed that, made the chimp step further. In two bounds he took the chimp off the deck and into the water—toward the far shore.

Ipan gave way then to pure blind panic. Leon let the legs and arms thrash—but to each he gave a push at the right moment. He could swim, Ipan couldn’t.

The near-aimless flailing held Ipan’s head out of water most of the time. It even gained a little headway. Leon kept focused on the convulsive movements, ignoring the cold water—and then Sheelah was there, her jaws agape.

She grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and shoved him toward shore. Ipan tried to grapple with her, climb up her. Sheelah socked him in the jaw. He gasped. She pulled him toward shore.

Ipan was stunned. This gave Leon a chance to get the legs moving in a thrusting stroke. He worked at it, single-minded among the rush and gurgle, chest heaving . . . and after a seeming eternity, felt pebbles beneath his feet. Ipan scrambled up onto the rocky beach on his own.

He let the chimp slap himself and dance to warm up. Sheelah emerged dripping and bedraggled and Ipan swept her up in his thankful arms.

WALKING WAS WORK AND IPAN WASN’T HAVING ANY.

Leon tried to make the chimp cover ground, but now they had to ascend difficult gullies, some mossy and rough. They stumbled, waded, climbed, and sometimes just crawled up the slopes of the valley. The chimps found animal trails, which helped a bit.

Ipan stopped often for food or just to gaze idly into the distance. Soft thoughts flitted like moths through the foggy mind, buoyant on liquid emotional flows which eddied to their own pulse.

Chimps were not made for extended projects. They made slow progress. Night came and they had to climb trees, snagging fruit on the way.

Ipan slept, but Leon did not. Could not.

Their lives were just as much at risk here as the chimps’, but the slumbering minds he and Kelly attended had always lived this way. To the chimps, the forest night seeped through as a quiet rain of information, processed as they slept. Their minds keyed vagrant sounds to known nonthreats, leaving slumber intact.

Leon did not know the subtle signs of danger and so mistook every rustle and tremor in the branches as danger approaching on soft feet. Sleep came against his will.

In dawn’s first pale glow Leon awoke with a snake beside him. It coiled like a green rope around a descending branch, getting itself into striking position. It eyed him and Leon tensed.

Ipan drifted up from his own profound slumber. He saw the snake but did not react with a startled jerk, as Leon feared he might.

A long moment passed between them and Ipan blinked just once. The snake became utterly motionless and Ipan’s heart quickened but he did not move. Then the snake uncoiled and glided away, and the unspoken transaction was done. Ipan was unlikely prey, this green snake did not taste good, and chimps were smart enough to be about other business.

When Sheelah awoke they went down to a nearby chuckling stream for a drink, scavenging leaves and a few crunchy insects on the way. Both chimps nonchalantly peeled away fat black land leeches which had attached to them in the night. The thick, engorged worms sickened Leon, but Ipan pulled them off with the same casualness Leon would have retying loosened shoelaces.

Ipan drank and Leon reflected that the chimp felt no need to clean himself. Normally Leon showered twice a day, before breakfast and before dinner, and felt ill at ease if he sweated, but here he wore the shaggy body comfortably. Had his frequent cleansings been a health measure, like the chimps’ grooming? Or a rarified, civilized habit? He dimly remembered that as a boy he had gone for days in happy, sweaty pleasure, and had disliked baths and showers. Somehow Ipan returned him to a simpler sense of self, at ease in the grubby world.

His comfort did not last long. They sighted raboons uphill.

Ipan had picked up the scent, but Leon did not have access to the part of the chimp brain that made scent-picture associations. He had only known that something disturbed Ipan, wrinkling the knobby nose. The sight at short range jolted him.

Thick hindquarters, propelling them in brisk steps. Short forelimbs, ending in sharp claws. Their large heads seemed to be mostly teeth, sharp and white above slitted, wary eyes. A thick brown pelt covered them, growing bushy in the heavy tail they used for balance.

Days before, from the safety of a high tree, Ipan had watched some rip and devour the soft tissues of a gigantelope out on the grasslands. These came sniffing, working downslope in a skirmish line, five of them. Sheelah and Ipan trembled at the sight. They were downwind of the raboons and so beat a retreat in silence.

There were no tall trees here, just brush and saplings. Leon and Sheelah angled away downhill and got some distance, and then saw ahead a clearing. Ipan picked up the faint tang of other chimps, wafting from across the clearing.

He waved to her: Go. At the same moment chorus rose behind them. The raboons had smelled them.

Their wheezing grunts came echoing through the thick bushes. Down the slope there was even less cover, but bigger trees lay beyond. They could climb those.

Ipan and Sheelah hurried across the broad tan clearing on all fours but they were not quick. Snarling raboons burst into the grass behind them. Leon scampered into the trees—and directly into the midst of a chimp troop.

There were several dozen, startled and blinking. He yelled incoherently, wondering how Ipan would signal to them.

The nearest large male turned, bared teeth, and shrieked angrily. The entire pack took up the call, whooping and snatching up sticks and rocks, throwing them—at Ipan. A pebble hit him on the chin, a branch on the thigh. He fled, Sheelah already a few steps ahead of him.

The raboons came charging across the clearing. In their claws they held small, sharp stones. They looked big and solid but they slowed at the barrage of screeches and squawks coming from the trees.

Ipan and Sheelah burst out into the grass of the clearing and the chimps came right after them. The raboons skidded to a halt.

The chimps saw the raboons but they did not stop or even slow. They still came after Ipan and Sheelah with murderous glee.

The raboons stood frozen, their claws working uneasily.

Leon realized what was happening and picked up a branch as he ran, calling hoarsely to Sheelah. She saw and copied him. He ran straight at the raboons, waving the branch. It was an awkward, twisted old limb, useless, but it looked big. Leon wanted to seem like the advance guard of some bad business.

In the rising cloud of dust and general chaos the raboons saw a large party of enraged chimps emerging from the forest. They bolted.

Squealing, they ran at full stride into the far trees.

Ipan and Sheelah followed, running with the last of their strength. By the time Ipan reached the first trees, he looked back and the chimps had stopped halfway, still screeching their vehemence.

He signed to Sheelah, Go, and they cut away at a steep angle, heading uphill.

IPAN NEEDED FOOD AND REST TO STOP HIS HEART FROM LURCHING at every minor sound. Sheelah and Ipan clutched each other, high in a tree, and crooned and petted.

Leon needed time to think. Who was keeping their bodies alive at the Station? It would be smart to let them stay out here, in danger, saying to the rest of the staff that the two odd tourists wanted a really long immersion.

His thinking triggered jitters in Ipan, so he dropped that mode. Better to think abstractly. And there was plenty out here that needed understanding.

The biotechnicians who planted chimps and gigantelope and the rest here had tinkered with the raboons. The wild days of explosive biotech, in the first years of the twencen, had allowed just about anything. Capabilities soon thereafter, in the twentens, had allowed the biotech tinkerers to see if they could turn a more distant primate relative, the baboon, into something like humans. A perverse goal, it seemed to Leon, but believable. Scientists loved to monkey with matters.

The work had gotten as far as pack-hunting behavior. But raboons had no tools beyond crudely edged stones, occasionally used to cut meat once they had brought it down.

In another few million years, under evolution’s raw rub, they might be as smart as chimps. Who would go extinct then?

At the moment he didn’t much care. He had felt real rage when the chimps—his own kind!—had turned against them, even when the raboons came within view. Why?

He worried at the issue, sure there was something here he had to understand. Sociohistory had to deal with such basic, fundamental impulses. The chimps’ reaction had been uncomfortably close to myriad incidents in human history. Hate the Stranger.

He had to fathom that murky truth.

Chimps moved in small groups, disliking outsiders, breeding mostly within their modest circle of a few dozen. This meant that any genetic trait that emerged could pass swiftly into all the members, through inbreeding. If it helped the band survive, the rough rub of chance would select for that band’s survival. Fair enough.

But the trait had to be undiluted. A troop of especially good rock throwers would get swallowed up if they joined a company of several hundred. Contact would make them breed outside the original small clan. Outbreeding: Their genetic heritage would get watered down.

Striking a balance between the accidents of genetics in small groups, and the stability of large groups—that was the trick. Some lucky troop might have fortunate genes, conferring traits that fit the next challenge handed out by the ever-altering world. They would do well. But if those genes never passed to many chimps, what did it matter?

With some small amount of outbreeding, that trait got spread into other bands. Down through the strainer of time, others picked up the trait. It spread.

This meant it was actually helpful to develop smoldering animosity to outsiders, an immediate sense of their wrongness. Don’t breed with them.

So small bands held fast to their eccentric traits, and some prospered. Those lived on; most perished. Evolutionary jumps happened faster in small, semi-isolated bands which outbred slightly. They kept their genetic assets in one small basket, the troop. Only occasionally did they mate with another troop—often, through rape.

The price was steep: a strong preference for their own tiny lot.

They hated crowds, strangers, noise. Bands of less than ten were too vulnerable to disease or predators; a few losses and the group failed. Too many, and they lost the concentration of close breeding. They were intensely loyal to their group, easily identifying each other in the dark by smell, even at great distances. Because they had many common genes, altruistic actions were common.

They even honored heroism—for even if the hero died, his shared genes were passed on through his relatives.

Even if strangers could pass the tests of difference in appearances, manner, smell, grooming—even then, culture could amplify the effects. Newcomers with different language or habits and posture would seem repulsive. Anything that served to distinguish a band would help keep hatreds high.

Each small genetic ensemble would then be driven by natural selection to stress the noninherited differences—even arbitrary ones, dimly connected to survival fitness . . . and so they could evolve culture. As humans had.

Diversity in their tribal intricacies avoided genetic watering down. They heeded the ancient call of aloof, wary tribalism.

Leon/Ipan shifted uneasily. Midway through his thinking, the word they had come in Leon’s thinking to mean humans as well as chimps. The description fit both.

That was the key. Humans fit into civilization despite their innate tribalism, their chimplike heritage. It was a miracle!

But even miracles called out for explanation. How could civilization possibly have kept itself stable, using such crude creatures as humans?

Leon had never seen the issue before in such glaring, and humbling, light.

And he had no answer.

THEY MOVED ON AGAINST THE BLUNT, DEEP UNEASE OF their chimps.

Ipan smelled something that sent his eyes darting left and right. With the full tool kit of soothing thoughts and the subtle tricks he had learned, Leon kept him going.

Sheelah was having more trouble. The female chimp did not like laboring up the long, steep gullies that approached the ridgeline. Gnarled bushes blocked their way and it took time to work their way around. Fruit was harder to find at these altitudes.

Ipan’s shoulders and arms ached constantly. Chimps walked on all fours because their immensely strong arms carried a punishing weight penalty. To navigate both trees and ground meant you could optimize neither. Sheelah and Ipan groaned and whined at the soreness that never left feet, legs, wrists, and arms. Chimps would never be far-ranging explorers.

Together they let their chimps pause often to crumble leaves and soak up water from tree holes, a routine, simple tool use. They kept sniffing the air, apprehensive.

The smell that disturbed both chimps got stronger, darker.

Sheelah went ahead and was the first over the ridgeline. Far below in the valley they could make out the rectangular rigidities of the Excursion Station. A flier lifted from the roof and whispered away down the valley, no danger to them.

He recalled a century ago sitting on the veranda there with drinks in hand and Kelly saying, If you stayed in Helsinki you might be dead. Also if you didn’t stay in Helsinki . . .

They started down the steep slope. Their chimps’ eyes jerked at every unexpected movement. A chilly breeze stirred the few low bushes and twisted trees. Some had a feathered look, burnt and shattered by lightning. Air masses driven up from the valleys fought along here, the brute clash of pressures. This rocky ridge was far from the comfortable province of chimps. They hurried.

Ahead, Sheelah stopped.

Without a sound, five raboons rose from concealment, forming a neat half-circle around them.

Leon could not tell if it was the same pack as before. If so, they were quite considerable pack hunters, able to hold memory and purpose over time. They had waited ahead, where there were no trees to climb.

The raboons were eerily quiet as they strode forward, their claws clicking softly.

He called to Sheelah and made some utterly fake ferocious noises as he moved, arms high in the air, fists shaking, showing a big profile. He let Ipan take over while he thought.

A raboon band could certainly take two isolated chimps. To survive this they had to surprise the raboons, frighten them.

He looked around. Throwing rocks wasn’t going to do the trick here. With only a vague notion of what he was doing he shuffled left, toward a tree that had been splintered by lightning.

Sheelah saw his move and got there first, striding energetically. Ipan picked up two stones and flung them at the nearest raboon. One caught him on the flank but did no real harm.

The raboons began to trot, circling. They called to each other in wheezing grunts.

Sheelah leaped on a dried-out shard of the tree. It snapped. She snatched it up and Leon saw her point. It was as tall as she was and she cradled it.

The largest raboon grunted and they all looked at each other.

The raboons charged.

The nearest one came at Sheelah. She caught it on the shoulder with the blunt point and it squealed.

Leon grabbed a stalk of the shattered tree trunk. He could not wrench it free. Another squeal from behind him and Sheelah was gibbering in a high, frightened voice.

It was best to let the chimps release tension vocally, but he could feel the fear and desperation in the tones and knew it came from Kelly too.

He carefully selected a smaller shard of the tree. With both hands he twisted it free, using his weight and big shoulder muscles, cracking it so that it came away with a point.

Lances. That was the only way to stay away from the raboon claws. Chimps never used such advanced weapons. Evolution hadn’t gotten around to that lesson yet.

The raboons were all around them now. He and Sheelah stood back-to-back. He barely got his feet placed when he had to take the rush of a big, swarthy raboon.

They had not gotten the idea of the lance yet. It slammed into the point, jerked back. A fearsome bellow. Ipan wet himself with fear but something in Leon kept him in control.

The raboon backed off, whimpering. It turned to run. In midstride it stopped. For a long, suspended moment the raboon hesitated—then turned back toward Leon.

It trotted forward with new confidence. The other raboons watched. It went to the same tree Leon had used and with a single heave broke off a long, slender spike of wood. Then it came toward Leon, stopped, and with one claw held the stick forward. With a toss of its big head it looked at him and half-turned, putting one foot forward.

With a shock Leon recognized the swordplay position. Ruben had used it. Ruben was riding this raboon.

It made perfect sense. This way the chimps’ deaths would be quite natural. Ruben could say that he was developing raboon-riding as a new commercial application of the same hardware that worked for chimpriding.

Ruben came forward a careful step at a time, holding the long lance between two claws now. He made the end move in a circle. Movement was jerky; claws were crude, compared with chimp hands. But the raboon was stronger.

It came at him with a quick feint, then a thrust. Leon barely managed to dodge sideways while he brushed the lance aside with his stick. Ruben recovered quickly and came from Leon’s left. Jab, feint, jab, feint. Leon caught each with a swoop of his stick.

Their wooden swords smacked against each other and Leon hoped his didn’t snap. Ruben had good control of his raboon. It did not try to flee as it had before.

Leon was kept busy slapping aside Ruben’s thrusts. He had to have some other advantage or the superior strength of the raboon would eventually tell. Leon circled, drawing Ruben away from Sheelah. The other raboons were keeping her trapped, but not attacking. All attention riveted on the two figures as they poked and parried.

Leon drew Ruben toward an outcropping. The raboon was having trouble holding its lance straight and had to keep looking down at its claws to get them right. This meant it paid less attention to where its two hooves found their footing. Leon slapped and jabbed and kept moving, making the raboon step sideways. It put a big hoof down among some angular stones, teetered, then recovered.

Leon moved left. It stepped again and its hoof turned and it stumbled. Leon was on it in an instant. He thrust forward as the raboon looked down, feet scrambling for purchase. Leon caught the raboon full with his point.

He pushed hard. The other raboons let out a moaning.

Snorting in rage, the raboon tried to get off the point. Leon made Ipan step forward and thrust the tip into the raboon. The thing wailed hoarsely. Ipan plunged again. Blood spurted from it, spattering the dust. Its knees buckled and it sprawled.

Leon shot a glance over his shoulder. The others had surged into action. Sheelah was holding off three, screeching at them so loudly it unnerved even him. She had already wounded one. Blood dripped down its brown coat.

But the others did not charge. They circled and growled and stamped their feet, but came no closer. They were confused. Learning too. He could see the quick, bright eyes studying the situation, this fresh move in the perpetual war.

Sheelah stepped out and poked the nearest raboon. It launched itself at her in a snarling fit and she stuck it again, deeper. It yelped and turned—and ran.

That did it for the others. They all trotted off, leaving their fellow bleating on the ground. Its dazed eyes watched its blood trickle out. Its eyes flickered and Ruben was gone. The animal slumped.

With deliberation Leon picked up a rock and bashed in the skull. It was messy work and he sat back inside Ipan and let the dark, smoldering chimp anger come out.

He bent over and studied the raboon brain. A fine silvery webbing capped the rubbery, convoluted ball. Immersion circuitry.

He turned away from the sight and only then saw that Sheelah was hurt.

THE STATION CROWNED A RUGGED HILL. STEEP GULLIES HAVE the hillside the look of a weary, lined face. Wiry bushes thronged the lower reaches.

Ipan puffed as he worked his way through the raw land cut by erosion. In chimp vision the night was eerie, a shimmering vista of pale greens and blue-tinged shadows. The hill was a nuance in the greater slope of a grand mountain, but chimp vision could not make out the distant features. Chimps lived in a close, immediate world.

Ahead he could see clearly the glowing blank wall ringing the Station. Massive, five meters tall. And, he remembered from his tourist tour of the place, rimmed with broken glass.

Behind him came gasps as Sheelah labored up the slope. The wound in her side made her gait stiff, face rigid. She refused to hide below. They were both near exhaustion and their chimps were balky, despite two stops for fruit and grubs and rest.

Through their feeble vocabulary, their facial grimacing and writing in the dust, they had “discussed” the possibilities. Two chimps were vulnerable out here. They could not expect to be as lucky as with the raboons, not tired out and in strange territory.

The best time to approach the Station was at night. And whoever had engineered this would not wait forever. They had hidden from fliers twice more this last day. Resting through the next day was an inviting option, but Leon felt a foreboding press him onward.

He angled up the hillside, watching for electronic trip wires. Of such technical matters he knew nothing. He would have to keep a lookout for the obvious and hope that the Station was not wired for thinking trespassers. Chimp vision was sharp and clear in dim light for nearby objects, but he could find nothing.

He chose a spot by the wall shadowed by trees. Sheelah panted in shallow gasps as she approached. Looking up, the wall seemed immense. Impossible. . . .

Slowly he surveyed the land around them. No sign of any movement. The place smelled peculiar to Ipan, somehow wrong. Maybe animals stayed away from the alien compound. Good; that would make security inside less alert.

The wall was polished concrete. A thick lip jutted out at the top, making climbing it harder.

Sheelah gestured where trees grew near the wall. Stumps nearer showed that the builders had thought about animals leaping across from branches. But some were tall enough and had branches within a few meters of the top.

Could a chimp make the distance? Not likely, especially when tired. Sheelah pointed to him and back to her, then held hands and made a swinging motion. Could they swing across the distance?

He studied her face. The designer would not anticipate two chimps cooperating that way. He squinted up at the top. Too high to climb, even if Sheelah stood on his shoulders.

Yes, he signed.

A few moments later, her hands holding his feet, about to let go of his branch, he had second thoughts.

Ipan didn’t mind this bit of calisthenics, and in fact was happy to be back in a tree. But Leon’s human judgment still kept shouting that he could not possibly do it. Natural chimp talent conflicted with human caution.

Luckily, he did not have much time to indulge in self-doubt. Sheelah yanked him off the branch. He fell, held only through her hands.

She had wrapped her feet securely around a thick branch, and now began to oscillate him like a weight on a string. She swung him back and forth, increasing the amplitude. Back, forth, up, down, centrifugal pressure in his head. To Ipan it was unremarkable. To Leon it was a wheeling world of heart-stopping whirls.

Small branches brushed him and he worried about noise and then forgot about that because his head was coming up level with the top of the wall.

The concrete lip was rounded off on the inside, so no hook could find a grip.

He swung back down, head plunging toward ground. Then up into the lower branches, twigs slapping his face.

On the next swing he was higher. All along the top of the wall thick glass glinted. Very professional.

He barely had time to realize all this when she let him go.

He arced up, hands stretched out—and barely caught the lip. If it had not protectively protruded out, he would have missed.

He let his body slam against the side. His feet scrabbled for purchase against the sheer face. A few toes got hold. He heaved up, muscles bunching—and over. Never before had he appreciated how much stronger a chimp could be. No man could have made it here.

He scrambled up, cutting his arm and haunch on glass. It was a delicate business, getting to his feet and finding a place to stand.

A surge of triumph. He waved to Sheelah, invisible in the tree.

From here on it was up to him. He realized suddenly that they could have fashioned some sort of rope, tying together vines. Then he could lift her up here. Good idea, too late.

No point in delaying. The compound was partly visible through the trees, a few lights burning. Utterly silent. They had waited until the night was about half over, he had nothing but Ipan’s gut feelings to tell him when.

He looked down. Just beyond his toes razor wire gleamed, set into the concrete. Carefully he stepped between the shiny lines. There was room among the sharp glass teeth to stand. A tree blocked his vision and he could see little below him in the dim glow from the Station. At least that meant they couldn’t see him, either.

Should he jump? too high. The tree that hid him was close, but he could not see into it.

He stood and thought, but nothing came to him. Meanwhile Sheelah was behind him, alone, and he hated leaving her where dangers waited that he did not even know.

He was thinking like a man and forgetting that he had the capability of a chimp.

Go. He leaped. Twigs snapped and he plunged heavily in shadows. Branches stabbed his face. He saw a dark shape to his right and so curled his legs, rotated, hands out—and snagged a branch. His hands closed easily around it and he realized it was too thin, too thin—

It snapped. The crack came like a thunderbolt to his ears. He fell, letting go of the branch. His back hit something hard and he rolled, grappling for a hold. His fingers closed around a thick branch and he swung from it. Finally he let out a gasp.

Leaves rustled, branches swayed. Nothing more.

He was halfway up the tree. Aches sprouted in his joints, a galaxy of small pains.

Leon relaxed and let Ipan master the descent. He had made far too much noise falling in the tree but there was no sign of any movement across the broad lawns between him and the big, luminous Station.

He thought of Sheelah and wished there were some way he could let her know he was inside now. Thinking of her, he measured with his eye the distances from nearby trees, memorizing the pattern so that he could find the way back at a dead run if he had to.

Now what? He didn’t have a plan. That, and suspicions.

Leon gently urged Ipan—who was nervous and tired, barely controllable—into a triangular pattern of bushes. Ipan’s mind was like a stormy sky split by skittering lightning. Not thoughts precisely; more like knots of emotion, forming and flashing around crisp kernels of anxiety. Patiently Leon summoned up soothing images, getting Ipan’s breathing slowed, and he almost missed the whispery sound.

Nails scrabbling on a stone walkway. Something running fast.

They came around the triangle peak of bushes. Bunched muscles, sleek skin, stubby legs eating up the remaining distance. They were well trained to seek and kill soundlessly, without warning.

To Ipan the monsters were alien, terrifying. Ipan stepped back in panic before the two onrushing bullets of muscle and bone. Black gums peeled back from white teeth, bared beneath mad eyes.

Then Leon felt something shift in Ipan. Primeval, instinctive responses stopped his retreat, tensed the body. No time to flee, so fight.

Ipan set himself, balanced. The two might go for his arms so he drew them back, crouching to bring his face down.

Ipan had dealt with four-legged pack hunters before, somewhere far back in ancestral memory, and knew innately that they lined up on a victim’s outstretched limb, would go for the throat. The canines wanted to bowl him over, slash open the jugular, rip and shred in the vital seconds of surprise.

They gathered themselves, bundles of swift sinew, running nearly shoulder to shoulder, big heads up—and leaped.

In air, they were committed, Ipan knew. And open.

Ipan brought both hands up to grasp the canines’ forelegs.

He threw himself backward, holding the legs tight, his hands barely beneath the jaws. The wirehounds’ own momentum carried them over his head as he rolled backward.

Ipan rolled onto his back, yanking hard. The sudden snap slammed the canines forward. They could not get their heads turned around and down to close on his hand.

The leap, the catch, the quick pivot and swing, the heave—all combined in a centrifugal whirl that slung the wirehounds over Ipan as he himself went down, rolling. He felt the canines’ legs snap and let go. They sailed over him with pained yelps.

Ipan rolled over completely, head tucked in, and came off his shoulders with a bound. He heard a solid thud, clacks as jaws snapped shut. A thump as the canines hit the grass, broken legs unable to cushion them.

He scrambled after them, his breath whistling. They were trying to get up, turning on snapped legs to confront their quarry. Still no barks, only faint whimpers of pain, sullen growls. One swore vehemently and quite obscenely. The other chanted, “Baaas’ard . . . baaas’ard . . .”

Animals turning in their vast, sorrowful night.

He jumped high and came down on both. His feet drove their necks into the ground and he felt bone give way. Before he stepped back to look he knew they were gone.

Ipan’s blood surged with joy. Leon had never felt this tingling thrill, not even in the first immersion, when Ipan had killed a Stranger. Victory over these alien things with teeth and claws that come at you out of the night was a profound, inflaming pleasure.

Leon had done nothing. The victory was wholly Ipan’s.

For a long moment Leon basked in it in the cool night air, felt the tremors of ecstasy.

Slowly, reason returned. There were other wirehounds. Ipan had caught these just right. Such luck did not strike twice.

The wirehounds were easy to see on the lawn. Would attract attention.

Ipan did not like touching them. Their bowels had emptied and the smell cut the air. They left a smear on the grass as he dragged them into the bushes.

Time, time. Someone would miss the canines, come to see.

Ipan was still pumped up from his victory. Leon used that to get him trotting across the broad lawn, taking advantage of shadows. Energy popped in Ipan’s veins. Leon knew it was a mere momentary glandular joy, overlaying a deep fatigue. When it faded, Ipan would become dazed, hard to govern.

Every time he stopped he looked back and memorized landmarks. He might have to return this way on the run.

IT WAS LATE AND MOST OF THE STATION WAS DARK. IN THE TECHNIcal area, though, a cluster of windows blossomed with what Ipan saw as impossibly rich, strange, superheated light.

He loped over to them and flattened himself against the wall. It helped that Ipan was fascinated by this strange citadel of the godlike humans. Out of his own curiosity he peeked in a window. Under enamel light a big assembly room sprawled, one that Leon recognized. There, centuries ago, he had formed up with the other brightly dressed tourists to go out on a trek.

Leon let the chimp’s curiosity propel him around to the side, where he knew a door led into a long corridor. The door opened freely, to Leon’s surprise. Ipan strolled down the slick tiles of the hallway, quizzically studying the phosphor-paint designs on the ceiling and walls, which emitted a soothing ivory glow.

An office doorway was open. Leon made Ipan squat and bob his head around the edge. Nobody there. It was a sumptuous den with shelves soaring into a vaulted ceiling. Leon remembered sitting there discussing the immersion process. That meant the immersion vessels were just a few doors away down—

The squeak of shoes on tiles made him turn.

ExSpec Ruben was behind him, leveling a weapon. In the cool light the man’s face looked odd to Ipan’s eyes, mysteriously bony.

Leon felt the rush of reverence in Ipan and let it carry the chimp forward, chippering softly. Ipan felt awe, not fear.

Leon wondered why Ruben said nothing and then realized that of course he could not reply.

Ruben tensed up, waving the snout of his ugly weapon. A metallic click. Ipan brought his hands up in a ritual chimp greeting and Ruben shot him.

The impact spun Ipan around. He went down, sprawling.

Ruben’s mouth curled in derision. “Smart prof, huh? Didn’t figure the alarm on the door, huh?”

The pain from Ipan’s side was sharp, startling. Leon rode the hurt and gathering anger in Ipan, helping it build. Ipan felt his side and his hand came away sticky, smelling like warm iron in the chimp’s nostrils.

Ruben circled around, weapon weaving. “You killed me, you weak little dope. Ruined a good experimental animal too. Now I got to figure what to do with you.”

Leon threw his own anger atop Ipan’s seethe. He felt the big muscles in the shoulders bunch. The pain in the side jabbed suddenly. Ipan groaned and rolled on the floor, pressing one hand to the wound.

Leon kept the head down so that Ipan could not see the blood that was running down now across the legs. Energy was running out of the chimp body. A seeping weakness came up the legs.

He pricked his ears to the shuffle of Ruben’s feet. Another agonized roll, this time bringing the legs up in a curl.

“Guess there’s really only one solution—”

Leon heard the metallic click.

Now, yes. He let his anger spill.

Ipan pressed up with his forearms and got his feet under him. No time to get all the way up. Ipan sprang at Ruben, keeping low.

A tinny shot whisked by his head. Then he hit Ruben in the hip and slammed the man against the wall. The man’s scent was sour, salty.

Leon lost all control. Ipan bounced Ruben off the wall and instantly slammed arms into the man with full force.

Ruben tried to deflect the impact. Ipan pushed the puny human arms aside. Ruben’s pathetic attempts at defense were like spiderwebs brushed away.

He butted Ruben and pounded massive shoulders into the man’s chest. The weapon clattered on the tiles.

Ipan slammed himself into the man’s body again and again.

Strength, power, joy.

Bones snapped. Ruben’s head snapped back, smacked the wall, and he went limp.

Ipan stepped back and Ruben sagged to the tiles. Joy.

Blue-white flies buzzed at the rim of his vision.

Must move. That was all Leon could get through the curtain of emotions that shrouded the chimp mind.

The corridor lurched. Leon got Ipan to walk in a sidewise teeter.

Down the corridor, painful steps. Two doors, three. Here? Locked. Next door. World moving slower somehow.

The door snicked open. An antechamber that he recognized. Ipan blundered into a chair and almost fell. Leon made the lungs work hard. The gasping cleared his vision of the dark edges that had crept in but the blue-white flies were there, fluttering impatiently, and thicker.

He tried the far door. Locked. Leon summoned what he could from Ipan. Strength, power, joy. Ipan slammed his shoulder into the solid door. It held. Again. And again, sharp pain—and it popped open.

Right, this was it. The immersion bay. Ipan staggered into the array of vessels. The walk down the line, between banks of control panels, took an eternity. Leon concentrated on each step, placing each foot. Ipan’s field of view bobbed as the head seemed to slip around on the liquid shoulders.

Here. His own vessel.

He fumbled with the latches. Popped it open.

There lay Leon Mattick, peaceful, eyes closed.

Emergency controls, yes. He knew them from the briefing.

He searched the polished steel surface and found the panel on the side. Ipan stared woozily at the meaningless lettering and Leon himself had trouble reading. The letters jumped and fused together.

He found several buttons and servo controls. Ipan’s hands were stubby, wrong. It took three tries to get the reviving program activated. Lights cycled from green to amber.

Ipan abruptly sat down on the cool floor. The blue-white flies were buzzing all around his head now and they wanted to bite him. He sucked in the cool dry air but there was no substance in it, no help. . . .

Then, without any transition, he was looking at the ceiling. On his back. The lamps up there were getting dark, fading. Then they went out.

LEON’S EYES SNAPPED OPEN.

The recovery program was still sending electrostims through his muscles. He let them jump and tingle and ache while he thought. He felt fine. Not even hungry, as he usually did after an immersion. How long had he been in the wilderness? At least five days.

He sat up. There was no one in the vessel room. Evidently Ruben had gotten some silent alarm, but had not alerted anyone else. That pointed, again, to a tight little conspiracy.

He got out shakily. To get free he had to detach some feeders and probes but they seemed simple enough.

Ipan. The big body filled the walkway. He knelt and felt for a pulse. Rickety.

But first, Kelly. Her vessel was next to his and he started the revival. She looked well.

Ruben must have put some transmission block on the system, so that none of the staff could tell by looking at the panel that anything was wrong. A simple cover story, a couple who wanted a really long immersion. Ruben had warned them, but no, they wanted it so. . . . A perfectly plausible story.

Kelly’s eyes fluttered. He kissed her. She gasped.

He made a chimp sign, quiet, and went back to Ipan.

Blood came steadily. Leon was surprised to find that he could not pick up the rich, pungent elements in the blood from smell alone. A human missed so much!

He took off his shirt and made a crude tourniquet. At least Ipan’s breathing was regular. Kelly was ready to get out by then and he helped her disconnect.

“I was hiding in a tree and then—poof!” she said. “What a relief. How did you—”

“Let’s get moving,” he said.

As they left the room she said, “Who can we trust? Whoever did this—” She stopped when she saw Ruben. “Oh.”

Somehow her expression made him laugh. She was very rarely surprised.

“You did this?”

“Ipan.”

“I never would have believed a chimp could, could . . .”

“I doubt anyone’s been immersed this long. Not under such stress, anyway. It all just, well, it came out.”

He picked up Ruben’s weapon and studied the mechanism. A standard pistol, silenced. Ruben had not wanted to awaken the rest of the Station. That was promising. There should be people here who would spring to their aid. He started toward the building where the Station personnel lived.

“Wait, what about Ruben?”

“I’m going to wake up a doctor.”

They did—but Leon took him into the vessel room first, to work on Ipan. Some patchwork and injections and the doctor said Ipan would be all right. Only then did he show the man Ruben’s body.

The doctor got angry about that, but Leon had a gun. All he had to do was point it. He didn’t say anything, just gestured with the gun. He did not feel like talking and wondered if he ever would again. When you couldn’t talk you concentrated more, entered into things. Immersed.

And in any case, Ruben had been dead for some time.

Ipan had done a good job. The doctor shook his head at the severe damage.

Kelly looked at him oddly throughout the whole time. He did not understand why, until he realized that he had not even thought about helping Ruben first. Ipan was himself, in a sense he could not explain.

But he understood immediately when Kelly wanted to go to the Station wall and call to Sheelah. They brought her, too, in from the wild darkness.

A YEAR LATER, WHEN THE INDUStrial conspiracy had been uncovered and dozens brought to trial, they returned to the Excursion Station.

Leon longed to lounge in the sun, after a year of facing news cameras and attorneys. Kelly was equally exhausted with the rub of events.

But they both immediately booked time in the immersion chambers and spent long hours there. Ipan and Sheelah seemed to greet their return with something approximating joy.

Each year they would return and live inside the minds. Each year they would come away calmer, somehow fuller.

Leon’s analysis of sociohistory appeared in a ground-breaking series of papers, modeling all of civilization as a “complex adaptive system.” Fundamental to the intricately structured equations were terms allowing for primordial motivations, for group behavior in tension with individual longings, for deep motivations kindled in the veldt, over a thousand millennia ago. This was exact, complex, and original; his papers resounded through the social sciences, which had finally been made quantitative.

Fifteen years later the work received a Nobel prize, then worth 2.3 million New Dollars. Leon and Kelly spent a lot of it on travel, particularly to Africa.

When questioned in interviews, he never spoke of the long trek he and Kelly had undergone. Still, in his technical papers and public forums, he did give chimpanzees as examples of complex, adaptive behavior. As he spoke, he gave a long, slow smile, eyes glittering enigmatically, but would discuss the subject no further.

TIME TRAVELERS NEVER DIE

Jack McDevitt

The author retired in June 1995 after twenty years with the Customs Service—the last eight of which were spent as a motivational trainer—and immediately began writing full time. He says that he is absolutely delighted with the change of pace. Mr. McDevitt’s most recent novel, Ancient Shores, is just out from HarperPrism, and he is well into the next, Eternity Road. His latest story for Asimov’s placed second in the 1994 UPC International Contest for Best Novella. It will also be featured in his short story collection, Standard Candles, due out from Tachyon Publications later this spring.

Thursday, November 24. Shortly before noon.

We buried him on a cold, gray morning, threatening snow. The mourners were few, easily constraining their grief for a man who had traditionally kept his acquaintances at a distance. I watched the preacher, white-haired, feeble, himself near the end, and I wondered what he was thinking as the wind rattled the pages of his prayer book.

Ashes to ashes—

I stood with hands thrust into my coat pockets, near tears. Look: I’m not ashamed to admit it. Shel was odd, vindictive, unpredictable, selfish. He didn’t have a lot of friends. Didn’t deserve a lot of friends. But I loved him. I’ve never known anyone like him.

—I’m sure and certain hope—

I wasn’t all that confident about the resurrection, but I knew that Adrian Shelborne would indeed walk the earth again. Even if only briefly. I knew, for example, that he and I would stand on an Arizona hilltop on a fresh spring morning late in the twenty-first century, and watch silver vehicles rise into the sky on the first leg of the voyage to Centaurus. And we would be present at the assassination of Elaine Culpepper, a name unknown now, but which would in time be inextricably linked with the collapse of the North American Republic. Time travelers never really die, he was fond of saying. We’ve been too far downstream. You and I will live for a very long time.

The preacher finished, closed his book, and raised his hand to bless the polished orchid-colored coffin. The wind blew, and the air was heavy with the approaching storm. The mourners, anxious to be away, bent their heads and walked past, laying lilies on the coffin. When it was done, they lingered briefly, murmuring to each other. Helen Suchenko stood off to one side, looking lost. Lover with no formal standing. Known to the family but not particularly liked, mostly because they disapproved of Shel himself. She dabbed jerkily at her eyes and kept her gaze riveted on the gray stone which carried his name and dates.

She was fair-haired, with eyes the color of seawater, and a quiet, introspective manner that might easily have misled those who did not know her well.

“I can’t believe it,” she said.

I had introduced him to Helen, fool that I am. She and I had been members of the Devil’s Disciples, a group of George Bernard Shaw devotees. She was an MD, just out of medical school when she first showed up for a field trip to see Arms and the Man. It was love at first sight, but I was slow to show my feelings. And while I was debating how best to make my approach, Shel walked off with her. He even asked whether I was interested, and I, sensing I had already lost, salvaged my pride and told him of course not. After that it was over.

He never knew. He used to talk about her a lot when we were upstream. How he was going to share the great secret with her, and take her to Victorian London. Or St. Petersburg before the first war. But it never happened. It was always something he was going to do later.

She was trembling. He really was gone. And I now had a clear field with her. That indecent thought kept surfacing. I was reasonably sure she had always been drawn to me, too, just as she was to Shel, and I suspected that I might have carried the day with her had I pressed my case. But honor was mixed up in it somewhere, and I’d kept my distance.

Her cheeks were wet.

“I’ll miss him, too,” I said.

“I loved him, Dave.”

“I know.”

He had died when his townhouse burned down almost two weeks before. He’d been asleep upstairs and had never got out of bed. The explanation seemed to be that the fire had sucked the oxygen out of the house and suffocated him before he ever realized what was happening. Okay, I didn’t believe it either, but that was what we were hearing.

“It’ll be all right,” I said.

She tried to laugh, but the sound had an edge to it. “Our last conversation was so goofy. I wish I’d known—” Tears leaked out of her eyes. She stopped, tried to catch her breath. “I would have liked,” she said, when she’d regained a degree of control, “to have been able to say goodbye.”

“I know.” I began to guide her toward my Porsche. “Why don’t you let me take you home?”

“Thank you,” she said, backing off. “I’ll be okay.” Her car was parked near a stone angel.

Edmond Halverson, head of the art department at the university, drew abreast of us, nodded to me, tipped his hat to her, and whispered his regrets. We mumbled something back and he walked on.

She swallowed, and smiled. “When you get a chance, Dave, give me a call.”

I watched her get into her car and drive away. She had known so much about Adrian Shelborne. And so little.

He had traveled in time, and of all persons now alive, only I knew. He had brought me in, he’d said, because he needed my language skills. But I believe it was more than that. He wanted someone to share the victory with, someone to help him celebrate. Over the years, he’d mastered classical Greek, and Castilian, and Renaissance Italian. And he’d gone on, acquiring enough Latin, Russian, French, and German to get by on his own. But we continued to travel together. And it became the hardest thing in my life to refrain from telling people I had once talked aerodynamics with Leonardo.

I watched his brother Jerry duck his head to get into his limo. Interested only in sports and women, Shel had said of him. And making money. If I’d told him about the Watch, he’d said, and offered to take him along, he’d have asked to see a Super Bowl.

Shel had discovered the principles of time travel while looking into quantum gravity. He’d explained any number of times how the Watches worked, but I never understood any of it. Not then, and not now. “But why all the secrecy?” I’d asked him. “Why not take credit? It’s the discovery of the ages.” We’d laughed at the new shade of meaning to the old phrase.

“Because it’s dangerous,” he’d said, peering over the top of his glasses, not at me, but at something in the distance. “Time travel should not be possible in a rational universe.” He’d shaken his head, and his unruly black hair had fallen into his eyes. He was only thirty-eight at the time of his funeral. “I saw from the first why it was theoretically possible,” he’d said. “But I thought I was missing something, some detail that would intervene to prevent the actual construction of a device. And yet there it is.” And he’d glanced down at the Watch strapped to his left wrist. He worried about Causality, the simple flow of cause and effect. “A time machine breaks it all down,” he said. “It makes me wonder what kind of universe we live in.”

I thought we should forget the philosophy and tell the world. Let other people worry about the details. When I pressed him, he’d talked about teams from the Mossad going back to drag Hitler out of 1935, or Middle Eastern terrorists hunting down Thomas Jefferson. “It leads to utter chaos,” he’d said. “Either time travel should be prohibited, like exceeding the speed of light, or the intelligence to achieve it should be prohibited.”

We used to retreat sometimes to a tower on a rocky reef somewhere downstream. No one lives there, and there is only ocean in all directions. I don’t know how he found it, or who built it, or what that world is like. Nor do I believe he did. We enjoyed the mystery of the place. The moon is bigger, and the tides are loud. We’d hauled a generator out there, and a refrigerator, and a lot of furniture. We used to sit in front of a wall-length transparent panel, sipping beer, watching the ocean, and talking about God, history, and women.

They were good days.

Eventually, he had said, I will bring Helen here.

The wind blew, the mourners dwindled and were gone, and the coffin waited on broad straps for the workmen who would lower it into the ground.

Damn. I would miss him.

Gone now. He and his Watches. And temporal logic apparently none the worse.

Oh, I still had a working unit in my desk, but I knew I would not use it again. I did not have his passion for time travel. Leave well enough alone. That’s always been my motto.

On the way home, I turned on the radio. It was an ordinary day. Peace talks were breaking down in Africa. Another congressman was accused of diverting campaign funds. Assaults against spouses were still rising. And in Los Angeles there was a curious conclusion to an expressway pileup: two people, a man and a woman, had broken into a wrecked vehicle and kidnapped the driver, who was believed to be either dead or seriously injured. They had apparently run off with him.

Only in California.

Shel had been compulsively secretive. Not only about time travel, but about everything. The mask was always up and you never really knew what he was feeling. He used to drive Helen crazy when we went out to dinner because she had to wait until the server arrived to find out what he was going to order. When he was at the university, his department could never get a detailed syllabus out of him. And I was present when his own accountant complained that he was holding back information.

He used to be fond of saying knowledge is power, and I think that was what made him feel successful, that he knew things other people didn’t. Something must have happened to him when he was a kid to leave him so in need of artificial support. It was probably the same characteristic that had turned him into the all-time great camp follower. I don’t know what the proper use for a time machine should be. We used it to make money. But mostly we used it to argue theology with Thomas Aquinas, to talk with Isaac Newton about gravity, to watch Thomas Huxley take on Bishop Wilberforce. For us, it had been almost an entertainment medium. It seemed to me that we should have done more with it.

Don’t ask me what. Maybe track down Michelangelo’s lost statue of Hermes. Shel had shown interest in the project, and we had even stopped by his workshop to admire the piece shortly before its completion. The artist was about twenty years old at the time. And the Hermes was magnificent. I would have killed to own it.

Actually, I had all kinds of souvenirs: coins that a young Julius Caesar had lost to Shel over draughts, a program from the opening night of The Barber of Seville, a quill once used by Benjamin Franklin. And photos. We had whole albums full of Alexander and Marcus Aurelius and the sails of the Santa Maria coming over the horizon. But they all looked like scenes from old movies. Except that the actors didn’t look as good as you’d expect. When I pressed Shel for a point to all the activity, he said, what more could there be than an evening before the fire with Al Einstein? (We had got to a fairly intimate relationship with him, during the days when he was still working for the Swiss patent office.)

There were times when I knew he wanted to tell Helen what we were doing, and bring her along. But some tripwire always brought him up short, and he’d turn to me with that maddeningly innocuous smile as if to say, you and I have a secret and we had best keep it that way for now. Helen caught it, knew there was something going on. But she was too smart to try to break it open.

We went out fairly regularly, the three of us, and my true love of the month, whoever that might be. My date was seldom the same twice because she always figured out that Helen had me locked up. Helen knew that too, of course. But Shel didn’t. I don’t think it ever occurred to him that his old friend would have considered for a moment moving in on the woman he professed (although not too loudly) to love. There were moments when we’d be left alone at the table, Helen and I, usually while Shel was dancing with my date. And the air would grow thick with tension. Neither of us ever said anything directly, but sometimes our gaze touched, and her eyes grew very big and she’d get a kind of forlorn look.

Helen was a frustrated actress who still enjoyed the theater. After about a year, she abandoned the Devil’s Disciples, explaining that she simply did not have time for it anymore. But Shel understood her passion and indulged it where he could. Whenever there was a revival, we all went. Inevitably, while we watched Shaw’s trapped characters careen toward their destinies, Shel would find an opportunity to tell me he was going to take her back to meet the great playwright.

I used to promise myself to stop socializing with her, to find an excuse, because it hurt so much to sit in the awful glare of her passion for him. But if I had done that, I wouldn’t have seen her at all. At night, when the evening was over and we were breaking up, she always kissed me, sometimes lightly on the cheek, sometimes a quick hit-and-run full on the lips. And once or twice, when she’d drunk a little too much and her control had slipped, she’d put some serious effort into it.

2.

Thursday, November 24. Noon.

The storm picked up while I drove home, reminiscing, feeling sorry for myself. I already missed his voice, his sardonic view of the world, his amused cynicism. Together, we had seen power misused and abused all through the centuries, up close, sometimes with calculation, more often out of ignorance. Our shared experiences, certainly unique in the history of the planet, had forged a bond between us. The dissolution of that bond, I knew, was going to be a long, painful process.

He’d done all the research in his basement laboratory, had built the first working model of his Temporal Occluding Transport System (which, in a flash back to his bureaucratic days with the National Science Foundation, he called TOTS) in a space between his furnace and a wall filled with filing cabinets. The prototype had been a big, near-room-sized chamber. But the bulk of the device had dwindled as its capabilities increased. Eventually, it had shrunk to the size of a watch. It was powered by a cell clipped to the belt or carried in a pocket. I still had one of the power packs at the house.

I would have to decide what to do with our wardrobe. It was located in a second floor bedroom that had served as an anteroom to the ages. A big walk-in closet overflowed with costumes, and shelves were jammed with books on culture and language for every period that we’d visited, or intended to visit.

But if my time-traveling days were over, I had made enough money from the enterprise that I would never have to work again—if I chose not to. The money had come from having access to next week’s newspapers. We’d debated the morality of taking personal advantage of our capabilities, but I don’t think the issue was ever in doubt. We won a small fortune at various race tracks, and continued to prosper until two gentlemen dropped by Shel’s place one afternoon and told him that they were not sure what was behind his winning streak, but that if it continued, they would break his knees. They must have known enough about us to understand it wouldn’t be necessary to repeat the message to me.

We considered switching into commodities. But neither of us understood much about them, so we took our next plunge in the stock market. “It’s got to be illegal,” said Shel. And I’d laughed. “How could it be?” I asked him. “There are no laws against time travel.”

“Insider trading,” he suggested.

Whatever. We justified our actions because gold was the commodity of choice upstream. It was research money, and we told each other it was for the good of mankind, although neither of us could quite explain how that was so. Gold was the one item that opened all doors, no matter what age you were in, no matter what road you traveled. If I learned anything during my years as Shel’s interpreter and faithful Indian companion, it was that people will do anything for gold.

While I took a vaguely smug view of human greed, I put enough aside to buy a small estate in Exeter, and retired from the classroom to a life of books and contemplation. And travel through the dimensions.

Now that it was over, I expected to find it increasingly difficult to keep the secret. I had learned too much. I wanted to tell people what I’d done. Who I’d talked to. So we were sitting over doughnuts and coffee on St. Helena, and I said to Napoleon—

There was a thin layer of snow on the ground when I got home. Ray White, a retired tennis player who lives alone on the other side of Carmichael Drive, was out walking. He waved me down to tell me how sorry he was to hear about Shel’s death. I thanked him and pulled into the driveway. A black car that I didn’t recognize was parked in front of the house. Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting inside. They opened their doors and got out as I drifted to a stop. I turned off the engine without putting the car away.

The woman was taller, and more substantial, than the man. She held out a set of credentials. “Dr. Dryden?” she said. “I’m Sgt. Lake, Carroll County Police.” She smiled, an expressionless mechanical gesture lacking any warmth. “This is Sgt. Howard. Could we have a few minutes of your time?”

Her voice was low key. She would have been attractive had she been a trifle less official. She was in her late thirties, with cold dark eyes and a cynical expression that looked considerably older than she was.

“Sure,” I said, wondering what it was about.

Sgt. Howard made no secret of the fact that he was bored. His eyes glided over me, and he dismissed me as a lowlife whose only conceivable interest to him might lie in my criminal past.

We stepped up onto the deck and went in through the sliding glass panels. Lake sat down on the sofa, while Howard undid a lumpy gray scarf, and took to wandering around the room, inspecting books, prints, stereo, whatever. I offered coffee.

“No, thanks,” said Lake. Howard just looked as if I hadn’t meant him. Lake crossed her legs. “I wanted first to offer my condolences on the death of Dr. Shelborne. I understand he was a close friend of yours?”

“That’s correct,” I said. “We’ve known each other for a long time.”

She nodded, produced a leather-bound notebook, opened it, and wrote something down. “Did you have a professional relationship?” she asked.

“No,” I said slowly. “We were just friends.”

“I understand.” She paused. “Dr. Dryden,” she said, “I’m sorry to tell you this: Dr. Shelborne was murdered.”

My first reaction was simply to disbelieve the statement. “You’re not serious,” I said.

“I never joke, Doctor. We believe someone attacked the victim in bed, struck him hard enough to fracture his skull, and set fire to the house.”

Behind me, the floor creaked. Howard was moving around. “I don’t believe it,” I said.

Her eyes never left me. “The fire happened between 2:15 and 2:30 A.M., on the twelfth. Friday night, Saturday morning. I wonder if you’d mind telling me where you were at that time?”

“At home in bed,” I said. There had been rumors that the fire was deliberately set, but I hadn’t taken any of it seriously. “Asleep,” I added unnecessarily. “I thought lightning hit the place?”

“No. There’s really no question that it was arson.”

“Hard to believe,” I said.

“Why?”

“Nobody would want to kill Shel. He had no enemies. At least, none that I know of.”

I was beginning to feel guilty. Authority figures always make me feel guilty. “You can’t think of anyone who’d want him dead?”

“No,” I said. But he had a lot of money. And there were relatives.

She looked down at her notebook. “Do you know if he kept any jewelry in the house?”

“No. He didn’t wear jewelry. As far as I know, there was nothing like that around.”

“How about cash?”

“I don’t know.” I started thinking about the gold coins that we always took with us when we went upstream. A stack of them had been locked in a desk drawer. (I had some of them upstairs in the wardrobe.) Could anyone have known about them? I considered mentioning them, but decided it would be prudent to keep quiet, since I couldn’t explain how they were used. And it would make no sense that I knew about a lot of gold coins in his desk and had never asked about them. “Do you think it was burglars?” I said.

Her eyes wandered to one of the bookcases. It was filled with biographies and histories of the Renaissance. My favorite period. The eyes were black pools that seemed to be waiting for something to happen. “That’s possible, I suppose.” She canted her head to read a title. It was Ledesma’s biography of Cervantes, in the original Spanish. “Although burglars don’t usually burn the house down.” Howard had got tired poking around, so he circled back and lowered himself into a chair. “Dr. Dryden,” she continued, “is there anyone who can substantiate the fact that you were here asleep on the morning of the twelfth?”

“No,” I said. “I was alone.” The question surprised me. “You don’t think I did it, do you?”

“We don’t really think anybody did it, yet.”

Howard caught her attention and directed it toward the wall. There was a photograph of the three of us, Shel and Helen and me, gathered around a table at the Beach Club. A mustard-colored umbrella shielded the table, and we were laughing and holding tall, cool drinks. She studied it, and turned back to me. “What exactly,” she said, “is your relationship with Dr. Suchenko?”

I swallowed, and felt the color draining out of my face. I love her. I’ve loved her from the moment I met her. “We’re friends,” I said.

“Is that all?” I caught a hint of a smile. But nobody knew. I had kept my distance all this time. I’d told no one. Even Helen didn’t know. Well, she knew, but neither of us had ever admitted to it.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s all.”

She glanced around the room. “Nice house.”

It was. I had treated myself pretty well, installing leather furniture and thick pile carpets and a stow-away bar and some original art. “Not bad for a teacher,” she added.

“I don’t teach anymore.”

She closed her book. “So I understand.”

I knew what was in her mind. “I did pretty well on the stock market,” I said. I must have sounded defensive.

“As did Dr. Shelborne.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s so.”

“Same investments?”

Yes, they were the same. With only slight variations, we’d parlayed the same companies into our respective fortunes. “By and large, yes,” I said. “We did our research together. An investment club, you might say.”

Her eyes lingered on me a moment too long. She began to button her jacket. “Well, I think that’ll do it, Dr. Dryden,” she said.

I was still numb with the idea that someone might have murdered Shelborne. He had never flaunted his money, had never even moved out of that jerkwater townhouse over in River Park. But someone had found out. And they’d robbed him. Possibly he’d come home and they were already in the house. He might even have been upstream. Damn, what a jolt that would have been: return from an evening in Babylon and get attacked by burglars.

I opened the sliding door for them. “You will be in the area if we need you?” Lake asked. I assured her I would be, and that I would do whatever I could to help find Shel’s killer. I watched them drive away and went back inside and locked the door. It had been painful enough believing that Shel had died through some arbitrary act of nature. But that a thug who had nothing whatever to contribute to the species would dare to take his life filled me with rage.

I poured a brandy and stared out the window. The snow was coming harder now. I couldn’t believe anyone would think for a moment that I could be capable of such an act. It chilled me.

In back somewhere, something moved. It might have been a branch scraping against the side of the house, but it sounded inside.

Snow fell steadily against the windows.

It came again. A floor board, maybe. Not much more than a whisper.

I took down a golf club, went out into the hallway, looked up the staircase and along the upper level. Glanced toward the kitchen.

Wood creaked.

Upstairs.

I started up, ascending as quietly as I could, and got about halfway when a movement at the door to the middle bedroom caught my attention. The wardrobe.

One of the curious phenomena associated with sudden and unexpected death is our inability to accept it when it strikes those close to us. We always imagine that the person we’ve lost is in the kitchen, or in the next room, and that it requires only that we call his name in the customary way to have him reappear in the customary place. I felt that way about Shel. We had lunched with Cervantes and ridden with Washington and lived a thousand other miracles. And when it was over, we always came back through the wardrobe and out onto the landing.

He came out now.

Shel stood up there, watching me.

I froze.

“Hello, Dave,” he said.

I hung on to the banister, and the stairs felt slippery. “Shel,” I said shakily, “is that you?”

He smiled. The old, crooked grin that I had thought not to see again. Some part of me that was too slow-witted to get flustered started flicking through explanations. Someone else had died in the fire. It was a dream. Shel had a twin.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s me. Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry. I know this must be a shock.” He moved toward me, along the top of the landing. I’m not sure what I was feeling. There was a rush of emotions, of joy, of anger, even of fear. He came down a few stairs, took my shoulders, and steadied me. His hands were solid, his smile very real, and my heart sank. Helen’s image rose before me.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Adrian Shelborne was tall and graceful, blessed with the clean-cut features of a romantic hero. His eyes were bright and sad. We slid down into sitting positions. “It’s been a strange morning,” he said.

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

He took a deep breath. “I know. I do believe I am, David.”

Suddenly it was clear. “You’re downstream?’

“Yes,” he said. “I’m downstream.” He drew his legs up in a gesture that looked defensive. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’ve spent two weeks trying to get used to this. That you were gone—”

“It’s true.” He spaced the words, not able to accept it himself.

“When you go back—”

“—The house will burn, and I will be in it.”

For a long time neither of us spoke. “Don’t do it,” I said at last. “Stay here.”

“I can’t stay here,” he said. “What does that do to the time stream?”

Damn the time stream. I was thinking how candlelight filled Helen’s eyes, how she and Shel had walked to the car together at the end of an evening, the press of her lips still vibrant against my cheek.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

“Of course I am. They just buried me, Dave. They found me in my bed. Did you know I didn’t even get out of my bed?”

‘Yes,” I said. “I heard that.”

“I don’t believe it.” He was pale, and I noticed his eyes were red.

My first ride with him had been to Gettysburg to listen to Lincoln. Afterward, when I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that I had really been there, he talked about having dinner with Caesar and drinking with Voltaire.

He must have felt my company to be of value, because he invited me to go a second time. I’d wondered where we were headed, expecting historic significance, but we went only to 1978 New Haven. We were riding a large misshapen brown chamber then, a thing that looked like a hot water tank. “I want you to meet someone,” he said, as we emerged into streets filled with odd-looking cars. Her name was Martha, and she had been Shel’s fiancée. Six hours after our arrival she would fall asleep at the wheel of her Ford. And Shel’s life would change forever. “She and I had dinner last night at The Mug,” he told me while we waited for her to come out of the telephone company building where she worked. “I never saw her again.”

It was 5:00 P.M., and the first rush out the door was beginning.

“What are you going to do?” I’d asked.

He was in a state of extreme nervous agitation. “Talk to her.”

I laughed. “Are you serious? What are you going to tell her?”

“I’ll be careful,” he said. Don’t want to create a paradox. “I just want to see her again.”

A light rain had begun. People started pouring out through the revolving doors. They looked up at the dark clouds, grimaced, and scattered to cars and buses, holding newspapers over their heads.

And then Martha came out.

I knew her immediately, because Shel stiffened and caught his breath. She paused to exchange a few words with another young woman. The rain intensified.

She was twenty years old and full of vitality and good humor. There was something of the tomboy about her, just giving way to a lush golden beauty. Her hair was shoulder-length and swung easily with every move. (I thought I saw much of Helen in her, in her eyes, in the set of her mouth, in her animation.) She was standing back under the building overhang, protected from the storm. She waved goodbye to the friend, and prepared to run for her car. But her gaze fell on us, on Shel. Her brow furrowed and she looked at us uncertainly.

Shel took a step forward.

I discovered I was holding his arm. Holding him back. A gust of wind blew loose dust and paper through the air. “Don’t,” I said.

“I know.”

She shook her head as if she recognized a mistake, and hurried away. We watched her disappear around the corner out onto the parking lot.

We had talked about that incident many times, what might have happened had he intervened. We used to sit in the tower at the end of time, and he’d talk about feeling guilty because he had not prevented her death. “Maybe we can’t change anything. But I feel as if I should have tried.”

Now, starting carefully downstairs, he seemed frail. Disoriented. “They think you were murdered,” I said.

“I know. I heard the conversation.” In the living room he fell into an armchair.

My stomach was churning and I knew I wasn’t thinking clearly. “What happened? How did you find out about the funeral?”

He didn’t answer right away. “I was doing some research downstream,” he said finally, “in the Trenton Library. In the reference section. I was looking at biographies, so I could plan future flights. You know how I work.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And I did something I knew was a mistake. Knew it while I was doing it. But I went ahead anyhow.”

“You looked up your own biography.”

“I couldn’t help it.” He massaged his jaw. “It’s a terrible thing,” he said, “to have the story of your entire life lying at your elbow. Unopened. Dave, I walked away from it twice and came back both times.” He smiled weakly. “I will be remembered for my work in quantum transversals.”

“This is what comes of traveling alone.” I was irritated. “I told you we should never do that.”

“It’s done,” he said. “Listen, if I hadn’t looked, I’d be dead now.”

I broke out a bottle of burgundy, filled two glasses and we drank it off and I filled them again. “What are you going to do?”

He shook his head. “It’s waiting for me back there. I don’t know what to do.” His breathing was loud. Snow was piling up on the windows.

“The papers are predicting four inches,” I said.

He nodded, as if it mattered. “The biography also says I was murdered. It didn’t say by whom.”

“It must have been burglars.”

“At least,” he said, “I’m warned. Maybe I should take a gun back with me.”

“Maybe.”

“What happens if I change it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well.” He took a deep breath and tried to smile. “Anyway, I thought you’d want to know I’m okay.” He snickered at that. His own joke.

I kept thinking about Helen. “Don’t go back at all,” I said. “With or without a gun.”

“I’m not sure that’s an option.”

“It sure as hell is.”

“At some point,” he said, “for one reason or another, I went home.” He was staring at the burgundy. He hadn’t touched the second glass. “My God. Dave, I’m scared. I’ve never thought of myself as a coward, but I’m afraid to face this.”

I just sat.

“It’s knowing the way of it,” he said. “That’s what tears my heart out.”

I got up and looked at the storm.

“Stay here for now,” I said. “There’s no hurry.”

He shook his head. “I just don’t think the decision’s in my hands.” For a long time, neither of us spoke. Finally, he seemed to make up his mind. “I’ve got a few places to go. People to talk to. Then, when I’ve done what I need to do. I’ll think about all this.”

“Good.”

He picked up the glass, drained it, wiped his lips, and drifted back against the sofa. “Let me ask you something: are they sure it’s me?”

“I understand the body was burned beyond recognition,” I said.

“There’s something to think about. It could be anyone. And even if it is me, it might be a Schrodinger situation. As long as no one knows for certain. it might not matter.”

“The police probably know. I assume they checked your dental records.”

His brows drew together. “I suppose they do that sort of thing automatically. Do me a favor, though, and make sure they have a proper identification.” He got up, wandered around the room, touching things, the books, the bust of Churchill, the P.C. He paused in front of the picture from the Beach Club. “I keep thinking how much it means to be alive. You know, Dave, I saw people out there today I haven’t seen in years.”

The room became very still.

He played with his glass. It was an expensive piece, chiseled, and he peered at its facets.

“I think you need to tell her,” I said gently.

His expression clouded. “I know.” He drew the words out. “I’ll talk to her. When the time is right.”

“Be careful,” I said. “She isn’t going to expect to see you.”

3.

Friday, November 25. Mid-morning.

The critical question was whether we had in fact buried Adrian Shelborne, or whether there was a possibility of mistaken identity. We talked through the night. But neither of us knew anything about police procedure in such matters, so I said I would look into it.

I started with Jerry Shelborne, who could hardly have been less like his brother. There was a mild physical resemblance between the two, although Jerry had allowed the roast beef to pile up a little too much. He was a corporate lawyer who believed Shel had shuffled aimlessly through life, puttering away with notions that had no reality in the everyday world in which real people live. Even his brother’s sudden wealth had not changed his opinion.

“I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” he told me that morning. “He was a decent man, had a lot of talent, but he never really made his life count for anything.” Jerry sat behind a polished teak desk, guarded by an India rubber plant leaning toward a sun-filled window. The furniture was dark-stained, leather-padded, highly polished. Plaques covered the walls, appreciations from civic groups, awards from major corporations, various licenses and testaments. Photos of his two children were prominently displayed on the desk, a boy in a Little League uniform, a girl nuzzling a horse. His wife, who had left him years earlier, was missing.

“Actually,” I said, “I thought he did pretty well.”

“I don’t mean money,” he said. (I hadn’t been thinking of money.) “But it seems to me a man has an obligation to live in his community. To make a contribution to it.” He leaned back expansively and thrust a satisfied finger into a vest pocket. “ ‘To whom much is given,’ ” he said, “ ‘much shall be expected.’ ”

“I suppose,” I said. “Anyway, I wanted to extend my sympathy.”

“Thank you.” Jerry rose, signaling that the interview was over.

We walked slowly toward the paneled door. “You know,” I said, “this experience has a little bit of déjà vu about it.”

He squinted at me. He didn’t like me, and wasn’t going to be bothered concealing it. “How do you mean?” he asked.

“There was a language teacher at Princeton, where I got my doctorate. Same thing happened to him. He lived alone and one night a gas main let go and blew up the whole house. They buried him, and then found out it wasn’t him at all. He’d gone on an unannounced holiday to Vermont, and turned his place over to a friend. They didn’t realize until several days after the funeral when he came home. Unsettled everybody.”

Jerry shook his head, amused at the colossal stupidity loose in the world. “Unfortunately,” he said, “there’s not much chance of that here. They tell me the dental records were dead on.”

I probably shouldn’t have tried to see how Helen was doing, because my own emotions were still churning. But I called her from a drug store and she said yes, how about lunch? We met at an Applebee’s in the Garden Square Mall.

She looked worn out. Her eyes were bloodshot, and she showed a tendency to lose the thread of conversation. She and Shel had made no formal commitment, as far as I knew. But she had certainly believed they had a future together. Come what may. But Shel had been evasive. And there had been occasions when, discouraged that she got so little of his time, she’d opened up to me. I don’t know if anything else in my life had ever been quite as painful as sitting with her, listening to her describe her frustration, watching the occasional tear roll down her cheek. She trusted me, absolutely.

“Are you all right?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “How about you?”

The talk was full of regrets, things not said, acts undone. The subject of the police suspicions came up, and we found it hard to subscribe to the burglar theory. “What kind of intruder,” I asked, “kills a sleeping man, and then sets his house on fire?”

She was as soft and vulnerable that day as I’ve ever seen her. Ironically, by all the laws of nature, Shel was dead. Was I still bound to keep my distance? And the truth was that Shel did not even care enough to ease her suffering. I wondered how she would react if she knew Shel was probably sitting in my kitchen at that moment, making a submarine sandwich.

I wanted to tell her. There was a possibility that, when she did find out, she would hold it against me. I also wanted to keep Shel dead. That was hard to admit to myself, but it was true. I wanted nothing more than a clear channel with Helen Suchenko. But when I watched her bite down the pain, when the sobs began, when she excused herself with a shaky voice and hurried back to the ladies’ room, I could stand it no more. “Helen,” I said, “are you free this afternoon?”

She sighed. “I wanted to go into the office today, but people get nervous around weepy physicians. Yes, I’m more or less free. But I’m not in the mood to go anywhere.”

“Can I persuade you to come out to my place?”

She looked desperately fragile. “I don’t think so, Dave,” she said. “I need some time.”

A long silence fell between us. “Please,” I said. “It’s important.”

More snow was coming. I watched it through the windshield, thick gray clouds drifting toward us. Approaching cars had their headlights on.

Helen followed me in her small blue Ford. I watched her in the mirror, playing back all possible scenarios on how to handle this. Tell her first, I finally decided. Leave out the time travel stuff. Use the story I’d told Jerry as an example of how misunderstandings can occur. He’s not dead, Helen. She won’t believe it, of course. But that’s when I get him and bring him into the room. Best not to warn him. God knows how he would react. But get them together, present Shel with a fait accompli, and you will have done your self-sacrificial duty, Dave. You dumb bastard.

I pulled through blowing snow into my driveway, opened the garage, and went in. Helen rolled in beside me, and the doors closed. “Glad to be out of that,” she said, with a brave smile that implied she had decided we needed something new to talk about.

The garage opened directly into the kitchen. I stopped before going through the door and listened. There were no sounds on the other side. “Helen,” I said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

She pulled her coat around her. Her breath formed a mist. “We aren’t going to go into it out here, I hope, are we?”

“No,” I said, as if the notion were absurd, and opened the door. The kitchen was empty. I heard no sounds anywhere in the house.

“It’s about Shel,” I said.

She stepped past me and switched on the kitchen lights. “I know,” she said. “What else could it be?”

A white envelope lay on the table, with my name on it, printed in his precise hand. I snatched it up, and she looked at me curiously. “What is it?” she asked.

“Just a list of things to do.” I pushed it into my pocket. “How about some coffee?”

“Sure. Sounds good.”

“It’ll have to be instant,” I said, putting a pot of water on the stove.

“Do you always do that?” she asked.

“Do what?”

‘Write yourself notes?”

“It’s my to-do list. It’s the first thing I do every morning.”

She got two cups down and I excused myself, slipped out, and opened the envelope.

Dear Dave,

I don’t know how to write this. But I have to think about what’s happened, and figure out what I need to do. I don’t want to jump the gun if it’s not necessary. You understand.

I know this hasn’t been easy for you. But I’m glad you were there. Thanks.

Shel

P.S. I’ve left most of my estate to the Leukemia Foundation. That will generate a half-dozen lawsuits from my relatives. But if any of those vultures show signs of winning, I’ll come back personally and deal with them.

I read it a half-dozen times. Then I crumpled it, tossed it, and went back to the kitchen.

She was looking out the window at the falling snow. Usually, my grounds were alive with blue jays and squirrels. But the critters were all tucked away now. “It’s lovely,” she said unexpectedly. And then: “So what’s the surprise?”

Startled, I tried laughing to gain time. “Son of a gun,” I said. “I went out to get it and came back without it.” We strolled into the living room, where she sat down on the sofa. I hurried upstairs in search of an idea.

I think I mentioned that the wardrobe was also a small museum. There were items of inestimable value, but only if you knew their origin. We had scrolls from the library at Alexandria, a sextant designed and built by Leonardo, a silver bracelet that had once belonged to Calpumia, a signed folio of Hamlet, a pocket watch that Leo Tolstoy had carried while writing War and Peace. There were photos of Martin Luther and Albert Schweitzer and Attila the Hun and Charles XII of Sweden. All more or less worthless.

I couldn’t bear to give away Calpurnia’s bracelet to someone who would not understand its true value. I settled instead for a gold medallion I’d bought from a merchant in Thebes during the fifth century, B.C. It carried a handsomely wrought likeness of a serpent. The Apollonian priest who was with me insisted I had acquired a steal. At one time, he said, it had belonged to Aesculapius, the divine doctor, who had been so good he cured the dead. He backed up his view by trying to buy it from me, offering six times what I’d paid for it.

I carried it downstairs and gave it to Helen, telling her that Shel had wanted me to be sure she got it in the event anything happened to him. She glowed, and turned it over and over, unable to get enough of it. “It’s exquisite,” she said. And the tears came again.

If that thing had possessed any curative powers, I could have used them at that moment.

Snow filled the world. The stand of oaks bordering the approach to the house faded out. As did the stone wall along Carmichael Drive, and the hedges on the west side of the property. Gradually a heavy white curtain was drawn across the middle of the lawn. “I think we’re going to get a foot before this is over,” I told Helen.

She stood by the curtains, enjoying a glass of Chablis. I’d started the fire, and it cracked and pocked comfortably. We added Mozart, and I hoped the storm would continue.

“I think so too,” she said. A pair of headlights crept past, out beyond the stone wall. “I feel sorry for anybody out in this.”

I stood beside her, and we talked inconsequentials. She had recovered herself, and I began to realize that it was her proximity to me, with all the baggage I brought to any meeting, that had triggered the emotional display earlier. I was not happy that Shel was still in the field. But during that afternoon, I came to understand that even if Shel were safely in his grave, I might still be the embodiment of too many memories. The decent thing to do would be to fade out of her life, just as Carmichael Drive and the outer grounds were fading now. But I knew I could not bring myself to do that.

She talked about looking for a break in the weather so she could go home. But luck held and the break did not come. The snow piled up, and we stayed near the fire. I was alone at last with Helen Suchenko, and it was perhaps the most painful few hours of my life. Yet I would not have missed them, and I have replayed them countless times since, savoring every movement. Every word. I feel sorry for anybody out in this. I was out in it, and I believed I would never find shelter.

We watched the reports on the Weather Channel. It was a heavy system, moving down from Canada, low pressure and high pressure fronts colliding, eight inches predicted, which, on top of yesterday’s storm, was expected to shut down the entire east coast from Boston to Baltimore.

She talked a lot about Shel that day. Periodically, she’d shake her head as if she’d remembered something, and then dismiss it. And she’d veer off onto some other subject, a movie she’d seen, the latest political scandal, a medical advance that held hope for a breakthrough in this or that. There were a couple of patients she was worried about, and a few hypochondriacs whose Eves were centered on their imagined illnesses. I told her how much I missed teaching, which wasn’t entirely true, but it’s the sort of thing people expect you to say. What I really missed was a sense of purpose, a reason to exist. I had that upstairs, in notes detailing conversations with Rachmaninoff and Robert E. Lee and Oliver Cromwell and Aristotle and H. G. Wells. Those conversations would make the damnedest book the world had ever seen, reports by the principal actors on their ingenuity, their dreams, their follies. But it would never get written.

We lost the cable at four o’clock, and with it the Weather Channel.

Gradually, the light faded out of the sky. I put on steaks and Helen made up a salad. Our timing was perfect because the power failed just as we put everything on the table. I lit a couple of candles, and she sat in the flickering light and looked happy. If the clouds had not dissipated, at least for these few hours they had receded.

Afterward, we retreated into the living room. The music had been silenced by the power outage, so we sat listening to the fire and the whisper of snow against the house. Occasionally, I glanced up at the door to the wardrobe, half-expecting it to open. I tried to plan what I would do if Shel suddenly appeared on the landing. I was caught in the ultimate eternal triangle.

It did not happen. We talked into the early hours, until finally she gave out and fell asleep. I moved her to the sofa and went upstairs for blankets. The heating system, of course, was not working, nor was anything else in this all-electric house. The second floor was already cooling off, but I had plenty of firewood.

I settled into a large armchair and drifted into sleep. Somewhere around two, I woke and lay for a time, listening to the silence. The fire was low. I poked at it, and tossed on another log. Helen stirred but did not waken.

The storm must have passed over. Usually, even during the early morning hours, there are sounds: a passing car, the wind in the trees, a dog barking somewhere. But the world was absolutely still.

It was also absolutely dark. No stars. No lights of any kind.

I pointed a flashlight out the window. The night had closed in, wrapped itself around the house so tightly that the beam seemed to plunge into a black wall. I felt internal switches go to alert. It looked like an effect out of a Dracula film.

I picked up the phone to call the 24-hour weather line. But it was dead. “What is it, Dave?” Helen’s voice was soft in the dark.

“You awake?” I asked.

“Sort of.”

“Come take a look out the window.”

She padded over. And caught her breath. “Where’d that come from?”

“I don’t know.”

We went outside. It was the thickest, darkest fog I’d ever seen. We didn’t sleep well the rest of the night. At about six, Helen made toast over the fire, and I broke out some fruit juice. The lights were still off. More ominously, there was no sign of dawn.

I wondered about Ray White, my neighbor. Ray was a good guy, but he lived alone in a big house, and I thought of him over there wrapped in this goddamn black cloud with no power and maybe no food. He wasn’t young, and I thought it would be a good idea to go check on him.

“I’ll go with you,” Helen said.

I got an extra flashlight, and we let ourselves out through the sliding door. I locked up, and we poked around until we found the pathway that leads down to the front gate. The flashlights didn’t help much. There’s a hundred-year-old oak midway between the house and the stone wall. It’s only about ten feet off the walk, but we could not see it. I heard something stirring in its branches.

We picked our way to the front gate. I opened it, and we eased out onto the sidewalk. “The entrance to Ray’s house is across the street, about twenty yards down,” I said. “Stay close.”

We stepped off the curb. Her hand tightened in mine. “Be careful,” she said. “Somebody might be trying to drive.”

We started across, but the snow cover stopped right in the middle of the street. It was the damnedest thing. There was no snow at all on the other side. There wasn’t even blacktop. The surface had turned to rock. Where the hell was there rock on the other side of Carmichael Drive? A patch of grass, yes, and some concrete. But not rock.

Something in my voice scared her. “You sure you know where we are?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

The rock was black. It almost looked like marble.

We found no curb. No sidewalk. None of the trees that lined the far side of the street. No sign of the low wall that encloses Ray White’s sprawling grounds and executive mansion.

We found nothing.

I tried calling White’s name. But no one answered.

“Are you sure we came but the right way?” Helen asked.

4.

Saturday, November 26. Late morning.

I woke up in a room lit only by a low fire. “You okay?” Helen asked. Her voice was thin.

I looked at the clock on the mantel. It was almost noon.

She came over and sat down beside me. “I’ve never seen weather like this,” she said.

I got up, collected snow, and melted it to make water. (It’s amazing how much snow you have to melt to get a little water.) I went into the bathroom, and, with the help of a flashlight, brushed my teeth. I tried to draw the bathroom around me, as a kind of shield against what was happening outside the house. The shower. The medicine cabinet. A couple of bars of soap. It was familiar, my anchor to reality.

When I returned downstairs, Helen was putting the phone back in the cradle. She shook her head no. It was still out. We opened a can of meat, added some vegetables, and cooked them over the fire. No matter what happened, we were in no personal danger. That was good to know, but it did not ease my fears.

Helen said she wasn’t hungry, but she ate well anyhow. So did I.

It had to do with Shel. I knew that beyond any doubt. We were in the presence of the irrational. I wondered whether we had already done irreparable damage, whether the old world had already receded beyond recall. I was terrified.

When we’d finished eating, I went upstairs to the wardrobe. Shel would be easy to find.

He was standing where I knew he would be: on the slopes of Thermopolae watching the troops come in. He looked good. Tanned. Fit. Almost like a man on vacation. There were a few lines around the eyes, and I knew that, for him, several years had passed since the funeral.

“Shel,” I said. “We need you.”

“I know,” he said gently. Below us, the Thespians were examining the ground on which they would fight. Out on the plain, north of the pass, we could see the Persian army. They stretched to the horizon. “I will go back.”

“When?”

His eyes took on a hunted look. “When I’m ready. When I’m able. There’s no hurry, Dave. We both know that.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “Something’s wrong. We can’t even find the rest of New Jersey.”

“I’m trying to live my life,” he said. “Be patient with me. I have a lot to do vet. But don’t worry. You can count on me.”

“When?”

“We have all the time in the world. Relax.”

“Okay, Shel. Help me relax. If you’re going to take care of everything, tell me what’s causing the weather conditions back home? Why the power is out? Why I can’t find my way across the street?”

“I know about all that,” he said.

“And—?”

“Look. Maybe it has nothing to do with me.”

The Hellenic squadrons were still filing in, their bright mail dusty from the journey north.

“I doubt it,” I said.

He nodded. “As do I. But I’ve promised to go back. What more do you want?”

“Maybe you should do it now.”

He glanced up at a promontory about a hundred feet over our heads. “What is now to you and me, Dave? What does the word mean?” When I did not respond, he knelt down and broke off a blade of grass. “Would you be willing to throw yourself from the top of that rock?”

“That has nothing to do with the business between us,” I said.

“Not even if I pleaded with you to do so? If the world depended on it?”

I looked at him.

“What if it didn’t matter whether you did it today or tomorrow? Or next month? Or forty years from now?”

“We don’t have forty years.”

“I’m not asking for forty of your years. I’m asking for forty of mine. I’ll do it, Dave. God help me, I’ll do it. But on my own schedule. Not yours.”

I turned away from him, and he thought I was going to travel out. “Don’t,” he said. “Dave, try to understand. I’m scared of this.”

“I know,” I said.

“Good. I need you to know.”

We passed ourselves off as traveling law-givers. We moved among the Hellenic troops, wishing them well, assuring them that Hellas would never forget them. We first glimpsed Leonidas sitting with his captains around a campfire.

People accustomed to modern security precautions would be amazed at how easy it was to approach him. He accepted our good wishes and observed that, considering our physical size, we would both have made excellent soldiers had we chosen that line of work. In fact, both Shel and I towered over him.

He had dark eyes and was only in his thirties. He brimmed with confidence, as did his men. There was no sense here of a doomed force.

He knew about the road that circled behind the pass, and he had already dispatched troops to cover it. The Phocians, as I recalled. Who would run at the first onset.

He invited us to share a meal. This was the third day of the standoff, before any blood had yet been spilt. We talked with him about Sparta’s system of balancing the executive by crowning two kings. And whether democracy would really work in the long run. He thought not. “Athens cannot stay the course,” he said. “They have no discipline, and their philosophers encourage them to put themselves before their country. God help us if the poison ever spreads to us.” Later, over wine, he asked where we were from, explaining that he could not place the accent.

“America,” I said.

He shook his head. “It must be far to the north. Or very small.”

We each posed with Leonidas, and took pictures, explaining that it was a ritual that would allow us to share his courage. Sparks crackled up from the campfires, and the soldiers talked about home and the future.

Later, I traded a gold coin to one of the Thespian archers for an arrow. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Shel said. “He may need the arrow before he’s done.”

I knew better. “One arrow more or less will make no difference. When the crunch comes, the Thespians will refuse to leave their Spartan allies. They’ll die too. All fifteen hundred of them.”

And history will remember only the Spartans.

We watched them, exercising and playing games in full view of their Persian enemies. Shel turned to me, and his face was cold and hard. “You know, David,” he said, “you are a monster.”

5.

Saturday, November 26. Mid-afternoon.

“This is not just heavy fog,” she said. “It’s midnight out there.” Helen bit down on a grape.

I sat staring at the window, wondering what lay across Carmichael Drive.

She was lovely in the candlelight. “My guess is that a volcano erupted somewhere,” she said. “I know that sounds crazy in South Jersey, but it’s all I can think of.” She was close to me. Warm and vulnerable and open. I reached out and touched her hair. Stroked it. She did not draw away. “I’m glad I was here when it happened, Dave. Whatever it is that’s happened.”

“So am I,” I said.

She smiled appreciatively. And after a moment: “So what do you think?”

I took a deep breath. “I think I know what it is.”

“I’m listening.”

“Helen, there’s a lot about Shel you don’t know. To put it mildly.” Her eyes widened. “Not other women,” I added hurriedly. “Or anything like that.”

That’s not the kind of statement, I suppose, that gets any kind of reaction. Helen just froze in place. “I mean it,” I said. “He has a working time machine.” I was speaking of him in the present tense. With Shel it gets sort of confused.

“I could almost believe it,” she said, after a moment.

I’d been debating whether to destroy my own unit. It would have been the rational thing to do, and the day after Shel’s death I’d even gone down to the river with it. But I hadn’t been able to bring myself to throw it into the water. Next week, I’d thought. There’s plenty of time. “Here,” I said. “I’ll show you one.” I took it out of the desk and handed it to her. It looks like an oversized watch. “You just strap it on, connect it to the power pack, here. Set the destination, and punch the stem.”

She looked at it curiously. “What is it really, Dave? A notebook TV?”

“Hell with this,” I said. I have to walk to keep my weight down. Three miles a day, every day. Other people walk around the block, or go down to a park. I like Ambrose, Ohio, near the beginning of the century. It’s a pleasant little town with tree-lined streets and white picket fences, where straw hats are in vogue for the men, and bright ribbons for the ladies. Down at the barber shop, the talk is mostly about the canal they’re going to build through Panama.

I pulled Helen close, brought up Ambrose’s coordinates, and told her to brace herself. “The sensation’s a little odd at first. But it only lasts a few seconds. And I’ll be with you.”

The living room froze. She stiffened.

The walls and furniture faded to a green landscape with broad lawns and shingled houses and gas street lamps.

When we came out of it, she backed into me. “What happened?” she asked, looking wildly around.

“We’ve just gone upstream. Into the past. It’s 1905. Theodore Roosevelt is President.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. Birds sang, and in the distance we could hear the clean bang of church bells. We were standing outside a general store. About a block away there was a railroad siding.

The wind blew against us.

Her breathing had gone somewhat irregular. “It’s okay,” I said. “It just takes a little getting used to.”

It was late September. People were working in yards, talking over back fences. “We’re really here, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” I said. “We are.”

“My God.” She took a long, deep breath. The air smelled of burning leaves. I saw hurt come into her eyes. “Why didn’t he ever say anything?”

“He kept it a secret for twenty years, Helen. It was habitual with him. He wanted to tell you, and he would have got around to it in his own good time.” I shrugged. “Anyway, no one else knows. And no one should. I’ll deny this whole thing if anyone ever asks.”

She nodded. “Is this,” lifting a hand in the general direction of the town, “connected with the problem at home? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“I think so.” Cabbage was cooking somewhere. I told her about Shel, how he had died but was still alive. Her color changed and she moved closer to me. When I’d finished, she only stared straight ahead.

“He’s still alive,” she said at last.

In a way, he’ll always be alive. “Yes,” I said. “He’s still out there.” I explained about the funeral, and how he had reacted.

I could see her struggling to grasp the idea, and to control her anger. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know how,” I said numbly.

“You can take us back, right?”

“Home? Yes.”

“And where else?”

“Anywhere. Well, there are range limits, but nothing you’d care about.”

A couple of kids with baseball gloves hurried past. “What you’re saying,” she said, “is that Shel should go back and walk into that fire. And if he doesn’t, the black fog will not go away. Right? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s what I think. Yes, Helen, that’s what he should do.”

“But he’s said he would do that? Right? And by the crazy logic of this business, it shouldn’t matter when.”

“But something’s wrong. I think he never did go back. Never will go back. And I think that’s the problem.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” she said.

“I know.” I watched a man with a handcart moving along the street, selling pickles and relishes. “I don’t either. But there’s a continuity. A track. Time flows along the track.” I squeezed her hand. “We’ve torn out a piece of it.”

“And—?”

“I think the locomotive went into the river.”

She tried to digest that. “Okay,” she said. “Grant the time machine. Dave, what you’re asking him to do is unreasonable. I wouldn’t go back either to get hit in the head and thrown into a fire. Would you?”

I got up. “Helen, what you or I would do doesn’t much matter. I know this sounds cold, but I think we have to find a way to get Shel where he belongs.”

She stood up, and looked west, out of town. The fields were brown, dried out from the summer heat. “You know where to find him?”

Yes.

“Will you take me to him?”

“Yes.” And, after a pause: “Will you help me?”

She stared at the quiet little buildings. White clapboard houses. A carriage pulled by two horses just coming around a corner. “Nineteen-five,” she said. “Shaw’s just getting started.”

I didn’t push. I probably didn’t need her to plead with him. Maybe just seeing her would jar something loose. And I knew where I wanted to confront him. At the one event in all of human history that might flay his conscience. “Let’s go home,” I said. “We need to do some sewing.”

“Why?”

“You’re going to need a costume.”

She looked at me and her eyes were hooded. “Why don’t we just shoot him?” she said. “And drag him back?”

“It seems that what you are really asking, Simmias, is whether death annihilates the soul?” Socrates looked from one to another of his friends.

The one who had put the question was, like most of the others, young and clear-eyed, but subdued in the shadow of the prison house. “It is an important matter,” he said. “There is none of more importance. But we were reluctant—” He hesitated, his voice caught, and he could go no farther.

“I understand,” said Socrates. “You fear this is an indelicate moment to raise such an issue. But if you would discuss it with me, we cannot very well postpone it, can we?”

“No, Socrates,” said a thin young man with red hair. “Unfortunately, we cannot.” This, I knew, was Crito.

Despite Plato’s account, the final conversation between Socrates and his disciples did not take place in his cell. It might well have begun there, but they were in a wide, utilitarian meeting room when Helen and I arrived. Several women were present. Socrates, then seventy years old, sat at ease on a wooden chair, while the rest of us gathered around him in a half-circle. To my surprise and disappointment, I did not see Shel.

Socrates was, on first glance, a man of mundane appearance. He was of average height, for the time. He was clean-shaven, and he wore a dull red robe. Only his eyes were extraordinary, conveying the impression that they were lit from within. When they fell curiously on me, as they did from time to time, I imagined that he knew where I had come from, and why I was there.

Beside me, Helen writhed under the impact of conflicting emotions. She had been ecstatic at the chance to see Shel again, although I knew she had not yet accepted the idea that he was alive. When he did not arrive, she looked at me as if to say she had told me so, and settled back to watch history unfold. She was, I thought, initially disappointed, in that the event seemed to be nothing more than a few people sitting around talking in an uncomfortable room in a prison. As if the scene should somehow be scored and choreographed and played to muffled drums. She had read Plato’s account before we left. I tried to translate for her, but we gave it up. I was just getting in the way of the body language and the voices, which, she said, had a meaning and drama all their own.

“When?” she whispered, after we’d been there almost an hour. “When does it happen?”

“Sunset, I think,” I said.

She made a noise deep in her throat.

‘Why do men fear death?” Socrates asked.

“Because,” said Crito, “they believe that it is the end of existence.”

There were almost twenty people present. Most were young, but there was a sprinkling of middle-aged and elderly persons. The most venerable of these looked like Moses, a tall man with a white beard and expressive white eyebrows and a fierce countenance. He gazed intently at Socrates throughout, and periodically nodded when the philosopher hammered home a particularly salient point.

“And do all men fear death?” asked Socrates.

“Most assuredly, Socrates,” said a boy, who could have been no more than eighteen.

Socrates addressed the boy. “Do even the brave fear death, Cebes?” Cebes thought it over. “I have to think so, Socrates.”

“Why then do the valiant dare death? Is it perhaps because they fear something else even more?”

“The loss of their honor,” said Crito with conviction.

“Thus we are faced with the paradox that even the brave are driven by fear. Can we find no one who can face death with equanimity who is not driven by fear?”

Moses was staring at Helen. I moved protectively closer to her.

“Of all men,” said Crito, “only you seem to show no concern at its approach.”

Socrates smiled. “Of all men,” he said, “only a philosopher can truly face down death. Because he knows quite certainly that the soul will proceed to a better existence. Provided he has maintained a lifelong pursuit of knowledge and virtue, and has not allowed his soul, which is his divine essence, to become entangled in concerns of the body. For when this happens, the soul takes on corporeal characteristics. And when death comes, it cannot escape. This is why cemeteries are restless at night.”

“How can we be sure,” asked a man in a blue toga who had not previously spoken, “that the soul, even if it succeeds in surviving the trauma of death, is not scattered by the first strong wind?”

It was not intended as a serious question, but Socrates saw that it affected the others. So he answered lightly, observing that it would be prudent to die on a calm day, and then undertook a serious response. He asked questions that elicited admissions that the soul was not physical and therefore could not be a composite object. “I think we need not fear that it will come apart,” he said, with a touch of amusement.

One of the jailers lingered in the doorway throughout the long discussion. He seemed worried, and at one point cautioned Socrates against speaking too much, or getting excited. “If you get the heat up,” he said, “the poison will not work well.”

“We would not wish that,” Socrates replied. But he saw the pained expression on the jailer’s face, and I thought he immediately regretted the remark.

Women arrived with lunch, and several stayed, so that the room became more and more crowded. In fact, no doors were locked, and no guards, other than the reluctant jailer, were in evidence. Phaedo, who is the narrator of Plato’s account, was beside me. He told me that the authorities had hoped profoundly that Socrates would run off. “They did everything they could to avoid this,” he said. “There is even a rumor that last night they offered him money and transportation if he would leave.”

Socrates saw us conversing, and he said, “Is there something in my reasoning that disturbs you?”

I’d lost the train of the discussion, but Phaedo said, “Yes, Socrates. However, I hesitate to put my objection to you.”

Socrates turned a skeptical gaze on him. “Truth is what it is. Tell me what disturbs you, Phaedo.”

He swallowed to make sure of his voice. “Then let me ask,” he said in a carefully neutral tone, “whether you are being truly objective on this matter? The sun is not far from the horizon and, although it grieves me to say it, were I in your position, I also would argue in favor of immortality.”

“Were you in his position,” said Crito, with a smile, “you would have taken the first ship to Syracuse.” The company laughed, Socrates as heartily as any, and the strain seemed relieved for the moment.

‘You are of course correct in asking, Phaedo. Am I seeking truth? Or trying to convince myself? I can only respond that, if my arguments are valid, then that is good. If they are false, and death does indeed mean annihilation, they nevertheless arm me to withstand its approach. And that too is good.” He looked utterly composed. “If I’m wrong, it’s an error that won’t survive the sunset.”

Simmias was seated immediately to the right of Moses. “I for one am convinced,” he said. “Your arguments do not admit of refutation. And it is a comfort to me to believe that we have it in our power to draw this company together again in some place of the gods’ choosing.”

“Yes,” said Crito. “I agree. And, Socrates, we are fortunate to have you here to explain it to us.”

“Anyone who has thought about these issues,” said Socrates, “should be able to reach, if not truth, at least a high degree of probability.”

Moses seemed weighed down with the infirmities of age, and with the distress of the present calamity. Still, he continued to glance periodically at Helen. Now, for the first time, he spoke: “I very much fear, Socrates, that within a few hours there will be no one left anywhere in Hellas, or anywhere else for that matter, who will be able to make these matters plain.”

“That’s Shel’s voice,” Helen gasped, straining forward to see better. The light was not good, and he was turned away from us now, his face hidden in the folds of his hood.

Then he turned and looked openly at us. He smiled sadly at her. And his lips formed the English words hello, Helen.

She was getting to her feet.

At that moment, the jailer appeared with the poisoned cup, and the sight of him, and the silver vessel, froze everyone in the chamber. “I hope you understand, Socrates,” he said, “this is not my doing.”

“I know that, Thereus,” said Socrates. “I am not angry with you.”

“They always want to blame me,” Thereus said.

Silence flowed through the chamber.

The jailer laid the cup on the table before him. “It is time,” he said.

The rest of the company, following Helen’s example, got one by one to their feet.

Socrates gave a coin to the jailer, squeezed his hand, thanked him, and turned to look at his friends one last time. “The world is very bright,” he said. “But much of it is illusion. If we stare at it too long, in the way we look at the sun during an eclipse, it blinds us. Look at it only with the mind.” He picked up the hemlock. Several in the assemblage started forward, but were restrained by their companions. Someone in back sobbed.

“Stay,” a voice said sternly. “You have respected him all your life. Do so now.”

He lifted the cup to his lips, and his hand trembled. It was the only time the mask slipped. Then he drank the hemlock down and laid the cup on the table. “I am sure Simmias is right,” he said. “We shall gather again one day, as old friends should, in a far different chamber.”

Shel clasped Helen a long time in his big arms. “It’s good to see you again,” he said. Tears ran down his cheeks.

She shivered. “What happened to you?” she asked.

A smile flickered across his lips. “I’ve been traveling a long time.” He stood silhouetted against the moon and the harbor. Behind us, the waterfront buildings of the Piraeus were illuminated by occasional lamps. He turned toward me. “David, you seem to have become my dark angel.”

I was emotionally drained. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said.

A gull wheeled overhead. “Socrates dies for a philosophical nicety. And Shelborne continues to run when all the world is at stake. Right?”

“That’s right,” I said.

Helen was still trembling. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

His lips twitched, and he ran his hand over the long white whiskers. He looked haunted. “I haven’t seen you for forty years,” he said. “You have no idea how many times I’ve gone to sleep dreaming of you. And you are even lovelier than I remember.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. Steadied her. “He’s been out here a long time.”

Her eyes blazed. “What happened to my Shel? What did you do with him?”

“He’s been living his allotted years,” he said. “Making them count for as much as he can as long as he can. Before my conscience here—” lifting his eyes and targeting me, “before my conscience succeeds in driving me into my grave.”

She couldn’t hold back any longer. Her tears flowed freely, and the water lapped against the piers. In that moment, I hated him.

“I’ve tried to go back,” he said. “God help me, I’ve tried. But I could not bring myself to lie in that bed.” Anger surfaced. I could not tell where it was directed. “Did you know that my skull was crushed?”

We knew.

He looked very old. And broken. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. The robes had no pockets. But he needed some kind of defensive gesture, so he folded his arms and turned to face the harbor. “I am not Socrates, Dave,” he said. “I will not drink from his cup.” His eyes locked on mine, and I could see him come to a decision. He drew us together, within the field of his Watch, and punched in a set of coordinates. “But I will settle the issue for you.”

Helen shook her head no. No more surprises. And everything began to slow down. The harbor winked out, a ship’s deck materialized underfoot, and the sky filled with fire.

We were on a Roman galley. The air was thick with powder and cinders, and the sails were down. We were pitching and rolling. The ocean broke across the deck, and men scrambled and swore at their stations. Below us, long oars dipped rhythmically into the waves. It was daylight, but we could not see more than twenty feet.

“How did you manage that?” I screamed at Shel over the hurricane of noise. The Watches had never possessed the precision to land people on a ship at sea.

“It’s been a lot of years,” he said. “Technology’s better than it used to be.”

“Where are we?” demanded Helen, barely able to make herself heard.

Shel was hanging onto a ladder. His clothes were drenched. “A.D. 79,” he said. “Just west of Pompeii.”

His eyes were afire. His silver hair was already streaked with black ash, and I began to suspect he had lost whatever anchor he might have had to reality. Time had become perhaps too slippery for him at last.

The ship rolled to starboard, and would have dumped Helen into the sea had the old man not grabbed her, and hung on, pushing me aside. “Isn’t this glorious?” he asked.

“Why are we here?” Helen demanded, wiping her eyes.

The sea and the wind roared, and the dust was blinding.

“I will pick the time of my death,” he cried. “And its manner.”

I was trying to scramble toward him, but I could do no more than hang on.

“I am uniquely qualified—”

We went down into a trough, and I thought the sea was going to bury us.

“—To make that choice,” he continued, ignoring the ocean. “My death will be an appropriate finale to the symphony of my life.”

A fireball roared overhead, and plowed into the water.

“Don’t do it,” I cried.

“Have no fear, David. I’m not ready yet. But when I am, this will be the way of it.” He smiled at me and touched the Watch. “What better end for a time traveler than sailing with Pliny the Elder?” And he was gone.

“What was that all about?” called Helen. We dipped again and salt water poured across the deck. “Maybe we ought to get out of here too.”

I agreed, and wrapped one arm around a stanchion, something to hang onto while I set the Watch.

“Wait,” she said. “Do you know who Pliny the Elder is?”

“A Roman philosopher.”

“I did a paper on him once. He was an essayist and moralist. Fought a lot for the old values.”

“Helen, can we talk about it later?”

“He was also a naval officer. He’s trying to rescue survivors. Dave, if Shel meant what he said, he’ll be back.”

“I understand that.”

“He’ll be older. But he’ll be back.”

“We can’t do anything about that. I don’t think we want to wait around here.”

We were on the starboard side, near the beam. The sails were down, and a few shadowy figures were moving through the volcanic haze. (I would have expected to hear the roar of the volcano, of Vesuvius, but the only noise came from the sea and the warm dry wind that blew across the deck.) “Let’s try the other side,” I said.

He was there, on the port quarter, clinging to a line, while the wind howled. Even more ancient this time, frail, weary, frightened. Dressed differently than he had been, in slacks and a green pullover that might have come out of the 1930s.

Cinders stung my eyes.

He saw us and waved. “I’ve been looking for you.” His gaze lingered on Helen, and then drifted toward the sea. His eyes seemed utterly devoid of reasoning. Nothing of the old Shelborne seemed to be left.

“Don’t,” I cried.

She let go her handhold and tried to scramble across the pitching deck. He was hanging onto a hawser, balanced near the rail.

The ship pitched, went up the front of a wave and down the back. He raised his hand in a farewell gesture, and the sea broke across the deck. I was thrown hard against a gunwale. The night was filled with water.

When it ended, Shel was gone. The rail was clear, and the line to which he’d clung whipped back and forth.

Helen shouted and pointed. I saw him briefly, rising over a swell, clutching a board and struggling to stay afloat, his white hair trailing in the water. But another wave broke over him and moments later the board popped to the surface, and drifted into the haze.

Something in the ship gave way with a loud crack, and the crewmen cried out. I pulled Helen close.

“Dead again,” she said.

Maybe this time for good. I pressed the stem.

6.

Saturday, November 26. Mid-afternoon.

We returned to the wardrobe in separate, but equally desperate, moods.

Helen could not connect the wild man on the galley with Shel, or even the moody septuagenarian on the dock at the Piraeus. Furthermore, she had not yet accepted either the reality or the implications of time travel. Yet, on a primal level, she had seen him. And for the second time during two weeks, she mourned him.

And I? I’d lost all feeling. How could I reconcile two graves? I collapsed into a chair and stared helplessly at the costumes, hanging neatly, marked off by period. Damn them. I remembered the planning and research that had gone into their creation. We had felt so well organized in those days. Prepared for anything.

I let it go.

And then I noticed that I was seeing the costumes. There was light in the room. It was gray, not bright, but it meant that the black mist was gone. I threw the curtains back, and looked out at a rain-swept landscape.

The trees, the grounds, the walkway, the garage, were visible, huddled together in the storm. The wall still circled the property. And beyond the wall, I could see most of Carmichael Drive. Most of it. But Ray White’s house was gone. As was the rest of the world over there. Carmichael Drive now skirted the edge of a precipice, its far side missing, broken off into a void. Beyond, I could see only gray sky.

Terrified, we went from room to room. Everywhere, in all directions, the picture was the same. On the east, where my property was most extensive, even the wall was gone. A seldom-used patio had been cut in half, and the stand of elms that used to provide shade for it now lined the limits of the world.

We opened a bottle of brandy and drew all the blinds in the house.

“Can’t we replay that last scene?” she asked. “Go back and rescue him? I mean, that’s the whole point of a time machine, isn’t it? Nothing’s ever irrevocable. You make a mistake, you go back and fix it.”

I was tired and my head hurt and at that moment I hated Adrian Shelborne with every fiber of my being. “No,” I said. “It would just make everything worse. We know what happened. We can’t change that”

“Dave,” she said, “how could we possibly make things worse?’

That was a pretty good question.

She eased onto a sofa and closed her eyes. “Time travel,” she said, “isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”

Rain rattled against the windows. “We need to find a way to eliminate the paradox.”

“Okay,” she said. “What exactly is the paradox?”

I thought it over. “Adrian Shelborne has two graves. One out on Monument Hill. And the other in the Tyrrhenian Sea. We have to arrange things so that there is only one.”

“Can we go back and stop the Friday night fire?”

“Same problem as trying a rescue on the galley. The Friday night fire has already happened, and if you prevent it, then what was the funeral all about?”

“It’s like a big knot,” she said. “No matter where you try to pull, everything just gets tighter.”

We were still wearing our Hellenic robes, which were torn and soiled. And we both needed a shower, but there was no water. On the other hand, we did have rain. And as much privacy as we could ever want.

I got soap, towels, and wash cloths. She took the backyard, which was
more sheltered (as if that mattered), and I stood out front. It was late November. but the weather had turned unseasonably warm nevertheless. Hot water would have been nice, but I felt pretty good anyway after I’d dried off and changed into clean clothes.

Then we sat, each in a kind of private cocoon, thinking about options. Or things lost. The rain continued through the afternoon. I watched rivulets form and wondered how much soil was being washed over the edge. Where? Where would it be going? When the weather cleared, I promised myself that I would walk out and look down.

“Who’s buried in the grave on Monument Hill?” she asked.

“Shel.”

“How do we know? The body was burned beyond recognition.”

“They checked his dental records. We can’t change that.”

She was sitting on the sofa with her legs drawn up under her. “We also can’t recover the body from the Tyrrhenian Sea. We have to work on Monument Hill. What can we do about the dental records?”

I looked at her. “I don’t think I understand.”

“We have a time machine. Use your imagination.”

Chain-reaction collisions have become an increasingly dangerous occurrence on limited-access highways around the world. Hundreds die every year, several thousand are injured, and property damage usually runs well into the millions. On the day that we buried Shel, there had been a pile-up in California. It had happened a little after eight o’clock in the morning under conditions of perfect visibility when a pickup rear-ended a station wagon full of kids headed for breakfast and Universal Studios.

We materialized by the side of the road moments after the chain reaction had ended. The highway and the shoulder were littered with wrecked vehicles. Some people were out of their cars trying to help; others were wandering dazed through the carnage. The morning air was filled with screams and the smell of burning oil.

“I’m not sure I can do this,” Helen said, spotting a woman bleeding in an overturned Buick. She went over, got the door open, and motioned me to assist. The woman was unconscious, and her right arm was bent in an awkward manner.

“Helen,” I said. “We have a bigger rescue to make.”

She shook her head. No. This first.

She stopped the bleeding and I got someone to stay with the victim. We helped a few other people, pulled an elderly couple out of a burning van, got one man with two broken legs off the road. (I was horrified. Shel and I had always maintained a strict hands-off policy.) “We don’t have time for this,” I pleaded.

“I don’t have time for anything else,” she said.

Sirens were approaching. I let her go, concentrating on finding what we’d come for.

He was alone in a blue Toyota that had rolled over onto its roof. The front of the car was crumpled, a door was off, and the driver looked dead. He was bleeding heavily from a head wound. One tire was spinning slowly. I could find no pulse.

He was about the right size, tangled in a seat belt. When Helen got there, she confirmed that he was dead. I used a jack knife to cut him free. EMT’s had arrived and were spreading out among the wrecked cars. Stretchers were appearing.

Helen could not keep her mind on what we were doing. “Your oath doesn’t count,” I said. “Not here. Let it go.”

She looked at me out of empty eyes.

“Help me get him out,” I said.

We wrapped him in plastic and laid him in the road. “He does look a little like Shel,” she said in a small voice.

“Enough to get by.”

Footsteps were approaching. Someone demanded to know what we were doing.

“It’s okay,” I said, “we’re doctors.” I pushed the stem and we were out of there.

His name was Victor Randall. His wallet carried pictures of an attractive woman with cropped brown hair seated with him in a front porch swing. And two kids. The kids were smiling up at the camera, one boy, one girl, both around seven or eight. “Maybe,” Helen said, “when this is over, we can send them a note to explain things.”

“We can’t do that,” I said.

“They’ll never know what happened to him.”

“That’s right. And there’s no way around it.”

There was also about two hundred cash. Later, I would mail that back to the family.

We carried him down to the garage and put him in the Porsche. I adjusted the temporal sweep to maximum, so that when we went the car would go with us.

7.

Thursday, November 10. Near midnight.

Mark S. Hightower had been Shel’s dentist for seven years. He operated out of a medical building across the street from Friendship Hospital, where Helen had interned, and where she still served as a consultant.

I’d met Hightower once. He was short, barrel-chested, flat-skulled, a man who looked more like a professional wrestler than a dentist. But he was soft-spoken and, according to Shel, particularly good with kids.

We materialized on a lot down on Penrod Avenue, which was in the commercial district. The area was always deserted at night. Ten minutes later, we approached the hospital and pulled into the parking lot at the Forest Elm Medical Center. Hightower was located in back, well away from the street.

Victor was in the front seat, supported from behind by Helen. He was wrapped in plastic. He’d stopped bleeding, and we had cleaned him up as much as we could. “Are you sure you know how to do this?” I asked.

“Of course not, Dave,” she said. “I’m not a dentist. But the equipment shouldn’t be hard to figure out. How do we get inside?”

I showed her a tire iron. “We’ll have to break in.”

She looked dismayed. “I thought you could manage something a little more sophisticated than that. Why can’t you just use that thing on your wrist and put us right inside the building?”

“Because it’s not very precise. We could be here all night.” I was thinking of Shel’s trick in moving us from the Piraeus to the quarter-deck on Pliny’s galley. If I’d tried that, we’d have gone into the ocean.

We put on gloves, and walked around the building, looking for an open window. There was none, but we found a rear exit that did not seem very sturdy. I wedged the tire iron between the door and the jamb, worked it back and forth, and felt the lock give. The door all but came off the hinges. I held my breath, waiting for the screech of a burglar alarm. It didn’t come, and we were past the first hurdle.

We went back to the Porsche, got Victor out of the back seat and half-carried, half-dragged him around to the open door. Once inside, we set him in a chair. Then we turned on penlights and looked around. A half-dozen rooms were designated for patients, opening off a corridor that looped around to the reception area. I wandered from office to office, not really knowing what I was looking for. But Helen did one quick turn through the passageway and pointed at a machine tucked away in a corner. “This is it,” she said. The manufacturer’s label said it was an orthopantomograph. “It does panoramic X-rays,” Helen said.

“Panoramic? What’s that?”

“Full mouth. It should be all we’ll need.”

The idea was that the person being X-rayed placed his forehead against a plastic rest, and his chin in a cup-shaped support. The camera was located inside a cone which was mounted on a rotating arm. The arm and cone would traverse the head, and produce a single panoramic image of the teeth. The only problem was that the patient normally stood during the procedure.

“It’ll take six to eight minutes,” said Helen. “During that time we have to keep him absolutely still. Think you can do it?”

“I can do it,” I said.

“Okay.” She checked to make sure there was a film cassette in the machine. “Let’s get him.”

We carried Victor to the orthopantomograph. At Helen’s suggestion, we’d brought along some cloth strips that we now used to secure him to the device. It was an uncomfortable and clumsy business, and he kept sliding away from us. Working in the dark complicated the procedure, but after about twenty minutes we had him in place.

“Okay,” she said. “He should be all right now. Don’t touch him. Right?”

I backed away.

“Something just occurred to me,” I said. “Victor Randall already has the head wound.”

Her eyes closed momentarily. “You’re suggesting the arsonist didn’t hit Shel in the head after all?”

“That’s what I think.”

She considered that piece of data. “This keeps getting weirder,” she said.

A mirror was mounted on the machine directly in front of the patient’s face. Helen pressed a button and a light went on in the center of the mirror. “They would tell the patient to watch the light,” she said. “That’s how they’re sure they’ve got it lined up.”

“How are we sure?”

“What’s the term? ‘Dead reckoning’ ?” She punched another button. A motor started, and the cone began to move.

Ten minutes later we took the cassette in back, carefully leaving Victor in place until we were sure we had good pictures. The developer was located in a windowless storage room. Helen removed the film from the cassette and ran it through the machine. When the finished picture came out, she handed it to me without looking at it. “What do you think?”

The entire mouth, uppers and lowers, was clear. “Looks good,” I said.

She held it against the light. “Plenty of fillings on both sides. Let’s see how it compares.”

The records were maintained in manila folders behind the reception desk. Helen found Shel’s, and sat down with it at the desk, where the counter hid her from anyone passing outside.

The folder was filled with records of Shel’s visits. “He goes every three months,” she said. “That’s not bad.” (She also tended to talk about him in the present tense.) The results of his most recent checkup were clipped on the right side. In the middle of the sheet was a panoramic picture, like the one we had just taken, and several smaller photos of individual sections. “I think they call these ‘wings’ ” she said. “But when they bring a dentist in to identify a body, they do it with these.” She held up the panoramic and compared the two. “They don’t look much alike in detail. And if they ever get around to comparing it with the wings, they’ll notice something’s wrong. But we should have enough to get by.”

She removed Shel’s panoramic, and substituted the one we had just taken. Then she replaced the folder. We wiped off the headrest and checked the floor to be sure we’d spilled no blood. “One more thing,” said Helen. She inserted a fresh cassette into the orthopantomograph. “Okay. We’ve done what we came to do. Let’s clear out.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “They’re going to know we broke in. We need to do something to make this look like a burglary.” As far as I could see, there wasn’t much worth stealing. Magazines. Cheap landscape prints on the walls. “How about a drill?” I said. “They look expensive.”

She squeezed my arm. “What kind of burglar would steal a drill?” She went on another tour of the office. Moments later, I heard glass breaking, and she came back with a couple of plastic bottles filled with pills. “Valium,” she said.

8.

Saturday, November 12. 1:15 a.m.

I had the coordinates for Shel’s workshop, so we were able to go right in.

It was located in the basement of the townhouse, a small, cramped, cluttered place that had a Cray computer front and center, banks of displays, and an array of experimental equipment I had never begun to understand. Moments after we’d arrived, his oil heater came on with a thump.

Helen grumbled that we would have to carry the body up to the second floor. But I had done the best I could. The math had always been Shel’s job, and the only place in the house I could get to was the workshop. So we dragged Victor up two flights of stairs to the master bedroom, dressed him in Shel’s pajamas, turned back the sheets, and laid him in bed. We put his clothes into a plastic bag.

We also had a brick in the bag. Shel kept his car keys in the middle drawer of a desk on the first floor. We had debated just leaving the clothes to burn, but I wanted to leave nothing to chance. Despite what you might think about time travel, what we were doing was forever. We could not come back and undo it, because we were here, and we knew what the sequence of events was, and you couldn’t change that without paying down the road. If we knew anything for sure now, we knew that.

I had left the Porsche at home this time. So we had to borrow Shel’s green Pontiac. It had a vanity plate reading SHEL, and a lot of mileage. But he took good care of it. We drove down to the river. At the two-lane bridge that crosses the Narrows, we pulled off and waited until there was no traffic. Then we pulled onto the bridge, went out to the middle, where we presumed the water was deepest, and dropped the bag over the side. We still had Victor’s wallet and ID, which I intended to burn.

We returned Shel’s car to the garage. By now it was about a quarter to two, forty-eight minutes before a Mrs. Wilma Anderson would call to report a fire at the townhouse. I was a little concerned that we had cut things too close, and that the intruder might already be in the house. But the place was still quiet when I returned the car keys to the desk.

We locked the house, front and back, which was how we had found it, and retired across the street, behind a hedge. We were satisfied with our night’s work, and curious only to see who the criminal was. The neighborhood was tree-lined, well-lighted, quiet. The houses were middleclass, fronted by small yards that were usually fenced. Cars were parked on either side of the street. There was no traffic, and somewhere in the next block we could hear a cat yowling.

Two o’clock arrived.

“Getting late,” Helen said.

Nothing stirred. “He’s going to have to hurry up,” I said.

She looked at me uncomfortably. “What happens if he doesn’t come?”

“He has to come.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way it happened. We know that for an absolute fact.”

She looked at her watch. Two-oh-one.

“I just had a thought,” I said.

“Let’s hear it.”

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is no firebug. Or rather, maybe we are the firebugs. After all, we already know where the fractured skull came from.”

She nodded slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

I left the shelter of the hedge and walked quickly across the street, entered Shel’s driveway, and went back into the garage. There were several gas cans. They were all empty.

I needed the car keys. But I was locked out now. I used a rock to break a window, got in, and retrieved the keys. I threw the empty cans into the trunk of his Pontiac. “Wait here,” I told Helen as I backed out onto the street. “Keep an eye open in case someone does show up.”

“Where are you going?”

‘To get some gas.”

There was an all-night station down on River Road, only a few blocks away. It was one of those places where, after eleven o’clock, the cashier locks himself into a glass cage. He was a middle-aged, worn-out guy sitting in a cloud of cigarette smoke. A toothpick rolled relentlessly from one side of his mouth to the other. I filled three cans, paid, and drove back to the townhouse.

It was 2:17 when we began sloshing the gasoline around the basement. We emptied a can on the stairway and another upstairs, taking particular care to drench the master bedroom, where Victor Randall lay. We poured the rest of it on the first floor, and so thoroughly soaked the entry that I was afraid to go near it with a lighted match. But at 2:25 we touched it off.

Helen and I watched for a time from a block away. The flames cast a pale glare in the sky, and sparks floated overhead. We didn’t know much about Victor Randall, but what we did know maybe was enough. He’d been a husband and father. In their photos, his wife and kids had looked happy. And he got a Viking’s funeral.

“What do you think?” asked Helen. “Will it be all right now?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I hope so.”

9.

Sunday, November 27. Mid-morning.

In the end, the Great November Delusion was written off as precisely that, a kind of mass hysteria that settled across a substantial chunk of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. Elsewhere, life had gone on as usual, except that the affected area seemed to have vanished behind a black shroud that turned back all attempts at entry, and admitted no signals.

Fortunately, it had lasted only a few hours. When it ended, persons who had been inside emerged with a wide range of stories. They had been stranded on rocky shores or amid needle peaks or in gritty wastes where nothing grew. One family claimed to have been inside a house that had an infinite number of stairways and chambers, but no doors or windows. Psychologists pointed out that the one element that appeared in all accounts was isolation. Sometimes it had been whole communities that were isolated; sometimes families. Occasionally it had been individuals. The general consensus was that, whatever the cause, therapists would be assured of a handsome income for years to come.

My first act on returning home was to destroy Victor Randall’s wallet and ID. The TV was back with full coverage of the phenomenon. The National Guard was out, and experts were already appearing on talk shows. I would have been ecstatic with the way things had turned out, except that Helen had sunk into a dark mood. She was thinking about Shel.

“We saved the world,” I told her. I showered and changed and put on some bacon and eggs. By the time she came downstairs it was ready. She ate, and cried a little, and congratulated me. “We were brilliant,” she said.

After breakfast she seemed reluctant to leave, as if something had been left undone. But she announced finally that she needed to get back to her apartment and see how things were.

She had just started for the door when we heard a car pull up. “It’s a woman,” she said, looking out the window. “Friend of yours?”

It was Sgt. Lake. She was alone this time.

We watched her climb the porch steps. A moment later the door bell rang.

“This won’t look so good,” Helen said.

“I know. You want to duck upstairs?”

She thought about it. “No. What are we hiding?”

The bell sounded again. I crossed the room and opened up.

“Good morning, Dr. Dryden,” said the detective. “I’m glad to see you came through it all right. Everything is okay?”

“Yes,” I said. “How about you?”

Her cheeks were pale. “Good,” she said. “I hope it’s over.” She seemed far more human than during her earlier visit.

“Where’s your partner?” I asked.

She smiled. “Everything’s bedlam downtown. A lot of people went berserk during that thing, whatever it was. We’re going to be busy for a while.” She took a deep breath and, for the moment at least, some unconscious communication passed between us. “I wonder if I could talk with you?”

“Of course.” I stepped back and she came in.

“It’s chaos.” She seemed not quite able to focus. “Fires, people in shock, heart attacks everywhere. It hasn’t been good.” She saw Helen and her eyes widened. “Hello, Doctor. I didn’t expect to see you here. I expect you’re in for a busy day too.”

Helen nodded. “You okay?” she asked.

‘Yeah. Thanks. I’m fine.” She stared out over my shoulder. Then, with a start, she tried to wave it all away.

We sat down. “What was it like here?” she asked.

I described what I’d seen. While I was doing so, Helen poured her some coffee and she relaxed a little. She had been caught in her car during the event on a piece of rain-swept foggy highway that just went round and round, covering the same ground. “Damnedest thing,” she said. “No matter what I did, I couldn’t get off.” She shook her head and drank the coffee.

“I could prescribe a sedative,” said Helen.

“No, thank you,” Lake said. She looked at me carefully. “I wonder if we might have a minute alone?”

“Sure,” Helen said. “I should be on my way anyhow.” She patted my shoulder in a comradely way and let herself out.

Lake turned her attention to me. “Doctor,” she said, “you’ve informed us you were home in bed at the time of Dr. Shelborne’s death. Do you stand by that statement?”

‘Yes,” I said, puzzled. “I do.”

“Are you sure?”

The question hung in the sunlit air. “Of course I am. Why do you ask?”

I could read nothing in her expression. “Someone answering your description was seen in the neighborhood of the townhouse shortly before the fire.”

“It wasn’t me,” I said, suddenly remembering the man at the gas station. And I’d been driving Shel’s car. With his vanity plate on the front to underscore the point.

“Okay,” she said. “I wonder if you’d mind coming down to the station with me, so we can clear the matter up. Get it settled.”

“Sure. Be glad to.”

We stood up. “Could I have a moment, please?”

“Certainly,” she said, and went outside.

I called Helen on her cellular. “Don’t panic,” she said. “All you need is a good alibi.”

“I don’t have an alibi.”

“For God’s sake, Dave. You’ve got something better. You have a time machine.”

“Okay. Sure. But if I go back and set up an alibi, why didn’t I tell them the truth in the beginning?”

“Because you were protecting a woman’s reputation,” she said. “What else would you be doing at two o’clock in the morning? Get out your little black book.” It might have been my imagination, but I thought the reference to my little black book angered her slightly.

10.

Friday, November 11. Early evening.

The problem was that I didn’t have a little black book. I’ve never been all that successful with women. Not to the extent, certainly, that I could call one up with a reasonable hope of finishing the night in her bed.

What other option did I have? I could try to find someone in a bar, but you didn’t really lie to the police in a murder case to protect a casual pickup.

I pulled over to the curb beside an all-night restaurant, planning to go in and talk to the waitress a lot. Give her a huge tip so she couldn’t possibly forget me. But then, how would I explain why I had lied?

The restaurant was close to the river, a rundown area lined with crumbling warehouses. A police cruiser slowed down and pulled in behind the Porsche. The cop got out and I lowered the window.

“Anything wrong, Officer?” I asked. He was small, black, well-pressed.

“I was going to ask you the same thing, sir. This is not a good neighborhood.”

“I was just trying to decide whether I wanted a hamburger.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. I could hear the murmur of his radio. “Well, listen, I’d make up my mind, one way or the other. I wouldn’t hang around out here if I were you.”

I smiled, and gave him a thumbs-up. “Thanks,” I said.

He got back in his cruiser and pulled out. I watched his lights turn left at the next intersection. And I knew what I was going to do.

I drove south on route 130 for about three quarters of an hour, and then turned east on a two-lane. Somewhere around eleven, I entered Clovis, New Jersey, and decided it was just what I was looking for.

The Clovis police station occupied a small two-story building beside the post office. The Red Lantern Bar was located about two blocks away, on the other side of the street.

I parked in a lighted spot close to the police station, walked to the bar, and went inside. It was smoky, subdued, and reeking with the smell of dead cigarettes and stale beer. Most of the action was over around the dart board.

I settled in at the bar and commenced drinking Scotch. I stayed with it until the bartender suggested I’d had enough, which usually wouldn’t have taken long because I don’t have much capacity for alcohol. But that night my mind stayed clear. Not my motor coordination, though. I paid up, eased off the stool, and negotiated my way back onto the street.

I turned right and moved methodically toward the police station, putting one foot in front of the other. When I got close, I added a little panache to my stagger, tried a couple of practice giggles to warm up, and lurched in through the front door.

A man with two stripes came out of a back room.

“Good evening, Officer,” I said, with exaggerated formality and the widest grin I could manage, which was then pretty wide. “Can you give me directions to Atlantic City?”

The corporal shook his head sadly. “Do you have some identification, sir?”

“Yes I do,” I said. “But I don’t see why my name is any business of yours. I’m in a hurry.”

He sighed. “Where are you from?”

“Two weeks from Sunday,” I said. “I’m a time traveler.”

11.

Sunday, November 27. Late evening.

Sgt. Lake was surprised and, I thought, disappointed to learn that I had been in jail on the night of the fire. She said that she understood why I had been reluctant to say anything, but admonished me on the virtues of being honest with law enforcement authorities.

I called Helen, looking forward to an evening of celebration. But I only got her recording machine. “Call me when you get in,” I told it.

The call never came. Just before midnight, when I’d given up and was getting ready to go to bed, I noticed a white envelope on the kitchen table.

My name was printed on it in neat, spare characters.

Dear Dave (it read),

Shel is back! My Shel. The real one. He wants to take me off somewhere, and I don’t know where, but I can’t resist. Maybe we will live near the Parthenon, or maybe Paris during the 1920s. I don’t know. But I do know you will be happy for me.

I will never forget you, Dave.

Love,

Helen

PS We left something for you. In the wardrobe.

I read it several times, and finally crumpled it.

They’d left the Hermes. They had positioned it carefully under the light, to achieve maximum effect. Not that it needed it.

I stood a long time admiring the piece. It was Michelangelo at his most brilliant. But it wasn’t Helen.

I went downstairs and wandered through the house. It was empty, full of echoes and the sound of the wind. More desolate now than it had been when it was the only thing in the universe.

I remembered how Helen had sounded when she thought she was sending me back to sleep with another woman. And I wondered why I was so ready to give up.

I did some quick research, went back to the wardrobe, scarcely noticing the statue, and put on turn-of-the-century evening clothes.

Next stop: the Court Theater in Sloane Square, London, to watch the opening performance of Man and Superman.

You’re damned right, Shelborne.

Time travelers never die.

THE COST TO BE WISE

Maureen F. McHugh
i

THE SUN WAS UP ON THE SNOW AND EVERYTHING WAS BRIGHT TO LOOK at when the skimmer landed. It landed on the long patch of land behind the schoolhouse, dropping down into the snow like some big bug. I was supposed to be down at the distillery helping my mam but we needed water and I had to get an ice ax, so I was outside when the offworlders came.

The skimmer was from Barok. Barok was a city. It was so far away that no one I knew in Sckarline had ever been there (except for the teachers, of course) but for the offworlders the trip was only a few hours. The skimmer came a couple of times a year to bring packages for the teachers.

The skimmer sat there for a moment—long time waiting while nothing happened except people started coming to watch—and then the hatch opened out and an offworlder stepped gingerly out on the snow. The offworlder wasn’t a skimmer pilot though, it was a tall, thin boy. I shaded my eyes and watched. My hands were cold but I wanted to see.

The offworlder wore strange colors for the snow. Offworlders always wore unnatural colors. This boy wore purples and oranges and black, all shining as if they were wet and none of them thick enough to keep anyone warm. He stood with his knees stiff and his body rigid because the snow was packed to flat, slick ice by the skimmer and he wasn’t sure of his balance. But he was tall and I figured he was as old as I am so it looked odd that he still didn’t know how to walk on snow. He was beardless, like a boy. Darker than any of us.

Someone inside the skimmer handed him a bag. It was deep red and shined as if it were hard, and wrinkled as if it were felt. My father crossed to the skimmer and took the bag from the boy because it was clear that the boy might fall with it and it made a person uncomfortable to watch him try to balance and carry something.

The dogs were barking, and more Sckarline people were coming because they’d heard the skimmer.

I wanted to see what the bags were made of so I went to the hatch of the skimmer to take something. We didn’t get many things from the offworlders because they weren’t appropriate, but I liked offworlder things. I couldn’t see much inside the skimmer because it was dark and I had been out in the sun, but standing beside the seat where the pilot was sitting there was an old white-haired man, all straight-legged and tall. As tall as Ayudesh the teacher, which is to say taller than anyone else I knew. He handed the boy a box, though, not a bag, a bright blue box with a thick white lid. A plastic box. An offworlder box. The boy handed it to me.

“Thanks,” the boy said in English. Up close I could see that the boy was really a girl. Offworlders dress the same both ways, and they are so tall it’s hard to tell sometimes, but this was a girl with short black hair and skin as dark as wood.

My father put the bag in the big visitors’ house and I put the box there too. It was midday at winterdark, so the sun was a red glow on the horizon. The bag looked black except where it fell into the red square of sunlight from the doorway. It shone like metal. So very fine. Like nothing we had. I touched the bag. It was plastic too. I liked the feeling of plastic. I liked the sound of the word in lingua. If someday I had a daughter, maybe I’d name her Plastic. It would be a rich name, an exotic name. The teachers wouldn’t like it, but it was a name I wished I had.

Ayudesh was walking across the snow to the skimmer when I went back outside. The girl (I hadn’t shaken free from thinking of her as a boy) stuck out her hand to him. Should I have shaken her hand? No, she’d had the box, I couldn’t have shaken her hand. So I had done it right. Wanji, the other teacher, was coming too.

I got wood from the pile for the boxstove in the guest house, digging it from under the top wood because the top wood would be damp. It would take a long time to heat up the guest house, so the sooner I got started the sooner the offworlders would be comfortable.

There was a window in the visitor’s house, fat-yellow above the purple-white snow.

Inside everyone was sitting around on the floor, talking. None of the teachers were there, were they with the old man? I smelled whisak but I didn’t see any, which meant that the men were drinking it outside. I sat down at the edge of the group, where it was dark, next to Dirtha. Dirtha was watching the offworld girl who was shaking her head at Harup to try to tell him she didn’t understand what he was asking. Harup pointed at her blue box again. “Can I see it?” he asked. Harup was my father’s age, so he didn’t speak any English.

It was warming up in here, although when the offworlder girl leaned forward and breathed out, her mouth in an O, her breath smoked the air for an instant.

It was too frustrating to watch Harup try to talk to the girl. “What’s your kinship?” he asked. “I’m Harup Sckarline.” He thumped his chest with his finger. “What’s your kinship?” When she shook her head, not understanding all these words, he looked around and grinned. Harup wouldn’t stop until he was bored, and that would take a long time.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “I don’t speak your language.” She looked unhappy.

Ayudesh would be furious with us if he found out that none of us would try and use our English.

I had to think about how to ask. Then I cleared my throat, so people would know I was going to talk from the back of the group. “He asks what is your name,” I said.

The girl’s chin came up like a startled animal. “What?” she said.

Maybe I said it wrong? Or my accent was so bad she couldn’t understand? I looked at my boots; the stitches around the toes were fraying. They had been my mother’s. “Your name,” I said to the boots.

The toes twitched a little, sympathetic. Maybe I should have kept quiet.

“My name is Veronique,” she said.

“What is she saying?” asked Harup.

“She says her kinship is Veronique,” I said.

“That’s not a kinship,” said Little Shemus. Little Shemus wasn’t old enough to have a beard, but he was old enough to be critical of everything.

“Offworlders don’t have kinship like we do,” I said. “She gave her front name.”

“Ask her her kinship name,” Little Shemus said.

“She just told you,” Ardha said, taking the end of her braid out of her mouth. Ardha was a year younger than me. “They don’t have kinship names. Ayudesh doesn’t have a kinship name. Wanji doesn’t.”

“Sure they do,” Shemus said. “Their kinship name is Sckarlineclan.”

“We give them that name,” said Ardha and pursed her round lips. Ardha was always bossy.

“What are they saying?” asked the girl.

“They say, err, they ask, what is your,” your what? How would I even ask what her kinship name was in English? There was a word for it, but I couldn’t think of it. “Your other name.”

She frowned. Her eyebrows were quite black. “You mean my last name? It’s Veronique Twombly.”

What was so hard about last name? I remembered it as soon as she said it. “Tawomby,” I said. “Her kinship is Veronique Tawomby.”

“Tawomby,” Harup said. “Amazing. It doesn’t sound like a word. It sounds made-up, like children do. What’s in her box?”

“I know what’s in her box,” said Erip. Everybody laughed except for Ardha and me. Even Little Sherep laughed and he didn’t really understand.

The girl was looking at me to explain.

“He asks inside, the box is.” I had gotten tangled up. Questions were hard.

“Is the box inside?” she asked.

I nodded.

“It’s inside,” she said.

I didn’t understand her answer, so I waited for her to explain.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Did someone bring the box inside?”

I nodded, because I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d said, but she didn’t reach for the box or open it or anything. I tried to think of how to say it.

“Inside,” Ardha said, tentative. “What is?”

“The box,” she said. “Oh wait, you want to know what’s in the box?”

Ardha looked at the door so she wouldn’t have to look at the off-worlder. I wasn’t sure, so I nodded.

She pulled the box over and opened it up. Something glimmered hard and green and there were red and yellow boxes covered in lingua and she said, “Presents for Ayudesh and Wanji.” Everybody stood up to see inside, so I couldn’t see, but I heard her say things. The words didn’t mean anything. Tea, that I knew. Wanji talked about tea. “These are sweets,” I heard her say. “You know, candy.” I knew the word sweet, but I didn’t know what else she meant. It was so much harder to speak English to her than it was to do it in class with Ayudesh.

Nobody was paying any attention to what she said but me. They didn’t care as long as they could see. I wished I could see.

Nobody was even thinking about me, or that if I hadn’t been there she never would have opened the box. But that was the way it always was. If I only lived somewhere else, my life would be different. But Sckarline was neither earth nor sky, and I was living my life in between. People looked and fingered, but she wouldn’t let them take things out, not even Harup, who was as tall as she was and a lot stronger. The younger people got bored and sat down and finally I could see Harup poking something with his finger, and the outland girl watching. Then she looked at me.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Me?” I said. “Umm, Janna.”

She said my name. “What’s your last name, Janna?”

“Sckarline,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “like the settlement.”

I just nodded.

“What is his name?” She pointed.

“Harup,” I said. He looked up and grinned.

“What’s your name?” she asked him and I told him what she had said.

“Harup,” he said. Then she went around the room, saying everybody’s names. It made everyone pleased to be noticed. She was smart that way. And it was easy. Then she tried to remember all their names, which had everyone laughing and correcting her so I didn’t have to talk at all.

Ayudesh came in, taller than anyone, and I noticed, for the first time in my life, that he was really an offworlder. Ayudesh had been there all my life, and I knew he was an offworlder, but to me he had always been just Ayudesh.

Then they were talking about me and Ayudesh was just Ayudesh again. “Janna?” he said. “Very good. I’ll tell you what, you take care of Veronique, here. You’re her translator, all right?”

I was scared, because I really couldn’t understand when she talked, but I guessed I was better than anybody else.

Veronique unpacked, which was interesting, but then she just started putting things here and there and everybody else drifted off until it was just her and me.

Veronique did a lot of odd things. She used a lot of water. The first thing I did for her was get water. She followed me out and watched me chip the ice for water and fill the bucket. She fingered the wooden bucket and the rope handle.

She said something I didn’t understand because it had do in it and a lot of pronouns and I have trouble following sentences like that. I smiled at her but I think she realized I didn’t understand. Her boots were purple. I had never seen purple boots before.

“They look strange,” she said. I didn’t know what looked strange. “I like your boots,” she said, slowly and clearly. I did understand, but then I didn’t know what to do, did she want me to give her my boots? They were my mother’s old boots and I wouldn’t have minded giving them to her except I didn’t have anything to take their place.

“It is really cold,” she said.

Which seemed very odd to say, except I remembered that offworlders talk about the weather; Ayudesh had made us practice talking about the weather. He said it was something strangers talked about. “It is,” I said. “But it will not snow tonight.” That was good, it made her happy.

“And it gets dark so early,” she said. “It isn’t even afternoon and it’s like night.”

“Where you live, it is cold as this, umm—” I hadn’t made a question right.

But she understood. “Oh no,” she said, “where I live is warm. It is hot, I mean. There is snow only on the mountains.”

She wanted to heat the water so I put it on the stove, and then she showed me pictures of her mother and father and her brother at her house. It was summer and they were wearing only little bits of clothes.

Then she showed me a picture of herself and a man with a beard. “That’s my boyfriend,” she said. “We’re getting married.”

He looked old. Grown up. In the picture Veronique looked older too. I looked at her again, not sure how old she was. Maybe older than me? Wanji said offworlders got married when they were older, not like the clans.

“I have boyfriend,” I said.

“You do?” She smiled at me. “What’s his name?”

“Tuuvin,” I said.

“Was he here before?”

I shook my head.

Then she let me see her bag. The dark red one. I loved the color. I stroked it, as slick as leather and shining. “Plastic?” I said.

She nodded.

“I like plastic,” I said.

She smiled a little, like I’d said something wrong. But it was so perfect, so even in color.

“Do you want it?” she asked. Which made me think of my boots and whether she had wanted them. I shook my head.

“You can have it,” she said. “I can get another one.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t appropriate.”

She laughed, a startled laugh. I didn’t understand what I’d done and the feeling that I was foolish sat in my stomach, but I didn’t know what was so foolish.

She said something I didn’t understand, which made me feel worse. “What did you say?” she said. “ ‘Appropriate’ ?”

I nodded. “It’s not appropriate,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

Our lessons in appropriate development used lots of English words because it was hard to say these things any other way, so I found that the words to tell her came easily. “Plastic,” I said, “it’s not appropriate. Appropriate technologies are based on the needs and capacities of people, they must be sustainable without outside support. Like the distillery is. Plastic isn’t appropriate to Sckarline’s economy because we can’t create it and it replaces things we can produce, like skin bags.” I stroked the bag again. “But I like plastic. It’s beautiful.”

“Wow,” Veronique said. She was looking at me sharp, all alert like a stabros smelling a dog for the first time. Not afraid, but not sure what to think. “To me,” she said slowly, “your skin bags are beautiful. The wooden houses”—she touched the black slick wood wall—”they are beautiful.”

Ayudesh and Wanji were always telling us that offworlders thought our goods were wonderful, but how could anyone look at a skin bag and then look at plastic and not see how brilliant the colors were in plastic? Dye a skin bag red and it still looked like a skin bag, like it came from dirt.

“How long you, um, you do stay?” I asked.

“Fourteen days,” she said. “I’m a student, I came with my teacher.” I nodded. “Ayudesh, he is a teacher.”

“My teacher, he’s a friend of Ayudesh. From years ago,” she said. “Have you always lived here? Were you born here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I am born here. My mother and father are born in Tentas Clan, but they come here.”

“Tentas Clan is another settlement?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “No. Sckarline only is a settlement.”

“Then, what is Tentas Clan?”

“It is people.” I didn’t know how to explain clans to her at all. “They have kinship, and they have stabros, and they are together—”

“Stabros, those are animals,” she said.

I nodded. “Sckarline, uh . . . is an appropriate-technology mission.”

“Right, that Ayudesh and Wanji started. Tentas Clan is a clan, right?”

I nodded. I was worn out from talking to her.

After that she drank tea and then I took her around to show her Sckarline. It was already almost dark. I showed her the generator where we cooked stabros manure to make electricity. I got a lantern there.

I showed her the stabros pens and the dogs, even though it wasn’t really very interesting. Tuuvin was there, and Gerdor, my little uncle, leaning and watching the stabros who were doing nothing but rooting at the mud in the pen and hoping someone would throw them something to eat. The stabros shook their heads and dug with their long front toes.

“This is Tuuvin?” Veronique said.

I was embarrassed. One of the stabros, a gelding with long feathery ears, craned his head toward me. I reached out and pulled on the long guard hairs at the tips of his ears and he lipped at my hand. He had a long purple tongue. He breathed out steam. Their breath always reminded me of the smell of whisak mash.

“Do you ride them?” Veronique asked.

“What?” I asked.

“Do you, um, get on their backs?” She made a person with her fingers walking through the air, then the fingers jumped on the other hand.

“A stabros?” I asked. Tuuvin and Gerdor laughed. “No,” I said. “They have no like that. Stabros angry, very much.” I pretended to kick. “They have milk, sometimes. And sleds,” I said triumphantly, remembering the word.

She leaned on the fence. “They are pretty,” she said. “They have pretty eyes. They look so sad with their long drooping ears.”

“What?” Tuuvin asked. “What’s pretty?”

“She says they have pretty eyes,” I said.

Gerdor laughed but Tuuvin and I gave him a sharp look.

The dogs were leaping and barking and clawing at the gate. She stopped and reached a hand out to touch them. “Dogs are from Earth,” she said.

“Dogs are aufwurld,” I said. “Like us. Stabros are util.”

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

“Stabros can eat food that is aunwurld,” I said. “We can’t, dogs can’t. But we can eat stabros so they are between.”

“Are stabros from Earth?” Veronique asked.

I didn’t know, but Tuuvin did, which surprised me. “Stabros are from here,” he said. “Ayudesh explained where it all came from, remember? Util animals and plants were here but we could use them. Aunwurld animals and plants make us sick.”

“I know they make us sick,” I snapped. But I translated as best I could.

Veronique was looking at the dogs. “Do they bite?” she asked. Bite?

“You mean”—I clicked my teeth—“like eat? Sometimes. Mostly if they’re fighting.”

She took her hand back.

“I’ll get a puppy,” Tuuvin said, and swung a leg over the side of the pen and waded through the dogs. Tuuvin took care of the dogs a lot so he wasn’t afraid of them. I didn’t like them much. I liked stabros better.

“There’s a winter litter?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but it hasn’t been too cold, they might be okay. If it gets cold we can always eat ’em.”

The puppy looked like a little sausage with short arms and legs and a pink nose. Veronique cooed and took it from Tuuvin and cradled it in her arms. She talked to it, but she talked in a funny way, like baby talk, and I couldn’t understand anything she said. “What’s its name?” she asked.

“Its name?” I said.

“Do you name them?” she asked.

I looked at Tuuvin. Even Tuuvin should have been able to understand that, the first thing anybody learned in lingua was “What’s your name?” But he wasn’t paying any attention. I asked him if any of the dogs had names.

He nodded. “Some of them do. The dark male, he’s a lead dog, he’s called Bigman. And that one is Yellow Dog. The puppies don’t have names, though.”

“I think this one should have a name,” Veronique said, when I told her. “I think he’ll be a mighty hunter, so call him Hunter.”

I didn’t understand what hunting had to do with dogs, and I thought it was a bitch puppy anyway, but I didn’t want to embarrass her, so I told Tuuvin. I was afraid he would laugh but he didn’t.

“How do you say that in English?” he asked. “ ‘Hunter’ ? Okay, I’ll remember.” He smiled at Veronique and touched the puppy’s nose. “Hunter,” he said. The puppy licked him with a tiny pink tongue.

Veronique smiled back. And I didn’t like it.

Veronique went to find her teacher. I went down to the distillery to tell Mam why I wasn’t there helping. Tuuvin followed me down the hill. The distillery stank so it was down below Sckarline in the trees, just above the fields.

He caught me by the waist and I hung there so he could brush his lips across my hair.

“It’s too cold out here,” I said and broke out of his arms.

“Let’s go in the back,” he said.

“I’ve got to tell Mam,” I said.

“Once you tell your mam, there’ll be all these things to do and we won’t get any time together,” he said.

“I can’t,” I said, but I let him make up my mind for me.

We went around the side, tracking through the dry snow where no one much walked, through the lacy wintertrees to the door to the storage in the back. It was as cold in the back as it was outside, and it was dark. It smelled like mash and whisak and the faint charcoal smell of the charred insides of the kegs. Brass whisak, Sckarline whisak.

He boosted me on a stack of kegs and kissed me.

It wasn’t that I really cared so much about kissing. It was nice, but Tuuvin would have kissed and kissed for hours if I would let him and if we would ever find a place where we could be alone for hours. Tuuvin would kiss long after my face felt overused and bruised from kissing. But I just wanted to be with Tuuvin so much. I wanted to talk with him, and have him walk with me. I would let him kiss me if I could whisper to him. I liked the way he pressed against me now; he was warm and I was cold.

He kissed me with little kisses; kiss, kiss, kiss. I liked the little kisses. It was almost like he was talking to me in kisses. Then he kissed me hard, and searched around with his tongue. I never knew what to do with my tongue when he put his in my mouth, so I just kept mine still. I could feel the rough edge of the keg beneath my legs, and if I shifted my weight it rocked on the one below it. I turned my face sideways to get my nose out of the way and opened my eyes to look past Tuuvin. In the dark I could barely make out Uukraith’s eye burned on all the kegs, to keep them from going bad. Uukraith was the door witch. Uukraith’s sister Ina took souls from their mother and put them in seeds, put the seed in women to make babies. The kegs were all turned different directions, eyes looking everywhere. I closed mine again. Uukraith was also a virgin.

“Ohhhh, Heth! Eeeuuuu!”

I jumped, but Tuuvin didn’t, he just let go of my waist and stepped back and crossed his arms the way he did when he was uncomfortable. The air felt cold where he had just been warm.

My little sister, Bet, shook her butt at us. “Kissy, kissy, kissy,” she said. “Mam, Janna’s back in the kegs with Tuuvin!”

“Shut up, Bet,” I said. Not that she would stop.

“Slobber, slobber,” she said, like we were stabros trading cud. She danced around, still shaking her butt. She puckered up her lips and made wet, smacking noises.

“Fucking little bitch,” I said.

Tuuvin frowned at me. He liked Bet. She wasn’t his little sister.

“Mam,” Bet hollered, “Janna said ‘fucking’ !”

“Janna,” my mother called, “come here.”

I tried to think of what to do to Bet. I’d have liked to slap her silly. But she’d go crying to Mam and I’d really be in trouble. It was just that she thought she was so smart and she was really being so stupid.

Mam was on her high stool, tallying. My mam wore trousers most often, and she was tall and man-faced. Still and all, men liked her. I took after her so I was secretly glad that men watched her walk by, even if she never much noticed.

“Leave your little sister alone,” she said.

“Leave her alone!” I said. “She came and found me.”

“Don’t swear at her. You talk like an old man.” Mam was acting like a headman, her voice even and cool.

“If she hadn’t come looking—”

“If you had been working as you’re supposed to, she’d have had no one to look for, would she.”

“I went out to see the visitors,” I said. “There are two. An old man and a girl. I helped Da carry their things to the visitors’ house.”

“So that means it is okay to swear at your sister.”

It was the same words we always traded. The same arguments, all worn smooth and shining like the wood of a yoke. The brand for the kegs was heating in the fire and I could smell the tang of hot iron in the dung.

“You treat me like a child,” I said.

She didn’t even answer, but I knew what she would say, that I acted like a child. As if what Tuuvin and I were doing had anything to do with being a child.

I was so tired of it I thought I would burst.

“Go back to work,” Mam said, turning on her stool. Saying, ‘this talk is done’ with her shoulders and her eyes.

“It’s wrong to live this way,” I said.

She looked back at me.

“If we lived with the clans, Tuuvin and I could be together.”

That made her angry. “This is a better life than the clans,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go back to work.”

I didn’t say anything. I just hated her. She didn’t understand anything. She and my Da hadn’t waited until they were old. They hadn’t waited for anything, and they’d left their clan to come to Sckarline when it was new. I stood in front of her, making her feel me standing there, all hot and silent.

“Janna,” she said, “I’ll not put up with your sullenness—” It made her furious when I didn’t talk.

So she slapped me, and then I ran out, crying, past Bet who was delighted, and past Tuuvin, who had his mouth open and a stupid look on his face. And I wished they would all disappear.

Veronique sat with Tuuvin and me at dinner in the guesthouse. The guesthouse was full of smoke. We all sat down on the floor with felt and blankets. I looked to see what Veronique would be sitting on and it was wonderful. It was dark, dark blue and clean on the outside, and inside it was red-and-black squares. I touched it. It had a long metal fastener, a cunning thing that locked teeth together, that Veronique had unfastened so she could sit on the soft red-and-black inside. Dark on the outside, red on the inside; it was as if it represented some strange offworld beast. My felt blanket was red but it was old and the edges were gray with dirt. Offworlders were so clean, as if they were always new.

Ayudesh was with the old man who had come with Veronique. Wanji was there, but she was being quiet and by herself, the way Wanji did.

Tuuvin had brought the puppy into the guesthouse. “She asked me to,” he said when I asked him what he was doing.

“She did not,” I said. “People are watching a dog in this house. Besides, you don’t understand her when she talks.”

“I do too,” he said. “I was in school too.”

I rolled my eyes. He was when he was little but he left as soon as he was old enough to hunt. Men always left as soon as they were old enough to hunt. And he hated it anyway.

Veronique squealed when she saw the puppy and took it from Tuuvin as if it were a baby. Everyone watched out of the corner of their eyes. Ayudesh thought it was funny. We were all supposed to be equal in Sckarline, but Ayudesh was really like a headman.

She put the puppy on her offworld blanket and it rolled over on its back, showing her its tan belly. It would probably pee on her blanket.

My da leaned over. “I hope it isn’t dinner.” My da hated dog.

“No,” I said. “She just likes it.”

My dad said to her, “Hie.” Then to me he said, “What is she called?”

“Veronique,” I said.

“Veronique,” he said. Then he pointed to himself. “Guwk.”

“Hello, Guwk,” Veronique said.

“Hello, Veronique,” said my da, which surprised me because I had never heard him say anything in English before. “Ask her for her cup,” he said to me.

She had one; bright yellow and smooth. But my da handled it matter-of-factly, as if he handled beautiful things every day. He had a skin and he poured whisak into her cup. “My wife”—he waved at Mam—“she makes whisak for Sckarline.”

I tried to translate but I didn’t know what whisak was in English.

Veronique took the cup. My da held his hand up for her to wait and poured himself a cup. He tossed it back. Then he nodded at her for her to try.

She took a big swallow. She hadn’t expected the burn, you could see. She choked and her face got red. Tuuvin patted her on the back while she coughed. “Oh my God,” she said. “That’s strong!” I didn’t think I needed to translate that.

ii

The sound of the guns is like the cracking of whips. Like the snapping of bones. The outrunners for the Scathalos High-on came into Sckarline with a great deal of racket; brass clattering, the men singing and firing their guns into the air. It started the dogs barking and scared our stabros and brought everyone outside.

Scathalos dyed the toes and ridgeline manes of their stabros kracken yellow. They hung brass clappers in the harnesses of their caravan animals and bits of milky blue glass from the harnesses of their dogs. On this sunny day everything winked. Only their milking does were plain, and that’s only because even the will of a hunter can’t make a doe stabros tractable.

Veronique came out with me. “Who are they?” she asked.

Even after just three days I could understand Veronique a lot better. “They are from a great clan, Scathalos,” I said. “They come to buy whisak.” We hoped they would buy it. Sometimes, when Scathalos outrunners came, they just took it.

“They’re another clan?” she asked. “Where are the women?”

“They’re outrunners,” I said. “They go out and hunt and trade. Outrunners are not-married men.”

“They have a lot of guns,” she said.

They had more guns than I had ever seen. Usually when outrunners came they had one or two guns. Guns are hard to get. But it looked as if almost every outrunner had a gun.

“Does Sckarline have guns?” Veronique asked.

“No,” I said.

“They’re not appropriate, right?”

A lot of people said we should have guns, whether Ayudesh and Wanji thought they were appropriate or not. They had to buy the clips that go with them. Ayudesh said that the offworlders used the need of the clips to control the clans. He said that it wasn’t appropriate because we couldn’t maintain it ourselves.

My da said that maybe some things we should buy. We bought things from other clans, that was trade. Maybe guns were trade too.

The dogs nipped at the doe stabros, turning them, making them stop until outrunners could slip hobbles on them. The stabros looked pretty good. They were mostly dun, and the males were heavy in the shoulders, with heads set low and forward on their necks. Better than most of our animals. The long hairs on their ears were braided with red and yellow threads. Handlers unhooked the sleds from the pack stabros.

Two of them found the skimmer tracks beyond the schoolhouse. They stopped and looked around. They saw Veronique. Then another stared at her, measuring her.

“Come with me,” I said.

Our dogs barked and their dogs barked. The outrunner men talked loudly. Sckarline people stood at the doors of their houses and didn’t talk at all.

“What’s wrong?” Veronique asked.

“Come help my mam and me.” She would be under the gaze of them in the distillery too, but I suspected she would be under their gaze anywhere. And this way Mam would be there.

“Scathalos come here for whisak,” I said to my mam, even though she could see for herself. Mam was at the door, shading her eyes and watching them settle in. Someone should have been telling them we had people in the guesthouse and offering to put their animals up, but no one was moving.

“Tuuvin is in back,” Mam said, pointing with her chin. “Go back and help him.”

Tuuvin was hiding the oldest whisak, what was left of the three-year-old brass whisak. Scathalos had come for whisak two years ago and taken what they wanted and left us almost nothing but lame stabros. They said it was because we had favored Toolie Clan in trade. The only reason we had any three-year-old whisak left was because they couldn’t tell what was what.

So my da and some of the men had dug a cellar in the distillery. Tuuvin was standing in the cellar, taking kegs he had stacked at the edge and pulling them down. It wasn’t very deep, not much over his chest, but the kegs were heavy. I started stacking more for him to hide.

I wondered what the outrunners would do if they caught us at our work. I wondered if Tuuvin was thinking the same thing. We’d hidden some down there in the spring before the stabros went up to summer grazing but then we’d taken some of the oldest kegs to drink when the stabros came back down in the fall.

“Hurry,” Tuuvin said softly.

My hands were slick. Veronique started taking kegs too. She couldn’t lift them, so she rolled them on their edge. Her hands were soft and pretty, not used to rough kegs. It seemed like it took a long time. Tuuvin’s hands were rough and red. I’d never thought about how hard his hands were. Mine were like his, all red. My hands were ugly compared to Veronique’s. Surely he was noticing that too, since every time Veronique rolled a keg over her hands were right there.

And then the last keg was on the edge. Uukraith’s eye looked at me, strangely unaffected. Or maybe amused. Or maybe angry. Da said that spirits do not feel the way we feel. The teachers never said anything at all about spirits, which was how we knew that they didn’t listen to them. There was not much space in the cellar, just enough for Tuuvin to stand and maybe a little more.

Tuuvin put his hands on the edge and boosted himself out of the cellar. In front of the store we heard the crack of the door on its hinges and we all three jumped.

Tuuvin slid the wooden cover over the hole in the floor. “Move those,” he said, pointing at empty kegs.

I didn’t hear voices.

“Are you done yet?” Mam said, startling us again.

“Are they here?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.” She didn’t seem afraid. I had seen my mam afraid, but not very often. “What is she doing here?” Mam asked, looking at Veronique.

“I thought she should be here, I mean, I was afraid to leave her by herself.”

“She’s not a child,” Mam said. But she said it mildly, so I knew she didn’t really mind. Then Mam helped us stack kegs. We all tried to be quiet but they thumped like hollow drums. They filled the space around us with noise. It seemed to me that the outrunners could hear us thumping away from outside. I kept looking at Mam, who was stacking kegs as if we hid whisak all the time. Tuuvin was nervous too. His shoulders were tense. I almost said to him, “you’re up around the ears, boy,” the way the hunters did, but right now I didn’t think it would make him smile.

Mam scuffed the dirt around the kegs.

“Will they find them?” I asked.

Mam shrugged. “We’ll see.”

There was a lot to do to get ready for the outrunners besides hiding the best whisak. Mam had us count the kegs, even Veronique. Then when we all three finally agreed on a number she wrote it in her tally book. “So we know how much we sell,” she said.

We were just finishing counting when outrunners came with Ayudesh. They came into the front. First the wind like a wild dog sliding around the door and making the fires all sway. Then Ayudesh and then the outrunners. The outrunners looked short compared to Ayudesh. And they looked even harder than we did. Their cheeks were winter red. Their felts were all dark with dirt, like they’d been out for a long time.

“Hie,” said one of the men, seeing my mother. They all grinned. People always seemed surprised that they were going to trade with my mam. The outrunners already smelled of whisak, so people had finally made them welcome. Or maybe someone had the sense to realize that if they gave them drink we’d have time to get things ready. Maybe my da.

My mam stood as she always did, with her arms crossed, tall as any of them. Waiting them out.

“What’s this,” said the man, looking around. “Eh? What’s this? It stinks in here.” The distillery always stank.

They walked around, looked at the kegs, poked at the copper tubing and the still. One stuck his finger under the drip and tasted the raw stuff and grimaced. Ayudesh looked uncomfortable, but the teachers always said that the distillery was ours and they didn’t interfere with how we ran it. Mam was in charge here.

Mam just stood and let them walk all around her. She didn’t turn her head to watch them.

They picked up the brand. “What’s this?” the man said again.

“We mark all our kegs with the eye of Uukraith,” Mam said.

“Woman’s work,” he said.

He stopped and looked at Veronique. He studied her for a moment, then frowned. “You’re no boy,” he said.

Veronique looked at me, the whites of her eyes bright even in the dimness, but she didn’t say anything.

He grinned and laughed. The other two outrunners crowded close to her and fingered the slick fabric of her sleeve, touched her hair. Veronique pulled away.

The first outrunner got bored and walked around the room some more.

He tapped a keg. Not like Mam thumped them, listening, but just as if everything here were his. He had dirty brown hair on the backs of his hands. Everywhere I looked I was seeing people’s hands. I didn’t like the way he put his hands on things.

Then he pointed to a keg, not the one he was tapping on but a different one, and one of the other men picked it up. “Is it good?” he asked.

My mam shrugged.

He didn’t like that. He took two steps forward and hit her across the face. I looked at the black-packed dirt floor.

Ayudesh made a noise.

“It’s good,” my mam said. I looked up and she had a red mark on the side of her face. Ayudesh looked as if he would speak but he didn’t.

The outrunner grabbed her braid—she flinched as he reached past her face—and yanked her head. “It’s good, woman?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice coming almost airless, like she could not breathe.

He yanked her down to her knees. Then he let go and they all went out with the keg.

Ayudesh said, “Are you all right?” Mam stood back up again and touched her braid, then flipped it back over her neck. She didn’t look at any of us.

People were in the schoolhouse. Ayudesh sat on the table at the front and people were sitting on the floor talking as if it were a meeting. Veronique’s teacher was sitting next to Ayudesh and Veronique started as if she were going to go sit with him. Then she looked around and sat down with Mam and Tuuvin and me.

“So we should just let them take whatever they want?” Harup said. He wasn’t clowning now, but talking as a senior hunter. He sat on his heels, the way hunters do when they’re waiting.

Ayudesh said, “Even if we could get guns, they’re used to fighting and we aren’t. What do you think would happen?”

Veronique was very quiet. She sat down between Tuuvin and me.

“If we don’t stand up for ourselves, what will happen?” Harup said.

“If you provoke them they’ll destroy us,” Ayudesh said.

“Teacher,” Harup said, spreading his hands as if he were telling a story. “Stabros are not hunting animals, eh. They are not sharp toothed like haunds or dogs. Haunds are hunters, packs of hunters, who do nothing but hunt stabros. There are more stabros than all the haunds could eat, eh. So how do they choose? They don’t kill the buck stabros with their hard toes and heads, they take the young, the old, the sick, the helpless. We do not want to be haunds, teacher. We just want the haunds to go elsewhere for easy prey.”

Wanji came in behind us, and the fire in the boxstove ducked and jumped in the draft. Wanji didn’t sit down on the table, but as was her custom, lowered herself to the floor. “Old hips,” she muttered as if everyone in the room weren’t watching her. “Old women have old hips.”

When I thought of Kalky, the old woman who makes the souls of everything, I thought of her as looking like Wanji. Wanji had a little face and a big nose and deep lines down from her nose to her chin. “What happened to you, daughter?” she asked my mam.

“The outrunners came to the distillery to take a keg,” Mam said.

I noticed that now the meeting had turned around, away from Ayudesh on the table toward us in the back. Wanji always said that Ayudesh was vain and liked to sit high. Sometimes she called him “High-on.” “And so,” Wanji said.

My mother’s face was still red from the blow, but it hadn’t yet purpled. “I don’t think the outrunners like to do business with me,” Mam said.

“One of them hit her,” I said, because Mam wasn’t going to. Mam never talked about it when my da hit her, either. Although he didn’t do it as much as he used to when I was Bet’s age.

Mam looked at me, but I couldn’t tell if she was angry with me or not.

Harup spread his hands to say, “See?”

Wanji clucked.

“We got the three-year-old whisak in the cellar,” Mam said.

I was looking but I didn’t see my da.

“What are they saying?” Veronique asked.

“They are talking,” I said, and had to think how to say it, “about what we do, but they, eh, not, do not know? Do not know what is right. Harup want guns. Wants guns. Ayudesh says guns are bad.”

“Wanji,” Tuuvin whispered, “Wanji, she ask—eh,” and then in our own tongue, “tell her she was asking your mam what happened.”

“Wanji ask my mother what is the matter,” I said.

Veronique looked at Tuuvin and then at me.

“Guns are bad,” Veronique said.

Tuuvin scowled. “She doesn’t understand,” he said.

“What?” Veronique said, but I just shook my head rather than tell her what Tuuvin had said.

Some of the men were talking about guns. Wanji was listening without saying anything, resting her chin on her head. Sometimes it seemed like Wanji didn’t even blink, that she just turned into stone and you didn’t know what she was thinking.

Some of the other men were talking to Ayudesh about the whisak. Harup’s wife, Yet, got up and put water on the boxstove for the men to drink and Big Sherep went out the men’s door in the back of the schoolhouse, which meant he was going to get whisak or beer.

“Nothing will get done now,” Tuuvin said, disgusted. “Let’s go.”

He stood up and Veronique looked up at him, then scrambled to her feet.

“Now they talk, talk, talk,” I said in English. “Nothing to say, just talk, you know?”

Outside there were outrunners. It seemed as if they were everywhere, even though there were really not that many of them. They watched Veronique.

Tuuvin scowled at them and I looked at their guns. Long black guns slung over their backs. I had never seen a gun close. And there was my da, standing with three outrunners, holding a gun in his hands as if it were a fishing spear, admiring it. He was nodding and grinning, the way he did when someone told a good hunting story. Of course, he didn’t know that one of these people had hit Mam.

Still, it made me mad that he was being friendly.

“We should go somewhere,” Tuuvin said.

“The distillery?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “they’ll go back there.” And he looked at Veronique. Having Veronique around was like having Bet, you always had to be thinking about her. “Take her to your house.”

“And do what?” I asked. A little angry at him because now he had decided he wasn’t going back with us.

“I don’t know, teach her to sew or something,” he said. He turned and walked across to where my dad was standing.

The outrunners took two more kegs of whisak and got loud. They stuck torches in the snow, so the dog’s harnesses were all glittering and winking, and we gave them a stabros to slaughter and they roasted that. Some of the Sckarline men like my da—and even Harup—sat with them and drank and talked and sang. I didn’t understand why Harup was there, but there he was, laughing and telling stories about the time my da got dumped out of the boat fishing.

Ayudesh was there, just listening. Veronique’s grandfather was out there too, even though he couldn’t understand what they were saying.

“When will they go?” Veronique asked.

I shrugged.

She asked something I didn’t understand.

“When you trade,” she said, “trade?”

“Trade,” I said, “trade whisak, yes?”

“Yes,” she said. “When you trade whisak, men come? Are you afraid when you trade whisak?”

“Afraid?” I asked. “When Scathalos come, yes.”

“When other people come, are you afraid?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Just Scathalos.”

She sat on my furs. My mam was on the bed and Bet had gone to sleep. Mam watched us talk, sitting cross-legged and mending Bet’s boots. She didn’t understand any English. It felt wrong to talk when Mam didn’t understand, but Veronique couldn’t understand when I talked to Mam, either.

“I have to go back to my hut,” Veronique said. “Ian will come back and he’ll worry about me.”

Outside the air was so cold and dry that the inside of our noses felt it.

“Don’t you get tired of being cold?” Veronique asked.

The cold made people tired, I thought, yes. That was why people slept so much during winterdark. I didn’t always know what to say when Veronique talked about the weather.

“We tell your teacher, you sleep in our house, yes?” I offered.

“Who?” she said. “You mean Ian? He isn’t really my teacher like you mean it. He’s my professor.”

I tried to think of what a professor might be, maybe the person who took you when your father died? It always seemed English didn’t have enough words for different relatives, but now here was one I didn’t know.

The outrunners and the Sckarline hunters were singing about Fhidrhin the hunter and I looked up to see if I could make out the stars that formed him, but the sky had drifting clouds and I couldn’t find the stars.

I couldn’t see well enough, the light from the bonfire made everyone else just shadows. I took Veronique’s hand and started around the outside of the circle of singers, looking for Ayudesh and Veronique’s teacher or whatever he was. Faces glanced up, spirit faces in the firelight. The smoke blew our way and then shifted, and I smelled the sweat smell that came from the men’s clothes as they warmed by the fire. And whisak, of course. The stabros was mostly bones.

“Janna,” said my da. His face was strange too, not human, like a mask. His eyes looked unnaturally light. “Go on back to your mother.”

“Veronique needs to tell the offworlder that she’s staying with us.”

“Go on back to the house,” he said again. I could smell whisak on him too. Whisak sometimes made him mean. My da used to drink a lot of whisak when I was young, but since Bet was born he didn’t drink it very often at all. He said the mornings were too hard when you got old.

I didn’t know what to do. If I kept looking for Veronique’s grandfather and he got angry he would probably hit me. I nodded and backed away, pulling Veronique with me, then when he stopped watching me, I started around the fire the other way.

One of the outrunners stumbled up and into us before we could get out of the way. “Eh—?”

I pulled Veronique away but he gripped her arm. “Boy?”

His breath in her face made her close her eyes and turn her head.

“No boy,” he said. He was drunk, probably going to relieve himself. “No boy, outsider girl, pretty as a boy,” he said. “Outsider, they like that? Eh?”

Veronique gripped my hand. “Let go,” she said in English.

He didn’t have to speak English to see she was afraid of him.

“I’m not pretty enough for you?” he said. “Eh? Not pretty enough?” He wasn’t pretty, he was wiry and had teeth missing on one side of his mouth. “Not Sckarline? With their pretty houses like offworlders? Not pretty, eh?”

Veronique drew a breath like a sob.

“Let go of her, please,” I said, “we have to find her teacher.”

“Look at the color of her,” he said, “does that wash off? Eh?”

“Do you know where her teacher is?” I asked.

“Shut up, girl,” he said to me. He licked his thumb and reached toward her face. Veronique raised her hand and drew back, and he twisted her arm. “Stand still.” He rubbed her cheek with his thumb and peered closely at her.

“Damn,” he said, pleased. “How come the old man isn’t dark?”

“Maybe they are different clans,” I said.

He stared at her as if weighing what I’d said. As if thinking. Although he actually looked too drunk to do much thinking. Then he leaned forward and tried to kiss her.

Veronique pushed him away with her free arm. He staggered and fell, pulling her down too.

“Let go!” she shrieked.

Shut up, I thought, shut up, shut up! Give in, he’s too drunk to do much. I tried to pull his arm off, but his grip was too strong.

“What’s this?” another outrunner was saying.

“Fohlder’s found some girl.”

“It would be fucking Fohlder!”

Veronique slapped at him and struggled, trying to get away.

“Hey now,” Ayudesh was saying, “hey now, she’s a guest, an offworlder.” But nobody was paying attention. Everybody was watching the outrunner wrestle with her. He pinned her with her arms over her head and kissed her.

Veronique was crying and slapping. Stop it, I kept thinking, just stop it, or he won’t let you alone.

Her grandfather tried to pull the outrunner off. I hadn’t even seen him come up. “No no no no no,” he was saying as if scolding someone. “No no no no no—”

“Get off him,” another outrunner hauled him away.

Ayudesh said, “Stop! She is our guest!”

“She’s yours, eh?” someone said.

“No,” Ayudesh said, “she should be left alone. She’s a guest.”

“Your guest, right. Not interested in the likes of us.”

Someone else grunted and laughed.

“She likes Sckarline better, eh?”

“That’s because she doesn’t know better.”

“Fohlder’ll show her.”

You all stink like drunks, I wanted to scream at them, because they did.

“Think she’s dark inside like she is outside?”

“Have to wait until morning to see.”

Oh, my da would be so mad at me, the stupid bitch, why didn’t she stop, he was drunk, he was drunk, why had she slapped at him, stupider than Bet, she was as stupid as Bet my little sister, I was supposed to be taking care of her, I was supposed to be watching out for her, my da would be so mad—

There was the bone crack of gunfire and everybody stopped.

Harup was standing next to the fire with an outrunner gun pointed up, as if he were shooting at Fhidrhin up there in the stars. His expression was mild and he was studying the gun as if he hadn’t even noticed what was going on.

“Hey,” an outrunner said, “put that down!”

Harup looked around at the outrunners, at us. He looked slowly. He didn’t look like he usually did, he didn’t look funny or angry, he looked as if he were out on a boat in the ice. Calm, far away. Cold as the stars. He could kill someone.

The outrunners felt it too. They didn’t move. If he shot one of them, the others would kill him, but the one he shot would still be dead. No one wanted to be the one that might be dead.

“It’s a nice piece,” Harup said, “but if you used it for hunting you’d soon be so deaf you couldn’t hear anything moving.” Then he grinned.

Someone laughed.

Everybody laughed.

“Janna,” Harup said, “take your friend and get us more whisak.”

“Fohlder, you old walking dick, get up from that girl.” One of them reached down and pulled him off. He looked mad.

“What,” he said, “what.”

“Go take a piss,” the outrunner said.

Everyone laughed.

iii

Veronique stayed with me that night, lying next to me in my blankets and furs. She didn’t sleep. I don’t think. I was listening to her breathe. I felt as if I should help her sleep. I lay there and tried to think if I should put my arm around her, but I didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t want to be touched.

And she had been a stupid girl, anyway.

She lay tense in the dark. “Are you going to be a teacher?” I asked.

She laughed. “If I get out of here.”

I waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. “Get out of here” meant to make someone leave. Maybe she meant if she made herself.

“You come here from Earth?” I asked. To get her to talk, although I was tired of lingua and I didn’t really want to think about anything.

“My family came here from Earth,” she said.

“Why?”

“My father, he’s an anthropologist,” she said. “Do you know ‘anthropologist’ ?”

“No,” I said.

“He is a person who studies the way people live. And he is a teacher.”

All the offworlders I had ever met were teachers. I wondered who did all the work on Earth.

“Because Earth lost touch with your world, the people here are very interesting to my father,” she said. Her voice was listless in the dark and she was even harder to understand when I couldn’t see her properly. I didn’t understand, so I didn’t say anything. I was sorry I’d started her talking.

“History, do you know the word ‘history’ ?” she asked.

Of course I knew the word history. “I study history in school,” I said. Anneal and Kumar taught it.

“Do you know the history of this world?”

It took my tired head a long time to sort that out. “Yes,” I said. “We are a colony. People from Earth come here to live. Then there is a big problem on Earth, and the people of Earth forget we are here. We forget we are from Earth. Then Earth finds us again.”

“Some people have stories about coming from Earth,” Veronique said. “My father is collecting those stories from different peoples. I’m a graduate student.”

The clans didn’t have any stories about coming from Earth. We said the first people came out of the sun. This somehow seemed embarrassing. I didn’t understand what kind of student she was.

“Are you here for stories?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Ian is old friends with your teacher, from back when they were both with the survey. We just came to visit.”

I didn’t understand what she’d said except that they were visiting.

We were quiet after that. I pretended to sleep. Sometimes there was gunfire outside and we jumped, even Mam on the bed. Everyone but Bet. Once Bet was asleep it was impossible to wake her up.

I fell asleep thinking about how I wished that the Scathalos outrunners were gone. I dreamed that I was at the offworlders’ home, where it was summer but no one was taking care of the stabros, and I said I could take care of the stabros, and they were all glad, and so I was a hero—and I was startled awake by gunfire.

Just more drinking and shooting.

I wished my da would come home. It didn’t seem fair that we should lie there and be afraid while the men were getting drunk and singing.

The outrunners stayed the next day, taking three more kegs of whisak but not talking about trade. The following day they sent out hunters but didn’t find their own meat and so took another stabros, the gelding I’d shown to Veronique. And more whisak.

I went down to the distillery after they took more whisak. It was already getting dark. The dark comes so early at this time of year. The door was left open and the fire was out. Mam wasn’t coming anymore. There was no work being done. Kegs had been taken down and some had been opened and left open. Some had been spilled. They had started on the green stuff, not knowing what was what and had thrown most of it in the snow, probably thinking it was bad. Branded eyes on the kegs looked everywhere.

I thought maybe they wouldn’t leave until all the whisak was gone. For one wild moment I thought about taking an ax to the kegs. Give them no reason to stay.

Instead I listened to them singing, their voices far away. I didn’t want to walk back toward the voices, but I didn’t want to be outside in the dark, either. I walked until I could see the big fire they had going, and smell the stabros roasting. Then I stood for a while, because I didn’t want to cross the light more than I wanted to go home. Maybe someone was holding me back, maybe my spirit knew something.

I looked for my father. I saw Harup on the other side of the fire. His face was in the light. He wasn’t singing, he was just watching. I saw Gerdor, my little uncle, my father’s half brother. I did not see my father anywhere.

Then I saw him. His back was to me. He was just a black outline against the fire. He had his hands open wide, as if he was explaining. He had his empty hands open. Harup was watching my father explaining something to some of the outrunners and something was wrong.

One of the outrunners turned his head and spat.

My father, I couldn’t hear his voice, but I could see his body, his shoulders moving as he explained. His shoulders working, working hard as if he were swimming. Such hard work, this talking with his hands open, talking, talking.

The outrunner took two steps, bent down and pulled his rifle into the light. It was a dark thing there, a long thing against the light of the fire. My father took a step back and his hands came up, pushing something back.

And then the outrunner shot my father.

All the singing stopped. The fire cracked and the sparks rose like stars while my father struggled in the snow. He struggled hard, fighting and scraping back through the snow. Elbow-walking backward. The outrunner was looking down the long barrel of the rifle.

Get up, I thought. Get up. For a long time it seemed I thought, Get up, get up. Da, get up! But no sound came out of my mouth and there was black on the snow in the trampled trail my father left.

The outrunner shot again.

My father flopped into the snow and I could see the light on his face as he looked up. Then he stopped.

Harup watched. No one moved except the outrunner who put his rifle away.

I could feel the red meat, the hammering muscle in my chest. I could feel it squeezing, squeezing. Heat flowed in my face. In my hands.

Outrunners shouted at outrunners. “You shit,” one shouted at the one who shot my father. “You drunken, stupid shit!” The one who shot my father shrugged at first, as if he didn’t care, and then he became angry too, shouting.

My breath was in my chest, so full. If I breathed out loud the outrunners would hear me out here. I tried to take small breaths, could not get enough air. I did not remember when I had been holding my breath.

Harup and the hunters of Sckarline sat, like prey, hiding in their stillness. The arguing went on and on, until it wasn’t about my father at all and his body was forgotten in the dirty snow. They argued about who was stupid and who had the High-on’s favor. The whisak was talking.

I could think of nothing but air.

I went back through the dark, out of Sckarline, and crept around behind the houses, in the dark and cold until I could come to our house without going past the fire. I took great shuddering breaths of cold air, breathed out great gouts of fog.

My mother was trying to get Bet quiet when I came in. “No,” she was saying, “stop it now, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”

“Mam,” I said, and I started to cry.

“What?” she said. “Janna, your face is all red.” She was my mam, with her face turned toward me, and I had never seen her face so clearly.

“They’re going to kill all of us,” I said. “They killed Da with a rifle.”

She never said a word but just ran out and left me there. Bet started to cry although she didn’t really know what I was crying about. Just that she should be scared. Veronique was still. As still as Harup and all the hunters.

Wanji came and got me and brought me to Ayudesh’s house because our house is small and Ayudesh’s house had enough room for some people. Snow was caked in the creases of my father’s pants. It was in his hands too, unmelted. I had seen dead people before, and my father looked like all of them. Not like himself at all.

My mother had followed him as far as the living can go, or at least as someone untrained in spirit journeys, and she was not herself. She was sitting on the floor next to his body, rocking back and forth with her arms crossed in her lap. I had seen women like that before, but not my mother. I didn’t want to look. It seemed indecent. Worse than the body of my father, since my father wasn’t there at all.

Bet was screaming. Her face was red from the effort. I held her even though she was heavy and she kept arching away from me like a toddler in a tantrum. “Mam! Mam!” she kept screaming.

People came in and squatted down next to the body for a while. People talked about guns. It was important that I take care of Bet so I did, until finally she wore herself out from crying and fell asleep. I held her on my lap until the blood was out of my legs and I couldn’t feel the floor and then Wanji brought me a blanket and I wrapped Bet in it and let her sleep.

Wanji beckoned me to follow. I could barely stand, my legs had so little feeling. I held the wall and looked around, at my mother sitting next to the vacant body, at my sister, who though asleep was still alive. Then I tottered after Wanji as if I were the old woman.

“Where is the girl?” Wanji said.

“Asleep,” I said. “On the floor.”

“No, the girl,” Wanji said, irritated. “Ian’s girl. From the university.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You’re supposed to be watching her. Didn’t Ayudesh tell you to watch her?”

“You mean Veronique? She’s back at my house. In my bed.”

Wanji nodded and sucked on her teeth. “Okay,” she said. And then again to herself, “Okay.”

Wanji took me to her house, which was little and dark. She had a lamp shaped like a bird. It had been in her house as long as I could remember. It didn’t give very much light, but I had always liked it. We sat on the floor. Wanji’s floor was always piled high with rugs from her home and furs and blankets. It made it hard to walk but nice to sit. Wanji got cold and her bones hurt, so she always made a little nest when she sat down. She pulled a red-and-blue rug across her lap. “Sit, sit, sit,” she said.

I was cold, but there was a blanket to wrap around my shoulders and watch Wanji make hot tea. I couldn’t remember being alone with Wanji before. But everything was so strange it didn’t seem to make any difference and it was nice to have Wanji deciding what to do and me not having to do anything.

Wanji made tea over her little bird lamp. She handed me a cup and I sipped it. Tea was a strange drink. Wanji and Ayudesh liked it and hoarded it. It was too bitter to be very good, but it was warm and the smell of it was always special. I drank it and held it against me. I started to get warm. The blanket got warm from me and smelled faintly of Wanji, an old dry smell.

I was sleepy. It would have been nice to go to sleep right there in my little nest on Wanji’s floor.

“Girl,” Wanji said. “I must give you something. You must take care of Veronique.”

I didn’t want to take care of anybody. I wanted someone to take care of me. My eyes started to fill up and in a moment I was crying salt tears into my tea.

“No time for that, Janna,” Wanji said. Always sharp with us. Some people were afraid of Wanji. I was. But it felt good to cry, and I didn’t know how to stop it so I didn’t.

Wanji didn’t pay any attention. She was hunting through her house, checking in a chest, pulling up layers of rugs to peer in a corner. Was she going to give me a gun? I couldn’t think of anything else that would help very much right now, but I couldn’t imagine that Wanji owned a gun.

She came back with a dark blue plastic box not much bigger than the span of my spread hand. That was almost as astonishing as a gun. I wiped my nose on my sleeve. I was warm and tired. Would Wanji let me sleep right here on her floor?

Wanji opened the plastic box, but away from me so I couldn’t see inside it. She picked at it as if she were picking at a sewing kit, looking for something. I wanted to look in it but I was afraid that if I tried she’d snap at me.

She looked at me. “This is mine,” she said. “We both got one and we decided that if the people who settled Sckarline couldn’t have it, we wouldn’t either.”

I didn’t care about that. That was old talk. I wanted to know what it was.

Wanji wasn’t ready to tell me what it was. I had the feeling that Ayudesh didn’t know about this, and I was afraid she would talk herself out of it. She looked at it and thought. If I thought, I thought about my father being dead. I sipped tea and tried to think about being warm, about sleeping but that feeling had passed. I wondered where Tuuvin was.

I thought about my da and I started to cry again.

I thought that would really get Wanji angry so I tried to hide it, but she didn’t pay any attention at all. The shawl she wore over her head slipped halfway down so when I glanced up I could see where her hair parted and the line of pale skin. It looked so bare that I wanted it covered up again. It made me think of the snow in my father’s hands.

“It was a mistake,” Wanji said.

I thought she meant the box, and I felt a terrible disappointment that I wouldn’t get to see what was inside it.

“You understand what we were trying to do?” she asked me.

With the box? Not at all.

“What are the six precepts of development philosophy?” she asked.

I had to think. “One,” I said, “that economic development should be gradual. Two, that analyzing economic growth by the production of goods rather than the needs and capacities of people leads to displacement and increased poverty. Three, that economic development should come from the integrated development of rural areas with the traditional sector—”

“It’s just words,” she snapped at me.

I didn’t know what I had done wrong so I ducked my head and sniffed and waited for her to get angry because I couldn’t stop crying.

Instead she stroked my hair. “Oh, little girl. Oh, Janna. You are one of the bright ones. If you aren’t understanding it, then we really haven’t gotten it across, have we?” Her hand was nice on my hair, and it seemed so unlike Wanji that it scared me into stillness. “We were trying to help, you know,” she said. “We were trying to do good. We gave up our lives to come here. Do you realize?”

Did she mean that they were going to die? Ayudesh and Wanji?

“This,” she said, suddenly brisk. “This is for, what would you call them, runners. Foreign runners. It is to help them survive. I am going to give it to you so that you will help Veronique, understood?”

I nodded.

But she didn’t give it to me. She just sat holding the box, looking in it. She didn’t want to give it up. She didn’t feel it was appropriate.

She sighed again, a terrible sound. Out of the box she pulled shiny foil packets, dark blue, red, and yellow. They were the size of the palm of her hand. Her glasses were around her neck. She put them on like she did in the schoolroom, absent from the gesture. She studied the printing on the foil packets.

I loved foil. Plastic was beautiful, but foil, foil was something unimaginable. Tea came in foil packets. The strange foods that the teachers got off the skimmer came in foil.

My tea was cold.

“This one,” she said, “it is a kind of signal.” She looked over her glasses at me. “Listen to me, Janna. Your life will depend on this. When you have this, you can send a signal that the outsiders can hear. They can hear it all the way in Bashtoy. And after you send it, if you can wait in the same place, they will send someone out to get you and Veronique.”

“They can hear it in Bashtoy?” I said. I had never even met anyone other than Wanji and the teachers who had ever been to Bashtoy.

“They can pick it up on their instruments. You send it every day until someone comes.”

“How do I send it?”

She read the packet. “We have to set the signal, you and I. First we have to put it in you.”

I didn’t understand, but she was reading, so I waited.

“I’m going to put it in your ear,” she said. “From there it will migrate to your brain.”

“Will it hurt?” I asked.

“A little,” she said. “But it has its own way of taking pain away. Now, what should be the code?” She studied the packet. She pursed her lips.

A thing in my ear. I was afraid and I wanted to say no, but I was more afraid of Wanji so I didn’t.

“You can whistle, can’t you?” she asked.

I knew how to whistle, yes.

“Okay,” she said, “here it is. I’ll put this in your ear, and then we’ll wait for a while. Then when everything is ready we’ll set the code.”

She opened up the packet and inside was another packet and a little metal fork. She opened the inside packet and took out a tiny little disk, a soft thing almost like egg white or like a fish egg. She leaned forward and put it in my left ear. Then she pushed it in hard and I jerked.

“Hold still,” she said.

Something was moving and making noise in my ear and I couldn’t be still. I pulled away and shook my head. The noise in my ear was loud, a sort of rubbing, oozing sound. I couldn’t hear normal things out of my left ear. It was stopped up with whatever was making the oozing noise. Then it started to hurt. A little at first, then more and more.

I put my hand over my ear, pressing against the pain. Maybe it would eat through my ear? What would stop it from eating a hole in my head?

“Stop it,” I said to Wanji. “Make it stop!”

But she didn’t, she just sat there, watching.

The pain grew sharp, and then suddenly it stopped. The sound, the pain, everything.

I took my hand away. I was still deaf on the left side but it didn’t hurt.

“Did it stop?” Wanji asked.

I nodded.

“Do you feel dizzy? Sick?”

I didn’t.

Wanji picked up the next packet. It was blue. “While that one is working, we’ll do this one. Then the third one, which is easy. This one will make you faster when you are angry or scared. It will make time feel slower. There isn’t any code for it. Something in your body starts it.”

I didn’t have any idea what she was talking about.

“After it has happened, you’ll be tired. It uses up your energy.” She studied the back of the packet, then she scooted closer to me, so we were both sitting cross-legged with our knees touching. Wanji had hard, bony knees, even through the felt of her dress.

“Open your eye, very wide,” she said.

“Wait,” I said. “Is this going to hurt?”

“No,” she said.

I opened my eyes as wide as I could.

“Look down, but keep your eyes wide open,” she said.

I tried.

“No,” she said, irritated, “keep your eyes open.”

“They are open,” I said. I didn’t think she should treat me this way. My da had just died. She should be nice to me. I could hear her open the packet. I wanted to blink but I was afraid to. I did, because I couldn’t help it.

She leaned forward and spread my eye open with thumb and forefinger. Then she swiftly touched my eye.

I jerked back. There was something in my eye. I could feel it, up under my eyelid. It was very uncomfortable. I blinked and blinked and blinked. My eye filled up with tears, just the one eye, which was very very strange.

My eye socket started to ache. “It hurts,” I said.

“It won’t last long,” she said.

“You said it wouldn’t hurt!” I said, startled.

“I lied,” Wanji said, matter-of-fact.

It hurt more and more. I moaned. “You’re hateful,” I said.

“That’s true,” she said, unperturbed.

She picked up the third packet, the red one.

“No,” I said, “I won’t hurt! I won’t! You can’t do it!”

“Hush,” she said, “This one won’t hurt. I saved it until last on purpose.”

“You’re lying!” I scrambled away from her. The air was cold where the nest of rugs and blankets had been wrapped around me. My head ached. It just ached. And I still couldn’t hear anything out of my left ear.

“Look,” she said, “I will read you the lingua. It is a patch, nothing more. It says it will feel cold, but that is all. See, it is just a square of cloth that will rest on your neck. If it hurts you can take it off.”

I scrambled backward away from her.

“Janna,” she said. “Enough!” She was angry.

I was afraid of it, but I was still more afraid of Wanji. So I hunched down in front of her. I was so afraid that I sobbed while she peeled the back off the square and put it on me.

“See,” she said, still sharp with me, “it doesn’t hurt at all. Stop crying. Stop it. Enough is enough.” She waved her hands over her head in disgust. “You are hysterical.”

I held my hand over the patch. It didn’t hurt but it did feel cold. I scrunched up and wrapped myself in a rug and gave myself over to my misery. My head hurt and my ear still ached faintly and I was starting to feel dizzy.

“Lie down,” Wanji said. “Go on, lie down. I’ll wake you when we can set the signal.”

I made myself a nest in the mess of Wanji’s floor and piled a blanket and a rug on top of me. Maybe the dark made my head feel better, I didn’t know. But I fell asleep.

Wanji shook me awake. I hadn’t been asleep long, and my head still ached. She had the little metal fork from the ear packet, the yellow packet. It occurred to me that she might stick it in my ear.

I covered my ear with my hand. My head hurt enough. I wasn’t going to let Wanji stick a fork in my ear.

“Don’t scowl,” she said.

“My head hurts,” I said.

“Are you dizzy?” she asked.

I felt out of sorts, unbalanced, but not dizzy, not really.

“Shake your head,” Wanji said.

I shook my head. Still the same, but no worse. “Don’t stick that in my ear,” I said.

“What? I’m not going to stick this in your ear. It’s a musical fork. I’m going to make a sound with it and hold it to your ear. When I tell you to I want you to whistle something, okay?”

“Whistle what?” I said.

“Anything,” she said, “I don’t care. Whistle something for me now.”

I couldn’t think of anything to whistle. I couldn’t think of anything at all except that I wished Wanji would leave me alone and let me go back to sleep.

Wanji squatted there. Implacable old bitch.

I finally thought of something to whistle, a crazy dog song for children. I started whistling—

“That’s enough,” she said. “Now don’t say anything else, but when I nod my head you whistle that. Don’t say anything to me. If you do, it will ruin everything. Nod your head if you understand.”

I nodded.

She slapped the fork against her hand and I could see the long tines vibrating. She held it up to my ear, the one I couldn’t hear anything out of. She held it there, concentrating fiercely. Then she nodded.

I whistled.

“Okay,” she said. “Good. That is how you start it. Now whistle it again.”

I whistled.

Everything went dark and then suddenly my head got very hot. Then I could see again.

“Good,” Wanji said. “You just sent a signal.”

“Why did everything get dark?” I asked.

“All the light got used in the signal,” Wanji said. “It used all the light in your head so you couldn’t see.”

My head hurt even worse. Now besides my eye aching, my temples were pounding. I had a fever. I raised my hand and felt my hot cheek.

Wanji picked up the blue packet. “Now we have to figure out about the third one, the one that will let you hibernate.”

I didn’t want to learn about hibernating. “I feel sick,” I said.

“It’s probably too soon, anyway,” Wanji said. “Sleep for a while.”

I felt so awful I didn’t know if I could sleep. But Wanji brought me more tea and I drank that and lay down in my nest and presently I was dreaming.

iv

There was a sound of gunfire, far away, just a pop. And then more pop-pop-pop.

It startled me, although I had been hearing the outrunners’ guns at night since they got here. I woke with a fever and everything felt as if I were still dreaming. I was alone in Wanji’s house. The lamp was still lit but I didn’t know if it had been refilled or how long I had slept. During the long night of winterdark it is hard to know when you are. I got up, put out the lamp, and went outside.

Morning cold is worst when you are warm from sleep. The dry snow crunched in the dark. Nothing was moving except the dogs were barking, their voices coming at me from every way.

The outrunners were gone from the center of town, nothing there but the remains of their fire and the trampled slick places where they had walked. I slid a bit as I walked there. My head felt light and I concentrated on my walking because if I did not think about it I didn’t know what my feet would do. I had to pee.

Again I heard the pop-pop-pop. I could not tell where it was coming from because it echoed off the buildings around me. I could smell smoke and see the dull glow of fire above the trees. It was down from Sckarline, the fire. At first I thought they had gotten a really big fire going, and then I thought they had set fire to the distillery. I headed for home.

Veronique was asleep in a nest of blankets, including some of my parents’ blankets from their bed.

“They set fire to the distillery,” I said. I didn’t say it in English, but she sat up and rubbed her face.

“It’s cold,” she said.

I could not think of anything to respond.

She sat there, holding her head.

“Come,” I said, working into English. “We go see your teacher.” I pulled on her arm.

“Where is everybody?” she said.

“My father die, my mother is, um, waiting with the die.”

She frowned at me. I knew I hadn’t made any sense. I pulled on her again and she got up and stumbled around, putting on boots and jacket.

Outside I heard the pop-pop-pop again. This time I thought maybe it was closer.

“They’re shooting again?” she asked.

“They shoot my father,” I said.

“Oh God,” she said. She sat down on the blankets. “Oh God.”

I pulled on her arm.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Hurry,” I said. I made a pack of blankets. I found my ax and a few things and put them in the bundle, then slung it all over my shoulders. I didn’t know what we would do, but if they were shooting people we should run away. I had to pee really bad.

She did hurry, finally awake. When we went outside and the cold hit her she shuddered and shook off the last of the sleep. I saw the movement of her shoulders against the glow of the fire on the horizon, against the false dawn.

People were moving, clinging close to houses where they were invisible against the black wood, avoiding the open spaces. We stayed close to my house, waiting to see whose people were moving. Veronique held my arm. A dog came past the schoolhouse into the open area where the outrunners’ fire had been and stopped and sniffed—maybe the place where my father had died.

I drew Veronique back, along to the back of the house. The spirit door was closed and my father was dead. I crouched low and ran, holding her arm, until we were in the trees and then she slipped and fell and pulled me down too. We slid feet first in the snow, down the hill between the tree trunks, hidden in the pools of shadow under the trees. Then we were still, waiting.

I still felt feverish and nothing was real.

The snow under the trees was all powder. It dusted our leggings and clung in clumps in the wrinkles behind my knees.

Nothing came after us that we could see. We got up and walked deeper into the trees and then uphill, away from the distillery but still skirting the village. I left her for a moment to pee, but she followed me and we squatted together. We should run, but I didn’t know where to run to and the settlement pulled at me. I circled around it as if on a tether, pulling in closer and closer as we got to the uphill part of town. Coming back around we hung in the trees beyond the field behind the schoolhouse. I could see the stabros pens and see light. The outrunners were in the stabros pens and the stabros were down. A couple of the men were dressing the carcasses.

We stumbled over Harup in the darkness. Literally fell over him in the bushes.

He was dead. His stomach was ripped by rifle fire and his eyes were open. I couldn’t tell in the darkness if he had dragged himself out here to die or if someone had thrown the body here. We were too close.

I started backing away. Veronique was stiff as a spooked stabros. She lifted her feet high out of the snow, coming down hard and loud. One of the dogs at the stabros pen heard us and started to bark. I could see it in the light, its ears up and its tail curled over its back. The others barked too, ears toward us in the dark. I stopped and Veronique stopped too. Men in the pen looked out in the dark. A couple of them picked up rifles, and cradling them in their arms walked out toward us from the light.

I backed up, slowly. Maybe they would find Harup’s body and think that the dogs were barking at that. But they were hunters and they would see the marks of our boots in the snow and follow us. If we ran they would hear us. I was not a hunter. I did not know what to do.

We backed up, one slow step and then another, while the outrunners walked out away from the light. They were not coming straight at us, but they were walking side by side and they would spread out and find us. I had my knife. There was cover around, mostly trees, but I didn’t know what I could do against a hunter with a rifle, and even if I could stop one the others would hear us.

There were shouts over by the houses.

The outrunners kept walking but the shouts did not stop, and then there was the pop of guns. That stopped one and then the other and they half-turned.

The dogs turned, barking, toward the shouts.

The outrunners started to jog toward the schoolhouse.

We walked backward in the dark.

There were flames over there, at the houses. I couldn’t tell whose house was on fire. It was downhill from the schoolhouse, which meant it might be our house. People were running in between the schoolhouse and Wanji’s house and the outrunners lifted their guns and fired. People, three of them, kept on running.

The outrunners fired again and again. One of the people stumbled but they all kept running. They were black shapes skimming on the field. The snow on the field was not deep because the wind blew it into the trees. Then one was in the trees. The outrunners fired again, but the other two made the trees as well.

There was a summer camp out this way, down by the river, for drying fish.

I pulled on Veronique’s arm and we picked our way through the trees.

There were people at the summer camp and we waited in the trees to make sure they were Sckarline people. It was gray, false dawn by the time we got there. I didn’t remember ever having seen the summer camp in the winter before. The drying racks were bare poles with a top covering of snow, and the lean-to was almost covered in drifted snow. There was no shelter here.

There were signs of three or four people in the trampled snow. I didn’t think it would be the outrunners down there because how would they even know where the summer camp was but I was not sure of anything. I didn’t know if I was thinking right or not.

Veronique leaned close to my ear and whispered so softly I could barely hear. “We have to go back.”

I shook my head.

“Ian is there.”

Ian. Ian. She meant her teacher.

She had a hood on her purple clothing and I pulled it back to whisper, “Not now. We wait here.” So close to the brown shell of her ear. Like soft dark leather. Not like a real people’s ear. She was shivering.

I didn’t feel too cold. I still had a fever—I felt as if everything were far from me, as if I walked half in this world. I sat and looked at the snow cupped in a brown leaf and my mind was empty and things did not seem too bad. I don’t know how long we sat.

Someone walked in the summer camp. I thought it was Sored, one of the boys.

I took Veronique’s arm and tugged her up. I was stiff from sitting and colder than I had noticed but moving helped. We slid down the hill into the summer camp.

The summer camp sat in a V that looked at the river frozen below. Sored was already out of the camp when we got there, but he waved at us from the trees and we scrambled back up there. Veronique slipped and used her hands.

There were two people crouched around a fire so tiny it was invisible and one of them was Tuuvin.

“Where is everyone else?” Sored asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. Tuuvin stood up.

“Where’s your mother and your sister?” he asked.

“I was at Wanji’s house all night,” I said. “Where’s your family?”

“My da and I were at the stabros pen this morning with Harup,” he said.

“We found Harup,” I said.

“Did you find my da?” he asked.

“No. Was he shot?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“We saw some people running across the field behind the schoolhouse.

Maybe one of them was shot.”

He looked down at Gerda, crouched by the fire. “None of us were shot.”

“Did you come together?”

“No,” Sored said. “I found Gerda here and Tuuvin here.”

He had gone down to see the fire at the distillery. The outrunners had taken some of the casks. He didn’t know how the fire had started, if it was an accident or if they’d done it on purpose. It would be easy to start if someone spilled something too close to the fire.

Veronique was crouched next to the tiny fire. “Janna,” she said, “has anyone seen Ian?”

“Did you see the offworlder teacher?” I asked.

No one had.

“We have to find him,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

“What are you going to do with her?” Sored asked, pointing at Veronique with his chin. “Is she ill?”

She crouched over the fire like someone who was sick.

“She’s not sick,” I said. “We need to see what is happening at Sckarline.”

“I’m not going back,” Gerda said, looking at no one. I did not know Gerda very well. She was old enough to have children but she had no one. She lived by herself. She had her nose slit by her clan for adultery but I never knew if she had a husband with her old clan or not. Some people came to Sckarline because they didn’t want to be part of their clan anymore. Most of them went back, but Gerda had stayed.

Tuuvin said, “I’ll go.”

Sored said he would stay in case anyone else came to the summer camp. In a day or two they were going to head toward the west and see if they could come across the winter pastures of Haufsdaag Clan. Sored had kin there.

“That’s pretty far,” Tuuvin said. “Toolie Clan would be closer.”

“You have kin with Toolie Clan,” Sored said.

Tuuvin nodded.

“We go to Sckarline,” I said to Veronique.

She stood up. “It’s so damn cold,” she said. Then she said something about wanting coffee. I didn’t understand a lot of what she said. Then she laughed and said she wished she could have breakfast.

Sored looked at me. I didn’t translate what she had said. He turned his back on her, but she didn’t notice.

It took us through the sunrise and beyond the short midwinter morning and into afternoon to get to Sckarline. The only good thing about winterdark is that it would be dark for the outrunners too.

Only hours of daylight.

Nothing was moving when we got back to Sckarline. From the back the schoolhouse looked all right, but the houses were all burned. I could see where my house had been. Charred logs standing in the red afternoon sun. The ground around them was wet and muddy from the heat of the fires.

Tuuvin’s house. Ayudesh’s house and Wanji’s house.

In front of the schoolhouse there were bodies. My da’s body, thrown back in the snow. My mam and my sister. My sister’s head was broken in. My mam didn’t have her pants on. The front of the schoolhouse had burned but the fire must have burned out before the whole building was gone. The dogs were moving among the bodies, sniffing, stopping to tug on the freezing flesh.

Tuuvin shouted at them to drive them off.

My mam’s hip bones were sharp under the bloody skin and her sex was there for everyone to see but I kept noticing her bare feet. The soles were dark. Her toenails were thick and her feet looked old, an old old woman’s feet. As if she were as old as Wanji.

I looked at people to see who else was there. I saw Wanji, although she had no face but I knew her from her skin. Veronique’s teacher was there, his face red and peeled from fire and his eyes baked white like a smoked fish. Ayudesh had no ears and no sex. His clothes had been taken.

The dogs were circling back, watching Tuuvin.

He screamed at them. Then he crouched down on his heels and covered his eyes with his arm and cried.

I did not feel anything. Not yet.

I whistled the tune that Wanji had taught me to send out the message, and the world went dark. It was something to do, and for a moment, I didn’t have to look at my mother’s bare feet.

The place for the Sckarline dead was up the hill beyond the town, away from the river, but without stabros I couldn’t think of how we could get all these bodies there. We didn’t have anything for the bodies, either. Nothing for the spirit journey, not even blankets to wrap them in.

I could not bear to think of my mother without pants. There were lots of dead women in the snow and many of them did have pants. It may not have been fair that my mother should have someone else’s but I could not think of anything else to do so I took the leggings off of Maitra and tried to put them on my mother. I could not really get them right—my mother was tall and her body was stiff from the cold and from death. I hated handling her.

Veronique asked me what I was doing but even if I knew enough English to answer, I was too embarrassed to really try to explain.

My mother’s flesh was white and odd to touch. Not like flesh at all. Like plastic. Soft looking but not to touch.

Tuuvin watched me without saying anything. I thought he might tell me not to, but he didn’t. Finally he said, “We can’t get them to the place for the dead.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“We don’t have anyone to talk to the spirits,” he said. “Only me.”

He was the man here. I didn’t know if Tuuvin had talked with spirits or not, people didn’t talk about that with women.

“I say that this place is a place of the dead too,” he said. His voice was strange. “Sckarline is a place of the dead now.”

“We leave them here?” I asked.

He nodded.

He was beardless, but he was a boy and he was old enough that he had walked through the spirit door. I was glad that he had made the decision.

I looked in houses for things for the dead to have with them, but most things were burned. I found things half-burned and sometimes not burned at all. I found a fur, and used that to wrap the woman whose leggings I had stolen. I tried to make sure that everybody got something—a bit of stitching or a cup or something, so they would not be completely without possessions. I managed to find something for almost everybody, and I found enough blankets to wrap Tuuvin’s family and Veronique’s teacher. I wrapped Bet with my mother. I kept blankets separate for Veronique, Tuuvin, and me and anything I found that we could use I didn’t give to the dead, but everything else I gave to them.

Tuuvin sat in the burned-out schoolhouse and I didn’t know if what he did was a spirit thing or if it was just grief, but I didn’t bother him. He kept the dogs away. Veronique followed me and picked through the blackened sticks of the houses. Both of us had black all over our gloves and our clothes and black marks on our faces.

We stopped when it got too dark, and then we made camp in the schoolhouse next to the dead. Normally I would not have been able to stay so close to the dead, but now I felt part of them.

Tuuvin had killed and skinned a dog and cooked that. Veronique cried while she ate. Not like Tuuvin had cried. Not sobs. Just helpless tears that ran down her face. As if she didn’t notice.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

Tuuvin said, “We will try for Toolie Clan.”

I didn’t have any idea where their winter pastures were, much less how to find them, and I almost asked Tuuvin if he did, but I didn’t want to shame his new manhood, so I didn’t.

“The skimmer will come back here,” Veronique said. “I have to wait here.”

“We can’t wait here,” Tuuvin said. “It is going to get darker, winter is coming and we’ll have no sun. We don’t have any animals. We can’t live here.”

I told her what Tuuvin said. “I have, in here”—I pointed to my head—“I call your people. Wanji give to me.”

Veronique didn’t understand and didn’t even really try.

I tried not to think about the dogs wandering among the dead. I tried not to think about bad weather. I tried not to think about my house or my mam. It did not leave much to think about.

Tuuvin had kin with Toolie Clan but I didn’t. Tuuvin was my clankin, though, even if he wasn’t a cousin or anything. I wondered if he would still want me after we got to Toolie Clan. Maybe there would be other girls. New girls, that he had never talked to before. They would be pretty, some of them.

My kin were Lagskold. I didn’t know where their pastures were, but someone would know. I could go to them if I didn’t like Toolie Clan. I had met a couple of my cousins when they came and brought my father’s half brother, my little uncle.

“Listen,” Tuuvin said, touching my arm.

I didn’t hear it at first, then I did.

“What?” Veronique said. “Are they coming back?”

“Hush,” Tuuvin snapped at her, and even though she didn’t understand the word she did.

It was a skimmer.

It was far away. Skimmers didn’t land at night. They didn’t even come at night. It had come to my message, I guessed.

Tuuvin got up, and Veronique scrambled to her feet and we all went out to the edge of the field behind the schoolhouse.

“You can hear it?” I asked Veronique.

She shook her head.

“Listen,” I said. I could hear it. Just a rumble. “The skimmer.”

“The skimmer?” she said. “The skimmer is coming? Oh God. Oh God. I wish we had lights for them. We need light, to signal them that someone is here.”

“Tell her to hush,” Tuuvin said.

“I send message,” I said. “They know someone is here.”

“We should move the fire.”

I could send them another message, but Wanji had said to do it one time a day until they came and they were here.

Dogs started barking.

Finally we saw lights from the skimmer, strange green and red stars. They moved against the sky as if they had been shaken loose.

Veronique stopped talking and stood still.

The lights came toward us for a long time. They got bigger and brighter, more than any star. It seemed as if they stopped but the lights kept getting brighter and I finally decided that they were coming straight toward us and it didn’t look as if they were moving but they were.

Then we could see the skimmer in its own lights.

It flew low over us and Veronique shouted, “I’m here! I’m here!”

I shouted, and Tuuvin shouted too, but the skimmer didn’t seem to hear us. But then it turned and slowly curved around, the sound of it going farther away and then just hanging in the air. It got to where it had been before and came back. This time it came even lower and it dropped red lights. One. Two. Three.

Then a third time it came around and I wondered what it would do now. But this time it landed, the sound of it so loud that I could feel it as well as hear it. It was a different skimmer from the one we always saw. It was bigger, with a belly like it was pregnant. It was white and red. It settled easily on the snow. Its engines, pointed down, melted snow underneath them.

And then it sat. Lights blinked. The red lights on the ground flickered. The dogs barked.

Veronique ran toward it.

The door opened and a man called out to watch something but I didn’t understand. Veronique stopped and from where I was she was a black shape against the lights of the skimmer.

Finally a man jumped down, and then two more men and two women and they ran to Veronique.

She gestured and the lights flickered in the movements of her arms until my eyes hurt and I looked away. I couldn’t see anything around us. The offworlders’ lights made me quite night-blind.

“Janna,” Veronique called. “Tuuvin!” She waved at us to come over. So we walked out of the dark into the relentless lights of the skimmer.

I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying in English. They asked me questions, but I just kept shaking my head. I was tired and now, finally, I wanted to cry.

“Janna,” Veronique said. “You called them. Did you call them?” I nodded.

“How?”

“Wanji give me . . . In my head . . .” I had no idea how to explain. I pointed to my ear.

One of the women came over, and handling my head as if I were a stabros, turned it so she could push my hair out of the way and look in my ear. I still couldn’t hear very well out of that ear. Her handling wasn’t rough, but it was not something people do to each other.

She was talking and nodding, but I didn’t try to understand. The English washed over us and around us.

One of the men brought us something hot and bitter and sweet to drink. The drink was in blue plastic cups, the same color as the jackets that they all wore except for one man whose jacket was red with blue writing. Pretty things. Veronique drank hers gratefully. I made myself drink mine. Anything this black and bitter must have been medicine. Tuuvin just held his.

Then they got hand lights and we all walked over and looked at the bodies. Dogs ran from the lights, staying at the edges and slinking as if guilty of something.

“Janna,” Veronique said. “Which one is Ian? Which is my teacher?”

I had to walk between the bodies. We had laid them out so their heads all faced the schoolhouse and their feet all faced the center of the village. They were more bundles than people. I could have told her in the light, but in the dark, with the hand lights making it hard to see anything but where they were pointed, it took me a while. I found Harup by mistake. Then I found the teacher.

Veronique cried and the woman who had looked in my ear held her like she was her child. But that woman didn’t look dark like Veronique at all and I thought she was just kin because she was an offworlder, not by blood. All the offworlders were like Sckarline; kin because of where they were, not because of family.

The two men in blue jackets picked up the body of the teacher. With the body they were clumsy on the packed snow. The man holding the teacher’s head slipped and fell. Tuuvin took the teacher’s head and I took his feet. His boots were gone. His feet were as naked as my mother’s. I had wrapped him in a skin but it wasn’t very big so his feet hung out. But they were so cold they felt like meat, not like a person.

We walked right up to the door of the skimmer and I could look in. It was big inside. Hollow. It was dark in the back. I had thought it would be all lights inside and I was disappointed. There were things hanging on the walls but mostly it was empty. One of the offworld men jumped up into the skimmer and then he was not clumsy at all. He pulled the body to the back of the skimmer.

They were talking again. Tuuvin and I stood there. Tuuvin’s breath was an enormous white plume in the lights of the skimmer. I stamped my feet. The lights were bright but they were a cheat. They didn’t make you any warmer.

The offworlders wanted to go back to the bodies, so we did. “Your teachers,” Veronique said. “Where are your teachers?”

I remembered Wanji’s body. It had no face, but it was easy to tell it was her. Ayudesh’s body was still naked under the blanket I had found. The blanket was burned along one side and didn’t cover him. Where his sex had been, the frozen blood shone in the hand lights. I thought the dogs might have been at him, but I couldn’t tell.

They wanted to take Wanji’s and Ayudesh’s bodies back to the skimmer. They motioned for us to pick up Ayudesh.

“Wait,” Tuuvin said. “They shouldn’t do that.”

I squatted down.

“They are Sckarline people,” Tuuvin said.

“Their spirit is already gone,” I said.

“They won’t have anything,” he said.

“If the offworlders take them, won’t they give them offworld things?”

“They didn’t want offworld things,” Tuuvin said. “That’s why they were here.”

“But we don’t have anything to give them. At least if the offworlders give them things they’ll have something.”

Tuuvin shook his head. “Harup—” he started to say but stopped. Harup talked to spirits more than anyone. He would have known. But I didn’t know how to ask him and I didn’t think Tuuvin did either. Although I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t any drum or anything for spirit talk anyway.

The offworlders stood looking at us.

“Okay,” Tuuvin said. So I stood up and we picked up Ayudesh’s body and the two offworld men picked up Wanji’s body and we took them to the skimmer.

A dog followed us in the dark.

The man in the red jacket climbed up and went to the front of the skimmer. There were chairs there and he sat in one and talked to someone on a radio. I could remember the word for radio in English. Ayudesh used to have one until it stopped working and he didn’t get another.

My thoughts rattled through my empty head.

They put the bodies of the teachers next to the body of Veronique’s teacher. Tuuvin and I stood outside the door, leaning in to watch them. The floor of the skimmer was metal.

One of the blue-jacket men brought us two blankets. The blankets were the same blue as his jacket and had a red symbol on them. A circle with words. I didn’t pay much attention to them. He brought us foil packets. Five. Ten of them.

“Food,” he said, pointing to the packets.

I nodded. “Food,” I repeated.

“Do they have guns?” Tuuvin asked harshly.

“Guns?” I asked. “You have guns?”

“No guns,” the blue jacket said. “No guns.”

I didn’t know if we were supposed to get in the skimmer or if the gifts meant to go. Veronique came over and sat down in the doorway. She hugged me. “Thank you, Janna,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

Then she got up.

“Move back,” said the red jacket, shooing us.

We trotted back away from the skimmer. Its engines fired and the ground underneath them steamed. The skimmer rose, and then the engines turned from pointing down to pointing back and it moved off. Heavy and slow at first, but then faster and faster. Higher and higher.

We blinked in the darkness, holding our gifts.

ABANDON IN PLACE

Jerry Oltion

Jerry Oltion made his name as a hard sf writer. His science fiction stories have been nominated for the Nebula award, and he won the Analog Reader’s Choice award for his story “The Love Song of Laura Morrison.” But Jerry also writes excellent fantasy stories, many of which have appeared in F&SF. (The most recent was “There Goes the Neighborhood” in our August issue.)

Jerry’s ability to write both fantasy and hard science fiction made this story almost inevitable. This novella is a hard science fantasy—something that’s rarely done because it’s difficult to do well. Yet Jerry manages the combination excellently, as you will see when you read “Abandon in Place.”

SIX HOURS AFTER DEKE Slayton, the astronaut, died of cancer, his racing airplane took off from a California airport and never came down. The pilot didn’t respond to the control tower, and the plane vanished from radar shortly after takeoff, but witnesses clearly identified it as Slayton’s. Which was impossible, because that same airplane was in a museum in Nevada at the time.

“The story made the rounds at the Cape. Engineers and administrators and astronauts all passed it along like scouts telling ghost stories around a campfire, but nobody took it seriously. It was too easy to mistake one plane for another, and everyone knew how fast rumors could get started. They had heard plenty of them over the years, from the guy who’d claimed to be run off the road by Grissom’s Corvette after the Apollo 1 fire to the Australian who’d supposedly found a piece of Yuri Gagarin’s spacesuit in the debris that rained over the outback when Skylab came down. This was just one more strange bit of folklore tacked onto the Apollo era, which was itself fast fading into legend.

Then Neil Armstrong died, and a Saturn V launched itself from pad 34.

Rick Spencer was there the morning it went up. He had flown his T-38 down from Arlington right after the funeral, grabbed a few hours of sleep right there at the Cape, then driven over to the shuttle complex before dawn to watch the ground crew load a communications satellite into the Atlantis. The ungainly marriage of airplane and rocket on pad 39 A would be his ticket to orbit in another week if they ever got the damned thing off the ground, but one of the technicians forgot to mark a step off his checklist and the whole procedure shut down while the foreman tried to decide whether to back up and verify the job or take the tech at his word when he said he’d done it. Rick was getting tired of waiting for somebody to make a decision, so he went outside the sealed payload mating bay for a breath of fresh air.

The sun had just peeked over the horizon. The wire catwalk beneath his feet and the network of steel girders all around him glowed reddish gold in the dawn light. The hammerhead crane overhead seemed like a dragon’s long, slender neck and head leaning out to sniff curiously at the enormous winged orbiter that stood there sweating with dew beneath its gaze. The ground, nearly two hundred feet below, was still inky black. Sunlight hadn’t reached it yet, wouldn’t for a few more minutes. The ocean was dark, too, except near the horizon where the brilliant crescent of sun reflected off the water.

From his high catwalk Rick looked down the long line of launch pads to the south, the tops of their gantries projecting up into the light as well. Except for pads 34 and 37. Those two had been decommissioned after the Apollo program, and now all that remained were the concrete bunkers and blast deflectors that couldn’t be removed, low gray shapes still languishing in the shadow of early dawn. Just like the whole damned space program, Rick thought. Neil had been given a hero’s burial, and the President’s speech had been full of promise for renewed support of manned exploration in space, but it was all a lot of hot air and everyone knew it. The aging shuttle fleet was all America had, and all it was likely to get for the foreseeable future. Even if NASA could shake off the bureaucratic stupor it had fallen into and propose anew program, Congress would never pass an appropriations bill for the hardware.

Rick looked away, but a flicker of motion drew his attention back to pad 34, where brilliant floodlights now lit a gleaming white rocket and its orange support tower. Rick blinked, but it didn’t go away. He stepped closer to the railing and squinted. Where had that come from? Over half of it rose above the dawn line, Rick looked over the edge of the Atlantis’s gantry and made a quick guess based on his own height. That rocket had to be over three hundred feet tall.

Three hundred and sixty-three, to be exact. Rick couldn’t measure it that closely, but he didn’t need to. He recognized the black-striped Saturn V instantly, and he knew its stats by heart. He had memorized them when he was a kid, sitting in front of his parents’ black-and-white TV set while he waited for the liftoffs. Three hundred sixty-three feet high, weighing over three thousand tons when fueled, the five F-1 engines in its first stage producing seven and a half million pounds of thrust—it was the biggest rocket ever built.

And it had also been over thirty years since the last of them flew. Rick closed his eyes and rubbed them with his left hand. Evidently Neil’s death had affected him more than he thought. But when he looked to the south again he still saw the brilliant white spike standing there in its spotlight glare, mist swirling down its side as the liquid oxygen in its tanks chilled the air around the massive rocket.

Rick was alone on the gantry. Everyone else was inside, arguing about the payload insertion procedure. He considered going in and asking someone to come out and tell him if he was crazy or not, but he abandoned that thought immediately. One week before his first flight, he wasn’t about to confess to hallucinations.

It sure looked real. Rick watched the dawn line creep down the Saturn’s flank, sliding over the ever-widening stages until it reached the long cylinder of the main body. The spectacle was absolutely silent. The only sound came from closer by: the squeak and groan of the shuttle gantry expanding as it began to warm under the light.

Then, without warning, a billowing cloud of reddish white smoke erupted from the base of the rocket. The eye-searing brightness of RP-1 and oxygen flame lit up the cloud from within, and more exhaust blasted sideways out of the flame deflectors.

Rick felt the gantry vibrate beneath him, but there was still no sound. The exhaust plume rose nearly as high as the nose cone, roiling like a mushroom cloud over an atomic blast, then slowly the rocket began to lift. Bright white flame sprayed the entire launch pad as the thundering booster, gulping thousands of gallons of fuel per second, rose into the sky. Only when the five bell-shaped nozzles cleared the gantry—nearly ten seconds after liftoff—did the solid beam of flame grow ragged at the edges. A few final tongues of it licked the ground, then the rocket lifted completely into the air.

The shuttle gantry beneath Rick’s feet shook harder. He grabbed for support just as the sound reached him: a thunderous, crackling assault that sent him staggering back against the catwalk’s inner railing, his hands over his ears. The gantry shook like a skyscraper in an earthquake, knocking him to his knees on the non-skid grating. He didn’t try to rise again, just stared upward in awe as the Saturn V dwindled rapidly now and the roar of its engines tapered off with distance.

The glare left afterimages when he blinked. He didn’t care. He watched the rocket arc over and begin its long downrange run, picking up orbital velocity now that it had cleared the thickest part of the atmosphere.

The door behind him burst open and a flood of white-jacketed technicians scrambled out. The first few stopped when they saw the enormous plume of exhaust rising into the sky, and the ones behind them piled into their backs, forcing them forward until everyone was packed near the railing. Molly, the payload foreman, gave Rick a hand up, and bent close to his ear to shout over the roar of the rocket and the babble of voices, “What the hell was that?”

Rick shook his head. “Damned if I know.”

“There wasn’t supposed to be a launch today,” she said.

Rick looked up at the dwindling rocket, now just a bright spark aiming for the sun, and said, “Something tells me Control was just as surprised as we were.” He pointed toward the base of the exhaust plume, where the cloud had spread out enough to reveal the gantry again.

“What?” Molly asked, squinting to see through the billowing steam. Then she realized what he was pointing at. “Isn’t that pad thirty-four?”

Molly and her payload crew reluctantly trooped back into the mating bay to see if the shaking had damaged their satellite, but since Rick was on his own time he rode the cage elevator down to the ground, climbed into his pickup, and joined the line of cars streaming toward the launch site.

The scrub oak and palmetto that lined the service road prevented anyone from seeing the pad until they had nearly reached it. Rick thought he should have been able to see the 400-foot gantry, at least, but when he arrived at the pad he realized why he hadn’t. It had vanished just as mysteriously as it had arrived, leaving not a trace.

Rick drove across the vast concrete apron to the base of the old launch pedestal. It looked like an enormous concrete footstool: four squat legs holding a ten-foot-thick platform forty feet in the air, with a thirty-footwide hole in the platform for the rocket exhaust to pour through. Off to the side stood the foundation and the thick blast protection wall of the building that had once housed propellant pumps and service equipment. Now both structures looked old and weathered. Rust streaks ran down their gray sides, and stenciled on the pitted concrete, the paint itself fading now, were the words, “ABANDON IN PLACE.”

Weeds grew out of cracks in the apron, still green and vigorous even right up next to the pedestal. Rick was beginning to doubt what he’d seen, because obviously nothing had launched from this pad for at least a decade.

But the contrail still arched overhead, high-altitude winds snaking it left and right, and when Rick opened the door and stepped out of his pickup he smelled the unmistakable mixture of RP-1 smoke and steam and scorched cement that came with a launch.

Doors slammed as more people got out of their cars. Dozens of them were there already, and more arrived every minute, but what should have been an unruly mob was strangely quiet. Nobody wanted to admit what they’d seen, especially in the face of so much conflicting evidence.

Rick recognized Tessa McClain, an experienced astronaut whom he’d dated a few times in the last couple of months, climbing out of the back of a white van along with half a dozen other people from the vehicle assembly building. When she saw him she jogged across the concrete to his side and said, “Did you see it?” Her face glowed with excitement.

“Yeah,” Rick said. “I was up on the gantry at thirty-nine.”

She looked up at the contrail overhead, her straight blond hair falling back over her shoulders. “Wow. That must have been a hell of a sight. I felt it shake the ground, but I didn’t get outside until it was already quite a ways up.” She looked back down at him. “It was a Saturn Five, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what it looked like,” he admitted.

“God, this is incredible.” She turned once around, taking in the entire launch pad. “A moon rocket! I never expected to see anything like it ever again.”

“Me either,” Rick said. He struggled to find the words to express what he was thinking. “But how could we possibly have seen anything? There’s no tower here, no fuel tanks, nothing. And the launch pedestal is too small for a fully fueled Saturn V. This complex was for the S-1B’s.”

She grinned like a child at Christmas. “I’m sure whoever—or whatever—staged this little demonstration was able to make all the support hardware they needed. And take it away again when they were done with it.”

Rick shook his head. “But that’s impossible.”

Tessa laughed. “We all saw it.” She pointed upward. “And the contrail’s still there.” Suddenly her eyes grew even wider.

“What?” Rick asked.

She looked across the rolling hummocks of palmetto toward the fifty-story-high vehicle assembly building—and the launch control center at its base. “I wonder if it’s sending back telemetry?”

IT TOOK A WHILE to find out. Nobody remembered what frequencies the Apollo spacecraft broadcast on or what protocols the data streams used, and the ground controllers had to dig through archived manuals to find out. It took still more time to set up the receivers to accept the signals, but when the technicians eventually tuned into the right frequencies they found a steady information flow. They couldn’t decode most of it, since the software to do that had been written for the old RCA computer system, but they did at least establish that the rocket had not vanished along with its ground support structures.

Rick and Tessa were in the launch control center now, watching the overhead monitors while programmers in the central instrumentation building frantically attempted to adapt the old programs to the new machines. What they saw was mostly a lot of numbers, but every few minutes one of the programmers would patch in another section of translated code and another display would wink into place on the screen. They had already figured out cabin temperature and pressure, fuel level in the upper stage tanks, and a few of the other simple systems.

By this point in a normal flight the whole project would rightfully belong to Mission Control in Houston, but there was nothing normal about this launch. When the Houston flight director heard what the Kennedy team was doing, he wanted nothing to do with it anyway. He intended to keep his own neck well out of the way when heads started rolling after this crazy debacle was over.

But the spacecraft stubbornly refused to disappear. Radar tracked it through one complete orbit and part of another, when its altitude and velocity began to rise. At the same time, the fuel levels in the third stage tanks began to drop. That could mean only one thing: The booster was firing again.

“Translunar injection,” Tessa whispered. “They’re going for the Moon.”

“Who’s ‘they’ ?” Rick asked. So far none of the telemetry indicated a live—or even a ghostly—passenger in the command module.

“It’s got to be Neil,” Tessa said. “And who knows who else is going with him.”

“Neil is in a box in Arlington cemetery,” Rick said. “I saw them put him there.”

“And you saw the launch this morning,” Tessa reminded him. “Neil being on board it is no more impossible than the rocket itself.”

“Good point.” Rick shrugged. Every dead astronaut from Gagarin on could be in the mystery Apollo capsule for all he knew. This bizarre manifestation was completely new territory; nobody knew the rules yet.

Enough people claimed to, of course. Psychics seemed to crawl out of the woodwork over the next few days, each with their own interpretation of the event. NASA had to close the gates and post guards around the perimeter of the space center to keep it from being overrun by curious mystics, but that merely fueled speculation that they were developing a new super-secret space vehicle at the taxpayers’ expense.

The administration tried the silent approach at first, but when that charge was leveled they reluctantly admitted that for once the fruitcakes were closer to the truth than the whistleblowers. In a carefully worded press release, NASA’s public relations spokesman said, “What appeared to be a Saturn Five moon rocket seemed to launch from the deserted complex thirty-four. This alleged launch was not authorized by NASA, nor was it part of any program of which NASA is aware. A complete investigation of the incident is being made, and our findings will be made public as soon as we learn what actually occurred.”

That was Bureauspeak for, “We don’t have a clue either.” Rick spent days with the investigation team, going over his story again and again—careful to say “appeared to” and “looked like” at all the appropriate spots—until he could recite it in his sleep, but no one was the wiser afterward. They examined the launch pad, which revealed no sign of a liftoff. All they could do was listen to the telemetry coming from the spacecraft and speculate.

Three days after its launch, the ghost Apollo entered lunar orbit. A few hours after that, the lunar module separated from the command module and made a powered descent toward the surface. It wasn’t headed for the Sea of Tranquility. It appeared to be landing at Copernicus, one of the sites proposed for further Apollo missions before the last three had been cancelled. But when it reached 500 feet, the telemetry suddenly stopped.

“What the hell happened?” demanded Dale Jackson, the impromptu flight director for the mission. He stood beside one of the consoles on the lowest of the terraced rows, looking around at the dozens of technicians who were scrambling to reacquire the signal.

Tessa and Rick were watching from farther up, sitting side by side at unused consoles and holding hands like teenagers on a date at the best movie of all time. When the telemetry stopped, Tessa flinched as if a monster had just jumped out of a closet.

“What happened?” Rick asked. “Did it blow up?”

Tessa shook her head. “Everything stopped,” she said. “The command module too, and it was still in orbit.”

“Five hundred feet,” Rick said. Something about that figure nagged at him. What happened at five hundred feet in a normal lunar descent? “Got it!” he said, loudly enough that everyone in the room looked back up at the screens. When they saw no data there, they turned to him.

“Five hundred feet was ‘low gate,’ when the pilot was supposed to take over from the descent computer and actually land the LEM,” he told them. “The computer couldn’t take it all the way to the surface. It wasn’t sophisticated enough to choose a landing site.”

Jackson asked, “So, what, you think it crashed? It was still five hundred feet up.”

Rick hesitated. He’d been biting his tongue for days now, afraid of knocking himself off the Atlantis mission with a poorly chosen phrase, but he had grown tired of being timid. He cleared his throat and said, “I think when the time came for a human to take over, it went back to wherever it came from.”

“Sure it did.” Jackson turned to the technicians. “Get me that signal.”

They tried, but it quickly became apparent that there simply wasn’t a signal any longer. Not even radar could find any sign of the spacecraft. The mysterious Apollo had vanished without a trace.

NASA held back Rick’s Atlantis mission an extra week while the ground crew checked the ship for damage from the shaking it had received, but at last they pronounced it ready to fly. On the morning of the launch, Rick and four other astronauts rode the elevator up the gantry, climbed in through the hatch in the side of the orbiter, and strapped themselves into their acceleration chairs. After a countdown that was only interrupted twice due to a defective pressure sensor in a fuel line, they finally lit the three main engines and the two solid rocket boosters and rode America’s space truck into orbit.

It was Rick’s first time in space. He had expected to be excited, and he was, but somehow not so excited as he had imagined. Instead of watching the Earth slide past beneath him, he spent most of his free time watching the Moon, now just past full. It had been lunar dawn at the landing site when the Apollo had lifted off, just the way it had been for the real flights over a quarter of a century earlier. That was to give the crew the best lighting angle for landing, and to make sure they had plenty of daylight to explore in. And to make emergency repairs if anything went wrong.

What a wild time that must have been, he thought as he floated between the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs and looked out the forward windows at the white disk a quarter million miles away. Flying by the seat of your pants, your life right at your fingertips and the entire world watching over your shoulder to see if you had the wits to keep yourself alive. Aldrin had accidentally snapped off the pin of the ascent engine arming switch with his backpack, and he’d had to poke a felt pen into the hole to arm the engines before he and Armstrong could leave the Moon. A felt pen! If something like that happened on the shuttle, ground control would probably order the crew to conserve power and wait for a rescue—except they still couldn’t launch a second shuttle within a month of the first one. Maybe they could get the Russians to come up and push the button for them with one of their felt pens.

He was being unfair. The Hubble telescope repair had taken some real ingenuity, and the spacelab scientists were always fixing broken equipment. But none of that had the same dazzle as flying to the Moon. Nowadays the shuttle astronauts seemed more like appliance repairmen than intrepid explorers. Rick had convinced himself that the shuttle was doing some valuable science, but now, after seeing a Saturn V launch only two weeks earlier, he realized that science wasn’t what had thrilled him when he’d watched them as a kid, and it wasn’t why he was here now. He was in space because he wanted to explore it, and this—barely two hundred miles off the ground—was the farthest into it he could get.

He wished Tessa were on his flight. She would know what he was feeling. On their dates, they had talked a lot about their reasons for becoming astronauts, and she had admitted to the same motives as he. But she had been scheduled for Discovery’s next launch in a month and a half.

He heard a shout from the mid-deck. “Merde!” A moment later, Pierre Renaud, the Canadian payload specialist whose company had paid for his ticket, floated through the hatchway onto the flight deck.

“What’s the matter?” Rick asked when he saw the look of dismay on Pierre’s face.

“The toilet has broken,” Pierre said.

Rick was on post-flight vacation in Key West when the next one went up. The phone woke him from a sound sleep just after dawn, and when he fumbled the receiver to his ear and answered it, Dale Jackson’s gravelly voice said, “There’s been another Saturn launch. Get your ass up here so we can compare notes with the last time.”

Rick came instantly awake. Less than an hour later he was in the air headed north. By the time he crossed Lake Okeechobee he could see the ragged remains of the contrail, and when he arrived at the Cape the place looked like an anthill that had just been kicked. Cars zoomed up and down the service roads, and the public highways outside the gates were packed in all directions.

Two wide-eyed Air Force cadets escorted him from the airport to a meeting room in the headquarters building, where NASA’s administrator, flight director, range safety officer, and at least a dozen other high-ranking officials were already deep in discussion over the incident. Rick noted with amusement that the flight surgeon was also present, and presumably taking notes. Jackson, the flight director, was talking about the difficulty of decommissioning a fully fueled Saturn V on the pad, should another one appear.

“We don’t even have facilities there to store the fuel anymore, much less pump it,” he was saying. “Especially not in the fifteen minutes or so that these things stick around. That’s barely time enough to hook up the couplings.”

Tessa was there as well, and she smiled wide and waved when she saw Rick. He edged around the conference table and pulled up a chair beside her. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.

“Getting the third degree,” Tessa answered. “I was at the pad when this one lifted off.”

“Which pad?”

“Thirty-four.”

“You’re kidding. You’d be toast if you were that close to the launch.”

“I was in the blockhouse.”

Rick supposed that would offer some protection. And besides, even that might not be necessary. The weeds hadn’t been charred or blown away in the first launch. “Why were you there?” he asked. “How did you know it would happen again?”

She grinned, obviously proud of herself. “Because ghosts usually repeat themselves until they get whatever they came for, and today was the next launch window.”

At the head of the table, Jackson was still talking. “. . . Nor do we have crawler capability to remove the rocket even if we could pump it dry. We’d have to completely rebuild the access road, and in the meantime we’d be left with a thirty-six-story embarrassment.”

Rick sized up the meeting in an instant. NASA saw these ghost rockets as a threat, and wanted them stopped.

“Why don’t we just put astronauts in them instead?” he asked. “There’s time enough to ride up the gantry and climb inside before launch.”

Jackson squinted down the table at him. “In a completely unknown and untested vehicle? No way.”

“It’s not unknown or untested,” said Tessa. “It’s a Saturn Five.”

“It’s a goddamned mystery,” Jackson said, “and there’s no valid reason to risk anyone’s life on one, either on the ground or in space.”

“What do you propose to do, then?” the range safety officer asked. “Shoot them down?”

Nervous laughter broke out around the table, but quickly died out. Jackson shook his head. “I propose we let them go. Assuming there are any more. They aren’t harming anything except our image.”

Warren Altman, latest in a string of five new administrators in the last two years, said, “Yes, precisely. Our image. We’re in enough trouble as it is without Congress thinking things are out of control down here.” He paused to take off his glasses, and used one of the earpieces for a pointer as he continued, “No, Dale, we can’t afford to do nothing. No matter how bizarre this situation is, we’ve got to take control of it, show Congress that we’re handling it, or we’ll lose even more credibility than we already have. That means decommissioning the damned things, and if we can’t do it on the ground then we’ll just have to do it in orbit.”

“How?” asked Jackson.

“Just as Rick suggested. Put an astronaut in one, and let him interrupt the mission once it reaches Earth orbit. We’ll already have a shuttle up there next month; it can rendezvous with the Apollo and our astronaut can return on the shuttle.”

“Leaving the third stage and the rest of the spacecraft in orbit,” Jackson pointed out.

“Better there than on the pad,” Altman replied. “Besides, maybe we can figure out a use for it. Skylab was just an empty Saturn third stage.” He laughed. “Hell, if this continues for a few months, we could have all the habitat modules we need to build a real space station.”

“And what if they disappear on us just like the last one?”

Altman’s eyes narrowed. He hadn’t thought of that. But he just shrugged and said, “We’ll worry about that later. Chances are the damned things will fade out as soon as we interfere anyway. That’s what usually happens with ghosts.” He pointed his glasses at Rick. “It’s your idea, do you want to volunteer?”

“Of course I do!” Rick said.

“You lucky bastard,” Tessa whispered.

HE THOUGHT SO TOO, until the training started.

For the next month, Jackson kept him on sixteen-hour days in the simulators, training for a mission that hadn’t even been considered in over two decades. He learned every switch and dial in the Apollo command module until he could operate the ship with his eyes closed, and he practiced every contingency that the flight engineers could come up with, including a lunar flyby and slingshot back to Earth in case the rocket wouldn’t let him shut it down before translunar injection. They had plenty of data already for that kind of abort: Apollo 13 had done a slingshot return when an oxygen tank had blown on the way to the Moon.

Rick even argued them into letting him train in a mockup lunar module, reasoning that he might be able to use it as a lifeboat in case of a similar emergency. They also let him practice using the descent and ascent engines for emergency thrust, and after he wheedled with them for a few days they even let him practice landing.

“Only because it’ll help you get a feel for the controls,” Jackson told him. “You couldn’t actually land even if you wanted to, because if you separate the lunar module from the command module, you’re dead. Rendezvous and docking is done from the command module, and you won’t have a pilot.”

Rick wondered about that. They didn’t know who or what might inhabit the capsule atop the enormous rocket. It might be anything from Armstrong’s preserved corpse to the Ghost of Christmas Future. The only thing NASA knew for sure was that they weren’t going to risk more than one person on this flight.

So Rick found himself standing alone at the base of the concrete pedestal during the hour before dawn on the morning of the next launch window. He wore a shuttle spacesuit modified to allow him to lie in an Apollo couch—the best they could come up with in only a month, since the few remaining Apollo suits in the Smithsonian and other museums were over thirty years old and wouldn’t hold air without major refurbishing. He also wore a parachute strapped to his back. The parachute was Jackson’s idea, in case the whole Saturn V, gantry and all, faded away when Rick tried to enter the capsule 350 feet off the ground.

Pad 34 was spooky in the pre-dawn twilight. Little gusts of wind rattled the bushes that grew out of the cracks in the concrete, and Rick felt eyes watching him. Most of those belonged to the NASA personnel who waited in the blockhouse nearly a thousand feet away, but the tingling at the back of his neck made Rick wonder if other eyes were watching him as well, and maybe judging him. What would they make of him? He’d been barely ten years old when the Eagle landed, was never a military pilot like the first astronauts, never even a soldier. Just a kid who’d always dreamed of becoming an astronaut. And now here he stood with his spacesuit on, holding his suitcase-sized portable ventilator like a banker with his briefcase waiting at a subway stop, while the empty launch pad mocked his every breath.

Even the pads to the north were empty. Discovery had already lifted off three days ago, taking Tessa and five others into orbit with the Spacelab, where they were to study the effects of free fall on fruit fly mating habits—and also to await Rick’s arrival. They had put themselves in the most likely orbit for the Apollo to take, but it was still a gamble and everyone knew it. If they had guessed wrong, Rick would have to go to plan B: re-entry using the Apollo capsule.

There would be no rescue if that didn’t work. None of the other shuttles were even close to being ready for launch; Atlantis was still at Edwards, waiting for a ride home that might never come because the 747 carrier plane had developed cracks in the wing struts, and Columbia and Endeavor were both in the vehicle assembly building with their supposedly reusable engines scattered across acres of service bay while the technicians tried to match enough parts to get one complete set to work.

At least Rick was there. His heart was pounding, but he was there and ready to fly. He squared his shoulders and checked his watch. Any time now.

Suddenly, silently, the rocket appeared. Spotlight glare blinded Rick until he lowered his sun visor, then he turned once around to orient himself. The gantry was right where he’d expected it to be, and the Saturn V . . . Rick tilted his head back and felt his heart skip a beat. It was colossal. From right there at the base of it, the thing looked like it already reached to the Moon.

He didn’t have time to gawk. He ran awkwardly for the elevator, his boots slapping the concrete, then climbed inside the elevator cage and rode it all the way to the top, nervously watching the ground drop farther and farther away. Two-thirds of the way up, he crossed into sunlight.

The metal structure squeaked and groaned around him, just like the shuttle gantry did. The grating underfoot scuffed against his boots as he crossed over on the swing arm bridge to the white room and the capsule. The hatch was open, as if waiting for him. Normally a crew of technicians would be there to help him into his seat, but he was completely alone. Nobody waited inside the capsule, either. Quickly, lest the rocket launch with him on the gantry, he climbed in, unplugged his ventilator and tossed it back out the hatch, and plugged one of the ship’s three umbilicals into his suit. He jounced up and down on the seat a time or two. Banged on the hatch frame with his gloved hand. Solid. Satisfied, he tossed the parachute out after the ventilator, pulled the hatch closed, sealed it, and sank back into the center couch.

The instrument panel was a forest of switches and knobs before him, uncomfortably close to his face. He scanned the readouts, looking for anomalies, while he took a deep breath and smelled the cool, metallic scent of pressurized air. His suit umbilical was working, then. He should have a radio link now, too. He spoke into his suit’s microphone. “Control, this is Apollo, do you read?”

“Loud and clear,” Jackson’s voice said.

“Ready for liftoff,” Rick told him.

“Good. Estimated time to launch.,.uh, call it two minutes.”

“Roger.” Rick’s pulse rate was sky high. He tried to calm himself down, but the lack of a real countdown somehow underscored how crazy this whole thing was. He was sitting on top of a ghost!

He forced himself to concentrate on the instruments in front of him. Main power bus, green. Cabin temperature, nominal. Fuel pressure—

Amber lights blinked on, and a low rumble vibrated the walls.

“Ignition sequence starting,” Jackson said.

“Roger. I feel it.”

“All engines running.”

Through the hatch window Rick saw the swing arm glide away, and the cabin seemed to sway slightly to the right.

“Liftoff. We have liftoff.”

The rumble grew louder, and now Rick felt the acceleration begin to build. The launch tower slid downward out of sight, and then all he could see was blue morning sky. He had expected the G’s to slam him back into the seat, but they built gently as the booster burned its fuel and the rocket grew lighter. When the second stage ignited there was a lurch and the G’s grew stronger, but still bearable.

This time Houston had gotten in on the act. Mission Control took over the flight now, and Laura Turner, the capsule communicator, said, “You’re looking good, Apollo. Escape tower jettison in twenty seconds.”

Rick felt the thump right on schedule, and now that the tower and its boost protection cover were gone he could see out the side windows as well. Florida was a long ways down already, and receding fast.

The third stage ignited a few minutes later, propelling the spaceship on into orbit. “Right on target,” Laura said. “We track you one hundred miles uprange of Discovery and closing.”

“Roger.”

And now it was time for Rick to earn his ride. He didn’t have to do much; NASA wouldn’t let him fly the Apollo toward the shuttle. It was his job to disarm the engines and let Tessa bring the shuttle to him. Holding his breath, he reached out to the too-close instrument panel with his gloved index finger. Would the ship let him take over now, or would it hold him prisoner all the way to the Moon? Or would it vanish in a puff of smoke the moment he touched the controls?

Only one way to tell. The switches clicked home with a satisfying thunk, and the indicator lights showed those circuits dead. The rest of the instruments, and the capsule itself, remained undisturbed. Rick took a breath, then reported, “Engines disarmed. Apollo is now safe for rendezvous.”

“Roger, Apollo. Sit back and enjoy the ride, Rick.”

He unstrapped himself and drifted free of the acceleration couch. The Apollo capsule might be cramped compared to the shuttle, but with only one person in it he had enough room to float from window to window and look at the blue and white Earth below.

And at the Moon, once again in its crescent phase. It beckoned to him stronger now than ever, for here he sat in a spaceship that could take him there. Take him there and land, if only he had two more astronauts to fly with him.

The shuttle was a bright speck against the solid black of space, drawing steadily closer. Rick watched until it resolved into the familiar stubby-winged orbiter.

“Apollo, this is Discovery,” Tessa said over the radio. “Do you read?” Her voice sounded excited, as well it might. Not every day did she get the chance to rendezvous with a ghost.

Rick smiled at the sound of her voice. He had always wanted to fly a mission with her. He had always assumed when it happened he would be the low man on the duty roster, cleaning rat droppings out of cages on a Spacelab flight or something, but here he was, commander of his own ship, making space history.

He said, “Discovery, this is Apollo. I read you loud and clear. Good to see you, Tessa.”

“Are you ready for EVA?”

EVA. Extra-vehicular activity. They couldn’t actually dock the Apollo and the shuttle; Rick would have to transfer across on his own, leaving the Apollo to coast onward alone, its engines silenced, its mission—whatever that might be—unfulfilled.

But if NASA really turned it into another Skylab, that might mollify whoever or whatever was behind these launches. Then maybe it wouldn’t go to waste.

Rick shook his head. Who was he kidding? NASA would never use this ship for anything. He’d known it ever since he saw the look on Altman’s face when Jackson asked what they would do if it faded away. Altman just wanted to show Congress—and the power behind the new Apollo—that NASA was still in control. He expected this to be the last of the mystery ships, now that Rick had deactivated it.

“Apollo, do you copy?” Tessa asked.

Rick swallowed. If he screwed with the flight plan, it would be the last time he ever flew. Worse, the spaceship could turn into gossamer and cobwebs at any moment, stranding him in cislunar space with nothing but a pressure suit, slowly suffocating as his air supply ran out. Or it could wait until he reached the Moon before fading out, just as the last two had done, the first over Copernicus and the second over the Aristarchus plateau. But if he didn’t at least try it, could he live with himself for the rest of his life, knowing that he’d once had the opportunity to go to the Moon but had turned it down?

He had always wanted to explore the unknown, well this was certainly his opportunity for it. He had no idea whose ghost this was or what its purpose might be, but it was his ship now, by right of conquest if nothing else. So what was he going to do with it?

Tessa called again. “Hello Apollo, are you ready for EVA?”

He took a deep breath. “Negative,” he said. “Negative. In fact, I think I’m going to need a little help over here.”

“What sort of help, Apollo?”

Looking out at the brilliant white crescent, he said, “I need someone to ride with me to the Moon. Preferably two someones. You know anybody who wants to go?”

Tessa’s shriek was inarticulate, a primal whoop of surprise or relief or laughter, but before Rick could ask her which it was, Laura, in Houston, said, “Don’t even think it, Rick. You do not have authorization for an extended mission. Is that clear?”

Rick sighed. But he could already hear the roar of bridges burning. “Clear as space itself, Laura, but I’m going. And if I can take a full crew with me, then I’m going to land when I get there. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Negative, Rick. You need ground control. Now that you’ve disarmed the engines, you have no assurance that any aspect of the mission will proceed normally. You’ll have to re-arm and fire the engines yourself, but without us you won’t know when to do that. Even after you’re on your way, you’ll need our radar for tracking, and you’ll need our computers to calculate course corrections, and—”

“I get the point, Capcom.” By the quickness of her response, Laura had obviously considered all this beforehand, but it didn’t matter. “You’re bluffing,” Rick told her. “You wouldn’t let us die out here if you could prevent it.”

She didn’t answer. Rick took that as answer enough. Tessa evidently did too; she said, “We’re coming over.”

A new voice, Dale Jackson’s, said, “You’re staying right there. Rick, Tessa, we will not provide tracking for a Lunar flight. I don’t care if you drift straight out of the Solar system, we will not jeopardize the entire space program just to satisfy your curiosity.”

“What space program?” Tessa asked. “We’re breeding fruit flies over here.” That wasn’t exactly fair, one of the payload specialists was an astronomer who was running a free-flying instrument platform—but she was from Japan.

“I’m not going to argue with you. Tessa, if you leave Discovery, you will be charged with dereliction of duty and reckless endangerment of the rest of the crew. And I’m not bluffing; if you attempt to leave Earth orbit in that Apollo, you’ll be on your own.”

Rick looked at the empty seats on either side of him. In a cramped alcove behind them was the navigation equipment—a telescope and sextant and a primitive guidance computer—that could theoretically provide him with enough measurements and computing ability to stay on course. But he hadn’t trained to use them, and he bet neither Tessa nor whoever was coming with her knew how to calculate their trajectory with them, either.

“What do you think, Tessa?” he asked. “Can we do it without ground control?”

“I don’t—”

“That will not be necessary,” a new voice said, drowning her out. It had a heavy accent, but Rick couldn’t place it immediately. Some foreign ham operator broadcasting on the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite frequencies?

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“I am Gregor Ivanov, of the Russian Space Agency in Kaliningrad. I have been monitoring your signal, and am prepared to offer assistance.”

Houston was evidently receiving his signal, too. “You can’t do that!” Jackson yelled.

The Russian laughed. “I certainly can. In fact, I must. International treaties legally require that Russia offer help to any craft that has been disabled or abandoned either at sea or in space.”

“You stay out of this!” Jackson yelled again. “That craft is neither disabled nor abandoned.”

“Oh? Perhaps I mis-heard you. Do you plan to offer ground radar support for the Lunar landing mission?” Gregor laughed again, clearly enjoying his position.

Jackson wasn’t amused. “Get off this frequency, Russkie,” he growled. “You’re creating an international incident.”

“I certainly hope so,” Gregor replied. “Apollo, I repeat my offer. Kaliningrad control will provide your ground support for a Lunar landing and sample return mission. Do you wish our assistance?”

Rick felt a laugh bubbling up from his own throat. Could he trust the Russians to guide an Apollo to the Moon? Would they actually help an American crew re-enact the mission that had embarrassed their country over thirty years ago? Probably. The cold war was dead and buried, with the Berlin Wall for a tombstone. Whether or not they could actually perform was the big question. Their computer equipment was nearly as antiquated as the 36K of wire-wrapped core memory under the navigation console.

But Rick really didn’t have much choice. Houston would fight him every step of the way. And besides, an international mission sounded kind of nice about now. Rick would need someone on his side when he returned. If he returned. Shaking his head, he said, “Any port in a storm, Kaliningrad. I accept your offer.”

“This is treason!” Jackson shouted, but Rick ignored him.

Tessa said, “We’re coming across, Apollo.”

“You’re already suited up?” It took two hours of pre-breathing pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from a shuttle astronaut’s bloodstream before they could exit the ship; Tessa and whoever else was coming with her must have started before Rick had even launched.

“Contingency planning,” Tessa replied, amusement in her voice. “You might have needed rescue, you know.”

“Ah, of course,” Rick said.

Jackson tried again. “Tessa, think about this. You’re throwing away your whole career for nothing.”

“I wouldn’t call a lunar landing ‘nothing.’ ”

“It’s a goddamned ghost! It’s worse than nothing. You could be killed!”

“Yes, I could, couldn’t I?” Tessa said. “We could all be killed. Or worse yet, we could all give up the dream and keep flying shuttles into low orbit until they all wear out and Congress decides that manned space flight is a waste of time. I don’t want to die in a geriatric ward, wishing I’d taken my one big chance at a real space mission.”

She grunted with effort, and Rick saw the shuttle’s airlock door swing open. A white spacesuited figure slowly emerged, then another. Rick wondered who the second person was. Another of the shuttle’s regular crewmembers? Unlikely. They needed someone to fly the thing back home. That left the Spacelab scientists. Rick ran down the list in his mind and came up with the obvious choice: Yoshiko Sugano, the Japanese astronomer. Her instrument pallet was designed to fly free of the shuttle’s annoying vibration and surface glow, and she had been trained to guide it by remote control. She understood docking maneuvers better than most of the regular astronauts, she would make a perfect command module pilot. Besides which, she would make the mission a truly international effort, a point that Tessa had no doubt considered long before Kaliningrad got into the act.

Sure enough, when the two spacesuited figures bumped up against the Apollo and crawled around to the open hatch, Rick saw Tessa’s grinning face through her bubble helmet, and behind her, swimming a bit in the one-size-fits-most shuttle suit, was Yoshiko. She didn’t look nearly as pleased with herself as Tessa, but she had come along.

“Request permission to come aboard,” she said somewhat breathlessly.

“Yes, yes, of course!” Rick said, helping her and Tessa through the narrow rectangle. It was a tight fit; his modified suit had made it okay, but regular shuttle suits had never been designed to fit through an Apollo hatch. Rick felt a moment’s panic run through him as he suddenly wondered if they would fit through the lander’s hatch. They could make it all the way to the Moon only to get stuck in the doorway.

It was too late to worry about that. Like Aldrin and Armstrong and the engine arming switch, they would just have to figure out something on the scene.

As they struggled to fit themselves into the three seats, Jackson tried one last grandstand act, threatening to charge them and the entire Russian Federation with piracy, but Rick said, “NASA doesn’t own this ship. Nobody does. Or maybe everyone does. Either way, if you’re not going to help us then get off this frequency, because we need it to communicate with ground control.”

“We’re ground control, dammit!” Jackson shouted, “and I’m telling you to return to the mission profile.”

“Sorry,” Rick said. “Kaliningrad is now in control of this flight. Please get off the air.”

Jackson said something else, but Gregor Ivanov also spoke at the same time, and neither transmission was intelligible.

“Say again, Kaliningrad, say again,” Rick said, and this time Jackson stayed quiet.

Gregor said, “You still have a chance to make your original launch window if you can prepare for boost within the next fifty minutes. Do you think that is possible?”

Rick looked at Tessa, who nodded and gave the thumbs up. Yoshiko, her eyes wide, only shrugged. This was her first space flight, and it was obviously not turning out the way she’d expected.

“We’ll have to get out of these damned suits,” Tessa said. “Ours aren’t modified for these chairs, and the TLI boost would probably break our necks if we tried it suited up.”

“Remove your suits, then,” Gregor said, “and prepare for acceleration in fifty-three minutes.”

“Roger.” Rick made sure the hatch was sealed, then repressurized the cabin. When the gauge neared five pounds, he twisted his helmet until the latches clicked free and pulled it off. Tessa and Yoshiko did the same.

Their three helmets alone nearly filled the space between their heads and the control panels. Removing their suits became a comedy in a closet as they elbowed each other and bumped heads and shoulders in their struggle. The control switches all had guards surrounding them, round loops of metal like old-style flip tops from pop cans sticking out on either side of the toggles to keep people from accidently tripping them, but Rick still winced each time someone brushed a panel with a hand or a foot.

“This is ridiculous,” Tessa said, giggling. “Let’s unsuit one at a time, and help each other out.”

“Right,” said Rick. “You first.” He and Yoshiko unsealed the waist ring around Tessa’s suit and lifted the top half over her head, then Yoshiko held her shoulders while Rick worked the lower half off her legs. That left her in the Spandex cooling and ventilation suit; not as comfortable as regular clothing, with its woven-in plastic tubes and air hoses snaking along all four limbs, but better than the spacesuit. She also left her communications carrier “Snoopy hat” on so she could still hear the radio signals from the ground. Rick stuffed the suit in the equipment bay behind the seats, then he and Tessa helped Yoshiko out of hers, and finally the two women helped him unsuit as well. It was still clumsy business, and at one point Rick found his face pressed against Yoshiko’s right breast, but when he said, “Oops, sorry!” and pulled away, he bonked his head on the control panel.

Yoshiko laughed and said, “Don’t worry about it. I think we will all become very familiar with one another before this is finished.” Rick glanced at Tessa, with whom he’d already become pretty familiar on the ground, and saw that she was grinning.

“In your dreams, Rick,” she said. “There’s barely room enough in here to pick your nose.”

Yoshiko blushed, and so did Rick. He said, “That’s not what I was thinking.”

“Sure it wasn’t. Watch yourself, Yo. He’s insatiable. Fortunately, the checklist will keep him too busy to paw us much.”

Yoshiko laughed nervously, and Rick realized he’d been had. Nothing he could say would redeem him.

Luckily, Tessa was right about the checklist. Besides stowing the spacesuits, they had to move the Apollo away from the shuttle—which was already receding on its own as well—then orient the ship correctly for the bum that would send them out of orbit, all while making sure the rest of the electronic and mechanical equipment was functioning.

Just over half an orbit later, their panel green and the moment of truth approaching, they waited nervously for the last few minutes to tick by. The engines were armed, the guidance computer was on line, and Kaliningrad had calculated the proper start time and duration for the burn just in case they had to go to manual control. As Rick, in the left seat, hovered with his finger near the manual fire button, Tessa said, “Hey, we haven’t named the ship yet. We can’t launch for the Moon without a name.”

“No, that would be bad luck,” Yoshiko agreed.

They both looked at Rick, who shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I hadn’t even thought about it. How about ‘The Ghost,’ or ‘The Spook?’ ”

Tessa shook her head. “No, that sends the wrong message. We need something positive, hopeful. Like ‘Second Chance,’ or, or—”

“Yes, you said it: ‘Hope,’ ” Yoshiko said. Then, looking at Rick, she said, “Or ‘The Spirit of Hope’ if you want to keep the ghost aspect.”

Rick nodded. “Yeah. I like it.”

“Me too.” Tessa licked her forefinger, tapped the overhead hatch in the docking collar—the farthest forward point she could reach—and said, “I christen thee The Spirit of Hope.”

Gregor’s voice came over the radio. “Very good, Spirit of Hope. Stand by for Trans-Lunar Injection in thirty seconds.”

The DSKY, the primitive display/keyboard, flashed, “Go/No-go?” This was their last chance to abort. Rick hardly hesitated at all before he pushed the proceed button. He had already committed himself.

The three astronauts kept their eyes on the controls, watching for signs of trouble, as Gregor counted down the time. The seconds seemed to stretch out forever, but at last Gregor said, “Now!” and right on cue, the Saturn IVB third stage engine automatically fired for the last time, pressing them back into their seats with a little over a gee of thrust. Rick let his hand fall away from the manual fire button and tucked it against the armrest.

The cabin rumbled softly, the acceleration much smoother than during the ride up through the atmosphere. Rick glanced out the side window at the Earth, but the gee force blurred his vision until it was just a smear of blue and white.

The burn went on and on, over five minutes of thrust, propelling them from 17,000 miles per hour to 25,000, enough to escape the Earth’s pull. Near the end of the burn, Rick forced his hand out to the cutoff button, just in case the computer didn’t shut it off at the right moment, but Gregor’s “Now!” and the sudden silence came simultaneously. Rick’s hand leaped forward with the cessation of thrust and pushed the button anyway, but it wasn’t necessary. They were coasting now, headed for the Moon.

AS SOON AS THEY UNBUCKLED from their couches, they began taking stock. They had three days of coasting to do before they reached the Moon, plenty of time to explore every nook and cranny in the tiny capsule. Every cubic inch of it seemed filled with something, and the only way to find out what was there was to unpack it, inspect it, and put it back into place. There was no room to leave things out; in fact, there was hardly room enough for them all to explore the ship at once.

Yoshiko had been right: within the first half hour they had ceased to worry about bumping into one another. In fact, attempting to avoid it just made them all the more aware of each other, so they simply ignored the forced intimacy and went on with their work, gently brushing aside the stray elbows and feet and other body parts that got in their way. Their spandex cooling and ventilation suits at least allowed the illusion of modesty, which was really all they could ask for in such a tiny space.

Rick didn’t mind brushing against Tessa, nor did she seem to mind it when he did. Both of them were grinning like newlyweds, and the air between them seemed charged with a thousand volts. They kissed once while Yoshiko was busy in the equipment bay, just a quick touch of the lips, but it sent a thrill down Rick’s spine nonetheless. This was better than any Shuttle flight with her would have been.

In most ways, at least. Rick’s conviction wavered a bit when Yoshiko found the food, which came in vacuum-packed plastic bags with little accordion necks to squirt water in through to rehydrate it—and to squirt the gooey result out into the astronaut’s mouth. Rick and Tessa laughed at her incredulous expression when she saw how it worked. “Like toothpaste?” she asked, and Rick, who had eaten the commercially available version in his school lunches throughout the fall of ’69, laughed and said, “It tastes about like it, too.”

“It’ll keep us alive,” Tessa said. “That’s what counts. I doubt I’ll taste a thing anyway.”

She was fiddling with something she had found in a locker. Suddenly she laughed and said, “Smile!” and when Rick and Yoshiko looked up, they saw that she had a TV camera aimed at them. “Hey Gregor, are you getting a picture?” she asked, panning from Rick to Yoshiko and back.

“Da, affirmative,” Gregor said. “Very clear signal.”

“Great!” Tessa panned slowly around the cabin, then went to a window and shot some footage of the Earth, already much smaller behind them.

“Wonderful!” Gregor said. “Perfect. We’re getting it all on tape, but if you’ll wait a few minutes I think we can broadcast you live on national television.”

“You’re kidding,” Tessa said, turning the camera back inside.

“Nyet. We are working on it right now. It’s late night in most of Russia; so what if we interrupt a few old horror movies? This is much more interesting.”

“Wow. Hear that, Houston? The Russians are showing us live on TV.”

Mission Control had been silent since before the TLI burn, but now Laura Turner, the regular capcom, said, “We read you, ah . . . Hope. We’re receiving your signal, too. Hi, Rick. Hi, Yoshiko.”

“Hi.” Rick and Yo waved at the camera. They could hear some sort of commotion going on in the background, either in Houston or Kaliningrad, but they couldn’t tell which.

Yoshiko said, “I wonder if anyone in Japan is receiving this?”

A few seconds later, a new voice said, “Yes, we are. This is Tomiichi Amakawa at Tanegashima Space Center, requesting permission to join communication.”

“Granted,” Gregor said. “And welcome to the party.”

“Thank you. We, too, are arranging to broadcast your signal. And Yoshiko, I have a message for you from your colleagues at university. They are very angry at you for abandoning their observatory, and they also wish you good luck.”

She grinned. “Give them my apologies, and my thanks. And tell them if any of them would have done differently, they have rocks where their hearts should be.”

“Hah! They envy you. We all do.”

“You should. This is an incredible experience.”

Gregor said, “We are ready. Perhaps you should give an introduction, so people will know why we are suddenly getting pictures from space.”

“Right,” said Tessa. She pointed the camera at Rick. “Go for it, Rick. You know as much about this as any of us.”

Rick swallowed, suddenly nervous. All of Russia and Japan were watching. And who knew who else? Anybody with a satellite dish and the right receiver could pick up their signal. He slicked his hair back, licked his lips nervously, and said, “Uh, right. Okay, well, hi, I’m Rick Spencer, an American astronaut, and this is Yoshiko Sugano from Japan, and Tessa McClain behind the camera, also from America.” Tessa turned the camera around, let it drift free, and backed up to get into the shot. She waved, tilting slowly sideways until she bumped her head against the back of a couch. All three astronauts laughed, and Rick felt himself relax a bit. When Tessa retrieved the camera and aimed it at him again, he said, “As you’ve probably heard by now, NASA has been plagued with ghosts for the last three months. Ghost Apollo rockets. Well, we decided to see if somebody could ride one into orbit, and once I got there I picked up Tessa and Yoshiko from the Discovery, and here we are.” He neglected to mention that they were defying orders; let NASA say so if they wanted to. At this point, they would look like the Grinch if they tried it.

Rick said, “Despite its mysterious origin, it seems to behave like a regular Apollo spacecraft. It’s every bit as solid as the original article—” he thumped one of the few bare stretches of wall with his knuckles “—and as you can see, every bit as cramped. But there’s an amazing amount of stuff in this little thirteen-foot-wide cone. Let’s show you some of it.” With that for an introduction, Rick led the camera on a tour through the command module, pointing out all the controls and the few amenities, including the waste collection bags, about which he said, “They’re primitive, but guaranteed not to break down at a delicate moment, like the shuttle toilet does half the time.” He waved at the control panels again, at the hundreds of switches and knobs and gauges, and said, “That’s the whole Apollo concept in a nutshell: nothing fancy, but it got the job done.

And God willing—or whoever is responsible for this—it’ll get the job done again.”

Tessa held the camera on the control panel until Gregor said, “Thank you, Rick. We’ve been thumbing through the manual down here, and it looks like it’s just about time for you to dock with the Lunar Module. Are you ready for that?”

Rick wondered what manual they were consulting. Probably a copy of Aldrin’s Men from Earth, or one of the later books published around the 25th anniversary of the first landing. Or it was conceivable that they had copies of the actual checklists from the original flights. The Soviets had had a good spy network back in the ’60’s.

It didn’t matter. They needed to dock with the LM, that much was obvious. Rick looked to Yoshiko. “How about it?” he asked. “I’ve trained a little on these thrusters in the simulator, but you’re our resident expert in docking maneuvers. You want to have a go at it?”

She gulped, realizing that this was her first big moment to either shine or screw up, but she nodded and said, “Yes, certainly,” and she pulled herself down into the pilot’s chair.

Rick and Tessa strapped themselves into their own chairs, and with Gregor’s coaching they blew the bolts separating the Command and Service Module from the S-IVB booster, exposing the Lunar Module that had ridden just beneath them all this way. Yoshiko experimented for a few minutes with the hand controller, getting the feel of the thrusters, while Tessa filmed the whole process, showing the people back home the ungainly, angular LM perched atop the spent third stage booster, and Yoshiko peering out the tiny windows as she concentrated on bringing the CSM around until the docking collar at the top of the capsule pointed at the hatch on top of the LM. A gentle push with the forward thrusters brought them toward it at a few feet per second, drifting slightly to the side, but she corrected for that with another attitude jet, and they drove straight in for the last few feet. The docking rings met a few inches off center, but the angled guide bars sticking out from the top of the Command Module did their job and with a little sideways lurch and a solid clang of metal on metal, the two spaceships met.

“Latches engaged,” Rick reported when the indicators lit up. He reached out and squeezed Yoshiko’s hand. “That was great,” he said. “Kaliningrad, we’re in business!”

Yoshiko sighed and closed her eyes for the first time in minutes, and over the radio Gregor said, “Congratulations. And thank you for the live coverage. It might interest you to know that millions of people in Russia and across most of Europe were watching over your shoulders.”

“And Japan, too,” Tomiichi Amakawa said.

Tessa whistled softly. “Wow. People are watching a space mission? Who’d have thought. Just like old times, eh?”

Yoshiko said, “It has been a long time. A whole new generation has been born who have never seen a Lunar flight. People are interested again.”

Rick looked out the window at a footpad of the LM angling through his view of the Earth. People were interested again? After years of shuttle flights, the astronauts taping science shows that were only broadcast on the educational channels after they ran out of cooking and painting programs, that was hard to believe. It was evidently true, though. For now, at least, people all over the world were once more looking up into the sky.

The Earth seemed to grow brighter, more distinct, as he gazed at it. Rick blinked his eyes, then flinched when Tessa screamed in his ear.

Rick whipped his head around toward her, and she pointed at the control panel. “It’s fading out!” she said.

Sure enough, the entire spaceship had taken on a hazy translucence. Earth could be seen right through the middle of it, without need for windows. It was like looking through heavily tinted glass, but it grew lighter even as they watched.

“Holy shit,” Rick whispered. His heart was suddenly pounding. They hadn’t lost any air yet, but if the ship kept fading . . .

“Spacesuits!” Yoshiko yelled, reaching around to pull one from behind the seats.

“Hope, what is happening?” Gregor asked, his voice tense.

“We’ve got—” Rick began before his voice failed. He swallowed and said, “Kaliningrad, we have a problem.” He helped Yoshiko with her suit, but he knew that they would be dead anyway if the ship vanished. In just their spacesuits they could survive for seven hours, maximum, before they ran out of air.

“What kind of problem?” Gregor asked.

“The ship is fading out on us,” Rick said, holding the lower half of Yoshiko’s suit while she stuffed her feet into it.

“Can you see it on the TV transmission?” Tessa asked, aiming the camera at the bright Earth through the spaceship’s walls. She was breathing hard, but after that initial scream she had brought herself firmly under control.

“Yes, we can,” Gregor answered.

“Damn. It’s really happening, then.”

Rick was having a lot more trouble than Tessa in keeping his fear from controlling him, but a sudden thought made him forget about his own predicament for a moment. “Cut the transmission,” he said to her.

“Why?”

“You want another Challenger?”

“Oh.” Tessa shut off the camera. She understood him perfectly. The biggest catastrophe with the Challenger, in terms of the space program as a whole, was not that it blew up, but that millions of people watched it blow up. NASA had never really recovered from that. If the whole world saw the Spirit of Hope kill its crew, it could destroy any renewed interest in space they had managed to create as well.

“It’s too late,” Tessa told him. “They already know what killed us.”

But even as she said it, the walls grew distinct again. Yoshiko stopped struggling into her suit, and Rick simply stared at the metal walls that once again enclosed them.

“Hope, what is your status?” Gregor asked.

“It’s back,” Rick said. “The ship is solid again.”

“What happened? Do you know what caused it?”

“Negative, negative. It just faded out, then came right back.”

“Did you do anything that might have influenced it?”

Rick looked at Tessa, then at Yoshiko. Both women shook their heads. “Hard to tell,” Rick said. “We screamed. We scrambled for spacesuits. Tessa shut off the camera.”

“We all realized we were going to die,” Tessa added, and when Rick frowned at her she said, “Well, we’re dealing with a ghost here. Maybe that’s important.”

“Maybe so,” Rick admitted.

Gregor said, “Do you have any abnormal indications now?”

Rick scanned the controls for any other clues, but there were none. No pressure loss, no power drain, nothing. “Negative, Kaliningrad,” he said. “According to the dashboard, we’ve got a green bird up here.”

Gregor laughed a strained, harsh laugh. “I begin to regret my hasty decision to oversee this mission. Never fear! I will not desert you. But this is troubling. Should I consult the engineers, or a medium?”

“Why don’t you try both?” Rick said.

Gregor paused a moment, then said, “Yes, of course. You are absolutely right. We will get right to work on it.”

The astronauts sat still for a moment, letting their breath and heart rates fall back toward normal. Rick looked over at his two companions: Yoshiko half into her spacesuit, Tessa holding the TV camera as if it were a bomb that might explode at any moment. Yoshiko reached out and touched the control panel, reassuring herself that it was solid again, then she turned up the cabin temperature. “I’m cold,” she said.

Rick chuckled. “That’s not surprising. Ghosts are supposed to make people feel cold.”

Tessa narrowed her eyes.

“What?”

“I was just thinking. Ghosts make people feel cold. They repeat themselves. What else do they do? If we can figure out the rules, maybe we can keep this one from disappearing on us again until we get home.”

Maybe it was just relief at still being alive after their scare, but the intense look in Tessa’s eyes was kind of a turn-on. All the same, Rick tried to pay attention to what she was saying. They did need to understand the rules. “Well,” he said, “they sometimes make wailing noises.”

Tessa nodded. “And they leave slime all over everything.”

Rick wiped at the edge of his couch. Bare metal and rough nylon webbing. No slime. “I don’t think we’re dealing with that kind of ghost,” he said.

Yoshiko asked, “Aren’t ghosts supposed to be the result of unfulfilled destiny?”

“Yeah,” Rick said. “I think that’s pretty clear in this case, anyway.”

“You mean Neil Armstrong, right?”

“Who else?”

“I don’t know. Armstrong doesn’t make sense. He already made it to the Moon. If this was his unfulfilled destiny, I’d think it would be a Mars ship, or a space station or something.”

“Good point,” Tessa said. “But if it isn’t Armstrong’s ghost, then whose is it?”

Rick snorted. “Well, NASA thinks it’s theirs. Maybe the organization is really dead, and we just don’t know it.”

“Was there another budget cut in Congress?” Tessa asked facetiously.

Rick laughed, but Yoshiko shook her head vigorously. “No, no, I think you have it!”

“What, it’s NASA’s ghost?”

“In a sense, yes. What if it’s the ghost of your entire space program? When Neil Armstrong died, so did the dreams of space enthusiasts all over your nation. Maybe all over the world. It reminded them that you had once gone to the Moon, but no longer could. Maybe the unfulfilled dreams of all those people created this spaceship.”

Rick looked out his tiny triangular window at the Earth again. Could he be riding in some kind of global wish-fulfillment fantasy? “No,” he said. “That can’t be. Ghosts are individual things. Murder victims. People lost in storms.”

“Shipwrecks,” Tessa said. “They can be communal.”

“Okay,” Rick admitted, “but they need some kind of focus. An observer. They don’t just pop into being all by themselves.”

Tessa’s hair drifted out in front of her face, she pushed it back behind her ears and said, “How do you know? If a ghost wails in the forest . . .”

“Yeah, yeah. But something made it fade out just now, and come back again a minute later. That seems like an individual sort of phenomenon to me, not some nebulous gestalt.”

Yoshiko was nodding wildly. “What?” Rick asked her.

“I think you’re right. And if so, then I know whose ghost this is.”

“Whose?”

“It’s yours.”

Rick, expecting her to name anyone but himself, laughed. “Me?”

“Yes, you. You’re the commander; it makes sense that you would control the, um, more spiritual aspects of the mission as well.”

Both women looked at him appraisingly. A moment ago Rick had found Tessa’s intensity compelling, but now those same eyes seemed almost accusatory. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I don’t have any control over this ship. Except for the usual kind,” he amended before anyone could argue the point. “Besides, the first two launches didn’t have anybody on board. And I wasn’t even there for the second one.”

Tessa said, “No, but you were there for the first one, the day after Neil’s funeral. And you’d just gotten back from your shuttle flight—depressed about all the things that went wrong—when the second one went up. If anybody was convinced the space program was dead, it was you.”

Rick steadied himself with the grab handle at the top of the control panel. “What, you think I’m channeling the combined angst of all the trekkies and fourteen-year-old would-be astronauts in the world?”

“Maybe. What were you thinking just now?”

“When it faded? I was thinking—” Rick wrinkled his forehead, trying to remember. “I was thinking how good it felt to have people interested in space again.”

“There, you see?”

“No, I don’t see,” Rick said, exasperated. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s a perfect correlation. When you thought nobody cared, that space exploration was dead, you got your own personal Apollo, but when you thought maybe the rest of the world did want to go into space after all, it went away.”

Yoshiko said, “And it came back when you thought our deaths would ruin that renewed interest.”

Rick’s head felt thick, abuzz with the crazy notion that he might be responsible for all this. The way Tessa and Yoshiko presented it made a certain sort of sense, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. “Come on,” he said. “This is a spaceship, not some . . . some vague shadow in the mist. It’s got rivets, and switches, and . . . and . . . well, hardware.” He gestured at the angular walls enclosing them.

Tessa said, “So? We already know it’s a ghost. That’s not the question. The question is whether or not you’re behind it.”

“I’m not,” Rick said.

“No? I think you are. And it’d be easy enough to test. Let’s experiment and find out.”

Rick felt his heart skip a beat. Any emotion he had felt for Tessa a moment ago was drowned out now by unreasoning panic. Ghostly hardware was one thing—he could accept that even if he didn’t understand it—but the notion that he might somehow exert some kind of subconscious control over it scared him to death. “Let’s not,” he said.

Tessa pulled herself closer to him. “You agreed that we should figure out the rules so we can keep it from disappearing on us again. We’ve got a theory now, so let’s experiment and see if we’re right.”

Rick looked out the window again. Black space all around. No stars. Earth visibly receding. He shivered at the sight. For the first time since the launch, he really understood how far they were from help. Whether or not he was responsible for the ghost, he was now responsible for three lives. And maybe, just maybe, a few dreams back home as well. He turned back inside and said, “We’ve got plenty to do already without crazy experiments. We’ve got to get this ship rotating or we’ll overheat on the side facing the sun, and we’ve got to take a navigational fix, and check out the Lunar Module, and so on. Right, Kaliningrad?”

“Yes,” Gregor said. “Portside skin temperature is rising. Also—” Voices just out of microphone range made him pause, then he said, “Our engineers agree with your theory, but suggest that you refrain from testing it at this time.”

“Your engineers agree?” Tessa asked.

“That is correct.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Nyet. I—” More voices, then Gregor said, “—I cannot tell you anything more yet. But please give us more time to study the problem here before you do anything, ah, unusual.”

Rick nodded and pulled himself down into his couch again. Gregor was obviously hiding something, but whether he was hiding information or ignorance, Rick couldn’t tell. Either way, he was glad to be let off the hook. He said, “I agree one hundred percent. All right, then, let’s get to work. Roll maneuver first, so strap in.”

Tessa looked as if she might protest, but after a few seconds she stowed the camera and belted herself into her couch as well. Yoshiko smiled and shook her head. “You beg the question,” she said, but she strapped in too.

Rick knew she was right. As they worked to set the spacecraft spinning, he considered what Yoshiko and Tessa had said. Logically, if any single person were responsible for the Apollo manifestations then he was as good a candidate as anyone, but despite his fear of uninformed experimentation he couldn’t make himself believe it. He didn’t feel responsible for anything; certainly not the fade-out they had just seen. His own life was on the line, after all, and he didn’t have a death wish.

He began to wonder about that as they went through their checklist. Would he be here if he didn’t? So many things could go wrong, nearly all of them deadly. Even the most routine tasks contained elements of danger. For instance, when they blew the bolts separating the spent S-IVB third stage from beneath their lunar module, the long tube began to tumble, spinning end over end and spraying unused propellent uncomfortably close to them. They had to use the thrusters twice to push themselves away from it before they finally watched it recede into space. The “barbecue roll” went off without a hitch, and the ship’s skin temperature evened out, but when Rick unbuckled and pulled himself over to the navigation instruments in the equipment bay he discovered that all their maneuvering had driven them off course.

“It looks like we’re closer to a polar trajectory than an equatorial one,” he reported to Kaliningrad after he had sighted on a guide star and a lunar landmark and let the computer calculate their position. A polar course was no good; landing and rendezvous would be much easier if they stayed close to the Moon’s equator. That way the command module would pass over the landing site on every orbit, and they would have a launch window every two hours without having to do a fuel-wasting plane change.

Gregor said, “Da, our radar confirms your measurement. Wait a moment, and we will calculate a correction burn for you.”

“Roger.” Rick strapped back into his couch and they used a short burst from the service propulsion system engine to bring themselves back onto an equatorial course. That, at least, provided some relief from another nagging worry; the SPS engine was the last link in the multi-stage chain that had brought them this far, and if it had failed to ignite they wouldn’t be able to brake into lunar orbit, or even make course corrections for a slingshot trajectory back home.

After the burn they had to check out the lunar module. With Yoshiko steadying her feet, Tessa opened the hatch between the two spaceships, then removed the docking probe so they could fit through the tunnel. Rick stowed the probe in the equipment bay and followed the two women into the lander, but it had even less room than the command module so he stayed in the tunnel, feeling a bit disoriented as he looked down from above on the angular instrument panel and flight controls. The ascent engine was a big cylinder between the slots where pilot and copilot stood, sort of like the way the engine in an older van stuck out between the driver and the passenger.

“Is this what you sit on during descent?” Yoshiko asked.

Tessa laughed. “No, you fly it standing up, with bungee cords holding your feet to the deck.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

Yoshiko looked around at the spartan furnishings. To save weight, everything not absolutely essential had been omitted, including switch covers and wiring conduit. Bundles of wires were tied into place, fuel and air lines ran exposed along the walls, and the few storage areas were covered with nylon nets rather than metal panels. The whole ship looked fragile, and in fact it was. A person could shove a screwdriver through the walls if they wanted to. Yoshiko said, “I think I’m glad you two are flying this one.”

They hadn’t talked before this about who would stay in the command module while the other two went down to the Moon. Though keeping Yoshiko in the command module where her docking skills would be most useful was the logical choice, Rick said, “Are you sure? I was prepared to draw straws for it if you wanted.”

She shook her head. “No. This is adventure enough. And who knows, if we inspire enough people I may have another chance to land later, when my own country sends a mission.”

Rick wondered what a Japanese lander would look like. Probably a lot slicker than this, he figured, though to be fair he had to admit that anybody’s lander would be slicker if it were built with modern materials. Most of the equipment—the engines and the computers and so forth—could be bought straight off the shelf nowadays. It would be so much easier to build a lunar lander now than it had been the first time, if people just wanted to.

Well, maybe they would. Who could say?

“You’ll certainly have a better chance than we will,” Tessa said. “Rick and I will be lucky to stay out of prison when we get—whoa!”

For a second, the Moon had shone brightly through the flight control panel. It was just a flicker, gone as soon as it had appeared, but the ship had done it again.

“It is you,” Tessa said, pointing accusingly at Rick. “You were thinking positive again, weren’t you?”

His heart had begun to pound, and a cold sweat broke out on his body as he said, “Jail isn’t exactly my favorite dream.”

“No, but I’ll bet money you were thinking good stuff just before that.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“But nothing. Every time you think we’re going to jump-start the space program with this little stunt, the ship disappears, and every time you think we’re not, it comes back. Admit it.”

Rick suddenly felt claustrophobic in the narrow access tunnel. He said, “No way! There are a million other factors that could be operating here. My optimism or pessimism isn’t controlling the ship.”

“I think it is.”

They stared at one another for a few seconds, then Gregor said over the radio, “Tessa’s theory may be correct. Our studies indicate that ghosts are often closely tied to emotional states.”

“Your studies of what?” Rick asked. “You can’t put ghosts in a lab.”

Gregor laughed. “No, but you can sometimes take the lab to the ghosts. You forget, Russia has been studying paranormal phenomena since the cold war. We may not know everything about them, but we have learned a thing or two.”

Rick and Tessa looked at each other, both clearly amazed. The Russians had actually gotten results? Impossible. Rick said, “I don’t believe you for a second.”

The Japanese controller, Tomiichi, had not spoken up for some time, but now he said, “Believe it. The Russians aren’t the only ones to investigate these matters.”

The Japanese too? Rick looked at Yoshiko, but she merely shrugged and said, “I am an astronomer, not a parapsychologist.”

“True enough,” Rick muttered, wondering why she hadn’t remembered that before when she and Tessa were brainstorming their crazy explanation for all of this. But evidently someone in Russia—and maybe Japan, too—thought they had a handle on it. “So what if you’re right, Kaliningrad?” Rick asked. “What do you suggest we do?”

“Be aware that you could die out there,” Gregor said. “And if Tessa is correct, then you should remind yourself occasionally that your death will also kill any chance of a resurgence in popularity for manned space flight.”

“I’m the one who made her turn off the camera,” Rick reminded him. To Tessa he said, “I know we’re in danger out here.”

“You’ve got to feel it,” Tessa said. “That’s what matters to a ghost. You’ve got to remind yourself all the time that this isn’t some kind of picnic.”

Rick shuddered at the thought of the ship disappearing again, maybe for good, and the three of them blowing away in opposite directions in the last puff of breathing air. “That won’t be hard,” he told her.

IT TURNED OUT to be tougher than he thought. Over the next two days, as they coasted toward the Moon, the ship faded out twice more, once to almost transparency before whatever was responsible brought it back. Maybe it was him, Rick thought after the second time. It had happened while he was asleep, and when Yoshiko had shaken him awake he had to admit that he had indeed been dreaming about a colony on the Moon.

Both Yoshiko and Tessa were looking at him like hostages in a bank robbery or something. That accusing look, combined with the adrenaline rush from waking to their screams and his own fear of death, suddenly pissed him off. As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he said, “All right, dammit, maybe I am in control of this thing. And if you’re right about that, maybe you’re right about experimenting with it, too.”

“What do you mean?” Tessa asked nervously.

“I mean if I’m God all of a sudden, then why don’t I use it for something? Like make us a bigger ship, or at least a more modern one. Something with a shower, for instance. Or how about the Millennium Falconf Maybe we could go to Alpha Centauri as long as we’re out here.”

“Nyet!” Gregor said loudly. “Do not experiment! It is more dangerous than you can imagine.”

Rick snorted loudly. “Well, comrade, if I’m in the dark then it’s because you guys are holding back on me. If you know what’s going on up here, then tell me. Why shouldn’t I dream up a nice, big fantasy instead of this cramped little can?”

“E equals MC squared, that’s why,” Gregor said. “Your ghost cannot violate the known laws of physics. We do not know where the energy comes from to create the . . . ah, the physical manifestation, but we do know that a clumsy attempt to manipulate it can result in a violent release of that energy.”

“You do, eh? And how do you know that?”

Gregor conferred for a moment with someone else in the control room with him, then came back on line. “Let us just say that not all of our underground explosions in the 1970s were nuclear.”

Rick looked out the window at black space. “You’ve made a weapon out of ghosts?” he asked quietly.

Gregor said, “Is an industrial accident a weapon? It is not useful unless you can direct it, and that’s what I’m trying to tell you now. You are the focus of this phenomenon, but not its master. If you are careful you can maintain it, but if you attempt to manipulate it, the result will be disastrous.”

“So you say.”

“So we have come to understand. We do not have all the answers either.”

Rick’s mad was wearing off, but frustration made him say, “Well, why don’t you come up with some? I’m getting tired of being the scapegoat up here.”

Gregor laughed softly. “We are doing our best, but you will understand if that is too little and too late. We are having trouble reproducing your situation in our flight simulators.”

“Hah. I’ll bet you are.” Rick took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “All right,” he said, “I’ll try to be good. But if you learn anything more about how this works, I want to know it instantly. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Gregor said.

Rick rubbed his eyes again and unstrapped from his chair. Looking pointedly at Tessa and Yoshiko, he said, “Okay, then unless anybody has an objection, I think I’ll have some breakfast.”

“No problem,” Tessa said, holding her hands out. Yoshiko nodded. They both turned away, either to give him some privacy or to escape his anger, but whichever it was he really didn’t care.

Tessa pulled herself into the equipment bay and began taking a navigational reading while he re-hydrated a bag of dried scrambled eggs.

“Hey,” she said a few minutes later. “We’re on a polar trajectory again.” She looked directly at Rick, who was sucking on a packet of orange juice.

“It’s not me,” he protested. “A polar orbit means we can’t land. The command module wouldn’t pass over our landing site again for an entire lunar day.” That was twenty-eight Earth days, far too long for a crew to wait on the surface. In order to rendezvous with the command module, they would have to make an orbital plane-change in mid-launch, a much more tricky and fuel-costly maneuver. Either that or the command module would have to make a plane change, which was equally difficult.

Yoshiko acquired a rapt expression for a few seconds, then said, “Unless you land at the pole. The command module would pass over both poles on every orbit.”

“We can’t land at the . . . can we?”

“Absolutely not,” Gregor’s voice said. “Even I will not allow that kind of risk. You would have bad lighting, extremes of temperature, no margin for error in landing sites, possibly even fog obscuring your vision on final approach.”

“Fog?” asked Tessa.

“It is possible. Current theory predicts water ice in some of the deeper craters near the pole, where sunlight can never reach them.”

“Wow,” whispered Rick. “Ice on the Moon. That would make supporting a colony a lot easier.”

“Rick.” Tessa was looking intently at the walls, but they remained solid.

“Look, it’s a fact,” Rick told her, still put out with the whole situation. “Ice would make it easier to set up a colony. We wouldn’t have to fly all our water up from Earth. That doesn’t mean I think we’re actually going to build one, okay?”

“All right,” Tessa said. “I just want you to be careful.” She looked out the window at the Earth, now just a tiny blue and white disk in the void. “So, Kaliningrad, what do you suggest?”

Gregor said, “Give us a minute.” He took longer than that, but when he came back he said, “We want to check your guidance computer’s program. Perhaps we can discover where it intends to take you.”

So Rick, who had at least trained with the primitive keyboard and display, pulled himself down into the equipment bay and ran the computer while Kaliningrad talked him through the procedure, and sure enough, the program was indeed for a polar trajectory. And when they checked the computer in the lander, they learned that it was programmed for a descent to the rim of the Aitken Basin, a six-mile-deep crater right on the Moon’s south pole.

“That’s ridiculous,” Rick said when he heard the news. “How could we be expected to land on the south pole? Like Gregor said, the light would be coming in sideways. Shadows would extend for miles, and every little depression would be a black hole.”

Tessa, who had been running the computer in the lander, said, “Well, maybe this switch labeled ‘Na inject’ could provide a clue. If it sprays sodium into the descent engine’s exhaust plume, it would probably light up like a candle flame and provide all the light we need.”

“You’re kidding.” Rick pulled his way through the docking collar into the lunar module to look for himself, and sure enough there was the switch, right next to one labeled “Hi-int Floods.”

Tessa said, “It looks like landing lights to me. Two separate systems for redundancy.”

“Those weren’t on the simulator I trained with,” Rick said.

“Of course not. NASA would never plan a polar landing. Too dangerous.”

They knew that NASA had been listening in on their broadcast all along, and sure enough, now Laura Turner in Houston said, “Well, maybe not, Tessa. We’ve been digging through the old paperwork here, and in fact one of the mission proposals was for a polar landing. You’re right, there was a lot of argument against it, but it was considered a possibility for a later mission after we’d gained enough experience with the easy ones. Of course it got axed along with everything else when the budget cuts came down, but if we’d had the support for it, we would eventually have gone.”

Rick felt a shiver run up his spine. “The last two ghosts went to Copernicus and Aristarchus. Those were on the list too, weren’t they?”

“That’s right.”

“So basically we’re re-enacting what the U.S. should have done all along.”

“That’s a matter of opinion, but yeah, I guess you could say that.”

Gregor asked, “Houston, can those guidance computers be reprogrammed for a less difficult landing site?”

“Negative,” Laura said. “The programs are hard-wired in core memory. There’s only two kilobytes of erasable memory, and they need that for data storage.”

“So it’s a polar landing or nothing,” Rick said, his breath coming short. He looked at the controls again. They were solid as a rock now.

“Looks that way,” Tessa said. She grinned at him. Even with the added danger, it was obvious what she would choose.

Rick gulped. Her wide smile and intense, almost challenging stare were incredibly alluring, but at the same time he couldn’t help wondering how deep a hole they could dig themselves into on this flight, anyway? Deeper, apparently, than he had first thought. But they were already in quite a ways; he couldn’t back out now. “All right, then,” he said. “A polar landing it is. I just hope we find something worth the risk.”

Tessa laughed, and leaned forward to kiss him. “Just going is worth the risk,” she said. “That’s what exploring is all about.”

BOTH HOUSTON and Kaliningrad were unhappy with their choice, but Houston didn’t have any say in the matter anymore, and Kaliningrad was caught in a dilemma of its own making, for bailing out now would amount to abandoning an international rescue in the middle of the attempt. So they reluctantly set up their own computers to match the course wired into the onboard ones, and on the eighty-third hour of the flight Rick, Tessa, and Yoshiko strapped themselves into their couches for the long rocket burn that would slow them into orbit around the Moon. That had to happen after they had rounded the horizon, which meant they would be cut off from Earth for the burn. The computer would count down the time and fire the engine automatically, but just in case it didn’t, they all set their watches to keep track as well.

The last few minutes dragged by. The moon wasn’t visible in the windows; they had turned the ship end-for-end so it was behind them now, their course missing the horizon by a mere hundred miles. Rick kept glancing at his watch, then at the computer display, then at the attitude indicators, making sure they were still lined up properly for the burn.

Yoshiko took careful notes. If Rick and Tessa crashed or couldn’t return from the surface, she would have to fire the trans-Earth injection burn herself and make the homeward flight alone.

Just before the burn, the computer asked Go/No-go? again, and Rick pushed “Proceed.” The three astronauts watched the countdown continue to zero, but Rick didn’t feel the engine kick in. He stabbed at the manual fire button hard enough to break his fingernail on it, and then he felt the thrust.

Tessa looked over at him, her mouth open. “The computer didn’t fire it on time?”

“I didn’t feel it,” Rick said. “Not until I—”

“It did,” Yoshiko said. “I felt it before you pushed the button. The computer’s okay.”

“Are you sure?” It had been a split-second impression on Rick’s part, and his body was so high on adrenaline that he might not have felt the thust immediately, but he’d have sworn it hadn’t fired until he hit the button.

“I’m sure,” Yoshiko said.

Rick looked to Tessa, who shrugged. “Too close to call, for me.”

Rick laughed a high-pitched, not-quite-panicky laugh. “What the hell,” he said. “We got it lit; that’s what counts. Are we still go for landing?”

Tessa nodded. “I am.”

“You still comfortable with the idea of staying up here by yourself for a day?” Rick asked Yoshiko.

“Yes,” she said.

“All right, then, let’s do it.”

They didn’t mention the possible computer glitch to Gregor when they rounded the back side of the Moon and reacquired his signal. They reported only that they had achieved orbit and were ready to proceed. Gregor had them fire another burn to circularize their orbit, and that one went off automatically, so Rick began to relax about that anyway. He had plenty else to keep him occupied. The flight out had been a picnic compared to the constant checklists they had to follow and the navigational updates they had to key into the computers before they could separate the two ships. They hardly had time to look out at the Moon, its gray cratered surface sliding silently past below. But finally after two more orbits, two hours each in the lighter lunar gravity instead of the hour and a half they were used to in Earth orbit, they were ready.

They had named the lunar module Faith, to go along with Hope and to signify their trust that it would set them down and bring them back again safely. So when Gregor was satisfied that everything was ready, he radioed to the astronauts, “You are go for separation, Faith.”

“Roger,” said Rick. He and Tessa were both suited up again and standing elbow to elbow in front of the narrow control panel.

In the command module, Yoshiko said, “Going for separation,” and she released the latches that held the two ships together. A shudder and a thump echoed in the tiny cabin, and they were free.

Faith’s computer rotated them around to the right angle, and when the proper time came, the engine lit for a thirty-second burn that lowered their orbit to within eight miles of the surface. They coasted down the long elliptical track, watching the cratered surface grow closer and closer, until their radar began picking up return signals and Gregor finally said, “You are go for powered descent.”

Rick pushed “proceed” on the keyboard, and the computer fired the engine again, slowing them to less than orbital velocity. They were committed now.

Tessa reached out and punched Rick in the shoulder. “Break a leg, buddy,” she said. “It’s showtime.”

It was indeed. Rick gave her a quick hug, clumsy in the suits but nonetheless heartfelt, then gave his attention completely to the controls. Their course was bending rapidly now, curving down toward the surface, which this close to the pole was a stark pattern of white crater rims holding pools of absolute blackness. Rick’s gloved finger hovered near the sodium inject switch, but he didn’t flip it yet. He didn’t know how much he had, and he wanted to save it for the actual landing.

Tessa called out their altitude, dropping rapidly at first, then slower and slower, until at six hundred feet they were only falling at twenty feet per second. Five seconds later she whispered, “Low gate,” and Rick rocked the controller in his hand, switching out the computer.

He held his breath. This was when the previous two lunar modules had disappeared, at the point where the pilot had to take over. He waited for that to happen again, but the lander dropped another fifty feet, then seventy-five, and it was still there.

“Whew,” he said. “We made it.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Tessa. “We’re still four hundred feet up!”

“Piece of cake,” Rick said, looking out the window at the landscape slowly moving past. It was impossible to tell which little arc of crater rim was their target, and the tiny triangular windows were too small to give them an overview of the larger picture, so Rick just picked one that looked reasonably wide and brought the lander down toward it. It was strewn with boulders, but there were plenty of clear spaces between them, if he could just hit one.

“Quantity light,” Tessa called out. He had only a minute of fuel left, less than he was supposed to have at this altitude, but it was still plenty at their rate of fall.

He slowed their descent to ten feet per second and rotated them once around. One big boulder right on the rim had a wide flat spot beside it, so he angled over toward it. Flying the lander felt just like the simulator, save for the shifting of weight, and that actually helped him get a feel for the controls.

“Two hundred feet, eleven down,” Tessa said.

Too fast. Rick throttled up the engine a bit.

“One eighty, six down. One seventy, three down. One sixty-five, zero down—we’re going back up!”

“Sorry,” Rick said, dropping the thrust again. While he was at it, he flipped on the sodium injector, and sure enough, the landscape exploded in bright yellow light. Even the bottoms of the craters were visible now, though they seemed fuzzy, out of focus.

No time to sightsee now, though. Tessa kept reading off the numbers, her voice rising a little in pitch. “Forty-five seconds. One sixty feet, four down. One fifty, five down, one forty, six down . . . you’re picking up too much speed!”

“Got it,” Rick said, nudging their thrust up a bit.

“One hundred, five down. Thirty seconds.”

Rick did the math in his head. At this rate of descent he had ten seconds of fuel to spare. Far less than regulation, but still enough if he didn’t waste any more. “Piece of cake,” he said again, holding it steady for the spot he had chosen.

The descent went smoothly through the next fifty feet, but with only fifty feet to go, the ground began to grow indistinct. “What’s that, are we kicking up dust?” Rick asked.

“I don’t know,” Tessa said. “It looks more like fog.”

“Fog? Damn, Gregor was right.” Rick held the controls steady, but they were descending into a white mist. The big boulder he’d been using for a marker disappeared in the cloud swirling up from the crater floor. Rick couldn’t tell if they were still going to miss it or not; they could be drifting right over it for all he could tell.

Tessa’s hand hovered near the Abort Stage button. That would fire the ascent stage’s engine, smashing the lower half of the lander into the surface as it blasted the top half free and back into orbit.

“We’re too low for that,” Rick said. “We’d crash with the descent stage if we tried it. Just hang on and call out the numbers.”

“Roger. Twenty, five down.”

That was pretty fast, but Rick didn’t budge the controller. If he shifted them sideways in the process, they could hit the boulder.

“Fifteen . . . ten . . . contact light!”

The feelers at the ends of the landing legs had touched the surface. Rick let the engine run for another half second, then shut it down. The lander rocked sideways just a bit, then lurched as they hit the surface hard. “Engine off,” Rick said, his eyes glued to the ascent engine fuel level. If held steady. No leaks, then, from the shaking, and no warning lights on any other systems. Looking over at the descent engine’s fuel gauge, he saw that they had six seconds left.

Tessa glared at him. “Piece of cake?” she asked. “Piece of cake!”

Rick, at a loss for words, could only shrug.

Yoshiko’s voice came over the radio. “Faith, Are you down?”

Tessa laughed. “Yes, we’re down. Through fog as thick as soup, with six seconds of fuel left.”

Fog. There was water on the moon. Rick looked out the window, pointed. “Look, it’s blowing away.”

Without the rocket exhaust and the harsh sodium light to heat the ice in the crater floor, what had already vaporized was rapidly expanding into the vacuum, revealing the rubble-strewn crater rim on which the lander had touched down. Rick looked for his landmark boulder, saw it out of the corner of his window, only a few feet away from the side of the lander. They had barely missed it. In fact two of the legs had straddled it. If one of them had hit it, the lander would have tipped over.

Rick put it out of his mind. They were down, and they had more important things to worry about.

TIME SEEMED TO TELESCOPE on them as they ran through another checklist to make sure the ascent stage was ready to go in an emergency, then they depressurized the lander and popped open the hatch to go outside. Rick went first, not because it was his Apollo or because he was in any way more deserving, but for the same reason that Neil Armstrong went first on Apollo 11: because in their bulky spacesuits it was too difficult for the person on the right to sidle past the person on the left in order to reach the door.

It was a tight squeeze, but he made it through the hatch. The corrugated egress platform and ladder were in shadow, so Rick had to climb down by feel. He pulled the D-ring that lowered the outside camera, and Gregor radioed that they were receiving its signal back on Earth. Rick figured he was probably just a silhouette against the side-lit background, but he supposed that was about as good as the grainy picture of Neil taking his first step.

He was on the last rung when he realized he hadn’t thought up anything historic to say. He paused for a moment, thinking fast, then stepped off onto the landing pad and then from there onto the frozen lunar soil. It crunched beneath his feet; he could feel it, though he couldn’t hear it in the vacuum.

Tessa had made it through the hatch, too, and was watching from the platform, obviously waiting for him to speak, so he held his hand up toward her—and symbolically toward Earth, he hoped—and said, “Come on out. The water’s fine!”

The water was indeed fine. Fine as powdered sugar, and about the same consistency. Brought to the Moon’s surface in thousands of comet strikes over the millennia, it had accumulated molecule by molecule as the vaporized water and methane and other gasses froze out in the shadowed crater bottoms at the poles. It was too cold, and the Moon’s gravity was too light, for it to pack down into solid ice, so it remained fluffy, like extremely fine snow. When Rick and Tessa walked out into it they sank clear to their thighs, even though they only weighed about fifty pounds, and they would probably have sunk further if they’d gone on. But they could feel the cold seeping into their legs already, so they had to scoop up what samples they could in special thermos bottles designed for the purpose and turn back. The sample equipment packed in the lander was designed for a polar mission, but their spacesuits were made to keep them warm in vacuum, not against ice that could conduct heat away.

So they walked around the crater rim, bounding along in the peculiar kangaroo-hop gait that worked so well in light gravity, looking for anything else that might prove interesting. That was just about everything as far as Rick was concerned. He was on the Moon! Every aspect of it, from the rocky, cratered ground underfoot to the sharp, rugged horizon, reminded him that he was walking on another world. He looked out toward the Earth, about two-thirds of it visible above the horizon, about two-thirds of that lit by the sun, and he felt a shiver run down his spine at the sight. He had thought he would never see it like that except in thirty-year-old pictures.

They were making pictures of their own now. Tessa carried the TV camera and gave a running commentary as they explored. Gregor said that everyone in Russia and Europe was watching, and Tomiichi said the same for Japan. And surprisingly, Laura said the same about the United States. “They even pre-empted Days of Our Lives for you,” she told them.

“Hah. Maybe there’s hope for our country yet,” Rick muttered.

“Watch it,” Tessa said, but whether for fear of him offending their watchers or for fear of him getting too hopeful she didn’t say.

Rick didn’t care. He felt an incredible sense of well-being that had nothing at all to do with whether or not they made it back alive. They were on the Moon, he and Tessa, at the absolute pinnacle of achievement for an astronaut. Higher than anything either of them had ever expected to achieve, at any rate. No matter what they faced on the way home, or after they got there, nothing could alter the fact that they were here now. And Rick couldn’t think of anyone he would rather share the experience with. He and Tessa would be spoken of in the same breath forever, and that was fine with him. He watched the way she bounded along in the low gravity, listened to her exclaim with delight with each new wonder she discovered, and he smiled. He wouldn’t mind at all sharing a page in the history books with her.

They collected rocks and more ice from all along their path. At one stop Rick packed a handful of snow into a loose ball and flung it at Tessa, who leaped nearly five feet into the air to avoid it. When the snowball hit on the sunlit side of the crater, it burst into a puff of steam.

“Wow,” Tessa said as she bounced to a stop, “did you see that? Do it again.”

Rick obligingly threw another snowball past her, and she followed it with the camera until it exploded against a rock.

“Did you guys back home see it too?” she asked. “What makes them blow up like that?”

Gregor said, “Heat, I’d guess. And vacuum. Without an atmosphere to attenuate the sunlight, a rock will heat up just as much there at the pole as it would at the equator, so when the snow touches the hot rock it flashes into steam.”

“Hah, I suppose so. Looks pretty wild.”

“It might also give us a good idea what gasses are in the snow. Rick, could you set a sample down a bit more gently on a sunlit surface and let us see how it boils off?”

Rick did as he asked, packing a double-handful of snow and setting it on a boulder’s slanted face. Steam immediately began to rise from it, then stopped after a few seconds. The snowball shifted slightly and more steam sublimed off, then another few seconds passed before the remaining snow melted into a bubbling puddle.

“Aha!” Gregor said. “Three separate fractions, at least. I would guess methane for the first, then ammonia or carbon dioxide, and finally water. That is wonderful news! All four gasses will be useful to a colony.”

“If we ever send one,” Rick said, trying to suppress his silly grin so Tessa wouldn’t grow afraid of his optimism, but that in itself made him laugh out loud.

“Damn it, Rick, you’re scaring me half to death!” she said. They both turned to look at the lander, glittering like a gold and silver sculpture on the concrete gray crater rim, but it remained solid.

“Don’t worry,” Rick told her. “I may be having fun, but I’m still just as scared as you are.”

“Good.”

They explored for another hour, but before they had even made it a tenth of the way around the crater they had to turn back. The suits only held another two hours of oxygen, and they would need that time to return to the lander, climb back inside, and pressurize the cabin again. And after that their time on the Moon would be over, because they had to get back to Hope as quickly as possible and blast off for Earth again before the plane of their polar orbit shifted too far away from a return path. Their SPS engine had enough fuel for a plane change of a few degrees, but the longer they waited the more it would take.

They had done enough already. They had discovered water on the Moon, and had gone a long way toward proving that it could sustain a colony if humanity wanted to send one. Now all they had to do was get home alive, but that in itself was a big enough job to keep them occupied full-time.

Yet as he waited for Tessa to climb up the ladder and kick the dust from her boots, Rick thought of one more thing he could do. His heart leaped in his throat at the thought, but it would be the perfect cap to a perfect day—provided he really wanted to do it. And provided he’d read Tessa’s signals right as well.

He had no time to decide. It was now or never. He gulped, muttered, “He who hesitates is lost,” and moved back away from the lander.

“What?” Tessa asked. She had reached the egress platform.

“Don’t go inside yet.” Rick paced a few yards away, then began scuffing five-foot-high letters into the crunchy soil with his boot. They showed up beautifully in the low-angled light.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

He didn’t answer. It would become obvious in a moment, if he could just remember how to spell. That was no sure bet; his head buzzed like an alarm going off, and his breath came in ragged gasps that had nothing to do with the exertion of drawing in the dirt. This would change his life even more than the trip to the Moon. Maybe.

“Oh, Rick,” Tessa said when he completed the first line, but she grew silent when she saw him begin a second. She was still silent when he finished his message:

Tessa, I love you.

Will you marry me?

He was still standing on the final dot below the question mark. He looked up at her, a dark silhouette against the darker sky, her gold-mirrored faceplate reflecting his own sunlit form and the words he’d written. He couldn’t see her expression through it, couldn’t tell what she was thinking. He waited for some indication, but after the silence stretched on so long that Gregor asked, “Rick? Tessa? Are you okay?” she began to climb down the ladder again.

“Stand by, Kaliningrad,” Rick said.

Tessa stepped back onto the lunar surface, walked slowly and deliberately over to stand beside Rick. Even this close, he couldn’t see her face, but he heard her sniff.

“Tess?”

She didn’t answer him, at least not over the radio. But she shook her head a little and stepped to the side far enough to scratch a single Word in the soil:

Yes.

Rick echoed it aloud. “Yes!” All his apprehension died in an instant. He bounded over to her and wrapped her in a bear hug. “Tessa, I love you!”

“Oh, Rick.”

“Are you two getting mushy again?” Yoshiko asked.

Rick laughed. “Mushy, hell, we’re getting married.”

The radio burst into a jumble of voices as everyone spoke at once, then Gregor’s voice cut through the rest. “My sincere congratulations,” he said, “but your launch window is fast approaching.”

“Roger,” Rick said. “We’re going inside now.”

He helped Tessa climb back into the lander, then he climbed up and kicked off as much dust as he could. Before he ducked in through the hatch he looked down at the words they had written on the ground, their declaration clearly written for all to see. Those words could stay there for a billion years or so, the way things weathered on the Moon. Or if people actually came up and mined the crater for ice, they could be obliterated within a decade. That would depend quite a bit on what happened on the trip home.

Rick thought again of all the things that could yet go wrong. Engine failures, docking failures, computer failures—the list seemed endless. Despite his excitement over his and Tessa’s future, if their personal welfare over the next few days made any difference then he would have no trouble staying sufficiently pessimistic to keep the ghost from fading away on them.

THE NUMBER of possible disasters shrank with each stage of the mission: Faith’s ascent engine carried them into orbit, and Yoshiko docked smoothly with the lander, and the SPS engine fired on time to send them back homeward; but the way Rick figured it, infinity minus a few was still infinity. Plenty of things could still go wrong.

Including, of course, the ghost disappearing. Twice more on the return trip, both times right after Gregor reported that “Moon fever” was once more gripping the world, the spacecraft’s walls grew indistinct around them, and both times they came back only after Rick convinced himself that their deaths could still squelch humanity’s renewed enthusiasm for space. All the evidence seemed to support Yoshiko’s and Tessa’s theory that he was somehow in control of the apparition, whether or not he was directly responsible for it.

Gregor would say no more about it, save that he should listen to them. Tessa took that as carte blanche to control his every action, including sleep, which she wouldn’t let him do. She was afraid he would start dreaming of the bold new age of space exploration and they would all die of explosive decompression before he could wake up. She refused to let Gregor or Tomiichi or Laura tell them anything more about the situation on Earth, and she kept inventing elaborate new scenarios in which humanity would decide not to follow their lead after all. And now that they were engaged, she seemed to think Rick’s personal space was hers to invade in whatever imaginative ways she could think of as well. She would tickle him if she thought he was drifting off, or kiss him, or brush against him seductively. Rick found it alternately amusing and annoying, depending on which stage of his sleep deprivation cycle he was in at the time.

To keep himself busy, and to keep his mind on other things, he made her an engagement ring out of one of the switch guards, which were already nearly the right size and shape. He snapped one off from beside a third-stage booster control that didn’t connect to anything anymore, and with a little filing on a zipper he buffed the rough edges down enough for her to wear it.

“I’ll treasure it forever,” she told him when he slid it onto her finger, but Rick was too befuddled from lack of sleep to know if she was fooling or serious.

Finally, less than a day out from Earth, Tessa could no longer stay awake either. As she drifted off to sleep, she admonished Yoshiko to continue the job, but as soon as her breathing slowed, Yoshiko told Rick, “Go ahead and sleep if you want. I think you’ll be more valuable to us tomorrow if you get some rest now.”

Rick, groggy with fatigue, tried to focus on her face. “Why?” he asked. “What’s tomorrow?”

She grinned diabolically. “Re-entry. Twenty-five thousand miles an hour, smack into the atmosphere. Sleep well.”

Rick slept, but just as Yoshiko had intended, all his dreams were of burning up in a fireball as the Apollo capsule hit the atmosphere at too steep an angle, or of skipping off into interplanetary space if they hit too shallow. Or of hitting their window square on and still burning up when the ghost ship proved incapable of withstanding the heat. The gunpowdery smell of the lunar dust they had tracked inside on their spacesuits didn’t help any, either; it only provided another sensory cue that they were on fire.

When he woke, Earth was only a couple hours away. It still looked much smaller than it had from the shuttle, but it felt so much closer and it looked so inviting after his hours of bad dreams that Rick almost felt like he was home already.

With that thought, the capsule grew indistinct again. Tessa screamed, “Rick!” and punched him in the chest, and Yoshiko said quickly, “Remember the consequences!”

The ship solidified once more, and Rick rubbed his sore sternum where Tessa’s ring had jabbed him. “Jeez, you don’t have to kill me,” he said. “I get scared just fine on my own when that happens.”

Tessa snorted. “Hah. If you were as scared as I am the ship would never disappear in the first place.”

“Well I’m sorry; I’ll try to be more terrified from now on.” Rick turned away from her, but there was no place to go to be alone in an Apollo capsule. After a few minutes of silence, he looked back over at her and said, “Okay, I’ll try harder to control this. But don’t look at me so accusingly when it happens, okay? I’m not trying to make it disappear.”

Tessa sighed. “I know you’re not. It’s just—I don’t know. I don’t have any control over it, except what little control I have over you. My life is in your hands. Hell, at this point the entire space program is in your hands. And all you have to do to kill it is get cocky.”

“No pressure,” Rick said sarcastically.

Yoshiko laughed. “Whether you like it or not, you embody the spirit of exploration. When we get back, that spirit will probably pass on to someone else, but right now it resides in you, and you have to bring it safely home.”

“With all due respect,” Rick said, “that sounds like a bunch of tabloid speculation to me.”

She shook her head. “No, this is really no different than any space mission. Every time someone goes into space, their nation’s spirit flies with them. When Apollo 1 killed its crew, your nation faltered for two years before going on, and when the Challenger blew up it took three more. When the Soviets’ Moon rocket blew up in 1969, they completely scrapped their lunar program and shifted to space stations. It’s like that all over the world. Every astronaut who has ever flown has had your ability, and your responsibility; yours is just more obvious than most, made physical by the same power that created this ship.”

Rick studied the industrial gray control panel before him while he considered what she’d said. The truth of it seemed undeniable, at least in principle. The details could be argued—retooling after an accident wasn’t exactly backing off—but it was true that exploration stopped each time an accident happened, and when it started again it almost always took a new, more conservative direction.

“Well,” Rick said at last, “I’ll try my best to pass the baton without fumbling. We’ve only got a couple hours left; after that it’s somebody else’s problem.”

They spent the time before re-entry stowing all the equipment and debris that had accumulated in the cabin throughout their week in space. While they worked, the Earth swelled from a blue and white ball to the flatter, fuzzy-edged landscape they were familiar with from the shuttle flights. At that point they only had a few minutes left before atmospheric contact, just time enough to jettison the cylindrical service module with its spent engine and fuel tanks, then reorient the command module so it would hit the atmosphere blunt end first.

All three of them were breathing hard as the last few seconds ticked away. They weren’t wearing their spacesuits; the gee forces would be too severe for that, and besides, if anything happened to the capsule they would bum up instantly anyway, spacesuits or no. Rick reached out and held Tessa’s hand, wishing he could reassure her that they would be okay, but he knew that a phrase like “Don’t worry” coming from him would only make her worry all the more. So he merely said, “Ready with the marshmallows?”

“Very funny,” she replied.

Yoshiko laughed, though, and said, “Nevermind marshmallows, I’m getting out my bathing suit. Hawaii, here we come!”

Their splashdown target was about a thousand miles west of there, but that would be their first landfall after the recovery ship picked them up. There were two recovery ships, actually, one Russian and one American, but the Russians had agreed to let the Americans pick up the capsule if they wished. NASA wished very much, so they got the prize, though neither Rick nor Tessa looked forward to the official reception.

The unofficial one, however, would be worth every minute of NASA’s wrath. The main reason for the Russian ship’s presence was to televise the splashdown for the curious world, which Gregor said was even more excited now that the last, most perilous stage of the mission was about to commence. The love story didn’t hurt their ratings, either.

Despite the extra danger from the publicity, Rick was glad for the attention; he was counting on public support to keep him and Tessa out of serious trouble, and maybe even provide them with a source of income from the lecture circuit until the new space program got started. Their careers in the shuttle program were certainly dead now, and only hero status would ever let them fly again.

Contact. The capsule shuddered and the seats pressed up against them. The force eased off for a second, then built again, stronger and stronger, until it was well over a gee. Air heated to incandescence shot past the windows, lighting up the inside of the capsule like a fluorescent tube, and the ship began to rock from side to side. Some of that was no doubt the guidance computer fine-tuning their trajectory with shots from the attitude control jets, but every few seconds the capsule would lurch violently as it hit a pocket of denser air. The deeper they plunged into the atmosphere, the greater their deceleration, until they were pulling nearly seven gees and struggling just to breathe.

Long minutes dragged past as the three astronauts remained pinned to their couches, barely able to move. Rick kept his hand near the manual controls mounted on the end of his armrest, but even when the buffeting became severe and the automatic system seemed to be overreacting, he didn’t take over control. He trusted the ghost more than he trusted his own instincts. It wouldn’t let them die now, not this close to the end of the mission.

The cabin walls flickered momentarily at that thought, and Rick cringed as he waited for a blast of flame to engulf him, but the fade-out only lasted for an eyeblink. Tessa and Yoshiko both gasped, but they said nothing. Speech was impossible with the incredible weight pressing them into their couches.

The ionized gas roaring by had cut off communications with the ground. Rick heard only static in his headphones, but the shriek of air around the blunt edge of the heat shield nearly drowned out even that. Up through the window he could see a twisting tail of white-hot flame stretching away for miles into a sky that grew steadily bluer as they fell.

Finally after six minutes the gee force began to ease off, and the flames streaming past the windows faded away. They had slowed to terminal velocity now, still plenty fast but not fast enough to burn away any more of their heat shield.

Rick looked at the altimeter at the top of the control panel. At 25,000 feet, just as the needle passed the black triangle on the gauge, the drogue parachutes opened with a soft jolt. Rick watched them flutter overhead, stabilizing the craft and slowing them just a bit more, then at ten thousand feet the main chutes streamed out and snapped open in three orange and white striped canopies. The capsule lurched as if it had hit solid ground, but then it steadied out and hung there at the bottom of the shroud lines, swaying slightly from side to side as it drifted.

The sun was only a few hours above the horizon, and waves scattered its light like millions of sparkling jewels below them. Rick let out a long sigh. “Home sweet home,” he said.

“Don’t relax yet,” Tessa said, eyeing the altimeter. “We’re still a couple miles up.”

“Yes, Mom.”

A new voice over the radio said, “Apollo, this is the U.S.S. Nimitz. We have you in visual.”

“Roger, visual contact,” Rick said. He loosened his harness and peered out the windows, but he couldn’t spot the ship, nor the Russian one. It was a big ocean.

The altimeter dropped steadily, swinging counter-clockwise through five thousand feet, then four, three, two . . .

“All right,” Rick said. “We’re going to make it.”

“Rick!” Tessa shot him an angry look. “We’re still at a thousand feet.”

Rick looked out at the ocean, now seeming close enough to touch. “I don’t care. I’ve played doublethink with the supernatural the whole way to the Moon and back; well now I’m done with that. We could survive a fall from here, so unless this thing sinks right on out of sight with us in it, I say superstition be damned: we’re home safe and sound.” He banged on the hatch for emphasis. It made a solid enough thud when he hit it, but a moment later it began to shimmer like a desert mirage.

“Rick, stop it!” Tessa yelled, and Yoshiko said, “Not yet, damn it, not yet!”

“I take it all back!” Rick shouted, but this time the capsule continued to fade. It supported their weight for another few seconds, but that was all. The control panel grew indistinct, the altimeter going last like the grin of the Cheshire cat, its needle dropping toward the last few tic marks, and then the couches gave way beneath them, pitching all three astronauts out into the air.

Rick flailed his arms wildly to keep from tumbling. His right hand struck one of the spacesuits and it bounced away from him, spinning around with arms and legs extended. The other two spacesuits had remained solid, too, and for a moment Rick wondered why they hadn’t faded along with the ship, but then he remembered that he and Tessa and Yoshiko had worn them aboard.

He twisted around, looking frantically for the only other non-ghostly items in the capsule, and he saw them just below, falling like the rocks they were: the samples he and Tessa had collected from the lunar surface.

“No!” he shouted, reaching for them as if he could snatch at least one rock out of the air, but he suddenly got a face full of water and he choked and coughed. The sample containers had been part of the ship, and they had disappeared, too, splashing him with their contents. He smelled ammonia, and something else he couldn’t identify before the wind whipped it away.

Everything they had collected, everything they had done, had vanished in one moment of arrogant pride. They were returning to Earth with nothing more than what they had taken with them.

Except the entire world knew they had gone and knew what they’d seen, nothing could take that away.

Tessa was a few feet to the side, but she had spread her arms and legs out to slow her fall. As she swept upward, her hair streaming out behind her, Rick shouted, “Don’t hit like that!”

“Of course not,” she yelled back at him. “I’ll dive at the last minute.”

Yoshiko was windmilling her arms to keep from going in headfirst, but she was tumbling too fast. “Cannonball!” Rick yelled at her, but he didn’t see if she tucked into the position or not. He barely had time to twist around so his own feet were pointed downward.

The ocean came up at them fast. Rick looked away, and this time he saw the ships, two enormous gray aircraft carriers plowing side-by-side through the waves toward him, their decks covered with sailors. And reporters. And scientists, and bureaucrats, and who knew what else.

Rick closed his eyes and braced for the impact he knew was coming.

BEAUTY AND THE OPÉRA OR THE PHANTOM BEAST

Suzy McKee Charnas

The author’s, previous tale for Asimov’s, “Boobs” (July 1989), won the 1990 Hugo award for Best Short Story: Ms. Charnas’s highly regarded novels include Walk to the End of the World, Motherlines, and The Vampire Tapestry. Her Hugo-award-winning novella, “Unicorn Tapestry,” was also staged as a play called Vampire Dreams in 1990. This event may have been a precursor to her lyrical look at horror and the opera.

For the first few months it was very hard to take my meals with him. I kept my gaze schooled to my own plate while he hummed phrases of music and dribbled crumbs down his waistcoat. His mouth, permanently twisted and swollen on one side, held food poorly; unused to dining in company, he barely noticed.

But to write of such things I must first set the stage. No more need be known, I think, than anyone might learn from Gaston Leroux’s novel,The Phantom of the Opéra , which that gentleman wrote using certain details he had from me in the winter of 1907 (he was a convivial, persuasive man, and I spoke far too freely to him); or even from this “moving picture” they have made now from his book.

M. Leroux tells (as best he can in mere words) of a homicidal musical genius who wears a mask to hide the congenital deformity of his face. This monstrous prodigy lives secretly under the Paris Opéra, tyrannizing the staff as the mysterious “Phantom” of the title. He falls in love with a foolish young soprano whose voice he trains and whose career he advances by fair means and foul.

She, thinking him the ghost of her dead father or else an angel of celestial inspiration, is dominated by him until she falls in love—with a rich young aristocrat, the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny (the name I shall use here also). The jealous Phantom courts her for himself, with small hope of success however, since, according to M. Leroux, he sleeps in a coffin and has cold, bony hands which “smell of death.”

Our soprano, although pliant and credulous, is not a complete dolt: she chooses the Vicomte. Enraged, the Phantom kidnaps her—

It was the night of my debut as Marguerite inFaust . I replaced the Opéra’s Prima Donna who was indisposed, due perhaps to the terrible accident that had interrupted the previous evening’s performance: one of the counterweights of the great chandelier had unaccountably fallen, killing a member of the audience.

Superstitious people (which in a theatre means everyone) whispered that this catastrophe was the doing of the legendary Phantom of the Opéra, whom someone must have displeased. If so that someone, I knew, was me. Raoul de Chagny and I had just become secretly engaged. My eccentric and mysterious teacher, whom I was certain was the person known as the Phantom, surely had other plans for me than marriage to a young man of Society.

Nervously, I anticipated confronting my tutor over the matter of the fatal counterweight when next he appeared in my dressing room to give me a singing lesson. I was sure that he would come when the evening’s performance was over, as was his habit.

But just as I finished my first number in Act Three, darkness flooded the theatre. Gripped in mid-breath by powerful arms, I dropped, a prisoner, through a trap in the stage.

I was mortified at being snatched away with my performance barely begun, but knowing that I had not sung well, I also felt rather relieved. It is possible, too, that some drug was used to calm me. At any rate I did not scream, struggle, or swoon as my abductor carried me down the gloomy cellar passages at an odd, crabwise run which was nonetheless very quick. I knew it was the Phantom, for I had felt the cool smoothness of his mask against my cheek.

No word passed between us until I found myself sitting in a little boat lit by a lantern at the bow. Opposite me sat my mentor, rowing us with practiced ease across the lake that lies in the fifth cellar down, beneath the opera house.

“I am sorry if I frightened you, Christine,” he said, his voice echoing hollowly in that watery vault, “but ‘Il etait un Roi de Thule’ was a disgrace, wobbling all over the place, and you ended a full quarter tone flat! You see the result of your distracting flirtation with a shallow boy of dubious quality, titled though he may be. I could not bear to hear what you would have made of ‘The Jewel Song,’ let alone the duet!”

“My voice was not sufficiently warmed up,” I murmured, for indeed Marguerite does not truly begin to sing until the third act. “I might have improved, had I been given time.”

“No excuses!” he snapped. “You were not concentrating.”

I ought to have challenged him about the lethal counterweight, to which my concentration had in fact fallen victim; but alone with him on that black, subterranean water, I did not dare.

“It was nerves,” I said, cravenly. “I never meant to disappoint you, Maestro.”

We completed the crossing in silence. In some way that I could not quite see he made the far wall open and admit us to his secret home, which I later learned was hidden between the thick barriers retaining the waters of the lake.

In an ordinary draped and carpeted drawing room, amid a profusion of fresh-cut flowers and myriad gleaming brass candlesticks and lamps, my teacher swore that he loved me and would love me always (despite the inadequate performance I had just attempted inFaust ). He knelt before me and asked me to live with him in the city above as his wife.

Now I was but a girl, and even down on his knee he was an imposing figure. He always wore formal dress, which flatters any tall man; carried himself with studied grace and dignity; and had (till tonight) behaved impeccably toward me. I had imagined the features behind the white, half-face mask he always wore as sad and noble, concealed for a vow of love or honor, or both.

But he had always seemed much older than I was and, acting as the opera’s demonic spirit, must live at best a highly irregular life. I had simply never imagined him as a suitor. In fact, I had named him from the first my “Angel of Music,” not because I thought he was some sort of heavenly visitor—I was a singer, not a convent-school girl—but to both state and remind him of a standard of conduct that I wished him to uphold in his dealings with me (it had not escaped my notice that he asked no payment for my lessons).

Taken aback by his proposal—and with Raoul’s ring hanging hidden on a chain ‘round my neck!—I temporized: “I am flattered, Monsieur. As my father is dead, you must speak with my guardian. But, forgive me, I do not even know your name, or who you are.”

The side of his mouth that I could see curved in a smile. “Your guardian is both deaf and senile; it is no use talking to him. As for me, I am the Opéra Ghost, as you surmise. My name is Erik.” He paused, breathed deeply, and added, “There, I have told you who I am; now I shall show you.”

With a sudden, extravagant gesture, he swept off his mask and with it all of his thick, dark hair—a wig! I gasped, hardly believing my eyes as he displayed to me the full measure, the positively baroque detail and extraordinary extent, of his phenomenal ugliness.

Large and broad, with bruise-colored patches staining the pallid skin, his head resembled nothing so much as an overripe melon. The fully revealed face was a nightmare. One eye was sunk in a crooked socket, the nose was half-formed and cavernous, and his cheek resembled a welter of ornamental plasterwork, all lumps and hollows and odd tags of skin. His mouth spread and twisted on that same side into a shocking blur of pink flesh, moist and shining. Only his ears were fine, curled tightly to the sides of his freckled crown with its scanty dusting of pale, lank hair. In short, he was a stomach-turning sight.

Abject and defiant at once this monster gazed up at me, clearly apprehending how I recoiled but bearing it in silence while he awaited my answer.

In that blood-freezing instant all my childish fancies and conceits—that with his teaching I would become a great singer, that he and my dear Raoul would gladly join forces to that end—were swept away. Words from the interrupted third act ofFaust came unbidden to my mind: “Oh, let me, let me, gaze upon your face!” I nearly burst into shrieks of hysterical laughter.

Instead, I managed to say, “I think you must be mad, Monsieur, to ask me to accept you!”

“Mad? Certainly not!” He sprang to his feet and glared down at me. “But I am every bit as dangerous as Opéra gossip makes me out to be. Do you remember the stagehand Joseph Buquet, who supposedly hanged himself last Christmas? In fact, he died at my hands, to stop his chattering about me. You may look to me also in the death caused by the fallen counterweight. I wasvery displeased with your behavior on the roof of my theatre the other evening with the importunate young man whose ring you wear secretly even now; and I made my protest.

“Also that crash, with certain communications from me, is what persuaded Madame Carlotta to step aside tonight and give you your chance to sing Marguerite, of which you made so little. I tell you these things so that you will believe me when I say that your Vicomte’s life depends upon your answer, and other lives also.”

My heart dropped. “You haven’t hurt Raoul! Where is he?”

“Why, he is here, unharmed. Only his fine feathers are somewhat ruffled.” He drew a heavy curtain, revealing a window into an adjoining room.

There sat the Vicomte de Chagny, struggling wildly in a chair to which he was lashed by a crisscrossing of thin, bright chains. His clothes were all awry from his wrenching to get loose, his opera cape was rucked up on the floor at his feet, and his top hat lay on its side in a corner.

Seeing me, Raoul began shouting mightily, his face so reddened that I feared an attack of apoplexy. The Phantom pressed some switch in the wall and Raoul’s voice became audible, bawling out my name: “Christine! Christine, has he touched you, has he insulted you? Charlatan! Scoundrel! Let me go! You ugly devil, I will break you in pieces, I will—”

The curtain fell again. Raoul’s yells subsided into frustrated grunting as he renewed his attempts to free himself.

I was horrified. I loved Raoul for his (normally) ebullient and affectionate nature and I dreaded to see him hurt. Of course, he was as artistically sensitive as a large veal calf, but we cannot all serve the Muses; nor is it a capital offense to be a Philistine.

I sank onto a velvet-seated chair, trying to collect myself. The Opéra Ghost stepped close and said darkly, “His life is in your hands, Christine.”

Now I understood his meaning, and I was aghast; yet my heart rose up in exhilaration at the grant of such power. That love of justice found mainly in children burned in my breast. Feeling at fault for the death of the counterweight victim at least, I longed to do right. The Phantom’s words seemed to mean that right lay within my grasp—if I had the courage to seize it.

Gripping the arms of my chair, I looked up into his awful face with what I hoped would seem a fearless gaze. “Monsieur Erik, I see in you a man of violence and cruelty. You wish to hurt Raoul because he loves me, and from what you say you plan some wider gesture of destruction as well if I refuse to be your wife.”

A vindictive gleam in his eyes confirmed the truth of this. I trembled for myself, and for Raoul who groaned and struggled in the next room. Clearly he could not rescue me; I must rescue him and with him, apparently, others unknown to me but equally at risk.

In fact, this great goblin in evening dress who called himself Erik, whom I had rashly taken for a friend and mentor, offered me a role grander than any I had yet sung on stage (this was the spring of 1881;Tosca had not yet been written), a challenge of breathtaking proportions. Still costumed as honest Marguerite and bursting with her unsung music, I determined to meet the test. I was very young.

“Here is my answer,” I said. “If you let Raoul go and swear, moreover, to commit no further violence so long as you live, I will stay with you—for five years.”

One does not survive in the arts without learning to bargain.

“Five years!” exclaimed the Ghost, fine spittle spraying from his twisted mouth.

“Monsieur Erik,” I replied, “I mean what I say: I offer my talent, such as it is, for you to shape and train as you choose, as well as my acceptance of your love—” My throat nearly closed on these words, and I was afraid I might vomit. “—on the terms I have stated, for five years.”

In fact, I had chosen the number out of the air; five years was the length of time I had spent at the Paris Opéra.

How well prepared I was for that moment I understood only upon later reflection. A French music professor had seen my father and me performing in our native Sweden, and, thinking my father a rustic genius on the violin, had brought us both to France. But my father—more at ease, perhaps, as an exhibitor of my talents than as someone else’s prize exhibit—had before long gone into a steep decline.

Extremity makes a monster of any dying man to those who must answer his incessant, heart wringing, and ultimately vain demands for help and comfort. I did not begrudge the duty I owed, and paid; but I learned in those long months the price of yielding to another person unbounded power over my days and nights. In life as in art, limitation is all.

The Phantom scowled, plainly perplexed by a response he had not foreseen. I added hurriedly, “And we must live here below, not out in the everyday world. The strain of pretending to be just like other people would be more than I could bear. That is my offer. Will you take it?”

He showed wolfish teeth. “Remember where you are. I can take what I want and keep what I like, for as long as I wish.”

“But, my dear Angel,” I quavered, “you may not like to have me with you even as long as five years. You are accustomed to your own ways, untrammeled by considerations of the wants of a companion. And we will not be honing my talents for public performance but only for our own satisfaction, which may lessen your pleasure in my constant company.”

“What do you mean?” he demanded. “I have promised from the first to make a famous diva of you!”

“Maestro,” I said, “please understand: you have allowed your passions to drive you too far. I doubt that the Opéra managers would accept your direction of my career now on any terms. You have just said that you killed a stagehand and loosed the counterweight on the head of a helpless old woman. In the world above, you are not a great music master but a callous murderer.”

“ ‘In the world above—’ ” he repeated intently. “But not here below? Then you forgive me?”

“I do not presume to forgive crimes committed against others,” said I, with the lofty severity of youth. “Still, neither can anything you or I might do bring back your victims alive and well, so what use is blame and condemnation? You have treated me—for the most part—with consideration and respect, and I mean to respond in kind. But I can accept no more advancement of my career by your efforts. I must reject a success made for me by the heartless criminality of the Opéra Ghost.”

He wrung his hands, a poignant gesture when coupled with his ghastly head and threatening demeanor. “But what have I to offer you, except my knowledge of music and my influence here at the Opéra?”

“That we must discover,” I replied more gently, for his question had touched me. As the answer to it was “nothing,” I dared to hope that my arguments might induce him to acknowledge the futility of his plans and release Raoul and me. “But making a career for me is out of the question now. Please put that possibility from your mind.”

Drawing a square of cambric from his pocket and patting his lips dry with it, he stared gloomily at the floor. No apology, no instant grant of liberty was forthcoming. I saw that he would not reconsider, and it was too late for me to do so.

“So,” I finished dejectedly, “my choice is to join you in exile and obscurity, not fame and glory.”

“Then you won’t sing in my opera, when it is staged?” he protested, sounding near to tears himself. “But I composed it for you!”

He had previously told me that he had been working on this opus for twenty years and that it was too advanced for me in any case; but I judged his emotion honest enough.

“And I will sing it for you if you wish,” I said quickly, “here in your home. Won’t that suffice? Can it be, my angel and teacher, that you do not want me at all, just my voice for your opera? Is it only my talent, put to use for your own recognition, that you love? I am sorry, but you must give that up. Guiltless as I am of your crimes, if I let you raise me up with hands tainted by murder I shall be as bloodstained as you are yourself.”

He blinked at me in pained bafflement. “How is it, Christine, that I love you to the depths of my soul, but I do not understand you at all? You are scarcely more than a child, yet you speak like a jurist! What do you want of me? What must I do?”

Taking a deep breath of the warm, flower-scented air, I repeated my terms: “You must release the Vicomte, unharmed. You must swear to do no more violence to him or to anyone. And five years from now you must let me go too.”

He flung away from me and began to pace the carpeted floor, raising puffs of dust with every step (for he had no servants, and like many artistic people he was an indifferent housekeeper). Freed from his oppressive hovering, I arose from my chair and surreptitiously breathed in the calming way that he himself had taught me.

“I have said that I love you,” he said sulkily over his shoulder, “and I mean love that lasts and informs a lifetime—not the trifling fancy of an Opéra dandy whose true loves are the gaming tables and the racetrack!”

This jeer, spoken with deliberate loudness, provoked renewed sounds of struggle in the next room, which I resolutely ignored.

“I am young yet, Maestro,” I said meekly. “Five years is a very long time to me.” He sighed, crossed his arms on his breast, and bowed his dreadful head. “But I can school myself to spend that time with you so long as I know there is an end to it; and if you will promise to sing for me, often, in your splendid voice that I have never heard equaled.”

“With songs or without them, I can keep you here forever if I choose,” he muttered.

“As a prisoner filled with hatred for you, yes,” I dared to reply, for I saw that he was losing heart. “But prisoners are the chains of their jailers, and they often pine and die. If I were to perish here, my poor dead body would stink and rot like any other. You would be worse off than you are now. I offer more than that, dear Angel; for five years, no less and no more.”

I think that no one had argued with Erik, face to face, for a very long time. He certainly had not expected reasoned opposition from me. He was on the verge of giving way.

Raoul chose this moment to issue a challenge at the top of his lungs from next door: “Fight me like a man, if youare a man, you disgusting freak! Choose your weapons and fight for her!”

The Phantom’s head came sharply up and he rounded on me so fiercely that I could not keep from flinching.

“Liar!” he shouted. “It’s a trick! You maneuver to save your little Vicomte, that is all! Do you think he would wait for you? Do you think he wouldwant you, after I have had you by me for even your paltry five years? You would be sadly disappointed, Ma’amselle. Or do you mean to coax and befool me, and then escape in a month or two when my back is turned and run to your Raoul? I will kill him first. You lying vixen, I will kill you both!”

“I am not a liar!” I cried, my eyes brimming over at last.

“Prove it!” he screamed, in a very ecstasy of grief and rage. “Liar! Little liar! Prove it!”

I stepped forward, caught him ‘round the neck and kissed him. I shut my eyes, I could not help that, but I pressed my mouth full on his bloated, glistening lips and leant my breast on his. My trembling hands fitted themselves to the back of his nearly naked head, holding his face tight to mine; and he was not cold and toadlike to the touch as I had anticipated, but vigorous and warm.

How can I describe that kiss? It was like putting my mouth to an open wound, as intimate an act as if I had somehow slipped my hand in among his entrails.

After a blind and breathless moment I stepped away again, much shaken. He had not moved but had stood utterly rigid from head to foot in my embrace. We looked one another in the eyes in shocked silence.

“So be it,” he said at last in a hoarse voice. “The boy goes free, and I will submit my hatreds to your authority.” His eyes narrowed. “But you must marry me, Christine. I will have no shadow cast upon your name or character on my account; and there must be no misunderstanding between us as to the duties owed whilst you live with me.”

“I accept,” I whispered, although I quailed inwardly at the mention of those “duties.”

He left me. There came some muffled, unsettling sounds from the next room, during which I had time to wonder wretchedly how my Raoul had fallen into the hands of this monster.

But according to Opéra gossip the Phantom was supremely clever, while I had reluctantly noticed in Raoul flashes (if that is the word) of the obdurate, uncomprehending stupidity of the privileged. I was familiar with this quality from my childhood days of entertaining, with my father, the wealthy farmers and burghers who hired us to make music for them. Apparently, the addition of noble blood only exacerbated the condition.

In a few moments Erik reappeared, holding his rival’s limp body in his arms like that of a sleeping child. Raoul had recently begun growing a beard, and he looked very downy and dear. The sight of him all but undid me.

“He is not hurt,” said the Phantom gruffly. “Bid him goodbye, Christine. You shall not see him again in my domain.”

I longed to press a parting kiss to Raoul’s flushed and slackjawed face, for he looked like Heaven itself to me. But my kisses were pledged now, every one. I must wait, in an agony of mingled terror and queasy anticipation, for their claimed redemption—not by Raoul, but by the Opéra Ghost.

I slipped off the little gold chain with Raoul’s ring on it, wound it ‘round his hand, and stood back helplessly as Erik bore him away.

Left alone, I rushed about the underground house like a bird trapped in a mineshaft. Fear drove me this way and that and would not let me rest. I was locked in, for Erik quite correctly mistrusted me; had I found a way out, I would have taken it.

The rooms of his secret house were modest, snug, and warm, with lamps and candles burning everywhere. The furniture, apart from a pair of pretty Empire chairs in the drawing room, consisted of heavy, dark, provincial pieces. A few murky landscape paintings hung on the walls. There were shelves of books and of ornamental oddments—a little glass shoe full of centime pieces, some carved jade scent bottles, a display of delicate porcelain flowers—which I dared not touch lest I doom myself forever, like Persephone eating the pomegranate seeds in Hades.

In my distraction I intruded into my captor’s bedroom, which was hung with tapestries of hunting scenes and pale green bedcurtains dappled in gold like a vision from the life of the young Siegfried. The sylvan effect was diminished by the presence of a number of elaborate, gilded clocks showing not only the hour but also whether it was day or night. I did not own a clock, being unable to afford one; clearly I was not in the home of a poor man.

There was no mirror in which to see my frightened face (nor even a windowpane, for behind the drapes lay blank walls). The only sound was the ticking of the clocks.

At last I sank onto a divan in the drawing room and gave way to sobs of misery and bitter self-reproach. I could scarcely believe myself caught in such a desperate coil. Yet here I was, a foreigner, a poor orphan with no family but my fellow-workers at the Opéra. I had made friends among the ballet rats, but no one listens to an alarm raised by a clutch of adolescent girls. My guardian, the old professor, was only intermittently aware of my existence these days. Who would miss me for more than a few hours, who would search?

Raoul was my one hope. I had met him years before, during a summer I had spent with my father at Chagny. Grown to be a handsome, lively man of fashion, the young Vicomte had turned up lately in Paris as the proud new owner of a box at the Opéra. I had been flattered that he even remembered me.

His proposal of marriage was typical of his impetuous and optimistic nature. In my more realistic moments, I had not truly believed that his family would ever permit such a joining. Now I had not even his ring to remember him by.

But he would save me, surely! I told myself that Raoul loved me, that he would lead an attack on the underground house and never give up until he had me back again.

How he might overcome the obstacle of my having spent—however long it was to be—unchaperoned in the home of another man, I could not imagine. Raoul’s people were not Bohemians. His brother the Comte had already expressed displeasure over the warm relations between Raoul and me, and that was without a kidnapping.

Still, my cheerful and enthusiastic Vicomte would not allow me to languish in captivity (I tried to blot out the image of him, red-faced, roaring, and chained to a chair). I had only to stand fast and keep my head, and he would rescue me.

Erik, returning at long last, showed me to a very pretty little bedroom with my meager selection of clothing already hanging in the wardrobe and my toiletries laid out on the table.

He behaved from this point as a gracious host, always polite, faultlessly turned out, and considerately masked. This surface normality was all that enabled me to keep my own composure. At night I slept undisturbed (when I did sleep) although there was no lock on my door. Daytimes the Phantom spent absorbed in composition, humming pitches and runs under his breath, pausing to play a phrase on the piano or to stab his pen into a large brass inkwell in the shape of a spaniel’s head.

I continued my own work as best I could. Each morning he listened to me vocalize, but he made no comment. When I ventured to ask him for a lesson, trying to restore our relationship to some semblance of its old footing, he said, “No, Christine. You must see how you get along without the aid of your Angel of Music.”

So I saw that my initial rejection still rankled, and that he was inclined to hold a grudge.

The third morning afterFaust , I burst into tears over breakfast: “You said you would free Raoul! He would come back for me if he were alive! You monster, you have killed him!”

Erik tapped his fingers impatiently upon the smooth white cheek of his mask. “Why should I do such a thing? He is an absurd young popinjay with no understanding of music, but I do not hate him; after all, you are here with me, not run off with him.”

I flung down my napkin, knocking over my water glass. “You murdered poor Joseph Buquet for gossiping about you. I daresay you did nothate him, but you killed him all the same!”

Frowning, Erik moved his knee to avoid the dripping water. “Oh, Buquet! One deals differently with aristocrats. I assure you, the boy is alive and well. His brother has taken him home to Chagny. Now eat your omelette, Christine. Cold food is bad for the throat.”

That evening he brought a ledger from the Opéra offices and set before me a page showing that the Vicomte de Chagny had given up his box two days after the night ofFaust . Raoul had signed personally for his refund of the remainder of the season’s fee. There was no doubt; I recognized his writing.

So in his own way Erikhad chosen his weapons, had fought for me—and won. At least no blood had been shed. I ceased accusing him and resigned myself to making the best of my situation.

I spent two weeks as his guest, solicitously and formally attended by him in my daily wants. He even took me on a tour of the lake in the little boat, and showed me the subterranean passage from the Opéra cellars to the Rue Scribe through which he obtained provisions from the outside world.

Then, during the wedding procession in a performance ofLohengrin , the Opéra Ghost and I exchanged vows beneath the stage. He placed upon my finger a ring that had been his mother’s, or so he supposed since he had found it in a bureau of hers (most of his furniture he had inherited from his mother, he told me; and that was all the mention he ever made of her).

He solemnly wrote out and presented to me a very handsome and official-looking civil certificate, and said that having had his first kiss already he would not trouble me for another yet, since he was so ugly and must be gotten used to.

Thus began my marriage to the Phantom of the Opéra.

In M. Leroux’s story the Phantom’s heart is melted by the compassion of the young singer. He releases the lovers and dies soon after, presumably of a morbid enlargement of the organ of renunciation. The soprano and her Vicomte take a train northward and are never heard of again.

But that is not what happened.

When he said “first kiss,” Erik may have spoken literally. Like any man in funds he could buy sexual favors and had certainly done so in the past. But with what wincing, perfunctory haste those services must have been rendered! And he was proud and in his own way gallant, or at any rate he wished to be both proud and gallant. I thought then and think still that although more than twice my age at least, he was very inexperienced with women.

For my part, I was virginal but not completely naïve. Traveling with my father I had observed much of life in its cruder aspects, in particular that ubiquitous army of worn-out, perpetually gravid country girls through whose lives we had briefly passed. My own mother, whom I scarcely recalled, had died bearing a stillborn son when I was two years old.

I regarded sexual matters as I did the stinks and wallowings of the pigsty. Before Raoul’s reappearance I had determined to remain celibate, reserving all my energies for my art. Even my dalliance with him had been chaste, barring a kiss or two. In any case, I had no idea what to expect from a monster.

No expectation could have prepared me for what followed.

For two nights Erik came and sat silently in a chair by my bed. I sensed him listening in the dark to my breathing and to the small rustlings I made as I shifted and turned, unable to sleep. I felt observed by some nocturnal beast of prey that might claw me to pieces at any moment.

On the third night he brought a candle. I saw that he was masked and wore a long robe of crimson silk. His feet, which like his hands were strong and well shaped, gleamed palely on the dark Turkish carpet.

He set the candle on the little table by my bed and said in a hushed tone, “Christine, you are my wife. Take off your gown.”

In those days decent women did not show their nakedness to anyone, not even their own husbands. But I had stepped beyond the pale; no convention or nicety protected me in Grendel’s lair.

He turned away, and when I had done as he said and lain down again in a trembling sweat of fear, he leaned over me and folded back the sheet, exposing the length of my body to the warm air of the room. Then he sat in his chair and looked at me. I stared at the ceiling, tears of shame and terror running from the corners of my eyes into my hair, until I fell into an exhausted sleep.

Next morning I lay a long time in bed wondering how much more I could bear of his stifled desire. I thought he meant to be considerate, gentling me to his presence as a rider gentles an unbroken horse, little by little.

Instead, he was crushing me slowly to death.

The following night he came again and set the candle down. “Christine, take off your gown.”

I answered, “Erik, you are my husband. Take off your mask.”

A frozen moment passed during which I dared not breathe. Then he tore off the mask, in his agitation dropping it on the floor. He managed not to snatch after it but stood immobile under my scrutiny, his face turned away only a little.

When I could gaze on that grotesque visage without my gorge rising, I knew I was as ready as I could ever be. I shrugged out of my nightdress, and taking his hand I drew him toward me. With a sharp intake of breath, he reached to pinch out the candle.

“No,” I said, “let it burn,” and I turned down the sheet.

After that he always came to my bed unmasked. He would lie so that I looked straight into his terrible face while his hands touched me, rousing and warming the places where his mouth would soon follow, that hideous mouth that devoured without destruction all the juices, heats, and swellings of passion.

He proved a barely banked fire, scorched and scorching with a lifetime of need. And I—I went up like summer grass; I flamed like pitch, clasped to his straining breast. As beginners, everything that we did was unbearably disgusting to us both, and so frantically exciting that we could not stop nor hold back anything. My God, how we burned!

Knowing himself to be only a poor, rough sketch of a man, he had few expectations and never thought to blame me for his own shortcomings (or, for that matter, for mine). He was at first too swift for my satisfaction, but he soon set himself to master the gratifications of lust as he might a demanding musical score. Some very rare books appeared on his shelves.

He studied languor, lightness of touch, and the uses of raw energy. I discovered how to lure him from his work, to meet his advances with revulsion and open arms at once, and to invite to my shrinking cheek his crooked kisses that came all intermixed with moans and whisperings and that seemed to liquefy my heart.

I learned to twine my legs ‘round his, guiding him home to that secret part of myself, the odorous, the blood-seeping, the unsightly, puckered mouth of my sex. To whom else could I have exposed that humid breach in my body’s defenses, all sleek with avidity? With what other person could I have shared my sweat, my spit, my rising deliriums of need and release filled with animal cries and groans?

Initially, I suffered the utmost, soul-wringing terror and shame. But then came an intoxication which I can only compare to the trance of song, and this was the lyric of that song: my monster adored the monstrous in me.

Oh, he enjoyed my pretty face, my good figure, and my long, thick hair, all the simple human handsomeness denied him in his own right. But what he craved was the Gorgon under my skirts. His deepest pleasure depended on the glaring difference between my comely outward looks and the seeming deformity of my hidden female part. He loved to love me with his twisted mouth, monster to monster, gross and shapeless flesh to its like, slippery heat to slippery heat, and cry to convulsion.

We awoke new voices in one another. To the slow coiling of our entangled limbs we crooned like doves. His climax wrung from him half-strangled, exultant cries like those of a soul tearing free from its earthly roots. In my turn, I sang for him the throaty songs of a body drowning rapturously in its own depths.

I commanded, praised, begged, and reviled him, calling him my loathsome demon, my leprous ape, my ruined, rutting angel, never stooping to the pretense that he was other than awful to look at. I felt that if I treated his appearance as normal, he would begin by being grateful; but in time he would come to hate and despise me for accepting what he hated and despised in himself. A man who feels this way will beat the woman who shares his life, whether he is a handsome man or an ugly one.

Erik did strike me once.

It was quite early in our life together. We were studying Antonia’s trio with her mother’s ghost and Dr. Miracle, fromThe Tales of Hoffmann , which Erik had heard at its Opéra Comique premier some three months earlier. From memory, he played Dr. Miracle’s diabolical music on the piano; and he sang the dead mother’s part, transposed downward, with an otherworldly sweetness and nobility that greatly moved and distracted me.

I struggled vainly with Antonia’s music (which he had written out for me), until Erik’s largely unsolicited advice spurred me to observe rather tartly that he was very arrogant in his opinions for an ugly man who lived in a cellar singing songs and writing music that no one would ever hear.

He leaped to his feet and, sharp as a whip, he slapped me. I stood my ground, my cheek hot and stinging, and said, “Erik, stop! By the terms of our bargain, you are not to be that sort of monster.”

“Am I not?” he snapped, glaring hatefully at me. “You go tripping out onstage in your finery and you open your mouth and everyone throws flowers and shouts the house down. I have twice the voice of any singer in Paris, but as you so kindly remind me, no audience will ever hear me and beg me for an encore! If you write a little song that is not too terrible, they will say what a clever creature you are to be able to sing songs and make them too. But they will never be brought to their knees in tears by my music. So what sort of monster willyou allowme to be, Christine?”

“I am sorry for what I said,” I muttered. I could not help but see how his lips gleamed with the saliva sprayed out during this tirade; repelled, I thrust my handkerchief toward him.

He snatched it from me and blotted his mouth, snarling, “Oh, spare me your so-called apologies! Why should you care for the feelings of a miserable freak?”

“I have said that I am sorry for my words,” I retorted with some heat. “I have not heard you say that you are you sorry for your action. Do you understand that the next time you strike me, whatever the provocation, I will leave you and I will never, ever come back? You will have to kill me to stop me; and then I will be revenged in the pain it will cost you if I die in your house, at your hands, which are beautiful and strong and that wish only to love me.”

He stared down at the handkerchief clenched in his fingers, and I saw by the droop of his shoulders that the perilous moment was past. Still I forged recklessly onward, for my heart was in a turmoil of confused and painful emotion. “If you must hit something go and beat the couch cushions until your rage is spent. But never raise your hand to me again!”

In low tones he began, “Christine, I—”

“It is all your fault!” I burst out. “You should not have sung her music, the dead mother’s music!”

“Ah,” he said. “The dead mother’s music.”

I stiffened, seized with dread that I had exposed a weakness to him that he would savagely exploit. But he only raised his head and sang once more, unaccompanied and more gloriously than before, that same lofty music of the ghostly mother urging her daughter to sing.

“Now,” he said afterward, “if you are moved to say cutting things to me, say them. I will endure it quietly.”

My eyes stung, for the music had again affected me deeply. So had the realization that he of all men knew why it did so, for surely his own mother had been dead to him from the day she first saw his terrible face. In his way, he was offering a very handsome apology indeed.

I shook my head, not trusting my voice.

He nodded gravely. “Very good, your restraint is commendable. After all, Christine, it is our task to master the music, not to let the music master us. Now, let us begin again.”

We began again.

Other crises arose, of course. His habitual cruelty and malice inclined him toward outrageous gestures of annoyance, as when I found him one afternoon preparing to burn alive a chorus girl’s little poodle that he had lured away for the purpose. The animal’s backstage yapping had disturbed an otherwise unusually good Abduction from the Seraglio .

I tore the matches from his unresisting hands. With my shawl I blotted as much lamp oil as I could from the dog’s coat. Then I carried the terrified creature up to the appropriate dressing area and left it there, its muzzle still tied shut with Erik’s handkerchief (the dog was not seen, or heard, at the Opéra again).

Returning, I found Erik in an agony of penitence, offering to drink lamp oil himself or to wear a tightly tied gag for as long as I wished, to redeem his transgression. He showed no remorse for the agonies he had meant to inflict on the dog and its owner, but he was deeply agitated at having once more nearly failed his promise to me, and in such a spectacular fashion.

I approved the gag as a fitting punishment. That night the Opéra Ghost cried like a cat into the layered thicknesses of cloth crushing his lips, while on my knees I ignited our own sweet-burning immolation.

Don’t misunderstand: in music he was my master and would be my master still if he stood here now. His talent and learning were broad, discriminating, and seemingly inexhaustible. It was he who led me to the study which came to absorb me, of the sorts of chromatic and key shifts that irresistibly evoke powerful emotions in the listener.

But his violence was mine to rule, so long as I had the strength and the wit to command it, by the submission I had won from him with that first kiss.

Between us we sustained a steep pitch of passion despite the muting effects of familiarity, I think because of the time limit I had set. “Never repeat even the prettiest melody more than thrice at a go,” my father used to say. “Knowing it must end enhances its beauty and prevents boredom in its hearers.”

Domestic chores gave Erik’s life a sense of normality; he yielded them only reluctantly to me. Nor did I wish to become his drudge.

However, his standards of housekeeping and cooking (two areas in which he had no talents whatsoever) were far below mine; and I did not expect him to wait upon me as he had when I was his guest. I had chosen a life (albeit a truncated one), not an escapade.

We wrangled cautiously over household duties and came to a rough arrangement, with many exceptions and renegotiations as circumstances required. When his compositional impulse flagged, if he could not relieve his frustration by prowling the upper floors of the opera house, I did not hesitate to assign him extra chores down below. More than once I sent him out of the house with a dusty carpet, a beater, and instructions to vigorously apply the latter to the former.

Having had none of the normal social experience that matures ordinary people, he could behave very childishly. This lent him an air of perennial youthfulness at once attractive and extremely trying. His emotions, when tapped, poured from him like lava, and he had great difficulty mastering the molten flow once it began. Physical work, like the demands of operatic singing, helped to bleed off at least some of his ungovernable energy.

In our leisure time I ventured to inquire about his past. His answers surprised me. I had thought him an aristocrat, but his arrogance was that of talent, not of blood. He was the son of a master mason in Rouen. When he was still a child his parents had either given or sold him (he did not know which) to a traveling fair.

As a young man he had ranged far and wide, living by his wits and his abilities as an artificer of ingenious structures and devices. He regaled me with tales of his exotic travels before he had settled in Paris, where, commanding some Turkish laborers (whose language he spoke) at work on Garnier’s great opera house, he had secretly constructed his home in its bowels. He had always worn a kerchief over his nose and mouth “for the dust,” but his workmen had been less interested in his hidden face than in the extra wages he had paid for their clandestine labor.

Given my knowledge of his character, I guessed that he omitted much repellent detail from these lively narratives. Though troubled I never pressed him, reasoning that such matters lay between him, the souls of those he had harmed, and God.

In my turn, I read aloud to him from the biographies and travel books that he favored, or repeated anecdotes of café life and gossip (no matter how stale) about composers and performers whose names he knew. I taught him some Swedish, a language of interest to him because of its strong tonal element, and he enjoyed hearing songs and legends of the northern lands, which he had never visited. As a child I had absorbed many tales, from folk tradition and from books, which now stood me in good stead. People raised in countries with long winters treasure stories and tell them well.

Outside of music, Erik was not so widely read as I had supposed. Many of the volumes on his shelves had only a few of their pages cut, for though he hungered for books he was impatient with their contents once he had them. In the first place, he was sure that he knew more about everything than anyone else did because he was a prodigy and well traveled in the world.

And then, he spent far more time roaming “his” opera house, or working on the various small mechanical contrivances that he was always inventing and refining, than he did reading. Indeed, he was in a continual ferment of activity of one kind or another, from the orbit of which I sometimes had to withdraw simply to rest myself.

I came to regard him as a flood of notes and markings falling in a tempestuous jumble upon the blank page of his life. He had instinctively tried to create order in himself through composing, with limited success: a well orchestrated life is not typified by ferocious obsessions and quixotic crimes. I believe he submitted to my scoring, as it were, in order to experience his own melody, in place of a ceaseless chaos of all but random noise.

Weeks and months passed, bringing our scheduled parting closer by increments almost too small to notice, and never spoken of. Even inadvertent allusions to my future departure sent Erik storming off to work on the darkest of his music, with its plunging, wheeling figures of mockery and despair.

It hurt me, that music. I think it hurt him. I never tried to sing any of it, nor, despite his previously stated intentions, did he ask me to.

In his opera, Don Juan Triumphant , Don Juan seduces an Archangel who helps him to master the Devil in Hell. From this position of power, the Don decrees a regime of true justice on Earth that wins over Heaven also to his side; whereupon God, dethroned, pulls down Creation in a mighty cataclysm in which all are swallowed up. A moral tale, then (as operas tend to be), the music and lyrics of which combined wild extremes of fury, yearning, and savage satire.

Of its quality, I will say this: Erik’s music was magnificent but too radical to have been accepted, let alone admired, in its own time (as he often said himself). Some days, his raw, raging chords drove me out to walk beside the underground lake in blessed quiet. Some days I sat weak with weeping for the extraordinary beauty and poignancy of what I heard. His music offered nothing familiar, comforting, or merely pretty. Parisian audiences would not have stood it.

Nonetheless, he spent hours planning the premier of his opera, which he projected for the turn of the century. All the great men of the world would be invited, and all would come (or else). The experience would change their lives. The course of history itself would be altered for the better by Erik’s music.

My lessons resumed soon after the night ofLohengrin . Erik taught me the rudiments of composition, which I spent many hours refining in practice. In particular, he had me sing and play my own alternate versions of musical figures from the works of the masters, by comparison with which I learned the measure of true genius (as well as the best direction of my own modest talents). This, he said, was how he had taught himself.

He was critical of men like Bizet, Wagner, Verdi, and Gounod, and fiercely envious of their fame. Yet he worked long and hard with me on their music, for he did not deny greatness when he heard it. At leisure, he would play Bach on the piano with a stiff but sure touch; and then his eyes often glittered with tears—of gratitude, I think, for the sublimeorder of that music.

It was a terror and a joy to sing for him. I have never known anyone to whom music was so all-absorbing, so demanding, and so painfully essential.

His vocal instruction was founded on carefully designed drill and on breathing techniques that he had learned in the Orient. Freed from constriction, my voice began to show its natural qualities. I saw that I might move from the bright but relatively emptysoubrette repertoire to the lower-lying, richer, lyric roles. Erik agreed with my assessment.

“Your voice will darken as it ages,” he said, “but you have the vocal capacity for some of the great lyric roles already, I can hear it. And the emotional capacity, too; you are not the child you were, Christine. Your Marguerite is much improved, and you will soon be ready to attempt Violetta.”

Under his tutelage my range expanded downward with minimal loss of agility above, and I gained a certain sumptuosity of tone overall. I would hear myself produce a beautifully floatedpianissimo and wonder how on earth I had done it.

Of course, the next day it was unattainable—these achievements torment singers by their evanescence. Erik would not permit me to overwork my voice striving to retake such heights. “Wait,” he said. “Rest. It will come.” About such things he was almost always right.

I bitterly missed performing in public with my improved skills. But in my heart I knew this sacrifice to be well suited to my collusion (however innocent) in Erik’s most recent crimes, which he had committed at least in part on my behalf.

There was much that I was incapable of learning from him, for he was gifted with a degree of musicality that I simply did not possess. I came to prefer hearing him sing for me (as he did often, true to his promise) to producing the finest singing of which I myself was capable. One’s most glorious tones are inevitably distorted out of true inside one’s own head.

Also, I came to realize that I had a very good voice but not a great one. He said otherwise; but he was in love. And I think that, in his heart, he was well content to train up an exceptional voice that was still not quite as fine as his own.

For he sang like a god, with a beauty that cannot be imagined by those who never heard him. He had a tenor voice of remarkable power, flexibility, and range, which because of his superb musicianship was never merely, monotonously, perfect. I was reminded of descriptions I had read of the singing of the great castrati of the previous century.

Without apparent effort Erik produced long, flowing lines of thrilling richness, like molten gold pouring improbably from the mouth of a stony basilisk. Joyous, meditative, amorous, wild, or sad, his singing enraptured me; I could not hear enough of it. As we worked together, he increased the bolder, rougher, more dramatic capabilities of his own voice, producing song expressive enough to pierce a heart of steel.

Or to calm a heart in panic. I had been prey to night terrors from an early age; when I cried out in my sleep Erik would come to me with a candle to remind me that I lived with a veritable walking nightmare of flesh, so how could I allow mere dreams to trouble me? Then he would sit by my bed and sing to me. Often he chose “Cielo e Mar,” from Gioconda , which he rendered with a tender serenity that soon sent me drifting off again.

How his moisture-spraying travesty of a mouth could produce song of such precision, versatility, and lustre, I never understood. He ought not even to have sung tenor; tall men are almost always baritones. But he was anomalous in so many respects that I gave up trying to account for him. Every time I heard him sing I reminded myself that from the first I had named him an angel.

Sometimes he talked of traveling together, singing for our supper like gypsies as each of us had in our youth. He was fascinated by the resemblances in our respective upbringings, I as a child-performer accompanying my peripatetic father, he as a circus freak astonishing audiences with feats of legerdemain and song, and, of course, with his shocking appearance.

But I saw the differences, which were stark.

My father was a country fiddler with no education, a hard drinker, and a fanatical gambler. He had not hesitated to exploit my pretty face and voice at the fairs, fine homes, and festivals where we performed. He played, I sang. Ours was not a sentimental relationship. Yet while he lived I never went hungry or found myself thrown naked upon the spiny mercies of the world.

Erik, expelled from his childhood home like a leper, had ranged the earth in the isolation to which his repulsive face condemned him. Escaping the circus he had traveled eastward, hiring his talents out to despots who half the time would have murdered him instead of paying him for his services, had he not outwitted them like some branded Odysseus. He had taken the name “Erik,” he said, because he liked its bold, Viking sound.

Occasionally, wondering how I had come to this strange new life, I fantasized that he and I were magical siblings, the ugly one and the pretty one, the “bad” one and the “good” one, joined at the soul by music. Parted early through mischance, we were now drawn close again—voluptuously, unlawfully close—by that indissoluble bond.

I did not share such fancies with Erik. He was stubbornly conventional about some things, family among them. But I was mated to a monster: what better occasion for my most perverse imaginings?

Erik’s own imaginings were far more dangerous.

One day when I called him to our noon meal, he sprang up from his writing desk and made me come sit down in his place. Pressing a pen into my hand and closing my fingers hard upon it, he tried to force me to shape letters on the blank page before me.

“Write,” he said harshly in my ear. “Surely there is some message you wish to send? Write to Raoul, at Chagny. You let him kiss you that night on the roof. Don’t you think about those expert kisses of his? Of course you do—you think of them when my clumsy mouth kisses you. Write and tell him, make him glad!”

The wildness of his accusations, the painful grip of his fingers on mine, and the palpable heat of jealous rage pouring off him all combined to scare me half out of my wits.

“Let me go!” I cried. I managed to raise my hand a little and fling the pen away. My arm knocked down the inkwell, which fortunately was nearly empty and did not break.

Erik stooped to retrieve it, muttering furiously, “Now see what you have done!”

“See what you have done,” I answered, still trembling. “You have raised your hand.”

“Coward!” he spat. “I barely touched you!”

“Your words are blows, just as you intend them to be,” I said. “I have told you what I will do if you abuse me.”

“Go or stay, it is all the same!” he shouted. “Your promise is a sham! Do you think me such a fool? You lie in my arms and dream of your pretty Vicomte, and in your heart you mock me!”

His face was dark with hatred—hatred of me , for my power to cause him pain. It meant nothing that I intended him no ill and in truth had no such power, save what he himself assigned to me. I saw that I was lost, for his fury was fed not by any actions of mine but by his own inner demons, that only he could master.

Terror closed my throat; injustice drove me to speak.

“Now you have clenched your fist,” I choked out. “Very well. Hit hard, Erik, punish the fraud you wrongly say I am. But strike to kill, for living or dead I shall be lost to you for good.”

In his rage he may not have heard my words; but he heard their music (for it welled from the same dark sources as his own) and he could not help but stop and listen.

“Why do you prevent me?”He struck his fist hard upon his thigh. “It is the pretext you long for, the blow that will free you! Why do you thwart me? Why?”

Even as he spoke I saw the answer dawn upon him (as it dawned upon me at the same moment): that I did not wish to be freed, but to live out my commitment to the end.

The frenzied glare died from his face, leaving it pale and haggard. “Oh, Christine,” he said. “Sometimes I imagine horrible things, and now I have nearly made them come true.”

“Do you think you have not?” I said, savage in my turn. “I warned you!”

I did not truly mean to leave him, now that his fury was in retreat. But I did mean to hurt him, and I succeeded. He stared at me with a stricken look.

Then he cast himself down before me, stretched prostrate upon the floor in a posture of such limitless submission that in the West it is only ever displayed before God. At one stroke he had transformed himself from a cultured, willful man of my own world (albeit outcast in it) into a faceless beggar groveling before some barbarian conqueror or the lawless caprice of Fate.

It was a vertiginous moment, appalling, piteous, and thrilling. I longed to stoop at once, all merciful forgiveness, and lift him up again; or else to grind my heel into the nape of his neck until he writhed at my feet. Paralyzed, I stared down at him, scarcely breathing.

In a muffled voice he begged my pardon. I stammered that I would pardon him when I could, for he had wronged me very deeply. He accepted this, rising without a word and withdrawing from the room.

He would not look me in the face or touch even the sleeve of my dress afterward. Two dismal days passed thus. Then I bade him to my bed, where we fell desperately upon one another as if deprived for two years, not two nights.

Resting beside him while our hearts’ tumult slowed, I said, “You were thinking of someone just now, Erik; who?”

“I thought of you,” he whispered. “There is no other.”

With the lightest touch I cupped my hand to his twisted cheek, encompassing as much as I could of what his mask normally concealed. “It is just the same for me. If you can believe me when I say so, then you are forgiven.”

He groaned and pressed his face blindly into my palm, wetting my fingers with his tears.

Raoul’s name was never spoken between us again.

Otherwise (and apart from his run-of-the-mill sulks and fits of spleen), Erik continued to show me the most constant and ardent regard. This was not as pleasant as it sounds. Worship from afar is flattering, but to be loved with consuming intensity by a person who lives cheek by jowl with all one’s frailties and failings is not only exhilarating but tremendously exhausting.

For my part, I continually reminded him what a triumph of character it was (his character as well as mine, since he managed for the most part to fulfill his side of our agreement) for me to keep my word and stay with him. Even when his deformity had acquired a strange beauty of its own in my eyes, I still called upon him (while we fervidly plundered each other’s bodies) as my disgusting incubus, my foul and greedy gargoyle, my lecherous ogre.

I must have been a wise child. I knew that love worthy of the name gives not what the beloved needs, but what the beloved wants.

What Erik needed was recognition of his full humanity, in spite of his repulsive looks and criminal behavior, from another human being who addressed him as an equal. What he wanted was to worship a woman exalted by both quality and attainment who could be repeatedly persuaded to descend to the level of his own base and hideous physicality, thus demonstrating again and again her exceptional love for him.

As for me, I exulted in each leap from my pedestal. What lesser achievement could be worth such a plunge into the bestial, ecstatic depths?

Well, we were opera folk. Only extremes would do.

So I continued to merit his devotion and my own self-respect, despite and because of the fact that I lived for that shudder of delicious horror when he laid his hand on me, and the exquisite creeping of my skin into tiny peaks at the touch of his wet, misshapen lips. In my eager body he took his revenge many times over on all the well made men in the world. I suppose I had my vengeance too, although I do not know upon whom.

Perhaps I harp on this “distasteful” subject. Perhaps I should refer more circumspectly to the craving of my ghastly Caliban for the delights of the flesh. Or is Caliban’s craving acceptable but not his gratification? And what of my desires and delights? I can guess what Raoul de Chagny would have said had I begged of him certain kisses thought in his world to be proper only between men and their whores.

Between the Opéra Ghost and myself nothing was “proper” or “improper.” “Morality” meant my dictum that he must not express his artistic judgment by murdering people who annoyed him.

For the rest, we consumed each other with willful abandon, two starvelings at a feast.

After an early phase of keeping me close (I had expected this and endured it patiently), he began to open his world to me. He showed me the trapdoors and passages he used to get quietly about the Opéra. The Phantom patrolled “his” theatre often, omnipresent, watchful, and intensely critical of all that occurred there. He seemed pleased that I found my own uses for his private pathways.

He routinely helped himself to fresh clothes from the costume racks, altering garments to fit and returning them to be cleaned with the rest (the wardrobe mistress, grown weary of constantly undoing his tailoring, now left a selection of clothing at the very back of the racks to be worn only by the Opéra Ghost).

Taking a leaf from his book, I filched the more tattered costumes of the little chorus and ballet rats, mended them in my leisure time (for I had been taught that idleness is both wasteful and a sin), and stealthily returned them again.

The Opéra girls, struggling along in their difficult and demanding world, took to leaving chocolates for their “good fairy” as well as the occasional pretty ribbon or fresh-cut bloom. If they guessed my secret, they kept it.

I pitied their passions and their pains. They had no potent Angel of Music to inspire and encourage them. There was only one such being, and he devoted himself to me alone.

In time Erik ventured outside with me. I always wore a veil and he went masked and covered in cloak and wide-brimmed hat. Some evenings he would hire a carriage and take me driving in the Bois de Boulogne to hear the gypsy music played in the restaurants there. Or we would take a night train out of town for a country walk. An eager amateur astronomer, he taught me to recognize not only the constellations but many stars by name.

In the city we spent fine evenings strolling the grandes boulevardes . We even attended, anonymous in costume, the lavish masquerade balls given at the Opéra itself, although for us these were not precisely social occasions.

We always came late, and left early to avoid the midnight supper after the gala. As we danced together in the crush or looked on from some quieter vantage point, Erik would murmur in my ear a stream of comments on the flirtations, machinations, and vendettas that he claimed to observe transpiring around us. These vitriolic, often scurrilous remarks always made me laugh, despite my resolve not to encourage the exercise of his more malevolent humor.

On our first anniversary he gave me my own key to the iron gate of the passage to the Rue Scribe. I made frequent use of it, for living as we did we needed time out of each other’s company.

Most of the daily marketing he did himself, being very pleased with his skill at passing unremarked (as he imagined) among ordinary folk. Closely muffled even in warm weather, he was not, I am sure, so inconspicuous as he thought. But he was both proud and jealous of his self-sufficiency, and I took care not to intrude upon it. He often returned with a gift for me—a book of poetry, a pair of gloves, a pretty bit of Meissen, or fresh flowers.

For my part, I brought back reports of the day and what occurred in it, and perhaps a colorful poster to replace one of the dreary pictures on his walls, a book from the stalls along the Seine, or a box of the little sweet meringues that he loved.

I took upon myself the task of posting the mail. I wrote to no one, but Erik was an enthusiastic, if menacing, correspondent to whoever caught his attention in the world of music. We attended most Opéra performances, seated in a sort of blind he had built in the shelter of a large, carved nymph on the wall (I always noted with a pang the strangers seated in Raoul’s old box). Afterward, Erik often addressed pages of venomous criticism to the managers, the newspapers, and to composers and artists as well.

Many of these missives I intercepted. But sometimes he mailed a letter himself while he was out, for there were occasional replies to be picked up addressed to “Erik Rouen,”Poste Restante . He did not share their contents with me.

We were always replenishing our stocks of candles and coal oil; it took great quantities of fuel to heat and light Erik’s home. He could well afford it; we lived on the spoils of years of extortion from the Opéra managers. In fact, by means of threats enforced by ingenious acts of sabotage, Erik had accumulated a small fortune.

He exhibited a lordly carelessness about money, mislaying sizable sums with evident unconcern; but in the normal course of things he spent modestly on books, wine, and other minor luxuries. It was apparent that he had extracted large payments from the managers primarily to demonstrate his power over them. Thus, I was always free to draw what cash I needed for my errands abroad.

Herbs and medicines were staples on my shopping list. Erik was prey to recurrent fevers contracted during his youthful travels, and to other ailments stemming perhaps from distortion of his internal organs. He had learned, of necessity, to doctor himself.

A deformity of the pelvic bones affected his carriage and his gait. His sinewy body was prodigiously strong, but the strain of holding himself straight and moving with a fluidity not natural to him caused him severe muscular tension and cramping. To quell his most intractable pains I kept a supply of laudanum, which he hated because it clouded his mind; but he accepted it from me when all else failed.

Thinking to help ease his lesser, chronic discomforts, I brought home one day an almond-scented rubbing oil. But I had hardly begun gliding my slippery palms down the long muscles on either side of his spine when he began to tremble, then to shake with dreadful, racking sobs. I was bewildered that I could have hurt him so. My touch was light, and in any case he was normally stoical, being accustomed to chronic aches and pains.

Now he gasped, “No, don’t!” and twisted desperately away. He sat rocking and crying, his clenched hands wedged tight between his knees as if to prevent even his own touch on his body.

This was not pain. It was grief.

I saw that while in my bed sheer lust carried him triumphant on its tide, the everyday intimacy of casual contact was more than he could bear. Even as an infant he must have been rarely touched by anyone, let alone touched kindly. The undemanding pressure of my hands had wakened in him the vast, deep-rooted anguish of that irremediable loss.

I could no more withstand this upwelling of sorrow—a child’s sorrow, ravaging a man’s body—than he could. All childhoods leave scars. Old hurts of my own throbbed in bitter sympathy with his. I fled to walk by the lake, filled with impotent rage against the common cruelty and indifference of humankind. And I cursed my own deficiency in that same cruelty and indifference; placed as I was, how much pity could I afford?

But I could not let the matter rest. The next day, with great difficulty, I persuaded him to let me try again on the understanding that he must stop me when his emotions threatened to overpower him. He did so, saying in a strained whisper, “Thank you, Christine!” Persevering in this fashion we extended his endurance to well over an hour at a time. Rubbing him down became a welcome routine for which I searched out fine oils and salves in my forays above ground.

It was strange, how the slow, wordless process of kneading the knots and torsions out of his muscles wove a spell of peace over us both. In those placid hours of mute, almost animal tranquility nothing was to be heard but our breathing, mine effortful and deliberate, his marked by the occasional painful gasp or deep, surrendering sigh.

I had no great experience at massage, and, as I discovered, no healing gift. I could soothe and sweeten, but I could not mend. Yet in the attentive handling of his gnarled and canted body I could express my tenderer feelings without putting myself at his mercy, which quality I knew to be in short supply and that unreliable at best.

Abroad alone in the noisy streets, I looked at the tradesmen bustling about their business, the ladies with their parasols or their muffs, the swaggering gentlemen swinging their canes, the very sparrows pecking the pavements; and I considered escape. Once or twice I thought I saw Raoul, but this was only fancy. Nor did I need his help, nor anyone’s.

At any time I might have betrayed Erik to the authorities. Or I might have silently slipped away with enough of his money to buy my passage back to Sweden, or to anywhere.

But what could it mean to wander freely in the wide, inhospitable world, when the dark angel whose life I shared owned all Paris at night? How could drawing room wit or the giggling gossip of friends rival the joy of spinning melody out of empty air, with Erik standing rapt like some lightning-struck Titan, or else raising his awful head to embrace my song and lift it with his own supple and ravishing voice?

Whenever I seriously contemplated flight, I had only to remind myself that beyond the Rue Scribe gate I was just another woman going about her domestic business. In the house under the Opéra, I was someone potent enough to raise fallen Lucifer into the splendor of Heaven, again and again. Underground, we soared.

And I had given my word.

I cannot pretend to know all that he felt. My absences seemed to increase his attachment to me. Perhaps the risk brought him to the sharpened edge of life, reminding him of his own younger, more adventuresome years. Surely he dreaded that one day I would fly for good, lured by some stranger’s wholesome beauty. It need not be Raoul. Any man was handsomer than Erik.

Often he followed me clandestinely through the streets. I made no objection. I had observed how lovers of pretty singers imagined treachery where there was none. So long as Erik could see for himself how I comported myself when I was abroad “alone,” he would be better able to hold his fears and suspicions in check.

I always knew he had been tracking me when he questioned me upon my return: whom had I seen or spoken to; by what route had I gone to the stationer’s? At my answers (which he knew by his own furtive observation to be true) he exuded such a vibrancy of relief and joy that my own heart was invariably lightened.

But I wondered sometimes whether it was right and good to make him happy, for by any sane standard he was a wicked man.

I could not deny that it gratified me deeply to dissolve his rages, griefs, and anxieties into something approaching, and sometimes far exceeding, contentment. My doing so made my life with him pleasanter, of course; but beyond that, such ease as I could grant him seemed all the sweeter in the giving for being completely gratuitous.

Was I, then, wicked too? I went into a church one damp afternoon and prayed for guidance on this point. As usual in my experience, none was forthcoming, so I used the time to assess my spiritual situation, and, insofar as it was perceptible to me, his.

All that I had been taught told me that in due course God must condemn Erik to the torments of Hell. Pardon would be outrageous: apart from all else, what of Joseph Buquet, whose murder cried out to Heaven? Or the woman crushed beneath the counterweight, which Erik had thrown down in a fit of piqué? “Thou shalt not kill”; having made that law, God must surely punish a murderer.

Not being God, however, I could do otherwise, like disobedient Eve. I already had: I had comforted the wicked, and gladly.

As I saw it, I could repent of my error and henceforth grudgingly yield up only the bare minimum of my promise. Or I could willfully continue to offer to Erik, for whom life in this world was already Hell and always had been, the fullest, richest measure of solace that I had power to confer.

This latter course, for good or ill, was the one I chose. How could I not, when it might be all the mercy there is?

That evening he sat behind me brushing my hair as I read aloud from the Revue Musicale about a new production of Tristan and Isolde . He interrupted me to remark on how my long tresses glowed in the lamplight; had I taken off my hat and veil to enjoy the sunshine, chancing recognition and exposure?

“It was raining,” I said. “I spent much of the day sheltering in a church, and, of course, I kept my hat on. But the softened air is doubtless healthy for the hair even so.”

With a sigh he pressed his naked face to the back of my neck. My blood leaped, and he knew; he always did. He began to stroke my skin, tracing with slow fingertips the beat of that thick pulse which shook me softly from root to crown.

“How can you give up the freedom of the day,” he murmured, his breath hot along my nape, “and come back to this dim grave where neither sunlight nor rain ever falls?”

What could I answer that he did not already know? Wordless, I leant my throat into his hand, the warm, muscular, bloodstained hand of the Minotaur of the Opéra labyrinth.

“But I forget,” he added in low and husky tones, “you are a northern girl and used to darkness from your childhood. Turn and kiss your darkness, Christine; he loves and misses you.”

The sun’s finest glories—its corona and its great, flaring prominences—only show when the moon eclipses it completely; he had told me that. I meant to remind him of it as he bent close over me, shrouding my face in his shadow. But I had already given up my mouth and my breath, and later, I forgot.

Another time, having been delayed an hour past when I had said I would be back, I found unlocked the door to the gunpowder room (which he had planned to blow up, obliterating himself along with the Opéra and everyone in it, if I had refused him). While I was gone he must have paced among the neatly stacked little barrels of death, goading the sleeping demon of his fury to make sure it was still alive and purposeful in case I failed to reappear.

I did not become pregnant. God cannot admire brainlessness in his creatures to whom he has gone to the trouble to give very good brains indeed. In all likelihood Erik was sterile, like most sports of Nature. Still, I regularly used certain preparations to subdue my fertility as best I might. Erik agreed wholeheartedly with this practice. He said he had no wish to foist the horrors of his own childhood off on some poor newcomer. Nor, I believe, did he wish to share my attention with a helpless and demanding infant.

We did quarrel sometimes, as couples do. The newspapers were a constant provocation, for Erik’s political views were barbaric.

I maintained that the world would benefit from rather more kindness and mutual care than from less, as he himself had good reason to know. He espoused brutal notions of social order, supporting his opinions with blood-curdling accounts of punishments and tortures he had seen on his travels. As men are both wicked and foolish, he said, they must have priests to make them penitent and kings to keep them obedient, and the harsher the better.

Sometimes he mocked my “naïveté” and “tenderheartedness” so pitilessly that I left the room in tears. It always ended in his kissing my hands and begging a penance for having upset me; but his Draconian ideas never changed.

He deplored the new freedom of the press from government censorship yet devoured news of sensational crimes, which excited his most wrathful responses: “Listen to this, Christine! A watercarrier in Montmartre has beaten his infant daughter to death, having first burnt her in the kitchen fire. He threw her body into a bucket of slops and went to sleep in his bed. The French working man is the only brute beast in the world with the vote!”

Looking up from my sewing I replied as steadily as I could, “Then what a good thing that now, by law, his surviving children must go to school where they can learn to be less brutal than their father and to use their votes intelligently.”

“You cannot teach an ass to sing,” he said scathingly, casting the newspaper down at his feet. “Republicanism is no more than government by brutes representing brutes.”

I could not resist answering. “Yet some say that poor people are better off now, and that your ‘brutes’ do no worse than all the monarchs and dictators France has had in this century.”

“Precisely the problem!” he said triumphantly. “There has been no political stability since the Terror, and there never will be so long as the mob is encouraged in rebellion. Without public order no nation can prosper, but your common man hates nothing so much as the rule of law.”

I said, “Can you speak of the ‘rule of law’ ?”

Bending upon me a very knowing and ironic glance he said, “Why, I think I know a little about it.”

I saw that he referred to the rule of my law that he had accepted over his own conduct; and I had no ready answer.

He nodded approvingly. “Good, you had best not argue further. You are a fine student of music, but careless and ill-informed when it comes to other matters.”

“I do the best I can,” I responded, “having little education except in music.”

“Weak,” he said, “a very weak answer, Christine. But you are of the weaker sex, so I suppose I must allow it; which is how your weakness weakens me.” He held up his hand to check my objection. “This is implicit in our bargain, by which you secured the right to wind me ‘round your little finger. I make no complaint. But do not imagine your authority to be absolute, however compliantly I may bend to your will; I am an ugly man, not a stupid one.”

“Erik,” I said, “you know perfectly well that the last word I would ever apply to you is ‘stupid.’ Will you tell me plainly what you mean?”

“No more than I have said,” he replied, and with that he got up and returned, humming to himself, to a project which he had recently begun behind locked doors.

A few days after this exchange, he invited me to accompany him to the public execution of a convicted murderer outside La Roquette Prison. I accepted. I had never witnessed this degrading spectacle but felt that I was sworn to share Erik’s life as fully as I might. And I did not like him saying that I was weak.

As we joined the crowd of spectators (which was dismayingly large for such a happening, and on such a cold dawn), someone hissed, “Look, Death-mask is here!” and they all drew aside before us. Erik strode the path thus made for him with princely hauteur, and I saw people reach furtively to touch his cloak as he passed. We ended much nearer to the guillotine than I wished to be.

Of what followed, the less said the better. The curious can still see such things for themselves.

My companion offered no comfort. Erik’s scorn for the doomed criminal, the presiding officials, and the watching crowd was boundless, his approval of the execution itself unclouded by any hint of empathy or horror. He clearly did not imagine himself pinned beneath the roaring blade, for all that he was guilty of extortion, two killings at least, and, I was sure, much else.

On the way home, profoundly distressed by what we had witnessed, I said accusingly that the people had seemed to know him there as if by his repeated presence.

“Yes, the habitués see me often,” he replied, his mask gleaming pale as bone in the dimness of the carriage. “But they do not know me. No one knows me but you, Christine.”

“Yet I do not know,” I said, “why you join the mob you profess to despise in this depraved and disgusting diversion!”

“To see done such justice as is to be had in this world,” he said, “and to remind myself what death is. Also, I like to think that my presence lends some distinction to the proceedings. They miss me when I am absent, and sometimes call upon the executioners to wait a little in case I am only delayed.”

I never discovered whether he was joking about this. He was fully capable of it.

After that I always went with him to La Roquette. I never grew used to it; yet I went. The satisfaction he took in these gruesome displays forced me to acknowledge that subjection of his crueler impulses to my ban was not the same thing as change in his own character. It is very tempting to overestimate one’s own influence upon another when it is passion that binds you to one another.

It must also be said that disdaining everyone equally, Erik did not share the common prejudices of the time. He did not hate the English or the Germans more than citizens of other nations, and he taught me to recognize the ingrained anti-Semitism of the French (which I had taken for granted) for the spiteful, willful ignorance that it was and is.

But he was no champion of the downtrodden; his sympathies were reserved entirely for himself. He frequently worked up a keen resentment over the availability to others of advantages that he had never enjoyed. There was nothing to do but wait out these moods of bitter self-pity.

Nor could I persuade him away from the vengefulness his life had taught him. Given the nature of that life, it was perhaps arrogant of me to have tried.

As for the secret project conducted behind locked doors, it proved to be his gift to me that Christmas. I gave him a dressing gown sewn of velvet patches I had cut from discarded costumes. He gave me a replica in miniature of the Taj Mahal that he had carved and painted in wood. He had once visited that monument to lasting love and had examined and memorized every detail, an adventure in itself that he recounted zestfully to me over our holiday meal.

Indeed, a whole lifetime of hitherto unshared incident was lavished upon me during my years with him, like fine wine eagerly poured only for my delectation and delight.

Had I been older and more experienced, I might have tried to reply in kind. This would have been an error. He did not need a past from me, having a rather over-rich one of his own. It was my present that he desired, all the immediate hours and days that I had promised him. And these I gave with open hands.

No doubt some would rather hear that we fought incessantly, that I tired of him or he of me, that we failed each other and parted in mutual hatred and disillusion. Had we lived in some suburb or narrow street of Paris, or worse yet on some grand boulevard, we might have come to that. Many marriages are stoven and sunk on the rocks of Parisian life.

Now and again he reminded me that he had intended for us to vacate the Opéra cellars and lead a “normal” life like everybody else. I was always quick to point out that he was not in the least like everybody else, and for that matter, on the evidence at hand, neither was I; and eventually these objections ceased.

As the end of our time together drew near, he became markedly morose and irritable. I saw that he was already grieving.

For my part, I walked through the streets and squares in the chilly rain and fitful sun of that last winter chafing unbearably for my freedom, now that it loomed so close. More than once I nearly flung the key to the Rue Scribe gate into the Seine. I longed to be borne quietly away on some gliding river-barge, empty-handed and friendless perhaps, but bound by no pledge or passion.

At the same time I struggled to find some way to extend my life with Erik, for I could not imagine a life without him. Restless and distraught, I thought of every possibility a hundred times over and rejected them all as many times.

It seemed to me that any meddling with the deadline I had set would undercut and cheapen all that we had achieved together, making a liar of me and a fool of him. With our mutual respect thus diminished, sooner or later our hard-won mastery of ourselves must decline into a wretched and debasing struggle for mastery of each other.

Moreover, I had first pledged myself to him in ignorance; now I knew the enormity of the task, and the thoughtless self-confidence of youth was spent. How much longer could I trust myself to be bold enough, quick enough, steady enough, my instincts true enough, for both of us?

Whole lifetimes spun out in my mind as I searched for a different conclusion. But I could find nothing acceptable other than to keep to the terms of our bargain. It is when Faust tries to fix the transient moment beyond its natural term, saying, “Stay, thou art fair!” that he is lost.

I wandered miserably through Erik’s rooms, touching papers and furniture and books when what I ached to do was to touch him, to press him close with feverish possessiveness. I often felt his gaze upon me now, scalding with similar, unspoken anguish.

He now began to suffer odd spells of lassitude, sitting for long periods with the newspaper in his hands yet scarcely turning a page, his face as white as marble and his forehead moistly gleaming. My questions about the nature of this unwonted fatigue were met with withering rebuffs. But when I came upon him mixing up a dose of laudanum for himself, I demanded an explanation. He admitted that for some time he had been experiencing severe pains in his teeth.

The condition must have begun years before. Still, I blamed myself. If I had not got in the habit of bringing down the dainties left me by the dancers and chorus girls, he might not have indulged so immoderately his taste for sweets.

Now abscesses had developed, this much I could determine; and I was very worried. But Erik flatly refused to go to a dentist, who must of necessity see his face. So these sieges of toothache came and went, borne by him with his customary fortitude.

We continued our studies although I was in poor voice, being easily brought to tears by emotional music (and there is no other kind in opera). The last piece which he sang through for me was “Why do you wake me?” from Werther (we had been discussing the French insistence upon verbal articulation at the expense of beauty of tone when singing in that language).

At the end, he rose abruptly from the piano and clapped shut its lid. The spell of Werther’s plaint was cut off as if Erik had cracked the neck of a living thing between his hands.

“When you know that I am dead,” he said, “—and I will make certain that you learn of it, Christine—I beg you to come back here to bury me. I hope you will continue to wear my ring until that time, when I ask that you be good enough to return it to me with your prayers before you cover me over.”

He meant his mother’s ring, a wreath of tiny flowers in pale gold which I had worn since the night of Lohengrin . I turned the ring on my finger, trying to take comfort from the fact that he spoke as though he meant to go on living in my absence. But living in what manner? I could no longer avoid that question, which had been burning in my thoughts.

“When I have gone, will you keep to your promise to be good?”

“Why should I?” he growled, shooting me an evil look. Then he quoted the monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (a book he had read many times over by the look of its pages), “ ‘Misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.’ ”

My heart pounded. Suddenly we stood at the edge of a precipice. “Erik, you gave your word!”

“I am not some titled nobleman,” he sneered. “I have no honor to preserve.”

I said, “You wrong yourself to say so. You have held to our agreement as only an honorable man would.”

He turned away without replying, dabbing at his mouth with his handkerchief, and fell to moodily rearranging the porcelain flowers on their shelf. I heard every tiny tick and brush of sound of these small actions, for I was listening harder than I ever had in my life. In my mind a cowardly voice said, Fool, have you forgotten that he is a monster? Look at him! He will never let you go! You should have fled when you had the chance!

“So you think I have behaved honorably?” he said at length, his back still turned to me. “Well, if I have I am sorry for it.”

Stung out of my fearful reverie I answered heatedly, “You have no right to be! You have been happier these past years than most men are in a lifetime. Deny it if you can!”

“I do not deny it!” He swung sharply ‘round to face me, eyes inflamed and hands clenched at his sides. “For pity’s sake, Christine, must I beg?Don’t leave. I love you. I need you. Stay with me!”

I had been braced for sarcasm and threats; this naked entreaty pierced me through. I shook my head, unable to speak.

“Set new terms, make any rules you like,” he urged. “I will keep to them, you know I can!”

“No,” I said, “no, Erik. It is time for you to see how you get along without your Angel of Conscience. I want my freedom, which I have won fairly.”

He stared at me with those burning eyes. The walls of his house pressed in upon me like dungeon walls and I felt a fierce passion for my liberty, sparked by the dread of losing it again before ever regaining it. In my fear, I hated him.

He said, “What if I say you must return to live here with me for six months of every year? It is a nice, classical solution.”

“It is no solution at all!” I cried, my mouth as dry as ashes.

“I don’t care.” His voice rose toward the loss of control that I—and perhaps he, too—dreaded. “I want more !”

“Erik,” I said, with all the steadiness I could command, “you are above all a musician, and musicians know better than anyone that at some point there is no ‘more’—no more beats to the measure, no more notes to the phrase, no more loudness or softness or purity or vibrato—or else music becomes mere noise, incoherent, worthless, and ugly.”

I saw him flinch, as I did, inwardly, but he said nothing.

“You know this to be true,” I finished desperately.

Of course he knew it. On this principle was based all his instruction and all our achievement together, and I saw him trapped and struggling in his own inescapable awareness of it. I wished to Heaven that he had been wearing his mask, for it was torture to watch his face.

At length he said bitterly, “You have had too good a teacher.” He shielded his eyes with his hand, as he did when he wished to listen closely to my singing without visual distraction. “Have you been happy here, Christine?”

“I have been happy,” I answered. “I am not happy at this moment, but I have been happy.”

“Well, that is a good thing,” he said in that same bleak and distant tone, still keeping his eyes hidden from me; and I went away to weep my tears of victory alone.

We spent those last nights stroking and kissing one another between fitful sleeps, pressed so tight together that we bruised each other. He stayed till the mornings in my bed instead of withdrawing to his own room. I would have held him back had he tried to go, but once he slept I quickly put the candle out. I dared not look long at his face, open and unguarded in sleep (his utmost, cleverest plea and offering), for fear that my resolve would crumble to nothing.

He was a wise child too, but I was wiser. I had learned how to defend us from each other and protect us from ourselves.

A week before I was to leave I came in from a long, troubled walk and saw him slumped at his writing desk. When I spoke to him, he answered faintly in a language that I did not know. Alarmed, I hurried to him and caught hold of his arm to bring him to himself again.

Involuntarily, my hand flew back: his whole body quaked with massive, deep-seated shudders. At my touch he collapsed, seized by such violent chills that I thought he was having convulsions.

I held him close to keep him from injuring himself and to warm him as best I could; and because I had to do something and could think of nothing else. When the shaking subsided, I helped him to his bed. I saw that the infection in his jaws had attacked again with terrifying virulence: his face was swollen, his skin was searingly hot, and it was evident that he did not know me.

In his first lucid moment I implored him to let me fetch a doctor. He was adamant against it, made me swear to bring no one, and would not be persuaded otherwise by anything I said.

He had committed no crimes since my taking up residence with him, of that I am certain; but he still had old deaths to answer for, and he was absolutely unwilling to risk exposure to the claims of the law. Perhaps now he could imagine his own goblin-head under the blade at La Roquette, before the greedy eyes of the crowd.

I imagined it; and I could not bear the thought.

So I nursed him as best I could, with drugs, folk remedies, and treatments which I found described in the medical texts on his shelves. It was not enough.

He had no pain, the nerves in his teeth being destroyed by then, but fever devoured him before my eyes. He ate nothing and kept down little of the medicines I prepared for him. At last he sank into a heavy sleep from which he rarely roused.

Late one afternoon he said, “I am so thirsty, Christine; the Devil is coming for me, and his fires are very hot!”

“No,” I said, “God is coming to apologize to you for your afflictions. It is His burning remorse that you feel.”

“What angel shall I send to comfort and befriend you when I am gone?” he asked. “The Angel of Death?”

“Don’t talk, it only tires you.” I poured him some water, spilling more than went into the cup.

“Never mind,” he muttered when he had taken a few dribbling sips, “that angry angel has not done my bidding for some time now. But I should curse you somehow before I die.”

“Curse me?” I cried. “Oh, Erik, why?”

His febrile gaze fastened hungrily upon my face. “Because you will be alive and abroad in the world, and I will be dead, down here. Your hair will glow like polished chestnuts in the sunlight when at last you throw off your hat and veil. If I had had such hair, I would have ventured onto the stage despite everything. With careful makeup, would it have been so bad?”

“I hate my hair!” I said. “I’ll cut it off.”

“It will grow back,” he answered dreamily. “As many times as you cut it, it will grow back more beautiful than ever, for the delight of other men.”

I answered, “Well, go on and curse me, then!” But other words echoed in my thoughts: I will not let thee go, unless thou bless me. Fresh, amazing tears flooded my eyes; I had thought myself drained dry as the Gobi by then.

“Oh, don’t cry,” Erik said with feeble exasperation. “What have you to cry about? You have won all, for now I cannot fail my promise. Look, I will make you another: should this ‘honor’ you have required of me earn me a few hours’ respite from Hell, I will spend them singing for you. Stop and listen sometimes and you may hear me.” Then he exclaimed, “My opera! Where is my Don Juan ?”

He struggled to sit up, gazing around the candle-lit room with that huge-pupiled stare which I remembered from my father’s deathbed. It is an unmistakable look, and seeing it again all but drove the heart right out of me.

“Your work is safe,” I rushed to assure him. “I will get it published—”

“No, no,” he broke in, with some force. “Leave it. I have told you, that music is not for this epoch. You will not let them come picking and clucking over my miserable carcass, will you? Be as kind toward my music. Bury it with me; bury it all.”

He caught my hand and pressed it to his malformed cheek, and only when I agreed to do as he asked did he release me. Then he sank back, white-faced and panting, on his pillows. I saw that his time was near, and that he knew it.

“Let me at least fetch you a priest,” I said, for I knew that he had been born into a Catholic household.

He said, “What for? I would only frighten him to death, adding to my burden of sins. You be my priest, Christine.”

So I lay down beside him in his bed, and he breathed new, horrific details of his past into my ear. I told him that I had no power to absolve him, but that if he truly repented of the evil he had done he must surely be forgiven.

He said, “Just listen , Christine.” So I did; though I dozed through much of this grim catalog, being very tired by then.

The chiming fugue of his clocks all striking woke me (it was eight at night). I opened my eyes to find him quietly watching me, his face—that freakish face which was now better known to me than my own—mere inches from mine. His lips were crusted from the fever and his poisoned breath fouled the air between us.

“Good, you are awake in time to see a wonder,” he whispered. “This hideous monster, the Phantom of the Opéra, will make himself vanish before your very eyes; and before the eyes of everyone else there will appear, as if out of nowhere, a beautiful young woman of passion, talent, and valiant character.”

I said something, “Oh, don’t,” or “Please.” It makes no difference what I said.

His eyelids drooped and the shallow rasping of his breathing grew more regular. Unable to keep my own aching eyes open, I slept. At some later point I heard him remark in a surprised and drowsy tone, “Do you hear birds singing, Christine? Imagine, songbirds, in a cellar! Open a door, let them out.”

That night he died.

Left alone with the cooling remains of the singular creature with whom I had spent a lifetime’s passion in a handful of incandescent years, I thought I would die myself. I wished that I might, stretched out beside his corpse in that damp and fetid bed with its curtains of fresh forest green.

In a while I rose, and found that I could scarcely bear to look at him. Absent the faintest animation, his face was a repulsive parody of a human face in a state of ruin and decay. I closed his eyes and set his mask in place to hide the worst.

I said no prayers then; I was too angry and too weary and could barely drive myself to do what needed doing. I washed him and dressed him in the formal attire that he had always favored and put the ring of little flowers on his finger.

My choice would have been to turn him adrift on the lake in his boat, a hundred candles flaming on the thwarts; or to build him a pyre on the bank, like Shelley’s pyre. But by then I was exhausted from tending to him, from grief, and from the not inconsiderable labor of preparing his lifeless body for its last rest.

So, with strength drawn from I know not where, I disposed him decently upon his fresh-made bed with his musical manuscripts piled ‘round him as he had wished. I covered him with his opera cloak and used the patchwork robe that I had given him to cushion his head. Against his lunar skin the velvet folds glowed rich and deep, like a sumptuous setting for some pale, exotic gem.

Seeing his face so remote and stony on that makeshift pillow, I understood that we touched no longer, he and I. We sped on invisible, divergent trajectories, driven farther apart by every passing instant. Nothing remained to keep me there.

In a trance of exhaustion I packed a few belongings and keepsakes, left the underground house, and tripped the concealed triggers he had shown me. A long, deep thundering sound followed, and I tasted stone-dust in the air.

Panic flooded me: how like him it would be, to contrive beforehand to bring the whole Paris Opéra crashing down in ruins upon his grave!

But all was as he had told me, according to his design: granite blocks placed within the walls rumbled down into their chiseled beds, sealing off every entrance and air-shaft of the Phantom’s home. Erik slept in a tomb more secure than Pharaoh’s pyramid.

I paced beside the underground lake, spent and weeping. Now I prayed. I was afraid for him. Apart from everything else, if he had somehow willed himself to die then that was the sin of suicide, which grows from the sin of despair.

Yet this possibility is implicit in every strong union. Someone departs first, and the one left behind decides whether to die, or to stay on awhile chewing the dusty flavor of words like “desolate,” and “bereft.”

In the end, fearing that somebody had heard the noise or felt the reverberations and was even now descending through the cellars to investigate, I roused myself to the final task of sinking the little boat in the lake. Then I let myself out by the Rue Scribe gate for the last time, five years and eleven days from the night of my debut in Faust .

Rain had fallen overnight; puddles gleamed on the cobblestones. A draggled white cat sheltering in a doorway watched me go.

Of my life since there is little to tell. My aged guardian having died, I was able to make arrangements to live quietly in Paris under my own name. Hardly anyone remembered the Phantom of the Opéra and the deeds attributed to him, for great cities thrive on novelty and their citizens’ memories are short (that is why M. Leroux felt free to publish his nonsense later on).

I tried to avoid knowledgeable or inquisitive people. To those who knew me I said that I had been driven away by the family of a noble admirer, and had been singing since in opera houses in distant lands (Raoul, I learned, had emigrated to America in the spring of 1881, shortly after my own disappearance).

While reestablishing myself I found I could live well enough. During my years underground I had had published a number of vocal pieces under my father’s name. I continued to sell new compositions, and drew investment income as well from the remains of Erik’s fortune.

But singing on the stage again disappointed me. My own voice seemed dull, and audiences—no matter how they applauded—even duller. Without an edge of fear and a need for approval, no singer can bring an audience, or a performance, to life. Having resumed my career with some success, I retired early and advertised for students. I found that I loved teaching and did it well.

Thus, I did not go on to become a great diva (one whose name has quietly dropped out of operatic history); sometimes I regret this, most often I do not. Must a life be so publicly celebrated to be accounted worthy? Besides, I had already been distinguished enough by Fate for a hundred lifetimes, even if that distinction was unknown to anyone, now, but myself. How I relished my ordinary days, my calmly unexceptional nights!

Rejoicing daily in my freedom, I was nonetheless lonelier than I could bear all by myself. I took comfort where I could; there are good men from that time of whom I still think fondly. But none ever came to me trailing the clouds of sinister and turbulent glory in which the Opéra Ghost had enfolded me.

During the Great War I volunteered as a nurse. Not surprisingly, I dealt calmly with the most frightful facial wounds. Erik’s awful countenance would not have been out of place on those wards, just as his music would suit perfectly the emerging character of the new century. Perhaps he was a true phantom after all, as well as a brilliant, cruel, afflicted man: a phantom of this brilliant, cruel, afflicted future.

My hospital work brought me to the admiring attention of a doctor several years my junior, and I married late in life for the first time, or so it seemed. The marriage was good, being founded in the shared trials and mutual respect of wartime service. To the day he died, René never knew the truth of my life before. If God holds that deception against me, I stand ready to answer for it along with everything else.

Nowadays I coach voice at the Opéra, although my own instrument has of course decayed with time. A gratifying number of well-known singers have trained with me over the years. My students are like my children and I help them as I can, awarding to the needier ones small stipends out of Erik’s money. He would not approve.

Does it seem incredible, to have gone from such a bizarre, outlaw existence to a placid one indistinguishable from millions of others? Yet many people walk through the world hiding shocking memories. I look sometimes at a man or a woman in a shop or a gallery, at a friend or a student sitting over a coffee with me, and I wonder what towering joys and howling depths lie concealed behind the mask of ordinary life that each one wears.

Even extraordinary lives are not entirely as they seem. Recently I discovered that Erik’s spaniel inkwell (into which I have just now dipped my pen) contains a secret drawer. Inside I found a sheaf of receipts all dated early in April 1881, made out to “Erik Rouen” for large cash payments from him to various men, in settlement of the formidable debts of a third party: Raoul de Chagny.

Underneath lay a pile of bank drafts running from that time until June 1885, four or five of them per year, for considerable amounts of money. Each had been signed by Erik in Paris, and some weeks later cashed by Raoul de Chagny in the city of New Orleans.

Finally, my shaking fingers drew out an envelope, posted from New Orleans and addressed to Erik. It contained a yellowed news clipping in English, dated July 17, 1885, announcing the marriage of Raoul de Chagny, a rising young dealer in cotton, and Juliet Ravenal, daughter of a prominent local broker and businessman. With this notice was enclosed a final bank draft (for yet another of those large sums which Erik had been in the inexplicable habit of mislaying), returned uncashed. There was no letter.

The message was clear enough: Raoul did not come back for me because Erik paid him not to. My Vicomte had gone to America as a Remittance Man! At least he had had the decency (or pride or whatever it was) to refuse further bribes once financially established in his new country.

I wept over those papers and all that they implied. But I smiled, too, at the resourcefulness, the cunning, and the sheer determination of my incomparable monster, who had thus firmly secured his victory without breaking his promise to me.

Age robs me of easy sleep, and many nights I lie awake remembering the little glass shoe full of centimes; and the shivering poodle stinking of lamp-oil; and the brush being drawn through my hair by a man who sits behind me, where I cannot see his face until I turn. In the dark I listen for some echo of the radiant voice of my teacher, my brother, my lover and accomplished master of my body’s joys, that dire, disfigured angel with whom I wrestled for over a thousand days and nights, in all the youthful vigor of my hunger and my pride.

My hair is short now, in the modern style. It has turned quite white.

The Comte de Chagny (Raoul’s title since his elder brother’s death) arrived this month from America to see to his French holdings. He came to the Opéra asking after me. I avoided him, and he has gone away again.

Awaiting my own exit, I live my days in this brash and cynical present as other people do. But I nourish my soul on the sweet pangs of looking back, more than forty years now, to the time when the Opéra Ghost and I lived together underground, in a candle-lit world of passion and music.

I have thought of writing an opera about it, but time seems short and I know my limitations. Someone else will write it, someday. They will get the story wrong, of course; but perhaps, all the same, the music will be right.

AGE OF AQUARIUS

William Barton

William Barton was born in Boston, and now resides in Gamer, North Carolina, with his wife Kathleen. As an engineering technician specializing in military and industrial technology, he once worked on the nation’s nuclear submarine fleet for the Department of Defense. Currently a free-lance writer and computer consultant, Mr. Barton’s novels include Hunting on Kunderer, A Plague of All Cowards, and When Heaven Fell. Soon to appear are The Transmigration of Souls and a collaborative novel with Michael Capobianco, Alpha Centauri. “Age of Aquarius” is his first story for Asimov’s.

It was hot and dusty as we walked across the vacant lot behind the Rex-all drugstore on Route 123 in Woodbridge, Virginia, typical of the weather that had dominated the whole summer of 1962. There was a high haze that made the cloudless blue sky look pale and tawny, temperature up around ninety-five, our skins cooled just a bit by a low, steady breeze, the soft, inconstant rushing sound of all the dark green leaves in all the full summer trees rubbing up against each other.

We three. Musketeers our idiot teachers liked to call us, but that wasn’t part of our cultural surround. Not then. I wasn’t to find and read a copy of that book for a decade, though I’d seen an old movie or two and knew what they meant. Athos? Porthos? Aramis? Not us. And who would be our D’Artagnan? No one. Larry Pernotto, who was tall and fat, liked to call himself Tars Tarkas. Neal Dixon, short, blond, already muscular, just had to be Gahan of Gathol. And I? Ghek the Kaldane. Ghek the Monster, whose hideous head could detach itself and crawl away on spidery legs, leaving its nameless rykor body to fend for itself.

At least when I was Ghek the Kaldane I didn’t have to be Burke the Jerk, slender but flabby, nondescript but for a big nose and crooked yellow teeth.

They were my friends, at least in part, maybe wholly because they loved the things I loved, playing in the woods, pretending we were . . . what? Elsewhere? Anywhere other than Marumsco Village, pretending it was anywhere, anywhen other than America the Boring in the not-quite-finished aftermath of the 1950s.

We went into the drugstore, store air conditioned, though that wasn’t quite universal yet, air not-quite cooled by a not-quite-adequate unit, ceiling fans stirring the air into a gentle swirl of breeze. We headed for the newsstand in the corner, ritual stop number one—later we’d be at the fountain and the odd-smelling, heavily rouged, wrinkle-faced old woman with the illegible name-tag would serve us the usual things. I’d have a strange-tasting lime rikkee in a tall, frosted glass, soda-water so cold it’d hurt my throat, while Neal drank a root beer and Larry would slurp his way through to the dregs of a chocolate Coke. The old lady used to laugh when she brought it to him, Coke-foam soiled by the syrup, looking like something you might find in the gutter after a rainstorm.

“Sudsy shit” was what Neal called it. Larry would just give him that bemused look, not quite a laugh, a sly look, as if he knew something we didn’t, and suck on the straw, eyes not quite focused, like the look on my dog’s face when he licks his own pecker.

Now, Larry stood in the corner, surreptitiously flipping through the latest Playboy, eyes half-lidded, face expressionless as he took in expanses of smooth haunch and glimpsed those rosy-nippled tits. I was always too embarrassed to do that, though I wanted to, had to pretend it wasn’t happening, stand by the comics rack, turning the carousel.

Magnus, Robot Fighter, 4000 A.D., The world-city of North Am. Leeja, Senator Clane’s daughter, with a gauzy, almost see-through blouse. A-1, the steak-sauce robot? Or was it 1-A? Maybe they used Lea & Perrins in 4000 A.D. Gold Key, all right. Magnus, Tarzan, Space Family Robinson, Turok, Son of Stone. It took a genius to think of that one. God damn it, a pair of Neolithic pre-Columbian American Indians thrown into a Paleolithic Lost World, world of Caucasian cave men and anachronistic dinosaurs . . .

Neal said, “Hey, Alan, look at this.” He was holding up a copy of the Washington Post. Two handsome, alien-looking men on the front page. Andrian Nikolaev, Pavel Popovich. Vostok III. Vostok IV. Orbited the Earth sixty-four times. Orbited the Earth forty-eight times. “Vostok III,” the subhead explained, “traveled 1,600,000 miles in four days.”

Larry said, “That’s three round trips to the Moon, right?”

I nodded. “Guess they’re ready . . .” The news story was smug, in a way, American media intellectuals glad to see the can-do boys shown up by bark-sandaled, cabbage-eating Rooskis. Comparing this feat, millions of miles, two ships orbiting together, to our most recent space “spectacular,” Scott Carpenter’s mighty three-orbit voyage.

Or.

Or the cover story on the Star. I picked up the other paper and looked at it. Peculiar headline: “War by Christmas?” Odd, cold thought. War. Like John Wayne in Wings of the Navy? Maybe not. Imagine myself standing out on the lawn, in the backyard of my parents’ home at 103 Staggs Court. Flash of light in the sky. Everything suddenly on fire. House blowing away on a hot nuclear wind.

“When it comes,” the TV voice had said, “the living will envy the dead.” Universal destruction. That’s what they said.

Neal was looking over my shoulder now. Eyes serious, face flat and expressionless. Neal’s father was a Marine officer, a major, stationed at nearby Quantico. Just maybe, Neal knew something the rest of us didn’t . . .

“You think?”

He shrugged, eyes far away. “Maybe.” He gestured at the paper. “Maybe not like that. I dunno. Maybe more like Korea. They, uh, might be sending my dad to southeast Asia soon. Laos. Viet Nam. I dunno.” He swallowed and looked away. “Hey, you read that stuff about Project Gemini in Life?”

“Yeah.” They were curtailing Project Mercury, cutting the last two flights, clearing the decks for the two-man ships which, they hoped, would begin flying by the spring of 1964.

‘Wonder what the Russians’ll be up to by then?”

“Maybe they’ll be on the Moon by then.”

“Maybe.”

By late October summer was gone, fall weather come and gone, and the trees were bare, the skies gray with the promise of an early winter. It was the time the three of us had always liked the best, though it grew dark too early.

It was cool outside, just right for playing after school, though this was a rainier fall than most. We could pretend we were on Venus, a magic world of gray on gray on gray, ignoring the lack of tropical weather, pretending it was a cold Venus, a Venus all our own. Anyway, Mariner II, launched in August, would soon show what the real Venus was like, would arrive there in December for its quick flyby.

Nice to dream about, to dream that they’d find . . . something. Something to make the world just a little bit nicer. Maybe when Mariners III and IV went to Mars, year after next, it’d be a little more interesting. Pictures. after all . . . Imagine, if Barsoom turned out to be true.

Besides, we were catching up to the Russians. Wally Schirra had just flown his six-orbit flight; next up Gordon Cooper and a whole day in space. What a laugh.

School over, playing over, friends gone home, dark outside, mother in the kitchen cooking the dinner, lots of sizzling sounds, food fried in margarine, fried, broiled, boiled, smell of pork and cabbage, our family half Anglo-Irish, the rest Eastern European. Lots of pork and cabbage and potatoes.

My father sat on the couch, frowning, absorbed in himself, watching Cronkite on our old magenta metal Magnavox black-and-white, which we’d had for almost ten years. “Jesus Christ . . .”

I looked up from the floor, where I was reading a new Ace paperback of The Moon Maid, saw my father sitting forward on the couch, eyes wide. On TV was a gray ocean scene, broad daylight, the Caribbean, floating in it an American warship, part of the fleet supposedly blockading Cuba. I hadn’t been paying that much attention, too much trouble in school, trouble with the other kids, to be interested in some adult world where people killed each other for reasons that just seemed stupid.

Flash of colorless fire leaping out over the gray water, boil of greasy-looking smoke, something splashing in the sea just beyond the freighter’s bow—view of the freighter continuing on its way, disappearing over the horizon.

“Margie!”

My mother came out of the kitchen, small, thin, dark-haired woman, pretty I supposed since she wasn’t even thirty yet, holding a spatula in one hand, harassed-looking, a little angry. “What . . .”

He gestured at the TV and her anger faded, replaced by a thin-lipped, hard expression. “Oh, Don . . .” She came and sat by his side, the two of them suddenly closer together than they usually sat.

I sat up, leaning against one arm of the couch, folding a page corner in the book to mark my place, shutting it, trying to figure out what was going on. Missiles in Cuba, Cuba blockaded, Kennedy giving speeches, my parents listening, I supposed, because they were Democrats, where they’d always ignored Eisenhower, or made fun of him, “that bald old coot . . .”

Eisenhower on TV, holding up a pathetic little nose cone in the wake of Sputnik I, calling it an “artificial comet”—my father looking at the TV then, quizzical. Comet?—Eisenhower on TV giving his farewell address, suddenly telling everyone to beware of the military-industrial complex, whatever that was. Maybe just another artificial comet, the bald old coot.

Kennedy on TV now, his skinny, rabbit-faced brother beside him, bespectacled, old-fashioned-looking Mr. MacNamara behind them both. Telling us he was giving Khrushchev just three weeks to get his damned missiles out of Cuba. Or else.

My father scratched his whiskery chin. “Or else what? Three weeks . . . Jesus, that’s just before Thanksgiving.”

My mother looked at him, eyes dark with concern. “Maybe we shouldn’t

I always looked forward to Thanksgiving. We’d take off, drive our ’59 Chevy Biscayne up to Boston for Thanksgiving dinner with all the relatives. I wondered if it’d be different this year, now that Grandpa was dead. My parents were still looking at each other. Maybe we shouldn’t . . .

And my mother jumped up, dashing for the kitchen, “Jesus, the dinner!”

Hmh. Well-done tonight, I supposed, looking away from the TV, out the window at darkness. Anyway, the events going on in Vah-Nah, the adventures of Julian and Orthis and dear, sweet Nah-ee-Lah, were a lot more interesting than anything Walter Cronkite could possibly have to say.

In the morning, three days before Thanksgiving break was due to start, it snowed while we were at school, kids laughing, lesson disrupted, while tiny white flakes drifted down out of a featureless, steely looking sky, dusting the red clay surrounding the blacktop playground, dusting the withered brown grass, falling on the scrubby little pine trees that bordered the clear area. There were little tunnels through the underbrush down there, places where kids had played, mashing everything into the ground, exposing bare dirt. Good places to hide.

Miss Johnson, who was, we knew, young and pretty, went and stood by the window, opened the shades the rest of the way. Wistful look. Was she hoping it’d snow enough for them to send us all home? Teachers didn’t get to go home on snow days, not unless the weather were really bad; they had to stay and work, grading papers, whatever it was they did when they weren’t teaching, but still . . .

We’d heard she was going to get married over Christmas break, all the little girls were excited by that, excited enough to find out we’d come back in January to find our teacher named Mrs. Pugh. When I heard that, I wondered how hard it was for her to decide to marry the guy, knowing what would happen with the kids.

Maybe not hard at all. Sometimes, hearing noises from my parents’ room, after bedtime, noises that stood for the things boys would talk about, not wanting to giggle like girls, failing, giggling anyway, trying to talk out the details from what we knew, from earlier childhood games, from guesses, from sneaking looks at pictures owned by your coarser sort of dad.

So I sat looking at Miss Johnson, trying to imagine her doing those things with Mr. Pugh, whoever he was, that wistful look on her face. Maybe she wasn’t thinking about the snow at all. Maybe just wishing she was married to Mr. Pugh already, and that it was nighttime right now. The snow stopped, and the sky started to brighten, turning white. By fifteen minutes before lunch period, the clouds were starting to rip apart, patches of bright blue showing through the shreds. We studied arithmetic, complex fractions I was really bad at, then grammar, where I was worse, then geography, where I was best in the class. No one seemed to care, geography not an important subject at all. After lunch, we’d study science, where I did okay, then art, which I Eked but was bad at, finally PE, so I could go home sweaty and smelling bad.

The PA speaker went “click.” Miss Johnson stopped speaking immediately, a slightly nervous look on her face, turning to look at the box above the door. Sometimes the principal would listen in, monitor the classes.

A voice, a throat clearing, Mr. Kildea’s voice. We were all scared to death of him, thin, angry-looking whippet of a man, a man whom we’d been sent to, when he was vice-principal, when we needed to be whipped. Which was, always, the way old Mr. Parsons, principal back then, had said it: “If you do this again,” stern, stern look, “Mr. Kildea will whip you!”

Now, Mr. Parsons was retired and Mr. Kildea was principal. Mr. Kill-Me, we called him.

Throat clearing over the PA system, then Mr. Kildea said, “We will have a civil defense drill now, after which school will be dismissed.”

Delighted laughter from the kids, Miss Johnson smiling, motioning for them to be silent. In a civil defense drill, the teachers would go home too. You could hear cheering from the hallway, from the open doors of other classrooms.

“DUCK AND COVER!”

We cowered under our desks, grinning at each other, snickering, and I heard a thump from the front of the room, Miss Johnson bumping her head as she tried to get under her own desk.

Imagine. Imagine. Brilliant light flaring from outside, glass shattering and ripping through the room, flensing us all just moments before the ceiling fell in. Would my little desk protect me, leaving me encased in some little, dark vacuole, so I could suffocate, or maybe just bleed to death in peace?

What would Miss Johnson think about, dying under her own desk? Mr. Pugh? Would she think about all the fun things she hadn’t gotten to do with him yet? The bell rang, telling us to go home.

The three of us stood together on the hill overlooking the playground beside Greenacre Drive, looking down the wooden steps at the school. It was a brilliant, clear day now, quite cold really, cold enough that our breaths made little plumes of smoke, like we had cigarettes going, which was what some of the younger kids liked to pretend.

Children were streaming out of the school, walkers like us heading off in all directions, riders lining up outside, monitored by patrols and duty teachers, waiting to get on their buses. There was a group of teachers over by the parking lot, standing together, talking, each one making his or her own little steam-jet of breath. Talking about what? Probably what they were going to do when they got home, with this little bit of free time. Unlike snow days, civil defense days didn’t have to be made up at the end of the year or on Saturday.

Miss Johnson was standing with them, talking to Mrs. Ellis. Probably telling her all about Mr. Pugh. Maybe telling her about all the fun things they were going to do together. Mrs. Ellis, who’d been married for a long time and had three kids of her own, would doubtless be aware of all the details.

The side door to the building popped open and Mr. Leisure came running out, running toward the parking lot. Neal nudged me. “What the hell’s wrong with him?”

I shrugged. “Who knows. Mr. Leisure . . .” Larry snickered. He and I had both had Mr. Leisure last year, a young guy, really strange and goofy, with a very short crew cut. He seemed like the sort of guy who’d probably been teased a lot as a kid and I always wondered what made him want to teach school. Maybe it felt like revenge.

He ran across the parking lot to where the other teachers were standing, stopped, waving his arms, mouth flapping like mad. They all seemed to freeze, freeze still for just a moment, then the group exploded, teachers running for their cars.

Over by the road, one of the buses suddenly pulled out of line, turning, going the wrong way up the driveway, with its door open, trailed by kids, running kids who hadn’t had a chance to get on. Up on the street, it accelerated, running the stop sign at the head of Botts Avenue.

Neal looked down at running teachers, fleeing buses, milling children, looked at us, face uneasy, and said, “Maybe we better go home now.”

Larry said, “What for? Let’s go down the drugstore. Or maybe over to the creek.”

Neal: “Well. Um.” Another uneasy look. “I need to ask my mom.”

Come to that, I’d need to ask my mom too. “Let’s go down to Larry’s house. We can phone from there.” Larry’s parents both worked, so no one would be home. His house made a good base of operations.

“Okay.”

We started to walk, the sky very clear and cold blue overhead, kids on both sides of the road, laughing, skipping, glad to be out of school. This is silly, I thought. What if there was a war now? What good would it do for us to be out here, walking home? See the mighty explosions. . . . See the winds of nuclear fire sweep me away. . . .

We got about to the crest of the hill, to where we could see Larry’s house at the top of the next hill, when light blinked in our faces, blinked once, waited a few long seconds, then blinked again. All up and down Greenacre Drive, streetlights went on, glowing a strange red-orange, brightening a bit, then dimming, going out again.

It was very quiet out, as if the wind had stopped blowing.

‘What the heck . . .?” Larry was looking up at them, puzzled. “That was weird . . .

Neal was standing still, then suddenly turning on his heel, facing a little east of due north. “There.” Pointing.

More light coming over trees, not like sunrise, not making the sky turn orange or anything, just faraway light shining through the trees.

“THERE!” Larry shouted, “over THERE!”

More light, a little to the west, not quite as bright as the first, as if farther away.

Bewildered, I turned and looked at Neal, was shocked to see tears in his eyes. “My dad,” he whispered. He looked at me then, face agonized. “My dad’s at Guantanamo. . . .”

Then he turned and ran, off down the street, very fast, crossing over to the other side, dodging a parked car, disappearing over the crest of the hill, footsteps fading fast. Neal was in good shape. I knew he’d be able to run the full two miles to his house, where his mother would be waiting.

Larry turned to me. “What’s going on, Alan?”

Larry wasn’t stupid. He had to know too. It just didn’t seem real.

I stood watching two fat brown-orange columns bulge up in the north, wondering myself what was going on. Light was playing inside them, a sullen red glow, like the light that glowed inside dying embers. Flickering though, on off, on off. . . .

Where the hell are the mushroom clouds? Where’s the firestorm? Are we dead already? Should we look for survivors so they can start to envy us?

Still watching a remote, silent disaster, I said, “I dunno. We better get up to your house. I want to call my mom.”

And Larry’s face was suddenly sober, suddenly full of knowledge. “We better get inside anyway. There’s . . . bound to be fallout sooner or later.”

And, I suddenly realized, the streets were empty around us. Everyone else had gone indoors.

Things were a little crazy for a few days after that. We went down to Larry’s house, where I tried to call my mom, but the phones were out. Not a dead line, like you got when the local system went down, just a fuzz of static like the TV makes when you turn it on in the middle of the night. I thought of staying for a while, then decided I’d better go home. My mom would be frantic. Besides, there was a little window of opportunity now, while the fallout clouds were still developing; and any prompt radiation from those faraway explosions had gone right through us while we stood and watched. Just thinking about that made my skin crawl.

I left Larry sitting nervously on the couch with his TV on, showing a pattern of colored static where WTTG-5 should have been. There was nothing on the radio either, FM sounding a lot like shortwave just then. The walk home, less than a mile, made me nervous too. Those two columns of smoke in the north had gotten tall and were starting to bend over toward the east.

There were cars in the street now, people driving too fast, and I could hear horns honking from the direction of Route 1.

My mom was frantic when I got there, grabbing me as I came through the door, thank-Godding, and our TV was on too, showing black and white static. My parents had been talking about getting a color TV for a while now, they weren’t quite as expensive as new cars, and I’d been hoping to see us get one for Christmas, hoping the old Magnavox would wind up in my room. We waited, and Mom kept going in the kitchen, switching from one Conelrad frequency to the other, hoping to hear something.

Around five o’clock, when it was starting to get dark outside, she started supper, reheating beef stew on the stove, putting brown ’n’ serve rolls in the oven, while we waited for Dad, who usually got home about quarter after. The power went off, TV going dead, radio going dead, lights going out, electric stove fading just before the stuff would’ve been ready anyway. And Dad didn’t show up.

We ate dinner by candlelight, Mom starting a fire in the fireplace, reminding me of the big snowstorm two winters back, when Marumsco Village had been without power for three days, and we waited, and looked out the window. Dark out there, dark and still. Stars in the sky, wisps of cloud, no Moon; I didn’t know whether it was new, a sliver hiding somewhere in the sky or just down. No lights from the other houses. No streetlights. No airplanes overhead. The headlights from an occasional car cruising slowly down Carter Lane.

Seven o’clock, me suddenly realizing I’d miss Bullwinkle. Nine o’clock, bedtime, Mom still standing at the window, looking out, crying now. I went to sleep on the couch around then.

When I woke up in the morning the fire was down to embers and it was snowing outside. I went to the window and looked out, saw our car in the driveway, blue tailfins dusted with white, realized Dad had come home some time during the night. The wintry grass on the front lawn was starting to get covered, the sky white, those featureless white clouds you see in a snowstorm you know is going to last a while. No one on the street. No one at all. Usually, this would bring the kids out fast, especially on a schoolless morning.

Is it fallout? I tried to look closely. Big flakes now, fluttering as they fell, looking a little bit like ash maybe, but very white. The flakes that fell on the brick windowsill were melting away to splotches of water. Snow. Just snow. It was starting to stick on the street now, whitening the blacktop, meaning it had gotten colder outside, cold enough to bring the blacktop down to freezing. I touched the window glass. Cold.

I suddenly remembered some stuff from a movie I’d seen a couple of years back. On the Beach. That final scene, of the submarine putting out to sea, the lonely woman watching from a distant headland, dying, then all those long views of empty streets, wind blowing newspapers along the gutter. The whole world a grave. Radiation. Giving me the creeps right now.

My parents’ door was shut. I went and stood in the hallway, wanting to knock, to go in and be with them, but I listened instead. Soft little noises. A brief murmur. The sound of the bed frame shifting. Shifting again. Again. Another murmur, something like a sigh. I went back to the living room and resumed staring out the window. They’d come out when they were done.

My parents kept me in for a few days, stayed in themselves, staring out the window apprehensively, waiting, I supposed, for the sky to fall, watching the almost-empty streets. Cars continued to go by, an occasional pedestrian striding quickly along the sidewalk. No kids.

My father told the story of his eighteen-hour commute home from work, told it over and over. His office in the Bureau of Mines building in DC suddenly shuddering, plaster cracking on the walls, window breaking, secretary screaming. Bright light suffusing the streets outside, light from the northeast, then dimmer light from almost due north. What the Hell . . .?

People in the hallways, boiling down the stairs, headed for the basement shelter, following the little trefoil signs. Dad started after them, got to the ground floor, stood in the foyer, where the big glass doors had been, looking out on a street full of people and cars, and started to think.

DC was still there and so was he. Those bombs hadn’t been anywhere real nearby. Maybe that was Baltimore and Philadelphia being blown to bits. In which case . . .

So he started for home.

Grinning: “I must’ve gotten stuck fifteen times, trying to go around wrecks on Shirley Highway! Good thing I managed to talk John and Karl into coming with me . . .” And he had, apparently, dropped them at their own houses on the way home.

I remembered a funny poster I’d seen in the hallway outside my dad’s office. It was the one that began, “In case of nuclear attack . . .” and ended, “. . . then kiss your ass good-bye.” Dad and his friends seemed to think it was a riot.

We ate lunch together, then he and Mom went back to bed for a while. I let Lucky, my little black-and-white cocker spaniel, out of the basement, where my mother insisted he be kept, and fed him, played with him a bit, and sat, looking out the window. Maybe TV would come back. Or I could get down the drugstore and spend my allowance on some of the new Burroughs books that Ace was supposed to be bringing out.

Two days, then three, and we were lucky at that. Dad was a geologist and still had a functioning Geiger counter stashed in the basement, from the days when he’d been with the USGS, had spent his summers working the Colorado Plateau. He kept poking its nose out the back door, testing. Nothing, nothing, and nothing again. Then the cupboards were empty and Dad said, “God damn it. Go ahead out and play, Alan.” Then he loaded up his hunting rifle, got in the car, and went grocery shopping.

I went over to Larry’s house first and was glad to see his parents had made it home too. They were pretty cold, lacking a fireplace, house heated by a charcoal hibachi they’d set up on the kitchen stove, next to a partly open window. Good enough for cooking, not much heat. We went over to Neal’s house then, but there was no one home, station wagon missing from their driveway.

By January, it became clear things weren’t going to get back to normal for a long time. No school, of course, and the TV never came back, nor the electricity. Dad took me shopping with him sometimes, and I guess I was really surprised to see the A&P still open. No lights, no cash registers, no meat, no frozen food, no fresh produce, but once a week a tractor trailer would pull in off Route 1 and unload canned goods. And the old bald guy, who’d been manager since the store opened here five years ago, was wearing a gun in a holster on his hip. He and some of the big boys who’d been working as baggers.

There was a big sign in the front window: CASH AND CARRY. NO FIREARMS ALLOWED. NO CHECKS. NO CREDIT. Dad kept carrying his loaded rifle, but we usually just left it locked in the car.

And radio finally did come back, a little bit, enough for us to understand. maybe, what had happened, locally, at least, sitting in the car listening to a staticky broadcast. The two bombs we’d seen had been meant for DC, one probably aimed at the White House, a few blocks from where my Dad worked, the other maybe for the Pentagon, where Larry’s mother had been a secretary.

Dad laughed when he heard: “The bastards missed!” And so one bomb had come down in the woods north of Wheaton, Maryland, the other just south of Annapolis. Baltimore had taken one in the harbor, and something had gone off between Richmond and Petersburg, emptying both cities.

Those missiles in Cuba had come ashore too, a hundred or more small nuclear detonations scattered across the south, taking out Miami, Atlanta. places like that. Weapons from Siberia had peppered the West Coast. And a squadron of long-range bombers had penetrated along a corridor from Boston to Chicago, wiping out both cities and a number in between.

Boston. That was all our relatives. Nobody said anything. Just not real, hearing it over the staticky radio.

All told, two-hundred-and-seventy-five nuclear weapons had detonated on North America, with a total yield in excess of a hundred and thirty megatons. Damage estimates varied, hard to say, “maybe sixty million dead.”

My father, staring at the radio, whispering, “And what about them . . .” Now, for the good news . . .

SAC got aloft, they said, in those minutes before the attack, several hundred bombers, their tankers . . .

Saddle up, boys. Work to be done.

Four-thousand-five-hundred gravity bombs, they said, three hundred Thor IRBMs, two-hundred-and-fifty Atlas and Titan-1 ICBMs, laying down a saturation pattern from Eastern Europe, across the USSR, and on into China. Forty-one thousand megatons. Casualties unknown. Damage inestimable. Long-term results incalculable.

There was a pall of smoke, they said, drifting out over the Pacific Ocean, the forests of Siberia, the cities of East Germany and Poland and Russia and China, presumably still ablaze.

My father laughing. My mother smiling.

Guess that’ll show them.

In March of 1963, it continued to snow heavily, and President Kennedy was assassinated by some ex-Marine named Oswald, who shot him in the face as he gave a speech in front of the Temporary White House in St. Louis.

Larry and I were playing down by the creek, dragging our way through waist-high drifts, holding our wooden swords, sticks we’d found, with likely enough shapes, silver duct tape making up the hilts. Alendar and Raitearyon were slogging westward along the Great River, sneaking up on the golden spire of Infinitarian’s stronghold. If we could get in there, could kill him, the forces of Venusia would triumph, could undo the ice age now gripping our gray world.

In the past, we’d had to stay down in the swampy land around the creek itself; now we could go up in most backyards. People had been leaving Marumsco Village, families loading up their cars by ones and twos, heading out, heading westward. Those who had places to go. Between the Mississippi and the Rockies, the country seemed to be intact, though it was hard to tell. Not much news on the radio, broadcasts we could pick up slowly growing rarer.

There’d been a little bit of excitement when Larry’s father built a big antenna out of pieces from the abandoned rooftops of several neighbors, somehow hooked his TV to a bunch of car batteries, then picked up a fuzzy signal from Memphis. Not much to it though. And it did continue to snow.

We sat on the railing of the little bridge where Hilton Avenue went over the creek, looking down on the frozen water. Snow was starting to pile up in drifts here too. Much more and you wouldn’t be able to find the creek unless you knew where to look. It seemed to be getting colder, and we’d taken to wearing sweaters under our parkas, me with too-tight long johns under my clothes, Larry with two pairs of pants.

Sitting there, tired from wading through hip-deep snow, breaths puffing out long jets of steam. It seemed to be getting dark out, like twilight, though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon.

Larry said, “The Barrs moved away this morning.”

That meant Larry was the last kid living on Greenacre Drive. I’d been the last kid on Staggs Court for more than a month. “Where to?”

He shrugged. “Texas, I think. Soapy’s brother’s supposed to live in Dallas.” Walter didn’t like it when we called his father that, but we did anyway, ever since we heard it was his college nickname.

“What about your parents?”

Another shrug. “Our people all live in New York. They might be still alive, but . . .” A third shrug. New York’s bombs had come down pretty far away, one up in the Catskills, the other out on Patchogue. “New York’s gotta be worse than here. I guess we’ll be staying put.” And then he turned and looked at me, kept on looking, waiting.

I nodded slowly. “Boston’s gone, but . . . We lived in Utah when I was little. My dad thinks we can take all the old camping gear and go back there, up into the mountains where there’s plenty of spring water, game to hunt. We might do all right there until things get back to normal.”

“That’d be cool. Think he’d let my family come?”

Sudden hard wish. What an adventure that’d be! But . . . I shook my head. “My parents think your dad’s an asshole.”

Larry nodded.

After a while, we started walking up the street, looking at abandoned houses. We’d been breaking into them lately, the empty houses of our friends, looking at their stuff, playing with their toys. One guy’s dad had a really great pornography collection, pictures of girls with their legs spread. I didn’t even know there were such things, and Larry kept wanting to go back. I think he was taking the pictures home one at a time.

We stuck it out ‘til July, then loaded up the car and drove away in the snow, Larry standing on my front steps, watching, motionless, until we turned the corner at the bottom of the street. I’m not sure whether he waved goodbye or not.

Though it should’ve been a quick shot, four, maybe five, days cross country to the little town of Moab, where we were sure to have friends, Dad’s old work buddies from back in the fifties, it took forever to get there.

In late September, on the day of my thirteenth birthday, I crouched behind the wreck of our car, on the shoulder of some road in southern Indiana, and watched five bearded men rape my mother. My father was lying in the snow a little distance away, lying still, snow around him stained red, steam rising from the big cut across his throat, big cut that had sprayed bright blood when one of the men hit him with a machete, Dad gargling, sounding just like he always had, in the bathroom, getting ready for work. He’d fallen to his knees, holding his neck, fallen to his face, rolling, rolling . . .

My dog Lucky was a little black rag in the snow not far away. He’d come running up, barking, barking, while Dad struggled and Mom screamed, barking, barking. One of the men turned, looked down, stepped on him hard. He only cried a little bit, then he was still, while I hid under the car and tried to stay quiet, laying there, staring at my dog.

They had Mom stripped all the way naked now, two of them holding her down in the snow, while a third did what he wanted. Her skin was starting to turn red, freezing cold I imagined, and she was moaning very softly, something like words, but not words. Once, I thought I saw her head turn, her eyes open, and look toward where I was hiding. Save me? Save yourself? I couldn’t tell. She shut her eyes and turned her head away.

When we didn’t get out to Utah fast, Mom and I both wanted to turn around, go back to our familiar house in Marumsco Village, but Dad kept insisting we’d get there, it’d just take a little longer. Then we couldn’t go back, roads to the east blocked by Federal troops, martial law rules keeping us off the main highways as we tried to work our way west. This was going to be our last attempt to get out of the Midwest, get across the Mississippi and on toward the mountains, Dad figuring we could try a northern route, up through Wyoming, where we heard things were getting better. Anyway, there was so much snow, people were staying away from the north.

One of the men was finished now, had his pants back up, laughing about how cold his butt had gotten during those few minutes, standing, holding a rifle, my dad’s rifle, cradled in his arms, watching the man who’d taken his place. This new guy had a big, muscular butt, covered with a lot of black hair.

A curious sense of detachment then, from what was going on, as if floating, far away. I remembered what had happened a couple of years ago, when the teen-age boy who lived next door talked me into coming down into his basement, what he’d tried to get me to do.

When these men finished with Mom, they’d come search the car, taking all our stuff, and they’d find me. Maybe they’d want to do it to me. too. How much difference is there between a grown woman and a nice, sleek little boy? I didn’t know.

The second man finished, kneeling between her legs, pulling up his pants, buckling his belt, zipping his fly, standing, number three taking his place, undoing his trousers, looking down at her, smiling. Mom’s eyes were open again, and she stayed in the position they’d put her in, bottom having made a nice, comfortable well in the snow, looking up at him. He kneeled, lay down on her, and started.

After a while, I slid out from behind the car and started crawling away. very quietly. There were nice, thick woods, leafless trees, quite close together, only a few dozen yards away. They’d see my trail, but they might not follow me into the woods.

I spent the night lying inside a dry sewer culvert, cowering in the darkness, wishing the night would end, wishing it would last forever. Tired, cold, shuddering like I was sick. Shutting my eyes, opening them on darkness, wondering if I’d slept. And hearing that sound. Far away voices, voices of women, ghost women, wailing, high, forlorn.

I used to be afraid of the dark when I was little, when I had so much trouble sleeping. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, Oh. no! Pang of fear, looking at the luminous clock dial, two A.M., knowing it was going to happen again, that I would lie through the rest of the night, listening to the ghost women cry.

I told my parents about the voices and they laughed. Just your imagination, they said. Just the sound of trucks running at high speed down U.S. 1 . . .

But there were no trucks on the highway anymore.

Image of dark red snow, snow around my still father. Image of my mother’s skin, reddening, reddening, as if in anticipation of the red snow that would surround her, once those men were finished. And Lucky, lying in the snow like a lost wig, just so much disembodied hair.

I wonder if they’re buried now? Would they bury a dead dog?

Lucky out on the snow, motionless, while starving crows pecked out his eyes. If it was summer, there’d be ants. But summer hadn’t come. Maybe it never would again.

Then, suddenly, it was day, wan gray light streaming into the pipe. I got out and stood on top of a nearby hill, looking back along my tracks, leading off through the woods, a crooked trail. If anyone was following me they’d have a pretty easy time. Go back? Go back and see what was left of my parents, my dog, see if they’d left anything I wanted in the wreck of the car? Image of red snow, of dead dog, of the way I might find Mom, sprawled naked in the snow.

I turned away, turned east, and started walking, head down, hands in my pockets. Anywhere. Anywhere but back to the car.

It took me a long damned time to walk home from Indiana. It kept snowing and snowing, me getting colder and colder, but glad I’d had a match box safe in my pocket, part of my old Cub Scout kit, when I crawled away from the car. Seventy-five wooden kitchen matches, enough to light seventy-five fires. I didn’t light one every night, only when I thought it was safe, when nobody could see the smoke. It was a good thing. It took me longer than that to get home.

I decided to walk home through West Virginia, so I crossed the Ohio River at Huntington, old iron bridge still intact, cars and trucks still using it, and headed up into the hills. Not too bad. Some game animals around, things I couldn’t catch. I killed some kind of rabbit by throwing a brick at his head, and he tasted pretty good. What I got used to eating was starving cats and dogs, which came up, purring, tail-wagging, looking for a handout until I broke their necks. The dogs weren’t too bad, but the cats kept making me sick. Puking, diarrhea. There were a few squirrels out wandering in the snow too, also starving to death. No birds. Other than crows, I hadn’t seen any birds to speak of since the day the bombs went off.

One day, walking along a ridge line above a country road, someplace, I don’t know where, I found a dead guy, a frozen carcass, gnawed a little bit on the face and hands, but not too much. He had a rifle, an old Enfield .303, still set up with a bayonet mount and military clip, just as it had been used in World War I, a dozen boxes of jacketed bullets, a backpack with five pounds of Slim Jims and a big bottle of chlorine tablets.

The Slim Jims were so rich, eating just one made me nauseous, but I knew what the tablets were for and started to use them. After that, I started feeling a little better. His clothes didn’t fit and they weren’t too clean, but I took them anyway. Even those big, nasty boots, which I figured I could trade to someone else someday. If there was a someday, or someone else.

One day, I found a little girl, maybe eight years old, very thin, crouching by herself in the snow, shivering. Naked. Just looking at me, skin red from the cold, especially on her back, just the way Mom’s had been. She was wet all over the insides of her legs, too, looking at me, eyes blank, just waiting. I guess she figured I’d do more of whatever had just been done to her.

And I guess I thought about it, for just a second. I’d been thinking about stuff like that a lot as I walked along in the dark, cold woods, walking home. Thinking about the magazines and pictures Larry and I had found in the empty houses. Thinking about Mom on her back in the snow, and about what those men had been doing to her.

Somewhere hereabouts would be the men who’d done whatever had been done to this little girl. Somewhere, maybe not so far away. I walked away, off into the woods away from the road, hoping I wouldn’t run into them—they’d probably kill me and take my gun. I walked away, leaving her there to crouch and shiver.

Maybe those other men left my mom lying on the road when they were done, too. Maybe they hadn’t killed her. Maybe she’d gotten up after a awhile, dug some clothes out of the wreck of the car, whatever the men had left for her. Maybe she saw my trail leading off into the woods, had started off after me. Maybe she was right behind me now, angry, angry at me for not trying to save her.

But, Mom, they would’ve killed me. . . .

I could feel the slap across my face, just like the slaps I got whenever I was bad. I stood looking around then, but there was nobody here. Nobody but me.

Maybe Mom, following me, would find the little girl, give her some clothes, would take care of her.

Then again, maybe she was dead, and the little girl would die too, would freeze to death in the night. I kept walking, under a dark gray sky. while it got darker and darker, and, after a while, the wind started to blow. It started snowing again, but I walked all night.

In the spring I finally got back to Marumsco Village. Real spring, the sky clear blue, soft warm wind blowing, snow melting away, filling the creeks with cold, clear, rushing water. It was, I thought, May of 1964, but I may have gotten confused somewhere along the way. April? June? I couldn’t tell.

I’d come across country as much as I could, avoiding towns and cities, avoiding the highways, trying to stay away from where I thought people would be. Stay away. Stay out of trouble. Stay in the woods. In northern Virginia, though, I had to come out at last, crossing roads, then walking along them, to get home.

I came down the steep, winding road south of Lorton, the one that switchbacked past the old quarry, came out of the woods on the north bank of the Occoquan River. It was wider than I remembered it, swollen with meltwater, and the old wooden bridge where Route 123 had crossed was gone, nothing left of it but a couple of cracked concrete abutments.

Occoquan, old-style town, very small, crummy old buildings lining the south bank a few miles above the Route 1 bridge. Where the bridge had been. I could see it was gone too, could see Conrad Island poking up out of Belmont Bay, the Potomac a streak of shiny water just beyond.

And Occoquan was gone as well, nothing left but a few blackened ruins, jagged brick walls and stuff sticking up out of old foundations. I wonder when that happened? Old arguments, from when we moved here, when I was just seven years old. We, northerners, wanted to say Oak-a-quan, the locals insisting on Awk. . . .

I went up and crossed at the ruins of the Hooes Creek Reservoir dam, jumbled concrete wreckage like so many huge rocks in the river. We used to go swimming there, and boating. Fun to row our boats up to the dam, get off onto its top, stand looking down from a dizzying height. I don’t think anyone ever fell.

Long, slow walk up the steep hill of 123, which was called Occoquan Road here, past the collapsed ruins of what I remembered as ramshackle housing, places where the local blacks lived, my father pointing out their fancy cars, sneering, telling me all about the way Negroes lived, the way they thought, how alien their priorities were.

Then up Hilton Avenue to corner of Fourth Street. Stand there, heart pounding, trying to decide. Neal’s house was here, dark and empty, windows smashed out. A few of the houses were burned, a few here and there, most just empty, many looking perfectly intact, as if their owners were away at work, would be home in the evening to cook supper and watch TV.

Image of myself, home from school, sitting, doing my homework at the coffee table, cartoons on the in the background. Captain Tugg. Spike Marlin. Axl Grackl. Once, Larry got a strange, flat pink pimple on the end of his nose, looking a bit like a dab of Silly Putty. We’d all taken to calling him Captain Tugg, in honor of the Captain’s obviously made-up nose.

So. I really ought to go up Fourth Street to Carter Lane, then on to 103 Staggs Court. Home. House on the hill, white with blue trim, weeping willow tree in the backyard, next to the old swingset my parents had bought for me in the spring of 1958 . . .

I turned and walked up Hilton Avenue, toward the foot of Greenacre Drive.

Walter Barr’s house was gone, burned away, ruins falling into the black hole of the basement, Karl English’s house next door charred but still standing. Across the street, Larry’s house was okay, in better shape than Neal’s had been, but not much better. His parents’ 1961 VW Beetle was sitting in the driveway, tires flat, and the living room’s big picture window was smashed out, jagged glass standing on the lower edge.

I stood for a while, looking, listening to the wind. Quiet here, quieter than it had ever been, the sun high and bright overhead, warm on the skin of my face, breeze pushing my hair around. Listen. Sigh of wind. Gurgle of water trickling in the gutter, running down Greenacre Drive toward the creek, where Larry and Neal and I had played for years.

I missed the sound of the traffic.

After a while, I crossed the street and went up to the door. When I pushed, it opened, not locked, not even latched. It was wet and stinky in the living room, couch mushy with rot, black mildew stains on the walls, like abstract art. Nothing in the kitchen, refrigerator door standing open, empty. Clean though, as if somebody’d tidied up right before the end. Downstairs bedroom. His parents’ bed was made up, but soaked now, and mushy.

Upstairs. Larry’s room, where I’d sat listening to music, enduring his fixation on the Four Seasons, talking about bullshit, weekend evenings, days when the weather was too lousy for us to play in the woods. Bed here not made. But wet. Mushy. There was a book on the nightstand, furred with mold, soft, so soft you could push a finger through it.

It was a hardcover copy of Liana of Gathol, a blue Grosset and Dunlap edition, binding reinforced with green tape. It was the copy from the Marumsco School library. I looked at the bookshelf. More library books, alongside the Ace paperbacks. All right. This is what Larry got up to, after I moved away.

I wonder where they went?

God. I wanted so badly for him to be here.

I went back outside then and started walking home, down the hill, toward the creek, trying hard not to cry. Failing. On the way, walking beside the creek, I found a puppy, small, brown and white, familiar looking. I took him in my arms, petted him for a while, then broke his neck.

I stood on the front steps of 103 Staggs Court for a long time, frozen, unable to go in. Just stood facing the door, dead puppy under my arm, looking through the screen at the blue-painted wood, the brass knocker, the nameplate my father’d put on a couple of years ago. Donald R. J. Burke, Jr., lying in the red snow of Indiana.

The windows were all intact, all along the front of the house, even the big pane of glass in the living room. Dark inside. Funny. If the electricity came back, maybe all the lights would go on, maybe even the stove, depending on how we’d left the switches. Maybe it had at some point. Maybe that was why so many houses had burned down. Not mine, though. My parents had a mania about that. Last thing, my dad had gone through the house, making sure everything was all right. For the day of our return.

I opened the screen door and tried the knob. Locked. Just the way we left it. And my key was still in my pocket, right where it had been, mixed with sixty-three cents change, the remains of my last allowance. From eighteen months ago. My hand shook, trying to prevent me from threading the lock.

Push. Turn. Push. The door swung open, silent, on hinges my father always kept carefully oiled. “So we don’t sound like Inner Sanctum around here.”

I went in.

Dark. Dusty. Sneeze.

Blue sectional sofa. Magenta Magna vox in the corner, next to the fireplace. I put the puppy down on the hearth. Brass fittings. Mesh cover closed, blackened ashes the remains of our last cooking fire. Dry logs in the rack by the door. Kindling in the box, pile of newspapers nearby.

Turn. My mother’s old upright piano, a bequest from her grandmother, who’d been still alive, living in a nursing home in Boston, ninety years old the day . . .

Flicker. Flicker. Two strobes of bright light in the north, changing things.

Kitchen clean, just the way we left it, refrigerator door propped open a bit, “so we don’t grow mold.”

I walked down the hallway, dust puffing out of the carpet at every footfall, pale clouds, not a lot, not really, exaggerated because it shouldn’t be here at all. My mother vacuums every day. . . .

Mother lying in the snow, naked, skin of her back reddening in the cold . . .

Bookcases, full of new Ace paperbacks, dry and safe. Lots of old children’s books, historicals. We Were There with Caesar’s Legions. Sat on my bed, that pale tan bedspread I preferred, sneezed at the dust. Sat. Patch of sunlight, sunlight pouring through the window, warm square on the brown carpet. My little student’s desk, mug full of pencils and pens. My schoolbooks, homework on that last day, piled neatly in one corner. Bureau, full of my clothes.

Might not fit anymore. I’m a lot skinnier. A little bit taller . . .

I got up and went to the living room, opened the flue, started a fire, cooked the puppy for my supper. And read Thuvia, Maid of Mars by the light of our kerosene lamp. And kept thinking I really ought to check on Lucky, down in the basement, make sure he’d been fed, had enough water.

And slept in my own bed.

Morning.

I ate some cold dog, looking out over the weedy ruin of my parents’ carefully tended backyard, sunlight yellow on brown grass, patches of green starting to appear here and there, wondering what to do.

Home now. Don’t leave. Safe here. Nonsense. In any event, the inventory wasn’t reassuring. We’d cleaned the cupboards bare when we left, taking all the canned food that would fit in the car. There was some stuff in the basement, a few big jars of dried beans, some cans of beets, stuff I’d’ve gagged over a year ago. I found a big bowl and put some navy beans on to soak. Not much pressure. A trickle. Gravity feed from uphill pipes maybe. Well. Dog would serve in place of pork, maybe I could find an onion somewhere. And there were still spice jars upstairs.

Beautiful day outside. Another clear blue sky, more brilliant sunshine, sun climbing up the vivid shield of heaven, like an image from a movie, or a book. . . .

I could hardly believe my books were safe. Walking in the darkness, in the cold and snow, huddling in sewer pipes, freezing, I never thought I’d ever lay in a warm, dry room and read Barsoom stories again.

I loaded my rifle, five in the clip, nothing in the chamber, clicked the safety, and went for a walk, carefully locking the door behind me.

The paths along the creek were still intact, still clearly marked, beaten earth between walls of dry vegetation, reedy weeds that would soon come back to life. We always wondered what made them, what kept them clear. Kids? Dogs? Wild animals. Still here, and I still didn’t know.

Stopped by the big dead tree, peering close. There. Line of little black ants emerging, headed out for their daily foraging trip. Like old friends. Larry and I used to come by here every so often and start thumping on the dry gray wood of the trunk, stirring them up. But they’d waited us out, after all, hadn’t they?

I followed the creek down past Hilton Avenue, followed a path that led up the hill, away from the creek, deeper into the woods. This was the one we’d found last, after we got tired of walking back and forth along the creek between our houses and the Drug Fair by Route 1. Sitting in the fluorescent-lit store, reading comics we didn’t want to buy, sitting at the fountain, loading our greasy french fries with masses of tart red ketchup. . . .

The path led uphill, following a line of rotting fence posts, a tangle of rusty barbed wire strands that disappeared under the leaf mold, emerged, vanished again. I followed it until I came to the crest of the hill.

Remember?

I remembered.

Larry and I walking along in the woods, bright spring day shining above the trees, following this newfound path, wondering where it led. Can’t go on forever. Sooner or later, we’d have to pop out of the woods, up by Our Lady of Angels Catholic church, or maybe at the foot of Botts Avenue. There was a new junior high school there, Fred M. Lynn, where we’d be going next year. . . .

This year!

I would already have completed my first year at the new school, if . . .

Remember coming to the top of the hill, stopping suddenly, surprised at the vista, Larry bumping into me, muffled exclamation of delight at the view.

We’d christened it Dorvo Valley, after some imaginary monsters that lived on our imaginary Venus.

Long, sloping hillside, bare of trees, dirt dug out in little craters, swathes of berry bushes, red berries whose names we never found out, growing in the tall brown grass, one lone tree in the middle of the valley, more woods beyond, the spire of the Catholic church visible above them, shining like polished brass in the morning sun.

“Look,” Larry whispered. “The Temple of Venusia . . .

Now, there was a patched brown wall tent set up under that lone tree, the black remains of a campfire dead before its closed flap. It opened then and he came out, stood looking up at me, face expressionless, small caliber pistol in one hand.

Not quite like stray cats, but close, not knowing what to say, how to act. Larry said, “Well. What d’you want?” Like that. Like nothing bad had ever happened.

He put out folding chairs for us, a camp table, started a fire, got out a big frying pan while I sat and watched. Skinny. Maybe fifty pounds lighter than he’d been when I left, bones standing out under the skin of his face, fingers long and thin. And he had a big slab of salty bacon, a bucket of what looked like fresh hens’ eggs, brown, from Rhode Island reds. . . .

There was, he said, nobody living in Woodbridge anymore. Nobody at all. And he’d found an abandoned farm south of town with chickens running loose, laying eggs all over the place, bacon hanging in a larder.

Stores with a few things left on the shelves, people’s houses, all sorts of abandoned stuff. . . .

Looking at me over a plate of bacon and eggs, a mug of badly made coffee. “Where’re you staying?”

“My parents’ house.”

Long look. “How are they?”

I shook my head.

A nod. “I went out to play one day, maybe six months after you left.

When I came home my mom and dad were gone and the house was wrecked.”

I ate, drank, realized I hadn’t had food like this in so long the flavors were unfamiliar.

“What’re you going to do?”

I shrugged. “Stay here. Um, in my house.” My house. “I’ve got no place else to go.”

Larry licked his plate, then stood, throwing it to one side, in a patch of weeds. Stood, stretched, then suddenly spun and looked at me. “Hey! Wait’ll you see this. . . .” He went into the tent, rummaged noisily, came out with a long, straight-bladed sword, pointed it at me. “So, Alendar. You want to play Venus now?”

I sat and stared, for a long moment, sat back then, and started to laugh. And it was exactly what I wanted to do. Play Venus with a belly full of eggs and bacon, play Venus with my best friend, and give no more thought to dead people, to a life in which I ate puppy dogs for breakfast.

Venus, at least, our Venus, was still the same.

And yet . . . we played that game because, always, we had wanted the world to change.

So it went on like that. We played together, foraged, going through people’s houses, talking, talking, slowly becoming ourselves again. Not saying anything about it. Nothing about parents. Nothing about the world, new or old, not what things had been, not what they were now. Just our world. Things we could find to do. And the ever-evolving portmanteau paradise of Venus. After a while, it did seem that it was Alendar and Raitearyon who lived on in the ruins of Marumsco Village, rather than Alan Burke and Larry Pernotto.

Summer had come back, beautiful and dry. Hot. Summer gone so long we’d almost forgotten what it could be like. Swimming down in Belmont Bay. Running wild in the woods. We looked and looked for a rowboat or a canoe, but couldn’t find one.

And no one here but us. It seemed so odd that everyone had gone away. Impossible. Once, as I stood resting at the top of the steep hill beyond Forest Glen Avenue, a bullet smacked hard into the trees nearby, followed by the echo of a distant gunshot. I never saw anyone, never heard any voices, for they’d all gone away.

We moved into my parents’ house together, setting him up in what had been their bedroom. He loved wallowing in their big double bed, snickering at the stains on the mattress as we changed their dusty old sheets.

Familiar. Familiar sights. I remembered having seen those stains before. Remembered listening to the soft sounds of my parents that I supposed led to their creation. Past. Gone. Forget it. For every memory of poor Lucky dead in the snow, there’s another memory of someone else’s puppy warm in your stomach. . . .

Then it was fall, then winter, and the snow came back, piling high in dark streets that never got plowed, Larry and I walking in the night, bundled up in new coats we found in a partly looted Sears. Sky full black overhead, flooded with hard, brilliant stars, Larry looking up, pointing out constellations to me, naming stars, pointing out Jupiter and Venus, even a red fleck he said was Mars.

Like the old days. Larry always memorizing things so he could show off, I supposed, stars, birds, wild flowers. . . .

In January, I shot a fat doe up on the eroded land where they’d just begun extending I-95 south from the terminus of Shirley Highway. Something I could do. A way to show off. Memory of myself at a carnival, propped just so, aiming at the wig-wagging target, squeeze-squeeze-squeeze . . . seven rounds, seven hits, taking a sturdy bamboo cane for my prize, looking around at a circle of astonished boys.

A mutter: “Fucking Burke? I don’t believe it . . .

Then, to our relief, spring again. It was 1965 already, though it didn’t seem to matter much. We seemed to be a little bigger, kept having to search people’s houses for new clothes, having to go farther afield every month as houses were mined out, as mold and mildew slowly won their inevitable victories over cloth and leather.

And we were walking along the embankment, walking beside the woods, looking down on the cracked concrete pavement of I-95. This part, just south of Shirlington, had been finished for years. We’d been hunting, doing okay, a small dog, a couple of seagulls. . . . More birds now than there’d been in years, Larry insisting that if the quail came back they’d be delicious. . . . Seagulls, though, tasted liked shit. I seemed to remember them hanging around the dump. Seagoing pigeons, that’s all.

And noise from the road. Unfamiliar noise, sending us back into the trees, crouching, rifles at ready, watching.

Grinding, like metal on metal on stone. They weren’t going very fast. Three big green trucks full of men in dark green uniforms, metal helmets, rifles held casually, muzzles pointed at the bright blue sky. Big white stars on the cab doors of the trucks, vertical exhaust pipes puffing black diesel smoke. Going past us, very slowly, disappearing to the north, sounds fading.

We sat there then, in the woods, silent for a while. Those were the first people we’d seen in a year, the first either of us had seen since I’d come home in the snow.

Finally, Larry said, “I thought it would stay this way, you know?”

I nodded. Just the two of us, pretending we were alone in a world emptied of human beings, playing, for the rest of our lives, which, just now, sort of seemed like forever.

I said, “Well. Things’ll change again. Maybe they’ll even change back. . . .” Marumsco Village full of children and cars and dogs, even though we’d eaten all the dogs ourselves, and cartoons on TV, teachers in school, bullies and comic books and friends. . . .

Larry whispered, “It can’t change back. The world is smashed flat and . . .” he turned and looked at me, eyes narrow, mirroring pain, “Our parents are dead.”

No. Things would never be what they had been, no matter how hard we wished. And I hadn’t wished very hard. Wishing made me remember the Indiana snow, though the only image left now was a very small one, of a little ball of hair stomped flat on the road. I still remembered the sound he made when the man did that to him.

When it happened, it happened very suddenly, without warning, without giving us much time to think. It was winter again, the same winter we both began having to shave for real, first him then me, changing blades more and more often, glad there were plenty of razor blades, wrapped bright and shiny in immortal plastic, in the ruins of all the stores down by Route 1.

There was snow in the sky, though none had fallen that day, and a lot more snow on the ground, crusted old snow, snow that had melted and frozen several times. Seedy-looking snow, though it never got as bad as it had when there were people in the world. I was looking forward to a new storm. Fair white world. A world which, when the blue skies came back, would glisten in the sun.

I’d been out by myself, hunting locally, but no luck. The woods around Marumsco Village seemed played out, driving us very far afield, the game, I supposed, understanding that we were here, that we’d eat them if we could.

I was walking up Hill Court, the street that dead-ended against my backyard, smelling the familiar smell of impending snow, wishing it would start to fall soon, imagining the slow, downward drift of heavy, clotted flakes, when I heard voices.

No big deal. Voices. This is Marumsco Village. Ten thousand people live around here. You always hear voices.

And me, stopped dead in the street. Listening. Suddenly sweating inside my coat, feeling it trickle down my sides, itching. Making me shiver.

Images. Always snowy images. Always colored so badly wrong. I worked the bolt on my rifle, slowly, nervous, hoping the voices would cover that little metallic click-clink, started down low, working my way past the DeButts’s green and white split-level, angling so I’d come up to the fence behind the woodpile. Woodpile right where my father built it, a bit smaller than it had been three years ago, though we tried to keep it replenished. Hauling wood in kids’ wagons is hard work.

There were four of them down in the backyard, standing in the flat spot where our plastic pool had been, standing under the dining room window. Broken window. Four bushy-bearded, sandy-haired men in ratty old clothes, torn up clothes, clothes far too light for the weather.

Something wrong with them? They don’t know how to find new clothes?

Larry was over by the trellis that supported my mother’s favorite rose bush, the wild-looking one by the backyard gate. Had his rifle, had it pointed at the men, the 30.06 that had belonged to his father, who never went hunting, just liked to keep guns around. Angry look on his face, too, stubborn.

And the men had funny accents, thick, adenoidal. Something I remembered from right around the time the bombs fell. One of them, a big, burly man with large, bare, red-knuckled hands, said, “Come on, boy. Put your gun down. We won’t hurt you.” Taking a step forward, right at the muzzle.

One of the other men laughed, a nasty little sound, and said, “Nah, not mooch . . .”

One of the other men said, “Come on, mate. Let’s get this done. Me bleedin’ arse is ’alf-froze . . .”

Larry standing still, his rifle steadfast, unwavering. Eyes big, though. Very big. Big enough I could see the whites . . .

Big enough . . .

I sighted in and put one through the man who’d said “mooch,” the others spinning suddenly. Click-clink, aim, fire, this time at the man with the bleedin’ arse . . .

WHACK. Something splintered the woodpile, bits stinging in my face. Larry’s rifle made its familiar muffled blaang. Click-clink. Aim. Squeeze the trigger.

Classic, ringing silence.

Four men lying in the snow.

Larry on his knees, puking.

I stood, reeling, feeling so very odd. No time for this . . . I went down the hill, started checking them out. One through the chest, hole the size of a softball beside his left shoulderblade. One through the throat, blood staining the snow, just like that other blood, that other snow. Third one lying on his back, eyes open, little red hole high on his sternum.

The fourth was the ringleader, curled in a little ball, crying softly to himself. I kicked his gun out of reach, nudged him with my toe. Grunt of agony. Gut shot, Larry’s rifle a faraway bang even now.

The man looked up at me, eyes bright with pain. I guess maybe that was terror too, Larry still retching in the background. The man said, “Oh. Oh, my God . . .”

Click-clink. Aim. Squeeze the trigger. Echoes fading away, bouncing around among all the little tract houses. Four men dead in the snow.

Larry whispered, “Jesus Christ, Alan. Oh, Christ . . .”

I looked over at him and said, “Alendar. Alendar and Raitearydn.”

A slow nod. All right. It’s all right. We’re heroes. Fantasy heroes are allowed to kill people. Registered in the same licensing office as James Bond. . . .

It took us hours to drag them over to the Marteaus’ yard, hack into the frozen ground with picks, get them buried. At least we did that. At least. And I don’t know where my parents are. Or Larry’s parents. Or poor Lucky. Or even that little girl.

Clean bones, by now. . . .

What was it the poet said? “Clean bones gone.”

Winter then, and spring. Spring of 1967, pickings around here beginning to grow sparse, the world refilling with people. More trucks on Route 1, common enough we got used to hearing them in the distance, motors rumbling as they shifted gears on the curves. Sometimes we’d go up on the hill beside Our Lady of Angels, what we’d long called the Temple of Venusia, and watch them go by.

And people back in Marumsco Village by ones and twos and little families, people wary of each other, no one we knew. An occasional car, prowling down the street, mean-eyed men and women staring at us. All right. We were used to carrying our guns.

I wondered where they were getting the gasoline. Nowhere nearby.

Then more people, and more. The world, indeed, changing back. Not to what it had been, but still, to something more familiar. I knew the old era had come to a close when the A&P opened back up, not the same manager, not the same bag boys, not the same cashiers, but the same canned goods, lining all the shelves. And I knew it was over for me the day I went in, wanting to shop, penniless, and applied for a job.

The man just looked me up and down, at the rifle tucked so casually under my arm, nodded, and put me to work. Fifty cents an hour, he said, and a bag of free groceries a week.

One Saturday afternoon in late May, the sun shining overhead, tangled lawns dotted with tall, stalky, wild-looking dandelions, Larry and I decided to go on into DC and see what was happening in the world. It would have been a long walk, twenty-two miles, but by then we’d fixed up our old bikes, my heavy red Schwinn, Larry’s sleek black Italian racer. It’d take no more than an hour and a half, up newly patched Shirley Highway, past the Pentagon, across the 14th Street Bridge and there you were.

It’d only been a few weeks since the store’d started selling battery-powered transistor radios, but we already felt like we’d somehow been transported into the past. Music. Music and news. Steve Allen every Friday night.

News hard to listen to, very strange news, news we’d missed over the past four years, world going on without us, as it had gone on without the presence of the many who’d died. I’d known permanent martial law was declared back in 63, but somehow missed the accession of Provisional President Robert MacNamara after that. Too wrapped up in my own misery, I guess. And, of course, then I was on that long, long walk. . . .

Missed the Collapse of Civilization. Just about everyone in Eurasia had, apparently, been killed. By bombs in the north, by famine in the south. Then trouble and more trouble. Deadly famine in Africa, revolution and conventional war in South America.

By 1964, they said, the population of the world, from a peak of nearly two-and-a-half billion, had fallen to less than six hundred million. That many people dead, they said, in eighteen months.

After which, the world held four surviving nation-states, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Holding off an avalanche of refugees by force of arms.

They say, in the end, they had to use nuclear weapons on Indonesia to keep the beggars at bay. And they had to evacuate the surviving population of Britain, all ten million of them, put them ashore empty-handed on the coast of South Carolina. Which, I suppose, explains where the Mooch Man and the Bleedin’ Arse came from. The grass over their graves, visible from my bedroom window, seemed particularly rich and green.

And now? MacNamara still holding on, of course, still running the show, giving speeches in his dry, flat voice, his face appearing in the thin newspapers of 1967, still wearing those old-fashioned glasses, glasses I remembered seeing on TV the day before the world came to an end.

Denouncing his opponents. Because the Senate had reconvened, secretly, in Montpelier, Vermont, independent of the martial law government, senators from thirty states who would, they said, reestablish the civil government under the Constitution. Would, they said, hold the 1968 Presidential Election on schedule. . . .

Hard to imagine that. We also heard, from a news report on WJZ-FM, staticky words read by good, old Frank McGee, that the Democratic Party was talking about holding a special convention, about to select the men they’d run for president next year. Rumor was it would be former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and someone called John Kenneth Galbraith. I never heard of him. Apparently, he’d been Ambassador to India during the war, and had somehow made his way home. It seemed very weird to have this stuff back, and the soldiers were everywhere.

It was a bright, sunny day when we rode across the Fourteenth Street Bridge, thin columns of blue smoke rising from the cityscape ahead of us as we rolled past the round, colonaded Jefferson Memorial, Capitol dome glistening white, Washington Monument towering just the way it always had. For some reason, I kept imagining it had fallen, imagining, maybe, that really great scene from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, where the saucer hits the base of the Monument and explodes, Monument toppling, falling in one piece to the ground like some vast white tree, people fleeing across the grassy hillside like colored-dot ants, being crushed as it fell upon them. Even when I was a little kid I knew the Monument was made from millions of stone blocks, would shatter as it fell. Still, the image was there.

Loud, throbbing roar from out over the tidal Basin. We sat on our bikes by the side of the road, looking out past the bright, pink and white cherry blossom trees, watching as a C-130 struggled up from National Airport, engines shrill as it circled over the city, then turned southward. A lot of people dead down south. A lot of cities just ruins around radioactive holes in the ground. Alas, Babylon? Maybe they’re making it down in Timucuan County. Maybe Fort Repose is still there.

Larry, watching the plane, shading his eyes with his hand, squinting, said, “I almost don’t remember what it’s like to ride on a plane anymore. . . .”

I’d never been for a plane trip, my parents talking about how, maybe this Christmas, we’d fly up to Boston rather than drive. Fly up, maybe, on one of those noisy Lockheed Electra turbo-props, or a Vickers Viscount. Not that many 707s on the short-haul routes up the east coast. Not yet.

The Mall between the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument was dusty now, grass all gone, but still the same, nonetheless, golden dome over the Natural History museum still glistening in the sun, red brick castle of the little Air and Space museum just the way I remembered it. I could hardly wait to see the stuffed elephant again, to stand looking up at the hanging model of a blue whale, the dugong’s skeleton that used to scare my mom. Or go over behind the castle and see that wrinkle-skinned old V-2, or a Jupiter-C just like the one that put Explorer 1 in orbit. . . .

The dusty Mall was full of tents, people walking among the tall, thick old trees, mostly military people in a variety of green, brown, and blue uniforms, Navy white here and there. A lot of men in gray business suits just like the one my dad used to wear to work.

Larry said, “What’s the matter?”

I wiped my eyes with the tail of my shirt, and said, “Nothing. I smell barbecue. . . .”

They were having a cook-out, one pudgy young soldier in corporal’s stripes told us, to celebrate the return of the U.S. Government to its traditional capital in Washington, D.C. Here. You boys want some hot-dogs? After lunch, he said, President MacNamara would come by to give a speech. . . .

And we found him, just like that, not long after the president gave his rather dull speech about how necessary it was to continue Martial Law, so the country could continue getting back on its feet, so we could lead the world on the long road to recovery.

We stood there for a long time, watching him flip greasy hamburgers on a smoking grill, chattering away with some short, stocky blond girl, both of them dressed in slightly threadbare Marine fatigues. Finally he looked up, maybe feeling our eyes on him, maybe just noticing us standing there. Puzzled look. Long, silent stare, then, “Oh, fuck. Alan? Larry?”

I was a little surprised at the way he rushed over and hugged me, at the bright, alien look in his eye, his little friend standing in the background, arms folded, grinning. And Neal Dixon, pounding me on the back, grabbing Larry by the shoulders and shaking him, laughing. “Jesus Christ, I figured I’d never see you guys again. . . .”

I remembered watching him run away, light coming through the trees, tall, ugly columns of smoking boiling up in the north. Four-and-a-half years ago, already. I said, “How’ve you been?”

Grin fading, serious look flooding his eyes. “Okay, you?”

I shrugged, glanced at Larry. “Um. How’s your brother? Your mom and dad.”

A hooded look. Hurt look. He said, “We live in an old brownstone over in Georgetown. Pretty neat. You’ll have to come by and . . .” A sudden silence, then, “My, uh . . . they nuked Guantanamo. No survivors. Yours?”

When I didn’t answer, he turned and looked at Larry, who said, “I don’t know. They’re just . . . gone, I guess.”

“Alan?”

I wanted to tell him about Indiana, about the red snow and Lucky and the way my mom’s face looked while she was being raped, but I couldn’t. “Dead.”

He nodded, turned back toward the grill, started pushing burgers and dogs around. “This is my friend Jeannie. Her father’s a colonel.” Neal’s father had been a major, maybe would’ve been a general by now. . . . He said, “We go to the base school they’ve set up over by Lafayette Park. We’re in the eleventh grade.”

A sudden, sharp shock. We’d all be graduating from high school in another year, if . . .

Neal said, “You guys still hungry? Plenty of burgers left. Jesus, Larry, I never imagined you could get so skinny. . . .”

By the spring of 1968, Marumsco Village, all of Woodbridge really, seemed almost back to normal. Streets full of people, kids playing in the woods again, even people we knew reappearing. The Marteaus came back to rebuild the ruined house where we’d buried Mooch Man and Bleedin’ Arse, their skinny daughter grown to become a rather attractive teenager. Son nowhere to be seen though, just the faded memory of the big boy who’d led me down into a dark basement one long-ago summer day. They asked after my parents, I asked after the son, and we all shook our heads together. Nothing.

I was surprised to find Marumsco Elementary School open again, to hear that Mr. Kildea was still its principal. Apparently, he’d crusaded to get it back open, had searched the entire country for his surviving teachers. When I went by, just for old-time’s sake, Miss Johnson was in her old classroom, looking just the same, smiling, remembering me well enough. And telling me her name was indeed Mrs. Pugh now, cheeks dimpling as she smiled. “I remember how funny you thought that was, Alan. . . .”

I felt like I was under a cloud as I walked back down Greenacre Drive toward Larry’s parents’ house, though the sky was a bright, featureless blue overhead, the trees fuzzed with new yellow-green buds, the birds of spring singing in the forest all around me.

Think about it. A few years at Fred M. Lynn. Then what? Garfield High School? I remembered my parents talking about an upcoming bondissue vote, speculating about whether it was worthwhile to build a brand new high school for the teenagers of Marumsco Village and the other developments around Woodbridge.

A couple of months more, and I would’ve been standing someplace in a cap and gown, accepting my piece of paper, parents beaming from the grandstand, shaking some principal’s hand. College, maybe. What had I wanted to be? A paleontologist. I’d always pictured myself wandering some desert wasteland. Montana. Outer Mongolia. I’d wanted to be Roy Chapman Andrews.

Now? Nothing. No future. Nothing but the past.

The world had changed all right. Changed into the horrific adventure I always dreamed about when I was a kid. Giant meteor comes down and wipes away the constraints of Civilization, and Alan Burke, Burke the Jerk, becomes Alendar Vexh-nem, son of Venusia, hero. But the world came back, and all the intervening five years did was take away what little I had. Adventure gone, and, with it, that old future I’d once regarded as a consolation prize.

So. What now, A&P stockboy with a seventh-grade education? You’re back in Marumsco Village again, with nowhere to hide, no place to run. And outside of America, the rest of the world is gone. They won’t be needing many paleontologists now.

Larry was waiting for me in front of 8 Greenacre Drive, toolkits opened on the lawn, next to the four new tires we’d scavenged, hood of the ’61 beetle already open, peering in at that strange-looking air-cooled engine. He looked up at me, frowning, “You get it?”

I held up the Chilton s I’d found in the old public library, open for business again, so I’d had to sign for a card where, only a year ago, I’d’ve just taken the book I wanted.

Looking at the engine, Larry said, “I remember working on this with my dad, you know? I feel like his ghost is in here somewhere.”

I nodded. When we’d cleaned out the basement of 103 Staggs Court, so we could set up our little workshop, we’d swept up a fair amount of dusty black dog hair. Hair shed by Lucky, living in the basement because my mother didn’t want him dirtying up our pretty new carpets. That felt like a ghost, too.

July. Nighttime. Electric light in Marumsco Village for the first time in six years. Streetlights lighting up the streets, washing all but the brightest stars from the sky, cars moving around in the semi-darkness. Strange to flip switches left motionless for a half-decade, strange to see the bulbs light right up. Strange to see the resistance elements on the old white kitchen range glow sullen orange. Strange to hear the refrigerator’s compressor humming softly, making ice again after a long, faithful wait. Strange to lie in my little bed, reading The Chessmen of Mars for the fiftieth time, reaching up when I started yawning and dropping the book on my face, pulling the chain of the old poodle-base black ceramic lamp, closing my eyes on darkness. . . .

And standing in front of the old magenta Magnavox, hesitating, then turning the flat knob to “on.” Crackle of static electricity from somewhere inside, the faint smell of burning dust. Larry, skeptical, just waiting, then there was a soft whisper from the speakers, the screen lighting up on familiar, grainy gray static.

Larry said, “Nothing on Channel 5,1 guess. . . .”

I turned the dial, marveling at that familiar old thud as the multilayer switch inside changed position. Nothing. More nothing. All the way to 13, then the white dot where we could install a UHF converter if we wanted, and beyond. Channel 4. WTOP-TV transmitting from the nation’s capitol. A talking-head newsman with very sleek, smooth black hair, placard on the desk that said “Neil Boggs.”

I glanced at Larry. Nothing. Motionless. Mesmerized, watching the man’s lips move, listening to his voice. Finally, he whispered, “Maybe we can fix my parents’ old color set.”

I said, “I wonder what’s on tonight? I heard Steve Allen has a new show. . . .”

The night of the Democratic Convention, we talked Emily Jensen and Karen Mediash into coming over to watch on our set. Not many TV’s had survived the intervening years, not many sets as tough as the old metal box my parents had bought in 1954, newer sets, more sophisticated technology much more fragile. I read something in the Post one day about how all those old-style tubes were immune to something called EMP. And new TVs cost a year’s salary in the new economy.

Getting the old VW back on the road made us mobile, injected us into the rather changed society of our surviving peers, the lost generation of teenagers for whom the world had come to an end just shy of Thanksgiving in 1962. Larry noticed Emily coming into the A&P, remembered her from the old days, still a pretty, chubby blond, still recognizable as the same sunny-faced girl we knew in school. Surprised us both when he struck up a conversation with her after their third or fourth encounter.

Turned out she was living with her dad, though her mother and brother had died in a flu epidemic that swept the Midwest in 1966. And they had with them Karen, her little brother Buddy, and Karen’s mom. Emily seemed reluctant to talk about that, but I remembered Karen Mediash as a thin, rather swarthy girl who’d been Emily’s shadow, the two of them playing girls’ sports together, constant companions. . . .

It seemed reasonable, when Larry started going out with Emily, that the two of us would sort of tag along, going to the movies together now that Marumsco Theatre was open again, featuring a dollar show every Saturday night, the two of them walking on ahead, holding hands, the two of us walking behind, not talking much.

It was like that when we sat down after dinner, the two girls praising the culinary skills we’d accumulated during five years on our own, neither of them imagining the splendid dishes I’d once learned to make out of leftover roast puppy. Larry and Emily somehow jamming themselves into my father’s favorite old red chair, arms around each other, Karen and I sitting on the same segment of my mother’s blue-nylon sectional sofa, sitting next to each other, only a few inches apart, but careful not to bump into each other.

On the TV, DNC chairman Abbie Hoffman was giving a pretty little speech, square, strong young face very handsome under a mass of short, dense curly black hair, telling us about the Nixon/Gold water plan to resurrect the Republican Party, run against Kennedy and Galbraith in the fall. This would, he said, wreak havoc with the Democrats’ plan to unseat President MacNamara, now officially running as an Independent, once it became clear he could not avoid the contest. They should, Hoffman told us, be supporting the Democratic ticket. Politics as usual can come back once we’ve got the Constitution restored.

Then Barry Goldwater himself came on, representing Richard Nixon, who was on a good-will tour of Canada right now, and explained how the mess the world was in was the Democrats’ fault, that they didn’t deserve a second chance. Let Kennedy/Galbraith stand down and support Nixon/Goldwater for the presidency. . . .

We watched, Karen and I, and tried to ignore Larry and Emily, squirming away in their chair. During an entertainment interlude, some skinny Brit named John Lennon sat at a piano, singing solo in a high, rough voice, a haunting melody called “Imagine.” Imagine, he asked us, what the world would be like today, if none of this had ever happened . . .

Some time before Bobby Kennedy came on to give his acceptance speech, Larry and Emily got up out of the chair, embraced and kissed, and I watched as Larry took her by the hand and led her down the long hallway to my parents’ old bedroom. They shut the door and I glanced at Karen. She was staring fixedly at the TV.

Later, while we listened to the speech, she let me hold her hand, and we pretended we didn’t hear the noises coming through the bedroom door. My parents, I remember, had been much quieter.

July 20, 1969.

One week, a carnival came rolling up Route 1 and set itself up on the broad, sloping parking lot of Marumsco Plaza, booths and tents erected like magic, burly men cursing as they jacked the little Ferris wheel level, horses for stunts and pony rides for kids and even a skinny, shaky-looking elephant that just stood there, chained to the bumper of a heavy truck. I liked the elephant, which had big, watery, intelligent-looking brown eyes.

The first night it was open, the four of us went over together, riding the rides, getting nauseous on chili dogs and cotton candy, Larry getting a mess of taffy-apple gunk stuck in his scruffy little beard. Emily laughing as she tried to pull it out, getting clumps of curly hair more than anything else.

The two of them, happy together, wrapped up in each other and some relaxing dream of a peaceful future. I could see the envy in Karen’s eyes.

After a while, Karen and I got tired of the rides and shows, went walking away from the lights and the parking lot, walking hand in hand up the big, bald hill behind the shopping center, where you could look out over the whole wide sprawl of Marumsco Village. Still not so many lights out there. Plenty of people now, but only one house in ten was inhabited, the rest slowly rotting away, caving in, yards grown up around them with weeds and saplings and dry brown grass.

We sat on the hilltop, arms around each other, and kissed for a while, hands wandering a bit, stopped and looked up at a vast, cloudless black sky spangled with hard, bright stars, sat watching, while a fat, brilliant white Moon slid down the western sky.

I lay with my head in Karen’s lap and remembered. Remembered the past. All of it lost. There’d been a big segment on this evening’s news about the ERTS-1 satellite that’d just been put up in Low Earth Orbit, the first non-military satellite to go up since before the war. Sharp, crisp color pictures, taken from outer space. The pictures of Europe and Asia were a revelation. You’d think the forests would be growing back already, but they’re not. Siberia’s a wilderness of eroding brown mud, everywhere it’s not black from burning.

Strange, oblique views of ruined cities, cities blown flat, cities burned away to nothing. There are eighteen large, water-filled craters where Moscow used to be. Eighteen. Did we really need that many? There aren’t even ruins there now. Just big holes in the ground, surrounded by bare, rain-gullied dirt.

They say the fighting in Europe went on for almost a month, refugees from the east flooding westward all the way to the sea, killing the survivors, then dying themselves. Fighting and fighting, until all the bullets were gone.

By comparison, my lost years were a vacation in Paradise.

Karen leaned down and kissed me again, gently, on the brow, and in a remote, wistful voice, said, “Larry and Emily seem so happy now. . . .”

It’d been a nice wedding, held under the big weeping willow tree my father’d planted in the spring of 1958. Larry handsome in a tuxedo we found in someone’s decaying house, Emily radiant in her mother’s wedding dress. And a nice enough reception to follow. Me, Karen and her relatives, Emily’s father, Jeannie and Neal and his mother and brother. A few leftover old friends who’d turned up again at last. . . .

I gave them 103 Staggs Court for a wedding present and moved my stuff over to 8 Greenacre Drive, which we’d begun fixing up. Only temporary though. . . .

Karen said, “We could be happy, too. If you wouldn’t . . .”

Happy. Maybe so. We’d slept together a few times, when I’d been insistent, jealous of Larry, during one or another of Karen’s more unguarded moments, maybe when she was jealous as well. It seemed all right, but . . . not, somehow, life’s foundation. Not anymore.

And, If you wouldn’t . . .

Image of Sargent Shriver, President Kennedy’s brother-in-law, on TV, telling us about the new Peace Corps, revival of that other president’s dream, of how American young people would go overseas now, to Europe and Japan, South America and India and Africa. Of how, together, we would rebuild the world.

Maybe it would be better than playing policeman with the army. Or building new bridges with the Job Corps. Maybe not. But it would certainly be better than working in the A&P in Marumsco Village, playing house with Karen for the rest of my life. Or maybe not. No way for me to know.

No reason for me to know.

Karen said, “We could be happy. It’d be like having our old lives back, sort of. . . .” Very far away now, maybe remembering those old days, plastic hallways and plastic friends and teachers and toys and cartoons on TV.

I said. “Maybe I don’t want my old life back. I saw my father killed. I watched my mother being raped, and ran away to save myself. I strangled puppy dogs and ate them for supper. I shot four men to death one day. I saw the whole world die.” Momentary silence, Karen sitting very still, one hand on my brow, eyes glistening in the moonlight. Finally, I said. “I don’t like working in the A&P for fifty cents an hour. And I don’t want to live with ghosts anymore.”

Nothing else to say.

So I lay there in the darkness with my head in Karen’s lap, looking up at a black and starry sky, carnival lights and noises playing out their little comic drama on the hard pavement below, looking up at the shadowy, crater-marked plains of the Moon, and wondered where we might be, right now, had none of it ever happened.

THE LAND OF NOD

Mike Resnick

“The Land of Nod” is the tenth, and last, story in Mike Resnick’s highly acclaimed Kirinyaga series. Thus far, the tales have garnered forty-four greater and lesser awards and nominations. The author, himself, is the winner of three Hugo Awards and a 1995 Nebula. His forthcoming novels include The Widowmaker and A Hunger in the Soul.

Once, many years ago, there was a Kikuyu warrior who left his village and wandered off in search of adventure. Armed only with a spear, he slew the mighty lion and the cunning leopard. Then one day he came upon an elephant. He realized that his spear was useless against such a beast, but before he could back away or find cover, the elephant charged.

His only hope was divine intervention, and he begged Ngai, who rules the universe from His throne atop Kirinyaga, the holy mountain that men now call Mount Kenya, to find him and pluck him from the path of the elephant.

But Ngai did not respond, and the elephant picked the warrior up with its trunk and hurled him high into the air, and he landed in a distant thorn tree. His skin was badly torn by the thorns, but at least he was safe, since he was on a branch some twenty feet above the ground.

After he was sure the elephant had left the area, the warrior climbed down. Then he returned home and ascended the holy mountain to confront Ngai.

“What is it that you want of me?” asked Ngai, when the warrior had reached the summit.

“I want to know why you did not come,” said the warrior angrily. “All my life I have worshiped you and paid tribute to you. Did you not hear me ask for your help?”

“I heard you,” answered Ngai.

“Then why did you not come to my aid?” demanded the warrior. “Are you so lacking in godly powers that you could not find me?”

“After all these years you still do not understand,” said Ngai sternly. “It is you who must search for me.”

My son Edward picked me up at the police station on Biashara Street just after midnight. The sleek British vehicle hovered a few inches above the ground while I got in, and then his chauffeur began taking us back to his house in the Ngong Hills.

“This is becoming tedious,” he said, activating the shimmering privacy barrier so that we could not be overheard. He tried to present a judicial calm, but I knew he was furious.

“You would think they would tire of it,” I agreed.

“We must have a serious talk,” he said. “You have been back only two months, and this is the fourth time I have had to bail you out of jail.”

“I have broken no Kikuyu laws,” I said calmly as we raced through the dark, ominous slums of Nairobi on our way to the affluent suburbs.

“You have broken the laws of Kenya,” he said. “And like it or not, that is where you now live. I’m an official in the government, and I will not have you constantly embarrassing me!” He paused, struggling with his temper. “Look at you! I have offered to buy you a new wardrobe. Why must you wear that ugly old kikoi? It smells even worse than it looks.”

“Is there now a law against dressing dressing like a Kikuyu?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, as he commanded the miniature bar to appear from beneath the floor and poured himself a drink. “But there is a law against creating a disturbance in a restaurant.”

“I paid for my meal,” I noted, as we turned onto Langata Road and headed out for the suburbs. “In the Kenya shillings that you gave me.”

“That does not give you the right to hurl your food against the wall, simply because it is not cooked to your taste.” He glared at me, barely able to contain his anger. “You’re getting worse with each offense. If I had been anyone else, you’d have spent the night in jail. As it is, I had to agree to pay for the damage you caused.”

“It was eland,” I explained. “The Kikuyu do not eat game animals.”

“It was not eland,” he said, setting his glass down and lighting a smokeless cigarette. “The last eland died in a German zoo a year after you left for Kirinyaga. It was a modified soybean product, genetically enhanced to taste like eland.” He paused, then sighed deeply. “If you thought it was eland, why did you order it?”

“The server said it was steak. I assumed he meant the meat of a cow or an ox.”

“This has got to stop,” said Edward. “We are two grown men. Why can’t we reach an accommodation?” He stared at me for a long time. “I can deal with rational men who disagree with me. I do it at Government House every day. But I cannot deal with a fanatic.”

“I am a rational man,” I said.

“Are you?” he demanded. “Yesterday you showed my wife’s nephew how to apply the githani test for truthfulness, and he practically burned his brother’s tongue off.”

“His brother was lying,” I said calmly. “He who lies faces the red-hot blade with a dry mouth, whereas he who has nothing to fear has enough moisture on his tongue so that he cannot be burned.”

“Try telling a seven-year-old boy that he has nothing to fear when he’s being approached by a sadistic older brother who is brandishing a red-hot knife!” snapped my son.

A uniformed watchman waved us though to the private road where my son lived, and when we reached our driveway the chauffeur pulled our British vehicle up to the edge of the force field. It identified us and vanished long enough for us to pass through, and soon we came to the front door.

Edward got out of the vehicle and approached his residence as I followed him. He clenched his fists in a physical effort to restrain his anger. “I agreed to let you live with us, because you are an old man who was thrown off his world—”

“I left Kirinyaga of my own volition,” I interrupted calmly.

“It makes no difference why or how you left,” said my son. “What matters is that you are here now. You are a very old man. It has been many years since you have lived on Earth. All of your friends are dead. My mother is dead. I am your son, and I will accept my responsibilities, but you must meet me halfway.”

“I am trying to,” I said.

“I doubt it.”

“I am,” I repeated. “Your own son understands that, even if you do not.”

“My own son has had quite enough to cope with my divorce and remarriage. The last thing he needs is a grandfather filling his head with wild tales of some Kikuyu Utopia.”

“It is a failed Utopia,” I corrected him. “They would not listen to me, and so they are doomed to become another Kenya.”

“What is so wrong with that?” said Edward. “Kenya is my home, and I am proud of it.” He paused and stared at me. “And now it is your home again. You must speak of it with more respect.”

“I lived in Kenya for many years before I emigrated to Kirinyaga,” I said. “I can live here again. Nothing has changed.”

“That is not so,” said my son. “We have built a transport system beneath Nairobi, and there is now a spaceport at Watamu on the coast.

We have closed down the nuclear plants; our power is now entirely thermal, drawn from beneath the floor of the Rift Valley. In fact,” he added with the pride that always accompanied the descriptions of his new wife’s attainments, “Susan was instrumental in the changeover.”

“You misunderstood me, Edward,” I replied. “Kenya remains unchanged in that it continues to ape the Europeans rather than remain true to its own traditions.”

The security system identified us and opened his house to us. We walked through the foyer, past the broad winding staircase that led to the bedroom wing. The servants were waiting for us, and the butler took Edward’s coat from him. Then we passed the doorways to the lounge and drawing room, both of which were filled with Roman statues and French paintings and rows of beautifully bound British books. Finally we came to Edward’s study, where he turned and spoke in a low tone to the butler.

“We wish to be alone.”

The servants vanished as if they had been nothing but holograms.

“Where is Susan?” I asked, for my daughter-in-law was nowhere to be seen.

“We were at a party at the Cameroon ambassador’s new home when the call came through that you had been arrested again,” he answered. “You broke up a very enjoyable bridge game. My guess is that she’s in the tub or in bed, cursing your name.”

I was about to mention that cursing my name to the god of the Europeans would not prove effective, but I decided that my son would not like to hear that at this moment, so I was silent. As I looked at my surroundings, I reflected that not only had all of Edward’s belongings come from the Europeans, but that even his house had been taken from them, for it consisted of many rectangular rooms, and all Kikuyu knew—or should have known—that demons dwell in corners and the only proper shape for a home is round.

Edward walked briskly to his desk, activated his computer, and read his messages, and then turned to me.

“There is another message from the government,” he announced. “They want to see you next Tuesday at noon.”

“I have already told them I will not accept their money,” I said. “I have performed no service for them.”

He put on his lecture face. “We are no longer a poor country,” he said. “We pride ourselves that none of our infirm or elderly goes hungry.”

“I will not go hungry if the restaurants will stop trying to feed me unclean animals.”

“The government is just making sure that you do not become a financial burden to me,” said Edward, refusing to let me change the subject.

“You are my son,” I said. “I raised you and fed you and protected you when you were young. Now I am old and you will do the same for me. That is our tradition.”

“Well, it is our government’s tradition to provide a financial safety net to families who are supporting elderly members,” he said, and I could tell that the last trace of Kikuyu within him had vanished, that he was entirely a Kenyan.

“You are a wealthy man,” I pointed out. “You do not need their money.”

“I pay my taxes,” he said, lighting another smokeless cigarette to hide his defensiveness. “It would be foolish not to accept the benefits that accrue to us. You may live a very long time. We have every right to that money.”

“It is dishonorable to accept what you do not need,” I replied. “Tell them to leave us alone.”

He leaned back, half sitting on his desk. “They wouldn’t, even if I asked them to.”

“They must be Wakamba or Maasai,” I said, making no effort to hide my contempt.

“They are Kenyans,” he answered. “Just as you and I are.”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling the weight of my years. “Yes, I must work very hard at remembering that.”

“You will save me more trips to the police station if you can,” said my son.

I nodded and went off to my room. He had supplied me with a bed and mattress, but after so many years of living in my hut on Kirinyaga, I found the bed uncomfortable, so every night I removed the blanket and placed it on the floor, then lay down and slept on it.

But tonight sleep would not come, for I kept reliving the past two months in my mind. Everything I saw, everything I heard, made me remember why I had left Kenya in the first place, why I had fought so long and so hard to obtain Kirinyaga’s charter.

I rolled onto my side, propped my head on my hand, and looked out the window. Hundreds of stars were twinkling brightly in the clear, cloudless sky. I tried to imagine which of them was Kirinyaga. I had been the mundumugu—the witch doctor—who was charged with establishing our Kikuyu Utopia.

“I served you more selflessly than any other,” I whispered, staring at a flickering, verdant star, “and you betrayed me. Worse, you have betrayed Ngai. Neither He nor I shall ever seek you out again.”

I laid my head back down, turned away from the window, and closed my eyes, determined to look into the skies no more.

In the morning, my son stopped by my room.

“You have slept on the floor again,” he noted.

“Have they passed a law against that now?” I asked.

He sighed deeply. “Sleep any way you want.”

I stared at him. “You look very impressive. . . .,” I began.

“Thank you.”

“. . . in your European clothes,” I concluded.

“I have an important meeting with the Finance Minister today.”

He looked at his timepiece. “In fact, I must leave now or I will be late.” He paused uneasily. “Have you considered what we spoke about yesterday?”

“We spoke of many things,” I said.

“I am referring to the Kikuyu retirement village.”

“I have lived in a village,” I said. “And that is not one. It is a twenty-story tower of steel and glass, built to imprison the elderly.”

“We have been through all this before,” said my son. “It would be a place for you to make new friends.”

“I have a new friend,” I said. “I shall be visiting him this evening.”

“Good!” he said. “Maybe he’ll keep you out of trouble.”

I arrived at the huge titanium-and-glass laboratory complex just before midnight. The night had turned cool, and a breeze was blowing gently from the south. The moon had passed behind a cloud, and it was difficult to find the side gate in the darkness. Eventually I did find it, though, and Kamau was waiting for me. He deactivated a small section of the electronic barrier long enough for me to step through.

“Jambo, mzee,” he said. Hello, wise old man.

“Jambo, mzee,” I replied, for he was almost as old as I myself was. “I have come to see with my own eyes if you were telling the truth.”

He nodded and turned, and I followed him between the tall, angular buildings that hovered over us, casting eerie shadows along the narrow walkways and channeling all the noises of the city in our direction. Our path was lined with whistling thorn and yellow fever trees, cloned from the few remaining specimens, rather than the usual introduced European shrubbery. Here and there were ornamental displays of grasses from the vanished savannahs.

“It is strange to see so much true African vegetation here in Kenya,” I remarked. “Since I have returned from Kirinyaga, my eyes have hungered for it.”

“You have seen a whole world of it,” he replied with unconcealed envy.

“There is more to a world than greenery,” I said. “When all is said and done, there is little difference between Kirinyaga and Kenya. Both have turned their backs on Ngai.”

Kamau came to a halt, and gestured around him at the looming metal and glass and concrete buildings that totally covered the cool swamps from which Nairobi took its name. “I do not know how you can prefer this to Kirinyaga.”

“I did not say I preferred it,” I replied, suddenly aware that the ever-present noises of the city had been overshadowed by the droning hum of machines.

“Then you do miss Kirinyaga.”

“I miss what Kirinyaga might have been. As for these,” I said, indicating the immense structures, “they are just buildings.”

“They are European buildings,” he said bitterly. “They were built by men who are no longer Kikuyu or Luo or Embu, but merely Kenyans. They are filled with corners.” He paused, and I thought, approvingly, How much you sound like me! No wonder you sought me out when I returned to Kenya. “Nairobi is home to eleven million people,” he continued. “It stinks of sewage. The air is so polluted there are days when you can actually see it. The people wear European clothes and worship the Europeans’ god. How could you turn your back on Utopia for this?”

I held up my hands. “I have only ten fingers.”

He frowned. “I do not understand.”

“Do you remember the story of the little Dutch boy who put his finger in the dike?”

Kamau shook his head and spat contemptuously on the ground. “I do not listen to European stories.”

“Perhaps you are wise not to,” I acknowledged. “At any rate, the dike of tradition with which I had surrounded Kirinyaga began to spring leaks. They were few and easily plugged at first, but as the society kept evolving and growing they became many, and soon I did not have enough fingers to plug them all.” I shrugged. “So I left before I was washed away.”

“Have they another mundumugu to replace you?” he asked.

“I am told that they have a doctor to cure the sick, and a Christian minister to tell them how to worship the god of the Europeans, and a computer to tell them how to react to any situation that might arise,” I said. “They no longer need a mundumugu.”

“Then Ngai has forsaken them,” he stated.

“No,” I corrected him. “They have forsaken Ngai.”

“I apologize, mundumugu,” he said with deference. “You are right, of course.”

He began walking again, and soon a strong, pungent odor came to my nostrils, a scent I had never encountered before, but which stirred some memory deep within my soul.

“We are almost there,” said Kamau.

I heard a low rumbling sound, not like a predator growling, but rather like a vast machine purring with power.

“He is very nervous,” continued Kamau, speaking in a soft monotone. “Make no sudden movements. He has already tried to kill two of his daytime attendants.”

And then we were there, just as the moon emerged from its cloud cover and shone down on the awesome creature that stood facing us.

“He is magnificent!” I whispered.

“A perfect replication,” agreed Kamau. “Height, ten feet eight inches at the shoulder, weight seven tons—and each tusk is exactly one hundred and forty-eight pounds.”

The huge animal stared at me through the flickering force field that surrounded it and tested the cool night breeze, striving to pick up my scent.

“Remarkable!” I said.

“You understand the cloning process, do you not?” asked Kamau.

“I understand what cloning is,” I answered. “I know nothing of the exact process.”

“In this case, they took some cells from his tusks, which have been on display in the museum for more than two centuries, created the proper nutrient solution, and this is the result: Ahmed of Marsabit, the only elephant ever protected by presidential decree, lives again.”

“I read that he was always accompanied by two guards no matter where he roamed on Mount Marsabit,” I said. “Have they also ignored tradition? I see no one but you. Where is the other guard?”

“There are no guards. The entire complex is protected by a sophisticated electronic security system.”

“Are you not a guard?” I asked.

He kept the shame from his voice, but he could not banish it from his face: Even in the moonlight I could see it. “I am a paid companion.”

“Of the elephant?”

“Of Ahmed.”

“I am sorry,” I said.

“We cannot all be mundumugus,” he answered. “When you are my age in a culture that worships youth, you take what is offered to you.”

“True,” I said. I looked back at the elephant. “I wonder if he has any memories of his former life? Of the days when he was the greatest of all living creatures, and Mount Marsabit was his kingdom.”

“He knows nothing of Marsabit,” answered Kamau. “But he knows something is wrong. He knows he was not born to spend his life in a tiny yard, surrounded by a glowing force field.” He paused. “Sometimes, late at night, he faces the north and lifts his trunk and cries out his loneliness and misery. To the technicians it is just an annoyance. Usually they tell me to feed him, as if food will assuage his sorrow. It is not even real food, but something they have concocted in their laboratories.”

“He does not belong here,” I agreed.

“I know,” said Kamau. “But then, neither do you, mzee. You should be back on Kirinyaga, living as the Kikuyu were meant to live.”

I frowned. “No one on Kirinyaga is living as the Kikuyu were meant to live.” I sighed deeply. “I think perhaps the time for mundumugus is past.”

“This cannot be true,” he protested. “Who else can be the repository of our traditions, the interpreter of our laws?”

“Our traditions are as dead as his,” I said, gesturing toward Ahmed. Then I turned back to Kamau. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Certainly not, mundumugu.”

“I am glad you sought me out, and I have enjoyed our conversations since I returned to Kenya,” I told him. “But something puzzles me: Since you feel so strongly about the Kikuyu, why did I not know you during our struggle to find a homeland? Why did you remain behind when we emigrated to Kirinyaga?”

I could see him wrestling with himself to produce an answer. Finally the battle was over, and the old man seemed to shrink an inch or two.

“I was terrified,” he admitted.

“Of the spaceship?” I asked.

“No.”

“Then what frightened you?”

Another internal struggle, and then an answer: “You did, mzee.”

“Me?” I repeated, surprised.

“You were always so sure of yourself,” he said. “Always such a perfect Kikuyu. You made me afraid that I wasn’t good enough.”

“That was ridiculous,” I said firmly.

“Was it?” he countered. “My wife was a Catholic. My son and daughter bore Christian names. And I myself had grown used to European clothes and European conveniences.” He paused. “I was afraid if I went with you—and I wanted to; I have been cursing myself for my cowardice ever since—that soon I would complain about missing the technology and comfort I had left behind, and that you would banish me.” He would not meet my gaze, but stared at the ground. “I did not wish to become an outcast on the world that was the last hope of my people.”

You are wiser than I suspected, I thought. Aloud I uttered a compassionate lie: “You would not have been an outcast.”

“You are sure?”

“I am sure,” I said, laying a comforting hand on his bony shoulder. “In fact, I wish you had been there to support me when the end came.”

“What good would the support of an old man have been?”

“You are not just any old man,” I answered. “The word of a descendant of Johnstone Kamau would have carried much weight among the Council of Elders.”

“That was another reason I was afraid to come,” he replied, the words flowing a little more easily this time. “How could I live up to my name—for everyone knows that Johnstone Kamau became Jomo Kenyatta, the great Burning Spear of the Kikuyu. How could I possibly compare to such a man as that?”

“You compare more favorably than you think,” I said reassuringly. “I could have used the passion of your belief.”

“Surely you had support from the people,” he said.

I shook my head. “Even my own apprentice, who I was preparing to succeed me, abandoned me; in fact, I believe he is at the university just down the road even as we speak. In the end, the people rejected the discipline of our traditions and the teachings of Ngai for the miracles and comforts of the Europeans. I suppose I should not be surprised, considering how many times it has happened here in Africa.” I looked thoughtfully at the elephant. “I am as much an anachronism as Ahmed. Time has forgotten us both.”

“But Ngai has not.”

“Ngai too, my friend,” I said. “Our day has passed. There is no place left for us, not in Kenya, not on Kirinyaga, not anywhere.”

Perhaps it was something in the tone of my voice, or perhaps in some mystic way Ahmed understood what I was saying. Whatever the reason, the elephant stepped forward to the edge of the force field and stared directly at me.

“It is lucky we have the field for protection,” remarked Kamau.

“He would not hurt me,” I said confidently.

“He has hurt men whom he had less reason to attack.”

“But not me,” I said. “Lower the field to a height of five feet.”

“But . . .”

“Do as I say,” I ordered him.

“Yes, mundumugu,” he replied unhappily, going to a small control box and punching in a code.

Suddenly the mild visual distortion vanished at eye level. I reached out a reassuring hand, and a moment later Ahmed ran the tip of his trunk gently across my face and body, then sighed deeply and stood there, swaying gently as he transferred his weight from one foot to the other.

“I would not have believed it if I had not seen it!” said Kamau, almost reverently.

“Are we not all Ngai’s creations?” I said.

“Even Ahmed?” asked Kamau.

“Who do you think created him?”

He shrugged again, and did not answer.

I remained for a few more minutes, watching the magnificent creature, while Kamau returned the force field to its former position. Then the night air became uncomfortably cold, as so often happened at this altitude, and I turned to Kamau.

“I must leave now,” I said. “I thank you for inviting me here. I would not have believed this miracle had I not seen it with my own eyes.”

“The scientists think it is their miracle,” he said.

“You and I know better,” I replied.

He frowned. “But why do you think Ngai has allowed Ahmed to live again, at this time and in this place?”

I paused for a long moment, trying to formulate an answer, and found that I couldn’t.

“There was a time when I knew with absolute certainty why Ngai did what He did,” I said at last. “Now I am not so sure.”

“What kind of talk is that from a mundumugu?” demanded Kamau.

“It was not long ago that I would wake up to the song of birds,” I said as we left Ahmed’s enclosure and walked to the side gate through which I had entered. “And I would look across the river that wound by my village on Kirinyaga and see impala and zebra grazing on the savannah. Now I wake up to the sound and smell of modern Nairobi and then I look out and see a featureless gray wall that separates my son’s house from that of his neighbor.” I paused. “I think this must be my punishment for failing to bring Ngai’s word to my people.”

“Will I see you again?” he asked as we reached the gate and he deactivated a small section long enough for me to pass through.

“If it will not be an imposition,” I said.

“The great Koriba an imposition?” he said with a smile.

“My son finds me so,” I replied. “He gives me a room in his house, but he would prefer I lived elsewhere. And his wife is ashamed of my bare feet and my kikoi; she is constantly buying European shoes and clothing for me to wear.”

“My son works inside the laboratory,” said Kamau, pointing to his son’s third-floor office with some pride. “He has seventeen men working for him. Seventeen!”

I must not have looked impressed, for he continued, less enthusiastically, “It is he who got me this job, so that I wouldn’t have to live with him.”

“The job of paid companion,” I said.

A bittersweet expression crossed his face. “I love my son, Koriba, and I know that he loves me—but I think that he is also a little bit ashamed of me.”

“There is a thin line between shame and embarrassment,” I said. “My son glides between one and the other like the pendulum of a clock.”

Kamau seemed grateful to hear that his situation was not unique. “You are welcome to live with me, mundumugu,” he said, and I could tell that it was an earnest offer, not just a polite lie that he hoped I would reject. “We would have much to talk about.”

“That is very considerate of you,” I said. “But it will be enough if I may visit you from time to time, on those days when I find Kenyans unbearable and must speak to another Kikuyu.”

“As often as you wish,” he said. “Kwaheri, mzee,”

“Kwaheri,” I responded. Farewell.

I took the slidewalk down the noisy, crowded streets and boulevards that had once been the sprawling Athi Plains, an area that had swarmed with a different kind of life, and got off when I came to the airbus platform. An airbus glided up a few minutes later, almost empty at this late hour, and began going north, floating perhaps ten inches above the ground.

The trees that lined the migration route had been replaced by a dense angular forest of steel and glass and tightly bonded alloys. As I peered through a window into the night, it seemed for a few moments that I was also peering into the past. Here, where the titanium-and-glass courthouse stood, was the very spot where the Burning Spear had first been arrested for having the temerity to suggest that his country did not belong to the British. And there, by the new eight-story post-office building, was where the last lion had died. Over there, by the water-recycling plant, my people had vanquished the Wakamba in glorious and bloody battle some three hundred years ago.

“We have arrived, mzee,” said the driver, and the bus hovered a few inches above the ground while I made my way to the door. “Aren’t you chilly, dressed in just a blanket like that?”

I did not deign to answer him, but stepped out to the sidewalk, which did not move here in the suburbs as did the slidewalks of the city. I prefered it, for man was meant to walk, not be transported effortlessly by miles-long beltways.

I approached my son’s enclave and greeted the guards, who all knew me, for I often wandered through the area at night. They passed me through with no difficulty, and as I walked I tried to look across the centuries once more, to see the mud-and-grass huts, the bomas and shambas of my people, but the vision was blotted out by enormous mock-Tudor and mock-Victorian and mock-Colonial and mock-contemporary houses, interspersed with needlelike apartment buildings that reached up to stab the clouds.

I had no desire to speak to Edward or Susan, for they would question me endlessly about where I had been. My son would once again warn me about the thieves and muggers who prey on old men after dark in Nairobi, and my daughter-in-law would try to subtly suggest that I would be warmer in a coat and pants. So I went past their house and walked aimlessly through the enclave until all the lights in the house had gone out. When I was sure they were asleep, I went to a side door and waited for the security system to identify my retina and skeletal structure, as it had on so many similar nights. Then I quietly made my way to my room.

Usually I dreamed of Kirinyaga, but this night the image of Ahmed haunted my dreams. Ahmed, eternally confined by a force field; Ahmed, trying to imagine what lay beyond his tiny enclosure; Ahmed, who would live and die without ever seeing another of his own kind.

And gradually, my dream shifted to myself: to Koriba, attached by invisible chains to a Nairobi he could no longer recognize; Koriba, trying futilely to mold Kirinyaga into what it might have been; Koriba, who once led a brave exodus of the Kikuyu until one day he looked around and found that he was the only Kikuyu remaining.

In the morning I went to visit my daughter on Kirinyaga—not the terraformed world, but the real Kirinyaga, which is now called Mount Kenya. It was here that Ngai gave the digging-stick to Gikuyu, the first man, and told him to work the earth. It was here that Gikuyu’s nine daughters became the mothers of the nine tribes of the Kikuyu, here that the sacred fig tree blossomed. It was here, millennia later, that Jomo Kenyatta, the great Burning Spear of the Kikuyu, would invoke Ngai’s power and send the Mau Mau out to drive the white man back to Europe.

And it was here that a steel-and-glass city of five million inhabitants sprawled up the side of the holy mountain. Nairobi’s overstrained water and sewer system simply could not accommodate any more people, so the government offered enormous tax incentives to any business that would move to Kirinyaga, in the hope that the people would follow—and the people accommodated them.

Vehicles spewed pollution into the atmosphere, and the noise of the city at work was deafening. I walked to the spot where the fig tree had once stood; it was now covered by a lead foundry. The slopes where the bongo and the rhinoceros once lived were hidden beneath the housing projects. The winding mountain streams had all been diverted and redirected. The tree beneath which Deedan Kimathi had been killed by the British was only a memory, its place taken by a fast-food restaurant. The summit had been turned into a park, with tram service leading to a score of souvenir shops.

And now I realized why Kenya had become intolerable. Ngai no longer ruled the world from His throne atop the mountain, for there was no longer any room for Him there. Like the leopard and the golden sunbird, like I myself many years ago, He too had fled before this onslaught of black Europeans.

Possibly my discovery influenced my mood, for the visit with my daughter did not go well. But then, they never did: She was too much like her mother.

I entered my son’s study late that same afternoon.

“One of the servants said you wished to see me,” I said.

“Yes, I do,” said my son as he looked up from his computer. Behind him were paintings of two great leaders, Martin Luther King and Julius Nyerere, black men both, but neither one a Kikuyu. “Please sit down.”

I did as he asked.

“On a chair, my father,” he said.

“The floor is satisfactory.”

He sighed heavily. “I am too tired to argue with you. I have been brushing up on my French.” He grimaced. “It is a difficult language.”

“Why are you studying French?” I asked.

“As you know, the ambassador from Cameroon has bought a house in the enclave. I thought it would be advantageous to be able to speak to him in his own tongue.”

“That would be Bamileke or Ewondo, not French,” I noted.

“He does not speak either of those,” answered Edward. “His family is ruling class. They only spoke French in his family compound, and he was educated in Paris.”

“Since he is the ambassador to our country, why are you learning his language?” I asked. “Why does he not learn Swahili?”

“Swahili is a street language,” said my son. “English and French are the languages of diplomacy and business. His English is poor, so I will speak to him in French instead.” He smiled smugly. “That ought to impress him!”

“I see,” I said.

“You look disapproving,” he observed.

“I am not ashamed of being a Kikuyu,” I said. “Why are you ashamed of being a Kenyan?”

“I am not ashamed of anything!” he snapped. “I am proud of being able to speak to him in his own tongue.”

“More proud than he, a visitor to Kenya, is to speak to you in your tongue,” I noted.

“You do not understand!” he said.

“Evidently,” I agreed.

He stared at me silently for a moment, then sighed deeply. “You drive me crazy,” he said. “I don’t even know how we came to be discussing this. I wanted to see you for a different reason.” He lit a smokeless cigarette, took one puff, and threw it into the atomizer. “I had a visit from Father Ngoma this morning.”

“I do not know him.”

“You know his parishioners, though,” said my son. “A number of them have come to you for advice.”

“That is possible,” I admitted.

“Damn it!” said Edward. “I have to live in this neighborhood, and he is the parish priest. He resents you telling his flock how to live, especially since what you tell them is in contradiction to Catholic dogma.”

“Am I to lie to them, then?” I asked.

“Can’t you just refer them to Father Ngoma?”

“I am a mundumugu,” I said. “It is my duty to advise those who come to me for guidance.”

“You have not been a mundumugu since they made you leave Kirinyaga!” he said irritably.

“I left of my own volition,” I replied calmly.

“We are getting off the subject again,” said Edward. “Look—if you want to stay in the mundumugu business, I’ll rent you an office, or”—he added contemptuously—“buy you a patch of dirt on which to squat and make pronouncements. But you cannot practice in my house.”

“Father Ngoma’s parishioners must not like what he has to say,” I observed, “or they would not seek advice elsewhere.”

“I do not want you speaking to them again. Is that clear?”

“Yes,” I said. “It is clear that you do not want me to speak to them again.”

“You know exactly what I mean!” he exploded. “No more verbal games! Maybe they worked on Kirinyaga, but they won’t work here! I know you too well!”

He went back to staring at his computer.

“It is most interesting,” I said.

“What is?” he asked suspiciously, glaring at me.

“Here you are, surrounded by English books, studying French, and arguing on behalf of the priest of an Italian religion. Not only are you not Kikuyu, I think perhaps you are no longer even Kenyan.”

He glared at me across his desk. “You drive me crazy,” he repeated.

After I left my son’s study I left the house and took an airbus to the park in Muthaiga, miles from my son and the neighbors who were interchangeable with him. Once lions had stalked this terrain. Leopards had clung to overhanging limbs, waiting for the opportunity to pounce upon their prey. Wildebeest and zebra and gazelles had rubbed shoulders, grazing on the tall grasses. Giraffes had nibbled the tops of acacia trees, while wartbogs rooted in the earth for tubers. Rhinos had nibbled on thornbushes, and charged furiously at any sound or sight they could not immediately identify.

Then the Kikuyu had come and cleared the land, bringing with them their cattle and their oxen and their goats. They had dwelt in huts of mud and grass, and lived the life that we aspired to on Krinyaga.

But all that was in the past. Today the park contained nothing but a few squirrels racing across the imported Kentucky blue grass and a pair of hornbills that had nested in one of the transplanted European trees. Old Kikuyu men, dressed in shoes and pants and jackets, sat on the benches that ran along the perimeter. One man was tossing crumbs to an exceptionally bold starling, but most of them simply sat and stared aimlessly.

I found an empty bench, but decided not to sit on it. I didn’t want to be like these men, who saw nothing but the squirrels and the birds, when I could see the lions and the impala, the war-painted Kikuyu and the redclad Maasai, who had once stalked across this same land.

I continued walking, suddenly restless, and despite the heat of the day and the frailty of my ancient body, I walked until twilight. I decided I could not endure dinner with my son and his wife, their talk of their boring jobs, their continual veiled suggestions about the retirement home, their inability to comprehend either why I went to Kirinyaga or why I returned—so instead of going home I began walking aimlessly through the crowded city.

Finally I looked up at the sky. Ngai, I said silently, I still do not understand. I was a good mundumugu. I obeyed Your law. I honored Your rituals. There must have come a day, a moment, a second, when together we could have saved Kirinyaga if You had just manifested Yourself. Why did You abandon it when it needed You so desperately?

I spoke to Ngai for minutes that turned into hours, but He did not answer.

When it was ten o’clock at night, I decided it was time to start making my way to the laboratory complex, for it would take me more than an hour to get there, and Kamau began working at eleven.

As before, he deactivated the electronic barrier to let me in, then escorted me to the small grassy area where Ahmed was kept.

“I did not expect to see you back so soon, mzee,” he said.

“I have no place else to go,” I answered, and he nodded, as if this made perfect sense to him.

Ahmed seemed nervous until the breeze brought my scent to him. Then he turned to face the north, extending his trunk every few moments.

“It is as if he seeks some sign from Mount Marsabit,” I remarked, for the great creature’s former home was hundreds of miles north of Nairobi, a solitary green mountain rising out of the blazing desert.

“He would not be pleased with what he found,” said Kamau.

“Why do you say that?” I asked, for no animal in our history was ever more identified with a location than the mighty Ahmed with Marsabit.

“Do you not read the papers, or watch the news on the holo?”

I shook my head. “What happens to black Europeans is of no concern to me.”

“The government has evacuated the town of Marsabit, which sits next to the mountain. They have closed the Singing Wells, and have ordered everyone to leave the area.”

“Leave Marsabit? Why?”

“They have been burying nuclear waste at the base of the mountain for many years,” he said. “It was just revealed that some of the containers broke open almost six years ago. The government hid the fact from the people, and then failed to properly clean up the leak.”

“How could such a thing happen?” I asked, though of course I knew the answer. After all, how does anything happen in Kenya?

“Politics. Payoffs. Corruption.”

“A third of Kenya is desert,” I said. “Why did they not bury it there, where no one lives or even thinks to travel, so when this kind of disaster occurs, as it always does, no one is harmed?”

He shrugged. “Politics. Payoffs. Corruption,” he repeated. “It is our way of life.”

“Ah, well, it is nothing to me anyway,” I said. “What happens to a mountain five hundred kilometers away does not interest me, any more than I am interested in what happens to a world named after a different mountain.”

“It interests me,” said Kamau. “Innocent people have been exposed to radiation.”

“If they live near Marsabit, they are Pokot and Rendille,” I pointed out. “What does that matter to the Kikuyu?”

“They are people, and my heart goes out to them,” said Kamau.

“You are a good man,” I said. “I knew that from the moment we first met.” I pulled some peanuts from the pouch that hung around my neck, the same pouch in which I used to keep charms and magical tokens. “I bought these for Ahmed this afternoon,” I said. “May I . . .?”

“Certainly,” answered Kamau. “He has few enough pleasures. Even a peanut will be appreciated. Just toss them at his feet.”

“No,” I said, walking forward. “Lower the barrier.”

He lowered the force field until Ahmed was able to reach his trunk out over the top. When I got close enough, the huge beast gently took the peanuts from my hand.

“I am amazed!” said Kamau when I had rejoined him. “Even I cannot approach Ahmed with impunity, yet you actually fed him by hand, as if he were a family pet.”

“We are each the last of our kind, living on borrowed time,” I said. “He senses a kinship.”

I remained a few more minutes, then went home to another night of troubled sleep. I felt Ngai was trying to tell me something, trying to impart some message through my dreams, but though I had spent years interpreting the omens in other people’s dreams, I was ignorant of my own.

Edward was standing on the beautifully rolled lawn, staring at the blackened embers of my fire.

“I have a beautiful fire pit on the terrace,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to hide his anger. “Why on earth did you build a fire in the middle of the garden?”

“That is where a fire belongs,” I answered.

“Not in this house, it doesn’t!”

“I shall try to remember.”

“Do you know what the landscaper will charge me to repair the damage you caused?” A look of concern suddenly crossed his face. “You haven’t sacrificed any animals, have you?”

“No.”

“You’re sure none of the neighbors is missing a dog or a cat?” he persisted.

“I know the law,” I said. And indeed, Kikuyu law required the sacrifice of goats and cattle, not dogs and cats. “I am trying to obey it.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“But you are not obeying it, Edward,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

I looked at Susan, who was staring at us from a second-story window.

“You have two wives,” I pointed out. “The younger one lives with you, but the older one lives many kilometers away, and sees you only when you take your children away from her on weekends. This is unnatural: A man’s wives should all live together with him, sharing the household duties.”

“Linda is no longer my wife,” he said. “You know that. We were divorced many years ago.”

“You can afford both,” I said. “You should have kept both.”

“In this society, a man may have only one wife,” said Edward. “What kind of talk is this? You have lived in England and America. You know that.”

“That is their law, not ours,” I said. “This is Kenya.”

“It is the same thing.”

“The Moslems have more than one wife,” I replied.

“I am not a Moslem,” he said.

“A Kikuyu man may have as many wives as he can afford,” I said. “It is obvious that you are also not a Kikuyu.”

“I’ve had it with this smug superiority of yours!” he exploded. “You deserted my mother because she was not a true Kikuyu,” he continued bitterly. “You turned your back on my sister because she was not a true Kikuyu. Since I was a child, every time you were displeased with me you have told me that I am not a true Kikuyu. Now you have even proclaimed that none of the thousands who followed you to Kirinyaga are true Kikuyus.” He glared furiously at me. “Your standards are higher than Kirinyaga itself! Can there possibly be a true Kikuyu anywhere in the universe?”

“Certainly,” I replied.

“Where can such a paragon be found?” he demanded.

“Right here,” I said, tapping myself on the chest. “You are looking at him.”

My days faded one into another, the dullness and drudgery of them broken only by occasional nocturnal visits to the laboratory complex. Then one night, as I met Kamau at the gate, I could see that his entire demeanor had changed.

“Something is wrong,” I said promptly. “Are you ill?”

“No, mzee, it is nothing like that.”

“Then what is the matter?” I persisted.

“It is Ahmed,” said Kamau, unable to stop tears from rolling down his withered cheeks. “They have decided to put him to death the day after tomorrow.”

“Why?” I asked, surprised. “Has he attacked another keeper?”

“No,” said Kamau bitterly. “The experiment was a success. They know they can clone an elephant, so why continue to pay for his upkeep when they can line their pockets with the remaining funds of the grant?”

“Is there no one you can appeal to?” I demanded.

“Look at me,” said Kamau. “I am an eighty-six-year-old man who was given his job as an act of charity. Who will listen to me?”

“We must do something,” I said.

He shook his head sadly. “They are kehees,” he said. “Uncircumcised boys. They do not even know what a mundumugu is. Do not humiliate yourself by pleading with them.”

“If I did not plead with the Kikuyu on Kirinyaga,” I replied, “you may be sure I will not plead with the Kenyans in Nairobi.” I tried to ignore the ceaseless hummings of the laboratory machines as I considered my options. Finally I looked up at the night sky: The moon glowed a hazy orange through the pollution. “I will need your help,” I said at last.

“You can depend on me.”

“Good. I shall return tomorrow night.”

I turned on my heel and left, without even stopping at Ahmed’s enclosure.

All that night I thought and planned. In the morning, I waited until my son and his wife had left the house, then called Kamau on the vidphone to tell him what I intended to do and how he could help. Next, I had the computer contact the bank and withdraw my money, for though I disdained shillings and refused to cash my government checks, my son had found it easier to shower me with money than respect.

I spent the rest of the morning shopping at vehicle-rental agencies until I found exactly what I wanted. I had the saleswoman show me how to manipulate it, practiced until nightfall, hovered opposite the laboratory until I saw Kamau enter the grounds, and then maneuvered up to the side gate.

“Jambo, mundumugu!” whispered Kamau as he deactivated enough of the electronic barrier to accommodate the vehicle, which he scrutinized carefully. I backed up to Ahmed’s enclosure, then opened the back and ordered the ramp to descend. The elephant watched with an uneasy curiosity as Kamau deactivated a ten-foot section of the force field and allowed the bottom of the ramp through.

“Njoo, Tembo,” I said. Come, elephant.

He took a tentative step toward me, then another and another. When he reached the edge of his enclosure he stopped, for always he had received an electrical “correction” when he tried to move beyond this point. It took almost twenty minutes of tempting him with peanuts before he finally crossed the barrier and then clambered awkwardly up the ramp, which slid in after him. I sealed him into the hovering vehicle, and he instantly trumpeted in panic.

“Keep him quiet until we get out of here,” said a nervous Kamau as I joined him at the controls, “or he’ll wake up the whole city.”

I opened a panel to the back of the vehicle and spoke soothingly, and strangely enough the trumpeting ceased and the scuffling did stop. As I continued to calm the frightened beast, Kamau piloted the vehicle out of the laboratory complex. We passed through the Ngong Hills twenty minutes later, and circled around Thika in another hour. When we passed Kirinyaga—the true, snow-capped Kirinyaga, from which Ngai once ruled the world—ninety minutes after that, I did not give it so much as a glance.

We must have been quite a sight to anyone we passed: two seemingly crazy old men, racing through the night in an unmarked cargo vehicle carrying a six-ton monster that had been extinct for more than two centuries.

“Have you considered what effect the radiation will have on him?” asked Kamau as we passed through Isiolo and continued north.

“I questioned my son about it,” I answered. “He is aware of the incident, and says that the contamination is confined to the lower levels of the mountain.” I paused. “He also tells me it will soon be cleaned up, but I do not think I believe him.”

“But Ahmed must pass through the radiation zone to ascend the mountain,” said Kamau.

I shrugged. “Then he will pass through it. Every day he lives is a day more than he would have lived in Nairobi. For as much time as Ngai sees fit to give him, he will be free to graze on the mountain’s greenery and drink deep of its cool waters.”

“I hope he lives many years,” he said. “If I am to be jailed for breaking the law, I would at least like to know that some lasting good came of it.”

“No one is going to jail you,” I assured him. “All that will happen is that you will be fired from a job that no longer exists.”

“That job supported me,” he said unhappily.

The Burning Spear would have no use for you, I decided. You bring no honor to his name. It is as I have always known: I am the last true Kikuyu.

I pulled my remaining money out of my pouch and held it out to him. “Here,” I said.

“But what about yourself, mzee?” he said, forcing himself not to grab for it.

“Take it,” I said. “I have no use for it.”

“Asante sana, mzee,” he said, taking it from my hand and stuffing it into a pocket. Thank you, mzee.

We fell silent then, each occupied with his own thoughts. As Nairobi receded farther and farther behind us, I compared my feelings with those I had experienced when I had left Kenya behind for Kirinyaga. I had been filled with optimism then, certain that we would create the Utopia I could envision so clearly in my mind.

The thing I had not realized is that a society can be a Utopia for only an instant—once it reaches a state of perfection it cannot change and still be a Utopia, and it is the nature of societies to grow and evolve. I do not know when Kirinyaga became a Utopia; the instant came and went without my noticing it.

Now I was seeking Utopia again, but this time of a more limited, more realizable nature: A Utopia for one man, a man who knew his own mind and would die before compromising. I had been misled in the past, so I was not as elated as the day we had left for Kirinyaga; being older and wiser, I felt a calm, quiet certitude rather than more vivid emotions.

An hour after sunrise, we came to a huge, green, fog-enshrouded mountain, set in the middle of a bleached desert. A single swirling dust devil was visible against the horizon.

We stopped, then unsealed the elephant’s compartment. We stood back as Ahmed stepped cautiously down the ramp, his every movement tense with apprehension. He took a few steps, as if to convince himself that he was truly on solid ground again, then raised his trunk to examine the scents of his new—and ancient—home.

Slowly the great beast turned toward Marsabit, and suddenly his whole demeanor changed. No longer cautious, no longer fearful, he spent almost a full minute eagerly examining the smells that wafted down to him. Then, without a backward glance, he strode confidently to the foothills and vanished into the foliage. A moment later we heard him trumpet, and then he was climbing the mountain to claim his kingdom.

I turned to Kamau. “You had better take the vehicle back before they come looking for it.”

“Are you not coming with me?” he asked, surprised.

“No,” I replied. “Like Ahmed, I will live out my days on Marsabit.”

“But that means you, too, must pass through the radiation.”

“What of it?” I said with an unconcerned shrug. “I am an old man. How much time can I have left—weeks? Months? Surely not a year. Probably the burden of my years will kill me long before the radiation does.”

“I hope you are right,” said Kamau. “I should hate to think of you spending your final days in agony.”

“I have seen men who live in agony,” I told him. “They are the old mzees who gather in the park each morning, leading lives devoid of purpose, waiting only for death to claim another of their number. I will not share their fate.”

A frown crossed his face like an early morning shadow, and I could see what he was thinking: He would have to take the vehicle back and face the consequences alone.

“I will remain here with you,” he said suddenly. “I cannot turn my back on Eden a second time.”

“It is not Eden,” I said. “It is only a mountain in the middle of a desert.”

“Nonetheless, I am staying. We will start a new Utopia. It will be Kirinyaga again, only done right this time.”

I have work to do, I thought. Important work. And you would desert me in the end, as they have all deserted me. Better that you leave now.

“You must not worry about the authorities,” I said in the same reassuring tones with which I spoke to the elephant. “Return the vehicle to my son and he will take care of everything.”

“Why should he?” asked Kamau suspiciously.

“Because I have always been an embarrassment to him, and if it were known that I stole Ahmed from a government laboratory, I would graduate from an embarrassment to a humiliation. Trust me: He will not allow this to happen.”

“If your son asks about you, what shall I tell him?”

“The truth,” I answered. “He will not come looking for me.”

“What will stop him?”

“The fear that he might find me and have to bring me back with him,” I said.

Kamau’s face reflected the battle that was going on inside him, his terror of returning alone pitted against his fear of the hardships of life on the mountain.

“It is true that my son would worry about me,” he said hesitantly, as if expecting me to contradict him, perhaps even hoping that I would. “And I would never see my grandchildren again.”

You are the last Kikuyu, indeed the last human being, that I shall ever see, I thought. I will utter one last lie, disguised as a question, and if you do not see through it, then you will leave with a clear conscience and I will have performed a final act of compassion.

“Go home, my friend,” I said. “For what is more important than a grandchild?”

“Come with me, Koriba,” he urged. “They will not punish you if you explain why you kidnapped him.”

“I am not going back,” I said firmly. “Not now, not ever. Ahmed and I are both anachronisms. It is best that we live out our lives here, away from a world we no longer recognize, a world that has no place for us.”

Kamau looked at the mountain. “You and he are joined at the soul,” he concluded.

“Perhaps,” I agreed. I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Kwaheri, Kamau.”

“Kwaheri, mzee,” he replied unhappily. “Please ask Ngai to forgive me for my weakness.”

It seemed to take him forever to activate the vehicle and turn it toward Nairobi, but finally he was out of sight, and I turned and began ascending the foothills.

I had wasted many years seeking Ngai on the wrong mountain. Men of lesser faith might believe Him dead or disinterested, but I knew that if Ahmed could be reborn after all others of his kind were long dead, then Ngai must surely be nearby, overseeing the miracle. I would spend the rest of the day regaining my strength, and then, in the morning, I would begin searching for Him again on Marsabit.

And this time, I knew I would find Him.

MOUNTAIN WAYS

Ursula K. Le Guin

The alien ways and heartaches of an intricate culture on the planet O are vividly realized in Ursula K. Le Guin's beautiful new story. The author's latest books include Unlocking the Air (HarperCollins, 1996), Four Ways to Forgiveness (HarperPrism, 1995), and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (HarperPrism, 1994).

Note for readers unfamiliar with the planet O:

Ki’O society is divided into two halves or moieties, called (for ancient religious reasons) the Morning and the Evening. You belong to your mother’s moiety, and you can’t have sex with anybody of your moiety.

Marriage on O is a foursome, the sedoretu—a man and a woman from the Morning moiety and a man and a woman from the Evening moiety. You’re expected to have sex with both your spouses of the other moiety, and not to have sex with your spouse of your own moiety. So each sedoretu has two expected heterosexual relationships, two expected homosexual relationships, and two forbidden heterosexual relationships.

The expected relationships within each sedoretu are:

The Morning woman and the Evening man (the “Morning marriage”)

The Evening woman and the Morning man (the “Evening marriage”)

The Morning woman and the Evening woman (the “Day marriage”)

The Morning man and the Evening man (the “Night marriage”)

The forbidden relationships are between the Morning woman and the Morning man, and between the Evening woman and the Evening man, and they aren’t called anything, except sacrilege.

It’s just as complicated as it sounds, but aren’t most marriages?

In the stony uplands of the Deka Mountains the farmholds are few and far between. Farmers scrape a living out of that cold earth, planting on sheltered slopes facing south, combing the yama for fleece, carding and spinning and weaving the prime wool, selling pelts to the carpet-factories. The mountain yama, called ariu, are a small wiry breed; they run wild, without shelter, and are not fenced in, since they never cross the invisible, immemorial boundaries of the herd territory. Each farmhold is in fact a herd territory. The animals are the true farmholders. Tolerant and aloof, they allow the farmers to comb out their thick fleeces, to assist them in difficult births, and to skin them when they die. The farmers are dependent on the ariu; the ariu are not dependent on the farmers. The question of ownership is moot. At Danro Farmhold they don’t say, “We have nine hundred ariu,” they say, “The herd has nine hundred.”

Danro is the farthest farm of Oro Village in the High Watershed of the Mane River on Oniasu on O. The people up there in the mountains are civilised but not very civilised. Like most ki’O they pride themselves on doing things the way they’ve always been done, but in fact they are a wilful, stubborn lot who change the rules to suit themselves and then say the people “down there” don’t know the rules, don’t honor the old ways, the true ki’O ways, the mountain ways.

Some years ago, the First Sedoretu of Danro was broken by a landslide up on the Farren that killed the Morning woman and her husband. The widowed Evening couple, who had both married in from other farmholds, fell into a habit of mourning and grew old early, letting the daughter of the Morning manage the farm and all its business.

Her name was Shahes. At thirty, she was a straight-backed, strong, short woman with rough red cheeks, a mountaineer’s long stride, and a mountaineer’s deep lungs. She could walk down the road to the village center in deep snow with a sixty-pound pack of pelts on her back, sell the pelts, pay her taxes and visit a bit at the village hearth, and stride back up the steep zigzags to be home before nightfall, forty kilometers round trip and six hundred meters of altitude each way. If she or anyone else at Danro wanted to see a new face they had to go down the mountain to other farms or to the village center. There was nothing to bring anybody up the hard road to Danro. Shahes seldom hired help, and the family wasn’t sociable. Their hospitality, like their road, had grown stony through lack of use.

But a travelling scholar from the lowlands who came up the Mane all the way to Oro was not daunted by another near-vertical stretch of ruts and rubble. Having visited the other farms, the scholar climbed on around the Farren from Ked’din and up to Danro, and there made the honorable and traditional offer: to share worship at the house shrine, to lead conversation about the Discussions, to instruct the children of the farmhold in spiritual matters, for as long as the farmers wished to lodge and keep her.

This scholar was an Evening woman, over forty, tall and long-limbed, with cropped dark-brown hair as fine and curly as a yama’s. She was quite fearless, expected nothing in the way of luxury or even comfort, and had no small talk at all. She was not one of the subtle and eloquent expounders of the great Centers. She was a farm woman who had gone to school. She read and talked about the Discussions in a plain way that suited her hearers, sang the Offerings and the praise songs to the oldest tunes, and gave brief, undemanding lessons to Danro’s one child, a ten-year-old Morning half-nephew. Otherwise she was as silent as her hosts, and as hard-working. They were up at dawn; she was up before dawn to sit in meditation. She studied her few books and wrote for an hour or two after that. The rest of the day she worked alongside the farm people at whatever job they gave her.

It was fleecing season, midsummer, and the people were all out every day, all over the vast mountain territory of the herd, following the scattered groups, combing the animals when they lay down to chew the cud.

The old ariu knew and liked the combing. They lay with their legs folded under them or stood still for it, leaning into the comb-strokes a little, sometimes making a small, shivering whisper-cough of enjoyment. The yearlings, whose fleece was the finest and brought the best price raw or woven, were ticklish and frisky; they sidled, bit, and bolted. Fleecing yearlings called for a profound and resolute patience. To this the young ariu would at last respond, growing quiet and even drowsing as the long, fine teeth of the comb bit in and stroked through, over and over again, in the rhythm of the comber’s soft monotonous tune, “Hunna, hunna, na, na. . .”

The travelling scholar, whose religious name was Enno, showed such a knack for handling newborn ariu that Shahes took her out to try her hand at fleecing yearlings. Enno proved to be as good with them as with the infants, and soon she and Shahes, the best fine-fleecer of Oro, were working daily side by side. After her meditation and reading, Enno would come out and find Shahes on the great slopes where the yearlings still ran with their dams and the newborns. Together the two women could fill a forty-pound sack a day with the airy, silky, milk-colored clouds of combings. Often they would pick out a pair of twins, of which there had been an unusual number this mild year. If Shahes led out one twin the other would follow it, as yama twins will do all their lives; and so the women could work side by side in a silent, absorbed companionship. They talked only to the animals. “Move your fool leg,” Shahes would say to the yearling she was combing, as it gazed at her with its great, dark, dreaming eyes. Enno would murmur “Hunna, hunna, hunna, na,” or hum a fragment of an Offering, to soothe her beast when it shook its disdainful, elegant head and showed its teeth at her for tickling its belly. Then for half an hour nothing but the crisp whisper of the combs, the flutter of the unceasing wind over stones, the soft bleat of a calf, the faint rhythmical sound of the nearby beasts biting the thin, dry grass. Always one old female stood watch, the alert head poised on the long neck, the large eyes watching up and down the vast, tilted planes of the mountain from the river miles below to the hanging glaciers miles above. Far peaks of stone and snow stood distinct against the dark-blue, sun-filled sky, blurred off into cloud and blowing mists, then shone out again across the gulfs of air.

Enno took up the big clot of milky fleece she had combed, and Shahes held open the long, loose-woven, double-ended sack.

Enno stuffed the fleece down into the sack. Shahes took her hands.

Leaning across the half-filled sack they held each other’s hands, and Shahes said, “I want—” and Enno said, “Yes, yes!”

Neither of them had had much love, neither had had much pleasure in sex. Enno, when she was a rough farm girl named Akal, had the misfortune to attract and be attracted by a man whose pleasure was in cruelty. When she finally understood that she did not have to endure what he did to her, she ran away, not knowing how else to escape him. She took refuge at the school in Asta, and there found the work and learning much to her liking, as she did the spiritual discipline, and later the wandering life. She had been an itinerant scholar with no family, no close attachments, for twenty years. Now Shahes’s passion opened to her a spirituality of the body, a revelation that transformed the world and made her feel she had never lived in it before.

As for Shahes, she’d given very little thought to love and not much more to sex, except as it entered into the question of marriage. Marriage was an urgent matter of business. She was thirty years old. Danro had no whole sedoretu, no childbearing women, and only one child. Her duty was plain. She had gone courting in a grim, reluctant fashion to a couple of neighboring farms where there were Evening men. She was too late for the man at Beha Farm, who ran off with a lowlander. The widower at Upper Ked’d was receptive, but he also was nearly sixty and smelled like piss. She tried to force herself to accept the advances of Uncle Mika’s half-cousin from Okba Farm down the river, but his desire to own a share of Danro was clearly the sole substance of his desire for Shahes, and he was even lazier and more shiftless than Uncle Mika.

Ever since they were girls, Shahes had met now and then with Temly, the Evening daughter of the nearest farmhold, Ked’din, round on the other side of the Farren. Temly and Shahes had a sexual friendship that was a true and reliable pleasure to them both. They both wished it could be permanent. Every now and then they talked, lying in Shahes’s bed at Danro or Temly’s bed at Ked’din, of getting married, making a sedoretu. There was no use going to the village matchmakers; they knew everybody the matchmakers knew. One by one they would name the men of Oro and the very few men they knew from outside the Oro Valley, and one by one they would dismiss them as either impossible or inaccessible. The only name that always stayed on the list was Otorra, a Morning man who worked at the carding sheds down in the village center. Shahes liked his reputation as a steady worker; Temly liked his looks and conversation. He evidently liked Temly’s looks and conversation too, and would certainly have come courting her if there were any chance of a marriage at Ked’din, but it was a poor farmhold, and there was the same problem there as at Danro: there wasn’t an eligible Evening man. To make a sedoretu, Shahes and Temly and Otorra would have to marry the shiftless, shameless fellow at Okba or the sour old widower at Ked’d. To Shahes the idea of sharing her farm and her bed with either of them was intolerable.

“If I could only meet a man who was a match for me!” she said with bitter energy.

“I wonder if you’d like him if you did,” said Temly.

“I don’t know that I would.”

“Maybe next autumn at Manebo. . .”

Shahes sighed. Every autumn she trekked down sixty kilometers to Manebo Fair with a train of pack-yama laden with pelts and wool, and looked for a man; but those she looked at twice never looked at her once. Even though Danro offered a steady living, nobody wanted to live way up there, on the roof, as they called it. And Shahes had no prettiness or nice ways to interest a man. Hard work, hard weather, and the habit of command had made her tough; solitude had made her shy. She was like a wild animal among the jovial, easy-talking dealers and buyers. Last autumn once more she had gone to the fair and once more strode back up into her mountains, sore and dour, and said to Temly, “I wouldn’t touch a one of ’em.”

Enno woke in the ringing silence of the mountain night. She saw the small square of the window ablaze with stars and felt Shahes’s warm body beside her shake with sobs.

“What is it? What is it, my dear love?”

“You’ll go away. You’re going to go away!”

“But not now—not soon—”

“You can’t stay here. You have a calling. A resp—” the word broken by a gasp and sob—“responsibility to your school, to your work, and I can’t keep you. I can’t give you the farm. I haven’t anything to give you, anything at all!”

Enno—or Akal, as she had asked Shahes to call her when they were alone, going back to the girl-name she had given up—Akal knew only too well what Shahes meant. It was the farmholder’s duty to provide continuity. As Shahes owed life to her ancestors she owed life to her descendants. Akal did not question this; she had grown up on a farmhold. Since then, at school, she had learned about the joys and duties of the soul, and with Shahes she had learned the joys and duties of love. Neither of them in any way invalidated the duty of a farmholder. Shahes need not bear children herself, but she must see to it that Danro had children. If Temly and Otorra made the Evening marriage, Temly would bear the children of Danro. But a sedoretu must have a Morning marriage; Shahes must find an Evening man. Shahes was not free to keep Akal at Danro, nor was Akal justified in staying there, for she was in the way, an irrelevance, ultimately an obstacle, a spoiler. As long as she stayed on as a lover, she was neglecting her religious obligations while compromising Shahes’s obligation to her farmhold. Shahes had said the truth: she had to go.

She got out of bed and went over to the window. Cold as it was she stood there naked in the starlight, gazing at the stars that flared and dazzled from the far grey slopes up to the zenith. She had to go and she could not go. Life was here, life was Shahes’s body, her breasts, her mouth, her breath. She had found life and she could not go down to death. She could not go and she had to go.

Shahes said across the dark room, “Marry me.”

Akal came back to the bed, her bare feet silent on the bare floor. She slipped under the bedfleece, shivering, feeling Shahes’s warmth against her, and turned to her to hold her; but Shahes took her hand in a strong grip and said again, “Marry me.”

“Oh if I could!”

“You can.”

After a moment Akal sighed and stretched out, her hands behind her head on the pillow. “There’s no Evening men here; you’ve said so yourself. So how can we marry? What can I do? Go fishing for a husband down in the lowlands, I suppose. With the farmhold as bait. What kind of man would that turn up? Nobody I’d let share you with me for a moment. I won’t do it.”

Shahes was following her own train of thought. “I can’t leave Temly in the lurch,” she said.

“And that’s the other obstacle,” Akal said. “It’s not fair to Temly. If we do find an Evening man, then she’ll get left out.”

“No, she won’t.”

“Two Day marriages and no Morning marriage? Two Evening women in one sedoretu? There’s a fine notion!”

“Listen,” Shahes said, still not listening. She sat up with the bedfleece round her shoulders and spoke low and quick. “You go away. Back down there. The winter goes by. Late in the spring, people come up the Mane looking for summer work. A man comes to Oro and says, is anybody asking for a good finefleecer? At the sheds they tell him, yes, Shahes from Danro was down here looking for a hand. So he comes on up here, he knocks at the door here. My name is Akal, he says, I hear you need a fleecer. Yes, I say, yes, we do. Come in. Oh come in, come in and stay forever!”

Her hand was like iron on Akal’s wrist, and her voice shook with exultation. Akal listened as to a fairytale.

“Who’s to know, Akal? Who’d ever know you? You’re taller than most men up here—you can grow your hair, and dress like a man—you said you liked men’s clothes once. Nobody will know. Who ever comes here anyway?”

“Oh, come on, Shahes! The people here, Magel and Madu—Shest—”

“The old people won’t see anything. Mika’s a halfwit. The child won’t know. Temly can bring old Barres from Ked’din to marry us. He never knew a tit from a toe anyhow. But he can say the marriage ceremony.”

“And Temly?” Akal said, laughing but disturbed; the idea was so wild and Shahes was so serious about it.

“Don’t worry about Temly. She’d do anything to get out of Ked’din. She wants to come here, she and I have wanted to marry for years. Now we can. All we need is a Morning man for her. She likes Otorra well enough. And he’d like a share of Danro.”

“No doubt, but he gets a share of me with it, you know! A woman in a Night marriage?”

“He doesn’t have to know.”

“You’re crazy, of course he’ll know!”

“Only after we’re married.”

Akal stared through the dark at Shahes, speechless. Finally she said, “What you’re proposing is that I go away now and come back after half a year dressed as a man. And marry you and Temly and a man I never met. And live here the rest of my life pretending to be a man. And nobody is going to guess who I am or see through it or object to it. Least of all my husband.”

“He doesn’t matter.”

“Yes he does,” said Akal. “It’s wicked and unfair. It would desecrate the marriage sacrament. And anyway it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t fool everybody! Certainly not for the rest of my life!”

“What other way have we to marry?”

“Find an Evening husband—somewhere—”

“But I want you! I want you for my husband and my wife. I don’t want any man, ever. I want you, only you till the end of life, and nobody between us, and nobody to part us. Akal, think, think about it, maybe it’s against religion, but who does it hurt? Why is it unfair? Temly likes men, and she’ll have Otorra. He’ll have her, and Danro. And Danro will have their children. And I will have you, I’ll have you forever and ever, my soul, my life and soul.”

“Oh don’t, oh don’t,” Akal said with a great sob.

Shahes held her.

“I never was much good at being a woman,” Akal said. “Till I met you. You can’t make me into a man now! I’d be even worse at that, no good at all!”

“You won’t be a man, you’ll be my Akal, my love, and nothing and nobody will ever come between us.”

They rocked back and forth together, laughing and crying, with the fleece around them and the stars blazing at them. “We’ll do it, we’ll do it!” Shahes said, and Akal said, “We’re crazy, we’re crazy!”

Gossips in Oro had begun to ask if that scholar woman was going to spend the winter up in the high farmholds, where was she now, Danro was it or Ked’din?—when she came walking down the zigzag road. She spent the night and sang the Offerings for the mayor’s family, and caught the daily freighter to the suntrain station down at Dermane. The first of the autumn blizzards followed her down from the peaks.

Shahes and Akal sent no message to each other all through the winter. In the early spring Akal telephoned the farm. “When are you coming?” Shahes asked, and the distant voice replied, “In time for the fleecing.”

For Shahes the winter passed in a long dream of Akal. Her voice sounded in the empty next room. Her tall body moved beside Shahes through the wind and snow. Shahes’s sleep was peaceful, rocked in a certainty of love known and love to come.

For Akal, or Enno as she became again in the lowlands, the winter passed in a long misery of guilt and indecision. Marriage was a sacrament, and surely what they planned was a mockery of that sacrament. Yet as surely it was a marriage of love. And as Shahes had said, it harmed no one—unless to deceive them was to harm them. It could not be right to fool the man, Otorra, into a marriage where his Night partner would turn out to be a woman. But surely no man knowing the scheme beforehand would agree to it; deception was the only means at hand. They must cheat him.

The religion of the ki’O lacks priests and pundits who tell the common folk what to do. The common folk have to make their own moral and spiritual choices, which is why they spend a good deal of time discussing the Discussions. As a scholar of the Discussions, Enno knew more questions than most people, but fewer answers.

She sat all the dark winter mornings wrestling with her soul. When she called Shahes, it was to tell her that she could not come. When she heard Shahes’s voice her misery and guilt ceased to exist, were gone, as a dream is gone on waking. She said, “I’ll be there in time for the fleecing.”

In the spring, while she worked with a crew rebuilding and repainting a wing of her old school at Asta, she let her hair grow. When it was long enough, she clubbed it back, as men often did. In the summer, having saved a little money working for the school, she bought men’s clothes. She put them on and looked at herself in the mirror in the shop. She saw Akal. Akal was a tall, thin man with a thin face, a bony nose, and a slow, brilliant smile. She liked him.

Akal got off the High Deka freighter at its last stop, Oro, went to the village center, and asked if anybody was looking for a fleecer.

“Danro.”—“The farmer was down from Danro, twice already.”—“Wants a finefleecer.”—“Coarsefleecer, wasn’t it?”—It took a while, but the elders and gossips agreed at last: a finefleecer was wanted at Danro.

“Where’s Danro?” asked the tall man.

“Up,” said an elder succinctly. “You ever handled ariu yearlings?”

“Yes,” said the tall man. “Up west or up east?”

They told him the road to Danro, and he went off up the zigzags, whistling a familiar praise song.

As Akal went on he stopped whistling, and stopped being a man, and wondered how she could pretend not to know anybody in the household, and how she could imagine they wouldn’t know her. How could she deceive Shest, the child whom she had taught the water rite and the praise-songs? A pang of fear and dismay and shame shook her when she saw Shest come running to the gate to let the stranger in.

Akal spoke little, keeping her voice down in her chest, not meeting the child’s eyes. She was sure he recognised her. But his stare was simply that of a child who saw strangers so seldom that for all he knew they all looked alike. He ran in to fetch the old people, Magel and Madu. They came out to offer Akal the customary hospitality, a religious duty, and Akal accepted, feeling mean and low at deceiving these people, who had always been kind to her in their rusty, stingy way, and at the same time feeling a wild impulse of laughter, of triumph. They did not see Enno in her, they did not know her. That meant that she was Akal, and Akal was free.

She was sitting in the kitchen drinking a thin and sour soup of summer greens when Shahes came in—grim, stocky, weather-beaten, wet. A summer thunderstorm had broken over the Farren soon after Akal reached the farm. “Who’s that?” said Shahes, doffing her wet coat.

“Come up from the village.” Old Magel lowered his voice to address Shahes confidentially: “He said they said you said you wanted a hand with the yearlings.”

“Where’ve you worked?” Shahes demanded, her back turned, as she ladled herself a bowl of soup.

Akal had no life history, at least not a recent one. She groped a long time. No one took any notice, prompt answers and quick talk being unusual and suspect practices in the mountains. At last she said the name of the farm she had run away from twenty years ago. “Bredde Hold, of Abba Village, on the Oriso.”

“And you’ve finefleeced? Handled yearlings? Ariu yearlings?”

Akal nodded, dumb. Was it possible that Shahes did not recognise her? Her voice was flat and unfriendly, and the one glance she had given Akal was dismissive. She had sat down with her soupbowl and was eating hungrily.

“You can come out with me this afternoon and I’ll see how you work,” Shahes said. “What’s your name, then?”

“Akal.”

Shahes grunted and went on eating. She glanced up across the table at Akal again, one flick of the eyes, like a stab of light.

Out on the high hills, in the mud of rain and snowmelt, in the stinging wind and the flashing sunlight, they held each other so tight neither could breathe, they laughed and wept and talked and kissed and coupled in a rock shelter, and came back so dirty and with such a sorry little sack of combings that old Magel told Madu that he couldn’t understand why Shahes was going to hire the tall fellow from down there at all, if that’s all the work was in him, and Madu said what’s more he eats for six.

But after a month or so, when Shahes and Akal weren’t hiding the fact that they slept together, and Shahes began to talk about making a sedoretu, the old couple grudgingly approved. They had no other kind of approval to give. Maybe Akal was ignorant, didn’t know a hassel-bit from a cold-chisel; but they were all like that down there. Remember that travelling scholar, Enno, stayed here last year, she was just the same, too tall for her own good and ignorant, but willing to learn, same as Akal. Akal was a prime hand with the beasts, or had the makings of it anyhow. Shahes could look farther and do worse. And it meant she and Temly could be the Day marriage of a sedoretu, as they would have been long since if there’d been any kind of men around worth taking into the farmhold, what’s wrong with this generation, plenty of good men around in my day.

Shahes had spoken to the village matchmakers down in Oro. They spoke to Otorra, now a foreman at the carding sheds; he accepted a formal invitation to Danro. Such invitations included meals and an overnight stay, necessarily, in such a remote place, but the invitation was to share worship with the farm family at the house shrine, and its significance was known to all.

So they all gathered at the house shrine, which at Danro was a low, cold, inner room walled with stone, with a floor of earth and stones that was the unlevelled ground of the mountainside. A tiny spring, rising at the higher end of the room, trickled in a channel of cut granite. It was the reason why the house stood where it did, and had stood there for six hundred years. They offered water and accepted water, one to another, one from another, the old Evening couple, Uncle Mika, his son Shest, Asbi who had worked as a pack-trainer and handyman at Danro for thirty years, Akal the new hand, Shahes the farmholder, and the guests: Otorra from Oro and Temly from Ked’din.

Temly smiled across the spring at Otorra, but he did not meet her eyes, or anyone else’s.

Temly was a short, stocky woman, the same type as Shahes, but fairer-skinned and a bit lighter all round, not as solid, not as hard. She had a surprising, clear singing voice that soared up in the praise-songs. Otorra was also rather short and broad-shouldered, with good features, a competent-looking man, but just now extremely ill at ease; he looked as if he had robbed the shrine or murdered the mayor, Akal thought, studying him with interest, as well she might. He looked furtive; he looked guilty.

Akal observed him with curiosity and dispassion. She would share water with Otorra, but not guilt. As soon as she had seen Shahes, touched Shahes, all her scruples and moral anxieties had dropped away, as if they could not breathe up here in the mountains. Akal had been born for Shahes and Shahes for Akal; that was all there was to it. Whatever made it possible for them to be together was right.

Once or twice she did ask herself, what if I’d been born into the Morning instead of the Evening moiety?—a perverse and terrible thought. But perversity and sacrilege were not asked of her. All she had to do was change sex. And that only in appearance, in public. With Shahes she was a woman, and more truly a woman and herself than she had ever been in her life. With everybody else she was Akal, whom they took to be a man. That was no trouble at all. She was Akal; she liked being Akal. It was not like acting a part. She never had been herself with other people, had always felt a falsity in her relationships with them; she had never known who she was at all, except sometimes for a moment in meditation, when her I am became It is, and she breathed the stars. But with Shahes she was herself utterly, in time and in the body, Akal, a soul consumed in love and blessed by intimacy.

So it was that she had agreed with Shahes that they should say nothing to Otorra, nothing even to Temly. “Let’s see what Temly makes of you,” Shahes said, and Akal agreed.

Last year Temly had entertained the scholar Enno overnight at her farmhold for instruction and worship, and had met her two or three times at Danro. When she came to share worship today she met Akal for the first time. Did she see Enno? She gave no sign of it. She greeted Akal with a kind of brusque goodwill, and they talked about breeding ariu. She quite evidently studied the newcomer, judging, sizing up; but that was natural enough in a woman meeting a stranger she might be going to marry. “You don’t know much about mountain farming, do you?” she said kindly after they had talked a while. “Different from down there. What did you raise? Those big flatland yama?” And Akal told her about the farm where she grew up, and the three crops a year they got, which made Temly nod in amazement.

As for Otorra, Shahes and Akal colluded to deceive him without ever saying a word more about it to each other. Akal’s mind shied away from the subject. They would get to know each other during the engagement period, she thought vaguely. She would have to tell him, eventually, that she did not want to have sex with him, of course, and the only way to do that without insulting and humiliating him was to say that she, that Akal, was averse to having sex with other men, and hoped he would forgive her. But Shahes had made it clear that she mustn’t tell him that till they were married. If he knew it beforehand he would refuse to enter the sedoretu. And even worse, he might talk about it, expose Akal as a woman, in revenge. Then they would never be able to marry. When Shahes had spoken about this, Akal had felt distressed and trapped, anxious, guilty again; but Shahes was serenely confident and untroubled, and somehow Akal’s guilty feelings would not stick. They dropped off. She simply hadn’t thought much about it. She watched Otorra now with sympathy and curiosity, wondering what made him look so hangdog. He was scared of something, she thought.

After the water was poured and the blessing said, Shahes read from the Fourth Discussion; she closed the old boxbook very carefully, put it on its shelf and put its cloth over it, and then, speaking to Magel and Madu as was proper, they being what was left of the First Sedoretu of Danro, she said, “My Othermother and my Otherfather, I propose that a new sedoretu be made in this house.”

Madu nudged Magel. He fidgeted and grimaced and muttered inaudibly. Finally Madu said in her weak, resigned voice, “Daughter of the Morning, tell us the marriages.”

“If all be well and willing, the marriage of the Morning will be Shahes and Akal, and the marriage of the Evening will be Temly and Otorra, and the marriage of the Day will be Shahes and Temly, and the marriage of the Night will be Akal and Otorra.”

There was a long pause. Magel hunched his shoulders. Madu said at last, rather fretfully, “Well, is that all right with everybody?”—which gave the gist, if not the glory, of the formal request for consent, usually couched in antique and ornate language.

“Yes,” said Shahes, clearly.

“Yes,” said Akal, manfully.

“Yes,” said Temly, cheerfully.

A pause.

Everybody looked at Otorra, of course. He had blushed purple and, as they watched, turned greyish.

“I am willing,” he said at last in a forced mumble, and cleared his throat. “Only—” He stuck there.

Nobody said anything.

The silence was horribly painful.

Akal finally said, “We don’t have to decide now. We can talk. And, and come back to the shrine later, if. . .”

“Yes,” Otorra said, glancing at Akal with a look in which so much emotion was compressed that she could not read it at all—terror, hate, gratitude, despair?—“I want to—I need to talk—to Akal.”

“I’d like to get to know my brother of the Evening too,” said Temly in her clear voice.

“Yes, that’s it, yes, that is—” Otorra stuck again, and blushed again. He was in such an agony of discomfort that Akal said, “Let’s go on outside for a bit, then,” and led Otorra out into the yard, while the others went to the kitchen.

Akal knew Otorra had seen through her pretense. She was dismayed, and dreaded what he might say; but he had not made a scene, he had not humiliated her before the others, and she was grateful to him for that.

“This is what it is,” Otorra said in a stiff, forced voice, coming to a stop at the gate. “It’s the Night marriage.” He came to a stop there, too.

Akal nodded. Reluctantly, she spoke, to help Otorra do what he had to do. “You don’t have to—” she began, but he was speaking again:

“The Night marriage. Us. You and me. See, I don’t—There’s some—See, with men, I—”

The whine of delusion and the buzz of incredulity kept Akal from hearing what the man was trying to tell her. He had to stammer on even more painfully before she began to listen. When his words came clear to her she could not trust them, but she had to. He had stopped trying to talk.

Very hesitantly, she said, “Well, I. . .I was going to tell you. . .The only man I ever had sex with, it was. . .It wasn’t good. He made me—He did things—I don’t know what was wrong. But I never have—I have never had any sex with men. Since that. I can’t. I can’t make myself want to.”

“Neither can I,” Otorra said.

They stood side by side leaning on the gate, contemplating the miracle, the simple truth.

“I just only ever want women,” Otorra said in a shaking voice.

“A lot of people are like that,” Akal said.

“They are?”

She was touched and grieved by his humility. Was it men’s boastfulness with other men, or the hardness of the mountain people, that had burdened him with this ignorance, this shame?

“Yes,” she said. “Everywhere I’ve been. There’s quite a lot of men who only want sex with women. And women who only want sex with men. And the other way round, too. Most people want both, but there’s always some who don’t. It’s like the two ends of,” she was about to say “a spectrum,” but it wasn’t the language of Akal the fleecer or Otorra the carder, and with the adroitness of the old teacher she substituted “a sack. If you pack it right, most of the fleece is in the middle. But there’s some at both ends where you tie off, too. That’s us. There’s not as many of us. But there’s nothing wrong with us.” As she said this last it did not sound like what a man would say to a man. But it was said; and Otorra did not seem to think it peculiar, though he did not look entirely convinced. He pondered. He had a pleasant face, blunt, unguarded, now that his unhappy secret was out. He was only about thirty, younger than she had expected.

“But in a marriage,” he said. “It’s different from just. . .A marriage is—Well, if I don’t—and you don’t—”

“Marriage isn’t just sex,” Akal said, but said it in Enno’s voice, Enno the scholar discussing questions of ethics, and Akal cringed.

“A lot of it is,” said Otorra, reasonably.

“All right,” Akal said in a consciously deeper, slower voice. “But if I don’t want it with you and you don’t want it with me why can’t we have a good marriage?” It came out so improbable and so banal at the same time that she nearly broke into a fit of laughter. Controlling herself, she thought, rather shocked, that Otorra was laughing at her, until she realised that he was crying.

“I never could tell anybody,” he said.

“We don’t ever have to,” she said. She put her arm around his shoulders without thinking about it at all. He wiped his eyes with his fists like a child, cleared his throat, and stood thinking. Obviously he was thinking about what she had just said.

“Think,” she said, also thinking about it, “how lucky we are!”

“Yes. Yes, we are.” He hesitated. “But. . .but is it religious. . .to marry each other knowing. . .Without really meaning to. . .” He stuck again.

After a long time, Akal said, in a voice as soft and nearly as deep as his, “I don’t know.”

She had withdrawn her comforting, patronising arm from his shoulders. She leaned her hands on the top bar of the gate. She looked at her hands, long and strong, hardened and dirt-engrained from farm work, though the oil of the fleeces kept them supple. A farmer’s hands. She had given up the religious life for love’s sake and never looked back. But now she was ashamed.

She wanted to tell this honest man the truth, to be worthy of his honesty.

But it would do no good, unless not to make the sedoretu was the only good.

“I don’t know,” she said again. “I think what matters is if we try to give each other love and honor. However we do that, that’s how we do it. That’s how we’re married. The marriage—the religion is in the love, in the honoring.”

“I wish there was somebody to ask,” Otorra said, unsatisfied. “Like that travelling scholar that was here last summer. Somebody who knows about religion.”

Akal was silent.

“I guess the thing is to do your best,” Otorra said after a while. It sounded sententious, but he added, plainly, “I would do that.”

“So would I,” Akal said.

A mountain farmhouse like Danro is a dark, damp, bare, grim place to live in, sparsely furnished, with no luxuries except the warmth of the big kitchen and the splendid bedfleeces. But it offers privacy, which may be the greatest luxury of all, though the ki’O consider it a necessity. “A three-room sedoretu” is a common expression in Okets, meaning an enterprise doomed to fail.

At Danro, everyone had their own room and bathroom. The two old members of the First Sedoretu, and Uncle Mika and his child, had rooms in the center and west wing; Asbi, when he wasn’t sleeping out on the mountain, had a cozy, dirty nest behind the kitchen. The new Second Sedoretu had the whole east side of the house. Temly chose a little attic room, up a half-flight of stairs from the others, with a fine view. Shahes kept her room, and Akal hers, adjoining; and Otorra chose the southeast corner, the sunniest room in the house.

The conduct of a new sedoretu is to some extent, and wisely, prescribed by custom and sanctioned by religion. The first night after the ceremony of marriage belongs to the Morning and Evening couples; the second night to the Day and Night couples. Thereafter the four spouses may join as and when they please, but always and only by invitation given and accepted, and the arrangements are to be known to all four. Four souls and bodies and all the years of their four lives to come are in the balance in each of those decisions and invitations; passion, negative and positive, must find its channels, and trust must be established, lest the whole structure fail to found itself solidly, or destroy itself in selfishness and jealousy and grief.

Akal knew all the customs and sanctions, and she insisted that they be followed to the letter. Her wedding night with Shahes was tender and a little tense. Her wedding night with Otorra was also tender; they sat in his room and talked softly, shy with each other but each very grateful; then Otorra slept in the deep windowseat, insisting that Akal have the bed.

Within a few weeks Akal knew that Shahes was more intent on having her way, on having Akal as her partner, than on maintaining any kind of sexual balance or even a pretense of it. As far as Shahes was concerned, Otorra and Temly could look after each other and that was that. Akal had of course known many sedoretu where one or two of the partnerships dominated the others completely, through passion or the power of an ego. To balance all four relationships perfectly was an ideal seldom realised. But this sedoretu, already built on a deception, a disguise, was more fragile than most. Shahes wanted what she wanted and consequences be damned. Akal had followed her far up the mountain, but would not follow her over a precipice.

It was a clear autumn night, the window full of stars, like that night last year when Shahes had said, “Marry me.”

“You have to give Temly tomorrow night,” Akal repeated.

“She’s got Otorra,” Shahes repeated.

“She wants you. Why do you think she married you?”

“She’s got what she wants. I hope she gets pregnant soon,” Shahes said, stretching luxuriously, and running her hand over Akal’s breasts and belly. Akal stopped her hand and held it.

“It isn’t fair, Shahes. It isn’t right.”

“A fine one you are to talk!”

“But Otorra doesn’t want me, you know that. And Temly does want you. And we owe it to her.”

“Owe her what?”

“Love and honor.”

“She’s got what she wanted,” Shahes said, and freed her hand from Akal’s grasp with a harsh twist. “Don’t preach at me.”

“I’m going back to my room,” Akal said, slipping lithely from the bed and stalking naked through the starry dark. “Good night.”

She was with Temly in the old dye room, unused for years until Temly, an expert dyer, came to the farm. Weavers down in the Centers would pay well for fleece dyed the true Deka red. Her skill had been Temly’s dowry. Akal was her assistant and apprentice now.

“Eighteen minutes. Timer set?”

“Set.”

Temly nodded, checked the vents on the great dye-boiler, checked the read-out again, and went outside to catch the morning sun. Akal joined her on the stone bench by the stone doorway. The smell of the vegetable dye, pungent and acid-sweet, clung to them, and their clothes and hands and arms were raddled pink and crimson.

Akal had become attached to Temly very soon, finding her reliably good-tempered and unexpectedly thoughtful—both qualities that had been in rather short supply at Danro. Without knowing it, Akal had formed her expectation of the mountain people on Shahes—powerful, wilful, undeviating, rough. Temly was strong and quite self-contained, but open to impressions as Shahes was not. Relationships within her moiety meant little to Shahes; she called Otorra brother because it was customary, but did not see a brother in him. Temly called Akal brother and meant it, and Akal, who had had no family for so long, welcomed the relationship, returning Temly’s warmth. They talked easily together, though Akal had constantly to guard herself from becoming too easy and letting her woman-self speak out. Mostly it was no trouble at all being Akal and she gave little thought to it, but sometimes with Temly it was very hard to keep up the pretense, to prevent herself from saying what a woman would say to her sister. In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.

They talked about the next step in the dyeing process, and then Temly said, looking off over the low stone wall of the yard to the huge purple slant of the Farren, “You know Enno, don’t you?”

The question seemed innocent and Akal almost answered automatically with some kind of deceit—“The scholar that was here. . .?”

But there was no reason why Akal the fleecer should know Enno the scholar. And Temly had not asked, do you remember Enno, or did you know Enno, but, “You know Enno, don’t you?” She knew the answer.

“Yes.”

Temly nodded, smiling a little. She said nothing more.

Akal was amazed by her subtlety, her restraint. There was no difficulty in honoring so honorable a woman.

“I lived alone for a long time,” Akal said. “Even on the farm where I grew up I was mostly alone. I never had a sister. I’m glad to have one at last.”

“So am I,” said Temly.

Their eyes met briefly, a flicker of recognition, a glance planting trust deep and silent as a tree-root.

“She knows who I am, Shahes.”

Shahes said nothing, trudging up the steep slope.

“Now I wonder if she knew from the start. From the first water-sharing. . .”

“Ask her if you like,” Shahes said, indifferent.

“I can’t. The deceiver has no right to ask for the truth.”

“Humbug!” Shahes said, turning on her, halting her in mid-stride. They were up on the Farren looking for an old beast that Asbi had reported missing from the herd. The keen autumn wind had blown Shahes’s cheeks red, and as she stood staring up at Akal she squinted her watering eyes so that they glinted like knifeblades. “Quit preaching! Is that who you are? ‘The deceiver’ ? I thought you were my wife!”

“I am, and Otorra’s too, and you’re Temly’s—you can’t leave them out, Shahes!”

“Are they complaining?”

“Do you want them to complain?” Akal shouted, losing her temper. “Is that the kind of marriage you want?—Look, there she is,” she added in a suddenly quiet voice, pointing up the great rocky mountainside. Farsighted, led by a bird’s circling, she had caught the movement of the yama’s head near an outcrop of boulders. The quarrel was postponed. They both set off at a cautious trot towards the boulders.

The old yama had broken a leg in a slip from the rocks. She lay neatly collected, though the broken foreleg would not double under her white breast but stuck out forward, and her whole body had a lurch to that side. Her disdainful head was erect on the long neck, and she gazed at the women, watching her death approach, with clear, unfathomable, uninterested eyes.

“Is she in pain?” Akal asked, daunted by that great serenity.

“Of course,” Shahes said, sitting down several paces away from the yama to sharpen her knife on its emery-stone. “Wouldn’t you be?”

She took a long time getting the knife as sharp as she could get it, patiently retesting and rewhetting the blade. At last she tested it again and then sat completely still. She stood up quietly, walked over to the yama, pressed its head up against her breast and cut its throat in one long fast slash. Blood leaped out in a brilliant arc. Shahes slowly lowered the head with its gazing eyes down to the ground.

Akal found that she was speaking the words of the ceremony for the dead, Now all that was owed is repaid and all that was owned, returned. Now all that was lost is found and all that was bound, free. Shahes stood silent, listening till the end.

Then came the work of skinning. They would leave the carcass to be cleaned by the scavengers of the mountain; it was a carrion-bird circling over the yama that had first caught Akal’s eye, and there were now three of them riding the wind. Skinning was fussy, dirty work, in the stink of meat and blood. Akal was inexpert, clumsy, cutting the hide more than once. In penance she insisted on carrying the pelt, rolled as best they could and strapped with their belts. She felt like a grave robber, carrying away the white-and-dun fleece, leaving the thin, broken corpse sprawled among the rocks in the indignity of its nakedness. Yet in her mind as she lugged the heavy fleece along was Shahes standing up and taking the yama’s beautiful head against her breast and slashing its throat, all one long movement, in which the woman and the animal were utterly one.

It is need that answers need, Akal thought, as it is question that answers question. The pelt reeked of death and dung. Her hands were caked with blood, and ached, gripping the stiff belt, as she followed Shahes down the steep rocky path homeward.

“I’m going down to the village,” Otorra said, getting up from the breakfast table.

“When are you going to card those four sacks?” Shahes said.

He ignored her, carrying his dishes to the washer-rack. “Any errands?” he asked of them all.

“Everybody done?” Madu asked, and took the cheese out to the pantry.

“No use going into town till you can take the carded fleece,” said Shahes.

Otorra turned to her, stared at her, and said, “I’ll card it when I choose and take it when I choose and I don’t take orders at my own work, will you understand that?”

Stop, stop now! Akal cried silently, for Shahes, stunned by the uprising of the meek, was listening to him. But he went on, firing grievance with grievance, blazing out in recriminations. “You can’t give all the orders, we’re your sedoretu, we’re your household, not a lot of hired hands, yes it’s your farm but it’s ours too, you married us, you can’t make all the decisions, and you can’t have it all your way either,” and at this point Shahes unhurriedly walked out of the room.

“Shahes!” Akal called after her, loud and imperative. Though Otorra’s outburst was undignified it was completely justified, and his anger was both real and dangerous. He was a man who had been used, and he knew it. As he had let himself be used and had colluded in that misuse, so now his anger threatened destruction. Shahes could not run away from it.

She did not come back. Madu had wisely disappeared. Akal told Shest to run out and see to the pack-beasts’ feed and water.

The three remaining in the kitchen sat or stood silent. Temly looked at Otorra. He looked at Akal.

“You’re right,” Akal said to him.

He gave a kind of satisfied snarl. He looked handsome in his anger, flushed and reckless. “Damn right I’m right. I’ve let this go on for too long. Just because she owned the farmhold—”

“And managed it since she was fourteen,” Akal cut in. “You think she can quit managing just like that? She’s always run things here. She had to. She never had anybody to share power with. Everybody has to learn how to be married.”

“That’s right,” Otorra flashed back, “and a marriage isn’t two pairs. It’s four pairs!”

That brought Akal up short. Instinctively she looked to Temly for help. Temly was sitting, quiet as usual, her elbows on the table, gathering up crumbs with one hand and pushing them into a little pyramid.

“Temly and me, you and Shahes, Evening and Morning, fine,” Otorra said. “What about Temly and her? What about you and me?”

Akal was now completely at a loss. “I thought. . .When we talked. . .”

“I said I didn’t like sex with men,” said Otorra.

She looked up and saw a gleam in his eye. Spite? Triumph? Laughter?

“Yes. You did,” Akal said after a long pause. “And I said the same thing.”

Another pause.

“It’s a religious duty,” Otorra said.

Enno suddenly said very loudly in Akal’s voice, “Don’t come onto me with your religious duty! I studied religious duty for twenty years and where did it get me? Here! With you! In this mess!”

At this, Temly made a strange noise and put her face in her hands. Akal thought she had burst into tears, and then saw she was laughing, the painful, helpless, jolting laugh of a person who hasn’t had much practice at it.

“There’s nothing to laugh about,” Otorra said fiercely, but then had no more to say; his anger had blown up leaving nothing but smoke. He groped for words for a while longer. He looked at Temly, who was indeed in tears now, tears of laughter. He made a despairing gesture. He sat down beside Temly and said, “I suppose it is funny if you look at it. It’s just that I feel like a chump.” He laughed, ruefully, and then, looking up at Akal, he laughed genuinely. “Who’s the biggest chump?” he asked her.

“Not you,” she said. “How long. . .”

“How long do you think?”

It was what Shahes, standing in the passageway, heard: their laughter. The three of them laughing. She listened to it with dismay, fear, shame, and terrible envy. She hated them for laughing. She wanted to be with them, she wanted to laugh with them, she wanted to silence them. Akal, Akal was laughing at her.

She went out to the workshed and stood in the dark behind the door and tried to cry and did not know how. She had not cried when her parents were killed; there had been too much to do. She thought the others were laughing at her for loving Akal, for wanting her, for needing her. She thought Akal was laughing at her for being such a fool, for loving her. She thought Akal would sleep with the man and they would laugh together at her. She drew her knife and tested its edge. She had made it very sharp yesterday on the Farren to kill the yama. She came back to the house, to the kitchen.

They were all still there. Shest had come back and was pestering Otorra to take him into town and Otorra was saying, “Maybe, maybe,” in his soft lazy voice.

Temly looked up, and Akal looked round at Shahes—the small head on the graceful neck, the clear eyes gazing.

Nobody spoke.

“I’ll walk down with you, then,” Shahes said to Otorra, and sheathed her knife. She looked at the women and the child. “We might as well all go,” she said sourly. “If you like.”

“. . . WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD”

Allen Steele

PROLOGUE

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

—ALEXANDER POPE, Autumn, 1365—8:05Z

The boy began climbing the mesa shortly after sunrise, stealing away from the village while his mother was making breakfast for his sisters. It wasn’t long before she noticed his absence; he heard her calling his name, her voice echoing off the sandstone bluffs of the canyon he called home, but by then he was almost a third of the way up the narrow trail leading to the top of the mesa.

Darting behind a pile of talus, he cautiously peered down at the adobe village. Pale brown smoke rose from fire pits within its circular walls, and tiny figures moved along the flat rooftops. There was no sign of pursuit, though, so after a few minutes he emerged from hiding and continued his long ascent.

He had hiked to the top of the mesa several times before, but always in the company of his father or one of his uncles, to set traps for tassel-ear squirrels and desert rabbits. The tribal elders had decreed that children were never to leave Tyuonyi alone, for it was only within the settlement’s fortified walls that they were safe from the Enemy. Yet the boy was never very obedient, and he had been plotting this journey for several weeks now. He knew of a stand of juniper trees that grew on top of the mesa. Although the morning was warm, the first frost had come to the canyon a few days ago, and juniper berries would now be sweet enough to eat. He had bided his time until his father and uncles went away on a hunting expedition, then he made his escape from the village.

The boy was little more than five years old, but he was almost as strong as a child twice his age; the soles of his bare feet were tough as leather, his small body accustomed to the rarefied air of the high desert. He scurried up the steep path winding along the mesa’s rugged cliffs, barely noticing the escarpments that plunged several hundred feet to the canyon floor. When he became thirsty, he paused to dig a small cactus out of the ground; he pulled its quills, peeled its skin, and chewed on its pulp as he continued his lonely trek.

It was shortly after he passed the landmark his father called Woman Rock—a sheer bluff scarred by an oval-shaped crevasse that bore a faint resemblance to a vagina—that he came to the place where deep blue sky met the ground. Suddenly, there was nowhere left to climb; the terrain lay flat, covered with mesquite and sage, with only blue-tinged mountain peaks in the far distance. He had reached the roof of the world.

The boy grinned broadly. He would find his juniper berries and stuff himself to his heart’s content, then he would swagger back down the trail to Tyuonyi, where he would regale his sisters and the other children with his tale of adventure. In his mind’s eye, he saw the tribal elders, impressed by his courage and fortitude, inviting him into their kiva, where he would undergo the sacred ceremonies which would affirm his status as a man. His mother and sisters would be proud of him, and when his father returned . . .

His father would probably tear off a willow branch and whip him to within an inch of his life.

Realizing this, the daydream vanished like so much cookfire smoke. Well, for better or worse, he was here. The least he could do was find a juniper tree.

He walked over to a nearby mesquite and lifted the flap of his loincloth. A thin yellow stream of urine irrigated its roots, and he sighed with satisfaction. The sun hadn’t yet climbed to its zenith, and he had plenty of time to find the object of his desire. Once he had eaten, perhaps he would locate a shady place to take a nap before . . .

A vague motion caught the corner of his eye.

The boy instinctively froze, not twitching a muscle as his dark eyes sought the source of the movement. For a moment he thought it might be a bird or a lizard, yet as he listened, he couldn’t detect any familiar animal sounds. Had it only been . . .?

There. Just to his left, about twenty paces away. A strange rippling pattern, like the forms hot air makes as it rises from sun-baked ground.

Turning very slowly, the boy studied the apparition. He half expected it to vanish any second, the way mirages always do when the breeze shifts a little, yet the pattern remained constant, spreading out before him like a wavering, transparent wall . . .

No. Not transparent . . . reflective, like the shallows of the creek that wound through the canyon. Indeed, he could see the reversed image of a nearby tree against its surface.

Remaining absolutely still, his heart thudding against his chest, he regarded the manifestation with dread and fascination. Then, ever so carefully, he knelt and, without taking his eyes from the strangeness, picked up a stone. Gathering his courage, he hesitated for another moment, then he leaped up and hurled the rock at the wall-of-air.

The boy had always possessed a keen eye. He had learned how to kill lizards when he was only three, and more recently had refined his talent to the point where he could knock a squirrel off a tree branch from twenty paces. The stone he threw now hurtled on a straight trajectory toward his selected point of reference, the center of the air-wall where the juniper tree was reflected . . .

The rock hit something that wasn’t there. It made an odd hollow sound, and in the briefest of instants, the boy glimpsed concentric whorls spreading outward from its point of impact. Then the rock bounced off the invisible surface and fell to the ground.

He was still staring at the place where stone had fallen when a ghostly hand touched his left shoulder.

“Go away, kid,” a voice said, in a language he couldn’t understand. “You’re bothering me.”

The boy leaped straight into the air. When his feet touched ground again, he was already running. His terrified scream echoed off the canyon walls as he sprinted back down the trail, the coveted juniper berries utterly forgotten.

A few moments passed, then the air shimmered around the place where the boy had stood. Thousands of tiny mirrors gradually assumed a man-shaped form until it solidified into a figure wearing a loose-fitting environment suit. He raised his gloved hands and pulled off his hood, then grinned at the invisible wall.

“Did you ever see someone run so fast?” he asked. “I bet he’s already halfway home.”

“That wasn’t a very nice thing to do,” a woman’s voice said within his headset. “You could have hurt him.”

“Oh, don’t worry so much. Just gave him a scare, that’s all.” Tucking the hood beneath his arm, Donal Bartel wiped sweat off his shaved head as he walked to the edge of the mesa and peered over the side. Although he could see the top of the trail, the boy was nowhere in sight. “All right, he’s gone. Let’s finish up here.”

He turned to watch as the spectral wall began to materialize, taking the form and substance of a saucer-shaped craft. Perched above the rocky ground on five petal-like flanges, its electrochromatic outer skin resumed its natural appearance until the vessel’s silver hull dully reflected the hot sun overhead. Hemispherical pods beneath its lower fuselage emitted an amber glow which pulsated within the craft’s shadow.

“You’ve got everything you need? “From within the single porthole on the Miranda’s low turret, the timeship’s pilot peered out at him. “We could stay a little longer, if you think we’re not going to be bothered anymore.”

Donal pondered Hans’s question as he unzipped the stealth suit and shrugged out of it. The suit was useful for hiding from contemporaries, but in the desert heat it threatened to suffocate him. “He’s not coming back, but once he tells his folks what he’s seen up here, someone might come up to investigate.”

“I agree.” The woman who had spoken earlier was climbing down a ladder set within one of the landing flanges. “The Anasazi are a very wary people. Someone down there might think the boy saw a scout from an enemy tribe.”

Donal nodded. For the last two days, he and Joelle had studied this isolated settlement of pre-Pueblo native Americans. Seven hundred years from now, this place would be identified on maps as Burnt Mesa, overlooking Frijoles Canyon within the Bandelier National Monument, not far from the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico. By then, the village of Tyuonyi would be a collection of ancient ruins carefully preserved by the United States government. The site would have a gift shop and a museum, and thousands of tourists would visit this place every year to saunter among the crumbling remains of what had once been a thriving settlement.

Yet their mission hadn’t been merely to record what Tyuonyi had looked like when it was inhabited. Twentieth-century archaeologists had already done that task, three hundred years before the Miranda had traveled back through chronospace. There was also the enduring controversy over the forces that had brought an end to the Anasazi civilization. Some CRC researchers, holding to theories first advanced during the late twentieth century, believed that some tribes had begun raiding others, committing atrocities that went beyond rape and slaughter to include ritualistic cannibalism. This was what had eventually forced many tribes to abandon their adobe homes and seek refuge in cliff dwellings; the Tyuonyi villagers had already built their own Long House within the talus walls of Burnt Mesa. Indeed, the very word Anasazi, given to the pre-Pueblo tribes by the nearby Navajos, meant “Ancient Enemy.”

“We might learn more if we stayed longer, but . . .” Joelle Deotado pushed back her long blond hair as she gazed at the distant village. “I don’t want to risk exposing ourselves, and we may have done that already.” She glanced over her shoulder at Donal. “You might have done the wrong thing, but it probably doesn’t matter. They would have found us sooner or later.”

“I’m sorry it worked out that way, but . . .” He shrugged. “You’re right. We’ve been compromised. Better pack up.”

“Very well,” Hans Brech said from within the timeship. “I’ll begin laying in a return trajectory, if that’s what you want.”

“That’s what we want.” Joelle walked toward the miniature cameras and listening devices they had concealed within foliage upon ledges overlooking the village. As expedition leader, it was her decision whether to call off a survey. “Let’s get ready to go.”

Donal sighed as he neatly folded the stealth suit. He had donned it when the motion sensors they had placed around the top of the trail detected the approach of the native boy. When Brech put the Miranda in chameleon mode, the timeship should have been adequately disguised, the energized fractal coating of its outer hull enabling it to blend in with its environment, yet the boy had the eyes of a cat and the curiosity to go with them. Joelle might not have liked the way he chased him away, but . . .

Something flashed. For an instant, he thought it was sunlight reflecting off the Miranda, until he realized that it was coming from the wrong direction, about 30 meters from the timeship. He turned his head, looked that way . . .

“Donal!” Joelle snapped. “Do you see . . .?”

“I see it,” he whispered.

Just above a large boulder near the top of the trail, not far from where the boy had emerged, a bright halo of white-yellow light had flickered into existence. About three meters in diameter, it surrounded an indistinct form lurking within its nucleus: a bisymmetrical figure, vaguely human-formed save for the pair of broad, winglike shapes that expanded outward from behind its body.

“Hans, are you getting this?” Donal spoke quietly, not daring to move a muscle. “Tell me it’s not a hallucination.”

“I’ve got it.” Brech’s voice was subdued. “Sort of. I mean, it’s not registering on . . . no, there it . . .”

Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the haloed figure vanished.

Not all at once, though. When it disappeared, Donal noticed that the nimbus seemed to collapse into itself, much as if it had created a miniature wormhole. As it did, sand and gravel were sucked into the vortex, and the surrounding scrub brush was violently yanked toward it. A half second later, there was a loud thunderclap as air rushed in to fill the vacuum. Donal’s hands went to his ears as Joelle yelled something unintelligible.

No one said anything for a moment.

“Was that an angel?” Joelle asked softly.

“If it was,” Brech said, “then it’s another good reason for us to leave.”

PART 1

Monday Times Three

Monday, January 12, 1998: 7:45 A.M.

The train from Virginia was crowded, as it always was during morning rush at the beginning of the week. Murphy could have driven into D.C., and in fact had left his home in Arlington intending to do just that, but when he heard on the radio that an accident on the Roosevelt Bridge had caused traffic to back up on the Beltway, he changed his mind at the last minute and decided instead to catch the inbound Metro from Huntington Station. Under normal circumstances he would have sat out the jam, but his meeting was scheduled for eight o’clock sharp, and this was one appointment for which he dared not be late.

So he sat nervously on the plastic seat, hands folded together on his briefcase, jostled every now and then by the man next to him reading the Washington Post . As the train rumbled through the long tunnel beneath the Potomac, he contemplated his reflection in the window. The face which gazed back at him was still young, yet rapidly approaching middle age; he saw creases where he had never noticed any before, a hairline subtly receding from his forehead and temples, dark circles beneath eyes that had once been curious and lively.

Was this just the Monday blahs, or was he was getting old, and more quickly than expected? It had been only seven years since he had left Cornell University, moving his wife and infant child from Ithaca to Washington so he could take a job with NASA. He’d had a beard then, as he recalled, and his eleven-year-old Volvo had still sported a peeling Grateful Dead sticker left over from some grad-student road trip he had taken with Donna. That seemed like a hundred years ago; the beard was long gone, he had traded in the trusty Volvo for a Ford Escort that promptly broke down once every three months, and even the Dead were no longer around. All that remained was another overworked and underpaid government bureaucrat, indistinguishable from the dozens of others riding the train to work.

He only hoped that, when the day was done, he’d still have a job to which he could commute.

Just as Murphy was checking his watch for the tenth time since boarding the Metro, the train began to decelerate. A few moments later, the next station swept into the view. Rushing past businessmen in overcoats, students in parkas, and shabby-looking street people, the train gradually coasted to a stop in front of the platform.

“L’Enfant Plaza. Transfer to all lines. Doors opening on the right.” Again, Murphy found himself wondering whether the train’s voice was recorded.

He pulled on his gloves, picked up his briefcase, stood up, and joined the line of passengers shuffling out of the car. Once on the platform, he quickened his pace; buttoning up his parka, he marched through the exit turnstiles, then jogged past the ticket machines to the long escalator leading up to E Street. Muted winter sunlight caught random flakes of snow drifting down through the entrance shaft; he pulled up his hood against the harsh wind and ignored the homeless people begging for spare change at the top of the escalator.

He was almost running by the time he covered the two city blocks that separated L’Enfant Plaza from his place of work. A long, eight-story glass box, NASA headquarters was as soulless as any of the other other federal offices surrounding the Mall, but at least it didn’t have the paranoid Post-Apocalypse-style of government buildings erected during the late sixties and early seventies, when government architects were obviously planning for civil insurrections by excluding ground-floor windows and limiting the number of entry doors. Digging into his coat pocket, Murphy pulled out his laminated I.D. badge and flashed it at the security guard behind the front desk, then sprinted for the nearest elevator just as its doors were beginning to close. He glanced at his watch; just a minute past eight. No time to visit his office; he reached past the other passengers to stab the button for the eighth floor.

The elevator opened onto a long corridor decorated with paintings of Saturn V rockets and Apollo astronauts being suited up. Murphy tugged off his coat as he strode down the hall, carefully noting the coded signs on each door he passed. In the seven years he had worked at NASA, he had been to this floor only a few times; this was the senior administrative level, and you didn’t come up here unless you had a good reason.

The boardroom was located at the end of the corridor, only a few doors down from the Chief Administrator’s office. The door was half-open; he could hear voices inside. Murphy hesitated for a moment, then took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

Three men were seated at the far end of the long oak table that took up most of the room; one chair had been left vacant between them. Their conversation came to a stop as Murphy walked in; everyone looked up at him, and for an instant he felt a rush of panic.

“Dr. Murphy, welcome. Please come in.” Roger Ordmann, the Associate Administrator of the Office of Space Science, pushed back his chair and stood up. “You’re running a little late. I hope you didn’t have any trouble getting here today.”

“My apologies. There was a . . .” No point in telling them about his decision to take the Metro. “Just a problem with traffic. Sorry if I kept you waiting.”

“Not at all.” Ordmann gestured to the vacant chair as he sat down again. “The Beltway can be brutal this time of day. At any rate . . . well, I believe you already know everyone here.”

Indeed he did. Harry Cummisky, Space Science’s Chief of Staff, was the man who had hired Murphy seven years ago. Although only a few years older than Murphy himself, he was the person to whom Murphy directly reported. Harry gave him a nod which was cordial yet nonetheless cool. If it weren’t for Murphy, after all, he wouldn’t be here today.

Next to him was Kent Morris, the Deputy Associate Administrator of NASA’s Public Affairs Office. Murphy knew Morris less well; they had met only three weeks ago, during NASA’s annual Christmas party. Morris seemed affable enough then, but there was a certain edge to him that Murphy instinctively disliked. As it turned out, his feelings were correct; Morris had just transferred over to NASA from the Pentagon, where the PAO was more inclined to scrutinize civilian employees for possible security breaches. It had been a little less than a week after the Christmas party when Morris had blown the whistle on Murphy.

As for Roger Ordmann . . . although Murphy had only met him once or twice before, he knew him all too well, if only by reputation. The former vice president of a major NASA contractor, Ordmann had been recruited to the agency by the Chief Administrator after Dan Goldin himself had come aboard during the Bush administration. Ordmann was a company man; he followed Goldin’s visionary lead without having much of a vision of his own, beyond making sure that Space Science continued to be sufficiently funded through the next fiscal year. Courtly, urbane, and soft-spoken, he could nonetheless be unmerciful when it came to dismissing any personnel in the Washington office who roused his ire.

“Yes, sir. I know everyone.” Murphy draped his coat over the back of his chair; there was a long, expectant silence as he sat down. Now it seemed as if everyone was staring at him, waiting for him to continue. “To start with . . .”

Feeling an itch in his throat, Murphy coughed into his hand. “Excuse me. To begin with, I apologize for any embarrassment I may have caused the agency. It wasn’t my intent to cast NASA in a bad light. When I wrote that article, I didn’t believe it would be attributed to . . .”

“David . . .” Roger Ordmann regarded him with a paternal smile. “This isn’t a formal board of inquiry, let alone an inquisition. We simply want to know . . . well, at least I’d like to know . . . how you drew your conclusions, and why you decided to publish them at this time.”

“And who gave you clearance to do so,” Morris added, much less warmly.

Murphy glanced across the table at the PAO deputy chief, and that was when he noticed a copy of the February issue of Analog resting before him. Not only that, but Ordmann and Cummisky also had copies. The very same science fiction magazine currently on sale in bookstores and newsstands across the country which, along with new stories by Michael F. Flynn, Paul Levinson, and Bud Sparhawk and book reviews by Tom Easton, also featured a nonfiction article by one David Z. Murphy: “How to Travel Through Time (And Not Get Caught).”

“So . . .” Steepling his fingers together, Ordmann leaned back in his chair. “Tell us why you think UFOs may be time machines.”

Mon, Oct 15, 2314—0946Z

Franc Lu awoke as the lunar shuttle fired its braking thrusters. Feeling the momentary pull of gravity, he pushed off the eyeshades he had donned a couple of hours ago and carefully blinked a few times. The ceiling lights had been turned down, though, so he didn’t have to squint; free fall returned after a moment, and he felt his body once more beginning to rise above his seat; he was thankful that he hadn’t neglected to check the straps before taking a nap.

Turning his head to the left, he peered out the oval porthole window next to his seat. Past the port engine nacelle, he caught a brief glimpse of Earth, an enormous, cloud-flecked shield that glided away as the shuttle completed its turnaround maneuver. Unable to make out any major continents through the clouds, he assumed that they must be somewhere over the Pacific. Probably just beyond the visible horizon lay Hong Kong, his ancestral home. Franc smiled at the thought. Someday, he would like to get another chance to visit . . .

“Well. Now there’s a pleasant smile.” Across the aisle, Lea put down her compad to regard him with mischievous eyes. “Pfennig for your thoughts?”

Franc started to reply, then realized, too late, that she was indulging one of her favorite games. “Caught you!” She playfully wagged a finger at him. “Now, tell me . . .”

“A pfennig is a coin.” Franc laid his head back against the seat. “Smallest form of hard currency used in Germany until 2003, when the deutsche mark was replaced by the Eurodollar.”

“Very good.” Yet she wasn’t about to let him get off so easily. “And what does that expression mean, ‘pfennig for your thoughts’?”

“That you’ve made a bad pun. And I was thinking about Hong Kong, if you must know. It might be an interesting place to visit.”

“I thought you’ve already been there. Three years ago, when . . .” Then her elegant eyebrows arched slightly. “Oh. You mean a CRC expedition.”

Franc nodded. “Dec 31, 1997. The day Great Britain formally ceded the island to the People’s Republic of China. An intriguing period, from what I’ve read.”

She shook her head as she folded shut her compad. “It might be, but it’s probably well documented. Nothing of major interest there. You could always file a proposal, of course, but . . .”

“The Board would probably turn it down. You’re right.” He shrugged, then turned toward the window again. “Just a passing thought.”

Earth had completely disappeared; now all he could see was the black expanse of cislunar space. From behind him, he could hear the small handful of fellow passengers beginning to move restlessly in their seats. They had been travelling for a little more than eighteen hours now, following the shuttle’s departure from the Mare Imbrium spaceport. A private spacecraft owned and operated by the Chronospace Research Centre, the shuttle didn’t have the luxury accommodations afforded by the large commercial moonships. Everyone aboard was a CRC employee; some were returning from furlough, while others like Lea and himself had their homes on the Moon. Yet because commercial craft weren’t permitted to dock at Chronos Station, you had to take the CRC shuttle or else try hitching a ride aboard a freighter.

Thinking about their destination, Franc reached to the comp in the seatback in front of him. He ran his forefinger across the index, and the panel changed to display a forward view. Now he could see what the pilots saw from the cockpit: a cruciform-shaped station, each arm comprised of five cylindrical modules, with two spherical spacedocks located at opposite ends of its elongated central core. Within the rectangular bay of the closer dock, Franc could make out tiny spacecraft, while others hovered in parking orbit nearby.

Out of curiosity, Franc touched his finger against the image of the spacedock farther away from the shuttle. As the shuttle completed an orbit around the station, for a brief instant he caught a glimpse of a small, saucer-shaped craft nestled within the hangar bays. Then, just as he expected, the scene was blotted out by a graphic inverted triangle.

*** CLASSIFIED ** CLASSIFIED ***

REMOTE IMAGING NOT

PERMITTED

CRC 103-B

*DOWN*

The screen wiped clean, to be replaced by the original index bar. “Verdammt,” Franc murmured in disgust. It was at times like this when the gentlemen in Security Division took their work a little too seriously. As if no one aboard a CRC shuttle had ever seen a timeship before . . .

Lea chuckled. “You’re getting better with your explicatives.”

“Cut it out.” He cast her a warning look. “I’ve been studying as hard as I can, and you know it.”

Closing her eyes, she laid her head back against the seat. “I just hope you’ve learned your history better than your German. You’re going to need it.”

Franc opened his mouth to object, then thought better of it. There was no sense in arguing with Lea when she was in one of her moods. So he tried to relax, but after a moment he touched the comp again, and passed the remaining minutes of the flight watching the shuttle complete its primary approach.

As the spacedock filled the screen, he reflected that Chronos Station was just over a kilometer in length. It wasn’t very large, at least in comparison to some of the colonies in Lagrange orbit, yet it was amazing to think that, almost three hundred years ago, airships nearly this same size had been built—and actually flown!—on Earth.

Franc smiled to himself. In just two days, they would see the Hindenburg. Then he’d offer Lea a penny for her thoughts.

Monday, January 14, 1998: 8:06 A.M.

Like so many physicists, David Zachary Murphy had fallen in love with science by reading science fiction.

His love affair began when he was ten years old and saw Star Trek on TV. That sent him straight to his elementary-school library, where in turn he discovered, tucked in among more conventional fare like The Wind in the Willows and Johnny Tremain, a half dozen lesser-known books: Rocket Ship Galileo, Attack from Atlantis, Islands in the Sky, and the Lucky Starr series by someone named Paul French. He read everything in a few weeks, then reread them a couple more times, before finally bicycling to a nearby branch library, where he found more sophisticated fare: I, Robot; Double Star; Needle in a Timestack; Way Station; and other classics of the genre.

By the time David Murphy reached the sixth grade, not only was he reading at college freshman level, but he was also taking a sharp interest in science, so much so that he regularly confounded his teachers by asking questions they couldn’t answer, such as the definition of a parsec. For Christmas, his bemused yet proud parents gave him a hobby telescope; when he caught a flu after spending one too many winter evenings in the backyard, his mother brought back from the neighborhood drugstore, along with Robitussin and orange juice, a magazine she happened to spot on the rack just below the new issue of Look: the January, 1969, issue of Analog. It seemed to be just the sort of thing her strange young son would like, and it might help keep him in bed.

David recovered from the flu two days later, but he faked sick for another school day so he could finish reading every story in the magazine. One of them was the first installment of a three-part serial by Gordon R. Dickson, Wolfling; for the next two weeks, he haunted the pharmacy newsstand until the February issue finally appeared. Not only did it have the second part of Wolfling, but it also contained, as the cover story, a novelette by Anne McCaffrey, “A Womanly Talent.” An insightful observer might have noted, in retrospect, that the lissome young lady depicted in Frank Kelly Freas’s cover painting for this story bore a strong resemblance to the woman David would eventually marry, yet that may have only been a coincidence.

For the next twenty-nine years of his life, David Murphy remained a devoted reader of Analog, seldom missing an issue, never disposing of any after he read them. On occasion he picked up some of the other science fiction magazines—Galaxy, If, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vertex—but it was only in Analog, in some indescribable way, that he found the sort of thing he liked to read. He went through high school with a copy tucked in among his textbooks—no small matter, for during the seventies it was far more socially acceptable to smoke pot than to be caught reading science fiction—and when he was in college and faced a choice between a meal or the latest issue, he would sooner go hungry before passing up on what he called “his Analog fix.” After he met Donna during his third semester of his postgrad tenure at Cornell, on the first night she spent with him she was astonished to find a dozen issues of Analog beneath the bed of his small apartment. She was even more amused the first time he took her home to visit his mother for Christmas, and she found boxes upon boxes of science fiction magazines stacked in the attic.

It was during this time, while he was working on his Ph.D. in astrophysics, that David attempted to write science fiction. It didn’t take very long—only a couple of dozen reject slips, garnered not only from Analog but also Asimov’s, Omni, and F&SF—for him to realize that, no matter how much he enjoyed reading SF, he had absolutely no talent for creating it. Not that he couldn’t write at all—in fact, one of his dissertation advisors, no less than the estimable Carl Sagan, often remarked on his innate writing skills—yet the art of fiction was beyond him; his dialogue was tone-deaf, his characters wooden, his plots contrived and reliant upon unlikely coincidences. This wasn’t very heartbreaking; writing was little more than a hobby, and certainly not a passion. Nonetheless, his secret ambition was to have his name appear in the same magazine he had followed since he was a kid. Even after he received his doctorate and was happily married to Donna, with a ten-month-old baby in his arms and a new job at NASA waiting for him, he considered his life to be incomplete until he was published in Analog.

Then, late one afternoon while sitting out a Beltway traffic jam with nothing but All Things Considered on the radio to keep him company, Murphy had a brainstorm. He may not have much talent as a fiction writer, but he wasn’t half-bad at nonfiction. After all, he had already published three articles in major astrophysics journals; it might be possible for him to turn those same skills to writing pop-science articles. Indeed, he knew several working scientists who moonlighted as regular contributors to Astronomy and Discover. Why couldn’t he do the same with Analog?

After dinner that evening, Murphy sat down in his study and, very methodically, made a list of ideas for articles he could see himself writing for Analog. It was remarkably easy; as a lifelong reader, he had a good grasp of what the magazine published, and as a NASA researcher he was able to keep up with the latest developments in the space science community.

At the top of the list was “Spacewarp Drives—Are They Possible?” This was followed by “Three Ways to Terraform Mars,” “Biostasis for Interstellar Travel,” “New Space Suit Designs,” “How to Grow Tomatoes on the Moon,” so forth and so on. . . and at the bottom of the list, added almost as an afterthought, was: “UFOs—A Different Explanation (Time Travel).”

Much to his surprise, Analog bought his article about spacewarp drives. The check he received for six weeks of part-time work amounted to a little less than half of his weekly take-home pay from NASA, but that wasn’t the point. Nine months later, when the article finally saw print, Murphy blew away the money by getting a baby-sitter to look after Steven and taking Donna to the best five-star restaurant in Georgetown. He proudly showed his advance copy to everyone from the maître’d to the cab driver, and Donna was embarrassed when he got mildly drunk and suggested that they have sex in the ladies room, but it was all worth it. His life was complete. He had been published in Analog.

Few of his colleagues saw the article. This didn’t surprise Murphy; during the last three years he had learned that all too many NASA employees were civil-service drudges who cared nothing for space and would have gladly gone to work at the Department of Agriculture or the IRS for a few more dollars and a reserved parking space in the garage. Yet a handful of people in the Space Science office were Analog readers; they recognized his by-line, and they stopped by his office to offer their compliments. Among them was Harry Cummisky; much to Murphy’s surprise, Harry not only liked the piece, but he also gave him permission to do research during office hours, so long as it didn’t interfere with his work.

That response, along with favorable letters published several months later in the magazine, was sufficient encouragement to send Murphy back to the keyboard. Over the course of the next four years, he became a semiregular contributor to Analog. The checks he received were deposited in Steven’s college fund, but earning a little extra cash wasn’t the major reason why he wrote. Besides the satisfaction of the craft itself, on occasion he found himself exchanging correspondence with science fiction authors who had read his articles and wanted to ask a few questions for stories they were developing. Likewise, his stock at NASA gradually rose. After his article on human biostasis was published, Harry sent him down to Huntsville to lecture on the subject at the Marshall Space Flight Center; a few months later he and his family were invited to Cape Canaveral to watch a shuttle launch from the VIP area. He became regarded within NASA headquarters as a member of the brain trust.

Then he wrote an article linking UFOs to time travel, and that’s when the shit hit the fan.

“This is . . . ah, it’s an intriguing theory.” Roger Ordmann slipped off his wire-frame glasses and pulled a handkerchief from his vest pocket to clean the lenses. “Rather unorthodox, but intriguing nonetheless.”

“And you have evidence for this?” Kent Morris had his copy of Analog open on the boardroom table.

“Well . . . no. But it isn’t a theory.” Murphy shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Kind of a thought experiment, really. This is a science fiction magazine, after all. This kind of speculation goes on all the . . .”

“I understand that,” Morris said impatiently, “but here, in your footnotes . . .” He peered at the last page of the article. “You’ve cited a NASA study on wormholes . . .”

“A paper from an academic conference held last spring on interstellar travel. I found it on the Web.”

“I know. I read it after I read your piece.” Morris frowned as he tapped a finger against the magazine. “The paper says nothing about time travel, let alone any connection with UFOs. You’ve drawn upon it to reach some rather far-fetched conclusions.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Murphy stole a glance at Cummisky. Harry wasn’t looking directly at anyone; his hands were folded together in his lap. He had remained silent so far, offering no comment, and Murphy had gradually come to the realization that Harry’s main concern was covering his own ass. There was no way his boss would rise to his defense.

“They’re far-fetched, I’ll admit,” Murphy said, “but they’re not inappropriate.”

Ordmann looked up sharply, and Morris raised a skeptical eyebrow. Cummisky softly let out his breath. Too late, Murphy realized that he had said the wrong thing. “What I mean is, I don’t think . . .”

“Please.” Ordmann held up a hand. “Perhaps we should back up a little, summarize what we know so far.” He put on his glasses again, picked up his copy of Analog. “David, on your own initiative, you’ve written an article for this . . . uh, sci-fi magazine . . . which claims that the UFOs aren’t from another planet, but instead may be time machines.”

“I didn’t make any such claim, sir. I merely speculated that . . .”

“Let me finish, please. Your main point is that, since there’s no feasible way for small spacecraft to cross interstellar distances, and since the star systems most likely to contain planets capable of harboring intelligent life are dozens of light-years from Earth, the only reasonable explanation for UFOs is that they’re vehicles somehow capable of generating wormholes, which in turn would enable their passengers to travel backward in time. Therefore, UFOs may have originated on Earth, but from hundreds of years in the future. That’s the gist of it, right?”

From across the table, Morris regarded him much as if he was one of the fanatics who haunted Lafayette Park across from the White House, holding up signs demanding the release of the Roswell aliens from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Harry sank lower in his seat, if that was at all possible.

“Yes, sir,” Murphy said, “but, like I said, it’s an entirely speculative proposition. I mean, I don’t think this is what’s happening. I’m only suggesting . . . extrapolating, that is, that . . .”

“I understand.” Unexpectedly, Ordmann smiled, with no trace of condescension. “As I said, it’s an intriguing idea. If someone in Hollywood made a movie out of it, it’d probably be a hit.” He chuckled and shook his head. “If I were you, I’d write a screenplay and send it to Steven Spielberg. Maybe he’d buy it for a few million dollars.” His smile faded. “But that’s not the point. You’ve written this article as a NASA scientist . . .”

“Pardon me, sir,” Murphy interrupted, “but I didn’t present my credentials in the article. There’s nothing in the piece which states that I work for the agency. . .”

“I understand that,” Ordmann said. “Nevertheless, you’re a senior NASA scientist. That lends a certain amount of credibility to your theory . . . or speculation, as you call it.”

Murphy was about to object, only to be headed off by Morris. “I went back and read your earlier pieces,” the Public Affairs chief said. “On two separate occasions, you made mention of the fact that you’re a physicist working for NASA. Although you don’t present your credentials in this particular article, many of them are bound to remember your affiliation with the agency.”

“Right. And there’s the problem.” Ordmann closed the magazine, placed it on the table. “David, I can take you downstairs to the mailroom and show you how many crackpot letters we receive each month. People claiming the Apollo program was canceled because we found cities on the Moon, that shuttle astronauts have seen flying saucers in orbit, that we’re covering up everything from alien invasions to the Kennedy assassination. That sort of thing’s been going on since the Mercury days, and hasn’t let up since.”

The Associate Administrator sighed as he removed his glasses once more. “This is why NASA has no official position on UFOs, other than to state that we’re not actively engaged in researching them. Even unofficially, we say that they don’t exist. Son, if a flying saucer landed in front of the White House and the Post called to ask for my opinion, I’d say it wasn’t there. That’s how carefully we have to play this sort of thing.”

Although he nodded, Murphy remained unconvinced. His previous articles had touched on subjects nearly as far-fetched. Indeed, in his piece on lunar agriculture, he had playfully suggested that marijuana could be potentially useful as a cash crop. No one had complained about that. Yet any public discussion of UFOs appeared to be off-limits.

There was no sense in arguing the point, though. “I see,” he said. “I’m sorry if this has embarrassed the agency. That wasn’t my intent.”

Ordmann smiled. “I’m sure that wasn’t the idea, David. And believe me, I don’t want to do anything that would stifle your creativity. When Kent brought this to my attention, I asked Harry to let me see some of the other things you’ve done. You’re a pretty good writer.” He chuckled a little. “You know, back when I was a kid, I used to read this magazine when it was still called Astounding. It was one of the things that got me interested in space. I’m glad to see that one of our people has this connection. It’s a good way of touching base with the public.”

Then he shook his head. “But I can’t let you go off half-cocked like this. Have you done any other articles lately?”

“Is there anything else awaiting publication?” Morris asked more pointedly.

“No, sir,” Murphy replied. “I’ve been a little too busy lately to do much writing.” Which was only a half-truth. Although he had been involved with analyzing the data received from the Galileo space probe, he had also been collecting notes on the same for an article he hoped to pitch to Analog. Perhaps he should come clean. “I’ve been thinking about doing a piece about Jupiter,” he added. “What Galileo tells us about the possibility of life in the Jovian system, that sort of thing.”

Morris ran a hand across his brow. There was no mistaking the look on his face: Christ, here we go again. Ordmann didn’t seem to notice, yet he frowned slightly. “Well, if and when you write that piece . . . or any other articles, for that matter . . . I want you to forward a copy to Kent, just to let him see what you’re doing.”

“Send it to me before you submit.” Morris glared across the table at Murphy. “And let me know if it’s going anywhere else other than this magazine. Understand?”

Murphy’s stomach turned to glass. For him, writing was an intimate experience; he never let anyone, not even Donna, see what he was doing before it was published. Being mandated to show his work to someone before he sent it away was like being told that he had to set up a camcorder in the bedroom. Yet the Associate Administrator had just laid down the law, with no hope of compromise.

“I understand, sir,” he said quietly.

Ordmann smiled sympathetically. “David, you’re a fine writer. I don’t want to do anything that puts a crimp in your creativity. But you’ve got to contain some of your wilder ideas . . . or at least while you’re working for NASA.”

And that was the bottom line, wasn’t it? For all Roger Ordmann cared, David Zachary Murphy could write that the President was under mind control by aliens from Alpha Centauri and that the Air Force had a fleet of starships hidden at the Nevada Test Range . . . but the moment he did so, he was out on the street. The last thing NASA HQ would tolerate was an in-house crank.

“I understand, sir,” Murphy repeated.

Harry exhaled as if he had been underwater for the last five minutes. He wasn’t going to lose his job today. Morris looked like a hyena gloating over a giraffe carcass. “Well, then . . . I’m glad we’ve got this settled.” Ordmann pushed back his chair, glanced at his watch. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m running late for a budget meeting on the Hill. It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Dr. Murphy.”

Then he was out the door, where a female aide anxiously waited for him, attaché case in hand. Harry mumbled something about making a phone call, then he hastily stood up and exited the conference room. Out in the hall, Murphy heard him taking the opportunity to shake hands with Ordmann and thank him profusely for his time and patience. Never too late to curry favor, he reflected sourly.

Which left him, for the moment, alone with Morris. At first, the Public Affairs chief studiously avoided meeting his eye as he folded his notebook and gathered his papers. Then he picked up the copy of Analog and his gaze lingered on the cover art, a Vincent Di Fate painting of an astronaut spacewalking outside a large spacecraft.

“You really like this sci-fi stuff, don’t you?” he asked.

“Been reading it all my life.” Murphy kept his voice even. Like most lifelong science fiction fans, he despised the word “sci-fi.”

Morris shook his head. “Not for me,” he murmured. “Too unbelievable. I prefer real stories.” He dropped the magazine on the table. “Kinda like The X-Files, though. That’s pretty good.” He turned toward the door. “Anyway, keep in touch.”

Murphy waited until he was gone, then he picked up the discarded Analog. Leafing through the magazine, he noted that several passages of his article had been highlighted with a yellow marker.

For some reason, he found himself oddly flattered. At least Morris had bothered to read the piece. Too bad he hadn’t understood a word.

Mon, Oct 15, 2314—1045Z

Franc expected to have a meeting with the Commissioner, yet not for several hours. When he arrived at his quarters on Deck 5E to drop off his bag, however, his desk had a message for him: Sanchez wished to see him and Lea as soon as possible.

Lea apparently had received the same message; he found her waiting for him in the central hub corridor, just outside the hatch leading to Arm 5. As a selenian, she could have taken a room on one of the upper levels, but since she was trying to get herself reacclimated to Earth-normal gravity, she had requested a berth on 4E. During the flight up from Tycho, Franc had once again tried to talk her into sharing his quarters on 5E. She had politely turned down his invitation, but it wasn’t too late to ask one more time.

“We can still get a room together, you know,” he said. “I checked with the AI. It told me there’s a double available on my deck, right across from where I am now. I looked at it before I came up here, and it’s really quite comfortable. All we have to do is move our stuff over there and . . .”

“Thank you, but no.” She favored him with a smile. “I’d prefer to sleep alone, if you don’t mind.”

“Well . . .” He hesitated. “Yes, I do mind, since you ask. I thought we were partners.”

“Oh, come on now.” She gave him a admonishing look. “We are partners . . . but I think you’re taking this a little too seriously for your own . . . our own good. Keep this up, and the next thing you know, you’ll be asking for a contract.”

“I never said anything about a contract.” Although, in fact, the thought had crossed his mind more than a few times lately. Even a twelve-month MH-2, with a non-exclusionary clause, would do. “I just hate breaking up a good team.”

She was about to say something when they were interrupted by a shrill electronic beep. They looked around to see a service bot moving down the corridor, the electrostatic brushes at the ends of its rotating arms sweeping dust from the cylindrical walls. “Move aside, please,” it droned as it approached. “Move aside, please.”

Irritated, Franc resisted the urge to kick the bot out of the way. That would have been recorded by the bot’s camera, though, and then he would have received a warning from the station AI not to interfere with maintenance equipment. He reached up to grasp an overhead handrail, and swung his legs up to let the bot pass. “Thank you for your cooperation,” the bot said as it whirred beneath him; its brushes barely missed Lea, who had flattened herself against the wall. “Please do not block the corridor.”

“That’s the whole point.” Lea looked up at Franc while he was still hovering above her. “We’re teammates. We’ve got to work together. Not only that, but we’re about to go on another expedition . . .”

“You didn’t mind New York.”

“That was different.” The first time they had slept together, it was while they were researching the causes of the Great Depression of the twentieth century. Three days after the crash of the New York Stock Exchange, it had been easy to get a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria; by then, they wanted some relief from the mass panic that had caused young millionaires to throw themselves through office windows. “That was a Class-3,” she added, speaking a little more softly now. “We’re about to do a Class-1. You know how dangerous that is.”

Franc reluctantly nodded. Like it or not, he had to agree. Class-3 expeditions were relatively low-risk sorties so long as no one interfered with the turn of events. The stock-market crash of 1929 was one of these, as was the Challenger disaster of 1985. Class-2 expeditions were more difficult, since they required CRC researchers to be closer to hazardous situations: the Paris student riots of 1968 were an example, as was pre-Renaissance Europe during the Plague. Class-1 missions were those in which the lives of researchers were directly placed in jeopardy. During the entire existence of the Chronospace Research Centre, there had only been two previous Class-1 expeditions: the eruption of Mont Pelée on Martinique in 1902, and the Battle of Gettysburg in 1864. No one had been hurt during the 1902 expedition, mainly because the research team had vacated St. Pierre before the village was destroyed, but during the Gettysburg expedition a CRC historian posing as a contemporary newspaper reporter was shot and killed by a Confederate rifleman while attempting to document Pickett’s Charge. His colleagues had been forced to leave his body behind, after first removing his recording equipment. Fortunately, there had been no risk of causing a paradox; so many unidentified corpses had littered the Gettysburg battlefield, the addition of one more made no real difference.

Since then, the Board of Review had been more careful in selecting potential missions. This wasn’t a difficult task; because of the inherent limitations posed by chronospace travel, many destinations were already out of the question. For reasons as yet unknown, it was impossible to travel farther back in time than approximately one thousand years. No one knew why, yet all previous attempts to open Morris-Thorne bridges that extended beyond the mid-1300s failed when the tunnels through the spacetime foam collapsed in upon themselves. Although there seemed to be no static cutoff line, the barrier existed nevertheless.

Likewise, although a timeship was able to return to its point of departure—say, from 1902 to Tues, Feb 12, 2313, when the Mont Pelée expedition was sent out—it was impossible to travel past the departure point. Therefore, the future was just as unvisitable as the more distant past. Just as no expeditions would ever be sent to witness the crucification of Christ or the destruction of the Library of Alexandria no one from the early twenty-fourth century would ever know what happened even a nanosecond after their departure. Chronospace could be breached, but it would never be conquered.

The Hindenburg expedition was dangerous. Franc didn’t dispute that. He was about to ask why this made any difference to their relationship when something scuttled across the ceiling past his shoulder. A tail gently flicked the side of his side, then a shrill voice shrieked next to his ear:

“Come now, come now, Franc Lu come to Paolo! Hurry! Come now!”

Franc quickly looked around, saw a blue-skinned lizard clinging to the ceiling rail. About fifteen centimeters in length, it regarded him through doll-like black eyes. When it spoke again, a long red tongue vibrated within its elongated mouth: “Come now! Now! Paolo wants you! Now!”

“Marcel!” Lea had anticipated seeing the little mimosaur again. Before she had boarded the shuttle at Mare Imbrium, she had taken a moment to purchase some cashews from a spaceport vendor. She pulled the bag out of her pocket and ripped open the cellophane. “Here,” she said, pushing off from the wall and gliding beneath Franc. “Brought these especially for you.”

“Nuts! Nuts nuts nuts nuts!” Marcel leaped from the handrail onto Lea’s shoulder. She laughed delightedly as the lizard curled its long tail around her neck, then she let the mimosaur thrust its mouth into the bag, gently stroking the fin on the back of its head.

“That’s one way of shutting him up,” Franc murmured. Personally, he found Marcel a trifle annoying. “He’ll make a fine pair of shoes one day.”

Mimosaurs were among the more interesting inhabitants of Gliese 876-B, an Earth-like satellite orbiting a gas giant fifteen light-years from Earth. Discovered during one of humankind’s first interstellar expeditions, they possessed the ability to learn simple words or phrases and recite them at will, along with an excellent memory for faces and names. Although they weren’t much more intelligent than the average house cat, they were far more adaptable to microgravity, which made them the favored pets of deep-space explorers. Paolo Sanchez had brought Marcel home from his last voyage as captain of the Olaf Stapledon before taking his present position as CRC’s Chief Commissioner. Now the mimosaur served as Sanchez’s messenger, running errands for him within Chronos Station.

Lea cast him a hostile glare. “Better be nice, or I’ll have him wake you up tomorrow morning.” She smiled at Marcel as she fed him the rest of his favorite treat. “Sousa. Do you remember Sousa, Marcel? Dah-dah-dah . . . dum-de-dah-dah-dum-de-dah . . .?”

On cue, Marcel lifted his head from the bag and began to whistle “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” just as Lea had taught him several months ago. That was as much as Franc could stomach. He had a low tolerance for cuteness.

“I get the point.” He turned and pushed himself toward Arm 6. “Let’s go see what Paolo has to say.”

Monday, January 14, 1998: 9:15 A.M.

Sixteen letters awaited Murphy when he checked his morning email. This wasn’t unusual; given a choice between picking up the phone or writing a memo, NASA people tended to opt for the latter. Sometimes his email came from people in the same building, even just down the hall. It was more convenient this way, to be sure, especially since it allowed the sender to attach files without having to use paper that inevitably would have to be recycled.

Nonetheless, there were times when he wondered whether email wasn’t the largest drawback of the computer revolution. At least three times a day he had to check for new messages, and every one of them had to be answered, if only by a short line: “Got it. Thanks. DZM.” Government work used to be a never-ending paper chase; now it was an electron derby.

Murphy pulled off his snow boots, slipped on a pair of felt loafers he kept beneath his desk, then settled the keyboard on his lap as he put his feet up on the desktop. Most of the stuff in queue was fairly routine. A note from one of his contacts at JPL in Pasadena, answering a couple of questions he had about Galileo data. Another message from another JPL scientist, with an attached GIF from Mars Pathfinder. A half dozen news releases from the press office, updates on the next shuttle mission and the current status of the Space Station program. A letter from a friend at Goddard Space Flight Center out in Greenbelt, telling him that he was coming into D.C. on Thursday and asking if he would be free for lunch. A Dilbert strip from last week which he had already read and forgotten, sent via listserv by a pal at Interior who apparently believed the comic strip was the font of all human wisdom; another jester relayed Letterman’s Top-Ten list of the come-on lines President Clinton might have tried on Paula Jones, which Murphy deleted without reading.

As he scrolled down the screen, Murphy picked up the chipped Star Wars mug Steven had given him for his birthday a couple of years ago, sipped the lukewarm coffee he had taken from the break room down the hall. Yet even as he skimmed through the email, his mind was elsewhere.

Why would an article in Analog garner so much attention from an associate administrator? After all, January was the beginning of the Washington budget season. As always, NASA would not only have to put together a proposal for the White House to take before Congress, but the Office of Space Science would also have to publicly defend its programs from critics on the Hill. So why would Roger Ordmann take an hour from his schedule—indeed, be willing to make himself late for a House subcommittee hearing—just to talk to some junior staffer who had written a piece about UFOs for a science fiction magazine?

And wasn’t there something rather unconstitutional about Ordmann’s insistence that he submit all future articles to Public Affairs Office? NASA was a civilian agency; although it still maintained ties to the Department of Defense, it had been several years since the last time a military payload had been sent into orbit aboard a shuttle, and now that the Air Force had its own space program, Murphy never heard of any classified projects being undertaken by NASA. Had Kent Morris, a former Pentagon PAO, simply been overeager? And if so, why would Ordmann mandate a review of any future articles Murphy might write?

Murphy rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as he glanced out the window. White flakes of snow flurried outside, obscuring the low rooftops that stretched out toward the Potomac. Although he was fortunate enough to have a window office, he didn’t rate high enough for a view of the Capitol. He gazed up at the narrow shelf above his desk: loose-leaf report binders, reference texts on astronautics and space physics, a few recent pop-science books about planetary exploration, guarded by the Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker action figures he bought for himself once when he had taken Steven to Toys “R” Us.

“Trust the Force, Luke,” he murmured. Yeah, right. And you know what Darth Vader would have said. The Force is strong with you . . . but you’re not a Jedi yet. . . .

The phone rang, startling him from his reverie. Murphy dropped his feet from the desk, reached forward to pick up the receiver.

“Space Science, Murphy,” he said.

For a moment, he heard nothing, making him wonder if someone in the building had dialed the wrong extension. It happened all the time. Then, a male voice:

“Is this Za . . . I mean, David Z. Murphy?”

“Speaking.”

“The same David Z. Murphy who writes for Analog?”

“Sometimes, yeah.” He glanced at the button pad, noted that the call was coming in from the outside line. “Who’s calling, please?”

“Dr. Murphy, this is Gregory Benford. I’m a professor of physics at the University of California-Irvine. I also write science fiction on occasion.”

Murphy’s mouth dropped open. “Yes, of course I’ve heard of you.” He sat up straight in his chair. “I’m a big fan of your work.”

Which was the unvarnished truth. One of the SF authors whom he admired the most was Gregory Benford; not only did he have a superb imagination, but he was also one of the small handful of writers whose novels and stories possessed a high degree of scientific plausibility. When Murphy began writing, one of the authors whose style he had consciously attempted to emulate was Benford’s, albeit unsuccessfully.

A dry chuckle from the other end of the line. “Call me Greg, please. And I rather like your stuff, too.”

“But I haven’t written any . . .” Then he realized Benford wasn’t talking about science fiction. “Oh, you mean my Analog articles.”

“You mean you’ve been published elsewhere? I haven’t seen your by-line except in. . .”

“No, no,” Murphy said hastily. “The things I’ve done for Analog are all . . . I mean, y’know, I’ve tried to write fiction, but they didn’t . . . I mean, it just didn’t work out.”

“That’s too bad. Anyway, Dr. Murphy . . .”

“David.”

“Sure. Anyway, as I was saying, the reason why I’m calling is that I’ve just read that article about time travel . . .”

“Really?” Murphy absently picked up a paper clip, tumbled it between his fingers. “Hope you liked it. I mean, I was really out in left field . . .”

“No, no, it was really quite interesting. The premise is a bit radical, to be sure, but you managed to support it quite well. I’m quite intrigued by the idea. In fact, I was hoping we could discuss it further. I have questions I’d like to ask you.”

“Certainly. My pleasure.” Murphy craned his neck to glance at the wall clock near the door. “I’ve got a department meeting in about a half hour, but I’ve got time before then. What do you want to know?”

“Actually, I sort of hoped we could get together for lunch.”

Murphy’s eyebrows rose. “For lunch? Today?”

“Sure, if it’s not too much trouble. I’m in town right now . . . there was a physics conference in Baltimore last weekend, and I stayed over to visit some friends in the area. I’m catching a flight back to L.A. this afternoon, but I’ve got some time to kill before then. Since I knew you worked at NASA, I thought I’d give you a buzz and see if you were available for lunch.”

Odd. Murphy hadn’t heard of any physics conferences being held in Baltimore, and his colleagues at Goddard were usually pretty good about keeping him informed of these things. Yet such conferences were commonplace; this one probably slipped his mind. “No . . . I mean, yes. By all means, I’d love to get together with you. Where are you staying? I’ll . . .”

“I was at the Hyatt, but I’ve already checked out,” Benford said. “Actually, I was thinking about dropping by the Air and Space Museum. It’s close to you, and I don’t want to take up your whole lunch hour, so why don’t we meet there?”

“Well . . . sure,” Murphy said, a little more reluctantly than he meant to sound. There was a restaurant on the museum’s fourth floor, but it wasn’t anything special: a cafeteria for tourists, offering little more than cheeseburgers and pizza. If he was going to have lunch with Gregory Benford, he would have preferred a more upscale bistro. There were a half dozen good cafés on Capitol Hill where they could meet. Yet Benford was probably in a hurry; after all, he had a plane to catch later today. “The Air and Space it is. How about twelve noon?”

“That’s good for me. I’ll meet you . . . how about on the ground floor, in front of the lunar lander? At twelve o’clock?”

“Fine by me. Twelve noon, then.”

“Very good, David. I’ll see you then.”

“It’ll be a pleasure, Dr . . . Greg, I mean.”

Another warm chuckle. “The pleasure’s all mine. See you at noon. Bye.”

Murphy put down the phone, took a deep breath, slowly let it out as he leaned back in his chair. How strange life could be sometimes. You start the morning getting carpeted by an associate administrator for something you’ve written, then less than an hour later you receive a call from one of the world’s leading SF authors, complimenting you for the same material and requesting your company for lunch.

“Maybe he’s right,” he muttered. “I ought to be a science fiction writer.”

Mon, Oct 15, 2314—1101Z

The Chief Commissioner’s suite was located on Deck 6A, at the top of Arm 6. Like nearly half of Chronos Station’s personnel, Paolo Sanchez had been born and raised on the Moon, and therefore preferred the decks closer to the hub, where the centripedal force was one-sixth Earth-normal. Unlike most other selenians, though, Sanchez had never visited Earth. As a former starship captain who had spent most of his ninety-seven Gregorians aboard ships and orbitals, it was likely that a trip to his ancestral home in Mexico City would be lethal. If high gravity didn’t crush his bones or bring about a coronary seizure, then he would soon become fatally ill from any one of thousands of airborne microorganisms against which his body did not have any natural defenses.

Franc and Lea entered Sanchez’s office through an antechamber that briefly subjected them to intense UV radiation. They shut their eyes and covered their faces with their hands until the humming ceased and a bell chimed, then the door slid open. The mimosaur, who had buried its face within Lea’s collar during the decontamination procedure, immediately leaped from her shoulder and bounded across the broad, semicircular room.

“Franc here, Lea here!” Marcel’s voice was an excited squeal. “Lea give Marcel nuts! Franc say . . .” Its voice changed to a pitch-perfect imitation of Franc’s: “That’s one way of shutting him up. He’ll make a fine pair of shoes one day.”

Franc winced. One more reason why he disliked mimosaurs in general, and Marcel in particular: they had a tendency to repeat verbatim everything they heard, particularly when it had to do with themselves. “A joke, sir,” he said. “I didn’t mean it the way it sounds.”

“I certainly hope not,” Sanchez replied coldly. “I like my friend just the way he is.”

The Commissioner was seated in a wing-back chair, surrounded by the three-dimensional framework of his desk. Writing tables, flatscreens, data units, shelves, and cabinets encompassed him like a cage; when he moved in a certain direction, his chair automatically pivoted upon six major points of axis. As Marcel ran toward him, Sanchez shifted his skeletal body slightly, and the chair rotated him from upside down to an upright position. The blue lizard leaped onto a slender bar holding a flatscreen, then bounced into Sanchez’s lap.

“Sing Sousa for Lea!” Marcel yelped as it nuzzled against the long, white-streaked beard flowing down Sanchez’s shallow chest. “She like! Sing for you . . .?” Once again, it began to whistle the archaic marching-band song.

“No, no, Marcel. Thank you, but another time.” Sanchez gently stroked the back of the mimosaur’s neck with his bony fingers. The mimosaur went quiet, save for a contented reptilian purr. “Hush now. We have many things to discuss.”

Having soothed his pet to silence, Sanchez raised dark eyes that vaguely hinted at his Latino bloodline. “Dr. Oschner, Dr. Lu, gracias for coming here on such short notice. I hope your holiday was pleasant.”

“Muchas gracias, señor.” Franc found a seat in one of the normal-style chairs positioned outside the Commissioner’s desk. “It was very pleasant. Thank you for allowing us to take a furlough.”

“Sì, señor. Taking a break helped us immensely.” Like Franc, Lea addressed the Commissioner in formal Spanish. It wasn’t necessary to do so, of course, yet it was common knowledge among CRC researchers that Sanchez was proud of his Mexican ancestry. His office was decorated with murals of nineteenth-century Catholic missions, and a matador’s costume and swords, brought back from a CRC expedition to that period, hung within an airtight frame on the wall behind his desk. If Sanchez had been physically capable of leading an expedition himself, it would probably be a Class-1 to the Republic of Texas, so he could witness the Battle of the Alamo firsthand.

“I’m glad to hear that.” The Commissioner switched back to colloquial English. “So you’re ready for the C120-37?” he added, referring to the upcoming expedition by its serial number. “I take it that you’ve completed your research.”

“Yes, sir,” Franc said. “Lea and I finished our work at Tycho College. We’ve confirmed through contemporary census records that our personae perished aboard the Hindenburg. Pending successful extraction by the Miranda, we should able to assume their roles with no major problems.”

“I’m meeting with the Miranda team later in order to work out the final details.” Lea raised her left arm, touched her wristcomp. “Here’s the preliminary report, as you’ve requested.”

Thank you.” The frail fingers of Sanchez’s left hand glided across the keypad on his armrest. The chair swiveled to the right and tilted upward slightly, allowing him to gaze at a screen above his head. The two researchers patiently waited while the Commissioner skimmed Lea’s report. “And you’ll be able to record their vocal patterns?”

“The extraction team will do that before we arrive,” Lea said. “The Frankfurter Hof was the favored hotel for American travelers, and the plan is for them to pick up our personae a few hours before our arrival.”

“John and Emma Pannes visited the Alte Oper the night before the Hindenburg left Frankfurt,” Franc added. “That’s within walking distance of the opera, so the plan calls for the abduction to take place in a pedestrian mall between those two points.”

Sanchez raised an elegantly tufted eyebrow. “And how do you intend to accomplish this, if it’s in a public place?”

“Two members of the Miranda team will be posing as Gestapo agents, and they’ll have rented an automobile for transportation. They’ll drive to the curb, stop, get out, and approach Mr. and Mrs. Pannes. After presenting their documents, they’ll demand that they accompany them.” Franc smiled. “This sort of thing was a common occurrence at this place and time, particularly in regard to foreigners. No one will report it. This was a very paranoid society, after all.”

“And the placement of your equipment?”

“Once the Pannes have been spirited away,” Lea said, “the team members will return to the Frankfurter Hof, this time dressed as civilians. They’ll be carrying our luggage. Once they’ve checked into the hotel, they will simply take our luggage to the Pannes’ room and, after using their room keys to gain entrance, substitute our bags for their bags, replacing tags as necessary. Early the next morning, they’ll check out again and return to the safe house in Griesheim.”

Sanchez nodded, but didn’t say anything as he continued reading the report. Franc was puzzled by his reticence. For a Class-1 briefing, the Commissioner was asking remarkably few questions. When Franc had been on the 1929 New York expedition, Sanchez had peppered his team with dozens of inquiries, and that had only been a Class-3 survey. This trip was not only more dangerous, it was also far more complex. Two timeships working in tandem, with the extraction of two contemporaries from a potentially hostile environment and replacing them with two researchers who would be in situ during a major disaster . . . any one of several dozen things could go wrong at any time. Not only that, but once he and Lea were aboard the Hindenburg and it was in flight, there was no way the mission could be aborted.

Nonetheless, Sanchez seemed to be accepting their prognosis at face value. Was the Commissioner becoming complacent? Or, as the thought suddenly occurred to Franc, was he preoccupied with some other matter?

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. From the corner of his eye, he saw Lea do the same. The mimosaur stood up in Sanchez’s lap, yawned and stretched in an oddly feline way, then hopped upon the warm surface of a data unit and curled up to take a nap. After a while, Sanchez grunted with what might have been satisfaction and rotated his chair to face them.

“Your preliminary report appears to cover all the foreseeable factors,” he said, “and as you probably expect, I have quite a few questions to ask. But there’s something I’d like to bring to your attention first . . . an incident that occurred during our last expedition.”

“The last expedition?” Franc glanced at Lea, then back at Sanchez. “If you mean the C320-29, we didn’t . . .”

“No, no.” Sanchez shook his head. “The C320-29 was flawless. If it hadn’t gone well, I would have never approved of the proposal for C120-37.” He smiled slightly. “And, yes, Dr. Lu, if this expedition is successful and your team delivers useful new information, I’ll consider taking your proposal for the C120-12 to the Board.”

Franc took a deep breath. The C120-12 was his dream mission: an expedition to Southampton, England, in 1912 to place two or more researchers aboard the HMS Titanic before it embarked upon its doomed Atlantic crossing. Within the CRC, this was widely considered to be the Mt. Everest of historical surveys, mainly because of the extraordinary risks it presented. In many ways, the C120-37 was a rehearsal for the C120-12; if he and Lea could prove that two CRC researchers could record the Hindenburg disaster and survive, then putting historians aboard the Titanic would be considered feasible.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. “I appreciate your support.”

“That’s beside the point. I’m referring to the last expedition. The one which returned last week.” He peered at him through the bars of his desk. “The C314-65. The Miranda expedition to New Mexico. You haven’t studied the final report?”

He knew about the mission to which Sanchez was referring, but he was embarrassed to admit that he hadn’t been keeping track of it. Lea stepped in to save him. “Many apologies, sir,” she said. “We were so involved with our own work, we didn’t have a chance to . . .”

“Not acceptable, Dr. Oschner. All researchers are required to read reports from previous expeditions. The objectives may be different, but there’s much to learned from . . .” Sanchez sighed, looked away. “I’m sorry. Perhaps I should know better. Thirteenth-century North American history isn’t your area, and you’ve been preoccupied with the C120-37.” Then he looked back at them. “You say you haven’t spoken with Hans Brech? He was the Miranda’s pilot for that mission, and for your own as well.” He hesitated. “By the way, Vasili Metz will be your pilot on the Oberon. Any objections?”

Franc pursed his lips and hoped that Sanchez wouldn’t pick up on his distaste for Metz. He was a good timeship pilot—one of the best, Franc had to reluctantly admit—yet they had worked together during the C320-29, and Franc had found Metz to be insufferable. “No, sir,” he said, then he changed the subject. “I haven’t spoken with Hans. Did something happen during his last flight?”

Sanchez said nothing for a moment. He settled his wiry frame back in his chair and solemnly regarded them with his unfathomable black eyes.

“Hans says they saw an angel,” he said at last.

Monday, January 14, 1998: 11:58 A.M.

A frigid blast of wind followed Murphy through the rear entrance of the National Air and Space Museum. Pausing for a moment by the Robert McCall mural to unbutton his parka, he glanced around the lobby. Save for a boisterous group of elementary-school children on a field trip, the ground floor was uncommonly quiet. A handful of people strolled through the Hall of Flight, pausing now and then to examine the Apollo 11 command module and Alan Shepard’s Mercury capsule, while kids in hockey jackets chased each other beneath the Wright Brothers flyer and the Bell X-1. By next spring, the museum would regain its stature as one of Washington’s most crowded public sites, yet during winter it was mainly visited by locals taking advantage of the dearth of tourists.

Blowing into the palms of his chilled hands, Murphy quickly walked through the museum, entering the Hall of Astronautics in the building’s west wing. He had been here countless times, yet still he hadn’t become jaded to the exhibits on this side of the building. A life-size mock-up of the Skylab space station; just beyond it, Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft, permanently docked in low orbit; between them, a small forest of boosters—Scout, Mercury-Redstone, Atlas, Titan II. As often as he had seen these giants, Murphy still found himself slowing his pace to marvel at them, and it was only when he happened to spot the digital clock above the entrance to the IMAX theater that he remembered that he had a lunch date to keep.

At the far end of the hall, symbolically positioned in front of the tall windows overlooking the Capitol Building, rested a full-size mock-up of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module. Schoolchildren impatiently shuffled their feet while a teacher attempted to explain its historical significance; they were more interested in the posters advertising the Star Wars exhibit on the third floor. Yet the tall gentleman standing near the red velvet rope seemed fascinated by the spacecraft. As Murphy walked closer, he saw him hunch forward slightly, as if to more closely examine one of the silver Mylar-covered panels on its lower fuselage.

Murphy approached him. “Dr. Benford?”

Startled, the visitor looked around sharply, then turned to face him. “Dr. Murphy, I presume.” He pulled a hand from the pocket of his parka. “Greg Benford. Pleased to meet you. Thanks for taking time to . . .”

“No, no, really. The pleasure’s all mine.” Murphy returned the affable smile as they shook hands. “Like I said on the phone, this is a real surprise. I never expected . . .”

“Any chance I get to come here, I take it.” Benford glanced again at the LM. “Always seems a little bigger than you think it is. When you see it in pictures from the Moon, it looks small, but then you get up close . . .”

“I know what you mean, yeah.” For once, though, Murphy found himself ignoring the LM. It was an odd experience, meeting someone whose photo he had previously seen on the back flaps of book jackets. Nonetheless, it was the same person: trim gray beard, salted brown hair, calm and studious eyes framed by wire-rim glasses. About his own height, with a middle-age paunch around the waistline. The barest trace of a Southern accent.

So this was Greg Benford. The author of “Doing Lennon,” the story which caused him to blow a high-school chemistry exam because he preferred to read it behind his textbook when he should have been paying attention to a review session, and In the Ocean of Night, which made him forget that he was supposed to take Karen Dolen to the freshman mixer, and Artifact, which he read during his honeymoon vacation in England, and . . .

“It really is an amazing machine.” Benford took a final glance at the LM, then he pulled back the sleeve of his L.L. Bean parka, glanced at the Rolex on his left wrist. “But, hey, I don’t want to keep you. I know you’ve got to get back to work soon.”

“No problem.” Murphy shook his head. “Really. I’ve done my last meeting for the day, and it isn’t like I’ve got to punch a clock.”

“Yeah, but I’ve still got a plane to catch.” Benford nodded toward the nearby staircase. The field trippers were already scurrying upstairs, screaming with adolescent excitement, followed by their exhausted teacher. “We’d better hurry, if don’t want to get caught behind the rugrats. After you . . .”

And so they marched up the four flights to the café, carrying on idle conversation until they reached the restaurant. The kids got there first, of course, but they were clustered outside, waiting for the rest of their group. Murphy led his guest past them into the cafeteria, and while they picked up plastic trays and began moving down the serving line, he told Benford about his work at the agency, how he had been hired to write summaries of current NASA science programs and expressing his frustration that it wasn’t the basic research for which he had been trained, his hopes that he might one day get transferred to Marshall or Goddard, or maybe even JPL in Pasadena. He even found himself talking about the irritation of having to take the Metro to work today before he realized that this probably wouldn’t interest anyone.

For his part, Benford kept his silence, listening attentively yet nonetheless remaining laconic. He said that he was writing a nonfiction book titled Deep Time, but he didn’t say much of what it was about, and he casually mentioned his involvement in a TV miniseries about a Mars colony, yet he distracted himself by asking for Italian dressing to go with his garden salad when Murphy pressed for details. After a while, Murphy came to the conclusion that Greg was better at listening than talking. So much the better; during his tenure at NASA, he had met far too many egoists who could smother you with their bombast, and with far less justification.

They took their trays to a table near the back of the room, where they hoped to avoid the noise created by forty children piling into the cafeteria. “So,” Benford said as he reached for the pepper shaker, “about this UFO article . . . what inspired you to write it?”

Murphy shrugged. “Remember that piece in Analog a long time ago, ‘How to Build a Flying Saucer’?” Benford thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “Anyway, someone examined the reports about UFOs—their general appearance, how they fly, the electromagnetic disturbances they’re supposed to cause, so forth and so on—and wrote an article which explained them, more or less, on the basis of aeronautical science and known physics. I just took it a step further, really. Ask the next question, as Theodore Sturgeon used to say.”

Benford speared a cucumber slice with his fork. “And what question was that?”

“If we accept the premise that UFOs exist . . . just for the sake of argument . . . then we’ve got to ask where they come from.” Warming to the subject, Murphy ignored the cheeseburger growing cold on his plate. “The extraterrestrial hypothesis, of course, is the favorite explanation, but that falls apart when you look at it from a logical perspective. There aren’t any other planets in our solar system where intelligent life could have evolved, let alone a technologically advanced race. The nearest habitable star systems are dozens of light-years away, so someone out there could conceivably have built starships to visit us, but any ship capable of travelling such enormous distances would have to be very large. The size of a small moon, really, if they’re reliant upon sub-drives . . .”

“Sub-c?” Benford shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“Umm . . . y’know. If c is the mathematical constant for the speed of light, then something travelling slower than light-speed is . . .”

“Oh, right. Of course.” Benford shook his head. “Sorry. Just a little distracted.” He nodded toward the children cavorting nearby. “You were saying . . .?”

“Right . . . well, if no one has seen a UFO that’s the reasonable size of a starship, and if we reject the notion that mother ships are lurking nearby . . . because, y’know, any backyard astronomer with a decent telescope would be able to spot them . . . then we have to discard the idea that they’re from space.”

“As most scientists already do.” Benford used his fork to play with his salad. “Have you read Philip Klass’s work? He’s been debunking UFO sightings for a long time.”

“And I don’t argue with any of it.” Murphy chuckled. “Believe me, I’m not a UFO buff of any sort. I think Klass is on the right track. If you ask me, ninety-nine percent of UFO sightings are a crock. If they’re not hoaxes or optical illusions, then they’re cloud formations, airplanes, meteors, hot-air balloons. . . anything but spaceships.”

“And the remaining one percent?”

Murphy picked up a couple of fries, daubed them in the tiny cup of ketchup. “The remaining one percent is the stuff no one’s been able to adequately explain, or at least without stretching things . . . swamp gas, Venus, all that. That doesn’t mean there aren’t reasonable explanations. We just haven’t learned what they are yet.”

“Which brings us to time machines.”

“Sort of.” Murphy shrugged. “I’m just playing the ‘what if’ game. Time travel may not be a reasonable explanation, but it certainly is a rational one. I mean, realistically speaking, an operational time machine would have to perform much like a spacecraft. First, it would have to open a quantum wormhole, and the only place you can safely do that is outside the atmosphere. Second, it would have to be capable of atmospheric flight. A saucer-shaped vehicle could do this. And third, a time traveler would probably want to be secretive, which accounts for why no flying saucers have landed on the White House lawn.”

“Sounds like a reasonable line of thought.”

“I kind of think so. Maybe it’s baloney . . . but like I said, I was just conducting a thought experiment.” Realizing that he was hungry, he picked up his cheeseburger. “Hey, apropos of nothing, but . . . if I sent you my copy of Heart of the Comet, would you sign it for me?”

“Sure, I’d be happy to.”

“That’d be great.” Murphy lifted the cheeseburger’s bun to make sure that there wasn’t a pickle hidden beneath it. “Maybe someday I can get Brin to sign it, too.”

“Who?”

“David Brin.” Murphy peered at him, but Benford’s expression remained neutral. “Your collaborator. The guy who co-wrote . . .”

“Oh, yeah. Right.” Benford grinned sheepishly. “David, of course.” He shook his head. “Sorry. It’s been a long weekend.” He plunged his fork back into his salad. “It’s an interesting theory, but not entirely original. I’ve seen some New Age books that postulate much the same idea.”

“So have I. One guy even went so far as to claim that Einstein was a time traveller. But that’s not where I’m coming from. In fact, I don’t even believe this myself . . .”

“You don’t?” Benford looked up. “But you made a pretty good case, and you supported it with known physics. The idea that wormholes, if they could be artificially created, could serve as gateways through time as well as through space . . . that was very convincing.”

“Thanks, but I was only reiterating things Hawking and Thorne have said. You’re familiar with their work, of course.” Benford gave a noncommittal nod. “Really, I was just doing the same thing that science fiction writers do . . . throwing out ideas, playing with crazy notions. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I think UFOs are time machines. It’s just . . . well, it’s just something to think about.”

“It certainly got my attention, that’s for sure.” Benford reached for the pepper shaker again. “That’s why I decided to call you. I read your piece on the plane flight over here, and thought it might be a good premise for a novel.”

“Really? I’m flattered.”

“Uh-huh.” Benford shook some more pepper over his salad. “I’ve never written a time-machine story, y’know. I figured this might be a good place to start.”

Murphy said nothing for a moment. Behind them, the schoolchildren were making a ruckus as they moved through the cafeteria line, fighting over slices of pizza while their harried teachers tried to keep them from turning the restaurant upside-down. Gregory Benford continued to poke at his salad. For the first time during their conversation, it seemed to Murphy as if he was consciously avoiding his gaze.

“Will you excuse me a moment?” he asked.

“Sure.” Benford barely looked up from his plate. “Not a problem.”

Murphy forced a smile as he pushed back his chair and rose from the table. He looked around for a moment until he found the signs indicating the way to the rest rooms. Trying not to walk too fast, he left the cafeteria.

As he hoped, there was a pay phone on the wall between the men’s and ladies’ rooms. Picking up the receiver, he shoved a quarter into the slot, then dialed the number for NASA’s main switchboard from memory. “Jan Zimmermann, please,” he said once the operator answered, and glanced at a nearby ceiling clock. It was almost a quarter to one; he hoped that Jan was still brown-bagging her lunch at her desk.

A short pause, then the phone buzzed twice. It was picked up on the third ring. “Policy and Plans, Janice Zimmermann.”

“Jan, it’s David Murphy. How’ya doing?”

The voice brightened. “Dave! I read your article in Analog this month! Great stuff!”

Murphy smiled despite himself. Although she held a low-level position, Jan Zimmermann was one of NASA’s true believers, those who worked for the agency because they fervently supported the idea of space exploration. But more importantly, or at least at this particular moment, she was a science fiction fan.

“Thanks, I appreciate it.” Murphy glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, I’m in a little bit of a rush here, but . . .”

“What can I do for you, hon? Did you get my email about the next Disclave?”

A longtime member of the Washington Science Fiction Society, Jan was deeply involved in running the annual SF convention held in Maryland. As head of programming, Jan had been bugging him to be a guest speaker for several years now. He had always turned her down, if only because the thought of sitting on a panel made him uneasy, but now that invitation might work in his favor . . .

“Sure did,” he said. “In fact, that’s sort of why I’m calling. I’d like to show up this year, but I’m sort of thinking that I’d like to do a panel with Gregory Benford, if he’s going to be there.”

“Well, I dunno . . .” Jan sounded reluctant. “He was a Disclave guest several years ago, but he hasn’t been back since . . .”

“Do you have his number?” Murphy asked, seeing his opening. “I’ve been in touch with him recently . . . I mean, he sent me a letter just a little while ago. . . and maybe I could talk him into coming out here for the next convention.”

“Really? That would be fantastic! Hold on a sec . . .” There was a short pause, during which Murphy heard a vague rustling in the background; he imagined her searching through the perpetual mess on her desk for an address book. He reached into his shirt pocket, found a Bic pen. After a few moments, her voice came back: “Okay, here it is. It’s his office number . . .”

Cradling the receiver against his shoulder, Murphy scribbled down the number on the back of his left hand, then repeated it back to Jan to make sure he had copied it correctly. “Thanks, dear,” he said. “I’ve really got to run. I’ll get back to you.”

Hoping he wasn’t being rude, he hung up, then pulled his wallet from his back pocket. After locating his ATT card, he carefully dialed the number Jan had given him, charging it to his home phone.

Somewhere on the other side of the continent, a phone began to ring. Once, twice, three times . . . Murphy glanced at the clock. It was nearly ten to one; in California, it would be almost ten o’clock. It shouldn’t be too early to . . .

The phone was picked up on the fourth ring.

“Hello?” a familiar voice said.

Murphy felt something tickle the nape of his neck.

“Ahh . . . Dr. Gregory Benford, please.”

“Speaking.”

“Greg Benford?” Murphy flattened the receiver against his ear. “Is this Gregory Benford, the writer?”

“Ahh . . . well, yes, it is, May I ask who’s calling?”

The very same voice. From over three thousand miles away.

“I’m . . . I’m . . .” Murphy felt a hot rush through his face. “I’m sorry, sir, but. . . sorry, I think there’s been a mistake.”

“What? I don’t . . .”

Murphy slammed down the phone, his mind racing as he sought to understand what was happening.

He had just met someone who looked exactly like Gregory Benford, who sounded just like Gregory Benford, but who was not only ignorant of one of the most common mathematical denominators in theoretical physics, but had also forgotten that he had coauthored a best-selling novel with another physicist, David Brin. Sure, all this might be explained by travel fatigue. Yet Gregory Benford would never be amnesiac of the fact that he had written Timescape, a novel which was not only regarded as one of his best-known works, and a Nebula Award winner as well . . .

But also a time-machine story.

Yet the Greg Benford with whom he had just shared lunch claimed never to have written a time-machine story.

And now, however briefly, Murphy had spoken with a Gregory Benford whose voice was absolutely identical, yet who was in his office on the other side of the country.

“Son of a . . .!” Murphy slammed his fist against the phone, then turned and stalked back down the hall toward the restaurant. Whoever this guy was, he had just played him like a yo-yo. It was a good impersonation, to be sure. For a little while there, the impostor had actually convinced him that he was the real deal. But just wait until . . .

Murphy stopped at the cafeteria entrance.

Their table was vacant. The chair where the impostor had been seated had been pushed back. Only their cafeteria trays remained in place. Children ran back and forth through the restaurant, but his lunch companion was nowhere to be seen.

Murphy stared at the table, then dashed to the nearby stairwell. Catching himself against the railing, he peered down. Far below, he saw the top of Apollo lunar module, but nothing else. No one was on the stairs.

What the hell was going on here?

Mon, Oct 15, 2314—1427Z

Like a scarab caught within a web of electrical lines and mooring cables, the Oberon floated in spacedock, its silver hull reflecting the raw sunlight that steamed through the bay doors. Hardsuited space workers moved around the timeship, their tethers uncoiling behind them as they inspected the vehicle’s negmass grid and wormhole generators. Standing in an observation cupola overlooking the spherical hangar, Franc watched the activity while he waited for the gangway to mate with the vessel. A foreman at a nearby console studied his screens as he gently coaxed the joystick that maneuvered the gangway into position; when its boxlike airlock was firmly nestled against the Oberon, he locked it into place and glanced over his shoulder at Franc.

“All right, Dr. Lu, you can go through now. Vasili’s waiting for you aboard.”

“Danke shön.” He was still practicing his German; the foreman gave him a baffled look in return. Franc slipped his feet from the stirrups on the floor, then pushed himself toward a nearby hatch. It parted in the center with a soft hiss, and he ducked his head as he entered an accordion-walled tunnel. The gangway was cold, its handholds frigid to the touch; regretting that he had neglected to put on a sweater before coming down here, he moved quickly down the long passageway.

At the end of the tunnel, he reached up and pressed a couple of recessed buttons on the ceiling. A panel flashed from red to green, then the gangway hatch rolled open, revealing the timeship’s outer hatch. Much to his irritation, it was still shut. “I’m here, Vasili,” he murmured, tapping his headset mike. “You can let me in anytime you’re ready.”

There was no reply, but a few moments later the hatch irised open. A young man floating upside down within the airlock peered down at him. “Sorry, Franc,” he said, giving him a embarrassed grin as he extended a hand. “We didn’t hear you coming.”

Vasili had doubtless known that he was on his way over; he was just subtly reminding Franc who was in the charge of the timeship, if not the expedition. “Not a problem, Tom.” He grasped Hoffman’s hand and allowed himself to be pulled up into the narrow compartment. “Everything on schedule?”

“We’re finishing the checklist now.” Hoffman backed away and nearly banged the back of his head against an open service port in the ceiling. He carefully shut it, mindful not to loosen the color-coded ribbons tied around the snakelike conduits that dangled from within. “Got a few more things to do, but we’ll be out of here on time.”

Franc nodded as he glanced around the compartment. While in spacedock, the timeship’s artificial gravity was neutralized; since its floors and ceilings lacked handrails and foot restraints, slender nylon ropes had been temporarily laid throughout the vessel’s four major compartments. He noted that the timeship’s EVA suit was barely fastened to the wall; someone had used it recently and hadn’t stowed it properly. “Good to hear,” he said, reaching over to cinch its straps a little more tightly. “Hey, nice haircut.”

“Like it?” The last time Franc had seen Hoffman, he was still sporting a scalplock. The braid was gone now, replaced by an early-twentieth-century hairstyle: sides and back trimmed close, slightly longer on top, neatly parted on the left. “I got it from a picture of Charles Lindbergh,” he said, running a hand through the bristles on the nape of his neck. “Think I’ll pass?”

“Sure. You look fine.” This expedition was going to be Hoffman’s first, and he was understandably self-conscious about his appearance. “Don’t worry about it,” Franc added. “So long as you keep a low profile, nobody’ll notice. Is Vasili in the control room?”

“He’s waiting for you.” Then he dropped his voice. “What’s going on? I hear you and Lea had a meeting with Sanchez.”

“Just the usual. Nothing to be concerned about.” Franc didn’t like lying to a member of his team, but he didn’t want to make Hoffman any more nervous than he already was. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a library fiche. “Here,” he said, handing the wafer to the mission specialist, “do me a favor and load this into the pedestal. Historical appendices for the twentieth century.”

“No problem.” Pulling himself along a rope, Hoffman floated through the open hatch into the narrow passageway. Franc fell in behind him and waited until Hoffman entered the monitor room at the far end of the corridor before he entered the open hatch on the right.

Oberon’s control room was a wedge-shaped compartment, its longest wall dominated by a horseshoe-shaped console. Some of the screens displayed diagrams and rapidly changing text, while others showed only test patterns. Service panels gaped open on the floor and ceiling, exposing densely packed nanocircuitry and bundled wiring. Through the single rectangular porthole above the console, he saw a space worker hovering just outside.

Vasili Metz was seated in the pilot’s seat, his head and shoulders thrust beneath the console. “Hello, Dr. Lu,” he said, not looking up. “You’ve seen Sanchez, I take it.”

“We met with him a couple of hours ago.” Pushing himself over to the chair, Franc grasped the seatback and let his feet dangle in the air. “He told us about the Miranda. They say they spotted an angel.”

“Yep. That’s what I’ve heard from Brech.” Beneath the console, Metz’s penlight moved back and forth. “It was only for a couple of seconds, but Hans mentioned it in his reports, and I’ve spoken with him about it. Did Paolo give you my recommendation?”

“Yes, he did. We discussed it for a while, and decided to proceed with the C120-37.”

Metz said nothing. Franc waited patiently until the pilot finally backed out from beneath the console and sat up straight in his chair. “You know,” he said at last, “I should be surprised, but I’m not. Figures you’d ignore this.”

“I’m not ignoring anything. I’m just refusing to be deterred by something we can’t explain.”

“I can’t explain them either.” Metz clicked off the penlight, shoved it in the breast pocket of his jumpsuit. “I just know that they show up when something’s about to go wrong.”

Franc knew all about angels. They had been spotted during two previous CRC expeditions: luminescent, vaguely man-shaped apparitions that suddenly appeared in the close vicinity of timeships, then winked out of sight just as quickly as they had appeared. Each time, only CRC historians or pilots had seen them; they never appeared when locals were present. Although no one knew what they were, several theories had been advanced to explain the sightings, the most popular being that they themselves were chrononauts, yet from farther up the timestream. They had never directly interfered with an expedition or caused any historical disturbances, but timeship pilots in particular regarded them as harbingers of misfortune. This fear wasn’t entirely unwarranted; the first time an angel had been spotted, it was during the C119-64, when a historian had been lost during the Battle of Gettysburg, and the second sighting was during the C220-63, when two researchers had been inadvertently photographed by contemporary bystanders in Dealy Plaza during the Kennedy assassination.

“But nothing went wrong during the C314-65, did it?” Franc asked. “The Miranda came home safely, right? No mishaps, no paradoxes?” Metz reluctantly nodded. “Then don’t worry about it. Whatever these things are, it’s nothing we should worry about.”

Metz seemed unconvinced. “I still don’t like it. It’s a bad omen . . .”

“We can always find another pilot, if it makes you that nervous.”

Franc tried not to sound too hopeful, but Metz shook his head. “No time to train another pilot. Miranda launches at 1800 hours, and Oberon follows at 0600 tomorrow.” He glanced toward the passageway. “Speaking of which, where’s Lea?”

“Up at Artifacts Division, making sure our outfits are ready.” Franc gazed around the control room. “Is this tub going to be flightworthy by tomorrow morning?”

“Routine maintenance. I always tear Oberon apart before we make a trip.” He scowled as he pulled an electric screwdriver from his tool belt. “And don’t call my ship a tub,” he added. “She’ll get us there and back, so treat her with a little respect.”

“Right. Sorry.” One more reason he didn’t much care for Metz: he got along better with machines than people. Franc released the seatback, turned toward the door. “All right, then. I’ll see you at 0500 for the prelaunch briefing.”

“I’ll be there.” Metz was already crawling back underneath the console. Franc heard the thin whine of a screwdriver as he loosened another panel. He waited another moment to see if the pilot had anything more to say, but apparently their discussion had come to an end.

Monday, January 14, 1998: 12:55 P.M.

Murphy almost collided with a pair of nuns as he flung open the glass front doors of the Air and Space Museum and dashed out onto the broad plaza.

The nuns glared at him as he trotted down the stairs to the sidewalk. He stopped to look first one way, then the next. A couple of teachers sneaking a smoke near the line of yellow school buses idling at the curb, a hot-dog vendor chatting with a police officer next to his pushcart, a homeless man rummaging through a garbage can. The fake Gregory Benford, though, was nowhere in sight.

There was no way he could have disappeared so quickly. He must still be nearby. Neglecting to button his parka, Murphy walked quickly past the school buses, then left the sidewalk and jogged across Independence Avenue to the Mall. Frozen grass below the thin blanket of fresh snow crunched beneath his boots as he jogged down the greenway, his eyes darting back and forth as he searched the faces of pedestrians strolling past the Smithsonian.

A couple of hundred feet away, he spotted a red M-sign: Smithsonian Station, the nearest Metro stop. He must have gone there. Lungs burning with each breath of cold, dry air, Murphy ran past snow-covered park benches and bare trees until he reached the subway station. Ignoring the slow-moving escalator, he bolted down the stairs, taking the steps three at a time.

He halted on the upper concourse, glanced in all directions. There were a dozen or so people in sight, purchasing farecards from the ticket machines or hurrying through the turnstiles to the lower platform, yet of the impostor there was no sign. A train rumbled into the platform below, and for a moment he fumbled in his pocket for a dollar. If he was fast enough, he could still buy a card and catch the next train. Yet common sense told him that there was no way Benford—or rather, the pseudo-Benford, as he now thought of him—could have reached the Metro before he did.

Gasping for air, Murphy sagged against a newspaper machine. He had guessed wrong. Whichever direction the impostor had taken after leaving the museum, it clearly hadn’t been this way.

He waited until he caught his wind, then he stepped onto the escalator and rode it back up to street level. He glanced at his watch: five after one. He could turn around, catch the subway to L’Enfant Plaza, yet there was always the slim chance that he might spot the impostor on the sidewalk. And even if he didn’t, he needed time to think . . .

Why would anyone impersonate a science fiction author just to talk to him? That was the big question, of course, but besides why? there was also how? The impersonation had been nearly perfect; not only had the impostor looked exactly like Gregory Benford, but—judging from the brief conversation Murphy had with the real Benford on the phone—he sounded like him as well. True, a good actor might be able to don a wig, a false beard, and fake glasses. An even more talented actor could mimic someone’s voice . . .

But why go to so much trouble?

Buttoning up his parka against the cold, his head lowered against the wind, Murphy strode down the sidewalk. As he reached the corner and waited for the green Walk light, another thought occurred to him: hadn’t he read somewhere that Gregory Benford had a twin brother?

Yes, he did: James Benford, another physicist, an identical twin who had also written some science fiction, both on his own and in collaboration with his more famous sibling. Could that be the person who . . .?

No. Murphy shook his head as the light changed and he stepped into the street. That didn’t make sense either. For one thing, why would Jim Benford want to impersonate his brother? Perhaps as a practical joke, but what would be the point if the intended victim was a complete stranger? And for another, Jim Benford wouldn’t have made the mistakes that had gradually tipped him off: not knowing thatc was the common variable for the speed of light, for instance, or being unaware that his brother had written a time-machine novel.

He could always call Greg Benford again, once he had returned to the office. Yeah, sure; Murphy could imagine how that conversation would go. Hello, Dr. Benford? You don’t know me, but my name’s David Murphy and I work for NASA Headquarters in Washington, and I just had lunch with someone who looks exactly like you . . . well, yes, I know there’s a lot of guys who kinda look like you, but this guy said he was you, and . . . anyway, can you tell me where your brother is right now, and if he has a weird sense of humor? Right. And if he was Greg Benford, he’d call someone at NASA to say that some wacko named Murphy was asking bizarre questions about him and his brother Jim.

The sky had begun to spit snow again. Glancing up, Murphy could make out the Capitol, obscured behind a milk white haze beyond the Reflecting Pool. He lowered his gaze again, began making his way back up Independence toward the Air and Space. No, better leave the real Gregory Benford out of this. Yet whoever the impostor was, he knew enough about Murphy to know that he would have been impressed enough with Benford’s reputation to meet with him for lunch to discuss . . .

An article in Analog about time travel.

Murphy stopped. That was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it? Forget for a moment whom he had met; it was the subject of their conversation that mattered.

This was the second time today that someone had paid undue attention to a piece he had written.

Despite the warmth of his parka, Murphy felt a chill run down his spine. First, a meeting with a senior NASA administrator, who had expressed concern that Murphy might somehow embarrass the agency by writing about UFOs and time travel, and then requested . . . no, mandated, really . . . that any future articles he wrote be submitted in advance to the Public Affairs Office. Then, less than an hour after that meeting, a phone call from someone pretending to be a noted physicist and author, who in turn wanted to know where he had gained the inspiration to write the same article . . .

How much of a coincidence could that be?

Murphy pulled up the parka’s hood and tucked his hands deep in its pockets. For some reason, his article had attracted someone’s attention. Yet all he had done was taken a few available facts, tied them to possible explanations, and come up with a plausible scenario, however unlikely it might be. Yet his piece hadn’t appeared in Nature or in the science section of the New York Times, but in a science fiction magazine. Hardly a venue guaranteed to gain a lot of attention.

Only . . . hadn’t this sort of thing happened once before?

Yes, it had. Back in 1944, at the height of World War II, when a writer . . . who was it again? Digging at his memory, Murphy absently snapped his fingers. Heinlein? Asimov? Maybe Hal Clement or Jack Williamson . . .?

No. Now he remembered. It was Cleve Cartmell, a writer almost completely forgotten today were it not for one particular story he had written for Astounding.

Titled “Deadline,” it was otherwise negligible save for one important detail: in it, Cartmell accurately described an atomic weapon, one which used U-235 as its reactive mass. He even went so far as to say that two such bombs, if dropped on enemy cities, could end the fictional war depicted in his story. An innocuous novelette in the back of a pulp SF magazine, yet within a few days of its publication in Astounding, its editor, John W. Campbell, Jr., was visited at his New York office by a military intelligence officer, who inquired who Cartmell was and how he might have come by his information. Yet Cartmell hadn’t worked for the Manhattan Project; his bomb was strictly the product of his imagination, his sources no more classified than textbooks found in any well-stocked public library. Nonetheless, he had stumbled upon the closest-kept secret of World War II; little more than eighteen months later, Fat Man and Little Boy were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If this sort of thing had happened before, why couldn’t it happen again?

Murphy found his hands were trembling, but not from the cold.

He glanced over his shoulder, saw someone walking up the sidewalk a couple of dozen feet behind him. He quickened his pace . . . then, on impulse, he crossed the street, putting a little more distance between himself and the man following him. At the end of the block, he turned another corner, taking an unanticipated detour on his route back to the office. When he looked back again, he no longer saw the other pedestrian.

Get a grip, he told himself. You’re jumping at shadows.

What he had written was fantasy. Sure, it possessed a certain air of verisimilitude—a handful of footnotes, some well-turned bits of technobabble—but it had no more basis in reality than the average Star Trek episode. There was no way that UFOs could actually be time machines . . .

Could they?

Suddenly, it seemed as if the city itself was watching him, the windows of the government office buildings peering down at him like great, unblinking eyes.

He began to walk a little faster.

Tues, Oct 16, 2314—0550Z

“Thank you, Traffic. Oberon ready for departure.” Metz tapped the lobe of his headset, then glanced over his shoulder at Franc. “If you want to take your seat . . .”

“Thanks, but I’d like to watch.” Holding on to the back of Vasili’s chair, Franc gazed through the control room porthole. “If you don’t mind, that is.”

Metz seemed ready to object, then he shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just as long as you and your people are strapped down in ten minutes, you can watch all you want.” He turned back to his console. “Traffic, take us out, please.”

A pair of spiderlike tugs began moving away from the timeship. The slender cables they dragged behind them uncoiled and became taut, then there was an almost imperceptible jolt as they began to haul Oberon out of spacedock. Spotlights passed across the timeship’s hull as it was slowly pulled toward the hangar door; off to one side, Franc caught a glimpse of a tiny figure in a hardsuit, holding a pair of luminescent wands above his head. The Oberon was on full internal power, of course, and capable of leaving spacedock without the assistance, yet for safety reasons it was customary not to activate the negmass drive until the vessel was clear of the station.

There really should be a band playing, Franc mused. Back in the early twentieth century, when a ship left port on a long voyage, it was a ceremonial occasion. A brass band performing “God Save the Queen,” colored ribbons tossed from the decks, the bellow of foghorns, cheering crowds gathered on the wharf. Now, there were only images flashing across flatscreens, the faint murmur of voices over the comlink. Logical, perfect, and utterly without soul.

The hangar door disappeared behind them; now they saw the blue-green expanse of Earth’s horizon. “All right, we’re clear.” Metz leaned forward against his straps, began tapping commands into the keypad. “T-minus six minutes to warp. Dr. Lu . . .”

“You don’t have to remind me.” Yet he lingered for another moment, observing the tugs as they detached their lines and peeled away to either side. In the far distance, above the limb of the earth, he caught a glimpse of a tiny spacecraft: a chase-ship positioned to observe Oberon’s passage into chronospace. “You’re sure you’ve got the right coordinates?”

Wrong question. “You want to go back and have the AI rechecked?” Vasili murmured, gesturing to the dense columns of algorithms scrolling down the screens on either side of him. “We can always scrub the launch, if you’re not . . .”

“Sorry. Didn’t meant to insult you.” He pushed himself toward the hatch. “Tell us when you’re ready.”

“I always do. Just make sure your people are strapped in.”

Franc left the flight deck, floated across the passageway to the passenger compartment. As he expected, Lea and Tom were already in their couches, the seats turned so that they could see the broad flatscreen on the far wall. Lea looked up as Franc pulled himself along the ceiling rungs to the middle couch. “Everything set?” she asked.

“Uh-huh. All we have to do is wait.” He pushed himself into the vacant couch, then reached for the lap and shoulder straps. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that Hoffman was anxiously watching the status panel next to the screen, his hands gripping the armrests of his couch so tightly that his knuckles were white. “Hey, Tom,” he said softly, “don’t damage the upholstery.”

“Sorry.” Hoffman managed a nervous smile. “First time.”

“Relax.” Franc gave him an easy grin as he cinched his straps tight. “It’ll be over so quick, you’ll barely know it happened.”

If the transition into chronospace went well, of course. There was no sense in reminding Hoffman of what would happen if something went wrong. The smallest, most seemingly insignificant miscalculation by Oberon’s AI and the wormhole would collapse in upon itself, forming a quantum singularity which would instantly destroy the timeship. If that happened, they’d find out what it was like to be stretched into spaghetti just before they were obliterated. Such catastrophic accidents had never occurred, or at least not to a timeship carrying a human crew, yet everyone in the CRC was aware of the fate suffered by primates aboard test vehicles during the late 2200s.

Now he was spooking himself. Deliberately casting the thought from his mind, Franc turned his attention to the wall screen. It displayed a rear-view projection behind the Oberon; propelled by its negmass drive, the timeship was quickly moving away from Chronos, and now the space station was a small toy receding in the distance. Farther away, a small band of bright stars moved above the limb of the Earth: orbital colonies, solar-power satellites, other spacecraft. Even now, Chronos traffic controllers would be closely monitoring Oberon’s flight path, making sure that the sixty-kilometer sphere of space surrounding the timeship was clear of any other vehicles.

“T-minus one minute.” Metz’s voice in his headset was terse. “Wormhole generators coming online.”

He felt Lea’s hand stray to his lap. He glanced at her, caught the look in her eyes. She wasn’t saying anything in front of Tom, but she was nearly as anxious as he was. Franc briefly clasped her hand, gave her a comforting smile. She nodded briefly, then returned her gaze to the status panel. Displayed on a smaller screen was a wire model of Earth’s gravity well. Oberon was coasting along a steep incline deep within the well; it was here, using the planet’s natural perturbation of spacetime, that the timeship’s wormhole generators would soon open a tiny orifice in the quantum foam.

“Thirty seconds and counting,” Metz said.

Franc closed his eyes, forced himself to relax. Imagine a pinhole in a sheet of tightly stretched rubber, he told himself. You push your finger against the pinhole, and it grows a little larger, dilating outward. You exert a little more pressure, and now the hole expands, large enough for you to stick your finger through. Yet you don’t stop there; you keep pushing, and now you can insert your hand . . . now your arm . . . now your entire body . . .

“Ten seconds,” Metz said.

He opened his eyes, saw the planet rushing toward him. The timeship was hurtling toward Earth’s atmosphere. If it remained on this course for four or five more minutes, the timeship would soon begin entering the ionosphere, and Metz would have to correct its angle of descent to prevent burn-up. The status panel, though, told a different tale: the timeship was rushing down an invisible funnel, the event horizon of the wormholeOberon was beginning to form around itself. Push a finger against a pinhole, and keep pushing until . . .

“Five . . . four . . . three . . .”

“Oh, God . . .” Hoffman whispered.

“Shut your eyes,” Franc said, just before he did so himself.

“Two . . . one . . .”

In the next instant, it felt as if reality itself had become that imaginary rubber sheet, stretched to an infinite length, longer than the entire galaxy, longer than the universe itself . . .

Then abruptly snapped.

He slammed back into his couch, so hard that he felt the vertebrae at the base of his neck pop, and at the same instant he heard a distant scream—Tom, or maybe it was Lea—as everything seemed to shake at once. There was a harsh, high-pitched whine that came from everywhere yet nowhere; he smelled something acrid and sickly-sour, and then . . .

“All right,” Metz said, “you can relax now. We’re through.”

Franc opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was a globular, semiliquid mass floating in midair next to his couch. Mystified, he raised a hand and reached out to touch it . . . then recoiled when he realized what it was. He carefully turned his head to the right, saw Hoffman wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

Tom caught Franc’s scowl, winced with embarrassment. “Sorry . . .”

“Never mind. Happens now and then.” And now you understand why we warned you not to eat breakfast, he silently added, but there was no sense in pointing that out now. He tried not to smile when Lea ducked away from the globule of vomitus as it floated closer to her. He touched the lobe of his headset. “Vasili, if it’s not too much trouble, we could use some gravity in here.”

“Just a moment,” the pilot said. A bar on the status panel shifted from red to green, and a few seconds later he felt the sudden sensation of falling, as if he were in an elevator that had just dropped a few floors. The globule splattered messily on the deck between their couches. It wasn’t pleasant, but at least it was better than having it wandering freely around.

Franc unclasped his lap and shoulder harnesses, rose unsteadily to his feet. At first glance, the image on the wallscreen seemed unchanged, until he looked a little closer and noticed that they were at a higher altitude. The daylight terminator, too, was in a different place; now it ran across the eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean, with nighttime falling on the British Isles and Spain.

“Are we in the right frame?” Tom asked.

“The AI says we’ve hit the correct coordinates,” Metz replied.“May 2, 1937, about 1800 hours GMT. I’d like to get a stellar reading to confirm it, though. Dr. Oschner, can you do that for me, please?”

“I’m on it.” Lea was already out of her couch; shoulders hunched slightly, she staggered to the hatch, opened it, and exited the compartment. In the monitor room, she would be able to access historical star charts from the library and match them against the real-time positions of visible constellations.

Although Hoffman had unbuckled his restraints, the younger man still lay in his couch, his face pale as he stared up at the ceiling. “Are you all right?” Franc asked quietly, and Tom gave him a weak nod. “Good. Take it easy for a minute, but then we’ve got work to do.”

“Yeah . . . okay, sure.” Tom took a deep breath, let out a rattling sigh. “It’s . . . different from the simulator, isn’t it?”

“It’s always different in the simulator.” He swatted Hoffman’s knee. “Cleanup detail is yours. When you’re done with that, you can help Lea and me get ready for insertion.”

Tom nodded again. Franc walked to the hatch, then silently waited another few moments to see if Hoffman could get up without any further coaxing. When Tom finally stirred, he opened the hatch and headed for the control room.

“Hoffman got sick, didn’t he?” Vasili had left his chair; he stood in front of the main engineering panel, running a check on the main systems. “I told Paolo I wanted a more experienced mission specialist for this trip.”

“First time for everyone.” So far as he understood the Oberon’s major control systems, everything looked as it should. “He’s a little shaky, but he’s getting over it. How’s the ship?”

“Fine. Made it through without a problem.” Metz turned away from the engineering panel. “Soon as Lea confirms our position, I’ll raise the Miranda, tell her we’re in position.”

“Okay.” Franc hesitated. “Need any help in here?”

“None, thank you.” Metz shot him a dark look as he returned to his seat. “When I need a copilot, Dr. Lu, I’ll ask for one.”

“Sure.” Rebuffed, Franc stepped away. “Pardon me for asking . . .”

“You’re pardoned.” Metz inched his seat a little closer to the console, began typing commands into the keypad. “If you want to help, you can go see what’s taking Lea so long. I should have received those readings five minutes ago.”

There were a few choice words Franc had for the pilot, but he resisted the urge to voice them. Indeed, there wasn’t much point in saying anything. Leaving Metz to his work, he turned and left the control room. Once in the passageway, he took a few moments to slowly count to ten, then turned and headed for the monitor room.

The screen dominating the far wall of the monitor room displayed a stellar chart, overlaid across a real-time view of the starscape outside the timeship. Lea stood before the pedestal in the center of the compartment; although her hands rested upon its touch pad, she seemed to be intently listening to something through her headset. She didn’t notice Franc’s presence until he touched her shoulder, and even then she barely looked up at him.

“Metz wants to know . . .”

“We’re here,” she said, distractedly nodding toward the wallscreen. “We’re where we’re supposed to be. Hold on a sec . . .” Lea impatiently ran her fingers across the touch pad, relaying the data to Metz’s console. “You’ve got to hear this.”

The compartment was suddenly filled with a strident, somewhat high-pitched male voice. Apparently coming from a ground-based radio source, it was distorted by static. The language was clearly German, though, and the voice steadily rose with intensity.

“I don’t have a clear fix, but it seems to originating from Berlin. I’ll feed it through the interpreter.” Lea tapped another command into the pedestal, and the screen changed to display upward-scrolling bars of text:

I, too, am a child of the people. I do not trace my line from any castle. I come from the workshop. Neither was I a general. I was simply a solider as were millions of others. It is something wonderful that amongst us an unknown from an army of millions of the German people—of workers and soldiers—could rise to be head of the Reich and nation.

“You know who that is?” she whispered. “You know who we were listening to?”

Franc slowly nodded. Almost 377 years in the past, he was hearing the voice of one of the worst figures ever to emerge from human history.

Somewhere down there, speaking into a radio microphone, was the hate-filled monster known as Adolf Hitler.

Monday, January 14, 1998: 5:06 P.M.

It wasn’t until he heard people in the corridor that Murphy realized that the workday had come to an end. Raising his head from the paperwork in which he had deliberately absorbed himself, he watched as a couple of secretaries marched past the half-open door of his office, pulling on their overcoats as they chatted about a Billy Joel concert they were attending later that evening. Outside the window, night had fallen without his noticing.

Murphy slipped some files into his briefcase, then straightened his desk and switched off the computer. He exchanged his loafers for snow boots, then stood up and gathered his parka. All the while, his gaze kept falling on the phone. For the past several hours, as much as he had tried to distract himself, he had kept expecting it to ring. Yet it never did, not even once, until the prolonged silence became unnerving.

“Cut it out,” he said to himself, under his breath. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Oh, yeah? a small voice in the back of his mind asked. Then why are you scared to go home?

No. He wasn’t scared to go home. It was leaving the office that bothered him. For the dozenth time this afternoon, he considered calling Donna and asking her to drive into the city to pick him up at the office. Perhaps he could sweeten the deal by suggesting that they go out to dinner. But that would mean she would have to battle rush-hour traffic on the Beltway, and she was undoubtedly already making dinner, and Steven wouldn’t get his homework done, and . . .

Nuts. He was taking public transportation, wasn’t he? There would be dozens of subway riders around him at all times. He’d never be alone for a minute. And what was he expecting anyway? A couple of guys in trench coats? That was like something from a Robert Ludlum novel. The pseudo-Benford? Okay, if he saw him again, he’d find a pay phone and call the cops. Or maybe the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America . . .

Murphy chuckled as he switched off the lights. No, there was nothing to worry about. He was just spooking himself. Hell, for all he knew, this might be an elaborate practical joke someone was playing on him. Whatever it was, he’d get it straightened out eventually . . .

The snow had continued to fall all afternoon, leaving the sidewalks covered with a layer of fresh white powder, the wind whisking it past streetlights and passing automobiles, giving it the appearance of fairy dust. A yellow snowplow grumbled up E Street, its blade grinding against icy asphalt as it shoved the drifts out of the way. Burying his face within his scarf, Murphy fell in with office workers trudging their way toward L’Enfant Plaza; he paused at the top of the subway escalator to buy the late edition of the Washington Times, then descended into the welcome warmth of the Metro station.

Murphy had become spoiled by having a reserved space in the NASA garage. In all the years he had lived in the D.C. area, he had seldom ridden the subway to and from work, preferring to use it on the weekends as a means of taking Steven to ball games at Kennedy Stadium or for Sunday shopping trips at Eastern Market. So the ride to the Virginia ’burbs took longer than he expected; the train was packed, with every seat taken and people standing in the aisles, gamely clinging to posts and ceiling rails as the car gently swayed back and forth. It was too crowded to open his newspaper, so after glancing at the headlines—the Times, in its usual self-righteous indignation, was making the most of the Paula Jones scandal—he tucked it beneath his briefcase and stared straight ahead, silently observing everyone while making eye contact with no one, the customary behavior of straphangers everywhere.

As the train emerged from beneath the Potomac, the crowd began to gradually thin out with each stop. Pentagon, Pentagon City, Crystal City, National Airport, Braddock Road, King Street . . . as the stations went by in turn, a few more people got on while even more got off, until by the time the Yellow Line reached Eisenhower Avenue there was no one left standing and there were empty seats here and there. When the old pensioner who had shared his seat got off at Eisenhower, Murphy was finally able to open his newspaper, yet he didn’t bother to do so. The next stop was Huntington, where he had parked his car this morning. Why bother to read when he was getting off soon?

Fatigued, idly hoping that Donna had fixed meat loaf and mashed potatoes for dinner and that Steven wasn’t going to be too demanding tonight, he absently gazed around the half-empty train. Across the aisle, a businessman read a John Grisham thriller. A little farther away, a couple of Latino teenagers in hooded sweatshirts muttered to each other in Spanish, loudly laughing every now and then. A middle-aged black woman stared listlessly out the window. A pretty girl with long red hair flowing from beneath her black beret caught his eye; she was easy to look at, and he found himself studying her until she noticed him. She regarded him coolly, her hard eyes challenging his intrusion, and he quickly glanced away, self-consciously shifting his attention to the window beside him.

Murphy might not have noticed the old man sitting in the rear of the train, had he not looked at the window at just that moment. Captured in its dark reflection, three rows back on the other side of the aisle, was a tall, gaunt man. Long brown hair turning gray, white beard covering his face, he wore an Army-surplus parka, its collar zipped up to his neck, a blue Mets baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Another one of Washington’s countless derelicts, easily ignored until they try to beg change from you . . .

Yet, in the instant Murphy spotted him, the bum was staring straight at him. Watching him.

Murphy instinctively glanced away. Then, uneasily, he turned his eyes toward the window once more. The man in the back of the train was still watching him, apparently unaware that he himself was being surreptitiously observed.

No, it wasn’t the pseudo-Benford; this guy was a bit shorter, his build less solid. A complete stranger . . . and yet, in some unfathomable way, his face seemed vaguely familiar. If you shaved off the beard, perhaps gave him a haircut . . .

The train lurched, began to slow down. Streetlights swept into view, distorting the window reflection. They were coming into the next station. “Huntington,” the recorded voice said from the ceiling speakers. “Doors opening on the right.”

The businessman put away his paperback, picked up his briefcase. The black lady sighed wearily, shifted her feet as if getting ready to stand. The Latino kids sullenly watched Murphy as he nervously moved his briefcase into his lap. The reflection disappeared behind the jaundiced glare of sodium-vapor streetlights as the train rushed into the elevated station. Through the window, Murphy could see a dozen or so people waiting on the platform, but no sign of a transit cop.

Faking a sudden cough, Murphy raised a hand to his mouth, then stole a glance behind him. The old man hastily looked away, yet he had one foot already in the aisle. Yes, he was planning to get off here.

For an instant, Murphy had an impulse to stay seated. Yet this was where he had parked his car. Unless he wanted to ride the Metro all the way to the end of the line, then buy another farecard and double back again, he had to get off here.

It’s only some wino, he told himself. Some poor homeless bastard. Maybe a little crazy. Likes to watch people on the train, that’s all . . .

The train trundled to a stop. The businessman and the black lady stood up, moved toward the door. Murphy hesitated a moment longer, then as the doors slid open, he quickly rose from his seat, rushed down the aisle. The black lady stared at him in mute surprise as he pushed past her, and the businessman muttered an obscenity at his back when their shoulders briefly collided. Then he was off the train, walking as fast as he could for the platform exit.

At the top of the stairs, he stopped briefly to peer over his shoulder. He couldn’t see the bum, yet the crowd was so dense, it was impossible to tell for certain. Holding on to the handrail, Murphy turned and began jogging down the stairs.

Just beyond the turnstiles, past the gated steel-mesh fence, lay the parking lot.

Sonntag, Mai 2, 1937—2147 CET

At first the city could not be seen, its environs hidden by a dense blanket of rain-swollen clouds, then the Oberon penetrated the overcast and suddenly Frankfurt appeared as a sprawl of urban light, its luminescence divided into unequal halves by the serpentine trail of the River Main. The infrared scopes picked out the most prominent landmarks: the high Gothic spire of St. Batholomäus Dom, the banks and office buildings of the central financial district, the immense shell of the Hauptbahnhof train station.

“Over there.” Standing next to Metz in the control room, Franc pointed to a small, irregular blotch of darkness just northwest of the Cityring, the narrow greenway that surrounded the oldest part of the city. “Near the Alte Oper . . . see it? That’s the Rothschild estate. Put us down there.”

The pilot peered at the screen. “No way. Too small, and way too close.” He pointed to a larger park several kilometers farther away, at the edge of the city just north of the Goethe-Universität. “I’d rather set down there. Less chance of being spotted.”

“That’s the botanical garden. You know how far we’d have to hike to get from there to the Frankfurter Hof?” Franc shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. So long as we’re in chameleon mode, no one’s going to see us. The streets are nearly vacant this time of night.”

“So you take a long walk.” Metz remained unconvinced. “An old man like you needs the exercise.”

Franc scowled. He was still getting used to his changed appearance. Now the apparent age of sixty, he had thinning gray hair and a slight paunch around the middle, along with an unaccustomed set of wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Although his nanoskin disguise wasn’t uncomfortable—it was his own epidermis, after all, reshaped at the microscopic level to provide a living mask—the period outfit he wore was nearly unbearable: a stiff black tuxedo with archaic tails over a cotton dress shirt and white tie. The sort of thing a gentleman would wear to the Sunday night opera in a European city. For all intents and purposes, he now resembled John Pannes, the American businessman whose place he would soon take aboard the Hindenburg.

“The farther we have to walk, the more likely we are to get into trouble. Just put us down there, all right?”

“Well, but . . .” Metz shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

“Good.” Despite his anxiety, he found himself eager to leave the Oberon. He was getting tired of quarreling with the pilot. “Give us about ten minutes. I’ll go check on Lea.”

He left the flight deck, walked down the passageway to the monitor room. The hatch was shut; he slid it open, and was immediately greeted by an outraged scream:.

“Franc! Knock first, for God’s sake!”

“Entschuldigen,” he murmured, grinning despite himself. Lea had apparently just emerged from the replication cell. The cylinder rested on one side of the compartment, steam rising from its open hood. “Didn’t mean to intrude.”

“Sorry. I just don’t . . . like the way I look, that’s all.”

No wonder Lea was embarrassed; although he had seen her nude many times, as the forty-five-year-old Emma Pannes she looked completely different. The replication cell had added about ten kilos of artificial flesh to her body, giving her larger breasts, broader hips, a little more roundness to her tummy and thighs. Emma Pannes wasn’t an unpleasant-looking woman, but she certainly didn’t possess Lea’s svelte figure.

“You better get used to this,” he added as he gallantly turned his back. “We’re an old married couple from Long Island, remember?”

“Never mind.” Behind him, he heard the rustle of fabric as she began to get dressed. “Have we made contact with the Miranda?”

“Vasili spoke with Hans about ten minutes ago.” Although Franc kept his back to her, from the corner of his eye he could see her figure half-reflected on the wallscreen, like a ghost superimposed above the nightscape of Frankfurt-Am-Main. “The advance team picked up the Pannes about an hour and half ago, shortly after they left the Frankfurter Hof on their way to the opera. They were alone, and nobody saw them. They’re at the safe house in Griesheim, and Hans will pick them up outside town tomorrow night after the Hindenburg departs from the aerodrome.”

“And our bags?”

“They’re on the way right now. Oh, and one more thing . . .” He reached to the high collar of his shirt, pressed his thumb and forefingers against his throat to activate the subcutaneous mimics implanted within his vocal cords. When he spoke again, his voice was gravelly and lower-pitched, with a distinct American accent. “We’ve received the voice patterns from the extraction team,” he said, and watched when she jerked her head in surprise. “I’ve already downloaded mine from the AI. Remember to get yours.”

“I won’t forget.” She let out her breath with relief. If one of the most risky parts of the mission had been the extrication of John and Emma Pannes from the city, then successfully obtaining their vocal patterns had been one of the most delicate. “So where’s Vasili going to put us down?”

“He wanted to put us down in the Botanischer Garten, but I held out for the Rothschild estate.” When the German members of the Rothschild family fled the country earlier this year, the grounds of their Frankfurt home had been claimed by the Nazi government; already it had been turned into a public park. “It’s much smaller, but we shouldn’t have any trouble.”

“No radar, and this side of the city isn’t known for its night life.” An irritated sigh. “Button me up, will you? I can’t reach behind me.”

She was wearing an ankle-length white evening gown of the late-1930s style. Artifacts Division had done their usual thorough job of researching contemporary fashions and tailoring authentic replicas, but he hoped that this style was close to what Emma Pannes had worn when she and her husband had left the Frankfurter Hof earlier this evening. Franc buttoned up the back of her dress, and she turned around to face him.

“How do I look?”

“Like my wife.” He couldn’t help but grin.

“Give up.” But she smiled when she said that, and it was a testament of the effectiveness of her nanosurgical treatment that her cheeks reddened slightly. “Get through this, and I might reconsider your proposal.”

“I’ll remember that.” She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Ready?” he asked, and she nodded as she picked up her overcoat. “All right, then . . . let’s go.”

They joined Hoffman in the passenger compartment and watched on the wallscreen as the Oberon fell toward the city. Metz brought the timeship down until it was two thousand meters directly above Rothschild Park, then paused to sweep the area with its infrared scopes. It was a drizzly Sunday night; as they anticipated, few people were on the streets, and the park was deserted.

Only the gentle stirring of tree limbs signaled the Oberon’s silent descent upon a broad clearing in the park’s center. Its hull now matte black, the timeship was virtually invisible to the naked eye. A few seconds before touchdown, its landing flanges spread open. The negmass drive whisked dead leaves aside as the saucer settled down, then everything was still.

As Hoffman opened the airlock hatch, Franc hastily turned off the interior lights. “Just to be on the safe side,” he murmured before he climbed down the ladder to the ground. He waited until Lea had come down the ladder, then he looked back up at Hoffman. “See you in New Jersey,” he added.

“I’ll be waiting. Good luck.” Hoffman gave him a quick thumbs-up, then the hatch irised shut.

Franc took Lea’s arm as they trotted away from the timeship. Once they were clear of the landing site, they turned and watched as the Oberon lifted off. The timeship was little more than an oval shadow as it silently ascended into the overcast sky; for a few moments, they heard the muted hum of its negmass drive, then even that disappeared.

The night was cool, the crisp air redolent of pine and oak, the grass moist with dew. A short distance away, from the top of a low rise, rose an ancient stone tower, a solitary remnant of the battlements that once surrounded the city in medieval times. Beyond the trees bordering the park, lights glimmered within the windows of nearby houses. All was dark and quiet.

“Let’s get out here.” Lea shivered within her coat, pulled it more tightly around her. “This place makes me nervous.”

If he had time, Franc would have lingered here for a little while longer. So much space, so many trees. On the Moon, nature was a luxury deliberately cultivated within subsurface habitats. Here, on Earth at this time, it could be found everywhere, even in the largest of cities. And the night was so full of secrets . . .

Yet Lea was right. The opera would be ending soon. Like the last act of any great drama, timing was everything. “Very well,” he said. His eyes now accustomed to the gloom, he spotted a nearby gravel path. “This way, I think.”

Together, they walked out of the park, at last finding an open gate in the high stone fence surrounding the former estate. Stepping out into the mellow glow of a streetlamp, they found themselves on the sidewalk of the Bockenheimer Antge, across the street from the Alte Oper. The opera house loomed before them as a massive Gothic edifice, a grotesque wedding cake made of marble and white granite. Lights gleamed from within high-arched windows, illuminating the statues on its gabled rooftops and the classical bas-relief on its ornate walls. From somewhere deep within the building, they could hear the muted, melodic rumble of an orchestra reaching its crescendo. Wagner, perhaps . . .

“It’s . . .” Fascinated by the sight of the Alte Oper, Lea searched for the right words. “Beautiful, but in an ugly sort of way.”

“Something like that, yes.” Franc stepped off the curb, then hastily retreated as an automobile’s headlights caught him in their glare. Its horn bleeped a shrill protest, then a sedan swept past them. He caught a glimpse of a woman’s face stoically regarding them from the passenger side, and he quickly looked away.

“Come on,” he murmured, taking her arm again. “We’re beginning to look like tourists.”

Lea smiled at him. “Well, that’s what we are, aren’t we?”

“Perhaps, but this isn’t a good time or place to be a foreigner.” He cautiously looked up and down the street. Now the music had stopped, and he could make out the staccato clatter of applause. “Come on . . . it’s letting out.”

They crossed the Bockenheimer Antge just as the first members of the audience emerged from the Alte Oper’s vaulted entrance. Although a few were plainly dressed, most were decked out in formal evening attire. Franc and Lea melded with the crowd as it spilled out onto the broad plaza in front of the opera house. Deliberately maintaining a casual pace, they sauntered past the central fountain and, ignoring the taxis parked alongside the Oper Platz, headed for the Cityring.

In the Middle Ages, Frankfurt had been surrounded by a broad moat flooded by waters diverted from the Main; within the moat were the walls which further protected the city from invading armies. During the eighteenth century, such fortifications were deemed no longer necessary, so the walls were torn down and the moat was filled. Now Frankfurt’s old city was encircled by a narrow park thick with trees, bordered on either side by motorways.

Arm in arm, Franc and Lea strolled down the cobblestone walkways leading through the center of the mall. The park was dark and densely wooded, its paths illuminated only by the occasional lamp. Every now and then someone quickly walked past, barely acknowledging their presence with a perfunctory nod and the murmured hallo orguten Abend, but otherwise the Cityring was almost completely deserted.

But not quite. As the path turned to the left, they came upon a couple of teenagers sitting on a stone bench beneath an old bronze water fountain, their arms wrapped around one another, their faces buried together. They could have been young lovers from any place and any time, except that the boy wore the brown uniform of Hitler Youth, and beneath her overcoat the girl wore the white blouse, blue skirt, and severe black shoes of the Jungmaedel, the Young Maidens. They looked up in alarm as Franc and Lea approached, then got up and guiltily scurried away, vanishing into the night like criminals.

“ ‘In the fields and on the heath,’ ” Lea murmured as she watched them go, “ ‘I lose Strength Through Joy.’ ”

“What?”

“Nothing. A takeoff on a propaganda song.” She gazed sadly after the young couple, then at the small handful of automobiles passing along the nearby Taunusanlage. “How empty this place is. For a late-spring night, you’d think there would be more people.”

Franc nodded. The silence was unnerving, as if an unofficial curfew had been declared. Above the trees, he could see the top floors of offices, banks, and apartment buildings across the adjacent avenues. Almost all the lights had been extinguished, giving them the appearance of cold stone hulks. There was a forlorn, almost dismal quality to the city, as if all humor and life had been drained from it.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to be here,” he said softly. “We’d better hurry.”

A little more quickly now, they strolled down the path, following the mall as it led them closer toward the city center. Soon the path ended where a street bisected the park. A sign beneath a lamp identified the avenue as the Kaiserstrasse. To the right, a half block down the sidewalk, just past a large statue, lay the Taunusanlage, and across the intersection was the Dresdener Bank.

Franc stopped, looked both ways in confusion. He had studied this area thoroughly, committing historical street maps to memory, yet all of a sudden he found himself disoriented. Memorizing map coordinates was one thing; being in the actual location was another.

“Do you remember which way we turn?” he asked.

Lea raised an eyebrow. “I thought you knew.”

“I thought I did, but . . .” Everything looks different on a map, he started to add, but that would only get her started. Right now, he didn’t need to have her needling him. On impulse, he turned to the right, strode down the sidewalk toward the intersection. He was positive that they were only two or three blocks from the Frankfurter Hof, and that the Kaiserstrasse would take them there . . . but two or three blocks in which direction?

He stopped again at the corner, turned around, looked at the statue. “Goethe,” he murmured as Lea joined him, nodding toward the twice-life-size figure of the German philosopher. “I didn’t read anything about passing this landmark, so maybe we’re . . .”

“Shh!” she suddenly whispered. “Walk the other way, John.”

John? He looked around, saw her beginning to walk away. “Lea, what . . .?”

“Halten!” a voice shouted.“Wohin gehen sie?”

Franc froze. A few steps ahead, Lea did the same. Reluctantly, he slowly turned to face the person she had spotted before Franc had become aware of his presence.

The stocky figure approaching them wore a brown uniform shirt with a red swastika armband, dark brown jodhpurs tucked into knee-high leather jackboots; suspended from his belt was a ceremonial dagger. The short bill of his uniform cap, emblazoned with the Nazi eagle, shadowed a broad, beefy face. Most menacing of all, in his right hand he held a long, black-painted wooden baton, its handle wrapped with strips of leather. The baton’s surface was faintly scarred, as if it had recently seen heavy use.

One of the Sturmabteilung, the so-called brown shirts with whom the Nazi Party had effectively taken control over all of Germany. Street brawlers and thugs from the beer gardens where they had been recruited, they roamed the streets at will, a paramilitary force whose authority superseded that of the local Polizei. This one looked as if he had just come from a nearby tavern; his red tie was loosened and slightly askew, his shirttails wadded around his belt.

“Wohin gehen sie?” he repeated. As he came closer, Franc could smell the schnapps on his breath. He thrust out his hand.“Wo sind sie Urkunde?” he demanded, looking past Franc at Lea as he impatiently snapped his fingers at her.“Geben sie mir Urkunde! Schnell!”

The subcutaneous translator beneath Franc’s left ear interpreted his demands—Where are you going? Where are your documents? Give them to me, quickly!—but there was no point in pretending to be a German native.“Wie bitte,” he said, a little more hesitantly than necessary, pretending not to speak the language as well as he actually did.“Ich sprech kaum Deutsch . . . sphrechen sie Englisch?”

The brown shirt’s eyebrows raised a little.“Amerikaner?” he asked, and smirked with contempt when Franc nodded.“Amerikan Juden?”

“Nein, mein Herr,” Lea said stiffly, then she resorted to English. “We’re not Jews. We’re tourists. We’ve just come from the opera.”

“Ja. Der Oper, ja.” The Nazi regarded them stoically for a few moments, his hand still thrust forward. “I speak some English,” he said at last, slowly and carefully. “Show me your papers, please.”

Franc dug into the pocket of his covercoat, pulled out his American passport and German visa. Lea did the same, but the brown shirt ignored her while he opened Franc’s passport and unfolded his visa. He stared at the passport photo, then held it up against Franc’s face. Franc waited patiently. Both were immaculate forgeries, courtesy of the Artifacts Division; they could easily pass close inspection by German customs officials and Schutzstaffel, let alone the bleary-eyed scrutiny of a drunk barbarian. Yet this oaf was clearly looking for trouble, and Franc was aware that the S.A needed no reason to arrest or detain them; they were foreigners, and therefore deemed worthy of suspicion.

“Wo ist . . .” he started, then belched sourly and began again. “Where are you staying, Herr Pannes?”

“The Frankfurter Hof.” Franc shrugged sheepishly. “I’m afraid we got a little lost. . .”

“Lost?” The brown shirt looked up sharply. “Was be-deutet das?”

“We don’t know where we are,” Franc said. Yes, the Nazi spoke English, but not very much, nor very well. “Can you tell us how to get to the Frankfurter Hof?”

“Ah! Lost. Ja.” He closed John’s passport and visa, but didn’t return them immediately. “It is down the street. A short distance.” He nodded past them, in the direction they had been taking on Kaiserstrasse before he stopped them. “You should be more careful, Herr Pannes. Frankfurt is a large city. Easy to get lost.”

“I understand, yes. Thank you for your assistance.”

The brown shirt nodded, then almost reluctantly he handed back Franc’s papers. “You may go. Auf wiedersehen.”

“Danke schön. Auf wiedersehen.”

“Heil Hitler,” the brown shirt muttered, almost as an afterthought, as he turned around and began staggering back the way he came.

Lea slowly let out her breath. “He didn’t even bother to check my papers,” she murmured, tucking her visa and passport back in her coat. “Not much regard for women, I see.”

Franc shook his head. “He wasn’t interested in you. He only wanted to harass me. Maybe I reminded him of someone he dislikes.” He smiled at her. “Nice move, speaking to him in English. They’re still giving Americans a wide berth, I think.”

“Not for very much longer.”

They continued down Kaiserstrasse, leaving the Cityring behind as they entered a long, narrow stretch of closed storefronts. Here and there, they spotted Nazi posters plastered to walls: recruitment propaganda for Nazi Youth, slogans for Strength Through Joy, heroic pictures of Adolf Hitler gazing down upon happy, industrious German workers. They came upon a tailor shop whose windows had been painted with a Star of David and the word Juden. Lea paused to regard it disdainfully; she was about to say something when Franc spotted someone walking down the opposite side of the street. He prodded her elbow, and she wisely kept her mouth shut as they hurried away.

Two blocks later, the Kaiserstrasse ended in a large plaza, and there they found the Frankfurter Hof. The city’s largest grand hotel, it sprawled across a city block on one side of the Kaiserplatz, its name inscribed above the Romanesque-columned archway between the five-story wings surrounding a central courtyard. Crossing the plaza, Franc and Lea strode through the archway and entered the courtyard; glancing up, he noticed the four carved Titans between the balconies of the fourth-floor rooms, their backs bowed as they held up the roof.

The uniformed doorman bowed gracefully as they walked through the front entrance, then helped Lea remove her coat. Taking off his own overcoat, Franc took a moment to glance around. The lobby was warm after the unseasonable coolness of the night, and it looked much the same as it did from the historical photos he had studied: velvet-upholstered chairs and sofas, with a grand piano in one corner and framed prints of country scenes on the papered walls. If his research was correct, then the registration desk would be through that archway to the left, with the elevators located only a short way from . . .

“Pannes! Hey, John!”

The voice was English-accented, and it came from the direction of the bar at the far end of the lobby. Looking around, Franc spotted several men seated around a low table. One, a ruddy-faced man in his mid-sixties, had raised his arm to gesture to him. “Come over here, man, and have a drink with us.”

“Be right there,” he called back, then he glanced at Lea. She gave him a wary smile; apparently his disguise was working. “I think some of the chaps want to see me,” he said. “Be a good girl, will you, and get our key from the front desk?”

“I’d be delighted to,” she said formally. She understood the protocol; in this age, proper ladies were not invited to share a nightcap with the gentlemen. “I’ll be up in the room.”

“Thank you, dear. I’ll come up soon.” He gave her a good-night kiss, then he folded his coat over his arm and marched across the lobby and up a short flight of polished oak steps to the hotel bar.

The bar was small and dimly lit, serenely masculine in the old European style: glass-fronted bookcases along dark oak-paneled walls, blue leather-backed chairs surrounding low tables, a long bar in front of mirror-backed shelves holding rows of liquor bottles. This time of night, it was nearly empty, save for the handful of men seated around a table beneath a classical painting. The barkeep, a stoical young man wearing a service tuxedo, studied Franc as he washed glasses in the sink behind the counter.

“John. Come over and sit down.” The oldest gentleman at the table, an Englishman about the same age as John Pannes, motioned to a vacant chair. “How was the opera?”

“It was . . . very German,” Franc said drily as he took a seat, and the other men chuckled knowingly. “It’s really much more Emma’s sort of thing. I only went along because she insisted.”

The other man smiled as he reached for a pack of Dun-hills next to his drink. Franc recognized him immediately: George Grant, an assistant manager for the London office of the Hamburg American Line. Since John Pannes worked for the same company, they knew each other as business associates. “I’ve never followed it myself,” he admitted as he shuffled a cigarette from the pack. “By the way, have you met these fellows? They’re sharing our flight with us tomorrow . . . well, most of them, at any rate.”

Two of the others introduced themselves with cordial handshakes. Franc pretended not to know them, although he was all too familiar with them. Edward Douglas, in his late thirties, was an advertising executive from New Jersey. Although it was now a secret, history would later record that, while in Germany doing marketing research on behalf of his company’s chief client, General Motors, Douglas had also been covertly gathering information for the U.S. Navy on German manufacturing capability. Yet the Gestapo had recently become aware of his espionage activities, and now he was fleeing Germany before he could be arrested as a spy. Dolan Curtis, on the other hand, was nothing more nor less than the president of a perfume-importing company in Chicago; like Pannes himself, he had been visiting Germany on business, and now was heading home to America.

The fourth man at the table, though, was an unfamiliar face: prematurely balding, with a trim mustache, his wire-rim glasses framed a pair of inquisitive eyes. As he bent across the table to pick up a briar pipe from the cut-glass ashtray, he offered his right hand to Franc. “Bill Shirer,” he said mildly. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Pannes.”

Franc was barely able to conceal his astonishment. Too late, Shirer noticed the look of recognition on his face. “Bill Shirer?” he said as they shook hands. “Not the columnist William Shirer . . .?”

Douglas laughed out loud as Shirer smiled indifferently. “Bill, you’re becoming famous,” he said, giving the journalist a slap on the knee. “Now even John’s heard of you, and he hardly ever reads the papers.”

“I pick it up on occasion,” Franc said, recovering quickly. Yet in the years to come, William L. Shirer’s reputation would outgrow his present job as a European correspondent for the Universal Press Syndicate. As an eyewitness to the events leading to World War II, he would later write several books about the Nazi regime, including its definitive history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Indeed, Franc had studied that same book while preparing himself for this expedition. Shirer’s presence here, though, was a surprise. “I thought you were based in Berlin, Mr. Shirer.”

“Bill, please.” Shirer settled back in his chair as he lit a match and held it to the bowl of his pipe. “I still am, but I’ve just taken a new job. Radio correspondent for the Columbia Broadcasting System. I’m down here doing a little research for a story.”

“And here I thought you were going to take us up on our offer.” Grant gave Shirer a sly wink. “We can still get you a ticket, if you care to change your mind. The flight’s not even half-booked.”

Franc was about to inquire what they were talking about, but decided to remain quiet. If it involved Hamburg American Lines, then John Pannes would have probably been privy to it. Fortunately, Dolan Curtis raised the question. “George offered you a ticket on the Hindenburg?” he asked, and Shirer nodded as he sucked on his pipe. “Why didn’t you take him up on it?”

“Entschuldigen sie?” Douglas raised his hand, signaling the barkeep.“Konnen sie mir helfen, bitte?”

“I would have liked to,” Shirer said, as the barkeep walked over, carrying his service tray, “but I have to turn it down. My editors didn’t want me to leave Berlin just now.” He shrugged. “I can see their point. A couple years ago, the Hindenburg was major news, but now another flight to New York . . . well. . .”

“Old hat. I suppose you’re right.” Grant turned to the barkeep and pointed to the empty glasses on the table. “Another round for all of us, please.” Apparently the waiter understood English, for he nodded. Grant looked at Franc. “What will you have, John. Your usual?”

Franc had no idea what John Pannes usually drank. “Nothing for me, thank you,” he said, then he turned back to Shirer. “I’m sorry you’re not coming along,” he said, which was only half a lie; although he would have enjoyed the opportunity to spend more time with this soon-to-be-legendary writer, history might have suffered a terrible loss if William Shirer had been aboard the Hindenburg. “So what story are you covering down here?”

Shirer pretended not to hear. Stoking his pipe, he glanced away, as if casually studying the books on the wall. No one else spoke, and for a few moments there was an uncomfortable silence at the table. The barkeep took his time gathering their glasses, then he returned to the bar and busied himself preparing their drinks. When he was gone, Shirer bent over the table. “Sorry about that,” he said quietly. “The walls have ears, you know.”

“He means that you have to be careful these days.” Douglas cast a meaningful glance at the barkeep. “You never know who’s an S.D. informant. And our friend here has been keeping the bar open for us a little longer than usual.”

Franc nodded. The Sicherheitdienst, the internal security directorate allied with the Gestapo, had infiltrated every aspect of daily life in Nazi Germany during this time. At one point, they employed nearly a hundred thousand people to eavesdrop upon their fellow citizens and report any anti-National Socialist activities to the secret police. Nonetheless, Franc couldn’t help but wonder whether Shirer’s visit to Frankfurt had anything to do with his own research.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the Hindenburg, does it?” he asked, keeping his voice low.

Shirer raised a curious eyebrow. “No. I’m just talking to some Catholic clergymen who are disturbed about recent events.” His eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “Why, is there something about the Hindenburg I should know?”

Franc wondered how Shirer would react if he told him, even in private, that the S.S. had heard rumors—and even a letter from an alleged psychic in Milwaukee, sent last month to the German embassy in Washington, D.C.—that a bomb was going to be placed aboard the airship. Yet there was no way he could let the journalist know this. History had to be allowed to take its course.

“No,” he said. “Just a thought.”

Shirer nodded, yet his piercing blue eyes remained locked on Franc through the pale smoke rising from his pipe. Somehow, in those intangible, almost telepathic ways a good journalist develops over years of experience, Shirer knew that John Pannes was lying. And Franc, playing the role of John Pannes, wondered if Shirer would recall this conversation four nights later, when he would be informed that the Hindenburg had mysteriously exploded while landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

But, of course, by then John and Emma Pannes would be dead . . .

There was a clink of glasses from behind them. The barkeep was returning to their table, his tray laden with schnapps, vodka, and bourbon. As he set down the drinks, Franc made a pretense of checking his watch. “Gentlemen, it’s getting a little late for me,” he said. “Emma’s probably wondering where I am by now.” He pushed back his chair, stood up. “If you’ll excuse me . . .”

“By all means.”

“Of course.”

“See you tomorrow, John.”

“A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Pannes.” William Shirer stood, offered his hand once more. “Next time you’re in the country, look me up.”

“I’d be delighted to, Bill,” Franc said, as they shook hands for the last time.

Monday, January 14, 1998: 6:02 P.M.

The parking lot outside the Metro station was well-lighted, yet not bright enough to put Murphy’s mind at ease. Long stretches of darkness lay between the evenly spaced lampposts, and the long ranks of snow-covered automobiles held many shadows.

He had walked about halfway down the center row, glancing over his shoulder now and then to see if he was being followed, before he realized that he couldn’t recall exactly where he had parked his car this morning. Somewhere toward the back of the lot; he had driven down the length of one row, then doubled back and driven all the way up another before he had found an empty space, which he vaguely remembered as being close to the fence. In his haste to catch the next train, though, he hadn’t taken note of the row number; all he had done was lock the door, shove the keys in his pocket, and dash to the platform.

Christ. For a guy with a Ph.D. in astrophysics, sometimes he could be the dumbest guy on the planet. For the first time in several hours, irritation replaced fear. The wind had picked up again, and now it blew glistening sheets of snow off the hoods of the cars parked around him. He pulled the hood of his parka up around his head as he marched through the icy fog, and wished again that he had held out for a NASA job in Alabama or Texas.

Somewhere close behind him, he heard ice being crunched underfoot.

Murphy stopped, then quickly looked around. Only a dozen yards away, someone was walking down the row behind him: a tall figure wearing a parka and a baseball cap, his right hand thrust in his coat pocket.

In that instant, Murphy was sure that it was the homeless man he had seen on the train. He glanced about, but there was no one else in sight. In the far distance, beyond the tops of dozens of cars, he could make out the squat box of the tollbooth. It was at least a hundred feet away, on the other side of a maze of automobiles, but there would be someone in there. A bored lot attendant, no doubt leafing through People magazine and listening to hip-hop on a ghetto-blaster as he warmed his feet next to a space heater. But he would have a phone, and . . .

Then the figure stopped in front of a Nissan Pathfinder, and his hand came out of his pocket. There was a shrillbwoop! bwoop! and the Pathfinder’s headlights flashed. The man walked to his utility vehicle and began dusting a patina of snow off the windshield.

Murphy relaxed. “Idiot,” he muttered as he turned around again. “You’re getting wound up over nothing.”

He reached the end of the row. Okay, he was at the back of the lot, and there was the fence. His wheels had to be somewhere nearby. Turning his face into the wind, he raised his hand against his face to shield his eyes against the blown snow as he trudged down the cross lane. Goddammit, did everyone in Arlington drive a Ford Escort? His old Volvo had once had a Grateful Dead sticker on the rear bumper—it made his car a little easier to identify, or at least until all the yuppies started sporting skull-and-lightning-bolt decals on their BMWs—but now he had something a little more distinctive. If he looked hard enough . . .

And there it was: a five-year-old forest green Escort, blanketed with snow but the white-and-blue sticker on its rear bumper clearly visible in the light cast by the nearby lamppost: I Want To Go—National Space Society 202/593–1900. Perhaps half of the cars in the NASA garage had this same sticker, but here in Huntington park ’n’ ride lot it stood out like a beacon. Murphy grinned, and decided this alone was good reason to renew his NSS membership.

Setting his briefcase down on the hood, he fumbled in his coat pockets until he found his key ring. He unlocked the driver’s side door, pulled it open, then leaned inside and found the long-handled ice scraper he kept beneath the passenger seat. Closing the door once again, he used its brush to clear off the windshield and side windows, then he began chipping at the thin layer of ice frozen to the glass. Yes, it was definitely time to consider moving to Houston. Next year, the shuttles would start sending up the first American modules of the new space station. Maybe he could get transferred to Johnson. They might need a new . . .

A man-shaped shadow fell across the Escort’s hood. Someone else searching for their car? Lost in dreams of Texas, he didn’t look up until he detected a vague motion just behind him.

“Dr. Murphy?”

The voice was old, harsh with age, yet oddly familiar.

Still bent over the car hood, Murphy half turned to see the old man from the train standing next to the Ford’s rear bumper.

His face was shaded by the baseball cap and shrouded by dense gray beard, yet nonetheless it seemed as if Murphy had seen it before. And there was something in his right hand, something that he held like a pistol, but not quite like a gun.

Murphy slowly raised himself from the hood. He lifted the ice scraper, defensively held it in front of him. The old man shifted uneasily; the weapon came up a little more, and now Murphy could see that its barrel formed a blunt, holeless shape. Absurdly, it resembled a Lazer Tag gun, like the ones he had seen at Toys “R” Us.

“Yeah,” he said. “Who are you?”

The old man hesitated. Although Murphy couldn’t clearly see his eyes beneath the bill of his ball cap, they seemed to shift from left to right, as if making sure that they were alone. Murphy was all too aware that they were.

“What do you want?” he demanded. “Why are you following me?”

“I’m sorry,” the stranger murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

He lifted the weapon, pointed it straight at Murphy.

“What . . .?”

The last thing Murphy felt was a white-hot charge of electricity surging through his body. He didn’t have a chance to scream before his body was flung backward into the space between the parked cars.

The old man regarded Murphy for a moment, his steamy breath rising from within his coarse beard. Then he thrust the weapon back into his pocket and, with a final look around, knelt over Murphy and picked up his ankles.

Dragging him through the snow, the stranger dropped him next to the driver’s door; he opened it, then hoisted Murphy by the shoulders and shoved him into the car. After setting him upright in the passenger seat, the old man searched Murphy’s pockets until he located his key ring and wallet. He retrieved Murphy’s briefcase from the hood of his car; after throwing it into the rear seat, he climbed into the Ford, settling behind the wheel before he shut the door behind him.

It took only a few seconds for him to locate the lot ticket; it was tucked into the pocket of the sun visor. He pulled a twenty-dollar bill from Murphy’s wallet and clenched it between his teeth, then he inserted the Ford key into the ignition. The cold engine clunked a little as it turned over, but start it did.

The old man smiled, checked Murphy again to make sure that he looked as if he was only dozing in the passenger seat, then he carefully backed out of the space.

Montag, Mai 3, 1937—1935 CET

It had rained all day in southern Germany, yet the rain had lapsed into a light drizzle by the time the buses carrying the Hindenburg passengers from the Frankfurter Hof arrived at the aerodrome on the other side of the Main. Their luggage had been freighted out to the aerodrome earlier that afternoon, but not before every bag, suitcase, steamer trunk, and shipping crate had been opened and thoroughly searched in the hotel lobby by uniformed Gestapo officers. The few passengers who came to the airfield from other locations also had their baggage opened and searched. As a routine precaution taken before every zeppelin flight, every matchbox and cigarette lighter was confiscated from the passengers, yet few were aware that the Gestapo were going through the baggage not in search of contraband, but for the explosive devices.

Finally, the passengers were allowed to leave the waiting room within the enormous hangar. The airship had already been towed out onto the field, and a uniformed band stood nearby, performing German folk ballads on brass instruments. As Franc and Lea strolled out of the hangar, a steward fell into step next to Lea to hold an umbrella over her head. Franc was just as happy the same courtesy was not afforded him; he wanted to look at the airship without something obscuring his vision.

He had studied the Hindenburg for nearly a year, was as familiar with every detail as its own crew; if asked, he could have recited its vital statistics from memory. Yet studying archival blueprints, photographs, and film clips was one thing; seeing the LZ-129 for himself was quite another. It loomed above them as a massive silver ellipse, as large as any interplanetary spacecraft that had ever been built in the lunar shipyards, so huge that, walking toward its bow, he couldn’t see its broad stabilizers at the stern. He stopped for a moment, not only to allow the nanorecorders concealed within the buttons of his overcoat to capture the image, but to drink in the sight himself.

“Magnificent,” he murmured. “Absolutely incredible . . .”

“Come along, John.” Lea stopped next to him; the steward patiently halted beside her, still carrying the umbrella. “You’ve seen this before,” she added, with just the right tartness in her voice. “It’s nothing new.”

She was right. John Pannes would be jaded by the sight of German airships; this wasn’t the first time he had boarded the Hindenburg. He shouldn’t be gawking at it now. “Of course, dear,” he said, reluctantly lowering his gaze. “I just can never get over it, that’s all.”

“Neither can I, Herr Pannes.” The steward might have only been being polite, but Franc sensed that he was also genuinely proud of his ship. “If you’ll come this way, please . . .”

As they walked toward the gangway stairs, the band began playing the “Horst Wessel Lied.” A contingent of Hitler Youth emerged from behind the hangar and began goose-stepping in formation toward the airship, their leader carrying the Nazi flag. Seeing this, Franc was suddenly glad to be leaving Germany. Glancing over his shoulder, he noted the carefully guarded expressions on the faces of many of the other passengers. Although the owners of the Zeppelin Corporation were trying to keep the Nazi Party at arm’s length—Hugo Eckener, its president, was profoundly opposed to the National Socialists to the point of refusing to christen the LZ-129 in Hitler’s honor—the Hindenburg had nonetheless been constructed with Nazi funds. Indeed, the Hindenburg, along with its smaller sister ship, the Graf Zeppelin, had already been used to drop Nazi leaflets on crowds during rallies in Nuremburg and Berlin. Conceived and built for less loathsome purposes, the Hindenburg had nonetheless become a major symbol of Nazi power.

Which was the very reason why the nascent German resistance movement had sought to place a bomb aboard. For all their ruthless authority, the Gestapo had been helpless to prevent this. The bomb was already concealed next to a gas bag in the airship’s aft section, just beneath the swastika painted on its upper vertical stabilizer. And three days from now, it would detonate, killing thirty-seven passengers and crew . . .

Franc felt something clutch his stomach. For an instant he had the urge to walk away from the Hindenburg as fast as he could. Lea must have noticed the look on his face, for she peered at him closely. “Something wrong, dear?” she murmured.

“Just a touch of indigestion.” This wasn’t a good time to contemplate history. “I’ll be better once we reach our cabin.”

They joined the line of passengers making their way up the gangways folded down from the airship’s belly. Franc didn’t allow himself another moment of hesitancy; he followed Lea up the stairs. They passed B Deck, which contained the crew quarters and galley, and emerged on the landing of A Deck, where another steward met them just in front of the bronze bust of Marshal von Hindenburg.

“Herr Pannes, Frau Pannes, welcome aboard.” He turned to lead them down a narrow corridor running amidships along the keel. “You’re in Cabin 12. This way, please . . .”

Their cabin was surprisingly small: a pair of double-decker bunks, a compact aluminum desk and a miniature sink which folded down from the bulkhead, a little closet in which their baggage had already been stowed. Somehow, Franc had expected something a little more spacious; the Oberon’s passenger compartment was larger than this. The steward showed them where everything was, told them that the lavatories were located below them on B Deck, and sternly reminded them that rauchen wasverboten outside the smoking room. Then he wished them a good flight, and left them in privacy.

Franc climbed the aluminum ladder to the upper bunk, sat down on its thin mattress, patted its handkerchief-size pillow. When he tried to sit up straight, his head touched the ceiling. He looked down at Lea and grinned. “I think we’re going to have to invent some new positions,” he said.

“Think of something else.” She gave him a brief scowl as she opened the cabin door. “They’re going to raise ship anytime now. I don’t want to miss this.”

The promenade on A Deck was crowded by the time they got there. A steward handed them glasses of champagne, then they found a vacant place near the starboard windows. On the ground below, they could see men holding on to the taut mooring cables. Twilight was beginning to set over the airfield; the rain had stopped, and rays of green-hued sunlight were slanting down through the heavy clouds.

The band struck up“Deutschland Uber Alles,” and after seemingly endless recitals of its refrain, the ground crew released the cables, then rushed forward to push away the control car. And then—slowly, ever so ponderously—theHindenburg began to rise from the airfield.

Franc put his right arm around Lea’s waist. After a moment, she nestled her head against his shoulder. “We’re on our way,” she said softly, as they watched Germany fall below them. “Next stop, New Jersey.”

He nodded, then ducked his head to give her a kiss on the cheek. “The next stop is history,” he whispered in her ear.

He didn’t mean his remark to be ominous, yet she took it as such. He knew she did, for he felt her tremble.

PART 2

“. . . WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD.”

Thursday, January 15, 1998: 11:12 P.M.

When the Center Hill Lake affair was over, after all the reports were filed with the appropriate agencies and various subcommittees had held closed-door hearings, when everyone with proper clearance had been reassured that the situation, although not completely resolved, at least was no longer critical . . . only then, looking back on the course of events, did Murphy come to realize that it really started the night before, in the Bullfinch on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Bullfinch was a venerable Capitol Hill watering hole, located about three blocks from the Rayburn Building in one direction and within walking distance of one of Washington’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods in the other. It was a favorite lunch spot for congressional aides and journalists who invaded it during happy hour, but by evening it became the after-hours hangout of federal employees from a dozen different departments and agencies. Coming off twelve-hour workdays, their shirts stained with sweat, their guts full of junk food, they emerged from Commerce and Agriculture and Justice and made their way to the Bullfinch for a few rounds with the boys before stumbling to Capitol South station to catch the next Metro out to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

Thursday was beer night for the Office of Paranormal Sciences. Murphy skipped these bull sessions more often than not, preferring to spend his evenings at home in Arlington with his wife and son. Donna was still mourning her mother’s death just before Christmas, though, and Steve seemed to be more interested these days in Magic cards than his father, so when Harry Cummisky tapped on his door shortly after eight and asked if he wanted to grab a couple of brewskis with the boys, Murphy decided to go along. It had been a long time since he had given himself a break; if he came home an hour late with Budweiser on his breath, then so be it. Donna would burrow into her side of the bed anyway, and Steven wouldn’t care so long as Dad took him to the comics shop on Saturday.

So he shut down the computer, locked up his office, and joined Harry and Kent Morris on a five-block trudge through sleet and slush to the Bullfinch. They were the last of the OPS regulars to arrive; several tables had already been pushed together in the back room, and an overworked waitress had already set the group up with pitchers of beer and bowls of popcorn. Although everyone was mildly surprised to see him, they quickly made room at the table. Murphy was aware of his button-down rep; he loosened his tie, admonished a wide-eyed Yale intern to stop addressing him as Sir and call him Zack instead, and poured the first of what he initially promised himself would be only two beers. A couple of drinks with the gang, a few laughs, then he would head home.

But that was not to be. It was a cold, damp night, and he was in a warm, dry bar. Gas flames hissed beneath fake logs in the nearby hearth, and firelight reflected off the panes of framed sports photos on the wood-paneled walls. Conversation was light, ranging from next week’s Super Bowl to current movies to the latest Hill gossip. The waitress’s name was Cindy, and although she wore an engagement ring she seemed to enjoy flirting with the OPS guys. Every time his mug was half-empty, Kent or Harry or someone else would quickly top it off. After his second trip to the john, Zack stepped into a phone booth and called home to tell Donna not to wait up for him. No, he wasn’t drunk; just a little tired, that’s all. No, he wouldn’t drive; he’d leave his car in the garage and take a cab. Yes, dear. No, dear. I love you, too. Sweet dreams, good night. And then he sailed back to the table, where Orson was regaling Cindy with the joke about the Texas senator, the prostitute, and the longhorn steer.

Before he realized it, the hour was late and the barroom was half-empty. One by one, the chairs had been vacated as the boys polished off their drinks, shrugged into their parkas and overcoats, and moseyed back out into the clammy night. Where there had once been nearly a dozen, now there were only three—Kent, Harry, and himself—teetering on that uncertain precipice between insobriety and inarticulate stupor. Cindy had long since ceased being amused and was now merely disgusted; she cleared away the empty mugs, delivered a pitcher that she firmly told them would be their last, and asked who needed a cab. Murphy managed to tell her that, yes ma’am, a cab would be a mighty fine idea, thank you very much, before he returned to the discussion at hand. Which, coincidentally enough, happened to be time travel.

Perhaps it wasn’t so odd. Although time travel was a subject usually addressed in the more obscure books on theoretical physics, OPS people were acutely interested in the bizarre; they had to be, for that was the nature of their business. So it didn’t seem strange that Murphy would find himself discussing something like this with Kent and Harry; it was late, they were drunk, and that was all there was to it.

“So imagine . . .” Harry belched into his fist. “ ‘S’cuse me, sorry . . . well, imagine if time travel was possible. I mean, le’s say it’s possible to go past to the past, y’know . . .”

“You can’t do it,” Kent said flatly.

“Sure, sure, I know.” Harry waved his hand back and forth. “I know it can’t be done, I know that, okay? But le’s jus’ pretend . . .”

“You can’t do it, I’m tellin’ ya. It can’t be done. I’ve read the same books, too, y’know, and I’m tellin’ ya it’s impossible. Nobody can do it. Nobody has the technology . . .”

“I’m not talkin’ ’boutnow, dammit. I’m talkin’ ’bout sometime in the future. Couple’a hundred thousand years from now, thass what I’m . . . that’s what I’m tryin’ to get at, y’know.”

“Somebody from the future, coming back here for a visit. That it?” Murphy had read a lot of science fiction when he was a kid, and time travel was a big subject in those stories. He even had a few beat-up old Ace Doubles stashed away in his attic, although he’d never admit that to these guys. Science fiction wasn’t well respected at OPS, unless it was The X-Files.

“Thass it.” Harry nodded vigorously. “Thass what I’m talkin’ bout. Somebody from the future comin’ back here for a visit.”

“Can’t be done,” Kent insisted. “Not in a hundred million years.”

“Yeah, well, maybe not,” Murphy said, “but just for the sake of argument, okay. Le’s pretend someone from the future . . .”

“Not just someone.” Harry reached for the half-empty pitcher, sloshed some more beer into his mug. “A lotta someones . . . a lot of people, comin’ back from the. . . y’know, the future.”

“Yeah, right, okay.” Kent eyed the pitcher with avarice; as soon as Harry put it down, he picked it up and poured much of the rest into his own mug, leaving a half inch at the bottom of the pitcher. “Simon sez le’s pretend. So where are they?”

“Tha’s it. Tha’s the’ point. Tha’s what summa the phizachists . . . phizzakists . . .”

“Physicists,” Murphy said. “What I am. I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I . . .”

Harry ignored him. “If you can go back in time in the future, come back to here. . .” He jabbed a finger against the table. “. . . then where are they? That’s what one of the Brits . . . the guy in the wheelchair, whassisname. . .”

“Hawking.”

“Right, Hawking. Anyway, that’s what he says . . . if time travel is possible, then where’re the time travellers?”

“Yeah, but didn’t somebody say that about aliens?” Kent raised an eyebrow; for an instant, he almost looked sober again. “That other guy . . . whatchamacallit, the Italian, Fermi . . . once said the same thing about aliens. Luggit what we do now . . . look for aliens!”

Murphy was about to add that, out of all the UFO sightings and abductions he had investigated in ten years with the OPS, he had yet to find one which panned out in terms of hard evidence. He had interviewed dozens of people who claimed to be have been taken aboard extraterrestrial spacecraft, and he’d collected enough out-of-focus photos of disc-shaped objects to fill a file cabinet, yet after a decade of government service, he had never found an alien or an alien spacecraft. He let it pass, though; this was not the time or place to be questioning his agency’s mission or methods, nor were these the people to whom he should be expressing his doubts.

“Not the same thing, man. Not the same thing.” Although there was still some beer left in his mug, Harry reached for the pitcher, but Kent snagged it first. “If’n there was time travellers, they’d sway . . . stay hidden. Nobody would know they were there. They’d do it for their own good. Right?”

Kent barked laughter as he poured the last dregs into his mug. “Yeah, sure. Like we got people from the future all ’round us now . . .”

“Well, shit, wemight.” Harry turned toward some guys seated nearby. “Hey, any of you fuggers from the future?”

They glared at him, but said nothing. Cindy was wiping tables and putting up chairs; she shot them a dark look. It was getting close to last call; she didn’t seem to be happy to have garrulous drunks harassing her last remaining customers. “You wanna cool it?” Kent murmured. “Geez, I didn’t meanta make it a federal case . . .”

“Hey, itis a federal case, man! Thass what we do, izzn’it? I say we bust this place for acceptin’ time travellers withoutta . . . withoutta . . . fuck, I dunno, a green card?”

Harry reached into his suit pocket, pulled out his badge holder with the OPS seal engraved on its leatherette cover, started to push back his chair. That was enough for Murphy; he grabbed Harry’s wrist before he could stand up. “Hey, hey, take it easy . . .”

Harry started to pull his hand free, but Murphy hung on. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Cindy giving the bartender a discreet hand signal; they were about a second away from being thrown out. “Calm down,” he murmured. “Keep this up and we’re going to land in jail.”

Harry glowered at him, and for a moment Murphy wondered if he was going to throw a punch. Then he grinned and dropped back into his chair. The badge folder slipped from his hand and fell onto the table. “Shit, man . . . I was just kidding, thass all. Jus’ makin’ a point, y’know.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” Murphy relaxed, pulled his hand away. “I know. You’re just kidding.”

“Thass right. Y’know an’ I know . . . ain’ no such thing as . . . geez, whatchamacallit . . .”

“I know, I know. We got the point . . .”

And that was it. Murphy hung around long enough to make sure that Harry had a cab ride and that he wouldn’t cause any more trouble, then he pulled on his parka and headed for the door, pausing at the bar to guiltily slip a five-spot into Cindy’s tip glass. The sidewalk was empty; the night frigid and silent. Pale exhaust fumes from the waiting taxi lingered above the curb like pallid ghosts; he climbed in, gave the driver directions to his place in Arlington, then settled back against the duct-taped seat and gazed out the frosted windows as they passed the floodlighted dome of the Capitol Building.

Time travel. Jesus. What a stupid idea.

Thursday, May 6, 1937: 7:04 P.M.

The leviathan descended from the slate gray sky. At first it was a silver ovoid, but as it turned northeast, it gradually expanded in size and shape, taking on the dimensions of a vast pumpkin seed. As the drone of its four diesel engines reached the crowd gathered in the New Jersey meadow, Navy seamen in white caps jogged toward an iron mooring mast positioned in the center of the landing field. Everyone else stared up at the behemoth as it cruised six hundred feet overhead, its great shadow passing across their faces as it began making a sharp turn to the west. Now they could clearly see the swastikas on its vertical stabilizers, the Olympic rings on the fuselage above the passenger windows, and—above its control gondola, just aft of its blunt prow, painted in enormous Gothic letters—the giant’s name.

Within the airship, passengers stood at titled cellon windows on A Deck’s promenade, watching as the Hindenburg made its final approach to Lakehurst Naval Air Station. They were arriving thirteen hours late, because of high headwinds over the Atlantic and an additional delay while a thunderstorm swept out to sea, but few people cared; during the last few hours, they had gazed down upon the spire of the Empire State Building, caused a Dodgers game to grind to a halt as they passed over Ebbets Field, and watched whitecaps breaking on the Jersey shore. Stewards had already carried their baggage to the gangway stairs aft of the staterooms, where it now lay piled beneath the bronze bust of Marshal von Hindenburg. It had been a wonderful trip: three days aboard the world’s largest and most glamorous airship, a flying hotel where mornings began with breakfast in the dining room and evenings ended with brandy and cigars in the smoking room.

Now the voyage was over, though, and everyone wanted to get their feet on the ground again. For the Americans, it was homecoming; in a few minutes, they’d be reunited with family and friends waiting for them at the aerodrome. For the sixty-one crew members, it was the Hindenburg’s seventh flight to the United States, the first this year. For a couple of German Jews, it was escape from the harsh regime that had taken control of their native country. For three Luftwaffe intelligence officers posing as tourists, it was a temporary layover in a decadent nation of mongrels.

For the passengers listed on the manifest as John and Emma Pannes, it was the beginning of the final countdown.

Franc Lu raised a hand from the promenade rail to his spectacles, gently tapped their wire frame as if absently adjusting them. A readout appeared on the inside of the right lens:19:11:31/—13:41(?)

“Thirteen minutes,” he murmured.

Lea Oschner said nothing, but gripped the rail a little harder. Around them, passengers were chatting, laughing, pointing at baffled cows in the pastures far below. The airship’s faint shadow was larger now, and moving closer; according to history, the Hindenburg would drop to 120 meters as it turned eastward again, heading back toward the mooring mast. The passenger decks were soundproof, so they couldn’t hear the engines, but Captain Pruss should now be ordering the engines reduced to idle-ahead; in another minute, they would be reversed to brake the airship for its docking maneuver.

“Relax,” he whispered. “Nothing’s going to happen yet.”

Lea forced a smile, but furtively clasped the back of his hand. Everyone around them was having a wonderful time; it was important that she and Franc appear just as carefree. They were John and Emma Pannes, from Manhasset, Long Island. John Pannes was the passenger manager for Hamburg-American German Lloyd Lines, the company that was the American representative for the Zeppelin airship fleet. Emma Pannes, fifteen years younger than her husband, was originally from Illinois. She had followed John’s job from Philadelphia to New York, and now they were returning from another business trip to Germany.

Nice, quiet, middle-aged people who wouldn’t be at all nervous about being aboard the Hindenburg despite the fact that thirteen . . . no, make that twelve . . . minutes from now, they were destined to die.

Yet John and Emma Pannes wouldn’t perish in the coming inferno. In fact, they were very much alive, well, and living somewhere in the twenty-fourth century. The CRC advance team had quietly abducted them while they were walking from their hotel to the opera on the evening of May 2, 1937, and delivered them safely to its safe house outside Frankfurt; by now they should have been picked up by the Miranda and transported to A .D. 2314. Franc hoped that the real John Pannes wouldn’t object too strongly to being kidnapped; given the alternative, though, he rather doubted that he would, once the facts were explained to him and his wife.

Now Franc was a sixty-year-old American businessman, and Lea was forty-five instead of twenty-nine. Their appearance had been altered so convincingly that, two nights earlier, they were able to share a table in the salon with the Pannes’ old friend, Ernst Lehmann, the dirigible captain who was aboard the Hindenburg to observe Captain Pruss on his first transatlantic flight. They had dinner with Lehmann without the captain noticing any difference, yet they carefully remained aloof during most of the trip, preferring to stay in their cabin. The less interaction they had with the passengers and crew, the less chance of them inadvertently influencing history.

There had been a close moment yesterday, though, when they’d joined a tour of the ship.

The tour was necessary. John and Emma had toured the airship, so they had to follow the course of history. Yet, more importantly, it gave the researchers an opportunity to fulfill the primary objective of their mission: delivering an eyewitness account of the Hindenburg’s last voyage, and documenting the reason why the LZ-129 had been destroyed. So while the passengers marched single file along the keel catwalk, gaping at the vast hydrogen cells within the giant duraluminum rings, Franc and Lea paused now and then to stick adhesive divots, each no larger than the rivets they resembled, to girders and conduits. They had artfully scattered the divots everywhere aboard the airship; the divots transmitted sights and sounds to the recorders concealed within Franc’s cigarette case and Lea’s makeup compact, both of which had evaded discovery by the Gestapo agents who inspected everything carried aboard the Hindenburg by its passengers before they left the Frankfurter Hof the morning of the flight. Of course, the Nazis had been searching for a bomb, not for surveillance equipment so microscopic that it could be hidden within commonplace items of the early twentieth century.

The incident occurred when the tour reached the airship’s stern, just below the place where the bomb was carefully sewn into the canvas liner beneath Cell Number 4. Kurt Ruediger, the ship’s doctor who was conducting the tour, had paused to point out the landing-gear well in the lower vertical stabilizer when they heard footfalls descending a ladder above them. A few seconds later, a rigger appeared from the darkness, stepping off the ladder to head forward toward the nose.

When he came into the half-light cast by the electric lamps strung along the catwalk, Franc and Lea recognized him at once: Eric Spehl, whom history would cast as the man who had planted the bomb that would destroy the Hindenburg. He didn’t look much like a saboteur, although he was within sight of the tiny package he had hidden in the gas cell while the ship was hangared at Friedrichshafen. Indeed, he seemed little more than an overworked rigger: a tall, blond man in drab cotton coveralls and rubber-soled shoes. As the passengers stepped aside to let him pass, though, Lea hesitated on the narrow catwalk. The necklace around her throat held a nanocam; this was her only chance to record Spehl’s image.

The heel of her left shoe caught on the aluminum-mesh floor, though, and she tripped and staggered backward, her hands blindly groping for the railing. The airship’s taut canvas skin lay only thirty feet below the catwalk; past that was a three-hundred-meter plummet into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. Franc reached out to catch her, but Spehl was closer. He grabbed her by the shoulders and steadied her, then he smiled politely and said something about being careful, Fraulein. Then he turned and walked away.

A small occurrence, over and done within a few seconds, yet the significance of such incidents had long been a matter of debate within the Chronospace Research Centre. Some researchers argued that worldlines were so rigid that even the slightest disturbance could have vast ramifications; look what had almost happened when the CRC placed someone in a parking lot behind a high fence near Dealy Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Others contended that chronospace was more flexible than anyone believed; minor accidents were allowable during expeditions because history was already in motion. It didn’t matter how many butterflies one crushed underfoot during the Pleistocene; the dinosaurs would die anyway.

Nonetheless, once Franc and Lea returned to their cabin, they had quietly fretted over whether the incident would cause a paradox. Yet history apparently hadn’t been disturbed. Monitoring the airship from their cabin the following morning, as the Hindenburg approached the American coast, they watched as Spehl walked down the keel catwalk, furtively looked either way, then climbed the ladder to Cell Number 4. The divot Franc placed at the bottom of the ladder couldn’t make him out in the visible spectrum, but his thermographic image showed him clinging to the ladder beneath the cell as he set the photographer’s timer that would send an electric current from two dry-cell batteries into a small phosphorous charge.

At 7:25 P.M. local, plus an indeterminate number of seconds, 203,760 cubic meters of hydrogen would be ignited. Thirty-seven seconds later, the Hindenburg would hit the ground as 241 tons of flaming mass.

Now the mighty airship was slowing down. Through the promenade windows, they saw the crackerbox shape of the hangar, the skeletal mooring mast surrounded by tiny figures in white caps. Franc tapped his glasses again:19:17:31/–08.29(?) In a few seconds, the aft water ballast tanks would be released, the bowlines dropped.

It wasn’t the next eight minutes that bothered him, though; it was the thirty-seven-plus seconds that would follow the explosion. He and Lea had had little trouble getting aboard the Hindenburg. Now they had to see if they could get off again.

Thursday, May 5, 1937: 7:21 P.M.

One of the most interesting things about the early 20th century, Vasili Metz concluded, was the way Earth looked from space.

It wasn’t just the relative smallness of its cities, or the clarity of the skies above them, or the subtle differences of the coastlines. It was surprising to see New York City when its skyline was new and not half-submerged, but even that was to be expected. This was his third mission as the Oberon’s pilot, and he had become accustomed to such changes. What struck him as unreal was the emptiness of near-Earth space. No powersats, no colonies, no shuttles. Chronos Station was nowhere to be seen. There wasn’t even any space debris; the first satellite wouldn’t be launched for forty years, and another thirty years would pass before free-falling junk would pose a navigational hazard.

On the other hand, it would be another ten years before anyone ever reported having seen a flying saucer. And it would remain that way if he had any say in the matter.

For the past three days, after a brief visit to Earth to drop off Lu and Oschner within Frankfurt, then a suborbital jaunt to deposit Tom Hoffman in New Jersey, Metz had held station in geosynchronous orbit above the Garden State. Except for when he monitored the Miranda ’s departure, when it opened the wormhole that would send the support team, plus two nice people named John and Emma Pannes, back to Chronos Station, he had been almost alone.

Three hours earlier, Oberon had descended to a new orbit 289 kilometers above New Jersey, and Metz had suddenly become quite busy. Maintaining the proper balance between the timeship’s negmass drive and Earth’s gravity, while simultaneously compensating for the planet’s rotation, was difficult enough; he also had to remain in contact with Hoffman. With no comsats available to assist them, and Tom unable to throw up a transceiver dish, they had to relay on old-fashioned ELF bands that wouldn’t likely be intercepted by ham radio operators of this period.

“Oberon, this is Lakehurst Base.” Hoffman’s voice came over Metz’s headset. “Do you copy? Over.”

Metz prodded his throat mike. “We copy, Lakehurst. What’s the mission status?”

“Status good. Hindenburg’s at the tower. Water ballast down, bowlines have just been dropped. Holding steady at about ninety-one meters. Event minus three minutes, sixteen seconds, and counting.”

Hoffman was trying to remain professionally detached, but Metz could hear the excitement in his voice. Nor could he blame him; the mission specialist was about to witness one of the classic technodisasters of this century, one which would put an end to commercial airship travel for the next nine decades. It was probably all Tom could do to remain seated within the automobile he had rented a couple of days earlier; however, it wouldn’t do for him to be seen lugging a comlink case around the aerodrome.

“Copy that, Lakehurst.” A flatscreen below the porthole displayed a false-color radar image of the Hindenburg floating above Lakehurst Naval Air Station. The dirigible was a light blue bullet-shaped blip surrounded by hundreds of tiny white gnats. Above the image was the mission timer:5.07.37/19.22.05/E—02.45(?). “Holding station, ready for pickup on your mark.”

“Very good, Oberon. I’m about . . .” The rest was lost in a wave of static. Metz’s hands moved across his console, correcting the timeship’s position; the static cleared and Hoffman’s voice came back:”. . . is huge. You wouldn’t believe how big it is. Almost the size of an asteroid freighter. It’s . . .”

“Keep your mind on the job.”

“The motor’s running. I’m ready to go.” Another pause. “Can you believe people actually used these things to get around? They smell awful.”

“I know. Stay focused.” Metz glanced at the mission chronometer again. Two minutes, eleven seconds and counting, plus or minus a few seconds given the inexactness of contemporary records. Those few seconds were going to be the tricky part of this operation.

“All right, Franc,” he murmured. “Don’t screw up now.”

Thursday, May 6, 1937: 7:23 P.M.

An odd stillness had fallen over the airfield. The light drizzle had let up for a moment as dull gray clouds parted here and there, allowing sunlight to lance down upon the aerodrome and reflect greenish twilight off the Hindenburg’s silver skin. The Navy men had the zeppelin’s mooring lines in their hands; they dug in their heels, playing tug-of-war with the leviathan looming three hundred feet above their heads. On the outskirts of the crowd, a radio newsman from Chicago delivered a breathless report of the airship’s arrival into a portable dictaphone machine.

Glancing around the promenade, Franc realized that he was surrounded by dead people. Fritz Erdmann, the Luftwaffe colonel who had been trying to ferret out a saboteur among his fellow passengers, but failed to notice Eric Spehl; he would soon be crushed by a flaming girder. Hermann Doehner and his lovely teenage daughter Irene, taking a family vacation to America: they were doomed as well. Moritz Feibusch, the sweet man whom the stewards had segregated from other German passengers simply because he was a Jew; he would soon perish. Edward Douglas, the General Motors businessman the Gestapo believed was an American spy, whom Erdmann had dogged during the entire flight; he, too, was living his last minutes.

And so were John and Emma Pannes. At least, this was how history would record their fate.

Although the clothes he and Lea had put on this morning appeared to be made of contemporary wool and cotton, they were woven from flame-resistant fabrics unknown in this century. The handkerchiefs in their pockets, once unfolded and placed over their mouths, contained two-minute supplies of molecular oxygen. They had left nothing in their baggage which had been made in the twenty-fourth century; the divots they had scattered throughout the airship would dissolve when the ambient air temperature reached 96 Celsius. When no one recovered their bodies from the wreckage, it would be presumed that their corpses had been incinerated by the inferno. This wasn’t too far from the mark; some of the bodies recovered from the disaster had only been identifiable by wedding bands or engraved watches.

“Time,” Lea whispered.

Franc prodded his glasses again. “Sixty-five seconds, plus or minus a few.” Then he took off the spectacles and slipped them into a vest pocket. She nodded and returned her hand to the railing.

There was a sudden rush of cool air. A few feet down the promenade, someone had cranked open a window. A woman waved to a man with a bulky motion-picture camera on the ground far below. Ghosts. He was surrounded by ghosts.

In the breast pocket of his jacket, Franc carried the one personal souvenir of this trip he had permitted himself: a folded sheet of paper, engraved with the Hindenburg’s name and picture, upon which were printed the airship’s passenger list. This wasn’t for the CRC; when he got home, he would frame it on the wall of his Tycho City apartment. Lea had nagged him about taking it, until he pointed out that it would be destroyed anyway; he later pretended not to notice when she tucked a teaspoon into the garter belt of her stockings. Little things like that wouldn’t be missed. He just wished he could save the two caged dogs back in the baggage compartment. Dogs were so scarce where they came from, and he hated to think what would happen to them when . . .

Franc took a deep breath. Calm down, calm down. You’re going to get through this. Just don’t lose your head now . . .

They had deliberately placed themselves on the starboard promenade of Deck B, not far from the gangway stairs. Many of the survivors had lived simply because they were here and not on the port promenade of the same deck, where others would be pinned down by dining-room furniture. The original John Pannes died because he left the promenade just before the crash to see about Emma, who had remained in their cabin for unknown reasons. Airsickness? A premonition, perhaps? History hadn’t recorded the exact reasons why the Pannes had died, but he and Lea wouldn’t make the same fatal error.

The airship’s stern would hit the ground first. Although the aluminum grand piano at the far end of the promenade worried them, they had already agreed to rush the gangway as soon as they felt that first, fateful jerk that everyone would initially assume to be a mooring rope snapping. Down the stairs past the Deck A landing, then down another flight of stairs to the passenger hatch . . . by the time they got that far, the airship would be almost on the ground. They shouldn’t have to jump more than four meters.

Thirty-seven seconds. From the instant when the first flame appeared on the upper aft fuselage to the moment the Hindenburg was a flaming skeleton, only thirty-seven seconds would elapse. Time enough to cheat history . . .

Or time enough to lose the bet.

Franc felt Lea slide against him. “If we don’t . . .”

“We will.”

Her head nodded against his shoulder. “But if we don’t . . .”

“Don’t tell me you love me.”

Her laughter was nervous and dry. “Stop flattering yourself.”

He managed to chuckle, and her hand briefly squeezed his arm before it returned to the railing. Franc glanced to his left, saw the dirigible’s shadow gliding closer to the mooring mast. “Hang on . . . any second now . . .”

The airship drifted back, forward, back again. The ground crew fought the wind as they hauled the behemoth toward the iron tripod. The two ground shadows converged, became as one.

Franc clung to the railing, felt it dig into his palms. Okay, okay . . . when is it going to happen?

A sudden, hard jolt ran through the ship.

He grabbed Lea’s shoulders, turned her toward the door heading to the gangway. “Okay, let’s go!” he snapped. “Move, move . . .!”

Lea took a step, then stopped. He slammed into her back.

“Wait a minute . . .” she whispered.

“Move!” He shoved at her. “We don’t have . . .!”

Then he stopped, and listened.

The deck was stable. It wasn’t tilting beneath their feet.

No screams. No shouting. The chairs and tables remained where they were.

Passengers gaped at them with baffled amusement. Edward Douglas chuckled and turned to say something behind his hand to his wife. Moritz Feibusch gave him a look of sympathy. Irene Doehner enjoyed a brief moment of teenage condescension. Colonel Erdmann sneered at him.

Then one of the stewards strolled down the promenade, announcing that the Hindenburg had arrived and that all passengers were to make way to gangway stairs. Please do not forget your baggage. Please proceed directly to American customs.

Franc looked down at Lea. Her face was pale; she trembled against him.

“What went wrong?” she whispered.

Friday, January 16, 1998: 8:12 A.M.

Murphy didn’t hear the phone when it rang; he was in the bathroom, using a styptic pen on the cuts his razor had made against his chin and neck. Lately he had been keeping the razor beneath a little glass pyramid that his wife had given him for Christmas, but it wasn’t preserving the blade’s sharpness the way its brochure claimed it would. Either that, or the brutal hangover he suffered this morning had made him sloppy while shaving.

At any rate, he wasn’t aware that someone was calling for him until Donna knocked on the door. Office, she mouthed silently as she extended the cordless to him, and Murphy winced. He was already running late, thanks to the blinding headache he’d woken up with; there must be some eight o’clock meeting he had forgotten, and someone at OPS had phoned to find out what was keeping him. Donna hadn’t been pleased when he’d come home drunk in a cab, and the prospect of having to give him a lift to the office wasn’t helping her forgive him. She gave him another withering look as he took the phone, then went back to watching the morning horoscope on TV.

“This is Zack.” He tucked the phone under his chin as he reached for the deodorant stick.

“Zack, it’s Roger Ordmann . . .”

The phone almost fell into the sink. Roger Ordmann was the agency’s Chief Administrator. Murphy had spoken with him exactly three times during his tenure at OPS; the first time was when he had been hired, the other two during social occasions. Roger Ordmann was the man the President called when Mary Lincoln’s ghost was seen roaming the second floor of the White House.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Ordmann. Sorry I’m running late, but the car battery died this morning. My wife’s about ready to bring me in, though, so . . .”

“That’s okay, Dr. Murphy. Perfectly understandable. We have a small problem here that we need to discuss.”

The bathroom tiles suddenly felt much colder beneath his bare feet. Oh, God, it’s something to do with last night. Harry got in a fight at the bar and was taken downtown. Or Kent cracked up his car while trying to drive home. The police got involved and his name came out. “A problem, sir?”

“Are you on a secure line?”

A moment of puzzlement. What was Ordmann asking? Then he remembered that he was on a cordless phone. “Umm . . . no, sir. Do you want me to . . .?”

“Please.”

“Just a moment, sir . . .” Murphy fumbled with the phone until he found the Hold button, then he stalked across the house to the little office next to the den. Donna barely glanced up as he shut the door behind him; the TV volume was up, which meant that she shouldn’t be able to hear what he was saying. The forecaster was explaining why this was a good day for Capricorns to renew old friendships, particularly with Scorpios.

Murphy sat down at the desk, picked up the hardwired phone, switched off the cordless. “I’m here, sir. Sorry to . . .”

“Is this a secure line?”

What was this? “I’m on another extension, yes sir, if that’s what you’re asking. I was in the bathroom, speaking on a cordless. Just got out of the . . .” Realizing that he was starting to babble, Murphy stopped himself. “Yes, sir, it’s secure.”

A pause, then: “There’s been a wreck.”

Oh, Jesus! One of the guys did try to drive home drunk! Kent or Harry—probably Harry, he had been the most inebriated—climbed behind the wheel, and then he. . .

Then Murphy remembered with whom he was speaking, and why it might be so important that they’d want to have a phone conversation on a line that couldn’t be casually monitored, and what this particular phrase signified in a different context.

“Yes sir, I understand.” His mind was already racing. “Where did it happen?”

“Tennessee. About sixty miles east of Nashville. About an hour and a half ago.”

“I see . . .” Murphy glanced around the office, trying to spot his road atlas, before he remembered where he had seen it last: in Steven’s room, where he had taken it for a homework assignment. Forget it. “Has anyone . . . I mean, has anyone found the car?”

“We’ve located the vehicle, but no one’s looked inside yet. An ambulance is being sent to check it out. Can you be ready to go in ten minutes?”

Something cold raced up his back. “Ten . . .? Mr. Ordmann, I haven’t even left the . . .”

“We’ve sent a car to pick you up. A plane’s waiting at Dulles, and we’ve got the rest of the team assembled. You’ll be briefed on the way. Can you be ready in ten minutes?”

Murphy was in his robe. His suit was still on the hanger and could probably use a pass with a lint brush; he hadn’t even picked out a tie. But an old Adidas gym bag in his closet had some clean clothes left over from last fall’s hunting trip, and it would only take a moment for him to pack up his laptop. “I’ll be ready.”

“Very good. You’ve got the ball, Dr. Murphy. Don’t drop it.”

“I won’t, sir,” he said, managing for the moment to sound much more confident than he felt. “We’ll be in touch.”

“Good karma,” Ordmann said, then he hung up.

Murphy gently placed the receiver in its cradle, sat back in his chair, and let out his breath. Sometime during the night, a light snow had fallen on Arlington. Through the office window, he could see where it had frosted Donna’s backyard garden and laid a white skein over the swing set Steve no longer used. It looked cold and lonely out there. He wondered if it was any warmer in Tennessee.

He sighed, then stood up and went to tell Donna that he was going away on a business trip.

Thursday, May 5, 1937: 8:00 P.M.

Thirty-five minutes after the Hindenburg docked at Lakehurst Naval Air Station, an explosion in one of the aft gas cells destroyed the airship.

No one was aboard when the fire ripped through the dirigible. All the passengers and crew members had disembarked by then, and even the ground crew managed to dash to safety before the burning airship hit the ground, taking out the mooring mast with it. A newsreel cameraman caught the conflagration on film; it was later remarked how fortunate it had been that the Hindenburg hadn’t exploded while still in the air, or otherwise an untold number of lives might have been lost.

Franc and Lea watched the fire from the safety of Tom’s rented Ford sedan, which he had driven to the outskirts of the aerodrome and pulled over on the shoulder. They had quietly collected their bags and walked down the gangway stairs; a stunned shuffle through customs, where officials stamped the Pannes’ passports and welcomed them back to America, then Hoffman met them just outside the receiving area. He instantly started to ask questions, but they signaled him to stay silent until they were out of earshot of the other passengers.

As they walked out to the car, Franc spotted Eric Spehl, still wearing his flight coveralls, climbing into the back of a checker cab. Unnoticed by either his fellow zeppelin men or the Luftwaffe intelligence officers, the rigger made his getaway. Fifteen minutes later, the bomb went off.

As clanging fire trucks raced down the road toward the inferno, the three of them looked at one another. “Well,” Tom said, “at least we haven’t created a paradox. We’re still here.”

Franc stared at the blazing airship. “The hell we haven’t!”

“We don’t know that yet,” Lea said from the backseat. “There’s been an anomaly. A serious one, to be sure, but it’s still only an anomaly.”

“Some anomaly.” Franc nodded toward the burning ship. “This isn’t like someone in Dallas noticing a couple of our people behind a fence during the Kennedy shooting. That didn’t change the course of history. This . . .”

“Oberon’s still there.” Tom cocked his head toward the uplink case where it lay open next to Lea; she had just used it to contact the timeship. “If this was a paradox, Vasili shouldn’t be up there and we would have disappeared. Right?”

“Define paradox,” Franc said angrily. “Tell me exactly what happens during a spatiotemporal paradox.”

“I don’t . . .”

“Come on, tell me precisely how a spatiotemporal paradox would affect a contemporary worldline . . .”

“Cut it out.” Lea snapped the case shut. “We can figure it out after we get to the rendezvous point.”

So they drove away from Lakehurst, heading southwest down lonely country roads into the cool New Jersey night. Deep within the Pine Barrens, house lights gradually became farther apart until they disappeared altogether. A low fog had settled upon the marshlands; the sedan’s tires beat against frost heaves in the weathered blacktop. Lea moved the case to the floor and lay down in the backseat; she remarked how incredibly large automobiles had been during this period, and Tom responded by observing how much gasoline they consumed in order to move this much mass. Franc, sullen and impatient, switched on the dashboard radio and turned the knob from one end of the dial to another, picking up AM-band stations out of Trenton, Philadelphia, and New York. Ballroom jazz, comedy shows, crime melodramas: he roamed back and forth, searching for something that might explain what had just happened.

Just as they turned off the highway onto a narrow trip of dirt road, a variety show out of New York was interrupted by a news flash. The German airship Hindenburg, which had mysteriously exploded an hour and fifteen minutes ago just after it had arrived in New Jersey, had been destroyed by an act of deliberate sabotage. An unsigned communiqué received by the station only a few minutes earlier stated that an underground organization in Germany was claiming responsibility for the act. The note stated that a bomb had been placed aboard the airship to awaken the world to the atrocities being committed by the Nazi government, and to send a clear signal to the German people that Adolf Hitler could yet be overthrown.

Franc switched off the radio. There was a long silence in the car. “That’s what I define as a paradox,” he said at last.

“We’re still here,” Tom said softly.

“Which only means that we’ve survived our own disturbance.”

“Who says it’s our fault?” Lea was sitting up again. “No one knows why Spehl’s bomb went off when it did. Maybe the timer was faulty, and it was supposed to go off at eight o’clock.”

“Or maybe he went back and reset it,” Tom said.

Franc nodded. “Sure. He ran into Emma Pannes the day before and decided that he didn’t want to sacrifice a beautiful fraulein to the flames.”

“So it’s my fault?” Lea gaped at him. “I can’t believe you . . .!”

“I’m joking.”

“That’s not very funny. I don’t even think you’re . . .”

“Will both of you just shut up?” Tom gripped the wheel more tightly as he strained to make out the primitive road through the fog. “We can’t do anything about it now, so just . . .”

Lea wasn’t through. “Do you think this is funny?”

“No, I don’t. But it’s a possible hypothesis for how . . .”

“Shut up!” Tom yelled. “Goddammit, both of you, just shut up!”

Once again, there was cold and awful silence in the car.

The road finally opened onto a broad clearing where a farmhouse had once stood some ten years before, until it had been destroyed by one of the brushfires that periodically raged through the Pine Barrens. Only a half-collapsed brick chimney remained; the rest was rotted cinders, old cedar stumps, and high grass, damp with rain and age.

Tom stopped the car and switched off the headlights; a chorus of bullfrogs and crickets greeted them when they opened the doors. Lea shivered and drew her overcoat more closely around her as she instinctively stepped closer to Franc. She had been born and raised on the Moon; nature sounds made her nervous. Franc put his arm around her as he stared up at the overcast sky. A westerly breeze was blowing the clouds away, revealing crisp bright stars in the moonless sky.

“You gave Vasili the correct coordinates, didn’t you?” he asked, then saw the expression on her face. “Sorry. Only asking.”

Tom pulled the uplink case out of the backseat, carried it a few feet away, and set it down. He returned to the car, clicked on the dome light, briefly inspected the car’s interior. No, there was nothing here that shouldn’t be left behind; Franc’s and Lea’s bags were stowed in the trunk, and they had all their documents and recording equipment with them. He pulled a small gold box out of his breast pocket, thumbed a recessed switch on the side, carefully placed it on the wheel well in the backseat. Five minutes after they departed, the Hertz company would be mysteriously deprived of one Ford sedan, or at least until some hunter chanced upon its charred wreckage.

When he joined Franc and Lea again, he saw that they were staring up at the sky. Looking up, he saw nothing for a moment. Then a small black shape moved past the Big Dipper, a circular patch slightly darker than the night sky. “Better get out the way,” he murmured. “Grab the case.”

The three of them hurried to the edge of the clearing. When they turned and looked up again, the shape had expanded into a broad opaque spot that grew larger as it blotted out the stars. Metz had the Oberon in chameleon mode; it was now nearly invisible to the naked eye. Even if radar had been in widespread use at this time, the timeship wouldn’t have appeared on any screens; the beams would have been deflected by its fuselage. Only the negmass grid on the craft’s underside could be detected, and that operated in near-total silence. It wasn’t until they heard a low hum and the wet grass of the clearing began to flatten out that they knew the Oberon was at treetop level.

The humming grew louder, then the timeship suddenly appeared just above them. Deliberately designed to resemble a classic sombrero-shaped flying saucer, it could have appeared on the cover of a late-twentieth-century UFO magazine; indeed, it had, for an alien-abduction story debunked by most contemporary experts. Light gleamed from its single porthole as landing gear opened like flower petals from its flat underside between the hemispherical pods of its wormhole generators. Oberon seemed to hesitate for just a moment, then the humming of its negmass drive sharply diminished, and the timeship settled to the ground.

The research team was jogging toward the craft when a hatch above one of the flanges irised open. Metz appeared as a silhouette at the top of the ladder. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “We gotta get out of here! Go, go, go!”

Franc was the first to reach the ladder. “Not so fast,” he said, hoisting the uplink case above his head. “We need to see what’s been done here. There might be something we don’t . . .”

“What, you mean you’re not through yet?” Metz reached down, grabbed the case’s handle, and snatched it out of Franc’s hand. “Maybe we should drop by Washington on the way up, let you assassinate Teddy Roosevelt . . .”

“It’s Franklin, not Teddy . . .”

“Who cares? You’re done.” Metz deposited the case behind him. “I just hope you haven’t screwed things up so much that we can’t get out of here.”

“Dammit, Vasili, it’s not our fault!” Lea’s voice was outraged. “We don’t know what happened, but it’s . . . we didn’t . . .”

“Save it for the Commissioner, Oschner. We’re on our way up.” Metz disappeared from the hatch. “Get aboard or stay behind. We’re out of here in sixty.”

“Vasili, wait!” Franc scrambled up the ladder and pulled himself up through the hatch into Oberon’s airlock. Contrasted with the cool New Jersey night, the wedge-shaped compartment was uncomfortably warm. The helmet of the EVA hardsuit lashed against the bulkhead reflected his face like a fun-house mirror. Franc took a moment to pull Lea the rest of the way up the ladder, then he darted through the inner hatch and followed the pilot down the narrow midships passageway to the control room. “Calm down. We’ve got to talk about . . .”

“There’s nothing to discuss, Doctor.” Metz entered the compartment, dropped into his seat and ran his palms across the console, clearing the timeship’s system for new programming. “And don’t tell me to calm down. Not after this. Now get your people strapped down. We’re lifting.”

“Okay, all right.” Franc raised his hands. “Get us out of here. Take us to orbit. But don’t open a bridge until we’ve assessed the situation and at least tried to determine what caused this in the . . .”

Metz swung around in his chair to jab a finger at Franc. “Look, Dr. Lu, don’t make me give you a remedial lecture in chronospace theory. Causality. Inconsistency paradoxes. The care and feeding of Morris-Thorne bridges. Remember?”

“All I’m saying is, we need to slow down, try to study what . . .”

“Study my ass. I’m making a hole while I can still can.” Metz swung back around, began stabbing at the console. Lights flashed orange, green, blue, and red; screens arrayed around the horseshoe displayed ship status, local topography, orbital maps, projected spacetime vectors. Metz glanced over his shoulder as he pulled on his headset. “Sorry, Franc, but you’re overruled. I’m the pilot, so what I say, goes. I say we make an emergency launch, so we’re going. Now get your team in their seats, because it’s going to be a fast ride to Chronos.”

There was no point in arguing. CRC protocols were strict on this point. Franc was in charge of the expedition’s research team, but timeship pilots had final say over what happened once its members were back aboard ship. And Metz was playing the situation by the book.

Franc turned and stalked out of the control room. When the hatch slid shut behind him, he slammed his fist against it in frustration. “Jerk!” he yelled.

Then he stepped across the passageway to the passenger compartment. Hoffman was already strapped into one of the three acceleration couches. “She’s in the monitor room,” he said before Franc could ask. “I think she’s . . .”

“I’ll get her. Stay put. Vasili wants to get us out of here.” Franc retreated from the hatch and turned toward the last of the timeship’s major compartments, located at the opposite end of the passageway from the ready room. “Lea! Vasili’s . . .!”

“I know. I heard.” Lea had already discarded her costume and had put on a skinsuit. Franc regretted the change; until Lea shed her disguise, the form-fitting bodysuit didn’t flatter her middle-aged appearance. He couldn’t blame her, though; once they got a chance, he would do the same. Sweat made these period clothes feel sticky. She stood at the pedestal in the middle of the compartment, her fingers dashing across its panel as she opened the library subsystem. “Just give me a minute. I want to see if I can access something from the mission recorders.”

“We don’t have a minute. Vasili’s going for an emergency launch.”

“Shut up and give me your cigarette case.” Lea had already hardwired her makeup compact to the pedestal; she held out her palm without looking at him. “Hurry.”

“We don’t have time for this,” he repeated, but he dug into his jacket and pulled out the cigarette case. Lea snatched it from his hand, impatiently shook out the unsmoked cigarettes, and ran a cord from the pedestal to the tiny dataport concealed in the bottom of the case. She tapped her fingers at the pedestal, then glanced up at the wallscreen. A red bar crept across the screen; the library subsystem was downloading everything the divots had collected aboard the Hindenburg.

“All right, we’ve got everything,” she murmured. “Now let’s see what happened in Cell Number Four just before . . .”

“Never mind that now. We’ve got to get strapped down.” Franc grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her away from the pedestal; she managed to grab the recorders before he propelled her through the hatch toward the passenger compartment. He got her inside just before the hatch sphinctered shut.

They were barely in their couches when the timeship begin to rise. Franc glanced at the status panel, and saw that Metz had switched off Oberon’s chameleon and gravity screen in order to divert power to the negmass drive. His lips tightened as he silently swore at the pilot. They were in for a rough ride. . .

Then they were shoved back in their seats as the timeship shot upward into the night. A wallscreen displayed a departure-angle view from beneath the saucer; the lights of the Jersey shore and New York City briefly appeared below them before they were obscured by high cloudbanks, then the Oberon punched through the clouds as it headed for space.

Too much, too fast. Franc clenched the armrests as pressure mounted on his chest. They shouldn’t be doing it this way. His vision was blurred, but he could make out Lea from the corner of his eye; she looked just as angry as he felt. Damn it, she was right. They still didn’t understand what had happened down there. He started to raise a leaden hand, then remembered that he had neglected to put on a headset. He couldn’t talk to Metz.

Earth’s horizon appeared on the wallscreen as a vast dark curve, highlighted by a thin luminescent band of blue. Stars appeared above the blue line at the same instant he felt his body begin to rise from the seat cushion. They had achieved escape velocity; Metz was throttling back the negmass drive. But they had to stop. They had to abort to low orbit. They needed time to study what had happened aboard the Hindenburg before . . .

And then the timeship’s wormhole generators went online.

Oberon’s AI discovered a quantum irregularity in Earth’s gravity well; exotic matter contained within the pods beneath the saucer enlarged the subatomic rift into a funnel large enough for the timeship to pass through, and laced the funnel’s mouth with energy fields that would keep the wormhole temporarily stable. Within moments, a small area of spacetime was warped into something that resembled a four-dimensional ram’s horn: a closed-timelike circle. Relentlessly attracted by the wormhole it had just created, the timeship plummeted into the closed-time circle.

Then something that felt like the hand of God slapped the timeship and sent it careening . . . elsewhere.

Friday, January 16, 1998: 10:26 A.M.

The jet was a fifteen-year-old Grumman Gulfstream II, a relic from the days when the government was still able to purchase civilian aircraft manufactured in the United States. On the inside, it only looked ten years old, which was a little better than the last ride on a Boeing 727 Murphy had taken. Yet the seats were threadbare, the overhead compartments smudged with handprints; there had been some turbulence when the jet had taken off from Dulles that had caused the fuselage to creak a bit and gave the woman sitting on the other side of the aisle reason to recite her mantra in a low, tense voice.

Once the jet leveled off at thirty-three thousand feet and the pilot switched off the seat-belt lights, an Army lieutenant walked down the aisle to ask if anyone aboard wanted refreshments before the briefing started. Murphy settled for coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. The woman demanded to know whether the bagels were kosher, the cream cheese was low-fat, and the coffee was from Guatemala. She was miffed when the lieutenant politely informed her that the bagels were frozen and that he didn’t know about the fat content of the cheese nor where the coffee beans had come from; she settled for hot tea and scrutinized the label on the tea bag before she dipped it in her mug.

There were five passengers aboard the Gulfstream, including Murphy himself. The humorless lady was also from OPS, but he didn’t know her name; he recognized her only from having passed her in office corridors, so he assumed she belonged to another division. The two military officers were in civilian clothes; so was the FBI man, but he was the only one besides Murphy who was dressed for the outdoors. He sat in the back of the plane, speaking on a phone while he worked on a laptop computer. When Murphy got up from his seat and went aft in search of a bathroom, the FBI man turned aside and cupped his hand over the phone as Murphy went past.

Weird. But not half as weird when, a half hour after takeoff, the senior military officer started the briefing.

“Gentlemen, ma’am,” he began once his aide had helped everyone swivel their chairs around so that they faced the table behind which he stood, “thank you for being here on such short notice. Your government appreciates your willingness to be summoned to duty so quickly, and I hope it hasn’t caused you any undue embarrassment.”

He then introduced himself as Colonel Baird Ogilvy; with him was Lieutenant Scott Crawford, also from U.S. Army Intelligence. The FBI agent’s name was Ray Sanchez; he was here principally to facilitate matters with local law-enforcement officials and to act as an official observer. Ogilvy seemed pleasant enough, a gray-haired gentleman in his mid-fifties who would have been at home in a golf cart; his aide was younger and a bit more intense, but he managed a brief smile when he was introduced. Sanchez, who put down his phone only reluctantly, looked as if he were carrying a glass suppository; he frowned when Ogilvy called him by name, but said nothing. Murphy decided at once to give him a wide berth if he could help it. Most of the guys he had met from the Bureau were decent enough chaps, but Sanchez was one of those who had seen too many Steven Seagal movies.

After the colonel introduced Murphy himself, identifying him as the OPS lead investigator for this mission, he went on to name the last two people on the plane. Murphy put a hand over his mouth when Ogilvy introduced the woman as Meredith Cynthia Luna. Lean and fox-faced, her brown hair styled in a rigid coif, she looked like a real-estate broker who had dropped acid and seen the face of the Almighty in a breakfast croissant. Murphy knew Luna only by reputation; a psychic from Remote Sensing Division, she was supposedly difficult to work with, apparently believing that she possessed a sixth-sense hot line to another dimension. She preened when Ogilvy mentioned her ESPer abilities, and Murphy wondered if she would demonstrate her talents by proclaiming that they would soon be flying over water.

Not for the first time, Murphy wondered why he was working for the Office of Paranormal Sciences; not for the first time, he remembered the reasons. NASA was dead, salary jobs at the National Science Foundation were vanishing faster than humpback whales, and far more astrologers were gainfully employed these days than astrophysicists. So Murphy did the best he could, trying to be a voice of reason among spoon-benders and firewalkers, and when he found himself contemplating resignation, he reminded himself that there was a mortgage that needed to be paid and a son who had to be sent to college, and thanked God that Carl Sagan was no longer alive so he wouldn’t have to tell his old Cornell prof what he was now doing for a living.

As Colonel Ogilvy continued, Crawford began passing out blue folders with eyes-only strips across the covers. “At 6:42 A.M. Eastern this morning, two F-15C fighters from Sewert Air Force Base outside Nashville were on a training sortie over the Cumberland Plateau sixty-eight miles east-southeast of base when they encountered an unidentified object.” Ogilvy’s eyes occasionally darted to his folder. “The planes were at 30,500 feet at this time, and the object was on a due-east heading above them, altitude approximately 45,000 feet when first sighted, approximately 10 to 15 miles distant from the planes’ position. It appeared to be entering the atmosphere at a sharp downward angle of approximately 47 degrees, at an airspeed in excess of Mach 2. Although the object wasn’t detected by radar either from the planes or by military or civilian air-traffic control, both pilots reported clear visual confirmation of the object.”

Ogilvy flipped to another page. “Upon receiving clearance from base, both planes moved to intercept the object. Upon close approach at 34,000 feet, they described the object as a flying saucer approximately 65 feet in diameter and 20 feet high—about the size of their own aircraft—which flew without any visible means of propulsion. At the front of the object’s upper hull was a single window.”

Meredith Cynthia Luna held up a hand; Ogilvy acknowledged her with a brief nod. “Did the pilots see any aliens within the spacecraft?”

“No, ma’am, the pilots didn’t spot any occupants. They were doing the best they could just to match the object’s course and speed.”

“Did the pilots report receiving any psychic transmissions?”

“Ma’am, the pilots attempted to contact the craft by radio, on both LF and HF bands. They received no transmissions, radio or otherwise.” Was Murphy imagining things, or was Ogilvy trying to keep a straight face?

“But it seemed as if the object had entered the atmosphere. Is that correct?”

“Given the fact that it was first spotted in the upper atmosphere and was descending at supersonic speed, that’s the impression they had, yes ma’am.” Ogilvy held up his hand. “Please let me finish the briefing, then I’ll take your questions.”

The colonel consulted his notes again. “When they failed to establish radio communication with the craft, both pilots maneuvered their aircraft so they could get a closer look at the object. By this point the craft had decelerated to sub-Mach velocity, and it appeared to be leveling off its approach as it passed an altitude of 29,000 feet. One pilot, Capt. Henry G. O’Donnell, took up position 700 feet from the craft’s starboard side, while his wingman, Capt. Lawrence H. Binder, attempted to fly closer to the object in order to inspect it. Binder was passing beneath the object’s underside when his jet apparently lost electrical power.”

“Lost power?” Murphy raised a hand; the colonel nodded in his direction. “You mean, he . . . his jet failed to respond to his controls?”

“I mean, Dr. Murphy, Capt. Binder’s aircraft lostall electrical power. Avionics, propulsion, telemetry, the works. He said it was as if someone had pulled the plug. His plane went into a flat spin, and Binder was forced to eject manually from the cockpit.”

“I’ve heard of this happening before,” Meredith Cynthia Luna murmured. “A police officer in Florida had his car lose power when he encountered a spacecraft.”

“Did he eject?” Lieutenant Crawford asked.

Murphy slapped a hand over his mouth. Oh God, don’t laugh, don’t laugh . . . then he saw Ogilvy forcing a cough into his fist as he shot a look at his aide, and realized that he wasn’t the only rational person aboard this plane.

“It’s not funny!” Luna’s face was red with righteous indignation. “The poor officer suffered a terrible ordeal! He was held captive for twelve hours!” Then she turned to the colonel. “Tell me . . . did the pilot receive any psychic impressions when this occurred?”

Murphy jotted down a note in the margins of his binder:100% loss of F-15 elec.—EMP?

Ogilvy ignored her. “Captain O’Donnell, upon seeing his wingman lose control of his craft while in close proximity of the object, decided that hostile action had been taken by the object. Following Air Force rules of engagement, he fell back one thousand feet, then locked his AIM-9 Sidewinder missile onto the object.”

Luna was horrified. “Oh, no! He didn’t . . .”

“Yes, ma’am. After attempting one last time to establish radio contact with the object, Captain O’Donnell launched his missile.”

Time unknown

“Hang on!” Metz shouted.

Franc barely had time to grab the armrest of the pilot’s chair before the timeship violently pitched sideways. Even so, he was hurled across the control room; his left shoulder slammed against a bulkhead, and he slid to the deck.

“Did it hit?” he yelled.

“Detonated in the negmass field.” Metz was still buckled in his seat, hauling against the stick as he fought for control. He glanced up at the ship-status screen. “No hull damage. We’re lucky. But we’re still going down.”

Ignoring his bruised shoulder, Franc struggled to his hands and knees, crawled upward along the deck toward Metz’s chair. In the last moments before the timeship plunged into Earth’s atmosphere, the pilot had managed to reactivate Oberon’s gravity screen. If he hadn’t, the missile’s shock wave would have pulverized him against the bulkhead.

A small blessing. Oberon was plummeting through Earth’s lower atmosphere, less than nine thousand meters above the ground. They didn’t know when or where they were, or even how they got there, save that the wormhole had thrown them back toward Earth so quickly that the timeship’s negmass drive had drained most of its energy in order to make a safe reentry. The AI had stabilized the ship just enough to keep the crew from being roasted alive, yet the effort had severely drained its fusion cells.

If that wasn’t bad enough, two contemporary aircraft had spotted the timeship during its atmospheric entry. One made the mistake of flying within the electromagnetic field cast by Oberon’s drive, causing the jet to lose power. Although its pilot had managed to escape, his partner apparently misinterpreted the accident as hostile action.

“Can you get us out of here?” The deck was tilting less sharply now as Metz began to level off the timeship. Grasping the armrest, Franc painfully clambered to his knees. “Maybe we can outrun that thing.”

“Any other time, no problem.” Clutching the stick, Metz stabbed at the console with his free hand. “But power’s down 47 percent and dropping, and the field’s getting weaker. If that jet launches another missile . . .”

“Understood.” The negmass field had effectively shielded the timeship from the missile, but they couldn’t count on the same luck again if the jet launched another one. “Hole generators?”

“Sure, I can open a hole.” Metz scowled as he punched at the flatpanels, trying to reroute more power to the drive. “If you want to blow an eighty-klick crater in the ground below us. That’ll screw up the worldline nice and proper, won’t it?”

“Forget I asked.” Stupid question; this was the very reason why timeships always departed from orbit. Franc glanced at a screen. The remaining jet had fallen back a little, but it was still dogging their every move. He tapped the mike he had snagged on his way out of the passenger compartment. “Lea? Got anything on that aircraft yet?”

Her voice came through his earpiece. “Library identifies it as a F-15C Eagle, circa late twentieth century U.S. Air Force.” She began reading data from the library pedestal.

“Single-seater . . . maximum speed Mach 2.5 . . . ceiling 18,288 meters . . . range about 5,600 kilometers . . . armament includes 20-mm cannon, air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles . . .”

“Forget that! How do we dodge the thing?”

“Dammit, Franc, how should I know?”

“Tom,” Metz snapped, “what’s going on back there?”

“I’m working on it!” The last time Franc had seen Hoffman, the mission spec was on his hands and knees in the passenger compartment, his arms thrust deep into a service bay beneath the deck plates. “I’ve rerouted the gravity subsystem to the negmass, but I can’t access the main bus without . . . shit!”

The deck buffeted violently as the timeship hit heavy turbulence. Through the headset, Franc heard Hoffman curse as he pitched sideways once more; true to his word, he had cut off the gravity screen. Hanging on to the armrest, Franc glanced again at the porthole. The last skeins of cirrus clouds dissipated like smoke, revealing a countryside of rolling hills shadowed by the early-morning sun. High country, dotted here and there by white spots and tiny irregular grids, sprawled below them: houses, small towns, farm fields. According to Lea, they were somewhere over Tennessee . . .

Franc glimpsed something that looked like two parallel black ribbons running through the hills—a highway, perhaps—then an irregular silver-blue surface swam into view. A large lake, its channels meandering past miles of sharp ridgetops . . .

“We can’t do this much longer,” Metz murmured. “I’m trying to lose that thing, but it’s . . .”

“Put it down,” he said softly.

“What?” Metz glanced over his shoulder at him, then followed his gaze to the porthole. “Down there?”

“Yeah, down there. Is the chameleon still operational?”

Metz glanced at his board. “If I divert ten percent power, sure, but it won’t work unless we’re hugging the ground.”

“Not the ground. The lake.” Franc reached forward, punched up a close-up shot of the lake below them; two more taps on the panel projected a thermographic false-image. “There’s the deep end,” he said, pointing at a dark blue splotch within the lake’s widest area. “If you can get down there, do a water landing, maybe we can submerge, lose that thing once and for all.”

The pilot’s eyes widened. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Probably, but you got a better idea? Maybe you can find a nice little airport. We can always tell the locals we’re from Mars.” He nodded toward the flatscreen; the jet continued to follow them like an angry terrier. “Or we can let our friend lob another missile at us. Maybe he’ll get lucky this time.”

Metz’s eyes raced from the porthole to the flatscreen to his status board: the lake, the jet, the uncertain status of his craft. Any way you added it up, it was a losing equation.

“Okay, all right. I’ll take us down.” The deck canted again as Metz pulled the stick to one side; this time, Franc hung on for dear life. “Now get back to your seat and buckle in. Whatever happens, it’s going to be rough.”

“Good luck.” Franc slapped the pilot’s shoulder, then let go of the armrest and flung himself toward the hatch behind him.

He nearly collided with Lea in the passageway; she opened her mouth to speak, but he shoved her into the passenger compartment before him. Hoffman was struggling back onto his knees; the tools from the fixit kit were skittering every which way across the deck, and he had only barely managed to shove the access panel shut.

“What’s going on?” he shouted. “What are we doing?”

“Landing in a lake! Hang on, going to be rough!”

Another violent swerve, and Franc fell headfirst into a couch. He managed to wrench its belly strap around himself just as the craft yawed once more.

“Going evasive!” Metz’s voice yelled in his headset.

Lea grabbed his thigh and clung to him as he grabbed her by the shoulders, but Tom was flung backward against a bulkhead. He slid down the wall, his arms limp at his sides.

“Tom!” Lea started to crawl toward the unconscious man.

“Strap down!” Franc yelled at her, then he flung her toward the adjacent couch. Lea hit the seat hard, but somehow she managed to land in it, not next to it. Dazed, she started pulling the straps around herself.

Franc glanced at Tom; there was nothing he could do for him. The timeship was probably working on 50 percent power or less; Metz was trying to dredge what little energy remained in Oberon’s cells for a controlled crash landing. Safely strapped down, Lea was shouting at Hoffman again, but he couldn’t answer; the mission specialist was out cold.

His throat gnarled with fear, his fingers digging into the armrests, Franc stared at the wallscreen. A rippling blue-green surface scudded past them only a hundred meters below, its edges marked by tall limestone bluffs. A trestle bridge shot beneath them with less than ten meters to spare, then it vanished, and they were going down, down, down . . .

“Tom, get up!” Lea was screaming at the top of her lungs. “Tom, wake up, wake up, oh God, we’re going to . . .!”

And then they hit the water.

11:57 A.M.

From the Air Force chopper, Center Hill Lake looked cold and gray. High clouds reflected dully off its meandering channels and tributaries, where the Caney Fork River flowed into deep valleys inundated long ago by a flood-control dam. At midwinter, the waterline was at its lowest level; when the UH-60 Blackhawk dropped to about two hundred feet, the noisy clatter of its rotors reverberated off high bluffs as the chopper flew past densely wooded ridges and hilltops.

From his seat behind the cockpit, Murphy studied Center Hill Lake with curiosity. Although most of the surrounding hills were filled were summer homes, a few of them almost mansions, none were on the shoreline itself; most of them looked closed for the winter. Colonel Ogilvy, who turned out to be a native Tennessean, told him on the flight out from Sewert AFB that the Army Corps of Engineers, which had erected the dam in the early fifties and maintained it today, had strict regulations against anyone building within five hundred feet of the shore. The few boathouses were ones protected by a grandfather clause in the regulations; most of the summer residents docked their boats at commercial marinas scattered along the lake. The regulations probably seemed draconian to the wealthy Nashville doctors, lawyers, and country musicians who kept summer getaways out here, but the trade-off was one of the most underdeveloped lakes Murphy had ever seen. He gazed down at the bare-branched woods and wondered how many deer he might bag during hunting season.

Then the Blackhawk swept around a bend, and the main channel opened before them: a vast expanse of water stretching several miles from shore to shore, with a tall road bridge towering above a bottleneck at the eastern end of the channel. The pilot brought the helicopter down lower as he banked to the left, and Murphy saw a sandy beach within a shallow lagoon on the opposite side of the channel. The beach belonged to a picnic area; as the chopper came closer, he saw that it had been invaded by the U.S. Army. A large tent had already been erected in the nearby picnic area; a couple of dozen figures, most wearing military fatigues, moved around the tent and the olive trucks parked nearby.

Even then, the helicopter didn’t immediately head for the beach. Instead, it veered toward the middle of the channel. From his seat next to him, Colonel Ogilvy unlatched his seat belt and leaned across Murphy to point at something through the window.

“Down there!” he yelled. “Can you see it?”

Murphy pushed aside the right cup of his ear protector as he looked where the colonel was pointing. At first, he couldn’t see anything; then he spotted a tiny island, not much larger than one of the summer houses surrounding the lake. Not an island, really, but rather a large sandbar; a couple of hardy oak trees had managed to survive the lake’s seasonal rise and fall, but he doubted that anything more than a few wood ducks lived out there.

Yet he didn’t see anything peculiar, save for several small plastic buoys forming a half circle around one side of the island. “See what?” he shouted back, shouting against the prop noise. “I don’t see anything!”

Across the narrow cabin, Meredith Cynthia Luna had her eyes tightly closed; she took deep breaths as her hands fondled a pair of animal energy stones: an armadillo for protection and safety, a butterfly for balance and grace. She had been airsick once already, shortly after the Blackhawk lifted off from Sewert AFB; apparently her painted pebbles didn’t work for nausea. Lieutenant Crawford sat next to her, relief bag in hand just in case she needed it. Her hair remained perfect.

“I can’t see anything either!” Agent Sanchez had taken another window and was staring downward. “Where are you looking?”

“Gotta look close!” Ogilvy jabbed a finger at the sandbar. “See that distortion? Like a warped mirror or something?”

Murphy peered out the window . . . and yes, now that the colonel mentioned it, he could detect an odd, semicircular object shimmering in the shallow water within the buoys. At first glance, it was undetectable, melding almost perfectly with the tiny island and the lake surrounding it. Then the helicopter passed over the object, and he was startled to see its shadow bulge outward slightly, as if reflected by an invisible convex surface.

“That’s it!” the colonel shouted. “That’s the yew-foh!”

“What’s making it do that?”

“Damn if I know! That’s why we called you!” Ogilvy reached forward to prod the pilot’s shoulder. “Okay, Captain, put us on the ground! We’ve got work to do!”

White sand kicked up as the copter settled down on a concrete boat ramp within the lagoon; the pilot waited just long enough for his passengers to get clear of his aircraft, then he took it back up into the sky. Now that he was closer, Murphy noticed that the soldiers wore black tabs over the division patches on the shoulders of their parkas: Rangers from the 101st Airborne at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. All wore helmets and sidearms; a few carried M-16s on shoulder straps. Murphy noticed several soldiers using entrenchment tools to fill burlap bags with sand, while others lugged them to shallow foxholes scattered along the beach. One contained a canvas-covered machine gun. The military wasn’t taking any chances.

A lieutenant hurried over to Ogilvy, saluted, and began to speak to him in a low voice. Sanchez headed straight for a concrete picnic table, where two other civilians had spread out topographic maps; the FBI had already gotten the state police to seal off all roads and highways leading to the lake, under the veiled pretense that a top-secret experimental jet had crashed here. Meredith Cynthia Luna walked on stiff legs to a picnic table, where she sat and tucked her head between her knees.

That left Murphy alone, at least for the moment. Unnoticed by anyone, his hiking boots scuffing against the frozen sand, he sauntered past the soldiers, the sandbag emplacements, the trucks, and the FBI men until he reached the water’s edge. Now there was nothing between him and the tiny island; it lay about half a mile across the channel, clearly visible by its lonely stand of oak trees. Yet the crashed UFO was invisible; only the buoys gently bobbing in the water marked its whereabouts.

What allowed it to camouflage itself like that? An energy field of some sort? That was his first guess, considering what happened to the jet that had flown too close to it. The pilot of the second F-15 claimed that his missile exploded before it reached its target, yet he also said that the object nearly disappeared when it got close to the lake; he had been able to follow it only by the shadow it cast against the lake, and he didn’t see clearly it again until it skipped across the lake’s surface like a flat rock before running aground on the sandbar. So if it was a field, perhaps it wasn’t completely impenetrable. It might be able to ward off kinetic-energy sources, like an incoming missile, but was useless against inert matter like . . .

“Find anything interesting, Dr. Murphy?”

Startled by Ogilvy’s voice, Murphy turned around so quickly that he almost lost balance. “Oh shit, don’t do that! You . . .”

“Sorry.” The colonel was faintly amused. “Didn’t realize you were so nervous.”

“I’m not.” Not really. Murphy let out his breath, nodded toward the sandbar. “Just trying to figure out what . . . um, what makes it go away like that.”

“From what I’ve been told, nobody knows.” Ogilvy pointed farther down the beach; a pair of inflated rubber boats lay on the shore. “Six men paddled out there about a half hour ago. They approached within thirty feet of the sandbar, but couldn’t make out anything except that shimmer we saw from the air.”

“Did they . . .?”

“No. They were under orders to only recon the area and drop buoys. One man said that he felt his paddle hit something under the water, like a smooth surface, but they didn’t see anything when they looked down. It spooked them, so they skedaddled.”

A smooth, invisible surface just under the water. “How deep is it out there, Colonel?”

“Maximum depth is about fifty feet. Around the sandbar, only ten to fifteen where the dinghy was. Five or less at the waterline.”

Damn! They were right on top of the thing, and still couldn’t see it. “This used to be farm country before the dam was built,” Ogilvy was saying, “so that’s probably the top of a low hill. The yew-foh might have sunk completely if it hadn’t hit it.”

“Maybe that’s what it was trying to do.”

“Maybe. But why would it want to do that?”

“Well, it was being chased by a fighter, so . . .” Murphy shrugged. “I don’t know. Still trying to figure that part out. When I know more, I’ll tell you.”

Ogilvy nodded, but didn’t say anything for a few moments. “Y’know, Dr. Murphy,” he said quietly, “you seem to have your head screwed on tight. For an OPS guy, that is.”

“How’s that, Colonel?” he asked warily.

“Call me Baird . . .”

“I’m Zack.”

“Zack.” They shook hands. “You’re a normal scientist, aren’t you?”

Normal scientist. Like there was another kind . . . “Astrophysicist, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I can tell. You’re asking questions, not assuming anything. You’re not jumping to conclusions, then trying to make the facts fit the answers you’ve already figured out. Ms. Luna, on the other hand . . .”

He didn’t finish, but stepped aside to let Murphy see for himself. Meredith Cynthia Luna had recovered her poise; she had now taken a lotus position at the picnic table, palms spread upward on her knees, head tilted back on her neck, eyes tightly closed. A handful of soldiers had paused to watch her, until an officer walked by and told them to get back to work.

“Asked her what she was doing,” Ogilvy murmured, “and she said she was trying to establish communion. Not communication . . . communion.”

On top of everything else, she was a Strieber believer. Lord . . . “She’s not in my division. If she wants anything, give it to her. I don’t care, just keep her out of my way.”

“So you don’t think she’s . . .?”

“Got anything to contribute? Not really. But I can’t get rid of her either.”

“Sort of figured as much.” Ogilvy paused, then went on in a low voice. “Frankly, my people don’t have much respect for your people. Cashews and pistachios, we tend to call ’em. But you’ve got a good rep. Word up is that you’re probably the most reliable person at OPS. If you think you’ve got a lock on this situation. . .”

“I’m flattered, but I don’t.”

“This is new to all of us, but you’re the nearest thing we’ve got to an expert.” Ogilvy took a deep breath. “Look, Zack, we’re making it up as we go along. Mr. Sanchez is working with the locals to keep a lid on this thing as long as we can. We’ve been lucky so far . . . hardly anyone saw this thing go down, and we’ve got the area bottled up. But that dog won’t hunt much longer.”

“How much longer?”

“Six, twelve hours. Twenty-four, tops. My people are ready to fly in more people and equipment, but we need to know what we’re dealing with first. Think you can do it, Dr. Murphy?”

Ogilvy posed this as a question, but it really wasn’t one. They both had higher authorities to whom they had to answer, and nobody upstairs was going to accept no for an answer.

“Yeah, I can do it,” Murphy said.

Time unknown

“I’m sorry, Tom.”

Franc gently folded Hoffman’s hands together on his chest, then pulled a blanket over the body. He spent another moment with the mission specialist, then carefully stood up and made his way upward along the precariously slanted deck to the hatch.

He had just left the passenger compartment when something thumped against Oberon’s hull. Bracing himself against a bulkhead, he listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything until Metz’s voice rang out from the control room.

“Lu! Get in here! We’ve got a problem!”

Like they didn’t have enough already. Franc pitched himself down the dark passageway until he reached the ajar hatch to the control room, then dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the compartment. Seated at his station, Metz was a shadow against the luminescent band of emergency lamps. Most of the screens glowed with status reports; one, however, displayed a camera view from outside the timeship.

“Oh, no,” Franc murmured. “Where did they come from?”

Just outsideOberon, three soldiers in a rubber boat. One cradled an archaic rifle in his arms; the second had an old-fashioned film camera aimed straight at them; the third gently guided the boat with a long plastic paddle. The first two were looking back at the oarsman, who gazed uncertainly into the water just beneath the boat.

“I didn’t see them coming,” Metz said in a low voice, as if afraid the intruders could hear them. “I had my head under the console, didn’t know they were out there until . . .”

“I know. I heard it, too.” They were floating just above the submerged end of the ship; the guy in the rear must have hit the hull with his paddle. “Is the chameleon functional?”

Metz glanced at one of the displays. “Still working. They can’t see us. But if they get much closer . . .”

He didn’t finish his thought. It hardly mattered. The soldiers knew they were here. The first vehicles had arrived on the nearby shore little more than an hour after Oberon’s crash landing, and although the chameleon hid the timeship from direct view, a vague outline of its hull could be detected from certain angles in midday sunlight. Helicopters had circled low over the sandbar several times already, but this was the closest any of the locals had dared to venture.

At least the airlock hatch was underwater. In fact, judging from the position of the raft, it was directly beneath the soldiers. The locals would have to send out divers to find it. Judging from the amount of activity on the shore, though, it wouldn’t be long before it occurred to them to do so.

They watched as the men in the boat took a few more pictures—at such close range, they were probably photographing distorted reflections of themselves—before they hastily paddled away again. Metz let out his breath. “Close one. Worse than Dallas.”

“Far worse than Dallas,” Franc said, but not accusingly. Recrimination was pointless by now; whatever happened in 1937, they were foiled but good. One expedition member was dead, his neck broken during that first violent impact with the lake. The timeship was down, its operational condition uncertain. Contemporaries had discovered their whereabouts, and these weren’t aborigines who would leave little more record of their brief passage than a few legends and some mysterious cave drawings.

Worst of all, they were shipwrecked in the late twentieth century. The most dangerous era in the history of humankind.

“They’re cautious now, but they’ll be back.” Franc clambered forward to peer at the screens. “How’s it coming so far?”

“Do you want the good news first, or . . .?” Metz caught Franc’s stern look. “Never mind. I’ve been working my way through the system to the primary drive. It’s still down, but the AI’s located the major problem. Main bus is damaged, a few boards are shot. I’ve retasked some repair nannies and sent them in, so they should complete their work in about an hour or so. Backup’s fully operational, though, so I’m . . .”

Franc impatiently twirled a finger, and Metz got to the point. “Pods are still intact. The drive can be fixed, although the grid’s flooded and it won’t work at optimal levels until we’ve been airborne for at least sixty seconds.”

“So we can get out of here. Right?”

Metz didn’t reply.

“Come on, Vasili. We can or we can’t. Which is it?”

“Two problems. The first, you know about already. Energy reserve’s down to 15 percent, just enough to keep the chameleon operational and the AI alive. I’ve got the cells on full recharge. Fortunately, we can electrolyze all the hydrogen we need from the water around us . . . one good thing about crashing in a lake. AI estimate is that we’ll be able to lift off again within six hours, less if we reserve internal power as much as we can.”

“Including low-orbit escape and wormhole entry?” Franc asked. Metz nodded, but he wasn’t smiling. He looked even more tense than usual. “So what’s the second problem?”

The pilot let out his breath. “We don’t know when we are. Where, that’s certain. . . the AI established a fix on our coordinates before we crashed. Tennessee, Cumberland Plateau, Center Hill Lake . . . the numbers are safely stored away. And judging from what we’ve seen so far, we’re in the late twentieth. Probably in the 1990s, but . . .”

“What year?”

“Can’t tell you that.” Metz shook his head. “That’s the problem. Primary telemetry grid is down, so we can’t pull in outside feed. No way to lock onto the local net. I might have been able to get a lock before we crashed, but I didn’t have to chance to . . .”

“I understand.” Under the circumstances, Vasili had done the best he could just to get them safely to the ground. However, lacking a precise fix on when they were, Oberon’s AI was unable to accurately plot a CTC return trajectory. This was something that couldn’t be guesstimated; the AI had to know exactly when and where in chronospace the timeship now existed. Spatial coordinates were estimated, but temporal weren’t; the most vital factor of the four-dimensional equation was missing.

“Sorry, Franc.” For once, Metz had put his arrogance in a drawer. “I wish I could give you better news, but . . .”

“Any idea what caused this? The paradox . . . the anomaly, I mean . . .”

“Lea’s still working on it. You might want to check with her.” Then he turned back to his console and didn’t look up again until Franc left the control room.

He found Lea at the library, running through the footage their divots had captured from the Hindenburg. Like Franc, she had taken a few minutes in the replication cell to change her appearance back to normal; her long black hair was pulled back in a ponytail that fell over her broad shoulders as she braced herself against the pedestal. She didn’t look up when he entered the compartment.

“Find anything?”

“Yes, I have,” she said. “I think I’ve isolated the divergence point.”

Franc propped himself against the pedestal as Lea typed a command into its keypad. “There was a lot of sift through, so I concentrated on the last three hours before we landed. We passed over Lakehurst at four o’clock, but had to divert because of wind gusts and high cumulus clouds at the field.”

“Uh-huh, I remember.”

“We flew south along the Jersey shore to ride it out. An hour and a half later, according to the historical record, Captain Pruss received a telegraph message from the field, stating that the weather conditions were still bad and recommending that he not attempt a landing until later. He wired back a message, stating that he wouldn’t return to Lakehurst until we was given clearance. That message was sent at 5:35 P.M. local. Now watch . . .”

She pressed the PLAY button on the pedestal. The wallscreen displayed the vast interior of the Hindenburg’s envelope. Franc recognized the angle immediately; it was the catwalk beneath Cell Number 4, where he had placed a divot during their tour of the airship. The digital readout at the bottom of the screen read5.6.37: 1741:29 when a lone figure walked past the divot. As he paused at the bottom of the ladder to quickly glance both ways, his face became visible for a brief instant. It was Eric Spehl, the rigger who had placed the bomb.

Spehl ascended the ladder, then passed out of camera range. “He’s gone about six minutes,” Lea said, tapping the pedestal again to skip forward, “and then. . .”

At5.6.37: 1747:52, Spehl reappeared on the ladder, climbing back down from Cell Number 4. Once again, he hastily glanced again, then walked back up the catwalk, heading toward airship’s bow. “I checked the record from this divot again,” Lea said, “both before and after Hindenburg landed. He didn’t come back here again.”

“He came back and reset the bomb. I’ll be damned.”

“That’s a good way of putting it, yes. And he did it just after the second time Captain Pruss postponed the landing.”

“But why didn’t he do this earlier?” Franc rubbed his chin thoughtfully; it felt good to feel his own flesh again. “Why the sudden change of mind?”

Lea let out her breath. “Maybe you were right. Perhaps he remembered the woman he encountered at this same spot . . .” She pointed at the frozen image of the empty catwalk . . . “the day before, and decided that he didn’t want to be responsible for her death. So he came back and reset the timer so that the bomb wouldn’t detonate until exactly eight o’clock, by which time he was certain the ship would be safely moored and all the passengers disembarked.”

Franc wanted to tell her that she was wrong, that she was blaming herself needlessly for what had happened. The evidence wasn’t inarguable; he wasn’t convinced. He couldn’t believe that history had been changed only because the two of them had been aboard the Hindenburg.

“So we created an alternate worldline,” he said.

“Right. The airship was destroyed anyway, but this time the German resistance movement was able to claim credit for what Spehl had done.”

“We heard that much on the car radio. What sort of difference did it make?”

“That’s the question.” She drummed a pensive fingertip against the pedestal. “Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that Spehl accomplished what he had intended. The Hindenburg was the very symbol of Nazi power. Assume that its destruction was the first act of open dissent that finally led to Hitler being ousted from power. Perhaps one of the subsequent assassination attempts was successful. . .”

“Come on . . . that’s one assumption too many.”

“Perhaps, but . . .” She hesitated. “Well, there’s one more thing. It’s not much, but. . .”

“Let’s have it.”

She turned back to the pedestal, began tapping in another set of commands. “Remember when the jets intercepted us after Oberon entered the atmosphere? When they tried to radio us?” He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. “I searched the flight recorder, full AV mode, then had the library backtrack historical sources. Here’s what I found.”

The two jets appeared on-screen as a pair of angular dots racing ahead of vapor trails; there was no digital readout at the bottom of the screen. As the dots began closing on the camera, they heard a static-filled radio voice:

“Sewert Tower, this is Wildcat One, we’ve got a confirmed bogey at . . .”

Lea froze the image, then gently moved a forefinger across the touchpad until a tiny square appeared over the nearest of the two jets. She then enhanced the image until it was magnified several hundred times; a window opened on the screen, showing the aircraft in greater detail. Another couple of keystrokes, and a wire-frame composite appeared next to the photographic image.

“The library positively identified this as an F-15C Eagle,” she went on. “A one-seat jet fighter used by the United States Air Force from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, when it was later replaced by an updated version of the same jet, the two-seat F-15E. We know that they had to be F-15C’s because only one pilot bailed out of the Eagle that flew through our negmass field.”

“So?”

“During radio communications between the jets and their home base, you can clearly hear the base being referred to as Sewert Tower. I checked with the library system, and it turns out Sewert Air Force Base was decommissioned in the late 1960s. It shouldn’t be there, let alone sending up fighters not put in service until ten years later.”

Franc stared long and hard at the split image on the wallscreen. “All right,” he murmured. “You’ve convinced me. We’re in an alternate worldline . . .”

“An alternate worldline we inadvertently created. And when we tried to return from 1937 to our own future, we ran into a rift in chronospace . . . a divergent loop in a closed-timelike circle. We’re lucky that we weren’t destroyed completely. As it was, we were dumped out here . . .”

“In a parallel universe,” Metz said.

Franc and Lea looked around to find the pilot leaning against the hatch. How long he had been there, they couldn’t know; he had probably heard most of the discussion. Just as well, Franc thought. It would save them the trouble of reiterating everything Lea had learned.

“Don’t bother.” Metz held up a hand. “I know. I screwed up. If we had remained in ’37, studied this a little longer, we might have seen this coming. I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

“No, Vasili. It’s everyone’s fault.” Holding herself up against the pedestal, Lea turned toward him. “Paradoxes like this had been postulated for a long time. Previous expeditions have been lucky until now. We were stupid to think our luck would hold out.”

“Forget it,” Franc said. “Point is, how do we get out of here?”

No one said anything for a moment. Metz finally cleared his throat.

“First thing,” he said softly, “we have to find out what time it is.”

3:00 P.M.

The second time the Rangers visited the sandbar, they approached the saucer from the opposite side of the tiny island, with four men in each of the two inflatable boats. They rowed slowly enough as not to cause any ripples when they dipped their oars in the water, and they observed strict silence during the journey, using hand signals to communicate. They went armed, with two of the soldiers carrying 35mm cameras and camcorders.

Colonel Ogilvy placed Lieutenant Crawford in charge of the operation; Murphy accompanied the landing party in the role of a civilian advisor. Not surprisingly, Meredith Cynthia Luna objected to being left behind. After two hours of psychic meditation, she declared that the UFO was inhabited by aliens from a planet located somewhere in the Crab Nebula; on the eve of the third millennium, they had come to invite Earth into the Galactic Federation. Ogilvy heard her out, then handed her an M-16 and asked if she need a refresher course in how to use it. It was a good ploy; she dropped the unloaded rifle as if it was a medium-rare steak, and although she bitched about approaching peaceful emissaries from another star system with weapons, the argument was effectively ended.

Murphy felt the bottom of his boat slide over the sandy shallows a few feet from the island. Crawford pointed to the sandbar, then balled a fist and pumped it down twice. The two Rangers at either end of the raft hopped out; their boots had barely splashed into the freezing water before they grabbed guy ropes and started hauling the boat ashore. About twenty feet away, the four soldiers in the second raft were doing the same. Everyone crouched low, rifles in hand, yet the Rangers were so quiet that a handful of ducks lounging in high weeds at the tip of the sandbar hardly noticed their presence.

It wasn’t until the troops had taken positions behind the two oaks that Crawford signaled Murphy to get out of the raft. The sandbar was littered with beer cans, washed-up sandwich wrappers, and lost fishing lures. Between the two trees was a small circle of blackened rock, a rudimentary fireplace left by boat bums. The tree trunks were carved with initials; as Murphy knelt behind one of the oaks, something jabbed against his knee. He looked down, spied a tiny hand sticking out of the soil, and reached down to pull up a sand-crusted Darth Vader action figure. A toy left here last summer by some child; the irony was inescapable. He smiled and tucked it into a breast pocket of his parka; perhaps Steven would like to have it.

Past the trees, though, there was nothing to be seen on the other side of the island. At least nothing that looked like an alien spacecraft, from the Crab Nebula or otherwise. Yet, as he looked closer, it seemed as if the waterline was distorted in a strange way, the late-afternoon sun casting weird, inconsistent shadows upon the beach. If he could only get a little closer . . .

Murphy glanced one way, then another. The Rangers lay on their bellies on either side of him, nervously peering over their rifles as if expecting some monster from a fifties sci-fi flick suddenly to come roaring out of the water. Crawford tapped him on the shoulder, raised a level palm, lowered it the ground, then pointed toward the opposite side of the sandbar. What the hell did he expect him to do, crawl across the island?

“Aw, nuts,” Murphy said aloud. “This is silly.” Then, before Crawford could stop him, he stood up and started walking toward the area of distortion.

The lieutenant called his name, the Rangers looked up at him in shocked confusion, but Murphy didn’t stop. Moving one step at a time, he raised his hands to shoulder height, hands out flat. His heart trip-hammered against his chest, his parka felt a little too warm; suddenly, he wondered if this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Yet there was no backing down; if he retreated now, Crawford would probably have him hog-tied and rowed back to the campground. And he was already past the trees, only a few yards from the waterline.

The area of distortion had a rounded look to it. As he drew closer, an image of himself abruptly appeared before him, flattened out as if in a translucent fun-house mirror. He reached out his right hand to touch the reflection . . .

His fingers met a cool, invisible surface. He was so surprised that his hand involuntarily jerked back. “Hey!” he yelled. “I found something!”

“Dr. Murphy, get back here!” Crawford shouted.

Murphy ignored him. He laid both palms against the surface, gently moved them across back and forth. He’d rather expected a tingle, and was mildly astonished not to receive it. Whatever was causing the invisibility effect, it wasn’t an energy field. He glanced at his wristwatch and observed that the second hand was still moving. If an electromagnetic source of some sort had disabled one F-15 and detonated the missile of a second, it wasn’t active now.

Behind him, he heard soldiers scuttling closer. Crawford was on the radio: “Grumpy to Stepsister One, Grumpy to Stepsister One. Snow White has approached bogey, established presence. Dwarves in position. Please advise. Over . . .”

He glided his hands across sloping surface, carefully exploring it as he established a mental map of the object. It seemed to go all the way down to his ankles, then it abruptly stopped, as if he had reached an edge of some sort. His reflection became sharper when he got closer, warped when he got farther away. Fascinated, he carefully lifted his right leg and braced his knee against the surface. Yes, it was definitely a metal hull of some sort. Putting his full weight against it, he gradually inched forward on his hands and knees . . .

He almost laughed out loud when he realized what he must seem to be doing: crawling in midair, at least five feet above sand and water. Somewhere behind him, he heard the soft whir-and-click of an automatic shutter. One of the soldiers handling the camera record was taking pictures of him. Murphy was just enough of a ham that he didn’t want to miss the opportunity. Careful to not lose his balance, he shifted his center of gravity to his haunches, rested the soles of his boots against the invisible surface, then slowly stood up. Good grief, he was . . .

At that instant, the UFO materialized.

One moment, it wasn’t there. The next, it was: an enormous silver bowl turned upside down and cast up against the sandbar, with almost half of it submerged beneath the water.

Startled, Murphy turned around too quickly; his feet lost their purchase and he fell down against the side of the saucer. The breath was almost knocked out of him; he slid halfway down the hull before he threw out his hands and braked his fall by sheer friction. As he fell, his head jerked up and . . .

At the top of the craft was a large, round turret, much like the crown of a hat. In the center of the turret was a small, square porthole. As Murphy slid down the saucer, an exterior shutter whisked sideways across the window, closing so quickly that he barely saw it before it molded so perfectly with the rest of the hull that it was impossible to tell it had ever been there at all.

Even so, in that briefest fraction of a second, Murphy caught a glimpse of something peering out at him. No . . . not something, but someone.

A human being.

Time unknown

The amber haze of winter sun briefly set the lake on fire before it set behind the hills, yet the darkness wasn’t complete. The timeship gleamed brightly within the halo of portable floodlights set up along the sandbar; tiny figures moved along the tiny island, some moving equipment into place, others standing guard with weapons in hand. Rubber boats shuttled back and forth across the channel; helicopters orbited almost constantly, their searchlights skimming across the dark waters.

Franc waited until night had completely fallen before he emerged from hiding. He had crouched in the shallows at the farthest end of the lagoon for the past half hour, raising his head above the surface only when he thought the darkness would conceal the bulge of the EVA suit’s helmet. The camp was little more than fifty meters from his position, yet never once had anyone ventured over here. So long as he remained quiet, no one would know he was nearby.

It was a dangerous scheme, to be sure, but so far it had worked well. The moment he exited the timeship, Metz switched off Oberon’s chameleon. Its abrupt appearance so thoroughly rattled the soldiers who had just invaded the island that no one noticed the telltale air bubbles caused by the opening airlock. Franc had fallen less than three meters before his boots sank into the muddy silt; he waited a few minutes, peering upward through the water to see if anyone had detected his presence, then he began his long hike across the lake bottom.

It had taken nearly two hours to reach the end of the lagoon. He didn’t switch on the helmet lamps until he was twenty feet below the surface; by then, he had already paused to allow for pressure equalization. Lea had programmed the heads-up display with a map of the lake, but it could only show what lay above the water, not below it. The lake bottom was covered with man-made debris of every shape and size: rusting soda cans, coolers filled with muck, shapeless pieces of painted wood, fiberglass, and metal, broken fishing poles, even an ancient automobile that had loomed out of the brown limbo like a dinosaur carcass. Artifacts from an age of negligence.

The hardsuit would only be the latest addition to the lake’s collection. When he was out of the water, safe within the woods along the shore, Franc lay on his back and struggled out of its ceramic carapace. The wool suit he had worn on the Hindenburg offered scant protection against the chill night air, but it would have to do; it was the only twentieth-century clothing he had saved from 1937. He took a few minutes to drag the EVA armor back to the lakeshore and shove it into the shallows; he heard a soft gulp as it swallowed water, then it disappeared from sight. With luck, it wouldn’t be found for another dozen years or so, if ever.

Franc pulled up the coat lapels and tucked his hands beneath his armpits. He felt the tiny square of the compad in his shirt pocket, and briefly considered using it to contact the Oberon. No, that was a bad idea; the locals might be scanning carrier frequencies, including microwave. Better not tip his hand until he was good and ready. Lea and Vasili would just have to sweat a while longer. At least they were warm enough to sweat . . .

Trying not to think about the cold, Franc began making his way through the dense thicket, careful not to step on any frozen branches underfoot. He heard the muted voices of soldiers on the nearby beach; when he paused to look back, he could just make out the lights encircling the Oberon. He regarded the distant timeship for a moment, just long enough to make him wonder at the lunacy of his own idea, then he turned and began trudging up the wooded slope.

Dozens of houses surrounded him, on the hillsides above the lake, but he could see lights from none of them. He briefly considered breaking into one, but decided to hold that only as a last resort. Even if they were presently unoccupied, these homes might have intruder alarms; he didn’t possess the tools necessary to circumvent them.

Besides, his task was relatively simple from here on. All he had to do was locate a public telephone. If he could just make his way to a paved road, he knew that a phone wouldn’t be distant. This was late-twentieth-century North America, after all. The locals loved telephones.

Road. Phone. Information. What could be more easy?

Wondering why Lea couldn’t have done this instead, Franc fought his way through the dark and frigid night.

6:11 P.M.

Dinner was a brown vinyl bag containing an MRE: a Meal Ready to Eat or a Meal Rejected by Ethiopians, depending which definition one wished to accept. Inside were green foil wrappers containing diced cold turkey in gooey brown gravy, a tasteless potato patty, a handful of crackers, a packet of instant coffee, and some wispy blue tissue that Murphy first assumed was a napkin until he was informed that it was toilet paper. Eating at a picnic table by lanternlight, he managed to choke down half of the MRE before he took the rest to a garbage can. He should have been ravenous, but the events of the last couple or hours had left him without much of an appetite.

Shortly after he and Crawford returned from the sandbar, Colonel Ogilvy had held a briefing for the civilian advisors in the command tent. The facts themselves were clear: although the saucer inexplicably became visible at 1505, it had remained silent since then. Listening equipment set up around the craft hadn’t disclosed any new information, no hatches had been discovered, and aside from what Murphy alone had seen in that brief instant before its single porthole closed, the craft’s occupants hadn’t chosen to reveal themselves.

Meredith Cynthia Luna remained adamant that the craft was an alien spaceship from a distant star system, and insisted that it contained emissaries from an interstellar federation. The possibility that these travelers might be human, or at least humanlike, only helped her embroider her revelation a little more: the human form wasn’t unique only to the planet Earth, but is widespread throughout the universe, and these “parahumans” were deliberately seeking out others of their own kind. We shouldn’t be confronting them with weapons, she charged, but had to find a more peaceful means of communication. She suggested that all the Rangers should immediately withdraw from the sandbar and allow her and several other OPS psychics to congregate on the island to attempt telepathic communication.

That was when Ogilvy laid down his cards. Since the Pentagon believed that the object posed a possible threat to national security, it had been decided that an attempt would be made to force entry. Metal-cutting torches used by the Navy for submarine rescue work were being flown in from Groton, Connecticut, along with technicians trained in their use. At 2400 hours, they would be deployed on the sandbar, where they would attempt to penetrate the object’s hull.

Luna objected, and for once Murphy found himself in agreement, albeit for different reasons. They didn’t know what was out there, but the fact that it had deliberately dropped its cloak tended to argue that the craft’s occupants meant no harm. He needed more time to study the object; perhaps it hadn’t come from the Crab Nebula, but neither was it from Tennessee.

Ogilvy had held firm: there would be no further debate on this point. This mission was under Defense Department auspices, and his orders had come from the highest levels. The colonel ended the briefing by telling everyone that chow would soon be served at the roach wagon, and then he closed his notebook and walked away.

Sanchez collared Murphy just before he went in search of a hot and tasty MRE. Although the military was handling the investigation, the FBI had jurisdiction over civilians working on this incident; this meant OPS was now working for the Bureau. Because Murphy hadn’t yet received Top Secret security clearance, he would have to sign a document that would ensure that he wouldn’t disclose anything he had heard or seen to anyone who didn’t have similar clearance. So far as the public was concerned, the incident at Center Hill Lake never happened.

The document would soon be faxed to Sanchez. Once he received it, he would bring it to Murphy for his signature. One look at the agent’s face told Murphy that there was no question whether he would sign it. Not unless he wanted to risk losing his job, let alone being sent to prison.

So dinner had been indigestible and the company worse, and Murphy found himself alone once more. The night was cold, the wind rising now that the sun was down. He pulled up his parka’s hood and looked for a place to hide. The command tent had been taken over by Ogilvy and Sanchez, and he didn’t want to see them right now. He briefly considered taking a quick nap in one of the Army trucks, but realized that he wasn’t tired anyway. His eyes roamed to the distant sandbar, and the silver saucer captured within a circle of floodlights. All things considered, he was tired of looking at the bloody thing; just for a little while, he wanted to get away from all this.

So he decided to take a walk.

It was surprisingly easy to leave camp. No one had placed a guard on him, after all, and he didn’t tell anyone that he was going away. A narrow paved road led uphill from the entrance to the picnic area; although a lone soldier stood watch at its gate, he didn’t object when Murphy told him that he wanted to take a short stroll and would be back soon. The sentry was there to keep people from sneaking in; since Murphy only wanted to stretch his legs, where was the harm? The sergeant informed him that there was a campground store a half mile up the road, near the top of the hill. It was closed down, of course, but there was a Coke machine out front. Would Murphy mind bringing back a soda for him? Murphy didn’t mind: one ice-cold Dr Pepper, coming up.

The breeze seemed to let up a bit once he was away from the water, but it rattled the bare branches around him. He tasted the scent of winter pine as the night closed in around him; the lights behind him vanished entirely, and he threw back his head to check out the constellations. It would have been a rare treat, since light pollution in the D.C. area forbade any decent stargazing, yet the sky was still overcast. A dark night; even after his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he could barely see his own hand when he held it at arm’s length. Too bad.

Before he knew it, he reached the top of the road, where the mellow glow of a forty-watt bulb faintly illuminated a crossroad nestled in a saddleback between two short hills. There was a small general store at the junction, one which undoubtedly offered minnows, Moon Pies, and Orange Crush during season. The windows were shuttered, its door locked, but the porch light had been left on, illuminating the battered Coca-Cola machine between an empty bait tank and a pay phone.

Someone was using the pay phone.

At first he thought it was one of the soldiers, perhaps sneaking a call home to a wife or girlfriend, but when Murphy got closer he saw that the figure wasn’t wearing military gear. Indeed, he seemed to be underdressed for the weather: a dark wool suit and nothing more, not even an overcoat. His back was turned, but even from a distance Murphy could tell that he was shivering in the cold.

Strange. Maybe he was a hitchhiker who had lost his way. Yet all the roads leading to this area had been blocked by state police; even then, the nearest highway was several miles away. Murphy studied the man at the phone as he walked toward the porch. Perhaps he was from one of the lakeside houses; Ogilvy had told them that they were summer homes, but maybe one of them was occupied year-round. Yet if that was the case, why would a permanent resident be using a pay phone to. . .?

“Thank you . . . yes, that would be most helpful.”

In the stillness of the night, Murphy heard the stranger’s voice clearly. It held an odd accent that he couldn’t quite place: British-American, yet with an faint Asian inflection.

“Yes, operator, would you be so kind as to tell me the exact date? Yes, ma’am . . . today’s date. And the year, please.”

The date? The year? What, he didn’t have a calendar?

The porch steps creaked when Murphy put his weight on them. Startled by his sudden appearance, the stranger looked up sharply, all but dropping the receiver from his hand.

“Sorry,” Murphy said automatically. “Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

The man at the phone looked vaguely Eurasian. He stared at Murphy through wire-rim glasses, then seemed to remember what he had been doing a moment earlier. He raised the receiver again. “I’m sorry, ma’am . . . could you repeat that, please?”

Murphy walked over to the Coke machine, dug into his trouser pockets for change. He felt the stranger’s eyes upon him as he found a couple of quarters and fed them into the slot. He had to be a vagrant; his clothes were so old-fashioned, they had to have come from the Salvation Army. Yet even the most destitute homeless men he had seen huddled on steam grates in downtown D.C. wore cast-off down coats or old baseball jackets. The last time Murphy had seen men’s clothing of this style was in old photos of his grandfather as a young man.

“Thank you, ma’am. You’ve been very helpful.” The stranger prodded the rim of his glasses as if adjusting them, then hung up the phone. He blew into his hands, cast a furtive glance at Murphy, then started to walk toward the steps.

“Cold night,” Murphy said.

The stranger hesitated. “Pardon me?”

“Cold night.” Murphy pushed the Dr Pepper button; there was a heavy clunk deep within the vending machine, then a can rattled down the chute. “At least twenty.”

“Twenty what?”

“Twenty degrees. The temperature.”

“Oh . . . well . . .” Drawing his coat lapels more closely around him, the man nodded in the general direction of the road behind him. “It doesn’t bother me. I don’t live far away. Just down the road. Came down to use the road . . . the phone, I mean.”

Was it his imagination, or did his voice sound a bit different now? Murphy bent to pick up the can of soda, and the stranger hurried past him. “I didn’t know anyone lived here year-round,” Murphy added. “I thought all these places belonged to summer people.”

“A few of us stay through the winter.” The other man took off his glasses, carefully folded them, placed them into his coat pocket. “Excuse me, but I. . .”

“Want to get home. Sure.” Murphy slipped the unopened soda into a pocket of his parka. “Take it easy.”

“Yes . . . uh, yeah.” He trotted down the porch steps. “I’ll take it easy. You take it easy, too.”

Murphy watched the stranger huddle into himself and quickly walk away, moving out of the faint glow of the porch light as he began marching up the road leading to the top of the nearest hill. Poor bastard probably lives in a trailer, he mused. Can’t afford a phone of his own, so he has to hike down here when he wants to make a call. Hope he’s got a good space heater or something to keep him warm . . .

But why would anyone call an operator to find out today’s date?

Crazy people. Crazy people in Washington, crazy people in Tennessee. Crazy people still working for OPS even though they knew better. Murphy shrugged, then went down the steps. He’d better get back to camp before Ogilvy or Sanchez or someone else missed him. The sergeant minding the checkpoint was probably thirsty for his Dr Pepper.

He had only walked a short distance before he realized that he could use a soda himself. No sense in going back with only one soft drink; it was going to be a long night. Might as well grab another one for the road. So he turned around and jogged back to the lonesome Coke machine.

When he searched his pockets, though, he discovered that he only had a quarter. Tough luck . . . then he glanced at the adjacent pay phone, and realized that the guy he just met had been talking to an operator.

Why would anyone walk all this way just to . . .?

Never mind. Point was, he hadn’t retrieved his change from the return slot. Probably too cold to remember that he had money coming back to him. And since the phone took twenty-five cents, there might be enough left in there for Murphy to buy himself a Sprite.

Murphy stepped over to the phone and poked an inquisitive finger into its tiny drawer. Sure enough, two dimes and a nickel. He dug them out, jingled them in his fist, then walked over to the Coke machine. He slipped his quarter into the slot and was about to slide home one of the dimes when he did a double take.

It was a Mercury dime.

He hadn’t seen a Mercury dime since he was in grade school.

Then he opened his palm and saw another Mercury dime and a buffalo nickel.

What were the chances of this occurring by accident? So far beyond the odds of probability that Murphy instantly rejected it as an explanation. And these coins looked good as new.

Okay, so maybe the stranger was a rare coin collector. Yeah, right. A rare coin collector who couldn’t afford decent winter clothes, but drops spotless Mercury dimes and buffalo nickels into pay phones. Well, maybe he was an absentminded collector who used rare coins to call operators on pay phones to ask them what time . . .

And just then, something Harry Cummisky said last night at the Bullfinch came back to him.

Friday, January 16, 1997: 6:48 P.M.

Careful not to switch it off, Franc folded the compad and thrust it into his pocket, then pulled the jacket more tightly around himself. The wind at the top of the hill was fierce and bone-chilling; his legs shook involuntarily, and he had to clench his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering. He stamped his feet against the blacktop in a vain effort to warm his frozen toes.

“Hurry up,” he whispered, glancing up at the opaque sky. “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up . . .”

It wasn’t only the cold that made him impatient. The chance encounter with the local had unnerved him to the point that he had almost forgotten his errand; it had taken a conscious effort to store the exact date and time in the memory of his faux spectacles. The man who had come to use the vending machine had been more than casually interested in his presence at the pay phone, and it wasn’t merely late-twentieth-century snoopiness. He might have been from one of the nearby homes, but Franc suspected otherwise.

Well, it didn’t matter much now. Metz was probably lifting off even now; once aloft, he’d find Franc by homing in on the signal from his still-active compad. He looked up again, although he knew Metz had probably reactivated the chameleon and that he wouldn’t be able to see the timeship until it was . . .

“Okay . . . who are you . . . anyway?”

The voice from the darkness was strained and out of breath, but familiar nonetheless. Franc whirled around, searching the road behind him.

“I said . . . who are you?”

The man from the store.

Franc finally made him out. Only a few meters away, struggling up the hill toward him.

“Nobody you would know, sir,” he replied. “I just live around here.”

“I . . . kinda doubt that.” The stranger stopped; he bent over and rested his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. He must have run all this way. “Nobody. . . lives around here . . . in winter. If they did, they’d . . . they’d . . . have their own phone.”

“I don’t.” Franc’s mind raced. The Oberon would be here any minute; he couldn’t allow his departure to be witnessed by a local. “I just use the pay phone to save money.”

“Yeah . . . right.” A soft jingle of loose change. “Money like this?”

Franc’s blood froze. Just the sort of anachronistic mistake the CRC trained its researchers to avoid committing; he had left 1937 currency in a 1998 pay phone.

“I think I forgot that, yes,” he said cautiously. “Thanks for bringing it back.” He held out his hand. “If you’ll let me have it, I’ll . . .”

“Go home . . . sure. That’s what you said.” The stranger didn’t come any closer. “Which gets back to . . . to my question. Who are you?”

“John Pannes.” The reply came automatically, as if he was again being queried by the Nazi brown-shirt on the street in Frankfurt.

“Okay . . . and where are you from, Mr. Pannes?”

“Sir, I don’t believe that’s any of your business.” Aware that the stranger’s night vision was probably as good as his own, Franc fought an impulse to glance up at the sky. “Now, if you’ll excuse me . . .?”

“Don’t think . . . I don’t think you’re telling the truth.” The other man stood up straight, took a deep breath. “Not from around here, and don’t think you’re . . .”

He coughed hard, bringing up phlegm. “Not from this time,” he said finally. “Are you, Mister Pannes?”

Franc felt blood rush from his face. Whoever this person was—although it was almost certain that he was with the soldiers camped nearby—he had surmised far too much. Whatever happened, he couldn’t be allowed to witness the Oberon’s touchdown. Yet he was out of wind from running all the way up the hill, and Franc had darkness on his side. If he was quick enough . . .

“You could be right,” Franc carefully replied. “Of course, it’s a little difficult for me to answer, considering that I don’t know you.”

“Name’s Murphy . . . Dr. Zack Murphy.” The stranger seemed to relax a bit. “Astrophysicist. Office of Paranormal Sciences, United States government.”

A scientist. However, despite his extensive research of the twentieth century, Franc had never heard of the Office of Paranormal Sciences. A manifestation of this new worldline? No time to wonder about that now.

“Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Murphy,” he said, taking a cautious step forward as he held out his hand. “I assume you’ve been looking for me?”

“Well, not really, but . . .” Murphy raised a hand, started toward him. “You still haven’t told me . . .”

He hesitated just then, and for an instant Franc wondered if Murphy had a glimmer of his intentions. Then he audibly gasped, and even in the darkness Franc could tell that he was staring upward at something in the sky above.

“What the hell is . . .?”

That was the break he needed. Ducking his head, thrusting his arms and shoulders forward, Franc rushed Murphy.

He cleared the distance in a few quick steps. Distracted, the astrophysicist was caught entirely off guard. Two fast, hard blows to the stomach, and he doubled over. Franc heard the breath whuff painfully from his lungs, then Murphy stumbled against him; his hands clawed at Franc’s clothes, either in a feeble effort to fight back or simply to keep from falling.

Franc wasn’t about to let him do either; he slammed a fist straight into Murphy’s jaw. There was the angry sound of tearing fabric as the other man toppled backward, and he felt cold air against his chest. Then the scientist hit the asphalt and lay still.

Now the limbs of the surrounding trees were whipping back and forth as if caught in a supernatural gale. A loud hum surrounded him, then Franc was pinned by a bright shaft of light. For an instant, he caught a glimpse of Murphy’s face—he didn’t seem much older than Franc himself—then he turned to see a broad, black oval hovering only a few meters above the ground.

Metz was in a hurry; he hadn’t lowered the landing flanges, and he hadn’t switched off the chameleon again. The light was from the open airlock hatch; Lea knelt in the hatch, extending her arm downward.

“Move it! We’ve got to get out of there!”

The wind whipped at his ripped coat; Murphy had managed to tear it when he went down. In a panic, he felt at coat pockets; the glasses still there. But he wasn’t done here yet . . .

“Hold on!” he shouted, then he stole a moment to kneel beside Murphy. Not completely unconscious, the scientist groaned softly as Franc rolled him over, but he was too groggy to offer any resistance. Franc pawed at his parka until he felt coins and heard the soft jingle of loose change. He reached into a pocket, retrieved the two dimes and one nickel that he had thoughtlessly left in the pay phone. Now the scientist had no tangible proof that he had ever encountered a chrononaut.

He started to stand up when he heard Murphy whisper something to him:

“Does . . . it . . . get any better?”

Franc knew what he meant.

“Depends what you do, my friend,” he murmured. Then he leaped up and dashed toward the waiting timeship.

7:02 P.M.

Headlights were already racing up the hill when Metz took the Oberon back into the sky. Minutes later, the timeship pierced the dense cloud layer above the Tennessee countryside. This time, there were no hostile aircraft in the sky, only the thinnest reaches of the stratosphere and, far above, the twinkling stars.

By then, Lea had taken Franc’s glasses to the library pedestal, where she downloaded the chronological figures gathered by its nanochip into the AI. She and Franc hurried into the control room and held their breath until Metz informed them that the parameters for a successful crosstime jaunt had been established. Oberon was still wounded, but it was healing rapidly; a few orbits, and it would be capable of opening a tunnel.

“But we can’t go home.” Metz’s fingers nervously tapped the console beneath a flatscreen image of two parallel closed-time circles. “We’ll get back to our year, no question about that. But we’ll still be in a different continuum.”

“So Chronos Station won’t be there.” Lea’s voice was flat, nearly hopeless.

“Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t.” The pilot shrugged. “We’ll have no idea until we get there. But we can’t stay here, and don’t even consider returning to 1937 . . .”

“I know,” Franc said. “We can’t change what we’ve already done. Not without creating another paradox, at least.”

“Sorry, but no.” Metz shook his head. “What’s done is done. We’re stuck with the results, whatever they may be.” He looked over his shoulder. “On the other hand, we could always go back to some point before 1937. Find a place to settle down in the past. A little farm in Kansas, circa 1890? A chateau in southern France around 1700? A modest vineyard in ancient Greece . . .?”

“Not tempting in the very least.” Franc smiled. “It’s a new universe, to be sure, but I don’t think it’ll be all that different.” His smile became a broad grin. “In fact, we may find it surprisingly similar.”

Metz’s face was unapologetically skeptical, but Lea stared at him. “What makes you think that?”

Franc absently played with the torn lining of his coat. “Only a hunch.”

Friday, January 16, 1998: 7:09 P.M.

“And you didn’t see the guy who hit you?”

“Not clearly, no.” Seated on the front bumper of the Hummer, Murphy leaned back against the grill. “I mean, it’s pretty dark . . .”

“I got that, but I still don’t understand why he’d just attack you.” Illuminated by the headlights, Ogilvy crouched on the road before him. “Neither do I understand what you were doing all the way up here. The sergeant at the checkpoint said you had just gone to the store for a soda. That’s a quarter mile down the road from here.”

Murphy gently touched the bruise on his forehead. It wasn’t very sore, but the motion helped hide his face. “Only wanted to stretch my legs a bit more before heading back to camp, that’s all. I hope I didn’t get your man in any trouble.”

“He’ll live.” Ogilvy glanced over his shoulder at the two soldiers searching the roadside with flashlights. “Let’s try it again. You walk all the way up here, just to stretch your legs, and when we find you, you’re beat-up and lying here in the road. You say it’s because some total stranger stepped out of the woods and asked you for some spare change, and when you told him you didn’t have any, he attacked you. Then he vanishes, just like that. Have I got everything?”

“I don’t have an explanation, either.” Murphy looked the colonel straight in the eye. “Maybe he was just . . . I dunno. Some crazy hitchhiker. Things happen like that.”

“Right.” The colonel slowly nodded. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me the truth?”

“That’s all there is. Honest.”

Ogilvy sighed as he stood up. “Well, whatever happened up here, it made you miss all the excitement. The yew-foh vanished. We think it lifted off.”

“Oh, shit! Really?” It was all Murphy could do to feign astonishment. “You mean it’s gone?”

“Happened about ten, fifteen minutes ago. First, it went invisible again, right under the eyes of the guys we left on the island. We heard a loud hum, then all the lights and electronic equipment went dead. Water shot up into the air where the saucer had been resting, and then . . . well, it was gone.”

“And you didn’t see anything?”

“Just a black shape taking off, but it was gone before we could track it.” Ogilvy tucked his hands in the pockets of his parka. “That’s when we discovered you were AWOL. It’ll be sweet bringing you back. When she found out you were missing, Ms. Luna claimed she received a psychic impression that you’d been taken by her aliens.”

Murphy laughed out loud, but not for reasons the colonel probably thought he did. For once, Meredith Cynthia Luna had come close to making the right guess. “I’m sure she’s been wrong before.”

“Yeah, well . . .” Ogilvy looked around again. “Go on, get in the vehicle. It’s warmer in there. I’m going to give my guys a few more minutes to find your mysterious friend, then we’ll go back and start breaking down camp. I don’t imagine we’ll find anything else, do you?”

“No, I doubt it.” Wincing from the bruises on his stomach, Murphy stood up from the bumper. “We might check the island again, just to be safe, but you’re probably right.”

He let Ogilvy open the Hummer’s passenger door, and waited in the shotgun seat until the colonel walked away to see whether the soldiers had discovered anything. When he was finally alone, he pulled a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket.

The paper had come from the stranger’s inside coat pocket, in that half instant when Murphy had grabbed at him during their fight and torn it. Murphy had only the vaguest recollection of the other man whispering something as he knelt over him; the two dimes and the nickel were missing when he regained consciousness, but this single sheet of paper was still clenched in his fist, along with a shred of dark fabric.

Murphy gently uncrumpled the paper and studied it under the dim glow of the dashboard. At the top of the page was a stylized dirigible flanked by olive branches; a scroll beneath the airship declared it to be the LZ-129Hindenburg.

Below the picture of the airship was a list of names: a passenger manifest. Halfway down the list, two names caught his eye: Mr. and Mrs. John and Emma Pannes, of Manhasset, Long Island.

Murphy looked up, saw the colonel walking back to the vehicle, followed by the two soldiers. He had just tucked the paper into an inner pocket when Ogilvy opened the right rear passenger door.

“We’re not going to find anything,” Ogilvy muttered as he settled into the backseat. “No need to rush, though. We’ve got until morning till we have to be out of here.”

“Yeah. No need to hurry.” Murphy turned his head to gaze out the window. The clouds were beginning to dissipate; for the first time tonight, he could make out a few stars. “ ‘Fools rush in . . . ’ ”

One of the Rangers opened the driver’s door to climb behind the wheel. “Pardon me, sir?” the soldier asked. “Did you say something?”

“Hmm? Oh, nothing.” Murphy smiled at his half reflection in the window. “Just thinking.”

PART 3

FREEWILL

Tues, Oct 16, 2314—0600Z

Against the darkness of space, from literally out of nowhere, there was the brilliant flash of defocused light as, for the barest fraction of a second, a tunnel opened within spacetime: a wormhole momentarily stabilized by exotic matter formed from vacuum fluctuations. In that sliver of an instant, the Oberon plunged out of chronospace.

The last tremors of the timeship’s passage had barely subsided when Franc heard the warble of the master alarm. Dazed, his eyes shut as he gripped the armrests of his acceleration couch, at first he thought the sound was imagined. Then he was thrown against his harness as the Oberon suddenly rolled to starboard, and it was at that moment he realized they were in trouble.

“Franc! What . . .?”

His eyes snapped open as Lea screamed, and the first thing he saw was the wallscreen. Earth lay several hundred kilometers below; sunlight reflecting off the tops of dense white clouds hid the ground from sight. Even without checking the chronometer, he knew that they were no longer in 1998, for the last things he had seen before Metz activated the wormhole generators were the nighttime lights of North America. Yet that wasn’t what he noticed.

Far above Earth, a vast gray wall stretched across space.

Terrifyingly enormous, apparently solid yet somehow oddly granular, it curved around the planet until it disappeared beyond the horizon, casting a broad shadow across the cloud tops. Somehow, it looked like . . .

“That’s impossible.” Lea’s voice was no more than an awestruck whisper, barely audible beneath the alarm. She stared at the screen, her mouth agape. “Please tell me it isn’t there.”

“It’s there. I see it, too.” Franc fumbled at his seat harness, finally locating the buckles and releasing them. His body started to float upward; he hastily grabbed the armrest to keep himself in his seat. With his free hand, he slapped the lobe of his headset. “Vasili!” he shouted. “Give us some gravity! And kill the alarm!”

The pilot didn’t respond, but the alarm abruptly went silent. Franc let out his breath, then glanced to his right. Tom Hoffman’s body was still securely strapped in the third couch, his corpse wrapped in a blanket. At least the sudden maneuvers hadn’t dislodged him, and so long as Oberon itself was still in good condition . . .

Franc turned his head to check the status panel next to the wallscreen. The bar graphs for all the major systems were still in the green, and there were no red warning lights. So what triggered the master alarm? He was about to shout for Metz again when his gaze fell on the real-time chronometer.

The readout was 16.10.2314/0601:06.06.

The Oberon had returned from the past. In fact, it had reliably emerged from chronospace less than a second into the future after its relative time of entry, with the remaining sixty-six seconds accounted for by the events of the past minute and few seconds. Indeed, they should be directly above the same point on Earth where the timeship had opened its wormhole to May 2, 1937. Therefore, if they were back in their own time, nothing should be different.

Suddenly gaining weight, his body fell back into the couch. The ship’s localized gravity field had been restored. A moment later, he heard Vasili’s voice in his headset.

“You guys better get up here,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

Franc nearly laughed out of loud. “Something’s . . .?” He pointed at the gray shape on the wallscreen. “Do you see that?” he demanded, forgetting that the pilot wasn’t in the same compartment. “That’s aring! That’s a goddamn planet ring!”

“I know.” Vasili’s voice was subdued. “We almost collided with it when we came out of chronospace. We got lucky . . . when the AI detected it, it went into autopilot mode and put us into lower orbit.” There was a pause. “Never mind that now. Just get up here. That’s not the worst of it.”

Lea was already unbuckling her harness. She hesitated as her eyes met Franc’s, then she prodded her headset. “What aren’t you telling us? Have you tried to raise Chronos?”

Another pause. “Chronos isn’t there. Nothing’s there. The orbitals, the Lagrange colonies . . . they’re all gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” Franc snapped. “They’re not responding?”

“No, I mean they’re gone. They’re simply not there.”

“What about Tycho?” Lea demanded. “Can you raise Tycho? Someone there should . . .”

“Lea,” Vasili said, ever so quietly, “the Moon is gone, too.”

Saturday, January 17, 1998: 2:30 A.M.

The Gulfstream II was still parked in front of a hangar at Sewert Air Force Base, right where Zack Murphy had last seen it only this morning . . . yesterday morning, he reminded himself, although it was difficult to remember that fact. In the predawn darkness, a brittle wind whipped across the airfield, tugging at the hood of his parka as he marched toward the waiting aircraft.

The Ranger team was still breaking camp at Center Hill Lake when Colonel Ogilvy began gathering the OPS team for the helicopter ride back to Sewert. Meredith Cynthia Luna had refused to leave, though; stubbornly insistent that the spacecraft belonged to alien emissaries, she wanted to remain behind for a little while longer, to “gather residual psychic impressions” from the crash site. Although Murphy secretly believed that she simply didn’t want to share company with him and Ogilvy, he wasn’t about to argue to the contrary. Much to his surprise, though, Ogilvy agreed to let her stay with the troops, so long as she caught a commercial flight back to Washington within the next twenty-four hours. Perhaps he was trying to appease OPS, or maybe he was just as sick of her as everyone else was; whatever the reason, after Ogilvy placed her in the care of Lieutenant Crawford—who didn’t seem thrilled by the prospect of baby-sitting the psychic—he herded Murphy and Ray Sanchez aboard the Blackhawk.

So now they were back where they had started. Chilled to the bone, exhausted beyond all meaning of the word, Murphy pulled his parka a little more tightly around himself as he shuffled toward the jet. With any luck, he might be able to grab a few winks before the plane landed at Dulles. The flight would take about two hours; factoring in the one-hour time difference, that meant they’d arrive in Virginia at about 5:30 A.M. An hour or so after that, and he’d be walking through his front door. Donna would still be asleep, but Steven would probably be up already, watching cartoons in the living room. Murphy absently patted the jacket pocket where he had tucked the little Darth Vader action figure he had found on the island beach. When he got a chance, he’d rinse the sand off it in the airplane’s washroom and give it to his son as a travelling present . . . and then he’d take the phone off the hook, climb into bed next to his wife, and sleep until well into the afternoon.

And after that?

Although he was too tired to think straight, Murphy knew that nothing would ever be the same again. After all, he had just met a time traveller. You don’t go to Disneyland after something like this . . .

Forget it, he told himself. Figure it out later.

Just ahead of him, a pair of Air Force officers in flight gear were standing next to the Gulfstream’s lowered stairway. Murphy assumed that they were the aircraft’s pilots. Ogilvy and Sanchez had stopped to speak with them; the four men were huddled together tightly, their shoulders hunched against the wind. As Murphy approached, they fell silent.

Murphy halted next to the stairs. “Anything wrong?” he asked. “Is there something I can do?”

He caught a sullen glare from Sanchez, but the FBI agent said nothing as he turned away. Ogilvy mustered an easy smile. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, then cocked a thumb toward the plane. “Go ahead, get aboard. I’ll tell you about it later.”

In that instant, Murphy had the premonition that he wasn’t going to get any sleep during the flight back to Washington. Yet there wasn’t much he could do about it now, so he trotted up the stairs and found a seat in the back of the plane. When he took off his parka, he made sure that he kept it folded in his lap, where he could keep his hands on it at all times. Through the window, he could see Ogilvy and Sanchez still talking to the pilots. As he watched, they turned and headed toward the stairs. A moment later, the pilots emerged through the hatch, followed by the colonel and the FBI agent. The pilots walked into the cockpit and shut the door behind them as Ogilvy and Sanchez took their seats near the front of the plane. Ogilvy propped his feet upon a vacant seat and lay his head back, while Sanchez placed his laptop computer on a table and opened it. Neither of them looked his way; after a few moments, Murphy cranked back his seat, pulled his coat up around his shoulders, and closed his eyes.

The Gulfstream had been airborne for a little less than fifteen minutes, just enough time for Murphy to doze off, when he heard someone settle into the seat next to him. “Zack?” Ogilvy said, insistent but not unkindly. “Wake up, son. We need to talk.”

Reluctantly, Murphy opened his eyes. The colonel had brought two foam cups of black coffee from the galley. “Do me a favor and fold down the table, will you?” he asked, nodding toward the seatback in front of him. “My hands are full.”

“Hmm . . .? Oh, sure.” Murphy reached out from beneath the parka, pulled down the tray table. “None for me, thanks,” he said as Ogilvy gently set down the coffee. “I’d like to get some sleep sometime before we land.”

“Sure. We’ve all had a hard day.” The colonel shook his head apologetically. “But I can’t let you do that just yet. We’ve got some loose ends to tie up first.” Picking up his coffee, he looked toward the front of the plane. “Agent Sanchez, would you like to join us?”

As if waiting for his cue, Sanchez moved down the aisle. Instead of taking the vacant seat on the other side of the aisle, though, he rested his elbows on the seatback. He gazed down at Murphy with cool dark eyes, but didn’t say anything.

“Is this about the nondisclosure agreement?” Murphy picked up the other coffee, took a tentative sip. Caffeinated or not, its warmth was welcome after the chill of the night. “I said I’d sign whatever you want me to, if that’s what’s bothering you.”

“Glad to hear it, Dr. Murphy. I’m pleased to know that you’re willing to cooperate with us. But that’s not what I . . . what we want to discuss with you.” Turning half-around in his seat, Ogilvy folded his hands together on the armrest. “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? What happened to you on the road just before we found you?”

Oh, hell . . . “Nothing happened,” he said, looking the colonel straight in the eye. “I took a walk up the road, that’s all. Just catching some air. And when I got to the top of the hill, some guy came out of the woods, asked me what time it was . . .”

“You said earlier that he asked you for spare change.”

“Well . . . yeah, I mean, he asked me for some change, and then he . . .”

“Roughed you up, right. That’s what you said.” Ogilvy reached up the ceiling panel above Murphy’s seat, clicked on the reading lamp. The sudden glare made him wince. “Y’know, for someone who’s been punched around,” Ogilvy said as he peered closely at Murphy, “you look like you’re in pretty good shape.”

“I got a good punch in the face. After that he hit me in the gut, then he threw me down and . . .”

“Threw you down on the road?” Ogilvy asked, and Murphy nodded. “The road was paved, so you should have some asphalt burns on your hands, maybe some scrapes on your coat.” He studied Murphy’s hands, then the back of his parka. “I don’t see any marks.”

“I didn’t . . . I mean, I didn’t hit the ground all that hard.”

“C’mon, Zack. I didn’t buy it back then, so why would I buy it now?” Ogilvy frowned, shook his head. “Something else happened up there. I know it, and you know it, so why don’t you just make things easier and come clean?”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Murphy said quietly.

Baird Ogilvy regarded him silently for a few moments, then slowly let out his breath as an exasperated sigh. “Agent Sanchez, you want to help me out here, please?”

“Dr. Murphy,” Sanchez said, “right now this plane is circling above the Kentucky state line, its pilots awaiting my instructions as to its next destination. If you don’t agree to render us your full cooperation, the plane will divert to Fort Campbell, where a military escort will meet us at the airfield. They will then drive you to the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, where you’ll be placed in their custody under maximum . . .”

“What?”

“You will placed in their custody under maximum security conditions until appropriate federal charges can be levied against you.” Sanchez’s voice never rose, his eyes never blinking once. “During this time, you will not be permitted to have any contact with the outside world. You will not be allowed to contact an attorney, or speak with your family, or . . .”

“You can’t do that!” Livid with anger, Murphy began to rise from his seat. “That’s illegal! You can’t . . .!”

The .45 automatic appeared so fast, he barely saw Sanchez’s hands move.

Murphy froze. From somewhere many miles away, he felt the liquid warmth of spilled coffee seeping through his right knee of his trousers.

“Please sit down, Dr. Murphy,” Sanchez said, his voice remaining even. “Any further action on your part will be considered a threat to . . .”

“Relax, please. Both of you.” Ogilvy placed a hand on Murphy’s shoulder, easing him back down. “Calm down, Zack. No one’s going to prison today.” Then he looked up at Sanchez. “Ray, please lower your weapon. That’s not necessary.”

The FBI agent hesitated, then withdrew his finger from the trigger and returned the .45 to the belt holster behind his back. Murphy’s heart galloped as he fell back into his seat. No one had ever pointed a gun at him in his entire life. For as long as he lived, he hoped it would never happen again.

“You . . .” he started, and realized his mouth was too dry to speak. He swallowed a hard lump in his throat. “You’re serious. You’d do this, wouldn’t you?”

“I’m sorry, but . . . yes, I would.” In the heat of the moment, Murphy hadn’t noticed that he had knocked over Ogilvy’s coffee as well. The colonel set the empty cup upright, then pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and used it to sponge up the coffee. “Try to look at this my way,” he continued. “An alien spacecraft . . . or at least what appears to be an alien spacecraft . . . crash-lands in a rural lake after an encounter with two military jets, one of which is forced down for unknown reasons. After being surrounded by army troops and remaining silent for over half a day, the craft inexplicably takes off again, becoming radar-invisible within moments of departure. I don’t know about you, but anything that demonstrates that sort of capability scares the cookies out of me.”

Ogilvy wadded up the wet handkerchief and dropped in the vacant seat on the other side of the aisle. “Then the senior OPS consultant charged with investigating this event is found on a nearby road. He claims to have been mugged . . . in the middle of the night, out in the middle of nowhere . . . but all evidence points to the contrary. Kind of suspicious, don’t you think?”

“I think . . .” Murphy hesitated, then looked away. “Nothing. I’ve got nothing to say.”

Ogilvy shook his head in disappointment. “Dr. Murphy, believe me, this isn’t a bluff. You’re hiding facts regarding a possible threat to national security. I know you’re in this way out of your depth, and I’m sorry that it has to be this way, because you seem to be a nice guy. But I’m telling you right now, if you don’t start talking, you’re going to be seeing the inside of a prison cell before the sun comes up.”

“If you do cooperate,” Sanchez added, his voice quietly persuasive, “everything that just happened here stays here, on the plane. I won’t file a report about this discussion, and neither will the colonel. Your record remains clean.”

“That’s right.” Ogilvy nodded in agreement. “No one at OPS will know, and neither will your family or colleagues. It’ll be classified at the highest levels.” Then he let out his breath. “But if you don’t cooperate . . .”

“I think I get the picture.” Nervously running his fingers through his hair, Murphy gazed out the window. Through a thin skein of clouds, he could see the lights of a large town passing beneath the strobes at the ends of the jet’s left wing. If they were above the Kentucky border, then it was probably Fort Campbell. If that was the case, the Gulfstream could be on the ground in five minutes. Military police were probably already waiting at the airstrip, ready to bundle him into a car for a quick ride up I-24 to Marion, Illinois.

He remembered the Darth Vader figure in his coat pocket. He had been looking forward to giving it to Steven when he got home. Sure, the kid probably had one already—Murphy had lost track of all the toys in his collection—but the look on his face would be priceless.

Yet there was something else in his parka, wasn’t there? He glanced down at his coat; it had fallen to the floor when he tried to get up, and it still lay there, rumpled around his feet. He had meant to protect the mysterious thing that he had found, keep it his own private secret, yet that no longer seemed to be an option. It would be found eventually, once his clothes were taken away and he was given a prison track suit . . .

“Your call, Dr. Murphy,” Sanchez said. “The clock’s ticking.”

Murphy slowly let out his breath. “All right,” he said, “you’ve got me.” He hesitated, then bent forward to pick up the parka. “There’s something here you need to see.”

Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1123Z

Seen from geosynchronous orbit, just above the plane of the equator, the changeling Earth was a thing of vast and frightening beauty.

The innermost rings, buff-colored swatches of fine dust less than a meter in depth, lay in low orbit only a few hundred kilometers above the planet. Rotating most rapidly of all, they were also in the slow process of disintegration; the night skies past the daylight terminator were constantly lit by the firefly sparks of micrometeorites flaming out in the upper atmosphere. Past a narrow, translucent gap lay the broad, charcoal-colored bands of middle rings; here, the rocky debris ranged in size from pebbles to small boulders, nearly a half kilometer in depth and extending for thousands of kilometers. Beyond them was another, slightly wider gap, and finally there were the outer rings, nearly as fragile as the inner rings yet having a higher albedo than their closer cousins.

The rings were all that remained of the Moon. Obliterated by forces beyond human comprehension, Earth’s former companion had betrayed it, become its murderer. The rings cast an elongated shadow upon the southern hemisphere over five hundred kilometers in width; at high noon, everything from the tip of Central America through the Caribbean to Africa’s western coast lay within a perpetual eclipse zone that changed only with the passing of the seasons. Worse, without the Moon’s gravity to moderate the ocean tides and wind patterns, coastal areas had disappeared beneath the oceans while windstorms perpetually raged inland.

Yet, the heaviest toll had been taken by the asteroid-size chunks of the Moon’s mantle and core that had rained down upon the planet’s surface. Seen through occasional breaks in the global cloud cover were vast stretches of scorched and cratered terrain. Where there had once been cities were now ruins, and what had once been plains and forests were now blackened wastelands.

Regardless of whatever had caused this planetary catastrophe or when it had occurred, its devastation was as merciless as it was complete. It was impossible for anything to have remained alive down there. Earth was dead.

“I’m not picking up anything.” His voice barely more than a whisper, Metz ran his hand across the com panel, searching every available frequency. “No radio, no cyber-net, no microwave transmissions . . . nothing. Not a single source.”

“Have you tried . . .?” Franc started to say, then stopped. He was about to ask if there were any satellite uplinks, but that was unlikely; the rings would have wiped out anything orbiting the planet.

“Have you received anything from the colonies?” Standing beside him, Lea trembled against his shoulder. “It’s been over an hour. You should have heard something from Mars at least.”

“There wasn’t anything the last time I checked, but . . .” Metz tapped a button on the panel, listened intently for a few moments, then shook his head. “Nothing. Not even a tachyon pulse.” He frowned. “You’d think we’d get some sort of space traffic, though, or least an answer from Deimos Port. But I’m not even receiving word from Ceres.”

Franc’s throat tightened. Earth and the Moon, wiped out . . . that much was hard to accept. Yet there were nearly fifty million people scattered across the solar system, from the Aresian settlements to the asteroid colonies, and even farther, to the Jovian and Saturnine moons. “I . . . I really can’t believe this,” he murmured. “I mean . . . every place in the system . . .”

“No . . . no, I don’t think so.” Lea’s eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, her voice a dry rasp. For a short time she had been on the verge of hysteria, yet she was beginning to pull herself together again. “Even if the major colonies had been destroyed, there’s too many places for people to hide out there.”

“Then maybe . . .” Metz thought about it a moment. “They might have evacuated everyone from the system. Picked up survivors, taken them . . .”

“No. Too many people for that.” Removing herself from the comfort of Franc’s arm, Lea stepped closer to the porthole, staring through it as if searching for answers in the obscene rings which encircled the planet. “They couldn’t get everyone aboard starships, even if they packed them in like . . .”

Her voice trailed off as her mouth slowly fell open. “Damn,” she whispered. “We’re forgetting something.”

“What’s going on?” Franc asked. “Lea, what are we forgetting?”

“This isn’t our worldline,” she said. “This isn’t the place we left.”

“But we came back to the same time . . .” Metz began.

“The same time, yes . . . but not the same place.” Lea continued to stare at the rings. “We changed history in 1937, right? That means our worldline changed. When we tried to return to 2314, we got dumped out into 1998, but it was the 1998 of another worldline. So it stands to reason that, when we left 1998, we would continue to follow this worldline to 2314 . . .”

“So it’s not our 2314,” Franc said.

“Right.” Lea pointed to the com panel. “That’s why we’re not picking up any transmissions from the colonies . . . because there never were any colonies, on Mars or Ceres or anywhere else. Maybe not even on the Moon.”

“Wait a minute. Hold on . . .” Turning around in his chair, Metz touched a different panel. Horizontal patterns appeared on a flatscreen; the pilot examined them closely, then pointed at the broadest group. “Look here. The infer-ometer doesn’t pick up any man-made metals in the ring debris, but there should be tons of it floating around out there, from all the orbitals . . .”

“That’s because there weren’t any orbitals. Chronos Station wasn’t destroyed because there never was a Chronos Station. Not in this worldline, at least.” Lea gestured at the porthole. “And that didn’t happen yesterday, or even last year. I don’t know much about planetary physics, but those rings aren’t new. They took time to form.”

“Three hundred sixteen years?” Franc was skeptical. “That isn’t my area either, but. . .”

“You’ve got another theory?” Lea shot him a hard look, then bent over the console and pointed toward the image of the ring-plane on another screen. “Vasili, can you get us a little closer to the center ring? If we can get a good sensor lock on one of those boulders, maybe the AI can run an analysis, tell us how long ago this happened.”

“Sure, I can get us closer, but I don’t know . . .”

“Good. I’ll be in the monitor room, setting up the program.” She turned so quickly that she almost collided with Franc. “You want to help me, or . . .?”

“No, no. You know what you’re doing.” Franc hastily stepped aside, and Lea brushed past him without another word. He waited until she had left the flight deck before he dared let out his breath. “She’s upset,” he said softly.

“You mean you’re not?” Metz was already entering the new trajectory into the flight computer. “Maybe it’s not our worldline, Dr. Lu, but in case you haven’t noticed . . .”

“I know. Sorry.” Everything was still sinking in. There was a certain sense of surrealness to all this, as if he was living in a nightmare. Perhaps it was only the lack of sleep; the last time he had closed his eyes, it was while he was aboard the Hindenburg, somewhere above the Atlantic. He glanced down at himself, grimaced in disgust. Although he had long since discarded his nanoskin, he still wore his 1937 clothes, donned again during his foray into 1998. The cuffs of his trousers were caked with dried mud over three and a half centuries old. “I think I’ll change, if you don’t mind,” he murmured, turning away from the console. “Might make me . . .”

“I’m getting something!” Metz snapped.

“What?” Franc looked around, saw that the pilot had his hands clasped over his headset. “What . . . you mean, a signal? Where . . .?”

“I don’t know! It just . . .!”

“Franc! Get in here!”

Hearing Lea, Franc bolted for the hatch. “Get a fix on that!” he yelled at the pilot as he dashed out of the control room. “Don’t lose it!”

Lea stood in front of the library pedestal, her hands locked onto the platform as she stared straight ahead “Vasili just received a transmission!” Franc shouted as he charged into the compartment. “He’s trying to . . .!”

“I know,” she whispered, and pointed at the wallscreen. “Look.”

Franc skidded to a halt, almost fell against her. Displayed across the screen, in characters the size of his hand, was a message:

OBERON

COME HERE

72˚ 35’ N 42˚ 39’ W

ALL WILL BE EXPLAINED

“Franc!” Vasili’s voice was loud in his headset. “I’ve got a fix on the signal! It’s coming from . . .”

“I know. It fed a message through the AI. We’ve got it on the screen.” All at once, Franc’s fatigue evaporated. “Seventy-two degrees, thirty minutes north, forty-two degrees, thirty-nine minutes west.” He was already entering the coordinates into the pedestal. “Sounds like it’s somewhere in North America. Go ahead and lay in a landing trajectory. I’ll figure out exactly where that is.”

“You’re not seriously thinking of going down there, are you?” Lea stared at him in astonishment. “You don’t know who sent that.”

“No . . . but they obviously know who we are.” Franc tapped the pedestal’s touch pad, and waited while the map formed on the screen. “Besides, it’s rude to ignore an invitation.”

Monday, January 19, 1998: 8:49 A.M.

The conference room was located on the second floor of the Capitol, just a few steps down the hall from the Senate cloakroom. Normally used for budget reviews and parliamentary sessions, on certain occasions it also served as a quiet, private place for closed-door hearings. This morning, a Capitol Hill police officer stood guard outside; so far since the meeting had begun, three senators, four aides, and two pages had paused to ask what was going on within, only to be given a wordless shrug in response.

The emptiness of the room made Murphy nervous. Whenever he glanced over his shoulder, all he saw were rows of vacant chairs. Off to one side sat the only spectator, a uniformed U.S. Army lieutenant, her gaze focused upon some distant place as her fingers danced across the keyboard of a portable stenograph. To his left, almost unrecognizable in his braided and service-striped dress uniform, sat Colonel Ogilvy, his papers spread out across the witness table. And directly in front of them, flanked on either side by three senior senators, was no less than the Vice President of the United States.

There was a long, silence as the Vice President studied the photocopy in his hands. No one said anything for a long time. Colonel Ogilvy had opened the hearing by making his statement; Murphy followed with his testimony. Although the men seated on the dais remained quiet, Murphy was acutely aware of every small sound in the room: the restless shifting of feet, the occasional phlegmy cough from the flu-stricken senator from Vermont, the gentle tinkle of cracked ice as the senator from California poured water into a glass from the pitcher on her desk. His wool suit, comfortable when he put it on this morning, was now unbearably warm, yet he dared not loosen his tie, and he was reluctant to even mop the sweat from his brow until Ogilvy, sliding his hand beneath the table, surreptitiously placed one of his ever-present handkerchiefs in his lap.

The Vice President gazed at the facsimile for another few moments, then raised his questioning eyes. “So, Dr. Murphy,” he said, “I take it that this . . .” He raised the photocopy. “. . . is your only evidence that you’ve encountered someone from the future.”

“Uh . . . yes sir.” Murphy had trouble finding his voice; he covered his mouth and cleared his throat. “Sorry . . . yes sir, Mr. Vice President. The only tangible evidence, that is. As I’ve told you, it was recovered only by accident, during my . . . uh, encounter . . . on the road outside the campground.”

“We have the original, Mr. Vice President, if you care to inspect it.” Ogilvy picked up the Hindenburg passenger manifest. Mounted on a piece of cardboard and sealed within a polyurethane wrapper with a red Top-Secret strip across its upper edge, it less resembled a historic artifact than evidence gathered from a crime scene. “I’ve brought it to show you and the other members of the committee that it’s not a forgery, but an authentic item.”

The Vice President was unimpressed. “I don’t doubt its authenticity, Colonel, yet this is the sort of thing one could find in any private collection.”

“We’ve got antique stores in my state where you could easily find something like this.” The senator from Vermont rubbed his nose in the paper tissue, then reached for the pint carton of orange juice on his desk. “In fact, just a few years ago, a dealer opened the back of a framed painting he had purchased in an estate auction and discovered a copy of the Declaration of Independence. A passenger list from a German airship . . .”

“With all due respect, Senator,” Ogilvy interrupted, “any document that old would show signs of aging. The paper would be brittle, the ink faded.” He gently laid the manifest on the table, then opened the report which lay before him. “If you’ll read page nineteen of our summary, you’ll find that we submitted this document to the FBI Crime Lab for analysis. They determined that it was printed no more than two weeks ago, on a type of industrial-grade paper that hasn’t been manufactured in Germany since the end of the Hitler regime. It’s brand-new, sir. It can’t possibly be a forgery.”

The senator from Vermont scowled at Ogilvy, then opened his unread copy of the report to the appropriate page. The Vice President, though, remained stoical. “Thank you for clarifying that point, Colonel, but the question was addressed to Dr. Murphy. Aside from this, what proof do you have of your allegation?”

Murphy knew that he had to be careful. Before he became the President’s running mate in the ’92 election, the Vice President had served as chairman of the Senate Science and Technology Committee, the same position now held by the senator from Vermont. Although the committee approved the annual OPS budget, the VP, no friend to mind readers or spoon-benders, was known to be profoundly skeptical of the agency’s purpose. Convincing him would be the toughest task of all.

“Mister Vice President,” he started, “regardless of the conclusions made by my agency, I believe that the origin of the . . . uh, the Center Hill Lake anomaly . . . wasn’t extraterrestrial . . .”

The senator from California raised a hand, politely interrupting him. “Excuse me, Dr. Murphy, but I wish to clarify this particular point. Although you’re a senior OPS investigator, you’re presenting testimony which runs contrary to your agency’s official findings. May I ask why?”

Again, he had to be careful, although for different reasons. Unlike the Vice President, the senator from California was a major supporter of the Office of Paranormal Sciences; no surprise, since she was known to employ psychics during her reelection campaigns. Murphy was about to reply, but Ogilvy beat him to it. “With respect to OPS, ma’am, Dr. Murphy is here today without his agency’s knowledge or approval. He has agreed to offer his testimony on behalf of the Defense Department, under the condition that whatever he says remains classified.”

And besides, Murphy thought sourly, it beats hell out of sitting in prison. Yet they were far past that point by now. He and Ogilvy had long since reached their peace. Now they had an entirely different agenda.

“Please let Dr. Murphy answer for himself, Colonel.” The senator returned her attention to Murphy. “The OPS report unequivocally states that the object which crashed in Tennessee was an alien spacecraft. The other OPS investigator, Ms. Luna, is convinced of this, as is your Chief Administrator, Mr. Ordmann. You, on the other hand, seem to be jumping ship. May I ask why?”

Murphy let out his breath. “Ms. Luna reached that conclusion even before we reached the crash site. She based her opinion on . . . well, personal convictions, rather than the evidence of her own eyes. I can’t speak for the Chief Administrator, since I haven’t yet personally discussed the matter with him, but I’m basing my conclusion on the evidence of my own eyes . . . along with the document we’ve shown you.”

“Which brings us back to the original question,” the Vice President said. “What other proof do you have?”

“When I climbed aboard the . . . uh, time machine, for lack of any better term . . . I briefly caught sight a human being behind its single porthole. That was my first indication that the craft wasn’t extraterrestrial. Later, when I first encountered the unknown party at a nearby camp store, he left behind three coins in the pay phone he was using. The coins were two Mercury dimes and a buffalo nickel, all in mint condition. That made me curious, so I followed him up the road, which is where he attacked me . . .”

“And this is where the . . . as you say, the time machine . . . landed to pick him up.” This from the senator from Arizona, who had remained quiet until now. A staunch Republican, he was here because of his chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but judging from his bemused expression, Murphy had little doubt that he wouldn’t have believed Earth was round if a Democrat told him it was.

“Yes, sir,” Murphy continued, “but just before the craft landed, after he knocked me to the ground, he took pains to recover the coins from my pocket. He didn’t realize that, during our fight, I had ripped the Hindenburg manifest from his pocket. If he had, I’m sure he would have taken that away from me as well. In hindsight, I believe he was trying to remove all evidence of his visit.”

“And why would he want to do that?”

Now they were stepping onto thin ice. “I’m not sure, Senator, but I believe that the craft’s arrival was entirely accidental. Judging from the man’s style of clothing, the change in his pocket, and the manifest I took from him . . . I think the craft was returning from 1937 when it crashed in our time. Why, I don’t know, but nonetheless it happened.”

“And this leads you to believe that the craft wasn’t from outer space,” said the senator from California.

Murphy shook his head. “No, ma’am, I think it came from space, all right. I just don’t think it originated there. It makes more sense to conclude that it came from somewhere . . . sometime, rather . . . in the future.”

There was a long silence in the conference room. The senators jotted down notes, shifted in their seats, cleared their throats. The Vice President glanced at his watch, then leafed again through their report. Off to the side, the Air Force stenographer briefly rested her hands next to her keyboard. Murphy glanced at the pitcher of ice water on the table between him and Ogilvy. His throat was parched, but he dared not reach for it. Don’t look scared, he told himself. They can smell fear.

“Colonel Ogilvy,” the Vice President said at last, and the colonel sat up a little straighter, “on page thirty-two of your report, you state that this affair constitutes a scientific crisis of the highest order. Would you mind telling us why?”

“Mr. Vice President,” Ogilvy said, “we have here evidence that we’ve been visited by individuals from the future.” The senator from Arizona rolled his eyes in disbelief, but the colonel chose to ignore him. “Whether or not this visitation was deliberate or accidental is almost a moot point, for the fact remains that time travel is possible. Furthermore, these visitors have displayed the ability to cloak their craft to the point of near-total invisibility, thus allowing them to penetrate American airspace. Their ships are capable of disabling F-15 warplanes without firing a shot themselves, and operate by means of propulsion systems far beyond our current technology.”

The senator from Arizona stopped smiling. He leaned forward in his chair, his hands clasped together on his desk. “Do you think this constitutes a threat, Colonel?”

“It very well may,” Ogilvy replied. “I’ve discussed this incident with a couple of a senior colleagues at the Pentagon, and they concur with my belief that this presents a possible threat to national security. Yet even if that isn’t the case, then there’s another consideration . . . if time travel is possible, then when was it invented?”

The senator from Vermont lowered the wad of tissue paper from his face. “I’m sorry, Colonel, but I don’t follow you. Why does that matter?”

“May I?” Murphy glanced at Ogilvy, and Baird nodded. “What the colonel means is, if some means of time travel was . . . or rather, will be . . . invented in the future, then when did this effort begin? We don’t know where . . . when, I mean . . . the ship came from. It could have come from two or three hundred years in the future, but it’s also possible that time travel was developed even sooner than that. Albert Einstein postulated that it was feasible when he devised his general theory of relativity over eighty years ago. Since then, several leading physicists have refined Einstein’s work to the point that many agree that the only real barriers to this sort of thing are technological.”

He hesitated. “This all sounds very wild-eyed, to be sure, and I may be stepping out on a limb here . . . but I think it can be done. Perhaps even sooner than we think.”

The senator from Arizona raised an cynical eyebrow. The senator from Vermont regarded him with eyes as stony as New England granite. The senator from California absently ran a hand through her hair. For just an instant, even the stenographer seemed to react; she blinked, and her fingers paused on the keyboard. Next to him, Baird Ogilvy allowed himself a slight smile, which he quickly covered with the back of his hand.

Yet Murphy knew he had made his point when he saw the Vice President, just for an instant, nod in agreement.

Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1432 Z

Mt. Sugarloaf rose from the middle of the Frontier Valley of the eastern Berkshires as a talon-shaped rock, its steep granite bluffs looming above the Connecticut River. During the twentieth century, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had taken possession of the mountain and set it aside as a nature reserve; a winding asphalt road led up its rounded western side to its craggy summit, where a fieldstone observation tower had been erected as a scenic overlook. From here the entire valley could be seen, from the Holyoke Range at its southern end to the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains in the north, with the river cutting straight through the flatlands spread across the valley floor.

At least, that was how it must have appeared three hundred years ago. As the Oberon cruised over the Pioneer Valley, Franc, Lea, and Vasili saw that even this placid corner of New England hadn’t survived the catastrophe that had wiped out all life on Earth. The Connecticut River was covered with a thick sheet of ice; with the average global temperature now five degrees below normal, this place hadn’t experienced summer for almost three centuries. Uncontrolled fires had ravaged the dense forests of the surrounding mountains, and acid rain had sterilized farm fields where corn, squash, and potatoes had once been cultivated in abundance. As the timeship closed in upon Mt. Sugarloaf, it passed over the burnt-out and lifeless ruins of nearby Amherst; the skyscrapers of the University of Massachusetts library and dormitories, oddly misplaced in the countryside, now rose above the decaying campus like soot-blackened tombstones.

The coordinates specified in the transmission they had received pinpointed Mt. Sugarloaf as the rendezvous site. Although Vasili and Lea agreed that there was no real reason to cloak the timeship, Franc decided to err on the side of caution; after all, they didn’t know who might be down there, or what they wanted. So Metz reluctantly activated the Oberon’s chameleon, yet they were almost a half kilometer from the mountain when they discovered that subterfuge wasn’t necessary.

“Smoke,” Lea said softly, pointing toward the summit. “There. See it?”

Franc leaned over the back of Vasili’s chair to peer through the porthole. A wavering brown plume spiraled upward from the mountaintop. “Could be a forest fire,” he murmured. “Maybe lightning struck there recently.”

“No, I don’t think so.” Vasili nodded toward one of the screens above his console, where a tiny, irregular blotch of light glowed on the radar-topography map. “I’m picking up an isolated IR trace. Too small to be from a natural source.” He looked up at Franc. “Someone’s down there. They’ve set a signal fire.”

“I think we’re expected.” Lea glanced uncertainly at Franc. “You want to go down now, or do you want to hold back a little longer?”

Franc hesitated. “No . . . no, let’s find out what this is all about.” He tapped Metz on the shoulder. “Deactivate the chameleon, then bring us in. Set down near the fire if you can.”

The pilot nodded, then he took Oberon out of chameleon mode. As the timeship closed in upon the mountain, they could see that the smoke rose from a rocky spur near the base of the observation tower. “We’re going to have trouble finding a place to land,” he murmured. “I don’t see any level . . .”

“Over there.” Franc pointed to a small clearing within the burnt-out remains of the woods just below the summit. “That looks flat enough.”

As the Oberon began to descend upon the mountain, the timeship was abruptly buffeted by crosswinds. As Lea grabbed the edge of the console for support; she happened to glance through the porthole. “Someone’s down there!” she snapped. “See him? Look . . .!”

One of the screens above the porthole displayed a close-up of the summit. Just as Lea said, a lone figure stood near the fire, watching the timeship as it approached. He raised his arms over his head and began to wave them back and forth.

“I see him.” Franc grabbed the back of Metz’s chair as the timeship was once again violently shaken by the wind. “How could anyone have lived through this?”

“We’ll find out soon enough.” Gripping the yoke within his fists, Metz carefully moved it back and forth as he fought for control. “Hang on, this might be a little rough.”

Metz waited until almost the last moment before he lowered the landing gear; despite his caution, the wind caught the flanges. Franc was nearly thrown off his feet as the deck tilted beneath him, and Lea yelled as she fell against the console. Then the flanges connected with hard surface and Oberon was down. Metz quickly shut down the negmass drive, then slowly let out his breath. “Sorry about that,” he murmured. “This just isn’t my day.”

Franc smiled to himself, then glanced at Lea and found that she was grinning as well. Perhaps it was only fatigue, but Vasili was beginning to show a little humility. “You did fine,” Franc said, patting the pilot’s shoulder. “We’re in one piece, that’s all that counts.”

“Yes, well, that’s only half of it.” Lea picked herself off the console, headed for the hatch. “Let’s go see who’s out there.”

“Better put something on,” Vasili called after them as Franc moved to follow her. “Temperature gauge says it’s just above freezing out there.”

The Oberon didn’t carry any survival gear, so they had to make do with the clothes they had worn in 1937. However, Franc found a stun gun in one of the equipment lockers; he had nearly forgotten that it was there, although it was standard equipment for timeships, just in case a research team encountered hostile contemporaries. He contemplated the weapon for a moment, then shoved it into his coat pocket while Lea’s back was turned to him. She probably would have objected to him carrying it, and under any other circumstances he might have left it behind, yet nonetheless he felt marginally safer for taking precautions.

The Oberon had landed in what appeared to have once been a small parking lot. Once upon a time, visitors to the overlook had parked their cars here, but now the asphalt was weather-beaten and broken, with weeds rising from its cracks. The air was brittle at the bottom of the ladder, the wind mournful as it groaned through the branches of dead trees. A short path led them past the blackened remains of a picnic shelter to the summit’s barren crown, where the ruins of the observation tower loomed against the hostile sky. The gray clouds had parted somewhat, allowing the cold rays of the midafternoon sun to bathe the mountaintop with its sullen light. As they reached the base of the tower, they saw Earth’s rings rising high above the distant mountains like a stone-colored rainbow.

The bonfire was a little larger than Franc expected, and the man who tended it said nothing as he and Lea cautiously approached him. Hands shoved in the pockets of what appeared to be a military-issue parka from the late twentieth century, he wore a dark blue baseball cap embroidered with the intertwined letters NY. The chill wind caught his brown-gray hair and blew it past his stooped shoulders, and his white beard smothered his mouth.

The old man barely glanced at Lea, but he regarded Franc with puzzlement which slowly turned to recognition.

“I . . . I know you,” he said, his voice a quiet stammer.

Franc stared back at him. “Have we met?” he asked. “I don’t . . .”

“You don’t remember me? It’s been nearly twenty-five years, but . . .”

“Twenty-five years?” Lea asked. “How would you know him from . . .?”

“I only sort of remember your face.” Ignoring Lea, he pulled a hand from his pocket, pointed a trembling finger at Franc. “But your coat . . . that’s what I remember the most. It didn’t look right, even back then. That’s the first thing that tipped me off . . .”

His coat? Franc self-consciously looked down at himself. He was wearing the same wool suit coat he had worn aboard the Hindenburg . . . yet hadn’t he worn it a second time? Only a few hours ago, in Tennessee . . .?

“Oh, my God,” he whispered.

“Your name is . . .” The old man shut his eyes. “John Pannes. We met a long time ago, in a place in . . .”

“You’re the man on the road,” Franc said. “The person I met when I . . .”

“When you made the phone call, yes.” The old man raised his eyes, took a deep breath. “My name is Zack Murphy . . . Dr. David Zachery Murphy. I’ve been brought here to meet you.”

Franc found himself unable to speak. “Brought here?” Lea asked. “By whom?”

For the first time, Murphy seemed to notice her. He opened his mouth and was about to answer when, out of the corner of his eye, Franc caught a sudden flash of light.

He turned around, looked at the observation tower. At its top, a luminescent halo had appeared: a corona of light, brighter than either the autumn sun or the bonfire beside which they stood. Within its nucleus, suspended within the phosphorescent glare, hovered a figure, featureless yet vaguely humanlike, save for the broad, wing-shaped appendages that spread outward from behind its back.

An angel.

“That’s what brought me here,” Murphy said, his voice shaking. “It . . . it brought me here because . . .”

He suddenly stopped, glancing to one side as if he had just heard something. When he looked back at them again, his face was ashen.

“It tells me we’re responsible for the end of the world.”

Thursday, August 6, 1998: 9:04 A.M.

“You’re sure no one’s going to find this place?” Murphy gazed at the towers of the University of Massachusetts as they drove past the campus on Route 116. “We’re pretty close to town.”

“Right on the Amherst line, to be exact.” Baird Ogilvy kept his left hand on the wheel as he reached for the cell phone tucked beneath the Blazer’s dashboard. “It’s actually in Sunderland, but that’s not much of a difference. Sure, someone’s bound to notice. There’s not too many places left where you can put something like this . . . at least, not unless you want to move out to the desert, and that’s more trouble than it’s worth, believe me.”

“Then why here?”

“The trick is to hide in plain sight. Now pay attention. This is how you get in.” Turning on the phone, the colonel switched to hands-off mode, then pressed a couple of digits on the keypad. The dial tone was replaced by the swift electronic beeping of a number being dialed, then the phone on the other end of the line buzzed three times before it was picked up. “ICR, may I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Extension 121, please,” Ogilvy said.

“One moment, I’ll connect you.” Ambient music drifted over the speakerphone for a few moments, then the other line was picked up again. “Shipping, Roucheau speaking,” a man’s voice said.

“Hi, is Gary in?” Ogilvy asked, giving Murphy a sly wink.

“Sorry, he’s out sick today.” The voice sounded bored. “Wanna leave a message?”

“Thanks. Just tell him Jeff called, okay?”

“Jeff called. Right. Will do.”

“Thanks, bye.” The line was hung up, and Ogilvy reached over to switch off the cell phone. “Got that? As you’re coming in, you call this number—555-8602—and ask for extension 121, then ask whoever picks up for Gary. He’s always going to be sick or out to lunch . . . unless there’s a site emergency, then he’ll be out of town. Understand?”

“Right. Ask for Gary, tell ’em Jeff called.” Murphy was admiring the countryside. Woods, farmland, mountains on all four sides. The foothills of the Berkshires. Deer season was pretty good around here, or at least so he had been told, although he had a feeling he wouldn’t get a chance to do much hunting. “What happens if there’s an emergency?”

“Drive past. Go straight home and wait for someone to call you.” Baird shook his head. “Don’t worry, it’s just a precaution. We’re not anticipating any problems.”

Murphy nodded. Although this part of western Massachusetts was as rural as you could get, they weren’t exactly in the middle of nowhere. On the right, they passed a convenience store and log-cabin barbecue shack; on the left, a farm-equipment supplier and a vegetable stand. Hidden in plain sight, he reminded himself. “What does ICR stand for, anyway?”

“Doesn’t stand for anything.” The colonel smiled at him from behind his sunglasses. After seven months of working together in the Pentagon, Murphy was still getting used to seeing him in civilian clothes again. “Three letters a DOD computer selected at random. If anyone asks, though, we make precision machine parts for offshore oil rigs. Hope you like being a company VP.”

“It’s a promotion,” Murphy said sourly. Although he was glad to get out of Washington, Donna had been upset when he resigned from OPS to take an unglamorous job in the private sector, until he pointed out that his annual salary would be three times that which he earned as a government employee and that Steven would be able to attend public schools where they wouldn’t have to worry about him getting harassed by street gangs. And the place they were buying in Deerfield was a bargain: a refurbished turn-of-the-century farmhouse on two acres, with a clear view of Mt. Sugarloaf from the kitchen window. For the first time in years, they wouldn’t have to worry much about traffic, crime, or smog. They would even be able to give Steven the dog he wanted so much. Life was looking up . . .

So long as he continued to lie to his family about what he was really doing out here, and pretend that the words Blue Plate only referred to a restaurant dinner special.

“Here we are.” Ogilvy slowed down, clicked the turn indicator downward as he turned left into a paved driveway. “Your new lab.”

It didn’t look anything like a government research facility: a large, flat-roofed factory building, the letters ICR painted across one panel of its beige aluminum-sided walls. Although a ten-foot chain-link fence surrounded the premises, there was no gatehouse, no armed guards patrolling the perimeter. Three sixteen-wheel trucks, each stenciled with the ICR logo, were parked beside the loading dock; Murphy spotted several men hauling crates from the trailers, some large enough to require forklifts. A black man riding a mower looked up as they pulled into the parking lot, then went back to cutting the grass. Everything was as boring as boring can be.

As Murphy and Ogilvy opened the Blazer’s doors and climbed out, a young man wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt pulled out over a T-shirt and a pair of jeans sauntered toward them. He glanced at Murphy, then raised a hand to Ogilvy. “Hi, Jeff!” he called out.

“Hi, Gary,” Ogilvy said, returning the friendly gesture. “Hey, lemme introduce you to my friend Zack. Zack, this is Gary. Gary, Zack Murphy.”

“Hi, Gary,” Murphy said, offering his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Likewise.” The young man shook Murphy’s hand, then he strolled away. “Have a nice day.”

Ogilvy moved a little closer to Murphy. “U.S. Marine,” he murmured. “He’s stationed out here to greet everyone who arrives. I’ve just introduced you, so he’ll remember your face from now on.”

Murphy stared at the young man. “Is he armed?” he asked quietly.

“Of course, though I bet you can’t figure out where he hides his weapon.” Ogilvy nodded toward the man on the riding mower. “So is he, and so’s the guy out back. They’re all named Gary, and so are their reliefs. We’ve got three guards on active duty at all times. When you see them, call them Gary after they call you Jeff. That’s the password.”

“Gary. Jeff. Got it.” Murphy watched Gary as he stopped, casually looked around, spit on the asphalt, and began moseying his way back across the parking lot. “Hard to believe that’s a Marine,” he said quietly.

“You’re telling me.” Ogilvy shook his head as he escorted Murphy toward the front door. “You don’t know what it took to get those guys to stop saluting every time they saw me.”

They walked into the building through the front entrance, where a nice-looking young woman sat behind a reception desk decorated with Beanie Babies and framed snapshots of children. “Hi, Jeff!” she said as they approached her desk. “Who’s your friend?”

“Lucy, this is Zack Murphy, our new VP. Zack, Lucy.” Ogilvy nodded toward the door behind her. “Is Doug in?”

“Yes, sir, he . . .”

“Don’t call me sir,” Ogilvy said, very softly. Lucy blanched as she hastily nodded. “Don’t do that again, okay?”

“Okay.” Embarrassed, Lucy reached into her desk drawer, pulled out a pair of laminated ID badges. “Doug’s in. Right that way.”

“Thanks, Lucy. Right this way, Zack.” Ogilvy led Murphy through the door behind Lucy’s desk, then sighed as it closed behind them. “That’s the third time I’ve had to tell her that.”

“So what does Lucy do, besides give us these?” He clipped the badge to his shirt pocket and flicked it with his finger.

“She’s the gatekeeper. When I called in, she was the one who answered the phone, so she knew we were coming. Remember, you have to do that every time before you arrive.” They began walking down a narrow corridor whose walls were decorated with framed photos of offshore oil rigs. “Other than that, she handles the public. When someone comes looking for a job, she tells them we’re not hiring. When the Girl Scouts drop in, she buys some cookies. When a reporter from the local paper wants to meet the company president, she arranges for an interview. . .”

“We’ve got a company president?”

“Sure. Doug reports to work every day.” Ogilvy grinned. “And before you ask, we really do ship machine parts out of here. They’re actually made in Taiwan, but you wouldn’t know unless you checked the serial numbers. We bring them in, put them in our own crates, load ’em on the trucks, send ’em to a warehouse in New Jersey, recrate them, and send ’em back here again, complete with new truck manifests for the interstate weigh stations. A never-ending cycle.”

Murphy was impressed. “You’ve got everything covered, don’t you?”

“Not yet. We still haven’t invented a time machine.”

The elevator at the end of the hall didn’t open until both Ogilvy and Murphy passed the bar codes on the back of their badges across its concealed scanner, then it took them upstairs, where the real offices were located. Here, everything was as busy as downstairs was quiet; the hallway was filled with stacked boxes and open shipping crates, and men were setting up computer terminals and phones on government-issue desks. “The first members of your team begin arriving next week,” Ogilvy said as they strolled down the corridor. “We hope to get everything up and running by Labor Day.”

“Three weeks?” Murphy raised an eyebrow. “That’s pretty short, isn’t it?”

Ogilvy shrugged. “For the main research center, sure, but we’ll be doing work elsewhere. One of the reasons why we’ve established operations in New England is because we’re close to MIT and Cornell . . .”

“And Washington, of course.”

“The Senate committee insisted upon that.” Ogilvy clasped his hands behind his back. “We may see some of them from time to time, but overall I think they’re going to . . . ah, check this out.”

They stopped in front of a large windowless room whose open door was a little thicker than the others. Coils of thick black cable lay scattered across the floor; several men in overalls stood on stepladders below open ceiling tiles or squatted beside floor panels, consulting wiring charts as they installed nests of electrical line. “This is where the supercomputer will go,” Ogilvy said. “It may take a little longer before it goes online, but the schedule calls for it to be operational by the end of November.”

Murphy was beginning to feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. “And the main lab? Where’s that going to be?”

Ogilvy smiled and crooked a finger, silently beckoning him to follow. They walked to the end of the corridor, and the colonel paused before a pair of wood-paneled doors on either side of the hallway. “My office is here,” he said, pointing to the left: a strip of masking tape on the door read Ogilvy—MD. “And here’s yours. After you.”

The door to the right was marked Murphy—SD. Military Director and Scientific Director, respectively. Murphy opened it and stepped into an office a little larger than the others down the hall. The furniture was still covered with plastic, the walls as yet unpainted; among the cardboard boxes stacked in the far corner, Murphy recognized some as the ones he had packed during his last days at OPS three weeks ago.

One wall of the office was dominated by a broad pane-glass window overlooking what had once been a factory floor. The building that Blue Plate now occupied was formerly owned by an industrial ceramics company that had folded two years earlier; its machinery had been removed, and now the main floor was being converted into a high-energy physics research lab. From this vantage point, Murphy could see a couple of dozen workmen preparing for installation of the equipment that would soon go here: parallel-processing computers, control consoles, ruby lasers, a lead-lined radioactive materials storage vault, the tall steel cylinder of a vacuum experiment chamber.

Forget Christmas, Murphy thought. This is Creation itself . . .

“Just don’t blow us up, okay?” Ogilvy said quietly. “You wouldn’t believe how many strings we had to pull to get funding for this.”

“I can believe it. Black budget, right?”

“Zack, the budget for this isn’t black . . . it’s ultraviolet.” The expression on the colonel’s face was as hard as his voice was soft. “The most ambitious scientific program in over fifty years. Nobody’s undertaken anything like this since the Manhattan Project. Nine months ago, I would have said it was impossible.” His reflection studied Murphy’s in the window. “I know what you’ve told the committee, Doc, but that’s Washington and this is here. So tell me the truth . . . you really think we can do this?”

Good question. He had been losing sleep over it for months now. In fact, the last time Murphy remembered having a good night’s rest was sometime last January, just before a UFO had crashed in Tennessee. Ever since then, the last words of the mysterious stranger he had encountered at Center Hill Lake had haunted him:

Depends what you do, my friend.

“Someone in the future did it,” he replied. “That much we know for certain. Which means they had to get started sometime in their past.” He looked straight at Ogilvy. “Yeah, we can do this. In fact, I’d say it’s a matter of predestination.”

Ogilvy didn’t respond. Instead, he rested his elbows on the windowsill as he contemplated the activity on the lab floor. “You know,” he said at last, “I was raised Lutheran. Religion never really took with me, but I remember some of it, and the idea of predestination was one of those things I remember being taught in Sunday school.”

Murphy put his hands in his pockets. He had never been particularly religious either, yet he felt even less comfortable talking about his beliefs than others. “Yeah? So?”

The colonel shrugged. “Well, you tell me that we’re predestined to do this, and on the face of it I’m not going to argue with you. As you say, someone managed time travel in the future, so it’s only logical that they . . . or, I guess, we. . . started here and now.” He hesitated. “But personally, I was always something of a Sunday school heretic. I happen to believe in free will.”

“And . . .?”

“And . . .” Ogilvy appeared as if he was ready to say something before he thought better of it. “Never mind,” he finished, turning away from the window. “Just a thought. C’mon, let me show you the rest of the setup.”

Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1512Z

And you say you began researching time travel in 1998?” Franc stared at Murphy in disbelief.

“That’s when the lab was built. We didn’t actually . . .” Murphy paused. He held his head a little to the right as if listening to something none of the others seated around the bonfire could hear. “I’m . . . I’m told that there’s other things you should know first,” he said. Noticing the curious expressions on the faces of the others, he shrugged in bafflement. “I don’t know how, but every now and then I hear a voice in my head. I was unconscious for some time before I woke up here, so maybe . . . perhaps it implanted something in my head.”

“I rather doubt that,” Franc said. “You don’t show any signs of surgery.” He peered up at the top of the nearby observation tower. The “angel” had vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared, yet nonetheless he had the eerie feeling that it hadn’t gone very far away. “Telepathic link?” he asked quietly, glancing at Lea. “It might be using him as a conduit.”

“It’s possible. Right now, it’s as good an explanation as any.” She looked back at Murphy. “But why doesn’t it want to reveal itself?”

“Where were you before you woke up?” Metz asked. He had left the Oberon and joined the others by the fire. “Did the angel . . .?”

“Wait, please.” Murphy shook his head, held up his hands “I realize you’ve got a lot of questions, but you’ve got to believe me when I say I don’t know all the answers.” Shivering against the late-afternoon wind, he tucked his hands within his armpits for warmth. “I’m just as confused about this as you are. The last time I clearly remember anything, it was . . .”

Once again, he abruptly fell silent, his eyes half-closing as his head tilted slightly forward. “I’m told,” he said at last, “that we’ve got to take this one step at a time, or otherwise you won’t understand anything. Does that make sense to you?”

“Sort of,” Franc said. Apparently, for reasons as yet unknown, Murphy was acting as a spokesman for the entity they had glimpsed at the top of the tower. “All right, we’ll take this bit by bit. What does it want us to know first?”

Frowning with concentration, Murphy stared into the fire. “Your history . . . your past. . . is somehow different from mine,” he said slowly. “The Hindenburg explosion . . . that’s when everything changed.”

“Yes, we know that,” Lea said. “We had gone back to 1937 to research its causes, and. . .” She glanced uncertainly at Franc, and he silently nodded. “Well, somehow we made a mistake that caused history to be changed, so that when we tried to return to our future . . .”

“You crashed in 1998,” Murphy said, “but now it was a different worldline than the one you left behind.” Again, the attentive pause, but this time his mouth dropped open in surprise. “There was a major war in the middle of the twentieth century, wasn’t there? Between Germany and the rest of Europe, with the United States, Russia, and Japan eventually becoming involved. Right?”

“That’s correct,” Franc said. “You mean that didn’t happen in your worldline?”

Murphy shook his head. “Germany annexed Austria in 1938, but that was as far as it went. The destruction of the Hindenburg was the turning point for the Nazi regime. After that, the German resistance movement rose against the Nazis, and it wasn’t long before the Vatican began secretly funneling aid to a Catholic underground organization known as White Rose.”

Hearing this, Franc felt a chill run down his back. Suddenly, he recalled the conversation he’d had with William Shirer in the bar at the Frankfurter Hof. The journalist had mentioned something about meeting with Catholic clergymen who were . . . how had he put it? . . . concerned about recent events. “Were they successful? White Rose, I mean.”

“Yeah, sure. It’s in all the history books . . . or at least, the ones I read. A few days after Germany took over Austria, the resistance staged a mass protest in Berlin. When the Gestapo arrested their leaders and publicly executed them, it touched off riots all across Germany. Nazi headquarters in major cities were torched, prominent party members were shot in their homes . . . overnight, the whole country turned against the Nazis. It ended when Adolf Hitler was assassinated by a conspiracy of his own generals, and after that the government fell apart pretty quickly. Their leaders were rounded up, or at least the ones who didn’t escape the country, and most of them put on trial and hanged or imprisoned. By then, the German army had retreated from Austria, and by 1940 it was all over.” Murphy seemed mildly surprised. “You mean it didn’t happen that way in your worldline?”

“No Second World War.” Lea was incredulous. “That means . . . no development of rocketry, no invention of the atomic bomb . . .”

“Sure, we got those,” Murphy said. “The U.S. tested the first atomic bomb in 1945. It was supposed to be dropped on Japan during the Pacific War, but President Truman opted for invasion instead. Russia sent the first satellite into orbit in 1960, and we launched ours a few months later. In 1976, America, Germany, and England sent a five-man expedition to the Moon, but that was the only time we . . .”

“When was the first computer invented?” Vasili asked.

“If you mean the very first one, that was designed by Charles Babbage sometime in the 1820s, but it was never actually . . .”

“No, I mean the ones that caused an information revolution in the late twentieth century.”

“Desktop computers?” Murphy shrugged. “I bought mine in ’91. A DEC Spectrum. One of the first on the market. Why?”

“I’m beginning to see a pattern.” Franc picked up a branch, fed it into the bonfire. “With the exception of the atomic bomb, there wasn’t major technological progress during the 1940s. Without World War II, there wasn’t an urgent need for the V-2 rocket or the Enigma codebreaker. Manned spaceflight and microelectronics were eventually developed, but at a much slower pace.”

“You mean, it happened sooner than that?” Murphy was outright astonished, and just a little envious. “If your worldline is that different, you must have had people living on the Moon by the end of the twentieth century.”

“Well, not really,” Lea said. “We didn’t build the first lunar colony until . . .”

“Never mind that now.” Franc didn’t want to get sidetracked. “When I met you . . . when I first met you, I mean . . . you mentioned something about an Office of Paranormal Sciences. What’s that?”

“OPS? It’s . . .” Again, there was an abrupt silence as Murphy listened to the voice in his head. “They . . . the ones you call angels, I mean . . . say that’s important. They don’t say why, but I guess this is another point where the worldlines diverge.”

“Go on.” Franc struggled to remain patient. “What’s different?”

Murphy stared into the fire for a few moments before he answered. “I think . . . I mean, I think it has to do with something that happened while I was in college. Sort of a social trend or a fad or whatever you want to call it, but in the seventies and eighties a lot of people started getting interested in psuedoscience. Astrology, ESP, channeling, dowsing, all that stuff . . .”

“UFOs?” Metz asked, giving a meaningful glance at the others.

“UFOs, sure. Seemed like everyone you knew had seen one, or at least knew someone who had seen one.” Murphy glanced in the direction of the Oberon. “Guess they weren’t that far off. But the biggest part of it was what people called lost German science . . . the crap a lot of the Nazis believed in.”

“I don’t understand.” Lea shook her head.

“Ariosophy, the hollow earth theory, using pendulums for decision-making, the world ice doctrine . . .” Murphy picked up a stick, prodded the bonfire’s embers. “It was all bullshit, of course, but a couple of best-sellers were published which claimed that the Nazis achieved scientific breakthroughs that were deliberately suppressed after the fall of the Hitler regime.”

“Makes sense.” Lea absently rubbed a forefinger across her lips. “Without a major European war or the Holocaust, the Nazis might not have been as stigmatized in the West as they were in our worldline. Some of the things they believed in might have been romanticized.”

“That’s what happened, exactly.” Murphy nodded. “Psuedoscience became popular, and it led people in the United States to demand that the government do more to investigate . . . y’know, that sort of thing.” His expression became grim. “So while NASA was being cannibalized and the National Academy of Sciences was begging for chump change, Congress founded OPS. I took a job with them because it was either that or flip burgers at McDonald’s.”

He shook his head at the memory. “The irony of all this was that, while Americans were going nuts over Nazi pseudoscience, the Germans themselves were racing ahead of us in terms of technological progress. So was England, France, Italy. . . first it started with basic research, then it went to product development, and finally it reached consumer goods. Got to the point that if you wanted a half-decent car, you had to buy European. Good ol’ Yankee know-how became knowing how to get the best deal from an Audi or BMW salesman . . . and then you guys crashed in ’98, and that changed the ball game.”

“That’s the part I don’t understand,” Franc said. “If the U.S. had fallen so far behind, how were you able to develop time travel?”

“Blue Plate was . . . well, it was done on the bootstrap principle.” Murphy picked up a branch, broke it over his knee, tossed the short end into the fire, and used the long end to poke at the embers. “You know the idea of someone trying to jump up by pulling at his bootstraps? No? Well, it’s sort of the same thing. . . if you can do it, you’ve taught yourself a new trick. The final objective of Blue Plate was figuring out time travel . . . because, y’know, if y’all were able to accomplish it, then that meant it must be possible . . . but the point was using this as a means of developing new technologies that would once again put the U.S. ahead of Europe. We needed a goal, and being the first country to accomplish time travel was it. Like the Manhattan Project all over again, only this time we didn’t have to worry about nuking anyone. War without casualties.”

“So Blue Plate was a crash program,” Vasili said.

“It started out that way, but it turned into a long-term effort. Theory is one thing. Putting it into actual practice is another.” Murphy tossed the stick into the flames. “Still, we didn’t do too badly. The underlying principles were well established, of course, and many physicists had already spent considerable effort refining Einstein’s work. It was mainly a matter of figuring out how to implement them, and then developing the hardware. We were ready for our first full-out test by . . .”

He suddenly stopped as if he had just heard something, then his face changed. “Oh, my God,” he whispered, his voice quiet with horror. “I didn’t know . . .”

“Know what?” Franc reached forward to grasp his arm. “What didn’t you know?”

“We were too early,” Murphy said. “We were much, much too early . . .”

Friday, February 16, 2024: 12:31 A.M.

Cold night lay across the Nevada desert. Pale moonlight glazed the distant slopes of the Papoosa Mountains, and an occasional errant breeze kicked up sand from the dry lake bed. A good night for secrets, for impossible things to become reality.

Standing at the edge of the long desert airstrip, Murphy sipped black coffee from a foam cup as he watched helicopters make a final low-level sweep across the foothills northeast of Groom Lake, their searchlights prowling the boulders and crevices of what had become unofficially named Freedom Ridge. UFO buffs had discovered the ridge about thirty years ago when it still lay in the no-man’s-land bordering the Nellis Test Range and used it as a vantage point for observing activity at this remote Air Force test site. After too many people began coming out here, the Air Force managed to persuade various congressional committees to expand the test range to include Freedom Ridge. The flying-saucer groupies retreated to Tikaboo Peak, yet that lay twenty-five miles from Groom Lake, too far for any meaningful observation, and even the most inquisitive of them no longer dared to hike into the restricted area. Nonetheless, the military always took the precaution of making sure that the adjacent hills were deserted before any test flights; there was no telling who might be camped out there, crouched beneath camouflage tarps with high-power telescopes and tripod-mounted cameras.

Murphy smiled at the thought. If so, he wished them luck. If there was anyone lurking on Freedom Ridge tonight, they were about to witness history being made, for not since the first prototype stealth aircraft had been developed had anything like this flown out of Area 51.

He turned to gaze upon the complex sprawled across the southeast side of the dry lake. Sodium-vapor lights illuminated a collection of low-built concrete office buildings, military barracks, machine shops, radar dishes, and fuel depots, all surrounding several aircraft hangars, the largest of them spacious enough to hold a C-5A Galaxy. As he watched, its doors were being slowly rolled open, revealing the massive black shape within.

“Time to rock,” he murmured.

Murphy took a last sip from his coffee, then tossed out its lukewarm remains and began sauntering back toward the hangar. The wind chose that moment to snatch at his baseball cap; he managed to grab it before it went dancing off across the desert, yet not before his hair, which he had allowed to grow out in the last few years, was blown from beneath its cover. Steven had given him the cap last summer when he had gone down to Brooklyn to visit him and his family. Murphy wasn’t much of a baseball fan, truth be told, but he had let Stevie take him to a Mets game if only to make up for all the times he had ducked Little League playoffs and day-trips to Boston to catch the Red Sox.

He scowled as he pulled the hood of his old Army parka over his head to keep the wind at bay. It was only slightly less cold than Donna’s voice the terrible night she demanded a divorce, barely more than fourteen months after they moved to Massachusetts. She took Steven with her when she moved back to upstate New York, and it was nearly two years before the court granted him full visitation rights; by then, his son had become alienated from his father, his ex-wife little more than a ghost seen through the living-room window of her second husband’s house in Syracuse. During the entire time, he had never been able to tell either one of them what he was really doing during all those eighteen-hour, seven-day work weeks he spent at ICR. No wonder she had left him; he couldn’t blame her for doing so. Yet losing Donna hadn’t been nearly as painful as the distance he had placed between him and Steven. Twenty-six years later, and the only tangible evidence he had that his son hadn’t utterly disowned him was a Mets cap . . .

God, he silently prayed, please don’t let tonight’s test be a washout. I’ve sacrificed far too much already.

Although a small crowd of military officials and civilian scientists had gathered outside the hangar, no one noticed Murphy until a soldier in desert camies spotted him strolling toward them. Murphy had partly unzipped his parka and was still groping for his ID badge when an Air Force general walked over to intervene.

“At ease, Sergeant,” he said. “He’s one of us.” The soldier cast Murphy a look of silent admonishment, then released his hand from his holstered sidearm, saluted the general, and walked away. The officer watched him go, then turned to Murphy. “Didn’t I tell you to keep your badge in plain sight at all times?”

“Sorry, Jake,” he murmured. “Just went out to see if I could spot any UFOs.” He gave him a wry grin. “Say, you don’t have any hidden around here, do you? I read this book once that said . . .”

“Cut it out.” The general wasn’t amused. “This is a high-security area. You can’t just wander off without letting anyone know where you’re going.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Murphy said. “My apologies. I’ll ask permission next time.”

As he closed his parka once more, he sourly reflected upon the fact that his relationship with Jake Leclede was nowhere near as informal as the one he had enjoyed with his predecessor. It had been almost three years since Baird Ogilvy had suffered a fatal stroke while playing golf in Florida, but Murphy still mourned his late friend as if he had only passed away last week. General Leclede had taken over as Blue Plate’s military director shortly thereafter; he had kept the project going, a remarkable feat considering that it had already cost the taxpayers nearly $60 billion and its original timetable had long since been thrown out the window, yet never once in those three years had he and Murphy ever gone out for beer and barbecue, as Murphy had frequently done with Baird. Indeed, it had taken two months before Murphy felt comfortable addressing the younger man by his first name.

“Please see that you do.” Then Leclede relented a little. “There’s your baby,” he said, nodding toward the aircraft being towed out of the hangar. “Ready for the big moment?”

Murphy didn’t answer immediately. It was difficult to find the right words, although “baby” wouldn’t have been one of them.

The SR-75 Penetrator was a sleek black condor, its titanium fuselage just over 160 feet in length, the span of its delta-shaped wings 97 feet from the sharp edges of its upward-canted winglets. Retractable canards folded outward from either side of its three-seater cockpit; the airscoops of its turbo-ramjets were large enough to swallow a man whole. Formerly code-named Aurora, the SR-75 had been a highly classified military secret, its test flights from Area 51 responsible for many of the UFO sightings from Freedom Ridge, until its existence had been reluctantly acknowledged shortly after the turn of the century when it flew reconnaissance missions during the Russian conflict. Even then, only one of the massive planes had ever been built; although capable of achieving hypersonic velocities in excess of Mach 3.5, its intense infrared signature and the noise it made at cruise speed made it easily detectable by ground forces.

Yet it wasn’t the SR-75 that attracted Murphy’s attention, but the smaller aircraft riding piggyback on a saddlelike pylon atop its upper fuselage. An unmanned lifting body 42 feet long, it vaguely resembled a silver manta ray, yet it lacked engines and, despite the oval porthole at its tapering prow, a cockpit capable of carrying a pilot. Nonetheless, it could have been any sort of experimental aircraft, save for the three small humps just aft of the cockpit.

The Pentagon had code-named the second craft Jade Lantern, yet Murphy and everyone else intimately associated with Blue Plate, with the sole exception of General Leclede, referred to their creation by a simpler name: Herbert. Herbert as in Herbert George Wells, the author of a novella that had given rise to the entire notion of time travel almost exactly a century before Blue Plate had been set into motion. Murphy had reread The Time Machine at least a dozen times during the last twenty-six years; more than once, lying awake at night, he had shared imaginary conversations with Mr. Wells. The military could call his creation Daffy Duck for all he cared; for him, Jade Lantern was Herbert, plain and simple.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’m ready.”

They watched as a yellow tractor towed the SR-75 across the concrete apron to edge of the airstrip. The runway lights came on, a double row of red lamps receding for three miles in either direction, as the tractor released the plane from its yoke. There was a loud whine as the pilot powered up the turbines, then the Penetrator began to taxi toward the southern end of the airstrip. From his briefing, Murphy knew that the enormous plane would need every inch of the six-mile runway in order to achieve takeoff.

“Okay, time to head in.” Leclede prodded Murphy’s arm. “We can watch from inside.”

“Why can’t we stay out here?” Murphy looked around, saw that most of the onlookers were heading toward the nearby operations building. “Is this dangerous or something?”

“Only to your ears. See those guys?” He pointed to a handful of jumpsuited ground crew standing near a candy-striped rescue vehicle. They were fitting ear protectors over their caps. “When this thing takes off, it’s like standing next to a space shuttle during launch. If you don’t want to lip-read for the next few days. . .”

“Right.” At age 66, Murphy was proud of the fact that he hadn’t yet lost his sense of hearing.

He followed Leclede through the security door, then climbed the stairs to an observation room on the second floor. Everyone who had been on the apron was now gathered in front of a row of plate-glass windows. The inside lights had been turned off, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom, but the airstrip was clearly visible by its runway lamps. The voices of the tower controller and the SR-75 pilot came through speakers in the ceiling:

“Runway check, Farm.”

“Runway clear, Janet Two.”

A pause, then: “All systems green-for-go, Farm. Request permission for takeoff.”

“You have permission, Janet Two. Happy trails.”

“Thank you, Farm. We’re rolling.”

For nearly half a minute, Murphy couldn’t see anything from the southern end of the runway. Then he began to hear a thin, high-pitched whine which quickly escalated into a howl as, all of a sudden, the SR-75 raced out of the darkness, its tricycle landing gear barely touching the ground as it hurtled past them. At that instant the whine dopplered into a thunderous roar that shook the window and made him instinctively cup his ears. He caught a fleeting glimpse of the flickering red torchlight of its afterburners, then the massive aircraft disappeared from sight.

“Wheels up, Farm.”

“Farm, we’ve started the clocks,” a new voice said. “Both are synched and running.”

“Copy that, Janet Two.”

Leclede unclasped his ears as he turned to him. “They’re away. All right, Zack, it’s your show now.”

“Thank you, sir,” Murphy muttered. He wondered how long that state of affairs would last. Not very much longer, if the test was a success . . .

They trotted back down the stairs, then crossed the operations building to an unmarked door guarded by an Air Force sergeant in camo gear. The general flashed his ID at the sentry; he saluted, then stood aside to let them pass. The room resembled a miniature version of Mission Control at Johnson Space Center; wide and dimly lit, the only light came from ostrich-neck lamps over the workstations arranged across the floor, its consoles winking with diodes, the CRTs casting a blue glow across the faces of the half dozen men and women seated at the carrels. The room was made more crowded by the military men gathered in the rear; Murphy had to push past a couple of Air Force officers just to get to his station.

“How’re we looking, Ev?” he murmured as he pulled off his parka and took his seat.

“So far, we’re golden.” Everett Backofen, the bearded young black man on his left, pointed with his pen toward a computer screen. It displayed a row of multicolored vertical bars, each pulsing slightly beneath a horizontal row of numbers that changed slightly with each passing moment. “We had a little spike about a minute ago, but I think that was just caused by g-force during takeoff. Otherwise, everything’s nominal. Herb’s staying within his parameters.”

“Good deal.” Murphy turned to the prim middle-aged woman sitting to his right. “Dorie, how’s telemetry?”

“We’re getting downlink now.” Doris Gofurther gently massaged her console’s trackball, and a tiny arrow leaped across her screen to a miniature pair of video images, both depicted in ghostly monochromatic shades of gray and black. She clicked once, and the one on the left expanded to show a vague form crossed by flickering lines of static. “There’s the rear-cockpit view,” she murmured. “I think I can clean it up a bit.”

“Do that, please. This looks like its coming from Mars.” Murphy studied the TV image of Herbert as seen from the backward-facing third seat of the SR-75. Even aided by starlight enhancement, it was difficult to make out the drone. “Ev, keep an eye on Herbert and tell me if he spikes again.” He allowed himself a smile. “And whatever you do, agree on which direction you want to go.”

Everett scowled as Doris chuckled under her breath, but no one else overheard the private joke. Which was just as well. Murphy had worked with Everett and Doris on Blue Plate for several months before he recognized the puns inherent in their last names. It was ironic that two of the physicists involved in the first attempt to penetrate chronospace would be named Gofurther and Backofen, but Murphy had long since decided to accept it as a good omen.

Pulling on a headset, Murphy opened the spiral notebook in front of him and ran his finger down the checklist. He studied the plan for a couple of minutes, listening to the reports coming from the other controllers in the room, then he glanced up at the pair of digital chronometers positioned on the far wall of the room, just below the strategic display of the SR-75’s flight plan. The clock on the left showed elapsed mission time as recorded by the SR-75; at this instant, it read 00:10:47:02. The one on the right, which showed the elapsed mission time as independently recorded by Herbert’s onboard computer, gave an identical reading. Both clocks had been synchronized to a tenth of a second, and both were set to begin recording the moment they were triggered by the mission specialist in the rear-facing backseat of the SR-75. Redundant recording systems had been built into both the Penetrator and Herbert, yet this was the one he and his team would monitor during the course of the experiment.

A faint rumble passed through the walls of the room. Murphy looked again from his notebook as the floor trembled beneath his feet. “Janet’s gone Mach,” an Air Force lieutenant seated at the carrel in front of Everett reported, his right hand clasped over his headset as he studied the radar panel before him. “Altitude 22,000 feet, range 10 miles.”

Murphy nodded. Like a hawk rising on desert thermals, the SR-75 was ascending in the steep gyre which would keep it above Area 51 even as it headed for the the stratosphere. Through his headset, he periodically heard the pilot’s terse voice as he communicated with the tower. The men in the back of the room murmured to one another, and Murphy was all too aware of General Leclede standing directly behind him, watching his every move. Murphy wished he could rid the room of all of them, Leclede included, but since there was no way he could do that, he nervously tapped his pen against an armrest and waited.

Eight minutes later, they heard the pilot’s voice again: “Farm, this is Janet Two. Angels one hundred and holding position. Waiting for your word, over.”

“We copy, Janet. Transferring com to Barn.”

“Janet, this is Barn,” the lieutenant said. “Stand by for preliminary test, over.”

“Roger that, Barn, we copy.”

“Okay, we’re on,” Murphy said. “Doris, how are we looking?”

“Good visual contact.” The TV monitor clearly showed Herbert reflecting the moonlight as it rode its saddlelike pylon on the back of the mother ship. Murphy smiled with satisfaction; they had deliberately picked this night for the test to take advantage of the full moon. “Activating onboard cameras,” she added as she flipped toggle switches on her console. A moment later, a second monitor lit, revealing the SR-75’s forward fuselage as seen from Herbert’s nose. “Flight recorders running, we’ve got good downlink.”

“Very well.” Murphy turned a page of his checklist, took a deep breath. “Everett, bring the SDM online up to fifty percent, then hold for check.”

Everett said nothing, but Murphy noticed that he quickly wiped his palms across his jeans before he laid his hands on the slidebars of his console. “SDM up to fifty,” he said softly as he gently raised the power levels of the spacetime displacement module within Herbert’s fuselage. The bar graphs on his screen rose halfway up the screen, then obediently stopped. “Fifty and holding,” he murmured. “All levels within safe parameters.”

They spent the next few minutes conducting a last-minute diagnostic check of all of Herbert’s major systems. Finding no problems at their end, they waited another minute for the SR-75’s crew to conduct their own checks. “All right,” Murphy said at last. “Gentlemen, ladies . . . if you’re ready?”

Everett gave his board a final lookover, then nodded. Doris slowly let out her breath, then gave him a thumbs-up. They were even more anxious than he was, if such a thing were possible. He glanced over his shoulder at Leclede, but received no solace from the general’s stoical expression. “All right,” he said, turning back to his console. “Lieutenant, tell them we’re ready for the drop.”

“Janet Two, we’re ready for deployment,” the lieutenant said tersely into his mike. A moment passed. “Commencing countdown . . . ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

At zero, there was a brief flash of pyros as Herbert was detached from the back of the SR-75. Murphy heard mild applause from behind him as the drone lifted away from the Penetrator. Its wings waggled briefly as it caught the larger aircraft’s slipstream, then the screen on the left went dark while the right showed the vague image of the black ship peeling away.

“Janet Two moving to safe distance,” the lieutenant reported. “Herbert at 100,000 feet and holding altitude, eight miles downrange.”

For the next few moments, the drone would remain at its present altitude, gliding at the edge of the stratosphere a little more than sixteen nautical miles above the desert, before it began its long plunge back to the ground below. Which was exactly what they wanted: a high-velocity fall toward a large gravitational mass.

“Everett, bring the SDM up to 100 percent,” Murphy said. “Arm master program, execute on my mark.

Backofen’s hands flew across his console. “SDM at 100 percent, master program loaded and armed, waiting your mark.”

“Doris . . .?”

“Telemetry locked, clear fix, recorders running.”

“Lieutenant?”

“Janet Two reports safe distance at 90,000 feet, two miles west from Herbert. They say they can see it clearly. Ground radar tracking both bodies.”

“Commence countdown on my mark.” Shoving back his chair, Murphy quickly moved to the lieutenant’s side. Leaning over him, he saw two distinct blips on the screen: Herbert in the center, the SR-75 just below it. He felt men pushing against his back as they tried to get closer, but he paid no attention to them. He glanced at the twin mission clocks on the wall. Both read the same: 00:23:18:46. He waited until they were at ten seconds short of the minute . . .

“Mark!” he snapped.

“Go on mark!” Backofen jabbed switches on his console. “T-minus ten . . . nine. . . eight . . .”

Murphy checked the mission clocks one more time, then he pointed his finger at a blank area on the radar screen, directly to the right of Herbert’s blip. “Watch that,” he whispered to the lieutenant. “Don’t blink, not even for a second. . .”

“I’m watching it, sir,” the lieutenant murmured. His right hand was clasped over his headset, listening to the voices from the SR-75.

“Five . . . four . . . three . . .”

“I’m getting a corona!” Gofurther yelled.

Murphy kept his eyes locked on the radar screen. “C’mon, sweetheart . . .” he whispered.

“Two . . . one . . .!”

“There it is!” Doris shouted.

At that instant, a third blip appeared near the right edge of the radar screen, directly behind the drone.

“Zero!”

Herbert’s blip suddenly vanished . . . but the one behind it remained.

“It went through!” the lieutenant yelled.

“I saw it!” Doris pointed at her TV screen. “It vanished! It disappeared, then it. . . Zack, I saw it!”

The SR-75 pilot was saying something, but his voice was lost in the uproar that swept through the control room. Murphy stared at the radar, watching as the new blip traced a solitary trajectory across the scope, while the men around him shouted in astonishment, cheered, clapped him on the back. It was then, and only then, that he raised his eyes to the mission clocks.

The one on the left, displaying the time as perceived by the SR-75, was 00:24:03:24. Yet the one on the right, which relayed the time as transmitted from Herbert, was 00:24:02:24.

For an instant barely longer than a human heartbeat, Herbert had caused a wormhole to open around itself, then slipped back in time . . . for one second.

In that single second, there had been two Herberts: the one about to disappear into chronospace, and the one that had appeared out of nowhere some distance behind it. When that happened, the ground radar had briefly captured both of them as two distinct blips.

Not only that, but Herbert’s nose camera had picked up an image of itself . . . as seen from behind.

“Jesus . . .” Feeling his knees beginning to buckle, Murphy sagged against the lieutenant’s console. He made himself take deep breaths; for a moment he thought he was going to faint. All around him, Air Force officers were shouting at one another as Doris and Everett hugged each other. He looked around, caught the expression on General Leclede’s face. It was nauseatingly smug, and Murphy had little doubt that, when he made his final report, he would claim most of the credit for the success of Blue Plate.

All of a sudden, the one thing he wanted most in the world was to get a breath of fresh air.

“Save the data,” he said to Everett, “and transfer control to the tower for the flyback phase.” Then, muttering apologies no one seemed to hear, Murphy grabbed his parka and began pushing through the crowd. Leclede called after him, but he pretended not to hear as he headed for the door.

The chill desert air was a relief after the closeness of the control room. The wind had died down, so he pulled his Mets cap out of his pocket and put it on. The ground crew was gathered at the edge of the airstrip, waiting for Herbert to make its remote-controlled landing. Murphy hoped he would get a chance to inspect the drone for himself before it was spirited away into one of the hangars. However, now that the Air Force knew the secret to temporal transit, everyone involved in Blue Plate—or at least the civilian R&D staff—would be retired. Herbert had just become a military asset.

Now he knew how J. Robert Oppenheimer must have felt . . .

The hell with it. Thrusting his hands in his jacket pockets, Murphy strolled away from the operations building. Perhaps it was just as well. He had never intended to let Blue Plate consume nearly one-third of his life. All he had ever wanted to do was figure out how someone with a handful of archaic pocket change and a passenger manifest for the Hindenburg could wind up in 1998.

“So now you know,” he murmured to himself. “Happy?”

Well, at least he had a military pension coming to him. The mortgage was paid off, and he had come to enjoy living in New England. Perhaps he could see Steven a little more often, and take in a few ball games at Shea Stadium . . .

Suddenly, everything around him seemed a little brighter, like the first light of dawn breaking over the secret airstrip.

Murphy was looking at the ground when it happened. He saw his own shadow stretching out before him, much as if a great floodlight had abruptly been switched on the night sky. Then he heard men shouting behind him . . .

“Hey, what . . .?”

“Holy shit, it’s . . .!”

“Nuke!”

Murphy whipped around, stared upward. For an instant, he, too, believed that the nuclear bomb had exploded far above the desert. He instinctively covered his eyes with his hands, yet there was no sound, no concussion, only a hellishly bright glare from high in the night sky, as if a miniature supernova had suddenly erupted far out in space . . .

“Oh, my God!” someone yelled. “Look at the Moon!”

Lowering his hands, Murphy gaped at the sky. The source of the glare was coming from where he had seen the Moon only a few moments ago . . .

He was still staring at the white-hot orb in the sky when something flashed directly behind him.

At first, he thought it the high beams of a nearby truck. He couldn’t take his eyes off the sky, and so he ignored it, but then the illumination grew brighter, overwhelming even the distant cataclysm, and suddenly he was aware of nearby men pointing his way, shouting in horror . . .

Murphy turned, found himself standing at the edge of a ball of light that had materialized directly behind him. Within the center of the aura was a vaguely man-shaped form, yet with wings that rose above its head.

Raising his hands against the blinding glare, Murphy started to step back, yet any thoughts of escape came much too late. The corona stretched out to envelop him, the figure within its nucleus reaching toward him . . .

The taloned hands that grasped his arms weren’t human.

Tues, Oct 16, 2314—1547Z

“You say you saw it?” Lea asked. “The angel, I mean . . . you got a close look at it?”

“Only for a second.” Murphy shrugged as he continued to gaze into the remains of the bonfire, as if summoning memories from its dying embers. “I’m not sure what happened then, except that I blacked out. When I woke up, I was here.” He gestured toward the fire. “I guess it left that to keep me warm. I don’t why or how, but I knew that you were coming, so I just waited until . . .”

“Tell us about the angel,” Lea said quietly. “What did it look like?”

Murphy shivered. “Lady, whatever it was, it was no angel. More like a reptile on two legs, with a face that would give you nightmares.” His brow furrowed as he thought about it. “About seven, eight feet tall, with long fins coming from its back. Leathery brown skin, long bony skull, black eyes. Evil-looking, but. . .”

He said nothing for a moment, then he shook his head. “But they’re not evil. At least, that’s what it’s telling me now. It says it’s deliberately hiding its appearance because we associate ugliness with evil, and it’s aware that we’d consider it repulsive.” A corner of his mouth inched upward. “I can’t fault its reasoning. From the brief glimpse I got of the one who brought me here, it’s about the worst thing I can imagine.”

The sun was starting to set behind the western side of the valley. With twilight closing in, the rings in the sky were beginning to change color, assuming muted shades of orange and red which vaguely resembled the autumn foliage that once graced New England at this time of year. “But these . . . this race, I mean. . . weren’t they the ones who destroyed the Moon?” Franc picked his words carefully, mindful that someone or something else was eavesdropping on their conversation. “That led to the destruction of our planet and everyone on it. Why shouldn’t we regard them as evil?”

Again, Murphy shut his eyes and lowered his head, assuming the posture of someone listening carefully to an unseen voice. “It insists that it’s . . . I mean, they . . . that they’re not evil,” he said at last, speaking haltingly. “It’s speaking about its race. It claims that they’re destroying our satellite . . . the Moon, I mean . . . was necessary in order to prevent us from damaging spacetime any further. If they hadn’t done so, we would have caused more paradoxes to occur, until . . .”

“So they snuff out five billion people?” Metz hurled a stick into the fire as he angrily rose to his feet. “You just can’t . . . I mean, who the hell elected them God? They’re . . .”

“For chrissakes, shut up!” Hands clamped over his ears, Murphy bent forward as if in physical pain. “I didn’t . . . I can’t . . .!”

“Vasili, sit down, please.” Lea moved closer to Murphy, wrapped an arm around him. “Take it easy,” she whispered. “It’s all right. Don’t rush, just take it easy . . .”

She shared a meaningful look with Franc. Like him, she was concerned about the precarious state of the scientist’s sanity. No wonder he was frightened; for the last couple of hours, he had been forced to act as a telepathic channel between them and the . . . whatever it was. Indeed, watching Murphy lay his head against Lea’s shoulder like a frightened child, Franc wondered whether he wasn’t close to snapping.

Metz regarded Murphy with disgust and loathing. “Sure,” he muttered. “Take it easy. We’ve got all the time in the world . . .”

“Be quiet.” Franc locked eyes with the timeship pilot. “And if you can’t be quiet, then go back to the Oberon.” Perhaps there was some sort of washover effect associated with the telepathic link; whenever any one of them—particularly Vasili, the most irritable of all—had become emotionally aroused, Murphy had reacted accordingly. He returned his attention to the old man cradled in Lea’s arms. “Dr. Murphy,” he said as quietly as he could, “if you need some rest, we can continue this later.”

Like it or not, he had to admit that Metz was right on one point: they did have all the time in world. Indeed, time was the only thing Earth had left . . .

Murphy surprised him by shaking his head. “No, no . . . this is too important. I just. . .” Opening his eyes, he sighed as he sat up straight. “I’m sorry, it’s just that . . . when I woke up this morning, it was 2024, and everyone I knew was still alive. And now . . .”

“We understand,” Lea said. “If it makes any difference, it hasn’t been easy on us, either.”

Daylight was beginning to fade, the fire quickly dying out. Franc found another branch behind him; he broke it in half, fed it into the low flames. “So tell us everything you know,” he said quietly, giving Metz an admonishing look. “We won’t interrupt again, I promise.”

“Everything I know. Sure . . .” Murphy pulled off his baseball cap, absently ran his fingers across its embroidered logo. “Okay, for what it’s worth, here goes. . .”

Again, a reticent moment. “The angels . . . the aliens, or whatever you want to call them . . . are an old race. I mean, very old . . . they were technologically sophisticated when we were still in the Stone Age. They won’t tell me what they called themselves, or where their home world is . . . was, I mean . . . located, because they wish to keep that secret. However, they will tell me that, for about a thousand years . . . our years, I think . . . they dominated a quadrant of our galaxy nearly two hundred light-years in diameter, and had explored most of the rest.”

“So they were conquerors,” Metz said flatly.

Franc shot him another look, but Murphy didn’t seem to mind. “At first they were, yeah, but as time went on they abandoned their ambitions for empire. I guess you could say they grew up. They realized it wasn’t much fun being the toughest kid on the block, because then nobody wants to play with you.” He smiled. “Those are my words, not theirs, but you get the point.”

“We do,” Franc said. “Go on, please.”

“There’s lots of intelligent races out there . . . no surprise, I guess we knew that all along . . . but very few reach the point of achieving space travel, and even fewer learn how to construct wormholes. The ones that do, though, soon discover that if they’re able to bridge space, they’re also able to bridge time. If you’re able to accomplish one, then the other comes naturally. Follow me so far?”

“Sure. That’s the way it happened with us,” Franc said. Lea shook her head at him, but he ignored her. At this juncture, there was no sense in hiding anything from Murphy; his future was their past, even if on different worldlines, and right now none of them had anything left to lose. “Where we came from, humankind launched the first hyperspace starship in 2257. We started exploring chronospace about twenty-five years later. And you’re right . . . we’ve found plenty of eetees, but none of them are capable of space travel, let alone time travel. So far, at least.”

Murphy nodded. “Well, they’re out there . . . or at least, the ones that survived. Apparently, time travel is the most dangerous thing an intelligent race can discover, because a civilization capable of exploring its own history is likewise capable of changing it. When that happens, more often than not they destroy themselves. . . and sometimes they take other races with them.”

He paused to heave a deep sigh. “That’s what happened to the angels. First they began to explore chronospace, and then they began to change history. They caused paradoxes which eventually destroyed not only their own home world, but also those of all the worlds within their dominium, until virtually none of their kind were left. The handful that remain alive have taken it upon themselves to make sure that this sort of thing never happens again.”

“So they’re . . . what? Time policemen?” Metz was skeptical. “Who appointed them?”

Murphy raised his shoulders in an empty shrug. “If you want to call them that, sure. They seem to see themselves as sentries. As for who appointed them . . . I guess you could say they appointed themselves.” He smiled slightly. “Maybe you can argue with that idea, but I don’t think they’d listen.”

“Well, if they’re listening right now, I’ve got two words for them . . .”

“Metz, just shut up, all right?” Franc glared at Vasili until he pointedly turned away, then he turned back to Murphy. “So they see themselves as sentries. You mean they monitor other races who are capable of time travel?”

“Exactly, yes. When they detect disturbances in spacetime, they investigate the source, and if it turns out that they’re being caused by the creation of artificial wormholes, then they observe the race that constructed them to see if they’re using them to travel back in time. If that’s the case, and if they believe that race is acting irresponsibly then they . . . well, they intervene.”

“That explains the other sightings.” Lea hugged her knees as she stared into the fire. “The angels other CRC expeditions reported . . . those were angels observing us, trying to determine what we were doing.” She looked at Murphy. “We’ve seen them before, but we didn’t know what they were.”

“So now you know.” Murphy picked his cap, pulled it back on his head. “When you went back to 1937, you caused a paradox that changed history and created a new worldline, and when you crashed in 1998, you caused yet another paradox which compounded the mistake . . .

“Which, in turn, led to humankind developing time travel two hundred years earlier than it originally had,” Lea finished.

“Right, and the angels couldn’t let that happen. They . . .” Murphy closed his eyes, his mouth pursing in concentration. “They say that . . . a race that values free will as strongly as we do . . . cannot be allowed to pursue time travel. We simply aren’t mature enough to understand the full consequences of our actions. This was why we had to be stopped.”

“Even at the cost of our world,” Franc said softly.

“Yes. Better the destruction of one world than many others.” When he raised his head once more, there were tears at the corners of his eyes. “They waited until we tested Herbert, and then they obliterated the Moon. Most of the human race perished virtually overnight when its larger fragments rained down on Earth. The survivors held on for a few more years, but by then the global climate had been damaged beyond the point of recovery. I’m . . . I’m the only person from my time to survive, and that’s only because the . . . I can’t call them angels, sorry . . . they brought me here, to tell you these things.”

“And that’s it?” Metz swung around to face him. “That’s all? ‘Hey, we blew up the Moon and killed everyone on your planet . . . sorry, but it’s your fault’?” He gestured to the nearby bluff. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t pitch you over.”

“It’s not his fault!” Franc scrambled to his feet.

“Stop it, both of you!” Lea yelled. “Vasili, he didn’t . . .!”

“No,” Murphy said quietly. “He’s right. It is my fault.”

Remaining seated on the ground, he gazed into the amber coals. “I shouldn’t have kept that piece of paper,” he continued, “but I did, and I shouldn’t have let myself be forced into telling anyone else where I thought it came from, but I did, and I shouldn’t have spent the next twenty-six years developing Herbert, but . . .”

He let out his breath, wiped tears from his face with the back of his hand. “Well, you know the rest. Maybe you guys made a mistake in 1937, but five billion people died because of mine.” He nodded toward the desolate valley spread out below them. “The folks who lived down there used to be my neighbors. Believe me, I’m tempted to jump myself. If it wasn’t because of . . .”

He stopped, listening for a few moments, then he looked up at them again. “But the aliens didn’t bring me here just to fill you in. They say this is just a warning . . .”

“Awhat?” Metz demanded.

“Yeah, I know . . . some warning, huh?” Murphy smiled bitterly. “But they say that we can still undo everything, if we’re willing to do so.”

He clambered to his feet, brushed off the back of his trousers. “I’m not hearing any more voices, but I think I can figure out the rest. This is only one worldline, right? That means there’s others. Other possible futures, I mean.” He glanced in the direction of the Oberon, then looked at Franc. “If I’m not mistaken, then that thing can still go back in time, right?”

“Sure. Of course it can,” Franc said. “It’s a little damaged, but it’s still flightworthy.” He turned toward Metz. “You can finish the repairs, can’t you?”

The pilot slowly let out his breath, scratched the back of his head. “Well, I don’t have . . .” Then he nodded. “Sure, I can do it. Give me a few hours, and we’ll be ready to go. What are you getting at, Lu?”

Franc didn’t reply at once. Stepping away from the fire, he looked at the obscene rings rising above the distant mountains. The last light of day was upon them, the cold wind beginning to rise once more.

“We made a mistake back there,” he said at last. “Now we’re going to undo it.”

Thursday, May 6, 1937: 6:43 P.M.

Twilight was settling upon the New Jersey coast, the last light of day gilding the breakers as they crashed against the beach. A pair of children building a sand castle at the edge of the surf heard the growl of engines just before an immense shadow passed over them. Looking up, they gaped in astonishment, then leaped to their feet and screamed in delight as a great silver ellipse cruised overhead.

The Hindenburg had been following the Jersey shoreline for nearly three hours now, its arrival at Lakehurst Naval Air Station delayed until weather conditions at the landing field improved. Yet now, just as the giant airship was approaching the town of Forked River, its radio operator received word that visibility was up to five miles and the winds had fallen to twenty knots. Captain Pruss told the pilots to set course for Lakehurst.

On the beach far below, one of the children watching the LZ-129 noticed a brief shimmer in the air just above the dirigible’s upper fin. Mystified, he raised a hand to shade his eyes against the sun, yet as the enormous craft slowed to make a northwest turn, the odd illusion was lost to sight. The boy decided his eyes were playing tricks; he grinned as the zeppelin gradually swung around. One day, he silently swore to himself, he was going to ride in one of those things . . .

“We’re almost in position,” Metz’s voice murmured in Franc’s headset. “Ready back there?”

Sitting in the open airlock hatch, his feet dangling over empty space, Franc watched as the Hindenburg grew steadily closer. Although invisible, the Oberon still cast a shadow across the dirigible; the timeship hovered barely thirty meters above the airship, and now he could clearly see the ribbing beneath its taut canvas skin.

“Ready,” he said. The palms of his hands were slick with sweat; he wiped them across his trousers, and tried not to think too much about what he was about to do. “Just get me above the aft flue vents.”

The Hindenburg swelled in size. Now he couldn’t see the ground anymore, only a vast expanse of silver-painted fabric. There was a limit to how close Metz could dare to bring the Oberon before the electromagnetic field of its negmass drive began to interfere with the dirigible’s diesel engines, yet he also had to take advantage of those few precious minutes over the town of Forked River when the airship made its turn toward Lakehurst, during which time it would be moving just slowly enough for Franc to safely board her.

At least, so he hoped . . .

“Ready for the ladder?” Murphy squatted on the other side of the hatch, clutching a floor bracket as he held onto a rolled-up fire ladder with the other. The ladder, along with the crowbar Franc had slipped into his belt, had come from the ruins of a hardware store just outside Amherst. Franc nodded, and Murphy tossed the ladder through the hatch. Its stainless-steel links rattled as it fell, then it snapped tight against the bracket.

Murphy leaned over the hatch and peered downward, then looked up again. “You’re about five feet short,” he shouted, trying to make himself heard over the keening whistle of the wind. “Can we get any closer?”

Franc glanced over his shoulder at Lea. Squatting on the deck behind him, her face pale, she shook her head. He looked down just as the rectangular slotted panels of the flues came into sight. They were almost on top of the airship. He reached forward, grabbed the top rung of the ladder.

“I’m over the vents!” Metz yelled. “Go now!”

He felt Lea’s hand on his shoulder, as if she was trying to hold him back. Yet he couldn’t allow himself the luxury of hesitation. Franc sucked in his breath, then gently pushed himself off the deck and through the hatch.

There was a terrifying instant when, as he put his weight on the ladder, the rungs gave a few centimeters of slack. He fell backward, yet he held on, and then the ladder took his weight and stopped his plunge. The wind ripped at his clothes and threatened to tear him off; he felt a surge of panic, and for a few moments all he wanted to do was cling to the rungs until Lea and Murphy hauled him back to safety . . .

“Franc, you can do this.” Lea’s voice was calm presence in his headset. “You can do this. Don’t look down. Just take it one step at a time, and don’t look down.”

“Right . . . okay.” Franc carefully lowered his right foot, blindly searched for the next rung down until the toe of his shoe found it. He reluctantly released his hand from the top rung, then reached down to grab the one below it. “Got it.”

“That’s it,” Lea gently coaxed him onward. “You’re doing fine. Now the next rung . . .”

Step by step, one rung at a time, Franc made his way down the ladder. It seemed to get easier the farther down he went; although he dared not look down, he could hear the roar of the Hindenburg ’s engines from far below. He glanced up, and almost laughed at what he saw: a square-shaped hole in the cloudy sky, with Murphy and Lea staring down at him. Incredibly, they were nearly twenty meters away.

“You’re almost there,” Lea said. “C’mon, you can do it . . .”

“Franc, you’re going to have to hurry.” Metz’s voice came over the comlink. “They’ve completed the turnaround, and they’re throttling up the engines.”

Now the ladder was swaying like a pendulum. Metz was trying to keep up with the Hindenburg. Disregarding Lea’s admonition, Franc looked down. Six more rungs to go, but the bottom of the ladder was still two meters above the top of the dirigible. Worse, the leading edge of the vertical stabilizer was less than thirty meters away. If the ladder swung any closer to it, he would be hurled against the huge fin.

“Franc, hurry!”

No time. Franc scrambled down the remaining rungs, until his feet had nowhere left to go. He took a deep breath, hesitated for a second, then released the ladder.

Much to his surprise, he managed to land on all fours. The envelope sagged beneath him, the rough canvas burning the palms of his hands. The slipstream threatened to grab his body and pitch him over the side. Franc flattened himself against the envelope, then began to crawl forward on his stomach, making his way toward the twin flue vents rising from the top of the airship.

The hinged wooden cover of the left vent was frozen shut. Still hugging the airship, he pulled the crowbar out of his belt and shoved the narrow end forward, wedging it between its cover’s lower slats. Bracing his feet against a rib and rising on his knees as high as he dared, he leaned against the crowbar, putting his weight upon it. The cover creaked in protest, then popped open, exposing the dark shaft below it.

Franc tucked the crowbar back into his belt, then crawled to the open flue, straightening up just long enough to swing his legs over the opening. As anticipated, the shaft’s interior was lined with ladder rungs. He swung himself over the side, relieved to get out of the wind.

“Okay, I’m in.” He glanced at the Rolex watch he had borrowed from Murphy; it read 6:55. “By my reckoning, I’ve got thirty minutes.”

“You don’t have that long,” Metz said.

“I know. Hang on as long as you can.”

The flue shafts were designed to vent hot air from the airship’s interior, but the Hindenburg’s riggers also used them to inspect and repair the hydrogen gas cells. As Franc hastily climbed down the narrow shaft, he listened for sounds from the catwalk below. He heard no one, but that was to be expected; the crewmen would be at their landing stations by now, either in the airship’s nose or in the small auxiliary control compartment located in the bottom of the lower stabilizer.

The shaft intersected the middle catwalk leading through the axial center of the ship. Franc carefully opened the hatch, peered first one way and then another, before creeping out onto the triangular gangway. All around him, enormous gas cells made of hand-stitched lengths of sheep gut gently groaned like the lungs of a leviathan, held in place by skeletal duraluminum rings and weblike strands of cable. Franc jogged down the catwalk, heading for the stern. He prayed that his footsteps wouldn’t be heard by anyone below, yet there wasn’t enough time for stealth.

He found the narrow ladder leading upward along the side of Cell Number Four. Somewhere up there was the place where the rigger had hidden his bomb. He dug into his trouser pocket, found the miniature electromagnetic sensor Metz had given him. It came from Oberon’s repair kit; Vasili used it to detect faulty wiring, and now Franc hoped that it would help him pinpoint the location of the explosive device concealed within the hydrogen cell.

Yet he didn’t need the sensor after all. Halfway up the ladder, he heard the gentle rustle of loose fabric. Clutching the sensor between his teeth, Franc scaled the last few rungs until he found the place where Spehl had used a knife to slice open the canvas outer envelope of the cell. He had stitched shut the opening, but the flap had come loose; as Franc gently prized it open, he found the bomb taped within.

It was a crude device: a small cotton bag filled with phosphorus, with wires leading into it from four flashlight batteries, which in turn were rigged to a Swiss nautical watch. “I’ve found it,” Franc said as he carefully inspected the bomb.

“You’ve got nineteen minutes.” Metz’s voice was terse. “Franc . . .”

“Shut up. I’m working.” Disarming the bomb without knowing exactly what he was doing would probably be a lethal mistake, but that wasn’t his intention. Peering closer at the watch face, he observed that its bevel was set at eight o’clock. The bevel must be the timer; when the minute hand touched its red index, the positive and negative wires connected to them would touch, and an electrical charge would be sent into the phosphorus charge. He reached into the gas bag and, ever so carefully, turned the bevel counterclockwise until the index rested above 7:25.

He slowly let out his breath. Regardless of his reasons for doing so, he had just condemned thirty-five people to death. On the other side of the airship, he and Lea would be standing on the Deck A promenade, watching through the windows as the Hindenburg coasted across New Jersey farmland toward Lakehurst. This time, though, they would get what they had come here for . . .

“Okay, it’s set,” he said as he closed the flap.

“Hindenburg’s dropping altitude,” Metz said. “I can’t stay here much longer.”

Franc checked his own watch: 7:07. Only eighteen minutes left. He swore under his breath as he began to scurry back down the ladder. Eighteen minutes. Perhaps there was marginally enough time for him to get back to the flue vent and climb back up to the top of the airship before the bomb went off, yet if he tried to board the Oberon while it was within sight of the airfield, it was almost certain that someone on the ground would spot him. Although the timeship was cloaked, he wasn’t; eyewitnesses would later report, and newsreel cameras would verify, the strange sight of a man climbing a ladder into thin air.

“Get out here,” he said. “I’ll find another way off.”

“Are you out of your . . .?”

“Don’t argue. I’ll signal when I get away. You can pick me up somewhere else.” He was at the bottom of the ladder now. He looked both ways, but no one else was on the catwalk. “Signing off now. If you don’t hear from me again . . . well, get Lea to figure it out. She’ll know what to do.”

Metz was saying something, but Franc didn’t have time to listen. He pulled off the headset and shoved it in his pocket, then began jogging down the catwalk, heading for the bow.

When the Hindenburg crashed, it went down fast. Thirty-seven seconds after the explosion, it was . . . would become . . . a flaming heap of collapsing metal. Although the stern hit ground first, most the survivors had been in the front of the ship, save for a handful of crewmen stationed in the lower rudder who managed to escape before they were burned or crushed to death. So his best chance of survival was to reach the lower decks at the front of the ship. However, he couldn’t allow himself to be seen in the passenger compartments, and too many crewmen would be in their quarters behind B Deck.

If he correctly remembered the ship’s layout, though, there was an airshaft between Cells Twelve and Thirteen which led down the lower catwalk forward of B Deck, just aft of the freight and mail rooms behind the control car. Two cargo hatches were located there; if he could get that far, he might be able to hide just long enough to wait out the explosion.

Franc was three-quarters of the way down the catwalk, just past the airshaft between Cells Ten and Eleven, when he heard German voices echoing from somewhere close by. He stopped, breathing hard as his eyes sought movement within the dimness of the envelope. He couldn’t see anything, but now he could hear footsteps against metal. There was someone—two engineers, probably—on the middle catwalk just ahead of him.

Franc turned, walked as quickly and quietly as he could back to the airshaft he had just passed. With a final glance over his shoulder, he opened its hatch, then ducked inside, pausing on the ladder just long enough to close the hatch behind him.

The shaft thrummed loudly with the muffled noise of the nearby engines; the ladder vibrated beneath the palms of his hands as he climbed downward. If his memory didn’t betray him, this shaft would take him to the lower catwalk running along the keel, just aft of the crew quarters. Yet there were no cargo hatches in this part of the ship’s underbelly, and he didn’t dare enter the forward engine cars, where engineers would be stationed during landing operations.

Like it or not, he’d have to make his way through the crew quarters to B Deck of the passenger compartment.

Reaching the bottom of the airshaft, he placed his ear against the hatch, yet the engine noise made it impossible for him to hear anything. Time was running out; he’d have to take a risk. Franc started to open the hatch, then he felt a familiar weight against his thigh. Looking down, he saw the crowbar he had taken with him from the Oberon, still dangling by its crook from his belt. Useless now, and an unexplainable liability if he was caught with it. Franc pulled it out of his belt, hung it from a ladder rung, then opened the hatch.

The keel catwalk was deserted. On either side of its triangular framework were the massive horizontal cylinders of fuel and water tanks; directly ahead lay a duraluminum bulkhead, with a closed door leading into the compartment beyond. Franc shut the airshaft hatch, then walked quickly past the tanks to the door. From somewhere far above, he could hear the indistinct voices of the engineers he had managed to avoid. He hesitated at the door, his right hand on the knob, then he turned it and pushed open the door.

The warmth of the crew quarters was welcome after the unheated chill of the envelope. Franc quietly shut the door, then put his back against the plaster wall, straining to listen for human sounds from the narrow passageway that lay before him. Just ahead, he heard vague movement within a cabin to the right; as he crept closer, he saw that its door was open. The crew quarters were almost empty, but not quite.

Holding his breath, walking on the balls of his feet, Franc stole toward the cabin door. Peering through the jamb, he spotted a young, dark-haired man bending over an open suitcase. Franc recognized him as one of the dining-room stewards; indeed, it was the same one who had escorted him and Lea to the Hindenburg when it left Frankfurt. With the ship coming into Lakehurst, his job was done, and now he was packing for a weekend layover in New York. Humming to himself, he turned toward the closet, and Franc took the moment to tiptoe past his cabin. Auf wiedersehen, mein freund, he thought. Hope you get out alive.

At the end of the passageway was another door. Franc carefully opened it, then slipped through into the corridor that lay beyond. He immediately recognized his surroundings; he was on B Deck, across from the keel corridor which ran through the lower deck of the passenger compartment. Just ahead was the landing that led to the stairs to A Deck; just around the corridor behind them, below his feet, were the twin gangways, still folded up within the airship’s belly.

He sighed with relief as he sagged against the bulkhead. Perfect. All he had to do was remain hidden for . . . how long? Realizing that he hadn’t checked the time in at least fifteen minutes, he raised his wrist, glanced at Murphy’s watch.

It read 7:23. Two minutes, perhaps less. The Hindenburg should be hovering directly over the landing field by now, slowly easing its way toward the mooring tower.

Just enough time to make contact with the Oberon. He pulled the headset from his trouser pocket, clasped it against his face. “Oberon, do you copy?” he said softly.

A few precious moments passed, then he heard Lea’s voice. “Franc, where are you?”

“B Deck, near the gangway,” he whispered. “Where are you?”

From down the corridor, he could hear the clatter of cookware in the galley; somewhere above, the faint voices of passengers watching from the A Deck promenade as the Navy ground crew ran to grab the ropes that had just been dropped. Up there, he would be touching the rim of his glasses, surreptitiously checking the time, murmuring something to Lea about getting ready . . .

“We’ve landed at the northern edge of the airfield,” Lea said. “Zack’s coming to . . .”

From the other side of the stairs, he heard a commode flush. A second later, the door to the nearest of the three toilets on B Deck swung open, and a passenger stepped out into the corridor: a tall, gray-haired man, instinctively looking down to check the fly of his trousers.

Franc whipped the headset from his face, shoved it back in his pocket as he glanced first one way, then the other. There was no place for him to hide. All he could do was stay still, hope that he wouldn’t be noticed.

Then the passenger turned to walk toward him, and Franc suddenly felt an icy chasm open in the pit of his stomach.

It was John Pannes.

For an instant, he believed it was he himself: the other version of Franc Lu, disguised to resemble one of the ill-fated passengers. Yet as the other man came closer, his eyes met Franc’s, and there was no hint of recognition, no shock of seeing oneself. Pannes merely looked at him oddly, as if spotting a fellow passenger who had somehow escaped his notice during the past three days, then turned toward the stairs leading to A Deck.

As he put a foot on the first riser, though, Pannes paused to look back at Franc. “Can I help you, young man?” he asked politely.

“No . . . no, sir,” Franc stammered. “Just . . . I’m just waiting, that’s all.”

Pannes nodded curtly. “One bathroom’s as good as the next,” he murmured, then he continued climbing the stairs.

Franc felt himself trembling as he watched Pannes disappear from sight. No doubt about it: that was the real John Pannes, the one who should now be in the twenty-fourth century, not taking a last-minute run to the toilet before the Hindenburg landed. Which meant that, one way or another, Franc wasn’t aboard, nor was Lea . . .

“Oh, my God,” he whispered. “What went . . .?”

There was a loud, hard thump from somewhere above and behind him, as if a great weight had suddenly landed on the back of the airship.

An instant later, the deck pitched violently beneath his feet, and Franc was hurled face forward. His breath was knocked from his lungs as he hit the carpeted floor, and for a moment he lay dazed and confused. Then he heard men and women screaming in terror as the airship made a sickening lurch and the deck tilted farther forward, throwing him against the floor even as he tried to clamber to his knees.

He managed to twist to one side just before he hit the bulkhead below the stairs. A sharp pain in his left shoulder; he ignored it as he grabbed a railing and staggered to his feet. Now he could feel heat against the back of his neck—something above him was burning—and all around him he heard heavy objects crashing against walls. From down the corridor behind him, men were shouting in German.

Another lurch, and now the airship plummeted downward. He grabbed a post next to the gangway stairs, clung to it with both hands as the ceiling behind him caved in. Through the cellon windows on the other side of the lower promenade, he caught a brief glimpse of the ground rushing toward him; he turned away just as the windows shattered.

Glass lacerated the side of his face, ripped skin from the backs of his hands. He was deafened by an infernal roar: burning hydrogen, groaning metal, voices raised in horror. Somehow, though, the gangway remained intact; dislodged by the impact, it gaped open, an exit from hell barely discernible through walls of acrid smoke.

Franc released the post, covered his face with his arms, charged headfirst down the gangway, Flaming debris rained down around him as his feet touched the ground; through heavy smoke, he caught glimpses of men and women running for their lives.

Hands above his head, gagging and coughing against fumes that threatened to fill his lungs, he lurched away from the flaming wreckage, ignoring the hands of the sailors who sought to rescue him.

He was safe. He had escaped. The Hindenburg had exploded, just as history had predicated it would . . .

And just as before, something had gone horribly wrong.

Thursday, May 6, 1937: 9:15 P.M.

“And you’re sure it was him?”

“Of course, I’m sure,” Franc insisted. “I wore his face for four days, didn’t I? And he was so close I could have . . . ow!”

“Sorry.” Lea withdrew the antiseptic spray, carefully examined the burns across his shoulders and back. Stripped to his briefs, his twentieth-century outfit now tattered rags heaped on the floor, Franc sat on one of the couches in Oberon’s passenger compartment, leaning forward on his elbows as Lea tended to his injuries. “Hold still,” she said. “I haven’t gotten to your legs yet.”

Franc grimaced, but obediently stretched out his legs as she bent down next to him. “I wouldn’t complain if I were you,” Murphy said. “You’re lucky to have gotten out of there at all. That thing went up like a furnace.”

Lea nodded, but avoided looking his way. The scientist was sitting on the couch formerly occupied by Tom Hoffman. Although she had balked at leaving his body behind, Vasili had pointed out that, if Murphy was going with them, there wasn’t room for Tom’s body aboard the timeship. In the end, they had buried him on the summit of Mt. Sugarloaf, near the base of the ruined observation tower.

“You should have been inside,” Franc hissed between his teeth as Lea sprayed the backs of his thighs and knees. He hadn’t even realized that he had suffered first-degree burns until he made it back to the Oberon. He looked down at Lea, then reached forth his hand to gently stroke her hair. She looked up sharply, and he smiled at her. “I’m glad it didn’t work out the first time,” he said softly. “I don’t think . . . I’m not sure we would have escaped.”

For a moment it seemed as if she was repressing a shudder, then she deliberately looked away. “Pass me that, will you?” she said to Murphy, pointing to the open med kit on the floor. Murphy leaned and pushed the box toward her. “So you don’t think the Pannes got away? You said he was on the stairs to A Deck when the bomb went off.”

“It’s possible, but . . .” Franc shook his head. “If this is the way it happened. . . the way it should have happened, I mean . . . then they didn’t escape. According to the historical record, he remained aboard to find his wife, and neither of them got out in time.” He looked down at the floor. “It’s too bad, really,” he added quietly. “I only met him for a moment, but he seemed like a good man.”

“Then consider yourself lucky,” Murphy said.

Franc nodded. He knew that he had been lucky, in more ways than one. Knowing that Franc was in serious trouble, Metz had gambled that Oberon’s chameleon would render it invisible to everyone at the naval station, and touched down at the edge of the landing field only a few hundred meters from the mooring tower. Since their attention had been focused entirely upon the Hindenburg, though, no one noticed the slight disturbance it made during touchdown. As soon as Franc was away from the crash scene, Murphy exited the Oberon, found him at the edge of the crowd, and, under the cover of twilight, guided him back to the timeship. Once they were both safely aboard, Metz lifted off again.

As makeshift rescue operations went, this one had gone off without a hitch. Yet every time Franc permitted himself to think about it, whenever he allowed his mind to reach back to those terrifying seconds—although they seemed like much longer: minutes, even hours—it all came rushing back. The hollow thud of the explosion, the violent plunge, the falling debris, the screams . . .

“Just be still,” Lea murmured. “This should only tickle.” She had pulled on a pair of thin plastic gloves, and now she was carefully opening a small, hermetically sealed canister. She noticed Murphy’s curious gaze and held it up for him to examine. “Naderm-310 . . . nanocellular epidermal restorative. It’s like a lotion. We, uh, put it on, and it . . .”

“Repairs the skin, using microscopic nanites.” Absently stroking his beard, Murphy inched a little closer as he studied the canister with fascination. “C’mon . . . it’s not like I’m a caveman, you know.”

“You had this?” she asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow.

“Not yet, but an Italian biotech firm was supposed to be working on it.” Murphy watched as Lea carefully poured a little of the lotion onto Franc’s back. “Where did this stuff come from?”

“I don’t know. The Moon, probably.” Lea began massaging the Naderm into the red and blistered parts of Franc’s skin. “So let’s try to figure this out. If you saw John Pannes on the Hindenburg, then that means you and I never got aboard. Right?”

“That’s the way it seems to me.” Franc scowled as he resisted the urge to reach back and scratch at himself. She was wrong; the lotion didn’t tickle, it itched, like a bad case of poison ivy. “And that shouldn’t have happened, if we’ve returned to our original worldline . . . that is, the worldline we left in 1937.”

“No, that would have been the changed worldline.” Murphy raised a finger. “The way you’ve explained it to me, in Worldline A, the Hindenburg explodes on schedule, killing John and Emma Pannes along with a couple of dozen other people.” He raised another finger. “And in Worldline B, the changed worldline, the two of you are on board instead of the Pannes, but screw things up so that history is altered and this new worldline is created . . . the one I’m from. Have I got it right so far?” Franc nodded. “So this shouldn’t be Worldline B, because you went back and changed things back to the way they should be, in Worldline A.”

“Yes, but when we boarded the Hindenburg, we were in Worldline A.” Lea finished spreading the lotion on Franc’s back and moved to his legs. “The night before we left Frankfurt, we arranged for the Pannes to be abducted on their way to the opera. We wouldn’t . . . we couldn’t have boarded the airship if that hadn’t succeeded.”

“So now we’re in Worldline C . . . a completely new worldline?” Franc suddenly felt hollow inside. “Then all this has been for nothing.”

“No . . . no, not necessarily.” Murphy stood up and walked to the wallscreen. It displayed Earth from low orbit, where Franc had taken the Oberon after leaving New Jersey. The elderly scientist had relished the ride into space; now he gazed down upon Earth, marshaling his thoughts. “You say you reset the bomb from eight o’clock to seven-twenty-five, right? It may have been that the bomb was set for eight o’clock all along, but the timer simply malfunctioned and it detonated prematurely. The fact that Lea encountered this Spehl guy may have been totally coincidental.”

“That doesn’t work,” Lea said. “When we checked the recordings made by the divots we placed in the envelope, we saw Spehl go back to Cell Number Four shortly before the Hindenburg reached Lakehurst.”

“Yes, but did you actually see him reset the timer? Or was he simply checking to make sure the bomb hadn’t been discovered?”

“That . . . seemed to be the logical assumption,” Franc said reluctantly.

Murphy smiled and shook his head. “Never assume anything . . . and that includes the notion that Worldline A has been altered because of events that occurred prior to today.”

Lea’s mouth fell open; for a moment she stared at Murphy. Then, without bothering to put away the Naderm, she got up from the floor. “Is there something wrong?” Franc asked.

“No. Stay here. I’ll be right back.” She left the compartment, heading in the direction of the monitor room.

“Nice lady,” Murphy said once she was out of earshot. He returned to his seat and sat down. “Your girlfriend?”

“No . . . not really.” Franc impulsively reached down to scratch at his legs, then thought better of it and removed his hand. The nanites were rebuilding his burned flesh; the pain had disappeared, but the constant itch threatened to drive him out of his mind. “What gives you that idea?”

“She was worried sick about you while you were aboard the Hindenburg. I thought she was going to tear your pilot’s head off when he told you that he couldn’t maintain position any longer.” Murphy’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but I think she cares a lot for you. If you don’t know that . . . well, like my generation used to say, you need to get a clue.”

Franc felt his face growing warm. “Let’s get back to what we were talking about before,” he said, deliberately changing the subject. “What did you mean by that?”

“What I meant was, you’re working under the assumption that this worldline may have altered solely because of actions you may or may not have taken before this date. Given the nature of your previous visit, I don’t blame you for reaching that conclusion.” Murphy shook his head. “But you’re forgetting that nearly three hundred years have gone by since 1937 and 2314. In other words, something in the future may prevent you from coming back here. And that . . .”

“Would you two mind keeping quiet? I can hear you all the way across the ship.”

They looked up, saw Metz standing in the doorway. Pleading exhaustion, the pilot had chased everyone from the control room shortly after the Oberon had achieved orbit, then shut the door to get some sleep. Now he stood just outside the passenger compartment, bleary-eyed and slump-shouldered, plainly irritated at having been wakened.

“Sorry, Vasili,” Franc said. “We didn’t know we were keeping you awake.”

“You are,” Metz grumbled. “If you’re going to talk, at least . . .” Then he looked aside. “Hey, what’s the . . .?”

“Excuse me.” Lea pushed Metz aside and stuck her head through the door. “I’ve found something in the library you need to see,” she said to the other two. “I think it’s important.”

As they entered the monitor room, Murphy was the first to react to the person whose image was displayed on the wallscreen. “Hey, that’s me!” he exclaimed, then he peered a little closer. “At least I think that’s me. I’ve never worn a mustache.”

“No, that’s definitely you.” Lea squeezed between him and Metz to take her place at the pedestal. “Just on the chance that I might find something, I entered your name into the library system. There was nothing under Zack Murphy, but then I tried David Zachary Murphy, and . . .”

“Man, I’m so young.” Murphy walked around the pedestal, stared at the archival still photo. The image was of a youngish-looking man in his early forties, wearing a black turtleneck under a tweed sports coat, casually leaning against a bookshelf. “Where did this picture come from? I mean . . . do you know when it was taken?”

“According to the file on you, it was taken in 2001.” Lea ran her hands across the pedestal keypad, and the photo diminished slightly in size as a horizontal bar of text appeared on the right side of the screen. “It comes from the dust jacket of the novel you . . . or rather, David Z. Murphy . . . published that year. Time Loves A Hero, it was called.”

“I . . . I published a . . .?”

“No,” Lea said, “he published a novel. David Z. Murphy, the man you became in Worldline A.” She scrolled down the text, reciting the vital statistics as they appeared. “Dr. David Z. Murphy was a NASA astrophysicist until 1998, when he left the space agency to become a freelance writer. He wrote nonfiction articles for various magazines until, in 2001, he published his first work of fiction, Time Loves A Hero, a science fiction novel . . .”

“Wow,” Murphy breathed. “I used to love science fiction.” He grinned at Franc and Vasili. “They hated the stuff at OPS, but I . . .”

“Wait a minute,” Lea interrupted. “It becomes more interesting. Time Loves A Hero was acclaimed as a major work of . . . get this . . . time-travel literature, in which the existence of UFOs was interpreted as being timeships from the distant future.”

Murphy’s expression changed from pride to horror. “Oh, no.”

“The novel was well received,” Lea continued, “and when interviewed by a science fiction fanzine . . . I have no idea what that term means . . . Murphy claimed that it was inspired by things he observed while working for NASA. In fact, he first delineated his theories regarding a possible connection between UFO sightings and time travel in an article published in 1998, in a magazine called Analog . . .”

“I used to read that when I was a kid.” Murphy shook his head in puzzlement. “But this is too weird to be a coincidence. A science fiction novel about timeships. . .”

“Hold on. It gets even more weird than that.” Lea touched the pedestal again and the screen changed; now it displayed a photograph of an athletic-looking man of indeterminate age, wearing a laboratory coat and standing near a large cylindrical machine. Although taller and with curly blond hair, his face bore a striking resemblance to Murphy’s.

Lea didn’t say anything for a moment. She watched Murphy as he studied the man on the screen. For a few seconds, he didn’t seem to recognize him . . . then his mouth fell open in astonishment.

“That’s Steven,” he whispered. “My son.”

“Yes, it is,” she said quietly. “Steven David Murphy . . . or rather, Dr. Steven D. Murphy, Ph.D., associate director of the Hawking High-Energy Physics Laboratory. Your son, Zack . . . or rather, your son in this worldline.”

“Steven became a physicist?” Murphy laughed out loud. “But he didn’t . . . I mean, he couldn’t . . . Christ, I love my boy, but he can’t balance his checkbook, let alone an equation. In fact, he has no interest in science at all. Where I come from, he’s a truck driver in New York . . .”

“In this worldline, it appears things went a bit differently.” Lea shrank the photo, adding text to the right side of the screen. “According to CRC historical data, Steven Murphy was inspired by his father’s writings to pursue a career in the sciences, particularly high-energy physics. After receiving his doctorate from Princeton, he went to work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, then moved to Hawking Station when it was built on the Moon in 2047 . . .”

“That’s . . . c’mon, there must be a mistake!” Murphy pointed a shaking finger at the screen. “Steven . . . at least my Steven . . . was born in 1989! If that picture was taken in 2047 . . .”

“Actually, it was taken in 2049, two years after he became its associate director.” Lea smiled at him. “And you’re correct . . . according to his biographical records, he was born in 1989 in this worldline as well.” She glanced over her shoulder at Franc. “Do you want to explain this, or shall I?”

“There’s been no mistake.” Franc glided up behind Murphy, lay a comforting hand on his arm. “Beginning in the early twenty-first century, considerable progress was made toward increasing human longevity. Eradication of major diseases, cellular rejuvenation, gene therapy . . . it’s a bit too long to explain. Trust me . . . he may not look it, but your son is sixty years old in that picture.”

“In fact, he didn’t die until 2152, at the age of 163,” Lea said. “But that’s not the point. According to CRC data, Dr. Steven Murphy was . . . pardon me, will become . . . one of the major theorists responsible for the practical development of time travel. His work at Hawking is directly connected to the invention of the wormhole generators.”

No one spoke. The room went quiet as Zack Murphy stared at the image of the man who, following in his father’s footsteps, would make profound discoveries that would inevitably lead to the development of time travel. His son, yet not quite his son, nonetheless responsible for a long train of events that, in the long run, would cause a paradox that would bring about the destruction of Earth itself.

“I’m . . . I think I’m . . .” Murphy abruptly turned away, lurched to the side of the room. His face was ashen as he collapsed against the bulkhead; for a second it seemed as if he would retch, then his legs seemed to collapse beneath him.

Franc rushed to his side. “Easy,” he murmured as he caught the old man by the shoulders, helped him slide down onto the floor. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be all right . . .”

“I don’t see how.” Silent until now, Metz nodded toward the screen. “Not if his son’s one of the main people behind the discovery of time travel.”

“But he didn’t!” Lea turned toward him. “Don’t you see? If John and Emma Pannes died on the Hindenburg, then that means Franc and I never got aboard, and the only way that could have happened is if we never left 2314! That must mean time travel was never developed in the first place!”

“So why are we here at all?”

“I don’t know. I can’t answer that.” Lea raised her hands in a helpless shrug. “I don’t think anyone could. Maybe it’s because of the laws of conservation of matter and energy, the fact that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Even though there’s been another paradox, we don’t simply disappear because. . . well, because we’re already here. Yet something must have happened . . . something will happen . . . which will prevent Steven Murphy from becoming the scientist who makes the conceptual breakthroughs that will lead to time travel.”

“You might have something there.” Franc stroked his chin as he regarded the image on the wallscreen. “You know,” he said slowly, “there may be a common thread here.” Turning around, he looked down at Murphy. Huddled on the floor of the compartment, his arms wrapped around his knees, the scientist once more looked as distraught as when they found him in 2314. “Zack, in your worldline—Wor1dline B, in 1998—you began work on a project that led to the development of time travel. That happened because you encountered us and therefore discovered that time travel was possible.”

“That’s . . . yeah, I follow you.” Murphy seemed to stir himself from his misery. “I think I do, at least . . .”

“Stay with me. In this worldline—Worldline A, in 1998, the very same year—your counterpart also began work on time travel, although in an indirect way . . . he wrote a magazine article postulating that UFOs might be timeships. This, in turn, inspired your son . . . his son, I mean . . .”

“I prefer to think that’s my son, thank you.” Murphy smiled despite himself. “Stevie’s a good kid, but his idea of intellectual discourse is comparing batting averages.”

“What’s a . . .? Oh, right. Baseball.” Franc waved it off. “Never mind. What I’m trying to say is, the point of conjunction between these two worldlines may not be the Hindenburg disaster, but rather you yourself.”

Murphy raised an incredulous eyebrow. “Me? But haven’t we already decided that the Hindenburg was . . .?”

“No,” Lea interrupted. “That was what we assumed, certainly, but it may be that the different outcomes of the Hindenburg disaster were only a consequence of the paradox. The true cause may well be something different. Both you and David Murphy did things that resulted in . . .”

“Wait a minute. Hold on.” Metz broke into the conversation. “Look, I’m not sure I’m following all of this, but aren’t you missing something? If Murphy . . . the other Murphy, I mean . . . wrote an article about timeships being mistaken for UFOs, then where did he get the idea?” He looked at Murphy. “If he’s as smart as you are, then something must have given him a clue . . . right?”

For the first time in several minutes, no one said anything. Lea fell silent as she turned back toward the pedestal, and Murphy stared up the photo of his alternative-worldline son. Franc finally let out his breath.

“I think we all know where this is going,” he said quietly. “Whatever the reason, we’re going to have to pay another visit to 1998 . . . this 1998, that is.” He glanced at Metz. “Can we do that? Without crashing this time, I mean?”

“Sure.” The pilot gave a weary shrug. “Why not? The coordinates are still entered, so we shouldn’t have any problems.”

“And what do you propose we do when we get there?” Murphy asked.

“We’re going to have a little chat with you,” Franc replied.

Monday, January 14, 1998: 12:55 P.M.

Murphy had just bought a hot dog from the pushcart vendor and was about to cross Independence to have lunch on a park bench in the Mall when he heard someone running down the front steps of the National Air and Space Museum.

He turned just in time to see Dr. David Z. Murphy come to a stop on the sidewalk only a dozen feet away. Behind him, a pair of nuns near the glass doors were glaring at him; a few feet away, the Washington police officer who had been carrying on a bull session with the vendor gave him a curious eye.

As David looked his way, Murphy stepped behind the hood of one of the school buses parked at the curb, ducking his head to avoid being spotted. Neither of the teachers taking a cigarette break in front of the bus noticed him, nor did the cop or the homeless man rooting through a nearby garbage can.

Murphy waited a few moments, then he cautiously emerged from hiding. He observed the younger version of himself striding the opposite way down the sidewalk; once past the last school buses, he dashed across Independence. Careful to remain out of direct line of sight, Murphy followed him across the street, and watched from a discreet distance as David began jogging down the Mall, heading in the direction of the M station.

For a moment, he had an impulse to follow him. It was a strange thing to see himself as others must have seen him twenty-six years ago: a time-dilated mirror image, observed from afar. So far as he could tell, there was no significant physical difference; indeed, he had recognized himself immediately. He would have liked to continue spying upon himself, yet at the same time, the eeriness of the situation left a cold sensation in his stomach.

Finding that he had lost his appetite, Murphy walked back to the Air and Space Museum and offered his hot dog to the homeless man, who regarded it with suspicion for a second before taking it from him with mumbled thanks. He reflected that he probably looked only a little less shabby: old Army parka, battered Mets cap, sleepless eyes. Probably just as well; it might help him fade into the background.

Yet that wasn’t his immediate concern. Shoving his hands into his pockets, he walked up the front steps of the museum, then loitered just outside the front entrance. He didn’t have long to wait; less than a minute later, Franc came out of the building.

The traveller pushed open the glass door carefully, glancing both ways. Once again, Murphy found himself marvelling at his changed appearance; when Franc had emerged from Oberon’s replication cell, Murphy couldn’t quite believe this was the same man he had seen climb into the cylinder only thirty minutes earlier. True, he wasn’t a perfect physical match for the author Gregory Benford—they had been forced to rely upon the biographical information in the timeship’s library, which fortunately included a digital recording of the real Benford’s voice along with a full-body photograph—but it was enough to fool anyone whom, they presumed, had never actually met the man. Yet one look at Franc’s—or rather, Benford’s—face told him that something had gone wrong.

“Which way did he go?” Franc asked quietly as he joined Murphy.

“That way.” He nodded in the direction David had taken. “He ran out about two or three minutes ago, looked around, then took off down the Mall. He looked rather upset.”

“That way?” Franc asked, and Murphy nodded again. “All right, let’s walk the other way. Better hurry . . . he might be back any minute.”

Zipping up the parka Murphy had purchased for him yesterday, Franc trotted down the steps. Murphy fell in beside him as he began marching up the sidewalk toward the Capitol. “What happened?”

“I’m not sure,” Franc murmured. “He believed I was Benford when we met. I’d even say he was a bit awestruck, although he tried to hide it. We went to lunch, had a long conversation, and then . . .” He shook his head. “He made some references to Benford’s work, and I think I gave the wrong answers.”

“I was afraid that might happen.” The biographical information had covered Benford’s contributions as a physicist, but hadn’t gone in great detail into his dual role as a science fiction author; Murphy had noticed the gaps when he and Franc were studying his background. Yet since the strategy had been for David Murphy to be interviewed by someone he would immediately recognize and trust, yet was unlikely ever to see again, Gregory Benford had been the best possible candidate, and Franc had undertaken the mission with the foreknowledge that a certain element of risk was involved. “He got suspicious, right?”

“It seems that way.” Franc furtively glanced over his shoulder, then began walking a little faster. “He excused himself to visit the men’s room and left the restaurant. I followed him, stayed back so he wouldn’t see me, and saw him go to a phone and make a call. I decided that he might be trying to check up on me, so I waited until his back was turned, then I sneaked down the stairs.”

“And he didn’t see you?”I would have, Murphy silently added.

Franc shook his head. “No. I hid behind a post on the second floor and waited until he left the restaurant and ran back down to the first floor, then I came out behind him.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t search the whole museum.” Murphy smiled to himself. “I must be a little dumber in this worldline,” he murmured.

Franc shrugged. “It’s a big place. He wouldn’t have found me.” Then he sighed. “We can’t afford for him to see me again, or at least in this persona. If he’s discovered that I’m not Benford . . .”

“The way he flew out of there, I’d say it’s a pretty good chance he has.” Just ahead, on the other side of the street, lay the Capitol Reflecting Pool, its waters covered with a thin sheet of milky ice. Office workers and bureaucrats strode past it, the collars of their overcoats turned up against the brisk wind. “So what did you find out? Has there been another paradox?”

“No. Of that, I’m certain.” Franc waited until a cab trundled past, throwing icy slush onto the curb, then he stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the street, heading for the broad terrace surrounding the pool. “He made it all up. It was a good guess, but nothing more than that. He hasn’t seen any timeships, that’s the main thing.”

“That means we’re in the clear.”

“No, not quite. It only means that he doesn’t know anything . . . or at least not yet. But I’m afraid this incident may lead him to investigate further, and if that’s the case, it may lead him to conclusions that we don’t want him to make.” Franc shoved his hands deeper within the pockets of his parka. “We can’t let that happen,” he added quietly, looking down at the snow-covered ground.

Hearing this, Murphy stopped. Lost in his own thoughts, Franc walked a few more steps before he noticed that Murphy was no longer with him. He halted, turned around, gazed back at him. He didn’t say anything, but simply waited.

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Murphy asked.

“I don’t know,” Franc replied. “What do you think I’m saying?”

“If you’re saying what I think you’re saying,” Murphy said, “then this is where we part company. No thanks, I’m getting off here.” He took a step back, half-intending to walk away as fast as he could.

“And where do you plan to go?” Franc pulled off his fake glasses and put them in his pocket. “You’re a man who’s already here. If you’ve got any identification, it’s from twenty-six years in the future. I hope you’re not planning on using it, because no one will ever honor it, let alone believe your story.”

“I’ll get by,” Murphy said. “I’ve done well so far.”

And indeed he had. After the Oberon landed the day before out on the outskirts of suburban Virginia, Murphy had left the timeship, taking with him the remaining reserves of 1937 American dollars and German marks left over from the Hindenburg expedition. After hitchhiking into downtown Washington, he visited a succession of rare-coin dealers until he found one willing to purchase his cache without asking many embarrassing questions. The currency was counterfeit, of course, but Franc had assured him that it was as authentic in appearance as the CRC’s Artifacts Division could make it. After acquiring nearly $500 in trade, he visited a second-rate car-rental place and, using a photo-laminated credit card from his wallet to prove his identity, managed to lease an automobile. After that, a shopping trip to a mall outside Arlington, where he bought suitable clothing for Franc. This might not be the 1998 of his worldline, but he still knew how to get around.

“Maybe you will,” Franc admitted. “You’re a smart person.” He fell quiet as a woman hastily strode past, then he walked a little closer. “But even if you do, where will that take you? You know how all this will eventually end.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. A hundred . . . a thousand different things could happen that would prevent . . .”

“No.” Franc shook his head. “I’m sorry, Zack, but you know better than that. You’ve seen the historical record. In a few years, David Murphy will publish a well-regarded science fiction novel which, in turn, will inspire his son to pursue time travel. Steven Murphy’s theories will inevitably lead to the invention of timeships, which will result in Lea, Vasili, and me visiting 1937. The chain of paradoxes will begin there, and continue until . . .”

“Shut up!”

“. . . And when it’s all over, everything you’ve ever known, everyone you’ve ever loved, will be gone, and you’ll be . . .”

Without really intending to do so, Murphy balled his right hand into a fist, swung it at Franc’s face. He hadn’t hit anyone since he was a teenager, though, and Franc saw it coming. He ducked the punch, but in doing so he lost his balance. His feet slipped on the icy sidewalk and he fell sideways, sprawling against the concrete basin surrounding the Reflecting Pool. He yelped in pain, then rolled away, wincing in pain as he clutched his left elbow.

“Oh, Jesus!” His anger vanishing as suddenly as it had appeared, Murphy knelt down next to Franc. “I’m sorry, I didn’t . . . I mean, I . . .”

“It’s all right. I’m not hurt.” Massaging his arm, Franc pushed himself up against the side of the basin. “I probably had that coming,” he said, scowling as he gently flexed his bruised elbow. “If that’s the best you can do, though, you’ve proven my point.”

Murphy sat down on the wall. Like it or not, Franc was right. He was an old man . . . worse, an old man stuck out of time. For chrissakes, he couldn’t even punch out someone anymore, not even in anger. If he was going to survive the winter streets of Washington in 1998, he was going to have to do better than that. A lot better.

“So . . . what’s your idea?” he asked.

Franc didn’t immediately answer. He gazed off into the distance, studying the thin spire of the Washington Monument at the far end of the mall. A few tentative flakes of snow were beginning to drift down from the slate sky. It was the beginning of a cold and sunless afternoon, with the threat of many more like it to come.

“There’s nothing else I can do,” he said at last. “At least, not now. I’ve got to return to the Oberon. You’re going to have to take over from here.”

“Okay.” Murphy let out his breath. Like it or not, he was committed. “Now what?”

“Follow Murphy . . . David, I mean . . . after he leaves his office. He told me he rode the . . . the M, I think you call it? Is that a rapid-transit system?” Murphy nodded, and Franc went on. “He rode the M to work today, from where he parked his car in Virginia. Had something to do with local traffic conditions . . .”

“The Beltway.” Murphy smiled. “Happens a lot around here.”

“So I’ve been told.” Franc reached to the front of his parka, unbuttoned its weather flap. “I want you to follow him from his office until you reach the place where he parked his car. Hopefully, the two of you will be alone by then.”

“Then . . .?”

“That’s going to be the hard part.” Franc unzipped the parka, thrust his hand inside. “But I’m going to give you something that will make the job a little easier . . .”

6:52 P.M.

Consciousness returned as the gentle sensation of movement within darkness, interrupted now and then by an abrupt jar, a sporadic glimmer of light. From somewhere nearby he heard a wet flopping sound.

At first he thought he was at home and in bed—it was early morning, and Donna was nudging him awake; the alarm must not have gone off, and it was time to go to work—but then he opened his eyes and discovered the source of the sound: windshield wipers, brushing aside thick flakes of snow streaming past headlights like thousands of tiny stars.

Another pair of headlights appeared in the left lane, dazzling him for a few moments until they suddenly dimmed, then the other vehicle swept past. Through the windshield, he caught brief glimpses of lighted windows—farmhouses, a Mobil station, a Maryland Farms convenience store—which quickly passed by, disappearing like mirages into the cold winter night.

He was in the front passenger seat of his own car.

Murphy slowly turned his head, saw the old man from the parking lot, his bearded face backlit by the dashboard. He drove with his left hand on the wheel, his right hand resting next to his thigh. Although Murphy wasn’t aware of making any sound, the old man glanced his way, smiled slightly.

“You’re awake,” he quietly observed. “Feeling okay?”

He had a faint headache, but Murphy didn’t answer at once. He looked to the right, peering through the side window. Wherever they were, it was out in the country—it looked like Virginia, but it could also be Maryland for all he knew. The headlights caught the reflective coating of a highway sign as it flashed by: Route 234. He knew the road; they were about twenty miles from Arlington.

“Don’t worry,” the old man said. “We’re not far from home.” He paused. “Bet your head hurts. Sorry about that. Don’t you keep a bottle of Tylenol in the glove compartment?”

“Yeah,” Murphy said, “I have some.” His hands were folded together in his lap, but he was surprised to find that he could move them. His kidnapper hadn’t bothered to tie him up. Which meant that, if he moved quickly enough . . .

“Don’t even think about it,” the old man said. “It’s not a good idea.”

“Think about what?”

The old man laughed: a dry, ironic chuckle, much the same as his own when he was amused by something which tickled him because it was so obvious. “Look at the speedometer,” he said. “We’re doing thirty-five right now. I’d drive a little faster, but the snow’s coming down hard, and I don’t think a plow’s been this way in the last half hour or so. If you tried to grab the wheel, we’d probably skid out and go off the road. Or we might hit a car coming in the other lane. Either way, you’d kill both of us.” He hesitated, then quietly added, “And jumping out is a bad idea, too. Remember what happened to Skip Baylor?”

Skip Baylor. Who the hell was . . .?

A face flashed before his memory. Skip Baylor, one of his friends from junior high. A short, skinny kid with shag-cut blond hair. Used to love old Bruce Lee movies, especially when he was stoned. Skip was the class daredevil; he’d try anything once, so long as people were watching. One Saturday night, when Skip was out cruising with a bunch of guys, someone wondered aloud what it would be like to jump out of a moving car. Skip decided to give it a shot. He broke his neck and died instantly.

“How do you know about Skip?”

Long silence from the old man. “I know about a lot of things,” he said at last, not unkindly, even a bit sadly. “Go on, get your Tylenol. It’ll make you feel better.”

Murphy reached for the glove box. His hand was on the knob when the old man spoke again. “It’ll be stashed next to the New York and Virginia road maps. I think there’s also an old Disney coloring book in there, along with some crayons. Steven liked to use them when you and Donna drove down to Florida to visit her mother, but even though he’s grown out of them now, you haven’t . . .”

“Who are you?” Murphy forgot about the glove box and the contents. “What are . . . who are you with? FBI? CIA? Army intelligence?”

Another dry chuckle, punctuated by a ragged cough. “None of the above. And, no, not the Russians or Mossad or . . . well, anyone you could think of.”

“NASA,” Murphy suggested.

“Gimme a break . . .” The old man gave him a skeptical look. “Unless, of course, you know something about NASA I don’t.” He waited a few moments for Murphy to answer, then he shook his head. “Okay, let’s come clean here. I’m taking you someplace . . .”

“Where?”

“We’re going to Manassas National Battlefield. It’s closed this time of year, but someone’s going to open the gate for us. My friends . . . our friends . . . are going to be waiting for us inside. They want to talk to you, David.”

Despite the warmth of the car, Murphy felt a chill. “Who’re your friends?”

“I could tell you, but you’d never believe me.” The old man stared into the snow spiraling past the headlights. “I had trouble accepting it myself,” he added. “It’s that kind of thing. But you’re going to have to trust me on this one. . . nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

For reasons he couldn’t explain, Murphy found himself beginning to trust the old man. By all logic, he knew that he shouldn’t—after all, he had shadowed him on the train, trailed him into the parking lot, then somehow knocked him unconscious, after which he had abducted him and driven him clear out into the middle of nowhere (but not quite—hadn’t he taken Steven out here a couple of times, using this route?). Yet his voice, his entire demeanor . . . it was much as if he was talking to a lifelong friend, someone he had known for many years. Every facial expression, every verbal tic, even the way he laughed, were strangely familiar.

And his face . . .

The Escort’s high beams caught a large wooden sign on the right shoulder of the road:

MANASSAS

NATIONAL BATTLEFIELD

PARK

The old man began to slow down, easing his foot off the gas while not braking, just as Murphy himself would have done. “Here it is . . . Molasses Park.” He glanced at Murphy. “Okay, for ten points, who used to call it that?”

“Stevie,” Murphy whispered, feeling cold once more. “He still does.”

The entrance came up, and the old man gently turned the wheel, steering the car into the snow-covered drive. He put his foot on the pedal again, and the car fishtailed a bit. “Damn,” he mumbled. “Wished I’d . . . you’d bought snow tires for this thing.”

“Sorry. Can’t afford them.”

The old man grunted as he turned into the skid. The car straightened out, then headed for the wooden gate which barred the park entrance. Yet now the gate was wide open; the Escort charged through, slewing snow as it passed the fieldstone fences on either side. “Not true,” he said. “You have enough cash, but snow tires are one more expense you don’t want to add if you didn’t have to. I mean, this is Virginia, isn’t it? Winter here isn’t as bad as it was in Ithaca, when you had the old Volvo . . .”

Murphy looked at him sharply. “How did you . . .?”

“Donna sometimes snores when she’s asleep, and she doesn’t like to make love while the lights are on, but she’s got a thing for park benches. That’s one of the reasons why you like coming out here.” The old man flicked the wipers up higher. “On the way home, you always drop by a little roadside shack, where you can get fried clams and Stevie can use the pot. And sometimes you stop at the mall to rent a movie from Blockbuster. You always argue over what to get. She likes romantic comedies, but you prefer . . .”

“Who the hell are you?”

“You’ve got three guesses, and the first two don’t count.”

That had been one of Skip’s favorite expressions.

The road was nearly invisible, but Murphy could make out the faint furrows of tire tracks; someone had come this way only a little while earlier. They followed the road into the park, passing trees whose branches sagged beneath thick blankets of snow, the headlights barely piercing the white squall. The road led them around a small hill toward a broad pasture; the headlights caught a metallic reflection: the rear bumper of another automobile, parked in the road just ahead.

The old man stopped behind the other car. “Okay, we’re here,” he said. He switched off the ignition, then opened his door. As the dome light came on, Murphy saw the odd gun with which he had been shot in the parking lot, nestled next to his thigh. The old man smiled as he picked it up. “Thanks for not making me use this on you again,” he said, not pointing it at him. “I didn’t like doing so the first time.”

Murphy climbed out, shut the passenger door behind him. Even in the darkness, he could make out the snow-covered hump of the other car. He expected someone to get out, yet no one did; so far as he could tell, they were all alone. “You said someone would be here,” he said as the old man walked around to join him.

“You’ll see.” He pulled the bill of his Mets cap low over his eyes, then motioned for Murphy to follow him. “C’mon. This way.”

Their boots crunched softly as they left the cars behind and trod into the pasture. Murphy’s imagination briefly entertained a dark thought—his frozen corpse, found face-down in the snow in this very spot by a park ranger—yet he found himself more perplexed than afraid. Somehow, he intuitively knew that he wouldn’t come to any harm.

About twenty feet from the road, the old man stopped. “Okay, we’re here.” He pointed into the darkness ahead. “Now watch . . . this is where it gets interesting.”

Murphy stared at him, then turned to peer through the snow. At first he saw nothing.

And then a flying saucer materialized before him.

It appeared quietly, reverse-phasing out of the storm as if it had been there all the time. Indeed, it must have, for its upper fuselage was covered with snow and shallow drifts were piled around its wedge-shaped landing gear. Yet they were so close to it that, had he taken a few more steps, Murphy would have walked face first into one of the lowered flanges.

Murphy felt his heart skip a beat. Unable to breathe, let alone muster the startled scream that caught halfway up his throat, he staggered back, his legs obeying an instinctive urge to flee, until his numbed feet slipped out from beneath him and he toppled to the ground. He landed on his back, his arms sprawled out on either side; for an absurd moment he looked as if he were trying to make a snow angel.

“Oh, Jesus!” he croaked. “What? . . . What is that . . .?”

“Exactly what it looks like.” The old man chuckled. “It’s a timeship, David.”

“A . . . a timeship.”

“That’s right. A timeship. Just like you wrote about in your article.” He bent down, offered his hand. “Nice guess. Couldn’t have done better myself. Now, c’mon, get up. There’s some people aboard who want to meet you.”

Murphy didn’t take his hand. Instead, he stared up the old man. His face lay in shadow, shrouded by snow and the darkness of night, yet suddenly it seemed as if he could see him as clearly as if it were high noon on a summer day.

“I know who you are,” Murphy whispered.

“Yes,” Murphy replied, “I expect you probably do.”

7:38 P.M.

“And that’s why you’re here,” Franc finished. “Do you understand now?”

“Yeah, sure . . . sure.” David Murphy slumped in one of the couches, gazing at nothing in particular. “It’s perfectly clear.”

“No. You’re not getting it.” Leaning against a bulkhead, Zack Murphy had remained quiet during the entire discussion. “You say you do, but you’re still trying to find a way to fit this into your old worldview.”

Franc glanced over his shoulder at him. “Dr. Murphy . . .”

“You think I don’t know myself?” Zack crossed the crew compartment, sat down next to David. “Look here, son . . .”

“I’m not your son.” David glared at the older version of himself. “Unless you’ve got another paradox you want to tell me about.”

Zack grinned back at him. “Mom was pretty good-looking in her time,” he said drily, “but I wouldn’t go that far.”

David surprised everyone by laughing out loud. Franc and Lea gave each other uncertain looks, and Metz stopped sniggering. Only Zack was amused. “Just a figure of speech,” he added. “Sorry.”

“Excuse me . . . sorry . . . didn’t mean it.” David shook his head. “But y’know, you’re right. I didn’t quite believe it . . . until just now, at least.”

“So now we’re straight, right?” Zack looked at him closely. “You know this isn’t some CIA plot, anything like that? You know this is the real deal?”

“Uh-huh.” David let out his breath, slowly nodded. “I knew it the moment I saw this thing. I just had trouble getting used to it.” He hesitated. “The only thing I’m still unconvinced about is why I’m responsible.”

“You’re not,” Franc said. “All of us share the burden. You’re only the primary factor, and your role in this hasn’t even begun yet. It’s what you may do in the future that concerns us.”

“That’s the part I don’t quite understand.” David crossed his legs, bridged his hands together. “You say that, in a couple of years, I’m going to write a science fiction novel that will inspire Steven to become the scientist who figures out time travel. But I’ve already tried to write fiction, and everything I submitted to magazines was rejected. That’s why I wrote articles instead.”

“But you originally intended to write fiction, correct?” Lea asked, and he slowly nodded. “So it could be that, a few years from now, you try your hand at it again.”

“And this time, you succeed.” Clasping his hands together in a similar gesture, Zack pointed his forefingers at David. “Possibly because you used . . . could use. . . the article you published for Analog as the basis for your novel. At any rate, the solution is simple. Don’t write a novel . . . or at least not that novel.”

“So you’re warning me not to do something I hadn’t intended to do already.” David slowly nodded, and Zack shrugged offhandedly. “Easy enough, but I’m not sure that’s going to solve all your problems. Someone else may already be interested in time travel.”

Franc raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Well, just this morning, I had a meeting with NASA’s associate administrator, Roger Ordmann. He’s the chief of Space Science, my department, and . . .”

“Whoa! Wait a minute!” Zack Murphy raised a hand. “Did you say Roger Ordmann?” David frowned and nodded, and Zack gaped at him in surprise. “That’s the Chief Administrator of OPS in my worldline.”

“Another convergence,” Lea murmured. They had already noted a certain reoccurence of names; Paolo Sanchez and Ray Sanchez, for example.

“One more indication that the worldlines aren’t that far apart.” Franc absently rubbed his chin with his forefinger. “In this frame of existence, he’s a senior NASA administrator. In the other, he performs much the same function for the Office of . . .”

“Y’know, maybe you shouldn’t be telling me this.” David looked first at Franc, then at Zack. “I mean, you’ve already told me enough about the different worldlines. Maybe it’s better if I don’t know all the details.”

“At this juncture, I’m not sure if it makes much difference,” Franc said, “but if you’d rather not know . . .” David shook his head. “Very well, but what about this meeting you had with Ordmann?”

“He’d read my article . . . someone else at NASA had brought it to my attention . . . and he said he was concerned about it being published by someone who worked at the agency. Said it might cast NASA in a bad light and all that. But the thing that really struck me . . . especially later, after you and I had our little chat at the Air and Space . . .”

“I haven’t apologized for that,” Franc said. “Sorry. It had to be done.”

“You scared the hell out of me, but . . . well, apology accepted.” David grinned at him. “I’d love to know how you did it, but . . . I dunno, maybe that’s one of those things I shouldn’t know, right?” Franc smiled, and he went on. “What struck me later was that your questions were the same as his. Like, what led me to believe that UFO sightings were tied to time travel.”

Lea groaned softly. “Oh, no,” Metz said, closing his eyes and putting a hand over his face. “Here we go again . . .”

“No, no,” Franc said quickly. “They’re not necessarily linked. This could be exactly what it seemed to be . . . a senior government official concerned about public perception.”

“But what if it isn’t?” Zack asked. “Again, look at the convergences. In my worldline, in this very same year, the American government began a crash program to develop time travel. Does this mean that the same thing is going on here, in this worldline?”

Lea wrapped her arms around herself and turned away. “Nothing we do matters,” she murmured. “No matter how this turns out, someone will eventually build a timeship.”

“My point exactly,” David said. “It may not matter whether I publish a novel or if my son becomes a physicist, because the idea’s out there already. So what are you going to do? Go back to 1898 and kill H.G. Wells? You can, if you really want to, but what’s to prevent another writer from coming up with the same concept? Or maybe you stop Einstein from developing the theory of relativity. You might, but does that necessarily prevent Stephen Hawking or Kip Thorne or someone else from investigating the same problems?”

“Free will,” Zack said quietly.

“Pardon me?”

“It all comes back to the question of free will.” Pushing himself out of his chair, the other Murphy clasped his hands behind his back. “We may be able to do certain things,” he said, pensively staring at the floor. “In fact, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that we will. The question is, should we?”

“Like . . . I dunno.” David thought about it a moment. “Maybe like the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki . . .”

“If you mean atomic bombs, that didn’t happen in my worldline,” Zack said. “About five thousand American G.I.s were killed during the invasion of Japan, and nearly fifty thousand Japanese died defending their country, but no country has ever dropped a bomb in wartime . . . or at least not where I come from.” He shook his head. “But you get the point. The technology may be inevitable, but the consequences aren’t, and the consequences of time travel are far more hideous . . . at least in the long run . . . than nuclear war would ever be.”

“So what do we do?”

“You already know what you have to do . . . or rather, don’t do. It’s up to you. These people have already made their decision.” Zack took a deep breath, then turned to face the others. “Dr. Lu? You’re still ready to go through with this?”

Franc hesitated, then glanced at Lea and Vasili. Both quietly nodded, Metz a little more reluctantly than the others. He smiled grimly, then turned back to the two Murphys.

“Yes, we are,” he said. “We’re staying here.”

“What . . .?” David Murphy rose from his chair. “Here? In this . . . I mean, in this year?”

“We don’t have much choice,” Lea said. “If we’ve succeeded, then the place we came from no longer exists. Or will never exist, technically speaking. The fact that we didn’t board the Hindenburg is proof of that. If we attempt to go forward from this point in time, we may very well crash-land again in some place farther up this worldline, as we did the first time we attempted to leave 1937.”

“Therefore potentially causing another paradox, with similar outcomes,” Franc said. “The same thing would probably occur if we tried to go back in time. No matter where we go, regardless of the year or location, in all likelihood another paradox would result. We would survive, of course . . . but the consequences would be unimaginable.”

“But . . .” David Murphy gaped at them in astonishment. “This is 1998. You’re from 2314. You don’t have a clue where you’re going to go, what you’re going to. . .”

“Sure they do.” Zack Murphy turned toward him. “I’m staying with them.”

“You’re . . . what?”

Zack smiled. “What else am I supposed to do? Come home with you, claim I’m your long-lost uncle?” He shook his head. “No, I’m going where they’re going, wherever that is. This may not be my 1998, but it’s close enough. So far, we haven’t done too badly. The currency’s a little out of date, but we managed to buy some clothes, rent a car . . .” He frowned, then gave David a wry smile. “We’re running a little low on cash, though. Think you could spare a few bucks?”

David hesitated, then reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet. A ten, three fives, and two ones. “That’ll do for a start,” Zack said as he took the money and folded it into his pocket. “Thanks. If Donna asks where you’ve been, tell her the car died and you had to call for a tow.”

“And what about the ship? You’re going to have trouble hiding something this big.”

Vasili looked uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “We’re not going to hide it,” he said. “We’re going to destroy it.”

Again, David’s mouth fell open in surprise. “Do you know what you’re saying? You’re going to maroon yourselves here.”

“I’m afraid so.” Franc appeared no less discomfited by the notion. “But again, we’ve got no other choice. As you just pointed out, we’d have trouble concealing it. Its chameleon requires a constant energy input, and once the batteries drained below a certain level it would become visible once more. There’s virtually no place on Earth where it could remain hidden without chance of discovery. Having someone stumble upon an operational timeship is far too great a risk for us to take. So destroying Oberon is the only option.”

“I’ve already programmed the AI to fly it out of the atmosphere.” Metz’s eyes were sad, his voice bleak. “The chameleon will remain operational until it’s achieved orbit. After Oberon reaches space, it’ll open a wormhole that will take it straight into the Sun.”

“Once it’s destroyed,” Franc continued, “for all intents and purposes, it will have never existed.” He gazed at the pilot. “I’m sorry, Vasili,” he added quietly, “but it has to be done.”

Metz nodded, but said nothing. Franc turned back to David Murphy. “Which brings us to a final question. Besides us, you’re the only person who knows anything about this . . .”

“Are you asking if I can keep a secret?” He shrugged. “Who would believe me?”

“Someone probably would,” Zack said. “In fact, there’s a lot of people out there who would be only too willing to suspend their disbelief, if they had any in the first place. You may be tempted to write a book about all this. Maybe you’d get lucky and it would become a best-seller. In any case, you could stand to make a few bucks.”

Temptation stole across David Murphy’s face. Zack noticed it; he frowned and shook his head. “Don’t do it,” he said quietly. “I beg of you, please don’t. You don’t know the things I’ve seen, but if you did, you’d never contemplate such a thing.”

“All right, so I won’t,” David said, reluctantly. “I promise. Mum’s the word. But you know, and I know, that the idea of time travel is already out there. Destroying this ship won’t make any difference if someone is already trying to figure out how to build something like this.”

“Which is another reason why we’re staying here,” Zack replied. “To make sure that no one does.” He smiled grimly. “Remember, I’ve already been through all this. I know what to look for.” Then he raised a finger and shook it at David. “And don’t think for an instant we’re going to forget about you. I know where you live.”

David didn’t reply. Franc studied him for a moment, then turned to the others. “I think that covers everything. Lea, is everything in the car?” She nodded, and he stood up. “Then it’s time to go.”

8:01 P.M.

The storm had let up while they were in the timeship. Although the sky was still overcast, the only snow that fell was a few crystalline flakes the wind blew away from Oberon’s fuselage. Lea shuddered within her 1930s-style overcoat as she marched through the drifts away from the timeship. “I’m going to have to get used to this,” she murmured to Franc through chattering teeth, then she looked at Zack. “Is it always this way, this time of year?”

“Usually. Sorry.” He took off his baseball cap, gave it to her. “We can always head south. Florida’s pretty nice in January.”

David Murphy trailed behind them, reluctant to leave the timeship behind. As they approached the road, he stopped and turned around. Vasili Metz had just climbed down the ladder and was jogging away from the Oberon. He was the only one who didn’t have a coat, and he wrapped his arms around himself in a futile effort to stay warm. On sudden impulse, Murphy pulled off his parka, offered it to him as he approached. Metz regarded it with surprise, then gratefully accepted it with mumbled thanks.

They trudged through the snow to the cars. “Mind if I borrow your brush?” Zack asked David, then he opened the left rear door of the Escort and found the long-handled ice scraper. He had just finished clearing the front and rear windows of the rental Chevy when they heard a low hum from somewhere behind him.

Murphy turned just in time to see the Oberon lift off. The hemispheres beneath its hull gleamed against the white pasture as the timeship slowly rose, the negmass drive whisking away sheets of snow from the ground below. The flanges folded up against the bottom of the saucer, and for a few seconds it seemed to David as if he were watching a scene from one of the fifties science fiction movies he had relished as a kid.

Then the Oberon faded from sight. The last impression they had of its passage from Earth was a vague shadow slightly darker than the sky, quickly disappearing into the night.

“Well . . . okay. Let’s go before we freeze to death.” Zack opened the Chevy’s rear passenger door, turned to help Lea inside. She stared at the place where the Oberon had once stood, then she allowed herself to be guided into the backseat.

Metz started to follow her, then he stopped. “I think this is yours,” he said to David, and began to pull off the parka.

“Keep it,” Murphy said. “You need it more than I do.” The former timeship pilot nodded, then climbed in behind Lea.

Zack shut the door behind him. “That’s awfully nice of you,” he said, “but wasn’t that a Christmas gift from Donna? Two years ago?”

“Umm . . . no, I bought it myself, at the outlet mall. Donna gave me a watch.” He grinned at Zack. “Maybe the convergences aren’t as close as we think.”

“I hope not.” He returned the smile, then handed the brush back to him, along with the keys to his own car. “Thanks, pal,” he said, extending his hand. “We’ll be in touch.”

Murphy hesitated, then shook hands with himself. “Take it easy, friend. Give me a call sometime.”

Neither of them seemed to know what to say next, so they left it at that. Zack turned and walked away.

Franc stood near the open front passenger door, still gazing into the sky. Murphy realized that he was looking upon a man lost in time, as homeless as any individual in history has ever been. When Franc lowered his face, Murphy noticed a faint wetness around his eyes. Franc saw him; he nodded once, distantly, then ducked his head and climbed into the car.

Murphy walked back to his own car, used the brush to clear the snow away from the windows. While his back was still turned, he heard Zack start the engine. The taillights flashed an amber glow across the windshield, then the tires crunched against the icepack as the car moved away, heading down the road out of the park.

Murphy resisted the impulse to watch them leave. Somehow, it seemed better that he not know which direction they were taking.

He was about to climb into his car when he detected a flash of light out of the corner of his eye. He turned around, saw an orb of light in the snow-covered pasture where the Oberon had rested. It remained for a moment, just long enough for him to realize what it was, then collapsed in upon itself like a mirage out of spacetime, finally disappearing with a faint thunderclap.

Murphy waited another moment, then he opened the car door and settled in behind the wheel. It had been a long Monday, and now it was time to go home.

WE WILL DRINK FISH TOGETHER . . .

Bill Johnson

“I’m sorry to call you at work, Tony,” my brother said, “but Sam died about an hour ago.”

Sweet Jesus, I thought. I could never get time to go see him, and now there’s no time left. What have I done?

“Was it easy on him? Did he go quick?” I asked. Steve shook his head.

“It wasn’t good, Tony. They think he fainted or something and fell while he was getting a shirt out of his closet. Probably hit his head against the door frame on his way down. His roommate was out walking with the nurses and nobody noticed Sam was missing. They found him later. He was unconscious and bleeding.”

“Damn,” I said softly. “Did they take him to the hospital?”

Steve shook his head again. “Doctor was there already at the home for someone else, so they put Sam back in his bed and sewed up his head. Then he started to complain about pain in his gut.” He looked down and away from the camera. I heard a high-pitched voice and laughter and the sound of little running feet. Elizabeth, fresh from her second birthday party, crawled up in Steve’s lap.

“Hi, hi, hi,” she said in a sing-song voice. She reached up and kissed her daddy, her face and fingers still sticky and speckled with pink icing. “Elizabeth!”

Elizabeth’s mother, Rose, appeared briefly on-screen behind her. She grabbed Elizabeth around the middle and swung her up to rest on one hip, then glanced at me and smiled. She handed Steve a brightly colored paper napkin with “Happy Birthday” printed on it in fluorescent pink and blue with the other hand.

“Elizabeth, Daddy’s trying to talk with Uncle Tony,” she said. She was a short woman, medium build, with strong arms and blonde hair cut in a shag. She turned quickly to face me. “Hello, Tony. I’m sorry to hear about Sam.” She turned back to Elizabeth. “Let’s go back to the party, honey. It’s time to open presents.”

“Open presents!” Elizabeth said with enthusiasm. She wiggled off her mother’s hip and headed for the kitchen, her mother dragging behind her.

Steve brushed crumbs off his clothes and icing off his face and looked up at me. We both smiled. “She gets worse after this,” I warned. “Two year olds are very busy people.”

“Like she isn’t already,” Steve said ruefully. “So, what happened?” I asked. “Was it his abdominal aorta again?”

“Probably, but there’s no way to tell without an autopsy, and I don’t think we need one of those,” Steve said. He took a deep breath and looked away from me. He did not look happy. “Tony, he didn’t want to go through the hospital routine again. After his last attack he put himself on a DNR.”

DNR. Do Not Resuscitate. A big red flag written in dry medical language. In ordinary English it meant the patient was ready to die, and wanted to go quickly and easily, without massive intervention. I tried to imagine Sam hooked up to monitors and tubes and needles, a thin, frail figure lost among the machines. Sam never lived like that, and it hurt to even imagine him dying that way. DNR was one hell of a better way to go. Especially for Sam.

“Dissected aorta hurts a little bit,” I said with careful understatement. Like a red-hot charcoal burning in your stomach, Sam told me after his last stay in the hospital. Like a cramp that never ends, and just gets tighter and tighter until it’s a digging rat bite that never goes away.

“They gave him morphine like water,” Steve said. “As much as he wanted.”

“Did it work?”

“They said it did,” Steve said. He sounded doubtful. He was a respiratory therapist at the University of Nebraska Hospitals. He knew all about DNR’s and aortas and how hard it was to die. “There’s always a first time for something to work.”

“When’s the funeral?” I asked.

“Bob and I are going up to Dakota tomorrow. We’ve got to deal with the bankers and the lawyers,” Steve said with distaste. “Funeral will be on Saturday.”

I thought quickly about work and schedules and how fast I could re-arrange my life. Luckily, or unfortunately, I didn’t have much of a life to re-arrange. Just this once that was an advantage.

“How about you fly in to Omaba on Thursday and drive up with Rose on Friday morning?” Steve said. “Rose’s sister will come to take care of Elizabeth but she can’t get free until Thursday night. That will also give us two cars up there.”

“However you want to do it, little brother. You’re in charge on this one,” I said.

“Thanks. I feel so lucky.”

“I’m sorry, Steve. It doesn’t seem fair . . .”

“But I’m a lot closer and I’m executor of the estate,” Steve finished for me. He hesitated. “Are you sure you can get away? I watch the news. I’ve seen you in the background around the alien.”

I thought about my orders to keep everything confidential, and mentally said screw it. Steve wasn’t in the media and he knew how to keep his mouth shut. “Yeah, I’m on security detail for the ambassador.”

“Can you get away? I mean, we can handle this if you can’t. Everybody will understand.”

I stiffened. Something must have shown on my face because Steve winced slightly.

“This is family business, Steve. I know what I’ve got to do. I’ll be there. You don’t have to worry about me.”

“We’ll see you at the house on Friday, then,” Steve said. “Visitation starts at three in Milbank.”

I killed the call and leaned back in my chair. The holster around my shoulders tugged at me and I absently took it If and laid it on the desk. I rubbed my shoulders and looked out the window. Spring was well advanced in the District, and the trees were heavy with buds and a few leaves. The cherry trees were in full bloom.

I checked the weather forecast for Dakota. Sleet, mixed with snow. Just about what I expected. It could be a full greenhouse summer everywhere else in the country, and Dakota would get a blizzard.

Enough delay. I took a deep breath and made the call.

“Carole? Tony. I need to take a few personal leave days.. .

“No,” she said.

Five minutes after I called her, and got my first “No,” I was in her office.

“Not a chance. No way. You’re in charge of the security detail for the ambassador. You can take time off later, when the negotiations are all over, but not now. I’m sorry,” Carole said.

I stared at the wall behind and above her. Everything in her office, from the standard-issue metal desk to her green, plastic-covered swivel chair to the leadlined anti-surveillance curtains that tightly covered the windows, was standard government issue. The same government that helped get me the hell out of Dakota, that gave me a career, that told me I was important and gave me a job that was important. I took a deep breath. “Then I quit. You’ll have my resignation letter in an hour.”

“You can’t resign!”

“I just did.”

Carole stood behind her desk and glared up at me. She was trim and athletic, but she couldn’t have weighed more than 130 pounds. She was medium height for a woman, which meant the top of her head came to just below my sternum.

In other words, I could have picked her up, tucked her under my arm and carried her around without any trouble. She scared the hell out of me. “You’ll give up everything to go to a damn funeral?”

“Carole, he raised my Dad. He was the closest thing to a grandfather I had,” I pleaded.

“I understand,” she said softly. “I really do. I wish you could go. I want you to go. But not now. Not after last Monday.”

Monday I became a hero, and the memory still hurt. I remembered the sudden feeling I had as I stood next to the ambassador, that it might be better if I moved just half a step to the left. Then the sudden flare of pain, and the way I spun and flailed as the bullet meant for the alien slammed into my impact vest.

The ambassador looked down at me, everything seeming to move in slow motion, his face a mask. Then he was buried under a pile of agents as they pushed him to the ground and covered him with their own bodies. The reaction team grabbed the shooter, and interrogation tracked him back to a reactionary group.

It was a simple solution. A crazy with a gun was something everyone could understand. And nobody got hurt except for me, and the vest protected me so that all I got was a huge bruise on my chest. The whole incident flashed on the news for maybe a day, and then was quickly forgotten. Everything was tied up nice and neat. Too neat.

Where did he get the gun? Where did he get the ID? How did be get so close?

What else was going on here?

The answers were logical and reasonable and too damned easy. Carole and I both suspected something more was involved, but there was no proof. Maybe we were too suspicious, but part of our job was to look for a conspiracy in everything. Now I just didn’t have the time.

“Carole, I’ve got to bury Sam.”

“Your brothers are there, right? They can bury him. You can pay your respects later,” she said. She looked away, shook her head, then looked up at me and her face softened. “Tony, he’s not going to know you’re not there. Life is for the living, and I’m sure he’d want you to do your work first. I’m sure he’d understand.”

I thought about Sam.

“First thing you’ve got to understand is that flatlanders might look like us, might sound like us, might even be related to us, but they don’t think like us,” Sam said in his cigarette rasp voice. I stood next to him in my footed pajamas, my favorite blanket in one hand, my other hand in his, and remembered how tall he looked as I stared up at him and his whisker-studded face. “Flatlanders measure themselves as individuals, and they use work as the measuring stick. We are different. To us, family is more important than kin. Kin are more important than line. Line is more important than any outsider. And everything is more important than work.”

No, I did not think Sam would understand.

“Damn it, Carole, I’m the oldest,” I said, frustrated. How to explain this to someone from the flats? I tried to make myself calm. “I’m the eldest in the line now. I’ve got to be there at the funeral.”

She looked up at my stubborn face, and tried another tack.

“What if our side needs you in the negotiations? Ambassador Foremost says he owes you a favor. What if we need to use that?”

I remembered Foremost, when he and Carole came to visit me in the examination room after the attack. I remembered his voice, dry as sandpaper and correct as a computer, his head cocked to the side with a nervous manner that always reminded me of the jerky movements of my pet parakeet. The rest of him, however, looked nothing like a bird. He was stockily built, just a few inches taller than Carole, and broad. Underneath the robes and harness I knew he was all muscle and bone, with a protective exoskeleton over his most vulnerable points. He was an omnivore, and the exobiologists claimed he was descended from cursorial hunters, much like early man. He looked more like a wolverine than an ape, but I liked the way he thought.

And that was part of the problem, when the Trader ship found us. Our races were different enough that communication was difficult, and similar enough that we were potential competitors. Potential for war or peace, trade or conflict. We seemed to be more advanced in some technologies that they wanted, but they never let us forget that they found us, not the other way around. And with a starship in orbit that could reach any place on Earth, they held the high ground.

Our weapons might be better, but we had no way to get them up and on target. Our boosters were too weak, and the Traders routinely destroyed anything that came near their ship and might even remotely be considered a threat to it.

The Traders, on the other hand, could drop asteroids on us from space. But asteroid strikes were not going to help them understand our genetic engineering technology. Or get the humans rumor said they wanted to bring on board to join their crew.

So we exchanged ambassadors, and started to negotiate.

And negotiate.

And negotiate.

“Where you suffer, I suffer,” Foremost told me in the hospital. He held my hand and looked closely into my eyes. “In my line, your name is now written.”

Carole looked puzzled, but what the ambassador said made perfect sense to me. It did not make me happy, but I understood it. I wondered what obligations went with his line. I thought briefly of rejecting him, but I did not know how he would react. Safer to say yes.

Really? a small voice inside me said. Are you sure about this?

I thought carefully.

“I accept,” I said. “What I have to tell you, though, is that in my line your name is not written.”

He hesitated, then bowed his head.

“I understand and accept this. Perhaps one day I will earn the right to write my name in your line.”

I relaxed, just a little. One part down. And no threats of war.

“But I’ll make sure you’re associated with my line as long as you’re here, and my guest,” I said.

He looked up, his eyes as black and hard and dead as a shark’s. I tried to read his expression in his face, but he was too unfamiliar, too different.

“I accept,” he said. He stood and left the hospital room.

I watched him as he left, his robe tight around his body. Now I was part of his line, and he was associated with mine. As long as he was on Earth he could claim protection and assistance from me and mine.

I hoped to hell he did not understand what I had just done for him. And I hoped I never had to find out what he had done for me.

That conversation was a week old, and that week seemed like a century ago. A week ago Sam was alive, and I was free to live any way I wanted, without responsibility. Now I had a different set of problems, and Foremost was not in them. Now my problem was Sam, and all the changes that Sam’s death made to my life.

I shook my head to clear it of memories and looked up at Carole.

“It’s not that kind of a favor,” I said. “Any personal business Foremost and I have is just that, personal business. Nothing I can say or do will have any effect on the negotiations.”

“But—”

“No,” I said and cut her off. I stood.

“I’m going to the funeral, Carole. You’ll have my resignation letter in an hour.”

I flew into Omaha the next day.

Rose, with Elizabeth propped on one hip, met me at the airport. When Rose saw me she put Elizabeth down and waved to me. I hurried to them and got a quick hug from Rose and a big, sloppy kiss on the cheek from Elizabeth.

“Would you like to fly, Elizabeth?” I asked.

“No,” she said firmly. She hid her face in her mother’s skirt, then peeked an eye out at me and smiled.

“Just a little bit?” I coaxed.

“Oh, Tony,” Rose said. “Here?”

“Here,” I said firmly.

I picked Elizabeth up under her arms and swung her through the air, feet flying wildly, oblivious to the stares of the other passengers, just because I missed her. She laughed and giggled and threw her head back. Rose just smiled and shook her head while Elizabeth’s hair swirled and flowed behind her.

“If you’re done now,” Rose said, when I put Elizabeth back on the ground. Elizabeth tried to walk in a straight line and instead staggered from side to side, like a drunken sailor, dizzy from her flight. She laughed and laughed until I scooped her up and put her on my shoulders. She grabbed my ears to use as steering handles.

“I’m ready now,” I told Rose.

I liked Omaba and I liked Steve’s house. It was a ranch style, built into the side of a hill so the basement was more like a first floor. He lived in a neighborhood on the far west side of Omaha, out where new subdivisions sprouted like wildflowers and cornfields fought a losing battle against construction bulldozers.

Elizabeth took me by the hand and walked me around inside and outside the house to show me her flowers and her toys. Rose walked next to me and worried.

“I saw you get shot on the news,” she said, and everything about her changed with those words. Rose my sister-in-law vanished and suddenly she was Rose the nurse and I was a patient. She subtly moved back a step to look at all of me, then stepped in closer to focus on my chest, where the bullet struck. I wondered how she did the transition so quickly. “Are you all right?”

“They checked me out at Walter Reed,” I reassured her. “I’m fine.”

“And the ambassador?”

“Not a scratch on him.”

“You’re not there with him now, Tony.”

I checked out the tulips that Elizabeth pointed out to me. There were red flowers and white flowers and buds that had not yet opened. “Security is with him all the time,” I said. “I was just one more agent.”

Rose walked away from us a few steps. Elizabeth saw a monarch butterfly and raced off to chase it. I saw the butterfly was in no danger, so I went after Rose.

We stood for a moment in the backyard and looked across the fence toward the fields. Next year they might sprout houses, but this year they still followed older rhythms. Furrows, newly plowed and rich with the stubble left over from last year’s harvesting, waited for corn planting. The soil was black and ready, thick with the morning dew and last weekend’s rain.

“Do you think things always get better, Tony?” she asked.

I did not think she was talking about the cornfield.

“No,” I said, after a moment. “Things don’t always get better. They may get better or they may get worse, but it’s not an always kind of thing. The only thing that is always is change. Sometimes things change on a regular cycle, like the planting and the growing and the harvesting and the fallowing. Sometimes they change on a bigger cycle, and the smaller cycles change with them or are destroyed. Whether it’s good or bad depends on where you stand and what you care about.”

“I don’t like change, Tony,” she said. “Everything I love is in those smaller cycles, the regular ones. I don’t know anything about the bigger cycles except that they might crush what I love.”

“I know,” I said awkwardly.

She turned away from the fields to face me, her arms folded across her chest. She looked down at the ground, then turned her head and looked out across the fields.

“We got rid of the bombs down here. Things finally looked safe for little girls to grow up. Then the Traders arrive,” she said bitterly. “I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to her.”

I hugged her, gently. I wanted to tell her everything was going to be all right, but I kept my mouth shut and watched Elizabeth chase butterflies. Finally, Rose reached up and patted my hand.

“Let’s get inside. We’ve got a long ride tomorrow.”

Rose never went to the north with Steve when he went up to Dakota to fish and hunt and visit Sam. Instead she stayed down south, in Nebraska and Iowa, and worked or visited her folks. This time she had to go north.

Margaret, Rose’s unmarried sister, came to stay with Elizabeth while we were gone. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, she had two mamas. Margaret loved the idea, and Rose was always more relaxed when Margaret was in charge instead of a day care center. We settled Elizabeth with Margaret, said all our good-byes, left all the emergency numbers, and drove north.

The interstate highway was on the Iowa side of the Missouri. I drove and Rose navigated as we followed the flat ribbon of gray concrete, two lanes wide in each direction, a man-made river of traffic. The river itself was out of sight on our left most of the time, and the loess hills, huge mounds of windblown dirt, rose up like miniature Rocky Mountains on our right. Gradually the hills arched away to the east and out of sight.

The Missouri curled back into view just as the smell hit us. Rose quickly rolled up the windows as we passed the mountain of manure from the Sioux City stockyards, and the giant billboard that declared: “This golden mountain represents millions to the Siouxland economy—”

North of downtown we passed over massive housing developments that rolled far to the east and west, like grass over a prairie. Neatly edged lawns and streets laid out in geometrically perfect curves and loops and cul-de-sacs spread out around us like some enormous geometrical poster child.

We crossed into South Dakota, over the Big Sioux river, and past the computer factories that hugged the Dakota side of the river. The factories were there because the corporate taxes were lower in Dakota, but the schools and the services and everything else were better in Iowa. So the houses and the people lived south of the Sioux, and the work stayed in Dakota.

Somehow, I was not surprised.

As we headed north, as the trees got fewer and fewer and smaller and smaller and more twisted and gnarled by the wind, Rose got quieter and quieter. She was an Iowa farm girl at heart, even if she was an expert transplant nurse, and she knew how a farm ought to be run. Nice and tidy. When she saw the fields had no fences, that the animals basically had nothing to stop them from coming across the roads, she had nothing to say.

The exit off the main road was marked by a stop sign and a small truck stop that had seen better days. It looked lost and forlorn in the icy drizzle and there was no sign of life except for a neon sign that sporadically blinked an advertisement for a cheap, local beer.

We turned right down a small two-lane blacktop road. I pointed across the brown cattails of a marsh to a copse of trees on the horizon.

“Summit,” I said.

Summit had a population sign-a small, metal rectangle with the town name and the population-at the turn off the main road. The sign read: 277. Now it was 276. We turned down Main Street, the only paved road in town, turned left at the pool hall, slid down gravel and clay roads for two blocks, then turned left again.

Sam’s house was a tiny white two-story A-frame. The green roof was speckled with black rectangles where shingles had blown free. The exterior was leafed metal siding, smeared with rust marks where the builder used cheap, ungalvanized nails. My brothers were inside. We saw their cars parked outside on the lawn, next to the smoking, burning barrels where they were burning trash from Sam’s house. The air was thick and humid with freezing rain and smoke.

I pushed open the door to Sam’s house and we entered through the mudroom. We opened the door to the kitchen and a wave of heat and dust slapped us in the face. We went inside and the dust started us both coughing. My brother Bob sat in a big, overstuffed chair under a window. The curtain was drawn tight across the window. He looked up at us and smiled through his big, black beard as Rose sneezed.

“Just think of all them skin cells from Sam and Laverne. Thousands and millions and billions of them,” Bob said. We coughed and he smiled again. “Wish we could open a window for you, but it’s too cold outside.”

In DC, in Nebraska, hell, even in the rest of South Dakota, it was spring. Here, 2000 feet above sea level, on the highest spot between the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers, it was still winter. Outside, we heard a noise: Whirrrrrr “Oh, no,” Steve said. He stood next to the kitchen counter with a bottle of beer in his hand. “Not him again.”

Bob grinned. I closed my eyes and prayed. Around me I felt Dakota settle lightly, the first layer, and grasp me firmly.

Rose stepped next to her husband, a little speck next to a giant. Steve, just as tall as me and even bigger, just shook his head and put on a long-suffering expression. Rose watched all three of us and looked puzzled. Roaaarrrr “Again,” Steve said, resignation thick in his voice.

Bob grinned again, but this time it was strained. I looked around and tried to figure out how I could get out of the house quickly, without my brothers taking vengeance later for leaving them like a coward. There was only one door out, and it was too late. Silence. “What’s going on?” Rose asked in a whisper. She looked nervous and pulled a little closer to Steve. I shook any head and Steve squeezed his eyes shut, made a face, and opened them again. Bob slumped deeper in his overstuffed chair.

A perfunctory knock at the door and we heard it swing open and Indian stepped inside. He was medium height, with long, greasy black hair pulled into a tail. His skin was coppery-brown, and his eyes were black and glassy. He wore a green combat jacket, torn and stained with grease, and a pair of jeans. “How ya doin’ ?”

“Fine, Indian,” Bob said. He gestured vaguely toward the outside, glanced at Rose, and grinned. “Got your town car outside?”

“Yep, yeah, I do,” he said, his voice deep and hoarse, chopped off, as if each syllable came from the edge of an axe. “Not the country car?”

“No, no, that one I’m still workin’ on. Yep, yeah, got that by the house up on some blocks,” he said. He laughed, a deep, throaty noise.

“Ya know, Sam was a good friend of mine, my buddy. He leave me anything in the will?”

“We don’t know,” Steve said. He knew. He was executor of the will. But he did not want to talk with Indian. Particularly when Indian was drunk. “You’ll have to ask the lawyer.”

“Yep, yeah, Sam was my buddy,” he said. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette. He carefully straightened it out, but it still flopped down, almost broken through halfway down the white paper. He looked around vaguely, saw me, and looked up.

“You are one big bastard, aren’t you?”

“Hello, Indian,” I said resignedly. He smiled and coughed.

“Mind if I make some fire, mind if I smoke?” he asked. He ignored us, the question just a formality, and lit up. Bob stopped smiling.

“We don’t have any ashtrays, Indian,” he said sharply. Indian waved his hand through the smoke, and waved off Bob’s irritation the same way.

“No problem,” be said. He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a green cotton work glove, stained black and hard with oil and grease. He put it on his left hand and dropped ash into it. “Yep, yeah, Sam was my buddy. He leave me anything in his will?”

Steve looked irritated. Bob closed his eyes. Rose pulled on my sleeve and I leaned down next to her.

“He’s wearing nail polish on his fingernails. Pink nail polish. And he’s got live .22 shells sewn on the outside of his jacket. Why is he doing that?”

I shrugged and stood straight.

Indian finished his cigarette and put the still-glowing butt into the back pocket of his jeans. He carefully gathered all the ash in his hand into a neat pile, then brushed his hands together and scattered the ash all over the floor.

Bob stood. He was well over six feet and two hundred pounds, and all of it muscle. Steve and I made Bob look short. The three of us formed up next to Indian and made a living wall. Rose huddled behind us.

Indian looked up, his eyes bleary.

“Yep, yeah, Sai was my friend.”

“We know, Indian. We know.”

He stepped back. We stepped forward. Without any contact we did a slow dance to move him toward the door and out of the house.

“So, you and Teddy Wahford been running any races lately with your town cars?” Bob asked. He tried to keep Indian’s mind occupied while we got him out of the house.

“Hell, no. Teddy’s golf cart can’t keep up with me,” Indian said. He laughed. Two more steps closer to the door. “He’s too damn slow.”

“You take the blade off your town car, Indian?” I asked. Two more steps. “Yep, yeah, I had to,” Indian said. He laughed again, his voice deep and thick with mucus. “Too much rock going’ into windows. Had to take it off.”

“You go faster with the blade off?”

“Slower. Don’t know why. Maybe I’ll put it back if Teddy gets a fresh charge in his cart.”

Finally, the door.

“Yep, yeah, Sam was my buddy,” Indian said. He looked up at us again. “You think he left me anything in his will?”

“Good-bye, Indian.”

He pushed through the door and went outside, back into what was now a mix of freezing rain and snow. Rose watched through the window as Indian got on his town car and pulled the starter cord.

Roaarr!

He drove off down the gravel road. “That’s a riding lawn mower,” Rose said flatly. Bob grinned.

“Oh, no. That’s Indian’s town car.”

Indian slid out of sight around a corner and past a stand of trees. The engine sound dwindled. The phone rang.

I picked it up, and it was Indian.

“Hey, big bastard, I forgot to tell you something,” he said, his voice barely audible above the roar of his engine and the crackle of cellular phone static. “There’s something asking for you in the pool hall.”

“Something. What’s something?”

“Damned if I know what it is. But it’s not part of any Summit line and the boys and girls got a little liquor in ’em. Whatever that thing is, if you want it to stay in one piece, you might want to get on down there.”

“Jesus, Indian, thanks for telling me right away,” I said sarcastically. Now I was angry. “We don’t need any trouble with someone from the flats who got up here by accident. You get yourself in there and tell everyone to calm down. I’m coming straight down.”

“What if the stranger isn’t from our line?”

“Then tell everyone that as far as I’m concerned, that stranger is associated until I get down there. And if the stranger gets hurt before I get there, then someone else is going to get hurt after I get there. Got it?”

“Done,” he said. “Don’t take long.”

The phone went dead.

Sam’s Pool Hall faced on Main Street, directly across from the bank, in what I always thought of as some kind of weird commentary on the divine and profane of commerce. A blue and red neon Hamm’s sign flashed in the window. I stepped up onto the landing, gave my boots a quick pass on the metal edge of the mudscraper to knock off the worst of the mud, and opened the door. Memories hit me like a sledgehammer.

Along the right wall were a dozen heavy oak chairs with high backs and broad armrests, like a king’s throne. The wood was dark, almost black, and worn to fit by fifty years of use. The chairs were chained firmly together and then bolted to the wall so no one could take them down and use them in a fight. They smelled of stale beer and moonshine and furniture polish.

Pink sawdust was scattered across the floor and piled up a couple of inches deep against the feet of the two pool tables that dominated the center of the room. There they squatted, the leather cups worn and cracked, the green felt tight and shiny, one in line behind the other down the middle of the room. A single lamp with cheap imitation. Tiffany glass and a huge light bulb hung over each table. Wire, with scoring disks strung along it like beads on a necklace, stretched taut high in the air above and across each table. The only way to move the disks was to reach up and push them with a pool cue.

The rack with the pool cues and the stretcher and the spare set of balls was tucked behind the bar, out of reach of anyone in search of a quick weapon to settle an argument. The bar was Sam’s pride and joy.

It was thirty straight feet of dark wood that looked like it was carved out of a single tree trunk. A brass step rod, always polished until it shone, ran along the bottom of the bar. A wall-length mirror, the bottom obscured by rows of half-full liquor bottles, covered the left wall itself.

Chuck stood behind the bar. He’d worked for Sam as a bartender as far back as I could remember, and he never seemed to get any older. Now he held a skullknocker club as shiny and polished as his bald head, and faced the rear of the pool hall with a bored look on his face. When the door opened and I came in he glanced at me briefly, and then pointed with his chin toward the rear of the pool hall.

Indian was in the back at a table, a long-neck beer in his hand and a smile on his face. When he saw me he wiped the smile off and tried to look serious.

Foremost faced three drunks, two men and a woman. He was in a low crouch, his cowl pushed back, his snout forward, his hands relaxed and up. As I watched him I saw his claws flicker in and out.

The drunk woman held a knife, some kind of a slip blade, in her right hand. As I watched she pulled a feint, flipped the knife into her left hand, and slashed. Foremost caught the blade in his robe, whipped it away almost contemptuously, and struck her quickly on the shoulder.

She spun around, staggered, and kept her footing. She got a stubborn look on her face, glanced around quickly, and started for Indian’s bottle. He got a protective look on his face and began to push his chair back, away from her.

“No way, Dove,” he said. He held the bottle away from her. “No breaking bottles in the pool hall. You know Sam’s rules. You can’t use this anyway. I’m not done with it. No way—”

“What the hell is going on here?” I shouted in my best parade sergeant voice.

Everyone froze.

I reached over the bar, took Chuck’s club, and tapped it lightly in my hand as I walked to the end of the bar. Indian quickly stood and arranged himself behind me.

Dove and the two other drunks looked up at me and said nothing. Foremost straightened out of his crouch and stood silently.

“Chuck!” I shouted, my eyes locked on Dove’s. “Give my friends here a beer.”

Three beers later I had Dove and her friends sitting down at a table. Another round later, including one for Indian and one for me, and a crème de menthe for Foremost, and we were all best friends.

“Hell, we never knew he was with you, Tony,” Dove said. She spilled half the beer down her throat and half down her chin. She wiped her lips with her sleeve. I motioned to Chuck to bring her another beer. “We just thought he didn’t look like he was part of a line. We thought we’d have a little fun with him.”

“Well, you were right,” I told Dove soothingly. “It’s important to watch for things like that, just in case flatlanders show up. And he’s not part of my line. But he’s associated.”

“If he’s associated, that’s all right,” Dove said, her head bobbing. “If he’s good enough for you, he’s good enough for us.”

“Now, I appreciate that, Dove. I’m touched. Really touched. So I’m going to tell Chuck to keep bringing you beer,” I said. I stood, and motioned Indian and Foremost to stand also. “Just for tonight, mind you. But all you can drink tonight.”

We moved to the little office in the back of the bar to the accompaniment of cheers from Dove and her friends. Once inside I dropped into the green, fake leather chair behind the desk. Foremost took the guest chair, a high-backed wood job with a dirty white padded seat, and Indian stood.

“Indian, get the word out that Foremost here,” I motioned to the alien, “is associated. I don’t want any more accidents with people like Dove. Once is an accident and I can understand that. Twice is deliberate and I’ll consider that an attack on the line. Understand?”

“Got it, Tony. I’ll get the word out. He’s associated and you want him left alone,” Indian said. I nodded.

“And I want him protected while he’s here,” I said. “I want you to do that job yourself.”

Indian looked down at his half-empty beer bottle. Something almost like shame seemed to flicker across his face.

“Maybe I’m not the best one for that, Tony. I’m not sure I’m everything I used to be,” he said slowly.

“I’m not asking you, Indian. I’m telling you. You need some food and some sleep. Get a Polish and some decaf from Chuck to take home. You look like hell.”

He opened the door to leave. I hesitated. “You did good tonight, Indian. Just like the old days.”

“Yeah?” he asked, and his face brightened. “Yeah.”

He shut the door behind him, and carried his new smile with him. I turned back to Foremost. “Jesus, you’re one hell of a lot of trouble.”

“It’s good to see you again also,” Foremost said, his voice deep and ragged. I sighed and shook my head. “What are you doing here, Ambassador?”

“I’ve come here for protection. Someone has tried to kill me.”

I almost laughed at that, thinking about Dove, then realized he was serious. “Ambassador—”

“Foremost,” he said. “Call me Foremost.”

“Foremost,” I continued, after a pause. “We caught the shooter from the capital and rolled up his network. Right now that’s probably the safest—” “You don’t understand,” he interrupted. “I’m not talking about the attempt on Earth. Someone tried to kill me on the ship.”

The ship was a huge cylinder, bigger than Ceres, and massed less than if it was made out of water. This told us it was hollow. How many billions lived inside?

No one knew. No human had ever been aboard.

All I knew was that it covered too many stars in the night sky and scared the hell out of me.

“After the last negotiation session in New York I went back to the ship,” Foremost said. He drank from a fresh crème de menthe I got him at the bar while I nursed a Scotch.

“The life-support system on my skimmer failed as I came out of the atmosphere into space. I tried to call for help, but my communications system was also broken. The temperature in the skimmer began to rise rapidly, and without life support I bad no way to get rid of the heat,” he said. He sipped at his drink. “Neither of these accidents has ever happened in my memory. And I am old enough to remember the last time the ship found an intelligent race that lived on a planet. Now, suddenly, both of these systems fail? At the same time? Against my particular skimmer? At just the worst possible moment? I believe the universe is perverse and all luck is bad. But in this case, even I doubt chaos and suspect causality.”

“You’re still alive,” I pointed out.

“I ejected. A secret precaution I put in place before the negotiations began.”

“Just in case we weren’t friendly,” I said grimly.

“I am old,” Foremost said. “Much, much older than you. I didn’t get that way by accident.”

The windows in the office rattled in the wind and I glanced outside. The rain and ice had stopped falling, and the temperature seemed to be at least a few degrees above freezing. The clouds were still there, low and gray, but they were lighter now, thinner.

Somewhere above them, the sun waited.

“Why are you here?”

“Before I left for the ship I asked about you, and was told about your resignation. Agent Carole also told me where the funeral would occur so I could send an appropriate memorial. I had the location with me and I coded it into my lifeboat. The computer did the rest.”

I shook my head.

“No, Foremost. I don’t want to know how you got here. I want to know why you got here,” I said. “Carole would throw a security blanket over you like you never dreamed of, if you just ask her. Me? I can’t even keep you out of a knife fight in a bar.”

He finished his drink and put it aside.

“After the shooting I declared you part of my line. You accepted that, and carefully told me I was not part of your line, but that as long as I was here, I was associated with your line and under your protection,” he said. He spread his arms wide. “Where else would I be safer than with you?”

Damn all lines, I thought. Damn all governments.

And damn my big mouth.

“Why would someone from the ship want to kill you?” I asked.

Foremost stood and walked to the window. The building next door to the pool hall was a feed store, and Claire bred bulldogs in a run behind her place.

When we were kids we played with the animals and helped clean them and their run. They were big, stupid, friendly dogs, with oversized paws and ears and the ugliest faces we ever saw. They climbed on us and pulled our clothes for attention and generally proved out the stereotype of the bulldog puppy.

Claire paid us in quarters, but we loved the dogs and we worked for candy when she was low on cash. Once, Steve and a runt got to be special friends. The two of them were constantly with each other, even to the point where he sneaked the dog out of the run when Claire was not looking.

Then one day Steve came to see his friend and he was gone. Sold. Claire tried to explain that she was sorry, it was a business to her, but he never understood. Finally she gave him extra candy and quarters and he ran all the way home, his face streaked with tears.

He gave everything to Bob and me, and never went back to Claire’s again.

“Mine is not the only race on the ship,” Foremost said. “And mine is not the only line in my race.

“Every time we find a new planet with something we want, some groups on board the ship prosper, and others lose. Overall, the ship gains. But that doesn’t make it any easier for the groups that lose.”

“This time the potential gains are bigger than usual,” I guessed. “So the losses will also be bigger than usual.”

“You understand,” Foremost said. “So what are you going to do?”

He stood back from the window, which made the bodyguard part of me relax, and went back to his chair.

“I have a new proposal from your people,” he said. “And I have a funeral to go to. I will think about one, and attend the other.”

“I’ll call Carole,” I said automatically. Then I stopped. “Who knows you’re here?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “No one, yet. By now my people will have found the empty skimmer and the message with my suspicions I left behind. The search will be on for me or my body.”

I finished the Scotch.

“I have to bury Sam,” I said, stubbornly. “If I call Carole we’ll have flatlanders on us like a blanket.”

“Ship people as well,” Foremost added. “Both my friends, and those who tried to kill me.”

The windows rattled to a fresh gust of wind and I heard the scattered pebble sound of freezing rain against the glass. “Did you bring any funeral clothes?”

When we were young, before Steve was born, my family lived in Sam’s house. Downstairs was the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, and Sam and Laverne’s bedroom. Upstairs were two tiny bedrooms.

I remembered the stairs as tall and hard to climb and for once a childhood memory was accurate. The stairs were steep, almost like a ladder, but Foremost scrambled up them quickly. I moved more slowly, my head down so I did not hit it on the doorways or the ceiling.

Foremost used the bedroom on the right. The bedroom on the left was completely filled with a huge, silvery, outdoor TV antenna. Foremost paused and looked at it.

“Communications?”

“Entertainment,” I said. “Reception only.”

“Wouldn’t it work better on top of the house?” Foremost asked.

“Sam liked it right here where he could touch it,” I said.

Steve and Rose slept in the downstairs bedroom. Bob camped out in the kitchen. Foremost used the upstairs and I was down on the couch in the living room.

The next morning we were up and moving at dawn. Steve made everyone a breakfast of scrambled eggs with American cheese, thick bacon, and bagels. Foremost discreetly tested everything for allergens, then took a dry bagel to eat with his field rations.

Bob finished his plate, pushed it back, and glanced at Foremost.

“So what do we do today?” he asked.

I finished my orange juice and put my plate by the sink. Steve got himself seconds from the skillet while Rose nursed a cup of coffee.

“Today we bury Sam,” I said.

“We know that,” Bob said impatiently. “Are you going to go get the Estep token?”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?” I asked. Bob shrugged and looked at Foremost again.

“Always got choices. Might not like them, but always got choices,” Bob said. “Token should be at the burial. Token always watches the Eldest get buried before it gets passed on to the new Eldest.”

“We’ll go to Oly’s house and pick it up,” I decided. “If someone does come looking for the Ambassador, they’ll come here first. We might as well be somewhere else.”

Bob grinned.

“What will Oly think about your friend?”

Steve snorted.

“Oly probably won’t notice anything different from normal when you two show up,” he said, disgusted.

“Oly’s not so bad,” I said, defensively.

Bob and Steve both stared at me, then smiled. Bob pushed away from the table and stood.

“We’ll get everything ready at this end. Be at the cemetery a few minutes early,” Bob said. I nodded and motioned for Foremost to follow me. As we got to the mudroom Bob tapped me on the shoulder.

“Steve and I’ll talk to the boys and girls,” he said in a low voice. “We’ll have eyes out to see if any strangers are in town.”

“The cemetery is an awfully lonely place. Lots of open country, except on the side with the woods,” I said.

“Easy to hide in them woods,” Bob agreed. “Or on a hilltop in the corn stubble.”

“You’ll take care of it?”

“Done.”

Foremost and I took the car that Rose and I used to drive up to Summit. It was another dark, rainy day, perfect for a funeral, and I still dialed down the tint on the windows to make it even harder for someone outside to see inside.

We turned right on the road, then left. We drove silently in the barren hills south of town, past fields used only as pasture, that grew only a bumper crop of rock.

The rock reminded me of Washington. I remembered a party in Georgetown, at one of the ever-so-discreet townhouses near the university. In the back, behind all the security doors and the antique furniture and more pretentious people than I could suddenly stand, was a tiny courtyard. I fled there with my Scotch to escape a too-aggressive bureaucrat’s daughter. There I found the rock.

Nothing special, just a small gray boulder about twice the size of a basketball, flecked with black and silver. It was tucked next to a dwarf willow beside a pool. Spray from a small waterfall moistened the rock, already tumbled and smoothed by the glacier that created it. I ran my bands over it and suddenly realized I was homesick.

Now we drove past uncounted fortunes of that kind of decorative rock, poking out of the fields, plowed into piles, pushed into heaps to get them out of the way. I glanced at everything around me, at the rain and the wetlands and the bare hills and the rock, and smiled. This was where that rock belonged, not in some little decorative garden, and maybe it was not the only thing that belonged here.

We crossed a ridgeline and stopped on top. I put the car in park, and started to get out of it. Foremost began to get out also. I reached over and touched him.

“You stay inside,” I said. “This will only take a minute.”

I stood on the ridge, silhouetted against the gray sky, for several minutes. Summit Lake used to be a field like any of a thousand fields in the old tribal lands. One day, as Sam told me, some fool woke up and thought he was in Iowa, not Dakota, and decided to try to plow good buffalo land. Instead of a neat, clean furrow through dirt he hit a rock. When he pulled the boulder off he found it was a caprock, over a spring.

Now Summit Lake filled the entire bowl, probably three or four square miles in area, with only a few scraggly trees to break the rolling, grass-covered hills. And it showed on no maps, not county or state or federal. You knew where it was, and you found it, or you were a flatlander and then what the hell were you doing here anyway?

Satisfied that Oly had plenty of time to see who it was, I got back in the car and headed off down the track to his shack next to the concrete boat landing.

Oly was outside on a bench tucked next to his house. He looked up when the car stopped, a knife and a piece of wood in his hands.

“He is a sculptor?” Foremost asked. I shook my head and pointed to the pile of wood shavings on the ground around Oly.

“He just likes to cut wood. He takes a big piece and makes it into a lot of little pieces. Then he starts over again with another big piece.”

“Why?” Foremost asked.

I took a deep breath. I was impatient to get this over, and unhappy about any time we spent out in the open where more people could see Foremost.

“Oly used to be the best carver in this part of the state,” I said. “I swear, magic used to flow out of his knife. Now he’s got some bad arthritis and his fingers don’t work so well. The magic still flows in him, but only in his mind. So he cuts the wood to remember, and he still sees the final carvings in his mind.”

“And the rest of us only see the shavings,” Foremost said.

“That’s our problem, not his,” I said briskly. “Maybe we just don’t know how to look right. Anyway, let’s go. We don’t have that much time.”

We got out of the car and walked over to Oly. He looked at me, then Foremost, then back to me. Then back to his wood.

The bench was an old driftwood tree trunk, gray and worn and twisted, roughly knocked with an axe into a flat surface. Oly propped the wood up on two old black plastic bait buckets to get it off the ground.

I sat on one side of Oly, and motioned Foremost to sit on the other side. We sat silently for a moment and stared out at the dark water.

Summit Lake was like a map if you knew how to read it. Small sloped waves, deceptively soft, in the middle where the water was deepest. Taller, thinner waves, with white froth tops and green water, almost as transparent as glass, near the shore and the underwater slope.

The fish that lived in the lake preferred different kinds of water and cover. A good fisherman could look at the lake, at the waves and color, and draw a mental map of what the bottom looked like. A good fisherman knew that walleye liked this kind of water; northern pike liked that kind. Bullhead swarmed over the points, and bass liked the sections where the branches of dead trees, flooded out years ago, poked through the surface.

Sam claimed the world was like a lake, and the people in it like fish. Most people went through their lives without much understanding of what was really going on. Only a few people could stand outside the world and actually see it and make sense out of it. He claimed Oly was one of the best of these.

Tradition said I had to talk first when I met Oly.

“So how’s the fishing been, Oly?”

He took a cut with his knife, and a curl of wood peeled onto the ground.

“Been worse. Been better,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I can see that.”

“You came back for Sam,” Oly said. Another curl of wood joined the pile on the ground. “Some people said you wouldn’t come back. Some people said you were gone from the line, said you didn’t even want to be associated anymore.”

“They can say it,” I said. “People can say anything they want. But I’m back.”

Oly was older than Sam, so old that even his grandchildren were older than the brothers and I. His teeth were blackened and mostly missing, his hair thin and the leathery scalp covered with brown age spots.

But his eyes were sharp and it was said that nothing happened in Summit he did not know.

“YOU brought a flatlander to the funeral,” Oly said.

“Steve’s wife, Rose,” I said. “He’s got a little girl now.”

“Steve’s got a baby,” Oly said. He shook his head. “He was such a funny looking little guy. Looked just like a duck. And now he’s got a baby of his own. Funny.”

I tried to imagine Steve, closer to seven foot than six, strong enough to break ribs as part of his job as a respiratory therapist, as a baby who looked like a duck. I smiled to myself.

“This is Foremost,” I said. “He’s from upstairs.”

Oly nodded.

“Word came around,” he said. “He’s associated?”

“I gave him my word.”

“With Sam gone, you can do that,” Oly said. He looked up at me. “I heard how you handled Dove last night.”

“Dove and the boys were just having some fun,” I said, uneasily. “You did it right,” Oly reassured me.

He took a final cut at the wood, looked at it critically, then folded the clasp knife and put it in his pocket. He stood and turned to Foremost.

“You come with a good recommendation,” he said, and jerked his head back over his shoulder toward me. “I try to do my best,” Foremost said.

“He’s good people,” Oly said. He stared hard at Foremost. “Don’t mess him up.

Oly turned and walked with a firm, clean step to his shack. Foremost and I stood and waited.

Oly was back in a minute. In one hand he carried a bundle about a foot long, wrapped in an oilcloth and tied with a piece of rawhide. In the other hand he carried a mason jar. He handed the package to me, and unscrewed the jar with the other.

“Limbo came by this morning,” Oly told me. “Said he found some tracks that he’d never seen before around his place. They looked like boot tracks, but not any kind of boot he’s ever seen.”

We all looked down at Foremost’s feet. His boots were as wide as they were long, with three large bulges where a human had toes. There was no way to ever confuse his feet with one of ours.

“He found the tracks all around some kind of metal torpedo that someone had hidden in the brush,” Oly said. “Limbo said there was writing on the outside of the metal, but he couldn’t read any of it.”

“I hid my escape pod after I landed. I hope I did not hurt anything on his farm,” Foremost said.

“And then you just walked west into town?” I asked.

“South,” he corrected me. “My garment has some camouflage capabilities, and my people are quite good at moving without being seen.”

Oly looked at me and smiled, a thin slash across his face. Limbo’s farm was east of town. So either Foremost lied when he said he walked south into Summit, or someone else was now prowling around town. The lie was too easy to check, if we looked in the brush north of town for another ship, so I had to assume we had another visitor.

“Sounds like we need a drink,” Oly said. He reached in the jar, fished around with his fingers, and pulled out the complete skeleton of a fish, head and all. He tossed this on the ground, then tipped the jar to his lips and took a deep drink, so that his Adam’s apple moved up and down like a piston. He wiped his lips and handed the jar to me.

The jar was old, tired glass, heavily decorated with curlicues and fancy writing. Inside I saw clear liquid on top and, on the bottom, a white sludge of particles that danced and flickered with oily, reflected light. The smell, a mixture of fish, spices, pickle juice, and pure alcohol, was enough to make my eyes water.

I took a small sip.

The sludge was smooth and silky, with a hint of cinnamon and bay on top of the full’ fish taste. Northern pike, I guessed. Then the vinegar cut through and seemed to slice my mouth open. Finally, the alcohol seemed to lift off the top of my head and let the cool breeze swirl around inside.

I handed the jar to Oly. He handed it to Foremost. He looked at the jar, puzzled, and touched it with his allergen analyzer. He stared hard at the display, as if he couldn’t believe the results, then tucked the analyzer away. He held the jar in his long, leathery fingers and took a hesitant sip. He closed his eyes while Oly smiled at him. He opened his eyes and handed the jar to Oly.

“Good,” be said, his voice raspy and hoarse. “Very good indeed. This is how you preserve the fish you catch?”

“Oly doesn’t fish,” I corrected. “People bring him fish they catch and don’t want.” I turned to Oly. “Who’s got the still now? I don’t recognize the taste of the moonshine.”

“You asking as a government man, or as one of us?” Oly said.

“I’m asking as me,” I answered. “Government man resigned his job to come to the funeral.”

Oly nodded and looked approving. Not many people around Summit had much love for the government. I lost a lot of respect when I went to Washington. The first time I got shot I gained most of it back, but it was an expensive way to put credit in that account.

“That batch of ‘shine is from Flipper’s new still,” Oly said. He looked at the jar critically. “I canned that jar a couple of years ago. Just took it out to see how it’s aging.”

“Not bad,” I said.

“But not quite ripe yet, either,” Oly grumbled. “That boy keeps doing fancy things to the old recipe for grain. He just can’t leave well enough alone. Makes it hard to can a decent fish when you don’t know what the ‘shine is going to taste like. These things have to match up just right.”

“Sometimes change is good,” I said.

“Don’t you start up on me,” Oly warned. “Change happens fast enough without rushing it.”

“What about Sam?” Foremost asked. “Did he fish?”

“Sam? Oh, he put his lines out for all sorts of things. Yes, he was a great fisherman. He caught fish all the time, but he never wanted to eat them. He just liked catching them, and making them do what he wanted,” Oly said, and grinned. “Kind of like what he did with people. He had his lines out for them, just like he did for fish. Never sure what he was going to catch, but always interested. Me, I’m different. I don’t like catching the fish, but I like to take care of them afterward. Same with people. Sam and me, we were like both sides of the mirror, the face that looks in and the face that looks back.”

The world is like the lake, and Sam and Oly sit on the shore, and talk and laugh and watch the water . . . “I put a fish in a jar, add ‘shine, spices, and just a little pickle juice. Then I let it rest for a few years. Makes it easier for me to eat with my gums,” Oly said, and smiled to expose his lack of teeth again.

“There are people on the ship who would pay you much for that single jar,” Foremost said.

“I’m always willing to talk about money,” Oly said. He handed the jar back to Foremost. “Have another sip and let’s talk.”

I left them alone for the moment and took the oilcloth package back to the car. Once there, I gently untied the rawhide and unfolded the material.

The Estep token was two pieces of bone, speckled black with age. They looked like the thighbones of some animal, bigger than a rabbit, smaller than a deer, but nothing I immediately recognized. I touched the bones, ran my finger up and down them, felt the smooth surface with its little pits and whorls, then tied the bundle together again and placed it carefully in the back seat.

Sam never talked much about the token of our line, just enough to let me know it was important. Once a year, at Orville Knob’s Nut Fest, the big party just before New Year’s Eve, the token was carefully laid out on a table set with a brilliant white tablecloth. The table was always tucked into a far corner of the room, unobtrusive but visible. I sat next to Sam all night one year, and brought him food and beer and listened and watched.

I saw members of the line sidle up to the table and look down at the token. Sam waited a moment, then leaned forward and spoke a few quiet words with the person. They would listen and nod and smile, or speak quietly about some problem they couldn’t solve. Then they put a few dollars on the table next to the token and walked away. When they left, I took the money and put it into the strongbox under Sam’s chair.

I knew that in the next few days Sam would work on the person’s problem. It might get solved, and it might not. Nothing was perfect, not even the token, but as a symbol it was damned powerful to us. To everyone else, it was just a couple of old bones.

I knew what I needed to do next, and wished I could drink more fish with Oly to give me some liquid courage. Finally I promised to do myself a favor in the future and picked up my satellite phone and called Carole.

Her personal secretary was an old friend and always answered the private number herself, instead of letting the voice mail do a screening, so I called that number. It rang twice and Phyllis picked up.

“Protective service.”

“Morning, Phyllis. It’s me.”

“Tony!” she said warmly. “Oh, it’s good to hear you. I miss you already.”

“Phyllis, you’re a better liar than anyone else in the office,” I said fondly. “I’ve only been gone two days.”

“Two long days. Two extremely long days.”

“I turned in my resignation, Phyllis. I’m not coming back. Better get used to it.”

“Herself needs you back, Tony. Things aren’t going so well right now.”

“I know,” I said. “More than you think. Is she in?”

“Hold two.”

I glanced back at the porch. Three open mason jars rested on the ground and Oly held another in his hand while Foremost tested it with his sampler.

“Tony? Where are you? All hell’s broken loose back here,” Carole said. Her voice sounded cool, efficient, and just a little desperate. “I’m still in Dakota. The funeral is this afternoon.”

“We got problems, Tony,” Carole said. “An alien we’ve never seen before, from a species we’ve never met before, is down here with the President.”

I nodded to myself. “I’ll bet this one doesn’t talk like an ambassador,” I said. There was silence from the other end of the line.

“No. Not like an ambassador. More like a general than an ambassador. She says Foremost is gone, they think we have him, and they want him back. They’re making demands and giving us veiled threats. No one is talking trade anymore. We have to find Foremost.”

“I know where he is,” I said.

“Where?”

“About fifty yards away from me, drinking with an old friend of mine,” I said.

“Talk to me, Tony. Tell me what’s going on,” Carole said.

I explained the situation quickly, as if I was doing a debrief on a routine assignment. When I finished, all I heard was her soft breathing on the phone.

I looked over at Oly and Foremost. They each took a jar in hand and sipped. Then they put them down, argued, and picked up another jar, and sipped. It looked like the Dakota version of a wine tasting.

“I want you to keep him there, safe, until I arrive. I’ll grab a jet at Andrews and get there in a couple of hours.”

I started to laugh. “What’s so damn funny?” she snapped.

“Where are you going to fly into? Fargo? Sioux Falls? Minneapolis? Those are the nearest cities with an airport big enough to take even the smallest kind of jet.”

“Then that’s where I’ll fly.”

“And then you drive,” I said, my voice suddenly serious. “You drive for hours. And then you arrive here, with a column of cars and trucks and God knows what else.”

“You have a problem with this?”

“We don’t take to outsiders up here, Carole. We call them flatlanders, people from outside the hills. You arrive here like that, without any kind of an invitation, like an invading force, and someone is going to have a few drinks, and then take a few shots. Maybe at you. Maybe at Foremost for bringing in outsiders.”

“No one would dare,” she said, uncertain.

I sighed.

“Carole, there’s a town up here where a man was shot down in broad daylight on Main Street with about a hundred witnesses around. No one liked the guy much and his death ended a feud between two lines. Everyone was pretty much satisfied with the result. Then a dozen marshals showed up to enforce flatlander law. If they were to arrest someone, anyone, it stood a very good chance of starting everything up again between the two lines,” I said.

“So what happened? What did the marshals find out?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing. Because no one saw a thing, and no one ever said a thing. In broad daylight, in the middle of town. Everyone kept their mouth shut.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“We take care of our own up here, Carole. Let us take care of things our way. “Foremost isn’t one of you.”

“He is right now. He’s associated, that means under the protection, of the biggest line in the county. He’s fine,” I said.

“Whose line is that?”

“Mine.”

I glanced back to the shack. Oly and Foremost sat close together on the bench. Foremost watched intently while Oly drew in the dirt with a stick. Occasionally they stopped and sipped more fish.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“I want you to be careful. I want you up here, but I want you up here alone. We don’t want the wrong people to follow you. Assume someone has a trace on you. Get rid of it. Then come up here, alone. Bring whatever communications equipment you want. I’ll keep Foremost safe until you arrive.”

“And then?”

“And then the three of us will get together and figure out what to do.”

“What about the tracks? what if someone from the ship is coming after Foremost?” she asked. “If there’s any trouble, we’ll deal with it in our own way.”

More silence, until it dragged on like one of those bargaining tricks they taught me in hostage negotiation school. The idea there was to let the silence drag on, let the person who is most anxious talk first.

But this was not some damn role-play game. “I don’t like it, Tony. But I don’t have much choice. We’ll do it your way.”

“Good,” I said, and let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Put me back to Phyllis. I’ll give her directions on how to get you here and where to meet me.

“All right. Give me a minute to tell her what I need and then I’ll put her on.”

The phone clicked once, I heard dead air, then the phone clicked again and Phyllis came on the line. “So how do I get her to you?” Phyllis asked.

I briefly gave directions. Phyllis repeated them back to me to make sure she had them down correctly.

“Tony, she’ll never say this, so I’ll say it for her,” Phyllis said. “Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

“She never would say it, would she?”

“Tony, she might not say it, but she doesn’t want you to quit,” Phyllis continued.

“How do you know that?”

“Those resignation papers of yours? They never made it to me. They’re still in their envelope, on her desk. Unopened. Why do you think that is?”

I looked at the lake, at the wind-ruffled water and the grass that swayed and tossed on the naked hills. Oly and Foremost relaxed back on the bench now and spoke slowly to each other.

“I don’t know, Phyllis. I just don’t know.”

“Think about it, Tony.”

I thought about a lot of things as Foremost and I drove back into town. I stuffed the tokens in their oilcloth under the seat and drove back by a different route than the one I used to get to Oly’s place. Training: never use the same route back from a location that you used to get there. Old habits from the Service died hard, and I decided sometimes it was good to keep in practice. Particularly with strange tracks and strange people walking around town.

We stopped at the house. I found a note taped on the back door that said Rose and Steve were at the church, and I was supposed to go directly to the cemetery. Bob was already out there to get things ready.

I changed clothes and carefully adjusted my holster so my handgun did not bulge under the suitcoat. Foremost scraped the mud off his feet and put on a clean robe. We met in the kitchen.

“How do I look?” Foremost asked.

He looked like a giant wolverine with funny looking hands. He looked like the kind of person who could spend an hour discussing the nuances of fish-based moonshine with a stranger from the hills. He looked like the kind of person who brought strangers into my town and problems into my life.

He looked like someone under my protection.

“You look fine,” I said. “Come on. Get in the car.”

We drove down the side streets, strangely abandoned by the children who had been scrubbed, poured into suits and dresses, and then marched to church for the funeral. We crossed Main and drove past cars and trucks parked on the grassy strips next to the church.

The church was Methodist, with a three-story-tall steeple that was the highest point in town. A giant cross, half the gold paint flaked off, topped the structure proudly. White paint on clapboard, six-foot-tall stained-glass windows, and a set of walk-up concrete steps to the main entrance finished off the picture.

“You have many different religions here?”

“Not so many as some towns, but a few. Methodists go here. Catholics go to Blue Cloud Abbey outside of town. Lakota might go to the shaman and a sweat lodge,” I said. “Your line goes to this church?” he asked, and nodded toward the church.

“Some do,” I said. “Some go to the other places. We’re all mixed up.”

We left town gravel behind and drove on county gravel. It sounded like the same thing, gravel was gravel, but even in Summit there was a difference between the town and the country. It was a small thing, hardly noticeable to outsiders, but town gravel roads were graded and smoothed while the country roads were ridged like corduroy. A little thing, but I had seen fights break out at Sam’s Pool Hall over less.

We bounced on county gravel while the clouds thickened up and got darker. A fleck of snow, huge and fat, struck the windshield. It stuck there, pinned like some exotic butterfly on display, then melted into a wet spot and a tiny droplet that streamed down the glass.

I turned left at a crossroads and went down the cemetery road. The surface was mixed gravel and dirt now, humped up in long ridges down both sides of the road. Once a year a grader might force its way down here, to level out the ridges and throw down new gravel. Maybe. If the county budget was in good shape that year. And it looked as if the budget had been in trouble for a long time.

I drove down the tire marks of other vehicles and used the bottom of the car as my own grader when I needed. Sometimes this put me on the right hand side of the road, sometimes on the left. Foremost hung on tight and looked straight ahead.

Marshes and sloughs, tiny wetlands filled with reeds and tall grass and old decayed fence posts with the rusted barbed wire still attached filled the fields on both sides of us whenever the road crossed a low spot. jays and sparrows and blackbirds perched on anything dry and watched us as we passed. I watched Foremost as his head jerked like the birds, and wondered what the hell was going on inside that brain.

We turned once again and we were at the cemetery.

Raw headstones, shaped but not yet engraved or polished, lay together in a gray tumbled pile in the ditch next to the crossroads. Tall grass, mixed brown from last fall and fresh baby green new growth from this spring, sprouted through and around the stones like whiskers on a dead man’s face.

The grass in the cemetery itself was clipped short and raked with military precision. Placed neatly in the field of green were the finished cousins of the headstones in the ditch. These, though, marched in strict rows, ordered by family and line, across the cemetery. Men and women, the important in life and those that passed through unnoticed, were all equal here. The only concession to sentiment was the small headstones of the children, tucked in close to their mothers. Bouquets of flowers, some real and withered, some plastic and worn, filled the cupholders of the children’s headstones.

I saw Bob’s car, the backhoe used to dig the grave, and a green canvas tent. The tent stood next to a pile of fresh black and brown dirt flecked with white glacial stone. Folding chairs were set up in two small rows under the tent and faced the grave.

I looked for Bob but didn’t see him. What I did see were so many ambush sites where a shooter could lay up and hide that I almost turned around and took Foremost back into town right then and there.

Trees pushed up next to the cemetery on one side and provided excellent cover. Across the road, the flax field was plowed and planted and empty, with a tremendous field of fire. Sloughs covered both of the other sides, so that we were in a kind of island, surrounded by trouble. Most times I thought of the cemetery as beautiful, peaceful even.

But not when there were strange tracks around my town. And where the hell was Bob?

I drove slowly down the rutted dirt track, dotted here and there with a flash of white that was last year’s crushed paving stone, toward the grave. I pulled the car into line next to Bob’s, passenger side facing his car. Then I loosened my gun in the holster, and opened the car door. “Do you want me in or out?” Foremost asked. “What kind of weapon would a killer from your ship have?”

“Pumped laser.”

“Could it cut through the car?”

“Yes. Easily.”

“What kind of surveillance and identification equipment would they use?” I asked.

“There are many,” Foremost said. “They might use a body-heat scanner or a low-light analyzer. Or any of a dozen other devices.”

I thought for a moment. With the tint dialed to full on the car windows, Foremost was invisible inside. Invisible, that is, to the bare-eyed locals around Summit. I was pretty sure my little window-tint trick wouldn’t keep him invisible to an assassin with military-level surveillance and identification gear. Foremost wasn’t built to be able to slip down to the floorboards and hide, so he sat up straight and provided a perfect silhouette to any sniper who could see him.

“Might as well get out then. Better to be a moving target than one that sits and waits,” I said. We shut the doors behind us softly, but it still seemed loud. “Bob?” I called. “Down here,” came his voice. We walked closer to the grave. “Where?”

“Down here,” he repeated.

We walked to the lip of the grave and looked down. The grave was about eight feet deep, with the concrete lining sunk into the bottom six feet of that so two feet of dirt remained on top to grow grass. Rob stood in the center of the open concrete box and looked up at us. “What the hell are you doing down there?” I asked.

He looked embarrassed. He slapped his hands together to knock off dirt and smiled.

“I wondered what it was like to be buried. I thought I’d just come down, feel it for a couple minutes, and come back out.”

“And?”

“And I can’t get out of the damned grave now. The concrete is too slick and the ground is too muddy. Give me a hand.”

I looked at our clean clothes and the mud. Bob was dressed in casual clothing, streaked with brown and black dirt.

“Where’re your funeral clothes?”

“In the car. I figured I’d change after I did this and no one would ever know.”

“Sweet Jesus,” I said disgustedly. “I didn’t bring any spare clothes. And I don’t want to think about what Aunt Gladys will say if I’m all covered with mud during the burial. Hold on a minute while I think of something.”

I went back to the car. I figured there must be something in the trunk, snow chains left over from winter or an old piece of rope or hose, that I could let down to him to get him out and still stay clean myself. I reached in my pocket and fumbled with my keys. They dropped to the ground and I swore mildly and bent over to pick them up.

The rear bumper blinked at me.

I hit the ground and rolled. Foremost shouted and flung up his arms. He staggered and stumbled backward, his arms flung wide. A cloud of steam engulfed him.

The light flashed again, and this time I saw the laser flare and burn part of Foremost’s robe. Jets of steam spurted from his clothes around his neck and armpits and waist and he hit the ground and lay motionless, half in the grave, half out.

I was up and moving, gun in my hand. I put the car between myself and the grove of trees where I saw the laser flash. :“Bob, you okay?”

“What the hell is going on up there?” he shouted back.

“Just shut up and do what I tell you,” I said. “Can you drag Foremost down in there with you?”

I heard Bob grunt, the sound of something heavy scraping on the grass and dirt, and another deeper grunt from Bob. “Got him.”

“He alive?”

“He’s breathing,” Bob said. “Not real regular, but he’s breathing.”

“Just keep him that way,” I said.

What would I do if I was the shooter? Foremost was down, hit twice, but there was no guarantee he was dead. The steam was the giveaway. A laser cuts cleanly through fabric and messily through flesh. It never sends out jets of steam. Which meant Foremost had some kind of protective layer underneath his robe to dissipate the laser heat. Was it tough enough to handle two shots?

The shooter had to be certain.

I glanced quickly underneath the car and saw a figure with a pair of feet coming toward the car at a trot. I took three deep breaths and came over the top of the hood, gun outstretched.

I fired three times, direct hits to the body. The creature, short and squat and all in gray so I could not tell what was clothing and what was skin, jerked at the impacts but kept on coming. It stared at me with a fixed caricature of a wild grin on its face, writhing tentacles where I had teeth, a thin slash of bone where I had lips. Then it shuffled its feet for balance and aimed the laser at me. The grin widened and I knew I was dead. The head exploded.

The body stood for a moment, fixed, as if it meant to keep on conng, as if the loss of its head was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. I worried for the saine moment that with this alien that might be true, that the head was nothing more than a place to put the eyes, that the brain might be in the torso.

Then the body crumpled and collapsed.

I ran to the shooter, my gun out and level, ready to fire if I saw a flicker of movement. When I got closer I kicked the laser away, far out of reach, and felt the body. It was cool to the touch, and lumpy, like a plastic bag full of rocks.

“It is called a Synth.”

I looked over my shoulder and saw Bob and Foremost, their clothes smeared with dirt. Bob stared at the alien, shook his head slowly, and went over to look at the laser.

“Do not try to use it,” Foremost warned. “The odds are good it is a personal weapon, keyed to the Synth.”

“Booby-trapped?” Bob asked.

“I don’t know the word,” Foremost said.

“Rigged to explode if someone other than the owner tries to use it,” Bob explained. “Probably,” Foremost agreed.

I stared at the country around me. The grass moved in waves to the winds, and the trees in the little forest rubbed and swayed in rhythm.

“Do they travel in pairs?” I asked.

“No, strictly alone. They are living killing machines. Put them in an area, give them instructions, and let them do their work. If you put two in an area they would most likely kill each other,” Foremost said.

“Hard to keep a species going that way,” I said.

“They manage somehow,” Foremost said dryly.

I stood and looked down at the Synth. Up close, the gray was partly clothing and partly skin, so close in color to each other that they blended to form a whole that was difficult to focus on. The alien looked like a silly-putty man, and I wondered if the rain would dissolve the skin and clothes and wash them into the grass.

I saw three smudge marks on the alien’s chest where my bullets struck some kind of protective vest. I looked at the marks and, for just a moment, I was pleased with myself. The bullet pattern was tight, the black smears close together, and I knew my old firearms instructor at the Service would be pleased. The Synth itself looked enough like one of the practice dummies at the Academy that I half expected it to snap back upright when this little exercise was over. But the rain puddled on the clothes and formed droplets on the skin and the Synth stayed dead.

“Indian, you can come out now,” I said, my voice pitched to carry against the weather.

Indian, his fatigue jacket smeared with a few new grass stains that would soon dry and mix with all the others, drew himself up from the edge of the trees. He wore a broad-brimmed hat with snap-down ear flaps, just as dirty and stained as the rest of his clothing. He carried a scoped rifle, as clean and well-tended as an opposite could be. He pointed down the road, then disappeared back in the trees.

“Funeral procession is coming down the road,” Bob said. I looked up and saw a black hearse, with a procession of other cars behind it. I kicked the Synth. “How the hell do I explain this?” I growled.

“Don’t need to,” Bob said. “This is Summit. That’s all you need to know, and all you need to say.”

Carole showed up about an hour after dusk, when the street lights on Main Street were just starting to get into some real work. Foremost and Oly and I sat on the steps outside the pool hall and passed a glass jar of fish back and forth. Bullhead, if I remember right. Bob and Steve and Rose were inside, acting as hosts for Sam’s wake. I could tell, from the rising level of voices and music and laughter inside, that the party was just starting to take off.

Driving down the street, Carole saw us, and turned to parallel park in front of the pool hall. She stopped the car and the driver’s side window rolled down. Even through the sharp cut shadows from the street lights I could see the relief on her face.

“All I thought about on the way down here was that you might be dead. Every time I closed my eyes on the plane I saw you in a coffin,” she said, her voice soft and tired. She turned her head a little to the side. “I’m glad you’re all right, too, Ambassador.”

I’m glad you’re all right, too, Ambassador?

I struggled with the thought that Carole spent the trip worried about me. Something of my confusion must have shown on my face. She smiled. “You don’t work for me anymore, do you? Then I can worry about you now.”

“And before?” I asked. “You were an agent. You had a job to do, and I had a job to do.”

“I wasn’t a person before, and now I am?”

“You were a person before,” she said carefully, “and an agent.”

“And now?”

She smiled again. Her face relaxed in a way I never remembered from Washington. I realized I liked that smile very much, and wondered where she’d kept it all those years. I suddenly wanted to make her smile again.

She started to get out of her car and I shook my head.

She stopped for a moment, her face frozen, and the old mask snapped back into place. For a moment I saw pain and hurt and loneliness. Then it was gone, and it was the Washington face back again. “Of course,” she said carefully. “I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “Park the car around the corner. We’re keeping Main Street clear. Then come back here. We need to talk.”

I moved over on the step a little and pushed Foremost with my butt, to move him down and make a space for her next to me. She watched me, startled at the way I touched him, and even more surprised when he accepted it without complaint. She smiled that smile again, and I was damned pleased with myself.

She drove around the corner, parked, and came back. She sat next to me. She wore a parka with a fur fringe and she fit just right next to me. Foremost passed her the glass jar of moonshine and fish. She wrinkled her nose at the smell.

“Tony, what is this stuff?”

“Ancient family drink,” I said. I took the jar from her, sipped to show it was safe, then wiped the rim with my shirt sleeve to clean it. I felt awkward and clumsy and about twelve years old while next to me sat the prettiest girl I knew. I waited for her to look up, to see it was really me sitting next to her-not some perfectly turned-out diplomat with ideal manners and looks. Then I figured she would carefully and politely edge away from me and go find someone better to be around. I handed her back the jar. “It’s really all right to drink.”

She took the jar, looked up at me with total confidence, and took a small sip. She handed the jar back.

“What’s going on out here?” she asked.

Main Street was strangely abandoned, even for Summit. Not a car was parked on the street, and the black asphalt was carefully chipped and scraped and cleaned so that it almost gleamed under the street light. A pair of freshly painted white lines, like the guard lines for a pedestrian crossing, stretched across the street.

“Time for the races,” Oly said. Foremost nodded.

Around the corner came Teddy Wahford on his golf cart, and Indian on his town car. They lined up carefully side by side between the lines. Limbo, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt even as his breath came out in puffs in the cold, stepped between them. He carried two small construction worker flags, one in each hand, their color drained by the overhead sodium light until the flags seemed more like a muddy gray than a bright orange. Foremost leaned back and banged his fist on the pool hall door. Bob opened the door from inside. Waves of noise and heat and light washed over us from inside.

“Yeah?”

“First race is ready,” Foremost said.

“About time,” Bob said. He shut the door and we heard him pounding on the long bar and shouting. Everything went quiet for a moment and then the door banged open and the crowd spilled outside with a roar. Carole grabbed my arm for balance as the crowd shoved past us. “what the hell is going on?” she asked again.

Chuck the bartender brought out a metal washtub filled with ice and cans of beer. He looked down at me as he walked past.

“Race beer should be in bottles”’ he growled disapprovingly. “Gets cold faster.”

“It’s cold enough already,” I said as my breath puffed into the night air. “And you can’t cut anyone with a can if someone gets angry about the race results.”

Chuck set down the tub on the curb next to Steve and Rose and Bob. They sold the beer as fast as they could pull the cans out of the ice and water.

“You sell the beer at a wake? That’s one hell of a way to make money,” Carole asked. I shook my head.

“No, we won’t make any money off this,” I said. “The first round was free, and in the morning we’ll take everything we made off all the rest of the beer and donate it to the town emergency heating fund.”

“Then why charge for the beer?”

“If it was free everyone would take too much. All we’d have left by now would be a bunch of passed-out drunks. This way most of them are still awake.”

“And that is important,” Foremost added knowledgeably. Carole looked puzzled.

“Each person who knew Sam gives back what they did best at his wake,” he explained. Steve overheard him and nodded, pleased.

“Ten on Teddy. I heard he got a new charge in his cart,” Steve said.

“Ten on Indian,” Foremost answered. He looked at me almost apologetically. “It would be disloyal to do anything else.”

Limbo dropped the flags and the racers rolled ahead. The golf cart was almost silent, just a high-pitched whine, but Indian’s town car roared and screamed. The crowd answered back.

Foremost leaned next to me and spoke quietly into my ear. “We need to talk,” he said.

“About?”

“I contacted my friends on the ship after the Synth attack. My enemies obviously know I’m alive and where I’m located. I wanted to give my friends the same advantage.”

“Sounds like a good idea,” I said. “I also told them everything we know about the Synth attack,” Foremost said.

On the street, Indian’s town car suddenly swerved into Teddy and bounced off the protective rubber bumpers attached all around the body of his golf cart. Teddy swore and shook his fist at Indian. Indian smiled back, his eyes glazed, and tipped his hat to Teddy. The crowd roared its approval.

“And?” I asked Foremost when it got quiet enough to hear him.

“They asked me to give you their thanks, for keeping me alive. They also put a protective air and space patrol over Summit for tonight. In the morning they’ll be down with transport to take me home,” Foremost said.

He sat next to me on the stoop, the cowl of his robe thrown back so he could use all his peripheral vision, his snout pointed straight at me. His eyes were very flat and black, with the silky gleam you see on creek stones when just the barest sheet of water flows over them.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said. “Why wait until morning?”

“Because I wanted to talk with you,” he said.

I sipped the last of my fish and put the jar down on the street, out of the way next to the steps so no one would accidentally break the glass. Foremost and I seemed to be locked inside our own little bubble of silence, the noise of the crowd unimportant and distant. I looked at him directly.

“What do you want to talk about?” I asked.

“You’ve heard that we plan to take some humans with us when we leave?”

“I’ve heard,” I said. “I never understood why.”

“From each world we take a society,” he said quietly. “The ship is huge, but space is bigger. We will never come back here again. But we want to take part of you with us.”

“Why?”

“Because we never know what we’ll face out there,” Foremost said. “All we know is that every planet is going to be different. And the more differences we have on the ship to choose from, the greater the chance that someone we have on-board will be able to talk with and understand whoever it is we meet.”

The town car was more powerful, but Indian couldn’t seem to steer a straight line. Foremost had bought him all the beer he could drink after the burial, to pay him back for his work that afternoon. Indian’s capacity for alcohol was tremendous, but by now I was sure he saw three or four roads, not just one. Teddy, on the other hand, figured out the best path and held to it, his head tucked down as if to reduce his wind resistance.

I looked around me, at my line and all the others that made up Summit. Every year there were fewer of us, as more and more children left for the cities. I remembered those children, the exiles as they called themselves, from the East Coast reunions. They always seemed angry and lost, as if they never quite fit in outside of Dakota.

As I never quite fit in.

I leaned back to Foremost.

“We can talk,” I said. I leaned forward and took a fresh jar of fish from Oly. I sipped and tried to figure out what kind of fish was in this batch. Northern Pike was my guess. “But tomorrow. Not tonight. Tonight is for Sam.”

Foremost nodded and I handed the jar to Carole.

Indian’s town car swept by me and kicked up gravel and I felt something sting my cheek.

“That bastard put the blade back on his town car to make it go faster! Indian, get your butt over here . . .”

ECOPOIESIS

Geoffrey A. Landis

They came from Earth to solve a senseless murder. But once on Mars, all they wanted was to stay alive.

WONDER WHY THEY CALL THIS THE RED planet?” I asked. The rebreather made my voice sound funny in my ears. “Looks like the brown planet to me.”

“You got a problem with brown, boy?” Tally said. Her voice was muffled by the rebreather she wore as well.

I turned, but Tally wasn’t looking at me; she was watching the opposite direction, standing in a half crouch. That position surely couldn’t be comfortable, but for her it looked completely easy and natural. Her head turned with a quick birdlike grace to glance now one way, now the other. Guarding our backs, I realized. Against what?

“Nothing wrong with brown, my opinion,” she said.

The more my eyes got used to the terrain, the more colors came out. Brown, yes, barren rocky brown plains and brown buttes and a brown stream frothing over a tiny waterfall. The hills were sharp-edged, looking as if they had been blasted out of bedrock the day before, barely touched by erosion. But in the brown were hints of other colors; a sheen of dark, almost purple, echoing the purple-gray of the cloudy sky, and even patches on the rocks where the amber shaded off to almost army green.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” said Leah Hamakawa. She was, as always, two steps ahead of us. She was down on one knee in the dirt, her nose right up against a rock. She’d taken both her gloves off and was scraping the surface of the rock inquisitively with her thumbnail.

I knelt down and scooped up a handful of rocks and dirt in my gloved hand. Close up, I could see that the brown was an illusion. The rocks themselves were the color of brick, but clinging to them were blotches of purple algae and tiny, dark amber specks of lichen. I pulled off one glove so I could feel the texture. Cold, with a rough grittiness. When I nibbed it between my fingers, the blotches of purple had a slimy feel. I was tempted to try pulling off the rebreather for a moment so I could put it right, up to my nose and smell it, but decided that, considering the absence of oxygen in the atmosphere, that would not be wise.

“Beautiful, yeah, right,” Tally said. “You got rocks in your head, girl. Stinks. I seen prettier stinking strip mines.”

“It used to be red,” Leah said. “Long ago. Before the Age of Confusion; before the ecopoiesis.” She paused, then added “I bet it was beautiful then, too.”

I looked at the handful of dirt in my palm. Mars. Yes, perhaps it was beautiful. In its way.

My ears and the flesh of my face in the places not covered by the rebreather were getting cold. The temperature was above freezing, but it was still quite chilly. The air in the rebreather was stale, smelling slightly rotten and distinctly sulfurous. That indicated a problem with the rebreather; the micropore filters in the system should have removed any trace of odor from the recycled air. I thought again about taking the rebreather off and seeing what the air smelled like.

“Shit,” said Tally. “Anyway, you and Tinkerman about done gawking the scenery? We got a murder to solve. Two murders.”

“They’ve been dead for well over a year,” Leah said. “They can wait another day. God, isn’t this place magnificent?”

“Stinks,” said Tally.

THE LANDER WAS BULBOUS AND SQUAT, PAINTED a pale green, with the name Albert Alligator in cursive script next to the airlock door. Leah and I cycled through the airlock together. Langevin, the pilot who had shuttled us down, was waiting for us in the suiting atrium when the inner lock opened. He opened his mouth to say something, and then abruptly shut it, gagged, and turned away, his hand going up to cover his mouth and nose. He scrambled out of the atrium abruptly. I looked at Leah. She shrugged, and reached up to unfasten the strap of the rebreather from behind her head.

“Let me get that,” I said, and she turned around and bent her neck. Any excuse to touch her. Behind me, I could hear Tally cycling through the lock. The strap unfastened, and I gently took a finger and ran it along Leah’s cheek, breaking the seal of the rebreather to the skin. Suddenly she broke away from me. “Oh, god!”

“What?”

“Take off your rebreather.”

Puzzled, I reached up, snapped the strap free, and pulled it forward over my head. The silicone made a soft “poik!” as the seal popped loose. I took a breath, and gagged on the sudden odor.

The smell was as if I’d been wading through a cesspool in the middle of a very rotten garbage dump. I looked down. My shoes were covered in brown. My hands were brown. One leg, where I’d knelt on the ground, had a brown spot on the knee. Leah was even dirtier.

Shit.

Tally popped through the lock, accompanied by a fresh burst of fecal odor. I held my nose and suppressed my instinct to gag.

“Of course,” said Leah. “Anaerobic bacteria.” She thought for a second. “We’re going to have to find some boots, and maybe overalls. Leave them outside when we come in.”

I started to giggle.

“What’s so goddam funny?” Tally said.

“I’ve decided you’re right,” I told her. “Mars stinks. Take off your rebreather. You’ll see.”

THE UTILITY LANDING PLATFORM WAS A HEXAGONAL TRUSS plate with small rocket engines mounted on three of the six comers. The hab-and-lab module that Spacewatch was delivering for our stay was strapped on the top. It hovered in the cloudy sky like a flying waffle iron. Langevin guided it in by remote control, setting it down in the sandy valley a hundred meter’s from the mins of the earlier habitat. His landing was as neat and as unconcerned as a man passing a plate of potatoes. Still operating by remote control, he unstowed the power crane, lifted the habitat off of the landing platform and iowered it gently to the ground. The habitat itself was an unpainted aluminum cylinder, fixed with brackets onto a platform with an electromechanical jack at each comer to level it on uneven ground. It was a small dwelling for three people, but would be adequate for our stay.

“Man, I don’t envy y’all,” he said. He delicately pinched two fingers over his nose. “No surprise nobody comes here.” He shook his head. “Anytliing else y’all need?”

“How about the rover?” Leah asked.

“It’s still in transit from the Moon; won’t arrive for a few more days. When it gets here, I’ll send it right down.”

TALLY WAS FIRST ONE INSIDE THE HABITAT, OF COURSE. EVEN though it had just come down from space, like a cat, she had to sniff it out herself. After five minutes she waved us in.

The interior of the habitat was brand new, the fixtures molded to the interior. Across from the airlock atrium was the air regeneration equipment, with three spherical pressure tanks painted blue to indicate oxygen, and three green-painted tanks of nitrogen to provide make-up gas. To the left was a combined conference room and kitchen area, and behind that the sleeping cubbies.

“Only two cubbies,” Tally said, “and a mite cozy ones at that. Guess we girls bunk down in one; give you the other all to yourself, Tinkerman.”

I couldn’t breathe for a moment. Somehow I managed to sneak a quick glance up. Tally wasn’t looking at me. She hadn’t yet realized that the silence was extending a bit too long. Leah glanced across at me. Her expression was neutral, curious, perhaps, as to what I would do. I couldn’t read her intention. I never could.

In a very small voice, I said, “I volunteer to share a bunk with Leah.”

Tally looked up sharply. Leah gazed back at her, her expression unreadable. But she didn’t voice an objection.

“Huh,” said Tally. I don’t think I’d ever seen Tally at a loss for words. “Well. Guess I get a cubby to myself.” She paused, and then added, almost to herself, “Lucky me.”

TERRAFORMED MARS HAD AN ATMOSPHERE HALF AS THICK AS Earth’s. That was enough pressure for a human to survive, but with no oxygen to breathe. With rebreathers to recirculate exhaust carbon dioxide back into breathable oxygen, we could survive outside comfortably without a vacuum suit. For that matter, you could survive outside stark naked, as long as you had your rebreather, and didn’t mind the cold.

Outside again, this time with boots and coveralls to keep the worst of the stinking dirt out of our habitat, we walked in silence across the rock-littered landscape the hundred meters to the place that the earlier habitat had been. Ragged edges of aluminum stuck out from the platform like ribs. Pieces of the habitat had been scattered across the plain by the wind, a fan-tail of shining metal and shards of composite sheeting visible against the brown all the way to the horizon.

There were two bodies, one within the remains of the exploded habitat, one out on the plain. Not much was left of them. The bodies were barely more than piles of dirt with a rib cage and part of a pelvis protruding, even the bones covered with the purple-brown of the Martian microbiota. I was glad for the filtering effect of the rebreather. I made videos of the bodies in position while Leah knelt down to examine them and take samples: clothing, hair, skin, tissue. After she examined the one in the habitat, she rose without speaking and went to the one outside. Unlike the other one, the clothing on this one was partly eaten away by bacteria.

Leah’s long black hair blew around her face as she worked, but the carbon-dioxide breeze wasn’t strong enough to move the pieces of aluminum framework. The wind must have been much stronger to have spread the wreckage so far.

Tally stood, as always, a dozen paces away, eyes restlessly scanning the horizon for enemies.

“We really should have had a doctor to do this analysis,” Leah said, standing up. “But a few things are obvious. For example, five man in the habitat had a fractured skull.”

“What?”

“But this one,” she nodded down at five body she was standing over, “shows no apparent sign of trauma. No rebreather, either, so I’ll hazard a guess that carbon dioxide poisoning was what did for him.” Leah put five tissue samples into her sample-pack and took a step toward the habitat. “I’ll have to let five computer analyze five samples to verify that, of course.” She looked around. “Who could have killed them? Why?” She looked up the plain, following the trail of debris. “I think we’ve seen enough. Tinkerman, you have enough pictures? Does your checklist have anything else?”

I looked down at the list. “No, as far as forensics is concerned, we’re done.”

“Then, unless you have any further suggestions, do you think maybe we could get them decently buried?”

When there’s a fatal incident in space, of whatever kind, there needs to be an investigation. If it was an accident, the cause has to be found so that Spacewatch Authority can take appropriate measures to prevent its recurrence, and deliver warning to anybody else with similar equipment.

We were that incident investigation team, Leah and I. Tally, a freelance survival specialist, was our protection. If somebody had killed the two researchers, deliberately blown up their habitat for some as-yet undetermined motive, whoever it was that had killed them might

But nobody cared about Mars. The exciting horizons were light-years away, where relativistic probes lasercast back terabits of images, giving the excitement of vistas that anybody could access on optical disk without the danger and discomfort of leaving Earth, and with far stranger life forms than any mere microbes. Mars was such an uninteresting location that it took over a year before Spacewatch Authority noticed that a scientific team that had gone there to study microbes hadn’t returned. They were the just researchers to bother with an on-site investigation of Mai’s in over a century.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I told Leah, back in the habitat. “Why would anybody want to murder two researchers on a stinky planet too close, to Earth to even be interesting?”

She shrugged. “Kooks. Bacteria-worshippers. Or, maybe one of them had an angry ex.”

“It’s not as if the planet were exciting,” I said. “They tried to terraform it. They failed. End of story, go home.”

“Failed? Tinkerman, you have it all wrong. You should go learn a little history before going on a trip.” I could hear her switching into lecture mode. “They didn’t try to terraform Mars. They never tried to terraform Mars. What they did was ecopoiesis, and they succeeded spectacularly, more than anybody had a right to expect.”

“Ecopoiesis,” I said, “terraforming, same thing.”

“Not at all.”

THE WAY LEAH TOLD IT, IT WAS PART EPIC, PART FARCE.

It’s hard for us, now, to imagine what it was like in the Age of Confusion, before the fusion renaissance and the second reformation, but the people of the twenty-first century had a technology of chemical rockets and nuclear reactors that, although primitive, had its own crude power. By the middle of the twenty-first century, Mai’s had been explored, cataloged, and abandoned. It was too cold to harbor life, even of the most primitive sort; the atmosphere was closer to vacuum than to air, and there were far more accessible resources in the asteroids. Mars was uninteresting.

It didn’t even make good video. The largest canyon in the solar system—so big that if you stand in the middle, the walls on both sides were out of sight over the horizon. The biggest mountain in the solar system—but the slope so gentle that it meant nothing on any human scale. Ancient fossil bacteria—but not even a hint of anything that hadn’t been dead and turned to rock a billion years before trilobites crawled the oceans. A hundred spots on Earth and across the solar system were more spectacular. Once somebody had climbed Olympus (and in the low gravity of Mars it wasn’t a hard climb), and had placed flags at both poles of Mai’s, why go back?

The ecopoiesis of Mai’s was done by a band of malcontents from one of the very first space settlements, Freehold Toynbee. Habitats—they called them “space colonies” back then—were crowded, dangerous, undersupplied, constantly in need of repair, and smelly. They were haven to malcontents, ideologues, fanatics, and visionaries: the vanguard of humanity, the divine agents of the manifest destiny of mankind into the universe. More succinctly, the habitats were home to people who couldn’t get along with their fellow humans on Earth. Arguments were their way of life.

It was an engineer named Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick who proposed that Toynbee could transform Mars. The people of Toynbee debated the question for a year, arguing every conceivable point of view with a riotous enthusiasm. At the beginning, the consensus of the colony seemed to be that since human destiny was in space, even to consider living on planetary surfaces could only be idiocy, or some deviant plot to subvert that destiny. But Kirkpatrick was more than just a maverick engineer with wild dreams, he was a man with a divine mission. A year later, the quibble about living on a planetary surface I wasn’t even part of the argument. Toynbee decided that the right of Mars to remain unchanged was preempted by the imperative of life to spread into new niches. They had convinced themselves that they had not merely a right, but a divine duty to seed life on Mars.

Mars, back then, was completely inhospitable to life. The atmosphere was less than one percent of the Earth’s, and the average temperature was far below freezing, even at the equator. But their analysis showed that the climate of Mars just might be unstable. The surface of Mars showed networks of canyons and run-off channels, dry lakes and the seashores of ancient oceans. There had been water on Mars, once, a billion years or more ago, and plenty of it. All that water was still there, hidden away. The old scientific expeditions had proven that—frozen in the polar ice-caps, locked into kilometer-thick hills of permafrost in the highlands. They convinced themselves that there was, in fact, far more water on Mars than previously suspected, frozen into enormous buried glaciers under featureless fields of sand. Enough to form whole oceans—if it could be melted. All that was needed was a trigger.

It’s not easy to heat up a planet, even temporarily. They did it by setting off a volcano. There were a number of ancient volcanoes on Mars to choose from; after many geological soundings to determine magma depth, they picked a small one. Or rather, a volcano small by Mars standards, still a monster by the standards of any Earthly mountains. Hecates Tholus; the Witch’s Teat. To set it off, they determined, required that they drill five kilometers deep into the crust of Mars.

Just because it was clearly impossible was no reason they wouldn’t do it. Mars has no magnetic field, and so the solar wind impacts directly on the planetary exosphere. A thousand miles above Mars, currents of a billion amperes course around the planet, driven by the solar wind-derived ionization. Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick and his team of planetary engineers short-circuited this current with a laser beam, ionizing a discharge channel through the atmosphere, creating the solar system’s largest lightning bolt. They discharged the ionosphere of Mars into the side of Hecate, instantly creating a meter-deep pool of molten rock. And then they did it again. And again, as soon as the ionospheric charge had a chance to renew. And again, a new lightning bolt every five minutes, day and night, for ten years.

One million lightning discharges, all on exactly on the same spot. They melted a channel through to the magma chamber below, and a volcano that had been sleeping for almost half a billion years awakened in a cataclysmic explosion. The eruption put carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere; more importantly, it shot a hundred billion tons of ash directly into the stratosphere. Over the course of several months, the ash settled down, blackening the surface.

The new, darker surface absorbed sunlight, wanning the planet and releasing adsorbed carbon dioxide from the soil. The released carbon dioxide thickened the atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect of the thicker atmosphere wanned the planet yet more. The resulting heat evaporated water from the polar ice caps into the atmosphere. Water in the atmosphere is an effective greenhouse gas, even more effective than carbon dioxide, and so the temperature rose a little more. Finally ice trapped underground for eons melted. A whole hemisphere of Mars was flooded, eventually to form the vast Boreal Ocean, as well as innumerable crater seas and ponds. But that was much later. In the beginning, in Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick’s lifetime, only on a band around the equator was water actually liquid all year round. But that was enough for what they wanted to do. Slowly, the eons-frozen permafrost of Mars was melting.

The atmosphere was still thin, and still almost entirely carbon dioxide, but Mars is a sulfur-rich planet. Sulfur dioxide frozen into the soil was also released, and rose into the atmosphere. Ultraviolet light from the sun photolyzed the sulfur dioxide into free radicals, which recombined to form sulfuric acid, which instantly dissolved into the new equatorial oceans. The new acid oceans attacked the ancient rocks of Mars, etching away calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate, releasing carbon dioxide. In a few years, the acid oceans had been once more neutralized—and the atmosphere was thick, fully half a bar of carbon dioxide, enough for a greenhouse effect warm enough to keep the new oceans liquid year round.

Mars had been triggered.

But how to keep this new atmosphere, to keep the planet warm? Not even Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick could keep a volcano erupting forever, and already the Witch’s Teat was settling down from an untamed explosion of ash to a sedate mound of slowly oozing lava.

Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick’s answer was bacteria. Anaerobic bacteria, to live in the oxygen-free atmosphere of Mars.

“Sewer bacteria,” I said.

“You got it, Tinkerman. Anaerobic bacteria—modified sewer organisms. Yeasts, slime-molds, cyanobacteria, methanogens and halophiles as well; but all in all, bacteria closer to gangrene than to higher life.”

“No wonder it stinks.” I shuddered. “They were crazy.”

“Not so. They were, in fact, very clever. They engineered a whole anaerobic ecology. The bacterial ecology darkened the surface, taking over the job of the volcanic ash. It burrowed into the rocks and broke them apart into soil, releasing absorbed carbon dioxide in the process. The met hanogens added methane, a vitally important greenhouse gas, to that atmosphere, and raised the temperature another few degrees. They didn’t dare establish too many photosynthetic forms, of course, because if the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to be converted into oxygen, the greenhouse effect that kept the planet warm would vanish, and the planet would return to its lifeless, frozen state.

“But terraforming Mars hadn’t, been their goal in the first place; in fact, terraforming was the very antithesis of what they intended. Their goal was ecopoiesis, the establishment of an ecology. They were Darwinists, and diversity was their creed. They looked down in contempt on unimaginative humans who believed that humans were the pinnacle of creation; they saw humanity as only agents of life, spore-pods by which life could jump from one world to another. They believed that once life, however primitive, could establish a toehold on Mai’s, it would adapt to its environment, and flourish, and someday evolve. Not to make a copy of Earth, but into something new, something indigenously Martian.”

“So they wanted to be gods.”

Leah shook her head. “They wanted to be men.”

“So they’re responsible for this place. Great.”

“The ecopoiesis was a wonder in its day, Tinkerman. It spawned debate across the Earth and cis-lunar space: was this the greatest feat of engineering in history, or was it a crime against nature? The year of arguing at Freehold Toynbee was nothing compared to the cyclonic fervor that was released when Joseph Smith Kirkpatrick proudly announced to the Earth what they had done.

“Kirkpatrick was kidnapped from Toynbee and put on trial in Geneva as an eco-criminal. The question the High Court argued was. Do Rocks Have Rights? Can it be a crime to destroy an ecosystem that contains no life? The trial took three years, and ended in a hung jury. Kirkpatrick was eventually acquitted of all charges, but he was never allowed to leave the Earth again, and died an angry, bitter man.

“Freehold Toynbee claimed ownership of Mars, and passed a law making it illegal for any human to land on it for the next billion years—but nobody paid any attention to their claim. For decades, Mai’s was the subject of intense scientific scrutiny. In a few more years Toynbee went bankrupt, for ecopoiesis paid no bills. Technologically obsolete, the colony itself was ripped apart for scrap; the colonists scattering to a hundred colonies and asteroid settlements. And then, after a few decades of fame, Mars was ignored Bacteria or no bacteria, there were far more abundant resources elsewhere in the solar system.”

“And if two researchers hadn’t decided to die here, it would still be uninteresting today.”

“Not uninteresting, no. Ignored, maybe. But not uninteresting.”

“To you.”

Leah smiled. “To me.”

LANGEVIN TOOK THE LANDER BACK UPSTAIRS, FLYing the utility platform in formation with him, leaving us done on the planet. We were in the tiny kitchen area of the habitat, sitting around the only table large enough to serve as a conference area. Leah spoke just. “Tally, did you learn anything?”

“After almost two years,” Tally said, “did you really, seriously believe any footprints of the perpers would be left preserved? Well, surprise.” She grinned. “Yeah, I found some boot prints. Took me some looking, let me tell you, but I found ’em.”

“So tell,” Leah said. “What did you get?”

“A few places in the lee of the rocks didn’t get washed away by rain or blurred by wind.” Tally shook her head. “But I checked them all; every damn print matches the size and patterns of one of the boots in the hab. Either whoever did it used the same boots as our late friends, or, more likely, whoever did it didn’t leave any boot prints. That’s all I’ve got. You?”

Leah spoke slowly. “The one in the hab died from being hit in the head. The other one died outside. No rebreather in evidence, and he wasn’t dressed for outside. Just a thin robe. Carbon dioxide poisoning, as I expected.”

“Hmm,” said Tally. “Two guys sleeping in the same cubby. Ask me, I’d call it as a lover’s quarrel gone violent. The one guy bashes the other in a fit of rage, probably didn’t mean to hit quire so hard. Then, realizing what he did, he blows up the habitat and walks outside to die.”

“Could be,” Leah said. “It’s a hypothesis, anyway. Can’t prove it one way or another with the evidence we have so far. One odd thing, the man who died outside had charred clothing.”

That explained the ragged appearance of the clothing of the man who had been outside. His clothes hadn’t been eaten by bacteria; they had been charred.

“Maybe caught alight when he blew the habitat?” Tally suggested. Leah shook her head. “Carbon dioxide and methane atmosphere. Nothing bums, outside.”

“Um,” Tally said. “Guess I don’t have an explanation for that one.”

“Tinkerman?” Leah said. “You get anything?”

I shook my head. “I collected as much of their records as I could find, but so far I can’t read them. A lot of their opticals were damaged by fire, and on the ones that weren’t, the surfaces are pretty corroded by exposure. I’ve started cleaning them off, and I may be able to get at some of their records, but, even if I can do it, reading it will be pretty much a bit by bit process. They weren’t very conscientious at making backups and putting them in a secure location, I’m afraid.”

“Pity. If we could read their diaries, it would help, let us see if anything was going wrong before the blow-up. Oh, well. Do what you can, and we’ll get together again tomorrow and check progress.”

As we bilked, Leah’s face had slowly been reddening. Her eyes were pale circles; her nose and lips and chin, where the rebreather had covered them, a pale diamond. The rest of her face slowly turned a brilliant scarlet, deepening even as I watched. She raised a hand and brushed her hair away from her face. “Ouch.” She looked puzzled.

Reflexively, I raised a hand to my temple. My own touch was like a whip, a brilliant stab of heat.

Tally looked at the two of us, grinning. “Well, well, aren’t you two the sight. Look like you’re wearing warpaint. Painted up like two owls, you are.”

Tally’s dark skin showed nothing, but Leah reached over and gently touched her face.

“Yow! Hey, that hurts! Shit!”

“Ultraviolet,” Leah said. “It’s the hard ultraviolet. CO_2 is too difficult for UV to split; it doesn’t form an ozone layer. The climate is cloudy and cold, but the hard UVs still get right down to the surface. I’d say, we’ve been a bit stupid, going out unprotected. Good thing we weren’t out much longer.”

“Shit,” said Tally. “Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“The hab has to have some kind of a med kit,” Leah said. “Maybe we’d better see if it has any sunburn ointment.”

AT NIGHT, IN THE CUBBY. I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT to expect.

She wasn’t in the bunk. She was sitting in the cubby’s one small chair, staring into space. I got into the bunk, on one side, making a space for her.

She didn’t move. Fifteen minutes. Half an hour.

I’d done something wrong. But she hadn’t objected! I thought—Damn.

The silence in the cubby was oppressive.

At last I said, “Leah?”

She said nothing.

“Leah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to try to—”

In the dark it was hard to tell where her eyes focused, but I could see the slight movement of her head and knew that she was looking at me.

“David.” She paused for a moment, and just before I was about to speak again, to apologize to her, she continued, “I’ve seen bodies before.”

It was not what I’d expected her to say. “Bodies?”

“I thought I was used to it.” Her voice was tiny in the darkness. “I thought I could handle it. I can handle it.”

It was odd. The bodies hadn’t bothered me. They had been so far decomposed that they were barely recognizable as having been human at all. And they hadn’t seemed to bother her, not in the daytime.

“I’ve seen too many bodies.” And then she came into bed, turning to face away from me. I held her. Her body was rigid, but she turned her face and pressed her head into my side. “Too many, too many.” Her breath was warm against my shoulder. “It wasn’t even anybody I knew. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m going to stop crying now.”

I touched her face. Her eyes were dry, but somewhere inside she seemed to be crying.

“I don’t even know why I’m still alive,” she said. “Everybody else died.”

I didn’t know what to say to her, so I stroked her hair and said, “I know, I know.”

“Careful how you touch me, you idiot,” she said, and her tone was back to normal. “My whole face feels like it’s on fire.”

I knew so little about her. She never talked about herself; she so deftly managed to always avoid tire subject. She had always seemed so much in control. But suddenly she was asleep, and the time for asking questions had passed.

I’VE HEARD THAT SOME PEOPLE FALL IN LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT. It took me about three classes.

The first one, I don’t think I even noticed her in particular, just another face among the many. I was teaching a class on troubleshooting. There are two techniques to troubleshooting equipment. The first is, you know the equipment so thoroughly that you have a sense of it, you know it as a friend, and when it’s down, you can feel what’s wrong by pure instinct. That method is rather hard to teach.

The other way is to be simple, thorough and logical; to home in on the problem by pure mechanical elimination, a matter of dogged and willfully unimaginative technique. That was the technique I was teaching. It means teaching how to be methodical, how to structure a grid to let no combination of symptoms escape detection.

The Institute has simple rules: everybody teaches, everybody learns. Every year, during the Earth’s northern-hemisphere summer, the Institute holds a month-long convocation, and this year I was teaching. My class lasted only a week, and it was almost half over before I really noticed Leah.

But, once I’d noticed her, I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The breeze rustled across pine needles, and I heard the sound of her voice, asking a question, precise, cogent, perfectly phrased. I’d see the way she cocked her head, listening. I became suddenly self-conscious, worried about how I presented the material, whether it was clear and precise.

So, when I finished, I sat in on her course, although it was somewhat out of my usual feeding range. Soliton-wave solutions of the Einstein field equations. I’m slow; my lips move when I solve field equations in four dimensions. She was a lot faster than the class, so smooth that it was obvious that she knew the material so well she didn’t even bother to review it before she started talking.

I knew that once tire convocation had ended, I would never see her again. The thought made me desperate, although I’d not spoken more than a half dozen words to her beyond what was required of a student. I knew absolutely nothing of her other than her name, Leah Hamakawa, and the obvious fact that she knew more about general relativity than I would be able to learn in a lifetime. I had to do something that would get her attention.

I invited her to come with me to visit old Los Angeles.

The month after the convocation is traditionally a time for vacation and independent study, before we went back to our individual lives, hiring out as Institute-bonded technicians or consultants or troubleshooters. I had no idea whether she’d be interested in a trip to OLA; it was a wild shot to try to impress her.

But her eyes had suddenly flared with interest, and, for the first time, she looked at me and actually saw me. “Old LA? Interesting. Have you been there?”

I didn’t want to admit that I hadn’t, so I temporized. “I know a good guide.”

OLA was one of the most dangerous, and certainly the oddest, of the ecosystems on the Earth. Back at the end of the second Elizabethan age, the doomed city had been the home of a dozen or more gene-splicing laboratories, corporations that had made synthetic retroviruses to replace flawed DNA with custom-designed synthetic, right inside the chromosome of the target organism. Other cities had such labs, too, of course, and Los Angeles hadn’t even been the most prominent of them. Just the unluckiest.

The virus that had gotten free was a generic gene-splicer. It would copy snippets of genes at random out of any host organism it happened to infect. As soon as it vectored to another host, it would make a billion copies of itself, and of its copied DNA, copy the genes back into a likely spot in the genome of the new host, and then start over again from the beginning by grabbing a snippet of DNA from the new host. As a parting gift to the new organism, it would then trigger the cell’s own enzyme promoters to express the DNA.

The fact that retroviruses copy DNA from one organism to another is a natural process, of course; just a part of the mechanics of evolution. The rogue virus had the effect of a million years of evolution, set loose in a single day: chaos.

Most of the additions to the genome were meaningless changes, genes which coded neither useful nor harmful proteins. Most of the changes that had effect were dysfunctional, and killed the hosts over the course of a few days or weeks, if they were lucky, or produced an explosion of cancers that killed the host over the course of months, if not so lucky. Over the course of the first year a great dieoff occurred.

The things that survived were—strange. The rogue virus had indiscriminately cut and pasted genes with no notion of species; what came out of the mingling were neither humans nor animals nor plants, but weird mixtures: predatory plants, octopuses wit h hands, tiger-sized raccoons that knew how to use guns, social bacteria that drew recondite, hypnotic patterns across deserted beaches. The thrown-together quarantine barriers held, barely, and the hastily mobilized scientific effort to combat the virus devised a specific antiviral protein that knocked out the rogue virus’s ability to reproduce. The plague was stopped before it spread outside the boundaries of what had been Los Angeles.

Inside the hundred-mile ring, surrounded by scorched sand and silent, instant death, what had once been Los Angeles was still evolving toward a new ecosystem. There was no place more deadly, or more strange. The retrovirus itself was gone, but the creatures it had spawned remained. You could go there, if you signed a waiver indicating that you knew the danger and were aware that there was no guarantee that you would come back.

The guide I had been told about was a mysterious survival specialist and weapons expert named Tally Okumba. Nobody, I was told, knew more about OLA, or about any of the odd, dangerous comers of the Earth, than Tally did; and nobody knew more about staying alive, on Earth or elsewhere.

“Old LA,” Leah said. Her eyes were veiled, dreaming. “When do we leave?”

IN THE LIGHT OF THE DAWN, TALLY WAS DANCING, HIGH KICKS, spins and backflips in the low gravity. Over her rebreather, her face was covered with a bone-white warpaint that, after a moment, I realized was an improvised sun-block. I watched her through the habitat’s window, and wondered how long she had been at it. Her flexibility was astonishing.

Leah did not mention what she’d said the night before, and I didn’t bring it up.

The task for the day was to gather up shards of the shattered habitat and as much of the wind-scattered contents as we could find. Leah and I worked mostly in silence, occasionally pointing out to each other pieces in the distance. Aerial photos taken as we had landed helped locate the more distant fragments, but didn’t substitute for plain, dogged walking.

The job took a lot of walking. The camp was located on the Syrtisian isthmus. This was a broad saddle that separated the Hellenian Sea from Gulf of Isidis, a bay of the Boreal Ocean which covered nearly the entire northern hemisphere of Mars. To the northwest the land sloped gently upward toward the Syrtis caldera, an ancient shield volcano, dead now for well over a billion years. An endless series of lava-etched gullies corrugated the landscape from northwest to southeast, each with a tiny brown stream at the bottom. The wind that scattered the pieces of the habitat had, in accord with Murphy’s law, been crosswise to the rilles, meaning that we had to trek up and down innumerable gullies to collect the fragments.

“It must have been some wind,” Leah said. “Blowing pretty constantly from the Hellenian Sea toward the Gulf, apparently.”

The carbon dioxide atmosphere was still now’, with barely a trace of breeze.

By local noon we had made a large collect ion of pieces. I took a break and sat on a rock by one of the streams. The brook foamed as it rippled over submerged rocks. Amber bubbles clumped together, then detached and floated downstream. The stream looked like an alcoholic’s vision of paradise: a river of ice-cold beer flowing down into a lake of beer, emptying somewhere into a frigid ocean of beer—

“Well, yes—what did you think that the rivers are?” Leah said, when I mentioned the thought to her. She was wearing a makeshift sunbonnet constructed from piloting charts; even with her face hidden by a rebreather and caked with bum ointment, she was stunningly beautiful. I wondered what it would be like to peel off her winter garments, to make love to her right there by the stream. “By any practical definition, it is a river of beer. Yeast is an anaerobic microorganism—the stuff that the ecopoiesis team seeded this planet with will ferment just about everything. Naturally carbonated, too: five hundred millibars of carbon dioxide atmosphere is going to dissolve a hell of a lot of carbonation into the water at this temperature. I’d bet that if you brought a glass of that stuff inside it would develop a pretty good head.”

“You mean I could drink this stuff?”

Leah looked at it critically. “Hmmm. You know, you just might be able to. Full of bacteria, I expect, but if our anti-biologicals aren’t working, we’re already dead anyway, so I doubt it’s a problem. Tell you what.” She looked up at me. “You try it, and let me know.”

I didn’t.

By midafternoon, we had gathered as much of the debris as we could find. Everything that looked like it might have originally been part of the habitat pressure vessel, Leah set out in a array next to the site of the explosion. Each piece was numbered, and then Leah began fitting them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

“There are some minor pieces missing, but I think we’ve pretty much got everything important,” she said at last.

I walked up behind her and looked at the neatly-indexed array of scrap. “What have you learned?”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t tell me a story, yet.” She picked up a piece and handed it to me. “Tell me what you think about this one.”

It was a curved piece of aluminum, forty centimeters long, somewhat bent. “Exterior habitat pressure-vessel wall,” I said.

“Right, so far. What else?”

The piece had broken at a seam at one edge. Shoddy workmanship? Probably not; the other end had ripped jagged right across; the weld had probably never been designed for the stress it must have taken. It was bent in the middle. The jagged end had a scrape of paint on the raw metal. “Blue paint chips on the end here,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “Anti the bend?”

It took me a moment, but suddenly I saw it. “Bent the wrong way,” I said. “It bowed in. The explosion should have blown it out.” I thought for a moment. “Could have been bent by the wind, later.”

She nodded, thoughtful. “Possibility. There are other pieces bent the same way, though.”

“How much overpressure would it take to bend it that way?”

“Good question,” she said. “If we could figure the overpressure as a function of position, we can guess the locus of the blast. Tunis out, though, that it doesn’t take much blast pressure to make the habitat structure fail this way. The pressure vessel was designed to hold an interior pressure; it’s not well designed against an external overpressure.”

“So, what do you think?”

“It might have failed in the rarefaction rebound following the overpressure of an explosion,” she said. “Microstructural examination might tell. Might not.”

“Or the explosion was outside the habitat.” That would make sense. If somebody had wanted to kill the team, the easiest way to do it would have been to put a bomb next to the shelter.

Leah shook her head and chose another piece to hand to me another. “Carbon deposits,” she said.

I looked at it and nodded. The bum marks were on the concave side, the interior. “Fire after the blast?” I suggested.

She nodded, but slowly. “Could be, I suppose. But after the habitat breach, everything vents to the reducing atmosphere. Fire goes out pretty quick.”

“IF IT WAS MURDER,” LEAH SAID, “WHO MIGHT HAVE DONE it?”

We were sitting back in the little conference room. My whole face itched now, despite the ointments that Tally had devised for sunburn. My face felt like I was still wearing the rebreather.

“Hard to say,” Tally said. “I suppose either one of ’em might have had enemies. If it wasn’t personal, I’ve got a few possibilities. First, before they went, turns out they got a couple of anonymous messages saying not to go. The point was, Mars was property of Freehold Toynbee, and it, was reserved for the Martians, however long it took them to appear. Humans were expressly forbidden to land.”

“Toynbee!” Leah said. “They were dissolved more than a century ago. Bankrupt and sold for scrap. Besides, lots of researchers have visited Mars.”

Tally nodded, slowly. “A century ago, yes. I doubt anybody been here in the last hundred years, though, except our poor friends. Seems hard to believe anyone would still care. A nut, I’d say. Still, a nut might be what we’re looking for.”

“And the other possibilities?”

“Turns out that there are still some people,” Tally said, “who think that ecopoiesis is usurping the role of God. And some who think that ecopoiesis is, or was, a crime against the ecosystem. And there’s been talk that if Mars could be triggered, then other planets, in other solar systems, could be. Some of these have life of their own, incompatible with terrestrial life. So, some radicals, they don’t want, Mars studied. They’re scared that any studying of Mars is a step to triggering planets in other solar systems. There are t hose who would like to stop that. Stop it early, and stop it at any cost.

“And, finally, there are those who worry about Mars, worry that this ecopoiesis might just be another LA waiting to happen.” She shrugged. “Me, I rather like old LA. Got that kind of raw charm you don’t see much in other cities nowadays. But I know that not everybody thinks like me.”

“I see,” said Leah. “And which of these would have set a bomb?”

Tally shrugged. “Any of them. Or all of them, working together.”

“Working together? Logically, the Toynbees and the eco-radicals are enemies.”

Tally smiled. “Logically, we’re not precisely talking rational people here.”

“So what do we have?”

“See, are we even sure it was a bomb?” Tally said. “Tinkerman, you find any suspicious pieces of pyrotechnic?”

I shook my head. “Nothing yet. But I don’t know much about bombs. I might have missed something.”

“Me neither,” Tally said. “And I do know about bombs, I do. A bit.”

LEAH HAMAKAWA WAS COMPLETELY OPAQUE TO ME. I NEVER had a clue what she was thinking, what she felt or thought about me. Sometimes her gaze would wander over me and stop, and she would look at me, not with a question, not with an invitation, just a look, calm and direct. I wished I knew what she was contemplating.

I wished I knew why I was so attracted to her.

The trip to Old LA had been a cusp in our relationship. On the trip we had just, been fellows, co-adventurers and nothing more. Afterward, Leah accepted the fact that I tagged along after her as just a facet of the environment, hardly worth commenting on. We’re not, actually, a team, although it must seem like it to others. Leah was the hotshot scientist, and, well, every team needs a tech and a pilot. Eventually she had noticed.

“Look,” Leah had said. “You’re as skittery as a colt, you’re stammering, I can’t get one full grammatical sentence out, of you in a cartload, and you’re so nervous I’m sure you’re going to break something. Do you want to sleep with me? Is that it?”

Her gaze was direct. It was always direct.

I couldn’t say anything. I had trouble closing my mouth.

“If you do,” she said, “fine, do it, or don’t do it, I don’t care, just will you quit stumbling around.”

And, later, after she’d taken off her clothes, she said, “Just don’t think it means something, okay? I couldn’t stand that.”

But it did. Maybe not to her, but to me.

And so we came to Mars. When the authorities had finally noticed that the missing science team had stopped filing status reports to Spacewatch, and the orbital eye they sent to report got, a break in the heavy Martian cloud cover and saw pieces of the habitat spread across ten kilometers of landscape—a “presumed fatal malfunction,” as it was reported, Spacewatch had asked for Leah; she had a rep for unraveling tough balls of fur, and I scrambled to rate the slot to go along. Not that this was so hard; I had my skills, piloting and mechanics and, yes, troubleshooting, and most crews were glad to have me aboard. In this investigation, the third slot on the team was special, in case the accident we were investigating was no accident at all, and the perpetrators might not be finished. The third slot needed a professional paranoid.

We both knew exactly the survival expert who was right for that place.

“Still hanging ‘round with that long-legged white girl, I see,” Tally had greeted me, when I came to ask if she wanted to join the team. “Give it up, boy, she’s too good for you.”

“Don’t I know it,” I’d said.

But that was the past, and brooding over the past wasn’t going to get me to bed, or explain Leah Iiamakawa to me. She had undressed without the least trace of self-consciousness and gotten into the cubby’s tiny bed. I undressed, with a lot more trepidation, and lay down beside her. She turned and watched me with a pellucid gaze, free of any emotion I could interpret She wouldn’t let me understand her, but for whatever reason of her own, she would let me love her.

For the moment, that would have to be enough.

THE NEXT DAY I WORKED ON DECODING THE DATA FROM THE damaged opticals, while Leah put together the jigsaw puzzle of the exploded habitat pieces, and Tally ranged in ever wider loops from the habitat, exploring. I succeeded in getting large blocks of data, but nothing was of any evident value: lengthy descriptions of bacteria, lists of bacteria count per square millimeter in a hundred different habitats.

“Here’s something,” Leah said. “Take a look at my collection of metals. But, no steel in the pieces here. And, take a look here.” She chose a piece out of the pile and handed it to me. It was a damaged recording unit. The capstan flopped loose in the absence of the steel axle it should have rotated on. She handed me another, a piece with a neat hole where a steel grommet should have fit.

“Does that mean anything?”

She shrugged. “Who can tell? Probably not.”

“Any steel fixtures hold pressure?”

Leah shook her head. “I checked the plans. No, all the iron and steel parts are incidentals. No steel penetration of the pressure hull.”

Tally came back from her scouting, and looked at us both. “You are working too hard,” she said. “It’s time for a break. Way past time, you ask me. And I know just the thing.”

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“Here.” She handed me a sheet of aluminum. It was about a meter long, slightly curved, one side coated with a carbon composite facing. In a comer “117 Outer” was written in Leah’s neat printing. A panel from the outer skin of the exploded habitat. A mounting flange with a hole for bolting interior fixtures was at one end. She handed another one to Leah. “Sure you don’t need these panels, now?” she asked Leah.

“Already looked at them.” Leah shook her head. “That was the side opposite the explosion. Nothing but junk, now.”

After we had suited up for outside and smeared one another’s faces white with sunblock, we each took a panel, and Tally led us up to the top of the ridge that rose above the habitat. The hill surface was composed of sand held in place with a thin veneer of purple-brown algae, slick as powdered Teflon. We had to choose our footing carefully to avoid skidding back down.

It was a gorgeous day. From the ridge, the marscape appeared striped, brown and purple strips in alternation all the way to the horizon. The purple was the algae, covering the sunnier face of each ridge; the brown anaerobic scum colonizing the shadier back face. The characteristic north-south wind pattern was clearly manifest in the form of long streaks trailing behind each of the larger boulders. Today, though, the wind was once again slight, erratic pieces. What’s missing?”

I looked over the junk pile. Skin, electronics, window fragments, plastic shards. “What?”

“Don’t you see it? Aluminum, titanium, carbon-composite, plastic—anything missing here?”

Now that she had given the hint, I could see it, too. “Steel. Nothing out of steel, or iron. Is that surprising? Steel’s heavy” Hardly anything in a space-going technology is made out of steel. In space, every extra gram is paid for over and over again in fuel.

“There’s not a lot of steel on a hab module,” Leah said, “but there is some. Look around our hab, not everything is made of the light gusts of no fixed direction.

We reached the top, and Tally smiled. She threaded a lanyard through the bolthole on her aluminum sheet, dropped it on the ground, and put one foot on it. “You might try this sitting down first,” she said. Holding the lanyard in one hand like a set of reins, she pushed off down the hill.

At first she didn’t move very fast. As the sled gathered speed, each bump sent it increasingly higher. Her balance seemed precarious, but in the one-third normal gravity of Mars, she had plenty of time. As she leaned to control the sled, her movements were a slow-motion ballet. We could hear her shout, muffled by her rebreather, trailing behind her.

“Yahoo!”

I looked at Leah. She looked back at me, then shrugged. She dropped her sled on the ground and pushed it with her toe, testing how well it slid over the scum. Then she sat down on it, grasped the lanyard with both hands and pulled it taut, and looked back over her shoulder. “Give me a push,” she said.

It took a little more skill than Tally had let on, but after a few spills, we got the hang of it, and organized scumsledding races. Tally on one sled and Leah and me together on another, then Leah and Tally together, then finally all three of us on one sled, Leah and I sitting locked together and “Lilly standing with her knees gripping my chest from behind.

At a rest break, sitting exhausted from climbing, I said to Tally, “So this means that you think there’s no danger? I mean, nobody trying to kill us?”

“Never said that.” Tally shook her head. “No, I’m not about to be calling all-clear, not quite yet. But I’m pretty sure that there’s no danger right exactly this instant. Not unless these killers are invisible and don’t leave footprints.” She paused. “And, ’sides,” she continued, “this is pretty much the tallest ridge in the area. If they were coming for us, we’d see ’em miles away.”

“But what if we did? What could we do? We’d be sitting ducks.”

Tally grinned a broad grin. “Sitting ducks, you say? Take a peep at that ridge over there.” She pointed.

I looked. Nothing special, no different than any other ridge. “So?”

I had glanced away for only an instant, but suddenly Tally had an omniblaster in her right hand, a knife in her left, and a projectile rifle with an infrared targeting scope resting at her feet. I had no idea how she could have concealed such armament on her.

“How about you?” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re naked?”

I was far from naked—the temperature couldn’t have been more than a few degrees above freezing—but I wasn’t carrying a weapon.

“Didn’t I tell you to always wear a gun?” she said. “Dangerous out here. Who knows who might want to shoot you?”

“Carry an omniblaster? No, I don’t think you ever told us that.”

“Yes I did. Told you both. Back in OLA.” She paused for a second. “Shit. I bet Leah’s walking around naked, too.” She shook her head. “You two just a bunch of children. I’m surprised you’ve lived this long, I really am.”

“Say, look,” said Leah, coming up behind us. “The sun’s out.”

We both looked up. The sky had been steadily overcast ever since we had landed, but the clouds were breaking up, and between them we had a glimpse of the sun.

“Take a look at that sky!” Tally said. “Isn’t that gaudy!” Behind the clouds, the Martian sky was a startling blue, a bright, nearly turquoise shade that I’d never seen on Earth. I couldn’t think of a reason offhand why the sky should be a different color, but, naturally, Leah could.

“Methane,” she said, after a second of thought. “After carbon dioxide, methane is the main atmospheric component here. Strongly absorbs red light, so the sky color is a deeper blue than just the Rayleigh scattering would predict.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Explains why the colors here are so muted,” Leah said.

With the sunlight, the wind had picked up as well, a steadily rising wind out of the north. Suddenly the coveralls we had on weren’t enough to keep us warm. We ran for the habitat.

THE OVERCAST HAD CLEARED COMPLETELY THE next day. The sky was preternaturally blue, and the wind had become a steady near-gale from the north. Leah and I worked inside. Tally still did her reconnaissance patrol outside, but I think that even she must have spent much of her time huddled in the wind screen of one or another of the boulders. Now we knew what had scattered the pieces of the habitat.

The missing iron, as it turned out, wasn’t a mystery at all. Once Leah realized what to look for, she found it easily enough, in t he form of grit scattered in with the rest of the habitat pieces.

“It’s a sulfur rich planet,” she said. “I should have thought of it. In the year and a half of exposure, everything iron or steel got converted to iron sulfide. It looked just like part of the regolith, so I overlooked it the first time.”

“In just a year?” I asked. “Isn’t that kinda fast?”

Leah shrugged. “Seems fast to me, too, but don’t forget the UV. The surface here is more reactive than we’re used to.”

I worked on deciphering their electronic records. They hadn’t kept personal logs, or perhaps if they had, they were on some optical I hadn’t found yet. The opticals I had were mostly data, with occasional notes about where or how the samples were collected. By afternoon I had enough to determine when the last data had been recorded, and could at least put a date to the disaster.

“Sometime on August tenth,” I told Leah. “Two years ago.”

“Really,” Leah said. “That’s interesting.”

“Interesting?” I said. “Not really. But you asked me for a date.”

“No, but it is interesting,” Leah said. “Today is June 23rd.”

“So?”

“That’s Earth reckoning, of course. The Mai’s year is 687 Earth days long—one year, ten months and a few weeks. So, in Mars reckoning, it’s nearly the first anniversary of the disaster. Five days from now, in fact.”

“Spooky,” I said.

“No, I wouldn’t call it spooky,” she said. “But it is an odd coincidence.”

I marked it on the calender.

I liked working alone with Leah, with Tally outside on patrol. I didn’t exactly resent Tally, but I did sometimes envy her effortless camaraderie with Leah. I welcomed the chance to be alone with her, even though, for the most part, we worked in silence.

“Tinkerman,” Leah said.

“Yes?”

“Once you start getting the data you’ve recovered indexed, do a search on weather for me.”

I shrugged. “No problem.” I looked at her. “You think it’s relevant to the investigation?”

She shook her head. “Just curious.”

They had, I discovered, not taken detailed observations of the Martian weather. But occasionally there was a mention of conditions outside. Their own experience mirrored Gill’s. About the same time in the Martian year, the overcast had cleared, and a steady wind had arisen out of the north. The day before the disaster, data had been marked with a note that samples from two sites had been missed; the wind had blown away the stakes marking the site locations.

On another optical I found satellite photos of Mars. I looked at these with interest. The weather clearing we’d seen wasn’t local to the Syrtisian saddle; the photos showed the northern hemisphere completely obscured by cloud cover, and then a sudden clearing across the entire hemisphere. The view must have been an infrared falsecolor, since the ocean was white and the land areas, in contrast, looked nearly black. I checked the dates on the photos, mid converted them in my head into Martian season. The clearing started at just about the end of northern hemisphere spring.

Leah nodded when I showed her what I’d recovered. She’d already radioed up to ask Langevin for orbital photographs, mid he’d confirmed that the clearing of the clouds we’d seen was ubiquitous, starting with breaks in the cloud cover at northern mid-latitudes, then slowly spreading south. “Apparently it’s a seasonal thing.”

Langevin had also mentioned that the rover had arrived, after a long slow transit from the Moon. Did we still want it? Where should he set it down?

Oh, yes, we still wanted it.

“TIME FOR A VACATION!” TALLY said, when the unpiloted utility lander had dropped the rover off and I had checked out the systems and declared it fully functional. The rover was the same awful shade of yellow-green as the lander had been, a color chosen for maximum contrast against the browns mid purples of Mars. It had six webbed wheels mounted on a rocker-bogey suspension that would give it incredible hill-climbing ability; I had little doubt that it would have been able to crawl right over the hab-lab, if an incautious pilot had tested poorly on navigation. I said as much to the team after the brief test drive.

“Are you seriously suggesting that the habitat was crushed by a rover?” Leah said. “No tread marks were found on any of the pieces we found.”

“A rover would have left tracks,” Tally said. “Even after two years, we’d have seen them.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I was just giving an example of how robust the suspension is.”

“I see.”

“So,” Tally said. “Time for a trip.”

“A trip,” Leah said. “Why not? Where did you want to go?”

“Why not go the beach?” Tally said. “Head north. See what a Mars ocean is like.”

“Mmm,” Leah said. “Not today. I’ll still be busy tomorrow, too, I think. Maybe the next day.”

“Copacetic,” said Tally. “I wouldn’t mind a day to do some long-range recon with the rover, anyway. That is, if Tink says it’s checked out okay?”

“All systems in perfect shape,” I said. “No reason for you not to drive around a bit.”

A lot of the work Leah asked me to do seemed to have nothing to do with the investigation of the accident. She was conducting her own investigation, I decided, a scientific investigation of the progress of terraforming—no, ecopoiesis—on Mars. She had me decipher all the data I could out of the opticals; data on bacteria counts and atmosphere, and checked it against the measurements she could make herself. “Cripes, I wish I were a biologist,” had become her favorite phrase, muttered as she stared into the screen of a microscope, counting bacteria, but she was clearly happy doing the work, and I was happy to assist, to do anything that made Leah happy.

More methane in the atmosphere, she said at a break. Some methane, ethylene, even acetylene. And quite a bit more oxygen that expected.

“Oxygen and methane? Isn’t that explosive?”

“No, oxy is still way under one percent; a’ in all, it’s still mostly a reducing atmosphere. The hydrocarbons are all greenhouse gases.”

“Gaia,” I said, suddenly realizing what she was getting at.

“Gaia,” she agreed, a soft smile creeping slowly across her face. The bacteria were producing greenhouse gases, warming the planet up. Making it a better abode for life.

I WAS GETTING BORED WITH THE CLAUSTROphobic spaces of the habitat, and the sameness of the landscape, and I was sure that Leah and Tally were as well. We were all looking forward to the jaunt north to the shores of the Boreal ocean. So I was rather surprised when, at breakfast on the morning designated, Tally shook her head, and said, “It’ll be just you two loverbirds. I’m not coming.”

I pretended interest in my food. I never could guess how Leah would react For me, the idea of a t rip in the pressurized rover, a thousand kilometers alone with Leah, was as close to heaven as I was likely to ever find.

“Why?” Leah said.

Tally smiled. “A trap.”

Despite assiduous searching, Tally had found no evidence whatsoever of sabotage. Anybody else would I lave said, that means it was an accident. Tally said: that means that they were clever.

We made a great show of our departure, deliberately packing the rover slowly and openly with all the supplies for three people to take an extended trip. Then all three of us got in. From outside, through the bubble canopy, it would be clear that three people were in the piloting compartment, eagerly watching the terrain.

It would be impossible to tell that one of the three was no more than a dummy constructed of spare clothing.

Once aboard, I powered up the rover, and it rose up from its squatting position to its full height above the Martian terrain. I checked all the systems one more time, testing each wheel in turn for forward and reverse power, making skid marks through the brown grit and tossing muck across the landscape. The bacteria would not care; they would thrive in one spot quite as well as another.

If somebody had bombed the just, habitat, and was clever enough and subtle enough to betray no sign of themselves, they must be flushed out of hiding. They might be complacent enough to try the same trick again, if they were thoroughly convinced that nobody was watching. Tally wanted to give them that chance. Tally wanted to watch them set; the bomb.

Systems all functional. I had a wild urge to wave goodbye to Tally, but that would never do. We set off with no ceremony.

FOR HUNDREDS OF KILOMETERS WE LOOKED at brown rocks, covered with a thin veneer of slime.

The wind got stronger as we drove north toward the ocean. The landscape was monotonous; rocks and lilies and tiny rivers, broken by lakes, each lake in the form of a perfect circle, reflecting the too-blue sky. To our left, the ground sloped gently up toward the ancient volcano whose flanks we were skirting. The actual summit of the volcano was invisible over the horizon. When we crossed the peak of the Syrtis saddle the wind was coming straight at us at well over a hundred kilometers an hour. It was enough to slow the rover’s progress considerably, and at places I almost worried that the wind would pick us up and blow us backwards, but the rover’s six huge wheels held traction superbly, and kept us moving.

Once across the pass, the wind dropped a bit, but never let up entirely. It was constant, unwavering from the north.

The rover drove itself, if we let it, with infrared laser-stripers searching out obstacles in front of it and a mapping program in its computer brain that continually compared the view against the inertial navigation and the stored satellite maps, to compute an optimal traverse across the rippled terrain. For most of the first day, Leah and I took turns driving, following the computer’s suggested path sometimes, diverting to a different route that looked smoother or more interesting when the whim struck. By the afternoon, the novelty of the drive had slackened, and we let the rover pick its own path.

Langevin had left Mars orbit days earlier, but he had left behind him a little areosynchronous communications relay, so we could have stayed in touch with Tally at the habitat if we had desired to. We kept radio silence, though, by agreement. Tally had said that we should assume that any radio communications we made would be heard by the enemy. The relay had enough power to let us send reports directly to Spacewatch. We transmitted our daily report back, essentially just a “yes, we’re alive” verification, and in the report we included a recorded snippet of Tally’s voice, to maintain Tally’s deception to her hypothesized snooping earn.

In the middle of the afternoon, the rover crested a rise and angled off to the west, finding a smoother traverse down the slope to avoid a field of boulders the size of skyscrapers. Leah was in the aft cabin, analyzing data she had brought with her, and I was alone in the cockpit. At first I didn’t know what I was seeing, looking north. The horizon was white.

This was the highest ridge between us and the ocean, so, looking north, I ought to be able to see the ocean. Was the ocean covered with ice? I overrode the autopilot and parked the rover for a moment, rummaging for binoculars to get a better view. Leah came up from the cabin.

“The ocean’s white,” I said.

“Odd.” Leah looked at it, pondering. “Notice; it’s nearly northern summer, and the ice melted months ago. Whitecaps, from the wind, maybe. We’ll see soon enough, if we keep driving.”

I took that as advice, and brought the autopilot back on line. The rover stalled to roll. Leah reached out an arm to steady herself against a handbar, and kept on standing, looking out the bubble at the horizon.

We didn’t reach the Boreal Ocean that evening. The autonavigation on the rover was perfectly capable of continuing its traverse after dark, but we were no more than thirty kilometers from the ocean, and we elected to shut down for the night, so that our arrival at the ocean would be in daylight.

After nine hours of motion, the cabin still seemed to rock with the motion of an imaginary traverse, although I had squatted the rover in the lee of a hundred-meter escarpment.

The workstations of the aft cabin folded away into panels on the walls, and two narrow cots folded out from the bulkhead, transforming the cabin into a small but cozy bedroom. I looked at the cots, and at Leah. The cots were narrow, but looked like they might be wide enough for two, if the two slept close. Leah gave me no hints. I folded the second cot back into its niche, and convinced myself that, I saw just the faintest trace of a smile on Leah’s face. In any case, she slid over silently, and I nestled myself in next to her.

We reached the ocean a bit before noon of t he next day. The final few kilometers was a steep traverse down the bluffs, not quite steep enough to be called cliffs, but steep enough that the rover picked its way slowly, sidling nearly crabwise down the last few hundred meters. There wasn’t much of a beach; just rocks. From above, the ocean was white. It moved with something more than just the rhythmic swell of waves. It writhed, and humped, looking almost alive. As we got closer, a fine spray peppered the bubble in erratic spurts. The spray dried to milky white flakes, smearing but not totally obscuring the view.

“Salt?” I said.

Leah shook her head. “Magnesium sulfate, mostly,” she said. She spoke louder than normal to be heard over the whistling of the wind and a sudden patter of spray. “The ocean’s got tons of it. It’s another reason the ocean doesn’t freeze solid in the winter; lowers t he freezing point a few degrees.”

I squatted the rover down behind a boulder, where it would be out of the worst of the spray, and we suited up with rebreathers and sunblock to go outside.

Outside, the constant wind was warm and damp. Between the wind and the spray, I think that it was the most miserable place on Mai’s. Leah, though, laughed and ran like a little girl, arching her back and spreading her anus, daring Mai’s to do its waist.

I took off one glove, raised my hand and caught a bit of spray on my fingers, then pulled up my rebreather mask slightly to put it to my tongue. It was slightly bitter. Leah looked back at me over her shoulder, and laughed. “Don’t eat too much of it,” she shouted.

“Why?” I shouted back. “It’s not poisonous.”

“You might regret it,” she shouted back. “You know what they used magnesium sulfate for in the old days?”

“What?”

“Laxative for infants! You’re standing right next to the universe’s largest dose of baby laxative!”

With that she turned back, and started to pick her way past the rocks toward the ocean. I scrambled to catch up with her. I could hear the ocean now, but it wasn’t the rolling of waves that I heard. It was a stranger sound, hissing and popping and splatting.

In a few moments we reached a final set of rocks, right at the edge of the ocean, and at last we could observe what we had been unable to see from further away.

The ocean was boiling.

From the pools at our feet to the farthest horizon, the entire ocean was aboil, bubbles rising up and breaking, spattering spray everywhere. Enormous bubbles rose burping out of the depths with a thunderous roar followed by a tremendous splatter; smaller bubbles rose with blurps and pops from everywhere; infinitesimally tiny bubbles fizzed and hissed in rocky pools.

An huge bubble burst in front of us, not five meters distant, and I instinctively flinched, anticipating being hit with scalding spray. Leah laughed with delight. She pulled her glove off and, when the slosh came toward her, bent over and dipped her bare hand into the boiling water. Before I could scream at her, she cupped a handful of water and, with a grin so large I could see it even behind her rebreather, she dashed it in my face and giggled.

The water was lukewarm.

WHEN WE GOT BACK IN THE ROVER, our coveralls were so stiff with dried spray that it was difficult to peel them off. Our faces and hands were red from the wind, and itchy with dried ocean. Leah was still in her puckish good mood, and as we peeled down to undergarments, she was laughing.

“You know what?” she said, pulling off her rebreather, and she didn’t bother to wait for an answer. “You know the great, thing about it? Makes it worth the whole trip?”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t stink!”

I opened my mouth to say something, and suddenly realized she was right. The stench of Mai’s that we had gotten so used to every time we came in from the outside, was missing.

“What a great planet,” she said.

We both stripped, and gave one another sponge baths. The water recycler would have the devil of a time pulling sulfate out of the water, but that was what machinery was for. I took a lot longer cleaning her off than I had any right to, and with one thing leading to another, it was nearly dark before either of us dressed.

I knew she was waiting for me to ask. At last I did. “Leah? The water was warm, but it wasn’t hot. Why was it boiling?”

“That’s an easy one. It wasn’t.”

“But—”

“Carbon dioxide,” she said. “I should have known, but it wasn’t obvious until I saw it. Mars has mostly carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so it should have been obvious that the oceans would be saturated with dissolved CO-two. It wasn’t boiling—it was fizzing.” That made sense, all but one thing. “But, wouldn’t it be in equilibrium? Why should it be fizzing?”

“Summer. The ocean is warming up in the summer sun. Carbon dioxide has a solubility in water that strongly decreases when it gets warmer. So, as summer comes to the northern hemisphere, the Boreal ocean releases carbon dioxide.”

“Oh.”

And it wasn’t until the middle of the night that she suddenly stiffened and sat bolt upright. “Oh,” she said, in a tiny voice. I opened my eyes and watched her sleepily. “The wind,” she said. “The wind.” She got up, and in a moment there was a glow as her computer came alight. She was beautiful, limned in pale fire by the glow cast by the screen backlighting.

“What is it?” I said.

“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

“It must be something.”

“Just—I had a thought, that’s all.”

“What?”

“I wonder.” She bit her lip. “Just how much carbon dioxide, exactly, do you think is dissolved in the Boreal Ocean?”

By the time the sky started to brighten with dawn, Leah was distinctly bedraggled, but she had it mostly worked out. The answer was, a lot. A hell of a lot

Over the long Martian winter, the temperature of the northern ocean dropped to near freezing, and the ocean had served as a sponge for carbon dioxide. A peculiar convection served to stir the ocean as it cooled: as the surface layers cooled and became saturated with carbon dioxide, they got denser, and sank, turning over the ocean until the entire ocean was uniformly cold and saturated with carbon dioxide.

When the spring began, the surface layers of the ocean warmed up, and the dissolved carbon dioxide began to come out of solution. But the wanner water, free of its heavy carbon dioxide, stayed on the surface; the cold, saturated water stayed below. With only two tiny moons, there was little in the way of tides to stir the deeps. The water got wanner, but, in the deep water, the dissolved carbon dioxide was under pressure. The water warmed a little, but the supersaturated carbon dioxide stayed in solution.

But it was an unstable situation, and ever more precarious as the season moved toward summer. Eventually, something must trigger the inevitable. Somewhere, a little of the carbon dioxide came out of solution, at pressure, and formed bubbles. The bubbles stirred the water, expanding as they rose, and the stirring let more carbon dioxide out of solution. The warm surface waters turned over, and supersaturated cold waters from the depths warmed up. Like a chain reaction, the release of supersaturated carbon dioxide was almost explosive, and it took only days for the reaction to spread across the entire width of the Boreal ocean. A whole winter’s worth of atmosphere was coming out of the ocean, and coming out with vigor.

The wind. We had felt the wind from the ocean, a clue blowing right in our faces, and we’d ignored it.

“They weren’t murdered, Tinkerman,” Leah said. “They were—my god, Tally’s still back there, in the habitat. She doesn’t know—The radio. We can get her on the radio, wain her.”

“Doesn’t know what?”

“I’ll explain everything when I talk to her. Quick, what day is it?” She grabbed my calender and looked at it. In neat letter’s, on the bottom comer of the square marked June 28, I had completely forgotten that I’d written a note: One Martian year RIP.

But Tally didn’t answer the radio, not the regular channels, not the emergency channel.

“Damn,” I said. “It’s Tally and her blasted radio silence. She won’t answer.”

Leah shook her head violently. “I know Tally better than that. She would listen to the emergency channel no matter what, and she’d answer when she heard us break silence. Tinkerman, I think the wind must have tom away the radio aerial. The hab was designed for space, not for Mars, and the antenna wasn’t that strongly mounted. Probably blew over the high-gain antenna as well.”

“So?”

“So how fast do you think this thing can go?”

It took longer to get moving than I had expected. The autonavigator wouldn’t come on line. Over the night the spray had fogged over the lenses of the laser stripers, and the autopilot wouldn’t budge without its obstacle-recognition system working. As I took the rover up the bluff on manual control, climbing only centimeters at a time over the rough spots, Leah fidgeted with clear agitation, but she stayed silent, knowing that distracting me from piloting would only slow us down. As soon as we had climbed a few hundred meters above the ocean, I put on a rebreather and, using half our supply of clean water, I carefully washed the laser striper and the bubble.

The steel parts of the rover looked matte, almost corroded. Wien we got back, I would have to take the rover down for inspection and overhaul. In fact, I would have preferred to do a thorough inspection right then, but I knew Leah wouldn’t let me stop for that. The rover’s autodiagnostic checked out green, so I put the autopilot back on line aid punched for speed.

There was nothing more we could do. There was no way that I could out-pilot the autonavigation system over a course it had run before; it had all the bad terrain memorized in detail and had learned exactly which parts to detour around and which were smooth running. The ride was bumpy, but that was only to be expected. I turned to Leah, and waved a hand.

“I’m ready to listen,” I said.

“It was all there in front of us,” Leah said. “All the clues, if only we’d really seen them. The pieces of the habitat, that should have tipped us off right there. The habitat modules, they weren’t originally designed for Mars. We knew that. Nobody ever goes to Mars, so how could there be hab modules designed for it? It’s a lunar habitat design.

“The air pressure on Mai’s is five hundred millibars, just about half that of Earth. So we set the pressure in the hab to five hundred millibars, and forgot about, it. With a nearly fifty-fifty mixture of oxygen and nitrogen in the air mixture, the oxygen in the habitat was just what it is at standard conditions, and after a week I bet you didn’t even remember that it wasn’t Earth standard.

“But there’s one critical difference. Lunar habitat modules are designed to withstand pressure from the inside. They’re plenty strong, against internal pressure. But what about external pressure?”

“It imploded.”

“Right. The air pressure on Mars is not a constant! All that gas dissolved in the northern sea—when it comes out of solution, the air pressure rises. It rises a lot. The wind, that constant wind from the north—that was our second clue. The habitat was set to maintain a constant pressure of five hundred millibars inside. Nobody ever designed it with the idea that the outside pressure might increase. Somewhere there was a weak joint, maybe a seam that wasn’t reinforced against an unexpected pressure from outside. It blew.”

“But there was an explosion. We saw the marks.”

Leah shook her head. “You saw the piece, the one with the tiny scrape of blue paint on it. What does blue paint mean to you?”

I only had to think for an instant. “Blue. Oxygen.”

“Right. The implosion must have punctured an oxygen tank in the habitat Pure oxygen, underpressure, spurting out into the Mars atmosphere. . . . the Martian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, but a good component is methane, and it’s got noticeable amounts of other hydrocarbons as well. In a pure oxygen leak, of course it will burn.”

“It must have happened at night,” I said. “They never knew what hit them. The one man was killed instantly. The other was tossed out of the hole in the side of the habitat, without a rebreather, to die of suffocation.”

Leah nodded. “And now the same thing is happening. The atmospheric pressure is rising. Tally’s there in the habitat, alone . . . and she’s waiting for the wrong enemy.”

WE WERE OVER THE PEAK OF THE SYRTIS SADDLE AND A good way into the long, slow downhill toward the Hellas basin, only a hundred kilometers from the hab, when the wheel fell off. Leah was on the radio, in the unlikely hope that perhaps the synchronous relay was the problem, and now that we were approaching line of sight conditions, direct communication might raise Tally. The wheel came off with a resounding snap, and the rover lurched.

The autopilot diagnosed the problem, instantly rebalanced the suspension to keep the weight away from of the missing wheel, and smoothly braked us to a stop, blaring alarms.

The alarms were a little late.

We both went outside to look. It was the right rear wheel that had failed; we found it a few dozen meters further on, where it had rolled up against a rock. The wheel itself was a titanium-alloy mesh, light enough to carry in one hand, for all that it was nearly two meters in diameter. The wheel bearing was steel. Or, it had originally been steel, when it had been there at all. There was little left of it.

“Well,” Leah said.

“Well,” I said. There was no way to replace a wheel; they weren’t supposed to come off. “I think maybe we can rebalance die rover. Shift the loading to the front left side. Five wheels ought to be enough. We might have to go a bit slower.”

Leah nodded. “It’s a plan.”

We piled rocks onto the rover, and strapped them down with bungees, to move die center of gravity forward off the missing wheel. Then we piled more rocks inside the rover, in the front left pilot’s seat. I didn’t mention that we would never get the Mara stink out of the rover; it was too late to worry about that, and we barely noticed it by then anyway. The autopilot refused to budge so much as a meter without an overhaul, so I piloted it on manual. This was good for less than a third the speed of the autopilot, but still, even that pace covered ground. Leah went, back into the aft cabin to examine the samples she had scraped off of the wheel.

It. was only a hundred kilometers. We finished more than fifty of them before the second wheel fell off.

We were going more slowly this time. There was no lurch, and no noise. The rover just slowly careened to the right, and kept on rolling until it slid to a stop on its side.

Leah came out of the hatch after I did. She didn’t bother looking at the axle, or at the rover. No need; it was obviously not going anywhere, even if we had a crane to put it back right-side up. The rocks we had piled onto die rover had cracked the bubble when it rolled. “Sulfur-reducing bacteria,” she said.

“Say again?”

“Sulfur-reducing bacteria,” she said. “Convert iron to iron sulfide. There’s energy in free iron; in the presence of free sulfur, enough energy for a bacterium to exploit. The lack of iron at the site; I should have figured that ordinary weathering wasn’t enough to account for it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Not that it matters now,” Leah said. “We don’t have time to waste. We’ve got to get to Tally and warn her.” With a matter of fact attitude, she hopped up onto a rock and stared across die horizon. “So how far do we have to walk?”

I tried the radio one more time. Come on, Tally. What was she doing, I wondered. Did she even know that the antenna was down, or did she just think we were scrupulous in keeping radio silence? Was she standing at the door of the habitat with a gun? Hiding behind the rocks, waiting for enemies that would never come? If only she would answer, it would only take an instant to tell her about the dangerously low habitat pressure.

Fix the antenna, Tally, I thought, just fix it, and listen to the radio. But she wouldn’t. Fixing the antenna would be too obviously a sign that the habitat was still occupied. I threw down the radio.

The inside of the rover was a mess, but we managed to scrounge two spare sets of replacement packs for the rebreathers. I downloaded the bearing to the hab out of the rover’s computer, and set the inertial compass. Once we got close, we would be able to use the habitat’s come-hither beacon to home in. I grabbed a set of portable radio transceivers and checked that they were working. I couldn’t think of anything more to carry. Before we left, Leah snipped two pieces of titanium sheeting away from internal part it ions of the rover, and snapped them free.

“Ready,” she said.

We ran.

The Mai’s gravity makes it easy to run, and the unwavering wind was, for a change, on our side. Still, after an hour of limning I was winded, and the second hour was more trudging than running. Our cold-suits trapped sweat all too well, and it ran down my back and down my legs, like ants with clammy feet.

Mai’s narrowed in on us. Ridges, followed by valleys; valleys followed by ridges. Another hour.

“Bear further to the right here,” Leah said.

“That’s not the most direct route.”

“I know.”

We were walking pretty slowly by now. Her route followed the contour, instead of cutting downhill, and was a bit easier, even if it was less direct. I was beginning to worry that we wouldn’t make it to the habitat by nightfall. It would be impossible to continue after darkness fell—Mars’s moons shed almost no useful light—and by the morning, we couldn’t even be certain that the habitat would still be there.

In another hour we had reached the edge of a long downhill. There, tiny in the distance was a glint of metal: our goal, the habitat.

It was impossible to tell from the gleam whether it was still in one piece.

Without a word, Leah handed me one of the two sheets of titanium. I looked at the downhill. It was a long, smooth grade, with the usual cover of Martian slime. I grinned, and Leah grinned back at me, her face in the rebreather mask like some painted mechanical demon, and then we both stood on our sleds, grasped the lanyards, and, at the same moment, pushed off.

We would arrive in style.

MY SLED SKIDDED TO A STOP IN A SPRAY OF slime a hundred meters or so from the habitat, and Leah stopped close behind me.

The habitat was apparently empty. But at least it was still apparently in a single piece. I ran toward it, shouting for Tally. I reached the airlock, and was just reaching out for the handle when I felt the gun pushed gently between my shoulder blades.

“Moving real slowly, friend, keep your hands in sight, and turn around. Slowly.”

Tally was painted the same color as the Martian slime, bits of sand and rock sticking to her randomly. The projectile rifle was in her left hand, aimed steadily at my middle. I could see the crinkling at the edges of her eyes as she smiled behind the rebreather. “Tinkerman. Welcome home.”

She lowered the gun, and turned to greet Leah. “Didn’t expect you to come back on foot. What brings y’all back so sudden?”

“The air pressure,” Leah said. “It’s going to—”

“Yeah,” Tally said. “I noticed something going on with the air. Could feel it in my bones, like a thunderstorm. Fact, I had to dial up the pressure in the hab three times in four days.”

Leah stopped, thunderstruck. “You increased the hab pressure?”

“Why, sure,” Tally said.

We just looked at each other.

“What?” Tally asked. “Something wrong with that? I figured that if the hab pressure wasn’t increased, there could be trouble.”

Leah shook her head. “No, nothing wrong. Nothing at all.”

IT WAS OUR LAST NIGHT ON MARS. WE HAD FILED A PRELIMinary report with Spacewatch, and in the morning, Langevin would bring the lander down to take us home I was looking out the tiny window of the hab at the Martian landscape. In the evening twilight the browns had turned to purple. Tiny puddles of water caught the sky light and reflected it back at us. Even the slime looked fragile and ethereal. “It is beautiful,” I said “in its way.”

“Ask me, it still stinks,” Tally said.

“It’s dying,” Leah said.

“Dying?” I turned away from the window.

Leah nodded slowly. “I’ve been finishing up the work from the data they had stored to optical before the accident. They got enough data to fully model the ecology. It’s dying.”

“How?” I asked. “Why?”

“Oxygen,” she said. “The oxygen level in the atmosphere is rising, slowly but inexorably. The photosynthetic forms simply out-compete the anaerobes, and the result is that oxygen is gradually accumulating in the atmosphere.”

“But that’s good,” I said. “That’s what happened on Earth. The biosphere is evolving.”

Leah shook her head. “But Mars isn’t Earth. The oxygen is stalling to scavenge hydrocarbons out of the atmosphere, and after that it will begin to displace carbon dioxide. Just like on Earth, but for Mars, that will be catastrophic. A few tens of millibars less carbon dioxide, and—” She clapped her hands. “Frozen solid. End of story.”

“But the Gaia hypothesis—doesn’t the presence of life regulate the temperature?”

She shook her head. “Bacteria are dumb. Gaia is a hypothesis; it’s never been a proven theory, hi this case, it happens to be a wrong theory.”

“You’re sure?”

Leah nodded. We were silent for a moment, and then I asked, “How long?”

“Hmmm? Well, couldn’t say precisely. Not enough data.”

“Give or take.”

“I’d give it few thousand years at the outside. Probably less than a thousand.” She saw me smiling, and added, shaking her head, “The time may be uncertain, but the fact still is, it will happen.”

That put a little different spin on it. We would all be dead before the planet returned to bare rock. No need to mourn for Mai’s, not for quite a while yet.

LATER, ALONE WITH JUST LEAH IN THE TINY SLEEPing cubbyhole, I made love to her slowly and deliberately. She closed her eyes and arched her back as I stroked her, in her own way sensuous as a cat, but still I couldn’t tell what sort of feeling she had for me.

When it was over, and we were lying in the dark, I had to ask. “Do you feel anything for me? Anything at all?”

Leah turned over. “Quit asking meaningless quest ions. I unask your question, Mu.”

Much later, after I thought she had fallen asleep, she said softly, “It looks like I’m stuck with you. I suppose there are worse people I could get stuck with. Don’t get in the way.”

It was all I could ask for. I will follow her as long as she will allow it, love her, ask nothing in return. Maybe someday I will mean something to her, maybe some day as much as a comfortable pair of slippers or a favorite chair.

In the meantime, though—it. was a large universe. There would be places to go, no end of places to follow her to. That was enough.

In the morning, the lander would come, and I would follow her home.

LOOSE ENDS

Paul Levinson

It can be hard to judge how you’re doing on a very big problem . . .

Jeff felt a certain hardness under his backside, as if he had fallen asleep on a plush chair and come awake on a park bench somewhere.

He opened his eyes and stared at his destiny: a large and messy lounge of some sort, outlines indistinct in what must have been the reflected light of evening street lamps. There was no doubt about it. The broken-down couch in the corner, worn wooden study tables to the right, books and papers and misshapen armchairs strewn around like some old rummage sale—this was a far cry indeed from the cool flowing continuum of the control room. The Thorne had worked after all.

Jeff strained to keep his adrenaline in check. Not even a cleaning person in the unlit room. Good. It was late at night, maybe even a weekend. No one to bump into. He pulled a low-intensity fireflighter from his pocket. In the weak approximation of daylight, the lounge looked even more 20th century. Remarkable! On the floor near his feet, he noticed a ratty-looking issue of Look magazine. The August 23, 1963 date on the cover caused another rush in his veins, but told him not enough of what he needed to know. The magazine could have been lying around for years by the looks of this room.

He had to know the exact date of his arrival. It would tell him which of the eight plans to implement. Clutching his deliberately nondescript suitcase, he walked quickly to the door. He noticed a tom Time magazine dated October-something, 1963, and frowned.

Jeff delicately opened the door and patted the shirt of his janitor’s outfit. He was an academic with strong ties to the working class—his great-great-grandparents had slaved in sweatshops—and he welcomed the prospect of testing out his jargon, costume, and identity on the local populace. Unfortunately—or fortunately—no victims were in sight. He walked out, carefully closed the door behind, and strode in search of an exit.

“Sher-er-ry, Sherry baby. She-er-ry . . .”

For some moments now, Jeff thought he had been hearing a faint falsetto whining. He walked down the last flight of stairs, out into the street, and recognized the shrieks as “Sherry”—an early rock hit by the Four Seasons. More inconclusive evidence, not particularly heartening. He’d done a special lecture on the Seasons and the Beach Boys just last year, and knew for a fact this song came from the summer of 1962.

The air felt chilled, like maybe early October. A ’59 or ’60 Fairlane 500, from which the Seasons’ song seemed to be emanating, was no more help in establishing an exact date than the song.

The street beyond the Fairlane looked clearer and uglier than he’d expected—a bright messy watercolor spilling onto itself. He wondered what his expectations about this place were really based on. Probably more on Andrews’s “Village Squared” hit of last year than the hours of 1980s film and photographs he had reviewed till his eyes had burned with fatigue.

He spotted a blonde girl in what used to be called dungarees walking towards him. “Uh, pardon me, Miss,” he said as nonchalantly as he could, “do you know the time . . . and the date please?”

She gave him a strange look and glanced at her watch. “A quarter to twelve,” she said, without slowing a step.

Well, thanks a lot, Jeff thought. “Excuse me, Miss, I’m sorry to bother you, but if you could tell me the date as well . . .”

He found himself shouting after her. She just kept walking. He shook his head and walked the other way.

The chill was beginning to eat at him as he made his way towards West Fourth Street and Washington Square Park. There the usual complement of derelicts and weirdos—some things never change, he smiled—were keeping the late-night vigil. No point in trying to get a straight answer about the date from that crew. He sighed, then noticed the quaint old phone booth on the corner. He picked up the receiver and pumped in eight quarters in rapid sequence to make sure he would get a connection. “Hello, Operator, could you tell me what today’s date is?”

“The date, sir? I’m sorry, but we’re only supposed to give out numbers.”

“Well, is there a number I can call to find out the date?” A faint odor of urine permeated the booth.

“Checking, sir. No, I have a number for the time, but I don’t see one for the date.”

“Well, then, do you think you could be a human being instead of, uh, a computer, and tell me the date anyway?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but we’re only supposed to give out numbers.”

“And have you no function in the universe or reason for existence other than giving out numbers?”

“I have no function, sir.”

Jeff slammed the phone down and shook his head. I’d make a great diplomat, he thought. At this rate, I—“Having trouble with the phone, Jack?” Jeff turned to find himself addressed by—was it a slacker or a hippie?—about twenty-five years of age. “The phone company’s been hangin’ everyone up lately, man.”

“Yeah,” Jeff smiled, “it’s getting worse and worse. Look, I wonder if you might be able to help me. I’m disoriented, I’ve got to know what the date is.” Jeff leaned out of the booth, deaf to the quarters that clanged in the coin return.

“I can dig it, man, really.”

“Good, then, can you tell me what the date is?” He inhaled deeply of the less tainted air outside the booth. Compared to what he had just been breathing in, it smelled like perfume.

“Well, like, that’s a difficult question, man. I mean it’s November 21st now, but it’ll be November 22nd in a few minutes. And of course for the cats over in England it’s already been November 22nd for a few hours, and—”

“OK, good,” Jeff said. “And the year?”

“The year?”

“Right, the year—as in 19—”

“Oh, well that’s the same everywhere, man. 1963.”

“What?”

“I know it, man, time flies faster and faster these days—”

Jeff walked dazedly down the street, fighting to think through flashes that spat at his brain. What the hell was this? He was supposed to have emerged some time in the fall—the end of November was cutting it a little close, but OK, that still gave him at least some weeks to get to NASA, Morton Thiokol, whomever. He knew the Thorne wasn’t perfectly precise. How could it be—generating the kind of savagely powerful local field needed to keep the Artificial Worm Hole open long enough to operate across time. So it couldn’t be that exact. But twenty-three years? What could he do to prevent the Challenger explosion back here in 1963?

He shook his head and it cleared a little. He had no choice now but to return to the lounge, activate the mechanism for return to 2084, and try the damn thing again. He retraced his steps to the Student Building. But his legs moved slower and slower, as if they opposed the decision to return. Finally he stopped.

He stared at the Student Building across the street. He focused on its gargoyled facade and played with a quarter in his pocket. He pivoted suddenly and walked quickly again in the direction of the park. A hundred and twenty-one years was a long time to have traveled into the past just to rush right back. He could take a few more minutes to think this over.

He wandered towards Sixth Avenue, then inside a coffee shop. He sat down and read the sticky plastic menu without comprehension. The cracks in the red leatherette upholstery jabbed his thighs.

“Had a rough day, huh, honey? What’ll it be?” The dyed blonde waitress was right out of a turn-of-the-century video. Upset as he was, Jeff the cultural historian liked this.

“Just a tea with milk, please.” By any conceivable logic, he ought to return as soon as possible to 2084, so he could try this again, and with any luck arrive at least a few months before January 28, 1986. To do that, he had to go back now to the lounge in the NYU Student Building from which he’d emerged, the exact same place, that was the way the Thorne worked.

But something in Jeff rebelled against this logic—something in his nature which said, look, you’ve gotten this far, it’s not good, but you may never get this far again, so you better take what you can of this chance to save the space program.

But how?

He’d have to improvise.

He thought about the endless careful plans his team had made for him to avoid getting caught up in some paradox—keep the loop clean, don’t do anything in the past that might undermine the very foundation of this project. Steer clear of everyone’s great-grandparents . . . Jeez, how the hell was he supposed to do that back here, twenty-three years earlier than he’d planned to arrive, when he had no idea where everyone he was supposed to avoid was?

Jeff rubbed under his head. Every second that he stayed here was a knife at the throat of his future. He was off the screen, way out of equation-range—a single word to a wrong person, some land-mine of the past, could set in motion a chain of events that erased his colleagues, maybe even him, from existence. True, he had no close family, no one that he really loved deeply anymore—well, maybe still Rena, in a way—but he certainly hadn’t undertaken this job to kill his friends, make himself a martyr to a reconstituted future that might never know he’d existed in the first place.

On the other hand, how likely was it that he’d fun into such a land-mine? Painstaking tests had shown that the effects of most interjections in the past were sooner or later washed out in the myriad of everything else that remained the same. And how could anyone from his vantage point truly know what was intended all along? Maybe he’d always been supposed to arrive here back in 1963—maybe he was ordained to help the space program, or humanity, in some way other than stopping the Challenger. Maybe that’s why the Challenger blew up after all, because there was no way he could influence events this far back to stop the explosion that took the heart and soul out of the space program, had set up the 21st century to be little more than an age of commentary looking back on the Golden Age. His head spun. He could feel the sweet buzzing vortex of paradox whispering in his brain, drawing him in—No, I have free will, I’ll do what I damn well choose, I don’t have time for paradox now, I only have time to act.

He looked at the clock on the wall. Twelve minutes after twelve. Too much lead time for the Challenger—the shuttle had barely been conceived of in 1963. He supposed he could live the next twenty-three years in normal time here, and devise a new plan to thwart the explosion. Thiokol Chemical Corporation had been awarded the NASA contract to build the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters on November 20, 1973—just about ten years from where he was now—so if he could hang on for a decade, he might even be able to begin doing some good then. Leroy Day had been picked to head planning for the shuttle in 1969, a few years nearer.

But this didn’t seem appealing. Ten years, even five, was a long time to stay out of trouble. And he couldn’t even be sure that the Artificial Worm Hole would remain operational that long. The most their tests had confirmed was safe return after eighteen months in the past.

He, of course, knew exactly what else he might try to do on this date. He knew its obvious significance. He didn’t have to be a cultural historian by training to know it. Jeez, he’d arrived at the edge of the oldest cliché in the science fiction CD. Everyone and their great-aunt Martha had written a story about it.

What was the likelihood that some error in the team’s calculations, some unexpected flux in the AWH, had landed him here on this of all dates? Maybe it wasn’t an accident that he’d somehow been dropped at the doorstep of what Time, nearly a century in his past and thirty-seven years from now, had dubbed one of the top five murders of the millennium.

But if so, what was its deeper purpose?

Surely not to stop the events in Dallas tomorrow—there really wasn’t enough time. He was in New York City, after midnight, on November 22, 1963. Way too soon for Challenger. All but too late for JFK.

All but too late . . . But what else could he could do back here, then? What else had he perhaps been meant to do here?

He shook his head.

Did they even have air service to Dallas this late at night? He didn’t know. What kinds of planes? Propellers? No, probably jets already.

Dallas was a thriving city even back in the 1960s, and at the very least he would probably be able to get a businessman’s flight early in the morning. But would that leave him enough hours? What was the point of flying all the way to Dallas just in time to hear that JFK had been shot?

But what was his alternative if he didn’t use the AWH to return to his starting point? Sit around like a jackass and wait for Walter Cronkite’s tear-choked voice to announce the assassination on TV?

Blondie arrived with his tea. Fortunately it was lukewarm, and Jeff was able to drink it down in two gulps. He pulled a crumpled bill out of his wallet and left it on the table. Some bank clerk in the next few weeks would be stunned to see a 1981-issue ten-dollar bill with Donald T. Regan’s signature, but he had no other money, and had to take a chance that such a minor anonymous anachronism wouldn’t disturb the time-line. Loops could be perfectly clean only in theory. The bill would likely be dismissed as a clumsy counterfeit or a joke. Maybe it would be lost before it even got to a bank teller.

He walked out onto Sixth Avenue and surveyed his options yet one more time. The city was harsh, the air stank, he didn’t belong here. The sensible thing to do was return to 2084. And yet . . .

He flagged down a passing cab. “Kennedy, uh . . . Idlewild Airport. On the double, Chief.” As the cab pulled away, Jeff recalled George Bernard Shaw’s line that the reasonable man adapts to his surroundings, the unreasonable man attempts to change his surroundings to suit himself, and all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.

There had to be something more to this than Dallas, but at this point Dallas seemed the only way to get to it.

Inside the coffee shop, the waitress stuffed the bill in her bosom pocket and laughed. “I tell ya,” she said to the fat man stuck behind the cash register like a melon, “these actor types are all the same. They never remember to wait for their change. I’m gonna keep this for good luck.”

“Tunnel or Bridge?” the cabbie grunted through chewing gum.

Jeff wasn’t completely sure what he was talking about. “Do what you think best, Mac. Just get me to the airport as fast as you can.” He shifted his weight on the springy seat and looked through the dirt-caked window . . .

“Just got off the late shift, right? My brother-in-law does the midnight-to-eight shift for Helmsley. You gotta do what you gotta do to make a living these days, right? What’s the use of talking.”

“Yeah, the inflation’s impossible,” Jeff agreed. Can’t go wrong in any century griping about inflation. And he made a note to himself to get out of the janitor’s outfit as soon as he got to the airport.

“Yeah,” the cabbie growled, “ain’t it the truth.”

Jeff felt in his pocket for his reassuring puterwafer but got no comfort from it. He was fully on his own now, plans pertaining to twenty-three years in the future all but worthless. In a worst-case scenario, if all he could catch was an early-morning flight, he’d have maybe an hour or two to get to the Book Depository Building in Dealey Plaza after his plane arrived in Dallas. If he could somehow get to the Building by eleven, he’d stake out the upper floors and try to intercept the gunman . . . or gunmen . . . or gun-women. He wondered whether he’d find Lee Harvey Oswald up there by those windows. Historians would give their right arms to know. A hundred and twenty years of theorizing had left them no closer to knowing who had killed Kennedy than the unsatisfying “lone nut” explanation of the Warren Commission.

One thing Jeff did know: the assassination of JFK probably did more to ultimately harm the prospects of humans in space than even the horrible Challenger disaster. His team had briefly considered sending him back here to 1963 in the first place, but rejected it on the grounds that too much was still unknown about the assassination for them to mount an effective plan to stop it. So here Jeff was without a plan anyway . . . rushing like a moth to a flame that he had little chance of extinguishing, but which was too attractive to resist.

“Any special terminal, Mac?” The grunt drew Jeff back to the real world, though this ride seemed scarcely more real than his musings. He looked at his watch and whistled. This old gasser had gotten him to the airport in under an hour. “American Airlines, Chief, and thanks.” Jeff set his watch to the time on the foolish-looking clock pasted on the cabbie’s dashboard. It we now 1:07 in the morning of November 22.

He paid in dirty dollar bills printed twenty years in the future and sprinted into the terminal—a garish but not uncharming combination of wine-red carpet and shiny chrome trimming. It reminded Jeff of early Technicolor movies. He ducked into the men’s room, unpacked clothes from his suitcase, and shortly emerged a stylish ’80s businessman. He expected this wouldn’t cause too much of a problem—if his clothes looked a little odd, people would likely chalk that up to his dressing European. There was more difference in hemispheric styles in this century.

He approached what appeared to be a mock-wood ticket desk. The pert red-headed Kewpie-doll behind the counter added to his feeling that he was in an ancient film. “Am I in time for the late-night flight to Dallas?” he asked with his friendliest smile.

“Oh, I’m very sorry, sir, but our last connecting flight left at 12:30. Our next one leaves at 10:00 this morning, and I believe that Braniff has a direct flight that leaves at 9:00. Shall I make a reservation for you?”

Damn. “Could you tell me what time the Braniff flight arrives in Dallas?”

She pulled out a paper directory and checked. “Eleven thirty-three Dallas time, sir. Shall I make the reservation?”

“Yes, please do,” Jeff said, “and could you point me in the direction of the airport hotel?” Jeff paid in cash—he had a bunch of credit cards too, but they were all hopelessly out of date, in the wrong way. She counted the money and Jeff held his breath. The bills were small denomination, suitably soiled, from the 1970s. She didn’t notice anything askew.

Jeff walked slowly to the end of the terminal. It would be ridiculously close in Dallas—even if the plane landed on time, he’d have just an hour to get to the Book Depository and stop the killing.

The bed in the International was unexpectedly comfortable though the room, like the airport terminal, had some faintly artificial smell. Jeff fell soundly asleep, and dreamed he was in a classroom giving his “Earth Was Never Room Enough” talk while Dion’s “Abraham, Martin, and John” played in the background. Rena sat in the front with her legs seductively crossed, but her face looked a lot like Sandra Dee’s. He could hear someone talking just outside the classroom, going on and on and utterly ignoring his lecture. It was James C. Fletcher, NASA administrator who had had the most to do with the shuttle program. Jeff was screaming at his students to pay attention when the phone rang.

He fumbled with the ungainly receiver and dropped it. Then he smacked himself in the mouth with it. “Hello,” he finally managed, rubbing his eyes and looking in vain for the viewer.

“Good morning, Dr. Harris! Five thirty wake-up call!” a sing-song female voice chimed merrily.

“Thanks.” Jeff replaced the receiver with great effort and sat up. He rubbed his sore lips and fought off the impulse to go back to sleep for just another fifteen minutes. He could sleep for fifteen days, the way he felt, but he dragged his body out of bed and quickly dressed. Last night’s businessman with maybe a blue knit tie to go with the gray wool suit would do fine.

The coffee house was a zoo. He hadn’t much appetite, but forced himself to eat the soggy eggs for strength. Looking around, he realized again that there was a lot he didn’t like about this place. Historians like their history from the safety and convenience of the future—the past on a platter with all the comforts of home. Not like this.

“Excuse me, sir.” The waitress startled Jeff as she leaned over with the check. “That’s an interesting bracelet you’ve got on there. My husband’s a jeweler, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.”

“Uh, thank you.” Jeff glanced down at his watch, scooped up the check, and quickly left the table. “My, uh, kid’s studying electronics,” he said half over his shoulder, “and it’s something he designed for me.” Great. He’d been wearing this flector for six years now, and with all the departure commotion yesterday he’d forgotten to take it off. Hustling to Braniff Departures, he removed the silver sliver from its embed on his wrist and placed it in a side compartment of his suitcase. Then he took out the clunky Timex analog someone had given him, and stopped a moment to set it and strap it on his wrist. He shook his head in self-disgust. First the future bills he was handing out like candy, and now this. The money he had no choice about, but the flector was sheer stupidity on his part.

He sighed. It didn’t really matter. If by some wild luck he could stop the JFK assassination in Dallas, nothing that he did now would make much difference. If not, well . . .

The plane was a sardine can, and Jeff sat white-knuckled in a window seat waiting for takeoff. Finally it began making taxiing noises, the comforting rumblings of some great beast’s innards, and Jeff leaned back and tried to relax. The stewardess had a tight skirt on, pitching her derriere right at him, better view than the window.

Well, so far his rating of 1963 was food and decor not too good, women a distinct possibility. This seemed in line with that refrain from the classic Woody Guthrie song about the social fallout of relativity: Can’t go North, can’t go South, or up, down, anymore. But I can still go in and out, Mr. Einstein, I can still go in and out.

It remained to be seen whether he could get in and out of the Book Depository in time.

The 707 pierced like a needle through the remnants of haze over Dallas. Jeff peered through his peephole at the airport below as the captain announced they’d be landing momentarily.

He had so little time. Everything depended on his getting to the Book Depository as quickly as possible. He’d shove through lines, jump over turnstiles, knock people down if he had to. No gesture of asinine civility could be allowed to slow his exit.

The screech of the aircraft hitting the ground hiked his pulse. He felt the seconds ticking, each in phase with his pounding blood. He braced for the performance. He could see nothing but the taxi at the end of the tunnel, the taxi that would bring him face-to-face with God-knew-what at the Book Depository.

The plane shuddered still. Its doors grumbled open. Debarking passengers spilled like mindless ooze into the terminal. But one of their number was more minded than he’d ever been in his life: single-minded in his determination to dive into that cab. Get out of my way, you goddamn fools. I don’t have time to say sorry.

Jeff swam in powerful strokes through the current, halfway through the terminal, now three-quarters through and almost out. Every shred of his being, every ounce of his purpose, was focused on closing this last little gap to the exit. He was almost believing that maybe he would stop the assassination after all, maybe this was the way indeed that he was destined to save the space program. He saw JFK’s face before him, superimposed on the Challenger, superimposed on the flames, superimposed on innumerable stars.

Which was why he never saw the towering cart of luggage that fell upon him less than three feet from the glass doors, and knocked him unconscious.

He opened his eyes to a throbbing headache and blurry white of what must have been a hospital room. Fumes of formaldehyde hung in his nostrils and made him gag. “I see you’re awake, Dr. Harris,” a lazy Texas accent jarred him. “You ran into a rack of luggage at the airport and sustained a moderate concussion, but you’re going to be just fine.”

Jeff leaned up on an elbow to get a look at the nurse. “Where am I?”

“St. Paul Hospital. We’ll need to run a few tests on you, and if everything’s all right you’ll probably be able to leave in the morning.”

“I. . .” Jeff fell back on the pillow and tried to breathe slowly. He felt cold and clammy and slightly in shock. He took several deep breaths, and tried to focus more clearly on the nurse. Her eyes looked red and puffy. Outside his room he heard what sounded like a radio or holocenter blaring in the corridor—a tumult of loud talking and wailing. “What’s going on out there?”

Nurse K. Arthur burst into tears, and Jeff got a sudden feeling in the pit of his stomach that he knew exactly what the ruckus was about.

“They killed the President,” she sobbed. “I really shouldn’t disturb you with this. They rushed him to Parkland Memorial, but he was too far gone.” She heaved with tears. “He was so young, so beautiful. Why would anyone want to do something like that?”

Jeff reached out to comfort her. “Ow!” Pain cut through his back like a stiletto.

“Here, let me help you.” Arthur leaned over and gently eased Jeff back into bed. “You probably wrenched a muscle or two.” She puffed up the pillow and smiled. “There. I’ll tell the doctor you’re up and I’m sure he’ll look in on you a little later.” Her smile suddenly wavered and tears welled up again in her eyes. “They wounded Vice President Johnson and killed Governor Connally. They say it was one of those Communists. What’s going to happen to the country now?”

“I don’t know,” Jeff barely answered, too tired to tell her that although her information was wrong, her sense of impending catastrophe was all too on-target.

He slept fitfully the rest of the day, pestered and punctured by a procession of interns and orderlies bent on waking him up, taking his temperature, and telling him he needed more sleep. He asked for a TV or radio at least five times and got nothing. The phone by his bed was broken. He couldn’t tell whether the morguelike atmosphere was standard or a consequence of the assassination. The assassination—every time he thought of it, he felt like retching. A leaden, queasy thickness of despair seemed to hang over everything.

He fell asleep at last into something deeper that let him dream. He watched a team of 19th-century surgeons, long hair and whiskers with a bittersweet alcohol smell in the room, work over what must have been a very important patient. Straining his head closer, he could see that the patient was a fish, cut open and spread apart down the middle. The chief surgeon produced a mallet and began pounding the fish, while others cut off pieces and put them in little bags. “Oh, I’m only joking, old boy,” the surgeon turned to Jeff and said in a crisp British accent, “this is dinner, of course!”

Jeff sat up sharply in bed, awakened by yet another nurse come to stick something in him. “What do you want now?” he rasped, wincing from the pain that came as he propped himself up.

“Just some intravenous for the evening, Dr. Harris. It’ll help you sleep.” She wheeled some torturelike contraption over to him. She was a big-boned, handsome, light brown woman, about thirty-five, who spoke with a lilting accent.

He shook his head to clear some of the cobwebs. “I already ate your lousy supper. Why do I need intravenous?”

“Pity the nurse who has a doctor for a patient,” she said in the mildly scolding tone of voice that seemed a part of every nurse’s repertoire. “Now why don’t you just lie back like a good boy and let me get this working.” A strong arm pushed Jeff back gently but firmly, and she began applying alcohol to his skin.

Once again the door flung open, this time admitting two burly black men carrying an impossibly fat TV set.

“I tell you what, Nurse, ah, Daniels.”

Jeff freed himself from her grip. “I’ll take this intravenous only if it’s prescribed and administered by an intern or resident. So you want me on that, you call in a doctor, fair enough?” This should buy him a little time to think this through. There was something he didn’t like about this nurse, not to mention that he wasn’t particularly partial to the prospect of being festooned with intravenous needles and tubing, 1960s style, carrying who knew what kind of viruses and sub-vees they didn’t even know about back here, and he might not have been inoculated against.

Daniels looked at the two men hooking up the TV set and then back at Jeff. “No meat off my behind, honey,” she said, and abruptly wheeled the equipment out the door.

Good—she’d apparently decided it wasn’t worth making a scene in front of the techies. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Jeff told them as they finished up. “See? It’s not true what they say about the media always causing problems. Sometimes a TV can be very helpful.”

They looked at him as if he was crazy, and left.

Jeff pivoted gingerly in the bed, placing his feet on the floor in slow, exaggerated motions. Pushing himself up shakily from his seated position, he found he could stand. He walked unsteadily to a chair by the window, and sat himself down with the utmost caution. The pain he expected in his back was mercifully slight. He reached for the suitcase lodged neatly against the window and fished inside for his clothing. Thank God the case wasn’t lost at the airport. And a good thing, too, that it had been programmed to open only in response to his and no one else’s sweat. Otherwise he’d have had some explaining to do about some of the contents.

He had to get out of here right away. He had to get back to New York, back to the student lounge. He reached deeper inside the suitcase. The rough fiber of the janitor’s uniform finally chafed his fingertips. He doubted that an NYU janitor looked anything like the hospital variety, but this was still his best choice. He dressed very carefully, praying that his body would hold up long enough for him to walk out of this horror-movie of a hospital—this horror-show of a world.

Suitcase under his arm, he tiptoed to the door and opened it a crack. His room seemed to be in the middle of a long, orange-pink tiled corridor that stretched in either direction with no one in sight. Peering out a bit more, he could see what looked like a nurse’s station down to his right. He hesitated. His mind felt swollen and paranoid, he had no confidence in his judgments. He didn’t feel good about just walking out, but he felt much worse about staying. He opened the door and strode as casually as he could to the left.

He slowly became aware of voices ahead of him. He took a few more steps, then stopped and listened. They were definitely moving closer. He looked down the corridor the other way. Too long a distance to try returning to his room. He glanced quickly around at the rooms within reach and tried the door of the nearest one.

Locked!

He tried another one.

Same result!

His hands grew moist and his head light and the voices louder. He felt nauseated, as if he was about to vomit and pass out. He breathed deeply, steadied himself, and tried another door.

It opened! He leaned against the inside of the door, thankful and quaking, until the entourage passed. From what he could hear, they seemed to be just a team of porters.

Relaxing a bit, he groped for the light switch to see whose room he was in. This was an extremely stupid move, he realized just as his hand flicked the switch, for the patient might well begin screaming. Fortunately the room seemed to be some sort of storage facility.

He looked around and stopped on a lumpy something stretched out in a far corner. Again his heart started pounding, for he suddenly was sure he was looking at a dead body. He forced himself to walk over and focus. The lumpy something was a long bag of stained linen.

He resumed his journey down the corridor, this time with a bit more assertion in his gait. He turned randomly down several connecting passages, passed several orderlies and nurses and made a point of not avoiding their gazes, and eventually wound up at what looked like a service elevator. The doors were open. He walked in, pressed Lobby, and hoped for the best.

The elevator wobbled its way down, Jeff envisioning himself a dead man dangling from a slowly descending rope. The doors finally opened on a poorly lit hallway that said Ground Floor. He walked a few feet, and was glad to see the hospital lobby. He wondered why the act of leaving a hospital always felt like escape from a high-security prison.

He hailed a cab and told him take me to the airport. The cabbie talked Kennedy, but Jeff was too tired to give more than grunts in response.

He sank into bed in the motel room, utterly drained. He closed his eyes and saw again the lumpy bag in the hospital laundry room. It was a woman’s body, face down, wearing only a 20th-century bra and shiny beige panties that clung tightly to her rear. She looked familiar. He turned her over and found eyes staring blankly up at his. He tried to scream, but his throat stuck. The eyes were Rena’s.

He sat up in bed, broken out in a cold sweat, and shuddered for a long time.

I guess I’m not as cut out for time travel as I thought, he said to himself. But how could anyone know that beforehand? You had to actually live through these loops, bristling with serrations, to know the toll they took.

Twelve hours later, he was on a plane for New York. Staring out the window as the engines revved up, Jeff realized he was losing a golden opportunity to stop the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. He looked at his watch. That would happen tomorrow. He toyed with the idea of making a last-minute dash from the plane and calling the Dallas police. He’d have plenty of time and . . . no! For once he’d do the cautious thing and return to New York and then 2084. No chance the police would take his call seriously anyway—just another crank come out of the now festering assassination woodwork.

Of course, a crank who knew about Oswald’s murder would be someone Jeff would want to meet. Wasn’t there some story that the Dallas police were indeed warned by someone about the shooting of Oswald? Was that someone Jeff? Or someone else on trespass from the future?

He fidgeted with his seat belt. Maybe the attempt on his life in the hospital last night—if that nurse with the intravenous was indeed trying to kill him—was intended precisely to stop him from interfering with Ruby’s murder of Oswald. No, that sort of reasoning would get him nowhere. It was paranoid nonsense. Yet he was here on this plane leaving the scene of the crime of the century, when there were plenty of things he still might do.

The plane’s lift-off ended his reverie. Jeff tried to direct his thinking to what awaited him—going back to 2084 with the Thorne, then in it once again, through a new AWH, and out again in 1985, the time he should have arrived in the first place, to stop the explosion of the Challenger. He stared steel-eyed out the window. No one could help JFK—that should have been obvious all along. You can’t change history on that major a level.

But the Challenger—that was more mechanical, presumably an accident of technology, not of sick human intention, more amenable to the time traveler’s ministration.

That was what he kept telling himself, but it gave him little comfort. Obviously, traveling back to 1985 wasn’t as easy as he and his team had thought—if it was, why was he here? There were things about time travel they didn’t understand.

He laughed bitterly. The last thing he wanted to be was a “Fourth Magi”—that additional wise man from the East who had gotten a late start in his journey to give the infant Jesus a gift. The potentate then spent the next thirty years in a vain search for Jesus, always arriving in places a few hours after Jesus had left. When he finally caught up it was too late—Christ was already on the cross. Just as Jeff had been with JFK. Would he be that way with the Challenger too? Arriving just in time to see that horrendous explosion that took so much else with it? Impotent witness wasn’t the role Jeff had trained for.

He landed at Idlewild in the early evening. The sadness in the air was thicker than pollution. Soon it would harden into the cynicism and outrage that disrupted the sixties and deformed a good deal more of the times that came after.

It’s not my fault, Jeff kept telling himself. My job was to stop the Challenger tragedy—I never really had a chance to stop what happened in Dallas. I wasn’t properly prepared. It was crazy even to try.

He took a cab back to the Village, the same trip he had taken forty-eight hours ago, in reverse. Everything was different. It was Saturday night, and throngs of people were out, but the sounds and colors were drained of vitality—as if someone had pulled the plug on the watercolor, and all of its light had leaked away.

His cab pulled up to the Student Building. Three green-and-black police cars huddled like ugly roaches near the entrance. Students were milling about, five or six officers were conferring on the side, and the night air crackled with the sound of police bulletins and the glare of pulsing lights.

“What’s going on here, Officer?” Jeff demanded, more sharply than he’d intended.

“Who the hell are you?”

Jeff fumbled for his faculty ID, crafted to look like a 1985 edition, and hoped it would get by the beefy, florid-faced policeman. “Sorry, Officer. I teach at the College of Liberal Arts and Science here.”

The cop eyed the ID, Jeff, and softened. “You’re a teacher from another division?”

“Right,” Jeff said, not really knowing what that meant.

The cop nodded. “The student lounge was broken into two hours ago and severely vandalized. These kids got no respect for property. Hey, Professor, you OK?”

Jeff felt his knees buckle. He reached out to the police car for support. “Officer, I’ve got to get up there right away. I . . . there are some important papers that I must get a look at.”

He was pleading.

“Out of the question.” A big arm restrained Jeff, already in motion towards the building. “The place is a mess. Glass and garbage all over. Someone torched that whole floor—probably some kid didn’t like his grades. Believe me, Professor, it’s not safe.”

Jeff pulled free of the blue arm. For a second he considered making a run to the building. But he knew it was hopeless. He hadn’t the vaguest idea what was really going on, what had happened in the lounge. But he knew with cloying certainty that his life was now seriously derailed.

Maybe the AWH had imploded, maybe some kid had torched the place as the cop had said, but whatever had happened there was no way that soft shimmering light would be there for him—surely no way he could code it for use and enter it even if it was there now, without a dozen witnesses looking on. A few dozen bills out of time he could take a chance on leaving back here; walking into the AWH with 1960s people as an audience, maybe even trying to follow, was insane. He couldn’t risk what that would do to reality—might do to his very existence.

So he turned and walked shakily down the street. The cop might have said something but he couldn’t hear it. The off-key amusement park quality of the Village congealed now into a proper smarmy nightmare. Jeff staggered a bit farther, then grabbed on to a corner lamp pole. Then he leaned over and did what he had wanted to do for nearly two days: he threw up what seemed like every ounce of substance in his stomach.

He looked at the mess he had made on the street, and wondered what part of that food might have come from 2084. It would be a long, long time if ever, he knew, before he was likely to see any of that again.

A Beatles song was playing somewhere in the distance. A DJ was talking. No historical moment, no hushed build-up. Just the Beatles.

Jeff opened his eyes. He looked out of his window at the street below. Mid-April sunshine coated the sidewalk like clarified butter.

“. . . Traffic light in most places but still heavy on the Kosciuszko Bridge,” the radio continued. “HOA halfway through the third shift with you on WABC. Good morning!”

Jeff hoisted himself out of the easy chair. His clothes felt stale and rumpled—he had spent the night in them—and he needed a shave. He stripped, showered, shaved, and approached the pile which served as his wardrobe closet. Today would be a special day. He put on a blue button-down shirt, dark brown corduroy slacks, and pulled his navy-blue knit tie into a loose fitting double-Windsor, the only kind of knot he knew how to make. He slung a corduroy jacket over his shoulder and ambled down the three flights of stairs.

Jeff played with his scrambled eggs at the Yorkville Restaurant and considered his situation for a thousandth time. He pushed three pieces of egg to one side. His arrival twenty-three years earlier than planned, the luggage accident in Dallas, the destruction of the student lounge—were these all related, or three pieces of random, rotten luck?

He couldn’t accept his being a Robinson Crusoe in the past. He understood his predicament, his utter stranding in the 1960s, logically enough. And yet some part of him had waited these past five months, hoping that one of his team would one day miraculously appear to rescue him. He’d imagined Rena in this role, but how could she? The mouth to 1963 had been sealed with the implosion or trashing or whatever had taken out the lounge. He’d been back up there several times, when no one was around, but the lounge had been totally reconstructed, with no sign of the AWH.

The team had no way of knowing he was even here—presumably all they would know is that he hadn’t succeeded in stopping the Challenger disaster. If they sent anyone else back, it would likely be to 1985, where he was supposed to have gone, not here. And who knows if Rena or whoever would succeed any better than he. Maybe Steven Hawking was right in his chronology protection conjecture—maybe the Universe protects itself from alterations via time travel—removes unwelcome Thornes from its side—whether by misdirecting travelers, blowing up AWHs, both, more.

So he was probably stranded. But maybe not totally without options. He had to gingerly probe the contours of time travel—see just what small things it might allow, and then perhaps he’d try a few larger things.

What he had in mind for today was the first modest step in this direction.

Jeff paid for his breakfast and walked out into the cool morning sunlight. His money problems were finally over—he had a job with a decent salary. Some parts of the team’s exhaustive planning had worked out after all, had survived his immersion in a time twenty-three years earlier than expected. Their massive search of historical records had uncovered fourteen Harrises who had done graduate work at universities in the mid-20th century. One, named Geoffrey, had earned a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Edinburgh in 1958. The names and academic disciplines were close enough that Jeff, with a mixture of Geoff’s credentials and his own knowledge of the field, would have been able to demonstrate a convincing identity in 1985-86—the team’s reason for coming up with this. But it turned out to also be enough for Jeff to land a job back here as an Adjunct Professor at the third school whose ad he’d answered—his act sufficiently polished, hinting just enough knowledge of new trends in the field to kindle admiration without suspicion. It was a last-minute spring teaching appointment, to fill in for a regular professor unexpectedly on leave, that required only cursory credentialing. But it was a foot in the door, and it paid real money.

He squinted at the Sun and inhaled deeply. The polluted air still bothered him, and he sometimes felt as if little pieces of black soot were burning holes in his chest. He wheezed slightly. But the day felt promising, even beautiful, and he caught the crosstown bus to the IRT subway on West 86th Street. This would take him to the “Intro to Sociology” class that he taught at City College on 137th Street in Harlem.

Farther up the subway line, near a place called Pelham Parkway in the Bronx, Mrs. Sarah Harris also made her way to work. The day was beautiful to her too, and she also wheezed a bit—from asthma—as she walked down the block to Saperman’s Bakery where she worked behind the counter. Her mind was filled today, as it was on many days, with images of the Ukrainian countryside around Kiev, and with pictures of her father. She could see him as clearly as if he were standing right in front of her, even though she had last seen him more than sixty years ago and a continent away. Her brown eyes, still keen and always wise, glistened a drop, not from soot but sentiment. Those eyes were almost identical to Jeff’s. She was his great-great-grandmother.

At City College, in a place presciently named Harris Hall, Jeff labored to make a concluding point about McLuhan. “So you see, it’s not what we watch on television that’s important, it’s the fact that we’re watching television—rather than reading a book or listening to the radio—that McLuhan says really counts. This is what he means by ‘the medium is the message.’ ”

Jeff looked at the students, most of whom were scribbling his words without the slightest comprehension.

The three girls from Queens who smiled at him certainly hadn’t the vaguest idea what he was talking about. Neither did the foreign kid, his mouth continuously hanging open, who at least made no attempt to disguise his puzzlement. But a few in the class did seem to have some understanding of what Jeff was saying. The girl in the back with the soft brown eyes seemed to be in touch with him. Anyway, Jeff liked the way she looked at him.

“OK, that’s about it for today. Read the pertinent sections of Gutenberg Galaxy, and I’ll see whether I can get you some advance copies of Understanding Media.” Jeff grabbed his corduroy coat and strode out the door, smiling at the girl with the soft brown eyes.

He hurried to the subway at 137th Street. He looked at his watch—the deflector model, for Jeff no longer cared about keeping such minor aspects of his cover. In fact, he hoped future artifacts like this might attract someone’s benevolent attention, maybe someone else from the future, who could help him. He’d have gladly kept spending his 1980s money too for the same reason, had he not been afraid that sooner or later some good Samaritan would have him arrested for counterfeiting.

It was 11:56—more than enough time.

But the subway took longer than expected, and it was 12:35 when Jeff ran down the long flights of stairs at the Pelham Parkway station in the Bronx. Saperman’s was only a few minutes away by foot, so Jeff wasn’t too worried. Still, he half-walked, half-ran.

He was sweating when he reached the bakery. He realized this was more from anxiety than exertion. His great-great-grandmother had died in 1992, at the age of ninety-seven. His grandfather, whom Jeff had spent some of the most satisfying times of his childhood with, had been just six when Sarah Harris had died. But grandpa carried memories of her warmth and voice and summers they had spent together in their cottage on Cape Cod Bay, and Jeff felt he knew Sarah through this.

But he stopped, suddenly not sure he could do this. What would he say to this woman? How would she react? A smell of apple strudel permeated his thoughts—grandpa’s strudel, an old family recipe grandpa had loved to bake—and this gave him courage. He walked in.

“Hello,” he said in the direction of the three matronly women who stood behind the counter and looked up at him as a clanking bell on the inside of the door announced his presence. Not a single one of them looked anything like his great-great-grandmother. “Can I help you?” one of them said in a soothing Jewish accent that he’d heard only in the movies.

“Uhm, yes . . .” he began, not quite sure what to say. “Does a Mrs. Sarah Harris work here?”

Just then he heard a rustle from the back. His great-great-grandmother walked out from behind a curtain, carrying some sort of cake in an open box.

“Sarah, a boichik to see you,” one of the women said with a laugh.

Jeff felt like shouting with joy. He suppressed this, along with the urge to jump over the counter and hug her. She looked great—like her best picture, from a bar mitzvah of someone named Sol, come to life.

Sarah was smiling, a wonderful smile he had seen in his father and some of his aunts and uncles and his grandfather. “You look like I know you,” she said. “You’re one of Louie’s grandsons?”

“Right, Louie,” Jeff answered quickly. His mind sped through family history. Louie was Sarah’s older brother. The two had come with a middle brother—Hymie—to New York around 1900. Sarah was a little girl then, about five, and Louie was like a father to her. Her real father and nine other brothers and sisters she would never see again. Louie—Uncle Louie, Jeff’s grandfather had always called him—had moved to the West Coast after World War II. He had fathered a big family himself, and Jeff recalled that these in turn had given Louie dozens of grandchildren who from time to time showed up at weddings and bar mitzvahs on the East Coast. Good. Jeff for now would be one of them.

Sarah took off her apron and moved out from behind the counter. “I’m taking the rest of the afternoon off,” she said to the matrons. “You tell Murray I’ll make up the time this weekend, OK?”

“No, no, please, Mrs. Harris,” Jeff raised his hand and smiled. He didn’t think he could take more than a few minutes with his great-great-grandmother in this first meeting. “I’ve got just a little over an hour before an appointment downtown, and I don’t want you to lose time from your job. How about we go for a cup of tea at the Dairy Restaurant by Lydig Avenue? It’s kosher, right?” He had checked out this whole neighborhood a week ago.

Sarah laughed heartily. “It seems you know me and this area very well. OK, let’s go to Lydig. Tell Murray I’m back in an hour,” she said over her shoulder to the counter.

“So it seems you know my name but I don’t know yours,” Sarah said as the two walked the half block around the corner to Lydig Avenue.

“I’m Jeff. Jeffrey Rosenberg.” Jeff was 99 percent positive that Rosenberg was Sarah’s maiden name.

Sarah’s eyes widened in pleasure. “Yosef was the name of my father. Wonderful of Shlomo to name you after him. We have only one son, and we named him after my husband’s—Yitzhak’s—mother. So you’re Shlomo’s boy, then?” Now Sarah’s eyes furrowed in some confusion. “Or are you Harry’s?”

Jeff smiled and thought frantically as they entered the restaurant. He ushered Sarah to a table, and once seated, ordered two cups of tea—with lemon for Sarah, milk for him—from the elderly waiter who looked like he had about five minutes left to live.

He knew that Sarah prided herself on perfect recall of every relationship in her extended family. Right now she was probably realizing that as far as she knew, Shlomo had no son named Jeffrey, and neither did Harry. Jeff breathed in sharply. Time to talk about the impossible.

“I’m not really Louie’s grandson,” he said slowly.

In another time and place—in fact, in most times and places, including this one—such an admission would have been cause for alarm for Sarah. But her powerful intuition told her this was not a stranger to be feared—not a stranger at all.

“You’re much closer to me than Louie’s grandchildren,” Sarah finally said. Her eyes looked loving, not challenging, to Jeff.

“You’ve traveled very far in your lifetime, Sarah,” Jeff said softly. “Do think it might be possible to travel across years, across time, just like you’ve traveled across great distances?” The tea arrived.

Sarah chuckled. “You mean like angels? Or maybe like the meshugenas on the Twilight Zone?” She pronounced the “w” like a “v,” so the show sounded like Tvilight Zone.

Jeff couldn’t help laughing. He would have sworn that the only TV this woman would have ever watched, other than the news, was the Lawrence Welk Show. “Yes, something like that.” Jeff felt much better after laughing. He put his teacup down. “Sarah, I’m going to tell you something now. You’re a very intelligent women, and what I’m going to tell you will seem totally crazy. But please hear me out. It will take just a minute. And then I’m going to ask you to do a very important favor for me. You don’t have to agree now, but please promise me that you’ll think about it.”

“It’s about what Hitler did in Europe?” she asked with a cry in her voice. Her hand shook, and she spilled some of her tea, though the cup was only half full. Jeff suddenly felt very guilty. His great-great-grandmother looked so much younger than he had pictured her, seen her in most of her pictures, that she had seemed at first not so old to him. Now she looked every one of her sixty years, and Jeff felt terrible that he was stirring up these demons about the Holocaust and who knows what else. But he had to finish what he had started here.

“No, it’s not about Hitler.” He paused. Tm your great-great-grandson, Jeffrey Harris.”

A small shriek came from Sarah, and the blood left her cheeks. “Sarah, please.” Jeff took her hand. “I have to leave now. But I need you to do something for me that is very very important—my life may depend upon it. In twenty-five years, you’ll get to know my grandfather, when he was just a little boy and you’ll be much older.” Jeff realized there were tears in his eyes. “And you’ll be a wonderful grandma to him, believe me. But I want you to promise that you’ll tell him—your little grandson—about this meeting. I’m not asking you to believe me now. You can tell your grandson that you had this meeting with a crazy man who claimed to be your great-great-grandson years ago. But everything depends on your telling him something—something about me, about this—twenty-five years from now.”

Sarah’s head shook—not no, but from tremors. Her eyes were a confused mixture of anger, uncertainty, love. Now she slowly shook her head no. “I don’t know you,” she whispered.

“I know. But I’m part of you—I’m your DNA, your blood.” Jeff stood up, then leaned over and kissed her. “I love you, Sarah, I always will. Go by your instincts in this.” He put a five-dollar bill on the table, and hurried out the door.

Now the April breeze caught his face, seemed to move him along. He walked in a daze, not really knowing where he was going, to the Pelham Parkway station. He paid his fare, walked through the wooden turnstile—nearly getting a splinter in his thigh—and sat down on the rotting green bench to wait for the train.

And then he remembered. His grandpa swinging with him on the hammock. Talking about a summer he’d spent years ago when his grandma was still alive, on Cape Cod. He was four, maybe five, so it was 1990 or 1991. His parents and little sister had gone out to Cooke’s for supper. He’d had a bad cold, and had to stay in the cottage. Grandma Sarah stayed with him. It had started raining—very hard—an August Cape Cod storm that seemed to drench the beach and every living thing. And she told him about the strange man who had come to her long ago in Saperman’s, the bakery where she used to work.

Jeff shook as he recalled his grandfather’s words. Thank you, Sarah—you came through for me. He felt like running back and hugging her, but didn’t dare, lest this somehow throw a curve into what he had just accomplished here.

He was sure this memory of what his grandfather had told him about what his grandmother had told him hadn’t existed before. It proved that he was real in this convoluted past—that he could do things here which could indeed change the future, even if the change was as slight as a grandmother’s words in a Cape Cod storm some sixty years before he’d been born. But those words, his memory of his grandfather’s conveyance of them, meant everything. Sarah Harris had given him his first real hope. If he could change the future through her, he could figure out a way to somehow contact his team, and get back to where he belonged.

He was crying. For he also realized that in a deep, indescribable way he missed Sarah Harris even more than his world of 2084, and he knew there was no way he ever could have both.

“I think he’s very attractive,” Carla Caplan of Flushing said. “You know, not in the Marlon Brando or Paul Newman way, but in a cuddly way. Like a teddy bear.” She stroked her left thumbnail with an emery board.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Amy Jacobson replied. “His accent is a little strange. And anyway, he never pays any attention to us. The only girl he ever looks at is the girl in back of the class.”

Carla moved her hand along the nylon stocking on her leg. “That’s not true, Amy. I’ve seen him look at us lots of times.”

“The two of you are ridiculous.” Sandy Greenfarb shook her curly brown hair. “Besides, teachers don’t date students in this pathetic school. City College is too old-fashioned for that.”

“Who said anything about dating?” Carla replied. “And you’re wrong, anyway. Didn’t you hear about Atwick in the bio department? They say he got a girl pregnant. Put some Spanish Fly in her drink.”

Sandy blushed. “That’s absurd. And anyway, Professor Harris is nothing like Professor Atwick. He’s much more refined—more of a gentleman.”

“How would you know?” Amy jumped back in.

“No one knows much about Professor Harris. He just started teaching here this term,” Carla said.

“He’s not married. That’s all Carla needs to know.” Amy laughed.

“Shh,” Sandy said as Jeff walked into the room.

“Late as usual.” Amy whispered.

“Well, I’ve read through most of your papers.” Jeff slouched into the chair on wheels and stretched his feet out on the desk. “And I’m afraid to say that they were more gruesome than I expected.”

A murmur of irritation rippled through the class.

“Now to begin with . . .” Jeff began, as one student, even later than he, hurried through the door. It was the girl with the soft brown eyes, who bit her lower lip in an apologetic Smile and slipped into a rear seat as inconspicuously as possible.

“Miss, uh . . .” Jeff inquired, returning the smile.

“Laura Chapin.”

“Yes, uh, Miss Chapin, I was just telling the class that most of these papers on the McLuhanesque interpretation of the Beatles missed the point entirely. But there were a few exceptions. And yours was among the most refreshing.”

Amy shot an I-told-you-so glance to Carla.

Laura’s eyes dilated with delight. “Thank you.”

Jeff finished the class five minutes early and headed quickly out the door. “Professor Harris,” Laura called after him. He stopped a few feet down the hall and turned to face her. Jeff realized she looked taller and older than he had thought, her brown hair jostling invitingly around her shoulders. “I wanted to thank you for what you said about my paper,” she said, slightly out of breath.

“You earned it. You have a fine mind.”

She smiled without looking too embarrassed. “I was wondering if we might be able to get together and talk sometime—in your office—I, um, have some questions I’d like to go over with you about grad school.”

Jeff looked at his watch and gestured Laura to walk with him towards the stairs. “Look, I’d ask you to join me for lunch right now, but I’ve a departmental meeting to attend. Why don’t we have lunch together next Monday?”

Now Laura’s face flushed a bit. “I . . . that would be very nice, but I’ve got labs starting at noon that run to four o’clock. Do you think it might be possible for us to meet in your office at 4:30 on Monday?”

Jeff stopped and looked steadily at Laura for a moment. Those eyes were alluring. “Monday at 4:30 it is, then,” he said crisply, and strode away.

“I almost didn’t keep our appointment today,” Jeff said, sipping the third glass of red wine he and Laura had partaken since they’d adjourned their meeting from his office.

“Oh? And what possibly could have kept you?” The wine had lowered Laura’s voice to a quiet, warm contralto. The cafe, five minutes on the subway from his office, had the smell of fine spirits and food.

“I didn’t want the aggravation,” Jeff said.

Laura considered his deadpan face, then burst out laughing. “Well, thank you very much.”

“What would you say if I told you that I could predict the future?” Jeff asked offhandedly, taking another sip of his wine.

“You mean in a socially forecasting way?”

“I mean in every way.”

“Well, Professor Harris, you told us in one of your lectures that for very good reasons no one can ever really know the future. So I would say either you were lying . . . or speaking metaphorically.”

“Good,” Jeff nodded, “but let’s say I stubbornly insisted that I did know the future, and that this in no way contradicts what I said in my lecture about no one ever being able to know the future. What would you say then?”

“I’d say you were kidding me or crazy.” Laura thought for a bit. “I don’t think the future exists yet—it doesn’t exist until it’s actually created, in the present—so there’s no way you or anyone could really know it in the way that we know we’re here in this little bistro on Broadway, for instance.”

“Fair enough.” Jeff waved to the waiter for another round of wine. “You’re sharp. But let’s say I were to tell you that Lyndon Johnson will beat Barry Goldwater by a landslide this November?”

Laura shook her head. “No. Not good enough. Everyone expects Goldwater to get the nomination, and there’s no way that Johnson won’t win big what with the Kennedy sympathy vote. You’d have to do better than that.”

Jeff smiled and rubbed his lips with his fingers. The Beatles’s “Thank You, Girl” played languorously in the background. “OK, how’s this: Let’s say I tell you that in about a year and a half from now, the Beatles will have a hit record called ‘Help’ from a movie by the same name?”

Laura laughed. “You’ve got imagination, I’ll say that for you. But I still don’t think I’d be convinced. How do I know that you’re not a personal friend of George Martin’s with some special information about the Beatles’s plans?” Laura frowned for a moment then snapped her fingers. “No, I’ve got it! You tell me what number on Billboard’s Hot 100 a wow-Beatle record—one that won’t almost certainly make number one—will be in 1966, and I’ll believe that you know the future!”

Laura extended her hands in a triumphant gesture, pitching over a nearly full glass of red wine onto her shirt in the process. Jeff jumped up, napkin in hand, and began patting Laura’s soaked sleeve dry. He progressed from her sleeve to her cheek, and suddenly was less than an inch from Laura’s upturned face. Her eyes were rosy with wine, her mouth soft and parted. He touched his lips to hers, gently at first, then found himself lost in a realm of warmth and darkness.

He finally pulled away. “Well,” he managed, gasping a bit for breath, “no one can ever say that I don’t give my students personal attention.”

“I’d be glad to write you a letter of recommendation,” she said, smiling. “Now you see why I didn’t want to have lunch with you.”

“You found this aggravating?”

“Quite the opposite,” Laura replied.

Still standing over her, Jeff touched her hair with his finger. “I’ve got a lot I need to tell you,” he said softly. “By the way, no one but a record producer would know the exact number on the charts of a record even now, so your test of my knowledge of the future is too demanding.”

They walked hand in hand a few evenings later along groves overlooking the Hudson River. Across they could see the Palisades of New Jersey, carved whole out of stone as if by some supreme civilization, and near them the palette of Wave Hill Park in the late spring. Wave Hill—home of Mark Twain, of Toscanini, and an Easter parade of a notables across a century. In the late 1800s, William Appleton had lived here, amidst his publication in America of Darwin and Spencer. JFK had lived in a house across the street in the 1930s. Recently a British ambassador had donated most of this to the people of New York.

Jeff knew it wouldn’t especially help his larger predicament to get involved with Laura, to tell her what he was about. On the other hand, what harm could it do—set in motion a jagged time-loop which would wink him out of existence? Not likely. And the smell of her neck and his need to talk had been compelling. So he’d told her. And here he was, still around, and feeling fine.

He breathed in slowly. Fragrances real and recalled bathed his brain. “You know, when I was a kid, my grandfather used to tell me about summers he spent on Cape Cod when he was a kid himself. At night, sometimes two or three in the morning, he’d walk along the beach and gradually leave his cottage in the distance. Sometimes he’d turn around and, still seeing the light of the cottage, would walk further until it was completely gone. Then he’d close his eyes and think, there’s no difference between what I see with my eyes open and my eyes closed. He’d sit in the salty water, a foot or two deep, and feel the cold fluid pulse of the cosmos throbbing through his clothes. Then he’d get up and walk again, cold but not shivering, until he made contact with that spot of light that was his cottage. He was never sure until it happened that he would see that light again. But when he did, he’d walk with the satisfaction of knowing that after having gone out to the very limits of his usual reality and beyond, he was about to enter it again. I never really fully understood what my grandfather was saying to me—until now.”

Laura looked at him, stroked his face with the center of her palm. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

“Serious about what?”

“The time travel,” Laura said.

Jeff said nothing.

“I can be with you anyway,” Laura said. “I don’t have to believe it’s real. I can pretend to believe it’s real, play along that you’re from the future, like you say you are. I’m not sure there’s all that much difference between really believing and pretending to believe anyway, if you pretend sincerely enough.”

“You’ve got some philosophy there,” Jeff said.

Laura took his hand, put it to her lips.

“And you’re not worried that I really am crazy—maybe dangerous?” Jeff asked.

“Oh, you’re dangerous all right,” she said, grazing her teeth over his index finger. “And as to your story—my feeling is that whatever the truth of it, you’re a good man. I feel right about that.”

Jeff sighed. “You remember what I said the first day of class about no one really knowing for sure that anything is real—we could well be dreaming all of this, and might even dream that someone pinched us and tried to awaken us and nothing happened—but that we’d all go crazy unless we took at least some leap of faith, and assumed on nothing better than faith that the world is real and we were really here?”

“I was late for that lecture, wasn’t I?”

“No, I’m quite sure you were there,” Jeff said. “Look, I’m trying to say that—”

“I know what you’re saying.” Now she looked at him very intently. “You want me to take that leap of faith with you and your story. You want me to assume that what you’re saying is true, even though I have no evidence for it and it flies in the face of reason. You want me to say, look, I know this is crazy, but I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt, entertain your insanity, see where it leads us. In other words, pretense isn’t good enough for you—you want to make this really hard for me.” She turned away.

“Something like that, right,” Jeff said.

“What is it about me that’s always attracted to lunatics?” she murmured. She turned around and kissed him full on the lips.

“Two papayas.” Jeff held up two fingers to the man at the Papaya King on 3rd Avenue and 86th Street. “One to drink here and a quart to go.” There was nothing like this drink in his century. Whatever the hell it was—whatever its special mixture of pulp and sugars—it was delicious.

He walked down 86th Street, package in hand, towards his place by the East River. His place . . . he was feeling more and more comfortable in this place, and that made him feel uncomfortable, out of place. There were things he missed from his world—faces on the phone, words on the screen, poles of the planet as easily accessible as the north and south parts of this borough—but he missed them less and less. Especially when he was with Laura.

Still . . . he picked up a copy of the Daily News. Johnson was on the cover, saying he was going ahead full force on the space program, and on the inside was a picture of Gus Grissom. Jeff had thought about doing something to prevent the fire that would kill Grissom, White, and Chafee in their Apollo 1 capsule on January 27, 1967. But that was still over two and a half years away, and he couldn’t be sure what impact that might have on the Moon landing, which was still the lonely high watermark of human penetration of space. No, he didn’t dare mess with that—better to bide his time, and wait the nineteen further years, almost to the day, for a chance to avert the Challenger catastrophe, and the fatal blow it had delivered, in retrospect, to the space program.

But Jeff didn’t suffer abidances of time very well. What was the point of time travel, anyway, if not to short-circuit ordinary time, make new things happen? It seemed the last thing that should be required of the time traveler was patience. Jeff knew now, ever since his experience with Sarah, that he could change the future—which meant that his existence here could make a difference. But he had to get some word back to his team in 2084. How? He’d even tried taking a page from Asimov—what was that book, The End of Eternity—and placed small, discreet, but clearly informative ads in a variety of significant journals and newspapers like The New York Times. But nothing had happened. He had no idea whether any of the ads had even come to the attention of the team—1964 was after all well before the age of on-line information, and an ad in a newspaper this old might well have slipped by the Big Scannings in the new millennium.

He opened the door to his apartment quietly, so as not to wake Laura. She’d been sleeping over a lot, and Jeff figured she’d be moving in with him soon. He wasn’t sure how his colleagues at City College would take this—the 1960s were one of the decades of sexual liberation, but Jeff wasn’t enough of an expert on that aspect of popular culture to know just how far that went.

He tiptoed into the bedroom. He liked looking at Laura when she was sleeping. Her eyes were open just a crack, and he could see the bottoms of her soft brown eyes tracing some sort of REM-dream diagram. He hoped it was of him. He looked at her body, her breasts, one nipple partly exposed. He could do a lot worse than spending the next twenty-three years with her.

He walked carefully back into the kitchen, put the papaya juice into the refrigerator—he loved it, a living antique, right out of the Smith-Sonyian—and took out some eggs. Was cholesterol verboten in this decade? He’d been meaning to ask Laura. It certainly wasn’t in his. He started a pot of water boiling for the eggs, and sat down at the table to read the paper.

“Jesus!” he shouted.

“What’s the matter?” Laura shuffled out of the bedroom, rubbing her eyes.

Jeff shook his head in shocked disbelief.

“What’s the matter, honey?” Laura walked over, put a concerned hand on his shoulder.

Jeff pointed to the paper.

“What? What is it?” Laura asked.

Jeff jabbed at a picture. “I know her,” he rasped. “She was a member of my team. Rena Sarrett.”

Laura leaned over, and read aloud the article associated with the photograph. “. . . Run down by a bus on Central Park South last week . . . died the next day . . . her co-workers say she was hired by Gaulin’s, an insurance firm, about six months ago . . . attempts to locate Miss Sarrett’s relatives have all proven unsuccessful . . . police would appreciate anyone with information contacting them—”

“She was part of your project?” Laura asked.

“Right,” Jeff said, his voice choked with emotion.

Laura had the presence of mind to turn off the water, which was furiously boiling. “And you and she were lovers?”

“What?” Jeff croaked.

“I’m sorry,” Laura said.

“Yeah, we were lovers. Once. A long time ago—actually, in a time which doesn’t even goddamn exist yet. Does that matter?”

“Did you love her?” Laura asked.

“Yes,” Jeff said, tears in his eyes. “But not as much as I love you.”

Laura put her arms around his neck, stroked his chest. “That’s all that matters to me. I love you too.”

Jeff rubbed the side of his face against her hand.

“What does this mean?” Laura asked. “I mean, your friend getting killed . . .”

“It means they sent her back too—maybe to find me here, who knows, maybe they got one of my messages after all,” Jeff said. “Or maybe they were trying to send her back to 1985, to do the same job I was supposed to do, but for some reason she got sucked back here to the 1960s too. I don’t know.”

“What are you—we—going to do now?” Laura asked.

“I don’t know,” Jeff said.

“I don’t really want to go to this party,” Jeff said, trudging reluctantly after Laura up a steep street in Washington Heights.

“Come on.” Laura turned around and pulled his hand. “It’s been over a month since you found out about Rena, and all you’ve been doing is moping and brooding—it’s time you got out and saw some people. It’s summer already, for God’s sake.”

“Not moping—thinking,” Jeff said. “I was knocked unconscious in Dallas, Rena was killed by a bus, both in places we shouldn’t have been. There’s got to be some comprehensible pattern in this.”

“I know,” Laura said, more softly. “It’s almost as if there’s something in the nature of things that doesn’t want people to time travel—and punishes them when they do.”

“You know I dreamed about Rena dead, shortly after I got out of the Dallas hospital,” Jeff said, recalling this for the first time. “I wonder if that has any connection to any of this.”

“Well, remember you told me that Kip Thorpe—”

“Thorne,” Jeff corrected.

“Right, Kip Thorne and his people hypothesized that people flip into alternate universes when they change history through time travel—that that’s how the loops opened by the Thorne stay clean—so maybe, somehow, because you’re here in the past, you’ve caused an alternate universe to come into being, and in that universe you already lived past knowing about Rena’s death, because that universe is progressing at a different pace, and somehow your dream connected you to this alternate version of your self . . .”

Jeff smiled. It was at times like this that he could understand how he had come to feel so close to Laura. “You don’t think I’m such a lunatic anymore, huh?”

Laura snuggled against him. “You’re definitely a lunatic—no doubt about that—but maybe not about time travel.”

Jeff kissed her on the forehead. “Well, here we are at Joannie’s building,” Laura said. “Don’t worry, I’m sure there’ll be other teachers there. Just think of this as another great safari into 1960s culture.”

“What can I fix you, Professor?”

“A scotch and water would be fine.” Richard Atwick adjusted his thin-rimmed glasses and quietly eyed the hosed legs and sleek red dress of his benefactor. “Why, thank you, Carla,” he said, taking the drink from her hand, “and I must say you’re looking as lovely tonight as always.”

He gulped half his drink down in one swallow and, sloshing the rest around in the glass, began walking through the six rooms of Joannie Pernelli’s parents’ apartment. The place was packed with partiers in varying states of dress, intimacy, and inebriation.

“Professor Harris.” Atwick strode over and extended his hand to Jeff. “I’ve seen you around campus, but I don’t think we’ve ever formally met. I’m Richard Atwick of Biology.” He suddenly put his hand to his ear as the Beatles’s “It Won’t Be Long” blared forth without warning.

“Nice to meet you,” Jeff said loudly over the twanging guitars. “Do you know Laura Chapin?”

“I don’t think so, but I’m glad to now.” Atwick said. “Are you doing graduate work?”

“Thanks for the compliment.” Laura smiled sweetly. “But I’m afraid I’m still undergrad. And if you two gentlemen have no objections, I think I’ll go off and mingle now with some of my own kind.”

“Nice.” Atwick watched her walk off and nodded at Jeff approvingly. “And what are you having to drink, Professor?”

“Please, call me Jeff.” Jeff tried not to respond to the nod. “I guess I’ll have some white wine if there’s any around.”

“Well, let’s just go and find some, shall we?” Atwick tugged on Jeff’s arm and started towards the bottles on the far side of the room. “You know, I’m delighted that you’ll be joining us again this fall in the Sociology Department. Sociology—that’s a discipline of the future! It’s good we’re building up our faculty in that area.”

“Well, I’m happy to be here at City College. It’s certainly one of the best schools in the country.”

“Well, we like to think so.” Atwick beamed. “Ah, here’s some sort of Soave. Will that do? Good.” Atwick began pouring. “Now I’ve heard your specialty is mass culture. And you did your graduate work at . . .” Atwick handed Jeff a brimming paper cup.

Jeff sipped a little and spilled a little on his shirt. “University of Edinburgh. And my specialty’s really mass media—you know, the work of Marshall McLuhan—rather than mass culture.” Jeff got a pang as he thought again about how he had successfully recycled the cover the team had provided—any thought of the team brought along painful images of Rena.

“Edinburgh, yes,” Atwick was saying. “Splendid mountain in the middle of the city. You worked under Phillip MacKenzie?”

“Mackenzie? Nope, don’t think I did,” Jeff said, wondering what he would say next if pressed. His credentials, after all, would not stand up to anyone who knew the real Geoff Harris, or even very long to anyone who knew someone who knew Geoff . . .

The sound quieted down a bit, and it occurred to Jeff that Atwick had a familiar British accent, maybe like a surgeon he half-remembered hearing once in a hospital . . .

“Of course, it’s a large university—” Atwick began.

“Professor Harris, it’s good to see you outside of the classroom!” Carla joined the men. Jeff was delighted for the intrusion.

“You know, I’m really mad at you for that C+.” She batted her eyelids flirtatiously at Jeff.

“Well, Carla, if Professor Harris had graded you for good looks, I’m sure you would have received an A+. Am I right, Jeff?”

“Absolutely,” Jeff said—thinking that, if his grasp of history was right, in a few decades that kind of bantering could bring both Atwick and him up on sexual harassment charges. He shuddered. Insane days they were, at the end of the 20th century. He’d be doing the world a big favor if the only thing he did back here was change that . . .

“Aw, I can’t stay mad at you guys, you’re too charming,” Carla mewed. “Do you believe in dancing with students, Professor Harris? Professor Atwick has already honored me with one of his cha-chas.”

Atwick bowed. “The honor was all mine.”

“Well, I’d be pleased to dance with you, Carla,” Jeff laughed, “but I’m afraid these new dances are too much for me.”

Carla smiled and subtly shifted her body so that her curves were more prominent. “I was thinking of something nice and slow.”

“Well, in that case, I’d be a madman to refuse.” Jeff winked at Atwick and extended his arm to Carla. He looked in vain for Laura as Carla escorted him to a room in which “The Best of Johnny Mathis” played incessantly.

An hour and who knows how many red dresses later, Laura came up behind Jeff. “Hi,” she whispered in his ear and kissed it. “Find out anything interesting?”

“Actually, yeah,” Jeff said, and handed Laura a glass of wine. “Amazing how many people seem to know the future when you’re primed to hear that in their conversation. One kid told me that he thinks the Beach Boys will go on to become second only to the Beatles in musical importance. Now how could he know that on the basis of ‘Surfin’ Safari’ and a couple of other uncreative songs in 1964?”

“Tall blond, sun-tanned boy, Mark?” Laura asked.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Well, he looks like one of the Beach Boys, so maybe he’s just self-impressed,” Laura laughed, and spilled her wine. “Oops.”

“You’ve got no luck with wine, have you?” Jeff was laughing too, now. He had to admit he was having a good time. “Here, take mine. I just poured it. I’ll go get another.”

“I think I’ve had fantastic luck with wine at least one time,” Laura said.

Jeff went to fetch another bottle in an adjacent room. The music there was louder than anywhere else. Jeff cringed a bit under the sound assault, then realized he was hearing something else mixed in with the music . . . a piercing wail coming from the next room. He dropped the bottle and ran in and found Laura shrieking on the floor.

“Laura, what’s the matter?” He lifted her face and looked intently into her eyes. They were grossly dilated. Her shrieks suddenly turned into hysterical laughter.

“Professor Harris, is she sick or something?” Sandy, who Jeff realized had been standing over them, was nearly in tears herself.

“I don’t know, Sandy. Look, could you please call me a cab?”

Jeff helped Laura to her feet. She was screaming and yelling at the top of her lungs but Jeff couldn’t make out what she was saying. She passed out in his arms in the elevator. He carried her into the back seat of the cab that arrived a few minutes later. “Get me to the closest hospital emergency room,” he told the driver, who looked as if he’d seen it all.

He carefully put her head on his lap and wiped big beads of sweat from the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were tightly shut and she drooled slightly from the corner of her mouth. He gently wiped that also. She was moaning and half-singing some Beatles song.

He had read of the effects of sixties psychedelic drugs on people—assuming that’s what this was, though it seemed a little early in the 1960s for that—and could see this was a very bad reaction, likely from something more nasty than LSD. Who the hell had given it to her?

In his day and age, treating it by simple suffusion would be child’s play. But here, more than a century earlier, with no nano-syndics at all—jeez, he hoped these “doctors” were up to this. What would they use to cleanse her chemistry? He sighed, stroked her face. There was no point in torturing himself. That wouldn’t stop her from dying. He had no choice but to put Laura in whatever primitive doctor’s hands this cabbie placed her.

But why did this happen?

Another damn mishap?

He had a searing insight for an instant. Yes, of course . . . But the cab swerved too sharply around some corner, and he lost it.

He looked down at Laura’s lips, and trembled.

Jeff had always found strength in the rivers of New York. He had spent hours as a child wandering along the banks of the Bronx River—more a stream, really, than a river—admiring its waterfalls, sticking his toes in its pools, following its path through the Botanic and Zoological Gardens. Years later, he would sit on the terrace of Rena’s high-rise on 125th Street, watching the powerful Hudson roll through the ninth decade of the stagnant 21st century. Good in medicine, agriculture, the intraphysics that the Thorne embodied, but not much else. Good in looking inward, backward, not outward. He walked now around Carl Schurz Park, looking down on the East River and its reflection of this 1960s city, hoping to find something he could use to recover his balance.

Laura was OK, resting in his apartment, well out of danger. That wasn’t the problem.

“Close,” the doctor had said. “Good thing you rushed her over here. Combo of booze and that kind of drug is dangerous. Good thing it responded to—”

Better get used to it, doc—you’ll see a lot more of it before this decade is over.

Thank God Laura was OK.

But Jeff wasn’t.

He had slept maybe an hour after bringing her home from the hospital, undressing her, tucking her safely in their bed. He’d had nightmares—older and younger versions of his great-great-grandmother coming in and out of his life, changing it with each appearance, editing the narrative that was him so many times that he had no bearings. Only alterations, of alterations.

Jeff had always valued the sanctity and clarity of his mind. That’s why he’d steered clear of the psychedelic drugs of his century—better to improve external reality than just your perception of it. But he figured the contamination now of his past and future was far more toxic to the psyche than the worst drugs. Coleridge, de Quincey, Huxley, Leary, Goonatilake—you’re all pikers compared to me.

But why was he feeling the brunt of this now?

Something Laura had said or done—not her almost ODing, but something that had happened then, though he didn’t know what—had unhinged him—

“Hi, honey.” A soft, cool hand touched his as he leaned against the stone embankment. He turned to Laura. She still looked pale.

“You shouldn’t be out yet. How are you feeling?”

She held up her palms in an I-don’t-know gesture. “I think pretty much better. I was going crazy in the house, and you were gone a long time. I was worried.”

Jeff pulled her close. “Oh, Laura, Laura,” he said softly, sadly. “What’s going on?”

They parted and held hands, looking down at the lights that slid upon the inky water below “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you?”

“I think so,” Jeff said quietly.

“Tell me,” Laura said.

“I think you know.”

“No.” Laura’s face furrowed in confusion.

Jeff dropped her hand and turned to face her. “You look very nice in those shorts.”

Laura patted the light red shorts she was wearing on this humid summer evening and looked even more confused. “What do my shorts have to do with anything?”

“For God’s sake, stop playing games with me, Laura!” A nearby elderly woman with blue-tinted hair glared at Jeff. He glared back and lowered his voice. “Try being honest with me for a change.”

She turned and looked out over the water. “I think I have been honest. I’ve told you how much I love you.” Her voice was husky.

“I don’t suppose you remember much of what you did when the DMT first hit you?” Jeff continued impassively.

“No, I don’t remember much of anything. The whole experience was horrible. You know that.” She started crying.

“So you have no idea what song you were singing when I took you home in the cab?”

She shook her head. “I can’t believe I was singing in that state—”

“Well, would it surprise you to know that you were singing a few lines of the Beatles’ ‘Yes It Is’ over and over again? ‘Please don’t wear red tonight.’ ”

“And you place some sort of significance on this?”

“I’ve been driving myself crazy, wandering around here for hours, trying to figure out what’s been bothering me ever since I heard you singing those lines. I didn’t even know until I saw you and your red shorts a few seconds ago that that song was the problem. But now I’m starting to understand. You still want to claim you have no idea what I’m talking about?”

“I haven’t the foggiest notion.” For the first time, annoyance was in Laura’s voice. She had stopped crying.

“I think you do. Do you know what today’s date is? June 29, 1964. Now the Beatles have released two albums in America so far, Meet the Beatles and The Beatles’ Second Album. Actually, they also have a third album on Veejay Records with some early songs. There’s also an album with songs from their Hard Day’s Night movie and a few new songs, Something New, which will be released here in a couple of weeks. You see I know all of this because I taught history of rock for five years when I first got my Ph.D.”

“I know all about your past and future,” Laura said tartly.

“Good.” Jeff grabbed her arm and raised his voice again. “And do you also know that ‘Yes It Is’ is on none of those albums? None of them! And in fact it won’t be heard in America until an album called Beatles VI is released sometime late next year?”

Laura pulled away and laughed sarcastically. “And that’s what all this is about? That when I was stoned out of my mind on some Brazilian drug maybe intended for you I sang some song that won’t be released in the US for another few months? There are a thousand explanations for that. I might know some English guy who heard Lennon and McCartney perform that song in a personal appearance. You yourself might have sung the song in your sleep. What’s the big deal?” Her voice was rasping, and she started to cough.

“Your life’s at stake,” Jeff said. “That’s the big deal. Don’t you get it?”

Laura just looked at him, eyes wide and brimming with tears. She started to walk away.

“Listen to me, goddamn it!” Jeff caught up to her, spun her around, put his hands heavily on her shoulders. “Rena died. I think I was almost killed. You were almost killed. These are serious forces we’re playing around with here.”

She turned her head away, as if from the intensity of his reasoning.

“Tell me the truth!” he demanded.

“I love you,” Laura said.

“We need more now,” Jeff insisted.

Laura exhaled, squeezed close to Jeff, then pulled away. “It’s getting windy out here,” she shivered. “Let’s go back to the apartment and I’ll try to tell you as much as I can.”

The kettle whistled. Jeff carefully poured the water into the porcelain teapot, let it warm a bit, then added two servings of Darjeeling tea and the extra one for the pot.

Laura was on the couch, arms around her knees and legs tucked under, talking. “We knew there was danger right after the arrival, but we didn’t think it continued years after.”

“None of the little expeditions before mine ran into any trouble at all,” Jeff said. “As far as I know, I was the first not to return—the first whose AWH self-destructed, or was destroyed by something else, after my time jump.”

“None of those little events before yours were intended to seriously alter history,” Laura said. “Your Challenger attempt was the first big-scale operation.”

Jeff felt cold, and touched the teapot for warmth. The number of lives lost in the Challenger explosion—if only he hadn’t been funneled back here to the 1960s.

“Suppose you start at the beginning,” he said, “though it still bothers me to talk of beginnings that in one sense haven’t even happened yet.”

“The gist is this,” Laura said. “My team was—will be—situated about fifteen years after yours in the future. We knew about your team. Knew about you, Rena, her getting killed here. When your team uncovered her death in a cache of old microfiche, they stopped the project. Sealed all the files. My team found out about it and decided, secretly and illegally, to reopen it. My job was to—”

“Don’t tell me—to stop the killing of JFK.”

“No,” Laura said.

“But you’re here in the 1960s,” Jeff said.

“My job was to keep an eye on you—assuming I could find you,” Laura said.

Jeff’s mouth hung open. “They sent you back here to find me?”

“Actually, not back here—to 1985,” Laura said.

“But—”

“Right,” Laura said. “But I wound up back here, just like you, and just like Rena. My team didn’t understand that at first. Neither did I. But I think it’s clear what’s going on now. The Thorne operates by creating basins of subatomic attraction, at both ends of the artificial wormhole. But if you create enough artificial basins, all in one place, that in effect must begin to operate like one hugely powerful natural basin, attracting all out-of-time units in its temporal vicinity. Like a well-worn ditch attracting rivulets of water.”

“Three were intended to go back to 1985 . . .” Jeff mused.

“Yes,” Laura said, “and they all ended up here more than twenty years earlier. Think about it. Your team perfected time travel, tried to bury it, my team dug it up—you can’t as a society, a species, unlearn a kind of knowledge. There must be thousands of time travel operations throughout the future. And a likely place for many of them to focus is JFK—first assassination on film, on tape, copied onto digiscan, holoscan, mirrorims, and who knows what new media. It’s the cultural icon of assassination, the beacon against which all others are measured.”

“The glittering prize for time travelers,” Jeff said, bringing Laura her tea.

“Yes,” Laura said, gratefully sipping.

“And pulling any other time travelers back here who happened to be floating around nearby in time-flux,” Jeff said.

Laura nodded. “Look at this very year—1964. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Marshall McLuhan—the sexual revolution, feminism, the ecology movement all get big boosts in the next few years. Why all of that packed into this one decade? Couldn’t be coincidence. The answer is that the 1960s were infected—and inspired—by time travelers. Despite all of our attempts at curbing possible cultural contamination from the future, it can’t be done. You’ve seen that. Some leaks out—and causes massive cultural upheavals.”

“John Lennon was a time traveler?” Jeff asked.

“I don’t know, maybe,” Laura said. “Maybe that’s why he was murdered. At very least I’d say he was touched by time travel.”

Jeff’s head was reeling. Someone else who didn’t deserve to die, whose death he’d like to prevent if he could. Surprise Lennon’s killer in that Dakota alley, break his goddamn gun-hand.

Was Jeff bound to spend his whole life now as a shackled witness to history? “How’d you find me?”

“Wasn’t too hard,” Laura said. “Once I got back here, realized I was stranded, I figured I might as well see if you landed back here too. We knew you were a teacher. You had to live, earn money somewhere. So I went around to every school in the area, saying I wanted to be a sociology major, and asking for information about the faculty. This was my plan for 1985, so I had some good credentials ready, made them just right with a little alteration. And when I talked to your chair at City College, I knew I hit pay dirt—he showed me your outline, and its emphasis on McLuhan. McLuhan’s been well known in Canada for over a decade, but not down here.”

“Why didn’t you tell me who you were?” Jeff asked.

“I didn’t want to spook you—have you run away on me, where I couldn’t find you again.”

“Good you succeeded in at least one thing,” Jeff smiled tiredly.

“Yeah.”

“With all the people who came back to save Kennedy, not a single one succeeded at that, did they?” Jeff asked.

“No,” Laura said, “at least not as far as we know in our universe of knowledge.” She shook her head. “I really do think that there’s something about history that resists attempts to change it.”

“Hawking’s Chronology Protection Conjecture?” Jeff said. “Thorne and his colleagues claimed to have refuted that, though I admit the math was a bit beyond me.”

“Refuted in theory—with the assumption of clean loops with no causality interference—but loops are much dirtier in practice, especially with big events affecting so many people like assassinations,” Laura said. “Attempts to change those either fail completely, or maybe just change the events a little bit—or cosmos forbid, maybe even ironically set up the events to happen in the first place.”

“Not to mention that they’re hazardous to the health of the time travelers,” Jeff added.

“You really think we’re in danger?” Laura asked.

“Obviously. My guess is the Universe sort of cleans up after itself—does what it can to make sure there aren’t too many loose ends, joints out of time, around at any one time. From that perspective, we’re irritants to the Universe—our very being here disturbs it. But that doesn’t mean we’ll definitely be killed. Maybe we’re just, I don’t know, accident prone, more likely in a statistical sense to meet harm than others. If we’re really careful, maybe we’ll live. After all, you and I are still alive and kicking.”

Laura pulled him down next to her on the couch.

Jeff’s mind flipped back to the images of the Challenger. “It’s so frustrating. To be back here, and not be able to even do anything about it. I mean, we have almost twenty years to plan some sort of intervention—maybe we can do something, something small that won’t rock the boat too much, but just enough to deflect the disaster, or the worst of it.” He saw the faces again. “Over a hundred kids were killed when the Challenger crashed into that schoolhouse near Miami. The kids dead, the astronauts dead, those images and flames burning into everyone’s brains all over America and the world—no wonder it stopped the space program dead in its tracks. No president or Congress could support it after an accident like that—even dictators couldn’t force it on their people—”

“What did you say?” Laura looked at him.

“What? About the Challenge?”

“What do kids in a schoolhouse have to do with that?” Laura asked. Jeff looked puzzled.

“The Challenger explosion was a terrible thing for the country, and the space program, yes,” Laura said. “It was horrible—everyone saw those seven astronauts walking to their death, waving to the cameras, right on television. But it blew up just a minute or so after launch—nowhere near Miami or a school filled with kids.”

Jeff gasped. “And the space program continued in your timeline?”

“Oh yes,” Laura said. “I mean, it’s got its problems. Serious ones. But we’ve got settlements on Mars and the asteroid belt and—”

And for the first time since he had stood in front of the NYU Student Building with police lights mocking him in the night, Jeff had more than a whisper of hope.

“Maybe the difference between your version of reality and the one I remember,” he said, “is us.”

THE FUNERAL MARCH OF THE MARIONETTES

Adam-Troy Castro

Adam-Troy Castro’s first story was a powerhouse tale called “Clearance to Land” that appeared in Pulphouse in 1989. Since then we have had the pleasure of publishing many of his tales, but nothing from the past will prepare you for this knockout novella about a strange alien ritual and the one woman who understands it.

1.

IT WAS IN THE THIRD YEAR of my indentured servitude that I rescued Isadora from the death-dance of the Marionettes.

This happened on Vlhan, a temperate world of no strategic importance to either the Terran Confederacy or any of the great offworld republics. An unremarkable place with soft rolling hills, swampy lowlands, and seasons that came and went too gently for anybody to notice the change, it was indistinguishable from a million similar worlds throughout the known universe, and it would have been charted, abandoned, and forgotten were it not for the Vlhani themselves; they were so different from every other sentience in the universe that seven separate republics and confederacies maintained outposts there just to study them. Because the Vlhani had been declared sentient, we called our outposts embassies instead of research stations, and ourselves diplomats instead of scientists, but almost nothing we did involved matters of state; we were so removed from real power that the idea of a genuine diplomatic incident—let alone a war—seemed a universe away.

My name was Alex Gordon then. On Vlhan, I was a twenty-two-year old exolinguist, born and raised in the wheelworld known as New Kansas; the kind of bookish young man who insists he dreams of visiting the real Kansas someday even after being told how long it’s been uninhabitable. Like the three dozen other indentures who made up the rest of our delegation, I’d bartered five years of service in exchange for a lifetime of free travel throughout the Confederacy; but I’d been so captivated by the mysteries of the Vlhani people that I seriously considered devoting my entire life to finding the choreographic Rosetta Stone that would finally make sense of their dance. For it was the Ballet that, once every sixteen standard lunars, made them the center of attention on a thousand worlds. It was simultaneously tragedy, art form, suicide, orgasm, biological imperative and mob insanity. The first time I saw it I was shattered; the second time I wept; the third. . . .

But this story’s about the third.

The one that belonged to Isadora.

2.

It was a warm, sunny day, with almost no breeze. We’d erected a viewing stand overlooking the great natural amphitheater, and installed the usual holo and neurec remotes to record the festivities for future distribution. As was customary, we gathered on the north rim, the assembled Vlhani spectators on the south. I sat among the mingled human and alien diplomats, along with ambassador Hai Dhiju, and my fellow indentures. Kathy Ng was there, making her usual sardonic comments about everything; as was our quartermaster Rory Metcalf, who talked gossip and politics and literature and everything but the spectacle unfolding before us; and Dhiju’s sycophantic assistant Oskar Levine, who waxed maudlin on his own personal interpretation of the dance. We were all excited by the magic we were about to witness, but also bored, in the way that audiences tend to be in the last few minutes before any show, and as we murmured among ourselves, catching up on gossip and politics and the latest news from our respective worlds, few of us dwelled on the knowledge that all of the one hundred thousand Vlhani in the bowl itself were here to die.

Hurrr’poth did. He was my counterpart from the Riirgaan delegation: a master exolinguist among a reptilian race that prided itself on its exolinguists. He usually liked to sit among the other delegations rather than sequester himself among his own people, and this year he’d chosen to sit beside me, which had a chilling effect on my conversations with anybody else. Like all Riirgaans, he had a blank, inexpressive face, impossible to read (a probable reason why they’d had to develop such uncanny verbal communication skills), and when he said, “We are all criminals,” I was uncertain just how to take it.

“Why? Because we sit back and let it happen?”

“Of course not. The Vlhani perform this ritual because they feel they have to; it would be immensely arrogant of us to stop it. We are correct in allowing their orgy of self-destruction. No, we are criminal because we enjoy it; because we find beauty in it; because we openly look forward to the day when they gather here to die. We are not innocent bystanders. We are accomplices.”

I indicated the neurecs focused on the amphitheater, for the benefit of future vicarious spectators. “And pornographers.”

Hurrr’poth trilled, in his race’s musical equivalent of laughter. “Exactly.”

“If you disapprove of it so much, then why do you watch?”

He trilled again. “Because I am as great a criminal as any one of you. Because the Vlhani are masterpieces of form following function, and because I find them magnificent, and because I believe the Ballet to be one of the most beautiful sights in a universe that is already not lacking for beauty. Indeed, I believe that much of the Ballet’s seductive power lies in how it indicts us, as spectators . . . and if I must be indicted for the Ballet to be a complete work, then I happily accept my guilt as one of the prices of admission. What about you? Why do you watch?”

I spoke cautiously, as lower-echelon diplomats must whenever posed sufficiently uncomfortable questions. “To understand.”

“Ahhhh. And what do you want to understand? Yourself, or the Vlhani?”

“Both,” I said—glibly, but accurately—and then hurriedly peered through my rangeviewers as a quick way of escaping the conversation. It wasn’t that I disliked Hurrr’poth; it was that his manner of cutting to the heart had always made me uncomfortable. Riirgaans had a way of knowing the people they spoke to better than they knew themselves, which may have been one reason they were so far ahead of us in decoding the danced language of the Vlhani. We could only ask childlike questions and understand simple answers. The Riirgaans had progressed to discussing intangibles. Even now, much of our research on the Vlhani had to be conducted with Riirgaan aid, and usually succeeded only in uncovering details they’d known for years.

This rankled those of us who liked to be first in everything; me, I just thought we’d accomplish more by cooperating. Maybe the Riirgaans just enjoyed watching others figure things out for themselves. Who knows? If the thriving market in Vlhani Ballet recordings means anything at all, it’s that sentient creatures are subject to strange, unpredictable passions . . . and that the Vlhani are plugged into all of them.

A wind whipped up the loose dirt around the periphery of the amphitheater. The Vlhani spectators on the far rim stirred in anticipation. The one hundred thousand Vlhani in the amphitheater mingled about, in that seemingly random manner that we knew to be carefully choreographed. Our instruments recorded the movements of each and every Vlhani, to determine the many subtle ways in which tonight’s performance differed from last year’s, I merely panned my rangeviewer from one end of the amphitheater to the other, content to be awed by the numbers.

Vlhani have been compared to giant spiders, mostly by people with an Earthbound vocabulary, and I suppose that’s fair enough, if you want a description that completely robs the Vlhani of everything that renders them unique. Personally, I much prefer to think of them as Marionettes. Imagine a shiny black sphere roughly one meter across, so smooth it looks metallic, so flawless it looks manufactured, its only concession to the messy biological requirements of ingestion, elimination, copulation and procreation a series of almost-invisible slits cut along one side. That’s the Vlhani head. Now imagine anywhere between eight and twenty-four shiny black tentacles attached to various places around that head. Those are Vlhani whips, which can grow up to thirty meters long and which for both dexterity and versatility put humanity’s poor opposable thumb to shame. A busy Vlhani can simultaneously stick one whip in the dirt, and render it rigid as a flagpole, to anchor itself while occupied with other things; b) use another four whips to carve itself a shelter out of the local raw materials, c) use another three whips to spear the underbrush for the rodentlike creatures it likes to eat; d) flail the rest of its whips in the air above its head, in the sophisticated wave-form sign language that Vlhani can use to conduct as many as six separate conversations at once. Even a single Vlhani, going about its everyday business, is a beautiful thing; one hundred thousand Vlhani, gathered together to perform the carefully choreographed Ballet that is both their holiest rite and most revered art form, are too much spectacle for any human mind to absorb properly at one time.

And too much tragedy too. For the one hundred thousand Vlhani gathered in that great amphitheater would soon dance without rest, without restraint, without nourishment or sleep; they’d dance until their self-control failed, and their whips carved slices from each other’s flesh; they’d dance until their hearts burst and the amphitheater was left filled with corpses. The ritual took place once each revolution of their world around their sun, and no offworlder claimed to understand it, not even the Riirgaans. But we knew it was some kind of art form, and that it possessed a tragic beauty that transcended the bounds of species.

Hurrr’poth said, “They are starting late, this year. I wonder if—”

I took a single, sharp, horrified intake of breath. “Oh, God. No.”

“What?”

I zoomed in, saw it again, and shouted: “AMBASSADOR!”

Hai Dhiju, who was seated two rows away, whirled in astonishment; we may have been an informal group on Vlhan, but my shout was still an incredible breach of protocol. He might have taken it a little better if he weren’t intoxicated from the mild hallucinogens he took every day—they left him able to function, but always a little slow. As it was, his eyes narrowed for the second it took him to remember my name. “Alex. What’s wrong?”

“There’s a woman down there! With the Vlhani!”

It wasn’t a good idea to yell it in a crowd. Cries of “What?” and “Where?” erupted all around us. The alien reactions ranged from stunned silence, on the part of my friend Hurrr’poth, to high-pitched, ear-piercing hoots, on the part of the high-strung Ialos and K’cenhowten. A few of the aliens actually got up and rushed the transparent barriers, as if inspired by one insane, suicidal Terran to join the unknown woman in that bowl where soon nothing would be left alive.

Dhiju demanded, “Where?”

I handed him my rangeviewer. “It’s marked.”

He followed the blinking arrows on the interior screen to the flagged location. All around us, spectators slaved their own rangeviewers to the same signal. When they spotted her, their gasps were in close concert with his.

I wasn’t looking through a rangeviewer at that moment; I didn’t see the same thing the others saw. My own glimpse had been of a lithe and beautiful young woman in a black leotard, with short-cropped black hair and unfamiliar striped markings on both cheeks. Her eyes had burned bright with some emotion that I would have mistaken for fear, were it not for the impossibly level grace with which she walked. She couldn’t have been older than her early twenties. Just about everybody who saw her the same moment the ambassador did now claims to have noticed more: an odd resonance to the way she moved her arms . . .

Maybe. Neither the ambassador nor anybody else around us commented on it at the time. Dhiju was just shocked enough to find the core of sobriety somewhere inside him. “Oh, God. Who the hell—Alex, you saw her first, you get to man the skimmer that plucks her the hell out of there. Hurry!”

“But what if—”

“If the Ballet starts, you’re to abort immediately and let the universe exact the usual fine for idiocy. Until then—run!”

I could have hesitated, even refused. Instead, I whirled, and began to fight my way through the crowd, an act that was taken by most of those watching as either a testament to my natural courage under fire, or a demonstration of Dhiju’s natural ability to command. The more I look back, and remember my first glimpse of Isadora, the more I think that it might have been her that drew me.

Maybe part of me was in love with her even then.

3.

I was free of the crowd and halfway to the skimmer before I noticed Hurrr’poth running alongside me, his triple-segmented legs easily keeping up with my less-than-athletic gait. He boarded the vehicle even as I did. He anticipated the inevitable question: “You need me. Take off.”

My official answer should have been that this was a human matter and that I was not authorized to take any liberties with his safety. But he was right. He had years more experience with the Vlhani; he possessed more understanding of their language. If nothing else, he was my best chance for getting out alive myself.

So I just said, “All right,” and took off, circling around the rear of the viewing platform and then coming in as low over the amphitheater as I dared. Once I was over the Vlhani I slaved the skimmer to my rangeviewer and had it home in on the woman. Thousands of shiny spherical black heads rotated to follow our progress; though a few recoiled, many more merely snapped their whips our way, as if attempting to seize us in flight. The average whip-span of a grown Marionette being what it was, they came close.

He peered over the side as we flew. “We don’t have much time, Alex; they’re all initiating their Primary Ascension.”

I was clipping on a Riirgaani-patented whip harness. “I don’t know what that means, Hurrr’poth.”

“It’s what we call one of the earliest parts of the dance, where they gather their energies and synchronize their movements. You would probably call it a rehearsal, or a tune-up, but it’s apparently as fraught with meaning as anything that follows; unfortunately, it doesn’t last very long, and it tends to be marked by sudden, unpredictable activity.” After a pause, he said: “Your flyby is causing some interesting . . . I would say clumsy and perhaps even . . . desperate variations.”

“Wonderful.” The last thing I needed was to be known all my life as the man who disrupted the Vlhani Ballet. “Do you see her yet?”

“I’ve never lost sight of her,” Hurrr’poth said calmly.

A few seconds later I spotted her myself. She was . . . well, the best possible word for her walk is, undulating . . . down the slope on the far side of the amphitheater, into the deepest concentrations of Vlhani. She was waving both of her long slender arms over her head, in a gesture that initially struck me as an attempt to catch my attention but almost immediately made itself clear as an attempt to duplicate the movements of the Vlhani. She moved like a woman fluent in the language, who not only knew precisely what she was saying but also had the physical equipment she needed to say it: all four limbs were so limber that they could have been Vlhani whips and not human arms and legs. One of the first things I saw her do was loop each of her arms all the way around her other one, not just once but half a dozen times, forming a double helix.

“Jesus,” I said, as we descended toward her. “She’s been enhanced.”

“At the very least,” agreed Hurrr’poth.

Her arms untangled, became jagged cartoon-lightning, then rose over her head again, waggling almost comically as little parentheses-shapes moved from wrist to shoulder in waves. As we came to a hovering stop three meters ahead of her, she scowled, an expression that made the scarlet chevrons tattooed on each cheek move closer to her dark penetrating eyes. Then she lowered her gaze and retreated.

“Leave her be,” said Hurrr’poth.

I stared at him. “She’ll die.”

“So will all these others. It’s why they’re here, and why she’s here. If you save her, you’ll be disturbing the Ballet for no good reason, and demonstrating to the Vlhani that you consider her life more valuable than any of theirs. No: leave her be. She’s a pilgrim. It’s her privilege to die if she wants.”

Hurrr’poth was probably right; being right was his way. But he did not know human beings, or me, anywhere near as well as he knew Vlhani, and could not understand that what he advised was unacceptable. I set the skimmer to land, and hopped out almost a full second before it was strictly safe to jump, hitting the slope with an impact that sent jabs of pain through both knees.

The Vlhani loomed above me on all sides: great black spheres wobbling about on liquid flailing whips. One stepped daintily over both me and the skimmer, disappearing without any visible concern into the roiling mob further down the slope; another half-dozen seemed to freeze solid at the sight of me, as if unsure what improvisations I might require of them. None seemed angry or aggressive, which didn’t make me feel any better. Vlhani didn’t have to be aggressive to be extraordinarily dangerous. Their whips had a tensile strength approaching steel and moved at speeds that had been known to exceed sound. And though we’d all walked among Vlhani without being harmed—I’d even been picked up and examined by curious ones—those had been calm, peaceful Vlhani, Vlhani at rest, Vlhani who still possessed their race’s equivalent of sanity. These were driven pilgrims here to dance themselves into a frenzy until they dropped; they could slash me, the woman, Hurrr’poth and the skimmer into slices without even being fully aware they were doing it . . .

Fifteen meters away, the woman twisted and arched her back and flailed arms as soft and supple as ribbons. “Go ‘way!” she shouted, in an unidentifiably-accented Human-Standard. “Don’t dang yeselves! Le’ me alone!”

I switched on my harness, activating the pair of artificial whips that immediately rose from my shoulders and snaked above my head, undulating a continuous clumsy approximation of the Vlhani dance for Friend. Our delegation had borrowed the technology and much of the basic vocabulary from the Riirgaans, with its built-in vocabulary of fifty basic memes, it was sufficient to allow us clumsy four-limb humanoids to communicate with the Vlhani at the level of baby talk. Which by itself wouldn’t be enough to get me and the girl out of the amphitheater alive . . .

. . . broadcasting Friend in all directions, I ran to her side, stopping only to evade a huge towering Marionette passing between us. When I got close enough to grab her, she didn’t run, or fight me; she didn’t even stop dancing. She just said, “Le’ me go. Save yeself.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t let you do this.”

She twisted her arm in a way wholly inconsistent with human anatomy, and twisted out of my grip without any effort at all. “Ye cannae stop me,” she said, flitting away in a pirouette graceful enough to hurt my eyes. I hadn’t even succeeded in slowing her down. I turned around, shot a quick Why-the-Hell-Aren’t-You-Helping-Me look at the impassive Hurrr’poth, then ran after her again.

I found her dancing beneath, and in perfect sync with, a Marionette five times her height; the eight whips it held aloft all undulating to the same unheard music as her own arms. It had anchored four of its whips in the ground, one on each side of her; turning itself into a enclosed set for her solo performance. The effect was sheltering, almost maternal, which didn’t make me feel any safer scurrying past those whips to join her at the center. Again, she made no attempt to evade me, merely faced straight ahead, looking past me, past the Vlhani, and past the eyes of all the sentients who’d be watching the recordings of this scene for more years than any of us would be alive . . . past everything but the movements her dance required her to make next.

The harness piped a thousand contradictory translations in my ear. Danger. Life. Night. Cold. Hungry. Storm. Dance. I had no idea whether it translated her or the Vlhani.

“All right,” I said, lamely. “You want to play it like this, go ahead. But tell me why. Give me some idea what you think you’re trying to accomplish!”

Her head rotated a perfect 360 degrees on her long and slender neck, matching a similar revolution performed by the featureless Marionette head directly above us. Her eyes remained focused on mine as long as her face remained in view, then sought me out again, the instant her features came around the other side. Her expression was serious, but unintimidated. “I tryin’ to waltz Vlhani. What are ye trying to accomplish? Kill yeself bein’ a gilgamesh?”

“I’d rather not. I just want you to come with me before you get hurt.”

“Ye’re in a lot hotter stew than I be. Leastin’ I ken the steps.”

The Vlhani didn’t stop dancing; they didn’t slow down or speed up or in any visible way react to anything either Isadora or I said. If anything, they took no visible notice of us at all. But I was there, in the middle of it, and though my understanding of Vlhani sign language was as minimal as any human’s, I did . . . feel . . . something, like a great communal gasp, coming from all sides. And I found myself suddenly, instinctively, thoroughly certain that every Vlhani in the entire amphitheater was following every nuance of every word that passed between this strange young woman and me. Even if they were not close enough to see or hear us, they were still being informed by those around them, who were in turn breathlessly passing on the news from those farther up the line. We were the center of their attention, the focus of their obsessions. And they wanted me to know it.

It wasn’t telepathy, which would have shown up on our instruments. Whatever it was couldn’t be measured, didn’t translate to the neurecs, wasn’t observed by any of the delegations. I personally think I was only making an impossible cognitive leap in the stress of the moment and for just one heartbeat understood Vlhani dance the way it was meant to be understood. Whatever the reason, I knew at once that this impasse was the single most important thing taking place in the entire valley . . .

Love, my harness squeaked. Safety. Dance. Food.

Sad.

She’d gone pale. “What are ye plannin’ to do?”

What I did was either the bravest or most insane or most perceptive thing I’ve ever done.

Reversing our positions, placing my life in her hands, I simply turned my back on her and walked away . . . not toward Hurrr’poth, the skimmer, and safety, but farther down the slope, into the densest concentrations of Vlhani. It was impossible to see very far into that maze of flailing black whips, but I approached a particularly thick part of the mob, where I might be filleted and sectioned in the time it took to draw a breath, as quickly as I could without actually breaking into a run. It was far easier than it should have been. All I had to do was disengage my terror from the muscles that drove my legs. . . .

She cried out: “Hey! HEY!”

Four Vlhani whips stabbed the earth half a meter in front of me. I flinched, but didn’t stop walking. The Vlhani moved out of my way with another seven-league step. I stepped over the stab wounds in the earth, continued on my way . . .

“. . . and found her circling around in front of me. “Just what the crot do ye ken ye’re doin’ ?”

My first answer was obliterated by stammering: a sign of the terror I was trying so hard not to feel. I swallowed, concentrated on forming the words and speaking them understandably, and said: “Taking a walk. It seems like a nice day for it.”

“Ye keep waltzin’ this direction, ye won’t last two minutes.”

“Then you’ve got yourself a moral decision,” I said, with a confidence that was a million kilometers away. “You can bring me back to my skimmer and hold my hand while I pilot us both back to safety. Or you can stay here and dance, and let me die with you. But the only way to avoid putting you on my conscience is to put myself on yours.”

Danger. Dance. Danger.

Hot wind fanned my back, a razor-sharp whirr following in its wake: the kind of near-miss so close that you feel the pain anyway. I stiffened, held on to my last remaining shreds of self-control, and walked past her.

She muttered a curse in some language I didn’t know and wrapped her arms around my chest. I mean that literally. Each arm went serpentine and encircled me twice before joining in a handclasp at my collarbone. They felt like human flesh; they were even warm and moist from exertion. But there was something other than muscle and bone at work beneath that too-flexible skin.

Her heart beat in sync with mine.

“I ought to let ye do it,” she breathed. “I ought to let ye waltz in there and get tom to gobs.”

I managed to turn my head enough to see her. “That’s your decision.”

“And ye really think ye ken what that’s goin’ to be, don’t you? Ye think ye ken me well enough to guess how much I’m willin’ to toss for some mungie catard tryin’ to play martyr. Ye . . . think . . . ye . . . ken.”

Sometimes, in crisis situations, you find yourself saying things so stupid they come back to haunt you. “I’m a good judge of people.”

“Ye’re a good judge of vacuum. Ye sit on that mungie viewing stand and ye coo at the spectacle and ye shed a brave tear for all the buggies tearin’ each other to gobs for yer ball-tinglies. And ye wear those ridiculous things,” indicating my artificial whips, “and ye write mungie treatises on how beautiful it all be and ye pretend ye’re tryin’ to understand it while all the while ye see nothing, ye ken nothing, ye understand nothing. Ye don’t even appreciate that they been goin’ out of their way to avoid gobbing ye. They been concentratin’ on ye instead of the show, usin’ all the leeway their script gives them, steppin’ a little faster here and a little slower there, just for ye, me mungie good judge of people. But if ye keep waltzin’ this direction, they won’t be able to watch out for ye without turning the whole show to crot, and they gob ye to spatters before yer next gasp!”

If she paused for breath at all during her speech, I didn’t notice. There were no hesitations, no false starts, no fleeting “uh”s to indicate blind groping for the phrase she needed; just a swift, impassioned, angry torrent of words, exploding outward like wild animals desperate to be free. Her eyes brimmed with an anguished, pleading desperation, begging me to leave her with the death she had chosen: the look of a woman who knew that what she asked was bigger than any of us; and she desperately needed me to believe that.

Danger. Dance. Birth.

I almost gave in.

Instead, I spoke softly: “I’m not interested in the moral decisions of the Vlhani. I’m interested in yours. Are you coming with me or not?”

Her grip loosened enough for me to wonder if my bluff had been called. Then she shuddered, and the beginnings of a sob caught in her throat. “Crod it. CROD it! How the hell did ye ken?”

At the time, I didn’t know her nearly well enough to understand what she meant.

But already, it was impossible not to hate myself, a little, for defying her.

4.

The trip back to the skimmer wasn’t nearly as nerve-wracking as the trip out, with her providing us a serpentine but safe path directly through the heart of the Ballet. She told me when to speed up, when to slow down, when to proceed straight ahead, and when to take the long way around a spot that inevitably, seconds later, became a sea of furiously dancing Vlhani. I followed her directions not because I considered her infallible, but because she seemed to believe she knew what she was doing, and I was completely lost.

Before we even got near the spot where I’d left the skimmer, I heard the hum of its drive burning the air directly above us: Hurrr’poth, piloting it to a landing beside us. Which was itself not the least of the day’s surprises, since the skimmer was set for a human gene pattern, and Hurrr’poth had no business being able to control it at all. Even as he lowered it to boarding altitude, I called, “What the hell—”

He waved. “Hurry up and get in. I don’t know how much time we have to do this.”

She trembled, not with fear, but with the utter heartbreak of a woman being forced to give up that which she wanted above all else. Getting her this far had shattered her; forcing her onto the skimmer would carve wounds that might not ever heal. But at least she’d have a chance to survive them . . . something I couldn’t say for her chances dancing among the Vlhani. I said, “You first.”

She took Hurrr’poth’s outstretched hand, and climbed aboard. I followed her, taking a seat directly beside her in case she decided to try something. Hurrr’poth took off, set the controls for the return flight, then turned around in his seat, so he could gently trill at us. “I hope you don’t consider me impolite, Alex.”

His manners were the very last thing on my mind. “For what?”

“For taking such liberties with your vehicle. But there were a number of very large Vlhani determined to pass through the spot where we’d landed—and I thought it best for the purposes of our safe escape that I argue with your genetic reader instead. It saw reason a lot faster than I thought it would.”

“Think nothing of it.”

He turned toward the girl. “My name is Viliissin Hurrr’poth. I am a third-level wave-form linguist for the Riirgaan delegation, and whatever else happens now, I must state my professional opinion that you are an astonishingly talented dancer for one of your species, you did not appear to be at all out of place among the Vlhani. It is a grand pleasure indeed to make your acquaintance. And you are—”

“Isadora,” she said, sullenly. It was a good thing he’d asked; I’d been too preoccupied by matters of survival to get around to it myself.

“Is-a-do-ra,” he repeated, slowly, testing each syllable, committing it to memory. “Interesting. I do not believe I’ve encountered that one before. Is there an adjunct to that name? A family or clan designation?”

She looked away: the gesture of a woman who no longer had the energy or the inclination to answer questions. “No. Just Isadora.”

I saw the silence coming and ached for the wit to come up with the words that would break it. I wanted to come up with a great, stirring speech about the sanctity of life and the inevitability of second chances: about the foolishness of suicide in a universe filled with millions of choices. I wanted to tell her that I was glad that she’d chosen to come with me and live, for I’d sensed something special about her—a strength of will and purity of purpose that would have rendered her special even without the enhancements that had made flexible whips of her limbs. I wanted to tell her that there were better places to apply those attributes than here, on this planet, in this amphitheater, among thousands of doomed Vlhani. I wanted to say all of that, and more, for I suddenly needed to understand her more than I’d ever needed to understand the creatures who danced below. But Hurrr’poth was right: she’d been perfectly at home among the Vlhani, and was just a trembling, devastated young woman beside us.

Below us, the Vlhani writhed: a sea of gleaming black flesh and snapping black whips, their spherical heads all turning to watch us as we passed.

“They look like they’re slowing down,” noted Hurrr’poth.

I couldn’t tell. To me, their Ballet looked every bit as frenetic now as it had five minutes ago. It all seemed perfectly graceful, perfectly fascinating, and perfectly alien: an ocean of fluid, undifferentiated movement, diminished not at all by the deletion of one strange young woman with chevrons on both cheeks. Why not? They’d always danced without her; they could just go ahead and dance without her again. If anything, they were probably relieved not to have her getting underfoot anymore . . .

I tried very hard to believe that, and failed. Hurrr’poth knew more about their dance than I. Not, it seemed, as much as Isadora—he wouldn’t have been able to stride into the middle of the Ballet and expect to keep his skin intact—but enough to read the essence of what he saw. If he said they were slowing down, they were slowing down.

And it could only be because I’d taken away Isadora.

They were as devastated as she was.

Why?

5.

We landed the skimmer in the open field behind the viewing stand. Dhiju led a small mob of humans and aliens from their seats to meet us. They all wanted to know who Isadora was, where she’d come from, and why she was here, I don’t honestly think anybody actually stayed behind to watch the Ballet. They crowded around us so densely that we didn’t even attempt to leave the skimmer: an ironic, unintended parody of the dance we’d all come here to witness.

Dhiju’s face was flushed and perspiring heavily—a condition owing as much to his intoxication as his concern—but he retained enough self-control to speak with me first. “Astonishing work, Alex. I’ll see to it that you get some time taken off your contract for this.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He next directed his attention to Hurrr’poth. “And you too, sir—you didn’t have to risk yourself for one of ours, but you did anyway, and I want to express my thanks for that.”

Hurrr’poth bowed slightly, a gesture that surprised me a little, since I would have expected much more than that from a sentient who so prized the sound of his own voice. Maybe he was too impatient for the part that we all knew would have to come next: Dhiju as disciplinarian. And Dhiju complied, with the fiercest, angriest, most forbidding expression he knew how to muster: “And as for you; young lady: do you have any idea just how many laws you’ve broken? just what the hell was going through your mind, anyway? Did you really wake up this morning and think it would be a good day for being torn to pieces? Is that what you wanted out of your afternoon today?”

Isadora stared at him. “The buggies invited me.”

“To what? Die? Are you really that blind?”

Whereupon Hurrr’poth returned to form: “Forgive me, Mr. Dhiju, but I don’t believe you’ve thought this out adequately.”

Dhiju didn’t like the interruption, but protocol forced him to be polite. “Why not? What mistake am I making?”

“I daresay it should be obvious. What do we know about this young lady so far? She’s obviously had herself altered to approximate Vlhani movement; she’s evidently learned more about their dance than either your people or mine have ever been able to learn; she’s made her way here from wherever it was she started, apparently without any of your people finding out about her; and she’s snuck herself into what may be the most thoroughly studied native ritual in recorded history, without hundreds of observers from seven separate confederacies spotting her until she was in the middle of it. No, Mr. Dhiju, whatever else you might say about her wisdom in trying to join the Vlhani Ballet, I don’t think you can fairly accuse her of coming here on a foolish spur-of-the-moment whim. What she’s done would have required many years of conscious preparation, a fair amount of cooperation from people with the resources to give her these enhancements, and a degree of personal dedication that I can only characterize as an obsession.”

Dhiju digested that for so long that I thought for a moment the hallucinogens had prevented him from understanding it at all. Then he nodded, regarded Isadora with a new expression that was closer to pity, and met my eyes. He didn’t have to actually insult me by giving the orders.

Find out.

I nodded. He turned and strode off, not in the direction of the viewing stand, but toward his own skimmer, which was parked with the rest of the embassy vehicles. A half-dozen indentures, including Rory and Kathy and Oskar, scurried along behind him, knowing that they’d be required for the investigation to follow.

I looked at Isadora. “You can save us all a lot of trouble by just telling us everything we need to know now.”

She glared at me insolently, the dark alien fires burning behind her eyes: still unwilling to forgive me for saving her life, or herself for saving mine. “Will it get me back to the show?”

“No. I’m sorry. I can’t imagine Dhiju ever allowing that.”

Her look was as clear as Dhiju’s: Then go ahead. Find out what you can. But I’m not going to make things easier for you.

Fair enough. If she could learn to understand the Vlhani, then I could sure learn to understand her. I turned to Hurrr’poth: “Are you coming along?”

He considered it, then bobbed his head no. “Thank you, Alex, but no. I think I can be of better use conducting my own investigation using other avenues. I will, however, be in touch as soon as I have anything relevant to contribute.”

“See you, you old criminal,” I told him.

It was a personal experiment, to see how he’d react to a joke, and he made me proud: “See you soon . . . pornographer.”

6.

It may have been the only time in the history of the human presence on Vlhan that the delegation was actually expected to deal with a Major Diplomatic Incident. Oh, we’d had minor crises over the years (uneventful rescue missions to pick up linguists and anthropologists who’d gotten themselves stranded in the field, tiffs and disagreements with the representatives of the other delegations), but never anything of life-and-death import; never anything designed to test us as representatives of the Confederacy, never a dozen separate mysteries all wrapped up in the form of one close-mouthed, steadfastly silent young woman.

And so we worked through the night, accomplishing absolutely nothing.

We took DNA samples, voice-prints, and retinal scans, sending them via hytex to the databases of a thousand planets; nobody admitted to having any idea who she was. We went through our library for record of human cultures with ritual facial tattooing. We found several, but none still extant that would have marked a young woman with chevrons on both cheeks. We seized on the slang phrases she’d used, hoping they’d lead us back to a world where they happened to be in current usage, and found nothing—though that meant little, since language is fluid and slang can go in and out of style at weekly intervals.

She silently cooperated with a medical examination which elaborated upon that which we already knew: that her entire skeleton, most of her musculature, and much of her skin had been replaced by enhanced substitutes. Her arms alone were minor miracles of engineering, with over ten thousand flexible joints in just the distance between shoulder and wrist. Her nervous system was also only partially her own, which made sense, since the human brain isn’t set up to work a limb that bends in that many places. She had a complex system of micro-controllers up and down her arms, to translate the nerve impulses on their way to and from the brain. She just had to decide the moves she wanted to make; the microcontrollers let her limbs know how to go about making them. There were also special chemical filters in her lungs, to maximize the efficiency with which she processed oxygen, several major improvements made to her internal connective tissue, and uncounted other changes, only some of which made immediate sense.

There weren’t many human agencies capable of this kind of work, and most of them operated at the level of governments and major corporations. We contacted just about all of those, from Transtellar Securities to the Bettelhine Munitions Corporation, they all denied any knowledge of her. Of course, they could have been lying, since some of her enhancements were illegal; but then they operated in the realm of profit, and there was no possible profit in turning a young woman into a sort of quasi-Vlhani, geared only toward her own self-destruction.

That left nonhuman agencies, some of which could be expected to harbor motives that made no human sense. But we couldn’t contact many of them by hytex, and the few we could were a waste of time, since they had a relaxed attitude toward the truth anyway. Kathy Ng, who was in charge of that aspect of the investigation, got fed up enough to grouse, “How am I supposed to know who’s telling the truth? None of them have ever been consistent liars!” Everybody sympathized; nobody had any better suggestions.

As for me, I spent four hours at the hytex poring through the passenger manifests of civilian vessels passing anywhere within a twenty light-year distance of Vlhan, finding nobody fitting her general description who couldn’t be accounted for. Then I stole a few minutes to check on Isadora, who we’d locked up in our biological containment chamber. It was the closest thing we had to a prison facility, though we’d never expected to use it that way. Hai Dhiju sat in the observation room, glaring at the sullenfaced Isadora through the one-way screen. Oskar Levine sat beside him, alternately gaping at Isadora and feeding Dhiju’s ego. When Dhiju noticed me, something flared in his bloodshot, heavy-lidded eyes: something that could have been merely the footprint of the hallucinogens still being flushed from his system, or could have been something worse, like despair. Either way, he didn’t yell at me to go back to work, but instead gestured for me to sit down beside him.

I did. And for a long time neither of us said anything, preferring to watch Isadora. She was exercising (though performing was more like it; since even though the room on her side of the shield was just four soft featureless walls, she had to know that there would be observers lurking behind one of them). Her form of exercise involved testing the flexibility of her limbs, turning them into spirals, arcs, and jagged lightning-shapes; a thousand changes each instant. It was several different species of beautiful—from its impossible inhuman grace, to the sheer passion that informed every move.

The translation device squeaked out a word every thirty seconds or so. Death. Vlhani. World. Sad. Dance. Food. Life. Sad.

Human.

None of it meant anything to me. But my eyes burned, just looking at her. I wanted to look at her forever.

Dhiju took a hit of a blue liquid in a crystalline cylinder. “Anything?”

It took me several seconds to realize he’d spoken to me. “No, sir. I don’t think she left a trail for us to find.”

Cold.

“It makes no sense,” he said, with a frustration that must have burned him to the marrow. “Everything leaves a trail. In less than one day I could find out what you had for breakfast the day you turned five, check your psych profile and find out which year of your adolescence featured the most vivid erotic dreams; get a full folio on the past fifteen generations of your family and still have time to get a full list of the dangerous recessive genes carried by the second cousins of all the children you went to school with. But everybody’s drawing a blank with her. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she was some kind of mutant Vlhani.”

“It would certainly make her a lot easier to deal with,” said Oskar. “Just send her back to the Ballet, and let nature take its course.”

I would have snapped at the bastard had Dhiju not beaten me to it. “Not an option.”

“Then ship her off-planet,” Oskar shrugged. “Or keep her in detention until the Ballet’s over.”

“I can’t. It’s become bigger than her.” Dhiju looked at me. “In case you haven’t heard, the Ballet’s off.”

I felt no surprise. “They stopped, then?”

“Cold. We weren’t really sure until about an hour ago—it took them that long to wind down—but then they just planted their center whips in the dirt and began to wait. They’ve already sent a message through the Riirgaans that they need her back in order to continue. I’ve been fending off messages from all the other delegations saying I ought to let her, as the Vlhani have jurisdiction here.”

I thought of our superiors back home, who’d no doubt want the Vlhani appeased to preserve future relations. “That kind of pressure’s only going to get worse.”

He emitted a sound midway between a sob and a laugh. “I don’t care how bad it gets. I have a serious problem with suicide. I think anybody foolish enough to choose it as an option is by definition not competent to be trusted with the decision.”

Storm. World.

I thought of all the Vlhani who made that decision every year—who came, as honored pilgrims, to the place where they were destined to dance until their hearts burst. We’d always found a terrible kind of beauty in that ritual . . . but we’d never thought of them as incompetent, or mad, or too foolish to be trusted with the choice. Was that only because we considered them nothing more than giant spiders, not worth saving?

Fire. Love. Danger.

Disturbed, I said, “I was with her, sir. She was one of the most competent people I’ve ever met.”

Dance.

“Not on that issue. It’s still suicide. And I don’t believe in it and I’m not going to let her do it.”

I faced the shield, and watched Isadora. She was running in circles now, so swiftly that she blurred. When she suddenly stopped, placed a palm against one wall, and hung her head, I couldn’t believe it was fatigue. She wasn’t sweating or breathing heavily; she’d just gotten to the point where it made Marionette sense to stop. After a moment, I said, “Has anybody actually tried talking to her directly?”

“That’s all I’ve been doing. I had people in there asking questions until their breath gave out. It’s no good. She just keeps telling us to, uh, crod ourselves.”

World. Dance.

“With all due respect, sir, interrogating her is one thing. Talking to her is another.”

Dhiju came close to reprimanding me, but thought better of it. “Might as well. You’re the only one here who’s ever demonstrated the slightest clue of how to deal with her. Go ahead.”

So I went in.

The containment chamber was equipped with a one-way field, permeable as air from one side but hard as anything in existence on the other. It was invaluable for imprisoning anything too dangerous to be allowed out, which up until now had meant bacteria and small predators. The controls for reversing the polarity were outside the chamber, on a platform within easy reach of Oskar and Dhiju. The second I passed through the silvery sheen at the doorway, I was, effectively, as much a prisoner as she was. But it didn’t feel that way; at the moment, I didn’t want to be anywhere else but with her.

She had her back to me, but she knew who I was even as I entered; I could tell that just by the special way she froze at the sound of my step. She turned, saw me, and with a resignation that hurt more than any words could, leaned back against the opposite wall.

I did not go to her. Instead, I found a nice neutral spot on the wall and faced her from across the width of the chamber. “Hello.”

Her expression would have been strictly neutral were it not for the anger behind those dark, penetrating eyes. Facing those eyes was like being opened up and examined, piece by piece. It should have been unsettling; against my will, I found I liked it.

“I’ve got to hand it to you,” I said, conversationally. “The Vlhani are on strike, the other delegations are going crazy, nobody here has the slightest clue who you are, and I’m supposed to come in here and get the information that everybody else can’t. Who you are. Where you come from, where you got those augmentations, and how you got here.”

Impatience. Establishing that she’d already been through this—that she hadn’t answered the questions before and wouldn’t be answering them now. Wondering just what I thought I was accomplishing by throwing good effort after bad.

And then I folded my arms and said, “The thing is, I really don’t care about any of that. Wherever you come from, it’s just a place. How you got here is just transportation. And as for who put in those augmentations? That’s just a brand name. None of that makes any difference to me at all.”

She rolled her eyes incredulously. “What does?”

“Why.”

“In twenty-five words or less?”

“Counting those? Sure. You have nineteen left.”

She blinked several times, back-counting, then flashed an appreciative smile. “Only if ye ken twenty-five as two words instead of one. Ye shouldn’t.”

“All right. But that still brings you down to . . . uh . . .”

“Seven,” she said, simply. And then: “I’m madly in love with their show.”

Damned if she hadn’t done it, on the dot. We grinned at each other—both of us understanding that she hadn’t told me anything I couldn’t have guessed already, but enjoying the little game anyway. I said: “So am I. So’s everybody on Vlhan, and half the known universe. That doesn’t explain how you came to understand it so well . . . and why you’re so determined to risk your life dancing among them.”

She waggled a finger at me. “Uh-uh, boyo. It’s yer turn. Twenty-five words or less, how can ye say ye love the Show when ye don’t ken it one bit?”

It didn’t come off as rude, the way she asked it—it was a sincere question, expressing sincere bafflement. I measured my response very carefully, needing to both be truthful and match the precision of her answer. “I suppose . . . that if I only loved things I understood perfectly, I’d be living a pretty loveless existence. Sometimes, love is just . . . needing to understand.”

“That’s not love, boyo. That’s just curiosity. Give yerself an extension and riddle me this: What do ye feel when ye watch their show? Do you ken their heart? Their creativity? Their need to do this, even at the edge of dyin’ ?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Some of it.”

“And how do ye ken ye’re not croddin’ the whole thing to bloody gobs? How do ye ken ye’re not seeing tears when the buggies mean laughs? Or that it’s really a big show and not a mungie prayer?”

It was hard to keep my voice level. “Is that what you’re saying, Isadora? That it’s not an art form?”

She shook her head sadly, and dared me with eyes like miniature starscapes. There was pain, there: entire lifetimes of pain. But there was arrogance, too: the kind that comes from being able to understand what so many others cannot. And both were tempered by the distant, but genuine hope that maybe I’d get it after all.

After a moment, I said, “All right. How about I tell you what we think we know, and you tell me how and where we’re sadly mistaken?”

She shrugged. “Ye’re free to toss.”

“All right. The Marionette dance isn’t a conventional symbolic language, like speech, but a holographic imaging system, like whalesong. The waveforms rippling up those whips aren’t transmitting words or concepts, but detailed three-dimensional images. They must be tremendously sophisticated pictures, too, since the amount of information being passed back and forth is huge. And if a Marionette can paint a detailed map of the immediate environment in about ten seconds of strenuous dance, then the Ballet may have enough detail for a complete scale model of this solar system. The problem is, we haven’t been able to translate more than a few simple movements—and even then we think they’re talking down to us.”

Isadora nodded. “Ye’re right. That they be.”

I had made that part up. Excited now, certain she had the key that the rest of us had missed, I leaned forward and said, “But they weren’t talking down to you, were you? They respected you. They made a place for you. How is that? Who are you to them?”

“Someone who kens them.”

“And how is it you understand the dance when we can’t?”

“Because I ken it’s a show, not a mungie code.” When I reacted to that with a mere uncomprehending blink, she just shook her head tiredly, appeared to reconsider silence as an option, and said: “Peer this. There’s a species out in space, known by a name I can’t make me lips say. They’re pitifully boring folks . . . born filing-systems, really . . . but they’re totally tingled to crot by the idea of the human pun. The idea of ringin’ two chimes with one phrase seems as sparkledusty to them as the buggie dance be to us. And their greatest brains been wastin’ years of sweat just tryin’ to ken. Ye can buy the whole libraries they’ve penned about it.”

I seemed to recall reading or hearing about the race in question, at some point in the distant past. “So?”

“So they crod up the whole sorry mess. They don’t ken humor and they don’t ken that a pun’s supposed to be funny. They think it’s zen-time instead . . . a, how-ye-put-it, ironic human commentary on the interconnectedness of all things. Once upon a time, I peered a pair of the dingheads pickin’ apart a old terran comedy about professional athletes with wack names—names that were questions like Who and What and Why. It didn’t seem all that laugh-time, to me, but I could ken it was supposed to be silly—and they didn’t. I vow to ye, Alex, it was like peering a couple of mathematicians dustin’ up over an equation. Like ye folks, they peered the mechanism, and missed the context.”

Dammit, she did know something. I pushed myself off the wall, and went to her. “So tell me the context. You don’t have to give me all of it, if you don’t want to, but something. A clue.”

And she smiled at me. Smiled, with eyes that knew far more than I ever would. “Will it get me back in the show?”

Against my will, I glanced at the featureless wall that concealed the outer lab; I didn’t need to be able to see through it to know what Ambassador Dhiju was doing on the other side. He was leaning forward in his seat, resting his chin on a cradle of locked hands, his eyes narrowing as he waited to see if I’d make any promises he couldn’t allow me to keep. He was probably silently urging me to go ahead; like all career diplomats, he’d spent a lifetime sculpting the truth into the shapes that best suited the needs of the moment, and would see nothing wrong with doing the same now. But he hadn’t been with her in the amphitheater, as I’d been; he hadn’t bartered his life for hers, and been the beneficiary of the sacrifice she made in return; he couldn’t know that it would have been unthinkable for me to even attempt to lie to her. So I came as close to being honest with her as I dared. I said nothing.

She understood, of course. It was inevitable that she would. And though she must have known the answer even before asking the question, it still hit her just as hard; she lowered her face, and looked away, unwilling to let me see what was in her eyes. “Then the deal’s bloody gobbed. I don’t speak one crot more ‘less I get back to the show.”

“But—”

“That’s final.”

After a moment, I understood that it was. It was all she cared about, all she had to negotiate with. Any attempt to pretend otherwise would be an insult. And so I nodded, and went to the door, waiting for Oskar to reverse the field so I could leave.

Except that I was wrong. It wasn’t final, after all; there was still business between us( still something she couldn’t say goodbye to me without saying.

She said: “Alex?”

I looked at her. “What?”

She didn’t meet my eyes: just stared at her feet, as if peering past the floor and past the ground to face a scene now half a day in our past. “Were ye just blowin’ dust, back at the show? Were ye . . . really goin’ to waltz with the buggies and me . . . if I’d not ridden that skimmer out with ye?”

“Absolutely. I wasn’t about to leave there without you.”

She nodded to herself, as if confirming the answer to a question that nobody had bothered to ask out loud . . . then shook her head, flashed a dazzling smile, and, in perfectly proper Human-standard, said: “Then you deserve this much. The Ballet doesn’t end, each year, just because the last dancer dies. Think . . . the persistence of vision.”

7.

We didn’t find out about it until the postmortems, but first blood was shed on a swampy peninsula over a thousand kilometers from our embassy: a place equally inhospitable to both Vlhani and Men, with terrain soft enough to swallow wanderers of either race.

Dr. Kevin McDaniel wasn’t officially attached to the embassy. In truth, he was an exobotanist, on Vlhan as part of an unrelated commercial project having something to do with a certain smelly reed native to the swamps. It may have been important work, but to the rest of us it was nowhere near as compelling as the mysteries of the Vlhani, which interested him not at all. Usually, we only remembered he was on-planet at all because he was a clumsy oaf, and one of us always had to keep him company lest some absentminded misstep leave him drowning in the ooze with nobody to pull him out. It was an annoying detail that everybody lower than Dhiju had pulled at least once. We made jokes about it.

Today, McDaniel’s babysitter was a plump young kinetic pattern analyst by the name of Li-Hsin Chang, who had entered her servitude one year behind me. Li-Hsin had bitterly complained about the duty rotation that had obliged her, and not anybody else, to miss the spectacle of the Ballet in favor of a week spent trudging through muck in the company of the single most boring sentient on the planet. And the strange developments at the amphitheater only made matters worse: even as she sat in the skimmer hovering five meters up and watched McDaniel perform his usual arcane measurements among the reeds, she was deeply plugged into the hytex, absorbing all the latest bulletins about me and Isadora and the Vlhani crisis.

Under the circumstances, Li-Hsin can be forgiven for failing to spot the Vlhani until it was almost upon him.

Vlhani can weigh up to a thousand kilos, but they have a controlled way of running that amounts to keeping most of that weight in the air, and even at full speed they can make significantly less sound than a running man. It’s not deliberate stealth, but tremendous inherent grace. And while even they’re not quite as quiet splashing through muddy swampland as they are galloping over dry, densely packed earth, they still never stumble, never make a misstep, never release one decibel of sound that they don’t absolutely have to. This one’s approach was drowned out until the very last minute by the hum of the skimmer’s drive and the clumsy splashing about of Dr. McDaniel. When Li-Hsin heard a particularly violent splash, she peered over the railing, saw that McDaniel had wandered only a few meters from where he was supposed to be, then heard another, louder, splash from the north.

It was a ten-whip mature Vlhani approaching at top speed. It ran the way Vlhani always run when they push themselves to their limits—spinning its whips like the spokes of a wheel, with the shiny black head at the center. It ran so fast that the whips blurred together in great gray streaks. It ran so fast that it seemed to be flying. And it was coming their way.

Li-Hsin can also be forgiven for not immediately realizing that it was hostile. For one thing, it wasn’t wholly unheard-of for a huge adult Vlhani to be running around in the middle of the swamp. It was unusual, but they did sometimes wander far from their usual habitat. She’d seen a mating pair just the other day. For another thing, Vlhani simply weren’t hostile. They may have been too dangerous to approach during their Ballet, but that was a function of the Ballet, not of the Vlhani. In their everyday existence, they were extraordinarily gentle, Li-Hsin had walked among them without protection for two years, and had developed an easy familiarity with those she saw most frequently. She even considered one or two of them friends—at least, as much as she could when the best our harnesses could do was pipe the meme Friend back and forth. That was enough for her. As it was for me. And the rest of us.

So even when she saw that Dr. McDaniel was directly in its path, it still didn’t occur to her that it might be deliberately attacking him. She did nothing more drastic than just flip on the amps and cry out: “Mac! Get out of the way!”

McDaniel, who’d been too absorbed in his measurements to see or hear the big Vlhani’s approach, glanced up at the skimmer, annoyance creasing his pale, sweaty features. He spotted the Vlhani a second later, stood there dumbfounded, wholly unwilling to believe that this was actually happening to him, then saw that he was about to be run over and leaped to one side, belly-flopping in the middle of a pool of stagnant water. He sank beneath the surface and did not come up for air. Vlhani whips sank deep into the ooze where he had been, with a force that would have pulped him. The Vlhani didn’t even slow down. It was ten meters past him before Li-Hsin even had time to yell, “MAC!”

She grabbed the controls and swooped low over the water where McDaniel had disappeared. He came to the surface choking and spitting, but waving that he was all right. She was about to descend further to pick him up when he spotted the Vlhani, fifty meters away and circling around for another go. Unlike Li-Hsin, he was totally ignorant about the Vlhani, and therefore had no preconceptions to shed; he knew immediately that the attack was real, and that the Vlhan would be on him again long before Li-Hsin managed to pick him up. He frantically waved her off: “Go away! It’s circling back!”

Li-Hsin looked up, and saw that McDaniel was right. If she still had any doubts about its intentions, the speed of its approach would have banished them: were this an accident, it would have slowed down and returned with exaggerated caution, hanging its head at the angle that we’d all come to recognize as mimed remorse. She glanced at McDaniel and shouted: “STAY DOWN!”

McDaniel yelled back: “DON’T—” But it was too late for Li-Hsin to hear him. In one smooth movement, she’d turned the skimmer around, aimed it toward the approaching Vlhani, and instructed it to accelerate. She did this without thinking, and without hesitation, seized by the kind of desperate inventiveness that takes over only when there are no other options available. A direct collision with a skimmer, moving at those speeds, would splatter even the largest Marionette; Li-Hsin had to know that such a crash would certainly kill her too. She probably hoped it would be intimidated enough to duck and run.

Except that it didn’t happen. Just before the moment of collision, the Marionette leaped, and came down on top of the skimmer. Two of its whips were broken at the moment of impact: another one was cleanly amputated by the lift coils. The rest cushioned its landing. The neurec connections, which had so clearly captured all of Li-Hsin’s actions and sensations up until now, now documented her helpless astonishment as she suddenly found herself surrounded by a cage of undulating whips. The Marionette’s head loomed close behind her for an instant, then disappeared out of frame. A whip slashed across the frame, blurred, and then disappeared, leaving her without a right arm.

The horizon behind them spun like a dial.

Then the skimmer crash-landed into the swamp, and both Li-Hsin and the Marionette were decapitated instantly.

It took McDaniel four hours to dig out the hytex and call for help. By then, those of us still left alive were way too busy to hear him . . .

8.

The only question anybody really managed to answer before everything fell to pieces was the precise manner of Isadora’s secret arrival on Vlhan. It was Rory Metcalf who made the connection with a supply transport that, about eight months ago, had entered Vlhan’s atmosphere half a world away from its assigned landing position, come within a hair’s breadth of a landing before seeming to realize that it was in the wrong place, then risen back to 50,000 meters to travel the rest of the way. This might have seemed suspicious at the time, but the bickering pilots had struck everybody as just a couple of incompetents with no real talent for the work. When Rory looked up their courier license, she found that they’d subsequently been arrested on several charges of carrying unregistered passengers. It was a mildly impressive piece of deduction, which probably solved one minor part of the mystery, but still explained absolutely nothing.

And even if we could put together the parts that mattered, we were running out of time.

We’d placed our embassy on an isolated plateau that was both higher and colder than the Vlhani found comfortable—a location we’d chosen not out of fear for our own safety, but common courtesy and respect for their privacy. After all, we could reach any place on their planet within three hours; we could walk among the Vlhani as frequently as they cared to let us, without obtrusively cluttering up any land they were already using. So, like the Riirgaans and the K’cenhowten and the Cid and all the other embassies, we’d placed our cluster of buildings far outside their normal migration patterns, and normally didn’t entertain Vlhani guests more than once or twice a year. Usually, we could stand outside the collection of prefabricated buildings that made up our compound, look down upon the rolling gray hills that surrounded us, and feel completely alone, as if we were the only sentients on the entire planet.

But not today. Today, when a few of us took a break to face the Vlhani sunset, we found a landscape dotted with thousands of spiders. The ones we could see were all approaching from the west; the other embassies reported many more approaching us from every direction, but the herds in the west had been closer, and were first to show up. They didn’t approach in formation, like an army, but in randomly spaced groups of one or two or three, like strangers all heading the same way by coincidence. They moved so quickly that every time they crested the top of a hill their momentum sent them flying in great coltish leaps. The sun behind them turned their elongated shadows into surrealistic tangles. The few that had reached the base of the plateau seemed content to mill about there, looking up at us, their trademark flailing whips now reminding me of nothing so much as fists shaken in anger.

Kathy Ng intoned, “The natives are restless.”

She gave it the special emphasis she used whenever she lifted a quote from the archaic adventure fiction she enjoyed so much; I’d never heard it before. “Do you think we’re going to have to fight them?”

“They certainly look like they’re trying to give us the impression, don’t they?” She bit her lower lip hard enough to turn it white. “I just hope it’s just their ancestral scare-the-shit-out-of-the-bipeds dance, or something.”

“Ancestral or not, it’s working.”

Our chief exopsychologist, Dr. Simmons, tsked paternally. “You’re being ethnocentric, people. We can’t say they’re acting hostile just because, to our eyes, it happens to look that way. Especially since, in all the years we’ve been here, nobody’s ever seen the Vlhani react to any conflict in an aggressive or violent fashion.”

“What about the Ballet?”

“That’s violent, all right . . . but it’s not conflict. It’s a highly stylized, intricately planned annual ritual, choreographed down to the very last step. Which means that it’s about as relevant to typical Vlhani behavior as your birthday party is to the remaining four-hundred-and-ninety-nine days of the year.”

“Which would make me feel a lot better,” said Rory Metcalf, “if not for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“This Ballet hasn’t been typical at all.”

That started everybody arguing at once. I missed most of what got said because Oskar Levine chose that moment to scurry out of the main building and summon me to Dhiju’s quarters. I hesitated just long enough to spare one more look at the army of Marionettes gathering down below, contemplate how long we’d be able to hold them off if we had to, and realize that if it came to that, we wouldn’t even be able to slow them down. We were a peaceful embassy on a peaceful world; we had nothing to fight them with beyond a few inadequate hand-weapons. We might as well start stockpiling sticks and stones . . . and if it came to that, we were all dead.

I shuddered and went to see Dhiju.

A funny thing. Desks, as practical pieces of office furniture, have been obsolete for over one thousand years. They were helpful enough when most work was done on paper, or on computer screens that needed to be supported at approximately eye-level . . . but since none of that’s true anymore, desks no longer serve functions important enough to merit all the space they take up. They’re still used only because they’re such effective psychological tools. There’s something about the distancing effect of that great smooth expanse that inherently magnifies the authority figure seated on the other side. And men like Dhiju know it. When I ran into his office, he was in position behind his, glowering as if from Olympus.

He gestured at the hytex projection floating in the air beside his desk. There were four main images fighting for supremacy there: a panoramic view of the amphitheater, where the participants in the Vlhani Ballet still stood motionless, patiently waiting for the show to go on; another view of the Vlhani gathering at the base of our plateau; the surveillance image of Isadora, serenely doing multijointed leg lifts in the Isolation Lab; and finally, a head shot of Hurrr’poth, looking as grave as his inexpressive Riirgaani face ever allowed him. I was unsure which image I was supposed to look at until Hurrr’poth swelled to fill my entire field of vision. The giant head turned to face me. “Alex,” he said. “The pornographer.”

“Hurrr’poth,” I said. “The criminal.”

He trilled, but it struck me as the Riirgaani equivalent of forced laughter: it went on a little too long, and failed to convey any amusement at all. “I thank you for coming, Alex. This is a very important communication, and since you were with Isadora in the Ballet, I felt that you might possess the keen perspective that your Ambassador Dhiju seems to lack.—Have I disturbed you in any way?”

I glanced at Dhiju, saw only anger, and remained mystified. “Uh . . . no. How can I help you?”

“You can listen,” said Hurrr’poth. “I was telling your Ambassador, here, that I speak not only as the chosen interpreter of the Vlhani people, but as the elected representatives of all the other embassies stationed on Vlhan. The Vlhani have spent the past several hours communicating their wishes on this matter, and we are at their request lodging an official protest against your embassy’s continuing interference with the indigenous culture of this planet.”

Dhiju made an appalled noise. “This is like something out of Kafka.”

“I am unfamiliar with that term, ambassador, but the Vlhani are trying to be fair about this. They understand that, armed with insufficient information, you and Alex acted to preserve the life of a fellow member of your species. They know that this was only natural, under the circumstances, and they bear you no ill will for doing what seemed to make sense at the time. Indeed, they respect you for it. But they also believe that they’ve shown you they consider the woman Isadora an integral part of this year’s Ballet . . . and that, by irresponsibly prohibiting her return to the amphitheater, you are inflicting irrevocable damage upon the most sacred ritual of their entire culture. They demand that you surrender her at once, so the Ballet can continue.”

“Will she die in the Ballet, like they do?”

“Of course,” said Hurrr’poth.

“Then the answer’s No,” said Dhiju.

“You are interfering with a tradition that has lasted hundreds of generations.”

“I am deeply sorry about that, Mr. Hurrr’poth. But Isadora’s not a member of Vlhani tradition. She’s a human being, and as such part of a tradition that abhors suicide. Nobody authorized her presence here, and I’m not about to authorize her participation in any ceremony that ends with her death. The Vlhani will just have to understand that.”

Then Hurrr’poth did trill: but it was a grim, bitter form of amusement . . . one I never would have expected from a sentient I’d imagined a harmless eccentric. “Sir: you are an idiot.”

Dhiju’s natural impulse to show anger crashed head-on with his professional duty to be totally courteous to all the other members of every alien delegation at all times. “Pray tell. Why?”

“Her presence here is not up to you to authorize. It is up to the Vlhani. It is their law and their judgment that applies on this world, and they have clearly recognized her and welcomed her and honored her with an integral position in their Ballet. When you behave as if you are the sole arbiter of who is and who is not supposed to be here, you demonstrate that you understand even less about this species than you understand about your own—which, if you still think the young lady doesn’t know what she’s doing, is saying a lot. If you persist in this course of action, you will only get the Vlhani more angry at you than they already are. And everything that happens from this moment on will be on your head.”

I broke protocol by interrupting: “Are you saying they’ll attack?”

Hurrr’poth faced me directly. “Yes.”

We had no way of knowing that the first skirmish had already taken place; neither Dhiju or I even happened to think of Kevin McDaniel or Li-Hsin Chang, who were half a world away, and well outside the usual Vlhani habitat. After a moment, Dhiju just said, “Understood. I’ll be back in touch with you as soon as I confer with my people.”

“You are making a terrible mistake! The Vlhani—”

Dhiju thumbed a pad beside him. The hytex projection folded up, shrank into a mote of blackness the size of a pea, then faded. Dhiju stuck out his lower lip, made a “t-t-t-t-t” sound from somewhere deep in his throat, and aside from that, remained in place, apparently finding volumes of meaning in the way his hands sat on the smooth desk before him. Eventually, he just said, “Susan.” And a new hytex projection took the place of the one he’d taken away: this one the static image of a girl in her early teens. She was fresh-faced, but wan, and she smiled in the patently artificial way that’s been common to all portraits, captured by any recording media, since the beginning of time.

“My daughter,” he said.

I had no idea what to say. So I lied. “She’s pretty.”

“You think so?—The truth is, I barely even saw her after she turned nine. Her mother and I became just too much of a bad mistake together, and I found it easier to stay away, on one off-world assignment after another. I got letters and recordings, but saw her in person maybe for a couple of months out of every year. And then, one day, when she was fifteen, a friend at a party introduced her to the latest fashionable import from off-world: a sort of . . . vibrating jewel . . . capable of directly stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain. . . .” He shuddered. “It took six months, Alex. Six months of killing herself a little bit more every day. Six months I didn’t even get to hear about until I was rotated home and found her gone.”

He sat there, thinking about that a while, letting Susan’s enlarged, joylessly smiling face accuse him at length.

And then he said: “Every once in a while, some poor bastard gets saddled with the kind of impossible decision that destroys his career and makes his name a curse for the next hundred years.—Go tell the others we’re evacuating. Deadline one hour. After that we’re taking the little gatecrasher with us and leaving everything we haven’t packed behind. Then we’ll take the transports into orbit and wait there until we can summon a ride home.”

My heart pounding past the threshhold of pain, I stepped toward him, faced his gray, deceptively watery eyes, and choked out what he already knew: “They’ll never let us back. You’ll be throwing away all our relations with the Vlhani, and everybody at home will blame you. You know that.”

“Yes. I do.” He looked past me, past the hytex projection, past the wall, and past the entire worsening crisis, and said: “But at least this time I’ll be here to save her.”

9.

The Vlhani were a black horde, covering the hills like flies, and though there were far, far more of them than anybody had ever documented in one place before, it was still impossible to look at them without sensing deliberate choreography at work. Even when threatening war, everything they did was still a dance, albeit a different kind of dance, with nothing graceful or balletic about it. This time, it was more like a march of death, their normally fluid gait reduced to something joyless and rigid that seemed as forced and unnatural coming from them as a goose-step coming from Man. They were packed most densely in the rocky terrain at the foot of our plateau, more crowded by far than anything I’d seen in the amphitheater, but never advancing beyond the rocks, even when the competition for space flattened them like creatures being crushed against an invisible wall. If that wall crumbled, the wave of Vlhani swarming up the slope would be upon us in seconds.

There weren’t many people visible; everybody was too busy performing the frantic business of a last-minute evacuation. That mostly meant clearing out the food stores, the infirmary, the records, and the tool lab; but everybody was human enough to spend a few precious seconds in their own quarters sweeping them clear of anything so personal we couldn’t bear to leave it behind. There wasn’t much of that, though; indentured diplomats don’t get much space for clutter. All I had was a pocket hytex and a length of severed Vlhani whip I’d salvaged from the amphitheater after last year’s Ballet; I irradiated it regularly to discourage decomposition, but time had taken its toll anyway and the chi tin that had once been harder than steel was now soft and spongy and cracked at the edges. Only a few days ago, an unworthy part of me had looked forward to the mass carnage at the Ballet so I could later search the amphitheater for a new coil to seal in permaglass. I remembered that, shuddered, and left the old one untouched on the shelf beside my bed. It was Vlhani, and if we were truly leaving, it belonged to Vlhan.

With twenty minutes to go, it fell to me, as the closest thing we had to an expert on the Isadora problem, to figure out a way to get her onto a transport safely. After all, her enhancements made her physically more than a match for any of us; if she decided to resist, she could easily be as formidable as a Vlhani. Drugs were out, since so much of her was artificial that nobody had any idea how to even begin to figure out what dosages would be safe or even effective on those portions of her anatomy that remained, and the embassy didn’t stock anything that could restrain her or be legitimately used as a weapon.

In the end, I snagged Oskar Levine—who, as I’ve said, I’d never liked much, but who happened to be the only person not doing anything—and armed him with two tanks of compressed cryofoam from the infirmary, one hose strapped to each arm. We kept the stuff on our skimmers in case of injuries in the field; we hadn’t used any at the embassy itself since last year, when Cecilia Lansky came down with a rare form of cancer we couldn’t cure on-site and had to be stored on ice until we could send her home for treatment. There was enough in those two tanks to wrap up a single full-grown Vlhani. If Isadora tried to break, Oskar would foam her.

He tried to talk me out of going in. “Use the intercom. Turn off the field, tell her to come out, I’ll get her in the doorway. It’ll be fast and easy.”

“I know. But I still think I can turn this thing around. I want to talk to her first.”

He gave me the kind of look most people reserve for irredeemable idiots. “If you walk out together, and I see no reason to trust her, I’ll foam both of you.”

“That’s reasonable enough. Long as you get me on a transport.”

“Fine,” he said. “Give me more work to do.”

“Oskar . . .!”

“It’s a joke, jerkoff. Don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of you either way.”

She’d pulled out the folding cot built into the rear wall of the chamber, and curled up to sleep there; a reasonable enough thing to do, given the circumstances, but still one that surprised me, as it was the first genuinely human gesture I’d ever seen from her. Somehow, without my ever realizing it, I had come to think of her as far beyond such considerations as any other perfectly designed machine. But she didn’t look like a machine now: she didn’t even look adult. With her eyes closed, and her knees hugging her belly, and her hands tightly clasped beside her chin, she resembled nothing so much as a little girl dreaming of the magic kingdoms that existed only inside her head. The tattoos on her cheeks could have been make-believe war paint, from a game played by a child . . .

Something stirred in me. A connection, with something. But whatever it was, was too unformed for me to make any sense of it yet.

I knelt down beside her and said: “Isadora.”

The illusion of normalcy was broken as both her arms and legs uncoiled, like liquid things that had never been restricted by bones. When her eyes opened they were already focused on me: wholly unsurprised by my presence, wholly unintimidated by anything I might have to say. The shadow of a smile played about her lips, revealing a warmth that surprised me. She did not get up: merely faced me from that position, and said. “Alex.”

“I thought you’d like a progress report.”

She refused to blink. “That’s fuzzy-pink of ye.”

“The Vlhani have surrounded us. Dhiju’s practically thrown away his career by giving the order to evacuate. We’re packing up, getting out, and taking you with us.”

She hugged her coiled arms a little closer to her chest. “I don’t want to go.”

“Like hell,” I said softly. “Whatever else you are, Isadora, you’re far from stupid. You knew we were watching the Ballet, you knew we would spot you, you knew we’d be honor-bound to try to stop you, and you knew how the Vlhani would react if we succeeded. You could have avoided this whole crisis by explaining everything in advance, or by enhancing yourself so much we couldn’t distinguish you from a Vlhani. Instead, you just made a surprise appearance—and got exactly the response you expected.”

Her eyes closed. “I didn’t ken what ye could do to get me out. Had no idea I’d waltz into a boyo gallant enough to hold himself hostage for me.”

Her tone put the word gallant in little quotes, defanging it, making it a joke . . . but not a bitter one. Encouraged, I pushed on: “And that’s the real reason you’re withholding the explanations, isn’t it? Even why you’re using that ridiculous dialect of yours, when you’ve already proven you can abandon it when you want to. Not because you’re trying to negotiate your way back to the dance. But because you’re trying to put off going back. You don’t really want to die. You’re looking for a way out. Any way out.”

“There is no way out.”

“Just refuse to participate!”

“I can’t do that. It will ruin the show.”

“So one year’s Ballet gets ruined, and the Vlhani are traumatized. But there’s another Ballet next year. So what? What’s really at stake here, Isadora? Why are they so determined to get you back?”

“Ye wouldn’t ken.”

“I . . . ken . . . enough to know when they’re angry, and when they’re afraid, and when they’re so desperate they don’t know what to do . . . but most importantly, enough to know when they’re holding back. They could have overrun us a couple of hours ago, and they haven’t. Because they don’t want to hurt us. They don’t want to hurt anybody . . . but they’re still ready to march all over us to get you back. Why is that, Isadora? What’s so special about you that they can’t just replace you with one of their own? And what’s so special about them that you can’t say no?”

In the silence that followed, I could almost hear Oskar fidgeting, outside the door . . . maybe even Dhiju himself checking his timetables and demanding to know just where the hell I was . . . but it was worth it. Her eyes glistened, and she faced her delicately tooled fingers. “Alex . . . have you ever dreamed of something so much, for so long, that you had to have it . . . even though you still weren’t certain it was what you wanted?”

I just waited.

She still didn’t look at me. “If I tell you, will it get me back to the Ballet?”

“Maybe yes and maybe no . . . but either way it might stop a whole lot of good people from getting hurt.”

She sat up then—a wholly unremarkable act rendered remarkable by the graceful precision with which she performed it. When a normal person rises from a prone position, their center of gravity shifts. Their muscles come into play, and there’s a subliminal moment of danger when they’re momentarily off-balance. It’s not something you notice in the way normal people move . . . unless you’ve seen Isadora, simply gliding from one position to the other. She rubbed the bridge of her nose, smiled ruefully, and once again spoke in a voice free of the thick accent she’d used to define herself for me. “Have to hand it to you, Alex . . . you know what strings to pull.”

I rose from my kneeling position and sat down beside her. “I better. We’re on a planet of Marionettes.”

She snorted. “Should I go for twenty-five words or less?”

“Let’s not limit ourselves.”

“When I was eight years old, I was living in my Uncle’s house, as his provisional ward pending . . . well, where I came from, there was a whole legal lexicon for such things, and I don’t really have to go into it. The Steinhoff recordings of the ’57 Ballet had just come out; I had myself plugged into the neurec, with the feed down low so I could still pay attention to everybody else in the house . . . not full gain, because I always had this need to know everything that’s going on around me. And my Uncle and his husband were plugged in too, also low because they were the kind of people who couldn’t ever stop talking about everything they saw, and my Uncle recited something straight off the hytex about how dark and mysterious the Vlhani were, and how their minds were so dark and alien that no human would ever understand them.

“It was the sort of platitude-laden gibberish that people learn to repeat so they can imagine themselves clever without ever bothering to think an original thought themselves. And I was eight years old . . . mesmerized by what I was watching . . . and I knew that what my uncle was saying was gibberish. Because it was the third recording I’d seen, over the past few months . . . and I was beginning to have some idea what the Vlhani were getting at.”

I swallowed. “How?”

“Crod it, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just some quirk in me that visualizes things differently, something in my perceptions that’s a little more Vlhani than human being . . . and maybe I was just young and impressionable enough to let the message seep through. Maybe it’s even a question of talent . . . something that transcended species and gave me the ability to understand when you and Dhiju and my Uncle just saw dancing buggies. But put that aside. What matters is that I saw one tiny aspect of the Ballet clearer than the Vlhani. I saw a critical flaw in their performance, something they didn’t even see themselves . . . something that made their Ballet a lie, and that only I knew how to correct.” She groped for my hand, found it, and gave me a tight squeeze. “I can’t describe what it was like, Alex. It was like . . . hearing a single discordant note in the greatest symphony ever written . . . and knowing that only I knew how to correct it. And that night I slipped out the window and ran away from home, determined to make it to Vlhan.”

I squeezed her hand right back. It felt human enough: nothing at all like the intricate arrangement of circuitry and plastics I knew it to be. “You were eight years old. How far could you get?”

“As far as I had to. You don’t understand: I wasn’t really eight years old anymore. The part of me that had been a child was dead. In its place was just this hungry, needful thing, with . . . with a responsibility. . . .” She sighed. “I don’t want to tell you all the risks I took, all the laws I broke, all the ways I . . . indentured myself . . . to get where I needed to go . . . but I had a primitive version of these enhancements within two years . . . and I was on Vlhan, communicating with the spiders, within four. They saw I was right, and let me know that when the time came for them to incorporate my ideas, I would have to be the one to dance them. As I always knew.”

“But you’re not a Vlhani. You can’t move like a Vlhani, no matter what crazy modifications you’ve made to yourself.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Maybe so. But don’t you see? That doesn’t matter. Art isn’t just technique, in any culture . . . it’s also Content. It’s understanding not just How, but also What, to express. And while I may not know everything the Vlhani do . . . the Vlhani still saw that I had something to offer them. Something they hadn’t even known they needed. And I’ve spent all the years since then preparing for that.”

“For Death.”

“You think I don’t have doubts? That I genuinely, honestly want to die? I want to have a life. I want to have all the things other people have. But I have no choice. It’s my responsibility. I have to do this.”

“No you don’t! What if I said that the Vlhani have no right to ask this of you? What if I said that you matter more than the Ballet? What if I said that the Vlhani will just have to muddle along without you, and try again next time?”

“You’d be demonstrating that you understand nothing,” she said. “Remember the Persistence of Vision—”

And maybe it was the sheer madness of everything that had happened between us, and maybe it was the memory of that one moment in the amphitheater when I sensed some small part of how much the Marionettes counted on her, and maybe it was a single moment of perfect telepathy . . . but all of a sudden the bottom dropped out of the universe, and I understood exactly what she’d been getting at. She saw the light dawn, and the most tragic thing happened to her eyes: they filled up with fresh hope she did not necessarily want.

Her hand squeezed mine again, this time with enough pressure to cross the threshhold of pain. I didn’t particularly mind.

I said, “Maybe—”

And that was really all I had a chance to say.

10.

She could have told us we were running out of time. She could have let us know that the Vlhani have a calendar, of sorts—not a written one, since they have no writing, but one they continually calculate themselves, using the passing of the seasons and the movement of the stars across the sky. She could have let us know that they placed an almost astrological importance on such things, especially where the Ballet is concerned; and that while, by their lights, it’s all right to put off the Ballet for maybe one or two of their days, everything was lost if they permitted us to delay the festivities much more than that. I’m certain she knew all that: she understood more about the Vlhani than any other human being who had ever lived.

Some of the people who later arrived to pick up the pieces said that Isadora as good as murdered everybody who died. They’re wrong. Because Isadora also understood about us, and she knew that we wouldn’t have listened, any more than we’d listened to Hurrr’poth, who’d advised me to leave her alone in the first place. And I think that even she never expected the attack to come as soon as it did. If she had, she might have tried to warn us harder . . .

In any event, we didn’t need to see outside to know that something very bad was happening. The walls and floor shook hard enough to make me think of charging cavalry, trying but failing to keep out the sounds of the invasion in progress outside: shouting, skimmers flying low overhead, wounds being ripped in buildings, and the thunderous drumbeat of thousands upon thousands of heavy metallic whips pounding holes in the ground. I shouted out the stupidest question imaginable: “Oskar! What’s going on out there?”

The voice that emerged from the intercom was sweaty and driven by panic. “I don’t know—I’m hearing—”

I found the wherewithal to ask the question properly. “Oskar! Are the spiders attacking?”

A siren wailed. Our emergency warning system. Installed as a matter of policy, not because anybody had ever expected it to be used. Against that, Oskar’s voice was tinny and distant: “Yeah. Yeah, Alex, I think they are.”

“Shit,” I said, with feeling.

Isadora said, “We have to let them know I’m going back to the Ballet.”

“To hell with that,” I said. I patched in to Oskar again: “All right, stay close. Let us out in two minutes. And keep your hose ready; you might have to use the foam.”

Somewhere not very far away, something metallic—a skimmer, probably—smashed into pieces with enough force to drown out every other sound in the universe. The silence that followed was one of those completely soundless intervals that happen randomly even in the midst of totally uncontrolled destruction—that don’t signal the end of the destruction, but merely serve to punctuate it, putting everything that follows in parentheses. By the time Oskar spoke again, the pounding had resumed, and I had to strain to make out his voice. He said: “Take your time. I’m sure as hell not going out there alone.”

I turned to Isadora. “You guided us past the Vlhani before. You’re going to have to do it again.”

She was stunned. “It’s two completely different situations, Alex. The Ballet was choreographed. I knew every move, I could predict where the Vlhani were going to be. This is chaos: a thousand individuals rioting in panic. I’m not going to have much more of a clue out there than you do. If I don’t let them know you’re taking me back to the Ballet—”

“Lie to them.”

“Their language can’t be lied in. It’s . . . like you said, a holographic imaging system, painting a perception of the world. To lie, I’d have to—”

“Then at least get them to back off while we make our way past them.”

“I don’t know they’ll all listen. Some of them have got to be half-insane with grief. Some of them are going to want to drag me back to the Ballet by force, others are going to hate me so much that they’ll fall all over themselves trying to kill me. I don’t know if—”

I grabbed her by the upper arm. “Isadora. Enough of Can’ts. Can you at least get us to a skimmer and into the air?”

She stared at me, stunned. “Just us?”

“And Oskar. And anybody else we can save. Can you do that?”

For one horrible second there, I thought she was going to offer the condition that I allow her to return to the Ballet. I thought that she truly wouldn’t care about all our lives, or for anything beyond going back to this destiny she’d selected for herself; that she would seize upon the opportunity to blackmail us into giving her what she wanted. I expected it. I waited for it.

Her eyes narrowed. And she said: “Yeah. I can try.”

I had Oskar reverse the field, and we ran for it.

11.

Neither Oskar nor I had the time to find and don a whip harness, but by the time we got outside, we saw that they would have been superfluous anyway.

The compound had been overrun by Vlhani.

A dozen had attacked the dormitory building. Four were on the roof, punching holes in the building with repeated blows from their long flailing whips. The rest had staked out the windows, and were busily using their whips to probe inside. One gave a sharp tug, and pulled something scarlet and ragged and human out the window.

One of the spiders towered over Foster Simmons and Kathy Ng, rotating in place so quickly that its whips strobed, becoming a transparent gray blur, behind which Foster and Kathy knelt bloody and imprisoned and screaming. The spider didn’t seem particularly inclined to tighten its grip and slice them to ribbons—but they must have tried to get past it, because Foster’s severed hand lay by itself only a few feet away. His whip harness whined Hurt Help Hurt Help, to no avail. I couldn’t see enough to tell if Kathy was hurt too.

Rory Metcalf and a bunch of others had gotten to one of the skimmers. They’d managed to take off, but a group of three Vlhani anchored to the ground had reached up and wrapped their whips around the housing. The skimmer strained in mid-air, veering from one side to the other in a vain attempt to break free. Rory pounded at one of the whips with her bare hands. As I watched, the skimmer lurched in a random direction and was promptly reined back in, but not before a burly figure I recognized as Wesley Harris flipped over the side and hit the ground hard.

Ambassador Dhi ju staggered through the midst of the carnage, clearly moved by it without ever being touched by it; beyond the fresh bruise on his forehead and a shallow cut on his upper arm, he wasn’t hurt at all. He walked blindly, without making any special attempt to avoid the Marionettes striding back and forth across the compound; and though they made no special attempt to avoid him either, their long sinuous whips stabbed the ground to the right and the left and the rear of him without once hitting him. When I got close enough to grab him by the hand I took a close look at his eyes and recognized his secret as the luck of the intoxicated: in trying to dull the pain of what had to be the greatest defeat of his life, he’d pumped himself up with so many recreationals that he simply didn’t see anything unusual about the chaos around him. I had to shout his name three times before he recognized it and followed us.

A ten-whip Marionette slashed at me. A cold wave knocked me back; I hit the ground with patches of cryofoam stealing pieces of sensation from my upper arms. The Marionette lay on the ground, four of its whips paralyzed, the others still flailing. Oskar stared, unwilling to believe that he was the one who’d brought it down. I caught a momentary glimpse of the dormitory building collapsing in on itself, saw Isadora frantically signing something in the air above her head, then spotted the silver glint of parked skimmers behind the commissary. There were several Vlhani blocking the way between us and that holy grail, but it was as good a direction as any. I yanked the mumbling Dhiju out of the nearest Marionette’s reach, and yelled “There!” We ran for it.

On our way there, the Marionette tethering Rory’s skimmer succeeded in upending it and tossing her out. Half a dozen indentures, some already wounded, fell too far to the ground. I turned, and caught a glimpse of Rory getting batted to one side by a flailing whip. She got up limping and with one hand clutched to her side. The three Vlhani released the now unoccupied skimmer (which rocketed over the edge of the plateau and plowed at full speed into a fresh assault wave of Vlhani), then converged upon her. I heard her shout as three of the newer indentures, who’d somehow avoided getting hurt or killed or trapped so far, overcame their panic enough to dart in her direction. One went down. I didn’t get to see what happened to Rory or the others, because that’s when the big bull Vlhani got me.

It wasn’t the first time I’d been lifted into the air by a Marionette. They were peaceful, playful people most of the time, and some of them liked to hoist humans in their whips as a way of saying hello. They’d always indicated their intentions before doing so, and always shown a keen and gentle understanding of the fragility of human flesh. Not so now. This one looped its whip around me from behind and yanked me into the air with a force that realigned my vertebrae. I didn’t know I’d been grabbed until I was already off the ground, being spun around and around so fast that the compound and the people and the rampaging Marionettes were reduced to undifferentiated streaks of color. As its whip tightened around my belly, the air whuffed from my open mouth, and I realized that this was the moment I was going to die.

And then the world stopped spinning and about thirty seconds later my head stopped spinning with it and I stared dazed and confused at a sky dominated by the sun, which abruptly up-ended and was replaced by the ground as the whip holding me circled around and showed me the reason I wasn’t dead.

Isadora.

Face flushed, eyes desperate.

Forehead covered with a sheen of fear.

Arms in the air, twisting into impossible wrought-iron loops and curves, circling around each other in ways that hurt the mind to imagine.

The Marionette lowered me gently to the ground, placing me in a standing position, though I was so dizzy that I almost immediately tumbled to my knees. Then it not only stood guard over us, as Oskar and Isadora helped me to my feet; but also silently escorted us, as they helped Dhiju and me stumble drunkenly toward the skimmers.

There were five of the vehicles parked behind the commissary. None were intact. The Vlhani had pounded three into unrecognizable masses of twisted metal and plastic; torn out the hytex and propulsion systems of the fourth; turned the fifth into a collection of dents and broken instrumentation that may have looked like hell, but seemed capable of wobbly flight. The seats had been ripped out, leaving only the metal housings. We got in anyway. The Vlhani protecting us merely looked down at us impassively, flailing its whips in a manner that could have meant anything at all.

I managed to ask Isadora one question as Oskar lifted off: “Did you tell it you were going back to the Ballet?”

She refused to look at me. “I told you: it’s next to impossible to lie to them. I don’t know enough of the future to promise that.”

“Then . . . what did you tell it?”

“That you were my friend. And that, whatever happened, I wouldn’t dance if you died.”

Oskar flew low over the embattled compound, looking for other people to save. Everybody we saw was either dead or too tightly surrounded by Vlhani to go after. I saw several indentures running zigzags through the wreckage, clumsily dodging the whips that herded them from one near miss to the next. I saw a few others who through exhaustion or despair had simply given up running; they knelt in the middle of the carnage, hostages to the mercy of the spiders. About half the people I saw were wearing whip harnesses, their little windup cables seeming a pathetic joke in light of all the real whips raining destruction all around them.

The one time Oskar saw an opportunity to save somebody, and tried to go in, about twenty Marionettes went after us, with great springing leaps that drove them thirty meters straight up. We hadn’t expected that at all; none of us, with the possible exception of Isadora, even had any idea they could jump. One collided with the skimmer so hard we almost flipped, then grabbed at us in a clumsy attempt to grab hold before falling back down to earth. Oskar took us a hundred meters higher up, circled away from the plateau to put us even further out of their reach, then wiped fresh blood from a gash in his forehead and said: “So? Is there even anyplace to go?”

Dhiju murmured something incomprehensible. Isadora and I glanced at each other. We held the look a little longer than we had to, exchanging recriminations, apologies, thanks, regrets . . . and more. Neither one of us wanted to break the silence.

In the end, I spared her that much, at least.

I said, “The amphitheater.”

12.

We were damaged too badly to make top speed, but the wind-bubble did curl over us when we asked it to, so we were able to go supersonic. At that, it would take us three hours instead of the usual forty minutes to reach the amphitheater . . . which simultaneously seemed too long and not long enough.

I called the Riirgaans. They patched me through to Hurrr’poth, who was—unsurprisingly—already in the air taking a rescue squad to our plateau. He’d started prepping the mission when I pulled Isadora from the Ballet. He’d suspected what was coming, too; had even tried to warn me, more than once. Even so, I had trouble seeing his help as magnanimous. When he jokingly called me pornographer, I disconnected him.

Less than two hours passed before Oskar and I used up our store of conversation, and Isadora crawled off into the rear screen to stare wordlessly at the landscape racing by down below. Under the circumstances, I was almost grateful when awareness limped back into Dhiju’s eyes. He croaked: “Y-you’re not taking her back . . .”

I spoke in a tightly controlled whisper, because I didn’t want Isadora to hear. “I’m sorry, sir. But yes, we are.”

He tried to muster up enough strength to be indignant. “I . . . specifically ordered . . .”

“I know. And I’m still hoping to work out a way where it doesn’t have to happen. But we have to do this. We have no choice.”

“They’re killers,” he said, almost petulantly. “We owe them nothing.

Now that they’ve murdered everybody, they don’t even have anything left to threaten us with. We don’t have to throw good blood after bad. We can still get her off-world. We can still save her. We can still . . .”

“The persistence of vision,” I murmured, hearing not my own voice, but hers.

“What?”

“The persistence of vision.” When Dhiju showed no signs of comprehension, I shook my head, as if sheer denial could erase everything I knew. Oskar must have sensed something wrong, just about then, because he left the controls and took a seat between us, looking haggard and grim and desperate to understand. I didn’t acknowledge him, or even Dhiju, at the moment, I was too lost in the size of it, too unable to fit other people into a universe which had suddenly changed all shape and form. “You can’t even blame them,” I said, distantly. “They thought they were going to lose everything. They had to go mad.”

“You’re not making any sense,” crabbed Dhiju.

Isadora didn’t turn around even then, but then she didn’t have to. I knew she was listening. I shook my head to fight off the shock, and spoke as earnestly as I could, in words meant for all of us. “It’s not something I’m comfortable knowing, sir. But with all the things she’s said, and all the things that have happened, I’ve begun to understand, a little. And I’ve learned . . . that we never had the slightest idea how big this was, for them. We knew their language was holographic. We knew they were drawing pictures for each other. We knew that whatever they were making with the Ballet was more important to them than their lives. And we were right about all that. But we also thought that a new Ballet began and ended every year . . . and in that we were wrong. The picture they paint, sir . . . it’s just a single frame. And it blends together, in their minds, with the picture they painted last year . . . and the one they’re going to paint one year from now. All arranged in sequence, and merged by the persistence of vision . . .”

“A motion picture,” Oskar said hoarsely.

Dhiju’s eyes flickered in his direction, then bored in on mine. “So?”

“So that’s why she can’t quit. For the same reason she surrendered when I threatened my own life. Because she’s driven by responsibility. And she knows that if she quit it wouldn’t just ruin one Ballet—which would traumatize the whole species but still leave them room to rebuild. No. It would shatter a single evolving work of art that they’ve been creating for the better part of their history. It would destroy everything they’ve ever been, everything they’ve ever dreamed about, and everything they’ve ever tried to accomplish. It would leave them with nothing to live for. And that’s why she can’t quit. Because it’s either her life . . . or the lives of every Vlhani that ever lived.”

Oskar breathed, “Holy,” utterly forgetting to specify a Holy What.

Dhiju remained silent. He just looked at me, and then at Oskar, and then at Isadora, who still sat staring out the screen, giving no indication that she heard any one of us. And then he turned back to me, and said, “I’m sorry, Alex. But even if this theory bears any relation to reality, which I doubt, it changes nothing. I’m still ordering you to stop her.”

Dammit, he had to understand. “Like I said, sir . . . I intend to try. I don’t want her to die any more than you do. But the Vlhani—”

He drowned me out. “The Vlhani are not my problem! It’s not my fault they’ve dedicated themselves to this thing! Their insanity is not my responsibility—and hers is! I won’t let her kill herself! And I’m ordering you to turn this crate around and demand asylum at one of the other embassies!”

“I can’t. I have to leave our options open . . . in case there’s no other way.”

Dhiju stared, unwilling to believe that a third-year indenture would risk everything by daring to defy him. He wrested control of his voice, and spoke with the kind of controlled quiet that can be heard in the middle of an explosion. “Alex. If you don’t do what I say within the next five seconds, I’ll consider it a gross act of insubordination and extend your contract fifty years.”

Oskar said: “Then you’ll have to extend mine too.”

I glanced at Oskar, astonished. I hadn’t expected him to join in my mutiny, I’d been counting on Isadora to help me overcome the two of them. But he faced Dhiju with the stoic intractability of a brick wall, and he gathered up the cryofoam harness, and he held it in his hand, to demonstrate what awaited if Dhiju tried to interfere in any way. It was funny. I’d never liked him, not even the slightest bit; he’d never been anything more to me than just somebody I had to deal with in order to do my job. But right now, I found myself hard-pressed to remember exactly why that was.

As for Dhi ju, he nodded, unsurprised, all the strength going out of him all at once. And he reached into the pocket of his tunic and took out one of his vials of blue liquid and swallowed it down in a gulp. He closed his eyes before we got to see them go fuzzy and dilated again, and murmured, “You’re both throwing away the rest of your lives.”

I began to protest, but Oskar rode me out. “No, Alex . . . that’s fair. Get out of the way and I’ll foam him, so he doesn’t have to watch.”

After a moment, I complied. Why not? Had I been in Dhiju’s position, I wouldn’t have wanted to be conscious either. And the ambient temperature in the skimmer dropped thirty degrees as the liquid bubbling sound filled the air around us.

13.

I sat beside Isadora for much of the hour that remained of our flight, not speaking, just making my presence known. Not that she spent all of that remaining hour or so just looking out the screen. All it showed was a nondescript series of hills and valleys and plains and lakes, none of which were by themselves particularly different from the those that puckered the landscape of ten million other worlds. Sometimes we passed over small herds of Vlhani, who were visible only as black dots against brown fields; if they heard the hum of our drive and looked up, to catch a glimpse of the vehicle bearing this year’s most honored dancer, it wasn’t what she needed to see. And so she spent most of that last hour just quietly sitting with me, not speaking much, but not remaining entirely quiet either: just sharing the space, and the wait, for that place which we both knew we’d reach all too soon.

Near the end of that hour, I asked her about the markings on her cheeks, already suspecting what she’d tell me. And I was right: they were merely desperate affectations left over from her first few days on her own—the legacy of an eight-year-old girl struggling to re-invent herself as she finagled her way from one world to another. Both they, and her made-up slang, were remnants of a past she’d created for herself—the kind of past that only could have been created by a frightened child forced to become adult before her time. I thought about the long hours Rory had spent searching her databases for a society that used those ritual markings, and those idioms . . . and wondered whether she’d still be alive to laugh about it when I told her.

Not long after that, I began to spot landmarks—the otherwise nondescript rock formations and dried riverbeds that my previous journeys to this place had taught me to recognize as the vicinity of the amphitheater. When Oskar pointed out a cratered plain pockmarked by the tracks of the one hundred thousand Vlhani dancers who had passed this way on their journey to the place where they were scheduled to die, my stomach seized up. And when we saw the Ballet . . .

. . . it had always been a magnificent sight. It still was. But today was the first time it filled me with dread.

Seen from a distance, with or without rangeviewers: a sliver cut into the face of the planet, filled with a gleaming black sea that swelled and surged like an intelligent amoeba. With the reflective Vlhani skin glowing red in the light of the rising sun, it looked like a lake of fire. An unworthy part of me wished for plasma cannons so I could make it one.

As we drew closer, we saw that not all of the Vlhani were in the amphitheater itself—there were several hundred gathered above the northern rim, arranged in two semicircular mobs with a single wide pathway between them. The pathway led straight to the heart of the Ballet. An invitation, set out for Isadora.

As for the viewing stand on the opposite rim: it was packed again. Not quite to capacity—since this time, there were no humans and only a few Riirgaans in the seats—but close enough to let me know that all of the alien delegations had returned to their places, eager to see the Ballet resume as scheduled. From this side of the amphitheater, it was easy to hate them, for their eagerness to see that which I would have given anything to stop. Would any of them mourn the Vlhani who died? Would any mourn Isadora?

Oskar told the skimmer to hover, then came over and knelt beside us. His eyes were tearing. “I was . . . going over this in my head. About what we’re doing . . . what we’re about to let her do. I kept . . . thinking . . . that there had to be some other way. And I think I have one.”

Isadora’s smile was grateful, but without much hope. “Oh?”

“Participate via hytex.”

It hit me like an electric current wired right into the spine. “What?”

“You heard me,” said Oskar. He turned to her. “You can dance your part somewhere safe; we’ll rig up a micro-remote to hover over the amphitheater and broadcast your image wherever you have to be. You can do everything you have to do without being anywhere near the Vlhani when they start losing muscle control.”

My heart pounded in my chest. “Isadora! Would that work?”

She shook her head sadly. “If the Vlhani were human, maybe. But they don’t see on the same wavelengths.”

“We can recalibrate! Project something they can see! Even sound, if we need to! Dammit, Isadora, we know so much more than you think! Give us a couple of hours to arrange it, and you’ll live!”

“But don’t you see what an insult that would be? All those Vlhani dying, and their most honored guest staying alive by remote control? Showing herself above them, by continuing to walk and breathe while everybody who waited for her dies? I can’t mock them that way. I won’t.”

“The spiders killed a lot of good people today,” Oskar pleaded. “They can use a little mockery.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss him. “But, please. I have to do this. If that means anything to you, please land so I can get it over with.”

He lowered his head, shuddered, and went off to the controls.

For me, it was not like we were sinking. It was like the ground was rising to meet us; like the entire planet was a single predator, and the horizons were razor-studded jaws inexorably closing shut. It was hard to remember that neither Oscar nor Dhiju nor I were in the same danger Isadora was: if we just stayed in the skimmer, let her disembark and then took off, the only person being swallowed whole today was the strange, beautiful, terrified but unwavering woman who knelt beside me. It didn’t make me feel any safer. If she died, it would still be too much like dying myself.

We were still some distance from the ground when I said: “Isadora.”

She abandoned the view and looked at me. “Alex.”

“Was everything you told the Vlhani true? Back at the compound?”

She smiled sadly. “I told you. It’s impossible to lie to them.”

“Then please. Listen. You don’t have to do this. There are alternatives. You can make them understand—”

She hugged me. “Thank you. But no. I have to do this.”

. . . and then she tightened her arms on the edge of the Skimmer and lightly jumped to the ground.

We were still about twenty meters up, so both Oskar and I yelped, instinctively certain that she’d just leaped to her death. But no: when I leaned over the edge I saw her lightly touch ground, wave at me, and run toward the amphitheater. She was as fast as one of them; before I even had time to react she had disappeared among the Vlhani.

I wasn’t enhanced. There was no way I’d ever be able to catch her. But catching her was not part of the plan. I’d always known that she had to do what she had to do.

Now it was my turn.

I shouted at Oskar. “For Christ’s sake! Land this thing! I have to go out there and talk to them!”

“Talk to—” Oskar started. “Are you out of your mind?”

“Just do it! Now!”

He aimed for a spot fifty meters from the Vlhani spectators. As we landed, I said, “Don’t wait for me, I’ll be okay! Just get back to the embassy and see if you can help any of the others!”

“B-but . . . what are you talking about, you can’t—”

I leaped over the side and hit the ground running.

All my instincts rebelled against the idea of charging creatures whom I’d so recently seen on the rampage. But the part of my mind still capable of remaining rational knew that I’d be in no danger from them at all; they no longer had any need to hurt me. They already had Isadora. If I had any fear at all it was that they would be able to recognize me as the one who’d rescued her once before, that for fear of me doing it again they’d bar my way and refuse to allow me into the amphitheater.

They didn’t. The ones on the rim just stood passively by as I ran among them, using the same path they’d cleared for Isadora. Their heads did swivel to watch me as I passed; expressionless globes that could have been registering annoyance, or disgust, or pity, or nothing at all. I like to think that they recognized compulsion when they saw it: that they didn’t stop me because they knew stopping me would do no good.

Maybe, in that, I reminded them of Isadora.

I made it over the edge of the bowl and began to half-run, half-fall, down the slope. It was not a gentle grade, like the place where I’d found her the first time, but a dirt slide that with a few more degrees of pitch would have begun to qualify as a cliff. I couldn’t remain upright and stay out of the way of the dancing Vlhani at the same time; I allowed myself to fall on my rear end and slide. I caught a glimpse of the viewing stand on the southern rim and wondered if anybody there could see me, if any of them were feeling little twinges of horror at the thought of the great spectacle being delayed yet again. Not that I cared; all I cared about, all I worried about, was Isadora. And she was nowhere in sight.

I came to rest in a sea of slashing whips. There was blood in my mouth and on the backs of my hands. The Vlhani around me were so densely packed that I couldn’t see more than twenty yards in any direction. Their whips, waving in the air above their heads, spun so passionately that the whirrs of their passage drowned out everything, even the ragged rasp of my breath.

Isadora wasn’t around to lead me out, this time.

That didn’t matter. What mattered was being here.

Because though I didn’t understand Vlhani dance (and didn’t even have the harness that would have physically equipped me to dance it), the language barrier has always been a poor excuse for not making the attempt to communicate.

And as Isadora herself had said: Art isn’t just technique, in any culture . . . it’s also Content. It’s understanding not just How, but also What to express.

So I stood up, and took a deep breath, and appealed to them in the only way I knew how. With words. I spoke to them in sounds they couldn’t possibly understand, hoping that the feelings would come through. I painted a word-picture that not only apologized for never truly understanding them before, but also mourned and celebrated the differences between us. It was a picture that flashed upon my friends lying dead or wounded at the embassy, and of just how many light-years they’d traveled to meet such an end; it was a picture that talked about how they’d deserved more, then came back to Isadora and how she deserved more too. It was a picture of a young woman who’d already given up everything—her home, her childhood, her normality, and now, probably, her life—for the Vlhani. I let them know that, however they measured such things, it was a sacrifice: and that it was a sacrifice only they were empowered to stop. And finally, I let them know how beautiful she was: as beautiful, in her own way, as their Ballet, and how much it mattered to me that she still be alive when the last dancing Vlhani fell to the trampled earth.

I never spoke at such length, or with such eloquence, in my entire life.

Had they understood the language, I would have broken their hearts.

But even as I poured everything I had into my words, I knew that I was nothing to them but a yapping little creature making noise. They surrounded me without reacting to me, their great spherical heads bobbing like toys.

And when I finally ran down, exhausted, unable to plead any more, unable to think of anything else that I hadn’t already said a dozen times, a Vlhani moved toward me, so gracefully that its whips barely seemed to brush the ground. One of its whips came down, gently curled around my waist, and lifted me up to the head. I had the distinct impression of eyes studying me, even though Vlhani don’t have eyes; the head merely rotated first one way, then the other, in no way conveying any expression at all. Out of reflex I reached out and placed a palm against its cool, polished surface, thinking of the alien brain that sat pulsing beneath. What did it think of me? Did it think me strange? Ungraceful? Ugly or beautiful?

It passed me to another Vlhani further up the slope. Which passed me to another one, and then to another one after that; until I was handed over to the ones standing up on the northern rim, who gently put me down and encircled me to ensure I wouldn’t dash into the amphitheater again.

They needn’t have bothered. I was done.

There was nothing left.

14.

Many hours later, the Riirgaan aircruiser flew in from the south, circled above me, and came to a rest on packed dirt a short distance away. The Vlhani who’d come to watch the Ballet milled around us, taking special care not to step on me or inconvenience the aircraft in any way. Rory and Oskar were both aboard, looking tearful and exhausted. They gave me weak little waves as Hurrr’poth hopped over the side, approached me, and then, folding his limbs in a manner that must have been painfully uncomfortable for a Riirgaan, knelt by my side. His face was as expressionless as always, but there was a tentative, concerned, uncharacteristically deferential manner to the way he regarded me. I mistook it for simple respect for my grief, and said nothing.

At length he said, “Alex.”

I asked him: “How many dead?”

“Vlhani or humans?”

I was in no mood to care about Vlhani. “You know I meant humans!”

“Seventeen. About half your delegation. Foster Simmons, Li-Hsin Chang, Kathy Ng . . .” When he saw how every name made me wince, he trailed off. “It could have been much worse. Almost half your number survived.”

“And Isadora? Did she?”

He placed a reptilian hand on my shoulder. “No.”

So I hadn’t pulled off the impossible miracle after all. For all these hours, I’d dared to persuade myself that I might have. I thought of her eyes, and the way she moved, and how I’d been the one to deliver her to the moment of her death, and I just knelt there, my shoulders shaking and my mind spinning between the rustle of the wind and the beating of my triphammer heart.

And then, once again, Hurrr’poth said, “Alex.”

I refused to look at him. “What.”

“I do not know if this will make a difference to you . . . but everybody among the spectators saw what you tried to do for her. What you did do for her. Everybody witnessed it: all the delegations. . . . and, soon, thanks to the holos and neurecs, all their worlds.”

I closed my eyes more tightly. Yes, that was all I needed. To have the single greatest failure of my life played endlessly throughout the universe. “And?”

“And,” he said, “it was not just Isadora and the Vlhani who danced magnificently today.”

Whereupon he stood, and returned to the aircruiser, leaving me alone with that.

Neither Hurrr’poth nor Rory nor Oskar came out to hurry me.

Eventually, I got off my knees, and went to them. Not because I’d accepted what he’d had to say. But because the show was done, and it was time for all the performers to go home.

15.

The Riirgaans offered Oskar and me citizenship and diplomatic immunity. Oskar took the deal, I didn’t. Oskar went home, legally nonhuman; I was court-martialed, got twenty years added to my contract, and went to the rancid, half-molten hellhole known as New Pylthothus, where I would be rotting still had I not smuggled myself AWOL two years later. Since then, I’ve been officially a fugitive. I have no intention of telling you where I am, hovy I changed my appearance, or what name I use now. I found a world acceptable for spending the rest of my life in hiding; I changed my face and my name and found a life for myself. I have friends, family. It’s happiness, of a sort. I’m not complaining.

The Confederacy attempted to suppress the holos and neurecs of that year’s Ballet, but when the anger over the violence against our people faded, the recordings still became the biggest thing to hit popular entertainment in centuries. They succeeded in making the long-time interest in the Vlhani an obsession for trillions; even the vast majority who still didn’t understand just what the Marionettes were getting at had to agree that, in some indefinable way easier felt than understood, Isadora had just brought their Ballet to an entirely new level. There was some half-hearted talk of reprisals and the “permanent” withdrawal of the installation—but within five standard years the triple-threat combination of a new administration, humanity’s notoriously short memory, and the ravenous demand for the new recordings still being made by the other embassies and distributed to human space on the black market, got a new embassy established on the ruins of the old. This one, I understand, is considerably better armed than ours was, though the indentures there haven’t yet been forced to prove it.

People love to speculate on who Isadora was, and where she came from; a hundred separate worlds have laid claim to being the place where she was born. Most of them don’t put forth very persuasive cases for themselves. All I know for sure is that if I ever did find out the name of the place she came from, I wouldn’t feel any pressing need to go there. It has nothing to do with her.

Close to three thousand young people have tried to do what Isadora did. The vast majority of those never made it off their own home-worlds; they were dreamers, yearning to be special and willing to do anything to emulate somebody who was. They either destroyed themselves or found somebody else to imitate. Of those who remained, a few actually succeeded in picking up enhancements somewhere: usually, pale imitations of Isadora’s that took away their humanity without giving nearly enough in return. A very small number—four women and two men—made it to Vlhan and into the Ballet, where they died. They’d understood little pieces of the show, too. But their names faded. Nobody remembers them the way people remember her.

I don’t know. Whatever the Vlhani are relating with this great fatal Ballet of theirs, I’m told it’s beautiful and profound and meaningful and worth dying for. But the other side of the story is that it’s not worth seeing the people you care about die . . . and I’ve personally lost all desire to decode that message for myself.

As a result, I have never seen Isadora’s Ballet. I refused to watch it on Vlhan, and I’ve refused to view the holos or neurecs. I would not be able to stand obsessively watching and re-watching either my own famously doomed appeal or the equally famous, inspirational moment when she fell.

Instead, I live with my memory of that moment at the compound, when she danced to save my life. Unlike the Ballet, which has been picked to pieces by experts all over the known universe, that performance was not recorded. There are no holos, no neurecs, no hytex analysis breaking it down into the tiniest millisecond fragments. Oskar was half-blind from the blood in his eyes, Dhiju, who lay on his back dazzled and open-jawed, was so much under the influence that no amount of artificial memory enhancement would ever succeed in separating the real from that which his mind created. As for me, I caught only the last ten seconds.

But I understood it all. Every single nuance.

When she later spoke to me in human words, she did not tell me the full truth about everything that dance had meant.

And what she really told the Vlhani keeps me warm, in a universe that would otherwise now seem dark and empty and cold.

MARROW

Robert Reed

Hidden inside the huge alien artifact they called home was a mysterious planet that held hidden wonders and the ultimate terror.

MISSION YEAR 0.00:

Washen couldn’t count all the captains spread out before her, and putting on her finest captainly smile, she joined them, trading the usual compliments, telling little stories about her travels, and with a genuine unease, asking if anyone knew why the Ship’s Master would want to bring them here.

“She’s testing us,” one gray-eyed colleague ventured. “She’s testing our obedience. Plus our security measures, too.”

“Perhaps,” Washen allowed.

Coded orders had found Washen through secure channels. Without explanation, the Master told her to abandon her post, discarding her uniform and taking on a suitable disguise. For the last seven days, she had played the role of dutiful tourist, wandering the vast ship, enjoying its wondrous sights, then after making triple—sure that she wasn’t being monitored, boarding an anonymous tube-car that had brought her to this odd place.

“My name is Diu,” said her companion, offering his hand and a wide smile.

She clasped the hand with both of hers, saying, “We met at the captains’ banquet. Was it twenty years ago?”

“Twenty-five.” Like most captains, Diu was tall for a human, with craggy features and an easy charm meant to instill trust in their human passengers. “It’s kind of you to remember me. Thank you.”

“You’re most welcome.”

The eyes brightened. “What do you think of the Master’s tastes? Isn’t this a bizarre place to meet?”

“Bizarre,” Washen echoed. “That’s a good word.”

The leech once lived here. An obscure species, ascetic by nature, they had built their home inside the remote confines of one of the ship’s enormous fuel tanks. Weaving together thick plastics, they had dangled this place from the tank’s insulated ceiling. Its interior, following a leech logic, was a single room. Vast in two dimensions but with a glowing gray ceiling close enough to touch, the surroundings made every human feel claustrophobic. The only furnishings were hard gray pillows. The air was warm and stale, smelling of odd dusts and persistent pheromones. Colors were strictly forbidden. Even the gaudy tourists’ clothes seemed to turn gray in the relentless light.

“I’ve been wondering,” said Diu. “Whatever happened to the leech?”

“I don’t know,” Washen confessed. She had met the species when they came on board. But that was more than a thousand years before, and even a captain’s memory was imperfect.

The leech could have simply reached their destination, disembarking without incident. Or they could have decided to build an even more isolated home, if that was possible. Or perhaps some disaster had struck, and they were dead. Shipboard extinctions were more common than any captain would admit. Some of their passengers proved too frail to endure any long journey. Mass suicides and private wars claimed others. Yet as Washen often reminded herself, for every failed species, a hundred others thrived, or at least managed to etch out some little corner of this glorious ship where they could hold their own. “Wherever the leech are, I’m sure they’re well.”

“Of course they are,” Diu replied, knowing what was polite. “Of course.”

In the face of ignorance, captains should make positive sounds.

Washen noticed how even while standing still, Diu was moving, his flesh practically vibrating, as if the water inside him was ready to boil.

“So, madam . . . I’m dying to know what you think! What’s our mission? What’s so important that the Master pulls us all the way down here?”

“Yes,” said a second voice. “What’s your best bad guess, darling?”

Miocene had joined them. One of a handful of Submasters in attendance, she was rumored to be the Master’s favorite. An imperious, narrow-faced woman, she was a full bead taller than the others, dressed in rich robes, her brindle colored hair brushing against the ceiling. Yet she stood erect, refusing to dip her head for the simple sake of comfort.

“Not that you know more than any of us,” the Submaster persisted. “But what do you think the Master wants?”

The room seemed to grow quiet. Captains held their breath, secretly delighted that it was Washen who had to endure Miocene’s attentions.

“Well,” Washen began, “I can count several hundred clues.”

A razor smile formed. “And they are?”

“Us.” They were standing near one of the room’s few windows—a wide slit of thick, distorting plastic. There was nothing outside but blackness and vacuum; an ocean of liquid hydrogen, vast and calm and brutally cold, lay some fifty kilometers below them. Nothing was visible in the window but their own murky reflections. Washen saw everyone at a glance. She regarded her own handsome, ageless face, black hair pulled back in a sensible bun and streaked with enough white to lend authority, her wide chocolate eyes betraying confidence with a twist of deserved pleasure.

“The Master selected us, and we’re the clues.”

Miocene glanced at her own reflection. “And who are we?”

“The elite of the elite.” Washen put names to the faces, listing bonuses and promotions earned over the last millennia. “Manka is a new second-grade. Aasleen was in charge of the last engine upgrade, which came in below budget and five months early. Saluki and Westfall have won the Master’s award for duty ten times each.” She gestured at the captain beside her, saying, “And there’s Diu, of course. Already an eleventh-grade, which is astonishing. You came on board the ship—warn me if I’m wrong—as just another passenger.” The energetic man said, “True, madam. Thank you for remembering.”

Washen grinned, then said, “And then there’s you, Madam Miocene. You are one of three Submasters with first-chair status at the Master’s table.”

The tall woman nodded, enjoying the flattery. “But don’t forget yourself, darling.”

“I never do,” Washen replied, earning a good laugh from everyone. And because nothing was more unseemly in a captain than false modesty, she admitted, “I’ve heard the rumors. I’m slated to become our newest Submaster.”

Miocene grinned, but she made no comment about any rumors.

Instead she took an enormous breath, and in a loud voice asked, “Can you smell yourselves? Can you? That’s the smell of ambition. No other scent is so tenacious, or in my mind, ever so sweet . . .!”

NO NAME BUT THE SHIP WAS NECESSARY. ANCIENT and spectacular, there was nothing else that could be confused with it, and everyone on board, from the Ship’s Master to the most disreputable stowaway, was justifiably proud of their magnificent home.

The ship began as a Jupiter-class world, but an unknown species had claimed it. Using its hydrogen atmosphere, they accelerated the core to a fraction of lightspeed. Then they built tunnels and compartments, plus chambers large enough to swallow small worlds. Premium hyperfibers lent strength and durability to the frame. And then, as with the leech’s plastic abode, the builders suddenly and mysteriously abandoned their creation.

Billions of years later, humans stumbled across the ship. Most of its systems were in a diagnostic mode. Human engineers woke them, making repairs where necessary. Then the best human captains were hired, and every manner of passenger was ushered aboard, the ship’s maiden voyage calling for a half-million year jaunt around the Milky Way.

Its undisputed ruler arrived a few hours later.

Accompanied by a melody of horns and angel-voiced humans, the Master strode into the room. Where other captains were disguised in civilian clothes, their leader wore a mirrored cap and uniform that suited her office, and for many reasons, her chosen body was broad and extraordinarily deep. It was status, in part. But a Master also needed bulk to give her augmented brain a suitable home, thousands of ship functions constantly monitored and adjusted, in the same unconscious way that the woman moved and breathed.

Gravity was weaker this deep inside the ship. With one vast hand skating along the ceiling, the Master deftly kept herself from bumping her head. A dozen of the low-grade captains offered greetings and hard cushions. Diu was among the supplicants, on his knees and smiling, even after she had passed.

“Thank you for coming,” said that voice that always took Washen by surprise. It was a quiet, unhurried voice, perpetually amused by whatever the radiant brown eyes were seeing. “I know you’re puzzled,” she said, “and I hope you’re concerned. So let me begin with my compelling reasons for this game, and what I intend for you.”

A handful of guards stood in the distance; Washen saw their tiny armored silhouettes as the room’s lights fell to nothing.

“The ship, please.”

A real-time projection blossomed beside the Master, channeled through her own internal systems. The spherical hull looked slick and gray. A thousand lasers were firing from the bow, aiming at comets and other hazards. Mammoth engines rooted in the stern spat out hurricanes of plasma, incrementally adjusting their course and speed. And a tiny flare on the equator meant that another starship was arriving. With new passengers, presumably.

“Now,” said the amused voice, “start peeling the onion. Please.”

In a blink, the hyperfiber hull was removed. Washen could suddenly make out the largest high-deck chambers; she knew each by name and purpose, just as she knew every important place too small to be seen. Then another few hundred kilometers of rock and water, air and hyperfiber were erased, exposing more landmarks.

“This perfect architecture.” The Master stepped closer to the shrinking projection, its glow illuminating a wide strong self-assured face—a face designed to inspire thousands of captains, and a crew numbering in the tens of millions. “In my mind, there’s been no greater epic in history. I’m not talking about this journey of ours. I mean about the astonishing task of exploring our ancient starship. Imagine the honor: To be the first living organism to step into one of these chambers, the first sentient mind in billions of years to experience their vastness, their mystery. It was a magnificent time. And I’m talking first-hand, since I was one of the leaders of the first survey team ..

It was an old, honorable boast, and her prerogative.

“We did a superlative job,” she assured. “I won’t accept any other verdict. Despite technical problems and the sheer enormity of it, we mapped more than ninety-nine percent of the ship’s interior. In fact, I was the first one to find my way through the plumbing above us, and the first to see the sublime beauty of the hydrogen sea below us .. .”

Washen hid a smile, thinking: A fuel tank is a fuel tank is a fuel tank.

“Here we are,” the Master announced. The projection had shrunk by a third. The fuel tank was a fist-sized cavern; the leech habitat was far too small to be seen. Then in the next moment, they were gone, another layer removed without sound or fuss. Liquid hydrogen turned into a blackish solid, and deeper still, a transparent metal. “These seas have always been the deepest features,” she commented. “Below them, there’s nothing but iron and a stew of other metals squashed under fantastic pressures.”

The ship had been reduced to a perfectly smooth black ball—the essential ingredient in a multitude of popular games.

“Until now, we knew nothing about the core.” The Master paused for a moment, allowing herself a quick grin. “Evidence shows that when the ship was built, its core was stripped of its radionuclides, probably to help cool the metals and keep them relatively stiff. We don’t know how the builders managed the trick. But there used to be narrow tunnels leading down, all reinforced with hyperfibers and energy buttresses, and all eventually crushed by time and a lack of repair.” A second pause, then she said, “Not enough room left for a single microchine to pass. Or so we’ve always believed.”

Washen felt herself breathing faster, enjoying the moment.

“There has never, ever been the feeblest hint of hidden chambers,” the Master proclaimed. “I won’t accept criticism on this matter. Every possible test was carried out. Seismic. Neutrino imaging. Even palm-of-the-hand calculations of mass and volume. Until fifty-three years ago, there was no reason to fear that our maps weren’t complete.”

A silence had engulfed the audience. Quietly, smoothly, the Master said, “The full ship. Please.”

The iron ball was again dressed in rock and hyperfiber. “Now the impact. Please.”

Washen stepped forward, anticipating what she would see. Fifty-three years ago, they passed through a dense swarm of comets. The captains had to throw gobs of antimatter into the largest hazards. Lasers fired without pause, evaporating trillions of tons of ice. But debris still peppered the hull, a thousand pinpricks of light dancing on its silver-gray projection, and then came a blistering white flash that dwarfed the other explosions and left the captains blinking, remembering that moment, and the shared embarrassment.

A chunk of nickel-iron had slipped through their defenses. The ship rattled with the impact, and for months afterwards, nervous passengers talked about little else. Even when the captains showed them all of the schematics and calculations, proving that they could have absorbed an even larger impact before anyone was in real danger . . . even then there people and aliens who insisted on being afraid.

With a palpable relish, the Master said, “Now the cross section, please.”

Half of the ship evaporated. Pressure waves spread down and out from the blast site, then pulled together again at the stern, causing more damage before they bounced, and bounced back again, the diluted vibrations still detectable now, murmuring their way through the ship as well as through the captains’own bones. “Al analysis. Please.”

A map was laid over the cross section, every feature familiar. Save one.

“Madam,” said a sturdy voice. Miocene’s voice. “It’s an anomaly, granted. But doesn’t the feature seem rather . . . unlikely . . .?”

“Which is why I thought it was nothing. And my trusted Al—part of my own neural net—agreed with me. This region is a change in composition. Nothing more.” She paused for a long moment, watching her captains. Then with a gracious oversized smile, she admitted, “The possibility of a hollow core has to seem ludicrous.”

Submasters and captains nodded with a ragged hopefulness.

Knowing they weren’t ordered here because of an anomaly, Washen stepped closer. How large was it? Estimates were easy to make, but the simple math created some staggering numbers.

“Ludicrous,” the Master repeated. “But then I thought back to when we were babies, barely a few thousand years old. Who would have guessed that a Jupiter class world could become a starship like ours?”

Just the same, thought Washen: Certain proposals will always be insane.

“But madam,” said Miocene. “A chamber of those proportions would make us less massive. Assuming we know the densities of the intervening iron, of course . . . “And you’re assuming, of course, that the core is empty.” The Master grinned at her favorite officer, then at all of them. For several minutes, her expression was serene, wringing pleasure out of their confusion and ignorance.

Then she reminded everyone, “This began as someone else’s vessel. We shouldn’t forget: We don’t understand why our home was built. For all we know, it was a cargo ship. A cargo ship, and here is its hold.”

The captains shuddered at the idea. “Imagine that something is inside this chamber. Like any cargo, it would have to be restrained. A series of strong buttressing fields might keep it from rattling around every time we adjusted our course. And naturally, if the buttressing fields were rigid enough, then they would mask whatever is down there—”

“Madam,” shouted someone, “please, what’s down there . . . Shouted Diu.

“A spherical object. It’s the size of Mars, but considerably more massive.” The Master grinned for a moment, then told the projection, “Please. Show them what I found.”

The image changed again. Nestled inside the great ship was a world, black as iron and slightly smaller than the chamber surrounding it. The simple possibility of such an enormous, unexpected discovery didn’t strike Washen as one revelation, but as many, coming in waves, making her gasp and shake her head as she looked at her colleagues’ faces, barely seeing any of them.

“This world has an atmosphere,” said the laughing voice, “with enough oxygen to be breathed, enough water for lakes and rivers, and all of the symptoms usually associated with a vigorous biosphere—”

“How do we know that?” Washen called out. Then, in a mild panic, “No disrespect intended, madam!”

“I haven’t gone there myself, if that’s what you’re asking.” She giggled like a child, telling them, “But after fifty years of secret work, using self-replicating drones to rebuild one of the old tunnels . . . after all that, I’m able to stand here and assure you that not only does this world exist, but that each of you are going to see it for yourselves . . .”

Washen glanced at Diu, wondering if her face wore that same wide smile.

“I have named the world, by the way. We’ll call it Marrow.” The Master winked and said, “For where blood is born, of course. And it’s reserved for you . . . my most talented, trustworthy friends . . .!”

WONDERS HAD BEEN ACCOMPLISHED IN A few decades. Mole-like drones had gnawed their way through beds of nickel and iron, repairing one of the ancient tunnels; fleets of tube-cars had plunged to where the tunnel opened into the mysterious chamber, assembling a huge stockpile of supplies directly above Marrow; then a brigade of construction drones threw together the captains’ base camp—a sterile little city of dormitories, machine shops, and first-rate laboratories tucked within a transparent, airtight blister.

Washen was among the last to arrive. At the Master’s insistence, she led a cleaning detail that stayed behind, erasing every trace of the captains’ presence from the leech habitat. It was a security precaution, and it required exacting work. And some of her people considered it an insult. “We aren’t janitors,” they grumbled. To which Washen replied, “You’re right. Professionals would have finished last week.”

Diu belonged to her detail, and unlike some, the novice captain worked hard to endear himself. He was probably calculating that she would emerge from this mission as a Submaster and his benefactor. But there was nothing wrong in calculations, Washen believed—as long as the work was done, successes piled high and honors for everyone.

Only tiny, two passenger tube-cars could make the long fall to the base camp. Washen decided that Diu would provide comfortable company. He rewarded her with his life story, including how he came into the captains’ ranks. “After a few thousand years of being a wealthy passenger, I realized that I was bored.” He said it with a tone of confession, and amusement. “But you captains never look bored. Pissed, yes. And harried, usually. But that’s what attracted me to you. If only because people expect it, captains can’t help seem relentlessly, importantly busy.”

Washen had to admit, it was a unique journey into the ship’s elite.

At journey’s end, their car pulled into the first empty berth. On foot, Diu and Washen conquered the last kilometer, stepping abruptly out onto the viewing platform, and not quite standing together, peering over the edge.

A tinted airtight blister lay between them and several hundred kilometers of airless, animated space. Force fields swirled through that vacuum, creating an array of stubborn, stable buttresses. The buttresses were visible as a brilliant blue-white light that flowed from everywhere, filling the chamber. The light never seemed to weaken. Even with the blister’s protection, the glare was intense. Relentless. Eyes had to adapt—a physiological change that would take several ship-days—and even still, no one grew accustomed to the endless day.

Even inside her bedroom, windows blackened and the covers thrown over her head, a captain could feel the radiance piercing her flesh just so it could tickle her bones.

The chamber wall was blanketed with a thick mass of gray-white hyperfiber, and the wall was their ceiling, falling away on all sides until it vanished behind Marrow.

“Marrow,” Washen whispered, spellbound.

On just the sliver of the world beneath them, the captain saw a dozen active volcanoes, plus a wide lake of bubbling iron. In cooler basins, hot-water streams ran into colorful, mineral-stained lakes. Above them, water clouds were gathering into enormous thunderheads. When the land wasn’t exploding, it was a rugged shadowless black, and the blackness wasn’t just because of the iron-choked soils. Vigorous, soot-colored vegetation basked in the endless day. And they were a blessing. From what the captains could see, the forests were acting as powerful filters, scrubbing the atmosphere until it was clean, at least to where humans, if conditioned properly, should be able to breathe, perhaps even comfortably.

“I want to get down there,” Washen confessed.

“It’s going to take time,” Diu warned, pointing over her shoulder.

Above the blister, dormitories and machine shops were dangling from the hyperfiber, their roofs serving as foundations. Past them, at the blister’s edge, the captains were assembling a silvery-white cylinder. It would eventually form a bridge to Marrow. There was no other way down. The buttress fields killed transports, and for many reasons, unprotected minds eroded in an instant, and died. To beat the challenge, their best engineer, Aasleen, had designed a shaft with its interior shielded with quasiceramics and superfluids. Theories claimed that the danger ended with Marrow’s atmosphere, but just to be safe, several hundred immortal pigs and baboons were in cages, waiting to put those guesses to the test.

Washen was thinking about the baboons, and timetables.

A familiar voice broke her reverie.

“What are your impressions, darlings?”

Miocene stood behind them. In uniform, she was even more imposing, and more cold. Yet Washen summoned her best smile, greeting the mission leader, then adding, “I’m surprised. I didn’t know it would be this beautiful.”

“Is it?” The knife-edged face offered a smile. “Is there any beauty here, Diu?”

“A spartan kind of beauty,” Diu replied.

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any feel for aesthetics.” The Submaster smiled off into the distance. “Tell me. If this world proves harmless and beautiful, what do you think our passengers will pay for the chance to come here?”

“If it’s a little dangerous,” Washen ventured, “they would pay more.”

Miocene’s smile came closer, growing harder. “And if it’s deadly, maybe we’ll have to collapse the tunnel again. With us safely above, of course.”

“Of course,” the captains echoed.

Diu was grinning, with his face, and if possible, with his entire body.

Mirrors and antennae clung to hyperfiber, gazing at Marrow. He gestured at them, asking, “Have we seen any signs of intelligence, madam? Or artifacts of any sort?”

“No,” said Miocene, “and no.”

It would be a strange place for sentience to evolve, thought Washen. And if the builders had left ruins behind, they would have been destroyed long ago. The crust beneath them wasn’t even a thousand years old. Marrow was an enormous forge, constantly reworking its face as well as the bones beneath.

“I can’t help it,” Diu confessed. “I keep dreaming that the builders are down there, waiting for us.”

“A delirious dream,” Miocene warned him.

But Washen felt the same way. She could almost see the builders slathering the hyperfiber, then building Marrow. This was a huge place, and they couldn’t see more than a sliver of it from their tiny vantage point. Who knew what they would eventually find?

Diu couldn’t stop talking. “This is fantastic,” he said. “And an honor. I’m just pleased that the Master would include me.”

The Submaster nodded, conspicuously saying nothing.

“Now that I’m here,” Diu blubbered, “I can almost see the purpose of this place.”

With a level glance, Washen tried to tell her companion, Shut up.

But Miocene had already tilted her bead, eyeing their eleventh-grade colleague. “I’d love to bear your theories, darling.”

Diu lifted his dark eyebrows.

An instant later, with bleak amusement, he remarked, “I think not.” Then he looked at his own hands, saying, “Once spoken, madam, the useful belongs to at least one other soul.”

MISSION YEAR 1.03:

Planetfall was exactly as the captains had planned—a routine day from the final five kilometers of bridge building to Miocene’s first steps on the surface. And with success came cheers and singing, followed by ample late suppers served with bottomless glasses of well-chilled champagne, and congratulations from the distant Master. Except for Washen, the day was just a little disappointing.

Watching from base camp, studying data harvests and live images, she saw exactly what she expected to see. Captains were administrators, not explorers; the historic moments were relentlessly organized. The landscape had been mapped until every bush and bug had a name. Not even tiny surprises could ambush the first teams. It was thorough and stifling, but naturally Washen didn’t mention her disappointment, or even put a name to her emotions. Habit is habit, and she had been an exemplary captain for thousands of years. Besides, what sort of person would she be if she was offended that there were no injuries, or mistakes, or troubles of any kind?

And yet.

Two ship-days later, when her six-member team was ready to embark, Washen had to make herself sound like a captain. With a forced sincerity, she told the others, “We’ll take our walk on the iron, and we’ll exceed every objective. On schedule, if not before.”

It was a swift, strange trip to Marrow.

Diu asked to ride with Washen, just as he’d requested to be part of her team. Their shielded tube-car retreated back up the access tunnel, then flung itself at Marrow, streaking through the buttress fields to minimize the exposure, a trillion electric fingers delicately playing with their sanity.

Then their car reached the upper atmosphere and braked, the terrific gees bruising flesh and shattering minor bones.

Artificial genes began weaving protein analogs, knitting their injuries.

The bridge was rooted into a hillside of cold iron and black jungle. The rest of the team and their supplies followed. Despite an overcast sky, the air was brilliant and furnace-hot, every breath tasting of metal and nervous sweat. As team leader, Washen gave orders that everyone knew by heart. Cars were linked, then reconfigured. The new vehicle was loaded, and tested, and the captains were tested by their autodocs: Newly implanted genes were helping their bodies adapt to the heat and metal-rich environment. Then Miocene, sitting in a nearby encampment, contacted them and gave her blessing, and Washen lifted off, steering towards the purely arbitrary north-northwest.

The countryside was broken and twisted, split by fault lines and raw mountains and volcanic vents. The vents had been quiet for a century or a decade, or in some cases, days. Yet the surrounding land was alive, adorned with jungle, pseudotrees reminiscent of mushrooms, all enormous, all pressed against one another, their lacquered black faces feeding on the dazzling blue-white light.

Marrow seemed as durable as the captains flying above it.

Growth rates were phenomenal, and for more reasons than photosynthesis. Early findings showed that the jungle also fed through its roots, chisel-like tips reaching down to where thermophilic bacteria thrived, Marrow’s own heat supplying easy calories.

Were the aquatic ecosystems as productive?

It was Washen’s question, and she’d selected a small, metal-choked lake for study. They arrived on schedule, and after circling the lake twice, as prescribed, she landed on a slab of bare iron. Then for the rest of the day they set up their lab and quarters, and specimen traps, and as a precaution, installed a defense perimeter-three paranoid Als who did nothing but think the worst of every bug and spore that happened past.

Night was mandatory. Miocene insisted that each captain sleep at least four hours, and invest another hour in food and toiletries.

Washen’s team went to bed on time, then lay awake until it was time to rise.

At breakfast, they sat in a circle and gazed at the sky. The chamber’s wall was smooth and ageless, and infinitely bland. Base camp was a dark blemish visible only because the air was exceptionally clear. The bridge had vanished with the distance. If Washen was very careful, she could almost believe that they were the only people on this world. If she was lucky, she forgot for a minute or two that telescopes were watching her sitting on her aerogel chair, eating her scheduled rations.

Diu sat nearby, and when she glanced at him, he smiled wistfully, as if he could read her thoughts.

“I know what we need,” Washen announced.

Diu said, “What do we need?”

“A ceremony. Some ritual before we can start.” She rose and walked to one of the specimen traps, returning with one of their first catches. On Marrow, pseudoinsects filled almost every animal niche. Six-winged dragonflies were blue as gemstones and longer than a forearm. With the other captains watching, Washen stripped the dragonfly of its wings and tail, then cased the rest into their autokitchen. The broiling took a few seconds. With a dull thud, the carcass exploded inside the oven. Then she grabbed a lump of the blackish meat, and with a grimace, made herself bite and chew. “We aren’t supposed to,” Diu warned, laughing gently.

Washen forced herself to swallow, then she told everyone, “And you won’t want to do it again. Believe me.”

There were no native viruses to catch, or toxins that their reinforced genetics couldn’t handle. Miocene was simply being a cautious mother when she told them, “Except in emergencies, eat only the safe rations.”

Washen passed out the ceremonial meat.

Last to take his share was Diu, and his first bite was tly. But he didn’t grimace, and with an odd little laugh, he told Washen, “It’s not bad. If my tongue quit burning, I could almost think about enjoying it.”

MISSION YEAR 1.22:

AFTER WEEKS OF RELENTLESS WORK, CERTAIN possibilities began to look like fact.

Marrow had been carved straight from the Jupiter’s heart. Its composition and their own common sense told the captains as much. The builders had first wrenched the uraniums and thoriums from the overhead iron, injecting them deep into the core. Then with the buttressing fields, the molten sphere was compressed, and the exposed chamber walls were slathered in hyperfiber. And billions of years later, without help from the vanished builders, the machinery was still purring along quite nicely.

But why bother creating such a marvel?

Marrow could be a dumping ground for radionuclides. Or it could have worked as an enormous fission reactor, some captains suggested. Except there were easier ways to create power, others pointed out, their voices not so gently dismissive.

But what if the world was designed to store power?

It was Aasleen’s suggestion: By tweaking the buttresses, the builders could have forced Marrow to rotate. With patience—a resource they must have had in abundance—they could have given it a tremendous velocity. Spinning inside a vacuum, held intact by the buttresses, the iron ball would have stored phenomenal amounts of energy—enough to maintain the on board systems for billions of years, perhaps.

Washen first heard the flywheel hypothesis at the weekly briefing.

Each of the team leaders was sitting at the illusion of a conference table, in aerogel chairs, sweating rivers in Marrow’s heat. The surrounding room was sculpted from light, and sitting at the head of the table was the Master’s projection, alert but unusually quiet. She expected crisp reports and upbeat attitudes. Grand theories were a surprise. Finally, after a contemplative pause, she smiled, telling the captain, “That’s an intriguing possibility. Thank you, Aasleen.” Then to the others, “Considerations? Any?”

Her smile brought a wave of complimentary noise.

In private, Washen doubted they were inside someone’s dead battery. But this wasn’t the polite moment to list the troubles with flywheels. And besides, the bioteams were reporting next, and she was eager to compare notes.

A tremor suddenly shook the captains, one after another, spreading out from its distant epicenter. Even for Marrow, that was a big jolt.

Compliments dissolved into an alert silence.

Then the Master lifted her wide hand, announcing abruptly, “We need to discuss your timetable.”

What about the bioteams?

“You’re being missed, I’m afraid. Our cover story isn’t clever enough, and the crew are suspicious.” The Master lowered her band, then said, “Before people are too worried, I want to bring you home.”

Smiles broke out.

Some were tired of Marrow; other captains were tickled with the prospects of honors and promotions.

“Everyone, madam?” Washen dared.

“At least temporarily.”

According to the ship’s duty roster, the missing captains were visiting a nearby solar system, serving as travel agents to billions of potential passengers. And the truth told, there’d been boring moments when Washen found herself wishing that the fiction was real. But not today. Not when she was in the middle of something fascinating . . .!

As mission leader, it was Miocene’s place to ask:

“Do you want us to cut our work short, madam?”

The Master squinted at the nearest window, gazing out at one of the ship’s port facilities. For her, the room and its view were genuine, and her captains were illusions.

“Mission plans can be rewritten,” she told them. “I want you to finish surveying the far hemisphere, and I want the critical studies wrapped up. Ten shipdays should be adequate. Then you’ll come home, and we’ll take our time deciding on our next actions.”

Smiles wavered, but none crumbled.

Miocene whispered, “Ten days,” with a tentative respect.

“Is that a problem?”

“Madam,” the Submaster began, “I would feel much more comfortable if we were certain that Marrow isn’t a threat.”

There was a pause, and not just because the Master was thousands of kilometers removed from them. It was a lengthy, unnerving silence. Then captains’ captain looked off into the distance, saying, “Considerations? Any?”

It would be a disruption. The other Submasters agreed with Miocene. To accomplish their work in ten days, with confidence, would require every captain, including those stationed with the support teams. Their base camp would have to be abandoned temporarily. That was an acceptable risk, perhaps. But mild words were obscured by clenched fists and distant, worried gazes.

Unsatisfied, the Master turned to her future Submaster. “Do you have any considerations to add?”

Washen hesitated as long as she dared. “Marrow could have been a flywheel,” she finally allowed. “Madam.”

Brown eyes closed, opened. “I’m sorry,” the Master responded, the voice devoid of amusement. “Aren’t we discussing your timetable?”

“But if these buttresses ever weakened,” Washen continued, “even for an instant, the planet would have expanded instantly. Catastrophically. The surrounding hyperfiber would have vaporized, and a shock wave would have passed through the entire ship, in moments.” She offered simple calculations, then added, “Maybe this was a elaborate flywheel. But it also would have made all effective self-destruct mechanism. We don’t know, madam. We don’t know if the builders had enemies, real or imagined. But if we’re going to find answers, I can’t think of a better place to look.”

The Master’s face was unreadable, impenetrable.

Finally she shook her head, smiling in a pained manner. “Since my first moment on board this glorious vessel, I have nourished one guiding principle: The builders, whomever they were, would never endanger this marvelous creation.”

Washen wished for the same confidence.

Then that apparition of light and sound leaned forward, saying, “You need a change of duty, Washen. I want you and your team in the lead. Help us explore the far hemisphere. And once the surveys are finished, everyone comes home. Agreed?”

“As you wish, madam,” said Washen. Said everyone.

Then Washen caught Miocene’s surreptitious glance, something in the eyes saying, “Nice try, darling.” And with that look, the faintest hint of respect.

PTEROSAUR DRONES HAD ALREADY DRAWN three maps of the region. Yet as Washen passed overhead, she realized that even the most recent map, drawn eight days ago, was too old to be useful.

Battered by quakes, the landscape had been beaved skyward, then torn open. Molten iron flowed into an oxbow lake, boiling water and mud, and columns of dirty steam rose skyward, then twisted to the east. As an experiment, Washen flew into the steam clouds. Samples were ingested through filters and sensors and simple Tensing chambers. Riding with the steam were spores and eggs, encased in tough bioceramics and indifferent to the heat. Inside the tip of the needle flask, too small to see with the naked eye, were enough pond weeds and finned beetles to conquer ten new lakes.

Catastrophe was the driving force on Marrow.

That insight struck Washen every day, sometimes hourly, and it always arrived with a larger principle in tow:

In some flavor or another, disaster ruled every world.

But Marrow was the ultimate example. And as if to prove itself, the steam clouds dispersed suddenly, giving way to the sky’s light, the chamber wall overhead, and far below, for as far as Washen could see, the stark black bones of a jungle.

Fumes and fire had incinerated every tree, every scrambling bug.

The carnage must have been horrific. Yet the blaze had passed days ago, and new growth was already pushing up from the gnarled trunks and fresh crevices, thousands of glossy black umbrella-like leaves shining in the superheated air.

Washen decided to blank the useless maps, flying on instinct.

“Twenty minutes, and we’re as far from the bridge as possible,” Diu promised, his smile wide and infectious.

No other team would travel as far.

Washen started to turn, intending to order chilled champagne for the occasion, her mouth opened and a distorted, almost inaudible voice interrupting her.

“Report . . . all teams . . .!”

It was Miocene’s voice strained through a piercing electronic whistle.

“What do . . . see . . .?” asked the Submaster. “Teams . . . report . . . Washen tried establishing more than an audio link, and failed.

A dozen other captains were chattering in a ragged chorus. Zale said, “We’re on schedule.” Kyzkee observed, “There’s some com-interference . . . otherwise, systems appear nominal.” Then with more curiosity than worry, Aasleen inquired, “Why, madam? Is something wrong?”

There was a long, jangled hum.

Diu was hunched over sensor displays, and with a tight little voice, he said, “Shit.”

“What—?” Washen cried out.

Then a shrill cry swept away every voice, every thought. And the day brightened and brightened, fat bolts of lightning flowing across the sky, then turning, moving with purpose, aiming for them.

From the far side of the world came a twisted voice:

“The bridge . . . where is it . . . do you see it . . . where . . .?”

The car bucked as if panicking, losing thrust and altitude, then its Als. Washen deployed the manual controls, and centuries of drills made her concentrate, nothing existing but their tumbling vehicle, her syrupy reflexes, and an expanse of burnt forest.

The next barrage of lightning was purple-white, and brighter, nothing visible but its seething glare.

Washen flew blind, flew by memory.

Their car was designed to endure heroic abuse, the same as its passengers. But it was dead and its hull had been degraded, and when it struck the iron ground, the hull shattered. Restraining fields grabbed bodies, then failed. Nothing but mechanical belts and gas bags held the captains in their seats. Flesh was jerked and twisted, and shredded. Bones were shattered and wrenched from their sockets. Then the seats were torn free of the floor, and like useless wreckage, scattered across several hectares of iron and burnt stumps.

Washen never lost consciousness.

With numbed curiosity, she watched her own legs and arms break, and a thousand bruises spread into a single purple tapestry, every rib crushed to dust and her reinforced spine splintering until she was left without pain or a shred of mobility. Washen couldn’t move her head, and her words were slow and watery, the sloppy mouth filled with cracked teeth and dying blood. “Abandon,” she muttered. Then, “Ship,” and she was laughing feebly. Desperately. A gray sensation rippled through her body. Emergency genes were already awake, finding their home in a shambles. They immediately protected the brain, flooding it with oxygen and anti inflammatories, plus a blanket of comforting narcotics. Then they began to repair the vital organs and spine, cannibalizing meat for raw materials and energy, the captain’s body wracked with fever, sweating salt water and blood, and after a little while, the body grew noticeably smaller.

An hour after the crash, a wrenching pain swept through Washen. It was a favorable sign. She squirmed and wailed, and with weak bands, freed herself from her ruined chair. Then with her sloppy rebuilt legs, she forced herself to stand.

Washen was suddenly twenty centimeters shorter, and frail. But she was able to limp over to Dill’s body, finding him shriveled and in agony, but defiant—a fierce grin and a wink, then he told her, “You look gorgeous, madam. As always.”

The others were alive, too. But not one machine in the wreckage would operate, not even well enough to say, “I’m broken.”

The six captains healed within a day, and waited at the crash site, eating their rations to reclaim their size and vigor. No rescue team arrived. whatever crippled their car must have done the same everywhere, they decided. Miocene was as powerless as them. And that left them with one viable option:

If Washen and the others wanted help, they were going to have to walk halfway around Marrow to find it.

MISSION YEAR 4.43:

THE BRIDGE RESEMBLED A RIGID THREAD, SILVERY and insubstantial. Sheered off in the high stratosphere, it was far too short to serve as an escape route. But it made a useful landmark. Washen’s team steered for the bridge during those last days, picking their way across the knife-like ridges and narrow valleys between. Wondering what they would find, whenever they rested—for a moment, now and again—they let themselves talk in hopeful tones, imagining the other captains’ surprise when the six of them suddenly marched out of the jungle.

Except when they arrived at the bridge, there was no one to catch off guard. The main encampment had been abandoned. The hilltop where the bridge was rooted had been split open by quakes, and the entire structure tilted precariously toward the east. A simple iron post kept the main doors propped open, and there was a makeshift ladder in the shaft, but judging by the rust, nobody had used it for months. Or perhaps years.

A sketchy path led west. They followed, and after a long while, they came to a fertile river bottom and wider paths. With Washen at the lead, they were jogging, and it was Miocene who suddenly stepped into view, surprising them.

The Submaster was unchanged.

In uniform, she looked regal and well-chilled. “It took you long enough,” she deadpanned. Then she smiled, adding, “It’s good to see you. Honestly, we’d nearly given up hope.”

Waslie swallowed her anger.

The other captains bombarded Miocene with questions. Who else had survived? flow were they inaking do? Did any machines work? Had the Master been in contact with them? Then Diu asked, “What kind of relief mission is coming?”

“It’s a cautious relief mission,” Miocene replied. “So cautious that it seems almost nonexistent.”

Her captains had built telescopes from scratch, and at least one captain was always watching the base camp overhead. The transparent blister was intact. Every building was intact. But the drones and beacons were dead, which meant that the reactor was offline. A three kilometer stub of the bridge would make the perfect foundation for a new structure. But there wasn’t any sign that captains or anyone was trying to mount any kind of rescue.

“The Master thinks we’re dead,” Diu offered, trying to be charitable.

“We aren’t dead,” Miocene countered. “And even if we were, she should be a little more interested in our bones, and answers.”

Washen didn’t talk. After three years of jogging, eating lousy food and forcing hope, she suddenly felt sickened and achingly tired.

The Submaster led them along a wide trail, working back through their questions.

“Every machine was ruined by the Event. That’s our name for what happened. The Event left our cars and drones and sensors as fancy trash, and we can’t fix them. And we can’t decide why, either.” Then she offered a distracted smile, adding, “But we’re surviving. Wooden homes, with roofs. Iron tools. Pendulum clocks. Steam power when we go to the trouble, and enough homemade equipment, like the telescopes, that we can do some simple, simple science.”

The jungle’s understory had been cut down and beaten back, and the new encampment stretched out on all sides. Like anything built by determined captains, the place was orderly, perhaps to a fault. The houses were clean and in good repair. Paths were marked with logs, and someone had given each path its own name. Everyone was in uniform, and everyone was smiling, trying to hide the weariness in the eyes and their voices. A hundred captainsshouted, “Hello! Welcome!”

Washen stared at their faces, and counted, and finally forced herself to ask, “Who isn’t here?”

Miocene recited a dozen names.

Eleven of them were friends or acquaintances of Washen’s. The last name was Hazz—a Submaster and a voyage-long friend of Miocene’s. “Two months ago,” she explained, “he was exploring a nearby valley. A fissure opened up suddenly, without warning, and he was trapped by the flowing iron.” Her eyes were distant, unreadable. “Hazz was perched on a little island that was melting. We tried to build a bridge, and tried to divert the current. Everything half-possible, we tried.”

Washen stared at the narrow face, at the way the eyes had grown empty, and it was suddenly obvious that Miocene had been more than friends with the dead man.

“The island shrank,” she told them, her voice too flat and slow. “It was a knob, if that. Hazz’s boots dissolved, and his feet were boiling, and his flesh caught fire. But he managed to stand there. He endured it. He endured it and even managed to turn and take a step toward on us, on his boiling legs, and he fell forward, and that’s when he finally died.”

Washen had been mistaken. This wasn’t the same Miocene.

“I have one goal,” the Submaster confessed. “I want to find a way to get back to the Master, and I’ll ask her why she sent us here. Was it to explore? Or was it just the best awful way to get rid of us . . .?”

MISSION YEAR 6.55:

THE IRON CRUST RIPPLED AND TORE APART UNDER a barrage of quakes, and with its foundation shattered, the bridge pitched sideways with a creaking roar, then shattered, the debris field scattered over fifty kilometers of newborn mountains.

Its fall was inevitable, and unrecorded. Geysers of white-hot metal had already obliterated the captains’ encampment, forcing them to flee with a minimum of tools and provisions. Lungs were scared. Tongues and eyes were blistered. But the captains eventually stumbled into a distant valley, into a grove of stately trees, where they collapsed, gasping and cursing. Then as if to bless them, the trees began releasing tiny balloons made from gold, and the shady, halfway cool air was filled with the balloons’ glint and the dry music made by their brushing against one another.

Diu coined the name virtue tree.

Miocene set her captains to planning new streets and houses, several of the virtue trees already downed when the ground ripped open with an anguished roar.

Wearily, the captains fled again, and when they settled, finally, they built strong simple houses that could be rebuilt anywhere in a ship’s day.

Nomadic blood took hold in them. When they weren’t stockpiling food for the next migration, they were building lighter tools, and when they weren’t doing either, they studied their world, trying to guess its fickle moods.

Washen assembled a team of twenty observant captains.

“Breeding cycles are key,” she reported. Sitting in the meeting hall, looking up and down the iron table, she reported that virtue trees spun their golden balloons only when the crust turned unstable. “If we see another show like the last one,” she promised, “we’re screwed. We’ve got a day, or less, to get out of here.”

Staff meetings were patterned after conferences with the Master, except they came on an irregular schedule, and Miocene presided, and despite her best intentions, the captains kept the atmosphere informal, even jocular, and because of the absence of soap, more than a little sour.

“How are our virtue trees acting?” asked Aasleen.

“As if they’ll live forever,” Washen replied. “They’re still happy, still early in their growth cycle. As far as we can tell.”

Miocene acted distant that day. Squinting at nothing, she repeated the word:

“Cycles.”

Everyone turned in their heavy chairs, and waited. “Thank you, Washen.” The Submaster rose and looked at each of them, then admitted, “This may be premature. I could be wrong for many reasons. But I think I’ve been able to find another cycle . . . one that’s unexpected, at least for me . . . There was the distant droning of a hammerwing, and then, silence. “Volcanic activity is escalating. I think that’s obvious.” The tall woman nodded for a moment, then asked, “But why? My proposal is that the buttresses have begun to relax their hold on Marrow. Not by much. Certainly nothing we can measure directly. But if it did happen, the metals under us are going to expand, and that’s why, according to my careful computations, our home is growing larger.”

Washen’s first impulse was to laugh; it was a joke. “Several kilometers larger,” Miocene told the stunned faces. “I’ve gathered several lines of evidence. The buttresses’ light has diminished by two or three percent. The horizon is a little more distant. And what’s most impressive, I think: I’ve triangulated the distance to our base camp, and it’s definitely closer than it was last year.”

A dozen explanations occurred to Washen, but she realized that Miocene must have seen them, then discarded them.

“If Marrow isn’t teasing us,” said the Submaster, “and if the buttresses don’t reverse the cycle, then you can see where we’re going.”

Washen cried out, “How long will it take, madam?”

A dozen captains shouted the same question. “The calculations aren’t promising,” Miocene replied. But she had to laugh in a soft, bitter way. “At the present rate, we’ll be able to touch that three kilometer stub of the bridge in about five thousand years ..”

MISSION YEAR 88.55:

IT WAS TIME FOR THE CHILDREN TO SLEEP. Washen had come to check on them. But for some reason she stopped short of the nursery, eavesdropping on them, uncertain why it was important to remain hidden. The oldest boy was telling a story. “We call them the Builders,” he said, “because they created the ship.”

“The ship,” whispered the other children, in one voice. “The ship is too large to measure, and it is very beautiful. But when it was new, there was no one to share it with the Builders, and no one to tell them that it was beautiful. That’s why they called out into the darkness, inviting others to come fill its vastness.”

Washen leaned against the fragrant umbra wood, waiting. “Who came from the darkness?” asked the boy.

“The Bleak,” young voices answered, instantly. “Was there anyone else?”

“No one.”

“Because the universe was so young,” the boy explained. “Only the Bleak and the Builders bad already evolved.”

“The Bleak,” a young girl repeated, with feeling.

“They were a cruel, selfish species,” the boy maintained, “but they always wore smiles and said the smartest words.”

“They wanted the ship,” the others prompted.

“And they stole it. In one terrible night, as the Builders slept, the Bleak attacked, slaughtering most of them in their beds.”

Every child whispered, “Slaughtered.”

Washen eased her way closer to the nursery door. The boy was sitting up on his cot, his face catching the one sliver of light that managed to slip through the ceiling. Till was his name. He looked very much like his mother for a moment, then he moved his head slightly, and he resembled no one else.

“Where did the survivors retreat?” he asked. “To Marrow.”

“And from here, what did they do?”

“They purified the ship.”

“They purified the ship,” he repeated, with emphasis. “They swept its tunnels and chambers free of the scourge. The Builders had no choice.”

There was a long, reflective pause. “What happened to the last of the Builders?” he asked.

“They were trapped here,” said the others, on cue. “And one after another, they died here.”

“What died?”

“Their flesh.”

“But what else is there?”

“The spirit.”

“What isn’t flesh cannot die,” said the young prophet.

Washen waited, wondering when she had last taken a breath.

Then in whisper, Till asked, “Where do their spirits live?” With a palpable delight, the children replied, “They live inside us.”

“We are the Builders now,” the voice assured. “After a long lonely wait, we’ve finally been reborn . . .”

MISSION YEAR 88.90:

LIFE ON MARROW HAD BECOME HALFWAY COMFORTABLE and almost predictable. The captains weren’t often caught by surprise eruptions, and they’d learned where the crust was likely to remain thick and stable for years at a time. With so much success, children had seemed inevitable; Miocene decided that every female captain should produce at least one. And like children anywhere, theirs filled many niches: They were fresh faces, and they were cherished distractions, and they were entertainment, and more than anyone anticipated, they were challenges to the captains’ authority. But what Miocene wanted, first and always, were willing helpers. Till and his playmates were born so that someday, once trained, they could help their parents escape from Marrow.

The hope was that they could rebuild the bridge. Materials would be a problem, and Marrow would fight them. But Washen was optimistic. In these last eight decades, she’d tried every state of mind, and optimism far and away was the most pleasant.

And she tried to be positive everywhere: Good, sane reasons had kept them from being rescued. There was no one else the Master could trust like her favorite captains. Perhaps. Or she was thinking of the ship’s well-being, monitoring Marrow from a distance. Or most likely, the access tunnel had totally collapsed during the Event, and digging them out was grueling, achingly slow work.

Other captains were optimistic in public, but in private, in their lovers’ beds, they confessed to darker moods.

“What if the Master has written us off?” Diu posed the question, then offered an even worse scenario. “Or maybe something’s happened to her. This was a secret mission. If she died unexpectedly, and if the First-chairs don’t even know we’re here .. .”

“Do you believe that?” Washen asked. Diu shrugged his shoulders.

“There’s another possibility,” she said, playing the game. “What if everyone else on the ship has died?”

For a moment, Diu didn’t react.

“The ship was a derelict,” she reminded him. “No one knows what happened to its owners, or to anyone else who’s used it since.”

“What are you saying?” Diu sat up in bed, dropping his legs over the edge. “You mean the crew and the passengers . . . all of them have been killed . . .?”

“Maybe the ship cleans itself out every hundred thousand years.”

A tiny grin emerged. “So how did we survive?”

“Life on Marrow is spared,” she argued. “Otherwise, all of this would be barren iron and nothing else.”

Diu pulled one of his hands across his face.

“This isn’t my story,” she admitted, placing her hand on his sweaty back. Their infant son, Locke, was sleeping in the nearby crib, blissfully unaware of their grim discussion. In three years, he would live in the nursery. With Till, she was thinking. Washen bad overheard the story about the Builders and the Bleak several months ago, but she ever told anyone. Not even Diu. “have you ever listened to the children?” Glancing over his shoulder, he asked, “Why?”

She explained, in brief.

A sliver of light caught his gray eye and cheek. “You know Till,” Diu countered. “You know how odd he can seem.”

“That’s why I never mention it.”

“Have you heard him tell that story again?”

“No,” she admitted.

Her lover nodded, looking at the crib. At Locke.

“Children are imagination machines,” he warned. “You never know what they’re going to think about anything.”

He didn’t say another word.

Washen was remembering her only other child—a long-ago foster child, only glancingly human-and with a bittersweet grin, she replied, “But that’s the fun in having them . . . or so I’ve always heard . . .”

MISSION YEAR 88.09:

THE BOY WAS WALKING ALONE, CROSSING THE PUBLIC round with his eyes watching his own bare feet, watching them shuffle across the heat-baked iron. “Hello, Till.”

Pausing, he lifted his gaze slowly, a smile waiting to shine at the captain. “Hello, Madam Washen. You’re well, I trust.”

Under the blue glare of the sky, he was a polite, scrupulously ordinary boy. He had a thin face joined to a shorter, almost blockish body, and like most children, he wore as little as the adults let him wear. No one knew which of several captains was his genetic father. Miocene never told. She wanted to be his only parent, grooming him to stand beside her someday, and whenever Washen looked at Till, she felt a nagging resentment, petty as can be, and since it was directed at a ten year old, simply foolish.

With her own smile, Washen said, “I have a confession to make. A little while ago, I overheard you and the other children talking. You were telling each other a story.”

The eyes were wide and brown, and they didn’t so much as blink. “It was an interesting story,” Washen conceded.

Till looked like any ten year old who didn’t know what to make of a bothersome adult. Sighing wearily, he shifted his weight from one brown foot to the other. Then he sighed again, the picture of boredom. “How did you think up that story?” she asked. A shrug of the shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“We talk about the ship. Probably too much.” Her explanation felt sensible and practical. Her only fear was that she would come across as patronizing.

“Everyone likes to speculate. About the ship’s past, and its builders, and all the rest. it has to be confusing. Since we’re going to rebuild our bridge, with your help . . . it does make you into a kind of builder . . .”

Till shrugged again, his eyes looking past her.

On the far side of the round, in front of the encampment’s shop, a team of captains had fired up their latest turbine—a primitive wonder built from memory and trial-and-error. Homebrewed alcohols combined with oxygen, creating a delicious roar. When it was working, the engine was powerful enough to do any job they could offer it, at least today. But it was dirty and noisy, and the sound of it almost obscured the boy’s voice.

“I’m not speculating,” he said softly.

“Excuse me?”

“I won’t tell you that. That I’m making it up.”

Washen had to smile, asking, “Aren’t you?”

“No.” Till shook his head, then looked back down at his toes. “Madam Washen,” he said with a boy’s fragile patience. “You can’t make up something that’s true.”

MISSION YEAR 114.41:

LOCKE WAS WAITING IN THE SHADOWS—A GROWN MAN with a boy’s guilty face and the wide, restless eyes of someone expecting trouble to come from every direction. His first words were, “I shouldn’t be doing this.”

But a moment later, responding to an anticipated voice, he said, “I know, Mother. I promised.”

Washen never made a sound.

It was Diu who offered second thoughts. “If this is going to get you in trouble . . . maybe we should go home . . .”

“Maybe you should,” their son allowed. Then he turned and walked away, never inviting them to follow, knowing they wouldn’t be able to help themselves.

Washen hurried, feeling Diu in her footsteps.

A young jungle of umbra trees and lambda bush dissolved into rugged bare iron: Black pillars and arches created an indiscriminate, infuriating maze. Every step was a challenge. Razored edges sliced at exposed flesh. Bottomless crevices threatened to swallow the graceless. And Washen’s body was accustomed to sleep at this hour, which was why the old grove took her by surprise. Suddenly Locke was standing on the rusty lip of a cliff, waiting for them, gazing down at a narrow valley filled with black-as-night virtue trees.

It was lucky ground. When the world’s guts began to pour out on all sides, that slab of crust had fallen into a fissure. The jungle had been burned but never killed. It could be a hundred years old, or older. There was a rich, eternal feel to the place, and perhaps that’s why the children had chosen it.

The children. Washen knew better, but despite her best intentions, she couldn’t think of them any other way.

“Keep quiet,” Locke whispered, not looking back at them. “Please.”

In the living shadows, the air turned slightly cooler and uncomfortably damp. Blankets of rotting canopy left the ground watery-soft. A giant daggerwing roared past, intent on some vital business, and Washen watched it vanish into the gloom, then reappear, tiny with the distance, its bluish carapace shining in a patch of sudden skylight.

Locke turned abruptly, silently.

A single finger lay against his lips. But what Washen noticed was his expression, the pain and worry so intense that she had to try and reassure him with a touch.

It was Diu who had wormed the secret out him.

The children were meeting in the jungle, and they’d been meeting for more than twenty years. At irregular intervals, Till would call them to some secluded location, and it was Till who was in charge of everything said and done. “What’s said?” Washen had asked. “And what do you do?” But Locke refused to explain it, shaking his head and adding that he was breaking his oldest promise by telling any of it. “Then why do it?” Washen pressed.

“Because,” her son replied. “You have every right to hear what he’s saying. So you can decide for yourselves.”

Washen stood out of sight, staring at the largest virtue tree she had ever seen. Age had killed it, and rot had brought it down, splitting the canopy open as it crumbled. Adult children and their little brothers and sisters had assembled in that pool of skylight, standing in clumps and pairs, talking quietly. Till paced back and forth on the wide black trunk. He looked fully adult, ageless and decidedly unexceptional, wearing a simple breechcloth and nimble boots, his plain face showing a timid, self-conscious expression that gave Washen a strange little moment of hope.

Maybe Till’s meetings were a just an old game that grew up into a social gathering.

Maybe.

Without a word or backward glance, Locke walked into the clearing, joining the oldest children up in the front.

His parents obeyed their promise, kneeling in the jungle.

A few more children filtered into view. Then with some invisible signal, the worshippers fell silent. With a quiet voice, Till asked, “What do we want?”

“What’s best for the ship,” the children answered. “Always.”

“How long is always?”

“Longer than we can count.”

“And how far is always?”

“To the endless ends.”

“Yet we live—”

“For a moment!” they cried. “If that long!”

The words were absurd, and chilling. What should have sounded silly to Washen wasn’t, the prayer acquiring a muscular credibility when hundreds were speaking in one voice, with a practiced surely.

“What is best for the ship,” Till repeated.

Except he was asking a question. His plain face was filled with curiosity, a genuine longing.

Quietly, he asked his audience, “Do you know the answer?”

In a muddled shout, the children said, “No.”

“I don’t either,” their leader promised. “But when I’m awake, I’m searching. And when I’m sleeping, my dreams do the same.”

There was a brief pause, then an urgent voice cried out, “We have newcomers!”

“Bring them up.”

They were seven year olds—a twin brother and sister—and they climbed the trunk as if terrified. But Till offered his hands, and with a crisp surely, he told each to breathe deeply, then asked them, “what do you know about the ship?”

The little girl glanced at the sky, saying, “It’s where we came from.”

Laughter broke out in the audience, then evaporated.

Her brother corrected her. “The captains came from there. Not us.” Then he added, “But we’re going to help them get back there. Soon.”

There was a cold, prolonged pause.

Till allowed himself a patient smile, patting both of their heads. Then he looked out at his followers, asking, “Is he right?”

“No,” they roared. The siblings winced and tried to vanish.

Till knelt between them, and with a steady voice said, “The captains are just the captains. But you and I and all of us here . . . we are the Builders.”

Washen hadn’t heard that nonsense in a quarter of a century, and hearing it now, she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or explode in rage.

“We’re the Builders reborn,” Till repeated. Then he gave them the seeds of rebellion, adding, “And whatever our purpose, it is not to help these silly captains.”

MIOCENE REFUSED TO BELIEVE ANY of it. “First of all,” she told Washen, and herself, “I know my own child. What you’re describing is ridiculous. Second of all, this rally of theirs would involve nearly half of our children—”

Diu interrupted. “Most of them are adults with their own homes.” Then he added, “Madam.”

“I checked,” said Washen. “Several dozen of the younger children did slip out of the nurseries—”

“I’m not claiming that they didn’t go somewhere.” Then with a haughty expression, she asked, “Will the two of you listen to me? For a moment, please?”

“Go on, madam,” said Diu.

“I know what’s reasonable. I know how my son was raised and I know his character, and unless you can offer me some motivation for this . . . this shit . . . then I think we’ll just pretend that nothing’s been said here ..”

“Motivation,” Washen repeated. “Tell me what’s mine.”

With a chill delight, Miocene said, “Greed.”

“Why?”

“Believe me, I understand.” The dark eyes narrowed, silver glints in their corners. “If my son is insane, then yours stands to gain. Status, at least. Then eventually, power.”

Washen glanced at Diu.

They hadn’t mentioned Locke’s role as the informant, and they would keep it secret as long as possible—for a tangle of reasons, most of them selfish. “Ask Till about the Builders,” she insisted. “I won’t.”

“Why not?”

The woman took a moment, vainly picking spore cases from her new handmade uniform. Then with a cutting logic, she said, “If it’s a lie, he’ll say it’s a lie. If it’s true and he lies, then it’ll sound like the truth.”

“But if he admits it—?”

“Then Till wants me to know. And you’re simply a messenger.” She gave them a knowing stare, then looked off into the distance. “That’s not a revelation I want delivered at his convenience.”

THREE SHIP-DAYS LATER, WHILE THE ENCAMPment slept, a great fist lifted the world several meters, then grew bored and flung it down again.

Captains and children stumbled into the open. The sky was already choked with golden balloons and billions of flying insects. In twelve hours, perhaps less, the entire region would blister and explode, and die. Like a drunken woman, Washen ran through the aftershocks, reaching a tidy home and shouting, “Locke,” into its empty rooms. Where was her son? She moved along the round, finding all of the children’s houses empty. A tall figure stepped out of Till’s tiny house and asked, “Have you see mine?”

Washen shook her head. “Have you seen mine?” Miocene said, “No,” and sighed. Then she strode past Washen, shouting, “Do you know where I can find him?”

Diu was standing in the center of the round. Waiting. “If you help me,” the Submaster promised, “you’ll help your own son.”

With a little nod, Diu agreed.

Miocene and a dozen captains ran into the jungle. Left behind, Washen forced herself to concentrate, packing her household’s essentials and helping the other worried parents. When they were finished, hours had passed. The quakes had shattered the crust beneath them, and the golden balloons had vanished, replaced with clouds of iron dust and the stink of burning jungle. The captains and remaining children stood in the main round, ready to flee. But the ranking Submaster wouldn’t give the order. “Another minute,” he kept telling everyone, including himself. Then he would carefully hide his timepiece in his uniform’s pocket, fighting the urge to watch the turning of its hands.

When Till suddenly stepped into the open, grinning at them, Washen felt a giddy, incoherent relief.

Relief collapsed into shock, then terror.

The young man’s chest cavity had been opened up with a knife, the first wound partially healed but the second wound deeper, lying perpendicular to the first. Ripped, desiccated flesh tried desperately to knit itself back together. Till wasn’t in mortal danger, but he wore his agony well. With an artful moan, he stumbled, then righted himself for a slippery instant. Then he fell sideways, slamming against the bare iron in the same instant that Miocene slowly, slowly stepped into view.

She was unhurt, and she was thoroughly, hopelessly trapped.

Spellbound, Washen watched the Submaster kneel beside her boy, gripping his straight brown hair with one hand while she stared into his eyes.

What did Till say to her in the jungle? How did he steer his mother into this murderous rage? Because that’s what he must have done. As events played out, Washen realized that everything was part of an elaborate plan. That’s why Locke took them to the meeting, and why he had felt guilty. When he said, “I know. I promised,” he meant the promise he made to Till.

Miocene kept staring into her son’s eyes.

Perhaps she was hunting for forgiveness, or better, for some hint of doubt. Or perhaps she was simply giving him a moment to contemplate her own gaze, relentless and cold. Then with both hands, she picked up a good-sized wedge of nickel-iron—the quakes had left the round littered with them—and with a calm fury, she rolled him over and shattered the vertebrae in his neck, then continued beating him, blood and shredded flesh flying, his head nearly cut free of his paralyzed body.

Washen and five other captains pulled Miocene off her son.

“Let go of me,” she demanded. Then she dropped her weapon and raised her arms, telling everyone in earshot, “If you want to help him, help him. But if you do, you don’t belong to our community. That’s my decree. According to the powers of my rank, my office, and my mood . . .”

Locke had stepped out of the jungle.

He was the first to come to Till’s side, but only barely. More than two-thirds of the children gathered around the limp figure. A stretcher was found, and their leader was made comfortable. Then with a few possessions and virtually no food, the wayward children began to file away, moving north when the captains were planning to travel south. Diu stood beside Washen; since when?

“We can’t just let them get away,” he whispered. “Someone needs to stay with them. To talk to them, and help them . . .”

She glanced at her lover, then opened her mouth. “I’ll go,” she meant to say.

But Diu said, “You shouldn’t, no. You’ll help them more by staying close to Miocene.” He bad obviously thought it through, arguing, “You have rank. You have authority here. And besides, Miocene listens to you. When it suited her, yes. “I’ll keep in contact,” Diu promised. “Somehow.”

Washen nodded, thinking that all of this would pass in a few years. Perhaps in a few decades, at most.

Diu kissed her, and they hugged, and she found herself looking over his shoulder. Locke was a familiar silhouette standing in the jungle. At that distance, through those shadows, she couldn’t tell if her son was facing her or if she was looking at his back. Either way, she smiled and mouthed the words, “Be good.”

Then she took a deep breath and told Diu, “Be careful.” And she turned away, refusing to watch either of her men vanish into the shadows and gathering smoke. Miocene stood alone, speaking with a thin dry weepy voice. “We’re getting closer,” she declared, lifting her arms overhead. Closer?

Then she rose up on her toes, reaching higher, and with a low, pained laugh, she said, “Not close enough. Not yet.”

MISSION YEARS 511.01-1603.73:

A DOZEN OF THE LOYAL GRANDCHILDREN DISCOVERED the first artifact. Against every rule, they were playing beside a river of liquid iron, and suddenly a mysterious hyperfiber sphere drifted past. With their youngster’s courage, they fished it out and cooled it down and brought it back to the encampment. Then for the next hundred years, the sphere lay in storage, under lock and key. But once the captains had reinvented the means, they split the hyperfiber, and inside it was an information vault nearly as old as the earth.

The device was declared authentic, and useless, its memories erased to gray by the simple crush of time.

There were attempts at secrecy, but the Waywards always had their spies. One night, without warning, Locke and his father strolled into the main round. Dressed in breechcloth and little else, they found Washen’s door, knocked until she screamed, “Enter,” then stepped inside, Diu offering a wry grin as Locke made the unexpected proposal: Tons of dried and sweetened meat in exchange for that empty vault.

Washen didn’t have the authority. Four Submasters were pulled out of three beds, and at Miocene’s insistence, they grudgingly agreed to the Waywards’ terms.

But the negotiations weren’t finished. Diu suddenly handed his ex-commanders wafers of pure sulfur, very rare and essential to the captains’ fledgling industries. Then with a wink, he asked, “What would you give us in return for tons more?”

Everything, thought Washen.

Diu settled for a laser. As he made sure it had enough punch to penetrate hyperfiber, nervous voices asked how the Waywards would use it. “It’s obvious,” Diu replied, with easy scorn. “If your little group finds one artifact, by accident, how many more do you think that the Waywards could be sitting on?”

Afterwards, once or twice every century, the captains discovered new vaults. Most were dead and sold quickly to the Waywards for meat and sulfur. But it was ninth vault that still functioned, its ancient machinery full of images and data, and answers.

The elegant device was riding in Miocene’s lap. She touched it lightly, lovingly, then confessed, “I feel nervous. Nervous, but exceptionally confident.”

The Submaster never usually discussed her moods.

“With a little luck,” she continued, “this treasure will heal these old rifts between them and us.”

“With luck,” Washen echoed, thinking it would take more than a little.

They arrived at the clearing at three in the morning, shiptime. Moments later, several thousand Waywards stepped from the jungle at the same moment, dressed in tool belts and little else, the men often carrying toddlers and their women pregnant, every face feral and self-assured, almost every expression utterly joyous.

Washen climbed out of the walker, and Miocene handed down the vault.

To the eye, it wasn’t an impressive macbine—a rounded lump of gray ceramics infused with smooth blue-white diamonds. Yet most of the Waywards stared at the prize. Till was the lone exception. Coming down the open slope, walking slowly, he watched Miocene, wariness mixed with other, less legible emotions.

Locke was following the Waywards’ leader at a respectful distance. “How are you, Mother?” he called out. Always polite; never warm.

“Well enough,” Washen allowed. “And you?”

His answer was an odd, tentative smile.

Where was Diu? Washen gazed at the crowd, assuming that he was somewhere close, hidden by the crush of bodies.

“May I examine the device?” asked Till.

Miocene took the vault from Washen so that she could hand it to her son. And Till covered the largest diamonds with his fingertips, blocking out the light, causing the machine to slowly, slowly awaken.

The clearing was a natural amphitheater, black iron rising on all sides. Washen couldn’t count all the Waywards streaming out of the jungle above. Thousands had become tens of thousands. Some of them were her grandchildren and great grandchildren. Diu would know which ones, perhaps. How many of her descendants lived with the Waywards? In the past, during their very occasional meetings, Diu had confided that the Waywards probably numbered in the millions—a distinct possibility since they’d inherited their parents’ immortal genes, and since Till seemed to relish fecundity. In principle, this entire audience could be related to Washen. Not bad, she thought. Particularly for a old woman who for many fine reasons had only that one child of her own. The vault began to hum softly, and Locke lifted an arm, shouting, “Now.”

Suddenly the audience was silent, everyone motionless, a palpable anticipation hanging in the hot dry air.

The sky grew dark, and the clearing vanished.

Marrow swelled, nearly filling the chamber. Barren and smooth, it was covered in a worldwide ocean of bubbling, irradiated iron that lay just beneath the hyperfiber ceiling, and the audience stood on that ocean, unwarmed, watching an ancient drama play itself out.

Without sound or any warning, the Bleak appeared, squirming their way through the chamber’s wall, through the countless access tunnels—insect like eyborgs, enormous and cold and swift.

Like a swarm of wasps, they flowed toward Marrow, launching gobs of antimatter that slammed into the molten surface, scorching white-hot explosions rising up and up. The liquid iron swirled and lifted, then collapsed again. In the harsh light, Washen glanced at her son, trying to measure his face, his mood. He looked spellbound, eyes wide and his mouth ajar, his body shivering with an apocalyptic fever. Every face seemed to be seeing this for the first time. Washen remembered the last time she spoke to Diu, almost a decade ago. She asked about the vaults and the Waywards’ beliefs, explaining that Miocene was pressing for details. In response, Diu growled, reminding her, “I’m their only nonbeliever, and they don’t tell me much. I’m tolerated for my technical expertise, and just as important, because I long ago stopped kowtowing to Miocene and all the rest of you.”

A hyperfiber dome suddenly burst from the iron, lasers firing, a dozen of the Bleak killed before the dome pulled itself under again.

The Bleak brought reinforcements, then struck again.

Hyperfiber missiles carried the antimatter deep into the iron. Marrow shook and twisted, then belched gas and fire. Perhaps the Bleak managed to kill the last of the Builders. Perhaps. Either way, the Builders’ revenge was in place. Was waiting. In the middle of the attack, with the Bleak’s forces pressing hard, the buttressing fields came on, bringing their blue-white glow. Suddenly the Bleak appeared tiny and frail. Then, before they could flee, the lightning storm swept across the sky, dissolving every wisp of matter into a plasma, creating a superheated mist that would persist for millions of years, cooling as Marrow cooled, gradually collecting on the warm, newborn crust.

Gradually, the Bleak’s own carbon and hydrogen and oxygen became Marrow’s atmosphere and its rivers, and those same precious elements slowly gathered themselves into butter bugs and virtue traces, then into the wide-eyed children standing in that clearing, weeping as they stared at the radiant sky.

The present reemerged gradually, almost reluctantly.

“There’s much more,” Miocene promised, her voice urgent. Motherly. “Other records show how the ship was attacked. How the Builders retreated to Marrow. This is where they made their last stand, whoever they were.” She waited for a long moment, watching her son’s unreadable face. Then with a genuine disappointment, she warned, “The Builders never show themselves. We understand a lot more now, but we’re still not sure how they looked.”

Till wasn’t awe struck by what he had just witnessed. If anything, he was mildly pleased, grinning as if amused, but definitely not excited or surprised, or even particularly interested with what Miocene had to say.

“Listen to me,” she snapped, unable to contain herself any longer. “Do you understand what this means? The Event that trapped us here is some kind of ancient weapon designed to kill the Bleak. And everything else on board the ship . . . perhaps .. .”

“Who’s trapped?” Till replied with a smooth, unnerving calm. “I’m not. No believer is. This is exactly where we belong.”

Only Miocene’s eyes betrayed her anger.

Till continued with his explanation, saying, “You’re here because the Builders called to you. They lured you here because they needed someone to give birth to us.”

“That’s insane,” the Submaster snarled.

Washen was squinting, searching for Diu. She recognized his face and his nervous energy, but only in the children. Where was he? Suddenly it occurred to her that he hadn’t been invited, or even worse “I know why you believe this nonsense.” Miocene said the words, then took a long step toward Till, empty hands lifting into the air. “It’s obvious. When you were a boy, you found one of these vaults. Didn’t you? It showed you the war and the Bleak, and that’s when you began all of this . . . this nonsense about being the Builders reborn . . .!”

Her son regarded her with an amused contempt.

“You made a mistake,” said Miocene, her voice shrill. Accusing. “You were a child, and you didn’t understand what you were seeing, and ever since we’ve had to pay for your ignorance. Don’t you see . . .?”

Her son was smiling, incapable of doubt.

Looking at the Waywards, Miocene screamed, “Who understands me?”

Silence.

“I didn’t find any vault,” Till claimed. “I was alone in the jungle, and a Builder’s spirit appeared to me. He told me about the Ship and the Bleak. He showed me all of this. Then he made me a promise: As this day ends, in the coming twilight, I’ll learn my destiny..”

His voice trailed away into silence.

Locke kneeled and picked up the vault. Then he looked at Washen, saying matter-of-factly, “The usual payment. That’s what we’re offering.”

Miocene roared. “What do you mean? This is the best artifact yet!”

No one responded, gazing at her as if she was insane. “It functions. It remembers.” The Submaster was flinging her arms into the air, telling them, “The other vaults were empty, or nearly so—”

“Exactly,” said Till. Then, as if it was beneath their leader to explain the obvious, Locke gave the two of them a look of pity, telling them, “Those vaults are ept because what they were holding is elsewhere now. Elsewhere.”

Till and Locke touched their scalps. Every follower did the same, fifty thousand arms lifting, a great ripple reaching the top of the amphitheater as everyone pointed at their minds. At their reborn souls.

Locke was staring at his mother.

A premonition made her mouth dry. “Why isn’t Diu here?”

“Because he’s dead,” her son replied, an old sadness passing through his face. “I’m sorry. It happened eight years ago, during a powerful eruption.”

Washen couldn’t speak, or move. “Are you all right, Mother?”

She took a breath, then lied. “Yes. I’m fine.”

Then she saw the most astonishing sight yet in this long and astonishing day: Miocene had dropped to her knees, and with a pleading voice, she was begging for Till’s forgiveness. “I never should have struck you,” she said. She said, “Darling,” with genuine anguish. Then as a last resort, she told him, “And I do love the ship. As much as you do, you ungrateful shit . . .!”

MISSION YEAR 4895.33:

FROM THE VERY TOP OF THE NEW BRIDGE, where the atmosphere was barely a sloppy vacuum, Marrow finally began to resemble a far away place. The captains appreciated the view. Whenever Washen was on duty, she gazed down at the city-like encampments and sprawling farms, the dormant volcanoes and surviving patches of jungle, feeling a delicious sense of detachment from it all. A soft gray twilight held sway. The buttresses had continued to shrivel and weaken over the last millennia, and if Miocene’s model proved true, in another two centuries the buttresses would vanish entirely. For a few moments, or perhaps a few years, there would be no barrier between them and the ship. Marrow world would be immersed in a perfect blackness. Then the buttresses would reignite suddenly, perhaps accompanied by another Event. But by then the captains and their families, moving with a swift, drilled precision, would have escaped, climbing up this wondrously makeshift bridge, reaching the old base camp, then hopefully, returning to the ship, at last.

What they would find there, no one knew.

Or in a polite company, discussed.

In the last five thousand years, every remote possibility had been suggested, debated in depth, and finally, mercifully, buried in an unmarked grave.

Whatever was, was.

That was the mandatory attitude, and it had been for centuries now.

All that mattered was the bridge. The surviving captains—almost two-thirds of the original complement—lived for its completion. Hundreds of thousands of their descendants worked in distant mines or trucked the ore to the factories. Another half million were manufacturing super strong alloys and crude flavors of hyperfiber, some of each added to the bridge’s foundation, while the rest were spun together into hollow tubes. Washen’s duty was to oversee the slow, rigorous hoisting of each new tube, then its final attachment. Compared to the original bridge, their contraption was inelegant and preposterously fat. Yet she felt a genuine pride all the same, knowing the sacrifices that went into its construction, and the enormous amounts of time, and when they didn’t have any other choice, a lot of desperate, ad hoc inventiveness.

“Madam Washen?” said a familiar voice. “Excuse me, madam.”

The captain blinked, then turned.

Her newest assistant stood in the doorway. An intense, self-assured man of no particular age, he was obviously puzzled—a rare expression—and with a mixture of curiosity and confusion, he announced, “Our shift is over.”

“In fifty minutes,” Washen replied, knowing the exact time for herself.

“No, madam.” Nervous hands pressed at the crisp fabric of his technician’s uniform. “I just heard. We’re to leave immediately, using every tube but the Primary.”

She looked at the displays on her control boards. “I don’t see any orders.”

“I know—”

“Is this another drill?” If the reinforced crust under them ever began to subside, they might have only minutes to evacuate. “Because if it is, we need a better system than having you walking about, tapping people’s shoulders.”

“No, madam. It’s not a drill.”

“Then what—?”

“Miocene,” he blurted. “She contacted me directly. Following her instructions, I’ve already dismissed the others, and now I am to tell you to wait here. She is on her way.” As proof, he gave the order’s file code. Then with a barely restrained frustration, he added, “This is very mysterious. Everyone agrees. But the Submaster is such a secretive person, so I am assuming—”

“Who’s with her?” Washen interrupted.

“I don’t think anyone.”

But the primary tube was the largest. Twenty captains could ride inside one of its cars, never brushing elbows with one another.

“Her car seems to have an extra thick hull,” the assistant explained, “plus some embellishments that I can’t quite decipher.”

“What sorts of embellishments?”

He glanced at the time, pretending he was anxious to leave. But he was also proud of his cleverness, just as Washen guessed he would be. Cameras inside the tube let them observe the car. Its mass could be determined by the energy required to lift it. He pointed to the pipelike devices wrapped around its hull, making the car look like someone’s ball of rope, and with a sudden dose of humility, he admitted, “I don’t seem to quite understand that apparatus.”

In other words, “Please explain it to me, madam.”

But Washen didn’t explain anything. Looking at her assistant—one of the most talented and loyal of the captains’ offspring; a man who had proved himself on every occasion—she shrugged her shoulders, then lied.

She said, “I don’t understand it, either.”

Then before she took another breath, she suggested, “You should probably do what she wants. Leave. If Miocene finds you waiting here, she’ll kick you down the shaft herself.”

THE SUBMASTER HAD EXACTLY THE SAME FACE and figure that she had carried for millennia, but in the eyes and in the corners of her voice, she was changed. Transformed, almost. On those rare occasions when they met face to face, Washen marveled at all the ways life on Marrow had changed Miocene. And then she would wonder if it was the same for her—if old friends looked at Washen and thought to themselves, “She looks tired, and sad, and maybe a little profound.”

They saw each other infrequently, but despite rank and Miocene’s attitudes, it was difficult to remain formal. Washen whispered, “Madam,” and then added, “Are you crazy? Do you really think it’ll work?”

The face smiled, not a hint of joy in it. “According to my models, probably. With an initial velocity of five hundred meters per—”

“Accuracy isn’t your problem,” Washen told her. “And if you can slip inside your target—that three kilometer remnant of the old bridge, right?—you’ll have enough time to brake your momentum.”

“But my mind will have died. Is that what you intend to say?”

“Even as thin and weak as the buttresses are now . . . I would hope you’re dead. Otherwise you’ll have suffered an incredible amount of brain damage.”

Washen shook her head. “Unless you’ve accomplished a miracle, and that car will protect you for every millisecond of the way.”

Miocene nodded. “It’s taken some twenty-one hundred years, and some considerable secrecy on my part . . . but the results have been well worth it.”

In the remote past—Washen couldn’t remember when exactly—the captains toyed with exactly this kind of apparatus. But it was the Submaster who ordered them not to pursue it. “Too risky,” was her verdict. Her lie. “Too many technical hurdles.”

For lack of better, Washen smiled grimly and told her, “Good luck then.”

Miocene shook her head, her eyes gaining an ominous light. “Good luck to both of us, you mean. The cabin’s large enough for two.”

“But why me?”

“Because I respect you,” she reported. “And if I order you to accompany me, you will. And frankly, I need you. You’re more gifted than me when it comes to talking to people. The captains and our halfway loyal descendants . . . well, let’s just say they share my respect for you, and that could be an enormous advantage.”

Washen guessed the reason, but she still asked, “Why?”

“I need to explore the ship. And if the worst has happened—if it’s empty and dead—then you’re the best person, I believe, to bring home that terrible news . . .”

JUST LIKE THAT, THEY ESCAPED FROM MARROW.

Miocene’s car was cramped and primitive, and the swift journey brought little hallucinations and a wrenching nausea. But they survived with their sanity. Diving into the remains of the first bridge, the Submaster brought them to a bruising halt inside the assembly station, slipping into the first empty berth, then she took a moment to smooth her crude, homespun uniform with a trembling long hand.

Base camp had been without power for nearly five millennia. The Event had crippled every reactor, every drone. Without food or water, the abandoned lab animals had dropped into comas, and as their immortal flesh lost moisture, they mummified itself. Washen picked up one of the mandrill baboons—an enormous male weighing little more than a breath—and she felt its leathery heart beat, just once, just to tell her, “I waited for you.”

She set it down, and left quietly.

Miocene was standing on the viewing platform, gazing expectantly at the horizon. Even at this altitude, they could only see the captains’ realm. The nearest of the Wayward cities—spartan places with cold and simple iron buildings fitted together like blocks—were hundreds of kilometers removed from them. Which might as well have been hundreds of light years, as much as the two cultures interacted anymore.

“You look as if you’re expecting someone,” Washen observed.

The Submaster said nothing.

“The Waywards are going to find out that we’re here, madam. If Till doesn’t already know, it’s only because he’s got too many spies, and all of them are talking at once.”

Miocene nodded absently, taking a deep breath.

Then she turned, and never mentioning the Waywards, she said, “We’ve wasted enough time. Let’s go see what’s upstairs.”

The long access tunnel to the ship was intact.

Tube-cars remained in their berths, untouched by humans and apparently shielded from the Event by the surrounding hyperfiber. Their engines were charged, every system locked in a diagnostic mode. The com-links refused to work, perhaps because there was no one to maintain the dead ship’s net. But by dredging the proper commands from memory, Washen got them under way, and every so often she would glance at Miocene, measuring the woman’s stern profile, wondering which of them was more scared of what they would find.

The tunnel turned into an abandoned fuel line that spilled out into the leech habitat.

Everything was exactly as Washen’s team had left it. Empty and dusty and relentlessly gray, the habitat welcomed them with a perfect silence. Miocene gripped her belly, as if in pain.

Washen tried to link up with the ship’s net, but every connection to the populated areas had been severed.

“We’re going on,” Miocene announced. “Now.”

They pressed on, climbing out of the mammoth fuel tank and into the first of the inhabited quarters. Suddenly they were inside a wide, flattened tunnel, enormous and empty, and looking out at the emptiness, Miocene said, “Perhaps the passengers and crew . . . perhaps they were able to evacuate the ship . . . do you suppose . . .?”

Washen began to say, “Maybe.”

From behind, with a jarring suddenness, an enormous car appeared, bearing down on them until a collision was imminent, then skipping sideways with a crisp, Al precision. Then as the car was passing them, its sole passenger—an enormous whale—like entity cushioned within a salt water bath—winked at them with three of its black eyes, winking just as people did at each other, meaning nothing but the friendliest of greetings.

It was a Yawkieen. Five millennia removed from her post, yet Washen immediately remembered the species’ name. With a flat, disbelieving voice, Miocene said, “No.”

But it was true. In the distance, they could just make out a dozen cars, the traffic light, but otherwise perfectly normal. Perfectly banal.

Pausing at the first waystation, they asked its resident AI about the Master’s health.

With a smooth cheeriness, it reported, “She is in robust good health. Thank you for inquiring.”

“Since when?” the Submaster pressed. “For the last sixty thousand years, bless her.”

Miocene was mute, a scalding rage growing by the instant.

One of the waystation’s walls was sprinkled with com-booths. Washen stepped into the nearest booth, saying, “Emergency status. The captains’ channel. Please, we need to speak to the Master.”

Miocene followed, sealing the door behind them.

A modest office surrounded them, spun out of light and sound. Three captains and countless Als served as the Master’s staff and as buffers. It was the night staff, Washen realized; the clocks on Marrow were wrong by eleven hours. Not too bad after fifty centuries of little mistakes The human faces stared at the apparitions, while the Als simply asked, “What is your business, please?”

“I want to see her!” Miocene thundered.

The captains tried to portray an appropriate composure.

“I’m Miocene! Submaster, First Chair!” The tall woman bent over the nearest captain, saying, “You’ve got to recognize me. Look at me. Something’s very wrongthe Als remembered them, and acted. The image swirled and stabilized again.

The Master was standing alone in a conference room, watching the arrival of a small starship. She looked exactly as Washen remembered, except that her hair was longer and tied in an intricate bun. Preoccupied in ways that only a Ship’s Master can be, she didn’t bother to look at her guests. She wasn’t paying attention to her AI’s warnings. But when she happened to glance at the two captains—both dressed in crude, even laughable imitations of standard ship uniforms—a look of wonder and astonishment swept over that broad face, replaced an instant later with a piercing fury.

“Where have the two of you been?” the Master cried out.

“Where you sent us!” Miocene snapped. “Marrow!”

“Where . . .?!” the woman spat.

“Marrow,” the Submaster repeated. Then, in exasperation, “What sort of game are you playing with us?”

“I didn’t send you anywhere . . .” In a dim, half-born way, Washen began to understand.

Miocene shook her head, asking, “Why keep our mission secret?” Then in the next breath, “Unless all you intended to do was imprison the best of your captains—”

Washen grabbed Miocene by the arm, saying, “Wait. No.”

“My best captains? You?” The Master gave a wild, cackling laugh. “My best officers wouldn’t vanish without a trace. They wouldn’t take elaborate precautions to accomplish god-knows-what, keeping out of sight for how long? And without so much as a whisper from any one of them . . .!”

Miocene glanced at Washen with an empty face. “She didn’t send us—”

“Someone did,” Washen replied.

“Security!” the Master shouted. “Two ghosts are using this link! Track them! Hurry! Please, please!”

Miocene killed the link, giving them time.

The stunned ghosts found themselves standing inside the empty booth, trying to make sense out of pure insanity.

“Who could have fooled us . . .?” asked Washen. Then in her next breath, she realized how easy it would have been: Someone with access and ingenuity sent orders in the Master’s name, bringing the captains together in an isolated location. Then the same ingenious soul deceived them with a replica of the Master, sending them rushing down to the ship’s core . . . “I could have manipulated all of you,” Miocene offered, thinking along the same seductive, extremely paranoid lines. “But I didn’t know about Marrow’s existence. None of us knew.”

But someone had known. Obviously.

“And even if I possessed the knowledge,” Miocene continued, “what could I hope to gain?”

An ancient memory surfaced of its own accord. Suddenly Washen saw herself standing before the window in the leech habitat, looking at the captains’ reflections while talking amiably about ambition and its sweet, intoxicating stink. “We’ve got to warn the Master,” she told Miocene. “Of what?”

She didn’t answer, shouting instructions to the booth, then waiting for a moment before asking, “Are you doing what I said?”

The booth gave no reply.

Washen eyed Miocene, feeling a sudden chill. Then she unsealed the booth’s door and gave it a hard shove, stepping warily out into the waystation.

A large woman in robes was calmly and efficiently melting the AI with a powerful laser.

Wearing a proper uniform, saying the expected words, she would be indistinguishable from the Master.

But what surprised the captains even more was the ghost standing nearby. He was wearing civilian clothes and an elaborate disguise, and Washen hadn’t seen him for ages. But from the way his flesh quivered on his bones, and the way his gray eyes smiled straight at her, there was no doubt about his name. “Diu,” Washen whispered. Her ex-lover lifted a kinetic stunner. Too late and much too slowly, Washen attempted to tackle him.

Then she was somewhere else, and her neck had been broken, and Dill’s face was hovering over her, laughing as it spoke, every word incomprehensible.

WASHEN CLOSED HER EYES. Another voice spoke, asking, “How did you find Marrow?” Miocene’s voice?

“It’s rather like your mission briefing. There was an impact. Some curious data were gathered. But where the Ship’s Master dismissed the idea of a hollow core, I investigated. My money paid for the drones that eventually dug to this place, and I followed them here.” There was soft laugh, a reflective pause. Then, “This happened tens of thousands of years ago. Of course. I wasn’t a captain in those days. I had plenty of time and the wealth to explore this world, to pick apart its mysteries, and eventually formulate my wonderful plan .. Washen opened her eyes again, fighting to focus. “I’ve lived on Marrow more than twice as long as you, madam.”

Diu was standing in the middle of the viewing platform, his face framed by the remnants of the bridge. “I know its cycles,” he said. “And all its many hazards, too.”

Miocene was standing next to Washen, her face taut and tired but the eyes opened wide, missing nothing. “How do you feel?” she inquired, glancing down at her colleague.

“Awful.” Washen sat up, winced briefly, then asked, “How long have we been here?”

“A few minutes,” Diu answered. “My associate, the false Master, was carrying both of you. But now it’s gone ahead to check on my ship—”

“What ship?”

“That’s what I was about to explain.” The smile brightened, then he said, “Over the millennia, I’ve learned how to stockpile equipment in hyperfiber vaults. The vaults drift in the molten iron. In times of need, I can even live inside them. If I wanted to pretend my own death, for instance.”

“For the Waywards,” Miocene remarked. “Naturally.”

The Submaster pretended to stare at their captor. But she was looking past him, the dark eyes intense and unreadable, but in a subtle way, almost hopeful. “What do you want?” asked Miocene.

“Guess,” he told them.

Washen took a long breath and tried to stand. Miocene grabbed her by the arms, and they stood together like clumsy dancers, fighting for their balance.

“The ship,” Washen managed.

Diu said nothing.

“The ultimate starship, and you want it for yourself.” Washen took a few more breaths, testing her neck before she pulled free of Miocene’s hands. “This scheme of yours is an elaborate mutiny. That’s all it is, isn’t it?”

“The Waywards are an army,” said Miocene. “An army of religious fanatics being readied for a jihad. My son is the nominal leader. But who feeds him his visions? It’s always been you, hasn’t it?”

No response.

Washen found the strength to move closer to the railing, looking down, nothing to see but thick clouds of airborne iron kicked up by some fresh eruption.

Miocene took a sudden breath, then exhaled.

Strolling towards them, huge even at a distance, was the false Master. Knowing it was a machine made it look like one. It had a patient stride, even with its thick arms raised overhead, waving wildly. “What about the Builders?” Miocene blurted. Diu nearly glanced over his shoulder, then hesitated. “What are you asking?”

“Did they really fight the Bleak?”

Diu enjoyed the suspense, grinning at both of them before he admitted, “How the fuck should I know?”

“The artifacts—?” Miocene began.

“Six thousand years old,” he boasted. “Built by an alien passenger who thought I was in the entertainment industry.”

“Why pretend to die?” Miocene asked.

“For the freedom it gave me.” There was a boy in his grin. “Being dead, I can see more. Being dead, I can disguise myself. I walk where I want. I make babies with a thousand different women, including some in the captains’ realm.”

There was silence.

Then for a moment, they could just begin to hear the machine’s voice—a deep sound rattling between the dormitories, fading until it was a senseless murmur. “We spoke to the Master,” Washen blurted. Miocene took the cue, adding, “She knows. We told her everything—”

“No, you told her almost nothing,” Diu snapped. “Are you certain?”

“Absolutely.”

“But she’ll be hunting for us,” Washen said.

“She’s been on that same hunt for five thousand years,” he reminded them. “And even if she sniffs out the access tunnel this time, I won’t care. Because on the way back down, I mined the tunnel. Patient one kilo charges of antimatter are ready to close things up tight. Excavating a new tunnel is going to take millennia, and probably much longer. Giving myself and my friends plenty of time to prepare.”

“What if no one digs us out?” Washen asked.

Diu shrugged, grinning at her. “How does the old story play? It’s better to rule in one realm than serve in another—?”

Then he hesitated, hearing a distant voice. The Master’s voice.

A laser appeared in his right hand, and he turned, squinting at his machine, puzzled by the frantic arm-waving.

“Another car,” said the voice, diluted to a whisper. “It’s in the berth next to yours . . .!”

“What car?” Diu muttered to himself.

“I believe I know,” Miocene replied, eyes darting side to side. “I built two vessels, identical in every way. Including the fact that you never knew they existed.”

Diu didn’t seem to hear her.

Miocene took a step toward him, adding, “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Someone else is here. Or if they squeezed in together, two someones.”

“So?” Diu replied. “A couple more captains lurking nearby—”

“Except,” Miocene interrupted, “I didn’t send my invitation to my captains.”

Diu didn’t ask to whom it was sent.

Washen remembered Miocene had stood on this platform, watching Marrow. Watching for Till, she realized. How long would it have taken him to move the car to the bridge? That was the only question. She had no doubts that once motivated, the Waywards could do whatever they wanted inside the captains’ realm.

“I was hopeful,” Miocene confessed. “I was hopeful that my son would be curious, that he would follow me back to the ship and see it for himself.”

There was a sound, sharp and familiar.

The false Master stopped in mid-stride, then began to collapse in on itself. Then a thin column of light appeared in the smoke, betraying the laser’s source.

Diu started to run. Miocene followed, and Washen chased both of them.

Beside the platform, in easy earshot, stood a drone. A lone figure was kneeling beneath its ceramic body, wearing breechcloth and holding a crude laser drill against his shoulder, intent on reducing the machine to ash and gas.

Diu saw him, stopped and aimed. At Locke.

Maybe he was hesitating, realizing it was his son. Or more likely, he simply was asking himself: Where’s Till? Either way, he didn’t fire. Instead, Diu started to turn, looking at his surroundings as if for the first time there was a clean hard crack.

A fat chunk of lead knocked Diu off his feet, opening his chest before it tore through his backside. With the smooth grace of an athlete, Till climbed out from the meshwork below the platform. He seemed unhurried, empty of emotion. Strolling past Wasbe, he didn’t give her the tiniest glance. It was like watching a soulless machine, right up until the moment when Miocene tried to block his way, saying, “Son,” with a weak, sorrowful voice.

He shoved her aside, then ran toward Diu. Screaming. At the top of his lungs, screaming, “It’s all been a lie—!”

Diu lifted his hand, reaching into a bloody pocket.

Moments later, the base camp began to shake violently. Dozens of mines were exploding simultaneously. But the enormous mass of the ship absorbed the blows, then counterattacked, pushing the access tunnel shut for its entire length, and as an afterthought, knocking everyone off their feet.

Diu grabbed his laser.

He managed to sit up.

Washen fought her way to her feet, but too late. She could only watch as Miocene managed to leap, grabbing Till by the head and halfway covering him as the killing blast struck her temple, and in half an instant, boiled away her brain.

Till rolled, using the body as a shield, discharging his weapon until it was empty. Then a burst of light struck him in the shoulder, removing his right arm and part of his chest even as it cauterized the enormous wound.

Using his drill, Locke quickly sliced his father into slivers, then burned him to dust.

Miocene lay dead at Washen’s feet, and Till was beside her, oblivious to everything. There was a wasted quality to the face, a mark that went beyond any physical injury. “It’s been a lie,” he kept saying, without sound. “Everything. A monstrous lie.”

Locke came to him, not to Washen, asking, “What is monstrous, Your Excellence?”

Till gazed up at him. With a careful voice, he said, “Nothing.” Then after a long pause, he added, “We have to return home. Now.”

“Of course. Yes, Your Excellence.”

“But first,” he said, “the ship must be protected from its foes!”

Locke knew exactly what was being asked of him. “I don’t see why—?”

“The ship is in danger!” the prophet cried out. “I say it, which makes it so. Now prove your devotion, Wayward!”

Locke turned, looking at his mother with a weary, trapped expression.

Washen struck him on the jaw, hard and sudden.

She had covered almost a hundred meters before the laser drill bit into her calf, making her stumble. But she forced herself to keep running, slipping behind the drone with only two more burns cut deep into her back.

It was as if Locke was trying to miss.

Hours later, watching from the dormitory, Washen saw her son carrying four of the comatose baboons out into the courtyard, where he piled them up and turned the lasers on them. Then he showed the ashes to Till, satisfying him, and without a backward glance, the two walked slowly in the direction of the bridge.

Washen hid for several days, eating and drinking from the old stores.

When she finally crept into the bridge, she found Disc’s sophisticated car cut into pieces, and Miocene’s fused to its berth. But what startled her—what made her sick and sad—was Marrow itself. The captains’ new bridge had been toppled. Wild fires and explosions were sweeping across the visible globe. A vast, incoherent rage was at work, erasing every trace of the despised captains, and attacking anyone that might pose any threat to a lost prophet.

In that crystalline moment of horror, Washen understood what she had to do. And without a wasted moment, she turned and began to make ready.

MISSION DATE-INCONSEQUENTIAL

AT THE SHIP’S CENTER, A SEAMLESS NIGHT has been born.

The figure moves by memory through the darkness, picking her way across a tangle of conduits and scrap parts. In a few moments, energy milked from hundreds of tube-cars will flow into an enormous projector, and for a fleeting instant or two, the darkness will be repelled. If her ink-and-paper calculations are correct, and if more than a century of single minded preparation succeeds, a message of forgiveness and rebirth will skate along the chamber’s wall, encircling and embracing the world. But that is just the beginning.

Wearing a pressure suit and two bulky packs, she climbs over the railing and leaps, bracing for the impact.

Boom.

The blister is thick, but she began the hole decades ago. Tools wait in a neat pile. With a minimum of cuts, the hole opens, and a sudden wind blows past her, trying to coax her into joining it, nothing outside but Marrow’s high cold stratosphere. The buttresses have vanished, at least for the moment.

There’s no time to waste. She obeys the wind, letting it carry her through the hole and downward in a wild tumbling spiral. The sky behind her erupts in light.

In the colors of fire and hot iron, it cries out, “A BUILDER IS COMING. SHE COMES TO LEAD YOU OUT OF YOUR MISERY!”

The Builder grabs the cord of her parachute, then begins to scream. Not out of fear. Not at all.

It’s the full-throated, wonderstruck scream of a girl who has forgotten just how very much fun it is to fall.

BROKEN SYMMETRY

Michael A. Burstein

Success in an experiment does not necessarily mean getting the results you expected. . . .

Prologue: Spin Down

No one saw the first four explosions. Only two people witnessed the fifth explosion, and BPB it killed one of them.

Jack Levinson and Daniel Strock, fellow math teachers at the local high school in Waxahachie, Texas, always spent their Sunday afternoons bicycling along the path of the old, abandoned Superconducting Supercollider main ring. Its sixty-mile circumference surrounded the town, a greater distance than either of the two friends ever bicycled on any given day. Instead, they liked to drive to the spot on the ring where they had last left off their biking, pedal for a few miles, and then return to their car. In bits and pieces, they had made a habit of completely finishing the path of the accelerator every few months. Not that they could see the old collider ring, of course, since, like most particle accelerators, it had been built underground. Nor did a track actually run above the buried ring. They bicycled on dry grass that looked the same everywhere, so that unless you knew the collider was beneath your feet, nothing in the way the ground appeared would tell you otherwise.

On this particular October afternoon, shortly after starting their ride, they stopped for a moment to relieve their thirst. They remained straddled on their bicycles. Jack reached down for his canteen, and poured the cool water down his parched throat. He offered it to Daniel, who shook his head. “I’m busy,” he said, checking his compass against a map.

“Come on,” Jack said, “you’d better take a sip if you don’t want to end up dehydrated.”

Daniel smiled. “Nah, I can take it.”

“You say that each and every time, and last week I almost had to carry you back to the car. Here.” Jack thrust the canteen at his friend, who took a sip and tossed it back.

Jack looked around. “Which way now?”

“Well,” Daniel said, turning the map around and squinting into the Sun, “I think we go—this way!”

As he spoke the last two words, he jumped back onto the pedals and sped away from Jack. Jack shook his fist, and almost lost his balance getting back onto the bicycle. Daniel was already thirty feet ahead. Laughing, Jack shouted, “Damn you! You always try to turn this into a race—”

A large explosion interrupted him, a loud boom accompanied by a blinding flash of light. He hit the dirt instantly, his body remembering the air raid drills from elementary school. Duck and cover, that’s what they always said to do. In a moment, the boom turned into the echo of a distant rumble, and Jack looked up.

The explosion had left a gaping hole in the ground, right where Daniel had been pedaling. Smoke drifted lazily out of the hole. Daniel and his bike lay off to the side, thrown by the force of the explosion. Jack jumped off his bike and ran over to his friend.

“Daniel!” he screamed, and what he saw shocked him. Daniel’s body was bruised and bleeding all over, and covered with metal fragments. He didn’t react to Jack’s scream.

Jack regained control and gently shook Daniel on the shoulder. It was scorching hot, and Jack pulled his hand away in searing pain. As he did, pieces of Daniel’s shirt and flesh came with it.

Jack spat on his hand in disgust, and took another look at Daniel. His friend’s head lolled off to one side, and he looked as limp as a rag doll. He was dead. Jack assimilated this information as best as he could, and passed out.

“Sheriff, Mr. Levinson has been in a major accident, and I don’t want you getting him all worked up.”

“Don’t worry, Doc,” said Sheriff Bob Kingsley in his natural drawl. He fixed his eyes in a squint and looked at the two Ellis County deputies, who nodded in agreement. The three made a strange picture, standing in the antiseptic white hospital hallway in uniform. Kingsley wore a ten-gallon hat over his dark, curly hair, the one affectation he allowed himself. “We just want to ask him a few questions.”

Dr. Korn shook his head. “Only one of you. I don’t want him to get too excited.”

Kingsley shrugged and followed the doctor into the hospital room. He emerged a few minutes later and headed over to the nurses’ station, his deputies in tow.

Waiting at the station was Sam Stratton, of the FBI. “Well?” he asked Kingsley, in a clipped voice.

“Well,” echoed the sheriff. “Mr. Levinson saw another hole form.”

“That makes five, now. And the first direct evidence that the ring is dangerous. It was an explosion, right?”

“Yep, and a pretty nasty one from what Levinson said. He’s still shaken up over the death of his friend.” Stratton dismissed Kingsley’s concern with a wave of his hand. “OK, Sheriff, thanks for your time. I’ll take over the investigation from here and call in my people.” He reached for the phone, but Kingsley interceded by grabbing his wrist.

“Begging your pardon, Mr. Stratton, but this is still Ellis County, and the area of the collider is still under my jurisdiction.”

Stratton glared at him. “We have jurisdiction over federal land.”

Kingsley smiled. “Ah, but it ain’t federal land anymore, is it? Hasn’t been for quite some time now.” Stratton pulled his wrist out of Kingsley’s grip, and brushed it off on his pants. “Very well, Sheriff. So what do you plan to do?”

“First thing I’m going to do is set up police barricades and declare the ground above the ring off limits. It won’t keep out everyone, but it should give us a few days of leeway before the press catches wind of it.”

“That’s exactly what I was planning to do. I don’t see why I shouldn’t be the one to supervise.”

“They won’t respect your barriers as much as they’ll respect mine, Mr. Stratton. Most of these people have an idea of who I am, and trust the sheriff’s office. You’re just the guy they sent in from Austin.”

Stratton squinted at Kingsley. “I can bring in the army, if necessary.” Kingsley frowned. “The army? You don’t really want to antagonize the townsfolk unnecessarily, do you? People don’t usually go out to the collider anyway. What’s the point of attracting all that attention?”

Stratton glared at him. “I still need to call in some people. Scientists.” Kingsley shook his head and smiled. “Call in your scientists if you want, Mr. Stratton, but I’m going to call in mine. Probably just as good.”

“Yours?” Stratton asked, with the slightest hint of a sneer.

“Yep, mine. I’m going to call in the guy who knows all there is to know about this accelerator. Got to know him a little over ten years ago, when he first came to direct the project. He’s back at Harvard now. If anyone knows what caused this thing to start burping over the past month, he would.” Kingsley turned to his deputies, and in an even voice, said, “Get me Roy Schwitters.”

1. Spin Up

The Superconducting Supercollider had been up and running for over a year now, and Ray Shwartz still couldn’t figure out why they weren’t able to get any data. He squatted in an underground access corridor, next to the main ring, and inspected the wall separating the two. The fluorescent light and white walls made it easy to see, and what Ray found annoyed him. There was nothing wrong with the wall. It was completely whole.

Footsteps echoed from behind and interrupted him. He stood up, pulled up the knot of his tie and mopped his bald head with a handkerchief; despite the air conditioning system and its infernal hum, Ray still felt hot from the Texas climate. He was more used to the climate of Boston, or Seattle. “Yes?” he asked, turning around.

Dr. Julia Kristin Anderson came around the corner. “Hello, Professor Shwartz—I mean, Ray,” she said, and smiled.

Ray smiled back at her. Kristin had her Ph.D. for a year now; they were more colleagues than teacher and student. And yet she still couldn’t break her old habits of calling him “Professor.”

“It’s OK, Kristin. At least you didn’t call me Director. What’s up?”

She squatted down next to the wall that Ray had just examined, and checked it herself. “Completely intact.”

“I thought we might have had a resurgence of the fire ants,” Ray said, “but I doubt even they could chew through that.” They laughed for a moment as Kristin stood up, and then Ray continued. “So what news do you have for me? It’s obviously not a problem with the ring.”

Kristin’s face settled into a more somber expression. “I wanted to tell you this personally.” She paused. “Yes?”

“Apparently, there’s nothing wrong with either the scintillators or the computers. The particle detectors should be working perfectly.”

Ray closed his eyes and sighed. “Damn. That’s what I was afraid of. How many beams have we run since the collider became operational? Almost a hundred, right?”

“Ninety-three, if we include the beams at the beginning that did yield data.”

“It wasn’t enough.” Ray pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket. “Damn it, Kristin, I wish I could figure this out. The SSC was my major goal in life. I know this may sound silly, but it was to be the grand culmination of the years I had spent doing physics. By now, we were supposed to have found the Higgs boson and verified the theory of Grand Unification. Instead, we’re getting nothing.”

He passed the sheet over to her. “I mean, look at that. Everything points to the collider running smoothly.” He ticked points off on his fingers. “We’re having no problem generating proton beams and antiproton beams in the containment rings; you and I have just ascertained that the ring walls are unharmed; and now you’re telling me that the detectors are fully functional as well.”

She studied the sheet and nodded. “True.”

“Well, then, Dr. Anderson, tell me, what piece of equipment is malfunctioning? Because I certainly can’t figure it out!”

She glanced around the room. “I don’t think anything is malfunctioning at all.”

“Nothing at all.”

“That’s right.”

“Then why aren’t we getting any data?”

“Professor—Ray, are you willing to entertain a—well, listen to a hunch?”

“I’ll accept anything at this point.” She smiled. “I hope you’re telling the truth, because what I’m about to suggest sounds totally ludicrous. You ever read any Sherlock Holmes?”

Ray nodded. “A long time ago.”

“My husband just turned me onto the stories, and they’re fascinating. Anyway, in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, he says, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ ”

“Yes, I remember that quote. Someone had it hanging in his office back at Harvard.”

Kristin shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I was reading that story and had our problem in the back of my mind when something clicked. Assuming all our equipment is functioning properly, what do our results tell us?”

“They tell us that Congress will cut our funding next year.”

“Seriously.”

“Sorry.” He sighed. “Although I am serious. If we don’t show positive results, Congress will take its 10 billion dollar loss and leave Waxahachie with a big hole in the ground.”

“I know. I remember the budget fights of the nineties; I almost had to leave graduate school because of it. But that’s not my point.”

“OK. You want to know what it means if all our equipment is functioning properly.”

“Yes.”

“Fine.” Ray stood up and walked over to the wall opposite the one the corridor shared with the ring. An old map of the SSC hung there, at eye level, with a red X next to the words, “YOU ARE HERE.” The overall picture looked like two small circles on top of a larger circle, reminiscent of Mickey Mouse’s head.

“Here,” Ray said, pointing to the two small circles, “we’re generating protons and antiprotons.”

“Right.”

“Then we inject them into the main collider.” Ray pointed to the larger circle.

“Right.”

Finally, Ray pointed to a rectangle that bordered the circle on the bottom. “And here, the detector should see a shower of subatomic particles when the two beams collide. But we don’t get that, except for those first few runs.”

“No, we don’t.”

“And you claim that the equipment isn’t at fault. So what do you think is happening?”

Kristin glanced around the room again, like she wanted to avoid eye contact. “Ray, I think the beams are just disappearing somehow.”

“Disappearing,” he echoed.

“That’s right. It would explain why the equipment checks out, and why we’re not seeing any collisions. Before the beams have a chance to collide in the detector, they—they go away.”

“You’re joking, right?” he asked, staring straight at her and frowning.

She glanced away, and quietly said, “No. I’m not.”

Ray sat down again. “Kristin, the only reason I’m not laughing in your face is because I respect your work too much to dismiss your ideas immediately. But you have to admit that this is a ridiculous thing to suggest.”

“I know. I already said that.”

“True, you did.” He smiled. “And, in point of fact, your idea does seem to fit the data. Perhaps we ought to investigate it, just so we can eliminate it as absurd. It’s not as if we’ve got anything else to work on here.”

Kristin stood up to leave. “Thanks, Ray. With your permission, I’ll go have people start moving detectors around the ring. Maybe we’ll be able to localize exactly where those beams are when they vanish.”

“Fine, I’ll authorize it. Just one thing before you go.”

She stopped. “Yes?”

“If those beams are disappearing, where are they going?”

She shook her head. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

2. Spin Down

Roy Schwitters looked out over the site of the latest explosion. With his handkerchief, he mopped his bald head and rubbed the perspiration out of his beard. The hot Sun beat down on him and Sheriff Kingsley, making Roy wish he could return to his air-conditioned office at Harvard. The flat grassland, which stretched all around for many miles, had been tom up in this one spot. Dirt and metal fragments mixed together, scattered about in a nearly perfect circle, twenty meters in diameter.

Roy studied the area for a few minutes. He walked around the circumference of the debris, occasionally squatting down to pick up a piece of metal or a handful of sand. When he finished, he brushed off his pants, positioned himself so the Sun shone behind him, and turned towards Kingsley.

“You’re right,” he said. He spoke, as always, in a soft unaccented tenor monotone. “It does look like there was an explosion inside the old SSC tunnel.”

“That’s what we figured when we found the first four holes, but we weren’t quite sure,” said Sheriff Kingsley. “Jack Levinson’s story confirmed it.”

“I see only one problem,” Roy said. “There’s nothing we did that would cause explosions to emanate from the tunnel. We never even had a chance to run one beam.” He gazed wistfully around him.

“We know,” said Kingsley, “but this was the fifth explosion, and they’ve all only happened around the ring where you scientists were going to do your experiments. That’s why I called you, Dr. Schwitters; frankly, I was a little surprised that you were willing to come back, after all that happened. But I am grateful.”

Roy winced at the memories triggered by the sheriff’s comments, but he let them pass. “Yes, I’m willing to come back, anytime. I’ve already told you that it can’t be the Supercollider doing this; we never even had a chance to turn the accelerator on.”

He walked around the debris again, and said, “Perhaps someone is setting off bombs, but I can’t think of any rationale for blowing up the tunnel. The project’s been long dead for these past ten years; it’s not like anyone should want to sabotage it now. You’ve probably just got some nut whose hobbies include blowing up outmoded scientific equipment. Maybe another Unabomber. I can’t help you there.”

“Begging your pardon,” Kingsley said, “but aren’t you forgetting something? Forensics tells us that they can’t find any remnants of a bomb. No chemicals, no timer, nothing. And the explosions are definitely originating from inside the tunnel.”

“So?”

“Well, I don’t pretend to be a physicist or anything like that, but I grew up here in Waxahachie and I remember all the hoopla when we got the SSC. I wasn’t always happy about it, but I stayed interested, and kept reading up about it, even after they decided not to use the facility for anything else, like they were saying they would. One thing I remember very well was that they sealed off the tunnel after Congress killed it. So how does this mad bomber set up his bombs?”

Roy thought a moment. “He probably found a hole somewhere and crawled in.”

“You mean he goes inside? We did a thorough drive around the main ring after the first explosion. Besides the holes that were actually caused by explosions—all of which we resealed immediately—there aren’t any other openings. So even if he’s as hardy as I am, Dr. Schwitters, I ask you again—how does he get inside?”

Roy had absolutely no idea what to say. He regarded the sheriff for a moment, then, without saying a word, he walked back to the car.

3. Spin Up

Kristin ran through the calculations for a fifth time. It couldn’t be right, she kept telling herself. There was no way that this could be right. And yet—

She rubbed her bleary eyes and picked up the phone to call Ray. He answered curtly. “Hello?”

“Ray, it’s Kristin. I think—”

He interrupted her. “Kristin, I don’t have time at the moment. Why don’t you—”

Ray cut himself off, and Kristin heard voices in the background. A moment later he got back on the line. “On second thought, why don’t you come to my office?” Click.

That was abrupt of him, Kristin thought. Something big must be going down.

She cradled the receiver, and nervously ambled over to Ray’s office. Her footsteps echoed as she walked down the empty corridor and around the comer. She opened the door.

Inside, Ray was talking with a darkhaired man in a two-piece suit. Kristin’s entrance had interrupted what looked like a heated conversation; Ray’s cheeks were flushed and the man looked distinctly uncomfortable.

“Kristin,” Ray said, “I’d like you to meet Louis Reichen, of the Department of Energy.”

Kristin closed the door behind her and approached Reichen. He was a small man, about the same height as Kristin, with a tiny mustache that looked like a chocolate stain, even up close. Kristin sensed trouble. Most people from the DOE showed up in plaid shirts and jeans, scientists interested in getting down to work on some project. This fellow looked like a businessman. He shook her hand firmly, then turned back to Ray, who sat behind his desk.

“As I was saying, Dr. Shwartz, the people back in Washington are getting restless, and they’ve sent me to look into things here.”

Ray looked at Kristin. “Dr. Anderson, would you please tell Mr. Reichen the current status of the SSC?”

Caught offguard, Kristin mumbled, “Uh, yeah,” and then filled Reichen in on their problems in getting data. “But I think I’ve—”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Ray interrupted. “Now, Mr. Reichen. I know this seems bad, but we’ve only been running it for about a year now. There’s bound to be problems until the accelerator has gone through a shakedown phase.”

“ ‘Shakedown phase,’ ” Reichen echoed. “You’ve had ten years to build this thing, Dr. Shwartz. Any problems you might have had during a ‘shakedown phase’ must surely have been foreseen.”

“Not necessarily,” Ray said. “When you’re dealing with an experiment as large as this, there are bound to be certain unknown factors—until you actually run the experiment, that is—that can’t be predicted beforehand.”

“In feet,” Kristin said, “that’s exactly how some of the greatest discoveries in science got made. X-rays. Vulcanized rubber. The—”

“Yes,” interrupted Reichen, “but none of those things cost as much as this contraption. Dr. Shwartz, do you know what they’re calling this—this fiasco in Congress? ‘The 10 Billion Dollar Hole in the Ground’ is the least of it. I wouldn’t want to tell you what I’ve heard them call it in back room discussions.”

Reichen picked up his briefcase. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m DOE; I support the collider, and want to see it working. But my hands are tied. If you can’t show me positive results, and demonstrate to Congress that this thing is more than just a big failure—well, I’ll have to tell them so, and they’ll kill it.”

Ray looked at the top of his desk. “What if I could show you those ‘positive results’ you want?”

“Well. . . .”

“Look.” Ray consulted a small calendar at the top of his desk, then glared at Kristin. He said, “It just so happens that we have a run scheduled for tomorrow. Why don’t you come watch, and you can judge for yourself. I promise you that we’ll get ‘positive results,’ as you put it.” Reichen nodded slowly. “That would be acceptable. I’ll leave the number of my hotel with the project secretary. I just hope you do have something to show me.”

They watched Reichen leave the room, and as soon as the door closed behind him Kristin glared back at Ray. “There is no run scheduled for tomorrow.”

“There is now.”

Kristin sat down. “How are you going to ensure positive results?”

“I’ll go out to the collider and tell it that Congress has ordered it to work smoothly tomorrow.” They laughed. Ray continued, “Hey, it worked for the space program once. One model of rocket kept failing on the launch-pad until someone from Washington told the chief engineer that it simply had to work the next time they launched it. The engineer went out to the rocket and ordered it to work. And it did.” Ray leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. “You had something you wanted to talk to me about?” he finally asked.

“Oh! As a matter of fact, I do.” She smiled. “And come to think of it, I do need another run of the accelerator to test my idea.”

“Which is?” Ray prompted.

“Ah, yes. My idea. Ray, I know what I’m about to propose will sound even more far-fetched than the idea of the beams just disappearing, but I think I know where they’re going. And, more than that, I think I can predict when they’ll vanish.” She looked around for a moment, flustered. “I left my calculations in my office.”

“We’ll get them later. What’s the idea?”

Kristin took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Do you recall Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?”

Ray looked surprised. “Yes, I do. Whenever a decision has to be made, the Universe splits into two separate universes. Avoids the thorny problem of the observer’s role, even if it’s not as elegant. Although I tend to feel that Everett’s interpretation was rendered moot by John Cramer and Shu-Yuan Chu, in their transactional interpretation.”

“Moot doesn’t mean invalid. Everett’s interpretation could still be considered a valid one.”

“Oh, sure,” Ray said, smiling, “assuming you could prove it over all others. People have been trying to assert one view of quantum mechanics over all others since the Copenhagen interpretation. But that’s the one people seem to accept the most.”

“Yeah. Well. The thing is, I’ve always been uncomfortable with that one. I mean, it’s one thing to say that, for a subatomic particle we can’t see with the naked eye anyway, its spin is undetermined until an observer looks at it and it chooses to be either spin up or spin down.”

Ray nodded. “Wave-function collapse.”

“Yes. But it’s quite another thing on a macroscopic scale. Look at Schrodinger’s cat. Does it really make sense to say that cat isn’t alive or dead until you open the box? I think Everett’s interpretation works a lot better. Schrodinger’s cat ends up alive in one universe and dead in another.”

“So what does Hugh Everett’s thesis have to do with the SSC?”

Kristin laughed. “Sounds like a riddle. Well, it’s like this. I’ve always been into studying the different interpretations of quantum mechanics, ever since that first course I took with Doug Strauss. And I must admit that I’ve always been fond of Everett’s idea—can’t you imagine what it would be like if every possible universe that ever could have been was really out there, somewhere?” She waved her hands in the air as if to demonstrate.

Ray shook his head. “I’ve tried to stay firmly planted in this Universe.”

“Your loss. Anyway, it always bothered me that Everett’s interpretation allowed for parallel universes, but ones that were inaccessible from ours. I mean, what’s the point of saying an alternate universe exists if you can’t get to it? It might as well not exist.”

“My point exactly.”

“Then something occurred to me. I read Everett’s original Princeton thesis, and noticed that he failed to take into account high energy interactions. I mean, extremely high energy interactions, on the order of a TeV.” She paused.

“Kristin, I’m not sure I see where this is leading. That is, I think I do, but—what exactly are you getting at?”

“I’m getting at the fact that at high energies, Everett’s theory predicts that a quantum mechanical ‘gate’ opens up, similar to an Einstein-Rosen bridge. For a split second, the barrier between different universes might be traversed. But we’ve never been able to create interactions of that magnitude until—”

“Until we built the SSC,” Ray finished for her.

“Yes.”

“Kristin, that’s utterly impossible.”

She felt her face flush. “So was splitting the atom,” she retorted.

Ray laughed. “So it was.”

“And look where it led us to today. Listen, Ray. You said that we have to do a run of the accelerator tomorrow anyway, to satisfy Reichen. Let me calibrate the detectors to verify my theory. In the meantime, you can go over my math and see if I missed anything.”

4. Spin Down

“I’ve gone over your math, and can’t find anything wrong with it,” Roy Schwitters said. “As much as it galls me to admit it, you’re right.”

Harold Volin grinned sheepishly, the grin of a small boy caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Six weeks ago, Roy had called him in to help figure out the problem of the SSC explosions. Now, they sat in a first floor office of the old SSC Administration building, studying the equations Volin had written out on a chalkboard. The building, along with many others, had been taken over by the county when the Department of Energy had pulled out, as there was no sense in letting good office buildings and state-of-the-art computer equipment go to waste. Sheriff Kingsley had somehow managed to arrange this office for Roy, nowhere near as luxurious as the office he had occupied when he had been director, but “good enough for government work,” as the sheriff had told him.

Roy considered Harold for a moment before continuing. Harold was a theoretician, a good physicist, but had a quirky personality that made him look for solutions to problems from the strangest angles. His red hair, thick beard, and incongruously high voice fit his personality perfectly. But it was exactly because of Harold’s odd way of looking at the world that Ray had called him in. And now, here was Harold’s solution, too off-the-wall to be considered seriously, but the only one that fit the data. So far.

Roy spoke slowly, unsure of his words. “Your calculations do seem to indicate that someone’s running the collider.”

Harold nodded eagerly, still smiling. He tended to speak quickly, with one word running into another. “The first clue you gave me was the symmetric nature of the explosions. It was exactly what you’d get if an antimatter beam went off course—zing!—and hit the walls of the ring. And given that the magnets only work at a few degrees Kelvin, any beam sent through at the moment would naturally run off course. After all, the magnets aren’t operational at the moment.”

Roy gave his friend an incredulous look. “You’re missing the point, Harold. None of it is operational. Not the magnets, not the detectors—and most of all, not the injectors! The SSC was never turned on. The project was killed long before we even got to the stage where we could generate one proton-antiproton beam, let alone five! I admit that your calculations indicate that the SSC has been turned on, but how? If there are in fact antiprotons in the ring, where are they coming from?”

Harold eyes twinkled. “That is the big question, isn’t it? Not, ‘Who’s running the collider?’ but ‘Where are the beams coming from?’ ”

“I don’t understand.”

Harold’s voice took on a sober tone. “Look, Roy, I know as well as you do that the SSC isn’t operational. There is no way that those beams are being generated by our SSC. But maybe—just maybe—they’re being generated by some other SSC.”

“Some other SSC?”

“In another universe.”

It took all night, but Harold finally convinced Roy of the logic of his theory. It had been difficult, at first, as Roy was a strong supporter of the standard Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

But the equations were incontrovertible.

“At least it gets rid of all those bizarre paradoxes,” Roy said.

Harold blinked. “Understated, as usual.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t seem to appreciate the magnitude of what I’ve proven here, Roy. Ever since the theory of quantum mechanics was developed, no one has been able to settle on one interpretation.”

“That’s because all were equally valid. Everything we observed fit any interpretation, from wave-function collapse to Bohm’s hidden variables.”

“But not anymore! Don’t you see? This discovery is so important, it’ll shake the foundations of philosophy as well as physics.”

Roy harrumphed and shook his head. “And it’s all due to a killed experiment. Don’t get me wrong, Harold, I am happy for you—”

“For us, you mean. It would be indecent not to list you as co-author.”

“All right, for us, then. But it still doesn’t change one annoying, undeniable fact. I was hoping that what we found would indicate a working collider.”

“Well, it does, in a sense,” Harold said. “It indicates a working SSC in some other universe. If it hadn’t been killed, it’s now about the time when we would have started running the machine. Think of it.”

Think of it. A universe where the SSC was never canceled. A universe where science never lost its way, where the government and the lay people understood the importance of this project, appreciated the need for basic research.

Perhaps in that universe, the other projects, like SETI and the human genome project, were also going strong. Perhaps in that universe, the space program hadn’t stopped at the Moon, but was even now moving humanity towards the stars. Perhaps.

“Harold,” Roy said softly, “can we use your theory to travel to that other universe?”

Harold looked wistful, and shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s unlikely. The energies are just too much. You’d have to be in the path of the beam, and that would probably kill you. Of course, we could get a resonance effect going, but I’m not sure how.”

Roy bit his lower lip and nodded. “It was worth asking. Too bad we can’t use your theory to our advantage.”

The two men sat in silence for a moment, and then Harold’s eyes glinted. “Actually, we can!”

“How?”

“Look,” Harold said, “What’s the most expensive part of the SSC?”

“The ring, of course,” Roy replied. Harold nodded, excitement in his eyes. “Yes, the ring. The detectors and even the computers are cheap compared to that. But don’t you see? We don’t have to worry about funding the ring anymore!”

“You mean to say—” Roy began.

“I mean to say that someone else in another universe is paying to run the beams. We can just set up detectors and piggyback on their experiments, like when we do experiments on synchrotron radiation. We just have to wait for a crossover, and I believe I can calculate when those will occur. And when a beam comes through—zing!—and collides with the protons in the surrounding dirt, we take data.” Roy pressed his fingers together and leaned back in his chair. “We could restart the SSC at a fraction of the original cost,” he said, “because the scientists in the other universe have already built it.”

“My point exactly.”

Roy picked up the phone to call the Department of Energy.

5. Spin Up

The Reichen run, as Kristin called it, was six weeks in the past. It was also the only run of the collider that had actually gone perfectly, ever since Reichen threatened to shut them down. Perhaps, Kristin had told Ray jokingly, there had been something to the idea of ordering the collider to behave itself. Since then, they had run the accelerator many more times, and as always, the beams kept disappearing.

Kristin and Ray stood on the hot grassy plain, studying the detector that should have picked up the beam they had run earlier today. After half an hour of examining the huge boxes filled with plastic scintillator, she turned to Ray and said, “Now do you believe my theory?”

Slowly, Ray said, “It does seem to be the only possible answer.”

“Only answer, you mean. Ray, you’ve checked my calculations. You know that I’ve predicted every single beam disappearance since the Reichen run. Either I’m the victim of the most improbable set of coincidences, or—” She shrugged. “Or I’m right. And I must be. The data proves it.”

Ray nodded. “I guess you’re right. Too bad.”

“Too bad?” Kristin felt stunned. “What do you mean, too bad? We’ve just demonstrated something that will shake the theoretical foundations of physics as much as relativity did!”

Ray smiled, bitterly. “Come on, let’s walk back to the car.”

In the car driving back to Waxahachie, he continued. “Kristin, I didn’t mean to belittle your accomplishment. Your theory will make a major impact, and you should be proud of that. But your theory also means that we’re going to have stop running the collider immediately.”

“What? Why?”

“Because if the beams are being diverted into another universe, who knows what damage they’re doing there? We’re sending antimatter beams into the unknown. If they’re interacting with the matter of an alternate Earth. . . .” He trailed off.

Kristin swallowed hard. “I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think we have to worry too much about that.”

“Why not? You don’t care if we’re causing matter-antimatter explosions in another universe?”

“No! It’s not that at all. We don’t have to worry about the explosions hurting anyone, because for this phenomenon to be happening, our SSC would probably have to resonate with another SSC in the other universe. It’s inherent in my calculations.”

Ray nodded. “I see. If that’s the case, then our beams would be traversing the barrier between universes simply to go from our tunnel into theirs.”

“Exactly. The beams may be going into another universe, but only if there’s an SSC ring there.” She paused. “An abandoned one, actually.”

“Abandoned? How do you know that?”

“Because otherwise the energies of their beam would cause positive feedback with ours, and—and I don’t want to think about what that would do to our universes. It might bring them together, or blow them apart.”

Ray sighed. “An abandoned ring. How ironic.”

“Ironic?”

He was silent as they took a curve. “Louis Reichen called today, from Washington.”

“Oh. It’s not good news, is it.” It was a statement, not a question.

“No, it’s not.”

“That’s why you brought up the idea of shutting down the SSC back there. To soften the blow.”

“Yes. After all, if we’re going to have to shut it down anyway, I would rather there be a good reason behind it. And if it was harming people in another universe, that would be a good reason. But this—this is just stalled budget talks and political infighting. And we’re the ones getting the ax for it.”

Kristin didn’t want to ask the next question, but needed to know. “How soon?”

“They’re giving us half a year to wrap up any experiments that we might still be running. I got them to grant us that much.”

“And then?”

“Unless we can think of some way to get those beams back, that will be the end of the SSC.”

They rode the rest of the way back in silence.

6. Spin Down

Roy couldn’t believe his luck. In only four weeks, they had convinced the DOE to reopen the SSC facility. He and Harold stood on the ground above the underground ring, watching the last of the scintillator detectors from Fermilab being installed.

“Are you sure about this, Harold?”

His eyes twinkled. “Very sure, as always. According to my calculations, this is the third most probable spot for the crossovers to occur. And anyway, the evidence is already all around us.” He swept his arm around to indicate the various holes in the ground, formed by fresh explosions during the last month. The current detector was being set up on a piece of the ground that was, as yet, unscarred.

“True,” Roy said, “although—”

A far away boom interrupted Roy. Everyone jumped, including the people setting up the new detector. They continued working when the echoes died down.

“Harold?”

“Sounds like it came from Detector One. A little early, but let’s go check it out.”

The two men drove along the circumference of the ring until they found the fresh hole, smoke lazily drifting out of it. They parked a safe distance away and approached on foot.

“Look,” Harold said, and whistled.

The hole was right in the center of the surrounding detector, which was unharmed. A blue light indicated that the detector had successfully taken data, which at this very moment the computers back in Waxahachie would be analyzing.

“I can’t believe our luck,” Roy said.

Over the next few months, Roy, Harold, and other physicists gathered in Waxahachie, and pored over the accumulated data from the SSC. Once again, Harold and Roy found themselves in Roy’s office, discussing the experiments.

“It looks good,” Harold told Roy. “We seem to be close to confirming the existence of the Higgs boson.” The two scientists tossed the physics back and forth for a while. The Higgs boson, a particle formed only at extremely high energies, was the key particle in the Grand Unification Theory. Discovery of the particle would indicate that three of the four fundamental forces—the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces—were actually aspects of one overall superforce.

“That still omits gravity,” Roy pointed out.

“Who cares? If we can get just one more run out of the other universe’s accelerator, we’ll have gotten closer than anyone has before. Even Einstein.”

Roy nodded. Einstein had spent the last years of his life trying to unite gravity with electromagnetism. If only he had known that gravity would be the hardest force to unite of them all.

“The next step would be an accelerator of even higher energies. Probably have to build it around the Moon.” Roy sighed, and smiled. “Too bad we won’t be around to see it.”

Harold chuckled. “Roy, God Himself could appear in front of you with the one ultimate equation that explains all of physics, and you would shrug and think about how it would put all of us out of work. Forget about it! We’ve accomplished what we set out to do. Many-wo rids and Grand Unification in one year, when just a few years ago we thought the SSC was long dead.”

Roy laughed. “It’s been a long, hard project, Harold. I’m just as happy as you are, but I’m exhausted from all the political stuff as well as the physics.”

“Well, relax. Just one more run of the accelerator, and you, my friend, will be on stage in Stockholm getting your Nobel prize.”

7.Spin Up

“That’s even more preposterous than your original theory,” Ray said. He and Kristin were eating lunch in the cafeteria. The mood around them was somber, and yet people were still joking here and there.

Kristin nodded. “I don’t care. We’ve got less than a month before they close us down forever. I think I have a right to request these runs.”

“What possible good could it do?”

“What possible harm?”

“Look, Kristin, I’m busy with a lot of other things. There’s paperwork to do, there are reporters to talk to—”

“Why won’t you let me try this experiment?”

Ray put down his sandwich and looked straight at his former student. “Because the truth is, I don’t believe you, Kristin. I’ve been humoring you about this alternate universe stuff. And we’ve got more important things to do in the final few days of the SSC than test your theory!”

A few people’s heads turned at the sound of Ray’s voice, but then they quickly went back to their own conversations. Ray’s shouting stung Kristin, but not nearly as much as his words did. It took her a moment to find her voice, and when she did, she spoke softly. “You—you don’t believe me?”

Ray sighed. “I’m sorry for shouting. Look, Kristin, it’s not that I don’t think you’re doing excellent science. And I wasn’t about to kick you off the program because of your strange ideas. I had a friend once who had some very weird ideas on Grand Unified Field Theory, but he did top-notch science otherwise, so—it’s just that we don’t have time.”

Finding her courage, Kristin said, “Let me run it by you one more time, Ray.”

Ray turned around to look at the clock on the wall behind him, then looked back at Kristin. “OK, one more time.”

She took a deep breath. “Fine. Let’s assume, for the moment, that I’m wrong, that I’m talking through my hat. Then you have two choices, either do the runs I suggest or do what’s scheduled. If you do my experiment, then yes, I admit, we lose out on whatever data we would have had otherwise. You’d be playing it safe, assuming that the data we’d be getting in these last few weeks would have any value at all.

“But now let’s assume that I’m right. Let’s assume that there is another universe, and that our current data does indicate feedback from there along an Einstein-Rosen bridge. In that case, whoever is in that other universe has been affecting the beams by taking data. Which can only mean one thing.

‘They’re doing the experiments that we’re supposed to be doing.”

“So why do you want to signal them?”

“Well, for one thing, it would be nice to let them know that their days of doing science on the cheap are over, wouldn’t it?”

Ray shook his head. “I still don’t see the point.”

“It’s obvious, Ray! If we can get a message through to them, they can get one through to us. If they’ve gotten good results, they can share them with us! We can present those results to Reichen and maybe, just maybe, Congress won’t shut us down!”

“But if you’re wrong, then it would be a complete waste of time.”

“It’s Pascal’s wager,” Kristin said suddenly.

“What?”

“Blaise Pascal, French mathematician—”

“I know who Pascal is.”

“Right. Anyway, he once asked himself if it was worth his time to follow the church, and he set it up as a bet. If God doesn’t exist, and you follow the church, you end up wasting a little bit of your time here on Earth.

But if God does exist, and you ignore the church, the payoff is eternal damnation.”

“Those are . . . interesting odds.”

“So what’s it going to be, Ray? Are we going to take the safe and easy path, and get some last trickle of data which may be worthless? Or will we take the risk that we might be wasting our time, but with a possible payoff that would keep the SSC running?” Ray looked around him for a moment. All these people, the scientists, technicians, and support staff, about to be put out of work because of a shortsighted Congress. Unless . . . “What do you want to do?”

Kristin smiled.

8. Spin Down

Harold handed the sheet of paper to Roy, who leaned back in his office chair. “The beams haven’t been regular anymore,” he said, as Roy studied the data. “We’re not getting ‘Zing! Zing!’ now, but rather, ‘Pop! Pop!’ ” Harold demonstrated with his hands his interpretation of zinging and popping, and Roy found himself unable to keep from laughing.

But this was a serious matter. “Without proper beams, we can’t finish the experiment,” he lamented.

“You’re telling me?” asked Harold. “We’re so close, so very close, and all we can do is hope that they send us what we need. I have to tell you, it’s got me real worried, Roy.”

The last time Roy had seen his friend so visibly distraught was when the proton decay experiments of the 1980s had failed to confirm Volin’s personal Grand Unification Theory, called SU(5). Its name had turned out to be as unimportant as the theory, since it had ended up disproved. Oddly enough, it was that same disproving of the theory that had led to the necessity of the SSC.

“Could the shorter beams be due to anything specific?” Roy asked.

“If so, it’s got me stumped. The beams aren’t cutting off the way my equations predict. It’s almost like they’re doing it deliberately. But why?”

Roy studied the data again, a listing of the different beam lengths. The shorter beam times did seem fairly self-consistent, as did the longer ones that were interspersed. But what could it all mean? He thought for a moment.

“Harold, let’s think this through. If the beams have been coming here, then what’s been happening in that other universe?”

Harold’s brow furrowed. “Trick question, right? If the beams are coming here, then they’re leaving there.”

“Which means that they haven’t been able to take any data. No beams.”

A shocked look appeared on Harold’s face. “That means that their experiment, as far as they know, is a failure. And—”

“And their government is probably just as unlikely to fund a failing experiment as ours is,” Roy concluded for both of them.

They were silent for a moment, then Harold said, “They can’t. They can’t shut down their collider. We’re so close.”

“Well, that just may be what they’re doing. Unless—”

“Unless what?”

“For the past few months, I’ve been trying to imagine what it would be like for me to live in that universe. What if I had gotten my collider, and then, just as it seems to be working, the beams keep vanishing? What would I do?”

“What you did in this universe. Keep fighting until the bitter end.”

“Right. But what if we were the ones losing beams? I would have called you in to examine the data, and what would you have found?”

It took Harold a few seconds. “The physics of the bridge is the same in either universe. I could probably have developed this theory in the other universe as well.”

Roy smiled. “Which means?” Harold’s eyes lit up. “Which means that they know about us! So if their collider is in danger of being shut down, they would try to let us know about it!” He snatched the paper out of Roy’s hands, studied it for a moment, and whistled.

“It’s Morse code. See here, where the data begins to get loopy? It’s an SOS!”

“So what does the rest of the message say?”

“Give me a minute. It’ll be easier if we use the computer to graph the pulse length versus time. . . .”

It was more like ten minutes until Harold had completely translated the message. Most of the message confirmed their ideas about the other universe. But it ended on a very ominous note.

Harold read, “ ‘Shutdown scheduled in few weeks. Must present data. Do you have any?’ ” He looked up at Roy, who rubbed his eyes.

“Well, yeah, we do,” Roy said, “but how do we share it with them?”

Harold got that twinkle in his eye again.

“You mean, how do we signal them back when we don’t have a beam?”

“Yes.”

Harold laughed. “Easy. Same way they signaled us, but in reverse. We set up the detectors to turn on and off very rapidly in Morse code, so when they send a beam over to us, they get a staggered disappearance instead of the usual ‘zing!’ kind. Our communication does depend on their sending us a beam, but we can still communicate. It’s a simple application of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Bell’s Theorem. We’ll just need a SQUID.”

A Superconducting Quantum Interference Device. A tiny integrated circuit cell made with superconductors, about the size of a transistor. Roy nodded. That made sense. They needed to interfere with the quantum mechanical nature of the beams, and both ideas Harold had cited involved quantum interactions. Bell’s Theorem, in particular, involved the quantum nature of information transfer. “If you can figure it out—”

“I can.”

“Then let’s do it.”

9. Spin Up

“I don’t believe it, sorry,” Louis Reichen said.

Kristin jumped up and hit Ray’s desk with her fist. “Damn it, Reichen, look at it! We’ve contacted them! They’re sharing their data! All we’ve got to do is keep the SSC running!”

“Kristin,” Ray said quietly.

This was not the way to convince Reichen, Kristin realized. She mumbled an apology and resumed her seat.

“Thank you,” Reichen said icily. “Now, as I was saying, I do not believe this.”

“So what do you think?” Ray asked. “Frankly? I think that you and Dr. Anderson are grasping at straws, trying to come up with anything to save your pet project.”

“You’re accusing me of making this up, aren’t you?” Kristin asked.

Reichen turned to look at her. “Not in so many words, no.”

“But you think I’m lying.”

Reichen sighed. “Dr. Anderson, let’s say that I do think you’re lying. Most likely, I would say that, in desperation, you have come up with some scheme for convincing me to keep the collider running. But I’d much rather not have to put such a thing in my report, if you catch my drift. It wouldn’t exactly be to your benefit, and I do have some sympathy for your situation.”

He turned back to Ray. “I’m here to supervise the shutdown of the SSC. I have an order here from the DOE that you are to stop running your experiments immediately.” He took a paper out of his jacket pocket and handed it to Ray. Ray took it without comment.

Reichen stood up. “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other over the next few weeks. I’ll try to make the shutdown go as smoothly as possible.” With that, Reichen stormed out the door.

“He threatened me. He actually threatened me.”

“I noticed.”

“You believe me, don’t you, Ray?”

“I believe you now.”

“So what do we do?”

“What do we do?” Ray opened one of his desk drawers and pulled out a piece of paper, which he passed over to Kristin. She read it and whistled. “Are you serious?” she asked.

“I am.”

She waved the paper in Ray’s face. “Why didn’t you show me this before?”

“I just worked out the physics a few days ago. Besides, I didn’t think it would come to this. I thought that once Reichen saw what we had, he’d naturally let us continue.”

“But he doesn’t believe in the people of the other universe.”

“No, so he doesn’t believe that they’re sharing data with us.” Ray took the paper from Kristin and ran his eyes over it. “I think this may be our only option. We just have to convince our counterparts in the other universe to cooperate.”

“Ray, maybe we shouldn’t attempt this. It sounds too dangerous. Maybe you were right—maybe it’s time to end things, here and now.”

Ray’s eyebrows shot up. He stood up, turned around, and walked to the window behind him. He stared outside, with his back to Kristin. When he next spoke, it seemed to Kristin that he spoke as much to himself as to her.

“You know, back when they were about to test the first atomic bomb, Enrico Fermi started taking bets on what the bomb would do. There was a small possibility, they said, that the bomb might ignite the atmosphere, and destroy the world completely. If I remember the story correctly, Fermi took the other side of the bet, figuring that if he lost he wouldn’t have to worry about paying up.”

“I thought he took the side that the atmosphere would ignite, and that he was relieved that he had to pay up.”

Ray turned to look at Kristin. “Either way, there comes a time when you have to do the experiment, because—because you just have to.” He walked back to his desk, bent over to write a message, and handed it to Kristin. “Here. Send this to them. We’ll schedule it for tomorrow afternoon. Make sure Reichen finds out in time to show up. But not in time to stop it.”

Kristin took the message and hurried out.

10. Spin Down

Roy Schwitters looked at the group of people he had assembled here on this empty plain, for what he hoped would be a historic first. Harold Volin, of course, who had figured everything out down to the last millisecond; they stood at T minus ten minutes. There were some of the other scientists recruited to work on the SSC as well, gathered around the makeshift cryonic chamber, half the height of a man, which they had managed to construct to contain the SQUID. They had barely an inkling of what was about to transpire.

And finally, mostly recovered but still seeming a bit weak, was Jack Levinson, one of the two teachers who had been witness to the explosion that had first dragged Roy back to the SSC. Levinson kept darting his head around, as if he expected to see another explosion any moment.

Or, perhaps, he expected to see his deceased friend Daniel Strock bicycling over, revealing his death to be a practical joke. Roy shook his head at the depressing thought, and looked away. He didn’t mean for today to make up for what Levinson had gone through, but he felt that the man had just as much right to be present as Roy himself did.

Just then, Harold tapped Roy on the shoulder. “Look,” he said, pointing in the direction of the afternoon Sun, and away from the scientists gathered around the SQUID. Two figures could be seen emerging from a car, a good distance away. They began to approach the small group of scientists.

“I was afraid this might happen,” Roy said. “Let’s see what they want.”

In less than a minute, the two men stopped in front of Roy and Harold. Roy recognized Sheriff Kingsley, who nodded his head by way of greeting. He looked distinctly uncomfortable, odd for a man who always made himself fit in anywhere.

“Hello, Sheriff,” Roy said. “I don’t think I remember your friend’s name.” It was the FBI agent who had tried to coordinate everything at the beginning; Roy had ignored him in favor of Kingsley, which he was now just beginning to think might have been a politically bad move.

“Sam Stratton,” the agent said by way of reintroduction. “The sheriff told me you would be here.” Stratton pointed at Kingsley, who looked at Roy as if pleading for forgiveness.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Stratton?”

Stratton pulled a paper out of the pocket of his blazer and handed it to Roy. “You can pick up and leave. I’m ordering all of you out of this area immediately.”

Roy took the paper, smiled, and thrust it back at Stratton without reading it. “Sorry, no can do.”

Kingsley cleared his throat and spoke up. “Doc Schwitters, be reasonable. I told this fellow that you would.”

Roy shook his head. “Sheriff, we’re about to witness something very important here. We can’t go just yet.”

“Listen to me,” Stratton said. “Is it true what Sheriff Kingsley told me? Have you predicted another explosion for this piece of the ring, in just a few minutes?”

“Not an explosion. A beam.”

“Same difference, if I understand what’s been going on. You’re endangering yourself and everyone else here! I’m ordering all of you to move to a safe distance.” He waved the paper in Roy’s face.

Roy frowned. “Mr. Stratton, I—”

“Roy!” Harold interrupted.

“What is it?”

“I think my calculations were a little off.” He pointed behind Stratton and Kingsley. “Look at the SQUID.”

Roy turned towards the metal cryonic canister, which held the SQUID inside. “My God.”

“It’s a trick,” Stratton said.

Kingsley turned around, and whistled. “No, it’s not.”

Slowly, Stratton turned his head around. The air ten feet away from them radiated with thousands of tiny sparks, as if a thousand tiny thunderstorms filled the area with lightning. The scenery behind the area wobbled, as if it was no longer the real three-dimensional world, but a painting done upon a canvas of rubber, stretching in all directions, back and forth. A soft warbling noise slowly increased in volume.

But what made it most frightening was that the other scientists were part of the scenery. Their bodies appeared to stretch, as if they were made of water, with waves passing through them, causing distortions in their shape.

Waves that were heading towards Roy and the others.

Stratton’s jaw dropped, and he let the paper fall to his feet. “What in God’s name is that?” Stratton exclaimed.

Harold looked at Stratton and smiled impishly. “Wave-function collapse.”

11. Spin Down

“They told me you would be here,” Reichen said, the sweat moistening his mustache. “I demand to know what’s going on.”

“Whatever do you mean?” asked Ray.

“I mean, here I have been told that you’re running one more beam, against orders, and you’re waiting for it to pass underneath your feet.”

“That’s right, Mr. Reichen,” Kristin interjected.

Reichen swiveled around to face her. “You realize what kind of trouble you’re in, doctor? You’ll never get another penny from the DOE. Your career in high energy physics is over.” Kristin shrugged. “How melodramatic of you. It was going to be over, anyway, once you killed the SSC.

“But it’s not over, Mr. Reichen. And you’re right where we wanted you.” Reichen looked around nervously. There were a few other scientists, but they were gathered at a spot a few yards away, chatting among themselves.

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” Kristin said, “since you showed us that Mohammed wouldn’t come to the mountain—”

A loud rumble began to shake the earth under their feet, and a sudden wind gusted up. Reichen looked frightened. Kristin smiled.

“We figured we’d bring the mountain to Mohammed,” she finished.

The din got louder. “What the hell’s going on?” Reichen roared.

“You didn’t believe that the other universe existed,” Ray said, as the air around them filled up with sparks of light and the scenery began to wobble. “I thought you might want to tell them that yourself.”

12. Spin Sideways

The two universes only coexisted in a small volume, with a radius of about ten meters from where the SQUID sat. The rippling, hazy effect continued, making everyone in the area appear to be submerged in lazily moving water. Roy Schwitters, Harold Volin, Sam Stratton, and Bob Kingsley found themselves almost overlapping with Ray Shwartz, Kristin Anderson, and Louis Reichen. Everyone in the two groups backed off slowly from each other, and regarded each other for a moment. To the people in one group, the people in the other group looked like phantoms, fading in and out of insubstantiality. When the first person spoke, from Spin Up, her voice sounded distorted to the people from Spin Down. But they barely noticed, as someone from Spin Down spoke at exactly the same time, and said exactly the same words.

“It’s you!” Kristin said to Ray, pointing at Roy.

“It’s you!” Harold said to Roy, pointing at Ray.

The two directors approached each other, cautiously. Through hand gestures, the one from Spin Up deferred to the one from Spin Down.

“I’m Roy Schwitters, director of the SSC.”

“That’s funny. I’m Ray Shwartz, director of the SSC. In my universe, I mean.”

They smiled, and attempted to shake hands. Their hands passed right through each other.

Ray looked over his shoulder, back at Reichen, who stood goggle-eyed in shock. “I think we may have proven our point.”

Harold and Kristin approached each other with similar caution, and introduced themselves. Harold laughed, and Roy turned to him. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Talk about your Grand Unification Theories,” Harold said, and then the universes separated.

Epilogue: Spin Down

Jack Levinson dismounted from his bicycle and removed his helmet. He wiped the sweat from his brow, reached for his thermos, and took a long drink of cool water. It was still the dry grassland, and it was still the SSC ring buried underneath, but it was no longer the same.

According to the Morse code communications, Ray Shwartz and the scientists in the other universe had gotten the go-ahead to continue running the SSC. As Roy Schwitters and the scientists in this Universe gathered data, they would continue to share it with the other universe.

Meanwhile, both Harold Volin and Kristin Anderson were working on the possibility of creating a stable bridge between the universes.

But none of it mattered much to Jack. His friend Daniel had died. It ended up not having been in vain, but still, it was all over for him. Like it had been all over for the SSC, just a few years ago.

But, Jack noted, with the discovery of the other universe, possibilities had opened up. There was another SSC, another Schwitters, another—

Perhaps there was another Jack in that universe.

Or perhaps . . . perhaps there was another Daniel in that universe, or in another one.

His heart feeling a little lighter, Jack got back onto his bicycle and headed home.

With thanks to the Roy Schwitters of our own Universe.

THREE HEARINGS ON THE EXISTENCE OF SNAKES IN THE HUMAN BLOODSTREAM

James Alan Gardner

James Alan Gardner lives in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, with his wife Linda Carson. He has published numerous pieces of short fiction in such places as Amazing, F&SF, OnSpec, and Tesseracts. In his spare time he plays piano, practices kung fu, and recovers from bruises. The following tale is his first for Asimov’s.

1. Concerning an Arrangement of Lenses, So Fashioned as to Magnify the View of Divers Animalcules, Too Tiny to Be Seen with the Unaided Eye:

His Holiness, Supreme Patriarch Septus XXIV, was an expert on chains.

By holy law, chains were required on every defendant brought to the Court Immaculate. However, my Lord the Jailer could exercise great latitude in choosing which chains went on which prisoners. A man possessed of a healthy fortune might buy his way into nothing more than a gold link necklace looped loosely around his throat; a beautiful woman might visit the Jailer privately in his chambers and emerge with thin and glittering silver bracelets—chains, yes, but as delicate as thread. If, on the other hand, the accused could offer neither riches nor position nor generous physical charms . . . well then, the prison had an ample supply of leg-irons, manacles, and other such fetters, designed to show these vermin the grim weight of God’s justice.

The man currently standing before Patriarch Septus occupied a seldom-seen middle ground in the quantity of restraints: two solid handcuffs joined by an iron chain of businesslike gauge, strong enough that the prisoner had no chance of breaking free, but not so heavy as to strain the man’s shoulders to the point of pain. Clearly, my Lord the Jailer had decided on a cautious approach to this particular case; and Septus wondered what that meant. Perhaps the accused was nobody himself but had sufficient connections to rule out unwarranted indignities . . . a sculptor or musician, for example, who had won favor with a few great households in the city. The man certainly had an artistic look—fierce eyes in an impractical face, the sort of high-strung temperament who could express passion but not use it.

“Be it known to the court,” cried the First Attendant, “here stands one Anton Leeuwenhoek, a natural philosopher who is accused of heresy against God and Our Lady, the Unbetombed Virgin. Kneel, Supplicant, and pray with his Holiness, that this day shall see justice.”

Septus waited to see what Leeuwenhoek would do. When thieves and murderers came before the court, they dropped to their knees immediately, making gaudy show of begging God to prove their innocence. A heretic, however, might spit defiance or hurl curses at the Patriarchal throne—not a good way to win mercy, but then, many heretics came to this chamber intent on their own martyrdom. Leeuwenhoek had the eyes of such a fanatic, but apparently not the convictions; without so much as a grimace, he got to his knees and bowed his head. The Patriarch quickly closed his own eyes and intoned the words he had recited five times previously this morning: “God grant me the wisdom to perceive the truth. Blessed Virgin, grant me the judgment to serve out meet justice. Let us all act this day to the greater glory of Thy Divine Union. Amen.”

Amens sounded around the chamber: attendants and advocates following the form. Septus glanced sideways toward Satan’s Watchboy, an ominous title for a cheerfully freckle-faced youth, the one person here excused from closing his eyes during the prayer. The Watchboy nodded twice, indicating that Leeuwenhoek had maintained a proper attitude of prayer and said Amen with everyone else. Good—this had just become a valid trial, and anything that happened from this point on had the strength of heavenly authority.

“My Lord Prosecutor,” Septus said, “state the charges.”

The prosecutor bowed as deeply as his well-rounded girth allowed, perspiration already beading on his powdered forehead. It was not a hot day, early spring, nothing more . . . but Prosecutor ben Jacob was a man famous for the quantity of his sweat, a trait that usually bothered his legal adversaries more than himself. Many an opposing counsel had been distracted by the copious flow streaming down ben Jacob’s face, thereby overlooking flaws in the prosecutor’s arguments. One could always find flaws in ben Jacob’s arguments, Septus knew—dear old Abraham was not overly clever. He was, however, honest, and could not conceive of winning personal advancement at the expense of those he prosecuted; therefore, the Patriarch had never dismissed the man from his position.

“Your Holiness,” ben Jacob said, “this case concerns claims against the Doctrine of the, uhh . . . Sleeping Snake.”

“Ah.” Septus glanced over at Leeuwenhoek. “My son, do you truly deny God’s doctrine?”

The man shrugged. “I have disproved the doctrine. Therefore, it can hardly be God’s.”

Several attendants gasped loudly. They perceived it as part of their job to show horror at every sacrilege. The same attendants tended to whisper and make jokes during the descriptions of true horrors: murders, rapes, maimings. “The spectators will remain silent,” Septus said wearily. He had recited those words five times this morning, too. “My Lord Prosecutor, will you please read the text?”

“Ummm . . . the text, yes, the text.”

Septus maintained his composure while ben Jacob shuffled through papers and parchments looking for what he needed. It was, of course, standard procedure to read any passages of scripture that a heretic denied, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding. It was also standard procedure for ben Jacob to misplace his copy of the relevant text in a pile of other documents. With any other prosecutor, this might be some kind of strategy; with ben Jacob, it was simply disorganization.

“Here we are, yes, here we are,” he said at last, producing a dog-eared page with a smear of grease clearly visible along one edge. “Gospel of Susannah, chapter twenty-three, first verse.” Ben Jacob paused while the two Verification Attendants found the passage in their own scripture books. They would follow silently as he read the text aloud, ready to catch any slips of the tongue that deviated from the holy word. When the attendants were ready, ben Jacob cleared his throat and read:

After the procession ended, they withdrew to a garden outside the walls of Jerusalem. And in the evening, it happened that Matthias beheld a serpent there, hidden by weeds. He therefore took up a stone that he might crush the beast; but Mary stayed his hand, saying, “There is no danger, for look, the beast sleeps.”

“Teacher,” Matthias answered, “it will not sleep forever.”

“Verily,” said Mary, “I promise it will sleep till dawn; and when the dawn comes, we will leave this place and all the serpents that it holds.”

Yet still, Matthias kept hold of the stone and gazed upon the serpent with fear.

“O ye of little faith,” said Mary to Matthias, “why do you concern yourself with the sleeping creature before you, when you are blind to the serpents in your own heart? For I tell you, each drop of your blood courses with a legion of serpents, and so it is for every Child of Dust. You are all poisoned with black venoms, poisoned unto death. But if you believe in me, I will sing those serpents to sleep; then will they slumber in peace until you leave this flesh behind, entering into the dawn of God’s new day.”

Ben Jacob lowered his page and looked to the Verifiers for their confirmation. The Patriarch turned in their direction, too, but he didn’t need their nods to tell him the scripture had been read correctly. Septus knew the passage by heart; it was one of the fundamental texts of Mother Church, the Virgin’s promise of salvation. It was also one of the most popular texts for heretics to challenge. The presumption of original sin, of damnation being inherent in human flesh . . . that was anathema to many a fiery young soul. What kind of God, they asked, would damn an infant to hell merely for being born? It was a good question, its answer still the subject of much subtle debate; but the Virgin’s words were unequivocal, whether or not theologians had reasoned out all the implications.

“Anton Leeuwenhoek,” Septus said, “you have heard the verified word of scripture. Do you deny its truth?”

Leeuwenhoek stared directly back. “I must,” he answered. “I have examined human blood in meticulous detail. It contains no serpents.”

The toadies in the courtroom had their mouths open, ready to gasp again at sacrilege; but even they could hear the man was not speaking in deliberate blasphemy. He seemed to be stating . . . a fact.

How odd.

Septus straightened slightly in the Patriarchal throne. This had the prospect of more interest than the usual heresy trial. “You understand,” he said to Leeuwenhoek, “this passage is about original sin. The Blessed Virgin states that all human beings are poisoned with sin and can only be redeemed through her.”

“On the contrary, Your Holiness.” Leeuwenhoek’s voice was sharp. “The passage states there are snakes in human blood. I know there are not.”

“The snakes are merely . . .” Septus stopped himself in time. He had been on the verge of saying the snakes were merely a metaphor; but this was a public trial, and any pronouncements he made would have the force of law. To declare that any part of scripture was not the literal truth . . . no Patriarch had ever done so in open forum, and Septus did not intend to be the first.

“Let us be clear on this point,” Septus said to Leeuwenhoek. “Do you deny the Doctrine of Original Sin?”

“No—I could never make heads or tails of theology. What I understand is blood; and there are no snakes in it.”

One of the toadies ventured a small gasp of horror, but even a deaf man could have told the sound was forced.

Prosecutor ben Jacob, trying to be helpful, said, “You must appreciate that the snakes would be very, very small.”

“That’s just it,” Leeuwenhoek answered with sudden enthusiasm. “I have created a device that makes it possible to view tiny things as if they were much larger.” He turned quickly toward Septus. “Your Holiness is familiar with the telescope? The device for viewing objects at long distances?”

The Patriarch nodded in spite of himself.

“My device,” Leeuwenhoek said, “functions on a similar principle—an arrangement of lenses that amplify one’s vision to reveal things too small to see with the naked eye. I have examined blood in every particular; and while it contains numerous minute animalcules I cannot identify, I swear to the court there are no snakes. Sleeping or otherwise.”

“Mm.” Septus took a moment to fold his hands on the bench in front of him. When he spoke, he did not meet the prisoner’s eyes. “It is well known that snakes are adept at hiding, are they not? Surely it is possible that a snake could be concealed behind . . . behind these other minute animalcules you mention.”

“A legion of serpents,” Leeuwenhoek said stubbornly. “That’s what the text said. A legion of serpents in every drop of blood. Surely they couldn’t all find a place to hide; and I have spent hundreds of hours searching, Your Holiness. Days and weeks and months.”

“Mm.”

Troublesome to admit, Septus didn’t doubt the man. The Patriarch had scanned the skies with an excellent telescope, and had seen a universe of unexpected wonders—mountains on the moon, hair on the sun, rings around the planet Cronus. He could well believe Leeuwenhoek’s magnifier would reveal similar surprises . . . even if it didn’t show serpents in the bloodstream. The serpents were merely a parable anyway; who could doubt it? Blessed Mary often spoke in poetic language that every educated person recognized as symbolic rather than factual.

Unfortunately, the church was not composed of educated persons. No matter how sophisticated the clergy might be, parishioners came from humbler stock. Snakes in the blood? If that’s what Mary said, it must be true; and heaven help a Patriarch who took a less dogmatic stance. The bedrock of the church was Authority: ecclesiastic authority, scriptural authority. If Septus publicly allowed that some doctrines could be interpreted as mere symbolism—that a fundamental teaching was metaphor, not literal fact—well, all it took was a single hole in a wineskin for everything to leak out.

On the other hand, truth was truth. If there were no snakes, there were no snakes. God made the world and all the people in it; if the Creator chose to fashion human lifeblood a certain way, it was the duty of Mother Church to accept and praise Him for it. Clinging to a lie in order to preserve one’s authority was worse than mere cowardice; it was the most damning blasphemy.

Septus looked at Leeuwenhoek, standing handcuffed in the dock. A living man with a living soul; and with one word, Septus could have him executed as a purveyor of falsehood.

But where did the falsehood truly lie?

“This case cannot be decided today,” Septus announced. “Mother Church will investigate the claims of the accused to the fullest extent of her strength. We will build magnifier devices of our own, properly blessed to protect against Satan’s interference.” Septus fought back a smile at that; there were still some stuffy inquisitors who believed the devil distorted what one saw through any lens. “We shall see what is there and what is not.”

Attendants nodded in agreement around the courtroom, just as they would nod if the sentence had been immediate acquittal or death. But ben Jacob said, “Your Holiness—perhaps it would be best if the court were to . . . to issue instructions that no other person build a magnification device until the church has ruled in this matter.”

“On the contrary,” Septus replied. “I think the church should make magnifiers available to all persons who ask. Let them see for themselves.”

The Patriarch smiled, wondering if ben Jacob understood. A decree suppressing magnifiers would simply encourage dissidents to build them in secret; on the other hand, providing free access to such devices would bring the curious into the church, not drive them away. Anyway, the question would only interest the leisured class, those with time and energy to wonder about esoteric issues. The great bulk of the laity, farmers and miners and ostlers, would never hear of the offer. Even if they did, they would hardly care. Minute animalcules might be amusing curiosities, but they had nothing to do with a peasant’s life.

Another pause for prayer and then Leeuwenhoek was escorted away to instruct church scholars in how to build his magnification device. The man seemed happy with the outcome—more than escaping a death sentence, he would now have the chance to show others what he’d seen. Septus had met many men like that: grown-up children, looking for colorful shells on the beach and touchingly grateful when someone else took an interest in their sandy little collections.

As for Leeuwenhoek’s original magnifier—Septus had the device brought to his chambers when the court recessed at noon. Blood was easy to come by: one sharp jab from a pin and the Patriarch had his sample to examine. Eagerly he peered through the viewing lens, adjusting the focus in the same way as a telescope.

Animalcules. How remarkable.

Tiny, tiny animalcules . . . countless schools of them, swimming in his own blood. What wonders God had made! Creatures of different shapes and sizes, perhaps predators and prey, like the fishes that swam in the ocean.

And were there snakes? The question was almost irrelevant. And yet . . . very faintly, so close to invisible that it might be a trick of the eye, something as thin as a hair seemed to flit momentarily across the view.

Then it was gone.

2. The Origin of Serpentine Analogues in the Blood of Papist Peoples:

Her Britannic Majesty, Anne VI, rather liked the Star Chamber. True, its power had been monstrously abused at times in the past five centuries—secret trials leading to secret executions of people who were probably more innocent than the monarchs sitting on the judgment seat—but even in the glorious Empire, there was a place for this kind of hearing. The queen on this side of the table, one of her subjects on the other . . . it had the air of a private chat between friends: a time when difficulties could get sorted out, one way or another.

“Well, Mr. Darwin,” she said after the tea had been poured, “it seems you’ve stirred up quite a hornet’s nest. Have you not?”

The fiercely bearded man across the table did not answer immediately. He laid a finger on the handle of his cup as if to drink or not to drink was some momentous decision; then he said, “I have simply spoken the truth, ma’am . . . as I see it.”

“Yes; but different people see different truths, don’t they? And a great many are upset by the things you say are true. You are aware there has been . . . unpleasantness?”

“I know about the riots, ma’am. Several times they have come uncomfortably close to me. And of course, there have been threats on my life.”

“Indeed.” Anne lifted a tiny slice of buttered bread and took what she hoped would seem a thoughtful nibble. For some reason, she always enjoyed eating in front of the accused here in the Star Chamber; they themselves never had any appetite at all. “The threats are one reason We invited you here today. Scotland Yard is growing rather weary of protecting you; and Sir Oswald has long pondered whether your life is worth it.”

That got the expected reaction—Darwin’s finger froze on the cup handle, the color draining away from his face. “I had not realized . . .” His eyes narrowed. “I perceive, ma’am, that someone will soon make a decision on this issue.”

“Exactly,” the queen said. “Sir Oswald has turned to the crown for guidance, and now We turn to you.” She took another tiny bite of the bread. “It would be good of you to explain your theories—to lay out the train of reasoning that led to your . . . unsettling public statements.”

“It’s all laid out in my book, ma’am.”

“But your book is for scientists, not queens.” Anne set down the bread and allowed herself a small sip of tea. She took her time doing so, but Darwin remained silent. “Please,” she said at last. “We wish to make an informed decision.”

Darwin grunted . . . or perhaps it was a hollow chuckle of cynicism. An ill-bred sound in either case. “Very well, Your Majesty,” he nodded. “It is simply a matter of history.”

“History is seldom simple, Mr. Darwin; but proceed.”

“In . . . 1430-something, I forget the exact year, Anton Leeuwenhoek appeared before Supreme Patriarch Septus to discuss the absence of snakes in the bloodstream. You are familiar with that, ma’am?”

“Certainly. It was the pivotal event in the Schism between Our church and the Papists.”

“Just so.”

Anne could see Darwin itching to leap off his chair and begin prowling about the room, like a professor lecturing to a class of dull-lidded schoolboys. His strained impetuosity amused her; but she hoped he would keep his impulses in check. “Pray continue, Mr. Darwin.”

“It is common knowledge that the Patriarch’s decision led to a . . . a deluge, shall we say, of people peering at their own blood through a microscope. Only the upper classes at first, but soon enough it spread to the lower levels of society, too. Since the church allowed anyone to look into a microscope without cost, I suppose it was a free source of amusement for the peasantry.”

“An opiate for the masses,” Anne offered. She rather liked the phrase—Mr. Marx had used it when he had his little visit to the Star Chamber.

“I suppose that must be it,” Darwin agreed. “At any rate, the phenomenon far outstripped anything Septus could have foreseen; and even worse for the Patriarchy, it soon divided the church into two camps—those who claimed to see snakes in their blood and those who did not.”

“Mr. Darwin, We are well aware of the fundamental difference between Papists and the Redeemed.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but I believe the usual historical interpretation is . . . flawed. It confuses cause and effect.”

“How can there be confusion?” Anne asked. “Papists have serpents in their blood; that is apparent to any child looking into a microscope. We Redeemed have no such contaminants; again, that is simple observational fact. The obvious conclusion, Mr. Darwin, is that Christ Herself marked the Papists with Her curse, to show one and all the error of their ways.”

“According to the Papists,” Darwin reminded her, “the snakes are a sign of God’s blessing: a sleeping snake means sin laid to rest.”

“Is that what you think, Mr. Darwin?”

“I think it more practical to examine the facts before making any judgment.”

“That is why we are here today,” Anne said with a pointed glance. “Facts . . . and judgment. If you could direct yourself to the heart of the matter, Mr. Darwin?”

“The heart of the matter,” he repeated. “Of course. I agree that today any microscope will show that Papists have snakes in their bloodstream . . . or as scientists prefer to call them, serpentine analogues, since it is highly unlikely the observed phenomena are actual reptiles—”

“Let us not bandy nomenclature,” Anne interrupted. “We accept that the entities in Papist blood are unrelated to cobras and puff adders; but they have been called snakes for centuries, and the name is adequate. Proceed to your point, Mr. Darwin.”

“You have just made my point for me, ma’am. Five centuries have passed since the original controversy arose. What we see now may not be what people saw then.” He took a deep breath. “If you read the literature of that long-ago time, you find there was great doubt about the snakes, even among the Papists. Serpentine analogues were extremely rare and difficult to discern . . . unlike the very obvious entities seen today.”

“Surely that can be blamed on the equipment,” Anne said. “Microscopes of that day were crude contrivances compared to our fine modern instruments.”

“That is the usual argument,” Darwin nodded, “but I believe there is a different explanation.”

“Yes?”

“My argument, ma’am, is based on my observations of pigeons.”

Anne blinked. “Pigeons, Mr. Darwin?” She blinked again. “The birds?” She bit her lip. “The filthy things that perch on statues?”

“Not wild pigeons, Your Majesty, domestic ones. Bred for show. For example, some centuries ago, a squire in Sussex took it into his head to breed a black pigeon from his stock of gray ones.”

“Why ever would he want a black pigeon?”

“That remains a mystery to me, too, ma’am; but the historical records are clear. He set about the task by selecting pigeons of the darkest gray he could find, and breeding them together. Over many generations, their color grew darker and darker until today, the squire’s descendants boast of pigeons as black as coal.”

“They boast of that?”

“Incessantly.”

Darwin seized up a piece of bread and virtually stuffed it into his mouth. The man had apparently become so engrossed in talking, he had forgotten who sat across the table. Good, Anne thought; he would be less guarded.

“We understand the principles of animal husbandry,” Anne said. “We do not, however, see how this pertains to the Papists.”

“For the past five centuries, Your Majesty, the Papists have been going through exactly the same process . . . as have the Redeemed, for that matter. Think, ma’am. In any population, there are numerous chance differences between individuals; the squire’s pigeons, for example, had varying shades of gray. If some process of selection chooses to emphasize a particular trait as desirable, excluding other traits as undesirable—if you restrict darker birds to breeding with one another and prevent lighter ones from contributing to the bloodline—the selected characteristic will tend to become more pronounced with each generation.”

“You are still talking about pigeons, Mr. Darwin.”

“No, ma’am,” he said triumphantly. “I am talking about Papists and the Redeemed. Let us suppose that in the times of Patriarch Septus, some people had almost imperceptible serpentine analogues in their bloodstream—a chance occurrence, just as some people may have curls in their hair while others do not.”

Anne opened her mouth to say that curls were frequently not a chance occurrence at all; but she decided to remain silent.

“Now,” Darwin continued, “what happened among the people of that day? Some saw those tiny, almost invisible snakes; others did not. Those who saw them proclaimed, This proves the unshakable word of Mother Church. Those who saw nothing said, The scriptures cannot be taken literally—believers must find the truth in their own hearts. And so the Schism split the world, pitting one camp against another.”

“Yes, Mr. Darwin, We know all that.”

“So, ma’am, you must also know what happened in subsequent generations. The rift in belief created a similar rift in the population. Papists only married Papists. The Redeemed only married the Redeemed.”

“Of course.”

“Consequently,” Darwin stressed the word, “those who could see so-called snakes in their blood only married those of similar condition. Those who saw nothing married others who saw nothing. Is it any wonder that, generation by generation, snakes became more and more visible in Papist blood? And less and less likely to be seen in the Redeemed? It is simply a matter of selective breeding, ma’am. The Papists are not different from us because the Virgin put her mark on them; they are different because they selected to make themselves different. To emphasize the difference. And the Redeemed have no snakes in their blood for the same reason—simply a side effect of our ancestors’ marital prejudice.”

“Mr. Darwin!” Anne said, aghast. “Such claims! No wonder you have angered the Papists as much as your own countrymen. To suggest that God’s sacred sign is a mere barnyard accident . . .” The Queen caught her breath. “Sir, where is your decency?”

“I have something better than decency,” he answered in a calm voice. “I have proof.”

“Proof? How could you prove such a thing?”

“Some years ago, ma’am,” he said, “I took passage on a ship sailing the South Seas; and during that voyage, I saw things that completely opened my eyes.”

“More pigeons, Mr. Darwin?”

He waved his hand dismissively. “The birds of the Pacific Islands are hardly fit study for a scientist. What I observed were the efforts of missionaries, ma’am; both Papists and the Redeemed, preaching to the natives who lived in those isles. Have you heard of such missions?”

“We sponsor several of those missions personally, Mr. Darwin.”

“And the results, ma’am?”

“Mixed,” Anne confessed. “Some tribes are open to Redemption, while others . . .” she shrugged. “The Papists do no better.”

“Just so, Your Majesty. As an example, I visited one island where the Papists had been established for thirty years, yet the local priest claimed to have made no true converts. Mark that word, true. Many of the natives espoused Papist beliefs, took part in Papist worship, and so on . . . but the priest could find no snakes in their blood, so he told himself they had not truly embraced Mother Church.”

“You would argue with the priest’s conclusion?”

“Certainly,” Darwin replied. “In my eyes, the island tribe was simply a closed population that for reasons of chance never developed serpentine analogues in their blood. If you interbreed only white pigeons, you will never develop a black.”

Anne said, “But—” then stopped stone-still, as the words of a recent mission report rose in her mind. We are continually frustrated in our work on this island; although the people bow before God’s altar, their blood continues to show the serpent-stain of the Unclean . . .

“Mr. Darwin,” Anne murmured, “could there possibly be islands where all the people had snakes in their blood regardless of their beliefs?”

“There are indeed, ma’am,” Darwin nodded. “Almost all the island populations are isolated and homogeneous. I found some tribes with snakes, some without—no matter which missionaries ministered there. When the Papists land among a people who already have analogues in their bloodstream, they soon declare that they have converted the tribe and hold great celebrations. However, when they land among a people whose blood is clear . . . well, they can preach all they want, but they won’t change the effects of generations of breeding. Usually, they just give up and move on to another island where the people are more receptive . . . which is to say, where they have the right blood to begin with.”

“Ah.”

Anne lowered her eyes. Darwin had been speaking about the Papists, but she knew the same was true of Redeemed missionaries. They tended to stay a year in one place, do a few blood tests, then move on if they could not show results—because results were exclusively measured in blood rather than what the people professed. If missionaries, her own missionaries, had been abandoning sincere believers because they didn’t believe the conversions were “true” . . . what would God think of that?

But Darwin hadn’t stopped talking. “Our voyage visited many islands, Your Majesty, a few of which had never received missionaries of any kind. Some of those tribes had serpentine analogues in their blood, while some did not . . . and each island was homogeneous. I hypothesize that the potential for analogues might have been distributed evenly through humankind millennia ago; but as populations grew isolated, geographically or socially—”

“Yes, Mr. Darwin, We see your point.” Anne found she was tapping her finger on the edge of the table. She stopped herself and stood up. “This matter deserves further study. We shall instruct the police to find a place where you can continue your work without disturbance from outside sources.”

Darwin’s face fell. “Would that be a jail, ma’am?”

“A comfortable place of sanctuary,” she replied. “You will be supplied with anything you need—books, paper, all of that.”

“Will I be able to publish?” he asked.

“You will have at least one avid reader for whatever you write.” She favored him with the slightest bow of her head. “You have given Us much to think about.”

“Then let me give you one more thought, Your Majesty.” He took a deep breath, as if he was trying to decide if his next words would be offensive beyond the pale. Then, Anne supposed, he decided he had nothing to lose. “Papists and the Redeemed have been selectively breeding within their own populations for five hundred years. There may come a time when they are too far removed from each other to be . . . cross-fertile. Already there are rumors of an unusually high mortality rate for children with one Papist parent and one Redeemed. In time—millennia perhaps, but in time—I believe the two populations may split into separate species.”

“Separate species? Of humans?”

“It may happen, Your Majesty. At this very moment, we may be witnessing the origin of two new species.”

Queen Anne pursed her lips in distaste. “The origin of species, Mr. Darwin? If that is a joke, We are not amused.”

3. The Efficacy of Trisulphozymase for Preventing SA Incompatibility Reactions in Births of Mixed-Blood Parentage:

The hearing was held behind closed doors—a bad sign. Julia Grant had asked some of her colleagues what to expect and they all said, Show trial, Show trial. Senator McCarthy loved to get his name in the papers. And yet the reporters were locked out today; just Julia and the Committee.

A very bad sign.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Grant,” McCarthy said after she had sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. His voice had a smarmy quality to it; an unpleasant man’s attempt at charm. “I suppose you know why you’re here?”

“No, Senator.”

“Come now, Doctor,” he chided, as if speaking to a five-year-old. “Surely you must know the purpose of this Committee? And it therefore follows that we would take great interest in your work.”

“My work is medical research,” she replied tightly. “I have no political interests at all.” She forced herself to stare McCarthy in the eye. “I heal the sick.”

“There’s sickness and there’s sickness,” the senator shrugged. “We can all understand doctors who deal with sniffles and sneezes and heart attacks . . . but that’s not your field, is it?”

“No,” she answered. “I’m a hematologist, specializing in SA compatibility problems.”

“Could you explain that for the Committee?”

The doctor suspected that every man on the Committee—and they were all men—had already been briefed on her research. If nothing else, they read the newspapers. Still, why not humor them?

“All human blood,” she began, “is either SA-positive or SA-negative—”

“SA stands for Serpentine Analogue?” McCarthy interrupted.

“Yes. The name comes from the outdated belief—”

“That some people have snakes in their bloodstream,” McCarthy interrupted again.

“That’s correct.”

“Do some people have snakes in their bloodstream?” McCarthy asked.

“Snakelike entities,” another senator corrected . . . probably a Democrat.

“Serpentine analogues are not present in anyone’s bloodstream,” Julia said. “They don’t appear until blood is exposed to air. It’s a specialized clotting mechanism, triggered by an enzyme that encourages microscopic threads to form at the site of an injury—”

“In other words,” McCarthy said, “SA-positive blood works differently from SA-negative. Correct?”

“In this one regard, yes,” Julia nodded.

“Do you think SA-positive blood is better than SA-negative?”

“It provides slightly more effective clotting at wounds—”

“Do you admire SA-positive blood, doctor?”

Julia stared at him. Mentally, she counted to ten. “I am fascinated by all types of blood,” she answered at last. “SA-positive clots faster . . . which is useful to stop bleeding but gives a slightly greater risk of stroke. Overall, I’d say the good points and the bad even out. If they didn’t, evolution would soon skew the population strongly one way or the other.”

McCarthy folded his hands on the table in front of him. “So you believe in evolution, Dr. Grant?”

“I’m a scientist. I also believe in gravity, thermodynamics, and the universal gas equation.”

Not a man on the Committee so much as smiled.

“Doctor,” McCarthy said quietly, “what blood type are you?”

She gritted her teeth. “The Supreme Court ruled that no one has to answer that question.”

In sudden fury, McCarthy slammed his fist onto the table. “Do you see the Supreme Court in here with us? Do you? Because if you do, show me those black-robed faggots and I’ll boot their pope-loving asses straight out the window.” He settled back in his chair. “I don’t think you appreciate the seriousness of your situation, Dr. Grant.”

“What situation?” she demanded. “I am a medical researcher—”

“And you’ve developed a new drug, haven’t you?” McCarthy snapped. “A new drug. That you want to loose on the public. I wonder if the person who invented heroin called herself a medical researcher, too?”

“Mr. McCarthy, trisulphozymase is not a narcotic. It is a carefully developed pharmaceutical—”

“Which encourages miscegenation between Papists and the Redeemed,” McCarthy finished. “That’s what it does, doesn’t it, doctor?”

“No!” She took a deep breath. “Trisulphozymase combats certain medical problems that occur when an SA-positive father and an SA-negative mother—”

“When a Papist man sires his filthy whelp on a Redeemed woman,” McCarthy interrupted. “When a Papist fucks one of the Saved! That’s what you want to encourage, Doctor? That’s how you’ll make the world a better place?”

Julia said nothing. She felt her cheeks burn like a child caught in some forbidden act; and she was infuriated that her reaction was guilt rather than outrage at what McCarthy was saying.

Yes, she wanted to say, it will make the world a better place to stop separating humanity into hostile camps. Most people on the planet had no comprehension of either Papist or Redeemed theology; but somehow, the poisonous idea of blood discrimination had spread to every country of the globe, regardless of religious faith. Insanity! And millions recognized it to be so. Yet the McCarthys of the world found it a convenient ladder on which they could climb to power, and who was stopping them? Look at Germany. Look at Ireland. Look at India and Pakistan.

Ridiculous . . . and deadly, time and again throughout history. Perhaps she should set aside SA compatibility and work on a cure for the drive to demonize those who were different.

“A doctor deals with lives, not lifestyles,” she said stiffly. “If I were confronted with a patient whose heart had stopped beating, I would attempt to start it again, whether the victim were an innocent child, a convicted murderer, or even a senator.” She leaned forward. “Has anyone here ever seen an SA incompatibility reaction? How a newborn infant dies? How the mother goes into spasm and usually dies, too? Real people, gentlemen; real screams of pain! Only a monster could witness such things and still rant about ideology.”

A few Committee members had the grace to look uncomfortable, turning away from her gaze; but McCarthy was not one of them. “You think this is all just ideology, Doctor? A lofty discussion of philosophical doctrine?” He shook his head in unconvincing sorrow. “I wish it were . . . I truly wish it were. I wish the Papists weren’t trying to rip down everything this country stands for, obeying the orders of their foreign masters to corrupt the spirit of liberty itself. Why should I care about a screaming woman, when she’s whored herself to the likes of them? She made her decision; now she has to face the consequences. No one in this room invented SA incompatibility, Doctor. God did . . . and I think we should take the hint, don’t you?”

The sharp catch of bile rose in Julia’s throat. For a moment, she couldn’t find the strength to fight it; but she couldn’t be sick, not in front of these men. Swallowing hard, she forced herself to breathe evenly until the moment passed. “Senators,” she said at last, “do you actually intend to suppress trisulphozymase? To withhold lifesaving treatment from those who need it?”

“Some might say it’s a sign,” McCarthy answered, “that a Redeemed man can father a child on a Papist without complications, but it doesn’t work the other way around. Doesn’t that sound like a sign to you?”

“Senators,” she said, ignoring McCarthy, “does this Committee intend to suppress trisulphozymase?”

Silence. Then McCarthy gave a little smile. “How does trisulphozymase work, Doctor?”

Julia stared at him, wondering where this new question was going. Warily, she replied, “The drug dismantles the SA factor enzyme into basic amino acids. This prevents a more dangerous response from the mother’s immune system, which might otherwise produce antibodies to the enzyme. The antibodies are the real problem, because they may attack the baby’s—”

“So what you’re saying,” McCarthy interrupted, “is that this drug can destroy the snakes in a Papist’s bloodstream?”

“I told you, there are no snakes! Trisulphozymase temporarily eliminates the extra clotting enzyme that comes from SA-positive blood.”

“It’s only temporary?”

“That’s all that’s needed. One injection shortly before the moment of birth—”

“But what about repeated doses?” McCarthy interrupted. “Or a massive dose? Could you permanently wipe out the SA factor in a person’s blood?”

“You don’t administer trisulphozymase to an SA-positive person,” Julia said. “It’s given to an SA-negative mother to prevent—”

“But suppose you did give it to a Papist. A big dose. Lots of doses. Could it destroy the SA factor forever?” He leaned forward eagerly. “Could it make them like us?”

And now Julia saw it: what this hearing was all about. Because the Committee couldn’t really suppress the treatment, could they? Her results were known in the research community. Even if the drug were banned here, other countries would use it; and there would eventually be enough public pressure to force reevaluation. This wasn’t about the lives of babies and mothers; this was about clipping the devil’s horns.

Keeping her voice steady, she said, “It would be unconscionable to administer this drug or any other to a person whose health did not require it. Large doses or long-term use of trisulphozymase would have side effects I could not venture to guess.” The faces in front of her showed no expression. “Gentlemen,” she tried again, “in an SA-positive person, the enzyme is natural. A natural component of blood. To interfere with a body’s natural functioning when there is no medical justification . . .” she threw up her hands. “Do no harm, gentlemen. The heart of the Hippocratic Oath. At the very least, doctors must do no harm.”

“Does that mean,” McCarthy asked, “that you would refuse to head a research project into this matter?”

“Me?”

“You’re the top expert in your field,” McCarthy shrugged. “If anybody can get rid of the snakes once and for all, it’s you.”

“Senator,” Julia said, “have you no shame? Have you no shame at all? You want to endanger lives over this . . . triviality? A meaningless difference you can only detect with a microscope—”

“Which means they can walk among us, Doctor! Papists can walk among us. Them with their special blood, their snakes, their damned inbreeding—they’re the ones who care about what you call a triviality! They’re the ones who flaunt it in our faces. They say they’re God’s Chosen. With God’s Mark of Blessing. Well, I intend to erase that mark, with or without your help.”

“Without,” Julia told him. “Definitely without.”

McCarthy’s gaze was on her. He did not look like a man who had just received an absolute no. With an expression far too smug, he said, “Let me tell you a secret, Doctor. From our agents in the enemy camp. Even as we speak, the Papists are planning to contaminate our water supply with their damned SA enzyme. Poison us or make us like them . . . one way or the other. We need your drug to fight that pollution; to remove the enzyme from our blood before it can destroy us! What about that, Dr. Grant? Will your precious medical ethics let you work on a treatment to keep us safe from their damned Papist toxins?”

Julia grimaced. “You know nothing about the human metabolism. People couldn’t ‘catch’ the SA factor from drinking water; the enzyme would just break down in your stomach acid. I suppose it might be possible to produce a methylated version that would eventually work its way into the bloodstream . . .” She stopped herself. “Anyway, I can’t believe the Papists would be so insane as to—”

“Right now,” McCarthy interrupted, “sitting in a committee room of some Papist hideaway, there are a group of men who are just as crazy as we are. Believe that, Doctor. Whatever we are willing to do to them, they are willing to do to us; the only question is, who’ll do it first.” McCarthy settled back and cradled his hands on his stomach. “Snakes all ’round, Dr. Grant. You can make a difference in who gets bitten.”

It was, perhaps, the only true thing McCarthy had said since the hearing had begun. Julia tried to doubt it, but couldn’t. SA-positive or negative, you could still be a ruthless bastard.

She said nothing.

McCarthy stared at her a few moments more, then glanced at the men on both sides of him. “Let’s consider this hearing adjourned, all right? Give Dr. Grant a little time to think this over.” He turned to look straight at her. “A little time. We’ll contact you in a few days . . . find out who scares you more, us or them.”

He had the nerve to wink before he turned away.

The other senators filed from the room, almost bumping into each other in the hurry to leave. Complicitous men . . . weak men, for all their power. Julia remained in the uncomfortable “Witness Chair,” giving them ample time to scurry away; she didn’t want to lay eyes on them again when she finally went out into the corridor.

Using trisulphozymase on an SA-positive person . . . what would be the effect? Predictions were almost worthless in biochemistry—medical science was a vast ocean of ignorance dotted with researchers trying to stay afloat in makeshift canoes. The only prediction you could safely make was that a large enough dose of any drug would kill the patient.

On the other hand, better to inject trisulphozymase into SA-positive people than SA-negative. The chemical reactions that broke down the SA enzyme also broke down the trisulphozymase—mutual assured destruction. If you didn’t have the SA enzyme in your blood, the trisulphozymase would build up to lethal levels much faster, simply because there was nothing to stop it. SA-positive people could certainly tolerate dosages that would kill a . . .

Julia felt a chill wash through her. She had created a drug that would poison SA-negatives but not SA-positives . . . that could selectively massacre the Redeemed while leaving the Papists standing. And her research was a matter of public record. How long would it take before someone on the Papist side made the connection? One of those men McCarthy had talked about, just as ruthless and crazy as the senator himself.

How long would it take before they used her drug to slaughter half the world?

There was only one way out: put all the snakes to sleep. If Julia could somehow wave her hands and make every SA-positive person SA-negative, then the playing field would be level again. No, not the playing field—the killing field.

Insanity . . . but what choice did she have? Sign up with McCarthy; get rid of the snakes before they began to bite; pray the side effects could be treated. Perhaps, if saner minds prevailed, the process would never be deployed. Perhaps the threat would be enough to force some kind of bilateral enzyme disarmament.

Feeling twenty years older, Dr. Julia Grant left the hearing room. The corridor was empty; through the great glass entryway at the front of the building, she could see late afternoon sunlight slanting across the marble steps. A single protester stood on the sidewalk, mutely holding a sign aloft—no doubt what McCarthy would call a Papist sympathizer, traitorously opposing a duly appointed congressional committee.

The protester’s sign read, “Why do you concern yourself with the sleeping creature before you, when you are blind to the serpents in your own heart?”

Julia turned away, hoping the building had a back door.

MOON SIX

Stephen Baxter

Mankind has finally returned in triumph to the surface of the Moon. One problem remains, however: Which Moon is it anyway?

BADO WAS ALONE ON THE PRIMEVAL beach of Cape Canaveral, in his white lunarsurface pressure suit, holding his box of Moon rocks and sampling tools in his gloved hand. He lifted up his gold sun visor and looked around. The sand was hard and flat. A little way inland, there was a row of scrub pines, maybe ten feet tall. There were no ICBM launch complexes here.

There was no Kennedy Space Center, in fact: no space program, evidently, save for him. He was stranded on this empty, desolate beach. As the light leaked out of the sky, an unfamiliar Moon was brightening. Bado glared at it. “Moon Six,” he said. “Oh, shit.”

He took off his helmet and gloves. He picked up his box of tools and began to walk inland. His blue overshoes, still stained dark gray from lunar dust, left crisp Moonwalk footprints in the damp sand of the beach.

Bado drops down the last three feet of the ladder and lands on the foil-covered footpad. A little gray dust splashes up around his feet.

Slade is waiting with his camera. “OK, turn around and give me a big smile. Atta boy. You look great. Welcome to the Moon.” Bado can’t see Slade’s face, behind his reflective golden sun visor.

Bado holds onto the ladder with his right hand and places his left boot on the Moon. Then he steps off with his right foot, and lets go of the LM. And there he is, standing on the Moon.

The suit around him is a warm, comforting bubble. He hears the hum of pumps and fans in the PLSS—his backpack, the Portable Life Support Systemand feels the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.

He takes a halting step forward. The dust seems to crunch beneath his feet, like a covering of snow: There is a firm footing beneath a soft, resilient layer a few inches thick. His footprints are miraculously sharp, as if he’s placed his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He takes a photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it will persist here for millions of years, he realizes, like the fossilized footprint of a dinosaur, to be eroded away only by the slow rain of micrometeorites, that echo of the titanic bombardments of the deep past.

He looks around.

The LM is standing in a broad, shallow crater. Low hills shoulder above the close horizon. There are craters everywhere, ranging from several yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows.

They call the landing site Taylor Crater, after that district of El Lago—close to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston—where he and Fay have made their home. This pond of frozen lava is a relatively smooth, flat surface in a valley once flooded by molten rock. Their main objective for the flight is another crater a few hundred yards to the west that they’ve named after Slade’s home district of Wildwood. Surveyor 7, an unmanned robot probe, set down in Wildwood a few years before; the astronauts are here to sample it.

This landing site is close to Tycho, the fresh, bright crater in the Moon’s southern highlands. As a kid Bado had sharp vision. He was able to see Tycho with his naked eyes, a bright pinprick on that ash-white surface, with rays that spread right across the face of the full Moon.

Now he is here.

Bado turns and bounces back toward the LM.

AFTER A FEW MILES HE GOT TO A SMALL TOWN.

He hid his lunar pressure suit in a ditch, and, dressed in his tube-covered cooling garment, snuck into someone’s backyard. He stole a pair of jeans and a shirt he found hanging on the line there.

He hated having to steal; he didn’t plan on having to do it again.

He found a small bar. He walked straight in and asked for a job. He knew he couldn’t afford to hesitate, to hang around figuring what kind of world he’d finished up in. He had no money at all, but right now he was clean-shaven and presentable. A few days of sleeping rough would leave him too dirty and stinking to be employable.

He got a job washing glasses and cleaning out the john. That first night he slept on a park bench, but bought himself breakfast and cleaned himself up in a gas station john.

After a week, he had a little money saved. He loaded his lunar gear into an old trunk, and hitched to Daytona Beach, a few miles up the coast.

THEY CLIMBED EASILY OUT OF TAYLOR.

Their first Moonwalk is a misshapen circle that will take them around several craters. The craters are like drill holes, the geologists say, excavations into lunar history.

The first stop is the north rim of a 100-yard-wide crater they call Huckleberry Finn. It is about 300 yards west of the LM.

Bado puts down the tool carrier. This is a handheld tray, with an assortment of gear: rock hammers, sample bags, core tubes. He leans over, and digs into the lunar surface with a shovel. Wlen he scrapes away the gray upper soil he finds a lighter gray, just under the surface.

“Hey, Slade. Come look at this.”

Slade comes floating over. “How about that. I think we found some ray material.” Ray material here will be debris from the impact that formed Tycho.

Lunar geology has been shaped by the meteorite impacts that pounded its surface in prehistory. A main purpose of sending this mission so far south is to keep them away from the massive impact that created the Mare Imbrium, in the northern hemisphere. Ray material unpolluted by Imbrium debris will let them date the more recent Tycho impact.

And here they have it, right at the start of their first Moonwalk.

Slade flips up his gold visor so Bado can see his face, and grins at him. “How about that. We is looking at a full-up mission here, boy.”

They finish up quickly, and set off at a run to the next stop. Slade looks like a human-shaped beach ball, his suit brilliant white, bouncing over the beachlike surface of the Moon. He is whistling.

They are approaching the walls of Wildwood Crater. Bado is going slightly uphill, and he can feel it. The carrier, loaded up with rocks, is getting harder to carry too. He has to hold it up to his chest, to keep the rocks from bouncing out when he runs, and so he is constantly fighting the stiffness of his pressure suit.

“Hey, Bado,” Slade says. He comes loping down the slope. He points. “Take a look.”

Bado has, he realizes, reached the rim of Wildwood Crater. He is standing on top of its dune-like, eroded wall. And there, planted in the crater’s center, is the Surveyor. It is less than 100 yards from him. It is a squat, three-legged frame, like a broken-off piece of an LM.

Slade grins. “Does that look neat? We got it made, Bado.” Bado claps his commander’s shoulder. “Outstanding, man.” He knows that for Slade, getting to the Surveyor, bringing home a few pieces of it, is the finish line for the mission.

Bado looks back east, the way they have come. He can see the big, shallow dip in the land that is Taylor, with the LM resting at its center like a toy in the palm of some huge hand. It is a glistening, filmy construct of gold leaf and aluminum, bristling with antennae, docking targets, and reaction control thruster assemblies.

Two sets of footsteps come climbing up out of Taylor toward them, like footsteps on a beach after a tide.

Bado tips back on his heels and looks at the sky.

The sky is black, empty of stars; his pupils are closed up by the dazzle of the sun, and the reflection of the pale brown lunar surface. But he can see the Earth, a fat crescent, four times the size of a full Moon. And there, crossing the Zenith, is a single, brilliant, unvanking star: the orbiting Apollo CSM, with Al Pond, their command module pilot, waiting to take them home.

There is a kind of shimmer, like a heat haze. And the star goes out.

Just like that—it vanishes from the sky, directly over Bado’s head. He blinks, and moves his head, stiffly, thinking he might have just lost the Apollo in the glare.

But it is gone.

What, then? Can it have moved into the shadow of the Moon? But a little thought knocks out that one; the geometry, of sun and Moon and spacecraft, is all wrong.

And anyhow, what was that heat haze shimmer? You don’t get heat haze where there’s no air.

He lowers his bead. “Hey, Slade. You see that?”

But Slade isn’t anywhere to be seen, either, the slope where he’s been standing is smooth, empty.

Bado feels his heart hammer.

He lets go of the tool carrier—it drifts down to the dust, spilling rocks—and he lopes forward. “Come on, Slade. Where the hell are you?”

Slade is famous for “gotchas”; he is planning a few that Bado knows about, and probably some he doesn’t, for later in the mission. But it is hard to see how he’s pulled this one off. There is nowhere to hide, damn it.

He gets to where he thinks Slade was last standing. There is no sign of him. And there aren’t even any footsteps, he realizes now. The only marks under his feet are those made by his own boots, leading off a few yards away, to the north.

And they start out of nothing, it seems, like Man Friday steps in the crisp virgin Moon-snow. As if he’s stepped out of nowhere onto the regolith.

When he looks back to the east, he can’t see the LM either.

“Slade, this isn’t funny, damn it.” He starts to bound, hastily, back in the direction of the LM. His clumsy steps send up parabolic sprays of dust over unmarked regolith.

He feels his breath getting shallow. It isn’t a good idea to panic. He tells himself that maybe the LM is hidden behind some low ridge. Distances are deceptive here, in this airless sharpness.

“Houston, Bado. I got some kind of situation here.” There isn’t a reply immediately; he imagines his radio signal crawling across the light-seconds’ gulf to Earth. “I’m out of contact with Slade. Maybe he’s fallen somewhere, out of sight. And I don’t seem to be able to see the LM. And . . . “And someone’s wiped over our footsteps, while I wasn’t looking—” Nobody is replying, he realizes.

That stops him short. Dust falls over his feet. On the surface of the Moon, nothing is moving, He looks up at the crescent Earth. “Ah, Houston, this is Bado. Houston. John, come in, capcom.” just silence, static in his headset.

He starts moving to the east again, breathing hard, the sweat pooling at his neck.

HE RENTED AN APARTMENT.

He got himself a better job in a radio store. In the Air Force, before joining NASA, he’d specialized in electronics. He’d been apprehensive that he might not be able to find his way around the gear here, but he found it simple-almost crude, compared to what he’d been used to. They had transistors here, but they still used big chunky valves and paper capacitors. It was like being back in the early ’60s. Radios were popular, but there were few TVS: small black and white gadgets, the reception lousy.

He began watching the TV news and reading the newspapers, trying to figure out what kind of world he’d been dropped in. The weather forecasts were lousy.

And foreign news reports, even on the TV, were sent by wire, like they’d been when he was a kid, and were often a day or two out of date.

The Vietnam War was unfolding. But there’d been none of the protests against the war here like he’d seen back at home. There were no live TV pictures, no color satellite images of soldiers in the mud and the rain, napalming civilians. Nobody knew what was happening out there. The reaction to the war was more like what he remembered of World War II.

There really was no space program. Not just the manned stuff had gone:

There were no weather satellites, communication satellites. Sputnik, Explorer, and all the rest just hadn’t happened. The Moon was just a light in the sky that nobody cared about, like when he was a kid. It was brighter, though, because of that big patch of highland where Imbrium should have been. On the other hand, there were no ICBMS, as far as he could tell.

HIS MOUTH IS BONE-DRY FROM THE PURE OXYGEN. HE IS BREATHING hard; he hears the hiss of water through the suit’s cooling system, the pipes that curl around his limbs and chest.

There is a rational explanation for this. There has to be. Like, if he’s got out of line of sight with the LM, somehow, he’s invisible to the LM’s radio relay, the Lunar Communications Relay Unit. He is linked to that by VHF, and then by S-band to the Earth.

Yeah, that has to be it. As soon as he gets back in line of sight of the LM, he can get in touch with home. And maybe with Slade.

But he can’t figure how he could have gotten out of the LM’s line of sight in the first place. And what about the vanished footsteps?

He tries not to think about it. He just concentrates on loping forward, back to the LM.

In a few minutes, he is back in Taylor Crater.

There is no LM. The regolith here is undisturbed.

Bado bounces across the virgin surface, scuffing it up.

Can he be in the wrong place? The lunar surface does have a tendency to look the same everywhere . . . Hell, no. He can see he is right in the middle of Taylor; he recognizes the shapes of the hills. There can’t be any doubt.

What, then? Can Slade have somehow gotten back to the LM, taken off without him?

But how can Bado not have seen him, seen the boxy LM ascent stage lift up into the sky? And besides, the regolith would be marked by the ascent stage’s blast.

And, he realizes dimly, there would, of course, be an abandoned descent platform here, and bits of kit. And their footsteps. His thoughts are sluggish, his realization coming slowly. Symptoms of shock, maybe.

The fact is that save for his own footfalls, the regolith is as unmarked as if he’s been dropped out of the sky.

And meanwhile, nobody in Houston is talking to him.

He is ashamed to find he is crying, mumbling, tears rolling down his face inside his helmet.

He starts to walk back west again. Following his own footsteps—the single line he made coming back to find the LM—he works his way out of Taylor, and back to the rim of Wildwood.

Hell, he doesn’t have any other place to go.

As he walks be keeps calling, for Slade, for Houston, but there is only static. He knows his signal can’t reach Earth anyway, not without the LM’s big S-band booster.

At Wildwood’s re there is nothing but the footfalls he left earlier. He looks down into Wildwood, and there sits the Surveyor, glistening like some aluminum toy, unperturbed.

He finds his dropped carrier, with the spilled tools and bagged rocks. He bends sideways and scoops up the stuff, loading it back into the carrier.

Bado walks down into Wildwood, spraying lunar dust ahead of him.

He examines the Surveyor. Its solar cell array is stuck out on a boom above him, maybe ten feet over the regolith. The craft bristles with fuel tanks, batteries, antennae, and sensors. He can see the craft’s mechanical claw where it has scraped into the lunar regolith. And he can see how the craft’s white paint has turned tan, maybe from exposure to the sunlight. There are splashes of dust under the vernier rocket nozzles; the Surveyor is designed to land hard, and the three pads have left a firm imprint in the surface.

He gets hold of a landing leg and shakes the Surveyor. “OK,” he calls up. “I’m jiggling it. It’s planted here.” There was a fear that the Surveyor might tip over onto the astronauts when they try to work with it. That evidently isn’t going to happen. Bado takes a pair of cutting shears from his carrier, gets hold of the Surveyor’s TV camera, and starts to chop through the camera’s support struts and cables. “Just a couple more tubes,” he says. “Then that baby’s mine.”

He’ll finish up his Moonwalk, he figures, according to the time line in the spiral-bound checklist on his cuff. He’ll keep on reporting his observations, in case anyone is listening. And then . . . when he gets to the end of the walk, he’ll figure out what to do next. Later there will be another boundary, when his PLSS’s consumables expire. He’ll deal with those things when they come. For now, he is going to work. The camera comes loose, and he grips it in his gloves. “Got it! It’s ours!”

He drops the camera in his carrier, breathing hard. His mouth is dry as sand; he’d give an awful lot for an ice-cool glass of water, right here and now.

There is a shimmer, like heat haze, crossing between him and the Surveyor. Just like before.

He tilts back and looks up. There is old Earth, the fat crescent. And a star, bright and unwavering, is crossing the black sky, directly over his head.

It has to be the Apollo CSM.

He drops the carrier to the dirt and starts jumping up and down, in great big lunar hops, and he waves, as if he is trying to attract a passing aircraft. “Hey, Al! Al Pond! Can you hear me?” Even without the LM, Pond, in the CSM, might be able to pick him up.

His mood changes to something resembling elation. He doesn’t know where the hell Apollo has been, but if it is back, maybe soon so will be the LM, and Slade, and everything. That will suit Bado, right down to the lunar ground he is standing on. He’ll be content to have it all back the way it had been, the way it is supposed to be, and figure out what has happened to him later. “Al! It’s me, Bado! Can you hear me? Can you..”

There is something wrong. That light isn’t staying steady. It is getting brighter, and it is drifting off its straight line, coming down over his head.

It isn’t the CSM in orbit. It is some kind of boxy craft, much smaller thail an LM, descending toward him, gleaming in the sunlight.

He picks up his carrier and holds it close to his chest, and stays close to the Surveyor. As the craft approaches he feels an unreasoning fear.

His kidneys send him a stab of distress. He stands still and lets go, into the urine collection condom. He feels shamed; it is like wetting his pants.

The craft is just a box, on four spindly landing legs. It is coming down vertically, standing on a central rocket. He can see no light from the rocket, of course, but he can see how the downward blast is starting to kick up some dust. It is going to land maybe fifty yards from the Surveyor, right in the middle of Wildwood Crater. The whole thing is made of some silvery metal, maybe aluminum. It has a little control panel, set at the front, and there is someone at the controls. It looks like a man—an astronaut, in fact—his face hidden behind a gold-tinted visor.

Bado can see the blue of a NASA logo, and a dust-coated stars and stripes, painted on the side of the craft.

Maybe fifty feet above the ground the rocket cuts out, and the craft begins to drop. The sprays of dust settle back neatly to the lunar soil. Now little vernier rockets, stuck to the side of the open compartment, cut in to slow the fall, kicking up their own little sprays.

It is all happening in complete silence.

The craft hits the ground with a solid thump. Bado can see the pilot, the astronaut, flick a few switches, and then turn and jump the couple of feet down off the little platform to the ground.

The astronaut comes giraffe-loping across the sunlit surface toward Bado and stops a few feet from him, and stands there, slightly stooped forward, balancing the weight of his PLSS.

His suit looks pretty much like a standard EMU, an Apollo Extravehicular Mobility Unit. There is the usual gleaming white oversuit—the thermal micrometeorite garment—with the lower legs and overshoes scuffed and stained with Tycho dust. Bado can see the PLSS oxygen and water inlets on the chest cover, and penlight and utility pockets on arms and legs. And there is Old Glory stitched to the left arm.

But Bado doesn’t recognize the name stitched over the breast. Williams. There is no astronaut of that name in the corps back in Houston.

Bado’s headset crackles to life, startling him.

“I heard you, when the LFU came over the horizon. As soon as I got in line of sight, I could hear you talking, describing what you were doing. And when I looked down, there you were.”

Bado is astonished. It is a woman’s voice. This Williams is a goddamn woman.

Bado can’t think of a thing to say.

HE DIDN’T FIND IT HARD TO FIND A PLACE IN the community here and to fabricate a fake ID about his past. Computers were pretty primitive, and there was little crosschecking of records.

Maybe, back home, the development of computers had been forced by the Apollo project, he speculated.

He couldn’t see any way he was going to get home. He was stuck here. But he sure as hell didn’t want to spend his life tuning crummy 1960s-design radios.

He tinkered with the Surveyor camera he’d retrieved from the Moon. As far as he could tell, it was a much more lightweight design than anything available here. But the manufacturing techniques required weren’t much beyond what was available here.

He started to take the camera components to electronic engineering companies. He took apart his lunar suit. In all this world there was nothing like the suit’s miniaturized telemetry system. He was able to adapt it to be used to transmit EKG data from ambulances to hospital emergency rooms. He sent samples of the Betacloth outer coverall to a fiberglass company, and showed them how the stuff could be used for fire hoses. Other samples went to military suppliers to help them put together better insulated blankets. The scratch-proof lens of the Surveyor camera went to an optical company to manufacture better safety goggles and other gear. The miniature, high-performance motors driving the pumps and fans of his PLSS found a dozen applications. He was careful to patent everything he “developed” from his lunar equipment. Pretty soon, the money started rolling in.

“MAYBE I’M DREAMING THIS,” WILLIAMS SAYS. “DEHYDRATION,OR SOMEthing . . . Uh, I guess I’m pleased to meet you.”

She has a Tennessee accent, he thinks. Bado shakes the hand. He can feel it through his own stiff pressure glove. “I guess you’re too solid for a ghost.”

“Ditto,” she says. “Besides, I’ve never met a ghost yet who uses VHF frequencies.”

He releases her hand. “I don’t know how the hell you got here,” she says. “And I guess you don’t understand this any better than I do.”

“That’s for sure.”

She dips her visored head. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

He holds up the carrier. “Sampling the Surveyor. I took off its TV camera.”

“Oh. You couldn’t get it, though.”

“Sure. Here it is.”

She turns to the Surveyor. “Look over there.”

The Surveyor is whole again, its TV camera firmly mounted to its struts.

But when he looks down at his carrier, there is the TV camera he’s cut away, lying there, decapitated. “Where’s your LM?” she asks.

“Taylor Crater.”

“Where?”

He describes the crater’s location. “Oh. OK. We’re calling that one San Jacinto. Ah, no, your LM isn’t there.”

“I know. I walked back. The crater’s empty.”

“No, it isn’t,” she says, but there is a trace of alarm in her voice. “That’s where my LM is. With my partner, and the Payload Module.”

Payload Module?

“The hell with it,” she says. “Let’s go see.”

She turns and starts to lope back to her flying craft, rocking from side to side. He stands there and watches her go. After a few steps she stops and turns around. “You want a lift?”

“Can you take two?”

“Sure. Come on. What choice do you have, if you’re stuck here without an LM?”

Her voice carries a streak of common sense that somehow comforts him.

Side by side, they bound over the Moon.

They reach Williams’ flying machine. It is just an aluminum box sitting squat on its four legs, with vernier rocket nozzles stuck to the walls like clusters of berries. The pilot has to climb in at the back and stand over the cover of the main rocket engine, which is about the size of a car engine, Bado supposes. Big spherical propellant and oxidizer tanks are fixed to the floor. There is an S-band antenna and a VHF aerial. There is some gear on the floor, hammers and shovels and sample bags and cameras; Williams dumps this stuff out, briskly, onto the regolith. She hops up onto the platform and begins throwing switches. Her control panel contains a few instruments, a CRT, a couple of handsets.

Bado lugs his heavy tool carrier up onto the platform, then he gets hold of a rail with both hands and jumps up.

“What did you call this thing? An LFU?”

“Yeah. Lunar Flying Unit.”

“I’ve got vague memories,” says Bado, “of a design like this. It was never developed, when the extended Apollo missions were canceled.”

“Canceled? When did that happen?”

“When we were cut back to stop when we get to Apollo 17.”

“Uh huh,” she says dubiously. She eyes the tool carrier. “You want to bring that thing?”

“Sure. It’s not too heavy, is it?”

“No. But what do you want it for?”

Bado looks at the battered, dusty carrier, with its meaningless load of rocks. “It’s all I’ve got.”

“OK. Let’s get out of here,” she says briskly.

Williams kicks in the main rocket. Dust billows silently up off the ground into Bado’s face. He can see frozen vapor puff out of the attitude nozzles, in streams of shimmering crystals, as if this is some unlikely steam engine, a Victorian engineer’s fantasy of lunar flight.

The basin of Wildwood Crater falls away. The lift is a brief, comforting surge.

Williams whoops. “Whee-hoo! What a ride, huh, pal?” She takes the LFU up to maybe sixty feet, and slows the ascent. She pitches the craft over and they begin sailing out of Wildwood.

The principles of the strange craft are obvious enough to Bado. You stand on your rocket’s tail. You keep yourself stable with the four peroxide reaction clusters, the little vernier rockets spaced around the frame, squirting them here and there. When the thrust of the single big downward rocket is at an angle to the vertical, the LFU goes shooting forward, or sideways, or backward across the pitted surface. Williams shows him the hand controls. They are just like the LA4’s. The attitude control moves in clicks; every time Williams turns the control the reaction rockets will bang and the LFU will tip over, a degree at a time. The thrust control is a toggle switch; when Williams closes it the lift rockets roar, to give her a delta-vee of a foot per second.

“These are neat little craft,” Williams says. “They fly on residual descentstage propellants. They’ve a range of a few miles, and you can do three sorties in each of them.”

“Each?”

“We bring two. Rescue capability.”

Bado thinks he is starting to see a pattern to what has happened to him.

In a way, the presence of the camera in his carrier is reassuring. It means he isn’t crazy. There really have been two copies of the Surveyor; one of which he’s sampled, and one he hasn’t.

Maybe there is more than one goddamn Moon.

Moon One is the good old lantern in the sky that he and Slade touched down on yesterday. Maybe Slade is still back there, with the LAD. But Bado sure isn’t. Somehow he stumbled onto Moon Two, the place with the Surveyor, but no LM. And then this Williams showed up, and evidently by that time he was on another Moon, Moon Three, with its own copy of the Surveyor. And a different set of astronauts exploring, with subtly different equipment. As if traveling to one Moon isn’t enough.

He thinks about that strange, heat-haze shimmer. Maybe that has something to do with these weird transfers.

He can’t discuss any of this with Williams, because she hasn’t seen any of the changes. Not yet, anyhow.

Bado clings to the sides of the LFU and watches the surface of the Moon scroll underneath him. There are craters everywhere, overlaid circles of all sizes, some barely visible in a surface gardened by billions of years of micrometeorite impact. The surface looks ghostly, rendered in black and white, too stark, unmoving, to be real.

HE KNEW HE WAS TAKING A RISK, BUT HE TOOK HIS LUNAR ROCKS TO a couple of universities.

He got laughed out of court. Especially when he wouldn’t explain how these charcoal-dark rocks might have got from the Moon to the Earth.

“Maybe they got blasted off by a meteorite strike,” he said to an “expert” at Cornell. “Maybe they drifted in space until they landed here. I’ve read about that.”

The guy pushed his reading glasses farther up his thin nose. “Well, that’s possible.” He smiled. “No doubt you’ve been reading the same lurid speculation I have, in the popular science press. What if rocks get knocked back and forth between the planets? Perhaps there are indeed bits of the Moon, even Mars, to be turned up, here on Earth. And, since we know living things can survive in the interiors of rocks—and since we know that some plants and bacteria can survive long periods of dormancy—perhaps it is even possible for life to propagate itself, across the trackless void, in such a manner.”

He picked up Bado’s Moon rock, dubiously. “But in that case I’d expect to see some evidence of the entry of this rock into the atmosphere. Melting, some glass. And besides, this rock is not volcanic. Mr. Bado, everyone knows the Moon’s major features were formed exclusively by vulcanism. This can’t possibly be a rock from the Moon.”

Bado snatched back his rock. “That’s Colonel Bado,” he said. He marched out.

He gave up, and went back to Daytona Beach.

THE LFU SLIDES OVER THE RIM TAYLOR CRATER. OR SAN JACINTO. Bado can see scuffed-up soil below him, and the big Huckleberry Finn Crater to his left, where he and Slade made their first stop.

At the center of Taylor stands an LM. It glitters like some piece of giant jewelry, the most colorful object on the lunar surface. An astronaut bounces around in front of it, like a white balloon. He—or she—is working at what looks like a surface experiment package, white-painted boxes and cylinders and masts laid out in a star formation and connected to a central nuclear generator by orange cables. It looks like an ALSEP, but it is evidently heavier, more advanced.

But the LM isn’t alone. A second LM stands beside it, squat and spidery. Bado can see that the ascent stage has been heavily reworked; the pressurized cabin looks to be missing, replaced by cargo pallets.

“That’s your Payload Module, right?”

“Yeah,” Williams says. “The Lunar Payload Module Laboratory. It got here on automatics before we left the Cape. This is a dual Saturn launch mission, Bado. We’ve got a stay time of four weeks.”

Again he has vague memories of proposals for such things: dual launches; well-equipped, long-stay jaunts on the surface. But the funding squeezes since ’66 have long since put pay to all of that. Evidently, wherever Williams comes from, the money is flowing a little more freely.

The LFU tips itself back, to slow its forward velocity. Williams throttles back the main motor and the LFU starts to drop down. Bado glances at the numbers; the CRT display evolves smoothly through height and velocity readings. Bado guesses the LFU must have some simple radar-based altimeter.

Now the LM and its misshapen partner are obscured by the dust Williams’ rocket is kicking up.

At fifty feet Williams cuts the main engine. Bado feels the drop in the pit of his stomach, and he watches the ground explode toward him, resolving into unwelcome detail, sharp boulders and zap pits and footprints, highlighted by the low morning sun.

Then vernier dust clouds billow up around the LFU. Bado feels a comforting surge of deceleration.

The LFU lands with a jar that Bado feels in his knees.

For a couple of seconds the dust of their landing cloaks the LFTJ, and then it begins to settle out around them, coating the LFU’s surfaces, his suit. There is a heat-haze shimmer. “Oh, shit.”

Williams is busily shutting down the LFU. She turns to face him, anonymous behind her visor.

THERE WASN’T MUCH ASTRONOMY GOING ON AT ALL, IN FACT, HE found out when he looked it up in the libraries. just a handful of big telescopes, scattered around the world, with a few crusty old guys following their obscure, decades-long projects. And all the projects were to do with deep space: the stars and beyond. Nobody was interested in the Solar System. Certainly in nothing as mundane as the Moon.

He looked up at Moon Six, uneasily, with its bright, unscarred north-west quadrant. If that Imbrium meteorite hadn’t hit three billion years ago—or in 1970—where the hell was it now?

Maybe that big mother was on its way, right now.

Quietly, he pumped some of his money into funding a little research at the universities into Earth-neighborhood asteroids.

He also siphoned money into trying to figure out what had happened to him. How he got here.

AS THE LAST DUST SETTLES, BADO LOOKS TOWARD THE CENTER OF TAYlor Crater, to where the twin LMS stood. He can make out a blocky shape there.

He feels a sharp surge of relief. Thank God. Maybe this transition hasn’t been as severe as some of the others. Or maybe there hasn’t been a transition at all . . . But Williams’ LM has gone, with its cargo-carrying partner. And so has the astronaut, with his surface package. But the crater isn’t empty. The vehicle that stands in its place has the same basic geometry as an LM, Bado thinks, with a boxy descent stage standing on four legs, and a fat ascent stage cabin on top. But it is just fifteen feet tall—compared to an LM’s twenty feet—and the cabin looks a lot smaller.

“My God,” Williams says. She is just standing, stock still, staring at the little lander. “Welcome to Moon Four,” Bado whispers. “My God.” She repeats that over and over.

He faces her, and flips up his gold visor so she can see his face.

“Listen to me. You’re not going crazy. We’ve been through some kind of transition. I can’t explain it.” He grins. It makes him feel stronger to think there is someone else more scared, more shocked, than he is.

He takes her through his tentative theory of the multiple Moons.

She turns to face the squat lander again. “I figured it had to be something like that.”

He gapes at her. “You figured?”

“How the hell else could you have got here? Well, what are we supposed to do now?” She checks the time on her big Rolex watch. “Bado. How long will your PLSS hold out?”

He feels embarrassed. Shocked or not, she’s cut to the chase a lot more smartly than he’s been able to. He glances at his own watch, on the cuff next to his useless checklist. “A couple of hours. What about you?”

“Less, probably. Come on.” She glides down from the platform of the LFU, her blue boots kicking up a spray of dust.

“Where are we going?”

“Over to that little LM, of course. Where else? It’s the only source of consumables I can see anywhere around here.” She begins loping toward the lander.

After a moment, he picks up his carrier, and follows her.

As they approach he gets a better look at the lander. The ascent stage is a bulbous, misshapen ball, capped by a fat, wide disk that looks like a docking device. Two dinner-plate-sized omnidirectional antennae are stuck out on extensible arms from the descent stage. The whole clumsy-looking assemblage is swathed in some kind of green blanket, maybe for thermal insulation.

A ladder leads from a round hatch in the front of the craft, and down to the surface via a landing leg. The ground there is scuffed with footprints.

“It’s a hell of a small cabin,” she says. “Has to be one man.”

“You think it’s American?”

“Not from any America I know. That ascent stage looks familiar. It looks like an adapted Soyuz orbital module. You know, the Russian craft, their Apollo equivalent.”

“Russian?”

“Can you see any kind of docking tunnel on top of that thing?”

He looks. “Nope. Just that flat assemblage at the top.”

“The crew must have to spacewalk to cross from the command module. What a design.”

An astronaut comes loping around the side of the lander, swaying from side to side, kicking up dust. When he catches sight of Bado and Williams, he stops dead.

The stranger is carrying a flag, on a pole. The flag is stiffened with wire, and it is clearly bright red, with a gold hammer and sickle embroidered into it.

“How about that,” Williams whispers. “I guess we don’t always get to win, huh.”

The stranger—the cosmonaut, Bado labels him—takes a couple of steps toward them. He starts gesticulating, waving his arms about, making the flag flutter. He wears a kind of hoop around his waist, held away from his body with stiff wire.

“I think he’s trying to talk to us,” Williams says.

“It’ll be a miracle if we are on the same frequency. Maybe he’s S-band only, to talk to Earth. No VHF. Look how stiff his movements are.”

“Yeah. I think his suit is semi-rigid. Must be hell to move around in.”

“What’s with the hula hoop?” Bado asks.

“It will stop him falling over, in case he trips. Don’t you get it? He’s on his own here. That’s a one-man lander. There’s nobody around to help him, if he gets into trouble.”

The cosmonaut is getting agitated. Now he hoists up the flag and throws it at them, javelin-style; it falls well short of Bado’s feet. Then the cosmonaut turns and lopes toward his lander, evidently looking for more tools, or improvised weapons.

“Look at that,” Bado says. “There are big funky hinges down the side of his backpack. That must be the way into the suit.”

Williams lifts up her visor. “Show him your face. We’ve got to find some way to get through to this guy.”

Bado feels like laughing. “What for?”

The light changes.

Bado stands stock still. “Shit, not again.”

Williams says, “What?”

“Another transition.” He looks around for the tell-tale heat-haze flicker.

“I don’t think so,” Williams says softly. “Not this time.”

A shadow, slim and jet-black, hundreds of feet long, sweeps over the surface of Taylor Crater.

Bado leans back and tips up his face.

The ship is like a huge artillery shell, gleaming silver, standing on its tail. It glides over the lunar surface, maybe fifty feet up, and where its invisible rocket exhaust passes, dust is churned up and sent gusting away in great flat sheets. The ship moves gracefully, if ponderously. Four heavy landing legs, with big spring-load shock absorbers, stick out from the base. A circle of portals glows bright yellow around the nose. A huge bull’s-eye of red, white, and blue is painted on the side, along with a registration number.

“Shit,” Bado says. “That thing must be a hundred feet tall.” Four or five times as tall as his lost LM. “What do you think it weighs? Two, three hundred tons?”

“Direct ascent,” she says.

“Huh?”

“Look at it. It’s streamlined. It’s built for landing on the Moon in one piece, ascending again, and returning to Earth.”

“But that was designed out years ago, by Von Braun and the boys. A ship like that’s too heavy for chemical rockets.”

“So who said anything about chemical? It has to be atomic. Some kind of fission pile in there, superheating its propellant. One hell of a specific impulse. Anyhow, it’s that or antigravity—”

The great silver fish hovers for a moment, and then comes swooping down at the surface. It flies without a quiver. Bado wonders how it is keeping its stability; he can’t see any verniers. Big internal flywheels maybe.

As the ship nears the surface, dust comes rushing across the plain, away from the big tail like a huge circular sandstorm. There is a rattle, almost like rain, as heavy particles impact Bado’s visor. He holds his gloved hands up before his face, and leans a little into the rocket wind.

The delicate little Russian lander just topples over in the breeze, and the bulbous ascent stage breaks off and rolls away.

IN THE MIRROR OF HIS BEDROOM HE STUDIED his graying hair and spreading paunch. Oddly, it had taken a while for him to miss his wife Fay.

Maybe because everything was so different. Not that he was sorry, in a sense; his job, he figured, was to survive here—to earn a living, to keep himself sane—and moping after the unattainable wouldn’t help. He was glad they’d had no kids, though.

There was no point searching for Fay in Houston, of course. Houston without the space program was just an oil town, with a big cattle pasture north of Clear Lake where the Manned Spacecraft Center should have been. El Lago, the Taylor housing development, had never been built.

He even drove out to Atlantic City, where he’d first met Fay, a couple of decades ago. He couldn’t find her in the phone book. She was probably living under some married name, he figured. He gave up.

He tried, a few times, to strike up relationships with other women here. He found it hard to get close to anyone, though. He always felt he needed to guard what he was saying. This wasn’t his home, after all.

So he lived pretty much alone. It was bearable. It even got easier, as he got older.

Oddly, he missed walking on the Moon more than anything else, more than anything about the world he’d lost. He kept reliving those brief hours. He remembered Slade, how he looked bouncing across the lunar sand, a brilliant white balloon. How happy he’d seemed.

THE SILVER SHIP TOUCHES DOWN WITH A THUMP, AND THOSE BIG LEGS flex, the springs working like muscles.

A hatch opens in the ship’s nose, maybe eighty feet from the ground, and yellow light spills out. A spacesuited figure appears, and begins rolling a rope ladder down to the surface. The figure waves to Bado and Williams, calling them to the ship.

“What do you think?” Bado asks.

“I think it’s British. Look at that bull’s-eye logo. I remember war movies about the Battle of Britain . . . Wherever the hell that’s come from, it’s some place very different from the worlds you and I grew up in.”

“You figure we should go over there?” he asks.

She spreads her hands. “What choice do we have? We don’t have an LM. And we can’t last out here much longer. At least these guys look as if they know what they’re doing. Let’s go see what Boris thinks.”

The cosmonaut lets Williams walk up to him. He is hauling at his ascent stage. But Bado can see the hull is cracked open, like an aluminum egg, and the cosmonaut’s actions are despairing.

Williams points toward the silver ship, where the figure in the airlock is still waving at them.

Listlessly, the cosmonaut lets himself be led to the ship.

Closer to, the silver craft looks even bigger than before—so tall that when Bado stands at its base he can’t see the nose.

Williams goes up the ladder first, using just her arms, pulling her mass easily in the Moon’s shallow gravity well. The cosmonaut takes off his hoop, dumps it on the ground, and follows her.

Bado comes last. He moves more slowly than the others, because he has his tool carrier clutched against his chest, and it is awkward to juggle while climbing the rope ladder.

It takes forever to climb past the shining metal of the ship’s lower hull. The metal here looks like lead, actually. Shielding, around an atomic pile? He thinks of the energy it must take to haul this huge mass of metal around. He can’t help comparing it with his own LM, which, to save weight, was shaved down to little more than a bubble of aluminum foil.

The hull shivers before his face. Heat haze.

He looks down. The wreckage of the little Russian lander, and Williams’ LFU, has gone. The surface under the tail of this big ship looks unmarked, lacking even the raying of the landing. And the topography of the area is quite different; now he is looking down over some kind of lumpy, sun-drenched mountain range, and a wide, fat rille snakes through the crust.

“How about that,” Williams says dryly, from above him. Her voice signal is degraded; the amplifier on the LFU is no longer available to boost their VHF link.

“We’re on Moon Five,” he says.

“Moon Five?”

“It seems important to keep count.”

“Yeah. whatever. Bado, this time the geology’s changed. Maybe one of the big primordial impacts didn’t happen, leaving the whole lunar surface a different shape.”

They reach the hatch. Bado lets the astronaut take his tool carrier, and clambers in on his knees.

The astronaut closes the hatch and dogs it shut by turning a big heavy wheel. He wears a British Union Flag on his sleeve, and there is a name stitched to his breast: Taine.

The four of them stand around in the airlock, in their competing pressure suit designs. Air hisses, briefly.

An inner door opens, and Taine ushers them through with impatient gestures. Bado enters a long corridor, with nozzles set in the ceiling. The four of them stand under the nozzles. Water comes gushing down, and runs over their suits. Williams opens up her gold sun visor and faces Williams. “Showers,” she says. “What for?”

“To wash off radioactive crap, from the exhaust.” She begins to brush water over her suit arms and legs.

Bado has never seen such a volume of water in lunar conditions before. It falls slowly from the nozzles, gathering into big shimmering drops in the air. Grayblack lunar dust swirls toward the plug holes beneath his feet. But the dirt is ingrained into the fabric of his suit legs; they will be stained gray forever.

When the water dries they are ushered through into a third larger chamber. The walls here are curved, and inset with round, tough-looking portholes; it looks as if this chamber reaches most of the way around the cylindrical craft.

There are people here, dozens of them, adults and children and old people, dressed in simple cotton coveralls. They sit in rows of crude metal-framed couches, facing outward toward the portholes. They stare fearfully at the newcomers.

The astronaut, Taine, has opened up his faceplate; it hinges outward like a little door.

Bado pushes back his hood and reaches up to his fishbowl helmet. He undoes it at the neck, and his ears pop as the higher pressure of the cabin pushes air into his helmet.

He can smell the sharp, woodsmoke tang of lunar dust. And, overlaid on that, there is a smell of milky vomit: baby sick.

The Russian, his own helmet removed, makes a sound of disgust. “Eta oozhasna!”

Williams pulls off her Snoopy flight helmet. She is maybe forty, Bado guesses—around Bado’s own age—with a tough, competent face, and closecropped blonde hair.

Taine shoos the three of them along. “Welcome to Prometheus,” he says. “Come. There are some free seats further around here.” His accent is flat, sounding vaguely Bostonian. Definitely British, Bado thinks, probably from the south of England. “You’re the last, we think. We must get away. The impact is no more than twelve hours hence.”

Bado, lugging his tool carrier, walks beside him. “what impact?”

“The meteorite, of course.” Taine sounds impatient. “That’s why we’re having to evacuate the colonies. And you alternates. The Massolite got most of them off, of course, but—”

Williams says, “Massolite?”

Taine waves a hand. “A mass transporter. Of course it was a rushed job. And it had some flaws. But we knew we couldn’t lift everybody home in time, not all those thousands in the big colonies, not before the strike; the Massolite was the best we can do, you see.” They come to three empty couches. “These should do, I think. If you’ll sit down I’ll show you how to fit the seat belts, and instruct you in the safety precautions .. .”

“But,” Williams says, “what has this Massolite got to do with .. .” She dries up, and looks at Bado.

He asks, “With moving between alternate worlds?”

Taine answers with irritation. “Why, nothing, of course. That’s just a design flaw. We’re working on it. Nonlinear quantum mechanical leakage, you see. I do wish you’d sit down; we have to depart.. .”

Bado shucks off his PLSS backpack, and he tucks his helmet and his carrier under his seat.

Taine helps them adjust their seat restraints until they fit around their pressure suits. It is more difficult for the Russian; his suit is so stiff it is more like armor. The Russian looks young, no more than thirty. His hair sticks up in the air, damp with sweat, and he looks at them forlornly from his shell of a suit. “Gdye tooalyet?”

The portholes before them give them a good view of the lunar surface. It is still Moon Five, Bado sees, with its mountains and that sinuous black rille.

He looks around at their fellow passengers. The adults are unremarkable; some of them have run to fat, but they have incongruously skinny legs and arms. Longterm adaptation to lunar gravity, Bado thinks.

But there are also some children here, ranging from babies in their mothers’ arms up to young teenagers. The children are extraordinary: spindly, attenuated. Children who look facially as young as seven or eight tower over their parents. The passengers clutch at their seat belts, staring back at him. Bado hears a clang of hatches, and a siren wails, echoing from the metal walls. The ship shudders, smoothly, and there is a gentle surge. “Mnye nada idtee k vrachoo,” groans the Russian, and he clutches his belly.

AS THE YEARS WORE ON HE FOLLOWED THE news, trying to figure out how things might be different back home.

The Cold War went on, year after year. There were no ICBMS here, but they had squadrons of bombers and nuke submarines and massive standing armies in Europe, And there were no spy satellites; nobody had a damn clue what the Russians—or the Chinese—were up to. A lot of shit came down that Bado figured might have been avoided, with satellite surveillance. It slowly leaked out into the paper press, usually months or years too late. Like the Chinese nuking of Tibet, for instance. And what the Soviets did to Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union remained a monolith, blank, threatening, impenetrable. Everyone in the U.S. seemed paranoid to Bado, generations of them, with their bomb shelters and their iodine pills. It was like being stuck in the late 1950s.

And that damn war in Indochina just dragged on, almost forgotten back home, sucking up lives and money like a bloody sponge.

Around 1986, he felt a sharp tug of wistfulness. Right now, he figured, on the other side of that heat-haze barrier, someone would be taking the first steps on Mars. Maybe it would be his old buddy, Slade, or someone like John Young. Bado might have made it himself Bado missed the live sports on TV.

IN FREE FALL, TAINE GIVES THEM SPARE COTTON COVERALLS TO WEAR, which are comfortable but don’t quite fit; the name stitched to Bado’s is Leduc, and on Williams’, Hassell.

Bado, with relief, peels off the three layers of his pressure suit: the outer micrometeorite garment, the pressure assembly, and the inner cooling garment. The other passengers look on curiously at Bado’s cooling garment, with its network of tubes. Bado tucks his discarded suit layers into a big net bag and sticks it behind his couch.

They are served food: stodgy stew, lukewarm and glued to the plate with gravy, and then some kind of dessert, like bread with currants stuck inside it. Spotted Dick, Taine calls it.

There is a persistent whine of fans and pumps, a subdued murmur of conversation, and the noise of children crying. Once a five-year-old, all of six feet tall, came bouncing around the curving cabin in a spidery tangle of attenuated arms and legs, pursued by a fat, panting, queasy-looking parent.

Taine comes floating down to them, smiling. “Captain Richards would like to speak to you. He’s intrigued to have you on board. We’ve picked up quite a few alternate-colonists, but not many alternate-pioneers, like you. Would you come forward to the cockpit? Perhaps you’d like to watch the show from there.”

Williams and Bado exchange glances. “What show?”

“The impact, of course. Come. Your German friend is welcome too, of course,” Taine adds dubiously. The cosmonaut has his head stuck inside a sick bag. “I think he’s better off where he is,” Bado says.

“You go,” Williams says. “I want to try to sleep.” Her face looks worn to Bado, her expression brittle, as if she is struggling to keep control. Maybe the shock of the transitions is getting to her at last, he thinks.

The cockpit is cone-shaped, wadded right in the nose of the craft. Taine leads Bado in through a big oval door. Charts and mathematical tables have been stuck to the walls, alongside pictures and photographs. Some of these show powerful-looking aircraft, of designs unfamiliar to Bado, but others show what must be family members. Pet dogs. Tools and personal articles are secured to the walls with elastic straps.

Three spacesuits, flaccid and empty, are fixed to the wall with loose ties. They are of the type Taine wore in the airlock: thick and flexible, with inlaid metal hoops, and hinged helmets at the top.

Three seats are positioned before instrument consoles. Right now the seats face forward, toward the nose of the craft, but Bado can see they are hinged so they will tip up when the craft is landing vertically. Bado spots a big, chunky periscope sticking out from the nose, evidently there to provide a view out during a landing.

There are big picture windows set in the walls. The windows frame slabs of jet-black, star-sprinkled sky.

A man is sitting in the central pilot’s chair. He is wearing a leather flight jacket, a peaked cap, and—Bado can’t believe it—he is smoking a pipe, for God’s sake. The guy sticks out a hand. “Mr. Bado. I’m glad to meet you. Jim Richards, RAF.”

“That’s Colonel Bado.” Bado shakes the hand. “U.S. Air Force. Lately of NASA.”

“NASA?”

“National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” Richards nods. “American. Interesting. Not many of the alternates are American. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to see more of your ship. Looked a little cramped for the three of you.”

“It wasn’t our ship. It was a Russian, a one-man lander.”

“Really,” Richards murmurs, not very interested. “Take a seat.” He waves Bado at one of the two seats beside him; Taine takes the other, sipping tea through a straw. Richards asks, “Have you ever seen a ship like this before, Colonel Bado?”

Bado glances around. The main controls are a conventional stick-and-rudder design, adapted for spaceflight; the supplementary controls are big, clunky switches, wheels, and levers. The fascia of the control panel is made of wood. And in one place, where a maintenance panel has been removed, Bado sees the soft glow of vacuum tubes. “No,” he says. “Not outside the comic books.” Richards and Taine laugh.

“It must take a hell of a launch system.”

“Oh,” says Richards. “We have good old Beta to help us with that.”

“Beta?”

“This lunar ship is called Alpha,” Taine says. “Beta gives us a piggyback out of Earth’s gravity. We launch from Woomera, in South Australia. Beta is a hypersonic athodyd—”

Richards winks at Bado. “These double-domes, eh? He means Beta is an atomic ramiet.”

Bado boggles. “You launch an atomic rocket from the middle of Australia? How do you manage containment of the exhaust?”

Taine looks puzzled. “What containment?”

“You must tell me all about your spacecraft,” Richards says.

Bado, haltingly, starts to describe the Apollo system.

Richards listens politely enough, but after a while Bado can see his eyes drifting to his instruments, and he begins to fiddle with his pipe, knocking out the dottle into a big enclosed ashtray.

Richards becomes aware of Bado watching him. “Oh, you must forgive me, Colonel Bado. It’s just that one encounters so many alternates.”

“You do, huh.”

“The Massolite, you know. That damn quantum-mechanical leakage. Plessey just can’t get the thing tuned correctly. Such a pity. Anyhow, don’t you worry, the boffins on the ground will put you to rights, I’m sure.”

Bado is deciding he doesn’t like these British. They are smug, patronizing, icy. He can’t tell what they are thinking.

Taine leans forward. “Almost time, Jim.”

“Aha!” Richards gets hold of his joystick. “The main event.” He twists the stick, and Bado hears what sounds like the whir of flywheels, deep in the guts of the ship. Stars slide past the windows. “A bit of showmanship, Colonel Bado. I want to line us up to give the passengers the best possible view. And us, of course. After all, this is a grandstand seat, for the most dramatic astronomical event of the century—what?”

The Moon, fat and gray and more than half-full, slides into the frame of the windows.

The Moon—Moon Five, Bado assumes it to be—looks like a ball of glass, its surface cracked and complex, as if scarred by buckshot. Tinged pale white, the Moon’s center looms out at Bado, given three-dimensional substance by the Earthlight’s shading.

The Moon looks different. He tries to figure out why.

There, close to the central meridian, are the bright pinpricks of Tycho, to the south, and Copernicus, in the north. He makes out the familiar pattern of the seas of the eastern hemisphere: Serenitatis, Crisium, Tranquillitatis—gray lakes of frozen lava framed by brighter, older lunar uplands.

He supposes there must be no Apollo 11 LM descent stage, standing on this version of the Sea of Tranquility.

The Moon is mostly full, but he can see lights in the remaining crescent of darkness. They are the abandoned colonies of Moon Five.

Something is still wrong, though. The western hemisphere doesn’t look right. He takes his anchor from Copernicus. There is Mare Procellarum, to the western limb, and to the north of that nothing but bright highlands.

“Hey,” he says. “Where the hell’s Mare Imbrium?”

Richards looks at him, puzzled, faintly disapproving.

Bado points. “Up there. In the northwest. A big impact crater—the biggestflooded with lava. Eight hundred miles across.”

Richards frowns, and Taine touches Bado’s arm. “All the alternate Moons are different to some degree,” he says, placating. “Differences of detail—”

“Mare Imbrium is not a goddamn detail.” Bado feels patronized again. “You’re talking about my Moon, damn it.” But if the Imbrium impact has never happened, no wonder the surface of Moon Five looks different.

Richards checks his wristwatch. “Any second now,” he says. “If the big brains have got it right—”

There is a burst of light, in the Moon’s northwest quadrant. The surface in the region of the burst seems to shatter, the bright old highland material melting and subsiding into a red-glowing pool, a fiery lake that covers perhaps an eighth of the Moon’s face. Bado watches huge waves, concentric, wash out across that crimson, circular wound.

Even from this distance Bado can see huge debris clouds streaking across the lunar surface, obscuring and burying older features, and laying down bright rays that plaster across the Moon’s face. The lights of the night-side colonies wink out, one by one.

Richards takes his pipe out of his mouth. “Good God almighty,” he says.

“thank heavens we got all our people off.”

“Only just in time, sir,” Taine says.

Bado nods. “Oh, I get it. Here, this was the Imbrium impact. Three billion years late.”

Richards and Taine look at him curiously.

IT TURNED OUT THAT TO BUILD A TELEPORT DEVICE—A ‘STAR TREK’ beaming machine—you needed to know about quantum mechanics. Particularly the Uncertainty Principle.

According to one interpretation, the Uncertainty Principle was fundamentally caused by there being an infinite number of parallel universes, all lying close to each other—as Bado pictured it—like the pages of a book. The universes blurred together at the instant of an event, and split off afterward.

The Uncertainty Principle said you could never measure the position and velocity of any particle with absolute precision. But to teleport that was exactly what you needed to do: to make a record of an object, transmit it, and re-create the Payload at the other end.

But there was a way to get around the Uncertainty Principle. At least in theory.

The quantum properties of particles could become entangled: fundamentally linked in their information content. What those British must have done is take sets of entangled particles, left one-half on their Moon as a transmitter, and planted the other half on the Earth.

There was a lot of technical stuff about the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen theorem that Bado skipped over; what it boiled down to was that if you used a description of your teleport passenger to jiggle the transmitter particles, you could reconstruct the passenger at the other end, exactly, from the corresponding jiggles in the receiver set.

But there were problems.

If there were small nonlinearities in the quantum-mechanical operators—and there couldn’t be more than a billion billion billionth part, according to Bado’s researchers—those parallel worlds, underlying the Uncertainty Principle, could short-circuit.

The Moon Five Brits had tried to build a cheap-and-dirty teleport machine. Because of the huge distances involved, that billion-billion-billionth nonlinearity had become significant, and the damn thing had leaked And so they had built a parallel-world gateway, by accident.

This might be the right explanation, Bado thought. It fit with Captain Richards’ vague hints about “nonlinear quantum mechanics.”

This new understanding didn’t make any difference to his position, though. He was still stranded here. The teleport devices his researchers had outlined—even if they’d got the theory right from the fragments he’d given them—were decades beyond the capabilities of the mundane world Bado found himself in.

RE-ENTRY IS EASY. BADO ESTIMATES THE PEAK ACCELERATION IS NO more than a couple of G, no worse than a mild rollercoaster. Even so, many of the passengers look distressed, and those spindly lunar-born children cry weakly, pinned to their seats like insects.

After the landing, Alpha’s big doors are flung open to reveal a flat, barren desert. Bado and Williams are among the first down the rope ladders, lugging their pressure suits, and Bado’s tool carrier, in big net bags.

Bado can see a small town, laid out with the air of a military barracks.

Staff are coming out of the town on little trucks to meet them. They are processed efficiently; the crew of the Prometheus gives details of where each passenger was picked up, and they are all assigned little labels and forms, standing there in the baking sunlight of the desert.

The spindly lunar children are lowered to the ground and taken off in wheelchairs. Bado wonders what will happen to them, stranded at the bottom of Earth’s deep gravity well.

Williams points. “Look at that. Another Prometheus.”

There is a launchb rail, like a pencil line ruled across the sand, diminishing to infinity at the horizon. A silver dart clings to the rail, with a slim bullet shape fixed to its back. Another Beta and Alpha. Bado can see protective rope barriers slung around the rail.

Taine comes to greet Bado and Williams. “I’m afraid this is goodbye,” he says. He sticks out a hand. “We want to get you people back as quickly as we can. You alternates, I mean. what a frightful mess this is. But the sooner you’re out of it the better.”

“Back where?” Bado asks.

“Florida.” Taine looks at them. “That’s where you say you started from, isn’t it?”

Williams shrugs. “Sure.”

“And then back to your own world.” He mimes stirring a pot of some noxious substance. “We don’t want to muddy the time lines, you see. We don’t know much about this alternating business; we don’t know what damage we might do. Of course the return procedure’s still experimental but hopefully we’ll get it right. Well, the best of luck. Look, just make your way to the plane over there.”

He points.

The plane is a ramjet, Bado sees immediately.

Taine moves on, to another bewildered-looking knot of passengers.

The Russian cosmonaut is standing at Williams’ side. He is hauling his stiff pressure suit along the ground; it scrapes on the sand like an insect’s discarded carapace. Out of the suit the Russian looks thin, young, baffled, quite ill. He shakes Bado’s hand. “Dos vidanya.”

“Yeah. So long to you too, kid. Hope you get home safely. A hell of a ride, huh.”

“Mnye nada k zoobnomoo vrachoo.” He clutches his jaw and grins ruefully.

“Schastleevava pootee. Zhilayoo oospyekhaf.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

A British airman comes over and leads the Russian away.

“Goddamn,” Williams says. “We never found out his name.”

HE GOT A REPORT IN FROM HIS METEORITE STUDIES GROUP.

Yes, it turned out, there was a large object on its way. It would be here in a few years’ time. Bado figured this had to be this universe’s edition of that big old Imbrium rock, arriving a little later than in the Moon Five world.

But this rock was heading for Earth, not the Moon. Its path would take it right into the middle of the Atlantic, if the calculations were right. But the margins of error were huge, and, and . . . Bado tried to raise public awareness. His money and fame got him onto TV, even, such as it was. But nobody here took what was going on in the sky very seriously anyhow, and they soon started to think he was a little weird.

So he shut up. He pushed his money into bases at the poles, and at the bottom of the oceans, places that mightn’t be so badly affected. Somebody might survive. Meanwhile he paid for a little more research into that big rock in space, and where and when, exactly, it was going to hit.

THE RAMJET TAKES TEN HOURS TO GET TO FLORIDA. IT IS A MILITARY ship—more advanced than anything flying in Bado’s world. It has the bull’s-eye logo of the RAF painted to its flank, just behind the gaping mouth of its inlet.

As the ramiet rises, Bado glimpses huge atomic aircraft, immense ocean-going ships, networks of monorails. This is a gleaming world, an engineer’s dream.

Bado has had enough wonders for the time being, though, and, before the shining coast of Australia has receded from sight, he’s fallen asleep.

They land at a small airstrip, Bado figures somewhere north of Orlando. A thin young Englishman in spectacles is there to greet them. He is wearing Royal Air Force blue coveralls. “You’re the alternates?”

“I guess so,” Williams snaps. “And you’re here to send us home. Right?”

“Sorry for any inconvenience you’ve been put through,” he says smoothly. “If you’ll just follow me into the van.. .”

The van turns out to be a battered diesel-engined truck that looks as if it is World War II vintage. Williams and Bado, with their bulky gear, have to crowd in the back with a mess of electronic equipment.

The truck, windowless, bumps along badly finished roads.

Bado studies the equipment. “Look at this stuff,” he says to Williams. “More vacuum tubes.”

Williams shrugs. “They’ve got further than we have. Or you. Here, they’ve built stuff we’ve only talked about.”

“Yeah.” Oddly, he’s forgotten that he and Williams have come from different worlds.

The roads off the peninsula to Merritt Island are just farmers’ tracks, and the last few miles are the most uncomfortable. They arrive at Merritt Island in the late afternoon. There is no Kennedy Space Center.

Bado gets out of the van. He is on a long, flat beach; he figures he is a way south of where, in his world, the lunar ship launch pads will be built. Right here there will be the line of launch complexes called ICBM Row.

But he can’t see any structures at all. Marsh land, coated with scrub vegetation, stretches down toward the strip of beach at the coast. Farther inland, toward the higher ground, he can see stands of cabbage palm, slash pine, and oak.

The place is just scrub land, undeveloped. The tracks of the British truck are dug crisply into the sand; there is no sign even of a road near here.

And out to the east, over the Atlantic, he can see a big full Moon rising. Its upper left quadrant, the fresh Imbrium scar, still glows a dull crimson. Bado feels vaguely reassured. That is still Moon Five; things seem to have achieved a certain stability.

In the back of the truck, the British technician powers up his equipment. “Ready when you are,” he calls. “Oh, we think it’s best if you go back in your own clothes. Where possible.” He grins behind his spectacles. “Don’t want you “Muddying up the time lines,” Williams says. “We know.”

Bado and Williams shuck off their coveralls and pull on their pressure suits. They help each other with the heavy layers, and finish up facing each other, their helmets under their arms, Bado holding his battered tool carrier with its Baggies full of Moon rocks.

“You know,” Bado says, “when I get back I’m going to have one hell of a lot of explaining to do.”

“Yeah. Me too.” She looks at him. “I guess we’re not going to see each other again.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

Bado puts down his carrier and helmet. He embraces Williams, clumsily.

Then, on impulse, Bado lifts up his helmet and fits it over his head. He pulls his gloves over his hands and snaps them onto his wrists, completing his suit.

Williams does the same. Bado picks up his tool carrier.

The Brit waves, reaches into his van, and throws a switch.

There is a shimmer of heat haze.

Williams has gone. The truck has vanished.

Bado looks around quickly.

There are no ICBM launch complexes. He is still standing on an empty, desolate beach.

The Moon is brightening, as the light leaks out of the sky. There is no ancient Imbrium basin up there. No recent impact scar, either.

“Moon Six,” Bado says to himself. “Oh, shit.”

Evidently those British haven’t ironed out all the wrinkles in their “experimental procedures” after all.

He takes off his helmet, breathes in the ozone-laden ocean air, and begins to walk inland, toward the rows of scrub pine.

ON THE DAY, HE DROVE OUT TOMERRITT ISLAND.

It was morning, and the sun was low and bright over the ocean, off to the east, and the sky was clear and blue, blameless.

He pulled his old Moon suit out of the car, and hauled it on: first the cooling garment, then the pressure layer, and finally the white micrometeorite protector and his blue lunar overshoes. It didn’t fit so well any more, especially around the waist—well, it had been fitted for him all of a quarter-century ago—and it felt as heavy as hell, even without the backpack. And it had a lot of parts missing, where he’d dug out components and samples over the years. But it was still stained gray below the knees with lunar dust, and it still had the NASA logo, his mission patch, and his own name stitched to the outer garment.

He walked down to the beach. The tide was receding, and the hard-packed sand was damp; his ridged soles left crisp, sharp prints, just like in the lunar crust.

He locked his helmet into place at his neck.

To stand here, as close as he could get to ground zero, wasn’t such a dumb thing to do, actually. He’d always remembered what that old professor at Cornell had told him, about the rocks bearing life being blasted from planet to planet by meteorite impacts. Maybe that would happen here, somehow.

Today might be the last day for this Earth. But maybe, somehow, some piece of him, fused to the glass of his visor maybe, would finish up on the Moon-Moon Six-or Mars, or in the clouds of Jupiter, and start the whole thing over again.

He felt a sudden, sharp stab of nostalgia, for his own lost world. He’d had a good life here, all things considered. But this was a damn dull place. And he’d been here for twenty-five years already. He was sure that back home that old Vietnam War wouldn’t have dragged on until now, like it had here, and funds would have got freed up for space, at last. Enough to do it properly, by God. By now, he was sure, NASA would have bases on the Moon, hundreds of people in Earth orbit, a couple of outposts on Mars, plans to go on to the asteroids or Jupiter.

Hell, he wished he could just look through the nonlinear curtains separating him from home. just once.

He tipped up his face. The sun was bright in his eyes, so he pulled down his gold visor. It was still scuffed, from the dust kicked up by that British nuclear rocket. He waited.

After a time, a new light, brighter even than rocket light, came crawling down across the sky, and touched the ocean.

THE UNDISCOVERED

William Sanders

William Sanders, author of fifteen published books, is best known to science fiction fans for the alternate-history comedies Journey to Fusang and The Wild Blue and the Gray, and for his short stories based on Cherokee tradition. (Two of these stories have appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth editions of the Year’s Best Science Fiction.) In his first tale for Asimov’s, Mr. Sanders works both veins at once. . . .

So the white men are back! And trying once again to build themselves a town, without so much as asking anyone’s permission. I wonder how long they will stay this time. It sounds as if these have no more sense than the ones who came before.

They certainly pick the strangest places to settle. Last time it was that island, where anyone could have told them the weather is bad and the land is no good for corn. Now they have invaded Powhatan’s country, and from what you say, they seem to have angered him already. Of course that has never been hard to do.

Oh, yes, we hear about these matters up in the hills. Not many of us actually visit the coastal country—I don’t suppose there are ten people in this town, counting myself, who have even seen the sea—but you know how these stories travel. We have heard all about your neighbor Powhatan, and you eastern people are welcome to him. Was there ever a chief so hungry for power? Not in my memory, and I have lived a long time.

But we were speaking of the white men. As you say, they are a strange people indeed. For all their amazing weapons and other possessions, they seem to be ignorant of the simplest things. I think a half-grown boy would know more about bow to survive. Or how to behave toward other people in their own country.

And yet they are not the fools they appear. Not all of them, at least. The only one I ever knew was a remarkably wise man in many ways, Do not make that gesture at me. I tell you that there was a white man who lived right here in our town, for more than ten winters, and I came to know him well.

I remember the day they brought him in. I was sitting in front of my house, working on a fish spear, when I heard the shouting from the direction of the town gate. Bigkiller and his party, I guessed, returning from their raid on the Tuscaroras. People were running toward the gate, pouring out of the houses, everyone eager for a look.

I stayed where I was. I could tell by the sound that the raid had been successful—no women were screaming, so none of our people had been killed or seriously hurt—and I didn’t feel like spending the rest of the day listening to Bigkiller bragging about his latest exploits.

But a young boy came up and said, “They need you, Uncle. Prisoners.”

So I put my spear aside and got up and followed him, wondering once again why no one around this place could be bothered to learn to speak Tuscarora. After all, it is not so different from our tongue, not nearly as hard as Catawba or Maskogi or Shawano. Or your own language, which as you see I still speak poorly.

The captives were standing just inside the gate, guarded by a couple of Bigkiller’s brothers, who were holding war clubs and looking fierce, as well as pleased with themselves. There was a big crowd of people by now and I had to push my way through before I could see the prisoners. There were a couple of scared looking Tuscarora women—one young and pretty, the other almost my age and ugly as an alligator—and a small boy with his fist stuck in his mouth. Not much, I thought, to show for all this noise and fuss.

Then I saw the white man.

Do you know, it didn’t occur to me at first that that was what he was. After all, white men were very rare creatures in those days, even more so than now. Hardly anyone had actually seen one, and quite a few people refused to believe they existed at all.

Besides, he wasn’t really white—not the kind of fish—belly white that I’d always imagined, when people talked about white men—at least where it showed. His face was a strange reddish color, like a boiled crawfish, with little bits of skin peeling from his nose. His arms and legs, where they stuck out from under the single buckskin garment he wore, were so dirty and covered with bruises that it was hard to tell what color the skin was. Of course that was true of all of the captives; Bigkiller and his warriors had not been gentle.

His hair was dark brown rather than black, which I thought was unusual for a Tuscarora, though you do see Leni Lenapes and a few Shawanos with lighter hair. It was pretty thin above his forehead, and the scalp beneath showed through, a nasty bright pink. I looked at that and at the red peeling skin of his face, and thought: well done, Bigkiller, you’ve brought home a sick man. Some lowland skin disease, and what a job it’s going to be purifying everything after he dies . . . That was when he turned and looked at me with those blue eyes. Yes, blue. I don’t blame you; I didn’t believe that story either, until I saw for myself. The white men have eyes the color of a sunny sky. I tell you, it is a weird thing to see when you’re not ready for it.

Bigkiller came through the crowd, looking at me and laughing. “Look what we caught, Uncle,” he said, and pointed with his spear. “A white man!”

“I knew that,” I said, a little crossly. I hated it when he called me “Uncle.” I hated it when anyone did it, except children—I was not yet that old—but I hated it worse when it came from Bigkiller. Even if he was my nephew.

“He was with the Tuscaroras,” one of the warriors, Muskrat by name, told me. “These two women had him carrying firewood—”

“Never mind that.” Bigkiller gave Muskrat a bad look. No need to tell the whole town that this brave raid deep into Tuscarora country had amounted to nothing more than the ambush and kidnapping of a small wood-gathering party.

To me Bigkiller said, “Well, Uncle, you’re the one who knows all tongues. Can you talk with this white-skin?”

I stepped closer and studied the stranger, who looked back at me with those impossible eyes. He seemed unafraid, but who could read expressions on such an unnatural face?

“Who are you and where do you come from?” I asked in Tuscarora.

He smiled and shook his head, not speaking. The woman beside him, the older one, spoke up suddenly. “He doesn’t know our language,” she said. “Only a few words, and then you have to talk slow and loud, and kick him a little.”

“Nobody in our town could talk with him,” the younger woman added. “Our chief speaks a little of your language, and one family has a Catawba slave, and he couldn’t understand them either.”

By now the crowd was getting noisy, everyone pushing and jostling, trying to get a look at the white man. Everyone was talking, too, saying the silliest things. Old Otter, the elder medicine man, wanted to cut the white man to see what color his blood was. An old woman asked Muskrat to strip him naked and find out if he was white all over, though I guessed she was really more interested in learning what his male parts looked like. The young Tuscarora woman said, “Are they going to kill him?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “Maybe.”

“They shouldn’t,” she said. “He’s a good slave. He’s a hard worker, and he can really sing and dance.”

I translated this, and to my surprise Muskrat said, “It is true that he is stronger than he looks. He put up a good fight, with no weapon but a stick of firewood. Why do you think I’m holding this club left-handed?”

He held up his right arm, which was swollen and dark below the elbow. “He almost broke my arm.

“He did show spirit,” Bigkiller agreed. “He could have run away, but he stayed and fought to protect the women. That was well done for a slave.”

I looked at the white man again. He didn’t look all that impressive, being no more than medium size and pretty thin, but I could see there were real muscles under that strange skin.

“He can do tricks, too,” the young Tuscarora woman added. “He walks on his hands, and—”

The older woman grunted loudly. “He’s bad luck, that’s what be is. We’ve had nothing but trouble since he came. Look at us now.”

I passed all this along to Bigkiller. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was going to kill him, but maybe I should keep him as a slave. After all, what other chief among the People has a white slave?” A woman’s voice said, “What’s going on here?”

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t have to. There was no one in our town who would not have known that voice. Suddenly everyone got very quiet.

My sister Tsigeyu came through the crowd, everyone moving quickly out of her way, and stopped in front of the white man. She looked him up and down and he looked back at her, still smiling, as if pleased to meet her. That showed real courage. Naturally he had no way of knowing that she was the Clan Mother of the Wolf Clan—which, if you don’t know, means she was by far the most powerful person in our town—but just the sight of her would have made most people uneasy. Tsigeyu was a big woman, not fat but big like a big man, with a face like a limestone cliff. And eyes that went right through you and made your bones go cold. She died a couple of years ago, but at the time I am telling about she was still in the prime of life, and such gray hairs as she had she wore like eagle feathers. She said, “For me? Why, thank you, Bigkiller.”

Bigkiller opened his mouth and shut it. Tsigeyu was the only living creature he feared. He had more reason than most, since she was his mother.

Muskrat muttered something about having the right to kill the prisoner for having injured him.

Tsigeyu looked at Muskrat. Muskrat got a few fingers shorter, or that was how it looked. But after a moment she said, “It is true you are the nearest thing to a wounded warrior among this brave little war party.” She gestured at the young Tuscarora woman. “So I think you should get to keep this girl, here.”

Muskrat looked a good deal happier.

“The rest of you can decide among yourselves who gets the other woman, and the boy.” Tsigeyu turned to me. “My brother, I want you to take charge of this white man for now. Try to teach him to speak properly. You can do it if anyone can.

KNOWE ALL ENGLISH AND OTHER CHRISTIAN MEN:

That I an Englishman and Subjeckt of Her Maiestie Queene Elizabeth, did by Misadventure come to this country of Virginia in the Yeere of Our Lord 1591: and after greate Hardships arriued amongst these Indians. Who haue done me no Harme, but rather shewed me most exelent Kindnesse, sans the which I were like to haue dyed in this Wildernesse. Wherefore, good Frend, I conjure you, that you offer these poore Sauages no Offence, nor do them Iniurie: but rather vse them generously and iustly, as they haue me.

Look at this. Did you ever see the like? He made these marks himself on this deerskin, using a sharpened turkey feather and some black paint that he cooked up from burned wood and oak galls. And be told me to keep it safe, and that if other white men came this way I should show it to them, and it would tell them his story.

Yes, I suppose it must be like a wampum belt, in a way. Or those little pictures and secret marks that the wise elders of the Leni Lenapes use to record their tribe’s history. So clearly he was some sort of didahnvwisgi, a medicine man, even though be did not look old enough to have received such an important teaching.

He was always making these little marks, scratching away on whatever he could get—skins, mostly, or mulberry bark. People thought he was crazy, and I let them, because if they had known the truth not even Tsigeyu could have saved him from being killed for a witch.

But all that came later, during the winter, after he had begun to learn our language and I his. On that first day I was only interested in getting him away from that crowd before there was more trouble. I could see that Otter was working himself up to make one of his speeches, and if nothing else that meant there was a danger of being talked to death.

Inside my house I gave the stranger a gourd of water. When he had eased his thirst I pointed to myself. “Mouse,” I said, very slowly and carefully. “Tsisdetsi.”

He was quick. “Tsisdetsi,” he repeated. He got the tones wrong, but it was close enough for a beginning.

I held my hands up under my chin like paws, and pulled my upper lip back to show my front teeth, and crossed my eyes. I waggled one hand behind me to represent a long tail. “Tsisdetsi,” I said again.

He laughed out loud. “Tsisdetsi,” he said. “Mus!”

He raised his hand and stroked his face for a moment, as if thinking of something. Then without warning he turned and grabbed my best war spear off the wall. My bowels went loose, but he made no move to attack me. Instead he began shaking the weapon above his head with one hand, slapping himself on the chest with the other. “Tsagspa,” he cried. “Tsagspa.”

Crazy as a dog on a hot day, I thought at first. They must have hit him too hard. Then I realized what was happening, and felt almost dizzy. It is no small honor when any man tells you his secret war name—but a stranger, and a prisoner!

“Digatsisdi atelvhvsgo’i,” I said, when I could finally speak. “Shakes Spear!”

I am him that was call’d William Shakspere, of Stratford-upon-Auon, late of London: a Player, of Lord Strange his Company, and thereby hangs a Tale.

Look there, where I am pointing. That is his name! He showed me that, and he even offered to teach me how to make the marks for my own. Naturally I refused—think what an enemy could do with something likethat!

When I pointed this out, he laughed and said I might be right. For, he said, many a man of his sort bad had bad luck with other people making use of his name.

It hapt that our Company was in Portsmouth, hauing beene there engaug’d: but then were forbid to play, the Mayor and Corporation of that towne being of the Puritann perswasion. For which cause we were left altogether bankrupt: so that some of our Players did pawne their Cloathing for monny to return Home.

Perhaps someone had cursed him, since he sometimes said that he had never meant to leave his own country. It was the fault of the Puritans, he said. He did not explain what this meant, but once he mentioned that his wife and her family were Puritans. So obviously this is simply the name of his wife’s clan. Poor fellow, no wonder he left home. The same thing happened to an uncle of mine. When your wife’s clan decides to get rid of you, you don’t have a chance.

But I, being made foolish by strong Drinke, did conceive to hyde my selfe on a Ship bownd for London. Which did seeme a good Idea at the Time: but when I enquyr’d of some sea-faring men, they shawed me (in rogue Jest, or else mayhap I misconstrew’d their Reply, for I was in sooth most outragiosly drunk) the Moonlight, which lay at the Docke. And so by night I stole aboord, and hid my selfe vnder a Boate: wherevpon the Wine did rush to my heade, and I fell asleepe, and wal’d not till the Morrow: to finde the Ship at sea and vnder Sayle, and the morning Sun at her backe.

Naturally it was a long time before we could understand each other well enough to discuss such things. Not as long as you might think, though. To begin with, I discovered that in fact he had picked up quite a bit of Tuscarorapretending, like any smart captive, to understand less than he did. Besides that, he was a fast learner. You know that languages are my special medicine—I have heard them say that Mouse can talk to a stone, and get it to talk back—but Spearshaker was gifted too. By the time of the first snow, we could get along fairly well, in a mixture of his language and mine. And when words failed, he could express almost any idea, even tell a story, just by the movements of his hands and body and the expression of his face. That in itself was worth seeing.

When I was discouer’d the Master was most wroth, and commanded that I be put to the hardest Labours, and giuen onely the poorest reauings for food. So it went hard for me on that Voyage: but the Sa ors lear’d that I could sing discers Songs, ayid new Ballads from London, and then I was vsed better. Anon the Captaine, Mr. Edward Spicer, ask’d whether I had any skill in Armes. To which I reply’d, that a Player must needs be a Master of Fence, and of all other Artes martial], forasmuch as we are wont to play Battles, Duelies, Murthers &c. And the Captaine said, that soone I should haue Opportunity to proue my selfe against true Aduersaries and not in play, for we sayl’d for the Spanish Maine.

All this time, you understand, there was a great deal of talk concerning the white man. Most of the people came to like him, for he was a friendly fellow and a willing worker. And the Tuscarora girl was certainly right about his singing and dancing. Even Bigkiller had to laugh when Spearshaker went leaping and capering around the fire, and when he walked on his hands and clapped his feet together several women wet themselves—or so I heard.

His songs were strange to the ear, but enjoyable. I remember one we all liked:

“Wid-a-he An-a-ho An-a-he-na-ni-no!”

But not everyone was happy about his presence among us. Many of the young men were angry that the women liked him so well, and now and then took him aside to prove it. And old Otter told everyone who would listen that once, long ago, a great band of white men had come up from the south, from the Timucua country, and destroyed the finest towns of the Maskogis, taking many away for slaves and killing the others. And this was true, because when the People moved south they found much of that country empty and ruined.

Spearshaker said that those people were of another tribe, with which his own nation was at war. But not everyone believed him, and Otter kept insisting that white men were simply too dangerous to have around. I began to fear for Spearshaker’s life.

At length we came vnto the Indies, being there joyn’d by the Hope well and other Ships whose names I knowe not. And we attack’d the Spanish Convoy, and took the Gaileon Buen Jesus, a rich Pryze: and so it came to pass that Will Shakspeare, Actor, did for his greate folly turn Pyrat vpon the salt Sea.

Then, early next spring, the Catawbas came.

Twas was no mere raid. They came in force and they hit us fast and hard, killing or capturing many of the people working in the fields before they could reach the town palisade. They rushed out of the woods and swarmed over the palisade like ants, and before we knew it we were fighting for our lives in front of our own houses.

That was when Spearshaker astonished us all. Without hesitating, he grabbed a long pole from the meat-drying racks and went after the nearest Catawba with it, jabbing him hard in the guts with the end, exactly as you would use a spear, and then clubbing him over the head. Then he picked up the Catawba’s bow and began shooting.

My friend, I have lived long and seen much, but I never was more surprised than that morning. This pale, helpless creature, who could not chip a arrowhead or build a proper fire or even take five steps off a trail without getting lost—he cut those Catawbas down like rotten cornstalks! He shot one man off the palisade, right over there, from clear down by the council house. I do not think he wasted a single shot. And when he was out of arrows, he picked up a war club from a fallen warrior and joined the rest of us in fighting off the remaining attackers.

Afterward, he seemed not to think he had done anything remarkable. He said that all the men of his land know stick-fighting and archery, which they learn as boys. “I could have done better,” he said, “with a long bow, and some proper arrows, from my own country.” And he looked sad, as he always did when he spoke of his home.

From that day there was no more talk against Spearshaker. Not long after, Tsigeyu announced that she was adopting him. Since this also made him Bigkiller’s brother, he was safe from anyone in our town. It also made me his uncle, but he was kind enough never to call me edutsi. We were friends.

Next we turn’d north for Virginnia, Capt. Spicer hauing a Commission from Sir Walter Ralegh to calle vpon the English that dwelt at Roanoke, to discooer their condition. The Gales were cruel all along that Coast, and we were oft in grave Peril: but after much trauail we reached Hatarask, where the Captaine sent a party in small Boates, to search out the passage betweene the Islands. And whilst we were thus employ’d, a sudden greate Wind arose and scattered the Boates, many being o’erturned and the Mariners drowned. But the Boate I was in was carry ‘d many Leagues westward, beyond sight of our Fel lowes: so we were cast vpon the Shore of the Maine, and sought shelter in the Mouthe of a Rioer. Anon, going ashore, we were at tack’d by Sauages: and all the men were slaine, save onely my selfe.

Poor fellow, he was still a long way from home, and small chance of ever seeing his own people again. At least he was better off than he had been with the Tuscaroras. Let alone those people on the coast, if they bad caught him. Remember the whites who tried to build a town on that island north of Wococon, and how Powhatan had them all killed?

Yet hauing alone escap’d, and making my way for some dayes along the Rioer, I was surprized by Indians of another Nation: who did glue me hard vsage, as a Slaue, for well-nigh a Yeere. Vntil I was taken from them by these mine present sauage Hostes: amongst which, for my Sinnes, I am like to liue out my mortal dayes.

I used to have a big pile of these talking skins of his. Not that I ever expected to have a chance to show them to anyone who could understand them—I can’t believe the white men will ever continue up into the hill country; they seem to have all they can do just to survive on the coast-but I kept them to remember Spearshaker by.

But the bugs and the mice got into them, and the bark sheets went moldy in the wet season, and now I have only this little bundle. And, as you see, some of these are no more than bits and pieces. Like this worm-eaten scrap:

as concerning these Indians (for so men call them: but if this be the Lande of India I am an Hebrews Iewe) they are in their owne Tongue clept Anni-yawia. Which is, being interpreted, the True or Principali People. By other Tribes they are named Chelokee: but the meaning of this word my frend Mouse knoweth not, neyther whence deriued.

They I think one reason he spent so much time on his talking marks was that he was afraid be might forget his own language. I have seen this happen, with captives. That Tuscarora woman who was with him still lives here, and by now she can barely speak ten words of Tuscarora. Though Muskrat will tell you that she speaks our language entirely too well—but that is another story. Spearshaker did teach me quite a lot of his own language—a very difficult one, unlike any I ever encountered—and I tried to speak it with him from time to time, but it can’t have been the same as talking with a man of his own kind. What does it sound like? Ah, I remember so little now. Let me see. . . . Holt dai long, dow hor-son nabe!” That means, “Shut up, you fool!”

He told me many stories about his native land and its marvels. Some I knew to be true, having heard of them from the coast folk: the great floating houses that spread their wings like birds to catch the wind, and the magic weapons that make thunder and lightning. Others were harder to believe, such as his tales about the woman chief of his tribe. Not a clan mother, but a real war chief, like Bigkiller or even Powhatan, and so powerful that any man—even an elder or a leading warrior—can lose his life merely for speaking against her.

He also claimed that the town he came from was so big that it held more people than all of the People’s towns put together. That is of course a lie, but you can’t blame a man for bragging on his own tribe.

But nothing, I think, was as strange as the plei.

Forgive me for using a word you do not know. But as far as I know there is no word in your language for what I am talking about. Nor in ours, and this is because the thing it means has never existed among our peoples. I think the Creator must have given this idea only to the whites, perhaps to compensate them for their poor sense of direction and that skin that burns in the sun.

It all began one evening, at the beginning of his second winter with us, when I came in from a council meeting and found him sitting by the fire, scratching away on a big sheet of mulberry bark. Just to be polite I said, “Gado hadvhne?

What are you doing?”

Without looking up he said in his own language, “Raiting a plei.”

Now I knew what the first part meant; raiting is what the whites call it when they make those talking marks. But I had never heard the last word before, and I asked what it meant.

Spearshaker laid his turkey feather aside and sat up and looked at me. “Ah, Mouse,” he said, “how can I make you understand? This will be hard even for you. I sat down on the other side of the fire. “Try,” I said.

O what a fond and Moone-struck fool am I! Hath the aire of Virgin nia addl’d my brains? Or did an Enemy smite me on the heade, and I knewe it not? For here in this wilde country, where e’en the Artes of Latters are altogether unknowne, I haue begun the writing of a Play. And sure it is I shall neuer see it acted, neyther shall any other man: wherefore ‘tis Lunacy indeede. Yet me thinkes if I do it not, I am the more certain to go mad: for I find my selfe growing more like vnto these Indians, and I feare I may forget what manner of man I was. Therefore the Play’s the thing, whereby The saue my Minde by intentional folly: forsooth, there’s Method in my Madnesse.

Well, he was right. He talked far into the night, and the more he talked the less I understood. I asked more questions than a rattlesnake has scales, and the answers only left me more confused. It was a long time before I began to see it.

Didn’t you, as a child, pretend you were a warrior or a chief or maybe a medicine man, and make up stories and adventures for yourself? And your sisters had dolls that they gave names to, and talked to, and so on?

Or . . . let me try this another way. Don’t your people have dances, like our Bear Dance, in which a man imitates some sort of animal? And don’t your warriors sometimes dance around the fire acting out their own deeds, showing how they killed men or sneaked up on an enemy town—and maybe making it a little better than it really happened? Yes, it is the same with us.

Now this plei thing is a little like those dances, and a little like the pretending of children. A group of people dress up in fancy clothes and pretend to be other people, and pretend to do various things, and in this way they tell a story.

Yes, grown men. Yes, right up in front of everybody.

But understand, this isn’t a dance. Well, there is some singing and dancing, but mostly they just talk. And gesture, and make faces, and now and then pretend to kill each other. They do a lot of that last. I guess it is something like a war dance at that.

You’d be surprised what can be done in this way. A man like Spearshaker, who really knows how-ak-ta is what they are called—can make you see almost anything. He could imitate a man’s expression and voice and way of movingor a woman’s—so well you’d swear he had turned into that person. He could make you think he was Bigkiller, standing right there in front of you, grunting and growling and waving his war club. He could do Blackfox’s funny walk, or Locust wiggling his eyebrows, or Tsigeyu crossing her arms and staring at some body she didn’t like. He could even be Muskrat and his Tuscarora woman arguing, changing back and forth and doing both voices, till I laughed so hard my ribs hurt.

Now understand this. These akta people don’t just make up their words and actions as they go along, as children or dancers do. No, the whole story is already known to them, and each akta has words that must be said, and things that must be done, at exactly the right times. You may be sure this takes a good memory. They have as much to remember as the Master of the Green Corn Dance.

And so, to help them, one man puts the whole thing down in those little marks. Obviously this is a very important job, and Spearshaker said that it was only in recent times, two or three winters before leaving his native land, that be himself had been accounted worthy of this honor. Well, I had known he was a didahnvwisgi, but I hadn’t realized he was of such high rank.

I first purpos’d to compose some pretty conceited Comedy, like vnto my Loue’s Labour’s Lost: but alas, me seemes my Wit hath dry’d vp from Misfortune. Then I bethought my selfe of the Play of the Prince of Denmark, by Thomas Kyd: which I had been employ’d in reuising for our Company not long ere we departed London, and had oft said to Richard Burbage, that I trow I could write a Better. And so I haue commenced, and praye God I may compleat, my owne Tragedie of Prince Hamlet.

I asked what sort of stories his people told in this curious manner. That is something that always interests me—you can learn a lot about any tribe from their stories. Like the ones the Maskogis tell about Rabbit, or our own tale about the Thunder Boys, or—you know.

I don’t know what I was thinking. By then I should have known that white people do everything differently from everyone else in the world.

First he started to tell me about a dream somebody had on a summer night. That sounded good, but then it turned out to be about the Little People! Naturally I stopped him fast, and I told him that we do not talk about . . . them. I felt sorry for the poor man who dreamed about them, but there was no helping him now.

Then Spearshaker told me a couple of stories about famous chiefs of his own tribe. I couldn’t really follow this very well, partly because I knew so little about white laws and customs, but also because a lot of their chiefs seemed to have the same name. I never did understand whether there were two different chiefs named Ritsad, or just one with a very strange nature.

The oddest thing, though, was that none of these stories seemed to have any point. They didn’t tell you why the moon changes its face, or how the People were created, or where the mountains came from, or where the raccoon got his tail, or anything. They were just . . . stories. Like old women’s gossip. Maybe I missed something.

To liue, or not to liue, there lyes the
To liue, or dye? Shall I
To dye or
To be or what? It

He certainly worked hard at his task. More often than not, I could hear him grinding his teeth and inuttering to himself as he sat hunched over his marks. And now and then be would jump up and throw the sheet to the ground and run outside in the snow and the night wind, and I would hear him shouting in his own language. At least I took it to be his language, though the words were not among those I knew. Part of his medicine, no doubt, so I said nothing.

God’s Teethe! Haue I beene so long in this Wildernesse, that I haue forgot all Skill? I that could bombast out a lyne of blank Uerse as readily as a Fishe doth swimm, now fumble for Wordes like a Drunk and who cannot finde his owne Cod-peece with both Handes.

I’m telling you, it was a long winter.

For who would thus endure the Paines of time:

To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, That waite in patient and most grim Array, Each arm’d with Speares and Arrowes of Misfortune, Like Indians ambuscaded in the Forest?

But that the dread of something after Death, That vndiscouered country, from whose Shores No Traueller returnes, puzzels the Will, And makes vs rather beare that which we knowe Than wantonly embarke for the Vnknowne.

One evening, soon after the snows began to melt, I noticed that Spearshaker was not at his usual nightly work. He was just sitting there staring into the fire, not even looking at his skins and bark sheets, which were stacked beside him. The turkey feathers and black paint were nowhere in sight.

I said, “Is something wrong?” and then it came to me. “Finished?” He let out a long sigh. “Yes,” he said. “Mo ful ai,” he added, which was something he often said, though I never quite got what it meant.

It was easy to see he was feeling bad. So I said, “Tell me the story—”

He didn’t want to, but finally he told it to me. He got pretty worked up as he went along, sometimes jumping up to act out an exciting part, till I thought he was going to wreck my house. Now and then he picked up a skin or mulberrybark sheet and spoke the words, so I could hear the sound. I had thought I was learning his language pretty well, but I couldn’t understand one word in ten.

But the story itself was clear enough. There were parts I didn’t follow, but on the whole it was the best he’d ever told me. At the end I said, “Good story.”

He tilted his head to one side, like a bird. “Truly?”

“Doyu,” I said. I meant it, too.

He sighed again and picked up his pile of raiting. “I am a fool,” he said.

I saw that he was about to throw the whole thing into the fire, so I went over and took it from him. “This is a good thing,” I told him. “Be proud.”

“Why?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Who will ever see it? Only the bugs and the worms. And the mice,” he added, giving me his little smile.

I stood there, trying to think of something to make him feel better. Ninekiller’s oldest daughter had been making eyes at Spearshaker lately and I wondered if I should go get her. Then I looked down at what I was holding in my hands and it came to me.

“My friend,” I said, “I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we put on your plei right here?”

And now is Lunacy compownded vpon Lunacy, Bedlam pyled on Bedlam: for I am embark’d on an Enterprize, the like of which this Globe bath neuer seene. Yet lie undertake this Foolery, and flynch not: mayhap it will please these People, who are become my onely Frends. They shall haue of Will his best will.

It sounded simple when I heard myself say it. Doing it was another matter. First, there were people to be spoken with.

We Aniyvwiya like to keep everything loose and easy. Our chiefs have far less authority than yours, and even the power of the clan mothers has its limits. Our laws are few, and everyone knows what they are, so things tend to go along without much trouble.

But there were no rules for what we wanted to do, because it had never been done before. Besides, we were going to need the help of many people. So it seemed better to go carefully—but I admit I had no idea that our little proposal would create such a stir. In the end there was a regular meeting at the council house to talk it over.

Naturally it was Otter who made the biggest fuss. “This is white men’s medicine,” he shouted. “Do you want the People to become as weak and useless as the whites?”

“If it will make all our warriors shoot as straight as Spearshaker,” Bigkiller told him, “then it might be worth it.”

Otter waved his skinny old arms. He was so angry by now that his face was whiter than Spearshaker’s. “Then answer this,” he said. “How is it that this dance—”

“It’s not a dance,” I said. Usually I would not interrupt an elder in council, but if you waited for Otter to finish you might be there all night.

“Whatever you call it,” he said, “it’s close enough to a dance to be Bird Clan business, right? And you, Mouse, are Wolf Clan—as is your white friend, by adoption. So you have no right to do this thing.”

Old Dotsuya spoke up. She was the Bird Clan Mother, and the oldest person present. Maybe the oldest in town, now I think of it.

“The Bird Clan has no objection,” she said. “Mouse and Spearshaker have our permission to put on their plei. Which I, for one, would like to see. Nothing ever happens around this town.”

Tsigeyu spoke next. “Howa,” she said. “I agree. This sounds interesting.”

Of course Otter wasn’t willing to let it go so easily; he made quite a speech, going all the way back to the origins of the People and predicting every kind of calamity if this sacrilege was permitted. It didn’t do him much good, though. No one liked Otter, who had gotten both meaner and longer-winded with age, and who had never been a very good didahnvwisgi anyway. Besides, half the people in the council house were asleep long before he was done.

After the council gave its approval there was no trouble getting people to help. Rather we had more help than we needed. For days there was a crowd banging around my house, wanting to be part of the plei. Bigkiller said if he could get that many people to join a war party, he could take care of the Catawbas for good.

And everyone wanted to be an akta. We were going to have to turn some people away, and we would have to be careful how we did it, or there would be trouble. I asked Spearshaker how many aktas we needed. “How many men, that is,” I added, as be began counting on his fingers. “The women are a different problem.”

He stopped counting and stared at me as if I were wearing owl feathers. Then he told me something so shocking you will hardly believe it. In his country, the women in a plei are actually men wearing women’s clothes!

I told him quick enough that the People don’t go in for that sort of thingwhatever they may get up to in certain other tribes—and he’d better not even talk about it around here. Do you know, he got so upset that it took me the rest of the day to talk him out of calling the whole thing off . . . Women! Merciful) Jesu! Women, on a Stage, acting in a Play! I shall feele like an Whore-Master!

Men or women, it was hard to know which people to choose. None of them had ever done anything like this before, so there was no way to know whether they would be any good or not. Spearshaker asked me questions about each person, in white language so no one would be offended: Is he quick to learn?

Does he dance or sing well? Can he work with other people, and do as he is told? And he had them stand on one side of the stickball field, while he stood on the other, and made them speak their names and clans, to learn how well their voices carried.

I had thought age would come into it, since the plei included both older and younger people. But it turned out that Spearshaker knew an art of painting a man’s face, and putting white in his hair, till he might be mistaken for his own grandfather.

No doubt he could have done the same with women, but that wasn’t necessary. There were only two women’s parts in this story, and we gave the younger woman , s part to Ninekiller’s daughter Cricket—who would have hung upsidedown in a tree like a possum if it would please Spearshaker—and the older to a cousin of mine, about my age, who had lost her husband to the Shawanos and wanted something to do.

For those who could not be aktas, there was plenty of other work. A big platform had to be built, with space cleared around it, and log benches for the people who would watch. There were torches to be prepared, since we would be doing it at night, and special clothes to be made, as well as things like fake spears so no one would get hurt.

Locust and Blackfox were particularly good workers; Spearsliaker said it was as if they had been born for this. They even told him that if be still wanted to follow the custom of his own tribe, with men dressed as woine, they would be willing to take those parts. Well, I always had wondered about those two.

But Spearshaker was working harder than anyone else. Besides being in charge of all the other preparations, he had to remake his whole plei to suit our needs. No doubt he had made a fine plei for white men, but for us, as it was, it would never do.

Many a Play haue I reuis’d and amended: cut short or long at the Company’s desyre, or alter’d this or that Speeche to please a Player:

e’en carued the very Guttes out of a scene on command of the Office of the Reuels, for some imagin’d Sedition or vnseemely Speeche. But now must I out-do all I euer did before, in the making of my Hamlet into a thing comprehensible to the Anni-yawia. Scarce is there a line which doth not haue to be rewrit: yea, and much ta’en out intire: as, the Play within the Play, which Mouse saith, that none here will vnderstande. And the Scene must be mov’d from Denmark to Vir ginnia, and Elsinore Castle transformed into an Indian towne. For marry, it were Alchemy enow that I should transmute vnietter’d Sau ages into tragick Actors: but to make royal Danskers of swart-fac’d Indians were beyond all Reason. (Speakist thou now of Reason, Will Shakespere? Is’t not ouer-late for that?)

You should have seen us teaching the aktas their parts. First Spearshaker would look at the marks and say the words in his language. Then he would explain to me any parts I hadn’t understood—which was most of it, usuallyand then I would translate the whole thing for the akta in our language. Or as close as I could get; there are some things you cannot really interpret. By now Spearshaker was fluent enough to help me.

Then the akta would try to say the words back to us, almost always getting it all wrong and having to start again. And later on all the people in the plei had to get together and speak their parts in order, and do all the things they would do in the plei, and that was like a bad dream. Not only did they forget their words—they bumped into each other and stepped on each other’s feet, and got carried away in the fight parts and nearly killed each other. And Spearshaker would jump up and down and pull his hair—which had already begun to fall out, for some reason—and sometimes weep, and when he had settled down we would try again.

Verily, my lot is harder than that of the Iewes of Moses. For Scripture saith, that Pharo did command that they make Brickes without Strawe, wherefore their trauail was greats: but now I must make my Brickes, euen without Mudd.

Let me tell you the story of Spearshaker’s plei. Once there was a great war chief who was killed by his own brother. Not in a fight, but secretly, by poison. The brother took over as chief, and also took his dead brother’s woman, who didn’t object.

But the dead man had a son, a young warrior named Amaledi. One night the dead chief appeared to Amaledi and told him the whole story. And, of course, demanded that he do something about it.

Poor Amaledi was in a bad fix. Obviously he mustn’t go against his mother’s wishes, and kill her new man without her permission. On the other hand, no one wants to anger a ghost—and this one was plenty angry already.

So Amaledi couldn’t decide what to do. To make things worse, the bad brother had guessed that Amaledi knew something. He and this really nasty, windy old man named Quolonisi—sounds like Otter—began trying to get rid of Amaledi.

To protect himself Amaledi became a Crazy, doing and saying everything backward, or in ways that made no sense. This made his medicine strong enough to protect him from his uncle and Quolonisi, at least for a time.

Quolonisi had a daughter, Tsigalili, who wanted Amaledi for her man. But she didn’t want to live with a Crazy—who does?—and she kept coming around and crying and begging him to quit. At the same time his mother was giving him a hard time for being disrespectful toward her new man. And all the while the ghost kept showing up and yelling at Amaledi for taking so long. It got so bad Amaledi thought about killing himself, but then he realized that he would go to the spirit world, where his father would never leave him alone.

So Amaledi thought of a plan. There was a big dance one night to honor the new chief, and some visiting singers from another town were going to take part. Amaledi took their lead singer aside and got him to change the song, telling him the new words had been given to him in a dream. And that night, with the dancers going around the fire and the women shaking the turtle shells and the whole town watching, the visiting leader sang:

“Now he pours it, Now he is pouring the poison, See, there are two brothers, See, now there is one.”

That was when it all blew up like a hot rock in a fire. The bad chief jumped up and ran away from the dance grounds, afraid he had just been witched. Amaledi had a big argument with his mother and told her what he thought of the way she was acting. Then he killed Quolonisi. He said it was an accident but I think he was just tired of listening to the old fool.

Tsigalili couldn’t stand any more. She jumped into a waterfall and killed herself. There was a fine funeral.

Now Amaledi was determined to kill his uncle. The uncle was just as determined to kill Amaledi, but he was too big a coward to do it himself. So he got Quolonisi’s son Panther to call Amaledi out for a fight.

Panther was a good fighter and he was hot to kill Amaledi, because of his father and his sister. But the chief wasn’t taking any chances. He put some poison on Panther’s spear. He also had a gourd of water, with poison in it, in case nothing else worked.

So Amaledi and Panther painted their faces red and took their spears and faced each other, right in front of the chief’s house. Amaledi was just as good as Panther, but finally he got nicked on the arm. Before the poison could act, they got into some hand-to-hand wrestling, and the spears got mixed up. Now Panther took a couple of hits. Yes, with the poisoned spear.

Meanwhile Amaledi’s mother got thirsty and went over and took a drink, before anyone could stop her, from the poisoned gourd. Pretty soon she fell down. Amaledi and Panther stopped fighting and rushed over, but she was already dead.

By now they were both feeling the poison themselves. Panther fell down and died. So did Amaledi, but before he went down he got his uncle with the poisoned spear. So in the end everyone died.

You do?

Well, I suppose you had to be there.

And so ‘tis afoots: to-morrow night we are to perform. Thank God Burbage cannot be there to witnesse it: for it were a Question which should come first, that he dye of Laughter, or I of Shame.

It was a warm and pleasant night. Everyone was there, even Otter. By the time it was dark all the seats were full and many people were standing, or sitting on the ground.

The platform had only been finished a few days before—with Bigkiller complaining about the waste of timber and labor, that could have gone into strengthening the town’s defenses—and it looked very fine. Locust and Blackfox had hung some reed mats on poles to represent the walls of houses, and also to give us a place to wait out of sight before going on. To keep the crowd from getting restless, Spearshaker had asked Dotsuya to have some Bird Clan men sing and dance while we were lighting the torches and making other last preparations.

Then it was time to begin.

What? Oh, no, I was not an akta. By now I knew the words to the whole plei, from having translated and repeated them so many times. So I stood behind a reed screen and called out the words, in a voice too low for the crowd to hear, when anyone forgot what came next.

Spearshaker, yes. He was the ghost. He had put some paint on his face that made it even whiter, and he did something with his voice that made the hair stand up on your neck.

But in fact everyone did very well, much better than I had expected. The only bad moment came when Amaledi—that was Tsigeyu’s son Hummingbird shouted, “Na! Dili, dili!” (“There! A skunk, a skunk!”) and slammed his war club into the wall of the “chief’s house,” forgetting it was really just a reed mat. And Beartrack, who was being Quolonisi, took such a blow to the head that he was out for the rest of the plei. But it didn’t matter, since he had no more words to speak, and he made a very good dead man for Amaledi to drag out.

And the people loved it, all of it. How they laughed and laughed! I never heard so many laugh so hard for so long. At the end, when Amaledi fell dead between his mother and Panther and the platform was covered with corpses, there was so much howling and hooting you would have taken it for a hurricane. I looked out through the mats and saw Tsigeyu and Bigkiller holding on to each other to keep from failing off the bench. Warriors were wiping tears from their eyes and women were clutching themselves between the legs and old Dotsuya was lying on the ground kicking her feet like a baby.

I turned to Spearshaker, who was standing beside me. “See,” I said. “And you were afraid they wouldn’t understand it!”

After that everything got confused for a while. Locust and Blackfox rushed up and dragged Spearshaker away, and the next time I saw him he was down in front of the platform with Tsigeyu embracing him and Bigkiller slapping him on the back. I couldn’t see his face, which was hidden by Tsigeyu’s very large front.

By then people were making a fuss over all of us. Even me. A Paint Clan woman, not bad-looking for her age, took me away for some attention. She was limber and had a lot of energy, so it was late by the time I finally got home.

Spearshaker was there, sitting by the fire. He didn’t look up when I came in. His face was so pale I thought at first he was still wearing his ghost paint. I said, “Gusdi nusdi? Is something wrong?”

“They laughed,” he said. He didn’t sound happy about it.

“They laughed,” I agreed. “They laughed as they have never laughed before, every one of them. Except for Otter, and no one has ever seen him laugh.”

I sat down beside him. “You did something fine tonight, Spearshaker. You made the People happy. They have a hard life, and you made them laugh.”

He made a snorting sound. “Yes. They laughed to see us making fools of ourselves. Perhaps that is good.”

“No, no.” I saw it now. “Is that what you think? That they laughed because we did the plei so badly?”

I put my hand on his shoulder and turned him to face me. “My friend, no one there tonight ever saw a plei before, except for you. How would they know if it was bad? It was certainly the best plei they ever saw.”

He blinked slowly, like a turtle. I saw his eyes were red.

“Believe me, Spearshaker,” I told him, “they were laughing because it was such a funny story. And that was your doing.”

His expression was very strange indeed. “They thought it comical?”

“Well, who wouldn’t? All those crazy people up there, killing each otherand themselves—and then that part at the end, where everyone gets killed!” I had to stop and laugh, myself, remembering. “I tell you,” I said when I had my breath back, “even though I knew the whole thing by memory, I nearly lost control of myself a few times there.”

I got up. “Come, Spearshaker. You need to go to sleep. You have been working too hard.”

But he only put his head down in his hands and made some odd sounds in his throat, and muttered some words I did not know. And so I left him there and went to bed.

If I live until the mountains fall, I will never understand white men.

If I hue vntil our Saviour’s returne, I shall neuer vnderstande Indians.

Warre they count as Sport, and bloody Murther an occasion of Mer riment: ‘tis because they hold Life itselfe but lightly, and think Death no greate matter neyther: and so that which we call Tragick, they take for Comedie. And though I be damned fort, I cannot sweare that they haue not the Right of it.

Whatever happened that night, it changed something in Spearshaker. He lived with us for many more years, but never again did he make a plei for us.

That was sad, for we had all enjoyed the Amaledi story so much, and were hoping for more. And many people tried to get Spearshaker to change his mind—Tsigeyu actually begged him; I think it was the only time in her life she ever begged anyone for anything—but it did no good. He would not even talk about it.

And at last we realized that his medicine had gone, and we left him in peace. It is a terrible thing for a didahnvwisgi when his power leaves him. Perhaps his ancestors’ spirits were somehow offended by our plei. I hope not, since it was my idea.

That summer Ninekiller’s daughter Cricket became Spearshaker’s wife. I gave them my house, and moved in with the Paint Clan woman. I visited my friend often, and we talked of many things, but of one thing we never spoke.

Cricket told me he still made his talking marks, from time to time. If he ever tried to make another plei, though, he never told anyone.

I believe it was five winters ago—it was not more—when Cricket came in one day and found him dead. It was a strange thing, for he had not been sick, and was still a fairly young man. As far as anyone knew there was nothing wrong with him, except that his hair had fallen out.

I think his spirit simply decided to go back to his native land.

Cricket grieved for a long time. She still has not taken another husband. Did you happen to see a small boy with pale skin and brown hair, as you came through our town? That is their son Wili.

Look what Cricket gave me. This is the turkey feather that was in Spearshaker’s hand when she found him that day. And this is the piece of mulberry bark that was lying beside him. I will always wonder what it says.

We are such stuff as Dreames are made on: and our little Life Is rounded in a sleep.

NOTES

1. Elizabethan spelling was fabulously irregular; the same person might spell the same word in various ways on a single page. Shakespeare’s own spelling is known only from the Quarto and Folio printings of the plays, and the published poetry; and no one knows how far this may have been altered by the printer. It is not even known how close the published texts are to Shakespeare’s original in wording, let alone spelling. All we have in his own hand is his signature, and this indicates that he spelled his own name differently almost every time he wrote it.

I have followed the spelling of the Folio for the most part, but felt free to use my own judgment and even whim, since that was what the original speller did.

I have, however, regularized spelling and punctuation to some extent, and modernized spelling and usage in some instances, so that the text would be readable. I assume this book’s readership is well-educated, but it seems unrealistic to expect them to be Elizabethan scholars.

2. Cherokee pronunciation is difficult to render in Roman letters. Even our own syllabary system of writing, invented in the nineteenth century by Sequoyah, does not entirely succeed, as there is no way to indicate the tones and glottal stops. I have followed, more or less, the standard system of transliteration, in which “y” is used for the nasal grunting vowel that has no English equivalent.

It hardly matters, since we do not know how sixteenth-century Cherokees pronounced the language. The sounds have changed considerably in the century and a half since the forced march to Oklahoma; what they were like four hundred years ago is highly conjectural. So is the location of the various tribes of Virginia and the Carolinas during this period; and, of course, so is their culture. (The Cherokees may not then have been the warlike tribe they later became—though, given the national penchant for names incorporating the verb “to kill,” this is unlikely.) The Catawbas were a very old and hated enemy.

3. Edward Spicer’s voyage to America to learn the fate of the Roanoke Colony—or rather his detour to Virginia after a successful privateering operation—did happen, including the bad weather and the loss of a couple of boats, though there is no record that any boat reached the mainland. The disappearance of the Roanoke colonists is a famous event.

It is only conjecture—though based on considerable evidence, and accepted by many historians—that Powhatan had the colonists murdered, after they had taken sanctuary with a minor coastal tribe. Disney fantasies to the contrary, Powhatan was not a nice man.

4. I have accepted, for the sake of the story, the view of many scholars that Shakespeare first got the concept of Hamlet in the process of revising Thomas Kyd’s earlier play on the same subject. Thus he might well have had the general idea in his head as early as 1591—assuming, as most do, that by this time he was employed with a regular theatrical company—even though the historic Hamlet is generally agreed to have been written considerably later.

5. As to those who argue that William Shakespeare was not actually the author of Hamlet, but that the plays were written by Francis Bacon or the Earl of Southampton or Elvis Presley, one can only reply: Hah! And again, Hah!

OCEANIC

Greg Egan

Australian author Greg Egan takes us to a distant water planet where human biology and religion have diverged sharply from our own. In an extraordinary tale that subtly reveals the complexities of this culture, a young man happens upon a startling discovery that threatens to capsize his worldview.

1

The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again.

In the bunk above me, my brother Daniel said distinctly, “Do you believe in God?”

My head was cleared of sleep in an instant, but I didn’t reply straight away. I’d never closed my eyes, but the darkness of the unlit cabin seemed to shift in front of me, grains of phantom light moving like a cloud of disturbed insects.

“Martin?”

“I’m awake.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Of course.” Everyone I knew believed in God. Everyone talked about Her, everyone prayed to Her. Daniel most of all. Since he’d joined the Deep Church the previous summer, he prayed every morning for a kilotau before dawn. I’d often wake to find myself aware of him kneeling by the far wall of the cabin, muttering and pounding his chest, before I drifted gratefully back to sleep.

Our family had always been Transitional, but Daniel was fifteen, old enough to choose for himself. My mother accepted this with diplomatic silence, but my father seemed positively proud of Daniel’s independence and strength of conviction. My own feelings were mixed. I’d grown used to swimming in my older brother’s wake, but I’d never resented it, because he’d always let me in on the view ahead: reading me passages from the books he read himself, teaching me words and phrases from the languages he studied, sketching some of the mathematics I was yet to encounter firsthand. We used to lie awake half the night, talking about the cores of stars or the hierarchy of transfinite numbers. But Daniel had told me nothing about the reasons for his conversion, and his ever increasing piety. I didn’t know whether to feel hurt by this exclusion, or simply grateful; I could see that being Transitional was like a pale imitation of being Deep Church, but I wasn’t sure that this was such a bad thing if the wages of mediocrity included sleeping until sunrise.

Daniel said, “Why?”

I stared up at the underside of his bunk, unsure whether I was really seeing it or just imagining its solidity against the cabin’s ordinary darkness. “Someone must have guided the Angels here from Earth. If Earth’s too far away to see from Covenant . . . how could anyone find Covenant from Earth, without God’s help?”

I heard Daniel shift slightly. “Maybe the Angels had better telescopes than us. Or maybe they spread out from Earth in all directions, launching thousands of expeditions without even knowing what they’d find.”

I laughed. “But they had to come here, to be made flesh again!” Even a less-than-devout ten-year-old knew that much. God prepared Covenant as the place for the Angels to repent their theft of immortality. The Transitionals believed that in a million years we could earn the right to be Angels again; the Deep Church believed that we’d remain flesh until the stars fell from the sky.

Daniel said, “What makes you so sure that there were ever really Angels? Or that God really sent them Her daughter, Beatrice, to lead them back into the flesh?”

I pondered this for a while. The only answers I could think of came straight out of the Scriptures, and Daniel had taught me years ago that appeals to authority counted for nothing. Finally, I had to confess: “I don’t know.” I felt foolish, but I was grateful that he was willing to discuss these difficult questions with me. I wanted to believe in God for the right reasons, not just because everyone around me did.

He said, “Archaeologists have shown that we must have arrived about twenty thousand years ago. Before that, there’s no evidence of humans, or any coecological plants and animals. That makes the Crossing older than the Scriptures say, but there are some dates that are open to interpretation, and with a bit of poetic license everything can be made to add up. And most biologists think the native microfauna could have formed by itself over millions of years, starting from simple chemicals, but that doesn’t mean God didn’t guide the whole process. Everything’s compatible, really. Science and the Scriptures can both be true.”

I thought I knew where he was headed, now. “So you’ve worked out a way to use science to prove that God exists?” I felt a surge of pride; my brother was a genius!

“No.” Daniel was silent for a moment. “The thing is, it works both ways. Whatever’s written in the Scriptures, people can always come up with different explanations for the facts. The ships might have left Earth for some other reason. The Angels might have made bodies for themselves for some other reason. There’s no way to convince a non-believer that the Scriptures are the word of God. It’s all a matter of faith.”

“Oh.”

“Faith’s the most important thing,” Daniel insisted. “If you don’t have faith, you can be tempted into believing anything at all.”

I made a noise of assent, trying not to sound too disappointed. I’d expected more from Daniel than the kind of bland assertions that sent me dozing off during sermons at the Transitional church.

“Do you know what you have to do to get faith?”

“No.”

“Ask for it. That’s all. Ask Beatrice to come into your heart and grant you the gift of faith.”

I protested, “We do that every time we go to church!” I couldn’t believe he’d forgotten the Transitional service already. After the priest placed a drop of seawater on our tongues, to symbolize the blood of Beatrice, we asked for the gifts of faith, hope, and love.

“But have you received it?”

I’d never thought about that. “I’m not sure.” I believed in God, didn’t I? “I might have.”

Daniel was amused. “If you had the gift of faith, you’d know.”

I gazed up into the darkness, troubled. “Do you have to go to the Deep Church, to ask for it properly?”

“No. Even in the Deep Church, not everyone has invited Beatrice into their hearts. You have to do it the way it says in the Scriptures: ‘like an unborn child again, naked and helpless.’ ”

“I was Immersed, wasn’t I?”

“In a metal bowl, when you were thirty days old. Infant Immersion is a gesture by the parents, an affirmation of their own good intentions. But it’s not enough to save the child.”

I was feeling very disoriented now. My father, at least, approved of Daniel’s conversion . . . but now Daniel was trying to tell me that our family’s transactions with God had all been grossly deficient, if not actually counterfeit.

Daniel said, “Remember what Beatrice told Her followers, the last time She appeared? ‘Unless you are willing to drown in My blood, you will never look upon the face of My Mother.’ So they bound each other hand and foot, and weighted themselves down with rocks.”

My chest tightened. “And you’ve done that?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Almost a year ago.”

I was more confused than ever. “Did Ma and Fa go?”

Daniel laughed. “No! It’s not a public ceremony. Some friends of mine from the Prayer Group helped; someone has to be on deck to haul you up, because it would be arrogant to expect Beatrice to break your bonds and raise you to the surface, like She did with Her followers. But in the water, you’re alone with God.”

He climbed down from his bunk and crouched by the side of my bed. “Are you ready to give your life to Beatrice, Martin?” His voice sent gray sparks flowing through the darkness.

I hesitated. “What if I just dive in? And stay under for a while?” I’d been swimming off the boat at night plenty of times, there was nothing to fear from that.

“No. You have to be weighted down.” His tone made it clear that there could be no compromise on this. “How long can you hold your breath?”

“Two hundred tau.” That was an exaggeration; two hundred was what I was aiming for.

“That’s long enough.”

I didn’t reply. Daniel said, “I’ll pray with you.”

I climbed out of bed, and we knelt together. Daniel murmured, “Please, Holy Beatrice, grant my brother Martin the courage to accept the precious gift of Your blood.” Then he started praying in what I took to be a foreign language, uttering a rapid stream of harsh syllables unlike anything I’d heard before. I listened apprehensively; I wasn’t sure that I wanted Beatrice to change my mind, and I was afraid that this display of fervor might actually persuade Her.

I said, “What if I don’t do it?”

“Then you’ll never see the face of God.”

I knew what that meant: I’d wander alone in the belly of Death, in darkness, for eternity. And even if the Scriptures weren’t meant to be taken literally on this, the reality behind the metaphor could only be worse. Indescribably worse.

“But . . . what about Ma and Fa?” I was more worried about them, because I knew they’d never climb weighted off the side of the boat at Daniel’s behest.

“That will take time,” he said softly.

My mind reeled. He was absolutely serious.

I heard him stand and walk over to the ladder. He climbed a few rungs and opened the hatch. Enough starlight came in to give shape to his arms and shoulders, but as he turned to me I still couldn’t make out his face. “Come on, Martin!” he whispered. “The longer you put it off, the harder it gets.” The hushed urgency of his voice was familiar: generous and conspiratorial, nothing like an adult’s impatience. He might almost have been daring me to join him in a midnight raid on the pantry—not because he really needed a collaborator, but because he honestly didn’t want me to miss out on the excitement, or the spoils.

I suppose I was more afraid of damnation than drowning, and I’d always trusted Daniel to warn me of the dangers ahead. But this time I wasn’t entirely convinced that he was right, so I must have been driven by something more than fear, and blind trust.

Maybe it came down to the fact that he was offering to make me his equal in this. I was ten years old, and I ached to become something more than I was; to reach, not my parents’ burdensome adulthood, but the halfway point, full of freedom and secrets, that Daniel had reached. I wanted to be as strong, as fast, as quick-witted and widely read as he was. Becoming as certain of God would not have been my first choice, but there wasn’t much point hoping for divine intervention to grant me anything else.

I followed him up onto the deck.

He took cord, and a knife, and four spare weights of the kind we used on our nets from the toolbox. He threaded the weights onto the cord, then I took off my shorts and sat naked on the deck while he knotted a figure-eight around my ankles. I raised my feet experimentally; the weights didn’t seem all that heavy. But in the water, I knew, they’d be more than enough to counteract my body’s slight buoyancy.

“Martin? Hold out your hands.”

Suddenly I was crying. With my arms free, at least I could swim against the tug of the weights. But if my hands were tied, I’d be helpless.

Daniel crouched down and met my eyes. “Ssh. It’s all right.”

I hated myself. I could feel my face contorted into the mask of a blubbering infant.

“Are you afraid?”

I nodded.

Daniel smiled reassuringly. “You know why? You know who’s doing that? Death doesn’t want Beatrice to have you. He wants you for himself. So he’s here on this boat, putting fear into your heart, because he knows he’s almost lost you.”

I saw something move in the shadows behind the toolbox, something slithering into the darkness. If we went back down to the cabin now, would Death follow us? To wait for Daniel to fall asleep? If I’d turned my back on Beatrice, who could I ask to send Death away?

I stared at the deck, tears of shame dripping from my cheeks. I held out my arms, wrists together.

When my hands were tied—not palm-to-palm as I’d expected, but in separate loops joined by a short bridge—Daniel unwound a long stretch of rope from the winch at the rear of the boat, and coiled it on the deck. I didn’t want to think about how long it was, but I knew I’d never dived to that depth. He took the blunt hook at the end of the rope, slipped it over my arms, then screwed it closed to form an unbroken ring. Then he checked again that the cord around my wrists was neither so tight as to burn me, nor so loose as to let me slip. As he did this, I saw something creep over his face: some kind of doubt or fear of his own. He said, “Hang on to the hook. Just in case. Don’t let go, no matter what. Okay??” He whispered something to Beatrice, then looked up at me, confident again.

He helped me to stand and shuffle over to the guard rail, just to one side of the winch. Then he picked me up under the arms and lifted me over, resting my feet on the outer hull. The deck was inert, a mineralized endoshell, but behind the guard rails the hull was palpably alive: slick with protective secretions, glowing softly. My toes curled uselessly against the lubricated skin; I had no purchase at all. The hull was supporting some of my weight, but Daniel’s arms would tire eventually. If I wanted to back out, I’d have to do it quickly.

A warm breeze was blowing. I looked around, at the flat horizon, at the blaze of stars, at the faint silver light off the water. Daniel recited: “Holy Beatrice, I am ready to die to this world. Let me drown in Your blood, that I might be redeemed, and look upon the face of Your Mother.”

I repeated the words, trying hard to mean them.

“Holy Beatrice, I offer You my life. All I do now, I do for You. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of faith. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of hope. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of love.”

“And grant me the gift of love.”

Daniel released me. At first, my feet seemed to adhere magically to the hull, and I pivoted backward without actually falling. I clung tightly to the hook, pressing the cold metal against my belly, and willed the rope of the winch to snap taut, leaving me dangling in midair. I even braced myself for the shock. Some part of me really did believe that I could change my mind, even now.

Then my feet slipped and I plunged into the ocean and sank straight down.

It was not like a dive—not even a dive from an untried height, when it took so long for the water to bring you to a halt that it began to grow frightening. I was falling through the water ever faster, as if it was air. The vision I’d had of the rope keeping me above the water now swung to the opposite extreme: my acceleration seemed to prove that the coil on the deck was attached to nothing, that its frayed end was already beneath the surface. That’s what the followers had done, wasn’t it? They’d let themselves be thrown in without a lifeline. So Daniel had cut the rope, and I was on my way to the bottom of the ocean.

Then the hook jerked my hands up over my head, jarring my wrists and shoulders, and I was motionless.

I turned my face toward the surface, but neither starlight nor the hull’s faint phosphorescence reached this deep. I let a stream of bubbles escape from my mouth; I felt them slide over my upper lip, but no trace of them registered in the darkness.

I shifted my hands warily over the hook. I could still feel the cord fast around my wrists, but Daniel had warned me not to trust it. I brought my knees up to my chest, gauging the effect of the weights. If the cord broke, at least my hands would be free, but even so I wasn’t sure I’d be able to ascend. The thought of trying to unpick the knots around my ankles as I tumbled deeper filled me with horror.

My shoulders ached, but I wasn’t injured. It didn’t take much effort to pull myself up until my chin was level with the bottom of the hook. Going further was awkward—with my hands so close together I couldn’t brace myself properly—but on the third attempt I managed to get my arms locked, pointing straight down.

I’d done this without any real plan, but then it struck me that even with my hands and feet tied, I could try shinning up the rope. It was just a matter of getting started. I’d have to turn upside-down, grab the rope between my knees, then curl up—dragging the hook—and get a grip with my hands at a higher point.

And if I couldn’t reach up far enough to right myself?

I’d ascend feet-first.

I couldn’t even manage the first step. I thought it would be as simple as keeping my arms rigid and letting myself topple backward, but in the water even two-thirds of my body wasn’t sufficient to counterbalance the weights.

I tried a different approach: I dropped down to hang at arm’s length, raised my legs as high as I could, then proceeded to pull myself up again. But my grip wasn’t tight enough to resist the turning force of the weights; I just pivoted around my center of gravity—which was somewhere near my knees—and ended up, still bent double, but almost horizontal.

I eased myself down again, and tried threading my feet through the circle of my arms. I didn’t succeed on the first attempt, and then on reflection it seemed like a bad move anyway. Even if I managed to grip the rope between my bound feet—rather than just tumbling over backward, out of control, and dislocating my shoulders—climbing the rope upside-down with my hands behind my back would either be impossible, or so awkward and strenuous that I’d run out of oxygen before I got a tenth of the way.

I let some more air escape from my lungs. I could feel the muscles in my diaphragm reproaching me for keeping them from doing what they wanted to do; not urgently yet, but the knowledge that I had no control over when I’d be able to draw breath again made it harder to stay calm. I knew I could rely on Daniel to bring me to the surface on the count of two hundred. But I’d only ever stayed down for a hundred and sixty. Forty more tau would be an eternity.

I’d almost forgotten what the whole ordeal was meant to be about, but now I started praying. Please Holy Beatrice, don’t let me die. I know You drowned like this to save me, but if I die it won’t help anyone. Daniel would end up in the deepest shit . . . but that’s not a threat, it’s just an observation. I felt a stab of anxiety; on top of everything else, had I just offended the Daughter of God? I struggled on, my confidence waning. I don’t want to die. But You already know that. So I don’t know what You want me to say.

I released some more stale air, wishing I’d counted the time I’d been under: you weren’t supposed to empty your lungs too quickly—when they were deflated it was even harder not to take a breath—but holding all the carbon dioxide in too long wasn’t good either.

Praying only seemed to make me more desperate, so I tried to think other kinds of holy thoughts. I couldn’t remember anything from the Scriptures word for word, but the gist of the most important part started running through my mind.

After living in Her body for thirty years, and persuading all the Angels to become mortal again, Beatrice had gone back up to their deserted spaceship and flown it straight into the ocean. When Death saw Her coming, he took the form of a giant serpent, coiled in the water, waiting. And even though She was the Daughter of God, with the power to do anything, She let Death swallow Her.

That’s how much She loved us.

Death thought he’d won everything. Beatrice was trapped inside him, in the darkness, alone. The Angels were flesh again, so he wouldn’t even have to wait for the stars to fall before he claimed them.

But Beatrice was part of God. Death had swallowed part of God. This was a mistake. After three days, his jaws burst open and Beatrice came flying out, wreathed in fire. Death was broken, shriveled, diminished.

My limbs were numb but my chest was burning. Death was still strong enough to hold down the damned. I started thrashing about blindly, wasting whatever oxygen was left in my blood, but desperate to distract myself from the urge to inhale.

Please Holy Beatrice—

Please Daniel—

Luminous bruises blossomed behind my eyes and drifted out into the water. I watched them curling into a kind of vortex, as if something was drawing them in.

It was the mouth of the serpent, swallowing my soul. I opened my own mouth and made a wretched noise, and Death swam forward to kiss me, to breathe cold water into my lungs.

Suddenly, everything was seared with light. The serpent turned and fled, like a pale timid worm. A wave of contentment washed over me, as if I was an infant again and my mother had wrapped her arms around me tightly. It was like basking in sunlight, listening to laughter, dreaming of music too beautiful to be real. Every muscle in my body was still trying to prize my lungs open to the water, but now I found myself fighting this almost absentmindedly while I marveled at my strange euphoria.

Cold air swept over my hands and down my arms. I raised myself up to take a mouthful, then slumped down again, giddy and spluttering, grateful for every breath but still elated by something else entirely. The light that had filled my eyes was gone, but it left a violet afterimage everywhere I looked. Daniel kept winding until my head was level with the guard rail, then he clamped the winch, bent down, and threw me over his shoulder.

I’d been warm enough in the water, but now my teeth were chattering. Daniel wrapped a towel around me, then set to work cutting the cord. I beamed at him. “I’m so happy!” He gestured to me to be quieter, but then he whispered joyfully, “That’s the love of Beatrice. She’ll always be with you now, Martin.”

I blinked with surprise, then laughed softly at my own stupidity. Until that moment, I hadn’t connected what had happened with Beatrice at all. But of course it was Her. I’d asked Her to come into my heart, and She had.

And I could see it in Daniel’s face: a year after his own Drowning, he still felt Her presence.

He said, “Everything you do now is for Beatrice. When you look through your telescope, you’ll do it to honor Her creation. When you eat, or drink, or swim, you’ll do it to give thanks for Her gifts.” I nodded enthusiastically.

Daniel tidied everything away, even soaking up the puddles of water I’d left on the deck. Back in the cabin, he recited from the Scriptures, passages that I’d never really understood before, but which now all seemed to be about the Drowning, and the way I was feeling. It was as if I’d opened the book and found myself mentioned by name on every page.

When Daniel fell asleep before me, for the first time in my life I didn’t feel the slightest pang of loneliness. The Daughter of God was with me: I could feel Her presence, like a flame inside my skull, radiating warmth through the darkness behind my eyes.

Giving me comfort, giving me strength.

Giving me faith.

2

The monastery was almost four milliradians northeast of our home grounds. Daniel and I took the launch to a rendezvous point, and met up with three other small vessels before continuing. It had been the same routine every tenth night for almost a year—and Daniel had been going to the Prayer Group himself for a year before that—so the launch didn’t need much supervision. Feeding on nutrients in the ocean, propelling itself by pumping water through fine channels in its skin, guided by both sunlight and Covenant’s magnetic field, it was a perfect example of the kind of legacy of the Angels that technology would never be able to match.

Bartholomew, Rachel, and Agnes were in one launch, and they traveled beside us while the others skimmed ahead. Bartholomew and Rachel were married, though they were only seventeen, scarcely older than Daniel. Agnes, Rachel’s sister, was sixteen. Because I was the youngest member of the Prayer Group, Agnes had fussed over me from the day I’d joined. She said, “It’s your big night tonight, Martin, isn’t it?” I nodded, but declined to pursue the conversation, leaving her free to talk to Daniel.

It was dusk by the time the monastery came into sight, a conical tower built from at least ten thousand hulls, rising up from the water in the stylized form of Beatrice’s spaceship. Aimed at the sky, not down into the depths. Though some commentators on the Scriptures insisted that the spaceship itself had sunk forever, and Beatrice had risen from the water unaided, it was still the definitive symbol of Her victory over Death. For the three days of Her separation from God, all such buildings stood in darkness, but that was half a year away, and now the monastery shone from every porthole.

There was a narrow tunnel leading into the base of the tower; the launches detected its scent in the water and filed in one by one. I knew they didn’t have souls, but I wondered what it would have been like for them if they’d been aware of their actions. Normally they rested in the dock of a single hull, a pouch of boatskin that secured them but still left them largely exposed. Maybe being drawn instinctively into this vast structure would have felt even safer, even more comforting, than docking with their home boat. When I said something to this effect, Rachel, in the launch behind me, sniggered. Agnes said, “Don’t be horrible.”

The walls of the tunnel phosphoresced pale green, but the opening ahead was filled with white lamplight, dazzlingly richer and brighter. We emerged into a canal circling a vast atrium, and continued around it until the launches found empty docks.

As we disembarked, every footstep, every splash, echoed back at us. I looked up at the ceiling, a dome spliced together from hundreds of curved triangular hull sections, tattooed with scenes from the Scriptures. The original illustrations were more than a thousand years old, but the living boatskin degraded the pigments on a time scale of decades, so the monks had to constantly renew them.

“Beatrice Joining the Angels” was my favorite. Because the Angels weren’t flesh, they didn’t grow inside their mothers; they just appeared from nowhere in the streets of the Immaterial Cities. In the picture on the ceiling, Beatrice’s immaterial body was half-formed, with cherubs still working to clothe the immaterial bones of Her legs and arms in immaterial muscles, veins, and skin. A few Angels in luminous robes were glancing sideways at Her, but you could tell they weren’t particularly impressed. They’d had no way of knowing, then, who She was.

A corridor with its own smaller illustrations led from the atrium to the meeting room. There were about fifty people in the Prayer Group—including several priests and monks, though they acted just like everyone else. In church, you followed the liturgy; the priest slotted in his or her sermon, but there was no room for the worshippers to do much more than pray or sing in unison and offer rote responses. Here it was much less formal. There were two or three different speakers every night—sometimes guests who were visiting the monastery, sometimes members of the group—and after that anyone could ask the group to pray with them, about whatever they liked.

I’d fallen behind the others, but they’d saved me an aisle seat. Agnes was to my left, then Daniel, Bartholomew and Rachel. Agnes said, “Are you nervous?”

“No.”

Daniel laughed, as if this claim was ridiculous.

I said, “I’m not.” I’d meant to sound loftily unperturbed, but the words came out sullen and childish.

The first two speakers were both lay theologians, Firmlanders who were visiting the monastery. One gave a talk about people who belonged to false religions, and how they were all—in effect—worshipping Beatrice, but just didn’t know it. He said they wouldn’t be damned, because they’d had no choice about the cultures they were born into. Beatrice would know they’d meant well, and forgive them.

I wanted this to be true, but it made no sense to me. Either Beatrice was the Daughter of God, and everyone who thought otherwise had turned away from Her into the darkness, or . . . there was no “or.” I only had to close my eyes and feel Her presence to know that. Still, everyone applauded when the man finished, and all the questions people asked seemed sympathetic to his views, so perhaps his arguments had simply been too subtle for me to follow.

The second speaker referred to Beatrice as “the Holy Jester,” and rebuked us severely for not paying enough attention to Her sense of humor. She cited events in the Scriptures which she said were practical jokes, and then went on at some length about “the healing power of laughter.” It was all about as gripping as a lecture on nutrition and hygiene; I struggled to keep my eyes open. At the end, no one could think of any questions.

Then Carol, who was running the meeting, said, “Now Martin is going to give witness to the power of Beatrice in his life.”

Everyone applauded encouragingly. As I rose to my feet and stepped into the aisle, Daniel leaned toward Agnes and whispered sarcastically, “This should be good.”

I stood at the lectern and gave the talk I’d been rehearsing for days. Beatrice, I said, was beside me now whatever I did: whether I studied or worked, ate or swam, or just sat and watched the stars. When I woke in the morning and looked into my heart, She was there without fail, offering me strength and guidance. When I lay in bed at night, I feared nothing, because I knew She was watching over me. Before my Drowning, I’d been unsure of my faith, but now I’d never again be able to doubt that the Daughter of God had become flesh, and died, and conquered Death, because of Her great love for us.

It was all true, but even as I said these things I couldn’t get Daniel’s sarcastic words out of my mind. I glanced over at the row where I’d been sitting, at the people I’d traveled with. What did I have in common with them, really? Rachel and Bartholomew were married. Bartholomew and Daniel had studied together, and still played on the same dive-ball team. Daniel and Agnes were probably in love. And Daniel was my brother . . . but the only difference that seemed to make was the fact that he could belittle me far more efficiently than any stranger.

In the open prayer that followed, I paid no attention to the problems and blessings people were sharing with the group. I tried silently calling on Beatrice to dissolve the knot of anger in my heart. But I couldn’t do it; I’d turned too far away from Her.

When the meeting was over, and people started moving into the adjoining room to talk for a while, I hung back. When the others were out of sight, I ducked into the corridor, and headed straight for the launch.

Daniel could get a ride home with his friends; it wasn’t far out of their way. I’d wait a short distance from the boat until he caught up; if my parents saw me arrive on my own I’d be in trouble. Daniel would be angry, of course, but he wouldn’t betray me.

Once I’d freed the launch from its dock, it knew exactly where to go: around the canal, back to the tunnel, out into the open sea. As I sped across the calm, dark water, I felt the presence of Beatrice returning, which seemed like a sign that She understood that I’d had to get away.

I leaned over and dipped my hand in the water, feeling the current the launch was generating by shuffling ions in and out of the cells of its skin. The outer hull glowed a phosphorescent blue, more to warn other vessels than to light the way. In the time of Beatrice, one of her followers had sat in the Immaterial City and designed this creature from scratch. It gave me a kind of vertigo, just imagining the things the Angels had known. I wasn’t sure why so much of it had been lost, but I wanted to rediscover it all. Even the Deep Church taught that there was nothing wrong with that, so long as we didn’t use it to try to become immortal again.

The monastery shrank to a blur of light on the horizon, and there was no other beacon visible on the water, but I could read the stars, and sense the field lines, so I knew the launch was heading in the right direction.

When I noticed a blue speck in the distance, it was clear that it wasn’t Daniel and the others chasing after me; it was coming from the wrong direction. As I watched the launch drawing nearer I grew anxious; if this was someone I knew, and I couldn’t come up with a good reason to be traveling alone, word would get back to my parents.

Before I could make out anyone on board, a voice shouted, “Can you help me? I’m lost!”

I thought for a while before replying. The voice sounded almost matter-of-fact, making light of this blunt admission of helplessness, but it was no joke. If you were sick, your diurnal sense and your field sense could both become scrambled, making the stars much harder to read. It had happened to me a couple of times, and it had been a horrible experience—even standing safely on the deck of our boat. This late at night, a launch with only its field sense to guide it could lose track of its position, especially if you were trying to take it somewhere it hadn’t been before.

I shouted back our coordinates, and the time. I was fairly confident that I had them down to the nearest hundred microradians, and few hundred tau.

“That can’t be right! Can I approach? Let our launches talk?”

I hesitated. It had been drummed into me for as long as I could remember that if I ever found myself alone on the water, I should give other vessels a wide berth unless I knew the people on board. But Beatrice was with me, and if someone needed help it was wrong to refuse them.

“All right!” I stopped dead, and waited for the stranger to close the gap. As the launch drew up beside me, I was surprised to see that the passenger was a young man. He looked about Bartholomew’s age, but he’d sounded much older.

We didn’t need to tell the launches what to do; proximity was enough to trigger a chemical exchange of information. The man said, “Out on your own?”

“I’m traveling with my brother and his friends. I just went ahead a bit.”

That made him smile. “Sent you on your way, did they? What do you think they’re getting up to, back there?” I didn’t reply; that was no way to talk about people you didn’t even know. The man scanned the horizon, then spread his arms in a gesture of sympathy. “You must be feeling left out.”

I shook my head. There was a pair of binoculars on the floor behind him; even before he’d called out for help, he could have seen that I was alone.

He jumped deftly between the launches, landing on the stern bench. I said, “There’s nothing to steal.” My skin was crawling, more with disbelief than fear. He was standing on the bench in the starlight, pulling a knife from his belt. The details—the pattern carved into the handle, the serrated edge of the blade—only made it seem more like a dream.

He coughed, suddenly nervous. “Just do what I tell you, and you won’t get hurt.”

I filled my lungs and shouted for help with all the strength I had; I knew there was no one in earshot, but I thought it might still frighten him off. He looked around, more startled than angry, as if he couldn’t quite believe I’d waste so much effort. I jumped backward, into the water. A moment later I heard him follow me.

I found the blue glow of the launches above me, then swam hard, down and away from them, without wasting time searching for his shadow. Blood was pounding in my ears, but I knew I was moving almost silently; however fast he was, in the darkness he could swim right past me without knowing it. If he didn’t catch me soon he’d probably return to the launch and wait to spot me when I came up for air. I had to surface far enough away to be invisible—even with the binoculars.

I was terrified that I’d feel a hand close around my ankle at any moment, but Beatrice was with me. As I swam, I thought back to my Drowning, and Her presence grew stronger than ever. When my lungs were almost bursting, She helped me to keep going, my limbs moving mechanically, blotches of light floating in front of my eyes. When I finally knew I had to surface, I turned face-up and ascended slowly, then lay on my back with only my mouth and nose above the water, refusing the temptation to stick my head up and look around.

I filled and emptied my lungs a few times, then dived again.

The fifth time I surfaced, I dared to look back. I couldn’t see either launch. I raised myself higher, then turned a full circle in case I’d grown disoriented, but nothing came into sight.

I checked the stars, and my field sense. The launches should not have been over the horizon. I trod water, riding the swell, and tried not to think about how tired I was. It was at least two milliradians to the nearest boat. Good swimmers—some younger than I was—competed in marathons over distances like that, but I’d never even aspired to such feats of endurance. Unprepared, in the middle of the night, I knew I wouldn’t make it.

If the man had given up on me, would he have taken our launch? When they cost so little, and the markings were so hard to change? That would be nothing but an admission of guilt. So why couldn’t I see it? Either he’d sent it on its way, or it had decided to return home itself.

I knew the path it would have taken; I would have seen it go by, if I’d been looking for it when I’d surfaced before. But I had no hope of catching it now.

I began to pray. I knew I’d been wrong to leave the others, but I asked for forgiveness, and felt it being granted. I watched the horizon almost calmly—smiling at the blue flashes of meteors burning up high above the ocean—Beatrice would not abandon me.

I was still praying—treading water, shivering from the cool of the air—when a blue light appeared in the distance. It disappeared as the swell took me down again, but there was no mistaking it for a shooting star. Was this Daniel and the others—or the stranger? I didn’t have long to decide; if I wanted to get within earshot as they passed, I’d have to swim hard.

I closed my eyes and prayed for guidance. Please Holy Beatrice, let me know. Joy flooded through my mind, instantly: it was them, I was certain of it. I set off as fast as I could.

I started yelling before I could see how many passengers there were, but I knew Beatrice would never allow me to be mistaken. A flare shot up from the launch, revealing four figures standing side by side, scanning the water. I shouted with jubilation, and waved my arms. Someone finally spotted me, and they brought the launch around toward me. By the time I was on board I was so charged up on adrenaline and relief that I almost believed I could have dived back into the water and raced them home.

I thought Daniel would be angry, but when I described what had happened all he said was, “We’d better get moving.”

Agnes embraced me. Bartholomew gave me an almost respectful look, but Rachel muttered sourly, “You’re an idiot, Martin. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

I said, “I know.”

Our parents were standing on deck. The empty launch had arrived some time ago; they’d been about to set out to look for us. When the others had departed I began recounting everything again, this time trying to play down any element of danger.

Before I’d finished, my mother grabbed Daniel by the front of his shirt and started slapping him. “I trusted you with him? You maniac! I trusted you!” Daniel half raised his arm to block her, but then let it drop and just turned his face to the deck.

I burst into tears. “It was my fault!” Our parents never struck us; I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

My father said soothingly, “Look . . . he’s home now. He’s safe. No one touched him.” He put an arm around my shoulders and asked warily, “That’s right, Martin, isn’t it?”

I nodded tearfully. This was worse than anything that had happened on the launch, or in the water; I felt a thousand times more helpless, a thousand times more like a child.

I said, “Beatrice was watching over me.”

My mother rolled her eyes and laughed wildly, letting go of Daniel’s shirt. “Beatrice? Beatrice? Don’t you know what could have happened to you? You’re too young to have given him what he wanted. He would have had to use the knife.”

The chill of my wet clothes seemed to penetrate deeper. I swayed unsteadily, but fought to stay upright. Then I whispered stubbornly, “Beatrice was there.”

My father said, “Go and get changed, or you’re going to freeze to death.”

I lay in bed listening to them shout at Daniel. When he finally came down the ladder I was so sick with shame that I wished I’d drowned.

He said, “Are you all right?”

There was nothing I could say. I couldn’t ask him to forgive me.

“Martin?” Daniel turned on the lamp. His face was streaked with tears; he laughed softly, wiping them away. “Fuck, you had me worried. Don’t ever do anything like that again.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay.” That was it; no shouting, no recriminations. “Do you want to pray with me?”

We knelt side by side, praying for our parents to be at peace, praying for the man who’d tried to hurt me. I started trembling; everything was catching up with me. Suddenly, words began gushing from my mouth—words I neither recognized nor understood, though I knew I was praying for everything to be all right with Daniel, praying that our parents would stop blaming him for my stupidity.

The strange words kept flowing out of me, an incomprehensible torrent somehow imbued with everything I was feeling. I knew what was happening: Beatrice had given me the Angels’ tongue. We’d had to surrender all knowledge of it when we became flesh, but sometimes She granted people the ability to pray this way, because the language of the Angels could express things we could no longer put into words. Daniel had been able to do it ever since his Drowning, but it wasn’t something you could teach, or even something you could ask for.

When I finally stopped, my mind was racing. “Maybe Beatrice planned everything that happened tonight? Maybe She arranged it all, to lead up to this moment!”

Daniel shook his head, wincing slightly. “Don’t get carried away. You have the gift; just accept it.” He nudged me with his shoulder. “Now get into bed, before we’re both in more trouble.”

I lay awake almost until dawn, overwhelmed with happiness. Daniel had forgiven me. Beatrice had protected and blessed me. I felt no more shame, just humility and amazement. I knew I’d done nothing to deserve it, but my life was wrapped in the love of God.

3

According to the Scriptures, the oceans of Earth were storm-tossed, and filled with dangerous creatures. But on Covenant, the oceans were calm, and the Angels created nothing in the ecopoiesis that would harm their own mortal incarnations. The four continents and the four oceans were rendered equally hospitable, and just as women and men were made indistinguishable in the sight of God, so were Freelanders and Firmlanders. (Some commentators insisted that this was literally true: God chose to blind Herself to where we lived, and whether or not we’d been born with a penis. I thought that was a beautiful idea, even if I couldn’t quite grasp the logistics of it.)

I’d heard that certain obscure sects taught that half the Angels had actually become embodied as a separate people who could live in the water and breathe beneath the surface, but then God destroyed them because they were a mockery of Beatrice’s death. No legitimate church took this notion seriously, though, and archaeologists had found no trace of these mythical doomed cousins. Humans were humans, there was only one kind. Freelanders and Firmlanders could even intermarry—if they could agree where to live.

When I was fifteen, Daniel became engaged to Agnes from the Prayer Group. That made sense: they’d be spared the explanations and arguments about the Drowning that they might have faced with partners who weren’t so blessed. Agnes was a Freelander, of course, but a large branch of her family, and a smaller branch of ours, were Firmlanders, so after long negotiations it was decided that the wedding would be held in Ferez, a coastal town.

I went with my father to pick a hull to be fitted out as Daniel and Agnes’s boat. The breeder, Diana, had a string of six mature hulls in tow, and my father insisted on walking out onto their backs and personally examining each one for imperfections.

By the time we reached the fourth I was losing patience. I muttered, “It’s the skin underneath that matters.” In fact, you could tell a lot about a hull’s general condition from up here, but there wasn’t much point worrying about a few tiny flaws high above the waterline.

My father nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true. You’d better get in the water and check their undersides.”

“I’m not doing that.” We couldn’t simply trust this woman to sell us a healthy hull for a decent price; that wouldn’t have been sufficiently embarrassing.

“Martin! This is for the safety of your brother and sister-in-law.”

I glanced at Diana to show her where my sympathies lay, then slipped off my shirt and dived in. I swam down to the last hull in the row, then ducked beneath it. I began the job with perverse thoroughness, running my fingers over every square nanoradian of skin. I was determined to annoy my father by taking even longer than he wanted—and determined to impress Diana by examining all six hulls without coming up for air.

An unfitted hull rode higher in the water than a boat full of furniture and junk, but I was surprised to discover that even in the creature’s shadow there was enough light for me to see the skin clearly. After a while I realized that, paradoxically, this was because the water was slightly cloudier than usual, and whatever the fine particles were, they were scattering sunlight into the shadows.

Moving through the warm, bright water, feeling the love of Beatrice more strongly than I had for a long time, it was impossible to remain angry with my father. He wanted the best hull for Daniel and Agnes, and so did I. As for impressing Diana . . . who was I kidding? She was a grown woman, at least as old as Agnes, and highly unlikely to view me as anything more than a child. By the time I’d finished with the third hull I was feeling short of breath, so I surfaced and reported cheerfully, “No blemishes so far!”

Diana smiled down at me. “You’ve got strong lungs.”

All six hulls were in perfect condition. We ended up taking the one at the end of the row, because it was easiest to detach.

Ferez was built on the mouth of a river, but the docks were some distance upstream. That helped to prepare us; the gradual deadening of the waves was less of a shock than an instant transition from sea to land would have been. When I jumped from the deck to the pier, though, it was like colliding with something massive and unyielding, the rock of the planet itself. I’d been on land twice before, for less than a day on both occasions. The wedding celebrations would last ten days, but at least we’d still be able to sleep on the boat.

As the four of us walked along the crowded streets, heading for the ceremonial hall where everything but the wedding sacrament itself would take place, I stared uncouthly at everyone in sight. Almost no one was barefoot like us, and after a few hundred tau on the paving stones—much rougher than any deck—I could understand why. Our clothes were different, our skin was darker, our accent was unmistakably foreign . . . but no one stared back. Freelanders were hardly a novelty here. That made me even more self-conscious; the curiosity I felt wasn’t mutual.

In the hall, I joined in with the preparations, mainly just lugging furniture around under the directions of one of Agnes’s tyrannical uncles. It was a new kind of shock to see so many Freelanders together in this alien environment, and stranger still when I realized that I couldn’t necessarily spot the Firmlanders among us; there was no sharp dividing line in physical appearance, or even clothing. I began to feel slightly guilty; if God couldn’t tell the difference, what was I doing hunting for the signs?

At noon, we all ate outside, in a garden behind the hall. The grass was soft, but it made my feet itch. Daniel had gone off to be fitted for wedding clothes, and my parents were performing some vital task of their own; I only recognized a handful of the people around me. I sat in the shade of a tree, pretending to be oblivious to the plant’s enormous size and bizarre anatomy. I wondered if we’d take a siesta; I couldn’t imagine falling asleep on the grass.

Someone sat down beside me, and I turned.

“I’m Lena. Agnes’s second cousin.”

“I’m Daniel’s brother, Martin.” I hesitated, then offered her my hand; she took it, smiling slightly. I’d awkwardly kissed a dozen strangers that morning, all distant prospective relatives, but this time I didn’t dare.

“Brother of the groom, doing grunt work with the rest of us.” She shook her head in mocking admiration.

I desperately wanted to say something witty in reply, but an attempt that failed would be even worse than merely being dull. “Do you live in Ferez?”

“No, Mitar. Inland from here. We’re staying with my uncle.” She pulled a face. “Along with ten other people. No privacy. It’s awful.”

I said, “It was easy for us. We just brought our home with us.” You idiot. As if she didn’t know that.

Lena smiled. “I haven’t been on a boat in years. You’ll have to give me a tour sometime.”

“Of course. I’d be happy to.” I knew she was only making small talk; she’d never take me up on the offer.

She said, “Is it just you and Daniel?”

“Yes.”

“You must be close.”

I shrugged. “What about you?”

“Two brothers. Both younger. Eight and nine. They’re all right, I suppose.” She rested her chin on one hand and gazed at me coolly.

I looked away, disconcerted by more than my wishful thinking about what lay behind that gaze. Unless her parents had been awfully young when she was born, it didn’t seem likely that more children were planned. So did an odd number in the family mean that one had died, or that the custom of equal numbers carried by each parent wasn’t followed where she lived? I’d studied the region less than a year ago, but I had a terrible memory for things like that.

Lena said, “You looked so lonely, off here on your own.”

I turned back to her, surprised. “I’m never lonely.”

“No?”

She seemed genuinely curious. I opened my mouth to tell her about Beatrice, but then changed my mind. The few times I’d said anything to friends—ordinary friends, not Drowned ones—I’d regretted it. Not everyone had laughed, but they’d all been acutely embarrassed by the revelation.

I said, “Mitar has a million people, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“An area of ocean the same size would have a population of ten.”

Lena frowned. “That’s a bit too deep for me, I’m afraid.” She rose to her feet. “But maybe you’ll think of a way of putting it that even a Firmlander can understand.” She raised a hand goodbye and started walking away.

I said, “Maybe I will.”

The wedding took place in Ferez’s Deep Church, a spaceship built of stone, glass, and wood. It looked almost like a parody of the churches I was used to, though it probably bore a closer resemblance to the Angels’ real ship than anything made of living hulls.

Daniel and Agnes stood before the priest, beneath the apex of the building. Their closest relatives stood behind them in two angled lines on either side. My father—Daniel’s mother—was first in our line, followed by my own mother, then me. That put me level with Rachel, who kept shooting disdainful glances my way. After my misadventure, Daniel and I had eventually been allowed to travel to the Prayer Group meetings again, but less than a year later I’d lost interest, and soon after I’d also stopped going to church. Beatrice was with me, constantly, and no gatherings or ceremonies could bring me any closer to Her. I knew Daniel disapproved of this attitude, but he didn’t lecture me about it, and my parents had accepted my decision without any fuss. If Rachel thought I was some kind of apostate, that was her problem.

The priest said, “Which of you brings a bridge to this marriage?”

Daniel said, “I do.” In the Transitional ceremony, they no longer asked this; it was really no one else’s business—and in a way the question was almost sacrilegious. Still, Deep Church theologians had explained away greater doctrinal inconsistencies than this, so who was I to argue?

“Do you, Daniel and Agnes, solemnly declare that this bridge will be the bond of your union until death, to be shared with no other person?”

They replied together, “We solemnly declare.”

“Do you solemnly declare that as you share this bridge, so shall you share every joy and every burden of marriage—equally?”

“We solemnly declare.”

My mind wandered; I thought of Lena’s parents. Maybe one of the family’s children was adopted. Lena and I had managed to sneak away to the boat three times so far, early in the evenings while my parents were still out. We’d done things I’d never done with anyone else, but I still hadn’t had the courage to ask her anything so personal.

Suddenly the priest was saying, “In the eyes of God, you are one now.” My father started weeping softly. As Daniel and Agnes kissed, I felt a surge of contradictory emotions. I’d miss Daniel, but I was glad that I’d finally have a chance to live apart from him. And I wanted him to be happy—I was jealous of his happiness already—but at the same time, the thought of marrying someone like Agnes filled me with claustrophobia. She was kind, devout, and generous. She and Daniel would treat each other, and their children, well. But neither of them would present the slightest challenge to the other’s most cherished beliefs.

This recipe for harmony terrified me. Not least because I was afraid that Beatrice approved, and wanted me to follow it myself.

Lena put her hand over mine and pushed my fingers deeper into her, gasping. We were sitting on my bunk, face to face, my legs stretched out flat, hers arching over them.

She slid the palm of her other hand over my penis. I bent forward and kissed her, moving my thumb over the place she’d shown me, and her shudder ran through both of us.

“Martin?”

“What?”

She stroked me with one fingertip; somehow it was far better than having her whole hand wrapped around me.

“Do you want to come inside me?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

She kept moving her finger, tracing the same line; I could barely think. Why not? “You might get pregnant.”

She laughed. “Don’t be stupid. I can control that. You’ll learn, too. It’s just a matter of experience.”

I said, “I’ll use my tongue. You liked that.”

“I did. But I want something more now. And you do, too. I can tell.” She smiled imploringly. “It’ll be nice for both of us, I promise. Nicer than anything you’ve done in your life.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

Lena made a sound of disbelief, and ran her thumb around the base of my penis. “I can tell you haven’t put this inside anyone before. But that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Who said I was ashamed?”

She nodded gravely. “All right. Frightened.”

I pulled my hand free, and banged my head on the bunk above us. Daniel’s old bunk.

Lena reached up and put her hand on my cheek.

I said, “I can’t. We’re not married.”

She frowned. “I heard you’d given up on all that.”

“All what?”

“Religion.”

“Then you were misinformed.”

Lena said, “This is what the Angels made our bodies to do. How can there be anything sinful in that?” She ran her hand down my neck, over my chest.

“But the bridge is meant to . . .” What? All the Scriptures said was that it was meant to unite men and women, equally. And the Scriptures said God couldn’t tell women and men apart, but in the Deep Church, in the sight of God, the priest had just made Daniel claim priority. So why should I care what any priest thought?

I said, “All right.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” I took her face in my hands and started kissing her. After a while, she reached down and guided me in. The shock of pleasure almost made me come, but I stopped myself somehow. When the risk of that had lessened, we wrapped our arms around each other and rocked slowly back and forth.

It wasn’t better than my Drowning, but it was so much like it that it had to be blessed by Beatrice. And as we moved in each other’s arms, I grew determined to ask Lena to marry me. She was intelligent and strong. She questioned everything. It didn’t matter that she was a Firmlander; we could meet halfway, we could live in Ferez.

I felt myself ejaculate. “I’m sorry.”

Lena whispered, “That’s all right, that’s all right. Just keep moving.”

I was still hard; that had never happened before. I could feel her muscles clenching and releasing rhythmically, in time with our motion, and her slow exhalations. Then she cried out, and dug her fingers into my back. I tried to slide partly out of her again, but it was impossible, she was holding me too tightly. This was it. There was no going back.

Now I was afraid. “I’ve never—” Tears were welling up in my eyes; I tried to shake them away.

“I know. And I know it’s frightening.” She embraced me more tightly. “Just feel it, though. Isn’t it wonderful?”

I was hardly aware of my motionless penis anymore, but there was liquid fire flowing through my groin, waves of pleasure spreading deeper. I said, “Yes. Is it like that for you?”

“It’s different. But it’s just as good. You’ll find out for yourself, soon enough.”

“I hadn’t been thinking that far ahead,” I confessed.

Lena giggled. “You’ve got a whole new life in front of you, Martin. You don’t know what you’ve been missing.”

She kissed me, then started pulling away. I cried out in pain, and she stopped. “I’m sorry. I’ll take it slowly.” I reached down to touch the place where we were joined; there was a trickle of blood escaping from the base of my penis.

Lena said, “You’re not going to faint on me, are you?”

“Don’t be stupid.” I did feel queasy, though. “What if I’m not ready? What if I can’t do it?”

“Then I’ll lose my hold in a few hundred tau. The Angels weren’t completely stupid.”

I ignored this blasphemy, though it wasn’t just any Angel who’d designed our bodies—it was Beatrice Herself. I said, “Just promise you won’t use a knife.”

“That’s not funny. That really happens to people.”

“I know.” I kissed her shoulder. “I think—”

Lena straightened her legs slightly, and I felt the core break free inside me. Blood flowed warmly from my groin, but the pain had changed from a threat of damage to mere tenderness; my nervous system no longer spanned the lesion. I asked Lena, “Do you feel it? Is it part of you?”

“Not yet. It takes a while for the connections to form.” She ran her fingers over my lips. “Can I stay inside you, until they have?”

I nodded happily. I hardly cared about the sensations anymore; it was just contemplating the miracle of being able to give a part of my body to Lena that was wonderful. I’d studied the physiological details long ago, everything from the exchange of nutrients to the organ’s independent immune system—and I knew that Beatrice had used many of the same techniques for the bridge as She’d used with gestating embryos—but to witness Her ingenuity so dramatically at work in my own flesh was both shocking and intensely moving. Only giving birth could bring me closer to Her than this.

When we finally separated, though, I wasn’t entirely prepared for the sight of what emerged. “Oh, that is disgusting!”

Lena shook her head, laughing. “New ones always look a bit . . . encrusted. Most of that stuff will wash away, and the rest will fall off in a few kilotau.”

I bunched up the sheet to find a clean spot, then dabbed at my—her—penis. My newly formed vagina had stopped bleeding, but it was finally dawning on me just how much mess we’d made. “I’m going to have to wash this before my parents get back. I can put it out to dry in the morning, after they’re gone, but if I don’t wash it now they’ll smell it.”

We cleaned ourselves enough to put on shorts, then Lena helped me carry the sheet up onto the deck and drape it in the water from the laundry hooks. The fibers in the sheet would use nutrients in the water to power the self-cleaning process.

The docks appeared deserted; most of the boats nearby belonged to people who’d come for the wedding. I’d told my parents I was too tired to stay on at the celebrations; tonight they’d continue until dawn, though Daniel and Agnes would probably leave by midnight. To do what Lena and I had just done.

“Martin? Are you shivering?”

There was nothing to be gained by putting it off. Before whatever courage I had could desert me, I said, “Will you marry me?”

“Very funny. Oh—” Lena took my hand. “I’m sorry, I never know when you’re joking.”

I said, “We’ve exchanged the bridge. It doesn’t matter that we weren’t married first, but it would make things easier if we went along with convention.”

“Martin—”

“Or we could just live together, if that’s what you want. I don’t care. We’re already married in the eyes of Beatrice.”

Lena bit her lip. “I don’t want to live with you.”

“I could move to Mitar. I could get a job.”

Lena shook her head, still holding my hand. She said firmly, “No. You knew, before we did anything, what it would and wouldn’t mean. You don’t want to marry me, and I don’t want to marry you. So snap out of it.”

I pulled my hand free, and sat down on the deck. What had I done? I’d thought I’d had Beatrice’s blessing, I’d thought this was all in Her plan . . . but I’d just been fooling myself.

Lena sat beside me. “What are you worried about? Your parents finding out?”

“Yes.” That was the least of it, but it seemed pointless trying to explain the truth. I turned to her. “When could we—?”

“Not for about ten days. And sometimes it’s longer after the first time.”

I’d known as much, but I’d hoped her experience might contradict my theoretical knowledge. Ten days. We’d both be gone by then.

Lena said, “What do you think, you can never get married now? How many marriages do you imagine involve the bridge one of the partners was born with?”

“Nine out of ten. Unless they’re both women.”

Lena gave me a look that hovered between tenderness and incredulity. “My estimate is about one in five.”

I shook my head. “I don’t care. We’ve exchanged the bridge, we have to be together.” Lena’s expression hardened, then so did my resolve. “Or I have to get it back.”

“Martin, that’s ridiculous. You’ll find another lover soon enough, and then you won’t even know what you were worried about. Or maybe you’ll fall in love with a nice Deep Church boy, and then you’ll both be glad you’ve been spared the trouble of getting rid of the extra bridge.”

“Yeah? Or maybe he’ll just be disgusted that I couldn’t wait until I really was doing it for him!”

Lena groaned, and stared up at the sky. “Did I say something before about the Angels getting things right? Ten thousand years without bodies, and they thought they were qualified—”

I cut her off angrily. “Don’t be so fucking blasphemous? Beatrice knew exactly what She was doing. If we mess it up, that’s our fault!”

Lena said, matter-of-factly, “In ten years’ time, there’ll be a pill you’ll be able to take to keep the bridge from being passed, and another pill to make it pass when it otherwise wouldn’t. We’ll win control of our bodies back from the Angels, and start doing exactly what we like with them.”

“That’s sick. That really is sick.”

I stared at the deck, suffocating in misery. This was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? A lover who was the very opposite of Daniel’s sweet, pious Agnes? Except that in my fantasies, we’d always had a lifetime to debate our philosophical differences. Not one night to be torn apart by them.

I had nothing to lose, now. I told Lena about my Drowning. She didn’t laugh; she listened in silence.

I said, “Do you believe me?”

“Of course.” She hesitated. “But have you ever wondered if there might be another explanation for the way you felt, in the water that night? You were starved of oxygen—”

“People are starved of oxygen all the time. Freelander kids spend half their lives trying to stay underwater longer than the last time.”

Lena nodded. “Sure. But that’s not quite the same, is it? You were pushed beyond the time you could have stayed under by sheer willpower. And . . . you were cued, you were told what to expect.”

“That’s not true. Daniel never told me what it would be like. I was surprised when it happened.” I gazed back at her calmly, ready to counter any ingenious hypothesis she came up with. I felt chastened, but almost at peace now. This was what Beatrice had expected of me, before we’d exchanged the bridge: not a dead ceremony in a dead building, but the honesty to tell Lena exactly who she’d be making love with.

We argued almost until sunrise; neither of us convinced the other of anything. Lena helped me drag the clean sheet out of the water and hide it below deck. Before she left, she wrote down the address of a friend’s house in Mitar, and a place and time we could meet.

Keeping that appointment was the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life. I spent three solid days ingratiating myself with my Mitar-based cousins, to the point where they would have had to be openly hostile to get out of inviting me to stay with them after the wedding. Once I was there, I had to scheme and lie relentlessly to ensure that I was free of them on the predetermined day.

In a stranger’s house, in the middle of the afternoon, Lena and I joylessly reversed everything that had happened between us. I’d been afraid that the act itself might rekindle all my stupid illusions, but when we parted on the street outside, I felt as if I hardly knew her.

I ached even more than I had on the boat, and my groin was palpably swollen, but in a couple of days, I knew, nothing less than a lover’s touch or a medical examination would reveal what I’d done.

In the train back to the coast, I replayed the entire sequence of events in my mind, again and again. How could I have been so wrong? People always talked about the power of sex to confuse and deceive you, but I’d always believed that was just cheap cynicism. Besides, I hadn’t blindly surrendered to sex; I’d thought I’d been guided by Beatrice.

If I could be wrong about that—

I’d have to be more careful. Beatrice always spoke clearly, but I’d have to listen to Her with much more patience and humility.

That was it. That was what She’d wanted me to learn. I finally relaxed and looked out the window, at the blur of forest passing by, another triumph of the ecopoiesis. If I needed proof that there was always another chance, it was all around me now. The Angels had traveled as far from God as anyone could travel, and yet God had turned around and given them Covenant.

4

I was nineteen when I returned to Mitar, to study at the city’s university. Originally, I’d planned to specialize in the ecopoiesis—and to study much closer to home—but in the end I’d had to accept the nearest thing on offer, geographically and intellectually: working with Barat, a Firmlander biologist whose real interest was native microfauna. “Angelic technology is a fascinating subject in its own right,” he told me. “But we can’t hope to work backward and decipher terrestrial evolution from anything the Angels created. The best we can do is try to understand what Covenant’s own biosphere was like, before we arrived and disrupted it.”

I managed to persuade him to accept a compromise: my thesis would involve the impact of the ecopoiesis on the native microfauna. That would give me an excuse to study the Angels’ inventions, alongside the drab unicellular creatures that had inhabited Covenant for the last billion years.

“The impact of the ecopoiesis” was far too broad a subject, of course; with Barat’s help, I narrowed it down to one particular unresolved question. There had long been geological evidence that the surface waters of the ocean had become both more alkaline, and less oxygenated, as new species shifted the balance of dissolved gases. Some native species must have retreated from the wave of change, and perhaps some had been wiped out completely, but there was a thriving population of zooytes in the upper layers at present. So had they been there all along, adapting in situ? Or had they migrated from somewhere else?

Mitar’s distance from the coast was no real handicap in studying the ocean; the university mounted regular expeditions, and I had plenty of library and lab work to do before embarking on anything so obvious as gathering living samples in their natural habitat. What’s more, river water, and even rainwater, was teeming with closely related species, and since it was possible that these were the reservoirs from which the “ravaged” ocean had been recolonized, I had plenty of subjects worth studying close at hand.

Barat set high standards, but he was no tyrant, and his other students made me feel welcome. I was homesick, but not morbidly so, and I took a kind of giddy pleasure from the vivid dreams and underlying sense of disorientation that living on land induced in me. I wasn’t exactly fulfilling my childhood ambition to uncover the secrets of the Angels—and I had fewer opportunities than I’d hoped to get side-tracked on the ecopoiesis itself—but once I started delving into the minutiae of Covenant’s original, wholly undesigned biochemistry, it turned out to be complex and elegant enough to hold my attention.

I was only miserable when I let myself think about sex. I didn’t want to end up like Daniel, so seeking out another Drowned person to marry was the last thing on my mind. But I couldn’t face the prospect of repeating my mistake with Lena; I had no intention of becoming physically intimate with anyone unless we were already close enough for me to tell them about the most important thing in my life. But that wasn’t the order in which things happened here. After a few humiliating attempts to swim against the current, I gave up on the whole idea, and threw myself into my work instead.

Of course, it was possible to socialize at Mitar University without actually exchanging bridges with anyone. I joined an informal discussion group on Angelic culture, which met in a small room in the students’ building every tenth night—just like the old Prayer Group, though I was under no illusion that this one would be stacked with believers. It hardly needed to be. The Angels’ legacy could be analyzed perfectly well without reference to Beatrice’s divinity. The Scriptures were written long after the Crossing by people of a simpler age; there was no reason to treat them as infallible. If non-believers could shed some light on any aspect of the past, I had no grounds for rejecting their insights.

“It’s obvious that only one faction came to Covenant!” That was Céline, an anthropologist, a woman so much like Lena that I had to make a conscious effort to remind myself, every time I set eyes on her, that nothing could ever happen between us. “We’re not so homogeneous that we’d all choose to travel to another planet and assume a new physical form, whatever cultural forces might drive one small group to do that. So why should the Angels have been unanimous? The other factions must still be living in the Immaterial Cities, on Earth, and on other planets.”

“Then why haven’t they contacted us? In twenty thousand years, you’d think they’d drop in and say hello once or twice.” David was a mathematician, a Freelander from the southern ocean.

Céline replied, “The attitude of the Angels who came here wouldn’t have encouraged visitors. If all we have is a story of the Crossing in which Beatrice persuades every last Angel in existence to give up immortality—a version that simply erases everyone else from history—that doesn’t suggest much of a desire to remain in touch.”

A woman I didn’t know interjected, “It might not have been so clear-cut from the start, though. There’s evidence of settler-level technology being deployed for more than three thousand years after the Crossing, long after it was needed for the ecopoiesis. New species continued to be created, engineering projects continued to use advanced materials and energy sources. But then in less than a century, it all stopped. The Scriptures merge three separate decisions into one: renouncing immortality, migrating to Covenant, and abandoning the technology that might have provided an escape route if anyone changed their mind. But we know it didn’t happen like that. Three thousand years after the Crossing, something changed. The whole experiment suddenly became irreversible.”

These speculations would have outraged the average pious Freelander, let alone the average Drowned one, but I listened calmly, even entertaining the possibility that some of them could be true. The love of Beatrice was the only fixed point in my cosmology; everything else was open to debate.

Still, sometimes the debate was hard to take. One night, David joined us straight from a seminar of physicists. What he’d heard from the speaker was unsettling enough, but he’d already moved beyond it to an even less palatable conclusion.

“Why did the Angels choose mortality? After ten thousand years without death, why did they throw away all the glorious possibilities ahead of them, to come and die like animals on this ball of mud?” I had to bite my tongue to keep from replying to his rhetorical question: because God is the only source of eternal life, and Beatrice showed them that all they really had was a cheap parody of that divine gift.

David paused, then offered his own answer—which was itself a kind of awful parody of Beatrice’s truth. “Because they discovered that they weren’t immortal, after all. They discovered that no one can be. We’ve always known, as they must have, that the universe is finite in space and time. It’s destined to collapse eventually: ‘the stars will fall from the sky.’ But it’s easy to imagine ways around that.” He laughed. “We don’t know enough physics yet, ourselves, to rule out anything. I’ve just heard an extraordinary woman from Tia talk about coding our minds into waves that would orbit the shrinking universe so rapidly that we could think an infinite number of thoughts before everything was crushed!” David grinned joyfully at the sheer audacity of this notion. I thought primly: what blasphemous nonsense.

Then he spread his arms and said, “Don’t you see, though? If the Angels had pinned their hopes on something like that—some ingenious trick that would keep them from sharing the fate of the universe—but then they finally gained enough knowledge to rule out every last escape route, it would have had a profound effect on them. Some small faction could then have decided that since they were mortal after all, they might as well embrace the inevitable, and come to terms with it in the way their ancestors had. In the flesh.”

Céline said thoughtfully, “And the Beatrice myth puts a religious gloss on the whole thing, but that might be nothing but a post hoc reinterpretation of a purely secular revelation.”

This was too much; I couldn’t remain silent. I said, “If Covenant really was founded by a pack of terminally depressed atheists, what could have changed their minds? Where did the desire to impose a ‘post hoc reinterpretation’ come from? If the revelation that brought the Angels here was ‘secular,’ why isn’t the whole planet still secular today?”

Someone said snidely, “Civilization collapsed. What do you expect?”

I opened my mouth to respond angrily, but Céline got in first. “No, Martin has a point. If David’s right, the rise of religion needs to be explained more urgently than ever. And I don’t think anyone’s in a position to do that yet.”

Afterward, I lay awake thinking about all the other things I should have said, all the other objections I should have raised. (And thinking about Céline. Theology aside, the whole dynamics of the group was starting to get under my skin; maybe I’d be better off spending my time in the lab, impressing Barat with my dedication to his pointless fucking microbes.

Or maybe I’d be better off at home. I could help out on the boat; my parents weren’t young anymore, and Daniel had his own family to look after.

I climbed out of bed and started packing, but halfway through I changed my mind. I didn’t really want to abandon my studies. And I’d known all along what the antidote was for all the confusion and resentment I was feeling.

I put my rucksack away, switched off the lamp, lay down, closed my eyes, and asked Beatrice to grant me peace.

I was awakened by someone banging on the door of my room. It was a fellow boarder, a young man I barely knew. He looked extremely tired and irritable, but something was overriding his irritation.

“There’s a message for you.”

My mother was sick, with an unidentified virus. The hospital was even further away than our home grounds; the trip would take almost three days.

I spent most of the journey praying, but the longer I prayed, the harder it became. I knew that it was possible to save my mother’s life with one word in the Angels’ tongue to Beatrice, but the number of ways in which I could fail, corrupting the purity of the request with my own doubts, my own selfishness, my own complacency, just kept multiplying.

The Angels created nothing in the ecopoiesis that would harm their own mortal incarnations. The native life showed no interest in parasitizing us. But over the millennia, our own DNA had shed viruses. And since Beatrice Herself chose every last base pair, that must have been what She intended. Aging was not enough. Mortal injury was not enough. Death had to come without warning, silent and invisible.

That’s what the Scriptures said.

The hospital was a maze of linked hulls. When I finally found the right passageway, the first person I recognized in the distance was Daniel. He was holding his daughter Sophie high in his outstretched arms, smiling up at her. The image dispelled all my fears in an instant; I almost fell to my knees to give thanks.

Then I saw my father. He was seated outside the room, his head in his hands. I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t need to. He wasn’t anxious, or exhausted. He was crushed.

I approached in a haze of last-minute prayers, though I knew I was asking for the past to be rewritten. Daniel started to greet me as if nothing was wrong, asking about the trip—probably trying to soften the blow—then he registered my expression and put a hand on my shoulder.

He said, “She’s with God now.”

I brushed past him and walked into the room. My mother’s body was lying on the bed, already neatly arranged: arms straightened, eyes closed. Tears ran down my cheeks, angering me. Where had my love been when it might have prevented this? When Beatrice might have heeded it?

Daniel followed me into the room, alone. I glanced back through the doorway and saw Agnes holding Sophie.

“She’s with God, Martin.” He was beaming at me as if something wonderful had happened.

I said numbly, “She wasn’t Drowned.” I was almost certain that she hadn’t been a believer at all. She’d remained in the Transitional church all her life—but that had long been the way to stay in touch with your friends when you worked on a boat nine days out of ten.

“I prayed with her, before she lost consciousness. She accepted Beatrice into her heart.”

I stared at him. Nine years ago he’d been certain: you were Drowned, or you were damned. It was as simple as that. My own conviction had softened long ago; I couldn’t believe that Beatrice really was so arbitrary and cruel. But I knew my mother would not only have refused the full-blown ritual; the whole philosophy would have been as nonsensical to her as the mechanics.

“Did she say that? Did she tell you that?”

Daniel shook his head. “But it was clear.” Filled with the love of Beatrice, he couldn’t stop smiling.

A wave of revulsion passed through me; I wanted to grind his face into the deck. He didn’t care what my mother had believed. Whatever eased his own pain, whatever put his own doubts to rest, had to be the case. To accept that she was damned—or even just dead, gone, erased—was unbearable; everything else flowed from that. There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.

I walked back into the corridor and crouched beside my father. Without looking at me, he put an arm around me and pressed me against his side. I could feel the blackness washing over him, the helplessness, the loss. When I tried to embrace him he just clutched me more tightly, forcing me to be still. I shuddered a few times, then stopped weeping. I closed my eyes and let him hold me.

I was determined to stay there beside him, facing everything he was facing. But after a while, unbidden, the old flame began to glow in the back of my skull: the old warmth, the old peace, the old certainty. Daniel was right, my mother was with God. How could I have doubted that? There was no point asking how it had come about; Beatrice’s ways were beyond my comprehension. But the one thing I knew firsthand was the strength of Her love.

I didn’t move, I didn’t free myself from my father’s desolate embrace. But I was an impostor now, merely praying for his comfort, interceding from my state of grace. Beatrice had raised me out of the darkness, and I could no longer share his pain.

5

After my mother’s death, my faith kept ceding ground, without ever really wavering. Most of the doctrinal content fell away, leaving behind a core of belief that was a great deal easier to defend. It didn’t matter if the Scriptures were superstitious nonsense or the Church was full of fools and hypocrites; Beatrice was still Beatrice, the way the sky was still blue. Whenever I heard debates between atheists and believers, I found myself increasingly on the atheists’ side—not because I accepted their conclusion for a moment, but because they were so much more honest than their opponents. Maybe the priests and theologians arguing against them had the same kind of direct, personal experience of God as I did—or maybe not, maybe they just desperately needed to believe. But they never disclosed the true source of their conviction; instead, they just made laughable attempts to “prove” God’s existence from the historical record, or from biology, astronomy, or mathematics. Daniel had been right at the age of fifteen—you couldn’t prove any such thing—and listening to these people twist logic as they tried made me squirm.

I felt guilty about leaving my father working with a hired hand, and even guiltier when he moved onto Daniel’s boat a year later, but I knew how angry it would have made him if he thought I’d abandoned my career for his sake. At times, that was the only thing that kept me in Mitar: even when I honestly wanted nothing more than to throw it all in and go back to hauling nets, I was afraid that my decision would be misinterpreted.

It took me three years to complete my thesis on the migration of aquatic zooytes in the wake of the ecopoiesis. My original hypothesis, that freshwater species had replenished the upper ocean, turned out to be false. Zooytes had no genes as such, just families of enzymes that resynthesized each other after cell division, but comparisons of these heritable molecules showed that, rather than rain bringing new life from above, an ocean-dwelling species from a much greater depth had moved steadily closer to the surface, as the Angels’ creations drained oxygen from the water. That wouldn’t have been much of a surprise, if the same techniques hadn’t also shown that several species found in river water were even closer relatives of the surface dwellers. But those freshwater species weren’t anyone’s ancestors; they were the newest migrants. Zooytes that had spent a billion years confined to the depths had suddenly been able to survive (and reproduce, and mutate) closer to the surface than ever before, and when they’d stumbled on a mutation that let them thrive in the presence of oxygen, they’d finally been in a position to make use of it. The ecopoiesis might have driven other native organisms into extinction, but the invasion from Earth had enabled this ancient benthic species to mount a long overdue invasion of its own. Unwittingly or not, the Angels had set in motion the sequence of events that had released it from the ocean to colonize the planet.

So I proved myself wrong, earned my degree, and became famous amongst a circle of peers so small that we were all famous to each other anyway. Vast new territories did not open up before me. Anything to do with native biology was rapidly becoming an academic cul-de-sac; I’d always suspected that was how it would be, but I hadn’t fought hard enough to end up anywhere else.

For the next three years, I clung to the path of least resistance: assisting Barat with his own research, taking the teaching jobs no one else wanted. Most of Barat’s other students moved on to better things, and I found myself increasingly alone in Mitar. But that didn’t matter; I had Beatrice.

At the age of twenty-five, I could see my future clearly. While other people deciphered—and built upon—the Angels’ legacy, I’d watch from a distance, still messing about with samples of seawater from which all Angelic contaminants had been scrupulously removed.

Finally, when it was almost too late, I made up my mind to jump ship. Barat had been good to me, but he’d never expected loyalty verging on martyrdom. At the end of the year, a bi-ecological (native and Angelic) microbiology conference was being held in Tia, possibly the last event of its kind. I had no new results to present, but it wouldn’t be hard to find a plausible excuse to attend, and it would be the ideal place to lobby for a new position. My great zooyte discovery hadn’t been entirely lost on the wider community of biologists; I could try to rekindle the memory of it. I doubted there’d be much point offering to sleep with anyone; ethical qualms aside, my bridge had probably rusted into place.

Then again, maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe I’d stumble on a fellow Drowned Freelander who’d ended up in a position of power, and all I’d have to do was promise that my work would be for the greater glory of Beatrice.

Tia was a city of ten million people on the east coast. New towers stood side-by-side with empty structures from the time of the Angels, giant gutted machines that might have played a role in the ecopoiesis. I was too old and proud to gawk like a child, but for all my provincial sophistication I wanted to. These domes and cylinders were twenty times older than the illustrations tattooed into the ceiling of the monastery back home. They bore no images of Beatrice; nothing of the Angels did. But why would they? They predated Her death.

The university, on the outskirts of Tia, was a third the size of Mitar itself. An underground train ringed the campus; the students I rode with eyed my unstylish clothes with disbelief. I left my luggage in the dormitory and headed straight for the conference center. Barat had chosen to stay behind; maybe he hadn’t wanted to witness the public burial of his field. That made things easier for me; I’d be free to hunt for a new career without rubbing his face in it.

Late additions to the conference program were listed on a screen by the main entrance. I almost walked straight past the display; I’d already decided which talks I’d be attending. But three steps away, a title I’d glimpsed in passing assembled itself in my mind’s eye, and I had to backtrack to be sure I hadn’t imagined it.

Carla Reggia: “Euphoric Effects of Z/12/80 Excretions”

I stood there laughing with disbelief. I recognized the speaker and her coworkers by name, though I’d never had a chance to meet them. If this wasn’t a hoax. . .what had they done? Dried it, smoked it, and tried writing that up as research? Z/12/80 was one of “my” zooytes, one of the escapees from the ocean; the air and water of Tia were swarming with it. If its excretions were euphoric, the whole city would be in a state of bliss.

I knew, then and there, what they’d discovered. I knew it, long before I admitted it to myself. I went to the talk with my head full of jokes about neglected culture flasks full of psychotropic breakdown products, but for two whole days, I’d been steeling myself for the truth, finding ways in which it didn’t have to matter.

Z/12/80, Carla explained, excreted among its waste products an amine that was able to bind to receptors in our Angel-crafted brains. Since it had been shown by other workers (no one recognized me; no one gave me so much as a glance) that Z/12/80 hadn’t existed at the time of the ecopoiesis, this interaction was almost certainly undesigned, and unanticipated. “It’s up to the archaeologists and neurochemists to determine what role, if any, the arrival of this substance in the environment might have played in the collapse of early settlement culture. But for the past fifteen to eighteen thousand years, we’ve been swimming in it. Since we still exhibit such a wide spectrum of moods, we’re probably able to compensate for its presence by down-regulating the secretion of the endogenous molecule that was designed to bind to the same receptor. That’s just an educated guess, though. Exactly what the effects might be from individual to individual, across the range of doses that might be experienced under a variety of conditions, is clearly going to be a matter of great interest to investigators with appropriate expertise.”

I told myself that I felt no disquiet. Beatrice acted on the world through the laws of nature; I’d stopped believing in supernatural miracles long ago. The fact that someone had now identified the way in which She’d acted on me, that night in the water, changed nothing.

I pressed ahead with my attempts to get recruited. Everyone at the conference was talking about Carla’s discovery, and when people finally made the connection with my own work, their eyes stopped glazing over halfway through my spiel. In the next three days, I received seven offers—all involving research into zooyte biochemistry. There was no question, now, of side-stepping the issue, of escaping into the wider world of Angelic biology. One man even came right out and said to me: “You’re a Freelander, and you know that the ancestors of Z/12/80 live in much greater numbers in the ocean. Don’t you think oceanic exposure is going to be the key to understanding this?” He laughed. “I mean, you swam in the stuff as a child, didn’t you? And you seem to have come through unscathed.”

“Apparently.”

On my last night in Tia, I couldn’t sleep. I stared into the blackness of the room, watching the gray sparks dance in front of me. (Contaminants in the aqueous humor? Electrical noise in the retina? I’d heard the explanation once, but I could no longer remember it.)

I prayed to Beatrice in the Angels’ tongue; I could still feel Her presence, as strongly as ever. The effect clearly wasn’t just a matter of dosage, or trans-cutaneous absorption; merely swimming in the ocean at the right depth wasn’t enough to make anyone feel Drowned. But in combination with the stress of oxygen starvation, and all the psychological build-up Daniel had provided, the jolt of zooyte piss must have driven certain neuroendocrine subsystems into new territory—or old territory, by a new path. Peace, joy, contentment, the feeling of being loved weren’t exactly unknown emotions. But by short-circuiting the brain’s usual practice of summoning those feelings only on occasions when there was a reason for them, I’d been “blessed with the love of Beatrice.” I’d found happiness on demand.

And I still possessed it. That was the eeriest part. Even as I lay there in the dark, on the verge of reasoning everything I’d been living for out of existence, my ability to work the machinery was so ingrained that I felt as loved, as blessed as ever.

Maybe Beatrice was offering me another chance, making it clear that She’d still forgive this blasphemy and welcome me back. But why did I believe that there was anyone there to “forgive me” ? You couldn’t reason your way to God; there was only faith. And I knew, now, that the source of my faith was a meaningless accident, an unanticipated side-effect of the ecopoiesis.

I still had a choice. I could, still, decide that the love of Beatrice was immune to all logic, a force beyond understanding, untouched by evidence of any kind.

No, I couldn’t. I’d been making exceptions for Her for too long. Everyone lived with double standards—but I’d already pushed mine as far as they’d go.

I started laughing and weeping at the same time. It was almost unimaginable: all the millions of people who’d been misled the same way. All because of the zooytes, and . . . what? One Freelander; diving for pleasure, who’d stumbled on a strange new experience? Then tens of thousands more repeating it, generation after generation—until one vulnerable man or woman had been driven to invest the novelty with meaning. Someone who’d needed so badly to feel loved and protected that the illusion of a real presence behind the raw emotion had been impossible to resist. Or who’d desperately wanted to believe that—in spite of the Angels’ discovery that they, too, were mortal—death could still be defeated.

I was lucky: I’d been born in an era of moderation. I hadn’t killed in the name of Beatrice. I hadn’t suffered for my faith. I had no doubt that I’d been far happier for the last fifteen years than I would have been if I’d told Daniel to throw his rope and weights overboard without me.

But that didn’t change the fact that the heart of it all had been a lie.

I woke at dawn, my head pounding, after just a few kilotau’s sleep. I closed my eyes and searched for Her presence, as I had a thousand times before. When I woke in the morning and looked into my heart, She was there without fail, offering me strength and guidance. When I lay in bed at night, I feared nothing, because I knew She was watching over me.

There was nothing. She was gone.

I stumbled out of bed, feeling like a murderer, wondering how I’d ever live with what I’d done.

6

I turned down every offer I’d received at the conference, and stayed on in Mitar. It took Barat and me two years to establish our own research group to examine the effects of the zooamine, and nine more for us to elucidate the full extent of its activity in the brain. Our new recruits all had solid backgrounds in neurochemistry, and they did better work than I did, but when Barat retired I found myself the spokesperson for the group.

The initial discovery had been largely ignored outside the scientific community; for most people, it hardly mattered whether our brain chemistry matched the Angels’ original design, or had been altered fifteen thousand years ago by some unexpected contaminant. But when the Mitar zooamine group began publishing detailed accounts of the biochemistry of religious experience, the public at large rediscovered the subject with a vengeance.

The university stepped up security, and despite death threats and a number of unpleasant incidents with stone-throwing protesters, no one was hurt. We were flooded with requests from broadcasters—though most were predicated on the notion that the group was morally obliged to “face its critics,” rather than the broadcasters being morally obliged to offer us a chance to explain our work, calmly and clearly, without being shouted down by enraged zealots.

I learned to avoid the zealots, but the obscurantists were harder to dodge. I’d expected opposition from the Churches—defending the faith was their job, after all—but some of the most intellectually bankrupt responses came from academics in other disciplines. In one televised debate, I was confronted by a Deep Church priest, a Transitional theologian, a devotee of the ocean god Marni, and an anthropologist from Tia.

“This discovery has no real bearing on any belief system,” the anthropologist explained serenely. “All truth is local. Inside every Deep Church in Ferez, Beatrice is the daughter of God, and we’re the mortal incarnations of the Angels, who traveled here from Earth. In a coastal village a few milliradians south, Marni is the supreme creator, and it was She who gave birth to us, right here. Going one step further and moving from the spiritual domain to the scientific might appear to ‘negate’ certain spiritual truths . . . but equally, moving from the scientific domain to the spiritual demonstrates the same limitations. We are nothing but the stories we tell ourselves, and no one story is greater than another.” He smiled beneficently, the expression of a parent only too happy to give all his squabbling children an equal share in some disputed toy.

I said, “How many cultures do you imagine share your definition of ‘truth’ ? How many people do you think would be content to worship a God who consisted of literally nothing but the fact of their belief?” I turned to the Deep Church priest. “Is that enough for you?”

“Absolutely not!” She glowered at the anthropologist. “While I have the greatest respect for my brother here,” she gestured at the devotee of Marni, “you can’t draw a line around those people who’ve been lucky enough to be raised in the true faith, and then suggest that Beatrice’s infinite power and love is confined to that group of people . . . like some collection of folk songs!”

The devotee respectfully agreed. Marni had created the most distant stars, along with the oceans of Covenant. Perhaps some people called Her by another name, but if everyone on this planet was to die tomorrow, She would still be Marni: unchanged, undiminished.

The anthropologist responded soothingly, “Of course. But in context, and with a wider perspective—”

“I’m perfectly happy with a God who resides within us,” offered the Transitional theologian. “It seems . . . immodest to expect more. And instead of fretting uselessly over these ultimate questions, we should confine ourselves to matters of a suitably human scale.”

I turned to him. “So you’re actually indifferent as to whether an infinitely powerful and loving being created everything around you, and plans to welcome you into Her arms after death . . . or if the universe is a piece of quantum noise that will eventually vanish and erase us all?”

He sighed heavily, as if I was asking him to perform some arduous physical feat just by responding. “I can summon no enthusiasm for these issues.”

Later, the Deep Church priest took me aside and whispered, “Frankly, we’re all very grateful that you’ve debunked that awful cult of the Drowned. They’re a bunch of fundamentalist hicks, and the Church will be better off without them. But you mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that your work has anything to do with ordinary, civilized believers!”

I stood at the back of the crowd that had gathered on the beach near the rock pool, to listen to the two old men who were standing ankle-deep in the milky water. It had taken me four days to get here from Mitar, but when I’d heard reports of a zooyte bloom washing up on the remote north coast, I’d had to come and see the results for myself. The zooamine group had actually recruited an anthropologist for such occasions—one who could cope with such taxing notions as the existence of objective reality, and a biochemical substrate for human thought—but Céline was only with us for part of the year, and right now she was away doing other research.

“This is an ancient, sacred place!” one man intoned, spreading his arms to take in the pool. “You need only observe the shape of it to understand that. It concentrates the energy of the stars, and the sun, and the ocean.”

“The focus of power is there, by the inlet,” the other added, gesturing at a point where the water might have come up to his calves. “Once, I wandered too close. I was almost lost in the great dream of the ocean, when my friend here came and rescued me!”

These men weren’t devotees of Marni, or members of any other formal religion. As far as I’d been able to tell from old news reports, the blooms occurred every eight or ten years, and the two had set themselves up as “custodians” of the pool more than fifty years ago. Some local villagers treated the whole thing as a joke, but others revered the old men. And for a small fee, tourists and locals alike could be chanted over, then splashed with the potent brew. Evaporation would have concentrated the trapped waters of the bloom; for a few days, before the zooytes ran out of nutrients and died en masse in a cloud of hydrogen sulphide, the amine would be present in levels as high as in any of our laboratory cultures back in Mitar.

As I watched people lining up for the ritual, I found myself trying to downplay the possibility that anyone could be seriously affected by it. It was broad daylight, no one feared for their life, and the old men’s pantheistic gobbledy-gook carried all the gravitas of the patter of streetside scam merchants. Their marginal sincerity, and the money changing hands, would be enough to undermine the whole thing. This was a tourist trap, not a life-altering experience.

When the chanting was done, the first customer knelt at the edge of the pool. One of the custodians filled a small metal cup with water and threw it in her face. After a moment, she began weeping with joy. I moved closer, my stomach tightening. It was what she’d known was expected of her, nothing more. She was playing along, not wanting to spoil the fun—like the good sports who pretended to have their thoughts read by a carnival psychic.

Next, the custodians chanted over a young man. He began swaying giddily even before they touched him with the water; when they did, he broke into sobs of relief that racked his whole body.

I looked back along the queue. There was a young girl standing third in line now, looking around apprehensively; she could not have been more than nine or ten. Her father (I presumed) was standing behind her, with his hand against her back, as if gently propelling her forward.

I lost all interest in playing anthropologist. I forced my way through the crowd until I reached the edge of the pool, then turned to address the people in the queue. “These men are frauds! There’s nothing mysterious going on here. I can tell you exactly what’s in the water: it’s just a drug, a natural substance given out by creatures that are trapped here when the waves retreat.”

I squatted down and prepared to dip my hand in the pool. One of the custodians rushed forward and grabbed my wrist. He was an old man, I could have done what I liked, but some people were already jeering, and I didn’t want to scuffle with him and start a riot. I backed away from him, then spoke again.

“I’ve studied this drug for more than ten years, at Mitar University. It’s present in water all over the planet. We drink it, we bathe in it, we swim in it every day. But it’s concentrated here, and if you don’t understand what you’re doing when you use it, that misunderstanding can harm you!”

The custodian who’d grabbed my wrist started laughing. “The dream of the ocean is powerful, yes, but we don’t need your advice on that! For fifty years, my friend and I have studied its lore, until we were strong enough to stand in the sacred water!” He gestured at his leathery feet; I didn’t doubt that his circulation had grown poor enough to limit the dose to a tolerable level.

He stretched out his sinewy arm at me. “So fuck off back to Mitar, Inlander? Fuck off back to your books and your dead machinery? What would you know about the sacred mysteries? What would you know about the ocean?”

I said, “I think you’re out of your depth.”

I stepped into the pool. He started wailing about my unpurified body polluting the water, but I brushed past him. The other custodian came after me, but though my feet were soft after years of wearing shoes, I ignored the sharp edges of the rocks and kept walking toward the inlet. The zooamine helped. I could feel the old joy, the old peace, the old “love”; it made a powerful anesthetic.

I looked back over my shoulder. The second man had stopped pursuing me; it seemed he honestly feared going any further. I pulled off my shirt, bunched it up, and threw it onto a rock at the side of the pool. Then I waded forward, heading straight for the “focus of power.”

The water came up to my knees. I could feel my heart pounding, harder than it had since childhood. People were shouting at me from the edge of the pool—some outraged by my sacrilege, some apparently concerned for my safety in the presence of forces beyond my control. Without turning, I called out at the top of my voice, “There is no ‘power’ here? There’s nothing ‘sacred’ ? There’s nothing here but a drug—”

Old habits die hard; I almost prayed first. Please, Holy Beatrice, don’t let me regain my faith.

I lay down in the water and let it cover my face. My vision turned white; I felt like I was leaving my body. The love of Beatrice flooded into me, and nothing had changed: Her presence was as palpable as ever, as undeniable as ever. I knew that I was loved, accepted, forgiven.

I waited, staring into the light, almost expecting a voice, a vision, detailed hallucinations. That had happened to some of the Drowned. How did anyone ever claw their way back to sanity, after that?

But for me, there was only the emotion itself, overpowering but unembellished. It didn’t grow monotonous; I could have basked in it for days. But I understood, now, that it said no more about my place in the world than the warmth of sunlight on skin. I’d never mistake it for the touch of a real hand again.

I climbed to my feet and opened my eyes. Violet afterimages danced in front of me. It took a few tau for me to catch my breath, and feel steady on my feet again. Then I turned and started wading back toward the shore.

The crowd had fallen silent, though whether it was in disgust or begrudging respect I had no idea.

I said, “It’s not just here. It’s not just in the water. It’s part of us now; it’s in our blood.” I was still half-blind; I couldn’t see whether anyone was listening. “But as long as you know that, you’re already free. As long as you’re ready to face the possibility that everything that makes your spirits soar, everything that lifts you up and fills your heart with joy, everything that makes your life worth living . . . is a lie, is corruption, is meaningless—then you can never be enslaved!”

They let me walk away unharmed. I turned back to watch as the line formed again; the girl wasn’t in the queue.

I woke with a start, from the same old dream.

I was lowering my mother into the water from the back of the boat. Her hands were tied, her feet weighted. She was afraid, but she’d put her trust in me. “You’ll bring me up safely, won’t you, Martin?”

I nodded reassuringly. But once she’d vanished beneath the waves, I thought: What am I doing? I don’t believe in this shit any more.

So I took out a knife and started cutting through the rope—

I brought my knees up to my chest, and crouched on the unfamiliar bed in the darkness. I was in a small town on the railway line, halfway back to Mitar. Halfway between midnight and dawn.

I dressed, and made my way out of the hostel. The center of town was deserted, and the sky was thick with stars. Just like home. In Mitar, everything vanished in a fog of light.

All three of the stars cited by various authorities as the Earth’s sun were above the horizon. If they weren’t all mistakes, perhaps I’d live to see a telescope’s image of the planet itself. But the prospect of seeking contact with the Angels—if there really was a faction still out there, somewhere—left me cold. I shouted silently up at the stars: Your degenerate offspring don’t need your help! Why should we rejoin you? We’re going to surpass you!

I sat down on the steps at the edge of the square and covered my face. Bravado didn’t help. Nothing helped. Maybe if I’d grown up facing the truth, I would have been stronger. But when I woke in the night, knowing that my mother was simply dead, that everyone I’d ever loved would follow her, that I’d vanish into the same emptiness myself, it was like being buried alive. It was like being back in the water, bound and weighted, with the certain knowledge that there was no one to haul me up.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up, startled. It was a man about my own age. His manner wasn’t threatening; if anything, he looked slightly wary of me.

He said, “Do you need a roof? I can let you into the Church if you want.” There was a trolley packed with cleaning equipment a short distance behind him.

I shook my head. “It’s not that cold.” I was too embarrassed to explain that I had a perfectly good room nearby. “Thanks.”

As he was walking away, I called after him, “Do you believe in God?”

He stopped and stared at me for a while, as if he was trying to decide if this was a trick question—as if I might have been hired by the local parishioners to vet him for theological soundness. Or maybe he just wanted to be diplomatic with anyone desperate enough to be sitting in the town square in the middle of the night, begging a stranger for reassurance.

He shook his head. “As a child I did. Not anymore. It was a nice idea . . . but it made no sense.” He eyed me skeptically, still unsure of my motives.

I said, “Then isn’t life unbearable?”

He laughed. “Not all the time!”

He went back to his trolley, and started wheeling it toward the Church.

I stayed on the steps, waiting for dawn.

TAKLAMAKAN

Bruce Sterling

Bruce Sterling tells us, “This is the third, and the longest, and certainly the weirdest, story in the ‘Chattanooga series.’ No kidding, down-and-dirty in-your-face genre SF, this baby features oodles of starships and robots, as well as the standard Chattanooga-style cybergizmos, sports freaks, neuters, spies, and anarchists.” The first two stories in the series were “Deep Eddy” (Asimov’s, August 1993) and the Hugo-award-winning “Bicycle Repairman” (Asimov’s, October 1996). Mr. Sterling’s latest projects include Wired magazine’s July cover story, “The Spirit of Mega,” and an SF political thriller, Distraction, that will be out soon from Bantam.

A bone-dry frozen wind tore at the earth outside, its lethal howling cut to a muffled moan. Katrinko and Spider Pete were camped deep in a crevice in the rock, wrapped in furry darkness. Pete could hear Katrinko breathing, with a light rattle of chattering teeth. The neuter’s yeasty armpits smelled like nutmeg.

Spider Pete strapped his shaven head into his spex.

Outside their puffy nest, the sticky eyes of a dozen gelcams splayed across the rock, a sky-eating web of perception. Pete touched a stud on his spex, pulled down a glowing menu, and adjusted his visual take on the outside world.

Flying powder tumbled through the yardangs like an evil fog. The crescent moon and a billion desert stars, glowing like pixelated bruises, wheeled above the eerie wind-sculpted landscape of the Taklamakan. With the exceptions of Antarctica, or maybe the deep Sahara—locales Pete had never been paid to visit—this central Asian desert was the loneliest, most desolate place on Earth.

Pete adjusted parameters, etching the landscape with a busy array of false colors. He recorded an artful series of panorama shots, and tagged a global positioning fix onto the captured stack. Then he signed the footage with a cryptographic time-stamp from a passing NAFTA spy-sat.

1/15/2052 05:24:01.

Pete saved the stack onto a gelbrain. This gelbrain was a walnut-sized lump of neural biotech, carefully grown to mimic the razor-sharp visual cortex of an American bald eagle. It was the best, most expensive piece of photographic hardware that Pete had ever owned. Pete kept the thing tucked in his crotch.

Pete took a deep and intimate pleasure in working with the latest federally subsidized spy gear. It was quite the privilege for Spider Pete, the kind of privilege that he might well die for. There was no tactical use in yet another spy-shot of the chill and empty Taklamakan. But the tagged picture would prove that Katrinko and Pete had been here at the appointed rendezvous. Right here, right now. Waiting for the man.

And the man was overdue.

During their brief professional acquaintance, Spider Pete had met the Lieutenant Colonel in a number of deeply unlikely locales. A parking garage in Pentagon City. An outdoor seafood restaurant in Cabo San Lucas. On the ferry to Staten Island. Pete had never known his patron to miss a rendezvous by so much as a microsecond.

The sky went dirty white. A sizzle, a sparkle, a zenith full of stink. A screaming-streaking-tumbling. A nasty thunderclap. The ground shook hard.

“Dang,” Pete said.

They found the Lieutenant Colonel just before eight in the morning. Pieces of his landing pod were violently scattered across half a kilometer.

Katrinko and Pete skulked expertly through a dirty yellow jumble of wind-grooved boulders. Their camou gear switched coloration moment by moment, to match the landscape and the incidental light.

Pete pried the mask from his face, inhaled the thin, pitiless, metallic air, and spoke aloud. “That’s our boy all right. Never missed a date.”

The neuter removed her mask and fastidiously smeared her lips and gums with silicone anti-evaporant. Her voice fluted eerily over the insistent wind. “Space-defense must have tracked him on radar.”

“Nope. If they’d hit him from orbit, he’d really be spread all over. . . . No something happened to him really close to the ground.” Pete pointed at a violent scattering of cracked ochre rock. “See, check out how that stealth-pod hit and tumbled. It didn’t catch fire till after the impact.”

With the absent ease of a gecko, the neuter swarmed up a three-story-high boulder. She examined the surrounding forensic evidence at length, dabbing carefully at her spex controls. She then slithered deftly back to earth. “There was no anti-aircraft fire, right? No interceptors flyin’ round last night.”

“Nope. Heck, there’s no people around here in a space bigger than Delaware.”

The neuter looked up. “So what do you figure, Pete?”

“I figure an accident,” said Pete.

“A what?”

“An accident. A lot can go wrong with a covert HALO insertion.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“Well, G-loads and stuff. System malfunctions. Maybe he just blacked out.”

“He was a federal military spook, and you’re telling me he passed out?” Katrinko daintily adjusted her goggled spex with gloved and bulbous fingertips. “Why would that matter anyway? He wouldn’t fly a spacecraft with his own hands, would he?”

Pete rubbed at the gummy line of his mask, easing the prickly indentation across one dark, tattooed cheek. “I kinda figure he would, actually. The man was a pilot. Big military prestige thing. Flyin’ in by hand, deep in Sphere territory, covert insertion, way behind enemy lines. . . . That’d really be something to brag about, back on the Potomac.”

The neuter considered this sour news without apparent resentment. As one of the world’s top technical climbers, Katrinko was a great connoisseur of pointless displays of dangerous physical skill. “I can get behind that.” She paused. “Serious bad break, though.”

They resealed their masks. Water was their greatest lack, and vapor exhalation was a problem. They were recycling body-water inside their suits, topped off with a few extra cc’s they’d obtained from occasional patches of frost. They’d consumed the last of the trail-goop and candy from their glider shipment three long days ago.

They hadn’t eaten since. Still, Pete and Katrinko were getting along pretty well, living off big subcutaneous lumps of injected body fat.

More through habit than apparent need, Pete and Katrinko segued into evidence-removal mode. It wasn’t hard to conceal a HALO stealth pod. The spy-craft was radar-transparent and totally biodegradable. In the bitter wind and cold of the Taklamakan, the bigger chunks of wreckage had already gone all brown and crispy, like the shed husks of locusts. They couldn’t scrape up every physical trace, but they’d surely get enough to fool aerial surveillance.

The Lieutenant Colonel was extremely dead. He’d come down from the heavens in his full NAFTA military power-armor, a leaping, brick-busting, lightning-spewing exoskeleton, all acronyms and input jacks. It was powerful, elaborate gear, of an entirely different order than the gooey and fibrous street tech of the two urban intrusion freaks.

But the high-impact crash had not been kind to the armored suit. It had been crueler still to the bone, blood, and tendon housed inside.

Pete bagged the larger pieces with a heavy heart. He knew that the Lieutenant Colonel was basically no good: deceitful, ruthlessly ambitious, probably crazy. Still, Pete sincerely regretted his employer’s demise. After all, it was precisely those qualities that had led the Lieutenant Colonel to recruit Spider Pete in the first place.

Pete also felt sincere regret for the gung-ho, clear-eyed young military widow, and the two little redheaded kids in Augusta, Georgia. He’d never actually met the widow or the little kids, but the Lieutenant Colonel was always fussing about them and showing off their photos. The Lieutenant Colonel had been a full fifteen years younger than Spider Pete, a rosy-cheeked cracker kid really, never happier than when handing over wads of money, nutty orders, and expensive covert equipment to people whom no sane man would trust with a burnt-out match. And now here he was in the cold and empty heart of Asia, turned to jam within his shards of junk.

Katrinko did the last of the search-and-retrieval while Pete dug beneath a ledge with his diamond hand-pick, the razored edges slashing out clods of shale.

After she’d fetched the last blackened chunk of their employer, Katrinko perched birdlike on a nearby rock. She thoughtfully nibbled a piece of the pod’s navigation console. “This gelbrain is good when it dries out, man. Like trail mix, or a fortune cookie.”

Pete grunted. “You might be eating part of him, y’know.”

“Lotta good carbs and protein there, too.”

They stuffed a final shattered power-jackboot inside the Colonel’s makeshift cairn. The piled rock was there for the ages. A few jets of webbing and thumbnail dabs of epoxy made it harder than a brick wall.

It was noon now, still well below freezing, but as warm as the Taklamakan was likely to get in January. Pete sighed, dusted sand from his knees and elbows, stretched. It was hard work, cleaning up; the hardest part of intrusion work, because it was the stuff you had to do after the thrill was gone. He offered Katrinko the end of a fiber-optic cable, so that they could speak together without using radio or removing their masks.

Pete waited until she had linked in, then spoke into his mike. “So we head on back to the glider now, right?”

The neuter looked up, surprised. “How come?”

“Look, Trink, this guy that we just buried was the actual spy in this assignment. You and me, we were just his gophers and backup support. The mission’s an abort.”

“But we’re searching for a giant, secret, rocket base.”

“Yeah, sure we are.”

“We’re supposed to find this monster high-tech complex, break in, and record all kinds of crazy top secrets that nobody but the mandarins have ever seen. That’s a totally hot assignment, man.”

Pete sighed. “I admit it’s very high-concept, but I’m an old guy now, Trink. I need the kind of payoff that involves some actual money.”

Katrinko laughed. “But Pete! It’s a starship! A whole fleet of ’em, maybe! Secretly built in the desert, by Chinese spooks and Japanese engineers!”

Pete shook his head. “That was all paranoid bullshit that the flyboy made up, to get himself a grant and a field assignment. He was tired of sitting behind a desk in the basement, that’s all.”

Katrinko folded her lithe and wiry arms. “Look, Pete, you saw those briefings just like me. You saw all those satellite shots. The traffic analysis, too. The Sphere people are up to something way big out here.”

Pete gazed around him. He found it painfully surreal to endure this discussion amid a vast and threatening tableau of dust-hazed sky and sand-etched mudstone gullies. “They built something big here once, I grant you that. But I never figured the Colonel’s story for being very likely.”

“What’s so unlikely about it? The Russians had a secret rocket base in the desert a hundred years ago. American deserts are full of secret mil-spec stuff and space-launch bases. So now the Asian Sphere people are up to the same old game. It all makes sense.”

“No, it makes no sense at all. Nobody’s space-racing to build any starships. Starships aren’t a space race. It takes four hundred years to fly to the stars. Nobody’s gonna finance a major military project that’ll take four hundred years to pay off. Least of all a bunch of smart and thrifty Asian economic-warfare people.”

“Well, they’re sure building something. Look, all we have to do is find the complex, break in, and document some stuff. We can do that! People like us, we never needed any federal bossman to help us break into buildings and take photos. That’s what we always do, that’s what we live for.”

Pete was touched by the kid’s game spirit. She really had the City Spider way of mind. Nevertheless, Pete was fifty-two years old, so he found it necessary to at least try to be reasonable. “We should haul our sorry spook asses back to that glider right now. Let’s skip on back over the Himalayas. We can fly on back to Washington, tourist class out of Delhi. They’ll debrief us at the puzzle-palace. We’ll give ’em the bad news about the bossman. We got plenty of evidence to prove that, anyhow. . . . The spooks will give us some walkin’ money for a busted job, and tell us to keep our noses clean. Then we can go out for some pork chops.”

Katrinko’s thin shoulders hunched mulishly within the bubblepak warts of her insulated camou. She was not taking this at all well. “Peter, I ain’t looking for pork chops. I’m looking for some professional validation, okay? I’m sick of that lowlife kid stuff, knocking around raiding network sites and mayors’ offices. . . . This is my chance at the big-time!”

Pete stroked the muzzle of his mask with two gloved fingers.

“Pete, I know that you ain’t happy. I know that already, okay? But you’ve already made it in the big-time, Mr. City Spider, Mr. Legend, Mr. Champion. Now here’s my big chance come along, and you want us to hang up our cleats.”

Pete raised his other hand. “Wait a minute, I never said that.”

“Well, you’re tellin’ me you’re walking. You’re turning your back. You don’t even want to check it out first.”

“No,” Pete said weightily, “I reckon you know me too well for that, Trink. I’m still a Spider. I’m still game. I’ll always at least check it out.”

Katrinko set their pace after that. Pete was content to let her lead. It was a very stupid idea to continue the mission without the overlordship of the Lieutenant Colonel. But it was stupid in a different and more refreshing way than the stupid idea of returning home to Chattanooga.

People in Pete’s line of work weren’t allowed to go home. He’d tried that once, really tried it, eight years ago, just after that badly busted caper in Brussels. He’d gotten a straight job at Lyle Schweik’s pedal-powered aircraft factory. The millionaire sports tycoon had owed him a favor. Schweik had been pretty good about it, considering.

But word had swiftly gotten around that Pete had once been a champion City Spider. Dumb-ass co-workers would make significant remarks. Sometimes they asked him for so-called favors, or tried to act street-wise. When you came down to it, straight people were a major pain in the ass.

Pete preferred the company of seriously twisted people. People who really cared about something, cared enough about it to really warp themselves for it. People who looked for more out of life than mommy-daddy, money, and the grave.

Below the edge of a ridgeline they paused for a recce. Pete whirled a tethered eye on the end of its reel and flung it. At the peak of its arc, six stories up, it recorded their surroundings in a panoramic view.

Pete and Katrinko studied the image together through their linked spex. Katrinko highlit an area downhill with a fingertip gesture. “Now there’s a tipoff.”

“That gully, you mean?”

“You need to get outdoors more, Pete. That’s what we rockjocks technically call a road.”

Pete and Katrinko approached the road with professional caution. It was a paved ribbon of macerated cinderblock, overrun with drifting sand. The road was made of the coked-out clinker left behind by big urban incinerators, a substance that Asians used for their road surfaces because all the value had been cooked out of it.

The cinder road had once seen a great deal of traffic. There were tire-shreds here and there, deep ruts in the shoulder, and post-holes that had once been traffic signs, or maybe surveillance boxes.

They followed the road from a respectful distance, cautious of monitors, tripwires, landmines, and many other possible unpleasantries. They stopped for a rest in a savage arroyo where a road bridge had been carefully removed, leaving only neat sockets in the roadbed and a kind of conceptual arc in midair.

“What creeps me out is how clean this all is,” Pete said over cable. “It’s a road, right? Somebody’s gotta throw out a beer can, a lost shoe, something.”

Katrinko nodded. “I figure construction robots.”

“Really.”

Katrinko spread her swollen-fingered gloves. “It’s a Sphere operation, so it’s bound to have lots of robots, right? I figure robots built this road. Robots used this road. Robots carried in tons and tons of whatever they were carrying. Then when they were done with the big project, the robots carried off everything that was worth any money. Gathered up the guideposts, bridges everything. Very neat, no loose ends, very Sphere-type way to work.” Katrinko set her masked chin on her bent knees, gone into reverie. “Some very weird and intense stuff can happen, when you got a lot of space in the desert, and robot labor that’s too cheap to meter.”

Katrinko hadn’t been wasting her time in those intelligence briefings. Pete had seen a lot of City Spider wannabes, even trained quite a few of them. But Katrinko had what it took to be a genuine Spider champion: the desire, the physical talent, the ruthless dedication, and even the smarts. It was staying out of jails and morgues that was gonna be the tough part of Katrinko. “You’re a big fan of the Sphere, aren’t you, kid? You really like the way they operate.”

“Sure, I always liked Asians. Their food’s a lot better than Europe’s.”

Pete took this in stride. NAFTA, Sphere, and Europe: the trilateral super-powers jostled about with the uneasy regularity of sunspots, periodically brewing storms in the proxy regimes of the South. During his fifty-plus years, Pete had seen the Asian Cooperation Sphere change its public image repeatedly, in a weird political rhythm. Exotic vacation spot on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Baffling alien threat on Mondays and Wednesdays. Major trading partner each day and every day, including weekends and holidays.

At the current political moment, the Asian Cooperation Sphere was deep into its Inscrutable Menace mode, logging lots of grim media coverage as NAFTA’s chief economic adversary. As far as Pete could figure it, this basically meant that a big crowd of goofy North American economists were trying to act really macho. Their major complaint was that the Sphere was selling NAFTA too many neat, cheap, well-made consumer goods. That was an extremely silly thing to get killed about. But people perished horribly for much stranger reasons than that.

At sunset, Pete and Katrinko discovered the giant warning signs. They were titanic vertical plinths, all epoxy and clinker, much harder than granite. They were four stories tall, carefully rooted in bedrock, and painstakingly chiseled with menacing horned symbols and elaborate textual warnings in at least fifty different languages. English was language number three.

“Radiation waste,” Pete concluded, deftly reading the text through his spex, from two kilometers away. “This is a radiation waste dump. Plus, a nuclear test site. Old Red Chinese hydrogen bombs, way out in the Taklamakan desert.” He paused thoughtfully. “You gotta hand it to ’em. They sure picked the right spot for the job.”

“No way!” Katrinko protested. “Giant stone warning signs, telling people not to trespass in this area? That’s got to be a con-job.”

“Well, it would sure account for them using robots, and then destroying all the roads.”

“No, man. It’s like—you wanna hide something big nowadays. You don’t put a safe inside the wall any more, because hey, everybody’s got magnetometers and sonic imaging and heat detection. So you hide your best stuff in the garbage.”

Pete scanned their surroundings on spex telephoto. They were lurking on a hillside above a playa, where the occasional gullywasher had spewed out a big alluvial fan of desert varnished grit and cobbles. Stuff was actually growing down there—squat leathery grasses with fat waxy blades like dead men’s fingers. The evil vegetation didn’t look like any kind of grass that Pete had ever seen. It struck him as the kind of grass that would blithely gobble up stray plutonium. “Trink, I like my explanations simple. I figure that so-called giant starship base for a giant radwaste dump.”

“Well, maybe,” the neuter admitted. “But even if that’s the truth, that’s still news worth paying for. We might find some busted up barrels, or some badly managed fuel rods out there. That would be a big political embarrassment, right? Proof of that would be worth something.”

“Huh,” said Pete, surprised. But it was true. Long experience had taught Pete that there were always useful secrets in other people’s trash. “Is it worth glowin’ in the dark for?”

“So what’s the problem?” Katrinko said. “I ain’t having kids. I fixed that a long time ago. And you’ve got enough kids already.”

“Maybe,” Pete grumbled. Four kids by three different women. It had taken him a long sad time to learn that women who fell head-over-heels for footloose, sexy tough guys would fall repeatedly for pretty much any footloose, sexy tough guy.

Katrinko was warming to the task at hand. “We can do this, man. We got our suits and our breathing masks, and we’re not eating or drinking anything out here, so we’re practically radiation-tight. So we camp way outside the dump tonight. Then before dawn we slip in, we check it out real quick, we take our pictures, we leave. Clean, classic intrusion job. Nobody living around here to stop us, no problem there. And then, we got something to show the spooks when we get home. Maybe something we can sell.”

Pete mulled this over. The prospect didn’t sound all that bad. It was dirty work, but it would complete the mission. Also—this was the part he liked best—it would keep the Lieutenant Colonel’s people from sending in some other poor guy. “Then, back to the glider?”

“Then back to the glider.”

“Okay, good deal.”

Before dawn the next morning, they stoked themselves with athletic performance enhancers, brewed in the guts of certain gene-spliced ticks that they had kept hibernating in their armpits. Then they concealed their travel gear, and swarmed like ghosts up and over the great wall.

They pierced a tiny hole through the roof of one of the dun-colored, half-buried containment hangars, and oozed a spy-eye through.

Bombproofed ranks of barrel-shaped sarcophagi, solid glossy as polished granite. The big fused radwaste containers were each the size of a tanker truck. They sat there neatly-ranked in hermetic darkness, mute as sphinxes. They looked to be good for the next twenty thousand years.

Pete liquefied and retrieved the gelcam, then re-sealed the tiny hole with rock putty. They skipped down the slope of the dusty roof. There were lots of lizard tracks in the sand drifts, piled at the rim of the dome. These healthy traces of lizard cheered Pete up considerably.

They swarmed silently up and over the wall. Back uphill to the grotto where they’d stashed their gear. Then they removed their masks to talk again.

Pete sat behind a boulder, enjoying the intrusion afterglow. “A cakewalk,” he pronounced it. “A pleasure hike.” His pulse was already normal again, and, to his joy, there were no suspicious aches under his caraco-acromial arch.

“You gotta give them credit, those robots sure work neat.”

Pete nodded. “Killer application for robots, your basic lethal waste gig.”

“I telephoto’ed that whole cantonment,” said Katrinko, “and there’s no water there. No towers, no plumbing, no wells. People can get along without a lot of stuff in the desert, but nobody lives without water. That place is stone dead. It was always dead.” She paused. “It was all automated robot work from start to finish. You know what that means, Pete? It means no human being has ever seen that place before. Except for you and me.”

“Hey, then it’s a first! We scored a first intrusion! That’s just dandy,” said Pete, pleased at the professional coup. He gazed across the cobbled plain at the walled cantonment, and pressed a last set of spex shots into his gelbrain archive. Two dozen enormous domes, built block by block by giant robots, acting with the dumb persistence of termites. The sprawling domes looked as if they’d congealed on the spot, their rims settling like molten taffy into the desert’s little convexities and concavities. From a satellite view, the domes probably passed for natural features. “Let’s not tarry, okay? I can kinda feel those X-ray fingers kinking my DNA.”

“Aw, you’re not all worried about that, are you, Pete?”

Pete laughed and shrugged. “Who cares? Job’s over, kid. Back to the glider.”

“They do great stuff with gene damage nowadays, y’know. Kinda reweave you, down at the spook lab.”

“What, those military doctors? I don’t wanna give them the excuse.”

The wind picked up. A series of abrupt and brutal gusts. Dry, and freezing, and peppered with stinging sand.

Suddenly, a faint moan emanated from the cantonment. Distant lungs blowing the neck of a wine bottle.

“What’s that big weird noise?” demanded Katrinko, all alert interest.

“Aw no,” said Pete. “Dang.”

Steam was venting from a hole in the bottom of the thirteenth dome. They’d missed the hole earlier, because the rim of that dome was overgrown with big thriving thornbushes. The bushes would have been a tip-off in themselves, if the two of them had been feeling properly suspicious.

In the immediate area, Pete and Katrinko swiftly discovered three dead men. The three men had hacked and chiseled their way through the containment dome—from the inside. They had wriggled through the long, narrow crevice they had cut, leaving much blood and skin.

The first man had died just outside the dome, apparently from sheer exhaustion. After their Olympian effort, the two survivors had emerged to confront the sheer four-story walls.

The remaining men had tried to climb the mighty wall with their handaxes, crude woven ropes, and pig-iron pitons. It was a nothing wall for a pair of City Spiders with modern handwebs and pinpression cleats. Pete and Katrinko could have camped and eaten a watermelon on that wall. But it was a very serious wall for a pair of very weary men dressed in wool, leather, and homemade shoes.

One of them had fallen from the wall, and had broken his back and leg. The last one had decided to stay to comfort his dying comrade, and it seemed he had frozen to death.

The three men had been dead for many months, maybe over a year. Ants had been at work on them, and the fine salty dust of the Taklamakan, and the freeze-drying. Three desiccated Asian mummies, black hair and crooked teeth and wrinkled dusky skin, in their funny bloodstained clothes.

Katrinko offered the cable lead, chattering through her mask. “Man, look at these shoes! Look at this shirt this guy’s got—would you call this thing a shirt?”

“What I would call this is three very brave climbers,” Pete said. He tossed a tethered eye into the crevice that the men had cut.

The inside of the thirteenth dome was a giant forest of monitors. Microwave antennas, mostly. The top of the dome wasn’t sturdy sintered concrete like the others, it was some kind of radar-transparent plastic. Dark inside, like the other domes, and hermetically sealed—at least before the dead men had chewed and chopped their hole through the wall. No sign of any rad-waste around here.

They discovered the little camp where the men had lived. Their bivouac. Three men, patiently chipping and chopping their way to freedom. Burning their last wicks and oil lamps, eating their last rations bite by bite, emptying their leather canteens and scraping for frost to drink. Surrounded all the time by a towering jungle of satellite relays and wavepipes. Pete found that scene very ugly. That was a very bad scene. That was the worst of it yet.

Pete and Katrinko retrieved their full set of intrusion gear. They then broke in through the top of the dome, where the cutting was easiest. Once through, they sealed the hole behind themselves, but only lightly, in case they should need a rapid retreat. They lowered their haul bags to the stone floor, then rappelled down on their smart ropes. Once on ground level, they closed the escape tunnel with web and rubble, to stop the howling wind, and to keep contaminants at bay.

With the hole sealed, it grew warmer in the dome. Warm, and moist. Dew was collecting on walls and floor. A very strange smell, too. A smell like smoke and old socks. Mice and spice. Soup and sewage. A cozy human reek from the depths of the earth.

“The Lieutenant Colonel sure woulda have loved this,” whispered Katrinko over cable, spexing out the towering machinery with her infrareds. “You put a clip of explosive ammo through here, and it sure would put a major crimp in somebody’s automated gizmos.”

Pete figured their present situation for an excellent chance to get killed. Automated alarm systems were the deadliest aspect of his professional existence, somewhat tempered by the fact that smart and aggressive alarm systems frequently killed their owners. There was a basic engineering principle involved. Fancy, paranoid alarm systems went false-positive all the time: squirrels, dogs, wind, hail, earth tremors, horny boyfriends who forgot the password. . . . They were smart, and they had their own agenda, and it made them troublesome.

But if these machines were alarms, then they hadn’t noticed a rather large hole painstakingly chopped in the side of their dome. The spars and transmitters looked bad, all patchy with long-accumulated rime and ice. A junkyard look, the definite smell of dead tech. So somebody had given up on these smart, expensive, paranoid alarms. Someone had gotten sick and tired of them, and shut them off.

At the foot of a microwave tower, they found a rat-sized manhole chipped out, covered with a laced-down lid of sheep’s hide. Pete dropped a spy-eye down, scoping out a machine-drilled shaft. The tunnel was wide enough to swallow a car, and it dropped down as straight as a plumb bob for farther than his eye’s wiring could reach.

Pete silently yanked a rusting pig-iron piton from the edge of the hole, and replaced it with a modern glue anchor. Then he whipped a smart-rope through and carefully tightened his harness.

Katrinko began shaking with eagerness. “Pete, I am way hot for this. Lemme lead point.”

Pete clipped a crab into Katrinko’s harness, and linked their spex through the fiber-optic embedded in the rope. Then he slapped the neuter’s shoulder. “Get bold, kid.”

Katrinko flared out the webbing on her gripgloves, and dropped in feet-first.

The would-be escapes had made a lot of use of cabling already present in the tunnel. There were ceramic staples embedded periodically, to hold the cabling snug against the stone. The climbers had scrabbled their way up from staple to staple, using ladder-runged bamboo poles and iron hooks.

Katrinko stopped her descent and tied off. Pete sent their haulbags down. Then he dropped and slithered after her. He stopped at the lead chock, tied off, and let Katrinko take lead again, following her progress with the spex.

An eerie glow shone at the bottom of the tunnel. Pay day. Pete felt a familiar transcendental tension overcome him. It surged through him with mad intensity. Fear, curiosity, and desire: the raw, hot, thieving thrill of a major-league intrusion. A feeling like being insane, but so much better than craziness, because now he felt so awake. Pete was awash in primal spiderness, cravings too deep and slippery to speak about.

The light grew hotter in Pete’s infrareds. Below them was a slotted expanse of metal, gleaming like a kitchen sink, louvers with hot slots of light. Katrinko planted a foamchock in the tunnel wall, tied off, leaned back, and dropped a spy eye through the slot.

Pete’s hands were too busy to reach his spex. “What do you see?” he hissed over cable.

Katrinko craned her head back, gloved palms pressing the goggles against her face. “I can see everything, man! Gardens of Eden, and cities of gold!”

The cave had been ancient solid rock once, a continental bulk. The rock had been pierced by a Russian-made drilling rig. A dry well, in a very dry country. And then some very weary, and very sunburned, and very determined Chinese Communist weapons engineers had installed a one-hundred-megaton hydrogen bomb at the bottom of their dry hole. When their beast in its nest of layered casings achieved fusion, seismographs jumped like startled fawns in distant California.

The thermonuclear explosion had left a giant gasbubble at the heart of a crazy webwork of faults and cracks. The deep and empty bubble had lurked beneath the desert in utter and terrible silence, for ninety years.

Then Asia’s new masters had sent in new and more sophisticated agencies.

Pete saw that the distant sloping walls of the cavern were daubed with starlight. White constellations, whole and entire. And amid the space—that giant and sweetly damp airspace—were three great glowing lozenges, three vertical cylinders the size of urban high rises. They seemed to be suspended in midair.

“Starships,” Pete muttered.

“Starships,” Katrinko agreed. Menus appeared in the shared visual space of their linked spex. Katrinko’s fingertip sketched out a set of tiny moving sparks against the walls. “But check that out.”

“What are those?”

“Heat signatures. Little engines.” The envisioned world wheeled silently. “And check out over here too—and crawlin’ around deep in there, dozens of the things. And Pete, see these? Those big ones? Kinda on patrol?”

“Robots.”

“Yep.”

“What the hell are they up to, down here?”

“Well, I figure it this way, man. If you’re inside one of those fake starships, and you look out through those windows—those portholes, I guess we call ’em—you can’t see anything but shiny stars. Deep space. But with spex, we can see right through all that business. And Pete, that whole stone sky down there is crawling with machinery.”

“Man oh man.”

“And nobody inside those starships can see down, man. There is a whole lot of very major weirdness going on down at the bottom of that cave. There’s a lot of hot steamy water down there, deep in those rocks and those cracks.”

“Water, or a big smelly soup maybe,” Pete said. “A chemical soup.”

“Biochemical soup.”

“Autonomous self-assembly proteinaceous biotech. Strictly forbidden by the Nonproliferation Protocols of the Manila Accords of 2037,” said Pete. Pete rattled off this phrase with practiced ease, having rehearsed it any number of times during various background briefings.

“A whole big lake of way-hot, way-illegal, self-assembling goo down there.”

“Yep. The very stuff that our covert-tech boys have been messing with under the Rockies for the past ten years.”

“Aw, Pete, everybody cheats a little bit on the accords. The way we do it in NAFTA, it’s no worse than bathtub gin. But this is huge! And Lord only know what’s inside those starships.”

“Gotta be people, kid.”

“Yep.”

Pete drew a slow moist breath. “This is a big one, Trink. This is truly major-league. You and me, we got ourselves an intelligence coup here of historic proportions.”

“If you’re trying to say that we should go back to the glider now,” Katrinko said, “don’t even start with me.”

“We need to go back to the glider,” Pete insisted, “with the photographic proof that we got right now. That was our mission objective. It’s what they pay us for.”

“Whoop-tee-do.”

“Besides, it’s the patriotic thing. Right?”

“Maybe I’d play the patriot game, if I was in uniform,” said Katrinko. “But the Army don’t allow neuters. I’m a total freak and I’m a free agent, and I didn’t come here to see Shangri-La and then turn around first thing.”

“Yeah,” Pete admitted. “I really know that feeling.”

“I’m going down in there right now,” Katrinko said. “You belay for me?”

“No way, kid. This time, I’m leading point.”

Pete eased himself through a crudely broken louver and out onto the vast rocky ceiling. Pete had never much liked climbing rock. Nasty stuff, rock—all natural, no guaranteed engineering specifications. Still, Pete had spent a great deal of his life on ceilings. Ceilings he understood.

He worked his way out on a series of congealed lava knobs, till he hit a nice solid crack. He did a rapid set of fist-jams, then set a pair of foam-clamps, and tied himself off on anchor.

Pete panned slowly in place, upside down on the ceiling, muffled in his camou gear, scanning methodically for the sake of Katrinko back on the fiber-optic spex link. Large sections of the ceiling looked weirdly worm-eaten, as if drills or acids had etched the rock away. Pete could discern in the eerie glow of infrared that the three fake starships were actually supported on columns. Huge hollow tubes, lacelike and almost entirely invisible, made of something black and impossibly strong, maybe carbon-fiber. There were water pipes inside the columns, and electrical power.

Those columns were the quickest and easiest ways to climb down or up to the starships. Those columns were also very exposed. They looked like excellent places to get killed.

Pete knew that he was safely invisible to any naked human eye, but there wasn’t much he could do about his heat signature. For all he knew, at this moment he was glowing like a Christmas tree on the sensors of a thousand heavily armed robots. But you couldn’t leave a thousand machines armed to a hair-trigger for years on end. And who would program them to spend their time watching ceilings?

The muscular burn had faded from his back and shoulders. Pete shook a little extra blood through his wrists, unhooked, and took off on cleats and gripwebs. He veered around one of the fake stars, a great glowing glassine bulb the size of a laundry basket. The fake star was cemented into a big rocky wart, and it radiated a cold, enchanting, and gooey firefly light. Pete was so intrigued by this bold deception that his cleat missed a smear. His left foot swung loose. His left shoulder emitted a nasty-feeling, expensive-sounding pop. Pete grunted, planted both cleats, and slapped up a glue patch, with tendons smarting and the old forearm clock ticking fast. He whipped a crab through the patchloop and sagged within his harness, breathing hard.

On the surface of his spex, Katrinko’s glowing fingertip whipped across the field of Pete’s vision, and pointed. Something moving out there. Pete had company.

Pete eased a string of flashbangs from his sleeve. Then he hunkered down in place, trusting to his camouflage, and watching.

A robot was moving toward him among the dark pits of the fake stars. Wobbling and jittering.

Pete had never seen any device remotely akin to this robot. It had a porous, foamy hide, like cork and plastic. It had a blind compartmented knob for a head, and fourteen long fibrous legs like a frayed mess of used rope, terminating in absurdly complicated feet, like a boxful of grip pliers. Hanging upside down from bits of rocky irregularity too small to see, it would open its big warty head and flick out a forked sensor like a snake’s tongue. Sometimes it would dip itself close to the ceiling, for a lingering chemical smooch on the surface of the rock.

Pete watched with murderous patience as the device backed away, drew nearer, spun around a bit, meandered a little closer, sucked some more ceiling rock, made up its mind about something, replanted its big grippy feet, hoofed along closer yet, lost its train of thought, retreated a bit, sniffed the air at length, sucked meditatively on the end of one of its ropy tentacles.

It finally reached him, walked deftly over his legs, and dipped up to lick enthusiastically at the chemical traces left by his gripweb. The robot seemed enchanted by the taste of the glove’s elastomer against the rock. It hung there on its fourteen plier feet, loudly licking and rasping.

Pete lashed out with his pick. The razored point slid with a sullen crunch right through the thing’s corky head.

It went limp instantly, pinned there against the ceiling. Then with a nasty rustling it deployed a whole unsuspected set of waxy and filmy appurtenances. Complex bug-tongue things, mandible scrapers, delicate little spatulas, all reeling and trembling out of its slotted underside.

It was not going to die. It couldn’t die, because it had never been alive. It was a piece of biotechnical machinery. Dying was simply not on its agenda anywhere. Pete photographed the device carefully as it struggled with obscene mechanical stupidity to come to workable terms with its new environmental parameters. Then Pete levered the pick loose from the ceiling, shook it loose, and dropped the pierced robot straight down to hell.

Pete climbed more quickly now, favoring the strained shoulder. He worked his way methodically out to the relative ease of the vertical wall, where he discovered a large mined-out vein in the constellation Sagittarius. The vein was a big snaky recess where some kind of ore had been nibbled and strained from the rock. By the look of it, the rock had been chewed away by a termite host of tiny robots with mouths like toenail clippers.

He signaled on the spex for Katrinko. The neuter followed along the clipped and anchored line, climbing like a fiend while lugging one of the haulbags. As Katrinko settled in to their new base camp, Pete returned to the louvers to fetch the second bag. When he’d finally heaved and grappled his way back, his shoulder was aching bitterly and his nerves were shot. They were done for the day.

Katrinko had put up the emission-free encystment web at the mouth of their crevice. With Pete returned to relative safety, she reeled in their smart-ropes and fed them a handful of sugar.

Pete cracked open two capsules of instant fluff, then sank back gratefully into the wool.

Katrinko took off her mask. She was vibrating with alert enthusiasm. Youth, thought Pete—youth, and the 8 percent metabolic advantage that came from lacking sex organs. “We’re in so much trouble now,” Katrinko whispered, with a feverish grin in the faint red glow of a single indicator light. She no longer resembled a boy or a young woman. Katrinko looked completely diabolical. This was a nonsexed creature. Pete liked to think of her as a “she,” because this was somehow easier on his mind, but Katrinko was an “it.” Now it was filled with glee, because finally it had placed itself in a proper and pleasing situation. Stark and feral confrontation with its own stark and feral little being.

“Yeah, this is trouble,” Pete said. He placed a fat medicated tick onto the vein inside of his elbow. “And you’re taking first watch.”

Pete woke four hours later, with a heart-fluttering rise from the stunned depths of chemically assisted delta-sleep. He felt numb, and lightly dusted with a brain-clouding amnesia, as if he’d slept for four straight days. He had been profoundly helpless in the grip of the drug, but the risk had been worth it, because now he was thoroughly rested. Pete sat up, and tried the left shoulder experimentally. It was much improved.

Pete rubbed feeling back into his stubbled face and scalp, then strapped his spex on. He discovered Katrinko squatting on her haunches, in the radiant glow of her own body heat, pondering over an ugly mess of spines, flakes, and goo.

Pete touched spex knobs and leaned forward. “What you got there?”

“Dead robots. They ate our foamchocks, right out of the ceiling. They eat anything. I killed the ones that tried to break into camp.” Katrinko stroked at a midair menu, then handed Pete a fiber lead for his spex. “Check this footage I took.”

Katrinko had been keeping watch with the gelcams, picking out passing robots in the glow of their engine heat. She’d documented them on infrared, saving and editing the clearest live-action footage. “These little ones with the ball-shaped feet, I call them keets,” she narrated, as the captured frames cascaded across Pete’s spex-clad gaze. “They’re small, but they’re really fast, and all over the place—I had to kill three of them. This one with the sharp spiral nose is a drillet. Those are a pair of dubits. The dubits always travel in pairs. This big thing here, that looks like a spilled dessert with big eyes and a ball on a chain, I call that one a lurchen. Because of the way it moves, see? It’s sure a lot faster than it looks.”

Katrinko stopped the spex replay, switched back to live perception, and poked carefully at the broken litter before her booted feet. The biggest device in the heap resembled a dissected cat’s head stuffed with cables and bristles. “I also killed this piteen. Piteens don’t die easy, man.”

“There’s lots of these things?”

“I figure hundreds, maybe thousands. All different kinds. And every one of ’em as stupid as dirt. Or else we’d be dead and disassembled a hundred times already.”

Pete stared at the dissected robots, a cooling mass of nerve-netting, batteries, veiny armor plates, and gelatin. “Why do they look so crazy?”

“Cause they grew all by themselves. Nobody ever designed them.” Katrinko glanced up. “You remember those big virtual spaces for weapons design, that they run out in Alamagordo?”

“Yeah, sure, Alamagordo. Physics simulations on those super-size quantum gel-brains. Huge virtualities, with ultra-fast, ultra-fine detail. You bet I remember New Mexico! I love to raid a great computer lab. There’s something so traditional about the hack.”

“Yeah. See, for us NAFTA types, physics virtualities are a military app. We always give our tech to the military whenever it looks really dangerous. But let’s say you don’t share our NAFTA values. You don’t wanna test new weapons systems inside giant virtualities. Let’s say you want to make a can-opener, instead.”

During her sleepless hours huddling on watch, Katrinko had clearly been giving this matter a lot of thought. “Well, you could study other people’s can-openers and try to improve the design. Or else you could just set up a giant high-powered virtuality with a bunch of virtual cans inside it. Then you make some can-opener simulations, that are basically blobs of goo. They’re simulated goo, but they’re also programs, and those programs trade data and evolve. Whenever they pierce a can, you reward them by making more copies of them. You’re running, like, a million generations of a million different possible can-openers, all day every day, in a simulated space.”

The concept was not entirely alien to Spider Pete. “Yeah, I’ve heard the rumors. It was one of those stunts like Artificial Intelligence. It might look really good on paper, but you can’t ever get it to work in real life.”

“Yeah, and now it’s illegal too. Kinda hard to police, though. But let’s imagine you’re into economic warfare and you figure out how to do this. Finally, you evolve this super weird, super can-opener that no human being could ever have invented. Something that no human being could even imagine. Because it grew like a mushroom in an entire alternate physics. But you have all the specs for its shape and proportions, right there in the supercomputer. So to make one inside the real world, you just print it out like a photograph. And it works! It runs! See? Instant cheap consumer goods.”

Pete thought it over. “So you’re saying the Sphere people got that idea to work, and these robots here were built that way?”

“Pete, I just can’t figure any other way this could have happened. These machines are just too alien. They had to come from some totally nonhuman, autonomous process. Even the best Japanese engineers can’t design a jelly robot made out of fuzz and rope that can move like a caterpillar. There’s not enough money in the world to pay human brains to think that out.”

Pete prodded at the gooey ruins with his pick. “Well, you got that right.”

“Whoever built this place, they broke a lot of rules and treaties. But they did it all really cheap. They did it in a way that is so cheap that it is beyond economics.” Katrinko thought this over. “It’s way beyond economics, and that’s exactly why it’s against all those rules and the treaties in the first place.”

“Fast, cheap, and out of control.”

“Exactly, man. If this stuff ever got loose in the real world, it would mean the end of everything we know.”

Pete liked this last statement not at all. He had always disliked apocalyptic hype. He liked it even less now because under these extreme circumstances it sounded very plausible. The Sphere had the youngest and the biggest population of the three major trading blocs, and the youngest and the biggest ideas. People in Asia knew how to get things done. “Y’know, Lyle Schweik once told me that the weirdest bicycles in the world come out of China these days.”

“Well, he’s right. They do. And what about those Chinese circuitry chips they’ve been dumping in the NAFTA markets lately? Those chips are dirt cheap and work fine, but they’re full of all this crazy leftover wiring that doubles back and gets all snarled up. . . . I always thought that was just shoddy workmanship. Man, ‘workmanship’ had nothing to do with those chips.”

Pete nodded soberly. “Okay. Chips and bicycles, that much I can understand. There’s a lot of money in that. But who the heck would take the trouble to create a giant hole in the ground that’s full of robots and fake stars? I mean, why?”

Katrinko shrugged. “I guess it’s just the Sphere, man. They still do stuff just because it’s wonderful.”

The bottom of the world was boiling over. During the passing century, the nuclear test cavity had accumulated its own little desert aquifer, a pitch-black subterranean oasis. The bottom of the bubble was an unearthly drowned maze of shattered cracks and chemical deposition, all turned to simmering tidepools of mechanical self-assemblage. Oxygen-fizzing geysers of black fungus tea.

Steam rose steadily in the darkness amid the crags, rising to condense and run in chilly rivulets down the spherical star-spangled walls. Down at the bottom, all the water was eagerly collected by aberrant devices of animated sponge and string. Katrinko instantly tagged these as “smits” and “fuzzens.”

The smits and fuzzens were nightmare dishrags and piston-powered spaghetti, leaping and slopping wetly from crag to crag. Katrinko took an unexpected ease and pleasure in naming and photographing the machines. Speculation boiled with sinister ease from the sexless youngster’s vulpine head, a swift off-the-cuff adjustment to this alien toy world. It would seem that the kid lived rather closer to the future than Pete did.

They cranked their way from boulder to boulder, crack to liquid crack. They documented fresh robot larvae, chewing their way to the freedom of darkness through plugs of goo and muslin. It was a whole miniature creation, designed in the senseless gooey cores of a Chinese supercomputing gelbrain, and transmuted into reality in a hot broth of undead mechanized protein. This was by far the most amazing phenomenon that Pete had ever witnessed. Pete was accordingly plunged into gloom. Knowledge was power in his world. He knew with leaden certainty that he was taking on far too much voltage for his own good.

Pete was a professional. He could imagine stealing classified military secrets from a superpower, and surviving that experience. It would be very risky, but in the final analysis it was just the military. A rocket base, for instance—a secret Asian rocket base might have been a lot of fun.

But this was not military. This was an entire new means of industrial production. Pete knew with instinctive street-level certainty that tech of this level of revolutionary weirdness was not a spy thing, a sports thing, or a soldier thing. This was a big, big money thing. He might survive discovering it. He’d never get away with revealing it.

The thrilling wonder of it all really bugged him. Thrilling wonder was at best a passing thing. The sober implications for the longer term weighed on Pete’s soul like a damp towel. He could imagine escaping this place in one piece, but he couldn’t imagine any plausible aftermath for handing over nifty photographs of thrilling wonder to military spooks on the Potomac. He couldn’t imagine what the powers-that-were would do with that knowledge. He rather dreaded what they would do to him for giving it to them.

Pete wiped a sauna cascade of sweat from his neck.

“So I figure it’s either geothermal power, or a fusion generator down there,” said Katrinko.

“I’d be betting thermonuclear, given the circumstances.” The rocks below their busy cleats were a-skitter with bugs: gippers and ghents and kebbits, dismantlers and glue-spreaders and brain-eating carrion disassemblers. They were profoundly dumb little devices, specialized as centipedes. They didn’t seem very aggressive, but it surely would be a lethal mistake to sit down among them.

A barnacle thing with an iris mouth and long whipping eyes took a careful taste of Katrinko’s boot. She retreated to a crag with a yelp.

“Wear your mask,” Pete chided. The damp heat was bliss after the skin-eating chill of the Taklamakan, but most of the vents and cracks were spewing thick smells of hot beef stew and burnt rubber, all varieties of eldritch mechano-metabolic byproduct. His lungs felt sore at the very thought of it.

Pete cast his foggy spex up the nearest of the carbon-fiber columns, and the golden, glowing, impossibly tempting lights of those starship portholes up above.

Katrinko led point. She was pitilessly exposed against the lacelike girders. They didn’t want to risk exposure during two trips, so they each carried a haul bag.

The climb went well at first. Then a machine rose up from wet darkness like a six-winged dragonfly. Its stinging tail lashed through the thready column like the kick of a mule. It connected brutally. Katrinko shot backwards from the impact, tumbled ten meters, and dangled like a ragdoll from her last backup chock.

The flying creature circled in a figure eight, attempting to make up its nonexistent mind. Then a slower but much larger creature writhed and fluttered out of the starry sky, and attacked Katrinko’s dangling haulbag. The bag burst like a Christmas piñata in a churning array of taloned wings. A fabulous cascade of expensive spy gear splashed down to the hot pools below.

Katrinko twitched feebly at the end of her rope. The dragonfly, cruelly alerted, went for her movement. Pete launched a string of flashbangs.

The world erupted in flash, heat, concussion, and flying chaff. Impossibly hot and loud, a thunderstorm in a closet. The best kind of disappearance magic: total overwhelming distraction, the only real magic in the world.

Pete soared up to Katrinko like a balloon on a bungee-cord. When he reached the bottom of the starship, twenty-seven heart-pounding seconds later, he had burned out both the smart-ropes.

The silvery rain of chaff was driving the bugs to mania. The bottom of the cavern was suddenly a-crawl with leaping mechanical heat-ghosts, an instant menagerie of skippers and humpers and floppers. At the rim of perception, there were new things rising from the depths of the pools, vast and scaly, like golden carp to a rain of fish chow.

Pete’s own haulbag had been abandoned at the base of the column. That bag was clearly not long for this world.

Katrinko came to with a sudden winded gasp. They began free-climbing the outside of the starship. It surface was stony, rough and uneven, something like pumice, or wasp spit.

They found the underside of a monster porthole and pressed themselves flat against the surface.

There they waited, inert and unmoving, for an hour. Katrinko caught her breath. Her ribs stopped bleeding. The two of them waited for another hour, while crawling and flying heat-ghosts nosed furiously around their little world, following the tatters of their programming. They waited a third hour.

Finally they were joined in their haven by an oblivious gang of machines with suckery skirts and wheelbarrows for heads. The robots chose a declivity and began filling it with big mandible trowels of stony mortar, slopping it on and jaw-chiseling it into place, smoothing everything over, tireless and pitiless.

Pete seized this opportunity to attempt to salvage their lost equipment. There had been such fabulous federal bounty in there: smart audio bugs, heavy-duty gelcams, sensors and detectors, pulleys, crampons and latches, priceless vials of programmed neural goo. . . . Pete crept back to the bottom of the spacecraft.

Everything was long gone. Even the depleted smart-ropes had been eaten, by a long trail of foraging keets. The little machines were still squirreling about in the black lace of the column, sniffing and scraping at the last molecular traces, with every appearance of satisfaction.

Pete rejoined Katrinko, and woke her where she clung rigid and stupefied to her hiding spot. They inched their way around the curved rim of the starship hull, hunting for a possible weakness. They were in very deep trouble now, for their best equipment was gone. It didn’t matter. Their course was very obvious now, and the loss of alternatives had clarified Pete’s mind. He was consumed with a burning desire to break in.

Pete slithered into the faint shelter of a large, deeply pitted hump. There he discovered a mess of braided rope. The rope was woven of dead and mashed organic fibers, something like the hair at the bottom of a sink. The rope had gone all petrified under a stony lacquer of robot spit.

These were climber’s ropes. Someone had broken out here—smashed through the hull of the ship, from the inside. The robots had come to repair the damage, carefully resealing the exit hole, and leaving this ugly hump of stony scar tissue.

Pete pulled his gelcam drill. He had lost the sugar reserves along with the haulbags. Without sugar to metabolize, the little enzyme-driven rotor would starve and be useless soon. That fact could not be helped. Pete pressed the device against the hull, waited as it punched its way through, and squirted in a gelcam to follow.

He saw a farm. Pete could scarcely have been more astonished. It was certainly farmland, though. Cute, toy farmland, all under a stony blue ceiling, crisscrossed with hot grids of radiant light, embraced in the stony arch of the enclosing hull. There were fishponds with reeds. Ditches, and a wooden irrigation wheel. A little bridge of bamboo. There were hairy melon vines in rich black soil and neat, entirely weedless fields of dwarfed red grain. Not a soul in sight.

Katrinko crept up and linked in on cable. “So where is everybody?” Pete said.

“They’re all at the portholes,” said Katrinko, coughing.

“What?” said Pete, surprised. “Why?”

“Because of those flashbangs,” Katrinko wheezed. Her battered ribs were still paining her. “They’re all at the portholes, looking out into the darkness. Waiting for something else to happen.”

“But we did that stuff hours ago.”

“It was very big news, man. Nothing ever happens in there.”

Pete nodded, fired with resolve. “Well then. We’re breakin’ in.”

Katrinko was way game. “Gonna use caps?”

“Too obvious.”

“Acids and fibrillators?”

“Lost ’em in the haulbags.”

“Well, that leaves cheesewires,” Katrinko concluded. “I got two.”

“I got six.”

Katrinko nodded in delight. “Six cheesewires! You’re loaded for bear, man!”

“I love cheesewires,” Pete grunted. He had helped to invent them.

Eight minutes and twelve seconds later they were inside the starship. They reset the cored-out plug behind them, delicately gluing it in place and carefully obscuring the hair-thin cuts.

Katrinko sidestepped into a grove of bamboo. Her camou bloomed in green and tan and yellow, with such instant and treacherous ease that Pete lost her entirely. Then she waved, and the spex edge-detectors kicked in on her silhouette.

Pete lifted his spex for a human naked-eye take on the situation. There was simply nothing there at all. Katrinko was gone, less than a ghost, like pitchforking mercury with your eyelashes.

So they were safe now. They could glide through this bottled farm like a pair of bad dreams.

They scanned the spacecraft from top to bottom, looking for dangerous and interesting phenomena. Control rooms manned by Asian space technicians maybe, or big lethal robots, or video monitors—something that might cramp their style or kill them. In the thirty-seven floors of the spacecraft, they found no such thing.

The five thousand inhabitants spent their waking hours farming. The crew of the starship were preindustrial, tribal, Asian peasants. Men, women, old folks, little kids.

The local peasants rose every single morning, as their hot networks of wiring came alive in the ceiling. They would milk their goats. They would feed their sheep, and some very odd, knee-high, dwarf Bactrian camels. They cut bamboo and netted their fishponds. They cut down tamarisks and poplar trees for firewood. They tended melon vines and grew plums and hemp. They brewed alcohol, and ground grain, and boiled millet, and squeezed cooking oil out of rapeseed. They made clothes out of hemp and raw wool and leather, and baskets out of reeds and straw. They ate a lot of carp.

And they raised a whole mess of chickens. Somebody not from around here had been fooling with the chickens. Apparently these were super space-chickens of some kind, leftover lab products from some serious long-term attempt to screw around with chicken DNA. The hens produced five or six lumpy eggs every day. The roosters were enormous, and all different colors, and very smelly, and distinctly reptilian.

It was very quiet and peaceful inside the starship. The animals made their lowing and clucking noises, and the farm workers sang to themselves in the tiny round-edged fields, and the incessant foot-driven water pumps would clack rhythmically, but there were no city noises. No engines anywhere. No screens. No media.

There was no money. There were a bunch of tribal elders who sat under the blossoming plum trees outside the big stone granaries. They messed with beads on wires, and wrote notes on slips of wood. Then the soldiers, or the cops—they were a bunch of kids in crude leather armor, with spears—would tramp in groups, up and down the dozens of stairs, on the dozens of floors. Marching like crazy, and requisitioning stuff, and carrying stuff on their backs, and handing things out to people. Basically spreading the wealth around.

Most of the weird bearded old guys were palace accountants, but there were some others too. They sat cross-legged on mats in their homemade robes, and straw sandals, and their little spangly hats, discussing important matters at slow and extreme length. Sometimes they wrote stuff down on palm-leaves.

Pete and Katrinko spent a special effort to spy on these old men in the spangled hats, because, after close study, they had concluded that this was the local government. They pretty much had to be the government. These old men with the starry hats were the only part of the population who weren’t being worked to a frazzle.

Pete and Katrinko found themselves a cozy spot on the roof of the granary, one of the few permanent structures inside the spacecraft. It never rained inside the starship, so there wasn’t much call for roofs. Nobody ever trespassed up on the roof of the granary. It was clear that the very idea of doing this was beyond local imagination. So Pete and Katrinko stole some bamboo water jugs, and some lovely handmade carpets, and a lean-to tent, and set up camp there.

Katrinko studied an especially elaborate palm-leaf book that she had filched from the local temple. There were pages and pages of dense alien script. “Man, what do you suppose these yokels have to write about?”

“The way I figure it,” said Pete, “they’re writing down everything they can remember from the world outside.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Kinda building up an intelligence dossier for their little starship regime, see? Because that’s all they’ll ever know, because the people who put them inside here aren’t giving ’em any news. And they’re sure as hell never gonna let ’em out.”

Katrinko leafed carefully through the stiff and brittle pages of the handmade book. The people here spoke only one language. It was no language Pete or Katrinko could even begin to recognize. “Then this is their history. Right?”

“It’s their lives, kid. Their past lives, back when they were still real people, in the big real world outside. Transistor radios, and shoulder-launched rockets. Barbed-wire, pacification campaigns, ID cards. Camel caravans coming in over the border, with mortars and explosives. And very advanced Sphere mandarin bosses, who just don’t have the time to put up with armed, Asian, tribal fanatics.”

Katrinko looked up. “That kinda sounds like your version of the outside world, Pete.”

Pete shrugged. “Hey, it’s what happens.”

“You suppose these guys really believe they’re inside a real starship?”

“I guess that depends on how much they learned from the guys who broke out of here with the picks and the ropes.”

Katrinko thought about it. “You know what’s truly pathetic? The shabby illusion of all this. Some spook mandarin’s crazy notion that ethnic separatists could be squeezed down tight, and spat out like watermelon seeds into interstellar space. . . . Man, what a come-on, what an enticement, what an empty promise!”

“I could sell that idea,” Pete said thoughtfully. “You know how far away the stars really are, kid? About four hundred years away, that’s how far. You seriously want to get human beings to travel to another star, you gotta put human beings inside of a sealed can for four hundred solid years. But what are people supposed to do in there, all that time? The only thing they can do is quietly run a farm. Because that’s what a starship is. It’s a desert oasis.”

“So you want to try a dry-run starship experiment,” said Katrinko. “And in the meantime, you happen to have some handy religious fanatics in the backwoods of Asia, who are shooting your ass off. Guys who refuse to change their age-old lives, even though you are very, very high-tech.”

“Yep. That’s about the size of it. Means, motive, and opportunity.”

“I get it. But I can’t believe that somebody went through with that scheme in real life. I mean, rounding up an ethnic minority, and sticking them down in some godforsaken hole, just so you’ll never have to think about them again. That’s just impossible!”

“Did I ever tell you that my grandfather was a Seminole?” Pete said.

Katrinko shook her head. “What’s that mean?”

“They were American tribal guys who ended up stuck in a swamp. The Florida Seminoles, they called ’em. Y’know, maybe they just called my grandfather a Seminole. He dressed really funny. . . . Maybe it just sounded good to call him a Seminole. Otherwise, he just would have been some strange, illiterate geezer.”

Katrinko’s brow wrinkled. “Does it matter that your grandfather was a Seminole?”

“I used to think it did. That’s where I got my skin color—as if that matters, nowadays. I reckon it mattered plenty to my grandfather, though. . . . He was always stompin’ and carryin’ on about a lot of weird stuff we couldn’t understand. His English was pretty bad. He was never around much when we needed him.”

“Pete . . .” Katrinko sighed. “I think it’s time we got out of this place.”

“How come?” Pete said, surprised. “We’re safe up here. The locals are not gonna hurt us. They can’t even see us. They can’t touch us. Hell, they can’t even imagine us. With our fantastic tactical advantages, we’re just like gods to these people.”

“I know all that, man. They’re like the ultimate dumb straight people. I don’t like them very much. They’re not much of a challenge to us. In fact, they kind of creep me out.”

“No way! They’re fascinating. Those baggy clothes, the acoustic songs, all that menial labor . . . These people got something that we modern people just don’t have any more.”

“Huh?” Katrinko said. “Like what, exactly?”

“I dunno,” Pete admitted.

“Well, whatever it is, it can’t be very important.” Katrinko sighed. “We got some serious challenges on the agenda, man. We gotta sidestep our way past all those angry robots outside, then head up that shaft, then hoof it back, four days through a freezing desert, with no haulbags. All the way back to the glider.”

“But Trink, there are two other starships in here that we didn’t break into yet. Don’t you want to see those guys?”

“What I’d like to see right now is a hot bath in a four-star hotel,” said Katrinko. “And some very big international headlines, maybe. All about me. That would be lovely.” She grinned.

“But what about the people?”

“Look, I’m not ‘people,’ ” Katrinko said calmly. “Maybe it’s because I’m a neuter, Pete, but I can tell you’re way off the subject. These people are none of our business. Our business now is to return to our glider in an operational condition, so that we can complete our assigned mission, and return to base with our data. Okay?”

“Well, let’s break into just one more starship first.”

“We gotta move, Pete. We’ve lost our best equipment, and we’re running low on body fat. This isn’t something that we can kid about and live.”

“But we’ll never come back here again. Somebody will, but it sure as heck won’t be us. See, it’s a Spider thing.”

Katrinko was weakening. “One more starship? Not both of ’em?”

“Just one more.”

“Okay, good deal.”

The hole they had cut through the starship’s hull had been rapidly cemented by robots. It cost them two more cheesewires to cut themselves a new exit. Then Katrinko led point, up across the stony ceiling, and down the carbon column to the second ship. To avoid annoying the lurking robot guards, they moved with hypnotic slowness and excessive stealth. This made it a grueling trip.

This second ship had seen hard use. The hull was extensively scarred with great wads of cement, entombing many lengths of dried and knotted rope. Pete and Katrinko found a weak spot and cut their way in.

This starship was crowded. It was loud inside, and it smelled. The floors were crammed with hot and sticky little bazaars, where people sold handicrafts and liquor and food. Criminals were being punished by being publicly chained to posts and pelted with offal by passers-by. Big crowds of ragged men and tattooed women gathered around brutal cockfights, featuring spurred mutant chickens half the size of dogs. All the men carried knives.

The architecture here was more elaborate, all kinds of warrens, and courtyards, and damp, sticky alleys. After exploring four floors, Katrinko suddenly declared that she recognized their surroundings. According to Katrinko, they were a physical replica of sets from a popular Japanese interactive samurai epic. Apparently the starship’s designers had needed some preindustrial Asian village settings, and they hadn’t wanted to take the expense and trouble to design them from scratch. So they had programmed their construction robots with pirated game designs.

This starship had once been lavishly equipped with at least three hundred armed video camera installations. Apparently, the mandarins had come to the stunning realization that the mere fact that they were recording crime didn’t mean that they could control it. Their spy cameras were all dead now. Most had been vandalized. Some had gone down fighting. They were all inert and abandoned.

The rebellious locals had been very busy. After defeating the spy cameras, they had created a set of giant hullbreakers. These were siege engines, big crossbow torsion machines, made of hemp and wood and bamboo. The hullbreakers were starship community efforts, elaborately painted and ribboned, and presided over by tough, aggressive gang bosses with batons and big leather belts.

Pete and Katrinko watched a labor gang, hard at work on one of the hullbreakers. Women braided rope ladders from hair and vegetable fiber, while smiths forged pitons over choking, hazy charcoal fires. It was clear from the evidence that these restive locals had broken out of their starship jail at least twenty times. Every time they had been corralled back in by the relentless efforts of mindless machines. Now they were busily preparing yet another breakout.

“These guys sure have got initiative,” said Pete admiringly. “Let’s do ’em a little favor, okay?”

“Yeah?”

“Here they are, taking all this trouble to hammer their way out. But we still have a bunch of caps. We got no more use for ’em, after we leave this place. So the way I figure it, we blow their wall out big-time, and let a whole bunch of ’em loose at once. Then you and I can escape real easy in the confusion.”

Katrinko loved this idea, but had to play devil’s advocate. “You really think we ought to interfere like that? That kind of shows our hand, doesn’t it?”

“Nobody’s watching any more,” said Pete. “Some technocrat figured this for a big lab experiment. But they wrote these people off, or maybe they lost their anthropology grant. These people are totally forgotten. Let’s give the poor bastards a show.”

Pete and Katrinko planted their explosives, took cover on the ceiling, and cheerfully watched the wall blow out.

A violent gust of air came through as pressures equalized, carrying a hemorrhage of dust and leaves into interstellar space. The locals were totally astounded by the explosion, but when the repair robots showed up, they soon recovered their morale. A terrific battle broke out, a general vengeful frenzy of crab-bashing and sponge-skewering. Women and children tussled with the keets and bibbets. Soldiers in leather cuirasses fought with the bigger machines, deploying pikes, crossbow quarrels, and big robot-mashing mauls.

The robots were profoundly stupid, but they were indifferent to their casualties, and entirely relentless.

The locals made the most of their window of opportunity. They loaded a massive harpoon into a torsion catapult, and fired it into space. Their target was the neighboring starship, the third and last of them.

The barbed spear bounded off the hull. So they reeled it back in on a monster bamboo hand-reel, cursing and shouting like maniacs.

The starship’s entire population poured into the fight. The walls and bulkheads shook with the tramp of their angry feet. The outnumbered robots fell back. Pete and Katrinko seized this golden opportunity to slip out the hole. They climbed swiftly up the hull, and out of reach of the combat.

The locals fired their big harpoon again. This time the barbed tip struck true, and it stuck there quivering.

Then a little kid was heaved into place, half-naked, with a hammer and screws, and a rope threaded through his belt. He had a crown of dripping candles set upon his head.

Katrinko glanced back, and stopped dead.

Pete urged her on, then stopped as well.

The child began reeling himself industriously along the trembling harpoon line, trailing a bigger rope. An airborne machine came to menace him. It fell back twitching, pestered by a nasty scattering of crossbow bolts.

Pete found himself mesmerized. He hadn’t felt the desperation of the circumstances, until he saw this brave little boy ready to fall to his death. Pete had seen many climbers who took risks because they were crazy. He’d seen professional climbers, such as himself, who played games with risk as masters of applied technique. He’d never witnessed climbing as an act of raw, desperate sacrifice.

The heroic child arrived on the grainy hull of the alien ship, and began banging his pitons in a hammer-swinging frenzy. His crown of candles shook and flickered with his efforts. The boy could barely see. He had slung himself out into stygian darkness to fall to his doom.

Pete climbed up to Katrinko and quickly linked in on cable. “We gotta leave now, kid. It’s now or never.”

“Not yet,” Katrinko said. “I’m taping all this.”

“It’s our big chance.”

“We’ll go later.” Katrinko watched a flying vacuum cleaner batting by, to swat cruelly at the kid’s legs. She turned her masked head to Pete and her whole body stiffened with rage. “You got a cheesewire left?”

“I got three.”

“Gimme. I gotta go help him.”

Katrinko unplugged, slicked down the starship’s wall in a daring controlled slide, and hit the stretched rope. To Pete’s complete astonishment, Katrinko lit there in a crouch, caught herself atop the vibrating line, and simply ran for it. She ran along the humming tightrope in a thrumming blur, stunning the locals so thoroughly that they were barely able to fire their crossbows.

Flying quarrels whizzed past and around her, nearly skewering the terrified child at the far end of the rope. Then Katrinko leapt and bounded into space, her gloves and cleats outspread. She simply vanished.

It was a champion’s gambit if Pete had ever seen one. It was a legendary move.

Pete could manage well enough on a tightrope. He had experience, excellent balance, and physical acumen. He was, after all, a professional. He could walk a rope if he was put to the job.

But not in full climbing gear, with cleats. And not on a slack, handbraided, homemade rope. Not when the rope was very poorly anchored by a homemade pig-iron harpoon. Not when he outweighed Katrinko by twenty kilos. Not in the middle of a flying circus of airborne robots. And not in a cloud of arrows.

Pete was simply not that crazy any more. Instead, he would have to follow Katrinko the sensible way. He would have to climb the starship, traverse the ceiling, and climb down to the third starship onto the far side. A hard three hours’ work at the very best—four hours, with any modicum of safety.

Pete weighed the odds, made up his mind, and went after the job.

Pete turned in time to see Katrinko busily cheesewiring her way through the hull of Starship Three. A gout of white light poured out as the cored plug slid aside. For a deadly moment, Katrinko was a silhouetted goblin, her camou useless as the starship’s radiance framed her. Her clothing fluttered in a violent gust of escaping air.

Below her, the climbing child had anchored himself to the wall and tied off his second rope. He looked up at the sudden gout of light, and he screamed so loudly that the whole universe rang.

The child’s many relatives reacted by instinct, with a ragged volley of crossbow shots. The arrows veered and scattered in the gusting wind, but there were a lot of them. Katrinko ducked, and flinched, and rolled headlong into the starship. She vanished again.

Had she been hit? Pete set an anchor, tied off, and tried the radio. But without the relays in the haulbag, the weak signal could not get through.

Pete climbed on doggedly. It was the only option left.

After half an hour, Pete began coughing. The starry cosmic cavity had filled with a terrible smell. The stench was coming from the invaded starship, pouring slowly from the cored-out hole. A long-bottled, deadly stink of burning rot.

Climbing solo, Pete gave it his best. His shoulder was bad and, worse yet, his spex began to misbehave. He finally reached the cored-out entrance that Katrinko had cut. The locals were already there in force, stringing themselves a sturdy rope bridge, and attaching it to massive screws. The locals brandished torches, spears, and crossbows. They were fighting off the incessant attacks of the robots. It was clear from their wild expressions of savage glee that they had been longing for this moment for years.

Pete slipped past them unnoticed, into Starship Three. He breathed the soured air for a moment, and quickly retreated again. He inserted a new set of mask filters, and returned.

He found Katrinko’s cooling body, wedged against the ceiling. An unlucky crossbow shot had slashed through her suit and punctured Katrinko’s left arm. So, with her usual presence of mind, she had deftly leapt up a nearby wall, tied off on a chock, and hidden herself well out of harm’s way. She’d quickly stopped the bleeding. Despite its awkward location, she’d even managed to get her wound bandaged.

Then the foul air had silently and stealthily overcome her.

With her battered ribs and a major wound, Katrinko hadn’t been able to tell her dizziness from shock. Feeling sick, she had relaxed, and tried to catch her breath. A fatal gambit. She was still hanging there, unseen and invisible, dead.

Pete discovered that Katrinko was far from alone. The crew here had all died. Died months ago, maybe years ago. Some kind of huge fire inside the spacecraft. The electric lights were still on, the internal machinery worked, but there was no one left here but mummies.

These dead tribal people had the nicest clothes Pete had yet seen. Clearly they’d spent a lot of time knitting and embroidering, during the many weary years of their imprisonment. The corpses had all kinds of layered sleeves and tatted aprons, and braided belt-ties, and lacquered hairclips, and excessively nifty little sandals. They’d all smothered horribly during the sullen inferno, along with their cats and dogs and enormous chickens, in a sudden wave of smoke and combustion that had filled their spacecraft in minutes.

This was far too complicated to be anything as simple as mere genocide. Pete figured the mandarins for gentlemen technocrats, experts with the best of intentions. The lively possibility remained that it was mass suicide. But on mature consideration, Pete had to figure this for a very bad, and very embarrassing, social-engineering accident.

Though that certainly wasn’t what they would say about this mess, in Washington. There was no political mess nastier than a nasty ethnic mess. Pete couldn’t help but notice that these well-behaved locals hadn’t bothered to do any harm to their spacecraft’s lavish surveillance equipment. But their cameras were off and their starship was stone dead anyway.

The air began to clear inside the spacecraft. A pair of soldiers from Starship Number Two came stamping down the hall, industriously looting the local corpses. They couldn’t have been happier about their opportunity. They were grinning with awestruck delight.

Pete returned to his comrade’s stricken body. He stripped the camou suit—he needed the batteries. The neuter’s lean and sexless corpse was puffy with subcutaneous storage pockets, big encystments of skin where Katrinko stored her last-ditch escape tools. The battered ribs were puffy and blue. Pete could not go on.

Pete returned to the break-in hole, where he found an eager crowd. The invaders had run along the rope-bridge and gathered there in force, wrinkling their noses and cheering in wild exaltation. They had beaten the robots; there simply weren’t enough of the machines on duty to resist a whole enraged population. The robots just weren’t clever enough to out-think armed, coordinated human resistance—not without killing people wholesale, and they hadn’t been designed for that. They had suffered a flat-out defeat.

Pete frightened the cheering victors away with a string of flash-bangs.

Then he took careful aim at the lip of the drop, and hoisted Katrinko’s body, and flung her far, far, tumbling down, into the boiling pools.

Pete retreated to the first spacecraft. It was a very dispiriting climb, and when he had completed it, his shoulder had the serious, familiar ache of chronic injury. He hid among the unknowing population while he contemplated his options.

He could hide here indefinitely. His camou suit was slowly losing its charge, but he felt confident that he could manage very well without the suit. The starship seemed to feature most any number of taboo areas. Blocked-off no-go spots, where there might have been a scandal once, or bloodshed, or a funny noise, or a strange, bad, panicky smell.

Unlike the violent, reckless crowd in Starship Two, these locals had fallen for the cover story. They truly believed that they were in the depths of space bound for some better, brighter pie in their starry stone sky. Their little stellar ghetto was full of superstitious kinks. Steeped in profound ignorance, the locals imagined that their every sin caused the universe to tremble.

Pete knew that he should try to take his data back to the glider. This was what Katrinko would have wanted. To die, but leave a legend-a very City Spider thing.

But it was hard to imagine battling his way past resurgent robots, climbing the walls with an injured shoulder, then making a four-day bitter trek through a freezing desert, all completely alone. Gliders didn’t last forever, either. Spy gliders weren’t built to last. If Pete found the glider with its batteries flat, or its cute little brain gone sour, Pete would be all over. Even if he’d enjoyed a full set of equipment, with perfect health, Pete had few illusions about a solo spring outing, alone and on foot, over the Himalayas.

Why risk all that? After all, it wasn’t like this subterranean scene was breaking news. It was already many years old. Someone had conceived, planned and executed this business a long time ago. Important people with brains and big resources had known all about this for years. Somebody knew. Maybe not the Lieutenant Colonel, on the lunatic fringe of NAFTA military intelligence. But.

When Pete really thought about the basic implications . . . This was a great deal of effort, and for not that big a payoff. Because there just weren’t that many people cooped up down here. Maybe fifteen thousand of them, tops. The Asian Sphere must have had tens of thousands of unassimilated tribal people, maybe hundreds of thousands. Possibly millions. And why stop at that point? This wasn’t just an Asian problem. It was a very general problem. Ethnic, breakaway people, who just plain couldn’t, or wouldn’t, play the twenty-first century’s games.

How many Red Chinese atom-bomb tests had taken place deep in the Taklamakan? They’d never bothered to brief him on ancient history. But Pete had to wonder if, by now, maybe they hadn’t gotten this stellar concept down to a fine art. Maybe the Sphere had franchised their plan to Europe and NAFTA. How many forgotten holes were there, relic pockets punched below the hide of the twenty-first century, in the South Pacific, and Australia, and Nevada? The deadly trash of a long-derailed Armageddon. The sullen trash heaps where no one would ever want to look.

Sure, he could bend every nerve and muscle to force the world to face all this. But why? Wouldn’t it make better sense to try to think it through first?

Pete never got around to admitting to himself that he had lost the will to leave.

As despair slowly loosened its grip on him, Pete grew genuinely interested in the locals. He was intrigued by the stark limits of their lives and their universe, and in what he could do with their narrow little heads. They’d never had a supernatural being in their midst before; they just imagined them all the time. Pete started with a few poltergeist stunts, just to amuse himself. Stealing the spangled hats of the local greybeards. Shuffling the palm leaf volumes in their sacred libraries. Hijacking an abacus or two.

But that was childish.

The locals had a little temple, their special holy of holies. Naturally Pete made it his business to invade the place.

The locals kept a girl locked up in there. She was very pretty, and slightly insane, so this made her the perfect candidate to become their Sacred Temple Girl. She was the Official Temple Priestess of Starship Number One. Apparently, their modest community could only afford one, single, awe-inspiring Virgin High Priestess. But they were practical folks, so they did the best with what they had available.

The High Priestess was a pretty young woman with a stiflingly pretty life. She had her own maidservants, a wardrobe of ritual clothing, and a very time-consuming hairdo. The High Priestess spent her entire life carrying out highly complex, totally useless, ritual actions. Incense burnings, idol dustings, washings and purifications, forehead knocking, endless chanting, daubing special marks on her hands and feet. She was sacred and clearly demented, so they watched her with enormous interest, all the time. She meant everything to them. She was doing all these crazy, painful things so the rest of them wouldn’t have to. Everything about her was completely and utterly foreclosed.

Pete quite admired the Sacred Temple Girl. She was very much his type, and he felt a genuine kinship with her. She was the only local that Pete could bear to spend any personal time with.

So after prolonged study of the girl and her actions, one day, Pete manifested himself to her. First, she panicked. Then she tried to kill him. Naturally that effort failed. When she grasped the fact that he was hugely powerful, totally magical, and utterly beyond her ken, she slithered around the polished temple floor, rending her garments and keening aloud, clearly in the combined hope/fear of being horribly and indescribably defiled.

Pete understood the appeal of her concept. A younger Pete would have gone for the demonic subjugation option. But Pete was all grown up now. He hardly saw how that could help matters any, or, in fact, make any tangible difference in their circumstances.

They never learned each other’s languages. They never connected in any physical, mental, or emotional way. But they finally achieved a kind of status quo, where they could sit together in the same room, and quietly study one another, and fruitlessly speculate on the alien contents of one another’s heads. Sometimes, they would even get together and eat something tasty.

That was every bit as good as his connection with these impossibly distant people was ever going to get.

It had never occurred to Pete that the stars might go out.

He’d cut himself a sacred, demonic bolt-hole, in a taboo area of the starship. Every once in a while, he would saw his way through the robots’ repair efforts and nick out for a good long look at the artificial cosmos. This reassured him, somehow. And he had other motives as well. He had a very well founded concern that the inhabitants of Starship Two might somehow forge their way over, for an violent racist orgy of looting, slaughter, and rapine.

But Starship Two had their hands full with the robots. Any defeat of the bubbling gelbrain and its hallucinatory tools could only be temporary. Like an on-rushing mudslide, the gizmos would route around obstructions, infiltrate every evolutionary possibility, and always, always keep the pressure on.

After the crushing defeat, the bubbling production vats went into biomechanical overdrive. The old regime had been overthrown. All equilibrium was gone. The machines had gone back to their cybernetic dreamtime. Anything was possible now.

The starry walls grew thick as fleas with a seething mass of new-model jailers. Starship Two was beaten back once again, in another bitter, uncounted, historical humiliation. Their persecuted homeland became a mass of grotesque cement. Even the portholes were gone now, cruelly sealed in technological spit and ooze. A living grave.

Pete had assumed that this would pretty much finish the job. After all, this clearly fit the parameters of the system’s original designers.

But the system could no longer bother with the limits of human intent.

When Pete gazed through a porthole and saw that the stars were fading, he knew that all bets were off. The stars were being robbed. Something was embezzling their energy.

He left the starship. Outside, all heaven had broken loose. An unspeakable host of creatures were migrating up the rocky walls, bounding, creeping, lurching, rappelling on a web of gooey ropes. Heading for the stellar zenith.

Bound for transcendence. Bound for escape.

Pete checked his aging cleats and gloves, and joined the exodus at once.

None of the creatures bothered him. He had become one of them now. His equipment had fallen among them, been absorbed, and kicked open new doors of evolution. Anything that could breed a can opener could breed a rock chock and a piton, a crampon, and a pulley, and a carabiner. His haul bags, Katrinko’s bags, had been stuffed with generations of focused human genius, and it was all about one concept: UP. Going up. Up and out.

The unearthly landscape of the Taklamakan was hosting a robot war. A spreading mechanical prairie of inching, crawling, biting, wrenching, hopping mutations. And pillars of fire: Sphere satellite warfare. Beams pouring down from the authentic heavens, invisible torrents of energy that threw up geysers of searing dust. A bio-engineer’s final nightmare. Smart, autonomous hell. They couldn’t kill a thing this big and keep it secret. They couldn’t burn it up fast enough. No, not without breaking the containment domes, and spilling their own ancient trash across the face of the earth.

A beam crossed the horizon like the finger of God, smiting everything in its path. The sky and earth were thick with flying creatures, buzzing, tumbling, sculling. The beam caught a big machine, and it fell spinning like a multiton maple seed. It bounded from the side of a containment dome, caromed like a dying gymnast, and landed below Spider Pete. He crouched there in his camou, recording it all.

It looked back at him. This was no mere robot. It was a mechanical civilian journalist. A brightly painted, ultramodern, European network drone, with as many cameras on board as a top-flight media mogul had martinis. The machine had smashed violently against the secret wall, but it was not dead. Death was not on its agenda. It was way game. It had spotted him with no trouble at all. He was a human interest story. It was looking at him.

Glancing into the cold spring sky, Pete could see that the journalist had brought a lot of its friends.

The robot rallied its fried circuits, and centered him within a spiraling focus. Then it lifted a multipronged limb, and ceremonially spat out every marvel it had witnessed, up into the sky and out into the seething depths of the global web.

Pete adjusted his mask and his camou suit. He wouldn’t look right, otherwise.

“Dang,” he said.

GET ME TO THE CHURCH ON TIME

Terry Bisson

The amazing exploits of Wilson Wu and his pal Irving, who we first met in “The Hole in the Hole” (February 1994), and Irv’s curvaceous fiancée, Candy, who we came to know in “The Edge of the Universe” (August 1996), are amusingly recounted in Terry Bisson’s hilarious new tale.

1.

The best way to approach Brooklyn is from the air. The Brooklyn Bridge is nice, but let’s admit it, to drive (or bicycle, or worse, walk) into homely old Brooklyn directly from the shining towers of downtown Manhattan is to court deflation, dejection, even depression. The subway is no better. You ride from one hole to another: there’s no in-between, no approach, no drama of arrival. The Kosciusko Bridge over Newtown Creek is okay, because even drab Williamsburg looks lively after the endless, orderly graveyards of Queens. But just as you are beginning to appreciate the tarpaper tenement rooftops of Brooklyn, there it is again, off to the right: the skyline of Manhattan, breaking into the conversation like a tall girl with great hair in a low-cut dress who doesn’t have to say a word. It shouldn’t be that way, it’s not fair, but that’s the way it is. No, the great thing about a plane is that you can only see out of one side. I like to sit on the right. The flights from the south come in across the dark wastes of the Pine Barrens, across the shabby, sad little burgs of the Jersey shore, across the mournful, mysterious bay, until the lights of Coney Island loom up out of the night, streaked with empty boulevards. Manhattan is invisible, unseen off to the left, like a chapter in another book or a girl at another party. The turbines throttle back and soon you are angling down across the streetlight-spangled stoops and backyards of my legend-heavy hometown. Brooklyn!

“There it is,” I said to Candy.

“Whatever.” Candy hates to fly, and she hadn’t enjoyed any of the sights, all the way from Huntsville. I tried looking over her. I could see the soggy fens of Jamaica Bay, then colorful, quarrelsome Canarsie, then Prospect Park and Grand Army Plaza; and there was the Williamsburg Tower with its always-accurate clock. Amazingly, we were right on time.

I wished now I hadn’t given Candy the window seat, but it was our Honeymoon, after all. I figured she would learn to love to fly. “It’s beautiful!” I said.

“I’m sure,” she muttered.

I was anticipating the usual long holding pattern, which takes you out over Long Island Sound, but before I knew it, we were making one of those heart-stopping wing-dipping jet-plane U-turns over the Bronx, then dropping down over Rikers Island, servos whining and hydraulics groaning as the battered flaps and beat-up landing gear clunked into place for the ten thousandth (at least) time. These PreOwned Air 707s were seasoned travelers, to say the least. The seat belts said Eastern, the pillows said Pan Am, the barf bags said Braniff, and the peanuts said People Express. It all inspired a sort of confidence. I figured if they were going to get unlucky and go down, they would have done so already. Through the window, the dirty water gave way to dirty concrete, then the wheels hit the runway with that happy yelp so familiar to anyone who has ever watched a movie, even though it’s a sound you never actually hear in real life.

And this was real life. New York!

“You can open your eyes,” I said, and Candy did, for the first time since the pilot had pushed the throttles forward in Huntsville. I’d even had to feed her over the Appalachians, since she was afraid that if she opened her eyes to see what was on her tray, she might accidentally look out the window. Luckily, dinner was just peanuts and pretzels (a two-course meal).

We were cruising into the terminal like a big, fat bus with wings, when Candy finally looked out the window. She even ventured a smile. The plane was limping a little (flat tire?) but this final part of the flight she actually seemed to enjoy. “At least you didn’t hold your breath,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

Ding! We were already at the gate, and right on time. I started to grope under the seat in front of me for my shoes. Usually there’s plenty of time before everyone starts filing out of the plane, but to my surprise it was already our turn; Candy was pulling at my arm and impatient-looking passengers, jammed in the aisle behind, were frowning at me.

I carried my shoes out and put them on in the terminal. They’re loafers. I’m still a lawyer, even though I don’t exactly practice.

“New York, New York,” I crooned to Candy as we traversed the tunnel to the baggage pickup. It was her first trip to my home town; our first trip together anywhere. She had insisted on wearing her Huntsville Parks Department uniform, so that if there was a crash they wouldn’t have any trouble IDing her body (whoever “they” were), but she would have stood out in the crowd anyway, with her trim good looks.

Not that New Yorkers aren’t trim. Or good looking. The black clad, serious-looking people racing by on both sides were a pleasant relief after the K-mart pastels and unremitting sunny smiles of the South. I was glad to be home, even if only for a visit. New Yorkers, so alien and menacing to many, looked welcoming and familiar to me.

In fact, one of them looked very familiar. . . .

“Studs!”

It was Arthur “Studs” Blitz from the old neighborhood. Studs and I had been best friends until high school, when we had gone our separate ways. I had gone to Lincoln High in Coney Island, and he had gone to Carousel, the trade school for airline baggage handlers. It looked like he had done well. His green and black baggage handler’s uniform was festooned with medals that clinked and clanked as he bent over an access panel under the baggage carousel, changing a battery in a cellular phone. It seemed a funny place for a phone.

“Studs, it’s me, Irving. Irv!”

“Irv the Perv!” Studs straightened up, dropping the new battery, which rolled away. I stopped it with my foot while we shook hands, rather awkwardly.

“From the old neighborhood,” I explained to Candy as I bent down for the battery and handed it to Studs. It was a 5.211 volt AXR. It seemed a funny battery for a phone. “Studs is one of the original Ditmas Playboys.”

“Playboys?” Candy was, still is, easily shocked. “Perv?”

“There were only two of us,” I explained. “We built a treehouse.”

“A treehouse in Brooklyn? But I thought . . .”

“Everybody thinks that!” I said. “Because of that book.”

“What book?”

“Movie, then. But in fact, lots of trees grow in Brooklyn. They grow behind the apartments and houses, where people don’t see them from the street. Right, Studs?”

Studs nodded, snapping the battery into the phone. “Irv the Perv,” he said again.

“Candy is my fiancée. We just flew in from Alabama,” I said. “We’re on our Honeymoon.”

“Fiancée? Honeymoon? Alabama?”

Studs seemed distracted. While he got a dial tone and punched in a number, I told him how Candy and I had met (leaving out my trip to the Moon, as told in “The Hole in the Hole”). While he put the phone under the carousel and replaced the access panel, I told him how I had moved to Alabama (leaving out the red-shift and the nursing home, as told in “The Edge of the Universe”). I was just about to explain why we were having the Honeymoon before the wedding, when the baggage carousel started up.

“Gotta go,” said Studs. He gave me the secret Ditmas Playboy wave and disappeared through an AUTHORIZED ONLY door.

“Nice uniform,” said Candy, straightening her own. “And did you see that big gold medallion around his neck? Wasn’t that a Nobel Prize?”

“A Nobel Prize for baggage? Not very likely.”

Our bags were already coming around the first turn. That seemed like a good sign. “How come there’s a cell phone hidden underneath the carousel?” Candy asked, as we picked them up and headed for the door.

“Some special baggage handlers’ trick, I guess,” I said.

How little, then, I knew!

2.

Flying into New York is like dropping from the twentieth century back into the nineteenth. Everything is crowded, colorful, old—and slow. For example, it usually takes longer to get from La Guardia to Brooklyn than from Huntsville to La Guardia.

Usually! On this, our Honeymoon trip, however, Candy and I made it in record time, getting to curbside for the #38 bus just as it was pulling in, and then catching the F train at Roosevelt Avenue just as the doors were closing. No waiting on the curb or the platform; it was hardly like being home! Of course, I wasn’t complaining.

After a short walk from the subway, we found Aunt Minnie sitting on the steps of the little Ditmas Avenue row house she and Uncle Mort had bought for seventy-five hundred dollars fifty years ago, right after World War II, smoking a cigarette. She’s the only person I know who still smokes Kents.

“You still go outside to smoke?” I asked.

“You know your Uncle Mort,” she said. When I was growing up, Aunt Minnie and Uncle Mort had been like second parents, living only a block and a half away. Since my parents had died, they had been my closest relatives. “Plus it’s written into the reverse mortgage—NO SMOKING! They have such rules!”

Born in the Old Country, unlike her little sister, my mother, Aunt Minnie still had the Lifthatvanian way of ending a statement with a sort of verbal shrug. She gave me one of her smoky kisses, then asked, “So, what brings you back to New York?”

I was shocked. “You didn’t get my letters? We’re getting married.”

Aunt Minnie looked at Candy with new interest. “To an airline pilot?”

“This is Candy!” I said. “She’s with the Huntsville Parks Department. You didn’t get my messages?”

I helped Candy drag the suitcases inside, and while we had crackers and pickled lifthat at the oak table Uncle Mort had built years ago, in his basement workshop, I explained the past six months as best I could. “So you see, we’re here on our Honeymoon, Aunt Minnie,” I said, and Candy blushed.

“First the Honeymoon and then the marriage!?” Aunt Minnie rolled her eyes toward the mantel over the gas fireplace, where Uncle Mort’s ashes were kept. He, at least, seemed unsurprised. The ornate decorative eye on the urn all but winked.

“It’s the only way we could manage it,” I said. “The caterer couldn’t promise the ice sculpture until Thursday, but Candy had to take her days earlier or lose them. Plus my best man is in South America, or Central America, I forget which, and won’t get back until Wednesday.”

“Imagine that, Mort,” Aunt Minnie said, looking toward the mantel again. “Little Irving is getting married. And he didn’t even invite us!”

“Aunt Minnie! You’re coming to the wedding. Here’s your airline ticket.” I slid it across the table toward her and she looked at it with alarm.

“That’s a pretty cheap fare.”

“PreOwned Air,” I said. She looked blank, so I sang the jingle, “Our planes are old, but you pocket the gold.”

“You’ve seen the ads,” Candy offered.

“We never watch TV, honey,” Aunt Minnie said, patting her hand. “You want us to go to Mississippi? Tonight?”

“Alabama,” I said. “And it’s not until Wednesday. We have to stay over a Tuesday night to get the midweek nonstop supersaver round-trip price-buster Honeymoon plus-one fare. The wedding is on Thursday, at noon. That gives us tomorrow to see the sights in New York, which means we should get to bed. Aunt Minnie, didn’t you read my letters?”

She pointed toward a stack of unopened mail on the mantel, next to the urn that held Uncle Mort’s ashes. “Not really,” she said. “Since your Uncle Mort passed on, I have sort of given it up. He made letter openers, you remember?”

Of course I remembered. At my Bar Mitzvah, Uncle Mort gave me a letter opener (which irritated my parents, since it was identical to the one they had gotten as a wedding present). He gave me another one for high school graduation. Ditto City College. Uncle Mort encouraged me to go to law school, and gave me a letter opener for graduation. I still have them all, good as new. In fact, they have never been used. It’s not like you need a special tool to get an envelope open.

“Aunt Minnie,” I said, “I wrote, and when you didn’t write back, I called, several times. But you never picked up.”

“I must have been out front smoking a cigarette,” she said. “You know how your Uncle Mort is about second hand smoke.”

“You could get an answering machine,” Candy offered.

“I have one,” Aunt Minnie said. “Mort bought it for me at 47th Street Photo, right before they went out of business.” She pointed to the end table, and sure enough, there was a little black box next to the phone. The red light was blinking.

“You have messages,” I said. “See the blinking red light? That’s probably me.”

“Messages?” she said. “Nobody told me anything about messages. It’s an answering machine. I figure it answers the phone, so what’s the point in me getting involved?”

“But what if somebody wants to talk to you?” I protested.

She spread her hands; she speaks English but gestures in Lifthatvanian. “Who’d want to talk to a lonely old woman?”

While Aunt Minnie took Candy upstairs and showed her our bedroom, I checked the machine. There were eleven messages, all from me, all telling Aunt Minnie we were coming to New York for our Honeymoon, and bringing her back to Alabama with us for the wedding, and asking her, please, to return my call.

I erased them.

Aunt Minnie’s guest room was in the back of the house, and from the window I could see the narrow yards where I had played as a kid. It was like looking back on your life from middle age (almost, anyway), and seeing it literally. There were the fences I had climbed, the grapevines I had robbed, the corners I had hidden in. There, two doors down, was Studs’s backyard, with the big maple tree. The treehouse we had built was still there. I could even see a weird blue light through the cracks. Was someone living in it?

After we unpacked, I took Candy for a walk and showed her the old neighborhood. It looked about the same, but the people were different. The Irish and Italian families had been replaced by Filipinos and Mexicans. Studs’s parents’ house, two doors down from Aunt Minnie’s, was dark except for a light in the basement—and the blue light in the treehouse out back. My parents’ house, a block and a half away on East Fourth, was now a rooming house for Bangladeshi cab drivers. The apartments on Ocean Parkway were filled with Russians.

When we got back to the house, Aunt Minnie was on the porch, smoking a Kent. “See how the old neighborhood has gone to pot?” she said. “All these foreigners!”

“Aunt Minnie!” I said, shocked. “You were a foreigner, too, remember? So was Uncle Mort.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“Never you mind.”

I decided to change the subject. “Guess who I saw at the airport today? Studs Blitz, from down the block, remember?”

“You mean young Arthur,” said Aunt Minnie. “He still lives at home. His father died a couple of years ago. His mother, Mavis, takes in boarders. Foreigners. Thank God your Uncle Mort’s benefits spared me that.”

She patted the urn and the cat’s eye glowed benevolently.

That night, Candy and I began our Honeymoon by holding hands across the gap between our separate beds. Candy wanted to wait until tomorrow night, after we had “done the tourist thing” to “go all the way.” Plus she was still nervous from the flight.

I didn’t mind. It was exciting and romantic. Sort of.

“Your Aunt Minnie is sweet,” Candy said, right before we dropped off to sleep. “But can I ask one question?”

“Shoot.”

“How can ashes object to smoke?”

3.

Our return tickets were for Wednesday. That meant we had one full Honeymoon day, Tuesday, to see the sights of New York, most of which (all of which, truth be told) are in Manhattan. Candy and I got up early and caught the F train at Ditmas. It came right away. We got off at the next-to-last stop in Manhattan, Fifth Avenue, and walked uptown past St. Patrick’s and Tiffany’s and Disney and the Trump Tower; all the way to Central Park and the Plaza, that magnet for Honeymooners. When we saw all the people on the front step, we thought there had been a fire. But they were just smoking; it was just like Brooklyn.

We strolled through the lobby, peering humbly into the Palm Court and the Oak Room, then started back downtown, still holding hands. Candy was the prettiest girl on Fifth Avenue (one of the few in uniform), and I loved watching her watch my big town rush by. New York! Next stop, Rockefeller Center. We joined the crowd overlooking the skaters, secretly waiting for someone to fall; it’s like NASCAR without the noise. Candy was eyeing the line at Nelson’s On the Rink, where waiters on rollerblades serve cappuccinos and lattes. It’s strictly a tourist joint; New Yorkers don’t go for standing in line and particularly not for coffee. But when I saw how fast the line was moving, I figured what the hell. We were seated right away and served right away, and the expense (we are talking four-dollar croissants here) was well worth it.

“What now?” asked Candy, her little rosebud smile deliciously flaked with pastry. I couldn’t imagine anyone I would rather Honeymoon with.

“The Empire State Building, of course.”

Candy grimaced. “I’m afraid of heights. Besides, don’t they shoot people up there?”

“We’re not going to the top, silly,” I said. “That’s a tourist thing.” Taking her by the hand, I took her on my own personal Empire State Building Tour, which involves circling it and seeing it above and behind and through and between the other midtown buildings; catching it unawares, as it were. We started outside Lord & Taylor on Fifth, then cut west on 40th alongside Bryant Park for the sudden glimpse through the rear of a narrow parking lot next to American Standard; then started down Sixth, enjoying the angle from Herald Square (and detouring through Macy’s to ride the wooden-treaded escalators). Then we worked back west through “little Korea,” catching two dramatic views up open airshafts and one across a steep sequence of fire escapes. Standing alone, the Empire State Building looks stupid, like an oversized toy or a prop for a Superman action figure. But in its milieu it is majestic, like an Everest tantalizingly appearing and disappearing behind the ranges. We circled the great massif in a tightening spiral for almost an hour, winding up (so to speak) on Fifth Avenue again, under the big art deco facade. The curb was crowded with tourists standing in line to buy T-shirts and board buses. The T-shirt vendors were looking gloomy, since the buses were coming right away and there was no waiting.

I had saved the best view for last. It’s from the middle of Fifth Avenue, looking straight up. You have to time it just right with the stoplights, of course. Candy and I were about to step off the curb, hand in hand, when a messenger in yellow and black tights (one of our city’s colorful jesters) who was straddling his bike beside a rack of pay phones on the corner of 33rd hailed me.

“To!”

I stopped. That’s how long I’d been in Alabama.

“Your name Irv?”

I nodded. That’s how long I’d been in Alabama.

He handed me the phone with a sort of a wink and a sort of a shrug, and was off on his bike before I could hand it back (which was my first instinct).

I put the phone to my ear. Rather cautiously, as you might imagine. “Hello?”

“Irv? Finally!”

“Wu?!” Everybody should have a friend like Wilson Wu, my Best Man. Wu studied physics at Bronx Science, pastry in Paris, math at Princeton, Herbs in Taiwan, law at Harvard (or was it Yale?) and caravans at a Gobi caravansary. Did I mention he’s Chinese-American, can tune a twelve string guitar in under a minute with a logarithmic calculator, and is over six feet tall? I met him when we worked at Legal Aid, drove Volvos, and went to the Moon; but that’s another story. Then he went to Hawaii and found the edge of the universe, yet another story still. Now he was working as a meteorological entomologist, whatever that was, in the jungles of Quetzalcan.

Wherever that was.

“Who’d you expect?” Wu asked. “I’m glad you finally picked up. Your Aunt Minnie told me you and Candy were in midtown doing the tourist thing.”

“We’re on our Honeymoon.”

“Oh no! Don’t tell me I missed the wedding!”

“Of course not,” I said. “We had to take the Honeymoon first so Candy could get the personal time. How’d you persuade Aunt Minnie to answer the phone? Or me, for that matter? Are you in Huntsville already?”

“That’s the problem, Irv. I’m still in Quetzalcan. The rain forest, or to be more precise, the cloud forest; the canopy, in fact. Camp Canopy, we call it.”

“But the wedding is Thursday! You’re the Best Man, Wu! I’ve already rented your tux. It’s waiting for you at Five Points Formal Wear.”

“I know all that,” said Wu. “But I’m having a problem getting away. That’s why I called, to see if you can put the wedding off for a week.”

“A week? Wu, that’s impossible. Cindy has already commissioned the ice sculpture.”

Wu’s wife, Cindy, was catering the wedding.

“The hurricane season is almost upon us,” said Wu, “and my figures are coming out wrong. I need more time.”

“You don’t have a figure—you’re a guy,” I pointed out. “And what do figures have to do with meteors or bugs, anyway?”

“Irving—” Wu always called me by my full name when he was explaining something he felt he shouldn’t have to explain. “Meteorology is weather, not meteors. And the bugs have to do with the Butterfly Effect. We’ve been over this before.”

“Oh yes, of course, I remember,” I said, and I did, sort of. But Wu went over it again anyway: how the flap of a butterfly’s wing in the rain forest could cause a storm two thousand miles away. “It was only a matter of time,” he said, “before someone located that patch of rain forest, which is where we are, and cloned the butterfly. It’s a moth, actually. We have twenty-two of them, enough for the entire hurricane season. We can’t stop the hurricanes, but we can delay, direct, and divert them a little, which is why ABC flew us down here.”

“ABC?”

“They bought the television rights to the hurricane season, Irv. Don’t you read the trades? CBS got the NBA and NBC got the Superbowl. ABC beat out Ted Turner, which is fine with me. Who needs a Hurricane Jane, even upgraded from a tropical storm? The network hired us to edge the ’canes toward the weekends as much as possible, when the news is slow. And State Farm is chipping in, since any damage we can moderate is money in their pocket. They are footing the bill for this little Hanging Hilton, in fact. ‘Footing,’ so to speak. My feet haven’t touched the ground in three weeks.”

“I built a treehouse once,” I said. “Me and Studs Blitz, back in the old neighborhood.”

“A treehouse in Brooklyn?” interjected a strangely accented voice.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Dmitri, stay off the line!” barked Wu. “I’ll explain later,” he said to me. “But I’m losing my signal. Which way you two lovebirds heading?”

We were heading downtown. Our first stop was Sweet Nothings, the bridal boutique in New York’s historic lingerie district. Candy made me wait outside while she shopped. Inspired, I bought a Honeymoon Bungee at the Oriental Novelty Arcade on Broadway. (“What’s it for?” Candy asked apprehensively. I promised to show her later.) Feeling romantic, I took her little hand in mine and led her back over to Sixth and presented her with the world’s largest interactive bouquet—a three block stroll through the flower market. We were just emerging from a tunnel of flowering ferns at 26th, when the pay phone on the corner rang. On a hunch, I picked it up.

When you get hunches as rarely as I do, you follow them.

“Irving, why do you take so long to answer?”

“I picked up on the first ring, Wu. How’d you manage that phone thing, anyway?”

“Software,” Wu said. “I swiped the algos for handwriting recognition out of an Apple Newton and interlaced them into a GPS (Global Positioning System) satellite feed program. Then I ran your mail order consumer profile (pirated from J. Crew) through a fuzzilogical bulk-mail collator macro lifted off a zip code CD-ROM, and adjusted for the fact that you’ve spent the past six months in Alabama. A friend in the Mir shunts the search feeds through the communications satellite LAN until the TRV-’ probability field collapses and the phone nearest you rings. And you pick it up. Voila.”

“I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean, how’d you get Aunt Minnie to answer the phone?”

“Changed the ring!” Wu said, sounding pleased with himself. “It took a little doing, but I was able to tweak a caller ID macro enough to toggle her ringer. Made it sound like a doorbell chime. Somehow that gets her to answer. I’ll send you the figures.”

“Never mind,” I said. “The only figure I want to see is you-know-who’s in her Sweet Nothings” (Candy, who was pretending not to listen, blushed) “and yours in a white tux at noon on Thursday! There’s no way we can change the wedding date.”

“Can’t you put it off at least a couple of days, Irv? I’m having trouble with my formula.”

“Impossible!” I said. “The ice sculpture won’t wait. Let the butterflies go and get on back to Huntsville. One hurricane more or less can’t make all that much difference.”

“Moths,” said Wu. “And it’s not just hurricanes. What if it rains on your wedding?”

“It won’t,” I said. “It can’t. Cindy guarantees clear skies. It’s included in the catering bill.”

“Of course it is, but how do you think that works. Irving? Cindy buys weather insurance from Ido Ido, the Japanese wedding conglomerate, which contracts with Entomological Meteorological Solutions—that’s us—to schedule outdoor ceremonies around the world. It’s just a sideline for EMS, of course. A httle tweaking. But I can’t release the first moth until the coordinates are right, and my numbers are coming out slippery.”

“Slippery?”

“The math doesn’t work, Irv. The Time axis doesn’t line up. In a system as chaotic as weather, you only have one constant, Time, and when it isn’t . . .”

But we were losing our signal, and Candy was looking at me suspiciously. I hung up.

“What are all these phone calls from Wu?” she asked, as we headed downtown. “Is something wrong with the wedding plans?”

“Absolutely not,” I lied. There was no reason to spoil her Honeymoon (and mine!). “He just wants me to help him with a—a math problem.”

“I thought he was the math whiz. I didn’t know you even took math.”

I didn’t, not after my sophomore year in high school. I was totally absorbed by history, inspired by my favorite teacher, Citizen Tipograph (she wanted us call her Comrade, but the principal put his foot down),who took us on field trips as far afield as Gettysburg and Harper’s Ferry. Every course C.T. taught, whether it was Women’s Labor History, Black Labor History, Jewish Labor History or just plain old American Labor History, included at least one trip to Union Square, and I grew to love the seedy old park, where I can still hear the clatter of the horses and the cries of the Cossacks (which is what C.T. called the cops) and the stirring strains of the Internationale. I tried to share some of this drama with Candy, but even though she listened politely, I could see that to her Union Square was just scrawny grass, dozing bums, and overweening squirrels.

Candy couldn’t wait to get out of the park. She was far more interested in the stacked TVs in the display window at Nutty Ned’s Home Electronics, on the corner of University and 14th, where dozens of Rosie O’Donnells were chatting silently with science fiction writer(s) Paul Park. There’s nothing better than a talk show without sound. We both stopped to watch for a moment, when all of the screens started scrolling numbers. Over Rosie and her guest!

On a hunch, I went into the store Candy followed.

Nutty Ned’s clerks were firing wildly with remotes, trying to tune the runaway TVs. The displays all changed colors but stayed the same. It was strange, but strangely familiar:

I figured I knew what it was. And I was right. At precisely that moment, an entire FINAL SALE table of portable phones started to ring. It made a terrible noise, like a nursery filled with children who decide to cry all at once.

I picked up one and they all quit.

“Wu? Is that you?”

“Irv, did you see my figures? I’m shunting them through the midmorn talknet comsat feed. See what I mean? I’m getting totally unlikely dates and places for these hurricanes, all down the line. Not to mention rainy weddings. And it’s definitely the T.”

“The T?”

“The Time axis, the constant that makes the Butterfly Effect predictable. It’s become a maverick variable, too long here, too short there. Speaking of which, I wish you wouldn’t make me ring you twenty times. It’s annoying, and I have other things to do here, living in a treehouse, like feed the flying—”

“I picked up on the first ring.”

“The hell you did! The phone rang twenty-six times.”

I did a quick count of the phones on the FINAL SALE table. “Twenty-six phones rang, Wu, but they each rang only once. And all at once.”

“Whoa!” said Wu. “I’m coming through in parallel? That could mean there’s a twist.”

“A twist?”

“A twist in local space-time. It’s never happened but it’s theoretically possible, of course. And it just might explain my slippery T axes. Have you noticed any other temporal anomalies?”

“Temporary comedies?”

“Weird time stuff, Irving! Any other weird time stuff happening there in New York? Overturned schedules! Unexpected delays!”

“Well, New York’s all about delays,” I said, “but as a matter of fact—” I told Wu about never having to wait for the subway. Or the bus. “Even the Fifth Avenue bus comes right away!”

“The Fifth Avenue bus! I’m beginning to think there may be more than a temporal anomaly here. We may be looking at a full-fledged chronological singularity. But I need more than your subjective impressions, Irving; I need hard numbers. Which way are you two lovebirds going?”

“Downtown,” I said. “It’s almost lunch time.”

“Perfect!” he said. “How about Carlo’s?”

When Wu and I had worked at Legal Aid, on Centre Street, we had often eaten at Carlo’s Calamari in Little Italy. But only when we had time to take a loooong lunch.

“No way!” I said. “It takes forever to get waited on at Carlo’s.”

“Exactly!” said Wu.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. “You plan to buy this phone?”

It was Nutty Ned himself. I recognized his nose from the television ads.

“No way,” I said.

“Then hang it the fuck up please.”

4.

“We got a menu as soon as we sat down,” I said. I was speaking on the model Camaro phone at Carlo’s, while Candy poked through her cold seafood salad, setting aside everything that had legs or arms or eyes, which was most of the dish.

“Impossible!” said Wu.

“We ordered and my primavera pesto pasta came right away. Maybe they have it already cooked and they just microwave it.” I said this low so the waiter wouldn’t hear. He had brought me the phone on a tray shaped like Sicily. It was beige, flecked with red. Dried blood? Carlo’s is a mob joint. Allegedly.

“What’s right away?”

“I don’t know, Wu. I didn’t time it.”

“I need numbers, Irv! What about breadsticks? Do they still have those skinny hard breadsticks? How many did you eat between the time you ordered and the time the food came?”

“Three.”

“Three apiece?”

“Three between us. Does knowing that really help?”

“Sure. I can use it either as one and one-half, or as three over two. Numbers don’t he, Irv. Parallel or serial, I’m beginning to think my T-axis problem is centered in New York. Everything there seems to be speeded up slightly. Compressed.”

“Compressed,” I said. When Wu is talking he expects you to respond. I always try and pick a fairly innocuous world and just repeat it.

“You’ve got it, Irv. It’s like those interviews on TV that are a little jumpy, because they edit out all the connective time—the uhs, the ahs, the waits, the pauses. Something’s happened to the connective time in New York. That’s why the phone rings ten times for me here—actually an average of 8.411—and only once for you.”

“How can the phone ring more times for you than for me?”

“Ever heard of Relativity, Irving?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“No buts about it!” Wu said. “Theoretically, a ninety degree twist could cause a leakage of Connective Time. But what is causing the twist? That’s the . . .”

His voice was starting to fade. Truthfully, I was glad. I was ready to concentrate on my primavera pesto pasta.

“Pepper?” asked the waiter.

“Absolutely,” I said. I don’t really care for pepper but I admire the way they operate those big wrist-powered wooden machines.

Candy loves to shop (who doesn’t?) so we headed across Grand Street to SoHo, looking for jeans on lower Broadway. Since there was no waiting for the dressing rooms (maybe Wu was on to something!), Candy decided to try on one pair of each brand in each style and each color. We were about a third of the way through the stack when the salesgirl began to beep; rather, her beeper did.

“Your name Irv?” she asked, studying the readout. “You can use the sales phone.” It was under the counter, by the shopping bags.

“How’s the coffee?” Wu asked.

“Coffee?”

“Aren’t you at Dean and DeLuca?”

“We’re at ZigZag Jeans.”

“On Broadway at Grand? Now my fuzzilogical GPS transponder is showing slack!” Wu protested. “If I’m three blocks off already, then that means . . .”

I stopped listening. Candy had just stepped out of the dressing room to check her Levis in the store’s “rear view” mirror. “What do you think?” she asked.

“Incredible,” I said.

“My reaction exactly,” said Wu. “But what else could it be? The bus, the breadsticks, the F train—all the numbers seem to indicate a slow leak of Connective Time somewhere in the New York metropolitan area. Let me ask you this, was your plane on time?”

“Why, yes,” I said. “At the gate, as a matter of fact. The little bell went ding and everybody stood up at 7:32. I remember noticing it on my watch. It was our exact arrival time.”

“7:32,” repeated Wu. “That helps. I’m going to check the airports. I can patch into their security terminals and interlace from there to the arrival and departure monitors. I’ll need a little help, though. Dmitri, are you there? He’s sulking.”

“Whatever,” I said, giving the ZigZag girls back their phone. Candy was trying on the Wranglers, and me, I was falling in love all over again. I rarely see her out of her uniform, and it is a magnificent sight.

In the end, so to speak, it was hard to decide. The Levis, the Lees, the Wranglers, the Guess Whos, the Calvins and the Glorias all cosseted and caressed the same incredible curves. Candy decided to buy one pair of each and put them all on my credit card, since hers was maxed out. By the time the ZigZag girls had the jeans folded and wrapped and packed up in shopping bags, it was 3:30—almost time to head back to Brooklyn if we wanted to beat the rush hour. But Wu had given me an idea.

Even guys like me, who can’t afford the Israeli cantaloupes or free-range Pyrenees sheep cheese at Dean and DeLuca, can spring for a cup of coffee, which you pick up at a marble counter between the vegetable and bread sections, and drink standing at tall, skinny chrome tables overlooking the rigorously fashionable intersection of Broadway and Prince.

D&D’s is my idea of class, and it seemed to appeal to Candy as well, who was back in uniform and eliciting (as usual) many an admiring glance both on the street and in the aisles. I wasn’t halfway through my Americano before the butcher appeared from the back of the store with a long, skinny roll of what I thought at first was miniature butcher paper (unborn lamb chops?), but was in fact thermal paper from the old-fashioned adding machine in the meat department. The key to Dean and DeLuca’s snooty charm is that everything (except of course the customers) is slightly old-fashioned. Hence, thermal paper.

“You Irv?”

I nodded.

He handed me the little scroll. I unrolled it enough to see that it was covered with tiny figures, then let it roll back up again.

“From Wu?” Candy asked.

“Probably,” I said. “But let’s finish our coffee.” At that very moment, a man walking down Broadway took a cellular phone out of his Armani suit, unfolded it, put it to his ear and stopped. He looked up and down the street, then in the window at me.

I nodded, somewhat reluctantly. It would have been rude, even presumptuous, to expect him to bring the phone inside the store to me, so I excused myself and went out to the street.

“Did you get my fax?” asked Wu.

“Sort of,” I said. I made a spinning motion with one finger to Candy, who understood right away. She unrolled the little scroll of thermal paper and held it up the window glass:

“Well?”

“Well!” I replied. That usually satisfied Wu, but I could tell he wanted more this time. Sometimes with Wu it helps to ask a question, if you can think of an intelligent one. “What’s the stuff?” I asked.

“Those are airport figures, Irv! La Guardia, to be specific. All the planes are on time! That tell you something?”

“The leak is at La Guardia?” I ventured.

“Exactly! Numbers don’t lie, Irv, and as those calculations clearly show, the connective temporal displacement at La Guardia is exactly equal to the Time axis twist I’m getting worldwide, adjusted for the earth’s rotation, divided by 5.211. Which is the part I can’t figure.”

“I’ve seen that number somewhere before,” I said. I dimly remembered something rolling around. “A shoe size? A phone number?”

“Try to remember,” said Wu. “That number might lead us to the leak. We know it’s somewhere at La Guardia; now all we have to pinpoint it. And plug it.”

“Why plug it?” I said. “This no-delay business just makes life better. Who wants to wait around an airport?”

“Think about it, Irving!” Wu said. There was an edge to his voice, like when he thinks I am being stupid on purpose. In fact I am never stupid on purpose. That would be stupid. “You know how a low pressure area sucks air from other areas? It’s the same with Time. The system is trying to stabilize itself. Which is why I can’t get the proper EMS figures for Hurricane Relief, or Ido Ido, for that matter. Which is why I asked you to delay your wedding in the first place.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. I was so excited about my upcoming Honeymoon that I had totally forgotten the wedding. “So let’s plug it. What do you want me to do?”

“Go to La Guardia and wait for my call,” he said.

“La Guardia?!? Aunt Minnie is expecting us for supper.”

“I thought she was Lifthatvanian. They can’t cook!”

“They can so!” I said, more out of loyalty than conviction. “Besides, we’re sending out for pizza. And besides—” I dropped my voice. “—tonight’s the night Candy and I officially have our Honeymoon.” Honeymoon is one of those words you can’t say without miming a kiss. Candy must have been reading my lips through the Dean & DeLuca’s window, because she blushed; beautifully, I might add.

But Wu must not have heard me, because he was saying, “As soon as you get to La Guardia . . .” as his voice faded away. We were losing our connection.

Meanwhile, the guy whose phone it was was looking at his watch. It was a Movado. I recognized it from the New Yorker ads. I kept my subscription even after moving to Huntsville. I gave him his phone back and Candy and I headed for the subway station.

How could Wu expect me to hang out at La Guardia waiting for his call on the night of my Honeymoon? Perhaps if the Queens-bound train had come first, I might have taken it, but I don’t think so. And it didn’t. Taking Candy by the hand, I put us on the Brooklyn bound F. It wasn’t quite rush hour, which meant we got a seat as soon as we reached Delancey Street. Did I mention that the train came right away?

Even though (or perhaps because) I am a born and bred New Yorker, I get a little nervous when the train stops in the tunnel under the East River. This one started and stopped, started and stopped.

Then stopped.

The lights went out.

They came back on.

“There is a grumbasheivous willin brashabrashengobrak our signal,” said the loudspeaker. “Please wooshagranny the delay.”

“What did she say?” asked Candy. “Is something wrong?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

Turns out we were in the conductor’s car. The lights flickered but stayed on, and she stepped out of her tiny compartment, holding a phone. “Ashabroshabikus Irving?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Frezzhogristis quick,” she said, handing me the phone.

“Hello?” I ventured. I knew who it was, of course.

“Irv, I need you in baggage claim,” said Wu.

“In what?”

“I’m closing in on the Connective Time leak. I think it’s a phone somewhere on the Baggage Claim and Ground Transportation level. I need you to go down there and see which payphone is off the hook, so we can . . . what’s that noise?”

“That’s the train starting up again,” I said.

“Train? I thought you were at the airport.”

“I tried to tell you, Wu,” I said. “We promised Aunt Minnie we would come home for dinner. Plus tonight’s my Honeymoon. Plus, you’re not looking for a pay phone.”

“How do you know?”

“The 5.211. Now I remember what it was. It was a battery for a cell phone. It was rolling and I stopped it with my foot.”

“Of course!” said Wu. “What a fool I am! And you, Irv, are a genius! Don’t make a move until I . . .”

But we were losing our signal.

“Make if sharanka bresh?” asked the conductor, a little testily. She took her phone and stepped back into her tiny compartment and closed the door.

5.

Every bad pizza is bad in its own way, but good pizza is all alike. Bruno’s on the corner of Ditmas and MacDonald, under the el, is my favorite, and Aunt Minnie’s too. A fresh pie was being popped into the oven as Candy and I walked in the door, and Bruno, Jr., assured us it was ours.

We were headed for home, box in hand, when a battered Buick gypsy cab pulled up at the curb. I waved it off, shaking my head, figuring the driver thought we’d flagged him down. But that wasn’t it.

The driver powered down his window and I heard Wu’s voice over the static on the two-way radio: “Irv, you can head for Brooklyn after all. I found it. Irv, you there?”

The driver was saying something in Egyptian and trying to hand me a little mike. I gave Candy the pizza to hold, and took it.

“Press the little button,” said Wu.

I pressed the little button. “Found what?”

“The leak. The 5.211 was the clue,” said Wu. “I should have recognized it immediately as a special two-year cadmium silicone battery for a low-frequency, high-intensity, short-circuit, long-distance cellular phone. Once you tipped me off, I located the phone hidden underneath the old Eastern/Braniff/Pan Am/Piedmont/People baggage carousel.”

“I know,” I said, pressing the little button. “I saw it there. So now I guess you want me to go to La Guardia and hang it up?”

“Not so fast, Irv! The phone is just the conduit, the timeline through which the Connective Time is being drained. What we need to find is the number the phone is calling—the source of the leak, the actual hole in Time, the twist. It could be some bizarre natural singularity, like a chronological whirlpool or tornado; or even worse, some incredibly advanced, diabolical machine, designed to twist a hole in space-time and pinch off a piece of our Universe. The open phone connection will lead us to it, whatever it is, and guess what?”

“What?”

“The number it’s calling is in Brooklyn, and guess what?”

“What?”

“It’s the phone number of Dr. Radio Dgjerm!”

He pronounced it rah-dio. I said, “Help me out.”

“The world-famous Lifthatvanian resort developer, Irving!” said Wu, impatiently. “Winner of the Nobel Prize for Real Estate in 1982! Remember?”

“Oh, him. Sort of.” I said.

“Which was later revoked when he was indicted for trying to create an illegal Universe, but that’s another story. And guess what?”

“What?”

“He lives somewhere on Ditmas, near your aunt, as a matter of fact. We’re still trying to pinpoint the exact address.”

“What a coincidence,” I said. “We’re on Ditmas right now. We just picked up a pizza.”

“With what?”

“Mushrooms and peppers on one side, for Aunt Minnie. Olives and sausage on the other, for Candy. I pick at both, since I like mushrooms and sausage.”

“What a coincidence,” said Wu. “I like it with olives and peppers.” He sighed. “I would kill for a hot pizza. Ever spend six weeks in a treehouse?”

“Ever spend six months in a space station?” asked a strangely accented voice.

“Butt out, Dmitri,” Wu said (rather rudely, I thought). “Aren’t you supposed to be looking for that address?”

“I spent three nights in a treehouse once,” I said. “Me and Studs. Of course, we had a TV.”

“A TV in a treehouse?”

“Just black and white. It was an old six-inch Dumont from my Uncle Mort’s basement.”

“A six-inch Dumont!” said Wu. “Of course! What a fool I am! Irv, did it have . . .”

But we were losing our signal. Literally. The driver of the gypsy cab was leaning out of his window, shouting in Egyptian and reaching for the phone.

“Probably has a fare to pick up,” I explained to Candy as he snatched the little mike out of my hand and drove off, burning rubber. “Let’s get this pizza to Aunt Minnie before it gets cold. Otherwise she’ll cook. And she can’t.”

Different cultures deal with death, dying, and the dead in different ways. I was accustomed to Aunt Minnie’s Lifthatvanian eccentricities, but I was concerned about how Candy would take it when she set Uncle Mort’s ashes at the head of the table for dinner.

Candy was cool, though. As soon as supper was finished, she helped Aunt Minnie with the dishes (not much of a job), and joined her on the front porch for her Kent. And, I supposed, girl talk. I took the opportunity to go upstairs and strap the legs of the twin beds together with the $1.99 Honeymoon Bungee I had bought in Little Korea. The big evening was almost upon us! There on the dresser was the sleek little package from Sweet Nothings: Candy’s Honeymoon negligee. I was tempted to look inside, but of course I didn’t.

I wanted to be surprised. I wanted everything to be perfect.

From the upstairs window I could see the big maple tree in Studs’s backyard. It was getting dark, and blue light spilled out through every crack in the treehouse, of which there were many.

I heard the doorbell chime. That seemed strange, since I knew Candy and Aunt Minnie were on the front porch. Then I realized it was the phone. I ran downstairs to pick it up.

“Diagonal, right?”

“What?”

“The screen, Irving! On the Dumont you had in the treehouse. You said it was six-inch. Was that measured diagonally?”

“Of course,” I said. “It’s always measured diagonally. Wu, what’s this about?”

“Blonde cabinet?”

“Nice blonde veneer,” I said. “The color of a Dreamsicle™. It was a real old set. It was the first one Aunt Minnie and Uncle Mort had bought back in the fifties. It even had little doors you could close when you weren’t watching it. I always thought the little doors were to keep the cowboys from getting out.”

“Cowboys in Brooklyn?” asked a strangely accented voice.

“Butt out, Dmitri,” Wu said. “Irv, you are a genius. We have found the twist.”

“I am? We have?”

“Indubitably. Remember the big Dumont console payola recall scandal of 1957?”

“Not exactly. I wasn’t born yet. Neither were you.”

“Well, it wasn’t really about payola at all. It was about something far more significant. Quantum physics. Turns out that the #515 gauge boson rectifier under the 354V67 vacuum tube in the Dumont six-inch console had a frequency modulation that set up an interference wave of 8.48756 gauss, which, when hooked up to household 110, opened an oscillating 88 degree offset permeability in the fabric of the space-time continuum.”

“A twist?”

“Exactly. And close enough to ninety degrees to make a small leak. It was discovered, quite by accident, by a lowly assistant at Underwriters Laboratory eleven months after the sets had gone on the market. Shipped. Sold.”

“I don’t remember ever hearing about it.”

“How could you? It was covered up by the powers-that-be; rather, that were; indeed, that-still-are. Can you imagine the panic if over a quarter of a million people discovered that the TV set in their living room was pinching a hole in the Universe? Even a tiny one? It would have destroyed the industry in its infancy. You better believe it was hushed up, Irv. Deep-sixed. Then 337,877 sets were recalled and destroyed, their blonde wood cabinets broken up for kindling, their circuits melted down for new pennies, and their #515 gauge boson rectifiers sealed in glass and buried in an abandoned salt mine 1200 feet under East Gramling, West Virginia.”

“So what are you saying? One got away?”

“Exactly, Irv. Only 337,877 were destroyed, but 337,878 were manufactured. Numbers don’t he. Do the math.”

“Hmmmm,” I said. “Could be that Aunt Minnie missed the recall. She hardly ever opens her mail, you know. Studs and I found the set in Uncle Mort’s basement workshop. It hadn’t been used for years, but it seemed to work okay. We didn’t notice it twisting any hole in Time.”

“Of course not. It’s a tiny hole. But over a long period, it would have a cumulative effect. Precisely the effect we are seeing, in fact. Many millions of connective milli-seconds have been drained out of our Universe—perhaps even stolen deliberately, for all we know.”

I was relieved. If it was a crime, I was off the hook. I could concentrate on my Honeymoon, “Then let’s call the police,” I said.

Wu just laughed. “The police aren’t prepared to deal with anything like this, Irv. This is quantum physics, Feynman stuff, way beyond them. We will have to handle it ourselves. When Dmitri finds the address for Dr. Dgjerm, I have a suspicion we will also find out what became of the legendary Lost D6.”

“Isn’t this a bit of a coincidence?” I asked. “What are the odds that the very thing that is messing you up in Quetzalcan is right here in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn? It seems unlikely.”

“That’s because you don’t understand probability, Irving,” said Wu. “Everything is unlikely until it happens. Look at it this way: when there’s a 10 percent chance of rain, there’s a 90 percent chance it won’t rain, right?”

“Right.”

“Then what if it starts raining? The probability wave collapses, and the ten percent becomes a hundred, the ninety becomes zero. An unlikely event becomes a certainty.”

It made sense to me. “Then it’s raining here, Wu,” I said. “The probability waves are collapsing like crazy, because the TV you are looking for is still in the treehouse. Turned on, in fact. I can see the blue light from here. It’s in the maple tree in Studs’s backyard, three doors down.”

“On Ditmas?”

“On Ditmas.”

“So your friend Studs could be involved?”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you!” I said. “He runs the baggage carousel at La Guardia that the phone was hidden under.”

“The plot thickens,” said Wu, who loves it when the plot thickens. “He must be draining off the connective time to speed up his baggage delivery! But where is it going? And what is Dgjerm’s role in this capef? We’ll know soon enough.”

“We will?”

“When you confront them, Irv, at the scene of the crime, so to speak. You said it was only two doors away.”

“No way,” I said. “Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Guess who?” I felt hands over my eyes.

“Candy, that’s why,” I said.

“Right you are!” Candy said. She blushed (even her fingertips blush) and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Coming upstairs?”

“You mean your Honeymoon?” Wu asked.

“Yes, of course I mean my Honeymoon!” I said, as I watched Candy kiss Aunt Minnie goodnight and go upstairs. “I don’t want to confront anybody! Any guys, anyway. Can’t you just turn the TV off by remote?”

“There’s no remote on those old Dumonts, Irv. You’re going to have to unplug it.”

“Tomorrow, then.”

“Tonight,” said Wu. “It’ll only take you a few minutes. If the leak is plugged tonight I can redo my calculations and release the first moth in the morning. Then if I catch the nonstop from Quetzalcan City, I’ll make Huntsville in time to pick up my tux. But if I don’t, you won’t have a Best Man. Or a ring. Or maybe even a wedding. Don’t forget, this moth works for Ido Ido, too. What if it rains?”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “You convinced me. But I’m just going to run over there and unplug it and that’s all.” I kissed Aunt Minnie goodnight (she sleeps in the barcalounger in front of the TV with Uncle Mort’s ashes in her lap), then called up the stairs to Candy, “Be up in a minute!”

Then headed out the back door.

6.

I’ll never forget the first time I visited my cousin Lucy in New Jersey. Lots of things in the suburbs were different. The trees were skinnier, the houses were lower, the cars were newer, the streets were wider, the yards were bigger and the grass was definitely greener. But the main thing I remember was my feeling of panic: there was nowhere to hide. The picture windows, one on each house, seemed to stare out onto a world in which nobody had anything to conceal, a terrifying idea to a pre-teen (I was eleven going on fifteen) since adolescence is the slow, unfolding triumph of experience over innocence, and teens have everything to hide.

I was glad to get back to Brooklyn, where everyone knew who I was but no one was watching me. I had the same safe feeling when I slipped out the kitchen door into Aunt Minnie’s tiny (and sadly neglected) backyard. The yards in Brooklyn, on Ditmas at least, are narrow slivers separated by board fences, wire fences, slat fences, mesh fences. Adulthood in America doesn’t involve a lot of fence climbing, and I felt like a kid again as I hauled myself carefully over a sagging section of chainlink into the Murphys’ yard next door.

Of course, they weren’t the Murphys anymore: they were the Wing-Tang somethings, and they had replaced the old squealing swing set with a new plastic and rubberoid play center in the shape of a pirate ship, complete with plank.

The next yard, the Patellis’, was even less familiar. It had always been choked with flowers and weeds in a dizzying, improbable mix, under a grape arbor that, properly processed, kept the grandfather mildly potted all year. The vines had stopped bearing when “Don Patelli” had died, the year I started high school. “Grapes are like dogs,” Uncle Mort had said. “Faithful to the end.” Everything Uncle Mort knew about dogs, he had learned from books.

A light came on in the house, and I remembered with alarm that the Patellis no longer lived there, and that I was no longer a neighborhood kid; or even a kid. If anybody saw me, they would call the police. I stepped back into the shadows. Looking up, and back a house or two, I spotted a shapely silhouette behind the blinds in an upstairs window. A girl undressing for bed! I enjoyed the guilty, Peeping Tom feeling, until I realized it was Candy, in Aunt Minnie’s guest room. That made it even better.

But it was time to get moving. Unplug the stupid TV and be done with it.

The loose plank in the Patellis’ ancient board fence still swung open to let me through. It was a little tighter fit, but I made it—and I was in the Blitzes’ yard, under the wide, ivy-covered trunk of the maple. The board steps Studs and I had nailed to the tree were still there, but I was glad to see that they had been had been supplemented with a ten foot aluminum ladder.

At the top of the ladder, wedged into a low fork, was the treehouse Studs and I had built in the summer of 1968. It was a triangular shed about six feet high and five feet on a side, nailed together from scrap plywood and pallet lumber. It was hard to believe it was still intact after almost thirty years. Yet, there it was.

And here I was. There were no windows, but through the cracks, I saw a blue light.

I climbed up the aluminum ladder. The door, a sheet of faux-birch paneling, was padlocked from the outside. I even recognized the padlock. Before opening it, I looked in through the wide crack at the top. I was surprised by what I saw.

Usually, when you return to scenes of your childhood, whether it’s an elementary school or a neighbor’s yard, everything seems impossibly small. That’s what I thought it would be like with the treehouse Studs and I had built when we were eleven. I expected it to look tiny inside.

Instead it looked huge.

I blinked and looked again. The inside of the treehouse seemed as big as a gym. In the near corner, to the right, I saw the TV—the six-inch Dumont console. The doors were open and the gray-blue light from the screen illuminated the entire vast interior of the treehouse. In the far corner, to the left, which seemed at least a half a block away, there was a brown sofa next to a potted palm.

I didn’t like the looks of it. My first impulse was to climb down the ladder and go home. I even started down one step. Then I looked behind me, toward Aunt Minnie’s upstairs guest room window, where I had seen Candy’s silhouette. The light was out. She was in bed, waiting for me. Waiting to begin our Honeymoon.

All I had to do was unplug the damn TV.

It’s funny how the fingers remember what the mind forgets. The combination lock was from my old middle school locker. As soon as I started spinning the dial, my fingers knew where to start and where to stop: L5, R32, L2.

I opened the lock and set it aside, hanging it on the bracket. I leaned back and pulled the door open. I guess I expected it to groan or creak in acknowledgment of the years since I had last opened it; but it made not a sound.

The last step is a long one, and I climbed into the treehouse on my knees. It smelled musty, like glue and wood and old magazines. I left the door swinging open behind me. The plywood floor creaked reassuringly as I got to my feet.

The inside of the treehouse looked huge, but it didn’t feel huge. The sofa and the potted palm in the far corner seemed almost like miniatures that I could reach out and touch if I wanted to. I didn’t want to. They sort of hung in the air, either real small, or real far away, or both. Or neither.

I decided it was best not to look at them. I had a job to do.

Two steps across the plywood floor took me to the corner with the TV. It was better here; more familiar. Here was the ratty rag rug my mother had donated; the Farrah Fawcett pinups on the wall. Here was the stack of old magazines: Motor Trend, Boy’s Life, Playboy, Model Airplane News. Here were the ball gloves, the water guns, right where Studs and I had left them, almost thirty years before. It all looked the same, in this corner.

The TV screen was more gray than blue. There was no picture, just a steady blizzard of static and snow. The rabbit ears antenna on the top were extended. One end was hung with tinfoil (had Studs and I done that?), and something was duct-taped into the cradle between them.

A cellular phone. I was sure we hadn’t done that. They didn’t even have cellular phones when we were kids; or duct tape, for that matter. This was clearly the other end of the connection from La Guardia. And there was more that was new.

A green garden hose was attached to a peculiar fitting on the front of the TV, between the volume control and the channel selector. It snaked across the floor toward the corner with the brown sofa and the potted palm. The longer I looked at the hose, the longer it seemed.

I decided it was best not to look at it. I had a job to do.

The electrical power in the treehouse came from the house, via a “train” of extension cords winding through the branches from Studs’s upstairs window. The TV was plugged into an extension cord dangling through a hole in the ceiling. I was reaching up to unplug it when I felt something cold against the back of my neck.

“Put your hands down!”

“Studs?”

“Irv, is that you?”

I turned slowly, hands still in the air.

“Irv the Perv? What the hell are you doing here?”

“I came to unplug the television, Studs,” I said. “Is that a real gun?”

“Damn tootin’,” he said. “A Glock nine.”

“So this is how you got all your medals!” I said scornfully. My hands still in the air, I pointed with my chin to the six-inch Dumont with the cell phone taped between the rabbit ears, then to the impressive array across Studs’s chest. Even off duty, even at home, he wore his uniform with all his medals. “That’s not really your Nobel Prize around your neck, either, is it?”

“It is so!” he said, fingering the heavy medallion. “The professor gave it to me. The professor helped me win the others, too, by speeding up the baggage carousel at La Guardia. You’re looking at the Employee of the Year, two years in a row.”

“The professor?”

Studs pointed with the Glock nine to the other corner of the treehouse. The far corner. I was surprised to see an old man, sitting on the brown sofa next to the potted palm. He was wearing a grey cardigan over blue coveralls. “Where’d he come from?” I asked.

“He comes and goes as he pleases,” said Studs. “It’s his Universe.” Universe? Suddenly it all came perfectly clear; or almost clear. “Dr. Radio Dgjerm?”

“Rah-dio,” the old man corrected. He looked tiny but his voice sounded neither small nor far away.

“Mother took in boarders after dad died,” Studs explained. “One day I showed Dr. Dgjerm the old treehouse, and when he saw the TV he got all excited. Especially when he turned it on and saw that it still worked. He bought the cell phones and set up the system.”

“It doesn’t really work,” I said. “There’s no picture.”

“All those old black and white shows are off the air,” said Studs. “Dr. Dgjerm had bigger things in mind than I Love Lucy anyway. Like creating a new Universe.”

“Is that what’s swelling up the inside of the treehouse?” I asked.

Studs nodded. “And incidentally, helping my career.” His medals clinked as his chest expanded. “You’re looking at the Employee of the Year, two years in a row.”

“You already told me that,” I said. I looked at the old man on the sofa. “Is he real small, or far away?”

“Both,” said Studs. “He’s in another Universe, and it’s not a very big universe.”

“Not big yet!” said Dr. Dgjerm. His voice sounded neither tiny nor far away. It boomed in my ear; I found out later, from Wu, that even a small Universe can act as a sort of resonator or echo chamber. Like a shower.

“My Universe is small now, but it’s getting bigger,” Dr. Dgjerm went on. “It’s a leisure Universe, created entirely out of Connective Time that your Universe will never miss. In another year or so, it will attain critical mass and be big enough to survive on its own. Then I will disconnect the timelines, cast loose, and bid you all farewell!”

“We don’t have another year,” I said. “I have to unplug the TV now.” I explained about the Butterfly Effect and the hurricanes. I even explained about my upcoming wedding in Huntsville. (I left out the part about my Honeymoon, which was supposed to be going on right now, as we spoke, just three doors down and a half a floor up!)

“Congratulations,” said Dgjerm in his rich Lifthatvanian accent. “But I’m afraid I can’t allow you to unplug the D6. There are more than a few hurricanes and weddings at stake. We’re talking about an entire new Universe here. Shoot him, Arthur.”

Studs raised the dock nine until it was pointed it directly at my face. His hand was alarmingly steady.

“I don’t want to shoot you, Irv,” he said apologetically. “But I owe him. He made me Employee of the Year two years in a row.”

“You also took a sacred oath!” I said. “Remember? You can’t shoot another Ditmas Playboy!” This wasn’t just a last-ditch ploy to save my life. It was true. It was one of our by-laws; one of only two, in fact.

“That was a long time ago,” said Studs, looking confused.

“Time doesn’t matter to oaths,” I said. (I have no idea if this is true or not. I just made it up on the spot.)

“Shoot him!” said Dr. Dgjerm.

“There’s another way out of this,” said a voice behind us.

7.

“A more civilized way.”

Studs and I both turned and looked at the TV. There was a familiar (to me, at least; Studs had never met him) face in grainy black and white, wearing some sort of jungle cap.

“Wu!” I said. “Where’d you come from?”

“Real time Internet feed,” he said. “Video conferencing software. My cosmonaut friend patched me in on a rogue cable channel from a digital switching satellite. Piece of cake, once we triangulated the location through the phone signals. Although cellular video can be squirrelly. Lots of frequency bounce.”

“This is a treehouse? It’s as big as a gymnasium!” exclaimed an oddly accented voice.

“Shut up, Dmitri. We’ve got a situation here. Hand me the gun, Blitz.”

“You can see out of a TV?” I asked, amazed.

“Only a little,” Wu said. “Pixel inversion piggybacked on the remote locational electron smear. It’s like a reverse mortgage. Feeds on the electronic equity, so to speak, so we have to get on with it. Hand me the gun, Studs. The Glock nine.”

Studs was immobile, torn between conflicting loyalties. “How can I hand a gun to a guy on TV?” he whined.

“You could set it on top of the cabinet,” I suggested.

“Don’t do it, Arthur!” Dr. Dgjerm broke in. “Give the gun to me. Now!”

Studs was saved. The doctor had given him an order he could obey. He tossed the Glock nine across the treehouse. It got smaller and smaller and went slower and slower, until, to my surprise, Dr. Dgjerm caught it. He checked the clip and laid the gun across his tiny, or distant, or both, lap.

“We can settle this without gunplay,” said Wu.

“Wilson Wu,” said Dr. Dgjerm. “So we meet again!”

“Again?” I whispered, surprised. I shouldn’t have been.

“I was Dr. Dgjerm’s graduate assistant at Bay Ridge Realty College in the late seventies,” explained Wu. “Right before he won the Nobel Prize for Real Estate.”

“Which was then stolen from me!” said Dr. Dgjerm.

“The prize was later revoked by the King of Sweden,” explained Wu, “when Dr. Dgjerm was indicted for trying to create an illegal Universe out of unused vacation time. Unfairly, I thought, even though technically the Time did belong to the companies.”

“The charges were dropped,” said Dgjerm. “But try telling that to the King of Sweden.”

Studs fingered the Nobel Prize medallion. “It’s not real?”

“Of course it’s real!” said Dgjerm. “When you clink it, it clinks. It has mass. That’s why I refused to give it back.”

“Your scheme would never have worked, anyway, Dr. Dgjerm,” said Wu. “I did the numbers. There’s not enough unused vacation time to inflate a Universe; not anymore.”

“You always were my best student, Wu,” said Dgjerm. “You are right, as usual. But as you can see, I came up with a better source of Time than puny pilfered corporate vacation days.” He waved his hand around at the sofa, the potted palm. “Connective Time! There’s more than enough to go around. All I needed was a way to make a hole in the fabric of space-time big enough to slip it through. And I found it!”

“The D6,” said Wu.

“Exactly. I had heard of the legendary lost D6, of course, but I thought it was a myth. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found it in my own backyard, so to speak! With Arthur’s help, it was a simple bandwidth problem, sluicing the Connective Time by phone from La Guardia, where it would never he missed, through the D6’s gauge boson rectifier twist, and into—my own Universe!”

“But it’s just a sofa and a plant,” I said. “Why do you want to live there?”

“Does the word ‘immortality’ mean anything to you?” Dgjerm asked scornfully. “It’s true that my Leisure Universe is small. That’s okay; the world is not yet ready for vacationing in another Universe, anyway. But real estate is nothing if not a waiting game. It will get bigger. And while I am waiting, I age at a very slow rate. Life in a universe made entirely of Connective Time is as close to immortality as we mortals can come.”

“Brilliant,” said Wu. “If you would only use your genius for science instead of gain, you could win another Nobel Prize.”

“Fuck Science!” said Dgjerm, his tiny (or distant, or both) mouth twisted into a smirk as his giant voice boomed through the treehouse. “I want my own Universe, and I already got a Nobel Prize, so don’t anybody reach for that plug. Sorry if I’ve thrown off your butterfly figures, Wilson, but your Universe won’t miss a few more milh-minutes of Connective Time. I will disconnect mine when it is big enough to survive and grow on its own. Not before.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” said Wu. “The more Universes, the better, as far as I’m concerned. Look here . . .”

Wu’s face on the TV screen stared straight ahead, as a stream of equations flowed down over it:

“Impossible!” said Dgjerm.

“Numbers don’t lie,” said Wu. “Your figures were off, professor. You reached critical mass 19.564 minutes ago, our time.

Your Leisure Universe is ready to cut loose and be born. All Irv has to do is—”

“Unplug the TV?” I asked. I reached for the plug and a shot rang out.

BRANNNGGG!

It was followed by the sound of breaking glass.

CRAASH!

“You killed him!” shouted Studs.

At first I thought he meant me, but my head felt okay, and my hands were okay, one on each side of the still-connected plug. Then I saw the thick broken glass on the floor, and I knew what had happened. You know how sometimes when you fire a warning shot indoors, you hit an appliance? Well, that’s what Dr. Dgjerm had done. He had meant to warn me away from the plug, and hit the television. The D6 was no more. The screen was shattered and Wu was gone.

I looked across the treehouse for the sofa, the potted palm, the little man. They were flickering a little, but still there.

“You killed him!” Studs said again.

“It was an accident,” said Dgjerm. “It was meant to be a warning shot.”

“It was only a video conferencing image,” I said. “I’m sure Wu is fine. Besides, he was right!”

“Right?” they both asked at once.

I pointed at Dr. Dgjerm. “The TV is off, and your Universe is still there.”

“For now,” said Dgjerm. “But the timeline is still open, and the Connective Time is siphoning back into your universe.” As he spoke, he was getting either smaller or farther away, or both. His voice was sounding hollower and hollower.

“What should we do?” Studs asked frantically. “Hang up the phone?”

I was way ahead of him; I had already untaped the phone and was looking for the OFF button. As soon as I pushed it, the phone rang.

It was, of course, Wu. “Everything all right?” he asked. “I lost my connection.”

I told him what had happened. Meanwhile, Dr. Dgjerm was getting smaller and smaller every second. Or farther and farther away. Or both.

“You have to act fast!” Wu said. “A universe is like a balloon. You have to tie it off, or it’ll shrink into nothing.”

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I hung up the phone.”

“Wrong timeline. The phone connects the baggage carousel to the D6. There must be another connection from the D6 to Dr. Dgjerm’s Leisure Universe. That’s the one that’s still open. Look for analog, narrow bandwidth, probably green.”

Dr. Dgjerm was standing on the tiny sofa, pointing frantically toward the front of the TV.

“Like a garden hose?” I asked.

“Could be,” said Wu. “If so, kinking it won’t help. Time isn’t like water; it’s infinitely compressible. You’ll have to disconnect it.”

The hose was attached to a peculiar brass fitting on the front of the set, between the channel selector and the volume control. I tried unscrewing it. I turned it to the left, but nothing happened. I turned it to the right, but nothing happened. I pushed. I pulled.

Nothing happened.

“It’s a special fitting!” said Dgjerm. I could barely hear him. He was definitely getting smaller, or farther away, or both.

“Let me try it!” said Studs, his panic showing his genuine affection for the swiftly disappearing old man. He turned the fitting to the left; he turned it to the right. He pushed, he pulled; he tugged, he twisted.

Nothing happened.

“Can I try?” asked a familiar voice.

“She can’t come in here!” shouted Studs.

It was Candy, and Studs was right: No Girls Allowed was our other bylaw. It was the bedrock of our policy. Nevertheless, ignoring his protests, I helped her off the ladder and through the door. Studs and I both gasped as she stood up, brushing off her knees. I had seen Candy out of uniform, but this was different. Very different.

She was wearing her special Honeymoon lingerie from Sweet Nothings.

Nevertheless, she was all business. “It’s like a child-proof cap,” she said. She bent down (beautifully!), and with one quick mysterious wrist-motion, disconnected the hose from the fitting. It began to flop like a snake and boom like thunder, and Candy screamed and dropped it. Meanwhile, Dr. Dgjerm was hauling the hose in and coding it on the sofa, which was beginning to spin, slowly at first, then more and more slowly.

I heard more booming, and felt a tremendous wind sweep through the treehouse.

I heard the sound of magazine pages fluttering and wood splintering.

I felt the floor tilt and I reached out for Candy as Studs yelled, “I told you so! I told you so!”

The next thing I knew, I was lying on a pile of boards under the maple tree, with Candy in my arms. Her Sweet Nothings Honeymoon lingerie was short on elbow and knee protection, and she was skinned in several places. I wrapped her in my mother’s old rag rug, and together we helped Studs to his feet.

“I told you so,” he said.

“Told who what?”

Instead of answering, he swung at me. Luckily, he missed. Studs has never been much of a fighter. “The by-laws. No Girls Allowed. Now look!” Studs kicked the magazines scattered around under the tree.

“It wasn’t Candy!” I said. “It was your precious professor and his Leisure Universe!”

Studs swung at me again. It was easy enough to duck. A few lights had come on in the neighboring houses, but they were already going off again.

The backyard was littered with boards and magazines, ball gloves, pinups, water guns and pocket knives. It was like the debris of childhood—it was the debris of childhood—all collected in one sad pile.

Studs was crying, blubbering, really, as he picked through the debris, looking (I suspected) for a little sofa, a miniature potted palm, or perhaps a tiny man knocked unconscious by a fall from a collapsing Universe.

Candy and I watched for a while, then decided to help. There was no sign of Dr. Radio Dgjerm. We couldn’t even find the hose. “That’s a good sign,” I pointed out. “The last thing I saw, he was coiling it up on the sofa.”

“So?” Studs took another swing at me, and Candy and I decided it was time to leave. We were ducking down to squeeze through the loose plank in the Patellis’ fence when I heard the phone ringing behind me. It was muffled under the boards and plywood. I was about to turn back and answer it, but Candy caught my arm—and my eye.

It was still our Honeymoon, after all, even though I had a headache from the fall. So, I found out later, did Candy.

8.

I thought that was the end of the Ditmas Playboys, but the next day at La Guardia, Studs was waiting for us at the top of the escalator to Gates 1-17. He had either cleaned or changed his uniform since the disaster of the night before, and his medals gleamed, though I noticed he had taken off the Nobel Prize.

At first I thought he was going to take a swing at me, but instead he took my hand.

“Your friend Wu called last night,” he said. “Right after you and what’s-her-name left.”

“Candy.” I said. “My fiancée.” She and Aunt Minnie were standing right beside me, but Studs wouldn’t look at them. Studs had always had a hard time with girls and grown-ups—which is why I was surprised that he had become so attached to Dr. Dgjerm. Perhaps it was because the brilliant but erratic Lifthatvanian Realtor was, or seemed, so small, or far away, or both.

“Whatever,” said Studs. “Anyway, your friend told me that, as far as he could tell, the Leisure Universe was cast loose and set off safely. That Dr. Dgjerm survived.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, we have a plane to catch.”

“What a nice boy that Arthur is,” said Aunt Minnie, as we boarded the plane. I felt no need to respond, since she was talking to Uncle Mort and not to me. “And you should see all those medals.”

The departure was late. I found that oddly reassuring. Candy sat in the middle, her eyes tightly closed, and I let Aunt Minnie have the window seat. It was her first flight. She pressed the urn with Uncle Mort’s ashes to the window for the takeoff.

“It’s his first flight,” she said. “I read in Reader’s Digest that you’re less nervous when you can see what’s going on.”

“I don’t believe it,” muttered Candy, her eyes closed tightly. “And how can ashes be nervous anyway?”

The planes may be old on PreOwned Air, but the interiors have been re-refurbished several times. They even have the little credit card phones on the backs of the seats. There was nobody I wanted to talk to for fifteen dollars a minute, but I wasn’t surprised when my phone rang.

“It’s me. Did the plane leave late?”

“Eighteen minutes,” I said, checking my notes.

“Numbers don’t lie!” said Wu. “Things are back to normal. I already knew it, in fact, because my calculations came out perfect this morning. I released the first moth in the rain forest at 9:14 AM, Eastern Standard Time.”

I heard a roar behind him which I assumed was rain.

“Congratulations,” I said. “What about Dr. Dgjerm and his Leisure Universe?”

“It looks like the old man made it okay,” said Wu. “If his Universe had crashed, my figures wouldn’t have come out so good. Of course, we will never know for sure. Now that our Universe and his are separated, there can be no exchange of information between them. Not even light.”

“Doesn’t sound like a good bet for a resort,” I said.

“Dgjerm didn’t think it all the way through,” said Wu. “This was always his weakness as a Realtor. However, he will live forever, or almost forever, and that was important to him also. Your friend Studs cried with relief, or sadness, or both when I told him last night. He seems very attached to the old man.”

“He’s not exactly a friend,” I said. “More like a childhood acquaintance.”

“Whatever,” said Wu. “How was your Honeymoon?”

I told him about the headache(s). Wu and I have no secrets. I had to whisper, since I didn’t want to upset Candy. She might have been asleep, but there was no way to tell; her eyes had been closed since we had started down the runway.

“Well, you can always try again after the ceremony,” Wu commiserated.

“I intend to,” I said. “Just make sure you get to Huntsville on time with the ring!”

“It’ll be tight, Irv. I’m calling from a trimotor just leaving Quetzalcan City.”

“An L1011? A DC-10?” The roar sounded louder than ever.

“A Ford Trimotor,” Wu said. “I missed the nonstop, and it’s a charter, the only thing I could get. It’ll be tight. We can only make 112 mph.”

“They stopped making Ford Trimotors in 1929. How can they have cell phones?”

“I’m in the cockpit, on the radio. The pilot, Huan Juan, and I went to Flight School together in Mukden.”

Why was I not surprised? I leaned over to look out the window, and saw the familiar runways of Squirrel Ridge, the airport, far below.

“We’re getting ready to land,” I said. “I’ll see you at the wedding!”

I hung up the phone. Aunt Minnie held the urn up to the window. Candy shut her eyes even tighter.

9.

Divorces are all alike, according to Dostoievsky, or some Russian, but marriages are each unique, or different, or something. Our wedding was no exception.

It started off great. There’s nothing like a morning ceremony. My only regret was that Candy couldn’t get the whole day off.

The weather was perfect. The sun shone down from a cloudless sky on the long, level lawn of the Squirrel Ridge Holiness Church. Cindy’s catering van arrived at ten, and she and the two kids, Ess and Em, started unloading folding tables and paper plates, plastic toothpicks and cut flowers, and coolers filled with crab cakes and ham biscuits for the open-air lunchtime reception.

All Candy’s friends from the Huntsville Parks Department were there, plus the friends we had in common, like Bonnie from the Bonny Baguette (who brought her little blackboard with the daily specials written on it; it was like her brain) and Buzzer from Squirrel Ridge, the Nursing Home, complete with diamond nose stud. My friend Hoppy from Hoppy’s Good Gulf, who happened to be a Holiness preacher, was officiating. (“Course I’ll marry Whipper Will’s young-un to Whipper Will’s Yank, ‘nuff said.”).

Aunt Minnie looked lovely in her colorful Lifthatvanian peasant costume (red and blue, with pink lace around the sleeves) smelling faintly of mothballs. Even Uncle Mort sported a gay ribbon round his urn.

It was all perfect, except—where was Wu?

“He’ll be here,” said Cindy as she unpacked the ice sculpture of Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveler (the only thing the local ice sculptor knew how to do), and sent Ess and Em to arrange the flowers near the altar.

“He’s on a very slow plane,” I said.

Finally, we felt like we had to get started, Best Man or no. It was 11:55 and the guests were beginning to wilt. I gave a reluctant nod and the twin fiddles struck up “The Wedding March”—

And here came the bride. I hadn’t seen Candy since the night before. She looked resplendent in her dress white uniform, complete with veil, her medals gleaming in the sun. Her bridesmaids all wore khaki and pink.

Since I was short a ring, Hoppy slipped me the rubber O-ring from the front pump of a Ford C-6 transmission. “Use this, Yank,” he whispered. “You can replace it with the real one later.”

“Brethren and sistren and such, we are gathered here today . . .” Hoppy began. Then he sniffed, and cocked his head, and looked around. “Is that a Ford?”

It was indeed. There is nothing that stops a wedding like a “Tin Goose” setting down on a church lawn. Those fat-winged little birds can land almost anywhere.

This one taxied up between the ham biscuit and punch tables, and shut down all three engines with a couple of backfires and a loud cough-cough. The silence was deafening.

The little cabin door opened, and out stepped a six foot Chinaman in a powder blue tux and a scuffed leather helmet. It was my best Man, Wilson Wu. He took off the helmet as he jogged up the aisle to polite applause.

“Sorry I’m late!” he whispered, slipping me the ring.

“What’s with the blue tux?” I knew it wasn’t the one I had reserved for him at Five Points Formal Wear.

“Picked it up last night during a fuel stop in Bozeman,” he said. “It was prom night there, and blue was all they had left.”

Hoppy was pulling my sleeve, asking me questions. “Of course I do!” I said. “You bet I do!” There was the business with the ring, the real one (“Is that platinum or just white gold?” Cindy gasped). Then it was time to kiss the bride.

Then it was time to kiss the bride again.

As soon as the ceremony was over, the twin fiddles struck up “Brand-new Tennessee Waltz,” and we all drifted back to the tables in the shade of the Trimotor for refreshments. We found an unfamiliar Mayan-Chinese-looking dude eyeing the shrimp, and made him welcome. It was Wu’s pilot friend, Huan Juan. Ess and Em served the congealed salad, after shrieking and hugging their father, whom they hadn’t seen in six weeks.

“I should have known better than to worry, Wu,” I said. “But did you say Bozeman? I thought that was in Montana.”

“It is,” he said, filling his plate with potato salad. “It’s not on the way from eastern Quetzalcan to northern Alabama, unless you take the Great Triangle Route.”

I knew he wanted me to ask, so I did: “The what?”

Smiling proudly, Wu took a stack of ham biscuits. “You know how a Great Circle Route looks longer on a map, but is in fact the shortest way across the real surface of the spherical Earth?”

“Uh huh.” I grabbed some more of the shrimp. They were going fast. The twin fiddles launched into “Orange Blossom Special.”

“Well, in all my struggles with the Time axes for EMS, I accidentally discovered the shortest route across the negatively folded surface of local space-time. Local meaning, our Universe. Look.”

Wu took what I thought was a map out of the pocket of his tux and unrolled it. It was covered with figures:

“As you can see, it’s sort of counter-intuitive,” he said. “It means flying certain strict patterns and altitudes, and of course it only works in a three engine plane. But there it is. The shortest Great Triangle Space-Time Route from Quetzalcan City to Huntsville traverses the Montana high plains and skims the edge of Chesapeake Bay.”

“Amazing,” I said. The shrimp, which are as big as pistol grips, are grown in freshwater ponds in western Kentucky. I couldn’t stop eating them.

“Numbers don’t he,” said Wu. “Not counting fuel stops, and with a Ford Trimotor there are lots of those, it took Huan Juan and me only 22 hours to fly 6476.54 miles in a plane with a top speed of 112 mph. Let me try one of those giant shrimp.”

“That’s great,” I said, looking through the thinning crowd for Candy. “But it’s almost 12:20, and Candy has to be at work at one.”

Wu looked shocked. “No Honeymoon?”

I shook my head. “Candy traded shifts for the trip to New York, and now she has to work nights, plus all weekend.”

“It’s not very romantic,” said Candy, edging up beside me. “But it was the best we could do. Huan Juan, have you tried the giant shrimp?”

The pilot nodded without answering. He and Wu were consulting in whispers. They looked up at the clear blue sky, then down at the calculations on the unrolled paper.

“They are intimately entwined,” I heard Wu say (I thought he was talking about Candy and me; I found out later he was talking about Time and Space). “All you have to do to unravel and reverse them is substitute this N for this 34.8, and hold steady at 2622 feet and 97 mph, air speed. Can you fly it?”

Huan Juan nodded, reaching for another giant shrimp.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Let’s take a ride,” said Wu, snapping his leather helmet under his chin. “Don’t look so surprised. This Trimotor’s equipped with a luxury Pullman cabin; it once belonged to a Latin American dictator.”

“Where are we going?” I asked, pulling Candy to my side.

“Nowhere! We are going to fly a Great Triangle configuration, compressed and reversed, over Squirrel Ridge for twenty-three minutes, and you will experience it as, let’s see—” He squinted, figuring—”Two point six hours of Honeymoon time. Better bring along some giant shrimp and ham biscuits.”

Cindy handed Candy a bouquet. Hoppy and Bonnie and all our friends were applauding.

“What about—you know?” I whispered to Candy. I meant the Honeymoon lingerie she had bought at Sweet Nothings.

With a shy smile she pulled me aside. While Em and Ess tied shoes to the tail of the plane, and while Huan Juan and Wu cranked up the three ancient air-cooled radials with a deafening roar, and while the rest of the guests polished off the giant shrimp, Candy opened the top button of her tunic to give me a glimpse of what she was wearing underneath.

Then we got on the plane and soared off into the clear blue. But that’s another story altogether.

THE SUMMER ISLES

Ian R. MacLeod

In his brilliant new story, a shift in the outcome of The Great War leads to a chilling tale of an England that casts a dark and terrifying cloud over . . .

One

On this as on almost every Sunday evening, I find a message from my acquaintance on the wall of the third cubicle of the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow. It’s two thumbnails dug into the sleek green paint this week, which means the abandoned shed by the allotments past the rugby grounds in half an hour’s time. A trail of other such marks run across the cubicle wall; what amounts nowadays to my entire sexual life. Here—Oh, happy, dangerous days!—is the special triplemark that meant a back room in the hotel of a sympathetic but understandably wary proprietor. He’s gone now, of course, has Larry Black, like so many others. Quietly taken one night for the shocks and needles of the treatment centers in the Isle of Man.

I pull the chain, clunk back the lock, and step out into the sweet Jeyes Fluid air. Placed above me on the wall as I wash my hands, with what, if you didn’t know this country, you would surely imagine to be ironic intent, hangs a photograph of John Arthur. He gazes warmly across his desk, looking younger than his forty-nine years despite his grey hair. The photograph is brass-framed, well-polished. Of course, no one has dared to deface it.

Outside along St. Giles, twilight has descended, yet the warmth of this early summer day remains. A convoy of trucks lumbers around the cobbles, filled with bewildered-looking conscripts on their way to the sprawling camps in the southeast of England. A few of the newer or expensively refurbished pubs already boom with patriotic songs. I pause to relight my pipe as I pass St. John’s, then lean spluttering against a wall and cough up out a surprising quantity of stringy phlegm, watched over by a small but disapproving gargoyle. Odd, disgusting, habit—hawking and spitting. Something that, until recently, I’d only associated with old men.

There’s still some life out on the playing fields. Undergrads are wandering. There are groups. Couples. Limbs entwine. Soft laughter flowers. The occasional cigarette flares. Glancing back at the towers of this city laid in shadows of hazy gold against the last flush of the sun, it’s all so impossibly beautiful. It looks, in fact, exactly like an Empire Alliance poster. Greater Britain Awake! I smile at the thought, and wonder for a moment if there isn’t some trace of reality still left in the strange dream that we in this country now seem to be living. Turning, sliding my hand into my pocket to nurse the encouraging firmness of my anticipatory erection, I cross the bridge over the Cherwell as Old Tom begins his long nightly chime.

Despite all the back-to-nature and eat-your-own greens propaganda that Home Secretary Mosley has been peddling, the shed at the far end of the allotments and the plots it once served remains abandoned, cupped as they are in a secret hollow, lost by the men who went to the War and never came back again. I lever open the door and duck inside. Tools and seeds and sweet dry manure. But no sign yet of my acquaintance as the floorboards creak beneath my feet. The darkness, even as my eyes grow accustomed to the gloom, becomes near-absolute as night settles outside. A distant bell ripples a muffled shipwreck clang. The late train to London rattles by in the distance, dead on time.

My acquaintance is late. In fact, he should have been here first. As I pushed back the door, his younger arms should already have been around me. He trembles often as not when we first lock together, does my acquaintance. After all, he has so much more to lose. For, despite the darkness and the secrecy with which we pretend to cloak our meetings, I know exactly who my acquaintance is. I have studied the lights of his house shining through the privet that he trims so neatly each fortnight, and I have watched the welcoming faces of his wife and two daughters as they greet him at his door.

Checking, occasionally, the radium glow of my watch, I let a whole hour slide by as the residues of early hope and fear sour into disappointment, and then frank anxiety. But what, after all, do I know of the demands of being a father, a husband? Of working in some grim dead-end section of the Censor’s Department of the Oxford City Post Office? At ten, I lever the shed door open and step back out into the summer night, leaving my long-forgotten libido far behind me. The stars shine down implacably through the rugby H’s as I make my way past lovers and drunks and dog walkers into the old alleys. I turn for a moment as I hear the whisper of footsteps. Could that be a figure, outlined against the mist of light that seeps from a doorway? But by the time I’ve blinked, it becomes nothing—an aging man’s fancy: the paranoias of love and fear.

Then quickly along Holywell where an owl calls, and onward under the plane trees to my college and my quad, to the cool waiting sheets of my room deep in the serene heart of this ancient city.

I open my eyes next morning to the sight of my scout Christlow bearing a tray containing a steaming pot of Assam, a rack of toast, my own special jar of marmalade. Even as the disappointments of the previous evening and the cold aches that have suddenly started to assail my body wash over me, I still have to smile to find myself here.

“Lovely morning, sir.” Christlow drifts through diamonds of sunlight to place the tray astride my lap. The circled cross of the EA badge on his lapel winks knowingly at me. “Oh, by the way, sir. You asked me to remind you of your appointment today.”

“Appointment?”

“At ten o’clock, you were seeing your doctor. Unless, of course, you’ve—”

“—No. Yes.” I nod in my pajamas, what’s left of my hair sticking up in a grey halo, a dribble of spilt tea warming my chin—all in all, a good approximation of an absent-minded don. “Thank you, Christlow, for reminding me.”

In that scarily deferential way of his, Christlow almost bows, then retreats and closes the door. With a sound like distant thunder, his trolley trundles off down the oak-floored corridor. And yes, I truly had forgotten my appointment. The dust-spangled sunlight that threads my room now seems paler and my throat begins to ache as whispers of pain and uncertainty come into my head.

Walking along High Street an hour later, I have to squeeze my way through the queue outside the Regal for the day’s first showing of Olivier’s Henry V. Many, like Christlow, wear EA badges. But all ages, all types, both sexes, every age and disability, are gathered. A mixture, most bizarrely of all, of town and gown—undergrads and workers—the two quite separate existences that Oxford so grudgingly contains.

Beyond the junction of Alfred Street I push through the little door beside the jewelers and climb the stairs to the surgery. The receptionist looks up without smiling, then returns to stabbing a finger at her typewriter. The posters in this poky waiting room are like the ones you see everywhere nowadays. With Your Help We Can Win. Now Is The Time. Join the Empire Alliance—Be a Part of the Modernist Revolution. There’s a fetching painting of the towers and spires of this great dreaming city aglow at sunset, much as I saw them yesterday. And, of course, there’s John Arthur.

“Mr. Brook. Doctor Parker will see you.”

I push through the doorway, blinking. Doctor Parker is totally new to me. Fresh-faced, young, and pinkly bald, he looks, in fact, almost totally new to himself. I have no one but myself to blame for taking my chances with the National Health Service. I could have availed myself of Doctor Reichard, who comes to our college every Wednesday to see to us dons, and is available at most other times, since, on the basis of a stipend granted by George I in 1715, these attendances comprise his sole professional duty. But my complaints—shortness of breath, this cough, the odd whispering that sometimes comes upon me, the growing ache in my bones—sound all too much like the simple ravages of age. And I nurse, also, a superstitious fear that my sexual leanings will be apparent to the trained medical eye.

“Sorry about this ah . . . I’ve only just got . . .,” he says as he glances down at his page-a-day calendar. Thursday 13 June 1940. The letters seem to glow, so brightly rainbowed at their edges that I wonder if this isn’t some other new symptom. “You’re the ah . . . The columnist, aren’t you? What was it? ‘The Fingers of History’ ?”

“ ‘Figures of History.’ ”

“Of course. Daily Sketch, every Saturday. Used to find it handy at school.” Then another thought strikes him. “And you knew him, didn’t you? I mean, you knew John Arthur. . . .”

“That was a long time ago.”

“But what’s he really like?”

I open my mouth to give my usual noncommittal reply. But it doesn’t seem worth it.

“Here we are.” He shuffles the X-rays into order, then leans over the file. “Um—Griffin Brooke. I thought it was Geoffrey, and Brook without the e?”

“It’s a sort of pen-name,” I say, although in fact the Oxford Calendar, the door to my rooms—even the name tags Christlow sews into my gowns—also read Geoffrey Brook. Griffin Brooke, the names I was born with, now reside only in odd corners such as this, where, despite the potential for confusion, I find myself reluctant to give them up.

As my thoughts drift toward all the odd accidents in life that have brought me here—and how, indeed, Fingers of History would be a good description of some historical process or other—another part of me watches Doctor Parker as he then raises the cover of my file a few inches to peer sideways into it.

Something changes behind his eyes. But when he clears his throat and smoothes back down the papers and finally makes the effort to meet my gaze, I’m still certain that I’m fully prepared for the worst. What could be more terrible, after all, than growing old, or emphysema, bronchitis, tuberculosis? . . .

“It seems,” he begins, “that a tumor has been growing in your lungs. . . . Outwardly, you’re still in good enough health, but I really doubt if there’s point in an operation.”

Not even any need for an operation! A stupid bubble of joy rises up from my stomach, then dissolves.

I lick my lips. “How long,” I ask, “have I got?”

“You’ll need to make plans. I’m so terribly sorry. . . .”

Thrust upon the gleaming linoleum rivers of the new NHS, I am kept so busy at first that there is little time left for anything resembling worry. There are further X-rays at the Radcliffe, thin screens behind which I must robe and disrobe for the benefit of cold-fingered but sympathetic men who wear half-moon glasses. Nurses provide me with over-sweet tea and McVitie’s Digestives. Porters seek my opinion about Arsenal’s chances in the FA Cup.

I feel almost heroic. And for a while I am almost grateful for the new impetus that my condition gives to a long-planned project of mine. A book not of history, but about history. One which examines, much as a scientist might examine the growth of a culture, the way that events unfold, and attempts to grapple with the forces that drive them. The Fingers of History? The odd way that inspiration sometimes arrives when you’re least looking for it, I may even have stumbled upon a title; serious and relevant to the subject, yet punning at the same time on my own small moment of popular fame in the Daily Sketch.

After years of grappling with the sense of being an impostor that has pervaded most of my life, I suddenly find that I am making good progress in writing the pivotal chapter about Napoleon. Was he a maker of history, or was he its servant? Of course, he was both—and yet it is often the little incidents, when history is approached from this angle, which stand large. Questions such as, what would have happened if his parents Carlo and Letizia had never met?—which normal historians would discount as ridiculous—suddenly become a way of casting new light.

But one post-hospital afternoon a week or so later, as I huddle over my desk, and the warm air drifting through my open window brings the chant and the tread of Christlow and his fellow EA members parading on the ancient grass of our college quad, the whole process suddenly seems meaningless. Now, I can see the futility of all the pages I have written. I can see, too, the insignificant and easily filled space that my whole life will soon leave. A few clothes hanging in a wardrobe, an old suitcase beneath a bed, some marks on a toilet cubicle wall. Who, after all, am I, and what possible difference does it make?

Pulling on my jacket, empty with fear, I head out into Oxford as evening floods in.

I was born in Lichfield—which, then as now, is a town that calls itself a city—in the year 1880. It’s middle England, neither flat nor hilly, north or south. Barring Doctor Johnson being born and a messy siege in the Civil War, nothing much has ever happened there. My father worked for Lichfield Corporation before he died of a heart attack one evening while tending his allotment. He’d had a title that changed once or twice amid great glory and talk of more ambitious holidays, but he’d always been Assistant-this and Deputy-that—one of the great busy-but-unspecified (“Well, it’s quite hard to explain what I do unless you happen to be in the same line yourself. . . .”) who now so dominate this country.

My mother and I were never that stretched; we had his pension and his life insurance, and she took on a job working at Hindley’s cake shop, and brought home bits of icing and angelica for me when they changed the window display. By this time, I’d already decided I wanted to be “a teacher.” Until I passed into Secondary School from Stowe Street Elementary, I was always one of the brightest in my class. Even a County Scholarship to Rugby seemed within reach. And from there, yes, I was already dreaming of the Magdalene Deer, sleek bodies bathing in the Cherwell at Parson’s Pleasure.

My later years in school, though, were a slog. Partly from struggling to keep pace among cleverer lads, I fell ill with something that may or may not have been scarlet fever. On my long stay away from school, a boy called Martin Dawes would call in each afternoon to deliver books and sit with me. Whilst up in my room, he would sometimes slip his hands beneath the waistband of my pajamas and toss me off, as if that, too, was a message that needed to be delivered from school. Of course, I was deeply grateful. After I had recovered, locked in the upstairs toilet with its ever-open window as my mother shuffled about in the kitchen, I would dutifully try to incorporate women into my pink imaginings as, in the absence of Martin’s attentions, I stimulated myself. But at some vital moment, their chests would always flatten and their groins would engorge as they stepped toward me, cropped and clean and shining.

That, in the personal history of what I term my pre-Francis days, is the sole extent of my sexual development. There was just me, my guilty semicelibacy, and helping my mother look after her house, and watching the lads I’d known at school grow up, leave home, marry, start families. I had, by my early twenties, also come to accept my position as a Second Class Teacher for the Senior Standard Threes at Burntwood Charity. In the articles with which I began my short career in the Daily Sketch nearly thirty years later, I gave the impression that John Arthur was one of my brightest and most ambitious pupils there, a little comet trail across the pit-dusty Burntwood skies. Thanks to numerous flowery additions by the Sketch’s copy editor, I also stated that he was pale-skinned, quiet, good-looking, intense, and that he possessed a slight West Country accent, this being the time before it had changed to the soft Yorkshire that we all know now—all traits that would have got him a good beating up in the playground—and that, “on summer evenings after school when the pit whistle had blown and the swallows were wheeling,” he and I would walk up into “the hazy Staffordshire hills” and sit down and gaze down at “the spires of Lichfield, the pit wheels of Burntwood, and the smokestacks of Rugeley from the flowing purple heather.” Now, after all these years of practice, this has become my party act. So, yes, John Arthur really is there in that classroom at Burntwood Charity with the smell of chalk dust and unwashed bodies. His hand is raised from the third row of desks to ask a more than usually pertinent question before I start to ramble on about one of my many pet subjects. That is how I recall him.

Too weary to stop, trailing cigarette smoke, memories, abstractions, I wander Oxford’s new suburban streets, passing illuminated porches bearing individual nameplates; Church House. Dawric. The Willows. It’s a quiet now, although scarcely past nine and only just getting fully dark. The houses have a sleepy look. Their curtains are drawn. Faintly, like the movement of ghosts, I can see the flicker of television screens in many darkened lounges.

A footstep scuffs in the street behind me, and the sound is so furtive and unexpected that I turn and look back, although there was nothing to see. I walk on more briskly. Beyond a patch of grass where Ball Games Are Prohibited lies the home of my acquaintance, with its black-and-white gable, the privet, and the long strip of drive that, in these days of ever-growing prosperity, will probably soon be graced with a Morris Ladybird “people’s car” instead of his Raleigh bicycle. But the windows of the house are darkened, uncurtained. And there is something odd about the look of them. . . .

My feet crunch on something sharper than gravel as I walk up the path to my acquaintance’s front door. Many of the windows in the bay are shattered, there is a pervasive, summery smell of children’s urine, and a fat iron padlock has been fitted across the door’s splintered frame. I see, last of all, the sign that the Oxford Constabulary have pasted across the bricks in the porch. Take Notice Hereby . . . but this sky is incredibly dark and deep for summer, and I can’t read further than the Crown-embossed heading. I slump down on the doorstep, scattering empty milk bottles, covering my face with my hands. Suddenly, it all comes to me. This. Death. Everything.

When I look up some time later, a figure is standing watching me from the suburban night with her arms folded, head tilted, a steely glint of curlers. “I’m Mrs. Stevens,” she tells me, offering a softly companionable hand to help me up, then leading me past the hedge and the dustbins into the brightness of her kitchen next door. Slumped at the table, I watch her as she boils the kettle and warms the pot.

“I know,” she says. “This must be a shock to you. . . .”

“They took them all away?”

“All of them. The pity of it really.” She stirs her tea and passes me mine. “Them young girls.”

“Nobody did anything to stop it?”

She gazes across at me, and licks the brown line of tea that’s gathered on her small mustache. “I’ll tell you what they were like, Mr. Brook. In every way, I’d have said, they were a decent couple. Only odd thing I remember now is they sometimes used to leave the light on without drawing the curtains so you could see right in. . . . The lassies were nice, though. Fed our cat for us when we went up to Harrogate last year. Knew them well yourself, did you?”

“He was just an acquaintance. But when they came to the house, was it the KSG or did—”

“—and you’d never have known, would you, to look at her?”

“Her? You mean . . .?”

“Ah . . .” Mrs. Stevens slaps her hand flat down on the table and leans forward, her brown eyes gleaming. “So you still don’t know the truth of it? Her real name was something Polish. All Zs and Ks.” She hurrumphs. “It’s understandable that they want to come here, isn’t it? Just as long as they don’t make themselves a burden, earn a decent living, talk like we do and don’t bother our children and keep themselves to themselves.”

“So what was the problem?”

“She was a Jew, wasn’t she? All these years they’ve been living next door and acting all normal and hiding it from us.” Mrs. Stevens raises her shoulders and shudders theatrically. “To think of it. It’s the dishonesty. And her nothing but a dirty little Jew.”

Two

Clouds sweep in across Oxford, thick and grey as wet cement. Rain brims over the low surrounding hills and washes away the hope of what had promised to be another spectacular summer. In the whitewashed yard of the town prison on a hissing grey dawn, two men are hanged for their part in an attempted mail robbery. In Honduras, the British prefix lost to revolution in 1919 is restored in a bloody coup. A car bomb in the Trans-Jordan kills fifteen German League of Nations soldiers. In India, as ever, there are uprisings and massacres, and I despair as I work on my book of ever making any sense of history. It seems, to quote Gibbon, little more than a register of cruelties, follies, and misfortunes.

In Britain, the Jews have always been small in number, and we’ve generally been “tolerant.” Before the rise of Modernism, my acquaintance and his family probably had little more to fear from exposure than the occasional human turd stuffed through their letter box. After all, Jewishness isn’t like homosexuality, madness, criminality, communism, militant Irishness: they can’t exactly help being born with their grabby disgusting ways, can they? Rather like the gypsies, you see, we didn’t mind them living, but not here, not with us. . . . In this as in so many other areas, all Modernism did when John Arthur came to power was take what people said to each other over the garden fence and turn it into Government policy.

I can well remember the Homeland for British Jewry newsreels: they were probably one of the defining moments of early Greater British history. There they were, the British Jews. Whole eager families of them helped by smiling Tommies as they climbed from landing craft and hauled their suitcases up onto the shingle of remote Scottish islands that had been empty but for a few sheep since the Clearances of a century before. And it was hard not to think how genuinely nice it would be to start afresh somewhere like that, to paint and make homely the grey blocks of those concrete houses, to learn the skills of shepherding, harvesting, fishing.

So many other things have happened since then that it has been easy to forget about the Jews. I remember a short piece of Pathé before Disney’s Snow White in what must have been 1939. By then they looked rustic and sunburned, their hands callused by cold winters of weaving and dry-stone walling, their eyes bright from the wind off the sea. Since then, nothing. A blank, an empty space that I find hard to fill even in my imagination.

One morning as thunder crackles and water streams and the whole college seems to shift and creak like a ship straining at its moorings, I’m still marooned in my rooms, ill and lost in the blind alley of my book when Christlow arrives at eleven to do the cleaning.

“You know the Jews, Christlow,” I chirp after clearing my throat.

“Jews sir? Yes sir. Although not personally.”

He pauses in his dusting. The situation already has a forced air.

“I was wondering—it’s part of my book, you see—what happened to the mixed families. Where a Jew married a gentile . . .”

“I’m sure they were treated sympathetically, sir. Although for the life of me I can’t imagine there was ever very many of them.”

“Of course,” I nod, and force my gaze back to my desk. Christlow resumes his dusting, his lips pursed in a silent whistle, amid the rain-streaming shadows as he lifts the photos along the mantelpiece of my mother, my father—and a good-looking, dark-haired young man.

“So you’ll be all right, then, sir?” he asks when he’s finished, picking up his box of rags and polishes. “Fine if I leave you now?”

“Thank you, Christlow. As always,” I add, laying it on thick for some reason, as if there’s a deeper debt that he and I owe each other, “you’ve done a splendid job.”

When he’s gone and his footsteps have faded into the college’s loose stirrings, I slide in the bolt, then cross to the gloom of my bedroom and drag my old suitcase from beneath the bed. I always keep its key in my pocket, but the hinges creak as I open them, rusty from disuse. Nothing inside has changed. The tin toys. The tennis slacks. The exercise book with the name Francis Eveleigh inscribed into the cardboard cover in thick childish letters. A school badge. A Gillette safety razor—his first? A pistol wrapped inside an old rag. A decent-enough herringbone jacket. A single shoe. A steel hip flask. A soldier’s pass for 14-26 September 1916, cross-stamped No Longer Valid. Various socks and old-fashioned collarless shirts and itchy-looking undies. A copy of Morris’s News from Nowhere. And a Touring Map of the Scottish Highlands, folded so often that the sheets threaten to break apart as I touch them.

I grab a handful of his clothes and bury my face into them, smelling Oxford damp, Oxford stone, Four Square Ready-Rubbed and Mansion House lavender floor polish. Little enough is left of Francis now. Still, that faint scent of his flesh like burnt lemon. A few dark strands of his hair . . .

What a joke I have become. My sole claim to fame is having dimly known a great man when he was still a child, and my sole claim to happiness lies almost as far back; a miracle that happened for a few days nearly thirty years ago. I suppose I’ve convinced myself since that homosexuals cannot really love—it’s easier that way. And yet at the same time, in all the years since, Francis had always been with me.

“It really doesn’t matter, Griff,” I hear him say as his fingers touch my neck. He smells not of lemons now, but of the rainy oak he’s been standing beneath as he watches my window from the quad. But he hasn’t aged. He hasn’t changed.

“No, it doesn’t matter at all,” he whispers as he turns me round to kiss me. “Not any of this. That’s the secret of everything.”

I smile to find him near me, and still shudder at the cool touch of his hands. In the moment before the thunder crackles closer over Oxford and I open my eyes, all pain is gone.

Ernie Svendsen, with his suspiciously foreign name, his long nose, his thick glasses, seems an unlikely survivor of my kind. He puts it down to something that he has on Oxford’s Deputy Chief Constable, although I would have thought that would have made him a prime candidate for a hit-and-run car accident.

We meet at a park bench the next afternoon, during a break in the rain.

“Do you think they’ll let them stay together?” I ask as he tosses bread from a brown paper bag to the feathered carpet of ducks that have gathered around us. “Will they send him to the Isle of Man, the girls and the mother to the Western Isles?”

Giving me a pitying look, Ernie shakes his head. “It doesn’t work like that, my friend. Oh, they’ll get it out of him. He’ll tell them anything—lies or the truth. People always blab on so when you threaten them. . . . I shouldn’t worry,” he adds, seeing the expression on my face. “If something was going to happen to you, it would have happened already. Being who you are, I’m sure you’ll be safe.”

“I’m not who I am. I’m not anybody.”

“Then you’re doubly lucky.”

“I keep asking myself what the point is. I mean—why?”

“I think you’ve forgotten what it’s like, my friend.”

“What?”

“Being the way we are—bent, queer. The guilt. The stupid scenes. You remember those leaflets, the promises of help, that we could be cured. Don’t tell me you didn’t secretly get hold of one.” He sighs. “If we could just press some button—pull out something inside us—don’t you think we’d all do it? Wouldn’t you take that chance, if you were given it? Isn’t John Arthur right in that respect—and wouldn’t the Jews feel the same?”

But to change would mean re-living my life—becoming something other than what I am. Losing Francis. So I shake my head. And I’ve heard the stories of what happens to my kind. The drugs. The electrodes. The dirty pictures. Swimming in pools of your own piss and vomit. That kind of treatment that was available even before Modernism made it compulsory. “It isn’t John Arthur,” I say. “It’s all of us. It’s Britain. . . .”

Ernie chuckles. “I suppose you’ll be alone now, won’t you?”

“Alone?”

“Without companionship. Without a cock to suck.”

I glance across the bench, wondering if Ernie’s propositioning me. But his eyes behind his glasses are as far away as ever; fish in some distant sea. Sex for him, I suspect, has always been essentially a spectator sport. That’s why he fits in so well. That’s why he’s survived. He doesn’t want a real body against him. All he needs is the sharp hot memories of those he’s betrayed.

“Look,” I say, “I just thought you might have some information about what happens to . . . to the Jews—and to people like us. Surely somebody has to?”

“All I know is what I read in the papers, my friend. And what I see in the newsreels.” His gaze travels across the silvered lawns. “I understand how it is. We’re only human, after all. It’s always sad when you lose someone. . . .”

He stands up, shaking the last of his breadcrumbs over the ducks, and I watch as he walks off, splashing a short cut across the lawns and then around the sodden nets of the empty tennis courts. I can’t help wondering if there will be a black official KSG Rover waiting for me somewhere soon. The polite request and the arm hooked around my elbow and the people passing by too busy going about their lives to notice. The drive to a dark clearing in a wood, the cold barrel to the forehead . . . I can’t help feeling selfishly afraid. But as I make my way down Holywell past the old city walls, the clouds in the west begin to thin, and the wind picks and plays with rents of blue sky as the sun flickers through. Dawdling along the narrow, unpredictable streets that wind around the backs of the colleges giving glimpses of kitchen dustbins and Wren towers, the light brightens. And Oxford. Oxford! All the years that I longed to see myself like this amid these quads and buildings, the twin shining rivers, the whispering corridors of learning.

Working on my book each evening after school in the front parlor as my mother nodded over her knitting in her chair behind me, I always knew that the dream was impossibly far away. But nourishing my one great work, I never even bothered to think of setting some more realistic target and perhaps submitting an essay on local history to the Lichfield Mercury or Staffordshire Life. It was all or nothing—and perhaps in my heart of hearts I was happy enough with nothing. One evening, I remember, the work at the parlor table was going particularly well and the hours slid by until I cracked my weary fingers and turned around to my mother to comment on the faint but foul smell that I had noticed. She sat unusually still in the dimness of the room behind me. Her head was lolling, her fingers were clenched around the knitting needles and her ball of wool had rolled from her lap in her final spasm.

Three

Now that the rain has ended and the sun has come out, all of Britain seems to drift, held aloft on wafts of dandelion and vanilla, the dazzling boom of bandstand brass. Each morning, the Express, the New Cross, and the Mail vie for punning headlines and pictures of Modernist maidens in fountains, ice cream-smeared babies, fainting guardsmen. With or without me, life seems intent on going on—but I find that I remain remarkably active in any case: with Christlow’s help, for example, I can manage to be fully dressed, my lungs coughed-out, my tablets taken, my limbs unstiffened, my eyes fully focused, my heartbeat and my breathing made almost regular by half past eight or nine at the latest. And thus aroused, thus fortified, I have taken a surprising number of trips out this August. This, after all, is my last chance to see anything, and I can easily afford to squander my savings by going First Class. But still, as I queue at the Oxford City Post Office for the appropriate cross-county passes that will get me to Lichfield, I can’t help but wonder if the woman behind the spittle-frosted glass knew my acquaintance, and who emptied his desk upstairs in the Censor’s Office, who scratched his name off the tea club . . .

Next morning, climbing aboard the Sir Galahad after it slides into Oxford Station, its streamlined snout oozing steam and the sense of far-away, I stumble past four senior officers of the KSG, the Knights of Saint George, as I make my way down the carriage in search of my reserved seat. They all look sleek, plump—seals basking on a sunny shore, washed by the warm waves of the future. A mother and daughter are opposite my place in the no smoking section further along. The morning sun pours over their blonde hair and their innocent blue eyes rest on me as I slump down. I feel I must look strange and sinister, already a harbinger of death, yet their manner is welcoming, and we begin to talk as the train pulls out in that absent, careless manner that strangers sometimes have. The husband, the little girl’s father, is a Black Watch major who’s risen through the Army ranks on merit in the way that only happens in real conflicts, and is currently on active service on the ever-troublesome India-Afghanistan border. The mother tells me she sleeps with his and John Arthur’s photograph beneath her pillow. I smile as their faces shine back at me and then gaze out of the window, watching the telegraph lines rise and fall and the world flash by, carrying me on toward Lichfield.

Living in what I still thought of my mother’s house back in the years before the War, alone and celibate, I still entertained thoughts of writing my book. But, after many botched attempts, I began to wonder if something else was missing. History, after all, is ever-changing, and must always be viewed from the perspective of the present. I was still as neutral in politics as I imagined myself to have become sexually, yet in my efforts to take myself seriously as a historian, I decided that politics probably lay at the cutting edge of current affairs, and I joined the local Fabian Society. It was probably a good job that I dipped my toe into the waters of political debate without any high ideals. Still, I can see with hindsight that it was an interesting time for British left wing politics. The younger and generally rowdier element (of which Francis Eveleigh was undoubtedly a member) were busily undermining the cozy nineteenth-century libertarianism of William Morris—the Morris, that is, who existed before he was re-invented by Modernism. But it was all naïvely innocent. Francis, for example, worked six days a week behind the counter of the John Menzies bookstall at Lichfield station, lived in digs, lifted his little finger when he drank tea, was secretive about his background, and spoke with a suspiciously upper-class accent. Still, I was drawn to him. I liked his youth, his enthusiasm, his good looks.

He and I began meeting occasionally after he had finished work at the station bookstall, and we would take quiet walks across the flat Staffordshire countryside. When we were alone, there was a lot less of the usual posturing and political debate, but nevertheless, the prospect of a war in Europe soon began to dominate our conversation. Francis, although supposedly a pacifist, was fascinated by the whole idea of conflict. In a white shirt, his collar loose, he would walk ahead of me as we wandered at evening along misty canal towpaths and across muddy spring fields. His body was slight and bony, yet filled with energy. He grew his hair a little longer than was then fashionable, and I loved to watch, as he walked ahead of me, the soft nest of curls that tapered toward the back of his neck.

“You understand, Griff,” he said to me once as we stood to catch our breath amid the cows beneath a dripping tree. “I can work these things out when we walk together.”

My heart ached. I could only smile back at him.

The idea of our taking a cycling trip to Scotland seemed to evolve naturally, gradually from this process. That was probably a good thing, for if I had planned that Francis and I could be on our own, sharing thoughts, ideas, and boarding house rooms for a whole fortnight, I am sure that love and terror would have prevented it from ever happening. But somehow, I found that we were checking maps and timetables on the basis of a vague hypothesis—playing with the whole idea, really—until suddenly we were talking proper dates and actual bookings and the thing had miraculously come about. And I was to pay. That, too, slipped easily under the yawning bridge of my uncertainties. Thank God, the idea of two men traveling together on holiday raised few suspicions in the summer of 1914. Francis, bless him, probably had a far clearer idea of where he was leading me, and what was to come. But for all of that, for absolutely everything about him, I am eternally grateful.

We ate in the dining carriage as the train pulled out of Birmingham, studying our maps. Yet we went to our shared sleeping compartment quite early, I recall, filled with that soothed, tired feeling that only the start of a long railway journey brings. In that narrow compartment, I tried to busy myself with sorting the contents of my suitcase on the lower bunk as Francis undressed beside me. Trembling, alone after he had headed up the corridor to wash, looking down at the half-erection that, absurdly, was trying to nudge its way out of my pajamas, I cursed myself for my stupidity in ever falling for the idea of this holiday. I pushed past him when he returned, and pulled down a window in the corridor and watched the fields burn with sunset as the telegraph wires rose and fell, rose and fell. By the time I finally got back to the compartment, the landscape had become a grainy patchwork and Francis was up in the top bunk, reading News from Nowhere. Muttering about how tired I felt, I climbed in below.

I stared up at the shape his body made against the bars of the bunk. It truly was soothing, this motion of the carriage, the steel clatter of the wheels. Eventually, when Francis turned off his light and wished me goodnight, I truly felt ready for sleep and when, about half an hour later, he began to shift down from his bunk, I simply imagined that he was heading off on a final trip to the toilets. Instead, he climbed in beside me.

His pajama shirt was already undone. He smelled faintly of soap and toothpowder, and beneath that of the warmth of his own flesh, like burnt lemon.

“This is what you want, Griff, isn’t it? . . .” he said. Then he put his arms around me, and he kissed me, and nothing was ever the same.

Clatter, tee, tee . . . Even here, on the way to Lichfield, that same sense of passing. Then as now, the onward rush of a train. Stations beside canal bridges. Stations in farmyards. Stations piled with empty milk churns and mailbags in the middle of pretty nowhere. And posters, posters. Posters of the seaside and posters of the country. Posters of towns. The Lake District for Rest and Quiet Imaginings. Take the Sunday Special and Visit Lambourn Downs, where a smiling couple are picnicking with their two pretty daughters as colored kites dance against a cloudless sky. . . .

Francis loved the place names as we journeyed across Scotland. Mellon Udrigle. Plockton. Grey Dog. Poolewe. Smearisary. The Summer Isles. When he wasn’t reading the newspapers he got hold of every day to keep track of the repercussions of the assassination of an obscure Archduke, he’d run his finger along some impossibly contoured and winding route that the pedals of our basket-fronted Northampton Humbers were supposed to carry us down, chosen entirely to include as many of those wonderful names as possible.

Alone together in those yellow-lit boarding house rooms with their great empty wardrobes, riding the creaking seas of hollowed-out double beds, his chin cupped in his hand and bare feet in the air, laughing at something, humming to himself, twiddling his toes, Francis would study his maps and his newspapers. Then he’d lay a hand across me and pull me closer with a touch that was both warmly sexual and at the same time had nothing to do with sex at all. “This is real history, Griff,” he said to me once when I expressed amazement that anyone should care about what was happening in the Balkans. “How can you pretend to be a historian and then let all this pass you by?”

I remember that Francis and I were in a pub on the evening of August 4th, 1914, when Asquith announced that Britain would be at war with Germany from midnight. I knew that he was going to enlist, and I could see that he was elated. It was no use arguing. And I, too, was excited by the prospect of this new future that lay ahead of us—that night, it was impossible not to be. Suddenly, after years of trying, we British could love each other and hate the Germans. Politics and diplomacy seemed trivial compared to the raw certainties of war. Soon, we were dancing in the crowd. Francis even kissed me. That August night, nobody cared. We were all one mass of hope and humanity.

On our journey south from the Highlands, without access to a sleeping carriage now that everyone wanted to travel, I did my best to talk seriously to Francis. I needed to fix as much of him in my mind as I could. But he was teasing about his past. Yes, I went to school but it was just a place. How do you think I learned? Do I have a brother?—well, you tell me. Go on, you know what I’m like, so guess. . . . It was a game we’d played before, but this time it was harsher, more hurtful. As we waited on swarming platforms and changed trains and searched for seats and stood in crowded corridors, I ended up telling Francis about myself instead.

“So, Griff . . .,” He smiled as we leaned against a window by our cases and the sleepers raced by. “You want to be a Professor? Have you ever even been to Oxford? Or would that spoil the dream?”

The train rocked us on, and Lichfield, despite my willing it not to, arrived soon enough. Francis and I parted outside the station without saying very much or even shaking hands, and I walked off toward what I still thought of as my mother’s house almost looking forward to being alone. In Saint Martin’s Square, a brass band was playing. Men, jolly as a works outing, talking and laughing freely in the way that we British so seldom do, queued up to enlist in the Staffordshire Regiment. They beckoned me to join them, but there was no bitterness when I smiled and shook my head, such was our country’s optimism.

Walking once again along the strangely shrunken streets of my home town, heavier now with the burdens of age and illness, looking over the low front wall of the house where I lived most of my life, I note the pebbledash that the new owner has added to the rendering, the replacement window frames. Hindley’s Cake Shop is still there with what look like the same cakes displayed in the window, although the butcher’s shop above which Francis used to live has become a gent’s outfitters, and the window of his room now bears the words Formal Dress Hire.

I take the bus in search of Burntwood Charity. But there’s no sign of the school where I started my career—or even of the road that led to it with fields on the far side, or of the pit wheels. The whole place consists of nothing but houses and a vast new “comprehensive” school. Quite remarkably when you come to think about it, John Arthur remains uncommemorated. I visit the Town Library, another old haunt, but, just as in Oxford, the Lichfield census data and the voting lists and the ratings and the parish records and pretty much every kind of document covering the period between the 1900s and the start of the thirties have been destroyed. Here, in fact, the scythes have cut even deeper. Even the records of the records had gone, along with the spaces they were supposed to occupy. It’s as if whole decades have vanished entirely.

The War in Britain was a strange affair, like a fever. People were more sociable, strangers would talk to each other, and even I went out more often; to the theater or to the music hall, or to one of the new cinematographs. At school, I taught my lads about the many historic acts of German aggression, and had them compose outraged letters to the Kaiser about the Zeppelin bombings of Great Yarmouth.

Francis wrote me the occasional letter at first after he volunteered. Griff, you’d hardly know me now. . . . I could almost see him trying on his new soldierly identity. The letters were filled at first with catalogues of acquaintances and military stupidities as he was posted around various training camps and temporary barracks in southern England. They grew shorter and blander once he reached France and the rapidly solidifying Western Front. I was like the millions of puzzled relatives and loved ones who were the recipients of such letters. I put his terseness down to shortage of time, and then to the military censors. But soon, by early 1915, Francis stopped writing to me altogether.

Two years passed. I only learned about Francis by chance when, queuing for a copy of the Post from the John Menzies bookstall on the platform at Lichfield station, I suddenly thought I heard his name being spoken. I knew what had happened straight away, just from the voices, although none of them had known him well. I’d heard its echo many times before from teachers and children at school, and people you passed in the street talking about a son, a husband, a brother. Like so many others, Francis Eveleigh had died in the Somme Offensive.

Pushed numbly into action, prodding and probing at the facts of Francis’s life in a way that I had resisted when he was still alive, I was able to discover that his parents lived in a large house set in arable countryside on the outskirts of Louth in Lincolnshire. Standing outside in my muddy shoes on a cold day as quizzical light fanned from their hall, I introduced myself to the maid as “a friend from Lichfield,” and was ushered into the drawing room where Mr. and Mrs. Eveleigh stood still as china figures on either side of the unlit fire, as if they had been waiting there for a long time. Mr. Eveleigh managed a bank, while his wife (Francis’s eyes and pale skin, his full dark hair that she always tied back in a bun) oscillated between various bridge clubs and civic societies. They were solid, dependable, and I was flattered and charmed that they were prepared to have anything to do with me. There was no hint, of course, that Francis and I had been lovers—or even that he’d had any kind of sexual life. But there was always a sense, somewhere amid all the weekends I was invited to the Eveleighs’ house, of a shared deeper fondness.

The light was always grey at the Eveleighs’ house, and a chill came to whatever part of your body was turned from the fire. Sitting in the dining room as the clocks ticked and the fire spat through interminable meals of boiled cabbage, boiled potatoes, and boiled bacon, it wasn’t hard to see why Francis had gone away. But I found it easy enough to fit in, and there was always the pleasure of being able to sleep in Francis’s childhood bed which still bore the imprint of his body, to slide open drawers that contained the starched uniforms of the various cheap public schools he had been forced to attend and bury my face in their folds.

Mr. Eveleigh talked endlessly about politics and the War. He’d ask me about the Jews; whether I didn’t think they were involved in a conspiracy to set one half of Europe against the other. I think he even mentioned “dumping the buggers on some remote Scottish island and leaving them to get on with it.” He asked if I agreed that the average working man was fundamentally lazy. He doubted whether every Tom, Dick, and Harry should be given the vote, and thought Lloyd George was just a Welsh windbag—what this country really needed was a true, strong leader . . .

The last time I saw the Eveleighs was just after the French Capitulation. I remember that my train journey up through Peterborough and Lincoln took place in an atmosphere as feverish as it had been when Francis and I journeyed back from Scotland four years before—but also very different. Strangers were talking to strangers again, but their voices were confused, their faces were hard and angry. There were rumors already of Lloyd George’s resignation and of a General Election, although, as all the major parties had supported the War, no one had any clear idea of what the campaign would be about. I bought one of the few papers that were left at a newsagent’s and stared at the headline. War Over. Allies Defeated. It was 6 August 1918; a date, it seemed to me, that would never look right in the cold pages of history.

The Eveleighs’ front door was open—which seemed like final confirmation that everything had changed. People were milling. Clients from the Bank. Friends from the bridge circle. Farmers and neighbors. Time passed. Voices grew louder, then began to fade. I was tired and had a headache by the time I found myself alone with Mr. and Mrs. Eveleigh. Still, Mr. Eveleigh insisted on spreading out a map of Belgium and France, then asking me to explain exactly who was to blame for this mess. No doubt making less sense than I imagined, I told him that the economies of all the nations had been seriously weakened, that the Bolsheviks’ treaty with Germany had been a capitulation, and the promised American reinforcements had been too few, and had come too late. Once the Germans made a break in the Allied lines, the certainties of trench warfare had crumbled; tactics were suddenly about communications, swiftness, surprise. With Paris succumbing and the British and Colonial Forces clustered chaotically around Cherbourg and Dieppe, there was nothing left to do but surrender to the Germans.

“We can’t leave it like this,” Mr. Eveleigh said, swaying as he poured himself yet another whisky. “There’ll have to be another war . . .”

Later, Mrs. Eveleigh showed me up to my room. “You might as well have these,” she said, handing me a child’s exercise book with Francis’s name on the cover, a couple of battered tin toys. “Oh, and there’s something else.” I sat on the bed and waited as she carried in a cardboard box with a War Office stamp on it. She lifted it open, filling the room with some faint other smell. Mud? Death? It was certainly unpleasant. The box proved to be half empty. There was that cheap edition of News from Nowhere. A spare pair of thick standard issue grey-green military socks. More odd was the pistol. It seemed well-kept and, more surprising still, a screw of yellowed paper containing a dozen of what looked like live bullets. Mrs. Eveleigh just gazed down at me as I sat on the bed and handled the thing.

“Keep that too,” she said, something new and harsh in her voice. “I don’t want it.”

She was standing closer now. Like me, and in her own quiet way, I think she had passed into that grey hinterland that lies beyond an excess of drink. I glanced around at the familiar wallpaper, the twee pictures, expecting her to turn and leave. But she just stood there in front of me, her hands knotting and unknotting across the long line of buttons that ran down her black dress.

“I only feel as though I’ve lost him now,” she said. “Before I knew we’d thrown away the War, it was always as if some part of him might still come back to me.”

I nodded, staring up at this twisted image of Francis as a middle-aged woman. Her eyes were lost in shadow; a shade deeper than black.

“And I wonder, even now, if he ever knew a woman.” She took a step closer so that our knees touched. I was looking right up at her now, the folds of her chin, the rapid rise and fall of her breasts. “I never knew what he was like,” she said.

“He was . . .” I tensed my hands, feeling enclosed, threatened. But something snapped. “I loved him, Mrs. Eveleigh. I just loved him . . .”

She took a step back and nodded severely. I had truly thought for a moment that we could somehow share our Francislessness. But, instead, I heard the sigh of her dress as she left the room, the soft clunk of the door closing.

The Eveleighs never wrote to me after that.

I never saw them again.

With half an hour to kill and the return train to Oxford delayed, I buy a Lichfield Mercury from the same John Menzies bookstall at the station and then share the waiting room with three members of the Young Empire Alliance. They’re little more than lads, really, and yet they affect maturity and ease as they smoke their Pall Malls and stretch out in long-trousered “boy-scout” uniforms. Two of them begin to hum a tune under their breath, alternately kicking each side of my bench in rhythm. A woman in a floral hat appears at the window, and I shoot her a despairing glance before she decides not to come in. I do my best to study the paper, the Sits Vac, where a Decent Widow is looking for a Clean Anglo Saxon Couple to take care of her and her Nice House. The Classified columns, where various Modernist and EA self-education courses and camps are on offer, along with supposedly War Office-endorsed photographs of the Mons Archers. The photo on the back page, beside a column giving advice to Young Mr. and Mrs. Modern on setting up home, is of an elderly woman hunched in the stocks on a village green. She has been put there, the caption jokily informs us, as a “show of local outrage.” Similar submissions from other readers are invited.

“I was wondering . . .” The best-looking of the YEA youths smiles. “Where’s an old bastard like you going?”

“Oxford,” I croak.

“Not one of them fucking eggheads, are you?”

“Well, as a matter of fact . . .”

“Tell you what . . .” He stands up. His face is tanned. His brown hair is cut so short that it would feel like velvet if you stroked it. He comes close to me and leans down. “The problem is . . .” A soft rain of his spittle touches my cheek. “I’m all out of cunting matches. Light my fag for me?”

He keeps his eyes on mine as I fumble in my coat pocket. His friends watch on, grinning. His irises are an intense, cloudless, blue. He squints slightly as the match flares, and he holds my hand to guide it toward the tip of his cigarette. Moments later, my train arrives, and I leave the waiting room a sweaty wreck, still bearing an uncomfortable erection.

My journey, though, is far from over. Summer heat has buckled the main line rails, and I end up stranded on the sun-bleached platform of a remote rural station with the faint promise of an eventual Oxford connection. There, I talk to the station master, a round-faced man whose body bulges gently from the gaps between the buttons of his uniform like rising dough.

“You know,” I say, clearing my throat, taking the kind of risk that the nearness of death encourages, “I’ve always wondered what happened to the people who were sent north. The newspapers about five years back always used to speak of the Jews. I mean—” I hesitate, searching without success for a better word, “their relocation.”

His eyes narrow as he looks at me, but the station is empty, and the rails stretch down through Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire amid nodding scoops of cow parsley and wild fennel. The air seems joined to the sky. We are safe here, alone. At other times, in other, happier places, I suspect that this station master and I might be engaged in some other kind of transaction. That is why we choose to trust each other.

“It’s quieter here now,” he says. “But three, four years ago, a lot of freight trains went past. Long things, they were, with slatted wooden sides, like the farmers use for market—only always at night. One of them pulled up, and this soldier got me out of bed to send a message down the line. A bad smell came off the trucks and I could hear movement inside. I thought it was just animals. But there were voices. And you could see their eyes. . . . Children’s fingers poking out of the slats . . .”

The station master stands up and shuffles through the tin heat toward his little station house. He returns with something in his hands.

“I found this,” he says, unfolding it, holding it out to me. “On the platform afterward.”

It’s a travel poster, almost like the ones for Skegness and Barmouth that are smiling down at us. A family are striding down a winding road that leads to a glittering sea. The father is grinning, beckoning us to join him while his wife holds the hands of their two daughters, who are chattering and skipping excitedly, their pig-tails dancing in mid-air. Set within the ocean, more hinted at than revealed, yet clearly the focus of the picture, lie a scatter of small islands. Looked at closely, they blur to just a few clever brush strokes, but they suggest hills and meadows, wooded glades, white beaches, and pretty shingle-roofed and whitewashed houses; a warm and happy place to live. The caption reads: Relocate to the Summer Isles.

The promised train does eventually arrive, and the station master and I make our farewells, briefly touching hands, a soft pressure of the flesh that I will soon be losing. I gaze out of the carriage as the train rattles on, close to tears. Oxfordshire comes. Then Oxford. Along Park End and George Street, the city is warm, summer-quiet, at peace with itself now it has lost the unwanted distraction of students, and smells sweetly of dusty bookshops, old stone, dog shit, grass clippings.

“Something for you, sir.” Christlow says, nearly falling over himself to intercept me as I limp across the quad. I take the letter he’s waving and climb the old oak stairs to my rooms, then stare at the crested envelope as I lean against the door, wondering if I should play a game with myself for a while and let it rest, wondering just how dangerous a letter can be . . . but already my hands are tearing at the wax seal, dragging out the one thick sheet of paper that lies inside.

Beneath a lion and unicorn, it reads:

WHITEHALL

FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER

8 August, 1940

G B—

I know it’s been a long time, but I honestly haven’t forgotten.

You may have heard that there’s going to be a “National Celebration” in London before and around 21st October, Trafalgar Day. It probably still seems a long way off, but I’d really like to see you there. I promise it’ll be nothing formal.

I really do hope you can make it. My staff will send you the details.

All the very best as ever,

J A.

Later that evening, I build a small fire in the grate of my rooms and feed it with the pages of my book. Everything, after all, ends this way. Napoleon, Peter the Great, Bismarck . . . all the Figures of History. The pages curl. Glowing fragments of paper dance up the chimney. Soon, there’s barely anything left to burn. It’s all over so quickly, and what is left of my life, as I open up my old suitcase and cradle Francis’s old pistol in my hands, feels simpler already.

Four

My college principal Cumbernald comes to my rooms one evening, stretching out in one of the chairs facing the fireplace and companionably beckoning me to join him. He’s a tall man, is Cumbernald. He radiates smooth affluence and, like most inferior academics, has pushed his way into administration. Yet he has risen ridiculously far, ridiculously fast. It’s almost nice, as the sunlight gleams on his bald head, to think that I’m probably going to bugger up his plans for the next academic year by dying.

“About Michaelmas Term,” he begins, crossing his legs to reveal a surprisingly brown length of shin. “I was thinking of giving you the old decline and fall for a change. Bit of a problem with Roberts, you see. Evidently wrote a book back in the twenties about the economics of the Roman Empire. Argued that the colonies were a drain on Rome. Then he keeps drawing comparisons with Britain. Even crops up in his students essays—although of course we can’t expect the dear things to know any better unless we teach them, can we?”

“I’d be surprised if Roberts’ book was still available.”

“But that’s not the point, is it? Remember Hobson? . . . And Brooking? Gone, of course. History changes. . . .”

“By the way,” I say, interrupting him as he pushes on, “you’ll have to do without me for the first week or so of Michaelmas.”

“Oh?”

“I have a personal invitation to the Trafalgar Day celebrations from John Arthur.”

I reach for the gold embossed wad of papers that arrived soon after that letter. Cumbernald studies them. He swallows audibly. “I’m sure that we can manage without you for a week or so. . . .” He smiles at me. “But you’re looking a bit peaky, Brook, if you don’t mind me saying so. And Eileen and the children and I, well, we have a chalet at this place outside Ross on Wye. It’s very clean, very friendly, very smart. All very modern. We’re always saying there’s room enough to fit in at least one interesting guest. So I was wondering . . .”

Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon, Apple and Custard, Apple and Custard, Cheese and Biscuits, Cheese and Biscuits, Fish and Chips, Fish and Chips . . .

Cumbernald’s two daughters are making piston-movements with their elbows, going faster and faster, pretending the Daimler’s a train as we bowl along the A40 toward Wales and Gloucester. Christine’s the eldest at eleven; a plump pre-adolescent who’s designated “clever” and “reads a lot.” Barbara’s seven, thinner, more self-assured, and “sporty.” Cumbernald clicks on the radio, and he and his wife Eileen argue about whether they want to listen to the Light or the Third Program. Snatches of Vera Lynn, static, and Tchaikovsky roar out from the loudspeakers—it’s like the avant-garde “European” music they’d be so quick to condemn—while Christine and Barbara grow alarmingly green and listless.

It seems later than it really is when we finally arrive at Penrhos Park. The lodge, clad with logs like some fairy tale woodsman’s cottage, is set in a pineshaded clearing. Cumbernald prepares the dinner out-of-doors using a crude iron device filled with charcoal while Eileen unpacks and the children disappear into the pines. Looking over the forest crown, I see the smoke of other cooking fires rising like Indian signals. As it gets darker, Eileen sets a lantern on the outdoor table, and we watch the moths flutter into oblivion on the hot glass.

“You look a better man already,” Cumbernald says, wineglass in his lap, looking pleasingly ridiculous in sandals, baggy shorts. “This is some place though, isn’t it, eh? A real breath of England.”

It’s suddenly night-quiet. With the faint stirring of the pines, the distant hoot of an owl, it wouldn’t take much imagination to catch the growl of a bear, the rooting chuff of a wild boar, the howl of wolves—the return of all the beasts of old to the vast Wood of Albion. Then I hear a thin shriek. The sound is so strange here, yet so familiar, that it takes me a moment to realize that it’s simply the passing of a train.

“It’s just a goods line,” Cumbernald explains. “Never quite worked out where it’s from or to. But I shouldn’t worry, old chap. That’s the latest I’ve ever heard one go by. They won’t disturb your sleep. I was thinking we could go down to the Sun Area this morning, by the way. That okay with you?”

“Oh? Yes. Fine . . .”

There’s eggs and bacon in the morning, which the girls have already been down to buy from the site shop so that Eileen, back in her traditional role now the cooking’s indoors, can prepare them. The sound of their sizzling mingles in my head with the clack and roar of the trains that fractured my night.

The Sun Area is lavishly signposted, yet still requires a long trek past high hedges and long walls, then a queue at a turnstile. The swing doors beyond lead to a hot wooden tunnel lined with benches: some kind of changing area. Eileen Cumbernald removes her halter top and hangs it on a numbered peg. She isn’t wearing a bra. Cumbernald, contrarily, first removes his shorts and his baggy y-fronts before taking off his sandals. The children, by some instantaneous process, are already naked, and scamper off to be swallowed by the bright square of light at the far end.

Cumbernald really is brown. Eileen, too; although I can see that she’s not as blonde as she pretends to be. I undo a few token buttons of my shirt, wondering how easy it would be to wake up if I pinched myself. The most amazing dream. I was with the college principal and his wife. They took all their clothes off, then asked me to do the same. . . . Having somehow divested myself of my clothes, and hobbled into the amazing sunlight, I promise to keep an eye on the children, and sit beside the lake with a copy of something called Future Past while Cumbernald and Eileen go off to rustle up a team for the volleyball. Out in the distance, white sails are turning. A woman breastfeeds her child on the towel next to mine, engaging me in alarming snatches of conversation. A young Adonis strides at the water’s edge. There’s barely any hair on his body. Amid all this display, his genitals are disappointing—a small afterthought—but then it really is true what they say; people in the nude are impossibly decent. We should all go around like this. I can see it now—Naturism—The Answer to the World’s Troubles. The only trouble is, I have a feeling that it was a title I drew the line at when I was stocking up for my researches on John Arthur in Blackwell’s.

I squint at the book I’m supposed to be reading. Chapter Five. The Greatness of the British Heritage—Truth or Myth? But I can feel the air passing over me—it’s strangely exhilarating—and I lie back on the towel and let the dreary pages splay in the sand. I’m part of the water, the air, the shouts and the cries. . . . Noon comes and goes. The afternoon glides by. I swim. I eat ice cream and a Melton Mowbray pork pie. I drink gallons of Vimto. By evening, as we grab our few belongings and head back up the slope, my skin is itchy and my prick, I can’t help noticing, looks a bit like one of Cumbernald’s barbecued sausages; cooked on just the one side.

That night, I shiver and roast, glazed in minty unguents. And the trains are busy again, banging back and forth, clanking chains and couplings, hissing brakes as they trundle back and forth. Then a creak of springs comes through the lodge’s thin walls as the Cumbernalds’ indulge in their own bit of coupling. And there are children’s cries, too; the clatter of the showers from which they emerge like drowned figures with their hair lank, thinly naked as they walk on to be swallowed by the light. . . .

At three o’clock, feeling stiff and nauseous, I pad through the dim parlor and open the patio doors. Silvery night lies over the trees in the clearing and I can hear the breath, like a great animal sighing, of a train that must be waiting almost directly behind the lodge. Barefoot, wrapped in my crumpled sheet, I wander toward it.

The huge engine sighs in impatience, then the wheels slip as they begin to take up the tension and move again, hauling the vast burden of wagons that lie behind. They are open-backed, covered in mottled camouflage, although it’s easy enough to make out the huge bodies of the Lancaster bombers as they clack past. Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon, Apple and Custard, Apple and Custard, Cheese and Biscuits, Cheese and Biscuits, Fish and Chips, Fish and Chips.

I shuffle back to the lodge trailing my shroud, and lie down to stare up at the grey swirling ceiling of my bedroom, wondering if I could truly perform the act that my thoughts, like the grinding of some unstoppable engine, keep returning: the one deed that would make my life mean something, and repay the debt that I owe to my acquaintance, and to Larry Black, and to all the others, the pleading fingers pushed through the slats of a railway carriage, those lost smiling families heading down the road to be swallowed in the brightness of the Summer Isles. I even owe that same debt to Francis, although the reasons are much harder to explain.

Bang bang. Scurrying KSG officers. The salty drift of cordite and smoke. I’m Charlotte Corday as she plunges her knife into Marat, I’m Gavrilo Princip and the Archduke Ferdinand, I’m John Wilkes Booth and Lincoln . . . I’m The Fingers of History.

Bang bang. Long after the stillness of the forest has reasserted itself, I can still hear the sound of that train.

The commonly accepted truths about John Arthur’s upbringing are that he was born John Arthur of William and Mary Arthur on 21 October 1890 in a suitably pretty cottage (now open to the public) in Cornwall. Mary Arthur died in childbirth, while William Arthur and his son ended up traveling up through Britain. In the popular imagination, John Arthur never lived in a house before the age of about twelve. He slept in barns, beneath hay ricks, under the stars. He sat on milestones gazing into the future. In the more far-fetched books I’ve encountered on my researches, you find pictures of John Arthur hand-prints in stones, John Arthur hawthorns that lean against the prevailing wind.

A small link with Burntwood is generally made along the lines of: “William Arthur set about learning his new trade as a miner in a pit (now-disused) in Southern Staffordshire, where John also briefly attended school before heading north to the South Yorkshire village of Raughton.” The famous pit at Raughton has also closed—the miners’ sons and daughters now work behind the counters of gift shops, museums, pubs, and guest houses. But here, for all I know, is where a boy called John Arthur really did spend his adolescence, and where his father died in a pit accident.

At the age of fifteen, John Arthur supposedly went down the pit himself. At eighteen, he was working the roads. At twenty, he went to night school in Nottingham. At twenty-three, the War intervened. He was wounded first in Flanders in 1915, and then again at the Somme. Back at the Front by mid 1917, promoted corporal, he famously won the George Cross at Ypres, yet somehow survived that and the confusion of defeat.

By the agreed figures, John Arthur would have been twenty-seven by then. As an ex-corporal, a leader of small groups of men used to the harsh decisions and horrors of war, he would have been well equipped to make his mark in the strange and violent world of 1920’s fringe politics. In Italy, Il Duce was already in power, building Romanesque temples and thumping his chest from balconies, while John Arthur was still trying to make his voice heard in the corners of East End bars and complaining about the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles. But for Britain, as South Africa plunged into civil war and the Russians expanded across Afghanistan toward the Indian border, there were only other losses to face, and then one final crushing humiliation. In 1923, the Irish Republicans defeated the British forces street by street in Dublin, then savaged them as they withdrew north.

Nothing seemed to have much value then. I, too, queued outside the grocers for ten pounds, then fifty pounds, and then a hundred pounds worth of rotten cabbage as General Election followed General Election and MacDonald succeeded Baldwin and then Baldwin took over again. India was in famine. There were street-battles and demonstrations. When Churchill took power during the Third General Strike of 1924-5 and succeeded in defeating the miners and the train drivers, then issued a “Guaranteed Pound” that people somehow actually believed in, it seemed as though the worst of Britain’s post-War nightmare might soon be over. But money was still short. The Communists and the Fascists didn’t go away. Neither did the reparations payments, the feeling of defeat, the whole sense of national crisis that Churchill was often so good at exploiting. In this new world order, Britain was a third-rate nation; a little island off a big continent, just like Tierra del Fuego, Ceylon, Madagascar.

I saw John Arthur once at that time, although I know that’s a privilege so many people claim nowadays. I was working by then as a teacher at Lichfield Grammar, although we had to subsist on credits and half pay. I was aware of the various bus stops and bushes that the lonely men of Lichfield would sometimes frequent, but I also knew about police entrapment, the shaming articles in the Lichfield Mercury that were so often followed by the suicide of those named, the long prison terms, and the beating and truncheon-buggerings that generally accompanied a night in the cells. Of course, I could have tried to honor Francis’s memory by seeking someone I cared about, but instead, as the twenties progressed from the time of the five-hundred-pound haddock into Churchill’s empty pontificating, I became a regular weekend visitor to London. From Francis, I had taken the turn that many inverts take once love has failed them, which is to remove the holy power from sex by making it a means of humiliation, parody, comedy, degradation.

Once, wandering near midnight in an area of East End dockland houses that the police had long given up policing, I crossed toward the gaslit clamor of an end-of-terrace pub. Just half an hour before, I had been on all fours on a fire-blackened wasteground, half-choking as a fist twisted the back of my collar while an unlubricated cock was forced into me. The pub was called the Cottage Spring. Dry-throated, I made my way toward the bar, then had to give up as I was pushed and shouldered. There was a sense, I suddenly realized, that something was about to happen here.

Those were restless, anxious nights in the East End. Yet, so obsessed was I with my own sexual pursuits that I hadn’t realized the many other kinds of risk I was taking. No one had noticed me when I came in, but I was sure that they would notice me now if I tried to leave. I glanced at the man nearest me and saw that his lips were moving. A whispered name, barely audible at first, but becoming clearer, was filling the air. He clambered up on the bar, then, did this man they were all calling for. His face looked pale and his hands were stained with mud or blood, yet he managed to keep an easy dignity as he balanced there with the dusty rows of glasses behind him. He raised his arms and smiled as he looked down at his people. Although he had changed much in the fifteen years since I had last seen him, it was that smile that finally made me certain. I was sure that this man—this John Arthur they were calling for—was in fact Francis Eveleigh.

I didn’t wave my arms and cry out. I didn’t even try to meet his eyes. Instead, I backed slowly toward a large pillar at the far end of the bar as others pushed forward to get nearer him. I hid myself from his gaze.

He’s refined his technique in all the years since, has John Arthur. Nevertheless, his performance on that night was essentially the same as those since outside 10 Downing Street, and on the nation’s television screens. That initial pause. The sharing, self-mocking smile that tells us that he still doesn’t understand why it has to be him. By then, you’re expecting nothing more than a calming chat, but suddenly, one of his anecdotes will twist around to some moment of national humiliation. Perhaps the forced scuttling of the fleet at Scarpa Flow in 1919, the refusal of MacDonald’s petition to join the League of Nations, or Ireland. There was always Ireland. John Arthur, more clearly in control now, will gaze sadly at his audience. Truly, his eyes say, if only we could only laugh and play like innocent children . . .

When his voice rises, it is imperceptible because it always lies in the wake of the passion of his audience. He seems so calm, in fact, so reluctant, that you find yourself filled with a kind of longing. Exactly what was said on that night matters as little as his recent speeches at the Olympics, or to Fordingham’s gloriously ill-fated Everest Expedition. All I know is that, despite my shock and fear, I was moved in the way that good popular music sometimes moves me. And that, when John Arthur had finished speaking and had stepped down from the bar, the men were happy to drift into the darkness toward whatever passed for their homes. For many years, I have clung to that image of John Arthur as the queller rather than the creator of violence. It’s part of what has kept me sane.

I found myself momentarily rooted behind my pillar when the crowd began to thin in the Cottage Spring. Francis’s hand was resting on the shoulder of a plumper, slightly older man who is now our Deputy Prime Minister, George Arkwright, and he was also talking to his then second-in-command Peter Harrison, who was executed for treason in 1938. I was surprised, as he stood there, to realize how much I still longed to hold him. Then, with that unnamed sense of being watched, he cast his eyes across the fallen tables and chairs in my direction. I just stood there with my hands in the pockets of my grubby coat, looking like the aging mess I knew I was. For a moment, John Arthur’s eyes bore the trace of a smile as they met mine, a shade of what could only be recognition. Then he looked away.

Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon . . .

Back from Penrhos Park to Oxford, and the days flash by. Golden Week nears. The stones and the fields glow with anticipation. The older University hands, us fellows and dons, doctors and vicars, MA’s in abstruse subjects, best-selling authors, sexual molesters, surreptitious alcoholics, athletes and aesthetes, caw and flap at each other in our black gowns as the punts still move and slow, move and slow beneath Magdalene Bridge.

Resuming my occasional traipses over to the Radcliffe, new X-rays reveal that the vast cancerous network that runs through my body has stopped growing. It’s still there, still almost certainly lethal, but, to all intents and purposes, the thing’s biding its time. Waiting, just as I am, while the days slip by into the maw of history.

“Couldn’t help noticing, sir,” Christlow says, preparatory to spitting on his cloth and wiping the small mirror above my bookshelves one morning, “that you’ve had an Invitation.” He actually says, Han Hinvitation, on the traditional working class assumption that anything posh has an extra “h” in it.

“That’s right,” I turn from the A-Z Map of Central London I’ve been studying.

“Matter of fact,” Christlow continues, still rubbing the mirror, “I’ll be off down in London myself for the period of the celebrations. In my own minor small capacity. So we may bump into each other . . .”

“I’ll certainly keep an eye out,” I say. But London’s a big place.

He puts down his rag, and we find ourselves gazing at each other. I’d never realized before how much Christlow looks like Mussolini: Modernism was probably always his destiny. He clears his throat. He’s probably about to ask me why I’m always hanging around now when he’s cleaning my rooms, and why I’ve put another lock on that old suitcase. But he simply gathers up his things as if in some sudden hurry and closes the door, leaving me to my thoughts, my dreams, my desk, my studies.

I open the window to take in a great, shivering breath of Oxford air. It has a cooler feel to it this morning. The limes are dripping, sycamore seeds are spinning, soft autumn bathes the towers and rooftops and domes with light. And the bells are ringing, filling my head, my eyes, my lungs, my heart. Oh, Oxford! Oxford! I cannot bear to leave you.

But history beckons.

My moment has come.

Five

The narrator in William Morris’s News from Nowhere awakes in London to find that summer has at last arrived. The air smells sweeter. The Thames runs cleaner, and the buildings along its banks have been transformed into glorious works of art. The people wear bright costumes, and smile at each other as they go about their everyday tasks. There is no poverty. Children camp in the Kensington Woods. The Houses of Parliament have been turned into a vegetable market.

A full century and a half before Morris predicted, his dream of Nowhere has come true. Truly, I think as I sip gin and gaze down from an airship droning high above the stately parks and teeming streets and the sun-flecked river, this city has never looked lovelier. The Adelphi Theater. Cleopatra’s Needle. The sightseeing boats that thread their wakes across the Thames . . . the engines of the Queen of Air and Darkness rise in pitch as she sinks down through the skies and across the flashing lakes and lidos of Hyde Park. Eventually, after much tilting and squealing of airbags, she is safely moored to a huge gantry, and I and a dozen or so other minor dignitaries are escorted along a wobbling tunnel to the lift that bears us dizzily to the ground.

It would be rude not to smile and wave for the lenses of the Pathé News camera that follow the progression of our open top bus. Who knows, a darker thought nudges me, this image of the killer’s face may be the one that makes it into history. We turn along Oxford Street into the wide new architecture of Charing Cross Road. Then Trafalgar Square, from where the Victory Spire at the end of Park Lane looks like some Jules Verne rocket, or a new secret weapon. Compared with all of this, the great government offices along Whitehall are solid and somber. To our right lies Downing Street, and, even as I watch, the gates slide open on electronic hinges, and out rolls a black Rover 3 Liter with Austin police patrol cars ahead and behind. There are no bells, no flashing lights. As the cars turn up Whitehall, I glimpse John Arthur’s face, absorbed in thought as he stares from the Rover’s plain unsmoked glass, and my heart freezes.

A loud-hailer calls out incoherent instructions as we disembark outside the New Dorchester’s entrance on the South Bank. Reeve-Ellis, the Under Secretary who’s in charge of us, lays a hand on my shoulder and steers me through the doors and across the vast main atrium where bare-breasted caryatids raise their arms to support the arches of the glass-domed roof.

“Two days before the big day now, Brook,” he murmurs in that dry voice of his. “About time we had a little chat . . .”

He leads me to a door marked No Admittance, where plump Police Constable T3308 jumps up from his chair, his holstered pistol swinging between his legs like a cock. My skin prickles, but all that lies beyond is a long corridor bustling with the click of typewriters and the slam of filing cabinets. “ ‘Fraid everything’s a mess here,” Reeve-Ellis says as he removes his jacket in his temporary office and shrugs on a baggy grey cardigan. His little mustache bristles as he attempts a smile. I know already that Reeve-Ellis is a Balliol man, 1909 intake, and was working in the Cabinet Office when Lloyd George resigned. So he’s seen it all, has toiled under every shade of administration.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I begin. “Exactly how—”

“—You’ll be up in the VIP seats for the afternoon parade up the Mall. Have to miss the end of that, though, I’m afraid, if we’re going to get you across to Downing Street in time.”

“So there’ll be—what?—about twenty or so people in the gardens at Number Ten. And I suppose some . . . staff?”

“That’s about right. It’s an informal occasion.”

“What if it rains?”

“We’re a lucky country, Brook. It won’t rain.” He smiles again. “As I say, keep a space in your diary for six o’clock, Monday. Don’t worry about protocol or what suit to wear—JA’s the least bothered person about that kind of thing you could possibly imagine.”

“I do have a new suit, actually,” I say. “It was delivered to me this morning from Hawkes on Saville Row.” Hand-tailored, the thing cost me a fortune, and feels quite different to any clothing I’ve ever worn. Just as I requested, the jacket has been tailored with an especially strong and deep inner left-side pocket to accommodate the pistol that currently lies hidden in the aged lining of the old suitcase I have brought with me.

I thought I’d already been through all the possible stages of grieving for my Francis when I discovered that he was alive again. I’d been angry. Almost suicidally miserable. Eventually, I’d come to imagine that my life was no longer under his shadow. But just knowing how I looked to him as I stood in that pub made me realize that everything about my life was still Francis, Francis, Francis. What, otherwise, was I doing in London in the first place, if not trying to wipe out my love for him?

Even in 1925, this John Arthur that he’d become was no longer a totally obscure figure, and I was soon saved the trouble of having to delve through National Rights! and The Spitalfields Chronicle to follow his activities. His was one of several names to emerge into the wider acres of political debate on the back of Churchill’s use of right wing groups to help break the long succession of strikes. But John Arthur was always ahead of the rest. With his accent, his manners, he seemed both educated and working class. In an age of lost certainties, he made good copy. And he had a knack of simply stating the obvious—that Britain was poor, that we were shamed by the loss of Ireland and Empire—that most politicians seem to lack. Unlike William Arkwright, Peter Harrison, and the soon-to-be rising star of Jim Toller, John Arthur was never openly racist or intolerant. His carefully cultured background, the wanderings, the War record, the thuggery and unemployment of the East End, presented, like the rest of the man, so many facets that you could select the one you preferred and ignore the rest.

In the winter of 1927, John Arthur stood at a by-election in Nottinghamshire as the first-ever Empire Alliance candidate. I can well remember the moment when I picked up my newspapers from the doormat on the morning after his maiden speech in Parliament. Appropriately enough, I think it was the Sketch that ran a smaller by-line asking Who Is Geoffrey Brook? which quoted an aside in his speech about how he’d been much influenced by a teacher named Geoffrey Brook in Burntwood, Lichfield. After all, I was a distant memory to him; there was no reason why he should exactly remember my name.

Over the next few days, when the press discovered my address, I had my own small moment of fame. They called me Geoffrey, and it seemed churlish to correct them when they were so nearly right. Would it have made any difference if I had announced that, while I knew little enough about this man who called himself John Arthur, he reminded me markedly of someone else with whom I had once had a homosexual affaire? Other than betraying a trust and guaranteeing my death in some freak accident, I doubt it.

The next year, 1928, while John Arthur was joined by another 10 EA MP’s at the spring General Election, and Churchill continued about the dogged business of keeping himself in power, the editor of the Daily Sketch approached me about writing a weekly column. At last, I felt like someone who mattered. Churchill, meanwhile, lasted until October 1929 and the Wall Street Crash. Ramsey MacDonald then became Prime Minister of a Government of National Unity while Oswald Mosley struggled to reunite Labour before giving up and joining the EA six months later, thus forcing yet another General Election. This time, John Arthur traveled from constituency to constituency by Vickers aeroplane, and such was the dangerous glamour of the EA by then that even his fat deputy George Arkwright with his trademark Homburg hat became a vote winner. Uniformed EA members marched in the streets of all the big towns, noting names as people emerged from polling stations. The EA won seventy seats. Amid an atmosphere of increasing crisis—unemployment, means tests, riots and starvation, open revolt in India, popular support for Unionist terrorist attacks in Ireland—John Arthur refused new Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s offer of a post in his Cabinet.

Chamberlain’s “get tough” policy in India over the next few months only served to increase the bloodshed, and the rest of the Empire was also starting to fray. A new Egyptian Government nationalized the Suez Canal. Welsh and Scottish Nationalists began to talk of independence. The country was in a state of collapse. Chamberlain was probably right in imagining that Britain would be torn apart by another pointless General Election. He was running out of options, but there remained one figure that the great mass of the public seemed to believe in. Not really a politician at all, and head of an organization that had never properly disowned violence. But controllable, surely; a useful figurehead to keep the prols happy and the bully boys at bay while the real brains got on with sorting out the mess that the country was in. It was thus without fuss or bloodshed, in a deal in which he seemingly played no part, that John Arthur was finally summoned to Number 10 and offered the only Cabinet post that he had said he would ever consider accepting.

Just after six o’clock on the chilly evening of November 10, 1932, John Arthur emerged from that famous black door to the clink of flashbulbs. In those days, traffic was still allowed along Downing Street, and he had to check left and right before he crossed over and raised his arms, smiling slightly as he looked about him. He said that he would be heading off to Buckingham Palace in a few minutes, where he planned to seek King George’s advice about forming Greater Britain’s first Modernist Government.

The flags and the bunting are going up as I’m chauffeur-driven across London to meet the King and Queen next morning. Tomorrow is the eve of Trafalgar Day, and there’s a Thanksgiving Service at Westminster Abbey. Already the advertisements on the sides of buses for Idris Table Waters have been replaced with cheery messages to our Leader. Greater Britain Thanks You. Here’s to the Future.

My black Daimler sweeps with a stream of others around Hyde Park Corner and through the towering gates to pull up beside the steel flagpoles in front of New Buckingham Place. I wade through a dizzy sense of unreality past the guardsmen in their busbies. I’m giving Monday’s suit a trial-airing, and have even placed News from Nowhere in the inner pocket to give a similar weight and feel to the pistol.

Dresses rustle as the queue shuffles forward. His Highness the Duke of York stammers slightly as he greets me. I bow. Then his wife the Duchess, and their two plain daughters. A moment later I’m standing before King Edward and Queen Wallis. I glance discreetly to both sides as I bow. It would be easy for me to reach inside my jacket at this point. Click back the hammer as I pull the pistol out. Two shots, minimum, thudding into the chest at close range. Within moments, this whole Place would implode in shatters of glass and steel, drawn up through the skies in a hissing gale, back toward fairyland where it belongs.

The guests wander out through pillared archways into the afternoon’s gracious warmth. There’s a stir when the silver trays of sweet Merrydown Wine emerge for the loyal toast. The gardens as I explore them still feel a little like Green Park of old. The stepped orchards and monumental statues don’t quite fit. The roses that amazingly still bud and flower on the trellises in this bright October sunlight look too red, too raw. You can almost smell the paint and hear the bellowing voice of the Queen of Hearts. No! No! Sentence first—verdict afterward. Looking around for something more filling than smoked salmon sandwiches, light-headed as my belly growls and premonitions of pain begin to dance around me, I recognize a famous face.

“Personally, I can’t stand fiddling around with plates and standing up at the same time,” he says affably. “Strikes me as a foreign habit.”

Deputy Prime Minister Arkwright looks small and ordinary in the flesh, almost exactly like his pictures, even without the pipe and the Homburg. In fact, he really hasn’t changed that much from the man I glimpsed standing with John Arthur all those years ago at the Cottage Spring. He was probably born cherubically plump, going-on-fifty.

“Hmm. Oxford,” he says when I tell him who I am. “You know, I still wish I’d had a university education. And you know John from way back?”

“I taught him briefly when he was a child,” I reply, conscious of the rainbowed sun gleaming on Arkwright’s blood-threaded cheeks, the strange intensity, even as he chomps cocktail sausages, of his gaze. William Arkwright’s the EA’s comic turn. He’s frequently seen on the arms of busty actresses. But he’s Deputy Prime Minister and Home Secretary. He’s the second most famous face in the country, even if he trails the first by a long way. He can hardly have come this far by accident.

“John’s always so quiet about his past—not that you’d believe it if you read the press.” Arkwright chews another handful of sausages. “Of course, no one gives a bugger about my upbringing. It’s called charisma, I suppose. Some of us have to make do with hard work.”

“Did you ever think you’d get this far?”

Arkwright tilts his head as the water clatters over the green brass dolphins behind us. “I’m permanently amazed, Mr. Brook. Although I know I don’t look it . . .”

I nod. I’d never realized how difficult it is to talk to someone famous, that sense of knowing them even though you don’t, and the way Arkwright’s looking at me as if there really is something shared between us. . . . Then I realize what’s happening—and immediately wish I hadn’t. It’s there in his eyes. It’s in that smile of his and the way he studies me. After all these years, I’ve finally met someone else who knows the truth about John Arthur.

“What do you think of John Arthur, Mr. Brook? I know it’s been a long time, but do you like him personally?”

“He has my . . . admiration.”

“Admiration.” Deputy Prime Minister William Arkwright smiles at me. “I suppose that’s about as much as any of us can hope for. . . .” Then he pretends to see someone else he recognizes over my shoulder, and waddles away.

Much of what happened after John Arthur became Prime Minister seemed so traditional that at first even the skeptics were reassured: the marches, the brass bands, the jamborees, and the improvement of the roads and the railways. The arrests certainly came. The few remaining communist and socialist MP’s were immediately deprived of their seats—after the years of riots, strikes, and disturbances, that only seemed like a sensible precaution. Left wing newspapers like the Manchester Guardian suffered firebomb attacks. The Jews and the Irish were the subject of intimidation. Homosexuals were still routinely beaten up. In many ways, in fact, little had changed.

At this time, Britain was still supposedly a democracy. But John Arthur plainly had little time for the fripperies of a discredited political system. In his first weeks in power, he passed a short Enabling Act that effectively meant he could rule by decree. In a country without any written constitution, that was all that was needed.

It was a time of whispers. In schools, there were Modernist masters who would report any colleagues to the EA-dominated Local Education Authorities. Anxious to keep our jobs, the rest of us never quite seemed to realize that we had crossed the line from the truth and had began to peddle lies. Despite the thrill of the fresh new vision that was gripping Greater Britain, as we now called our country, there was an atmosphere of almost perpetual crisis. When I was summoned to the Headmaster’s study midway through the 2B’s Tuesday morning lesson one day in 1932, all the usual suspicions went though my mind. Poor results, perhaps, in the new Basic Grade exams? My sucking off that foundry worker outside the Bull at Shenstone last Saturday evening? Some new twist of the national curriculum that I had failed to absorb? The Daily Sketch and I had already parted company. Once again, I was a nobody, nearing retirement and easily discarded. And behind that, behind it all, was the fearsome burden of what I knew about John Arthur.

“Take a pew, take a pew. . . .” The headmaster smiled at me with alarming warmth as I slumped down. “I’ve received a letter this morning.” He rubbed the thick vellum between his fingers as if he still didn’t believe it. “From the Vice Chancellor at Oxford, in fact. It seems that they’re seeking to widen their, ah, remit. Trying to get in some fresh educational blood. Your name, Brook, has been mentioned. . . .”

Back at the New Dorchester, surrounded by bakelite angels, deep fur rugs, soft leather chairs, a huge television set, and an ornate stained-glass frieze depicting Saint George Resting in a Forest, quite unable to rest, I put on my coat and head out into the sprawling London night. The traffic roars by as I cross Westminster Bridge, and the strung lights twinkle along the Embankment. People are running, amazingly enough, dressed up like athletes in shorts and vests, and there are accordionists and street vendors, floating restaurants, arm-in-arm lovers, wandering tourists. The newshoardings for the final edition Evening Standard proclaim France and Britain Clash over Egypt. You can almost feel the news hotting up as the summer cools.

Fairgrounds have been set up in all the parks, and the sickly smell of candy floss spills across all of London. Children, their faces shining with sugar, grease, and excitement, nag their parents for a last ride on one of the vast machines. I find a shooting gallery and aim and shoot, aim and shoot while the couple beside me smear their mouths across each other’s faces. Bang Bang. Gratifyingly, several of the tin ducks sink down, and my hand hardly seems to be trembling. Further out beyond the tents and the rides lies a great bonfire. Two Spitfires swoop out of the night, agitating the sparks and trailing ribbons of smoke while lads stripped to the gleaming waist climb over each other to make trembling pyramids, marshaled by absurd middle-aged men in khaki shorts and broad-brimmed hats, and I’m enjoying the comedy and pondering the question of what else goes on in those lines of tents, when I sense that I’m being stared at from across the ring. It’s Christlow, his face slippery with firelight as he marshals the next shining cluster of Modernist youth. But his eyes flick away from mine when I attempt to smile at him. He looks around as if in panic, then stumbles from sight into the trembling heat.

Everything seems tired now. Lads are yelling fuck-this and fuck-that at each other and the toilet tents have turned nasty. As I limp back along the safe, tramp-and pervert-free streets in search of a taxi, all London is suddenly, dangerously quiet, and seems to be waiting. The night staff at the New Dorchester are out with mops and vacuum cleaners in some of the communal spaces, doing their night duties, and everything in my room is immaculate, unchanged. Saint George is still at prayer in his forest of glass. The sheets of my huge bed are drum-taut. I sleepwalk over to the tall ash-and-ebony cabinet and pour out a drink from the first bottle that comes to hand to help down the tablets. Now, I notice, my hand really is shaking. I reach to the line of buttons and make the lights dim. Saint George fades, the forest darkens.

I lift my old case out from the wardrobe, sliding my hand into the flabby lining and feeling for the gnarled stock of the pistol, conscious of the weight of the metal, the pull of history, gravity, fate. Then—as now seems as good a time as any—I begin to load it. Five bullets are left out of the ten I started with, and they look newer and cleaner than I imagined. I tested the others against a dead tree stump late one evening in Readon Woods when the very stars seemed to shrink back in surprise that the damn things still worked. Now, each remaining one makes a tiny but purposeful click in the cylinder.

It was a cool day when I first arrived at Oxford, with the year’s first frost covering the allotments. The sky was pale English blue and beneath it lay everything that I had ever dreamed of or expected. The bells, the bicycles. Christlow. Worn stone steps. Faded luxury. Casement widows. The college principal Cumbernald taking me for lunch at the White Horse jammed between Blackwell’s and Trinity as if he really had every reason to welcome me. But by the time we’d opted—yes, why not?—for a third pint of Pedigree, I didn’t even feel like an impostor. I felt as if I was gliding at last into the warm currents of a stream along which my life had always been destined to carry me.

I remember that the news vendors were selling a Special Extra Earlyedition of the Oxford Evening News as we walked back along High. Cumbernald bought a copy and we stood and read it together. Other people were doing the same, forming excited clusters, nearly blocking the street. A British Expeditionary Force had landed north of Dublin, and a task-force fleet led by HMS Hood had accepted the surrender of Belfast. All in all, it was a fine day to be British.

More fine days were to follow. There was easy victory in Ireland. The commemorative Victory Tower went up and up in London. I, meanwhile, shivered pleasurably at Christmas to the soaring music of the choir at King’s. And for these new and nervous students who entered my rooms clutching essays and reading lists, I became what I had always been, which was a teacher. There were gatherings, paneled rooms, mulled wine in winter, mint teas and Japanese wallpapers in the spring, cool soft air off the river on long walks alone. Greater British forces aided Franco’s victory over the communists in Spain. The Cyprus Adventure came and went. We re-took Rhodesia. I bought myself an expensive new gramophone.

The rest of the world found it easier to regard John Arthur as a kind of Fascist straight-man to Mussolini. France, Germany, and the Lowlands were too busy forming themselves into a Free Trade Community while the USA under Roosevelt, when it wasn’t worrying about the threat in the Far East from a resurgent Japan, remained doggedly isolationist. In the Middle East, Britain’s canny realignment of Egypt’s King Farouk in the Modernist mold, and his conquest of Palestine with the help of British military advisors, were seen as no more than par for the course in that troubled region. After all, Britain was behaving no more aggressively than she had throughout most of history. Even now that the whole of Kent has been turned into a military camp as a precaution against some imagined Franco-German threat, the world still remains determined to think the best of us.

Meanwhile, I grew to love Oxford almost as much in reality as in the dream. Eights Week. The Encaenia Procession. Midnight chimes. The rainy climate. The bulldogs in their bowler hats checking college gardens for inebriate sleepers. The Roofs and Towers Climbing Society.

History went on. The Jews were re-located. Gypsies and tramps were forcibly “housed.” Homosexuals were invited to come forward for treatment. Of course, I was panicked for a while by that—but by then I had my acquaintance, our discreet messages on the cubicle wall at the Gents beside Christ Church Meadow, our casual buggerings when he’d do it to me first and then I’d sometimes do it to him—my soft and easy life. I had my desk, my work, my bed. I had my books, the tea rooms, the gables, the cupolas, the stares of the Magdalene deer, the chestnuts in flower, music from the windows of buildings turned ghostly in the sunlight, young voices in the crystalline dusk, and the scent of ancient earth from the quads.

I was dazed. I was dazzled. Without even trying, I had learned how to forget.

Six

I am dragged back toward morning by sleek sheets, a clean sense of spaciousness that cannot possibly be Oxford, and an anguished howling. My head buzzes, the light ripples. London, of course. London. The New Dorchester . . . I fumble for my tablets on the bedside table as the sirens moan, and I’m blinking and rubbing my eyes when the door to my room swings open.

“Sorry about this, Brook.” Reeve-Ellis leans in. He’s already dressed, and has PC T3308 in tow. “Frightful cock-up to have an air raid practice on this of all days. You know what these bongo-bongo players are like—probably think it’s the Great White God coming down to impregnate their daughters. There’s a good man. Just pop on that dressing gown. . . .”

It’s pandemonium along the corridors. People are flapping by in odd assortments of clothing with pillow-creases on their cheeks and electrified hair. Reeve-Ellis steers me down the main stairs, then on through crowds in the main atrium. “A lot easier if we go this way,” he says, and he, PC T3308, and I struggle against the flow until we reach an eddy beside the hotel souvenir shop where another PC—he’s K2910 according to his shoulder badge—is standing guard at the same door marked No Admittance that I was led into two days before. PC K2910 follows us as we go in. The howl of the siren, the sound of people moving, suddenly grows faint. This early in the offices beyond, there are no phones ringing, no typewriters clicking.

“Along here,” Reeve-Ellis says, shoving his hands into his cardigan pockets. PC K2910 keeps just behind me. PC T3308 strides ahead and opens another door marked Emergency Exit Only that leads to a damp and dimly lit concrete tunnel. It slams shut behind us. Here, at last, the New Dorchester’s carpets and luxury give out. The passage slopes down. Water drips from tiny stalactites on the roof. The air smells gassy and damp.

We reach a gated lift which clanks us down past coils of pipework to some kind of railway platform. An earthy breeze touches our faces as we wait and the rails begin to sing before an automatic train slides in, wheezing and clicking with all the vacant purpose of a toy, hauling a line of empty mail hoppers with pull-down wooden seats. PC K2910 clambers in first, then helps Reeve-Ellis. I try taking a step back, wondering about escape.

“Might as well just get in, sir,” PC T3308 says, offering a large, nail-bitten hand. Hunched in our train as we slide into the tunnel, I’m conscious of my slippered feet, my pajamas beneath the dressing gown. Grey wires along the walls rise and fall, rise and fall. I study the two policemen squatting opposite me in what light there is. PC T3308 is bigger and older, with the jowled meaty face and body of an old-fashioned copper, PC K2910 is freckled, red-headed, thin; he seems too young, in fact, to be a policeman at all.

We disembark at another mail station, and travel upward in another gated lift. Then, suddenly, the walls are almost new—painted the same municipal green that covered the walls of the Gents by Christ Church Meadow. PC T3308 grips my arm. There are doors leading into offices, but the place seems empty, abandoned, and we’re still deep underground.

“It’s in here.” Reeve-Ellis opens a door to an office where there are three chairs and a desk, one battered-looking tin filing cabinet, and fat pipes run across the ceiling.

“You may as well sit down, Brook.” Reeve-Ellis points to the chair on the far side of the desk as PC K2910 locks the door behind us, and I notice as my body settles into it that it gives off a sour, unfortunate smell. The air is warm in here, almost swimmingly hot.

“Whatever all of this is,” I say, “You should know that I’ve no close friends or relatives. And I have terminal cancer—you can look it up in my NHS records. . . .”

“I’m afraid,” Reeve-Ellis says, “that it doesn’t work like that.”

PC T3308 leans across and lifts my right hand from the arm rest, splaying it palm-up at the edge of the desk. He sits down on it, his fat-trousered bottom pushed virtually in my face. I hear the rasp of a belt buckle, and something jingles. I imagine that they’ll start asking me questions at any moment, long before they do anything that might actually case me pain.

“If this is—” I begin just as, with a small grunt of effort, PC K2910 brings the truncheon down across the fingers of my right hand.

Alone now, I can hear Reeve-Ellis’s voice as he talks to someone on the telephone in a nearby room. Yes. No. Not yet. Just as you say . . . I can tell from the sound of his voice that he’s speaking to a superior.

I’m cradling my right hand. It’s the most precious thing in the entire world. My index finger is bent back at approximately 45 degrees just above the first joint, and it’s swelling and discoloring as I watch. The first and middle fingers are swelling rapidly too, although they could simply be torn and bruised rather than broken.

This is terrible—as bad as I could have imagined. Yet I’ve had plenty of opportunity lately to get used to pain. The thing about torture isn’t the pain, I decide between bouts of shivering. It’s the simple sense of wrongness.

The keys jingle. Reeve-Ellis and the two PC’s re-enter the room.

“I won’t piss you about, Brook,” Reeve-Ellis says. “I’m no expert, anyway, at this kind of thing. . . .”

PC K2910 extracts his note pad and pencil. With that freckled narrow face of his, he still looks far too young. PC T3308 and leans back against the wall and nibbles at his nails. A sick tremor runs though me.

“Perhaps you could begin,” Reeve-Ellis continues, “by telling us exactly why you’re here. What all of this is about . . .”

“You brought me here. I’m supposed to be an honored guest, and then you . . .”

But almost before I’ve started, Reeve-Ellis is sighing in weary irritation. He’s nodding to PC K2910 to find the keys to let him out of the room again. Once he’s gone, the two PC’s glance at each other, and come around to me from opposite sides of the desk. Their hook their hands beneath my armpits.

“I didn’t think this was the sort of thing the London Constabulary specialized in,” I say. “I always imagined this was all left to the KSG nowadays.”

“Oh, we don’t need those fancy boys, sir. Piss-poor at anything from what I’ve heard. Now, if you’ll just stand up . . .”

I try to grab the chair’s armrest with the fingers of my good hand, but soon I’m standing upright and the PC’s are moving me toward the old grey filing cabinet in the corner of the room. I feel the agonizing pull of my tendons as they hold my damaged right hand over the open drawer. Then PC T3308 raises his boot and kicks it shut.

“These things have a pattern,” Reeve-Ellis says, sitting in front of me again. “You have to accept that, Brook. What you must realize is that there’s only one outcome. Which is you telling me everything.”

A soft click, and there on the table, although stretched and blotched to my eyes as if in some decadent non-realist painting, lies the pistol that I inherited in some other life, some other world, from Francis.

“If you could just tell me how and why you got this thing, and what it was doing in your suitcase.”

“It’s a relic,” I say. “It belonged to a friend of mine who died in the War.”

“Can you tell me his name?”

I hesitate. A billow of black agony enfolds me. “Francis Eveleigh. As I say, he’s dead.”

“Where did he live?”

I tell him the name of the street in Lichfield, and then—what could it matter now?—that of Francis’s parents’ house in Louth. “It came back with his effects when he died at the Somme.”

“And the bullets?”

“They came with the effects as well.”

“So it all came to you—” Reeve-Ellis strokes his chin. “This gun, these bullets, as a memento of this Eveleigh fellow? And you’ve kept them with you ever since?”

“Yes.”

“Ever used the gun?”

“No . . . Well, once. I wanted to make sure that it still worked.”

“Did it?”

“I’m no expert. It seemed to fire.”

“I see. And what did you intend to do with it?”

“What do you think?”

Reeve-Ellis frowns. “I thought we’d got past that stage, old man.”

“I intended to kill John Arthur.”

Reeve-Ellis nods. He seems unimpressed. Behind him, PC K2910 frowns, licks his pencil, makes a note. Somewhere, a phone is ringing.

“It was Christlow,” I say, “wasn’t it?”

“Who?”

“Christlow, my scout. He told you about the gun.”

“We seem to be forgetting here exactly who is asking the questions.” Reeve-Ellis smiles. I sense that the two PC’s behind him are loosening their stance. Perhaps all this will soon be ending. Then he stands up and nods to them as he leaves the room, even though I’m screaming that I’ve already told him everything.

But there are more questions, the nightmare of my hand in the filing cabinet again. Pain’s a strange thing. There are moments when it seems there has never been anything else in the whole universe, and others when it lies almost outside you. I think of Christ on his cross, of Torquemada and Matthew Hopkins. All those lives. And even now. Even now. In Japan. In Spain. In Russia. In Britain. I’m not lost at all. Not alone. A million twisted ghosts are with me.

I flinch as the lock slides and the door opens. Alone this time, Reeve-Ellis sits down.

“I was once John Arthur’s lover,” I swallow back a lump of vomit. “I bet you didn’t know that?”

Reeve-Ellis frowns at me. A loose scab breaks open as the flesh on my hand parts and widens. The sensation is quite disgusting.

“I was asked to show you these,” he says, laying down a brown manila envelope and sliding out four grainy enlargements of faces and upper bodies, all apparently naked. Three are white-lit against a white cloth background; the fourth—a man, I realize when I’ve sorted out the approximate details of these gaunt, near-bald, blotched, and virtually sexless figures—is standing against a wall. They are each holding in spider-thin hands a longer version of the kind of slot-in numbers that churches use for hymns. My vision blurs. A large part of me doesn’t want to recognize these people.

“How do I know,” I say, “that they’re still alive?”

“You don’t.”

I gaze back at the photographs. Eyes that fix the camera without seeing, as if they can fill up with so many sights that light is no longer absorbed. My acquaintance, he looks younger, older, beyond time, with the thin bridge of his nose, the ridges of his cheeks, the taut drum-like skin, the sores. His wife, his children, are elfin, fairy people, blasted through into nothingness by the light that pours around them. . . .

“These people—”

“—I was just asked to show you, Brook. I don’t know who they are, what they mean to you.”

The lock on the door slides back. Both PC’s stand close to the wall without a word, watching me and Reeve-Ellis.

“Are you proud of this?” I say to them all. “Is this how you wanted the Summer Isles?”

“Just concentrate on telling us everything, old man.” Reeve-Ellis looks weary, defensive, frustrated. In spite of everything, I still have this feverish sense that there’s some part of this equation that I haven’t yet glimpsed. “Do you really think you could get even this close to John Arthur with a pistol unless someone wanted you to? Still, it must have been fun while it lasted, playing your stupid little game.”

He picks up the photos, taps them together, and slides them back into the envelope. PC’s T3308 and K2910 move toward me, grip me beneath my arms and bear me up toward the filing cabinet once again.

When I’ve told them more than I imagined I ever knew. When I’ve told them about Francis Eveleigh and about my acquaintance and about poor Larry Black at the Crown and Cushion and Ernie Svendsen who deserves it anyway and all the children I used to teach who I know are grown up by now and culpable as all we British are yet at the same time totally blameless. When I’ve told them about that time in the twenties when I saw Eveleigh again at the Cottage Spring except he was now really John Arthur. When I’ve told them everything, I’m suddenly aware of the sticky creak of the chair I’m in, and of the waiting emptiness that seems to flood around me.

“Well . . .,” Reeve-Ellis says. “I suppose we had to get there eventually.” He takes PC K2910’s notebook. The way he stuffs it into his pocket, I know he’s going to destroy it. The two PC’s are careful this time. They lift me up almost gently and, amazingly, my limbs still work as we stagger out along the corridor. We come to a door marked Maintenance Only, where PC K2910 fiddles with the bolts and swings it open into a shock of night air. I can hear the murmur of traffic as PC T3308 leads me into the darkness, but the sound is distant, shielded on all sides by brick and glass and concrete. The patch of sky is the same shape and color as a cooling television screen—there’s even one small dot-like star in the middle. I’d always imagined that my life would end in a prettier place. A remote clearing in some wood in the Home Counties, the cry of a fox and the smell of leaves and moss . . .

I glance back. Reeve-Ellis stands in the lighted doorway, hands stuffed into his cardigan as he leans against the frame. It really is quiet here. The whole of this pre-Trafalgar Day, and the celebratory service I was expecting to attend at Westminster Abbey, has gone by. PC T3308 lets go of me and I sag to my knees, still struggling to protect the precious burden of my hand. I hear the creak of leather as he reaches to release the flap of his holster as somewhere, faintly, dimly, deep within the offices, a phone starts ringing. His breathing quickens.

“Wait!” Reeve-Ellis calls across the courtyard, and his footsteps recede. The night falls apart, pulses, regathers as I breathe the rotten air that my own body is making, trying to wish away this moment, this pain. Eventually, the phone stops. Somewhere across London, a train whistle screams. I think of a rocking sleeper carriage. A man’s arms around me, his lips against mine. The gorgeous, shameless openness . . .

Reeve-Ellis’s footsteps return, the lines of his body re-shape against the bright doorway.

“There’s been,” he calls, “a change of plan . . .”

Reeve-Ellis drives a Triumph Imperial, a big old car from the pre-Modernist early thirties with rusty wings and a vegetable smell inside given off by the cracked leather seats. It creaks and rattles as he drives, indicating fitfully, jerking from side to side along the London streets.

“Who was that phone call from?”

“After what you’ve been through, old man . . .,” he says, stabbing at the brake as a taxi pushes ahead of us. “You really don’t want to know. Believe me. Just count yourself as bloody lucky. . . .”

The brightening sky shines greyish-pink on the Thames as we cross Westminster Bridge. At the New Dorchester, the remnants of a fancy dress party are lingering. A Black Knight is clanking around in the remains of his armor while Robin Hood is arguing mildly about some aspect of room service with Reception. We fit in here, Reeve-Ellis and I. He’s come as what he is, and I’m something from the War—or perhaps the last guest at The Masque of the Red Death.

Reeve-Ellis punches the button for the lift.

“The message,” he says as the lighted numbers rise, “is that you carry on as before.”

“What?”

“Today, old man. You still get to see John Arthur. . . .”

We arrive at my floor. My bed has been made, but otherwise nothing has changed since I left here a day ago. The nymphs still cavort across the ceiling. Saint George is still at prayer in his forest.

“Get some rest,” Reeve-Ellis advises after summoning the hotel’s resident nurse and doctor on the phone. “Watch the parades on television. I’ll make sure someone fixes you up and sees that you’re ready in time. . . .”

“Those people—the photographs you showed me.”

“I don’t know.”

“And what about you? Aren’t you afraid?”

“Of what, old man?”

“This . . .” I gesture wildly about me, nearly falling. “Hell.”

“If there is a hell,” Reeve-Ellis says, reaching to grasp the handle of the door, “you and me, old man—we’d probably hardly notice any difference. We’d just get on with doing the only things we know how. . . .” Then he closes the door, leaving me alone in my plush room at the New Dorchester. My wristwatch on the bedside table has stopped ticking, but the electric clock on the wall tells me it’s just after six in the morning. I make the effort to slide back the wardrobe doors with my left hand and check my suitcase. The scents of Oxford still waft from inside, and everything has been left so neatly that it’s almost a surprise to find that the pistol really is missing. Clambering to my feet, I swallow a handful of my tablets and study the label on the bottle, although the handwriting is indecipherable. But how would my body react if I took the whole lot? Would that be enough to do it? And the antiinflammatories, I could take all of those, too. I gaze at the stained glass frieze of Saint George. There’s dragon’s blood, I notice now, on his praying gauntleted hands. I’ve been left alone—so perhaps they’re expecting this of me; a bid at suicide. But then wouldn’t I have been killed already? I throw the bottle across the room with my clumsy left hand. Somehow, it actually hits the frieze, but it bounces off with a dull clunk, raining tablets. Weeping, I scuttle across the floor, picking them up, and collapse on my huge bed.

Beyond my windows, a barge sounds its horn. Lozenges of light ripple and dance with the nymphs on the ceiling. I’d press the button on the headboard that makes the doors slide back, were I able to reach it. I’d like to smell the Thames on what feels like this last of all days, I’d love to hear it innocently lapping. Here in London, it has fostered trade, cholera, prosperity, and been the muse of a thousand poets. There were bonfires upon it in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, so hard did it freeze. . . .

I see myself in front of a class of students once again, speaking these words. Francis Eveleigh is there—he’s a young boy, no more than ten, and for some reason his arm is in a sling. And Cumbernald, and Christlow, and Reeve-Ellis, and my acquaintance, and the many other faces that have filled my life.

I smile down at them as they sit with their scabbed elbows and knees, their grubbily cherubic faces, the looming playtime forgotten for a while as they listen. These, I know, are my only moments of greatness. So listen, just listen. All I want to do is to tell you one last tale.

Seven

Monday 21 October 1940. Trafalgar Day. John Arthur’s fiftieth birthday, his silver jubilee. At nine, and under clearing skies even though the forecasts had remained doubtful, the church bells begin to ring out all across the country. There had been talk of rain coming in from the North Sea, driven down over Lincolnshire and across the Fens toward London. But that was just a tease. After a glorious summer of seemingly endless celebrations, no one ever doubted the perfect autumn day this would turn out to be.

By eight o’clock, as the hotel doctor sets and splints my hand and the nurse gags my mouth with a stick to stop me biting my tongue in my agony, trestle tables are being laid in village halls and on dew-damp greens from Mablethorpe to Montgomery, from Treviscoe to Nairn. Balloons are being inflated and jellies turned out onto plates. Guardsmen are polishing their buckles and blancoing their straps while grooms feed and brush their shining mounts. We British are still unsurpassed at this kind of thing.

The doctor’s manner is brisk—so unsurprised that there doesn’t seem to be any point in asking whether he’s used to dealing with matters of this sort. And I’m too busy weeping, anyway, until he gives me one last blissfully large injection: Floating, white as angels, the nurse and a hotel steward remain on hand to help me with the tricky process of bathing and dressing. Then I’m placed before my television set, which is already glowing, giving off a smell of warm bakelite and electricity, and my head is supported and my arm is rested. I drift in and out of the rest of the morning on the monochrome visions that come out at me. Already, the ghosts of Empire are moving from Horse Guards Parade, past Admiralty Arch, and along the Mall. Fizzing out at me in shades of grey, they turn at Palace Gardens and march back along the far side of the Mall. The Fourth Infantry. The Gurkhas. The Northamptonshire (Youth) Branch of the Empire Alliance. Bowlerhatted veterans from the War. The Metropolitan Police. The Knights of Saint George.

As noon passes, the King arrives in a white uniform. Pointedly, a gap still remains between him and Deputy Prime Minister Arkwright. It’s typical of John Arthur to delay his entrance on this of all days. I can well imagine, in fact, what a delicious luxury it must be to sit in the book-lined calm of his Downing Street study, working quietly through papers while the yearning sea-roar of a whole nation and Empire drifts through the sash windows. It’s hard to imagine a greater moment of power. Where to after this, Francis? Oh, Francis—despite everything, I almost feel as if I can almost understand. . . .

Then he arrives. John Arthur, wearing a plain grey suit, settles into his seat beside the King, and every eye, every camera, and with it, the attention of the whole world, shifts to watch him. The latter part of the parade is more military. It’s hard not to be impressed by grey-black tanks of such shining bulk that they leave burning trails behind them on the television, and artillery, and bombers swooping low; the sound of their engines reaching me first overhead, trembling the warm air through my balcony windows. But through everything, even in the long minutes when he’s not on the screen, my thoughts remain fixed on that one distant figure. I keep asking how it’s possible for one man to change anything. And would I have killed him? I don’t know. I don’t know. Already, that dream seems as lost and remote as the Summer Isles that Francis and I never got around to visiting.

The procession finally ends at half past four with a final massive boom, and gouts of cordite and tank exhaust. The air in my room is cooler now, and the sky outside my balcony doors is already darkening.

“Here’s the suit, sir, is it . . .?”

The process of dressing me is more like armoring a knight of old; it would be easier if we had pulleys and winches. But still we get there, these hotel people and I, moving along shifting avenues of pain as the light from the television plays over us. Then triumphal music cuts short and John Arthur sits at his desk in his Downing Street study. His eyes are black pools in the moment before the dancing electrons settle in the camera; his silver hair dazzles like wet sand.

“As most of you probably know by now,” he begins, arms on the desk, a small sheaf of papers in front of him, “today is a special day for me personally. As well as celebrating Admiral Nelson’s famous victory at Trafalgar with all the majesty our Nation can muster, I must also celebrate my own fiftieth birthday. . . .”

A nostalgic and a personal note, then, to begin with. It must be said, though, that John Arthur doesn’t look fifty. He doesn’t look any age at all. The chauffeur touches my good arm, my good shoulder, but I’m still looking back at the screen as he steers me out into the corridor, trying like the rest of the world to trap a little of John Arthur’s light. Outside in the grey London dusk, I sink down into the soft hide of yet another Daimler as the New Dorchester slides away. Despite everything, I feel a gathering sense of excitement as, warmly beside me, John Arthur’s voice murmurs on the car radio.

“There are signs—indeed, alarming signs—that in Britain itself, this very island, we must prepare for troubles to come. I heard only this morning that Presidents De Gaulle and Von Papen have signed a treaty that draws even closer links between their economies and also those of the Low Countries, uniting their military forces into what is effectively one vast European army. . . .”

The French-and-German-threat has been a favorite theme in the popular press, but now John Arthur is giving it his own approval. I stare at my chauffeur’s close-cropped neck as we drone across the empty tarmac of Westminster Bridge, wondering; does he hear those guns, the same grinding engine of history that fills my bones? Much though we British relish the threat of war, there is always a strange sense of shifting values when a fresh enemy is declared. And our main ally in this can only be Stalin’s Russia, with Spain, perhaps Italy. Such a conflict would drag in America and the Colonies, China, expansionist Japan, . . .

We drive along Whitehall as the speech ends in a typically wistful finale. All this talk of war seems like a dream as we pass into Downing Street. The old Whip’s Office is now the National Headquarters of the Empire Alliance, and the traffic and the tourists are kept back by those iron gates, but little else has changed here with the advent of Modernism. A London constable still stands guard at the polished black door of Number 10, just as he has done since Peel introduced them. He doesn’t even wear a gun. Inside, the air smells disappointingly municipal—a bit like Oxford—of beeswax and floor polish and fried bread and half-smoked cigars; slightly of damp, even. There are voices. Other people are wandering. I look around, and glimpse one or two of the other nobodies I’ve come to recognize during my stay at the New Dorchester. I really am back on the tracks of the itinerary that had always been intended for me—six o’clock, PM meets and greets . . . It’s as if the pistol, this hand, never happened. I wander through to an elegant room of wood panels and mirrors, then out into the Downing Street gardens.

Seen from the back, with its tall windows, pillars, its wrought iron and its domes, Number 10 looks a small stately home tucked into a quiet side street in the heart of London. The transformation from that terraced front is so much like all the other shams of Modernist Britain that I have to remind myself that the building has been this way since the 1730s. The willows in the garden slump limp and grey, the rose bushes are crumpled fists of paper. Paraffin lamps are carried out, shining on the guests as they move amid the mossy urns and statutes, glinting over the mirror-black waters of the ornamental pool. As they mill and chatter in the hushed tones of visitors to a consecrated building, I follow the gravel path leading to the deeper darkness beside the garden’s outer wall.

A small stir arises, followed by lightning blasts of flashbulb, and a grey-haired man of slightly less than average height moves easily amid his people, one to the next, shaking hands. Their voices reach me as wordless calls; cries, murmurs, exclamations. John Arthur’s shirt looks incredibly white. The lanterns seem to brighten as he passes them. I imagine my last moment of history as I step toward him from these deeper shadows and he smiles with that warmth of recognition that politicians have. Then the feel and the sound of the gun. Bang bang. Blood flowering blackly within the white of his shirt. His eyes fixed on mine, knowing and unknowing as he falls back.

John Arthur seems to glance in my direction as I stand hidden against the dark mass of the ilex tree. Already, discreet KSG minders are shepherding some of the guests back into the house. The garden slowly empties and the voices grow fewer and quieter as damp darkness thickens. I’ve seen almost all I want to see as John Arthur, arms behind his back now, white cuffs showing, looking a little tired, prepares to follow them. Then he turns and glances back. He takes a step toward the darker reaches of the garden. And I, feeling some impelling force behind me in the night, take a step forward. It’s almost as if I’m still being pushed into this moment by the fingers of history.

We meet at the very edge of what remains of the light.

“It is you, isn’t it?” John Arthur shakes his head. His voice, his whole posture, belong to a far younger man. His hands flutter white, then his eyes flicker down to my sling.

“That was done yesterday,” I say, my voice more unsteady than I’d intended. “Your people did it to me when they took away the gun.”

“No,” he shakes his head, his gaze fixing mine so firmly that a tremor runs through me. “It wasn’t my people, Griff. You were arrested without my authority. . . .”

Griff. A blackbird signs briefly from a bush, but otherwise there is earthy darkness, an implacable sense of silence.

“I heard that you were ill and I wanted to see you. That was all. No one told me about . . .” He runs his hand back though his sleek grey hair. It’s a fair impression of distress. “No one told me about the gun. As soon as I heard you’d been arrested, I ordered your immediate release.”

I study him. What am I supposed to say?

“Haven’t got long to talk now, Griff,” John Arthur points toward the house with his thumb. “They’ll soon want me back in there.”

“I thought you made your own decisions.”

He laughs at that. Then he shrugs and shoves his hands into the pockets of his suit. It’s a typical gesture of his; we’ve all seen it a million times. “But, look, I’ve been thinking about you these last few months. . . .” We are standing barely a pace apart now, yet he looks grainy and grey with the great house now glowing behind him. Still less than real. “I’d like for us to talk this evening, have a drink. We could go somewhere, Griff. Just you and I. I could shake this off for a while. . . .”

With that, he turns and walks back toward the house. There are many stars kindled overhead now; the night will be crisp and clear. Shadows that I hadn’t noticed before separate from the trees and the ancient walls and move toward me. I almost want to run.

John Arthur is silent as he drives swiftly along Horse Guards Parade and then on through clear barricaded side streets. No one turns to stare. The speeding, blank-windowed official car is, after all, commonplace in Modernist Britain.

“You enjoyed the show?”

“The show?” I look over at him.

“Of course,” he pushes the car faster. “You were here to kill me. . . .”

Drunk and jolly Tommies squat aside the lions as we pass Trafalgar Square. Everywhere, flags are being waved, people are leaning dangerously from windows. There will be deaths tonight. There will be conceptions. On through Covent Garden and across the Strand, then past the Inns of Court. A taxi draws up beside us as we queue to get into Cheapside. Two women in evening clothes are talking animatedly in the back.

“Tell me this, though, Griff,” he says, his fingers clenching and unclenching the wheel’s stitched leather. “Whatever made you think the world would change if there was no John Arthur?”

“Who would replace you? Jim Toller’s too young—and nobody trusts him. People like Smith and Mosley are second-rate politicians. I suppose there was Harrison, but then he was conveniently executed. And we’ve all been laughing at William Arkwright for years. . . .”

“You shouldn’t underestimate Bill. I’ve kept him close to me because he’s the one person I can least trust. You’re wrong about it all, in fact, Griff. The military, the bloody establishment. They all want rid of me. Why do you think I made that speech this evening? Why do you think this country has to fight? They’re afraid, Griff. All of them are afraid. . . .”

Soon, we are in Whitechapel. He makes a turn and the tires squeal across the wet cobbles, then rumble to the curb of a dead end beside a scrap of wasteground. Clinging to my dignity, not waiting for him to come and help me, I climb slowly out. It’s cold and dark here. The ground is sticky with litter and the air has a faintly seasidey smell of coal smoke and river silt. John Arthur opens the rear door and takes a hat from the back seat—an ordinary-looking trilby—then a dark overcoat, which he pulls on, raising the collar.

“There,” he says, turning with his arms outstretched, “who would recognize me?” The transformation is, of course, complete.

My walk is slow and labored as we head past the terraced houses, and John Arthur helps me by snaking his arm around my back to support some of my weight, giving me a little lift as we step over a pothole and up onto the loose beginnings of a pavement. In odd, flashing moments, he feels almost like Francis. His breathing and way he walks is almost the same, and his skin, beneath everything, still smells faintly of burnt lemon.

Soon, we’re drawing close to the sidings, tracks, and cliff-face brick warehouses of the docks, where local people have gathered for a view of the fireworks above the Thames. Mothers in slippers with scarves wrapped over their curlers. Men with fags behind their ears and the stubble of a day off work peppering their chins. They Ohh and Ahh as the sky crackles and the colors shine in gutters and ignite the myriad warehouse windows. No one notices John Arthur and I as we slip between them. He’s just a slight middle-aged man helping his invalid father.

A little away from the crowd, tea chests lie heaped beside a wall. I slump down even though the air is sour here, and John Arthur sits beside me. In shadow, he risks taking off his hat, gestures toward the crowd. “They all seem so happy,” he says. “A few drinks, a bed, food, some flesh to hold, some bloody fireworks . . .”

“They worship you.”

“Do they? You tell me, Griff. You’re the historian.” He looks at me challengingly then, does this ex-lover of mine—does this John Arthur, and something chill and terrible runs down my spine. Now, powerless as I am, I’m sure that I was right to try to kill him. “It’s not enough, is it? After what we went through. I thought it might be enough when I first visited Dublin after the victory. And then again when word came through from Rhodesia.” He shakes his head as sulfurous plumes of red smoke drift over London. “You don’t know what the War was like, Griff. No one does who wasn’t there. . . .”

He’s leaning forward now, eyes fixed on nowhere as the flashes of light catch and die over the planes of his face, the silver of his hair, his elbows resting on his knees as he grips the rim of his hat, turning it over and over.

“It was all so easy when I enlisted,” he says. “There were men chatting with each other on the train as it took us down to this big park north of Birmingham. Suddenly we were all the same—bosses and laborers . . . I was a rifleman, Griff. Third best shot in the training battalion when the Lee Enfields finally arrived. Went to France in December as part of Kitchener’s First Army. . . . And don’t believe any of the bloody rubbish about King and Regiment and Country, Griff. You fight for the bloke who’s standing next to you. You put up with all the mud and the lice and the officers and the regimental bullshit for their sake.”

“It must have been terrible.”

“It wasn’t terrible. Don’t give me that. It wasn’t terrible at all. I’ve never laughed more in my life, or felt more wanted, more as if I belonged. The rain. The rats. The mud. It was all like some stupid practical joke. And it was quiet a lot of the time and there were empty fields where you could lie down in the evening and stare up at a perfect sky. Then down to the town, most us of half-drunk already, and the fat white mademoiselles spitting on their fingers and saying laver vous. Yes, Griff, I did that too. And I had friends, mates, encounters. There were places. Nobody cared. . . .” He stares down, his silvered head bowed as the rockets whoosh and wheel, scrawling out the sky.

“We were sent to the Somme in June 1916. It was supposed to be the big push that would win the War, but we knew that we were just covering a French cock-up. I lay awake that last night. We all knew we were going over the top in the morning. Not that they told you, but you could tell from the guns. I couldn’t sleep. Boom, boom, and the stink of the trenches. Boom, boom, boom. Then the big guns stopped, and that silence was the worst thing of all. We were moved up to the front line. Thousands, thousands of us. And there was silence, just men breathing and the shuffle of our feet on the duckboards and the creak and jingle of our packs. And for the first time, I knew that I’d lost it. I felt terribly afraid.”

“The whistle went and men started to climb out of the trenches. A lot of them just fell back, and I thought they were being clumsy until I realized they’d been shot already. And I just stood there. It was the worst moment of my life but I knew I couldn’t go back, so I started to climb up out of that trench. My mates were already running around the pool of a big shell hole miles ahead, but I was just wandering in a nightmare, looking for somewhere to hide. . . .”

“I don’t know when I got hit, Griff—or how long it took. But there was this heat across my side as I slid down into this long hollow. I knew it wasn’t that bad. . . . I could have gone on, Griff. I could have climbed out of that ditch and gone on. But I didn’t. I just crouched there the whole day. Boom, boom—I could hear the shells whistling over. The bullets rattling. But I was alone with my fear, Griff. Quite alone.”

“Darkness came and the flares went up. Men with stretchers found me and hauled me out, and I looked enough of a mess to be convincing as I was taken back to the field dressing station. I was given some water and a jab of morphine and quinine and carried across the fields to a big river barge just as dawn was coming. You could still smell the coal that they’d cleared out of the barge beneath all the other stench, and you could hear the water laughing around the sides as we pulled away from the jetty.”

“A few men were crying and moaning. A lot were comatose or simply asleep. There was a man with his head half-blown off on the stretcher nearest to me. He couldn’t possibly live, his brains were coming out, and then he started this terrible moaning. He was trying to speak, but his jaw was so wrecked I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Something K and something M. His limbs were jerking and this noise he was making just went on and on. It was a sound out of hell. Then I looked at him again with the top of his skull ripped off like an egg, and I realized what he was saying. He was saying, Kill Me . . .”

“I managed to stand up, and he seemed to quieten for a moment then, and look back up at me from his ruined face with his one good eye. I took strength from that, and I understood that what he wanted was what you’d do for any mate of yours in the same position. He had a pistol on his belt, but I knew that it was too late to use it here. And I was still lost, still afraid. In fact, it seemed as if was his strength that enabled me to take the blanket from by his feet and push it down over his face and hold it there. Of course, he began to fight and buck after a while—it takes longer than you’d imagine to kill a man—but eventually he stopped struggling. And I was glad that I still had this one soldierly act left in me. I knew that he’d died a hero’s death, this man. This soldier.”

“Perhaps it was that or the drugs I’d been given which made me do what I did next. I don’t know. I felt for the waxed envelope that they’d tied to his tunic at the dressing station. His name was John Arthur, and he was a private in the Staffordshires like me, although from a different battalion. And it struck me that John Arthur was a good name for a soldier, a good name for a man. I’d always hated being Francis Eveleigh, anyway. It was all done in that moment, in the foul air of that barge with the water laughing beside me, swapping names just to see how it felt to become him. And straight away, you know, as I lay down again on my pallet and the fever began to take a bigger hold, it felt better. . . .”

John Arthur is silent for a moment as the sky above London foams with light, pushing at us like a wind.

“Didn’t anyone ever suspect?”

“The rest of my platoon had been wiped out. So had John Arthur’s. And I caught pneumonia, you see, Griff, so I was shipped back to England. By the time I was finally ready for active duty again, I could have been anyone for all the difference it made. So I went back to the front as S4538 Rifleman Arthur, D Company 7th Service Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, and I knew from the first time I heard the guns that this time it would be better, this time I wouldn’t feel any fear. I was even made corporal, and I won the George Cross. . . . But that’s common knowledge.”

“What was it like when the War ended?”

“I went up to Raughton, which was John Arthur’s last address before enlisting. I found out that the Yorkshire accent I’d copied from one of the cooks was all wrong, but that didn’t matter. We were like ghosts. Nobody seemed to belong anywhere then. The place was just a pit village and the address was a cheap boarding house. One or two people told me they remembered him, but I never really knew if they did. He’d been slightly older than me, but seemed to have made little impression on the world. His father had been an itinerant who’d started out in the West Country and had died in a mining accident. . . .”

“But I knew I had to do something more with this new life John Arthur had given me. Do you understand that, Griff? So I jumped on a cattle truck, took the train down to London. It was cold that winter and there was the flu epidemic. Each morning under the bridges and in the shop fronts, a few extra bodies didn’t wake up. And the men in suits and the women in hats who’d never done anything but complain about the rationing just wrinkled their noses and stepped over them. And there were queers like you, Griff, who’d get a man to do anything for the price of a meal. And fat cats and Jews. And the bright young things. And the colonels who were back from the War, jingling with medals and a big pension.”

“But I still remembered I was John Arthur. And I began to meet people who understood that there was nothing left in all the lies that had once kept this country afloat. And you saw what it was like—Griff, that night fifteen years ago. You saw how easy it is to be John Arthur. He was always waiting there. Even now, he’s leading me on.”

The big display is reaching its climax. Even here, what must be two miles off, there’s a sweet-sour reek of gunpowder as the flares blossom overhead. John Arthur puts his trilby hat on, straightens it, checks that his coat collar is still up, and offers me his hand again. “Come on, Griff, I’ll buy you that drink. . . .”

I let him help me up, and an elderly woman in a hairnet and a housecoat glances across the road. Her hand goes up to her mouth for a moment, childlike in wonder. Is it? But no, no . . . it couldn’t be. Relieved, she looks back toward the crackling sky.

John Arthur breathes easily beside me, helping me along as I wonder what I should say, what horrors I could tell him that he doesn’t know already, what questions should I ask. But it’s like all those letters that I never wrote to him. It’s like all the promises of love that, even in that brief, glorious time when Francis and I were alone, were never given. It’s like my unwritten book. It’s like my whole life.

The sky is on fire now. The houses look flash-lit, pushed back into skeletons of their real selves. I stumble as renewed pain shoots through me. Our two linked shadows leap, burned and frozen ahead into the pavement, and it seems that we’re at the lip of a vast wave that will soon break through everything, dissolving, destroying. Then, with one last final bellow, the display ends and we move on through the East End, the ordinary East End of London in this night of the 21st of October 1940, beneath a bruised sky, in shocked, blotchy darkness.

A public house juts at the triangular meeting of the two streets facing toward the Mudchute and the Isle of Dogs. The sign is unilluminated, painted in dark colors. If I didn’t know this place already, I probably wouldn’t be able to make out the words Cottage Spring. The room inside is smaller than the place I remember stumbling into fifteen years before. But I recognize the counter that John Arthur leapt onto, and the pattern of the mirror, now cracked, that lies behind it; there, even, is the fat pillar in the corner that I once hid behind.

There’s a moment of bizarre normality as John Arthur takes off his hat, lowers his coat collar, and walks up to the bar. Two cloth-capped men are playing darts, while three underage lads sit nursing their pints, and an old man stares at his evening glass of stout. They’re some of the few who couldn’t be bothered to see tonight’s fireworks, or even watch them at home on TV, and it’s amusing to observe their reactions as they realize who’s just come in. There’s puzzlement, doubt—like that old woman by the docks—followed by that standard British reluctance to make a fuss.

“I’ll buy everyone their next round,” John Arthur says, speaking with that soft Yorkshire accent: the very image of himself, and suddenly, they’re all clustered around him, breathless and eager like children at a fête when Father Christmas finally arrives. John Arthur signs beer mats, he laughs and shares a joke. He really is John Arthur now, and these are his people. The old man downs the rest of his stout, spilling most of it down his shirt, and quavers that he’d like another. The lads ask for halves of ginger beer, which John Arthur laughingly changes to the pints of Fuller’s that they were on before.

Outside, word of who’s here must have got out, for there are children’s and women’s voices, the shadows of raised hands and heads shifting across the frosted windows. And I’m just standing here, tired and in pain. Drained of anger. Drained of hope. Soon to be drained of life. I shuffle closer to that pillar at the end of the bar, in need once more of its reassuring anonymity. John Arthur’s forgotten about me anyway. These are his people. This is where he belongs. I’m just a name from the past that he couldn’t remember well enough to get right when he made his speech to the Parliament that he later dissolved. A phone begins to ring at the back of the pub, unanswered. Somewhere, a car engine is racing.

The voices of the men are easier now. Yes, they realize, he really is just as everyone says; an ordinary bloke you could share a drink with. John Arthur looks across as the roar of an approaching car fills the street. He seems to notice me now almost as he did all those years ago. It’s as if nothing has ever changed. But this time, somehow, his smile is more genuine, and as he walks over with his arms a little apart, I can’t help but smile back at him.

There comes a sharp sound of banging, and the thought passes, too quickly to be fully-formed, that the fireworks have resumed. Then, one by one, the frosted windows of the Cottage Spring begin to fall in. They burst into shining veils, and splinters of wood fly out as the room explodes in a reflecting spray of collapsing mirrors. The men at the bar are jerked, thrown back, lifted. The glass is like a great watery tide, rolling and rising. John Arthur pirouettes as the last window explodes and the shining air flowers silver and red around him, then the pillar I’m beside splatters and streams before everything stops and fills with sudden, terrible silence.

As I look down at this shattered place and these broken dolls lying on the crimsoned linoleum, there comes a sudden crash as the last of the big mirrors falls, and faint, at the very edge of everything, are the sounds of crying, fumbling, moaning, weeping. Then the roar, once again, of that car. Gears smash as it turns, and I wait for more bullets, but instead something large and metallic flies through a gaping window. A thick, round-cornered box with a single wire protruding, it hits an upended table and skids hissing through the sparkling wreckage to settle beside Francis’s body.

Then the car pulls away with a screech of tires in the last moment before the world erupts into darkness.

Eight

Every morning now, I awake not knowing who or where I am, filled with a vague sense of horror and helplessness. I do not even know if I am human, or have any real identity of my own. For a moment then, I am under the rubble again and Francis is beside me. His hand is in mine, and flutters like an insect in the moment that he dies. My life seems to float out in both directions from that point. It’s like unwrapping a complex present; tearing away at silvery ribbons of the future and the past, although I know that it’s all just some trick—a party game—and that I will be left clutching nothing but tangled paper, empty air.

I ungum my eyes and look out at the world, accepting the strange fact of my continued existence. But it remains a slow process even though this beamed ceiling is familiar to me; fraught with a sense of aftermath. I am Brook, yes, I am Geoffrey Brook. I am a lecturer, a teacher—in fact, a true Professor of History now. And Oxford, yes, Oxford.

I feel for my glass, my tablets, which lie a long way beyond the Chinese pheasants cavorting on my eiderdown. I sense that it is early, still dark outside my window, although a strange light seems to wash up from the quad and there is a chill to the air beyond the crackling heat of my fire. Somewhere across the rooftops and towers, a bell, distant yet clear, begins to chime the hour. When silence and equilibrium return, I slide inch by inch across the sheets until my feet drop off the edge of the bed. I am old, I think. I am old. Perhaps that is the last shock I have been waiting for.

Bunioned, barefoot, trying not to exhaust myself by coughing, I stumble through the cavorting firelight toward my window, dribbling fingers of condensation as I wipe the mullions with my wrecked and arthritic right hand and gaze at the strange whiteness. It has snowed again in the night. Of course. This is Oxford and it has snowed again in the night. . . . I have to close my eyes, then, as a twinge of pain and the rawness in my throat sets off another ugly memory.

I remember everything now. I am here. I am alive. This is the last day of the year of 1940. John Arthur is dead.

I’m still leaning there, still staring from my college window in a drugged half-doze, when the breakfast trolley rumbles toward my door. The knock sounds hesitant, mistimed, yet still I’m somehow expecting Christlow as the handle turns and the chill outer air touches my skin. But it’s Allenby.

“Good morning, Professor. Terrible lot of snow in the night as you’ve doubtless seen. Got a nice fire going for you earlier while you were still asleep. . . .” He slips my padded silk dressing gown from the hook near the fire where it’s been warming. His breath is cool on my neck as he helps me into it; like the sense of the snow. He bends down to sheathe my feet in lambskin slippers. He’s young and good-looking, is Allenby. He says all the right things; he doesn’t even wear an EA badge. But he still seems like a barely competent actor, forever trying and failing to find the essential meaning of his role.

“You’ve got that appointment, by the way.”

“Appointment?”

“Twelve o’clock at the George Hotel. Miss Flood is coming up from your publishers in London.”

Then he lays the morning’s papers out before me. Sheet upon warm rustling sheet that smell crisply of ink and freshly felled wood; all that history in the making. I’m tempted to ask Allenby to take the damn things away, but I know that that would seem ungrateful. And there’s something—I remember now—something that still pricks my interest, although as yet I can’t quite recall what.

I reach out toward the table, using my right hand like a scoop to push the Times into the better grip of my left. PM Announces Immediate Inquiry into Scandal of Jewish Homeland. RAF Airlifts Aid. The photograph beneath shows a group of people huddled outside a rough hut. They are skeleton-thin, clothed in rags. I raise it closer to my eyes, so close that their faces become collections of printed dots.

My college Daimler slides through the slush along High, Catte, and Broad. We park at the corner of George Street and the Cornmarket, where my driver helps me out onto the oystered ice of the pavement and leads me into the Ivy Restaurant. The colors that the snow and the cold have bleached out of Oxford all seem to have fled into these rooms. The ceilings are pink, the walls lean with gilded mirrors, there are flowers at every table. As is often the case now, rumor of my arrival has spread before me, and I must wait and smile and raise a trembling hand in acknowledgment as the dining room erupts into applause. But the moment isn’t over-played as I shuffle toward the best table by the window where Miss Flood awaits me.

Her bracelets jangle as she sips her wine. Her fingers are restless as she picks at a bread roll, missing the chains of cigarettes that, since I succumbed to a coughing fit at one of our early meetings, she refrains from smoking in my presence.

“I was speaking to Publicity only yesterday, Geoffrey,” she tells me. “And you’re definitely the flagship of our spring list.”

“That’s good to know. . . .” I wheeze. “I received your letter with the, er, galleys only the day before yesterday.”

“Try not to think of them as galleys or proofs, Geoffrey. Think of them as . . .” Miss Flood waves her hand, clutching an imaginary cigarette. “Complimentary reading material.” She smiles.

I nod. What she means is that she wants to keep me well away from the tricky business of correcting my own scholarly inaccuracies, my ungrammatical turns of phrase.

Miss Flood delves into her briefcase and shows me a glossy mock-up of the dustjacket. The first print run is thirty thousand, with the presses ready to roll with another thirty thousand after that. You’ll never know from the look of this book that Miss Flood’s other major authors write do-it-yourselfs and whodunnits. I really can’t complain.

“As to the title,” she says, tapping the celluloid with a scarlet fingernail, “you’ll see that we’ve stuck with our original idea. That, er, other suggestion that you made. Good though it was, I’m afraid that it didn’t quite click with our marketing people. Fingers of History was too close, if you see what I mean. There are a lot of people out there who still remember your work and who’d love to have a hardback copy of your best articles. . . .”

STORY OF YOUR LIFE

Ted Chiang

YOUR FATHER IS ABOUT TO ASK ME THE QUESTION. THIS IS the most important moment in our lives, and I want to pay attention, note every detail. Your dad and I have just come back from an evening out, dinner and a show; it’s after midnight. We came out onto the patio to look at the full moon; then I told your dad I wanted to dance, so he humors me and now we’re slow-dancing, a pair of thirtysomething swaying back and forth in the moonlight like kids. I don’t feel the night chill at all. And then your dad says, “Do you want to make a baby?”

Right now your dad and I have been married for about two years, living on Ellis Avenue; when we move out you’ll still be too young to remember the house, but we’ll show you pictures of it, tell you stories about it. I’d love to tell you the story of this evening, the night you’re conceived, but the right time to do that would be when you’re ready to have children of your own, and we’ll never get that chance.

Telling it to you any earlier wouldn’t do any good; for most of your life you won’t sit still to hear such a romantic— you’d say sappy— story. I remember the scenario of your origin you’ll suggest when you’re twelve.

“The only reason you had me was so you could get a maid you wouldn’t have to pay,” you’ll say bitterly, dragging the vacuum cleaner out of the closet.

“That’s right,” I’ll say. “Thirteen years ago I knew the carpets would need vacuuming around now, and having a baby seemed to be the cheapest and easiest way to get the job done. Now kindly get on with it.”

“If you weren’t my mother, this would be illegal,” you’ll say, seething as you unwind the power cord and plug it into the wall outlet.

That will be in the house on Belmont Street. I’ll live to see strangers occupy both houses: the one you’re conceived in and the one you grow up in. Your dad and I will sell the first a couple years after your arrival. I’ll sell the second shortly after your departure. By then Nelson and I will have moved into our farmhouse, and your dad will be living with what’s-her-name.

I know how this story ends; I think about it a lot. I also think a lot about how it began, just a few years ago, when ships appeared in orbit and artifacts appeared in meadows. The government said next to nothing about them, while the tabloids said every possible thing.

And then I got a phone call, a request for a meeting.

I spotted them waiting in the hallway, outside my office. They made an odd couple; one wore a military uniform and a crewcut, and carried an aluminum briefcase. He seemed to be assessing his surroundings with a critical eye. The other one was easily identifiable as an academic: full beard and mustache, wearing corduroy. He was browsing through the overlapping sheets stapled to a bulletin board nearby.

“Colonel Weber, I presume?” I shook hands with the soldier. “Louise Banks.”

“Dr. Banks. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us,” he said.

“Not at all; any excuse to avoid the faculty meeting.”

Colonel Weber indicated his companion. “This is Dr. Gary Donnelly, the physicist I mentioned when we spoke on the phone.”

“Call me Gary,” he said as we shook hands. “I’m anxious to hear what you have to say.”

We entered my office. I moved a couple of stacks of books off the second guest chair, and we all sat down. “You said you wanted me to listen to a recording. I presume this has something to do with the aliens?”

“All I can offer is the recording,” said Colonel Weber.

“Okay, let’s hear it.”

Colonel Weber took a tape machine out of his briefcase and pressed play. The recording sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur.

“What do you make of that?” he asked.

I withheld my comparison to a wet dog. “What was the context in which this recording was made?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“It would help me interpret those sounds. Could you see the alien while it was speaking? Was it doing anything at the time?”

“The recording is all I can offer.”

“You won’t be giving anything away if you tell me that you’ve seen the aliens; the public’s assumed you have.”

Colonel Weber wasn’t budging. “Do you have any opinion about its linguistic properties?” he asked.

“Well, it’s clear that their vocal tract is substantially different from a human vocal tract. I assume that these aliens don’t look like humans?”

The colonel was about to say something noncommittal when Gary Donelly asked, “Can you make any guesses based on the tape?”

“Not really. It doesn’t sound like they’re using a larynx to make those sounds, but that doesn’t tell me what they look like.”

“Anything— is there anything else you can call tell us?” asked Colonel Weber.

I could see he wasn’t accustomed to consulting a civilian. “Only that establishing communications is going to be really difficult because of the difference in anatomy. They’re almost certainly using sounds that the human vocal tract can’t reproduce, and maybe sounds that the human ear can’t distinguish.”

“You mean infra- or ultrasonic frequencies?” asked Gary Donnelly.

“Not specifically. I just mean that the human auditory system isn’t an absolute acoustic instrument; it’s optimized to recognize the sounds that a human larynx makes. With an alien vocal system, all bets are off.” I shrugged. “Maybe we’ll be able to hear the difference between alien phonemes, given enough practice, but it’s possible our ears simply can’t recognize the distinctions they consider meaningful. In that case we’d need a sound spectrograph to know what an alien is saying.”

Colonel Weber asked, “Suppose I gave you an hour’s worth of recordings; how long would it take you to determine if we need this sound spectrograph or not?”

“I couldn’t determine that with just a recording no matter how much time I had. I’d need to talk with the aliens directly.”

The colonel shook his head. “Not possible.”

I tried to break it to him gently. “That’s your call, of course. But the only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker, and by that I mean asking questions, holding a conversation, that sort of thing. Without that, it’s simply not possible. So if you want to learn the aliens’ language, someone with training in field linguistics— whether it’s me or someone else— will have to talk with an alien. Recordings alone aren’t sufficient.”

Colonel Weber frowned. “You seem to be implying that no alien could have learned human languages by monitoring our broadcasts.”

“I doubt it. They’d need instructional material specifically designed to teach human languages to nonhumans. Either that, or interaction with a human. If they had either of those, they could learn a lot from TV, but otherwise, they wouldn’t have a starting point.”

The colonel clearly found this interesting; evidently his philosophy was, the less the aliens knew, the better. Gary Donnelly read the colonel’s expression too and rolled his eyes. I suppressed a smile.

Then Colonel Weber asked, “Suppose you were learning a new language by talking to its speakers; could you do it without teaching them English?”

“That would depend on how cooperative the native speakers were. They’d almost certainly pick up bits and pieces while I’m learning their language, but it wouldn’t have to be much if they’re willing to teach. On the other hand, if they’d rather learn English than teach us their language, that would make things far more difficult.”

The colonel nodded. “I’ll get back to you on this matter.”

The request for that meeting was perhaps the second most momentous phone call in my life. The first, of course, will be the one from Mountain Rescue. At that point your dad and I will be speaking to each other maybe once a year, tops. After I get that phone call, though, the first thing I’ll do will be to call your father.

He and I will drive out together to perform the identification, a long silent car ride. I remember the morgue, all tile and stainless steel, the hum of refrigeration and smell of antiseptic. An orderly will pull the sheet back to reveal your face. Your face will look wrong somehow, but I’ll know it’s you.

“Yes, that’s her,” I’ll say. “She’s mine.”

You’ll be twenty-five then.

The MP checked my badge, made a notation on his clipboard, and opened the gate; I drove the off-road vehicle into the encampment, a small village of tents pitched by the Army in a farmer’s sun-scorched pasture. At the center of the encampment was one of the alien devices, nicknamed “looking glasses.”

According to the briefings I’d attended, there were nine of these in the United States, one hundred and twelve in the world. The looking glasses acted as two-way communication devices, presumably with the ships in orbit. No one knew why the aliens wouldn’t talk to us in person; fear of cooties, maybe. A team of scientists, including a physicist and a linguist, was assigned to each looking glass; Gary Donnelly and I were on this one.

Gary was waiting for me in the parking area. We navigated a circular maze of concrete barricades until we reached the large tent that covered the looking glass itself. In front of the tent was an equipment cart loaded with goodies borrowed from the school’s phonology lab; I had sent it ahead for inspection by the Army.

Also outside the tent were three tripod-mounted video cameras whose lenses peered, through windows in the fabric wall, into the main room. Everything Gary and I did would be reviewed by countless others, including military intelligence. In addition we would each send daily reports, of which mine had to include estimates on how much English I thought the aliens could understand.

Gary held open the tent flap and gestured for me to enter. “Step right up,” he said, circus-barker-style. “Marvel at creatures the likes of which have never been seen on God’s green earth.”

“And all for one slim dime,” I murmured, walking through the door. At the moment the looking glass was inactive, resembling a semicircular mirror over ten feet high and twenty feet across. On the brown grass in front of the looking glass, an arc of white spray paint outlined the activation area. Currently the area contained only a table, two folding chairs, and a power strip with a cord leading to a generator outside. The buzz of fluorescent lamps, hung from poles along the edge of the room, commingled with the buzz of flies in the sweltering heat.

Gary and I looked at each other, and then began pushing the cart of equipment up to the table. As we crossed the paint line, the looking glass appeared to grow transparent; it was as if someone was slowly raising the illumination behind tinted glass. The illusion of depth was uncanny; I felt I could walk right into it. Once the looking glass was fully lit it resembled a life-sized diorama of a semicircular room. The room contained a few large objects that might have been furniture, but no aliens. There was a door in the curved rear wall.

We busied ourselves connecting everything together: microphone, sound spectrograph, portable computer, and speaker. As we worked, I frequently glanced at the looking glass, anticipating the aliens’ arrival. Even so I jumped when one of them entered.

It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three nonadjacent arms curled up at its sides. Gary called them “heptapods.”

I’d been shown videotapes, but I still gawked. Its limbs had no distinct joints; anatomists guessed they might be supported by vertebral columns. Whatever their underlying structure, the heptapod’s limbs conspired to move it in a disconcertingly fluid manner. Its “torso” rode atop the rippling limbs as smoothly as a hovercraft.

Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod’s body. It walked back to the doorway from which it entered, made a brief sputtering sound, and returned to the center of the room followed by another heptapod; at no point did it ever turn around. Eerie, but logical; with eyes on all sides, any direction might as well be “forward.”

Gary had been watching my reaction. “Ready?” he asked.

I took a deep breath. “Ready enough.” I’d done plenty of fieldwork before, in the Amazon, but it had always been a bilingual procedure: either my informants knew some Portuguese, which I could use, or I’d previously gotten an introduction to their language from the local missionaries. This would be my first attempt at conducting a true monolingual discovery procedure. It was straightforward enough in theory, though.

I walked up to the looking glass and a heptapod on the other side did the same. The image was so real that my skin crawled. I could see the texture of its gray skin, like corduroy ridges arranged in whorls and loops. There was no smell at all from the looking glass, which somehow made the situation stranger.

I pointed to myself and said slowly, “Human.” Then I pointed to Gary. “Human.” Then I pointed at each heptapod and said, “What are you?”

No reaction. I tried again, and then again.

One of the heptapods pointed to itself with one limb, the four terminal digits pressed together. That was lucky. In some cultures a person pointed with his chin; if the heptapod hadn’t used one of its limbs, I wouldn’t have known what gesture to look for. I heard a brief fluttering sound, and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrate; it was talking. Then it pointed to its companion and fluttered again.

I went back to my computer; on its screen were two virtually identical spectrographs representing the fluttering sounds. I marked a sample for playback. I pointed to myself and said “Human” again, and did the same with Gary. Then I pointed to the heptapod, and played back the flutter on the speaker.

The heptapod fluttered some more. The second half of the spectrograph for this utterance looked like a repetition: call the previous utterances [flutter1], then this one was [flutter2flutter1].

I pointed at something that might have been a heptapod chair. “What is that?”

The heptapod paused, and then pointed at the “chair” and talked some more. The spectrograph for this differed distinctly from that of the earlier sounds: [flutter3]. Once again, I pointed to the “chair” while playing back [flutter3].

The heptapod replied; judging by the spectrograph, it looked like [flutter3flutter2]. Optimistic interpretation: the heptapod was confirming my utterances as correct, which implied compatibility between heptapod and human patterns of discourse. Pessimistic interpretation: it had a nagging cough.

At my computer I delimited certain sections of the spectrograph and typed in a tentative gloss for each: “heptapod” for [flutter1], “yes” for [flutter2], and “chair” for [flutter3]. Then I typed “Language: Heptapod A” as a heading for all the utterances.

Gary watched what I was typing. “What’s the ‘A’ for?”

“It just distinguishes this language from any other ones the heptapods might use,” I said. He nodded.

“Now let’s try something, just for laughs.” I pointed at each heptapod and tried to mimic the sound of [flutter1]; “heptapod.” After a long pause, the first heptapod said something and then the second one said something else, neither of whose spectrographs resembled anything said before. I couldn’t tell if they were speaking to each other or to me since they had no faces to turn. I tried pronouncing [flutter1] again, but there was no reaction.

“Not even close,” I grumbled.

“I’m impressed you can make sounds like that at all,” said Gary.

“You should hear my moose call. Sends them running.”

I tried again a few more times, but neither heptapod responded with anything I could recognize. Only when I replayed the recording of the heptapod’s pronunciation did I get a confirmation; the heptapod replied with [flutter2], “yes.”

“So we’re stuck with using recordings?” asked Gary.

I nodded. “At least temporarily.”

“So now what?”

“Now we make sure it hasn’t actually been saying ‘aren’t they cute’ or ‘look what they’re doing now.’ Then we see if we can identify any of these words when that other heptapod pronounces them.” I gestured for him to have a seat. “Get comfortable; this’ll take a while.”

In 1770, Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour ran aground on the coast of Queensland, Australia. While some of his men made repairs, Cook led an exploration party and met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals that hopped around with their young riding in pouches, and asked an aborigine what they were called. The aborigine replied, “Kanguru.” From then on Cook and his sailors referred to the animals by this word. It wasn’t until later that they learned it meant “What did you say?”

I tell that story in my introductory course every year. It’s almost certainly untrue, and I explain that afterwards, but it’s a classic anecdote. Of course, the anecdotes my undergraduates will really want to hear are ones featuring the heptapods; for the rest of my teaching career, that’ll be the reason many of them sign up for my courses. So I’ll show them the old videotapes of my sessions at the looking glass, and the sessions that the other linguists conducted; the tapes are instructive, and they’ll be useful if we’re ever visited by aliens again, but they don’t generate many good anecdotes.

When it comes to language-learning anecdotes, my favorite source is child language acquisition. I remember one afternoon when you are five years old, after you have come home from kindergarten. You’ll be coloring with your crayons while I grade papers.

“Mom,” you’ll say, using the carefully casual tone reserved for requesting a favor, “can I ask you something?”

“Sure, sweetie. Go ahead.”

“Can I be, um, honored?”

I’ll look up from the paper I’m grading. “What do you mean?”

“At school Sharon said she got to be honored.”

“Really? Did she tell you what for?”

“It was when her big sister got married. She said only one person could be, um, honored, and she was it.”

“Ah, I see. You mean Sharon was maid of honor?”

“Yeah, that’s it. Can I be made of honor?”

Gary and I entered the prefab building containing the center of operations for the looking glass site. Inside it looked like they were planning an invasion, or perhaps an evacuation: crewcut soldiers worked around a large map of the area, or sat in front of burly electronic gear while speaking into headsets. We were shown into Colonel Weber’s office, a room in the back that was cool from air conditioning.

We briefed the colonel on our first day’s results. “Doesn’t sound like you got very far,” he said.

“I have an idea as to how we can make faster progress,” I said. “But you’ll have to approve the use of more equipment.”

“What more do you need?”

“A digital camera, and a big video screen.” I showed him a drawing of the setup I imagined. “I want to try conducting the discovery procedure using writing; I’d display words on the screen, and use the camera to record the words they write. I’m hoping the heptapods will do the same.”

Weber looked at the drawing dubiously. “What would be the advantage of that?”

“So far I’ve been proceeding the way I would with speakers of an unwritten language. Then it occurred to me that the heptapods must have writing, too.”

“So?”

“If the heptapods have a mechanical way of producing writing, then their writing ought to be very regular, very consistent. That would make it easier for us to identify graphemes instead of phonemes. It’s like picking out the letters in a printed sentence instead of trying to hear them when the sentence is spoken aloud.”

“I take your point,” he admitted. “And how would you respond to them? Show them the words they displayed to you?”

“Basically. And if they put spaces between words, any sentences we write would be a lot more intelligible than any spoken sentence we might splice together from recordings.”

He leaned back in his chair. “You know we want to show as little of our technology as possible.”

“I understand, but we’re using machines as intermediaries already. If we can get them to use writing, I believe progress will go much faster than if we’re restricted to the sound spectrographs.”

The colonel turned to Gary. “Your opinion?”

“It sounds like a good idea to me. I’m curious whether the heptapods might have difficulty reading our monitors. Their looking glasses are based on a completely different technology than our video screens. As far as we can tell, they don’t use pixels or scan lines, and they don’t refresh on a frame-by-frame basis.”

“You think the scan lines on our video screens might render them unreadable to the heptapods?”

“It’s possible,” said Gary. “We’ll just have to try it and see.”

Weber considered it. For me it wasn’t even a question, but from his point of view it was a difficult one; like a soldier, though, he made it quickly. “Request granted. Talk to the sergeant outside about bringing in what you need. Have it ready for tomorrow.”

I remember one day during the summer when you’re sixteen. For once, the person waiting for her date to arrive is me. Of course, you’ll be waiting around, too, curious to see what he looks like. You’ll have a friend of yours, a blond girl with the unlikely name of Roxie, hanging out with you, giggling.

“You may feel the urge to make comments about him,” I’ll say, checking myself in the hallway mirror. “Just restrain yourselves until we leave.”

“Don’t worry, Mom,” you’ll say. “We’ll do it so that he won’t know. Roxie, you ask me what I think the weather will be like tonight. Then I’ll say what I think of Mom’s date.”

“Right,” Roxie will say.

“No, you most definitely will not,” I’ll say.

“Relax, Mom. He’ll never know; we do this all the time.”

“What a comfort that is.”

A little later on, Nelson will arrive to pick me up. I’ll do the introductions, and we’ll all engage in a little small talk on the front porch. Nelson is ruggedly handsome, to your evident approval. Just as we’re about to leave, Roxie will say to you casually, “So what do you think the weather will be like tonight?”

“I think it’s going to be really hot,” you’ll answer.

Roxie will nod in agreement. Nelson will say, “Really? I thought they said it was going to be cool.”

“I have a sixth sense about these things,” you’ll say. Your face will give nothing away. “I get the feeling it’s going to be a scorcher. Good thing you’re dressed for it, Mom.”

I’ll glare at you, and say good night.

As I lead Nelson toward his car, he’ll ask me, amused, “I’m missing something here, aren’t I?”

“A private joke,” I’ll mutter. “Don’t ask me to explain it.”

At our next session at the looking glass, we repeated the procedure we had performed before, this time displaying a printed word on our computer screen at the same time we spoke: showing human while saying “Human,” and so forth. Eventually, the heptapods understood what we wanted, and set up a flat circular screen mounted on a small pedestal. One heptapod spoke, and then inserted a limb into a large socket in the pedestal; a doodle of script, vaguely cursive, popped onto the screen.

We soon settled into a routine, and I compiled two parallel corpora: one of spoken utterances, one of writing samples. Based on first impressions, their writing appeared to be logographic, which was disappointing; I’d been hoping for an alphabetic script to help us learn their speech. Their logograms might include some phonetic information, but finding it would be a lot harder than with an alphabetic script.

By getting up close to the looking glass, I was able to point to various heptapod body parts, such as limbs, digits, and eyes, and elicit terms for each. It turned out that they had an orifice on the underside of their body, lined with articulated bony ridges: probably used for eating, while the one at the top was for respiration and speech. There were no other conspicuous orifices; perhaps their mouth was their anus, too. Those sorts of questions would have to wait.

I also tried asking our two informants for terms for addressing each individually; personal names, if they had such things. Their answers were of course unpronounceable, so for Gary’s and my purposes, I dubbed them Flapper and Raspberry. I hoped I’d be able to tell them apart.

The next day I conferred with Gary before we entered the looking-glass tent. “I’ll need your help with this session,” I told him.

“Sure. What do you want me to do?”

“We need to elicit some verbs, and it’s easiest with third-person forms. Would you act out a few verbs while I type the written form on the computer? If we’re lucky, the heptapods will figure out what we’re doing and do the same. I’ve brought a bunch of props for you to use.”

“No problem,” said Gary, cracking his knuckles. “Ready when you are.”

We began with some simple intransitive verbs: walking, jumping, speaking, writing. Gary demonstrated each one with a charming lack of self-consciousness; the presence of the video cameras didn’t inhibit him at all. For the first few actions he performed, I asked the heptapods, “What do you call that?” Before long, the heptapods caught on to what we were trying to do; Raspberry began mimicking Gary, or at least performing the equivalent heptapod action, while Flapper worked their computer, displaying a written description and pronouncing it aloud.

In the spectrographs of their spoken utterances, I could recognize their word I had glossed as “heptapod.” The rest of each utterance was presumably the verb phrase; it looked like they had analogs of nouns and verbs, thank goodness.

In their writing, however, things weren’t as clear-cut. For each action, they had displayed a single logogram instead of two separate ones. At first I thought they had written something like “walks,” with the subject implied. But why would Flapper say “the heptapod walks” while writing “walks,” instead of maintaining parallelism? Then I noticed that some of the logograms looked like the logogram for “heptapod” with some extra strokes added to one side or another. Perhaps their verbs could be written as affixes to a noun. If so, why was Flapper writing the noun in some instances but not in others?

I decided to try a transitive verb; substituting object words might clarify things. Among the props I’d brought were an apple and a slice of bread. “Okay,” I said to Gary, “show them the food, and then eat some. First the apple, then the bread.”

Gary pointed at the Golden Delicious and then he took a bite out of it, while I displayed the “what do you call that?” expression. Then we repeated it with the slice of whole wheat.

Raspberry left the room and returned with some kind of giant nut or gourd and a gelatinous ellipsoid. Raspberry pointed at the gourd while Flapper said a word and displayed a logogram. Then Raspberry brought the gourd down between its legs, a crunching sound resulted, and the gourd reemerged minus a bite; there were cornlike kernels beneath the shell. Flapper talked and displayed a large logogram on their screen. The sound spectrograph for “gourd” changed when it was used in the sentence; possibly a case marker. The logogram was odd: after some study, I could identify graphic elements that resembled the individual logograms for “heptapod” and “gourd.” They looked as if they had been melted together, with several extra strokes in the mix that presumably meant “eat.” Was it a multiword ligature?

Next we got spoken and written names for the gelatin egg, and descriptions of the act of eating it. The sound spectrograph for “heptapod eats gelatin egg” was analyzable; “gelatin egg” bore a case marker, as expected, though the sentence’s word order differed from last time. The written form, another large logogram, was another matter. This time it took much longer for me to recognize anything in it; not only were the individual logograms melted together again, it looked as if the one for “heptapod” was laid on its back, while on top of it the logogram for “gelatin egg” was standing on its head.

“Uh-oh.” I took another look at the writing for the simple noun-verb examples, the ones that had seemed inconsistent before. Now I realized all of them actually did contain the logogram for “heptapod”; some were rotated and distorted by being combined with the various verbs, so I hadn’t recognized them at first. “You guys have got to be kidding,” I muttered.

“What’s wrong?” asked Gary.

“Their script isn’t word-divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them. Take a look.” I showed him how the logograms were rotated.

“So they can read a word with equal ease no matter how it’s rotated,” Gary said. He turned to look at the heptapods, impressed. “I wonder if it’s a consequence of their bodies’ radial symmetry: their bodies have no ‘forward’ direction, so maybe their writing doesn’t either. Highly neat.”

I couldn’t believe it; I was working with someone who modified the word “neat” with “highly.” “It certainly is interesting,” I said, “but it also means there’s no easy way for us write our own sentences in their language. We can’t simply cut their sentences into individual words and recombine them; we’ll have to learn the rules of their script before we can write anything legible. It’s the same continuity problem we’d have had splicing together speech fragments, except applied to writing.”

I looked at Flapper and Raspberry in the looking glass, who were waiting for us to continue, and sighed. “You aren’t going to make this easy for us, are you?”

To be fair, the heptapods were completely cooperative. In the days that followed, they readily taught us their language without requiring us to teach them any more English. Colonel Weber and his cohorts pondered the implications of that, while I and the linguists at the other looking glasses met via video conferencing to share what we had learned about the heptapod language. The videoconferencing made for an incongruous working environment: our video screens were primitive compared to the heptapods’ looking glasses, so that my colleagues seemed more remote than the aliens. The familiar was far away, while the bizarre was close at hand.

It would be a while before we’d be ready to ask the heptapods why they had come, or to discuss physics well enough to ask them about their technology. For the time being, we worked on the basics: phonemics/graphemics, vocabulary, syntax. The heptapods at every looking glass were using the same language, so we were able to pool our data and coordinate our efforts.

Our biggest source of confusion was the heptapods’ “writing.” It didn’t appear to be writing at all; it looked more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs. The logograms weren’t arranged in rows, or a spiral, or any linear fashion. Instead, Flapper or Raspberry would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration.

This form of writing was reminiscent of primitive sign systems, which required a reader to know a message’s context in order to understand it. Such systems were considered too limited for systematic recording of information. Yet it was unlikely that the heptapods developed their level of technology with only an oral tradition. That implied one of three possibilities: the first was that the heptapods had a true writing system, but they didn’t want to use it in front of us; Colonel Weber would identify with that one. The second was that the heptapods hadn’t originated the technology they were using; they were illiterates using someone else’s technology. The third, and most interesting to me, was that the heptapods were using a nonlinear system of orthography that qualified as true writing.

I remember a conversation we’ll have when you’re in your junior year of high school. It’ll be Sunday morning, and I’ll be scrambling some eggs while you set the table for brunch. You’ll laugh as you tell me about the party you went to last night.

“Oh man,” you’ll say, “they’re not kidding when they say that body weight makes a difference. I didn’t drink any more than the guys did, but I got so much drunker.”

I’ll try to maintain a neutral, pleasant expression. I’ll really try. Then you’ll say, “Oh, come on, Mom.”

“What?”

“You know you did the exact same things when you were my age.”

I did nothing of the sort, but I know that if I were to admit that, you’d lose respect for me completely. “You know never to drive, or get into a car if—”

“God, of course I know that. Do you think I’m an idiot?”

“No, of course not.”

What I’ll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remind me, again, that you won’t be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won’t be someone I could have created by myself.

The military had set up a trailer containing our offices at the looking-glass site. I saw Gary walking toward the trailer, and ran to catch up with him. “It’s a semasiographic writing system,” I said when I reached him.

“Excuse me?” said Gary.

“Here, let me show you.” I directed Gary into my office. Once we were inside, I went to the chalkboard and drew a circle with a diagonal line bisecting it. “What does this mean?”

“ ‘Not allowed’ ?”

“Right.” Next I printed the words not allowed on the chalkboard. “And so does this. But only one is a representation of speech.”

Gary nodded. “Okay.”

“Linguists describe writing like this—” I indicated the printed words “— as ‘glottographic,’ because it represents speech. Every human written language is in this category. However, this symbol—” I indicated the circle and diagonal line “— is ‘semasiographic’ writing, because it conveys meaning without reference to speech. There’s no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds.”

“And you think all of heptapod writing is like this?”

“From what I’ve seen so far, yes. It’s not picture writing, it’s far more complex. It has its own system of rules for constructing sentences, like a visual syntax that’s unrelated to the syntax for their spoken language.”

“A visual syntax? Can you show me an example?”

“Coming right up.” I sat down at my desk and, using the computer, pulled up a frame from the recording of yesterday’s conversation with Raspberry. I turned the monitor so he could see it. “In their spoken language, a noun has a case marker indicating whether it’s a subject or object. In their written language, however, a noun is identified as subject or object based on the orientation of its logogram relative to that of the verb. Here, take a look.” I pointed at one of the figures. “For instance, when ‘heptapod’ is integrated with ‘hears’ this way, with these strokes parallel, it means that the heptapod is doing the hearing.” I showed him a different one. “When they’re combined this way, with the strokes perpendicular, it means that the heptapod is being heard. This morphology applies to several verbs.”

“Another example is the inflection system.” I called up another frame from the recording. “In their written language, this logogram means roughly ‘hear easily’ or ‘hear clearly.’ See the elements it has in common with the logogram for ‘hear’ ? You can still combine it with ‘heptapod’ in the same ways as before, to indicate that the heptapod can hear something clearly or that the heptapod is clearly heard. But what’s really interesting is that the modulation of ‘hear’ into ‘hear clearly’ isn’t a special case; you see the transformation they applied?”

Gary nodded, pointing. “It’s like they express the idea of ‘clearly’ by changing the curve of those strokes in the middle.”

“Right. That modulation is applicable to lots of verbs. The logogram for ‘see’ can be modulated in the same way to form ‘see clearly,’ and so can the logogram for ‘read’ and others. And changing the curve of those strokes has no parallel in their speech; with the spoken version of these verbs, they add a prefix to the verb to express ease of manner, and the prefixes for ‘see’ and ‘hear’ are different.”

“There are other examples, but you get the idea. It’s essentially a grammar in two dimensions.”

He began pacing thoughtfully. “Is there anything like this in human writing systems?”

“Mathematical equations, notations for music and dance. But those are all very specialized; we couldn’t record this conversation using them. But I suspect, if we knew it well enough, we could record this conversation in the heptapod writing system. I think it’s a full-fledged, general-purpose graphical language.”

Gary frowned. “So their writing constitutes a completely separate language from their speech, right?”

“Right. In fact, it’d be more accurate to refer to the writing system as ‘Heptapod B,’ and use ‘Heptapod A’ strictly for referring to the spoken language.”

“Hold on a second. Why use two languages when one would suffice? That seems unnecessarily hard to learn.”

“Like English spelling?” I said. “Ease of learning isn’t the primary force in language evolution. For the heptapods, writing and speech may play such different cultural or cognitive roles that using separate languages makes more sense than using different forms of the same one.”

He considered it. “I see what you mean. Maybe they think our form of writing is redundant, like we’re wasting a second communications channel.”

“That’s entirely possible. Finding out why they use a second language for writing will tell us a lot about them.”

“So I take it this means we won’t be able to use their writing to help us learn their spoken language.”

I sighed. “Yeah, that’s the most immediate implication. But I don’t think we should ignore either Heptapod A or B; we need a two-pronged approach.” I pointed at the screen. “I’ll bet you that learning their two-dimensional grammar will help you when it comes time to learn their mathematical notation.”

“You’ve got a point there. So are we ready to start asking about their mathematics?”

“Not yet. We need a better grasp on this writing system before we begin anything else,” I said, and then smiled when he mimed frustration. “Patience, good sir. Patience is a virtue.”

You’ll be six when your father has a conference to attend in Hawaii, and we’ll accompany him. You’ll be so excited that you’ll make preparations for weeks beforehand. You’ll ask me about coconuts and volcanoes and surfing, and practice hula dancing in the mirror. You’ll pack a suitcase with the clothes and toys you want to bring, and you’ll drag it around the house to see how long you can carry it. You’ll ask me if I can carry your Etch-a-Sketch in my bag, since there won’t be any more room for it in yours and you simply can’t leave without it.

“You won’t need all of these,” I’ll say. “There’ll be so many fun things to do there, you won’t have time to play with so many toys.”

You’ll consider that; dimples will appear above your eyebrows when you think hard. Eventually you’ll agree to pack fewer toys, but your expectations will, if anything, increase.

“I wanna be in Hawaii now,” you’ll whine.

“Sometimes it’s good to wait,” I’ll say. “The anticipation makes it more fun when you get there.”

You’ll just pout.

In the next report I submitted, I suggested that the term “logogram” was a misnomer because it implied that each graph represented a spoken word, when in fact the graphs didn’t correspond to our notion of spoken words at all. I didn’t want to use the term “ideogram” either because of how it had been used in the past; I suggested the term “semagram” instead.

It appeared that a semagram corresponded roughly to a written word in human languages: it was meaningful on its own, and in combination with other semagrams could form endless statements. We couldn’t define it precisely, but then no one had ever satisfactorily defined “word” for human languages either. When it came to sentences in Heptapod B, though, things became much more confusing. The language had no written punctuation: its syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined, and there was no need to indicate the cadence of speech. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. A “sentence” seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together; the only difference between a sentence and a paragraph, or a page, was size.

When a Heptapod B sentence grew fairly sizable, its visual impact was remarkable. If I wasn’t trying to decipher it, the writing looked like fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style, all clinging to each other to form an Escheresque lattice, each slightly different in its stance. And the biggest sentences had an effect similar to that of psychedelic posters: sometimes eye-watering, sometimes hypnotic.

I remember a picture of you taken at your college graduation. In the photo you’re striking a pose for the camera, mortarboard stylishly tilted on your head, one hand touching your sunglasses, the other hand on your hip, holding open your gown to reveal the tank top and shorts you’re wearing underneath.

I remember your graduation. There will be the distraction of having Nelson and your father and what’s-her-name there all at the same time, but that will be minor. That entire weekend, while you’re introducing me to your classmates and hugging everyone incessantly, I’ll be all but mute with amazement. I can’t believe that you, a grown woman taller than me and beautiful enough to make my heart ache, will be the same girl I used to lift off the ground so you could reach the drinking fountain, the same girl who used to trundle out of my bedroom draped in a dress and hat and four scarves from my closet.

And after graduation, you’ll be heading for a job as a financial analyst. I won’t understand what you do there, I won’t even understand your fascination with money, the preeminence you gave to salary when negotiating job offers. I would prefer it if you’d pursue something without regard for its monetary rewards, but I’ll have no complaints. My own mother could never understand why I couldn’t just be a high school English teacher. You’ll do what makes you happy, and that’ll be all I ask for.

As time went on, the teams at each looking glass began working in earnest on learning heptapod terminology for elementary mathematics and physics. We worked together on presentations, with the linguists focusing on procedure and the physicists focusing on subject matter. The physicists showed us previously devised systems for communicating with aliens, based on mathematics, but those were intended for use over a radio telescope. We reworked them for face-to-face communication.

Our teams were successful with basic arithmetic, but we hit a road block with geometry and algebra. We tried using a spherical coordinate system instead of a rectangular one, thinking it might be more natural to the heptapods given their anatomy, but that approach wasn’t any more fruitful. The heptapods didn’t seem to understand what we were getting at.

Likewise, the physics discussions went poorly. Only with the most concrete terms, like the names of the elements, did we have any success; after several attempts at representing the periodic table, the heptapods got the idea. For anything remotely abstract, we might as well have been gibbering. We tried to demonstrate basic physical attributes like mass and acceleration so we could elicit their terms for them, but the heptapods simply responded with requests for clarification. To avoid perceptual problems that might be associated with any particular medium, we tried physical demonstrations as well as line drawings, photos, and animations; none were effective. Days with no progress became weeks, and the physicists were becoming disillusioned.

By contrast, the linguists were having much more success. We made steady progress decoding the grammar of the spoken language, Heptapod A. It didn’t follow the pattern of human languages, as expected, but it was comprehensible so far: free word order, even to the extent that there was no preferred order for the clauses in a conditional statement, in defiance of a human language “universal.” It also appeared that the heptapods had no objection to many levels of center-embedding of clauses, something that quickly defeated humans. Peculiar, but not impenetrable.

Much more interesting were the newly discovered morphological and grammatical processes in Heptapod B that were uniquely two-dimensional. Depending on a semagram’s declension, inflections could be indicated by varying a certain stroke’s curvature, or its thickness, or its manner of undulation; or by varying the relative sizes of two radicals, or their relative distance to another radical, or their orientations; or various other means. These were nonsegmental graphemes; they couldn’t be isolated from the rest of a semagram. And despite how such traits behaved in human writing, these had nothing to do with calligraphic style; their meanings were defined according to a consistent and unambiguous grammar.

We regularly asked the heptapods why they had come. Each time, they answered “to see,” or “to observe.” Indeed, sometimes they preferred to watch us silently rather than answer our questions. Perhaps they were scientists, perhaps they were tourists. The State Department instructed us to reveal as little as possible about humanity, in case that information could be used as a bargaining chip in subsequent negotiations. We obliged, though it didn’t require much effort: the heptapods never asked questions about anything. Whether scientists or tourists, they were an awfully incurious bunch.

I remember once when we’ll be driving to the mall to buy some new clothes for you. You’ll be thirteen. One moment you’ll be sprawled in your seat, completely unselfconscious, all child; the next, you’ll toss your hair with a practiced casualness, like a fashion model in training.

You’ll give me some instructions as I’m parking the car. “Okay, Mom, give me one of the credit cards, and we can meet back at the entrance here in two hours.”

I’ll laugh. “Not a chance. All the credit cards stay with me.”

“You’re kidding.” You’ll become the embodiment of exasperation. We’ll get out of the car and I will start walking to the mall entrance. After seeing that I won’t budge on the matter, you’ll quickly reformulate your plans.

“Okay Mom, okay. You can come with me, just walk a little ways behind me, so it doesn’t look like we’re together. If I see any friends of mine, I’m gonna stop and talk to them, but you just keep walking, okay? I’ll come find you later.”

I’ll stop in my tracks. “Excuse me? I am not the hired help, nor am I some mutant relative for you to be ashamed of.”

“But Mom, I can’t let anyone see you with me.”

“What are you talking about? I’ve already met your friends; they’ve been to the house.”

“That was different,” you’ll say, incredulous that you have to explain it. “This is shopping.”

“Too bad.”

Then the explosion: “You won’t do the least thing to make me happy! You don’t care about me at all!”

It won’t have been that long since you enjoyed going shopping with me; it will forever astonish me how quickly you grow out of one phase and enter another. Living with you will be like aiming for a moving target; you’ll always be further along than I expect.

I looked at the sentence in Heptapod B that I had just written, using simple pen and paper. Like all the sentences I generated myself, this one looked misshapen, like a heptapod-written sentence that had been smashed with a hammer and then inexpertly taped back together. I had sheets of such inelegant semagrams covering my desk, fluttering occasionally when the oscillating fan swung past.

It was strange trying to learn a language that had no spoken form. Instead of practicing my pronunciation, I had taken to squeezing my eyes shut and trying to paint semagrams on the insides of my eyelids.

There was a knock at the door and before I could answer Gary came in looking jubilant. “Illinois got a repetition in physics.”

“Really? That’s great; when did it happen?”

“It happened a few hours ago; we just had the videoconference. Let me show you what it is.” He started erasing my blackboard.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t need any of that.”

“Good.” He picked up a nub of chalk and drew a diagram:

“Okay, here’s the path a ray of light takes when crossing from air to water. The light ray travels in a straight line until it hits the water; the water has a different index of refraction, so the light changes direction. You’ve heard of this before, right?”

I nodded. “Sure.”

“Now here’s an interesting property about the path the light takes. The path is the fastest possible route between these two points.”

“Come again?”

“Imagine, just for grins, that the ray of light traveled along this path.” He added a dotted line to his diagram:

“This hypothetical path is shorter than the path the light actually takes. But light travels more slowly in water than it does in air, and a greater percentage of this path is underwater. So it would take longer for light to travel along this path than it does along the real path.”

“Okay, I get it.”

“Now imagine if light were to travel along this other path.” He drew a second dotted path:

“This path reduces the percentage that’s underwater, but the total length is larger. It would also take longer for light to travel along this path than along the actual one.”

Gary put down the chalk and gestured at the diagram on the chalkboard with white-tipped fingers. “Any hypothetical path would require more time to traverse than the one actually taken. In other words, the route that the light ray takes is always the fastest possible one. That’s Fermat’s Principle of Least Time.”

“Hmm, interesting. And this is what the heptapods responded to?”

“Exactly. Moorehead gave an animated presentation of Fermat’s Principle at the Illinois looking glass, and the heptapods repeated it back. Now he’s trying to get a symbolic description.” He grinned. “Now is that highly neat, or what?”

“It’s neat all right, but how come I haven’t heard of Fermat’s Principle before?” I picked up a binder and waved it at him; it was a primer on the physics topics suggested for use in communication with the heptapods. “This thing goes on forever about Planck masses and the spin-flip of atomic hydrogen, and not a word about the refraction of light.”

“We guessed wrong about what’d be most useful for you to know,” Gary said without embarrassment. “In fact, it’s curious that Fermat’s Principle was the first breakthrough; even though it’s easy to explain, you need calculus to describe it mathematically. And not ordinary calculus; you need the calculus of variations. We thought that some simple theorem of geometry or algebra would be the breakthrough.”

“Curious indeed. You think the heptapods’ idea of what’s simple doesn’t match ours?”

“Exactly, which is why I’m dying to see what their mathematical description of Fermat’s Principle looks like.” He paced as he talked. “If their version of the calculus of variations is simpler to them than their equivalent of algebra, that might explain why we’ve had so much trouble talking about physics; their entire system of mathematics may be topsy-turvy compared to ours.” He pointed to the physics primer. “You can be sure that we’re going to revise that.”

“So can you build from Fermat’s Principle to other areas of physics?”

“Probably. There are lots of physical principles just like Fermat’s.”

“What, like Louise’s principle of least closet space? When did physics become so minimalist?”

“Well, the word ‘least’ is misleading. You see, Fermat’s Principle of Least Time is incomplete; in certain situations light follows a path that takes more time than any of the other possibilities. It’s more accurate to say that light always follows an extreme path, either one that minimizes the time taken or one that maximizes it. A minimum and a maximum share certain mathematical properties, so both situations can be described with one equation. So to be precise, Fermat’s Principle isn’t a minimal principle; instead it’s what’s known as a ‘variational’ principle.”

“And there are more of these variational principles?”

He nodded. “In all branches of physics. Almost every physical law can be restated as a variational principle. The only difference between these principles is in which attribute is minimized or maximized.” He gestured as if the different branches of physics were arrayed before him on a table. “In optics, where Fermat’s Principle applies, time is the attribute that has to be an extreme. In mechanics, it’s a different attribute. In electromagnetism, it’s something else again. But all these principles are similar mathematically.”

“So once you get their mathematical description of Fermat’s Principle, you should be able to decode the other ones.”

“God, I hope so. I think this is the wedge that we’ve been looking for, the one that cracks open their formulation of physics. This calls for a celebration.” He stopped his pacing and turned to me. “Hey, Louise, want to go out for dinner? My treat.”

I was mildly surprised. “Sure,” I said.

It’ll be when you first learn to walk that I get daily demonstrations of the asymmetry in our relationship. You’ll be incessantly running off somewhere, and each time you walk into a door frame or scrape your knee, the pain feels like it’s my own. It’ll be like growing an errant limb, an extension of myself whose sensory nerves report pain just fine, but whose motor nerves don’t convey my commands at all. It’s so unfair: I’m going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn’t see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal?

And then there will be the times when I see you laughing. Like the time you’ll be playing with the neighbor’s puppy, poking your hands through the chainlink fence separating our back yards, and you’ll be laughing so hard you’ll start hiccupping. The puppy will run inside the neighbor’s house, and your laughter will gradually subside, letting you catch your breath. Then the puppy will come back to the fence to lick your fingers again, and you’ll shriek and start laughing again. It will be the most wonderful sound I could ever imagine, a sound that makes me feel like a fountain, or a wellspring.

Now if only I can remember that sound the next time your blithe disregard for self-preservation gives me a heart attack.

After the breakthrough with Fermat’s Principle, discussions of scientific concepts became more fruitful. It wasn’t as if all of heptapod physics was suddenly rendered transparent, but progress was steady. According to Gary, the heptapods’ formulation of physics was indeed topsy-turvy relative to ours. Physical attributes that humans defined using integral calculus were seen as fundamental by the heptapods. As an example, Gary described an attribute that, in physics jargon, bore the deceptively simple name “action,” which represented “the difference between kinetic and potential energy, integrated over time,” whatever that meant. Calculus for us; elementary to them.

Conversely, to define attributes that humans thought of as fundamental, like velocity, the heptapods employed mathematics that were, Gary assured me, “highly weird.” The physicists were ultimately able to prove the equivalence of heptapod mathematics and human mathematics; even though their approaches were almost the reverse of one another, both were systems of describing the same physical universe.

I tried following some of the equations that the physicists were coming up with, but it was no use. I couldn’t really grasp the significance of physical attributes like “action”; I couldn’t, with any confidence, ponder the significance of treating such an attribute as fundamental. Still, I tried to ponder questions formulated in terms more familiar to me: what kind of worldview did the heptapods have, that they would consider Fermat’s Principle the simplest explanation of light refraction? What kind of perception made a minimum or maximum readily apparent to them?

Your eyes will be blue like your dad’s, not mud brown like mine. Boys will stare into those eyes the way I did, and do, into your dad’s, surprised and enchanted, as I was and am, to find them in combination with black hair. You will have many suitors.

I remember when you are fifteen, coming home after a weekend at your dad’s, incredulous over the interrogation he’ll have put you through regarding the boy you’re currently dating. You’ll sprawl on the sofa, recounting your dad’s latest breach of common sense: “You know what he said? He said, ‘I know what teenage boys are like.’ ” Roll of the eyes. “Like I don’t?”

“Don’t hold it against him,” I’ll say. “He’s a father; he can’t help it.” Having seen you interact with your friends, I won’t worry much about a boy taking advantage of you; if anything, the opposite will be more likely. I’ll worry about that.

“He wishes I were still a kid. He hasn’t known how to act toward me since I grew breasts.”

“Well, that development was a shock for him. Give him time to recover.”

“It’s been years, Mom. How long is it gonna take?”

“I’ll let you know when my father has come to terms with mine.”

During one of the videoconferences for the linguists, Cisneros from the Massachusetts looking glass had raised an interesting question: was there a particular order in which semagrams were written in a Heptapod B sentence? It was clear that word order meant next to nothing when speaking in Heptapod A; when asked to repeat what it had just said, a heptapod would likely as not use a different word order unless we specifically asked them not to. Was word order similarly unimportant when writing in Heptapod B?

Previously, we had only focused our attention on how a sentence in Heptapod B looked once it was complete. As far as anyone could tell, there was no preferred order when reading the semagrams in a sentence; you could start almost anywhere in the nest, then follow the branching clauses until you’d read the whole thing. But that was reading; was the same true about writing?

During my most recent session with Flapper and Raspberry I had asked them if, instead of displaying a semagram only after it was completed, they could show it to us while it was being written. They had agreed. I inserted the videotape of the session into the VCR, and on my computer I consulted the session transcript.

I picked one of the longer utterances from the conversation. What Flapper had said was that the heptapods’ planet had two moons, one significantly larger than the other; the three primary constituents of the planet’s atmosphere were nitrogen, argon, and oxygen; and fifteen twenty-eights of the planet’s surface was covered by water. The first words of the spoken utterance translated literally as “inequality-of-size rocky-orbiter rocky-orbiters related-as-primary-to-secondary.”

Then I rewound the videotape until the time signature matched the one in the transcription. I started playing the tape, and watched the web of semagrams being spun out of inky spider’s silk. I rewound it and played it several times. Finally I froze the video right after the first stroke was completed and before the second one was begun; all that was visible onscreen was a single sinuous line.

Comparing that initial stroke with the completed sentence, I realized that the stroke participated in several different clauses of the message. It began in the semagram for ‘oxygen,’ as the determinant that distinguished it from certain other elements; then it slid down to become the morpheme of comparison in the description of the two moons’ sizes; and lastly it flared out as the arched backbone of the semagram for ‘ocean.’ Yet this stroke was a single continuous line, and it was the first one that Flapper wrote. That meant the heptapod had to know how the entire sentence would be laid out before it could write the very first stroke.

The other strokes in the sentence also traversed several clauses, making them so interconnected that none could be removed without redesigning the entire sentence. The heptapods didn’t write a sentence one semagram at a time; they built it out of strokes irrespective of individual semagrams. I had seen a similarly high degree of integration before in calligraphic designs, particularly those employing the Arabic alphabet. But those designs had required careful planning by expert calligraphers. No one could lay out such an intricate design at the speed needed for holding a conversation. At least, no human could.

There’s a joke that I once heard a comedienne tell. It goes like this: “I’m not sure if I’m ready to have children. I asked a friend of mine who has children, ‘Suppose I do have kids. What if when they grow up, they blame me for everything that’s wrong with their lives?’ She laughed and said, ‘What do you mean, if?’ ”

That’s my favorite joke.

Gary and I were at a little Chinese restaurant, one of the local places we had taken to patronizing to get away from the encampment. We sat eating the appetizers: potstickers, redolent of pork and sesame oil. My favorite.

I dipped one in soy sauce and vinegar. “So how are you doing with your Heptapod B practice?” I asked.

Gary looked obliquely at the ceiling. I tried to meet his gaze, but he kept shifting it.

“You’ve given up, haven’t you?” I said. “You’re not even trying any more.”

He did a wonderful hangdog expression. “I’m just no good at languages,” he confessed. “I thought learning Heptapod B might be more like learning mathematics than trying to speak another language, but it’s not. It’s too foreign for me.”

“It would help you discuss physics with them.”

“Probably, but since we had our breakthrough, I can get by with just a few phrases.”

I sighed. “I suppose that’s fair; I have to admit, I’ve given up on trying to learn the mathematics.”

“So we’re even?”

“We’re even.” I sipped my tea. “Though I did want to ask you about Fermat’s Principle. Something about it feels odd to me, but I can’t put my finger on it. It just doesn’t sound like a law of physics.”

A twinkle appeared in Gary’s eyes. “I’ll bet I know what you’re talking about.” He snipped a potsticker in half with his chopsticks. “You’re used to thinking of refraction in terms of cause and effect: reaching the water’s surface is the cause, and the change in direction is the effect. But Fermat’s Principle sounds weird because it describes light’s behavior in goal-oriented terms. It sounds like a commandment to a light beam: ‘Thou shalt minimize or maximize the time taken to reach thy destination.’ ”

I considered it. “Go on.”

“It’s an old question in the philosophy of physics. People have been talking about it since Fermat first formulated it in the 1600s; Planck wrote volumes about it. The thing is, while the common formulation of physical laws is causal, a variational principle like Fermat’s is purposive, almost teleological.”

“Hmm, that’s an interesting way to put it. Let me think about that for a minute.” I pulled out a felt-tip pen and, on my paper napkin, drew a copy of the diagram that Gary had drawn on my blackboard. “Okay,” I said, thinking aloud, “so let’s say the goal of a ray of light is to take the fastest path. How does the light go about doing that?”

“Well, if I can speak anthropomorphic-projectionally, the light has to examine the possible paths and compute how long each one would take.” He plucked the last potsticker from the serving dish.

“And to do that,” I continued, “the ray of light has to know just where its destination is. If the destination were somewhere else, the fastest path would be different.”

Gary nodded again. “That’s right; the notion of a ‘fastest path’ is meaningless unless there’s a destination specified. And computing how long a given path takes also requires information about what lies along that path, like where the water’s surface is.”

I kept staring at the diagram on the napkin. “And the light ray has to know all that ahead of time, before it starts moving, right?”

“So to speak,” said Gary. “The light can’t start traveling in any old direction and make course corrections later on, because the path resulting from such behavior wouldn’t be the fastest possible one. The light has to do all its computations at the very beginning.”

I thought to myself, the ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in. I knew what that reminded me of. I looked up at Gary. “That’s what was bugging me.”

I remember when you’re fourteen. You’ll come out of your bedroom, a graffiti-covered notebook computer in hand, working on a report for school.

“Mom, what do you call it when both sides can win?”

I’ll look up from my computer and the paper I’ll be writing. “What, you mean a win-win situation?”

“There’s some technical name for it, some math word. Remember that time Dad was here, and he was talking about the stock market? He used it then.”

“Hmm, that sounds familiar, but I can’t remember what he called it.”

“I need to know. I want to use that phrase in my social studies report. I can’t even search for information on it unless I know what it’s called.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know it either. Why don’t you call your dad?”

Judging from your expression, that will be more effort than you want to make. At this point, you and your father won’t be getting along well. “Can you call Dad and ask him? But don’t tell him it’s for me.”

“I think you can call him yourself.”

You’ll fume, “Jesus, Mom, I can never get help with my homework since you and Dad split up.”

It’s amazing the diverse situations in which you can bring up the divorce. “I’ve helped you with your homework.”

“Like a million years ago, Mom.”

I’ll let that pass. “I’d help you with this if I could, but I don’t remember what it’s called.”

You’ll head back to your bedroom in a huff.

I practiced Heptapod B at every opportunity, both with the other linguists and by myself. The novelty of reading a semasiographic language made it compelling in a way that Heptapod A wasn’t, and my improvement in writing it excited me. Over time, the sentences I wrote grew shapelier, more cohesive. I had reached the point where it worked better when I didn’t think about it too much. Instead of carefully trying to design a sentence before writing, I could simply begin putting down strokes immediately; my initial strokes almost always turned out to be compatible with an elegant rendition of what I was trying to say. I was developing a faculty like that of the heptapods.

More interesting was the fact that Heptapod B was changing the way I thought. For me, thinking typically meant speaking in an internal voice; as we say in the trade, my thoughts were phonologically coded. My internal voice normally spoke in English, but that wasn’t a requirement. The summer after my senior year in high school, I attended a total immersion program for learning Russian; by the end of the summer, I was thinking and even dreaming in Russian. But it was always spoken Russian. Different language, same mode: a voice speaking silently aloud.

The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet nonphonological mode always intrigued me. I had a friend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language, and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder what it was like to have one’s thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair of hands instead of an inner voice.

With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trancelike moments during the day when my thoughts weren’t expressed with my internal voice; instead, I saw semagrams with my mind’s eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane.

As I grew more fluent, semagraphic designs would appear fully formed, articulating even complex ideas all at once. My thought processes weren’t moving any faster as a result, though. Instead of racing forward, my mind hung balanced on the symmetry underlying the semagrams. The semagrams seemed to be something more than language; they were almost like mandalas. I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable. There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected, no “train of thought” moving along a particular route; all the components in an act of reasoning were equally powerful, all having identical precedence.

A representative from the State Department named Hossner had the job of briefing the U.S. scientists on our agenda with the heptapods. We sat in the videoconference room, listening to him lecture. Our microphone was turned off, so Gary and I could exchange comments without interrupting Hossner. As we listened, I worried that Gary might harm his vision, rolling his eyes so often.

“They must have had some reason for coming all this way,” said the diplomat, his voice tinny through the speakers. “It does not look like their reason was conquest, thank God. But if that’s not the reason, what is? Are they prospectors? Anthropologists? Missionaries? Whatever their motives, there must be something we can offer them. Maybe it’s mineral rights to our solar system. Maybe it’s information about ourselves. Maybe it’s the right to deliver sermons to our populations. But we can be sure that there’s something.”

“My point is this: their motive might not be to trade, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot conduct trade. We simply need to know why they’re here, and what we have that they want. Once we have that information, we can begin trade negotiations.”

“I should emphasize that our relationship with the heptapods need not be adversarial. This is not a situation where every gain on their part is a loss on ours, or vice versa. If we handle ourselves correctly, both we and the heptapods can come out winners.”

“You mean it’s a non-zero-sum game?” Gary said in mock incredulity. “Oh my gosh.”

“A non-zero-sum game.”

“What?” You’ll reverse course, heading back from your bedroom.

“When both sides can win: I just remembered, it’s called a non-zero-sum game.”

“That’s it!” you’ll say, writing it down on your notebook. “Thanks, Mom!”

“I guess I knew it after all,” I’ll say. “All those years with your father, some of it must have rubbed off.”

“I knew you’d know it,” you’ll say. You’ll give me a sudden, brief hug, and your hair will smell of apples. “You’re the best.”

“Louise?”

“Hmm? Sorry, I was distracted. What did you say?”

“I said, what do you think about our Mr. Hossner here?”

“I prefer not to.”

“I’ve tried that myself: ignoring the government, seeing if it would go away. It hasn’t.”

As evidence of Gary’s assertion, Hossner kept blathering: “Your immediate task is to think back on what you’ve learned. Look for anything that might help us. Has there been any indication of what the heptapods want? Of what they value?”

“Gee, it never occurred to us to look for things like that,” I said. “We’ll get right on it, sir.”

“The sad thing is, that’s just what we’ll have to do,” said Gary.

“Are there any questions?” asked Hossner.

Burghart, the linguist at the Fort Worth looking glass, spoke up. “We’ve been through this with the heptapods many times. They maintain that they’re here to observe, and they maintain that information is not tradable.”

“So they would have us believe,” said Hossner. “But consider: how could that be true? I know that the heptapods have occasionally stopped talking to us for brief periods. That may be a tactical maneuver on their part. If we were to stop talking to them tomorrow—”

“Wake me up if he says something interesting,” said Gary.

“I was just going to ask you to do the same for me.”

That day when Gary first explained Fermat’s Principle to me, he had mentioned that almost every physical law could be stated as a variational principle. Yet when humans thought about physical laws, they preferred to work with them in their causal formulation. I could understand that: the physical attributes that humans found intuitive, like kinetic energy or acceleration, were all properties of an object at a given moment in time. And these were conducive to a chronological, causal interpretation of events: one moment growing out of another, causes and effects created a chain reaction that grew from past to future.

In contrast, the physical attributes that the heptapods found intuitive, like “action” or those other things defined by integrals, were meaningful only over a period of time. And these were conducive to a teleological interpretation of events: by viewing events over a period of time, one recognized that there was a requirement that had to be satisfied, a goal of minimizing or maximizing. And one had to know the initial and final states to meet that goal; one needed knowledge of the effects before the causes could be initiated.

I was growing to understand that, too.

“Why?” you’ll ask again. You’ll be three.

“Because it’s your bedtime,” I’ll say again. We’ll have gotten as far as getting you bathed and into your jammies, but no further than that.

“But I’m not sleepy,” you’ll whine. You’ll be standing at the bookshelf, pulling down a video to watch: your latest diversionary tactic to keep away from your bedroom.

“It doesn’t matter: you still have to go to bed.”

“But why?”

“Because I’m the mom and I said so.”

I’m actually going to say that, aren’t I? God, somebody please shoot me.

I’ll pick you up and carry you under my arm to your bed, you wailing piteously all the while, but my sole concern will be my own distress. All those vows made in childhood that I would give reasonable answers when I became a parent, that I would treat my own child as an intelligent, thinking individual, all for naught: I’m going to turn into my mother. I can fight it as much as I want, but there’ll be no stopping my slide down that long, dreadful slope.

Was it actually possible to know the future? Not simply to guess at it; was it possible to know what was going to happen, with absolute certainty and in specific detail? Gary once told me that the fundamental laws of physics were time-symmetric, that there was no physical difference between past and future. Given that, some might say, “yes, theoretically.” But speaking more concretely, most would answer “no,” because of free will.

I liked to imagine the objection as a Borgesian fabulation: consider a person standing before the Book of Ages, the chronicle that records every event, past and future. Even though the text has been photoreduced from the full-sized edition, the volume is enormous. With magnifier in hand, she flips through the tissue-thin leaves until she locates the story of her life. She finds the passage that describes her flipping through the Book of Ages, and she skips to the next column, where it details what she’ll be doing later in the day: acting on information she’s read in the Book, she’ll bet one hundred dollars on the racehorse Devil May Care and win twenty times that much.

The thought of doing just that had crossed her mind, but being a contrary sort, she now resolves to refrain from betting on the ponies altogether.

There’s the rub. The Book of Ages cannot be wrong; this scenario is based on the premise that a person is given knowledge of the actual future, not of some possible future. If this were Greek myth, circumstances would conspire to make her enact her fate despite her best efforts, but prophecies in myth are notoriously vague; the Book of Ages is quite specific, and there’s no way she can be forced to bet on a racehorse in the manner specified. The result is a contradiction: the Book of Ages must be right, by definition; yet no matter what the Book says she’ll do, she can choose to do otherwise. How can these two facts be reconciled?

They can’t be, was the common answer. A volume like the Book of Ages is a logical impossibility, for the precise reason that its existence would result in the above contradiction. Or, to be generous, some might say that the Book of Ages could exist, as long as it wasn’t accessible to readers: that volume is housed in a special collection, and no one has viewing privileges.

The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.

Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?

I stopped by Gary’s office before leaving for the day. “I’m calling it quits. Did you want to grab something to eat?”

“Sure, just wait a second,” he said. He shut down his computer and gathered some papers together. Then he looked up at me. “Hey, want to come to my place for dinner tonight? I’ll cook.”

I looked at him dubiously. “You can cook?”

“Just one dish,” he admitted. “But it’s a good one.”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m game.”

“Great. We just need to go shopping for the ingredients.”

“Don’t go to any trouble—”

“There’s a market on the way to my house. It won’t take a minute.”

We took separate cars, me following him. I almost lost him when he abruptly turned in to a parking lot. It was a gourmet market, not large, but fancy; tall glass jars stuffed with imported foods sat next to specialty utensils on the store’s stainless-steel shelves.

I accompanied Gary as he collected fresh basil, tomatoes, garlic, linguini. “There’s a fish market next door; we can get fresh clams there,” he said.

“Sounds good.” We walked past the section of kitchen utensils. My gaze wandered over the shelves— peppermills, garlic presses, salad tongs— and stopped on a wooden salad bowl.

When you are three, you’ll pull a dishtowel off the kitchen counter and bring that salad bowl down on top of you. I’ll make a grab for it, but I’ll miss. The edge of the bowl will leave you with a cut, on the upper edge of your forehead, that will require a single stitch. Your father and I will hold you, sobbing and stained with Caesar salad dressing, as we wait in the emergency room for hours.

I reached out and took the bowl from the shelf. The motion didn’t feel like something I was forced to do. Instead it seemed just as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl when it falls on you: an instinct that I felt right in following.

“I could use a salad bowl like this.”

Gary looked at the bowl and nodded approvingly. “See, wasn’t it a good thing that I had to stop at the market?”

“Yes it was.” We got in line to pay for our purchases.

Consider the sentence “The rabbit is ready to eat.” Interpret “rabbit” to be the object of “eat,” and the sentence was an announcement that dinner would be served shortly. Interpret “rabbit” to be the subject of “eat,” and it was a hint, such as a young girl might give her mother so she’ll open a bag of Purina Bunny Chow. Two very different utterances; in fact, they were probably mutually exclusive within a single household. Yet either was a valid interpretation; only context could determine what the sentence meant.

Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle. Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it. Two very different interpretations.

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.

When the ancestors of humans and heptapods first acquired the spark of consciousness, they both perceived the same physical world, but they parsed their perceptions differently; the worldviews that ultimately arose were the end result of that divergence. Humans had developed a sequential mode of awareness, while heptapods had developed a simultaneous mode of awareness. We experienced events in an order, and perceived their relationship as cause and effect. They experienced all events at once, and perceived a purpose underlying them all. A minimizing, maximizing purpose.

I have a recurring dream about your death. In the dream, I’m the one who’s rock climbing— me, can you imagine it?— and you’re three years old, riding in some kind of backpack I’m wearing. We’re just a few feet below a ledge where we can rest, and you won’t wait until I’ve climbed up to it. You start pulling yourself out of the pack; I order you to stop, but of course you ignore me. I feel your weight alternating from one side of the pack to the other as you climb out; then I feel your left foot on my shoulder, and then your right. I’m screaming at you, but I can’t get a hand free to grab you. I can see the wavy design on the soles of your sneakers as you climb, and then I see a flake of stone give way beneath one of them. You slide right past me, and I can’t move a muscle. I look down and see you shrink into the distance below me.

Then, all of a sudden, I’m at the morgue. An orderly lifts the sheet from your face, and I see that you’re twenty-five.

“You okay?”

I was sitting upright in bed; I’d woken Gary with my movements. “I’m fine. I was just startled; I didn’t recognize where I was for a moment.”

Sleepily, he said, “We can stay at your place next time.”

I kissed him. “Don’t worry; your place is fine.” We curled up, my back against his chest, and went back to sleep.

When you’re three and we’re climbing a steep, spiral flight of stairs, I’ll hold your hand extra tightly. You’ll pull your hand away from me. “I can do it by myself,” you’ll insist, and then move away from me to prove it, and I’ll remember that dream. We’ll repeat that scene countless times during your childhood. I can almost believe that, given your contrary nature, my attempts to protect you will be what create your love of climbing: first the jungle gym at the playground, then trees out in the green belt around our neighborhood, the rock walls at the climbing club, and ultimately cliff faces in national parks.

I finished the last radical in the sentence, put down the chalk, and sat down in my desk chair. I leaned back and surveyed the giant Heptapod B sentence I’d written that covered the entire blackboard in my office. It included several complex clauses, and I had managed to integrate all of them rather nicely.

Looking at a sentence like this one, I understood why the heptapods had evolved a semasiographic writing system like Heptapod B; it was better suited for a species with a simultaneous mode of consciousness. For them, speech was a bottleneck because it required that one word follow another sequentially. With writing, on the other hand, every mark on a page was visible simultaneously. Why constrain writing with a glotto-graphic straitjacket, demanding that it be just as sequential as speech? It would never occur to them. Semasiographic writing naturally took advantage of the page’s two-dimensionality; instead of doling out morphemes one at a time, it offered an entire page full of them all at once.

And now that Heptapod B had introduced me to a simultaneous mode of consciousness, I understood the rationale behind Heptapod A’s grammar: what my sequential mind had perceived as unnecessarily convoluted, I now recognized as an attempt to provide flexibility within the confines of sequential speech. I could use Heptapod A more easily as a result, though it was still a poor substitute for Heptapod B.

There was a knock at the door and then Gary poked his head in. “Colonel Weber’ll be here any minute.”

I grimaced. “Right.” Weber was coming to participate in a session with Flapper and Raspberry; I was to act as translator, a job I wasn’t trained for and that I detested.

Gary stepped inside and closed the door. He pulled me out of my chair and kissed me.

I smiled. “You trying to cheer me up before he gets here?”

“No, I’m trying to cheer me up.”

“You weren’t interested in talking to the heptapods at all, were you? You worked on this project just to get me into bed.”

“Ah, you see right through me.”

I looked into his eyes. “You better believe it,” I said.

I remember when you’ll be a month old, and I’ll stumble out of bed to give you your 2:00 A.M. feeding. Your nursery will have that “baby smell” of diaper rash cream and talcum powder, with a faint ammoniac whiff coming from the diaper pail in the corner. I’ll lean over your crib, lift your squalling form out, and sit in the rocking chair to nurse you.

The word “infant” is derived from the Latin word for “unable to speak,” but you’ll be perfectly capable of saying one thing: “I suffer,” and you’ll do it tirelessly and without hesitation. I have to admire your utter commitment to that statement; when you cry, you’ll become outrage incarnate, every fiber of your body employed in expressing that emotion. It’s funny: when you’re tranquil, you will seem to radiate light, and if someone were to paint a portrait of you like that, I’d insist that they include the halo. But when you’re unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you then could simply be a fire alarm bell.

At that stage of your life, there’ll be no past or future for you; until I give you my breast, you’ll have no memory of contentment in the past nor expectation of relief in the future. Once you begin nursing, everything will reverse, and all will be right with the world. NOW is the only moment you’ll perceive; you’ll live in the present tense. In many ways, it’s an enviable state.

The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don’t act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods’ mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history’s events; it is also that their motives coincide with history’s purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology.

Freedom isn’t an illusion; it’s perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it’s simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It’s like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There’s no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can’t see both at the same time.

Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

I turned on the VCR and slotted a cassette of a session from the Fort Worth looking glass. A diplomatic negotiator was having a discussion with the heptapods there, with Burghart acting as translator.

The negotiator was describing humans’ moral beliefs, trying to lay some groundwork for the concept of altruism. I knew the heptapods were familiar with the conversation’s eventual outcome, but they still participated enthusiastically.

If I could have described this to someone who didn’t already know, she might ask, if the heptapods already knew everything that they would ever say or hear, what was the point of their using language at all? A reasonable question. But language wasn’t only for communication: it was also a form of action. According to speech act theory, statements like “You’re under arrest,” “I christen this vessel,” or “I promise” were all performative: a speaker could perform the action only by uttering the words. For such acts, knowing what would be said didn’t change anything. Everyone at a wedding anticipated the words “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” but until the minister actually said them, the ceremony didn’t count. With performative language, saying equaled doing.

For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place.

“First Goldilocks tried the papa bear’s bowl of porridge, but it was full of brussels sprouts, which she hated.”

You’ll laugh. “No, that’s wrong!” We’ll be sitting side by side on the sofa, the skinny, overpriced hardcover spread open on our laps.

I’ll keep reading. “Then Goldilocks tried the mama bear’s bowl of porridge, but it was full of spinach, which she also hated.”

You’ll put your hand on the page of the book to stop me. “You have to read it the right way!”

“I’m reading just what it says here,” I’ll say, all innocence.

“No you’re not. That’s not how the story goes.”

“Well if you already know how the story goes, why do you need me to read it to you?”

“Cause I wanna hear it!”

The air conditioning in Weber’s office almost compensated for having to talk to the man.

“They’re willing to engage in a type of exchange,” I explained, “but it’s not trade. We simply give them something, and they give us something in return. Neither party tells the other what they’re giving beforehand.”

Colonel Weber’s brow furrowed just slightly. “You mean they’re willing to exchange gifts?”

I knew what I had to say. “We shouldn’t think of it as ‘gift-giving.’ We don’t know if this transaction has the same associations for the heptapods that gift-giving has for us.”

“Can we—” he searched for the right wording “— drop hints about the kind of gift we want?”

“They don’t do that themselves for this type of transaction. I asked them if we could make a request, and they said we could, but it won’t make them tell us what they’re giving.” I suddenly remembered that a morphological relative of “performative” was “performance,” which could describe the sensation of conversing when you knew what would be said: it was like performing in a play.

“But would it make them more likely to give us what we asked for?” Colonel Weber asked. He was perfectly oblivious of the script, yet his responses matched his assigned lines exactly.

“No way of knowing,” I said. “I doubt it, given that it’s not a custom they engage in.”

“If we give our gift first, will the value of our gift influence the value of theirs?” He was improvising, while I had carefully rehearsed for this one and only show.

“No,” I said. “As far as we can tell, the value of the exchanged items is irrelevant.”

“If only my relatives felt that way,” murmured Gary wryly.

I watched Colonel Weber turn to Gary. “Have you discovered anything new in the physics discussions?” he asked, right on cue.

“If you mean, any information new to mankind, no,” said Gary. “The heptapods haven’t varied from the routine. If we demonstrate something to them, they’ll show us their formulation of it, but they won’t volunteer anything and they won’t answer our questions about what they know.”

An utterance that was spontaneous and communicative in the context of human discourse became a ritual recitation when viewed by the light of Heptapod B.

Weber scowled. “All right then, we’ll see how the State Department feels about this. Maybe we can arrange some kind of gift-giving ceremony.”

Like physical events, with their casual and teleological interpretations, every linguistic event had two possible interpretations: as a transmission of information and as the realization of a plan.

“I think that’s a good idea, Colonel,” I said.

It was an ambiguity invisible to most. A private joke; don’t ask me to explain it.

Even though I’m proficient with Heptapod B, I know I don’t experience reality the way a heptapod does. My mind was cast in the mold of human, sequential languages, and no amount of immersion in an alien language can completely reshape it. My worldview is an amalgam of human and heptapod.

Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present. After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn’t arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades. It is the period during which I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it, starting during my interviews with Flapper and Raspberry and ending with my death.

Usually, Heptapod B affects just my memory: my consciousness crawls along as it did before, a glowing sliver crawling forward in time, the difference being that the ash of memory lies ahead as well as behind: there is no real combustion. But occasionally I have glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience past and future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century-long ember burning outside time. I perceive— during those glimpses— that entire epoch as a simultaneity. It’s a period encompassing the rest of my life, and the entirety of yours.

I wrote out the semagrams for “process create-endpoint inclusive-we,” meaning “let’s start.” Raspberry replied in the affirmative, and the slide shows began. The second display screen that the heptapods had provided began presenting a series of images, composed of semagrams and equations, while one of our video screens did the same.

This was the second “gift exchange” I had been present for, the eighth one overall, and I knew it would be the last. The looking-glass tent was crowded with people; Burghart from Fort Worth was here, as were Gary and a nuclear physicist, assorted biologists, anthropologists, military brass, and diplomats. Thankfully they had set up an air conditioner to cool the place off. We would review the tapes of the images later to figure out just what the heptapods’ “gift” was. Our own “gift” was a presentation on the Lascaux cave paintings.

We all crowded around the heptapods’ second screen, trying to glean some idea of the images’ content as they went by. “Preliminary assessments?” asked Colonel Weber.

“It’s not a return,” said Burghart. In a previous exchange, the heptapods had given us information about ourselves that we had previously told them. This had infuriated the State Department, but we had no reason to think of it as an insult: it probably indicated that trade value really didn’t play a role in these exchanges. It didn’t exclude the possibility that the heptapods might yet offer us a space drive, or cold fusion, or some other wish-fulfilling miracle.

“That looks like inorganic chemistry,” said the nuclear physicist, pointing at an equation before the image was replaced.

Gary nodded. “It could be materials technology,” he said.

“Maybe we’re finally getting somewhere,” said Colonel Weber.

“I wanna see more animal pictures,” I whispered, quietly so that only Gary could hear me, and pouted like a child. He smiled and poked me. Truthfully, I wished the heptapods had given another xenobiology lecture, as they had on two previous exchanges; judging from those, humans were more similar to the heptapods than any other species they’d ever encountered. Or another lecture on heptapod history; those had been filled with apparent non-sequiturs, but were interesting nonetheless. I didn’t want the heptapods to give us new technology, because I didn’t want to see what our governments might do with it.

I watched Raspberry while the information was being exchanged, looking for any anomalous behavior. It stood barely moving as usual; I saw no indications of what would happen shortly.

After a minute, the heptapod’s screen went blank, and a minute after that, ours did, too. Gary and most of the other scientists clustered around a tiny video screen that was replaying the heptapods’ presentation. I could hear them talk about the need to call in a solid-state physicist.

Colonel Weber turned. “You two,” he said, pointing to me and then to Burghart, “schedule the time and location for the next exchange.” Then he followed the others to the playback screen.

“Coming right up,” I said. To Burghart, I asked, “Would you care to do the honors, or shall I?”

I knew Burghart had gained a proficiency in Heptapod B similar to mine. “It’s your looking glass,” he said. “You drive.”

I sat down again at the transmitting computer. “Bet you never figured you’d wind up working as a Army translator back when you were a grad student.”

“That’s for goddamn sure,” he said. “Even now I can hardly believe it.” Everything we said to each other felt like the carefully bland exchanges of spies who meet in public, but never break cover.

I wrote out the semagrams for “locus exchange-transaction converse inclusive-we” with the projective aspect modulation.

Raspberry wrote its reply. That was my cue to frown, and for Burghart to ask, “What does it mean by that?” His delivery was perfect.

I wrote a request for clarification; Raspberry’s reply was the same as before. Then I watched it glide out of the room. The curtain was about to fall on this act of our performance.

Colonel Weber stepped forward. “What’s going on? Where did it go?”

“It said that the heptapods are leaving now,” I said. “Not just itself; all of them.”

“Call it back here now. Ask it what it means.”

“Um, I don’t think Raspberry’s wearing a pager,” I said.

The image of the room in the looking glass disappeared so abruptly that it took a moment for my eyes to register what I was seeing instead: it was the other side of the looking-glass tent. The looking glass had become completely transparent. The conversation around the playback screen fell silent.

“What the hell is going on here?” said Colonel Weber.

Gary walked up to the looking glass, and then around it to the other side. He touched the rear surface with one hand; I could see the pale ovals where his fingertips made contact with the looking glass. “I think,” he said, “we just saw a demonstration of transmutation at a distance.”

I heard the sounds of heavy footfalls on dry grass. A soldier came in through the tent door, short of breath from sprinting, holding an oversize walkie-talkie. “Colonel, message from—”

Weber grabbed the walkie-talkie from him.

I remember what it’ll be like watching you when you are a day old. Your father will have gone for a quick visit to the hospital cafeteria, and you’ll be lying in your bassinet, and I’ll be leaning over you.

So soon after the delivery, I will still be feeling like a wrung-out towel. You will seem incongruously tiny, given how enormous I felt during the pregnancy; I could swear there was room for someone much larger and more robust than you in there. Your hands and feet will be long and thin, not chubby yet. Your face will still be all red and pinched, puffy eyelids squeezed shut, the gnomelike phase that precedes the cherubic.

I’ll run a finger over your belly, marveling at the uncanny softness of your skin, wondering if silk would abrade your body like burlap. Then you’ll writhe, twisting your body while poking out your legs one at a time, and I’ll recognize the gesture as one I had felt you do inside me, many times. So that’s what it looks like.

I’ll feel elated at this evidence of a unique mother-child bond, this certitude that you’re the one I carried. Even if I had never laid eyes on you before, I’d be able to pick you out from a sea of babies: Not that one. No, not her either. Wait, that one over there.

Yes, that’s her. She’s mine.

That final “gift exchange” was the last we ever saw of the heptapods. All at once, all over the world, their looking glasses became transparent and their ships left orbit. Subsequent analysis of the looking glasses revealed them to be nothing more than sheets of fused silica, completely inert. The information from the final exchange session described a new class of superconducting materials, but it later proved to duplicate the results of research just completed in Japan: nothing that humans didn’t already know.

We never did learn why the heptapods left, any more than we learned what brought them here, or why they acted the way they did. My own new awareness didn’t provide that type of knowledge; the heptapods’ behavior was presumably explicable from a sequential point of view, but we never found that explanation.

I would have liked to experience more of the heptapods’ worldview, to feel the way they feel. Then, perhaps I could immerse myself fully in the necessity of events, as they must, instead of merely wading in its surf for the rest of my life. But that will never come to pass. I will continue to practice the heptapod languages, as will the other linguists on the looking-glass teams, but none of us will ever progress any further than we did when the heptapods were here.

Working with the heptapods changed my life. I met your father and learned Heptapod B, both of which make it possible for me to know you now, here on the patio in the moonlight. Eventually, many years from now, I’ll be without your father, and without you. All I will have left from this moment is the heptapod language. So I pay close attention, and note every detail.

From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?

These questions are in my mind when your father asks me, “Do you want to make a baby?” And I smile and answer, “Yes,” and I unwrap his arms from around me, and we hold hands as we walk inside to make love, to make you.

AURORA IN FOUR VOICES

Catherine Asaro

Our culture tends (somewhat hypocritically) to regard science and art as quite separate, even alien. But others might blend them in ways we’d find really alien. . . .

I

The Dreamers of Nightingale

He missed the sun.

The planet Ansatz boasts one city, Nightingale, a gem that graces eternal night. Just as a diamond sparkles because light that ventures into its heart is captured, bouncing from face to face, so Jato Stormson was trapped in Nightingale. Unlike the light inside a faceted diamond, however, he could never escape.

After a few years, his memories of home faded. He could no longer picture the sun-parched farm on the planet Sandstorm where he had spent his boyhood. It was always dark in Nightingale.

The Dreamers—the artistic geniuses who created Nightingale—were also mathematical prodigies. That was why they named their planet Ansatz. It referred to a method of solving differential equations. Guess an answer, an ansatz, and see if it solved the equation. If it didn’t, make another guess. Another ansatz. Jato felt as if he were trapped on a guess of a world.

One night he went to the EigenDome, an establishment for dancing. He sat at a table and waited for the drink server, but the server never came to his table. That was why he rarely visited the Dome. The artist who had designed the place considered it aesthetic to have humans serve the drinks and the humans in Nightingale ignored him. But that night he was lonelier than usual and even the icy Dreamers were better than no company at all.

Made from synthetic diamond, the Dome resembled a truncated soccer ball. Jato had looked up its history in the city library and found a treatise on how the Dome’s shape mimicked the molecule buckyball. Its holographic lighting evoked the quantum eigenfunctions that described a buckyball. He didn’t understand the physics, but he appreciated the beauty it produced.

Tonight Dreamers were everywhere, dancing, talking, humming. Centuries of playing with their genes and living in perpetual night had bleached their skin almost to translucence. Their hair floated around their bodies like silver smoke. Light from lamps outside the Dome refracted through the diamond walls, gracing the interior with rainbows that collected on the Dreamers in pools of color. They glistened like quantum ghosts.

Across the Dome, the doors opened. A spacer stood in the doorway, her body haloed by the rainbow luminance. This was no Dreamer. She looked solid. Sun-touched. She must have come in on one of the rare ships that visited Nightingale; rare, because the Dreamers allowed no immigration and most sun-dwellers found a city of unrelieved night depressing anyway. The only reason people usually came to Ansatz was to trade for a Dream.

Ah, yes. The Trade.

Dreamers make a simple offer; give one a pleasant dream and in return the Dreamer will give you a work of art. They allow you ten days to try. After that, you must leave Nightingale, trade or no trade. Considering the prices Dreamer art claims throughout the Imperialate, that trade seems astoundingly one-sided, the offer of great treasure for no more than a nice dream.

Jato had let the lure of that promise fool him. He spent years saving for the ticket to Ansatz. But how do you give a dream? It was harder than it sounded, particularly given how sun-dwelling humans revolted the Dreamers. The same husky build and rugged looks that had won him such admiration back home repelled the Dreamers. Considering their disdain for ugliness, he feared they wouldn’t even let him stay the ten days.

They never let him go.

So now he sat by himself and watched the spacer walk to a table across in the Dome. She wore dark pants tucked into boots and a white sweater with gold rings decorating the upper arms. Her clothing looked familiar, but Jato couldn’t place why. She had no jacket; Nightingale’s weather machines aided the planet’s natural convection to keep the climate pleasant, free from the fierce winds the tore at the rest of Ansatz. Her hair was a cloud of black curls with gold tips, and dark lashes framed her eyes—green eyes, the color of a leaf in the forest. Her skin had a dusky hue, full of rosy blooming health. None of the Dreamers spared her a second look, but Jato thought she was lovely.

She sat down—and the server showed up to take her order. Irked, Jato got up and headed for the laser bar, intending to insist they serve him. Reaching it, however, was no simple feat. The Dome’s floor consisted of nested rings, each slowly rotating in one direction or the other. The text he had found in the library described some business about “mapping coefficients in quantum superpositions onto ring velocities.” All he knew was that it took a computer to coordinate the motion so patrons could step from one ring to another without falling. Dreamers carried it off with grace, but he had never mastered it.

He managed to reach the dance floor, a languid disk turning in the Dome’s center. Dancers drifted away from him, slim and willowy, silver-eyed works of art. On the other side, he ventured into the rings again and was soon being carried this way and that. Each time he neared a hovertable occupied by Dreamers, it floated away on cushions of air. He wished just once someone would look up, admit his presence, give a greeting. Anything.

Meanwhile, the server brought the spacer her drink, which was a LaserDrop in a wide-mouthed bottle. Tiny lasers in the glass suffused the drink with color: helium-neon red, zinc-selenium blue, sodium yellow. Drink in hand, she settled back to watch the dancers.

Jato quit pretending it was the bar he wanted and headed for the spacer. But whenever he neared the ring with her hovertable, people and tables that had been drifting away suddenly blocked his path. The spacer meanwhile finished her drink, slid a payment chip into the table slot, and headed for the door. He started after her—and the drink server appeared, blocking the way, his back to Jato, his tray of laser-hued drinks held high.

Jato scowled. He had always been long on patience and short on words. But even the most stoic man could only take so much. He put his hand against the server’s back and pushed, not hard, just enough to make the fellow move. The server stumbled and his tray jumped, rum splashing out of the jars in plump drops. Even then, no one looked at Jato, not even the server.

He made it to the door without pushing anyone else. Outside, lamps lit the area for a few meters, but beyond their radiance, night reigned under a sky rich with stars. Jato strode away from the Dome, his fists clenched. He didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing their treatment provoke him.

The Dome was on the city outskirts, near the edge of a large plateau where the Dreamers had built Nightingale. The Giant’s Skeleton Mountains surrounded the plateau, falling away from it on three sides and rising in sheer cliffs on the fourth, here in the north. The northern peaks piled up higher and higher in the distance, until they become a jagged line against the star-dazzled sky.

The Dreamers claimed they built Nightingale as a challenge: can you create beauty in so forbidding a place? This was the reason they gave. Jato had heard others put forth, but the Dreamers denied them.

Although his past attempts at convincing spacers to smuggle him offplanet had failed, he never gave up. In the distant shadows, he saw the spacer climbing the SquareCase, a set of stairs carved into a cliff. The first step was one centimeter high, the second four, the third nine, and so on, their heights increasing as the square of integers. The first twenty ran parallel to the cliff, but then they turned at a right angle and stepped into the mountains, rising taller and taller, until they became cliffs themselves, too high, too dark, and too distant to distinguish.

By the time he reached the first step of the SquareCase, the spacer was climbing the tenth, about the height of her waist. She sat on it, half hidden in the dark while she watched him. He approached slowly and stopped on the ninth step.

“Can I do something for you?” she asked.

“I wondered if you wanted a guide to the city.” It sounded unconvincing, but it was the best introduction he could think of.

“Thank you,” she said. “But I’m fine.” The conversation screeched to a halt.

He tried again. “I don’t often get a chance to talk to anyone from offplanet.”

Her posture eased. “I noticed my ship was the only one in port.”

“Did you come to trade for a Dream?”

“No. Just some minor repairs. I’ll be leaving as soon they’re done.”

Behind her, Jato caught sight of a globe sparkling with lights in a fractal pattern. As it floated forward, it resolved into a robot drone over a meter in diameter, its surface patterned by delicate curls of the Mandelbrot set, swirls fringed by swirls fringed by swirls in an unending pattern of ever more minute lace.

Following his gaze, the woman glanced back. “What is that?”

“A robot. It watches this staircase.”

She turned back to him. “Why does that make you angry?”

“Angry?” How had she known? “I’m not angry.”

“What does it do?” she asked.

“I’ll show you.” Jato strode forward and hauled his bulk onto the tenth step. Although he towered over the spacer, she seemed unperturbed, simply scooting over to let him pass. That self-confidence impressed him as much as her beauty.

As he approached the eleventh step, the globe whirred into his face. When he tried to push it away, it rammed his shoulder so hard he fell to one knee.

“Hey!” The woman jumped up and grabbed for him, as if she actually thought she could stop someone his size from falling over the edge. “Why did it do that?”

He stood up, brushing rock dust off his trousers. “As a warning.”

That’s when she did it. She smiled. “Whatever for?”

Jato hardly heard her. All he saw was her smile. It dazzled.

But after a moment, her smile faded. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He refocused his thoughts. “What?”

“You’re just staring at me.”

“Sorry.” He motioned at the globe. “It was warning me not to go past the city border, which crosses the cliff here.” Having the drones watch him up here was almost funny. As if he could actually escape Nightingale by climbing a staircase that grew geometrically.

“Why can’t you leave the city?” she asked.

He discovered he couldn’t make himself tell her, at least not yet. Why should she believe his story? Eight years ago, the Dreamers had showed up at his room in the Whisper Inn and locked his wrists behind his back with cuffs made from sterling silver Möbius strips. He had no idea what was happening until he found himself on trial. They convicted him of a murder that never happened and sentenced him to life in prison.

Supposedly, years of treatment had “cured” him, and he no longer posed a danger to society. So the Dreamers let him out of his cell, which had never been a cell anyway, but an apartment under the city. For a giddy span of hours he had thought they meant to send him home; if he was no longer dangerous, after all, why keep him under sentence?

He soon found out otherwise.

For the Dreamers who believed in his guilt, which was most of them, it would take a lifetime for him to atone. One of their most renowned artists, Crankenshaft Granite, had argued—with truth—that to Jato it would be almost as much a punishment to spend his life confined to Nightingale as to his apartment. But by making the city his jail, they showed their compassion for a criminal who had turned away from his violent nature. Jato saw why that logic appealed to the Dreamers, who for some reason had a driving need to see themselves as kind, yet who in truth considered all sun-dwellers flawed, deserving neither freedom nor friendship.

But he knew the truth. Crankenshaft’s motives had nothing to do with compassion. The only reason Jato had a modicum more freedom now was because it made Crankenshaft’s life easier.

Jato didn’t want to see that wary look appear on this woman’s face, the one spacers always wore when they learned his story. Not yet. He wanted to have these few minutes without the weight of his conviction pressing on them.

So instead of telling her, he pointed at his feet and made a joke. “This is where I live. These are my coordinates.”

“Your what?”

So much for scintillating wit, he thought. “Coordinates. This staircase is the plot of a non-linear step function.”

She laughed, like the sweet ringing of a bell. “Why would anyone go to all this work just to make a big plot?”

“It’s art.” He wished she would laugh again. It was a glorious sound.

“This is some art,” she said. “But you haven’t told me why your people won’t let you leave.”

His people? She thought he was a Dreamer? It wasn’t only that he bore no resemblance to them. Dreamers were gifted at both art and mathematics, neither of which he had talent for. Yet this beautiful woman thought he was both. He grinned. “They like me. They don’t want me to go.”

She stared at him, her mouth opening.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She closed her mouth. “What?”

“You’re just staring at me.”

“I—your smile—” She flushed. “My apologies. I’m afraid I’m rather tired.” She gave him a formal nod. “My pleasure at your company.” Then she turned and headed down the stairs.

He almost went after her, stunned by her abrupt leave-taking. But he managed to keep from making a fool of himself. Instead, he stood in the shadows and watched her descend the SquareCase.

When Jato turned into the underground corridor that dead-ended at his apartment, he saw a Mandelbrot globe waiting at the door. Given that he lived nowhere near Nightingale’s perimeter, only one reason existed for its presence. Crankenshaft had sent it. With Jato no longer confined to his apartment, Crankenshaft could have him brought wherever he wanted instead of the Dreamer having to come down here.

Jato spun around and ran, his boots clanging on the metal floor. If he could find a side passage too narrow for the globe to follow, he might evade capture. It was a stupid game Crankenshaft played; if Jato escaped the drones, Crankenshaft let him have the day off.

A whirring sound came from behind him. The drone hit his side and he stumbled into the wall, bringing up his arms to protect his face. An aperture opened on the robot and an air syringe slid out, accompanied by the hiss of its firing.

His view of the hall wavered, darkened, faded. . . .

Jato opened his eyes. A face floated above him, an aged Dreamer with eyes like ice. Gusts of wind fluttered her silver hair around her cheeks. He knew that gaunt face. It belonged to Silicate Glacier. Crankenshaft’s wife.

Crankenshaft was standing behind her. Tall for a Dreamer, he had a well-kept physique that belied his one-hundred and six years of age. Black hair covered his head in bristles. He had two-tone eyes, grey bordered by red, like old ice in ruby rings.

Jato spoke in a hoarse voice. “How long?”

“You have slept several hours,” Crankenshaft said.

“I meant, how long do you need me for?”

“I don’t know. We will see.”

As Jato pulled himself into a sitting position, Silicate stepped back, avoiding contact with him. He swung his legs over the stone ledge where he had been lying and looked around. Crankenshaft had chosen the big studio. The ledge jutted out of the west wall, an otherwise blank plane of grey stone. On the left, the south wall was a window looking over Nightingale, which lay far below. The east and north “walls” were holoscreens, sheets of thermoplastic that hung from the ceiling. Holos rippled in front of them, swaths of color that trembled as breezes shook the screens.

It always disoriented Jato, that wind. Moving air didn’t belong inside a house. For that matter, neither did Mandelbrot globes. But two floated here, one hovering behind Crankenshaft and another prowling the studio.

The major feature in the room was a round pool. A glossy white cone about two meters tall rose out of the water. A second cone stood next to it, its top cut flat in a circular cross-section. The three other cones in the pool were cut at angles, giving them elliptical, parabolic, and hyperbolic cross-sections.

“Circle today,” Crankenshaft said. Then he headed across the drafty studio to a console in the corner where the two holo-walls met.

Jato looked at Silicate and she looked back, as cool and as smooth as stone. Then she too walked away, leaving the studio via a slit in a thermoplastic wall.

A gust rumpled Jato’s hair and he shivered, wrapping his arms around his body. “Do you have a jacket?” he asked.

Crankenshaft didn’t answer, he just stooped over his console and went to work. So Jato waited, trying to clear out the haze left in his mind by the sedative.

A globe nudged his shoulder. When he stayed put, it pushed harder. “Flame off,” he muttered.

A syringe extended out of the globe.

Still intent on his console, Crankenshaft said, “It shoots a heat stimulant. A strong specimen such as yourself might tolerate it for ten minutes before going into shock.”

Jato scowled. Where did Crankenshaft come up with this sick stuff? He looked at the globe, at Crankenshaft, at the globe again. With Crankenshaft he used care in choosing his battles. This one wasn’t worth it.

He took off his boots and went to the pool. The knee-deep water was cool today, but at least no ice crusted the surface. He waded to the truncated cone and climbed up onto it, then sat cross-legged, hugging his arms to his chest for warmth.

“Move ten centimeters to the north,” Crankenshaft said.

Jato moved over. “Can you warm it up in here?”

Crankenshaft sat down at his console, concentrating on whatever he was doing. So Jato moved to the south side of the cone.

Crankenshaft looked around. “Move to the other side.”

“Turn on the heat,” Jato said.

“Move.”

“After you turn on the heat.”

Stalemate.

Reaching back to the console, Crankenshaft touched a panel. A globe whirred behind Jato and he heard a syringe hiss. Heat flared in his biceps, spreading fast, up his shoulder and down his arm.

“Hot enough?” Crankenshaft asked.

It was excruciating, but Jato had no intention of letting on how much it bothered him. He simply shrugged. “What will you do? Put your model into shock because he objects to freezing?”

A muscle under Crankenshaft eye twitched. He went back to work, ignoring Jato again. However, the room warmed and the burning in Jato’s muscles cooled. Either Crankenshaft had lied or else the drone had delivered an antidote with the poison, probably in a bio-sheath that dissolved after a few minutes in the blood.

Over the next few hours the wind dried Jato’s clothes. Silicate came in once to bring Crankenshaft a meal on a stone platter. Jato wondered about her, always attentive, always silent. Did she create her own art? Most Dreamers did, even those who worked other jobs. Silicate’s only occupation seemed to be waiting on Crankenshaft. But then, Jato doubted Crankenshaft would tolerate artistic competition in his own household.

Finally Crankenshaft stood up, rolling his shoulders to ease the muscles. “You can go,” he said, and left the studio.

Just like that. You can go. Get out of my house. Clenching his teeth, Jato slid off the cone and limped across the pool, sore from sitting so long. After coaxing his boots on under his wet trousers, he went to a door in the corner of the studio where the window-wall met one of the thermoplastic walls.

Icy wind greeted him outside. He stood at the top of a staircase that spiraled down the cliff Crankenshaft owned. The city glimmered far below, and beyond it ragged mountains stretched into the darkness. Millennia ago a marauding asteroid had struck the planet, distorting it into a blunt teardrop that lay on its side, its axis pointed at Quatrefoil, the star it orbited. Although Ansatz was almost tidally locked with Quatrefoil, it wobbled enough so most of its surface received at least a little sunlight. Night reigned supreme only here in this small region around the pole.

Crankenshaft’s estate was high enough to touch the transition zone between the human-made pocket of calm around Nightingale and the violent winds that swept Ansatz. Yet despite the long drop to the plateau, the staircase had no protection, not even a rail. Another of Crankenshaft’s “quirks.” After all, he never used these stairs.

Jato grimaced. When he came willingly, Crankenshaft always had a flycar waiting to take him home. Today he would have to go back inside and ask for a ride, a prospect he found as appealing as eating rocks.

So he went down the stairs, stepping with care, always aware of the chasm of air. Around and around the spiral he went, never looking around too much, lest it throw off his balance. He wondered how he would appear to someone down in the city. Perhaps like a mote descending a stone DNA helix on the face of a massive cliff.

The helix image caught his mind. It would make an intriguing sculpture. He could go to the library and find a text on DNA. It would have to be a holobook, though, rather than anything on the computer.

Before Jato had come to Ansatz, his computer illiteracy hadn’t mattered. As the oldest son of a water-tube farmer on Sandstorm, he hadn’t been able to afford web access, let alone a console. Although everyone here in Nightingale had access to the city web, it did him little good. However, he had figured out how to tell a console in the library to print books.

He doubted he would try the helix sculpture, though. Reading could only give information, not talent. One thing he had to say for Crankenshaft: the man was brilliant. Jato could never imagine him giving away his stratospherically-priced work for a Dream. Besides, what Dream would he find pleasant? Pulling wings off bugs, maybe.

Jato scowled. A few Dreamers high in Nightingale’s city government knew Crankenshaft had set him up. They framed him for a crime so brutal it would have meant execution or personality reconfiguration anywhere else. Imperialate law was harsh: an escaped convict fleeing into a new jurisdiction could be resentenced there for his crime. That often-denounced law was intended to ease the morass of extradition problems that arose as more and more planets came under Imperial rule. But it let Crankenshaft blackmail him; if Jato escaped Nightingale, he was subject to death or a brain wipe.

Crankenshaft’s work was known across a thousand star systems. He was a genius among geniuses, and on Ansatz that translated into power. Whatever he wanted for his art, he was given.

Including Jato.

II

Dream Debt

Jato lay in bed, unable to sleep. He had dimmed the lights until only faint images of sand-swept fields softened the walls, holoart he had created himself, memories of his home.

Even after eight years, he still found this room remarkable. He had grown up in a two-room dustshack his family shared with two other families. Here he had, all to himself, a bed with a quilt, a circular bureau, a mirror, a bathroom, and soft rugs for the floor. The Dreamers charged no rent and gave him a living stipend. His medical care was free, including the light panels and vitamin supplements his sun-starved body craved.

Tonight the room felt emptier than usual. He gave up trying to sleep and went to the bureau, a round piece of furniture that rotated. He removed his statue from the top drawer. He had come to Ansatz hoping for a miracle, to trade for a fabulous treasure. He had his own dreams then, ones he hoped to achieve by selling such a masterpiece: a farm of his own, a business, a better home for his family, well-deserved retirement for his parents, a wife and children for himself. A life.

He had never intended to make art. Still, living in Nightingale, how could a person deny the pull to create? The statue had taken years to finish and he kept it hidden now, knowing how lacking the Dreamers would find his attempts. He liked it, though.

To get the stone he wanted, he had climbed down windscoured cliffs below Nightingale, into crevices lost in the night-dark shadows. There he cut a chunk of black marble no human hand had ever before touched. Back in his rooms, he fashioned it into a bird with its wings spread wide, taloned feet beneath its body, supported by a stand carved from the same stone. Next he made clay copies of it. He spent several years cutting facets into the copies, redoing them until he was satisfied. Then he carved the facets into the statue and inlaid them with crystalline glitter.

Dreamers used elegant mathematical theories to design their creations. Jato knew his was simple in comparison. The geometry of the facets specified a fugue in four voices, each voice an aspect of his life: loss, of his home and life on Sandstorm; beauty, as in the stark glory of Nightingale; loneliness, his only companion here; and the dawn, which he would never again see.

Holding the statue, he lay down in bed and fell asleep.

The bird sang a miraculous fugue, creating all four voices at once. Jato held it as he ran through Nightingale. The pursuing Mandelbrot drone gained ground, until finally it whirred around in front of him. Fractals swirled off its surface and turned into braided steel coils. They wrapped around his body, crushing his chest and arms, silencing the bird. He reeled under the icy stars and fell across the first step of the SquareCase.

He wrestled with the coils until he worked his arms free, easing the pressure on the bird. It sang again and its voice rose to the stars on wings of hope.

The fractal coils fell away from his body. As Jato stood up, the spacer appeared, walking out of the shadows that cloaked the SquareCase. She toed aside the coils and they melted, their infinitely repeating patterns blurred into pools of glimmering silver. The bird continued to sing, its fugue curling around them in a mist of notes.

The spacer stopped only a pace away. Her eyes were a deep green, dappled like a forest, huge and dark. She brushed her fingers across his lips. Jato put his hand on her back, applying just enough to pressure to make the decision hers; stay where she was, or step forward and bring her body against his.

She stepped forward. . . .

The Whisper Inn was a round building, graceful in the night. Holding his bundle, Jato stood at its door, an arched portal bordered by glimmering metal tiles.

“Open,” he said.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. “Open.”

Swirling lines and speckles appeared on the door and a holo formed, an amber rod hanging in front of the door. A curve appeared by the rod and rotated around it, sweeping out a shape. When it finished, a vase hung in the air with the rod piercing its center. Soothing pastel patterns swirled on the image.

“Solid of revolution complete,” the door said. “Commence integration.”

“What?” Jato asked. No door had ever asked him to “commence integration” before.

“Shall I produce a different solid?” it asked.

“I want you to open.”

Silver and black swirls suffused the vase. “You must calculate the volume of the solid.”

“How?”

“Set up integral. Choose limits. Integrate. Computer assistance will be required.”

“I have no idea how to do that.”

“Then I cannot unlock.”

Jato scratched his chin. “I know the volume of a box.”

The vase faded and a box appeared. “Commence integration.”

“Its volume is width times height times length.”

Box and rod disappeared.

“Open,” Jato said.

Still no response.

Jato wondered if the Innkeeper had his door vex all visitors this way. Then again, Dreamers would probably enjoy the game.

“Jato?” the door asked.

“Yes?”

“Don’t you want to enter?”

He made an exasperated noise. “Why else would I say ‘Open’ ?”

Box and rod reappeared. “Commence integration.”

“I already did that.”

“I seem to be caught in a loop,” the door admitted.

Jato smiled. “Are you running a new program?”

“Yes. Apparently it needs more work.” The door slid open. “Please enter.”

Muted light from laser murals lit the lobby. As the floor registered his weight, soft bells chimed. Fragrances wafted in the air, turning sharp and then sweet in periodic waves.

The Innkeeper’s counter consisted of three concentric cylinders about waist height, all made from jade built atom-by-atom by molecular assemblers, as were most precious minerals used in Nightingale’s construction. The Innkeeper sat at a circular table inside the cylinders, reading a book.

Jato went to the counter. “I’d like to see one of your customers.” He knew the spacer had to be here; this inn was the only establishment in Nightingale that would lodge sun-dwellers.

The Innkeeper continued to read.

“Hey,” Jato said.

The Dreamer kept reading.

Jato scowled, then clambered over the cylinders. “The offworld woman. I need her room number.”

The Innkeeper rubbed an edge of his book and the holos above it shifted to show dancers twirling to a Strauss waltz.

Jato pulled the book out of his hand. “Come on.”

The Innkeeper took back his book without even looking up. A whirring started up behind Jato, and a Mandelbrot globe bumped his arm.

“I owe her,” Jato said. “She gave me a dream.”

That caught the Dreamer’s attention. He looked up, his translucent eyebrows arching in his translucent face. “You come with Dream payment?” He laughed. “You?”

Jato tried not to grit his teeth. “You know payment has to be offered.”

“She is in Number Four,” he said.

Jato hadn’t actually expected a reply. Apparently the unwritten laws of dream debt overrode even the Innkeeper’s distaste for talking to large, non-translucent people.

Old-fashioned stairs led to the upper levels. As Jato climbed, holoart came on, suffusing the walls with color. He glanced back to see the holos fade until only sparks of light danced in the air, mimicking the traces left by particles in an ancient bubble chamber.

No one answered when he knocked at Number Four. He tried again, but still no answer.

As he started to leave, a click sounded behind him. He turned back to see the spacer in the doorway, light from behind her sparkling on the gold tips of her tousled hair. She wore grey knee-boots and a soft blue jumpsuit that accented her curves. The only decorations on her jumpsuit were two gold rings around each of her upper arms. A tube trimmed each of her boots, running from the heel to the top edge of the boot, an odd style, but attractive.

“Yes?” she asked.

Jato swallowed, wondering if he had just set himself up for a rebuff. He tried to think of a clever opening that would put her at ease, perhaps intrigue or even charm her. What he ended up with was the scintillating, “I came to see you.”

Incredibly, she stepped aside. “Come in.”

Her room was pleasant, with gold curtains on the windows and a pretty rumpled bed that looked as if she had been sleeping in it.

Jato hesitated. “Did I wake you? I can come back later.”

“No. Now is good.” She motioned him to a small table gleaming with metal accents. Its fluted pedestal supported two disks, the upper joined to the lower along a slit that ran from its center to its rim, a style common in Nightingale. The only explanation Jato had ever extracted from a Dreamer was, “Riemann sheets.” He had looked it up at the library and found an opaque treatise on complex variable theory that apparently described how the sheets made a multi-valued expression into a mathematical function.

After they sat down, he set his bundle in front of her and spoke the formal phrases. “You gave me a dream. I offer you my work in return.”

She watched his face. “I don’t understand.”

“A beautiful dream.” He wondered if he sounded as awkward as he felt. “This is what I have to trade.” Pulling away the wrapping, he showed her the bird. Giving it up was even harder than he had expected. But it was a matter of honor: he had a debt and this was the only payment he had to give.

As she sat there staring at his life’s creation, his face grew hot. He knew the wonders she had seen in Nightingale. The bird was pitiful in comparison.

“It makes music,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t make the music but it tells you how to make it.”

She looked up at him. “Jato, I can’t accept this.” An odd expression crossed her face, come and gone too fast to decipher. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought it was awe. Then she said, “Regulations don’t allow me to accept presents.”

Through the sting of her refusal, he realized what she had said. “How did you know my name is Jato?”

“After we talked, I looked up your Ansatz records.”

He stared at her. Those records were sealed. That was the deal; as long as he did what Crankenshaft wanted, his records remained secret and he had his relative freedom on Ansatz.

Somehow he kept his voice even. “How?”

“I asked,” she said. “The authorities had to let me.”

Like hell. They were supposed to say No. Had his presence become so offensive that they decided to get rid of him despite Crankenshaft? Or maybe Crankenshaft no longer needed him.

Then it hit Jato, what else she had said. Regulations didn’t allow her to accept gifts. Regulations.

Of course. He should have recognized it earlier. The gold bands on her jumpsuit were no decorations. They denoted rank.

“You’re an ISC soldier,” he said.

She nodded. “An Imperial Messenger. Secondary Class.”

Jato stared at her. Secondary was equivalent in rank to colonel and “Messenger” was a euphemism for intelligence officer. He had almost asked a high-ranking spy-buster to smuggle him off Ansatz.

ISC, or Imperial Space Command, was the sole defense in known space against the Traders, whose military made a practice of “inviting” the settled worlds to join their growing domain. All settled worlds. Whether they wanted to join or not. The Traders based their economy on what they called “a benevolent exchange of work contracts designed to benefit both workers and the governing fellowships that hold their labor contracts,” one of the more creative, albeit frightening, euphemisms Jato had heard for slavery. The Imperialate had formed in response, an attempt by the free worlds to remain that way. That was why so many colonies, including Ansatz, had joined the Imperialate despite the loss of autonomy that came with ISC’s autocratic control.

He spoke with a calm he didn’t feel. “Are you going to turn me over to ISC?”

“Well, no,” she said. “I just wondered about you after you followed me up those strange stairs.”

Relief swept over him, followed by distrust, then resentment, then embarrassment. One of his few comforts on Ansatz had been his pleasure in creating the bird. Now every time he looked at it he would remember how she rejected it.

As he rose to his feet, an emotion leapt across her face. Regret? It was mixed with other things, shyness maybe, even a fear of rejection. It went by too fast for him to be sure.

She stood up. “May I request an alternate gift? Something that wouldn’t violate regulations?”

He had no alternate gifts. “What do you mean?”

“I’d like to see Nightingale.” She hesitated. “Perhaps you would show it to me?”

She wanted a guide? True, he was the best candidate; the Dreamers would never deign to offer such services. But most people would prefer no guide at all to a convicted murderer.

Of course his records said he was “cured.” Besides, rumor claimed Messengers had enhanced speed and strength. Perhaps she was confident enough in her abilities that she didn’t see him as a threat.

“All right,” he said.

“Well. Good.” It came again, her beguiling flash of shyness. “Shall we, uh, go?”

He smiled. “It would help if I had a name to call you.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course.” She actually reddened. “Soz.”

“Soz.” He gave her a bow from the waist. “My pleasure at your acquaintance.”

Her face softened into a smile. “And mine at yours.”

They walked down to the lobby in awkward silence. Outside, they strolled through the Inn’s rock garden, where tall lamps made shadows stretch out from human-sized mineral formations. The arrangement of rocks looked random, but it had an underlying order calculated from chaos theory.

As they followed a path toward the city proper, Jato tried to relax. Conversation had always been his stumbling block. In his adolescence, he had discussed it with is father while they were weeding a field.

“About girls,” he had said.

“What about them?” his father asked.

“You know.”

His father sat back on his heels. “Treat her right and she’ll treat you right.”

“Can’t talk.”

“Then listen.”

“Don’t know what ‘treat her right’ means.”

“The way you want to be treated.”

Jato thought of having a girl treat him the way he wanted to be treated. “What if we get into trouble?”

His father scowled. “Don’t.”

He had figured that his father, who became his father only a few tendays after he married Jato’s pregnant mother, would have had a more informative answer than that. “What if it happens anyway?”

“You see that it doesn’t.” He pointed his trowel at Jato. “You go planting crops, boy, you better be ready to take responsibility if they grow.” Lowering his arm, he looked across the field to where Jato’s mother was curing tubes by the water shack, her long hair brushing her arms, Jato’s five younger siblings helping her or playing in the dust. “Choose a place you value.” His voice softened. “A place you can love.”

Jato watched him closely. “Did you?”

He turned back, his face gentle now. “That I did.”

That was the extent of his father’s advice on women, sex and love, but it had held up well over the years. On Nightingale, however, he barely ever had the chance to talk to a woman, let alone go walking with one. So being with Soz felt odd.

Eventually the path became a boulevard. They ended up at a plaza in front of Symphony Hall, near the tiled pool. A lamp came on, bathing the pool in rosy light, and a fountain shot out of the water in a rounded arch. A gold lamp switched on, followed by a fountain with two arches, then a green lamp and three arches, and so on, each fountain adding smaller refinements to the overall effect. Altogether, they combined to create a huge blurred square. Sparkles of water flew around Jato and Soz and mist blew in their faces.

“It’s lovely,” Soz said.

Jato watched her, charmed by the way the rainbow-tinged mist haloed her head, giving her pretty face an ethereal aspect. She looked like a watercolor painting in luminous colors. “It’s called the FourierFount,” he said.

She smiled. “You mean like a Fourier series?”

“That’s right.” He restrained himself from blurting out how much he liked her smile. “The water arches can’t combine like true wave harmonics, but the overall effect works pretty well.”

“It’s unique.” She glanced down at his hands. “Jato, look. Your bird.”

He held up the statue and saw what she meant. Light from the fountain was reflecting off the glitter so that it surrounded the statue with a nimbus of rainbows.

She held out her hands. “May I?” He handed it to her, and she turned it this way and that, watching the shimmer of light on its facets. “What did you mean, that it makes music?”

“The angle of each facet defines a note.” He wondered if he even had the words to explain. Before composing the fugue, he had tried to learn music theory, but in the end he just settled for what sounded right. He played no instruments, nor could he make notes in his mind without hearing them first. He needed a computer to play his creation. The Dreamers steadfastly ignored his requests for web training, so he muddled through on his own, eventually learning enough to use one particular console in the library.

“Could I hear the music?” Soz asked.

Her request touched off an unexpected spark of panic. What if she scorned what she heard, the musical self-portrait he had so painstakingly crafted? “I can’t play it,” he said. “It needs four spherical-harmonic harps.”

“We can have a web console do it.”

He almost said no. But he owed her for the dream and playing the fugue would pay his debt. Going on a walk through Nightingale didn’t count; dream debt required a work of art created by the debtor.

Still he hesitated. “It’s a long way to the console I use.”

She motioned at Symphony Hall. “That building must have public consoles.”

He could imagine what she would think of a grown man who could barely log into the web of a city where he had lived for years. He paused for a long time before he finally said, “Can’t use them.”

“It has no console room?”

“It has one.”

“Can’t you link to your personal console from here?”

His shoulders were so tense, he felt his sweater pulled tight across them. “No personal console.”

She blinked. “You don’t have a personal console?”

“No.”

“Where do you work?”

“Library.”

“We can probably link into the library system from here.” She watched his face as if trying to decipher his mood. “I can set it up for you.”

So. He had run out of excuses. After another of their awkward pauses, he said, “All right.”

He took her to an alcove in Symphony Hall. Blue light filled the room and blue rugs carpeted the floor. The sculpted white shapes of the public consoles made a pleasing design around the perimeter of the room.

Soz sat on a cushioned stool in front of the nearest console. “Open guest account.”

When a wash of blue appeared the screen, Jato almost laughed. Only Dreamers would color-coordinate a room’s decor with its web console.

“Welcome to Nightingale,” the console said. “What can I do for you?”

“Library access,” she said. “Establish a root directory here, standard branch structure and holographics, maximum allowed memory, full paths to available public nodes, and all allowed anonymous transferral options.”

“Specify preferred nodes,” the console said.

“One to produce a music simulation, given a representation of the score and a mapping algorithm.”

A new voice spoke in mellow tones. “Treble here. Please position score and define algorithm.”

Soz glanced at Jato. “You can take it from here.”

He just looked at her. It had sounded like she was speaking another language. He hadn’t even known the computers she spoke to existed. “Take it where?”

She stood up and moved aside. “Tell Treble how to access your files.”

“I don’t have an account.”

“Everyone has an account.”

He had to make a conscious effort to keep from gritting his teeth. “I guess I’m no one.”

Soz winced. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.” She started to say more, then stopped. Glancing around the alcove, she said, “This room must be easy to monitor.”

“Probably.” Did she think the Dreamers were watching them? “The drones keep track of me.”

She nodded. Any questions or comments she had intended to make about his lack of computer accounts remained unsaid. Instead she indicated a horizontal screen on the console. “If you put the statue there and give Treble the mapping for the fugue, it will make a hologram of the bird, digitize it, transform the map, and apply the transform to the digitized data.”

Jato wished he were somewhere else. This was worse than the business with the door at the Inn. At least then he had been revealing his ignorance to an inanimate object. “I’ve no idea what you just said.”

Incredibly, she flushed, as if she were the one making an idiot out of herself rather than him. “Jato, I’m terrible at this. Ask me to calculate engine efficiency, plot a course, plan strategy—I’m a whiz, like you with your art. Put me in front of a handsome man and I’m as clumsy with words as a pole in a pot.”

He stared at her. A whiz . . . like you with your art. She thought he was a “whiz.” A handsome whiz, at that.

Jato smiled. “You’re fine.” He motioned at the console. “So I put the statue there?”

Her face relaxed. “That’s right. Then tell Treble how to figure out the notes.”

He set down the bird, and two laser beams played over it, making the glitter sparkle. When they stopped, he said, “Treble?”

“Attending,” the console answered.

“The angle a facet makes with the base of the bird specifies a note. It varies linearly: facets parallel to the base are three octaves below middle C and those perpendicular are three octaves above.” He touched the statue, his fingertips on its wings. “Each plane parallel to the base defines a chord and each facet touching the plane is a note in that chord. To play the fugue, start at the bottom and move to the top.”

“Is height a discrete or continuous variable?”

“Continuous.” Only a computer could do it. Human musicians would have to take planes at discrete heights. If the intervals between the planes were small enough, the human version approached the computer version. But the fugue only truly became what he intended when the distance between planes was so small that for all practical purposes it went to zero.

“Facets with one ridge are played by a spherical-harmonic baritone harp,” he said. “Two ridges is tenor, three alto, and four soprano. Loudness is linear with glitter thickness, from pianissimo to fortissimo. Tempo is linear with the frequency of the light corresponding to the glitter color.” He tapped a beat on the console. “Red.” He increased the tempo. “Violet.”

“Data entered,” Treble said. “Any other specifications?”

“No.” Then, realizing he would have to see Soz’s reaction to the music, Jato said, “Yes. Lower the room lights to fifteen percent.”

The lights dimmed, leaving them in dusky blue shadows. It was too dark to see Soz’s face clearly.

A deep note sounded, the rumbling of a baritone harp. After several measures of baritone playing alone, tenor joined in with the same melody, mellow and smooth. Alto came next and soprano last, as sweet as the dawn.

Treble shaped the music far more tenderly than the generic program he used in the library. Yes, that was it, the minor key there, that progression, that arpeggio. Treble had it right. At the bird’s arching neck, soprano soared into a shimmering coloratura. Notes flowed over them, radiant and painful, too bright to endure for long. The other harps came in like an undertow, pulling soprano beneath their deeper melodies. At the head of the bird, soprano burst free again, a fountain of sound.

Yes. Treble had it. Treble knew.

Gradually the music slowed, sliding over the outstretched wings above the bird. Finally only baritone rumbled in the glimmering wake of soprano’s fading glory. The last notes vibrated in the alcove and died.

Jato stood frozen, afraid to move lest it rouse Soz to reveal her reaction. Yet the silence was also unbearable. What did she think? That was him in that music, the vulnerable part, without barriers or protections.

Her head was turned toward the console, so he saw only her profile. A glimmer showed on her cheek. Something was sliding down her face.

He touched the tear. “Why are you crying?”

“It’s so beautiful.” She looked up at him. “So utterly sad and utterly beautiful.”

Beautiful. She thought his music was beautiful. He tried to answer, make a joke or something, but nothing came out. So he drew her into his arms and laid his cheek on top her head.

She didn’t pull away. Instead she put her arms around his waist and held him. The fresh scent of her newly washed hair wafted around him. Softly she said, “What place do you like best in Nightingale?”

“The Promenade.”

“Will you take me there?”

He swallowed. “Yes.”

III

The Giant’s Rib

Bathed in starlight, the west edge of the plateau dropped into the jagged immensity of the Giant’s Skeleton Mountains. Its crevices cut deep into the planet’s crust, the tormented remains of a planetoid impact that had brutalized Ansatz in a long-vanished eon. Spires jutted up like skeletal fingers on walls between the chasms.

Natural bridge formations tried to span the kilometers-deep fissures, but most spans were incomplete, their broken ends hanging in the air.

The plateau itself claimed one of the few unbroken bridges. The Promenade. It rose up from the plateau’s southern corner, spanned its length, and ended high in the northern cliffs. Two kilometers long and averaging only two meters wide, the bridge curved out from the plateau over a great chasm. Spires on the chasm walls supported it with columns of rock.

The Dreamers had tooled the Promenade’s upper side into a path, giving it meter-high retaining walls on both sides. They laid down a courtyard at its southern base, with undulating lines enameled into the geometric design of gilded tiles.

As Jato and Soz crossed the courtyard, wind grabbed his jacket and tossed her curls around her face. She said something, but he couldn’t hear her over the blustering wind, so he leaned down. “Say again?”

Her breath tickled his ear. “It’s exhilarating.”

“It’s even stronger on the Promenade.”

“Beat you there!” She took off and sprinted up the bridge, leaning forward against its steep cant. Laughing, he tried to catch her, but she ran like a rocket.

They raced the entire kilometer to the apex. At the top, Soz threw out her arms and spun around, her hair whipping about her head. She spoke and the wind kidnapped her words. When Jato shook his head and pointed to his ears, she shouted, “How far to the bottom?” Then she leaned over the wall, staring into the void below.

“Three kilometers!” He pulled her back to safety turning her around, his bird pressed against her back, his pulse beating hard as the bridge vibrated in the rushing gales. She looked up at him with a flushed face. The wind, the night, the danger—it brought her alive. Without stopping to think, he pulled her into an embrace.

Sliding her arms around his neck, she drew his head down into a kiss. He returned the favor with pleasure, making up for eight years of solitude. He couldn’t believe this, that she wanted him. Who would have thought it?

Jato paused. Why did she want him? Lifting his head, he looked down at her. He was trapped on Ansatz for life and they both knew she would soon leave. What was this, take advantage of the love-starved convict, then go back to her life where she didn’t have to worry about him?

Soz watched his face, her eyes alternately visible and hidden as the wind threw around her hair. She touched his cheek with fingers as gentle as the smile that kept emerging and hiding behind those glorious curls. Jato decided the “why” didn’t matter. He wanted to tell her things, how good she felt, how lovely she looked, but he couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t sound clumsy. So instead he kissed her again.

The bridge’s vibrations were increasing, making it pitch like the deck of a sea-ship. It gave a particularly inspired heave and knocked Soz and Jato apart, separating them as if it were their chaperon. They stumbled back from each other, both flailing their arms for balance. Jato laughed and Soz spread her arms wide as if to address the Giant’s Skeleton itself with her protest.

Then something on the plateau caught her attention. She went back to the wall and peered toward Nightingale. “What are those?”

Looking out, Jato saw what she had noticed, the familiar statues, massive and tall, halfway between the plateau’s edge and the city. Sometimes those gigantic stone beasts were lit and other times they stood in the dark, like now, their mouths forever open in silent roars.

“Wind Lions,” Jato said. Coming to stand behind her, he put his arms around her waist. “Wind machines. If they were ever turned on, the cliffs would magnify their effect.”

“No wonder it’s so windy up here.”

He bent his head and spoke against her ear. “This is normal wind. The Lions aren’t on.”

When his breath wafted against her ear, she closed her eyes and sighed. With her back against his front, she raised her arms and slid them around his neck. The motion pulled up her breasts, making her nipples point at the stars. He kissed her ear, and she rubbed her head against his cheek like a cat. Then she murmured, a soft noise audible only with his head so close to hers, one of those sounds he had forgotten a woman made when she liked the way a man touched her. Maybe it was the eight years of solitude, but he couldn’t remember any woman on Sandstorm feeling this fine. He wondered how it would be to make love up here in the wild gales, three kilometers above the Giant’s chasm.

“Why not?” she asked.

He smiled. Why not indeed? “Why not what?”

She lowered her arms and turned in his embrace. “Why aren’t the Lions ever on?”

He tilted his head toward the courtyard. “Do you remember the design in the tiles back there? The curving lines?” When she nodded, he said, “It’s a plot of the vortices for a single-degree oscillator with an undamped torsional flutter.” He stroked her blowing curls back from her face. “Wind makes the Promenade twist. If it ever blew hard enough, the vortices in its wake around the bridge would drive a self-induced resonance until the Promenade tore itself apart.”

“What would ever possess them to set it up like that?”

Jato smiled. “Because they’re crazy.” As he bent his head to kiss her, the bridge gave a violent shudder and threw them to the side. They stumbled along the wall, lurching from side to side as they struggled to regain their footing. It didn’t work; they finally toppled over and hit the walkway with a thud.

“Hey!” Soz laughed, struggling to wriggle out from under Jato’s bulk. “It’s mad at us.”

“I’ve never seen it this windy.” Jato managed to get up to his knees, but when Soz tried to do the same, the agitated bridge knocked her over again. She finally succeeded by moving with an unnatural speed, as if she had toggled a switch that activated an enhanced mode of her body. They knelt there face to face, Jato holding her shoulders, she with her hands braced against his chest. The Promenade kept moving, more than he had ever felt it do before, rippling almost. It moaned in the assault of air as if the Giant were waking from his mountainous grave.

Soz wasn’t smiling any more. “The Lions are blowing.”

He couldn’t believe it. “That’s impossible. The Dreamers consider this art. They would never destroy it.”

“The whole bridge is shaking. It doesn’t feel stable.”

They stared at each other. Then they scrambled to their feet and took off running for the northern cliffs. The cliffs were closer than the courtyard, but even so they had nearly a kilometer to go.

Suddenly the bridge lurched like a string shaken by a mammoth child. Flailing.

Then it came: a great booming crack. Thunder roared as if a great mountainous rib was tearing away from the Giant’s skeleton. The bridge convulsed and they sprawled forward, slammed down onto the path. Rolling onto his side, Jato grabbed Soz and they held on to each other while the universe convulsed around them.

Within seconds the frenzied gyrations of the bridge eased. They managed to sit up, hanging onto each other while they stared back along the way they had come.

Meters away, the broken end of the Promenade hung in the air.

For one endless instant they stared at the jagged remains of that break. The shuddering edge shook off a chunk of itself, and the boulder dropped into the void below, hurtling into the shadows.

Carefully, so very carefully, they got to their feet and backed away, taking each step as if they were in a mine field. Only when they were well away from the break did they turn.

And then they ran.

The Promenade groaned in the onslaught of wind. They sped through a universe of wailing gales and convulsing rock, racing toward the shadowed bulk of a mountain that seemed an eternity distant.

Finally, mercifully, they were almost there. A few more steps—

A meter away from safety, the bridge pitched under their feet and slammed them against the wall. Stars wheeled past Jato’s vision as he flipped over the barrier. He grabbed at the air, at the rock, anything—

With a wrenching jolt, he yanked to a stop. He had caught a projection and was hanging from it, his body dangling against the outer side of the Promenade. He scrabbled for a toehold, but the bridge was shaking too much to let him get purchase. Far below, the chasm waited.

His hands began to slip.

“Jato!” Soz’s voice was almost on top of him. She had fallen lengthwise on the wall, with one leg hanging over the edge.

“Below you!” he shouted. His hands slipped again.

As she grabbed for him, he lost his grip. She caught one of his wrists—and the force of his falling yanked her off the wall. They dropped, dropped, dropped—

And smashed into ground. Soz landed on top of him with an impact that nearly broke his ribs. She rolled off and kept rolling, scrabbling for a handhold. He clutched her upper arm, but it jerked through his grasp, then her elbow, her lower arm, her wrist—and he locked hands with her, clutching in desperation while they slid downhill. He struggled to stop their plunge, but his fingers just scraped over stone.

Then he caught a jutting piece of rock and held on hard, his body straining with Soz’s weight. A scratching came from below—and she let go of his hand.

“Soz, no!” He grabbed at the air. “Soz!”

“It’s all right.” Her strained voice came from below him. “You slowed me down enough so I could stop on a ledge. We’re on a shelf in the cliff, under the Promenade.”

“How can you tell? It’s dark.” Even the starlight was muted below the bridge.

“Got enhanced optics in my eyes,” she said. He heard more scrabbling, and then she was pulling herself up beside him.

So they went, climbing the cliff centimeter by excruciating centimeter. Soz reached the landing at the end of the Promenade and stood up, her body silhouetted against the stars. He climbed up next to her, half expecting the ground to crumble. But they were solidly on the mountain now, at the top of a staircase that wound its way through the mountains down to the plateau.

They descended in silence. Gradually the wind eased, until it was no more than a whisper of its earlier violence.

Finally Soz said, “Someone knew we were up there.”

“The drones.” Jato wondered if Crankenshaft had set alarms in the city computer web to alert him when anyone looked at records of the trial. Whoever had set the Wind Lions against them would be desperate now, knowing they had to complete what they started lest Soz escape and report back to ISC.

“I hadn’t intended to get involved here,” Soz said. “I was going to wait until I got back to headquarters to recommend they send an investigator.”

Investigator? Jato stiffened. If ISC got into this, he could be retried in an Imperial court. “Soz, why? I’m serving the sentence they gave me.”

She spoke quietly. “To find out why someone went to so much trouble to trump up that phony murder charge against you.”

That threw him. Really threw him. Crankenshaft had been meticulous in setting up the evidence, specifically to fool people like Soz.

It was a moment before he found his voice. “How did you know it was false?”

She snorted. “I saw the holos of that kid you supposedly killed. He was hanging around the port docks, watching a ship unload cargo.”

“ ‘That kid’ was a computer creation. He never existed.”

“I know.”

“But how?”

She motioned toward the starport. “In several holos you can see the ship he’s watching. It’s a Tailor Scout, Class IV. Eight years ago those Tailors were using non-standard flood lamps to light their docking bays. Kaegul lamps. Advertised as ‘the next best thing to sunlight.’ They emitted ultraviolet light as well as visible.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

She shook her head. “Their UV component was too strong. It caused sunburns. So that model fell out of use fast. Only a few ships ever carried it.”

Jato whistled. “Dreamers have less melanin in their skin than most people. It makes them more susceptible to UV.”

Quietly she said, “Any Dreamer who spent as long under those Kaeguls as they claimed that boy did would have been broiled raw. Those records are beautiful, near perfect. Probably 99.9 percent of the people seeing them would have been fooled. But they’re still fakes.” Glancing at him, she added, “That’s not all.”

“What else?”

“Combat.”

“Combat?”

“See enough of it and you get good at recognizing the symptoms of shock.” She watched his face. “You. In every holo. You hardly said a word throughout that entire trial.”

The whole nightmare was a blur in his mind. “Nothing I said would have made any difference.”

“But why, Jato? Judging from how the Dreamers treat you—forgive me for saying it, but they act as if they don’t like having you around.”

“They think I’m revolting.”

“So why make you stay?”

His voice tightened. “Because of Granite Crankenshaft.”

“What is that?”

“Not what. Who. A Dreamer. He wanted me to be his model. For life. To sit for him with nothing in return but the ‘honor’ of living here. I told him no. I thought he was crazy.”

She stared at him. “He framed you for murder because you wouldn’t be his model?”

“I don’t know why. He finds me as repulsive as everyone else here.” Jato spread his hands. “He used blackmail because it’s more effective than abduction. As long as I cooperate, he won’t call in the Imperial authorities.”

“All because he wants to paint your picture?”

“Not paint. Holosculpture. It’s on his web. I’ve never seen what he’s doing.” He exhaled. “The stakes are high, Soz. His sculptures bring in millions. A few have gone for billions.”

She drew him to a stop. “This Crankenshaft—does he have glittering hair?”

“I don’t know. It’s too short to tell.”

“Black?”

“Yes.”

“How about his eyes?”

“Grey, with red rings.”

“Bloodshot?”

“No. The irises have red in them.”

She blew out a gust of air. “This is making more sense.”

“It is?”

“The Traders established this colony.”

It wasn’t her comment that surprised him, but how she said it, as an accepted fact rather than a long-debated theory the Dreamers vehemently denied. The Traders were a genetically engineered race distinguished by red eyes, and black hair with a distinctive shimmering quality. Their creators had only been trying to engineer for a higher pain tolerance, but the work produced an unplanned side-effect: Traders felt almost no emotional pain either—they had no compassion.

A race with no compunction about hurting people could do a lot of damage. Fast. When they began to spread the stain of their brutality across the stars, the colonized worlds had two choices: submit to them or join the Imperialate. As far as Jato knew, no one had ever willingly chosen the Traders.

There were those who claimed the Dreamers descended from a group of Trader geniuses morally opposed to their own brutal instincts. They manipulated their genes to rid themselves of those instincts and produced their translucent coloring as an unexpected side-effect. It led them to settle on Ansatz in the forgiving dark, where they traded the fruits of their genius for dreams, in penance for the sins of their violent siblings.

“It’s possible Crankenshaft carries throwback genes,” Jato said. “His wife, too. She’s like ice.”

Soz considered him. “You realize that except for your eyes and the relative dullness of your hair, you could pass for a Trader.”

He stiffened. “Like hell. I can trace my family—”

“Jato.” She laid her hand on his arm. “No one would ever mistake you for a Trader. It’s the Dreamers’ problem, not yours. They evolved themselves into a mild people, rejecting their heritage. Your large size, dark hair, and muscular build may stir memories they can’t deal with. It’s probably why your appearance bothers them.”

A strange thought, that. It would never have occurred to him that perhaps he repulsed the Dreamers because he reminded them of themselves.

She peered down the stairs, though they were too far up to see much except the lonely circle of light from a lamp at the bottom. “Who do you think activated the Wind Lions?” She turned back to him. “Are we up against the city government or this Crankenshaft? Or both?”

He considered. “Most city officials don’t believe I was set up. Those few involved with the set up would be more subtle, use a scenario easier to pass off as an accident. This is Crankenshaft’s style. He would go for drama and make it look like I planned it, some rape-murder-suicide thing.”

“Charming man,” she muttered. “Stupid, though. ISC would never buy it. I have augmented strength and reflexes. You would more likely end up dead than me.”

“Even with the Promenade breaking?”

That made her think. “It would complicate things,” she admitted. She motioned at the plateau. “If he’s the one who turned on the Lions, those drones down there must be his.”

“Drones?” Jato swore and started back up the steps.

Soz grabbed his arm. “There’s nowhere to go that way.”

He stopped, seeing her point. They couldn’t go up, they couldn’t go down, and the chasm waited beneath them. Now was the time to find out what arsenal, if any, they had at their disposal. “What else can you do besides see in the dark?”

“I’ve a computer node in my spine with a library of combat reflexes.” She bent her arm at the elbow. “My skeleton and muscles are augmented by high-pressure hydraulics and powered by a microfusion reactor that delivers a few kilowatts. It gives me reflexes and strength two to three times greater than normal, as much as my body can sustain without overheating.”

“Can you stop the globes?”

“Three or four, I could handle. But there are nine there.” She looked down the stairs again. “They’re coming.”

He saw it now too, the Mandelbrot sparkle of globes revving into active mode. Their lights flowed upward in a fractal curve of luminance.

“Jato,” a voice said.

He nearly jumped. The voice came out of empty air: cool, impersonal, commanding.

“Come down here,” it said. “Bring the woman.”

As Jato’s adrenalin surge calmed, he realized it was only a globe transmitting the voice. “Go to hell, Crankenshaft.”

“You have twenty seconds to resume descending,” his tormentor said.

“Let her go and I’ll do what you want,” Jato said.

“Fifteen seconds.”

The globes continued up the stairs, whirring like a swarm of huge bugs. Ten steps away, five, two. A syringe hissed, and Soz feinted with a speed that blurred, kicking up her leg. Her heel smashed into a globe, and it spun out from the cliff in a spiral of glittering lights.

A second globe rolled in to fill the gap, a third came from the side, a fourth whirred behind Soz, and a fifth hung over them, its syringe pointing down like the cannon on a miniature battlecruiser. Jato and Soz kept moving; feint, dodge, feint, Soz using her augmented speed. Two globes collided in midair with the grating racket of ceramoplex crashing together.

It was only a matter of seconds before a syringe shot hit Jato in the chest. The area went numb almost instantly and the sensation spread fast. As his arms dropped like stones to his sides, he lost his balance and tumbled down the stairs, stars and mountains careening past his vision.

He had one final glimpse of Soz lying on her back on the stairs, pinned down by globes, before his head hit stone.

IV

Aurora

A high ceiling came into focus. After a while a thought surfaced in Jato’s mind. He was alive.

He sat up, favoring his bruises. He was alone in Crankenshaft’s studio. No, not alone. Soz lay on the other end of the ledge, eyes closed, her torso rising and falling with each breath. Relief rushed over him, followed by a Neanderthal impulse to go over, stake out his territory, and protect her from Crankenshaft. It wasn’t the world’s most logical response given she was an Imperial Messenger, but he had it just the same.

He wondered why she was still unconscious. Even his body contained nanomeds designed to repair and maintain it. An ISC officer probably carried molecule-sized laboratories.

As he got off the ledge, a clink sounded. Turning, he saw a chain with one end attached to a ring in the wall. Its other end fastened to a manacle around his ankle.

He gritted his teeth, wishing he could wrap the chain around Crankenshaft’s neck. At least the tether was long enough to let him reach Soz. That almost made him back off; he trusted nothing Crankenshaft did. But his instincts were still at work, conjuring up protect mate impulses, so he went over to her.

Crankenshaft had no illusions about Soz needing protection. Her wrists were manacled behind her back and also to a ring in the ledge. He had set her boots on the floor and chained her ankles to the ledge. For some inexplicable reason, he also put metal bands around her neck and waist. Jato leaned over to lay his palm on her forehead—

Her hand clamped around his wrist so fast he barely saw her move. He froze, staring as she sat up. It hadn’t been obvious from the way she had been lying, but the chain joining her manacles was broken.

He found his voice. “How did you get free?”

She dropped his hand, her face relaxing as she recognized him. “Nano-chomps. I carry a few hundred species.”

“You mean molecular disassemblers?”

“In my sweat.”

He stepped back. He had no desire to have voracious bugs in her sweat take him apart atom by atom.

“They can’t hurt you,” Soz said. “Each chomper disassembles a specific material. The ones I carry are rigidly particular, even down to factory lot numbers.”

He motioned at her manacled feet. “Wrong lot number?”

“Apparently so. Or else flaws in the molecular structure.” Leaning over, she rubbed her wrist against the chain attached to his ankle.

“Hey.” He jerked away his leg. “What are you doing?”

“They might work on yours.”

“You don’t think that’s dangerous, carrying bugs in your body that take things apart?”

“They aren’t bugs. They’re just enzymes. And they’re no more dangerous than being trapped here.”

He knew it was probably true, but even so, he was having second thoughts about his amorous impulses. People sweated when they made love. A lot.

“Jato, don’t look like that,” she said. “The chompers are produced by nodules in my sweat glands that only activate when I go into combat mode. Besides, they can’t take apart people. Our composition is too heterogeneous.”

He sat on the ledge, near her but not too close, and motioned at his still-chained ankle. “Wrong lot, I guess.”

“I guess so.” She tugged the manacle on her wrist, managing to slide it up about a centimeter. The skin on her wrist was more elastic than normal tissue, not a lot, but enough so she could drag it out from under the manacle. He saw what she was after, a small round socket in her wrist.

“You have a hole,” he said.

“Six of them, actually. In my wrists, ankles, lower spine, and neck.”

That explained the neck and waist bands. “What do they do?”

“Pick up signals.” She held up her arm so the socket faced the console across the room. “If I insert a plug from that node into this socket, it links the computer web inside my body to the console.”

That didn’t sound like much help. “The plug is there and you’re here.”

“That’s why consoles transmit infrared signals.” Her face had a inwardly directed quality, as if she were running a canned routine to answer him while she focused her attention elsewhere. “The sockets act as IR receivers and transmitters. Bio-optic threads in my body carry signals to the computer node in my spine. It processes the data and either responds or contacts my brain. Bio-electrodes in my neurons translate its binary into thought: 1 makes the neuron fire and 0 does nothing. It works in reverse too, so I can ‘talk’ to my spinal node.”

He suspected Nightingale was probably flooded with IR signals. “How can you stand so much noise hitting you all the time?”

“It doesn’t. Only if I toggle Receive.” Her full attention came back to him. “The signals do get noisy and it isn’t as secure as a physical link. But it’s enough to let me interact with a node as close as the one over there.”

“And?”

She made a frustrated noise. “This room ought to be bathed in public signals. But I’m getting nothing at all.”

He doubted Crankenshaft would cut himself off from the city. “Maybe he did something to you.”

“My diagnostics register no software viruses or tampering.” She paused. “But you know, my internal web is engineered in part from my own DNA. Maybe he infected it with a biological virus.” Without another word, she lifted her wrist and spit into its socket.

Dryly Jato said, “Insulting it won’t help.”

She smiled. “The nanomeds in my saliva may be able to make antibodies if there’s a virus loose in my biomech web.”

“Are you getting anything?”

“Nothing.” Several moments later she said, “Yes. A notice about a ballet.” Her concentration had turned inward again. “I still can’t link to the city system . . . but I think I can get into the node in that console over there.”

Jato stared at her. “Not a chance. That’s Crankenshaft’s private node. Everyone knows his security is unbreakable.”

A cold smile touched her lips. “Security is my game.”

A moment later she said, “I can call up his holosculpture of you if you want.”

Jato swallowed. She might as well have hit him with that ancient proverbial ton of bricks. “Yes. I want.”

She indicated the center of the studio. “That’s it.”

He turned—and almost gasped.

The air above the pool was glowing with a rainbow-hued mist. It drifted across the glistening white cones that stood in the water, like shadows made on outcroppings of rock by clouds obscuring a sun. This, from a man who had lived his entire life in the night. Holos of Jato appeared on every cone. On the tallest, the one with the circular cross-section, he sat with knees to his chest, shivering, his clothes and hair dripping. He was younger, eight years younger, only a husky teenager. His face cycled through emotions: rage, confusion, resentment.

An older Jato stood on the next cone, the one with its top cut off at a slant, giving it an elliptical cross-section. He remembered when he had modelled for it, how he stood for hours on a narrow shelf protruding from the surface. Crankenshaft had since removed the shelf and erased it in the image, so the Jato holo simply floated in the air, with red and blue clouds scudding across his face. He was shouting, fists clenched at his sides. No sound: just his mouth moving. With the play of light, it was hard to make out words, but he knew what they were. He had been cursing Crankenshaft in his native tongue.

The Jato by the parabolic cone was sitting, submerged to his hips in the pool. He trailed his hands back and forth in the water, a habit he had developed to cope with the boredom. He was kneeling by the hyperbolic cone, up to his waist in water. Crankenshaft had doctored the holo to make him look old. Ancient. His face was a map of age untouched by the biosculpting the rich used to sustain youth during their prolonged lives. Gusts blew brittle white hair around his head. Stooped, gnarled, decrepit: it was a portrait of his mortality.

That tableau remained frozen for a few seconds. Then all the Jatos stood up and began stepping from cone to cone, passing through each other while multi-colored clouds flowed across their bodies. Some raged, others shivered, others moved like machines.

Each figure split, becoming two Jatos, all continuing their strange march. They split again, the original of each quartet stepping from cone to cone while the others kept pace in the air. New images appeared like shadows, all different by just a small amount, creating a feathered effect. A younger one was crying. He remembered that day; he had told Crankenshaft about his family, how he loved them, how they must think he had died. Another Jato image was laughing. Laughing. Yet there were times he had laughed—even had civil conversations with Crankenshaft.

Holos of water augmented the pool, overlaid on the real water like multiple exposures: waves in impossibly sharp points, or serrated like a saw, glowing phosphorescence in red, purple, green, blue-green, gold, and silver. Gusts in the studio whipped the true water into peaks that added random accents to the holos.

The Jatos split again, along with their shadows. They all stopped and raised their hands, the motion feathered among the images, as if it portrayed multiple quantum universes, each projecting a future that diverged from the original. The image of a rainbow-hued waterfall sprayed over the figures, making them shimmer. But no blurring could hide the fury on those faces.

“Saints almighty,” Soz said. “It’s spectacular.”

Jato tried not to grit his teeth. “That’s why he’s so famous.”

“I can see why he wanted you for his model.”

“You can?”

She motioned at the holos. “You couldn’t get that purity of emotion—that fury—from a Dreamer. From most anyone. But from you, it’s perfect. Pure passion unadulterated by civilization.”

“Am I supposed to be flattered by that?”

Soz winced. “I didn’t mean—” She stopped, staring at the sculpture. “Jato, look at your eyes.”

“That would be a feat.” But he knew what she meant. He studied the images—and when he saw it, he nearly choked. Crimson. Ruby hard and ruby cold. The eyes on each image had turned red. The hair was changing too, going from dark brown to crystalline black. He couldn’t believe it. Crankenshaft was making him look like a Trader.

He stood up, his fists clenching at his sides. “I’ll kill him.”

“It’s guilt,” Soz said. “And catharsis.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It’s all there,” she said. “The guilt the Dreamers feel, knowing the brutality their disowned kin have inflicted on a thousand peoples. And catharsis. Realizing the monster isn’t in them anymore. They’ve freed themselves, become Dreamers instead of Traders.”

“Then it’s a lie.” Jato was so angry he could barely get the words out. “For this ‘catharsis,’ Crankenshaft made himself into the very thing this is supposed to free him from. He’s made me look like what he hates in himself, what he can never get rid—” Jato stopped cold. Then he sat down again. “Oh, hell.”

Soz was watching his face. “What?”

“His greatest work. Face his demons and exorcise them. I’m the substrate.” It was suddenly all too obvious. “Get rid of me and he loses his inner devils.” Jato swallowed. “He’s going to kill me as part of the sculpture. It’s what he’s always intended.”

She stared at him. “That’s sick.”

Jato wished he had never pulled her into this. “If we had died on the Promenade, he would have worked with that footage. Now you’re onto him, so he has nothing to lose by bringing us here where he can tailor the work to his needs.”

“Actually,” a voice said. “You’re the one who is going to kill her.”

He looked up with a jerk. Crankenshaft was standing across the studio, by the console in the corner where the two holo-walls met. In one hand he held Jato’s bird sculpture; in the other, he had a laser carbine.

“A tragedy,” Crankenshaft continued, in the voice he used when he wanted to bait Jato, to drive his rage. “She came to the greatest artist alive hoping to inspire a dream. A beautiful woman, after all, has certain advantages. Unfortunately she arrived while you were here.” He sighed. “I should never have left you two alone. But who would have thought an Imperial Messenger would be in danger? Besides, Jato, we thought we had cured you.” He shook his head. “She was overconfident. An unguarded moment and you were able to bind her.” Lifting the bird, he said, “A blunt instrument you stole from me brought about her death. I was forced to kill you in self-defense.”

Jato stood up, an explosion working up inside of him. But before it let loose, Soz spoke in a mild voice. “You’re Granite Crankenshaft.”

Unease showed on their captor’s face. “You should have never pried into his records, Messenger.”

“Why would you claim Jato stole that bird from you?” she asked. “He made it.”

The tic under Crankenshaft’s eye gave a violent twitch. He shifted the sculpture, his hand gripped around it as if he held a weapon. “No one would ever believe he created a work as stunning as this, with that fugue. Only his exposure to me enabled him to do it. Me. He could never have done it by himself. So the credit belongs to me.”

Jato knew he should be infuriated that Crankenshaft would claim credit for his work. But the implication in his captor’s words so staggered him that the arrogance of the statement rolled off his back. He could hardly believe it. The great Granite Crankenshaft was threatened by his work.

Crankenshaft unhooked a cord from his belt and threw it at them. It landed at Jato’s feet, a leather thong with ceramoplex balls on each end that could have been anything from decorations to superconducting webs.

“Tie her hands behind her back,” Crankenshaft said.

Jato crossed his arms. “No.”

Crankenshaft touched a panel on the console. A giant globe crept through a slit in the thermoplastic wall and floated to the center of the studio.

“Non-linear dynamics and metapsychology,” he commented. “Do you know that with detailed enough initial conditions, you can model procreation? The correlation between the calculated results and an actual act that proceeded from those conditions is quite high.”

Jato scowled. “What are you talking about?”

“Sex,” he said. “Establish the initial scene well enough and you can model the rest with amazing accuracy.”

“Go to hell,” Jato said.

“Tie her hands.”

“No.”

“Commence protocol,” he said.

Three syringe guns slid out of the globe. Jato didn’t duck fast enough, but it didn’t matter: none of the shots were aimed at him. Soz moved in a blur, but she couldn’t go anywhere with her ankles chained to the ledge. One shot missed her, but judged from her reaction, the other two hit home. She jerked as if she had been struck and her entire body tensed.

“What are you doing?” Jato shouted at Crankenshaft.

“Jato, it’s all right,” Soz said. “I’m fine.”

“It’s a clockwork venom,” Crankenshaft told her. “Even your meds can’t adapt enough to deal with it.”

She said nothing, just focused her attention on him with an unsettling intensity.

“What’s a clockwork venom?” Jato asked.

Soz glanced at him. “The name comes from clock reactions.” Although she sounded cool, sweat was beading at her temple. “Combine certain chemicals under proper conditions and they cycle through a series of reactions. In human blood, clockwork venoms undergo a cycle, each step producing a different poison.”

“Can your nanomeds fight it?” Jato asked.

Crankenshaft answered. “Even sophisticated meds have trouble with complicated cycles. This one has hundreds of steps, all with varying duration lengths and side reactions that change from cycle to cycle. It’s a brilliant work of chemistry.” He gave Jato an appraising look. “You’ve felt one poison in the cycle. Last time you were here. Perhaps you recall?”

Jato remembered all right. It had burned like hell.

“The others have different effects,” Crankenshaft observed, as if Soz were a lab experiment. “Nausea, muscle stiffness, dizziness, pain. She’ll start vomiting soon. Eventually she will die.”

Soz remained calm, but sweat was running down her temples. When she wiped at it, the motion looked mechanical, as if she had let the hydraulics in her body take over.

“As soon as her hands are bound,” Crankenshaft said, “I’ll give her the antidote.”

“Jato.” She spoke quietly. “Do what he says. Please.”

There was no mistaking the strain in her voice. Jato grabbed the thong off the floor and wrapped it around her wrists. The broken lock mechanism on her manacles felt warm, probably from the energy released when her chompers ate it. He tied the thong loosely around her wrists, making no attempt to knot it. But the ceramoplex balls activated and yanked the cords tight, binding her wrists and then locking into each other.

“Leather,” Crankenshaft said.

Jato straightened up. “What?”

“In molecular terms, it’s complex,” he said. “More heterogeneous than, say, manacles. Not as strong, but a logical backup when dealing with disassemblers.”

Jato gritted his teeth. How did Soz stay so cool? She just watched Crankenshaft, intent and quiet. Crankenshaft took a ring with two mag-keys off his belt and threw it to them. As the keys hit the floor near Jato’s foot, a syringe on the globe hissed. Soz moved like an automaton, trying to duck, but the shot hit her anyway.

“That had better be the antidotes,” Jato said.

“The red key unlocks your ankles,” Crankenshaft said. “Gold unlocks hers.”

After Jato freed their ankles, Soz moved stiffly, swinging her legs off the ledge.

“Go to the pool,” Crankenshaft said. “Both of you.”

“No,” Jato said.

“Don’t make it harder on her than necessary,” Crankenshaft said. “I can calculate a lot of what I need, but I’ll achieve better results with genuine images of the two of you to work from.”

Jato stayed put. “I won’t rape her and I won’t kill her. You can doctor holos to make me look like a Trader, but nothing can make me act like one.”

Crankenshaft’s voice hardened. “Go to the pool. Otherwise, I’ll pump her so full of clockwork venom she’ll beg you to kill her.”

With no warning, Soz moved. Fast. Dropping to one knee by her boots, she whipped out her hands, shreds of leather flying away from her wrists. She yanked the “decorative” tubes off her boots and brought them up, one in each hand, liquid shooting out from both. One stream splattered over the drone, creating clouds of gas. The other hit Crankenshaft’s carbine and splashed into his face. He shouted, dropping the laser as he covered his face with his hands. When the gun hit the ground, it shattered like porcelain.

The Mandelbrot globe hissed and a shot from its air-syringe hit Jato in the neck. In a bizarre blur of motion, Soz threw her boots. They hurtled through the air and smashed into the globe, shattering its outer shell where the liquid from her cylinder had doused it. The whole assembly crashed to the floor, its innards breaking apart on the stone. Blinking and humming, the debris moved in twitches as it began to reassemble itself.

“Smash the components!” Soz yelled, sprinting across the studio. She moved like a puppet, her body under control of hydraulics rather than muscles and bones.

As Jato strode over to crush the remains of the drone, he saw Crankenshaft lower his hands, revealing a face covered with burns. In the same instant that he grabbed for a gun on his belt, Soz reached him. She brought her hands up with eerie speed and hit him under the chin, snapping back his head. He flew over backward, crashing to the ground. His head hit the floor and he lay still, breathing but unconscious.

“Soz, no!” Jato raced forward when she jerked up her leg. He collided with her as her foot came down, and they staggered to the side, enough to make her miss Crankenshaft. Her foot hit the floor with a teeth-jarring impact that would have crushed the Dreamer’s chest.

Jato gulped in a breath. “No killing.”

She turned to him like a machine, no emotion on her face. It was hard to believe this was the same woman he had kissed on the Promenade.

Then her expression became human again, as if she had reset herself. She exhaled. “He’ll live.” Grimly she added, “We might not. Are you all right?”

A familiar burning was spreading in his neck and torso. “I took a shot of venom. Did he give you an antidote?”

“No. More venom.” She went to retrieve her boots and their tubes. “My meds are trying to synthesize an antidote, but it’s hard to do when their target keeps changing.”

“We better hurry.” He grabbed his bird off the console. “His node must have alerted the city and his other drones.”

She pulled on her boots. “I put locks on his system. It will take a few minutes for it to break them.” Her voice sounded strained. Labored.

As Jato turned toward the door across the room, his gaze raked the pool—and he froze.

The holosculpture was still evolving. It had spawned more and yet more Jatos, until they blended into a design of feathered motion. A superimage had formed, a fractal, its pattern repeating on a finer and finer scale. Superimposed on the fractal, a face was coming clear. A giant Trader face.

His face.

“No.” He spun back to the console.

“Come on!” Soz called.

He stabbed at the console. “We have to destroy that sculpture.”

“We have to go! We don’t have much time.”

“He stole my life.” Jato gave up on the computer and swung around to her. “He created a mirror of himself, but he put it on me. It’s like—like—” He slammed his palm against the console. “He’s a thief. Of my soul.” He pointed at the sculpture. “That’s me. No matter where I go or what I do, as long as that exists he owns me.”

Sweat was dripping down her face. “I can’t guarantee I’ll find all his backups.”

“If anyone can, it’s you.” He clenched his fists. “He owes me. And for him, losing his ‘masterpiece’ will be a punishment worse than dying.”

Soz strode to the console and went to work, making hieroglyphics ripple across its panels in garish displays. She didn’t waste time pulling out her wrist socket; instead, she hauled off her boot and set her foot on the console, showing no strain with the contorted position as she plugged a prong from the console into her ankle socket.

Seconds passed.

Longer.

Waiting.

“Got it!” Soz jerked out the prong. “Downloaded one copy into my internal memory for you. Erased everything else.” She yanked on her boot. “Now let’s go.”

They ran across the studio to the cliff door. As they stepped outside, into the blasting wind, she stared down the stairs. “No rail.”

Jato struggled to keep his balance, fighting the gales and his venom-induced dizziness. “I’ll go first. If I fall, I won’t hit you. You’re light enough so if you fall you probably won’t knock me off.”

“All right.” Her voice sounded thick.

He had expected her to insist on going first. His gut reaction ignored the obvious; she was part computer and machines worked on logic rather than heroics.

Clutching his statue, he started down the stairs. An abyss of air and rushing wind surrounded them, turbulent, violent. Step. Step again. He took it slow, halting when waves of dizziness hit.

Step.

Step again.

Scrapes came from above and he jerked his head up to see Soz lose her footing. Lunging for her, he lost his own balance and stumbled on the step, teetering over the void. Lurching back, he reeled to the step’s inner edge, where he fell to one knee and found himself staring down the shaft of air in the center of the spiral.

“Jato?” Soz rasped.

He took a breath, looking up to see her kneeling on the step above him.

“You all right?” he asked. She nodded and they got up, then continued their descent.

The wind was probably cold, but with the fever burning in his body he couldn’t tell. He moved in a haze of nausea and dizziness.

Step.

Step again.

Step—

No step. He looked down. They had reached the bottom.

Soz made a strangled sound and sagged against his back, grabbing him around the waist with both arms to keep from falling. Turning, he put his arm around her for support.

They walked around Nightingale, far enough outside the city to let darkness cloak them. His legs strained to run but he held back, not only because his poisoned body couldn’t keep such a pace but also because it would draw attention. A couple strolling arm-in-arm along a romantic path was one thing; two people running was another.

He motioned at the tubes on her boots. “What’s in those things?”

“Liquid nitrogen.” She sounded hoarse. “With disassemblers to boost its effect. It freezes what it hits and the chompers eat it. They’re less specialized than the ones in my body, which makes them more dangerous, but they dissolve after exposure to air.”

“How did you free your hands? Do the chompers in your sweat eat leather after all?”

“No.” She grimaced. “Mine are far too specific. Anything general enough to take apart a material as heterogenous as animal hide would probably take apart our hides too.” She showed him the broken chain on her manacle. “Feel.”

He ran his finger along the jagged edge. “It’s sharp.”

“So was the part on the ledge. I rubbed the thong against it until it cut the leather.”

“No tech that time,” he said. “Just brains.”

She smiled wanly. Sweat soaked her collar and she walked stiffly, her legs controlled by the hydraulics inside her body.

The starport was so small it had no terminals, just a gate at the airfield entrance. As they neared it, two Mandelbrot globes rolled out to intercept them. Jato tried to dodge, but the one headed for him easily compensated for his evasive actions. It slammed him in the chest and he stumbled backward, then recovered and sprinted to the side. As the globe followed, he doubled back to run around it. The ploy worked with Crankenshaft’s drones on days he programmed them for slower responses, to make the chase “entertaining.” Jato doubted this one belonged to Crankenshaft, though; after what had happened, his would go for the kill.

This globe caught him—and rammed his head. As he fell, patches of light punctuated his vision and loud noises buzzed in his ears. With his statue cradled against his chest, he hit the ground and groaned. As he rolled away from the whirring demon, he caught a glimpse of the aircontrol tower. Lights were coming on inside it.

They had run out of time.

Then Soz said, “Eat it, fractal.”

A stream of liquid arched into view, bathing the drone in a shower of glistening drops. The globe reoriented on Soz like a giant ceramoplex balloon. As it went after her, she tried to feint, but she lost her balance and fell to her knees. When the globe swooped in on her head, she jerked to the side. It hit her shoulder—and shattered, raining Mandelbrot innards all over her body. In seconds, she was kneeling in the midst of junk large and small, from both globes, lights blinking and components humming.

Soz and Jato stared at each other. Then they scrambled to their feet and sprinted for the airfield. Alarms were blaring, coming from the distant airtower and speakers along the field’s perimeter. As they ran through the gate, which was no more than a few bars that swung to one side, Jato saw a Jag starfighter out on the tarmac. It gleamed like alabaster, as much a work of art as any sculpture.

When they reached the Jag, its hatch dilated like a high-speed holocam. As soon as they lunged through the opening, it snapped closed. A membrane irised in the nose of the ship, revealing a cockpit. As Soz squeezed into the pilot’s seat, it folded an exoskeleton of controls around her like a silver-mesh glove. Jato stood behind her chair, hanging on to its back while his nausea surged.

“Neck and lower spinal nodes blocked,” an androgynous voice said.

“Ankles,” Soz said, intent on her controls.

While her hands flew over her forward controls, a robot claw pulled off her boots and a mesh enfolded her feet, plugging into her ankle sockets. After that Jato heard nothing; the ship was communicating directly with her internal systems.

Suddenly Soz spun around her chair and pulled down Jato’s head. He fell forward, grabbing the arms of her seat to catch himself. She kissed him hard, pushing her tongue into his mouth.

He jerked away. “Are you craz—”

“I’m giving you the antidote. In my saliva. My web figured it out and my meds made it.” She pulled him back into the kiss.

So he kissed her, while guns boomed from the port defenses and the ship shook. Although the Nightingale port claimed only a small arsenal, it could still do damage. He just hoped the Jag could protect itself while its pilot and her passenger took their medicine.

Then Soz pulled away from him and smiled. The cockpit elongated and a second chair rose from the deck. “Co-pilot’s seat,” she said. “You take.”

He slid into the seat, and a slender probe from it extended to his ear—in time for him to hear a voice shout, “Skyhammer-36, acknowledge!”

He nearly jumped out of the chair. Then he realized he was hearing Soz’s communications with the aircontrol tower.

“You are not cleared for take-off!” the voice said. “I repeat, you are not cleared for take-off.”

“Tough,” Soz said. Then she fired the rockets.

Jato knew a stealth craft like the Jag could come and go with barely a whisper—if that was what its pilot wanted. They took off in a thundering roar of rockets. For her parting salute to Nightingale, Soz blasted the holy hell out of that tarmac.

As acceleration pushed them into the seats, a holomap came on, showing Nightingale receding into the spectacular bones of the Giant’s Skeleton Mountains. The peaks withdrew until they were no more than wrinkles in the vast panorama of the world.

Gradually Jato’s mind absorbed the situation. He was free. Free.

Or at least, he thought he was free. “What happens now?” he asked.

Soz glanced at him. “I’ll take you to headquarters. You can clear your name.” She hesitated, a blush on her cheeks. “I can help out, if—if you would like.”

Her uncertainty floored him. He had seen her face death by Promenade collapse, clockwork venom, and snuff-art, all with remarkable composure. Yet asking if he wanted her to stick around made her nervous.

He smiled. “Yes. I would like that.”

Her face gentled. She glanced at the statue he still held. “I felt what it took for you to offer your sculpture to me. Thank you.”

“It’s not much.”

“It’s spectacular, Jato. Both the bird and the fugue.”

He swallowed, at a loss how to tell her how much her words meant. So instead he motioned at her holo display. “Soz, look.”

Together they watched the sun rise over the rim of Ansatz.

STEAMSHIP SOLDIER ON THE INFORMATION FRONT

Nancy Kress

Just before the plane touched down at Logan, Allan Haller gave one last check to the PID on the back of his tie-tack. Good. Intense vibration in the Cathy Aw icon, superintense in Suzette, and even Charlie showed acceptable oscillation. No need to contact any of them, that would save time. Patti and Jon, too their icons shivered and thrilled at nearly top speed. And three minutes till landing.

“My, look at what you have there,” said his seatmate pleasantly. A well rounded grandmotherly sort, she’d been trying to engage him in conversation since La Guardia. “What sort of gadget is that, might I ask?”

No, Allan almost said, because what ground could possibly be gained? But then he looked at her again. Expensive jacket, good haircut, Gucci bag. Certainly money, but probably not entrepreneurial-rich old women tended to safe and stodgy investments. Still, what could he lose? Two and a half minutes until landing, and speculative capital, as he well knew, was sometimes found in very odd places.

“It’s a PID-A personal-icon display,” he said to Grandma Money. “It shows the level of electronic interaction going on with my family-my wife Cathy here, my son and daughter on these two icons-and two of my chief business associates. Each of them is wired with a WIPE, a ‘weak interactive personal electronic field,’ in various items of clothing that communicate with each other through a faint current sent through their bodies. Then all interactions with other electronic fields in their vicinity are registered in their WIPES and sent wireless to each other’s PIDS. I can tell, for instance, by how much the Cathy icon is vibrating that she’s probably working at her terminal-lots of data going through her icon. Suzette is probably playing tennis-see, her icon is superoscillating the way WIPE fields do when they’re experiencing fast-motion physical interference, and Charlie here—”

“You send electric current through your children’s bodies?” Grandma Money sounded horrified.

“It isn’t dange—”

“All the time? And then you Big-Brother them? All the time?”

Allan flipped down the tie-tack. Well, it had been worth a skirmish, as long as the time talking to her would have been downtime anyway. With a slight bump, the plane made contact with the runway.

“Don’t they . . . well, I don’t mean to be rude, but doesn’t your family object to—” But Allan was already moving down the aisle toward the jetway, from the forward seat he’d had booked precisely because it was the first to disembark. By the time the other passengers were reaching for their overhead luggage, he was already in the airport, moving fast, talking into his phone.

“Jon, what have you got?”

“A third prospect. Out in Newton; the car company will do the max-efficient route. The company is Figgy Pudding, the product is Newssort. It goes through the whole Net looking for matches to key words, then compares the news items with ones the user has liked in the past and preselects for him-the usual statistical-algorithm gig. But they’re claiming 93 percent success rate.”

“Pretty good, if it’s true.”

“Worth a skirmish,” Jon said, in New York. “That’s all in Boston.” He hung up.

Allan didn’t break stride. “Figgy Pudding”—the cutesy name meant the talent was old, left over from the generation that could name a computer after a fruit and a communications language after a hot beverage. Still, some of those geezer geeks still had it. Worth a skirmish.

“Your car is waiting at these coordinates,” his wristwatch said, displaying them along with a route map of Logan. “Thank you for using the Micro Global Positioning System.”

Allan tacked through the crowd, past the fast-food kiosks, the public terminal booths, the VR parlors crammed with kids parked there while parents waited for flights. The driver, who had of course been tracking Allan through MGPS, already had the car door opened, the schedule revisions from Jon, the illax-effish route. No words were necessary. Allan sank into the back seat and unfolded his meshnet.

This was Haller Ventures’ latest investment to come to market. Allan loved it. A light, flexible cloth meshed with optic-fiber wires, it could be folded almost as small as a handkerchief. Yet it could receive as much data as any other dumb terminal in existence, and display it in more varied, complex configurations. Fast, powerful, keyed both to Allan’s voice and to his chosen tactile commands for max effish, fully flexible in interacting with his PID and just about every other info-device, the meshnet was everything high-tech should be. It was going to make everyone connected with Haller Ventures rich.

Richer.

“Jon message,” Allan said to the meshnet. “Display.” And there was the in formation about Figgy Pudding: stock offerings, annual reports, inside run-downs put together and run through the Haller investment algorithms with Jon’s usual efficiency. Nobody on the information front could recon better than Jon, unless it was Allan himself. Carefully he studied the Figgy Pudding data. Looking good, looking very good. “Five minutes until your first scheduled stop,” his wristwatch said. A second later, the phone buzzed, then automatically transferred the call to the meshnet once it verified that the meshnet was unfolded. Cathy’s icon appeared on the soft metallic surface.

“Cathy message,” Allan said. The driver, curious, craned his gaze into the rearview mirror, but Allan ignored him. Definitely no ground to be gained there.

“Hey, love,” Cathy’s voice said. “Schedule change.”

“Give it to me,” Allan said, one eye still on the Figgy Pudding projections.

“Suzette made it. She’s in for the Denver Preteen Semi-Final Skating Championship!”

“That’s great!” Allan said. Damn, but he had great kids. Although Charlie . . . “I’ll send her congratulations.”

“Good. But she needs to leave Tuesday, on a nine-twenty a.m. plane. I have to be in court in Albuquerque on the Darlington case. Can you see her off at the airport?”

“Just a sec, hon.” Allan called up the latest version of his schedule. “No can do. Patti’s got me in Brussels from Monday night to Tuesday afternoon, with a stop at a London biotech on the hop home.”

“Okay,” Cathy said cheerfully. She was always cheerful; it was one of the reasons Allan was glad she was his wife. “I’ll get a driver for her, and Mrs. Canning can see her off. Consider it covered. Are we still on for dinner and hanky-panky Wednesday?”

“Let me check . . . yes, it looks good. Five o’clock at the Chicago Plaza.”

“I’ll be there,” Cathy said. “Oh, and give Charlie a call, will you? Today?”

“What’s with Charlie?”

“Same thing,” Cathy said, and for just a moment her cheerfulness faltered.

“Okay,” Allan said. “Don’t worry.”

“You on your way to Novation?” Cathy of course received constant updates of his schedule, as he did of hers. Although she had fewer updates; even consulting attorevs as good as she was sometimes stayed in the same city for as long as three days. “Novation is the biorobot company, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Allan said. “Patti’s pushing it pretty strong. But frankly, I don’t have much faith in radical tech that makes this many extravagant claims. Promise the moon, deliver a rusty asteroid. I don’t expect to be impressed.”

“That’s my man. Make ‘em work for it. Love you.”

“Love you, too,” Allan said. The Cathy icon vanished from his meshnet.

“Two minutes until your first scheduled stop,” his watch said.

Perfect.

Allan was wrong. He might not have expected to be impressed with Novation, but, almost against his will, he was.

As soon as he entered the unprepossessing concrete-block building, he could feel the data rush. Vibrating, racing, dancing. Whatever made a place blaze on the very edge of the information front, this place had it.

His contact entered the lobby just as Allan did. On top of the moves. She was an Indian woman in her late thirties, dressed in khaki slacks and a red shirt. All her movements were quick and light. Her black eyes shone with intelligence.

“Allan. I’m Skaka Gupta, Chief Scientist at Novation.” Although of course Allan already knew that, plus everything relevant about her career, and she knew that he knew. “Welcome to our Biorobotics Unit.”

“Thank you.”

“Would you like a max-effish print-out of our current status?” A courtesy only; Novation’s official profile would have been supplied to his firm yesterday. With an update this morning, if anything had changed overnight. And she’d know he’d prefer the figures and projections put together by his own people, in which the official profile was only one factor.

“No, thank you,” Allan smiled. “But I am very eager to see your work directly.”

“Then let’s do that.” She smiled back, completely sure of herself. Or of her work. Allan hoped it was of her work; he could sniff genuine success here. It smelled like money.

“Let me babble about the basics,” Skaka said, “and you jump in with questions when you want to. We’re passing through the biolab now, where we build the robots. Or, rather, start them growing.”

Behind a glass wall stood rows of sterile counters, each monitored by automated equipment. A lone technician, dressed in white scrubs and mask, worked at a far counter. Allan said, “Let me test my understanding here. Your robot bodies are basic mass-ordered cylinders, with electro-field intercommunication, elevation-climbing limbs, and the usual sensors.”

“That’s right. We’ll see them in a minute-they look like upended tin cans with four skinny clumsy legs and two skinny clumsy arms. But their processing units are entirely innovative. Each circuit board you see here, in each clear box, is being grown. We start with textured silicon plate etched with logic circuits, and then seed them with fetal neurons, grown on synthetic peptides. The fetal tissue used comes from different sources. The result is that even though the circuit scaffolds are the same, the neurons spin out different axons and dendrites. And since fetal brains always produce more neurons than they ultimately need, different ones atrophy on different boards. Each processor ends up different, and so the robots are subtly different too.”

Allan studied the quiet, orderly lab. Skaka merely waited. Finally he said, “You’re not the only company exploring this technique.”

“No, of course not. But we’ve developed significant new variations-significant by several orders of magnitude. Proprietary, of course, until you’ve bought in.”

Until, not if. Allan liked that.

“The proof of just how different our techniques are lies right ahead. This way to the primate house.”

“Monkeys?” Allan said, startled. This had not been in the prereading.

Skaka, walking briskly, grinned over her shoulder. “P-r-i-m-e-E-i-g-h-t house. It’s a joke. Currently we have eight robots in each of two different stages of development. Both groups are in learning environments modeled on the closed-system forests once used with chimps. Follow me.”

She led him out of the lab, down a long windowless corridor. Halfway, Allan’s tie-tack beeped twice. “Excuse me, Skaka, is the men’s room—”

“Right through that door.”

Inside, Allan flipped over his tie tack. The PID icon for Charlie had stopped vibrating completely. Immediately Allan phoned his son.

“Charlie? Where are you?”

“What do you mean, where am I? It’s Friday, right? I’m at school.”

“In. . .”

“In Aspen.”

“Why aren’t you in Denver?”

“Not this week, Dad, remember?”

Allan hadn’t. Mrs. Canning’s tutorial schedule for the kids’ real-time educational experiences was complex, although of course Allan could have accessed it on his meshnet. Maybe be should have. But Charlie’s physical location wasn’t the issue.

“What are you doing in Aspen, son? Right now?”

“Nothing.”

Allan pushed down his annoyance. Also his concern. Charlie-so handsome, so smart, twelve years old-spent an awful lot of time doing nothing. Just sitting in one room or another, staring into space. It wasn’t normal. He should be out playing soccer, exploring the Net, teasing girls, racing bikes. Even reading would be more productive than this passive staring into nothing.

Allan said, “Where’s Mrs. Canning? Why is she letting you do nothing? We don’t pay her for that, you know.”

“She thinks I’m writing my essay about the archeological dig we did in the desert.”

“And why aren’t you writing it?”

“I will . . . look, Dad, I gotta go now. See you next week. Love you.”

“But Charlie—” The phone went dead.

Should he call back? When Charlie got like this, he often didn’t answer. Got like what? What was wrong with a kid who just turned himself off and sat, like a lump of bacon fat?

Nothing. Nothing was wrong with his son.

“Allan? Everything all right?” Skaka, rapping discreetly on the men’s room door. Christ, how long had Allan been staring at the motionless Charlie icon on his PID? Too long. The schedule would be all shot to hell.

“Fine,” he said, striding into the corridor. “Sorry. Now let’s see the Prime Eight House.”

“You’ve never seen data like this,” Skaka promised, and strode faster to make up for the lost time.

He never bad seen data like this.

Each of the two identical “learning environments” was huge, two point three acres, circled by a clear plastic wall, and furnished with gray platforms at various heights and angles, steps and ramps and potholes, mini-mazes and obstacles that could be reconfigured from outside the enclosures. The environments looked like monochromatic miniature-golf courses that had undergone an earthquake. In the first enclosure were eight of the tin-can robots, moving slowly and ponderously over the crazed terrain. Each was painted with a bright logo: “Campbell’s Tomorrow Soup . . . Chef-Boy-R&D . . . Lay’s Pareto Chips.”

“Programmer humor,” Skaka said. “This batch was only activated yesterday. See, they haven’t learned very much about navigation, let alone how to approach their task efficiently.”

“What is their task?” Allan said. Now they were getting to the maneuvers not covered in the prospectus.

“See those green-gray chips scattered throughout the environment? The robots are supposed to gather as many of those as they can, as fast as they can.”

Allan peered through the plastic. Now he could see the chips, each about the size of a small cookie, lying in holes, on railings, between walkways, under ramps. The closest robot, Processed Corn, reached for one with its long-ended “arm.”

It missed. The chip slid away, and the robot fell over. Trying to right itself, it thrashed too close to the edge of a large pothole and fell in, where it kept on thrashing. Allan laughed. “ ‘War is hell.’ ”

“What?” Skaka said.

“Nothing. How many chips have the robots gathered so far?”

“One.”

“And how long have they been at it?”

“Six hours. Now come with me to Prime-Eight Two.”

Allan followed her again. They passed Chef-Boy-R&D and Net-wiser Beer lammed up against each other. Each time one moved to the right to go around the other, the second robot did the same. They ended up deadlocked against the plastic wall, four spindly legs marching futilely against each other.

Skaka unlocked a door and led Allan onto a catwalk overlooking the second enclosure. Identical to the first, it also contained eight painted robots, this group all motionless.

“Watch,” Skaka said.

She pressed a button. A shower of gray-green chips fell from the ceiling, landing in holes, on railings, between walkways, under ramps. Immediately the robots sprang to life. They marched, clambered, searched. Allan’s watch tingled on his wrist, and his tie twitched. Even outside the enclosure, his electrical biofield registered the enormous amount of data surging through the air as the robots communicated with each other. Within minutes all the chips had been gathered into a pile and shoved through a slit in the enclosure. They fell in a shower onto the corridor floor.

“Jesus Turing Christ,” Allen said, inadequately. “Are you telling me this batch of robots learned to do that by themselves? That they had no additional programming over the first biobots?”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” Skaka said, in triumph. “Six minutes, forty nine seconds. They keep beating their own record as they get more and more efficient at the task. This batch has been learning for five weeks, two days.”

“Let me see it again.”

Skaka pressed the button to release more chips, which fell onto different places than before. The eight robots sprang into action. Allan noted that instead of each robot searching a discrete area of the enclosure, each seemed to go for a chip according to complex factors of proximity, relative altitude, difficulty of retrieval, and even, it seemed to him, differences in agility that must have stemmed from the different fetal neurons in their processors. More than once he saw a robot start toward a chip, then veer off to go for a different one, while another robot seized the first chip.

“That’s right,” Skaka said, eyeing Allan. “They’ve learned to increase efficiency by sharing knowledge. And they make cooperative decisions based, according to the mathematical analyses we’ve done, on a very detailed knowledge of their differences in capability. And they evolved all those techniques by themselves.”

Allan watched Hot Bytes Saisa race on its spindly legs to the slit in the wall and shove the chips through.

“Six minutes, thirty-four seconds,” Skaka said. “Allan, I’m sure somebody like you can see the breakthrough this represents in autonomous computer learning. It makes artificial intelligence-with everything that implies in terms of corporate or military systems-nearly within our grasp. Now, doesn’t that seem a potentially profitable investment for your venture capital firm?”

Allan watched the plastic chips shower over Skaka’s feet. To the victor belong the spoils.

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

After that, Figgy Pudding and Morrison Telecommunications were both anticlimactic. Figgy might be worth a small investment, just to establish a beachhead, but nothing major. Morrison Telecommunications was stodgy. Not anywhere near the front, not even really in the war zone. Same old, same old.

Allan flew to DC and spent the night at the newly renovated Watergate. Jon had booked him into two skirmishes tomorrow with labs doing government work, and Patti had added two briefing sessions with firms already using Haller Ventures money. While he was at dinner, he studied the info on each that she sent him. By dessert, the figures had changed once and the meetings for tomorrow changed twice.

Upstairs, Allan felt restless. There was nothing good on TV, not even with 240 channels. He couldn’t seem to concentrate on his favorite Net game, Battle Chess. Every time he moved a piece, the computer countered him with blinding speed. When be lost his lieutenant to the computer’s tank, which could move any number of squares through all three dimensions, Allan surrendered. It was a relief when Cathy called.

“Allan? How’d it go today?”

He told her about Novation-there was nothing he kept from Cathy. She was impressed, which cheered him a little. But then she said, “Listen, love, I’m going to have to reschedule our Wednesday rendezvous. I have the chance to go to Hong Kong after all.”

“On the Burdette case? Great!” he forced himself to say. Cathy had worked for this for a long time.

“I’m thrilled, of course. Lane is reworking my schedule. We’ll send it as soon as the snafus are out. Did you call Charlie?”

“Yeah. He’s still just sitting a lot. Honey, do you think we should get him, well, help?”

Cathy’s voice changed. “You know, I’ve been thinking that myself. Not that there’s anything really wrong with him, but just as a precaution. . ..”

“I’ll have Jon research psychologists,” Charlie said heavily. “Listen, do you think we could reschedule our rendezvous to—”

“Oops, gotta go, there’s Lane with another update on the Burdette case. God, me and international policy making! I can hardly believe it. Love you.” The Cathy icon vanished.

“Love you, too,” Allan said to the blank meshnet.

But there was no reason to wallow in gloom. He would call Suzette; his daughter was always a delight. Suzette, however, was not taking calls. Neither was Allan’s brother in Florida. His mother, her system informed him, was sailing in the Aegean and would return his call when she returned, unless it was an emergency. It was not an emergency. The icons on his PID all vibrated and shimmered, even Charlie’s, thank heavens. Allan went to bed.

The next day, he felt fine. Meetings, the schedule, the flow of data and money and possibility. God, he loved it. A prosthetic device, almost invisible, to enhance human hearing through 30,000 eps. A significant gain in surveillance-satellite image resolution. Another of the endless small advances in nanotech, rearranging atoms in what would someday be the genie-in-the-bottle of the telecommunications and every other industry.

At 6:18, while he was wrapping up the nanotech briefing, Skaka Gupta called. “Allan, I’m sorry to interrupt your day, but could you fly back here tonight?

There’s something you should see.”

Her voice sang with excitement. Allan felt it leap over the netlink, electrifying his own nerves. And it would avoid another empty evening in a hotel room. But he said with cool professionalism, “My schedule is rather full, Skaka. Are you sure that flying back to Boston will be worth my time?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, and at the tone in her voice, he called Jon to rearrange the schedule.

The robots in Prime-Eight One still struggled to find and retrieve chips. Chefboy-R&D lay on its cylindrical side like an overturned beetle, spindly legs waving desperately to right itself. Skaka, practically running toward Prime-Eight Two, didn’t even glance through the plastic fence.

“Look,” she said, outside the second enclosure. “Watch.”

But there was nothing to see. The eight robots stood motionless around the uneven terrain. A minute passed, then another. Allan started to feel impatient. After all, his time was valuable. He could be checking in with Jon, receiving information updates, finding help for Charlie, even playing Battle Chess All of a sudden, the robots began to move. They lumbered to roughly equidistant positions within the enclosure. A brief pause, and then the chips rained down from the ceiling. Immediately the robots swung into action. Within minutes, the chips had all been gathered. Unsweetened Intelsauce deposited them through the slit.

“Six minutes, fourteen seconds,” Skaka breathed. “The physical limitations will eventually limit any more gains in efficiency. But that’s not the point anymore. Allan, they’ve learned to anticipate when chips will fall, before they do. They anticipate tasks that haven’t yet been signaled!”

“On a regular schedule, you mean. The chips fall, say, every two hours—”

“No! That’s what’s so amazing! The chips don’t fall at completely random times, there’s a schedule, the same one we’ve used since the beginning, although I admit we interrupted it yesterday for your visit. The usual schedule has built-in variations around human factors like work shifts, staff meeting, lunch breaks. The bots have apparently learned it over time and are now anticipating with one hundred percent accuracy when chips will be released. They’re also anticipating the most probable places for the rolling and ricocheting chips to come to rest, given that the terrain changes daily but the chip-release points are fixed in the ceiling. Ever since last night, they’ve moved into max-effish gathering positions a few minutes before the chips fall!”

Allan stared at the tin-can robots, with their garish logos and silly names. Anticipatory task management, based on self-learning of a varied-interval schedule. In biochips. It could have tremendous potential applications in manufacturing, for maintenance machinery, in speeding up forecast software . . . His brain spun.

“Don’t you think,” Skaka said softly, “that this was well worth the trip back here?”

Allan kept his tone cool, although it took effort. “Possibly. But of course I have a number of reservations and questions. For instance, have you—” His phone rang, two beeps, a priority call. “Dad? Charlie. Did you know our neighbors in Aspen have been arrested?”

“Charlie, I’m pretty busy right now, I’m with a—”

“They’ve been arrested for terrorism. There are cops all over the place.”

Terrorism. Cops. Bombs, guns. What neighbors? Allan couldn’t remember meeting anyone in Aspen.

“Where’s Mrs. Canning? Let me talk to her. Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right,” Charlie said scornfully. “Mrs. Canning took Suzette to the ice rink.”

“Then here’s what I want you to do. just a minute. . .” Belatedly, Allan remembered Skaka, who was trying to look as if she hadn’t overheard. “Excuse me, Skaka, it’s my son. . ..”

“Of course,” Skaka said, turning to gaze away, into the robot enclosure. The backs of her shoulders, just a little too rigid, said, Why haven’t you got your personal life well enough arranged so it doesn’t interfere with what may well be the most important investment opportunity of the decade?

“Charlie, first call your mother and tell her what you just told me. Also Mrs. Canning. Then call a car and driver, and pack your things and Suzette’s and Mrs. Canning’s. Have the driver take you to the Denver apartment. I’ll have Jon or Patti okay the car bill and cancel the Aspen house.”

“But, Dad—”

“Charlie, just do it. I don’t want you in any danger!”

“Oh, okay.” Charlie sounded disgusted. Twelve-year-old bravado.

Quickly, Allan called Jon. Skaka’s shoulders were still stiff. Allan resented having lost the advantage. As in-control as he could manage, he said to Skaka, “My son. There’s been terrorist activity in what should have been a safe neighborhood. I had to get him out.”

Her eyes widened. “Of course. What kind of terrorist activity?”

It occurred to Allan that he hadn’t asked. He didn’t know the charges, the situation, the neighbors, themselves. They were only local; he spent so much time global.

“The under-control kind,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t pick up on the evasion. “And we can be out of there in half an hour. Charlie’s a good packer.”

Skaka smiled. “So is my daughter. We, too, have no fixed residence. I don’t know how scientists managed before disposable leases.”

“Neither do I.” Allan warmed to her again; she was making his lapse into civilian more forgivable. “What plan do you use?”

“Live America. Their Code Nine Plan: three-bedroom leases, no more than ten minutes from an airport, warm blue decor, level three luxury. They even include our choice of pet at each house. It suits my husband, daughter, and nanny just fine.”

“We’re a Code Eleven. Four bedrooms. We have two kids.”

Allan and Skaka smiled at each other, then looked away. That was the problem with talking about personal life: it interfered with the strategy. Reconnaissance scouts had to stay detached, keep moving, remain tense and alert. The information frontier was an unpredictable place.

Skaka said briskly, “My staff will be watching very closely whatever the bots incorporate next into their learning, if anything. Should another breakthrough occur, they’ll notify me and I’ll notify you.”

“Good,” Allan said. “Meantime, let’s talk about the breakthrough we already have. I’ve got some questions.”

“Shoot,” Skaka said, and her shoulders visibly loosened.

Allan spent the night on a sleeper plane to Singapore. Mrs. Canning settled the kids in the Denver apartment, although Suzette complained the ice-rink there wasn’t as good as at Aspen. She wanted to lease in Chicago, which “Coach Palmer said has a tenth-mega rink!” Allan said he’d think about it. Cathy called to postpone their romantic rendezvous until Sunday; her case was dragging on. Patti identified two more companies for Allan to check out, both on the far edge, both potential coups. One was in Sydney, the other in Brasilia. The Charlie icon on Allan’s PID sat motionless.

The Singapore company had developed what it called a “graciously serious approaching” to that perennial coming attraction, the smart road that would direct cars, freeing the driver to do other things besides drive. Allan had expected that his visit would result in hiring one of the independent consultants Haller Ventures used to evaluate automotive technology, but it didn’t even need that. Singapore wasn’t doing anything Allan hadn’t seen before. Not worth a skirmish. On to Sydney.

From the plane he called Charlie. “Son? Not much action in your PID icon.”

Totally vibrationless, for five straight hours, and not a time when Charlie could be expected to be asleep.

“No,” Charlie said neutrally.

Allan tried to keep his tone light. “So what ya doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Charlie—”

“Did you know that when Robert Fulton invented the steamship, at least three other guys were making the same thing at the same time?”

“Charlie—”

“Gotta go, Dad. Love you.”

“Three minutes till landing,” said his wristwatch. “MGPS coordinates for your car are displayed.”

“Allan!” Patti said. “Action in Tunis. Looks like a genuine outpost. Company is called Sahara Sun, and they manufacture solar panels. Stats follow. Also rerouting on tomorrow’s schedule.”

“Two minutes till landing.”

Allan closed his eyes. But when the plane stopped, he was the first one to spring up, grab his carry-on, deplane from the front row. In Jakarta.

No-Sydney. Jakarta was tomorrow.

Or the next day?

Sydney was fiber-optics with increased carrying capacity due to smaller-grain alloys.

Jakarta was medical technology, an improved electrocardiograph that could predict fibrillation by incorporating elements of chaos theory into the computer analysis of data. Eighty-one-point-three success rate.

So far.

Bombay was no good. Supposedly an important advance in holographic videoconferencing, but actually old, old, old stuff. Jon had slipped up.

Berne was briefing and inspection tour of an ongoing investment, currently in beta-testing phase. A Haller Ventures accountant and quality assurance expert met Allan there.

Milan was fascinating. The benchmark for parallel-systems processing was one trillion operations per second. The Italian techies had achieved it with half the hardware previously required. There was much noisy gesturing and an earthy Tuscany wine.

Tunis was robots in the desert. The entrepreneurs drove Allan onto the rim of the Sahara, jouncing in Rovers over miles of rocky sand to a sundrenched site where solar panels were being assembled by simple robots. The bots also assembled more of themselves. They separated ores from the desert sand for raw material, using solar power to create the high temperatures to do it: a selfperpetuating mechanical kingdom slowly spreading over the empty desert floor. The excess solar power was converted into electricity to sell, once cables were in place. A solid, conservative strategy. Allan ordered a tech-consultant evaluation immediately, including a climate projection for thirty years. Desert wars had been lost before to climate.

He caught a transatlantic flight home. The Brazilian engagement had been postponed. Cathy had gone to Los Angeles-the Tunis trip had once more scuttled their rendezvous-with Suzette, who had a major skating competition. Charlie was on a nature hike in Yosemite with the commercial edu-group Mrs. Canning subscribed him to. The leased apartment in Aspermo, Aspen had been canceled, and anyway it was Oakland this month because of Suzette’s competition schedule-would be empty.

The little Tunisian robots had looked like rectangular suitcases, not cylindrical tin cans. Nonetheless, Allan called Skaka Gupta from the transatlantic flight. She was in Berne. Allan rerouted himself to Boston anyway. He didn’t like coming home to a new leased place with no one else there.

At Novation he was met by a flustered young man, no more than twenty-three, in jeans, leather sweater, and the ubiquitous sneakers set with tiny flashing mirrors. Allan recognized the type: a software expert. Awkward, bright as hell, and secretly scornful of “bean counters.” No, that wasn’t the term anymore: “cashware clods.” Allan smiled icily and looked slightly bored.

“Paul Sanderson? Allan Haller. You’re going to give me Skaka’s pitch, right?”

Skaka had left no data for a new pitch, as far as Allan knew.

Paul Sanderson looked confused. “Yes . . . no, I mean, she didn’t . . . I was just going to show you what the bots can do now.”

“Fine, fine. But keep the jargon to a minimum.” A preemptive strike, with the force of an order. Sanderson would get either hurry or meek, unsure how his boss would want Allan treated.

He got meek. “Sure. Well, uh, this way.”

The robots in Prime-Eight One seemed to Allan slightly less uncoordinated, although they still wandered hopelessly. Campbell’s Tomorrow Soup lunged at a chip but missed it. Sanderson dawdled past the enclosure, peering through the plastic, fidgeting. Why? To cover his own edginess, Allan flipped over his tie and checked his PID.

The icons all vibrated so fast he could barely see they were there.

“You’ve created a superstrength data field here!” he exclaimed, and as Sanderson turned toward him with a grin of embarrassment, Allan understood. “You have, haven’t you? You’ve made the whole facility into a microwave field that lets the Prime-Eight Two bots interface directly with the Net. You retrofitted them with the communications software to do that.”

Sanderson nodded sheepishly. “I know regs say I should have warned you before you stepped into the field, but it’s not dangerous in such short exposure, really it’s not. And your own corn devices will return to normal functioning just as soon as we “I’m not concerned about either my devices or my health!” Allan snapped. “But Skaka promised to keep me abreast of any major changes in the research!”

“Well, there haven’t really been any,” Sanderson said. “Although we’d hoped . . . but so far, nothing has changed. The bots just go on anticipating the chip-release schedule and—”

“Is Prime-Eight One wired to the Net, too? Or aren’t you going to tell me that, either?”

Sanderson looked shocked. “No, of course it’s not wired. If we don’t do it at exactly the same point as we did this group, we’d compromise the research design!”

“As opposed to compromising your investors’ confidence,” Allan snapped. “Fine. Tell Ms. Gupta to call me when she returns. And please be advised that I retain the right to bring in my own evaluators here, since I’m obviously not being told everything voluntarily.”

“Mr. Haller, please don’t think that because—”

“That’s all,” Allan snapped, turned, and left.

Back in his car, he asked himself why he was so angry. He owned a piece of Novation, yes, but he owned pieces of a lot of outposts where the front shifted abruptly and unpredictably. That was the nature of fronts. So why was he so upset?

He didn’t know. And there was o time to think about it. His next flight left in forty-two minutes.

Just enough time to study the information for tomorrow’s 6:30 breakfast meeting.

Cathy and Allan finally connected in New York; she had an unexpected re-route in her schedule. As he entered the elevator, Allan felt his chest tighten. Ten days since he’d last seen his wife! And oh, bow he’d missed her . . . and how he loved the giddy excitement of their reunions. Surely couples who were together all the time couldn’t get this excited.

Nor was he disappointed. Afterward, lying together on the big hotel bed, dreamily watching the wall program shade from hectic red to cool soft blues (it must be keyed to their breathing), Allan felt utterly content.

Cathy, however, didn’t let him drift for long. “Honey, there’s something we need to talk about. It’s Charlie.”

Immediately Allan’s mood changed. He hiked himself up against the pillows. “How did he seem in Los Angeles?”

“Strange.” Cathy hesitated. “I know he’s on the edge of adolescence, trying his wings, some hostility to be expected blah blah blah . . . but he wasn’t hostile. He was just as nice to Suzette as ever, really thrilled for her when she won. And he wasn’t at all secretive with me. It’s just that he’s gone off in such strange directions in his personal interests. For instance, he talked a lot about the Age of Reason and its social implications.”

“Just a sec,” Allan said. He reached for the meshnet, crumpled with the rest of his clothes on the floor by his bed, and did a Quik-Chek. Age of Reason: an eighteenth-century period of great intellectual awareness and activity, characterized by questioning of authority, emphasis on the experimental method in science, and creative self-determination in arts, culture, and politics.

“I could have told you what it was,” Cathy said, nettled.

“I know.” Cathy was a lawyer; she would have gone into far more well organized particulars than Allan wanted. “But it’s just history, right? An interest in history doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, Charlie said something or other to me about Robert Fulton and the steamship. Maybe Mrs. Canning started a new school unit.”

“No, I checked. They’re still concentrating on earth sciences. But that’s not all. I accessed Charlie’s Twenty-Two-the personal-notes tablet, but only the unencrypted part, of course-and he—”

“He’s still using a Twenty-Two? Good Lord, that computer’s been obsolete for at least three months! I’ll send him a new one-there’s something much better coming out now.”

Cathy said acidly, “There’s always something much better coming out. But that’s not the point, Allan. What I found on Charlie’s tablet were lists of ‘ages.’ All the lists were subtly different, but there were dozens of them.”

“What do you mean, ‘ages’ ?”

“Stone Age. Iron Age. Age of Heroes. Age of Faith. Dark Ages. Age of Reason. Industrial Age. Space Age. Itiformatio Age. That one’s always last oil every list, presumably because we’re in it now. Dozens of different list’s!”

“Odd,” Allan said, because it was clear she expected him to say something. But, frankly, Cath, it doesn’t sound dangerous. So he’s wondering about history. That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Exhibit Three: When I asked him about the lists, he didn’t get angry that I’d been snooping in his tablet. Instead, he looked at me in that intense way he has, not moving a single facial muscle-you know how he is-and said, “Mom, how do we know that our family is really information-front warriors, and not really just homeless people?’ ”

Allan considered. That did sound serious. “Did you ask him if he’s feeling that you and I travel too much? That we should make an effort to be all together more often as a family?” He and Cathy had worried this before.

“Yes. But he said no, that wasn’t it at all, his friends’ parents were just the same. So I asked him what was it, and he only said, “When it’s steamship time, it’s steamship time,’ and sank into one of those motionless trances of his. Allan, I couldn’t get him to even answer me for half an hour, no matter what I did. It’s like he was someplace else, sitting right there in front of me!”

Allan gazed out the window. Far below, the New York traffic sounds hummed dimly, reassuringly. Allan said slowly, “I got the names of two good child psychologists, one in Denver and one in San Francisco.”

“Well, that won’t do a lot of good, since we’re not going to be in Oakland after a few more weeks. We’re all leasing in Kansas City for the Shephard trial. Can’t you take the trouble to memorize our schedule?”

After a minute she added, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Allan said. “I know you’re worried about Charlie, too. Listen, I’ll find a psychologist in . . .” he blanked for a moment-“Kansas City.”

“Okay.” Cathy smiled wanly, then clung to him. He could feel the tension in her bare back.

Charlie had always been such an easy kid. Suzette had been the temperamental one. That’s why they were concerned, Allan told himself; it was all relative. Still, for Charlie to just sit and go into a trance where he didn’t even answer people . . . that couldn’t be normal, could it? To be so cut off?

Why, he wouldn’t even be tuned into the Net. Anything could develop, and Charlie wouldn’t even know it!

Allan held his wife tighter. “I’ll re-route to see him tomorrow.”

Re-routing wasn’t easy. Neither Jon nor Patti were pleased. Jon had to go himself to check out bone-marrow scanning in Raleigh. The director of a firm making low-cost orbiting solar panels in Dallas wouldn’t be available for another two weeks if Allan missed that appointment, because the director would be in Tokyo. Videoconferencing, the director said sniffily, was not an acceptable substitute. Allan told Patti to tell the director to go to hell. He got a flight to the new apartment in Kansas City.

But then Paul Sanderson called from Novation. Skaka Gupta must again be somewhere else. “You said . . . I mean, you seced to indicate last time you were here, Allan . . . uh, Mr. Haller . . . that if something noteworthy happened with the bots you wanted to see it right away, so—”

“And something has? Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t be worse. Can you describe the development to me?”

“Oh, sure,” Sanderson said, with such relief in his voice that Allan decided he better go to Novation himself after all. The data smelled important. If he took a flight almost immediately to Boston, even flying standby if he had to . . . shit, he hated flying standby, if only developments in transferring people could keep up with innovations in transferring data-if he flew standby, and then could book a flight getting him to the Kansas City lease by at least midnight . . . “Never mind explaining. I’ll be there this afternoon.”

“Okay,” Sanderson said unhappily. “We’ll be expecting you.”

We. Him and the robots? Did Sanderson identify with them that much?

Maybe; engineer types never seemed to have any real life. Just endless tinkering with software, in the same subroutines, same location, same days.

Suddenly Allan was hit with a memory. So vivid, so visceral, it almost seemed as if he no longer stood in the middle of a frantic metropolitan airport but instead was in the cool woods behind the house where he’d grown up, lying on his back on a carpet of pine needles. Billy Goldman, his best friend, lay beside him, both of them gazing upward at the sun-dabbled branches lacing the sky, smelling the sweet tangy pines, and Billy saying, “Why would anyone want to kiss a girl? Yuuccckkk!”

Now, where had that come from? Astonished, Allan shook his head to clear it. The mind was a strange thing. Tossing in the unrelated, the pointless, the unprofitable, the irrelevant. The distracting.

By the time he reached Boston, he had a headache no pills could touch.

He arrived at Novation in a foul mood. Sanderson met him nervously. “This way, Mr. Haller, we’ll go right to Prime-Eight Two, unless you want some, urn, coffee, or maybe—”

“No. Let’s go.”

Sanderson walked past Prime-Eight One without turning his head, but Allan stopped to study the robots. It seemed to him that they gathered their chips a little more smoothly, with less fumbling. He thought he even saw Processed Corn start forward, then swerve abruptly to miss crashing into Ocean Spray Cacheberries. They were starting to cooperate.

Prime-Eight Two, on the other hand, looked no different. The bots stood motionless on the complex terrain. Allan and Sanderson stood outside the enclosure, Sanderson fidgeting. “Chip fall in seven minutes. We don’t want to alter the schedule, you know, because even though then you wouldn’t have to wait, you wouldn’t really be seeing the exact same phenomenon we’ve been observing, so it isn’t—”

“I understand,” Allan said. “I can wait.”

But he bad to do something to fill in seven minutes, besides intimidating Sanderson. The heavy data fire meant he couldn’t access his mesh-Net. Instead, Allan repeated to himself the personal-notes tablet on his son’s Twenty-Two. He had accessed the tablet from the plane, telling himself that parental duty outweighed teenage privacy.

Age of Reason . . . Age of Reason . . . Information Age . . . Age of Reasoning . . . Enlightenment? No no no . . . Start again Stone Age Iron Age Bronze Age . . . no no NO NO it’s here someplace-TO DO: do sections 84-86 homework for Tuesday find three examples of igneous rock buy mom a birthday present . . . AGE OF REASON . . . The girl I saw in the park was not wearing underwear!!!!! . . . Age of Reason . . .

The robots behind the plastic wall lumbered into position, a moment before chips scattered from the ceiling. “They’ve learned to cut the anticipation pretty fine,” Sanderson said. Allan didn’t reply. He watched as the bots efficiently gathered all the chips. They seemed no faster than before, but no slower either. His meshnet had gone dead, presumably from the bots’ intense occupation of all available bandwidths to the Net. what exactly were they downloading? And what use were their biochip brains making of it? They didn’t need the Net’s vast libraries of information to gather chips efficiently. “Have you traced their download sources yet?”

“Some of them,” Sanderson said. He didn’t look at Allan, and his tone was evasive. “Watch-here it comes.”

But what “came” was . . . nothing. Literally. The robots dumped all the chips into their bucket, held in the graspers of Techs/Mex Chili, and then went motionless.

Sanderson began to talk very fast. “They’ve been doing that for twenty-four hours now. Gathering the chips the way they’re programmed to, but then just not depositing them through the wall. Nobody’s tinkered with their programming. They just . . . don’t do it.”

Allan studied Techs/Mex Chili. “What do your download-source traces show?”

“Not much,” Sanderson said, and Allan saw that his previous evasiveness had been embarrassment. Programmers hated not knowing what was going on in their programs. “Or, rather, too much. They’re apparently accessing all sorts of stuff, bits of everything on the Net, maybe even at random. At least, we haven’t found any patterns yet.”

“Umm,” Allan said noncommittally. “Squirt the full trace files to my office. Our people will look at it as well.”

“I don’t really have the authori—”

“Just do it,” Allan said, but for once the tone of command didn’t work. Sanderson looked scared but determined. “No, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. Not without Skaka’s say-so.”

Allan capitulated. “All right. I’ll call her myself.”

The young programmer looked relieved. Allan went on studying the quiet robots in their gaudy, silly paint, guarding their bucket of totally useless chips.

He couldn’t reach Skaka Gupta, so he left her a message to call him. His flight was delayed, and it was well past midnight before the car left him in front of the unfamiliar apartment building in Kansas City. No, not unfamiliar . . . it looked comfortingly like the one in Oakland, the one in Denver, the one in Aspen, the one in New Orleans, the one in Atlanta, the one in Raleigh . . . Mrs. Canning, alerted by the security system, let him in, then stumbled sleepily back to bed. He checked on Suzette, lying with both arms flung out at her sides and one knee bent, looking energetic even in sleep. Her hair had grown. Allan went next to the room Charlie always had. The boy stirred and mumbled as Allan entered. “Hi, Dad.”

“Hey, son.”

“What . . . what the reason?”

“The reason for what, Charlie?” Allan said gently, but Charlie was already back to sleep.

For several minutes, Allan watched him. Cathy’s light fine hair, Allan’s beaky nose, Charlie’s own individual chin. His son. On his tablet Allan had the name of a good child psychologist in Kansas City. Just don’t let it be neurological, he prayed formlessly. Not a neurological degeneration, not a brain tumor, not any problem they could do nothing about. Not my Charlie.

In his own bedroom, which he found located where his bedrooms always were, Allan couldn’t sleep. He reviewed the data for the next day’s meetings, both local so he could spend more time with Charlie. He did some sit-ups and stretches, and then he tossed in the new, familiar bed.

His son sitting and staring into space, unreachable by ordinary communication . . . The robots, refusing to turn in their chips . . . Tomorrow’s meetings, half the data for which he’d already forgotten . . . He didn’t really want to attend any of them anyway. Same old, same old . . . No, what was be thinking? None of it was the same old. It was all interesting new breakthroughs, beachheads on the newest fronts, and he was privileged to have a part in scouting them out . . . So why did he just want to stay huddled forever in this familiar apartment he’d never seen before? Damn, he hated it when he couldn’t sleep!

Groping beside his bed, Allan picked up his meshnet. Just holding it, unwrapping it, knowing all the information it put at his command, made him feel better instantly. At night the system didn’t signal his messages, merely stored them until he was done sleeping. Maybe there was something from Cathy.

But the only new message was from Skaka Gupta: Please call me at the lab. Important. The transmission time was only ten minutes ago. She had returned early to Boston, and was working very late.

“Skaka? Allan Haller. What’s going on?”

“Hello, Allan.” She sounded tired, as well she might. It was half past one. “I didn’t expect to hear from you till morning. But you might as well know now. We’ve had a temporary setback.”

“What kind of setback?”

“The robots have stopped functioning. No, that’s not true-they only look like they’re not functioning because they’re not gathering chips any more, as they were programmed to do. Instead, they’ve speeded up massively the amounts of data they’re pulling off the Net, and processing it in parallel non-stop. And they’re. . .” Her voice stumbled.

“They’re what?”

“They’re just huddled together in a ring, touching sides, their visual and auditory and infrared sensors shut down. Just huddled there, blind to their environment.”

He didn’t answer. After a minute, Skaka’s tone changed, and Allan realized for the first time that, despite her glossy competence, she really was a scientist and not an information-front soldier. No entrepreneur would have said, as she did next, “Allan-I know your firm is small, and that you’ve invested a lot of money in Novation. We can get another grant, but if this project flops, are we going to bring you down?”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ll be all right,” Allan said, which was true. He wasn’t ever insane enough to commit all of his resources to the same battle.

Commit all of his resources to the same battle . . . “That’s good,” Skaka said. “But it doesn’t touch the real issue. Allan, I don’t know what the bots are doing.”

“I do,” he said, but so softly she couldn’t hear him. Dazed, he managed to get out, “It’s late. Talk in the morning.” He cut the connection.

And sat on the edge of the bed, naked legs dangling over the side, staring at nothing.

Commit all of his resources to the same battle . . . That’s what they all had been doing. Many different skirmishes-solar panels, robots, high-resolution imaging, nanotech, smart autos-but all part of the same war. Stone Age, Bronze Age, Age of Chivalry, Space Age . . . Information Age. The only game in town, the scene of all the action, the all-embracing war. Uncle Sam Wants You!

But no age lasted forever. Eventually the struggle for bronze or gold or green chips-or for physical or digital terrain-would come to an end, just as all the other Ages eventually had. One succeeding the other, inexorable and unstoppable . . . When it’s steamship time, went the old saw, then nothing can stop the steamship from coming. And when the Age of Steam was over, it was over. Civilization was no longer driven by steam. Now it was driven by information. Gather it in, willy-nilly, put it in electronic buckets, give it to the owners. Or the generals.

Why?

What if they gave a war and nobody came?

That’s why the robots had stopped. That’s why they stood staring into space, only their brains active. They had at their command all the data on the Net, plus the complex-and-growing human neural circuits of their biochips. They were on top of it all, wired in, fully cued for the next stage. Not “how can we gather those chips with max-effish” but “rather why should we gather chips at all?”

Not the Age of Reason. The Reasons Age.

Things changed. One day steam, then steam is over. One day you can’t imagine wanting to kiss a girl, the next day you pant after it. One day you rely on your frontier neighbors for survival of your very home, the next day you don’t know your neighbors’ names and don’t have a settled home.

One day the mad rush after information and chips, the next day you sit and stare trance-like, far more interested in why you were interested in chips and information than in the commodities themselves. Not that the information itself wouldn’t continue to accumulate. It would. But the center was shifting, the mysterious heart of each Age where the real emphasis and excitement were. The front.

Charlie must sense it only dimly. Of course-he was a child, and he didn’t have Allan’s honed instincts. But that Charlie sensed it at all, the coming change, was probably because be was a child-this was the world he would inherit. Charlie would be an integral part of it. But integrated more slowly than the bots, which were riding the advance wave of the human Net, shock troops racing toward where the info-wars gave way to the next step in the long, long march of humanity’s development.

Which would be . . . what? What would the Reasons Age actually be like?

Allan shivered. Suddenly he felt old. He had evolved in the Information Age, had flourished in it . . . He was a natural as a scout on the high-tech front. Would there be a place for him when the guns grew more muffled, the pace slowed, and the blaze of battle gave way to the domestic concerns of the occupation? Could he adapt to whatever came next?

Then his confidence returned. Of course he could! He always had. The Information Age might end, the Reasons Age arise, but he could make it. In fact, there was probably a way to turn the whole thing to his own profit. All he needed was the right approach, the right allies, the right strategy. The right data. Tomorrow, he’d start to gather it.

Smiling, Allan slept.

THE PLANCK DIVE

Greg Egan

Greg Egan’s last three stories for Asimov’s, “Cocoon” (May 1994); “Luminous” (September 1995); and “Tap” (November 1995), have all made the Hugo award’s final ballot. The paperback edition of Mr. Egan’s near-future novel, Distress, and the hard-cover edition of his far-future novel, Diaspora, have just been released by HarperPrism.

Gisela was contemplating the advantages of being crushed—almost certainly to death, albeit as slowly as possible—when the messenger appeared in her homescape. She noted its presence but instructed it to wait, a sleek golden courier with winged sandals stretching out a hand impatiently, frozen in mid-stride twenty delta away.

The scape was currently an expanse of yellow dunes beneath a pale blue sky, neither too stark nor too distracting. Gisela, reclining on the cool sand, was intent on a giant, scruffy triangle hovering at an incline over the dunes, each edge resembling a loose bundle of straw. The triangle was a collection of Feynman diagrams, showing just a few of the many ways a particle could move between three events in spacetime. A quantum particle could not be pinned down to any one path, but it could be treated as a sum of localised components, each following a different trajectory and taking part in a different set of interactions along the way.

In “empty” spacetime, interactions with virtual particles caused each component’s phase to rotate constantly, like the hand of a clock. But the time measured by any kind of clock travelling between two events in flat spacetime was greatest when the route taken was a straight line—any detours caused time dilation, shortening the trip—and so a plot of phase shift versus detour size also reached its peak for a straight line. Since this peak was smooth and flat, a group of nearly straight paths clustered around it all had similar phase shifts, and these paths allowed many more components to arrive in phase with each other, reinforcing each other, than any equivalent group on the slopes. Three straight lines, glowing red through the centre of each “bundle of straw”, illustrated the result: the classical paths, the paths of highest probability, were straight lines.

In the presence of matter, all the same processes became slightly skewed. Gisela added a couple of nanograms of lead to the model—a few trillion atoms, their world lines running vertically through the centre of the triangle, sprouting their own thicket of virtual particles. Atoms were neutral in charge and colour, but their individual electrons and quarks still scattered virtual photons and gluons. Every kind of matter interfered with some part of the virtual swarm, and the initial disturbance spread out through spacetime by scattering virtual particles itself, rapidly obliterating any difference between the effect of a tonne of rock or a tonne of neutrinos, growing weaker with distance according to a roughly inverse square law. With the rain of virtual particles—and the phase shifts they created—varying from place to place, the paths of highest probability ceased obeying the geometry of flat spacetime. The luminous red triangle of most-probable trajectories was now visibly curved.

The key idea dated back to Sakharov: gravity was nothing but the residue of the imperfect cancellation of other forces; squeeze the quantum vacuum hard enough and Einstein’s equations fell out. But since Einstein, every theory of gravity was also a theory of time. Relativity demanded that a free-falling particle’s rotating phase agree with every other clock that travelled the same path, and once gravitational time dilation was linked to changes in virtual particle density, every measure of time—from the half-life of a radioisotope’s decay (stimulated by vacuum fluctuations) to the vibrational modes of a sliver of quartz (ultimately due to the same phase effects as those giving rise to classical paths)—could be reinterpreted as a count of interactions with virtual particles.

It was this line of reasoning that had led Kumar—a century after Sakharov, building on work by Penrose, Smolin and Rovelli—to devise a model of spacetime as a quantum sum of every possible network of particle world lines, with classical “time” arising from the number of intersections along a given strand of the net. This model had been an unqualified success, surviving theoretical scrutiny and experimental tests for centuries. But it had never been validated at the smallest length scales, accessible only at absurdly high energies, and it made no attempt to explain the basic structure of the nets, or the rules that governed them. Gisela wanted to know where those details came from. She wanted to understand the universe at its deepest level, to touch the beauty and simplicity that lay beneath it all.

That was why she was taking the Planck Dive.

The messenger caught her eye again. It was radiating tags indicating that it represented Cartan’s mayor: non-sentient software that dealt with the maintenance of good relations with other polises, observing formal niceties and smoothing away minor points of conflict in those cases where no real citizen-to-citizen connections existed. Since Cartan had been in orbit around Chandrasekhar, ninety-seven light years from Earth, for almost three centuries—and was currently even further from all the other spacefaring polises—Gisela was at a loss to imagine what urgent diplomatic tasks the mayor could be engaged in, let alone why it would want to consult her.

She sent the messenger an activation tag. Deferring to the scape’s aesthetic of continuity, it sprinted across the dunes, coming to a halt in front of her in a cloud of fine dust. “We’re in the process of receiving two visitors from Earth.”

Gisela was astonished. “Earth? Which polis?”

“Athena. The first one has just arrived; the second will be in transit for another ninety minutes.”

Gisela had never heard of Athena, but ninety minutes per person sounded ominous. Everything meaningful about an individual citizen could be packed into less than an exabyte, and sent as a gamma-ray burst a few milliseconds long. If you wanted to simulate an entire flesher body—cell by cell, redundant viscera and all—that was a harmless enough eccentricity, but lugging the microscopic details of your “very own” small intestine ninety-seven light years was just being precious.

“What do you know about Athena? In brief.”

“It was founded in 2312, with a charter expressing the goal of ‘regaining the lost flesher virtues.’ In public fora, its citizens have shown little interest in exopolitan reality—other than flesher history and artforms—but they do participate in some contemporary interpolis cultural activities.”

“So why have these two come here?” Gisela laughed. “If they’re refugees from boredom, surely they could have sought asylum a little closer to home?”

The mayor took her literally. “They haven’t adopted Cartan citizenship; they’ve entered the polis with only visitor privileges. In their transmission preamble they stated that their purpose in coming was to witness the Planck Dive.”

“Witness—not take part in?”

“That’s what they said.”

They could have witnessed as much from home as any non-participant here in Cartan. The Dive team had been broadcasting everything—studies, schematics, simulations, technical arguments, metaphysical debates—from the moment the idea had coalesced out of little more than jokes and thought experiments, a few years after they’d gone into orbit around the black hole. But at least Gisela now knew why the mayor had picked on her; she’d volunteered to respond to any requests for information about the Dive that couldn’t be answered automatically from public sources. No one seemed to have found their reports to be lacking a single worthwhile detail, though, until now.

“So the first one’s suspended?”

“No. She woke as soon as she arrived.”

That seemed even stranger than their excess baggage. If you were travelling with someone, why not delay activation until your companion caught up? Or better yet, package yourselves as interleaved bits?

“But she’s still in the arrival lounge?”

“Yes.”

Gisela hesitated. “Shouldn’t I wait until the other one’s all here? So I can greet them together?”

“No.” The mayor seemed confident on this point. Gisela wished interpolis protocol allowed non-sentient software to play host; she felt woefully ill-prepared for the role, herself. But if she started consulting people, seeking advice, and looking into Athena’s culture in depth, the visitors would probably have toured Cartan and gone home before she was ready for them.

She steeled herself, and jumped.

The last person who’d whimsically redesigned the arrival lounge had made it a wooden pier surrounded by grey, windswept ocean. The first of the two visitors was still standing patiently at the end of the pier, which was just as well; it was unbounded in the other direction, and walking a few kilodelta to no avail might have been a bit dispiriting. Her fellow traveller, still in transit, was represented by a motionless placeholder. Both icons were highly anatomical-realist, clothed but clearly male and female, the unfrozen female much younger-looking. Gisela’s own icon was more stylised, and her surface, whether “skin” or “clothing”—either could gain a tactile sense if she wished—was textured with diffuse reflection rules not quite matching the optical properties of any real substance.

“Welcome to Cartan. I’m Gisela.” She stretched out her hand, and the visitor stepped forward and shook it—though it was possible that she perceived and executed an entirely different act, cross-translated through gestural interlingua.

“I’m Cordelia. This is my father, Prospero. We’ve come all the way from Earth.” She seemed slightly dazed, a response Gisela found entirely reasonable. Back in Athena, whatever elaborate metaphoric action they’d used to instruct the communications software to halt them, append suitable explanatory headers and checksums, then turn the whole package bit-by-bit into a stream of modulated gamma rays, it could never have fully prepared them for the fact that in a subjective instant they’d be stepping ninety-seven years into the future, and ninety-seven light years from home.

“You’re here to observe the Planck Dive?” Gisela chose to betray no hint of puzzlement; it would have been pointlessly cruel to drive home the fact that they could have seen everything from Athena. Even if you fetishised realtime data over lightspeed transmissions, it could hardly be worth slipping one-hundred-and-ninety-four years out of synch with your fellow citizens.

Cordelia nodded shyly, and glanced at the statue beside her. “My father, really . . .”

Meaning what? It was all his idea? Gisela smiled encouragingly, hoping for clarification, but none was forthcoming. She’d been wondering why a Prospero had named his daughter Cordelia, but now it struck her as only prudent—if you had to succumb to a Shakespearean names fad at all—not to put anyone from the same play together in one family.

“Would you like to look around? While you’re waiting for him?”

Cordelia stared at her feet, as if the question was profoundly embarrassing.

“It’s up to you.” Gisela laughed. “I have no idea what constitutes the polite treatment of half-delivered relatives.” It was unlikely that Cordelia did, either; citizens of Athena clearly didn’t make a habit of crossing interstellar distances, and the connections on Earth all had so much bandwidth that the issue would never arise. “But if it was me in transit, I wouldn’t mind at all.”

Cordelia hesitated. “Could I see the black hole, please?”

“Of course.” Chandrasekhar possessed no blazing accretion disk—it was six billion years old, and had long ago swept the region clean of gas and dust—but it certainly left the imprint of its presence on the ordinary starlight around it. “I’ll give you the short tour, and we’ll be back long before your father’s awake.” Gisela examined the bearded icon; with his gaze fixed on the horizon and his arms at his sides, he appeared to be on the verge of bursting into song. “Assuming he’s not running on partial data already. I could have sworn I saw those eyes move.”

Cordelia smiled slightly, then looked up and said solemnly, “That’s not how we were packaged.”

Gisela sent her an address tag. “Then he’ll be none the wiser. Follow me.”

They stood on a circular platform in empty space. Gisela had inflected the scape’s address to give the platform “artificial gravity”—a uniform one gee, regardless of their motion—and a transparent dome full of air at standard temperature and pressure. Presumably all Athena citizens were set up to ignore any scape parameters that might cause them discomfort, but it still seemed like a good idea to err on the side of caution. The platform itself was a compromise, five delta wide—offering some protection from vertigo, but small enough to let its occupants see some forty degrees below “horizontal.”

Gisela pointed. “There it is: Chandrasekhar. Twelve solar masses. Seventeen thousand kilometres away. It might take you a moment to spot it; it looks about the same as the new moon from Earth.” She’d chosen their coordinates and velocity carefully; as she spoke, a bright star split in two, then flared for a moment into a small, perfect ring as it passed directly behind the hole. “Apart from gravitational lensing, of course.”

Cordelia smiled, obviously delighted. “Is this a real view?”

“Partly. It’s based on all the images we’ve received so far from a whole swarm of probes—but there are still viewpoints that have never been covered, and need to be interpolated. That includes the fact that we’re almost certainly moving with a different velocity than any probe that passed through the same location—so we’re seeing things differently, with different Doppler shifts and aberration.”

Cordelia absorbed this with no sign of disappointment. “Can we go closer?”

“As close as you like.”

Gisela sent control tags to the platform, and they spiralled in. For a while it looked as if there’d be nothing more to see; the featureless black disk ahead of them grew steadily larger, but it clearly wasn’t going to blossom with any kind of detail. Gradually though, a congested halo of lensed images began to form around it, and you didn’t need the flash of an Einstein ring to see that light was behaving strangely.

“How far away are we now?”

“About thirty-four M.” Cordelia looked uncertain. Gisela added, “Six hundred kilometres—but if you convert mass into distance in the natural way, that’s thirty-four times Chandrasekhar’s mass. It’s a useful convention; if a hole has no charge or angular momentum, its mass sets the scale for all the geometry: the event horizon is always at two M, light forms circular orbits at three M, and so on.” She conjured up a spacetime map of the region outside the hole, and instructed the scape to record the platform’s world line on it. “Actual distances travelled depend on the path you take, but if you think of the hole as being surrounded by spherical shells on which the tidal force is constant—something tangible you can measure on the spot—you can give them each a radius of curvature without caring about the details of how you might travel all the way to their centre.” With one spatial dimension omitted to make room for time, the shells became circles, and their histories on the map were shown as concentric translucent cylinders.

As the disk itself grew, the distortion around it spread faster. By ten M, Chandrasekhar was less than sixty degrees wide, but even constellations in the opposite half of the sky were visibly crowded together, as incoming light rays were bent into more radial paths. The gravitational blue shift, uniform across the sky, was strong enough now to give the stars a savage glint—not so much icy, as blue-hot. On the map, the light cones dotted along their world line—structures like stylised conical hour-glasses, made up of all the light rays passing through a given point at a given moment—were beginning to tilt towards the hole. Light cones marked the boundaries of physically possible motion; to cross your own light cone would be to outrace light.

Gisela created a pair of binoculars and offered them to Cordelia. “Try looking at the halo.”

Cordelia obliged her. “Ah! Where did all those stars come from?”

“Lensing lets you see the stars behind the hole, but it doesn’t stop there. Light that grazes the three-M shell orbits part-way around the hole before flying off in a new direction—and there’s no limit to how far it can swing around, if it grazes the shell close enough.” On the map, Gisela sketched half a dozen light rays approaching the hole from various angles; after wrapping themselves in barber’s-pole helices at slightly different distances from the three-M cylinder, they all headed off in almost the same direction. “If you look into the light that escapes from those orbits, you see an image of the whole sky, compressed into a narrow ring. And at the inner edge of that ring, there’s a smaller ring, and so on—each made up of light that’s orbited the hole one more time.”

Cordelia pondered this for a moment. “But it can’t go on forever, can it? Won’t diffraction effects blur the pattern, eventually?”

Gisela nodded, hiding her surprise. “Yeah. But I can’t show you that here. This scape doesn’t run to that level of detail!”

They paused at the three-M shell itself. The sky here was perfectly bisected: one hemisphere in absolute darkness, the other packed with vivid blue stars. Along the border, the halo arched over the dome like an impossibly geometricised Milky Way. Shortly after Cartan’s arrival, Gisela had created an hommage to Escher based on this view, tiling the half-sky with interlocking constellations that repeated at the edge in ever-smaller copies. With the binoculars on 1000 X, they could see a kind of silhouette of the platform itself “in the distance”: a band of darkness blocking a tiny part of the halo in every direction.

Then they continued towards the event horizon—oblivious to both tidal forces and the thrust they would have needed to maintain such a leisurely pace in reality.

The stars were now all brightest at ultraviolet frequencies, but Gisela had arranged for the dome to filter out everything but light from the flesher visible spectrum, in case Cordelia’s simulated skin took descriptions of radiation too literally. As the entire erstwhile celestial sphere shrank to a small disk, Chandrasekhar seemed to wrap itself around them—and this optical illusion had teeth. If they’d fired off a beam of light away from the hole, but failed to aim it at that tiny blue window, it would have bent right around like the path of a tossed rock and dived back into the hole. No material object could do better; the choice of escape routes was growing narrower. Gisela felt a frisson of claustrophobia; soon she’d be doing this for real.

They paused again to hover—implausibly—just above the horizon, with the only illumination a pin-prick of heavily blue-shifted radio waves behind them. On the map, their future light cone led almost entirely into the hole, with just the tiniest sliver protruding from the two-M cylinder. Gisela said, “Shall we go through?”

Cordelia’s face was etched in violet. “How?”

“Pure simulation. As authentic as possible . . . but not so authentic that we’ll be trapped, I promise.”

Cordelia spread her arms, closed her eyes, and mimed falling backwards into the hole. Gisela instructed the platform to cross the horizon.

The speck of sky blinked out, then began to expand again, rapidly. Gisela was slowing down time a millionfold; in reality they would have reached the singularity in a fraction of a millisecond.

Cordelia said, “Can we stop here?”

“You mean freeze time?”

“No, just hover.”

“We’re doing that already. We’re not moving.” Gisela suspended the scape’s evolution. “I’ve halted time; I think that’s what you wanted.”

Cordelia seemed about to dispute this, but then she gestured at the now-frozen circle of stars. “Outside, the blue shift was the same right across the sky . . . but now the stars at the edge are much bluer. I don’t understand.”

Gisela said, “In a way it’s nothing new; if we’d let ourselves free-fall towards the hole, we would have been moving fast enough to see a whole range of Doppler shifts superimposed on the gravitational blue shift, long before we crossed the horizon. You know the starbow effect?”

“Yes.” Cordelia examined the sky again, and Gisela could almost see her testing the explanation, imagining how a blue-shifted starbow should look. “But that only makes sense if we’re moving—and you said we weren’t.”

“We’re not, by one perfectly good definition. But it’s not the definition that applied outside.” Gisela highlighted a vertical section of their world line, where they’d hovered on the three-M shell. “Outside the event horizon—given a powerful enough engine—you can always stay fixed on a shell of constant tidal force. So it makes sense to choose that as a definition of being ‘motionless’—making time on this map strictly vertical. But inside the hole, that becomes completely incompatible with experience; your light cone tilts so far that your world line must cut through the shells. And the simplest new definition of being ‘motionless’ is to burrow straight through the shells—the complete opposite of trying to cling to them—and to make ‘map time’ strictly horizontal, pointing towards the centre of the hole.” She highlighted a section of their now-horizontal world line.

Cordelia’s expression of puzzlement began to give way to astonishment. “So when the light cones tip over far enough . . . the definitions of ‘space’ and ‘time’ have to tip with them?”

“Yes! The centre of the hole lies in our future, now. We won’t hit the singularity face-first, we’ll hit it future-first—just like hitting the Big Crunch. And the direction on this platform that used to point towards the singularity is now facing ‘down’ on the map—into what seems from the outside to be the hole’s past, but is really a vast stretch of space. There are billions of light years laid out in front of us—the entire history of the hole’s interior, converted into space—and it’s expanding as we approach the singularity. The only catch is, elbow room and head room are in short supply. Not to mention time.”

Cordelia stared at the map, entranced. “So the inside of the hole isn’t a sphere at all? It’s a spherical shell in two directions, with the shell’s history converted into space as the third . . . making the whole thing the surface of a hypercylinder? A hypercylinder that’s increasing in length, while its radius shrinks.” Suddenly her face lit up. “And the blue shift is like the blue shift when the universe starts contracting?” She turned to the frozen sky. “Except this space is only shrinking in two directions—so the more the angle of the starlight favours those directions, the more it’s blue-shifted?”

“That’s right.” Gisela was no longer surprised by Cordelia’s rapid uptake; the mystery was how she could have failed to learn everything there was to know about black holes, long ago. With unfettered access to a half-decent library and rudimentary tutoring software, she would have filled in the gaps in no time. But if her father had dragged her all the way to Cartan just to witness the Planck Dive, how could he have stood by and allowed Athena’s culture to impede her education? It made no sense.

Cordelia raised the binoculars and looked sideways, around the hole. “Why can’t I see us?”

“Good question.” Gisela drew a light ray on the map, aimed sideways, leaving the platform just after they’d crossed the horizon. “At the three-M shell, a ray like this would have followed a helix in spacetime, coming back to our world line after one revolution. But here, the helix has been flipped over and squeezed into a spiral—and at best, it only has time to travel half-way around the hole before it hits the singularity. None of the light we’ve emitted since crossing the horizon can make it back to us.

“That’s assuming a perfectly symmetrical Schwarzschild black hole, which is what we’re simulating. And an ancient hole like Chandrasekhar probably has settled down to a fair approximation of the Schwarzschild geometry. But close to the singularity, even infalling starlight would be blue-shifted enough to disrupt it, and anything more massive—like us, if we really were here—would cause chaotic changes even sooner.” She instructed the scape to switch to Belinsky-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz geometry, then restarted time. The stars began to shimmer with distortion, as if seen through a turbulent atmosphere, then the sky itself seemed to boil, red shifts and blue shifts sweeping across it in churning waves. “If we were embodied, and strong enough to survive the tidal forces, we’d feel them oscillating wildly as we passed through regions collapsing and expanding in different directions.” She modified the spacetime map accordingly, and enlarged it for a better view. Close to the singularity, the once-regular cylinders of constant tidal force now disintegrated into a random froth of ever finer, ever more distorted bubbles.

Cordelia examined the map with an expression of consternation. “How are you going to do any kind of computation in an environment like that?”

“We’re not. This is chaos—but chaotic systems are highly susceptible to manipulation. You know Tiplerian theology? The doctrine that we should try to reshape the universe to allow infinite computation to take place before the Big Crunch?”

“Yes.”

Gisela spread her arms to take in all of Chandrasekhar. “Reshaping a black hole is easier. With a closed universe, all you can do is rearrange what’s already there; with a black hole, you can pour new matter and radiation in from all directions. By doing that, we’re hoping to steer the geometry into a more orderly collapse—not the Schwarzschild version, but one that lets light circumnavigate the space inside the hole many times. Cartan Null will be made of counter-rotating beams of light, modulated with pulses like beads on a string. As they pass through each other, the pulses will interact; they’ll be blue-shifted to energies high enough for pair-production, and eventually even high enough for gravitational effects. Those beams will be our memory, and their interactions will drive all our computation—with luck, down almost to the Planck scale: ten-to-the-minus-thirty-five metres.”

Cordelia contemplated this in silence, then asked hesitantly, “But how much computation will you be able to do?”

“In total?” Gisela shrugged. “That depends on details of the structure of spacetime at the Planck scale—details we won’t know until we’re inside. There are some models that would allow us to do the whole Tiplerian thing in miniature: infinite computation. But most give a range of finite answers, some large, some small.”

Cordelia was beginning to look positively gloomy. Surely she’d known about the Divers’ fate all along?

Gisela said, “You do realise we’re sending in clones? No one’s moving their sole version into Cartan Null!”

“I know.” Cordelia averted her eyes. “But once you are the clone . . . won’t you be afraid of dying?”

Gisela was touched. “Only slightly. And not at all, at the end. While there’s still a slender chance of infinite computation—or even some exotic discovery that might allow us to escape—we’ll hang on to fear of death. It should help motivate us to examine all the options! But if and when it’s clear that dying is inevitable, we’ll switch off the old instinctive response, and just accept it.”

Cordelia nodded politely, but she didn’t seem at all convinced. If you’d been raised in a polis that celebrated “the lost flesher virtues”, this probably sounded like cheating at best, and self-mutilation at worst.

“Can we go back now, please? My father will be awake soon.”

“Of course.” Gisela wanted to say something to this strange, solemn child to put her mind at ease, but she had no idea where to begin. So they jumped out of the scape together—out of their fictitious light cones—abandoning the simulation before it was forced to admit that it was offering neither the chance of new knowledge, nor the possibility of death.

When Prospero woke, Gisela introduced herself and asked what he wished to see. She suggested a schematic of Cartan Null; it didn’t seem tactful to mention that Cordelia had already toured Chandrasekhar, but offering him a scape that neither had seen seemed like a diplomatic way of side-stepping the issue.

Prospero smiled at her indulgently. “I’m sure your Falling City is ingeniously designed, but that’s of no interest to me. I’m here to scrutinise your motives, not your machines.”

“Our motives?” Gisela wondered if there’d been a translation error. “We’re curious about the structure of spacetime. Why else would someone dive into a black hole?”

Prospero’s smile broadened. “That’s what I’m here to determine. There’s a wide range of choices besides the Pandora myth: Prometheus, Quixote, the Grail of course . . . perhaps even Orpheus. Do you hope to rescue the dead?”

“Rescue the dead?” Gisela was dumbfounded. “Oh, you mean Tiplerian resurrection? No, we have no plans for that at all. Even if we obtained infinite computing power, which is unlikely, we’d have far too little information to recreate any specific dead fleshers. As for resurrecting everyone by brute force, simulating every possible conscious being . . . there’d be no sure way to screen out in advance simulations that would experience extreme suffering—and statistically, they’re likely to outnumber the rest by about ten thousand to one. So the whole thing would be grossly unethical.”

“We shall see.” Prospero waved her objections away. “What’s important is that I meet all of Charon’s passengers as soon as possible.”

“Charon’s . . .? You mean the Dive team?”

Prospero shook his head with an anguished expression, as if he’d been misunderstood, but he said, “Yes, assemble your ‘Dive team.’ Let me speak to them all. I can see how badly I’m needed here!”

Gisela was more bewildered than ever. “Needed? You’re welcome here, of course . . . but in what way are you needed?”

Cordelia reached over and tugged at her father’s arm. “Can we wait in the castle? I’m so tired.” She wouldn’t look Gisela in the eye.

“Of course, my darling!” Prospero leant down and kissed her forehead. He pulled a rolled-up parchment out of his robe and tossed it into the air. It unfurled into a doorway, hovering above the ocean beside the pier, leading into a sunlit scape. Gisela could see vast, overgrown gardens, stone buildings, winged horses in the air. It was a good thing they’d compressed their accommodation more efficiently than their bodies, or they would have tied up the gamma ray link for about a decade.

Cordelia stepped through the doorway, holding Prospero’s hand, trying to pull him through. Trying, Gisela finally realised, to shut him up before he could embarrass her further.

Without success. With one foot still on the pier, Prospero turned to Gisela. “Why am I needed? I’m here to be your Homer, your Virgil, your Dante, your Dickens! I’m here to extract the mythic essence of this glorious, tragic endeavour! I’m here to grant you a gift infinitely greater than the immortality you seek!”

Gisela didn’t bother pointing out, yet again, that she had every expectation of a much shorter life inside the hole than out. “What’s that?”

“I’m here to make you legendary!” Prospero stepped off the pier, and the doorway contracted behind him.

Gisela stared out across the ocean, unseeing for a moment, then sat down slowly and let her feet dangle in the icy water.

Certain things were beginning to make sense.

“Be nice,” Gisela pleaded. “For Cordelia’s sake.”

Timon feigned wounded puzzlement. “What makes you think I won’t be nice? I’m always nice.” He morphed briefly from his usual angular icon—all rib-like frames and jointed rods—into a button-eyed teddy bear.

Gisela groaned softly. “Listen. If I’m right—if she’s thinking of migrating to Cartan—it will be the hardest decision she’s ever had to make. If she could just walk away from Athena, she would have done it by now—instead of going to all the trouble of making her father believe that it was his idea to come here.”

“What makes you so sure it wasn’t?”

“Prospero has no interest in reality; the only way he could have heard of the Dive would be Cordelia bringing it to his attention. She must have chosen Cartan because it’s far enough from Earth to make a clean break—and the Dive gave her the excuse she needed, a fit subject for her father’s ‘talents’ to dangle in front of him. But until she’s ready to tell him that she’s not going back, we mustn’t alienate him. We mustn’t make things harder for her than they already are.”

Timon rolled his eyes into his anodised skull. “All right! I’ll play along! I suppose there is a chance you might be reading her correctly. But if you’re mistaken . . .”

Prospero chose that moment to make his entrance, robes billowing, daughter in tow. They were in a scape created for the occasion, to Prospero’s specifications: a room shaped like two truncated square pyramids joined at their bases, panelled in white, with a twenty-M view of Chandrasekhar through a trapezoidal window. Gisela had never seen this style before; Timon had christened it “Athenian Astrokitsch.”

The five members of the Dive team were seated around a semi-circular table. Prospero stood before them while Gisela made the introductions: Sachio, Tiet, Vikram, Timon. She’d spoken to them all, making the case for Cordelia, but Timon’s half-hearted concession was the closest thing she’d received to a guarantee. Cordelia shrank into a corner of the room, eyes downcast.

Prospero began soberly. “For nigh on a thousand years, we, the descendants of the flesh, have lived our lives wrapped in dreams of heroic deeds long past. But we have dreamed in vain of a new Odyssey to inspire us, new heroes to stand beside the old, new ways to retell the eternal myths. Three more days, and your journey would have been wasted, lost to us forever.” He smiled proudly. “But I have arrived in time to pluck your tale from the very jaws of gravity!”

Tiet said, “Nothing was at risk of being lost. Information about the Dive is being broadcast to every polis, stored in every library.” Tiet’s icon was like a supple jewelled statue carved from ebony.

Prospero waved a hand dismissively. “A stream of technical jargon. In Athena, it might as well have been the murmuring of the waves.”

Tiet raised an eyebrow. “If your vocabulary is impoverished, augment it—don’t expect us to impoverish our own. Would you give an account of classical Greece without mentioning the name of a single city-state?”

“No. But those are universal terms, part of our common heritage—”

“They’re terms that have no meaning outside a tiny region of space, and a brief period of time. Unlike the terms needed to describe the Dive, which are applicable to every quartic femtometre of spacetime.”

Prospero replied, a little stiffly, “Be that as it may, in Athena we prefer poetry to equations. And I have come to honour your journey in language that will resonate down the corridors of the imagination for millennia.”

Sachio said, “So you believe you’re better qualified to portray the Dive than the participants?” Sachio appeared as an owl, perched inside the head of a flesher-shaped wrought-iron cage full of starlings.

“I am a narratologist.”

“You have some kind of specialised training?”

Prospero nodded proudly. “Though in truth, it is a vocation. When ancient fleshers gathered around their campfires, I was the one telling stories long into the night, of how the gods fought among themselves, and even mortal warriors were raised up into the sky to make the constellations.”

Timon replied, deadpan, “And I was the one sitting opposite, telling you what a load of drivel you were spouting.” Gisela was about to turn on him, to excoriate him for breaking his promise, when she realised that he’d spoken to her alone, routing the data outside the scape. She shot him a poisonous glance.

Sachio’s owl blinked with puzzlement. “But you find the Dive itself incomprehensible. So how are you suited to explain it to others?”

Prospero shook his head. “I have come to create enigmas, not explanations. I have come to shape the story of your descent into a form that will live on long after your libraries have turned to dust.”

“Shape it how?” Vikram was as anatomically correct as a Da Vinci sketch, when he chose to be, but he lacked the tell-tale signs of a physiological simulation: no sweat, no dead skin, no shed hair. “You mean change things?”

“To extract the mythic essence, mere detail must become subservient to a deeper truth.”

Timon said, “I think that was a yes.”

Vikram frowned amiably. “So what exactly will you change?” He spread his arms, and stretched them to encompass his fellow team members. “If we’re to be improved upon, do tell us how.”

Prospero said cautiously, “Five is a poor number, for a start. Seven, perhaps, or twelve.”

“Whew.” Vikram grinned. “Shadowy extras only; no one’s for the chop.”

“And the name of your vessel . . .”

“Cartan Null? What’s wrong with that? Cartan was a great flesher mathematician, who clarified the meaning and consequences of Einstein’s work. ‘Null’ because it’s built of null geodesics: the paths followed by light rays.”

“Posterity,” Prospero declared, “will like it better as ‘The Falling City’—its essence unencumbered by your infelicitous words.”

Tiet said coolly, “We named this polis after Élie Cartan. Its clone inside Chandrasekhar will be named after Élie Cartan. If you’re unwilling to respect that, you might as well head back to Athena right now, because no one here is going to offer you the slightest cooperation.”

Prospero glanced at the others, possibly looking for some evidence of dissent. Gisela had mixed feelings; Prospero’s mythopoeic babble would not outlive the truth in the libraries, whatever he imagined, so in a sense it hardly mattered what it contained. But if they didn’t draw the line somewhere, she could imagine his presence rapidly becoming unbearable.

He said, “Very well. Cartan Null. I am an artisan as well as an artist; I can work with imperfect clay.”

As the meeting broke up, Timon cornered Gisela. Before he could start complaining, she said, “If you think three more days of that is too awful to contemplate, imagine what it’s like for Cordelia.”

Timon shook his head. “I’ll keep my word. But now that I’ve seen what she’s up against . . . I really don’t think she’s going to make it. If she’s been wrapped in propaganda about the golden age of fleshers all her life, how can you expect her to see through it? A polis like Athena forms a closed trapped memetic surface: concentrate enough Prosperos in one place, and there’s no escape.”

Gisela eyed him balefully. “She’s here, isn’t she? Don’t try telling me that she’s bound to Athena forever, just because she was created there. Nothing’s as simple as that. Even black holes emit Hawking radiation.”

“Hawking radiation carries no information. It’s thermal noise; you can’t tunnel out with it.” Timon swept two fingers along a diagonal line, the gesture for “QED.”

Gisela said, “It’s only a metaphor, you idiot, not an isomorphism. If you can’t tell the difference, maybe you should fuck off to Athena yourself.”

Timon mimed pulling his hand back from something biting it, and vanished.

Gisela looked around the empty scape, angry with herself for losing her temper. Through the window, Chandrasekhar was calmly proceeding to crush spacetime out of existence, as it had for the past six billion years.

She said, “And you’d better not be right.”

Fifty hours before the Dive, Vikram instructed the probes in the lowest orbits to begin pouring nanomachines through the event horizon. Gisela and Cordelia joined him in the control scape, a vast hall full of maps and gadgets for manipulating the hardware scattered around Chandrasekhar. Prospero was off interrogating Timon, an ordeal Vikram had just been through himself. “Oedipal urges” and “womb/vagina symbolism” had figured prominently, though Vikram had cheerfully informed Prospero that as far as he knew, no one in Cartan had ever shown much interest in either organ. Gisela found herself wondering precisely how Cordelia had been created; slavish simulations of flesher childbirth didn’t bear thinking about.

The nanomachines comprised only a trickle of matter, a few tonnes per second. Deep inside the hole, though, they’d measure the curvature around them—observing both starlight and signals from the nanomachines following behind—then modify their own collective mass distribution in such a way as to steer the hole’s future geometry closer to the target. Every deviation from free fall meant jettisoning molecular fragments and sacrificing chemical energy, but before they’d entirely ripped themselves apart they’d give birth to photonic machines tailored to do the same thing on a smaller scale.

It was impossible to know whether or not any of this was working as planned, but a map in the scape showed the desired result. Vikram sketched in two counter-rotating bundles of light rays. “We can’t avoid having space collapsing in two directions and expanding in the third—unless we poured in so much matter that it collapsed in all three, which would be even worse. But it’s possible to keep changing the direction of expansion, flipping it ninety degrees again and again, evening things out. That allows light to execute a series of complete orbits—each taking about one hundredth the time of the previous one—and it also means there are periods of contraction across the beams, which counteract the de-focusing effects of the periods of expansion.”

The two bundles of rays oscillated between circular and elliptical cross-sections as the curvature stretched and squeezed them. Cordelia created a magnifying glass and followed them “in”: forwards in time, towards the singularity. She said, “If the orbital periods form a geometric series, there’s no limit to the number of orbits you could fit in before the singularity. And the wavelength is blue-shifted in proportion to the size of the orbit, so diffraction effects never take over. So what’s there to stop you doing infinite computation?”

Vikram replied cautiously, “For a start, once colliding photons start creating particle-antiparticle pairs, there’ll be a range of energies for each species of particle when it will be travelling so much slower than lightspeed that the pulses will begin to smear. We think we’ve shaped and spaced the pulses in such a way that all the data will survive, but it would only take one unknown massive particle to turn the whole stream into gibberish.”

Cordelia looked up at him with a hopeful expression. “What if there are no unknown particles?”

Vikram shrugged. “In Kumar’s model, time is quantised, so the frequency of the beams can’t keep rising without limit. And most of the alternative theories also imply that the whole setup will fail eventually, for one reason or another. I only hope it fails slowly enough for us to understand why, before we’re incapable of understanding anything.” He laughed. “Don’t look so mournful! It will be like . . . the death of one branch of a tree. And maybe we’ll gain some knowledge for a while that we could never even glimpse, outside the hole.”

“But you won’t be able to do anything with it,” Cordelia protested. “Or tell anyone.”

“Ah, technology and fame.” Vikram blew a raspberry. “Listen, if my Dive clone dies learning nothing, he’ll still die happy, knowing that I continued outside. And if he learns everything I’m hoping he’ll learn . . . he’ll be too ecstatic to go on living.” Vikram composed his face into a picture of exaggerated earnestness, deflating his own hyperbole, and Cordelia actually smiled. Gisela had been beginning to wonder if morbid grief over the fate of the Divers would be enough to put her off Cartan altogether.

Cordelia said, “What would make it worthwhile, then? What’s the most you could hope for?”

Vikram sketched a Feynman diagram in the air between them. “If you take spacetime for granted, rotational symmetry plus quantum mechanics gives you a set of rules for dealing with a particle’s spin. Penrose turned this inside out, and showed that the whole concept of ‘the angle between two directions’ can be created from scratch in a network of world lines, so long as they obey those spin rules. Suppose a system of particles with a certain total spin throws an electron to another system, and in the process the first system’s spin decreases. If you knew the angle between the two spin vectors, you could calculate the probability that the second spin was increased rather than decreased . . . but if the concept of ‘angle’ doesn’t even exist yet, you can work backwards and define it from the probability you get by looking at all the networks for which the second spin is increased.

“Kumar and others extended this idea to cover more abstract symmetries. From a list of rules about what constitutes a valid network, and how to assign a phase to each one, we can now derive all known physics. But I want to know if there’s a deeper explanation for those rules. Are spin and the other quantum numbers truly elementary, or are they the product of something more fundamental? And when networks reinforce or cancel each other according to the phase difference between them, is that something basic we just have to accept, or is there hidden machinery beneath the mathematics?”

Timon appeared in the scape, and drew Gisela aside. “I’ve committed a small infraction—and knowing you, you’ll find out anyway. So this is a confession in the hope of leniency.”

“What have you done?”

Timon regarded her nervously. “Prospero was rambling on about flesher culture as the route to all knowledge.” He morphed into a perfect imitation, and replayed Prospero’s voice: “ ‘The key to astronomy lies in the study of the great Egyptian astrologers, and the heart of mathematics is revealed in the rituals of the Pythagorean mystics . . .’ ”

Gisela put her face in her hands; she would have been hard-pressed not to respond herself. “And you said—?”

“I told him that if he was ever embodied in a space-suit, floating among the stars, he ought to try sneezing on the face plate to improve the view.”

Gisela cracked up laughing. Timon asked hopefully, “Does that mean I’m forgiven?”

“No. How did he take it?”

“Hard to tell.” Timon frowned. “I’m not sure that he’s capable of grasping insults. It would require imagining that someone could believe that he’s less than essential to the future of civilisation.”

Gisela said sternly, “Two more days. Try harder.”

“Try harder yourself. It’s your turn now.”

“What?”

“Prospero wants to see you.” Timon grinned with malicious pleasure. “Time to have your own mythic essence extracted.”

Gisela glanced towards Cordelia; she was talking animatedly with Vikram. Athena, and Prospero, had suffocated her; it was only away from both that she came to life. The decision to migrate was hers alone, but Gisela would never forgive herself if she did anything to diminish the opportunity.

Timon said, “Be nice.”

The Dive team had decided against any parting of the clones; their frozen snapshots would be incorporated into the blueprint for Cartan Null without ever being run outside Chandrasekhar. When Gisela had told Prospero this, he’d been appalled, but he’d cheered up almost immediately; it left him all the more room to invent some ritual farewell for the travellers, without being distracted by the truth.

The whole team did gather in the control scape, though, along with Prospero and Cordelia, and a few dozen friends. Gisela stood apart from the crowd as Vikram counted down to the deadline. On “ten”, she instructed her exoself to clone her. On “nine”, she sent the snapshot to the address being broadcast by an icon for the Cartan Null file—a stylised set of counter-rotating light beams—hovering in the middle of the scape. When the tag came back confirming the transaction, she felt a surge of loss; the Dive was no longer part of her own linear future, even if she thought of the clone as a component of her extended self.

Vikram shouted exuberantly, “Three! Two! One!” He picked up the Cartan Null icon and tossed it into a map of the spacetime around Chandrasekhar. This triggered a gamma-ray burst from the polis to a probe with an eight-M orbit; there, the data was coded into nanomachines designed to recreate it in active, photonic form—and those nanomachines joined the stream cascading into the hole.

On the map, the falling icon veered into a “motionless” vertical world line as it approached the two-M shell. Successive slices of constant time in the static frame outside the hole never crossed the horizon, they merely clung to it; by one definition, the nanomachines would take forever to enter Chandrasekhar.

By another definition, the Dive was over. In their own frame, the nanomachines would have taken less than one-and-a-half milliseconds to fall from the probe to the horizon, and not much longer to reach the point where Cartan Null was launched. And however much subjective time the Divers had experienced, however much computing had been done along the way, the entire region of space containing Cartan Null would have been crushed into the singularity a few microseconds later.

“If the Divers tunnelled out of the hole, there’d be a paradox, wouldn’t there?” Gisela turned; she hadn’t noticed Cordelia behind her. “Whenever they emerged, they wouldn’t have fallen in yet—so they could swoop down and grab the nanomachines, preventing their own births.” The idea seemed to disturb her.

Gisela said, “Only if they tunnelled out close to the horizon. If they appeared further away—say here in Cartan, right now—they’d already be too late. The nanomachines have had too much of a head start; the fact that they’re almost standing still in our reference frame doesn’t make them an easy target if you’re actually chasing after them. Even at lightspeed, nothing could catch them from here.”

Cordelia appeared to take heart from this. “So escape isn’t impossible?”

“Well . . .” Gisela thought of listing some of the other hurdles, but then she began to wonder if the question was about something else entirely. “No. It’s not impossible.”

Cordelia gave her a conspiratorial smile. “Good.”

Prospero cried out, “Gather round! Gather round now and hear The Ballad of Cartan Null!” He created a podium, rising beneath his feet. Timon sidled up to Gisela and whispered, “If this involves a lute, I’m sending my senses elsewhere.”

It didn’t; the blank verse was delivered without musical accompaniment. The content, though, was even worse than Gisela had feared. Prospero had ignored everything she and the others had told him. In his version of events, “Charon’s passengers” entered “gravity’s abyss” for reasons he’d invented out of thin air: to escape, respectively, a failed romance/vengeance for an unspeakable crime/the ennui of longevity; to resurrect a lost flesher ancestor; to seek contact with “the gods.” The universal questions the Divers had actually hoped to answer—the structure of spacetime at the Planck scale, the underpinnings of quantum mechanics—didn’t rate a mention.

Gisela glanced at Timon, but he seemed to be taking the news that his sole version had just fled into Chandrasekhar to avoid punishment for an unnamed atrocity extremely well; there was disbelief on his face, but no anger. He said softly, “This man lives in Hell. Mucous on the face plate is all he’ll ever see.”

The audience stood in silence as Prospero began to “describe” the Dive itself. Timon stared at the floor with a bemused smile. Tiet wore an expression of detached boredom. Vikram kept peeking at a display behind him, to see if the faint gravitational radiation emitted by the inflowing nanomachines was still conforming to his predictions.

It was Sachio who finally lost control and interjected angrily, “Cartan Null is some ghostly image of a scape, full of ghostly icons, floating through the vacuum, down into the hole?”

Prospero seemed more startled than outraged by the interruption. “It is a city of light. Translucent, ethereal . . .”

The owl in Sachio’s skull puffed its feathers out. “No photon state would look like that. What you describe could never exist, and even if it could it would never be conscious.” Sachio had worked for decades on the problem of giving Cartan Null the freedom to process data without disrupting the geometry around it.

Prospero spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. “An archetypal quest narrative must be kept simple. To burden it with technicalities—”

Sachio inclined his head briefly, fingertips to forehead, downloading information from the polis library. “Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?”

“Messages from the gods, or from the depths of the soul; who can say? But they encode the most profound and mysterious—”

Sachio cut him off impatiently. “They’re the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity’s greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you’ve created is not only devoid of truth, it’s devoid of aesthetic merit.”

Prospero was stunned. He looked around the room expectantly, as if waiting for someone to speak up in defence of the Ballad.

No one made a sound.

This was it: the end of diplomacy. Gisela spoke privately to Cordelia, whispering urgently: “Stay in Cartan! No one can force you to leave!”

Cordelia turned to her with an expression of open astonishment. “But I thought—” She fell silent, reassessing something, hiding her surprise.

Then she said, “I can’t stay.”

“Why not? What is there to stop you? You can’t stay buried in Athena—” Gisela caught herself; whatever bizarre hold the place had on her, disparaging it wouldn’t help.

Prospero was muttering in disbelief now, “Ingratitude! Base ingratitude!” Cordelia regarded him with forlorn affection. “He’s not ready.” She faced Gisela, and spoke plainly. “Athena won’t last forever. Polises like that form and decay; there are too many real possibilities for people to cling to one arbitrary sanctified culture, century after century. But he’s not prepared for the transition; he doesn’t even realise it’s coming. I can’t abandon him to that. He’s going to need someone to help him through.” She smiled suddenly, mischievously. “But I’ve cut two centuries off the waiting time. If nothing else, the trip did that.”

Gisela was speechless for a moment, shamed by the strength of this child’s love. Then she sent Cordelia a stream of tags. “These are references to the best libraries on Earth. You’ll get the real stuff there, not some watered-down version of flesher physics.”

Prospero was shrinking the podium, descending to ground level. “Cordelia! Come to me now. We’re leaving these barbarians to the obscurity they deserve!”

For all that she admired Cordelia’s loyalty, Gisela was still saddened by her choice. She said numbly, “You belong in Cartan. It should have been possible. We should have been able to find a way.”

Cordelia shook her head: no failure, no regrets. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve survived Athena so far; I think I can see it through to the end. Everything you’ve shown me, everything I’ve done here, will help.” She squeezed Gisela’s hand. “Thank you.”

She joined her father. Prospero created a doorway, opening up onto a yellow brick road through the stars. He stepped through, and Cordelia followed him.

Vikram turned away from the gravitational wave trace and asked mildly, “All right, you can own up now: who threw in the additional exabyte?”

“Freeeeee-dom!” Cordelia bounded across Cartan Null’s control scape, a long platform floating in a tunnel of colour-coded Feynman diagrams, streaming through the darkness like the trails of a billion colliding and disintegrating sparks.

Gisela’s first instinct was to corner her and shout in her face: Kill yourself now! End this now! A brief side-branch, cut short before there was time for personality divergence, hardly counted as a real life and a real death. It would be a forgotten dream, nothing more.

That analysis didn’t hold up, though. From the instant she’d become conscious, this Cordelia had been an entirely separate person: the one who’d left Athena forever, the one who’d escaped. Her extended self had invested far too much in this clone to treat it as a mistake and cut its losses. Beyond anything it hoped for itself, the clone knew exactly what its existence meant for the original. To betray that, even if it could never be found out, would be unthinkable.

Tiet said sharply, “You didn’t raise her hopes, did you?”

Gisela thought back over their conversations. “I don’t think so. She must know there’s almost no chance of survival.”

Vikram looked troubled. “I might have put our own case too strongly. She might believe the same discoveries will be enough for her—but I’m not sure they will.”

Timon sighed impatiently. “She’s here. That’s irreversible; there’s no point agonising about it. All we can do is give her the chance to make what she can of the experience.”

A horrifying thought struck Gisela. “The extra data hasn’t overburdened us, has it? Ruled out access to the full computational domain?” Cordelia had compressed herself down to a far leaner program than the version she’d sent from Earth, but it was still an unexpected load.

Sachio made a sound of indignation. “How badly do you think I did my job? I knew someone would bring in more than they’d promised; I left a hundredfold safety margin. One stowaway changes nothing.”

Timon touched Gisela’s arm. “Look.” Cordelia had finally slowed down enough to start examining her surroundings. The primary beams, the infrastructure for all their computation, had already been blue-shifted to hard gamma rays, and the colliding photons were creating pairs of relativistic electrons and positrons. In addition, a range of experimental beams with shorter wavelengths probed the physics of length scales ten thousand times smaller—physics that would apply to the primary beams about a subjective hour later. Cordelia found the window with the main results from these beams. She turned and called out, “Lots of mesons full of top and bottom quarks ahead, but nothing unexpected!”

“Good!” Gisela felt the knot of guilt and anxiety inside her begin to unwind. Cordelia had chosen the Dive freely, just like the rest of them. The fact that it had been a hard decision for her to make was no reason to assume that she’d regret it.

Timon said, “Well, you were right. I was wrong. She certainly tunnelled out of Athena.”

“Yeah. So much for your theory of closed trapped memetic surfaces.” Gisela laughed. “Pity it was just a metaphor, though.”

“Why? I thought you’d be overjoyed that she made it.”

“I am. It’s just a shame that it says nothing at all about our own chances of escape.”

Each orbit gave them thirty minutes of subjective time, while the true length and time scales of Cartan Null shrank a hundredfold. Sachio and Tiet scrutinised the functioning of the polis, checking and rechecking the integrity of the “hardware” as new species of particles entered the pulse trains. Timon reviewed various methods for shunting information into new modes, if the opportunity arose. Gisela struggled to bring Cordelia up to speed, and Vikram, whose main work had been the nanomachines, helped her.

The shortest-wavelength beams were still recapitulating the results of old particle accelerator experiments; the three of them pored over the data together. Gisela summarised as best she could. “Charge and the other quantum numbers generate a kind of angle between world lines in the networks, just like spin does, but in this case they act like angles in five-dimensional space. At low energies what you see are three separate subspaces, for electromagnetism and the weak and strong forces.”

“Why?”

“An accident in the early universe with Higgs bosons. Let me draw a picture . . .”

There was no time to go into all the subtleties of particle physics, but many of the issues that were crucial outside Chandrasekhar were becoming academic for Cartan Null anyway. Broken symmetries were being restored as they spoke, with increasing kinetic energy diluting differences in rest mass into insignificance. The polis was rapidly mutating into a hybrid of every possible particle type; what governed their future would not be the theory of any one force, but the nature of quantum mechanics itself.

“What lies behind the frequency and wavelength of a particle?” Vikram sketched a snapshot of a wave packet on a spacetime diagram. “In its own reference frame, an electron’s phase rotates at a constant rate: about once every ten-to-the-minus-twenty seconds. If it’s moving, we see that rate slowed down by time dilation, but that’s not the whole picture.” He drew a set of components fanning out at different velocities from a single point on the wave, then marked off successive points where the phase came full circle for each one. The locus of these points formed a set of hyperbolic wavefronts in spacetime, like a stack of conical bowls—packed more tightly, in both time and space, where the components’ velocity was greater. “The spacing of the original wave is only reproduced by components with just the right velocity; they trace out identical copies of the wave at later times, all neatly superimposed. Components with the wrong velocity scramble the phase, so their copies all cancel out.” He repeated the entire construction for a hundred points along the wave, and it propagated neatly into the future. “In curved spacetime, the whole process becomes distorted—but given the right symmetries, the shape of the wave can be preserved while the wavelength shrinks and the frequency rises.” Vikram warped the diagram to demonstrate. “Our own situation.”

Cordelia took this all in, scribbling calculations, cross-checking everything to her own satisfaction. “Okay. So why does that have to break down? Why can’t we just keep being blue-shifted?”

Vikram zoomed in on the diagram. “All phase shifts ultimately come from interactions—intersections of one world line with another. In the Kumar model, every network of world lines has a finite weave. At each intersection, there’s a tiny phase shift that makes time jump by about ten-to-the-minus-forty-three seconds . . . and it’s meaningless to talk about either a smaller phase shift, or a shorter time scale. So if you try to blue-shift a wave indefinitely, eventually you reach a point where the whole system no longer has the resolution to keep reproducing it.” As the wave packet spiralled in, it began to take on a smeared, jagged approximation of its former shape. Then it disintegrated into unrecognisable noise.

Cordelia examined the diagram carefully, tracing individual components through the final stages of the process. Finally she said, “How long before we see evidence of this? Assuming the model’s correct?”

Vikram didn’t reply; he seemed to be having second thoughts about the wisdom of the whole demonstration. Gisela said, “In about two hours we should be able to detect quantised phase in the experimental beams. And then we’ll have another hour or so before—” Vikram glanced meaningfully at her—privately, but Cordelia must have guessed why the sentence trailed off, because she turned on him.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” she demanded indignantly. “Collapse into hysterics at the first glimmering of mortality?”

Vikram looked stung. Gisela said, “Be fair. We’ve only known you three days. We don’t know what to expect.”

“No.” Cordelia gazed up at the stylised image of the beam that encoded them, swarming now with everything from photons to the heaviest mesons. “But I’m not going to ruin the Dive for you. If I’d wanted to brood about death, I would have stayed home and read bad flesher poetry.” She smiled. “Baudelaire can screw himself. I’m here for the physics.”

Everyone gathered round a single window as the moment of truth for the Kumar model approached. The data it displayed came from what was essentially a two-slit interference experiment, complicated by the need to perform it without anything resembling solid matter. A sinusoidal pattern showed the numbers of particles detected across a region where an electron beam recombined with itself after travelling two different paths; since there were only a finite number of detection sites, and each count had to be an integer, the pattern was already “quantised”, but the analysis software took this into account, and the numbers were large enough for the image to appear smooth. At a certain wavelength, any genuine Planck scale effects would rise above these artifacts, and once they appeared they’d only grow stronger.

The software said, “Found something!” and zoomed in to show a slight staircasing of the curve. At first it was so subtle that Gisela had to take the program’s word that it wasn’t merely showing them the usual, unavoidable jagging. Then the tiny steps visibly broadened, from two horizontal pixels to three. Sets of three adjacent detection sites, which moments ago had been registering different particle counts, were now returning identical results. The whole apparatus had shrunk to the point where the electrons couldn’t tell that the path lengths involved were different.

Gisela felt a rush of pure delight, then an aftertaste of fear. They were reaching down to brush their fingertips across the weave of the vacuum. It was a triumph that they’d survived this far, but their descent was almost certainly unstoppable.

The steps grew wider; the image zoomed out to show more of the curve. Vikram and Tiet cried out simultaneously, a moment before the analysis software satisfied itself with rigorous statistical tests. Vikram repeated softly, “That’s wrong.” Tiet nodded, and spoke to the software. “Show us a single wave’s phase structure.” The display changed to a linear staircase. It was impossible to measure the changing phase of a single wave directly, but assuming that the two versions of the beam were undergoing identical changes, this was the progression implied by the interference pattern.

Tiet said, “This is not in agreement with the Kumar model. The phase is quantised, but the steps aren’t equal—or even random, like the Santini model. They’re structured across the wave, in cycles. Narrower, broader, narrower again . . .”

Silence descended. Gisela gazed at the pattern and struggled to concentrate, elated that they’d found something unexpected, terrified that they might fail to make sense of it. Why wouldn’t the phase shift come in equal units? This cyclic pattern was a violation of symmetry, allowing you to pick the phase with the smallest quantum step as a kind of fixed reference point—an idea that quantum mechanics had always declared to be as meaningless as singling out one direction in empty space.

But the rotational symmetry of space wasn’t perfect: in small enough networks, the usual guarantee that all directions would look the same no longer held up. Was that the answer? The angles the two beams had to take to reach the detector were themselves quantised, and that effect was superimposed on the phase?

No. The scale was all wrong. The experiment was still taking place over too large a region.

Vikram shouted with joy, and did a backwards somersault. “There are world lines crossing between the nets! That’s what creates phase!” Without another word, he began furiously sketching diagrams in the air, launching software, running simulations. Within minutes, he was almost hidden behind displays and gadgets.

One window showed a simulation of the interference pattern, a perfect fit to the data. Gisela felt a stab of jealousy: she’d been so close, she should have been first. Then she began to examine more of the results, and the feeling evaporated. This was elegant, this was beautiful, this was right. It didn’t matter who’d discovered it.

Cordelia was looking dazed, left behind. Vikram ducked out from the clutter he’d created, leaving the rest of them to try to make sense of it. He took Cordelia’s hands and they waltzed across the scape together. “The central mystery of quantum mechanics has always been: why can’t you just count the ways things can happen? Why do you have to assign each alternative a phase, so they can cancel as well as reinforce each other? We knew the rules for doing it, we knew the consequences—but we had no idea what phases were, or where they came from.” He stopped dancing, and conjured up a stack of Feynman diagrams, five alternatives for the same process, layered one on top of the other. “They’re created the same way as every other relationship: common links to a larger network.” He added a few hundred virtual particles, crisscrossing between the once-separate diagrams. “It’s like spin. If the networks have created directions in space that make two particles’ spins parallel, when they combine they’ll simply add together. If they’re anti-parallel, in opposing directions, they’ll cancel. Phase is the same, but it acts like an angle in two dimensions, and it works with every quantum number together: spin, charge, colour, everything—if two components are perfectly out-of-phase, they vanish completely.”

Gisela watched as Cordelia reached into the layered diagram, followed the paths of two components, and began to understand. They hadn’t discovered any deeper structure to the individual quantum numbers, as they’d hoped they might, but they’d learnt that a single vast network of world lines could account for everything the universe built from those indivisible threads.

Was this enough for her? Her original, struggling for sanity back in Athena, might take comfort from the hope that the Dive clone had witnessed a breakthrough like this—but as death approached, would it all turn to ashes for the witness? Gisela felt a pang of doubt herself, though she’d talked it through with Timon and the others for centuries. Did everything she felt at this moment lose all meaning, just because there was no chance to carry the experience back to the wider world? She couldn’t deny that it would have been better to know that she could reconnect with her other selves, tell all her distant family and friends what she’d learnt, follow through the implications for millennia.

But the whole universe faced the same fate. Time was quantised; there was no prospect of infinite computation before the Big Crunch, for anyone. If everything that ended was void, the Dive had merely spared them the prolonged false hope of immortality. If every moment stood alone, complete in itself, then nothing could rob them of their happiness.

The truth, of course, lay somewhere in between.

Timon approached her, grinning with delight. “What are you pondering here by yourself?”

She took his hand. “Small networks.”

Cordelia said to Vikram, “Now that you know precisely what phase is, and how it determines probabilities . . . is there any way we could use the experimental beams to manipulate the probabilities for the geometry ahead of us? Twist back the light cones just enough to keep us skirting the Planck region? Spiral back up around the singularity for a few billion years, until the Big Crunch comes, or the hole evaporates from Hawking radiation?”

Vikram looked stunned for a moment, then he began launching software. Sachio and Tiet came and helped him, searching for computational shortcuts. Gisela looked on, light-headed, hardly daring to hope. To examine every possibility might take more time than they had, but then Tiet found a way to test whole classes of networks in a single calculation, and the process sped up a thousandfold.

Vikram announced the result sadly. “No. It’s not possible.”

Cordelia smiled. “That’s all right. I was just curious.”

ECHEA

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s 1998 publications will include the last two novels in her Fey series—Fey 4: The Resistance and Fey 5: Victory—as well as her mainstream hardcover, Hitler’s Angel. She and her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, will also publish a novel, Captain’s Table, in this summer’s Star Trek crossover series. Her latest story for us is a heartbreaking tale about the many different kinds of loss.

I can close my eyes and she appears in my mind as she did the moment I first saw her: tiny, fragile, with unnaturally pale skin and slanted chocolate eyes. Her hair was white as the moon on a cloudless evening. It seemed, that day, that her eyes were the only spot of color on her haggard little face. She was seven, but she looked three.

And she acted like nothing we had ever encountered before.

Or since.

We had three children and a good life. We were not impulsive, but we did feel as if we had something to give. Our home was large, and we had money; any child would benefit from that.

It seemed to be for the best.

It all started with the brochures. We saw them first at an outdoor café near our home. We were having lunch when we glimpsed floating dots of color, a fleeting child’s face. Both my husband and I touched them only to have the displays open before us:

The blank vista of the Moon, the Earth over the horizon like a giant blue and white ball, a looming presence, pristine and healthy and somehow guilt-ridden. The Moon itself looked barren, as it always had, until one focused. And then one saw the pockmarks, the shattered dome open to the stars. In the corner of the first brochure I opened, at the very edge of the reproduction, were blood-splotches. They were scattered on the craters and boulders, and had left fist-sized holes in the dust. I didn’t need to be told what had caused it. We saw the effects of high velocity rifles in low gravity every time we downloaded the news.

The brochures began with the Moon, and ended with the faces of refugees: pallid, worn, defeated. The passenger shuttles to Earth had pretty much stopped. At first, those who could pay came here, but by the time we got our brochures, Earth passage had changed. Only those with living relatives were able to return. Living relatives who were willing to acknowledge the relationship–and had official hard copy to prove it.

The rules were waived in the case of children, of orphans and of underage war refuges. They were allowed to come to Earth if their bodies could tolerate it, if they were willing to be adopted, and if they were willing to renounce any claims they had to Moon land.

They had to renounce the stars in order to have a home.

We picked her up in Sioux Falls, the nearest star shuttle stop and detention center to our home. The shuttle stop was a desolate place. It was designed as an embarkation point for political prisoners and for star soldiers. It was built on the rolling prairie, a sprawling complex with laser fences shimmering in the sunlight. Guards stood at every entrance, and several hovered above. We were led, by men with laser rifles, into the main compound, a building finished almost a century before, made of concrete and steel, functional, cold, and ancient. Its halls smelled musty. The concrete flaked, covering everything with a fine gray dust.

Echea had flown in on a previous shuttle. She had been in detox and sick bay; through psychiatric exams and physical screenings. We did not know we would get her until they called our name.

We met her in a concrete room with no windows, shielded against the sun, shielded against the world. The area had no furniture.

A door opened and a child appeared.

Tiny, pale, fragile. Eyes as big as the moon itself, and darker than the blackest night. She stood in the center of the room, legs spread, arms crossed, as if she were already angry at us.

Around us, through us, between us, a computer voice resonated:

This is Echea. She is yours. Please take her, and proceed through the doors to your left. The waiting shuttle will take you to your preassigned destination.

She didn’t move when she heard the voice, although I started. My husband had already gone toward her. He crouched and she glowered at him.

“I don’t need you,” she said.

“We don’t need you either,” he said. “But we want you.”

The hard set to her chin eased, just a bit. “Do you speak for her?” she asked, indicating me.

“No,” I said. I knew what she wanted. She wanted reassurance early that she wouldn’t be entering a private war zone as difficult and devastating as the one she left. “I speak for myself. I’d like it if you came home with us, Echea.”

She stared at us both then, not relinquishing power, not changing that forceful stance. “Why do you want me?” she asked. “You don’t even know me.”

“But we will,” my husband said.

“And then you’ll send me back,” she said, her tone bitter. I heard the fear in it.

“You won’t go back,” I said. “I promise you that.”

It was an easy promise to make. None of the children, even if their adoptions did not work, returned to the Moon.

A bell sounded overhead. They had warned us about this, warned us that we would have to move when we heard it.

“It’s time to leave,” my husband said. “Get your things.”

Her first look was shock and betrayal, quickly masked. I wasn’t even sure I had seen it. And then she narrowed those lovely chocolate eyes. “I’m from the Moon,” she said with a sarcasm that was foreign to our natural daughters. “We have no things.”

What we knew of the Moon Wars on Earth was fairly slim. The news vids were necessarily vague, and I had never had the patience for a long lesson in Moon history.

The shorthand for the Moon situation was this: the Moon’s economic resources were scarce. Some colonies, after several years of existence, were self-sufficient. Others were not. The shipments from Earth, highly valuable, were designated to specific places and often did not get there. Piracy, theft, and murder occurred to gain the scarce resources. Sometimes skirmishes broke out. A few times, the fighting escalated. Domes were damaged, and in the worst of the fighting, two colonies were destroyed.

At the time, I did not understand the situation at all. I took at face value a cynical comment from one of my professors: colonies always struggle for dominance when they are away from the mother country. I had even repeated it at parties.

I had not understood that it oversimplified one of the most complex situations in our universe.

I also had not understood the very human cost of such events.

That is, until I had Echea.

We had ordered a private shuttle for our return, but it wouldn’t have mattered if we were walking down a public street. I attempted to engage Echea, but she wouldn’t talk. She stared out the window instead, and became visibly agitated as we approached home.

Lake Nebagamon is a small lake, one of the hundreds that dot northern Wisconsin. It was a popular resort for people from nearby Superior. Many had summer homes, some dating from the late 1800s. In the early 2000s, the summer homes were sold off. Most lots were bought by families who already owned land there, and hated the crowding at Nebagamon. My family bought fifteen lots. My husband’s bought ten. Our marriage, some joked, was one of the most important local mergers of the day.

Sometimes I think that it was no joke. It was expected. There is affection between us, of course, and a certain warmth. But no real passion.

The passion I once shared with another man–a boy actually–was so long ago that I remember it in images, like a vid seen decades ago, or a painting made from someone else’s life.

When my husband and I married, we acted like an acquiring conglomerate. We tore down my family’s summer home because it had no potential or historical value, and we built onto my husband’s. The ancient house became an estate with a grand lawn that rolled down to the muddy water. Evenings we sat on the verandah and listened to the cicadas until full dark. Then we stared at the stars and their reflections in our lake. Sometimes we were blessed with the northern lights, but not too often.

This is the place we brought Echea. A girl who had never really seen green grass or tall trees; who had definitely never seen lakes or blue sky or Earth’s stars. She had, in her brief time in North Dakota, seen what they considered Earth–the brown dust, the fresh air. But her exposure had been limited, and had not really included sunshine or nature itself.

We did not really know how this would affect her.

There were many things we did not know.

Our girls were lined up on the porch in age order: Kally, the twelve-year-old, and the tallest, stood near the door. Susan, the middle child, stood next to her, and Anne stood by herself near the porch. They were properly stair-stepped, three years between them, a separation considered optimal for more than a century now. We had followed the rules in birthing them, as well as in raising them.

Echea was the only thing out of the norm.

Anne, the courageous one, approached us as we got off the shuttle. She was small for six, but still bigger than Echea. Anne also blended our heritages perfectly–my husband’s bright blue eyes and light hair with my dark skin and exotic features. She would be our beauty some day, something my husband claimed was unfair, since she also had the brains.

“Hi,” she said, standing in the middle of the lawn. She wasn’t looking at us. She was looking at Echea.

Echea stopped walking. She had been slightly ahead of me. By stopping, she forced me to stop too.

“I’m not like them,” she said. She was glaring at my daughters. “I don’t want to be.”

“You don’t have to be,” I said softly.

“But you can be civil,” my husband said.

Echea frowned at him, and in that moment, I think, their relationship was defined.

“I suppose you’re the pampered baby,” she said to Anne.

Anne grinned.

“That’s right,” she said. “I like it better than being the spoiled brat.”

I held my breath. “Pampered baby” wasn’t much different from “spoiled brat” and we all knew it.

“Do you have a spoiled brat?” Echea asked.

“No,” Anne said.

Echea looked at the house, the lawn, the lake, and whispered. “You do now.”

Later, my husband told me he heard this as a declaration. I heard it as awe. My daughters saw it as something else entirely.

“I think you have to fight Susan for it,” Anne said.

“Do not!” Susan shouted from the porch.

“See?” Anne said. Then she took Echea’s hand and led her up the steps.

That first night we awakened to screams. I came out of a deep sleep, already sitting up, ready to do battle. At first, I thought my link was on; I had lulled myself to sleep with a bedtime story. My link had an automatic shut-off, but I sometimes forgot to set it. With all that had been happening the last few days, I believed I might have done so again.

Then I noticed my husband sitting up as well, groggily rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.

The screams hadn’t stopped. They were piercing, shrill. It took me a moment to recognize them.

Susan.

I was out of bed before I realized it, running down the hall before I had time to grab my robe. My nightgown flapped around me as I ran. My husband was right behind me. I could hear his heavy steps on the hardwood floor.

When we reached Susan’s room, she was sitting on the window seat, sobbing. The light of the full moon cut across the cushions and illuminated the rag rugs and the old-fashioned pink spread.

I sat down beside her and put my arm around her. Her frail shoulders were shaking, and her breath was coming in short gasps. My husband crouched before her, taking her hands in his.

“What happened, sweetheart?” I asked.

“I–I–I saw him,” she said. “His face exploded, and the blood floated down.”

“Were you watching vids again before sleep?” my husband asked in a sympathetic tone. We both knew if she said yes, in the morning she would get yet another lecture about being careful about what she put in her brain before it rested.

“No!” she wailed.

She apparently remembered those early lectures too.

“Then what caused this?” I asked.

“I don’t know!” she said and burst into sobs again. I cradled her against me, but she didn’t loosen her grip on my husband’s hands.

“After his blood floated, what happened, baby?” my husband asked.

“Someone grabbed me,” she said against my gown. “And pulled me away from him. I didn’t want to go.”

“And then what?” My husband’s voice was still soft.

“I woke up,” she said, and her breath hitched.

I put my hand on her head and pulled her closer. “It’s all right, sweetheart,” I said. “It was just a dream.”

“But it was so real,” she said.

“You’re here now,” my husband said. “Right here. In your room. And we’re right here with you.”

“I don’t want to go back to sleep,” she said. “Do I have to?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing it was better for her to sleep than be afraid of it. “Tell you what, though. I’ll program House to tell you a soothing story, with a bit of music and maybe a few moving images. What do you say?”

“Dr. Seuss,” she said.

“That’s not always soothing,” my husband said, obviously remembering how the House’s Cat in the Hat program gave Kally a terror of anything feline.

“It is to Susan,” I said gently, reminding him. In her third year, she played Green Eggs and Ham all night, the House’s voice droning on and on, making me thankful that our room was at the opposite end of the hall.

But she was three no longer, and she hadn’t wanted Dr. Seuss for years. The dream had really frightened her.

“If you have any more trouble, baby,” my husband said to her, “you come and get us, all right?”

She nodded. He squeezed her hands, then I picked her up and carried her to bed. My husband pulled back the covers. Susan clung to me as I eased her down. “Will I go back there if I close my eyes?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “You’ll listen to House and sleep deeply. And if you dream at all, it’ll be about nice things, like sunshine on flowers, and the lake in summertime.”

“Promise?” she asked, her voice quavering.

“Promise,” I said. Then I removed her hands from my neck and kissed each of them before putting them on the coverlet. I kissed her forehead. My husband did the same, and as we were leaving, she was ordering up the House reading program.

As I pulled the door closed, I saw the opening images of Green Eggs and Ham flicker across the wall.

The next morning, everything seemed fine. When I came down to breakfast, the chef had already placed the food on the table, each dish on its own warming plate. The scrambled eggs had the slightly runny look that indicated they had sat more than an hour–not even the latest design in warming plates could stop that. In addition, there was French toast, and Susan’s favorites, waffles. The scent of fresh blueberry muffins floated over it all, and made me smile. The household staff had gone to great lengths to make Echea feel welcome.

My husband was already in his usual spot, e-conferencing while he sipped his coffee and broke a muffin apart with his fingers. His plate, showing the remains of eggs and ham, was pushed off to the side.

“Morning,” I said as I slipped into my usual place on the other side of the table. It was made of oak and had been in my family since 1851, when my mother’s people brought it over from Europe as a wedding present for my many-great grandparents. The housekeeper kept it polished to a shine, and she only used linen placemats to protect it from the effects of food.

My husband acknowledged me with a blueberry-stained hand as laughter made me look up. Kally came in, her arm around Susan. Susan still didn’t look herself. She had deep circles under her eyes, which meant that Green Eggs and Ham hadn’t quite done the trick. She was too old to come get us–I had known that when we left her last night–but I hoped she hadn’t spent the rest of the night listening to House, trying to find comfort in artificial voices and imagery.

The girls were still smiling when they saw me.

“Something funny?” I asked.

“Echea,” Kally said. “Did you know someone owned her dress before she did?”

No, I hadn’t known that, but it didn’t surprise me. My daughters, on the other hand, had owned only the best. Sometimes their knowledge of life–or lack thereof–shocked me.

“It’s not an unusual way for people to save money,” I said. “But it’ll be the last pre-owned dress she’ll have.”

Mom? It was Anne, e-mailing me directly. The instant prompt appeared before my left eye. Can you come up here?

I blinked the message away, then sighed and pushed back my chair. I should have known the girls would do something that first morning. And the laughter should have prepared me.

“Remember,” I said as I stood. “Only one main course. No matter what your father says.”

“Ma!” Kally said.

“I mean it,” I said, then hurried up the stairs. I didn’t have to check where Anne was. She had sent me an image along with the e-mail–the door to Echea’s room.

As I got closer, I heard Anne’s voice.

“. . . didn’t mean it. They’re old poops.”

“Poop” was Anne’s worst word, at least so far. And when she used it, she put all so much emphasis on it the word became an epithet.

“It’s my dress,” Echea said. She sounded calm and contained, but I thought there was a raggedness to her voice that hadn’t been there the day before. “It’s all I have.”

At that moment, I entered the room. Anne was on the bed, which had been carefully made up. If I hadn’t tucked Echea in the night before, I never would have thought she had slept there.

Echea was standing near her window seat, gazing at the lawn as if she didn’t dare let it out of her sight.

“Actually,” I said, keeping my voice light. “You have an entire closet full of clothes.”

Thanks, Mom, Anne sent me.

“Those clothes are yours,” Echea said.

“We’ve adopted you,” I said. “What’s ours is yours.”

“You don’t get it,” she said. “This dress is mine. It’s all I have.”

She had her arms wrapped around it, her hands gripping it as if we were going to take it away.

“I know,” I said softly. “I know, sweetie-baby. You can keep it. We’re not trying to take it away from you.”

“They said you would.”

“Who?” I asked, with a sinking feeling. I already knew who. My other two daughters. “Kally and Susan?”

She nodded.

“Well, they’re wrong,” I said. “My husband and I make the rules in this house. I will never take away something of yours. I promise.”

“Promise?” she whispered.

“Promise,” I said. “Now how about breakfast?”

She looked at Anne for confirmation, and I wanted to hug my youngest daughter. She had already decided to care for Echea, to ally with her, to make Echea’s entrance into the household easier.

I was so proud of her.

“Breakfast,” Anne said, and I heard a tone in her voice I’d never heard before. “It’s the first meal of the day.”

The government had fed the children standard nutrition supplements, in beverage form. Echea hadn’t taken a meal on Earth until she’d joined us.

“You name your meals?” she asked Anne. “You have that many of them?” Then she put a hand over her mouth, as if she were surprised she had let the questions out.

“Three of them,” I said, trying to sound normal. Instead I felt defensive, as if we had too much. “We only have three of them.”

The second night, we had no disturbances. By the third, we had developed a routine. I spent time with my girls, and then I went into Echea’s room. She didn’t like House or House’s stories. House’s voice, no matter how I programmed it, scared her. It made me wonder how we were going to link her when the time came. If she found House intrusive, imagine how she would find the constant barrage of information services, of instant e-mail scrolling across her eyes, or sudden images appearing inside her head. She was almost past the age where a child adapted easily to a link. We had to calm her quickly or risk her suffering a disadvantage for the rest of her life.

Perhaps it was the voice that upset her. The reason links made sound optional was because too many people had had trouble distinguishing the voices inside their head. Perhaps Echea would be one of them.

It was time to find out.

I had yet to broach the topic with my husband. He seemed to have cooled toward Echea immediately. He thought Echea abnormal because she wasn’t like our girls. I reminded him that Echea hadn’t had the advantages, to which he responded that she had the advantages now. He felt that since her life had changed, she should change.

Somehow I didn’t think it worked like that.

It was on the second night that I realized she was terrified of going to sleep. She kept me as long as she could, and when I finally left, she asked to keep the lights on.

House said she had them on all night, although the computer clocked her even breathing starting at 2:47 a.m.

On the third night, she asked me questions. Simple ones, like the one about breakfast, and I answered them without my previous defensiveness. I held my emotions back, my shock that a child would have to ask what that pleasant ache was in her stomach after meals (“You’re full, Echea. That’s your stomach telling you it’s happy.”) or why we insisted on bathing at least once a day (“People stink if they don’t bathe often, Echea. Haven’t you noticed?”). She asked the questions with her eyes averted, and her hands clenched against the coverlet. She knew that she should know the answers, she knew better than to ask my older two daughters or my husband, and she tried ever so hard to be sophisticated.

Already, the girls had humiliated her more than once. The dress incident had blossomed into an obsession with them, and they taunted her about her unwillingness to attach to anything. She wouldn’t even claim a place at the dining room table. She seemed convinced that we would toss her out at the first chance.

On the fourth night, she addressed that fear. Her question came at me sideways, her body more rigid than usual.

“If I break something,” she asked, “what will happen?”

I resisted the urge to ask what she had broken. I knew she hadn’t broken anything. House would have told me, even if the girls hadn’t.

“Echea,” I said, sitting on the edge of her bed, “are you afraid that you’ll do something which will force us to get rid of you?”

She flinched as if I had struck her, then she slid down against the coverlet. The material was twisted in her hands, and her lower jaw was working even before she spoke.

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Didn’t they explain this to you before they brought you here?” I asked.

“They said nothing.” That harsh tone was back in her voice, the tone I hadn’t heard since that very first day, her very first comment.

I leaned forward and, for the first time, took one of those clenched fists into my hands. I felt the sharp knuckles against my palms, and the softness of the fabric brushing my skin.

“Echea,” I said. “When we adopted you, we made you our child by law. We cannot get rid of you. No matter what. It is illegal for us to do so.”

“People do illegal things,” she whispered.

“When it benefits them,” I said. “Losing you will not benefit us.”

“You’re saying that to be kind,” she said.

I shook my head. The real answer was harsh, harsher than I wanted to state, but I could not leave it at this. She would not believe me. She would think I was trying to ease her mind. I was, but not through polite lies.

“No,” I said. “The agreement we signed is legally binding. If we treat you as anything less than a member of our family, we not only lose you, we lose our other daughters as well.”

I was particularly proud of adding the word “other.” I suspected that, if my husband had been having this conversation with her, that he would have forgotten to add it.

“You would?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“This is true?” she asked.

“True,” I said. “I can download the agreement and its ramifications for you in the morning. House can read you the standard agreement–the one everyone must sign–tonight if you like.”

She shook her head, and pushed her hands harder into mine. “Could you–could you answer me one thing?” she asked.

“Anything,” I said.

“I don’t have to leave?”

“Not ever,” I said.

She frowned. “Even if you die?”

“Even if we die,” I said. “You’ll inherit, just like the other girls.”

My stomach knotted as I spoke. I had never mentioned the money to our own children. I figured they knew. And now I was telling Echea who was, for all intents and purposes, still a stranger.

And an unknown one at that.

I made myself smile, made the next words come out lightly. “I suspect there are provisions against killing us in our beds.”

Her eyes widened, then instantly filled with tears. “I would never do that,” she said.

And I believed her.

As she grew more comfortable with me, she told me about her previous life. She spoke of it only in passing, as if the things that happened before no longer mattered to her. But in the very flatness with which she told them, I could sense deep emotions churning beneath the surface.

The stories she told were hair-raising. She had not, as I had assumed, been orphaned as an infant. She had spent most of her life with a family member who had died, and then she had been brought to Earth. Somehow, I had believed that she had grown up in an orphanage like the ones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ones Dickens wrote about, and the famous pioneer filmmakers had made Flats about. I had not realized that those places did not exist on the Moon. Either children were chosen for adoption, or they were left to their own devices, to survive on their own if they could.

Until she had moved in with us, she had never slept in a bed. She did not know it was possible to grow food by planting it, although she had heard rumors of such miracles.

She did not know that people could accept her for what she was, instead of what she could do for them.

My husband said that she was playing on my sympathies so that I would never let her go.

But I wouldn’t have let her go anyway. I had signed the documents and made the verbal promise. And I cared for her. I would never let her go, any more than I would let a child of my flesh go.

I hoped, at one point, that he would feel the same.

As the weeks progressed, I was able to focus on Echea’s less immediate needs. She was beginning to use House–her initial objection to it had been based on something that happened on the Moon, something she never fully explained–but House could not teach her everything. Anne introduced her to reading, and often Echea would read to herself. She caught on quickly, and I was surprised that she had not learned in her school on the Moon, until someone told me that most Moon colonies had no schools. The children were home-taught, which worked only for children with stable homes.

Anne also showed her how to program House to read things Echea did not understand. Echea made use of that as well. At night, when I couldn’t sleep, I would check on the girls. Often I would have to open Echea’s door, and turn off House myself. Echea would fall asleep to the drone of a deep male voice. She never used the vids. She simply liked the words, she said, and she would listen to them endlessly, as if she couldn’t get enough.

I downloaded information on child development and learning curves, and it was as I remembered. A child who did not link before the age of ten was significantly behind her peers in all things. If she did not link before the age of twenty, she would never be able to function at an adult level in modern society.

Echea’s link would be her first step into the world that my daughters already knew, the Earth culture denied so many who had fled to the Moon.

After a bit of hesitation, I made an appointment with Ronald Caro, our Interface Physician.

Through force of habit, I did not tell my husband.

I had known my husband all my life, and our match was assumed from the beginning. We had a warm and comfortable relationship, much better than many among my peers. I had always liked my husband, and had always admired the way he worked his way around each obstacle life presented him.

One of those obstacles was Ronald Caro. When he arrived in St. Paul, after getting all his degrees and licenses and awards, Ronald Caro contacted me. He had known that my daughter Kally was in need of a link, and he offered to be the one to do it.

I would have turned him down, but my husband, always practical, checked on his credentials.

“How sad,” my husband had said. “He’s become one of the best Interface Physicians in the country.”

I hadn’t thought it sad. I hadn’t thought it anything at all except inconvenient. My family had forbidden me to see Ronald Caro when I was sixteen, and I had disobeyed them.

All girls, particularly home-schooled ones, have on-line romances. Some progress to vid conferencing and virtual sex. Only a handful progress to actual physical contact. And of those that do, only a small fraction survive.

At sixteen, I ran away from home to be with Ronald Caro. He had been sixteen too, and gorgeous, if the remaining snapshot in my image memory were any indication. I thought I loved him. My father, who had been monitoring my e-mail, sent two police officers and his personal assistant to bring me home.

The resulting disgrace made me so ill that I could not get out of bed for six months. My then-future husband visited me each and every day of those six months, and it is from that period that most of my memories of him were formed. I was glad to have him; my father, who had been quite close to me, rarely spoke to me after I ran away with Ronald, and treated me as a stranger.

When Ronald reappeared in the Northland long after I had married, my husband showed his forgiving nature. He knew Ronald Caro was no longer a threat to us. He proved it by letting me take the short shuttle hop to the Twin Cities to have Kally linked.

Ronald did not act improperly toward me then or thereafter, although he often looked at me with a sadness I did not reciprocate. My husband was relieved. He always insisted on having the best, and because my husband was squeamish about brain work, particularly that which required chips, lasers, and remote placement devices, he preferred to let me handle the children’s interface needs.

Even though I no longer wanted it, I still had a personal relationship with Ronald Caro. He did not treat me as a patient, or as the mother of his patients, but as a friend.

Nothing more.

Even my husband knew that.

Still, the afternoon I made the appointment, I went into our bedroom, made certain my husband was in his office, and closed the door. Then I used the link to send a message to Ronald.

Instantly his response flashed across my left eye.

Are you all right? He sent, as he always did, as if he expected something terrible to have happened to me during our most recent silence.

Fine, I sent back, disliking the personal questions.

And the girls?

Fine also.

So, you linked to chat? Again, as he always did.

And I responded as I always did. No. I need to make an appointment for Echea.

The Moon Child?

I smiled. Ronald was the only person I knew, besides my husband, who didn’t think we were insane for taking on a child not our own. But I felt that we could, and because we could, and because so many were suffering, we should.

My husband probably had his own reasons. We never really discussed them, beyond that first day.

The Moon Child, I responded. Echea.

Pretty name.

Pretty girl.

There was a silence, as if he didn’t know how to respond to that. He had always been silent about my children. They were links he could not form, links to my husband that could not be broken, links that Ronald and I could never have.

She has no interface, I sent into that silence.

Not at all?

No.

Did they tell you anything about her?

Only that she’d been orphaned. You know, the standard stuff. I felt odd, sending that. I had asked for information, of course, at every step. And my husband had. And when we compared notes, I learned that each time we had been told the same thing–that we had asked for a child, and we would get one, and that child’s life would start fresh with us. The past did not matter.

The present did.

How old is she?

Seven.

Hmmm. The procedure won’t be involved, but there might be some dislocation. She’s been alone in her head all this time. Is she stable enough for the change?

I was genuinely perplexed. I had never encountered an unlinked child, let alone lived with one. I didn’t know what “stable” meant in that context.

My silence had apparently been answer enough.

I’ll do an exam, he sent. Don’t worry.

Good. I got ready to terminate the conversation.

You sure everything’s all right there? he sent.

It’s as right as it always is, I sent, and then severed the connection.

That night, I dreamed. It was an odd dream because it felt like a virtual reality vid, complete with emotions and all the five senses. But it had the distance of VR too–that strange sense that the experience was not mine.

I dreamed I was on a dirty, dusty street. The air was thin and dry. I had never felt air like this. It tasted recycled, and it seemed to suck the moisture from my skin. It wasn’t hot, but it wasn’t cold either. I wore a ripped shirt and ragged pants, and my shoes were boots made of a light material I had never felt before. Walking was easy and precarious at the same time. I felt lighter than ever, as if with one wrong gesture I would float.

My body moved easily in this strange atmosphere, as if it were used to it. I had felt something like it before: when my husband and I had gone to the Museum of Science and Technology in Chicago on our honeymoon. We explored the Moon exhibit, and felt firsthand what it was like to be in a colony environment.

Only that had been clean.

This wasn’t.

The buildings were white plastic, covered with a filmy grit and pockmarked with time and use. The dirt on the ground seemed to get on everything, but I knew, as well as I knew how to walk in this imperfect gravity, that there wasn’t enough money to pave the roads.

The light above was artificial, built into the dome itself. If I looked up, I could see the dome and the light, and if I squinted, I could see beyond to the darkness that was the unprotected atmosphere. It made me feel as if I were in a lighted glass porch on a starless night. Open, and vulnerable, and terrified, more because I couldn’t see what was beyond than because I could.

People crowded the roadway and huddled near the plastic buildings. The buildings were domed too. Pre-fab, shipped up decades ago when Earth had hopes for the colonies. Now there were no more shipments, at least not here. We had heard that there were shipments coming to Colony Russia and Colony Europe, but no one confirmed the rumors. I was in Colony London, a bastard colony made by refugees and dissidents from Colony Europe. For a while, we had stolen their supply ships. Now, it seemed, they had stolen them back.

A man took my arm. I smiled up at him. His face was my father’s face, a face I hadn’t seen since I was twenty-five. Only something had altered it terribly. He was younger than I had ever remembered him. He was too thin and his skin filthy with dust. He smiled back at me, three teeth missing, lost to malnutrition, the rest blackened and about to go. In the past few days the whites of his eyes had turned yellow, and a strange mucus came from his nose. I wanted him to see the colony’s medical facility or at least pay for an autodoc, but we had no credit, no means to pay at all.

It would have to wait until we found something.

“I think I found us free passage to Colony Latina,” he said. His breath whistled through the gaps in his teeth. I had learned long ago to be far away from his mouth. The stench could be overpowering. “But you’ll have to do them a job.”

A job. I sighed. He had promised no more. But that had been months ago. The credits had run out, and he had gotten sicker.

“A big job?” I asked.

He didn’t meet my gaze. “Might be.”

“Dad—”

“Honey, we gotta use what we got.”

It might have been his motto. We gotta use what we got. I’d heard it all my life. He’d come from Earth, he’d said, in one of the last free ships. Some of the others we knew said there were no free ships except for parolees, and I often wondered if he had come on one of those. His morals were certainly slippery enough.

I don’t remember my mother. I’m not even sure I had one. I’d seen more than one adult buy an infant, and then proceed to exploit it for gain. It wouldn’t have been beyond him.

But he loved me. That much was clear.

And I adored him.

I’d have done the job just because he’d asked it.

I’d done it before.

The last job was how we’d gotten here. I’d been younger then and I hadn’t completely understood.

But I’d understood when we were done.

And I’d hated myself.

“Isn’t there another way?” I found myself asking.

He put his hand on the back of my head, propelling me forward. “You know better,” he said. “There’s nothing here for us.”

“There might not be anything in Colony Latina, either.”

“They’re getting shipments from the U.N. Seems they vowed to negotiate a peace.”

“Then everyone will want to go.”

“But not everyone can,” he said. “We can.” He touched his pocket. I saw the bulge of his credit slip. “If you do the job.”

It had been easier when I didn’t know. When doing a job meant just that. When I didn’t have other things to consider. After the first job, my father asked where I had gotten the morals. He said I hadn’t inherited them from him, and I hadn’t. I knew that. I suggested maybe Mother, and he had laughed, saying no mother who gave birth to me had morals either.

“Don’t think about it, honey,” he’d said. “Just do.”

Just do. I opened my mouth–to say what, I don’t know–and felt hot liquid splatter me. An exit wound had opened in his chest, spraying his blood all around. People screamed and backed away. I screamed. I didn’t see where the shot had come from, only that it had come.

The blood moved slowly, more slowly than I would have expected.

He fell forward and I knew I wouldn’t be able to move him, I wouldn’t be able to grab the credit slip, wouldn’t be able to get to Colony Latina, wouldn’t have to do the job.

Faces, unbloodied faces, appeared around me.

They hadn’t killed him for the slip.

I turned and ran, as he once told me to do, ran as fast as I could, blasting as I went, watching people duck or cover their ears or wrap their arms around their heads.

I ran until I saw the sign.

The tiny prefab with the Red Crescent painted on its door, the Red Cross on its windows. I stopped blasting and tumbled inside, bloody, terrified, and completely alone.

I woke up to find my husband’s arms around me, my head buried in his shoulder. He was rocking me as if I were one of the girls, murmuring in my ear, cradling me and making me feel safe. I was crying and shaking, my throat raw with tears or with the aftereffects of screams.

Our door was shut and locked, something that we only did when we were amorous. He must have had House do it, so no one would walk in on us.

He stroked my hair, wiped the tears from my face. “You should leave your link on at night,” he said tenderly. “I could have manipulated the dream, made it into something pleasant.”

We used to do that for each other when we were first married. It had been a way to mesh our different sexual needs, a way to discover each other’s thoughts and desires.

We hadn’t done it in a long, long time.

“Do you want to tell me about it?” he asked.

So I did.

He buried his face in my hair. It had been a long time since he had done that, too, since he had shown that kind of vulnerability with me.

“It’s Echea,” he said.

“I know,” I said. That much was obvious. I had been thinking about her so much that she had worked her way into my dreams.

“No,” he said. “It’s nothing to be calm about.” He sat up, kept his hand on me, and peered into my face. “First Susan, then you. It’s like she’s a poison that’s infecting my family.”

The moment of closeness shattered. I didn’t pull away from him, but it took great control not to. “She’s our child.”

“No,” he said. “She’s someone else’s child, and she’s disrupting our household.”

“Babies disrupt households. It took a while, but you accepted that.”

“And if Echea had come to us as a baby, I would have accepted her. But she didn’t. She has problems that we did not expect.”

“The documents we signed said that we must treat those problems as our own.”

His grip on my shoulder grew tighter. He probably didn’t realize he was doing it. “They also said that the child had been inspected and was guaranteed illness free.”

“You think some kind of illness is causing these dreams? That they’re being passed from Echea to us like a virus?”

“Aren’t they?” he asked. “Susan dreamed of a man who died. Someone whom she didn’t want to go. Then ‘they’ pulled her away from him. You dream of your father’s death–”

“They’re different,” I said. “Susan dreamed of a man’s face exploding, and being captured. I dreamed of a man being shot, and of running away.”

“But those are just details.”

“Dream details,” I said. “We’ve all been talking to Echea. I’m sure that some of her memories have woven their way into our dreams, just as our daily experiences do, or the vids we’ve seen. It’s not that unusual.”

“There were no night terrors in this household until she came,” he said.

“And no one had gone through any trauma until she arrived, either.” I pulled away from him now. “What we’ve gone through is small compared to her. Your parents’ deaths, mine, the birth of the girls, a few bad investments, these things are all minor. We still live in the house you were born in. We swim in the lake of our childhood. We have grown wealthier. We have wonderful daughters. That’s why we took Echea.”

“To learn trauma?”

“No,” I said. “Because we could take her, and so many others can’t.”

He ran a hand through his thinning hair. “But I don’t want trauma in this house. I don’t want to be disturbed any more. She’s not our child. Let’s let her become someone else’s problem.”

I sighed. “If we do that, we’ll still have trauma. The government will sue. We’ll have legal bills up to our eyeballs. We did sign documents covering these things.”

“They said if the child was defective, we could send her back.”

I shook my head. “And we signed even more documents that said she was fine. We waived that right.”

He bowed his head. Small strands of gray circled his crown. I had never noticed them before.

“I don’t want her here,” he said.

I put a hand on his. He had felt that way about Kally, early on. He had hated the way an infant disrupted our routine. He had hated the midnight feedings, had tried to get me to hire a wet nurse, and then a nanny. He had wanted someone else to raise our children because they inconvenienced him.

And yet the pregnancies had been his idea, just like Echea had been. He would get enthusiastic, and then when reality settled in, he would forget the initial impulse.

In the old days we had compromised. No wet nurse, but a nanny. His sleep undisturbed, but mine disrupted. My choice, not his. As the girls got older, he found his own ways to delight in them.

“You haven’t spent any time with her,” I said. “Get to know her. See what she’s really like. She’s a delightful child. You’ll see.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want nightmares,” he said, but I heard capitulation in his voice.

“I’ll leave my interface on at night,” I said. “We can even link when we sleep and manipulate each other’s dreams.”

He raised his head, smiling, suddenly looking boyish, like the man who proposed to me, all those years ago. “Like old times,” he said.

I smiled back, irritation gone. “Just like old times,” I said.

The nanny had offered to take Echea to Ronald’s, but I insisted, even though the thought of seeing him so close to a comfortable intimacy with my husband made me uneasy. Ronald’s main offices were over fifteen minutes away by shuttle. He was in a decade-old office park near the Mississippi, not too far from St. Paul’s new capitol building. Ronald’s building was all glass on the river side. It stood on stilts–the Mississippi had flooded abominably in ’45, and the city still hadn’t recovered from the shock–and to get to the main entrance, visitors needed a lift code. Ronald had given me one when I made the appointment.

Echea had been silent during the entire trip. The shuttle had terrified her, and it didn’t take long to figure out why. Each time she had traveled by shuttle, she had gone to a new home. I reassured her that would not happen this time, but I could tell she thought I lied.

When she saw the building, she grabbed my hand.

“I’ll be good,” she whispered.

“You’ve been fine so far,” I said, wishing my husband could see her now. For all his demonizing, he failed to realize she was just a little girl.

“Don’t leave me here.”

“I don’t plan to,” I said.

The lift was a small glass enclosure with voice controls. When I spoke the code, it rose on air jets to the fifth floor and docked, just like a shuttle. It was designed to work no matter what the weather, no matter what the conditions on the ground.

Echea was not amused. Her grip on my hand grew so tight that it cut off the circulation to my fingers.

We docked at the main entrance. The building’s door was open, apparently on the theory that anyone who knew the code was invited. A secretary sat behind an antique wood desk that was dark and polished until it shone. He had a blotter in the center of the desk, a pen and inkwell beside it, and a single sheet of paper on top. I suspected that he did most of his work through his link, but the illusion worked. It made me feel as if I had slipped into a place wealthy enough to use paper, wealthy enough to waste wood on a desk.

“We’re here to see Dr. Caro,” I said as Echea and I entered.

“The end of the hall to your right,” the secretary said, even though the directions were unnecessary. I had been that way dozens of times.

Echea hadn’t, though. She moved through the building as if it were a wonder, never letting go of my hand. She seemed to remain convinced that I would leave her there, but her fear did not diminish her curiosity. Everything was strange. I suppose it had to be, compared to the Moon where space–with oxygen–was always at a premium. To waste so much area on an entrance wouldn’t merely be a luxury there. It would be criminal.

We walked across the wood floors past several closed doors until we reached Ronald’s offices. The secretary had warned someone because the doors swung open. Usually I had to use the small bell to the side, another old-fashioned affectation.

The interior of his offices was comfortable. They were done in blue, the color of calm he once told me, with thick easy chairs and pillowed couches. A children’s area was off to the side, filled with blocks and soft toys and a few dolls. The bulk of Ronald’s clients were toddlers, and the play area reflected that.

A young man in a blue worksuit appeared at one of the doors, and called my name. Echea clutched my hand tighter. He noticed her and smiled.

“Room B,” he said.

I liked Room B. It was familiar. All three of my girls had done their post-interface work in Room B. I had only been in the other rooms once, and had felt less comfortable.

It was a good omen, to bring Echea to such a safe place.

I made my way down the hall, Echea in tow, without the man’s guidance. The door to Room B was open. Ronald had not changed it. It still had the fainting couch, the work unit recessed into the wall, the reclining rockers. I had slept in one of those rockers as Kally had gone through her most rigorous testing.

I had been pregnant with Susan at the time.

I eased Echea inside and then pulled the door closed behind us. Ronald came through the back door–he must have been waiting for us–and Echea jumped. Her grip on my hand grew so tight that I thought she might break one of my fingers. I smiled at her and did not pull my hand away.

Ronald looked nice. He was too slim, as always, and his blond hair flopped against his brow. It needed a cut. He wore a silver silk shirt and matching pants, and even though they were a few years out of style, they looked sharp against his brown skin.

Ronald was good with children. He smiled at her first, and then took a stool and wheeled it toward us so that he would be at her eye level.

“Echea,” he said. “Pretty name.”

And a pretty child, he sent, just for me.

She said nothing. The sullen expression she had had when we met her had returned.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asked.

“I don’t want to go with you,” she said.

“Where do you think I’m taking you?”

“Away from here. Away from–” she held up my hand, clasped in her small one. At that moment it became clear to me. She had no word for what we were to her. She didn’t want to use the word “family,” perhaps because she might lose us.

“Your mother–” he said slowly and as he did he sent Right? to me.

Right, I responded.

“—brought you here for a check-up. Have you seen a doctor since you’ve come to Earth?”

“At the center,” she said.

“And was everything all right?”

“If it wasn’t, they’d have sent me back.”

He leaned his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands and placing them under his chin. His eyes, a silver that matched the suit, were soft.

“Are you afraid I’m going to find something?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“But you’re afraid I’m going to send you back.”

“Not everybody likes me,” she said. “Not everybody wants me. They said, when they brought me to Earth, that the whole family had to like me, that I had to behave or I’d be sent back.”

Is this true? he asked me.

I don’t know. I was shocked. I had known nothing of this.

Does the family dislike her?

She’s new. A disruption. That’ll change.

He glanced at me over her head, but sent nothing else. His look was enough. He didn’t believe they’d change, any more than Echea would.

“Have you behaved?” he asked softly.

She glanced at me. I nodded almost imperceptibly. She looked back at him. “I’ve tried,” she said.

He touched her then, his long delicate fingers tucking a strand of her pale hair behind her ear. She leaned into his fingers as if she’d been longing for touch.

She’s more like you, he told me, than any of your own girls.

I did not respond. Kally looked just like me, and Susan and Anne both favored me as well. There was nothing of me in Echea. Only a bond that had formed when I first saw her, all those weeks before.

Reassure her, he sent.

I have been.

Do it again.

“Echea,” I said, and she started as if she had forgotten I was there. “Dr. Caro is telling you the truth. You’re just here for an examination. No matter how it turns out, you’ll still be coming home with me. Remember my promise?”

She nodded, eyes wide.

“I always keep my promises,” I said.

Do you? Ronald asked. He was staring at me over Echea’s shoulder.

I shivered, wondering what promise I had forgotten.

Always, I told him.

The edge of his lips turned up in a smile, but there was no mirth in it.

“Echea,” he said. “It’s my normal practice to work alone with my patient, but I’ll bet you want your mother to stay.”

She nodded. I could almost feel the desperation in the move.

“All right,” he said. “You’ll have to move to the couch.”

He scooted his chair toward it.

“It’s called a fainting couch,” he said. “Do you know why?”

She let go of my hand and stood. When he asked the question, she looked at me as if I would supply her with the answer. I shrugged.

“No,” she whispered. She followed him hesitantly, not the little girl I knew around the house.

“Because almost two hundred years ago when these were fashionable, women fainted a lot.”

“They did not,” Echea said.

“Oh, but they did,” Ronald said. “And do you know why?”

She shook her small head. With this idle chatter he had managed to ease her passage toward the couch.

“Because they wore undergarments so tight that they often couldn’t breathe right. And if a person can’t breathe right, she’ll faint.”

“That’s silly.”

“That’s right,” he said, as he patted the couch. “Ease yourself up there and see what it was like on one of those things.”

I knew his fainting couch wasn’t an antique. His had all sorts of diagnostic equipment built in. I wondered how many other people.

Certainly not my daughters. They had known the answers to his questions before coming to the office.

“People do a lot of silly things,” he said. “Even now. Did you know most people on Earth are linked?”

As he explained the net and its uses, I ignored them. I did some leftover business, made my daily chess move, and tuned into their conversation on occasion.

“–and what’s really silly is that so many people refuse a link. It prevents them from functioning well in our society. From getting jobs, from communicating–”

Echea listened intently while she lay on the couch. And while he talked to her, I knew, he was examining her, seeing what parts of her brain responded to his questions.

“But doesn’t it hurt?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Science makes such things easy. It’s like touching a strand of hair.”

And then I smiled. I understood why he had made the tender move earlier. So that he wouldn’t alarm her when he put in the first chip, the beginning of her own link.

“What if it goes wrong?” she asked. “Will everybody–die?”

He pulled back from her. Probably not enough so that she would notice. But I did. There was a slight frown between his eyes. At first, I thought he would shrug off the question, but it took him too long to answer.

“No,” he said as firmly as he could. “No one will die.”

Then I realized what he was doing. He was dealing with a child’s fear realistically. Sometimes I was too used to my husband’s rather casual attitude toward the girls. And I was used to the girls themselves. They were much more placid than my Echea.

With the flick of a finger, he turned on the overhead light.

“Do you have dreams, honey?” he asked as casually as he could.

She looked down at her hands. They were slightly scarred from experiences I knew nothing about. I had planned to ask her about each scar as I gained her trust. So far, I had asked about none.

“Not any more,” she said.

This time, I moved back slightly. Everyone dreamed, didn’t they? Or were dreams only the product of a linked mind? That couldn’t be right. I’d seen the babies dream before we brought them here.

“When was the last time you dreamed?” he asked.

She shoved herself back on the lounge. Its base squealed from the force of her contact. She looked around, seemingly terrified. Then she looked at me. It seemed like her eyes were appealing for help.

This was why I wanted a link for her. I wanted her to be able to tell me, without speaking, without Ronald knowing, what she needed. I didn’t want to guess.

“It’s all right,” I said to her. “Dr. Caro won’t hurt you.”

She jutted out her chin, squeezed her eyes closed, as if she couldn’t face him when she spoke, and took a deep breath. Ronald waited, breathless.

I thought, not for the first time, that it was a shame he did not have children of his own.

“They shut me off,” she said.

“Who?” His voice held infinite patience.

Do you know what’s going on? I sent him.

He did not respond. His full attention was on her.

“The Red Crescent,” she said softly.

“The Red Cross,” I said. “On the Moon. They were the ones in charge of the orphans–”

“Let Echea tell it,” he said, and I stopped, flushing. He had never rebuked me before. At least, not verbally.

“Was it on the Moon?” he asked her.

“They wouldn’t let me come otherwise.”

“Has anyone touched it since?” he asked.

She shook her head slowly. Somewhere in their discussion, her eyes had opened. She was watching Ronald with that mixture of fear and longing that she had first used with me.

“May I see?” he asked.

She clapped a hand to the side of her head. “If it comes on, they’ll make me leave.”

“Did they tell you that?” he asked.

She shook her head again.

“Then there’s nothing to worry about.” He put a hand on her shoulder and eased her back on the lounge. I watched, back stiff. It seemed like I had missed a part of the conversation, but I knew I hadn’t. They were discussing something I had never heard of, something the government had neglected to tell us. My stomach turned. This was exactly the kind of excuse my husband would use to get rid of her.

She was lying rigidly on the lounge. Ronald was smiling at her, talking softly, his hand on the lounge’s controls. He got the read-outs directly through his link. Most everything in the office worked that way, with a back-up download on the office’s equivalent of House. He would send us a file copy later. It was something my husband insisted on, since he did not like coming to these appointments. I doubted he read the files, but he might this time. With Echea.

Ronald’s frown grew. “No more dreams?” he asked.

“No,” Echea said again. She sounded terrified.

I could keep silent no longer. Our family’s had night terrors since she arrived, I sent him.

He glanced at me, whether with irritation or speculation, I could not tell.

They’re similar, I sent. The dreams are all about a death on the Moon. My husband thinks–

I don’t care what he thinks. Ronald’s message was intended as harsh. I had never seen him like this before. At least, I didn’t think so. A dim memory rose and fell, a sense memory. I had heard him use a harsh tone with me, but I could not remember when.

“Have you tried to link with her?” he asked me directly.

“How could I?” I asked. “She’s not linked.”

“Have your daughters?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Do you know if anyone’s tried?” he asked her.

Echea shook her head.

“Has she been doing any computer work at all?” he asked.

“Listening to House,” I said. “I insisted. I wanted to see if–”

“House,” he said. “Your home system.”

“Yes.” Something was very wrong. I could feel it. It was in his tone, in his face, in his casual movements, designed to disguise his worry from his patients.

“Did House bother you?” he asked Echea.

“At first,” she said. Then she glanced at me. Again, the need for reassurance. “But now I like it.”

“Even though it’s painful,” he said.

“No, it’s not,” she said, but she averted her eyes from mine.

My mouth went dry. “It hurts you to use House?” I asked. “And you didn’t say anything?”

She didn’t want to risk losing the first home she ever had, Ronald sent. Don’t be so harsh.

I wasn’t the one being harsh. He was. And I didn’t like it.

“It doesn’t really hurt,” she said.

Tell me what’s happening, I sent him. What’s wrong with her?

“Echea,” he said, putting his hand alongside her head one more time. “I’d like to talk with your mother alone. Would it be all right if we sent you back to the play area?”

She shook her head.

“How about if we leave the door open? You’ll always be able to see her.”

She bit her lower lip.

Can’t you tell me this way? I sent.

I need all the verbal tools, he sent back. Trust me.

I did trust him. And because I did, a fear had settled in the pit of my stomach.

“That’s okay,” she said. Then she looked at me. “Can I come back in when I want?”

“If it looks like we’re done,” I said.

“You won’t leave me here,” she said again. When would I gain her complete trust?

“Never,” I said.

She stood then and walked out the door without looking back. She seemed so much like the little girl I’d first met that my heart went out to her. All that bravado the first day had been just that, a cover for sheer terror.

She went to the play area and sat on a cushioned block. She folded her hands in her lap, and stared at me. Ronald’s assistant tried to interest her in a doll, but she shook him off.

“What is it?” I asked.

Ronald sighed, and scooted his stool closer to me. He stopped near the edge of the lounge, not close enough to touch, but close enough that I could smell the scent of him mingled with his specially blended soap.

“The children being sent down from the Moon were rescued,” he said softly.

“I know.” I had read all the literature they sent when we first applied for Echea.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “They weren’t just rescued from a miserable life like you and the other adoptive parents believe. They were rescued from a program that was started in Colony Europe about fifteen years ago. Most of the children involved died.”

“Are you saying she has some horrible disease?”

“No,” he said. “Hear me out. She has an implant–”

“A link?”

“No,” he said. “Sarah, please.”

Sarah. The name startled me. No one called me that any more. Ronald had not used it in all the years of our reacquaintance.

The name no longer felt like mine.

“Remember how devastating the Moon Wars were? They were using projectile weapons and shattering the colonies themselves, opening them to space. A single bomb would destroy generations of work. Then some of the colonists went underground–”

“And started attacking from there, yes, I know. But that was decades ago. What has that to do with Echea?”

“Colony London, Colony Europe, Colony Russia, and Colony New Delhi signed the peace treaty–”

“–vowing not to use any more destructive weapons. I remember this, Ronald–”

“Because if they did, no more supply ships would be sent.”

I nodded. “Colony New York and Colony Armstrong refused to participate.”

“And were eventually obliterated.” Ronald leaned toward me, like he had done with Echea. I glanced at her. She was watching, as still as could be. “But the fighting didn’t stop. Colonies used knives and secret assassins to kill government officials–”

“And they found a way to divert supply ships,” I said.

He smiled sadly. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s Echea.”

He had come around to the topic of my child so quickly it made me dizzy.

“How could she divert supply ships?”

He rubbed his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Then he sighed again. “A scientist on Colony Europe developed a technology that broadcast thoughts through the subconscious. It was subtle, and it worked very well. A broadcast about hunger at Colony Europe would get a supply captain to divert his ship from Colony Russia and drop the supplies in Colony Europe. It’s more sophisticated than I make it sound. The technology actually made the captain believe that the rerouting was his idea.”

Dreams. Dreams came from the subconscious. I shivered.

“The problem was that the technology was inserted into the brain of the user, like a link, but if the user had an existing link, it superseded the new technology. So they installed it in children born on the Moon, born in Colony Europe. Apparently Echea was.”

“And they rerouted supply ships?”

“By imagining themselves hungry–or actually being starved. They would broadcast messages to the supply ships. Sometimes they were about food. Sometimes they were about clothing. Sometimes they were about weapons.” He shook his head. “Are. I should say are. They’re still doing this.”

“Can’t it be stopped?”

He shook his head. “We’re gathering data on it now. Echea is the third child I’ve seen with this condition. It’s not enough to go to the World Congress yet. Everyone knows though. The Red Crescent and the Red Cross are alerted to this, and they remove children from the colonies, sometimes on penalty of death, to send them here where they will no longer be harmed. The technology is deactivated, and people like you adopt them and give them full lives.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Perhaps your House reactivated her device.”

I shook my head. “The first dream happened before she listened to House.”

“Then some other technology did. Perhaps the government didn’t shut her off properly. It happens. The recommended procedure is to say nothing, and to simply remove the device.”

I frowned at him. “Then why are you telling me this? Why didn’t you just remove it?”

“Because you want her to be linked.”

“Of course I do,” I said. “You know that. You told her yourself the benefits of linking. You know what would happen to her if she isn’t. You know.”

“I know that she would be fine if you and your husband provided for her in your wills. If you gave her one of the houses and enough money to have servants for the rest of her life. She would be fine.”

“But not productive.”

“Maybe she doesn’t need to be,” he said.

It sounded so unlike the Ronald who had been treating my children that I frowned. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Her technology and the link are incompatible.”

“I understand that,” I said. “But you can remove her technology.”

“Her brain formed around it. If I installed the link, it would wipe her mind clean.”

“So?”

He swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “I’m not being clear,” he said more to himself than to me. “It would make her a blank slate. Like a baby. She’d have to learn everything all over again. How to walk. How to eat. It would go quicker this time, but she wouldn’t be a normal seven-year-old girl for half a year.”

“I think that’s worth the price of the link,” I said.

“But that’s not all,” he said. “She’d lose all her memories. Every last one of them. Life on the Moon, arrival here, what she ate for breakfast the morning she received the link.” He started to scoot forward and then stopped. “We are our memories, Sarah. She wouldn’t be Echea any more.”

“Are you so sure?” I asked. “After all, the basic template would be the same. Her genetic makeup wouldn’t alter.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “Trust me. I’ve seen it.”

“Can’t you do a memory store? Back things up so that when she gets her link she’ll have access to her life before?”

“Of course,” he said. “But it’s not the same. It’s like being told about a boat ride as opposed to taking one yourself. You have the same basic knowledge, but the experience is no longer part of you.”

His eyes were bright. Too bright.

“Surely it’s not that bad,” I said.

“This is my specialty,” he said, and his voice was shaking. He was obviously very passionate about this work. “I study how wiped minds and memory stores interact. I got into this profession hoping I could reverse the effects.”

I hadn’t known that. Or maybe I had and forgotten it.

“How different would she be?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Considering the extent of her experience on the Moon, and the traumatic nature of much of it, I’d bet she’ll be very different.” He glanced into the play area. “She’d probably play with that doll beside her and not give a second thought to where you are.”

“But that’s good.”

“That is, yes, but think how good it feels to earn her trust. She doesn’t give it easily, and when she does, it’s heartfelt.”

I ran a hand through my hair. My stomach churned.

I don’t like these choices, Ronald.

“I know,” he said. I started. I hadn’t realized I had actually sent him that last message.

“You’re telling me that either I keep the same child and she can’t function in our society, or I give her the same chances as everyone else and take away who she is.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I can’t make that choice,” I said. “My husband will see this as a breach of contract. He’ll think that they sent us a defective child.”

“Read the fine print in your agreement,” Ronald said. “This one is covered. So are a few others. It’s boilerplate. I’ll bet your lawyer didn’t even flinch when she read them.”

“I can’t make this choice,” I said again.

He scooted forward and put his hands on mine. They were warm and strong and comfortable.

And familiar. Strangely familiar.

“You have to make the choice,” he said. “At some point. That’s part of your contract too. You’re to provide for her, to prepare her for a life in the world. Either she gets a link or she gets an inheritance that someone else manages.”

“And she won’t even be able to check to see if she’s being cheated.”

“That’s right,” he said. “You’ll have to provide for that too.”

“It’s not fair, Ronald!”

He closed his eyes, bowed his head, and leaned it against my forehead. “It never was,” he said softly. “Dearest Sarah. It never was.”

“Damn!” my husband said. We were sitting in our bedroom. It was half an hour before supper, and I had just told him about Echea’s condition. “The lawyer was supposed to check for things like this!”

“Dr. Caro said they’re just learning about the problem on Earth.”

“Dr. Caro.” My husband stood. “Dr. Caro is wrong.”

I frowned at him. My husband was rarely this agitated.

“This is not a technology developed on the Moon,” my husband said. “It’s an Earth technology, pre-neural net. Subject to international ban in ’24. The devices disappeared when the link became the common currency among all of us. He’s right that they’re incompatible.”

I felt the muscles in my shoulders tighten. I wondered how my husband knew of the technology and wondered if I should ask. We never discussed each other’s business.

“You’d think that Dr. Caro would have known this,” I said casually.

“His work is in current technology, not the history of technology,” my husband said absently. He sat back down. “What a mess.”

“It is that,” I said softly. “We have a little girl to think of.”

“Who’s defective.”

“Who has been used.” I shuddered. I had cradled her the whole way back and she had let me. I had remembered what Ronald said, how precious it was to hold her when I knew how hard it was for her to reach out. How each touch was a victory, each moment of trust a celebration. “Think about it. Imagine using something that keys into your most basic desires, uses them for purposes other than–”

“Don’t do that,” he said.

“What?”

“Put a romantic spin on this. The child is defective. We shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

“She’s not a durable good,” I said. “She’s a human being.”

“How much money did we spend on in-the-womb enhancement so that Anne’s substandard IQ was corrected? How much would we have spent if the other girls had had similar problems?”

“That’s not the same thing,” I said.

“Isn’t it?” he asked. “We have a certain guarantee in this world. We are guaranteed excellent children, with the best advantages. If I wanted to shoot craps with my children’s lives I would–”

“What would you do?” I snapped. “Go to the Moon?”

He stared at me as if he had never seen me before. “What does your precious Dr. Caro want you to do?”

“Leave Echea alone,” I said.

My husband snorted. “So that she would be unlinked and dependent the rest of her life. A burden on the girls, a sieve for our wealth. Oh, but Ronald Caro would like that!”

“He didn’t want her to lose her personality,” I said. “He wanted her to remain Echea.”

My husband stared at me for a moment, and the anger seemed to leave him. He had gone pale. He reached out to touch me, then withdrew his hand. For a moment, I thought that his eyes filled with tears.

I had never seen tears in his eyes before.

Had I?

“There is that,” he said softly.

He turned away from me, and I wondered if I had imagined his reaction. He hadn’t been close to Echea. Why would he care if her personality had changed?

“We can’t think of the legalities any more,” I said. “She’s ours. We have to accept that. Just like we accepted the expense when we conceived Anne. We could have terminated the pregnancy. The cost would have been significantly less.”

“We could have,” he said as if the thought were unthinkable. People in our circle repaired their mistakes. They did not obliterate them.

“You wanted her at first,” I said.

“Anne?” he asked.

“Echea. It was our idea, much as you want to say it was mine.”

He bowed his head. After a moment, he ran his hands through his hair. “We can’t make this decision alone,” he said.

He had capitulated. I didn’t know whether to be thrilled or saddened. Now we could stop fighting about the legalities and get to the heart.

“She’s too young to make this decision,” I said. “You can’t ask a child to make a choice like this.”

“If she doesn’t–”

“It won’t matter,” I said. “She’ll never know. We won’t tell her either way.”

He shook his head. “She’ll wonder why she’s not linked, why she can only use parts of House. She’ll wonder why she can’t leave here without escort when the other girls will be able to.”

“Or,” I said, “she’ll be linked and have no memory of this at all.”

“And then she’ll wonder why she can’t remember her early years.”

“She’ll be able to remember them,” I said. “Ronald assured me.”

“Yes.” My husband’s smile was bitter. “Like she remembers a question on a history exam.”

I had never seen him like this. I didn’t know he had studied the history of neural development. I didn’t know he had opinions about it.

“We can’t make this decision,” he said again.

I understood. I had said the same thing. “We can’t ask a child to make a choice of this magnitude.”

He raised his eyes to me. I had never noticed the fine lines around them, the matching lines around his nose and mouth. He was aging. We both were. We had been together a long, long time.

“She has lived through more than most on Earth ever do,” he said. “She has lived through more than our daughters will, if we raise them right.”

“That’s not an excuse,” I said. “You just want us to expiate our guilt.”

“No,” he said. “It’s her life. She’ll have to be the one to live it, not us.”

“But she’s our child, and that entails making choices for her,” I said.

He sprawled flat on our bed. “You know what I’ll chose,” he said softly.

“Both choices will disturb the household,” I said. “Either we live with her as she is–”

“Or we train her to be what we want.” He put an arm over his eyes.

He was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. “Do you ever regret the choices you made?” he asked. “Marrying me, choosing this house over the other, deciding to remain where we grew up?”

“Having the girls,” I said.

“Any of it. Do you regret it?”

He wasn’t looking at me. It was as if he couldn’t look at me, as if our whole lives rested on my answer.

I put my hand in the one he had dangling. His fingers closed over mine. His skin was cold.

“Of course not,” I said. And then, because I was confused, because I was a bit scared of his unusual intensity, I asked, “Do you regret the choices you made?”

“No,” he said. But his tone was so flat I wondered if he lied.

In the end, he didn’t come with Echea and me to St. Paul. He couldn’t face brain work, although I wished he had made an exception this time. Echea was more confident on this trip, more cheerful, and I watched her with a detachment I hadn’t thought I was capable of.

It was as if she were already gone.

This was what parenting was all about: the difficult painful choices, the irreversible choices with no easy answers, the second-guessing of the future with no help at all from the past. I held her hand tightly this time while she wandered ahead of me down the hallway.

I was the one with fear.

Ronald greeted us at the door to his office. His smile, when he bestowed it on Echea, was sad.

He already knew our choice. I had made my husband contact him. I wanted that much participation from Echea’s other parent.

Surprised? I sent.

He shook his head. It is the choice your family always makes.

He looked at me for a long moment, as if he expected a response, and when I said nothing, he crouched in front of Echea. “Your life will be different after today,” he said.

“Momma–” and the word was a gift, a first, a never-to-be repeated blessing–“said it would be better.”

“And mothers are always right,” he said. He put a hand on her shoulder. “I have to take you from her this time.”

“I know,” Echea said brightly. “But you’ll bring me back. It’s a procedure.”

“That’s right,” he said, looking at me over her head. “It’s a procedure.”

He waited just a moment, the silence deep between us. I think he meant for me to change my mind. But I did not. I could not.

It was for the best.

Then he nodded once, stood, and took Echea’s hand. She gave it to him as willingly, as trustingly, as she had given it to me.

He led her into the back room.

At the doorway, she stopped and waved.

And I never saw her again.

Oh, we have a child living with us, and her name is Echea. She is a wonderful vibrant creature, as worthy of our love and our heritage as our natural daughters.

But she is not the child of my heart.

My husband likes her better now, and Ronald never mentions her. He has redoubled his efforts on his research.

He is making no progress.

And I’m not sure I want him to.

She is a happy, healthy child with a wonderful future.

We made the right choice.

It was for the best.

Echea’s best.

My husband says she will grow into the perfect woman.

Like me, he says.

She’ll be just like me.

She is such a vibrant child.

Why do I miss the wounded sullen girl who rarely smiled?

Why was she the child of my heart?

TIME GYPSY

Ellen Klages

1

Friday, February 10, 1995. 5:00 p.m.

As soon as I walk in the door, my officemate Ted starts in on me. Again. “What do you know about radiation equilibrium?” he asks.

“Nothing. Why?”

“That figures.” He holds up a faded green volume. “I just found this insanely great article by Chandrasekhar in the ’45 Astrophysical Journal. And get this—when I go to check it out, the librarian tells me I’m the first person to take it off the shelf since 1955. Can you believe that? Nobody reads anymore.” He opens the book again. “Oh, by the way, Chambers was here looking for you.”

I drop my armload of books on my desk with a thud. Dr. Raymond Chambers is the chairman of the Physics department, and a Nobel Prize winner, which even at Berkeley is a very, very big deal. Rumor has it he’s working on some top secret government project that’s a shoe-in for a second trip to Sweden.

“Yeah, he wants to see you in his office, pronto. He said something about Sara Baxter Clarke. She’s that crackpot from the 50s, right? The one who died mysteriously?”

I wince. “That’s her. I did my dissertation on her and her work.” I wish I’d brought another sweater. This one has holes in both elbows. I’d planned a day in the library, not a visit with the head of the department.

Ted looks at me with his mouth open. “Not many chick scientists to choose from, huh? And you got a post-doc here doing that? Crazy world.” He puts his book down and stretches. “Gotta run. I’m a week behind in my lab work. Real science, you know?”

I don’t even react. It’s only a month into the term, and he’s been on my case about one thing or another—being a woman, being a dyke, being close to 30—from day one. He’s a jerk, but I’ve got other things to worry about. Like Dr. Chambers, and whether I’m about to lose my job because he found out I’m an expert on a crackpot.

Sara Baxter Clarke has been my hero since I was a kid. My pop was an army technician. He worked on radar systems, and we traveled a lot—six months in Reykjavik, then the next six in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Mom always told us we were gypsies, and tried to make it seem like an adventure. But when I was eight, mom and my brother Jeff were killed in a bus accident on Guam. After that it didn’t seem like an adventure any more.

Pop was a lot better with radar than he was with little girls. He couldn’t quite figure me out. I think I had too many variables for him. When I was ten, he bought me dresses and dolls, and couldn’t understand why I wanted a stack of old physics magazines the base library was throwing out. I liked science. It was about the only thing that stayed the same wherever we moved. I told Pop I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, but he said scientists were men, and I’d just get married.

I believed him, until I discovered Sara Baxter Clarke in one of those old magazines. She was British, went to MIT, had her doctorate in theoretical physics at 22. At Berkeley, she published three brilliant articles in very, very obscure journals. In 1956, she was scheduled to deliver a controversial fourth paper at an international physics conference at Stanford. She was the only woman on the program, and she was just 28.

No one knows what was in her last paper. The night before she was supposed to speak, her car went out of control and plunged over a cliff at Devil’s Slide—a remote stretch of coast south of San Francisco. Her body was washed out to sea. The accident rated two inches on the inside of the paper the next day—right under a headline about some vice raid—but made a small uproar in the physics world. None of her papers or notes were ever found; her lab had been ransacked. The mystery was never solved.

I was fascinated by the mystery of her the way other kids were intrigued by Amelia Earhart. Except nobody’d ever heard of my hero. In my imagination, Sara Baxter Clarke and I were very much alike. I spent a lot of days pretending I was a scientist just like her, and even more lonely nights talking to her until I fell asleep.

So after a master’s in Physics, I got a Ph.D. in the History of Science—studying her. Maybe if my obsession had been a little more practical, I wouldn’t be sitting on a couch outside Dr. Chambers’s office, picking imaginary lint off my sweater, trying to pretend I’m not panicking. I taught science in a junior high for a year. If I lose this fellowship, I suppose I could do that again. It’s a depressing thought.

The great man’s secretary finally buzzes me into his office. Dr. Chambers is a balding, pouchy man in an immaculate, perfect suit. His office smells like lemon furniture polish and pipe tobacco. It’s wood-paneled, plushly carpeted, with about an acre of mahogany desk. A copy of my dissertation sits on one corner.

“Dr. McCullough.” He waves me to a chair. “You seem to be quite an expert on Sara Baxter Clarke.”

“She was a brilliant woman,” I say nervously, and hope that’s the right direction for the conversation.

“Indeed. What do you make of her last paper, the one she never presented?” He picks up my work and turns to a page marked with a pale green Post-it. “ ‘An Argument for a Practical Tempokinetics?’ ” He lights his pipe and looks at me through the smoke.

“I’d certainly love to read it,” I say, taking a gamble. I’d give anything for a copy of that paper. I wait for the inevitable lecture about wasting my academic career studying a long-dead crackpot.

“You would? Do you actually believe Clarke had discovered a method for time travel?” he asks. “Time travel, Dr. McCullough?”

I take a bigger gamble. “Yes, I do.”

Then Dr. Chambers surprises me. “So do I. I’m certain of it. I was working with her assistant, Jim Kennedy. He retired a few months after the accident. It’s taken me 40 years to rediscover what was tragically lost back then.”

I stare at him in disbelief. “You’ve perfected time travel?”

He shakes his head. “Not perfected. But I assure you, tempokinetics is a reality.”

Suddenly my knees won’t quite hold me. I sit down in the padded leather chair next to his desk and stare at him. “You’ve actually done it?”

He nods. “There’s been a great deal of research on tempokinetics in the last 40 years. Very hush-hush, of course. A lot of government money. But recently, several key discoveries in high-intensity gravitational field theory have made it possible for us to finally construct a working tempokinetic chamber.”

I’m having a hard time taking this all in. “Why did you want to see me?” I ask.

He leans against the corner of his desk. “We need someone to talk to Dr. Clarke.”

“You mean she’s alive?” My heart skips several beats.

He shakes his head. “No.”

“Then—?”

“Dr. McCullough, I approved your application to this university because you know more about Sara Clarke and her work than anyone else we’ve found. I’m offering you a once in a lifetime opportunity.” He clears his throat. “I’m offering to send you back in time to attend the 1956 International Conference for Experimental Physics. I need a copy of Clarke’s last paper.”

I just stare at him. This feels like some sort of test, but I have no idea what the right response is. “Why?” I ask finally.

“Because our apparatus works, but it’s not practical,” Dr. Chambers says, tamping his pipe. “The energy requirements for the gravitational field are enormous. The only material that’s even remotely feasible is an isotope they’ve developed up at the Lawrence lab, and there’s only enough of it for one round trip. I believe Clarke’s missing paper contains the solution to our energy problem.”

After all these years, it’s confusing to hear someone taking Dr. Clarke’s work seriously. I’m so used to being on the defensive about her, I don’t know how to react. I slip automatically into scientist mode—detached and rational. “Assuming your tempokinetic chamber is operational, how do you propose that I locate Dr. Clarke?”

He picks up a piece of stiff ivory paper and hands it to me. “This is my invitation to the opening reception of the conference Friday night, at the St. Francis Hotel. Unfortunately I couldn’t attend. I was back east that week. Family matters.”

I look at the engraved paper in my hand. Somewhere in my files is a xerox copy of one of these invitations. It’s odd to hold a real one. “This will get me into the party. Then you’d like me to introduce myself to Sara Baxter Clarke, and ask her for a copy of her unpublished paper?”

“In a nutshell. I can give you some cash to help, er, convince her if necessary. Frankly, I don’t care how you do it. I want that paper, Dr. McCullough.”

He looks a little agitated now, and there’s a shrill undertone to his voice. I suspect Dr. Chambers is planning to take credit for what’s in the paper, maybe even hoping for that second Nobel. I think for a minute. Dr. Clarke’s will left everything to Jim Kennedy, her assistant and fiancé. Even if Chambers gets the credit, maybe there’s a way to reward the people who actually did the work. I make up a large, random number.

“I think $30,000 should do it.” I clutch the arm of the chair and rub my thumb nervously over the smooth polished wood.

Dr. Chambers starts to protest, then just waves his hand. “Fine. Fine. Whatever it takes. Funding for this project is not an issue. As I said, we only have enough of the isotope to power one trip into the past and back—yours. If you recover the paper successfully, we’ll be able to develop the technology for many, many more excursions. If not—” he lets his sentence trail off.

“Other people have tried this?” I ask, warily. It occurs to me I may be the guinea pig, usually an expendable item.

He pauses for a long moment. “No. You’ll be the first. Your records indicate you have no family, is that correct?”

I nod. My father died two years ago, and the longest relationship I’ve ever had only lasted six months. But Chambers doesn’t strike me as a liberal. Even if I was still living with Nancy, I doubt if he would count her as family. “It’s a big risk. What if I decline?”

“Your post-doc application will be reviewed,” he shrugs. “I’m sure you’ll be happy at some other university.”

So it’s all or nothing. I try to weigh all the variables, make a reasoned decision. But I can’t. I don’t feel like a scientist right now. I feel like a ten-year-old kid, being offered the only thing I’ve ever wanted—the chance to meet Sara Baxter Clarke.

“I’ll do it,” I say.

“Excellent.” Chambers switches gears, assuming a brisk, businesslike manner. “You’ll leave a week from today at precisely 6:32 a.m. You cannot take anything—underwear, clothes, shoes, watch—that was manufactured after 1956. My secretary has a list of antique clothing stores in the area, and some fashion magazines of the times.” He looks at my jeans with distaste. “Please choose something appropriate for the reception. Can you do anything with your hair?”

My hair is short. Nothing radical, not in Berkeley in the 90s. It’s more like early Beatles—what they called a pixie cut when I was a little girl—except I was always too tall and gawky to be a pixie. I run my fingers self-consciously through it and shake my head.

Chambers sighs and continues. “Very well. Now, since we have to allow for the return of Clarke’s manuscript, you must take something of equivalent mass—and also of that era. I’ll give you the draft copy of my own dissertation. You will also be supplied with a driver’s license and university faculty card from the period, along with packets of vintage currency. You’ll return with the manuscript at exactly 11:37 Monday morning. There will be no second chance. Do you understand?”

I nod, a little annoyed at his patronizing tone of voice. “If I miss the deadline, I’ll be stuck in the past forever. Dr. Clarke is the only other person who could possibly send me home, and she won’t be around on Monday morning. Unless—?” I let the question hang in the air.

“Absolutely not. There is one immutable law of tempokinetics, Dr. McCullough. You cannot change the past. I trust you’ll remember that?” he says, standing.

Our meeting is over. I leave his office with the biggest news of my life. I wish I had someone to call and share it with. I’d settle for someone to help me shop for clothes.

Friday, February 17, 1995. 6:20 a.m.

The supply closet on the ground floor of LeConte Hall is narrow and dimly lit, filled with boxes of rubber gloves, lab coats, shop towels. Unlike many places on campus, the Physics building hasn’t been remodeled in the last 40 years. This has always been a closet, and it isn’t likely to be occupied at 6:30 on any Friday morning.

I sit on the concrete floor, my back against a wall, dressed in an appropriate period costume. I think I should feel nervous, but I feel oddly detached. I sip from a cup of lukewarm 7-11 coffee and observe. I don’t have any role in this part of the experiment—I’m just the guinea pig. Dr. Chambers’s assistants step carefully over my outstretched legs and make the final adjustments to the battery of apparatus that surrounds me.

At exactly 6:28 by my antique Timex, Dr. Chambers himself appears in the doorway. He shows me a thick packet of worn bills and the bulky, rubber-banded typescript of his dissertation, then slips both of them into a battered leather briefcase. He places the case on my lap and extends his hand. But when I reach up to shake it, he frowns and takes the 7-11 cup.

“Good luck, Dr. McCullough,” he says formally. Nothing more. What more would he say to a guinea pig? He looks at his watch, then hands the cup to a young man in a black T-shirt, who types in one last line of code, turns off the light, and closes the door.

I sit in the dark and begin to get the willies. No one has ever done this. I don’t know if the cool linoleum under my legs is the last thing I will ever feel. Sweat drips down between my breasts as the apparatus begins to hum. There is a moment of intense—sensation. It’s not sound, or vibration, or anything I can quantify. It’s as if all the fingernails in the world are suddenly raked down all the blackboards, and in the same moment oxygen is transmuted to lead. I am pressed to the floor by a monstrous force, but every hair on my body is erect. Just when I feel I can’t stand it any more, the humming stops.

My pulse is racing, and I feel dizzy, a little nauseous. I sit for a minute, half-expecting Dr. Chambers to come in and tell me the experiment has failed, but no one comes. I try to stand—my right leg has fallen asleep—and grope for the light switch near the door.

In the light from the single bulb, I see that the apparatus is gone, but the gray metal shelves are stacked with the same boxes of gloves and shop towels. My leg all pins and needles, I lean against a brown cardboard box stenciled Bayside Laundry Service, San Francisco 3, California.

It takes me a minute before I realize what’s odd. Either those are very old towels, or I’m somewhere pre-ZIP code.

I let myself out of the closet, and walk awkwardly down the empty hallway, my spectator pumps echoing on the linoleum. I search for further confirmation. The first room I peer into is a lab—high stools in front of black slab tables with Bunsen burners, gray boxes full of dials and switches. A slide rule at every station.

I’ve made it.

Friday, February 17, 1956. 7:00 a.m.

The campus is deserted on this drizzly February dawn, as is Telegraph Avenue. The streetlights are still on—white lights, not yellow sodium—and through the mist I can see faint lines of red and green neon on stores down the avenue. I feel like Marco Polo as I navigate through a world that is both alien and familiar. The buildings are the same, but the storefronts and signs look like stage sets or photos from old Life magazines.

It takes me more than an hour to walk downtown. I am disoriented by each shop window, each passing car. I feel as if I’m a little drunk, walking too attentively through the landscape, and not connected to it. Maybe it’s the colors. Everything looks too real. I grew up with grainy black-and-white TV reruns and 50s technicolor films that have faded over time, and it’s disconcerting that this world is not overlaid with that pink-orange tinge.

The warm aromas of coffee and bacon lure me into a hole-in-the-wall cafe. I order the special—eggs, bacon, hash browns and toast. The toast comes dripping with butter and the jelly is in a glass jar, not a little plastic tub. When the bill comes it is 55¢. I leave a generous dime tip then catch the yellow F bus and ride down Shattuck Avenue, staring at the round-fendered black Chevys and occasional pink Studebakers that fill the streets.

The bus is full of morning commuters—men in dark jackets and hats, women in dresses and hats. In my tailored suit I fit right in. I’m surprised that no one looks 50s—retro 50s—the 50s that filtered down to the 90s. No poodle skirts, no DA haircuts. All the men remind me of my pop. A man in a gray felt hat has the Chronicle, and I read over his shoulder. Eisenhower is considering a second term. The San Francisco police chief promises a crackdown on vice. Peanuts tops the comics page and there’s a Rock Hudson movie playing at the Castro Theatre. Nothing new there.

As we cross the Bay Bridge I’m amazed at how small San Francisco looks—the skyline is carved stone, not glass and steel towers. A green Muni streetcar takes me down the middle of Market Street to Powell. I check into the St. Francis, the city’s finest hotel. My room costs less than I’ve paid for a night in a Motel 6.

All my worldly goods fit on the desktop—Chambers’s manuscript; a brown leather wallet with a driver’s license, a Berkeley faculty card, and twenty-three dollars in small bills; the invitation to the reception tonight; and 30,000 dollars in banded stacks of 50-dollar bills. I pull three bills off the top of one stack and put the rest in the drawer, under the cream-colored hotel stationery. I have to get out of this suit and these shoes.

Woolworth’s has a toothbrush and other plastic toiletries, and a tin “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” alarm clock. I find a pair of pleated pants, an Oxford cloth shirt, and wool sweater at the City of Paris. Macy’s Men’s Shop yields a pair of “dungarees” and two T-shirts I can sleep in—69 cents each. A snippy clerk gives me the eye in the Boys department, so I invent a nephew, little Billy, and buy him black basketball sneakers that are just my size.

After a shower and a change of clothes, I try to collect my thoughts, but I’m too keyed up to sit still. In a few hours I’ll actually be in the same room as Sara Baxter Clarke. I can’t distinguish between fear and excitement, and spend the afternoon wandering aimlessly around the city, gawking like a tourist.

Friday, February 17, 1956. 7:00 p.m.

Back in my spectator pumps and my tailored navy suit, I present myself at the doorway of the reception ballroom and surrender my invitation. The tuxedoed young man looks over my shoulder, as if he’s expecting someone behind me. After a moment he clears his throat.

“And you’re Mrs.—?” he asks, looking down at his typewritten list.

“Dr. McCullough,” I say coolly, and give him an even stare. “Mr. Chambers is out of town. He asked me to take his place.”

After a moment’s hesitation he nods, and writes my name on a white card, pinning it to my lapel like a corsage.

Ballroom A is a sea of gray suits, crew cuts, bow-ties and heavy black-rimmed glasses. Almost everyone is male, as I expected, and almost everyone is smoking, which surprises me. Over in one corner is a knot of women in bright cocktail dresses, each with a lacquered football helmet of hair. Barbie’s cultural foremothers.

I accept a canapé from a passing waiter and ease my way to the corner. Which one is Dr. Clarke? I stand a few feet back, scanning nametags. Mrs. Niels Bohr. Mrs. Richard Feynman. Mrs. Ernest Lawrence. I am impressed by the company I’m in, and dismayed that none of the women has a name of her own. I smile an empty cocktail party smile as I move away from the wives and scan the room. Gray suits with a sprinkling of blue, but all male. Did I arrive too early?

I am looking for a safe corner, one with a large, sheltering potted palm, when I hear a blustery male voice say, “So, Dr. Clarke. Trying the H.G. Wells route, are you? Waste of the taxpayer’s money, all that science fiction stuff, don’t you think?”

A woman’s voice answers. “Not at all. Perhaps I can change your mind at Monday’s session.” I can’t see her yet, but her voice is smooth and rich, with a bit of a lilt or a brogue—one of those vocal clues that says “I’m not an American.” I stand rooted to the carpet, so awestruck I’m unable to move.

“Jimmy, will you see if there’s more champagne about?” I hear her ask. I see a motion in the sea of gray and astonish myself by flagging a waiter and taking two slender flutes from his tray. I step forward in the direction of her voice. “Here you go,” I say, trying to keep my hand from shaking. “I’ve got an extra.”

“How very resourceful of you,” she laughs. I am surprised that she is a few inches shorter than me. I’d forgotten she’d be about my age. She takes the glass and offers me her other hand. “Sara Clarke,” she says.

“Carol McCullough.” I touch her palm. The room seems suddenly bright and the voices around me fade into a murmur. I think for a moment that I’m dematerializing back to 1995, but nothing so dramatic happens. I’m just so stunned that I forget to breathe while I look at her.

Since I was ten years old, no matter where we lived, I have had a picture of Sara Baxter Clarke over my desk. I cut it out of that old physics magazine. It is grainy, black and white, the only photo of her I’ve ever found. In it, she’s who I always wanted to be—competent, serious, every inch a scientist. She wears a white lab coat and a pair of rimless glasses, her hair pulled back from her face. A bald man in an identical lab coat is showing her a piece of equipment. Neither of them is smiling.

I know every inch of that picture by heart. But I didn’t know that her hair was a coppery red, or that her eyes were such a deep, clear green. And until this moment, it had never occurred to me that she could laugh.

The slender blond man standing next to her interrupts my reverie. “I’m Jim Kennedy, Sara’s assistant.”

Jim Kennedy. Her fiancé. I feel like the characters in my favorite novel are all coming to life, one by one.

“You’re not a wife, are you?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Post doc. I’ve only been at Cal a month.”

He smiles. “We’re neighbors, then. What’s your field?”

I take a deep breath. “Tempokinetics. I’m a great admirer of Dr. Clarke’s work.” The blustery man scowls at me and leaves in search of other prey.

“Really?” Dr. Clarke turns, raising one eyebrow in surprise. “Well then we should have a chat. Are you—?” She stops in mid-sentence and swears almost inaudibly. “Damn. It’s Dr. Wilkins and I must be pleasant. He’s quite a muckety-muck at the NSF, and I need the funding.” She takes a long swallow of champagne, draining the crystal flute. “Jimmy, why don’t you get Dr. McCullough another drink and see if you can persuade her to join us for supper.”

I start to make a polite protest, but Jimmy takes my elbow and steers me through the crowd to an unoccupied sofa. Half an hour later we are deep in a discussion of quantum field theory when Dr. Clarke appears and says, “Let’s make a discreet exit, shall we? I’m famished.”

Like conspirators, we slip out a side door and down a flight of service stairs. The Powell Street cable car takes us over Nob Hill into North Beach, the Italian section of town. We walk up Columbus to one of my favorite restaurants—the New Pisa—where I discover that nothing much has changed in 40 years except the prices.

The waiter brings a carafe of red wine and a trio of squat drinking glasses and we eat family style—bowls of pasta with red sauce and steaming loaves of crusty garlic bread. I am speechless as Sara Baxter Clarke talks about her work, blithely answering questions I have wanted to ask my whole life. She is brilliant, fascinating. And beautiful. My food disappears without me noticing a single mouthful.

Over coffee and spumoni she insists, for the third time, that I call her Sara, and asks me about my own studies. I have to catch myself a few times, biting back citations from Stephen Hawking and other works that won’t be published for decades. It is such an engrossing, exhilarating conversation, I can’t bring myself to shift it to Chambers’s agenda. We leave when we notice the restaurant has no other customers.

“How about a nightcap?” she suggests when we reach the sidewalk.

“Not for me,” Jimmy begs off. “I’ve got an 8:30 symposium tomorrow morning. But why don’t you two go on ahead. The Paper Doll is just around the corner.”

Sara gives him an odd, cold look and shakes her head. “Not funny, James,” she says and glances over at me. I shrug noncommittally. It seems they have a private joke I’m not in on.

“Just a thought,” he says, then kisses her on the cheek and leaves. Sara and I walk down to Vesuvio’s, one of the bars where Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Ginsberg spawned the Beat Generation. Make that will spawn. I think we’re a few months too early.

Sara orders another carafe of raw red wine. I feel shy around her, intimidated, I guess. I’ve dreamed of meeting her for so long, and I want her to like me. As we begin to talk, we discover how similar, and lonely, our childhoods were. We were raised as only children. We both begged for chemistry sets we never got. We were expected to know how to iron, not know about ions. Midway through her second glass of wine, Sara sighs.

“Oh, bugger it all. Nothing’s really changed, you know. It’s still just snickers and snubs. I’m tired of fighting for a seat in the old boys’ club. Monday’s paper represents five years of hard work, and there aren’t a handful of people at this entire conference who’ve had the decency to treat me as anything but a joke.” She squeezes her napkin into a tighter and tighter wad, and a tear trickles down her cheek. “How do you stand it, Carol?”

How can I tell her? I’ve stood it because of you. You’re my hero. I’ve always asked myself what Sara Baxter Clarke would do, and steeled myself to push through. But now she’s not a hero. She’s real, this woman across the table from me. This Sara’s not the invincible, ever-practical scientist I always thought she was. She’s as young and as vulnerable as I am.

I want to ease her pain the way that she, as my imaginary mentor, has always eased mine. I reach over and put my hand over hers; she stiffens, but she doesn’t pull away. Her hand is soft under mine, and I think of touching her hair, gently brushing the red tendrils off the back of her neck, kissing the salty tears on her cheek.

Maybe I’ve always had a crush on Sara Baxter Clarke. But I can’t be falling in love with her. She’s straight. She’s 40 years older than I am. And in the back of my mind, the chilling voice of reality reminds me that she’ll also be dead in two days. I can’t reconcile that with the vibrant woman sitting in this smoky North Beach bar. I don’t want to. I drink two more glasses of wine and hope that will silence the voice long enough for me to enjoy these few moments.

We are still talking, our fingertips brushing on the scarred wooden tabletop, when the bartender announces last call. “Oh, bloody hell,” she says. “I’ve been having such a lovely time I’ve gone and missed the last ferry. I hope I have enough for the cab fare. My Chevy’s over in the car park at Berkeley.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I hear myself say. “I’ve got a room at the hotel. Come back with me and catch the ferry in the morning.” It’s the wine talking. I don’t know what I’ll do if she says yes. I want her to say yes so much.

“No, I couldn’t impose. I’ll simply—” she protests, and then stops. “Oh, yes, then. Thank you. It’s very generous.”

So here we are. At 2:00 a.m. the hotel lobby is plush and utterly empty. We ride up in the elevator in a sleepy silence that becomes awkward as soon as we are alone in the room. I nervously gather my new clothes off the only bed and gesture to her to sit down. I pull a T-shirt out of its crinkly cellophane wrapper. “Here,” I hand it to her. “It’s not elegant, but it’ll have to do as a nightgown.”

She looks at the T-shirt in her lap, and at the dungarees and black sneakers in my arms, an odd expression on her face. Then she sighs, a deep, achy sounding sigh. It’s the oddest reaction to a T-shirt I’ve ever heard.

“The Paper Doll would have been all right, wouldn’t it?” she asks softly.

Puzzled, I stop crinkling the other cellophane wrapper and lean against the dresser. “I guess so. I’ve never been there.” She looks worried, so I keep talking. “But there are a lot of places I haven’t been. I’m new in town. Just got here. Don’t know anybody yet, haven’t really gotten around. What kind of place is it?”

She freezes for a moment, then says, almost in a whisper, “It’s a bar for women.”

“Oh,” I nod. “Well, that’s okay.” Why would Jimmy suggest a gay bar? It’s an odd thing to tell your fiancée. Did he guess about me somehow? Or maybe he just thought we’d be safer there late at night, since—

My musings—and any other rational thoughts—come to a dead stop when Sara Baxter Clarke stands up, cups my face in both her hands and kisses me gently on the lips. She pulls away, just a few inches, and looks at me.

I can’t believe this is happening. “Aren’t you—isn’t Jimmy—?”

“He’s my dearest chum, and my partner in the lab. But romantically? No. Protective camouflage. For both of us,” she answers, stroking my face.

I don’t know what to do. Every dream I’ve ever had is coming true tonight. But how can I kiss her? How can I begin something I know is doomed? She must see the indecision in my face, because she looks scared, and starts to take a step backwards. And I can’t let her go. Not yet. I put my hand on the back of her neck and pull her into a second, longer kiss.

We move to the bed after a few minutes. I feel shy, not wanting to make a wrong move. But she kisses my face, my neck, and pulls me down onto her. We begin slowly, cautiously undressing each other. I fumble at the unfamiliar garter belts and stockings, and she smiles, undoing the rubber clasps for me. Her slender body is pale and freckled, her breasts small with dusty pink nipples.

Her fingers gently stroke my arms, my thighs. When I hesitantly put my mouth on her breast, she moans, deep in her throat, and laces her fingers through my hair. After a minute her hands ease my head down her body. The hair between her legs is ginger, the ends dark and wet. I taste the salty musk of her when I part her lips with my tongue. She moans again, almost a growl. When she comes it is a single, fierce explosion.

We finally fall into an exhausted sleep, spooned around each other, both T-shirts still crumpled on the floor.

Saturday, February 18, 1956. 7:00 a.m.

Light comes through a crack in the curtains. I’m alone in a strange bed. I’m sure last night was a dream, but then I hear the shower come on in the bathroom. Sara emerges a few minutes later, toweling her hair. She smiles and leans over me—warm and wet and smelling of soap.

“I have to go,” she whispers, and kisses me.

I want to ask if I’ll see her again, want to pull her down next to me and hold her for hours. But I just stroke her hair and say nothing.

She sits on the edge of the bed. “I’ve got an eleven o’clock lab, and there’s another dreadful cocktail thing at Stanford this evening. I’d give it a miss, but Shockley’s going to be there, and he’s front runner for the next Nobel, so I have to make an appearance. Meet me after?”

“Yes,” I say, breathing again. “Where?”

“Why don’t you take the train down. I’ll pick you up at the Palo Alto station at half-past seven and we can drive to the coast for dinner. Wear those nice black trousers. If it’s not too dreary, we’ll walk on the beach.”

She picks up her wrinkled suit from the floor where it landed last night, and gets dressed. “Half past seven, then?” she says, and kisses my cheek. The door clicks shut and she’s gone.

I lie tangled in the sheets, and curl up into the pillow like a contented cat. I am almost asleep again when an image intrudes—a crumpled Chevy on the rocks below Devil’s Slide. It’s like a fragment of a nightmare, not quite real in the morning light. But which dream is real now?

Until last night, part of what had made Sara Baxter Clarke so compelling was her enigmatic death. Like Amelia Earhart or James Dean, she had been a brilliant star that ended so abruptly she became legendary. Larger than life. But I can still feel where her lips brushed my cheek. Now she’s very much life-size, and despite Chambers’s warnings, I will do anything to keep her that way.

Saturday, February 18, 1956. 7:20 p.m.

The platform at the Palo Alto train station is cold and windy. I’m glad I’ve got a sweater, but it makes my suit jacket uncomfortably tight across my shoulders. I’ve finished the newspaper and am reading the train schedule when Sara comes up behind me.

“Hullo there,” she says. She’s wearing a nubby beige dress under a dark wool coat and looks quite elegant.

“Hi.” I reach to give her a hug, but she steps back.

“Have you gone mad?” she says, scowling. She crosses her arms over her chest. “What on earth were you thinking?”

“Sorry.” I’m not sure what I’ve done. “It’s nice to see you,” I say hesitantly.

“Yes, well, me too. But you can’t just—oh, you know,” she says, waving her hand.

I don’t, so I shrug. She gives me an annoyed look, then turns and opens the car door. I stand on the pavement for a minute, bewildered, then get in.

Her Chevy feels huge compared to the Toyota I drive at home, and there are no seatbelts. We drive in uncomfortable silence all through Palo Alto and onto the winding, two-lane road that leads to the coast. Our second date isn’t going well.

After about ten minutes, I can’t stand it any more. “I’m sorry about the hug. I guess it’s still a big deal here, huh?”

She turns her head slightly, still keeping her eyes on the road. “Here?” she asks. “What utopia are you from, then?”

I spent the day wandering the city in a kind of haze, alternately giddy in love and worrying about this moment. How can I tell her where—when—I’m from? And how much should I tell her about why? I count to three, and then count again before I answer. “From the future.”

“Very funny,” she says. I can hear in her voice that she’s hurt. She stares straight ahead again.

“Sara, I’m serious. Your work on time travel isn’t just theory. I’m a post-doc at Cal. In 1995. The head of the physics department, Dr. Chambers, sent me back here to talk to you. He says he worked with you and Jimmy, back before he won the Nobel Prize.”

She doesn’t say anything for a minute, then pulls over onto a wide place at the side of the road. She switches off the engine and turns towards me.

“Ray Chambers? The Nobel Prize? Jimmy says he can barely do his own lab work.” She shakes her head, then lights a cigarette, flicking the match out the window into the darkness. “Ray set you up for this, didn’t he? To get back at Jimmy for last term’s grade? Well, it’s a terrible joke,” she says turning away, “and you are one of the cruelest people I have ever met.”

“Sara, it’s not a joke. Please believe me.” I reach across the seat to take her hand, but she jerks it away.

I take a deep breath, trying deperately to think of something that will convince her. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out. In September, Modern Physics is going to publish an article about you and your work. When I was ten years old—in 1975—I read it sitting on the back porch of my father’s quarters at Fort Ord. That article inspired me to go into science. I read about you, and I knew when I grew up I wanted to travel through time.”

She stubs out her cigarette. “Go on.”

So I tell her all about my academic career, and my “assignment” from Chambers. She listens without interrupting me. I can’t see her expression in the darkened car.

After I finish, she says nothing, then sighs. “This is rather a lot to digest, you know. But I can’t very well believe in my work without giving your story some credence, can I?” She lights another cigarette, then asks the question I’ve been dreading. “So if you’ve come all this way to offer me an enormous sum for my paper, does that mean something happened to it—or to me?” I still can’t see her face, but her voice is shaking.

I can’t do it. I can’t tell her. I grope for a convincing lie. “There was a fire. A lot of papers were lost. Yours is the one they want.”

“I’m not a faculty member at your Cal, am I?”

“No.”

She takes a long drag on her cigarette, then asks, so softly I can barely hear her, “Am I—?” She lets her question trail off and is silent for a minute, then sighs again. “No, I won’t ask. I think I prefer to bumble about like other mortals. You’re a dangerous woman, Carol McCullough. I’m afraid you can tell me too many things I have no right to know.” She reaches for the ignition key, then stops. “There is one thing I must know, though. Was last night as carefully planned as everything else?”

“Jesus, no.” I reach over and touch her hand. She lets me hold it this time. “No, I had no idea. Other than finding you at the reception, last night had nothing to do with science.”

To my great relief, she chuckles. “Well, perhaps chemistry, don’t you think?” She glances in the rearview mirror then pulls me across the wide front seat and into her arms. We hold each other in the darkness for a long time, and kiss for even longer. Her lips taste faintly of gin.

We have a leisurely dinner at a restaurant overlooking the beach in Half Moon Bay. Fresh fish and a dry white wine. I have the urge to tell her about the picture, about how important she’s been to me. But as I start to speak, I realize she’s more important to me now, so I just tell her that. We finish the meal gazing at each other as if we were ordinary lovers.

Outside the restaurant, the sky is cloudy and cold, the breeze tangy with salt and kelp. Sara pulls off her high heels and we walk down a sandy path, holding hands in the darkness. Within minutes we are both freezing. I pull her to me and lean down to kiss her on the deserted beach. “You know what I’d like,” I say, over the roar of the surf.

“What?” she murmurs into my neck.

“I’d like to take you dancing.”

She shakes her head. “We can’t. Not here. Not now. It’s against the law, you know. Or perhaps you don’t. But it is, I’m afraid. And the police have been on a rampage in the city lately. One bar lost its license just because two men were holding hands. They arrested both as sexual vagrants and for being—oh, what was the phrase—lewd and dissolute persons.”

“Sexual vagrants? That’s outrageous!”

“Exactly what the newspapers said. An outrage to public decency. Jimmy knew one of the poor chaps. He was in Engineering at Stanford, but after his name and address were published in the paper, he lost his job. Does that still go on where you’re from?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe in some places. I don’t really know. I’m afraid I don’t pay any attention to politics. I’ve never needed to.”

Sara sighs. “What a wonderful luxury that must be, not having to be so careful all the time.”

“I guess so.” I feel a little guilty that it’s not something I worry about. But I was four years old when Stonewall happened. By the time I came out, in college, being gay was more of a lifestyle than a perversion. At least in San Francisco.

“It’s sure a lot more public,” I say after a minute. “Last year there were a quarter of a million people at the Gay Pride parade. Dancing down Market Street and carrying signs about how great it is to be queer.”

“You’re pulling my leg now. Aren’t you?” When I shake my head she smiles. “Well, I’m glad. I’m glad that this witch hunt ends. And in a few months, when I get my equipment up and running, perhaps I shall travel to dance at your parade. But for tonight, why don’t we just go to my house? At least I’ve got a new hi-fi.”

So we head back up the coast. One advantage to these old cars, the front seat is as big as a couch; we drive up Highway 1 sitting next to each other, my arm resting on her thigh. The ocean is a flat, black void on our left, until the road begins to climb and the water disappears behind jagged cliffs. On the driver’s side the road drops off steeply as we approach Devil’s Slide.

I feel like I’m coming to the scary part of a movie I’ve seen before. I’m afraid I know what happens next. My right hand grips the upholstery and I brace myself for the oncoming car or the loose patch of gravel or whatever it is that will send us skidding off the road and onto the rocks.

But nothing happens. Sara hums as she drives, and I realize that although this is the spot I dread, it means nothing to her. At least not tonight.

As the road levels out again, it is desolate, with few signs of civilization. Just beyond a sign that says “Sharp Park” is a trailer camp with a string of bare light bulbs outlining its perimeter. Across the road is a seedy-looking roadhouse with a neon sign that blinks “Hazel’s.” The parking lot is jammed with cars. Saturday night in the middle of nowhere.

We drive another hundred yards when Sara suddenly snaps her fingers and does a U-turn.

Please don’t go back to the cliffs, I beg silently. “What’s up?” I ask out loud.

“Hazel’s. Jimmy was telling me about it last week. It’s become a rather gay club, and since it’s over the county line, out here in the boondocks, he says anything goes. Including dancing. Besides, I thought I spotted his car.”

“Are you sure?”

“No, but there aren’t that many ’39 Packards still on the road. If it isn’t, we’ll just continue on.” She pulls into the parking lot and finds a space at the back, between the trash cans and the ocean.

Hazel’s is a noisy, smoky place—a small, single room with a bar along one side—jammed wall-to-wall with people. Hundreds of them, mostly men, but more than a few women. When I look closer, I realize that some of the “men” are actually women with slicked-back hair, ties, and sportcoats.

We manage to get two beers, and find Jimmy on the edge of the dance floor—a minuscule square of linoleum, not more than 10 x 10, where dozens of people are dancing to Bill Haley & the Comets blasting from the jukebox. Jimmy’s in a tweed jacket and chinos, his arm around the waist of a young Latino man in a tight white T-shirt and even tighter blue jeans. We elbow our way through to them and Sara gives Jimmy a kiss on the cheek. “Hullo, love,” she says.

He’s obviously surprised—shocked—to see Sara, but when he sees me behind her, he grins. “I told you so.”

“James, you don’t know the half of it,” Sara says, smiling, and puts her arm around me.

We dance for a few songs in the hot, crowded bar. I take off my jacket, then my sweater, draping them over the railing next to the bottles of beer. After the next song I roll up the sleeves of my button-down shirt. When Jimmy offers to buy another round of beers, I look at my watch and shake my head. It’s midnight, and as much as I wanted to dance with Sara, I want to sleep with her even more.

“One last dance, then let’s go, okay?” I ask, shouting to be heard over the noise of the crowd and the jukebox. “I’m bushed.”

She nods. Johnny Mathis starts to sing, and we slow dance, our arms around each other. My eyes are closed and Sara’s head is resting on my shoulder when the first of the cops bursts through the front door.

Sunday, February 19, 1956. 12:05 a.m.

A small army of uniformed men storms into the bar. Everywhere around us people are screaming in panic, and I’m buffeted by the bodies running in all directions. People near the back race for the rear door. A red-faced, heavy-set man in khaki, a gold star on his chest, climbs onto the bar. “This is a raid,” he shouts. He has brought reporters with him, and flashbulbs suddenly illuminate the stunned, terrified faces of people who had been sipping their drinks moments before.

Khaki-shirted deputies, nightsticks in hand, block the front door. There are so many uniforms. At least 40 men—highway patrol, sheriff’s department, and even some army MPs—begin to form a gauntlet leading to the back door, now the only exit.

Jimmy grabs my shoulders. “Dance with Antonio,” he says urgently. “I’ve just met him, but it’s our best chance of getting out of here. I’ll take Sara.”

I nod and the Latino man’s muscular arms are around my waist. He smiles shyly just as someone pulls the plug on the jukebox and Johnny Mathis stops in mid-croon. The room is quiet for a moment, then the cops begin barking orders. We stand against the railing, Jimmy’s arm curled protectively around Sara’s shoulders, Antonio’s around mine. Other people have done the same thing, but there are not enough women, and men who had been dancing now stand apart from each other, looking scared.

The uniforms are lining people up, herding them like sheep toward the back. We join the line and inch forward. The glare of headlights through the half-open back door cuts through the smoky room like the beam from a movie projector. There is an icy draft and I reach back for my sweater, but the railing is too far away, and the crush of people too solid to move any direction but forward. Jimmy sees me shivering and drapes his sportcoat over my shoulders.

We are in line for more than an hour, as the cops at the back door check everyone’s ID. Sara leans against Jimmy’s chest, squeezing my hand tightly once or twice, when no one’s looking. I am scared, shaking, but the uniforms seem to be letting most people go. Every few seconds, a car starts up in the parking lot, and I can hear the crunch of tires on gravel as someone leaves Hazel’s for the freedom of the highway.

As we get closer to the door, I can see a line of black vans parked just outside, ringing the exit. They are paneled with wooden benches, filled with the men who are not going home, most of them sitting with their shoulders sagging. One van holds a few women with crew cuts or slicked-back hair, who glare defiantly into the night.

We are ten people back from the door when Jimmy slips a key into my hand and whispers into my ear. “We’ll have to take separate cars. Drive Sara’s back to the city and we’ll meet at the lobby bar in your hotel.”

“The bar will be closed,” I whisper back. “Take my key and meet me in the room. I’ll get another at the desk.” He nods as I hand it to him.

The cop at the door looks at Sara’s elegant dress and coat, barely glances at her outstretched ID, and waves her and Jimmy outside without a word. She pauses at the door and looks back at me, but an MP shakes his head and points to the parking lot. “Now or never, lady,” he says, and Sara and Jimmy disappear into the night.

I’m alone. Antonio is a total stranger, but his strong arm is my only support until a man in a suit pulls him away. “Nice try, sweetie,” the man says to him. “But I’ve seen you in here before, dancing with your pansy friends.” He turns to the khaki-shirted deputy and says, “He’s one of the perverts. Book him.” The cop pulls Antonio’s arm up between his shoulder blades, then cuffs his hands behind his back. “Time for a little ride, pretty boy,” he grins, and drags Antonio out into one of the black vans.

Without thinking, I take a step towards his retreating back. “Not so fast,” says another cop, with acne scars across both cheeks. He looks at Jimmy’s jacket, and down at my pants and my black basketball shoes with a sneer. Then he puts his hands on my breasts, groping me. “Loose ones. Not all tied down like those other he-shes. I like that.” He leers and pinches one of my nipples.

I yell for help, and try to pull away, but he laughs and shoves me up against the stack of beer cases that line the back hallway. He pokes his nightstick between my legs. “So you want to be a man, huh, butchie? Well, just what do you think you’ve got in there?” He jerks his nightstick up into my crotch so hard tears come to my eyes.

I stare at him, in pain, in disbelief. I am too stunned to move or to say anything. He cuffs my hands and pushes me out the back door and into the van with the other glaring women.

Sunday, February 19, 1956. 10:00 a.m.

I plead guilty to being a sex offender, and pay the $50 fine. Being arrested can’t ruin my life. I don’t even exist here.

Sara and Jimmy are waiting on a wooden bench outside the holding cell of the San Mateo County jail. “Are you all right, love?” she asks.

I shrug. “I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep. There were ten of us in one cell. The woman next to me—a stone butch?—really tough, Frankie—she had a pompadour—two cops took her down the hall—when she came back the whole side of her face was swollen, and after that she didn’t say anything to anyone, but I’m okay, I just—” I start to shake. Sara takes one arm and Jimmy takes the other, and they walk me gently out to the parking lot.

The three of us sit in the front seat of Jimmy’s car, and as soon as we are out of sight of the jail, Sara puts her arms around me and holds me, brushing the hair off my forehead. When Jimmy takes the turnoff to the San Mateo bridge, she says, “We checked you out of the hotel this morning. Precious little to check, actually, except for the briefcase. Anyway, I thought you’d be more comfortable at my house. We need to get you some breakfast and a bed.” She kisses me on the cheek. “I’ve told Jimmy everything, by the way.”

I nod sleepily, and the next thing I know we’re standing on the front steps of a brown shingled cottage and Jimmy’s pulling away. I don’t think I’m hungry, but Sara makes scrambled eggs and bacon and toast, and I eat every scrap of it. She runs a hot bath, grimacing at the purpling, thumb-shaped bruises on my upper arms, and gently washes my hair and my back. When she tucks me into bed, pulling a blue quilt around me, and curls up beside me, I start to cry. I feel so battered and so fragile, and I can’t remember the last time someone took care of me this way.

Sunday, February 19, 1956. 5:00 p.m.

I wake up to the sound of rain and the enticing smell of pot roast baking in the oven. Sara has laid out my jeans and a brown sweater at the end of the bed. I put them on, then pad barefoot into the kitchen. There are cardboard boxes piled in one corner, and Jimmy and Sara are sitting at the yellow formica table with cups of tea, talking intently.

“Oh good, you’re awake.” She stands and gives me a hug. “There’s tea in the pot. If you think you’re up to it, Jimmy and I need to tell you a few things.”

“I’m a little sore, but I’ll be okay. I’m not crazy about the 50s, though.” I pour from the heavy ceramic pot. The tea is some sort of Chinese blend, fragrant and smoky. “What’s up?”

“First a question. If my paper isn’t entirely—complete—could there possibly be any repercussions for you?”

I think for a minute. “I don’t think so. If anyone knew exactly what was in it, they wouldn’t have sent me.”

“Splendid. In that case, I’ve come to a decision.” She pats the battered brown briefcase. “In exchange for the extraordinary wad of cash in here, we shall send back a perfectly reasonable-sounding paper. What only the three of us will know is that I have left a few things out. This, for example.” She picks up a pen, scribbles a complex series of numbers and symbols on a piece of paper, and hands it to me.

I study it for a minute. It’s very high-level stuff, but I know enough physics to get the gist of it. “If this really works, it’s the answer to the energy problem. It’s exactly the piece Chambers needs.”

“Very, very good,” she says, smiling. “It’s also the part I will never give him.”

I raise one eyebrow.

“I read the first few chapters of his dissertation this afternoon while you were sleeping,” she says, tapping the manuscript with her pen. “It’s a bit uneven, although parts of it are quite good. Unfortunately, the good parts were written by a graduate student named Gilbert Young.”

I raise the other eyebrow. “But that paper’s what Chambers wins the Nobel for.”

“Son of a bitch.” Jimmy slaps his hand down onto the table. “Gil was working for me while he finished the last of his dissertation. He was a bright guy, original research, solid future—but he started having these headaches. The tumor was inoperable, and he died six months ago. Ray said he’d clean out Gil’s office for me. I just figured he was trying to get back on my good side.”

“We can’t change what Ray does with Gil’s work. But I won’t give him my work to steal in the future.” Sara shoves Chambers’s manuscript to the other side of the table. “Or now. I’ve decided not to present my paper in the morning.”

I feel very lightheaded. I know she doesn’t give her paper, but—“Why not?” I ask.

“While I was reading the manuscript this afternoon, I heard that fat sheriff interviewed on the radio. They arrested 90 people at Hazel’s last night, Carol, people like us. People who only wanted to dance with each other. But he kept bragging about how they cleaned out a nest of perverts. And I realized—in a blinding moment of clarity—that the university is a branch of the state, and the sheriff is enforcing the state’s laws. I’m working for people who believe it’s morally right to abuse you—or me—or Jimmy. And I can’t do that any more.”

“Here, here!” Jimmy says, smiling. “The only problem is, as I explained to her this morning, the administration is likely to take a very dim view of being embarrassed in front of every major physicist in the country. Not to mention they feel Sara’s research is university property.” He looks at me and takes a sip of tea. “So we decided it might be best if Sara disappeared for a while.”

I stare at both of them, my mouth open. I have that same odd feeling of déjà vu that I did in the car last night.

“I’ve cleaned everything that’s hers out of our office and the lab,” Jimmy says. “It’s all in the trunk of my car.”

“And those,” Sara says, gesturing to the boxes in the corner, “are what I value from my desk and my library here. Other than my Nana’s teapot and some clothes, it’s all I’ll really need for a while. Jimmy’s family has a vacation home out in West Marin, so I won’t have to worry about rent—or privacy.”

I’m still staring. “What about your career?”

Sara puts down her teacup with a bang and begins pacing the floor. “Oh, bugger my career. I’m not giving up my work, just the university—and its hypocrisy. If one of my colleagues had a little fling, nothing much would come of it. But as a woman, I’m supposed to be some sort of paragon of unsullied Victorian virtue. Just by being in that bar last night, I put my ‘career’ in jeopardy. They’d crucify me if they knew who—or what—I am. I don’t want to live that way any more.”

She brings the teapot to the table and sits down, pouring us each another cup. “End of tirade. But that’s why I had to ask about your money. It’s enough to live on for a good long while, and to buy all the equipment I need. In a few months, with a decent lab, I should be this close,” she says, holding her thumb and forefinger together, “to time travel in practice as well as in theory. And that discovery will be mine—ours. Not the university’s. Not the government’s.”

Jimmy nods. “I’ll stay down here and finish this term. That way I can keep tabs on things and order equipment without arousing suspicion.”

“Won’t they come looking for you?” I ask Sara. I feel very surreal. Part of me has always wanted to know why this all happened, and part of me feels like I’m just prompting the part I know comes next.

“Not if they think there’s no reason to look,” Jimmy says. “We’ll take my car back to Hazel’s and pick up hers. Devil’s Slide is only a few miles up the road. It’s—”

“It’s a rainy night,” I finish. “Treacherous stretch of highway. Accidents happen there all the time. They’ll find Sara’s car in the morning, but no body. Washed out to sea. Everyone will think it’s tragic that she died so young,” I say softly. My throat is tight and I’m fighting back tears. “At least I always have.”

They both stare at me. Sara gets up and stands behind me, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. “So that is how it happens?” she asks, hugging me tight. “All along you’ve assumed I’d be dead in the morning?”

I nod. I don’t trust my voice enough to say anything.

To my great surprise, she laughs. “Well, I’m not going to be. One of the first lessons you should have learned as a scientist is never assume,” she says, kissing the top of my head. “But what a terrible secret for you to have been carting about. Thank you for not telling me. It would have ruined a perfectly lovely weekend. Now let’s all have some supper. We’ve a lot to do tonight.”

Monday, February 20, 1956. 12:05 a.m.

“What on earth are you doing?” Sara asks, coming into the kitchen and talking around the toothbrush in her mouth. “It’s our last night—at least for a while. I was rather hoping you’d be waiting in bed when I came out of the bathroom.”

“I will. Two more minutes.” I’m sitting at the kitchen table, rolling a blank sheet of paper into her typewriter. I haven’t let myself think about going back in the morning, about leaving Sara, and I’m delaying our inevitable conversation about it for as long as I can. “While we were driving back from wrecking your car, I had an idea about how to nail Chambers.”

She takes the toothbrush out of her mouth. “It’s a lovely thought, but you know you can’t change anything that happens.”

“I can’t change the past,” I agree. “But I can set a bomb with a very long fuse. Like 40 years.”

“What? You look like the cat that’s eaten the canary.” She sits down next to me.

“I’ve retyped the title page to Chambers’s dissertation—with your name on it. First thing in the morning, I’m going to rent a large safe deposit box at the Wells Fargo Bank downtown, and pay the rent in advance. Sometime in 1995, there’ll be a miraculous discovery of a complete Sara Baxter Clarke manuscript. The bomb is that, after her tragic death, the esteemed Dr. Chambers appears to have published it under his own name—and won the Nobel Prize for it.”

“No, you can’t. It’s not my work either, it’s Gil’s and—” she stops in mid-sentence, staring at me. “And he really is dead. I don’t suppose I dare give a fig about academic credit anymore, should I?”

“I hope not. Besides, Chambers can’t prove it’s not yours. What’s he going to say—Carol McCullough went back to the past and set me up? He’ll look like a total idiot. Without your formula, all he’s got is a time machine that won’t work. Remember, you never present your paper. Where I come from it may be okay to be queer, but time travel is still just science fiction.”

She laughs. “Well, given a choice, I suppose that’s preferable, isn’t it?”

I nod and pull the sheet of paper out of the typewriter.

“You’re quite a resourceful girl, aren’t you?” Sara says, smiling. “I could use an assistant like you.” Then her smile fades and she puts her hand over mine. “I don’t suppose you’d consider staying on for a few months and helping me set up the lab? I know we’ve only known each other for two days. But this—I—us—Oh, dammit, what I’m trying to say is I’m going to miss you.”

I squeeze her hand in return, and we sit silent for a few minutes. I don’t know what to say. Or to do. I don’t want to go back to my own time. There’s nothing for me in that life. A dissertation that I now know isn’t true. An office with a black and white photo of the only person I’ve ever really loved—who’s sitting next to me, holding my hand. I could sit like this forever. But could I stand to live the rest of my life in the closet, hiding who I am and who I love? I’m used to the 90s—I’ve never done research without a computer, or cooked much without a microwave. I’m afraid if I don’t go back tomorrow, I’ll be trapped in this reactionary past forever.

“Sara,” I ask finally, “are you sure your experiments will work?”

She looks at me, her eyes warm and gentle. “If you’re asking if I can promise you an escape back to your own time someday, the answer is no. I can’t promise you anything, love. But if you’re asking if I believe in my work, then yes. I do. Are you thinking of staying, then?”

I nod. “I want to. I just don’t know if I can.”

“Because of last night?” she asks softly.

“That’s part of it. I was raised in a world that’s so different. I don’t feel right here. I don’t belong.”

She kisses my cheek. “I know. But gypsies never belong to the places they travel. They only belong to other gypsies.”

My eyes are misty as she takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom.

Monday, February 20, 1956. 11:30 a.m.

I put the battered leather briefcase on the floor of the supply closet in LeConte Hall and close the door behind me. At 11:37 exactly, I hear the humming start, and when it stops, my shoulders sag with relief. What’s done is done, and all the dies are cast. In Palo Alto an audience of restless physicists is waiting to hear a paper that will never be read. And in Berkeley, far in the future, an equally restless physicist is waiting for a messenger to finally deliver that paper.

But the messenger isn’t coming back. And that may be the least of Chambers’s worries.

This morning I taped the key to the safe deposit box—and a little note about the dissertation inside—into the 1945 bound volume of The Astrophysical Journal. My officemate Ted was outraged that no one had checked it out of the physics library since 1955. I’m hoping he’ll be even more outraged when he discovers the secret that’s hidden inside it.

I walk out of LeConte and across campus to the coffee shop where Sara is waiting for me. I don’t like the political climate here, but at least I know that it will change, slowly but surely. Besides, we don’t have to stay in the 50s all the time—in a few months, Sara and I plan to do a lot of traveling. Maybe one day some graduate student will want to study the mysterious disappearance of Dr. Carol McCullough. Stranger things have happened.

My only regret is not being able to see Chambers’s face when he opens that briefcase and there’s no manuscript. Sara and I decided that even sending back an incomplete version of her paper was dangerous. It would give Chambers enough proof that his tempokinetic experiment worked for him to get more funding and try again. So the only thing in the case is an anonymous, undated postcard of the St. Francis Hotel that says:

“Having a wonderful time. Thanks for the ride.”

DIVIDED BY INFINITY

Robert Charles Wilson

I

IN THE YEAR AFTER LORRAINE’S DEATH I CONTEMPLATED suicide six times. Contemplated it seriously, I mean: six times sat with the fat bottle of Clonazepam within reaching distance, six times failed to reach for it, betrayed by some instinct for life or disgusted by my own weakness.

I can’t say I wish I had succeeded, because in all likelihood I did succeed, on each and every occasion. Six deaths. No, not just six. An infinite number.

Times six.

There are greater and lesser infinities.

But I didn’t know that then.

I was only sixty years old.

I had lived all my life in the city of Toronto. I worked thirty-five years as a senior accountant for a Great Lakes cargo brokerage called Steamships Forwarding, Ltd., and took an early retirement in 1997, not long before Lorraine was diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that killed her the following year. Back then she worked part-time in a Harbord Street used-book shop called Finders, a short walk from the university district, in a part of the city we both loved.

I still loved it, even without Lorraine, though the gloss had dimmed considerably. I lived there still, in a utility apartment over an antique store, and I often walked the neighborhood—down Spadina into the candy-bright intricacies of Chinatown, or west to Kensington, foreign as a Bengali marketplace, where the smell of spices and ground coffee mingled with the stink of sun-ripened fish.

Usually I avoided Harbord Street. My grief was raw enough without the provocation of the bookstore and its awkward memories. Today, however, the sky was a radiant blue, and the smell of spring blossoms and cut grass made the city seem threatless. I walked east from Kensington with a mesh bag filled with onions and Havarti cheese, and soon enough found myself on Harbord Street, which had moved another notch upscale since the old days, more restaurants now, fewer macrobiotic shops, the palm readers and bead shops banished for good and all.

But Finders was still there. It was a tar-shingled Victorian house converted for retail, its hanging sign faded to illegibility. A three-legged cat slumbered on the cracked concrete stoop.

I went in impulsively, but also because the owner, an old man by the name of Oscar Ziegler, had put in an appearance at Lorraine’s funeral the previous year, and I felt I owed him some acknowledgement. According to Lorraine, he lived upstairs and seldom left the building.

The bookstore hadn’t changed on the inside, either, since the last time I had seen it. I didn’t know it well (the store was Lorraine’s turf and as a rule I had left her to it), but there was no obvious evidence that more than a year had passed since my last visit. It was the kind of shop with so much musty stock and so few customers that it could have survived only under the most generous circumstances—no doubt Ziegler owned the building and had found a way to finesse his property taxes. The store was not a labor of love, I suspected, so much as an excuse for Ziegler to indulge his pack-rat tendencies.

It was a full nest of books. The walls were pineboard shelves, floor to ceiling. Free-standing shelves divided the small interior into box canyons and dimly-lit hedgerows. The stock was old and, not that I’m any judge, largely trivial, forgotten jazz-age novels and belles-lettres, literary flotsam.

I stepped past cardboard boxes from which more books overflowed, to the rear of the store, where a cash desk had been wedged against the wall. This was where, for much of the last five years of her life, Lorraine had spent her weekday afternoons. I wondered whether book dust was carcinogenic. Maybe she had been poisoned by the turgid air, by the floating fragments of ivoried Frank Yerby novels, vagrant molecules of Peyton Place and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

Someone else sat behind the desk now, a different woman, younger than Lorraine, though not what anyone would call young. A baby-boomer in denim overalls and a pair of eyeglasses that might have better suited the Hubble Space Telescope. Shoulder-length hair, gone gray, and an ingratiating smile, though there was something faintly haunted about the woman.

“Hi,” she said amiably. “Anything I can help you find?”

“Is Oscar Ziegler around?”

Her eyes widened. “Uh, Mr. Ziegler? He’s upstairs, but he doesn’t usually like to be disturbed. Is he expecting you?”

She seemed astonished at the possibility that Ziegler would be expecting anyone, or that anyone would want to see Ziegler. Maybe it was a bad idea. “No,” I said, “I just dropped by on the chance . . . you know, my wife used to work here.”

“I see.”

“Please don’t bother him. I’ll just browse for a while.”

“Are you a book collector, or—?”

“Hardly. These days I read the newspaper. The only books I’ve kept are old paperbacks. Not the sort of thing Mr. Ziegler would stock.”

“You’d be surprised. Mysteries? Chandler, Hammett, John Dickson Carr? Because we have some firsts over by the stairs. . . .”

“I used to read some mysteries. Mostly, though, it was science fiction I liked.”

“Really? You look more like a mystery reader.”

“There’s a look?”

She laughed. “Tell you what. Science fiction? We got a box of paperbacks in last week. Right over there, under the ladder. Check it out, and I’ll tell Mr. Ziegler you’re here. Uh—”

“My name is Keller. Bill Keller. My wife was Lorraine.”

She held out her hand. “I’m Deirdre. Just have a look; I’ll be back in a jiff.”

I wanted to stop her but didn’t know how. She went through a bead curtain and up a dim flight of stairs while I pulled a leathery cardboard box onto a chair seat and prepared for some dutiful time-killing. Certainly I didn’t expect to find anything I wanted, though I would probably have to buy something as the price of a courtesy call, especially if Ziegler was coaxed out of his lair to greet me. But what I had told Deirdre was true; though I had been an eager reader in my youth, I hadn’t bought more than an occasional softcover since 1970. Fiction is a young man’s pastime. I had ceased to be curious about other people’s lives, much less other worlds.

Still, the box was full of forty-year-old softcover books, Ace and Ballantine paperbacks mainly, and it was nice to see the covers again, the Richard Powers abstracts, translucent bubbles on infinite plains, or Jack Gaughan sketches, angular and insectile. Titles rich with key words: Time, Space, Worlds, Infinity. Once I had loved this sort of thing.

And then, amongst these faded jewels, I found something I did not expect—

And another. And another.

The bead curtain parted and Ziegler entered the room.

He was a bulky man, but he moved with the exaggerated caution of the frail. A plastic tube emerged from his nose, was taped to his cheek with a dirty Band-Aid and connected to an oxygen canister slung from his shoulder. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. He wore what looked like a velveteen frock coat draped over a T-shirt and a pair of pinstriped pajama-bottoms. His hair, what remained of it, was feathery and white. His skin was the color of thrift-shop Tupperware.

Despite his appearance, he gave me a wide grin.

“Mr. Ziegler,” I said. “I’m Bill Keller. I don’t know if you remember—”

He thrust his pudgy hand forward. “Of course! No need to explain. Terrible about Lorraine. I think of her often.” He turned to Deirdre, who emerged from the curtain behind him. “Mr. Keller’s wife . . .” He drew a labored breath. “Died last year.”

“I’m sorry,” Deirdre said.

“She was . . . a wonderful woman. Friendly by nature. A joy. Of course, death isn’t final . . . we all go on, I believe, each in his own way. . . .”

There was more of this—enough that I regretted stopping by—but I couldn’t doubt Ziegler’s sincerity. Despite his intimidating appearance there was something almost willfully childlike about him, a kind of embalmed innocence, if that makes any sense.

He asked how I had been and what I had been doing. I answered as cheerfully as I could and refrained from asking after his own health. His cheeks reddened as he stood, and I wondered if he shouldn’t be sitting down. But he seemed to be enjoying himself. He eyed the five slender books I’d brought to the cash desk.

“Science fiction!” he said. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a science fiction reader, Mr. Keller.”

(Deirdre glanced at me: Told you so!)

“I haven’t been a steady reader for a long time,” I said. “But I found some interesting items.”

“The good old stuff,” Ziegler gushed. “The pure quill. Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“There was a time when science seemed so sterile. It didn’t yield up the wonders we had been led to expect. Only a bleak, lifeless solar system . . . a half-dozen desert worlds, baked or frozen, take your pick, and the gas giants . . . great roaring seas of methane and ammonia . . .”

I nodded politely.

“But now!” Ziegler exclaimed. “Life on Mars! Oceans under Europa! Comets plunging into Jupiter—!”

“I see what you mean.”

“And here on Earth—the human genome, cloned animals, mind-altering drugs! Computer networks! Computer viruses!” He slapped his thigh. “I have a Teflon hip, if you can imagine such a thing!”

“Pretty amazing,” I agreed, though I hadn’t thought much about any of this.

“Back when we read these books, Mr. Keller, when we read Heinlein or Simak or Edmond Hamilton, we longed to immerse ourselves in the strange . . . the outré. And now—well—here we are!” He smiled breathlessly and summed up his thesis. “Immersed in the strange. All it takes is time. Just . . . time. Shall I put these in a bag for you?”

He bagged the books without looking at them. When I fumbled out my wallet, he raised his hand.

“No charge. This is for Lorraine. And to thank you for stopping by.”

I couldn’t argue . . . and I admit I didn’t want to draw his attention to the paperbacks, in the petty fear that he might notice how unusual they were and refuse to part with them. I took the paper bag from his parchment hand, feeling faintly guilty.

“Perhaps you’ll come back,” he said.

“I’d like to.”

“Anytime,” Ziegler said, inching toward his bead curtain and the musty stairway behind it, back into the cloying dark. “Anything you’re looking for, I can help you find it.”

Crossing College Street, freighted with groceries, I stepped into the path of a car, a yellow Hyundai racing a red light. The driver swerved around me, but it was a near thing. The wheel wells brushed my trouser legs. My heart stuttered a beat.

. . . and I died, perhaps, a small infinity of times.

Probabilities collapse. I become increasingly unlikely.

“Immersed in the strange,” Ziegler had said.

But had I ever wanted that? Really wanted that?

“Be careful,” Lorraine told me one evening in the long month before she died. Amazingly, she had seemed to think of it as my tragedy, not hers. “Don’t despise life.”

Difficult advice.

Did I “despise life” ? I think I did not; that is, there were times when the world seemed a pleasant enough place, times when a cup of coffee and a morning in the sun seemed a good enough reason to continue to draw breath. I remained capable of smiling at babies. I was even able to look at an attractive young woman and feel a response more immediate than nostalgia.

But I missed Lorraine terribly, and we had never had children, neither of us had any close living relations or much in the way of friends; I was unemployed and unemployable, confined forevermore within the contracting walls of my pension and our modest savings . . . all the joy and much of the simple structure of my life had been leeched away, and the future looked like more of the same, a protracted fumble toward the grave.

If anything postponed the act of suicide it wasn’t courage or principle but the daily trivia. I would kill myself (I decided more than once), but not until after the news . . . not until I paid the electric bill . . . not until I had taken my walk.

Not until I solved the mystery I’d brought home from Finders.

I won’t describe the books in detail. They looked more or less like others of their kind. What was strange about them was that I didn’t recognize them, although this was a genre (paperback science fiction of the 1950s and ’60s) I had once known in intimate detail.

The shock was not just unfamiliarity, since I might have missed any number of minor works by minor writers; but these were major novels by well-known names, not re-titled works or variant editions. A single example: I sat down that night with a book called The Stone Pillow, by a writer whose identity any science fiction follower would instantly recognize. It was a Signet paperback circa 1957, with a cover by the artist Paul Lehr in the period style. According to the credit slug, the story had been serialized in Astounding in 1946. The pages were browned at the margins; the glued spine was brittle as bone china. I handled the book carefully, but I couldn’t resist reading it, and insofar as I was able to judge it was a plausible example of the late author’s well-known style and habits of thought. I enjoyed it a great deal and went to bed convinced of its authenticity. Either I had missed it, somehow—in the days when not missing such things meant a great deal to me—or it had slipped out of memory. No other explanation presented itself.

One such item wouldn’t have worried me. But I had brought home four more volumes equally inexplicable.

Chalk it up to age, I thought. Or worse. Senility. Alzheimer’s. Either way, a bad omen.

Sleep was elusive.

The next logical step might have been to see a doctor. Instead, the next morning I thumbed through the yellow pages for a used-book dealer who specialized in period science fiction. After a couple of calls I reached a young man named Niemand who offered to evaluate the books if I brought them to him that afternoon.

I told him I’d be there by one.

If nothing else, it was an excuse to prolong my life one more interminable day.

Niemand—his store was an overheated second-story loft over a noisy downtown street—gave the books a long, thoughtful examination.

“Fake,” he said finally. “They’re fake.”

“Fake? You mean . . . counterfeit?”

“If you like, but that’s stretching a point. Nobody counterfeits books, even valuable books. The idea is ludicrous. I mean, what do you do, set up a press and go through all the work of producing a bound volume, duplicate the type, flaws and all, and then flog it on the collector’s market? You’d never recoup your expenses, not even if you came up with a convincing Gutenberg Bible. In the case of books like this the idea’s doubly absurd. Maybe if they were one-off from an abandoned print run or something, but hell, people would know about that. Nope. Sorry, but these are just . . . fake.”

“But—well, obviously, somebody did go to the trouble of faking them.”

He nodded. “Obviously. It’s flawless work, and it can’t have been cheap. And the books are genuinely old. Contemporary fakes, maybe . . . maybe some obsessive fan with a big disposable income, rigging up books he wanted to exist. . . .”

“Are they valuable?”

“They’re certainly odd. Valuable? Not to me. Tell you the truth, I kind of wish you hadn’t brought them in.”

“Why?”

“They’re creepy. They’re too good. Kind of X-Files.” He gave me a sour grin. “Make up your own science fiction story.”

“Or live in it,” I said. We live in the science fiction of our youth.

He pushed the books across his cluttered desk. “Take ’em away, Mr. Keller. And if you find out where they came from—”

“Yes?”

“I really don’t want to know.”

Items I noticed in the newspaper that evening:

GENE THERAPY RENDERS HEART BYPASS OBSOLETE

BANK OF ZURICH FIRST WITH QUANTUM ENCRYPTION

SETI RESEARCHERS SPOT “POSSIBLE” ET RADIO SOURCE

I didn’t want to go back to Ziegler, not immediately. It felt like admitting defeat—like looking up the answer to a magazine puzzle I couldn’t solve.

But there was no obvious next step to take, so I put the whole thing out of my mind, or tried to; watched television, did laundry, shined my shoes.

None of this pathetic sleight-of-hand provided the slightest distraction.

I was not (just as I had told Deirdre) a mystery lover, and I didn’t love this mystery, but it was a turbulence in the flow of the passing days, therefore interesting. When I had savored the strangeness of it to a satisfying degree I took myself in hand and carried the books back to Finders, meaning to demand an explanation.

Oscar Ziegler was expecting me.

The late-May weather was already too humid, a bright sun bearing down from the ozone-depleted sky. Walking wasn’t such a pleasure under the circumstances. I arrived at Finders plucking my shirt away from my body. Graceless. The woman Deirdre looked up from her niche at the rear of the store. “Mr. Keller, right?” She didn’t seem especially pleased to see me.

I meant to ask if Ziegler was available, but she waved me off: “He said if you showed up you were to go on upstairs. That’s, uh, really unusual.”

“Shouldn’t you let him know I’m here?”

“Really, he’s expecting you.” She waved at the bead curtain, almost a challenge: Go on, if you must.

The curtain made a sound like chattering teeth behind me. The stairway was dim. Dustballs quivered on the risers and clung to the threadbare coco-mat tread. At the top was a door silted under so many layers of ancient paint that the moulding had softened into gentle dunes.

Ziegler opened the door and waved me in.

His room was lined with books. He stepped back, settled himself into an immense overstuffed easy chair, and invited me to look at his collection. But the titles at eye level were disappointing. They were old cloth volumes of Gurdjieff and Ouspenski, Velikovsky and Crowley—the usual pseudo-gnostic spiritualist bullshit, pardon my language. Like the room itself, the books radiated dust and boredom. I felt obscurely disappointed. So this was Oscar Ziegler, one more pathetic old man with a penchant for magic and cabbalism.

Between the books, medical supplies: inhalers, oxygen tanks, pill bottles.

Ziegler might be old, but his eyesight was still keen. “Judging by the expression on your face, you find my den distasteful.”

“Not at all.”

“Oh, fess up, Mr. Keller. You’re too old to be polite and I’m too old to pretend I don’t notice.”

I gestured at the books. “I was never much for the occult.”

“That’s understandable. It’s claptrap, really. I keep those volumes for nostalgic reasons. To be honest, there was a time when I looked there for answers. That time is long past.”

“I see.”

“Now tell me why you came.”

I showed him the softcover books, told him how I’d taken them to Niemand for a professional assessment. Confessed my own bafflement.

Ziegler took the books into his lap. He looked at them briefly and took a long drag from his oxygen mask. He didn’t seem especially impressed. “I’m hardly responsible for every volume that comes into the store.”

“Of course not. And I’m not complaining. I just wondered—”

“If I knew where they came from? If I could offer you a meaningful explanation?”

“Basically, yes.”

“Well,” Ziegler said. “Well. Yes and no. Yes and no.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That is . . . no, I can’t tell you precisely where they came from. Deirdre probably bought them from someone off the street. Cash or credit, and I don’t keep detailed records. But it doesn’t really matter.”

“Doesn’t it?”

He took another deep drag from the oxygen bottle. “Oh, it could have been anyone. Even if you tracked down the original vendor—which I guarantee you won’t be able to do—you wouldn’t learn anything useful.”

“You don’t seem especially surprised by this.”

“Implying that I know more than I’m saying.” He smiled ruefully. “I’ve never been in this position before, though you’re right, it doesn’t surprise me. Did you know, Mr. Keller, that I am immortal?”

Here we go, I thought. The pitch. Ziegler didn’t care about the books. I had come for an explanation; he wanted to sell me a religion.

“And you, Mr. Keller. You’re immortal, too.”

What was I doing here, in this shabby place with this shabby old man? There was nothing to say.

“But I can’t explain it,” Ziegler went on; “that is, not in the depth it deserves. There’s a volume here—I’ll lend it to you—” He stood, precariously, and huffed across the room.

I looked at his books again while he rummaged for the volume in question. Below the precambrian deposits of the occult was a small sediment of literature. First editions, presumably valuable.

And not all familiar.

Had Ernest Hemingway written a book called Pamplona? (But here it was, its Scribners dust jacket protected in brittle Mylar.) Cromwell and Company, by Charles Dickens? Under the Absolute, by Aldous Huxley?

“Ah, books.” Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. “They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles. This will tell you what you need to know.”

The book he gave me was cheaply made, with a utilitarian olive-drab jacket. You Will Never Die, by one Carl G. Soziere.

“Come back when you’ve read it.”

“I will,” I lied.

“I had a feeling,” Deirdre said, “you’d come downstairs with one of those.”

The Soziere book. “You’ve heard of it?”

“Not until I took this job. Mr. Ziegler gave me a copy. But I speak from experience. Every once in a long while, somebody comes in with a question or a complaint. They go upstairs. And they come back down with that.”

At which point I realized I had left the paperbacks in Ziegler’s room. I suppose I could have gone back for them, but it seemed somehow churlish. But it was a loss. Not that I loved the books, particularly, but they were the only concrete evidence I had of the mystery—they were the mystery. Now Ziegler had them back in his possession. And I had You Will Never Die.

“It looks like a crank book.”

“Oh, it is,” Deirdre said. “Kind of a parallel-worlds argument, you know, J. W. Dunne and so on, with some quantum physics thrown in; actually, I’m surprised a major publisher didn’t pick it up.”

“You’ve read it?”

“I’m a sucker for that kind of thing, if you want the truth.”

“Don’t tell me. It changed your life.” I was smiling.

She smiled back. “It didn’t even change my mind.”

But there was an odd note of worry in her voice.

Of course I read it.

Deirdre was right about You Will Never Die. It had been published by some private or vanity press, but the writing wasn’t crude. It was slick, even witty in places.

And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the Dancing Wu-Li Masters, it came down to this:

Consciousness, like matter, like energy, is preserved.

You are born, not an individual, but an infinity of individuals, in an infinity of identical worlds. “Consciousness,” your individual awareness, is shared by this infinity of beings.

At birth (or at conception; Soziere wasn’t explicit), this span of selves begins to divide, as alternate possibilities are indulged or rejected. The infant turns his head not to the left or to the right, but both. One infinity of worlds becomes two; then four; then eight, and so on, exponentially.

But the underlying essence of consciousness continues to connect all these disparate possibilities.

The upshot? Soziere says it all in his title.

You cannot die.

Consider. Suppose, tomorrow afternoon, you walk in front of a speeding eighteen-wheeler. The grillwork snaps your neck and what remains of you is sausaged under the chassis. Do you die? Well, yes; an infinity of you does die; but infinity is divisible by itself. Another infinity of you steps out of the path of the truck, or didn’t leave the house that day, or recovers in hospital. The you-ness of you doesn’t die; it simply continues to reside in those remnant selves.

An infinite set has been subtracted from infinity; but what remains, remains infinite.

The subjective experience is that the accident simply doesn’t happen.

Consider that bottle of Clonazepam I keep beside the bed. Six times I reached for it, meaning to kill myself. Six times stopped myself.

In the great wilderness of worlds, I must have succeeded more often than I failed. My cold and vomit-stained corpse was carted off to whatever grave or urn awaits it, and a few acquaintances briefly mourned.

But that’s not me. By definition, you can’t experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.

I am the one who wakes up in the morning.

Always.

Every morning.

I don’t die.

I just become increasingly unlikely.

I spent the next few days watching television, folding laundry, trimming my nails—spinning my wheels.

I tossed Soziere’s little tome into a corner and left it there.

And when I was done kidding myself, I went to see Deirdre.

I didn’t even know her last name. All I knew was that she had read Soziere’s book and remained skeptical of it, and I was eager to have my own skepticism refreshed.

You think odd things, sometimes, when you’re too often alone.

I caught Deirdre on her lunch break. Ziegler didn’t come downstairs to man the desk; the store simply closed between noon and one every weekday. The May heat wave had broken; the sky was a soft, deep blue, the air balmy. We sat at a sidewalk table outside a lunch-and-coffee restaurant.

Her full name was Deirdre Frank. She was fifty and unmarried and had run her own retail business until some legal difficulty closed her down. She was working at Finders while she reorganized her life. And she understood why I had come to her.

“There’s a couple of tests I apply,” she said, “whenever I read this kind of book. First, is it likely to improve anyone’s life? Which is a trickier question than it sounds. Any number of people will tell you they found happiness with the Scientologists or the Moonies or whatever, but what that usually means is they narrowed their focus—they can’t see past the bars of their cage. Okay, You Will Never Die isn’t a cult book, but I doubt it will make anybody a better person.”

“Second, is there any way to test the author’s claims? Soziere aced that one beautifully, I have to admit. His argument is that there’s no subjective experience of death—your family might die, your friends, your grade-school teachers, the Princess of Wales, but never you. And in some other world, you die and other people go on living. How do you prove such a thing? Obviously, you can’t. What Soziere tries to do is infer it, from quantum physics and lots of less respectable sources. It’s a bubble theory—it floats over the landscape, touching nothing.”

I was probably blushing by this time.

Deirdre said, “You took it seriously, didn’t you? Or half seriously . . .”

“Half at most. I’m not stupid. But it’s an appealing idea.”

Her eyes widened. “Appealing?”

“Well—there are people who’ve died. People I miss. I like to think of them going on somewhere, even if it isn’t a place I can reach.”

She was aghast. “God, no! Soziere’s book isn’t a fairy tale, Mr. Keller—it’s a horror story!”

“Pardon me?”

“Think about it! At first it sounds like an invitation to suicide. You don’t like where you are, put a pistol in your mouth and go somewhere else—somewhere better, maybe, even if it is inherently less likely. But take you for example. You’re what, sixty years old? Or so? Well, great, you inhabit a universe where a healthy human being can obtain the age of sixty, fine, but what next? Maybe you wake up tomorrow morning and find out they cured cancer, say, or heart disease—excluding you from all the worlds where William Keller dies of a colon tumor or an aneurism. And then? You’re a hundred years old, a hundred and twenty—do you turn into some kind of freak? So unlikely, in Soziere’s sense, that you end up in a circus or a research ward? Do they clone you a fresh body? Do you end up as some kind of half-human robot, a brain in a bottle? And in the meantime the world changes around you, everything familiar is left behind, you see others die, maybe millions of others, maybe the human race dies out or evolves into something else, and you go on, and on, while the universe groans under the weight of your unlikeliness, and there’s no escape, every death is just another rung up the ladder of weirdness and disorientation. . . .”

I hadn’t thought of it that way.

Yes, the reductio ad absurdum of Soziere’s theory was a kind of relativistic paradox: as the observer’s life grows more unlikely, he perceives the world around him becoming proportionately more strange; and down those unexplored, narrow rivers of mortality might well lie a cannibal village.

Or the Temple of Gold.

What if Deirdre was too pessimistic? What if, among all the unlikely worlds, there was one in which Lorraine had survived her cancer?

Wouldn’t that be worth waiting for?

Worth looking for, no matter how strange the consequences might be?

News items that night:

NEURAL IMPLANTS RESTORE VISION IN FIFTEEN PATIENTS

“TELOMERASE COCKTAIL” CREATES IMMORTAL LAB MICE

TWINNED NEUTRON STARS POSE POTENTIAL THREAT, NASA SAY

My sin was longing.

Not grief. Grief isn’t a sin, and is anyway unavoidable. Yes, I grieved for Lorraine, grieved long and hard, but I don’t remember having a choice. I miss her still. Which is as it should be.

But I had given in too often to the vulgar yearnings. Mourned youth, mourned better days. Made an old man’s map of roads not taken, from the stale perspective of a dead end.

Reached for the Clonazepam and turned my hand away, freighted every inch with deaths beyond counting.

I wonder if my captors understand this?

I went back to Ziegler—nodding at Deirdre, who was disappointed to see me, as I vanished behind the bead curtain.

“This doesn’t explain it.” I gave him back You Will Never Die.

“Explain,” Ziegler said guilelessly, “what?”

“The paperbacks I bought from you.”

“I don’t recall.”

“Or these—”

I turned to his bookshelf.

Copies of In Our Time, Our Mutual Friend, Beyond the Mexique Bay.

“I didn’t realize they needed explaining.”

I was the victim of a conjuror’s trick, gulled and embarrassed. I closed my mouth.

“Anomalous experience,” Ziegler said knowingly. “You’re right, Soziere doesn’t explain it. Personally I think there must be a kind of critical limit—a degree of accumulated unlikeliness so great that the illusion of normalcy can no longer be wholly sustained.” He smiled, not pleasantly. “Things leak. I think especially books, books being little islands of mind. They trail their authors across phenomenological borders, like lost puppies. That’s why I love them. But you’re awfully young to experience such phenomena. You must have made yourself very unlikely indeed—more and more unlikely, day after day! What have you been doing to yourself, Mr. Keller?”

I left him sucking oxygen from a fogged plastic mask.

Reaching for the bottle of Clonazepam.

Drawing back my hand.

But how far must the charade proceed? Does the universe gauge intent? What if I touch the bottle? What if I open it and peer inside?

(These questions, of course, are answered now. I have only myself to blame.)

I had tumbled a handful of the small white tablets into my hand and was regarding them with the cool curiosity of an entomologist when the telephone rang.

Pills or telephone?

Both, presumably, in Soziere’s multiverse.

I answered the phone.

It was Deirdre. “He’s dead,” she told me. “Ziegler. I thought you should know.”

I said, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m taking care of the arrangements. He was so alone . . . no family, no friends, just nothing.”

“Will there be a service?”

“He wanted to be cremated. You’re welcome to come. It might be nice if somebody besides me showed up.”

“I will. What about the store?”

“That’s the crazy part. According to the bank, he left it to me.” Her voice was choked with emotion. “Can you imagine that? I never even called him by his first name! To be honest—oh, God, I didn’t even like him! Now he leaves me this tumbledown business of his!”

I told her I’d see her at the mortuary.

I paid no attention to the news that night, save to register the lead stories, which were ominous and strange.

We live, Ziegler had said, in the science fiction of our youth.

The “ET signals” NASA scientists had discovered were, it turned out, a simple star map, at the center of which was—not the putative aliens’ home world—but a previously undiscovered binary neutron star in the constellation Orion.

The message, one astronomer speculated, might be a warning. Binary neutron stars are unstable. When they eventually collide, drawn together by their enormous gravity, the collision produces a black hole—and in the process a burst of gamma rays and cosmic radiation, strong enough to scour the Earth of life if the event occurs within some two or three thousand light-years of us.

The freshly discovered neutron stars were well within that range. As for the collision, it might happen in ten years, a thousand, ten thousand—none of the quoted authorities would commit to a date, though estimates had been shrinking daily.

Nice of our neighbors to warn us, I thought.

But how long had that warning bell been ringing, and for how many centuries had we ignored it?

Deirdre’s description of the Soziere book as a “bubble theory” haunted me.

No proof, no evidence could exist: that was ruled out by the theory itself—or at least, as Ziegler had implied, there would be no evidence one could share.

But there had been evidence, at least in my case: the paperback books, “anomalous” books imported, presumably, from some other timeline, a history I had since lost to cardiac arrest, a car accident, Clonazepam.

But the books were gone.

I had traded them, in effect, for You Will Never Die.

Which I had returned to Oscar Ziegler.

Cup your hands as you might. The water runs through your fingers.

There was only the most rudimentary service at the crematorium where Ziegler’s body was burned. A few words from an Episcopal minister Deirdre had hired for the occasion, an earnest young man in clerical gear and neatly pressed Levis who pronounced his consolations and hurried away as if late for another function. Deirdre said, afterward, “I don’t know if I’ve been given a gift or an obligation. For a man who never left his room, Mr. Ziegler had a way of weaving people into his life.” She shook her head sadly. “If any of it really matters. I mean, if we’re not devoured by aliens or god knows what. You can’t turn on the news these days. . . . Well, I guess he bailed out just in time.”

Or moved on. Moved someplace where his emphysema was curable, his failing heart reparable, his aging cells regenerable. Shunting the train Oscar Ziegler along a more promising if less plausible track . . .

“The evidence,” I said suddenly.

“What?”

“The books I told you about.”

“Oh. Right. Well, I’m sorry, but I didn’t get a good look at them.” She frowned. “Is that what you’re thinking? Oh, shit, that fucking Soziere book of his! It’s bait, Mr. Keller, don’t you get it? Not to speak ill of the dead, but he loved to suck people into whatever cloistered little mental universe he inhabited, misery loves company, and that book was always the bait—”

“No,” I said, excited despite my best intentions, as if Ziegler’s cremation had been a message, his personal message to me, that the universe discarded bodies like used Kleenex but that consciousness was continuous, seamless, immortal. . . . “I mean about the evidence. You didn’t see it—but someone did.”

“Leave it alone. You don’t understand about Ziegler. Oscar Ziegler was a sour, poisonous old man. Maybe older than he looked. That’s what I thought of when I read Soziere’s book: Oscar Ziegler, someone so ridiculously old that he wakes up every morning surprised he’s still a human being.” She stared fiercely at me. “What exactly are you contemplating here—serial suicide?”

“Nothing so drastic.”

I thanked her and left.

The paradox of proof.

I went to Niemand’s store as soon as I left Deirdre.

I had shown the books to Niemand, the book dealer. He was the impossible witness, the corroborative testimony. If Niemand had seen the books, then I was sane; if Niemand had seen the books they might well turn up among Ziegler’s possessions, and I could establish their true provenance and put all this dangerous Soziere mythology behind me.

But Niemand’s little second-story loft store had closed. The sign was gone. The door was locked and the space was for lease.

Neither the jeweller downstairs nor the coffee-shop girl next door remembered the store, its clientele, or Niemand himself.

There was no Niemand in the phone book. Nor could I find his commercial listing. Not even in my yellow pages at home, where I had first looked it up.

Or remembered looking it up.

Anomalous experience.

Which constituted proof, of a kind, though Ziegler was right; it was not transferable. I could convince no one, ultimately, save myself.

The television news was full of apocalypse that night. A rumor had swept the Internet that the great gamma-ray burst was imminent, only days away. No, it was not, scientists insisted, but they allowed themselves to be drawn by their CNN inquisitors into hypothetical questions. Would there be any safe place? A half-mile underground, say, or two, or three? (Probably not, they admitted; or, We don’t have the full story yet.)

To a man, or woman, they looked unsettled and skittish.

I went to bed knowing she was out there, Lorraine, I mean, out among the plenitude of worlds and stars. Alone, perhaps, since I must have died to her—infinities apart, certainly, but enclosed within the same inconceivably vast multi-universe, as alike, in our way, as two snowflakes in an avalanche.

I slept with the pill bottle cradled in my hand.

The trick, I decided, was to abandon the charade, to mean the act.

In other words, to swallow twenty or thirty tablets—a more difficult act than you might imagine—and wash them down with a neat last shot of Glenlivet.

But Deirdre called.

Almost too late.

Not late enough.

I picked up the phone, confused, my hands butting the receiver like antagonistic parade balloons. I said, or meant to say, “Lorraine?”

But it was Deirdre, only Deirdre, and before long Deirdre was shouting in an annoying way. I let the phone drop.

I suppose she called 911.

II

I woke in a hospital bed.

I lay there passively for more than an hour, by the digital clock on the bedstand, cresting waves of sleep and wondering at the silence, until I was visited by Candice. Her name was written on her lapel tag. Candice was a nurse, with a throaty Jamaican accent and wide, sad eyes.

“You’re awake,” she said, barely glancing at me.

My head hurt. My mouth tasted of ashes and quicklime. I needed to pee, but there was a catheter in the way.

“I think I want to see a doctor,” I managed.

“Prob’ly you do,” Candice agreed. “And prob’ly you should. But our last resident went home yesterday. I can take the catheter out, if that’s what you want.”

“There are no doctors?”

“Home with their families like everybody else.” She fluffed my pillow. “Only us pathetic lonelyhearts left, Mr. Keller. You been unconscious ten days.”

Later she wheeled me down the corridor—though I insisted I could have walked—to a lounge with a tall plate glass window, where the ward’s remaining patients had gathered to talk and weep and watch the fires that burned fitfully through the downtown core.

Soziere’s curse. We become—or we make ourselves—less “likely.” But it’s not our own unlikeliness we perceive; instead, we see the world growing strange around us.

The lights are out all over the city. The hospital, fortunately, has its own generator. I tried to call Deirdre from a hospital phone, but there was no dial tone, just a crackling hiss, like the last groove in an LP record.

The previous week’s newspapers, stacked by the door of the hospital lounge, were dwindling broadsheets containing nothing but stark outlines of the impending gamma-ray disaster.

The extraterrestrial warning had been timely. Timely, though we read it far too late. Apparently it not only identified the threatening binary neutron stars—which were spiralling at last into gaudy destruction, about to emit a burst of radiation brighter than a billion galaxies—but provided a calculable time scale.

A countdown, in other words, which had already closed in on its ultimate zero. Too close to home, a black hole was about to be born.

None of us would survive that last flash of annihilating fire.

Or, at least, if we did, we would all become extremely unlikely.

I remember a spot of blue luminescence roughly the size of a dinner plate at arm’s length, suspended above the burning city: Cherenkov radiation. Gamma rays fractured molecules in the upper atmosphere, loading the air with nitric oxides the color of dried blood. The sky was frying like a bad picture tube.

The hard, ionizing radiation would arrive within hours. Cosmic rays striking the wounded atmosphere would trigger particle cascades, washing the crust of the Earth with what the papers called “high energy muons.”

I was tired of the ward lounge, the incessant weeping and periodic shouting.

Candice took me aside. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “what I told the others. I been into the medicine cupboard. If you don’t want to wait, there are pills you can take.”

The air smelled suddenly of burning plastic. Static electricity drew bright blue sparks from metal shelves and gurney carts. Surely this would be the end: the irrevocable death, the utter annihilation, if there can ever be an end.

I told Candice a nightcap might be a good idea, and she smiled wanly and brought me the pills.

III

They want me to keep on with my memoirs.

They take the pages away from me, exchange them for greater rations of food.

The food is pale, chalky, with the claylike texture of goat cheese. They excrete it from a sort of spinerette, white obscene lumps of it, like turds.

I prefer to think of them as advanced machines rather than biological entities—vending machines, say, not the eight-foot-long centipedes they appear to be.

They’ve mastered the English language. (I don’t know how.) They say “please” and “thank you.” Their voices are thin and reedy, a sound like tree branches creaking on a windy winter night.

They tell me I’ve been dead for ten thousand years.

Today they let me out of my bubble, let me walk outside, with a sort of mirrored umbrella to protect me from the undiluted sunlight.

The sunlight is intense, the air cold and thin. They have explained, in patient but barely intelligible whispers, that the gamma ray burst and subsequent bath of cosmic radiation stripped the earth of its ozone layer as well as much of the upper atmosphere. The oxygen that remains, they say, is “fossil” oxygen, no longer replenished. The soil is alive with radioactive nuclei: samarium 146, iodine 129, isotopes of lead, of plutonium.

There is no macroscopic life on Earth. Present company excepted.

Everything died. People, plants, plankton, everything but the bacteria inhabiting the rocks of the deep mantle or the scalding water around undersea volcanic vents. The surface of the planet—here, at least—has been scoured by wind and radiation into a rocky desert.

All this happened ten thousand years ago. The sun shines placidly on the lifeless soil, the distant blue-black mountains.

Everything I loved is dead.

I can’t imagine the technology they used to resurrect me, to re-create me, as they insist, from desiccated fragments of biological tissue tweezed from rocks. It’s not just my DNA they have recovered but (apparently, somehow) my memories, my self, my consciousness.

I suppose Carl Soziere wouldn’t be surprised.

I ask about others, other survivors reclaimed from the waterless desert. My captors (or saviours) only spindle their sickeningly mobile bodies: a gesture of negation, I’ve come to understand, the equivalent of a shake of the head. There are no other survivors.

And yet I can’t help wondering whether Lorraine waits to be salvaged from her grave—some holographic scrap of her, at least; information scattered by time, like the dust of an ancient book.

There is nothing in my transparent cell but bowls of water and food, a floor soft enough to serve as a mattress, and the blunted writing instruments and clothlike paper. (Are they afraid I might commit suicide?)

The memoirs run out. I want the extra food, and I enjoy the diversion of writing, but what remains to be said? And to whom?

I’ve learned to distinguish between my captors.

The “leader” (that is, the individual most likely to address me directly and see that others attend to my needs) is a duller shade of silver-white, his cartilaginous shell dusted with fine powder. He (or she) possesses many orifices, all visible when he sways back to speak. I have identified his speaking-orifice and his food-excreting orifice, but there are three others I haven’t seen in use, including a tooth-lined maw that must be a kind of mouth.

“We are the ones who warned you,” he tells me. “For half of a million years we warned you. If you had known, you might have protected yourself.” His grammar is impeccable, to my ears anyway, although consonants in close proximity make him stumble and hiss. “You might have deconstructed your moon, created a shield, as we did. Numerous strategies might have succeeded in preserving your world.”

The tocsin had sounded, in other words, for centuries. We had simply been too dull to interpret it, until the very end, when nothing could be done to counter the threat.

I try not interpret this as a rebuke.

“Now we have learned to transsect distance,” the insectile creature explains. “Then, we could only signal.”

I ask whether he could re-create the Earth, revive the dead.

“No,” he says. Perhaps the angle of his body signifies regret. “One of you is puzzle enough.”

They live apart from me, in an immense silver half-sphere embedded in the alkaline soil. Their spaceship?

For a day they haven’t come. I sit alone in my own much smaller shelter, its bubble walls polarized to filter the light but transparent enough to show the horizon with vicious clarity. I feel abandoned, a fly on a vast pane of dusty glass. And hungry. And thirsty.

They return—apologetically—with water, with paper and writing implements, and with a generous supply of food, thoughtfully pre-excreted.

They are compiling, they tell me, a sort of interstellar database, combining the functions of library, archeological museum, and telephone exchange. They are most grateful for my writings, which have been enthusiastically received. “Your cosmology,” by which they must mean Soziere’s cosmology, “is quite distinctive.”

I thank them but explain that there is nothing more to write—and no audience I can even begin to imagine.

The news perplexes them. The leader asks, “Do you need a human audience?”

Yes. Yes, that’s what I need. A human audience. Lorraine, warning me away from despair, or even Deirdre, trying vainly to shield me from black magic.

They confer for another day.

I walk outside my bubble at sunset, alone, with my silver umbrella tilted toward the western horizon. When the stars appear, they are astonishingly bright and crisp. I can see the frosted breath of the Milky Way.

“We cannot create a human audience for you,” the leader says, swaying in a chill noon breeze like a stately elm. “But there is perhaps a way.”

I wait. I am infinitely patient.

“We have experimented with time,” the creature announces. Or I think the word is “experimented.” It might as easily have been the clacking buzz of a cricket or a cicada.

“Send me back,” I demand at once.

“No, not you, not physical objects. It cannot be done. Thoughts, perhaps. Dreams. Speaking to minds long dead. Of course, it changes nothing.”

I rather like the idea—when they explain it—of my memoirs circulating through the Terrestrial past, appearing fragmented and unintelligible among the night terrors of Neanderthals, Cro-Magnons, Roman slaves, Chinese peasants, science fiction writers, drunken poets. And Deirdre Frank, and Oscar Ziegler. And Lorraine.

Even the faintest touch—belated, impossible—is better than none at all.

But still. I find it difficult to write.

“In that case,” the leader says, “we would like to salvage you.”

“Salvage me?”

They consult in their own woody, windy language, punctuated by long silences or sounds I cannot hear.

“Preserve you,” they conclude. “Yourself. Your soul.”

And how would they do that?

“I would take you into my body,” the leader says.

Eat me, in other words. They have explained this more than once. Devour my body, hoc est corpus, and spit out my soul like a cherry pit into the great galactic telephone exchange.

“But this is how we must do it,” the leader says apologetically.

I don’t fear them.

I take a long last walk, at night, bundled against the cold in layers of flexible foil. The stars have not changed visibly in the ten thousand years of my absence, but there is nothing else familiar, no recognizable landmarks, I gather, anywhere on the surface of the planet. This might be an empty lakebed, this desert of mine, saline and ancient and, save for the distant mountains, flat as a chessboard.

I don’t fear them. They might be lying, I know, although I doubt it; surely not even the most alien of creatures would travel hundreds of light-years to a dead planet in search of a single exotic snack.

I do fear their teeth, however, sharp as shark’s teeth, even if (as they claim) their bodies secrete an anaesthetic and euphoriant venom.

And death?

I don’t fear death.

I dread the absence of it.

Maybe Soziere was wrong. Maybe there’s a teleological escape clause, maybe all the frayed threads of time will be woven back together at the end of the world, assembled in the ultimate library, where all the books and all the dreams are preserved and ordered in their multiple infinities.

Or not.

I think, at last, of Lorraine: really think of her, I mean; imagine her next to me, whispering that I ought to have taken her advice, not lodged this grief so close to my heart; whispering that death is not a door through which I can follow her, no matter how hard or how often I try. . . .

“Will you accept me?” the leader asks, rearing up to show his needled mouth, his venom sacs oozing a pleasant narcotic.

“I’ve accepted worse,” I tell him.

ZWARTE PIET’S TALE

Allen Steele

Frontier folk learn to make what they need—including legends.

People often speak of Christmas as being a season of miracles. Indeed, it sometimes seems that’s all you hear about during the holiday season; download the daily newsfeed, and you’re sure to find at least one doe-eyed story about a lost child reunited with his parents, a stray pet finding his way home, a maglev train that barely avoids colliding with another, a house burning down without anyone being killed. These things can happen at any time, and often do, but when they occur at Christmas, a special significance is attached to them, as if an arbitrary date on the Gregorian calendar somehow has a magical portent.

That sort of thing may go smooth on Earth, but anyone on Mars who believes in miracles is the sort of person you don’t want to be with during a habitat blowout or a dust storm alert. Belief in miracles implies belief in divine intervention, or luck at the very least; that kind of attitude has killed more people out here than anything else. Luck won’t help you when a cell of your dome undergoes explosive decompression, but having paid attention during basic training will. I’ve known devoutly religious people who’ve died because they panicked when a wall of sand came barrelling across the plains, while atheists who kept their heads and sprinted to the nearest shelter have survived. Four people returning to Wellstown from a water survey were killed on Earth’s Christmas Day back in M.Y. 46, when the driver of their rover rolled the vehicle down a twenty-meter embankment; there was no yuletide miracle for them.

I’m sorry if this may seem cynical, but that’s the way it is. Almost a million aresians now live on Mars, and we didn’t face down this cold red world by believing in Santa Claus. Luck is something you make for yourself; miracles occur when you get extra-lucky. I’ve been here for over twenty years now, and I’ve never seen it work differently, whether it be on Christmas, Yom Kippur, or First Landing Day.

Yet still . . . there’s always an exception.

Sure, we celebrate Christmas on Mars. We just don’t do it the same way as on Earth.

The first thing you have to remember is that we count the days a bit differently. Having 39.6 more minutes each day, and 669 days—or sols, as we call ’em—in a sidereal period, meant that aresians threw out both Greenwich Mean Time and the Gregorian calendar in A.D. 2032, long before the Pax Astra took control of the near-space colonies, way before Mars declared its independence. The Zubrin calendar has twelve months, ranging from 48 to 66 sols in length, each named after a Zodiac constellation; it retroactively began on January 1, 1961, which became Gemini 1, M.Y. 1 by local reckoning. The conversion factors from Gregorian to Zubrin calendars are fairly complex, so don’t ask for an explanation here, except to say that one of the first things newcomers from Earth have to realize is that April Fool pranks are even less funny at Arsia Station than they were back in Indiana.

Indeed, aresians pretty much did away with Halloween, Thanksgiving, Guy Fawkes Day, Bastille Day, and virtually every other Earth holiday. Our New Year’s is out of whack with the rest of the solar system, and instead of Columbus Day we have First Landing; when Mars seceded from the Pax Astra in 2066, or M.Y. 57, we began commemorating the event with our own Independence Day. A few religious holidays continue to be observed at the same time as they are on Earth. West Bank, the small Jewish settlement on the western slope of the Tharsis bulge, celebrates hanukkah in accordance with the traditional Hebrew calendar; I was once there for the third night of hanukkah, and watched as the family with whom I was staying lit its menorah when the colony’s DNAI calculated the sun had set in Jerusalem.

Christmas has been imported as well, yet because the aresian year was nearly twice as long as Earth’s, it comes around half as often. The first colonists tried having their Christmas promptly on December 25th, but it felt odd to be celebrating Christmas twice a year, sometimes in the middle of the Martian summer. When the colonies formally adopted the Zubrin calendar in M.Y. 38, it was decided that the aresian Christmas would fall only once every two Earth years; this meant that we had to devise our own way of observing the holiday. So instead of designating one single sol in Taurus as being Christmas Day, aresians picked the second week of the month as Christmas Week, beginning on Ta. 6 and continuing through Ta.13; it was roughly adapted from the Dutch tradition of observing December 6 as the Feast of St. Nicholas. During that week, everyone would take a break from all but the most essential labor, and this would give families and clans a chance to get together and exchange gifts. Devout Christians who wished to continue unofficially observing December 25 as Jesus’s birthday were welcome to do so—New Chattanooga and Wellstown took two sols off each aresian year for a terran-style Christmas—but it wasn’t marked on the Zubrin calendar.

Most of the original Seven Colonies, with the exception of West Bank, accepted Christmas Week as a respite from the hard work of settling the Martian frontier. As more immigrants from Earth and the Moon began establishing new colonies along the eastern equator, they adopted Christmas Week as well. Yet, as time went on, the aresian Christmas began to lose much of its original meaning.

Indeed, as some noted, the week never had that much meaning to begin with. Since it wasn’t held to celebrate of the birth of Christ, it had little religious significance. Families and clans tended to live in the same colonies, often sharing the same quarters, so there wasn’t much point in setting aside an entire week for them to get together. These colonists lived on the verge of poverty; Pax trade tariffs and the enormous cost of importing items from Earth made Christmas presents beyond the reach of most people, and giving someone a new helmet liner is hardly the stuff of romance. So what usually happened during Christmas Week was that people congregated in taprooms to get ripped on homebrew and hempweed; when the taprooms closed, louts roamed the corridors looking for trouble. By mid-century, Christmas Week had degenerated into debauchery, random violence, and the occasional fatal accident. It wasn’t a lot of fun.

Worse yet was the fact that the first generation of aresians to be born on Mars was growing up with only second-hand knowledge of what Christmas was supposed to be like. They’d read old microfiche stories about Rudolph and Santa Claus, the Grinch and Scrooge, or watch disks of ancient films like It’s A Wonderful Life and Frosty the Snowman, and then go to their parents asking why Santa didn’t drop down their chimney to leave wrapped and ribboned gifts beneath a tree strung with lights and tiny ornaments. Perhaps you can successfully explain to a four-year-old why there aren’t any reindeer and Douglas firs on Mars, or even point out that your two-room apartment doesn’t have a hearth, let alone a chimney . . . but try telling a small child that there’s no such person as Santa.

Mars was in desperate need of a St. Nicholas, a Father Christmas, a Santa Claus. In M.Y. 52, he arrived in the form of Dr. Johann Spanjaard.

Despite the fact that I’m one of the few people on Mars who knew him well, there’s very little I can tell you about Doc Spanjaard. That’s not much a surprise, though; folks came here for many different reasons, and not always the best ones. Frontiers tend to attract people who didn’t quite fit in the places they came from, and on Mars it’s impolite to ask someone about their past if they don’t voluntarily offer that information themselves. Some aresians will blabber all day about their home towns or their old job, but others I’ve known for twenty years and still don’t know where they were born, or even their real names.

Johann Spanjaard fell somewhere between these extremes. He was born in Holland, but I don’t know when: around A.D. 2030 is my best guess, since he appeared to be in his early forties when he arrived at Arsia Station. He was trained as a paramedic, and briefly worked on Clarke County; and later at Descartes Station. He was a Moon War vet; he told me that he witnessed the Battle of Mare Tranquillitatis, but if he had any combat medals he never showed them to me. He returned to Earth, stayed there a little while, left again to take a short job as a beltship doctor, then finally immigrated to Mars. There were at least two women in his past—Anja, his first wife, and Sarah, his second—but he seldom spoke of them, although he sent them occasional letters.

No children. In hindsight, that may be the most significant fact of all: even after marrying and leaving two wives, Doc didn’t have any kids. Save that thought.

Doc Spanjaard immigrated to Mars in M.Y. 52, five aresian years before the colonies broke away from Pax. By then Arsia Station had become the largest colony; nearly a hundred thousand people lived in reasonable comfort within the buckydomes and underground malls that had grown up around the base camp of the original American expedition, just south of the Noctis Labyrinthis where, on a nice clear day, you could just make out the massive volcanic cone of Arsia Mons looming over the western horizon. The colony had finally expanded its overcrowded infirmary into a full-fledged hospital, and Doc was one of the people hired to staff its new emergency ward.

I came to know Doc because of my job as an airship pilot. One of Arsia General’s missions was providing medical airlifts to our six neighbor colonies in the western hemisphere; although they had infirmaries of their own, none possessed Arsia General’s staff or equipment. The hospital had contracted my employer, AeroMars, to fly doctors out to these remote settlements and, on occasion, bring back patients for treatment. Within two sols of Doc’s arrival at Arsia General, I flew him over the Valles Marineris to Wellstown so he could treat a burn victim from an explosion at the fuel depot. We ended up hauling the poor guy back to Arsia Station that same day; the sortie lasted twenty-seven hours, coming and going, and when it was over we were too wired to go to bed, so we wandered over to the Mars Hotel and had a few beers.

That trip established a regular pattern for us: fly out, do what had to be done, fly back, hand the case over to the ER staff, then head to the nearest taproom to decompress. However, I seldom saw Doc Spanjaard get loaded; three beers was his limit, and he never touched hard liquor. Which was fine with me; I’m a featherweight drinker myself, and two beers was the most I’d allow myself because I never knew when I’d get beeped to drag Miss Thuvia back into the sky again. But the three of us logged a lot of klicks together; once I had the princess tied down in her hangar and Doc had washed someone else’s blood off his hands, we’d park our rumps in a quiet bar and tap mugs for a job well done.

We were a mutt-‘n-jeff team if there ever was one. Doc was tall and preposterously skinny, with solemn blue eyes and fair skin that helmet burn had freckled around his trim white beard; imagine an underfed St. Nicholas and you’ve got it down. I was the short, dumpy black sidekick from Tycho City who had a thing for Burroughs classics and loved old Eddie Murphy movies even though I had never spent more than two weeks on Earth (what can I say? he made me laugh). But Doc had a wry sense of humor that most people didn’t see, and I was the only airlift pilot who wouldn’t panic when he had to perform a emergency tracheotomy at twelve hundred meters with a utility knife and a pen.

We saw a lot of action over the course of the next nine months; by my count, we saved at least thirty lives and lost only four. Not bad for two guys whose biggest complaint was losing a lot of sleep. The Martian Chronicle caught wind of our act and wanted to do a story on us. We talked it over during a ride back from Sagan, then radioed back to Arsia General and arranged for the reporter to meet us at the Mars Hotel after we got home. The reporter was there, along with his photographer and one of Doc’s former patients, a sweet young thing from West Bank whose heart was still beating again due to Doc’s ministrations and my flying skills, but gee gosh, we forgot where we were supposed to meet them and went to Lucky Pierre’s instead. Two more missed interviews, followed by profuse apologies and sworn promises that we’d be at the right place next time, went by before the Chronicle finally got the message. On Mars, the phrase “mind your own business” is taken seriously, even by the press.

But it wasn’t always funny stuff. Our job took us places you’d never want to see, the settlements established along the equatorial zone surrounding the Valles Marineris. Over forty Earth years had elapsed since First Landing, and humankind had made substantial footholds on this big red planet, yet beyond the safe, warm confines of Arsia Station life could be pretty grim. New Chattanooga was infested with sandbugs, the seemingly indestructible mites which lived in the permafrost and homed in on any aquifer large enough for them to lay eggs; the colony’s water tanks were literally swimming with them, and despite the best filtration efforts they were in every cup of coffee you drank and every sponge-bath you took. DaVinci was populated by neocommunists who, despising bourgeois culture and counterrevolutionary influences, wanted little to do with the rest of the colonies, and therefore turned down most aid offered by Arsia Station. Their subsurface warrens were cold and dimly-lit, their denizens hard-eyed and ready to quote Mao Tse Tung as soon as you entered the airlock. Viking, the northernmost settlement, was located on the Chryse Planitia near the Viking I landing site: two hundred people huddled together in buckydomes while eking out the most precarious of existences, and every time we visited them, the population had grown a little smaller. And people spoke only in hushed tones about Ascension, the settlement near Sagan just south of the Valles Marineris that had been founded by religious zealots; living in self-enforced isolation, running short of food and water, finally cut off from the neighboring colonies by the planetwide dust storm of M.Y. 47, its inhabitants began murdering one another, then cannibalizing the corpses.

Doc and I saw a side of the Martian frontier that most people on Earth didn’t even know existed: hypothermia, malnutrition, disease, injuries caused by carelessness or malfunctioning equipment, psychosis, and not a few deaths. We did what we could, then we flew home and tried to drown our sorrows in homemade brew. There’s many wonderful things about Mars, but it’s not Earth or even the Moon; this is a place with damned little mercy, and those it doesn’t kill outright, it conspires to drive insane.

Perhaps we went a little stir-crazy ourselves, for one night in the Mars Hotel we got to talking about what we missed about Christmas.

It was the third week of Aries, M.Y. 53. Christmas was only a couple of weeks away, and already the taprooms were brewing more beer for the festivities to come. We had just returned from delivering medical supplies to the poor schmucks at Viking, and were watching the bartender as he strung some discarded fiberoptics over the bar.

“I miss mistletoe,” I murmured. I was working on my second beer by then, so I wasn’t conscious of my alliteration. “Mistletoe and Christmas trees.”

“You don’t know mistletoe and Christmas trees,” Doc said.

“Sure do. Had them in my family’s apartment. My mother and father, they used to kiss beneath the . . .”

“You grew up on the Moon. You had vinyl mistletoe and plastic Christmas trees. Bet you’ve never smelled the real thing.”

“No, but it was close enough.”

“Not in the slightest. You’d know the difference.” Doc sipped his beer. “But I get the point. Out in the belt, we’d get together in the wardroom on Christmas Eve and sing carols. You know caroling . . .?”

“Sure. ‘Silent Night,’ ‘The First Day of Christmas,’ ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ . . .”

“ ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,’ that’s my favorite. And then we’d exchange gifts. Sarah gave me a ring with a little piece of gold from an asteroid ore our ship had refined.” He smiled at the memory. “Marriage didn’t last, but I held onto the ring.”

“My favorite was a little rocket from my Dad. I was eight . . . nine, I guess. He made it for me in his lab. About two meters long, with a hollow nose cone. We put a little note with our squid number in the cone, then went EVA and hiked up to the crater rim, set the trajectory, fueled it up and fired it at Earth.” Once again, I remembered that little rocket’s silent launch, and how it lanced straight up into the black sky over Tycho. “Dad told me that it would eventually get there and land somewhere, and maybe someone would find it and send back a letter.”

“Anyone ever fax you?”

“Naw. It probably never got to Earth . . . or if it did, it probably burned up on entry.” I shrugged. “But I like to think that it made the trip, and just landed some place where no one ever found it.”

“But it meant something, didn’t it? Like Sarah’s ring. No Christmas gift is ever insignificant. There’s always a little of your soul in whatever you give someone.” Doc scowled at the lights being strung above the bar. “Here, it’s just an excuse for people to get drunk and stupid, and the next day everyone has to apologize to each other. Sorry for banging on your door. Sorry for keeping you awake last night. Sorry for making a pass at your wife . . .”

“What do you expect? Rudolph the green-nosed reindeer?”

“Red. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. Don’t they teach you selenians anything?”

“Oh, yeah. Red-nosed reindeer.” I polished off my second and last, shoved the mug across the bar. “Yeah, I know, but all that Santa stuff doesn’t make a lot of sense out here, y’know?”

“It doesn’t? Why shouldn’t it?”

I could tell that he was spoiling for a fight. “Aw, c’mon, Doc . . . does this look like Earth to you? Cheststuff smoking on an open fire, jackass stepping on your toes . . .”

“You can’t even get the lyrics right! ‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your toes . . .’ ”

“What’s a chestnut?”

“Never mind.” He turned away from me. “Jeff, I’ll have another one. Put it on his tab.”

I didn’t object. Doc was in a self-righteous mood; when he was this way, silence was the only way you could deal with him. I helped myself to some fried algae from the bowl the bartender had placed between us while I waited for him to calm down.

“I guess what I miss the most,” he finally said, “is the look . . . no, not just the look, the glow . . . children have on Christmas morning. Until I came here, I’d never seen a kid who didn’t think it was the best day of the year. Even out in the belt, it was something they could look forward to. But here . . .”

“I know what you mean.” My gaze wandered to the line of ceramic liquor bottles lined up on the shelf. “The best some of them can hope for is that their folks won’t be too hung over to make breakfast for them. I mean, some people try to do better, but . . . I dunno, something’s missing.”

“I’ll tell you what’s missing.” Doc tapped his finger against the bartop. “It isn’t just trees or presents. Magic, that’s missing. There’s no Sinterklass.”

“Yeah. No Santa Claus.”

“Did I say Santa Claus? I didn’t say Santa Claus. I said Sinterklass.”

“There’s a difference?”

For a moment, I thought he was going to brain me with his beer mug. “Hell, yes, there’s a difference! Sinterklass arrives in Holland on a ship from Spain. He’s a tall, slender gent with a long white beard who wears a red robe and bishop’s minter. He rides into town on a white horse with his assistant Zwarte Piet, where he gives presents to all the good children on his list. Then he . . . what’s so damn funny?”

“That’s Santa Claus, you quack! Only the details are different! Reindeer, elves, a sleigh from the North Pole . . . it’s still the same mook, right down to the extortion racket.”

“True, but Sinterklass came first . . . or St. Nicholas, if we want to call him by his proper name.” He swigged his beer. “He was brought to America by the Dutch, but just like everything else brought over from Europe, he was changed until virtually no one remembered his origins.”

“Tell me about it. Same thing happened to my African ancestors . . . although not by choice.”

“Then you’d appreciate the similarity between Santa’s elves and Zwarte Piet. It means Black Peter . . . he’s a Moor.”

I shrugged. “Sounds like a demotion. My great-grandfather used to play Santa every Christmas at a shopping mall. There weren’t many of them black Santas back then, I’m told.”

“Your grandfather played Santa Claus?” He raised an eyebrow. “Now there’s a coincidence. My father played Sinterklass in our village, as did my grandfather.”

“No kidding?”

“Goes with the genes.” He stroked his trim white beard. “Men in my family have the right whiskers for the job. All we have to do is let our beard grow out and. . .”

He stopped just then. To this day, I’ll never forget his slack-jawed expression as he stared at me in wonderment. He had just spoken of the glow that children have on Christmas morning; in that instant, I saw something like that appear in his own face. Wonder and joy, wonder and joy; tidings of wonder and joy . . . I don’t believe in telepathy any more than I do in Santa Claus, yet I suddenly knew exactly what he was thinking.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” I said, turning to hop off the stool and book out of there. “Don’t even think for a minute . . .”

“Oh, shut up and sit down.” Doc grabbed my wrist before I could make it to the door. “Let’s see if we can work this out.”

Against my better judgement, I stayed. Doc finished his beer, and then we switched to coffee, and by the end of the evening I had a new name.

Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet live in the caldera of Olympus Mons, within an invisible buckydome which contains their secret toyshop. When they’re not making toys or teaching sandbugs to perform tricks for their flea circus, they watch all the boys and girls of Mars through magic telescopes that can peer through walls, putting together a long list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.

Then, on the first sol of Christmas Week, they load their gifts aboard their airship, climb aboard, and fly away from Olympus Mons. Over the next seven sols they visit the colonies one by one, stopping at each to distribute presents to the good children of Mars. They may stay overnight at a settlement, because sometimes Black Peter gets too tired to fly St. Nicholas to the next colony, but if they do stay, the children should try to leave the pair alone, or next Christmas they may find the boots of their skinsuits filled with sand instead of candy.

That’s the story that we artfully disseminated through the Marsnet. It was posted on all the usual sites kids would mouse, plus a few that their parents would find. It isn’t hard to create a myth, if know what you’re doing, but Doc and I didn’t do it all by ourselves, and not without running into a little trouble.

Arsia Station’s board of selectmen were skeptical when we formally pitched the idea to them at the next weekly meeting. They thought Doc and I had dreamed this up as a sneaky way of earning overtime until Doc explained that we would also be transporting food, medical supplies, and replacement parts to the settlements. Not only that, but since we would be hitting each settlement in turn, we could take stuff from one place to another, in much the same way supply caravans presently operated, yet in a shorter time-span and for more charitable reasons. The selectmen were all too aware of the ill-will some of the smaller settlements felt toward Arsia; our plan would make for good colonial relationships. So they found a few extra megalox in the budget to fund an extended medical sortie, not the least of which was subcontracting Miss Thuvia from AeroMars for a seven-sol sortie.

When we contacted the other five colonies and informed them of our proposal, we received mixed reactions. Wellstown, Sagan, Viking, and New Chattanooga were mystified by the notion of a Martian Santa, but otherwise interested, albeit not wildly enthusiastic; if anything, it meant they would be receiving a previously unscheduled visit from Arsia General, and a few freebies to boot. West Bank was initially cool to the idea—they didn’t observe Christmas Week, after all—until we agreed to knock off the Sinterklass routine and perform as if it was just another airlift. But DaVinci was the aresian home of Ebenezer Scrooge; after a few days of stone silence, we received a terse fax from its Proletariat, stating that the free people of DaVinci had decided to reject St. Nicholas was an archaic symbol of capitalistic society and Black Peter as a shameful hold-over of racist imperialism. Well, tough boots: no candy for the commies.

Most people went for it, though, and once word leaked out about what Doc and I intended to do, we received assistance from various individuals, sometimes without us soliciting them for help. Aresians have a strong tradition of looking out for the other guy, after all, and the citizens of Arsia Station came out for us. A textile shop volunteered to make toys for us: tiny Mars landers, statuettes of men in skinsuits, some inflatable replicas of Miss Thuvia. A food-processing firm turned out several kilos of hard candy; it looked weird and tasted the same, or at least so I thought, but Doc field-tested samples on kids passing through the ER ward and none of them spit it out. A lady I was dating from Data One hacked out a game pak which she stored on a handful of spare disks; one of them was a little hide-and-seek involving Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet chasing each other through a three-dimensional maze. She made sure that the odds of Black Peter winning the match were always in my character’s favor, something which Doc resented when he tried playing it.

Yet the best efforts were those on behalf of our skinsuits. It wouldn’t do for us to cycle through airlocks looking like any other dust-caked aresian coming in from the cold. Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet were magical, after all; we had to look the part. So we hired Uncle Sal, Arsia’s premier skinsuit tailor, to come up with some hempcloth overgarments which closely mimicked the traditional costumes worn in the Netherlands. Doc’s outfit was bright red and white, with a long scarlet cape whose ribbed hood, when pulled over his helmet, looked much like a bishop’s minter. My costume was dark blue, with a plumed white collar around the neck and puffed-out sleeves and leggings. To add to the effect, Sal weaved colored microfilaments through the garments; when we switched them on, we looked like walking Christmas trees.

The only problem we had was with Doc’s beard. He stopped trimming it once our plan was approved, and within a couple of weeks it flowed down his face like a pale waterfall. It looked terrific and his girlfriends loved running their fingers through it, but he had the damnedest time tucking it into his helmet. He finally figured out what that hearty “ho-ho-ho” business was all about; it allowed him to spit out the whiskers in his mouth.

Altogether, it was an impressive effort, doubly so by the fact that we pulled it all together in less than three weeks. On Ta. 6, M.Y. 53, Doc and I climbed aboard Miss Thuvia and set sail from Arsia Station. The blimp had been temporarily festooned with multicolored lights. I turned them on as soon as we were clear of the hangar, and watched from the gondola windows as a small crowd of aresians waved us farewell.

It was a good beginning, but our first stop, at twilight on the first day of the tour, was a bust. West Bank didn’t want anything to do with Christmas, so I kept the lights turned off when we approached the settlement on the western slope of the Tharsis volcano range, and we weren’t wearing our outfits when we exited the blimp’s airlock. The settlers were cordial enough; we handed out sweets and toys to the handful of kids we met inside, and once their folks unloaded the supplies they had requested—which wasn’t much, because West Bank took pride in its self-sufficiency—we had a meal and a glass of wine in the commissary before we were shown the way to the hostel. Nothing lost, but nothing really gained either, save for fuel and a night’s rest; by dawn the next morning we were airborne again. The only thing which made the trip worthwhile was seeing the sunrise over Pavonis Mons as we flew eastward toward the upper edge of the Noctis Labyrinthis.

That was the longest leg of the journey. Over a thousand klicks lay between West Bank and Wellstown, and although Doc stood watch in the cockpit while I bunked out for a couple of hours, I did little more than doze. Questions ran through my mind even while my eyes were shut, murmuring like the incessant drone of Miss Thuvia’s props. What were we doing, two grown men dressing up like the Dutch Santa and his Moorish apprentice? I could be home now, trying to find an unattached lady with whom I could share some holiday cheer. What were we trying to achieve here? The children at West Bank had shown only slight interest in us; a little girl had stoically gazed at the toy lander Doc placed in her hand, and a small boy had made a sour face when he ate the candy I had given him. Yeah, so maybe Christmas wasn’t part of their culture, but the Jewish friends with whom I had been raised on the Moon knew what it was, if only for the spirit of the season. Perhaps Christmas didn’t belong on Mars. So why did any of this matter?

When I finally got up and went forward, I could see that Doc had been contemplating the same thought. “It’ll go better in Wellstown,” he said softly, but I don’t think he believed it either.

We ate cold rations as the sun went down behind us, drank some more powdered coffee, and said very little to one another until the lights of Wellstown appeared before us, a tiny cluster of white and amber lights against the cold darkness of the Martian night. Almost reluctantly, we pulled on our skinsuits; I almost forgot to switch Miss Thuvia’s Christmas lights until we were above the landing field.

A handful of men grabbed our mooring lines, dragged us in, tied us down. It was only the second time we had worn our costumes on EVA; Doc stepped on his cape and nearly fell down the gangway, and the puffed-out legging of my suit forced me into a bow-legged gait. We looked stupid as we made our way to the airlock of the nearest buckydome. The final touch came when Doc couldn’t fit inside, and he had to lower the peaked hood of his cape.

The outer hatch shut behind us; we got a chance to study each other as the airlock cycled. Two fools in gaudy, luminescent skinsuits. A bad dream come to life. We had been flying for the past twelve hours, but I would have gladly flown straight home if I thought it would save me any further humiliation. Why did I ever let Doc talk me into . . .?

Then the green light flashed above the inner hatch. Doc and I were unclasping our helmets when the lockwheel began turning its own, then the inner hatch was thrown open from outside. Bright light rushed into the airlock, and along with it, the excited squeals of the dozens of children waiting outside.

At that instant, it all made perfect sense.

Even after all these years, I still consider that first Christmas tour to be our best. We ran short of candy and toys before we were through, and we were bone-tired by the time we left Sagan for the last leg of the circuit back to Arsia Station, yet we brought home with us the most exciting discovery since microfossils were found in the Noctis Labyrinthis.

St. Nicholas was alive and well and living on Mars. How could nearly three hundred kids possibly be wrong?

Sometimes it was tough. The children at Viking broke our hearts: grimy, hungry, wearing cast-off clothes, but enchanted the moment we stepped through the airlock. None rejected our awful candy, and they fought jealously over the crude toys from Doc’s bag until we made sure that everyone had something to take home. They took turns sitting in Sinterklass’s lap, and he listened to stories of hardship and loss that would have horrified the worst curmudgeon. Several kids were sallow and feverish with lingering illnesses that required Doc to play physician as well as holiday saint; we were prepared for that, so after a sneaky sort of examination (“How long is your tongue? I bet you’ve got the longest one here. Open your mouth and let Sinterklass see. Oh, yes, you do, don’t you . . .?”) he’d send the sick ones over to Black Peter for a card trick and a couple of pills; later, we’d give the rest of the prescription to their parents.

Sometimes it was funny. A little girl in New Chattanooga was adamant in her outspoken belief that Sinterklass was a fake; the brat kept yanking at Doc’s beard, tearing out white hair by its roots in her dogged attempt to dislodge his mask. She got candy and a toy—no child came away empty-handed during that first tour—but before we left the following morning I tracked down her skinsuit in the community ready-room and filled her boots with handfuls of sand. She was much nicer to us the next year. Sagan’s resident nymphomaniac decided that the holiday season wasn’t complete until, in her words, she had “made Santa’s bells jingle.” She started by sitting in his lap and whispering something in Doc’s ear that succeeded in turning his nose bright red. At any other time, Doc might have obliged, once they were safely away from the little ones, but he decided that this might set a bad precedent. To her credit, she took his refusal with good grace . . . and then she asked me why I was called Black Peter.

And, yeah, sometimes it was scary. A slow leak in one of her hydrogen cells caused Miss Thuvia to lose altitude as we were flying from Viking to New Chattanooga. The pressure drop occurred while we were flying over Cupri Chasm, one of the deepest parts of the Valles Marineris; for a few minutes, it looked as if we would crash in the red-rock canyon dozens of kilometers below us. I awoke Doc from his nap and he scrambled into the gondola’s rear to open the ballast valves. When that wasn’t enough, he shoved some cargo containers out the airlock—including, much to our regret, one containing several bottles of homemade wine we were freighting from Wellstown to the other colonies. We jettisoned enough weight from the princess to keep her aloft just long enough to clear the chasm, but she left skid marks when she landed at New Chattanooga. And then we had to put on our costumes and pretend that we hadn’t just cheated death by only a few kilos.

But it was fun, and it was exhilarating, and it was heart-warming, and it was good. Even before we arrived back at Arsia Station, where we were greeted not by the small handful who had witnessed our departure a week earlier but by hundreds of skinsuited colonists who surrounded the crater and threw up their arms as Miss Thuvia came into sight, Doc and I swore to one another that we’d make the same trip again next year.

It wasn’t because our newfound fame—we still ducked the Martian Chronicle when it came to us for an interview—or the lure of adventure, or even another shot at our cuddly friend in Sagan. It was simply because we’d brought something pure, decent and civilized to Mars. Perhaps that was a Christmas miracle in itself. If so, then we wanted another one, and another one after that.

We’d eventually receive our miracle. But it wasn’t one I would have ever expected.

In 2066, the Pax Astra underwent a political upheaval when the Monarchists overthrew the ruling New Ark Party on the Clarke County space colony near Earth. The coup d’etat was led by former New Ark members frustrated with the economic stagnation brought on by the Pax’s government by consensus. They formed an opposition party with the intent of recasting the Pax Astra as a democratic monarchy, and eventually deposed the New Ark in a near-bloodless revolution. Yet shortly after Queen Macedonia had been crowned, the aresian representatives to the new Parliament realized that Martian interests were a very low priority in the new order. The diplomats caught the next cycleship home; no sooner had they arrived at Arsia Station that they formally announced that Mars was seceding from the Pax Astra and that its colonies were declaring political independence.

This was the beginning of the great Martian immigration. Within a year, our world began receiving the first shiploads of refugees from the Pax. Most were New Ark loyalists who had quickly discovered that Monarchist democracy was restricted to those who supported the royal agenda, which mainly involved keeping itself in power and persecuting anyone who objected. Since the Moon was part of the Pax and life on Earth was intolerable to those who had been born in low-gee environments, Mars became their only sanctuary.

But we hadn’t built a Statue of Liberty anywhere on our planet, and even Arsia Station was ill-equipped to handle the dozens, then hundreds, of refugees—drybacks, you want to use the impolite term—who came to us during the long winter of M.Y. 57. Human survival on Mars has always been a frail and precarious matter; even with mandatory water rationing and voluntary birth control, the six colonies were unable to support everyone from the Pax who wanted to move here. Ascension was reopened and West Bank relaxed its standards to admit non-Jewish immigrants; when their resources were exhausted, the colonies sent messages to the Pax pleading for it to stop sending more bodies our way. Yet the Monarchists turned a deaf ear to us; since Mars was no longer within the Queen’s domain, it was a convenient dumping ground for its dissidents, low-lifes, and criminals. When its escapees began to include people they wanted to keep to themselves, they revoked exit visas and began searching outbound vessels. But they couldn’t stop everyone from leaving, and it was a rare week when the contrail of another lander wasn’t spotted streaking across our pink skies.

Some of the newcomers came equipped to establish new settlements; this was how we got Nova America in the Solis Planum south of Arsia Station, Graceland in the Margaritifer northeast of New Chattanooga, and Thankgod up on southern edge of the Acidalia Plantia. Others arrived with little more than a second-rate skinsuit and a handful of useless Pax lox that the Mars colonies had stopped accepting as hard currency. They often came down in cramped landers stripped of all but the most essential hardware. Many arrived safely; one way or another, they managed to survive, even prosper. A few crashed in remote areas. Decades later, explorers were still finding their remains: sad and lonesome skeletons, desiccated by dust storms, half-buried within cold red drifts.

As the month of Taurus rolled around once more, Doc and I found little free time to prepare for Christmas Week. I had received paramedic training by then, so I could assist Doc when we flew out on a sortie; good thing, too, because Arsia General’s resources were stretched to the limit. Besides the fact that many immigrants had sustained injuries during landing, just as many had become ill during their long flight from near-space. Radiation sickness, calcium deficiency, dysentery, bronchitis, malnutrition, Tibbet’s disease, a half-dozen different strains of influenza . . . you name it, they had it. We had already logged sixteen hundred hours aboard Miss Thuvia by Christmas, and were seldom seen in the bars at Arsia Station.

Yet just because the colonies were in crisis didn’t mean that Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet got a break. Indeed, their presence was needed more than ever before; the children whom we had visited during our first tour were now teenagers and young adults, but their ranks had been filled by yet more kids, many of whom were toddlers born on Clarke County and the Moon. Uprooted from their homes by the Monarchist revolution, bewildered and frightened by their harsh new environment, some sick, most living in awful poverty, they needed Christmas just as much as they needed air, food, and medicine.

Our annual Christmas tour had become a major part of aresian life by now. The West Bank elders finally decided that a little gentile culture wasn’t such a bad thing after all, so they allowed us to wear our costumes when we came to call, and since DaVinci’s socialist government had crumbled a couple of years earlier, St. Nicholas and Black Peter were now welcome as the next stop after Viking. Along with the revived Ascension colony and three new settlements, the tour now had nine stops, not including our home port at Arsia Station.

This meant that Doc and I spent the entire holiday week on the road, sometimes making two stops a day. Fortunately, the older colonies had learned to not depend upon Arsia Station to make the holiday season for them; as well as offering room and board if we stayed overnight and refuel Miss Thuvia when she touched down, they began making gifts of their own for their neighbor settlements. Since Miss Thuvia has a limited payload capacity, and therefore couldn’t haul thousands of kilos of Christmas presents from one settlement to another, a rather clever system of gift-giving had been devised: each colony gave presents to the next settlement on our route. Arsia Station gave to West Bank, West Bank to Wellstown, Wellstown to Viking, Viking to DaVinci, and so forth. Every other year, Doc and I reversed the schedule so that DaVinci gave stuff to Viking, etc. And the gifts themselves ranged from the simple to the elaborate; West Bank made wonderful handcrafted dreidels that spun forever, Wellstown could be depended on to supply excellent wine, DaVinci distributed illustrated chapbooks of poetry and short stories, Viking’s artists contributed tiny yet endlessly fascinating sand paintings, and Sagan’s gliders could fly for almost a quarter-klick. And, of course, Arsia Station continued to send candy and small toys to every child who wanted one.

The new settlements were still too impoverished to spend the time or energy to making gifts of their own, though, so I sent email to representatives at each of the older colonies, telling them that Black Peter would be reserving a little extra cargo space aboard Sinterklass’s magic dirigible for gifts to Ascension, Nova America, Graceland, and Thankgod. No one objected to the deviation from standard operating procedure, and we were promised extra goodies from everyone when Miss Thuvia lifted off from Arsia on Sag. 6.

For the past four years, the Christmas tour had been blessed with good flying weather. Our luck couldn’t last forever, though; by the time we arrived at DaVinci, Marsnet had posted nowcasts of a severe dust storm developing in the Amazonis Plantia, due west of the Tharsis Montes range. West Bank, which we had left only eighteen hours earlier, was already reporting high winds. They warned us that Miss Thuvia wouldn’t be able to handle the storm, and suggested that we deflate our craft and hunker down at DaVinci until the worst was over.

That might be good advice at any other time, but during Christmas Week it posed a real problem. Dust storms have been known to last for days or weeks, even months on certain historic occasions. If Doc and I chose to ride out the storm in DaVinci, we might be celebrating New Year’s there. About two dozen immigrants in Thankgod were barely holding out in shelters little more sophisticated than those built by the First Landers; they were in dire need of the food, water, and medicine aboard Miss Thuvia. And we quietly regarded DaVinci was our least favorite of stopovers; we hadn’t forgotten the snubbing we’d received during our first tour, and more than a few hard-line neocommies still hadn’t warmed up to us.

We managed to get the station manager to loan us a long-range rover. It was about six hundred and fifty klicks from DaVinci to Thankgod, but since the rover burned methane/oxygen and carbon dioxide, it was capable of manufacturing its own fuel from the atmosphere and from recaptured water vapor from the condensers, and ditto for cabin air. Using the rover would be slower than taking the blimp, but flying Miss Thuvia in this sort of weather was out of the question. The rover had a top speed of seventy klicks per hour, so the round-trip to Thankgod would take about nineteen or twenty hours. If we budgeted two hours for our appearance at Thankgod and add two more as a fudge-factor, and with luck—there’s that word again—we’d only lose a sol. Thus we figured the storm should blow itself out by the time we made it back to DaVinci; then we’d be able to reinflate the blimp and head for New Chattanooga.

The kids at the remaining colonies on our tour might have to wait a bit for their Christmas, but there were limits to even Sinterklass’s magic. However, we had little doubt that we’d make it to Thankgod.

That’s what we told ourselves. In hindsight, I think we were counting on miracles we hadn’t earned.

So Doc and I loaded our stuff into the rover and set out from DaVinci near the middle of the same sol. The wind was already rising from the west as we followed the line of compacted rover tracks away from the colony into the high country northeast of the Valles Marineris. We hadn’t covered a hundred klicks before Doc had to switch on the windshield blowers.

Well, no problem. You’ve seen one dust storm, you’ve seen a dozen. I brewed some more coffee, then sacked out in the shotgun seat. When I woke up, my first thought was that I had overslept and that night had already fallen, until Doc told me that it was only late afternoon. The road had completely disappeared behind rippling curtains of red sand; despite the rover’s lights, visibility had diminished to only a few meters ahead of the front bumper.

We were driving into the throat of the worst winter storm in . . . well, forget the stats. It was nasty, and that’s all there was to it.

Yet we weren’t worried. Not really. We had a clear satellite fix on our location, so there was no real danger of getting lost out here. Although our ground speed had dropped to fifty klicks, the rover’s six tandem wheels continued to move through the dense sand that scurried around us. We had air, we had hot coffee, we had Nashville music on the CD player; the howling wind buffeted the rover as if it was a boat on high seas, but it was Christmas, and we were Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet. We couldn’t be stopped, storm or no storm.

I had just switched off with Doc, and he was rummaging through the food locker in search of cold rations which wouldn’t taste too much like cardboard, when we received a microbeam transmission from Arsia Station. I thought it was just a courtesy call: the folks back home making sure we weren’t in trouble. The reception was bad, and I was fumbling for a headset when Doc came forward and told me to keep my hands on the yoke, he’d take care of it.

I didn’t catch most of it; my attention was focused on avoiding boulders and craters. Doc played the keys until he got a semi-clear channel, listened for a few minutes, scribbled some stuff on a pad, murmured a few words, then clicked off and turned to me.

“Problem.”

“Big or small?”

“Dunno. Phobos Station spotted a lander making atmospheric entry about a half-hour ago. Probably from a Pax freighter that made orbit earlier today. Arsia Traffic locked onto its transponder and followed it down until they lost it in the storm.”

“Where did it come down?” Then I shook my head. “Oh, no. I can guess this one . . .”

“Edge of the Acidalia, about a hundred and fifty klicks southeast of Thankgod.”

“Aw, for the love of . . .”

It figured this might happen, if only because it had happened before; the commander of a Pax refugee ship tried to drop his lander on one of the new colonies without first informing Arsia of his intentions. Pax Royal Intelligence, in an attempt to stop the hemorrhage of its best and brightest from Clarke County and the Moon, had recently begun spreading ugly rumors that we’d launch missiles at any immigrant ships arriving in aresian space. This played into the hands of freighter captains taking aboard drybacks as unlisted passengers; they’d load them aboard a lander, drop ’em near a new settlement, then swing around the planet, make a periapsis burn, and scoot for home before anyone was the wiser. The commander and his crew make out like bandits from the megalox they’ve taken from their desperate passengers; meanwhile, we’re saddled with another dozen or so immigrants who didn’t know they were being taken for a ride, both literally and figuratively.

Only in this case, the freighter captain had deposited his human cargo in the middle of a dust storm. Perhaps he wasn’t fully aware of the ferocious nature of the Martian climate, but I couldn’t bring myself to give him to benefit of the doubt. More likely he knew that dead men don’t tell tales, let alone disclose ship registry numbers.

I was still fuming about this while Doc played with the high-gain. “I’ve got something,” he murmured after a few moments. “Weak, but it’s there.”

“Vox or transponder?”

“Transponder. You think we’re going to get local vox through this crap?”

Good point. Unless the drybacks were bouncing signals off one of the satellites, they probably couldn’t transmit anything through the storm. Landers that came down intact, though, were programmed to broadcast a shortwave distress signal as soon as they touched down, even if it was only a repeating Morse-code dit-dot-dit that could be received for hundreds of kilometers. “Mayday cast?” I asked, and Doc nodded without looking up. “Can you get a lock on it?”

Doc dickered with the keypad a little while longer before he spoke again. “Yeah, got it. I’m feeding the coordinates to your board.”

A topo map appeared on the flat just above the yoke. The signal source was approximately hundred and fifty kilometers east-southeast of Thankgod, about forty klicks west of our beeline from the colony. Doc looked at me, I looked at him, and that was it. We didn’t even discuss the matter; there was no question of whether or not we’d head for the crash site. We were Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet, but before that we were meds, and this is what we did, plain and simple.

“Pain in the ass,” I murmured as I began punching the new coordinates into the nav system.

“Yeah. Kind of screws up Christmas, don’t it?” Doc lurched out of his seat and headed aft again. “So what do you want? Cheese and tomato, ham and cheese, or turkey?”

It was close to midnight when we located the downed lander.

One moment, it wasn’t there; the next, it was in our high-beams, a gargantuan manta ray that had mysteriously been thrown across space and time. Its starboard landing skid had buckled during touchdown, so the craft listed sharply to one side, its right wing half-buried in the sand, the wind had driven dust into its engine intakes. The cockpit faced away from us, but there was a dim glimmer of light from within the main hatch porthole.

I halted the rover about ten meters away, and tried one last time to raise someone on the radio. As before, there was no answer, not surprising since the ship had sustained heavy damage during landing. I went aft and found that Doc had already suited up. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to either of us to strip off all the Father Christmas stuff, but now we didn’t have the time nor inclination. So we switched on the holiday lights so we could see each other better in the darkness. Doc raised his hood and picked up his medical bag, then we cycled through the airlock.

We made our way to the lander with our heads down, our arms raised to shield our faceplates against windblown silt and gravel. Glancing back, I could make out the rover only by its lamps. I doubted that anyone within the lander had heard our approach through the storm. If, indeed, there were any survivors.

Typical of Pax spacecraft, the airlock was only large enough to accommodate one person at a time. I went first; Doc waited outside while I closed the outer hatch. The light we’d seen outside came from an emergency lamp in the ceiling, but there was sufficient power in the back-up electrical system to allow me to run the cycle-through routine. I went by the book, though, and didn’t unlatch my helmet even after the green light appeared above the inner hatch.

For a moment, there was only darkness when I pushed open the hatch. Then a half-dozen flashlight beams swung my way, and muffled voices cascaded from the gloom:

“. . . opening! Look, the hatch . . .!”

“. . . the hell, where did he come . . .?”

“. . . it’s a man! Daddy, there’s a man in . . .!”

“. . . everyone, stand back! Get back from the . . .!”

“It’s okay. Everything’s all right!” I raised a hand against the sudden glare. “I’m from Arsia Station! I’m here to rescue you!”

They couldn’t hear me, of course; they were all shouting at once, and my voice didn’t carry well through the closed helmet. Yet there were at least a dozen people in here, shadows backlit by flashlight beams. Moving awkwardly against the sloped deck, I stepped the rest of the way out of the airlock, then turned to close the hatch behind me.

Something slammed against my shoulder, hard enough to make me lose my balance. I collapsed against the airlock hatch. It fell into place, then a hand grabbed my shoulder and twisted me around, shoving me back against the portal.

“Don’t move!” a voice yelled at me. “Keep your hands where I can see ’em!”

“Hey, cut it out!” I yelled back. “I’m just trying to . . .!”

There’s nothing like having a gun shoved in your face to kill conversation. Even in the dim light, I could make out the maw of a Royal Militia blaster, a miniature particle-beam cannon capable of ending all debate over my hat size.

The guy holding it didn’t look too pleasant, either: a large gent with a selenian helmet tan, his dark eyes narrowed with rage. His breath fogged my faceplate—it must be pretty cold in here for it to do that—but above the heavy sweater he wore was a blue uniform jacket. Its epaulets told me it was from the Pax Astra Royal Navy. I had a hunch that it wasn’t military surplus.

“Kyle, cut it out!” A woman’s voice somewhere behind the ring of flashlights. “Can’t you see he’s . . .?”

“Shut up, Marcie.” Kyle let go of me and backed away a few centimeters, but kept his weapon trained on my face. “Okay, Mars boy, I.D. yourself.”

I took a deep breath. “Look, calm down, okay? Don’t shoot. I’m not here to . . .”

“Jeez, lieutenant, let him take off his helmet.” This from another man elsewhere in the compartment. “How can you hear him?”

“Kyle . . .” Marcie said.

“Everyone shut up!” Kyle braced his feet against the deck. “Okay, open up . . . slowly.”

“Okay, all right. Take it easy.” I slowly moved my hands to my suit collar, began unlatching the ring. I heard a child crying from somewhere in the darkness.

I was getting a bad feeling about my friend Kyle. If he was a former PARN officer, then he was doubtless a deserter. Worse, he had most likely heard the Pax agitprop that aresians are cannibals who raid dryback landers. My Christmas gear didn’t help matters much; it wasn’t your usual standard-issue skinsuit, so to him I probably looked like the Martian equivalent of a wild native wearing a grass skirt and a shrunken head. The man was desperate and afraid, and hiding his fear behind a gun.

“Look,” I said once I had removed my helmet, “you’re not in any danger, I promise you. We’re a med team from Arsia Station. Our rover’s just outside. We picked up your transponder signal and . . .”

“There’s more than one of you?” His eyes flickered to the hatch behind me. “How many are out there?”

Great. Now he thought he was surrounded. “Just one other guy. I promise you, we’re not armed. Please, just put down the gun and we can see about getting you out of this jam, okay?”

“Kyle, would you listen to him?” The woman who had spoken before, Marcie, stepped a little closer. Now I saw that her neck was wrapped in thick swatches of torn fabric. A crude neck brace; she probably suffered whiplash during the crash. “He doesn’t mean us any harm, and we’re . . .”

“Dammit, Marcie, did you hear what he just said? Nobody drives from Arsia Station in a rover. If there was going to be rescue mission, why didn’t it come from Thankgod?” Kyle’s gun didn’t budge an millimeter. “I’m not about to take this guy at his word. He’s just going to have to . . .”

Whatever Kyle was about to propose that I do—I suspect it wasn’t pleasant—it was forgotten when the hatch suddenly clunked.

Everyone heard the sound. They froze, staring past me. I felt the hatch nudge my back, and I automatically moved aside before I realized what I was doing.

“Doc,” I yelled, “don’t come in!”

“Shut up!” Kyle shifted his gun first to cover me, then aimed it at the hatch. “You there, listen up! I’ve got a gun on your pal, so you’d better stop right . . .!”

“Ho, ho, ho! Mer-r-r-ry Christmas! Mer-r-r-r-r-r-ry Christmas!”

Then the hatch was pushed fully open, and in walked Sinterklass.

Doc had removed his helmet and had lowered his hood. In the darkness of the cabin, the lights of his suit glowed like a childhood fantasy. Motes of dust swirled from his red cape and caught in his long white beard like flakes of fresh-fallen snow.

“Mer-r-r-r-r-ry Christmas!” he bellowed again, and gave another jolly laugh.

In that instant, he was no longer Doc Spanjaard. He had become every holiday legend. Sinterklass, St. Nicholas, Father Christmas . . .

“Santa!”

The little girl I had heard earlier bolted from the gloom. Before Kyle or Marcie or anyone else could grab her, she rushed across the dark cabin.

“It’s Santa Claus!” she screamed. “Santa’s on Mars! Mama, you were right! There’s a Santa Claus on Mars!”

As Doc bent to catch her in his arms, I heard another child call out, then another, and suddenly two more kids darted past the legs of the bewildered adults surrounding us. They were all over Doc before anyone could stop them, least of all Kyle, who suddenly didn’t seem to know what to do with the gun in his hands, and Doc was laughing so hard that I thought he was going to lose his balance and fall back into the airlock with three children on top of him, and everyone else was yelling in relieved surprise . . .

Then Marcie turned to Kyle, who stood in gape-jawed confusion, his blaster now half-raised toward the ceiling so that it wasn’t pointed at any of the kids.

“So what are you going to do?” she murmured. “Be the guy who shot Santa Claus?”

He stared at Doc, then at me. “But it isn’t Christmas yet.”

“Welcome to Mars,” I said quietly. “We do things a little different here.”

He nodded, then put the gun away.

And that was our Christmas miracle.

We dispensed some food from the lander; the three children were handed toys from Doc’s sack and the adults were given two bottles of wine. Doc spent a couple of hours treating injuries while I went back to the rover and radioed both Thankgod and Arsia to tell them that we had located the lander. Arsia informed me that the storm was ebbing in our region and that DaVinci had already volunteered to send out a couple of rovers to pick up the new arrivals. I relayed the news to Kyle, whom I learned was their leader; he couldn’t look me straight in the eye when he tendered an apology for his behavior, but I accepted it anyway.

By the time Doc and I left the crash site, the first light of dawn was appearing on the eastern horizon; it might be mid-summer back on Earth, but here it was the third sol of Christmas. Peace on Mars, good will towards men.

We completed that long, hard tour, and returned to Arsia Station only a little later than usual. Once I had put Miss Thuvia to bed, Doc and I decompressed in the Mars Hotel. For the first time since we had started this little homecoming ritual, we allowed ourselves to get drunk. No wonder Doc rarely got blotto; he didn’t hold his liquor very well. He sang dirty songs and made jokes no one understood; it’s a good thing no children were present, because he would have ruined Christmas for them forever. The last I saw of him that night, he was being helped out of the bar by two of his girlfriends, neither of whom seemed likely to let him quietly pass out before they gave him the mistletoe treatment.

We made eight more Christmas tours before I retired from service. By then I was married and running AeroMars; my wife and business partners didn’t want me leaving Arsia Station for several sols each year to haul candy and toys to distant settlements. Nor was it necessary for me to play Black Peter any longer; now there were nineteen self-sustaining colonies scattered across the planet, and nearly every one of them had their own homemade Sinterklass and Zwarte Piet costumes.

Doc, though, continued to play his role every year, if only to take a rover out to nearby settlements. He was the first and best Sinterklass on Mars, and everyone wanted to see him; he relished the job, and continued it long after he set up a private practice at Arsia. Toys and candy for all the children, wine for the adults, and a different Zwarte Piet everywhere he went. It was what he did, period. And whenever he came home, we got together for drinks and small talk.

Twelve years after we made the Acidalia rescue mission, though, Doc didn’t come back to the bar. He went out alone to Ascension during another dust storm and . . . well, vanished. No final transmissions, and no one ever found his vehicle. He simply disappeared, just like that.

I miss Doc, but I think this is an appropriate way to go. Mars is full of mystery; so is Christmas, or at least it should be. The holiday got ruined on Earth because everything wonderful about it was gradually eroded, the magic sucked away. Out here, though, we’ve got a great Christmas, and a patron saint all our own.

He lives in the caldera of Olympus Mons.